key: cord-0043307-04goxwsx authors: oates, sarah title: the easy weaponization of social media: why profit has trumped security for u.s. companies date: 2020-05-11 journal: digi war doi: 10.1057/s42984-020-00012-z sha: f33080ba67dc7e51a210747402761742f25e5cce doc_id: 43307 cord_uid: 04goxwsx american-based social media companies have become active players in digital war, both by accident of design and a subsequent failure to address the threat due to concerns over profits. discussions about the negative role of social media in society generally address the myriad problems wrought by social media, including electoral manipulation, foreign disinformation, trolling, and deepfakes, as unfortunate side effects of a democratizing technology. this article argues that the design of social media fosters information warfare. with its current composition and lack of regulation, social media platforms such as facebook and twitter are active agents of disinformation, their destructive force in society outweighing their contributions to democracy. while this is not by deliberate design, the twin forces of capitalism and a lack of regulation of the world’s largest social media platforms have led to a situation in which social media are a key component of information war around the globe. this means that scholarly discussions should shift away from questions of ethics or actions (or lack thereof) on the part of social media companies to a frank focus on the security risk posed to democracy by social media. this article departs from the usual discussion of the role of social media in society by comparing its value to its destructive elements. the problem with trying to "balance" both the benefits of social media such as its challenge to censorship and ability to aggregate social movements against destructive elements such as disinformation and the loss of privacy suggests we can somehow offset one side against the other. but if social media are making a country vulnerable to a key component of modern warfare, that really cannot be "balanced" even by the ability of social media to give voice to those often ignored by the mainstream media or to allow citizens to find affinity groups online. it's like saying that we can find a "balance" for discussing other national security issues, such as the idea that while an enemy might have superior weapons, at least our nation spent more on social welfare over the past decade. it might be true, but it won't help you win the war when the tanks roll over your borders. as executives in silicon valley bristle at these ideas, let us first consider the nature of modern war and why information has become a key element of contemporary conflict. it is not so much that we need to understand the digital aspect of modern warfare; rather we need to see that digital warfare is a new way of understanding war in the digital age. digital war is the central, rather than peripheral, issue. according to the federation of american scientists, digital war is "a subset of what we call information war, involves non-physical attacks on information, information processes, and information infrastructure that compromise, alter, damage, disrupt, or destroy information and/or delay, confuse, deceive, and disrupt information processing and decision making." 1 one of the most useful frames to consider information war is as the "fifth dimension" of warfare, joining land, sea, air, and space as spheres of battle (franz 1996) . information war is more precise than the notion of "cyber war" (hunker 2010) . indeed, the two concepts of "digital war" and "cyber war" are often conflated, given that "cyber" capabilities could be much broader than information operations and could embrace such tactics as dedicated denial of service (ddos) attacks to bring down servers, the takeover of critical infrastructure via online or local malware, or even drone attacks that are programmed from afar. that kind of conflation is actually not useful, in that it reduces information to a subset of a broader phenomenon and underplays the critical role of information in conflict. while it is disruptive for a country to lose access to the internet due to an attack on a server, this does not have the same insidious danger as subversive propaganda. cutting off access is an obvious act of war that has a clear solution. infiltrating a media system, especially social media, in order to sow seeds of distrust in a way that undermines political institutions is a far more insidious and corrosive act of aggression against a society. this discussion is focused on information war as it is carried out on social media, the battle for hearts and minds, as the most recent, critical development in modern warfare. social media play a very important part in that war and social media are a critical part of both attack and defense in modern warfare. indeed, information operations not only augment, but they often presage or even essentially replace conventional warfare. while the most publicized attack on democracy has been through attempted russian influence in the u.s. elections, countries in europe also have uncovered sustained anti-democracy campaigns by russians in countries ranging from estonia to the united kingdom. while the u.s. and other countries are aware of the threats and are responding, this article argues that it is difficult to have a robust response when u.s. social media companies are key distribution nodes of foreign disinformation. the ways in which narratives about coronavirus have become part of information warfare should sound a particularly ominous warning to democracies. a combination of fear, a large degree of unknown about the virus, as well as the rapid shifts in the evolution of the epidemic highlight how quickly disinformation can travel through social media at vulnerable moments. while national governments and major media outlets also are struggling with covering and framing the outbreak, social media platforms allow for authoritarian communication campaigns to widen and deepen the gaps between citizens and countries just when those connections are most desperately needed to combat an international health crisis. an example of this has been the attempt by authoritarian states (including china) to hint or even outright claim that the virus originated in a laboratory in the united states. now that it is impossible for social media companies to ignore the rising evidence of the central role of social media in inculcating conflict, they have defaulted to two key arguments in their defense: freedom of speech and the idea that the problem is limited to a fundamental misuse of their platforms. a core point emphasized by social media supporters was that the platforms were also vehicles for positive social change, such as in the arab spring, although the platforms showed very little ability or desire to adapt their programs to a range of national laws or norms. a 2008 article called "doing just business or just doing business" highlighted the problem: if internet companies choose to do business in china, for example, they must abide by china's censorship rules. in the case of the yahoo! email service, this meant turning over personal information on hong kong dissidents (dann and haddow 2008) . dann and haddow argued that the companies had violated their ethical standards, in that it was reasonable to surmise that turning over the information would have adverse consequences for their users. this ethical discussion, which took place before the current global reach of u.s. social media companies, now seems touchingly quaint. dann and haddow describe a world in which the main concerns were about privacy, censorship, and state surveillance, notably whether a country could compel an internet service provider to hand over personal information on its users. there was also disquiet about search engines being compliant with information filtering and collection regimes in non-free states. social media companies still face these challenges, but they pale in the face of the ability of states to weaponize social media for both domestic and international use. in particular, the way that social media companies organize users into affinity groups (for example, by friending on facebook or via hashtags on twitter) makes it remarkably easy to find ways to manipulate these groups. when you add on the way that social media companies sell audiences to advertisers by identifying key markers via user activity (friends, posts, clicks, likes, shares, etc.), you have the ability to manipulate both domestic and foreign audiences as never before. while there has been outrage over cambridge analytica, the same capacity to identify and manipulate social media users still lies at the heart of the social media business model. and there is little sustained outrage over that. social media companies would (and do) argue that it's unfair to blame the nature of social media itself if it winds up as the fifth dimension of warfare. siva vaidhyanathan disagrees: in his 2018 book antisocial media, vaidhyanathan asserts that the entire design of social media makes it the perfect carrier for disinformation and that social media companies do little to counter this. indeed, the arguments by mark zuckerberg and other social media officials are at best misinformed and, at worst, disingenuous. given the evidence of the weaponization of social media and the particular lack of foreign citizens to have any right of redress against u.s. companies, 2 it is clear that unregulated and mostly unresponsive dominant media platforms are choosing not to fundamentally change their business model. indeed, shareholders in facebook, twitter, and similar companies would not wish for greater policing of their platforms. the central element of the social media business model is the argument that social media companies are platforms, not providers, of information. this is protected by section 230 of the u.s. communication decency act, which states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." this sounds a little circular but it means that the blame lies with the source of any problematic content, not the platform that provides the content. this has functioned as a get-out-of-jail-free card for facebook and other internet providers if someone, for example, harasses or bullies or even threatens an individual or group. at the same time, section 230 has been hailed by internet advocates as protection of free speech, which is true, but also (inadvertently) creates a great opportunity for proponents of disinformation. 3 section 230 is a very liberal interpretation of u.s. law, which is quite protective of free speech to the point that even hate speech is permissible in the united states. this has created some friction in the united states, but the truly dangerous aspect isn't entirely domestic. it creates opportunities for digital war in two ways. first, it leaves the "digital borders" for disinformation more or less open for foreign states (this is aside from the problems of domestic disinformation). at the same time, as facebook became the dominant social media platform around the world, citizens in other countries find themselves in the same dilemma. while citizens and their leaders discover they need to use the u.s.-based platform in order to communicate and even govern, at the same time social media platforms such as facebook foster disinformation. they have introduced a communications system with a powerful virus of disinformation. this is exacerbated by the fact that facebook also owns whatsapp and instagram, which carry the same problems. a u.s. freedom of speech model has set up a system through which disinformation flourishes and undermines democracy in countries worldwide. it is not that social media companies are unaware or even naive about the way in which their platforms are used for disinformation. rather, there are strong economic incentives for keeping the current laissez-faire 'platform' model. there are three key parts to the model: the needs of the advertisers are primary over those of the users; there is almost no vetting of the identity of who is posting; and content is virtually unmoderated. when content is moderated, it is automated as much as possible and this, so far, has been fairly ineffective. ignoring the role of social media as the fifth dimension of war is lucrative, especially for facebook. according to facebook's 2019 annual report, 4 the company had revenue of $70.7 billion and earned $18.5 billion. despite all the bad press about facebook in the wake of the 2016 russian election interference scandal, daily active users still increased by nine percent to 1.66 billion by the end of 2019. the number of employees at facebook surged as well in 2019, with the company reporting 44,942 workers at the end of 2019, an increase of 26 percent in a single year. overall, the company estimated that on average about 2.5 billion people used facebook at least every month by end of 2019, an increase of eight percent in a single year. the company describes itself in the press release in this way: "founded in 2004, facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. people use facebook's apps and technologies to connect with friends and family, find communities and grow businesses." the self-description highlights the deliberate self-deception: while facebook does provide the services listed, it also furnishes an excellent way to spread malicious disinformation and propaganda to both domestic and foreign audiences. if we want to return to the question of business ethics, one could argue that facebook (and other social media companies) are continuing with a 'hands off' business model to keep costs down and profits up. and it's working. in the five years ended on december 31, 2019 (before the global financial shock from covid-19), facebook stock increased in value by about 163 percent, while the nasdaq index was up about 87 percent over the same period. 5 allowing free access to the platform keeps revenue up and costs down. this raises the question of whether social media could change so that there would be a better balance between the benefits and the drawbacks for society, notably the weaponization of social media to promote foreign disinformation. the real problem is that the users are not the financial priority of facebook or almost any social media site. rather, the advertisers are the key customers being served by the platform. in addition, the investors (in the form of shareholders) also rank far above the users in terms of company priorities. almost any move made to protect the platform and its users from being used in digital war would adversely affect service to the advertisers and the shareholders. as the currency of social media platforms such as facebook is in the number of users, you should keep barriers to entry as low as possible. although facebook is slightly harder to join than twitter, it's still relatively easy to create fake accounts. 6 changing a system in which artificial intelligence is overwhelmingly used to detect fake accounts would be expensive and cumbersome, but still possible (not least by having better ai). but there is a deeper problem. as the value of social media companies is based to a large degree on the number of users, it is not in the interest of the companies (or their shareholders) in either identifying fake accounts or in discouraging them in general. while social media companies may publicly condemn fake accounts and occasionally purge some, in reality fake accounts prop up their business model. content moderation is a more complex issue for social media companies. on the one hand, better content moderation would make a more pleasant experience for a user seeking to avoid extreme speech, pornography, trolling, or what could be considered culturally inappropriate elements of the public sphere (or inappropriate for a particular age or group). social media companies do moderate their content to screen out child pornography, extreme violence, etc., although even this is quite difficult. yet, emotionally charged subject matter drives engagement (celis et al. 2019 ). this dovetails with the need to attract consumers to the site so that they can be marketed to advertisers. thus, a quiet, calm public sphere is not the best for their business model. it's true that it would be much more expensive for social media companies to moderate either content or users in a more forceful and efficient way. but as with fake users, outrageous content also helps the bottom line. so it's a lose-lose for social media companies to police their users and their content, as it would be far more costly and actually might reduce engagement. so their reluctance to do so is more than financial or logistical. moderation works directly against their core economic interests as companies. 7 if the economics of social media make it illogical for the platforms to change, how can we inculcate a shift in how social media works? if we stick to a dialogue that compares the benefits of social media to the problems of social media, we are unlikely to drive change. however, if citizens and policymakers alike can be made aware of the critical role of u.s. social media companies in supporting information operations by foreign states, then change is more likely. this means making the central role of information warfare in modern conflict much more visible and compelling. this will take a significant shift in thinking for citizens, democratic leaders, and social media companies alike: in the american laissez-faire freedom of speech model, it is assumed that misinformation and even disinformation are just part of the marketplace of ideas. however, this is a misconception in a world in which information is deployed into highly engaged, yet highly segregated, communities of voters who are essentially walled off from fact-based journalism and information. in the united states, russia and other foreign entities are able to deploy weapons of mass persuasion directly on vulnerable citizens, with both the vulnerabilities and the deployment system provided to a large degree by social media companies. this vulnerability also came into clearer view during the coronavirus epidemic, as propaganda released for financial and political gain added to the global 'infodemic.' in order to fully understand the role of social media companies in warfare, we need to return to the concept of the fifth dimension of war, i.e. information warfare. it is added to the first four dimensions of land, sea, air, and space. information warfare is, of course, not a new phenomenon but it is radically changed and augmented by the digital sphere. in particular, the advent and wide adoption of social media around the globe gave a unique and unprecedented opportunity for countries to carry out information operations on the citizens of other states. the design of social media allows foreign influence operations to identify key groups, infiltrate them, and manipulate them. in 2016, russians were particularly interested in using wedge issues as ways to polarize and manipulate u.s. citizens and could be effective at doing this with trump supporters via social media (jamieson 2018) . in other words, the design of social media companies is no longer an issue of pros and cons. according to analysts such as vaidhayanathan, facebook's entire design creates the perfect operating theater for information warfare. with social media in its current state, this type of activity cannot be detected or curtailed in a reasonable way because it is embedded in the very nature of social media. it is so easy to pose as another, to gain trust, to polarize, and even convince people to change behavior that american corporations such as facebook create a low-cost weapon for foreign enemies. thus, american corporate ingenuity and business logic created a weapon that is deployed against americans themselves. this again brings up the problem of tradeoffs. americans are now accustomed to the affordances of social media, including the idea that it is "free" to the user. in point of fact, user activity is harvested and sold to advertisers, so users are working for the social media companies in exchange for access. few users, however, either realize or are particularly perturbed by that tradeoff. we could compare this to the rise of the automobile as a mode of transport. initially, cars were seen as independent luxury items and there were few rules to govern their use. the early automobile age was accompanied by chaos and a high rate of accidents. over time, governments took over regulation of the roads and-to a large degree-of car safety through the introduction of seat belts, anti-locking brakes, airbags, and other features. yet, almost 40,000 americans die in car accidents every year and tens of thousands more are injured. 8 so americans do accept tradeoffs. but there has never been a national discussion about the security tradeoffs in social media. what is the level of safety that is necessary? how can we start a national conversation about this? why is it a mistake to leave this in the hands of companies? how can we maintain a robust online sphere, but keep it much safer? are citizens willing to pay for this, either directly or through government support? if the nature of the problem is framed as one of national security, can u.s. regulation work? regulating social media is enormously difficult and that's just in the united states, which has the advantage of being the headquarters of large western social media companies. much of this is due to excessive cyber-optimism in the united states, in particular as an echo of the origins of the internet as a research and educational tool outside of the commercial realm. although that aspect of the internet has been long overshadowed by the commercial web, there is no comprehensive set of laws to specifically regulate the internet. nor is there any public consensus on social media regulation, although just over half of americans now believe that major tech companies should be more heavily regulated. 9 but according to the pew research center, republicans feel that tech companies might already interfere with content too much: 85 percent of republicans suspect that tech companies censor political viewpoints. can americans be convinced that social media regulation is a security issue? we can turn to the issue of terrorism as a shift in thinking from civilian to defense issues. prior to 9/11, the idea that u.s. citizens would go through body and luggage searches for all domestic flights would have been laughable. yet, americans and visitors now go through searches not only at airports, but in a wide range of other public spaces. while this is framed as a defense against foreign attacks, americans face significant threats from domestic terrorism. here is a silver lining to how illuminating the capabilities of social media as a tool for foreign actors to wage disinformation war against u.s. citizens is useful. american democracy also faces significant online domestic threats, from anti-vaxxers to hate groups to disinformation attacks on political opponents. politically, though, there is no will to frame social media as a key part of that problem; rather, the general narrative is that disinformation is an unfortunate side effect of the social media we cannot live without. to change this attitude on the part of americans and u.s. social media companies, it will take a radical shift in understanding how social media has opened up a new and (so far) asymmetric battlefield for enemies of the american state. american perception of conflict and security shifted radically with 9/11. the threat of social media is much less visible and woven not only into the generally opaque nature of social media as people pose, pretend, and market themselves. it also comes at a time when the u.s. government is particularly weak as the political sphere is deeply split over the trump administration's actions. that being said, americans do seem to be waking up both to the threat and the lack of protection from social media companies. while russian interference is seen through a strictly partisan lens, chinese interference creates a much more unified response. nor have social media executives won themselves much praise for their disingenuous performance at congressional hearings. as the coronavirus pandemic has led to heightened awareness of both the importance and vulnerability of trustworthy information, this could be a watershed moment in understanding and valuing the communication ecosystem. youtube chief executive susan wojcicki said that the virus had been "an acceleration of our digital lives" and noted that it caused the platform to speed up changes to direct users to authoritative information. 10 it is particularly relevant to consider how youtube addressed health disinformation in the coronavirus pandemic, in that a study by the oxford internet institute found that the platform had emerged as a "major purveyor of health and wellbeing information" (marchal et al. 2020, p. 1) . the washington post column that quoted wojcicki speculated that health disinformation was taken more seriously than political disinformation by social media platforms. the relative affordances of social media companies might baffle and confuse many americans, but security threats never baffle or confuse americans for long. all it will take is some relatively unified political leadership that can highlight this threat and americans may indeed be ready for significant changes to the current social media model. just as americans pay a security tax for every airline flight, they may be willing to endorse a model of social media that is forced to take responsibility for its users and content. this will likely mean much more stringent government regulation and a change from section 230. while this is disappointing for liberal concepts of free speech, free speech cannot work in a system in which it is weaponized by foreign adversaries. controlling polarization in personalization: an algorithmic framework just doing business or doing just business: google, microsoft, yahoo! and the business of censoring china's internet ks: school of advanced military studies, united states army command and general staff college cyber war and cyber power: issues for nato doctrine cyberwar: how russian hackers and trolls helped elect a president: what we don't, can't, and do know coronavirus news and information on youtube: a content analysis of popular search terms antisocial media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy key: cord-0051339-y5tavcjb authors: cohen, jennifer title: covid-19 capitalism: the profit motive versus public health date: 2020-09-20 journal: public health ethics doi: 10.1093/phe/phaa025 sha: 59f944ccb1e2b5f571cb1a0fd30548f875539245 doc_id: 51339 cord_uid: y5tavcjb market incentives in capitalist economies and public health requirements are contradictory. in the covid-19 pandemic, market-rewarded self-interested behavior has been exposed as a source of mortality and morbidity. profit-motivated behaviors can keep people from accessing necessities for health thereby harming individuals and possibly damaging population health. the profit motive can also undermine healthcare system capacity by maldistributing goods that are inputs to healthcare. furthermore, because profit-seeking is economically rational in capitalism, capitalist imperatives may be incompatible with public health. the ways markets misallocate resources provide a rationale for state responsibility for health, which is a public good. responsibility for health, described as-at least potentially and partly-an individual pursuit, per the liberal tradition, remains a key topic for ethicists in public health literature. critics typically point to social determinants of health and other contextual and structural factors that lie outside of individual control (holm, 2003; bell and green, 2016; brown et al., 2019; levy, 2019; mackay, 2019; verweij and dawson, 2019; . some discussions pose responsibility for health as lying either with individuals because of their behaviors or with the government because of those circumstances beyond individual control. this individualversus-state framing obscures the mechanism through which most individuals, directly or not, secure the necessities of life in a capitalist economy: the market. a careful review of markets should inform such discussions; individuals can hardly be responsible for their health if the market system does not provide access to inputs to health. markets can misallocate resources for a number of reasons-behavioral, institutional and structuralrelated to supply and demand. for example, lack of income impedes access to goods and services for those unable to pay for, or in economic language, to effectively demand, the necessary commodities in the marketplace (holm, 2003; cohen and rodgers, 2020) . as verweij and dawson (2019) note, within-population inequalities offer justice-based reasons for the state to take responsibility for health. another reason to look closely at markets is the profit motive, a supply-side behavioral force, which provides a different rationale for deindividualizing responsibility for health in capitalist economies. i argue that profit-motivated behaviors keep individuals from accessing necessities and undermine public health and health systems as demonstrated during the covid-19 pandemic. furthermore, because such behavior is economically rational in capitalism, capitalist imperatives may be incompatible with public health (smith, 1776) . in times of crisis, such as the covid-19 pandemic, it can be tempting to view price-gougers, hoarders and those who violate quarantine orders as self-interested jerks, with antisocial or even sociopathic behavior. however, focusing on individual 'rule-breakers' elides social and economic context (roy, 2017)-capitalism incentivizes profit-seeking at significant cost to public health. these people are not rule-breakers; their behavior is consistent with capitalist logic. antisocial entrepreneurialism occurs at all levels: from a student charging classmates for single-squirts of hand-sanitizer (harvey, 2020) , to people stockpiling and unapologetically reselling cleaning wipes on craigslist and facebook marketplace (tiffany, 2020) , to drug companies jacking up prices for medications like insulin (thomas, 2019) . in the usa, the federal government failed to take responsibility for regulations, leaving a void to be filled by private entities, some of which enacted more ethical policies than government itself. amazon and ebay swiftly banned secondhand sales of hand-sanitizer and bleach wipes, noting that such sales were in violation of policies related to fair pricing (terlep, 2020; tiffany, 2020) . ebay cited its 'disaster and tragedy' policy, which prohibits attempting 'to profit from human tragedy or suffering' (ebay, n.d.). meanwhile, there seems to be little political will to stop $500 epipens at the governmental level. the prescriptive profit-seeking behavior incumbent to capitalism that is lauded in other times exists in tension with the cooperation required during crises. ambiguity around whether to applaud or punish profit-seeking behavior is demonstrated in the case of the student, whose 'dad was calling him up to let him know he's a "legend"' (harvey, 2020) . a commenter on the story wrote, 'give him ten years he'll be a great businessman who understands supply and demand'. in the same moment that people are dying from covid-19, stores have shortages of hand-sanitizer because of pricegouging. the cognitive dissonance is clear and profitseeking wins plaudits even as it causes deaths. where this behavior is recognized as troubling, it is often reframed in terms of the behavior of a few 'bad apples', which shames individuals while concealing the economic structure incentivizing exactly that behavior-among individuals and businesses, including those making pharmaceuticals. it is this economic structure that puts all of us at risk. as one seller says 'i weighed whether or not this was a moral thing . . . my conclusion was, "if i don't do this, someone else is going to. that allowed me to do it"' (tiffany, 2020) . these stories are not amusing anecdotes about entrepreneurialism. they are about societal values, which the pandemic reveals are gendered and racialized matters of life and death in starker terms than usual. they are more evidence that health is a public good that is too important to be left to the market mechanism (segall, 2005) . going further, the stories are evidence that capitalism grows capitalists, from children to adults, who seek to profit from human suffering. the profit motive is at odds with the requirements of public health. capitalism incentivizes individual gain, while public health requires a slightly more complex understanding of individual and social needs over time. the profit motive undermines healthcare system capacity when, for example, 'entrepreneurs' hoard what are effectively inputs to health and healthcare. entrepreneurial hoarding means that some people cannot take precautions to maintain their health, which has the potential to increase the demand for healthcare. for healthcare workers the relationship is two-fold. when healthcare workers become sick because they do not have personal protective equipment, they increase demand for care while reducing supply of care. when healthcare workers die, this too reduces healthcare system capacity. the longer-term implications are dire. the profit motive and public health also present diametrically opposed normative interpretations of behavior. for individuals to behave 'well', in public health terms, is for them to not undermine the healthcare system, for example, by impeding healthcare workers' access to personal protective equipment. but to behave economically rationally, then, is to behave 'poorly'. individuals do have the right to behave imperfectly, even in solidaristic settings (davies and savulescu, 2019) , however, this particular variant of imperfect behavior keeps other individuals-healthcare workers and others-from being able to obtain commodities necessary for health. in effect, like (in)ability-to-pay on the demand side, the profit motive is a supply-side force that can render individuals incapable of responsibility for their health (levy, 2019) . if health is a public good (nonexcludable), as it arguably is, the ways markets misallocate provide a rationale for state responsibility. the state does not beat out the individual for ethical grounds to take responsibility for health, it beats the market. none declared. on the perils of invoking neoliberalism in public health critique against moral responsibilisation of health: prudential responsibility and health promotion the same lesson over and over: drugs alone will not get us to 90-90-90 working paper solidarity and responsibility in health care disaster and tragedy policy. ebay student sent home for selling hand sanitizer by the squirt to classmates blaming the consumer: on the free choice of consumers and the decline in food quality in denmark taking responsibility for responsibility reflections on responsibility and the prospect of a long life the assets-based approach: furthering a neoliberal agenda or rediscovering the old public health? a critical examination of practitioner discourses unconditional welfare benefits and the principle of reciprocity an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations amazon dogged by price gouging as coronavirus fears grow express scripts offers diabetes patients a $25 cap for monthly insulin. the new york times the hand-sanitizer hawkers aren't sorry. the atlantic, 11 march sharing responsibility: responsibility for health is not a zero-sum game patrick hoffman contributed initial thoughts and he and francois venter gave valuable feedback. book reviews 109 home and homeland: the dialogics of tribal and national identities in jordan by linda layne. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 188 pp. the formation of jordanian tribal and national identities is the central theme of layne's home and homeland. this study focuses on the abbadi tribes of the east jordan valley and is based on extensive fieldwork conducted by layne between 1979 and 1988. layne's central argument is that for the abbadi and for jordanian society in general, tribal and national identities are in dialogic rela­ tionships, deriving meaning from and conditioning one another. she challenges approaches to jordanian social and political identity which compartmentalize individuals according to rigid palestinian/east bank/tribal lines, arguing that identities are constantly shifting and being reconstructed through discourse between tribespeople, urbanites, the monarchy, bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, hashemite rulers, and western social scientists. in the introductory chapter of this work, the author reviews and assesses notions of social identity. layne criticizes mosaic and segmentary models of collective identity on two grounds: they are essentialist in tending to posit col­ lective identity in terms of social masses and they provide "pigeonhole" models of identity which require the presence of an observer. here she introduces a "posture-oriented" approach to identity which "sees identity as meaning con­ structed on an ongoing basis through the everyday practices of making a place in the world, that is, adopting a posture in the context of changing circumstances and uncertain contingencies." layne devotes the next three chapters to the abbadi tribes. she outlines sig­ nificant changes that occurred in the jordan valley in the twentieth century in tenns of the tribes' relationship with land and state. her case study focuses on domestic space as an expression of how the tribespeople have constructed their social entities in the context of inclusion in the jordanian nation-state and inte­ gration into world capitalism. the author emphasizes the strong threads of conl 10 the american journal of islamic social sciences 14:4 tinuity woven through the process of changing identity. a chapter assessing the changing architectonics of the home and family describes how the abbadis still maintain "a modified pattern of seasonal transhumance," moving for the sum­ mer season into goat hair tents. layne's work then moves from a tribal to a national level with a discussion of the jordanian debate in the 1980s over the compatibility of tribalism with mod­ em citizenship. the author analyzes tribal voting patterns during the 1984 par­ liamentary by-elections to argue that tribespeople can function fully as citizens while retaining their tribal identity. the theme of "posture" is carried through to the monarchy in the last section of this work where layne discusses the role of king hussein in shaping social and political identities, particularly through the expropriation of tribal heritage as a symbol of jordanian national identity. home and homeland makes a valuable contribution toward discussions of social identity in the middle east region. layne effectively demonstrates the flu­ idity and complexity of social identity formation and is well justified in point­ ing to the flaws in "pigeonhole" models of collective identity. the greatest strength of this work lies in layne's presentation of her extensive and obvious­ ly diligent fieldwork, which offers us a detailed portrayal of aspects of abbadi domestic life. unfortunately however, layne's analysis of broader socioeconomic and polit­ ical trends effecting identity formation in jordan is not comprehensive. no ref­ erence is made to political liberalization in jordan since 1989. the context of the 1984 elections is not properly explained. the palestinian component of jordanian society is very undertreated, and palestinian conceptions of identity are not analyzed. finally, appearing as it did after the 1989 parliamentary elec­ tions, it seems extraordinary that this work has completely neglected to discuss the islamic component of jordanian social identity. nonetheless, it must be said that layne's case study has made an informative and thought-provoking contribution to the stili somewhat limited scholarship on jordan and will certainly generate further discussion of social identity in the middle east region. marion boulby teacher education network ontario institute for studies in education university of toronto toronto, ontario, canada key: cord-0046813-h35rwsif authors: jagodzinski, jan title: between the nonhuman and inhuman: the challenge of the posthuman for art|education in the twenty-first century date: 2020-05-05 journal: pedagogical explorations in a posthuman age doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-48618-1_12 sha: b9616b8f96bc892d71190ca3f8ece07e321d4890 doc_id: 46813 cord_uid: h35rwsif what is ‘human’ is modulated by inhuman (inorganic) and nonhuman (organic) forces, which provides an understanding of the posthuman. this is the process of technogenesis. in this chapter, i draw on deleuze and guattari’s understanding of control societies to question big data, and how it impacts art|education, especially the field of design in ‘designer capitalism.’ the chapter ends by arguing that the hylomorphic tradition that has shaped design studies can be overcome through only certain forms of biomimicry that recognizes the ‘vibrancy’ of matter that utilize ‘technologies of lassen.’ this is a twenty-first-century competency needed in the era of the anthropocene, or euphemistically called climate change. name a few, have instituted programming at the elementary grades so that the very young become data savvy. as we know, the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics(stem), which makes up the core of such initiative for design, has been lobbied by art educators to include art as part of this movement known as steam, to little avail when it comes to funding through grants. steam would need to be re-orientated to the state of the anthropocene that shifts economic priorities to the values of what has been called 'commonism' (dardot and laval 2019) where the basic elements that have no boundaries, such as water, land, and air, become a global responsibility to be cared for and carefully monitored for global health. such a dream, while far away, can be realized after such a devastating pandemic like in this chapter, i want to explore two things: the first is big data, what i refer to as the inhuman in my title, and to touch on the nonhuman which, in recent literature, points to the vibrations of matter itself (barad 2007; bennett 2010) . by inhuman, i refer to technologies that have shaped human capacities, or what is often referred to as technogenesis (hayles 2012; stiegler 1998; simondon 2016) . derrida (1976) referred to this same development as grammatology, which seems to collapse everything into 'text.' his claim that "there of nothing outside the text," is too limiting. in contrast, the nonhuman in deleuze and guattari's terms refers and extends the range to affects and percepts. as they write in what is philosophy? "the percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man […] affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man, just as percepts-including the town-are nonhuman landscapes of nature " (1994: 169) . nonhuman extends into inorganic life for deleuze and guattari. it is not confined to the organic sphere; life in this realm is closer to zoë than bios, and it refers to virtuality, the potential that may be actualized by 'releasing' life. this distinction i am making is not maintained in the broad literature when it comes to thinking the nonhuman. some authors recognize this difference between inhuman and nonhuman but simply do not state it (barnet 2004) . inhuman, as i am thinking it through, is closer to michel serres (see moser 2016) notion of exo-darwinism, which is the reprogramming of the senses as each new technology is invented that affects and effects the 'human' body reciprocally, both physiologically and psychically. to recall chapter 9 when reviewing infant synaesthesia: it is possible now, with the help of technologies like fmri to isolate specific areas of the brain, to link otherwise separate domains of senses such as 'seeing' with the 'tongue. ' peter weibel (2015) uses the term 'exo-evolution' to identify the processes of technology being able to cross-reference our senses. the invention of the josephson junction of superconductivity has made it possible to form a bridge or 'junction' between natural and artificial nerve cells. this has enabled a revolution in thinking how the brain can be 'rewired.' its neuroplasticity-the capacity of synapses, nerve cells to change their functions-enables quite literally the development of cyborgian body where it has been possible for blind people to 'see' with their tongue via an instrument called a brainport invented by paul bach-y-rita in 1998. reprogramming sensory life in the processing of data by the brain is now a reality. the affective turn has spread throughout all disciplines and the hallmark of relational ontology has been 'affect' and 'becoming.' multiple ontologies are now called on (paleček and risjord 2013) . in the more conservative circles, affect is treated as emotion (the emotional brain) and 'becoming' simply another form of social transformation. deleuze and guattari had already developed the more radical position through their machinic philosophy. affects and percepts are understood as being autonomous entities-inorganic-and 'becoming' is grasped as an 'event' that deterritorializes entities in an assemblage. the nonhuman and the inhuman both shape what it is to be human-better understood as what is now called the 'posthuman' with its competing definitions that include the transhuman and the 'human' as thought through the lens of neoliberalist thought. this latter development should be identified as 'posthumanism,' a continuation of humanist developments in contrast to the posthuman with its attempts to decenter the human. let me begin with the inhuman-and the question of big data as information that art and design educators need to visualize, which is the dominant mode of modulating and controlling movement and time in control societies. the question to ask when it comes to big data: what should art|educators worry about especially in the way images and digital information is related? big data refers to what one can do with large-scale data that cannot be done with smaller batches, to extract new insights or create new forms of value in ways that change markets, organizations, the relationship between citizen and governments, and more for our purposes, the perception of images today that interest artists and educators (see, for instance, andrejevic 2013). contemporary big data banks are well protected both physically and cybernetically secured. the headquarters of bahnhof, a swedish internet service (isp) provider, the former home of wikileaks, is located 30 meters (100 feet) under the granite rocks of vita berg park in stockholm. the location was a former nuclear bunker and command center during the cold war. internet companies like google process more than 24 petabytes of data per day. 1 petabyte is 1 million gigabytes. in 2007, it was estimated that there was about 300 exabytes of stored data. astounding when one exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes! (techcrunch 2008) . these numbers are unfathomable and sublime. they cannot be comprehended. the core of big data is prediction. it's the application of mathematics to huge quantities of data in order to infer probabilities and not potentialities and possibilities. potentialities and possibilities belong to the virtual realm of all things. the various modeling predictions that took place during the covid pandemic is a good example of the way big data outcomes are projected depending on what statistical numbers are supplied, and how 'good' the data is. for instance, dr. deborah birx, one of trump's top official advisors, reported as of april 2, 2020, that 50% of the data for the coronavirus tests was missing. not all the states had reported in. the televised charts presented could not be trusted. virtual factors, all of which are lumped together under what behaviors the populace will take (distancing, washing hands, wearing masks, isolating, equipment available, and so on) are not part of these outcomes. we don't know which virtual multiplicities will be actualized. big data research calls for self-correcting autopoietic systems that can augment or replace the fallibility of human judgment, like smart cars that can drive themselves, the environment is constantly 'read' via information flows so that such a 'smart' car, for example, can respond to each situation and even 'learn' from it: thus its 'smart' car status. the application of big data takes human judgment out of making recommendations, diagnosing certain illnesses, and recommending certain treatments. the central message of covid is "stay home," isolate, and keep distance. such proclamations of judgment are not prophetic but prophylactic. for that to take place requires the cinematic science-fiction world of minority report where 'criminals' are identified before they commit their crime. they are magically identified through the clairvoyant networking of three "pre-cogs." it is they who are capable of grasping the virtual dimension and not big data. no human, however, is able to outplay a computer at chess as we saw garry kasparov lose to the supercomputer big blue. humans are, however, better at the game of jeopardy where guesswork and memory are still involved. watson, the computer lost. but, then there was the matchup with the world champion of the game go, 9 dan ranked ke jie of china, who lost three consequent games to google's alphago. it was so devastating that ke jie decided to give the game up. china and korea have the best go payers in the world. despite these 'smart machines,' there seems to be little comfort in the complexity of urban living when it comes to banking, finance, and health. such complexity is now navigated via machinic thought. machines 'talk' to one another at supra-human speed without our knowledge and comprehension of such coded language. inhuman seems to be the proper descriptor for ai in such cases. 'terminator-type' movies that directly address the anxiety of ai's superiority seem plentiful. star trek: picard ends its first season with picard becoming a "synth." the use of big data is applied to be given a sense of direction, to gain insight into the macro-level, to predict future scenarios. causes are not what is searched for, rather patterns and correlations within the sifted data that have been mined and gathered constitute results from which policy is then extrapolated. it is about what is happening, not why it is happening, and that it is happening. 'real time,' so to speak. big data, in short can identify more accurately the 'control' needed in a managed society that deleuze and guattari address. big data has become a significant corporate asset to set economic plans in motion, as well as enabling the use of algorithms throughout the designer world, a development that has been carefully explored and critiqued through the many writings of luciana parisi (see, for instance, parisi 2013) . perhaps more unnerving is the continual mapping of the body via datafication. by this, i mean both the extrinsic and intrinsic human body. the extrinsic body refers to "quantified self-movement," initiated by fitness aficionados, medical maniacs, and tech junkies who measure every element of their bodies output so as to live 'better,' better referring to controlling and managing their energy expenditures in the environment: calorie intakes, steps taken during the day, power meters, and so on. the intrinsic body (or affective body) is being tapped as well. you can now track sleep patterns by measuring brainwaves, or have a gps system that tracks a sensor attached to an asthma inhaler to warn you of environmental triggers that can bring about an asthma attack; you can buy a wristband that monitors your vital signs like heart rate and skin conductivity so you know how stressed you are. there is an app, which can be installed on your smartphone that enables you to monitor a body's tremors for parkinson's disease and other neurological disorders. you can even generate a networked social map that shows how linked-in you are with others. the point to be made here is that both the conscious and unconscious thoughts, both intrinsic and extrinsic body sensations are now being exteriorized through digitalized technologies. the future manufacture of avatars is said to increase in complexity and sophistication due to the proliferation of such research. in 2045, a hologram-like avatar is projected, like the hologram doctor on the television series star trek: voyager. this has now been 'one-bettered' by a number of holographic variations of captain cristóbol rios of star trek: picard, each with a task to perform on board his spaceship. it is unlikely that such design engineering developments are likely to stop before such seemingly impossible goal is reached. the desire is there. what this means is that all life as zoë-as nonhuman (inorganic) or 'free' life-is being captured as bios, captured through hyper-capitalist research, production, and expansion, which is then packaged and sold back to us. creative energy (zoë) comes with a price tag, metaphorically like the commercial energy drinks (red bull, monster energy, full throttle) that promise an explosion of zoë once they have been consumed. in short, the human is reduced to an object of technological manipulation and is no longer properly 'human' as we once thought. this presents the paradox now famously made by bruno latour (1993) : we have never been modern from the start but have modified our species through our invented technologies. there is no hard distinction between nature and culture, and never has been. the eoliths, tools used by the various australopithecus species that have been discovered thus far (afarensis, africanus, anamensis, sediba, and robustus), were a factor in modifying their brain/body physiology and cognition. we can also look to bernard stiegler's (1998) stance by recognizing what he calls the epiphylogenic development of our species according to the logic of prosthetic supplementation. this has led us to a point where the industrialization of memory leads to a loss of individuation (see chapter 6), the inability to create outside of these technologies of control, the data banks that archive knowledge, which perpetuate the illusion of participation, democracy and 'free' play, and the capturing of "tertiary memory," or mnemotechnics as suggested by stiegler. "savoir-faire," the knowledge of how to make do in the marxist sense, is now being replaced with "savoir-vivre," the knowledge as to "how to live" based on psycho-technological apparatuses that capture and package life as bios. even the maker movement referred to earlier, which does enable free experimentation to release the life of zoë is being harnessed by corporations. i would like to look at one example where image impact and information come together to show that the excess of zoë as nonhuman life always escapes the capturing of life through capitalist means of inhuman biopower as theorized by the late michel foucault (1978) . in my own work (for instance, jagodzinski 2010), i differentiate machinic technologies of macht pervaded by biopower from machinic technologies of lassen, technologies that enable a release of the 'free' life of zoë, which belongs to the virtuality of all things. this was a distinction first made by martin heidegger and later explored by krzysztof ziarek (2013) . machinic technologies of lassen tap into creative potential so that the future is not closed by a control society as envisioned by capitalist grasp of big data. an example here is fabio lattanzi antinori's the obelisk (2012), a circular sculpture placed on a pedestal that changes color from opaque to transparent according to four main crimes that are committed against peace: genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression, and crimes of war. the color changes depend on 'current' online news data that is 'fed' into this sculpture as it processes and translates the data. (copyright prevents me from showing the image, but an internet search readily shows a number of angles of this sculpture.) the assemblage technology of lattanzi antinori's sculpture deterritorializes, as deleuze and guattari put it, the datafication that is constantly capturing attention and affecting extrinsic and intrinsic bodies, and marketing that experience as bios. in this view, the exchange of life as zoë and bios forms a never-ending becoming of transformation pervaded by ethical and political values. the danger is that any release of zoë through deterritorialization in a capitalist system is always dependent on economics where profit dollars are the issue, not necessarily the health of our species or the planet. the obelisk is a beacon giving us a state of our global health. its technology is enabling (lassen) and not controlling. the visible human project (vhp) (for images, simple search the internet for this project) offers perhaps the best example of big data in service of biopower for surgical planning and visual pedagogy. in my view, this is an example of macht technology. in a nutshell, this is an archival project where a data set of an entire human male and female cadaver was rendered as a three-dimensional image utilizing computed assisted tomography (cat) and magnetic resonance interferometry (mri). mri and cat are the new visual technologies of datafication. these visual digitalized technologies have become new ways of surveying the body as well as the brain. they are both beneficial and detrimental in the way visual information provided is interpreted and applied. when it comes to neurological research, in many cases equating specific emotions to specific parts of the brain, interpretive scans come dangerously close to phrenological research of the nineteenth century. the sole use of fmri to make projective determinations concerning mental health has been flagged for its uncertainties. issues of visibility, the rendering and management of the body's interior, the relations of part to whole and between the normal and pathological, all come into play in this vhp project. the cadaver selected to be the first man into digital space, preserved indefinitely, was a convicted criminal, 39-year-old joseph jernigan who had signed a donor consent form making his corpse available for scientific research, despite an appendectomy and a missing tooth. physiologically, as a specimen he was certainly less than 'perfect' in this sense. the transformation of his body into digital data required placing the cadaver in an mri machine to be fully scanned, which then provided the needed template. the cadaver was then frozen in blue gelatine at-85 ℃. once suitably solid, it was then cut into four sections. each section was then cat and mri scanned. the cadaver was then planed (cut) into 1-mm intervals. each body section was digitally photographed, so that each photograph registered a small move through the body's mass. 1878 slices, each slice was a 24-bit digitalized colored image, and when put together composed 15 gigabytes of computer space, equivalent to 23 cd-roms. that was back in 1994. these slices could be restacked and manipulated via so-called computer 'flythroughs' to explore specific organs and body parts. the data set allowed organs to be isolated, dissected, and orbited; sheets of muscle and layers of fat and skin could be lifted away, and bone structures could be isolated. more animation and computer simulation have now been introduced to make the visual more 'alive,' going beyond mere color play and resolution. as a body archive of visual data, it could then become 'shareware' for any medical lab who wanted to buy and use it. its transmissibility-the quality of telematicity-is inscribed in the data itself, and it has particular agential powers. the vhp, which effectively is a virtual cyber-body, is a biotechnology that is meant to aid the 'live body' for therapeutic ends-the improvement of health and medical education, for more accurate imaging and removal of tumors or organ malformations, the planning and rehearsal of new surgical procedures such as telesurgery and keyhole surgery, and so on. the comparison that is made from an image-object (i.e., the virtual cyber-body) to a 'real' body-object (i.e., an actual patient), and then back again in a continuous circuit of referencing, establishes a startling relation. the vhp not only creates an archive of knowledge about the human body, but it also asserts that the body is itself an archive and an organic form of storage and replication. this is not simply a metaphor. the procedures of the vhp literally make the body an archive. it is a way to itemize and index an actual human body composed of finite content, open to multiple forms of ordering and modes of retrieval. as martin heidegger (1977) presupposed, bio-scientific ways of modeling and understanding the order of living matter carry with them the means of instrumentation. this link between art and science goes back to the renaissance. this means, on the one hand, understanding the human body as database or information archive is metaphorical. on the other hand, this very mode of understanding produces material practices that work the body as simply a database. in short, this is medicine's structuring fantasy of perfect management where living bodies predictably embody the application of biomedical techniques that are developed utilizing big data research like the vhp. this is paradigmatic for macht technologies. the fantasy of biomedicine is that matter is somehow programmable; the desire is to order materiality according to algorithmic efficiencies of the computer and the shutting out of life as zoë. the vhp from this perspective is a form of medical pornography providing an inexhaustible satisfaction to fulfill that desire. the medical gaze is capable of seeing 'everything' there is to see in and through the body. life here, designated as bios and information, act as synonymous terms. in the vhp, we see how form supplants matter. if the materiality of the flesh, or 'meat' as science fiction writers refer to it, the density, recalcitrance, palpability, and opacity of flesh were considered positive values, then the production of vhp figures could be evaluated as a violent procedure, the annihilation of body substance valued only for the production of a navigable spectacle. in the form/matter distinction, the only significance of matter for anatomy is its yielding of form for the medical gaze. the palatability of matter, that is, its ability to encounter and resist touch, is simple an obstacle to the eye, an inert and incidental biomass. it is matter as zoë that is being ignored and thus the need for other medical imaginaries. it is interesting to note that as the number of actual cadavers being dissected by hand drops, the more fine-motor hand skills are lost as the necessary neuronal circuits atrophy. it was andré leroi-gourhan (1993) who warned: when the hand loses its importance, crafts(person) ship also fades, and begins to be carried out by media machines. this de-manualization of art is a sure sign of decay. we might say that such skill has migrated to the two thumbs used exclusively for texting on cell phones. ganglia growth that connects those neuronal circuits is certain to be strengthened and thickened. the vhp exemplifies the aristotelian tradition of hylomorphism-the notion that matter obeys laws imposed on it from the outside. life as bios forwards form, the categorization of parts and pieces by way of the iconic form of the body, animated by speeding up and arresting the body's cycles or capacities. what continually is excluded is the becoming of life as zoë, which is the time of becoming, organic time of death and decomposition-the nonhuman or inorganic in deleuze and guattari's terms. in short 'death' as the entropy of the organism is made amenable to the virtual time of computed space-the time of storage, retrieval, morphing, and computer serialization as in any videogame. the data object can be destroyed and then restored, repeated, deleted, deformed and reformed, morphed from one form into another without damage, loss or labor, just like in a videogame. there is only cyber-death as when an avatar disappears on the screen. virtual computer time is a negentropic eternity-no death is ever felt. in all those operations, life as zoë -the nonhumandoes not enter into the process; entropic time does not exist. yet, the haunt of the criminal jerrigan does not go away from this project, but this is another story that brings to the surface historical traces that ethically insist on the past. the virtual (which is real) is again missing. to end this section with perhaps an obvious claim: the aesthetics of the vhp, which is generalizable to all hylomorphic thought, presents a view of biomedical health based on big data where the diseased living body can potentially return to its original condition of equilibrium or homeostasis from which it departs, and the problem of death postponed. it is life-in-death that pervades the biomedical imagination. such an aesthetics defends against the full recognition of the hypercomplex formation of the living organism characterized by iatrogenic illness-that is, the flux and eddy of health and illness that characterizes the uncertainty of any medical intervention into a field of disease. this realization stares us in the face in the flux of the 2020 covid pandemic. deaths are real. the recognition of zoë as a perpetual movement of non-reversible imbalance, an aleatory, and uncertain flow and, of course, the irreversibility of an organism's being toward death become less of an issue for the biomedical gaze. humans, like homeorhetic dynamic assemblages, are fluid not static systems, singularities modified by both inhuman and nonhuman entities-by the bacteria and viruses that live within us, and the technologies that modify us. this dimension attaches us to the creaturely life of the cosmos and dark matter, which deleuze and guattari refer to as the inorganic (zoë). the vhp is paradigmatic of posthumanist developments of mastery over matter as part of the big data craze in control societies, rather than posthuman developments that recognize the precarity of all living organisms-that is life as zoë that is so crucial due to climate change, the era of the anthropocene, and pandemic catastrophes. i end this chapter with the importance of recognizing that 'life,' referred to as free energy of zoë is what artists and art educators must address and keep in mind. i refer to this life as the nonhuman, as opposed to the inhuman of algorithmic big data. zoë as nonhuman life needs to be constantly forwarded. this is not to say that i am supporting an either/or binary: zoë or bios; analog or digital; continuous or discontinuous. no. analog is not 'superior' to digital, both are in play. it is a matter of recognizing the status of this 'play' in every assemblage. in the vhp, the digital supersedes the analog. a macht technology overwhelms the materiality of flesh as the cadaver vanishes. in distinction, operating rooms are exemplars where enabling technologies (lassen) are inseparable from the body in which they intervene to save lives. yet, the encroachment of ai technologies into ehealthcare systems as macht technologies via body area networks (ban) cannot be ignored (peterson & iliadis 2020). in the contemporary world, pervaded by climate change, only an ecological consciousness can off-set the pervasive technological instrumentalized imaginary. one way to do this is to overcome the hylomorphism by pointing to artists and designers who have embraced science, but have done so in ways that overcome the false division between culture and nature, embracing the technologies of lassen as the freeing up of zoë. the contemporary situation that design pedagogy faces is one where there is a finitude of planetary resources. all those minerals and fabricated plastics that are needed to constantly innovate computerized technologies are presenting significant geopolitical problems. jussi parikka (2014) has called this the 'anthrobscene.' certain minerals are not easily mined due to the politics between corporations and national states, as weak as some of those states are. it is a 'no brainer' that the anthropocentric activities of man are changing the global climate where the 6th extinction of our species is now occurring; the way food is grown and distributed via global trade agreements and global capital means that the growing global population cannot be fed within these capitalist distributive systems. the ravages of war and terrorism have become a permanent feature of everyday life in syria and yemen, and globally as well. this has led to massive refugee and asylum seekers flooding into the post-industrial countries, a factor that global capitalism cannot control. the conflict over natural resources, especially water, and the constant air pollution in countries such as china raises basic issues of sustainability of the human body. we can add to this list of 'capitalist woes': unemployment, homelessness, trade-wars, resource conflicts, foreign debt, arms trades, nuclear weapons, and inter-ethnic violence. worse, perhaps is that there has been a significant shift toward fascist regimes and right-wing populist politics globally. the election of donald trump as the 45th president of the united states has worried what is already a precarious global order-then a covid pandemic to ensure true confusion and devastation. against this backdrop designing for designer capitalism seems like folly, and art and its education need to recognize this global precariousness to educate our children otherwise. there are several designers that art educators can turn to address this situation. for designers such as tony fry (2009 fry ( , 2010 fry ( , 2012 , 'sustainability' is not understood in terms of capitalist design, but sustainability as the necessity of ontologically designing ourselves, as we, as a species have blindly done until reaching this critical point of anthropogenic change. this requires making a world-within-the-world other than as it currently exists. design education at all levels has to wean itself off its current entrapment with the corporate world of designer capitalism for nonsustainable life as presented in chapters 6 and 7. sustainability is about the ability to create so as to keep up generative connections; these connections can only arise out of differential relations that will maintain an intensity to continue to generate difference. this is most certainly a twenty-first-century core competency. while there is no running away from current technologies, science and art can come together in different sustainable ways. there are a number of designers, artists, and architects who are working with scientists across a wide variety of fields who have questioned the hylomorphic thinking where form is imposed on nature, often by brute force, what is often referred to as a 'heat, beat, treat' process, which uses up 96% of the material that results in waste but produces only 4% of the product! the work of rachel armstrong (2015) in collaboration with christian kerrigan is an outstanding paradigmatic example where the nature|culture divide no longer holds as the attempt is to develop living systems of their own invention that are able to symbiotically come together to create sustainable structures, for instance the project to prevent venice from sinking (hobson 2014) . this is an excellent example of lassen-technology. rachel armstrong's thrust here is to develop 'living architecture'-that is self-repairing architecture through 'protocell' technologies. together, with other chemists and scientists, armstrong and her colleagues are able to manipulate these 'protocells,' which have properties of living systems, so that a new form of architecture emerges free of hylomorphism. projects include attempting to prevent venice from sinking by having these metabolic materials grow a limestone reef around the aging and rotting wood. while this is not an overnight process, it is a sustainable project. in 2013, the edf foundation in paris presented an exhibition that drew artists together who demonstrated this geo-biological turn (see ulgc 2013). the shift in paradigmatic thinking to understand 'distributive agencies' is well on its way. the realization has come that the nonhuman world and the inhuman world of artificial intelligence or smart technologies possess 'agentic capacities' and must be understood symbiotically and put to use. an attunement with nature is necessary and urgent. human action is conditioned by a manifold of social, material, institutional, and corporeal factors that come together as assemblages that are held together through desire. this is in keeping with the machinic thought of deleuze and guattari. such an understanding is beginning to pervade all the sciences as a direct effort by well-known pioneers such as bruno latour, donna haraway, and katherine hayles to note the most prominent and often quoted. there is no 'pure' nature that has not already been altered. as bruce sterling (2000) the founder of the viridian design movement maintains, there is not a liter of seawater anywhere without its share of polychlorinated biphenyls (pcbs). new microscopic bacteria have now been discovered that thrive on plastic waste thrown in our oceans. the entanglement between the technologies of nature and technologies of culture fold over each other; they are no longer separate spheres. there is no 'nature' per se. it becomes 'ecology without nature' as argued forcefully by timothy morton (2009) . brute force (hylocentrism) has been the previous approach to issues of bioenergy (oil, coal, gas); the shift with biological design treats the cell as the hardware and the genes as the software. life becomes a code that is interchangeable, depending on the manipulation, to produce energy for specific purposes. it can become energy, food, and fiber, analogous to what is happening in the domain of stem cell research. it is possible to transfer genes from one cell to another to create new species. here, zoë and bios work together symbiotically as both genetics and genetic drift are accounted for. nanotechnologies, for example, are used to purify water. given that water continues to be a growing problem, desalination becomes possible by making water filters with carbon nanotubes; it is possible to remove salt from saltwater without the need to apply extreme high pressure to force water through conventional semipermeable filters. nanotechnology overcomes hylomorphic mentality as well. again, i would see these as exemplars of 'lassen-technologies.' biomimicry as championed by janine benyus (2002 benyus ( , 2009b offers many examples of design that uses nature as a guide. she offers a redesigning of the world based on the designs of nature. "in a biomimetic world, we would manufacture the way animals and plants do, using sun and simple compounds to produce totally biodegradable fibers, ceramics, plastics, and chemicals. our farms, modeled on prairies, would be self-fertilizing and pest-resistant. to find new drugs or crops, we would consult animals and insects that have used plants for millions of years to keep themselves healthy and nourished. even computing would take its cue from nature, with software that 'evolves' solutions, and hardware that uses the lock-and-key paradigm to compute by touch" (benyus 2009a, online) . this emerging field of biomimicry, as it too moves away from hylomorphism, however, remains trapped within a capitalist economic system, bringing certain skepticism as to just how such design can address a planetary ecological consciousness in clever ways without addressing the ethico-politics means when doing so. but, perhaps this is the best hope we have now? the same question can also be extended to the ecological imagination as applied to 'vibrant architecture' by rachel armstrong (2008 armstrong ( , 2015 , which views building as part of (inhuman) computer programming that establishes a 'germline structure,' offering humans the potential to make genetic adjustments with a predictable lifecycle of the architecture once it is no longer responsive to human activity. it then decays in the ecosystem to be recycled by its progeny. currently, an ecological pedagogy of design that grapples with the very 'design' of our species via technologies (what i have called inhuman) and nonhuman forces of zoë, as illustrated by the intermingling of art, design, and science via biomimicry, seems far from sight/cite/ site. however, it seems to me this is the way art education's imagination needs to go to help re-orientate the current direction of art and design education from its capitalist orientation to one that recognizes the forces that shape the anthropocene. this seems to me to be a twenty-first-century imperative for art|educators. without such a reorientation, what might be called an ecologics that supports an ecosophy in félix guattari's (2000) terms, it is unlikely that a new generation of children will be able to overcome a 'strictly' technologic (inhuman) mentality of macht technologies as it is such a powerful force today, whereas it is precisely the combination of art|science|philosophy that is badly needed for post-conceptual art (osborne 2013 ) that explores the anthropogenic production during this era of the capitalocene (moore 2017), yet another, more accurate term for what has been inappropriately popularized as the anthropocene. references andrejevic, m. (2013) . infoglut: how too much information is changing the way we think and know. new york, ny: routledge. artificial evolution: a hands-off approach for architects vibrant architecture: matter as a codesigner of living structures how arduino is open-sourcing imagination| ted meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning technical machines and evolution vibrant matter: a political ecology of things biomimicry: innovation inspired by nature biomimicry institute biomimicry in action| ted common: on revolution in the 21st century what is philosophy? of grammatology (g. c. spivak, trans.) history of sexuality: an introduction design futuring: sustainability, ethics, and new practice design and politics futuring, the city & sustainment-the remaking of design | ted the three ecologies how we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis the question concerning technology and other essays growing a 'giant artificial reef' could stop venice sinking visual art and education in an era of designer capitalism: deconstructing the oral eye we have never been modern the obelisk trans.), idem, gesture and speech the capitalocene, part 1: on the nature and origin of our ecological crisis ecology without nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics the encyclopedic philosophy of michel serres: writing the modern work and anticipating the future anywhere or not at all: philosophy of contemporary art relativism and the ontological turn within anthropology anthrobscene contagious architecture: computation, aesthetics, and space embodied computing: wearables, implantables, embeddables, ingestibles on the mode of existence of technical objects manifesto: viridian design movement technics and time 1: the fault of epimetheus google processing 20,000 terabytes a day, and growing making the geo-biological turn. alive/en vie. aux frontières du design the seeing tongue: new aspects of exo-darwinism language after heidegger m $m mnmn svstem? it is suggested as remedy for evils of modern capitalism what is the corporative system? it is suggested a s remedy for evils o f modern c a p i t a l i s m by eileen egan no. 5a published in u. s. a. august 5, 1941 by our sunday visitor press huntington, indiana our sunday visitor library huntington, indiana nihil obstat: rev. t. e. dillon censor librorum imprimatur: john francis noll, d. d., bishop of port wayne what is the corporative system? t h e recent publication of "the church and social order" by the archbishops and bishops of the united states has been the occasion of a great inquiry into the theory and practice of the corporative system. besides stating f o r americans the teaching of the church on ownership, property, wages, security and labor the bishops laid down general outlines f o r the establishment of a social order which would make f o r a betterment of our present condition by the practical application of general moral principles. the remedy they offer is "the reintegration of the social body by means of vocational groups", or, in other words, the gradual adoption of the sane corporative order which pope leo x i i i and pius xi advocated in their famous encyclicals. it is important to note that the suggested remedy is not a complete political framework t h a t overnight would bring utopia. i t is certainly not a form of totalitarianism as some very leftist critics would like people to think. because italy developed a false conception of the corporative system through the dictatorship of the fascist party, these same critics would have us believe that corporativism means fascism or totalitarianism. they neglect to mention that the pope, in recommending the true corporative system, condemned such a mis4 what is the corporative. system ? such a system is, in its essence, a reform movement which recognizes certain roots in capitalism which have given rise to the misery and unrest we see about us today. it is merely a method to overcome these evils and to promote economic democracy among the peoples. before we can understand the remedy, we must understand the sources of the evils of our present order. capitalism was founded on the idea that if men were allowed to conduct their business enterprises absolutely free from any restraints whatsoever, they would give the best service to themselves and to the state. this liberalistic notion was upheld by the most influential economic thinkers of capitalism's early age, and can still be heard today. this notion, which sounds very well when expounded smoothly, conveniently frees the business world of all considerations of morality, justice and concern for the common good. as long as the businessman himself came out richer, all was well. along with this, went the idea of the absolute right of property. the catholic church had always taught that property was only entrusted to a human being as long as he makes good use of it, and that the possession of property has a two-fold aspect, one, the right to own it individually, two, the duty to use it in line with the common good of society. the factory or house owner who refused to install the necessary safety or sanitary precautions on the grounds that the factory or house 5 what is the corporative. system ? was his property and that, therefore, he could do what he liked with it, was conveniently forgetting the second aspect of ownership and was, according to the church's teaching, not obeying the moral law. the complete divorce of business and ownership of all kinds from any moral restraints created a situation in which the strong and ruthless could prey upon the weak members of society. the christian teaching that all men are equal in the sight of god was twisted to support woeful injustices. the heads of great enterprises which ruined their competitors, oppressed their workmen, and controlled their entire field of endeavor countered any criticism with the statement that since all men were equal, any man could rise in the world as they had done. if pressed f u r t h e r , they would defend themselves by crying that they lived in a f r e e country. the misuse of the words freedom and equality has brought us to our present condition, in which the weaker members of society own nothing a t all, in which economic dominance is held securely by the few, who use it for their own advantage. in america, the richest and most progressive country in the world, almost one out of four of our working population is unable to find work. we have large cotton surpluses, and people without s h i r t s ; we have idle builders and families without houses. it is not necessary to describe f u r t h e r , since nothing is more obvious 6 what is the corporative. system ? than want in the midst of plenty. men seeking power seize upon these obvious evils to foment class war. this, of course, adds to the chaos and may bring f a r greater evils in its train. the corporative remedy starts from the basic evils. it advocates a return to ethical standards in the conduct of all business. instead of holding out individual profit as the be-all and end-all of business enterprise, the common good would be the criterion of action. this would bring back the idea of a just wage f o r the working man, that is, a wage that would provide f o r him and his family the physical and cultural conditions of a good life. since it is unjust to limit the owning of property to a few, a wider distribution of property would be a necessary condition of a good social order. another result of bringing moral principles back into the economic life of the nation, would be the .serious attempt to create security f o r the ordinary wage-earner. since the wage-earner is a man made in the image and likeness of god, he has a positive right to a just wage, a modicum of security and the ownership of some portion of the world's goods. if the tonic of such moral principles were injected into the sick body of our social order, the evil effects of class war would cease. as a machinery to attain such excellent ends, the bishops point to the corporative system. i t is applicable to many political frameworks, f o r example, republican or monarchic.. in each locality, workmen and employers of the 7 what is the corporative. system ? same vocation would form unions in which both groups would actively participate f o r the good of all. these would band together with all other workers and employers of the same field in the entire nation. these powerful federations, representing all interests of the vocations, would set standards of work and production to protect the public, and would promulgate and enforce just provisions of work, wages and general welfare f o r the wage-earner. even agricultural and cultural pursuits could be organized in the same manner, so that no worker would be left alone and unprotected against injustice. the greater part of the work f o r social and economic justice would be done by the regional unions of employers and employees, but the state would have to be a watchful guardian of the rights of the weak. in most modern countries, the state, under capitalism, has been a f a r more watchful guardian of the rights of the strong. by throwing the responsibilities for the general welfare back on the community organization, a decrease of centralized power would inevitably result. if, finally, men were represented according to their vocations in one chamber of the government, the interests of all members of society would be more surely taken care of. workers in the legislature would find some means of bringing the surplus cotton to those who need shirts, and of providing work f o r idle builders by supplying houses f o r families without adequate shelter. 8 what is the corporative. system ? the problem is not insoluble if we throw over a few of the evil principles invented in capitalism's -early days to j u s t i f y the insatiable greed f o r profits of the few. as can be seen, this is a very general suggestion, and would have to be modified to fit each country. for example, a highly industrialized country would have a different version from a country whose activities are largely rural. portugal, the one european country which has experimented with this system, has some unique features to satisfy the needs of her fishing and agricultural populations. these will be explained in a later article. whatever good organizations had grown up in a country would of course be the basis f o r the transition into the corporative system. labor unions would enlarge their numbers and broaden their functions. the important thing, however, is the return to the principles of justice and morality so that all men may be made partakers, in more even measure, of the goods which are on the earth. rebirth in p o r t u g a l — a glance a t t h e background "jphrough many sources, the principle outlines of the corporative state are becoming better known. to those interested in such an organization of society, it is of serious interest to examine its results in the one country that has honestly tried it. just as the eyes of communists everywhere turned to russia to find proof of the results of communistic ideals, so the eyes of less atheistic economists and workers turn to portugal to see the results of the corporative experiment. communism and corporativism contrasted there could be no greater contrast i-n the world than between the results of communism in russia and corporativism in portugal. in portugal the new state was ushered in first by a peaceful assumption of power from a corrupt governing group; then by the adoption of a constitution through a free plebiscite. in russia rivers of blood flowed that marxism might grow. religion, under the soviet, has been openly persecuted by killing, confiscation, arbitrary arrest, torture, and anti-religious propaganda. in new portugal, no religion or race has been persecuted. christian and jew prosper together, and their rights are specifically guaranteed in the constitution. "the paradise of workers" has gradually reduced every man to the dignity of 10 what is the corporative. system ? an animal whose stomach should be filled (if convenient), but who, beyond that, has only the right to obey the dictates of a totalitarian government or submit to liquidation. the portuguese citizen is oppressed by no government but protected by a state which announces in its constitution that all its acts are subservient to the moral law, and that it has a duty to see that the benefits of civilization are made available to all. instead of starving its citizens by the millions, portugal is protecting its families by giving them the security of a living wage, proper housing and good medical care. russia has her enemies roaming about the world seeking the ruin of nations, stirring up discord, as in the united states, and war, as in spain. it recently waged war upon one small nation and is threatening others. portugal is giving her citizens the blessings of peace in internal and external affairs, and is true to her mission of bringing christianity to the world, whether by standing up f o r right principles at geneva or by building schools for native children in her extensive colonial possessions. the contrast between communism and corporativism could be extended to every department of government action, though enough has been said to bring out the main difference between the two systems: communism is destructive, while corporativism is constructive. the results cited above are not accidental, but inevitable since marxism finds its basis in hate, and corporativism springs from love, from the chris11 what is the corporative. system ? tian conception of the brotherhood and mutual interdependence of mankind. from retrogression to progress the history of portugal f o r the last hundred years had been one of retrogression. by trying to imitate the successes of industrial england, portugal lost, for a while, her true individuality and found herself burdened by a staggering load of debts to foreigners. she was perpetually in fear of having her colonies taken away from her by more powerful countries, yet was unable to afford even a small fleet to protect them. in 1908, the king of portugal was murdered by the agents of an international organization. in 1910, a republic was declared by a minority peculiarly active in lisbon and with strong connections abroad. to consolidate its power, the "democratic" republicans threw all their opponents into jails. so great was the suffering of thousands of these persecuted people that protest meetings were held in london to petition an amnesty for political prisoners. the accounts written on the spot by philip gibbs describing the horrible conditions of these jails and dungeons are a prophecy of what was to happen later in spain. a systematic persecution of religion was entered into by men who stigmatized the name of democracy by calling themselves democrats. the writer has noted great skepticism of this type of democracy among simple portuguese nuns, who during the troubled days of the last war, were 12 what is the corporative. system ? driven into exile in belgium, then england, and even to the united states. the new leaders fought among themselves f o r complete power, and revolutions were bloody and frequent. the fortunes of the country fell lower and lower. the misery of the country people grew so acute that they preferred to leave their homeland, and for many years, to use a common saying, the most important export of portugal was peasants. that was the lot of a nation which had once led the world in discovery and colonization and had owned one of the greatest and most far-flung empires that the world has ever seen. salazar most unusual 'dictator' the people finally got tired of waiting f o r the promised constructive reforms of the government. in 1926, people of many shades of opinion united and took the power from the inept and corrupt politicians. not long a f t e r wards, a brilliant professor of economics at coimbra university was given the task of bringing order into the chaotic finances of his country. this was dr. antonio oliveira salazar, now prime minister of portugal. the first thing he insisted upon was a balanced budget. by the heroic cooperation of the portuguese people, and by a ruthlessly honest administration of funds, this was accomplished. a good start was then made toward reducing the foreign debts piled up by the politicians of earlier regimes. the budget surpluses of the first few years of dr. salazar's administration 13 what is the corporative. system ? formed a bulwark against the depression t h a t came upon the world at that time. let us take a quick glance at the constructive efforts of the portuguese government in these last difficult years. in 1933, a constitution was adopted by plebiscite, and a beginning was made in the corporative organization of society. portugal had reached its great heights under the ancient guild system, and portuguese thinkers had long recommended a return to the principles of that system. the response of its people to an honest government, true to the t r a ditions of the country, was immediate. a statute of labor was promulgated by the new government and accepted by the people. labor contracts between employers and employees made for stability in working conditions by avoiding costly strikes and class struggles. wages were made very much higher and productivity was increased. unions of workmen spread in a count r y hitherto poorly unionized. benefits of wise organization were spread to agricultural and fishing centres through the sponsoring by the government of cooperative enterprises whereever there was need f o r them. when the active principle of the common good was brought back into the economic life of the nation, the effects were startling. through cooperation toward a common end and with the backing of a watchful government, industrial peace was assured. due to the more just apportionment of wages, buying power increased enormously. the problem of unemployment, which had threatened to be14 what is the corporative. system ? come desperate because of the closing of the doors of brazil to immigration, was gradually conquered. now portugal can boast t h a t as nearly as possible, she has found a constructive solution f o r the modern world's peacetime nightmare, workers without work. every class has voice in rule political order was achieved through vesting power in a president of the republic and in a national assembly elected by the nation. the representatives of the workers unions and employers' associations meeting together in corporations may advise the national assembly concerning the proposed legislation. thus f a r , the corporations do not meet together as a body, but discuss affairs in panels. by their advice, however, they help assure the fact that the interests of the nation as a whole will not be subordinated to pressure by a few, or to politicians' votes. the corporations, representing the entire economic, intellectual and moral life of the nation, will have more power as the corporative structure comes of age. its colonies also benefit a colonial act to regularize the administration of the colonies of africa, china, the atlantic and oceania was promulgated. in its statement of the labor and other rights of the natives, this act is a magnificently christian and progressive document. trade between the mother country and the colonies was greatly increased since the advent of the new government. a small navy of very modern ships was built in 15 what is the corporative. system ? england and portugal to protect these extensive possessions. new yorkers saw the small, trim "tejo" in the harbor on the occasion of opening of the portuguese exhibit a t the new york world's f a i r in 1939. order and peace from chaos order and peace now reign in "the little house of portugal". the period of national apathy and shame has passed and a consciousness of national pride and high destiny has taken hold of the people. in the previous hundred years, portugal sank lower and lower in national and international aifairs, in spite of the fact that this was a period of prosperity and economic expansion. in a time of world-wide depression, she organized herself slowly and surely under the principles of a corporative republic and has attained a prosperity she has not known since her golden age. for us the importance of this great national renovation and reconstruction lies in the fact that it was based on certain potent and simple t r u t h s which the modern world conveniently forgot, but which solid thinkers taught long before the rise of capitalism and will continue to teach no matter what system replaces it. social security under t h e corporative system every one of us who depends on wages for rent, clothes, food and the other necessities of life, has had to worry about the steadiness of his income. in america, due to the many abuses of our economic system, we have had to become extremely "social security conscious". it is therefore of great interest to us to see how other systems meet the same problem. in portugal, where a corporative system of government is being gradually built up, the ordinary working man is finding more and more security in his job and in the conditions of his daily life. we will examine unemployment, wages, working conditions and the state of business. work created on needed projects world depression skips no country today, and portugal was affected as we were. her important exports of cork, sardines and wine went down considerably, and of course men lost their jobs. dr. salazar, the present prime minister, took office as minister of finances one year before the depression. when he saw the results of the depression, he and his government studied the situation as it affected the working man. men had to be put back to work without bankrupting an already debt-ridden country. first, many abuses of the old tax-collecting system were swept away; then taxes were made some17 what is the corporative. system ? what higher in view of the changed situation. the budget, which the politicians had been unable to balance in almost a hundred years, was balanced in one year through the efforts of a completely honest administration, and a minister of finances who was an economist, not a vote-begging job-seeker. a f t e r careful study, the following were found to be among the country's most pressing needs; roads, docks f o r commerce, houses f o r working-men and their families, the rudiments of a navy, more national selfsufficiency in the staple articles of food, improvement in transportation facilities through long necessary reconstruction of existing railway lines. made country nearly self sufficient no project was started without a definite, practical plan. every plan involved some necessary and basic addition to the welfare of the people and their country. men were put to work building some of the needed ships (others had to be built in england hecause of that country's superior technical facilities). unemployed workers found useful toil in building and improving the portuguese roads; in tearing down old and unsanitary houses and constructing clean, pleasant dwellings to house a rapidly growing population. the port of oporto, the industrial city of the north, was improved, and the harbor works of the town of setubal have been completed. expensive changes are being executed in the port of lisbon to help it achieve the importance it should assume as a great atlantic harbor. 18 what is the corporative. system ? twelve other less important harbors are included in the scheme f o r port improvement. the work on these is slowly but surely being brought to completion. the production of wheat, as a single example of government help in the production of staples, has been vastly increased so that the country is now self-sufficient in this regard. two of the projects vital to the goal of self-sufficiency are irrigation and the erection of storage places f o r foodstuffs. both of these problems have been energetically and wisely worked out. the entire plans are not yet in execution, but enough has been done to show that the government has found the correct solution. the government itself took over the improvement of transportation by reconstructing bridges, tracks and other equipment. the results are a great help to trade and tourism in this little country. today, the portuguese government can still balance its budget, while pointing with pride to a record of less than one person in two hundred unemployed. freed nation of class war the solving of the problem of unemployment is only one aspect of portugal's program f o r the welfare of the working man. the other aspect is f a r more important because it is the translation into action of basically sound principles of social reconstruction. the statute of labor makes unnecessary the furious class war we sometimes see in the united states because it enshrines in the constitution the idea that man as a human being has rights in regard to a iiv19 what is the corporative. system ? ing wage, security, and worthy conditions of work. it also sets up an efficient organization to safeguard these rights for every worker in the land. advances in social life working men and women are entitled to a paid vacation the length of which depends on the number of years they have been employed. provision is made f o r illness or forced unemployment. men may not be fired for trivial reasons; thus no man feels at the mercy of an employer's whim. if the employer does not fulfill these conditions, the worker may appeal to the tribunal of labor situated in each district. the writer has seen the workers come to the tribunal in their work clothes and tell their story in full confidence that the justice done to their fellows will be done to them. private companies have been quick to cooperate with the government in providing good medical care, sanitary conditions of work, and in some cases, more adequate housing. the statute of labor also provides that the local unions representing each industry make labor contracts with the employers' associations. these contracts must live up to certain standards and are binding in the locality in which they are adopted. naturally different localities and conditions call for different terms. the correct carrying out of the terms of these contracts is a matter which is the concern of the tribunal of labor. thus the worker, even in remote dis20 what is the corporative. system ? tricts, is not alone and defenseless in his struggle f o r justice and security. corporativism promotes democracy one of the most important things the portuguese experiment has done is to prove to the world that corporativism is not a cut-and-dried system to be imposed like a shell on the economic and political life of a country. portugal has proved that corporativism is the application of certain basic principles to economic and social life for the purpose of promoting economic democracy in the modern world. portugal's own solution of her rural problems is a case in point. in 357 rural areas there is a central casa do povo, or people's house. here the small f a r m e r may obtain credit without enriching a bank or money lender. both worker and larger landowner contribute to the upkeep of the house. small but regular contributions make possible help to the worker in illness, unemployment, and old age. these centres also serve as posts f o r instruction and entertainment. these sources of security and enlightenment have, in the few years of their existence, worked wonders in the improvement of rural life. when their possibilities for promoting consumers' and producers' cooperatives are more fully realized, the results will be worth watching. insurance against bad times the fishermen, important in a country with a coastline like portugal's, have similar centres called casas dos pescadores, or fishermen's houses. one such house that the writer saw 21 what is the corporative. system ? had helped an entire village through a winter of small catches by providing complete medical care, lunches and dinners, clothes, schools and an old men's home. a small proportion from each catch had been put aside in good times so that a large surplus was ready for any emergency. these houses, run on cooperative lines, are a lesson to other countries in local self-help and self-government. incidentally, it is as close an approximation of true economic and political democracy as this writer has seen anywhere. naturally, there was some opposition to the entire portuguese scheme from employers who wanted absolute freedom to make as much money as possible without having to join guilds or abide by regional labor contracts. however, when the increased buying power caused by higher wages brought about business expansion during a world depression, their views have shown a change. many businessmen, in fact, insist that the stability and expansion of business is a tribute to the corporative system. certainly the rural worker or farmer, the fisherman and the city worker can localize the cause of their new security and higher standard of living. social w o r k s under a corporative republic jn america, we are inclined to think that because we have more cars and bathrooms per unit of population, all progress is ours. it might be surprising to take note of the progress being made in small european countries with f a r less resources of trade or wealth. in portugal, besides banishing unemployment and creating security for the working man, a progressive government has inspired or sponsored many activities to improve the living conditions of all wageearners and their families. these activities include extensive housing developments, a comprehensive plan f o r medical care, particularly in tuberculosis, more park spaces f o r the use of children, modern provision f o r the care of dependent members of society, and the bringing of education and culture to those most remote from the centres of culture. family unit basis of government the portuguese constitution recognizes the family unit as the basis f o r the government and as existing before the government; therefore the family as a unit has rights that should be respected and protected. when a housing scheme was planned, this consideration came f i r s t . instead of building apartment houses where human beings are crowded like members of an insect community, it was decided to build a house f o r 23 what is the corporative. system ? each family. the poor as well as the rich, says the portuguese government, have the right to privacy. the houses are of different sizes, comprising 3, 4, 5, 6, and even 7 and 8 room units. each house has its shower; many have private gardens; all are pleasantly situated and landscaped. the lucky families who live in these houses pay only 10 per cent of their monthly income as rent. that figure, of course, is in striking cont r a s t to the rent-salary ratio of wage-earners in the united states. if a man earns only $75 a month, he can keep his family in a lovely six room house f o r $7.50 monthly. the best is yet to come. p a r t of this $7.50 goes to pay an insurance premium, so that if the head of the house dies, the home immediately becomes the property of the family. it is easy to see t h a t this is an enormous step in the protection of the family as a family. in any event, a f t e r twenty years of such payments, the house automatically becomes the property of the family. state protects people from disease by the summer of 1939, 10,000 persons had been accommodated in such projects. such developments are still under construction, and a f t er a medical check-up, more and more families leave unsatisfactory habitations f o r these brightly cheerful homes. the writer has seen these clean and happy sections in lisbon, oporto, viana do castelo and aveiro. they are to be found in many other districts where the need was felt. certainly the healthy, economically 24 what is the corporative. system ? secure citizens found here, will bring dividends to their progressive little republic. portugal has inaugurated an. excellent service in its national compaign to rid the country of tuberculosis. from a large headquarters in lisbon, all activities are directed and coordinated. in most of the large towns, there is a station to serve the surrounding countryside. preventive measures are directed from these centres. examinations are made available to all. thus the citizenry at large is protected from infection. modern medical care reaches the poorest fisherman through the cooperatively run fishermen's house. these houses employ as many as eight or ten doctors. the pre-natal care given to mothers is excellent. it is surprising to the. visitor to see a modern delivery room in an old-fashioned fishing village. medical care f o r agricultural workers is often obtained at the people's house t h a t is found in each rural area. for industrial workers, the service is just as thorough. the larger factories employ resident physicians who give not only care during working hours, but general medical attention at a nominal cost. the need now is f o r more hospitals. lisbon has some magnificent new structures such as the maternity hospital, alfredo da costa. in the nort* the hospitals are more crowded, since map» come f o r care now who never had a chance a t hospital service before. the facilities of the coimbra university hospital were taxed to the utmost when the writer visited it. but so acutely 25 what is the corporative. system ? are the members of the government aware of this need t h a t action will probably come soon. aid for orphans, sick and aged so f a r we have seen only the work done for wage-earners and their families. what about those too old, infirm, or otherwise prevented f r o m supplying themselves with a livelihood? in everytown, there is a central hospital f o r those who are aged, infirm or unable to work. this is called the "misericordia." instead of being the bleak dwelling we often see in the united states, they are often the most distinguished structures of the town. for orphans there is similar provision. in both cases, there is an enormous amount of private charity, and of course, since freedom of religion has been re-established, the religious orders have found their way back to the service of society's outcasts. to describe the "misericordias" and other catholic social works that the writer saw in coimbra alone, would require a long article. it is interesting to note, however, t h a t one of the biggest orphanages f o r boys and girls, once had dr. salazar, the present prime minister, as an active director in the days when he was professor of economics at the university. the directress is proud to point out the spot in the ancient chapel where he used to pray every time he paid his visit to the orphanage. chtistian spirit of charity is need parks f o r children can be seen in many parts of lisbon and in other portuguese cities. these 26 what is the corporative. system ? sometimes supply winter recreation under expert care f o r the children of working mothers. the cultural aspect is not lost in these activities f o r the betterment of the least favored members of society. to accommodate those whose education was neglected under the bomb-ridden liberal regime, 2,050 centres of instruction f o r the acceleration of education have been opened. these are often located in the people's houses. here come men and women to learn to write, and children f r o m isolated homesteads. as of 1939, there were 46,000 students enrolled at these centres. for lightening the monotony of work, there are excellent "movies" to be seen a t the peoples' houses. in the summer, six great trucks travel from village to village carrying their burden of dreams. this is the travelling theatre, inaugurated nearly four years ago f o r the benefit of the country dweller. for a poor country, portugal has done well. to a visitor, the activity on behalf of the working man seems amazing, the results already achieved, more amazing. the fact that all these things have been done with small resources is a proof that it is not more riches that the world needs to satisfy the needs of its peoples, but more of the christian spirit of charity and more of a desire to serve the common good. key: cord-0051431-32bfze4e authors: giuliani, elisa title: piketty, thunberg, or marx? shifting ideologies in the covid-19 bailout conditionality debate date: 2020-10-09 journal: j int bus policy doi: 10.1057/s42214-020-00072-8 sha: ef6ce2967b405b958b39d6a78c77786c68646195 doc_id: 51431 cord_uid: 32bfze4e are crises an opportunity to push for fundamental changes? can the covid-19 crisis help to promote an ideological shift towards a different type of capitalism? by conducting a quantitative content analysis of the international press on the covid-19 bailout conditionality debate, this article documents the existence of three dominant narratives: the distributive justice, environmental justice, and marxist-type anti-capitalistic narratives. yet, only the distributive justice assumed greater prominence during the period of observation, signaling a small step towards an ideological shift in which the general public may become more open to scrutiny of companies’ dividend and bonus policies and more averse to acceptance of tax avoidance and the accumulation of excessive wealth by members of the corporate elite. the article concludes by recommending mnes and their ceos to be prepared for more distributive justice challenges in the future. much has changed since the bubonic plague that hit england in the mid-1600s but, as the above quote argues, there is a common thread linking this earlier pandemic and the current covid-19 crisis: both hit the poor much harder than the rich. pandemics are only one of several sustainability grand challenges in need of a solution, whose impacts are especially severe for the underprivileged and poorer strata of our society. other current challenges include a range of environmental threats from climate change to the noxious impacts of toxic pesticides; a wide spectrum of business-related human rights risks including those related to child labor and modern slavery; the rise of within-country economic inequality and the problem of tax avoidance. while diverse in nature, all of these issues are global problems that need global solutions, and are challenges about which scientific research has produced significant knowledge. however, governments' responses have often been slow, fragmented, and therefore ineffective on a global scale. by most accounts, these challenges represent 'wicked problems' (rittel & weber, 1973) , which are hard to tackle because they are social systems problems (churchman, 1967) around which decision-makers have conflicting values and whose complexity requires multi-stakeholder coordination and the involvement of public as well as private actors on a global scale. as suggested by eden and wagstaff (2020) these are problems where ''politics trumps evidence and solutions are never first best or permanent''. even in the most successful cases of implementation of global treaties to regulate and fix problems (e.g., the un declaration on universal human rights, the paris agreement on climate change, and the stockholm convention on pesticides), not all countries have chosen to ratify these treaties at the same time or to enforce national regulation to ensure their success. in international business terms, this fragmentation leads to institutional voids which allow companies with an international reach such as multinational enterprises (mnes) to engage in social or environmental arbitrage practices in order to profit from imperfect global regulatory architectures (surroca, tribo & zahra, 2013) . it is interesting that rather than being condemned, these arbitrage practices are accepted as part of a portfolio of legitimate activities that mnes can undertake to remain profitable, and which are openly exploited by governments to attract investors. in this context, international business ethics scholars have warned about the tensions that international managers will have to face when they operate in countries whose cultural or legal standards are different from those of their home country, especially if host countries' legal requirements are loose or poorly enforced (donaldson & dunfee, 1999) . such studies have led to recommendations for managers to find ways to maintain high standards when it comes to fundamental rights, on issues like for instance ''child labor, prison labor, or discrimination'' (p. 60), (s.c. hypernorms), while otherwise they have warned about the need to find creative ways to adapt to and respect local cultural norms and habits. however, as widely documented by the business and human rights literature (see giuliani & macchi, 2014 for a review), it has proven very hard for mnes to respect fundamental rights in poorly regulated host countries, where exploitative or otherwise-defined lower standard conduct may not even be considered unlawful or immoral. more fundamentally, however, arbitrage is tolerated because it is a practice that pays off economically: it greases mnes' operations and thus allows for local economic gains in the form of more and better jobs, and economic growth. the point i want to make is that the narrative that endorses mnes' regulatory arbitrage in the name of economic value generation is not based on inviolable economic principles. rather, i would argue that its acceptance is based on the decisionmakers' cognitive frames and reflected in the dominant narratives that have been constructed around given issues which condition ideologies and thus lead to the acceptance of certain ''unitary truths'' (smith & tushman, 2005) and to the rejection of equally valid or even potentially superior other ''truths''. research in fields as diverse as e.g., linguistics (fillmore, 1976; lakoff, 2004) and strategic change (fiss & zajac, 2006) shows that cognitive frames -the way in which individuals make sense of the complex world around themcan be performative, meaning that they can shape actions and decisions to change (cornelissen & werner, 2014) . in economics, douglass north has provided a fascinating account of the relevance of beliefs and ideologies for institutional development and economic growth. as he put it: ''the dominant beliefs, that is, of those political and economic entrepreneurs in a position to make policies, over time result in the accretion of an elaborate structure of institutions, both formal rules and informal norms, that together determine economic and political performance.'' (north, 2003, p. 4) . however, accomplishing such changes requires a cognitive frame shift, and this does not come easy. for example, decision-making around sustainability issues is an area where resistance to change (ford, ford, & d'amelio, 2008) is particularly severe because it involves disruption to comfort zones and acceptance of paradoxes and ambiguities to which most decision-makers are reluctant to agree (hahn, preuss, pinkse, & figge, 2014) . on this front, it seems that the current dominant cognitive frame is still one where sustainability goals are a desirable outcome only if their achievement is not figure 1 the evolution of the three narratives during the crisis. note: the y-axis measures the frequency of the terminologies attached to each narrative dictionary in the text, and the x-axis refers to the successive weeks from jan 19 to june 7, 2020. now, the median ftse 100 executive salary is £850,000, and the median bonus is £1.4m on top. a 30 per cent cut to annual salary and the cancellation of bonus payments, however, would amount to a loss of £1.65m. even then, our ceo would still be a member of the 0.00001 per cent. they wouldn't go hungry and could still order whatever lexus model they wanted (the company usually pays anyway). the independent, april 27, 2020 some businesses receiving government cash and favourable loans are continuing to handsomely reward top executives and shareholders. some are owned by wealthy individuals who for years have paid minimal tax personally and through their companies. the times, may 20, 2020 it will have to be scrutinized further before being forwarded to the cabinet for approval. there have been heated discussions in the online and offline worlds along with insights offered by politicians, bankers, and academics on possible solutions for thai and, more importantly, the fact that taxpayer money worth more than 100 billion of baht could be used to fund a state-owned enterprise saddled with a long history of corruption and nepotism. the bangkok post, may 18, 2020 (b) environmental justice narrative the economic challenge that represents the coronavirus outbreak has also to be seen as an opportunity to undertake in the context of the eu green deal an urgent reorientation of the eu economy as the current crisis reveals the fragility of a carbon-intensive system built on highly interconnected and specialised global supply chains. the guardian, march 16, 2020 (c) marxist-type anti-capitalist narrative perhaps, we need a new national flag. one that simply reads: ''profit before people''. there's been plenty of stories about individual companies and bosses acting despicably during the outbreak -but don't be fooled into thinking this is about a few bad apples. the problem, the dysfunction, is systemic. the structures we have set in place around the economy allow the rich to sponge off the state when they need to, while simultaneously vilifying the poor and weak if they find themselves dependent on state support. it's a satanically sick joke; hypocrisy on an epic level. the herald, may 7, 2020 emphasis in italics added. detrimental to economic performance, and for this reason win-win business models -where sustainability projects are used instrumentally to increase profits -have become a very popular way of addressing sustainability challenges ( van der byl & slawinski, 2015) . however, win-win models often imply the perseverance of the standard profit-oriented cognitive frames, and neither embrace new more paradoxical logics nor imply radical departures from 'business as usual' (giuliani, tuan, & calvimontes cano, 2020). covid-19 crisis if we look at the past, crises potentially can spark some changes to the dominant narratives and to policymaking. whereas on the one hand it is true that the 2008 financial crisis did not radically alter the functioning of the financial systems despite the wave of criticisms of the moral hazards linked to bank bailouts (krugman, 2009 ), on the other hand, economic historians point to the political economy changes promoted by the great depression and the two world wars and reflected in the increasing role of the state in the economy and the construction of the welfare state (persson & sharp, 2015) . clearly, the reactions to shocks and crises differ, and affect industries differently. also, some crises are endogenous -engendered directly by the economic players as in the case of the 2008 financial crisis, while others are more (although perhaps not completely) exogenous -as in the case of natural disasters, wars, civil conflicts, and pandemics. a shock such as that wrought by the covid-19 crisis could accentuate latent conflicts because quite suddenly imbalances and disparities across members of the same society are exacerbated, and threats which the dominant narrative has allowed to be overlooked for years are brought to light. with all that in mind, i explore the narratives that have developed out of the ''bailout conditionality'' debate which emerged when countries began to discuss policy solutions to help companies hit by the covid-19 crisis get back on track. first, i describe the narratives emerging from the bailout conditionality debates based on qualitative content analysis of reports in the international press during the crisis (from january 19 to june 7, 2020). second, i perform a quantitative content analysis to assess the temporal dynamics of these narratives during this period. 1 with specific reference to the bailout of large companies, three narratives stand out: the distributive justice, environmental justice, and marxisttype anti-capitalistic narratives ( table 1) . the distributive justice narrative was born out of larger discussions on the rising within-country economic inequality -a debate that existed in the academic circles well ahead of the covid-19 crisis and which was popularized in piketty's (2014) book capital in the xxi century. this narrative openly stigmatizes companies for non-payment of taxes and denounces their shareholders and executives for enriching themselves at a time when so many others are suffering. it also debunks all the preconceptions about the well-functioning of markets and the well-deserved payoffs of risk taking, to the point that a ceo's salary cut is portrayed as a desirable action since the individual in question ''wouldn't go hungry'' and could still afford ''whatever lexus model'' she/he wanted (see table 1 (a) for examples). the environmental justice narrative focuses on bailouts conditional on companies meeting certain environmental targets. essentially, it portrays the covid-19 crisis as an epochal opportunity to start a new green transition towards a low-carbon economy, and resonates with calls for an environmental turn in policy-making from different social groupsincluding the younger generations moved by the greta thunberg fridays for future initiative (see table 1 (b)). finally, the crisis has given space to a fairly radical marxist-type narrative 2 that questions the legitimacy of the whole capitalistic system which as the quote in table 1 (c) shows, is depicted using some extreme terminologies as a ''satanically sick joke'' where the ''structures…in place around the economy allow the rich to sponge off the state when they need to, while simultaneously vilifying the poor and weak''. next, i look at how these three narratives developed during the start-up phase of the covid-19 crisis (20 weeks in total). figure 1 shows that during the first 6 weeks following the start of discussion of bailout conditionalities both the distributive and environmental justice narratives increased in the press but that after that initial period the former assumed greater prominence and the relevance of the latter decreased, and for most of the remaining period of observation has remained flat apart from a slight rise in the last observed week. the marxisttype anti-capitalistic narrative was present in the press, but was never dominant. starting from week six, it left the stage to the distributive justice narrative. the focus on the distributive justice narrative continued through the period of observation. while the analysis of press narratives on its own is insufficient to demonstrate that we are on the brink of an epochal ideological change, it suggests that we may be becoming familiar with new truths, and that these new truths might potentially be transformative. the arguments at the core of the distributive justice narrative were present among activists (see e.g., the tax justice network) and scholars (zucman & saez, 2019 among others) prior to the crisis but the crisis provided an opportunity for these arguments to be amplified to reach a much wider audience. some recent research suggested that media coverage on corporate tax avoidance becomes more frequent and more negative during economic downturns, when readers display heightened sensitivity towards what they perceive to be greedy and unfair business conduct (chen, schuchard & stomberg, 2019) . likewise, during the covid-19 crisis, such distributive justice arguments have been consistently prominent in the press and have emerged in high-level policy debates, too. for instance, on april 17, 2020, the european parliament adopted a resolution recommending that: eu institutions and the member states ensure that public financial support provided to firms in order to combat the economic effects of covid-19 is conditional upon the funding being used to benefit employees and the recipient firms refraining from bonuses to the management, tax evasion, paying out dividends, or offering share buy-back schemes for as long as they receive such support. (european parliament, 2020, 34). in the same spirit, on april 24, 2020, eu finance minister bruno le maire declared that ''if your headquarters is located in a tax haven, it is obvious that you will not be able to benefit from public aid,'' adding that ''if you have benefited from the state's cash flow, you cannot pay dividends and you cannot buy back shares'' (braun, 2020) . other countries in europe have announced similar conditions and even us president donald trump has conceded that he would ''be ok with prohibiting companies that receive federal assistance during the coronavirus pandemic from using that money for stock buybacks in the future'' (reinicke, 2020) . certainly, a discussion about the need to avoid a ''lemon socialism'' scenario, where taxpayers are asked to absorb the losses of failing companies, is not new to this covid-19 crisis: it was an issue of concern during the 2008 financial crisis, too (krugman, 2009) , and back then some voices were raised about the moral inappropriateness of allowing bailed out banks and financial institutions to award dividends to shareholders or bonuses to executives. however, in concrete terms, very little was achieved on this front at that time (see acharya, gujral, kulkarni, & shin, 2011; jabko & massoc, 2012) , but these arguments could achieve more traction in the context of the covid-19 crisis, given the severe, pervasive, and enduring impacts on the real economy. the relevance of these seemingly changing narratives might be signaling a small step towards an ideological shift in which the cognitive frames of the general public and the electorate may become more open to scrutiny of companies' dividend and bonus policies (hereafter distributive policies) and more averse to acceptance by society of tax avoidance and the accumulation of excessive wealth by members of the corporate elite (e.g., majority shareholders and executives). these narratives may even potentially intensify in the future as governments will have to decide whether to continue to bailout companies in the aftermath of the crisis and which types of fiscal policies are better suited for containing inequality, which may prompt debates about the need to raise marginal tax rates for the wealthy or on capital gains (dietsch et al., 2020) . such continuing debate may keep the general public alert and trigger demands for the accumulation of wealth to not be at the expense of other stakeholders (e.g., workers, communities) or the environment. should there be some ''normalization'' of these kinds of expectations among the general public, this could leave ample room to redesign policies to address sustainability grand challenges other than pandemics. for instance, it might increase consensus about the need to explore a new policy space where public subsidies to companies and market-based incentives such as competitive bidding schemes must be anchored firmly to companies' human rights and environmental track records. it might also promote related policies banning or disincentivizing companies from redistributing their gains unless they show improved social and environmental performance or limit systematic state support to companies with aggressive tax planning. perhaps the bailout conditionality debate provides another opportunity to set the ground for more courageous policy-making in one or more of these directions which is what is needed most to ensure that a greater difference is marked between our future and daniel defoe's times. finally, ideological shifts of the kind discussed above could modify the expectations of mnes stakeholders -especially workers and external audiences including consumers, the press, and the general public. in that scenario, mnes possibly might in the future have to face greater scrutiny of their distributive policies, and demands for solid justifications for payments of dividends to shareholders or bonuses to executives despite the workers involved in their value chains for instance not being guaranteed minimum wages. it is well known that mnes have already adopted sophisticated impression management strategies to deal with multiple accountability requests on a complex range of social and environmental issues (fabrizio & kim, 2019) and that ceos are becoming activists themselves by adopting an open stance towards some of the apparent aberrations of contemporary western societies -as in the case of racial or lgbqt+ discrimination (chatterji & toffel, 2019) . nonetheless, it is less clear how such advancements might contribute to resolving the tensions at the core of capitalism which cannot be addressed simply by the addition of a new policy to augment the lists of mne ''good deeds''. sociologist johan bellamy foster reframes marx's idea of capitalism as a production system that ''is thoroughly wasteful with human material….so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist'' (marx, vol. iii pp. 90-92 quoted in foster, 2020, p. 183) . hence, if we were to ask mnes to play their part in reforming capitalism such that wealth accumulation at the top of the value chain (shareholders, executives) should not be at the expense of those at the bottom (workers, children, vulnerable groups, etc.), we would be asking for a radical reform of corporate governance that would undoubtedly need to exceed what social responsibility policies currently do. irrespective of whether the covid-19 crisis will lead to such a radical transition at this time, it seems to me that current and future global corporate leaders should focus seriously on familiarization with distributive justice and other similar narratives in order to be prepared to act responsibly when the next crisis strikes. i am indebted to ari van assche, sarianna lundan, and an anonymous reviewer for their supportive and insightful comments on this short article. thanks also go to giovanni federico for sharing his knowledge, and to giada gerberini and valentina giovannoni for research assistance. the idea of this article came while preparing a talk for the regional studies association (rsa) webinar ''nothing new under the sun: how the past informs today's policy responses; crisis and (missed) opportunities'', held on 27 may 2020, where i received useful comments on this article's core idea. all errors and omissions are mine. funding open access funding provided by university of pisa within the crui-care agreement. 1 quantitative content analysis has been used to document trends in rhetorical strategies over time. i used ad hoc dictionaries (available upon request) and liwc software to analyze the press. the selection of press was made using the nexis uni database to identify ''newspaper'' articles based on keyword search ''coronavirus or covid and bailout''. the search included over 12,000 articles (amounting to 21,105,655 words) written in english. while this selection includes newspapers from non-english speaking countries if they have newspapers published in english, it excludes other languages which may bias the universe towards more ''western'' views on the matter. also, the analysis does not consider outlets other than newspapers (e.g., blogs, industry reports). hence, the results presented in this note need to be considered in light of these caveats. 2 it has to be acknowledged here that this narrative reflects how marx's core ideas were popularized, not his own thinking. as krätke (2020, p. 20) puts it, marx ''did not criticize capitalism as a system of injustice or condemn it as the source of all evils; he saw capitalism not as a wrong track leading mankind astray from its 'true' destination, but as a necessary and largely progressive stage in human history'' and he believed rather that ''capitalism would come to an end because of its inherent tendencies to self-destruction''. elisa giuliani (phd) is full professor at the department of economics & management of the university of pisa, and director of the responsible management research center (remarc). she is editor for research policy, in the editorial boards of economic geography, the journal of economic geography, and the business and human rights journal. her research interests lie at the intersection of international business, development studies, economic geography, and innovation studies. her core areas of research are industrial clusters and global value chains, multinational enterprises' impacts on development processes, and the dynamics of innovation networks. recently, her research focuses on the social and environmental responsibility of big companies, on innovation and human rights, and on the causes and consequences of business-related human rights infringements. publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. accepted by ari van assche, deputy editor, 25 august 2020. this paper is part of a series of contributions dealing with the implications of the covid-19 pandemic on international business policy, and it was single-blind reviewed. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. dividends and bank capital in the financial crisis of companies based in tax havens cannot get bailouts, says french minister assessing the impact of ceo activism media coverage of corporate taxes wicked problems putting framing in perspective: a review of framing and frame analysis across the management and organizational literature covid-19 -repercussions, challenges, and responses in international political economy why ethics travels: the promise and peril of global business ethics evidence-based policymaking and the wicked problem of sdg 5 gender equality eu coordinated action to combat the covid-19 pandemic and its consequences frame semantics and the nature of language the symbolic management of strategic change: sensegiving via framing and decoupling multinational corporations' economic and human rights impacts on developing countries: a review and research agenda creating shared values meets human rights. a sense-making perspective in small-scale firms reluctant disclosure and transparency: evidence from environmental disclosures. organization science resistance to change: the rest of the story the marx revival. key concepts and new interpretations 177-196 cognitive frames in corporate sustainability: managerial sensemaking with paradoxical and business case frames french capitalism under stress: how nicolas sarkozy rescued the banks capitalism bailouts for bunglers. the new york times don't think of an elephant! know your values and frame the debate the era of political economy: from the minimal state to the welfare state in the twentieth century capital in the twenty-first century trump says he'd be ok with a bailout that prevents companies from using cash on share buybacks-and claims he was 'never happy' with them in the past, markets insider dilemmas in a general theory of planning managing strategic contradictions: a top management model for managing innovation streams stakeholder pressure on mnes and the transfer of socially irresponsible practices to subsidiaries embracing tensions in corporate sustainability: a review of research from win-win and trade-offs to paradoxes and beyond the triumph of injustice: how the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay izetbegwicialija ali book reviews islam between east and west 307 islam between east and west by alija ali izetbegovic published by: the american trust publications, indianapolis, indiana 46232, u.s.a. price: $12.00 (paper) islam between eqst and west is a remarkable work of multidisciplinary scholarship by a bosnian muslim lawyer who is currently serving a fourteen year term in a yugoslavian prison for his islamic activism and “fundamen talist digressions”. educated in sarajevo and paris, alija ali izetbegovic has been active in islamic work throughout his adult life. writing, lecturing, and organizing islamic educational and welfare activities, he has been a constant source of intellectual and spiritual inspiration for thousands of young yugosla vian muslims. alija’s main objective in this book is to examine the roots of the cultural crisis, moral anarchy and political upheavals of the modern west and to show how these are related to the influence of partial truths and reductionist ideological perspective. the central thesis of this book is that there are three distinct views of the world that reflect three different elemental possibilities: the religious, the materialistic, and the islamic. islamic worldview is integral in that it combines both pure religiosity and pure materialism. bile pure religion em phasizes conscience and pure materialism emphasizes nature, the focus of islam is on man who lives in the worlds of both conscience and nature. the author then shows how both pure religion (christianity, hinduism and buddhism) and materialistic philosophies (socialism and capitalism) have given partial answers to life’s integral questions of “ideals” and “interests” and how they have been trying to compensate for their primal inadequacies and half-truths through continuous compromises in both theory and praxis. the author argues on the basis of considerable historical evidence that the actual realization of these two opposing views of the world has been quite different from what they originally aspired to achieve. a modified, post-renaissance humanist interpretation of christianity and the religio-moral basis of socialist egalitarianism with its teleological view of history clearly demonstrates that 308 vol. 2, no. 2. 1985 it is impossible to be a consistent christian o r a consistent materialist. it is with reference to these formulations and arguments that our author builds a case for islam as a “third way“, the only world view which takes into account both the spiritual and material needs of man. it is because of this integral world view that islam has always been a target of attack from the two opposite directions: from the religion which considers it as ”too natural, actual, and tuned to the world”; and from science which sees in it elements of religion and mysticism. despite these apparently contradictory “right” and “left” wing tendencies, there is but one islam which simultaneously reflects inspiration and experience, eternity and time, thought and practice, soul and body; in short, man’s life in all its aspects. the author shows how islam played an important role as an intermediary between the ancient cultures and the modern west. he urges that islam must again today, “in a time of dramatic dilemmas and alternatives”, resume its role as an intermediary ideology in a divided world. the final chapter of the book develops another interesting and rather pro vocative hypothesis: that england in particular and anglo-saxon culture in general (as opposed to the other european societies) have found a middle road between religion and materialism and thus bear a strong resemblance to the “third way” of islam. alija argues that english society, economy, polity, art and literature, and philosophy and social thought are the closest approxima tion of the bipolarity of the islamic model. the author follows the parallelism between islamic and english minds through series of examples from roger bacon to george bernard shaw. elaborating on the meaning of spengler’s parallel between the prophet mohammad and cromwell, alija notes that, from the viewpoint of the philosophy of history, the emergence of england and the anglo-saxon spirit in the west has many things in common with the emergence of islam in the east. it is no wonder, then, that while on the con tinent an empiricist, as a rule, will also be an athiest, in england, the father of empiricism, john locke placed the concept of god in the center of his ethical theory and upheld the hereafter’s sanctions in establishing moral prin ciples for society. spencer’s education, alija argues, might very well have been written by a muslim intellectual. the whole thrust of the anglo-saxon moral philosophy, with its emphasis on the harmony between the individual and the society, egalitarianism, social responsibility, and the ethical bases of political economy, demonstrates clear correspondence between english and islamic moral and intellectual traditions. not disagreeing entirely with alija’s hypothesis about the differences in con tinental and anglo-saxon traditions of moral philosophy, the reviewer feels that the argument seems to have been stretched too hr. although alija seeks to focus on the most historically significant variations between continental and english social and moral thought and praxis, he tends to overlook cer american journal of islamic social sciences izetbegovidalija ali islam between east and west 309 tain important affinities between these two traditions, affinities that are ob viously derived from the religious mainstream of western christianity. if we are not primarily concerned so much with causal relationships as with long term consequences of ideas, even the left hegelians, with their passionate desire for social harmony and intellectual crusade for universalism and politi cal reforms, could be traced to their cousins in the british isles. but this is a minor point. alija knows his subject very well. he is well versed in western thought and is intimately familiar with relevant literature in physical, biological and social sciences as well as in humanities. he is particularly at his best when he discusses masterpieces of western art and literature and offers new and often provocative interpretations of their mean ing for individual and society. alija’s critique of evolutionism and materialistic/scientific bases of human life is both comprehensive and devastating. he brings arguments in his criti que from zoology, molecular biology, physics, chemistry, and cultural anthropology, and presents an alternative view of evolution of “civilization” as against the constancy of culture. his critique of humanism is similarly brilliantly conceived. he rejects the possibility of developing a secular ethics, an ethics based on the denial of god. in line with the other moral philosophers (jacques maritain, for example) he very clearly shows how concepts fashionable in contemporary humanistic philosophy (justice, equality, fairness, fraterni ty) become meaningless if they are not firmly anchored in the belief in god. discussions on culture and civilization, mass culture, family, and communi ty are also very forceful and illuminating. alija’s view of islam is closer to existentialists. to him, “islam is a method”, (one is quickly reminded of sartre’s searchfor method), and not a “ready made solution”. it is not something given; one has to discover it for oneself. to me, this view seems a somewhat new interpretation of islam, apparent ly contrary to the orthodox view which regards islam as a totally defined and once-for-all completed religion and a way of life. as far as i know, the only other muslim thinker who comes closer to this view was mohammad iqbal who spoke of the continuity of the creative process in the universe and the opening up of new horizons for man on earth. but it must be noted that iqbal’s concept of the continuity of “kun” refers to physical and intellectual spheres and not to the moral sphere which, according to him, is “given” in the qur’an and the life of the prophet. it is probably because of this existentialist view of islam that the author seems to acknowledge a continued persistence of “tension” even within the framework of islamic bipolarity. that is, the tensions that he identifies in religion and science do not find their complete resolution even in islam, although they do assume a new creative and sublime posture in islamic biopolarity. 310 american journal of islamic social sciences vol. 2, no. 2, 1985 the major focus of the book is on the critique of pure religion and pure materialism. the ony full treatment of islamic alternative is in chapter viii, especially in its section on “bipolarity of the five pillars of islam.” thus the critique comes out as much stronger and convincing than affirmation. in terms of space and coverage, two-thirds of the book consists of criticism of religion and materialism or with the supremacy of adreligion over science. discus sion of islam as a “third way” is relatively brief and sketchy. chapter 111 on “the phenomenon of art”, though excellent in its own right, becomes larger than life in the context of the basic premises and objectives of the book. that is, it tends to present a highly exaggerated case in favour of the primacy of art and literature over science. it thus undermines the cen tral thesis of the book, viz. that both are half-truths. art and literature, in this particular case, become substitutes for religion and islam. there is, however, a difference between the statement that art and literature are pro ducts of rdigious inspiration and the statement that they are religion as such. also, the author’s view of religion is basically anthropological. hence, he includes all kinds of ancient myths, superstitions, and magical rituals in his definition of religion. so far so good. but the problem arises when he equates this kind of raw and unstructured religious symbolism with the coherent and systematic theology and cosmology of revealed religions (judaism, christianity, and islam) and treats them at the same level. like some other contemporary muslim writers but not at the same magnitude our author also commits at some places the familiar intellec tual sin of comparing “our best” with “their worst”. perfected by the christian missionaries and polemicists writing on islam and the muslim world, it has now been appropriated as a standard technique by some muslims as well, especially in their da’wa-oriented writings. according to this technique, islamic norms and ideuls are compard with western practices and behaviours, in stead of comparing ideals with ideals and practices with practices. having expressed some minor disagreements on certain issues, i must con clude by saying that it is an excellent work of scholarship on the subject. a book of this type has to have some polemics in its style and presentation but, in the main, it is full of perceptive observations on matters of moral and social philosophy. the style is lucid and the presentation of arguments is brilliant and extraordinarily engaging. the author has a masterly grasp on his subject and knows the west from very closed quarters. unlike many other muslim intellectuals who have compared islam and the west in terms of their world views and philosophical positions on individual and society, alija does not impose a single standard of orthodoxy upon the west’s entire intellectual history. he takes a more differentiating view of the intellectual history of the west and discusses important areas of divergence within both the athiestic and religious traditions. he is extremely well-versed in the intricacies of thedogical izetbegovidalija ali islam between east and west 311 debates in western christianity as well as in the controversies associated with the secular ideas of utopian politics. he draws fruitful comparisons between these two opposing intellectual currents and identifies certain important struc tural affinities between islam on the one hand and some aspects of the western thought and praxis, on the other. mumtaz ahmad washington, d.c. key: cord-0047580-7pd5k07g authors: hall, richard title: the hopeless university: intellectual work at the end of the end of history date: 2020-07-14 journal: postdigit sci educ doi: 10.1007/s42438-020-00158-9 sha: 41b085e9298c1b845d9974dd3361dc3b454be45f doc_id: 47580 cord_uid: 7pd5k07g the university is being explicitly restructured for the production, circulation and accumulation of value, materialised in the form of rents and surpluses on operating activities. the pace of restructuring is affected by the interplay between financial crisis and covid-19, through which the public value of the university is continually questioned. in this conjuncture of crises that affect the body of the institution and the bodies of its labourers, the desires of capital trump human needs. the structural adjustment of sectoral and institutional structures as forms, cultures as pathologies, and activities as methodologies enacts scarring. however, the visibility of scars has led to a reawakening of politics inside and beyond the university. the idea that history had ended because there is no alternative to capitalism or its political horizon, is in question. instead, the political content of the university has reasserted itself at the end of the end of history. in this article, the idea that the university at the end of history has become a hopeless space, unable both to fulfil the desires of those who labour within it for a good life and to contribute solutions to socio-economic and socio-environmental ruptures, is developed dialectically. this enables us to consider the potential for reimagining intellectual work as a movement of sensuous human activity in the world, rather than being commodified for value. this is experienced across a wide corporeal and psychological terrain through the following: increased workloads; demands for knowledge exchange, research impact and commercialisation; internationalisation strategies aimed at opening up new markets; casualisation and precarious employment; intersectional inequalities in promotion and tenure; attacks on pensions and wages; demands for more innovation in (online) teaching; the sanctity of data and algorithmic control in setting strategies (morrish and sauntson 2019) . the drive behind constant revolutionising is for universities to increase the value of academic commodities, by reducing the quantity of intellectual labour that is socially necessary for their production and their circulation in the market. this is grounded in reducing the quantity of time. this might be the time for knowledge transfer, or to turnaround marking, or to develop and deliver an accelerated degree. there is a given, global, average level of productivity, and being able to undercut this average gives an institution competitive edge, crucial in the struggle for student fees, research funding and league table position. therefore, differential technical composition of specific forms of intellectual labour is brought into stark relief in the market. as such, the quantitative value of a specific commodity or activity is determined by abstract (homogeneous) human labour measured by time, rather than social purpose (heterogeneous). this is reinforced ideologically by the desire for data that promise enriched monitoring or tracking of performance, alongside behavioural changes (williamson 2020) . data again reinforce how the symbolism of the university is predicated upon the imaginaries of a network or ecosystem of external actors, who work to shape its forms, pathologies and methodologies. flows of data enable new quantifications of university work, underpinned by a machinery of global production that disassembles existing flows of labour, finance and technology and reassembles them for profit or rent. the fusion of new technologies and technocratic modes of organising work creates new forces and relations of production, which coalesce as the platform university. moreover, fusing technologies, flows of data and quantification, behavioural science and algorithmic governance reinforces white, colonial and patriarchal hegemonic norms (boyd 2017) . in the platform university, algorithmic control points to the movement of right (hegel 1942) , or the search for transhistorical truth and certainty. it promises to finesse a controlled ecosystem for collecting rent, enabling and distributing human capital and exchanging and transferring commodities. the platform enables the university to impose flexploitation through the creation of micro-activities or micro-commodities in relation to the production of curriculum content, research outputs, assessments and so on (morgan and wood 2017) . this makes academic work precarious and entrepreneurial and brings the particular nature of that work into relation with algorithmic control as a moving, capitalist reason, which can be optimised for value (huws 2014; srnicek 2017) . in these ways, capital as a totalising system is revealed as an inhuman power, driving intensification and proletarianisation in the struggle for both the accumulation of value and increased rates of profit (marx 1844 (marx /1974 (marx , 1894 (marx /1991 . capital is an ongoing crisis for those forced to labour, in order to exist, and the capitalist university increasingly exemplifies that crisis. moreover, crises of capital, in the form of underconsumption (e.g. of courses), overproduction (e.g. of phd graduates) or falling rate of profit (e.g. weak net cash inflow for investment), also shape the symbolism of the university. this is an institution seemingly shaped only in relation to crisis. the latest financial crisis to impact capitalism, triggered in 2007, has been used to justify further commodification of life under austerity politics. the university been really subsumed inside the evidenced-based imaginary of the market (hall and bowles 2016) . on the one hand, it is treated as an input, or a means of production, into a wider economic system that has come to dominate life. on the other hand, it is treated as a material representation of a chronically and historically failing system, to be infiltrated by consultancies working in the name of agility, innovation, productivity and value-formoney (bevins, bryant, krishnan, and law 2020) . infiltration is accelerated by the systemic inability to catalyse new forms of accumulation, coupled with both the need to generate surpluses of time, labour, value and money, and the demand to find outlets for a mass of inactive, financial surpluses. these generate: & a flood of new credit, for instance, student and institutional debt that reinforce a financialised, political ideology & a focus upon infrastructure projects, based upon brand management and a desire for productivity by increasing the organic composition of capital (i.e. increasing the amount of fixed capital that an individual unit of labour can put to work) & hoarding of surpluses for investment in infrastructure, rather than on academic labour & a policy focus upon productivity and the development of human capital, grounded in entrepreneurship and commercialisation; database control of staff and student performance & the ongoing separation of institutional governance and sector regulation, from the production of knowledge the working conditions of university labourers are reduced to a common sense of economic survival, with political decisions about the institution outsourced to bureaucrats. yet, the validity of this common sense has been challenged by covid-19 as a generalised threat to the human body. economistic common sense has been thrown into asymmetrical relationship with the corporeal need for human survival, as competing institutions and their regulators seek to mitigate or adapt to the impacts of the pandemic. this coronavirus crisis has been overlain on top of the secular crisis of capitalism, revealed as a long depression (roberts 2018) , and has thrown the desire for value into stark relation with humane values. thus, attempts at mitigation or adaptation have included calls for bailouts in the uk (universities uk 2020), or for a virtual, national and federated university of new zealand (newstalk zb 2020). these have focused upon maintaining the content of business-as-usual and preserving its institutions, with university workers expected to bear the cost of preservation. calls for preservation through restructuring, merging or federating have been interpreted as academia's shock doctrine (kornbluh 2020) . this reflects the material and historical reality that crises of capital demand sacrifices, in order to release idle or unproductive skills, knowledge, capabilities and infrastructures from sectors, businesses and individuals deemed less useful or with lower productive potential (marx 1894 (marx /1991 ). adaptations to, or mitigations of, the specifics of coronavirus are colonised and mediated by capital's constant revolutionising. in spite of the shattered confidence and faith in the structures of everyday social interaction, the pandemic illustrates our difficulty in escaping the symbolic power of capitalist social relations (de sousa santos 2020). it becomes difficult to consider university work for another world, precisely because the interaction between societies and nature, ecology and the world is governed by a metabolism, or form of social metabolic control, grounded in ongoing extraction, exploitation and expropriation (clark and bellamy foster 2010; bhattachariyya 2018) . in their inability to reimagine own labour, coupled with anxious exhaustion about the pandemic situation, university workers are reduced to tactical struggles, like the invasion of work into homelife and its impact on caring responsibilities or costs. as capital uses the crisis to colonise the home and social reproduction further, the university is revealed inside monopolies of power that delegitimise self-care. colonising leaves scars through the violence of structural adjustment. structural adjustment erupts from the dynamics of capitalist social production grounded in the treadmill of competition between businesses like universities, inside sectors like he that are brought into interdependence with other sectors of the economy. interconnections emerge through innovations that revolutionise the relations or forces of production, and yet these innovations also amplify competition, which in turn changes the organic composition of those universities and sectors. in response to covid-19 forecasts of reduced fees from international, domestic and postgraduate students, limited research funding and low net cash inflow, institutions are planning redundancies; capitalising upon distance or online provision; refusing to furlough staff on fixedterm or part-time, hourly paid contracts; asking staff to take pay cuts; and intensifying algorithmic management and communication systems (london economics 2020; workers inquiry network 2020). as the university life cycle, driven by the circuits of capital, is ruptured by the uncertainties in the life cycle of the coronavirus, injustices are intensified. in the desire for business-as-usual, it is impossible for capitalist time to slow or stop, in order for humans to understand their emerging material (corporeal and psychological) and historical (temporal) relationship to the virus. the abstract world of capital appears to have more power than the concrete world of the virus. hence, responses are predicated upon the balance of risk between physical and economic death, measured against the possibility of a second wave of the pandemic and new lockdown measures (oxford economics 2020). yet those very responses are also affected by hysteresis, or the permanent structural, corporeal or psychological scarring caused by an event. so, the generalised transmission of covid-19 into the human population creates effects that manifest themselves as persistent problems in established systems of social reproduction. problems like economic growth or output cannot rebound back to a pre-crisis trend line, because that would require accelerated and impossible levels of production. thus, the gdp available for services or investment is permanently lost. growth may return to a long-term rate of expansion, but without rebound back to the pre-crisis trend, there are permanent scarring and losses (cerra and saxena 2018) . hysteresis makes a nonsense of ideas of business-as-usual or a return to normality for universities, as cash flow, operating income, turnover, surpluses and output are each reduced and cannot be recovered. however, it also challenges liberal cries to preserve or sustain the sector. overlapping crises reveal the privileged symbolism and ideation of the public university, which faces the social necessity of reproducing value, through productivity and competition. thus, calls for bailouts and assistance for students, like the coronavirus aid, relief, and economic security (cares) act in the usa or canada's bill c-15 including emergency student benefit, or bailouts for institutions, come with conditions set by finance capital. across economies and universities, the pandemic tests eligibility for support, based upon instantiating new relations and forces of production, like mergers, federations, homeworking or hybrid forms of delivery. this is the context for the public university, which is further scarred by a loss of academic capacity, for instance, in relation to established research and public engagement around climate forcing or social inclusion. in responding to hysteresis, competition drives institutions at the core of he sectors, represented by research-intensive institutions that are export-driven, prestigious and international, to accumulate or compensate for lost income at the expense of institutions at the periphery already over-leveraged against specific student or debt markets. those over-leveraged institutions then work to replace more expensive university labourers with those who are cheaper, and to deploy more technology (hershbein and kahn 2018) . as established sectoral and institutional quantitative thresholds are breached, in terms of operational activity, teaching, research and public engagement, qualitative changes are imposed ideologically. for university workers, the result is either further anxiety in an age of heightened uncertainty and risk (morrish and priaulx 2020) or cynicism about the academic project (allen 2020) . under the rule of covid-19, one option would have been democratic planning and governments bearing the risk of uncertainty for institutions, with the speed of transition to new ways of working underwritten by cheap credit, central management of infrastructural investment, or bailouts. instead, the market and private investment remain pre-eminent, thereby skewing socially needed investment towards that which is behavioural, incentivised and economic (bossie and mason 2020) . market coordination is maintained with institutions owning uncertainty and risk, in relation, first, to student recruitment and markets, operating activities and research and, second, the development of new forms of organisational development and entrepreneurial activity. this is the structurally adjusted, symbolic common sense of public he. for university workers, this common sense shapes a pathology of powerlessness, reinforced by calls for self-sacrifice that are integral to the reproduction of bourgeois society (marx 1852) . thus, academic staff are expected to plan for both fully online and hybrid future delivery, whilst also delivering the same quality of education, and institutions performance manages the risk for the maintenance of quality and value-formoney. these projected risks regulate the metabolic relationship between public and university, through the struggle over value and business continuity. as global labour markets, including that for academic labour-power, are forcibly adjusted under the pandemic, a new, structurally adjusted normal will scar workers anew unless ruptured by the struggle for an alternative. the immanence of viral and financial pandemics has thrown the imaginaries upon which we base our understandings of the world into confusion. coronavirus inflects economic populism, protectionism and the rise of the alt-right, the politics of austerity, climate forcing and metabolic rifts, and creates a new historical and material terrain of struggle. however, the symbolism of capitalism denies any horizon of possibility beyond its continued accumulation and organisation of social life. in this view, history has ended because capitalism and its institutions are natural and transhistorical, and in this end of history, our imaginations cannot process alternatives (fukayama 1992 ). yet, reinforcing crises have called this into question, such that at the end of the end of history (aufhebunga bunga 2019), there is a renewed tension over whether it is easier to imagine the end of the world (and of our humane values) than it is the end of the capitalist university (and its drive for economic value) (jameson 1994, following franklin 1979)? the university is emblematic of the collapse in the symbolic power of humans to reimagine the world. even whilst they enrich the general intellect of society, or our collective wealth in skills, knowledge, capacities and capabilities (marx 1857 (marx /1993 ), university workers have not been able to imagine how such enrichment might operate beyond mediations like the market, which seem to form an impregnable realm or kingdom (de sousa santos 2020). instead, those workers have complied with the acceleration of a society defined technocratically and in economistic terms, at great cost to those who labour inside it and who are left to compete for scarce privilege, status and power, though institutional and subject-based structures. at the end of history, these structures create textures or forms of value, whose content and commodities are created through, first, cultures revealed as pathologies of overwork, self-harm and self-sacrifice (hall and bowles 2016) and, second, activities of teaching, learning, research and administration that describe methodologies for control and performance management (birmingham autonomous university 2017). inside these forms, the pathological and methodological content of the institution is internalised by the university worker and her ego-identity, thereby diminishing the potential for mutuality. differential levels of proletarianisation in the conditions of labour, shaped by competition over status, militate against the creation of common ground between university workers or struggles for humane work. in spite of these struggles, the university is still painted as a liberal institution that simply needs reform, rather than transformation or abolition (meyerhoff 2019) . this liberal position maintains the reified symbolic power of the university and cannot trace the links between institutions under capitalism, which enable the reproduction of intersectional and liminal injustices, in the name of value (motta 2018) . reification is grounded in values and modes of performance represented by white, colonial and patriarchy, and these are the grounds upon which the institution, its disciplines and individuals are judged and performance-managed (amsler and motta 2017) . this enables the separation of the political economy and humanist potential of intellectual work, separated out in the form academic labour. whilst this divorces the university from its potential contribution to social transformation, at the end of history, policy in the bourgeois institution obsesses over productivity, efficiency and value-for-money (ansell 2020) . elsewhere, critical university studies has identified how, in governance, regulation and funding, he is not working, and to look for solutions that recover or redeem the idea of the university (connell 2019) . analyses have applied a range of historical models to the sector (brandist 2016) ; focused upon particular fractions of academic labour, like professors (evans 2018) ; highlighted enclosures through discourses of policy and language (morrish and sauntson 2019); and centred upon the acceleration of the platform university (hoofd 2017) . alternatives include recovering 'the public university' (holmwood 2011) ; building educational co-operatives (woodin and shaw 2019); recovering reified norms of academic freedom (furedi 2017) ; refining the idea of the university in relation to the market (frank, gower, and naef 2019) ; or considering the social and ecological futures of the university and its publics (facer 2019) . the university is an anchor point in any social re-imagination, but it needs to be recentred away from dominant, neoliberal discourse. these counter-narratives tend to describe organising principles that desire a better capitalist university, framed by hope, love, care, solidarity and so on. they form a terrain of outrage, but they tend to lack a deeper, categorical analysis of either the forces or relations of production that discipline and give texture and meaning to the university. there is limited possibility for a critique that situates university work against its basis in alienated labour (hall 2018) , through which the 'vampire' of capital exists because it feeds upon living labour (marx 1867 (marx /2004 . moreover, they risk preserving hegemonic imaginaries that are not mindful of intersectional and indigenous experiences and ways of knowing the world. this limits our collective engagement with radical imaginaries (andreotti 2016; elwood, andreotti, and stein 2019) , subaltern struggles (moten and harney 2013) or structural disadvantage (darder 2018) , and instead reinforces how the university has become a failed or impossible redeemer (allen 2017) . at the end of history, the flow of capitalist time reproduces a global, exploitative, cognitive caste system that is reinforced by the legitimacy of universities in the global north, their disciplinary separations and their claims to knowledge-as-truth. these claims are systemic and algorithmic, centre around particular determinations of effectiveness and efficiency and able to be fine-tuned to reinforce a trajectory of timeless growth. in part, this is how the university's forms, pathologies and methodologies amplify the compulsion for algorithmic modes of control. it is how universities have been able to use abundant living labour to move online during the pandemic and thereby create new platform ecosystems at low short-term cost. here, there are questions around whether the university is too fragile to cope with the future impacts of financial crisis and pandemic and needs accelerated and agile reengineering. the world bank report on 'global waves of debt' (kose, nagle, ohnsorge, and sugawara 2019) and international monetary fund report 'debt is not free' (badia, medas, gupta, and xiang 2020) highlight the vulnerability of sectors and economies that are over-leveraged, and in which profitability and investment are assumed under low interest rates and precarious or surplus employment. a separate world bank group report (2020: 7) on the pandemic shock and policy responses highlights the need to generalise 'innovations and emergency processes, [so that] systems can adapt and scale up the more effective solutions.' regardless of economic or psychological scarring, at the end of history, turning 'recovery into real growth' becomes yet another opportunity for capital to impose its shock doctrine of structural adjustment. here, university disciplines are reduced to highlighting issues around inequality and associated policy responses (piketty 2020) or analysing the psychological impacts of economic instability (collier 2018) . in general, the forms, pathologies and methodologies that reproduce the university are unable to imagine a world beyond capitalist social relations at the end of the end of history. this inability is reinforced by the divorce between the politics and governance of the university and its deterministic, economic symbolism. the fragmentation of work, shaped by a loss of co-operation beyond competition, scarred by precarity and oriented around value rather than humanity, generates hopelessness. responses to the pandemic have tended to mirror those for climate forcing, although the timescale requires more intensive action. in the scramble to maintain business-asusual and the same form of the institution or its key function as a competing business, sustainability is overlain on top of existing strategies for teaching, research, internationalisation, commercialisation and so on. here, institutions project responsibility onto the individual for managing her resilience or mindfulness, or the value of her programmes of study and research, and then use the crisis to make cuts and re-engineer. as institutions and sectors use the crisis to accelerate commodification, there is a risk that a new hopeless or depressive position subsumes autonomy and withers hope (iorio and tanabe 2019), or living concepts like hygge (larsen 2019), inside the university. the university worker's position is rendered more hopeless where she can see induced behaviours are incongruent with her inner being. however, they are enforced through sanctions, surveillance or performance management that are toxic, and subject to constant revolutionising alongside the coercive necessity of alienated labour (marx 1844 (marx /1974 . this is the logic of the university, in which all potentially sensuous or meaningful activity is objectified as powerlessness and self-loss. in the reproduction of the capitalist university, this catalyses hopelessness in two senses. the first lies in the inability of the university to address crises other than in relation to value, through the imposition of authoritarian forms of management, pathological cultures of growth or business-as-usual, and methodological activities that fixate on commodity exchange. it has therefore become a useless use-value, in the sense that its social worth and its feasibility are defined by flows of capital, with the creation of a liveable environment for all secondary. the hopeless university has become devoid of useful content. the second sense lies in an understanding of how capital structures and disciplines the labour of love inside the university, negating its humane possibilities, and as a result breeds despair, depression and melancholy as a space beyond anxiety. any hopes that universities might be places for the creation of new forms of freedom or social wealth are marginalised by the imposition of precarious existences inside anxiety machines that catalyse overwork and ill-being (hall and bowles 2016) . increasingly, those who work inside universities have either to become self-exploiting or self-harming or to deploy enough cognitive dissonance to overcome the lack of authentic hope that another world might be possible. dissonance is harder to maintain as academic work becomes more explicitly remade for-value and determined in the market. inside institutions that reproduce structures/forms, cultures/pathologies and activities/methodologies that are withering, a starting point is sitting with hopelessness as a trigger for authentic grief and mourning. rather than uncritical hope, defensive lamentation or yearning for an idealised, historical and public place, this process of grieving demands that labourers understand how hopelessness is reproduced inside the university. discussions have opened up about the reinforcement of objectification and the denial of subjectivity, such that university workers become habituated to inhumanity. this is reflected in the recent analyses of the zombie university (smyth 2017) ; the automatic university (williamson 2020); the university in ruins (readings 1996) ; the psychotic university (sievers 2008) ; whackademia (hil 2012) ; the university as a ruined laboratory (dyer-witheford 2011), or a branch office of conglomerates (derrida 2001) ; terminal subjectivities in he (allen 2017) ; the need to hospice the university (andreotti, stein, ahenakew, and hunt 2015) ; and fugitive existences in the university (moten and harney 2013). the hopelessness theory of depression is useful here in framing these metaphors through the relationship between depressive symptoms and the loss of agency, alongside the amplification of individual vulnerability inside environments that are negative imaginaries (schneider, gruman, and coutts 2012) . inside institutions like universities which govern themselves overtly and covertly through endemic intensification, selfharm, shaming, performance management and intersectional injustices (ahmed 2017; gill 2009 ), it is possible to analyse the development of vulnerability using chabot's (2018) work on global burnout. he focuses upon the impact of overwork, alongside mental and physical exhaustion, in relation to values-driven, service work. this is especially the case in sectors that are performance-managed around excellence and whose metabolism is defined as a struggle over scarce resources, status and privilege. chabot (2018: 12) states that burnout 'replaces the richness of a healthy relationship between individuals and their work with an immense void of meaninglessness'. here hopelessness has a layered complexity linked to an inability to consider future positives, such that a negative miasma or contagion generates vulnerability (macleod, rose, and williams 1993) . inside highly competitive environments, vulnerability also tends to shape a deeper relationship between defeat, entrapment and depression (tarsafi, kalantarkousheh, and lester 2015) . here, persistent and seemingly inevitable negative events become 'occasion setters' that can trigger hopelessness (abramson, metalsky, and alloy 1989) . these might include negative student assessments, being overlooked for promotion or tenure, daily micro-aggressions, an unmanageable workload, limited research grant success and so on. forms, pathologies and methodologies shape environments in which negative outcomes come to be expected (abramson et al. 1989; abramson et al. 2000) . these have been described in a range of quitlit (literature about quitting the academy) and sick-lit (literature about illness in the academy). hopelessness, powerlessness and vulnerability are amplified through histories of patriarchy, colonialism, exclusion and intersectional injustice, which engender cultural and political depression (fitz-henry 2017; xiao et al. 2014) . it is important to recognise the differential ability to exist without hope or to withstand structural injustices that limit individual agency in the face of hopelessness. intersectional injustices are reproduced inside forms, by pathologies and methodologies that question the legitimacy and value of certain bodies (ahmed 2017) . sitting with these injustices potentially uncovers ways of knowing the self in relation to the structural inequalities and textures of the institution, and thereby to understand issues of trust, agency and voice. this is central in enabling individuals, working in a divided, competitive environment, and who are struggling with a range of negative events, to work against seeing themselves as useless. this is central in understanding tactics for survival pending revolution, including cynicism, stoicism, apathy, refusal, becoming fugitive, exodus or organising. these describe the boundaries of personal agency in hopeless ecosystems. thus, whilst pessimism might more accurately describe the weltschmerz felt by many staff and students (abramson et al. 1989 ), hopelessness becomes a useful heuristic for analysing the forms, pathologies and methodologies designed to exploit labour inside the university. a systemic treatment of hopelessness places the individual, her environment and her society into asymmetrical relationship, rather than focusing upon the individual's learned helplessness or psychological deficits. this takes the particular evidence of increased occupational health referrals, reports of mental distress, and suicides not as individual failings, but instead as moments for reconceptualising those experiences at the level of the university (morrish 2019). the collective, academic capacity to do this work of critique was questioned half a century ago by le baron (1971: 567) : 'i could exhort my fellow academics to work within academia towards a new consciousness, transcending habits of egoism, competition, and possessing, but i am all too conscious of marx's biting attacks on such "idealistic" and "utopian" methods.' more recently, szadkowski (2016: 49-50) argued that 'the hierarchically organized community of scholars is a rather non-antagonistic force to capital'. as the scholarly community of the university demonstrates its hopelessness, subaltern university workers might come to hospice the organisation as it passes away (andreotti et al. 2015) . this may be the case for those struggling with the inability of intellectual work inside the university to overcome helplessness in the face of environmental crises. here, the ability to sit with hopelessness, or to exist without hope, enables an acceptance of being in the world, rather than the university's insistence that we labour to control it. understanding the ways in which the university seeks to impose control, and the ways in which hopelessness ruptures the self inside the organisation, requires a dialectical mode of analysis. the hopeless university emerges dialectically though three moments (dunayevskaya 2002; lenin 1981) . first is an engagement with thinking that brings universal concepts into relation with particular experiences, in order to question existing structures, cultures and practices and thereby generate new universals. this is a movement of thinking that situates the symbolism of the institution against the range of ways in which it is imagined in practice, in order to move towards a concrete understanding of its reality. it also places those existing structures of the institution, alongside its cultures and practices, in relation to the totality of capitalist social relations. second is elaborating the relationship between quantitative and qualitative change. the experience of life inside the university is subject to constant, measurement and the attempt to validate conceptual clarity about the world through evidence or data that are a quantity of experience. at particular moments, quantity describes qualitative change, for instance, in new conceptualisations or discourses of the student-as-consumer, the platform university, the quantified self or the need for decolonisation. there are also societal relations immanent to these qualitative changes, and which challenge the relation of data to discourses, and the reproduction of power and privilege. thus, hegel (2010: 179-80) noted how 'number stands between the senses and thought', helping to develop 'the category of the internally self-external that defines the sensuous'. here, the concrete world experienced by individuals is brought into relation with symbolic, external contexts through mediations like the market. this imminence between quantitative tipping points and qualitative change shifts cultures and perceptions and offers a moment of conceptual or psychological negation. this is the third dialectical moment, the law of the negation of the negation. here, there exists the ongoing movement of society, beyond everyday activities like assessment and laboratory research, or that which mediates social progress, like the power of the division of labour. thus, calls for state funding for higher education under covid-19 negate the sanctity of private property and the consumption of education-based services. however, this negation then reveals the contradictions between the private and public values of a degree, which leads to further questioning of the idea of the university. crucially, hegel (2018) raises the idea of an external, sensuous consciousness, which marx (2004) later inverts, in terms of activity in the world being practical and human-sensuous. this is a reminder that humans make the world and that there is potential for generating meaning that is not achieved through the objectification of education for the development of human capital. this dialectical unfolding of particular, concrete experiences of the world, in relation to universal conceptions that normalise or stabilise thinking, is overlain by individual and structural factors in reproducing the totality of capitalism. thus, the university is implicated in our social relations, and our social relations are implicated in the university, at one and the same time. this immanence impacts levels of control, anxiety and hopelessness as the structures/forms that shape university work are compelled by the value-form; the cultures/pathologies of the university exploit our relationship to nature, the environment and each other; and our activities/methodologies reproduce alienating labour processes. social existence inside the university gives texture to a set of fluid identities, in particular for academics, whose work is centred around a perceived identity between thought and being. identities are fluid because internal conceptions and external forms, pathologies and methodologies are in dialectical relation. as a result, subjectivity is mediated by the relationship between the academic-as-subject and the objects of her consciousness (including workloads, learning environments, technologies, peers). these are determined materially and historically by particular forms of social existence. at the transition between the end of history and the end of the end of history, a struggle over subjectivity erupts for university workers who are told that uncertainty can be controlled through algorithmic control and self-sacrifice, but for whom the development of certainty is immanent to their consciousness of that environment as hopelessly alienating. struggle demands a many-sided analysis of social forces, political actions, relations and forces of production, in order to understand what is possible. the requirement is to abstract concrete qualities from different objects or experiences, like inequitable workloads or analyses of attainment gaps, in order to generate new abstractions or universal conceptions. this brings individual characteristics into direct relation with the totality of social existence, and potentially offers new modes of negation, or social transformation. this is not idealism; rather, it is a materialism that questions capitalism's transhistorical claims to bourgeois equality (marx 1875 (marx /1970 ). thus, it becomes possible to bring diverse imaginaries of hopeless and powerless experiences in the university into relation with its symbolism as a mode of organising capitalist social relations. in response, it is possible to imagine the negation of, for instance, the commercialisation of research as private property; the status and privilege of the academic division of labour; and intellectual competition rooted in commodity exchange. it is then possible to imagine the abolition of the hopeless university and the legitimacy of its forms, pathologies and methodologies for intellectual work. abolition aims at sublating or assimilating and overcoming barriers to human living, in order that an alternative world becomes possible. this negative, dialectical mode of thinking is important because the spirit (or reason) of capitalist social relations that controls life is abstract and symbolic, as well as being imagined or experienced concretely (through precarity, overwork, ill-health and so on). by thinking of the university dialectically, a negative possibility emerges from the diversity of experiences that pushes beyond the historical and material symbolism of the university-as-is. instead, the potential for qualitative change is situated as transformational (adorno 1966) . a movement of dialectical thinking reveals subjectivity as a constant movement of becoming, in which categories of life are brought into comparison and contradiction. here there is a struggle over two different conceptions of life. first is life calibrated around capitalist institutions that impose a totalising movement of value and which measure difference and diversity against hegemonic norms. this is the reason of capitalism. second is life emerging from negative dialectics (adorno 1966) , raising the possibility for alternative conceptions that cannot be synthesised from particular identities and their non-identities. this recognises that subjectivity is formed from ontological and epistemological imaginaries grounded in difference. it is the refusal to abstract this difference around dominant modes of quantification that forms humane connections, or the potential for unity-through-difference. such heterogeneous thought offers boundaries that determine a horizon of hope. this is not the idealism of hegel, focused upon the unfolding of the idea, or the absolute spirit beyond humanity; rather, it is marx's conception of the study of history as the primary science. hope erupts at the end of the end of history. it is a historical and material dynamic, which is a movement of sensuous human activity in the world, and 'the consistent consciousness of nonidentity' (adorno 1966: 5) . moreover, it is a process of ongoing reflection that continually critiques reality, by bringing different imaginaries of the world into relation to show the unity of universal difference. struggle is crucial in this process of critique and is predicated upon the potential for rupturing and transcending the imposition of labour as the mode of social organisation. in analysing the struggle for authentic intellectual work at the end of the end of history, this is the starting point for transcending the symbolism of the hopeless university. the duality of financial and viral pandemics has exposed the fraud at the heart of narratives of meaningful intellectual work at the end of history. it exposes the fraud at the heart of the structures, cultures and activities of universities in the north atlantic, whose pathological and methodological forms reproduce space-time inextricably forvalue. capitalism as the means of social organisation continues to be ruptured by intersectional, temporal and geographical injustices that erupt from points of labour and points where labour touches society. a range of indigenous resistances, struggles grounded in race, gender, disability and class, emergent revolts against toxic ecological policies and climate forcing and resistance to economic and political populism, form a movement that places the institutions of capital in stark opposition to humane values. through struggle, the political economics of capital's war on labour are revealed, although in many instances they require critique. for university workers, such critique centres the institutional inability to respond meaningfully to this re-emergence of history, beyond unilaterally declaring businessas-usual in the face of covid-19, or noting a climate emergency whilst remaining implicated in the consumption of fossil fuels. at the end of the end of history, when the abstracted power of capital has revealed its pollution of systems of life and living, the hopeless university demonstrates the inferiority in its soul. it is dominated by strategies for public engagement, internationalisation, teaching and learning, research and sustainable development, which collapse the horizon of possibility and are limited to algorithmic solutions to insoluble, structural and systemic positions. the hopeless university is a flag bearer for a collective life that is becoming more efficiently unsustainable. mutuality and voice point beyond hopelessness. as adorno (1966: 17-18 ) noted, '[t]he need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. for suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject'. for bloch (1986) , engaging with the internalisation of anxiety and its projection into the world as fear is a means to recover a more authentic sense of what the self might be in the world. an authentic moment of freedom is learning that a better capitalist university, like a capitalism that works for everyone, is impossible because the structures that reproduce the world for-value militate against a liveable life. instead, hope emerges in care for ourselves against the institutions that have brutalised us. it emerges in a reconnection of the idea of human-as-intellectual, with the human-as-psychological and the human-in-nature, rather than the human divorced from herself as a worker and exploiter of the natural world. the hopelessness of capitalism, amplified by the university and its focus upon knowledge transfer, spillover, human capital, impact, excellence and so on, is refused where people remember and uncover their own capacities. the hopeless university hides our latent or undeveloped abilities from us, or it strips our developed skills, knowledge and capacities from us, in the name of value. refusal emerges from the ability of university labourers to conceptualise themselves as a force for themselves, rather than focusing upon their privilege and status (with a limited consciousness as a class in itself). a moment of possibility lies organisationally, in seeing similarities, connections and solidarities across the range of academic and professional services staff, and students, who labour inside the university, and making connections to struggles at the level of society. refusal emerges where people understand the potential of and in their own mass intellectuality (hall and winn 2017) . this offers a different route away from hopelessness, through constant reflection on what has been incorporated or lost, and thereby emerges renewed through mourning. this is bloch's (1986) idea that a life that sits authentically with hopelessness moves towards hope precisely because it acknowledges what is possible from inside the current situation. this is not a melancholic or despairing hope for a return to an idealised university. as history returns, the hegemonic symbolism of institutions that further estrangement from active knowing, doing, being and becoming must be refused and their ontologies and epistemologies negated (holloway 2016) . instead, particular imaginings of universal concepts of human existence inside capitalism are a moment of resistance and refusal. understanding and recognising those particular experiences point towards unity-through-difference as a new mode of organising social life. thus, in refusing the idea of the hopeless university, indigenous, feminist, decolonial, queer, disabled, intersectional conceptions, counter-cartographies and narratives offer guides (mbembe 2019). these counterpoints frame intellectual work in relation to the body, soul, psyche, collectivity and nature, through the past, present and future. this moves us from functional analyses of our near-term extinction (bendell 2018) , to a discussion of what it means to live well in this moment, and the potential to discuss alternative, plural horizons of possibility (elwood et al. 2019) . as cleaver (2017: 290) argues 'we are no longer talking about replacing one world with another, but one world with many.' here, socially useful intellectual work at the end of the end of history uncovers processes of knowing, doing and being, rather than sanctifying knowledge that can be commodified. in respecting the unity of our difference, as humans rather than academics, professional services' staff or students, we can turn our attention to 'the only scientific question that remains to usâ�¦: how the fuck do we get out of this mess?' (holloway 2010: 919) . for university workers, this begins from the question: how do we know the university? in the act of knowing, empathy emerges, rather than imaginaries that are aggrieved, disappointed, helpless or hopeless. the symbolism of the hopeless university is a limit to any such transformation, because it is structured around forms, pathologies and methodologies for the commodification and mediation of intellectual work. with no categorical analysis of this symbolism, labourers idealise hope, and yet hope is no plan. instead, a dialectical process of transcendence is needed, which highlights the one-sidedness of knowledge, institutions and disciplines as limiting factors in determining understanding (dunayevskaya 2002) . this is a moment of courage, which recognises the need to know authentically and plurally the diseased and pathological context for suffering inside the university. this recognises alienation, ill-being and ill-health as symptomatic of structural processes experienced differentially. suffering is absolutely relative, and in this emerges a potential horizon of possibility. a next step asks whether it is possible to forgive the university, and take responsibility for how we feel about it, alongside our own projections and internalisations. instead of being dominated by the university, projecting our own hopes and fears onto it, as well as internalising its modes of privilege and performance, this might begin the process of focusing upon intellectual work as it is integrated inside ourselves as complete humans capable of sensuous, practical activity in common. conflict of interest the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. the hopelessness theory of suicidality hopelessness depression: a theory-based subtype of depression negative dialectics living a feminist life the cynical educator the marketised university and the politics of motherhood research and pedagogical notes: the educational challenges of imagining the world 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developed countries. for a non-democratic country to become democratized the structure responsible for the shift of regimes is capitalism responsible for the distribution of the produced wealth and creates middle class so needed for seeking accountability of governance. wealthier countries have a predisposition to be “more democratic” which allows the average citi zen to have access to resources, unlike “less democratic” regimes where access to resources is limited, not merit based and questionable. keywords: political changes, structure, capitalism, democratic, resources 1. introduction since xix-th century to nowadays three waves of democratization, followed by two reverse waves, became the ground work of modern concept of democratization. twentieth century offers a rich legacy on democratic transitions as the modern states started to take form and alongside the democratization phenomenon described as the three waves of democratization followed with counter waves (huntingon, 1991), the theoretical approach about the process was to be built. concept of democracy is nothing new in the process, but now in an explanatory and analytical pattern concept of transition –theoretical frame, conditions required for it to take place and measurement was to be built. theoretical approaches in the field of democratization, beside differences, forms what is called ‘‘paradigm of transition‘‘, where transition is understood as the changing from one inferior status to a superior one. democratic transition seems to be considered as a new concept, but in fact it is not such – we can detect the changes in antique greek cities which explored different types of governments from aristocracy, monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy and democracy .part of ‘‘ paradigm of transition‘‘ is the debate for the causes of democratic transition ,with an emphasis on the theory developed by lipset in 1959 enhancing economic development as a chain effect developer , solely able to support regime changes. this paper analyses economic factor’s capacity to address such changes on the study case of kenya and uganda, which in the postcolonialism years started their way toward democratization .kenya who was able to have a more developed economy rather than uganda has achieved more than uganda in the democratization process of the country. 10 giola cami 2. literature review authors, who take economic development as an argument to explain trends of democratization, analyse this correlation in two dimensions: economic development as a trigger to democratization process economic performance as a factor which supports the legitimacy of an already established democracy. modernization theory, founded on lipset’s theory, claims that modern democracies have come into existence in economically developed countries; therefore for a non-democratic country to become democratized through modernization, it is capitalism the structure that is responsible for the distribution of the produced wealth and creates middle class (lipset 1959: 78). lipset established the democratization explanatory theory based on economic data, positively correlating economic development and legitimacy of institutions with the degree of democracy (lipset 1960: 46). according to author ‘the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy’ (lipset 1959: 75; 1960: 48–50), lipset relates the degree of economic development with the degree of democracy. according to author, from the greek antique the level of democracy has been labelled with societies in which the difference between the rich and the poor is light, with a wide middle class which has access to wealth; and that societies characterized by an rich elite and poor massive population are subject to oligarchy and tyranny (lipset : 75). author relates economic development with four ingredients: wealth, industrialization, urbanization and education, which when tested with empirical data lipset argues that average wealth, degree of industrialization and urbanization, and the level of education is much higher for the more democratic countries rather than those countries which score lower in democracy evaluation indicators. wealthier countries have a predisposition to be “more democratic” which allows the average citizen to have access to resources, unlike “less democratic” regimes where access to resources is limited, not merit based and questionable. according to lipset education -basing his argument in bryce’s theory that education if it does not make men good citizens makes it a least easier to become so (lipset :79) , author empirically establishes his argument that the more literate a society is , the more it will be tolerant to minority groups, opposition and tend to establish democratic regimes. also lipset bases his theory on tocqueville’s (1835) argument that lawful institutions have a crucial importance in controlling and checking centralized government power. daniel lerner in his work “the passing of traditional society: modernizing the middle east” (1958) draws a correlation between democratic regimes and economic development, taking in basis the variables of lipset and argues that a society firstly swimming in the waters of urbanization, is followed by a rising wave of literacy, rising media participation and finally therefore is produced democracy, standing solid on the above factors. gary mark and diamond do further reinforce the argument of lipset, after analysing 30 years after lipset’s first argument on the issue, only to enrich and support the solid and strong correlation between economic development and democracy, as the authors agree that the evidence shows, with striking clarity and consistency, a strong causal relationship between economic development and democracy’ (marks and diamond 1992: 6) . yet, diamond puts an emphasis more on human development index as a better indicator rather than gdp, who argues that the argument of lipset has still validity and has proven its self in the tests of the time, but notices the increase of the importance of human rights as a more adequate variable to explain democracy stating that ‘the more well-to-do the people of a country, on average, the more likely they will favour, achieve, and maintain a democratic system for their country’. the author projects a positive trended relation between democracy and political and social characterized by a high level of human rights .authors base their argument on the ground of holding lipset’s argument of a positive relationship between economic development and democracy as not linear as it has been subject of weakening and reversal in middle class (gary & diamond, 1992:3), while as human development continues to be an adequate and proper predictor on the like hood of democracy. economic development –a prerequisite for democratization case of kenya and uganda 11 robert a. dahl in the same line with lipset’s argument associates polyarchy with economic ingredients as high level of income, wealth per capita, continuous growth of income and wealth, increase in urbanization, a decreasing trend in the agricultural populations, growing literacy level (dahl 1989: 251). for samuel huntington regimes –democratic and non-democratic ones – are legitimized by prospering economically (huntington 1991: 34-36), when concluding that almost all wealthy countries are democratic and almost all democratic countries are wealthy (huntington 1991: 34).yet, according to huntington, if a regime will fail economically it might undermine the regime, but on the same line economic success of an authoritarian regime will legitimize it. robert barro in “determinants of democracy” (1999) supports and confirms lipset/ aristotle hypothesis which concludes that the higher the standard of living the more democracy is promoted. democracy, according to barro, is closely measured with electoral rights, civil liberties, standard of living by capita gdp, the gap between male and female schooling and middle class (barro 1999: 182). 3. kenya’s economic development in 1964 kenyan government decided to project economy under a capitalist framework aiming to empower and vitalize economy, though in practice it was a mix of state and private sectors presence to ensure high rate of growth (zeleza, 1991: 36). private sector was focused on agriculture and industry, trying to support enterprises toward farming and cooperatives and producing goods due to their raw materials. these policies built an economy depended on western countries as technology, foreign investments and markets came directly from them. aiming fi, government applied liberal policies which created a soft environment for foreigners who were asked to put capital into kenya. redistribution policy through growth harvested increment in investment creating thus stable income source (zeleza, 1991: 37). during late 80’s due to political oppression of kenyan government to opposition fi were cut until 1991 when multiparty system was sanctioned in the new amendments made to constitution. kenya’s economy during the years has adopted a market-free economy with little state ownership in infrastructure enterprises, making it the hub of east and central africa. home to financial , communication and transportation services, since the early days of post-independence the liberal policies for foreign investments has created a reputation as friendly hub for investments. agriculture is the backbone of the economy, which produces 1/3 of gdp.75% of population works in this sector mainly in the farming structures. horticulture by 23% and tea by 22% are the columns of income via exports in agriculture. fishing relies on lake victoria and magadi which in early 2000s provided up to 128,000 metric tons of fishes, but due to pollution and illegal fishing incomes from this sector have been decreasing over the last years. industry sector for now is not as developed as agriculture because poor infrastructure is a present obstacle toward growing industrial enterprises. it is focuses on food and customer goods production and government is working to export more processed goods. in eastern africa it is the most developed country in terms of technology and lacks in trade logistics, but to attract fi it needs investments especially in energy sector which is not doing great for now. government has introduced vision2030 package of reform and investment to empower industrial sector in kenya, which includes investments up to usd 300 million to achieve a 6.8% growth in this sector, establishing a good spot as a middle income economy and a regional trade hub. 3.1. exports and imports both are significant indicators of income and outcome of national fund policies, drawing a map of one country’s potential and projecting thus its competing abilities in an international hub. export relies mostly on agriculture products like tea, coffee and horticultural products; petroleum products, cement and fish are some of the exports goods from kenya. import is mostly focused on aluminium steel, petroleum products, resins, plastics and transportation equipment. export partners are uganda, tanzania, united states, united kingdom, netherlands, zambia, pakistan and uae; main import partners include india, china, uae, saudi arabia, 12 giola cami egypt and south africa. the following graph compares export and import from 1995-2015, data acquired from world bank official site. figure 1.kenya: export and import 1995 – 2015 source: observatory of economic complexity, 2015 both exports and import from 1995 to 2005 have increasing trend, but exports seem to have slow improvement, while as imports have a breakthrough starting 2005. from 1995 – 2005 export’s growth is usd 2.6 billion, while as import’s growth is usd 2.3 billion. in the timetable of 2005 – 2015 export is increased with 37%, while import by 174% or usd 11.9 billion. 3.2 gdp per capita gross domestic product, referred as gdp, is the indicator in dollar value of a country’s wealth which includes the goods and services during a certain timetable. because it provides specific data unified in the same structure for countries, it creates standing base for comparison. evaluating kenya’s economy magnitude starting from postindependence 1964 to 2018, the following data generated by world bank shows these trends: figure 2.kenya’s gross domestic product 1964 – 2016 source : world bank national accounts data, 2016 starting off with less than one billion dollars in 1964, gdp has been growing continuously with ups on the way, except 1982-1984, 1992-1994 and 1998-2000 were some light decrease in economy takes place. these fall downs happen to be before or after presidential elections: 1983, 1992 and 2002 elections. the biggest breakthrough takes economic development –a prerequisite for democratization case of kenya and uganda 13 place in 2006 were an increase of 9 (nine) billion dollars becomes the new financial reality in kenya’s economy and such trend has been building same path ever since. 3.3 hdi human development index is considered to be an important indicator for the prosperity of a country despite gdp, focusing on people and their abilities which can channel government’s national policies. it is built on three dimensions: health, education and standard of living which respectively are measures by life expectancy at birth, years of schooling and gross national income per capita. kenya’s data on hdi shows the following trends: figure 3.kenya’s human development index 1990 2015 source: united nations development programme, 2015 ranked worldwide 146-th out of 188, kenya is labelled as member of medium human development group, just one step above low human development group. hdi’s annual growth has been slow in change, stable in poor results toward achievement in the standard of people’s lives. there is a fall down of life expectancy from 1990 – 2010, which is the starting point of the increase of lei from 58.8 (2010) to 62.2 (2015), approximately 10.5% growth. education index (ei) more or less shares the same features as trending years; since 2010 it has been the same of 11.1 values and it marks an 8.1 % growth since 1991 – 2 more years of schooling. gni per capita from 1990 has targeted 8% growth from 2,287 to 2,881 and this is an important achievement impacting therefore positively chances to further support middle class . hdi itself has seen an improvement from 0.473 to 0.555, translated in 8.5% growth in the last three decades. change is slow, but promising in increasing steps. 3.4 public debt considered to be the most crucial indication of a nation’s struggle with its finances, public debt in kenya has been increasing because of the emerging need of investments in public policies to support economic growth. 14 giola cami figure 4.kenya’s public debt as a percentage of gdp source: country economy, 2016 peak of pd was in 2002 when it reached 61.84 of gdp; in the following years it started to fall dawn reaching the lowest rate in 2007 being 38.37% of gdp. from 2007 it has drawn increasing trend which by 2016 makes 53.47% and if comparing with 1998 there is actually a decrease of 0.6 percentage point. kenya’s economy is promising to pursue growth and enrich prosperity in the country. agriculture makes 75% of the country’s gdp, but government is working to implement public policies which support industrial development. recently project vision2030 has been introduced as part of the efforts government is doing to empower industrial sector as an important column of economy. being considered as a regional trade hub, it’s a legacy that has been relying on the continuous governmental efforts to make kenya a suitable and warm business environment for fi, by conduction labour regulations and investment laws which give foreigners same treat as local ones. not to forget that its transportation infrastructure –despite in a need for more investmentshas lead country to be a cross-international route for regions transportation logistics, referred as “preferred entry point to east africa”. energy sector absolutely is in need for attention and government has planned to invest usd 1.4 billion on geothermal power plants with a capacity of 280 mw. its population of nearly 50 million configures promising median age of 19.2 years old and as kenya is offering secondary education for free in order to promote working skills of its citizens , creating thus a well-educated workforce – an advantage to its neighbours. in a graphical view, kenya’s economic potential would be: figure 5.kenya’s potential for foreign investments source: business sweden in kenya, 2017 economic development –a prerequisite for democratization case of kenya and uganda 15 4. uganda’s economic development after gaining independence from britain in 1962, uganda’s economy was primarily based on agriculture sector. from 1962 to late 1980s political situation in the country has was characterized by turmoil, instability, issues with human rights and coup d’état which caused economy to perform poorer with no significant growth. years characterized of political and economic chaos, including civil war in the north, impacted country’s finances till late 1980s. yet, it is to be taken in consideration that growth has been stable despite slow progress. increasing inequality, unemployment especially among youth generation, high rate of corruption have halted uganda to achieve a flagship as a middle income country, while 83% of population is rural and industrialization process has not made enough advancement to increase urban population. home to natural resources like copper, cobalt, hydropower, limestone, salt, arable land, gold and oil uganda baptized as “the pearl of africa” has received international attention especially for its oil presence. recently 6.5 billion barrels of oil are discovered, out of which according to world bank 1.4 billion are recoverable. oil production is expected to start in 2020 and the following licensed companies to operate are: total e & p uganda, tullow uganda and china national offshore oil corporation (cnooc) which operate in 6 (six) blocks/ areas as indicated in the picture: figure 6.uganda’s oil licensed companies source : nogtec, 2014 4.1. export – import both are significant indicators of income and outcome of national fund policies, drawing a map of one country’s potential and projecting thus its competing abilities in an international hub. uganda is ranked 126th largest export economy globally, a rank due to 2016 exports which reached usd 11.7 b. exports lately have been led by gold which covers 22% of exports or usd 697 m , followed by coffee 14% or usd 413 m . other export goods include raw tobacco, cocoa beans, raw sugar, fish, cement, corn, rice, plants, dried legumes, flowers. imports, like exports, in 2016 hit the numbers as with an increase of usd 5.58 b from 2015 to usd 11.7 b. imported goods are mostly industrial products which uganda itself cannot produce for the moment due to the lack of technology and funds and they include: refined petroleum 12%, medicaments 5%, telephones 4.4%, palm oil 3.4%, cars 2.2%, wheat2.2%, delivery trucks 2%. 16 giola cami figure 7.uganda: exports and imports 1995 -2016 source: observatory of economic complexity, 2015 from 1995 to 2005 exports have been increased by 41.3% or usd 310 m, while imports have been increased by 100% or usd 1 b. from 2005 to 2015 exports have been increased by 477% or usd 5 b and imports have been increased by 449 %. the difference between imports and exports is relatively high – only in 2016 this gap was usd 558 m. 4.2. gdp three gross domestic product’s data for uganda can be found from 1960 to 2016 from world bank national accounts data and oecd national accounts data, which provides official numbers in usd value, allowing ground for comparison. figure 8.uganda’s gross domestic product, 1960 -2016 source: world bank national accounts data, 2016 economic growth from 1960 to 1980-s has been slow due to the mix economy system presented by obote 1 regime, who introduced a socialist approach to economic development with the main focus of delivering social services to people. “common man’s charter” was founded on the policy on nationalization of corporations, thus diminishing private sector enterprises in the market. while 90% of population relied on agriculture as main source of living, growth on gdp from 1960 to 1970 raised annually approximately 5%. economic development –a prerequisite for democratization case of kenya and uganda 17 during amin’s regime 1971-1979 who came into power via military coup economy shrunk due to the policy of expulsion of ugandans with asian origin that covered most of the enterprises in the private sector. delivery of social services failed while obote 1 state enterprises were totally inefficient. post amin era 1979 – 1986 six governments came into power mining any ground of political stability which would allow economic development instead of shrinking pattern which continued till early 1990. when current president museveni came into power he applied successful package of reforms aiming liberalization of economy such as economic recovery programme and structural adjustment programmes empowering private sector and from 1992 each year gdp has been growing. 4.3 hdi human development index is considered to be an important indicator for the prosperity of a country despite gdp, focusing on people and their abilities which can channel government’s national policies. it is built on three dimensions: health, education and standard of living which respectively are measures by life expectancy at birth, years of schooling and gross national income. uganda’s data on hdi shows the following trends: figure 9.uganda’s human development index, 1990 – 2015 source: united nations development programme, 2015 ranked worldwide 163-rd out of 188, uganda is labelled as member of low human development group sharing the same spot with haiti. over the last 25 (twenty-five) years of hdi evaluation lei is increased from 45 to 59.2 ,which means nowadays ugandans’ life expectancy has been increased with 14.2 years , while education index has achieved a 4.3 additional years of studying . gni has been increased by 120% from usd 759 million to usd 1.67 billion. hdi value last half century with light ups and downs has the same scoring and uganda is considered to be the last group of hdi global ranking with little progress. comparing to the region uganda is below the average of sub-saharan african countries’ average of 0.523 and below “low human development” group average scores. 4.4 public dept. considered to be the most crucial indication of a nation’s struggle with its finances, public debt in kenya has been increasing because of the emerging need of investments in public policies to support economic growth. 18 giola cami figure 10.uganda’s public debt 19972014 source: country economy, 2014 uganda’s case when it comes to public debt is promising; due to the hard work it took to decrease debt during mid 2000s when from 60% in 2003 it fell down to 18.8% in 2009. years following 2010 have shown an increasing trend, yet no more than 30% of its gdp, regionally distinguished for its performance. uganda’s economy relying mostly in agriculture has produced a rural population and due to the lack of investments necessary funds to support industrial enterprises, technological development and telecommunication effect negatively economy in the course of a industrialized global economy. in 2020 oil production is expected to start which if treated carefully and corruption is pushed away will give a push up to economy to make crucial reforms toward industrializing economy and subsequently imports which are mainly based on industrial products will decrease and the gap with exports will be positive. a more developed economy would empower education by increasing quality, supporting education system by offering free secondary education and creating thus a middle class, much needed for democratic reformation. urbanization however is conditional on the basis of a developed transportation system because as of 2017 the primary form of transport is walking, while only 20% of roads are in a fair condition (haas, 2017). 5. comparing kenya and uganda economic development is strongly related with the political changes in both countries, as certain regimes have worked upon building economic institutions toward either state centralized economy or free market. since obote took over the rule of country in 1964 he worked for the implementation of a liberalized economic system, projected economy under a capitalist framework aiming to empower and vitalize economy, though in practice it was a mix of state and private sectors presence to ensure high rate of growth (zeleza, 1991: 36). generally kenya’s economy has adopted a market-free economy with little state ownership in infrastructure enterprises, making it the hub of east and central africa. home to financial , communication and transportation services, since the early days of post-independence the liberal policies for foreign investments has created a reputation as friendly hub for investments. uganda, like kenya, is an agriculture focused economy but at the rate of 75% 90%. the starting point was the same for both countries, but while kenya developed a liberalized market , uganda was more of state centralized enterprises and due to political turmoil from 1971 to 1986 every economic institution build by obote regime was destroyed, further economic development was not supported. economic development –a prerequisite for democratization case of kenya and uganda 19 figure 11.kenya and uganda: comparing export data, 1995 – 2015 source: observatory of economic complexity, 2015 in terms of exports, uganda has been exporting mostly agriculture products and has been performing poorer than kenya and has seen been shrunk from 2014. same trends follows kenya, but at better number of exporting. as far as imports data following suggests that kenya’s imports have been greater than uganda’s one – it mostly imports industrial goods, as its technologic development is insignificant. figure 12.kenya and uganda: comparing import data, 1995 – 2015 source: observatory of economic complexity, 2015 while measuring economic growth in terms of gdp, data suggests that kenya has done better progress than not industrialized uganda: 20 giola cami figure 13.kenya and uganda: comparing gdp in capita, 1980 – 2016 source :world bank national accounts data, 2016 the same results come even when comparing their ranking and scores in human rights index. kenya has achieved slightly a better position than uganda: kenya is considered as a “middle human development” group member, while as uganda is a “low human development” group member. comparing to the region uganda is below the average of sub-saharan african countries’ average of 0.523 and below “low human development” group average scores. figure 14: kenya and uganda: comparing hdi values, 1990 – 2015 source: united nations development programme, 2015 the post-independence period from1963 – 2018 indicate kenya performing financially better than uganda, as political environment has been a key factor on shaping reforms which restored financial policies be those for good or bad. kenya’s economy is promising to pursue growth and enrich prosperity in the country. government is working to implement public policies which support industrial development. project vision2030 has been introduced as part of the efforts government is doing to empower industrial sector as an important column of economy. being considered as a regional trade hub, it’s a legacy that has been relying on the continuous governmental efforts to make kenya a suitable and warm business environment for fi, by conduction labour regulations and investment laws which give foreigners same treat as local ones. not to forget that its transportation infrastructure –despite in a need for more investmentshas lead country to be a cross-international route for regions transportation logistics, referred as “preferred entry point to east africa”. energy sector absolutely is in need for attention and government has planned to invest usd 1.4 billion on geothermal power plants with a capacity of 280 mw. economic development –a prerequisite for democratization case of kenya and uganda 21 current governments museveni in uganda is actually empowering economy, with a growing perspective of exports and a public debt that is much better than the other part of the region. biggest obstacle that uganda faces is the lack of industrialization, technology and very poor transportation means. it’s reported that “walking” is the most used mean of transportation. government is looking forward to investing in the above fields, and the funds might soon be available as of 2020 oil production will come into being with already six blocks in the western part legalized to work at. in both countries economy is a prerequisite to democratic development to support institutions, fight corruption and empower their selves regionally for more interaction in a globalized world. a better economy means a better education, middle class and citizens eager to require accountability. of course in these countries where governments have been flourishing in a culture of “leader having no share of power”, if international factor will not push for democratic development in the country, economic stability as well might become a shelter for a non-democratic regime. comparing democracy in kenya and uganda to show which of one has applied a more liberal, democratic country than the other the following graph shows each country’s score by freedom house. political rights and civil liberties are the columns on which the evaluation is based: table 15.kenya and uganda: comparing freedom house’s scores, 2001 – 2018 source: freedom house reports, 2018 a more economically developed kenya a more democratized country; a less developed uganda a less democratized country. in their whole history of evaluation , except year 2002 when they have been evaluated same, kenya has scored less than uganda ( scoring scales varies from 1 to 7 , with 1 to stand for free democratized countries and 7 for not free, non-democratic countries). kenya and uganda offer a great example to study correlation between economic development and democracy as they both had the same starting point, same political legacy but since their independence it has resulted that kenya, more developed financially than uganda, has been able to perform more democratic reforms rather than uganda. 6. conclusions there is a correlation between economic development and democracy showing a positive relationship. more democratic countries allow the average citizen to have access to resources like the contribution of wealth, unlike “less democratic” regimes where access to resources is limited, not merit based and questionable. with clarity and consistency, a strong causal relationship between economic development and democracy is also an explanatory pattern of the differences of democracy between uganda and kenya. being economically developed includes having a strong middle class which attains accountability claims toward governments. education, industrialization, poverty and human rights are crucially important to build a democratic society. 22 giola cami kenya and uganda – two countries in the eastern africa with the same colonial legacy – respectively in 1963 and 1962 gain their independence and since then their starting point has been the same but progress different. kenya which was able to create early post-colonialism institutions to support private enterprises in the agriculture and industrial sector succeeded to shift toward successful economy. uganda on the other hand did not go on the same path, its progress was short lighted and the events after would bring total destruction of any institution. for uganda economic development started somewhere around 1986 and so did its democracy, while an early developed kenya accelerated stability and democratic reforms in the country. 7. references barro, r. (1999) determinants of democracy , journal of political economy, pp.182 country economy (apr 15, 2018) general government gross debt (apr 15, 2018) https://countryeconomy.com/national-debt dahl, r. (1989) polyarchy :participation and opposition, yale university press, pp. 251 freedom house (apr 10, 2018) freedom in the world 1991 -2018 : country reports https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2018 huntington, s. (1991) the third wave –democratization in the late twentieth century, university of oklahoma press, pp.34-36 lerner, d. (1958) the passing of traditional society: modernizing the middle east, new york, free press of glencoe lipset, s.m. (1959) some social requisites of democracy: economic development and political legitimacy, american political science review (53) , pp.75-79 marks, g. & diamond, l. (1992) seymour martin lipset and the study of democracy, american behavioural scientist, 35, pp.6 nogtec (2014) , uganda signs mou with oil firms over production http://www.nogtec.com/uganda-signs-mou-with-oil-firms-over-production/ observatory of economic complexity (apr 10, 2018) , country profile https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/ken/ the swedish trade and invest council (2017) business sweden in nairobi: the infrastructure sector in kenya, nairobi. united nations development programme (apr 15, 2018) , country reports http://hdr.undp.org/en world bank national account data (apr 8 , 2018) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.mktp.cd zeleza, p.t. (1991) visions of freedom and democracy in postcolonial african literature, pp.36-37 key: cord-0049263-u3js7zo0 authors: westoby, peter; harris, verne title: community development ‘yet-to-come’ during and post the covid-19 pandemic: from derrida to zuboff date: 2020-07-08 journal: community dev j doi: 10.1093/cdj/bsaa026 sha: adb449b95b16f14cf43a991fb9821278b37dc317 doc_id: 49263 cord_uid: u3js7zo0 the contours of this article, written as a dialogue between two authors, one in australia (westoby) and one in south africa (harris), outline a derridean deconstruction of community development ‘yet-to-come’ during and post coronavirus disease 2019. reflecting on our two countries’ experiences, drawing on theorists such as zuboff (surveillance capitalism), freire (critical literacy), foucault (biopower), escobar (pluriversality) and berardi (semio-capitalism), we argue for transformational critical digital literacy work that enables greater community awareness of the consequences of digital lives and also transformative praxis. riffing off many experiences that readers will be familiar with (lockdown, social distancing, tracing apps, virtual meetings and so on), the dialogue also suggests a soulful community development yet-to-come, foregrounding embodied lives, slowness, place, relationality and connection. global pandemic, causing a global shock to health, economic, political and social systems-and this article considers how community development can respond. the contours of our article, written as a dialogue between two authors, one in australia (westoby) and one in south africa (harris), outline a derridean deconstruction drawing on several lines of enquiry. these include zuboff's analysis of surveillance capitalism (linking to naomi klein's shockdoctrine); freire's notion of critical literacy through dialogue; foucault's notion of biopower; escobar's ideas of the pluriverse and berardi's on soul. we write this article from a perspective generated by a dialogue between a community development practitioner/scholar/analyst and an activist archivist/scholar. both of us come to this deconstructive task profoundly privileged-along every intersecting vector of privilege, including at this time maintaining paid jobs during the pandemic-and acknowledging the profound uncertainly of these times. our approach to deconstructing community development for one yet-tocome does not intend to make invisible the revival of 'community as mutuality' and expressions of neighbourly care during the pandemic. the pandemic has created opportunity as never before to explore community-online, and the role, practice and efficacy of virtual communities during a time of physical distancing-and we affirm these expressions of 'community building'. others have been examining what community-led development needs to bring to communities experiencing coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) (for example, the movement for community-led development-https:// mcld.org/share-innovations/). as such, from a derridean perspective there are many examples of 'community as hospitality' while also recognizing the manifestations of community as 'munitions' (the muni within community) (o'connor, 2010: 125) -as some people, groups and communities create barriers and borderlands to 'keep people out', a kind of 'anticommunity' formation of place and boundary. what i bring to the dialogue with verne, and to the deconstructive task more broadly, is a critical lens shaped by derrida, foucault, freire, zuboff, escobar and berardi. with it we look to offer a critical digital literacy framework for community development praxis, along with other insights. verne, as i come to the end of a page of introductory musings, setting up our dialogical provocation, i am interested in your reading of zuboff's surveillance capitalism, and how her work links to what is unfolding during this pandemic of covid-19? verne: thanks peter. as always, in a few sentences you hold both a clutch of ideas and a bunch of tempting questions. but let me focus, initially, on surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2019) . the book came out in 2019 and is monumental in many senses. zuboff outlines what she regards as an unprecedented development in capitalism, one involving the extraction of the most intimate and private information about individuals (what she calls 'behavioural surplus', zuboff, 2019: 194-200) and its sale to corporate and other customers who use it to modify behaviours for both good and ill, but mostly in order to make obscene amounts of money. she outlines in great detail how the big tech companies, the juggernauts, sidestep rights to privacy, data protection norms and restrictions on monopoly in order to build behavioural surplus, largely without the knowledge or the consent of the people from whom the surplus is extracted. and she demonstrates how that surplus can be used-and has been used-to influence people's purchasing patterns, manipulate their preferences, persuade them to vote in elections and referenda, and even determine the results of such critical societal decision-making processes. billions of people around the world are hooked into systems which provide a service-from online purchasing to email, from information searching to movie downloads-but for which they pay a fearful price. zuboff warns that this is just the beginning. she argues that we are on the brink of a decisive move into what she calls ubiquitous computing, in which extraction from individuals takes place even when they are not online-they will be, and increasingly already are, being watched and recorded by their cars, their refrigerators, their watches, their spectacles, and so on. humanity is relinquishing its right to sanctuary. that's a lot, i know. and i've just skimmed the surface of a multilayered and richly textured work. but before i attempt to link it to covid-19, i have to say that surveillance capitalism needs to be read alongside work by others, which is equally important at this moment. work which, if anything, digs even deeper than zuboff. so, for instance, jackie wang's 2018 book on what she calls 'carceral capitalism'. wang unfolds how big data, logarithms and related tools are used to incarcerate populations without the need for literal prisons and other places of detention. or amy webb's 2019 work on artificial intelligence (ai), in which she shows that 'we are crossing a threshold into a new reality in which ai is generating its own programs, creating its own algorithms, and making choices without humans in the loop' (webb 2019: 125) . covid-19 is providing humanity with an opportunity to reflect on where it finds itself, what it wants and what it really needs. sadly, scarily, at the same time it creates almost the perfect platform for the archons of capitalism and ai to expand their reach exponentially under the pretext of combatting catastrophe. so, as we rely on technology more heavily for connection, for community, in a time of social distancing, unavoidably we unlock new layers of behavioural surplus for the archons. as we advocate free or very cheap access to online services for the world's most vulnerable people, potentially we are giving the archons new sources of surplus. and so on. peter: verne, you have provided a glimpse into some of the key recent literature on surveillance capitalism. i would add that we are now seeing greater cooperation, or collusion between the mega-corporations that zuboff and the other authors you mention analyse, and the state. so not only are there significantly more 'data' being harvested by corporations as people, during and post-social distancing/lockdowns, live more of their lives online, but there are data linked to health now being collected and stored by states, with citizens being quick to comply. for example, in australia the government launched the coronavirus tracing app named covidsafe app on 26 april 1 . this was two weeks before the relevant legislation even went to parliament on 12 may 2 . one intriguing thing is that more than 6 million australian citizens downloaded the app even before the legislation went to parliament. without even understanding how it works, or it being subjected to technical tests (about claims of safety and security of data collection), or even review of the legislation prior to normal procedure. people, in the name of 'safety' and under pressure to 'do the right thing by their fellow citizens' (invoking 'community') and with a carrot offered ('lockdown restrictions can be lifted quicker if people download the app'), citizens were quick to comply. australia is obviously not alone in using this technology-in china and india downloading their app is mandatory; apparently one-third of icelanders had downloaded their equivalent at the time of us writing, and so forth. intriguingly, for the australian app, data are being stored by amazon web services, the seattle based mega-corporation that zuboff writes about. mapping this recent technological initiative simply grounds the terrain we are talking about. in the period of lockdowns during this pandemic, and now subsequent forms of tracing and surveillance, we see a potent manifestation of what foucault called biopolitics and biopower. as rachel adams (2017) outlines: in short, biopolitics can be understood as a political rationality which takes the administration of life and populations as its subject: 'to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order'. biopower thus names the way in which biopolitics is put to work in society, and involves what foucault describes as 'a very profound transformation of [the] mechanisms of power' of the western classic age. in the will to knowledge, foucault writes of 'a power that exerts a positive influence on life, which endeavours 1 https://www.health.gov.au/resources/apps-and-tools/covidsafe-app. 2 https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/bills_legislation/bills_search_results/result?bid= r6556. community development 5 to administer, optimize and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations' 3 . the main point being that the state has not, in most countries, had to use force or repressive power. people subject themselves willingly to this biopower. but, now the key point: in this willing subjection to biopower, are people aware of the interplay of this behavioural surplus you discuss above and actual surveillance power? this brings us to the idea of freire and critical digital literacy, a key element of a community development yet-to-come. i would suggest that 'critical digital literacy' can be understood as a form of pedagogy for making sense of and deconstructing the digital and material forces and power that shape our world. in engaging with the politics of digital governance alongside its use in everyday life, a critical digital literacy approach to community development links people's lived experiences to the broader context of structural and social power in which they are situated. what do you think verne? verne: so, i'm hearing two questions in your reflection peter. one has to do with awareness, the other with what you're calling 'critical digital literacy'. yes, we need far more awareness of the kinds of surveillance we are routinely exposed to by our devices. if i remember correctly, the first time i really thought about this was during the student uprising on south africa's university campuses in the period 2015-2017. 4 my organization was involved in mediation work, while friends of mine (some students, some faculty) found themselves caught up in what felt like a tidal wave. in the early stages, student leaders used whatsapp and other tools very effectively to mobilize action and direct operations. but it was not long before university administrations and police intelligence units began using these same tools both for surveillance and for targeted disruption of student formations. this is when i started reading more and thinking more deeply about the price people pay for being plugged in digitally. although, i have to say, i find deep inside myself a resistance to caring about surveillance. i mean caring for myself. this probably has something to do with long years of anti-apartheid work, during which one learned to assume that everything one was doing and saying was under scrutiny. in that space it is easy either to become paranoid-the one extreme-or to develop a 'fuck them' approach. it probably also has something to do with my unease around data protection and all the other layers of privacy our global elites afford themselves, when the great majority of human beings-living and working in crowded shared spaces-experience almost no privacy at all. another consequence of being plugged in digitally is complicity in a vast material network, which is all about extraction, consumption and disposal. the virtual, i think, seduces us into being blind to the extent to which it hinges on: mines extracting coltan and other substances required in the manufacture of hardware; factories producing devices; the labour of human beings sweating in those mines and factories in often inhumane conditions; cables cutting through landscapes and seabeds, disturbing ecosystems, sometimes terminally; huge landfills receiving the hardware waste spawned by ever-accelerating appetites for the new and the upgraded; and so on. awareness of this complicity, it seems to me, is critical to the possibility of soulfulness in digital literacy. i'll keep looping back to this possibility. so, yes, awareness is vital. although, as usual, i have far more questions than i do answers. as i develop knowledge about the kinds of surveillance and the modes of behavioural manipulation made possible by the systems and the devices i'm using, i do wonder how i can put that knowledge to work. how can i contribute to shifting things? or has that struggle already been lost? questions not unrelated to one i've been wrestling with through these covid-19 months of virtual meetings, classes and workshops-how to nurture soul, even find it, in these relentlessly illuminated and windowed two-dimensional spaces? how to resist the gaze of narcissus and forget the extent to which algorithms are crunching data on one's facial expressions and every other minute detail available to the system's sensors? well, i could go on. by the way, did you sign up to covidsafe? peter: like the field of critical health literacy (sykes, wills & popple, 2017) and critical thinking generally, a 'critical digital literacy' linked to normative community development work would assume 'circles' of people can come together to make sense of what's unfolding-awareness as you say of what's happening and our complicities-but also identify transformative possibilities through praxis. so i'd like to reframe your question: 'how can i contribute to shifting things?' to 'how can we contribute to shifting things?' the 'we' is crucial in a freirean community development tradition. your thinking and the likes of zuboff provide crucial expertise such that dialogue, collective analysis and strategizing are well informed. tracing back to some of our key points, covid-19 has accelerated a move into more digital lives. this leads to numerous key issues from a transformative perspective. lines of inequality are amplified-the 'haves and have-nots' now linked to digital access. i'm reminded of the opening scene of the 2019 academy award winning movie parasite, in which a poor korean family living in squalor awake to find that the woman living in the flat above them has put a password on her wi-fi ensuring they cannot access it anymore. this exclusion from the wi-fi triggers a trajectory of further impoverishment. for the privileged the pandemic has been a giant pause, a kind of resting moment for contemplation, more yoga, perhaps alcohol detox and goodness knows what else. for the poor it has been catastrophic-and we now talk of the hunger pandemic unfolding in your continent. along with inequalities, we see this flocking to an online world also has huge winners and losers economically. think of corporations such as amazon, facebook, google, uber eats, zoom and others. huge economic winners. in australia the two huge food retail corporations have increased profits significantly. many local businesses have collapsed or gone into what our government called hibernation. so, we see the globalization versus localization debates heightened. as such there are many dualities at work which we are yet to make sense of. some globalized supply chains have collapsed, which might lead to a focus on nationalized or localized production and supply lines. but it's not just economic issues. as you've explained, surveillance capitalism isn't just harvesting data for consumption. it's also about politics, shifting the whole norms and assumptions of democratic institutions. cambridge analytica 5 etc. brexit, trump, morrison in australia-all indications that normal 'polling' can't predict. invisible forces at work. as more people move online this harvesting of data for political purposes will surely become even more potent. maybe the panopticon is all encompassing-we have lost the fight already as you suggest. yet freire's work offers not only awareness but the invitation to expanding imaginations-what he called imaginative literacy, before acting. there are alternatives. my final thoughts here related to freire's idea of expanding imaginations. a key previous contributor to this journal (esteva 2014 (esteva , 2015a is the mexican post-development thinker/activist, gustavo esteva, linked to the universidad de la tierra (university of the earth), supporting the zapatista struggle in southern mexico. as a post-development thinker, much of esteva's work has been an inquiry into 'what comes after failed development?' and i think one of our threads here is that forty years of hyper-capitalist neoliberal policy making, following 200 years of industrial capitalism, has failed us all profoundly, particularly the poor and the non-human world. as such, reaching then beyond the either/or prospect of hyper-capitalist market-led development versus state-led capitalism or socialism is 'the commons', which represents the 'cell of a new society' (esteva, 2015b: 744) . this is an example of the possibility of re-imagining-this 'beyond' the either/or options of state or market, and instead, a mutuality tradition of cooperation and commoning. i wonder if the panopticon gives rise to what a transformative critical digital literacy could lead to. a new dreaming of mechanisms such as platform cooperatives: e.g. local people using digital platforms to cooperate and create local businesses in ways that delink from the global corporations such as uber eats, uber and amazon. in saying this, i also acknowledge that esteva's approach to 'the commons' is quite necessarily different to many. recognizing the enclosure of the commons as a historical process (are not digital worlds now being enclosed?), and acknowledging the movements that are reclaiming or regenerating the commons (for example commonly managed land, wikipedia, open-access software, cooperatives, and so forth), he advocates for people to see what's already happening. his suggestion is that there is a new post-capitalist world emerging among the commons. but, importantly, it is not one form. so, he is adamantly against the idea of 'the commons' as a universal category, but is instead for a 'family of words that includes different traditions' of commoning (esteva, 2015b: 744) . oh, and to answer your last question, no, i didn't download the covid-safe. verne: glad to hear it. tell me, was there only an 'i' involved in that decision, or was there also a 'we' at play, a circle of friends and colleagues, a community? your point on community is taken, in principle, but i wanted to make a point about how important it is for each one of us to take personal responsibility for how and when we plug in. the tech titans routinely confront us with reams of small print-we need to read it. sometimes we might have to turn down an app because of its onerous ts&cs. say no to the cookie permissions and other requests which dangle on the screen invitingly. decline a new fridge because it will be recording my habits and related behaviours. or just walk away from a particular digital space altogether-i took one look at facebook when it first exploded onto the scene and ran. i don't want to sound virtuous here-this is more a reminder to myself than a description of a practice. truth is covid-19 has made it more difficult than ever to take responsible decisions about plugging in. for, as you point out, the move into digital terrain has accelerated, bringing with it those frequent and unsought requirements to download software or to upgrade it in order to participate optimally in virtual processes. often i've felt that i don't have a choice. this accelerated move does bring benefits, for sure, but overwhelmingly for society's elites. and, as you point out, the social divides have been profoundly deepened. here in south africa we have seen the great majority of people left behind in every way. take schooling for example. for more than two months now the great majority of learners have sat at home through the covid-19 lockdown without access to the devices (and the air time and the data and the connectivity) they need in order to participate in online learning. while private school learners have moved almost seamlessly into what feels like a new era. naomi klein has exposed how in the usa the tech giants are talking to states about using covid-19 to leapfrog education into a 'utopian' future of remote learning, in which the mass of people will be left behind irrevocably (klein 2020) . what klein and others (harari 2015 , for example) are warning of-when what is happening in education is replicated in health services, public transport and every other arena of service delivery-is a human revolution on the scale of the industrial and agricultural revolutions. this is a revolution we don't want. social justice activists in south africa are beginning to mobilize around the challenge. small victories have been won in relation to the inordinate costs of data. more and more now (in the midst of covid-19) the call is for universal free access to the internet, linked to demands for a universal basic income grant, ownership of property (the vast majority of south africans, whether they live on communally owned land in deep rural areas or in urban township and informal settlement sprawls, don't have title deeds), access to social capital networks, and the online provision of information in a form which is accessible and usable to those using cheap handheld devices. all of this is achievable. all of it is designed to ensure that the great mass of people is not left behind, once and for all. so, peter, we enable people to be plugged in. but what does community development look like in this space? you started talking about platform cooperatives and community use of 'the commons'. tell me more. talk to me about how we nurture soul in this space. peter: along with your very sharp analysis, you ask two good questions and offer a provocation. first my answer to your opening question: did i choose to not download covidsafe app alone-or 'was there a 'we' involved'? in a sense there's always the 'i'-taking full responsibility for my decision. yet, most certainly a 'we'-there was intensive online debate among people i was connected to via social media (your non-beloved facebook) generally, and among those in the community development fraternity particularly. intensive debate and fierce disagreement are not always pleasant. i had a clear public line-that i would not download it due to all the reasons we have outlined above. some community development colleagues, and even students i have taught, were angry with me, arguing that downloading the app was a key indicator of being 'for community', not the individual. they suggested that as a public figure i should be taking the lead in advocating 'for community'. but, in fact, the stronger public line i took was to advocate for dialogue and agonistic dialogue no matter what positions and action people adopted. recognizing that people were sitting in very different spaces on this, the key for me became preferably dialogue, and if not possible, at least respectful difference (mouffe's (1993) 'agonistic conflict', which she contrasts with antagonistic conflict whereby disagreement is conflated with demonizing of the enemy). now, regarding your question and provocation: 'but what does community development look like in this space? and: 'talk to me about how we nurture soul in this space'. hard to answer. i will in some ways sidestep the question, perhaps a 'soulful community development yet-to-come', as derrida would have framed it (see westoby, 2019) . but i will probe the question signposting what i mean by soul, and then suggesting a way forward with three lines of thought. you ask of soul. in previous writings (westoby, 2016) , i discuss soul from two key traditions-of depth psychology on one hand (aka james hillman, thomas moore, mary watkins and carl jung) and on the other hand critical theory (aka 'bifo' berardi, particularly his book on colonising the soul, 2009). avoiding definition, but drawing on the first tradition, soul is an emissary of depth, connection, slowness, embodied living. metaphorically and mythologically, soul leans 'downwards' (hence depths) in contrast to ego and spirit that leans upwards (skyscrapers, endless flying, ambition). as i write those words, i am struck by how the icarus-like nature of hypermodernity, with a love of flying all over the world, has been more or less grounded during covid-19. and many people's ambitions have been thwarted. drawing on the second critical theory tradition of 'bifo', we home in on understanding contemporary capitalism and its particular restructuring of the workplace. within this analytical lineage, he argues that since the 1970s, at least within advanced capitalist economies, work has been transformed for many as a place of cognitive labour, as people use their minds at work more than their bodies. it is within this space of cognitive labour that desire, creativity and imagination are most manifest. it is where most people love to be, in contrast to the time prior to the 1970s, when most people wanted to work less, as work was mainly mechanical labour. in a sense, then, people are now at their most creative, intelligent selves at work, and therefore they want to spend more time there. as a result, people's identities and energies are constructed less from community, or the social fabric of society, than from the 'social factory' where they are employed. for many, work becomes their community. however, from a critical perspective this creative and imaginative work is contextualized by a competitive neoliberal capitalist economic system, which creates failure (after all it is impossible for everyone to win in a competitive work space), stress (people become tired of creating, of constantly making themselves, of competing), ultimately manifest in anxiety, panic and depression. bifo argues that the soul has been colonized (berardi, 2009: 14) by this kind of modern cognitive labour in the social factory, and that furthermore, 'something in the collective soul has seized up'. (ibid: 10). for bifo, soul, as gravity of the body, takes people into these seized, panicked, depressed places as a gift, inviting reconsideration of how they might want to live and work. with such an analysis in mind, a soul perspective on community development work also considers, in dialogue with the likes of bifo, how to recreate autonomous and strategic sites of work, action and community that offer an alternative to the current structure of neoliberal capitalist enterprise. soul signifies an aesthetic response to orthodox notions of contemporary work, and a call to reorient sensuality and vitality away from the social factory of work and towards re-weaving the social fabric of community-a new 'ecology of late capitalism' and radical reform. in the light of this emissary of soul (understood through both the traditions of depth psychology and critical theory), indicators of a soulful community development yet-to-come would be embodied life, slowness, careful noticing as opposed to rapid action, less flight and more connectivity to locality/fleshy bodies, a re-orienting towards the social and community fabric of life (not work). i would suggest our idea of a transformative critical literacy would be complemented by circles of people reflecting on place, the body, slowness, place, work and connection. in suggesting this, i am aware that a duality is set at play. an inevitable one, articulated by arturo escobar in his ground-breaking book designs for the pluriverse (2018). in that book he suggests humans live at a crossroads: on the one hand cyborg, ever-plugged in digitally; yet on the other hand a real need to return to an embodied, relationally oriented life that is more rooted in community, place and sustainable bioregions. first nations people provide much wisdom for the latter path. at the same time, he recognizes that ultimately it will not be either/or. so, i am suggesting that this community development yet-to-come will embrace a transformative critical digital literacy as a popular education strategy of enabling citizens to make sense of the cultural-social-economic and political forces shaping our lives. i would add that this digital literacy would also need to probe into the impacts of this hyper-connected world on our bodies, our nervous systems, our mental health (and 'bifo' berardi provides many insights into this). at the same time a soulful community development yet-to-come insists on a return to the body, relationality, locality, slowness. both/and. verne, i'd like to make a final comment, for as we engage in our dialogue, i am also participating in a three-month online global dialogue hosted by the proteus initiative. our dialogue is focused on what we call 'delicate activism in a time of covid-19'. in many ways delicate activism aligns with a 'soul' approach in that the key to this work is sharpening our observational capabilities (kaplan and davidoff, 2014) . the backdrop to this need for sharpening is that much social practice is a constant movement between the polarity of observation and intervention. we observe, observe, dialogue, 'make sense of', and then with a hopefully accurate analysis, take action (intervention). yet, western ways of being in the world lean way too heavily towards quick intervention. a delicate activism suggests we refrain for much longer than our habitual impulse from intervention, or non-reflexive action, and instead spend a lot more time observing what is unfolding (not solitary observation, but as rigorous practice of using senses, analysis and in dialogue with others). i would suggest that as the world experiences the profound disruption of covid-19, community practitioners need to be attending to rigorous observation. and the irony of this is that observation is an intervention. to observe is to witness, to become intimate with what's unfolding (perhaps our own families again, or localities during lockdowns?), to even fall-in-love with life again, one not dominated by what berardi calls hyper-capitalism (berardi, 2009) . a community development yet-to-come informed by soul and a delicate activism demands slowness my friend. and i say this with a full awareness of the privileged position of being able to even imagine slowness as an imperative. after all, with the hunger pandemic already ravaging many parts of the world, the hungry cannot choose slowness. verne: slowness. indeed. slow enough to be fully present. slow enough to connect, to see the chimera that is every either/or and to begin apprehending the both/and which is always already at play. this, for me, is the thread which weaves together deconstruction, intersectionality and archetypal psychology, and draws them into realms of soul. derrida, escobar, bell hooks and james hillman as soulmates. 6 in pluriverse, escobar delineates another important dimension of resisting binary opposition. it's a passage in which he's exploring worldviewsor epistemes or 'worldings'-other than 'patriarchal capitalist modernity'. what he demonstrates is a decolonial politics in which subaltern worlds deliberately disengage from dominant ones and connect with them only very intentionally and strategically (escobar 2018: 217) . as living ghosts, they haunt power both by withdrawing from space-by declining particular roles, by letting silence speak for them-and by entering space when least expected. so, in relation to the digital it's not only about being plugged in or not; it's about plugging in and plugging out on terms not determined by dominant worlds; on terms that are, at the very least, negotiated. both/and. this reminds me of an online archival project undertaken some years ago by the archival platform, driven by my friend and colleague mbongiseni buthelezi-ancestral stories. 7 it's rationale was a profession and a field of enquiry in south africa-genealogy-dominated by whiteness and inhospitable to indigenous ways of knowing and doing. the project not only troubled a dominant discourse; it also revealed the extent to which younger generations of black south africans are using social media and other digital platforms to engage with and share ancient knowledges. as you know my friend, it took me many years to discover the possibilities of soul connection in the digital realm. as a writer i clung to my fountain pen and my beautiful handcrafted notebooks, the computer merely a technical device for transcribing and transporting texts. but now i've learned the delights of creating and crafting text on screen. i've befriended devices and started to find the soul in their designs, their sounds and their surfaces. i've learned whole new subtleties of touch, my fingers capable of an unimagined lovemaking with hardware. the fountain pen and notebooks are still beloved, but no longer in monogamy. and, of course, i've learned how soulmates can nurture their connection digitally. you and i communicate every day though we live in different continents-arguably, fundamental qualities of our relationship (and a plethora of connective nuances) have been opened, if not created, by technology. the big learning for me in recent months-and it's very specifically a covid-19 lockdown learning-is the extent to which deeper collective processes and encounters can be held virtually. i guess along the lines of what is emerging for you in the delicate activism dialogue. i've seen my organization using curated whatsapp binges to enable colleagues to stay in touch, and have frequently been surprised by the levels of sharing taking place. over several weeks i've participated in a panel interviewing applicants in the usa and south africa for the atlantic fellows for racial equity, with both the bonds developed within the panel and the intimacy of the engagements completely unexpected. and i've facilitated workshops, which have subverted my scepticism fundamentally. virtual break-out groups can work, electronic flipcharts offer dimensions beyond the reach of paper and koki pens, 'reading a room' on a screen is possible (in fact, it invites a pluriversal reading of multiple rooms), sometimes people look in mirrors more readily when they're in the 'safety' of their bedrooms, and so on. i've been surprised. but not seduced. the digital is both liberating and limiting. knowing the limits is critical, as is retaining capacity to say 'no', and being able to avoid addiction. one's got to be able to switch off long enough to enjoy retreats into wilderness and other forms of unpluggedness. on one's own or with people who can offer real, material, more or less sweaty, hugs. (after seventy days of lockdown now, my body craves hugs, handshakes, an arm around my shoulders.) one's got to be able to switch off long enough to engage in the dimensions of community which the digital does not reach. peter: verne, i loved your contemplative musings on the possibilities, the surprises, and yes that warning to not be seduced. as we come to an end of our dialogue, your stories remind me of a small journey with a few people during this lockdown. classic community development you might say. here's the story: 'i' had an idea. i'd been inspired reading jenny odell's how to do nothing: resisting the attention economy (2019), yet sensed it would be good to read with others, and living in a new bioregion, wanted to connect with new people even in a digital way. hence, i discussed the idea of a 'critical reading group', which is essentially freire's 'circle work' with odell's book as the 'code' to trigger dialogue. no one 'teaching', just a dialogue. i reached out to two others, not saying, 'i'd like to start a reading group', but, 'i have an idea to read with others, what do you think? how about 'we' start a reading group'. a subtly different question, but important from a community development perspective. this group became a project of a 'we', not an 'i', and as the other two said 'yes, let us do this' (the 'us' is important) and reached out to others, we became a circle of eight. it's illustrative of our community development method: 'i' to 'we' and it has been a rich journey so far. the content of the book also echoes much of what you have just shared, asking 'what is it to resist the attention economy?'-not delink from it (for that would be to retreat from politics)but bring a new intentionality, to avoid being sucked into the cacophony of noise, news and necessity. this resistance, escobar's 'disengagement', is crucial. this community development yet-to-come is honing its analysis of those possibilities of digital community, of transformative digital literacy, and yet supporting a praxis of people in resistance, in turning off, delinking. returning to odell-herself quoting berardi-s/he suggests that the new regime that we need to make real sense of community development 15 is not founded on the repression of dissent: nor does it rest on the enforcement of silence. on the contrary, it relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent, and critique banal and ridiculous . . . . instances of censorship are rather marginal when compared to what is essentially an immense informational overload and an actual siege of attention . . . . (odell, 2019: 18) . biopower (our consent), literacy (awareness) and a new praxis: stepping out of this overload, this siege, yet with intention stepping into digital platforms that enable new connections, new analyses and creative praxis (local, as per my book reading group; global as in the proteus initiative and your work between the usa and rsa). the importance of the covid-19 pandemic as enabling slowness and observation that will possibly enable people collectively to see the fissures, the small cracks in the edifice of globalizing industrial surveillance capitalism and intervene with 'right action'. and maybe here it's worth clarifying-this slowness we are imagining is not so much about some bourgeois version of rest and relaxing-albeit i have always chosen to imagine the afternoon siesta as the most perfect act of resistance against hyper-productive capitalist demands. no, this slowness enables a more rigorous careful process of observation (analysis) which leads to more potent intervention (action). verne: the challenge for most people is to find that slowness in the midst of a clutter of activity, to be slow while acting with speed. we're talking about a slowness, then, which is not necessarily literal. as to whether covid-19 and its aftermath will lead to the kind of potent action-as in transformational and sustainable-which is required, that remains to be seen. could this moment unfold as but another in a series which in the recent past have triggered a tsunami of activity but failed to secure structural change? this moment reminds me of others-in 2003 i was in toronto marching against the invasion of iraq, a participant in just one of thousands of mass protests around the world; in 2008 there were many protests in south africa as there were elsewhere responding to the wall street-induced global economic implosion; i passed through new york in 2011 just as the occupy wall street movement emerged; and last year one of my projects was in stockholm to interview greta thunberg during a fridays for future strike action. it has been clear for a long time now that what bell hooks calls imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is not sustainable (hooks 2013: 177) . and it is obvious that covid-19 creates yet another opportunity for swift and deliberate dismantling of the intersecting apparatuses of oppressive power. but i suspect that we are still a long way short of a breakthrough. it's feeling like just another tsunami. i was introduced at a keynote of the 2018 international association of community development as a community development scholar, activist and analyst. i kind of liked the ring of it; almost poetic. yet, more accurately, from the age of twenty years i've been on a journey of community development practice, deeply shaped by a grass-roots tradition, freirean in nature, and place-based. that evolved over many years, particularly as i worked in south africa, uganda, the philippines, nepal, png and vanuatu. then at the age of 40 i found myself a late-comer wading into the academy, and perhaps by chance took up a position as community development scholar just as anthony kelly retired from forty years of teaching/practice service at the university of queensland (where community development has been taught for over forty years, a rich tradition). since then, i've loved the journey of a more intentional dance that links theory and practice together-the rigour of the academy intersecting with the responsivity of daily community development practice. i've been a writer or co-writer/editor of fourteen books and over fifty professional journal articles on community development, and love that there is an emerging global 'community of scholarship' growing around the world. verne harris: head, leadership and knowledge development, nelson mandela foundation; adjunct professor, nelson mandela university, south africa. my first experiences of community-based work were in anti-apartheid structures during the 1980s and early 1990s. most of my career has been about connecting reckoning with pasts to the making of liberatory futures. i served in government throughout nelson mandela's presidency, including a spell with the truth and reconciliation commission. i was mandela's personal archivist from 2004 until his death in 2013 and have spent the best part of two decades at the nelson mandela foundation trying to build a dialogical memory for justice praxis. along the way i have read deeply in deconstruction and intersectionality, authored or co-authored six books (including two novels), edited a few more, and travelled to many countries in search of communities, which have found ways to heal and to dream and to nurture inter-generational learning. crossing paths with peter twenty-four years ago was to enliven my soul journey profoundly. michel foucault: biopolitics and biopower', in critical legal thinking the soul at work: from alienation to autonomy designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy and the making of worlds commoning in the new society conversing on the commons: an interview with gustavo estevapart 1 conversing on the commons: an interview with gustavo estevapart 2 sapiens: a brief history of humankind writing beyond race: living theory and practice, routledge illumination: a living voice a delicate activism, the proteus initiative the return of the political the role of community development in building critical health literacy carceral capitalism, semiotext(e) the big nine: how the tech titans and their thinking machines could warp humanity, public affairs a community development yet-to-come': jacques derrida and reconstructing community development praxis the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power key: cord-0045147-k3w8h961 authors: carr, paul r. title: shooting yourself first in the foot, then in the head: normative democracy is suffocating, and then the coronavirus came to light date: 2020-06-10 journal: postdigit sci educ doi: 10.1007/s42438-020-00142-3 sha: 97879b16ce35daf316c27cbddda2d31833db2918 doc_id: 45147 cord_uid: k3w8h961 this text starts with the premise that ‘normative democracy’ has rendered our societies vulnerable and burdened with unaddressed social inequalities. i highlight three central arguments: (1) social media, and, consequently, citizen engagement are becoming a significant filter that can potentially re-imagine the political, economic, and social worlds, which increasingly bleed over to how we might develop and engage with ‘democracy’; to this end, i introduce a brief case study on the nefarious interpretation of the killing of jamal khashoggi in 2018 to underscore the tension points in normative democracy; (2) capitalism, or neoliberalism, needs to be more fully exposed, interrogated, and confronted if ‘normative, representative, hegemonic, electoral democracy’ is to be re-considered, re-imagined, and re-invented; the perpetuation of social inequalities lays bare the frailty of normative democratic institutions; (3) covid-19 has exposed the fault lines and fissures of normative democracy, illustrating here the ‘common sense’ ways that power imbalances are sustained, which leaves little room for social solidarity; i present herein the case of the economic/labor dynamic in quebec during the coronavirus. ultimately, i believe the quest to re-imagine a more meaningful, critically engaged democracy, especially during a context that is imbued with a political, economic, and public health crisis, cannot be delayed much longer. 2018; thésée, carr, duclos, and potwora 2018) , and contextualizes how we think (and act) about the subject. to further clarify this context of how normative democracy manifests itself, i highlight the following examples from my research projects with colleagues over the years, which involved studies in some 15 countries with roughly 5000 teacher education and educator participants (carr and thésée 2019) : & we found that the vast majority did not have a robust, significant democratic experience in their own education; & that this has affected how they consider democracy and education; & that social justice is, for many, a difficult and problematic area to cultivate in and through education owing to a weakly asserted, structured, and supported institutional culture based on normative democracy; & that most considered that the space for inclusive and critical engagement in and through education is constrained, limited, and fraught with obstacles; & that racialized participants had significantly higher levels of experience, conscientization, and engagement with, for example, racism, antiracism, and efforts to address racial inequities, which further underscores how normative democracy closes down fundamental debate, dialog, teaching and learning as well as transformative education while presenting the posture and framework of democracy. when democracy and education are considered to be naturally disconnected while not leaving room for a more critically engaged democracy, it is not difficult to imagine the suffocating nature of normative democracy. normative elections, the ones that have been so effectively presented by the usa as the backbone to any meaningful democracy, have been jettisoned into a cesspit of turmoil and intractable debate that often neglects problematizing some of the most intractable and germane issues (achen and bartels 2017; howe 2010; torcal and ramon montero 2013) . not everyone involved in elections is corrupt or corrupted, or is afflicted with unsightly motivations, and people who go to the polls are not simply sheep being led to the proverbial slaughterhouse. there is a great deal of complexity as to why we vote and why we hope that there will be some hope in participating in mainstream democracy, but the faith in electoral democracy is waning almost everywhere (torcal and ramon montero 2013; carr and thésée 2019 ). yet, these normative elections, which are often ordered to measure with the threat of massive (real and rhetorical) carpet-bombing and worse, if not realized, are replete with all kinds of paradoxical anti-democratic maneuvers, starting with who can be elected, how much money plays into the process, how media can control and shape the message, manipulation, and diversion is a fundamental component, how seeking to win is more a priority than seeking to build a meaningful democracy, and how capitalism is the enormous, indelicate, meandering proverbial 800pound gorilla in the room (amico 2020; carr and thésée 2019) . added to this is the role, the purpose, and place of education in supporting, cultivating, and building a critically engaged democracy as well as critically engaged citizen participation. it is extremely difficult to have one without the other (democracy without education, for example, or, rather, meaningful, critically engaged democracy without meaningful, critically engaged education). (see carr 2011, and carr and thésée 2019 , as well as the unesco chair dcmét website at uqo.ca/dcmet/ for an archive of publications.). and then, starting in late 2019, the world started to feel the indelible, intractable, and (in)visible perturbations of the coronavirus, which emanated in china, and has quickly disseminated throughout all regions, making it a global pandemic. the number of people affected, contracting the virus, and ultimately succumbing to it, is increasing daily at this time but there is much analysis and data-crunching indicating that, in many areas, after several weeks of self-distancing, hygienic measures, increasing testing, closing down all but 'essential services', and enhancing medical and health care measures, the 'curve' may be flattening. however, few people believe that the virus will disappear, nor that the cost, in terms of human life, will be entirely negligible. so what is the connection to democracy, capitalism (or perhaps more correctly neoliberalism), and covid-19? the vulnerabilities, inequalities, and fault lines that existed prior to the coronavirus have been exacerbated, and the virus has disproportionately impacted racialized, marginalized, and lower income communities. the contraction and death rates are higher, and the economic, labor, living, and social conditions have worsened, notably for already vulnerable communities. this pandemic, sadly, provides a tremendous and significant impetus to re-consider and re-calibrate our thinking around democracy (diamond 2020; roy 2020) . this text starts with the premise that 'normative democracy' has put us in a pickle, and that, although there are ways out if it, this will require breaking out of the glass box that has a great many of us believing that there is no alternative. i highlight three points related to democracy in this text, formulating the following central arguments: 1) social media and, consequently, citizen engagement are becoming a significant filter that can potentially re-imagine the political, economic, and social worlds (outside of and beyond normative democracy), which increasingly bleed over to how we might develop and engage with 'democracy' (garrett 2019) ; to this end, the advent of 'fake news' is a worthy subject to explore here because a functioning democracy, to a certain degree, is dependent on media/political literacy, critical engagement/participation, and the capacity to communicate, analyze, and disseminate nuanced perspectives, ideas, and information; i introduce a brief case study on the nefarious interpretation of the killing of jamal khashoggi in 2018 (bbc news 2019) to underscore the tension points in normative democracy; 2) capitalism, or neoliberalism, needs to be more fully exposed, interrogated, and confronted if 'normative, representative, hegemonic, electoral democracy' is to be re-considered, re-imagined, and re-invented (lydon 2017) ; the perpetuation of social inequalities lays bare the frailty of normative democratic institutions; 3) covid-19 has exposed the fault lines and fissures of normative democracy, illustrating here the 'common sense' ways that power imbalances are sustained, which leaves little room for social solidarity (human rights watch 2020); i present here a small case study of the economic and labor dynamic in quebec during the coronavirus. ultimately, i believe the quest to re-imagine a more meaningful, critically engaged democracy, especially during a context that is imbued with a political, economic, and public health crisis, cannot be delayed much longer. capitalism, in addition to acknowledged and unacknowledged hegemony, is central to this model or framework, and a natural order and superiority flows effortlessly through thinking and believing that this is the only way to be, exist and function. democracy 2.0, which considers more fluidly agency, power crystallizations, social justice, and individual as well as collectivist media and citizen engagement, is much messier than democracy 1.0, which connects more directly with normative, representative, hegemonic, and electoral machinations (carr, hoechsmann, and thésée 2018) . social media is an exemplary feature of this new environment and can help us draw out the fundamental question if greater media, communication, and online involvement can lead to more robust, critical democratic forms of citizen participation. elsewhere, with colleagues (carr, daros, cuervo, and thésée 2020) , i describe some of the overlapping components, processes, and concerns that help frame the context for social media, fake news, and citizen participation. it would appear that everyone today is somehow connected to social media, even if one does not have an account for one or many of the social networks that pervade, link and smother the socio-cultural landscape (keating and melis 2017) . there are networks for an untold array of information sharing and gathering. nouns have become verbs as in 'youtubbing,' 'blogging,' 'vlogging,' 'googling,' 'facebooking,' etc.. the reach is significant, and the digital imprints (and footprints) are equally commensurate (sun, wang, shen and zhang 2015) . one can do a search for a pair of shoes on amazon.com, and, magically, there will be ads for shoes on the personal facebook feed immediately afterward. algorithms are increasingly programming what we see, and aligning at least some of our attention on 'stuff,' for lack of a better word, where we might not otherwise be interested. this surveillance, usurpation and data-gathering was significantly exposed in 2018, with facebook being highlighted for a particularly negative watershed year (sutton 2018; wong and morris 2018) . among the litany of events, problems and phenomena that have plagued facebook, which are clearly not limited to this one, albeit prominent social network, were the following claims, findings and evidence, amongst other issues: algorithms connected to the 'negative effects to referral traffic,' unregulated ads that underscored the mueller investigation that has, as it focus, in large part, the russian involvement in the 2016 us presidential election, the cambridge analytica scandal that 'obtained the data of tens of millions of facebook users without their knowledge or consent to help build a powerful political influencing tool,' privacy and security issues, 'special data-sharing arrangements with tech manufactures like amazon, apple and samsung,' hacking of accounts, and regulation problems (sutton 2018) . (carr et al. 2020: 4) fake news has leaped into mainstream consciousness over the past few years as if it is the problem hampering democracy. emphasizing that fake news is rarely neatly packaged within a singular category, the report cited above cautions that deception needs to be interrogated at various times while viewing media messages. with the avalanche of fake accounts, fake (bot) users, and fake (or tampered with) algorithms, the terrain is fertile for fake news. this is especially the case if users, consumers, and citizens are conditioned to not question or verify what comes their way, are reluctant to disbelief 'official' sources, are ignorant, are disinterested, or are enveloped in turbulent news cycles with complex, nuanced, voluminous information, for which they are unable to decipher the diverse and divergent realities emanating from a particular situation, event, or reality (carr, daros, cuervo, and thésée 2020) . citizen participation requires critical engagement, and constructing media/political literacy, however defined, needs to be considered in order to better underpin meaningful forms of democracy (carr, cuervo, and daros 2019) . the hailstorm of misinformation, misdirection, and disinformation during the early phases of the coronavirus mirrors the general online landscape, serving as both a tremendous opportunity and a mud-slide concurrently, and highlighting the potential for meaningful solidarity as well as, conversely, marginalization and xenophobia (ali and kurasawa 2020) . i am also drawn to the nuanced layers that mackenzie and bhatt (2020) add to this debate, suggesting that '[b]ullshit is different from lying and it need not undermine trust, particularly when it is blatant'. (the literature around the notion and proliferation of 'bullshit' is linked to, and builds on, the work of harry g. frankfurt, notably the 2005 book aptly entitled on bullshit.) this is extremely relevant in contemporary times, given populist movements, xenophobic manifestations, and the denunciation of human rights, and the quest to diminish 'news' as being 'fake' as a basic principle emanating from some powerful leaders in the western world as well as elsewhere. at the same time, i acknowledge that the traditional media is anchored in biases and hegemonic trappings but am troubled that the 'fake news' caravan seeks to whitewash anything that may bring contrary dimensions to the debate, especially in relation to revealing, exposing, and countering mainstream narratives related to war, conflict, racism, inequalities, and the like. democracy 1.0 had a relatively controlled audience, whereas democracy 2.0 has let the floodgates open, and this means that there are now opportunities for critique, solidarity, and mobilization that may not have been as readily available previously, including diverse social movements that have taken off through social media (carr, daros, cuervo, and thésée 2020) . these social movements can be a force of change in society at the local, national, and global levels where governments and international institutions are unwilling, unable, or unmotivated to respond to the needs of the population. for instance, black lives matter (mundt, ross, and burnett 2018) , #metoo (botti et al. 2019) , occupy, and idle no more have all had a significant social media influence, and environmental, peace, and other movements have also been influential at diverse levels in mobilizing solidarity that surpasses cultural, linguistic, geographic, and political boundaries carty 2019) . within the quickly evolving media/social media landscape, i can think of what appear to be several major (media and/or social) events in recent times-noting full-well that by the time this article is published, they may not even be recognizable-including the khashoggi killing, the covington school student debacle, the parkland shooting, the kavanaugh nomination, the thai cave recue, the (british) royal wedding, the manifestations in haiti, the never-ending quest to build a 'wall/barrier/fence' between the usa and mexico, and the political/humanitarian crisis in venezuela, among many others. i apologize for the usa-centric focus here. as a canadian, i am fully cognizant of the depth and reach of usa tentacles, thinking, control, power, and influence in and on my own work, as well as on many others, even though i collaborate widely with colleagues in diverse jurisdictions and contexts, notably in latin america. the usa and its interests bleed over to every region of the world, and, although united statesians (the concept of 'american' is hotly contested and does not cover all of the peoples of the 'americas') may not be talking collectively (in a central way) about the world or may not be collectively immersed in ingratiating the usa into the infinite number of political and economic issues, concerns, and cultural representations of the other countries and peoples, the world is watching, listening, and being consumed by the behemoth of usa empire. the covid-19 pandemic also squarely places the usa within the core of the action, with daily pronouncements about blaming china, cutting off funding to the world health organization, downplaying the spread of the virus, boasting about how the virus has been beaten back, and spreading the political and economic reach of this country far and wide, in military, diplomatic, commercial, and (potentially) humanitarian ways. it seems as though the reality of this being a (global) pandemic, a far-reaching health crisis, is only partially the story, and the present manifestations in the usa of people demanding that 'isolation' be stopped, while so many are being infected and even dying, is almost incomprehensible, and social media concurrently exposes, denounces, disseminates, and provides an echo chamber for what is taking place. so i question what becomes news, indeed viral, and how does it become more than click-bait, algorithmic entertainment, the bouncing around in limited, like-minded networks, tepid sharing, and a platform for trolls? is it about numbers, the quantity of clicks, views, shares and reads, or something more substantive? at the same time, what are the true dimensions of the issue(s)? who frames it, how, and why, and to what end? what is omitted, downplayed, obfuscated, how and why? in the list of issues in the previous paragraph, we can think of many pitfalls, foibles, and problematic concerns as to what 'issues' look like in democracy 2.0. all issues are not simply a usa problem, but connections to elites, hegemony, power differentials, and media framing are, i believe, worth establishing and interrogating. what is clear is that power differentials are at play in how fake news is constructed, disseminated, understood, and engaged with. the more volatile social media can push up against normative media in further determining how fake news can be projected, masked, embellished, and consumed. concerning the jamal khashoggi killing in october 2018 in istanbul (bbc news 2019), we can follow the usual process of focusing on hegemonic interests and avoiding contextual factors and backdrops. several significant and pivotal factors were down-or under-played in reporting on this tragedy. for example, the relationship to the saudi kingdom, human rights, billions upon billions of dollars in armaments sold to the saudis, the unimaginable assault by saudi arabia against yemen, and the impending famine and genocide in yemen as a result, women's rights, journalistic freedom, and an unending series of beheadings by the quasi-untouchable saudi regime. undoubtedly, information, discussion, debate, reports, and mobilization on all of these fronts can be located and advanced through social media, in spite of the mainstream, hegemonic vision. the point here is that central, controlled, and 'manufactured' debate, at least within a condensed and constrained optic and timeframe, shined a light on the actual killing of khashoggi in turkey, who did it, how, and why. yet, significantly, it was only weakly concerned with the other, what could/should be considered to be, highly pertinent and central issues that are/were intertwined within this quagmire. why such deference was paid to the saudi leadership in this case, when this same deference is not paid in many other instances, especially when the faulty regime is not an ally, is quite pertinent. the lack of historical, political, and economic context, combined with the propensity to avoid latching onto 'research', and a plurality of visions, perspectives, and experiences seem to be a predominant feature of how these stories crystallize. the khashoggi example, like others, contains an evolving set of circumstances and frames, as well as questions, and we are cognizant of how some segments of social media can provide differing narratives that can, consequently, re-shape the 'official' story. yet, the social media dimensions can also counter the formal hegemonic narrative, and this is where alternative forms of 'democracy' can start to take hold (jenkins, shresthova, gamber-thompson, kligler-velenchik, and zimmerman 2016) . why the more critical dimensions within the khashoggi case (or the venezuela situation or others, for that matter) were/are not more broadly taken up by democracy 1.0 relates, i believe, to the hegemonic shaping/framing of the issues. it is also combined with a weakly focused mainstream media, whose reach is now consumed within the 'fake news' bubble, and a still questionable place, at least among many formal political leaders and their business sector supports, of uncontrolled social movements and social media within formal political spheres. however, i do believe that this last factor-social movements and social media being a mobilizing force-is, and will continue to potentially be, central to conceptualizing, developing, cultivating, building, and elaborating a more decent, meaningful, robust, and critically engaged democracy, in spite of the status quo aiming to maintain and sustain its hegemonic place. social media movements can also lead to dictatorship, genocide, and an infringement of rights (sapra 2020) . for instance, gayo-avello (2015) hypothesizes that social media may contribute but is not the central feature to democratization: in short, social media is not a democratizing catalyzer per se. it is just one of many factors, in addition to great tactical tools, provided the conditions in the nondemocratic country are suitable. moreover, there are many variables which can negatively affect the outcome of any uprising, even without the regime tampering with social media. in other words, social media does not make people free; freedom requires people taking risks and organizing themselves. (gayo-avello 2015: 6) social media cannot magically lead to class consciousness, anti-racism, peace, and social solidarity. however, it may be able to provide an outlet and legs to important stories, events, and realities for people who were only previously loosely connected. this could have a dual effect of further questioning and delegitimizing normative democracy, and also providing space and voice for marginalized interests, perspectives, and arguments. social media is now indelibly a part of the citizen participation landscape. what is the point of living in a 'democracy' if you are one of those living in abject poverty, are homeless, and are working tirelessly to make ends meet but never achieve economic justice (ely yamin 2020)? of course, the notion of having the 'freedom' to pursue your dreams, as in 'the american dream', is sufficiently grounded within normative debates to ensure that questioning entrenched, systemic, institutional, deeply grounded social inequalities will be quickly snuffed out. within the usa context, amadeo (2019) highlights the increasing social inequalities as follows: structural inequality seems to be worsening. between 1979 and 2007, after-tax income increased 275% for the wealthiest 1% of households. it rose 65% for the top fifth. the bottom fifth only increased by 18%. that's true even adding all income from social security, welfare, and other government payments. during this time, the wealthiest 1% increased their share of total income by 10%. everyone else saw their share shrink by 1-2%. as a result, economic mobility worsened. the 2008 financial crisis saw the rich get richer. in 2012, the top 10% of earners took home 50% of all income. (amadeo 2019) powers, fischman, and berliner (2016) have highlighted how research on poverty and social inequalities is poorly understood or operationalized, which further underpins weak policy responses to entrenched and systemic problems. similarly, it is helpful to problematize how wealth has been accrued historically through genocide, slavery, imperialism, war and conflict, colonialism, and a host of racialized, sexist, and other machinations in addition to piketty's (2017) welldocumented treatise capital in the twenty-first century. mclaren (see pruyn and malott 2016) has highlighted marx's theory on surplus value and the limited mobility between the social classes, and the crushing blow of capital against labor; ultimately, the value of what is produced encounters hyper-inflation in the hands of investors, owners, and speculators without real production, which may seem locked into the days of children being exploited in coal mines over a century ago but there are still many parallels today. giroux (2016) has coined 'casino capitalism' to label the politicoeconomic system that enraptures the vast majority of formal, and to varying degrees, informal activity that underpin mass exploitation. he further elucidates the danger of continuing on the one-way neoliberal path before us: neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the right to participate in the market, and supplant issues of social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individualism and the belief that all social relation be judged according to how they further one's individual needs and self-interests. matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion for the other have given way to the limiting orbits of privatization and unrestrained self-interest, just as it is has become increasingly difficult to translate private troubles into larger social, economic, and political considerations. one consequence is that it has become more difficult for people to debate and question neoliberal hegemony and the widespread misery it produces for young people, the poor, middle class, workers, and other segments of societynow considered disposable under neoliberal regimes which are governed by a survival-of-the fittest ethos, largely imposed by the ruling economic and political elite. (giroux 2016) mclaren (see pruyn and malott 2016) and giroux (see giroux, sandin, and burdick, 2018) have also made a compelling case to interpret today's reality as a politicoeconomic context that is launching us into hyper-sophisticated forms of fascism. within this backdrop, i believe that there is a great need, as there always has been, to be more fully engaged with (and in) education, in political circles and in public debate, in general, in relation to the philosophy and operationalization of capitalism and, in particular, to the all-encompassing mercantilization of all public and private goods, services, and experiences enveloped within neoliberalism. the covid-19 context has expedited and underscored the slippery slope toward authoritarianism, stripping away rights while creating socio-economic cleavages that are even more serious than before . democracy 2.0 is tethered to democracy 1.0 conceptualizations of the world, but the door is (slightly) open to develop a new world, despite the titanic hegemonic vice-grip that maintains a stranglehold on education and public debate. as alluded to in the previous section, the collective 'we' are free to surf the web, consume, create, diffuse, comment, and cajole the other, whether the 'other' knows us, sees us, or cares about us or not. we are not frontally impeded from opening our eyes and ears. on the contrary, many movements have been stimulated from doing so-including the arab springalthough the aftermath re-captured regressive hegemonic features of what preceded it. the dilemma is that the corporate/business politico-economic (hegemonic) world has grown into this concurrently in-your-face and stealth, quickly-evolving, dynamic context seamlessly stamping its imprint in every way possible. the interplay between democracy 1.0 and democracy 2.0, thus, offers tremendous potential for citizen participation and engagement while, simultaneously, presenting the quicksand mirage that we may not be as 'free' as we think we are, or we may not be as 'engaged' as we think that we are. neoliberalism has many people around the world gasping for air. now mired in a pandemic that vacillates from signs of encouragement that the 'curve is flattening' to fears that 'community transmission' is rapidly spreading through asymptomatic contact, there is enormous stress about when there will be an effective vaccination, how the health context will play out, and, increasingly, when will the 'economy get back to normal.' at this point in time-although we are aware of massive numbers (the information is not hidden, anyway) of unnecessary deaths in 'developing' countries related to hunger, disease, poverty, and conflict-we can see the extreme concern within local, national, and international governments and institutions to get the economy working. while most of the world has emphasized 'social distancing' as a key measure to diminish the dissemination and transmission of covid-19, an eerily bizarre phenomenon has taken hold in the usa (wong, vaughan, quilty-harper, and liverpool 2020) . disparate, semi-organized protests against 'self-isolation' are taking place in diverse locations, often replete with a range of arms and placards enunciating the right to, among other things, 'haircuts' and to 'play golf.' is it pure insanity, a case of hubris beyond all limits, an anti-science ideology that needs to play out in every sector-including the environment-or complete indifference to human suffering? while the usa situation deeply underscores the anxiety and agitation around the health/economy dichotomy, i present below a brief illustration of the neoliberalization of the political and economic convergence through an example of the coronavirus in québec (canada). québec, a predominantly french-speaking province of 8.5 million people in canada, provides an interesting illustration of how a jurisdiction within a federal framework has worked to mobilize, sensitize, and activate a range of health, economic, political, and education measures to confront covid-19. there are daily press briefings, information sessions, directives, a vast media campaign, testimonies, and a host of consultations, which all serve to educate the public and to engage the citizenry concurrently. it would be disingenuous to simply criticize where there have been gaps and problems; the reality is that many people have worked diligently and courageously to create a sense of the gravity of the problem and to diminish the extent of the propagation of the virus. having a universal healthcare system has been, i believe, indispensable to understanding how to assess, allocate, distribute, and organize resources. this is not an individual problem but a vast, insidious collective one. it should be acknowledged as well that what we know is shifting and re-calibrating in real time, and decisions made on march 1 were questioned and re-assessed by march 7 and so on. moreover, what we know now cannot always be fully understood until later, and decisions that are taken in that light can lead to nefarious situations and the rampant spread of the virus. hindsight is 20/20 as the proverb goes so a fulsome diagnosis of what we are doing today will be more effectively critiqued once we are through to the other side of the pandemic. the situation in québec, one that is surely not unknown elsewhere, underscores the fragility of 'normative' democracy; this is, i believe, a question of normative democracy working the way that it does. one heart-wrenching issue that we are observing at this time is that the vast majority of deaths in québec, like elsewhere, is among those 70 years of age and older, and particularly the 80 + age-group. moreover, what many of us did not know or fully consider, the vast majority of deaths up until now within québec are among those who are in long-term care residences (in french, they are called cshlds), roughly 70%, which are essentially senior's residences for people with health issues. the transmission within these residences is extensive and rapid, with an increasing number of personnel, nurses, and doctors also being affected. one residence, for example, experienced an overwhelming amount of infection (herron, discussed below), and there are others that have also been deeply affected. one might say that there are two public health crises at this time: one for the general population and another for these particular residences with this specific group. on the one hand, the population is astonished, sickened, and in shock ('how could this happen?,' 'especially to "our elderly"?'). on the other hand, this was a serious politico-economic cocktail being mixed for a couple of decades, massaged through diverse political parties within the normative democracy that adjudicates such matters. (why was there such sustained neglect and under-funding? why was this not flagged as a serious catastrophe in the making?). i would like to underscore that this is not a problem of one person, one political party, one decision, one law, or one particular model: it is the consequence of systemic, institutional failure/negligence as well as the thinnest wedges of normative democracy carrying the day over the broader public interest and good. i briefly present some of the specific underlying conditions that lay the groundwork for what is playing out within this vulnerable population at this time: a lack of monitoring, under-paying workers, and diminished policy importance and planning. media accounts provide information on the tragedy unfolding before our eyes. in one case, at herron, in western montréal, the chsld there, which is privately owned, experienced serious staffing shortages, insufficient equipment, poor oversight, inadequate support from oversight bodies, and unacceptable communications with health authorities. mckenna (2020) provides a sense of the chaos and suffering there: nurses were getting sick, too: six out of the seven registered nurses on staff were experiencing covid symptoms, and of seven licensed practical nurses (lpns), only four were still healthy. (…). about a quarter of the orderlies (préposés aux bénéficiares, or patient attendants) had also stopped workingeither because they were experiencing covid symptoms or because they felt it was no longer safe to work at chsld herron. within weeks, a quarter of those patient attendants would test positive for covid-19. (…). bedridden residents were lying in sheets stained brown up to their necks in excrement, so long had it been since their diapers had been changed. some were dehydrated and unfed. (…). the head of professional services at the ciusss, dr. nadine larente, is the doctor who went to help. she told the french-language newspaper la presse the place was in chaos: one lpn and two patient attendants were trying to care for 130 residents. food trays had been placed on the floor, dishes untouched because residents with mobility issues could not reach them. (mckenna 2020). about double the number, proportionately, of seniors in québec opt for long-term care residences compared with the rest of the country, which could be a function of culture, policy, economics, and options available, and the rapidly aging québécois population is a further aggravating factor preparing the context (dougherty 2020). one expert (see lowrie 2020) noted that the spatial configuration 'with long corridors and residents sharing rooms, have a harder time isolating sick residents from uninfected ones, compared to residences with house-style layouts, where residents live in smaller wings' is another factor that helps explain the extreme transmission of the virus in chslds. with staff falling ill or refusing to come to work, there has been a massive campaign to recruit retired nurses and also to bring doctors and specialists into the overburdened long-term care system; the premier of the province has also asked for the military (over a thousand troops) to further provide support within these seniors' residences. social class and political power are fully intertwined in the quickly unraveling situation involving seniors' residences in québec. raising the minimum wage in québec, for example, was vigorously opposed by the present government and others along the way, fearful that employers, especially small businesses, could not afford it. while there is no maximum wage being regulated, those struggling with the minimum wage are often obligated to work two or three jobs, to seek assistance elsewhere, and face other severe challenges, including in relation to housing, childcare, education, and the cost of living. the chsld situation brought everything to a head, with it being clearly obvious that those designated as 'essential services' were often those being paid the least in society. the premier took the almost unprecedented measure of apologizing for underpaying workers when it became difficult and problematic to staff these residences: 'i know a lot of quebecers are asking themselves how we could have got ourselves in this situation,' a sombre legault said at his friday briefing, addressing the catastrophe unfolding in covid-19-stricken long-term seniors' residences (chslds). 'i myself have spent several days and nights asking what i should have done differently.' 'if i was able to redo one thing, i would have increased the wages of orderlies faster, even without the accord of the unions. i assume full responsibility. we entered this crisis ill equipped, and clearly the situation deteriorated for all kinds of reasons. the virus got in.' (authier 2020) . the premier also took a series of steps to increase pay for healthcare workers. as part of its effort to improve working conditions in the health-care system, quebec announced that nearly 300,000 employees in both the public and private sector will be getting temporary pay increases. workers who are in direct contact with the diseasesuch emergency-room professionals and nurses in coronavirus testing centreswill receive an 8 % boost in their salaries. those working in long-term care homes, known as chslds, will also be among the 69,000 workers to benefit from the 8 % raise…. another 200,000 people who work in the health-care system but aren't as directly exposed to the disease, such as the nurses who staff the 811 health line, will get a salary increase of 4 %. and workers in private long-term care homes, many of whom make little more than minimum wage, will get an additional $4 per hour. that measure appears designed to discourage these workers from quitting and staying home, to take advantage of federal financial assistance that's worth $2000 a month. (shingler, stevenson, and montpetit 2020) . one question that arises here is how these workers could have been underpaid for so long, and what the effect may have been, for them, the people receiving the care, the healthcare institutions and system, and society as a whole. did it dissuade qualified workers from pursuing careers or staying in them? what were the other priorities that negated remunerating fairly such indispensable and 'essential' workers? on the economic side of the ledger, how efficient is it to underpay some employees and over-compensate others who have not actually done the work or who are, ironically, considered to be disproportionately fundamental? is a 10:1 ratio for salaries at the top and the bottom reasonable or should it be 100:1 or 1000:1? in canada, in general, the wage differentials are less extreme and odious than the usa, but the issue of social (in)equality is also a significant concern there. one study (mishe and wolfe 2019) focused on usa compensation provides some backdrop to how public services and priorities can be disproportionately affected. ceo compensation is very high relative to typical worker compensation (by a ratio of 278-to-1 or 221-to-1). in contrast, the ceo-to-typical-worker compensation ratio (options realized) was 20-to-1 in 1965 and 58-to-1 in 1989. ceos are even making a lot more-about five times as much-as other earners in the top 0.1%. from 1978 to 2018, ceo compensation grew by 1007.5% (940.3% under the options-realized measure), far outstripping s&p stock market growth (706.7%) and the wage growth of very high earners (339.2%). in contrast, wages for the typical worker grew by just 11.9%. there is a lot of complexity to how covid-19 is analyzed, and comparing diverse sites/ jurisdictions/systems and how data are compiled and evaluated may not reveal the true breadth and scope of the reality. similarly, there are many moving parts and lots of people (remunerated and volunteer) involved and engaged, and there are also all kinds of activities aimed at supporting a solidified, vigorous response. my intention in presenting this case study is not to admonish or diminish those serious and important efforts. on the contrary, it is my hope that this pandemic will reveal a silver lining somewhere in that extreme vulnerabilities and shortcomings need to be rectified in order to ensure, as much as possible, that economics will not suffocate political considerations in the future. and i have not emphasized here the race, gender, and other pivotal underlying factors underpinning this pandemic, but they are also a significant piece of the puzzle. this text has underscored what 'democracy' we are trying to achieve, to cultivate, and to ingratiate. the focus and direction of my central arguments about the lack of bone fide democracy within a normative, mainstream political framework that preaches that we live in a developed democracy has, i believe, become accelerated and accentuated as a result of covid-19. i have highlighted some of the fundamental issues and problems with 'normative, representative, hegemonic, electoral democracy,' and also emphasized the pivotal contextual shifts and cornerstones embedded in democracy 1.0 as well as democracy 2.0. i have also made the case for more robust, critically-engaged citizen participation, which would require or, at the very least, benefit from new forms of education and media/political literacy. the social media equation was brought to light since it serves as an unruly, uncontrolled, and rapidly evolving microcosm of the world, its diversity, its problems, its challenges, and its potential. i was careful to not make a definitive declaration related to achieving democracy through the potentially transformative technologies that now shape how we live and function and relate to the world. despite everything, we are still mired in conflict(s), in inequitable power relations, and in 'democracies' that are not very 'democratic. ' we are still straddling democracy 1.0, in which formal political declarations are fabricated with partisan political interests at the fore, the stock market is seemingly central to everything, and business elites are catered to at every level. similarly, tax cuts-regardless of political stripe-figure into everything, political parties shamelessly line up to receive 'donations' (does anyone believe that they come with no strings attached?), tax breaks for companies must be considered as much as lower tax rates for the rich (does anyone believe that rich people will create more employment based on having more cash? if so, why are there so many off-shore accounts in tax-havens intended to not pay tax?), and (military) might is (still) right for many. the further the coronavirus expands, the more there is discussion about needing an economic balance to 'get back to normal,' and indicators such as the stock market are central to supposedly gaging what is happening (karabell 2020) . of course, there have been lots of (incremental) changes, and lots of new laws, policies, practices, and shifts in cultural norms that have benefitted, generally speaking, women, racialized minorities, the poor, and the vulnerable. yet, social inequalities, despite massive technological and others changes, not only persist but, in many regards, are increasing. how could this be when there is so much wealth? why do so many people leave their countries in complete desperation, why is there still so much military conflict-most of which goes unreported-why do so many problems of poverty and discrimination persist in the most vulgarly palpable ways, why is there such little global outrage over the state and fate of indigenous peoples (the loss of land, language, culture and autonomy), and why is the 'environment' not the priority? this very partial list of questions is noteworthy because neoliberalism is, definitely, an accelerator to many of the problems we are facing . to be clear here, this is not a binary proposition, and avoiding confronting real problems with real people will not address real suffering, oppression and marginalization (gray and gest 2018) . we might ask: why are there (recurrent, entrenched) problems when there are so many people, projects, forces, and movements fighting for a more decent, robust, and (even) alternative democracy 2.0, one that could place neoliberalism within a new, different and alternative landscape? how should hegemony be understood today when (many) people so freely believe that they have complete agency over their actions, thoughts and experiences, and when (many) people believe that voting is the (only) key? i would stress here that the binary capitalist-socialist, rich-poor binary is not the most productive lens through which to examine the complexity of such extreme power imbalances around the world. the debate around 'democracy,' i believe, needs to be more all-encompassing, involving all of the tentacles and blockages of neoliberalism into the class, race, gender, cultural, and other pivotal sociological markers of identity, and it also needs to carve out a place for how power works, is distributed and recreated. this debate needs to leave open the door for unknown questions and answers as well as (creative and alternative) processes and deliberations, accepting that the normative elections in place are most likely not very beneficial for most people, and, most definitely, the massive numbers of people who do not participate, willingly or unwillingly (van reybrouck 2017). it is important to connect the local with the global, as we can through covid-19. ely yamin (2020) provides a sense of the need to address global issues globally and to be leery of not considering the complexity of the linkages between complex problems. but that and many other challenges requires weaving human rights praxis-human rights for social change-into broader social movements, as well as working across disciplinary silos. the problems facing the rights movement are too complex for any one set of advocacy tools or any one field's expertise. of course, there is no single monolithic 'human rights community' just as there is no unified 'health and human rights community'. those tropes are used from the 'inside' to police the boundaries of orthodoxy and from the 'outside' to caricaturize sets of actors and strategies. yet, there are dangers of circling the wagons defensively around our professional tribes. the complexity of the challenges posed by rampant inequality, the spread of authoritarianism and illiberalism, distrust in multilateralism, and climate cataclysm call for embracing justified critiques and opening up to new ideas and perspectives-and uniting with labor, environmental and many other social justice movements. (ely yamin 2020) inspired by paulo freire's transformative work (freire 1970) , i would advocate for more openness and acceptance of political realities that shape our lived experiences as well as an extremely healthy dose of humility as means to being able to understand, engage with, and be with the 'other.' i explore more fully the interconnections and inspiration of freire's work with my colleague gina thésée (carr and thésée 2019) . the hard-wired, testosterone-induced, keep-fundraising-at-all-times political systems that have been put in place all over the place need to be re-imagined before they suffocate themselves and everyone else. people will slowly divest themselves from the voting game, leaving it as an empty shell filled with a bunch of white guys in suites. (yes, there are some openings for other identities in this equation but the game was made by and for these guys.) freire wrote of conscientization, and i believe that to get there, we need to focus on peace, not war, social, and cultural development as opposed to economic development, solidarity, and emancipation rather than exclusively on individual rights and liberties, and the recognition that we are (all) human beings. as human beings, we are not required to be racist (no baby is racist but we learn to be so), sexist (a totally learned behavior), classist (exploiting one's neighbor is not an obligation), kill one another (who gets killed anyway? the rich or the poor, and who are they? do we care?), or live with so much misery, hatred, and oppression. ultimately, we are in the same boat (or world) together. one could see the glass half full with lots of progress all over the place, and, yet, the empty side of the glass contains real people living through unimaginable (for the full side of the glass) realities; the wage discrepancies and gaps in the québec example exemplify this reality. the quest for a meaningful democracy aimed at both sides of the glass would be a more conducive option, and re-imagining democracy will require more fully and, even disproportionately, considering the empty side of the glass. taking a stand against democracy 1.0 and 'normative, representative, hegemonic, electoral democracy' is a necessary condition to moving forward for this re-imagined democracy. donkervoort (2020) underscores that the pandemic has been exploited by 'autocrats' but that citizens can resist and coalesce around global initiatives to weaken and confront hegemonic forces. this could mean enhanced civil society engagement across all boundaries with an eye to unmasking and dismantling the concentration of wealth and power. covid-19 has exposed the need for a different universe, not only in terms of public health but also, importantly, in relation to democracy and citizen engagement (roy 2020) . so while my foot, to return to the title, may be in taters, i'm hopefulindeed, it may be the only way out if this-that my head will not be the ultimate causality as we strive to either sustain or re-imagine a democracy that can not only take us out of a pandemic but, rather, into social solidarity that will remove our bodies and minds (and souls) from imminent disaster. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. democracy for realists: why elections do not produce responsive government #covid19: social media both a blessing and a curse during coronavirus pandemic. the conversation structural inequality in america: how structural inequality stifles the american dream do democracy and capitalism really need each other? harvard business review the struggle for democracy in education: lessons from social realities covid-19 analysis: legault offers a mea culpa -but did he really have a choice? montreal gazette jamal khashoggi: all you need to know about saudi journalist's death the #metoo social media effect and its potentials for social change in europe. brussels: feps -foundation for european progressive studies does your vote count? critical pedagogy and democracy citizen engagement in the contemporary era of fake news: hegemonic distraction or control of the social media context? postdigital science and education social media and the quest for democracy: faking the re-awakening? democracy 2.0: media, political literacy and critical engagement it's not education that scares me, it's the educators…': is there still hope for democracy in education, and education for democracy? social movements and new technology america's covid-19 disaster is a setback for democracy. the atlantic while autocrats exploit the pandemic 70% of quebec's covid-19 deaths are in long-term care, seniors' residences. ipolitics putting human rights at the centre of struggles for health and social equality on bullshit pedagogy of the oppressed social media's contribution to political misperceptions in u.s. presidential elections social media, democracy, and democratization the mad violence of casino capitalism. counterpunch the covid-19 pandemic is exposing the plague of neoliberalism the new henry giroux reader: the role of the public intellectual in a time of tyranny silent citizenship: the politics of marginality in unequal democracies citizens adrift: the democratic disengagement of young canadians by any means necessary: the new youth activism as covid-19 spreads, listen to the stock market for now social media and youth political engagement: preaching to the converted or providing a new voice for youth? many factors behind covid-19 outbreaks hitting quebec's long-term care homes noam chomsky: neoliberalism is destroying our democracy: how elites on both sides of the political spectrum have undermined our social, political, and environmental commons. the nation why are american elections so long? orderlies worked without ppe, covid-19 patients wandered herron's halls for days after health agency took over lies, bullshit and fake news: some epistemological concerns ceo compensation has grown 940% since 1978: typical worker compensation has risen only 12% during that time. economic policy institute scaling social movements through social media: the case of black lives matter capital in the twenty-first century making the visible invisible: willful ignorance of poverty and social inequalities in the research-policy nexus this fist called my heart: the peter mclaren reader (volume i) the pandemic is a portal the last decade showed how social media could topple governments and make social change -and it's only getting crazier from here no one 'is more deserving,' says legault, raising wages of 300,000 health-care workers as covid-19 cases climb location information disclosure in location-based social network services: privacy calculus, benefit structure, and gender differences facebook's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year: and youthought you had a rough conjuguer démocratie et éducation : perceptions et expériences de futurs-es enseignants-es du québec. citizenship education research journal/revue de recherche sur l'éducation à la citoyenneté political disaffection in contemporary democracies: social capital, institutions, and politics against elections: the case for democracy it's complicated: facebook's terrible 2018. the guardian covid-19 latest: cdc director warns us second wave could be even worse si'zi tz'ay uganda entrepreneurs: why are they in business edward d. bewayo montclair state university abstract the role of entrepreneurship in economic development is well recognized in most western countries. the recognition of this role is increasingly becoming international as many east european and third world countries replace state capitalism withpee enterprise economic systems. this paper repons on a survey study done about the development and future prospects of entrepreneurship in uganda. based upon responses from 208 small business owners, the paper discusses what motivates uganda entrepreneurs, their risk taking willingness, and rhe involvement offamily members in the family business. the majority of uganda entrepreneurs cited monetary considerations as the main reason for going into business, which could be a reflection of uganda's current economic conditions. however, most of them would not exchange business ownership forjobs even ifjobs became available and paid as well as their businesses. this was due to the independence uganda entrepreneurs enjoy as business owners. uganda entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs for monetary reasons but remain entrepreneurs for the freedom entrepreneurship accords them. introduction the entrepreneurship spirit is catching on internationally as market-oriented economies replace planned economies, as individual/corporate capitalism replaces state capitalism, and as democracy replaces dictatorship. in countries such as the united states, small business and entrepreneurship make significant contributions to the economy. small businesses (businesses with up to one hundred employees) employ close to 50% of the american workforce and produce over 40% of the gross national product (gnp). and since they create most of the new jobs, they are a key tool for getting the economy out of rcccssions. in a real sense, small busmess and entrepreneurship make up the centerpiece of the amctican free enterprise economic system. many policymakers in developing countries, especially with the collapse of central planning ideologies and increasingly at the urging of international bodies such as the international monetary fund (via the sometimes controversial structural adjustment policies), are adopting free enterprise mechanisms. one of these mechanisms, small business/entrepreneurship, is looked at with panicular enthusiasm and it is frequently thought or taken for granted that entrepreneurships "will lead the way to new economic development (giamartino, 1991). malcolm harper has summarized the reasons why entrepreneurship is expected to play an even bigger role in developing countries than it plays in developed countries (harper, 1991). the following are some of the reasons that harper suggests. first, during colonial times (and many countries, especially in africa, became independent as recendy as the 1980s) government was responsible for all economic activities. this colonial legacy must be broken and emrepreneurship is the way to do it. second, another legacy of 67 colonialism are state enterprises, a good example of which are the ubiquitous marketing boards. these state enterprises are failing badly. they leave major gaps in goods, services, and jobs. entrepreneurs are ncedcd to continue the operations. third, colonial governments and the multinational corporations originating from colonial mother countries tended to favor capital intensive technologies amidst a shortage of capital and an abundance of labor. what is needed are local entrepreneurs to start new enterprises using labor intensive technologies. fourth. some sections of the population in developing countries were deprived and, in some instances, continue to be deprived of access to resources. such deprivation prevents these populations from participation in national (political and economic) developmenn starting their own businesses is the only opuon available to them. this nation-building role of cnuepreneurship, probably a secondary one in most developed countries, is a primary one in most new countries where entire tribal or religious groups do not have as yet a good sense of belonging to "their" country. another factor that makes entreprcneurship critical, especially in countries such as uganda, the focus of this paper, are the civil wars that have devastated the economies left behind by the colonial regimes. in the case of uganda, the wars all but destroyed the state enterprises. they did the same to peasant farming, thus,'orcing a population influx into urban areas. nearly unique to uganda, the civil wars also forced an exodus of the asian community from uganda. they had been. since early in the colonial period, the backbone of uganda's trading sector. when peace finally or temporarily returns, the gaps left behind must be filled. new entrepreneurs must set up enterprises to replace those destroyed by the wars and those that were abandoned by the asians. this paper investigates the form entrepreneurship in uganda is taking and its prospects in the future. because entrepreneurship develops within its surrounding environment (peterson, 1988), we should expect certain unique features in relation to uganda's entrepreneurship. methods between the summer of 1990 and the spring of 1991 a questionnaire was distributed to about 700 ugandan entrepreneurs in and around kampala, the capital, and masaka, a town 80 miles southwest of kampala. the sample may be described as a convenience sample, noi selected randomly at all. business owners had to be approached in person at their places of business/work and requested to volunteer to complete the quesuonnaire. the completed qucstionnaircs also had to be picked up in person by the author or his assistants. many of thc cnucpreneurs who had volunteered to complete the questionnaire did not do so. however, by june 1992, 208 usable, completed questionnaires had been received, a response rate of 30%. the questions on the questionnaire fell into the categories of demographic, motivation, risk-taking, family involvement, ownership, financing, location/facilities, and sales growth strategies. in this paper, the discussion is restricted to demographic factors, motivauon, risk-taking, and family involvement. table i provides information about the sample entrepreneurs and their businesses. 68 table 1 demographic features of the surveyed ugandan entrepreneurs and their businesses a. types of respondents'. period in existence businesses t~s ~n. ~9'ears no. retail 64 31 under 3 45 22 wholesale 20 10 over 3 to 5 37 18 wholesale and over 5 to 7 40 19 retail 25 12 over 7 to 9 24 12 construction 13 6 over 9 to ll 22 11 manufacturing 40 19 over 11 to 16 23 11 tfanspoftauon 8 4 over 16 to 21 6 3 others 38 18 over 21 9 4 not given 2 1 total 208 100 total 208 101* c. age of sample entrepreneurs d. education of sample entrepreneurs years no. level no. 9o under 30 35 17 p7 (7 yrs.) 13 6 30-40 68 33 s2 (9 yrs.) 12 6 40-50 51 25 s4 (11 yrs.) 72 35 50-60 29 14 s6 (13 yrs.) 43 21 over 60 7 3 some university 1 &1 not given 18 9 university degree 48 23 not given** 19 9 total 208 101 total 208 100 may not be equal to 100 due to rounding in this and other tables. probably 0 to 6 years of education. 69 findings what kind of people go into business and why? it is assumed that unless we know the motives of those people who venture into small business, it will be difficult to promote entrepreneurship (carland, hoy and carland, 1988). several questions on the questionnaire solicited reasons why the respondents were operating their own businesses. all questions were open-ended because there can be a large number of reasons why people go into business for themselves (cooper, 1990). the responses had to be content-analyzed for categorization. as can be seen in table 2a, a substantial majority (59%) of the uganda entrepreneurs who were surveyed were in business for making a living more than for anything else. this message was expressed clearly, although in a variety of ways. some of the responses on these lines were: "to make money," to cain money," "to supplement my ofbce income," "that's only where i can get enough income for my development," "there is good money in business," "to earn a living," and "to become wealthy." fourteen of the 208 respondents (7%) indicated to be their own boss (independent) as the reason why they were in business for themselves. this was a significantly smaller percentage than is commonly found by researchers in other places (shapero, 1985). it could be a reflection of uganda's current circumstances as we point out later. however, those who pui down "to be my own boss" as the reason why they were in business for themselves expressed this idea in the following ways, among others: "because i want to be independent," "self-reliant," and "i don't want to be an employee of anybody." table 2 the motivation of uganda entrepreneurs a. why are you in business b. why don't you work i'or for yoursell? . government or somebody else? reasons no. reasons no. independence 14 7 no freedom 32 15 make a livmg 123 59 low pay 44 21 others 60 29 others 107 51 no answer 11 5 no answer 25 12 total 208 100 total 208 99 sixty (29%) of the respondents gave a large assortment of reasons why they were in business for themselves which could not be categorized into any broad, concrete ideas. the following are a sampling of such reasons: "to exploit my skill," "to save my family's face," "to serve 70 humanity," "love of architecture," "i didn't go to school," and "because my father was in business." in another question where respondents were asked why they did not work for government or someone else, monetary concerns (pay was too low) were cited 21% of the time, while lack of freedom was cited 15% of the time. but there were 107 (51%) responses that were so varied that they could not be categorized clearly. and 25 (12%) did not respond to this question. it appears that there are many more reasons why uganda entrepreneurs aren', working for government or someone else than why they are in business for themselves. however, monetary concerns seemed to be more dominant than self-control concerns. interestingly, the common belief that autonomy, freedom, and independence are available more for the entrepreneur than for the employee was very widely held. when asked about the ways in which owning one's business was better than working for someone else (see table 3a), an entire 61% (127 respondents) cited independence. better pay was cited by only 20%, less than half of the number that cited independence. this might mean that uganda entrepreneurs are more sure about the self-control in the entrepreneurial sector than about its superior pay. nevertheless, it is financial rewards (making a living) that get emphasized when uganda entrepreneurs are asked why they are working for themselves. it is as if they are saying that while independence is available more in the self-employment arena than in being employed by someone else, making a living (economic survival) is more important and for now, at least, given uganda's circumstances, self-employment provides a firmer assurance for survival. table 3 why uganda entrepreneurs remain entrepreneurs a. in which ways is owning a b. would you consider a job business better than being which pays the same as your an employee? current business? reasons no. no. independence 127 61 yes 48 23 beuer pay 42 20 no 145 70 others 37 18 no answer 15 7 no answer 2 i total 208 100 total 208 100 what will happen if uganda's circumstances (economic and political) continue to improve, if government and corporate jobs become plentiful? how will entrepreneurship be affected? to explore this area respondents were asked, "would you consider a job which 71 pays the same as your currcm business?" as shown in table 3b, only 48 (23%) respondents would consider a job of similar monetary rewards as their current business. an entire 70% (145 respondems) would not consider such a job. the reluctance to consider a job may have to do with the extras entrepreneurship gives besides income. as we just stated, one such extra well known to the uganda entrepreneur is independence of action. they may even feel, correctly or incorrecdy, that enuepreneurship offers more job security. probably a secure government or corporate job in current uganda is something that is extremely unimaginable. probably uganda's current enu epreneurs will not and cannot be expected to abandon their businesses and seek jobs even when they exist and their remuneration is reasonable. but what about tomorrow's would-be entrepreneur? if monetary rewards continue to be emphasized (and there is no reason to feel that this will be the case), then jobs which pay well will lure would-be entrepreneurs away from entrepreneurship. however, tomorrow's would-be entrepreneurs are today's children, especially the children of uganda's current enu'eprencurs. the involvement of children in the family business has a lot to do with whether the children take up entrepreneurship when they grow up. in another section we present the findings related to family involvement. risk taking going into business for oneself is always a risky decision because one can never totally eliminate thc possibility of failure. several questions on the questionnaire centered around failure. table 4 summarizes respondents'pinions about failure. although only 53 (26%) respondents had ever experienced own business failure (table 4a), a much larger number of them, 157 (76%), knew somebody whose business had failed in the past (table 4b). so, business failure is not exactly a strange, vague idea, but a real possibility for those who venture out on their own in the business world in ugan&la and anywhere. table 4 awareness of risk of failure a. have you ever had a b. do you know anybody whose business which failed? business failed? ~n. ~%%u ~n. yes 53 26 yes 157 76 no 145 70 no 36 17 no answer 10 5 no answer 15 7 total 208 101 total 208 100 respondents were, therefore, asked what they would do if their businesses failed. as seen in table sa "try again" was the response of the majority (51%). this is consistent with 72 the findings we have already stated. only 38 (18%) respondents indicated that they would look for jobs if their businesses failed. the bias for trying again after a business failure was revealed again in responses to two other more focused questions. the question, "if your business failed, would you look for a job?" resulted in more negative responses (47%) than positive responses (41%). on the other hand, the question, "if your business failed, would you try again?" resulted in an overwhelming affirmation (78%), with only 12% answering negatively (table sb and c). table 5 response to risk of failure a. what would you do if your business failed? no. look for job 38 18 try again 105 51 cultivate (peasant farming) 22 11 other possibilities 24 12 no answer 19 9 total 208 101 b. if your business failed, c. if your business failed, would you look for a job? would you try again? no. no. yes 85 41 yes 163 78 no 98 47 no 25 12 no answer 25 12 no answer 20 10 total 208 100 total 208 100 cross tabulations showed that those who had ever failed were much more (71%) prepared to try again than those who had never failed (50%). it was also found, through cross tabulations, that 80% of those who would prefer to look for jobs if their businesses failed were still open to trying another business again. on the other hand, only 34% of those who would prefer trying again if their current businesses failed were still open to looking for a job. these findings are very consistent with those of other researchers. albert shapero, for example, basing himself on many studies on entrepreneurs in many countries, developed and underdeveloped, states: "when entrepreneurs are asked what they would do if they lost their companies, they almost always answer, start another company'" (shapero, 1985). 73 family involvement "entrepreneurs beget entrepreneurs" is probably as good a saying as anyone can find in social phenomena. that entrepreneurs tend to come from families with entrepreneurial parents has been validated in study after study (hisrich, 1989). in this study, several respondents gave "growing up around a family business" as the reason why they are in business i'or themselves. growing up around a family business implies that family members involve themselves in the affairs of the family business. this is how a family business promotes entrepreneurship. several questions on the questionnaire solicited information about the involvement of family members in the family business. table 6 shows the responses to the questions. as can bc scen in table 6a, 104 (50%) of the surveyed entrepreneurs came from families with cnu'cprencurial parens. if wc include respondents who had other relatives (other than parents) who owned businesses, then thc number of respondents with entrepreneurial family backgrounds rises to 123 (59%), the number of respondents with entrepreneurial backgrounds is very high given the very low percentage of people who own businesses in the total population of uganda. such a number can only be explained by the tendency of entrepreneurs bcgcuing entrepreneurs. twenty-four of the surveyed cnucprcneurs got their businesses from their parents (table 6b). another 16 respondents got their businesses from other relatives (table 7b). thus, 40 (19%) respondents got their businesses from parents and other relatives. they are still operating the businesses. these numbers arc much higher than they would be in the united states where many parents sell their businesses when they retire and where offsprings who inherit businesses mostly prefer to sell them. all this is possible in thc united states because there is an active market for existing small businesses. there does not appear to bc a market for existing small businesses in uganda. none of the respondents had bought his/hcr business from anybody. if indeed there is no market for existing businesses in uganda, and it needs to be invcstigatcd, it is not a good sign i'or the advancement of cnucprcncurship. for one thing, thc "buying existing business" route to entrepreneurship remains unavailable. in the u.s., 2g% of business owners bought their businesses (cooper, 1986). second, a parent who doesn't want to give/gift his/her business to a relative will probably still have to, unless thc option of abandoning thc business is considered preferable. morcovcr, realizing his/hcr dilemma, he/shc may turn the business into a cash cow to be milked until abandoned. 74 table 6 family involvement in parents'usiness a. was your father or mother b. did you get your business engaged in business? from your parent(s)? no. no. yes 104 50 yes 24 12 no 96 46 no 150 72 no answer 8 4 no answer 34 16 total 208 100 total 208 100 c. did you work in your parents'usiness? no. yes 59 28 no 72 35 no answer 77 37 total 208 100 table 7 family involvement in other relatives'usiness a. did your other relatives b. did you get your business (not parents) own a from other relatives? business? no. no. 9b yes 156 75 yes 16 8 no 44 22 no 141 68 no answer 8 4 no answer 51 25 total 208 101 total 208 101 c. did you work in other relatives'usiness? no. yes 40 19 no 123 59 no answer 45 22 total 208 100 75 working in the family business is a major way to prepare oneself to take over the family business or to get into some other kind of business (gundry, 1993). as can be seen from table 6c, 59 respondents (28%) worked in their parents'usinesses. another 40 respondents (19%) worked in other relatives'usinesses (table 7c). cross tabulations showed that respondents who had worked in their parents'usinesses were not only likely to go into business themselves, but were also more likely to go into similar lines of business as their parents. twenty-nine percent (29%) of the 104 respondents whose parents had businesses went into the same lines of business as their parents. however, if the respondents had worked in their parents'usinesses, the number of the respondents who went into similar lines of business as their parents rose to 46%. summary and conclusions when asked why they are in business for themselves and why they are not working for government or somebody else, most uganda small business owners emphasized "making a living." they are beuer able to make a living as entrepreneurs than as employees. while making a decent living is an important goal for entrepreneurs all over the world, independence of action accorded by being one's own boss has been routinely found to be the leading motivation for most entrepreneurs. the uganda entrepreneurs'mphasis on monetary concerns may be merely a reflection of uganda's current economic situation. after 20 years of civil wars, paid employment is not only scarce, but it also doesn't pay enough to just survive. an unascertainable number ol'he surveyed, entrepreneurs were also doubling as government civil servants. entrepreneurship was intended to supplement their low paying jobs. probably the vast majority of uganda small business owners are not in business to become millionaires (very wealthy), but just to make a living. however, while making a living as entrepreneurs, they also like the independence owning a business allows them. the vast majority of the surveyed uganda enuepreneurs are very much aware that employees do not gcnerafly have this kind of independence. indeed, when asked whether they would cxchangc their businesses for jobs that pay similarly as their businesses, the vast majority of them answered with a resounding no. as elsewhere, small businesses in uganda fail in vast numbers. twenty-six percent (26%) of the surveyed entreprcncurs had ever experienced a failed business. and 76% knew of a person whose business had failed. however, as true entrepreneurs, they aren't daunted by this great potential for failure. if their businesses failed, the majority of the surveyed entrepreneurs will more readily try another business than seek jobs. one hundred and four (50%) of the 208 surveyed uganda small business owners came from families where parents owned businesses. the tendency that entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial family backgrounds is, therefore, valid for uganda too. twenty-four (23%) of the 104 business owners whose parents had businesses actually got their businesses from their parems. this relatively high percenmge reflects two possibilities. firsh it may rcflcct parents who encourage their children to be involved in the family business, thus, making thc children learn the "ropes." second, it may also reflect parents who pass their 76 businesses to their children partly because they cannot sell the businesses and children who run the businesses they inherit partly because they cannot sell those businesses. the first possibility mentioned above is an unqualified positive sign for the future of entrepreneurship in uganda. the second possibility is potentially adverse to entrepreneurship. without selling businesses, potential entrepreneurs cannot buy them. buying existing businesses is one of the popular routes people take to become entrepreneurs. without selling and buying businesses, some people may never become entrepreneurs. also, without the possibility of selling your business, it may not be attractive enough to make long-term investments in that business since you may never be around to recoup the financial outlays. a worthwhile research topic on uganda entrepreneurship is to assess the existence of the market for small businesses. if indeed no market exists, what are the reasons for this? it may turn out that many of these reasons have to do with culture. accordingly, uganda's model of entrepreneurship and its development may contain unique features, not selling family businesses being one of them. in passing, the limitations of this study should be pointed out. the sample used in the study was biased in two major ways. first, it was biased towards business owners who were prepared to be open to a nosy outsider, even though his assistants were always local people. there is no way of telling whether the business owners who volunteered to complete the questionnaire were those who ran their businesses more efficiently and/or those who considered it to be politically safe to be open. in many areas access to business owners was through the rcs (resistance councils), a pseudo local government system. some rcs were adamantly against the study, others reluctantly agreed to it, and still others gave it their support. another bias in the study is that it concentrates on urban areas and even here, on only two urban centers-kampala and masaka. it is inevitable that the picture painted in this paper about uganda envepreneurship is far brighter than what it could possibly be for the entire country. for example, the long list of obstacles to entrepreneurship in uganda, which salvatore olwoc, the uganda small business researcher and consultant, listed in his book "how to start a small business in uganda" (olwoc, circa 1988), does not squarely and entirely apply to entrepreneurship in kampala and possibly masaka. 77 references carland, james, hoy, frank and carland, joann. (1988). ewho is an entrepreneur? is a question worth asking." american journal of small business, 12, 4, 33-39. cooper, arnold. (1986). "entrepreneurship and paths to business ownership." ~strate ic mmm i 11. 7 (i .-9 5). 55-65. cooper, arnold. (1990). "new businesses in america." nfib foundation. giamartino, gary. (1991). "will small business be the answer for developing economies?" journal of small business mana ement (jsbm), 29, i, 91. also see carland, james and carland, joann. (1993). "entrepreneurship: an economic phoenix." pro e din s of e 8th annual national confen nce of usasbe, 24-31. gundry, lisa and harold welsch. (1993). "differences in familial influence among women-owned busincsscs." proceedin s f 8th annual national conferenc of usasbe, 103-110. ee .ml i . (1991). "e m d ip ' ll «." ~h.hi ~)h 6p 1*.15,4,7-11. hisrich, robert. (1989). entre reneurshi startin dcvelo in and mana in a new entcrn)rise. homewood, il: irwin, pp. 54-57. olwoc, salvatore y. (n.d.). "how to start a small business in uganda." the semadec group, management training and advisory center, kampala, uganda. pctcrson, rein. (1988). "understanding and encouraging entrepreneurship internationally." jsbm, 26, 2, 1-7. shapcro, alben. (1985). "why entrepreneurship? a worldwiide perspective." jsbm, 23, 3, 1-5. ibid., p. 3. 78 layout juni 2016 antara ziarah religius dan kapitalisasi di era globalisasi: catatan etnografis umrah al makin universitas islam negeri sunan kalijaga, yogyakarta indonesia email: almakin3@gmail.com abstract this article is written based on ethnographical notes, through observation, interviews, and direct involvement in the lesser pilgrimage (umroh) to medina on march 12-20, 2016. the writing focuses on the performance of the ritual and other factors which have influenced the development of the holy city from social, economic, and cultural perspectives making the modern city of medina. this article reveals that medina as a holy city of pilgrimage destination grows with modern capitalism with the mushrooming business in accommodation and world products. not only does the religion of islam mix with capitalism, but the combination of the two does not decrease the sacrality of the city and the performance of the rituals in the city. in fact, the sacrality and holiness remain intact amidst commercialization of the city in the forms of luxuriouos hotels, malls, and modern kiosks. what is more, modern medina is a symbol of plurality with the muslim visitors for pilgrimage coming from different countries who bring their own local cultures and various religious traditions seen in their diverse fashions, traditions, and religious rites. keywords: religiosity, religious commodifications, umrah abstrak tulisan ini berasal dari data etnografi, catatan, observasi, wawancara dan pengalaman langsung ziarah umroh ke madinah pada tanggal 12-20 maret, 2016. catatan yang berfokus pada ritual dan faktor yang mempengaruhi madinah modern dari sisi sosial, ekonomi, dan budaya untuk berusaha memotret madinah dari berbagai sudut. dalam artikel ini ditemukan potret madinah sebagai kota tujuan ibadah ziarah dan juga sekaligus kapitalisasi modern dengan menjamurmnya bisnis akomodasi dan produk-produk dunia. tidak hanya fenomena agama berbaur dan akrab dengan dunia kapitalisme, namun juga penyatuan keduanya tidak menyurutkan ritualitas keagamaan. kenyataannya, kesucian kota itu tetap terjaga ditengah komersialisasi madinah dengan maraknya kemegahan hotel, mall, dan kios-kios. madinah modern juga sekaligus menjadi penanda pluralnya kaum mus○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ doi 10.18196/aiijis.2016. 0057.114-134 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 115115115115115vol. 12 no. 1 juni 2016 lim dunia dengan membawa budaya dan tradisi keislaman yang berbeda-beda terlihat dari mode pakaian, tradisi, dan praktek keagamaan dalam ziarah di kota itu. kata kunci: relijiusitas, komodifikasi agama, umrah pendahuluan artikel ini didasari data penelitian etnografis pada tanggal 12-20 maret, 2016 dalam ibadah umrah yang diselenggarakan oleh darul hijrah tour dan travel, cilacap, jawa tengah bekerjasama dengan pt. marco jakarta dengan izin kementerian agama no. 344/2015. penelitian dan observasi ini tentu juga sekaligus pelibatan langsung peneliti dalam ibadah umrah tersebut dan dengan begitu memberikan nuansa data dan interpretasi yang didasarkan pada pengalaman, wawancara, observasi dengan interpretasi etnografis.1 selain itu, makalah ini dilengkapi dengan data sejarah dari literatur yang memadai dalam melacak kota madinah. ibadah umrah tersebut dipimpin oleh abu syauqi, direktur darul hijrah tour dan mutawwif (pemandu) oleh arifin yang sudah bermukim di mekah selama tujuh tahun. rombongan itu terdiri dari tiga puluh orang dari berbagai profesi, mulai dari pegawai bank, nelayan, petani, guru, kiai, pedagang, pensiunan pegawai negeri sipil dan lain-lain. asal muasal kota para peserta ibadah juga berbeda-beda: jakarta, yogyakarta, pati, banyumas, cilacap, dan bandung.2 data didapat dari observasi, wawancara dengan peserta dan pelibatan langsung, juga mendapatkan data dari peserta umrah selama di madinah yang berasal dari negara lain, di antaranya: pakistan, india, mesir, dan uzbekistan. data yang terekam dan tercatat kemudian diolah sedemikian rupa dan diceritakan secara naratif untuk sampai pada kesimpulan penggambaran madinah dari berbagai segi. observasi di sekitar kota madinah juga dijalani langsung. untuk pembahasan dalam tulisan ini dibagi ke dalam beberapa bagian yaitu: tentang unsur kesejarahan madinah itu sendiri dengan dukungan literatur yang memadai, juga fungsi dan perubahan kota itu dari waktu ke waktu disinggung secara singkat, kemudian langsung memaparkan hasil observasi lapangan. hasil observasi dibagi ke dalam beberapa tema yang meliputi perkembangan terkini kota itu dari segi fasilitas struktur dan infrastruktur, keadaan ekonomi dan kegiatan bisnis, ibadah para peziarah, suasana di masjid al-haram nabawi yang meliputi juga raudah dan museum. artikel ini bermaksud memberikan paparan tentang situasi dan kondisi madinah saat ini ketika ibadah umrah itu dilaksanakan dan dengan begitu memaparkan bahwa madinah ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 116116116116116 afkaruna sebagai tujuan ziarah dan ritual kaum muslim tidak sesederhana yang dibayangkan hanya sebagai kota ibadah, tetapi madinah merupakan kota yang sudah berkembang karena modernisasi dan globalisasi sehingga aktivitas tidak hanya terbatas ibadah. aktivitas ekonomi dan bisnis, perhotelan, pertokoan, dan jual-beli, sangat dominan. ibadah terkait erat dengan hal-hal duniawi dan tidak bisa dihindari dalam membahas ritual keagamaan mengaitkannya dengan kondisi sosial.3 madinah dalam sejarah madinah adalah kota perdana dalam sejarah islam yang dibangun langsung oleh nabi muhammad, setelah beliau hijrah (migrasi) dari makkah, tempat kelahiran yang berstatus haram (suci). pembangunan kota di abad tujuh masehi dan pertama hijriyah ini meliputi pembangunan politik dan agama; dalam hal ini, islam berarti juga ritual, sosial, dan kekuatan politik.4 di madinah, masyarakat muslim awal berkembang dan juga secara politik menguat, terutama setelah kemenangan demi kemenangan diraih dalam berbagai konflik dan peperangan melawan orang-orang mekah dan non-muslim sekitar. sampai era empat khalifah pengganti pemimpin nabi muhammad (abu bakar, umar, utsman, dan ali) yang tetap beribukota di madinah, pusat politik lalu pindah ke damaskus, lalu baghdad, dari dinasti umayyah dan abbasiyah. secara politik, perpindahan kekuasaan selanjutnya dalam sejarah islam terjadi berkalikali dan berlainan negara, benua, dan belahan dunia. namun, madinah sebagai kota suci (haram) tetap penting dalam kehidupan keagamaan muslim di seluruh dunia hingga kini. madinah penting karena masjid nabawi yang dibangun nabi dan sudah diperluas meliputi rumah, makam, dan halaman, raudhah (tempat imam dan makam nabi), makam baqi (para sahabat dan muslim awal), bukit uhud, masjid quba, dan masjid bain qiblatain (antara dua kiblat), dan sekarang terdapat museum di samping masjid nabawi yang megah.5 membayangkan madinah pada era nabi, dan sesudahnya pada masa kekhalifahan dan klasik tentu berbeda dengan madinah modern saat ini. tetapi letak sebagai sebuah haram dalam relijiusitas muslim tidak banyak berubah, walaupun sesudah menghadapi berbagai perubahan sejarah dan politik. tepatnya, madinah terletak di propinsi hijaz, kerajaan saudi arabia dengan letak geografis 24° 28’ n, longitudinal 39° 36’ e, 160 km dari laut merah, dan sekitar 350 km dari kota mekah, arah utara.6 konon sebelum zaman nabi bermigrasi, madinah bernama yatsrib dan nama itu masih banyak juga disebut dalam dokumen-dokumen sesudahnya. penduduk sebelum masa is○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 117117117117117vol. 12 no. 1 juni 2016 lam, didominasi suku-suku arab berbagai klan dan juga sebagian penduduk menganut yahudi, dan terjadi percampuran antara yahudi dan arab dalam hal budaya, tradisi, dan perkawinan.7 beberapa suku yahudi yang disebut dalam kitab sirah, tabaqat, dan tarikh, masih berafiliasi yahudi dan berhadapan dengan islam awal yang pesat dan terjadi konflik dan perjanjian dengan masyarakat muslim awal, yang terekam dalam dokumen yang dikenal dengan nama madinah charter (perjanjian madinah). madinah sudah mengalami transformasi berkali-kali dari satu era ke era yang lain, satu dinasti ke dinasti yang lain, dan satu perubahan politik ke perubahan politik yang lain. dari sisi fisik dan arsitektur tampaknya madinah tidak meninggalkan satu bangunan kuno era nabi pun, dan peninggalan yang signifikan, karena perubahan yang sangat mendasar terjadi era wahabi modern awal, peralihan dari turki utsmani dan wangsa saudi, di awal abad dua puluh. konon tahun 1916, syarif husain b. ali memberontak kekuasaan turki di provinsi hijaz, namun pemberontakan gagal, dan hijaz tetap termasuk madinah di tangan turki. namun setelah perang, hijaz menjadi daerah kekuasaan syarif husain hingga tahun 1925. rival utama syarif husain adalah ibn saud yang mengambil hijaz tahun 1925 termasuk madinah.8 pada awal abad dua puluh raja abd. al-aziz mengawali perubahan itu dan mengubah seluruh bangunan dan tempat-tempat sakral. wahabi sangat mencurigai segala bentuk kesyirikan dan menghabisi seluruh situs sekitar rumah nabi, makam nabi dan para khalifah dan keluarganya yang saat ini dikenal dengan nama raudah, dan makam-makam yang sekarang dikenal sebagai baqi.9 namun, sebagai kota tujuan ziarah dan ibadah, status suci madinah tetap dipertahankan dengan alasan persaudaraan dan tentu saja ekonomi, karena kehidupan agrikultur tempo dulu sudah tidak dapat lagi menopang kota ini. sejak berkembangnya industri minyak di saudi, madinah sudah resmi meninggalkan era agrikultur yang sejak masa nabi masih dikenal dengan berbagai tanaman seperti kurma (phoenix dactylifera) dengan berbagai jenisnya, anggur (vitis vinifera), delima (punica granatum), tin (ficus carica), dan zaitun (olea europaea). semua produk itu masih bisa dilihat di madinah kini, namun sebagai penghasil utama dan penopang ekonomi madinah, tidak lagi bisa diandalkan. banyak produk itu dijual ditempat-tempat tertentu dan pasar, baik tradisional maupun mall-mall modern, namun hanya sebagai oleh-oleh peziarah. pemerintah modern saudi berinvestasi besar sekali dalam ekonomi infrastruktur dan superstruktur untuk keperluan ziarah ke dua kota suci (mekah dan madinah), dan itu terasa sekali hingga kini, bahwa ziarah telah dan akan ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 118118118118118 afkaruna menghidupi sekian banyak penduduk dua kota itu dalam jasa akomodasi, dagang, dan wisata religi.10 pada masa awalnya, madinah sebagai pusat pemerintahan nabi dan juga pusat masyarakat islam awal, madinah penting dari berbagai segi sosial, politik, agama, dan budaya. namun, sejak pemerintah mu’awiyah b. abi sufyan pindah ke damaskus dan dimulainya dinasti umaiyah, madinah menjadi kota yang sedikit netral dalam urusan politik, walaupun bukan berarti selamat dari konflik umat islam yang berkepanjangan dan terus menerus. sewaktu mu’awiyah menunjuk anaknya, yazid b. mu’awiyah sebagai khalifah, banyak yang tidak setuju dan berlindung di madinah. mereka yang tidak ingin terlibat pertikaian demi pertikaian juga berada di madinah seperti abdullah b. umar. namun, masa itu juga sekaligus madinah sebagai kota yang sedikit terisolasi dan terpisah dari hiruk-pikuk politik damaskus dan baghdad selanjutnya pada era abbasiyah. sampai pada masa turki utsmani, madinah sepertinya hanya tempat beribadah, pengkajian dan diskusi keagamaan. imam malik menjadikan tradisi penduduk kota ini sebagai sumber hukum dan masuk dalam kategori “sunnah”. imam syafi’i tidak menganggap ini penting dalam hal hukum islam, dan lebih memilih hadis, ijmak dan qiyas. banyak ilmuwan, ulama, dan para ahli islam awal tinggal di kota madinah. namun madinah modern saat ini bukanlah madinah ratusan tahun yang lalu. madinah modern merupakan jawaban dan reaksi atas berkembangnya politik di saudi yang dikuasai ideologi wahabi dengan relijiusitas muslim dunia serta keterikatan emosi orang beriman pada kota yang dibangun oleh nabi ini. serjeant, 11 salah satu pemerhati sejarah islam awal, berasumsi bahwa status haram madinah itu tidak sejak awal pra-islam telah ada, tidak seperti mekah yang memang sudah berstatus haram jauh hari sebelum islam dan qur’an diwahyukan. haram pada dasarnya merujuk pada larangan bagi penduduk sekitar untuk melakukan perang antar suku, membunuh, menyakiti makhluk hidup, bahkan memotong rambut. haram berhubungan dengan kedamaian dan aliansi antar suku. suku dan kesukuan di arab melibatkan banyak hal tentang kerjasama, perserikatan, pernikahan, dan perjanjian.12 misalnya, suku yang lemah akan berlindung di ka’bah di mekah karena status haram itu, dan suku yang kuat melindunginya.13 di madinah, haram bermula dari perjanjian madinah yang memuat pemberian kesalamatan bagi orang muslim dan non-muslim, maka status kota madinah itu meningkat dari tempat migrasi dan tempat tinggal nabi menjadi haram dan suci pada era itu dan sesudahnya. patut dicatat pula, bahwa status haram sebetulnya ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 119119119119119vol. 12 no. 1 juni 2016 terdapat pada banyak tempat, tidak hanya milik eksklusif kota makkah, tetapi misalnya yamamah juga berstatus haram, bagi pemimpin agama dan politik lain, yakni musaylimah.14 begitu juga beberapa suku pra-islam mempunyai tempat suci yang diharamkan, dimuliakan, berfungsi sebagai tempat perdamaian, dan tempat ibadah. non-muslim tidak diperkenankan berkunjung ke dua kota haram (mekah dan madinah).15 peters bahkan berteori bahwa status haram madinah justru terbentuk setelah nabi wafat, karena ada makam nabi di sana, maka madinah dimuliakan oleh umat islam. 16 sebelum nabi wafat, tidak ada tempat istimewa yang dimuliakan dan bisa mengangkat status haram madinah. status ini yang akhirnya menjadi daya tawar madinah pada era-era selanjutnya setelah nabi. hotel dan mall setelah penulis tiba di kota madinah pada tanggal 12 maret 2016, berikut narasi yang bisa disusun berdasarkan observasi, pengalaman, dan wawancara. madinah yang saat ini terlihat adalah kota metropolitan, yang penuh warna tidak hanya tentang religiusitas atau keislaman, tetapi juga menyangkut peran sosial dan ekonomi. yang jelas melihat madinah saat ini sudah menyangkut persoalan kapitalisme dan relijiusitas yang menyatu. kota ini tidak hanya dihiasi masjid agung dan megah, masjid peninggalan nabi muhammad yang dibangun masa beliau masih memimpin masyarakat terbatas city-state madinah, namun kini dihiasi oleh mall-mall dan hotel-hotel berbintang mengelilingi kota ini. yang jelas mall terbesar tepat di sebelah masjid adalah al-noor mall17 dan tempat belanja ben dawood,18 yang sangat lengkap seperti carrefour di indonesia yang menjamur; tempat belanja lengkap yang megah dan menjanjikan secara komersial yang mengundang banyak pengunjung dari masjid madinah itu sendiri. mall dan tempat belanja tersebut modern dan lengkap dari mode sampai jam tangan dengan produk-produk barat dan china. mall adalah entitas yang bisa diukur dengan kacamata ekonomi dan sosial, begitu juga mall di madinah. di sekeliling masjid nabawi adalah hotel-hotel megah dan berbintang, tempat para peziarah menginap, lengkap dengan fasilitas yang memadai. di antara yang megah dan berbintang lima dan empat: crowne plaza madinah, intercontinental dar al-iman, intercontinental dar al-hijrah19, madinah hilton, anwar al-madinah movenpick hotel.20 ada banyak website yang berisi informasi termasuk harga hotel di madinah.21 penulis sendiri sebagai peziarah pada rombongan umrah tinggal di salah satu hotel yang dekat dengan masjid ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 120120120120120 afkaruna nabawi, safoora al-huda yang berbintang empat dengan pelayanan yang baik.22 teman saya sumanto al qurtubi, yang bekerja sebagai professor di dekat kota riyadh, yang kebetulan bertemu di madinah, memilih tinggal di hotel nozol, yang kurang lebih sama bintangnya dengan hotel saya.23 hotel kami berdua dikelilingi hotel-hotel mewah menjulang dan berwibawa. kami sebagai anggota peziarah umrah tidak memesan hotel sendiri karena disediakan oleh biro travel. pemimpin rombongan abu syauqi, mempunyai hubungan dengan orang indonesia yang menjadi pemukim di sana, dan disitulah peran orang ini menghubungkan biro travel di indonesia dengan hotel dan segala persiapannya di tanah suci. jelasnya, abu syauqi tidak membuka website hotel untuk memesan hotel secara mandiri, tetapi bertumpu pada kenalan orang indonesia yang bermukim di saudi. mereka yang bermukim rata-rata berprofesi sebagai mediator dan terutama sebagai mutawwif, semacam tour guide, tetapi untuk umrah dan haji. walaupun identik dengan pemandangan hotel dan mall, tidak semua peziarah selalu berbelanja. beberapa peziarah selalu berusaha tinggal di masjid nabawi, tidak pernah, atau jarang sekali menengok kamar hotel. dari kegiatan hotel bisa kita mengintip: setiap pagi sarapan dengan model arab: khubz, buah zaitun olive, tahinah, susu dan keju arab. menu nasi ada dua: nasi putih dan nasi asin. para peziarah yang tinggal di sofara al-huda berasal dari malaysia, singapura dan indonesia yang selara makannya sama. mereka memilih tahu, ikan bandeng dan rendang. siang dan malam selera nusantara, lengkap dengan sambal, kerupuk, dan sayur lodeh. makan di madinah, walaupun terlihat seperti masakan indonesia, tidak seperti di indonesia, rasanya masih kurang berbumbu dan terasa seperti rasa melayu, tetapi dipaksakan. pasar tradisional yang menarik dari pemandangan madinah dan sekitarnya di samping pasar tradisional tidak kurang dari 200 meter dari masjid adalah banyaknya burung dara yang beterbangan. para penjaja makanan burung dara juga bersemangat menawarkan pada para peziarah untuk memberi makan. burung dara beterbangan di pasar tradisional tepat di muka masjid nabawi lurus. patut dicatat, bahwa pasar tradisional ini semakin sedikit peminatnya, jika dibanding dengan toko-toko yang sudah modern di sekitar hotel dan masjid, tentu fasilitas dan kenyamanan mengalahkan yang lebih kuno dan tradisional. madinah adalah kota komersial, sepertin masa lalunya. pusat perdagangan dan transit para jamaah umrah menjanjikan keuntungan yang tidak sedikit, maka para ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 121121121121121vol. 12 no. 1 juni 2016 pedagang dan pemodal, baik itu tradisional maupun internasional sangat bersemangat untuk bersaing dan mengadu untung dengan menanam modal di kota suci ini. pasar tradisional masih menjual kurma kering, tasbih, turban, akar siwak (salvadora persica), dan produk-produk klasik yang biasa menjadi oleh-oleh peziarah ketika pulang. yang unik dan patut dicatat adalah para penjaja menjual dengan mengucapkan beberapa bahasa indonesia. begitu saya dan istri datang menghampiri penjual itu, mereka menyapa dengan bahasa indonesia, terutama tentang angka dan kosa kata kunci dalam perdagangan itu, “cukup dua puluh real saja.” dilanjut dengan kata-kata lain, “ini tiga puluh real. itu seratus real saja. murah, ini dijual murah.” juga di restoran arab yang sangat laris dan berjubel pun menjual dengan bahasa indonesia. makanan khas arab: ayam panggang, domba, dan terong, juga melayani bahasa indonesia. beberapa menerangkan dagangannya dengan bahasa indonesia. bahkan sedikit ada sentimen atau ikatan emosional, karena antri memakai bahasa indonesia, yang antri lainnya dilewati. pengaruh melayu atau nusantara tempo dulu dalam sejarah24 masih terasa di madinah, apalagi di mekah yang nantinya akan ditulis dalam artikel terpisah. bahasa indonesia atau melayu cukup populer, para pedagang buah, emas, dan pakaian cukup fasih mengucapkan beberapa kata dasar seperti “murah, dua puluh, empat puluh, sampai seratus.” salah satu toko kebun kurma di pinggiran madinah, penjualnya memang orang indonesia menggunakan bahasa indonesia dengan pengeras suara. penjual ini melengkapi iklannya untuk buah kering dari tin, kurma, plum (prunus), zaitun, dan lain-lain dengan menjanjikan bahwa itu tidak hanya makanan kesukaan nabi, juga makanan di surga. kios-kios di samping mall dan hotel, sekitar masjid nabawi terdapat banyak kios beraneka rupa, mulai dari mainan anak-anak, parfum, pakaian, buah-buahan, hingga jam tangan. yang patut dicatat adalah keragaman dari suasana perdagangan dan toko-toko modern dan semi-modern yang buka di sepanjang jalan sekitar hotel, dan kadang seperti pasar “kaget” di sekitar masjid, adalah produk yang cukup “barat.” barang produk eropa seperti jam tangan merk swatch, tag hauer, festina, tissot, rolex, dan merek-merek terkenal lainnya menjadi favorit.25 tentu ini jauh dari unsur sekedar ibadah dalam mengunjungi masjid nabawi dan madinah kota nabi membangun umat, namun ini hendaknya harus dilihat dari sisi etnografis yang melibatkan unsur sosial, ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 122122122122122 afkaruna ekonomi, politik, dan dalam konteks globalisasi masa kini. salah satu bukti dari globalisasi dan pengaruh era ekonomi di luar kendali dan batas negara adalah produk-produk modern dari berbagai negara yang banyak mewarnai toko-toko di madinah. madinah tidak lagi tradisional dan hanya tempat ziarah dan ibadah untuk umrah ataupun haji, namun kota itu adalah kota perdagangan dan tempat produk-produk bersaing satu dengan lainnya, dengan begitu para peziarah tidak dianggap lagi hanya sebagai orang yang sekedar beribadah, tetapi sebagai konsumen yang menjanjikan potensi pasar dan profit. pola pikir dan faktor seperti ini akan menempatkan madinah tidak hanya sebagai tempat tujuan ziarah ibadah, namun juga sebagai pasar potensial, kapitalisasi; dan bahkan dengan tradisi oleh-oleh yang banyak dijumpai ketika haji dan umrah adalah jam tangan merek terkenal. pemimpin rombongan umrah, abu syauqi, dengan bangga menunjukkan hadiah dari salah satu temannya dari indonesia yang bermukim di madinah, berupa jam tangan asli tissot dari swiss. toko-toko buah berjejeran, dan terutama kios semi modern lebih ramai. para peziarah lebih nyaman mengunjungi yang semi modern dengan harga tertera di tag daripada yang tradisional dengan harga yang masih tawarmenawar. di pasar tradisional, ditemui penjaga toko surban, sajadah, dan topi haji yang mengaku bolak-balik jakarta-madinah. buah-buahan yang umum bisa dijumpai adalah izmir pig (tin) yang konon di suatu pasar tradisional, para peziarah menyatakan itu buah surga. seorang peziarah dari rombongan umrah, bergumam kepada temannya, “di surga nanti hidangannya adalah buah tin”. tidak tahu kebenarannya apakah di surga nanti akan menikmati buah tin, namun membeli barang di madinah juga didasari keyakinan teologis akan berkah, bahwa tin adalah buah surga, kurma adalah makanan nabi dan sahabatnya, makanan yang lebih berkah dan lebih salafi daripada makanan keseharian orang indonesia: beras dan umbi-umbian. terdapat peziarah di rombongan kami yang sudah berulang-ulang datang ke madinah dengan sengaja mencari jenis kurma tertentu. pemimpin rombongan, abu syauqi mencari kurma jenis sukkari: hitam bulat dan dengan harga terjangkau. hematnya, kurma itu cukup manis dan berkualitas, dengan khasiatnya tidak hanya sebagai obat segala macam penyakit, juga sebagai obat kuat dalam aktivitas seksual. abu syauqi menerangkan itu kepada penulis sembari tersenyum yang disambut gelak tawa seluruh peserta umrah di bus yang disopiri oleh orang indonesia yagn sudah lama bekerja di madinah. kebiasaan umrah berkali-kali merupakan tradisi baru masyarakat indonesia, ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 123123123123123vol. 12 no. 1 juni 2016 karena ekonomi meningkat, dan transportasi pesawat yang terjangkau. biro umrah juga bermunculan bak cendana di musim hujan. mereka meraup untung dan terus menjalankan bisnis dengan persaingan yang ketat. konon masyarakat madura kelas atas, yaitu kelas kiai, menjalankan umrah berkalikali dengan tujuan untuk berbulan madu. dalam tradisi madura, banyak kiai, atau minimal keluarga kiai, yang berpoligami berkali-kali dan berbulan madu di tanah suci dengan melaksanakan umrah. salah satu informan adalah emma, berasal dan masih keluarga kiai di madura yang menyaksikan para saudara dan tetangga sesama kiai melakukan poligami dan berbulan madu dengan menjalankan umrah. dalam melaksanakan umrah untuk berbulan madu, kemungkinan kurma jenis sukkari yang dipercaya meningkatkan libido seksual, menunjang kelas elit itu untuk menikmati ibadah dan istri baru sekaligus. masjid nabawi madinah saat ini, pada abad 21, adalah kota metropolitan dan modern. jalanan rapi dan hotel-hotel mendominasi pemandangan kota. hotel-hotel menjulang tinggi dengan arsitektur terkini dengan fasilitas lengkap dan berbintang. jauh dari kesan padang pasir dan kuno tempat perang antar suku, madinah kini tidak hanya kota tradisional tujuan ziarah dan ibadah. memang selama dua puluh empat jam, masjid nabawi yang megah selalu ramai dengan para pengunjung yang beribadah, berfoto selfie, dan beraktivitas jual beli. para peziarah biasanya menenteng tas kecil untuk membawa sandalnya ke dalam masjid, karena kalau diletakkan di depan masjid kemungkinan akan hilang. masjid nabawi sejak dari pelataran sampai area dalam memang luas dan mewah, dengan tiang-tiang berjajar, penuh ukiran kaligrafi indah menawan. lantai marmer dari bebagai benua mengkilap tertutupi karpet rapi dan bersih, dengan warna mencolok licin. tiang-tiang membentuk batang kurma dan pelepahnya mengembang, seperti di kebun kurma era nabi yang duduk dengan para sahabatnya seribu empat ratus tahun lalu. sekilas tiangtiang kuno di dalamnya terlihat seperti tiang-tiang terkenal masjid granada di spanyol eropa di masa kejayaan islam dinasti umaiyah. bedanya, masjid nabawi masih aktif dan terus menerima tamu dari para peziarah seluruh dunia dengan berbagai macam pakaian, gaya, ritual, niat, dan aktivitas. masjid nabawi dipenuhi para peziarah tidak pernah berhenti dan selalu ramai: duduk berdoa, berdiri shalat, minum air zamzam di sepanjang tiang, dan membaca qur’an. setiap waktu shalat, para jamaah berebut untuk maju dan duduk di shaf terdepan. di sekitar tiang masjid, air zamzam ditempatkan di wadah○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 124124124124124 afkaruna wadah dengan pancuran gratis diminum. bentuk arsitek masjid nabawi pada dasarnya mengambil inspirasi dari pohon kurma, yang sudah terkenal sejak masa nabi. madinah memang lebih subur dari mekah, karena banyak sekali kebun kurma sampai kini. tiangtiang megah mengitari seluruh kompleks masjid nabawi dengan mengambil motif kurma, mengembang, menyangga atap yang kokoh. petugas kebersihan berkeliling dengan membawa sapu, juga petugas shaf dan seperti polisi yang memakai turban khas arab, putih dengan kotak-kotak merah kecil. setiap sudut terdapat alqur’an yang dipajang di dekat tiang-tiang rapat, juga air zamzam gratis. para jamaah yang berjubelan dapat meminumnya, sebagian berkonsentrasi membaca qur’an atau sedang berdoa berkomat-kamit. di luar masjid, lebih tampak motif kurmanya. pelataran masjid nabawi dihiasi payungpayung yang mengembang saat diperlukan, siang dan hujan. payung menutup saat siang. pelataran masjid menegaskan kembali, bahwa kurma merupakan ide dasarnya. payung menutup bermotif pohon kurma sangat jelas; jika mengembang berubah seperti payung besar melindungai para peziarah yang sedang berdoa, seperti zaman kuno dahulu, ketika para sahabat nabi berkumpul di area itu, di bawah pohon kurma. para peziarah para jamaah yang sekaligus peziarah ke kota madinah sangat beragam. berbagai rasa dan tradisi keagamaan bisa dilihatnya, dari cara beribadah dan jenis pakaian yang tampak.26 yang asli dari tanah arab berpakaian ala saudi menggunakan turban putih bermotif merah dan berbaju putih. namun kebanyakan para peziarah yang berasal dari belahan dunia lain menggunakan pakaian tradisional masing-masing, yang berbeda dan kadang mencolok. peziarah pakistan menggunakan pakaian pakistan yang lain sama sekali dengan tradisi berpakaian arab. peziarah india menggunakan pakaian india yang menjuntai. dari eropa timur bekas daerah soviet juga banyak sekali menampilkan pakaiannya yang khas. dari indonesia, singapura dan malaysia menggunakan pakaian asia yang khas dengan sarung dan songkok hitam, dan kadang dikombinasi dengan topi bulat putih, atau dikenal dengan istilah topi haji. madinah adalah kota beragam yang sama sekali tidak seragam. dari sisi peziarah, ini meliputi orang-orang muslim dunia yang plural. dari etnis dan tradisi keagamaan, islam tidak satu, tapi kompleks dan jumlahnya beraneka rupa. banyak kebiasaan yang tidak kita ketahui. dari segi tutup kepala banyak ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 125125125125125vol. 12 no. 1 juni 2016 yang memakai topi beragam, indonesia sendiri mempunyai banyak ragam topi, dari kopiah tradisional hitam, sampai putih bulat yang sekarang umum dipakai. songkok putih pun dengan hiasan bunga-bunga atau motif indah lainnya yang menjadikannya berbeda dengan topi bentuk lain. banyak muslim dari india, afrika, pakistan atau eropa timur yang memakai topi model lain dan bertambah beraneka rupa bagaimana para jamaah berbeda antara satu dan lainnya. topi kecil seperti topi yahudi dipakai oleh orang eropa timur, dengan lobang di depannya untuk sujud. surban dilipat-lipat dilingkarkan di kepala, bahkan bagaimana melipatkannya bermacam-macam cara, belum juga menyebut jenis surban, warna, dan model yang digunakan oleh orang dari berbagai tradisi dan budaya. kreatifitas orang beriman dalam memakai pakaian menunjukkan bahwa agama islam yang telah menyatu dengan budaya selalu hidup dan tidak mati. interpretasi pakaian selalu seiring dengan budaya dan tradisi setempat, dan kini berkumpul di madinah untuk tujuan ziarah dan mengenang bagaimana madinah seribu lima ratus tahun yang lalu. ada upaya homogenisasi misalnya dengan pakaian ala arab, dan ini terlihat di indonesia itu sendiri, yang mungkin lebih terasa lebih islami dengan adopsi budaya arab yang serba menjuntai dan bersurban. tetapi sentuhan dari masingmasing baju arab dari berbagai belahan dunia menampakkan perbedaan yang menyolok dan tidak mengarah pada penyeragaman. kreatifitas menggabungkan berbagai tradisi dan saling menginspirasi atau saling meniru dan mempengaruhi, menambah heterogennya islam dilihat dari sisi mode dan gaya. fenomena para peziarah di madinah menunjukkan, bahwa islam tidak satu dan homogen. sejak awal tidak mungkin islam disamaratakan dalam tradisi dan budaya. islam memang mengajarkan persamaan, ekualisisasi dan egalitarianism, namun bukan berarti homogenisasi. tradisi islam awal agama ini mengajarkan persamaan pada manusia karena semua ras berkedudukan sama di mata tuhan, tetapi tidak menyeragamkan budaya (q.s. 49: 13). ras dan kultur yang berbeda memberikan sentuhan berbeda dan beragam pada islam itu sendiri. ini terlihat di madinah, tempat penting berkumpulnya umat muslim dari seluruh dunia. jauh sekali dari kesan seragam pada para peziarah, tetapi berbeda-beda dan satu; dan ini semua memperkaya unsur islam global saat ini. para peziarah kota madinah tetap rapi. mereka tinggal di hotel-hotel mewah di sekitar masjid nabawi, makan dan bertempat tinggal dengan jadwal yang teratur dibimbing mutawwif. setiap waktu shalat, mereka pergi ke masjid nabawi dengan berjalan. mobil-mobil berhenti memberi jalan para peziarah ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 126126126126126 afkaruna menuju masjid nabawi. shalat subuh dengan azan dua kali; yang pertama sebagai penanda untuk pergi ke masjid, yang kedua penanda waktu shalat subuh. jamaah sudah mulai berdatangan sekitar jam tiga malam, bahkan ada yang sengaja bermalam di masjid itu untuk i’tikaf. para peziarah dari travel dibangunkan pada hari pertama untuk mengikuti shalat pertama qiyamul lail di masjid nabawi. museum di samping masjid nabawi dibangun museum, namun akan sedikit mengecewakan karena tidak secuil barang kuno era masa lalu pun yang tersimpan di museum itu. pameran dalam museum itu lebih menyerupai rekaan maket dan rekayasa masa lalu daripada museum untuk menghadirkan masa lalu itu sendiri. museum itu memperlihatkan biografi nabi muhammad yang tidak dilihat dari sumber-sumber terkuno yang mendekati era nabi, tetapi dari buku-buku modern yang terbit di arab era kini. museum itu jelasnya merakayasa biografi era masa lampau, tetapi tidak berdasarkan data primer, temuan arkeologi, atau pun penelitian serius. tapi lebih mencerminkan pada makna biografi demi religiusitas umat muslim saat ini, berupa legitimasi keyakinan orang masa kini pada nabi; citra yang dibentuk berdasarkan keimanan, bukan berdasarkan penelitian atau benda kuno. bentuk rumah nabi, bagan keturunan (nasab atau genealogi), kota madinah masa itu, hanya berupa rekaan, tidak didukung barang-barang kuno yang pernah ditemukan: perisai, pedang, teks, atau barang-barang peninggalan. citra nabi diambil dari buku-buku terkini dan mungkin pembentukan baru siapa itu nabi dan makna apa yang terkandung dalam islam tempo ini. maket kuno tentang rumah nabi dan masjid nabawi juga tidak dilengkapi dengan data dan penelitian historis yang memadahi. tetapi museum merupakan rekayasa keimanan dan apologetis. museum madinah itu lebih bisa disebut sebagai sarana dakwah dan propaganda, daripada sarana sejarah dan tidak untuk menjawab bagaimana menghadirkan masa lalu sebenarnya. semua yang dipamerkan sudah bernada teologis dan apologetis, untuk mengagungkan dan menarik minat para peziarah yang sudah dipenuhi dengan niat ibadah menggebu dan guna mencari berkah. kota kedua tanda yang paling nyata di masjid nabawi madinah adalah tulisan besar di pintu, “al-shalat fi hadha al-masjid afdhalu min alfi shalat illa fi masjid al○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 127127127127127vol. 12 no. 1 juni 2016 haram” (salat di masjid ini lebih mulia dari seribu kali [di masjid lain] kecuali di masjid al-haram). deklarasi yang sekaligus pernyataan, bahwa status madinah sebagai kota nabi, pembangun kota ini dan peletak dasar masyarakat madinah, kota tempat nabi membangun umat islam, komunitas pertama yang menjadi pusat dua hal: pemerintahan berupa kota madinah itu sendiri yang diteruskan sampai empat khalifah (abu bakar, umar, utsman dan ali), berupa city-state, sebagaimana disebutkan dalam republic-nya plato seribu tahun sebelumnya,27 juga sebagai pusat agama, yaitu vatikan romawi yang telah ada paling tidak tiga ratus tahun sebelumnya. madinah adalah dua hal, dimana politik dan agama menyatu saat zaman nabi itu sendiri. namun, dari sisi kutipan kaligrafi di masjid nabi di atas, jelas bahwa awalnya nabi tidak membangun sanctuary-shrine (tempat suci) di madinah, jika itu masih relevan adanya, tidak ada perubahan pada masamasa selanjutnya. madinah tetap di bawah mekah dengan statusnya secara keagamaan dan kesakralan, sebagai tempat dimana nabi dan kaum quraisy berasal dan menjaga ka’bah. suku quraisy adalah penanggung jawab atas ka’bah sebagai tempat yang dimuliakan, bahkan sebelum islam.28 ka’bah merupakan simbol utama dari umat islam hingga kini. madinah kota kedua, setelah mekah, dalam arti relijiusitas bagi muslim seluruh dunia. nabi yang sudah pindah ke madinah karena menerima tantangan dan perlawanan kaum status quo di mekah masih saja menempatkan ritual utama mengarah ke mekah, arah kiblat shalat. kiblat madinah dari dahulu hingga kini tetap saja mekah. walaupun dulu kala masyarakat madinah pernah berkiblat ke jerusalem, bait al-maqdis,29 yang pada masa umar khalifah kedua dibangun al-aqsa. hal itu dibuktikan dengan masjid bain qiblatain yang masih berdiri dan shalat pernah dilakukan dengan menghadap ke dua arah kiblat, bait al-maqdis dan ka’bah. nabi lalu diperintahkan tuhan untuk memilih mekah sebagai awal dan penanda identitas islam yang berbeda dengan yahudi dan kristiani, yang sama sekali tidak ada relasinya secara teologis dengan mekah. madinah sebagai kota hijrah mempunyai status yang unik, pusat pemerintahan dan pusat agama, dimana nabi diturunkan padanya banyak ayat qur’an. raudhah tempat yang paling suci di madinah selain masjid sebagai magnet yang menarik kaum muslim adalah raudhah: tempat imam dan makam nabi, umar dan abu bakar. juga sekaligus rumah nabi dalu, yang tidak terlihat lagi, ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 128128128128128 afkaruna karena konon dihancurkan demi pembangunan dan perluasan masjid yang hingga kini tidak pernah berhenti. untuk ke raudhah, peziarah harus masuk masjid nabawi melewati tempat imam. antrian padat dan sangat kompetitif, penuh dengan orang-orang dari berbagai penjuru dan terlihat dari pakaian dan bahasa yang digunakan. antrian panjang dari subuh hingga subuh berikutnya menandakan kekeramatan tempat ini. masjid nabawi tidak pernah mati dan istirahat, juga karena faktor raudhah. untuk masuk di dalamnya yang banyak dipenuhi oleh ayat qur’an dan keutamaaan nabi, peziarah bersaing dan berdesakan dengan bersemangat satu dengan lainnya. shaf (barisan) demi shaf terlalui dengan kesabaran dan himpitan peziarah, akhirnya penulis berhasil masuk di raudhah. tulisan arab indah mengantung di sana sini, tembok dan ukiran, dengan berbagai ayat qur’an. setelah mencapainya, para peziarah bersemangat untuk salat beberapa rakaat. waktu penulis berhasil mencapai raudhah dengan perjuangan adalah dhuha, segera penulis melaksanakan salat beberapa rakaat, sebagaimana pemimpin rombongan abu syauqi mencontohkannya. shalat dhuha itu dilaksanakan berkali-kali dan setelah usai harus segera pergi karena bergiliran dengan peziarah lainnya. petugas askar (polisi) akan mengusir peziarah yang sudah terlalu lama. selanjutnya para peziarah berjalan menyusuri makam nabi dan dua sahabat utama yang terlihat dari lubang kecil, itupun dijaga ketat oleh askar. seorang peziarah dari india dengan bahasa inggris khas logat india berdiri antri di belakang penulis. ia bersemangat, tersenyum dan menyapa, “you are from indonesia, right?”. penulis balik bertanya, “how do you know?”. ia tersenyum dan menunjuk, “your black hat is typical dan indeed pretty”. peziarah ini terus membaca qura’n diiringi zikir sepanjang antrian. ia sangat berharap agar bisa masuk raudah, sebagaimana juga jamaah di samping penulis, dari pakistan, afrika, eropa timur, dan lain-lain. di samping penulis juga terdapat tiga anak muda dari mesir berbahasa arab, kemudian penulis sapa dengan arab fusha (resmi), “min ain?”. tiga orang mesir ini tersenyum sambil berdesakan, “min indonesia tahki bi al-fusha.” dalam antrian berdesakan dan berhimpitan dengan kaki tetangga, penulis berusaha ramah dengan para pesaing. berbincang soal logat fusha dan syuqiah (keseharian) dengan tiga pemuda mesir untuk menghibur waktu. untuk beberapa lama, penulis beradaptasi bahasa, agar tidak terlalu fusha. seperti laisa diganti ma fi dan ghairu maujud juga dengan ma fi. begitu juga di luar masjid ketika berjalanjalan, penulis bertanya pada para pedagang dengan bahasa yang sedikit gaya syauqi walaupun masih formal: “kam tsaman!”. dia malah menjawab dengan ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 129129129129129vol. 12 no. 1 juni 2016 bahasa indonesia melayu, “dua puluh riyal saja, murah!”. penjagaan ketat bertujuan agar para pezirah tidak terlalu mendekat, mengusap pun tidak sempat. hanya lewat sebentar dan memegang pintu dan lubang kecil untuk mengintip makam nabi. tapi banyak dari para peziarah yang sudah terharu luar biasa dan menangis sesenggukan. seorang peziarah dari surabaya, bertanya kepada penulis, “apakah itu makam nabi muhammad.” penulis jawab: “ya, betul.” langsung peziarah itu menangis, terharu, dan bergumam terbata-bata, “ya allah, saya akhirnya melihat makam nabi muhammad.” kesimpulan madinah sebagai kota nabi dan tujuan ziarah kaum muslim dunia hingga kini bukanlah semata-mata kota tempat ibadah dan ritual kekhusukan. madinah sebagai kota yang berkembang terutama dalam menyambut para peziarah dunia yang tidak pernah sepi berkembang menjadi kota yang didominasi dengan aktivitas ekonomi dan sosial. dan para peziarah dengan motivasi ibadah terus-menerus melakukan ritual. namun di sekitar madinah sebagai tempat bisnis dan penanaman modal meliputi hotel, mall, pertokoan, kios, dan pasar tradisional, merupakan tempat aktivitas ekonomi dan menjanjikan keuntungan. dari sinilah nafas kapitalisasi kota itu muncul dan berkembang. hotel mewah, mall, toko modern, sedang menggeser pasar tradisional dan toko kuno. madinah yang sejak awal menjadi pusat ibadah dan negara islam, telah bergeser dan berganti, terutama saat ini, peran ekonomi diwakili perhotelan dan mall sangatlah penting. singkatnya, semangat keagamaan menyatu dengan semangat kapitalisme, beribadah dan berbisnis bagi mereka yang menanam modal. kesimpulan lain ialah, bahwa ibadah di madinah dengan berziarah sekaligus, menunjukkan keragaman pengunjung dengan berbagai mode, busana, gaya, budaya dan tradisi. madinah adalah simbol keragaman karena banyaknya peziarah dari belahan dunia dengan praktik islam yang berbeda. di sisi lain, perkembangan kapitalisasi kota modern ternyata juga tidak menggeser semangat relijiusitas peziarah madinah. tampaknya, keagamaan saat ini menyatu dengan kapitalisme dan terlihat di kota nabi. catatan akhir 1 lihat contoh penelitian etnografis, misalnya: clifford geertz, the interpretation of cultures: selected essays (new york: basic books, 1973); robert w. hefner, hindu javanese: tengger tradition and islam (princeton, n.j.: princeton univer○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 130130130130130 afkaruna sity press, 1985); al makin, challenging islamic orthodoxy: accounts of lia eden and other prophets in indonesia (dordrecht, holland; cinnaminson [n.j.], u.s.a.: springer, 2016). 2 biro haji dan umrah darul hijrah tour and travel, “album kenangan umrah 12 21 maret 2016” (darul hijrah tour and travel, 2016). 3 al makin, anti-kesempurnaan: membaca, melihat, dan bertutur tentang islam (yogyakarta: pustaka pelajar, 2002). 4 w. montgomery watt, muhammad: prophet and statesman (london: oxford university press, 1961); w. montgomery watt, muhammad at medina (oxford: clarendon press, 1956); hugh kennedy, the prophet and the age of the caliphates: the islamic near east from the sixth to the eleventh century (london; new york: longman, 1986); patricia crone and michael cook, hagarism: the making of the islamic world (cambridge; new york: cambridge university press, 1977). 5 muhòammad farid wajdi, da’irah al-ma»arif al-qarn al-»isyrin., vol. 8 (beirut: dar al-fikr, 1996), pp. 542–552. 6 w. montgomery watt, “al-madinah,” in the encyclopaedia of islam, ed. c edmund bosworth et al., vol. v (leiden: brill, 1986), pp. 994–98. 7 wajdi, da’irah al-ma»arif al-qarn al-»isyrin., vol 8: pp. 529–542. 8 f e peters, “medina,” in the oxford encyclopedia of the modern islamic world, ed. john l esposito, vol. 3 (new york: oxford university press, 1995), pp. 92–93. 9 r. b. winder, “al-madinah: modern city,” in the encyclopaedia of islam, ed. c edmund bosworth et al., vol. v (leiden: brill, 1986), pp. 998–1007. 10 russel king, “the pilgrimage to mecca: some geographical and historical aspects,” erd erdkunde 26, no. 1 (1972): pp. 6 1–73. 11 r. b. serjeant, “haram and hawtah,” in the encyclopedia of religion, ed. mircea eliade, vol. 6 (new york: macmillan, 1987), pp. 196–98. 12 ella landau-tasseron, “the status of allies in pre-islamic and early islamic arabian society,” islamic law and society 13, no. 1 (2006): 6–32; uri rubin, “the ilaf of quraysh: a study of sura cvi,” arabica 31, no. 2 (1984): pp. 165– 88. 13 lihat, misalnya, m. j. kister, “mecca and tamim (aspects of their relations),” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 8, no. 2 (1965): 113–63, doi:10.2307/3595962; m. j. kister, “some reports concerning mecca from jahiliyya to islam,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 15, no. 1/2 (1972): 61–93, doi:10.2307/3596312. 14 al makin, representing the enemy: musaylima in muslim literature (frankfurt am main; new york: peter lang, 2010); al makin, “from musaylima to the kharijite najdiyya,” al-jami’ah 51, no. 1 (2013): pp. 33–60. 15 zachary karabell, “medina,” in encyclopedia of the modern middle east, ed. reeva s simon, philip mattar, and richard w bulliet, vol. 3 (new york: macmillan reference usa, 1996), p. 1192. 16 peters, “medina”; soad maher muhammed, “the kingdom of saudi arabia, center of islamic civilization,” in saudi arabia and its place in the world., ed. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 131131131131131vol. 12 no. 1 juni 2016 ministry of information, kingdom of saudi arabia (lausanne, switzerland: three continents publishers, 1979), pp. 77–100. 17 “al noor mall,” diakses 6 mei 2016, http://www.alnoormall.com/. 18 “weekly promotion madinah,” diakses 6 mei 2016, http://www.bindawood.com/en/pro_madinah.html. 19 “hotels near al-masjid al-nabawi,” ihg, akses 28 april 2016, http:// www.ihg.com/destinations/us/en/attractions/843-al-masjid-al-nabawimadinah-hotels. 20 “good hotel close to the prophet’s mosque review of elaf taiba hotel, medina, saudi arabia tripadvisor,” akses 28 april 2016, https:// www.tripadvisor.com/showuserreviews-g298551-d306560-r105249399elaf_taiba_hotel-medina_al_madinah_province.html. 21 “medina hotels,” akses 28 april 2016, https://www.expedia.co.id/prophetsmosque-hotels.0-l6118152-0.travel-guide-filter-hotels?rfrr=redirect.from.www.expedia.com%2fprophets-mosque-hotels.0-l6118152-0.travelguide-filter-hotels&; “hotels.com,” akses 28 april 2016, http:// www.hotels.com/de1684985/hotels-near-prophet-s-mosque-medina-saudiarabia/; “hotel dekat al-masjid al-nabawi tarif hotel terbaik yang berada di sekitar tempat ibadah di medina, arab saudi,” agoda, akses 28 april 2016, http://www.agoda.com/id-id/hotels-near-al-masjid-al-nabawi/attractions/medina-sa.html; “hotels near the prophet’s mosque, saudi arabia.,” booking.com, akses 28 april 2016, http://www.booking.com/landmark/sa/themosque-of-the-prophet-mohammad.en-gb.html. 22 “help! which hotel is best?,” booking.com, akses 30 april 2016, http:// www.booking.com/searchresults.en-gb.html?dest_id=-3092186;dest_type=city. 23 “nozol royal inn hotel, al madinah, saudi arabia,” booking.com, akses 30 april 2016, http://www.booking.com/hotel/sa/royal-inn.en-gb.html. 24 michael francis laffan, islamic nationhood and colonial indonesia: the umma below the winds (london; new york: routledge curzon, 2003). 25 “omega watches: al-hussaini trading co, medinah, saudi arabia,” akses 6 mei 2016, http://www.omegawatches.com/stores/storedetails/1407/; “raymond weil genève > search > swiss luxury watches,” akses 6 mei 2016, http://www.raymond-weil.com/en/stores/search; “tag heuer store madina luxury watches in madina paris gallery rashid madina,” akses 6 mei 2016, http://store.tagheuer.com/143329-paris-gallery-rashid-madina. 26 untuk argumen keragaman, lihat, misalnya al makin, keragaman dan perbedaan, budaya dan agama dalam lintas sejarah manusia (yogyakarta: suka press, 2016). 27 plato, the republic, ed. g. r. f ferrari, trans. tom griffith (cambridge: new york: cambridge university press, 2000). 28 kister, “mecca and tamim (aspects of their relations)”; kister, “some reports concerning mecca from jahiliyya to islam”; rubin, “the ilaf of quraysh”; landau-tasseron, “the status of allies in pre-islamic and early islamic arabian society.” 29 al-tabari, the history of al-tabari: the foundation of the community, ed. w. mont○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 132132132132132 afkaruna gomery watt, trans. m. v mcdonald (albany, n.y.: state university of new york press, 1987), pp. 24-25, http://search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&an=14037. daftar pustaka crone, patricia, and cook, michael. 1977. hagarism: the making of the islamic world. cambridge-new york: cambridge university press. geertz, clifford. 1973. the interpretation of cultures: selected essays. new york: basic books. hefner, robert w. 1985. hindu javanese: tengger tradition and islam. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. karabell, zachary. 1996. “medina.” in encyclopedia of the modern middle east, edited by reeva s simon, philip mattar, and richard w bulliet, 3:1192. new york: macmillan reference usa. kennedy, hugh. 1986. the prophet and the age of the caliphates: the islamic near east from the sixth to the eleventh century. london-new york: longman. king, russel. 1972. “the pilgrimage to mecca: some geographical and historical aspects.” erd erdkunde 26, no. 1: 61–73. kister, m. j. 1965. “mecca and tamim (aspects of their relations).” journal of the economic and social history of the orient8, no. 2. h. 113–63. doi:10.2307/ 3595962. kister, m. j. 1972. “some reports concerning mecca from jahiliyya to islam.” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 15, no. 1/2: 61–93. doi:10.2307/3596312. laffan, michael francis. 2003. islamic nationhood and colonial indonesia: the umma below the winds. london: new york: routledgecurzon. landau-tasseron, ella. 2006. “the status ofallies in pre-islamic and early islamic arabian society.” islamic law and society 13, no. 1: 6–32. makin, al. 2002. anti-kesempurnaan: membaca, melihat, danbertutur tentang islam. yogyakarta: pustaka pelajar. makin, al. 2016. challenging islamic orthodoxy: accounts ofliaeden and other prophets in indonesia. dordrecht, holland: cinnaminson [n.j.], u.s.a.: springer, makin, al. 2013. “from musaylima to the kharijitenajdiyya.” al-jami’ah 51, no. 1. h. 33–60. makin, al. 2016. keragaman dan perbedaan, budaya dan agama dalam lintas sejarah manusia. yogyakarta: suka press. makin, al. 2010. representing the enemy: musaylama in muslim literature. frankfurt am main. new york: peter lang. muhammed, soad maher. 1979. “the kingdom of saudi arabia, center of islamic civilization.” in saudi arabia and its place in the world., edited by ministry of information, kingdom of saudi arabia, 77–100. lausanne, switzerland: three continents publishers. peters, f e. 1995. “medina.” in the oxford encyclopedia of the modern islamic world, edited by john l esposito, 3:92–93. new york: oxford university press. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 133133133133133vol. 12 no. 1 juni 2016 plato. 2000. the republic. edited by g. r. f ferrari. translated by tom griffith. cambridge, new york: cambridge university press. rubin, uri. 1984. “the ilafof quraysh: a study of sura cvi.” arabica 31, no 2: 165–88. serjeant, r b. 1987. “haram and hawtah.” in the encyclopedia of religion, edited by mirceaeliade, 6:196–98. new york: macmillan. tabari. 1987. the history of al-tabari: the foundation of the community. edited by w. montgomery watt. translated by m, v mcdonald. albany, n.y.: state university of new york press. wajdi, muhammad farid. 1996. da»irahma»arif al-qarn al-»ishrin. vol, 8. beirut: dar al-fikr. watt, w. montgomery. 1986. “al-madinah.” in the encyclopaedia of islam, edited by c. edmund bosworth, van donzel, bernard lewis, and ch. pellat, v:994– 98. leiden: brill. watt, w. montgomery. 1956. muhammad at medina. oxford: clarendon press. watt, w. montgomery. 1961. muhammad: prophet andstatesman. london: oxford university press. biro haji dan umrah darul hijrah tour and travel. album kenangan umrah 1221 maret 2016. darul hijrah tour and travel. “good hotel close to the prophet’s mosque review of elaftaiba hotel, medina, saudi arabia tripadvisor.” akses28 april 2016. https://www.tripadvisor.com/ showuserreviews-g298551-d306560-r105249399-elaf_taiba_hotelmedina_al_madinah_province.html. “help! which hotel is best?” booking.com. akses 30 april 2016. http:// www.booking.com/searchresults.en-gb.html?dest_id=-3092186;dest_type=city. “hotel dekat al-masjid al-nabawi tarif hotel terbaik yang berada di sekitartempatibadahdi medina, arab saudi.” agoda. 28april 2016. http:// www.agoda.com/id-id/hotels-near-al-masjid-al-nabawi/attractions/medinasa.html. “hotels nearal-masjid al-nabawi.” ihg. akses28 april 2016. http://www.ihg.com/ destinations/us/en/attractions/843-al-masjid-al-nabawi-madinah-hotels. “hotels nearthe prophet’s mosque, saudi arabia.” booking.com. akses28 april 2016. http://www.booking.com/landmark/sa/the-mosque-of-the-prophetmohammad.en-gb.html. “hotels.com.” akses28 april 2016. http://www.hotels.com/de1684985/hotels-nearprophet-s-mosque-medina-saudi-arabia/. “medina hotels.” akses 28 april, 2016. https://www.expedia.co.id/prophetsmosque-hotels.0-l6118152-0.travel-guide-filter-hotels?rfrr=redirect.from.www.expedia.com%2fprophets-mosque-hotels.0-l6118152-0.travelguide-filter-hotels&. “omega watches: al-hussaini trading co, medinah, saudi arabia.” accessed may 6, 2016. http://www.omegawatches.com/stores/storedetails/1407/. “raymond weil genève > search > swiss luxury watches.” akses 6mai, 2016. http://www.raymond-weil.com/en/stores/search. ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ 134134134134134 afkaruna http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&scope= site&db=nlebk&db= nlabk&an= 14037. “tag heuer store madina luxury watches in madina paris gallery rashid madina.” accessed may 6, 2016. http://store.tagheuer.com/143329-paris-gallery-rashid-madina. “weekly promotion madinah.” akses6 mei, 2016. http://www.bindawood.com/ en/pro_madinah.html. winder, r. b. 1986. “al-madinah: modern city.” in the encyclopaedia ofislam, edited by c edmund bosworth, van donzel, bernard lewis, and ch. pellat, v:998–1007. leiden: brill. nozol royal inn hotel, al madinah, saudi arabia.” booking.com. akses 30 april 2016. http://www.booking.com/hotel/sa/royal-inn.en-gb.html. “al noor mall.” akses 26 mei 2016. http://www.alnoormall.com/. 27 publicity or impact? the use of crowdfunding by indonesian social media influencers during the covid-19 pandemic nissa cita adinia universitas indonesia, indonesia email: nissacita@ui.ac.id mediana hanifa email: hanifamediana@gmail.com universitas indonesia, indonesia abstract indonesia is marching toward tackling challenges during the endless covid-19 pandemic. under a situation known as vuca (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous), a troop of social media influencers (smi) paved the way to create crowdfunding initiatives. shedding from the discussion of disaster capitalism, where individual or entities make profit from large-scale crises, also take advantage of the destabilized atmosphere, this paper analyses the initiatives of three indonesian social media influencers in raising funds through kitabisa. com from march to november 2020. under the hashtag #bersamalawancorona (together fight the corona), the biggest crowdfunding platform, kitabisa.com has gathered more than 158 billion rupiahs (11,2 million usd) taken from 5.655 campaigns during march to november 2020 period. these efforts are mainly pioneered by smis and their followers. combining desk review and social media analysis method, the paper revealed that the crowdfunding initiatives by smis portrayed two sides of a coin: on the one hand reflects the emergence of solidarity and social contribution to create a positive impact, and on the other, journal of social studies (jss), issn: 1858-2656 (p); 2721-4036 (e) vol. 18. no. 1 (2022), pp. 27-46 doi: 10.21831/jss.v18i1. 39797. 27-46 28 journal of social studies (jss), volume 18, number 1, 2022: 27-46 generates publicity. it is, however, too quick to conclude whether the initiatives reflect a practice of disaster capitalism, because the publicity that they generated for these crowdfunding initiatives were not higher compare to publicity they gained from their everyday content. keywords: covid-19, indonesia social media influencer, crowdfunding, publicity, social media analysis, disaster capitalism introduction the coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) has triggered an unprecedented global health and socio-economic crisis. since the official first case, march 2nd 2020 to july 2021, indonesia has recorded 77.583 deaths of which 1.454 of them were medical professionals (nakes.laporcovid19.org, 2021, kawalcovid19. id, 2021). when the pandemic affects the population, solidarity emerges and the need to help each other grows. community action is a vital part of the public health effort during the pandemic. crowdfunding is a known platform to ignite community action to donate and gain more impact, particularly in helping the needs. in indonesia, since the beginning of the pandemic, social media influencers are among the many who initiated using the crowdfunding to support health professionals. kitabisa.com is one of the crowdfunding platforms in indonesia that has been used for various purposes, personal or social, from disaster relief to political campaigns. established in 2013, kitabisa has created the possibility to collect funds by taking relatively small contributions from many people. during the early outbreak of the global covid-19 pandemic, crowdfunding platforms were primarily used for fundraising. they were being used to help in combating the health crisis, including kitabisa.com. under the tagline “mari bergotong royong membangun indonesia” (let’s work together to develop indonesia), by may 2020, kitabisa has recorded 3,8 million users whom named “good people” (#orangbaik). approximately 64 thousand crowdfunding projects had been facilitated by kitabisa (kitabisa.com, 2020). the platform has been used by individuals, organizations, private companies, government institutions, social organizations (ngos), hospitals, and public figures, including influencers. kitabisa, as leading charity-donation platform in indonesia, is not without criticism. akbar and irwansyah (2019) argued the practice of charity was commonly given to the closest people, neighbors and close because of 29 publicity or impact? the use of crowdfunding by indonesian social ...(nissa cita adinia and mediana hanifa) family relationships. given the ubiquitous social problems, information and communication technology like kitabisa platform has shifted the focus of individuals in doing charitable practices. instead of practicing charity, kitabisa becomes platform that perpetuates a capitalistic economic system: selecting social problems as display (production), sharing the ads in their owned or earned social media channels (distribution), and being consumed by individuals who are now rather to have quick, easy and indirect (charity) transaction (p. 117). social media influencers (smis) are among the many crowdfunding users that utilize the platform for social cause. archer et al. (2021) stated the global pandemic has shown a spotlight on the sometimes-questionable influence of so-called social media influencers (smis) or ‘micro-celebrities’ or “microcelebrities (p.107). influencers have been recognized as being a strategic and powerful tool in promoting products and ideas (klassen et al, 2018; abidin, 2016). studies show that during the early covid-19, smis were increasingly engaged by major not-for-profit organizations, governments, particularly commercial brands to create and distribute content for purposeful objectives. in his paper, archer et al. argued that smis, just as private industries that make profit from large-scale crises, also take advantage of the destabilized atmosphere for personal gain by strategically positioning themselves as trusted information (and entertainment) sources, actively playing a role in deepening the inequality between those caught up in mass economic cutbacks with the ‘elite’ who is being looked to for solutions (2021, p. 108). archer et al. argued that under the spotlight of disaster capitalism, the smis exploited profit. in indonesia, smis use crowdfunding platforms individually to gather donations for the medical professionals impacted by the covid-19 outbreaks. rachel venya, atta halilintar, andovi da lopez, baim wong, arief muhammad, afgan, maia estianty were among the famous names to encourage donation via kitabisa (adikara, 2020) and have used the hashtag #bersamalawancorona and #kitabisalawancorona interchangeably. within the first month since the first case was officially announced, kitabisa released that approximately 8 billion rupiahs were raised by indonesia’s social media influencers and instagram celebrities (hasibuan, 2020). the fund, according to the statement, is allocated to supply health workers’ needs, especially in the form of personal protective equipment (ppe) such as masks, gloves, surgical gowns, and various other medical aids (disinfectants, alcohol, and thermal scanners) which distributed to covid-19 referral hospitals and other hospitals and clinics in indonesia (cnbcindonesia.com, 2020). 30 journal of social studies (jss), volume 18, number 1, 2022: 27-46 this paper aims to describe how three indonesia’s social media influencers used crowdfunding platform to create positive impact during the early covid-19 pandemic, and in taking the light of archer et al argument, to what extend the three capitalized their crowdfunding work for their own publicity. literature review social media influencers according to freberg et al. (2011, p.90), smis represent a new type of independent third-party endorsers who shape the audience’s attitudes through blogs, tweets, and social media. while abidin (2015) defines influencers as “everyday, ordinary internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narratin of their personal lives and lifestyle, engage with their followers in digital and physical spaces, and monetize their following by integrating ‘advertorials’ into their blogs or social media posts.” other literatures emphasize on its celebritiy-side, defining social media celebrities as individuals who became famous via their social media presence, as opposed to traditional celebrities who gained fame from film, music, and tv shows (khamis et al., 2016 in jin et al., 2018). jin elaborated that consumers have a stronger connectedness toward the non-traditional stars, and they perceive them as more authentic, which results in higher purchase intention of the endorsed products. these definitions imply an extensive network of followers; trusted tastemakers in one or several niches; engaging with the followers through social media; and monetizing their activities. other literatures use the term buzzers that generate electronic words of mouth for smis. research shows the role of buzzers and wom is significant in shaping a homogeneous consumption pattern. the audience no longer determines their choice of goods and services, as the media as well as social media influencers plays a role in shaping their choices (akbar, 2019). instead of growing as empowered individuals, in the era of digital media the public is the object of industry and capitalism. truth is no longer objective, but the media determines truth through the role of buzzers and wom (p. 225). 31 publicity or impact? the use of crowdfunding by indonesian social ...(nissa cita adinia and mediana hanifa) crowdfunding, celebrity’s crowdfunding, and social influence according to mollick (2014), crowdfunding is considered a funding method for a variety of new ventures, allowing individual founders of forprofit, cultural, or social projects to request funding from many individuals, often in return for future products or equity. crowdfunding act as a platform or agent connecting investors with entrepreneurs. one of the advantages of using crowdfunding is it is real-time and open insight to the funding history and information about fundraising campaign. there has been a rapid increase in celebrities participating in the crowdfunding, since they often represent higher credibility compared to other investors, especially if their image is congruent with the products (choi and rifon in agnihotri et al., 2021). agnihotri (2021) also found that individuals place a greater value on the opinions and actions of celebrities, as investors, if they have been successful as an investor in the past, even if the product was misfit with the celebrity’s image. zhao et al. (2016) called influencers’ ability to be key opinion leaders on social media as social influence. deutsch and gerard (1955) stated there are two elements of social influence, which are informative and normative influences. informative influence refers to digital reputation created from the influencer’s profile: the number of followers, volume of postings, and identity status (liu et al., 2020). profile attribution can be monitored and used by candidate donators to evaluate a crowdfunding project, initiated by an smi, thus it can affect donor’s funding decision. normative influence, on the other hand, refers to the result of spreading information process where netizens are susceptible to distributed contents, identifying them and re-uploading those contents, so it can influence users in term of their decision on funding (deutsch & gerard, 1955). cascades is the spreading of information process where contents are distributed to all social environments, starting from an individual uploading a content to be spread to his/her social environments and then it will be reuploaded and shared by other social circles and so forth (cha et al., 2008). publicity publicity is widely known as public visibility or awareness of any product, service, person, or organization. it may also refer to the movement of information from its source to the public (not always via the media). grunig (1992) mentioned public relations is often reduced to publicity. he argues that 32 journal of social studies (jss), volume 18, number 1, 2022: 27-46 publicity is a form of activity that should be associated with the sales promotion effort of a company to help air advertising and personal salesmanship. publicity is also known as an important strategic element and promotional tool due to its effect of intentional exposure on a consumer. this helps publicity gain an advantage over other forms of marketing, such as advertising, as it often boosts credibility (lord & putrevu, 1993). publicity is also created through reputation management in which organizations try to strive via the web. furthermore, as aula (2010) stated, despite the fact that publicity, both good or bad, can be beneficial for an organization, company, or individuals, much of it is paid. lord & putrevu (1993) claimed that regardless of its benefit within the marketing sector, publicity is lacking the ability to be repeated, in comparison to paid advertising. disaster capitalism klein (2007), the one coined the notion of disaster capitalism, explained that disaster have become the preferred moments for advancing a vision of a ruthlessly divided world, one in which the very idea of a public sphere has no place at all (p. 49). he elaborated, every time new crisis hits, the fear and disorientation that follow are harnessed for radical social and economic reengineering. each new shock is midwife to a new course of economic shock therapy. the end result is the same kind of unapologetic partition between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned (klein, 2007). in their article, archer, wolf, and nalloor (2021) argued that smi has made the most of the new normal. “influencers deliberately position themselves to take advantage of the atmosphere of destabilization for personal gain” (p. 108). moreover, smis have effectively embraced the neoliberal capitalist system, by rapidly pivoting to benefit from the upheaval: strategically positioned themselves as trusted information (and entertainment) sources, actively playing role in deepening inequalities between those caught up in mass redundancies and economic cut backs, and the “elite” who is being looked up to for solutions. methods this is qualitative descriptive research. descriptive research seeks to systematically describe the characteristics of objects to be examined properly. three indonesian social media influencers are selected in non-probability sampling method, using two main criteria: he/she is social media influencers with 33 publicity or impact? the use of crowdfunding by indonesian social ...(nissa cita adinia and mediana hanifa) more than 1 million following users and has open crowdfunding platform for the purpose of covid-19 donation that enlisted in 15 top crowdfunding initiative at the early of covid-19 pandemic in november 2020. during the donation period, these influencers also used the same hashtag #bersamalawancorona (together fighting the corona). for ethical consideration, this paper uses smi 1, smi 2, and smi 3. the first step in addressing the research objectives, this paper used desk review to present a better understanding of how smis use crowdfunding platforms to gather their initiatives. this is done by observing their post on crowdfunding platform, kitabisa, as well as their promotion done in their social media channels. second step, to get the overview of publicity harnessed for the influencers, this paper uses social media analysis from the initiatives. social media analysis is the process of gathering and analysing data from social network such networks such as facebook, instagram, linkedin and twitter. sponder and khan (2017) described social media analytics as the art and science of extracting valuable hidden insight from vast amoung of semi-structured and unstructured social media data to enable informed and insightful decision making. smi’s twitter, youtube, and instagram were three channels that were analysed in this paper as they were used by the smi’s to generate and publicize their initiatives. results and discussion our research objects: among the highest paid indonesian smis and top initiators for covid-19 cause in indonesia under hashtag #bersamalawancorona, a number of institutions, celebrities and influencers have been involved in crowdfunding through kitabisa. there were approximately 5655 campaigns with a total of 168 billion rupiahs gathered under the hashtag (kitabisa.com, 2020). interestingly, from march to november 2020, the largest crowdfunding initiatives came from those who are prominent in social media platforms. most initiatives were aimed to help medical professionals needs during the early outbreak of covid-19 pandemic. the top 15 smis and their initiatives are : (1) rachel vennya (celebgram) – rp 9.2 billion; (2) dr. tirta (celebgram) – rp 5.1 billion; (3) arief muhammad dan tiara pangestika (celebgrams, youtubers) – rp 3 bilion; (4) adib hidayat (celebtwit/journalist) – rp 2 billion; (5) maia estianty (mucision) – rp 2 billion; (6) cathy sharon (actrist) – rp 1.9 billion; 34 journal of social studies (jss), volume 18, number 1, 2022: 27-46 (7) raffi gigi rafathar (artist/youtuber) – rp 1.5 billion; (8) alshad kautsar (youtuber) – rp 736 million; (9) hansol jang (youtuber) – rp 666 million; (10) andrea dian (actrist) – rp 635 million; (11) atta halilintar (youtuber) – rp 608 million; (12) cynthia tan (fashion designer/celebgram) – rp 575 million; (13) dwi handayani (celebgram/celebtwit) – rp 501 million; (14) velove vexia (actrist) – rp 418 million; (15) augie fantinus (tv and radio presenter/ youtuber) – rp 418 million (taken from: https://galangdana.kitabisa.com/ partners/bersamalawancorona in november, 2020) in this research, the discussion will focus on three influencers who have initiated crowdfunding: smi 1, smi 2, and smi 3. the three were among the afore mentioned names successfully gather billions of donations for the covid-19 crisis. as zhao et al (2016) concept on social influence, this section will explore the informative influence (of these smis as crowdfunding initiators. smi 1 smi 1 is 25 years old who has 5.1 million followers on instagram, and 1,3 million youtube subscribers in november, 2020. smi 1 is known for her social media contents on lifestyle, travelling, beauty, and family. influencer 1 created all the contents and uploaded them with her image as a modern muslim mother (kumparan.com, 2020). influencer 1 received job offers as endorser to promote various products and services that varies from household needs such as toilet cleaner brand, floor cleaner and halal dish detergent brand, as well as her own slim beauty product. influencer 1 also received endorser job for fashion and food products that often were uploaded through instagram story. several businesses owned by influencer 1 such as in culinary sector with sate goreng taichan, rumah sedep, and ngikan. besides, influencer 1 also has business on fashion sector including mahika kids and vel the modest (kumparan.com, 2020). smi 2 influencer 2 is a member of a prominent family in indonesia. the 26 years old man has a deposit of popularity because his family is quite popular in indonesia (correcto.id, 2020). influencer 2 becomes more popular by actively uploading contents through instagram and youtube. his instagram account has around 16 million followers, while his youtube has 26 million subscribers. these numbers are fantastic achievement which makes influencer 35 publicity or impact? the use of crowdfunding by indonesian social ...(nissa cita adinia and mediana hanifa) 2 as southeast asia’s top youtuber with the highest number of subscribers (liputan6.com, 2020). smi 2 is the eightieth richest youtuber in the world with monthly income approximately 23 billions rupiahs (cnbcindonesia.com, 2020). youtube is the main platform for smi 2 to gain his popularity, but instagram also has important role on it. contents around lifestyle, sports, automotive and games are mostly uploaded in smi 2 social media. in addition to that, smi 2’s creative avenue as a film director and singer were often highlighted as well as messages on the key to success and hard work. smi 2 endorses major brands including samsung and smartfren. smi 3 smi 3 is an influencer that also committed in crowdfunding initiative in the midst of covid-19 pandemic. the 30 years old man was firstly known through social media platform twitter under an anonymous account and a book that adapted to widescreen. his instagram account has 2.4 million followers while his youtube account has about 2.5 million subscribers. based observation, influencer 3’s instagram contents were focused on lifestyle, family and automotive. as reported by republika.co.id (2020), influencer 3 has developed eight businesses, starting from culinary, cellphone to journal book as well as platform to bridge sellers online and offline. he also endorsed major brands such as pepsodent, asus, and smartfren. the three smis have shown credibility both as successful entrepreneurs as well as marketing instruments, as product and services endorser, for major brands. during the first month of covid-19 outbreak, smi 1 started her crowdfunding project on march 16, 2020, while smi 2 and smi 3 started theirs on 17 and 18 of march 2020, respectively (kitabisa.com, 2020). table 1 shows the level of social media fame followed by the crowdfund initiative that each smi has created. table 1. crowdfunding initiatives by smis at the early covid-19 pandemic name of influencer smi 1 smi 2 smi 3 instagram account verified account verified account verified account number of followers*) 5,1 million 16 million 2,4 million 36 journal of social studies (jss), volume 18, number 1, 2022: 27-46 name of influencer smi 1 smi 2 smi 3 twitter account n/a verified account verified account number of followers*) n/a 104,7 thousand 4,9 million youtube account verified account verified account verified account number of subscribers*) 1,32 million 26,2 million 2,59 million volume of posts*) 84 videos 1,144 videos 399 videos title of crowdfunding initiative mutual help against covid-19 (tolong menolong lawan covid-19) help nurses! masks & ppe needed! (tolong para perawat! masker & apd dibutuhkan!) fight covid-19: emergency fund for the society (melawan covid-19: dana darurat untuk masyarakat) link of crowdfunding initiative https://kitabisa. com/campaign/ bersamacegahcovid19 https://kitabisa. com/campaign/ melawancovid19 https://kitabisa. com/campaign/ danadaruratcovid19 number of collected donation **) rp9,205,530,814 rp608,455,236 rp3,050,628,242 number of donator **) 138,173 individuals 8,633 individuals 45,788 individuals used platform kitabisa and instagram kitabisa and instagram kitabisa and instagram source: instagram, twitter, youtube, and kitabisa.com *) data taken in mei 2020) **) data taken in november 2020 from table 1 it can be inferred that smi 1 gathered more fund at the early stage of covid-19 pandemic with less followers than smi 2 and smi 3 and more donators joining her cause. 37 publicity or impact? the use of crowdfunding by indonesian social ...(nissa cita adinia and mediana hanifa) positive outcome from smis crowdfunding initiatives in november 2020, in their official statement, kitabisa recorded 158 billion rupiahs of donations from march to november 2020 period only. (latest financial audit from ernst and young, displayed in their page, kitabisa foundation collected a total donation of 835 billion rupiahs in 2020 only, and total revenue for administrative cost up to 36 billion rupiahs (kitabisa.com, 2022)). from each crowdfunding initiative, kitabisa provides a link that encourage transparency on the use of the fund. however, no detail financial report provided from each of the campaigns. table 2 resumes the funding distribution from the three smis crowdfunding initiatives taken from each smis’ initiative link. table 2. distribution of donation from each smi – recap pe r s o n / initiative reporting year distribution of donation beneficiaries form of donation location smi 1 2021 • health workers • covid referral (and non-referral) hospitals • underprivileged communities • funeral attendant • items of personal protective equipments (ppe) • 11 units of ventilators ui covent 20 • sanitary & hygiene equipment for public facility • multivitamins and personal hygiene/ ppe • meals and logistic for funeral attendant (not specified) 38 journal of social studies (jss), volume 18, number 1, 2022: 27-46 pe r s o n / initiative reporting year distribution of donation beneficiaries form of donation location smi 2 2020 • health workers • 14 hospitals • underprivileged communities • general public • personal protective equipment (ppe) • public handwasher equipment depok, bandung, banten dki jakarta north, central and east jakarta, bayan, banyumas, toli-toli, morowali, north sulawesi, sindang barang, halmaera, pasuruan, palembang, surakarta, pegadegan, bulili smi 3 2022 • personal • underprivileged entreprenerus. • small medium enterprises • startup capital for ntt communities (fishing boats, empowerment programs, training and education, lending-scheme capital) • business capital for smes and personal • business capital for warong renovation, shopping smes programs, vending charts) • essential needs (sembako) 15 provinces in indonesia 39 publicity or impact? the use of crowdfunding by indonesian social ...(nissa cita adinia and mediana hanifa) there is no detailed information whether the donators coming from each smis’ followers or from her/his own funds. smi 1 revealed she spent 775 million rupiahs for her covid-19 cause, whilst smi 2 proclaimed his march and april income as youtuber will be used for frontlines health workers in fighting the covid-19. from the provided link, each of smi provided a bit of infographic about the use of the fund, complete with photos with beneficiaries, number of donation. in this sense, positive impact on the fundraising initiative is perceived well by the donators. beneficiaries are diverse from medical / health workers, hospital organizations, underprivileged individuals and communities, small medium enterprises (smes) and funeral attendant as well as general public visiting public places. smi 3 has more savvy way in providing success story of the beneficiaries from underprivileged entrepreneurs or small medium enterprise owners who received his fundraising. the message shows positive impact resulted from the initiative rather than showing a mere of “funds delivery” (https://kitabisa.com/ campaign/danadaruratcovid19/latest-news, 2022). publicity harnessed from the smis’ crowdfunding initiative according to social media analysis carried in november 2020, it found a number publicity harnessed by smi’s crowdfunding initiative during the early covid-19 pandemic. the following table 3 describe publicity gained by each of observed smi from their social media channels. 40 journal of social studies (jss), volume 18, number 1, 2022: 27-46 table 3. social media analysis on smi’s crowdfunding initiative *) twitter instagram youtube smi 1 smi 1 doesn’t have twitter account, nevertheless, the publicity she gained on twitverse about her initiative ranked highest among the other. in 17 march 2020, kumparan (news portal) tweeted an article about her initiative and got 35 thousand likes and 12 thousand retweet and 742 comments. this made smi 1 enlisted in indonesia trending topic on march 17, 2020. in 20 march 2020, detik (news portal) also tweeted their article about smi 1’s initiative and got 3400 likes, 955 retweets, and 113 comments. smi 1’s fist instagram content on her crowdfunding initiative got 197 thousand likes, while her average post got approximately more than 300 thousand likes. her second posting on the initiative got more than 334 thousand likes. this is due to her success in gaining 4 billion rupiahs donation within 2 days period only. no youtube content about her initiative was posted here. smi 2 smi 2 promoted his initiative on his twitter account on 20 march 2020, proclaimed he will donate his income as youtuber to fight covid-19, especially, as he said, for the “income hero”. his tweet got 1300 retweets, 9600 likes and 658 comments, the highest interaction so far from his twitter. through similar content on instagram, smi 2 gained 700 thousand likes which is above average number of like on influencer 2’s instagram account of 500 likes. different from the others, its youtube channel, smi 2’s discussion on covid-19 topic did not interest its viewers, only 300 thousand views, even though the average number of views per video can reach 1.5 million for each content. there is no particular content with clear call to action like in instagram or his twitter. 41 publicity or impact? the use of crowdfunding by indonesian social ...(nissa cita adinia and mediana hanifa) twitter instagram youtube smi 3 data shows that contents which were uploaded by smi 3 on covid-19 crowdfunding through his twitter account got 3,100 re-tweeted, 10.2 thousand likes with 138 comments. then, for contents that smi 3 has uploaded on instagram, it got 305 thousand likes and bigger than average like at his content which around 150200 thousand times smi 3 did not upload any content that related with covid-19 to his youtube account. *) this social media analysis was carried 14th of november 2020 diagram 1. google trend analysis between smi 1,2,3 it is found that smi 1’s crowdfund initiative creates virality, as she successfully collected fund as much as 4 billion rupiah only within two days, to the point of earned publication from news outlets and twitter’s trending topic. indonesia’s record museum (muri) was willing to give smi 1 an award because of her achievement, however she decided to refuse the award, which action created another publicity (kompas.com, 2020). smi 2 and smi 3 also gained some publicity on his initiative. smi 2 gets higher interaction from his publicized post in twitter and instagram, as well as smi 3 on his instagram and twitter account. as youtuber, smi 2 post on his 42 journal of social studies (jss), volume 18, number 1, 2022: 27-46 crowdfunding initiative did not get much attention compared to his regular content. however, when cross-checked with google trend analysis, (outside smis’ social media channels) during march to november 2020 the smis’ crowdfunding campaigns. this can imply two things: first, with more than 26 million subscribers in youtube, smi 2 remained superior as opinion maker in digital media. second, publicity generated about smis’ crowdfunding initiatives may not as significantly contributed to their fame as their regular-everyday content. discussion responding covid-19 pandemic social media influencers in indonesia, initiated crowdfunding projects to help the most impacted parties. those crowdfunding were run through platform kitabisa and the initiatives have been spread widely by influencers through twitter, instagram and youtube. smi 1 smi 2, smi 3, are both influencers and celebrities that are popular and reputed individuals who received significant media attention. within a mere of two days, the initiative can gather more than 4 billion rupiahs (smi 1), a 600 million rupiahs in two months (smi 2), or 1,5 billion rupiahs (smi 3), such amount of fund that is hardly gathered by regular fundraising initiative. agnihotri et al (2021) highlighted the element of trustworthiness of celebrity endorsement that implies honesty, integrity, and believability of an endorser. in the light of agnihotri et al (2021) research, this paper found there was not any similar project in the past by each smis on the crowdfunding initiatives, nor showing congruity with their previous endorsed products, nevertheless individuals/ investors seemed trust the smis’ initiatives. this shows the role of smis as opinion makers not just in product marketing, but also in crowdfunding initiatives. smis’ initiatives through crowdfunding platform show how solidarity emerged at the time of covid-19. particularly at the early stage of outbreaks when physical distancing policy applied, people have urged to lend their hands for the needs. it has been proved with available crowdfunding actions under #bersamalawancorona, including that have been portrayed by the three smis’ initiatives. observation shows positive impact resulted from these initiatives as well as, further, on another level, encourage solidarity and increase social resilience during the uncertainty. 43 publicity or impact? the use of crowdfunding by indonesian social ...(nissa cita adinia and mediana hanifa) furthermore, with normative influence they have, (deutsch & gerar, 1995; chat et al., 2008) information spreading process from smi message have cascaded and distributed to wider social environment faster, which, later, generate publicity for smis’ celebrity’s reputation. looking at what archer et al. (2021) claimed how smis are making the most of new normal during covid-19 pandemic, referred as ‘disaster capitalism’ term, this paper found public awareness on smi 1, smi 2, and smi 3 is heightened in march 2020, but when it is looked as an overall experience from march to november period, the publicity harnessed from each of crowdfunding campaign were not as significant as their everyday content. incite on akbar & irwansyah’s (2019) argument on how kitabisa has perpetuated a capitalistic system for charity, this paper shows the significant role of social media influencers in creating mutual benefit. as the platform puts social problems in the shop window, smis partake in calling out and cheering those who need to express solidarity and generosity (in an easy and fast manner) effectively to donate, and in return, gain more publicity. conclusion crowdfunding initiatives during the early covid-19 outbreaks from three social media influencers have presented two side of a coin, one as expression of solidarity and social contribution, and the other as mean of publicity. however, it is too dubious to say whether the campaigns reflect a lot, of as what archer et al (2021) argued as, disaster capitalism. social media analysis between march and november 2020 shows publicity for the three smis was obviously generated, but not as significant as their regular contents. this paper is not without limitations, which paves the way for future research. this study does not dwell on each smi’ followers’ motive on selecting certain campaign, nor exploring deeply how each smi may represent symbol that can encourage action for their followers, or how the crowdfunding action during the pandemic has contribute to the betterment of each smi’s reputation management. a study with discourse network analysis that maps out how a discourse and actors are related and contested may be useful to extend and deepen this paper. 44 journal of social studies (jss), volume 18, number 1, 2022: 27-46 acknowledgement this paper is edited and revised from previous version that is presented for the the 4th international conference communication and business (iccb) 2021 held by london school of public relation (lspr) communication & business institute under the title “publicity or community resilience? the use of crowdfunding by indonesian micro-celebrities during pandemic, that it was selected as best paper. references galang dana kitabisa. 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(2016). a computational approach to measuring the correlation between expertise and social media influence for celebrities on microblogs. world wide web, 19(5), 865–886. key: cord-0049546-7cs1z6x6 authors: baraitser, lisa title: the maternal death drive: greta thunberg and the question of the future date: 2020-09-04 journal: psychoanal cult soc doi: 10.1057/s41282-020-00197-y sha: fe2af62a813b967c957aebe4382fdeddcc12ca64 doc_id: 49546 cord_uid: 7cs1z6x6 the centenary of freud’s beyond the pleasure principle (freud, 1920a/1955) falls in 2020, a year dominated globally by the covid-19 pandemic. one of the effects of the pandemic has been to reveal the increasingly fragile interconnectedness of human and non-human life, as well as the ongoing effects of social inequalities, particularly racism, on the valuing of life and its flourishing. drawing on earlier work, this paper develops the notion of a ‘maternal death drive’ that supplements freud’s death drive by accounting for repetition that retains a relation to the developmental time of ‘life’ but remains ‘otherwise’ to a life drive. the temporal form of this ‘life in death’ is that of ‘dynamic chronicity’, analogous to late modern narratives that describe the present as ‘thin’ and the time of human futurity as running out. i argue that the urgency to act on the present in the name of the future is simultaneously ‘suspended’ by the repetitions of late capitalism, leading to a temporal hiatus that must be embraced rather than simply lamented. the maternal (death drive) alerts us to a new figure of a child whose task is to carry expectations and anxieties about the future and bind them into a reproductive present. rather than seeing the child as a figure of normativity, i turn to greta thunberg to signal a way to go on in suspended ‘grey’ time. and why should i be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? (greta thunberg) this paper is late. not just a little late but seriously forestalled. there is some pressure -an urgency produced by the centenary of freud's beyond the pleasure principle falling in 2020 -and the desire and pleasure in partaking in a collaborative, timely celebration of the work. there are the ordinary repetitions that are holding this up: a chronic relation to my own thoughts, veering towards and away from the satisfactions and disturbances of ideas connecting or linking; the chronic overwhelm produced by the difficulty of saying 'no' and resisting the temptations of an overloaded life; and the realities of overload brought on not by a chronic relation to limits but by their obliteration by the institutions and systems that govern our lives. then, of course, as 2020 has deepened, there have been the temporalities of illness, care and grief; of the suspension of time under conditions of lockdown; the stop-start of uncertainty and helplessness. for some, it has been a time of permanent and dangerous work; of intolerable waiting for others; and of the fault-lines of inequality and racial injustice urgently rupturing the otherwise monotonous rhythm of a global pandemic. in 2020, everything and nothing went on hold. during this time, i continued to work with patients, albeit 'remotely', in the strange temporality of a five times per week psychoanalysis. even with so much time, the wait between sessions can be felt to be intolerable. to be in an analysis is to be held in suspension from one session to the next. one of my patients describes the wait as an agonizing 'blank time', like the crackling of an oldfashioned tv. it is not dead time as such but the incessant noise of nothing happening. to be in the session, however, produces a different kind of disturbance: an utterly absorbing kind of time that they liken to the colour blue. we move between the absorbing blue time of the sessions to the blank, crackling, maddening time between them. there is a 'session-time' analyst, who is blue, and a 'between-session-time' analyst, who maddens with a blank, crackling absence. time is both interminable -a wait between the sessions that feels like it goes on forever -and chronic: the repetition of blue, blank, blue, blank, blue, blank… beyond the pleasure principle is freud's meditation on the temporalities of repetition and return as species-time articulates with the time of the subject. in many ways, the death drive is a temporal concept, holding together the paradoxical time in which repetition contains within it a backwards pull towards the no-time of the living organism, even as the shape of this relation describes 'a life'. 100 years later, time in the early decades of the 21st century ó 2020 springer nature limited. 1088-0763 psychoanalysis, culture & society appears oddly analogous: it seems to loop or repeat but is undercut by a pull towards no-time, since the human and planetary future is not just foreshortened but now 'foreclosed' by the immanent twin disasters of capitalist and (neo)colonial expansion (baraitser, 2017a, p. 8) . franco 'bifo' berardi has long argued that our collective human future has come and gone and that the future has outlived its usefulness as a concept (berardi, 2011) . time after the present will come, but it will not bring the promises of bettering the conditions of the now for most, this having been a central aspect of european and north american future narratives in the post-war period (toffler, 1970; lee, 2004; luhmann, 1976) . in fact, as naomi klein (2007) argues, the very folding of disaster into capitalist discourses, governmental policies and institutional practices does not stave off disaster but profits further from it, pushing the relations between the human and non-human world to the brink of sustainability. what this implies is that disaster is not a future horizon we must urgently draw back from but a condition we have already incorporated, profited from and continue to sustain in the present. in these conditions of 'crisis capitalism', whole populations are kept in a 'chronic state of near-collapse' (invisible committee, 2009, p. 31) , 1 a kind of temporal hiatus in which one goes on but without a future. amy elias (2016) has noted the intensive discussions about the 'presentism' of post-wwii globalized societies that have revolved around the idea of the loss of history (p. 35). in these narratives, a sense of a saturated, elongated, thin present is a product of a traumatized western collective consciousness confronting the unprecedented 'event' of wwii. however, these narratives, she argues, have given way in the 21st century, as humankind 'has created its own version of durational time inside (rather than outside) the box of historicity' (p. 36). this durational time is not bergson's duration that teams with experience (bergson, 1889 (bergson, /1994 (bergson, , 1896 (bergson, /2004 but the empty, timeless time of a 'marketplace duration' (elias, 2016, p. 35) , closer to the maddening crackling of nothing happening that my patient describes. in addition, as time is increasingly synchronized in the post-war period in terms of economic, cultural, technological, ecological and planetary registers, the 'present' itself becomes the management of a tension between time that is felt to be synced or simultaneous and time that is multiple or heterogeneous to simultaneity (burges and elias, 2016, p. 3) . we could think of this tension as produced by the dominating effects of european models of time (mills, 2014 (mills, , 2020 . european time is constantly imposed by the west on 'the rest' through the temporal structures of empire and enacted through colonization, exploitation, extraction and enslavement. european time comes to mediate representations of the world through the imposition of a particular account of the world-historical present on other temporal organizations -cosmic time, geological time, earth time, soil time, indigenous time, women's time, queer time, to name a few (chakrabarty, 2009; freeman, 2010; kristeva, 1981 kristeva, /1986 nanni, 2012; puig de la bellacasa, 2017) . another way to put this is that, although freud proposes that repetition leads to the ultimate suspension of time -the return to non-being -the state of nonbeing produced by temporal suspension in the early 21st century is radically unequally distributed. writing under conditions of lockdown during the covid-19 pandemic, achille mbembe (2020) states: for we have never learned to live with all living species, have never really worried about the damage we as humans wreak on the lungs of the earth and on its body. thus, we have never learned how to die. with the advent of the new world and, several centuries later, the appearance of the 'industrialized races,' we essentially chose to delegate our death to others, to make a great sacrificial repast of existence itself via a kind of ontological vicariate. non-being, or death, is a luxury that hasn't yet been learnt by the 'human', non-being having been delegated to slaves -those humans who are denied status as humans against which the category of 'human' is both founded and flounders -as well as to non-human others. unless we recognize the 'universal right to breath' (emphasis added) for all organic matter, mbembe argues, we will continue to fail to die for ourselves, the death drive being projected, that is, into the body of that which is deemed non-human. if we go on collectively refusing to die for ourselves, we could say that the temporality of the current human predicament is closer to what martin o'brien calls 'zombie time' (o'brien, 2020) . as an artist and writer living with cystic fibrosis, which gives rise to symptoms very similar to covid-19 (coughing, shortness of breath, exhaustion), o'brien has now outlived his own life expectancy. he writes: zombie time insists on a different temporal proximity to death. like the hollywood zombie which holds within it a paradox, in that it is both dead and alive, those of us living in zombie time experience death as embodied in life […] .we had come to terms with the fact that we are about to die, and then we didn't. freud's movement towards death is circular: a repetitive arc that leads us back to the inorganic, so that in some sense it too describes zombie time, the fact we have always already surpassed our death date, whereby a life is an act of return. each organism follows its own path, he tells us, to death, and that deviation is a life. a path, however, is not quite what o'brien is suggesting. here the presence of death is sutured to every aspect of life, closer perhaps to melanie klein's insistence on the death drive as a permanent unconscious phantasy that must be managed as a life-long psychic struggle (klein, 1946 (klein, / 1975 . two questions arise from this. firstly, does recognizing 'death as embodied in life' lead us to begin to die for ourselves? in this 'hour of autophagy', as mbembe (2020) puts it, we will no longer be able to delegate death to an other. we do, indeed, have to die not just in our own fashion but on our own behalf. in one reading of freud's death drive, it is associated with the freedom to do one's own thing, follow one's own path and stands as a marker of an independent life in many ways free from others -even if, as lacan would have it, not free from the big other. 2 but, as so many feminist, queer, disability, and black studies scholars have attested, living an independent life is a fantasy; it is always premised on dependency or interdependency, which so often requires the temporary or permanent tethering of the life of an other, or, more profoundly, the harnessing of 'life' itself. 3 judith butler (2020) writes in the force of non-violence that we are all born into a condition of 'radical dependency' (p. 41), that no-one stands on their own, that we are all at some level propped up by others. freud's suggestion of 'eternal return' requires practices of maintenance that have largely been accorded to women, people of colour, animals, and other non-human others. these practices of maintenance entail the temporalities of often mind-numbing repetition: reproductive and other forms of labour that support, sustain, and maintain all living systems. in order to 'deviate', someone or something else needs to preserve, maintain, protect, sustain, and repeat. those 'others' stay on the side of life, not as progression or even deviation towards death but as a permanent sustaining of life-processes. death in life requires a simultaneous articulation, in other words, of life in death, in which the temporalities of progression, regression, and repetition can be understood as supported and supplemented by another temporal element within the death drive that operates through 'dynamic chronicity': an element that animates 'life' in such a way as to allow the subject to die in its own fashion. i call this life in death the 'maternal death drive' (baraitser, 2017a) to distinguish it from the pleasure principle or the 'life' drive. secondly, if the time of the 'now', as i've elaborated above, takes the form of dynamic chronicity, a suspended yet chronically animated time that pushes out temporal multiplicity, what work needs to be done in order that this form of time retains some connection to a futurity for all? do the repetitions of 'blue blank' in their own circular fashion retain within them a relation to futurity, even if they don't exactly lead us somewhere else? i would hope, after all, that my patient may eventually, with time, come to experience the 'blue-session' analyst and the 'blank-absent' analyst as one and the same analyst, even as the agonies of having and losing may continue to be difficult. from a kleinian perspective, the time that this requires is the time in which what is hated and what is loved come to have a relation to one another, which klein calls 'depression' (klein 1946 (klein /1975 and which may entail 'depressing time'. we could say that it is the time in which we come to be concerned about the damage done to what is loved, the time whereby what is loved and what is hated can come to matter to one another, making the time of working through that of 'mattering' itself. furthermore, mbembe (2020) writes: community -or rather the in-common -is not based solely on the possibility of saying goodbye, that is, of having a unique encounter with others and honoring this meeting time and again. the in-common is based also on the possibility of sharing unconditionally, each time drawing from it something absolutely intrinsic, a thing uncountable, incalculable, priceless. (emphases in original) this would suggest that, supplementary to the time of blue-blank (saying goodbye again and again), there is another time: that of the 'in-common'. this is a time of permanent mattering, which also takes time to recognize. it is, if you like, the time in which depressive guilt survives and hence the time it takes for a future to be recognized within the present, rather than being the outward edge, the longed-for time that is yet to come. in what follows, and taking my cue from beyond the pleasure principle itself, i attempt to rework freud's death drive by drawing attention to a particular form of developmental time that lies inside the time of repetition, which i link to 'life in death'. in chapter ii of freud's essay, in the midst of his struggle with the meaning of repetition, pleasure and unpleasure, he turns to a child. the function of the child at this point in the text is to provide the case of 'normalcy' -the play of children -in order to help him understand the 'dark and dismal topic of traumatic neurosis' (freud, 1920b (freud, /2003 . the child will be 'light' (read white) and playful but turns out to be deeply troubled. instead of dragging the cotton reel along the floor as the adults intended, so it could turn and check its existence at any point, the child, standing outside the cot, throws the reel into the cot, accompanied by an o-o-o-o sound, so it cannot be seen, and then pulls it out with a 'da!' that freud describes as 'joyful' (p. 52). the pleasure of refinding, however, is postponed -in the time between 'gone' and 'found', the child plays at waiting, as it attempts to remaster the experience, freud tells us, of its 'gone' mother. this is of course also an attempt to deal with its own goneness from the imagined place of the mother; the child is standing outside the cot, after all. the passivity of being left is repeated but transformed through an act of 'revenge', a repetitive act of aggression in which, through psychic substitution, something essentially unpleasurable is turned into something 'to be remembered and to be processed in the psyche' (p. 52). the child does this by identifying with the mother, waiting in her place. my aim is to repeat freud's impulse, re-inserting a mother and child into the scene of the death drive 'proper' as a way to signal how to die on our own behalf and therefore how to go on in the suspended hiatus we appear to be living through. the maternal, as i will elaborate, appears as a non-normative developmental temporality within the death drive. in my account, the child reappears, however, in the figure of the child-activist greta thunberg. she is the child who has been invested in symbolically to carry hope for the future, a hope that she is decidedly pushing back towards those of the generation who came before her, calling on them to take action now, before it is too late. although thunberg names her vision of the world in terms of 'black and white' thinking, i draw on laura salisbury's notion of 'grey time' (salisbury, in press) in order to understand what to do with the time that remains in which action can still take place. it is always an uncomfortable thing to do, to insert a mother and child into a scene where they are ostensibly not wanted. it carries the sour smells of heteronormativity and essentialism that still cling to discussions of the maternal and relegate mother-child configurations as the counterpoint to those who are 'not fighting for the children', as lee edelman (2004) suggested in his famous polemic no future. for edelman, the death drive is a queer refusal of futurity that allows negativity to operate as a 'pulsive force' that would otherwise trap queer as a determinate stable position (p. 3). the child and mother come to represent the ultimate trap, that of development itself -the unfolding of the normative temporalities of birth, growth, development, maturation, reproduction, wealth generation and death. in some ways, this is what makes the insertion of mother-child back into discourses about the death drive rather 'queer'. in doing so, i deliberately refuse the association between motherhood and normativity and suggest that motherhood is the name for any temporal relation of 'unfurling' whereby the unfurling of one life occurs in relation to the unfurling of another, albeit out of sync. in fact, as i will elaborate below, for a life to unfurl there needs to be the presence of another life that is prepared to wait whilst life and death can come to have a relation to one another. this suspended time of waiting for life to unfurl is a non-teleological, crystalline form of developmental time based on the principle of life in death (baraitser, 2017a, p. 92) . whilst motherhood is always in danger of being squeezed out of this kind of queer theory, it is also in danger of being squeezed out of feminist theories that purport to make space for the maternal. julia kristeva's essay 'women's time' (1981/1986 ), for instance, conceptualized female subjectivity as occupying two forms of time: cyclical time (repetition) and monumental time (eternity without cleavage or escape). these two 'feminine' forms of time, she argued, work to conceal the inherent logic of teleological, historical, 'masculine' time, which is linear, progressive, unfolding and yet constantly rupturing, an 'anguished' time (p. 192) . masculine time rests on its own stumbling block, which is death. cyclical time and 'monumental' or eternal time, kristeva argued, are both accessed through the feminine, so that the feminine signifies a less 'anguished' time because it is uncoupled from the death of the subject and more concerned with suturing the subject to extrasubjective time. although this has been rightly critiqued for essentializing 'the feminine' through the normative positioning of the female subject on the side of the biological, as well as mobilizing a nonpolitical appeal to 'nature', i have argued elsewhere that, in attempting to separate the feminine from cyclical and monumental time, feminist theory designates the maternal as the keeper of species-time, in which the mother becomes a biologistic and romanticized subject attached to the rhythms of nature (baraitser, 2009, p. 5) . toril moi (1986) writes of kristeva's essay that the question for kristeva was not so much how to valorize the feminine but how to reconcile maternal time with linear (political and historical) time (p. 187). without a theory of the desire to have children (a desire that can permeate any gender configuration and that i name as maternal regardless of the gendered body that desires it), we leave the door open to the consequence of a failure to theorize and the maternal falls out of signification, time and history. moreover, motherhood is not just the desire for children but a particular form of repetitive labour relegated largely to women and particularly, in the global north, to women of colour and women from the south. although the concept of 'social reproduction' has been expanded to incorporate a much broader array of activities than caring for children, maternal labour remains distinct from other forms of domestic labour. joy james (2016) argues that the ongoing trauma and theft involved in slavery, for instance, produces not only western democracy but a repudiated 'twin' within western theory that she names 'the black matrix' (p. 256). where mothers in captivity and slavery have always provided the reproductive and productive labour that underpin wealth and culture, they are systematically erased -not just in culture but in what she calls 'womb theory' (theory, for instance, that accommodates feminism, intersectionality and antiracism, whilst still denying the maternal captive). despite this, she claims, the black matrix can act as a 'fulcrum' that leverages power against captivity (p. 257). i would argue that this power comes, in part, from the impossibility of the maternal captive remaining indifferent to her labour. subsistence farming, cooking, cleaning, household maintenance, support work and the production of status are forms of repetition from which it remains possible to emotionally disattach. but the 'labour' of maternity is 'affective, invested, intersubjective' (sandford, 2011, p. 6 ) and retains an ethical dimension that is distinct. here the maternal emerges as a figuration of the subject that is deeply attached to its labouring, whose labouring is a matter of attachment to that labour, as well as providing the general conditions for attachment (the infant's psychic struggle to become connected to the world) to take place. we could say, then, that the time of repetition under the condition that is maternity becomes the time of mattering, as opposed to the 'meaningless' time of reproduction: the time, that is, in which repetition may come to matter. this time can be felt as obdurate, distinctively uncertain in its outcome, both intensive and 'empty', and bound to the pace of the unfurling other. what is at play is a kind of crystalline developmental time within the time of history. it takes the form of repetition, but this repetition holds open the possibility of something coming to matter, rather than the death drive understood only as a return to non-being. a maternal death drive? what might this conjunction mean? freud always maintained that the two elements of psychic life that couldn't be worked through were the repudiation of femininity in both men and women, by which he meant the repudiation of passivity; and the death drive, the repetitive return again and again to our psychic dissolution or unbinding. in 'analysis terminable and interminable', written in the last years of his life, freud (1937 freud ( / 1964 ) named these the 'bedrocks' of psychic life, evoking an immoveable geological time. the permanent fixtures of psychic life that an analysis cannot shift are the hatred of passivity and the simultaneous impulse to return to an ultimate passive state, suturing the feminine to death in psychoanalysis. earlier, in beyond the pleasure principle, freud had offered an hypothesis in which, despite his conception of drives as exerting the pressure that presses for change, they are constrained by a conservatism, meaning they do not operate according to one singular temporality. this double temporality within the death drive is drawn out by adrian johnston (2005) , who has noted freud's (1905 freud's ( / 1955 ) developmental account of the drive in three essays on the theory of sexuality and later in 'instincts and their vicissitudes ' (1915/1957) , where the drive is articulated as maturing over time. johnston (2005) maintains that freud's drive is simultaneously timeless and temporal, both interminable (it repeats) and containing an internal tendency to deviate, to change its object and its aim (it develops or alters) (p. 228). after all, something happens, according to freud, that shifts the human organism from one that dies easily to one that diverges ever more widely from the original course of life (that is, death) and therefore makes ever more complicated detours before reaching death. for johnston, alteration can be understood as an intra-temporal resistance to the time of iteration, a negation of time transpiring within time. this means that the death drive therefore includes rather than negates developmental time. this is not a developmental tendency separated off and located within the selfpreservative drives or a 'life' drive but a death drive that contains within it its own resistance to negation. i would want to reclaim this doubled death drive as 'maternal', the drive that includes within it the capacity for development, for what johnston calls 'alteration', which always mediates the axis of repetition or 'iteration' (p. 344). the maternal death drive would describe the unfolding of another life in relation to one's own path towards death and marks the point that alteration and iteration cross one another. if we move from freud to klein, we see how this double temporality plays out between the maternal and child subject. i have described elsewhere how, in love, guilt and reparation, klein (1937 klein ( /1998 tells us that anxiety about maternal care and dependency on the maternal body in very early life -the relationship, that is, with a feeding-object of some kind that could be loosely termed 'breast' -is a result of both the frustrations of that breast (its capacities to feed but also to withhold or disappear at whim) and what the infant does with the hatred and aggressive feelings stirred up by those experiences of frustration that rebound on it in the form of terrifying persecutory fantasies of being attacked by the breast itself (pp. 306-43; see also baraitser, 2017b, p. 4 ). klein's conceptual infant swings in and out of psychic states that are full of envious rage and makes phantasized aggressive raids on the maternal body in an attempt to manage the treacherous initial experiences of psychical and physical survival. klein (1937 klein ( /1998 moves us closer to a more thing-like internal world permeated less with representations and more with dynamic aggressive phantasies of biting, hacking at and tearing the mother and her breasts into bits, and attempts to destroy her body and everything it might be phantasized to contain (p. 308). in klein's thinking, libido gives way to aggression, so that the defences themselves are violent in their redoubling on the infant in the form of persecutory anxiety. one's own greed and aggressiveness themselves become threatening, along with the maternal object that evokes them, and have to be split off from conscious thought. coupled with this are feelings of temporary relief from these painful states of mind (p. 307) and these 'good' experiences form the basis for what we could think of as love. it is only as the infant moves towards a tolerance of knowing that good and bad 'things' and experiences are bound up in the same person (that is, both (m)other and self) that guilt arises as an awareness that we have tried to destroy what we also love. whilst this can overwhelm the infant with depressive anxiety that also needs to be warded off, there is a chance that this guilt can be borne and a temporary state of ambivalence can be achieved that includes the desire to make good the damage done. 'unfurling', then, arises out of the capacity to tolerate the proximity of love and hate towards the mother, but the mother also needs to tolerate the time this takes -to be prepared to go back 'again and again' to the site of mattering without becoming too overwhelmed or rejecting. it is here that futurity emerges, not as that which is carried forward by the child but as this element within the death drive that i am naming as maternal, which is a capacity to tolerate repetition within the present. to return to a lacanian formulation, chenyang wang (2019) , in his work on differentiating real, imaginary and symbolic time in lacan, shows how lacan's death drive is not so much the reinsertion of the bodily or biological into the human subject but the traumatic intrusion of the symbolic into the organism at the expense of the imaginary, which evokes the real body. wang describes how what he calls the 'real future' (p. 69) does not involve the human subject. where the ego may continue to imagine a future of fulfilled wishes, hopes and expectations, in which the present is characterized as a mode of 'waiting' until the future unfolds, the death drive in fact interrupts the fantasy of the future as something unreachable or unattainable and instead returns the future to the subject as something that has already structured it. for wang, real time opens the subject to the real present that is neither instantaneous or immediate but the freedom of returning to the same place in one's own way. he sees this as the offer of the possibility of freedom that transcends the isolated, egoic individual, otherwise trapped in its established temporal order (p. 79). we could say, then, that the death drive includes rather than negates developmental time and holds out the possibility of a time that breaks free of the ego's imaginary sense of past, present and future. developmental time, from this perspective, is precisely a suspension of the flow of time, a capacity to wait for the other to unfold. maternity, in its failure to be indifferent to the specificity of its labour, implies a return, again and again, to a scene that matters, a kind of repetition that is not quite captured by the death drive as excessive access to jouissance, nor to the death drive as a deviation towards a unique form of death, but that might after all have something to do with generativity, indeed with freedom, not of the self, but of the other. the return to a scene that matters is not a kind of flowing time (anyone who has spent time with small children will know this) nor the stultifying time of indifferent labour, but living in a suspended or crystalline time, which is the time it takes for mattering to take place. finally, we can link the maternal death drive to elizabeth freeman's (2019) concept of 'chronothanatopolitics' (p. 57) that extends mattering beyond the mother-child relation to the politics of mattering in the contemporary moment. in her discussion of 'playing dead' in 19th century african-american literature, freeman notes that many african-american stories involve 'fictive rebirths'(p. 55). these are stagings of death and rebirth, not just once but multiple times, so that in these stories slaves and their descendants are constantly moving towards and away from death. feigning death, she argues, does not solve the problem of having not been 'born' as human -a position well established within afropessimist thought -but allows an engagement through repetitive staged dying with what jared sexton (2011) has called 'the social life of social death' (quoted in freeman, 2019, p. 55). freeman therefore builds on freud's death drive to develop a concept of 'chronothanatopolitics' in which life is not simply the opposite of death but the opposite of the 'presence' of death (p. 57), a temporary 'disappearing' of death within life, the counterpart to the maternal death drive as life in death. staging one's death again and again, she states, is a way of managing the life/death binary, rather than simply a commitment to life or an acceptance of unchanging black deathliness. where freud's death drive does refuse any simple opposition between life and death, freeman notes, it nevertheless proposes a universal and purely psychic drive. she calls instead for recognition of a socio-political death drive enacted by white supremacy: chronothanatopolitics is the 'production of deathliness and nonbeing by historical forces external to the subjectivity it creates for nonblack people, and forecloses for people of african descent' (p. 55). in the 21st century, we see 'playing dead' resurfacing in the 'die-ins' revived by the protest movement black lives matter. time becomes central, creating what freeman terms 'temporal conjoinments' with death (p. 85) through counting 'i can't breathe' 11 times, as eric garner did. we have seen this repeated in 2020, when protesters hold a silence or take the knee for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the time that george floyd had his neck knelt on by the police officer who killed him on 25 may. 'mattering', in the sense of black life coming to matter, freeman notes, captures the double meaning of coming to importance and becoming-inert substance or matter, giving the phrase an ambivalent valence. mattering refuses the afropessimist insight that black life is structurally foreclosed and instead implies a more open stance towards non-being. by miming death rather than life, black lives matter activists 'commit to an (a)social life within death even as they fight for an end to the annihilation of blackness' (p. 86). here, life in death is the 'social' work of activism that counts the time that is left within black life even as it is extinguished, just as it is the social work of mothering that waits for life to unfurl towards its death without knowing when or how this will take place. miming death, again and again, is analogous to returning to the scene of mattering again and again, the hiatus within the path towards death that i have described as the maternal death drive. however, freeman's work provides the corrective to an easy universalizing of the drive, pointing us towards the way that black lives matter politicizes repetition in the name of life in death. recently i've seen many rumours circulating about me and enormous amounts of hate. (greta thunberg) in the child to come: life after the human catastrophe, rebekah sheldon (2016) charts a recent shift in the use of the child to suture the image of the future. the child, metonymic with the fragility of the planetary system and therefore in need of protection, has become 'the child as resource' (p. 16). as resource, the child is used to carry both expectations and anxieties about the future. unlike earlier iterations, the child as resource is premised on a future that cannot be taken for granted. much of the affect around ecological disasteranxiety, fear, terror, hopelessness, despair, guilt, determination, protectivenesscomes not so much from an awareness of the current effects of global climate change as they play out in the present but from the projected harm to the future that it portends. and the future, sheldon reminds us, is the provenance of the child. sheldon describes the history of this relationship between child and future as emanating from the 19th century at the same point as modern theories of 'life' begin to proliferate in darwin and of course in freud. 'the link forged between the child and the species', she writes, 'helped to shape eugenic historiography, focalized reproduction as a matter of concern for racial nationalism, and made the child a mode of time-keeping' (p. 3). in the face of anxious concerns about the deep biological past of the human species, the child held open a future through a coordination of the trio 'life, reproduction and species' with that of 'race, history and nation'. freud's child, for instance, caught both in the relentless unfolding of developmental time and the timelessness of unconscious life, is also the site of the regulation of 'life' itself. whilst these two axes of temporality (development and timelessness), as we saw above, cross one another, the figure of the child is nevertheless a 'retronaut, a bit of the future lodged in the present ' (p. 4) . yet, at the same time, sheldon's child is already melancholic. it knows its childness can't be preserved; it will be lost; just as the future is felt also to be something constantly slipping away. as a melancholic figure, sheldon suggests that the child as resource has a very specific task right now: to cover over the complex systems at work in biological materiality. as non-human animacy becomes more visible in conditions of planetary crisis, with it comes the terrifying potential (at least for the human world) of nature to slip its bonds. the child stands in for life itself at a time of vibrant and virulent reassertion of materialisms in all their forms. the child's new task, according to sheldon, becomes one of binding nonhuman vibrancy back into the human, into something safer, and into the frame of human reproduction. this perhaps helps us modulate how we might respond to the figure of greta thunberg, the climate activist who describes herself as both 'autistic' and living with asperger's, and to her work as a 'cry for help' (thunberg, 2019, p. 3) . during 2018, when she was 15 years old, thunberg started to skip school to sit outside the swedish parliament with a sign reading 'skolstrejk fö r klimatet' [school strike for climate]. 4 as a result of the school climate change movement that grew around thunberg's 'fridays for future' actions during 2019, there has been an intensive, rapid sanctification of the plain-speaking, white, plaitedhaired child now simply known as 'greta'. although she herself acknowledges that she is not unique and is part of a network of youth movements in the global south who bear the brunt in the present for the effects of climate disaster largely produced by the global north, she has nevertheless become an enormously influential figure through whom climate discussions now pass. some describe her influence as simply the 'greta effect' (watts, 2019) . there is a specific and careful simplicity to the way thunberg talks. in a speech entitled 'almost everything is black and white', she states, 'i have asperger's syndrome, and to me, almost everything is black or white' (thunberg, 2019, p. 7) . utilizing what others may see as a disability, a difficulty in seeing shades of grey, she speaks against the need for more complexity, more reflection, more science; in short, a more 'grown up' approach to climate chaos: 'we already have all the facts and solutions. all we have to do is to wake up and change […] everything needs to change. and it has to start today' (p. 11). it is this rhetorical insistence that there is no more time and that the future of her generation has been stolen by the inaction of the generation that has come before that positions her as not so much future-orientated but backed up against a closing future, looking back towards those who came before her as they continue to gaze ahead towards what they imagine is her future. as she states, 'we children are doing this to wake the adults up. we children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. we children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back' (p. 68). in many ways, we could see thunberg as performing a call, in the name of a human reproductive future, for the binding of nonhuman vibrancy back into the human, into something safe and stable, the child's new task that sheldon describes. we could also make a critical reading of the ways thunberg -as a contemporary incarnation of maisie in henry james ' (1897/1969 ) what maisie knew, where the child-protagonist is sacrificed to save a negligent and damaged society -re-mobilizes a discourse that re-stabilizes the differences between the generations in the name of the reproduction of the white heteronormative social bond. however, i want to read thunberg's 'black and white' thinking as metonymic with my patient's blank and blue: the oscillation between the absorbing blue of the analytic session and the suspended time of nothing happening between the sessions; the time of no-analyst and the agonies of waiting. thunberg (2019) states: 'there are no grey areas when it comes to survival. either we go on as a civilization or we don't. we have to change' (p. 8). in many ways, she refuses 'development' in the sense of klein's depressive position functioning, where blue and blank come to be understood as having a relation to one another, and insists instead on their separation, on what klein would call 'paranoid-schizoid' thinking, in which blue and blank are radically split apart, as a viable place to speak from. indeed, she goes on insisting she is a child and that development is precisely what has got us into so much trouble. she warns us that, from the perspective of blank time (the time of nothing happening), blue time is absorbing for sure, but it is short, cannot last, and time itself needs to urgently come to matter if we are to find a way out of the current predicament. if we want to repair a relationship with monumental time, there is only action or no action, blue or blank, as we have now run out of time. despite the obvious occlusion of the many brown and black children who have protested, spoken out, organized school strikes and presented to the un over the years and gained no coverage, what is striking is that the white child claims that it is her unusual perspective, in which black and white remain separate, that is our only way out. in describing what she calls 'grey time', laura salisbury (in press) reminds us that grey is not, strictly speaking, a colour at all; rather, it is a shade. as such, it is achromatic, composed of black and white in various shades of intensity, rather than hues. moving from colour to time, salisbury claims that grey time can be thought of as similarly a time that contains intensities of affect, naming grey time as 'anachromistic', a form of intensive temporality that belongs to and traverses the perceiving subject and the aesthetic object. to speak of grey time as anachromistic is to evoke an aesthetic experience that is against colour or hue, but, with its echo of anachronism, also produces a slub in the fabric of time as it is usually thought. the double gesture of the term anachromism is the attempt to speak to time's intensity rather than, as is more usual, concentrating on its flow or movement, while trying to capture an atmosphere where there is a weaving or binding in of blank, uncertain, colourless 'colour', and affect into what is felt of time. (emphasis in original) grey time, then, is an intensity of time that moves us beyond the impasse of action and no action, or blue and blank, by acting as a slub or thickening in the oscillation between the two. this thickening, if we follow salisbury, both reveals time's stuck oscillation between black and white at the same point as it acts to bind greyness into what is felt of time. grey inhabits black and white without resolving the oscillation, both intensifying the sense of time's stuckness but also drawing attention to the affect of greyness, of uncertainty. whilst the time for grey thinking, as thunberg states, may have passed, perhaps salisbury's attention to grey time is important. as the existential dangers facing humanity deepen -by mbembe's description, the destruction of the biosphere, the criminalization of resistance and the rise of determinisms, whether genetic, neuronal, biological or environmental -so perhaps greta thunberg's urgency cannot be heard until we bind the blank, uncertain, colourless affect of the grey 'now' into what is felt of time. mbembe (2020) writes of the covid-19 virus: of all these dangers, the greatest is that all forms of life will be rendered impossible. […] at this juncture, this sudden arrest arrives, an interruption not of history but of something that still eludes our grasp. since it was imposed upon us, this cessation derives not from our will. in many respects, it is simultaneously unforeseen and unpredictable. yet what we need is a voluntary cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interruption. without which there will be no tomorrow. without which nothing will exist but an endless series of unforeseen events. (emphasis in original) this is, indeed, grey time -a voluntary cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interruption to business as usual as a response to the profound ó 2020 springer nature limited. 1088-0763 psychoanalysis, culture & society uncertainty that is the reality of the interdependencies of all forms of life. although i know that there is no way for 'couch time' to have an effect without a 'session-time' analyst and a 'between-session-time' analyst eventually coming together in the time that is an analysis, it may be that we have simply run out of time. then a new psychoanalytic temporality may be needed, one that understands the simultaneous need for and suspension of development in the name of really knowing about the death drive; one in which action would no longer be simply understood as acting out but in which the mutative interpretation, the one that brings about change, can be grey, ill-timed, coming too soon and too late, before it is too late. maternal encounters: the ethics of interruption ó 2020 springer nature limited. 1088-0763 psychoanalysis postmaternal, postwork and the maternal death drive. special issue: the postmaternal after the future 1889/1994) time and free will: an essay on the immediate data of consciousness 1896/2004) matter and memory the 1911 schoolchildren strikes when the kids are united introduction: time studies today the force of non-violence the climate of history: four theses no future: queer theory and the death drive past/future time binds: queer temporalities, queer histories. durham and london beside you in time: sense methods and queer sociabilities in the american nineteenth century /1955) three essays on the theory of sexuality /1957) instincts and their vicissitudes /1955) beyond the pleasure principle beyond the pleasure principle /1964) analysis terminable and interminable a queer place and time lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route semiotext(e). invisible committee, the (2014) to our friends the (2017) now. new york: semiotext(e) 1897/1969) what maisie knew the womb of western theory: trauma, time theft and the captive maternal time driven: metapsychology and the splitting of the drive /1975) notes on some schizoid mechanisms /1998) love, guilt and reparation the shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism /1986) women's time chronophobia: on time in the art of the 1960s the future cannot begin: temporal structures in modern society the universal right to breathe. translated by c. shread. critical inquiry white time: the chronic injustice of ideal theory the chronopolitics of racial time introduction to women's time the colonisation of time: ritual, routine and resistance in the british empire you are my death: the shattered temporalities of zombie time matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds grey time: anachromism and waiting for beckett what is maternal labour? the social life of social death: on afro-pessimism and black optimism the child to come: life after the human catastrophe no one is to small to make a difference. london: penguin, random house future shock subjectivity in-between times: exploring the notion of time in lacan's work the greta thunberg effect: at last, mps focus on climate change. the guardian publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. ó 2020 springer nature limited. 1088-0763 psychoanalysis the research in this paper was funded by a wellcome trust collaborative award, 'waiting times', grant number [205400/a/16/z] (see waitingtimes.exeter.ac.uk). data sharing is not applicable as no datasets were generated and/or analysed for this study. (2007) and hedva (2016) . 4. in doing so, she was perhaps unwittingly building on a long history of school strikes, certainly dating back at least 100 years in the uk, in which schoolchildren mobilised against caning in 1889 and later came out on strike as part of a number of localised general strikes in 1911. see bloom (2010 bloom ( , 2011 . key: cord-0043591-xnxbt6t7 authors: mclaren, peter title: religious nationalism and the coronavirus pandemic: soul-sucking evangelicals and branch covidians make america sick again date: 2020-05-19 journal: postdigit sci educ doi: 10.1007/s42438-020-00122-7 sha: 5a8e35fd1cabbfbd17507c671f5c94300fabb873 doc_id: 43591 cord_uid: xnxbt6t7 this article investigates the response to the coronavirus crisis by evangelical christian nationalists in the usa. the article outlines the curious mediaverse of religious nationalism—its post-truth and fake news aspects in particular—links religious nationalism to american exceptionalism, and analyzes conflicts between secular and religious authorities. drawing upon some lessons from the past, the article addresses the wider implications of christian nationalism on american politics, and capitalist ideology, as it has been played out virally in the corporate media. the article shows that the ideological underpinnings of evangelical christianity prevent its proponents from understanding the virus in an historical and materialist manner and points toward more epistemically sound approaches to relationships between science and religion. it concludes that privatization, austerity capitalism, and ‘gig economy’ need to be replaced by socialist alternatives and seeks inspiration in theory and practice of marxism and south american liberation theology. the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. william butler yeats (1921) apoplectic apocalypticism: religious nationalism as virus recently, journalist amanda marcotte (2020) shared a disturbing story: 'a train engineer named eduardo moreno, apparently with great deliberation, derailed the freight train he was manning in southern california, nearly killing occupants of three nearby cars. his target? the usns mercy, a navy medical ship that's been assisting nearby hospitals with covid-19 patients.' the rationale given by the train engineer is enough to cause even the most reserved introvert to spit fire. marcotte elaborates: 'apparently, moreno believes in a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus crisis is a hoax being deployed to cover for a shadowy takeover of the government. ' will sommer (2020) reported on an illinois woman inspired by pro-trump qanon conspiracy theory videos who traveled to new york city armed with more than a dozen knives and who intended to kill former vice president joe biden. she tried to get near to the us navy hospital ship comfort, the hospital ship that was sent to new york city to help with the coronavirus pandemic, but mistook the comfort for the uss intrepid, a 'retired' aircraft carrier. like many qanon believers, she had become obsessed with the comfort, convinced that it's being used to rescue 'mole children' from the clutches of liberal elites who enjoy sodomizing and then cannibalizing young children. some of these same conspiracy theorists believe that children are being held hostage in secret tunnels beneath city streets by liberal democrats to be used in rituals designed to conjure satan. a vigilant trump was apparently onto them in a thrice and is preparing to bring the evil doers to justice. sommer and marcotte's reporting identifies one type of conspiracy theoryfueled insanity-that which has infected the trumpster qanon followers and those who enable them, including (the previously) anti-vaccination crusader, president donald trump. but there is another type of insanity, the one that attempts to separate the rich and the poor and then pretends that such a separation does not exist. trump and the conspiracy theorists belong in this camp, too. the whistle-a-happy-tune-happy-talkkeep talkin'-happy-talk cover up that paints the gross economic inequalities that mark disaster capitalism to be as normal as a spring day with chirping birds has been rent asunder by the coronavirus. amidst the ideological debris being flung about-from both the right and the left-in the daily online philippics against the deep state, what is not being engaged nearly enough, i.e., what needs a wider and more critical expansion of understanding, is the effect that the coronavirus is having on the powerless and the poor throughout the capitalist world. tricontinental: institute for social research warns: madness engulfs the planet. hundreds of millions of people are in lockdown in their homes, millions of people who work in essential jobsor who cannot afford to stay home without state assistancecontinue to go to work, thousands of people lie in intensive-care beds taken care of by tens of thousands of medical professionals and caregivers who face shortages of equipment and time. narrow sections of the human populationthe billionairesbelieve that they can isolate themselves in their enclaves, but the virus knows no borders. (tricontinental 2020) it is clearly recognizable for anyone with the most pedestrian discernment that the poor and powerless in our social order have never been given much consideration by the ruling class politicians and bureaucrats who are supposed to be looking out for the welfare of the collective citizenry. when it comes to the current coronavirus pandemic, italian author francesca melandri writes: 'class will make all the difference. being locked up in a house with a pretty garden is not the same as living in an overcrowded housing project. nor is being able to work from home or seeing your job disappear' (tricontinental 2020) . in this world held captive by coronashock, the working class, the daily wage workers and migrant workers from around the globe who manage to survive being killed by the coronavirus, face the horror of not being able to provide food and shelter for their families-assuming that they already have a place to shelter themselves and their loved ones. some of those who survive will likely end up on the assembly lines of high-tech security companies making ip (internet protocol) cameras-bosch security systems, canon, arecont vision, avigilon-that will help to monitor them once the coronavirus pandemic is curtailed and life goes on. but it will not be life as usual. it will be life in an updated, refurbished postdigital panopticon (jandrić et al. 2018; peters 2020) . during the pandemic, devega (2020) predicts that 'many people will embrace being monitored and tracked. the ability of an authoritarian regime to co-opt that technologysome of which is already in use by google, for exampleis very frightening. ' and in this toxic mix of circumstances-where we are saddled with a president who has claimed that a final us coronavirus death toll of approximately 100,000 to 200,000 people would indicate that his administration has 'done a very good job' (rupar 2020 )-the evangelical community is putting countless numbers of people at risk by refusing to stop holding large church gatherings and refusing to cease its decades long attack on science. in the usa the evangelical community has found a second-tier messiah in the person of donald trump (mclaren and jandrić 2020a). christian nationalism in the age of trump is a religious virus that gives no respite to its hostthe commonweal and its enduring search for spiritual and material prosperity. but trump is no fool when it comes to pleasing his base-he had been cannily throwing them red meat long before his run for president. and as president he is well on the way to defunding planned parenthood and, in the mind of many evangelicals, to bringing about the biblical apocalypse. approximately 40% of american adults are biblical apocalypticists and believe that jesus will, or likely will, return to earth by 2050 (dias 2020) . from the time that the coronavirus crisis first appeared on the shores of god's favorite piece of real estate, it became clear that it is comorbid with christian nationalism; or to put it another way, christian nationalism seems to be a co-occurring condition relative to pandemics that reach the shores of america the beautiful (mclaren and jandrić 2020a). some religious scholars, in fact, are in agreement that there is a two-way relationship between religion and nationalism, a mutual reification and buttressing. as grzymala-busse (2019) explains: [i]n this relationship, religiosity defines the nation-and nationalism reinforces religiosity, leading to unusually high rates of national identification with a given religion and high rates of religiosity itself. this mutual reinforcement characterizes countries where religious participation and religious nationalism are both high, such as the philippines, poland, ireland until the late 1990s, or the united states. (grzymala-busse 2019) and while this is certainly true, we cannot blur the distinction between the sacred dimension of religion and profane sphere of the political nation, which remain separate even when they contradict and/or reinforce each other. i would not want to make the case that christianity is equivalent to the political state in whose wheelhouse trump sits in washington (when he is not bedizened in golf attire swinging the clubs at mar-a-lago). but it is increasingly clear that trump has identified himself with charismatic, pentecostal, and evangelical christianity, largely for political reasons-their practitioners perceive him as a divine instrument of god and are prevalent in key states important for trump's reelection chances. i am largely against religious states in principle, and have said so when speaking in israel, or pakistan, or the west bank (palestine). i have always supported freedom of religion within a secular state apparatus open to a wide range of religious faiths. and i have always defended 'the separation of church and state' (thomas jefferson's phrase) in articulating my understanding of the intent and function of the establishment clause and free exercise clause of the first amendment to the united states constitution which reads: 'congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...' (see mclaren and jandrić 2020b) . ignoring the constitution, those who have helped to manufacture the virus of christian nationalism boast no need of critical sobriety and less need for metropolitan intellectuals with their incessant insistence on finding new ways to clamp down on what they see as the necessary separation of church and state. christian nationalism is a sickness that poisons every ethico-political reservoir of hope and possibility with a fatal hubris. for decades, the messages of prosperity preachers have hollowed into my mind, sometimes in the form of a revolving worm announced by a roll of thundering apocalyptic prose and on other occasions like a flaming corpse decamped from the grave of undiscovered history. and in my most paranoid moments, they take the shape of unclean spirits shooting like roman candles from some pungent, weed-strewn sepulcher right out of buffy the vampire slayer. on the surface christian nationalism may seem about as dangerous as the skeletons that spring from the crypt at spook-a-rama, courtesy of deno's wonder wheel amusement park on coney island. but that would be a serious miscalculation. what cannot be denied is that christian nationalism in the age of trump and his disaster capitalism cabinet stalks the halls of the white house and the nation's airwaves like marx and engels' hobgoblin rudely awakened from the depths of oblivion. former evangelical frank schaeffer states: 'we're at a time now when the naked lickspittle enablement of donald trump by his evangelical followers is more horrifying than ever…' (schaeffer in boggioni 2020a). he goes on to say: 'when we come to this time of covid-19 overtaking our country, a literal life and death issue, we see two things very clearly…. one is the utter moral bankruptcy of this leader who pits himself against governors trying to save their people, and the second is the utter moral bankruptcy of evangelical, the white evangelical voter.' (schaeffer in boggioni 2020a) after being placed in charge of the coronavirus crisis, the first action undertaken by mike pence was to form a prayer circle with evangelical supporters. later, the state of oklahoma held a statewide prayer day where megachurch pastors from all over the state appeared with gov. kevin stitt (r-ok) to try and pray away the coronavirus. and, of course, prayer circles popped up all over the country. that would not be so bad if these titans of christian power were not part of a long tradition that was infamously anti-science. rational-and religious-minded citizens as well as atheists (and i count myself as among the former group) have no immunity to this type of siege, to this type of hobbesian war of all against all; we have no maid of orléans armor of god that can protect us from the battlefield tactics of idolatrous trumplar knights, from this inescapably salty theology creeping up our spine like a winter chill at a nova scotian fishing village, and from this widespread winnowing of reason, this twitterverse phrasemongering pitched from a mar-a-lago golf course caddy shack. the trump cults that operate like impassioned yet enigmatic love functionaries for jesus and the 45th president regularly hand over our future to corporations (which chomsky refers to as 'private tyrannies') (falcone 2015) , a measure tantamount to having a spiritual death wish that will surely lead to self-destructive turmoil, if not a fate more harrowing than even end times prophets can wrench from the moribund secrets hidden within ancient scrolls discovered on episodes of the naked archeologist. the trump cult places in counterpoint the endless sweep of falsehoods about the coronavirus and the turbid, unyielding faith of those who propagate such falsehoods (see peters et al. 2020a, b) . while we lack at present 'a set of evidentiary standards for establishing the empirical existence of religious nationalism that goes beyond the invocation of religious motifs and symbols in politics' (grzymala-busse 2019), it seems reasonable to assert that religious nationalism is alive and well among trump's evangelical christian base-and it's not pretty. according to anna grzymala-busse (2019), religious nationalism, especially in the christian world, 'has shaped the very definition of legitimate citizenship, delineating the nation and privileging some political actors and visions in making public policy, obtaining electoral support, and building states.' religion, as it relates to 'behavior, belief, and belonging,' is extremely ramped up among evangelicals, in terms of 'attending religious services, evangelizing, and taking part in communal religious activities such as bible study or prayer.' according to grzymala-busse (2019): belief is an internalized and personal adherence to the doctrine and to the sacred: the personal level and kind of faith, acceptance of doctrine, and relationship to the deity, the sacred, and religious teachings. belonging, or affiliation, is a much weaker connection: it may simply consist of self-identification or a nominal belonging to a given religion. grzymala-busse (2019) elaborates that 'where nationalism seeks political recognition and sovereignty for the nation, religious nationalism does so for a nation first and foremost defined by religion.' she also points out correctly that 'referents of religion are the sacred and the transcendental: nations are fundamentally mundane and political.' and i fully agree with the observation that '[w]hether religion and nation replace, reconcile with, or reinforce each other, they are conceptually and empirically distinct.' additionally, i would argue that intense activities such as bible study, prayer, proselytizing, participating in religious pilgrimages and peregrinations, contributing to religious publications, and attending religious performances can create the contextually specific conditions of possibility for religious nationalism once the tribal conditions in american politics are met for the creation of a patriotic protestant temperament. and once trump was elected, reshuffled the government, and began to communicate through twitter, the tribal conditions were set in place. twitter for trump is equivalent to the microphone at the lectionary of a church. from here he can dictate the catechism for the day's events. the compatibility and mutual buttressing between the secular state and the evangelical community redound to the trump administration, solidifying his christian base while accentuating the chasm between the illegitimate state and the 'true' religious calling of the country to bring freedom to all nations of the world, whether this includes imposing sanctions or bombing those countries back to the stone age. the hebraic idea of people enjoying a special covenant with god has had an impact on northern irish, afrikaner, and israeli nationalism-and also on us nationalism (grzymala-busse 2019). the narratives of nations as divinely 'chosen people' have merged religious and national identities in these countries, and i would say that trump's moving of the us embassy from tel aviv to jerusalem certainly has secured the gratitude of many israelis and christians who believe that this action brings the world one step closer to armageddon and the coming of the messiah-for christians this would mean that jesus would establish the kingdom of god on earth and 'true' christians who had repented their sins would receive heaven as their reward. the pandemic for some is seen as a 'divine reset.' get ready! the locusts having been swarming in east africa, wildfires have ravaged australia, and the golden trumpet was shaken free from angel moroni's hand on top of the salt lake temple during a recent earthquake (dias 2020) . while it might be that those totemic entities known as sports have displaced religion as the chief factor in human group relationships in the usa, religion is still going strong. just witness how many americans today believe in angels. some reports say 8 in 10 (cbs news 2011). alt-right ethno-nationalist movements are identifying with nordic symbology (just look at the symbols on alt-right shields during their confrontations with antifa). are they seeking historical continuity with the inhabitants of ragnarok? are they seeking the twilight of the gods, where odin and the fenrir wolf will fight each other to the death? and where loki will go against the aesir and fight heimdall to the death. will tyr and the watchdog garm that guards the gates of hel kill each other? stay tuned for a new season of the coronavirus dating game, where participants will compete to find couples who are still alive in new york city. clearly, as grzymala-busse (2019) puts it, '[r]eligious nationalism thus reinforces popular religiosity-and that religiosity becomes a marker of who belongs to the nation and who is a "true" member of the national community.' this statement could not be more apposite than in the usa today given the anti-muslim policies of trump, and the hostility toward migrants, immigrants, and those seeking refugee status as a result of experiencing persecution in their own countries. and of course, there are other attitudes that accompany religious nationalism that are associated with cultural homogeneity and the preservation of national traditions. these include 'natalism, redistribution to members of the religious nation, the preservation of national religious symbols and traditions' (grzymala-busse 2019). in contrast, religious nationalism 'holds little affinity for increased diversity or change in national composition' (grzymala-busse 2019). religious nationalism thus correlates with high levels of hostility toward immigrants and other new groups that dilute the existing national identity (grzymala-busse 2019). and, of course, there is an antipathy toward stem cell research, abortion rights, same-sex marriage, divorce, and other issues that are related to public policy. conflicts between secular and religious authorities reinforce old borders as well as breed new borders, and borders are prone to propagating violence. give me a border, and i will show you an enemy! some evangelical christians who argue that christianity is under attack in the usa have motivated christian militias to prepare for a holy war against the deep state. religion and nation, god-talk and nation-talk, all those contentious and toxic analogues tend over time to genuflect toward conflict-if not outright violence. that is the nature of this virus. is it any wonder that the nrx movement refers to trump as the 'god-emperor' who has the power and will to 'restore order to an immigrant-flooded nation under the thumb of a progressive media-academic complex -"global jewry," in neo-nazi-speak' (o'brien 2020). o'brien writes that: [t]he neoreactionary movement, also known as 'nrx' or 'dark enlightenment,' is a geeky subset of the racist, misogynistic far-right that has festered in silicon valley's libertarian circles for over a decade, especially within the cryptocurrency community. its members revere [peter] thiel, microdose lsd and gussy up totalitarian ideas with a pseudo-intellectualism that creates a moral pretext for them to undermine -'engineer,' they might saydemocracy. (o'brien 2020) and to say that christian nationalism (i would link this to the prosperity gospel ideology which is deeply imbricated in the logic of capitalism, that is, the ruling ideas which marx argued are inextricably braided to the ideas of the ruling class) is plagueinfested would be an insult to the power of the plague. if the prosperity preachers are wincing from criticisms by fellow evangelicals, they certainly know how to hide it as they continue to double down on their convictions. their embrace of trump-who before his presidency rarely ventured into spiritually loaded territory-has been widely documented, and commentaries that have offloaded scathing criticism are not difficult to find. the evangelical community continues to preen itself as the spokesperson for the correct trajectory of today's political christianity and in doing so has proclaimed donald trump as the new christian messiah (mclaren and jandrić 2020a). we've all seen their performances on television or in person-the flair, the fanfare, the bargain basement pageantry, and the carnivalesque world of sensations. have you ever seen a video of paula white speaking in tongues? just watch some old reruns of robert tilton's show, success-n-life, and you might see where she got some of her tonguetwisting blubbering. (personally, i prefer tilton's haut couture glossolalia; he's the donald trump of charismatic prayer language, the king of sanctifying gibberishapologies to pat boone.) mahte ke sodoebo! koda basanda andanda de bosoto! beesee deeeetee labo! hey there bobby lee, and howdy jimbo, have you tried jim bakker's 'silver sol liquid' that he says can diagnose or cure coronavirus illness, you know, covid-19. it's been effective against sars and hiv. wiped them right out! yes, this type of religiously tainted ideological muck is suffused all around us: a chuck e. cheese attempt at creating a rarified air of sanctity, a pantheon of kitsch religious props, and an obsessive overlighting of the preacher on center stage clog dancing to the delicate harmony of a cheyenne frontier days' tie-down rodeo act. the whacky outpourings of the preacher, declaimed before a wildly effusive live audience, are often compelling in their allusive religiosity and emotional spirituality-thank you jesus! praise god!-yet devastating in their theological barrenness, pushing scripture beyond its semantic and semiotic limits. betty, put down that textbook on evolution! i've been telling you since you were in kindergarten that human beings co-existed with dinosaurs and maybe even tamed some of the smaller ones and kept them as pets. didn't you watch the flintstones when you were growing up? no-you were too busy watching that communist mr. rogers! a splashy aestheticism stands in for what we might hope to be the sepulchral depths of an impassioned religious celebration. preaching while enthralled with the sensation of being enthralled-it all boils down to this. we might profitably entertain this preponderance of delusion by asking the following questions: could this spectacle be traced to the hebraic idea of the covenant which is revealed in the narratives of nations as divinely 'chosen people'? could it be tied historically to the advent of 'confessionalization' or the protestant reformation (see grzymala-busse 2019)? could this type of spectacle be a twentieth-century remnant of biblical literalism or the detritus of an arch monasticism so spiritually claustrophobic that it finally led to a mass exodus to the cities? could religious hysteria have slowly trickled down through the ages, only to be rekindled in big tent revivalism and the eventual appearance of the praise-be-to-god-amening-hallelujahing grahams, falwells, robertsons, swaggarts, whites, tiltons, bakkers, and others of this grandstanding, self-serving ilk? could it be that god is having a kayleigh mcenany-type meltdown? or can the spectacle be traced to something more recent? a sloppy metaphysics spun from the lecture halls of liberty university perhaps? an overweening estimation of the power of suggestion? an increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex that can be correlated with inclinations toward social justice, christian morality, aristotelian ethics, and liberation theology as opposed to those with increased gray matter volume in the amygdala (which is part of the limbic system concerned with emotions) that could be associated with alt-right adjacent evangelical christianity and political conservatism? could it be the rise of radio shock jocks such as rush limbaugh, whom president trump honored with the presidential medal of freedom? indeed, the pathological logic and demonic invective of rightwing broadcasters like rush limbaugh could be a contributing factor to the madness that surrounds us (see mclaren and jandrić 2020b) . (don't you feel falwell must be one of limbaugh's dittoheads? can't you just picture jerry falwell jr. in miami, his scarf billowing in the night air as he drives his convertible into the parking lot of his favorite dance club, listening to rush on the radio?) or, simply put, is the lock-step attachment of evangelicals to trump more of a case of just plain hypocrisy on the part of the contemporary evangelical leadership? surely there is much more to the story. and there is. benjamin e. park (2018) writes that during times of national or international crisis, the power of religious rhetoric is a force that can always be counted on historically to focus on and reinvigorate the idea of american nationalism. and in recent years, its singular purpose has been to connect christianity with the republican party, which can be seen in the moral majority's ascension to the national stage in the 1980s and its connection to ronald reagan and the republican party (park 2018) . but we can see explicit religiosity and conservatism reaching back even earlier to the framers of america's federal government: 'though the framers of america's federal government sought a distinction between denominational influence and state powerso much so that evangelical observers critiqued the constitution as a "godless document"-partisans quickly capitalized on the power of religious rhetoric in political debates' (park 2018) . in the age of revolutions, which included both the french revolution and the american revolution, key figures turned to biblical figures for inspiration. according to park (2018) , french philosopher jean-jacques rousseau, for instance, 'looked to moses as the premier example for turning a "national body" into "a political body" that lived together with stability and peace.' in germany, friedrich schlegel 'argued for a symbiotic relationship between religion and politics' (park 2018) . the french revolution caused american leaders to become concerned about the violence into which france descended, promoting 'competing theologies of national belonging' (park 2018) , and causing some politicians to rationalize french anarchy and violence as a result of a lack of religious devotion among its citizens. the french revolution influenced america's concept of exceptionalism and placed christianity at the center of the idea of patriotism (park 2018) . there was fear that the french revolution was a threat to christianity globally. and the influence of writers such as thomas paine became a concern of major significance since he was in favor of banishing religion from society and embracing secularism in its stead and embracing the enlightenment commitment to universal rationalism as a challenge to religious authority and authoritarianism. consequently, park (2018) writes that '[i]n a world of growing secularism, the united states is presented as a last refuge for explicit christian devotion.' and in recent times, burgeoning religious nationalism has 'even made possible one of the unlikeliest of alliances: the loyalty between evangelical ministers and donald trump.' the ideological hieroglyphics directing trump's thinking are not hard decipher, as bob cesca makes clear when he writes: during a presidency that's beyond satire, no one really anticipated that trump's red hat militia would end up being a death cult, but here we are. the cult's warped calculus is basically this: trump will only be re-elected with a prospering economy, but if covid-19 decimates the economy, trump could lose. so we have to save the economy, literally at any cost, even if it means we have to sacrifice older americans (who typically vote republican). (cesca 2020) trump's evangelical base seems to be adhering to their master's logic. and besides, kathaleen wall, a member of the texas state republican executive committee and a candidate for texas' 22nd congressional district, is euphoric that the coronavirus has a silver lining: it's going to save more people than it kills this week-because abortion clinics in the state of texas have been closed (chapman 2020a) . i am certain most of trump's salvation corps would agree. the evangelical community-who are less likely to be seen wearing a protective mask while shopping at the local piggly wiggly than their scientifically minded atheist brethren-has received an upsurge of attention during the coronavirus crisis. journalist catherine stewart disagrees that christian nationalism is equivalent to a religion, since she notes the positive things many evangelicals and other christians are doing with respect to the coronavirus crisis. she prefers to view christian nationalism as a political ideology 'that cloaks itself in religious rhetoric' and as a political movement 'that put trump in power' (cited in chapman 2020b). she writes:´the movement promotes an anti-science culture … that has obviously contributed to our inability collectively to address this crisis in an evidence-based fashion. misinformation is rife in those hyper-conservative and highly politicized religious communities that were all in for trump' (chapman 2020b) . trump has boasted about his effectiveness in mobilizing the country against the coronavirus crisis, but amanda terkel has shown the extent to which trump downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus when it first showed up in the usa. this timeline is worth quoting in full: on feb. 10, he repeatedly predictedat a meeting with governors, at a campaign rally and in a fox business interviewthat the coronavirus would no longer be a problem by april. he then made this claim at least three more times a few days later. 'now, the virus that we're talking about having to doyou know, a lot of people think that goes away in april with the heatas the heat comes in. typically, that will go away in april. we're in great shape though. we have 12 cases -11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.' [feb. 10] 'looks like by april, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.' [feb. 10] 'i really believe they are going to have it under control fairly soon. you know in april, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather. and that's a beautiful date to look forward to.' [feb. 10] 'we think and we hope, based on all signs that the problem goes away in april.' [feb. 13] 'there's a theory that, in april, when it gets warmhistorically, that has been able to kill the virus. so we don't know yet; we're not sure yet.' [feb. 14] 'i think it's going to work out fine. i think when we get into april, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus.' [feb. 14] on feb. 10, there were 12 confirmed cases of covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, in the united states, according to johns hopkins university. now there are nearly 200,000. and on tuesday, the death toll in the u.s. surpassed 3,000, making the virus more deadly than the 9/11 terrorist attacks that reshaped much of american life. who knows how many people will have died as the result of the coronavirus by the time this article sees print? (terkel 2020) trump has referred to the covid-19 as the 'corona flu,' minimizing its potential to wreak lethal havoc on the us population. geriatric populations especially are at major risk. mike davis (2020) reports that the death rate among those over 65 is 23% in italy and 18% in britain. because of the shortage or unavailability of test kits, containment in the usa is virtually impossible, and without testing it is difficult to ascertain the size of the infected population. davis (2020) reminds us that 'this virus is mutating as it courses through populations with different age compositions and acquired immunities.' davis (2020) also points out that`even if the virus remains stable and little mutated, its impact on under-65 age cohorts can differ radically in poor countries and amongst high poverty groups.' davis admonishes journalists and western governments for egregiously ignoring the threat of the coronavirus to the global poor. he warns us that '[t]he only certainty is that rich countries and rich classes will focus on saving themselves to the exclusion of international solidarity and medical aid. walls not vaccines: could there be a more evil template for the future?' the usa was woefully unprepared for previous flu seasons, and its hospitals were unable to cope with those who became stricken as a result of 'profit-driven cutbacks of in-patient capacity' which resulted in a shortage of medical supplies and hospital bed availability. davis notes (2020) that 'er conditions in such institutions are already unable to cope with seasonal infections, so how will they cope with an imminent overload of critical cases?'. already '380,000 nursing home patients die every year from facilities' neglect of basic infection control procedures.' nursing homes are very likely to become 'coronavirus hotspots.' davis (2020) underscores the unwillingness of big pharma to participate in the development of new antibiotics and antivirals, remarking that '[o]f the 18 largest pharmaceutical companies, 15 have totally abandoned the field.' they are more interested in producing profits by churning out tranquilizers, pain killers, and viagra. davis warns that`[a]s the antibiotic revolution is rolled back, old diseases will reappear alongside novel infections and hospitals will become charnel houses.' the role of the`big lie' in germany's wwii persecution of the jews is often attributed to goebbels and the nazis and was used to push long-standing anti-semitism into the unholy precinct of torture, medical mutilation and mass executions. jennifer rubin (cited in burris 2020a) condemns fox news for spreading what amounts to the big lie with respect to appropriate ways of reacting to the coronavirus. she writes: in short, fox newsits anchors, its contributors, its panelists and its guests (e.g., republican elected officials)have spread provably wrong information to its viewers on arguably the most important story in our lifetimes,' said rubin. 'a large percentage of americans who form the trump cult and absorb his misleading information (it's like the flu! plenty of tests!) get their misinformation reinforced by an outlet that seeks as its main goal to support the president. (rubin in burris 2020a) clearly trump is no 1950s' commando cody-type hero, when it comes to a national crisis. commando cody defended us from the radar men from the moon. trump cannot make enough test kits available for the american public. in fact, he has clearly exacerbated the crisis by dint of his initial cavalier attitude toward it. and yet, even the medical experts have waffled on exactly how to fight the virus. at first they said that americans do not need to wear masks; then they changed their minds. kenen and roubein (2020) report: 'the agency said the virus spread through "droplets" from coughs and sneezesbut then warned about catching it from people with no symptoms, or even from surfaces, like subway turnstiles or metal shopping carts. it said young people are at low riskbut the hospital beds and morgues of new york called that into question.' and while confusion has reigned supreme among the trump administration, including its medical teams, what is very clear is that the country should be practicing social distancing and residents should remain in their homes unless they are part of essential services to the community. many trump supporters, however, are flagrantly disregarding the advice of medical experts since they want to show their loyalty to trump by downplaying the crisis. hey, let us go to the beach today, honey, it's a nice sunny day! thanks to the slavish veneration that they afford their man-child master in his war against america, trump's cult followers are more receptive to the idea that the coronavirus should be called the 'china virus.' hey, let us make the virus the fault of china, to deflect blame away from trump's ineptitude in handling the crisis! the alt-right and ethno-nationalist movements are going to be inundated with new applications for membership as a result of trump's racist dog whistle. and all of this is occurring when the number of deaths in the usa has exceeded the us death toll during its invasion of vietnam, when us lawmakers are cashing in on millions of stock transactions, when school districts across the country are preparing to lay off 300,000 teachers, and when gun-toting michigan protestors pack into the statehouse, calling for the governor to be hanged because of her stay-at-home law. and let's not forget the stream of vile comments made by politicians who think it's a fair tradeoff to let the elderly and infirm die in order to preserve the economy (don't they realize that the coronavirus also kills children?). take, for example, comments made by the repugnant antioch planning commission chairman ken turnage ii, who felt compelled to compare the corona virus to a forest fire that burns: old trees, fallen brush and scrub-shrub sucklings' that drain resources, adding that society will 'strengthen' when the pandemic 'is all settled.' 'we would have significant loss of life, we would lose many elderly, that would reduce burdens in our defunct social security system, health care cost (once the wave subsided), make jobs available for others and it would also free up housing in which we are in dire need of,' turnage wrote in the post that has since been deleted. 'we would lose a large portion of the people with immune and other health complications. i know it would be loved ones as well. but that would once again reduce our impact on medical, jobs, and housing.' (prieve 2020) these comments made all the more chilling as they appear delivered in a dispassionate, pragmatic, and businesslike manner, echo aktion t4, the program for involuntary euthanasia in nazi germany, a project of mass murder that took the lives of approximately 300,000 people between 1939 and 1945. the program was based on eugenics theory, racial hygiene, and budgetary concerns. certain people were selected as lebensunwertes leben, 'unworthy of life,' or 'useless eaters' and were killed by lethal injection, gas, or other means. that we have politicians that would so easily condemn america's 'useless eaters' to a suffocating death should serve as a warning that the unthinkable could happen again and this time in a country that brags about its concern for human rights. the herd immunity argument is similar. judith butler writes: because 'the vulnerable' are not deemed productive in the new quasi-aryan community, they are not valued lives, and if they die, that is apparently acceptable, since they are not imagined as productive workers, but 'drains' on the economy. although the herd immunity argument may not make this claim explicitly, it is there (cited in yancy 2020). well, i hope burning away the rotting old brush is worth it to mr. ken turnage ii. maybe he can make another killing on estate auctions. charles sykes (2020) reports that feckless and fancy-free evangelical jerry falwell jr.-who is as subtle about his adoration of trump as the hair and mustache dye on mypillow ceo mike lindell-has held in flagrant disregard the health of his students at his liberty university and, by extension, the health of all those with whom his students will come into physical contact. falwell, who has maintained that the coronavirus was a plot to hurt trump and hinted that it could be a bioweapon created by north korea or china to attack the usa, has acted recklessly and irresponsibly. despite the escalating coronavirus pandemic, several thousands of students and professors returned to liberty university's main campus, while the rest of the nation's campuses were locked down: falwell, who is the president of the conservative christian school, defending his decision by insisting that '99 percent of [students] are not at the age to be at risk and they don't have conditions that put them at risk.' that, of course, is factually untrue: young people are not immune. indeed, last week the centers for disease control and prevention said more than a third of u.s. patients ill enough to be hospitalized were ages 20 to 54. and of course, even young people who do not become seriously sick can pass the disease to others. (sykes 2020; see palma 2020a) s.v. date (2020) reports that trump has been trying to convince the american people that he has been a great wartime president who has done a miraculous job in protecting the country from the coronavirus: 'having sold himself as a great business and military leader despite bankrupt casinos and bone spurs, president donald trump faces his greatest challenge yet: making americans forget the two months he dismissed concerns about a deadly pandemic as a "hoax"'. at the time of this writing, trump's approval ratings are increasing, demonstrating yet again that the american public have fallen victim to the swarmy cult of trump. trump's evangelical followers can continue to bask in his carnivorous glory. an immediate challenge to be reckoned with is the idea that the coronavirus can be cured by prayer or by being implored by a preacher to touch the television screen (very likely close to the commercial break). sky palma writes: one of those people is evangelist kenneth copeland…who visited the white house in 2018 for a dinner trump held with a group of evangelical leaders. earlier this month, copeland went viral for a segment he did on this victory network channel where he asked his viewers to put their hands on their tv screens in order to receive god's divine protection against the coronavirus. 'put your hand on that television set,' copeland said. 'hallelujah. thank you, lord jesus. he received your healing. now say it: "i take it. i have it. it's mine. i thank you and praise you for it."' (palma 2020b) when the catholic church is searching for a miracle to prove sainthood, it is well understood that finding such proof can take years, even decades, of careful investigation, including scientific investigation. do we really expect those desperate for a cure for, say, liver disease to find the holy spirit cascading through the neon, xenon, and argon gases that have miraculously combined into the phosphor gas that makes up the cells of their flat screen television set? or by making such a statement am i admitting to an egregious lack of faith? will my television set suddenly turn on by itself, in the middle of the night, with an urgent message from john the baptist that the second coming is now in progress? since it is unlikely that those pastors under 60 have ever frequented pavilions for pulmonary patients (my father died slowly and painfully of emphysema, and hacking coughs and mounds of bloody mucous were a steady fixture of my childhood and adolescence), they may feel that they have been granted divine immunity by the holy spirit. or, should they contract the disease and survive, they can then make the boastful claim that their daily baptism in the word of god protected them from a painful death. by calling for church services to continue, they willingly subject themselves and the hundreds or thousands who pack their churches to the virus, and this is true even if they hold their church services outdoors. do pastors think outdoor winds do not carry christian spittle? even if that spittle is born again? reverend tony spell, who defied an order from louisiana governor john bel edwards against large gatherings in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, because the good reverend spell believes the handling of the coronavirus pandemic is 'politically motivated,' was charged on six misdemeanor counts for his actions, but, hallelujah, he is going to be advised in court by alabama's infamous judge roy moore (even though moore is not licensed to practice law in louisiana). moore believes that charging rev. spell is a violation of the acknowledgment that god is sovereign in america (gstalter 2020) . and even though he has been charged, reverend spell is back at it again, intent on holding more services at his life tabernacle megachurch in baton rouge, with the justification that jesus is a physician: …people's hope is in the house of god…if they do contract the virus, if they have fears of the virus, the church is more essential now than ever to pray with people, to let them know there is a physician in jesus christ. he is the healer; come under you all that are weary and heavy-laden, let me give you rest. we were supposed to be at a million and a half body bags and we're at 4,800 so the narrative is false. (spell in boggioni 2020b) reverend spell claims to believe the science surrounding covid-19 but then argues, astonishingly, that because he heard that some people are infected with the virus and recover without even being aware they had the virus, this somehow justifies putting his parishioners (and those with whom they may come into contact) at serious risk. for the good reverend, spiritual healing supersedes medical safety precautions. he also claims that his services are preventing incidents of domestic violence, suicide, and starvation (spell in boggioni 2020b). in fact, rev. death wish let-me-be-remembered-as-a-martyr-spell is advocating religious fanaticism, calling for christians literally to die from the coronavirus in the name of religious freedom. he proclaimed that those who 'prefer tyranny over freedom do not deserve freedom.' he also said that 'the bible teaches us to be absent from our bodies so we can be present with the lord. … so like any revolutionary, or like any zealot, or like any pure religious person, death looks to them like a welcomed friend' (palma 2020c) . does this sound to you a bit like a christianized version of the´heaven's gate' cult, whose leaders preached that suicide would allow them to exit their bodily 'containers' in order to enter an alien spacecraft hidden behind the hale-bopp comet? a nightmare scenario: aaron bundy joins rev. spell in a waco-like standoff. this is an attack of the branch covidians. other megachurch pastors are intent on flouting social distancing guidelines during palm sunday and easter. kelly burton, a pastor at lone star baptist church in lone star, texas, wrote: 'satan's trying to keep us apart, he's trying to keep us from worshipping together. but we're not going to let him win' (barone 2020) . fundamentalist christians, as a spiritual tribe, frequently rally around the idea that they are being persecuted. remember how indignant christian evangelicals felt about being´persecuted' by the vile, evil, satanic greeting of 'happy holidays' because they felt it was an attack on´merry christmas' and christianity in general? fox news played this 'persecution' to the hilt. trump bragged to a conservative student group, turning point usa, that he had given the right to speak the words 'merry christmas' back to americans after it was falsely claimed that the white house's 'national christmas tree' was renamed the 'holiday tree' under president obama. does anyone remember when, in 2003, france criticized the us plan to invade iraq and elected officials in the us house of representatives decided to rename french fries 'freedom fries'? fortunately, i'm not ancient enough to recall when, during world war i, sauerkraut was renamed 'liberty cabbage' and german measles became known as 'liberty measles.' if evangelical christians want to understand religious persecution in a more serious vein, they can certainly find valid examples of the persecution of christians-where those faithful to their beliefs have been exiled, or tortured, or burned alive at the stake. but the idea that christians are being persecuted for having to hold their church services online-as most college professors have been required to do with teaching their classes during this pandemic-is stretching the notion of persecution to absurd proportions (mclaren 2020). but this christian persecution complex does serve a purpose. evangelical congregations can now identify as martyrs-with those christians thrown to the lions in ancient rome by emperor nero. but, seriously, we are talking here about throwing christians to their laptops so that they are forced to watch their pastors speak in tongues on their computer screens. how traumatizing is that? have the faithful forgotten that you can now be healed by touching a tv screen while a church service is in progress? and i'm sure god would not discriminate against computer screens. just ask evangelical preacher kenneth copeland. haven't these evangelicals heard of cybertemples and churches, and online prayer chapels in networked environments that can be customized to any religious belief system? yes, be wary of technology but do not be too fearful that watching a church service in lieu of the real thing is the digital equivalent to being a loser. (is there anything worse in trumpworld than not winning?) the public release of the apple iphone was regarded as the 'jesus phone' when it first came out in 2007. and then for those with more conservative inclinations, there is the flip-phone, sometimes called the 'kosher phone,' that has no internet to tempt the user into entering the world of sin-the original model being the lg vx5500, which was released in 2008. ammon bundy of the malheur militia (who once led an armed takeover of a wildlife refuge in oregon) has encouraged idaho residents to defy the social distancing orders. at a public meeting, he told the audience that the coronavirus is a 'relatively low-risk situation' and added that 'if nine out of 10 people were dying, it still does not justify the taking of rights' (humphrey 2020) . bundy warned that he was willing to use weapons to 'defend' the rights of businesses to remain open during the pandemic (humphrey 2020) . and you can be sure that white supremacist militia members all over the country are all on board with this sentiment. perhaps they frequent the same shooting ranges as their fellow evangelicals where they can share information on the best firearms to have during a pandemic. hey you rookies, avoid the five-shot snubnose, j-frame, revolvers. they have heavier trigger pulls and a shorter sight radius and lack the accuracy of revolvers with larger frames. get your asses in gear on this, okay? pandemic preppers arm up! already lawmakers in michigan are wearing bulletproof vests to the statehouse to protect themselves from duck dynasty lookalikes carrying assault rifles. you've got them running scared bobby lee! ever since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, i've been telling you that the day will come when you need to soak the flag of freedom in the blood of tyrants! hey bubba, why not use your $1,200 cash payment to invest in an ar-15 with a scope? (in the meantime most of the money in the government's 'economic stabilization plan' will be used by the federal reserve to buy up u.s. treasury and other bonds in order to prevent a collapse of the international financial system. and they will be lending money directly to corporations-a frightening prospect!) but of course, all of this drama around putting people at risk of the coronavirus is supposedly for the benefit of the younger generation, who will otherwise die (and according to trump, many will die of suicide), should the economy collapse. besides, it's a chance to show that born again christians are not wimps. trump has now tacked to the left in so far as stressing the deadly seriousness of the virus yet immediately afterwards he tacked to the right again, by saying that we need to open the country up again for business (some people are questioning if trump has business ties to the drug hydroxychloroquine or if he's onto something that has escaped the attention of the medical establishment. after all, he's a billionaire, and in his own words, a 'stable genius'). perhaps trump would be willing to attend a service at the river church in tampa where, as burris (2020b) notes, pastor rodney howard-browne 'has denounced… social distancing claiming that he can cure the coronavirus just like he did with the zika virus (which still exists).' howard-browne 'promised his flock that he would never close the church, regardless of what scientists and doctors say' (burris 2020b) . howard-browne is insistent that he has a cure for the covid-19: we are not stopping anything. i've got news for you, this church will never close. the only time the church will close is when the rapture is taking place…. we brought in 13 machines that basically kill every virus in the place, and uh, if somebody walks through the door it's like, it kills everything on them. if they sneeze, it shoots it down at like 100 mph. it'll neutralize it in split seconds. we have the most sterile building in, i don't know, all of america. (burris 2020b) amen! so let me ask this: if the evangelical leaders are so sure that their faith will protect them, will they volunteer to be the last ones to receive the vaccine when it is available? if we learn one thing from this pandemic, it is that the us health care system, ripped to shreds by tax breaks for the rich, privatization, austerity capitalism, and the rise of the 'gig economy,' needs to be replaced by socialized medicine. the whole country needs socialism-and if people cannot see this, then it just shows how powerful a hegemon the media industrial complex is, as it continues to create the 'necessary illusions' that so far have worked effectively in keeping the american people from mounting a popular ground-level challenge to the overall capitalist system. here the media serve as a self-replicating filibustering mechanism that keeps the public in a state of endless debate over whether or not there are viable alternatives to the current capitalist system, creating a pendulum of inertia at both ends of the argument. it appears that many christian nationalists formulate the pandemic in a way that metaphysically juxtaposes nature to history, producing a manichean duality of good versus evil, a social universe overpopulated by metaphysical reflections of a mystified world. they understand the pandemic not as historically mediated by circumstances engendered in a world that is both real and law-governed-i.e., as in the chronic tendency of capitalism toward overproduction-and that can be explained dialectical analysis, but as trapped within a chamber pot history in which the laws of nature remain static, timeless, and stagnant. in this way, the virus can be interpreted as an indication of god's wrath against those who support abortion or who are homosexual and those in the deep state who are working to undermine trump and setting up cannibal-pedophile rings underneath dingy strip mall pizza joints. an attachment to this type of paranoid ideology clearly is preventing evangelical christians from understanding the virus in an historical and materialist mannerfrom the vantage point of a deep realism-and thus promoting relief from spiritual constipation. does not the basis of the spiritual reside in the material-in flesh, blood, and brain? i'm not taking a physicalist position here-since i think it is very likely that consciousness exists beyond the material and is mediated, that is, refracted (not reflected) in, along, and through the brain. what i am saying is that evangelicals appear in many cases to have adopted a creed of thought that antiseptically separates the general from the particular and the universal from the specific and conceives of dichotomies (i.e., fact versus value) from an abstract and metaphysical perspective. but binary oppositions-let us say male and female, black and white, and up and down-are not oppositions only in a metaphysical or idealistic sense, but in the real world of scarcity, they exist as 'distinctions' trapped within dependent hierarchies. capitalism constrains labor, whiteness constrains blackness, maleness constrains femaleness, and so on-via capitalism's institutionalized structures and their normalizing functions attached to racism, sexism, division of labor, judicial system, etc. we must wake up to the fact that we make ourselves (our self and social formation) in accordance with wider laws of nature. and in so doing, we are dependent upon laws of necessity. external nature imposes necessity upon human beings. but there is, after all, absolute necessity and contingent necessity. necessity is absolute only in relation to the needs of society, which are historically specific. we live in a capitalist society, and we necessarily have to sell our labor power for a wage unless we own the means of production. in other words, needs are contextually specific; they are contingent upon the situation at hand (i.e., mode of production, geopolitics, existential challenges). so that contingency and necessity have to be understood dialectically, not as 'either/or' but as 'both/and.' all things are relative to the necessity that produces them. yet evangelical preachers declaim messianically that humankind is universally born of the spirit and propagate the falsehood that contingent phenomena such as the coronavirus are in reality divine plagues cast upon humankind for the sin of homosexuality, abortion, fornication, political correctness, and multiculturalism. in this way, for evangelicals, faith in the transcendent supernatural power of jesus must supersede science. humans are perceived as powerless if they decline to pray to the god of prosperity. here science is glibly supplanted by a metaphysical abstraction. but prayer should not be done in the spirit of helplessness. we cannot pray and then abdicate our responsibility for achieving what we are praying for because we are denying the difficult work ahead in saving the country from covid-19. prayer can serve as a smokescreen that hides the class struggle and the socialist structures that are necessary to create a world prepared for disasters such as the coronavirus pandemic. i am not denigrating the power of prayer here since i endorse the following statements of the galileo commission: 1. no human intellectual activity, including science, can escape the fact that it has to make assumptions that cannot be proven using its own methodology (i.e., absolute presuppositions). 2. the prevalent underlying assumptions, or world model, of the majority of modern scientists are narrowly naturalist in metaphysics, materialist in ontology, and reductionist-empiricist in methodology. 3. this results in the belief that consciousness is nothing but a consequence of complex arrangement of matter, or an emergent phenomenon of brain activity. 4. this belief is neither proven, nor warranted. 5. in fact, there are well-documented empirical phenomena that contradict this belief (galileo commission 2020). this is not an argument against materialism; as a bona fide, teslified, ecopedagogicalized social scientist, i rely on materialist analysis, but i can affirm that there are reasons to move beyond materialist explanations for understanding and appreciating certain phenomena. this is not prophecy television gobbledygook speech. i remain committed to an historical materialist analysis of capitalism and still, at the same time, consider it possible that prayer may have some effects that cannot be explained by traditional paradigms of science (see mclaren and jandrić 2020b). but during a pandemic, prayer should not be a substitute for medical research. and prayer circles cannot replace medical treatment. and religious bullshit cannot take the place of rational adjudication and dialectical reasoning. paula, jerry, and franklin, are you listening? you might want to order some books on liberation theology or join a paulo freire or thomas merton reading group. i'm sure they will encourage you to pull up a chair. attend a sunday service by dr. william j. barber, ii, co-chair of the poor people's campaign. you can still accept jesus as your lord and savior without at the same time blaming the filthy commies from waging a war against christianity through their advocacy of multiculturalism, feminism, lgbtq rights, bilingual education, and democratic socialism. well, the list goes on. liberation theology advocates a preferential option for the poor and its exponents and practitioners have stood beside peasant resistance movements in latin america, even as us trained and sponsored death squads of the salvadorean military and police forces assassinated many of their leaders, including six jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter in 1979 in their residence on the campus of the jesuit central american university (uca) in san salvador, el salvador. the death squads also participated in the assassination of archbishop óscar arnulfo romero, the 'voice of those without voice,' who was gunned down saying mass at hospital de la divina providencia, a catholic hospital specializing in oncology and care for the terminally ill. liberation theology has learned from the writings of karl marx without abandoning the teachings of jesus, teachings which condemn differentiating wealth-the egregious reality that some people are rich at the expense of others who are poor. you can learn, too. check your local library. better still, visit some base communities in america latina. defiant pastors vow to host palm sunday mass during coronavirus pandemic ex-evangelical rains hellfire on 'moronic monster' trump for becoming the 'pro-death' president. rawstory, 29 march louisiana pastor grilled on cnn for plan to pack 27 buses full of worshipers and haul them to church during covid-19 crisis. rawstory conservative columnist shreds fox news for dangerously misinforming america on coronavirus florida residents pack into megachurch after pastor promises cure for coronavirus. rawstory, 29 march poll: nearly 8 in 10 americans believe in angels. 23 december trump's gruesome new pandemic pivot would be ludicrous -if his followers weren't so ready to swallow the poison. rawstory, 31 march texas republican says coronavirus is saving more lives than it's killing because it shut down abortion clinics. rawstory, 24 march here's how christian nationalists have shaped the federal government's response to coronavirus. rawstory, 2april trump's coronavirus claim is his biggest lie yet -and it could be working. rawstory, 31 march the monster is finally at the door brace for 'an authoritarian nightmare' as trump's coronavirus response is proven to be a spectacular failure the apocalypse as an 'unveiling': what religion teaches us about the end times. the new york times creating the horror chambers: an interview with noam chomsky galileo commission. (2020). galileo commission report donald trump blasts nfl anthem protesters: 'get that son of a bitch off the field'. the guardian religious nationalism and religious influence roy moore to advise louisiana pastor arrested for allegedly defying ban on large gatherings. the hill malheur militia's ammon bundy defies covid-19 social distancing orders. blogtown: portland mercury /malheur-militias-ammon-bundy-defies-covid-19-social-distancing-orders postdigital science and education why america is scared and confused: even the experts are getting it wrong. politico, 31 march trump's tribe of wacko supporters have spiraled out of control -and now they're a major threat to public health and safety. rawstory networked religion: metaphysical redemption or eternal regret? postdigital science and education the fellowship of the crooked cross: trump's evangelical hounds of hell postdigital dialogues on critical pedagogy, liberation theology and information technology the far-right helped create the world's most powerful facial recognition technology trump urges michigan's whitmer to strike a deal with anti-quarantine protesters trump haunted by his evangelical supporters' science denial as he confronts the coronavirus crisis. rawstory trump-loving pastors are telling their followers they can physically heal coronavirus with the power of prayer. rawstory death is a welcomed friend': pastor calls on christians to defy coronavirus lockdowneven if it kills them. rawstory the revolutionary roots of america's religious nationalism. religion & politics philosophy and pandemic in the postdigital era: foucault, agamben, žižek. postdigital science and education a viral theory of post-truth. educational philosophy and theory viral modernity? epidemics, infodemics, and the 'bioinformational' paradigm. educational philosophy and theory east bay politician under fire for saying let coronavirus kill the elderly, weak and homeless trump says 200,000 americans could die from coronavirus, because he's done´a very good job'. vox a qanon devotee live-streamed her trip to n.y. to take out joe biden. the daily beast trump's coronavirus quarantine rhetoric fuels a dangerously politicized pandemic trump said coronavirus would 'miraculously' be gone by april. well, it's april. huffington post donald trump: 'i could shoot somebody and i wouldn't lose any voters these migrant workers did not suddenly fall from the sky: the fourteenth newsletter judith butler: mourning is a political act amid the pandemic and its disparities michael robartes and the dancer critique of capitalism h i cu el j v/w^w the social question— v critique of capitalism by dom virgil michel, o.s.b., ph.d. st. john*s abbey, collegeville, minn. 1936 wanderer printing co. st. paul, minn. h q 13 alt rights reserved impvimi potest: alcuin deutsch, o.s.b., abbot nihil obstat: alexius hoffmann, o.s.b., cens. dep. imprimatur .* joseph f. busch, bishop of st. cloud may 16, 1935 the social question series five critique of capitalism by dom virgil michel, o.s.b., ph.d. st. john's abbey, collegeville, minn. our sunday visitor library huntington, indiana 1936 wanderer printing company—st. paul, minnesota contents page l critique of social systems 5 2 . supremacy of the money power 9 3. breakdown of social solidarity 14 4. capitalistic economy defeats itself 19 5. profit versus social service 24 6. inhuman versus human relations 29 7. mechanization of the workingman 34 8. suppression of personality 39 9. business becomes a great gamble 44 deatwo 1. critique of social systems it is not a matter of giving information when one states today that the critics of capitalism are divided into two divergent camps. on the one hand are those who attack capitalism with full force and refuse to give it any quarter. in their minds capitalism is "all wrong" and the sooner it is overthrown the better for all mankind. on the other hand there are those who still have all their hopes for the "good life" pinned on some form of capitalism. these usually acknowledge that many abuses have occurred in our day of dominant capitalism, but they consider these abuses as not inherently connected with the system as such. the second class of critics says that all our capitalistic civilization needs is a bit of doctoring up; while the first class asserts most vigorously that the operation needed to heal us of our social evils is such that the patient cannot survive the ordeal. often the divergence into two camps is called a divergence between those who wish to abolish the profit-system and those who wish to retain it. a critique of capitalism today easily turns out to be a critique of our entire civilization, and any social evils inherent in the latter are then laid at the feet of capitalism. "unfair, entirely 5 unfair,” the opponents of such critics declare, “you are confusing the economic system of capitalism with the philosophy of life that has been dominant in our civilization, and are then finding it child's play to condemn the economic system.” “there is nothing unfair about that,” is the reply: “our economic system has shaped our civilization especially in the last century and a half. the dominant power in our social life, and in our political life as well, has been economic. the philosophy that has influenced our public life has been permeated by the principles of laissez-faire . our whole civilization has been capitalistic, and capitalism must be judged by the condition of our civilization even as the tree is judged by its fruits. in the days before the depression the spokesmen of capitalism were content enough to point to every advantage offered by our civilization as being the result of the capitalistic system.” be that as it may, any economic system is at once a system that has to do with attaining the necessaries as well as the comforts of life and distributing them among men and is at the same time an attitude towards the general meaning of human life, or in other words a philosophy or spiritual attitude towards life. this is true of capitalism; and it is likewise true of any economic system that may be proposed as a substittue for it. socialism, communism, distributism, the medieval economy—all of these 6 deal with the ways and means of making material goods subserve the needs and the enjoyment of man, and all of them have an underlying philosophy of life that has to do with the ultimate meaning of life, its purpose and its true values. our present-day capitalism has not only happened to grow up side by side with the laissezfaire theory which is thoroughly individualistic and which separated economic life from interference on the part of the state; but it has actually grown and developed under the guiding inspiration of this same laissez-faire . it is in fact very doubtful whether capitalism could have developed into what we have today except under the influence of the philosophy of life that is contained in the laissez-faire theory. whether this intimate causal connection is to be denied or not, should become to some extent evidence in the course of a critique of capitalism. such a critique cannot be satisfied with pointing out some undesirable features of our present economic life; it must face the further question: do these arise out of the very nature of capitalism, or are they merely accidental? what are the criteria to be used in thus adjudging an economic system or a theory of economic life? roughly one may mention three points which must come into consideration whenever there is question of evaluating any current or proposed economic system, whether capitalism or socialism, or communism, or any other possible one: 7 (1) how does the system fulfil the general purpose of material goods in regard to mankind? does it help to make these goods subserve the needs of men? how efficient is it in attaining the distribution of the necessary goods to all men? (2) what is the relation of the system to family stability and the moral virtues on which rests the stability of the family and of social life in general? does it promote the social relations of men, and foster the spirit of solidarity among human beings? (3) how does it safeguard and promote the individual rights of man: the right to live, to work, to determine one's means oflivelihood, to exercise free choice in the development of one's abilities and personality, to obey the moral law, to worship according to one's conscience, to be a respectable member in the society of men, etc., etc.? these three classes of values go to make up the full life of man here on earth. the first regards the necessary means for the development of the other two, and the last two embrace all that is of value to man here below as an individual and as a social being. an economic system must stand or fall by its attitude on the true values of human existence and by its being a successful means for the attainment of these by 8 2. supremacy of the money power the relations of men living together in society may be determined by two quite contrary attitudes. one of these attitudes is based on tne principle of mutual aid and cooperation between members; and the other is based on ths. principle of mutual competition or combat between members. the one makes for solidarity and a better life for all and is based on justice and charity. the other makes for a universal struggle for existence based on the survival of the most competent, or those who are fittest for such a "battle of all against all.” the struggle for existence based on competition is the general law of animal life—the law of the jungle. it makes for the development and supremacy of power; so that the struggle for existence turns to a struggle for the power to rule by right of might. the union for better life ("united we stand"), based on mutual cooperation, is the general law of reasonable animals, the law of human kind. yet this social cooperation also exists among some animals, who by instinct live together in mutual aid, e.a.. bees and ants. and the animal struggle for existence also exists among men, who thereby lower themselves to the status of brute or dumb animals. 9 ' the individualistic philosophy of modern capitalism is built upon the latter rule: each individual must look out for his own best interests only. this is the law of the jungle applied to human existence and it naturally ends in the supremacy of power, the glorification of might, no matter how subtly that might may exercise its domination, no matter how invisibly that power may work. any struggle for existence among men, based on the law of the jungle, must end either in social chaos or in the absolute monopoly of all conditions of life by those who come out ahead in the struggle and dominate by virtue of power. or the result may be a combination of both. this seems to be true of capitalism today. it has failed in all the criteria which an economic system or a philosophy of life must finally be judged. it has failed in the proper distribution of the necessaries of life, so that we have want and starvation in an age of plenty or of potential superabundance. it has failed in the upholding of a proper scale of human values, and in preserving the dominance and health of the social units that are necessary to the life of man. e.g. f the family. and all this by reason of the successful pursuit of its one goal: the winning out of the few "best men" in the struggle for economic supremacy and control. the influence of economic power on our civilization has ended by being in absolute control of all the channels of life. 10 in the preceding series of articles on the social question some mention was made of the growing monopoly of our economic life by financial capitalism and of the initial opposition on the part of the law to economic interlocking and combining. but the influence of capitalism was stronger than that of law, and the incorporation laws of the different states not only became more and more lax as the struggle continued, but the growing organizations were finally allowed to write almost any clause they wished into their charters. thus "extreme powers not only to operate the business, but also to alter or take away pre-existing rights of stockholders/* established the absolute supremacy of those who held the controls. the whole economic life of the nation was in their hands. "when two hundred such artificial persons [corporations] begin to control the public press, run the strongest lobbies, determine the prices of commodities arbitrarily, close down the factories, crash the stock markets, change the purchasing power of money so that debts become usurious, and in general block the free exchange ind flow of money and credit, and acquire the ownership of eighty per cent of all productive property, then, what liberty is left for the one hundred and twenty million natural persons of this commonwealth? even the stockholders of such corporations are the slaves of their own directors" (john c. rawe, s.j., the american review , february, 1935). 11 this is the logical result of the rationalization of all economic endeavor towards the single goal of profit for profit's sake, or profits for ^ver further investment and larger control. the twentieth century has seen the full triumph of capitalism, and thus constitutes the golden age of its achievement. today no one can doubt any longer that money reigns supreme and dominates everything. it is the triumph of plutocracy. money is today the great international power behind all government. and every phase of our life, economic production, militarism, commerce, amusements, even education, are all definitely subject to and controlled by those who own and loan the money for civilization to carry on. and the control is exercised not for the common good of society or public welfare as such, but for the private emolument of those in power. that much is inherent in the supremacy of the profit motive. the power of money is all the more absolute because it is international in its organization far beyond any such international organization in the political field; because it is impersonal and anonymous, and for that reason almost entirely invincible and irresponsible. since god and mammon cannot be served at the same time, the full outcome of capitalism has meant the domination of mammon in this world over god. no wonder that our civilization shows also the characteristic moral decay 12 of other civilizations that were dominated by those who controlled economic power. when economic power and success is the highest recognized value in any society, then the society must needs lose its hold on the accepted moral values of christianity. what doth it profit any man or all of society if it gain the whole world and lose the life of its soul? '"nowadays, as more than once in the history of the church/' writes pius xi, “we are confronted with a world which in large measure has almost fallen back into paganism." 13 3. breakdown of social solidarity the spirit of individual profit-seeking is one that frankly fosters egoism, especially when it is sponsored in the name of a free-for-all struggle among men who should be cooperating as brothers and should have some care one of the other because of their common membership in the human family. the egoism arising out of our laissez-faire capitalism has indeed shown the characteristic of all true egoism: the desire for domination over their fellowmen by the successful capitalistic supermen. this has been the "success” for which men have striven in bitterest competition. when such an attitude is tied up with the economic pursuit of wealth for the sake of the power that wealth bestows, it must needs leave all spiritual ideals out of account, since they are but hindrances in the attainment of this goal. this is all the easier when the science of economics or of economic activity is professedly separated from principles and ideals of ethics or moral conduct. now the welfare of society, of human brotherhood, depends on the upholding and the pursuit of higher spiritual ideals in life. whatever is immoral and unspiritual must be either suppressed or kept within control of these ideals, 14 else it will tend in its turn to destroy them. under such circumstances could the ruthless pursuit of egoistic material aims have any but a destructive effect on the higher ideals of social life? the history of our times shows an increase of immorality and impiety that at the very least runs parallel with the growth of the dictatorship of plutocracy. one of the consequences of this modern egoism is the isolation and consequent disorganization it effects among men. instead of unifying men unto social cooperation, it pits man against man and class against class, for on this the struggle depends out of which the economic superman rises victorious. hence even in the most democratic of countries we see the ever greater division of men into classes between whom there is nought of the love that should exist between men, and much of the bitterest hate. this is especially true in regard to the two great divisions characterized as capital and labor. “the demand and supply of labor/' says pius xi, “divides men on the labor market into two classes, as into two camps, and the bargaining between these parties transforms this labor market into an arena where the two armies are engaged in combat." another consequence has been the increasing moral anarchy that only helps to increase the disintegration of social units. wherever the principle of every-man-for-himself has taken root, 15 family solidarity has disappeared, and with it the natural nursery grounds for the learning of the principle and the blessings of human brotherhood. there has been less and less of common family life in modern times. often the members of a family hardly get together even for meals. each member is respected as a producer, but unwelcome as a consumer. even the one child is often avoided so that man and wife may spend their time freely away from home. similarly the social solidarity of the community has suffered greatly. on the one hand men and families may be heaped up in close city quarters and remain strangers to one another, even potential enemies. on the other hand the instability of economic security makes for shifting to and fro from place to place, so that the "home town" has no further human meaning than the place of birth. where there is communal solidarity there is human fellowship. the latter has bonds of human sentiment and common ideals. where such fellowship is displaced by the heaping up of unrelated masses, the community of ideals is narrowed down to the will to exist and to enjoy, each one for himself and as much as he can. the same disintegrative spirit has entered into public life. "the intermingling and scandalous confusing of the duties and offices of civil authority and of economics has produced crying evils and has gone so far as to degrade the majesty of the state. the state which should be the 16 supreme arbiter, ruling in kingly fashion far above all party contention, intent only upon justice and the common good, has become instead a slave, bound over to the service of human passion and greed" (quadragesimo anno ) . officials of states have indeed been imbued with the supreme importance of the economic motive in life and have used their official position almost without scruple, it seems, for their own economic advantage. apart from that they have their duty to their constituents. affairs of the nation are decided on the basis of the advantage to regional or local constituencies. officials are intent on "bringing home the bacon" in order to insure their re-election, and this in order to repeat for their constituents, etc., etc. the public life becomes a mirror on a large scale of the struggle between individuals and groups for the material advantages of this life. in such a condition of affairs there is little room for the statesman who tries to visualize the common good, and who puts the latter above the particular good of any section of the whole commonwealth. one of the effects of this growing disintegration of human solidarity is on the one hand the concentration of power and success in the hands of the few, and on the other hand the increasing helplessness, even despair, of the masses. in growing numbers the latter feel the futility of initiative and effort and the emptiness of the "good will" to improve their lot when success 17 cannot be theirs in any event. the final outcome of egoism is sterilization of human hopes and good will. the fundamental right to live, to work, to develop personality, becomes a mockery, so that this birthright of man will readily be sold for the mess of pottage held out as a bait by social demagogues so frequently in human history. 18 4. capitalistic economy defeats itself we sometimes hear men use the phrase “unbridled capitalism/' but the addition of the adjective is superfluous when speaking of presentday economic life. for it is part of the nature of the capitalistic system to be unbridled or unchecked. that lies at the very foundation of laissez-faire . it also follows from the avowed aim of our economic life: production or business for profit. it is this underlying viewpoint that has given its dynamic character to modern capitalism. if the goal of economic activity is profit, what is there to limit this activity except the impossibility of further profit? hence the constant urge for more and greater profits, the constant expansion of industry, its absorption of competitors, etc. it is not without reason that some have spoken of modern combines as giant octopuses spreading their tentacles to embrace the entire globe. it is this spirit of our day that has given us the accepted slogan of always “bigger and better," and the life-aim of our successful business men as not profit-for-a-living but living-forprofit and for the power that accompanies accumulation of wealth. it is this dynamic urge for more profit and the swallowing up of smaller units into the 19 larger in order to avoid the minor crises of competition, some say, that necessarily brings on the severer economic depressions such as we are experiencing today. through constant expansion of business and the credit that goes with it, even the largest concerns become top-heavy. the crest of the wave breaks and the collapse that follows comes on apace. since there is a limit to au things human, critics say, this unlimited forward march with eyes glued only to one thing, more profit, must inevitably end in severe economic crises from which there is no escape in terms of our super-capitalism. in other words, dynamic capitalism logically defeats itself by leading periodically to ever greater depressions. industrial capitalism is of its nature engaged in the manufacture of two kinds of goods: (1) capital goods to be used for production; and (2) consumable goods, to be used or used up in the satisfaction of needs and wants. naturally the success of production of capital goods depends on the successful production of consumable goods. one does not make tools with which to make tools with which to make yet more tools ad infinitum. all production finally depends on the successful marketing and sale of the consumable goods. now much of the profits and high-bracket salaries paid in industry is normally used for further investment, that is, for further expansion of production. and this expanded production in turn depends for its success on the great20 er consumption of goods. but the power to buy consumable goods is made up chiefly of the wages given to the common laborers and of a small part of the incomes in the higher brackets. according to the customary distribution of profits, only a part of the total industrial returns is available or is used for purchase of consumable goods. since expansion of industrial activities means some increase of labor's purchasing power, the inevitable breakdown does not come at once. while production expands consuming power increases somewhat, although the amount of production has also thereby increased still more. the latter keeps at least one step ahead of the former as long as expansion continues. but as soon as production ceases to expand, or the total wages paid by industry ceases to increase, purchasing power lags behind the required amount, the market clutters, the expected profits do not accrue and production is decreased, purchasing power is thereby reduced in a still greater degree, etc., and the depression is on. in the past generations there have been at least two or three conditions that tended to ease up the untoward consequences just mentioned. one of these was our moving western frontier, which was always a land of new opportunity for those who had failed “back east." in regard to europe (and america as well), there were the untapped resources and markets of south america, asia, and africa. and there was also 21 the unsaturated market everywhere in regard to new inventions like the automobile and the radio. but our frontier has long ago sunk down in the pacific and practically all the world has now been exploited wherever it has not itself become industrial and expansionist. these past safetyvalves against depressions no longer exist. while industries expanded, and new lands were tapped, and markets were not yet saturated, all went well, although even then there were periodic checks upon the flow of purchasing power by the increasing use of labor-saving machinery among other things. while foreign investments lasted, there was an outlet for accumulated capital, even if no consuming power was thereby produced at home. to all these conditions of capitalistic success an end had to come by reason of the natural limitations of things if not by reason of increasing jealousies and rivalry. once profits cease to increase according to expectations there is a check on the spirit of enterprise, and the downward movement may take on the proportions and momentum of a giant avalanche. this lies in the very nature of the production -for-profit ideal. "for the capitalist system of productive organization," writes g. d. h. cole, "is based essentially on the incentive of private profit. the capitalist entrepreneur will not and cannot go on producing goods unless he can make a profit by their sale. his market is thereby limited not by the needs of the consumers but by 22 their willingness and ability to pay him a remunerative price. as the prices he can get tend to fall as the supply of goods on the market is increased, the entrepreneur is disposed to retaliate by restricting production in order to keep them up to a remunerative level. but this reacts on his costs, which tend to decrease with larger and to increase with smaller output/' the final result of all this we are only too well aware of today. it is capitalism's vicious circle. 23 5. profit versus social service the term ‘ 'service' ' has become quite a slogan in modern business. the purpose of the latter professedly is to give "service/' yet everyone knows that behind the service is the further purpose and expectation of more profit. the real motto is service for better business, i.e., for better profits. this is inherent in the philosophy of modern capitalism. unfortunately the aim of this philosophy cannot work in two directions, and so it must needs neglect the basic principle, that the purpose of material goods is really servicing of the needs of mankind, at least whenever that purpose clashes with the guiding one of profit. those profits, in turn, which are not needed for subserving the wants of the owner have only one purpose today, that of further investment in profitable economic enterprises. the ultimate purpose of money is the breeding of more money. one of the most powerful incentives for the development of interlocking directorates and of holding companies was that these enabled the capitalist to avoid "social control," i. e., control of business in the interests of the common good. far from being "business for service," it meant increasing power and control in the interests of 24 high-powered owners to the neglect of the good of laborer and consumer, often to their positive harm. regarding holding companies, e. g., bonbright and means have the following to say: '‘recently the holding company has been extensively employed to avoid the social control of banking. here it has been .used to defeat the purpose of state and federal banking laws restricting branch banking. ... in 1926 only a few insignificant banks were controlled by holding companies. by the end of 1929 thirty-eight holding companies controlled over five hundred banks with combined resources of over $8,000,000,000. with one exception these banks were in states not allowing branch banking" (encyclopedia of the social sciences.) the plutocratic corporations, which grew by swallowing up ever more and more independent owners and smaller corporations, have thus gained ever greater control of money and through money of industry. it was estimated in 1931 that one per cent of the banks controlled ninety-nine per cent of financial resources in the united states ( the new republic , oct. 14) . since control is for profit, it means that almost a whole nation is at work for the profit of the small number of those in control. as an example, it should be interesting to quote government statistics that were compiled and issued in a report as early as 1913. three corporations, joined together as affiliates or al25 lies, held 341 directorships in 112 important corporations with total resources of $22,245,000,000. they were distributed as follows: (1) 34 banks and trust companies: $2,679,000,000 resources, being thirteen per cent of all banking resources. (2) 10 insurance companies: $2,293,000,000 resources, being fifty-seven per cent of all insurance resources. (3) 32 railroads: $11,784,000,000 capitalization with 150,000 mileage. (4) 24 industrial and commercial combinations: $3,339,000,000 capitalization. (5) 12 public utility companies: $2,150,000,000 capitalization. if one remembers that control of such holdings means concentration of the profits which arise out of the energies of millions of men scattered over the whole country, the present unequal distribution of wealth becomes quite intelligible. the unequal distribution of wealth between different classes can also be seen from the increase of returns received by each of them, say, from the year 1923 to the beginning of the depression in 1929. if the figure 100 be taken as a basis for the incomes of 1923 then the increase from then to 1929 is as follows: (1) speculative profits increased from 100 to 400.3—an increase of slightly over four hundred per cent in the six years. 26 (2) interest and dividends increased from 100 to 1 77,2. (3) wages increased from 100 to 112.4. still more striking are the figures of the internal revenue bureau for 1933 in comparison with 1932, two of the worst years of the depression. the newspaper headlines reported in large letters that "million dollar income list doubles in year" with the sub-heading "81,000 fewer returns filed by class earning $5,000 or less—three earn 26 million in 1933." while there were twenty individuals that had an income of over a million dollars in 1932 there were forty-six such in 1933. throughout, the number of individuals receiving $25,000 or more income per year had increased from 1932 to 1933; while the number of those that received less than $25,000 per year income had decreased very considerably, and the number of those receiving an income below the limits of taxation in turn increased greatly. even in the depression, with most of the business activity a result of relief money pumped into the social organism by the government, the maldistribution not only continued but grew alarmingly. while the christian tradition has always upheld the right of all men to such a share in the goods of the earth as is required for the needs of life and for freedom from economic worries, our economic system has been functioning on quite a different principle. verily, to him that hath shall be given, and he shall abound; but 27 from him that hath not, also that which he thinketh he hath, shall be taken away. the scriptural passage occurs five times in the course of three gospels. this is not a matter of good or bad will on the part of a few favored individuals. it lies in the very structure of our economic system that the unequal distribution should go on, and should increase with its continuance. there can be no surprise in this if one remembers that the system itself was developed, not under the banner of social service, but under that of maximum profit for those who come out on top in the general struggle. 28 6. inhuman vs. human relations. in former times the transaction of business was generally a human relation between two neighbors or fellows of the same larger community. people bought at stores and shops whose owners and operators they knew at least by name and whom they could approach in person. these owners had to keep on friendly terms with the community and the neighborhood else their business would suffer. today it is generally impossible for the average consumer to get in touch with the person who is ultimately responsible for the business policies of the firm he is buying from. it is today company so-and-so which erects a new establishment and conducts its business. usually the consumer knows only that the business is owned by some company or corporation whose center is far away, and whose board of directors is an intangible impersonal power functioning behind locked doors as far as he is concerned. all the local men connected with the business are only hired on salaries; they are sorry they cannot contribute to this or that neighborhood enterprise, they must obey orders from headquarters, etc. no wonder that this type of gigantic business corporation is ruthless in extermination or amalgamation of smaller 29 independent rivals. human relations no longer come into consideration. this is an accompaniment of the large type of corporation which at first had to fight its way into toleration, then attained legal protection and thereafter grew strong enough to oppose all legislation that was meant to curb its powers in favor of human relations or social weal. "in a society in which petty trade faded gradually before big business/' write hamilton and till, "an easy gradation led from person to corporation and from right to privilege. the rhetoric of democracy provided a plausible verbal disguise for the cause of property; and in the name of freedom of contract the united states supreme court declared invalid many acts of social legislation. ... in a transition as gradual as the course of events which gave it protective coloring, the rights of man were being converted into the immunities of corporations" (encyclopedia of the social sciences ). in an article on "corporations and human liberty," in the american review (feb., 1935), john c. rawe, s.j., points out that the amendment to the constitution which defined more clearly the rights and privileges of human persons was the one used in our law courts to defend the privileges and property rights of corporations. in other words, what was to be a safeguard for the rights of human persons became the bulwark of the immunities 30 and privileges of legal persons. it was this fact that helped to raise mere ownership to a right standing high above other human rights, and that made ownership the outstanding absolute right of our super-capitalistic age. “the legal guarantee of limited liability in case of bankruptcy/' writes father rawe, “and the use of natural rights with judicial approbation have given the incorporated companies a power with respect to ownership which has no parallel in the whole history of property. there is only one kind of ownership which exceeds it in extent and that is state ownership—the illegal ownership assumed unto itself by an irresponsible, tyrannical, communistic state." “no one will accuse our government of tyrannical communistic activities," he goes on, “nor has it ever intended to sell out its citizens and their belongings to any one of several joint stock corporations of its own creation. it is the joint stock corporations who are forcing the sale, a chosen incorporated few who forget that we are human beings and that our government is set up primarily to protect us and not the joint stock corporations from political and economic disasters." if critics of capitalism point to the neglect of human and personal values in our present economic life, this is but a natural result of the general trend we are referring to, and likewise the natural result of the business-for-profit ideal. in such a system consumers do not count except 31 in so far as they actually furnish the purchasing power which keeps the wheels of industry agoing. and labor does not come off a whit better. labor is one of the necessary sources of expense in the conducting of industry, like the raw materials that must be purchased. it is but a commodity like the latter, to be purchased at the lowest possible cost or to be taken into account only insofar as it is indispensable for creating industrial profits. this whole attitude is well expressed in the accepted definitions of contemporary economic science, which aims only at being a mirror of things as they are. two or three examples will suffice for our purposes. they are taken from a much used college text-book on elementary economics in two large volumes. (1) property is "the right to income; that is, the right to the benefits or services of wealth or free persons." note the supremacy of property over all else since it is ownership as such that confers the right to the benefits of wealth and to the services of free persons. (2) "wealth is the source of income, whereas property is the distributor of income" (p. 21). where does labor come in? apparently it is nothing but a cost factor. (3) income is defined as the "benefits or services rendered by wealth or free persons." all of this belongs by right to "property" and so the circle is complete. 32 how different from the christian tradition of the despised middle ages! then property meant the right to the necessaries and the reasonable comforts of life plus the duty of serving the needs and wants of others. human considerations and values came first and the basic rights of men stood high above all others. 33 7. mechanization of the workingman. in an efficient industrial plant production must operate like clockwork. the pace is set by a complicated machinery of which all parts must work together with mechanical precision. the men connected with the machine work are made part and parcel of this dominating mechanism. they must accept the pace set by the machine, start when it starts, and keep up with its speed. the men themselves are divided in their tasks until each one does but a smallest part in endless repetition with all the dull monotony of the drive-shaft of a wheel. in a complex machinery there must be a hundred per cent regimentation; and the workers connected with machine production are made to approximate the machine as closely as possible. between the relation of present man to the machine and of former man to his tools there is an immense difference. the machine like the tool is the product of human development. both tool and machine are extensions of man's organs, but with a difference that is gigantic. the machine may well be called the "iron beast." in a sense the machine separates man even from his own personal nature. man dominates his tools even while he is limited to definite procedures by their use. but the machine dominates 34 man once it has been set in motion. there is something almost demoniac in the machine, say, in a locomotive or an automobile, over against the old-fashioned horse-carriage. an animal is always a living thing; but a machine is lifeless, an immense store-house of mechanical power in which there is something uncanny once the power is unloosed. once it is set a-going, it goes on in spite of all opposition till something breaks. thus the machine has truly separated man from nature; it has segregated the powers of nature from their human elements and constructed a relatively autonomous monster according to whose pace all the world today is made to speed on in a maddening race (cf. peter wust, von der daemonie der modernen technik ) . once set in motion by the dynamic drive of modern capitalism, the machines of industry carry man along in the rushing current of their inhuman momentum. coupled with the gigantic combinations of our economic system, this has produced a modern moloch that swallows all who are its victims either through too abject subservience or through refusal to adore. there is no room left for human elements to have human play, no opening for human affections beyond the initial wonder at the giant creation of man's brain. chesterton has well pointed out that today the average worker really does not know for whom he is working—the personal relation has 35 been abolished by the mechanization of labor. it is now impossible, he goes on, to persuade workers to show love or service to their employers. who are the latter? a minimum requirement for self-respect in a servant is that he knows whom he is serving. the worker should have at least a suspicion whose employee he is in industry. modern capitalistic, monopolistic industry shoves about thousands of men, lays them off, rehires them, regardless of their individuality. they are mere cogs in a machine. millions of workers, moreover, never get to see what they really produce, whom they obey, or who really gets the benefit from their work. we can demand that a soldier give up his life for his country, or that a christian give his life for his faith, but we can demand of no man that he undergo continuous self-denial for an unknown power. the mechanization of human personality has been thus described by one whose soul revolted against the experience: “i write from an intimate knowledge of modern machine industry with its mass production, its speeding up and general soullessness. when i entered industry i found it a nightmare of time-recording clocks which rang with a sharp staccato clang when the card was stamped, and of numbered brass tool checks which impressed upon me that my place in the universe was c702, a contention i instinctively disputed. no one had any individuality at all. the machine took hold of 36 me with its iron fingers and worked me into the shape required. every second had to be accounted for. as i clocked off one job, i clocked on to the next. . . . attention was lavished on the stresses and strains of machinery and metal, but the more delicate mechanism of human nerve and sinews—not to speak of human souls—was ignored” (central-blatt and social justice , november, 1926). with the increasing absorption of smaller business, and the consequent reduction of ever more small owners to mere hired workers, the dethronement of human personality has gone on continuously. ever more and more men are but mechanical or semi-mechanical parts of a huge system that is entirely beyond their control. they exercise no real control over their economic status; they have no power of determination even over their wages. for with the system of distribution in vogue, ownership has the place of priority, and all human elements apart from ownership receive barely enough to keep them alive and sufficiently strong to continue working at the pace set for them. at best they are reduced to the status of domestic animals who are fed to do their share of work and are considered useless beyond that. the average hired worker is at the mercy of the unseen powers for whom he is working. he dares not look ahead too far and face all possibilities else he must see the threat of constant economic insecurity in the offing. he is always 37 more or less in the position of a beggar who must placate those on whom he is dependent. he has the beggar's freedom to accept what is offered him or else to starve. he is a victim of the same system and spirit under which the black slavery of the past centuries developed to its utmost, one can hardly use the word flourished . he is but one of the increasing number of economic dependents that swell the ranks of the white proletariat of our civilization and that have rightly been called economic slaves. has belloc prophesied too well the advent of the servile state? 38 8. suppression of personality. in a preceding series we spoke of human labor as the expression of personality. in its ideal form it is the personal exercise of one’s energies by which the resulting product receives the stamp of one’s own character. to work is then to put the stamp of one’s spirit on matter. this idea held most truly of the exercise of the handicrafts of an earlier day. but it is far from true regarding the large-scale industrial production of our times. where human labor has been completely mechanized, all that savors of personality and all that savors of individual spirit must also be suppressed. work that is in accordance with the dignity of human nature, work that is truly the exercise of human personality, must always be such as to answer to the fundamental traits of the human person. it must contain characteristics that have a natural appeal to human personality. it must give some opportunity for personal pride, some outlet for the creative character of labor, some basis for pleasure or for the sense of personal possession and attachment even when the work must needs be disagreeable in itself; it should be purposive in the sense that its relation to a whole outcome is grasped as a personal relation and a personal contribution. there should 39 be some play for initiative or at least responsibility for the contribution and for the larger whole of which it is a part. in other words, there must somewhere be a basis in the work for personal pride and attachment, loyalty of some kind. else the work will be far from ennobling, will be degrading to all that is best in human nature and personality. all of the aspects of work just mentioned, which combine to make human labor something worthy of the dignity of man, are absent to a maximum degree in the industrial system of today, save for the favored few. the. extreme division of labor has separated the individual from all contact with the whole product in its finished form, even as it has separated the laborer altogether from personal attachment to the tools he works with. in mass production each worker makes only a small part of the whole product, performs only a minimum series of different actions, but repeats these in endless repetition. this makes for a maximum of monotony and dullness in the work instead ofpride and joy. especially where the scientific study of the mechanical contribution of each human movement has been scientifically developed, so that the maximum result can be obtained with a minimum of effort, the mechanization of man is at its utmost peak. of course, this scientific study has been praised for reducing the wasteful expenditure of human energy by individual laborers, but it has also tended more and more to 40 crush out all human elements by reducing spontaneity to nil. and where the laborers are also completely at the mercy of a machinery that sets the pace inexorably, this scientific study has but resulted in the better adaptation of the man to the machine, that is, in speeding up production. what else could one expect where the sole avowed purpose of life is that of maximum result with minimum effort, or maximum profit with least cost. in the article quoted in the preceding number of this series the writer, c702, goes on to say: "but i write unjustly. we were not ignored. on the contrary, a gentleman with a stopwatch frequently stood over a man, timing an operation and calculating how few motions were required to complete a given task. when the time was fixed each worker had to do the job in that time and in that way. ... i cannot complain that we were not studied. but the purpose of the study was the work, not the man. no one dreamt of considering the effect on his wellbeing and development." such labor is depersonalized or dehumanized to the nth degree. the absence of human loyalty and uplifting sentiment during working hours takes the form of an unwholesome repression that looks for excessive relief in the offwork periods. yet it is part of our system that the home is only too often as despiritualized as the factory. there is no living where men are heaped up like animals, without the privacy and 41 the comforts that permit legitimate self-respect to man. the life of the modern large city is to a great extent separated from the bonds and the beauties of nature, of home, of fellowship, and of neighborhood. persons often criticize the modern laborers for the excessive way in which they crave for amusement and excitement away from home and factory. but is the blame all their own? they are but part of the whole mass of humanity of today that is madly trying to escape the ennui of life, desperately trying to escape from what our modern life and its philosophy has made of man. in this escape, too, the laborer again has the greatest disadvantage. when he tries to seek a compensation for the dullness of the day's labor, he must needs have recourse to sensational forms of cheap amusement. and these are themselves capitalistically organized, not for the humanizing purpose of satisfying man's spirit, but for a maximum of material profit. the whole set of conditions surrounding the laborer today must have a profound and depressing psychological effect. the economic insecurity that makes him virtually a beggar with the beggar's freedom to take what is offered or else to starve, the inadequacy of wages when he has work, the de-spiritualizing effect of this work, the involuntary submission to all these, must needs develop a mentality that is skeptical and indifferent to all true human values, if not 42 positively hostile—the easy prey to sympathetic propaganda of any kind. the blame for this does not rest with the laborer. it rests with the system under which black slavery could flourish as never before in the history of mankind, and in which black slavery has ceded to a white proletariat whose lot under economic slavery is often rather worse than better in comparison with its predecessor. is it the advent of a new barbarism? 43 9. business becomes a great gamble. a theory of economics based on the autonomy of economics, that is, on the view that business is its own law and is subject only to its supreme aim of profit, will naturally chafe at all restraint that hinders the attainment of its one goal. the philosophy of laissez-faire made immunity from legal interference a principle, as well as the separation of economics from ethics. where nevertheless there existed legal checks to the accepted ambitions of the economic supermen, the latter used their power and ingenuity to circumvent the law, as happened for example in the development of interlocking directorates. why not, if the whole purpose of life is material gain on the part of those who come out on top in the struggle of all against all? the preferential contracts and preferential price fixings made possible through the powers given by interlocking directorates is only one small item in the list of means and devices fot achieving the accepted end of all life. the competition for economic victory has given rise to a waste of natural resources, a disregard of future generations, that is highly immoral when judged in the light of christian principles regarding the purpose of the things of earth. it has given rise to wholesale falsifica44 tion of goods, flooding the market with cheap, non-durable articles of all kinds; to artificial creation of demand by means of advertising statements that were often as false as they possibly could be. it is not without reason that men have spoken of the moral chaos or moral anarchy of our economic life. as the trend towards concentration of ownership and control increased, it became easier to eliminate smaller and weaker competitors in any business. the outcome has been that competition has to a large extent been eliminated in our economic life and supplanted by monopoly. yet competition was one of the bulwarks of laissezfaire capitalism; it was precisely on this competition that the social benefits of our system were thought to depend. as long as competition continued, it was the consumers, the general public, that would be the beneficiaries. but when competition became unprofitable for those who were coming out on top in the general struggle, competition had to disappear in favor of the more ultimate principle of maximum gain through monopoly. thereby capitalism denied one of its own most basic principles. it was thus that the social purpose and social good of economic life, which was to be attained by all-around competition, was first of all fettered by the chains of "natural economic laws," and then left to die in secret—“spurlos vetschwundenv 9 in place of the erstwhile competition between productive and commercial en45 terprises, came the growing manipulation of markets and money for a quick turnover of profits. responsibility for losses to the public was readily abolished by subservient lawmakers. “the managerial group escaped responsibility to investors; dabbled in securities of their own corporations; and, with a nice appreciation of their own merits, voted to themselves bonuses. in what had gradually come to be positions of trust they disported themselves in the grand tradition of personal ownership. the separation of finance from industry created the absentee proprietor, the speculator and the investment banker. as a result authority was divorced from responsibility, and power was removed far from the sources of knowledge’' (william h. hamilton and irene till) . the era of modern speculation entered in full force. formerly speculation had meant merely the “investment of resources in the effort to create wealth." but now it meant “the buying and selling of commodities, securities or land in the hope of realizing a profit from fluctuations in prices." this is the current type of speculation; it “is primarily competitive and acquisitive. it is only incidentally productive." its purpose is always “to gain a relative advantage at the expense of the rest of the community either by superior knowledge or by superior luck" (article “speculation" in the encyclopedia of the social sciences ) . 46 of course, the general public were let in on this speculative buying of stocks—this was part of the increasing democratization of ownership! but it was also necessary for the captains of speculation, who in that way had always a ready host of helpless victims for their superior knowledge or power. hilaire belloc is often accused of one-sided emphasis in his historical judgments. yet the following pertinent picture of our economic life is by no means farfetched: "it was precisely because men wanted to enjoy rather than to own, because they lost the sense of what is fundamental in man, that they promoted a machinery [system] by which the first great landlord of the 'reformation' rising on the ruins of religion was economically dominant, next the merchant capitalist reached the head of affairs until now more and more the mere gambler or the mere swindler enjoys supreme economic power in our diseased and moribund economic society" ( the church and socialism ) . in this connection father belliot (manuel de sociologie catholique ) speaks of three kinds of social parasites, of which two are socially useless, and one positively harmful: (1) those in need and not working—beggars, tramps, etc. — today we must add the millions of unemployed who are only too willing to work but unable to do so by reason of conditions that are beyond their control. (2) those who do not work, but still are not in need—men of means living on 47 their wealth. (3) those who work, but only to exploit the labor of others—many brokers, speculators of all kinds, promoters boosting new enterprises, usurers, etc. the first two classes, he continues, are burdensome for society in some way or other other; the third is much worse, it is positively dangerous and a menace to the common good. the first two classes are more useless than positively harmful; the third class is positively harmful and not merely useless. the first two classes are idle and inactive, while the third is anything but that. it is very active, but its activity consists in despoiling others, who are the true producers, of a part of their legitimate profits, of the products of their labor and energy. the third class is rightly called that of social bloodsuckers. they are an economic evil and are anti-social in their philosophy as in their life. they constitute the worst aspect of capitalism, the professional speculators and plutocrats. they constantly violate the rule that the product of labor belongs to those who do the work. they are born out of a defective principle of distribution of wealth, and out of a false, nay an immoral, conception of values. 48 by the same author: st. thomas and today comments on the economic views of aquinas. 15c postpaid pamphlets on the social question: i. human rights. 15c postpaid. ii. ownership. 15c postpaid. iii. labor and industry. 15c postpaid. iv. the nature of capitalism. 15c postpaid. v. critique of capitalism. 15c postpaid. vi. ideals of reconstruction. 15c postpaid. vii. reconstruction schemes (in press) . viii. money and the common good (in preparation) . ix. the theory of state (in preparation). the wanderer printing co., 128 east tenth st., st. paul, minnesota “. . . it is a pleasure to commend “der wanderer" and "the wanderer " two publications which are issued within the territory of our archdiocese with our cordial approval. the place which they have gained in the field of catholic journalism is a guarantee of their fitness to be welcomed in every catholic home,*9 john gregory murray, archbishop of st, paul, "the catholics who read "the wanderer 99 regularly will find it a most reliable guide in all religious and social questions that today puzzle so many of our people, i hope and trust that the pastors of our diocese will do all they can to secure readers for your very thorough and thoroughly catholic paper," 4* joseph f. busch, bishop of st, cloud, ", , . all things considered, “the wanderer” is the best weekly that comes to my desk. to me its weekly visit is a real joy." rev. f. x. lasance, cincinnati, o. the wanderer is a modern catholic political and economic review. it presents the informed catholic viewpoint on all matters of public interest. the news of the week is covered in a well rounded-out survey combining the news recorded with editorial comment. there are, in addition, seven columns per week of editorials on the views and trends of the day. a page is devoted to articles of interest to the family; there is a literary page; local news and ecclesiastical news is treated briefly on the last page. in no other catholic publication in america will you find a greater variety of interesting reading and informative matter. you owe it to yourself to investigate the wanderer. for sample copies write to; wanderer printing company 128 east tenth street, st. paul, minn. key: cord-0052178-rsnuvlnt authors: ruth, damian title: indigenous wisdom, capital, technology and education date: 2020-10-31 journal: nz j educ stud doi: 10.1007/s40841-020-00181-1 sha: 64c85ea0c72de819b1fc63f41eed17fb93d5ff74 doc_id: 52178 cord_uid: rsnuvlnt this article contrasts specific aspects of indigenous world views and wisdom on the one hand with specific themes in capitalism, colonisation, corporate interests, technology and education, on the other and argues that there is a fundamental clash of values between them. there is no assumption of a homogenous indigenous wisdom and no claim is made about novel insight into capitalism, colonisation, corporate interests and technology and education. the contribution is in tracing lines of thought in all of them and, by juxtaposing them in the context of a contemporary upsurge in digital/online/blended learning with particular attention to the global techno-corporation, to expose a fundamental clash of values that deserves more thorough scrutiny than it is getting. the paper does not present a linear argument, but rather a woven tapestry of themes. the conclusion is that education would be better served by the insights of indigenous wisdom and a more critical and tempered view of capitalism and technology. when māori hunters returned from the forest with birds they had killed, they gave a portion of the kill to the priests, who, in turn, cooked the birds at a sacred fire. the priests ate a few of them and then prepared a sort of talisman, the mauri, which is the physical embodiment of the forest hau which translates from the te reo as 'spirit,'. this mauri is a gift the priests give back to the forest and which "causes the birds to be abundant. 1 it is estimated that american settlers slaughtered between 30 to 60 million bison in the 19th century. hunters on cross-country trains would shoot bison from their windows, sometimes several at a time. they would then often cut out the tongues and leave the rest of the carcass to rot. 2 this paper explores the clash between a sensibility shaped by indigenous world views on the one hand and capitalist/marketized world views and a technological mindset on the other. it identifies a core of sensibilities among many indigenous peoples without assuming a homogenous indigenous world view and it does not attempt to convey the complexities of indigenous wisdom. it identifies capitalist/marketized world views and relates them to colonisation. it then identifies specific themes in technology, particularly educational technology. the paper does not offer comprehensive or novel insights in these fields. rather the contribution is in tracing lines of thought in all of them and, by juxtaposing them in the context of a contemporary surge in digital/online/blended learning, illuminate a fundamental clash of values that deserves scrutiny. the reader is invited to consider the metaphor of plaiting, or, since i am writing in aotearoa new zealand, rauru, a te reo word, one meaning of which is plaiting strands to form a cord but which has other relevant meanings. there is some urgency to the debate as covid-19 takes its toll and educational institutions in aotearoa new zealand as elsewhere turn to distance and online learning as a kind of saviour. in doing so, some pitfalls of educational technology are being glossed. covid-19 presents an opportunity for the shock troops of capitalism (klein, 2007 (klein, , 2020 from the level of the individual entrepreneur (subramanian, 2020) to the giants of corporate technology (microsoft teams, fb, etc.) . the combination of capitalism, colonial legacies, corporate power and technology create a toxic brew that stands in radical contrast to the need for environmental sustainability and what indigenous wisdom has to offer. the intention here is to refine and advance the arguments about the deleterious effects of education-as-market (ruth 2018) in combination with the critical analysis of māori and technology (marshall 2000) . ruth offers a view of education as gift, a sustainable cyclical process which stands in contrast to the unsustainable extraction of commodity exchange value where education is a commodity and the student a customer. marshall's critique of the introduction of technology as a school subject in new zealand in 1993 invokes heidegger's concept of standing reserve in which everything, including humanity, is turned into an exploitable resource. heidegger's view of the non-neutrality of technology and its exploitative nature resonates with the indigenous view of the interconnectedness of things. the implication of ruth and marshall's positions is that the world of capitaliszed, marketized and technologized education is incommensurate with an indigenous view of education as a process of developing a holistic awareness of being in and part of the world, a sensibility, or worldview, eloquently describe by mason durie, charles royal, carl mika, georgina stewart and others. because the organizational logic of the paper is that of weaving, tapestry or plaiting, rather than a linear sequence of points, i offer at this point an overview. the first strand is indigenous wisdom, with an emphasis on māori epistemology. the second strand is some core features of capitalism. i then return to broader points of indigenous wisdom. this then allows for the consideration of colonisation. the next major strand is technology. we then return again to indigenous epistemology. we are then able to consider capitalism with particular reference to the corporation. this combination is particularly pernicious in terms of education, where the thrall of technology may obscure the extent of marketization and corporatization in education via 'tech giants'. we then move on to the technologized mindset followed by a specific consideration of educational technology. the intent is to develop the case that the summative impact of the world view informed by capital + market + corporation + technology is much greater than its parts, and in its effect, and in contrast to an indigenous perspective, is inimical to the well-being of the earth and all in it. hence throughout the paper the constant references back and forth and across the different strands. it seems appropriate that a paper challenging the dominance of a western mindset that assumes that atomising and disassembling phenomena is an unproblematic and productive way of understanding, and that linear logic is preferable to a circular or spiralling approach, adopts the latter approach. defining 'indigenous' is politicaly fraught. the term has been politically useful, but it tends to 'normalize diverse groups' (mika 2016) so i shall outline characteristics rather than offer a definition, which also better suits the paper's theme. contrasting indigenous and western wisdom can be misleading. bird-hunting māori and bisonhunting settlers were not doing the same thing but nor were the bison-hunting settlers doing what their forebears did. watson (2005, p. 135) in the context of world history points out that "in many cultures, the first few seeds are not sown but thrown down alongside the furrow as an offering to the gods. by the same token, the last few fruits were never taken from the tree, a few tufts of wool were always left on the sheep and the farmer, when drawing water from the well, would always put back a few drops so that it would not dry up". hyde writes in the context of reciprocity and gift. his thinking aligns with sandel's (2007) case against the pursuit of perfection which celebrates the market and technology but ignores the giftedness of life. here lies the clash between a groundedness and mutual recognition endemic to indigenous sensibilities and the everywhere no-place of global neo-liberal capitalism and the disembodied virtual presentation of personhood. wisdom has become an explicit concern in management ( kessler and bailey 2007; kupers and pauleen 2013) which behoves those concerned with management and especially the management of education to emerge from the pit of economic managerialism, raise their sights higher than the current year's budget, and become aware of the culturally specific and dominant norms prevailing in their practice (fitzgibbons and humphries 2011; henry and pene 2001) . let us bear in mind the contrast between the bird hunting of māori in aotearoa/new zealand and the bison hunting of the american settlers. the contrast demonstrates fundamental differences about being in the world, and different understandings about what the world is and how we may know it. some general distinctions may sometimes be made between western science and indigenous knowledge, but they are always problematic. "indigenous knowledge cannot be verified by scientific criteria nor can science be adequately assessed according the tenets of indigenous knowledge. each is built on distinctive philosophy, methodologies and criteria" (durie 2005, p. 1) . furthermore, in making such distinctions, the fundamental debates within and the crituqes of western science (casti 1989 (casti , 2001 are too easily elided. likewise, one may challenge beliefs surrounding indigenous knowledges but although beliefs such as " (a) knowledge can be neatly divided into indigenous versus western worldviews, and these epistemologies are opposite and irreconcilable, (b) indigenous knowledge always supports a view of nature and of social life that is inherently benign and based on an ethic of care, and (c) indigenous knowledge is static and immutable, and when indigenous youth adopt ideas or practice exogenous to the culture they lose their sense of identity" (barca and arenas 2012, p. 5) may be challenged, it is the case that indigenous communities can find common ground on the basis of a human-ecological union with a distinctive environmental ethic (durie 2005, p. 302) . although one may write of indigenous without falling into othering and homogenizing (royal 2004) , the process of othering and homogenizing usually entails epistemic and cultural violence. 'indigenous' is at best "a placeholder for diverse specific traditions that are localised and place based, unlike each other but sharing a philosophical base…" (stewart 2020, p. 39) . the emphasis in many indigenous authors is on the relationship with the environment. more specifically, 'a "formal indigenous culture" is one that is conscious in its relationship with natural world environments' (royal 2004, p. 1, emphasis in the original). the tendency to associate 'indigenous' with a group of people is misleading. it is rather a worldview and set of values. it is "a way of seeing, being, thinking and experiencing the world" (royal 2005, p.6) . in terms of knowledge, it involves internalised knowing, knowing of the head and heart, an understanding, illumination, and wisdom (royal 2005) . at this point we may note the following intersections with capital. in terms of capital, we have reached a point of the market mind. post the 2008 gfc, chang (2010) wrote of 23 things that needed to be said about capitalism. the thrust of his argument is that the neo-liberal ideology of free markets is not capitalism but destroys it. there is no such thing as a free market. debates about free and fair trade are "essentially about moral values and political decisions … it is not something economists with their technical tool kits are particularly well equipped to rule on" (chang 2010, p. 7) . what is required is an assessment of foundational values. chang does not, in his critique of the capitalist system, dismiss the profit motive, but there is an important nuance here. profit-seeking is not greed, and 'the fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. it was the expansion of markets and of market values, into spheres of life where they don't belong… we need to ask whether there are some things money should not buy" (sandel 2012, p. 7) . how to value health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties are, sandel insists, moral and political questions. of course, the environment and education can be capitalized, marketized, financialized, but this does not simply clash with an indigenous world view, it destroys it, along with a concept of education connected to human flourishing. the crux of the issue is the very concept of value, and how we distinguish between creation and extraction, between productive and non-productive activities. in the words of mazzucato (2018) how do we establish the value of everything and analyse making and taking in the global economy. the dominant current world view marked by concepts of capital and market is predicated on fragmentation, alienation and extraction, and given the state of the earth, is manifestly bankrupt. this view contrasts starkly with indigenous knowledge. i have invoked the metaphor of rauru, of plaiting. i am not māori and do not speak te reo, but the little i have learnt so far leads me to appreciate what an intensely contextual and associative language it is. rauru is plaiting but also refers to the umbilical cord. this sense of an interconnected, integrated and ecologically sensitive connection with mother earth and one another is a thread running through chang, sandel and mazzucato's arguments. as noted above, to write of indigenous runs the risk of misleading homogenization. i do not assume sameness, but pointing out certain sensibilities common to indigenous peoples from different parts of the world help to highlight the deficiencies in the capitalist-techno-global mindset. according to viergever (1999, in durie, p. 3) the three distinguishing features of indigenous knowledge are "that it is a product of a dynamic system, it is an integral part of the physical and social environment of communities and it is a collective good the emphasis on the ground, the earth, the environment is repeatedly emphasized in indigenous knowledge relating to "a specific local environment over the long term … settling in and sinking one's roots" (jolly et al. 2011 ). the sense of contextual time as opposed to clock time is noted (verbos et al. 2011) . whereas breaking down into component parts is standard western scientific method, "indigenous knowledge places greater emphasis on the construction of models where multiple strands can be accommodated to make up an interacting whole. understanding comes not so much from an appreciation of component parts as from synthesis into a wider context" (durie 2005, p. 5) . these themes are noted by indigenous intellectuals from different parts of the world. gregory cayete, tewa of new mexico, describes traditional american indian education as an education that "sustained a wholesome life process … that unfolded through mutual, reciprocal relationships between one's social group and the natural world … a communally integrated expression of environmental education. … emphasizing how our lives are truly and profoundly connected to other people and the physical world (1994, pp. 26-27) . senghor (in shutte 1993, pp. 25-26) , on african knowing writes… the negro african does not draw a line between himself and the object; he does not hold it at a distance … his participation is intuitive". in recent decades, especially through east and southern africa, the concept of ubuntu has developed (bhengu 1996; mbigi and maree 1995; boon 1996; qobo and nyathi 2016) . it is a humanistic philosophy expressed through the proverb "a person is a person through other people" and emphasizes the relatedness of all people and of all people with nature. it emphasizes the collective and solidarity, the connection with the land and nature, and a sense of service and stewardship. however, in terms of education, the challenge is substantial. altbach (1982) points out that it is not easy to create 'indigenous' academic models because the institutional patterns and the pedagogical techniques and even the basic structure of knowledge prevalent in universities today are western in origin. they are encoded with a specific logos and anthropos, that hang together (eze 1997, p. 13 ). henry and pene (2001, p. 239 ) also note that "for māori the western university is as problematic as the knowledge it constructs" and they explain how whare wananga which means houses of higher learning have been developed to counter the 'epistemic violence' inflicted by eurocentric epistemologies (seuffert 1997) . i continue to explore indigenous, specifically māori, values below, but this is an appropriate point to note the importance of "a specific local environment over the long term … settling in and sinking one's roots" and the metaphor of rauru. indigeneity is "predominantly a western idea in its essence" (mika 2016) . indigenous peoples have no need to define themselves as indigenous-it only made sense to do so in the face of a coloniser. it was capital seeking resources and markets in 'foreign' lands that created 'indigenous' and supported the cultural complex of fascination with the exotic, along with appreciation, insult, contempt and eventually degradation and exploitation. i return to the matter of epistemic violence and an attention economy below. we now turn to connect the above themes to technology. in the myths of humans getting power and knowledge, warnings, prohibitions and caveats abound. we may enjoy the gifts of technology but should note the violence and loss the gifts entail (burnett et al. 2009 ). furthermore, the impact of a new technology is often quite subtle and slow, but far-reaching. for example, the introduction of the heavy plough in the frankish empire radically reversed the relation between man and nature by making the capacity of a machine, rather than human need the standard of land division. "formerly he had been part of nature; now he became an exploiter of nature" (white 1971, pp. 172-173) . this reversal burgeoned into the scientific method. the controversy over francis bacon's torturing of nature or putting her on the rack, is complex (pesic 1999) and beyond this paper, although there is a point to be made here about the conflation of other with reference to the white male, in which nature and indigenous/brown/black/female are treated as subordinate with man (sic) as scientist is engaged in heroic struggle with nature in which both are tested and purified. it is not a relationship predicated on assumptions of interconnectedness. pesic suggests that bacon's vocation as a lawyer and judge relates to his use of "torture" (or its latin cognates) to denote excessive and wrongful force; he never speaks of experiment expressly as the "torture of nature." in contrast, he uses "vexation" to indicate agitation or disturbance within legitimate limits. we will return to the language of vexation and torture below. despite pesic's defence, the feminist critiques of 'heroic' 'testing' and 'purification' stand. in identifying technique, or technical efficiency, as the key ideological fetish of modern industrialized authoritarian states, marcuse (1941, p. 138 ) defined technology as "a mode of production, as the totality of instruments, devices and contrivances which characterise the machine age [which] is thus at the same time a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behaviour patterns, an instrument for control and domination". in this state "the efficient individual is the one whose performance is an action only insofar as it is the proper reaction to the objective requirements of the apparatus, and his liberty is confined to the selection of the most adequate means for reaching goals which he did not set" (p. 142). rationality is transformed from being a critical force into one of adjustment and compliance. in a technological society, the structure of all human life and its systems of organization reflect the logic of the machine (ellul 1973) . the implications for education are obvious. the point of tertiary education, we are constantly told, is to produce 'work-ready graduates'. given how the economy in most developed/western countries is stacked against the marginalised indigenous (and female) population, being 'work-ready' may provide for individual escape as it promotes the uncritical social reinforcement of disadvantage. we now turn back to some core features of indigenous views, particularly māori world views, before returning to a closer examination of capital and markets. the core māori value of being-in the-world as relational wisdom rests on kaitiakitanga or stewardship through which humans as stewards are endowed with a mandate to use the agency of their mana (spiritual power, authority) to create mauri ora (conscious well-being in a web of reciprocal relationships. in the māori view, a human is born into a relational world as kaitiaki, empowered to be a steward and endowed with obligations. it creates a sense of belonging, a kinship which is an expansive term for a variety of relationships. (spilleret al. 2011a, b, p. 226) . these values exist in dynamic relationship to one another as interlocking parts of a whole system of knowledge and are inseparable from the ongoing context of life itself. the environment itself is a stakeholder. who speaks for the trees? this question is core to indigenous culture and to sustainable development. spiller et al. offer a comparison of 'unwise' and 'wise' organizations in terms of māori wisdom. it is worth expanding on the idea of mana in the light of what has been observed about technology. in the māori worldview, the child arrives with mana, and agency to create mauri ora, a conscious well-being which is the well-spring of sustainability. mana as a concept denotes agency for realizing potential. mana means spiritual power, authority, and sovereignty, drawn from various sources. being a steward endowed with mana requires that a child lives, and grows into an adult, in respectful recognition of their own mana and mana in the world around them. in this view, empathetic relationships are not limited to a parental figure alone but include spiritual, ancestral, environmental, as well as human emotional attachments. these reciprocal relationships of respect appreciate that personal well-being is intimately linked to the well-being of others and the environment. it is an ethic that seeks to uplift and empower others for the common good which is threaded into the fabric of existence (henare 1998, p. 18) . in explaining relational well-being, wealth and an ethic of care in terms of business, spiller et al. (2011a, b) contrast māori values with independent, rational, self-interested, utility maximizing organizations and individuals. their analyses correlate with differences between native american and dominant values in management education tabulated by verbos et al. (2011) . the core of capitalist ideology is the idea of independent, rational, self-interested, utility-maximizing organizations and individuals. management education often deteriorates into a celebration of this ethos and under the influence of neo-liberalism the whole of education becomes predicated upon it and violence becomes more comprehensive than epistemic (berdayes and murphy 2016; choi 2016) . there is an argument in both the marketization and technologization of education that progresses as follows. at some point, it becomes possible to place a market value on something. we can put a price on it-a field of wheat, the machine, a person. we may turn a process or insight into intellectual property. in this way we convert one thing into something else. a person becomes a slave, or a unit of labour, calculable in money. at first there is doubt which may become a hue and cry and the tensions are explicit. but the conceptual process proceeds: it is possible to monetize/ technologize something; it is possible to monetize/technologize almost anything; the monetized/technologized form is what is valued; therefore, if we want to value something, we should monetize/technologize it; there are advantages to monetization/technologization; therefore we should monetize/technologize all possible things so that they can be valued; eventually, only those things which can be monetized/ technologized can and will be valued. the market shall be joined with technology and together they shall govern. the conditions, languages, entities, and values that prove recalcitrant will be relabelled, which will lead to redefinition and possibly eradication. when digitalization, even in the euphemistically and wholesomely labelled 'blended learning' environment meshes with the power of giant technology corporations, the need for vigilance becomes a matter of democratic survival and social justice. the corporation has a profit-seeking logic. as universities become corporatized and technologized there is an exponential impact. we need to appreciate that the technology of computers, virtual lecture theatres, skype, zoom and so on is not the whole picture of technology. the artefacts and the processes we create to use them eventually create their own mindset. when we talk about distance learning, or online courses, we are not simply appending an adjective to an artefact, we are changing what we mean by 'learning' or 'course'. it is an ecological change. likewise, when profit becomes the institutional goal, this goal begins to shape individual actions. fiscal efficiency rather than social benefit begins to shape the intellectual landscape of teachers, lecturers and students. using a machine to efficiently process an investment is not the same as educating a person; the corporatized technologized university (if it still makes sense to call the machine that) does the former. it does not do the latter. klein (2020, p. 38) noting how eric schmidt of google celebrates "the ad hoc home schooling programme that teachers and families across the country had been forced to cobble together during this public health emergency as 'a massive experiment in remote learning'" warns of education, health and society at large saturated with corporate interest. the crux here is intent and this is the brilliant heideggerian insight of kubrick's 2001 space odyssey, when from one second to the next a bone becomes a spaceship. we should not gloss artefact and intent. a bone is a bone until it is used as a weapon; it is not made as such. a nuclear weapons satellite is made as a weapon. that technology may not create intent does not mean that its deployment is neutral (cf marshall on heidegger above). it is always ideological, and the story of technology is not only a story of incremental improvement. it is a story of radical ecological change. the train and rifle were not the cause of settler avarice but they radically facilitated the process of extraction (tongues for the plates of wealthy easterners), destruction and waste. what must be emphasized here is the role of the corporation as "an autonomous technical structure that behaves by a system of logic uniquely well suited to its primary function: to give birth and impetus to profitable new technological forms, and to spread techno-logic around the globe" (mander 1991, p. 120 ). there are, according to mander, eleven inherent rules of corporate behaviour: the profit imperative; the growth imperative; competition and aggression; amorality; hierarchy; quantification, linearity, and segmentation; dehumanisation; exploitation; ephemerality; opposition to nature, and homogenisation, and "to ask corporations to behave otherwise is like asking an army to adopt pacifism. form is content" (p. 137). achbar and abbot (2003) diagnose the corporation as a psychopath. this presumes an identity imbued with intent and thereby brings into question the notion of 'person'. how do we respond in the face of what corporations do? are they simply diseased and therefore requiring treatment? have we reached a point of necessary euthanasia for the common good? corporations are major producers and consumers of technology and the quintessential means of this process is the computer. with this perspective, we could understand better the limits of the computer revolution. "if the triumph of a revolution is to be measured in terms of the social revision it entrained, then there has been no computer revolution" (weizenbaum 1976, p. 32) . postman suggest that if riesman was right in calling the press "the gunpowder of the mind", the computer, "in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind" (postman 1993, p. 116). forty years later, we could say the same of the digital 'revolution' and the inherent criminality of the corporation (tombs and whyte 2015) . foer (2017, p. 55) finds it "chilling to hear [larry page] contemplate how google will some day employ more than one million people … that's not just dominating an industry … it's a statement of google's intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world…" he notes that "facebook is a carefully managed top down system, not a robust public square … a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation" (p. 57). facebook creates the impression it offers choice as it paternalistically nudges users in the direction that thoroughly addicts them. it is a massive deceit. he notes computer scientists' aphorism that describes "how algorithms relentlessly hunt for patterns: they talk about torturing the data until it confesses… data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear … when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organization that runs the machines" (p. 72). the computer scientist torturing the data in order to create algorithms that will in turn control users is baconian par excellence. i now turn back to technology per se for a moment, before turning to technology in education. postman opens his essay on technology with reference to the legend of thamus who challenged the god theuth with his many inventions, one of them being writing. thamus duly assesses the gift and points out that although it may confer advantages, it is not a tool to increase wisdom, but merely a tool for recollection. postman makes the point that "the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it" (postman 1993, p. 4). we should beware of 'zealous theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo" (p. 5). technology changes our language, our words, and then our discourse, and then our thinking. it creates new definitions of old terms and "imperiously commandeers our most important terminology". technology is not an equalising instrument. it confers status and power and the benefits and deficits of a new technology are not distributed equally. "embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another" postman points out (p. 13) and notes that "new technologies alter the structure of our interests; the things we think about. they alter the character of our symbols; the things we think with. and they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop" (p. 20). odell (2019) writes of resisting the attention economy, and refuses "the frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one's career, and individual entrepreneurship [and wishes to celebrate] a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn't always stop at the boundary of the individual" (p. xvi). it means paying attention or concentrating. her focus on attention goes to the heart of education. technology that is episodic and manipulative runs counter to an education that seeks to enable deep sustained awareness and analysis. the attention economy relies on fear and anxiety, with the assumption that disruption is more productive than the work of maintenance. capitalist logic thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction-we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. (p. 25). odell's thinking resonates with the local, rooted, temporal nature of indigenous wisdom. the issue here is "context collapse" which creates a "lowest-commondenominator philosophy of sharing [that] limits users to topics that are safe for all possible readers." (marwick and boyd 2011, p. 126, in odell p. 159) . spatial context collapse (meyrowitz 1986 ) is accompanied by temporal collapse, into what odell describes as "one big "situation," [wherein] instantaneity flattens past, present and future into a constant, amnesiac present. the order of events, so important for understanding anything, gets drowned out by a constant alarm bell" (p. 163). carr (2011) too is worried about what the internet is doing to our brains. like hal at the end of 2001 space odyssey he feels "my mind is going, i can feel it. i can feel it". carr feels that the net is "chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation" (p. 6). print allowed us to become deep readers and ponder meaning. with screen and social media we can still decode text quickly, "but we are no longer guided toward a deep, personally constructed understanding of the texts' connotations. instead we are hurried off toward another bit of related information, and then another and then another. the strip-mining of 'relevant content' replaces the slow excavation of meaning" (p. 166). strip mining captures the essence of the settler/capitalist view of the world. it is non-ecological. in google's world, intelligence is equated with data-processing efficiency, the brain is a big chip in the skull, it can solve vastly complex problems that have never been solved before, but cannot assess what problems are worth solving, and ambiguity is not an opening for insight, but a bug to be fixed. (carr, p. 73) . commenting on the backlash to the shallows carr records that he has dozens of stories from people on how the web "has scattered their attention, parched their memory, or turned them into compulsive nibblers of info snacks". there is a massive deceit at play, whereby acquisition of information masquerades as understanding. technology is a mindset that has a specific production logic (franklin 1990 (franklin /1999 ). the crucial idea in terms of education is the distinction between what franklin calls holistic technologies and prescriptive technologies. the focus is not on what is being done but how it is done. in holistic technologies the doer is also the planner and is in charge of the process and decision-making throughout, whereas prescriptive technologies entail a division of labour designed for compliance. prescriptive technologies are underpinned by a production model. those areas of human activity related to caring, and that require reciprocity, such as education, nursing and all the caring professions, are intensely relational and contextual. we have become so used to production models that although we might accept that students, patients, the frail and the aged cannot be effectively cared for if they are considered as material objects, we continue to design systems as if they are. an important feature of production models that franklin points out is that it is easy to frame the process to allow for externalities to be disregarded. "production models are perceived and constructed without links into a larger context. this allows the use of a particular model in a variety of situations. at the same time such an approach discounts and disregards all effects arising from the impact of the production activity on its surroundings… we know today … that the deterioration of the world's environment arose precisely from such inadequate modelling. processes that are cheap in the marketplace are often wasteful and harmful in the larger context, and production models make it quite easy to consider contextual factors as irrelevant (pp. 20-21). as wtih odell and carr the clash with an indigenous world view is clear. in a world where everything is connected and we are all part of a woven fabric, there are no externalities. environmental feedback is part of what is being done. franklin links this to education. what is disregarded in the production model of education is … "an individual's own conscience and discernment" (p. 37). the development of an individual's conscience and discernment is precisely the goal of education. crucial to education would be presence and reciprocity, which, franklin stresses, is not feedback. "feedback is a particular technique of systems adjustment … [it] exists within a given design. it can improve the performance, but it cannot alter its thrust or the design. reciprocity, on the other hand, is situationally based. it's a response to a given situation. it is neither designed into the system nor is it predictable. reciprocal responses may indeed alter initial assumptions. they can lead to negotiations, to give and take, to adjustment, and they may result in new and unforeseen developments" (p. 43). feedback masquerading as reciprocity is a deception, a lie. a non-negotiable nonreciprocal predictable 'education' is training of the lowest order, akin to training rats. technology as saviour in the face of calamity is not new in education, but there are several reasons to be cautious. this is not the first-time educators have turned to digital technology in times of crisis (czerniewicz 2020) . it happened with the christchurch earthquake, the new orleans floods, political unrest in hong kong and many times in south africa. in such circumstances the variations of blended learning get "drawn in existing political agendas and extreme claims [are] made. conspiracies flourish … fake news will infiltrate the system … technological decisions will be shaped in ways that reflect existing differences, alliances, discourses and perspectives in particular institutions … hurried incomplete efforts to teach online give blended learning a bad name". czerniewicz notes that teams working in digitally mediated education literacies depended on face-to-face team interaction for collegial support. she concludes that threaded through the debates are "questions of power and whose interests are being served … it will be political … change will be appropriated for different ends and tell different stories for different people. technology is never neutral". a general point made by many negative critiques of educational technologies is that they replicate, reify and support existing political, economic and social relations and in this respect their innovativeness is limited. they tend towards intensification, standardisation and homogenisation. the promise of greater freedom and flexibility is false-the truth is that most of these technologies are reductionist. a virtual world is better described as a "synthetic" (castronova 2006) world, or "simulacrum" (murphy 2012) . the virtual classroom is a "non-place" (auge 1995) . in such environments the participants do not have the power to influence or modify the terms of engagement. they offer what fuery (2008, p. 33) call a "false mode of active engagement". there are multiple dimensions of falsehood. that which seems to matter most in effective teaching-professionalism, a sense of vocation, emotion and embodiment and interpersonal relationship, is diminished. what takes place is not "collaborative collegiality, but interaction between teachers that are coerced, administratively regulated and orientated around the implementation of predetermined outcomes" (selwyn 2014, p. 60) . in terms of open technologies selwyn notes tensions between individual and collective production, power imbalances in production processes, and that the mass consumption of open courses does not alter the state of an elite remaining the processors. as jeremy knox (2012, in selwyn, p. 80 ) has noted, the limitations of production and consumption are evident in the emphasis of open educational resources on individual self-driven-direction and autonomy. open access does not alter the basic revenue model of capitalist societies. there are some analysts who perceive benefits to digital games, but again selwyn offers a persuasive list of reservations which cohere around how such games reinforce individualism, possessiveness and competition, and that the "learning" in digital games "supports repetitive adjustments to the rules, rhythms and expectations of the game design rather than genuine educational engagement" (p. 104). social media seems to promise change opportunity. however, popular criticism abounds. social media does not promote independent and critical thought, distracts from learning, and promotes disrespectfulness. and as selwyn points out most social media are not actually especially participatory in nature. most applications rely on a small core of producers and promote consumption as a greater value than production. they rely on an ambivalent consumer who always wants more and are linked to commercial and corporate interest. social media creates an affective economy requiring constant self-valorisation, bounded by an attention economy, "compelling users to concentrate on a commoditized promotion of self, as well as the maintenance of personal status, favour and online reputation" (selwyn, p. 121) . although as social beings we always 'present' ourselves to others, social media ramps up the potential for outright deceit. it also "engenders a particular kind of'sociability'-a safe, non-threatening exchange in where everyone is obliged to 'join' and 'participate' but where actual actions and knowledge are highly conformist and consensual … dialogue becomes increasingly ritualized and composed solely of mantra and cliché" (p. 121). we may begin to discern here those elements of technology that inculcate and promote a mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualized and extractive mentality that is at odds with a relational, contextualised and holistic understanding of humans in the world based on reciprocity. bowers (2000 bowers ( , 2014 notes the failure of computer enthusiasts to examine their deep cultural assumptions and the ethnocentric and formulaic quality of their thinking. he points out even the valid criticism of computer-mediated education lacks a global perspective on the world's ecological crisis. "what is missing is how the western technological mindset differs from that of other culture groups-particularly those that have encoded their knowledge of place, relationships, and life cycles into the mentoring, narrative and ceremonies" (2000, p. 112) . the promotion of cheap, just in time learning does not attend to the traditional purposes associated with higher education, specifically "exposure to a broad range of cultural traditions that enable active and reflective participation in civic life" (p. 19). computer advocates are too prone to abstract thinking and a "dangerous combination of altruism and romanticism" (p. 122). he repeatedly makes the point, made by many others, that when an institution outsources education to a technology, it is outsourcing it to the corporation that controls the technology. he points out that thinking skills are not culturally neutral. a tool like storybook weaver assumes that "culturally autonomous students construct their own understanding of the external world … [a problem] for a culture that encodes its moral framework in a knowledge of ecological relationships in the narratives that are passed down through generations" (2014, p. 130). he makes a cogent case for how digital technology reinforces abstract thinking and cannot grasp the complexity of local cultural and environmental contexts, which he calls cultural and natural ecologies. technology reinforces the common but misguided assumption that the point of education is to promote freedom and individual autonomy as though individuals can exist independently of the cultural natural ecology from which they derive their language and basic sources of energy. the creation of an educational industry and privatisation, along with digital technology in education, promises much and does indeed deliver some benefits to some, but it also deceives and destroys. given the theme of clashing values, we should consider the corporation and technology in education as a kind of colonisation. although not always at the same level of explicit brutal destruction inflicted on indigenous cultures by waves of imperialist colonisation, we should note that schools and 'education' were major tools in the colonial arsenal (mckinley and smith 2019) and they can become sites of resistance and recovery. the welsh 'not' was used to punish schoolchildren who spoke welsh in schools in c19. today school children have been punished for not speaking welsh (the telegraph, 14 november 2012). māori children were beaten if they spoke te reo. in september 2020 we had, in aotearoa, te wiki o te reo māori (māori language week). the kenyan author, ngugi wa thiongo, educated at a mission school, wrote in decolonising the mind (1986) how the colonial classroom became a tool of psychological conquest in africa and beyond. "better than the cannon, it made the conquest permanent," he wrote. "the cannon forces the body and the school fascinates the soul." the point here is that education in practice is never a pure enterprise. it is always political, economic and ideological. times of transition usually entail the risk of valorising the ideological at the expense of the the philosophical. in the light of covid-19 a senior university academic in new zealand wrote of her university's gains in its capacity to provide online learning as "let's not go backward … the genie of online learning is now out of the bottle … how do we ensure online learning is seen as good as, if not better than, the traditional on-campus experience?" (byrnes 2020). byrnes' comments are frequent themes in the educational technology debate; the novel technology is assumed to be positive; and the genie metaphor alludes to a magical fulfilment of desire. this is the context in which my university has ramped up support for staff to teach online with concern for the well-being of educators and students framed in human resource terms and relatively little explicitly political and philosophical debate on the nature of and purpose of education. the techno-genie has been emerging from various vessels ever since a human picked up a bone to bash another human's head. the market entices and technology enthralls. to focus on the benefits of technological at the expense of the philosophical and political is itself a political and ideological manouevre. intense transitions provoke more than an adjustment of opinion. they may challenge professional identity and require philosophical contemplation and a reassessment of values. benade (2017) reflects on "the mental shifts and sometimes painful transitions teachers and leaders are making and experiencing, as they move through uncharted waters, from traditional classroom practices to ones emphasising collaboration, teamwork and the radical de-centring of their personal roles" (p. 2). why are teachers finding it painful? i think more is at stake than change or uncharted waters, distinct from the radical de-centring of personal roles. after all, an emphasis on collaboration and teamwork is what many teachers aspire to achieve. in fact, i suspect that many teachers (i certainly did) found that traditional notions of education required a practice more akin to crowd control which many found distasteful but endured and ensured because they had to. a more 'open' relationship would allow for what benade later identifies as crucial-"giving teachers frameworks on which to construct coherent value positions of their own" (p. 7). the same can be said of students and technologically mediated ersatz collaboration. the sources of pain in educators have been precisely identified by palmer (1998) : "an obsession with educational externals-including relentless and mindless standardized testing (p. xvii) … a mindset that cares more about weights and measures more than meaning (p. xxi)"; he offers the simple but profound premise that "good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher" (pp. 10-11). he writes of "the pain of having my peculiar gift as a teacher crammed into the procrustean bed of someone else's method and the standard procedures prescribed by it". the crux of the issue is trust which can be correlated with performance (bryk and schneider 2004) . this is the pain that educators feel-not being trusted to realise their vocation. when the interests of accountants and technologists dominate my teaching, i suffer from vocational dissonance and i would say that at the moment the sphere of education in societies is pervaded by systemic dissonance, especially in societies marked by colonisation and in multi-cultural societies with marginalised populations. if we identified neo-liberal economics and technology as contemporary forces of colonisation and appreciated indigenous cultures, we would refuse the intrusion of repugnant values that reduce teachers and students to units of exchange and we would refuse the expectation to cope and endure a sense of helplessness and frustration over the deployment of unnecessary and inappropriate technology. capital and technology are not central to what i wish to achieve as an educator but have been interpolated into the process. the misguided assumption is that my intent to enhance another person's understanding may be made more efficient. however, i know from personal experience that this is often not the case and claims of greater institutional efficiency are often more assumed than examined. the effect is that i am pushed further away from my core work-my vocation. irrespective of personal proclivity we are not required to engage in philosophical debate, but we are required to engage with technology which is often trivial, banal, manipulative and not worthy of attention. hence the many furtive sotto voce remarks-confessions actually-of colleagues who struggle. hence much dark humour and rage. it is a painful situation at a personal level. it is also systemically and socially costly, for widespread vocational dissonance is a loss for the society as whole. in a multi-cultural society, which increasingly means most societies, the epistemic violence of corporate-backed technopoly is a recipe for at least cultural pain and dissonance, if not annihilation. the pain radiates between individuals, cultures and societies via educational systems. the point is: tips, tricks and techniques are not at the heart of education -fire is. i mean finding light in the darkness, staying warm in the cold world, avoiding being burned if you can, and knowing what brings healing if you cannot. that is the knowledge that our students really want, and that is the knowledge we owe them. not merely the facts, not merely the theories, but a deep knowing of what it means to kindle the gift of life in ourselves, in others, and in the world. 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corporate criminal management education in indian time decolonising the mind: the politics of language in african literature computer power and human reason: from judgement to calculation cultural climates and technological advances in the middle ages publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations acknowledgement i thank laura czerniewicz, jason mika and alan woodside, and the reviewers of nzjes for their helpful comments on drafts of this article. key: cord-0043840-dlo85peu authors: galanis, michael title: corporate law versus social autonomy: law as social hazard date: 2020-05-26 journal: law critique doi: 10.1007/s10978-020-09267-7 sha: a6c5b9cf891aa0b360fe231a4800ad5537b72c1f doc_id: 43840 cord_uid: dlo85peu this article argues that corporate law has become the legal platform upon which is erected a social process impeding society’s capacity to lucidly reflect on its primary ends; in this sense, corporate law is in conflict with social autonomy. this process is described here as a social feedback loop, in the structural centre of which lies the corporation which imposes its own purpose as an irrational social end, i.e. irrespective of its potentially catastrophic social consequences. the article argues that resolving the conflict between corporate law and social autonomy is impossible, because it presupposes a change of social paradigm towards one where corporate law as business organisation law has no obvious fit. this questions the social legitimacy of corporate law, signifies its non-permanence and thus opens up the field for seeking radical alternatives in the future. to effectively meet its challenges by redefining its ends. institutions appear as if they have acquired a dominant agency of their own, even when inertia is socially hazardous. 1 this article claims that what is currently regarded as standard corporate law has a role in the emergence and persistence of such an inertia problem in our society. within capitalism, corporate law is a central institutional component of a 'social feedback loop'-i.e. a self-reinforcing social process-by which the primary corporate purpose, namely wealth accumulation, is amplified and imposed upon society as a supreme and indisputable social end. the mechanics of this loop are fairly simple. firstly, as an extremely effective device for protecting corporate wealth and for promoting organisational expansion, the basic anatomy of corporate law has found an unprecedented fit with the primary capitalist purpose of infinite wealth accumulation. it has enabled business growth to the extent that economic activity is primarily organised within and between private, manager-controlled bureaucracies. 2 thus, corporate law is the legal platform for the bureaucratisation of the economy. at the corporate level, bureaucratic organisation tends to suppress the questioning of objectives. therefore, once these are internally set by management, they are constantly reproduced by a feedback process within the corporate organisation. secondly, due to its social dominance, the bureaucratic corporation externalises those privately-set objectives so that they are eventually elevated to social ones and this creates a wider social feedback loop. corporate law is thus a legal structure for this social process which has become so pervasive that it hinders society's reflective capacity in relation to its objectives. this capacity is the essential basis of social autonomy, since an autonomous society is founded on the recognition that social goals are endogenously fashioned and therefore subject to social scrutiny without predeterminations. in other words, by providing the legal foundation for the proliferation of the bureaucratised business organisation, the structural core of the feedback loop, corporate law serves as an institution rendering our society essentially heteronomous, i.e. a society founded on the belief that its primary ends are exogenously and eternally determined. this way, material accumulation acquires eternal validity as a primary social end and its consequences are ignored or marginalised. corporate law is thus inevitably in conflict with social autonomy and therefore it is a socially hazardous institution. on this basis and drawing from the theory on bureaucracy and castoriadis' social philosophy, this article argues that the social legitimacy of corporate law needs critical re-examination. while engaging in a detailed discussion of alternative organisational forms is beyond this article's scope, the finding that corporate law is socially hazardous is in itself important: it sets the basic parameters for further research on how business organisation law can be radicalised, in order to dismantle the social feedback loop presented here and sustain social autonomy. the discussion will proceed as follows. the next part will examine the role and organisational impact of corporate law as a vehicle for business. the third part will analyse the social significance of these organisational changes to argue corporate law is a socially hazardous institution which reproduces social heteronomy by locking social ends within a capitalist frame. the fourth part will explore the possibility of instituting social autonomy, as a social ideal, but show that corporate law in its current form can have no obvious place in a society organised on this basis. in the light of these findings, the concluding section summarises the basic parameters of future reform for restoring the social legitimacy of business organisation. that corporate law is a socially significant institution is revealed by its very long history. the short historical account which follows will show that its role has certainly changed over the centuries to reflect different organisational needs and social conditions, even if its basic anatomy has remained remarkably stable. however, what distinguishes the social function of corporate law within capitalism is that for the first time it is a fully private institution in respect of its purpose, its legitimacy and the interests it protects. this reconception has had a tremendous impact on business organisation and the evolution of capitalism more generally. in one of the earliest historical accounts on the corporation, williston (1888, p. 106) traces its origins initially in primitive associations of individuals who formed entities representing clans, tribes or families. 3 in classical antiquity incorporated entities were used by groups of artisans or public contractors, and later by church organisations, incorporated medieval guilds, municipalities, charities and hospitals. what williston emphasises is that in most of their long history the role of corporate entities (and of corporate law) was of a purely public or quasi-public character. they had a wider social role-e.g. monasteries performed to a large extent the role the welfare state has today (rushton 2001 )-or served the purpose of regulating public affairs, whether those were connected to professions, proximity of residence or activity, and so on. even mercantilist companies conducted trade activities on behalf of the state and this made the distinction between markets and the state quite fuzzy, an important factor for their social legitimacy (alborn 1998). 4 hence, incorporation in the pre-capitalist age was regarded as a scarce privilege and corporate charters were actively regulated by the state which required promoters to show their corporations served the public interest. 5 with the advent of capitalism all this was to change. as arnold (1937, p. 186) observes, this era is defined by 'the prevailing ideal […] of the freedom and dignity of the individual engaged in the accumulation of wealth.' this is known as the 'capitalist spirit', the principal force behind capitalism, which has been taken up by adam smith, karl marx, max weber and many others who have built on their works, in order to trace and explain its true origins. we will return to this later (see fourth part below), but what matters in this instance is that, in spite of their divergence in other respects, all these strands agree that perpetual wealth accumulation as an end in itself is the dominant organisational principle and purpose in capitalist society. as new social interests emerged carrying and being determined by the capitalist spirit, they also demanded the re-conception of existing institutions and of their relationship with the state. more specifically, business interests required an organisational structure which could serve the attainment of infinite economic accumulation by accommodating increasing scale and complexity. the old legal infrastructure based on trust deeds, contractual partnerships or agency law had served entrepreneurship well as long as business relationships were personal, localised and relatively simple; they were institutions capable of organising small-scale, entrepreneurial capitalism. however, such instruments proved inadequate for large business scale and for attracting investment capital from outside investors (pearson 2002, p. 862; taylor 2006, p. 17) . so, business organisation law eventually had to turn capitalist by offering a legal structure for large, impersonal and complex business relations. from an organisational perspective, the corporate structure was an ideal vehicle for large business. while this point will be analytically discussed below, for now it is sufficient to emphasise two things. on the one hand, incorporation facilitated the governance of distant and impersonal relations though the creation of a corporate pool of assets and the delegation of their management to professional directors. legal recognition of the corporate person as the fictitious entity representing the common business purpose is crucial for this as it provides a fixed owner of business assets and a reference point for corporate governance. on the other hand, it allowed theoretically limitless capital-raising with the issuing of shares as tradable instruments, while also offering investors protection from business risk beyond their control by limiting their liability in respect of corporate debt. as these elements had already been present in pre-capitalist corporations, there was no need to re-invent the wheel; the old corporate structure simply had to be privatised by being assigned to serve the purpose of private wealth accumulation. thus, by the mid-1800s, corporate legitimacy solely rooted in public or quasipublic purposes had already come to an end. this demanded the abolition of the old regime of state-controlled corporate charters and the re-conception of the corporation as a privately created and aimed institution. this privatised legitimacy of 5 monastic entities were somewhat exceptional in this respect as they were the ones that pioneered incorporation in britain before the state began to exercise its control over it (seymour 1903). the corporation inevitably became entrenched in britain, the heartland of capitalism at the time, with the joint stock companies act of 1844 and the limited liability act of 1855. this legislation granted general incorporation rights to privately owned businesses and offered shareholders all the protection against business debt previously reserved for quasi-public entities. both acts were emblematic legislative attempts engrained in economic liberalism signifying the privatisation of corporate law in exchange for some disclosure requirements towards middle-class investors (jones and aiken 1995, esp. p. 69) . the latter, thus, became the private enforcers of any remaining (social) scrutiny by being vested with the right to litigate misconduct (keay 2014, pp. 92-96) . in fact, a legal infrastructure of this type for the pursuit of the capitalist spirit was already in place in all major jurisdictions by the mid-1800s (pistor et al. 2002, pp. 809-810) . in a nutshell, as the private economic sphere expanded, the privatisation of corporate law followed as an inevitable consequence. contrary to its treatment in other historical accounts as a symbol of (industrial) capital axiomatically (e.g. ireland 1996, p. 69; talbott 2016 ; see also third part below), the corporation is an ancient organisational form which is, nonetheless, radically adapted within capitalism, in order to serve private wealth accumulation as an overriding social objective whose prevalence is historically distinct. this reconception, however, has eventually led to further social developments, this time promoted, if not triggered, by corporate law. if the privatisation of corporate law through the liberalisation of the right to incorporate can be regarded as an outcome of social change, within capitalism it has led to further social transformation. the offering of the corporation's organisational features to private business has transformed economic organisation, which is now predominantly ordered by corporate hierarchies and in bureaucratic terms to the extent that capitalism has evolved into something which is not too different from a decentralised and essentially privatised planned system; this is managerial capitalism. this section will focus on how corporate law has supported and promoted this capitalist mutation. crucial for this purpose is organisational scale and its association with managerial empowerment. in this respect, chandler's (1977 chandler's ( , 1990 ) historical exploration of the interaction between organisational growth and organisational mode has emerged as a standard source. 6 he demonstrates how advances in transport and communications in the 1800s enlarged markets and created opportunities for business growth in scale and scope. this made mass production and diversification strategies possible for corporations via horizontal and vertical integration. with those strategies emerged a large multidivisional corporate form controlled by a professional managerial bureaucracy with significant immunity from investor scrutiny. berle and means (1967) have shown how shareholders as collective owners of control rights were too diffuse and too detached to influence strategic decision-making. as corporate controllers, managers pursued monopoly or oligopoly rents in saturated markets by restricting competition through collusion, while they simultaneously created new markets by investing in new product development. marketing and advertising divisions emerged as critical parts in this process by manipulating consumer needs (marcuse 1964) , in order to create and maintain demand. simultaneously, input costs were controlled via vertical integration and labour costs were contained by the division of tasks which effectively de-skilled and commodified labour wherever necessary (braverman 1998) . as a result, commodity, capital and labour markets were largely internalised by corporate hierarchies. simultaneously, through their market share or oligopolistic collusion, managerial corporations were able to influence prices and market conditions. this has been empirically established since the 1930s (hall and hitch 1939) and confirms adam smith's (1976, pp. 754-755) aversion towards the corporation as an anticompetitive arrangement; chandler (1977) has described this as the replacement of the market by the managerial 'visible hand'. indeed, competition law has been historically ineffective in containing the concentration of economic power within corporate bureaucracies. for instance, once collusion via cartel agreements became illegal, prohibitions were easily evaded via mergers and acquisitions (licht 2014, p. 150 ) so that collusion was also internalised by the merged corporate bureaucracies. the effect has been a turn from the multidivisional incorporated bureaucracy towards the incorporation of divisions as subsidiaries hierarchically controlled by holding corporations (zey and camp 1996; prechel 1997) 7 and more recently to supply chain networks dominated by a small number of firms in each sector (humphrey and schmitz 2001; witting 2019) . due to this ineffectiveness of competition law in controlling concentration, most markets have become predominantly oligopolistic; a trend that has accelerated since the 1980s (autor et al. 2017; griffin 2018; kamerbeek 2010) . 8 so, with the rise of the managerial oligopolistic corporation, early entrepreneurial capitalism, first in the us and later in other major jurisdictions (chandler 1990; hannah 1976 ), 9 has mutated into today's corporate capitalism, a society where markets are internalised and dominated by private (corporate) bureaucracies commanded by virtually unaccountable managers. corporate controllers' independence from internal and external pressures is a crucial aspect of this capitalist mutation. it 8 on the dilemmas faced by regulatory authorities related to cartel versus merger control see leclair (2011, esp. pp. 151-154) . 9 for a more recent claim that the managerial corporation was already dominant in the uk by the beginning of the twentieth century see foreman-peck and hannah (2012) . 7 the validation of single-shareholder companies in english law since salomon v salomon & co ltd [1897] ac 22, allowed the creation of subsidiaries relatively early (chapman 1985) . in the same fashion, initial prohibitions of holding companies in the us were gradually lifted in the 1880s (butler 1985, pp. 161-163) . regarding german corporate groups, fohlin (2005, p. 228) reports that 'in 1904, less than 1 percent of [corporations] held nearly a quarter of the corporate capital stock'. is well recognised in organisation theory that managers' autonomy unleashes their drive for endless expansion through organic growth and the acquisition of existing or potential competitors (penrose 1959; marris, 1998; odagiri 2008) . 10 this fits perfectly with infinite accumulation as an end in itself. in other words, the managerial corporation is essentially a self-controlled and growth-oriented hierarchy designed to reproduce itself together with its own capitalist ideas. managerial autonomy and its effects have not even been contained by the restructuring of financial markets and the economy more generally towards financial capitalism, since the mid-1970s. financialisation has certainly instigated significant organisational changes in business organisation. on the one hand, it has increased the weight of profit opportunities from asset-price speculation as opposed to production investment (dore 2008; epstein 2005 ; van der zwan 2014; tori and onaran 2018). on the other, it has enhanced the role of investor interests, as the reform of savings systems and their investment in securities markets has concentrated share ownership in the hands of institutional investors and speculators like hedge funds. 11 thus, corporate control rights are more tangled with stock market speculation and expectedly managerial corporations are more inclined to emphasise the importance of share valuation in their decision-making. however, this is not a sign of managers' surrender to external investor pressure. instead, corporate bureaucracies have emerged as dominant financial players in sync with other financial speculators. they are actively involved in securities markets by way of mergers and acquisitions involving competitors as well as by profiteering from financial speculation directly. 12 managers, especially at the top, rather than being more constrained, have also found a great opportunity in the financialised economic environment, as they can use the stock market to increase their own pay, while they also increase pay-outs to shareholders at the expense of labour interests (appelbaum et al. 2019; dünhaupt 2013) . they do so by expanding the weight of their share-based remuneration and simultaneously manipulating share prices with extensive share-repurchase programmes (lazonick 2013; bergstresser and philippon 2006) , and by brokering deals in the market for corporate control for which they (and shareholders) get heavily rewarded. thus, if certain observers initially claimed that managerial control would eventually be dismantled and disappear (jensen 1989 ), corporate managers have been able to simply align corporate (and their own) goals with the financialised mode of wealth accumulation (boyer 2005; froud et al. 2006) . what may distinguish early corporate capitalism from its financialised mode is related to the method of economic accumulation-financial speculation has been added as a growing component to wealth accumulation based on mass production-and the distribution of costs (primarily to wage earners) and benefits (asset owners). both modes, however, remain equally faithful to the leading principle of infinite accumulation as an end in itself (boltanski and chiapello 2007; boltanski and esquerre 2016) and the managerial corporation retains its position as the primary structure through which this principle materialises. thus, modern business practice is typified by the expanding dominance of private incorporated bureaucracies which are largely unconstrained by what is commonly understood as the 'market mechanism' either in financial or input and output markets. that being so, some predominantly post-modernist organisation theorists have tried to balance the lack of extra-organisational (i.e. market) pressure on the managerial corporation with what they see as intra-organisational constraints. they emphasise the increasing need for independent 'knowledge-workers' as a challenge to manager-controlled hierarchies, which may lead to a post-bureaucratic era defined by organisational methods like project-management and semi-autonomous units (adler 2001; fenwick et al. 2019) . 13 however, empirical scrutiny has exposed that such techniques are simply tighter reformulations of hierarchical control relying on the same principles of accountability and surveillance found in traditional hierarchies (diefenbach and sillince 2011; vie 2010; courpasson and clegg 2006) . thus, the twenty-first century capitalist organisation remains as bureaucratic as that of the previous century, if not more so. in this sense, corporate capitalism has essentially evolved into an economic system operating according to a decentralised but coordinated plan primarily devised by private bureaucratic organisations run by managers with minimal outside constraints. hence what is commonly referred to as 'free-market' capitalism is a gross misdescription and as real as a unicorn. 14 the contribution of corporate law to this transformation by which the entrepreneurially controlled firm is replaced by bureaucratised oligopolies has been immense. without the essential anatomy of standard corporate law all this would have been impossible. more specifically, focusing on the effective implementation of what they call 'asset partitioning ' hansmann and kraakman (2000) have explained the importance of corporate personality and shareholder limited liability as protective devices for the corporate entity's wealth ('entity shielding'), on the one hand, and for its investors ('owner shielding'), on the other. they argue very thoroughly how for large-scale business corporate law, as a form of property law rather than contract law, is necessary for instituting effectively the defensive protection of the corporate entity's assets from those who control it or from third parties. without the creation of the fictitious corporate person by operation of the law, asset partitioning would be impossible to enforce against third parties and thus incorporation would be pointless. ironically, the privatisation of corporate law is now mirrored by the corporate person being offered protection at the highest-level through constitutional law (grear 2006; greenwood 2017) ; this demonstrates how entrenched the corporation has become within capitalism. the legal ascertainment and fortification of the corporate pool of assets is fundamental for the rise of the bureaucratic corporation, since it offers the proprietary certainty required for enlarging corporate wealth without the risk of misappropriation. simultaneously, this legal certainty assists in the exploitation of corporate assets for increasing financial liquidity-e.g. via direct borrowing or securitisation-in order to generate and exploit further profit opportunities. it also facilitates the retention and re-investment of profit that has been instrumental in the growth of the managerial corporation. relatedly, the perpetuity of the autonomous corporate person also matches perfectly the idea of infinite accumulation, because it disentangles the latter from the limitations imposed by the finite human life. additionally, corporate personality combined with shareholders' limited liability provide the legal basis for liability management by holding companies through risk externalisation and regulatory arbitrage (muchlinski 2010; tweedale and flynn 2007) . this has been instrumental in the expansion of corporate group activity nationally and internationally. thus, by allowing the transformation of business parts into incorporated divisions (subsidiarisation), corporate law supports endless accumulation not only in a temporal and quantitative, but also in a geographical sense. simultaneously, limited liability is also facilitative of expansion, organically or via acquisitions, as it allows equity investors to shield themselves from business risk beyond their control-i.e. from the cost of large scale-both directly and via diversification (blair 2003, p. 439) . more importantly for the current historical moment of capitalism, asset partitioning has also allowed the managerial corporation to adapt to the demands of financialisation. what ireland (2010) has dubbed as the 'reification' of the corporation facilitates the dismantling or combination of business parts as subsidiaries which themselves can be treated as standalone assets. relatedly, the emergence of the share as an autonomous tradable asset, 15 a feature concomitant to the recognition of the corporate person, is perfectly aligned with the asset price-based accumulation regime of financialisation. by making possible the tradability of shares (hansmann et al , p. 1361 , corporate personality is a sine qua non for the market for corporate control, and an essential element of financialised capitalism. additionally, the governance features of the corporation are also finely tuned with and supportive of unbounded wealth accumulation. blair (2003, pp. 433-434) has highlighted the importance of vesting decision-making with a board of directors as an entity-shielding feature via directors' accountability towards the corporate person as such. 16 this point becomes particularly important in large manager-controlled corporations where the board acquires primacy in defining and pursuing the corporate person's interests condensed in the legal notion of the corporate objective. 17 this is a theoretically and doctrinally divisive notion in corporate law scholarship, first, due to the question whether the corporate objective ought to include social concerns in some way, and, second, due to its open-ended and malleable legal nature. the latter is no coincidence as the objective's open-endedness assigns its ultimate formulation to the corporation itself and, more specifically, to whoever controls it. we have seen that before the corporation's privatisation these issues were more or less settled by the imposition of the public interest by the state as ultimate controller. however, within corporate capitalism the corporate objective is internally determined by managerial hierarchies with very little outside control as shareholders are rather passive monitors (cheffins 2009 ). in this context then it should be seen primarily as an entity shielding device against outside interference with managerial autonomy. the latter is further strengthened by the formulation and judicial application of the law governing business judgment, which generally precludes ex-post scrutiny (mcmillan 2013; keay 2006; deipenbrock 2016) . the only differentiation one could make as to how the objective is applied is that, compared to others, in financialised corporations shareholder interests and accumulation through assetprice speculation may carry more weight in decision-making compared to other objectives (boyer 2000; mitchell 2001; jürgens et al. 2002; stockhammer 2006) . overall, the privatisation of corporate law has been a precondition for the emergence of bureaucratic capitalism. by protecting corporate wealth and enabling the organisation of large business it serves the purpose of limitless accumulation very successfully; corporate law is the essential legal infrastructure for the bureaucratic corporation. however, the social consequences of corporate law's privatisation are much deeper and wider. these are explored next. having demonstrated the contribution of corporate law to the bureaucratisation of capitalism, we will now turn to assessing the broader impact of this transformation. we will show how corporate law has enabled business organisation to reproduce the capitalist spirit to the point where social transformation is now severely hindered by the social structure. to explain this point an appraisal of the essential features of bureaucratic organisation is important. while bureaucracy is an ancient form of organisation, it is only within capitalism that it became a subject of inquiry with hegel (1976, paras. 287-297) being the first to discuss its role and character. his focus was on public administration (he wrote prior to the privatisation of corporate law) which in his view has a positive social role as a mediator between the private and public interest. however, he recognised that extensive division of labour carries the risk of bureaucrats losing sight of their social role. 18 this observation by hegel had great potential for understanding the extensive social impact of bureaucratisation and was taken up much later by weber. however, hegel himself did not expand on it and simply suggested ethical training and social accountability as remedies without being much more specific. as a result, hegel's concise analysis has had little influence on modern theory of bureaucracy. at best, it inspired marx's brief critique of hegel in his early works 19 where bureaucracy within capitalism is presented as an instrument of domination used by the capitalist class to guarantee its property rights and, thus, exercise its dominance over the working class. in this sense, he treated both state and corporate bureaucracies similarly. however, as krygier (1985) observes, marx's treatment of bureaucratic organisation created insurmountable difficulties for his theoretical adherents who could not explain soviet bureaucracy's autonomous power without resorting to paradoxical or contradictory claims; state bureaucrats could not be a social class with independent interests and this contradicted the central marxist tenet of struggle between capital and labour. in the context of capitalism, this limitation equally applies to corporate bureaucracies, as marxist theory cannot explain managerial autonomy from capital ownership as managers do not fit neatly into capital or labour. it seems hegel's intuition about bureaucrats' propensity to diverge from their socially designated role was probably correct; it allowed for bureaucracy's autonomous agency. weber was the first to offer a systematic account of bureaucratic organisation and in a way he reconciled the hegelian concern about bureaucrats' social conscience with the instrumentality point of marx. he did this by constructing his 'ideal type' of bureaucracy as an analytical tool for organisational practice and by assessing the wider social impact of its widespread use within capitalism. his departure point was that large organisational size is essentially associated with bureaucratisation (weber 1978, pp. 221 and 224; also dimock and hyde 1940, p. 36) , which explains how corporate capitalism has emerged as predominantly bureaucratic. as organisational scale increases, personal relationships wane and are replaced as a source and form of ordering by an impersonal hierarchical order. similar claims have been made by simon (1976) who finds that large scale and complexity require a hierarchical organisation based on a centralised objective-setting at the top and decentralised operational decision-making through delegation and division of tasks at levels below. for weber(ians)-hegel and marx would also agree-bureaucratic organisation is grounded on two fundamental and related principles: technique and domination. the former principle refers to managerial expertise in devising 'rational' procedural techniques and rules for the pursuit of bureaucratic goals, which are impersonal and independent of other norms that are incompatible with bureaucratic rationality. managerial tacit knowledge increases efficiency, but at the same time managerial expertise denotes a shift of control towards the highest ranks of managers. in weber's own words, '[b]ureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge ' (1978, p. 225) . the second principle, domination, is the disciplinary effect of managerial techniques-primarily through the definition of tasks and objectives as well as through the manipulation of incentives (edwards 1979, esp. pp. 128-129 and 148-149 )-upon those employed in the bureaucracy, 19 see marx (1970) and marx and engels (1974) . who may not share the same goals as those set for their organisation. thus, bureaucracy is fundamentally an effective incentive alignment instrument for the achievement of hierarchically set goals (weber 1978, p. 990) . expectedly, the recognition by weber of bureaucracy's potential power over individual social agency has generated an immense literature comparing his efficient 'ideal type' with organisational reality. so, some (e.g. bigley and roberts 2001; du gay 2000) have celebrated bureaucracy's organisational effectiveness, while others (e.g. dugger 1980 ) have emphasised its tendency to diverge from the weberian ideal due to various dysfunctions that allow personality traits (expressed as status seeking, inner circles, personal favours etc.) to affect organisational efficiency. however, even such critics accept the power of bureaucracy over the individual's mode of rationalising the world which promotes instrumental reasoning over social conscience (merton 1940) . in fact, this prevalence of instrumental rationality is the very reason for weber's own misgivings about capitalist bureaucratisation. he regarded bureaucracy as unable and unsuitable for tackling the political question of social ends (weber 1978, p. 266 et seq.) . in this regard, he was very careful in distinguishing practical rationality from substantive rationality. the former refers to instrumentality, while the latter is concerned with the 'rationalisation' 20 of action on the basis of unverifiable value postulates. 21 as kalberg (1980 kalberg ( , p. 1156 notes, when it comes to systematising action in certain or all life-spheres, such as family, religious, professional life and so on, 'a radical perspectivism prevails in which the existence of a rationalization process depends on an individual's implied or stated unconscious or conscious preference for certain ultimate values'. different individual and social substantive rationalities can easily coexist within the same social-historical moment, even if they have to compete against each other. so what is to be instrumentally pursued by the weberian bureaucracy is to be determined independently and outside of it through a substantively rational social function, i.e. by politics. thus, weber (1978, p. 222) was careful enough to point out that ideally at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy 'there is an element that is at least not purely bureaucratic'. otherwise, bureaucratic domination over social agency can turn the 'precision instrument' into a social hazard. 22 this is encapsulated in weber's renowned 'iron cage' metaphor describing the prevalence of instrumental rationality (for the pursuit of economic acquisition) as a result of expanding bureaucratisation in modern society; 23 weber had the hindsight of the managerial corporation that marx or hegel did not. accordingly, hibou (2015, p. 24 et seq.) focuses on the process of abstraction as a necessary function of bureaucratic organisation. she explains how the extensive use of aggregated and quantified information in order to devise standardised rules, practices and targets requires and simultaneously leads to the proliferation of arbitrary abstraction. this (otherwise necessary) form of organisation constructs an artificially static 'reality', in order to deal with uncertainty and contingency in the governance process. governing by aggregation and quantification enables communication between governors and governed through providing a set of stable reference points. but once those are instituted, the illusion of stable certainty also leads the organisation to forget their artificiality and arbitrariness as constructed 'realities'. the result is a 'closure of minds' that can lead to tunnel vision and, as such, stifle reflexive evaluation of established practices, goals or standards. in addition, anything that is not measurable and quantifiable is of lesser or no importance in the governance process, so that substantive rationality is subjected to instrumentality. similarly, castoriadis (1997a) critiques bureaucracy on the basis that, instead of merely closing meaning, abstraction ultimately destroys meaning completely. 24 it does so by reducing qualitative differences and social relations into quantitative ones, so as to eventually produce a measurable value, most preferably in monetary terms, in order to facilitate hierarchical dominance. but this value has no meaning whatsoever beyond a specific irrational belief in its actual validity and usefulness. more explicitly, it has no meaning beyond serving the unverifiable and, thus, irrational goal of economic accumulation. what is concerning in relation to bureaucratic domination within corporate capitalism is that, as we saw in the second part above, the managerially-controlled corporate bureaucracy is not simply instrumentally managing, even imperfectly, the implementation of goals set through processes outside of it, as weber would have liked. on the one hand, the managerial corporation implements the principle of infinite accumulation to perpetuate its own existence in accordance with the capitalist spirit; managerial incentives' growth orientation has already been mentioned earlier. simultaneously though, due to its bureaucratic antagonism towards substantively rational goal-setting action, it is unable to reflect upon its own goals and radically alter them if necessary. in this way, it supports a feedback loop where economic accumulation requires instrumental reason and instrumental reason perpetuates economic accumulation as a supreme value. thus, corporate governance issues can only refer to the corporate hierarchy's instrumental efficiency in achieving this otherwise unverifiable value to the point of irrationality. all this is all too familiar in the context of empirical corporate governance scholarship. it explains, for instance, the nonresolvability of the corporate valuation problem and the impossibility of treating the share price as an accurate reflection of the 'real' economic value of production; all these values actually produced are simply arbitrary and fictitious constructions of a particular belief system, and are simply accepted as 'real' by investors and managers as a social fact (haiven 2011) . this may fit nicely with the 'rationalisation' of the governance process within the framework of economic positivism, but it is absolutely nonsensical beyond it; it is equivalent to organising by (self-)deception (murphy 2014) . certainly, this feedback loop of economic instrumentality would be of limited importance, if it was simply contained within the boundaries of business organisation. the 'iron cage' of instrumental rationality would not have a generalised impact on society's substantively rational deliberation and would simply reduce such corporate logic to one of many competing value systems. however, within corporate capitalism we also have the subversion of this social process for two reasons. firstly and more obviously, the larger the number of people participating in and being governed by corporate bureaucracy, the larger the social influence of the latter's logic. indeed, within corporate capitalism labour markets are predominantly organised in bureaucratic terms, which is not surprising given the economic dominance of the managerial corporation (jacob 2004; also hamel and zanini 2016) . secondly, the social power of the latter is also exerted through its extensive channels of influence over policy and culture. the literature demonstrating the excessive levels of large corporations' socio-political power is immense and need not be reiterated here. 25 what is noteworthy, though, is that more recently corporate influence has reached extraordinary levels with the use of internet technology for the generation and analysis of 'big data' by which even the most private spheres of human agency are placed at the service of corporate profitability. this type of 'surveillance capitalism' (zuboff 2015) is a supercharged form of accumulation which relies on using personal data for predicting and modifying human behaviour in ways that make traditional mass production marketing practices appear as totally innocent and ineffectual. thus, through these two channels of social dominance operating simultaneously at both micro and the macro level, the managerial corporation imposes its (ir)rationality not only upon itself, but also upon society as a whole. this is of utmost importance from a social goal-setting perspective: the internal feedback loop of corporate bureaucracy, which rationalises corporate action through the dogma of economic accumulation, inevitably emerges as a social feedback loop. 26 this underlies the persistence and intensification of the capitalist spirit over the past two centuries and its further amplification more recently within the financialised version of corporate capitalism. it also explains the conformist character of regulatory reform in response to the global financial crisis a decade ago and, more 25 for a review see hillman, et al. (2004) . on the primary channels of corporate political influence see barley (2007) and sitkoff (2002) . for a claim that corporations have now assumed public functions so as to become political agents see crouch (2011) and scherer et al. (2014) ; see also maclean et al. (2010) for an empirical study confirming the social power of small corporate elites in the form of material and symbolic domination. 26 this conclusion is at odds with crouch's (2011) conclusions contemplating that social critique of corporate activity can have a real impact. the argument here is that the impact of social critique on corporate reform is significantly stifled by the social feedback loop of bureaucratic capitalism. importantly, to the intensifying ecological crisis. 27 the bureaucratised private corporation and the financial interests attached to it have become the stratum carrying, instituting and legitimising economic rationality as the ultimate, unquestionable social value system. the same phenomenon is described by habermas as the 'colonisation of the world' 28 by bureaucratic power, effectively denoting the subjugation of weberian value-based rationality to economic instrumentality in a way that limits critical reflection about values at the individual and social level. in this logic, every aspect of social life can be reduced to quantifiable, monetised values ready to be used for the purposes of economic accumulation. this sustains the spirit of capitalism but also entrenches the corporation's central role in the feedback loop of economic rationalisation, because it prevents non-conforming and incompatible value postulates from arising even outside the corporate boundaries. substantive rationalisation is not simply subjugated, but suppressed due to its incompatibility with corporate logic. thus, social space is created for the capitalist spirit to expand through the generation of a growing number of reductionist postulates like those in empirical corporate governance literature mentioned earlier in this discussion. as a result, economic accumulation emerges as the ultimate and unchallengeable social value to the extent that society cripples its capacity to reflect upon and re-determine its instituted ends in spite of their irrationality and hazardous consequences. 29 in other words, the social feedback loop of corporate capitalism is one of social heteronomy where deterministic economic logic appears to be the most prevalent way of rationalising social action. its structural core, corporate law and the business organisation erected upon it, renders the capitalist spirit a structural concern as opposed to a mere spiritual one. this structural centrality of corporate law also makes its radical reform unlikely without prior social change signified by the prevalence of another spirit. to the extent corporate law impedes such change, it is a socially hazardous institution and, thus, its legitimacy is lost. 27 the thorough review of corporate law evolution by johnston (2017) clearly demonstrates the conformist nature of legal reform, which increasingly excludes societal concerns by focusing managerial accountability on the prioritisation of financial (shareholder) interests. similarly, the soft approach towards engagement expectations from institutional shareholders with otherwise pressing environmental concerns in the uk stewardship code 2020 can also be explained by prevailing economic rationality (katelouzou 2019) . in fact, the judiciary too seems to have internalised the capitalist spirit as illustrated by the high court ruling in r (on the application of people & planet) v hm treasury [2009] ewhc 3020 admin. i am indebted to one of the journal referees for this point. 28 habermas (1984, pp. 154 and 196) describes the process as one where 'economic and bureaucratic spheres emerge in which social relations are regulated only via money and power'. similarly, in his influential critique marcuse (1964) focused on the rise of the consumerist culture driven by the preference manipulation strategies of the oligopolistic corporation as a social control mechanism imposing the capitalist spirit of irrational accumulation. 29 discussing the hazards of capitalist accumulation is beyond this article's scope. however, its irrationality is highlighted by piketty's (2014) discovery that even the narrow purpose of accumulation, namely social economic prosperity, is not achieved due to rising income inequality; the so-called 'trickle-down' theory has no solid empirical grounding (akinci 2018) . i am grateful to one of the referees for this argument. thus far, we have questioned the legitimacy of corporate law within capitalism on the basis of its instrumental role in the bureaucratisation of business organisation which is now the platform for the social feedback loop imposing economic goals' primacy as social ends. this 'iron cage' effect of corporate law inevitably indicates a very pessimistic prospect about social change. however, the following discussion will show how society cannot be eternally structured as an unbreachable cage of heteronomy by fully suppressing its reflective capacity. however, this also indicates that corporate law's future as business organisation law is in no way guaranteed. to explore the possibility of breaking out of the current heteronomous social setting of corporate capitalism it will be necessary first to discuss in more detail how an autonomous society may emerge. similarly to the emergence of capitalism in the first place, this would be a process of radical societal change which would necessarily require the uprooting of the capitalist accumulation-orientated paradigm. thus, the discussion will have to turn back to tracing the latter's origins. as mentioned earlier, smith, marx and weber provided seminal analyses upon which the three dominant theoretical approaches on the origins of capitalism have been built. admittedly, the discussion of such important works could only be crude here and does not do justice to their complexity and eminence. it will be shown, however, that none of these threads can adequately explain the rise of capitalism as a radical social paradigm shift and thus fail to offer sufficient guidance on whether and how the heteronomy loop can be broken. first, the perspective following smith's (1976, p. 25 ) early analysis attributes the drive for capitalist accumulation to human nature and thus considers its pursuit as naturally beneficial. there is a 'propensity in human nature', to use smith's own words, to engage in self-interested exchanges, in order to promote well-being through wealth accumulation; human nature is thus reduced to the homo-oeconomicus. however, this 'natural' propensity cannot be easily reconciled with the emergence of economic accumulation as a dominant ideal only relatively recently in human history. nor does this proposition, so unreservedly adopted in economic theory, offer a convincing basis for its explicit or implicit reference to the natural character of accumulation as a social purpose; it can only be accepted axiomatically and thus has no rational grounding (hollander 1977) . founded on this axiom, smith's perspective cannot offer an explanation for social transformation towards or away from capitalism. at best it resorts to exogenous contingency and this is often the path followed by those adopting capitalism as a natural social ideal. thus, north and thomas (1973) locate the roots of the capitalist spirit in population growth which resulted in market expansion and profit opportunities. however, they do not explain why population growth initiated capitalism in eighteenth-century england, when it could have done so in the netherlands where a more dramatic population growth was noted two centuries earlier (wallerstein 1976, p. 276) . similar claims have been based on scientific knowledge expansion in the pre-capitalist era, but again scientific advances have been too linear to suggest a revolution in the strict sense and definitely not unique in history (kearney 1964) . so, even if the problem concerning the axiomatic nature of accumulation could be ignored, the contingency proposition also offers little in relation to explaining social paradigm shifts towards capitalism or any other social system. additionally, another historical contradiction and irony is that among the initial carriers of the capitalist spirit were the private merchants around smith's time who organised their activities as private corporations (mcnally 1990, p. 22 et seq.) . this denies the very essence of free exchange, hence smith's hostility towards them and his accusation that they privatised and corrupted mercantilism (muthu 2008, p. 185) . this historical contradiction is of course even more pronounced now that capitalism is predominantly bureaucratic and the corporation is the primary structural pillar of capitalism. on the other hand, the marxist strand traces the capitalist spirit to the economic structure of feudalism and reduces it to a reflection of an oppressive mode of production relations (marx 1909; brenner 1982) . on this basis, there is little fundamentally wrong with accumulation as a (natural) social purpose provided it is socialised; 30 the standard (but false) prediction of marx was that this would happen inexorably. so for marx(ists) the capitalist spirit is mostly an epiphenomenon of structural change from feudalism to capitalism to socialism on a naturally pre-determined path defined by a class struggle between the working and the capitalist class. this struggle is founded upon and ultimately determined by the economic structure of production relations and the commodification of labour (meiksins wood 2002, p. 96 et seq.) . even if the problem of marxist historical determinism and its actual refutation by history itself could be ignored, the commodification of labour is not particular to the capitalist era; slavery certainly pre-dates it. moreover, within corporate capitalism social classes are no longer those observed by marx and different classes can have similar aspirations and vice versa. this has already been mentioned above in relation to the managerial class; corporate management without ownership rights over capital does not fit the distinction between capitalist and worker (barbalet 1986; graeber 2014, pp. 74-75) . one could add to this today's wage-earners who are tomorrow's pensioners and therefore interested in stock market returns or land and other asset prices. thus, social change cannot be solely explained by class struggle and one would have to look elsewhere for its roots. the weberian strand is more open-though not without its own problems-as to the drivers of social change by referring to various social status groups as carriers of competing ideas (values) some of which may prevail depending on these groups' relative social power (wright 2005) . it traces the origins of capitalism to the combination of technological with cultural factors (e.g. the 'protestant ethic'). however, scientific progress is of lesser importance in the emergence of capitalism, because it is cultural factors that determine its uses (weber 2005, at xxxvii) ; the emphasis is thus on the world of ideas. for weber, capitalist accumulation is neither a natural state of affairs (as in smith) nor a product of economic relations (as in marx) , but the consequence of a particular way of rationalising the world, which prevails over other competing rationalities. in fact, weber's major contribution in this respect is not so much his point on the relation between religion and social change, but his emphasis on how religious rationality gradually gave way to instrumental rationality (he called this the 'disenchantment' of the world) devoted to the perpetual pursuit of material wealth as the predominant characteristic of capitalism. however, as already mentioned and contrary to marx's optimism about social evolution, weber's sociological analysis of modern capitalism was quite pessimistic: rationalisation came with the proliferation of the bureaucratic 'iron cage' which would become so inexorable that only charismatic leadership outside of it could subject it to a substantively rational process of goal redefinition. history vindicates weber's first point, but by relying on charisma as a solution he offers little more than another contingency-based proposition. charismatic leadership is not guaranteed and, even if it was, it could not ensure a desirable social order; weber was aware of this problem but could not offer a satisfactory answer (dow 1978, p. 85) . in this respect castoriadis' (1987) theory of radical social paradigm shifts based on the concept of the social imaginary, not only responds to this problem in weberian theory, but also avoids the methodological difficulties and contradictions in the other perspectives described above. his basis is the individual and his emphasis is on the role of imagination, a human capacity that has either been ignored (e.g. in cartesian rationalism) or rejected as distortive of truth (as in aristotelian ethics) or subjected to some form of transcendental reason (as in kant). the prominence of imagination in castoriadis is more than justified. it is for some time now empirically established by cognitive science that human learning, reasoning and purposive action are entwined with the imagining capacity of the brain (e.g. hesslow, 2012; schacter 2012; gaesser 2012; stokes 2014; leahy and sweller 2008; dolan 2002) . on this evidence, ignoring, rejecting and subjugating imagination as a factor influencing human action in traditional philosophy now seem outdated. therefore, incorporating it in the study of social phenomena (the law included) has been long overdue and this is exactly what gives currency and force to castoriadis' theory on social change and stability. however, as we shall see, this framework offers more than explanations, as it suggests the possibility of instituting social autonomy through a pure conception of democratic polity as a social ideal. thus, it is not only helpful in explaining (corporate) capitalism's emergence and appraising the social feedback loop's ultimate force, but also offers guidance as to how such structures can be dismantled and avoided in the future; this ticks all the boxes for our purposes here. the starting point for castoriadis is the subconscious and, in particular, its ability to create imaginary representations ex nihilo. this conception of human imagination recognises the psyche's potential to do more than simply re-present external reality that it then simply re-produces (castoriadis 1987, p. 283 ). castoriadis calls this psychical capacity the 'radical imaginary'. this empirically proven cognitive process (brogaard and gatzia 2017; dijksterhuis and meurs 2006; dietrich 2004 ) is the source of radical novelty-creative 'out of the box' thinking-rather than the simple re-interpretation or synthesis of already existing and pre-imagined 'realities' (modell 2003) . 31 interaction with the external world, i.e. perception, relies on imagination which interprets but also gives meaning to this experience. ultimately the psyche creates its own imagined and therefore subjective representation of the world. it is perhaps accurate to compare this with the subjective understanding of the self and the world described by weberian substantive rationality; both lead to an open-ended notion of rationality, so as to accommodate different images of the self. certainly, castoriadis (1997b) does not disregard social conditioning and this creative process is 'not in nihilo or cum nihilo ' (ibid., pp. 321-322) . 32 due to an inherent tendency of the individual as a social being to internalise socially created representations of external reality, the psyche is always socially conditioned. for example, the individual socialised within capitalism will more or less resemble the homo oeconomicus or some type of personality that fits within the capitalist structure so as to exist within this context. this is indeed the source of the social feedback loop's power within corporate capitalism. since, by its nature, corporate bureaucracy is a mechanism for confining meaning within the economic accumulation frame, it effectively restrains the creative capacity of the radical imaginary; its proliferation contradicts individual autonomy. to the extent, however, that this structural power is unable to fully determine the radical dimension of the subconscious, bureaucratic control can never be complete. there will always be a fault-line between the social feedback loop and the individual's radical imaginary. thus, imagining a different mode of being, even within capitalism, always remains a possibility which necessarily begins from the individual social agent. this battleground between socialisation and the radical imaginary is indeed, for castoriadis, the driver of social change and what therefore created the capitalist spirit in the first place. he links what occurs at the individual level with the emergence of social order by tracing the latter's roots in the former. it is from the creation of shared images of shared 'realities' arising from agents' co-existence in space and time (the social-historical) that a society is instituted. this shared imagination of society's individual members as an 'anonymous collective' (castoriadis 1997b, p.322) generates central significations-such as god, the economy, justice or capital-which do not refer to logic or actual reality, but have to refer to other things to signify how society thinks about them. so, within capitalism, capital has to refer to machines, land, work (human resources), shares or, more recently, personal data. through such second order significations society gives meaning to everything else-e.g. wages, goods, profit, costs and so on-and is held together by referring to them. thus, a society's history-specific logic is ultimately determined by its central significations which are unverifiable creations of collective imagination, the 'radical social imaginary' (castoriadis 1987, pp. 358-365) . this, as thompson (1982, 31 see also adams (2005, p. 35) referring to the transcript of a discussion on this point between castoriadis and ricoeur. 32 as castoriadis (1997b, pp. 321-322) explains, this psychical capacity is 'an a-causal vis formandi. a-causal does not mean "unconditioned" or absolute, ab-solutus, separated, detached, without relations'. for more nuanced interpretations of the radical imaginary see also adams (2005). p. 664) observes, creates central significations explaining 'the orientation of social institutions, the constitution of motives and needs, the existence of symbolism, tradition, and myth.' in this creative process which institutes society, social praxis is of primary importance. social agents' spontaneous activity, even if mundane and not necessarily revolutionary, often requires imagining the future and their position in it. from this inevitably originates an infinite creation of new significations (joas and meyer 1989) which may not always be compatible with what is already instituted and such contradictions can instigate minor or wider changes. certainly, social praxis occurs in various domains and among a variety of social groupings where different significatory configurations may emerge. to the extent such groupings see themselves as belonging in the same society they will more or less share that society's central logic, the dominant imaginary, and remain conformist. indeed, the transition from entrepreneurial to corporate and financial capitalism can be explained in this way. however, even central significations are not immune from this process of constant flux. social praxis does not exclude the existence and emergence of other radically different imaginaries carried to various degrees by particular social segments. so there is always a tension within the instituted society, which can eventually bring about radical social change as self-alteration even without clean breaks; arnason calls this a 'long revolutionary process' (arnason 2001, p. 157; also ciaramelli 1997) . as all societies are subjectively self-instituted, they are also subjected to the forces of change endogenously. thus, capitalism can also be explained as the outcome of a particular accumulation of such practice-driven reconfigurations of previous rationalities which gave rise to the capitalist imaginary. the roots of the capitalist spirit can indeed be traced in weber's verdict that, in the aftermath of the enlightenment, the world was 'disenchanted' following the retreat-even if not complete-of religious rationalities (weber 1946, pp. 129-156; also harrison 2017) . this created a vacuum in relation to rationalising life's finitude, which had to be filled by a phantasy of omnipotence expressed through the domination over nature. in this context, it did not take long until economic rationality became an elite project too, by which social salvation would be attained through the pursuit of material accumulation (hirschman 1977) . indeed, this is what underlies adam smith's optimism about economic development and is recognised by mill (1909, pp. 696-699) ; also schmidt (2014) or even marx as the driver of infinite economic accumulation, served by instrumental reason; certainly this is weber's verdict too. all this can be attributed to the workings of the radical social imaginary which has instituted what castoriadis calls 'rational mastery' as the central signification guiding capitalist society; he uses the terms 'pseudo-rational' and 'pseudo-mastery' to denote its imaginary and unverifiable essence. however, this irrationality matters little, since central significations cannot have a rational basis anyway. it suffices that rational mastery has surpassed religionbased salvation so that infinite material accumulation is promoted as a governing social end. as benjamin pointed out almost a century ago, the emergence of the market or a market ethic as the 'natural' arbiter and calculator of social activity is not too different from the metaphysical beliefs which were more prevalent in the pre-capitalist world. 33 what does matter is that this social imaginary orientates our society, through the process exposed above, by referring and giving meaning in various degrees to all other organisational aspects; an objectively rational basis is completely unnecessary for that to happen. indeed, castoriadis' major contribution in locating the roots of social framing in the workings of imagination, is that by doing so he has also opened the way towards radical reflection on institutional arrangements and thus towards promoting social change. if transformation towards bureaucratic capitalism can be explained as a product of social imagination, breaking the social feedback loop is also possible without having to resort to the nebulous concept of weberian charisma. to the extent that the radical (social) imaginary is not constrained, capitalism just like any other previous social order, is also susceptible to incremental change resulting from mismatches between regular praxis and what is instituted. the more such frictions accumulate, the higher the likelihood of generalised questioning of central significations. certainty, catalytic events, may even speed up and radicalise social change. for instance, in response to the global coronavirus pandemic, we have witnessed the unprecedented suspension of economic activity imposed by governments, in order to prioritise public health. simultaneously, the private sector has been mobilised and quasi-nationalised with the substitution of private incomes by state subsidies (partington 2020) . this could signify a moment of radical departure from economic determinism and the supremacy of economic accumulation could be significantly challenged. however, even as such events have been unfolding, the forces of social inertia (and the social feedback loop) have not vanished: the corporate sector-especially big pharmaceutical companies-is still relied upon (and legitimised) as the potential saviour from the pandemic, while even wage subsidies could turn out to be a costly and disguised effort ensuring the survival of established economic rationality. also, rather striking have been the objections of powerful corporate interests to the prioritisation of public health over the economy, even as coronavirus fatality rates had been accelerating (reich 2020) . thus, the possibility of a paradigm shift will ultimately depend on whether the epidemic's social impact prevents a return to the servitude of the capitalist imaginary, once the possibility of sidelining economic accumulation in favour of another social end (e.g. public health) has already been experienced; this had previously been considered 'irrational' and impossible. however, the more exceptional a crisis, the more likely the response to it will also be regarded as exceptional. as such, this response may never become systemic, so that social inertia eventually prevails. still, even if a radical shift away from the capitalist spirit and practice could indeed become a visible possibility after such dramatic events, the next and more important logical question is about the type of any new central signification(s) and its social desirability. to answer this question, a vital distinction should be made here: while all societies are essentially and always self-instituted, they are not necessarily autonomous, as they tend to conceal their self-instituting capacity. this heteronomy arises when the instituted structure leads to a closure of meaning by suppressing the workings of the radical imaginary, as illustrated in the context of bureaucratic organisations (third part above). social heteronomy can be explained on the basis of a central imaginary representation postulating institutions which are based on a rationality presumed objective and extra-social; e.g. god's will or the market logic as a natural law. this is when the relationship between society and its institutions is 'turned upside down', to use castoriadis' words, with the former serving the latter (castoriadis 1987, pp. 91 and 110) . the only remedy and defence against heteronomy is to institute society on the basis of what castoriadis calls the central signification of autonomy. effectively, this is a political call for a society that takes responsibility for and abides by its own rules, but only for as long as they serve its democratically selected goals by similarly self-reflective and actively responsible citizens in a 'circle of creation' (klooger 2012, pp. 91-92) . so, if weber's hope for social emancipation rests with charismatic leadership, castoriadis' proposition is for a system of institutions promoting lucidly reflective, but necessarily democratic, practice as an enduring project of autonomy. anchoring the radical social imaginary and its institutional manifestation within such a democratic process is the safeguard against the risk of charismatic leaders' authoritarian subjectivism; not an unknown phenomenon these days. the infinity of the project of autonomy is indispensable because, contrary to rational democratic deliberation à la habermas (1996, pp. 287-328) , for castoriadis, social outcomes can never be ideal, even if they have emerged through a rational process; procedural rationality principles are also socially determined and valueladen. 34 all institutions can only be substantively rational and therefore arbitrary to the extent they are founded on unverifiable values which make them always open to radical revision. social autonomy requires the acceptance of this type of openness and its full enactment includes the revision of social deliberation processes too. indeed, the social feedback loop problem presented above vindicates castoriadis' concern in that current democratic arrangements seem to struggle against corporate power. the struggle for social autonomy, even in the aftermath of a pandemic or other crisis, is therefore twofold. on the one hand, it is for sustaining radical change against the tide of the social feedback loop of economic determinism for long enough. on the other hand, it is for ensuring that the new structure replacing the old will institute the central signification of autonomy. unfortunately, the measures adopted in response to the pandemic (general lockdown with the suspension of fundamental freedoms) can hardly be reconciled with autonomy. this risks rendering the social feedback problem analysed in this article even more acute in the future. on the basis of the normative position outlined above, the primary social legitimacy criterion for corporate law, as with any other institution, is its compatibility with autonomous reflective action. this open (in terms of corporate legitimacy), but quite prescriptive (in terms of method), criterion necessitates the undoing of the social feedback loop in order to resolve the conflict between corporate law and social autonomy. the question then is if corporate law can indeed accommodate this criterion. to begin with, that in an autonomous society one would expect to find institutional arrangements promoting democratic deliberation on a substantively rational setting is unquestionable. in such a context, business organisation would be assigned to serve social purposes which are democratically set, without exercising social agency independently of its individual participants. essentially this presumes that business organisation ought to be non-bureaucratic, otherwise it would undermine individual agents' reflective capacity and frustrate substantively rational deliberation within its decision-making and governance arrangements more generally. nonetheless, the analysis in the third part above has exposed the impossibility of this within the setting of the managerial corporation and corporate capitalism. we have already established that the social feedback loop and its corporate law foundation is a typical illustration of the inverted social arrangement where society exists to serve its institutions as corporate bureaucracy imposes its goals upon society. the re-imagination of corporate law through its privatisation as business organisation law is the root cause of this problem. ultimately, through corporate law our society has instituted and reproduces its own heteronomy. even if not all corporations are managerial and bureaucratic, we have shown how, by its nature as a governance form, corporate law has an in-built propensity towards organisational growth, that is, a bureaucratisation tendency. as such corporate law is a mechanism for confining meaning within the economic accumulation frame and ultimately limits the creative capacity of the radical imaginary; it contradicts autonomy by reproducing the capitalist logic through its re-incarnations as a managerial structure. this is indeed its fatal flaw from the perspective of autonomy and in respect of its compatibility with a society instituted on the basis of that perspective. seen in this way, modern corporate law is simply an ideologically charged product of our own society's self-imposed imaginary. in other words, corporate law, the legal foundations of the social feedback loop, can only be explained and justified by adhering to the heteronomous capitalist logic and the ideology that follows and solidifies it. as observed by lefort (1978, p. 296) , ideology conceals the imaginary nature of central significations through 'the linking together of representations which have the function of re-establishing the dimension of society 'without history' at the very heart of historical society'. the significance of this is that it crystallises meaning by making issues which are essentially social, political and therefore temporary look as if they are simply of a technical nature with little normative background (thompson 1982, p. 672) and of eternal legitimacy. the proliferation of pseudo-scientific mathematical modelling in the justificatory framework for current corporate law doctrine is simply another sophisticated tool concealing the ideological roots of corporate law with a pseudo-scientific gloss (chen and hanson 2004) . lifting this technocratic facade would simply reveal that corporate law is a deeply political instrument and would open the door towards re-subjecting it to political (i.e. democratic) deliberation about its use. indeed, this way of treating corporate law could open the door to democratic reflection which could resolve its conflict with society. however, this re-politicisation would contradict its very nature as an institution serving private business interests, i.e. infinite private accumulation as a social end. after all, it was privatised in order to facilitate the supremacy of private economic interests over the public interest through reducing the latter to the former. if this subjugation has not been problematic within capitalism, its questioning is equivalent to doubting the very foundations of our society so long as it is guided by the capitalist imaginary. the more business activity diverges from what is regarded as the public interest (as it increasingly seems to be the case) the trade-off between business organisation and social objectives becomes more pronounced and this delegitimises the former. as mentioned above, the temporary suspension of capitalist accumulation could indeed instigate radical social reflection on the social role of corporate law, but inertia could yet again prevail after the pandemic's containment; e.g. the focus could be targeted towards economic 'rebuilding' along conventional lines but with higher intensity. indeed, the first signs of the feedback loop's further entrenchment are already visible, as among the post-coronavirus reforms considered by the british government is the introduction of manager-friendly corporate insolvency rules (partington and stewart 2020) . if the legitimacy problem of business organisation is to be resolved, its governing law ought to take a radically different turn by imposing limits on the concentration of social power by private organisations outside and above the reach of democratic scrutiny. 35 otherwise, even if the social feedback loop's force could be temporarily suspended by social crisis to allow for the emergence of a new social logic, corporate bureaucracy would at best mould it to fit its own interests (even if radically new) as another type of 'iron cage' or it could revert and re-impose the default business purpose of endless accumulation yet again. as explained earlier, the root of corporate law's socially hazardous nature is its orientation towards accumulation which leads to increasing scale, bureaucratisation and the freezing of meaning in economic terms. thus, one of the preconditions for engraving autonomy in the social structure is to socialise business organisation through the imposition of an organisational limit to its scale. this would dismantle the heteronomy loop by removing the dominant agency that business organisation currently has acquired, which subjugates social scrutiny. it would also prevent the colonising effect of business practice and ideology outside of its strict limits in other sectors of public and private life. business organisation would thus become more of a receiver of social significations and more adaptive to social purposes. what is clear from the analysis so far though is that corporate law as a structure for business organisation has no evident fit in a social context of this kind-its 'legitimacy' exists only in a heteronomous social setting. therefore, the use of corporate law as business organisation law ought to be marginalised and replaced by structures respectful of autonomy. in fact, if a prediction can be made, this could be inevitable to the extent that capitalist accumulation has reached its natural limits and inexorably leads to societal adaptation towards a postgrowth era. 36 this is indeed an insurmountable challenge to capitalist society's central signification, the phantasy of 'mastery over nature', whereas the coronavirus pandemic's impact could also fertilise the ideological debate. however, more effort along the lines suggested in this part will be necessary if social autonomy is to be instituted, so corporate lawyers' social role is specific and significant. in spite of corporate law's social impact discussed here, we have established that social paradigm change is after all inevitable, since our social order is subjected to the radical imaginary's creative forces and therefore can never be eternally set. however, it matters little whether the heteronomy loop of corporate capitalism can be temporarily broken, if this breaking does not lead to an autonomous society and is replaced instead by some other heteronomous social arrangement. thus, what matters most is that social focus and therefore academic effort should be on replacing the current relation between society and its structure with a different one instituting the principle of autonomy. inevitably, within this frame our business organisation law ought to look very different to how it currently does and its legitimacy must be grounded on its capacity to accommodate self-reflection, rather than being based on some other 'objective' (ir)rationality. as a first start in this direction, even if this is a painful process for corporate lawyers, we should acknowledge that corporate law's social legitimacy has already been lost. from this acknowledgment begins the responsibility to re-envisage business organisation law in radically different terms, if it is to cease being an institution of hazardous social inertia. the paradigm of social autonomy constitutes a good general guide in this process which undoubtedly will have to be dynamic and perpetual. even if working out the detail of what business organisation law ought to be is beyond the endeavour of this article, the discussion above has revealed one major aspect of corporate law causing its legitimacy problem as a hazardous institution of heteronomy, namely its inherent orientation towards endless accumulation. law reform in this area could then start by actively promoting the marginalisation of corporate law in the structuration of business organisation. positive action along these lines could involve the promotion of non-corporate legal structures for non-hierarchical organisation which can accommodate autonomous agency better. to the extent radical social change is at least imaginable (if not inevitable), the 'black-letter' corporate lawyer (an increasingly imaginary figure) would then need to be prepared for the marginalisation of the private business corporation. delaying this could eventually backfire as the increasing divergence between corporate and social interests may eventually take a more authoritarian or violent turn, and the coercive reaction to the coronavirus is not too promising. inequality and economic growth: trickle-down effect revisited interpreting 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multidivisional form to corporate groups of subsidiaries in the 1980s: capital crisis theory the rise of capitalism : in theory and practice ' | lhg-e/iq.(a , 'ti^ovv\('^ f) . — c-'se o-| — /^i>u c32> m 6 che wse v of capitalism in theory and practice by the rev. thomas a. meehan ^‘_<y the rise of capitalism reverend thomas a. meehan no. 72 published in u.s.a. december 20, 1940 by oue sunday visitor press huntington, indiana nihil obstat: rev. t. e. dillon censor librorum imprimatur: john francis noll bishop of fort wayne oeadlinibcf the rise of capitalism in theory and practice we are living in an age predominated by capitalistic thought and procedure. the entire frame of our economic order rests upon capitalistic initiative and design. modern society is so thoroughly imbued with its ideas and ideals that one seldom finds among the great generality of mankind its procedure or thought questioned. one does hear, it is true, the voices of a few intellectuals, social economists, and others, crying out against some of the evils of the capitalist system, for example unjust wages, concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, or fixed prices ; or again, on the other hand, one may hear the not too distant rumble that indicates great unrest among the exploited millions of the laboring class. but even among many of these much of their thought is capitalistic and most of their desires fall in the same category. today among the larger proportion of urban workers, one might almost say amongst all those whose weekly wage is over thirty-five dollars, capitalist ideals are consecrated, and capitalist thought predominates. individualism, equal op4 the rise of capitalism portunities for all, is its keynote ; laissezfaire, freedom from all restraint, whether religious, social, or political, its catchword ; and thrift, frugality, and industry, its virtues. so great a hold has this philosophy (for it is the philosophy that determines the technical system of production, distribution, and consumption) on the modern mind that most men look upon america as a land of equal opportunity, where hard work and thrift in true alger fashion is ever rewarded, despite the fact that of the 27.5 million families in america in 1928, six million had incomes of less than one thousand dollars per year; 12 million less than fifteen hundred dollars; and 20 million less than twenty-five hundred dollars. twelve million families received the same per cent of the total national income as thirty-six thousand families receiving over seventy-five thousand dollars did. the lack of desire for any external check on business enterprise is adequately demonstrated by the fact that it would be a gross exaggeration to say that more than three million catholics, in the united states, without even trying to estimate the number of non-catholics, had read the great social pronouncements of leo xiii and pius xl a further proof, if one be needed, can be found in the voluminous amount of contemporary newspaper and periodical criticisms on in theory and practice 5 any government interference with business. anyone having the courage to criticize this system, whether they be among the great catholic leaders, like father charles coughlin, father john cronin, s.s., or monsignors haas and ryan, or other social-minded individuals like president roosevelt, mr. hutchins of university of chicago, or united states' justice frankfurter, is generally labelled as a radical. all the organs of capitalism, the newspaper, radio, large industrialists, or commencement speakers, go on blowing the horn of success. so true is this analysis, that success, material success, has become the sole end of the greater proportion of our vast educational system.^ each succeeding generation through this means, is impregnated with capitalist philosophy, and nurtured in its surroundings. the origins of such philosophy exerting such influence on so many people should be of interest to all. the purpose then of this pamphlet will be to examine as thoroughly as possible the beginnings of the capitalist spirit or philosophy of life, attempt to define this rather elusive term and likewise to trace nascent capitalist practice. no attempt will be made to condemn capitalism as a technical sys1. harold g. moulton, income and economic progrgress, (brookings institute study) washington, 1936, p. 37. 6 the rise of capitalism tern, for the fault is not in the system as such but in the motivating principles behind the system. there are as many (if not more) definitions of capitalism as there are hues in the spectrum. it has been called the organization of business upon a large scale by an employer or company of employers possessing an accumulated stock of wealth wherewith to acquire raw materials and tools, and hire labor, so as to produce an increased quantity of wealth which shall constitute profit.^ again saved income used by industry to command labor and raw materials, for making instruments of further production, such as factories or machines.^ also as an institution for facilitating the production, circulation, and distribution of wealth.^ many more such definitions, all more or less correct in as far as they go, could be cited, but to little or no avail. all of these are clearly technical definitions which pruned of verbiage could read wealth, invested in industry, agriculture, or commerce. if the whole of our problem was simply concerned with the technical side of capitalism our inquiry might well stop right here. but one can know every 2. raymond j. corrigan, s.j. “the church” and the nineteenth century. milwaukee, 1936, p. 302. 3. john f. cronin, s.s. economics and society, baltimore, 1938 (3rd ed.) p. 2. 4. bernard e. bums, “the roots of disorder,” columbia, xvlii, 1938, (march), p. 8. in theory and practice 7 definition of capitalism from every technical point of view and still fail to know what capitalism is. capitalism to understand capitalism in all of its various ramifications we must go back to the beginnings of capitalism and find the motivating force behind it, in other words its philosophy of life, then only, and even then not perfectly, will we be able to grasp the spirit of capitalism. to find the spirit we have to go back to an age when admittedly it did not exist. we have to find out just what predominated then and is lacking or substituted by something else in the modern economic world. in order to do this history cannot be treated in two broad divisions, namely medieval and modern. one must consider first the medieval period as ending possibly with dante alighieri and his great epitome of the knowledge, attainments and catholicity of the preceding centuries.^ then a transitional period embracing roughly about two hundred and seventy-five years, which was characterized by the decline of catholicism and the holy roman empire, the rise of national states, and the growth of individualism in political thought, in the arts and sciences, in religious thought, and finally industry, commerce. 6. conde b. fallen and john j. wynne, s.j. the catholic dictionary, new york, 1929, p. 280. 8 the rise of capitalism and finance. this period is commonly called the renaissance.® modern history would then commence about the seventeenth century, when this new individualism so manifest in the transitional period flowered forth into the breakup of the churches into numerous sects in the religious world, into the rise of the secular democratic state in the political world, and the rise of capitalism in the economic world.'^ to take then each period in succession and trace the growth of capitalism will be our endeavor. the late middle ages were ‘‘ages of faith.’’ society was looked upon as an organism, closely knit and united with each group having its own function in promoting the common good. man’s ultimate destiny was foremost and the social and economic order was merely to minister to this end under the law of god. the king ruled by virtue of his oath of coronation and was expected to be just and promote the common good or 6. ibid, p. 821-822. 7. this opinion which is purely personal, is at least substantiated in point of time and fact by the following : “but even in the earlier period the influence (of religion) on economics was not at all times of equal strength. the great development of economics as an independent science, which culminated in the work of adam smith had begun in the previous century, and the breaking down of the unity and authority of christian dogma had been progressively increasing since the first half of the sixteenth century.’* george o’brien, an essay on the economic effects of the reformation, london, 1923, p. 4. in theory and practice be deposed. under the king, the lords of the manor had sovereignty over their subjects. with their rights went definite responsibilities, they could not cast off the serfs or underlings as modern industrialists can. under these lords were the serfs, whose liberty was to some extent curtailed, yet whose fundamental right to personality was respected. the various groups were not independent one of the other, but rather interdependent with corresponding rights and obligations towards those above and below them. ^ religion dominated and enervated every phase of life, the cultural, political and economic, as well as the purely social. in his period economics was viewed purely from the viewpoint of ethics. wealth was looked upon as being a social, not an individual instrument. each one was to acquire merely that amount which would maintain his station in life. the question in the medieval mind was not how much i get, but how much do i need. one had not only to discriminate between what was lawful and unlawful, but had to limit his intensity in the use of lawful means. under such a system unrestricted enrichment was impossible, indeed the true medievalist would consider it senseless.^ 8. john s. cronin s. s. op. cit., p. 12. 9. amintore fanfani, catholicism, protestantism, and capitalism, new york, 1939, p. 24. 10 the rise of capitalism the church in the “ages of faith’’ insisted, just as she does today, on the superior importance of spiritual riches, with this difference that her authority was far more reaching. this had the effect of subordinating material and pecuniary desires, and the placing of economic functions in their proper place, as merely one of the many means to the attainment of the all important end — eternal happiness. in line with this thought man was considered by medieval moralists and theologians as having a natural right to property flowing from man’s dominion over nature. but he was to acquire no more than his station in life demanded, and superfluous goods were at the disposal of all. the end of all production was use and not profit. hence trade was legitimate, but considered morally dangerous for there was always the temptation to trade for a profit, rather than at a profit. to trade for a profit is avarice which is soundly denounced by st. thomas, who considers it as generally being a mortal sin, without however excluding the possibility of its being a venial sin under certain circumstances.^^ nor was the same author less severe on usury, which is the same as our “pure interest” today. 10. george o’brien, op. cit. p. 6. 11. st. thomas aquinas, summa theologica, taurini, 1929, ii, ilq. in theory and practice 11 he considers this to be a mortal sin and holds the offender to strict restitution.^^ st. thomas, however, never prohibited ‘‘natural interest.’’ payment for simple lending he forbade as taking advantage of another’s need, but he allowed the person advancing money to share in any surplus which the loan created.^^ labor —the common lot of mankind—is necessary and honorable; trade is necessary, but perilous to the soul; finance, if not immoral, is at best sordid, and at worst disreputable, sums up fairly well the medieval attitude to trade and finance. but though trade was dangerous and “pure interest” denounced, the medievalist realized that trade was necessary. hence duns scotus argued if there were no private traders the state would have to engage them, and their profits are therefore legitimate, and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate to the trader’s status, but payment for labor, skill, and risk.^^ hence the predominant note of medieval economics is that the selfishness and avariciousness of man was always held in check. over all his actions including his economic ones there was a salutary moral restraint which might well be summed 12. ibid. q. 78 2 ad 6. 13. ibid. q. 78 1 ad 6—also g. o’brien, op. cit. 6, 13. 14. r. h. tawney, religion and the rise of capitalism. n. y.. 1926, p. 33. 12 the rise of capitalism up in the words of henry of langenstein: '‘he who has enough to satisfy his wants and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance—all such are incited by damnable avarice, sensuality and pride/’^^ what we have described so far was the ideal of the "ages of faith,’’ and just as today there are many catholics who violate many laws of god and church, so likewise, there were sinners in the middle ages. there is no other way of explaining the treatises of st. thomas aquinas, duns scotus, and other schoolmen, on avarice and usury, and likewise the condemnation of these vices by popes and councils of the church, except by admitting that not a few men did not live up to the ideal held up for them by the church. if this interpretation be true, we already had capitalism, namely the investing of money for profit in practice in the middle ages. yet even these men were not imbued with the capitalist spirit; they did not seek wealth for its own sake. neither could medieval society in 15. ibid. p. 36. in theory and practice 13 any way be considered capitalistic for these men, though admittedly more than a few, were nevertheless the exception. invariably they repented on their deathbeds, admitted their errors, and made amends by building churches, schools, and orphanages. individualism the second period, which we have designated the transition period, was characterized by a growing sense of individualism.^'^ this term also defies definition. one historian has called it ‘‘an assertion of exaggerated individual rights and liberties to the exclusion of the rights of society and the family.” this mode of action began to grow in europe from about the middle of the fourteenth century not merely in one phase of life, but in all the component parts of life. in the religious order it manifested itself by a growing discontent with the “moral restraint” so characteristic of the middle ages, both on the part of the merchant and on the part of certain feudal lords, who were becoming national kings. in the political order na16. amintore fanfani, op. cit., 32 and r. g. tawney, op. cit., 30, 31. 17. the designation of the period from 1325 to 1600 as the transition period, though personal, is not without authority. carleton b. hayes in a political and cultural history of europe, new york, 1936, i, p. 26, at least suggests such a division. 18a. raymond corrigan, s.j., op. cit. p. 305. 14 the rise of capitalism tional monarchs were asserting absolute power which conflicted with the rights of the lords and the church, to say nothing of the peoples. in the commercial order it meant the throwing off of the moral restrictions of the church together with the rather narrow provincialism of the middle ages and the subsequent seeking of new worlds and new markets. in cultural life it meant the turning from the idealism and mysticism of the middle ages to a pursuit of the natural. because this spirit of individualism, of every man for himself, is one of the dominant characteristics of the capitalistic spirit it might be well to examine briefly the causes which brought it into being. the causes of necessity are identical with those which rang down the final curtain on the middle ages and prepared for the advent of our modern age. one of the undermining forces of the middle ages was travel. before the crusades the population of europe lived in thousands of scattered, isolated little hamlets. in fact, according to carleton b. hayes, prior to the year 1500 there was not a city in europe with a population of 100,000. the majority of the population lived and died within the narrow confines of his native hearth and the surrounding countryside. this provincialism was especially shaken by the later crusades because all of europe was on in theory and practice 15 the road. from this peoples received the desire for the good of other peoples ; this stimulated trade and commerce. it likewise weakened religious and ethical sanctions, for the trader moved from his circle of friends into the growing cities where he was unhampered by any social or religious inhibitions. also doing business on a large scale, the merchant’s risks were greater, and hence he fought the trade restrictions of the guilds in order to make greater profit to cover possible losses.i^b black death another cause in the breakdown of medieval society and the rise of individualism was the black death. this terrible scourge which decimated over half of the man power of europe brought about the freeing of the serfs from the land and the subsequent enclosure of the common lands by the lords. most of the serfs in the beginning welcomed this freedom, but it had this effect that it broke down the social organism of the middle ages, and freed the lord of the manor from his duties toward the serfs.^^ during this period the merchants, traders, and bankers, who had fretted under the ethical restrictions of the mid18b. carleton b. hayes, op. cit., 61-66, and john f. cronin, s.s. op. cit., 14-15. 19. j. f. cronin, op. cit., 16-17—carleton b. hayes, op. cit., 50-53. 16 the rise of capitalism die ages were growing wealthy and powerful. they could exact protection and privileges from national monarchs against the guilds and lords of the manor, by financing his growing national ambitions. once national unity was achieved, political power was vested in the hands of the bourgeosie or middle class.^^ the final blow to the tottering middle ages was the decline of her center and source of life the church and the waning of faith. during the entire period of transition there is a notable decline in her power and authority brought about, to some extent, by the forces mentioned above, and greatly enhanced by the papal exile at avignon, and the great western schism, coupled with many abuses within the church.2i all of these divergent and sometimes conflicting incidents occasioned a notable decline in fervor and faith in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, and set the stage for the final death-knell of any conception of an organic society — the protestant revolt. in view of what has been said above it must be conceded that technical forms of capitalistic business organization existed in catholic times.^^ whether the 20. carleton b. hayes, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 26, 46, 55-60. 21. john f. cronin, op. cit., p. 14, carleton b. hayes, op. cit., i. pp. 146-152. 22. on this point cf. max weber (talcott parsons tr.) the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, london, 1930, p. 91. in theory and practice 17 impetus to capitalistic enterprise was occasioned by the decline of faith or the decline in faith brought about by the rise of the spirit of individualism is a difficult point to determine. practical capitalism was flourishing in italian cities, characterized by intense competition, unbridled speculation in loans, and maximum profits through minimum wages. even a system of insurance was devised to diminish risks. by 1500 the medici family of florence dominated italian finance and the early spanish expeditions were financed at least in part by the fugger family of augsburg, who by the year 1546 had amassed a fortune of four million gulden ($40,000,000 in present day american currency) . the same period saw the rise of another famous banking family, the welsers of augsburg. venice, genoa, florence, antwerp, lyons, paris, and rouen, frankfurt, strassbourg, lisbon, and seville became the centers of capitalist enterprise.^^ during this transition period theologians and moralists were coming to the realization that services such as trade and finance acually created wealth. necessary adjustments to the usury code were attempted in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. it was now broadened so as to allow a premium for risks. 23. carleton b. hayes, op. cit., i, 84 and r. g. tawney, op, cit., 72-76. 18 the rise of capitalism loss, and other legitimate hazards of business.24 however, though capitalist practices were flourishing even a half century before the protestant revolt the whole or even the majority of society was not impregnated with the spirit of capitalism.^^ one can only conjecture what could have happened if the protestant revolt had been averted. but it seems fairly certain that the church with a reform taking place from within would have insisted upon the personal dignity of man, denouncing the setting up of unlimited worldly possessions as an end, and insisted upon a fair distribution of wealth to the lower classes as she has done within the past fifty years.^^ whatever hope there was to preserve the old interdependent and correlated society of europe vanished in 1520 when martin luther broke definitely with the church by publishing three bold pamph24. callistus iii, “regimini universale,” maii, 1455, and bulls “inter multiplici,” councilium) lateraneuse, apri. 28, 1515 henrians demzinger et clementas bonnewort, enchiridion symbolorum, friburg, 1928. 249-250, and 256. 25. a. fanfani, op. cit., 178. 26. leo xiii, rerum novarum and pius xi, quadragesimo anno. also on this point see preserved smith, the age of the reformation, new york, 1930, p. 26. “had the forces already at work within the church been allowed to operate, probably much of the moral reform desired by the best catholics would have been accomplished quietly without violent rending of christian unity that actually took place.” in theory and practice 19 lets an address to the nobility of the german nation, on the babylonian captivity of the church of god, and on the freedom of christian man, the first pointed out to the nobles that there was nothing particularly sacred about the christian priesthood, and slyly pointed out that they might easily enrich themselves by confiscating the holdings of the church. the second pamphlet denied the authority of the papacy and the efficacy of the sacramental system. and the third held that salvation was not dependent on the sacraments and good works, but rather on man’s despairing of his own efforts and throwing himself on god’s assurancos.^*^ luther in reality did little to help the growing capitalist spirit, and it is doubtful if he ever intended to help it in any way. true he sided with the nobility in the peasants wars of 1524, but that was merely to protect his own interests for he saw that only with the protection of the nobility could he escape the ban of empire issued against him at worms in 1521. in his writings, particularly in his long sermon on usury, and his tract on trade and usury, he maintains the teaching of the schoolmen of the twelfth and thirteenth century. with customary violence he gave no quarter to capitalis27. carleton b. hayes, op. cit., i, 154-155. 20 the rise of capitalism tic desires. price must be determined by the income needed to maintain the merchant in his station of life, and must be proportioned to his labor and his risk. he must not take advantage of scarcity, nor corner a market. above all he must not sell dearer for deferred payments. he denounced all interest and said: ‘the devil invented it, and the pope by giving sanction to it, has done untold evil throughout the world.^'2® what luther definitely, though possibly inadvertedly, accomplished was to unleash the capitalist spirit by removing the “moral restraint” ever present in a united christendom. his making the bible the sole authority in religious matters and each individual a judge unto himself unleashed a force beyond his control and gave to capitalism one of the predominating notes in its ideology — “every man for himself,” and led almost directly to the formation of the secular state.2^ it is easily conceivable that this new force which was unleashed may have remained sterile and unproductive, limited to a few german counties and finally obliterated in the catholic counter reformation carried out so thoroughly by the 28. joseph clayton, luther and his work, milwaukee, 1937, p. 267 and r. h. tawney, op. cit., p. 94-95, john f. cronin, op. cit., p. 16. 29. r. h. tawney, op. cit., p. 100-103. in theory and practice 21 jesuits and the capuchins in the latter half of the sixteenth century if capitalist enterprise had not received an encouraging hand and greater incentive to its ideology by john calvin. he like luther, though they were poles apart in economic theory, brought about the breakdown of the moral restraint of the church. but further than this, unlike luther, he openly espoused the capitalist cause by allowing '‘pure interest’" with certain restrictions. he did not go the length of justifying all usury in every case and circumstance. he started from the premise that capital, banking, credit, large scale commerce and finance were perfectly natural and profit its natural complement. he wrote: "what reason is there why the income from business should not be greater than that from land-owning. whence do the merchant’s profits come except from his own diligence and industry the restrictions placed upon the acquisition of wealth were that interest should not be allowed or at least limited where the urgent need or the borrower, the emergency of the poor, and the welfare of the state demanded it. in this he differed radically from the eighteenth and nineteenth century individualists who 30. r. h. tawney, op. cit., p. 104, and george o’brien, op. cit., p. 21. 22 the rise of capitalism feel the only restriction is the relative bargaining power of the lender and borrower, but at least he gave rise to their philosophy. he justified usury and rejected the teaching and authority of the church.^^ the implication contained in this doctrine was to determine economic thought for the next four hundred years. the impetus that the protestant doctrines gave to the capitalistic spirit cannot be exaggerated. from the protestant revolt down, to the present day the end of modern society has been the acquiring and the accumulation of wealth. wealth became the one important and sought-after end, it was no longer considered as a means. once the fetters of ‘'moral restraint’’ imposed by the catholic church were rent asunder, the greediness of fallen man was unleashed. princes, lords and barons, eager to acquire new sources of wealth, were happy to learn from luther, henry viii, and other reformers that the extensive landed estates of the catholic church might and should be confiscated. bankers, merchants, and manufacturers, intent upon the profitable conduct of their business, heard with joy the considered judgment of calvin that the charging of “pure interest” had been unjustly condemned by the catholic church and that morality was exclusively a matter of individual 31. g. o’brien, op. cit., p. 20-21. in theory and practice 23 conscience. added to this, the doctrine of predestination effected the consecrating of the economic virtues. calvinism, and later its offspring, puritanism, openly taught that financial effort and thrift were the badge of the godly ; poverty and idleness under their guidance became the greatest of economic sins. god was merely manifesting his present displeasure and foreshadowing his future discrimination against the poor and the idle; whereas, energy, thrift, prosperity, and success, was an open manifestation of future glory.^2 this doctrine differed radically from the catholic teaching of resignation to the will of god, of charity to the poor, and of poverty itself being a badge of god's special love. in a word these doctrines gave moral sanctions to economic individualism. the practical results of these doctrines was almost immediately manifested. in 1525, while luther was still fulminating against the traders, the imperial council passed an ordinance expressly allowing merchants to sell at the highest prices they could get, and certain monopolies 32. carleton b. hayes, op. cit., 1, 214-215, how quickly this spirit grew may be judged by the fact that prior to calvin’s judgment a law was enacted in protestant england forbidding usury as “a vice most odious and detestable,” and “by the word of god forbidden.” later in 1571, elizabeth repealed the law as having operated to “the utter undoing of many gentlemen, merchants, occupiers, and others.” usury up to ten per cent was legal. ibid, cit., footnote. 24 the rise of capitalism were recognized. at antwerp in the year 1531 a new merchants’ exchange was built in which all the transactions now seen on our stock or produce exchanges took place. wild speculation predominated, many times on borrowed money, bets were made on prices and events.^^ all moral restraints were removed, and the badge of godliness was enterprise and initiative. capitalists in england drew dividends from buccaneering and slave trading. trading companies were formed from the year 1550 on, among the more notable being the merchant adventurers (russian company) which had two hundred and forty members in joint stock corporation, levant company, the east india company. all of these were formed before the year 1600, generally to discover and exploit regions, dominions, islands and places unknown.^^ the middle of the sixteenth century marked the broadening of capitalism from the commercial to the industrial field. the guilds were not able to keep up with the demands for merchandise and many times would not consent to the traders’ demands to cheapen or adulterate their products, so one by one the great guilds fell under the control of the large commercial companies. 33. preserved smith, op. cit., p. 632. 34. ibid, p. 632-536. in theory and practice 25 but capitalism didn’t stop at control of economic life, its influence was exerted on the political life as well. town councils and governments were more or less dominated by the wealthy burghers. national monarchs were bribed into extending economic privileges to the capitalist class, and parliaments became little more than the expression of their wills.^® this trend in the political order had grave economic consequences. in brussels, in the year 1544, a law was enacted which gave the capitalists control over the tapestry guilds and abolished their mutual benefits and religious functions. brandenburg enacted a law which laid down terms for entrance into any guild, which matter was formerly decided by the members. under edward vi in england the religious endowments of the guilds were confiscated. and under elizabeth the weavers act practically started the factory town system and the statute of apprentices placed the masters in power at the expense of the journeymen. act after act in the various countries of europe favored the employers at the expense of the laborers.^® capitalist procedure likewise affected agriculture. we have already alluded to the “enclosure system” which began in england before the protestant revolt. 35. ibid, p. 549-550. 36. ibid, p. 540-541. 26 the rise of capitalism after this event and the consequent cessation of ''moral restraint’’ it took on unbounded proportions. by elizabeth’s time one-third of all the arable land in england, much of which was enclosed "common land,” was used for grazing. the reason for this was to supply the looms of the netherlands with much needed wool. between the years 1525 and 1534 the price of "raw wool” doubled. also about the same time the ancient copyhold by which land was held for centuries was changed to a leasehold, at the end of which the rent could be raised or the tenant ejected at the will of the owner. under the copyhold system, prevalent throughout the middle ages the tiller of the soil had certain vested rights, all of these were now obliterated.^'^ from these few examples one sees that the protestant revolt and the theories of the reformers while they are not the direct cause of technical capitalism are nevertheless almost exclusively the source of capitalistic ideology. the doctrines of private interpretation of the bible, of the negation of the efficacy of good works, and of predestination led to the exaltation of the individual with himself as the sole code of morality, charity was looked upon as being effeminate, and wealth and material progress the sole problem of man here below. why worry 37. ibid, p. 544-547. in theory and practice 27 about a future life, a final judgment, a day of reckoning, questioned the good protestant burgher, if this has already been irrevocably decided. once this idea permeated the whole of society, once wealth became its sole end then we have the setting up of capitalist philosophy of life. this we believe was a consequence of the protestant revolt. once this idea became the motivating force of society the transition period ends and we launch into modern history. then it was but a series of necessary consequential steps from freedom of religious restraint, to freedom of political restraint or laissez-faire philosophy, and thence to freedom from economic restraint, or free competition. the full consequences of any movement cannot be honestly judged at the time when the movement begins. many of the consequences are not foreseen, much less desired by the leaders of the movement itself. hence to see the full consequences of the protestant revolt on the growth of the capitalistic spirit we have found it best to examine the writings prevalent in england one hundred years after the revolt, and to see the effect the fundamental protestant tenets had on capitalistic ideology. nowhere in calvinistic thought so prevalent as amongst the various pamphleteers during the years of the puritan 28 the rise of capitalism revolt in england, and, strange as it may seem, most of the ideology, most of the stock phrases, and the philosophy of modern capitalism can be found in these works written but a hundred years after calvin and directly traceable to his doctrines, whether he willed it so or not. most of these pamphlets are concerned primarily with toleration and liberty of conscience. much material can be found in them for the development of the democratic secular states, but as these issues do not concern us here they shall be passed over. thus william walwyn, one of the levellers, while urging religious freedom brings out that the true end of religious freedom was not the toleration of a sect or congregation, but the free flourishing of the commonwealth.^® to him the individual had the perfect right of determining his religious belief and likewise the government of the land. government, law, religion, and social institutions should foster individual enterprise for labor, production and trade. he almost laid down the norm which england was to follow in building up her empire when he said: ‘t conceive it will appear upon inquiry, 1. that in whatsoever country the greatest stock of money and 38. william holler, tracts on liberty in puritan revolution, 1638-1647, 1934, v. 62. in theory and practice 29 credit shall be raised, there will the greatest trade of the world be established. 2. that the greatest trade of one country, both a capacity of undermining and eating out the lesser trades of any countries (sic). 3. that the greatest trade will be able to make the greatest number of shipping. and 4. that what nation soever can attain to and continue the greatest trade and number of shippings, will get and keep the sovereignty of the seas, and consequently the greatest dominion of the world.’’^^ the part of government is merely to preserve the peace and leave every man to his own judgment in all things possible. here the pleader for religious toleration speaks like the true british imperialist. in another work he urges parliament to adopt measures for the expansion of trade, manufacuring, shipping, plantations in america and for the establishment of a system of financial credit and exchange. further he advises that the vexing question of the ethics of usury (10% already allowed by law—see above) be settled by the advice of merchants as well as clergymen.^® thus for him private judgment or toleration is merely a stepping stone to the right of private enterprise or property. tolerance was 39. ibid, 66, also 93-94. 40. ibid. p. 66. 30 the rise of capitalism unsustaintable because it hindered trade and commerce. another pamphleteer of this period william robinson thought much in the same vein. he wanted england to convert the unbelievers of other lands. conversion was impossible without intercourse, and intercourse without tolerance. and unless you have both there will be no trade. religion should be made to serve capitalist enterprise and foreign missions set up to grace foreign trade.**^ john milton, richard overton, thomas prince, john goodwin, john lilburne all agreed on the rights of private judgment though they disagreed on various minor points. all of them exalted the individual above society, above the state, and of course primarily above any religious matter. hence less than one hundred years after the revolt we find one of the predominating notes of modern capitalism, and the center of its whole philosophy, namely individualism, held by many and seemingly it had become the accepted mode of thinking. as the levellers and the separatists and the puritans thought so the business world reacted. the commercialism, mercantilism, and growth of industry in this same seventeenth century, whether it be in england or the netherlands, was 41. ibid. p. 69. in theory and practice 31 only putting into practice what most men engaged in commerce and trade were already thinking. the ideals of individualism had come to their natural conclusion the setting up an almost totally material order free from any restraint whatsoever. such a society would have not only been impossible, but even inconceivable in the “ages of faith.’’ an isolated individual or an isolated section of society may haveacted in a capitalistic manner, but the great body of society frowned upon, if they did not actually avoid and condemn such exceptions. this idea is most admirably expressed by tawney in his exhaustive study on the subject: “but the quality in modern societies which is most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to the founder of the christian faith lies deeper than the exceptional failures and abnormal foibles against which criticism is most commonly directed. it consists in the assumption, accepted by most reformers with hardly less naivete than by defenders of the established order, that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object and the final criterion of human success. such a philosophy, plausible, militant, and not indisposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecution, may triumph or may decline. what is certain is that it is a negation of 32 the rise of capitalism any system of thought or morals, which can, except by a metaphor, be described as christian. compromise is as impossible between the church of christ and idolatry of wealth which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the church and state idolatry of the roman empire.’’^^ 42. r. g. tawney, op. cit., p. 286. in theory and practice 33 bibliography 1. burns, bernard e., “the roots of disorder,” columbia xviii. 1938, march. 2. callistus iii, “regimini universali,” maii 6, 1455. 3. clayton, joseph, luther and his work, milwaukee, 1937. 4. corrigan, raymond j., s.j., “the church” and the nineteenth century. milwaukee, 1938. 5. cronin, john f., s.s., economics and society, baltimore. 1938, (3rd ed.) 6. denzinger, henrians et bonnewort, clementas, enchiridion symbolorum, friburg, 1928. 7. fanfani, amintore, catholicism, protestantism, and capitalism. new york, 1939. 8. hayes, carleton b., a political and cultural history of europe. new york, 1936. 9. moulton, harold g. income and economic progress, (brookings institute study) washington, 1936. 10. o’brien, george, an essay on the economic effects of the reformation, london, 1923. 11. fallen, conde b., & wynne, john j., s.j. the catholic dictionary, new york 1929. 12. papal bulls “inter multiplius” concilium lateraneuse, april 28, 1515. leo xiii, rerum novarum. pius xi, quadragesimo anno. 34 the rise of capitalism 13. smith, preserved, the age of the reformation, new york, 1930. 14. st. thomas aquinas, “summa theologica,” taurini, 1929. 15. tawney, r. h., religion and the rise of capitalism, new york, 1926. 16. weber, max, the protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism, london, 1930. some of our latest five cent pamphlets (if you order less than 5 for 2so, the price is loe eaoh postpaid) 1 with whom is the catholic church unpopiilar? 2 why not investigate the catholic religion? 3 does it matter much what man believes? 4 is one religion as good as another? 5 the bible in the middle ages. 6 why you should be a catholic. 7 the catholic church and civil governments. 8 the bible an authority only in catholic hands. 9 the catholic answer. 10 public interests of the church. 11 the way of the cross. 12 which is christ’s true church? 18 communion prayers for every day. 14 the little flower and the word of god. 15 what think you of christ?—study of his divinity. 16 “aunt helen’s” letters to first communicants. 17 is papal infallibility reasonable? 18 can (lur priests forgive sins? 19 does confession make sinning easy? 20 correct conception of god’s church. 21 indulgences; what are they? 22 penance and self-denial: why? 23 holy scripture and evil spirits. 24 catholic women in the home. 25 the real presence: pact or ihction? 26 the church and disarmament. 27 shall we have a second spring? 28 are you sincere? 29 the divine law on family life. 30 the holy eucharist and reason. 31 can indulgences be bought? 32 religion’s a b o’s for the educated. 33 is the church woman’s enemy? 34 “tl^ is body.” ^e drama ot the mass. 35 the mysteries of the holy rosary. 86 cathouc action: what is it? 37 a living wage today. 38 unity in service. 39 the holy hour (5 forms). 40 courtship and marriage. 4 1 cardinal manning. 42 prom byway to highway. 43 god’s way is the only right way. 44 marriage: why indissoluble? 45 catholic marriage: how achieve it? 46 marriage: catholic or mixed? 47 why attend sunday mass? 48 company keeping; when is it a sin? 49 aids to purity. 50 the queen of seven swords. 61 the way of the ooss (msgr. sheoi). 52 the seven last words. 53 does that man love you? 54 the christian home: a nation’s bulwark. 55 training in chastity. 56 does the church serve humanity? 57 the society of the propagation of the faith for foreign missions. 58 why should we give thanks to god? 69 mariology marches on. 60 war or peace. 61 the one and only church. 62 an appeal to careless catholics. 63 america’s bh'st altar boy. 64 through purgatory. 6({ does the unirerse dwarf man? 66 fields for catholic action. 67 the church: the interpreter of the bible. 68 communism’s challenge to youth. 69 the holy name: why reverence itt 70 seven sons of a saint. 71 catholic beginnings in chicago. 72 the rise of capitalism. 73 the new knowledge and the old faith. 74 the church and temperance. 76 truly emmanuel. 76 mexico destroys religious freedom. 77 the sacred heart: why honor it? 78 the protestant mind—in 1936 a. d. 79 the communistic crisis. 80 a grown up altar boy. 81 explanations for a stranger attending catholic services. 82 “the christian faith before the bar of reason.*’ 83 the story of the bible. 84 maid of the sacred sword. 85 why do we pray for the dead? 86 learn of me. 87 are mercy-killings justifiable? 88 frederick ozanam and catholic action. 89 modern indifference and theological science. 90 the traveler’s guardian. 91 birth control and national decay. 92 catholic liturgy and catholic life. 93 for better. for worse. 94 lessons to be learned from persecutions. 95 constitution of the united states. 96 christ’s last words from the cross. 97 lent and its observance. 98 st. patrick. apostle of ireland. 99 the converted jew. 100 novena for the feast of pentecost. 101 the catholic mother—her glory. 102 a martyr to the seal of confession. 103 devotion to st. anthony of padua. 104 the priesthood: a divine institution. 105 a search for the true church. 106 a study in black and "^^ite. 107 a shrewd investment. 108 a thought for every day of lent. 109 our lady of lourdes. 110 the truth about catholics. 111 world war on god. 112 christian civilization versus bolshevist barbarism. 113 watch your habits. 114 the equality of women: a catholic view. 115 wtiat of our republic’s future. 116 can america stay out of war? 117 the church and a living wage. 118 training your child. 119 “god’s year and the church's year.” 120 consoled. 121 a christian vs. an anti-christian front. 122 the catholic doctrine of purgatory. 123 a search for happiness. 124 youth’s struggle for decency. 126 the why and whither of labor unions. 127 the home prayer book. 128 god and his church. 129 my college daze. 130 great european monarch and world peace. 131 shall i marry a non-catholic? 132 reflections on the stations of the cross. 183 nano nagle. 134 god, the world and the catholic workingman. 135 the christian mother. 136 the spiritual symbolism of television. 137 i witness a baptism 138 forgiven. 139 are you missing something? 140 the road to peace. 141 god and the professors. 142 let’s be fair. $8.00 per 100, plus transportation. our sunday visitor. huntington. ind. creating the new egyptian woman: consumerism, education, and national identity, 1863-1922 mona l. russell new york: palgrave macmillan, 2004. 237 pages. in this tome, russell examines four principal foci in her historiographic work on egypt: “the rise of capitalism, the development of an indigenous bureaucracy, the creation of a modern educational system, and the evolution of the nationalist movement” (p. 5). the author compares and contrasts consumption rates between lower-, middle-, and upper-class egyptian women and investigates how western patterns of capitalism paralleled and diverged from indigenous urban templates of consumerism. against this backdrop, she frames women’s education “in a larger struggle for cultural and intellectual hegemony” (p. 7). her engaging work is sprinkled with examples and analyses of egypt’s societal “contact and confrontation with european thought and culture” (p. 8). russell’s volume is intended to be accessible to non-specialists as well as helpful to specialists in the field. its sources include archival documents from the dar al-kutub, l’institut d’egypte, the egyptian national archives, the libraries of the american university in cairo and the presbyterian historical society in philadelphia, and other primary materials. an earlier version of this manuscript stemmed from the author’s doctoral research under the tutelage of judith tucker. russell’s work is a noteworthy contribution to the fields of middle east and women’s studies, communication, education, economics, and other related areas of inquiry. the author’s introduction addresses qasim amin’s concept of the “new woman.” russell places the disparate views of egyptian women in the context of growing consumerism and educational opportunities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. chapter 2 discusses khedive ismail’s nation-building, chapter 3 studies urban patterns of consumption and economic development, and chapter 4 deftly analyzes the rise of consumer culture and advertising in the west in contrast to the development of robust consumerism in egypt. chapter 5 addresses “the new egyptian woman and her western sisters,” and chapters 6 and 7 focus on female education. the politics of textbooks is reviewed in chapter 8, which is followed by the author’s “conclusion,” detailed notes, and a helpful index. an intriguing passage (p. 20) references the types of education received by male and female slaves in the royal harem. russell explains that potential book reviews 107 suitors considered it an honor to marry former slaves of the royal family. rising literacy rates in the nineteenth century helped to spur further societal development, including the advent of widespread advertising for home and health products that, in turn, fueled the rate of consumption. however, the author notes that the most significant change in the late nineteenth century was the expansion of cairo’s environs to the north and northeast via the newly developed modes of public transportation (p. 34). of particular interest are the chapters pertaining to women’s education. in the nineteenth century, the egyptian government was unable to keep pace with the pressing demands for primary education and, in particular, for schools for women. at this point, foreign mission schools were established alongside schools that had been created by the country’s religious and ethnic minorities as early as the seventeenth century. parents were faced with the choice of sending their daughters to traditional kuttabs (qur’anic schools), foreign mission and other private schools, or government educational institutions. russell remarks that “the existence of parallel systems of education fit neatly with the british notion of a bifurcated system of education based upon class, as well as elite egyptian class interests” (p. 95). the american presbyterian mission, founded in 1854, established schools to provide educational opportunities for egyptian girls belonging to various socioeconomic classes. the author credits american mission schools, which “served to improve education in egypt both quantitatively and qualitatively” (p. 114). she notes that “between the years of 1863 and 1879 alone, 129 private schools opened in egypt, the majority of which were presbyterian or catholic” (p. 109). however, her cursory review of the american mission is limited to three pages (113-16), which is disproportionate coverage given the substantial influence that american mission schools had on the creation of other foreign mission schools and on the egyptian government’s decision to offer more educational opportunities for egyptian girls. for example, christine sproul’s unpublished dissertation “the american college for girls, cairo, egypt: its history and influence on egyptian women: a study of selected graduates” (university of utah: 1982), is not mentioned in the author’s research. in the conclusion to chapter 6, russell states: “over the course of the nineteenth century, the choices for girls’ education dramatically expanded, and by 1900 they included a range of public and private facilities offering education from kindergarten to post-secondary” (p. 125). nevertheless, the author concludes that educational opportunities for egyptian girls were bifurcated by economic and social class distinctions. although elite women still struggled with gender barriers due to traditional 108 the american journal of islamic social sciences 24:1 attitudes and androcentric practices, they had a wider array of educational opportunities from which to choose, including individual home instruction from skilled tutors. girls of more humble origins typically had fewer educational options and confronted static understandings of gender roles. educational reform in egypt was characterized by cultural identity struggles between the british occupiers and indigenous peoples. in the late nineteenth century, reform was often equated with anglicizing the curriculum. beginning around 1906, the egyptian government shifted its emphasis toward reclaiming the importance of arabic language instruction and from this point on, egyptian educators sought to nationalize the curriculum and focus on egyptian history, arabic, and religion (p. 129). russell’s astute analysis of women’s changing roles in modern egypt is a significant contribution to islamic thought. her volume merits widespread classroom usage as well as additional research on the changing roles of women in contemporary egypt. jeffrey c. burke, ph.d. assistant professor, religious studies program lynchburg college, lynchburg, virginia book reviews 109 190-note for authors prajñâ vihâra, volume 7, number 2, july-december, 2006, 5-12 5 © 2000 by assumption university press his majesty’s philosophy of sufficiency economy: an alternative for the sustainable development of thailand sumet tantivejkul secretary-general, chaipattana foundation abstract the extreme application of capitalism and consumerism has lead to a destruction of natural resources and has corrupted the foundation of the country’s development system. this paper examines the theory of sustainable economy developed by his majesty king bhumipol adulyadej. it stresses the middle path as the overriding principle for appropriate conduct and way of life by the populace at all levels. this applies to conduct and way of life at the level of individual, family and community, while providing a choice of balanced development strategy for the nation so as to develop in line with the forces of globalization, and shielding against inevitable shocks and excesses that may arise. “this sufficiency means to have enough to live on. sufficiency means to lead a reasonably comfortable life, without excess, or overindulgence in luxury, but enough… the word to have enough is sufficient; sufficiency is moderation. if one is moderate in one’s desires, one will have less craving. if one has less craving, one will take less advantage of others. if all nations hold this concept – i don’t mean sufficiency economy – this concept of moderation, without being extreme or insatiable in one’s desire, the world will be a happier place.” his majesty king bhumibol adulyadej 4 december 1998 a decade ago, thai people followed and relied on the western world’s model of economy, aiming specifically for growth and wealth, without considering the solid foundation of the country and without understanding if that model would fit our economic and social system. in retrospect, the money we were spending for the nation was hardly ours, we still had to borrow from others, as well as use foreign technology. this extends even to human resources; we borrowed the skills of foreigners (who ultimately created instability in our system), without thinking of expanding our own intellectual capital. without a solid foundation, the unstable system collapsed. in 1997, the economic crisis hit thailand severely. it started with the flotation of its currency, and brought great negative impacts to the thai society and thai people at large. a large number of people went bankrupt and lost their jobs, their homes and their pride. the crisis made thai people, both in private and public sectors, aware of the vulnerability of the country’s economic foundation and the problems of heavy reliance on foreign investment, technology, and markets. the catastrophe left a scar in thai economic history that is still remembered by most thais today. consumerism not only was the system corrupted, but also the thai’s also developed habits of over consumption, which led them to bankruptcy and the country to crisis. consumerism interrupts the world function by replacing the normal common sense of desire for an adequate supply of life’s necessities with an unnatural ongoing search for unnecessary things. as a result, people tend to hasten the replacement of the old. those who try to push consumerism instill us with the idea that the economy and quality of life would improve if people buy more things and spend excessively. financial resources which should be spent on fundamentals such as nourishment, 6 prajñâ vihâra housing, education, or other public service activities, unfortunately, are spent on products of little value and little social return. consumerism is a cyclical system in which the consumer develops a false sense of need to purchase more products to accommodate previously purchased items, further benefiting the producers’ income. as more things are forced upon consumers, the amount of waste and other undesirable products increases extensively. each year we consume more oil, energy and valuable natural resources that will be most valuable in the future. as a result of this over consumption, we face an oil crisis. even as the oil price continues to rise, a number of thai people are still buying new cars. a lot of them are unable to afford luxury ones, so they pay by installment. like other unnecessary items, they are paying by credit cards. this growing consumption leads to continuing wars for valuable natural resources, such as oil, diamonds, gold and other limited resources; resources which ultimately are not vital for our survival. maybe in the future, people will fight for water or even the air that we breathe! are we depending on others too much? are there any ways out? is it about time that we need to stand on our own feet and become more self-reliant? sufficiency economy: an alternative to the world crisis the heart of “development” has always been the improvement of livelihood of the people in general. however, to improve does not necessary mean to increase gdp or to increase the markets or consumers, it should rather mean the empowerment of sustainable happiness and individuals become self-reliant to raise their quality of life. fortunately, the livelihood of the thai people and strength of the thai nation have been nurtured and developed by his majesty king bhumibol adulyadej. through his caring leadership and his ingenious thinking, his majesty has earned love and profound respect of his people. while laying the foundations for his country’s development strategy, his sumet tantivejkul 7 majesty’s philosophy of “sufficiency economy” lies at the heart of thailand’s development, and it can truly serve as guidance for the country’s economic and social developments. over the past three decades, his majesty has graciously reminded thai people through his royal remarks on many occasions of a step-bystep and balanced approach to development, which is now known as the philosophy of sufficiency economy. the philosophy provides guidance on appropriate conduct through numerous aspects of life. the following is one example of an excerpt from his royal speech in 1974: “economic development must be done step by step. it should begin with the strengthening of our economic foundation, by assuring that the majority of our population has enough to live on… once reasonable progress has been achieved, we should then embark on the next steps, by pursuing more advanced levels of economic development. here, if one focuses only on rapid economic expansion without making sure that such plan is appropriate for our people and the condition of our country, it will inevitably result in various imbalances and eventually end up as failure or crisis as found in other countries.” since the crisis, his majesty has reiterated and expanded on the sufficiency economy concept in his remarks made in december 1997 and the following years. the concept points the way for recovery that will lead to more flexible, balanced and sustainable development, better able to meet the challenges arising from globalization and other worldly changes. definition of the sufficiency economy philosophy “sufficiency economy” is a philosophy bestowed by h.m. king bhumibol adulyadej of thailand that stresses the middle path as the overriding principle for appropriate conduct and way of life by the populace at all levels. this applies to conduct and way of life at the level of individual, family and community, while providing a choice of balanced development 8 prajñâ vihâra strategy for the nation so as to develop in line with the forces of globalization, and shielding against inevitable shocks and excesses that may arise. “sufficiency” means moderation and due consideration in all modes of conduct, together with the need for sufficient protection from internal and external shocks. to achieve this, the application of knowledge with prudence is essential. in particular, great care is needed in the application of theories and technical know-how and methodologies for planning and implementation. at the same time, it is essential to strengthen the moral fiber of the nation, so that everyone, particularly public officials, academics or theoreticians, businessmen and financiers, adheres first and foremost to the principles of honesty and integrity. in addition, a balanced approach combining patience, perseverance, diligence, wisdom and prudence is indispensable to cope appropriately with critical challenges arising from extensive and rapid socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural changes occurring as a result of globalization. therefore, the sufficiency economy philosophy involves the three following principles: 1. rationality: we have to use our own judgment and rationality to choose our own way of conduct, our own path of living without following blindly the irrational globalization trend, such as overly extravagant life style and over consumption. you can choose your own suitable model of living for your own life with your own rational judgment. 2. moderation: judgment is also used for considering our limitations. how much do we have in our savings? can we spend without going bankrupt? we have to learn about our own limitations, capacities and potentialities, such as human capital, financial capital and availability of resources, and start there. only a balanced conduct of living will be in harmony with others. 3. risk management: this stage is to prepare ourselves to accept and face the impacts and other changes which are expected to likely happen in the future, both interior and exterior. we have to create our own savings, national savings, and to become self reliant without always depending on foreign countries. sumet tantivejkul 9 some might think that this philosophy of sufficiency economy is outdated, old fashioned and cannot lead the country to prosperity. the new systems to measure a better living in the past, we normally used “wealth” as a criterion to measure a better living, and gross domestic product or gdp was the most useful figure. this system measures the quantity of products and services that a country produces. at that time, most people believed that crime usually went down when gdp went up and when gdp rose, quality of health and life just simply got better. however in the 1970s, researchers and social policy experts weakened that belief. when subtracted from gdp, the cost of crime, unemployment, malnutrition, environmental deterioration, etc., it was found that for the last 30 years, a better living does not essentially depend on increasing incomes and economic figures. in fact, the number of people suffering from depression in industrialized countries had escalated tenfold in 50 years. the word “wealth” in fact came from the word “well-being”. so “wealth” in its origin does not really mean just economic prosperity, but something much broader than that. now that we believe that gdp is no longer the most useful figure to measure a better living, he human development index or hdi, which was issued annually by the united nations, is an alternative to that. all countries around the world are ranked according to their people’s life expectancy, educational attainment, and adjusted real income rather than by the nation’s economic figures. another new trend that is now becoming more popular for measuring a better living is the gross domestic happiness (gdh) or gross national happiness (gnh), invented by his majesty king jigme singye wangchuck of bhutan. this country is one example that concerns about what globalization may bring and wants to preserve its unique culture and social values by holding on to a new term, gnh, through his majesty king jigme singye wangchuck’s 1972 declaration: “gross national happiness is more important than gross national product.” this system has been applied since 1972, using “four pillars of happiness” — 10 prajñâ vihâra sustainable economic development, conservation of the environment, promotion of national culture and good governance. benefits and happiness his majesty king bhumibol adulyadej also pays great attention to the well-being and happiness of the thai people. unlike his majesty king jigme singye wangchuck, the thai king did not invent a new system to measure happiness for his nation; instead he created a new term “benefits and happiness”, which he stated in many occasions because he believes that “benefits have to go along with happiness”. benefits without happiness will create an unbalanced approach to well-being. if the life of the individuals is not balanced and they do not care to invite sufficiency into their life, only personal material value will hold significance. when material accumulation reaches its peak, things will just break down and will have to start everything from zero again. economic growth alone normally benefits less people, but balance of income distribution benefits people as a whole. economic development and income distribution must develop together to generate a greater profit for the country at large. the extreme application of capitalism and consumerism leads to total destruction of natural resources and corrupts the foundation of the country’s development system, whereas the sufficiency economy leads towards a more balanced approach to better living. the world is now in chaos. if we do not stop our habits of over consumption, the sustainable state will never happen. the natural resources will be depleted and our descendants will suffer deprivation. i believe that to follow the king’s idea of “benefits and happiness” can create a better living among mankind, and that the philosophy of sufficiency economy can build a solid foundation for the country’s development. if things are carried out on the moral and ethical basis, we can achieve progress with stability. it may take a bit longer, but it will be less risky. and ultimately, we will be able to achieve happiness and sustainable growth. source: undp sumet tantivejkul 11 12 prajñâ vihâra against animal rights? a comment on "contro i diritti degli animali? proposta per un antispecismo postumanista (against animal right? a proposal to a post-human antispeciesism)", by roberto marchesini against animal rights? a comment on contro i diritti degli animali? proposta per un antispecismo postumanista (against animal right? a proposal to a post-human antispeciesism), by roberto marchesini alberto giovanni biuso associate professor of theoretical philosophy, university of catania doi: 10.7358/rela-2016-002-bius agbiuso@unict.it for horkheimer, the “indescribable, unimaginable suffering of the animals, the animal hell in human society, […] the sweat, blood, despair of the animals” (1978, 66-7) are the grounds of capitalism. however, it is clear that these features are not exclusively capitalistic. our fear for animality is ancient, profound, ancestral. this fear of ours is understandable, after all, because it is based on the need to mark the territory, identify the pack’s identity, impose a hierarchy. all these elements are obviously deeply related to an animal nature. the homo sapiens shows his animality precisely as he is trying to distance himself from it. this particular animal, then, has had to create conceptual and practical means to protect himself from himself, using his own tools. herein lies the root of the humanist paradigm. there are many well-known examples of this view: the adoption of the human as the measure of all things (greek sophists), pico della mirandola’s de hominis dignitate, the vitruvian icon by leonardo da vinci, representing a human being at the centre of the universe. in order to describe these and other manifestations of humanism at its fullest, richard ryder came up with the term speciesism in 1970, with a clear analogy with racism and sexism. this term is rather ambiguous as it flattens animal specificity within the intra-specific discriminations of our species, but is nevertheless useful to define the consequences of something much deeper: namely, the humanist paradigm. this is paradigm à la kuhn and, in this sense, it increasingly shows its weaknesses, flaws, mistakes, contradictions and unresolved conundrums. the aim of roberto marchesini’s reflection as a whole and of his mailto:agbiuso@unict.it http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/relations/issue/view/73 alberto giovanni biuso 218 relations – 4.2 november 2016 http://www.ledonline.it/relations/ latest monograph in particular is precisely the criticism of speciesism. this criticism is intended and practiced as a signal, a caesura, a fracture, a break within the humanist paradigm and supports a new and more correct anthropological and epistemological paradigm. the goal is to identify the speciesist roots of humanism and the humanist roots of speciesism. indeed, humanism is based on some fundamental principles, a few precise negations and several categorisations. the principles are the following: “1. the paradigm of the human incompleteness […]. 2. the concept of culture as autopoietic, autarkic, disjunctive and elevating […]. 3. the ergonomic view of techne, conceived of as the art of making tools that, in an ancillary way, improve the inherent predicates without polluting the purity of the human. 4. the concept of episteme as the measure and subsumption of the world […]. 5. the idea of the human as an end and as a meaning, consequently emptying all other entities of significance” (marchesini 2014, 23-4). this very short list is enough to understand that speciesism concerns the view that homo sapiens has of himself rather than his evaluation of the other animals. speciesism is a way to consider his position in being rather then a set of discriminative or violent behaviours towards the rest of being. being born out of fear, humanism is primarily a radical negation of animality as such. first of all of one’s own animality and, only then, of the animality of others. the humanist confuses her animal being with the mere corporeality and mistakes the animality of the non-human for the simple mechanism of its organs. the deep spiritualism of this reductionist conception of animality shows that “the humanist paradigm is based on a substitution that, following the theocentric medieval canon, simply replaces god with the human being. in this perspective of the human being, we can talk about a onto-utopia, namely an ontopoeisis placed within a devaluation of nature, which is considered distopic respect to the human predicates” (marchesini 2014, 25). theocentrism is, therefore, one of the constitutive cores of humanism, which restlessly operates in favour of distancing and, at the same time, of homologation. the aim is to distance the human from the rest of animality, while homologating animality into uniform categories which is an obvious mistake both on an ontological and on a logical level. simply, the animal does not exist. this categorisation causes the dismissal of the only real difference: not the one between the human and other animals, but rather the one between animals, humans included. it is “clear that our species is different from the others, but the same cannot be said for chimpanzees, elephants, hummingbirds – just to make some examples. […] this interpretation gives life to an essentialist anthropocentrism, able to disjoint the human being from the network of living beings and connect him to a dimension which http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/relations/issue/view/73 against animal rights? 219 relations – 4.2 november 2016 http://www.ledonline.it/relations/ is other from nature” (marchesini 2014, 89). in this way, the heterospecific is flattened, discredited, simplified and dissolved. with the same mistaken gesture, the human as contiguous to the nature that he is, along with difference within the nature that he inhabits, is flattened, glorified, simplified and dissolved. hence some behaviours that are supposed to respect difference and, instead, are fully part of the humanist paradigm. it does not make sense, for instance, to ask what animal is the most intelligent because this question obviously takes a very precise form of intelligence – that of humans – as a hierarchical criterion. and human intelligence is, too, the result of hypersimplification, as there are several and different kinds of intelligence within the human species. the conviction that the animal different from us it totally other and unknowable derives from this simplification/devaluation. on the contrary, many cases – e.g. that of the gorilla koko, who learnt and used the language of american deaf-mutes – demonstrate that “the unknowable animal is a humanist invention, and the umwelten are not separated entities but rather overlapping contexts with several thresholds of encounter” (marchesini 2014, 53). therefore, the negation of human animality is based upon and explained by the negation of identity and difference. it is a negation of difference because “speciesism is the negation of the otherness of heterospecifics” (marchesini 2014, 28). this negation of identity unifies the entire animality as active life of matter, and is the core of the human presumption of being something special in the living realm. the human is unique, of course, as unique as the form of existence of any other living being. every life form is unique in biological terms: there are no gaps or breaks, but rather developments and differences within continuity. even in some antispeciesist practices “the separation between the human and the non-human is actually a form of speciesism, as it relies on an aprioristic dichotomy between the two terms, that is, it is radically based on humanist speciesism” (marchesini 2014, 105). thus, real overcoming of speciesism implies overcoming the very concepts of centrality and primacy of any entity in the world. difference is a shared by all the species: it is an identity that unifies us in difference. speciesism also means to think that this difference is not ontological but hierarchical. this is what happens whenever – with the best intentions – we claim that the heterospecific only has a lesser ability compared to the human. “are we sure”, though, “that by saying that between the human and the other species there are only quantitative differences, we do not fall into an even worse anthropocentric statement? viewing the others as subjects minus habentes and not as owners of different predicates, aliud http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/relations/issue/view/73 alberto giovanni biuso 220 relations – 4.2 november 2016 http://www.ledonline.it/relations/ habentes, is one of the most boorish forms of anthropocentrism” (marchesini 2014, 58). on the contrary, we must understand and accept that it is not possible “to establish if the perceptive canon of a cat or a horse is the best, as these perceptions are specialised in in order to accomplish functional goals that do not overlap. the function of an attribute cannot be considered in terms of plus and minus, and no species can be the measure of another, because adaptive means cannot overlap and each species  – including the human – is not a neutral entity but emerges from an immersive declination” (marchesini 2014, 65). speciesism also means being convinced – as many philosophies and “progressive” political stances have historically been – that there is no such thing as human nature and that the homo sapiens coincides with that described by pico della mirandola, leon battista alberti and other humanists: namely, a historical, voluntary and autopoietic entity. but “considering the human being as the exclusive result of social or historical contingencies means supporting the humanist idea of pico’s manifesto. if human nature is negated or reduced to the point of being inconsistent, what follows is a clear form of speciesism” (marchesini 2014, 104); “[…] those who reject speciesism and yet negate the complexity and articulation of human nature inadvertently adhere to the very disjunctive mechanism that grounds speciesism” (marchesini 2014, 93). the negation of human nature is also articulated by attributing temporality only to homo sapiens as well as describing non-human nature as the realm of the invariable and the same. “on the contrary, if we consider the thought of complexity, as it emerges from the 1960s onwards, it is clear that the meaning of time, in its two terms of contingency and necessity, has come back to the fore” (marchesini 2014, 95). the twofold negation of the temporality of nature and of the consistency of the human originates from some forms of “progressive” speciesism, which are as subtle as it is tricky. it originates the acknowledgement of the necessity guiding the natural world and the assignment of free will only to the human being, “seen as free, responsible for his destiny as he is undetermined and therefore able to escape a canon, to emancipate and determine himself” (marchesini 2014, 89). it originates the universalism of rights and therefore the application, to non-human beings, of criteria of liberation typical of our species; this universal principle is “already anthropocentric per se, as it is informed by the human matrix that thinks it can take a framework (which is a right) that can also apply to the non-human sphere” (marchesini 2014, 100). despite the merits of their works, scholars such as peter singer and tom regan belong to the universal canon and, “in homage to the theoretihttp://www.ledonline.it/index.php/relations/issue/view/73 against animal rights? 221 relations – 4.2 november 2016 http://www.ledonline.it/relations/ cal, anthropometric coordinates, they follow an inclusive logic towards the human universal instead of the pluriversal required for the formulation of ‘different rights’. the inclusion of non-human animals in the human universal is the most speciesist act there can be, even though its discriminative expression is hidden by an obviously and courageously emancipatory intention – the revolutionary implications of these thesis must be acknowledged with frankness” (marchesini 2014, 101). hence the contraposition between the innate (animal/natural) element and the apprehended (human/cultural) element, while the truth is that complex reality of being-in-the-world consists of the recursion that every animal experiences between the modalities allowed by its structure (innate) and the refinement of practices allowed by that structure (apprehended). all of this mainly produces the concept and the practice of utopia as the separation from the chthonic state of the human and as “the humanist aspiration not to be animals, the utopian desire for a different reality, the concrete fear of seeing ourselves in the eyes of the non-human” (marchesini 2014, 23). if there is no such thing as human nature, all of this is possible. however, all of this is possible only for the human, who sets himself, once again, beyond the identity/difference relationship with the rest of animality. therefore, as marchesini clearly states, “utopia, however disguised it may be, is a speciesist topos because, in accordance with human virtuality and the negligence towards the telluric, it highlights neverland rather than the real. […] whoever professes a utopia inevitably negates human nature and, therefore, places the human being in a different domain to the heterospecifics’, thereby actually supporting the humanist dichotomy between the human and the other species, which is propaedeutic to every speciesist ideology” (marchesini 2014, 99-100). utopia also expresses another fundamental character of humanism: its dualism. “so: a) the animal belongs to nature, while the human to culture. b) the former is the product of phylogenesis, while the latter is destined to ontogenetic freedom. c) the former is closed off within an umwelt, while the latter is able to dwell within a welt” (marchesini 2014, 90). beyond historicisms, (human) rights, utopias and dualisms, the reality of human animality consists of an original and constant hybridation with other animals, and of the hybridation of all those animals with collective, relational and instrumental technologies marking the dynamism of life on our planet: “an introjective anthropocentrism gives birth to such a rooted forma mentis that it is even hard to make oneself understood when claiming that human predicates are the product of hybridation with otherness. the result of this is a trivialisation of the heterospecifics and today’s total negligence of the human towards the relationship with the non-human: we http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/relations/issue/view/73 alberto giovanni biuso 222 relations – 4.2 november 2016 http://www.ledonline.it/relations/ believe we are self-sufficient in our ontological dimension and, at most, we read biodiversity through the ecologic, aesthetic, economic, preservationist lens. in so doing we do not realise that, by depriving the heterospecific of their referential meaning, we will find out that the human is the emperor with no clothes” (marchesini 2014, 82). contra gehlen’s anthropology – marchesini’s ancient and constant polemical target – it must be understood that culture does not exempt the homo sapiens from some biological lack, but rather creates a lack filled by the continuous and necessary relationship with the sphere of other animals, machines 1 and the sacred. this relationship is what we call culture, which is not set against nature (as reduced to matter and res extensa), but is profoundly symbiotic with it in linguistic, operational, and conceptual terms: “we can therefore claim that culture is not a ‘crutch’ used to compensate for the lacks or flaws of human nature, but is like falling in love: namely, it is the construction of a hybrid, expressive space which connects us to the other and associates the thought of ourselves as separated from our partner to a feeling of lack” (marchesini 2014, 131). a self-aware anti-speciesism, thus, rejects any form of ludditism or romantic naturalism. rather sciences “able to give us some descriptive and explanatory frameworks that are increasingly less anthropocentric” (marchesini 2014, 64) and knowledge – even in technological terms – are for antispeciesism a means of contamination with animal otherness, of anthropo-decentrism, of common liberation (of every animal, us included) from the sphere of some needs to which other animals have been functional for centuries. the hope is to reach, slowly but steadily, the goal expressed in the interview presented at the end of the book. in his answers to eleonora adorni, marchesini says that the aim is to “see the animal as a companion and not as an exploitable machine” (marchesini 2014, 167). this itinerary is based on the post-humanist principles that question “a) the ontological exclusivity of the human. b) the pretension to take human features as the term of comparison or measure of non-human entities. c) the idea that the human subsumes the characters of the world. d) the autarkic vision of the anthropoietic process” (marchesini 2014, 144). overcoming these claims, exclusions and hierarchies means preserving the human from his 1 “each technology is like a virus entering the human cell, namely its predicates, and modifying it by re-organising its functions-structures, namely its predicates” (marchesini 2014, 108). “if, conversely, we question the patient, obsequious obedience to techne, suspending the anthropocentric conception of ancillary nature. we realise that the instrument is a bad servant and, contrary to what we might believe, it heavily impacts on the definition of its goals, as it shows new horizons into which we can project ourselves” (marchesini 2014, 111). http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/relations/issue/view/73 against animal rights? 223 relations – 4.2 november 2016 http://www.ledonline.it/relations/ own autopoieitic dreams, which are ready to turn into the nightmare of the inadvertent destruction of his own identity, along with the difference. “de facto, whoever dismisses the importance of otherness, stresses species solipsism, or exalts anthropocentrism seriously endangers human future” (marchesini 2014, 143). it is confirmed, thus, that speciesism is an anthropological and hermeneutic question, and for this reason it is also animal: “the speciesist core does not consist, if not as a temporary geography of discussion, of animal predicates bur rather of the way in which the human being thinks of himself” (marchesini 2014, 90). in this way, one can glimpse one of the most intimate, albeit hidden, elements of nietzsche’s übermensch, whose meaning and anti-speciesist implications are clear: this notion states the overcoming of any hierarchic separation between the human and animality, which the former is and will always be. “the animal that we are and are not is more certain than our cogito, experiments life and is able to find its sources of happiness; it is a body that expresses, in a dionysian way, a will within the impotence that challenges the laws of thermodynamics and transforms resources into endowments, laws into spaces of freedom, and time into an internal universe to be infinitely filled” (marchesini 2014, 55). references horkheimer, max. 1978. dawn & decline: notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969, translated by michael shaw. new york: seabury press. marchesini, roberto. 2014. contro i diritti degli animali? proposta per un antispecismo postumanista. casal monferrato: sonda. http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/relations/issue/view/73 baltic journal of economic studies 220 vol. 8 no. 3, 2022 1 national university "odesa law academy ", ukraine (corresponding author) e-mail: yakovlevdenys@gmail.com orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2828-4669 researcherid: gno-9727-2022 2 international university of economics and humanities named after academician stepan demianchuk, ukraine e-mail: milabogush@mail.com 3 odesa i.i. mechnikov national university, ukraine e-mail: odyachenko10@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.30525/2256-0742/2022-8-3-220-227 the voice of the middle class and economic democracy in ukraine denys yakovlev1, liudmyla borovyk2, olha diachenko3 abstract. the purpose of the article is to determine the role of the middle class in political democracy and economic democracy in ukraine. the role of the ukrainian middle class in the revolutionary events of 2004 and 2013–2014 – the ukrainian maidans, the influence of the middle class on the results of the parliamentary elections in ukraine and its presentation in the verkhovna rada of ukraine are noted. the pendulum-like oscillation of self-identification of the middle class between "service to the oligarchs" and "resistance to democracy," the basis of civil society, is noted. the emphasis is placed on the fact that democracy is the rule of the middle class, and the principle of equal freedom is at the core of economic democracy. the compromise between capitalism and democracy is the need to distribute the public good under the supervision of political democracy in the interests of the middle class. methodology. the theory of economic democracy was used to study the essence and characteristics of the middle class in ukraine. by means of sociological methods of empirical research middle class identification by indicators of income, education, labor (employment), consumer behavior is given. differences of "european" middle class from ukrainian middle class are marked. in connection with the fact that the level of income of the ukrainian middle class does not correspond to the indicators of eu countries, the necessity of application of subjective indicators to determine self-identification of middle class representatives in ukraine is substantiated. the definition of the middle class from the opposite, i.e., what the middle class is not (not the oligarchs, not the authorities, not the working class, etc.) is also applied. results. the trajectories of the middle class in ukraine have been defined – from active participation in the ukrainian revolutions to the role of a servant of the oligarchic regime. the middle class is well positioned to establish a regime of political democracy and to oppose the oligarchic-lumpen alliance. what hinders this is the insufficient activity of the middle class during election campaigns and especially after them. the oligarchs' established monopoly in the economy and media space allows for effective election campaigns in the mass media and the financing of political parties. this nullifies attempts of the middle class to establish political democracy in ukraine. the growing role of the new middle class – intellectuals and representatives of the creative industries – has been noted. the self-identification factors of the middle class include a sense of justice, responsibility for the future and the practice of democratic values. according to sociological research, representatives of the ukrainian middle class strive for democratic changes, overcoming corruption, deconstruction of the oligarchic regime, and implementation of market reforms. they have higher education, are interested in art, go to restaurants, and can sometimes afford vacations abroad. the political parties that declared support for the middle class and defined it as a target group in the elections included the "team of winter generation," "veche," "self reliance", and "voice". the first two were perceived as oligarchic projects, while the last two parties made it to parliament, respectively, in the eighth and ninth convocations. separately, the 2019 elections, in which the voice of the middle class became truly powerful, are examined separately. the "old faces," representatives of the post-soviet oligarchy, and bureaucrats lost in the majoritarian districts. the middle class refused to support those politicians and parties that had become "servants of the oligarchs" in parliament, taking an important step in building not only a political democracy, but also an economic this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution cc by 4.0 baltic journal of economic studies 221 vol. 8 no. 3, 2022 democracy. practical implications. the results of the study can be used in the process of european integration of ukraine, the implementation of reforms to develop political democracy as the rule of the middle class and economic democracy as a democratic system of redistribution of public resources. value/originality. this study of the middle class and economic democracy allows us to understand the economic factors that influence politics, the role of the middle class and its characteristics in the process of establishing political democracy and economic democracy in ukraine. key words: middle class, economic democracy, political democracy, oligarchy, political revolution, principle of equal freedom, elections. jel classification: d72, f59 1. introduction the middle class in ukraine is probably the most enigmatic social phenomenon since independence in 1991. gradually realizing itself in the economy as a small and medium business, in politics it, like a cheshire cat's smile, now appears, playing a decisive role at the next historical crossroads, then disappears right before one' eyes. studies of economic democracy point out that under current conditions there is ample room for redistribution of economic power between the rich, the poor, and the middle class (ringen, 2004). this requires the establishment of a regime of political democracy – putting economic power under the control of the middle class. the compromise between capitalism and democracy is as follows: "…those who own instruments of production consent to the institution of the private ownership of capital stock while productive instruments consent to political institutions that permit other groups to effectively press the claims to the allocation of resources, the distribution of output" (przeworski & wallerstein, 2021). one of the main prerequisites for the rise of the middle class, and consequently of political and economic democracy, is the spread of the principle of equal freedom. since the enlightenment, the principle of equal freedom has become the basic moral reference point by which the legitimacy of social and political institutions has been judged (archer, 2002). although today we lack empirical data regarding the starting conditions and genesis of the middle class in ukraine. the gradual overcoming of totalitaria nism and the introduction of equal freedom is associated with the process of the collapse of the ussr . probably, at the beginning of the 90s the middle class was formed as an heir of the intelligentsia and the soviet bureaucracy, shadow speculative business and power structures. in ukraine, the middle class has gone from semi-legal businesses, impoverished intellectuals, and "serving the oligarchs" to the driving force behind the maidans, a class of volunteers, activists, and volunteers who provide resistance to russian full-scale military aggression. the middle class in ukraine emerged with the beginning of "restructuring" and "publicity ". political democracy is associated with the policy of "restructuring" and "publicity ", the first shoots of which could be observed in ukraine in the late 80s of the twentieth century – early 90s, starting as an initiative "from above", led not only to the development of national identity, and formed the preconditions for the middle class (yakovlev, 2015). it is largely thanks to the middle class that ukraine has been at the forefront of the post-soviet democratic transformation. yes, one should not underestimate the role of the middle class in the ukrainian political maidans – the "orange revolution" (2004) and the "revolution of dignity " (2013–2014). these events twice radically changed the political course of the state in the direction from authoritarianism to democracy, at least to electoral democracy. after overcoming the political crisis and the opposition coming to power (in 2005 – president v. yushchenko, and in 2014 – p. poroshenko), the activity and cohesion of the middle class was not enough to put pressure on the government to implement market economic reforms. the middle class has always made a democratic political choice. for ukraine, it is a choice in favor of a proportional electoral system, a parliamentary-presidential model, and democracy as the rule of the middle class (yakovleva & yakovlev, 2020). what about economic democracy? having made political revolutions and won political democracy (at least in its electoral dimension), the middle class did not ask for a social revolution and the estab lishment of economic democracy. rather, it fell back into disrepute. or, more precisely, pushed out of the field of public politics was an effective alliance of oligarchs and the "lower" classes from the point of view of retaining power. this alliance was called "oligarchic-lumpen" in ukrainian publicity. political democracy is impossible without a middle class. economic democracy is understood as the redistribution of economic power among individuals, as the involvement of the people in economic power directly rather than through elected representatives (ringen, 2004). baltic journal of economic studies 222 vol. 8 no. 3, 2022 in a democracy, the decision is made by a majority of citizens, which limits the political choices of others. the middle class, thanks to its activism, has played a significant role in times of dramatic change. in elections, and especially after them, the middle class is still losing the competition for economic democracy – the establishment of a fair distribution of public resources. during election campaigns in ukraine, oligarch candidates with populist rhetoric always win. it is about face-changing oligarchic parties, not about the essence of politics (kroytor & yakovlev, 2020) and the political discourse that is supported by the oligarchic media (yakovlev, amirov & stoliarova, 2021). oligarchs nominate candidates who, thanks to populist rhetoric, receive the support of the majority of voters. this fully applies not only to political competition, but also to economic competition. although the free market is able to distribute products and services, taking into account the preferences of small groups or individuals, even in conditions of free competition, political and economic choices are available to the citizen, limited by collective choice. economic democracy limits the choice of any individual. this provision of economic science can in no way justify the fact that in ukraine the oligarchy, through media influence and lobbyism in parliament, pushes the middle class to the margins of economic policy. it should be noted: "the distorted system of the ukrainian economy, where the lion's share of production is concentrated in the hands of large and very large businesses, and most of the population works either for them or for the state, which pays miserable salaries to its employees, also determines the distorted system of distribution of society into classes." (zanuda, 2013) increasing the participation of the middle class in a just economic distribution, which ukraine so desperately needs in the present conditions, is directly dependent on its role in politics. political democracy creates the conditions for the middle class to be represented in politics. note that the middle class can become a driving force not only to overcome oligarchy, but also to revive economic democracy in the global dimension (ringen, 2004). why hasn't the middle class in ukraine taken advantage of this opportunity so far? 2. in search of the middle class in ukraine: from "servants of the oligarchs" to the creative class there is no unity among researchers in defining the essence of the middle class and its social and economic characteristics. on the one hand, the middle class is seen as resistance to oligarchy and authoritarianism, resistance to democracy and the market economy, the foundation of civil society. on the other hand, the middle class in post-soviet ukraine is identified as "serving the oligarchs". the middle class is referred to as an "undefined" class (zanuda, 2013). one of the markers of the need to form a middle class and to expand the circle of opportunities for middle-class representatives in the economy and politics is the fixation of public opinion on the large income gap between the rich and the poor. the income gap has created a social divide. thus, in 1993, 79% agreed with the statement that there was a big difference in income, in 1995 – 82%, in 1998 – 92%. the situation has not changed for decades, because in 2019 the figure was 95% (oksamytna & symonchuk, 2020). these attitudes suggest that citizens perceive this unequal distribution as unjust, and that the political order that promotes it is illegitimate. to the direct question "how fair or unfair is the distribution of income in ukraine?" the vast majority of ukrainians (94.1%) in 2019 described this distribution as "unfair" or "extremely unfair," still often choosing both answers. according to experts of the razmukov center, "the process of formation of the middle class in modern ukraine is fundamentally different from western standards. if in the west the typical representatives of this layer are lawyers, doctors, teachers, middle managers, in ukraine the middle class (according to the property criterion) includes the so-called "oligarchs' service" – biased employees of mass media, corrupt officials, corrupt lawyers and managers of various foreign companies, elite entertainment facilities, beauty salons and fitness clubs. and this stratum has neither the educational nor the moral level to be a carrier of state ideology, to act as a basis for political and economic development." (bychenko, mishchenko, pyshchulina, rachok & shanhina, 2016) the problem lies in the application to the ukrainian middle class of such criteria as "education," "work," "income," and "status". in ukraine, the level of education does not mean the level of income that corresponds to the middle class, and the status of teachers and doctors, who should certainly be classified as middle class, in society is far from the ideals of political democracy and economic democracy, because representatives of these professions must resort to additional employment and/or shady practices to improve their financial situation, which negatively affects their status in society. "according to estimates by marketing companies that are interested in calculating how much this middle class can spend, buying apartments, cars, refrigerators, our middle class is between 5 and 15% of the population. we could conventionally call middle class those who work mostly for multinational baltic journal of economic studies 223 vol. 8 no. 3, 2022 companies or big ukrainian businesses in positions related to the financial and information sector." (zanuda, 2013) by the way, the presence of the shadow economy also adds uncertainty, as official statistics on the middle class require considerable refinement. because of the obvious difficulties with the identification of the middle class in ukraine some sociologists suggest the following. first, to distinguish between the "european middle class" (about 2% of ukrainian citizens belong to it in terms of income) and the "ukrainian middle class," identified on the basis of the real income of the middle class in ukraine. in the process of defining the ukrainian middle class there is a core. this is the part of the population that meets all the criteria of the ukrainian middle class. the "core" is about 12% of the population. the periphery of the ukrainian middle class includes those who meet at least one of the criteria. according to o. balakireva, the following criteria should be used to identify the middle class: 1 – the population whose material and property status corresponds to the interpretation of the middle class in ukraine (about 35%); 2 – the population with a high professional and educational status (about 40%); 3 – the population that identifies with the middle class (about 45%); 4 – the population that meets almost all the criteria of the middle class, i.e. constitutes its "core" (about 12%) (chernova, 2014). the instability of the middle class periphery is exacerbated by economic, political and social crises, and in times of war the middle class periphery is threatened with extinction. this will have extremely negative consequences, since it is the middle class that is not only the backbone of volunteers going to the front, but also the volunteers and activists providing the rear. it is clear, however, that the study of the middle class under conditions of war is yet to come. secondly, to identify the middle class not by what it is, but by what it is not. it is possible to identify the middle class by identifying those social groups with which representatives of the ukrainian middle class do not identify themselves. in other words, the middle class is not aristocracy, not power, not working class, not business, etc. (chernova, 2014). at the same time, in modern society it is possible to talk about a "new middle class" – intellectuals, representatives of the creative class (experts, representatives of the creative industries and creative professions, etc.). here higher education and the creation of intellectual products are indispensable. alongside the new middle class is the "old middle class. this refers to entrepreneurs, owners of small and medium-sized businesses. one possible approach is also to study the self-definition of the middle class, the so-called "subjective middle class". an important factor in the subjective selfidentification of the middle class is a sense of justice and responsibility for the future. it should be noted: "explaining the difference between how many ukrainians consider themselves to be middle class and the much lower estimates of experts, we suggest adding to the purely material attributes – income, education, ability to buy a house and a car, give education to their children, have access to quality medicine, rest – also a social and psychological factor – responsibility for the future." (zanuda, 2013) one of the main criteria for the identification of the middle class is the practice of democratic values. this was fully demonstrated during the ukrainian squares. democratic values are one of the most important attributes of the middle class: "...the most common motive for going to maidan was the brutal beating of protesters in the capital on the night of november 30 repression (70% of respondents). in second place was viktor yanukovych's refusal to sign the association agreement with the eu (53.5%). in third place is the desire to change life in ukraine (50%)." (press conference, 2013). according to the next wave of research on the maidan in 2014, a significant part of it was made up of the middle class: "...by occupation in the modern maidan-seed ... there are most of all specialists with higher education – 27%, significantly increased the number of entrepreneurs (17%). at the same time there are workers (15%), pensioners (7%) and those with no permanent job (13%) (from maidan camp to maidan-sich: what has changed? 2014). to self-identify as middle class, sociologists suggest that citizens determine their family 's level of well-being on a five-step self-assessment scale: 1) " we can barely make ends meet, we don't even have enough money for necessary foodstuffs"; 2) " we have enough to eat and buy the necessary inexpensive things"; 3) "on the whole, there is enough to live on, but it is difficult to buy durable goods"; 4) " we live well, but we are not yet able to make some purchases (e.g., buy an apartment)"; 5) " we can afford to buy almost anything we want" (chernova, 2014). the middle class is identified if the respondent chooses positions 3 and 4. objective economic indicators of the middle class include income level (which allows for an acceptable standard of living for the family and savings), availability and nature of material assets (availability of at least housing, a car and a summer house), consumer behavior, education at least specialized secondary, employment in non-physical labor, and availability of a permanent job or own business (chernova, 2014). this methodology is used by the razumkov center. according to it, the citizens of ukraine consider stable income, providing a high standard of living; comfortable housing; work, which baltic journal of economic studies 224 vol. 8 no. 3, 2022 corresponds to qualification and accordingly is paid; durable consumer goods; high level of education; insurance policies, etc. to be mandatory signs of the middle class (bychenko, mishchenko, pyshchulina, rachok & shanhina, 2016). the position of the ukrainian, i.e., "relative" middle class regarding the political and economic choice of ukraine in favor of european integration, democracy and market economy differs significantly from the positions of other classes: the oligarchs, as the upper class of ukrainian society and the poor, as the lower class. here are some figures: "...26% of the poor – and 55% of the relative (ukrainian) middle class and 61% of the absolute (european) class would vote for ukraine's accession to the eu. internet users: among the relative middle class – 65%, among the absolute – 85%, and among the poor – only 27%, among those who only have enough to eat – 36%." (bychenko, mishchenko, pyshchulina, rachok & shanhina, 2016) while the list of oligarchs in ukraine has remained virtually unchanged since the 2000s, the middle class, on the other hand, is the most unstable class. the "european" middle class includes 1.5-2% of the ukrainian population, while the rest – about 35% to 45% – constitutes the "ukrainian" middle class. this class earns much less income than the european middle class, but has other characteristics that allow it to be referred to this class. members of the ukrainian middle class have higher education, are interested in art, go to restaurants, can sometimes afford vacations abroad, and are politically active. and most importantly, regarding the values of political and economic democracy – they identify themselves as a middle class, seeking democratic changes in politics, over-coming corruption and the thickening of bureaucracy, deconstructing oligarchic artificial monopolies, establishing the rule of law, and introducing economic reforms. 3. the promotion of the middle class in ukraine: from political to economic democracy and back again the political revolutions that led to a change in power due to the conflict of elites and the transformation of the political regime through mass mobilization during the protest movements in ukraine did not lead to profound social and economic changes. j.goldstone believed that a new wave of politicians, that is, the emergence of new faces in politics could greatly enhance the revolutionary movement and bring about change (goldstone, 2001). the middle class played the role of a catalyst for political change in the revolutions of 2004 and 2013–2014 and certainly contributed to the "reset" of power, bringing more "new" faces to parliament each time. it did not become an independent player in either politics or economics. does this mean that the middle class in ukraine has turned into a servant of the oligarchs? to answer this question, it is necessary to refer to economic democracy and determine the influence of economic factors on revolutions. yu. matsiievskyi believes that the conflict between the elites and mobilization were almost the only common factors in both ukrainian maidans, the economic situation was different: "in 2004 the economic situation contributed to the record growth of ukrainian gdp (12%). after the recession of 2009 (by 15%), the recovery was very slow. according to the results of 2013, gdp showed zero growth. for the entire period of yanukovich's presidency, there was talk of a possible default. against this background, the situation in 2014 stands in stark contrast to that of 2004. although the protests in both cases were not due to material problems, it is the latter that consistently garnered more percentages in responses to what might push people into the streets." (matsiievskyi, 2014). according to sociologists, in 2014 the majority of participants in the dignity revolution can be attributed to the middle class. at the beginning of the revolution, 64% of the protesters had higher education, 40% were specialists with higher education, and 9% were entrepreneurs. 92% came to the maidan on their own, meaning they had enough money to support themselves (ilko kucheriv "democratic initiatives", 2013). by manipulating the opinion of the majority through media scandals, the oligarchy promotes its representatives to elected office. political democracy without the middle class has become a regime of support for the oligarchy. in my opinion, after thirty years of authoritarianism and oligarchic domination, the middle class has realized the danger. this explains the role of the middle class in the protests of 2004 and 2013–2014, their participation in armed resistance to russian aggression, and their volunteer activities. the middle class does not yet have a political party that defends its interests. although many political projects have sought to garner support from the middle class in elections, from the purely oligarchic "team of winter generation" (2002) and "veche" (2006) to "self reliance" (2014) and "voice" (2019). the latter two forces successfully made it to the verkhovna rada of ukraine in the eighth and ninth convocations, respectively. however, despite the presence of the "voice" faction in the verkhovna rada, the voice of the middle class is still not loud and powerful enough. it is enough for a temporary political crowd, not for systematic daily political work to defend its own interests: "in elections, the notional middle class (or those who count themselves among them) may well vote for baltic journal of economic studies 225 vol. 8 no. 3, 2022 a party that convincingly promises to act in its interests. but it is not yet able to create and finance its own political force... the ukrainian middle class is heterogeneous. moreover, the goals and objectives of different groups belonging to it often contradict each other. in practice it turns out that many of those who today have a high level of income in ukraine and nominally can be considered "middle class", embedded in various corruption schemes, are representatives of the army of officials or law enforcement officers or associated with oligarchic companies." (kazanskyi, 2018) in ukraine, the role of the middle class in politics is gradually growing, although it is still minimal. this is partly due to the influence of the oligarchs. more precisely, the political alliance between the oligarchs, who have created monopolies in the economic and information spaces, and the poor pensioners and wage earners. such an alliance has been dubbed the "oligarchic-lumpen regime". "it is about a distorted system of resource distribution and influence in the political-economic system, where the key players are a few oligarchs who concentrate capital, ownership of enterprises, and therefore control over politics, media, etc. they are interested in depending on them for the rest of the citizens, who would work in their enterprises, have low wages, and obediently support their decisions. such a model is inefficient, incapable of development, wastes the country 's opportunities and potential, making it weak... the way out of this circle is in the state of a powerful middle class: people with property, income, and a civic position that will make them independent of the oligarchs and capable of free decisions and actions. in particular, to participate in decision-making and control power." (halaichenko, 2017) at the same time, it should be noted a certain imbalance between the declarations of democratic values and the real behavior of the middle class. their decisions can often be called pragmatic, they act in their personal interests, reproducing negative practices and serving the oligarchic system. during elections, the middle class always supports oligarchic projects, new faces, populist forces, etc. however, in the ukrainian context, according to statistics, the "lumpen" could also include officials who in reality led a luxurious life as a result of corruption. only in post-maidan ukraine at the legislative level (law of ukraine "on amendments to certain legislative acts of ukraine regarding the peculiarities of declarations of property, income, expenses and financial obligations in 2016", 2016) the requirement to declare income by high-ranking officials was established. their difference from the middle class is the predominance of selfishness over public interest: "lumpen is a state of mind, not a social status. i believe that most of our government and the verkhovna rada now are lumpen. because i consider lumpen people to be those who know only two things instead of four arithmetical ones – to take and to divide. and adding and multiplying remain unknown to them." (zanuda, 2013) the political activity of the middle class manifests itself not only during political revolutions – the ukrainian maidans. the composition of the ukrainian parliament is evenly transformed. in particular, the defeat of many millionaires and representatives of oligarchic groups in the early elections of the verkhovna rada of ukraine in 2019 shows the growing influence of the middle class on the voting results and politics in general. the first convocations of the verkhovna rada of ukraine could be attributed to the predominance of the middle class, but the problem is that this was a soviet and post-soviet middle class that had no predominant democratic values, did not believe in the market economy and relied more on leaders and heads rather than on themselves. the average deputy was over 45 years old, had a higher education, used to work as an engineer, and among the most common professions were also teachers and agronomists. starting from the third convocation, economists and lawyers (also professions that fall under the middle class) became predominant. and although in the eighth convocation there were already fewer deputies with higher education, but the profession of manager was popular – from top managers to chairmen of supervisory boards (krymeniuk & ott, 2019). the results of the 2019 parliamentary elections allow to assume that the role of the middle class in ukraine is growing, although it is still far from the level of european democracies. thus, under the majoritarian system, middle-class representatives of the "servants of the people" confidently defeated the parliamentary scales – the millionaires. the losers included representatives of big business and the ruling post-soviet class, such as v. bohuslaiev (owner of the zaporizhzhia company "motor-sich", people's deputy of ukraine, etc.), k. zhevaho (executive director of "ferrexpo", beneficiary of "finance and credit" bank, people's deputy of ukraine, etc.), o. hranovskyi (chairman of the board of directors of "assofit holdings limited", 8th convocation people's deputy of ukraine, etc.), o. tretiakov (president of atek-95, co-owner of "hlavred-media" holding, people's deputy of ukraine of iv, v, vi, viii convocations, etc.), ye. chervonenko (president of the concern "orlan", people's deputy of ukraine of the 4th convocation, in 2005 – minister of transport of ukraine, etc.), в.b. kolesnykov (former secretary of the presidium of the party of regions, people's deputy of ukraine of v, vi, vii convocations, former deputy prime minister and former minister baltic journal of economic studies 226 vol. 8 no. 3, 2022 of infrastructure in the government of mykola azarov (2010–2012), chairman of the board of zat "konti"), d. dobkin (former mayor of kharkiv and chairman of the kharkiv regional council, people's deputy of ukraine of several convocations). at the same time, other representatives of the oligarchic class – v. novynskyi, o. hereha, i. rybakov, etc., won in the districts. at the same time in the previous parliament, which was elected in 2014 after the revolution of dignity, there were 90 official millionaires out of 423 deputies. regarding the composition of the ninth parliament, representatives of the media and business culture ("creative class") prevail (ukrainska pravda, 2019). according to the results of snap elections in 2019, the ukrainian parliament has been renewed by more than 80% (legislative initiatives lab., 2019). the average age of the deputies of the council of the ninth convocation is 40 years old. voters once again bet on middle-class representatives: "this time more newcomers came to parliament with the 'servant of the people' and the 'voice' party. of the two dozen members of parliament of the "golos" party, only the leader of this political force, sviatoslav vakarchuk, had previously held a parliamentary mandate. serving the oligarchs – there are many show business stars, tv anchors, famous bloggers, athletes, journalists, and community activists in the new parliament. in particular, the employees of the "1+1" tv channel and kvartal 95 studio became deputies – both employers recently had common business interests with volodymyr zelenskyy. a well-known restaurateur, wedding photographer, as well as a toastmaster, a singer, and others are also present on the new board." (polishchuk, 2019) by refusing to support politicians and parties who have become "servants of the oligarchs" rather than representatives of the interests of the middle class in parliament, the citizens of ukraine have taken an important step toward building not only a political but also an economic democracy. 4. conclusions political democracy implies that power is in the hands of the middle class. the struggle for political democracy in ukraine confirms this maxim of political science. the ukrainian middle class tries to actively participate in politics by supporting the revolutionary events – the orange revolution in 2004 and the 2013–2014 revolution of dignity – and by standing up for ukraine's european integration process. in modern conditions, the middle class is in the front line of resistance to russian armed aggression. under the conditions of post-martial law, one of the main challenges that ukraine must overcome is the choice of a further model of development. the choice between two alternatives (between the lumpen-oligarchic eurasian model and european democracy) in favor of political and economic democracy necessarily involves the active participation of the middle class, a policy aimed at protecting the interests of the middle class and expanding its economic and political opportunities. what prevents this is the oligarchic regime in ukraine, or rather the alliance between the highest and lowest economic classes. given that the state of the economy does not allow us to determine the presence of the european middle class by income level, in order to identify the middle class in ukraine the following is proposed. first, the further use of a five-step income scale for self-identification of the middle class and the study of the level of education and value characteristics allows us to distinguish the core of the middle class (10-12% of ukrainian citizens) and the periphery (35-45% of citizens). second, the middle class in ukraine is an "uncertain" class because of its constant oscillation of selfidentification between "serving the oligarchs" and being a pillar of democracy and civil society. that is why a "new" middle class – the creative class (intellectuals, representatives of creative industries and creative professions, etc.) deserves special attention. the future of democracy depends on their behavior. third, identification of the middle class from the opposite is "not oligarchy ", "not power", "not working class", etc. one of the main criteria for identification of the middle class in ukraine is subjective identification – confession of democratic values. this was fully manifested during the ukrainian political revolutions – the squares of 2004 and 2013–2014. for the development of the middle class in ukraine it is necessary to establish and consolidate a regime of political democracy based on the principle of equal freedom, moving from electoral democracy to expanding opportunities for the middle class to participate in politics. this will allow economic and financial resources to be redistributed from the oligarchs in favor of the middle class. in turn, economic democracy will strengthen the role of the middle class and establish political democracy in ukraine in the process of european integration. references: bychenko, a., mishchenko, m., pyshchulina, o., rachok, a., & shanhina, l. 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(2020). institutional interaction and political choice in a transitional society. what role for the social sciences? nationalism and ethnic politics, vol. 2(4), pp. 582–608. received on: 14th of july, 2022 accepted on: 29th of august, 2022 published on: 30th of september, 2022 debt system or property system? the pamphlets in the social action series, of which this is the twelfth number, are edited by the social action department of the national catholic welfare conference. they represent an effort to present to the general public, and especially to catholics, a discussion of current economic facts, institutions and proposals in the united states in their relation to catholic social teaching, particularly as expounded in pope pius xi’s encyclical “forty years after—reconstructing the social order” (quadragesimo anno). in the spirit of that encyclical they are urged upon and recommended to individuals, study clubs, discussion groups and school classes. copyright, 1938, by the missionary society of st. paul the apostle in the state of new york debt system or property system? by richard dana skinner author of “seven kinds of inflation,” etc. social action series no. 12 published for the social action department n. c. w. c. by the paulist press 401 west 59th street new york, n. y. nihil obstat: arthur j. scanlan, s.t.d., censor librorum. imprimatur : •b patrick cardinal hayes, archbishop of new york . new york , may 1 , 1938. printed and published in the u. s. a. by the paulist press, new york, n. y. copyright, 1938, by the missionary society of st. paul the apostle in the state of new york deaefcwted foreword mr. skinner has written a startling story here about the growing conflict within the property system itself between debt and property, between the mounting and prior demands of creditors and the claims of all others for livelihood from work and ownership. it throws a new light on the problem of establishing social justice in the united states. social action department national catholic welfare conference i'pq debt system or property system ? by richard dana skinner r^ar from achieving a constantly greater and greater stability, the twentieth century economic world shows every symptom of increasing the scale of its business booms and agonizing depressions. even the boldest and most sincere efforts of governments to “make the system work” have met with sharp and challenging reverses. it is said that “capitalism is on trial.” every large scale business reversal, with its toll of lost jobs, mortgage foreclosures, bankruptcies and sheer human misery, has become a field day both for communists and fascists. the communists would end the system of private property entirely, and the fascists would place private property in virtual receivership under the strict administration of an all-powerful government. both of them say that the present system is inherently unsound, that all attempts to patch it up are mere palliatives, and that social justice is doomed unless we establish a revolutionary new order. is there an answer to their charges? the purpose of this pamphlet is to present in the strongest possible terms at least one answer. it will not be the all too common answer that the present system would be quite all right if only the human beings involved would behave with patience, charity of heart and justice of intellect. almost any conceivable system might work if men were angels! no. the unemployed, the dispossessed, the innocent victims of the economic machine demand a 5 6 debt system or property system ? more realistic answer than that. they know from tragic facts that the present system is unstable, and they suspect very strongly that this instability is not due wholly to the injustice of men toward men, that something is inherently —and not just accidentally—wrong with the system, and they clamor to know the true nature of that monstrous defect. if they are to turn away from communists and fascists, they must turn toward something else. they are convinced from generations of harrowing experience that capitalism as it now operates is not the thing toward which they can turn with confidence or even with reasonable hope. this pamphlet will attempt to show the precise nature of a basic defect in the present system and to describe another kind of capitalism which the modern world has never yet given a chance to live and work. a preliminary statement instead of leading up to conclusions, it is sometimes best to state them first in brief form, and then give the supporting evidence and argument. following this method, the answer to both communists and fascists can be stated this way: (a) modern capitalism is not a system of the private ownership of means of production (as its most ardent supporters naively suppose) but a divided house in which private property ownership is alternately debauched and wrecked by the simultaneous existence of another kind of ownership, namely, private ownership of debt claims, or claims against privately owned property. (b) this inherent division of interests (property owners against creditors) is the greatest single contributing cause, aside from human injustice and dishonesty, to the admitted instability of the modern system. it promotes exaggerated booms and necessitates cataclysmic depressions as a “corrective.” debt system or property system ? 7 (c) the existence, side by side, of property capitalism and debt capitalism is wholly unnecessary, is unsound morally, is a relatively modern invention, and grew up in its present form only after john calvin, in his defense of usury , threw over the earlier christian doctrines against money lending. (d) it is wholly feasible and practicable to have a system of private ownership of productive property in which all capital will have to accept the risks and responsibilities of ownership and in which there will be no conflicting ownership in the form of debt claims against property. (e) such a system—no longer divided internally against itself—would insure the integrity and preservation of private tangible property, would greatly enhance the degree of personal liberty and initiative, would vastly minimize the necessity for intervention and domination by central government, and, by lessening the channels for human greed, would enormously strengthen the chances for the spirit of social justice to prevail in modern society. the divided house of modem capitalism the modern capitalist world is only one-half private property ownership; the other half is creditorship. in the united states this is not only true as a rough figure of speech; it is literally true in facts and figures. there are debt claims, direct and indirect, open and concealed, against one-half the appraised value of all tangible property. the condition was even worse in 1932 when the appraised value of properties had fallen very low. then debts amounted to nearly 60 per cent of all property values. here are the 1932 figures, with their sources: (a) the national industrial conference board appraised all tangible property, that is, farms, factories, railroads, merchandise on hand, etc., as worth $230,600,000,000 8 debt system or property system? (b) the conference board also estimated private long term debts (bonds, mortgages, etc.) as amounting to $81,800,000,000 (c) state and local debts (for which property owners were liable through taxes) amounted to 19,600,000,000 (d) federal debt (for which taxpayers were also liable) amounted to 19,200,000,000 (e) bank loans (excluding mortgages already counted under [a] above) for which property owners were directly liable amounted to 16,500,000,000 (f) total debts $137,100,000,000 it is obvious that this debt total represented a claim, direct or indirect, concealed or open, against far more than half the appraised value of all the property in the united states. in exact figures, the debts were 59.4 per cent of the value of all property. owners of private property in the aggregate were morally mortgaged to exactly this extent to the owners of the combined debt claims. after 1932, property values for several years rose faster than debt claims, but in the end of 1937 property values again declined as a result of the abrupt business recession. it is wholly reasonable to estimate that in early 1938, debt claims existed against at least one-half the value of all tangible property. so much ? debt system or property system ? 9 then, for substantiating the statement that in the united states, at least, the capitalist world is only one-half private ownership of tangible property; and that the other half is ownership of debt claims or creditorship. but why should this be alarming? and in just what way does it create a divided house and inherent instability? the bare facts are alarming—if for no other reason — simply because the proportion of debt claims against total property wealth has nearly doubled in the united states since the days before the great war. in 1914, there were only $27 of debt claims against each $100 worth of tangible property. thus this basic condition is not static nor stable but growing constantly in magnitude. if one owned a house and property in 1914 worth $10,000 and owed debts of $2,700, then one was “worth” exactly the difference between the two figures, or $7,300. but if, by 1938, one still owned a house and property worth $10,000 but had accumulated debts of $5,000, then, as an owner, one was “worth” only $5,000. add a few zeros to these figures, and we can see at once that property owners today are worth far less, in proportion to the value of the property “owned,” than they were in 1914. in our vast community, taken as a whole, the percentage share, or “stake,” of private property owners in the tangible wealth of the country is far less than it was a few decades ago. the ownership of debt claims is slowly but surely displacing the responsible ownership of tangible property—and with the disappearance of that tangible property ownership goes the real heart and core of capitalism in its best and most creative sense. how creditorship destroys ownership we have come to take the existence of debts so much for granted that the full import of a doubling of debt compared to property wealth in twenty-five years escapes most of us—including many of our esteemed economists, whose 10 debt system or property system ? minds are so “debt-ridden” that they almost compose economic poems in its praise. at all events, debt as a “system” never seems to alarm them. it is only when debt grows “too large” (whatever that may mean!) that they show uneasiness. even some of our most ardent social and monetary reformers rest content with attacking certain “kinds” of debt (such as government bonds to finance wars or relief, or real estate mortgage debt) and never attack debt as something wrong and harmful in itself. for this reason, we had better try to think through, step by step, the nature of debt and the reasons why it destroys the integrity of that very private ownership of property which most of us regard as the basis of our whole society. the real debt problem can be illustrated best by taking the case of a farmer. he has accumulated $1,000 and decides to move into a new community. he finds a tract of land which can be purchased for $2,000. as this is more money than he possesses, he decides to borrow the additional $1,000. (for our present purpose, it makes no difference whether he borrows by giving a mortgage on the new land or borrows simply on his note to a friend.) having borrowed the money and purchased the land, he is still “worth” $1,000. that is, he owns property worth $2,000 but owes a debt of $1,000 which must be subtracted before arriving at his “net” or real worth. we now move ahead five years. our farmer has been moderately successful, and so has the community around him. the price of farm products has gone up steadily and with it the value of land. a new man arrives in the county and offers our farmer $4,000 for his tract of land—or twice what he paid for it five years ago. the offer is so tempting that our farmer accepts. he receives his $4,000 and, with due honesty, pays back that original loan of $1,000. that leaves him with $3,000—or just three times what he had five years ago. he has trebled his money. but in what way? only thanks to the fact that while farm values debt system or property system? 11 were rising, the value of his loan remained fixed ! at the time he made the loan, it amounted to half the value of his farm property. but now, being fixed in dollar amount, it represents only one-quarter of the value of the property. our farmer has benefited enormously—trebling his wealth—by the simple fact that debt remains fixed while all other values fluctuate. would you blame our farmer overly much for thinking that debt was a beneficent creation of human genius? suppose, originally, that our farmer had had the full purchase price of the farm, or $2,000, and had paid for it outright. then, by selling it five years later for $4,000 he would merely have doubled his money instead of trebling it! but by borrowing half the purchase cost, or, as the phrase goes, by using “other peoples’ money,” he has made a profit of 200 per cent instead of a meager profit of only 100 per cent. the lender of the money has, of course, suffered by the transaction. when he gets his money back, it will buy only half as much farm property as it would have bought at the time he first made the loan. but that is no concern of our farmer. he grows enthusiastic over the idea of debt and all it can do to increase the proportion of his profits out of land speculation. this, of course, is the first simple indictment against the debt system. it increases the greed of property owners. considering greed as a sin, the debt system increases the “occasion of sin” by offering a chance to make far larger percentage profits with borrowed money than we could make by the outright use of our own funds only. our farmer might not have been tempted to sell his farm for an offer that would only have doubled his own original investment. he might well have argued that continuity of living in one place had its compensating advantages, and that the value of land ownership comes quite as much from this inner and outer sense of continuity as from possible chances of profits. but a system which offers him 12 debt system or property system ? a trebling of his original investment is a system which is fashioned to break down every last shred of moral resistance and to turn our farmer once and for all into a real estate speculator instead of a sturdy yeoman with his feet well planted in the soil. it is well to take this aspect of the debt system first, precisely because it is the aspect usually ignored by all social demagogues. money lending and the debt system at large have their origins in the increased greed of owners for inordinate percentage profits. the “hard-hearted creditor” phase is quite another matter, and although this phase is the usual caviar of the demagogues, there could never be any hard-hearted creditors if, in the first instance, there had been no eager borrowers, chasing the promised profits from the use of “other peoples’ money.” indictment number one, then, is that the mere existence of the debt system increases the channels for human greed, and so weakens the moral fiber of the community in the general cause of social justice. we now return to our prosperous farmer with his trebled fortune. once more he moves into new fields, and this time buys a $6,000 tract of land, one-half with his own $3,000 and one-half with a new loan of $3,000. he figures, in the privacy of his own awakened speculative instinct, that if he can duplicate his previous performance and sell his new property in five years for $12,000 he will again have trebled his fortune and be the happy possessor of $9,000 after paying off his new loan. but now a series of local droughts and a general decline in the prices of farm products due to competition in foreign lands promptly shatter his dreams. the local value of land goes down instead of up during the next five years. at the end of the period, the value of his farm has been cut in half. it is worth in the market only $3,000. but that is exactly the sum he owes to his creditor. subtracting what our farmer owes from the value of what he debt system or property system ? 13 owns, he is worth, net, precisely nothing at all ! the debt system has wiped him out! of course, as we know, if he had been content to buy a smaller farm, a $3,000 farm outright, he would not be wiped out at all. he would have lost some of his dollar worth, of course. but his farm would at least be worth $1,500 and there would be no creditor at his door clamoring for repayment of a loan. but he was not content to be an outright owner. his first success with the debt system had beguiled him into further operations with its magic. and today he has lost everything. his creditor, of course, in this case has profited—having loaned half the value of the farm and being able now to claim, as a fixed debt, the whole value of the farm. this, then, is the ordinary, the popular and the readily understood indictment against the debt system. but, in its essence, it is like the first indictment reversed. this time, the debt after having previously debauched the farm owner and turned him into a greedy speculator now wipes him out, roots him up, and, by way of filip to the occasion, satisfies the greed of the creditor in the process. debt as an inherent destroyer now there are three special points to note in this sad —and wholly typical—illustration of the debt system. first, the economic interests of borrower and lender are at all times inherently—and not merely accidentally— opposed to each other. when the borrower profits, the lender loses, and vice versa. hence the literal fact of the “divided house” in a community such as ours where ownership of debt claims and ownership of real property are equally distributed. second, the principles underlying the farmer’s debauching and final ruin are precisely the principles underlying our entire economic system. no matter how complex the structure and arrangement of 14 debt system or property system ? our system, the genesis of the great booms is precisely like the genesis of the farmer’s initial greedy purchase with borrowed funds, and the genesis of the great depressions is precisely like the second and disastrous operation of this same farmer. third, it will be noted that we have considered the debt system quite independently of any question of interest “rates.” charges of “usury” are usually flung at high interest rates, and the pleas of the demagogues are all for lower interest rates. but the real evil is separate entirely from all question of interest and centers in the one simple fact that debt claims remain fixed while all other values fluctuate. but interest, being fixed, while income and earnings fluctuate, partakes, of course, of the essential evil of the capital debt problem itself. taking up these points in the same order, we can see, first of all, that the division within the present dual capitalist system is of the very kind calculated to create endless disorder and instability. if you happen to be the owner of a debt claim, such as a government bond or a real estate mortgage, it is to your selfish interest to have general prices decline. your fixed debt claim then becomes worth much more in terms of what it will buy in goods and services. the private owner of tangible property suffers, but your own advantage comes out of his suffering. on the other hand, you suffer if general prices rise, because your debt claim, remaining fixed, becomes worth less and less in terms of what it will buy. but in this upward price cycle, your debtor doubles or trebles the profits he would have made without the use of your money, and out of your suffering during the price inflation, he builds a fortune. your position as creditor, and his position as owner can never be reconciled, not even by heroic efforts of “good will” and “cooperation.” personalities and intentions have nothing to do with the case. your positions in our two-sided and divided economy are inherently opdebt system or property system ? is posed. whatever hurts him benefits you. whatever enriches him impoverishes you. the only difference between you is this, that as a creditor, you will always have some purchasing power left, no matter how greatly it may dwindle, whereas the pressure of your fixed debt against his property may cause him to lose everything. hence the inevitable disorder; and hence, even more, the inevitable constant weakening of the whole principle of ownership of tangible property. in the end, the divided house can fall only one way and that is on the property owner, thus extinguishing what was once, in theory, the very essence of ownership capitalism. the situation is ironic, tragic and wholly indefensible and impracticable. yet how often do you hear the “classic” economists point this out? perhaps the greatest irony of all lies in the further fact that owners and creditors are not divided into groups as separate people. on the contrary, the same individual is usually both a property owner and a creditor. he is literally pulled in two directions at once. a man may own a house, for instance, on which a savings bank holds a mortgage. at the same time, he may have money on deposit in that savings bank. in that case, his own mortgage—the money he owes the bank—may be part of the security behind the deposit which the savings bank owes him. in so far as the bank has invested his money for him in debt claims, this man is himself a creditor; but in so far as he owns property against which the bank has a mortgage claim, he is an owner-debtor. this is only one common instance of the impossible tangle of interests under which we live. it is also quite common for the same individual “capitalist” to own the stock (or ownership shares) of a railroad and also some bonds or debt claims against the same railroad. in that event, if the railroad is threatened with bankruptcy, he is forced as a bondholder creditor to proceed in court against himself as 16 debt system or property system? stockholding owner. some fifty million life insurance policy holders in this country are dependent for the security of their insurance upon the investments of insurance companies in debt claims; yet out of these fifty million people, a vast number own small businesses or shares in large business and have major business interests as owners wholly at variance with their interests as insurance-holding creditors. small wonder, then, that this tearing apart of interests and these divisions between groups and within the minds of individuals bring recurrent economic disturbances which can be compared only to those mental states of internal conflict which the doctors call “neuroses.” our whole economy is literally “neurotic” and shows all the mass movements symptomatic of high neurotic tension and instability in the individual. our whole system is so complex, with tangible ownership and intangible creditorship so intermingled that it is often difficult to trace the destructive effects of the debt system, especially in exaggerating both booms and depressions. nevertheless, if we are to understand just why the debt system opens us so wide to the charges and attacks of communists and fascists, we must try to understand the general principles at work. they are, as pointed out above, quite as simple as the case of the individual farmer we have reviewed. the complexity centers only in the methods and channels used for the financing and operations of trade and business. but the broad principle remains just this, that people, as individuals, as corporations or as governmental units borrow money in the hope that rising prices and rising activity and values will enable them to pay off the debts with great profit to themselves. they expect values to rise while the debts remain fixed, and hope that this will double their percentage profits—exactly as in the case of the farmer. but if values and activity fall, instead of risdebt system or property system? 17 ing, all those who have borrowed stand to lose what they once owned just twice as rapidly as they would have otherwise. then they scramble to pay off debts as rapidly as possible while the things they own still have some value greater than the debts. this forces down prices still faster—and eventually widespread bankruptcy and panic despair are the result. finally creditors foreclose, take over properties in satisfaction of debts and become the new owners. debts, for the time being, are wiped out or greatly reduced by this process, but only to have the whole cycle soon begin again as the new owners become ambitious in their turn to make money by fresh borrowings against their new properties. some cold-blooded economists tell us that there is no serious evil in all this, since real property is not destroyed in the turmoil and all we have, in fact, is “a change in ownership.” what they obviously forget, in their isolated economic observation towers, is the human agony involved, the destruction of the life’s savings of individuals, the destruction of the moral value of continuous creative ownership, and the ultimate human disillusionment with the whole “capitalist” system. it is no comfort to the man who has been urged to “own a home” to have that home taken away from him through foreclosure with the complacent remark that the house and land are not being destroyed. his personal ownership of it is destroyed—and that, nothing else, is the real tragedy. we cannot, at one and the same time, extol the principle of private ownership and cherish a system which is inevitably destructive of ownership. another way in which the debt system exaggerates both booms and depressions is through the operation of fixed interest. we have seen that the inherent evil of debt is quite distinct from the problem of the interest rate. but the mere fact that interest rates are customarily fixed, just as the principal of the debt is fixed, exerts a tremen18 debt system or property system? dous pressure (or “leverage” as it is often called) upon the whole system, both on the up-side of a boom and on the down spiral of a depression. let us see just how this works. the social menace of fixed interest the actual case history of one of our largest railroad systems will illustrate the point. this road was originally financed, by much more than half, with borrowed funds. the stockholding owners put in only a small portion of the total funds used. the rest came from bondholders, who are now, of course, long-term creditors of the road. in the depression year of 1932, this road earned, over and above all operating expenses, some 52 million dollars— a tidy sum ! but it just happens that the fixed interest on the road’s bonds and notes amounted to 62 million dollars, or 10 million more than the earnings from operations. the owners were then faced with this dilemma: should they risk losing their ownership of the road by failing to pay the full interest due and so forcing the bondholders to foreclose—or should they meet the 10 million deficit from cash reserves and plan the most rigid and heroic economies the following year to recoup that cash? they did just what you and i would expect, humanly, under such difficulties. they paid the fixed interest out of reserves, and clamped on the economy lid. but what did this involve? it meant, obviously, firing every last marginal worker in the shops and on the maintenance crews, in curtailing every possible order for new equipment. in this way, the owners hoped to squeeze out the difference between the 52 million earned and the 62 million owed in fixed interest. it was the human thing for them to do, as owners trying to keep their property. but it was also the inhumane thing to do as affecting not only the labor employed on the road, but also the labor employed in all the factories making equipment and supdebt system or property system ? 19 plies for the road. from the lumber camps supplying wood for cross ties, from the locomotive and car factories and the steel mills making rails, nuts and bolts, to the shops and crews of the road itself, the pressure was felt all along the line—a pressure that would never have been necessary had it not been for that huge total of fixed interest charges which had to be met if ownership was to be conserved. thus it is very simple to figure how the pressure of this fixed sum—which, under our debt system had to be paid regardless of whether or not it was earned—enormously increased the existing unemployment all along the line and in every part of the country. yet (precisely as in the case of the farmer whose case we studied first) it is a brutal fact that if this railroad had been financed entirely by common stock (that is, by ownership instead of creditor capital) it would have had no crisis in 1932. the 52 million dollars of operating earnings would have provided enough for a substantial dividend to all stockholders, and still left enough over to maintain moderate employment schedules and moderate orders for new equipment and supplies. the moral wrong of the debt system by this time, it must be superlatively clear that the moral wrong of the debt system lies in the fixed nature of all debt claims, both as to principal amount and as to interest. the fact that debts can and do remain fixed implies : (a) that the owner of the debt claim divorces himself from all moral responsibility for the welfare of the tangible property against which his debt claim is created; (b) that, in theory, at least, he assumes no share of the normal business risks involved in the operation of a property; 20 debt system or property system ? (c) that the whole community must pay the fixed tribute of interest, or the fixed amount of principal falling due, regardless of general conditions—these community payments being garnered indirectly through increased unemployment and through the cost of goods or services purchased (such as railroad transportation in the above example) and increased taxes paid to relieve the human demands of the unemployed. these moral wrongs—irresponsibility and usurious exaction—are chargeable against the creditor’s side of the debt picture. but, as we have seen, there are further moral wrongs chargeable against the borrower’s side, and they also spring from the fixed nature of both principal and interest debt. in this case, the fact that debts can and do remain fixed implies : (a) that the owner reaps more than his just share of percentage profits in times of rising activity and prices; (b) that the owner is thus encouraged to keep his ownership stake as small and precarious as possible in order to make the percentage returns on his investment as inordinately high as possible; (c) that this increases the employment hazards of everyone working directly on the debt-encumbered property, and working indirectly for that property in other contributing industries; (d) that everyone in the entire community sooner or later becomes involved in the owner’s added risks, that the cost of goods of all sorts carries the added burden of the owner’s fixed interest charges, that reduced purchasing power from the layoff of one set of workers soon spreads distress even to industries that have no direct debt of their own; and (e) finally, that human greed, avarice and selfishness are increased in the entire economic system by the very fact that fixed debts and fixed interest in their very nature create this stimulant or occasion for precarious gamdebt system or property system? 21 bling for high and unwarranted profits. this turns creative and constructive ownership into a wild scramble for speculative profits at the risk and often to the destruction of the entire economic community. are debts and capitalism one and the same? this all too brief summary of the debt system of the modern world at least shows us one reason why, judging from results and history, the communists and fascists have a strong prima facie case against “capitalism.” but is the debt system actually an integral part of the capitalism of private ownership, or is it merely an accidental side growth? it is a gigantic fact—that we know. but is it a necessary fact? could it be eliminated by a regular and orderly process so as to leave us with a pure capitalism of private ownership that would present a wholly different and far sounder economic structure? we know that the christian theologians and moralists of the days before john calvin disapproved of borrowing and lending at interest. but it is often said that they were living in an entirely different type of society and that their arguments applied only to the economy of the middle ages. moreover, most of their arguments applied to the question of interest itself, and less to the even greater question of the principal sum of a debt. nevertheless, the nature of their objections, if studied carefully, applied very clearly to the moral values we have discussed just above. they held that money, of itself, did not and could not “fructify”—that a return on the use of money could be justified only by an assumption of a share of risk. they implied that the fixed quality of interest was, of itself, an admission of a rejected responsibility and risk. all in all, the theologians and moralists can fairly be said to have approved of the profit system and of private ownership, but to have rejected flatly, as morally wrong, any use of money which 22 debt system or property system ? dissociated the claim of the lender from any share of either profits or losses, and from any share of responsibility toward the business enterprise itself and its effects upon the community. we are on very safe ground in assuming that these same theologians, if faced by the conditions of today, would reassert the same principles. they would say, in effect, that (a) private ownership in productive property, with the attendant profit system, are sound principles because they promote individual independence and liberty, because with every ownership “right” goes a corresponding fair risk and a corresponding social responsibility. (b) ownership of “property” in the form of fixed debt claims at fixed interest rates is morally unsound, because it places discord between owner and borrower, because it undermines the integrity and continuity of tangible property ownership, and because the owner of the debt claim deliberately divorces himself from all fair risk and from all social responsibility for the use made of his money. (c) an inherently divided economic house is inevitably headed for collapse. (d) such a division is wholly unnecessary, as well as immoral. (e) a christian economic society should recognize and tolerate legally only the one form of capitalism which provides ownership of tangible property and the full acceptance of risks and social responsibility. all the facts of record since the widespread introduction of “debt financing” support the above conclusions. but a great many people still ask how it would be possible or feasible, now that the debt system has become so ingrained and so entangled with our lives, to get rid of it. debt system or property system? 23 the simplest answer to this question is that we are already—though unconsciously—moving in the direction of eliminating fixed debts, and that we already have large scale precedent for financing growing industries without recourse to debt. widespread moratoria on mortgage debts, reorganizations of business without too strict a regard to the letter of the debt contracts, and the large scale financing of such an industry as aviation by common stock (i. e., by ownership money) instead of by bonds (i. e., debt claims) all give us important clues to the instinctive defense which our society is setting up against the inherent evils of the debt system and our divided house. but is this enough? is a blind, stumbling, unconscious movement of this sort any effective defense against communism and fascism at a time of world-wide debt crisis? quite obviously, it is not! moreover, by failing to clarify the issues involved, any such movement of virtual debt “repudiation” merely imperils the integrity of all contracts, the good along with the bad, and further weakens the moral fiber of the whole community. we can only face an issue effectively, and with benefit to our moral natures, by facing it honestly and openly and in the full consciousness of where we are headed and why. what we need, if we are to restore private property ownership to its proper moral value as a “way of life” and to its proper functioning as a social system, is an open declaration by the community itself of the following principles and projected action: (a) that we wish, definitely and consciously, to work toward a system of ownership unencumbered by debt. (b) that we desire this as much to protect the moral values of ownership itself as to remove the menace of creditorship—in other words, to eliminate a huge incentive to greed. 24 debt system or property system ? (c) that we also desire this in order to eliminate the precarious fact of an inherently divided economic house. (d) that we wish to effect the change or transition from the divided into the unified system gradually and with full regard for the moral obligations of existing debt contracts. (e) that to achieve this gradual change, we propose measures along the following lines: 1. to make the incurring of further debt obligations after a given date illegal—by the simple process of making debts created after that date uncollectible at law. 2. to encourage, in the interim, the financing of all new enterprise by ownership capital (common stock or partnership money). obviously, the whole transition would involve many gradual adjustments which, on the surface, would make the above suggestions seem unduly simple and hazardous. to illustrate only a few of the real difficulties, what are we to do about our outstanding insurance policies which involve the payment of fixed sums to beneficiaries? the insurance companies can meet these fixed claims only if they can invest, as they now do, in fixed debt at fixed interest, and so be sure of having the fixed dollar amounts when they fall due. or, to take another complex point, what are we to do about the claims of bank depositors? these deposits can only be met if the banks, in turn, invest chiefly in fixed debt claims ( i. e., by making loans or by investing in bonds). as we have seen before, the debt system has already grown so huge and complex that, like a cancer growth, it reaches into every fiber of the system. it cannot be eliminated at one stroke of the knife without destroying both good and bad economic tissue. but are these complications any greater than the danger to our whole existence involved in a continuation of debt system or property system ? 25 the present divided system? or, as complications, are they in fact as insoluble as they appear at first glance? both as to insurance policies and as to bank deposits, for instance, we find that these policies and deposits are, themselves, debt claims. hence all present money values represented by them come under our general suggestion that—up to a specified date or dates — all prior existing debt contracts should be scrupulously respected. repudiation is inherently an unjust means, no matter how desirable or urgent the end we have in view. as long as we definitely reject repudiation, the apparent complexities of readjustment become less and less. for instance, if it were established that after ten years from now, no new insurance policies should be taken out under present debt contract forms, then all insurance after that date could be “written,” as the phrase goes, on some different and more flexible basis, such as dollar payments based on the current cost of living at the time the policies fall due. this would certainly be no worse than the present system, under which the beneficiary of the policy is paid off in a fixed dollar amount, regardless of whether the cost of living has risen or fallen since the contract was first made. as matters now stand, insurance policy holders, being “creditors,” stand to lose every time there is a sharp rise in general prices. under the new system suggested, they would receive something approaching a fixed purchasing power. they would no longer have to fear “inflation.” the matter of bank deposits is more technical (though not really more complex in basic principle) and demands a detailed discussion far beyond the scope of this pamphlet.* but we might point out that it is perfectly feathe author has discussed the technical details of non-debt banking in considerable detail in his book, seven kinds of inflation, published in 1937 by the whittlesey house division of the mcgraw-hill book company. in this book will also be found extended discussions of a non-debt capitalism in many other ramifications. 26 debt system or property system? sible to separate deposit banks from lending banks. under such a separation, those of us who wanted a place to deposit cash would simply use deposit banks, which would act as custodians of the cash for a service fee, permitting withdrawal and transfers by check. but these deposit banks would make no loans. their sole revenue would come from the service fees. in place of the present lending banks, we would then have institutions which would invest depositors’ funds at the depositors’ own collective risk, the depositors to share in the profits and losses, exactly as they would if they took individual direct partnership interests in the business transactions of their neighbors. these banks would be merely investing agents for the temporarily idle funds of the community. if they provided money to a merchant for a transaction, they would share in his profits or in his losses. thus the merchant could not increase his percentage profits through use of “other peoples’ money”—nor would he risk being wiped out by fixed debts if his transaction showed a loss. apart from the complications presented by insurance and banking (neither of which, on close examination, presents insuperable obstacles) the transition to a nondebt system demands chiefly a full public understanding of what is being done and, with the recognition of existing debt contracts, a willingness to make the adjustment gradual enough to avoid severe intermediate shock. there remains, however, one serious objection commonly presented to the elimination of the debt system. it is said that our great “progress” of the last few centuries would have been impossible without the debt system, that only by borrowing against future hopes and developments have these hopes become realized. this argument needs attention on two counts. first, our alleged “progress” has brought us to the point of threatened destruction of the whole capitalist system. hence the reality of the “progress” is most dubious. debt system or property system ? 27 second, if the argument held true, tangible property values over the last few decades would have increased approximately as rapidly as debts. but the exact contrary is true, as we have seen. debts are twice as large in proportion to property values as they were some twenty-five years ago. thus debts have not turned “hopes” into “realities.” they have merely piled up increased creditor claims against realities. the real increases in tangible wealth and standard of living come when the public at large invests its savings in the building of new enterprises. it is a most significant fact that, in spite of our huge debt total, many of our greatest industries have been built up entirely with the investment of real ownership capital at risk, and with no borrowed money to speak of. the entire aviation industry was built up this way, with the pleasing result that no major aviation companies went bankrupt even in the 1932 depression. the huge ford motor industry grew out of ownership investment by a few men. many of our largest industrial concerns have no funded debt outstanding in the form of bonds. progress comes with ingenuity, courage and the taking of risks and responsibilities. nothing could stifle real progress more effectively than the growing notion that money should be “invested” only by lending, with no responsibility for results, and with no theoretical risk. we might add one last word by way of picturing the probable workings of a true ownership capital system without debts. as a system, it would probably be known as “equity capitalism,” to distinguish it from our present divided house of equity owners and debt claim owners. in this newer system, so close to the heart of christian ethics, no one group would be profiting in the rise and fall of activity and prices at the expense of any other group. if prices and activity fell, all incomes would be reduced, broadly speaking, but so would the cost of liv28 debt system or property system? ing, so that real buying power in terms of goods and services would decrease far less than under our present methods. the income of creditors would not remain fixed while prices fell, thus giving them an advantage over all others in the community. this fact alone would give the entire community a fresh sense of unity. there would still be struggles between capital and labor for a fair division of whatever earnings and profits existed. there would still be human dishonesty and greed. but the chances for greed to profit exorbitantly would be vastly less than they are today. the pressure (or “leverage”) against employment in bad times would be infinitely less severe. continuity and integrity of ownership would be enormously increased. this in itself would encourage small accumulations of property-—in land and private houses, in small share holdings of larger businesses and in temporary transactions through the new types of banks as described above. today, those who have been wiped out after years of attempted small-scale accumulation are cynical and afraid. under the added security of an equity capitalism, their faith in the principles of ownership would be greatly restored. our answer, then, to both communists and fascists, to those who would destroy private property and to those who would place it under the direct control of an allpowerful state, is simply this: before you destroy or conscript anything so fundamental to human instinct as the accumulation of property, why not try the exciting experiment first of strengthening private ownership? the results of modern capitalism which you deplore are real enough. they have no excuse. but they are chiefly the results of a system of the private ownership of debt claims, and are in no important sense the result of private ownership of real property. be fair. distinguish between the two kinds of private ownership. blame the modern system as much as you want for mixing up the debt system or property system ? 29 two kinds. but recognize this mixing of the two for just what it is—a result of abandoning true christian ethics of property, and a result of the most prodigious amount of fuzzy economic thinking that the world has ever endured in four consecutive centuries. give true equity capitalism its day of fair trial. join in a basic crusade of social justice to protect and conserve private ownership against the whole idea of fixed debts. free our lives of the whole debt system, root and branch, and you will then have freed both our moral conscience and our vast constructive energies. n. c w. c. study club outline i. operation of modern debt-capitalism (pp. 5-9) 1. what are the attitudes of fascism and communism to private property ? ( how does the present operation of capitalism encourage these ? 2. discuss: (a) division of property system by debt claims. (b) division as cause of modern instability. (c) no necessity for division. (d) practicability of system in which all capital accepts risks and responsibilities. (e) advantages of such a system. 3. show how modern capitalism is one-half private property ownership, the other half creditorship. 4. discuss the growing nature of this division and its dangers. ii. how creditorship destroys ownership (pp. 9-19) 1. what has been the attitude of the economists toward debt? 2. discuss example of loss and gain to individual farmer because debt system remains fixed while all other values fluctuate. 3. discuss in detail with examples: (a) how economic interests of borrower and lender are at all times inherently opposed. (b) analogy between examples of farmer and national booms and depressions. (c) the participation of interest (because fixed) in the essential evil of capital debt. iii. moral wrong of the debt system (pp. 19-21) 1. discuss the following moral wrongs ascribable to the fixed nature of debts and interest: (a) throwing off of moral responsibility. (b) avoidance of share of normal business risks. (c) community and social payments. 30 debt system or property system? 31 (d) excess profit in times of rising activity. (e) encouragement to restrict ownership. (f) increase of employment hazards. (g) community involvement in risks. (h) increase of human greed, avarice and selfishness in entire economic system. iv. are debts and capitalism one and the same? (pp. 21-29) 1. how do the objections of the theologians to interest charges in the middle ages apply to our present system? 2. how are we now moving in the direction of eliminating fixed debts? is this enough? 3. discuss the proposals: (a) to make incurring of further debt obligations after given date illegal. (b) to encourage meanwhile financing of all new enterprise by ownership capital. 4. picture the probable workings of this “equity capitalism.” catholic action for social justice 1(1 how shall we know well the right moral principles andspread them? we shall all be unified in our religious program and our work under the bishops (48). we shall join a catholic lay organization working with and under the church (31). we shall get it to start, or we shall join, a program of training (31). we shall take part in study clubs and industrial conferences and the like (8). we shall spread books, newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets (8). we shall get the help of a priest trained in this matter (46). we shall start work among youth (47). we shall attend lay retreats (47). we shall be apostles to our own associates—workers to workers, employers to employers, and so on (46). we shall ground all our ideas in the encyclicals of the popes (48). we shall take on the social charity of brotherhood in god and in christ (44). we shall lead good catholic lives (44). we shall know the crisis facing us which has, with the grace of god, put the destiny of mankind in our hands (47). we shall have hope, because the christian spirit of the people is strong, ignorance and environment can be overcome, and even the most abandoned have in them the sparks of “a natural christian soul” (45) ; and because already much has been done to make known and apply the social teaching of the church (7-13; 45-6). * numbers refer to pa^e numbers of pope pius xi*s encyclical “reconstructing: the social order" (n. c. w. c. edition). for further information and assistance , write: national catholic welfare conference, social action department 1312 massachusetts avenue nw., washington, d. c. social action series all pamphlets contain n. c. w. c. study club outlines no. i—new guilds: a conversation by rev. r. a. mcgowan no. 2—rugged individualism by rev. john f. cronin, s.s., ph.d. no. 3—the wages and hours of american labor by rev. francis j. haas, ph.d., ll.d. no. 4—what laws must we have? by elizabeth morrissy, ph.d. no. 5—consumers' cooperatives by rev. edgar schmiedeler, o.s.b., ph.d. no. 6—-the american labor movement by rev. francis j. haas, ph.d., ll.d. no. 7—credit unions by frank o'hara, ph.d. no. 8—the constitution and catholic industrial teaching by rt. rev. john a. ryan, d.d. no. 9—prices in the united states by rev. john f. cronin, s.s., ph.d. no. 10—economic power in the united states by george t. brown, ph.d. no. 11—our rural proletariat by rev. edgar schmiedeler, o.s.b., ph.d. no. 12—debt system or property system? richard dana skinner no. 13—why the guilds decayed henry somerville no. 14—women in industry members of n. c. w. c. social action dept. other titles in preparation the mediaeval guild—the rise of capitalism—steps toward the guild today—government in economic life—avoiding fascism and communism —money and credit—negro labor—the office worker—taxes—machines and men—economic life and catholic action. 5 cents each, $3.50 the 100, $30.00 the 1,000 ( carriage extra ) the paulist press 401 west 59th street new york, n. y. 51 http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 1 demystifying the theoretical framework of research in islamic finance: a review of literature nanik kustiningsiha,soesilowati soema atmadjab,syed alamdar ali shahc a stie mahardhika, indonesia. nanik.kustiningsih001@gmail.com b stie mahardhika, indonesia. atiekatma@gmail.com c universitas airlangga, indonesia. alamdar2000pk@yahoo.com abstractthis research takes insights into the research on islamic finance before and after the occurrence of financial crisis to rediscover its linkages with islamic socialism and capitalism across international boundaries to establish grounds of islamic finance theoretical framework. it takes extensive review of literature on islamic socialism, capitalism and islamic capitalism taking into account differences in practices of islamic finance in islamic and non islamic countries. research in islamic finance has great linkages with islamic socialism, islamic capitalism and capitalism as affected by the occurrence of financial crisis during the period of research. the originality value of this research work lies in the novel selection of period of research literature, and the discovery of theoretical framework in islamic finance research, “islamic socialistic capitalism”. key words: islamic socialism, islamic capitalism, capitalism, islamic socialistic capitalism jel classification: p16, p19,p27,p29 i. introduction: modern islamic finance has seen a major hump in the global financial markets during the last decade [2,44]. its application in more than 70 countries of the world in general and particularly in usa during the crisis of 2008 has shown its ability to protect institutions during the period of crisis [21,24]. this can be considered as a major turnaround for islamic finance industry, because until 2004 islamic finance was not very well accepted by western world mainly because of the strong uphold of riba in their economies [8,13]. one of the causes for sluggish growth of islamic finance in western economies is the fact that islamic literature failed to prove its legitimacy to be accepted as a new science that can establish as a new direction to in-practice phenomenon of “riba” [12,49]. the concept of market economy, based on the concept of competition between buyers and sellers, that has been on boom during is against the concept of “tazkia e nafs” (meaning controlling your unislamic and beyond means wishes) [13,49]. comparing the economies of mena region and western world, the reasons for such unacceptability have been found to be the difference in “free trade” and in the allowance of private entrepreneurship between two regions [1,48]. the concept of islamic finance has gained importance just in the last century after having been discussed for ages [9,23]. to be very exact it started its modern application in 1963, when an egyptian bank generated its earnings solely based on profit & loss sharing basis [40]. a concerted effort in this direction can be regarded as starting from the year 1973 when muslim countries resolved to establish a bank for development of islamic finance in muslim countries based on the principles of shariah [46]. this is marked as the first major step officially taken by the muslim states for promotion of islamic finance. the purpose of establishing a mechanism for development of islamic finance is also to disintegrate the flow of funds of muslims from institutions functioning on the basis of riba [28,42]. with this broad objective in perspective islamic finance authorities started developing islamic finance products that can match the conventional finance products but at the same time can also match the shariah requirements [7,40]. in the initial era of islamic finance industry the islamic financial institutions relied on three modes of islamic finance; mufawada (based on musharika & mudarba), murabaha (based on cost plus selling), and ijarah (based on the principles of leasing) [14,42]. the research conducted in first decade of the twenty first century shows unprecedented challenges for the growth of islamic finance on a number of grounds. firstly, it has to enforce its acceptability as a science that has been denied earlier. secondly, it has to design and introduce products that can meet the demands of modern day customers; and lastly but most importantly it has to survive the era of global financial crisis that might have eroded the islamic financial institutions like other biggies! the concept of islamic socialism is based on the combination of religious principles, anti capitalism and anti-imperialist politics taking its roots somewhat from russian revolution. its existence is normally discussed within the realm of political economy and economic systems; however, the literature on islamic finance shows that researches in this area are also widely affected by “arab nationalism” due to its roots from arab regions. concurrently, as modern financial systems basically have their roots in capitalism [38] and the latest developments in islamic finance are primarily modifying the conventional financial system products into islamic products [10,51]. therefore there is a need to reassess the path of ejif – european journal of islamic finance no 14, december (2019) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 2 modern islamic finance. to have a holistic view of the progress of islamic finance literature in twenty first century, there is a need to carry out a survey of literature of islamic finance research. this is important because, the era starting from the year 2003 sets the direction of modern research in islamic finance after being neglected by the west [15,34]. accordingly we set the following research objectives for the purpose of our research:  to locate the roots of modern islamic finance research from various economic systems.  to determine the difference in the progress of islamic finance between muslim and non muslim countries.  ultimately, to find any new hidden theoretical framework that the islamic finance research. apart from the point of view of islamic research, the era 2003 to 2006 is also critical because of the fact that the financial crisis started immediately after it. hence, it will be very crucial to gauge the progress of islamic finance research in this era which will also help identify what factors have caused success to islamic finance in various parts of the world, and who have benefitted from it to heal; who to heal and develop; and who to develop straight away. in order to meet our objectives we have taken reviews of literature on of islamic socialism, capitalism and islamic capitalism from the works of prominent researchers in respective areas, and further have conducted a survey of literature of islamic finance research in different parts of the world on the following issues:  progress on islamic finance in muslim and non muslim countries and regions;  progress on the issue of corporate governance in islamic finance  progress on the issue of analytical methods in islamic the research on above issues have been made on islamic finance literature to figure out the answers to our following research question based upon our research objectives:  whether the research in islamic finance is affected by islamic socialism, capitalism and islamic capitalism simultaneously? as this is a pioneering research in this area hence this main question will be further explored with the help of following sub research question:  whether non muslim countries are taking more benefit out of islamic finance research than muslim countries?  is there any the new theoretical framework apart from islamic capitalism, islamic socialism and capitalism, being followed in islamic research? ii. literature review a. islamic socialism [31] working on the roots of arab socialism terms it as a root cause of islamic socialism. in his work he points that islamic socialism has its roots stemmed in the essays of jamal ud din afghani’s essays written between 1892 to 1897. however, in modern age it got its roots from russian revolution’s antiimperialist politics as well. according to [17, 31] distinct from absolute socialism, afghani’s school of thought for islamic socialism involves the materialists and bigoted divines as well. summing up, in modern age islamic socialism refers to a socioeconomic system that takes its basic roots from the teachings of the holy quran, ahadith and gets its development roots from arab nationalism, anti-imperialism, and anti colonialism with shades of democracy of public mandates as well [5,16]. b. capitalism historically it is a system in which economic activities are controlled by the private owners with the objective to maximize their wealth [9,36]. over the years capitalism has taken many forms that include laissez-faire capitalism, welfare capitalism and state capitalism all of which have three common bases namely, public ownership, social policies and market freedom which are important functions of an islamic economy as well [53]. however, in recent times the supporters of capitalism have changed this term affected by the ideas of karl marx, into “free enterprise” or “private enterprise” and the term “capitalist” has been changed with “investors” or “rentiers” [55]. b. islamic finance a. literature on progress of islamic finance in various countries [48] who compares the economy of mena region with usa, european and central asian states opines that mena countries take more time to establish and close businesses, lack hr processes and have higher quantum of informal markets which mark them with low economic development. [5,54] points that adaptation of basel principles into islamic finance system is merely accounting based and therefore requires more improvement. [11,19] point that the progress made in uk even until 2004 was great while the germany was in infancy stages. they stressed the need of islamic finance research and development in financial engineering and credit products trading as well. conducting a qualitative study for implementation of islamic banking in south africa in the year 2005, [22] states that it is in very early stages of development. there was a lot required to be done for promotion of islamic finance education, islamic finance boards, islamic finance research institute and development of local standards. [45] while discussing the challenges of islamic finance in usa argues that it can prosper in the region rapidly if research can be made to work out terms and conditions to extend bank credit to non muslims. [35] narrates that islamic finance in turkey plays the role of political economics more than economic development. [11,47] argues that in bahrain and malaysia debt based products for instance, products based on murabaha and bay` bi al-thaman al-ajil dominates the application of islamic finance. ejif – european journal of islamic finance no 14, december (2019) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 3 discussing applications of islamic finance in lebanon and comparing it with other countries in mena region [18] argues that islamic finance regulations have been introduced in the country in year 2004 however, until 2006 the country had not made significant progress because of some legal issues. for promotion of islamic finance he argues that the country authorities are required to offer incentives to investors to set up islamic financial institutions and islamic research bodies. also long terms islamic securities, primary and most importantly secondary markets are required to be established. [12,26] in his research for the period upto the year 2006 in usa states that islamic financial institutions are losing their moral ground to compete because most of their products are debt like instruments which are mostly based on conventional financial benchmarks. for this reason many conventional finance institutions have also started to adopt islamic finance because they see very few operational differences. [52] while conducting a research on islamic project finance in canada indicate that for its faster development government guarantees are required. [4] while discussing islamic finance in australia argue that although islamic finance is making progress yet it was not governed by the australian regulatory authority. in giving recommendations to promote islamic finance in australia, [6] suggest more government involvement, international connections and research & development. [3] argue that australian government need to enact through parliament to make islamic finance competitive to practice even in the uk model. b. literature review about analytical methods [33,50] in their research indicate that an attempt to converge islamic and western economics schools of thoughts on western methods and study references alone is not justifiable. using their approach based on set theory they opined that islamic economics mechanism is a vital distinctive approach of managing life based on the concept of quran and ahadith, therefore it has its own systematic mechanism to provide analysis and solution of economic problems. [49] opines that islamic economics is although a separate phenomenon yet it is far less than the standards to be considered as a science merely on the basis of not dealing in interest. discussing, the performance appraising of islamic and conventional banks [19,52] find that performance measurement of islamic banks is altogether different and hence should be measured on the basis of cost, technical, allocative, scale, and pure technical efficiency scores and not on the basis of conventional accounting ratios. also [32] finds that islamic financial institutions perform better in countries were the society is altogether islamic like, iran, saudi arabia, sudan. [6] in their ice breaking research on time value of money in islamic environment state that in islamic finance matters the adjustment of time value of money is purely dependent upon return on trade and/or business capital; and no addition in the value of money is allowed after it has been created once. c. literature review about corporate governance issues in islamic finance [37] discussing on the concept of governance argues that islamic finance has been proven to be a vehicle for the implementation of islamic economics principles, which is making its way to emerge as a power house to enforce shariah anywhere around the world wherever the islamic finance will be practiced. discussing about research and development [25,41] in their research about fundamentals of interest in islamic realm points that most of the islamic banking products are debt like instruments e.g., murabaha, which is not an ideal scenario even according to islamic ideology. [41] further argues that promulgation of islamic finance is in fact is based upon existence of islamic society until which no significant progress in shariah compliance can be witnessed. the crux of [41] research is to encourage research in islamic finance based on no exploitation and not on riba free. [4] while conducting a research on islamic banking sector find that islamic finance being practiced is almost like having conventional banking under islamic names. the products used are debt based like ijarah, and murabaha [39]. [51] acknowledged that muslim researchers lack appropriate contemporary skills to analyze complex macroeconomic situations. islamic economics primarily lead by islamic finance should be developed on altogether different lines with greater maqasid (objectives) of shariah in mind and not maximization of material benefits [20,51]. they not only advise a periodic review of islamic products, but going one step further they advise revision of global monetary system for a broader perspective of shariah compliance. realizing the growth potential of islamic finance in 2006 world bank issued three documents on corporate governance numbered [28,29,30] that deal with challenges faced by islamic financial institutions and protecting interests of their stakeholders. these documents focus that all countries practicing islamic finance should develop indigenous regulations to smooth shariah compliant operations competitive with the conventional counterparts both on financial and non financial basis. commenting on the issue of governance [43] argues that there exist huge differences in the practices of islamic finance all over the world which is also causing hindrances in its across the board acceptability and development of universal islamic financial markets. he suggested introduction of “group ijtihad”, which brings people all around the globe together to settle the issues in practices of islamic finance. c. islamic capitalism according to [22] this term may sound awkward for the practitioners of islamic finance in many islamic countries, however, the fact is that it exists and takes back its roots from the period of prophet (pbuh) and his caliphs (r.a.) afterwards. the prophet (pbuh) himself used to conduct business and the caliphs after him abu bakar (r.a) and usman(r.a) were both traders as well [22]. a critical close analysis of literature on islamic business practices during the early days of islam and its comparison with modern capitalism shows that both these economic systems have three major ejif – european journal of islamic finance no 14, december (2019) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 4 concepts in common namely: good governance, enforcement of contracts and protection of property rights, upon the basis of which we can form further rules of islamic capitalism [22]. iii. conclusion the period of 2003 to 2006 seems to be a take off period for islamic finance. this is because islamic finance started to attract the world based on “interest based economies” [8]. a review of literature on various aspects shows that many economies of the world have started skewing towards islamic finance [7,27]. the concepts of corporate governance got strengthened and rules on it formulated even by the world bank. various non muslim countries like germany, australia, uk, and usa recognized its potential and made legislation for its smooth progress. even muslim countries realized the need of attending the call of time and started making appropriate adjustments in their economies to foster results for optimum utilization of islamic finance potential. discussing about the competitive performance environment of islamic and conventional financial institutions it has been observed that islamic financial institutions perform better in an islamic society than in conventional societies, therefore promotion of islamic values in daily practice are more important. keeping in view this phenomenon islamic financial institutions working in non muslim societies, or even to deal with non muslims, have to devise products which are suitable for their individual requirements and societies. the debate about the legitimacy of time value of money within the realm of islamic finance has also been clarified that its adjustment is allowed only in the case of trade transactions and not in the case of merely lending of money in which case it only becomes a matter of changing wealth from hand to hand without any real significant economic contribution. discussing about the role of state for promotion of islamic finance it is recommended that the governments should come forward to guarantee the provision of finance to investors to promote economic development in respective economies. in a nutshell we can opine that researchers of islamic finance are asking much bigger role of research bodies, states and global regulatory financial bodies like world bank and imf to promote the financial institutions working under the realm of islamic finance. however, as identified the islamic finance that emerged in practice in most of the countries is more following the path of conventional financial institutions by introducing a majority of debt based products. in this way in a sense islamic financial institutions have started to diverge from the realm of capitalism, with a cover of shariah compliance, towards “islamic capitalism” characterized by mixture of elements of capitalism and pure islamic thought [22]. the emergence of concept of government patronage and guarantees and extended role of islamic financial institutions is required for the betterment of society, and corporate governance. in this way the elements of islamic socialism have penetrated into islamic capitalism making the path towards “islamic socialistic capitalism”. accordingly, by virtue of being stemmed from arab regions and adopting the route of islamic capitalism, islamic finance research seems to have developed the theoretical framework as mentioned in the figure. http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 5 figure : theoretical framework of islamic socialistic capitalism: socialism islamic system based on quran and ahadith capitalism islamic socialistic capitalism islamic capitalism antiimperialism arab nationalism , anti colonialism democracy islamic socialism ejif – european journal of islamic finance no 14, december (2019) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 6 iv areas of further study in this research work we observe islamic finance research has taken a new theoretical framework of “islamic socialistic capitalism”. this theoretical framework takes its roots not only from muslim history alone, rather also from societal norms of arab culture, socialism and capitalism as well. this new theoretical framework therefore opens up a new door for the contemporary researchers of islamic finance to discuss the issues which were addressed very late by the conventional finance researchers. these include, environmental boundaries available for a recipient and issuer of shariah compliant finances, restricting the powers of a business owner to manage his business to the extent not to exploit customers like we just witnessed in the latest financial crisis, and most importantly to suggest policies based on permutations of compulsory element of teachings of islam, with the elements of any of capitalism, socialism or any other societal norms around the world. references 1]. abbas, m., azid, t., and hjbesar, 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(1983). capitalism. keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, revised edition. oxford university press. p. 51. isbn 0-19-520469-7. ejif – european journal of islamic finance editorial team editor in chief prof. paolo pietro biancone, university of turin, italy editorial board prof. dian masyita, university of padjadjaran, indonesia prof. abdulazeem abozaid, qatar faculty of islamic studies, qatar prof. ahmad aref almazari, king saud university, saudi arabia prof. marco meneguzzo, università degli studi di roma "tor vergata", italy prof. nidal a. alsayyed, inayah islamic finance research institute, usa prof. roberta aluffi, university of turin, italy prof. ghassen bouslama, neoma business school, campus de reims, france prof. nazam dzolkarnaini, salford university, uk prof. kabir hassan, university of new orleans, usa prof. khaled hussainey, university of plymouth, uk prof. rifki ismal, university of indonesia prof. tariqullah khan, hamad bin khalifa university, qatar prof. ali khorshid, icma centre reading university, uk prof. amir kia, utah valley university, usa prof. laurent marliere, université paris-dauphine, france prof. federica miglietta, university of bari, italy prof. hakim ben othman, university of tunis, tunisia prof. mohamed ramady, king fahd university of petroleum and minerals, saudi arabia prof. mamunur rashid, nottingham university, malaysia prof. younes soualhi, international islamic university, malaysia prof. laurent weill, university of strasbourg, france islamic studies in sumatera: prospects and challenges zuhri sunan kalijaga state islamic university, yogyakarta zuhri01@yahoo.com abstract: discussing about islamic studies in the territorial context has long been mentioned by observers in contemporary islamic studies after the collapse of orientalist’s paradigm, however, in the territorial context of indonesia, a regional islamic studies has not been mentioned at all. whereas, materially, both in the context of humanity nor religion, it is very urgent for being researched and developed in indonesia, both from science, research, or institutional side. this article tries to start the efforts above by targeting the islamic studies of sumatra. the growth history and also interaction’s dynamics of religion and socials, the struggle between religion and power as reflected in the results of studies about classical islam of sumatera, both in the colonialism and post-colonialism era indicated a shift in issues knots. in the context of islamic studies, that fact is a prospective land and also a challenge for further investigation. because in each shift, the existence of religion and religious are always in disadvantaged position. therefore, it is needed to revitalize islamic studies on sumatra that was driven by the higher religious education in order to maintain the existence and contribution for meeting the various dynamics and relations issues, also the conflicts of interest among religion, humanity, capitalism, environmental and power which have been more complex lately, particularly in sumatera. keywords: islam, islamic studies, sumatera introduction although reviewing the studies on islam or often referred by islamic studies is a multi-perspective study. clearly, the discussion of islamic studies is not necessarily positioned as islamic affairs only. it could be the study of history, philosophy and criticism of islamic studies and also about the epistemology. whatever its name, the discussion of islamic studies is very important in the establishment and even reinforcement context of islamic studies existence as a discourse or study area, and as a contemporary disciplines. reflecting to that urgency, the islamic studies mailto:zuhri01@yahoo.com 132 | ajis: academic journal of islamic studies vol. 1 no. 2, 2016 scientifically still requires the strengthening of its epistemological, methodological and axiology. so, its presence truly has a strong base of knowledge, the methodological framework of thinking and logic, clear and has core values that can be a vision or purpose of islamic studies development. thus, the discussion of islamic studies differs to the study of islam itself, the study of islam is the investigation about it, while the study of islamic studies is talking about scientific field. when presenting about islamic studies in germany on a public lecture forum during his visits to the islamic research institute in islamabad pakistan in december 1996, annemarie schimmel explained about theemergence history, journey, and development of islamic studies in germany, which he began in the 12th century or precisely in 1143 ad when the koran was first translated into latin in spain and triggered the interests from severalgerman intellectuals (christian) to read. islamic studies then grows under the influence of martin luter’s ideas (d. 1546 ad) and johann wolfgang von goethe in the 19th century ad onwards. the thing discussed by schimmel about islamic studies in germany was about the history of islamic studies. it means, one thing that need to be underlined here is the history. however, despite of the historical studypresented by schimmel is still need to be investigated further, it was so clear that islam had an exact background and long journey in germany.1 the same thing was done by ibrahim abu bakar. according to him, the formation period of islamic studies in malaysia began in 1950s and until now there are patterns of islamic studies which distinctly divided into three phases, the religious, linguistic, then pragmatic and liberal. once again, what was written by ibrahim abu bakar shows that islamic studies is different with islamclearly. he classifies islamic studies in the following phases of the development and characteristics.2 unlike two papersabove, charles kurzman aims the development of islamic studies 1 annemarie schimmel, “islamic studies in germany: a historical overview”, islamic studies, vol. 49, no. 3, (2010), pg. 401-402. 2 ibrahim abu bakar, “a history of islamic studies in malaysia”,oriente moderno, nuovaserie, anno 19, (80), nr. 2, (2000), pg. 371-393. zuhri: islamic studies in sumatera | 133 in the us by the data in context of 1960s until the early 2010. though, there is an increased interest of islamic studies in america.3 by reading some papers on top, along with the other sources, we can draw a red line, that investigating the dynamics of islamic studies in the region or particular area can present a variety of interesting phenomenon both in the internal, general, as well as the investigation of community and its relation with the religious. those phenomena, without exception in the indonesian regions which are rich of islamic discourses as on sumatera and java. at the same time, one thing which should also be stressed that the study of islam is not synonymous to islam. it might be that islam has long been grown in certain communities but there has been no scientific studies about its development. this view seems to be different from what is understood by zuhri in the introduction to the study of islam, he believes that study of islam could not be separated from the process of islamization, since islamization or religious proselytizing of islam might not be a reality without the preliminary studies, methodological studies, or evaluation studies about islamic proselytizing which is appropriate to the context of certain society.4 a study of particular community usually can be found in regional or area studies, a multi-perspective disciplines which developed after the second world war. one characteristic of regional studies is the approach used is usually interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary. therefore, ideally, a regional islamic studies presents in a multi-perspective, however, it of course requires a lot of times, energy, and mind. even though, ideally, it does not mean there is no solution implemented. an understanding of the multi-perspective can be interpreted as an investigation of islam by using a certain perspective, while using the other perspective will produce a different conclusion. as a result, what they study about islam in a particular region exists by a multi-perspective study.5 thus, multiperspective does not exist to assess an islamic phenomenon as a material object of islamic studies, multi-perspective comes from the compilation of 3 charles kurzman, “islamic studies in u.s. universities”, review of middle east studies, vol. 46, no. 1, (2012), pg. 24-30. 4 h. zuhri, pengantarstudi islam, (yogyakarta: fa press, 2016), pg. 7. 5benjamin i. schwartz, “presidential address, area studies as a critical discipline” , the journal of asian studies, vol. 40, no. 1, (1980), pg. 15-16. 134 | ajis: academic journal of islamic studies vol. 1 no. 2, 2016 islamic studies which emerged and developed in a particular context and time. by reading some articles about islamic studies in a particular territorial context, generally means talking about institutions that are focused his studies on islam. it means, the study of islam is institutionalized islamic studies. islamic studies in sumatera must be different to islamic studies in america and europe. islam which is studied in sumatra, as well as in another areas in indonesia, is the traditional studies of islam as a faith committed by his believers. such investigations can be classified as traditional islamic studies using an established traditional perspective. this investigation is not a process-oriented discourse, but is more focused on doctrinal. this model of assessment usually carried out by islamic educational institutions, both for publics as madrassas or schools and especially for boarding school. it does not mean there is no discourse for the studies in boarding school or other traditional institutions. but, discourse is not the prioritized scale or orientation. there is still a discourse presents, but also in the context of doctrinal strengthening. still in the context about relation between islamic studies and regional, generally cantonal indicates a place or space which form the characteristic, limitation or characteristics that differ from one region to another. therefore, in every investigation about islamic studies at any particular region, on the title of the article indicates word in, as does the article entitled islamic studies in italy6, and the oriental and islamic studies in hungary: a communication,.7 in this context, sumatera is not just the place, sumatera was built as an identity that does not need the word in when investigating about sumatera islamic studies. sumatra becomes a unit that could not be separated from the process of islamic studies growth in the area. if the word sumatera is not mentioned, so almost all the theses contained in the study of islam will fall apart by itself. in other words, the space or area context and limitation of sumatra have no significance because the word sumatera as a place does not differs from aceh, palembang, or java. the term “in sumatera” will only 6allesandro bausani, “islamic studies in italy in the xix –xx cc”, east and west, vol. 8,no. 2 (1957), pg. 147-156. 7 laszlo hars, “oriental and islamic studies in hungary: communication”, islamic studies, vol. 15, no. 1, (1976), pg. 53-58 . zuhri: islamic studies in sumatera | 135 give obstacles for identifying and presenting them in a more specific and characterized context that distinguish from the other region or space. examining about sumatera islamic studies means stringing, framing, and tracing its roots which grow islamic studies and characteristics that became the special of islamic studies sumatra. in the end, sumatera islamic studies should ideally be a part of islamic studies in the indonesian archipelago. establishing identity of islamic studies in sumatra sumatera is the sixth largest cluster of islands on earth. this means sumatera is the sixth largest island in the world. as an island with a variety of flora, fauna and humans, in historical context, sumatera is not clearly identifiable until the classical era. sumatera’s name will give a different understanding and pronunciation among each writers. some people call it the country of ophir, where there is a legendary mountain called ophir, while the arabic rovers in 1173 called it ramni,8 on the other hand marco paulo called it java minor, these mentioning written in a paper published in 1269.9 the origin of the word sumatra began to be heard along with the entry of hindu-buddhist kingdom in the 9th century. there is an opinion claimed that the word itself derived from sanskrit, samudra, which means ocean, samudrapasai kingdom is the empire in the middle far away of island, if viewed from the middle east or china as the center of world civilization at that time. while other sources mentioned that sumatra word derived from sanskrit, swarnadwipa, which means the island of gold and swarnabhumi which means golden land. however, the first person used sumatra term is one of sriwijaya’s kings in the early 10th century by saying sumaterabhumi. thus, at least since the 10th century the term sumatra are well known although the pronunciation is different, this is because the authors or rovers differ from one another both in language and origin. odorico da pordenone in his explanation at the early 14th century called it by sumoltra, while ibn batutah in his journey records in rihlahila al-masyriq at 1345 called it by samathrah, and the 8 of course, this arabian rover is not ibnubatutah, because he was born in 1304 ad and was dead at 1377 ad. 9 william marsden, thehistory of sumatera, (london: thomas payne and son, 1934), pg. 2-7 136 | ajis: academic journal of islamic studies vol. 1 no. 2, 2016 dutch and british, like jan huygen van linschoten and sir francis drake at the 16th century has always been consistent in writing using the word sumatra. from the above explanations, in the context of classical islamic thought or before 1250 ad. in the context of islamic studies, just few of academics concern about term or concept of sumatera. they prefer space concepts of aceh, palembang, padang or minangkabau, because in those places islamic studies spread well. the same is also reflected in figures that use regional names such as al-sinkili, al-palimbangi, al-minangkabaui. based on what author knows, there is only one figure who uses the term al-sumaterani, he is the shams al-din al-sumateranii, a charismatic sufi figure from aceh. there are several reasons why the term al-sumaterani rarely used among indonesian archipelago scholars. first, they feel more confident using the termal-jawi. scholars from indies or indonesia who settled in mecca get more comfort using it. it means, for the international context, a brand used by indonesian archipelago scholars is al-jawi, although they do not come from java. one of the figures using the word al-jawi, as stated in his manuscript mawlidsharaf al-anam, is ibrahim bin al-khulusiwudd al-jawi al-sumbawi.10 therefore, ibrahim al-kurani generalized that scholars who study in mecca called by al-jawiyyin, they came from java, as researched by azyumardiazra.11 second, sumatra is well known by the island, not by society or culture, whereas the scientists who use family name for a certain place, refers to the society and culture of science, not to the space or area that makes them worthy to bear it. among the family name identical with its culture, such as al-makassari, al-marakushi, albaghdadi, al-hilli, al-naisaburi, al-isfahani, and much more. after the collapse of ethno-religionism and ethno-nationalism system, then towards the system of nation-state or the nation today, efforts to highlight the regional in establishing identity seems need to be rethought. in the context of indonesian-ness now, territorial boundaries based on tribal or ethnic identities that make up certain identity will be positioned as a discussion. therefore, in the context of islamic studies now, modern 10annabel the gallop, “a jawi sourcebook for the study of malay paleography and orthography” dalamindonesia and the malay world, vol. 43, no. 125, (2015), pg. 26. 11azyumardiazra, jaringan ulamatimur tengah dan kepulauan nusantara abad xvii-xviii : akar pembaruan islam indonesia, (jakarta: kencanaprenada, 2015), pg. 141142. zuhri: islamic studies in sumatera | 137 or post-modern, ethno-nationalism terms as developed in the 15th century ad until the middle of 20th century ad needs to be re-examined. at the same time, islamic studies and investigations developed no longer strict to the boundaries of ethnicity or a particular locality, moreover if we talk about problems assumptions of religion and modernity lately indicate that the problem of religion now is no longer about textuality issues but on empirical question that goes beyond traditional spaces; capitalism.12 by making the problem of capitalism as lighters idea, sumatera islamic studies can be a common thread and also the idea of prospective which become an own nuance and characteristic in contemporary islamic studies. capitalism became the lighter because the islamic elite and middle-class islam now are always on line with wealth owning issues in the context of both individually or collectively. still in the same context, power and flow motion of islamic studies have finally broke the traditional boundaries and turned into an imaginary boundaries formed by power relations and the owners of capital. we can simplify that the urgency of sumatera islamic studies is back to the nature of islamic studies in the context of how religion contact and even form the characteristics which deliberately created by elites to exploit sumatera for increasing the purses of the capital owners. besides as a motivating factor and identity forming of sumatera islamic studies, capitalism is also a wrecking machine that targeted sumatera’s resources. environmental damage caused by excessive exploitation of nature should be a part of points that led to the birth of the 12esposito written that, “the study of these new islamically oriented and committed leaders and the organizations to which most belong will require careful studies that combine analysis of textual sources and empirical data. the collection of manifestos and publications must be complemented by in-depth interviews and field research. islamicists have often been too content with written texts while social scientists have emphasized field studies and statistics. yet all too often studies of islamic activists and organizations have found both groups of scholars too reliant on newspaper reports, selected texts, and second-hand information or conjecture. as academics we emphasize the importance of empirical research, but sometimes it is astonishing to see how often studies of islamic leaders and organizations are based solely on religious tracts and newspaper accounts and not informed by first-hand experience and interviews. this approach is particularly problematic in an area where textual sources are limited, where key individuals are often too busy to write or too monitored to be frank in public contexts. john l. esposito, “presidential address 1989: islamic studies challenges and prospects”, middle east studies association bulletin, vol. 24, no. 1, (1990), pg. 10. 138 | ajis: academic journal of islamic studies vol. 1 no. 2, 2016 sumatra islamic studies’ identity or in other words islam and environment can be used as brand for sumatera islamic studies. the tradition of managing and exploiting sumatran nature has been taken place since the colonial era until now. the process of human transmigration in sumatra is also encouraged by the labor needs for the exploitation process. the same as many things related to all life aspects which are correlated with religious on one side and capitalism on the other. institutions of islamic studies in the primary level and at the college level has made the elements profane as mainstream social ideology today. those practices finally positioned religion as cover or reason for various purposes only. consequences of capitalist ideology spread into all aspects of life implicate the birth of new social problems which lead religion to participate handling these problems. among the social problems that should be a concern of religion is environmental degradation, poverty, social welfare, religious marginalization, and conflict between social and religious and many more. those issues should be part of the actual islamic discourse or contemporary islamic studies which should be developed and becomes socio-religious movements today. prospect of islamic studies in sumatra by the collective strength and compatibility to the problems in the field or community, sumatera islamic studies, in the context and meaning of contemporary islamic studies, has a very promising prospect for the efforts and contribution to the development of islam and islamic contributions to society. one dimensional power of sumatera islamic studies, which becomes its own prospects then, is a strong tradition of thought and religious discourse that directly interacted to social problems around. religious responses written by classical muslim intellectuals such as nuruddin al-raniri as syaikh al-islam kesultanantoward hamzahfansuri and shamsuddin al-sumaterani’s thoughts show the evidence, although it is still frequently polemic and apologetic.13 the above responses are not merely responded with discourse only, but also became a part of the principles, patterns and rules of interaction in religion and society. it means, there is an effort and 13azyumardiazra, jarinngan ulama, pg. 225-229. zuhri: islamic studies in sumatera | 139 even the movement about how the religious ideas can be capable to respond social problems.14 response and religious movements in sumatera are not only in the context of response toward (1) understand the social reality as well as in texts written by al-raniri and others, and (2) the objectification of religion on culture as reflected in adat basandi syara', syara' basandi kitabullah,15 but also the response (3) internalization of religion, as occurs in the form of religious secularization. the latter one should be a concern and also becomes the islamic studies identity in this contemporary era. apart from discourse patterns above, the other prospects of sumatera islamic studies is the abundance of approaches, especially approaches to the humanities and social sciences in understanding the sumatran islamic realities and problems. to comprehend about socio-religious problems which has been worse nowadays, islamic studies are still struggling with traditionalistic approaches based on the text. traditionalistic approach remains necessary and should be used as the entrance for investigating and understanding about islam16. however, when islam as a social reality gets in touch with the problems and social dynamics, the analysis used should be appropriate to the material object inevitably. that framework of thought has been initiated, and even theorized by ibnkhaldun through his muqaddimah, but unfortunately, that brilliant idea has not been widely applied in the analyzes which are carried out by muslim intellectuals today. the process and urgency of approach based on the humanities and social sciences been more urgent to be developed because a religion in the shari'ah minded has not been able to solve problems which shackle 14 this effort in european context produces the secularization, bassamtibi written that; “social scientists and historians concerned with social change, including those studying islam, are generally agreed those secularization is an inevitable consequence of the high degree of differentiation attained by modern industrial society”. bassamtibi, “islam and secularization: religion and functional differentiation of the social system”, archives for philosophy of law and social philosophy, vol. 66, no. 2, (1980), pg. 211. 15 as explained by ramayulis, traktat marapalam “adat basandi syara’, syara’ basandi kitabullah’ (diktum kramat konsensus pemuka adat dengan pemuka agama dalam memadukan adat dan islam di minangkabau sumatera barat)”, theologia, vol. 5 no. 1, (2011). different contexts written by yasrul huda, “islamic law versus adat: debate about inheritance law and the rise of capitalism in minangkabau”, studia islamica, vol. 15, no. 2, (2008). taufik abdullah, “adat and islam: an examination of conflict in minangkabau”, indonesia, vol 2, (1966), pg. 1-24. 16 h. zuhri, pengantarstudi islam, (yogyakarta: fa press, 2016), pg. 130. 140 | ajis: academic journal of islamic studies vol. 1 no. 2, 2016 the religion in the midst of dynamics struggle and social change processes which run so quickly. at the same time, these approaches can make islamic studies might be parallel to the humanities and social sciences, even the observers of islamic studies would be more prominent or has more capabilities than the social scientists in sumatra. this caused by the double perspectives (traditional and humanities-social approaches) which are integrated in the understanding of religious phenomenon.17 besides of this approaching issue, sumatera islamic studies has not been arranged well. therefore, it could be presented in hand book of islam sumatera. besides that, there should also be encyclopedia of islam sumatera, bibliography of islam sumatera, and dictionary of islam sumatera. all the projects above are parts of the future sumatera islamic studies prospects and also the duty for islamic investigators in higher institutions of islam which wide-spread from aceh to lampung.18 exactly, there has been no clear mapping about islam in sumatera until now. mapping functioned as a guide book and then becomes a potential, prospects, and even the new future discussions. mapping is not just talking about today context but also in a historical context. islamic historical of sumatera should be comprehensively mapped, because it is still scattered in various articles of international journals. therefore, islam sumatera mapping can be a data bank about islam both in terms of social, thought, legal, demographic, distinctiveness, and others. islam mapping is a project which has not been discussed in sumatra and even in other places. by the power of data and documents, people will be able to see the relation between islamic studies and its history, also the sustainability of islamic studies in the future. as believed by azimnanji that;19 the field of islamic studies will continue to be more diverse and encompassing in its scope, than in the past. there are many possibilities 17 amin abdullah always discusses islamic studies by using inter-discipline approach or which he often called by integrativeinterkonektif approach. as in amin abdullah, “religion, science and culture: an integrated –interconnected paradigm of science”, aljami’ah journal of islamic studies, vol. 52, no. 1 (2014), pg. 175-205. 18 as a simple and classic example, bibliography efforts done by john m echols in his survey in cornell university , john m. echols, “notes and materials for the study of atjeh in the cornel university library”, indonesia, vol. 1 (1966), pg. 124-140. 19azimnanji, “introduction“, dalam azim nanji (ed.) mapping islamic studies: genealogies, continuity and change, (berlin: mouton de gruyter, 1997), pg. xix. zuhri: islamic studies in sumatera | 141 open for adding to its subject matter and methods, including the role of islam as a cultural force of great diversity, the increasing public participation in society by women (whom contributions and role still await detailed study within islamic studies), the history of rural, agricultural and mountainous peoples of the muslim world and new interactions among scholarship can contribute to knowledge, linking a fifth of humanity that is muslim experts, to others among whom muslims live and with whom they share increasingly the task of building mutual understanding. beside the specific characters of religious and social dialoging in sumatera islamic studies process, it is also very prospective because of cultural inheritance from sumatera’s islamic intellectuals. their literacy tradition have the own characteristics differ from javanese’s. in java community, writing will be done by fibers or babad concept with java script or arabic pegon letters, while it will be arabic in sumatera, such as bustan al-salathin written by nuruddin al-raniri and texts using malay with arabic script (pegon), such as hikayat raja-raja pasai which is still full of mysteries and hikayat abdullah written by abdullah bin abdul kadirmunsyi (d. 1854). this tradition of writing is still understood generally as a text or partial manuscript, where the work seems coming from individual creativity only, but the tradition of literacy always be collective and must grow and evolve along with society. the texts which have been widely studied by western reviewers such as drewes can be republished not just for historical needs, but the more crucial one for now is ethical discussions which have been worse lately. thus, sumatran scholars’ books need to be re-printed and discussed together in public, there is a revitalization process of scholars’ ideas for the importance of scientific accustoming which grows and develops in society.20 that process needs to be handled by observers who focus on this field and institutions of islamic studies. by socializing the works of sumatran classical scholars, as in table i, it could be possible in the following years the new books written to criticize, respond to or even do pen-syarakh-an to the texts above. with the above work, there is a continuity process of 20 this relation reflected in a discussion between scholars and society. in the context of aceh, for example, this it is too complex but could give the contribution for sumatera islamic studies existence. see alfian; “the ulama in the acehnese society: a preliminary observation”. southeast asian journal of social science, vol. 3, no. 1, (1975), pg. 27-41. 142 | ajis: academic journal of islamic studies vol. 1 no. 2, 2016 sumatera islamic studies tradition which actually has long been growing, but dimmed lately. finally, there is a typical continuity process which can be an icon for islamic higher institutions in sumatera. table i classical scholars’ works in the 16th until 18th century no title author الغالم كفایة 1 ismail al-minangkabauwi 2 في المؤمنین تذكرات و المسلمین نصیحة المجاھدین كرمة و الجھاد فضائل abd al-shamad al-palimbangi منین المؤ إمام حقیقة في الراغبین تھفة 3 abd al-shamad al-palimbangi nur al-din al-raniri السالطین بستان 4 nur al-din al-raniri المعالم كشف في العلوم جواھیر 5 abd al-rauf al-sinkili البدیعة مواعظ 6 abd al-rauf al-sinkili الطالب مرأة 7 abd al-rauf al-sinkili شطاریة 8 abd al-rauf al-sinkili المفردین مسلك سلوك الى جالمحتا عمدة 9 abd al-rauf al-sinkili الفرائض كتاب 10 ali haji bin raja haji ahmad النافس تحفة 11 the above lists are just small parts of the thousands manuscripts in indonesian archipelago, especially sumatera which is still untouched until now. the manuscripts are spread in various libraries in indonesia, malaysia, europe and also america. the works above are generally still in manuscript form, so it could not be read or discussed by people in general. all of these are the prospects and challenges for the existence establishment of sumatera islamic studies. in addition, the texts written in the 17th and 18th century, the same as 19th and 20th century, have not explored fully. until now there has not been a lot of reviewers who zuhri: islamic studies in sumatera | 143 review the figures such as abdul hamid hakim (d. 1959) an ushulfiqh writer, syakh abdul majid (d. 1984), who copying the works of syam aldin al-sumatrani and abd al-rauf al-sinkili. likewise, yasin al-padangi with the number of works. although those texts are not directly in contact with the real condition of sumatera, but its existence must be included into the sumatran context to strengthen the brand of sumatera islamic studies. challenges in sumatera islamic studies through the varied researches done by higher education and research centers in sumatera, it must be recognized that sumatera islamic studies has been existed since the rising era of islamic empire and then be more victorious in the old colonial era by various fields of studies, perspectives and targets. sumatera islamic studies has even grown since colonialism era. there are some western figures who focus on sumatera islamic studies, they are snouck hurgronje (1857-1936), especially in aceh classical studies, and indonesian scholars in makkah.21 besides hougronje, other western scientists who studied sumatran islam is james seagel, drewes, and many more. they studied about sumatran islam, particularly aceh, manuscripts, and living traditions in sumatran muslim communities which are often done by a less objective approach. this assumption still need to be proven for sure, because we could not claim yet whether it is true or not. however, the important thing to be underlined is islamic studies throughout its history could not be separated from its forming interests and powers. because they are often be a fundamental denying issue among some people to reject the views of islam constructed by western scientists. scientists who often called by orientalist or orientalism, to refer to the developed principles of idea, frequently using approaches based on the colonialist orientation, it is the orientation which believes in subordination of the east which were colonized under western superiority, namely europe. the response for this paradigm was the existing cause of post-colonialist approach. although at first, this theory focused on the study of literature and arts, 21 g.w.j. drewes, “snouckhurgronje and the study of islam”, bijdragen tot de taal-, landen volkenkunde, deel 113, 1ste afl. (1957), pg. 1-15 144 | ajis: academic journal of islamic studies vol. 1 no. 2, 2016 but on islamic studies conducted by western intellectuals also cannot avoid biases of specific knowledge and power.22 sumatera islamic studies today is still filled with the ideas awakened by the base colonialist paradigm of thinking. this paradigm is so entrenched and seemed to be a single truth gotten by those who have the formed hegemony knowledge. this fact then becomes an obstacle in sumatera islamic studies. until now the representation of aceh classical studies is scnoukhourgronje, studies texts by al-raniri and friends are g.w.j. drewes and other orientalists such as john r. bowen, islam reviewers from islamic universities should come forward to criticize and develop further the tradition of islamic studies that emphasizes religious dimensions. the tradition of this study certainly did not intend to delete the previous paradigms but rather to complement previous assessment paradigm. the history of sumatran islam phenomenon always present in the dynamics and modernity clash on the one hand and traditionality on the other hand,23 the clash between textualism with traditionalism, the clash between despair and collective power, war padri in pagaruyung, collision scholars and ulubalang in aceh, it has not been excavated scientifically, mainly by intellectuals insider who are psychologically linked with the history of the dynamics above. phenomenon above can actually be a common thread and problem-solving vision for contemporary religious issues in sumatera today. in this context too, will appear how the dynamics of sumatran islam in the era of colonialism on the one hand and post-colonialism on the other side. in the era of colonialism, there is a triangle elite powers that became the axis of discourse motion and the religious burst; master of colonial, master of customs, religious figures or scholars., while in the post-colonial era, the elite powers turned into the power of bureaucrats politics, financiers, and the religious elite. all the things collaborated into the competition and struggle to maintain and even strengthen their influence. in the process of this seizure, religion becomes a victim, as well as the environment and the people. islamic studies of post-colonialism should be brought seriously to strengthen and 22 the long explanation about this could be found in edward said, orientalism, (new york: pengiun book, 1979). 23dalearnoer, the modernist muslim movement in indonesia 1900-1942. (singapure; oxford university press, 1973). zuhri: islamic studies in sumatera | 145 establish synergy among religions, people and nature or environment. this could be done if the reviewer or islamic intellectuals and muslims are not tempted by the dominance and material. conversely, if they are exposed, they will become parts of the political possessor corporation and capitalism which hate religion, people and the environment. based on the above challenges, sumatera islamic studies does not only need a framework of adequate then also comprehensive methodologies and approaches, but also requires figures for carrying and presenting islam as the power of freeing and enlightening. in fact, it can be said that the figures are missed surely. in other words, islamic studies will have a positive synergy with contemporary sumatran islamic religious movements who know well who is friend or enemy, and who is subject or object. by that vision, islamic studies does not stop at the level of discourse but continue to the growth of public awareness about the problems substance faced today. if the problematical substance of islam is not explored, islam will be further from societies, islam is getting away from the centers of civilization in sumatra. one of the facts which proved the existence of a marginalization process in islamic studies is the decreasing role of surau concept in minangkabau and boarding school in aceh. surau is not just a place to teach islam, but also the place to discuss about islam and produce islamic ideas in the form of a written text which then served as guidelines to be taught in public.24 those two are just few examples of degradation in role and centers of islamic studies in sumatera. such conditions are challenges for islamic studies observers, why the role of surau and gayoh becomes faded, is there any replacement in society. conclusion sumatran islam overflows in the material side but so poor in discourseand development. those two could only be done by using the adequate and comprehensive review process (studies). this study is important because sumatran islam has its own complex and relational problems which are related to the other elements outside islam. re 24pramono, “tradisiintelektualkeislamanminangkabau: kajianatas imam maulana abdul manaf amin al-khatibdankarya-karynya” , this paper presented in filologi seminar in ciloto, jawa barat , januari 24th-26th2005. 146 | ajis: academic journal of islamic studies vol. 1 no. 2, 2016 discuss the history of islamic studies conducted by the western orientalist and successors such as snouckhourgronje is the first step that must be established to deconstruct the history of sumatran islam. the next step is re-read and develop the relationship between islam with social phenomenon in various forms and dynamics which run all the time and appeared in social conflicts, especially in the colonialism era. the dynamics patterns and conflicts described above still exist after postcolonialism and current post-reformation but with different shapes and symbols. reading and studying the above phenomenon should use the adequate methods and approaches. those need to be developed and discussed further then tested, because the abundant materials on islamic studies without being accompanied by strength in the methods and approach will only give a misinterpretation and superficiality in understanding islam. last, sumatera islamic studies should be supported by a system of investigation and references as well as adequate research. all three must become a tradition in the centers of modern islamic studies in sumatra as in stain, iain and uin. bibliorgaphy abdillah, masykuri demokrasi di persimpangan makna “respon intelektual muslim di indonesia terhadap konsep demokrasi 1966-1993” (yogyakarta: pt tiara wacana, 1999), cet. i, abdullah, amin. religion, science and culture: an integrated–interconnected paradigm of science”, al-jami’ah journal of islamic studies, vol. 52, no. 1 (2014). abdullah, taufik. “adat and islam: an examination of conflict in minangkabau”, indonesia, vol 2, (1966). alfian. “the ulama in the acehnese society: a preliminary observation”. southeast asian journal of social science, vol. 3, no. 1, (1975). azra, azyumardi. jaringan ulamatimur tengah dan kepulauan nusantara abad xvii-xviii: akar pembaruan islam indonesia, (jakarta: kencana prenada, 2015). bakar, ibrahim abu. “a history of islamic studies in malaysia”, oriente moderno, nuovaserie, anno 19, (80), nr. 2, (2000). bausani, allesandro. “islamic studies in italy in the xix –xx cc”. east and west, vol. 8, no. 2 (1957). drewes, g.w.j. “snouckhurgronje and the study of islam”, bijdragen tot de taal-, landen volkenkunde, deel 113, 1ste afl. (1957). zuhri: islamic studies in sumatera | 147 echols, john m. “notes and materials for the study of atjeh in the cornel university library”, indonesia, vol. 1 (1966). esposito, john l. “presidential address 1989: islamic studies challenges and prospects”, middle east studies association bulletin, vol. 24, no. 1, (1990). gallop, annabel the. “a jawi sourcebook for the study of malay paleography and orthography” dalamindonesia and the malay world, vol. 43, no. 125, (2015). hars, laszlo. “oriental and islamic studies in hungary: communication”, islamic studies, vol. 15, no. 1, (1976). huda, yasrul. “islamic law versus adat: debate about inheritance law and the rise of capitalism in minangkabau”, studiaislamica, vol. 15, no. 2, (2008). kurzman, charles. “islamic studies in u.s. universities”, review of middle east studies, vol. 46, no. 1, (2012). marsden, william. the history of sumatera, (london: nanji, azim, “introduction “, dalamazimnanji (ed.) mapping islamic studies: genealogies, continuity and change, (berlin: mouton de gruyter, 1997). noer, dalier. the modernist muslim movement in indonesia 1900-1942. (singapure; oxford university press, 1973). pramono, “tradisi intelektual keislaman minangkabau: kajian atas imam maulana abdul manaf amin al-khatib dan karya-karyanya”, makalah disampaikan pada seminar filologi di ciloto, jawa barat, 24-26 januari 2005. ramayulis, “traktat marapalam: adat basandi syara’syara’ basandi kitabullah’ (diktum kramat konsensus pemuka adat dengan pemuka agama dalam memadukan adat dan islam di minangkabau sumatera barat”, theologia, vol. 5 no. 1, (2011). said, edward. orientalism, (new york: pengiun book, 1979). schwartz, benjamin i. “presidential address, area studies as a critical discipline”,thejournal of asian studies, vol. 40, no. 1, (1980). schimmel, annemarie. “islamic studies in germany: a historical overview”, islamic studies, vol. 49, no. 3, (2010). tibi, bassam. “islam and secularization: religion and functional differentiation of the social system”, archives for philosophy of law and social philosophy, vol. 66, no. 2, (1980). zuhri, h. pengantarstudi islam, yogyakarta: fa press, 2016. 148 | ajis: academic journal of islamic studies vol. 1 no. 2, 2016 228 published by the ufs http://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/at © creative commons with attribution (cc-by) p. kopiec prof. p. kopiec, department of protestant theology, john paul ii catholic university of lublin, poland. e-mail: petrko@kul.pl orcid: https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-0581-0737 doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.18820/23099089/actat. v42i2.15 issn: 1015-8758 (print) issn: 2309-9089 (online) acta theologica 2022 42(2):228-242 date received: 15 july 2022 date accepted: 16 september 2022 date published: 14 december 2022 the lutheran “convivial economy” as a christian economic heterodoxy: significance, components, and proposals to the current socio-economic order1 abstract representatives of the economic heterodoxy only occasionally mention proposals of churches and religious organisations concerning the socio-economic order. yet, churches and their doctrines are abundant sources of reflection on social and economic matters. theologians employ their religious knowledge and pastoral experiences in developing theological conceptions of the socio-economic models. usually, they are rather critical towards global neoliberal capitalism when pointing out its disastrous consequences for entire societies and cultures. an example is the “convivial economy”, a concept developed within the lutheran world federation for the past eight years. lutheran theologians use the term “economy” in a broader sense, enlarging the space of their reflection on culture, society, and environment. an essential part of this approach is migration, which is regarded as an inherent part of contemporary social reality and understood as both a challenge and an opportunity for society. the article outlines the meaning and dimensions of the convivial economy, including the topic of migration. it employs the narration of economic heterodoxy/orthodoxy to highlight a dominant christian position towards the prevailing economic order. 1 the article was supported by the national science centre, poland (ref. no. 2018/31/b/hs1/01254). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/za/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/za/ mailto:petrko@kul.pl http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0581-0737 http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/23099089/actat.v42i2.15 http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/23099089/actat.v42i2.15 kopiec the lutheran “convivial economy” 229 1. introduction the global socio-economic discussion is dominated by the criticism of the neoliberal economy, on the one hand, and its defence, on the other. many approaches are critical towards the liberal and neoliberal paradigm of the free market and suggest alternatives to the prevailing order. the economic orthodoxy of neoliberalism clashes with the economic heterodoxy models and trends. institutionalism, feminism, post-keynesianism, marxism – the list of the heterodox approaches is far longer. heterodox economics refers to specific economic theories and community of economists that are in various ways an alternative to mainstream economics in explaining the provisioning process, thereby making economics a contested scientific discipline (lee 2011:5). nevertheless, representatives of the economic heterodoxy only occasionally mention varied proposals of churches and religious organisations concerning the economic order. however, churches and their doctrines are abundant sources of reflection on social and economic matters. theologians and church leaders employ their religious knowledge and pastoral experiences in developing theological conceptions of socio-economic models. they are usually rather critical towards global neoliberal capitalism when pointing out its consequences for entire societies and cultures. an example is the “convivial economy”, a concept developed within the lutheran world federation (lwf) for the past eight years. the lutherans define “conviviality” simply as “the art and practice of living together” and link this definition to the thinking on socioeconomic order. moreover, they use the term “economy” in a broader sense, enlarging the space of their reflection on culture, society, and environment. an essential part of this approach is migration, regarded as an inherent part of contemporary social reality. migration is understood as both a challenge and an opportunity for society. the article outlines the meaning and dimensions of the convivial economy, including the topic of migration. it employs the narration of economic heterodoxy/orthodoxy to highlight a dominant christian position towards the prevailing economic order. the text uses a literary survey and an analysis of the studies on the essence of capitalism and the lutheran documents (of both the lwf and the evangelical church in germany) on the socio-economic order. 230 acta theologica 2022:42(2) 2. economic orthodoxy and heterodoxy: the perspectives of capitalism as alluded to earlier, heterodoxy in the economy refers to the economic approaches that are different or alternative to the economic orthodoxy constituted by neoliberal globalised capitalism. the heterodox models vary widely in their opinion on capitalism and relationships between economy, culture, and social institutions. there are heterodox concepts that seek changes in capitalism without rejecting it; there are also those striving for a complete transformation of the entire socio-economic order. both “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” are terms employed to mark the positions in power and, as fusfeld (2000:171) argued, heterodoxy often becomes orthodoxy, and orthodoxy often becomes heterodoxy, as the economy changes, as the social context of economic thoughts changes, and as ideas develop and change. lee (2011:3) mentions three ways of defining economic heterodoxy: heterodox economics refers to economic theories and the community of economists that are in various ways an alternative to mainstream economics. however, some economists use ‘heterodox’ to depict dissent from the conventional theories within the mainstream, while others define heterodox in terms of dissent from the mainstream, and a third group suggests that the dividing line between heterodox and mainstream economics is fluid over time so that what once was heterodox is now mainstream and vice-versa. thus, mainstream economy is a counterpoint of reference, and nowadays, by this is meant neoliberal capitalism. capitalism itself is defined differently, depending on the analytical and historical perspective. most of the research points out the 16th century as the beginning of capitalism, considering the rise of a global banking system and the new meaning of money. schumpeter (2006:78) stressed this change: the development of the law and practice of negotiable paper and of created deposits is the best indication we have for dating the rise of capitalism. this historical perspective corresponds with the observation of ingham (2008, 53), who distinguished three key components of contemporary capitalism: the monetary system of production of bank-credit money, market exchange, and private enterprise production of commodities. of course, all of them are interdependent. kopiec the lutheran “convivial economy” 231 furthermore, the emergence of capitalism occurred in the wake of a balance between the early modern state and capitalist bourgeoisie, the process that max weber called “memorable alliance” (ingham 2008:58). until the present, this historical alliance constitutes an institutional and ideological space of capitalism. ingham (2008:58) concludes that capitalism is characterised by two independent sources of power – the state’s legitimised sources of force and the private ownership and control of economic sources (capital). this brief historical and analytical description of capitalism gives one a glimpse of the nature of neoliberal orthodoxy. the neoliberal approach invokes adam smith’s idea of the market as a self-regulating mechanism, on the one hand, and as an instrument of social integration, on the other. self-interest and competition are understood as natural factors of the famous invisible hand of the market as natural regulation of economic life. the fundamental tenets of smithian philosophy are a cornerstone of economic thinking that has dominated global relations since the 1980s. it has brought about deregulation of financial markets and privatisation of production, reducing the state’s influences on the economy. yet its influences have reached far beyond the economy; another driving force of thinking in terms of social darwinism has emerged when justifying both, selfishness in social relationships, growing inequalities in society, and ferocious social competition; it has also converged with and advanced consumption in culture, promoting a kind of cultural dumping and thereby destroying social relations (leywa 2009:365). while combining with accelerating globalisation, neoliberal orthodoxy has built a system often named turbo-capitalism (as proposed by luttwak) or casino-capitalism (ulrich beck). both labels indicate the scale of economic activities that overwhelmed culture, society, politics, and the endless risk that has become an inherent and approved component of socio-economic order. 3. the christian criticism of the neoliberal economy christian churches give a strong, seldom heard voice of criticism of neoliberal orthodoxy. the self-values of turbo-capitalism such as unconstrained profit, ferocious competition, and conspicuous wealth seem to be at odds with christianity. yet christians are not unanimous in their thinking on neoliberal economy, and there are many differences across denominations, theological movements, continents, and specific churches. a good example is the lausanne movement, an organisation gathering evangelicals from all over the world, of which members are divided in their approach to the role of state and social institutions in regulations of economic activities – the evangelicals 232 acta theologica 2022:42(2) from the usa are far more willing to minimalise the power of the state than the evangelical communities from europe and south america (tizon 2014:175). on the other hand, some theological circles seem to be the strongest critics of capitalism, even as being close to the marxist position. for instance, duchrow (2011:69-70), leader of the radicalising reformation movement, links capitalism with fascism, claiming that both have caused the death of millions of people. both fascism and capitalism affirm effectiveness and strength; impose mechanical ways of thinking; fight with their ideological alternatives, and contend with individuals’ reflexive attitudes. both are a manifestation of totalitarianism. duchrow argues that capitalism, while regarding economic growth as a primary objective, exploits entire societies as a tool to achieve its abstractive goals. moreover, he admits that the totalitarianism of capitalism is even more latent, as it relies on an internal logic of profit (geldlogik). this may explain the passive attitude of societies facing growing social inequalities. duchrow’s tenets are close to liberation theology and on the margins of the theological mainstream. however, the official words of different churches, interconfessional and ecumenical organisations also express critical approaches to neoliberal economic orthodoxy and capitalism. even though their criticism is of a different nature, the teaching of the vast majority of christian churches warns against the consequences of uncritical acceptance of the neoliberal economic order. suffice it to mention pope francis’ (2013) observations on the economy of exclusion and idolatry of money contained in the exhortation evangelii gaudium (“the joy of the gospel”), for instance, in point 55 of the text: one cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. the current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! we have created new idols. the worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. exod. 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. generally speaking, the text of exhortation leaves no doubt that the bishop of rome is a determined opponent of the neoliberal economic order. the mainstream of the ecumenical movement, headed by the world council of churches (wcc), makes even more harsh utterances than those of the pope. nevertheless, for decades, the largest ecumenical organisation has been a strong agent of a more just social order and thereby an advocate of transformation of the prevalent economic model. this ecumenical criticism started to develop for good in 1983 at the general assembly of the wcc in vancouver, at the launch of the programme “justice, peace and integrity kopiec the lutheran “convivial economy” 233 of creation” (jpic). the programme had two crucial assumptions: first, the rejection of the idea of political, economic, and technological progress as the main factor of social development (or rather disintegration), and secondly, the emphasis that justice, peace, and integrity of creation are integrated and striving for them must be formulated in one social strategy (wcc 1983:131). the idea of jpic became the background of further initiatives of the wcc. the programme “alternative globalisation addressing people and earth” was most relevant, launched during the wcc’s general assembly in harare in 1998 and continued in the ensuing assemblies in porto alegre and pusan. theologians from geneva clearly emphasised that globalising economy, driven by the neoliberal philosophy of unfettered market, caused increasing poverty, ecological catastrophes, as well as social and political injustices in many places of the world (wcc 1990:2). they strived for a critical reinterpretation of capitalism, mainly by rejecting the dogma of its apparent “naturality” and of economic growth as an autotelic value. the neoliberal socio-economic approach was even directly named “the economy of death”, the disorder destroying society, culture, and environment. instead, the wcc proposed an “economy of life”, a counter idea that would drive a profound transformation of social reality. the preamble to the declaration of the “economy of life” appears as one of the most critical utterances of the genevan organisation: this call to action comes in a time of dire necessity. people and the earth are in peril due to the over-consumption of some, growing inequalities as evidenced in the persistent poverty of many in contrast to the extravagant wealth of a few, and intertwined global financial, socioeconomic, ecological and climate crises … life in the global community as we know it today will come to an end if we fail to confront the sins of egotism, callous disregard and greed which lie at the root of these crises … an economy of life is not only possible, it is in the making – and god’s justice lies at its very foundation! (mshana & peralta 2010:1). 4. an outline of the convivial economy as mentioned earlier, the programmes of the ecumenical movement have become a source of inspiration for many churches and religious organisations in their social and economic teaching. one of them is the idea of “convivial economy” of the lwf. an introductory remark suffices when examining the convivial economy: it is rather a socio-economic and ethical approach regarding economic order and economic activities as part of social life. such shift in emphasis is a hallmark of many economic heterodoxies: the economy must be regarded as a social institution, thereby, a part of social reality and not the reverse. 234 acta theologica 2022:42(2) the convivial economy does not offer a “pure” economic model using, for instance, econometrics to assess and forecast the most efficient economic actions. instead, the convivial economy employs the term “economy” in a much broader sense, being closer to the greek etymology of oíkovouía (οίκος – house, and νομος – law, rule); thus, the primordial meaning of the word referred to the art of managing a household. the etymology of “convivial economy” is also a pure economic matter. conviviality derives from the spanish word convivencia (english, coexistence, life together) and the lwf theologians define it as “the art and practice of living together” (lwf 2017a:3; 2014:4). thus, the lutheran approach emphasises social relations based on the etymological starting point. conviviality may be regarded as an attitude of active social involvement in a growing social and cultural diversity; therefore, it is about going beyond classes, race, culture, religion, and gender. the etymology of “conviviality” relates with the diaconal engagement (lwf 2014:20). varied experience from the diaconal work helped list three main components of the convivial attitude: vocation, dignity, and justice (lwf 2014:15; addy 2019). having observed growing systemic contradictions of the prevalent economic model, lwf theologians addressed conviviality to the sphere of economy and labour. the dignity of the human person, his/her vocation to contribute to social life, and finally, justice as the key principle of every relationship creates a background of the convivial economy as the model contrary to the neoliberal approach. if the latter causes a defragmentation of society and expels increasing numbers of individuals and groups on the margins of social life, the former aims to reintegrate parts of social reality. therefore, the convivial economy is a counterproposal for economic idolatry overwhelming contemporary reality. as the authors of this approach notice, it is about making the objectives of the economic activities – profit and effectiveness – measures to improve human and social well-being, not the reverse. the well-being itself must not be understood in terms of sheer comfort, changing one’s life in a quest for permanent consumption. if properly comprehended and applied, the economic model helps develop a human potential for the common good of society and the earth. thus, the sphere of work must not be an area of destroying competition or a field where a job is the privilege of a few; a place of economic activity must not simply be a quest for profit justifying injustice and dishonesty; economic actors must not view human beings as merely a measure on the way to economic success (ekd 2015:49). observations of contemporary signs of crisis such as the growing economic inequalities, increasing unemployment, both technological and structural, further commodification of work and earthly resources, kopiec the lutheran “convivial economy” 235 to mention only a few, all of them confirm the warnings listed above. as counter model for contemporary economic orthodoxy, the convivial economy proposes a view of the economy through vocation, dignity, and justice. all these categories might employ a theological significance when adopting it to the economic and social fields. of course, vocation is meant broadly rather than merely a position in the organisation of the church. instead, it reflects the social teaching of the lutheran reformation and refers to the calling of each member of the christian society to partake in the tasks given by god. in luther’s thought, when truly and honestly performed, every human profession is the way of true christian life and an answer to god for his gracious gift of salvation (ekd 2015:6). consequently, the vocation might be understood through the lenses of weber’s theory: as a factor of one’s position in a stratified social system and the function in the division of labour. both the theological view of luther and the sociological view of weber help comprehend the goals of the convivial economy. thus, the term “vocation” refers to the idea that each man/woman has his/her function in social life according to his/her skills and abilities. the perspective of the prevalent economic approach reduces this integral meaning. on the one hand, vocation is linked merely with paid work; on the other hand, many people are being deprived of their workplaces, due to the continuing financialisation of work. the logic of the globalised market economy pushes entire groups out on the margins of employment. in many countries, especially young people are doomed to precarious work conditions, and the future of societies appears unstable, resulting in gloom. concurrently, the market economy includes the forms of human activities that have been out of the logic of profit and competition. moreover, the vast majority of social policy systems aim to regulate as many human actions as possible. this is the basic outline of the sphere of work in europe nowadays (lwf 2017a:6). from this starting point, the lwf (2017b:5) lists three categories in the field of human actions: employment (with or without an employment contract, or as selfemployed); work (needed for our common life but not paid for); and activity (contributing to personal and social life but not essential for survival needs, such as leisure pursuits). obviously, this list brings to mind hannah arendt’s distinction of the forms of activities fundamental to the human condition, of the vita activa (labour, work, action). although the categories distinguished by the lutheran theologians do not point out class differences, they do highlight a hallmark of the current socio-economic order. 236 acta theologica 2022:42(2) this order commercialises and regulates the vast majority of human activities, with destructive consequences for social relations and human well-being. a place of human existence free from state and market power is dramatically shrinking. our livelihood and our well-being depend on the decisions of politicians and often random forces of the globalised markets. we are forced to endless competition in growing sectors of social realities and to a tacit acceptance of a dominant way of thinking. it makes human life less happy, less free, and less healthy. thus, the convivial economy is about making the human sphere of work less individualistic and focusing on more goals than merely profit and effectiveness. as the lwf theologians argue, in the convivial economy, work would be recognised as important for the health of society, and the pressure to turn work into employment would be diminished. employment would be organised within a framework which ensured a living wage (or would supplement an already adequate basic income). no one must work excessive hours or under bad conditions simply to survive. activity would be enhanced because time would be released for reciprocal activities, culture, and work, on which a convivial society could be based (lwf 2017a:5). it is obvious that the demands of the convivial economy call to retreat from the economisation of human reality, of the dominant way of thinking, assuming that the entire reality relies on the logic of profit, egoistic self-interest, and competition. vocation refers to the sphere of work. the second keyword in considering the convivial economy is justice. the lwf theologians do not examine this notion in theological or philosophical terms; rather, they use it to describe contemporary economic inequalities. they seem to refer to one of the dominant polemics in the current poverty studies taking place between two counter positions: those who are claiming that the politics of economic growth causes gradual mitigation of the global poverty and those who argue that a decrease in poverty is merely a statistical aspect, poorly reflecting reality. in terms of politics and economics, justice is thus discussed as a selfvalue of the global social policy systems. the financialisation of the economy, global growth of economic inequality, economic crises with their destructive consequences (especially the financial crisis of 2008) can be regarded as the consequences of a lack of justice (lwf 2017a:7; see also ekd 2009). the authors of the convivial economy’s programme argue that the various effects of neoliberal orthodoxy are too often treated as coming from personal greed or personal morality, without taking seriously into account the deplorable results of liberalisation and deregulation of markets. the way they present justice kopiec the lutheran “convivial economy” 237 puts them on the side of devoted critics of neoliberal orthodoxy. therefore, the convivial economy corresponds with many other approaches in the ecumenical movement. human dignity is the final listed keyword. as in the previous instance, the lwf theologians examine human dignity through the lenses of current economic upheavals. they argue that the prevailing economic model drives socio-economic tendencies that seriously impair social order and daily human well-being. they mention four detailed examples. first, it is an expectation of fast and continuous profit; this means making decisions about investment or disinvestment based on the short-term rate of return. such a maximisation of profit often comes at the expense of either the wage earners or the allocation to the research and development sector or system of social politics. secondly, economic transformations driven by the neoliberal orthodoxy result in the privatisation (and, one might say, commodification) of many public services and the rifts in social security systems. this economic shift manifests even in the language used in public services: their recipients are now customers rather than citizens; moreover, public institutions work partly as commercial enterprises (lwf 2017a:8). this leads to a poorer quality of public services such as housing, care services, health, and education offered to less wealthy people and, in general, to growing economic precariousness and instability of a vast number of families, communities, and individuals. thirdly, it is the restructuring of income maintenance systems, especially aid systems for potential excluded groups such as the unemployed, the disabled, or the ill, etc. unlike previous social insurance concepts of support, the current prevalent model requires an objective assessment of one’s eligibility. this often means that public institutions and agencies employ profit’s logic, leading to a stigmatisation of social aid recipients. fourthly, economic orthodoxy makes people more vulnerable to the consequences of large-scale structural economic changes in the daily life of workers and consumers. the costs of financial crises, relocations, or privatisation are shifted to the citizens. of particular importance for daily life are tendencies in the sphere of work, as the employed market economy measures continuously lead to its economisation. in this instance, beck’s (2014:107) remark that people are called to find “biographical solutions to systemic contradictions” is relevant. as the lwf theologians argue, in all these cases human dignity, which is an essential attribute of each person is denied and undermined and the attitudes in society become harsher to those on the margins (lwf 2017a:9). 238 acta theologica 2022:42(2) in order to protect human dignity, the convivial economy makes several proposals for tackling the gloomy consequences of the current upheavals in the socio-economic order. first, it suggests serious discussion on a universal mechanism of the basic citizen income (lwf 2017a:9). obviously, the idea of the basic income has appeared in many circles and been tested in several countries (switzerland, finland); however, the lwf theologians appeal to the opinions of many faithbased organisations and religious think-tanks (lwf 2017b:7). the basic income would protect individuals and families, especially the most vulnerable, from the rapid rifts in the economy; it would give people “the floor”, preventing poverty and providing the background for a more stable and balanced family life. secondly, the convivial economy includes the proposals referring to education, especially to lifetime learning. sufficient educational politics is crucial, especially when facing fast changes in employment regulations and job offers (lwf 2017a:10; see also ekd 2016). education must not be reduced to the training for work or skills for employment; rather, it must be a “learning for the whole of life”; it should develop the instruments and abilities for metacognition. thirdly, as the lwf theologians argue, health and welfare services must not be regarded in terms of profit, but as an entitlement, especially for the most vulnerable members of society (lwf 2017a:9) . 5. migration in the convivial economy justice, vocation, and dignity are the three components of the convivial economy and, simultaneously, the keywords in its description. the lwf theologians explain the significance of this approach, by distinguishing five critical areas of the current socio-economic order, where conviviality would heal the growing structures of injustice and poverty: work and welfare, debt, migration, corruption and transparency, creation, and environment. it is worthwhile to stress that the theologians deal with this list by appealing to the experience of lutheran faith-based organisations working in different contexts. migration is the crucial dimension of the current socio-economic upheavals; it is both their cause and effect. it is obviously not a new issue; in fact, human history is migration history. nevertheless, globalisation, technological and communication progress, as well as current political conflicts set a new context for contemporary migration patterns. moreover, when considering a specific european context, important push factors stem from the political integration kopiec the lutheran “convivial economy” 239 within the european union (eu). social mobility (horizontal) is thereby a right established and guaranteed by law and a basic entitlement of eu citizens. it is a truism that migration changes society in almost every aspect: economic, political, cultural, religious, etc. the convivial economy, when approaching the european background, considers this wide range of perspectives: these various dimensions of migration, mobility and being an asylum seeker or refugee have meant that local communities, towns and cities are becoming more diverse (lwf 2017a:18, 19). from this point on, the lwf theologians draw a sociological portrait of the present phases of migration in europe and its consequences. in the first phase of migration, they pay attention to the economic migration within the member states of the eu, and to the ambiguous results of this right. on the one hand, younger or highly skilled people are free to seek better work and education conditions; free mobility affords many qualified workers an opportunity to improve their personal economic situation. the migration of a skilled and qualified workforce boosts economic growth in the pull countries and helps sort out the results of demographic processes, particularly the ageing of societies. on the other hand, this free mobility of workers has, at times, disastrous consequences for the emigration countries within the eu: the growing number of euro orphans, the disintegration of families and “a disruption of normal family norms”, as well as the brain drain effect that hinders economic development in many countries, thereby destroying social cohesion. a different matter is criminal human traffic: [t]here are many who come to the western countries organised by socalled gang masters to do very low paid or seasonal jobs, and often the living and working conditions are extremely exploitative (lwf 2017a:19). the second phase of migration is the question of refugees and asylum seekers. in the european context, this aspect seems to have more serious consequences and constitutes the most crucial problem for many european countries; they face an increasing conflict of values, cultural patterns, and as a consequence, an increase in social disintegration. societies in the immigration countries must learn the differences between various waves of migration, and the mechanisms of constituting groups and communities of the migrants within the host country, as, for instance, the causes of radicalising of younger generations of immigrants and refugees. this question links with the distinction between integration and assimilation: the former has to create a context where people can live together without becoming “separated or 240 acta theologica 2022:42(2) segregated”, whereas the latter assumes that “the immigrants and refugees should assimilate themselves to local culture”, which is, as the lwf theologians argue, more or less an impossible goal (lwf 2017a:20). the convivial economy is about the positive patterns of integration; about learning to cross the boundaries of prejudices and stereotypes, and about daily building new relationships and solidarities. the alternative is a high wall between continents and regions. 6. conclusion as alluded to earlier, the lutheran proposal of a convivial economy is not a sheer economic model, especially when applying the prevailing meaning of economy. yet, it becomes more relevant when recalling the primary etymology of “economy” as the art of managing the household. in this way, the convivial economy joins the rising stream of alternatives to the current prevalent economic order. most of them argue that the economy requires changes – in terms of purposes and values – and that leaving matters as they are, would lead to disastrous consequences, especially in the face of uncontrolled technological progress. however, this stream is not homogenous; alternative voices reverberate from different ideological positions, being sometimes at odds with one another. the convivial economy is based on theological foundations. the keywords (vocation, justice, and human dignity) around which it is organised cannot be considered without reference to their biblical and theological basis. hence, it is a socio-economic alternative reflecting the christian faith, mindset, and diaconal experiences of theologians and church leaders who are its authors. it is, therefore, universal. when grounded in the european context, it may be examined and applied as a source of inspiration in socio-economic transformations worldwide. ultimately, it may be a theological answer to addressing the moral indifferentism of neoliberal capitalism. bibliography addy, t. 2019. community practice and critical community research: perspectives from conviviality and the cable approach. diaconia 10(2). [online.] retrieved from: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/a639658609/aone?u=anon~4906ace9&sid=googl escholar&xid=751c83e4 [17 september 2022]. beck, u. 2014. ulrich beck: pioneer in cosmopolitan sociology and risk society. münchen: ludwig maximilian universität. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04990-8 https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/a639658609/aone?u=anon~4906 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04990-8 kopiec the lutheran “convivial economy” 241 duchrow, u. 2011. brauchen wir eine europäische befreiungstheologie? alternativen zum marktliberalen verständnis von freiheit aus dem geist des evangeliums. in: u. beyer (ed.), facetten der freiheit. evangelischer und säkularer freiheitsbegriff in der spannung gesellschaftlicher wirklichkeit. 5 jahre evangelische stadtakademie aachen (aachen: verlag mainz g.), pp. 51-80. evangelische kirche in deutschland (ekd) 2009. like a high wall, cracked and bulging. statement by the council of the evangelical church in germany on the global financial and economic crisis. hannover: church office of the evangelical church in germany. 2015. solidarität und selbstbestimmung im wandel der arbeitswelt. eine denkschrift des rates der evangelischen kirche in deutschland (ekd) zu arbeit, sozialpartnerschaften und gewerkschaften. gütersloh: gütersloher verlaghaus. 2016. gute schule aus evangelischer sicht. impulse für das leben, lehren und lernen in der schule. hannover: kirchenamt der evangelischen kirche in deutschland. fusfeld, d.r. 2000. comments on the roundtable discussions: the progress of heterodox economics. journal of the history of economic thought 22(2):171-177. https://doi. org/10.1080/10427710050025376 ingham, g. 2008. capitalism. with a new postcript on the financial crisis and its aftermath. cambridge: polity press. lee, f.s. 2011. the pluralism debate in heterodox economics. review of radical political economics 20(10):1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613411402643 leywa, r. 2009. no child left behind: a neoliberal repackaging of social darwinism. journal of critical education policy studies 7(1):364-381. lutheran world federation (lwf) 2014. seeking conviviality: re-forming community diakonia in europe. geneva: the lutheran world federation, department for mission and development. 2017a. towards a convivial economy. the contribution of the re-formed community diakonia in europe. 2017b. called to transform. a lutheran perspective on religion and development. geneva: the lutheran world federation. https://doi.org/10.1080/10427710050025376 https://doi.org/10.1080/10427710050025376 https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613411402643 242 acta theologica 2022:42(2) mshana, r. & peralta, a. 2010. economy of life. linking poverty, wealth and ecology. geneva: wcc publications. pope francis 2013. apostolic exhortation “evangelii gaudium”. [online.] retrieved from: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/ papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html#no_to_an_ economy_of_exclusion [15 july 2022]. schumpeter, j.a. 2006. history of economic analysis. new york: routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203983911 tizon, a. 2014. evangelism and social responsibility. the making of a transformational vision. in: l. dahle, m.s. dahle & k. jorgenson (eds), the lausanne movenemt: a range of perspectives (oxford: regnum), pp. 170-181. https://doi.org/10.2307/j. ctv1ddcs3p.19 world council of churches (wcc) 1983. gathered for life. official report sixth assembly of the wcc, vancouver, canada. geneva: wcc publications. 1990. world convocation on justice, peace and the integrity of creation. now is the time. final document and other texts. geneva: wcc publications. keywords trefwoorde convivial economy joviale ekonomie economic heterodoxy ekonomiese heterodoksie vocation beroep lutheran luthers migration migrasie https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html#no_to_an_�economy_of_exclusion https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html#no_to_an_�economy_of_exclusion https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html#no_to_an_�economy_of_exclusion https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203983911 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203983911 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1ddcs3p.19 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1ddcs3p.19 _hlk88136129 _hlk117937430 _hlk117937418 changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 3 http://dx.doi.org/10.15826/csp.2017.1.3.018 article the end of utopias? leonid fishman institute for philosophy and law, ural branch of the russian academy of sciences, yekaterinburg, russia abstract the present article discusses the legitimacy of the question: are we really living in the era of “the end of utopias”? it is argued that a positive response to this question is possible only if, when considering utopias, their predominantly “left” content, left phraseology and the declaration of left anti-capitalist goals are placed at the forefront. however, if we approach utopias from the point of view of their objectively executable functions, their primary content is no longer utopian in the usual sense. a utopia is always a “function of the real” (labica, 2004, p. 291). contemporary utopian consciousness should be considered taking into account that: (a) utopias are inextricably linked with capitalism; (b) they serves its transformation (defining its “spirit” by its criticism) in transition from one stage to another; (c) they are an expression of the worldviews and aspirations of social groups (classes) rising at different stages of capitalism. therefore, in order to find the place in the social structure in which modern utopias are born, it is necessary to locate the “rising class”. the article defines the rising class as one that has, at least potentially, the greatest productivity. its role in social production is increasing; around it are formed production, cultural and other relations, which become decisive according to the foreseeable historical perspective. the “creative class” is considered in terms of a contemporary rising class. dazzled by its bright prospects, it is inclined to impose its utopia of the “creative economy” on the majority. the consequence of the rise of the “creative class” is a concomitant growth in the precarious social group of service workers and other social strata for whom the prospects of gaining entry into the ranks of the cognitariat are becoming increasingly unstable. now that these strata are more likely to struggle for their existence, they find themselves trying to defend what has been lost without raising questions about the need to radically transform the social system. variants of modern utopian consciousness are considered, proceeding from the outlined view of the socio-structural transformation of contemporary societies. received 31 january 2017 © 2017 leonid fishman accepted 02 april 2017 lfishman@yandex.ru published online 18 december 2017 260 leonid fishman keywords utopia, spirit of capitalism, rising class, creative class, technological substitution introduction today, it is difficult to resist the fact that “the end of utopias” did not transpire as predicted by g. marcuse (marcuse, 2004). no less often is it said that utopias have changed, e.g. become “concrete” or “private”, that their only function was “civil repair” (alexander, 2002) or that their object was the reform of democracy. according to f. ainsa, the creation of “partial” or “fragmentary” utopias is, apparently, the task of developed democratic societies, which should be solved by social collectives not loner-dreamers. at the present time, the traditional contradiction between the struggle for a complete renewal of society and maintenance of the status quo is being gradually replaced by a multiplicity of such mutually agreed “partial” utopias appearing in the spheres of education and labour or seen in the development of certain “segments” of contemporary urbanity. this becomes possible thanks to the recognition of two fundamental truths: the increasing complexity of the manifestations of a multipolar, interdependent world, and the need to search for a “consensus” (ainsa, 1997). however, reasoning of this kind differs little from the statement concerning the “end of utopias” if by the latter we refer to revolutionary utopias whose stated goal is to go beyond the limits of capitalism. in this case, if, when considering utopias, the predominantly “leftist” content, left-wing phraseology, declarations of anti-capitalist goals, etc., are at the forefront, we certainly live in the era of the end of utopias. nevertheless, if utopias are approached from the point of view of their objectively executable functions, their main content is no longer utopian in the traditional sense; perhaps those who proclaim the “end of utopias” are simply looking for and failing to find them in their usual place “under the sun”. however, a utopia is always a “function of the real” (labica, 2004, p. 291). it is from this point of view that contemporary utopian consciousness should be considered, irrespective of the form it takes. such an approach implies that utopianism: a) is inextricably linked with capitalism; b) serves its transformation (defining its “spirit” by its criticism) in the transition from one stage to another; c) is an expression of the worldview and aspirations of social groups (classes) rising at different stages of capitalism. utopianism and the spirit of capitalism the inextricable connection between utopia and capitalism is best viewed in the light of luc boltanski and eve chiapello’s concept of the changing “spirits of capitalism”. in the light of this concept, a utopia consists primarily in a criticism of capitalism. 261changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 3 utopian consciousness is closely connected with the image of capitalism, which serves as the object of its criticism. to a large extent, this determines both rising and descending consciousness and, as such, consists in the suspended state of relevant social groups. from this point of view, liberal utopianism is a critique of real capitalism in the sense of the pragmatic and not ideologically overburdened continuation of the domination of capitalist class – not to mention socialist criticism, which in this sense is the direct heir of the liberal (rosanvallon, 2007, p. 219). thus, utopian-critical consciousness is, so to speak, negatively shaped by the existing image of capitalism and the legitimising strategies transformed under its influence (i.e., the “spirit of capitalism”). even in a critical reaction to the discomfort of social existence, utopian consciousness cannot raise itself far above this existence. thus, utopian consciousness and imagination objectively perform the function of transforming (but not overcoming!) capitalism by influencing its “spirit”. the “spirit of capitalism” depends on utopias to the extent that it responds to the aspirations of the rising classes, placing upon their aspirations the means of their legitimisation. in legitimising itself, capitalism must connect its existence with the satisfaction of the aspirations and needs of the representatives of these classes, in such a way that these become possible (or even uniquely possible) precisely within the framework of capitalism (boltanski, chiapello, 2011, pp. 56–61). in other words, if we were actually living in the period of the end of utopias, this would imply the end of capitalism. capitalism certainly – and unambiguously – exists, although its continued existence is hardly problem-free. and this also means that utopias (or at least utopian consciousness and imagination) exist; their existence is a logical necessity. those who talk about the “end of utopias” are referring in historical terms to the specific socialist, communist, anarchic and other left-wing critiques of capitalism that are characteristic of its industrial stage. the present “end of utopias”, however, is just the end of the utopias of the era of industrial capitalism, traces of which are still evident in the vague dreams of some leftists concerning an “educational dictatorship” in the jacobin style (johnson, 2012). these utopias ceased to be relevant because they had already done their critical work on the transformation of early capitalism, with its “protestant work ethic”, into the “labour society” (castel, 2009) with – to use the terminology of boltanski and chiapello – the “second spirit of capitalism”. in so doing, they already managed to make way for those critiques that, to a large extent, determined the “third spirit of capitalism.” however, these critiques are not generally considered to be “utopian” since “utopias” are necessarily communist-socialist in their orientation. political discourses of the rising minority adhering to the position of k. mannheim, we proceed from the assumption that utopianism, at least in the epoch of capitalism, creates rising classes (mannheim, 1991, p. 122). therefore, in order to locate the place in the social structure in which modern utopias are born, it is necessary to identify the “rising class”. in what does it consist? which classes can today be considered to be “rising”? 262 leonid fishman taking as samples the leading classes of the modern era (the bourgeoisie and the proletariat), we can say that the rising class is that which disposes, if only potentially, the greatest productivity. due to its increasing role in social production, the members of such a class occupy key positions, are able to defend themselves, can sabotage production and communications, etc. around it are formed production, cultural and other relations, which become decisive according to the foreseeable historical perspective. when it comes to a contemporary rising class, the source of technical and cultural innovations allegedly playing a decisive role in the economy is usually considered in terms of “creative class” or “cognitariat”. in the past, utopias that transformed the spirit of capitalism were associated with rising classes, which constituted, if not a majority of the population, then a very significant (quantitatively and qualitatively) part thereof: hence the “third estate”, the working class and, finally, the “middle class”. however, the specific character of the present time consists in the fact that, if there are now rising classes, then they are quantitatively rather insignificant. even if we delineate the boundaries of the creative class as widely as possible, as r. florida is inclined to do, it still represents a clear minority of the working population of even the most advanced countries. a critical examination of the concept of the creative class reveals that the majority of the social groups attributed to it are in fact representative of the service sector, which was, so to speak, renamed in advance into “also creative class”. moreover, due to ongoing economic and technological changes, these individual groups are constantly shrinking. no sooner does one imagine oneself to be the main beneficiary from the achievements of progress, to which a bright future is almost guaranteed, than the next stage of development demonstrates this is not so. the periodic flaring up and fading of the utopias of the middle class, the creative class, and the bohemian bourgeoisie are cyclically accompanied with outbursts of jubilance and the loss of hopes. the utopia of “self-realisation” and the involvement of the majority of the population in a certain “creative economy” look very problematic in the outlined perspective. this understanding is reflected, in particular, in the following passage of r. florida, the creator of “creative class theory”. in his view, the creative class has enough power, talent and strength to play a significant role in the transformation of the world. its representatives (in fact, the entire society) have the opportunity to turn their inclination towards introspection and the revaluation of values into practical action aimed at a more ambitious renewal and transformation of society...” in practice, things are never quite so simple. in order to achieve genuine social cohesion, the creative class must offer representatives of other classes a realistic vision of ways for improving life, if not by participating in the creative economy, then at least by accessing some of its benefits. if it does not take these actions, the already constantly deepening social and economic contradictions will become even more significant. i am afraid this will lead to the result that our life at the top of an unhappy society will be far from serene. it is time for the creative class to grow up and take responsibility (florida, 2016). whatever may be said in the sense of creativity not being “the prerogative of a select few geniuses”, the most recent utopia that engenders capitalism cannot 263changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 3 be a utopia for the majority. as v. s. martianov notes, “the utopias of the creative class, e.g. hipster urbanism, gentrification and the creative industries, are oriented towards privileged urban minorities” (martianov, 2016, p. 49). in reality, fully-fledged membership of the “creative class” consists in only a very few leaders, e.g. engineers, scientists, top-managers, etc. the peculiarity of their social position generates a utopian consciousness typical of the self-defeating branch of the enlightenment, which is not oriented to the progress of mankind as a whole, but rather to the progress of reason (fishman, 2016) and, of course, its most “advanced” adepts. these latter, as winners, will receive everything, while all the others are taken into account at best as a problem to be solved, an annoying hindrance. it is possible to consider the specific utopia of the top of the “creative class” to be transhumanism. a worldview that pins its hopes on technological progress is not surprising for a social group that considers itself to be the main productive force, whose role will only grow, while other people will gradually become superfluous. however, in its fantastical variant, it is also attractive – both to superfluous and potentially superfluous people – to the extent that it promises a future in which artificial intelligence, robots and some kind of universal machine are engaged in production and service and the human being is fully supported by them. however, objectively speaking, this is precisely the utopia of a shrinking minority, which actually addresses itself not to “humanity” and “society”, but to that chimerical state of singularity when both humanity and society become superfluous. it only has a chance to transform capitalism if its adherents become more socially conscious than they are now. it would certainly be a mistake to reduce the political discourses of this rising minority to transhumanism, with its attendant deviation from social issues. representatives of the same minority, who understand the limitations of the “utopia of the creative class”, reflect on the rather gloomy prospects that the continuing progress of science and technology implies for everyone else today. for example, martin ford devoted a whole book to these perspectives, whose title speaks for itself: rise of the robots: technology and the threat of a jobless future. in this book, ford already comes very close to raising the question of the need for another transformation of capitalism: “we will have to get rid of the idea that workers are a source of funds for supporting pensioners and financing social programmes and instead admit that this source comprises our entire economy as a whole” (ford, 2016, pp. 368–369). however, it is just this kind of criticism on the part of the (so far) rising minority, which in the future can also be assimilated by the majority that, in its mass form, expresses itself politically in other ways. political discourses of the non-rising majority what about the majority that does not belong to the “creative class”? this consists, for the most part, in the service sector workers for whom to join the ranks of the creative minority is an almost impossible dream. this class, if not yet comprising “superfluous people”, consists of people involved in “useless work”, the demand for which is conditioned by the existence of other people engaged in similarly useless 264 leonid fishman work (greber, 2014, p. 151). moreover, the scope of this useless labour is reduced in proportion to the development of processes of technological substitution. in the classical mannheimian scheme, the specificity of ideologies and utopias is explained by the class position and the distorted point of view dictated by it, from which only a part of the real state of things is visible, and the other part is not visible or not completely visible. this “over-rational” scheme can be corrected in the spirit of d. greber by replacing the point of view with the “point of imagination”, with the illusory consciousness being explained by a “skew of the imagination” (greber, 2014a, p. 139). it is possible that this new interpretation is itself the product of the consciousness of certain social groups (service workers), whose representatives are guided primarily “by imagination”, and therefore that the position of the other groups is also assessed from the point of view of their “imbalances”. since there is no sustainable role in social production for social groups that are clearly not “rising” (“useless work” cannot be assigned to such), they also cannot offer projects for the reorganisation of society as a whole, i.e. analogues of classical utopias. the opportunity here, consisting not even in improving one’s position, but simply in not losing what one has, is illusory for these groups; therefore, they cannot see a “bright future”. however, they are still capable of expressing outrage at their position, clothed in rhetoric whose ideological zeal is neither right nor left (žižek, 2012, pp. 150–152). unlike the utopias of the industrial period, which were expressions of the aspirations of classes possessing the real possibility of empowered communication (because they really controlled important spheres of the economy), these sentiments are engendered by social groups whose ability to communicate with power centres is very limited. w. beck noted that nowadays the voice of a person as a citizen and a producer does not mean much; however, the voice of a consumer, a “global client”, which grabs more and more power, means a lot. like capital, it disposes a global “no”, a no-buying power. like capital, a political consumer can use the “no” policy as a calculated side effect of economic actions; that is, uncontrolled and with insignificant own costs” (beck, 2007, p. 317). but, apparently, this point of view no longer fully reflects reality. if, for the majority, salaries, in terms of purchasing power parity, do not increase (which is already a fact repeatedly confirmed by statistics), arguments concerning the alleged “power of non-buying” acquire a distinct shade of bullying. in addition, since the consumer does not constitute a class, consumers can neither sabotage communication nor production. at the same time, in the workplace, this consumer is usually a service worker, in which context he is obliged to understand a client who does not need to understand him, because he is “always right”. the skewing of imagination is thus caused by the fact that the service sector worker is doomed to constantly enter into a relationship of one-sided, “impotent” communication. in this process, he must constantly show benevolence and cordiality, affability, politeness, affability and graciousness, restraint, finesse, solicitude, skill and erudition, as well as the ability to use a smile (basova, 2008). the position of the service worker – the proletarian of contemporaneity – is characterised by the fact that he or she produces someone else’s “quality of life” at the 265changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 3 expense of his or her own. a large part of the service worker’s life, therefore, consists of pretending to be something that one is not. it’s not even about selling one’s labour, time or skills, but rather about disposing one’s spiritual qualities, one’s personality. in a literal sense, the service worker is involved in “selling oneself”. his or her natural desire therefore consists in life on the rent, which implies the cessation of such a trade. today it leads, for example, to downshifting, in which attitude many find an attractive alternative to the “rat race”. it also includes many alternative ways of life in squats, anarchic communities, eco-villages, etc. be that as it may, if the rethinking of the connection between a social position and a political discourse with an emphasis on “imagination” is adequate to the current state of things, it is obvious that a “skewed imagination” creates very specific forms of political thinking. utopias (as well as ideologies) in the former sense imply the primacy of rational goal setting, which goes beyond the framework of self-consciousness entirely as a consequence of “skewing of the imagination”. suspension within the framework of this distortion, as presently seems to be the case, gives rise to the absolutisation (if not ontologisation) of the communication method inherent to the social group (in this case, based on a quick reaction tailored to the customer’s desires). this leads to the justification of the “concrete utopia” that is embodied “here and now” in forms of social organisation that reveal a clear “similarity with capitalism itself” (manche, 2015). today’s majority political discourses are almost diametrically opposed to the utopias of the left in the traditional sense. this is an expression of the political aspirations of the “non-rising-class” and concerns the need to change the world to incorporate the virtues of a “concrete utopia”. since the skewed imagination of these social groups simply cannot imagine a “place that is not there”, it rather focuses on a “place that (and only that!)” is located in “civil society” and “democracy”. this kind of political imagination is easily assimilated by populist identity politicians and (thus) unlikely to transcend the emerging rental society. these modern “utopias” reflect the worldview of those social groups that cannot seriously count on this or that form of income as compensation for their lost former social subjectivity. therefore, they fluctuate between the desire for income compensation for the loss of subjectivity (which they often do not have and do not expect in a stable form) (fishman, 2016a, pp. 116–129) and gaining some “autonomy”, which for them becomes the only realistic strategy in relation to the formation of the rental society. ideologically, the requirements of income compensation can be disguised in the clothes of the former utopias; however, then we should refer to “reactionary utopias”, whose adherents want to return to a place that is no longer there. it has been repeatedly observed that members of movements like “occupy wall street” do not demand anything concrete; rather, they protest to signal their indignant outrage. but why? with full and frank awareness of their situation, they cannot demand anything but their share of rent; however, that entails admitting that they are superfluous people. nevertheless, recognising oneself as such either implies being reconciled to one’s position or posing the question more radically than these superfluous people are 266 leonid fishman capable of doing. they are not yet able to coldly face the facts because they believe that they still have something to lose. is a revolutionary utopianism possible today? (from the “function of the real” beyond the limits of capitalism) the foreseeable future will bring (and is already bringing) a steady decline in jobs due to technological substitution, including for those who are still engaged in the service sector. here we refer not to a skewed imagination, but about the fact that the social position that generates such an imagination itself ceases to be economically in demand. if an increasing number of people turns out to be banally superfluous, then it becomes more than simply another kind of utopia of self-actualisation; to that will be added another clear inflection of the utopia of demand, contrasted with the utopia of the total superfluity of a person in the context of transhumanism. the present situation is quite reminiscent of early capitalism, in which the bourgeoisie was an unquestionably rising class, while the proletariat was the nonrising moreover, “suffering” – class. now it is the “creative class” that is rising. like the bourgeoisie before it, it is just as dazzled by its bright prospects and just as inclined to impose its utopia of the “creative economy” on the majority; in this way, it closely resembles the classic utopia of the self-made man, according to which every hired worker can join the bourgeois. the consequence of the rise of the “creative class” is a concomitant growth in the precarious social group of service workers and other social strata for whom the prospects of gaining entry into the ranks of the cognitariat are becoming increasingly untenable. now that these strata are more likely to struggle for their existence, they find themselves trying to defend what has been lost without raising questions about the need to radically transform the social system. but must it always be thus? and is today’s analogue of the proletariat also only temporarily a non-rising class, which will proclaim its revolutionary utopias at some point in the future? the hope for the realisation of this assumption is that the proletariat of the industrial phase of capitalism’s development was not originally a rising class in many respects. it was a class whose political rights, access to culture and education were highly circumscribed; they did not even have enough free time for such things. and it created revolutionary utopias, because in the socio-political sense the prospects for its rise under capitalism seemed precarious and untenable. for the workers, the prospect of recovery through overcoming capitalism looked more realistic and convincing than the utopia of the bourgeoisie, which claimed that everyone could become a bourgeois. nevertheless, the industrial proletariat was an objectively rising class, since its economic role was growing by leaps and bounds. this seemed so obvious that even a look directed towards a fantastic future revealed [as in h. g. well’s novel the time machine (1895)], along with the privileged “eloi”, the oppressed “morlocks” on which, in fact, everything depended. ultimately, for several decades, a socio-political model was victorious in which the economic role of the working class (and then the “middle class” of wage workers) had become a condition for ensuring its political, cultural and 267changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 3 educational rise. thus, it was that the revolutionary utopias of going beyond capitalism turned into a critique that was functional for capitalism. with the social layer of service workers replenishing the ranks of the precariat, the situation is different. on the one hand, it cannot be denied that workers in the service sector have long represented a major part of the working population of most developed countries. on the other hand, the development of new technologies is buffeting them with increasing force; they are the primary candidates for victimhood of technological replacement processes. a single development of a particular kind of software is all that is necessary to force many workers out of the labour market, beginning with accountants and ending with taxi drivers or workers in the spheres of trade and fast food. many have already been superseded; others will be in the foreseeable future. today, technological progress destroys more jobs than it creates; in addition, the majority of newly created jobs are worse paid and require fewer qualifications (ford, 2016, pp. 93–177). of course, the growth of the creative class, accompanied by the process of its gentrification, creates vacancies for all sorts of domestic servants, which partly takes care of matters that were formerly a strictly familial sphere. a portion of this new servant echelon, according to r. florida, even has sufficient social capital to qualify for entry into the ranks of the creative class (florida, 2007, p. 94). nevertheless, it is obvious that the new gentry cannot provide employment for all those in need of it. in addition, there is no guarantee that the process of technological replacement will not in the foreseeable future lead to a reduction in the ranks of the creative class itself. thus, by contrast with the industrial proletariat and even with the “middle class”, the majority of workers in the service sector have no prospect of social recovery. the prospect of such a rise (“involvement in the creative economy”) can only ever apply to the minority of this class, consisting of the servants of the new gentry. others gradually turn out to be the “suffering class” or “underclass”, whose condition can be maintained by the payment of “basic income” or some other kind of benefit. according to z. bauman, “in a society where consumers, and not producers, are the driving force of economic prosperity (it is precisely in a revival caused by the growth of consumption that we place our hopes as a means of solving economic problems), the poor do not represent value as consumers: they are not spurred to make purchases by flattering advertisements, they do not have credit cards, they cannot count on current bank account loans and the goods they need typically bring tiny profits to traders or even do not bring any profits at all. not surprisingly, these people have been relegated to the “underclass”: they are no longer a temporary anomaly awaiting correction, but a class outside classes, a group outside the “social system”, an estate without whose existence it would be more convenient and everyone else would feel better.” (bauman, 2005, pp. 93–94) therefore, a stipend will be provided not so much for humane reasons as for the sake of maintaining the purchasing power of the majority of consumers, which is necessary in order to continue the mass production of goods and services and to make a profit. in fact, given the development of technological substitution processes within the framework of capitalism, the most favourable future variant for the majority of service 268 leonid fishman workers and other members of the precariat is the construction of a kind of neo-feudalism. this means that, in general, members of the creative class, who do not need many servants, will nevertheless keep them for humanitarian reasons, for preserving social stability and in order to ensure a relatively comfortable social environment. but even this comparatively favourable scenario does not give rise to real opportunities for the social uplift of the majority, since, according to the logic of capitalism, such opportunities can only appear in social groups whose economic role is growing, not decreasing. the logic of capitalism, which, from the economic point of view, leaves open the possibility of cultural, educational, etc. rises for the majority – a possibility still representing economic value – is also the logic of utopia as a “function of the real”. if there is no room for such a possibility (the neo-feudal perspective looks more like an anti-utopia), this implies that the path of utopia as a “function of the real” is closed to the majority. it also means that the prospect of recovery for the majority is now associated only with a society in which the production of “goods” and “services” in itself will lose its meaning, both as a leading way for human self-identification and as a source of profit; 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(2012). god nevozmozhnogo: iskusstvo mechtat’ opasno [the year of dreaming dangerously]. moscow: evropa. contents prajñâ vihâra, volume 6, number 2, july-decmber 2005, 115-132 115 © 2000 by assumption university press conflicting values: a tribute to max weber francis pangfei lai assumption university of thailand abstract this paper examines the wisdom of max weber in the light of the theme: ‘asian heritage in a global society.’ in particular, the paper addresses the wisdom of an uncritical embrace of western values, particularly that of capitalism and that of the blind adoption of westernized democratic concepts, by the cultures of asia. it looks at the conflicting social values between the eastern and the western ways of life and questions how humankind should react in the light of such conflicts. additionally, this paper takes a long and hard look into the conflicting values in the commercial world. it aims to show the inadequacy of the present definition of ‘market value’ as advocated by present day property professionals as the definition fails to take into consideration of the value of any property for the ‘public good’. the conflict that arises between the value for the benefit of the public and that for the benefit of a commercially interested individual or group is highlighted. it proposes another version of that definition of ‘market value’ that incorporates the concept of value for the common good of the public. social actions before we enter into discussions on the topic of conflicting values, it is relevant to look into weber’s concept of social actions. to weber, there are four types of social actions, namely: zweckrational, wertrational, affective action, and traditional action. in many ways, the type of social action that a person takes governs the value that s/he places in the property or asset or issue that s/he is examining or considering. it is therefore of primary importance for us to come to grips with these four types of social actions at the very beginning. zweckrational refers to those social actions that are rationally chosen with the means to attain a particular goal very much in mind. such actions have also been referred to as ‘technocratic thinking’ and the action of an engineer in the construction of a bridge to cross a river is an example of zweckrational thinking. wertrational refers to those social actions that are value oriented characterized by striving for a goal that is not at all rational in itself but is pursued by rational means. an example of wertrational action is of an individual who seeks salvation by following the teachings of a prophet. an affective action is one that is based entirely on the emotional state of the person rather than on the rational weighting of the pros and the cons. a traditional action is a social action that follows tradition or custom or habit without so much as reflecting on the purpose or on the meaning of that action. people engage in this type of action almost without thinking because the action is always done by society. weber’s main purpose of identifying these four types of social actions is to demonstrate to us in his writings that the modern world, with its globalized setting and heavily influenced by the westernized thoughts, comprises mainly of people who are taking social actions more for reason of goal-oriented rationality (that is zweckrational) rather than for reason of value (wertrational); of emotion (affective action); or of tradition (traditional action). rationalization, bureaucracy, authority and oligarchy: weber is thus concerned with the rationalization process of society, which is the practical application of knowledge to achieve one’s desired end. this can of course lead to efficiency, to the proper coordination of activities that can result in the control over both the physical and the social environment. rationalization is a product of “scientific specialization and technical differentiation” that seems to be a characteristic of the western 116 prajñâ vihâra culture.1 rationalization is the guiding principle behind bureaucracy and the increasing division of labor. it has led to the unprecedented increase in both the production and distribution of goods and services. it is also associated with secularization, depersonalization, and oppressive routine. increasingly, human behavior is guided by observation, experiment and reason (zweckrational) to master the natural and social environment so as to achieve an end which is deemed desirable.2 as mentioned earlier,3 freund has defined ‘rationalization’ as “the organization of life through a division and coordination of activities on the basis of exact study of men’s relations with each other, with their tools and their environment, for the purpose of achieving greater efficiency and productivity.” weber’s general theory of rationalization refers to the increasing human activities in mastering the natural and social environments, which in turn, brings about changes in social structure with the result that we have now a set of changed human characteristics through changing values, changing philosophies, and changing beliefs. such superstructural norms and values as individualism, efficiency, self-discipline, materialism, and calculability (all of which are included in weber’s concept of zweckrational) have been encouraged by the bureaucratization process. bureaucracy and rationalization are now rapidly replacing all other forms of organization. they are becoming strangleholds on all sectors of western society. it is horrifying to think that the world may one day be filled with nothing but human cogs in a mechanized society with little men clinging to their little jobs and striving toward bigger ones, acting in the best interest of our present administrative systems. this overall passion for bureaucracy is enough to drive one to despair. it is as if through politics we are deliberately conditioned to become men who need ‘order’ and nothing but order, and we then become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if it is taken away that the world should know no men but these: it is in such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we do to oppose this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life. francis pangfei lai 117 rationalization is the most general element of weber’s theory. he identified rationalization with an increasing division of labor, bureaucracy and mechanization.4 he associates it with depersonalization, oppressive routine, rising secularism, as well as being destructive of individual freedom. the focus on rationalization leads weber into thinking about the operation and expansion of large organizations, both in the public and private sectors of societies. to weber, bureaucracy can be considered to be a particular case of rationalization, as it is applied to human organization. bureaucratic coordination of human activities is the distinctive mark of modern social structures. weber tracks down the main characteristics of an ideal-type bureaucracy as an organization with a hierarchy of authority divided into efficient specialized-labor departments, totally impersonal, conducting its affairs under a rigid written code of conduct and all promotions within the organization being based on focused achievements. according to weber, bureaucracies are goal-oriented organizations designed according to rational principles in order to efficiently attain their goals. offices are ranked in a hierarchical order, with information flowing up the chain of command, directives flowing down. operations of the organizations are characterized by impersonal rules that explicitly state duties, responsibilities, standardized procedures and conduct of office holders. offices are highly specialized. appointments to these offices are made according to specialized qualifications rather than ascribed criteria. all of these ideal characteristics have one goal, to promote the efficient attainment of the organization’s goals.5 the bureaucratic coordination of the action of large numbers of people has become the dominant structural feature of modern societies. it is only through this organizational device that large-scale planning and coordination, both for the modern state and the modern economy, can become possible. the consequences of the growth in the power and scope of these organizations is the key in the understanding of our world. where there is organization, there must be authority so that the organization can be directed towards its goals. to weber, there are three types of authority: traditional; charismatic; and rational-legal based. it is the third type of authority – the rational-legal based type that bureaucratic organizations of our modern societies have adopted. this type of authority is anchored in impersonal rules that have been legally defined and it parallels 118 prajñâ vihâra the growth of zweckrational social actions. traditional authority is based on the belief in the sanctity of tradition while charismatic authority rests on the appeal of a leader who claims allegiance because of the force of his/ her extraordinary personality. weber notes that although the major advantage of a bureaucratically-run organization is the efficiency in which it is attaining its goals, the organization is unwieldy when dealing with individual cases. the impersonality, so important in attaining efficiency of the organization, is thus dehumanizing. but the concern over bureaucracy’s threat to the members of a particular organization has served to overshadow its effects on the larger society. weber is very concerned about the impact that rationalization and bureaucratization have on our socio-cultural systems. by its very nature bureaucracy generates an enormous degree of unregulated and often unperceived social power. because of bureaucracy’s superiority over other forms of organization, they have proliferated and now dominate modern societies. those who control these organizations, weber warns, control the quality of our life, and they are largely selfappointed leaders. what is worse is the fact that such self-appointed leaders in the name of efficiency within the bureaucratic organization can set double standards – one for themselves and their associates and one for the rest within the members of their societies. such double standards, especially in commercial dealings can lead in turn to conflicting values within an organization. bureaucracy thus tends to result in oligarchy, or rule by the few officials at the top of the organization. in a society dominated by large formal organizations, there is a danger that social, political and economic power will become concentrated in the hands of the few who hold high positions in the most influential of these organizations. robert michels,6 a socialist who followed closely the thoughts of weber, was disturbed to find that the socialist parties of europe, despite their democratic ideology and provisions for mass participation, seemed to be dominated by their leaders, just as the traditional conservative parties. he came to the conclusion that the problem lay in the very nature of organizations. he formulated the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ which read: “who says organization, says oligarchy.” francis pangfei lai 119 according to this “iron law”, democracy and large scale organization are not compatible. any large organization, michels pointed out, is faced with problems of coordination that can be solved only by creating a bureaucracy. a bureaucracy, by design, is hierarchically organized to achieve efficiency, that is to say that many decisions that have to be made every day cannot be made by large numbers of people in an efficient manner. the effective functioning of an organization therefore requires the concentration of much power in the hands of only a few people. the organizational characteristics that promote oligarchy are reinforced by certain characteristics of both leaders and members of the organizations. people achieve leadership positions precisely because they have unusual political skill; they are adept at getting their way and persuading others of the correctness of their views. once they hold high offices, their power and prestige are further increased. leaders have access and control over information and facilities that are not available to the rank-and-file. they control the information that flows down the channels of communication. leaders are also strongly motivated to persuade the organization of the rightness of their views, and they use all of their skills, power and authority to do so. by design of the organization, the members within the rank and file of an organization are less informed than their ‘superiors’. from birth, we are taught to obey those in positions of authority and therefore, the rank and file members tend to look to the leaders for policy directives and are generally prepared to allow leaders to exercise their judgment on most matters. the stage is now set for the very presence of conflicting values. capitalism and the protestant ethics: we have to make one last point before we launch into the presence of ‘conflicting values’ in our society. this concerns that of protestant ethics. weber is concerned with the meaning that people give to their actions. he comes to the conclusion that social actions of modern society are shifting from traditional to rational actions. he questions the cause of this shift and in the process of trying to understand this, weber studies the religious and economic systems of many civilizations. weber comes to 120 prajñâ vihâra believe that the rationalization of action can only be realized when traditional ways of life are abandoned.7 because of this shift, modern people may have a difficult time realizing the hold of tradition over pre-industrial societies. weber’s task is then to uncover the forces in the west that have caused people to abandon their traditional religious value orientation that have encouraged them to develop a desire for acquiring goods and wealth. after a careful study, weber raises the hypothesis that it is the protestant ethics that breaks the traditional hold of people and encourages them to apply themselves rationally in their work. he finds that calvinism has developed a set of beliefs around the concept of predestination. it is the belief of followers of calvin that one cannot do good works or perform acts of faith to ensure a place in heaven. one is either within the elect or one is outside those people elected. but, wealth has developed to be a sign in which one is deemed to be ‘elected’. this then provides the encouragement for everyone to strive to be rich and powerful by applying rigid disciplines to oneself in the single-minded goal of acquiring wealth.8 weber has studied non-western cultures and he finds that several of these pre-industrial societies have had the technological infrastructure and other necessary preconditions to begin the process of capitalism and economic expansion. but here, capitalism failed to emerge.9 to weber, the only force missing there were the positive sanctions to abandon traditional ways. “by such a comparative analysis of causal sequences, weber tried to find not only the necessary but the sufficient conditions of capitalism.”10 while weber does not believe that the protestant ethic was the only cause of the rise of capitalism, he believes it to be a powerful force in fostering its emergence. asian values in the onslaught of globalization: with the settings laid, we can now proceed to talk about asian values in the context of globalization. we shall begin by looking at the asian values, both social and commercial, prior to the arrival of any western influence into an asian society. francis pangfei lai 121 perhaps mainland china is a good place to start as an example of the pre-west cultural values. for many years of ancient china, the entire societal systems was based upon an hierarchical grouping of ‘scholars’, ‘farmers’, ‘workers’ and ‘retailers’ in which case the commercial element of society was placed at the very bottom of the social scale. this is chiefly because of the innate distrust of business people as they went about their businesses ever ready to make an extra tael of gold by dishonest means. the military came under the group of workers and the main purpose of military presence in the society is the protection of the interests of scholars and farmers essentially. imperial examinations were held, perhaps once every five years, to select people for both the administrative service (which includes the officers of the courts and the local magistrates) and the military service (for the protection of the interests of the emperor down to the law and order of a provincial community). scholars of the day studied both chinese classics and chinese philosophy. to the chinese, philosophy and religion are imbedded into their daily lives as living actions of ethics and they are not separate topics to be observed, examined and criticized. “the basic aim of chinese philosophy has not been primarily that of understanding the world, but that of making people great. … being great has a double aspect in chinese thoughts. first of all, it involves inner greatness, which is a magnitude if spirit reflected in the peace and contentment of the individual in his or her completeness. second, it involves outer greatness, which is manifested in the ability to live well practically, dignifying the social context of one’s ordinary day-to-day existence. this ideal is called ‘sageliness within and kingliness without.’ “11 in china, even to this day, philosophy has been the chief concern of every educated person. in ancient china, if a man were educated at all, the first education he received was in philosophy as young children recited the four books comprising the confucian analects, the book of mencius, the great learning, and the doctrine of the mean. the first reading text was the three characters classic and the very first statement therein was “the nature of man is originally good,” the very fundamental ideas of mencius’ philosophy. contrary to common belief in the west, confucianism is no more a religion as platonism or aristotelianism. the four books mentioned 122 prajñâ vihâra above may have been called collectively as the chinese bible but they are not books on creation, or on heaven and hell. in the chinese sense, therefore, the terms philosophy and religion are both ambiguous. philosophy and religion form part and parcel of life itself, of living out one’s life that calls for considerateness of the wishes of others. returning to koller,12 both inner and outer greatness are basic to all three forms of chinese philosophy – confucianism, taoism and neoconfucian. lao tzu says that unless one knows and lives according to the inner laws of the universe, which he calls the ‘invariables’, one can end up in disaster. for confucius, the most basic thing is the cultivation of one’s humanness and to regulate all our activities in accordance with this developed humanness. because of the importance of both inner and outer greatness, chinese people always give the greatest importance to the consideration for people in general. the human world is considered primary importance and the world of things, secondary. emphasis on human greatness naturally leads to the emphasis on ethics and the spiritual life. the spirit, rather than the body, becomes the more important aspect of human. this spirit must be nourished and cultivated in order that it can develop according to its capacities. if we measure the social actions of the ancient chinese with the yardstick of max weber, then, we find that the actions were essentially of the cultural value type (wertrational); of the emotional type (affective action); and the traditional type (traditional action). the actions were very far removed from the goal-oriented type (zweckrational). there is no desire here to elaborate on every asian cultural system. suffice it to say that, in the asian context, the chinese example given above shows one typical aspect of life. the common denominator is the fact that social actions in the asian context are generally less of the goaloriented type. they are more of the other three types of cultural value, of emotional and of traditional and the failure to comprehend this fact can lead to grave misgivings and misunderstandings between the people from the asian cultures and heritage and those from the western cultures. this paper attempts to illustrate such misgivings and misunderstandings in the form of known conflicting values. francis pangfei lai 123 asian cultural values rest in the belief in historicity. they emphasize on the rank and the station of a person in a society and on looking into the past as a guide for future conduct. the west has criticized these aspects as feudalistic such that they prevent true egalitarianism from taking place. it has been said by many in the west that in the present day of fast moving age of information technology that produces obsolescence in months rather than in years, can we afford to constantly look back into our past before we move forward into our future. this paper advocates that it is wiser for us to take an asian approach to life. egalitarianism and the western style of democracy that advocates one man one vote system cannot be working for the benefit of the entire society when there are poverty and illiteracy amongst the population. singapore and malaysia are shining examples where the western democratic system has been tampered with the eastern influence under the name of ‘guided democracy’ and both countries have progressed to the envy of many westernized nations. societal values: those of us who practiced the art and science of property valuation or property appraisal are familiar with the concept of market value in determining the commercial value of a property or fixed asset. the ivsc13 has defined the term market value as: “the estimated amount for which a property should exchange on the date of valuation between a willing buyer and a willing seller in an arm’s length transaction after proper marketing wherein the parties had each acted knowledgeably, prudently, and without compulsion.” a careful study of the definition will disclose that there can never be any property that has ever been transacted at market value as defined. the first requirement for ‘market value’ is that of a ‘willing buyer’ and ‘willing seller’. most transactions occur with one party being unwilling to 124 prajñâ vihâra enter into a transaction or rather being pushed into acting by some external forces, most likely because of economic downturns or other personal mishaps. the next requirement for ‘market value’ is ‘an arm’s length transaction’. most transactions may look as if it is totally unrelated but in actual practice there may well be some connections between the two transacting parties, however remotely. the last requirements of ‘market value’ are the hardest to comply. for the two parties to act ‘knowledgeably, prudently, and without compulsion’, full disclosure is required, especially of the vendor such that the purchaser can act with full knowledge of the property. in the structured bureaucratic world as described by weber, genuine disclosures may not be in the interest of some controlling groups and thus property transactions are rarely transacted under these last requirements. more often than not, the purchasers are entering into transactions that they are totally unaware of the implications until after the sale and purchase agreements have been signed and sealed. property valuation as a profession becomes important only in the global setting and is influenced by the western concept of ‘highest and best use’ of land usage the most efficient use of a plot of land commercially, with complete disregard both to those people who will be living on earth in the future and to the environment. weber’s has argued that the westernized social setting that emphasizes the essentials of goal-oriented and rationally related social actions that emphasize detached efficiency, especially for the benefits of the very few, can one day destroy a nation. our point is this: there is a gap that exists between the ‘market value’ of a property as defined and the ‘value’ of the same property for the common good to the society at large, that is to say, for the overall interest of the entire community. perhaps, more explanation here is warranted. take the value of the houses around a public park as an example. without the presence of the public park, built by public expenditure, the commercial values of those houses might be much lower than those of the present. if the ruling bureaucratic government is not an enlightened group in matters concerning town planning, environmental issues and the preservation of the present for the benefits of the future, there would not be any public park built. the houses around the park have therefore two sets of conflicting values – one the commercial value and the other the value from the wider perspective of the ‘benefits’ to society. francis pangfei lai 125 to put this concept in a nutshell, the two conflicting values would only meet as one under the following limiting conditions: condition # 1: the general public is one that is well educated to such an extent that the man-in-the-street can wisely elect into power a group of dedicated and educated representatives who are able to view matters from a totally different and wider perspective than that of a commercial viewpoint. condition # 2: the bureaucracy of government comprised of wisely elected people who cares for the interests of the communities at large. condition # 3: the values are not distorted due to the presence of interested parties in the bureaucracy of government. condition # 4: social actions may have to be modified away from weber’s zweckrational type towards the wertrational, or the affective, or the traditional types. what does all this boils down to in the context of asian heritage and asian culture? we need to take a look at the political and social fabrics of communities within the asian context. here we have the localized villages – the moo bans of thailand or the kampongs of malaysia or the ancestral villages of ancient china. the village elders make most of the decisions concerning the well-being of the villagers, usually in consultation with one another. the ‘common good’ of the community is decided by these people. they will send their representatives to the wider society within which they live and in their turn the committee of this wider society will decide the ‘common good’ of the society. in this form of setting, professional valuers as we know them in today’s society, would have to argue their valuation viewpoints with the elders and would need to modify their property values to incorporate the wishes of the community at large. herman daly and john cobb jr.14 have written a book on the subject of for the common good: redirecting the economy towards community, the environment, and the sustainable future that is most relevant for the present time. the main goal of the book is to deconstruct neoclassical economic theory and set forth a more holistic model that more fully accounts for the individual, the community, and the natural world. 126 prajñâ vihâra in the first half of the book, daly and cobb discuss the implicit assumptions and theoretical fallacies governing contemporary economic scholarship; in the second half, they discuss numerous policy changes toward their economic goal of a society based on community and ecological balance. the book also includes an appendix where they construct an “index of sustainable economic welfare” intended to supplant gross national product as a measure of economic well-being. a lot of the ideas of weber’s have been incorporated in the book. suffice it to say as of now that conflicting values are here to stay. it is up to us to recognize their existence and to ponder over the need for the inclusion of societal values into our commercial decisions, especially in regard to the development for the future of humankind. we now understand, for instance, that the contemporary economical theory holds a crude, mechanistic worldview of economics as an autonomous individual driven purely by the self-interest and that society is just an aggregate of such individuals. this view tends to equate gains in society as a whole with the increases in goods and services acquired by its individual members, but it says nothing about the changes in the quality of the relationships that constitute that society. daly and cobb15 advocate the departure from radical individualism to the notion of a “person-in-community”. their main argument concerns the need for realigning government and social structures toward smaller social and economic units. this is not at all dissimilar to the asian context of the village community. they argue that it now becomes difficult, if not impossible, for governments to perform their essential non-market functions when economic power is centralized at the global level, while political power is decentralized to national and local levels. for the system to function in the interest of community, economic and political power must be in balance at any given system level. to daly and cobb, the emerging global society must develop democratically controlled institutions at all levels: international, national, and local. it also needs to create a decentralizing context for economic activities that returns institutional control to people, roots economic interests in local soil, and reestablishes some sense of human community. all this points again to the need for us to backpedal a little to the asian culture and values, where the family and the immediate community have the final say in most domestic activities. this francis pangfei lai 127 is a move away from bureaucratic authority, away from secularism and back to family and religious traditions forming the key to inculcate social values in the young. in order to achieve the goal of decentralization of political power and the breaking up of the large bureaucratic authority that can be so harmful to the common good as explained by weber, we need to start a program of the following four activities to be undertaken immediately to lead to an overall policy shift: #1. there ought to be a significant university reform away from the stress of business studies as the prime target of a community. we need to produce more community-minded thinkers and community-minded doers, not sharp-witted commercial wizards out to make a quick baht at every opportunity with complete disregard to ethics; #2. we ought to go back to our roots and to nurture our community-building venues. in the case of urban centers like bangkok, there ought to be programs in place to re-build a sense of belonging to localized communities. #3. there ought to be a dedicated public awareness program to bring home the message that we should be acting socially to bridge the gap of conflicting values – both social values and commercial values. this entails the need to change our way of measuring economic success by devices other than the purely monetary values of the gross national product (gnp). #4. we ought to convince the people in our communities to return to the older practices of life where religious traditions prevailed. secularism, which is so much associated with the globalized trends of today, should be discouraged as contrary to the common good of society. concluding options: we have traced the works of max weber to understand the reasons why present-day globalized setting, with its entourage of rationalization, bureaucracy, authority, oligarchy, western-styled democracy and capitalism may not be for the common good of humankind. 128 prajñâ vihâra we have briefly mentioned that, whilst it may be true that the ancient asian cultures and beliefs, if totally re-adopted, cannot lead us to be an efficient, effective work and goal-oriental organization, there are merits in some of these ancient ways of work attitude. we have taken a look at the western definition of ‘market value’ in the case of property valuation and appraisal and we raised the argument that such a definition can only bring about a heightened tension between two conflicting values – that for the commercial world and that for the more enlightened ‘common good’ of the entire population. we have raised the issue of ‘conflicting values’ and we have proposed that a solution can possibly be found in the works of daly and cobb jr. in their research. many scholars have dwelt on the need for environmental assessments in property development and in town planning issues but such ideas have not been able to be translated in simply ordinary terms for the general public to comprehend. there can only then be three concluding options: one is to take no action at all in the belief that god who cares about us will have his solutions for humankind; the second is to continue to take in the wisdom from the globalized western world and pursue a continued track of zweckrational social actions, where the organizations within our society are goal-oriented and successmotivated with the current gnp as the chief measure of economic success; the third and last option is to decide now for a change to blend in the asian heritage and culture with the better of the globalized setting and to give in to more social actions that are wertrational, affective and traditional. the choice is ours to make. finally, we are recommending the property consultancy fraternity that the term ‘market value’ for a property should be re-phrase to include the consideration for the common good of humankind in the following draft format: “market value is the best estimate of the value of a property as at the date of valuation after due consideration has been given to the following three key issues: francis pangfei lai 129 #1. market value is an estimate of value of a possible transaction of the property between a seller and an unrelated buyer, the two parties being totally unrelated in every sense of the word, that is to say, without any commercial interest in each other’s business; #2. market value of a property should reflect the fact that the two parties to the possible transaction mentioned above are fully aware of all the data concerning the property, including those data known to the seller but not apparent to the buyer; #3. market value of a property should additionally reflect the overall contribution of that property to the common good of the immediate surrounding community and to the society at large.” endnotes 1 freund (1968). 2 elwell, (1999). 3 see page 2 of this paper. 4 gerth and mills (1946). 5 aron (1970). 6 michels (1915). 7 coser (1977). 8 gerth and mills, (1946). 9 gerth and mills, (1946), p. 61. 10 gerth and mills, (1946), p. 61. 11 koller, john m, (1985), second, edition, p. 245 – 246. 12 koller, john m. (1985), chapter 16, pp. 245 – 249. 13 ivsc stands for the international valuation standards committee, a body comprised of property valuers that sets up standards for the valuation of capital assets of publicly listed companies and works conjunctionally with the committee for international accounting standards. 14 daly, herman & cobb, john jr. (1989). 15 daly, herman & cobb, john jr. (1989). 130 prajñâ vihâra references aron, raymond (1970). main currents in sociological thought ii. new york: anchor books. coser, lewis a. (1977). masters of sociological thought: ideas in historical and social context, second edition. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich. daly, herman and cobb, john jr. (1989). for the common good: redirecting the economy toward community, the environment and a sustainable future. boston: beacon press. elwell, frank w. (1999). industrializing america: understanding contemporary society through classical sociological analysis. west port, connecticut: praeger. freund, julien (1968). the sociology of max weber. new york: vintage books. gerth, hans and c. wright mills (translators and editors). (1946 [1958]) from max weber: essays in sociology. new york: galaxy books. kloppenberg, james t. (1998). the virtues of liberalism. oxford: oxford university press. koller, john m. (1985). second edition. oriental philosophies. new york: charles scribner’s sons. michels, robert (1915). political parties: a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. translated by eden paul and cedar paul. new york: the free press. rics (2000). international valuation standards (2000). united kingdom: london, royal institution of chartered surveyors. stocker, michael (1989). plural and conflicting values. oxford: oxford university press. francis pangfei lai 131 132 prajñâ vihâra baltic journal of economic studies 169 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 corresponding author: 1 private higher educational establishment-institute "ukrainian-american concordia university ", ukraine. e-mail: oleksandr.romanovskyi@uacu.edu.ua orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3618-2999 2 national pedagogical dragomanov university, ukraine. e-mail: yuliia.romanovska@uacu.edu.ua orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0207-3348 3 private higher educational establishment-institute "ukrainian-american concordia university ", ukraine. e-mail: internship_wiuu@hotmail.com orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3614-544x doi: https://doi.org/10.30525/2256-0742/2021-7-5-169-183 the impact of academic capitalism on the formation of innovation policies in higher education and science oleksandr romanovskyi1, yuliia romanovska2, oleksandra romanovska3 abstract. innovation policy in the field of higher education and science is one of the main components of the state socio-economic policy of social development and is aimed at creating favorable conditions for the market launch of new ideas created in this sphere. the purpose of the study is to analyze the decisive influence of academic capitalism on the formation of innovation policy in higher education and science, contributing to the creation of an innovative environment for transformational change in this sphere. the methodology of the research is based on an objective standardized approach to the analysis of factual data on the development and implementation of innovation policy in higher education systems and leading universities of the world, the latest published results of experiments, materials of scientific literature on innovation policy and innovation management. research results. the main directions of innovation policy of entrepreneurial university and innovation relations in the sphere of higher education and science are investigated. it is shown that innovative transformations in the sphere of higher education and science, as a rule, take place within the framework of the innovative policy determined by the leaders of this sphere. it is noted that innovation policy in higher education is a link between the policy of research and scientific (scientific and technical) activities, search and dissemination of knowledge, education and training of qualified specialists in the field of technological development, industrial policy and environmental policy. the authors studied the following: the types of activities promoted by innovation in higher education and innovative environment of this activity; the main directions and main components of innovative policy of entrepreneurial university; innovative relations in higher education and science; innovative environment; the importance of having the necessary competencies, their formation and development; internal and external sources of competencies for universities, etc. practical implications. the authors suggest that innovation policy in higher education is a link between the policy of research and scientific (scientific and technical) activities; search and dissemination of knowledge; education and training of qualified specialists – on the one hand, and technological development; industrial policy and environmental policy – on the other. this can be used in the creation of the theory and practice of innovation policy development in higher education. the article as a whole is devoted to the further development of the theoretical foundations of higher education innovatics. key words: academic capitalism; higher education innovatics; innovative policy; innovative environment; management of innovation activities. jel classification: a23, i21, i25, o31, o32 i. introduction numerous studies and scholarly literature provide useful information about the positive impact of academic capitalism on the socio-economic and sociohumanitarian spheres of human activity. analyzing the impact of academic capitalism on innovative transformational changes in higher education and science, on the development of academic or university entrepreneurship, and on the further promotion of innovation in higher education and science, it is baltic journal of economic studies 170 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 necessary to investigate the impact of innovation policy on these processes. the authors devoted this article to the study of the main directions of innovation policy of entrepreneurial university and innovation relations in the sphere of higher education and science. the article considers innovative transformations in the sphere of higher education and science, which, as a rule, take place within the innovation policy determined by the leaders of this sphere. innovation policy in higher education is studied, which acts as a link between the policy of research and scientific (scientific and technical) activities, search and dissemination of knowledge, education, training of qualified specialists in the development of technology, industrial policy, environmental policy. the object of the study is the activity promoted by innovation in higher education and innovative environment of this activity; the main directions and main components of the innovation policy of the university of entrepreneurship; innovative relations in higher education and science, as well as innovative environment. the important tasks of innovation policy are determined by the availability of necessary competences, their formation and development. internal and external sources of competencies for universities, etc. are considered. consider some publications that contain the fundamentals of the theory of academic capitalism, theory of innovation, innovation management, academic or university entrepreneurship, innovation activity, innovation policy, innovation environment – the main factors of innovation management in higher education and innovation transformation of science. these works formed the basis of the theory and practice of the interdisciplinary direction of higher education innovatiсs (romanovskyi & romanovska, 2020). according to s. slaughter and l. leslie, the essence of "academic capitalism" is the transformation of research and teaching into a kind of entrepreneurship: the implementation of research projects depends directly on receiving cash subsidies from individual corporations (slaughter & leslie, 1997). "academic capitalism" sets new directions for the development of modern higher education and manifests itself at three levels: institutional, departmental, and individual. academic capitalism at the institutional level is realized against the background of changes in the financing of higher education institutions, the reduction of state funding and the need to find sources of additional funds. the study of academic capitalism at the department level is of interest because it is where a variety of activities take place and staff members adapt to new values. at the individual level, within academic capitalism, there is a redefinition of the distribution of time between the core activities of faculty: teaching, research, service (leslie, oaxaca & rhoades, 2001). in its essence, the environment of academic capitalism, which has embraced the sphere of higher education and science (as well as all other social, social and humanitarian spheres of human activity) by market and market-like relations, is also a new phenomenon in the general system of capitalism. it was in the environment of academic capitalism that the powerful innovative development of both the socialhumanitarian and industrial spheres of human activity began. the acceleration of innovation gave rise to the digital revolution and has become the objective reality of today 's globalized world. a complete description of innovation processes was made by j. schumpeter: he analyzed "new combinations" of changes in the development of economic systems. he added a definition of innovation as "new combinations" of new or existing knowledge, resources, equipment, and so on (schumpeter, 1934, p. 65). also j. schumpeter and g. mensch introduced the term "innovation," which was defined as the translation of a scientific discovery into a new technology or product (schumpeter, 1976; mensch, 1979). a number of works are devoted to the definition of the concept of "innovation" (for example: baregheh, rowley, & sambrook, 2009; edison, ali, & torkar, 2014; rogers, 2003; drucker, 2002), etc. the theoretical foundations of innovation, innovative development, and innovation management, include the 2006–2016 global study of innovation management in the book (the quest for innovation, 2006), in the article (chen, viardot, & brem, 2019), and in the works of l. bouwer (bouwer, 2015; 2017). in his comprehensive book f. damanpour synthesizes the research of the last 50 years in the field of innovation, reviewing the basic elements of innovation and providing an interconnected perspective on innovation in organizations. the author provides an overview of key concepts, terms and theory, explores processes of generation and adoption of technological and non-technological innovations, examines innovation activities and internal mechanisms and procedures in organizations (damanpour, 2020). this research is based on the following conceptual foundations of innovative development of higher education: – h. etzkowitz's concept of innovative development of society by the triple helix model (etzkowitz, 2003; 2008; 2019; viale & etzkowitz, 2010; dzisah & etzkowitz, 2012; cadorin et al., 2019), which is successfully used in many developed countries (usa, uk, canada, australia, japan, germany, sweden and many other countries of the eu) and in the developing world (china, russia, brazil, some other south american countries, etc.); baltic journal of economic studies 171 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 – b. clark's concept of transforming conventional universities into innovative universities focused on internal entrepreneurial activity (business universities) (clark, 1998; 2000; 2004), which has been confirmed in the higher education systems of many countries of different continents (north and south america, the usa, western europe, japan, africa). – the innovation policy platform (ipp), developed by the world bank group and the organization for economic cooperation and development, is an interactive web-based space that provides easy access to knowledge, learning resources, indicators, and communities for innovation policy design, implementation, and evaluation. the platform helps users learn how innovation systems work, identify best practices in different countries, conduct statistical comparative analysis, and develop and implement effective policy solutions. more broadly, it facilitates knowledge sharing and cooperation between countries and regions (the innovation policy platform, 2013). for more than 50 years, the sphere of higher education and science has been subject to various innovative changes, the direction of which depends on the goals set by innovators. since practically all areas of social, economic and social-humanitarian activity of mankind are connected with the sphere of higher education and science, it is reasonable to investigate, identify and group innovations according to the spheres of application and the tasks set before them. 2. analysis of recent studies and publications among recent publications devoted to innovation in higher education, the following works seem interesting. in "innovation in higher education; will there be a role for ‘the academe/university’ in 2025?" eddie blass and peter hayward present five scenarios for the future of higher education based on factors such as funding, ownership and use of "research", ensuring good "teaching," and the potential missing link: developing social innovation. the authors emphasize that by refocusing on fostering social innovation, the university can find a new means of adding value to society that will sustain it after 2025 (blass, & hayward, 2014). in his article, dustin swanger examines the current state of higher education and the pressures facing colleges. he also explores innovation and some of the challenges facing innovation in higher education, as well as some successes. the article recommends some changes that can be implemented on any campus to improve outcomes and efficiency (swanger, 2016). p. serdyukov's article is devoted to the problem of innovation in american higher education. analyzing the publications of american specialists in the field of higher education and innovation, studying the real situation with the use of innovation in higher education institutions, he notes the following (serdyukov, 2017). unbundling is the process by which products previously sold together are separated into their component parts. in (mccowan, 2017), the author argues that there has been a dynamic separation of teaching and research in higher education. this dynamic has been primarily financially motivated and driven by the for-profit sector, but has also had a pedagogical motivation in the form of an emphasis on personalization and employability. this article presents a theoretical analysis of this trend and proposes new conceptual tools with which to chart the regulatory implications. the article ( jakovljevic, 2018) deals with institutional innovation and some models of innovation in higher education. the author concludes that modern research on innovation informs us about the models and nature of innovation and their main facets: a) tar model; b) stakeholder model; c) structural model; d) structured governance models and e) triple helix and quadruple helix innovation models. in the book (branch, hørsted, & nygaard, 2018) presents key examples of innovative teaching and learning practices in higher education. the book is truly international, with contributions from australia, england, denmark, hong kong, italy, qatar, scotland, south africa, tasmania, vietnam, and the united states. although the educational settings in these countries are very different, there are striking similarities in approaches to innovative teaching and learning. the following works ( jessop, 2018; somers et al., 2018; münch, 2020) are devoted to a critical study of the problems of academic capitalism. the oecd's mission-oriented innovation policies (moip) is an online toolkit that provides an easyto-follow guide to help policymakers develop and implement mission-oriented innovation policies. " with the support of policymakers and through partnerships with individual institutions, the toolkit is intended to be a reference platform for all those who develop, implement or research and advise on mission-driven innovation policies. faced with growing societal challenges of unprecedented scale and scope, several governments are experimenting with a new policy approach of pooling effort, resources, and knowledge across disciplinary, sectoral, and political blocs to collectively address clear, bold, and inspiring goals. building on the lessons learned from these early experiments, this online policy toolkit is designed to provide policymakers with analytical knowledge and practical information on designing, managing, and implementing moip initiatives" (mission-oriented innovation policies, 2020). the author of the following paper, s. otten concludes that it is generally agreed that innovative and inclusive approaches to policy development include the baltic journal of economic studies 172 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 following methodologies, such as: a) collaborative design with stakeholders; b) user/customer-centered design – an iterative design process in which users and their needs are central to each stage; c) design thinking – a methodology of discovery/design/ prototyping/testing/repetition; d) understanding the customer journey from start to finish, including pain points; e) public interaction – open communication with citizens and stakeholders; f ) seeking and considering different opinions and experiences. these points are closely related to the others, and there is quite a bit of overlap. they have quite a bit to do with maintaining the role of the user in the process, stakeholder collaboration, and community engagement (otten, 2018). the author analyzes the experience of innovation policy development in countries such as australia, denmark, mexico, new zealand, singapore and the united kingdom. 3. purpose of the article the aim of the study is to analyze the decisive influence of academic capitalism on the formation of innovation policy in higher education and science, contributing to the creation of an innovative environment for transformational change in this sphere. this study is also a further development of the theory and practice of university innovation, defining the tasks, directions and features of innovative transformations in higher education and science. an important issue of the study is the effective organization of management in the field of innovation transformation, innovation policy and innovation relations in the subjects of higher education and science – universities and research institutes. 4. research methods and methodology the authors used the following research methods: – dialectical approach to analyzing and understanding the content and features of innovative development of higher education under the influence of market relations of academic capitalism and university entrepreneurship; – analysis of innovative transformations as economic categories in the system of socio-economic relations and interrelations of the integral economic system of the modern knowledge society; – methods of abstraction, system-structural and information-theoretical approaches are used to study the conditions for the formation of new innovative forms of university entrepreneurship, the features and essence of entrepreneurial activity of the university; – a critical study of the impact of innovation transformation and academic entrepreneurship on the financial sustainability of higher education institutions; – methods of analysis and synthesis are used to study various innovative approaches and technologies in higher education and form a complete picture of the complex innovative activities of subjects, objects and the higher education system as a whole. the methodology of the research is based on an objective standardized approach to the analysis of factual data on the development and implementation of innovation policy in higher education systems and leading universities of the world, the latest published results of experiments, materials of scientific literature on innovation policy and innovation management. the research methodology includes: – methods of empirical research of innovations in higher education, (including observation, experiment, comparison, measurement and comparison); – statistical methods of scientific description and study of various innovative phenomena in the system of higher education that allow quantitative (numerical) expression; – critical examination and awareness of the concept of innovation in higher education; – analysis of literary sources, including electronic and computer-based tools; comparison and verification of the feasibility or necessity of implementing various types of innovation, analysis of their effectiveness and the possibility of spreading and implementation on objects and subjects of higher education system; forecasting ways of forming new innovation policy, innovative approaches, methods and technologies; integration of research results and the formation of scientific-theoretical, methodological and practical provisions of the new direction – innovation of higher education. 5. presentation of the main research material innovatics of higher education is a branch of knowledge aimed at the study, creation of explanation and effective implementation of innovations in higher education and science. the authors will consider the main results of the study of innovation policy in higher education and science and directions of its implementation. further development of the sphere of higher education and science directly depends on the quality of innovation policy and intensity of innovation in this area. the main role is played by the human factor, which creates an innovative environment and uses the necessary innovative technologies, methods, techniques and approaches. analyzing the publications on this topic, the article (cai & qiongqiong, 2020) addresses some issues of innovation policy of higher education and university leaders in the process of building innovation ecosystems as an environment for the development of higher education and science. baltic journal of economic studies 173 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 the work (borrás & edquist, 2015) on how governments and leaders pay (and should pay) attention to building competencies (including education, training, skills, and practical experience) when designing and implementing innovation policies is significant. the article proposes a typology of internal and external, individual and organizational sources of innovation-related competencies. this is necessary to examine the most common initiatives taken by governments in this direction. the paper identifies three common weaknesses and imbalances in innovation systems in terms of education, training, and skills: a) insufficient levels of competencies in the system; b) the time lag between the short-term needs of firms for specific competencies; c) the long time required to develop them, and the imbalance between internal and external sources of competencies in firms. the authors developed a set of general criteria for restructuring policy instruments to address these tensions and imbalances. in (tierney & lanford, 2016), the authors believe that higher education in the 21st century faces global forces that require innovative research, innovative pedagogy, and innovative organizational structures. a theoretical understanding of innovation is essential to the continued development of higher education and science. the authors outline such a conceptual framework based on the innovative literature in various academic disciplines. thus, there are four inevitable trends in higher education that can lead to innovative responses. working definitions of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship are given by clarifying a number of terms related to innovation. the concepts of sustained and disruptive innovation are discussed. this shows that change and innovation have been a constant feature of higher education since its inception. three aspects of innovation are considered – diversity, intrinsic motivation, and autonomy. these aspects have a positive impact on the ability of people in higher education to innovate. three complementary concepts – time, efficiency, and trust – are then examined, which are important for scrutinizing innovation in an institutional setting. further, turning to the united states, there is evidence that the american system of higher education is considered an important factor in national economic, scientific, and social progress. more than four thousand public and private institutions of higher education, awarding degrees and professional qualifications, significantly improve the quality of their educational and scientific activities, using innovative technologies, methods, techniques, approaches and solutions. due to the increasing complexity of production processes in all spheres of human activity, the demand for higher, vocational and specialized technical education is constantly growing. according to experts published before the covid-19 pandemic, the number of full-time students is expected to reach more than 23 million by 2025 (brewer & shirley, 2017). over the past 20 years, growth in college enrollment has come mainly from non-traditional students (i.e., those who did not attend college right out of high school and those who do not attend college full-time), who now make up about 40 percent of all students. the serious problem of expanding access comes after decades of skyrocketing tuition fees. the reasons for these increases range from unprecedented competition for outstanding faculty and talented students to a bloated administrative apparatus, changing students' tastes and status from diligent consumers of knowledge to market consumers demanding more services, and declining teaching loads of full-time faculty. despite rising student tuition revenues, many colleges and universities are under severe financial pressure as operating costs rise faster and government support for public institutions declines. in this sector, innovation is critical to meet u.s. needs in the coming years. innovation in u.s. higher education can be defined as the introduction of new methods and practices to improve production efficiency (brewer & tierney, 2011). for most teaching and learning-oriented sectors, this means recruiting students and providing them with opportunities to earn a degree (ultimately, in the hope of producing productive and successful citizens) that result from some process of learning combined with a range of operational support services. innovation is possible with both instructional and operational support and involves creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation at the institutional level. innovation by an institution of higher education or other organization depends on a number of factors, including the availability of new technological capabilities and the market and social context in which they operate. labor-intensive industries are innovating using a number of approaches, including a) the use of information technology; b) different work strategies, such as greater job differentiation, use of contingent workers and creative compensation schemes; c) re-engineering key processes, such as through subcontracting; and d) a focus on the core mission and separation of supporting activities. federal policy plays a crucial role in driving innovation in higher education through levels of funding and regulation, as well as a broader regulatory environment that affects learning and operations. the authors made recommendations in three main areas: redesigning student financial aid, creating regulatory frameworks that facilitate institutional experimentation, and creating new designs for broader implementation (brewer & shirley, 2017). analyzing data from many scientific sources and summarizing the results of their own research, the authors propose to consider the activities promoted baltic journal of economic studies 174 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 by higher education innovatics (romanovskyi, romanovska & romanovska, 2021) and the innovative environment of these activities (figure 1). all of the activities promoted by higher education innovatics take place in such an innovative environment: one of the tools of innovation management in the sphere of higher education and science is the innovation policy (innovation policy). as it is known, the innovation policy is the state policy directed on control and maintenance of balance between the rights of owners of the information and necessity of innovations and technical progress. on the other hand, innovation policy is a link between the policy of research and technological development and industrial policy. it aims to create favorable conditions for bringing ideas to market. the authors suggest that innovation policy in higher education is a link between the policies of a) research and scientific (scientific and technical) activities; b) search and dissemination of knowledge; c) education and training of qualified specialists – on the one hand, and d) technological development; e) industrial policy and f ) environmental policy – on the other. in general, innovation policy in the sphere of higher education is one of the main components of the state socio-economic policy of society development and is aimed at creating favorable conditions for the introduction of new ideas created in this sphere to the market. innovation systems are divided into national innovation systems, regional innovation systems, local innovation systems, technological innovation systems and sectoral innovation systems. at that, the following levels can be considered: state; branch (sphere of higher education and science); regional or local; subjects of branch subordination (universities, colleges, various educational institutions or scientific institutions, other organizations of higher education and science system, etc.). o. granstrand and m. holgersson define the innovation system as "a set of components and causal relationships that influence the creation and use of innovation and innovation activities" (granstrand & holgersson, 2020). when considering a university or research institute, it is necessary to distinguish between external and internal innovation policies. external innovation policy is a joint, team-coordinated line of behavior of a university or research institute in the market of educational and scientific services, defining priority innovative projects and leading to an increase in the level of development of the university or research institute. internal innovative policy is a regulation of behavior of the personnel directed on innovative type of development of university (research institute). the essence of personnel behavior is determined by relations that develop between employees in the innovative sphere of university or research institute activity. in general, the innovation policy of higher education institution or research institute is a guide to the choice of priority areas of the innovation process, development and implementation of innovative plans and projects, formation of the necessary relations between employees in the university (research institute). by its type the innovation policy of higher education institution or research institute can be different: narrowing (reduction); stable functioning; growth (expansion). the policy of contraction (reduction), steady functioning or growth (expansion) is based on an analysis of the goals of the university or research institute, which are defined as the specific end state (final position) of the university or research institute, or the desired result. in determining the purpose decrease (reduction) of the final state (position) of the university or research innovative environment in the sphere of higher education innovatics internal and external innovation relationships innovative microclimate/ innovative aura competency building (including: education, training, skills and practical experience), with a special focus on academic (university) entrepreneurship and business competencies innovative individual and corporate culture innovative policy innovative thinking, consciousness, and behavior, including business qualities, entrepreneurial mentality, knowledge, skills, and experience innovation ecosystem figure 1. innovative environment in the sphere of higher education innovatics baltic journal of economic studies 175 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 institute is seen in the maintenance, preservation of the production of scientific and educational services, the share of the mastered market of such services, wages and number of employees or in a gradual slowdown in the growth of scientific and educational services, hoping for the opportunity of promotion in the future. the goals of contraction (reduction) are chosen by universities and research institutes working under unfavorable conditions. investments in innovative projects in this case are either absent or incidental. this is the policy of survival. innovative policy of stable functioning provides for comprehensive improvement and enhancement of the quality of educational and scientific activities through the introduction of innovative methods and technologies. at the same time there are no plans to increase or decrease the volume of statutory activities. growth (expansion) goals imply a positive trend, the difference between them depends on their content, and they can be aimed at: – achieving a high level of educational, scientific, methodological and technological development, which is manifested in the state of the implemented educational and scientific processes and learning technologies – in the degree of their novelty, quality, efficiency, productivity, progressiveness; – achieving a high level of economic development of the university or research institute, which is manifested in an increase in the competitiveness of educational and scientific products and services, increasing market share, expanding volumes, improving financial results and financial condition; – achieving a high level of social development of the university or research institute, which is manifested in the socialization of the results of activities and increasing the role of the individual – the humanization of the management process. investments in innovations in the framework of growth policy are regular and have a clear direction, which characterizes the innovation policy. innovative growth policy is characterized by external (socialization of activity results) and internal (humanization of management process) social orientation. the policy of innovative growth can be extensive or intensive, risky or moderate, and allow the use of alternative sources of funding and investment. the main principles of the external innovation policy of the sphere of higher education and science and its structural subdivisions (universities and research institutes) are: – the unity of scientific and educational processes, administrative and managerial activities and their focus on the economic, social and spiritual development of society; – optimal combination of state regulation and budgetary financial support with self-government and means of self-sufficiency; – formation of innovative projects in priority areas of research, defined by state and regional innovation and scientific-technical policy; – support of leading scientists, scientific teams, research and scientific-pedagogical schools, capable of providing the advanced level of education and scientific research, development of scientific and technical creativity of young people; – conducting a full cycle of research and development, ending with the introduction of ready-made services and products, the formation of start-ups (spin-off and spin-out); – support of entrepreneurial activity in the scientific sphere, broad commercialization of r&d results; – internationalization of education, followed by the integration of science and education into the international community; – formation of network structures in the organization of innovative and scientific and technical activities; formation of the world base of scientific knowledge. internal innovation policy should be formed and implemented on the basis of the following principles: – continuous development of the innovative capacity of the university or research institute required to implement innovations; – comprehensive implementation of innovations, in which all types of innovations are closely interrelated and mutually contribute to each other; – creation of a structural unit responsible for the formation and implementation of innovation policy and strategy; – mobilization of personnel, maximum use of financial, material and intellectual resources to implement innovations; – material, moral and social encouragement of innovation activity; – risk accounting and assessment. innovation policy of entrepreneurial university, as a tool for managing its development, is a decisive factor of innovation activity, one of the important elements of the innovation process in the university, research institutes, etc. this policy should contribute to the disclosure of innovative potential, the creation of innovative-active, effective behavior of the personnel. the innovation policy of entrepreneurial university should take into account the peculiarities of the activity of an educational institution focused on academic entrepreneurship. the main components of the innovation policy of entrepreneurial university are: 1. environment: – external-favorable, neutral, unfavorable: regional (municipal) level; national level; international level; – internal. 2. the goal of university development: – narrowing (decreasing); – growth (expansion): extensive; intensive. baltic journal of economic studies 176 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 3. the attitude to risk: – risky; – moderate (moderate). 4. field of activity: – educational; – scientific (scientific and technical); – cultural and educational activities; – administrative and managerial support; – financial; – academic and entrepreneurial; – related business (provision of various paid services); – economic, commercial, auxiliary, and other types of university activities; – sports, leisure, everyday life, extracurricular activities of the university. 5. the nature of innovation selection: – selective; – indicative; – comprehensive. 6. sources of funding for universities: – budget; – extra-budgetary; – your own; – multi-channel system for finding, attracting and accumulating funds. 7. the method of forming the innovation policy of universities: – traditional; – intuitive; – scientifically based. 8. the nature of the implementation of the innovation policy of universities: – stable; – unstable. 9. the degree of entrepreneurship implementation: – low (medium); – high. 10. expected results of the implementation of the innovation policy of universities: – innovative development of higher education institutions; – innovative development of the region; – local, regional and national economic growth. external and internal policy of universities is under stood in the same way as for enterprises (organizations). the peculiarity of modern external innovation policy of the university is the introduction of the best foreign experience of the world's leading universities in international education, internationalization of higher education, the introduction of distance learning, partnerships with foreign universities and exchange them with students and faculty. the same applies to exchanges with entrepreneurial universities. extensive innovation policy is a policy of change in the direction of quantitative development of certain characteristics of universities that are amenable to innovation. intensive innovation policy is a policy of change in the direction of qualitative improvement of relevant characteristics. in terms of risk, universities are characterized by a moderate innovation policy. given the specifics of universities, risk taking can only take place in scientific activities (research and implementation of the results of the latest scientific and technological developments and technologies). but the university needs to develop a risk management program. among risk management methods, preference should be given to risk insurance and the distribution of responsibility of the participants (main executors) of the innovation project. indicative innovation policy means that the university should develop in accordance with civil and public indicators (standards, norms) established by society. selective innovation policy means development in priority directions, determined by external innovation and industrial policy of the state and the region. traditional approach to the formation of innovation policy means that it does not take into account the requirements of the external environment, qualitative changes in the internal environment, the level of development of the university itself. intuitive approach implies the development of innovation policy by one person on the basis of intuitive feelings. scientifically grounded innovation policy is a collective social process of improving the activities of universities based on established traditions, best international practices, trends in the development of the university and the country with the obligatory consideration of national peculiarities. the innovation policy of an entrepreneurial university may include the following main directions: – educational (organization of the educational process, provision of statutory educational services, development of educational technologies, organization of methodological work, etc.); – scientific, research and technology (organization of scientific research in priority areas of science and technology, automation and informatization of all spheres of university activities, implementation of design work, development of new equipment and high technology); – cultural and educational (children's upbringing, education, parental, cultural and educational work with students, organization of social and humanitarian and socially useful activities of students and teachers, patronage of schools, participation in charitable projects, etc.) – administrative and managerial (making administrative and managerial decisions at different levels of university management: rectorate → deans → departments → executors; councils → implementation of council decisions); baltic journal of economic studies 177 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 – financial (new forms of use of financial savings; expansion of sources of financial resources, funds; new methods and measures to preserve and increase the financial resources of the university); – academic-entrepreneurial (patent and licensing activities, technology transfer and dissemination of new knowledge, commercialization of r&d results, creation of new technologies and startups); – economic (administrative and economic activities), commercial (obtaining additional income through: commercial use of real estate and material and technical means of the university; the organization on commercial terms related and additional educational and scientific services, professional advice and expertise; provision of premises and equipment for forums, conferences, seminars on lease terms; production and sale of university souvenirs; organization on contractual terms of publishing activities for internal and external customers, etc.), auxiliary and other (by type of university activities); – sports (organization of sports competitions, leisure time of students and teachers, strengthening health and improving the lives of students and lecturers); – cooperation with the "outer world" (business contacts with customers and consumers of educational and scientific services, commercialized r&d results, representatives of the state (government), industry (business), presence in the markets of educational and scientific services, participation in competition with other universities and scientific (research) institutes); – extracurricular activities of the university (organization of various competitions, cultural events, humanitarian and international programs). budgetary innovation policy is a policy that is fully financed from the budget of all levels: state, regional, municipal. extrabudgetary innovation policy is financed at the expense of financial resources of extrabudgetary funds, firms, enterprises, organizations and institutions, population, sponsors, foreign sources. having its own funding, the university carries out innovative activities at the expense of earned funds (financial resources). multichannel innovation policy assumes that funding comes from all of the above sources, financial resources (loans) of banks can also be attracted. by the nature of the implementation of innovation policy can be stable, that is implemented in accordance with the adopted program and plans for innovation, or unstable, that is implemented to the extent of objective and subjective necessity. innovation policy can be based on low (average) or high degree of implementation of entrepreneurship in higher education institutions. budget (state, municipal) higher educational institutions with substantial state support can afford to use only some types of entrepreneurship (marketing, advertising, search for customers of educational and scientific services and potential employers for graduates). for private educational institutions entrepreneurship is the main tool for the implementation of statutory activities. in practice, it is possible to conduct an external intensive, moderate degree of sustainability of innovation policy, based on multi-channel (multiresource) model of financing and effective statutory entrepreneurial activity. the internal policy should correspond to the external one. otherwise, the university will not only fail to develop, but may even cease its activities. it is expected that the results of the implementation of innovation policy of universities can be both internal innovative development of universities and innovative development of the region, local, regional and national economic growth. innovation in industry (business) can be implemented through the transfer of innovative technologies, the transfer (transplantation) of new industries, the opening of new firms and companies (start-ups), the improvement and innovative transformation of existing industrial facilities and so on. along with excellence in academic entrepreneurship to commercialize r&d results, innovative development at the local, regional and national levels is a significant contribution of universities to the social and economic improvement of society. any process corresponds to certain relations developing between its participants. innovation policy is characterized by innovative relations, which must be implemented by the subjects and objects of management. the subject of managerial relations is an active link, influencing these relations; the object of managerial relations is a passive part of relations, perceives influence and is subjected to it. in this sense, any subject (carrier) of managerial relations is both active and passive in one way or another. the subjects (carriers) of innovative relations of higher education are all members of society, social groups, social structures connected in one way or another with the sphere of education, science and production. they can be individual and associated (collective). the university can also act as a subject and object of interaction with the external environment at the macro-, mesoand micro-levels (in terms of innovative attitude to the environment and the importance of action, as well as on the spatial scale and the effect of action). from the point of view of macroeconomics, universities themselves, being the institutional links of the formal education system, can also act as subjects of innovative relations. at the same time they act as objects of management. the university can act as an economic entity in the research and production complex, in the regional educational system, in the system of continuing education, entering into both internal (intra-university, intra-institutional, baltic journal of economic studies 178 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 intracorporate) and external management relations with the external environment. at the micro level the subjects of innovative actions are heads of universities – structural subdivision responsible for innovation policy. the objects of management are, on the one hand, innovative activity, on the other hand, the entire team of the university. actually, innovative relations arise between people regarding the formation and implementation of innovations. in this case, the processes associated with the production and recreation of the new (new knowledge, new products or services, new managerial combinations, new social relations) or simply with the introduction of changes to the already known, existing, must not be spontaneous, unconscious, but necessarily consciously put on a scientific basis and have the character of specialization. from this point on, when innovative relations become such that they are constantly reproduced, we can talk about a special type of managerial relations – innovative relations, which are present in any sphere of human life, including higher education and science. in higher education there are innovative relations of both objective and subjective nature (figure 2). they are realized through the interests of subjects and objects of higher education. objective innovative relations in education are socio-economic in nature, directed by the interests of society and dependent on it. such relations include the following: – innovation and economic, including innovative and market (innovative entrepreneurial); – innovative and pedagogical; – innovative and managerial, including innovative and organizational; – innovative and financial; – innovative operations with property. subjective innovative relations include innovation and psychological, and innovation and moral, affecting feelings, emotions and subjective ethical assessments of people. they also include relations of innovative corporate culture. innovation and psychological, in particular, is the psychological contour of the relations expressing the psychology of the economic entities and the university. for example: the expectation, patience and continuing trust in the authorities on the part of the scientific and pedagogical body about the equitable distribution of rich in their potential and at the same time limited resources. they are an important part of the sociopsychological relationships that last in education when everything else is disappearing. a teacher, a scientist are those professions in which vocation, talent, giftedness, desire to create and serve mankind are of paramount importance. these professions will be alive as long as human beings are alive. the relations of innovative corporate culture or innovative-moral relations are such relations between people, which can be evaluated in terms of good and evil (for example, it is honesty, reliability of social relations of economic entities). the innovative corporate-entrepreneurial culture of the university is important (see below). innovative moral and ethical norms of relationships in educational institutions are also very important, which can act as a protection against abuse and corruption. all types of innovative relations in education (see figure 2) are carried out in the system of reproduction of goods and resources, branch, regional and intersectoral relations: between spheres of economy and society, between education and society. innovative relations in the sphere of higher education and science objective innovation relations innovation-economic, including innovative market (innovative entrepreneurial) innovative pedagogical innovative financial innovative operations with property subjective innovation relations innovative psychological innovative moral innovative corporate culture innovative managerialical, including innovative organizational figure 2. innovative relations in the sphere of higher education and science baltic journal of economic studies 179 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 changes in innovation and economic relations in higher education, carried out on a systematic scientific basis, accelerate social progress. other types of innovative relations, especially innovative-financial and innovative-managerial ones, can and should contribute to such progress by synchronizing innovative changes. these types of relations are characteristic both for external and internal innovative policy of higher education institution. the central issue of innovation policy in higher education and science is how government officials and decision makers in higher education and science should focus on developing competencies (education, training, and skills) in developing and implementing innovation. here is a brief look at the typology of internal and external, as well as individual and organizational sources of competence related to innovation in this area. identify "three common weaknesses and imbalances in innovation systems in terms of education, training and skills: a) insufficient levels of competencies in the system; b) the time lag between the short-term needs of firms for specific competencies and c) the long time required to develop them, and the imbalance between internal and external sources of competencies in firms" (borrás & edquist, 2015). in addition, they define "competencies as the set of knowledge, skills, and experiences that people and organizations possess. they can be seen as a set of acquired abilities and dispositions to perform a particular activity, often including a specific set of (analytical, physical, etc.) techniques and methods; and based on a certain level of past experience. consequently, competencies are the result or outcome of a process to which people or organizations are exposed (a pattern of learning and/or a series of new tasks)." in general, different types of competencies can be distinguished: managerial competencies or skills; scientific, educational, technological, engineering and mathematical competencies; or more general social, economic and communication competencies. the authors define that "competence formation, for its part, is the actual process of formal or informal development or acquisition of specific competencies by individuals and organizations. it should be noted that we proceed from the perspective of the learning economy ... as an appropriate first step in this topic of competence formation. according to this view, innovation performance in the economy is highly dependent on the learning of organizations and individuals, understood as their continued ability to adapt to and change in relation to a rapidly changing external context based on their competencies and their ability to build on those competencies." thus, it is logical to conclude that in the field of higher education and science a) competences are a set of professional knowledge, skills and experience possessed by individuals and universities; b) competence development is a process of formal or informal development, training and acquisition by individuals and universities of specific competences in a given field. from the perspective of the innovation system, one of the most important aspects is the process by which competencies are created, maintained and developed. there is a close connection between a university 's internal capabilities and its ability to draw on external sources of knowledge. universities interact with other universities, firms, companies, and other types of organizations in different ways and with different goals in terms of knowledge and skills. there are some forms of external interaction that are critical for two reasons; first, because they are one of the most common forms of external university interaction in innovation systems; and second, because they demonstrate a high level of learning, experience, and/or skill development in ways that universities can potentially benefit from external knowledge sources. such forms of external interaction are as follows: a) university-industry relations aimed at developing human resources; b) university-to-university relationships aimed at advancing science and technology for human needs; c) leading users of free economic services as key external sources of knowledge for innovation processes; d) artificial intelligence, based on a human-centered method of computer modeling in which part of the research is outsourced, as well as crowdsourcing, as a new form of collective pooling of knowledge resources in the innovation system. consider the essence of internal and external sources of competence for universities (figure 3). in many countries there are various types of state activities related to the creation, maintenance and development of competencies, which have a direct and indirect impact on the innovative activities of heis, firms and other organizations in the system. the traditional cornerstones of state activities to support competencies, formation and development of competencies in the innovation system are: – regulation, organization and financing of education systems (primary, secondary, higher and post graduate – both public and private); – support and incentive schemes for vocational training systems. s. borrás and c. edquist identify the following three common types of deficiencies, tensions and imbalances in the innovation system: – insufficient level of competence in economics and/or complete loss of competence. – the time gap between the short-term needs of firms and the long time needed to develop competencies. baltic journal of economic studies 180 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 an imbalance between internal and external competencies, leading to excessive isolation from or dependence on external sources. the first is related to a lack of competencies in the economy. this may be because the economy is unable to create the competencies its firms need for a stable level of innovation, or because there is a complete loss of competencies due to negative migration flows in the country or region. the development of competencies in economics is not only related to the level of academic achievement or training. competence in economics is also highly dependent on the continuous development of skills and experience in the organization of work. it is now widely recognized that this type of know-how, based on skills and experience, is important for the level of competence in the economy. as a result, the impact of offshore production activities on the level of competence in the economy has been debated worldwide for many years. the relocation of firms' production activities in recent decades to lower-wage countries is a loss of jobs and competencies in the home country. skills and experience are based on mid-level employees and managers with practical experience in production organization. internal and external sources of competence for heis definition: competences that remain outside the university, but can be acquired by the university through exchange/ cooperation content: interaction of university (or research institute) and industry for human resources development interaction of the university and its leading users outsourcing and crowdsourcing (as components of artificial intelligence) external sources of competence for heis definition: organizational university competencies developed at the university or acquired from outside. they are an integral part of the university, and are often called "structural capital". individual competencies (human capital) acquired through employment. they are less firmly integrated into the competence of the university content: information and competences of knowledge in free economic zones, which are embodied in knowledge bases and databases, catalogs for clients, organizational regulations (business administrative documents) and procedures, as well as scientific and educational developments, trademarks, patents, copyrights, trade secrets and etc. individual competencies (human capital) acquired through employment. they are less firmly integrated into the firm. human capital: formal primary, secondary, higher and post-higher education of employees. scientific and professional training and continuous development of skills in the statutory activities of the university. reverse brain drain and immigration of highly skilled workers. internal sources of competence for heis figure 3. internal and external sources of competence for heis baltic journal of economic studies 181 vol. 7 no. 5, 2021 workers involved in product and process innovation require in-depth knowledge of the product and its production process, which cannot be achieved in research laboratories alone. in addition, advanced forms of production depend not only on a significant level of scientific and technical knowledge, but also on skilled and experienced workers, that is, on competence. the second question concerns the time lag between the needs of firms for specific competencies in the short term and the long time required to develop them. the third group of potentially problematic issues in the innovation system is the imbalance between internal and external competencies, which leads to either isolation from external competencies or overdependence on them (borrás & edquist, 2015). it is the innovative policy in the sphere of higher education and science that should help to eliminate this imbalance. universities and colleges should develop innovative programs, technologies and methods of advanced training for timely formation and development of necessary competencies for all spheres of social and economic activity of the world community. 6. conclusions academic capitalism makes the innovative development of higher education and science real and inevitable. both theoretical research and practical experimentation, as well as the creation of fundamental knowledge in this area, are needed to better understand the promising directions of such development. it is innovatics of higher education is designed to combine theoretical research and practical experience to better understand the essence of innovation in the sphere of higher education and science. the study examines some basic issues of innovation policy in the sphere of higher education and science as one of the main components of the state socio-economic policy of social development and is aimed at creating favorable conditions for bringing new ideas created in this sphere to the market. considered further development of the theoretical foundations of higher education innovatics, including: activities promoted by higher education innovation; innovative environment of activities promoted by higher education innovation; the main directions of innovation policy of an entrepreneurial university; the main components of the innovation policy of an entrepreneurial university; innovative relations in higher education and science; innovative environment; the importance of having the necessary competencies, their formation and development; internal and external sources of competencies for universities, etc. the authors suggest that innovation policy in higher education is a link between the policy of research and scientific (scientific and technical) activities; search and dissemination of knowledge; education and training of qualified specialists – on the one hand, and technological development; industrial policy and environmental policy – on the other. the main directions of innovation policy of entrepreneurial 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(2010). the capitalization of knowledge. a triple helix of university–industry– government. edward elgar publishing, 368 p. baltic journal of economic studies 104 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 corresponding author: 1 admiral makarov national university of shipbuilding, kherson branch, ukraine. e-mail: lavloe@gmail.com 2 admiral makarov national university of shipbuilding, kherson branch, ukraine. e-mail: alvirginis@gmail.com 3 admiral makarov national university of shipbuilding, kherson branch, ukraine. e-mail: nira@ukr.net doi: https://doi.org/10.30525/2256-0742/2019-5-2-104-116 socio-economic and institutional preconditions for the formation of the educational services market in higher education of ukraine anatolii lomonosov1, oksana lomonosova2, iryna nadtochii3 abstract. when considering the problems of the educational services market formation and functioning in higher education, most authors attribute the emergence of this market to fundamental political and economic changes in ukraine in the early 1990s and its transition to a market economy. this approach is limited as the market for educational services has existed before. in the process of market expansion into public spheres in ukraine in the last decade of the 20th century, it got a generally completed form, although its formation has not yet ended and continues to transform. over the past hundred and fifty years, the socio-economic system in ukraine has changed three times: the second half of the 19th century – the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the beginning of the 20th century – the transition from capitalism to socialism, the beginning of the 21st century – the reverse transition from socialism to capitalism. the educational services market is one of the components of a market system of the country as a whole. the nature of socio-economic relations, of course, influenced the formation and functioning of the educational services market in higher education, which was under various factors affecting it in different socio-economic and institutional conditions. therefore, this study considers three main historical stages of the formation of this market, each corresponding to a certain socio-economic system: development of the educational services market in higher education of ukraine in the late 19th-early 20th centuries at the stage of formation and rise of capitalism; functioning of the deformed educational services market in higher education of the ukrainian ssr after the victory of the socialist revolution and in the soviet union era; widescale introduction of market relations in higher education of modern ukraine during the period of democratic transformations, changes in the socio-economic and political system, the abandonment of socialism and the return to the capitalist system. this approach, unlike most of those presented in modern ukrainian economic literature, covers the entire historical period, in which there was a market for educational services in ukraine’s higher education. to ascertain the peculiarities and the characteristics of the market, at each stage the presence and development of its main elements should be determined. those elements, as a rule, include goods, demand, supply, competition, and prices for goods or services. at all stages, the principal stimulator for the formation of the educational services market in higher education in ukraine was the chronic underfunding of state higher education institutions. the dissatisfied demand of the population for higher education was also a significant factor in the formation and development of the educational services market. the market for educational services in higher education became developed after ukraine had gained independence. commercialization of educational services in higher education, the creation of private higher education institutions, the corresponding institutional transformations, and the legislative framework formation were typical for this stage. as a general scientific basis of the research, a dialectical method of analysis of socio-economic processes was applied. for the theoretical part of the study, historical-logical and abstract-logical methods were used, which allowed determining the key factors that caused the emergence of the educational services market in higher education of ukraine, as well as to study the evolution of ideas about it. as the information base of the study, a set of legislative and normative acts of ukraine and the ministry of education and science of ukraine, as well as some research works of domestic and foreign scientists concerning various aspects of the formation of the educational services market in higher education were used. for quantitative assessment of the market relations spread in higher education, statistical baltic journal of economic studies 105 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 methods were used to process both complete and selective information. the basis of our research was the data of the state statistics service of ukraine (from 1991 to 2017). key words: higher education, problems in higher education, educational services market development, educational services market in higher education in ukraine, educational services market formation in higher education, commercialization of higher education. jel classification: j40, l10, i25, n34, o15, p36 1. introduction formation of a market for paid services in higher education should be considered one of the most significant events in higher education of the postsoviet ukraine. this market is an integral part of the market economy and its emergence leads to the gradual transformation of social and economic relations in higher education. in the circumstances of the transitional economy and due to lack of information on the future need for specialists, it creates the basis for the transition from the strict centralized management to a flexible market regulation in higher education, combined with its state regulation. the educational services market in higher education with the elements of self-regulation serves as a connecting link between production and consumption of educational services provides communication between the higher education institutions (hei), consumers of educational services and employers. this market significantly enhances the population’s access to higher education, promotes increased operational efficiency and effectiveness of higher education institutions, and increases competition among them. currently, the development of the educational services market in ukraine takes place simultaneously with the complex political and economic processes in conditions of economic, social, political, and demographic instability. in its modern shape, the educational services market has been formed over a relatively short period and socio-economic relations in the sphere of educational services cannot be considered well-developed. the regulatory support of the hei performance in the market conditions needs significant improvement. it is necessary to note the inadequate elaboration of theoretical and methodological principles for the functioning of the educational services market, the fragmentary study of its problems, which does not correspond to the role of higher education in society, which is now on the path to its post-industrial phase. the immaturity of economic relations on the educational services market has aggravated the socioeconomic problems in higher education, some of which were inherent in higher education of ukraine before it has become an independent state. some of these problems have become chronic. among them one should note: reduction in state funding for higher education and the complexity of funding sources diversification for heis as a result of the difficult situation at the vast majority of enterprises; the unclaimed results of scientific research by production sphere and low solvency of the population; imbalance of demand and supply in the educational services market and inconsistency of the educational services market and the labour market; the negative demographic situation, which causes a reduction in demand for higher education; the outflow of the most talented youth from the regions to study at the universities of large cities of ukraine and even in other countries from where they, as a rule, do not return after studying; poorly developed theoretical and methodological pricing principles for paid services in higher education; the decline in the quality of education; low competitiveness of higher education system and insufficient volume of export of educational services; increase in educational services volume mainly due to the rise of training costs; the absence of reliable regional monitoring of the educational services market; insufficient state regulation of the educational services market, especially in the regions, etc. to comprehend these problems, as well as their significance and better solutions to them, a further research on the educational services market in higher education of ukraine seems to be necessary to determine the peculiarities of the educational services market formation and the study of its characteristic features that, in the conditions of transformation of the economic system, become of the utmost importance. 2. literature review there is much prior research in the ukrainian contemporary economic literature on the problems of the educational services market in higher education of ukraine. the general problems of the formation of this market in ukraine are discussed in (yeliseyeva at all, 2012; karpyuk, 2009; podzigun, 2014; chekalovska, 2012). great attention is paid to the statistical analysis of the development of this market in ukraine, mainly the dynamics of its quantitative indicators (karpyuk, 2009; milevsky, milevskaya, 2014; malyukina, 2014; chernysh, 2016). the educational services markets of the certain regions in ukraine are investigated (shender, 2013; yurchuk, 2013), the ways to improve the state baltic journal of economic studies 106 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 management of the development of these markets are determined by (ambrazhey, 2011; voyna, 2013). in some cases, despite the fact that the ascertaining of the essence and trends of the educational services market development was proclaimed as a research aim, the authors most carefully considered the educational services themselves (yashchuk, 2013). at the same time, in the overwhelming majority of research papers, the authors avoid the analysis of the preconditions and the time of the emergence of the educational services market in ukraine. often its emergence is associated with the time when ukraine proclaimed its independence (yevmenkova, 2011; yashchuk, 2013; podzigun, 2014; chekalovska, 2012; karpyuk, 2009; babiy, 2013; malyukina, 2014; chernysh, 2016; petrenko, 2010, etc.). sometimes, even in the research works, focused on the analysis of the educational services market emergence and development, this issue is not considered (poyta, 2011). in our opinion, to determine the availability of the educational services market in higher education of ukraine in different periods of its existence and the characteristics of the main stages of its formation, a more thorough scientific justification is needed. detection and correct interpretation of trends and prospects for the development of this market involves an analysis of the conditions of its formation, as well as the allocation of separate characteristic stages of its development and identification of their peculiarities. the aim of this paper is to identify the complex of socio-economic and institutional preconditions and peculiarities of the educational services market formation in higher education of ukraine. 3. results 3.1. the main approaches to determining the preconditions for the formation of the educational services market in higher education of ukraine the formation of the educational services market in higher education of ukraine is often associated with the fundamental changes in society that took place in the 1990s during the transition to a market economy. various authors refer to commercial relations in higher education, paid education and the emergence of private heis as the main factors (or evidence) shaping this market. the most widespread opinion regarding the emergence of the educational services market in higher education of ukraine is that it appeared only due to the formation of a market economy in the early 1990s. according to k. m. yevmenkova, “market transformations in post-socialist countries and in ukraine, in particular, have led to the formation of the educational services market” (yevmenkova, 2011). similarly, t. a. yashchuk believes that “market relations in the education of our country arose with the beginning of market reforms in the economy” (yashchuk, 2013). a similar opinion is maintained by s. m. podzigun (2014), g. s. chekalovska (2012), and others. but, as mentioned below, part of market relations and some features of the educational services market in higher education of ukraine existed in pre-revolutionary (before 1917), soviet, and preperestroika periods. the transition to a market economy has only created opportunities for its development. o. a. karpyuk, r . p. babiy, a. o. malyukina and a. v. chernysh, also tie up the educational services market with the 1990s and assert that its formation was caused by “the emergence of commercial relations in education, the formation of a network of private education institutions” (karpyuk, 2009; babiy, 2013; malyukina, 2014; chernysh, 2016). but the emergence of commercial relations and the formation of a network of private heis are not equivalent. commercial relations are the root cause here, while the formation of a network of private heis is its consequence. moreover, paid education in ukraine existed almost all the time, since the end of the 19th century. l. m. petrenko believes that the presence of the educational services market is evidenced by the fact that “educational services in the field of training the personnel for production, services, construction, etc. are provided by various organizations and institutions.” furthermore, in her opinion, “the emergence and steady growth of the share of paid services in the modern state sector of education indicate the existence of market relations in the field of vocational education and training” (petrenko, 2010). paid services and competition evidence market relations. but the fact that different organizations and institutions take part in the training of personnel is not a sign of the market. the market can function when only one manufacturer is present. it should be emphasized that the complete denial of market relations in higher education in the times of the soviet union is erroneous. it is necessary to agree with the authors, who assert the earlier emergence of the educational services market. for example, a. m. osmanov and a. m. yesetova state that “the educational services market existed in the pre-perestroika period. but it was poorly developed, or rather, it was a state monopoly, and it significantly differed from its present state” (osmanov, yesetova, 2012). indeed, the system of higher education was under pressure from the command-administrative system for many years; its activities, core indicators, and resource allocation were tightly planned and controlled. y. b. rubin, noting the absence of a legal competitive market in the ussr , calls the soviet order in the educational services market irrational and characterizes the market itself as a quasi-market (rubin, 2011). at the same time, he points out the presence of the so-called “black market of near-educational services,” which baltic journal of economic studies 107 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 “permeated the activities of prestigious universities and faculties, despite periodic campaigns to combat bribes” (rubin, 2011). emphasizing the lack of competition in higher education, except for competition among the illegal operators of educational, as well as other services (coaches, corrupt officials, etc.), the author draws attention to the total nature of consumer competition for access to educational services and conditions of inequality for consumers depending on their nationality, party membership or belonging to “the chosen few.” it should be noted here that there was a certain competition for consumers among higher education institutions. this is especially true of the 1980s. higher education institutions received an admission plan and had to fulfil it at any cost, so they conducted active career guidance work among young people, which in fact was an advertising campaign to attract university entrants. the modern economic literature describes the emergence of a network of private heis (karpyuk, 2009; babiy, 2013; malyukina, 2014 et al.) and the presence of tuition fees (petrenko, 2010) as the main reasons for the formation of the educational services market and the evidence of its existence. but it should be emphasized that these phenomena existed before in ukraine when it was part of the russian empire, as well as during the soviet union time. in the russian empire, tuition fees were introduced at state universities in 1817 for the first time, and then, when in the second half of the 19th century there appeared non-government higher education institutions – they were introduced in them too (derevyanko, 2013). 3.2. development of the educational services market in higher education of ukraine at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, rapid industrial development and general economic growth in the russian empire, whose part ukraine was then, led to a significant increase in the demand of employers for postgraduates, on the one hand, and the demand of the population for higher education on the other. it was the time when kharkiv institute of technology, kyiv polytechnic institute, ekaterinoslav mining college, kyiv and kharkiv commercial institutes were established. in kharkiv, agricultural institute evacuated from nova alexandria began its work (derevyanko, 2013). institutes of the russian empire, including ukraine, were unevenly filled up. for example, st. petersburg and kyiv universities were extremely crowded and had a lot of students, while the provincial universities, especially their historical-philological faculties, had few or no students at all (ivanov, 1991). ukrainian heis, as well as other educational institutions of the russian empire, were funded by the state but these funds were never enough to ensure their normal operation. at the beginning of the 20th century, “the most important item of financial revenues after the state allocations was the tuition fees, which formed ‘special funds’ for higher education. students covered the largest expenditures, which were not provided with budgetary allocations. the growth of the number of students led to a significant replenishment of these funds, which helped the educational institutions” (ivanov, 1991). special funds also included interest on universities’ capital, income from specially created enterprises, income from the property sale, etc. (belyakov, 2007), that is, income from entrepreneurship. in the soviet union, special funds became known as extra-budgetary ones. in case of insufficient funding, heis usually solved their financial problems by raising tuition fees. the size of tuition fees was set by the institutions themselves. thus, at st. vladimir kiev imperial university in the 1880s, in addition to tuition fees, students also paid fees to lecturers whose classes they attended (mohylnyi, 2014). as at that time, in the conditions of the development of capitalism, the state did not meet the growing needs for specialists, non-governmental (free) higher education institutions appeared. it was not subsidized by the state and was represented by two types of heis. the first type included the universities, which were created on an “ideological basis” at the initiative and expense of the bourgeois intellectuals as educational institutions. funds from non-governmental organizations and philanthropists covered the universities costs and development, as well as material assistance to students. the second type included heis, which were organized on a commercial basis and had the aim of providing the founders with income in the form of interest on invested capital (ivanov, 1991). non-governmental higher education institutions quickly adapted to changing conditions, organizing training new commercial and technical specialities, thereby increasing the supply of educational services. as a result of the growth of economic and social needs, at the end of 1916, there were 20 non-state higher education institutions operating in ukraine (33.9% of the total number of non-governmental heis in russia as a whole) (prokopenko, 2013). non-governmental heis, the first of which originated in the 1860s-1870s, were not supported by the state. thus, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, only in ukraine the tsarist regime refused to establish agricultural institutes in poltava, simferopol, kamianka, polytechnic institutes in mykolaiv, sevastopol, simferopol, and veterinary institute in kamianets-podilskyi (prokopenko, 2013). as a result of restrictions, non-state universities were established only in large cities. and only at the end of 1905 that it was officially allowed to open private “courses with a curriculum higher than average” (ivanov, 1991). baltic journal of economic studies 108 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 not all private universities could successfully compete with government ones. that led to a “lack of people,” and consequently, the financial non-viability of a certain part of them (ivanov, 1991). 3.3. the market elements in the ukrainian ssr in the pre-perestroika period. paid education the next year after the 1917 revolution paid education was abolished. the non-state universities ceased to exist. but the catastrophic shortage of funds for the universities’ maintenance led to the reinstatement of tuition fees, which resulted in the fact that in 1922 in ukraine almost 80% of students paid tuition fees. the students of medical and socio-economic heis paid the highest tuition fees (kravchuk, 2011). different aspects of the tuition fees collection at educational institutions, including higher educational establishments, were regulated by a number of decrees of the aucec and the spc of the rsfsr , which were adopted in 1923, 1924, and 1927, and by the decision of the spc of the ussr in 1940. at the same time, various privileges for the military, the disabled, educators, etc. were established. higher education in ukraine in the post-revolutionary period was characterized by the main elements of the educational services market. there were supply and demand for higher education. at the same time, demand was unregulated while supply was strictly regulated by the state in the soviet union. almost all the time since the end of the 19th century, students paid full or partial tuition fees. there wasn’t a free price setting during the soviet era. pricing was the exclusive sphere of the state, not the heis. ultimately, tuition fees at the universities of the soviet union were cancelled only in 1956. as it was mentioned above, there was competition among the heis for consumers. admission to universities was carried out on a competitive basis. that is, there was simultaneous competition between providers and consumers of educational services. students did not cover the full cost of their studies. the maximum tuition fees were limited by the state, though students who had good results could receive a scholarship. due to the limited size, the fees only partially covered the costs of the university operation, supplementing government allocations. it is interesting to mention that the specialists’ training for business entities could be carried out on the basis of agreements between the heis and these entities when the latter paid for specialists’ training, though both the heis and business entities were state-owned. (derevyanko, 2013). in the soviet union, apart from tuition fees, universities could have other extra-budgetary funds. extra-budgetary funds included rent of university buildings and hostels (these funds were used for their maintenance, equipment, and repair), revenues from transport (intended for its maintenance, repair, and replenishment), revenues from production activities of auxiliary enterprises and farms (spent on their organization, current maintenance, and expansion), etc. planning and control over extra-budgetary expenditures were the same as over budget ones. the largest income source was self-supporting research work on orders of enterprises and industry research organizations. thus, one should recognize that there was the educational services market in the ukrainian ssr , though it was limited, undeveloped, deformed, and strictly regulated by the state. 3.4. the educational services market in higher education of modern ukraine 3.4.1. market relations in higher education the idea of the need for a broad introduction of market relations in higher education, according to authors of the monograph edited by o. tikhonov, was disseminated in the 90s of the last century (tikhonov, 1998). on this occasion, in 1990, guy neave, a world-famous specialist in higher education policy in europe and in european integration, who then was director of research for the international association of universities (iau) in paris, describing the tendencies in higher education of western europe in 1988–1990, points out that “market should be considered the main element underlying the european policy in higher education” (neave, 1990). this is also true for north american universities (buchbinder, newson, 1991). a well-known british economist, a former adviser to m. thatcher, douglas hague claimed in 1991, that under present conditions, “liberal universities” should be replaced by universities which “operate as a business in the field of science” (hague, 1991). the concept of entrepreneurial university appeared in the mid-1990s. according to burton r. clark, such a university is focused on innovation, knowledge commercialization, diversifying of funding base, close connection with the environment (clark, 1998). today, the signs of the entrepreneurial university include entrepreneurship in research, educational, and other activities, obtaining a financial result from these activities, competitiveness in the markets of research, vocational educational services, labour, finance and commodities (bunyak, 2016). in the soviet union, including ukraine, the transformation of the economic system and its transition to market relations took place in the second half of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. these changes spread to the entire society. higher education was not spared by them either. thus, the expansion of the market into all spheres of public life in ukraine coincided with the introduction of market relations in higher education in western europe and north america. the main factors in the development of market relations in education, according to the authors (tikhonov, 1998) are the following: baltic journal of economic studies 109 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 the acquisition the status of fixed capital by knowledge in society and funding sources diversification in education; changing the role of the state in education; spread of neo-conservative ideology; development of new information technologies. 3.4.2. financial problems of higher education institutions as the factor that accelerated the formation of the educational services market at the end of the 20th century a number of socio-economic preconditions necessary for the formation of the educational services market were present in the pre-perestroika period in ukraine. they are: division of labour and specialization; the relative economic isolation of universities, which acted as business entities and offered training in their specialities (as well as in certain new ones); the presence of steady demand for higher education; freedom and independence for consumers to choose universities and specialities (this demand was unregulated, although the state regulated the number of places in each speciality); certain competition among consumers and among the majority of universities. but there was no academic, financial, and organizational autonomy, pedagogical freedom of educators, freedom of research, learning, etc. economic, financial, organizational decisions, decisions on educational and research programs, the forms of studies, and other matters were necessarily consistent with the higher institutional level organization. the state regulated the size of the tuition fees. all this made the education services market undeveloped, inferior but, albeit in a deformed state, it still existed. as already noted, during the soviet era, in addition to budget allocations, universities could have extra-budgetary funds, which they received mainly as a result of selfsupporting research work on orders of enterprises and industry research organizations. thus, the total income of the hei consisted of two parts: budget allocations and extra-budgetary funds. in the first half of the 1960s, the share of the latter was more than 20%. in the future, the share of extra-budgetary funds in the total proceeds steadily increased, reaching almost 50% in the late 1980s (table 1). in the second half of the 1980s, in the era of perestroika, together with economic reform and accelerating socioeconomic development of the country, there was a transition of enterprises to self-financing. similarly, an attempt was made to transfer higher education to the new conditions of management because the overwhelming part of them was experiencing difficulties. to stimulate the growth of selfsupporting research work and attract additional revenues to finance their activities, since 1987, they were allowed to form an accumulation fund in the amount of 20% of selfsupporting funds. they could also manufacture products, provide organizations and people with paid services in the field of culture, passenger transportation, health resort services, physical culture and sports, housing, etc. that is, they got the opportunity to provide a large range of paid services. moreover, they even had pre-planned tasks for paid services development. but since these plans were not carried out (butenko, 1990), self-supporting research was the main source of extra-budgetary funds. as it was mentioned above, in the soviet union enterprises, institutions, collective farms, etc. could fund hei’s activities to some extent. for example, the kherson branch of the mykolaiv shipbuilding institute (now national university of shipbuilding), founded in 1967, for more than thirty years was financed from the budget, and funds allocated by the kherson shipyard. at the same time, in the total amount of heis’ financing, the share of enterprises in comparison with the volumes of state budget revenues, if any, was negligible. most often those enterprises gave outdated equipment, devices and materials, etc. for free. thus, heis got funding from several sources. but the main source was funding from the state budget, and they used it for direct student training. the economic and social processes that took place in the soviet economy in the second half of the 1980s did not allow universities to increase the volume of work, services, etc. for enterprises and population, as the financial situation of universities and the state committee on science and education authorities required. moreover, there appeared some new problems. many enterprises were on the verge of bankruptcy as a result of the rupture of economic ties among them, a drop in effective demand, inflation, etc. the situation became more complicated because the enterprises of the military-industrial complex always had priority development. the conversion of the military-industrial complex broke traditional ties among businesses and industries. instead of high-tech production, enterprises were forced to produce simpler and cheaper goods, but which in conditions of inflation were in demand. the difficult financial situation of enterprises and their refusal to produce and develop table 1 the ratio between funding sources for higher education in the ukrainian ssr in 1961-1988 sources of funding source share on average over the period 1961-1965 1966-1970 1971-1975 1976-1980 1981-1985 1986-1988 budget allocations 77,5 74,4 66,4 61,8 56,2 51,5 extra-budgetary funds 22,5 25,6 33,6 38,2 43,8 48,6 source: compiled by the authors according to (chugaev, 1990) baltic journal of economic studies 110 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 new complex, high-tech products led to the curtailment of research, in which heis were involved. the crisis situation at the enterprises led not only to the mass termination of their interaction with universities in the field of research but also to a significant reduction in the need for young professionals. at that time, production did not require a large number of new professionals because of its significant reduction, a decrease in its technical level, and lack of financial resources even to stay viable. thus, there was a reduction of the budget financing and a simultaneous decrease, or the complete disappearance of opportunities for higher education institutions to receive extra-budgetary funds. it should be emphasized that the higher education of the soviet union was in a difficult situation not only because of the financial problems and enterprises’ degradation in the 1980s. insufficient funding of higher education for many years influenced the ways and dynamics of its development, its content, and quality. all this, together with other factors that negatively affected higher education led to the fact that in the late 1980s the condition of higher education in the ussr was recognized as a crisis one. for example, in (gausner et all., 1992), the authors directly point out the crisis of the system for staff training and retraining. they give three main reasons for that. the first one is a sharp decrease in the financing of education from the state budget. the second one is the reduction of funds allocated by enterprises for training and retraining of staff. the third reason is the lack of demand for professional knowledge of an increasing number of professionals as a result of the falling demand for high-tech products. new socio-economic problems, generated by the transition from the command-and-control economy to a market one, aggravated the old unresolved financial problems in ukraine’s education in the 1990s. denationalization, democratization, and liberalization led to the emergence of complex and controversial processes, as well as significant economic, political, and social changes in society. in the early 1990s, there was a sharp increase in energy prices (gas prices increased 100 times, oil prices 300 times in 1992), in production cost prices, and a significant drop in industrial and agricultural production. even a simple reproduction of fixed assets became impossible. there was inflation and then hyperinflation in 1992–1995. at the same time, the economic potential of the country decreased almost twice, as well as its scientific and technical potential, the structure of social production deteriorated, unemployment and social insecurity increased, there was a significant differentiation in people’s incomes (chumachenko, 2000). the deepening of the crisis was facilitated by such factors as: the deformed structure of the national economy of ukraine, which once was the part of the soviet one, focused primarily on the military-industrial complex needs; backward agriculture; poor control of all transformational processes at the macro level; the presence of a significant number of environmentally hazardous and power-consuming enterprises. it is natural that under such conditions, there was a further reduction of the state budget of ukraine, and funding of education significantly deteriorated. starting from 1994 and almost to the beginning of the 2000s, budget funds were allocated, as a rule, only to salaries and scholarships, but they were not enough for these purposes, they were received and paid with considerable delay. the state wage arrears in heis were eliminated only in the late 1990s. many of the educational institutions were on the verge of survival. the funding cuts and difficult situation in the country forced heis to adhere to austerity measures, even to the detriment of the quality of training. therefore, heis, along with the introduction of a strict economy, constantly sought out additional sources of funding. the only way out of the situation could be to provide higher education institutions with the opportunity to get additional funds. the law of ukraine “on education”, adopted by the verkhovna rada of the ukrainian ssr in 1991, in addition to funding public education institutions at the expense of the corresponding budgets, funds of the sectors of the national economy, state enterprises and organizations, provided additional sources of funding. universities got permission to receive funds for training and retraining according to the concluded contracts; to provide additional educational services; to perform scientific research and other types of work. unlike the soviet period, universities now could independently set the size of tuition fees, decide on the size of contract prices for performing various work. the financial capabilities of the majority of enterprises and organizations led almost to a complete reduction of research work, and other activities (manufacturing and repairing of machines, appliances, inventory, etc., providing transport services, leasing premises and equipment, etc.) allowed getting only insignificant additional revenues. in this regard, the main source of income for public universities, in addition to budget financing, was the tuition fees, due to which they received 70-95% of the proceeds to the special fund in this period. getting additional funds from the paid students’ training is the most simple for heis since it allows them to concentrate primarily on their core activities (educational and research ones). the organization of paid training provides for the availability of appropriate demand from enterprises and the public. as a result of the unsatisfied effective demand for higher education in the first years of ukraine’s independence, there was a rapid increase in the number of those who paid tuition fees at the heis. in 2006, the number of students enrolled in state and municipal higher education institutions for studying for the funds of individuals and legal entities reached its maximum baltic journal of economic studies 111 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 value – 246.8 thousand people (figure 1). it also was facilitated by an increase in the number of secondary school leavers. the gradual decrease in the number of students who paid tuition fees began after 2005. their minimum value after the maximum of 2006 was in 2015 when 104.7 thousand people were enrolled. one should take in account that in ukraine at the beginning of the 2016–2017 academic year, there were only 13 municipal heis, making up 4.5% of the total number of heis (main indicators, 2017). 1.8% of students study there. that is, figure 1 practically illustrates the dynamics of students’ admission to state higher education institutions. the rapid increase in the admission of students to study for the funds of individuals and legal entities led to the fact that their number in 1999 reached, and during 2000–2007, as well as in 2010, exceeded the number of students who got the state-supported places. in 2016, the proportion of students who entered the state and municipal higher education institutions for studying at the state budget funds amounted to 54% of the total number of students enrolled that year. 3.4.3. the emergence and development of a non-state sector of higher education in independent ukraine the formation of the educational services market was also facilitated by the emergence and development of the non-state education sector. there is a widespread belief that the first non-state higher education institutions appeared after the law of the ukrainian ssr “on education” was adopted in 1991, which legally established the equal rights of all education institutions, including higher education, regardless of the form of ownership (zerkal, siryi, 2016). but the emergence of non-state education is related to the restructuring, which began in the second half of the 1980s, the democratization of society, the formation of market relations in the economy, the recognition of private property. the significant role here played the desire of creative personalities to free themselves from strict regulations, as well as their disappointment with their financial situation, which did not match their qualifications, erudition, creativity, pedagogical and organizational skills. the first non-state universities in ukraine appeared in the mainstream of the slogan “what is not forbidden is allowed” in the late 1980s, which corresponds to the liberal-democratic principle: “everything that is not forbidden is allowed.” these non-state higher education institutions were of various organizational and legal forms. it was especially true for universities that were created prior to the adoption of legislative norms that regulated the heis establishment and activities in the new socio-economic conditions. for example, the well-known interregional academy of personnel management was founded in kyiv in 1989 as a cooperative “kyiv research and implementation centre ‘kadry’” with the right to conduct educational, methodological and publishing activities. cooperatives at that time were the most widespread organizational and legal form of entrepreneurship, which was in line with the rapid development of the cooperative movement. figure 1. students’ enrolment at state and municipal higher education institutions by the sources of funding 19 3, 5 20 5, 0 2 43 ,2 26 3, 0 27 2, 7 31 4, 5 34 4, 8 35 9, 5 37 3, 9 39 8, 3 42 2, 7 43 0, 9 42 0, 1 37 1, 0 33 4, 9 35 7, 2 28 6, 7 31 6, 9 32 2, 6 26 8, 0 24 0, 0 24 1, 8 17 5, 5 17 4, 1 17 0, 1 15 0, 1 13 7, 1 12 9, 6 15 3, 4 14 1, 4 13 5, 7 13 5, 9 13 6, 5 13 5, 5 14 0, 4 19 0, 5 16 9, 5 14 8, 9 18 8, 8 18 4, 9 17 5, 9 16 6, 0 15 6, 2 14 9, 7 40 ,1 63 ,6 1 07 ,5 12 7, 1 13 6, 2 17 8, 9 20 4, 4 20 9, 9 21 7, 7 23 2, 3 24 6, 8 24 6, 1 23 1, 3 18 0, 5 16 5, 5 10 4, 7 11 0, 4 11 7, 91 52 ,5 14 2, 8 13 7, 7 18 1, 7 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 19 95 -1 99 6 19 96 -1 99 7 19 97 -1 99 8 19 98 -1 99 9 19 99 -2 00 0 20 00 -2 00 1 20 01 -2 00 2 20 02 -2 00 3 20 03 -2 00 4 20 04 -2 00 5 20 05 -2 00 6 20 06 -2 00 7 20 07 -2 00 8 20 08 -2 00 9 20 09 -2 01 0 20 10 -2 01 1 20 11 -2 01 2 20 12 -2 01 3 20 13 -2 01 4 20 14 -2 01 5 20 15 -2 01 6 20 16 -2 01 7 аcademic years in th ou s. p er so ns total including: at the expense of the state and local budget at the expense of state entities, individuals and legal entities baltic journal of economic studies 112 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 the private hei “international management institute” was created as a joint venture organized by the swiss international management institute and the institute of economics of the academy of sciences of the ukrssr in 1989. kharkiv institute of social progress was founded in 1990, before the formation of a modern legislative framework for education. in 1991, the laws “on enterprise in the ukrainian ssr”, “on entrepreneurship in the ukrainian ssr” and “on education” formed new institutional preconditions for the further development of higher education in ukraine. in particular, they officially eliminated the state monopoly on providing paid services in education, recognized the possibility of establishing heis of the non-state form of ownership, and equated them to state universities. the law of the ukrainian ssr “on education” stipulated that “the activities related to the provision of services for education and training of specialists of different levels of qualification” only begin when a license is available. but “at the same time, the licensing and accreditation system was merely declarative” (horpynych, salov, 2012). since 1996, the procedure has got its modern form, and “normalization, systematic character, and orderliness appeared in licensing and accreditation work” (horpynych, salov, 2012). newly established non-state heis actively filled vacant niches in the higher education services market. it was, first of all, training of students in economic, managerial, legal, and other specialities that were in demand by the population, and which state universities were not able to satisfy at that time. besides, training in these specialities did not require laboratory facilities and equipment, which made it possible to start the educational process rather quickly. starting in 1993, the process of active emergence of new non-state higher education institutions began. it continued until 2007 when the number of heis reached its maximum (115 heis). after that, their number declined to 78 in 2016 (figure 2). it is noteworthy that the dynamics of changes in the number of state and non-state heis from 1996 to 2016 was identical. therefore, the share of non-state universities in this period fluctuated within rather narrow limits – from 27.2% to 32.4%. the main reasons for reducing the number of universities, including non-state ones, is a significant decrease in secondary school graduates, as well as increased control over the quality of training from the state. at the same time, entrants in ukraine continue to prefer state higher education institutions. thus, between 1995 and 2016, the number of students enrolled at state higher education institutions was much higher each year than the number of those who entered private heis (figure 3). since 1995, the number of students enrolled at universities of all forms of ownership has been steadily increasing and in 2006 reached its maximum value (507.7 thousand people). in the same year, the number of students enrolled at the state and municipal higher education institutions was the largest one (430.9 thousand people). the maximum number of those enrolled at non-state higher education institutions was in 2005 (80.3 thousand). after that, the number of entrants began to decrease, and in 2017 this figure reached its minimum. 264.4 thousand people were enrolled at all universities figure 2. dynamics of the number of state, communal and non-state higher education institutions in ukraine in 1991–2016 20 9 20 8 19 7 22 9 15 6 15 7 1 90 19 1 19 9 20 2 20 6 22 0 22 3 22 5 23 2 23 5 23 3 23 2 23 6 23 6 24 0 24 2 24 3 23 8 23 1 15 4 788 080 96 2 2 2 42 64 75 78 92 9 3 92 9 3 9 8 10 4 11 4 11 3 11 4 11 5 11 3 10 8 10 6 10 7 10 3 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220 240 260 280 19 91 -1 99 2 19 92 -1 99 3 19 93 -1 99 4 19 94 -1 99 5 19 95 -1 99 6 19 96 -1 99 7 19 97 -1 99 8 19 98 -1 99 9 19 99 -2 00 0 20 00 -2 00 1 20 01 -2 00 2 20 02 -2 00 3 20 03 -2 00 4 20 04 -2 00 5 20 05 -2 00 6 20 06 -2 00 7 20 07 -2 00 8 20 08 -2 00 9 20 09 -2 01 0 20 10 -2 01 1 20 11 -2 01 2 20 12 -2 01 3 20 13 -2 01 4 20 14 -2 01 5 20 15 -2 01 6 20 16 -2 01 7 academic years in t ho us . p er so ns state and communal heis non-state heis baltic journal of economic studies 113 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 of ukraine, that is, twice less than in 2006. at that, 248.2 thousand people enrolled at state and municipal heis, which is 57.6% of the same indicator in 2006. only 16,200 persons entered non-state heis in 2017, which practically corresponded to the level of 1995 (13,300 people). the proportion of students enrolled in non-state heis during the whole period under consideration is insignificant. it ranged from 16.0% (in 2005) to 6.5% (in 2017). moreover, during the fourteen years (from 1995 to 2000 and from 2009 to 2016) the value of this indicator did not exceed 10%. entrants enrolled at heis for paid training also prefer state universities. it is evidenced by the admission results of those enrolled for paid training, in state and communal as well as non-state universities in ukraine in 1995–2016 (figure 4). the proportion of the number of figure 3. enrolment at heis of ukraine by forms of ownership figure 4. enrolment at heis of ukraine by forms of ownership, at the expense of state entities, individuals, and legal entities (paid education) 25 9, 9 25 3, 2 29 1, 6 34 8, 1 34 1, 3 31 4, 538 1, 4 37 0, 54 25 ,249 1, 2 50 7, 7 50 3, 0 47 5, 2 43 2, 5 40 8, 6 38 7, 1 34 6, 4 30 0, 4 29 0, 1 26 4, 7 22 1, 5 20 6, 8 24 1, 8 24 0, 0 26 8, 032 2, 6 31 6, 9 28 6, 73 57 ,2 33 4, 9 37 1, 042 0, 1 43 0, 9 42 2, 7 39 8, 3 37 3, 9 35 9, 5 34 4, 8 31 4, 5 27 2, 7 26 3, 0 24 3, 2 20 5, 0 19 3, 5 13 ,2 18 ,1 23 ,6 25 ,4 24 ,4 27 ,9 34 ,8 35 ,67 1, 1 76 ,7 80 ,3 69 ,4 58 ,5 49 ,1 42 ,3 31 ,9 27 ,7 27 ,1 21 ,6 16 ,5 13 ,3 54 ,3 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 19 95 -1 99 6 19 96 -1 99 7 19 97 -1 99 8 19 98 -1 99 9 19 99 -2 00 0 20 00 -2 00 1 20 01 -2 00 2 20 02 -2 00 3 20 03 -2 00 4 20 04 -2 00 5 20 05 -2 00 6 20 06 -2 00 7 20 07 -2 00 8 20 08 -2 00 9 20 09 -2 01 0 20 10 -2 01 1 20 11 -2 01 2 20 12 -2 01 3 20 13 -2 01 4 20 14 -2 01 5 20 15 -2 01 6 20 16 -2 01 7 academic years in t ho us . p er so ns total state and communal heis non-state heis 327,1 301,7 322,8 302,4 234,8 201,1 213,2 165,6 122,8 167,2 177,9 141,5 123,6 276,3 259,0 246,7 210,8 164,0 154,2 129,0 80,1 53,4 142,8137,7 181,7 165,5 180,5 231,3 246,1246,8 232,3 217,7 209,9204,4 178,9 136,2127,1 107,5 63,6 40,1 104,7110,4 117,9 152,5 18,1 13,223,6 25,424,427,9 34,835,6 54,3 71,176,7 80,3 69,458,5 49,142,331,927,727,1 21,616,5 13,3 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 19 95 -1 99 6 19 96 -1 99 7 19 97 -1 99 8 19 98 -1 99 9 19 99 -2 00 0 20 00 -2 00 1 20 01 -2 00 2 20 02 -2 00 3 20 03 -2 00 4 20 04 -2 00 5 20 05 -2 00 6 20 06 -2 00 7 20 07 -2 00 8 20 08 -2 00 9 20 09 -2 01 0 20 10 -2 01 1 20 11 -2 01 2 20 12 -2 01 3 20 13 -2 01 4 20 14 -2 01 5 20 15 -2 01 6 20 16 -2 01 7 academic years in th ou s. p er so ns total state and communal heis non-state heis baltic journal of economic studies 114 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 students admitted at non-state heis in the total number of students enrolled for paid training at state and nonstate heis in the period under consideration ranged from 24.9% (in 1995) to 14.3% (in 2013). this figure reached its minimum value in 2016 when it was 10.7%. for comparison, we should note that in the world, the proportion of students whose training was financed by private sources during 2011–2015 amounted to about 27%. accordingly, public funding provided 73% of students (businessstat). the given information testifies to the minor role of non-state heis, which they play in the modern educational services market of ukraine. although in the early 1990s it was thought that they would create significant competition with state universities. applicants attempting to enter state hei for public procurement, in the event of failure, go to the same university for paid training. sometimes consumers have a certain degree of distrust to the quality educational services at non-state universities. there are grounds for this since a significant part of their scientific and pedagogical staff is full-time teachers of state universities and at non-state ones, they work on a part-time basis, which often affects their attitude to their duties. a characteristic feature of the third stage of the educational services market development in higher education is the competition among heis for students. at this stage, unlike the first two (the end of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th centuries and the soviet period), it has become significant. institutions of higher education tried to increase the admissions of students for paid training. it allowed state institutions to receive funds to compensate for state underfunding and to ensure development, while for private ones it was the primary source of funding. a particular intensification of competition took place, starting in mid-2006 when there was a decline in the number of applicants due to the decrease of secondary school graduates. in these circumstances, it is very important for state heis to prevent reduction of the number of students, as it influences the number of academic staff positions. (lomonosov, lomonosova, 2007). 4. conclusions there are three stages of the formation and distribution of the higher education services market in ukraine. each of them has led to obvious qualitative changes in the state of the educational services market and corresponds to the socio-economic system that existed in ukraine during a certain period of history. the first stage – the end of the 19th century – the beginning of the 20th century coincides with the emergence of capitalism. the main factors of the emergence of market relations in higher education were the rapid growth of employers’ demand for professionals with a university degree, simultaneously increased demand of the population for it, as well as insufficient funding of state universities, which led to the distribution of paid training. there appeared two types of non-state universities. the first ones were founded on the “ideological basis” for educational purpose; the others, based on commercial principles, were intended to generate profit. one of the features of the second stage in the ukrainian ssr period was fee-paying education, which took place in state universities (non-state ones were abolished). the size of tuition fees was regulated by the state, though they did not cover all expenses of the university. there were various benefits for some categories of students. tuition fee system at soviet universities existed until 1956. there was some competition present among the heis for consumers, although that was the situation that strictly regulated supply. demand for higher education was unregulated and dissatisfied. in addition to budgetary allocations as the primary funding source, universities had some extra-budgetary funds. the most money came from enterprises and industry research organizations as the fees for research and development. all this testified to the presence of a market in the ukrainian ssr , although it was underdeveloped, deformed, imperfect, and controlled by the state. the third stage is related to the liberalization of the economy and market transformations in ukraine. it began in the second half of the 1980s when ukraine was part of the ussr and practically coincided with the dissemination of entrepreneurial university ideas in the world. the radical changes in society that took place in the 1990s spurred the development of the educational services market in higher education. after ukraine gained independence in 1991, this stage of the educational services market formation in higher education is the most important, essential, and completed. it is characterized by the commercialization of educational services in higher education. in contrast to the first stage (the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries), the creation of private heis was not limited and had a clear legal framework. in the period of the ussr , there were no private universities at all. the activating means for the development of the educational services market in higher education at all stages of its formation and distribution was insufficient funding. chronic underfunding of state heis made them actively seek out additional sources of funding, and even before ukraine became independent, formed powerful motives at universities to provide paid services to enterprises, institutions, and the population. thus, the higher education of ukraine, since the end of the 19th century, has been characterized by the main elements of the educational services market: supply and demand for higher education, competition among higher education institutions for consumers and competition among consumers for places in heis, tuition fees (full or partial). baltic journal of economic studies 115 vol. 5, no. 2, 2019 references: ambrazhey, o. a. 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(2016). periodization of the history of higher education in ukraine and the practice of subsidiaries activities in the period of ukraine's independence. scientific works of the petro mohyla chornomorsky state university of the kyiv-mohyla academy complex. series: history, 274(262), 7–11. http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 1 development and perspectives of ethical finance in iran massimo papa and francesco petrucciano centro interdisciplinare per gli studi sul mondo islamico “francesco castro” (cismi), university of rome tor vergata , massimo.papa@uniroma2.it centro interdisciplinare per gli studi sul mondo islamico “francesco castro” (cismi), university of rome tor vergata , francesco.petrucciano@alumni.uniroma2.eu abstract— iran has a rich and old tradition of ethical finance and economics. well before the islamic revolution, institutes and initiatives were active in encouraging an inclusive vision of economy. although re-elaborated under a different light, these concepts survived in the current constitution, which defines economy using a “social” approach (art.43). under this light, the legality of capitalism and that of the use of private investment are one of the pillars of economy itself (art.44) only if subordinated to religiously inspired ethical principles of justice and equity and in a way that makes of them a mere complement to state or to the corporative actors. religious guidance is therefore immanent even in the very own definition of economy as a mean, and not as an end, to get social purposes like, inter alia, welfare, elimination of poverty and abolition of deprivation of means of self-sustainment. state-driven economics was nevertheless a prominent concept in original iranian constitutional thought. starting from the nineties, financial and economic reforms have been leading the system from a corporatist vision that characterised the first fifteen years of existence of the islamic republic to a more actual social market, putting in discussion and somewhat reinventing the relationship between the public and the private. keywords: iran, islam, bonyad, ethics, finance, law. i. introduction we can not make a net distinction between the market, that makes up the life of the companies and constitutes the environment where the business lives, and the general characteristics of the human society hosting and, somewhat, governing that market. instruments like corporate social responsibility or health, safety and environment are social tools, extremely important ones to understand the nature of this coexistence given they represent the way the business dialogues, communicates and introduces itself to the public. in the history of modern iran, we can clearly distinguish two different phases of development of the relationship between business and ethics: that of before the revolution, and modern revolutionary iran. in turn, each of these periods may be divided into different phases, with often very different characteristics the one to the others: the first period of the pahlavi kingdom (first industrialisation) and the period following the economic crisis of the ‘50es by one side; the first decade after the revolution and the current era, by the other. a reference has been done to the first period of pahlavi ruling, an historical moment dating prior to the first samples of ethical finance and of other tools like corporate social responsibility in western world. that would qualify the experiences of “attention to social issues” belonging to the first half of the 20th century’s iran as a separate matter. however, we shall not forget that responsibility and ethics in business and finance, as a concept, has lived a continuous process of transformation, and that every specific contest may witness a different experience. ethics is defined as a systematic approach to moral judgements based on reason, analysis, synthesis, and reflection. in the west, tools like csr were born as a philanthropic tool in an environment where capitalism, free market and a scarce presence of the state in public life and workers protection. iran represented (and still represents) a mailto:massimo.papa@uniroma2.it mailto:francesco.petrucciano@alumni.uniroma2.eu ejif – european journal of islamic finance special issue islamic and social finance (2019) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 2 deeply different context, characterised mainly by islam, under the light of the ja’fari doctrine. ja’fari islam is, by a social point of view, an extremely important presence given it makes of business ethics a religious matter, making of ethics an immanent concept in the whole system. we should not forget that islam overcomes the concept of “faith” as we commonly understand in the western world, and that it constitutes the very shape of the law itself [1]. law, under this light, is not in fact a human product but the manifestation of the will of god. it is, therefore, eternal and not liable to err. islam is, at the end, the entire system and islamic legal systems are completely correspondant to it. the islamic faith is itself a social matter where big attention is given to fairness in contracts, balance between the counterparts, and where a specific attention is given to the wellness of the community over the wellness of the individual. finance is, of course, the most significant and meaningful part of business by the point of view of fairness in contracts and lawfulness of transaction, given its very nature of trading services with no provision of material goods. ii. the industrialisation: the beginning of the 20th century during the time of reza shah pahlavi, iran witnessed a deep transformation of its society and of its economy. the iran left him by the qajars, the house that ruled the country prior to the pahlavis and up to 1925, was a rural society mostly unequally distributed in a vast land with few big cities, no linguistic cohesion and even less industrial development [2]. in that moment, the idea of a modern state itself was lacking in iranian identity. sophisticated financial activities were absent in iranian market and almost all of them belonged to the most traditional trade activities, already perfectly regulated by the religious authorities through their interpretation on, and personal effort (ijtihad, هاداجت ) in understanding the law in every single case. therefore, traditional trading activities (by which almost the entire economy was made up by) was considered conform to religious lawfulness (halal, حالل), which made of them “ethical” by definition. that conformity left no possibility to have a further need for a room to be enhanced. the first parliament (majlis, مجلس) of the country, created after a constitutional revolution seeking a european-styled development plan for iran, had to fulfil the most challenging event for a country en route to a deep transformation: that of the promulgation of a civil and of a commercial code. that happened in 1928, bringing with it the need to regulate and accept into iranian system some financial institutes and tools coming mainly from the west world, therefore proposing to then iranian legislator the challenge to consider them licit or not. iran took an extremely sophisticated choice while deciding to adopt the code system while completely adapting it to the islamic ja’fari orientation, therefore proposing a “new” model of codification. that model, differently from other countries of the area, would not choose to print a mere copy of a european legal text, translating it into persian and adding a personal status code (ahwal shakhsiyya) for familiar and personal issues, but would build its entire civil system harmonizing it in toto with the islamic system [3]. with this experience, iran faces for the first time the ethical dilemma of the lawfulness of adopting financial tools which very origin is unrelated to the islamic world but rather belonging to the western system. iii. finance and ethics in the iranian civil code of 1928 the very fact that iran was facing a true revolutionary historical period while adopting the civil and commercial codes was clear since the beginning of the parliamentary debate over the issue. in a famous statement at the majlis in 1927, the then representative dr. mohammad mossadegh made clear in front of the assembly that his being a “persian and a muslim” would not let him accept iran to just absorb a mere translation of a european code and make of it a source of its law. in particular, mossadeq stressed the necessity for his country to always keep its islamic foundation, even in moments when the foundation of the country was “mistakenly” identified with “the concept of modernisation” itself. mossadeq, therefore, qualified the modernisation as “false”, stressing the need of not passively accepting it, as it would (to his vision) destroy the country. a clear stance against a school of thought that would have wanted iran in the line of those countries accepting to merely adopt the western system, but in line with ejif – european journal of islamic finance special issue islamic and social finance (2019) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 3 those underlying the idea of a need to reform welcoming many orientations and ideas of western origin. in the first book of the code this orientation is made clear while the legislator addresses the issue of gambling and betting, which are both to be considered not conform to islam given the well-known prohibition of aleatory enrichment. therefore, such juristic acts do not find any legitimation in the law. art.645 of the code statutes that gambling and betting are not valid juristic acts, unproductive of effects and for which no legal action shall be admittible. the same norm shall be applied with reference to all obligations produced by illicit juristic acts. iv.the islamic revolution and the current costitutional asset of economics and finance the constitution seeing the light after the revolution of 1979 gives economics and finance a completely new definition and reads them under the light islam provides them with. current constitution does not actually make any difference between financial activities and pure economic ones, such as trade of goods. although in islamic law fair trade is considered a highly valuable activity in the life of a muslim (mohammad used to be a commercial arbiter for a long period of his life), finance presents some difficulties given it is related to production and interchange of services whose value may be determined, in some cases, in an arbitrary way. that is the case of some financial tools, such as derivative obligations, whose output (given market value) may effectively be dependent on factors independent to one’s efforts or work and therefore to deserve his own enrichment. that may make of their profit an illicit (haram, َحَرام) one. art.2, 3 and 4 of the constitution are the main guidance for the exegesist of the iranian legal system wishing to study its main sources and constitute the cornerstone of the entire fundamental chart. art.2 states that all sources of the law shall be consistent with islam (“divine revelation and its fundamental role in setting forth laws”), therefore giving it the qualification of a super-constitutional norm. as we read in the preamble of the constitution itself, “in the view of islam, government does not derive from the interests of a class, nor does it serve the domination of an individual or a group. rather, it represents the fulfilment of the political ideal of a people who bear a common faith and common outlook, taking an organized form in order to initiate the process of intellectual and ideological evolution towards the final goal, i.e., movement towards allah”. after a few lines, the preamble addresses the problem of the qualification of the term “economics” (eqtesad, قتصادا ). it states that while strengthening the foundations of the economy, whose fundamental consideration will be that of fulfilling the material needs of man in the course of his overall growth and development, the new order of the state (which means the islamic republic) will fix a principle in contrasts with other economic systems. the aim would be that of the “concentration and accumulation of wealth and maximization of profit. in materialist schools of thought, the economy represents an end in itself, so that it comes to be a subversive and corrupting factor in the course of man's development. in islam, the economy is a means, and all that is required of a means is that it should be an efficient factor contributing to the attainment of the ultimate goal”. art.3 of the constitution recalls what held in the previous one and, while compiling a list of the duties of the state. the twelfth point reports the “planning of a correct and just economic system, in accordance with islamic criteria, in order to create welfare, eliminate poverty, and abolish all forms of deprivation with respect to food, housing, work, health care, and the provision of social insurance for all”. art.43 of the constitution opens the chapter iv, dedicated to “economy and financial affairs”. it obviously recalls the content of art.2, considering the vision islam has of economy and its main objectives and characteristics. the first paragraph puts, as its objectives, “achieving the economic independence of the society, uprooting poverty and deprivation, and fulfilling human needs in the process of development”. these objectives are to be reached through very social means and are driven by a social and ethical vision: “ensuring conditions and opportunities of employment for everyone, with a view to attaining full employment”. the action of the state is present especially while placing the means of work at the disposal of everyone able to work and lacking the means. the most interesting thing of this article is that it provides the aforementioned means in the form of cooperatives, through granting interest-free loans or “recourse to any other legitimate means that neither results in the concentration or circulation of wealth in the hands of a few individuals or groups, nor turns ejif – european journal of islamic finance special issue islamic and social finance (2019) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 4 the government into a major absolute employer”. it also statutes that these steps must be taken with due regard for the requirements governing the general economic planning of the country at each stage of its growth. a constitution is not usually required to specify or regulate in detail its provisions, neither to name expressly the institutions that will be called to make those provisions reality. at the moment of the writing of the constitution, many religious foundations were working in social issues in order to provide the people with an alternative way of development out of shah’s revolutionary means. these foundations were found on one of the very basic principles of islam as a religious system, that of the cooperation towards the realisation of the ummah as a perfect human organisation [4]. as a consequence of the revolution, the entire banking system was turned into a interest-free one, and at the same time a huge reform on capital and financial operators was implemented [5]. . v. bonyad bonyad (foundation, بنیاد) is the term that mostly embodies the concept of ethical finance in iran given it represents the most typical and particular juridical form of a financial actor in the islamic republic’s legal environment [6][7]. founded under the revolutionary process of islamization of the entire imperial iran’s system, bonyads took over the role the shah had given to institutions such as the pahlavi foundation, and their assets were entitled to the revolutionary councils all around the country, keeping them therefore separated from the state’s patrimony (ghanimat system). this has constituted the prodromal act of a series of legislative reforms that would implement the actual structure of the islamic republic’s administration. sundering the public into two spheres, the one of which would be under the strict control of the religious guidance, somewhat escaping from the classical tools of administrative and financial control by the state, is a juridical instrument in full conformity to the principles of "guardianship of the jurisconsult" (velayat-e faqih), regulating the constitutional asset of the islamic republic [8]. bonyads therefore enjoy a wider degree of independence and administrative freedom, being free to manage, hold and constitute business active in almost all possible markets with the exception of the oil one. by a theorical and legal point of view, bonyads shall operate as charity organizations: that would mean, called to address their activities in order to redistribute incomes and not to pursue a profit orientation. nevertheless, the specificity of the institution and the fact that bonyad has become a true nomen juris distinguished from the simple concept of non-profit organisation has made of it a reality difficult to measure, to define and to tailor a specific management regime for. another important aspect of the bonyads is that, competing in market against private business, are often blamed on contributing to the insufficient development and transparency of the market itself, impeding an harmonious development of the country’s economy. bonyads are not subject to the general accounting laws and are not required to pay taxes, while their actual monetary consistence remains substantially impossible to be defined. unaccountable to the central bank governor as well, there is a lack of proper oversight and control of these foundations. there is no doubt that the current system has awakened many criticism from inside and outside the country: a particularly interested eye on the issue has been put by the incumbent iranian executive, following the steps of the previous reformist khatami government of the ‘90es. a structural reform of the entire iranian economic law, in light of a long-awaited liberal revolution would help the country to address in a better way the challenges the country is facing and to diversify its way of developing a truly wider economy. that may allow an actual opening to modern experiments of ethical finance, today still restricted into the bonyad system and the provisions of art.3, 43 of the constitution. conclusion the ethical finance in iran is witnessing the last stage of development started around one hundred years ago: as a country, iran always featured very advanced characteristics of social development and attention to the needs of a society in evolution. by the other side, belonging to ja’fari school made the country a centre for a “national” school of thought in this sense and the constitutional provisions of social justice and ejif – european journal of islamic finance special issue islamic and social finance (2019) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 5 protection were, of course, seen as to boost to the development of such a perspective, but the challenge now seems to be that of sustainability. more than being a pure economic issue, we shall now understand how the paradigm of a state-driven economics can coexist with a mixed system of state + market and who is the one who is in charge of that references [1] aa.vv., le shi’isme imamite, 1970, parigi, presses universitaires de france [2] abrahamian e., storia dell'iran. dai primi del novecento a oggi, 2009, roma, donzelli [3] papa m., introduzione al codice civile della repubblica islamica dell’iran, 2015, roma, eurilink [4] cilardo a., teorie sulle origini del diritto islamico, 1990, roma, ipocan [5] shari’ati a., l’individuo, il marxismo, l’islam, 1985, roma, centro culturale islamico europeo [6] michalak l.o., salacuse j.w., social legislation in the contemporary middle east, 1986, berkeley, institute of international studies, university of california [7] abdolmohammadi p., cama g., l’iran contemporaneo, 2015, milano, mondadori università [8] whefner w.r., islamic law and society in the modern world, 2011, bloomington, indiana university press ejif – european journal of islamic finance editorial team editor in chief prof. paolo pietro biancone, university of turin, italy editorial board prof. dian masyita, university of padjadjaran, indonesia prof. abdulazeem abozaid, qatar faculty of islamic studies, qatar prof. ahmad aref almazari, king saud university, saudi arabia prof. marco meneguzzo, università degli studi di roma "tor vergata", italy prof. nidal a. alsayyed, inayah islamic finance research institute, usa prof. roberta aluffi, university of turin, italy prof. ghassen bouslama, neoma business school, campus de reims, france prof. nazam dzolkarnaini, salford university, uk prof. kabir hassan, university of new orleans, usa prof. khaled hussainey, university of plymouth, uk prof. rifki ismal, university of indonesia prof. tariqullah khan, hamad bin khalifa university, qatar prof. ali khorshid, icma centre reading university, uk prof. amir kia, utah valley university, usa prof. laurent marliere, université paris-dauphine, france prof. federica miglietta, university of bari, italy prof. hakim ben othman, university of tunis, tunisia prof. mohamed ramady, king fahd university of petroleum and minerals, saudi arabia prof. mamunur rashid, nottingham university, malaysia prof. younes soualhi, international islamic university, malaysia prof. laurent weill, university of strasbourg, france aseas 11(1) | 13 frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar: the case of the mwetaung (gullu mual) nickel mine in chin state rainer einzenberger ► einzenberger, r. (2018). frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar: the case of the mwetaung (gullu mual) nickel mine in chin state. austrian journal of south-east asian studies, 11(1), 13-34. since 2010, myanmar has experienced unprecedented political and economic changes described in the literature as democratic transition or metamorphosis. the aim of this paper is to analyze the strategy of accumulation by dispossession in the frontier areas as a precondition and persistent element of myanmar’s transition. through this particular regime of dispossession – described as frontier capitalism – the periphery is turned into a supplier of resource revenues to fuel economic growth at the center. the paper takes up the case study of the mwetaung (gullu mual) nickel mine on the border to chin state and the “politics of dispossession” around this project. it analyzes the strategies, motives, and objectives of a broad ad-hoc coalition that emerged in 2013 to defend their access to land against forms of legal dispossession by the state. in this case, the attempted dispossession has been successfully challenged, by making use of new opportunities for political participation. keywords: chin state; frontier; mining; myanmar; politics of dispossession  introduction following the 2010 elections, myanmar seemed to go against the general trend in southeast asia towards increasing authoritarianism. while other countries in the region were returning to authoritarian rule (thailand, for instance, entering its fifth year of military dictatorship in may 2018), myanmar’s elected semi-civilian government seemed to push towards political liberalization. especially after the electoral victory of the national league for democracy (nld) in december 2015, hopes were high for a ‘speeding-up’ of a democratization process under the leadership of nobel prize laureate aung san suu kyi whose stated aim is the “emergence of a democratic federal union” (“state counsellor daw aung san suu kyi’s”, 2017).1 indeed, the majority of observers and academics understood 1 even though aung san suu kyi was barred from officially becoming president for constitutional reasons, she assumed the newly established position of state counsellor and ministerial posts. she became the de facto leader of the semi-civilian government. president htin kyaw, installed by aung san suu kyi, remained largely in her shadow, getting little attention and media coverage. however, he resigned recently and was replaced by win myint who is said to be as loyal to aung san suu kyi (“myanmar parliament elects suu kyi”, 2018). aktuelle südostasienforschung  current research on southeast asia w w w .s ea s. at d o i 10 .1 47 64 /1 0. a se a s20 18 .1 -2 14 | aseas 11(1) frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar the recent developments as an ongoing transition from authoritarian rule under a former military junta towards a more liberal electoral democracy. they point to a number of major political achievements, such as the release of political prisoners, easing of media censorship, growing freedom of expressions, new ceasefire agreements and more (egreteau & robinne, 2015, p. ix). others are taking a more cautious approach and characterize the process as a “‘protracted transition’ in which oppositional forces, ethnic groups, and the military have started to renegotiate political power” (bünte, 2016, p. 370); or as a “caretaking democratization” highlighting the continuing influence of the military and the top down nature of the political reform (egreteau, 2016). thus, a core question concerns the structural changes and continuities which influence the country’s political trajectories. egreteau and robinne (2015) consequently opted for the notion of a “metamorphosis” rather than a “transition” to describes the “deep-seated, incremental and observable transformations but with elements of resilience if not (frustrating) persistence, such as the political salience of the armed forces” (p. 4). at least since the renewed outbreak of violence in rakhine state in 2012 and military confrontation in the north of the country, this became painfully clear (burma news international, 2017; doyle & rigby, 2016). the “unprecedented violence” against self-identifying rohingya involving security forces, civilians, as well as militant armed groups, attracted massive international attention and was qualified by the un as an act of “ethnic cleansing” (international crisis group, 2017; united nations human rights office of the high commissioner, 2017). analyzing myanmar’s transition from a political economic perspective, jones (2014a) suggested that the “military has been left ‘holding the ring’ placing broad constraints on the reform process” (p. 156). rather than myanmar becoming the next democratic poster child he sees the country transforming into a more “normal” southeast asian state, with state power serving only a “narrow social constituency” (pp. 167-168). pointing towards a scenario potentially similar to the cambodian experience, he describes myanmar’s recent capitalist development as “highly rapacious and coercive” in an early phase of primitive accumulation (p. 167). a precondition for the recent transition (contrary to earlier attempts) was the incorporation of the periphery through an emerging “ceasefire-capitalism” (woods, 2011). the co-optation of ethnic armed groups in the border areas through business concessions and transnational capital allowed the regime to re-focus on its roadmap to ‘disciplined democracy’ and ensure its own economic survival (jones, 2014b). the specific accumulation regime, mainly based on the extraction and dispossession of land and natural resources in the frontier areas through authoritarian means (including but going beyond ceasefire agreements) is termed here as frontier capitalism. it builds on the concept of the frontier which traces the particular process of accumulation, enclosures, and contested property regimes in areas of fragmented authority as a result of coercive incorporation into the national state and global circuits of capitalism (geiger, 2009; kelly & peluso, 2015; peluso & lund, 2011). the aim of this paper is to analyze frontier capitalism and the related politics of dispossession as a persistent element of myanmar’s transition. while it does not intend to further theorize myanmar’s political transition on a macro level (see jones, 2014a, 2014b), it offers empirical evidence and insights into the dynamics of the transition at the sub-national and local level. it looks at the particular case of the mwetaung aseas 11(1) | 15 rainer einzenberger (gullu mual) nickel mine project in northern chin state, a politically relatively ‘stable’ area under ceasefire since 2012. while in other frontier areas local resistance to dispossession led to the breakdown of ceasefires and renewed armed conflict (brenner, 2015; burma news international, 2017), civil society in chin state is making use of increasing political spaces to voice their resistance. by focusing on grassroots mobilization during the period from 2013 to 2014, the article aims to contribute to a growing body of critically engaged literature on the “politics of dispossession” (levien, 2013a) in contemporary myanmar (prasse-freeman, 2015; zaw aung & middleton, 2016). it documents a notable ‘success story’ of an anti-dispossession movement which has received little attention in media and academic literature so far (for an exception, see mark, 2016). the research presented in this paper is part of an ongoing research project on “contested frontiers” in myanmar (einzenberger, 2016a). it is based on literature review and multi-sited field research conducted between 2015 and 2017 over several months in yangon, kalay, hakha and other locations, particularly in chin state. semistructured interviews and open interviews were conducted with civil society activists, representatives of communities, investors, political parties, local government, and others.2 in addition to interviews (conducted partly in english and in local languages with the support of local interpreters), the information gathered was cross-checked with documentation provided by the chinland natural resources watch group (cnrwg, 2013) as well as (local) english online media sources (ei ei toe lwin, 2013; khaipi, 2013; kyemon & ju nine, 2013; mirante, 2017; thawng zel thang, 2013).3 the article proceeds as follows: the first part introduces the theoretical core concepts followed by a summary of the historical background of myanmar’s economic transition from a ‘pseudo-socialist’ isolated economy to a more liberalized market economy. the second part of the article discusses the empirical findings of the case study with a special focus on the role of local civil society, political parties, and the local government. furthermore, it explores the importance of land rights and indigenous rights issues for the anti-dispossession movement. frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession from a theoretical perspective, the specific process of (re-emerging) capitalist development in the periphery areas of myanmar can be framed as “frontier capitalism” (laungaramsri, 2012).4 here, frontier capitalism means the specific “regime of dispossession” (levien, 2013b) 5, in particular the dispossession of land and natural resources 2 the names of the local communities as well as the names of the persons interviewed remain anonymous in order to protect their identity. 3 i would like to thank the cnrwg for their permission to translate the burmese language report into english. 4 while laungaramsri (2012) does not clearly define “frontier capitalism”, she argues that “provincial authorities have engaged in widespread transboundary and joint economic enterprises, particularly in the peripheries. such collaboration, which often bypasses central governance, with chaotic boundaries between what is recognized as ‘used (or productive)’ and ‘unused (underproductive)’ resources, along with unclear regulatory control, allow the growth of what i call ‘frontier capitalism’” (p. 466). 5 levien (2013b) defines “regimes of dispossession” as “socially and historically specific constellations of state structures, economic logics tied to particular class interests, and ideological justifications that generate a consistent pattern of dispossession” (p. 383). 16 | aseas 11(1) frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar in border or frontier areas through authoritarian or outright violent means facilitated by the state for the benefit of a narrow elite. the concept of the frontier is a helpful analytical tool to explain processes of incorporation and transition of ‘unproductive land’ in the periphery into the national economy and ultimately the capitalist world system (geiger, 2009; hall, 2012, 2013). frontiers are defined as sparsely populated areas, close to borders and rich in natural resources, where land and territory is contested. often the state claims sovereignty over those areas, but in practice falls short of exercising full administrative control (geiger, 2009; hall, 2013). apart from being a zone of transition, the frontier can also be understood as a process “where authorities, sovereignties, rights, and hegemonies of the recent past have been challenged by new enclosures, property regimes, and territorializations” (peluso & lund, 2011, p. 667). the corresponding representation of the ‘imaginary frontier’ as ‘wild’, ‘unused’, or ‘virgin’ serves as a legitimating ideology for its exploitation. local claims, usage rights, and customary practices are thus ignored or disregarded by the state, to be sacrificed for national development (barney, 2009; geiger, 2009; kelly & peluso, 2015). processes of enclosures and primitive accumulation (or accumulation by dispossession) are a defining feature of incorporation and transition in the frontier (foweraker, 1981; geiger, 2009; hall, 2013; harvey, 2003). to this end, the state (and non-state actors) employ a variety of strategies and mechanisms, including both “the rifle and the title” (grajales, 2011). this means, capitalist relations are not only achieved by outright violent dispossession but also by other more subtle means such as “legal dispossession” involving the state (pichler, 2015). thereby, state legislations (for instance land laws) can play a crucial role in establishing the legal basis for a new land market through commodification of land and codification of ownership. unsurprisingly, processes of coercive incorporation and dispossession in the frontier are often met with resistance by the local population (hall, 2012, 2013). they challenge the forced imposition of capitalist relations based on state legislation, which mostly disregard customary practices and local modes of production. according to levien (2013a), the “dispossession of land creates a specific kind of politics” which he calls “politics of dispossession” (pp. 355-356). this involves forms of resistance mainly targeting the state and applying “physical, political, and legal means to maintain possession against the dissipating force of brokers, and the coercive force of the state” (p. 366). before discussing the “politics of dispossession” around the particular case of the mwetaung project in more detail, the next section provides an overview of myanmar’s broader economic transition since the beginning of the 1990s, and its impact on the frontier areas. from burmese way to socialism to ceasefire capitalism since myanmar abandoned its burmese way to socialism and opened up its economy to international investors in the beginning of the 1990s, the country’s economic development was essentially based on processes of primitive accumulation and resource extraction (bissinger, 2012; jones, 2014a; lambrecht, 2004; maclean, 2008; schaffar, 2008). the main motive for its ‘open-door policy’ was the desperate economic situation, after decades of self-imposed isolation and economic mismanagement under military rule, which also triggered the mass uprisings of 1988. after aseas 11(1) | 17 rainer einzenberger staging a coup and crushing the uprisings, the state law and order restoration council (slorc) took an “entrepreneurial turn” (maclean, 2008), offering “the right to exploit the rich untapped natural resources of burma to foreign investors in joint venture with state enterprises” (mya maung, 1995, p. 679). a series of laws, such as the wasteland instructions (1991) and mining laws (1994), were introduced to facilitate a market-based economy and private investment (franco, 2016; moody, 1999). the much-needed foreign exchange allowed the military junta to purchase new arms from china, expand its army, and tighten its grip to power against the will of the majority population (mya maung, 1995). in particular, myanmar’s neighboring countries thailand and china were more than willing to exploit the natural resources across their border and establish friendly relations with the military junta. already a few months after the slorc takeover, the thai military and associated companies negotiated concessions for teak extraction in myanmar, since thailand’s own forests had already been depleted (bryant, 1997). in the early 1990s, the yadana and yetagun pipelines were built by a consortium of international companies to import natural gas from the andaman sea to thailand to secure energy for its fast-growing economy. this caused widespread human rights abuses and environmental degradation (earthrights international, 2000). a few years later, china started to invest in myanmar following its ‘going out’ policy, overtaking thailand as its biggest investor in 2010 (inclusive development international, 2016). china mainly invested in (hydro) power (63%), oil and gas (25%), as well as in mining (11%) (dunn, ji, & peng, 2016; earthrights international, 2008). following the 1990 elections, the military also changed its tactics towards its border areas from military interventions to ‘business solutions’. in a process described as “ceasefire capitalism” (woods, 2011), members of the military regime brokered business deals with ethnic armed groups. legal concessions for the extraction of natural resources in the border areas and other lucrative business were offered to ethnic elites in return for ceasefire agreements (jones, 2014b; schaffar, 2008; woods, 2011). according to woods (2011), the burmese army used “land concessions in ceasefire zones as an explicit postwar military strategy to govern land and populations to produce regulated, legible, militarized territory” (p. 747). the ceasefires “weakened and co-opted much of the opposition” (jones, 2014b, p. 780) and allowed the military regime to refocus on its roadmap to a ‘disciplined democracy’ in order to safeguard its long-term political interests. continuing this approach, in 2011, president thein sein initiated a new round of ceasefires, which led to the signature of the national ceasefire agreement (nca) in 2015. yet, some ethnic armed groups who had already existing ceasefires (such as the kachin independence army) were not included in the latest round. this was partly related to competing claims over access to natural resources in the region (burma news international, 2017).6 as a result of the expansion of ceasefires and increasing exploitation of land and resources, “politics of dispossession” have clearly been on the rise since 2011 (buchanan, kramer, & woods, 2013). local media has documented land conflicts virtually on a daily basis (for some recent cases, see htike nanda win, 2017; myint moe, 2017). until 2015, 6 the 1994 ceasefire “broke down after the military took control of a kia outpost near a chinese-run dam in 2011” (burma news international, 2017, p. 7). 18 | aseas 11(1) frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar the farmland investigation commission (installed by the usdp – union solidarity and development party – government following public pressure) recorded more than 11,000 official complaints related to conflicts over land (htoo thant, 2015). prior to 2012 communities rarely dared to speak out in public, due to heavy restrictions on the freedom of expression and media censorship. since 2012 people have begun to exercise their ‘new freedoms’ offered by gradual political liberalization (bünte, 2016).7 in particular, several large-scale chinese investment projects attracted widespread attention in relation to land confiscation and were targeted by public protests. the best-known cases were the letpadaung/monywa copper mine near mandalay and the myitsone hydropower dam in kachin state with an investment volume of about usd 3.6 billion (simpson, 2013). the letpadaung/monywa mining case became internationally known due to the violent crackdown of myanmar security forces on peaceful protestors (including buddhist monks) (zerrouk & neef, 2014). for many it symbolized the continuation of authoritarian means employed by the government to ensure an extractivist accumulation regime even after an apparent political liberalization. even the former opposition leader and current state counsellor aung san suu kyi publicly defended the continuation of the mining project despite heavy criticism (“aung san suu kyi support”, 2013). the myitsone dam on the other hand has been considered a success story for the anti-dispossession movement. in a nationwide “save the irrawaddy” campaign framed in ethno-political opposition to ‘chinese exploitation’, a broad coalition could be formed between local ethnic activists from northern myanmar (in particular kachin state) and urban based environmental and pro-democracy groups (kiik, 2016). the hydropower project was finally suspended by president thein sein and not continued until today (einzenberger, 2016b; oh & andrews-speed, 2015). in the following section, i will discuss in more detail the politics of dispossession around another, less known investment project proposed by chinese investors on the border to chin state – an area under ceasefire since 2012. the case of mwetaung (gullu mual) nickel mine in chin state the mining project known as mwetaung/phartaung project (which translates from burmese as snake and frog mountain) or gullu mual (after the local name) is situated right at the border between chin state and sagaing region (see figure 1).8 chin state is part of the western frontier of myanmar towards india and bangladesh and is often described as the least developed region in myanmar, difficult to access, and mostly mountainous. until recently, the government had little economic interest in the remote region. unlike the eastern and northern frontier, it was hardly known for large-scale resource extraction, except for some logging (callahan, 2007). this is partly explained by its particular location bordering northeast india, itself long isolated and ‘cut off ’ from the rest of india. armed conflict remained relatively low key in the region with the chin national front (cnf) taking up arms only in 1988.9 7 at times, protest can take on dramatic forms such as the case of a farmer in shan state who burned himself to death in protest against the seizure of his land by the military (wa lone, 2015). 8 hereafter, the name “mwetaung” will be used following the use in the cnrwg report and other official documents (cnrwg, 2013; nmic, 2013). 9 the cnf is a chin nationalist political organization founded in 1988 and dedicated to ensuring selfaseas 11(1) | 19 rainer einzenberger nevertheless, following 1988, chin state experienced considerable militarization and expansion of army battalions and with it regular human rights abuses (callahan, 2007; chin human rights organization, 2012; sakhong, 2010). the mwetaung project is the first major extractive industries project recently proposed in chin state. it is located in tiddim township in the natmyaung reserved forest area, close to the town of kalay (north mining investment company ltd. [nmic], 2013). officially in sagaing region, kalay functions as a sort of ‘gateway’ to nearby chin state. with around 130,000 inhabitants (ministry of immigration and population, 2014), the majority of which are reportedly ethnic chin or zomi10, it is also an important trading hub along the road to nearby india (bordering the northeastern state of manipur). until very recently, kalay also accommodated the only university and airport in the vicinity of chin state.11 the border between sagaing region and chin state begins right at the end of the town near kalay university campus at the chin foothills.12 the history of the mwetaung project dates back to the 1960s (see table 1), when the chin geologist ngaw cin pau discovered major nickel deposits in the mwetaung/ phartaung hills (barber, zaw, & crow, 2017; vumson, 1986; win & myint, 1998). however, for decades, no further plans for exploration progressed. the self-imposed international isolation under the burma socialist programme party (bspp) (1962– 1988) and the lack of capital investment and technology inhibited any large-scale exploitation (oh & andrews-speed, 2015). following its entrepreneurial turn in the early 1990s, the junta actively promoted foreign investment into mining in several “geologically favorable” areas including the mwetaung hills (“invitation to mining investors”, 1995). in 1994, the military government passed the myanmar mines law in order “to fulfill the domestic requirements and to increase exports by producing more mineral products” (leckie & simperingham, 2010). however, it took until the early 2000s before the first plans for an exploitation of the mineral deposits emerged. prior bids for exploration of the mwetaung area by western companies in the 1990s lead to nothing (moody, 1999). they either shunned the political risk or questioned the profitability (interview with former employee of nmic, yangon, december 2017). only chinese companies showed interests in further exploration. a 2008 report listing chinese investment projects in myanmar mentioned kingbao (jinbao) mining co. determination for chin state. its armed wing is the chin national army with more than 200 armed soldiers. about least 70 cna soldiers were killed during fighting with the myanmar military between 1988 and 2012. after 2003, fighting with government troops stopped (burma news international, 2017). the ceasefire agreement with the cnf on state level was signed on 7 january 2012 (“breakthrough: cnf signed ceasefire”, 2012). 10 in northern chin state, the local population prefers to call themselves zomi instead of chin and there is some controversy around the naming. the zo historian vumson (1986), for instance, prefers the term zo because “he believes that names such as kuki and chin which originated as abuse names should not be adopted as designation of a people”. sakhong (2010), on the other hand, prefers the term chin as a name for a collective identity. however, there is no available official data on ethnic categories in the census data. 11 in the meantime – as of 2018 – a new airport is planned near the town of falam and a new university was opened in hakha. 12 at one of the first research trips to the region in 2015, i had to pass a checkpoint and show my passport right at the ‘border’ between sagaing region and chin state, reinforcing the impression that it is more than just an internal administrative border. until the ceasefire agreement in 2012, chin state was only accessible with a special permit. 20 | aseas 11(1) frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar having signed an agreement with the ministry of mining no. 3 to conduct exploration and feasibility studies on the mwetaung (earthrights international, 2008). according to local residents in the early 2000s, some chinese workers visited the area for exploration. yet, the contract was cancelled, and new negotiations were held in 2012 with the north petro-chem corporation of china (“union mines minister receives”, 2012). finally, in may 2012 a contract for a feasibility study was signed with another chinese company, north mining investment company ltd. (nmic) (“agreement inked to assess”, 2012). around that time, the market price for nickel on the world market had reached a peak of over usd 20,000 per ton (infomine, n.d.). the investing company nmic submitted a feasibility study to the ministry of mining in february, 2013 (nmic, 2013). according to what little is known about the project plans for the opencut mining, the project was to cover around 55 acres (about 22 ha), including several buildings for housing, offices, and storage as well as two 15-megawatt coal-fired power plants. the ferronickel concentrates extracted from the mine and produced on site in a smelter would be transported via a newly built access road and the india-myanmar friendship road to a new jetty on the chindwin river. from there, the minerals would be shipped to yangon then further to china (cnrwg, 2013). village consultations and civil society movements in late 2012, the local population took notice of the planned mining project for the first time. a yangon-based service company named asia guiding star services company limited (agss) assigned by nmic visited some of the 15 villages surrounding the mwetaung/phartaung area to collect data for the environmental, social, and health impact assessments.13 the service company acted as an initial intermediary between the chinese investor, the government, and the local population. in this role, the firm tried to put pressure on the village heads to give their consent for the planned mining project: workers from agss company came to collect data about the water and the soil; their main point was to get the consent from the local people; it was only the first time we heard about this and it was too early to give our consent, we needed to discuss first; in other villages they tried to meet the village head and get the consent. (interview with local residents, november 2016) in order to convince village heads to give their consent, agss promised ‘development’ for the area including new schools, hospitals, roads, and electricity. they generally ignored questions concerning negative impacts, while they highlighted the positive impacts such as jobs. indecisive about how to respond to the proposal, several villagers contacted local civil society organizations in the nearby town of kalay. the civil society groups had already been active in civic education and other political awareness raising programs as soon as the opportunity had emerged in 2012. the awareness raising programs included “basic understanding of democracy”, “civil 13 according to its own website, the company has been involved in the construction of the yadana and yetagun gas pipeline, the traders hotel, and many other construction projects during the time of the military regime prior to 2010 (asia guiding star services company limited [agss], 2012). aseas 11(1) | 21 rainer einzenberger society organizations”, and, “development and democracy”. the loose network of local civil society groups organized several rounds of public consultations. over one hundred meetings and information events were organized within the first few months of 2013 alone (cnrwg, 2013). in the beginning, villagers were divided on how to respond to the proposed mining project, with one faction supporting and the other opposing the project. previous experience of oppression under authoritarian rule and fear of the central government played a major role in local perceptions. moreover, the escalation of violence at the letpadaung mine (located in sagaing region) had an intimidating effect. some of the civil society actors from kalay were also active themselves in the letpadaung case before 2012. in general what they [the villagers] said is that we have no choice because this is the agreement between the government and the foreign company so it is useless to resist; but in my opinion it was influenced by fears which are rooted in a long history of military oppression; they don’t accept it but they at least wanted to take advantage of the company, this was before civil society leaders came for awareness raising. (interview with cnrwg, november 2016) shortly after the first consultations, a broad coalition comprising of affected villagers and urban based civil society organizations (youth groups, student groups, political activists) from kalay was formed as a ‘watch group’ on the mwetaung project. this ad hoc coalition was subsequently officially named the chinland natural resources watch group (cnrwg). remarkably for a majority chin/zomi ethnic network in a predominately christian area was the inclusion of non-ethnic as well as buddhist groups. indeed, one of the first big assemblies was held in a buddhist monastery in kalay where the head monk actively supported the coalition. thus, the coalition tried to gain legitimacy and leverage with the buddhist majority population similar to other protest movements in the country drawing strongly on buddhist symbolism (prasse-freeman, 2015; zaw aung & middleton, 2016). in addition to crossing ethnic and religious lines, it also had a cross-class character (including peasants and urban residents) not uncommon for anti-dispossession movements (levien, 2013a). considering itself a loose grassroots movement, the cnrwg opened up a public space for deliberation and consultation on the contested mining project. we recommend, if you don’t know if it is good or bad, don’t make any decision. the conflict was so hot at that time. the group who opposed the project was accused to oppose the development. . . . the government also said like the company; they came together and put pressure on the villagers to sign to agree. after this, our group and the villagers demanded the companies and the government to explain to the public how they work, to explain the plan to the public. (interview with cnrwg, november 2016) the role of the government and political actors while initial steps towards the exploitation of the mwetaung/phartaung hills were already taken under the previous military regime, the first activities on the ground 22 | aseas 11(1) frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar coincided not only with the early period of the newly inaugurated semi-civilian government, but also with increasing activities of the local government and local political parties.14 although vested with limited powers and led by the usdp – a party known for its close ties to the military – the creation of state level political institutions, with a high representation of chin ethnic parties, provided an opportunity for the civil society network to advocate for more transparency, participation, and democratic decision making (nixon, joelene, kyi pyar, thet aung, & matthew, 2013; united nations development programme, 2014). one major achievement was to push the chin state government, including the chinese investor nmic, to public consultations. a meeting was held at the town hall in tiddim in april 2013 with both members of the cnrwg and concerned villagers in attendance. in preparation for the meeting, the network had collected a long list of questions for nmic in order to demand detailed information on the expected project plan and its potential impacts. yet due to heated debates and furious villagers insisting to get clear answers the meeting was cut-short by the chin state government. subsequent visits by representatives of nmic and the chin state government to the affected villages ended without any results. the sticking point was the question about potential impacts and distribution of costs and benefits of the proposed project (cnrwg, 2013). after several rounds of public consultation and deliberation without any clear answers by the mining company and the local government, the majority of the villagers did no longer believe in any beneficial arrangements. nevertheless, the chin state government reported to the union government that villagers had agreed with the mining project (thawng zel thang, 2013). reportedly, the chin state minister responsible for mining was facing considerable pressure from the central government in naypyidaw to ensure consent for the project and support nmic. given the mixed experience with the chin state government and its limited role regarding questions of resource governance (lynn & oye, 2014), civil society actors finally turned to chin/zomi members of parliament (mps) at the union level: we changed our way of approaching; we went to the union hluttaw. the executive branch was directly influenced by the military; the mps were a little more flexible than the ministers. the ministers are not elected persons. they don’t look at our local people’s rights. they don’t look down; they look up [to the central government], also this time. our way at that time was to convince them [hluttaw mps] to be on the side of the local people. if they are powerful in their respective parties they will push the ministers, we hoped. and we can say we were successful. (interview with civil society activist near mwetaung, november 2016) while the civil society network was autonomous from party politics, political parties played an important role in the political dispute around the mwetaung project. 14 “about five parties participated in the 2010 election in chin state. the national league for democracy boycotted the election nationally and parties to which it was allied in chin also boycotted the ballot. the parties that competed in the state in 2010 included the chin national party (cnp) and chin progressive party (cpp), representing the chin people at a state level, and the union solidarity and development party and the national unity party. the two chin parties each won five seats in the 24-member state hluttaw” (sithu aung myint, 2015). the chief minister in the 2010 cabinet, appointed by the president, was pu hung ngai from the usdp – a former member of the army. he appointed the ministers of his cabinet. pu kyaw ngein from cpp was the minister responsible for mining (“chin state ministers”, 2013). aseas 11(1) | 23 rainer einzenberger while their positions seemed to be unclear or even contradictory at the beginning, four of the chin parties finally set out to conduct their own survey on the mwetaung case in 2013 to get a better understanding of the local perception.15 the survey concluded that – contrary to the findings of the state government – the majority of affected villagers disapproved of the project. the report also criticized the involvement of a chinese company and stated that “local communities prefer mining companies from a democratic country to those from china if the project must proceed, although the majority objects to its implementation” (thawng zel thang, 2013). towards the end of 2013, the chin political parties finally aligned their position with that of the local civil society network after considerable grassroots lobbying. a statement was put forward citing “lack of information” and “lack of rule of law” as well as “little benefit” for chin state, and the parties expressed their “deep concern” on the implementation to the project (cnrwg, 2013). while the chin national front (cnf), the only ethnic organization with an armed wing (the chin national army) had strong influence on regional and national politics, in particular since the ceasefire agreement in 2012 (burma news international, 2017), its direct involvement in the anti-dispossession movement against the mwetaung project is less clear. however, the cnf publicly stated that it rejects extractive industries in chin state at this moment (“cnf wants to halt”, 2016). in november 2013, the speaker of the pyithu hluttaw (lower house of the union parliament), shwe mann, and regional ministers visited kalay and met with local civil society. responding to the concerns voiced by the local population, the speaker promised to ensure that “the project won’t damage the lives of people” (cnrwg, 2013). since 2014, the project has apparently been on hold. according to some residents, nmic pulled out of the project due to increasing public pressure and local resistance. however, a former employee of nmic cited failed resource sharing negotiations between the company and the ministry of mines and the declining world market price for nickel (from usd 20,000 to under 10,000) as the main reasons for the pull-out from the project.16 in any case, local civil society groups see the suspension of activities as a consequence of their own continuous efforts and as a success story of civil society mobilization (interview with villagers near mwetaung, november 2016). yet, according to recent media reports and local activists, other investors, local companies, and investors from india have shown new interest to explore the mining deposits in the area (“cnf wants to halt”, 2016; mirante, 2017). land rights and resource sharing an immediate concern for the local people regarding the mwetaung project was the potential loss of their farmland on which they largely depended for their livelihood. this was despite assurances by the mining company that no village land would be affected or taken (cnrwg, 2013). given the experiences of other communities 15 according to ethnic media reports, the chin national party (cnp), chin progressive party (cpp), ethnic national development party (endp) and asho chin national party (acnp) met with more than 700 people from 14 villages and over 10 organizations in both chin state and kalay from 2 to 9 september 2013 (thawng zel thang, 2013). 16 according to the former nmic employee, the company was dissolved after the related concessions by the myanmar investment commission had expired. 24 | aseas 11(1) frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar with mining projects (in particular the letpadaung mine), however, local communities stayed alerted. already long before the first news of the mining project broke, villagers were afraid of being dispossessed of their land. the reason was that, as in many frontier areas, most farmers do not own any legal land titles for their farmland.17 in accordance with local customary practices, they practice swidden (shifting) cultivation along the slopes around mwetaung (ewers anderson, 2014; mark, 2016). in government maps, however, their farmland is officially categorized as ‘reserved forest’ under the jurisdiction of the ministry of environmental conservation and forestry. according to government sources, this designation originated from colonial times and has never been changed or verified since (kyemon & ju nine, 2013). typically for frontier regions, there is an overlap of claims and a mismatch between the official and actual land use around the mwetaung area (nmic, 2013). registration of their farmland is challenging, if not impossible, since the national land laws introduced in 2012 did not recognize customary practices of upland agriculturalists such as shifting cultivation. customary rights are only enforceable as long as there is no interest from outside the region. the overall changes in the political economy following myanmar’s opening and the new land laws and investment laws threatened customary institutions (ewers anderson, 2014). a local land rights activist criticized that the new farmland law (farmland act, 2012) and vacant land laws (the vacant, fallow and virgin land act, 2012) had actually turned the villagers into “illegal settlers” although they had been farming in the area already for generations. moreover, he complained about the “burman bias” of the legislation since “the burmese don’t know anything about the traditional customary law of the ethnic people” (interview with land rights activist, kalay, november 2016). also, the communities themselves were very conscious of the situation and challenged the state’s image of the frontier as an ‘empty’ and ‘virgin’ space to be brought to ‘productive’ use with the support of foreign investment. the union government does not care about our chin customary law. in british times, this was practically applied even in the high courts, but this government does not care at all. there is no land which is not occupied by our own people in chin state. the villages have exact boundaries and they occupy all areas. there is not even a single inch of land not occupied in our chin customary land use system. but this is not accepted by our government. (interview with villagers near mwetaung, november 2016) even though the 2016 national land use policy (nlup) envisions the recognition of customary land use systems and calls for the revision of land use maps and records through public consultation processes, little has happened on the ground (the republic of the union of myanmar, 2016). on the contrary, in late 2016, the parliamentary commission for legal and special issues analysis pointed out that “it is not necessary to include the ethnic nationalities’ land use rights as a separate part in the national land use policy” (the commission for legal and special issues analysis, 2016). also, according to land rights activists, the national league for democracy 17 according to ewers anderson (2014), only an estimated 15% of all land in myanmar is titled. aseas 11(1) | 25 rainer einzenberger (nld) government did not follow up on the nlup implemented under their rival usdp government. even though solving the land problems was one of the central promises of the nld during its election campaign, the government was slow to solve existing problems or reform laws. to take matters in their own hand, some villagers around mwetaung are meanwhile seeking legal protection through community forest registration, even if the process is complicated and slow. this gives communities the opportunity to obtain official permission from the forestry department to use a demarcated forest area for 30 years. yet, it is still unclear if this approach will be feasible and ensure the long-term interests of the communities (einzenberger, 2017; kyaw tint, springate-baginski, & mehm ko ko gyi, 2011). in addition to the immediate dangers of dispossession, villagers also rejected the government’s justification for the mining project and the terms of the deal. one argument brought forward by the central government was that chin state should also contribute to the national budget to finance national development, since the poor state was still a net receiver fully financed by the union. in addition, according to media reports and chin politicians, only 2-5% of the benefits or around usd 500,000 were earmarked for chin state (ei ei toe lwin, 2013; mirante, 2017). the resisting villagers, framed as ‘narrow minded’ and ‘anti-development’ by the investor and the government, rejected the project’s unfair distribution of costs and benefits. the promised benefit would amount to only around one us dollar per year and capita, as one villager amusedly remarked in an interview. the major bulk of the benefits would go to the central government’s budget, and the chinese investor according to the sharing agreements (which in the end failed). in public statements, the communities made clear that they regarded the mineral deposits in the mwetaung area as ‘chin property’ to be used for future generations only under a federal system which guaranteed the self-determination of chin state. local land rights activists also claimed that the central government tried to gain control over the mwetaung area by other, more indirect means. they accused the government of shifting the demarcation of the border between chin state and sagaing region and thus shifting the mwetaung area out of the jurisdiction of chin state into the more “mining friendly” sagaing region (mirante, 2017). this process has become known as the ‘boundary issue’. already in 2008, the cnf officially “lambasted the burmese military junta over its plan to add some parts of zomi (chin) state into sagaing division”. according to a media report, “around 8,000 acres of farmland, teak forests and gulu mual called ‘mwe taung’ nickel and chromium mining areas” would be included in the sagaing division (“cnf criticizes burmese regime”, 2008). local land rights groups recently tried to collect historical evidence to prove that chin state slowly lost territory, which had been incorporated by the ‘lowland regions’ since independence, and started to advocate with the local government (interview with land rights activist, january 2017). indigenous rights and transnational mobilization the local communities’ historical and identity-based claims of ownership were also accompanied by international indigenous rights discourses. one of the first public events organized by local civil society groups during the mobilization campaign 26 | aseas 11(1) frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar took up the issue of free prior informed consent (fpic). banners donated by a local civil society organization were displayed at public exhibitions at villages around the mwetaung area (cnrwg, 2013). the banners explained the un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples (undrip) and the concept of fpic as one of its core principles in the burmese language (united nations, 2008). villagers resented the complete lack of information and transparency around the mining project. neither the local government nor the investing company had informed the residents in advance about the plans, despite long running preparations (see table 1). instead, villagers were pressured to provide their consent to the project ad hoc without any clear and detailed information, being only provided with some vague pamphlets (described by one activist as propaganda). also, the environmental impact assessment (eia) and social impact and health assessment (sia/hia) reports, which according to nmic were submitted to the ministry of environmental conservation and forestry in march 2013, were never disclosed to the public (nmic, 2013).18 drawing on international indigenous rights instruments, local civil society groups made use of an emerging transnational indigenous rights discourse in order to defend their interests (myanmar centre for responsible business, institute for human rights and business, & the danish institute for human rights, 2016). in 2015, a coalition of indigenous peoples in myanmar/burma, a network of over 20 (ethnic) organizations (including chin organizations), submitted a report for the 2015 universal periodic review to the un human rights council in geneva. in the report, the network criticized the increasing confiscation of land and the violation of indigenous rights, citing also the mwetaung case (coalition of indigenous peoples in myanmar/burma, 2015). a transnational dimension to the mwetaung campaign was added to the local movement in august 2013 when exile groups, identifying themselves as ‘indigenous zomi’, gathered in cities in the united states, norway, india, australia, and other countries to protest against the planned mining project in their ‘homeland’. in washington dc, representatives of the world zomi congress condemned the suspected “confiscation of land” and exploitation of natural resources in chin state in front of the chinese embassy and called for an immediate stop of the project (khaipi, 2013). in their public statements, they directly referred to the undrip and claimed ownership over their “indigenous land”: we are here today as zomi national indigenous people from burma who are oppressed by our government. the reason we are here today is that the chinese north mining company and the chinese government and the burmese government are mining in our land, our indigenous, own land. . . . as the indigenous people in myanmar, we have the right to claim according to undrip article 25 and 27. that is why the gullu mual nickel project . . . is our own property and we are here to stop it today. therefore, until the burmese government has changed our constitutional law which will give us the right to own our land, we will stop this project. (wzc channel, 2013 [transcript of youtube video, min. 8:45-11:16]) 18 local villagers and activists only received pictures of the report cover, but never copies of the full report. aseas 11(1) | 27 rainer einzenberger while locally the civil society alliance was crossing ethnic and religious divides, including burman buddhist groups, as well as christian ethnic groups, identity-based claims (such as in the quote above) were still obvious. in public consultations, local villagers repeatedly claimed that the mineral deposits were “chin property” to be preserved for future generations and that the myanmar government or chinese investors had no right to extract them. however, in what way local coalitions were directly linked with transnational ‘indigenous zomi’ campaigns against the mwetaung project is still unclear. according to the cnrwg, there was only limited contact with groups overseas. conclusion the case of the mwetaung mining project discussed in this paper illustrates the strategy of accumulation by dispossession in the frontier areas as a persistent element of myanmar’s political economy. through this particular regime of dispossession, described here as frontier capitalism, the periphery is gradually turned into a supplier of resource revenues to fuel economic growth at the center while gaining little benefits itself. the country’s latest transition, including the introduction of a series of legal and political reforms, facilitated investment (in particular from its neighbors) and provided a new dynamic for the expansion of the frontier. this expansion relies on the support of foreign capital, in particular china, since the early 2000s. in the case of the mwetaung project, the attempted dispossession has been successfully challenged, at least for the moment, by a local civil society coalition using new opportunities for political participation. the politics of dispossession in this case were characterized by political strategies targeting newly established democratic institutions. the mobilization was initiated by an ad hoc grassroots coalition based on emerging civil society actors since 2011 (such as the cnrwg). the movement was independent from political parties, but targeted political actors on regional, national, and even transnational political scales. despite bridging ethnic and religious divides locally, demands for indigenous rights and self-determination, including land and resource governance rights were voiced by actors identifying themselves as ethnic chin or indigenous zomi. this divergent and even contradictory character is not uncommon for anti-dispossession movements. while local initiatives did not reject extractive development projects as such, they rejected the authoritarian and non-transparent manner in which this particular project was unfolding. a main concern was the dispossession of their agricultural lands, which are not legally recognized under the current legal framework introduced as part of the current transition. this framework is considered biased towards the majority lowland population and ignorant of ethnic customary practices. given the particular political history in this frontier region, local communities rejected the government’s demands as illegitimate and showed little trust in the promises made by the government and investors. this was mixed with strong anti-chinese sentiments – a legacy of recent experiences in the region and beyond. yet, the frontier regions, including chin state, will likely face further coercive integration and exploitation in the context of future regional initiatives such as chinas belt and road initiative (bri). following china’s involvement, india is also seeking to enhance the integration of trade and investment in the northeast 28 | aseas 11(1) frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar through its bangladesh–china–india–myanmar forum for regional cooperation (bcim) economic corridor. unless the central government and investors are prepared to change their approach and renegotiate conditions of integration, including decentralized decision-making and benefit-sharing agreements, politics of dispossession will continue to shape myanmar’s transition. date chronology of events around the mwetaung (gullu mual) mining project 1960s initial geological surveys by dr. ngaw cin pau 1988 slorc takes over power after uprising in august 1988 1994 slorc adopts new mines law 1995 announcement in government newspaper invites foreign companies to conduct mineral prospecting and exploration operations 2005 kingbao (jinbao) mining ltd of china signed an agreement on nickel mineral exploration and feasibility study with no. 3 mining enterprise of the ministry of mines. after initial explorations, the contract expires. 2010 general elections on november 7 2012 cnf signs 9-point state level ceasefire agreement in january 2012 new negotiations are held in april concerning exploration of minerals in mwetaung with the north petro-chem corporation of china 2012 cnf signs union level 15-point ceasefire agreement in may 2012 north mining investment co. ltd receives permission for ferro nickel deposit feasibility study in may 2013 asia guiding star services company limited (agss) starts to collect data for eia/sia surveys in january 2013 local communities seek advice concerning mwetaug project from kalay csos in january figure 1. location of mwetaung mining project, bordering chin state and sagaing region. (myanmar information management unit, figure by the author). aseas 11(1) | 29 rainer einzenberger 2013 formation of local cso networks at local monastery in kalay 2013 media campaign in kalay town 2013 poster exhibitions on fpic in local villages 2013 village consultation meetings around mwetaung area between january and february with hundreds of participants 2013 civil society coalition on mwetaung is renamed to chinland natural resources watch group (cnrwg) in february 2013 north mining investment co. ltd submits feasibility reports on 'mwetaung nickel smelt-ing project' to the ministries of mines, and environmental conservation and forestry 2013 reports of environmental impact assessment (eia), social impact assessment (sia) and health impact assessment (hia) are submitted to ministry of environmental conservation and forestry 2013 meeting with local political parties in march discussion of mwetaung project at chin state parliament 2013 public consultation with local government and nmic in tiddim town hall, nrwg pres-ents 48 questions in april 2013 nmic holds village meetings 2013 buddhist monk and cnrwg members meet with local media 2013 meeting with chin regional government and chin mps in hakha in may 2013 meeting at tiddim town hall: manager from nmic answer 46 questions 2013 cnrwg sends letter to the mr. quintana, un special rapporteur on myanmar in august 2013 cnrwg and gdi conduct collaborative research in mwetaung area in august and sep-tember 2013 representatives of four chin political parties conduct a survey on the mwetaung project with local communities in september 2013 chin parties meet with state government in hakha 2013 press conference in yangon with cnrw, gdi, chin political parties and civil society representatives 2013 meeting with speaker of union parliament (lower house) shwe mann in kalay in november 2014 according to media reports in january, the gullu mual project has been suspended table 1. chronology of events around the mwetaung (gullu mual) mining project. 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(2014). the media discourse of land grabbing and resistance during myanmar’s legal reformation: the monywa copper mine. law and development review, 7(2), 275-312. 34 | aseas 11(1) frontier capitalism and politics of dispossession in myanmar about the author rainer einzenberger is a phd candidate at the department of development studies, university of vienna. his research interests include political science, land and resource politics, critical geography, and indigenous movements with a regional focus on southeast asia. ► contact: rainer.einzenberger@univie.ac.at acknowledgements i would like to thank all persons involved who supported the research for this paper, in particular the chinland national resources watch group (cnrwg), my friends from chin state, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. the research and publication was financially supported through grants by the university of vienna (kwa) and the faculty of social sciences. _________ chandra crudup, phd, msw, associate clinical professor, school of social work, arizona state university, phoenix az. chris fike, ms, llmsw, clinical social worker with mcdowell healing arts center, saginaw, mi. claire mcloone, lmsw, lecturer, school of social work, arizona state university, phoenix, az. copyright © 2021 authors, vol. 21 no. 2/3 (summer 2021), 654-671, doi: 10.18060/24120 this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. de-centering whiteness through revisualizing theory in social work education, practice, and scholarship chandra crudup chris fike claire mcloone abstract: institutions that frame social work education and prepare future practitioners are firmly rooted in hegemonic philosophies and practices that perpetuate colonization, oppression, and white supremacy. in recognizing that white supremacy is a mechanism of social control, that our current social structure is grounded in liberal-patriarchal capitalism, and that social work conforms to prevailing social norms, we, as social workers, must acknowledge our complicity in perpetuating a white supremacist master narrative (pewewardy & almeida, 2014). the white supremacist ideology inherent within western social work literature, teaching methodologies, and practice strategies only serves to perpetuate an oppressive system. this structure does not envision social workers as agents of change, but rather as essential cogs of the status quo who foster client dependence on a system that is inherently marginalizing. one mechanism for disrupting the white supremacy that has become a master narrative in social work is to create a counter-narrative (pewewardy & almeida, 2014). this paper creates a counter-narrative by using the pyramid of white supremacy framework (safehouse progressive alliance for nonviolence, 2008; tuzzolo, 2016) to critique social work and deconstruct post-racial fallacies ascendant within the profession, and re-visualizes ecological systems framework as a mechanism for de-centering whiteness in social work scholarship, practice, and education. keywords: antiracism; de-centering whiteness; white supremacy; ecological systems framework; counter-narrative; pedagogy; practice; scholarship as a profession informed by such lofty values as service, social justice, dignity and worth of the individual, integrity, competence, and the importance of human relationships (national association of social workers [nasw], 2018), social workers often become so infatuated with the idea of helping or saving “people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty” (nasw, 2018) that we fail to acknowledge the ascendancy of white supremacist norms in our profession. we become socialized by the same hegemony we claim to fight against. this often leaves us blinded to issues of internalized white ideology within the profession and resistant to race-based self-critique (pewewardy & almeida, 2014). we must name white supremacy and intentionally work to disrupt it. as kendi (2019) notes, “the only way of undoing racism is to consistently identify and describe it, and then dismantle it” (p. 9). white supremacy is a mechanism of social control (pewewardy & almeida, 2014). shannon (1970), longres (1972), and mcmahon and allen-meares (1992) identified how white supremacist norms became a master narrative in social work practice, research, and education. one mechanism for disrupting the white supremacy that has become a master about:blank crudup et al./re-visualizing ecological systems theory 655 narrative in social work scholarship, practice, and education is to create a counter-narrative (pewewardy & almeida, 2014). this article serves as a public counter-narrative to that normative white supremacist narrative in social work. we, as authors, outline how the three core pillars of social work (scholarship, practice, and education) perpetuate white supremacy, critique white supremacy frameworks ascendant within social work, deconstruct post-racial fallacies within the profession, and re-visualize ecological systems framework. we, as authors, acknowledge that we are part of a history and profession of social workers, who are collectively responsible for doing the work of decentering whiteness in social work education, practice, and scholarship. therefore, we will use “we” and “us” to acknowledge that as a profession this work must be done by all who educate, practice, organize, are activists, and do research in the name of social work. pyramid of white supremacy in social work as an arm of colonization, social work has foundational roots of racism centering whiteness, maleness, elitism, and anti-immigrant ideals. the most commonly taught origin story of social workfriendly visitorsconsisted of white upper-class women that deemed poverty as a moral deficit and aimed to assimilate immigrants, by othering them and infiltrating their communities (maylea, 2020; park, 2008). similarly, today wellintentioned social work scholars, practitioners, and educators do not always recognize the ways we have inadvertently ascribed to the ideas of white supremacy because the profession is functioning by design in centering whiteness. the pyramid of white supremacy created by safehouse progressive alliance for nonviolence (2008) and then adapted by tuzzolo (2016) helps us identify how socially acceptable practices (covert) and socially unacceptable practices (overt) are all forms of white supremacy and counter to what we say we value in the profession. visual depictions like the pyramid assist us in recognizing how our narrative does not match our actions. connecting covert actions with socially unacceptable forms of racism, we acknowledge the pervasiveness and danger of all forms of white supremacy. realizing the connection of social work’s legacy of oppression guised as moral forms of helping is vital to a path towards an anti-racist narrative forward. moving beyond a critique of our existing frameworks into a true paradigm shift requires reimagined foundations and theories – ones that acknowledge the reality of systemic racism within our own profession. re-visualizing ecological systems framework the ecological systems framework is foundational to social work research, practice, and pedagogy. it is used by practitioners to better understand how a client and their multiple environments influence each other. bronfenbrenner (1986) created a five-level model of personal and environmental influence to address his concerns that developmental psychologists were neglecting the impact of environmental factors on human development, specifically focusing on children (renn, 2003; seshadri & knudson-martin, 2013). his model focused on influences placed upon an individual by their environment, their responses to their environment, and the context of the socially constructed time (renn, advances in social work, summer 2021, 21(2/3) 656 2003). to decenter whiteness from the pillars, we must critically review the ways it has seeped into our foundational theories and frameworks. the traditional social work understanding of the ecological systems framework is often depicted visually by layered circles with macro systems representing the outside circles moving towards a circle in the middle representing the individual at the center of the systems. nesting systems surrounding the individual represent the process and outcomes that each system has on the individual at the core of the system (stormshak & dishion, 2002). this bullseye depiction of the model was created to help better understand the framework. after reviewing the literature, crudup (2014) found the traditional conceptualization (see figure 1) of the ecological systems theoretical model does not seem to accurately depict the interactions among and between systems. though each circle looks embedded, the solid lines of each circle or system visually depicted in the traditional visual model do not allow for the permeation and overlap that often occurs between and among systems. the ecological systems model encompasses both processes and outcomes by placing an individual at the center or origin of development with nested systems surrounding the individual or couple, increasing in distance between the singular self and the self as a component of a much larger community (stormshak & dishion, 2002). figure 1. traditional visual of ecological systems framework this visual representation puts focus and responsibility on the individual to overcome years of historical trauma and social constructs created to prevent them from succeeding rather than a community's responsibility of supporting humanity. distancing the individual from the community is consistent with a systemic structure that puts the pressure on an individual to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, perpetuating a myth that avoids recognition and solutions to deal with societal constructs that do not make that possible for crudup et al./re-visualizing ecological systems theory 657 historically marginalized populations. it centers the idea that one is functioning within a system that sees them and is created for them. this model was created for a system that centers whiteness and maleness, therefore, the model really only functions as originally visualized if the individual at the center is white and male. not only does this reinforce the systems of white patriarchal supremacy and how it works, it visually shows the barriers with the bullseye image. though one could argue that if you are a white person in the middle of this system all of the lines between the individual and each surrounding circle are gray, the fact is the entire model was built with a white person being in the middle. therefore, whiteness is centered, literally. having a relational focus rather than an individual focus could be one way to reimagine how a framework such as the ecological systems framework could de-center whiteness. the individual is by themselves in the middle, with a sole focus, with barriers between them and the systems around them. what would happen if the community was at the center rather than the individual? what if the role individuals play within their community was the focus to balance the importance of an individual's contributions to their society and society’s responsibility to support the individual was more clearly depicted? this framework directly informs social workers’ person-in-environment understanding of working with individuals (karls & wandrei, 1994). focusing on the person rather than the community and how the individual contributes and receives from the community is by design in line with white supremacist ideology. social workers must reconstruct this inherent individualism and focus on how an individual’s health, wellbeing, and sense of self is a direct result of how they contribute to the community, as well as how a community's overall well-being then gives back and contributes to the individuals wellbeing and health. this relational focus as opposed to the individualistic focus has seeped into social work pedagogy, practice, and scholarship, the three pillars, in ways that have made our profession complicit with oppressive white supremacy. we teach multiculturalism rather than racism because it feels better for the individual rather than addressing racism – a more uncomfortable topic, but racism is the core of what we need to address. in scholarship, quantitative research is valued despite it stripping humanity and context from individuals and turning them into manipulatable numbers. in practice, we perpetuate the system by focusing on what the individual can do for themselves and take from society or gains from systems rather than how they can contribute to their community for a mutual individual and collective benefit. crudup (2014) developed a new visual representation that portrays a more accurate reflection of the systems encountered by interracial couples in her study as a means of understanding how systems and social constructions impact their couple identity. crudup’s (2014) ecological systems framework for understanding interracial marriage (see figure 2) used the concept of a funnel rather than the traditional bullseye visual representation previously associated with the ecological systems framework. the funnel represented the social constructions that have been created throughout history, shaping society and influencing history, policy, popular media, and other macro level systems of which individuals and couples are a part. within the funnel there were the two major socially advances in social work, summer 2021, 21(2/3) 658 constructed systems that impacted black female/white male interracial couples: race and gender. the “structural power constructed by whiteness and maleness” has influenced the construction of both concepts and its function within community, social, and familial systems (root, 2001, p. 11). race and gender have socially constructed known roles, boundaries, and expectations that have become understood in society. the overlapping race, gender, community, social networks, and family systems capture how neither acts alone, but each intersects and impacts the other resulting in individual and in the case of crudup’s (2014) research, couple identities. figure 2. ecological systems framework for understanding interracial marriage crudup (2014) used the funnel conceptualization and its incorporation of social construction of the systems framework to understand how black female/white male interracial couples navigated their experiences as an interracial couple. recognizing that the bullseye visual centers whiteness, describing how it perpetuates systemic oppression, and then re-visualizing the ecological systems framework is an example of the work that is needed by the profession to de-center whiteness. if the profession continues to value social justice, we need to be willing to do the work of reconceptualizing a world and a way of practicing that is antiracist. this work is difficult because of how conditioned we have been by whiteness. challenging a core component of a profession, such as ecological systems framework, is difficult not only because of how it has been established within the profession, but also because of the linear way of thinking that was used in the original design. linear notions of understanding are similar to white systemic ways of knowing. we can counter this linear narrative by focusing less on the individual and how they fit within an exclusionary system, and focus more on narratives, testimonials, oral histories, and other ways of knowing that can create a community that crudup et al./re-visualizing ecological systems theory 659 focuses on the actual strengths of every person. adding a racial justice lens and reconstructing the model is an invitation to move back to humanity, at the same time embed and expand our strengths perspective to include the power of both community and individual identities. building on crudup’s (2014) original image we are able to see the systems perspective in a way that more accurately represents how the framework applies to all populations, not just white people, with the revised ecological systems framework (see figure 3). figure 3. revised ecological systems framework the revised ecological systems framework converts crudup’s (2014) image that focused on understanding interracial couple identities to a visual that can be applied similarly to the bullseye depiction of the ecological systems framework. this illustration depicts the overlapping systems that have been influenced and constructed through historical and social constructs, while taking into account the strong implications of race and gender at every level and its impact on an individual moving within those systems. the individual therefore is influenced by and interacts with each system while also holding on to their unique self (self-determination). the individual is a part, but not the sole center of the worlds surrounding them. advances in social work, summer 2021, 21(2/3) 660 figure 4. comparison of traditional and revised ecological systems framework. when viewing the two images side by side (see figure 4), it is clear the revised ecological systems framework image is more intersectional. this aspect alone helps in understanding the true influence and relational nature of all systems demonstrating how they converge and impact each other. the individual moves through and is impacted by the community, and thus the community is impacted by the individual. this relational impact helps better depict the person-in-environment that is a hallmark of the social work profession. the revisualization of this framework allows us to move from a siloed framework that lends to deficit assumptions to a more inclusive focus on strengths. this neutralizes the model to be strengths focused for all communities, not just those benefiting from white privilege. simply reflecting on and revisualizing a core framework in the profession, through a decentering lens, we create a counter-narrative that should start a ripple effect across the pillars that has a long lasting and sustainable impact on our communities. creating a counter-narrative in crafting a counter-narrative we recognize that antiracist approaches to social work require us to challenge professional hegemony through deconstructing, disrupting, and dismantling traditional ivory tower conceptualizations of social work scholarship, practice, and education (tamburro, 2013). we further acknowledge that, historically, antiracist perspectives have fallen short because they “promote equity and parity within a hierarchical system that has been re-inscribed following every movement to dismantle white supremacy” (pewewardy & almeida, 2014, p. 234). to reinforce the urgency of the need to de-center white ideology in social work we must also contextualize this counternarrative within this moment in history, a juncture characterized by the acceptance of black americans dying at the astoundingly disproportionate rate of nearly 1 in 1,000 (or 97.9 per 100,000) as a result of a global pandemic (apm research lab, 2020) and by the normalization of a president of the united states failing to condemn white supremacy during a presidential debate (national public radio, 2020). as pewewardy & almeida crudup et al./re-visualizing ecological systems theory 661 (2014) concede, there is “no better way for people to develop the skills and determination to interrupt white supremacy than to be unsettled by anger, fear, and/or guilt” (p. 231). the counter-narrative outlined herein is one that leans into this revolutionary moment, taps into the emerging racial disquietude, and brings to bear our experiences as social workers, educators, scholars, organizers, and activists. james baldwin spoke of witness, “witness to what i’ve seen and the possibilities that i think i see” (lester, 1984, para. 25). sparked by public witness to the murders of ahmaud arbery by armed vigilantes and of botham jean, atatiana jefferson, breonna taylor, sean reed, tony mcdade, and george floyd at the hands of police, brands, companies, businesses, sports teams, universities, and schools of social work all publicized their support for the movement for black lives. but we also witnessed the emergence of an antiracist narrative that not only failed to challenge the white supremacy master narrative, but served to reinforce it (monteiro, 2020). we saw rich white capitalists donate millions to black lives matter, while at the same time funding and praise were being heaped upon racial justice and antiracist narratives that remained grounded in conservative ideologies and the existing hegemonic structure (monteiro, 2020). then we witnessed the social work profession double back its investment in that white supremacy master narrative while feigning antiracist intentions. for example, we saw the nasw (2020) issue a statement in support of strengthening social worker and police partnerships in response to the ongoing racist violence perpetrated by law enforcement. we even saw an emergence of performative antiracist messaging among other social work institutions, some of which seemed to acknowledge the need to “address the social ills, inequities and systematic disparities that have divided american society” (special commission to advance macro practice in social work, personal communication, 29 june 2020) while others seemed to recognize that social work has, “not yet reckoned with the racism and anti-blackness that exists among ourselves and our key social welfare institutions” (adams & dettlaff, 2020, para. 2); very few actually were willing to name white supremacy. fewer were willing to address the equally destructive nature of oppression perpetuated by fields most closely associated with social work, such as child welfare. the child welfare system is another system complicit with white supremacy across the pillars that the profession must reckon (dettlaff, 2020). this “well intentioned” system historically has perpetuated and caused harm to individuals and communities of marginalized populations in the name of “helping” (mulzer & urs, 2017). the process of moving from witness to action requires us to name and disrupt white supremacy and to craft a counter-narrative that intentionally and specifically de-centers whiteness. three pillars of social work we, as authors, conceptualize social work as consisting of three interlocking pillars: pedagogy, practice, and scholarship. the pillars of social work serve as a system of checks and balances on the profession. each pillar of the profession is important to ensure the profession is meeting its charge to “promote social justice and social change with and on behalf of clients” (nasw, 2018, para.3). the convergence of pillars outlines the advances in social work, summer 2021, 21(2/3) 662 overarching narrative of what social work aspires to be: practice informing pedagogy and scholarship, scholarship informing practice and pedagogy, and pedagogy informing practice and scholarship. each pillar must move beyond cultural awareness and individualistic approaches and deconstruct western ivory tower conceptualizations of pedagogy, practice, and scholarship by holding each linking pillar accountable to do the same. it is also important to highlight that two of the three pillars mostly fall within academia. those teaching future generations of social workers and advancing social work scholarship must begin doing the work to truly shift the narrative of our racist profession. mcmahon & allen-meares (1992) posited the question of whether social work was racist. their content analysis focused on interventions with historically marginalized populations. they found that the social work profession was superficial in its attempts to be antiracist because of its colorblind approach, its normalized oppression of clients by centering awareness of social workers, its intense focus on the individual rather than the structural systems that need to be addressed to assist the client, and its repetitive nature of normalizing the status quo (mcmahon & allen-meares, 1992). despite concluding that, “programs will require a more advocating, proactive, organized, and antiracist stance from the profession” (mcmahon & allen-meares, 1992, p. 538), the profession continues to struggle with how to actually de-center racist white patriarchal ideologies that infiltrate our pedagogy, practice, and scholarship. in the almost 30 years since the publication of the work of mcmahon & allen-meares (1992), it seems as though there is a disconnect among the pillars. while there has been scholarship asking the right questions and determining that the profession needs to move towards being antiracist, there continues to be a struggle to de-center whiteness within each of the pillars (kolivoski et al., 2018; maylea, 2020; pewewardy & almeida, 2014). the profession itself continues to grapple with how to address the work that must be done to eradicate white supremacist ideologies from within the profession. it is the responsibility of social workers and allied organizations within each pillar to address ways in which we have been and continue to be complicit in perpetuating white patriarchal systems that are harmful to historically marginalized populations. contextualizing the pillars pedagogy the pillar of pedagogy is the foundation of the profession. it is within this pillar the journey of every social worker begins. this pillar is responsible for building a firm understanding of the ethics and values of the profession, the skill set of working with individuals, groups, and community settings, the value of ongoing learning and practitioner self-reflection, and all other aspects of quality related to the social work profession. it is within this pillar that we educate the next generation of scholars on what is valued in scholarship and practice. field experience is a staple component of the social work pedagogical structure for the preparation and development of the practitioner (cswe, 2008). practice and scholarship directly influence what is taught, and what is taught directly influences practice and scholarship. therefore, pedagogy is the place we often see the crudup et al./re-visualizing ecological systems theory 663 perpetuating of white patriarchal ideas. it is here that much of what has been done in practice or scholarship is seen being repeated as the guide post on how social workers are supposed to practice or conduct research. a critical conceptualization of social work education frames learning as a practice of freedom, wherein educators create spaces for students to critically and creatively engage reality to discover how to participate in sociocultural transformation (freire, 1970). decentering whiteness in social work pedagogy demands that we address underlying colonial philosophies rather than simply altering theoretical frameworks and choosing different methods (crampton, 2015; gray et al., 2013). as integrated members in institutions that perpetuate colonization, social work educators have a responsibility not only to decolonize and deconstruct or de-center whiteness in social work (tamburro, 2013), but to amplify critical antiracist frameworks. ideas of “multiculturalism” and “cultural competence” stand in the way of a clear and untethered examination of white supremacy (kolivoski et al., 2018; pewewardy & almeida, 2014). for example, critical race theory is discussed as a pedagogical answer to the shortcomings of social work’s flawed multiculturalism perspectives (kolivoski et al., 2018), but is not quantified, assured, prioritized or required in standard practice. doing so would no doubt be met with controversy given that social work tends to conform to prevailing social norms and that any work that counters those racist master narratives tends to be met with experiences of anger, fear, and/or guilt, particularly from white consumers (pewewardy & almeida, 2014). in order for pedagogical changes to hold any weight in our lived realities, we must connect them to tangible, material changes in our communities. otherwise, pedagogical changes only exist to uphold the performance we seek to abandon. social work educators must teach students how to recognize and confront colonized approaches and spaces as a means of shifting the educational paradigm beyond colonial constraints. inclusion of such approaches must move beyond superficial discussions but rather include in depth exploration and practice of how to disrupt generations of historical systemic trauma. new theories that abandon individualism and provide space for a realignment towards truly ethical social work are a starting point for the radical change this moment necessitates. crudup’s (2014) model, along with the revised ecological systems framework (see figure 3) creates a starting point where the true complexity of social problems can be captured, analyzed, and understood pedagogically. students in field must develop tools to define and operationalize colonization, decolonization, and deconstruction. instructors must be able to teach these concepts and be able to critically examine colonized social work classroom spaces and pedagogical approaches. pedagogy must move beyond the hollow fulfillment of vague accreditation criteria which frames antiracism as a linear objective focused on individual self-reflection, rather than a material reality that is imperative to the health of all of society. historical context should frame the rationale for why we must deconstruct, disrupt, and dismantle traditional social work pedagogy in our current sociopolitical climate. social work educators must learn to recognize and confront problematic ways in which we perpetuate educational models that are anti-black and center whiteness. social work pedagogy should transform classroom spaces (in-person and online) and shift the educational paradigm. this advances in social work, summer 2021, 21(2/3) 664 would entail a radical reassessment of foundational theories, assessment methods, and institutional cultures. it necessitates that we are actively interrogating our own ideas, supporting one another in accountability, and changing harmful dynamics within our own organizations. we can begin this work by having guest speakers from historically marginalized populations share with our students about topics not directly tied to historically marginalized populations. this avoids the dehumanizing pitfall of tokenizing our colleagues and valuing them for their skill set. social work educators must equip practitioners and scholars with the language and context to recognize and confront the ideology of white supremacy inherent within hegemonic conceptualizations of the profession. educators must challenge and recognize ways in which they perpetuate colonized philosophies, pedagogies, and research methodologies. this means that instructors both in the classroom and in the field must name and address the ways racism is threaded through the systems and profession, rather than avoid discussions due to individual discomfort (hair, 2015). it is imperative that educators can disrupt antiquated anti-black and white-centered pedagogical practices and explore the role of individual and collective critical consciousness in deconstructing social work education. the council of social work education must intentionally hold programs accountable to the inclusion of such pedagogical practices and curriculum to ensure that the profession is actively dismantling the racism and oppressive ways that have nestled themselves within the preparation process of practitioners and scholars. practice the practice pillar is the heart of the profession. it is the central realization of the pedagogy taught and the lessons learned from scholarship. it is the practical application of theory that has lasting impact and change on communities and individuals we work with. practice is the most public-facing, frontline aspect of the field. social workers have been seen making changes in individual lives, within communities, and influencing policy at local, state, and national levels for almost 150 years. practice is the profession. it is the implementation of skills taught in the pedagogy pillar and actualization of the evidencebased practices demonstrated in the scholarship pillar. the practice pillar interlocks with scholarship through practice-oriented research, using scholarship to inform practice, and teaming up with scholars to evaluate innovative new practices. this is where the opportunity to perpetuate or prevent harm is most tangible. it is within this pillar that individual social workers have direct contact with historically marginalized populations and are responsible for not invoking further trauma. without the other pillars doing the work to address this, industry standards continue to gloss over true reparative work that social workers should be doing with individuals and communities. it is the role of licensing committees and regulatory boards to continue to identify, describe, and dismantle ways in which practitioners are held accountable to do no harm-including oppression. at the same time, we must recognize licensing boards are not immune from systemic racism, and may not be the only solution (castex, 2019; woodcock, 2016). without understanding the impact of colonization, social workers are not prepared to engage in the social justice work that guides our professional values and ethics (tamburro, 2013). further, institutions that prepare future practitioners – namely, academia and crudup et al./re-visualizing ecological systems theory 665 professional associations-remain firmly rooted in hegemonic philosophies and practices that perpetuate colonization, oppression, and white supremacy (gray et al., 2013; pyles, 2016). the white supremacist ideology inherent within the majority of western social work literature, teaching methodologies, and practice strategies only serves to perpetuate an oppressive system. this structure does not envision social workers as agents of change, but rather as the cogs of the status quo who foster client dependence on a system that is inherently marginalizing. social work practice must move away from this dynamic if we ever want to move beyond the lip service of what our value statements are to actualizing an anti-racist and anti-oppressive profession. recognizing and dismantling colonized professional practices aligns with antioppressive critical theory as well as with critical constructivism (eketone & walker, 2013). practice methodologies that integrate a decolonizing framework focus on critique and deconstruction of and resistance to the dominant western structures that create and maintain oppression and exploitation while also acknowledge the inherent validity of accumulated knowledge within oppressed societies, particularly socially constructed values, cultural ethics, and language (eketone & walker, 2013). decolonized practice methods are often grounded in a grassroots perspective on professional engagement, looking to community members as experts of their own experiences, strengths, and needsinformed by native american traditions, worldviews, and practices (eketone & walker, 2013). de-centering whiteness from social work practice requires us to challenge professional hegemony through deconstructing, disrupting, and dismantling western ivory tower conceptualizations of practice. this work demands that we address underlying colonial philosophies rather than simply altering theoretical frameworks and choosing different methods (crampton, 2015; gray et al., 2013;). practitioners must recognize and confront colonized approaches and spaces as a means of shifting the practice paradigm for working with individuals and communities beyond colonial constraints. practitioners must become accustomed to dismantling notions of white patriarchal systems that permeate micro, meso, and macro levels of social work. the revised ecological systems framework is a catalyst to begin this work, which is non linear and a continuous process. social workers must be able to identify language and context to recognize and confront the ideology of white supremacy inherent within hegemonic conceptualizations of social work practice. practitioners must recognize ways in which they perpetuate colonized philosophies, strategies, and practice methodologies, and disrupt antiquated colonial practice approaches. they must learn to move beyond the individualized nature inherent in the core frameworks from which they work to approaching their work through collective critical consciousness that is able to deconstruct social work practice. organizations like nasw and association of social work boards (aswb) must revisit their purpose to not only advocate for communities and social work practitioners but to also ensure that social work professionals are held accountable with service protocols, hiring standards, funding sources, and addressing personal bias. advances in social work, summer 2021, 21(2/3) 666 scholarship the scholarship pillar has legitimized the profession. through establishing sound evidence to support the work that is done by practitioners, social work researchers provide the evidence needed to justify funding to continue work supported by government and other funding agencies. social work scholars serve as members of interdisciplinary research teams that impact every aspect of human well-being from the individual to influencing policy change. beyond evaluating and building knowledge to inform social work practice, the scholarship pillar assesses and evaluates the other two pillars. while social work scholars have started to recognize and acknowledge the ways in which traditional western research methods perpetuate colonialism (gray et al., 2013; pyles, 2016), the institutions that employ scholars – namely academia, professional associations, and research centers – continue to encourage hegemonic philosophies and practices that promote the perpetuation of oppression and white supremacy. an antiracist social work framework requires that the profession must acknowledge its complicity in colonizing practices and research projects and condemn past and ongoing effects of colonialism (gray et al., 2013). evidence based practice – a term social work borrowed from the medical profession (jenson & howard, 2013) – is one mechanism that social work scholarship has used as a gatekeeping mechanism. though gatekeeping is not inherently something to be avoided, we must be cautious on how it is used intentionally or unintentionally to exclude. one way of doing this is to move towards evidence based africentric practice that ensures a comprehensive scope of the practice when working with our complex society (gilbert et al., 2009). de-centering whiteness within the pillar of scholarship means deconstructing oppressive aspects of research from design, implementation, analysis, and dissemination. decolonized research methodologies align with anti-oppressive critical theory as well as with critical constructivism (eketone & walker, 2013). research methodologies that integrate decolonization frameworks tend to focus on critique and deconstruction of the dominant western structures that create and maintain oppression and exploitation (eketone & walker, 2013). decolonizing methodologies demonstrate hegemonic resistance through acknowledging the inherent validity of accumulated knowledge within oppressed societies, particularly socially constructed values, cultural ethics, and language (eketone & walker, 2013). social work scholars who integrate decolonized research methods recognize that research involves more than simply visiting a community, doing the work, and leaving (gray et al., 2013). gray et al., (2013) reference community-based participatory research (cbpr) as a methodological example, wherein scholars are expected to spend time with participants, become a part of the community, and learn “through direct experience and sustained interaction with people in the community” (p. 15). decolonized research methods are often informed by a grassroots perspective on scholarship, looking to community members as experts of their own experiences, strengths, and needs. social work scholars must undo racism within their research by identifying, describing and dismantling the way it seeps into their work (kendi, 2019). they must do this at every step of the research process, including examining and naming their own biases, beliefs, and ways of knowing. critically examining methodologies, theories, and dissemination crudup et al./re-visualizing ecological systems theory 667 practices is a challenge when confronting larger ways of knowing, but must be done to address embedded mechanisms of whiteness that infiltrate knowledge production and dissemination. this means utilizing case studies, participatory action research (par), video ethnography, and other methodologies that capture a holistic narrative that critically analyzes beyond the individual and captures more than the depersonalizing nature of solely reductive quantitative scholarship. par is viewed as an example of a decolonized approach, one in which people from the community are engaged from problem definition though to findings dissemination (gray et al., 2013). grounded in critical constructivism, video ethnography integrates elements of a decolonized research methodology by enabling researchers to reobserve, and analyze, the nuances of an interview that are not always captured, documented, or remembered through “re-living” a live account of the interview leading to greater accuracy and more information gleaned (gottdiener, 1979). one of the most notable organizations to advance and legitimize the scholarship pillar is the society for social work and research (sswr). sswr “advances, disseminates, and translates research that addresses issues of social work practice and policy and promotes a diverse, just, and equitable society” (sswr, 2021, para. 5). though this mission aligns well with the nasw code of ethics’ description of a profession that promotes social justice and social change, not one of the seven statements of its mission explicitly references the promotion of a diverse, just, and equitable society. nor does the sswr mission include the disruption and deconstruction of white patriarchal systemic ways of knowing through methodologies or dissemination. social work scholars and organizations must deconstruct colonial ways of conducting and disseminating research to de-center mechanisms of whiteness with the social work profession. this includes acknowledging ways of complicity and reflecting on the ways scholarship impacts the other pillars by shackling knowledge production through perpetuating white patriarchal norms within the profession. rather than being a resource for social work practitioners, responding to the needs in the field, institutions separate themselves and create barriers for collaboration. one example of this includes exorbitant conference fees. another is scholarship published behind a paywall, where it often remains within academia, inhibiting the ability for meaningful scholarship to reach the people who need it most. conclusion ...it is absolutely too late for you to be an ally. at this moment in history, as we move to abolish racism, it calls for you to either be an accomplice or completely get out of the way. ~ rev. dr. stephany rose spaulding (spaulding, 2020, para. 1) in recognizing that white supremacy is a mechanism of social control, that our current social structure is grounded in liberal-patriarchal capitalism, and that professional social work tends to conform to prevailing social norms (pewewardy & almeida, 2014), we have to acknowledge social work’s complicity in perpetuating a white supremacist master narrative. if the social work profession is going to continue forward with such aspirational values such as service, social justice, dignity and worth of the individual, integrity, competence, and the importance of human relationships (nasw, 2018), then we have to advances in social work, summer 2021, 21(2/3) 668 be intentional about de-centering whiteness in scholarship, practice, and pedagogy. there must be an immediacy to this work. the interlocking pillars create an accountability system that can and should hold the profession accountable in decentering whiteness. each pillar has a responsibility to do their part and not leave it to another pillar to pick up and lead, we all must be leaders in actualizing the values of our profession. it is time to move beyond identifying and describing the ways that white supremacy have infiltrated the three pillars 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(2016). abuses and mysteries at the association of social work boards. research on social work practice, 26(2), 225-231. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049731515574346 author note: address correspondence to chandra crudup, school of social work, arizona state university, phoenix, az, 85004. email: ccrudup@asu.edu acknowledgment: some content within this article was previously presented in the unpublished doctoral dissertation a multi-decade look at black female/white male interracial marriages (crudup, 2014). https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155008422952523&set=a.85127512522.81621.626002522&type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155008422952523&set=a.85127512522.81621.626002522&type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155008422952523&set=a.85127512522.81621.626002522&type=3&theater https://doi.org/10.1177/1049731515574346 pyramid of white supremacy in social work re-visualizing ecological systems framework creating a counter-narrative three pillars of social work contextualizing the pillars conclusion international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 581 revolutionary love: cyc and the importance of reclaiming our desire kathleen s. g. skott-myhre and hans a. skott-myhre abstract: as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, the question of what we do and why we do it as cyc workers cannot be ethically separated from the lived suffering, social and cultural marginalization, and direct oppression of the young people with whom we engage. the fundamental question is whether we accede to the demands of an ever more indifferent and brutalizing system of abstract economic rule, or respond with new forms of value, ways of living and caring for one another. this article will propose a framework of revolutionary love in partial response to these questions. the article will present a theoretical framework for a politics of child and youth care premised in the post-marxist writings on love and capitalism in the work of gille deleuze, felix guattari, and antonio negri. keywords: capitalism, desire, child and youth care, deleuze and guattari, love kathleen s. g. skott-myhre, psy.d. is an assistant professor in the college of social sciences psychology department at the university of west georgia, 1601 maple street, carrollton georgia, u.s.a., 30118. email: kskott@westga.edu hans skott-myhre, ph.d. is an associate professor of child and youth studies at brock university, 500 glenridge avenue, st. catharines, ontario, canada, l2s 3a1. email: hskottmy@brocku.ca mailto:kskott@westga.edu mailto:hskottmy@brocku.ca international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 582 the question of feelings and sociality if the field of child and youth care is centered on the development and nurturance of relationships, then it might well be argued that a defining aspect of our work must engage the realm of affect and emotion. certainly, for those working on the line in the day-to-day interactions between young people and adults in the countless institutional and quasi-institutional settings where we encounter young people, there is no more disruptive or rewarding aspect to what we do than the expression of feelings. indeed, the functional capacity of a given program or classroom is often centered on the management and manipulation of emotionally-driven interactions between all of the people involved, both young and older. such a web of affect and emotion comprises a kind of dynamic ecology with all of the features of the more familiar biological environmental ecologies. felix guattari (2005) makes this point, when he reminds us that our very survival depends not just on our ability to manage the biosphere in which we live, but also the delicate and complex ecologies of our socially constituted consciousness and interwoven affective connectivity. he argues that the three ecologies (social, environmental, and conscious) are deeply interdependent. without a healthy biosphere, human life would be severely challenged at the very level of survival. however, human consciousness plays a powerful role in shaping the physical environment in which we live. the way that we deploy our thoughts and creative capacities determines what we produce and how we produce it. our rationality and reason give us the possibility of assessing the impacts of our behaviors on the biosphere. to the degree that we are capable of seeing clearly and accurately the ways in which our creative activities positively or negatively impact the web of life, upon which we are dependent, we are able to flourish in concert with each other species. guattari (2005) argues that both the biosphere and forms of social consciousness can sustain similar kinds of ecological damage that can weaken both the physical biodiversity and resilience of our social capacities. he makes the case that just as the physical environment has suffered degradation, so has the world of thought and sociality. in terms of the physical environment, the historical period that encompasses the development of industrial capitalism and the european colonial project has produced massive shifts in the environment that include the loss of significant degrees of biodiversity and an increase in the level of substances that are toxic to living organisms. the shift from industrial capitalism to the current mode of virtual global capital has been marked by an alarming escalation in levels of pollution, unsustainable increases in human populations, and resulting levels of consumption that have shifted weather patterns in ominous and troubling ways. guattari argues that these negative developments have been matched in the arenas of human sociality and our capacity for creative thought and consciousness. he asserts international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 583 that key modes of sociality such as solidarity, universes of fraternity, sociability, neighborhood, human warmth, and inventiveness might well be listed on the endangered species list of thought and praxis. we would argue, that these modes of sociality are key to the work we do with young people and that if they are threatened under the current mode of capitalist economy, then this becomes a political issue of significant importance to child and youth care theorists and practitioners. desiring production the question of affect is crucial here. it is through our mutual emotional connections and affiliations that we construct our relations. and it is through our affective encounter with the world that we form the capacity for thought and, through the combination of thought and feeling, our very ability to be creative and to produce our world together (spinoza, 2000). this is what deleuze and guattari (1983) refer to as desiring production. in this sense, desire is not premised in lacking anything, as in the desire to acquire that which we don’t have. instead, desiring production is the desire to act, to create, and to produce. such desire, deleuze and guattari (1983) argue, is the foundation of all forms of human creativity and hence all forms of human sociality. what is in crisis, then, in our human social ecologies, is the ability to freely engage our desire. it is marx (1978) who reminds us that capitalism appropriates not just our laboring bodies, but also our modes of thought and how we come to see the world. althusser (1971) called this ideology and argues that what we come to think of as common sense is actually the world given to us by the dominant logic of our age. pignarre and stengers (2011) call the ability of capitalism to convince us that the logic of the dollar is the logic of life, a form of sorcery. they propose that capitalism’s ability to appropriate the fabric of social and emotional production is premised in the ability to have us believe that the logic of capitalism is eternal. that is to say, that rampant individualism, selfishness, the money sign as the primary driver of society, and a radical disregard for future consequences, is intrinsic to human thought and behavior. pignarre and stengers suggest that capitalism would have us believe that capitalist logic is simply the way things have always been, will always be, and there is no real alternative to capitalism. guattari (2005) refers to this as the logic of “ignorance and fatal passivity” (p. 34). to counter such a logic, pignarre and stengers (2011) suggest that we need to develop a counter-sorcery, an alternative common sense, if you will. if capitalism holds us in a trance that denies any form of living except subjection to its logic and domination, then to break the trance, we must access an experience powerful enough to wake us up to the reality of our creative capacities. as marx (1978) powerfully informs us, we must come to understand that we produce the world in our material and actual interactions. to understand the contradiction here, it is important to remember that capitalism is a system of abstract signs, such as money, that doesn’t produce anything substantive. as negri (1996) tells us, to survive and expand, capitalism must appropriate our living creativity and transform it into the abstraction of money. this is a sleight of hand through international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 584 which capitalism convinces us that what we do is worth merely what can be measured in money. the trick can work only if we cooperate in the illusion. the magic trick can be seen for what it is and a new mode sociality engaged, only if we seize back our own desiring production. capitalist appropriation of our social lives we would argue that it is through fields of engagement, founded in human relationships, such as child and youth care, that desiring production can be engaged and put to work. to do this, it is important to challenge the ways in which the abstract system of capitalist value has inveigled itself into the very fabric of our social lives. in its most recent iteration, capitalism has gone beyond dominating and controlling our bodies so that we are willing to subject our physical creative capacities to the regimes of the factory. under the current mode of production, it is our very ability to think and to interact that has become the object of capitalist subjectification. we have replaced the physical tedium of the factory for the mind numbing tedium of the call center. in this shift, capitalism has begun to appropriate our capacity for communicating, socializing, caring, and thinking together. as hardt and negri (2009) have pointed out, this has infected our workplaces through the new technologies of social networking. in our own field, we can see an emphasis on the importance of teams working together smoothly and managing the affective, emotional components of our work together. indeed, a child and youth care worker’s evaluation may well include commentary on how well you interact with your teammates and how well you control your negative affects. you might need to take courses on anger management, either for yourself, or so you can manage the feelings of the youth with whom you work, or even your fellow team members. it has become important that you learn to be happier at work. to evidence satisfaction with your employment is now part of your responsibilities. it doesn’t matter how well you work with young people and families, getting along with your teammates and management becomes a central task. having good social skills and effectively communicating with others become central to your evaluation. it is important to note that many of the responsibilities of managing the affective relations of the workplace fall to women, as that group that has traditionally been responsible for these functions in the home. as they move from the home into the workplace, they are expected to transfer nurturance and caring from their family to their co-workers (skott-myhre, 2015). of course, one might argue that good social skills, communication, and teamwork are essential elements of good child and youth care work. however, it is not the skill sets themselves that are at issue. it is their appropriation to the ends of the system of value that is capitalism. to be a good team player means to avoid friction, disruption, disobedience, and resistance to command. to effectively communicate means to seamlessly disseminate the messages and instructions of the institution. to care for others means to make sure that they are happy, which translates into compliance with the corporate dictates of what looks like emotional satisfaction. one should demonstrate how pleased one is to work here. our teams must care for each other in such a way that we all international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 585 are working as one joyful productive unit. it is, as hardt and negri (2009) put it, a corruption of our social and emotional capacities, or as guattari would have it, a degradation of our social, emotional, and intellectual ecologies. to the degree that the above-mentioned corruption and degradation have infiltrated our work, it turns our intended goal of deploying relationship as a life affirming force into a copy that turns on itself. in this turning, our desiring production, as emotions, thoughts and sociality, becomes frustrated and blocked. this blockage can cause an overwhelming sense of frustration, futility, and impotence. our very ability to care for one another is turned into a pale shadow of its truly revolutionary potential and is diverted to the needs of the abstract addiction that is capitalism. is it any wonder that under such circumstances, we experience epidemic levels of burnout, anxiety, and depression (smullens, 2012) or that we turn away from our central work of creating productive social relations with the young people we encounter and instead put our energies into becoming “professionals”? the obstacles to our desiring production close off our access to affect based in actual material relations. instead of being able to come together to discuss the ways that our workplace impinges on our freedom to work with young people and each other in socially relevant ways, we are left with a severely diminished set of possible conversations about discipline, control, trauma, diagnosis, and so on (see mattingly, stuart, & vanderven, 2010). if we do discuss our emotions, it is within the framework of our own separate and individual struggles. seldom do we have a conversation as a “team” about the common experiences we share of anxiety, depression, and impotence. if we do, such conversations tend to center around our own individual limitations, traumatic histories, or lack of social/emotional competence. indeed, most of the conversations about emotions are decidedly managerial. we discuss how we might manage our feelings in the workplace rather than what social and material conditions might be at the root of our discomfiture (hardt & negri,2009; koeske & koeske 1989). feelings such as love, solidarity, and affectionate caring for young people are often carried on as if they were an aside and not the primary impetus of our work. if we engage with powerful feelings such as love, we are frequently dismissed as overly sentimental or not seriously engaged in the clinical practice of behavioral change. in fact, robust positive affects such as love are mostly discussed in the framework of a problem, such as a transgression of what is considered to be a professional boundary or as a dangerous engagement between co-workers who are erotically or romantically involved. of course, there is always the issue of an erotic or emotional relationship, or a fantasized relationship between a young person and a worker. in short, conversations about powerful emotions such as love are held within the framework of threats to the institution or as a disciplinary issue. here again, our emotional capacities, even those with a positive valence, are regulated and controlled by institutional and professional parameters, rather than constituted by the actual relations between those doing the work. international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 586 self-care and boundaries the institutional management of powerful emotions in our work is relegated to the questions of self-care and boundaries. we are warned not to let our feelings have too much impact in the workplace. love, but not too much. care, but with boundaries. protect yourself from your engagement with other living humans because they can compromise your professional positioning and your smooth functioning as a good worker. be sure to remain in full control of your feelings at all times. if you need help with this, the institution will provide workshops, trainings and even outside help to assist you in using your capacity for relationship to the benefit of the institution. the training we receive, both culturally and professionally, in the paradigm of the psychological individual supports these institutional frameworks. the idea that our emotions reside within us and are our responsibility, promotes the belief that we must be in control. if we experience negative or dystonic affects, it is because of some lack on our part. if we are anxious, worried, or depressed, it is because we have not learned to manage the traumas and vicissitudes of life, or perhaps we are suffering from a biological or chemical imbalance. the solution to such dilemmas is either to learn to manage our feelings through the application of reason and rationality, or to seek to have our biochemistry altered by the pharmaceutical/medical industry. in this, there is no opportunity to discuss the pervasive commonality of these affects. the fact that most of us are experiencing these dystonic affects and that maybe such affects are not simply the effect of a dysfunctional individual psychology or biology is hidden from view and excluded from discussion. if we could talk about our experiences together, we might discover that such feelings could be a response to a dysfunctional social system as we have suggested above. if we were to have these discussions, then we might well think about our programs not as amalgams of individual psychopathology shared to varying degrees by young people and adults, but as collectivities premised in what we hold in common. we might consider our programs from the perspective of an emotional milieu where feelings happen between people, not within people. in this, our discussions might center on how we as a group could set and produce the emotional temperature of our program. the focus would move from the management of individual emotions, to exploration of how our common experiences might inform our understandings of what is happening to us collectively within the institutions where we work. the emotional temperature of a program would be understood as responsive to an ever shifting, complex, and specific mix of personal history, social hierarchies, physical environmental constraints, and institutional norms and behavioral expectations. in short, our programs would become premised in the practical application of the idea that we think and we feel, and we act collectively. international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 587 accessing our desire we argue, that the vehicle for making this kind of shift lies in our ability to access our desire. this kind of desire, as noted above, is not premised in any kind of lack. indeed, deleuze and guattari (1983) point out that lack is the driving engine of capitalist rule. it is through the idea that something is always missing from our lives, that we are deficient in some way, and that capitalism can create us as subjects who consume. deleuze (1992) makes this case when he argues that under global capital, we are controlled by our credit reports. our credit reports are, of course, based on the degree to which we successfully manage debt. under the current system, we are encouraged from all sides to expend more than we have for things that are sold to us, as though they were the answer to our dystonic sense of alienation and impotence. such a social system is premised on an ongoing perception that there is never enough, but if we keep accumulating, someday we will win the lottery and be secure and in command of our destiny. deleuze calls this a system of infinite deferral in which our goals are always deferred and unattainable. for example, no degree, diploma, or training program will assure us secure ongoing employment. as soon as we become certified professionals, the requirements change or the job category literally disappears. this set of contradictions and antagonisms functions through the logic of what deleuze and guattari (1983) term the paranoid pole of production. this mode of production restricts social capacities and movements by overdetermining them according to pre-set patterns of meaning. such meaning is not derived from the actual lived experience of life rather through “an absolute system of belief…permanently fixed and exhaustively defined by a supreme authority, figure-head, or god” (holland, 1999, p. 3). such authority operates from outside the material realm and derives its absolute rule from its universal coding of living force. capitalism over-codes the rich and infinitely variable flows of life into the singular form of the money sign. since the money sign is both an arbitrary and abstract form absolutely separate from life, when the value of living things is measured according to money they will invariably come up short. in other words, there will always be a sense of lack driving human beings to try to attain more of an ever shifting and abstract sign that is ultimately alien to their interests. we can see this capitalist over-coding in the work we do when a program puts “financial survival” as measured in grant dollars and funding over the actual needs of living staff and children. indeed, this is the discourse that tells us that there is not enough money for schools, medical care, decent housing, and the like, yet there is more than enough money for wars, mansions, and yachts. it is the language of austerity in which the well-being of stock markets and national economies are given more importance than the subsistence needs of living species, human and other. this story of lack, where there is never enough, frames our desires as inevitably frustrated by definition. the alternative definition of desire is derived from within the lived experience of the actual material realm. it is founded in the living force of life itself, which is infinitely creative and always collective. there is nothing abstract about it. it operates through production from the smallest atomic particle to the largest cosmic configuration of international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 588 galaxies and dark matter. it operates, as guattari has suggested, continuously as a series of interwoven ecologies. in this sense, our human desires are never built upon abstraction, but out of our literal idiosyncratic capacities as singular bodies in combination with other bodies to produce webs of actions and thoughts. deleuze and guattari (1983) tell us that we never speak, write, think, or act in isolation. all of our thoughts and actions are premised in relationship. this is the source of our desire as the collective force to act and produce. deleuze and guattari propose that we are all working together all the time. each of us in our own productions is composed of all the people and elements we have and will encounter. we lack nothing because we have all of the force of the cosmos available to us. we are a crowd. who is our crowd? the idea of life force, of course, takes us back to the question of relationship in child and youth care. who is our crowd? it is simply all of us. it is everyone we encounter during our work together. this is the reason that it is so important to the systems of domination to keep us isolated, fearful of each other, and insecure about our capacities for production. if we actually accessed our crowd from within the work we do, child and youth care would become a powerful set of activities indeed. however, it is not simply the youth and adults we encounter physically in our day-to-day work. although we may be separated by geography, time, and differences in culture and social practices, in a globalized world, we now all operate as a kind of community. with access to the internet and increased flows of human beings and other species across, what can only be called, the mythical borders of the nation state, the idea that any of us operates in isolation is patently ridiculous (hardt & negri, 2009). indeed, whether we know it or not we are involved, quite literally, in the three ecologies of environment, thought, and consciousness that guattari described. our modes of desiring production are constantly bringing the future into being. this is happening at the level of a child and youth care program within its own physical parameters, and it is also happening in all the global interactions on the internet and other social media that staff and young people access daily. the question is: what future is to be called forth? which form of desire will define who we are to become? it is to this end that the force of life and desire, as played out in the relational work in child and youth care, becomes forcefully political. and it is here that the question of desire as affective force can be re-engaged. if, as we noted above, relationships are driven and produced through affective and emotional resonance, then desire as productive force flows along trajectories of feeling. perhaps, in our work, one of the most powerful passionate resonances not driven by lack is what we might call political love. given our description of the mechanisms of capitalist domination and emancipation through our desiring production as a collective project, we might well define political love as the creation of new forms of community that serve the common desire of us all. if this were the case, then our relational task as child as youth care workers would shift from the registers of lack and control towards experimentation with international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 589 the force of living desire. in other words, we would shift our work away from attempting to manage and control young people and, instead, work with them on developing new ways to perceive the world and our place in it. through this, we might explore alternative methods for developing joint capacities for creativity. as social and cultural innovators, we could possibly seek out new configurations of identity premised in our fresh encounters with our “crowd”. abandoning lack to search for this new identity, we would need to abandon lack in all its variations and codes. the regimes of traditional psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry with their focus on dysfunction, diagnosis, and developmental over-coding would be abandoned in favor of models of desire and the unconscious premised in the richness of our collective force working together for a common purpose. as guattari (2010) points out, perhaps we have the unconscious we deserve already pre-structured and over-coded with the language of lack and deficit. alternate models of unconscious desire rooted in the earliest pre-structural writings of freud (1997), the schizoanalytic writings of deleuze and guattari (1983), or the work of the psychiatric hypnotist milton erickson (erickson & rossi, 1980) might form a new framework for how we could move away from ourselves and our subjectivity. in these writings, we might be able to find a way to think about our relationship with young people and each other, premised in the ways we could connect collectively through our common experiences and modes of creative expression (krueger, 2005). we could explore the contingent production of our mutual modes of who we are constantly becoming rather than engaging in the archeological exercises of exploring the trauma of who we have been. such an investigation would not be framed by pre-existing frameworks developed by disciplinary experts, but premised in material and contemporary tangible sets of relations not transcendent abstraction. this would require that we abandon the intoxicating effects of abstract codes and idealist aspirations in favor of the sobriety of actual encounter. hardt and negri (2009) tell us that this kind of work is the fundamental political task. to develop new modes of subjectivity and consciousness as the primary driving impetus for our work reconfigures the field of child and youth work away from complicity with the dominant system of rule and towards what hardt and negri (2009) propose as love as revolt. love hardt and negri (2009) tell us that love, in this sense, is not love as traditionally imagined within the dominant sphere of social coding that is capitalism. such love is neither passive nor spontaneous. this love is not bounded by the binary world of the couple, the stifling confines of the family, or the paranoid configurations of the nation, the people, or the community. indeed, hardt and negri propose that we seek to love those most alien to us first, in order to expand the field of love as far as we can. this is love of the crowd as those closest and those furthest away. implied here, is the idea that love does not simply happen to us, as if it were an event that mystically arrives from international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 590 elsewhere. we must actively love in the same way we actively create our lives and ourselves together from all the elements available. in this sense, love operates as a connective flow between guattari’s (2005) ecologies. love is that which connects thoughts, consciousness, and the physical environment in each moment. love is “an action, a biopolitical event, planned and realized in common” (hardt & negri, 2009, p. 180). to love in this way is not simple. it requires thoughtful reflection and bold experimentation. to attempt our work as the kind of love that revolts against the strictures and dominant codes of our profession and discipline is both dangerous and, we would argue, necessary. while some might reason that this kind of political work is outside the scope of child and youth care, we would maintain that, as a relationally derived field ostensibly dedicated to the well-being of young people, it should be its central function. we contend that the stakes are high. if we are to ethically engage in the care of young people, then it is hypocrisy of the highest order to suggest that life as it is lived today under global capitalism is something to which young people should accommodate. there is no caring for anyone, much less young people, under the current system of value. if we are to take seriously our mandate of care, then a new mode of life that is attentive to the needs of actual living beings and a celebration of their capacities needs to be explored, and an alternative system of value implemented. the idea that things can go on for human beings without serious negative repercussions is fast becoming an obvious delusion. if we love the young people that we encounter in our work and ourselves, then we must open the field of child and youth care to actual fields of struggles and sets of relations. while this sounds like a daunting and somewhat ominous task, with potential career ending possibilities for any child and youth care worker reckless enough to attempt it, there are both comfort and revolutionary force in accessing our crowd. it is in discovering and experimenting with those in our crowd that we might become fearless through the force of love. by seeking out those young people and fellow workers who are searching for alternate ways of thinking and being, we begin to create something else. this is, after all, how child and youth care and youth work came into being in the first place. while we may venerate the founders of the field now as established and recognized elders, they were deviants and rebels. we would suggest that the roots of any true field of relational work are always driven forward by those with nothing left to lose; those who are so profoundly dissatisfied with how human beings are being treated that they are driven to find new ways to work. in our drive to become respectable, we have lost some of this spirit over the past decades. we are calling for its return. revolt the force of such revolt, however, is not to be found in the single radical leader any longer. we must now seek our collective force together through the power and resilience of all living things. it is not enough to mount a radical platform and a set of brand-new slogans. our time calls for social experimentation in new modes of life. we must find ways to break the hold of capitalist coding on our ability to think. our international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 591 consciousness is saturated with the structures and old congealed forms of thought and perception. these outmoded perceptions need to be broken and ruptured to open new modes of perception. there are groups of young people across the planet experimenting in precisely these ways. one need only think about the involvement of young people in the community gardening movement, the anti-globalization demonstrations, occupy, the recent global response to the shooting of young black men in the united states, the students who are putting their lives on the line in mexico and hong kong, the youth work protests in the united kingdom over cuts in services to young people, young people’s involvement in idle no more and the aboriginal fight for sovereignty, as well as groups such as femen and pussy riot among many others. our field needs to be in touch with these movements and with these experiments, rather than seeking the solace of old age in the bourgeois senescence of professionalism. it is also time to rethink our relations with other bodies and species. we can no longer imagine that care for young people can be restricted to their bodies and minds alone. it is a travesty to call what we do care, when we thoughtlessly allow the young people we care for to be subjected to the worst kinds of environmental pollutants, psychical, emotional, and physical. to say we care and then do nothing about the loss of biodiversity that will severely impact on the health and well-being of the next generation is irresponsible in the extreme. it is time to acknowledge that the web of living ecologies has grown to include humans, non-humans, and post-humans. the world of virtual technology can no longer be ignored. the three ecologies that guattari argues need to be integrated cannot hold humans at the center. our field needs to be rethought within the realities of the 21st century with all of its political and revolutionary imperatives. we contend it is love as revolt that allows for the maximum exploration and expression of these imperatives. if we are to care for young people in the way that we have just described, then we need to investigate not what love is, but what it can do. if love is the connective force through which we find our maximum capacity for mutual and singular productive creativity, then it is through all of our relations that the new world can emerge. this love is not particular to our individual experience, but is related to who we are not yet. love as care between us allows for the opening of experimental spaces where we can become more than what the dominant system tells us we are. explorations of multiple forms of identity and configurations of our desires become the order of the day for our work together. if there is no lack, then we are free to open ourselves generously without restraint. we can give of ourselves in full expenditure without the anxiety and fear of running out of ourselves. since we are not restricted as a particular subject but related concretely to all of creation, we can freely explore that which we hold in common. hardt and negri (2009) tell us that what we have in common is everything. however, we don’t own it and it doesn’t own us. instead, it composes us and we compose it. these collective interests drive love as a connective force as they manifest in radical idiosyncratic difference in each moment and through the thoughts and acts of each body. in this, love is creative force manifested as radical difference. it is our desire, our love, and our alterity that creates the world. it is important to remember that systems of domination only take over what life has created. if we are to international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 592 care for young people, it is imperative that we work to retake the force of our desire and the ability to create the world as an affirmation of living force. after all, perhaps love and desire connect the inherent force of life with the idiosyncratic capacities of each of us. if our field of child and youth care were to take the world of affective connectivity seriously, then we could access the possibility of living life as it is without mediation, subordination, or domination. through seizing our desires as our own field of exploration and experimentation, we might be able to break down the barriers of exclusion, discipline, codes of loyalty, and cultural or social affiliation that separate and divide us. this could open our work as a site of mutual transformation where we can confront the struggles, contradictions, and antagonisms that form our current lived reality under capitalist rule. some might claim that this is too idealistic, but we are not proposing, in the end, a particular form of society. what we are suggesting is that we open our relations to the kind of experimentation that both challenges current modes of subjugation and leads to new worlds and new people. this is already happening across the planet in a proliferation of minor revolt. the question becomes: what is the role of child and youth care in the emerging world of the 21st century? will we be scrambling to please the regimes of dominance and control and calling it care, or will we be courageous enough to open new pathways that affirm the possibilities for living ecologies of care? it is an open question, yet one that will be answered by who we choose to become together. international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 593 references althusser, l. 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(2011). capitalist sorcery: breaking the spell. new york: palgrave macmillan. text box http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203007426 text box http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jcop.20033 text box http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203610725 international journal of child, youth and family studies (2015) 6(4): 581–594 594 skott-myhre, k. s. g. (2015). the feminization of labour and the dsm-5. annual review of critical psychology. smullens, s. (2012, fall). what i wish i had known: burnout and self-care in our social work profession. the new social worker, social work e-news, 143. (online magazine). spinoza, b. (2000). ethics. (g. h. r. parkinson, ed. and trans.). oxford: oxford university press. key: cord-0012435-rquefe2l authors: lemmens, pieter title: social autonomy and heteronomy in the age of ict: the digital pharmakon and the (dis)empowerment of the general intellect date: 2015-10-17 journal: found sci doi: 10.1007/s10699-015-9468-1 sha: 011a6641ffdf31374c7962780018d7ea3184bd3a doc_id: 12435 cord_uid: rquefe2l ‘the art of living with icts (information and communication technologies)’ today not only means finding new ways to cope, interact and create new lifestyles on the basis of the new digital (network) technologies individually, as ‘consumer-citizens’. it also means inventing new modes of living, producing and, not in the least place, struggling collectively, as workers and producers. as the so-called digital revolution unfolds in the context of a neoliberal cognitive and consumerist capitalism, its ‘innovations’ are predominantly employed to modulate and control both production processes and consumer behavior in view of the overall goal of extracting surplus value. today, the digital networks overwhelmingly destroy social autonomy, instead engendering increasing social heteronomy and proletarianization. yet it is these very networks themselves, as technical pharmaka in the sense of french ‘technophilosopher’ bernard stiegler, that can be employed as no other to struggle against this tendency. this paper briefly explores this possibility by reflecting upon current diagnoses of our ‘technological situation’ by some exemplary post-operaist marxists from a stieglerian, pharmacological perspective. this paper briefly looks at the impact of the new digital network technologies (dnts) on today's workers, consumers and citizens 'living' with these technologies within the context of today's cognitive and consumerist capitalism, diagnosing it as predominantly heteronomizing (decreasing the autonomy of subjects) and therefore disempowering, a loud choir of ideological proponents of a bright digital utopia notwithstanding. it also explores, however, how these technologies can nevertheless be recruited to increase social autonomy. more specifically, it explores how these technologies can foster the empowerment of what is called the 'general intellect' in the italian post-marxist movement of post-autonomism or post-operaism, one of the most vital movements of marxist thought in recent times. although this tradition of thinkers, whose ranks include antonio negri, michael hardt, paolo virno, maurizio lazzarato and franco berardi, is explicitly concerned, among other things, with studying the shifting relationships between technological change on the one side and the class struggle of workers against capital and vice versa on the other, what is generally absent in their analyses is an explicit account of technology and the various ways it mediates, constitutes and conditions social relationships and relations to the self. in short, it lacks an explicit philosophy of technology. in this paper, therefore, i will use bernard stiegler's pharmacological conception of technology and see how it can be used to elaborate and enrich the analyses of today's general intellect by the operaist-autonomist tradition, which always revolve around the issue of recomposition (an autonomist term referring to the unification, politicization and becoming-conscious of itself-i.e., für sich and not just an sich-of the labor force) or the empowerment of the general intellect as a process of collective political subjectivation (the process of becoming a political subject) of workers/citizens. given the exploratory nature of this paper, i will only provide some suggestions in that direction. cognitive capitalism, a term coined by the french economist yann moulier-boutang, refers to the current mode of capitalism in which not labor power but cognitive and affective capacities are the crucial determinants of productivity and the main sources of surplus value. it is a capitalism that thrives on the exploitation of cognition, attention, affection and what moulier-boutang calls attention-power and invention-power (moulier-boutang 2011, 32) . it involves the capturing of monetary gains from knowledge production and innovation by a 'collective intelligence' or a 'general intellect' described by lazzarato in terms of 'cooperation between brains' (lazzarato 2002) . using the metaphor of bees, moulier-boutang writes that the wealth produced under cognitive capitalism derives from the constant 'pollination' of society by the multitudes on the wings of the digital networks (moulier-boutang 2011, 108). cognitive capitalism submits cognition to the economic imperatives of profit maximization and competition, and replaces industrial capitalism, which was mainly based on the exploitation of labor power as muscular capacity. in the context of cognitive capitalism, and as a result of the deployment of dnts, the human cognitive apparatus is increasingly incorporated into the digital cognosphere. another central concept within post-autonomist discourse, derived from the famous 'fragment on machines' in karl marx' grundrisse and reinterpreted in the context of today's cognitive capitalism, is that of the general intellect. marx uses this notion of the general intellect in the grundrisse only once, to designate the objectified labor incorporated in machines or as the power of knowledge and science, incarnated in machines as dead labor or as fixed capital subsuming and controlling variable capital or living labor (i.e. workers). for marx, the notion of general intellect refers to the system of machinery as the scientifically objectified power of labor that is transformed as such into the power of capital. in the machinery of industrial capitalism, the laborers' knowledge appears as something alien and external to him and living labor appears as subsumed under selfactivating objectified labor. as marx writes: 'it belongs to the concept of capital that the increased productive force of labor is posited rather as the increase of a force outside itself, and as labor's own debilitation' (marx 1993, 702) . in post-autonomism, however, the concept of the general intellect is understood quite differently, not as external machinery opposing living labor as fixed capital but as fixed capital inside living labor, i.e., as an attribute of living labor. in cognitive capitalism, the general intellect comes to refer to the information, the communication, the languages, codes, skills and competences of the immaterial laborers. as antonio negri emphasizes, cognitive capitalism's labor force carries its means of production once again inside itself, in its brains (negri 2008b, 66) . it is fixed capital residing in the nervous systems of living labor and is referred to in the hr departments of companies and public institutions as 'human capital'. according to negri and many other post-autonomists, this general intellect as the fixed capital residing in human brains grants labor a relative yet increasing independence with respect to capital and allows it a growing margin of autonomy (ibid.). it would also represent a break with the process of proletarianization, since it involves a certain reappropriation of the means of production by labor, thereby putting an end to the dialectics of the instrument of labor first theorized by hegel (negri 2008a, 65) . as will be shown, however, this assertion is highly doubtful. post-autonomists generally applaud the digital revolution and the chances it provides for the struggle of labor against capitalist domination. moulier-boutang, and in particular hardt and negri in their empire trilogy, affirm that dnts are ultimately favorable to the expansion of the autonomy of the multitude vis à vis capital, although they enable new and highly effective forms of labor control as well (moulier-boutang, ch. 4, hardt and negri 2000, 294-7) . both labor and capital have to operate under the network condition today, the digital networks providing the matrix for both the new figure of sovereignty known as empire and of immaterial production by the multitude, the living prey of and alternative to empire. for hardt and negri, given its globally networked condition, the multitude as the assemblage of singularities forming the new proletariat is principally capable of self-rule and autonomy, since it is able to produce its own means of production (that is to say: cooperation and communication as the substance of the common) all by itself, independent of capital (hardt and negri 2009, 140f) . in fact, they suggest that the immaterial production and decision-making via dnts by the multitude provides, by itself, the model for a genuine multitudinous and absolute democracy (hardt and negri 2004, 339) . so, for hardt and negri, dnts are ultimately empowering and autonomizing, providing, in principle, the socio-technological condition for a global radical democracy as the self-rule and selfmanagement of the multitude. in stark contrast to hardt and negri, franco berardi fails to perceive the emancipatory potential of dnts. his term for the contemporary form of capitalism is semiocapitalism: a capitalism thriving on the exploitation of linguistic, symbolic and cognitive, that is to say sign-producing or semiotic labor (berardi 2009a, 21) . berardi points to the fact that cognitive or immaterial labor, far from gaining more and more autonomy with respect to capital, is becoming increasingly captured and controlled inside the digital networks, through the generalized implementation of what he calls technical and financial automatisms operating exclusively according to the logic of competition and surplus extraction and engendering more and more psychological and social automatisms (ibid., 88; berardi 2009b, 7) . what he sees emerging in the context of cognitive capitalism is an increasing integration of the human mind into the digital circuits of capital, the organic nervous systems of the cognitariat more and more incorporated into and submitted to the operational logics and rhythms of the digital nervous system, shaping a genuine 'assembly line of netproduction' (berardi 2011, 55) . the cognitariat's consciousnesses are exposed to an ever more expanding and accelerating cogno-and infosphere, a situation that leads to a growing discrepancy between cyberspace, the ever growing and virtually infinite mass of semiotic and informational commodities circulating on the net, and cybertime, the finite mental time necessary for processing and elaborating this information (berardi 2009b, 40-1) . this discrepancy induces all kinds of psychopathologies-like depression, anxiety, panic and attention disorders of all kinds-and leads to the exhaustion and ultimately destruction of psychic and mental energies (berardi 2009a, 158) . it erodes subjects' sensibility and affectivity due to the constant pressure to adapt one's psychic apparatus to the codes and rhythms of the network. moreover, the constant mobilization of attention as well as the fragmentation and fractalization of workers' time prevents the formation of collectivity and solidarity as a necessary basis for effective resistance and action against the domination of capital. it is due to these paralyzing and sterilizing labor conditions, berardi claims, that the political recomposition of the general intellect, and the possibilities for political subjectivation and the creation of solidarity, is systematically frustrated (berardi 2011, 14) . the necessity of always 'being connected' for participating in cognitive production supposes the adjustment of one's psychic apparatus to the codes, the logic, the speed and the rhythm of the infosphere and engenders the loss of reflexivity and the erosion of sensibility and receptiveness. a central theme in the admittedly quite gloomy analyses of berardi is that of the exhaustion of libidinal energies as a defining dimension of contemporary cognitive labor, a theme that also runs through the work of stiegler, as we will see. the minds of the cognitarians, glued to demanding screens from the morning until the evening, are more and more disconnected from their bodies as well as from the social body. berardi states that it cannot be denied that the intellectual capacity of today's general intellect is potentially boundless-and here he is largely in agreement with hardt and negri and moulier-boutang-but that it currently lacks any consciousness of itself (ibid., 163). the creation of such a self-consciousness is precisely the emancipatory political task of the future. berardi's work is important in that it shows that transformations in the techno-cognitive environment change the conditions for political subjectivation and redefine the possibilities as well as the constraints for collective struggle. however, he only seems to perceive the negative side of current transformations. for him, the big political question is how to create a self-consciousness out of the general intellect so as to gain a common ground of understanding for collective action that can be effective and truly autonomizing. his suggestion is that the kind of politics necessary for such a task of commonization and autonomization should have the character of a therapy and not of political resistance and action in the traditional, say leninist sense of the term, which would only deepen our exhaustion and depression, as he argues (ibid., 37-8). an effective and vitalizing future emancipatory politics should concern itself instead with re-directing the social investments of desire, from the pathogenic investment in competition, accumulation and work to an investment in community, friendship and love. at some point he even proposes the embracement of a 'radical passivity' as the only way to counter the neoliberal ethos of relentless competition and productivity (ibid., 138). thus, for berardi, desire and affect are crucial. important to note here is that berardi conceives of desire not anymore (as marcuse, foucault and also deleuze and guattari were inclined to do in their days) as a positive force that is inherently emancipatory but, inspired by jean baudrillard, as a field upon which conflicting forces intersect, principally mediated by technology (berardi 2009a, 154) . the problem with berardi, however, is that no effort is made of developing a strategy for confronting and dealing with the diagnosed situation in terms of that situation itself, i.e., on the terrain of dnts, the inevitable condition for political engagement in our time. berardi keeps silent when it comes to the question of how to transform the situation from within, so to speak. he does not seem to perceive any chance of changing the currently hegemonic disempowering efficacy of the dnts for the better, or at least he does not make any effort in theorizing such a possibility. this might be explained from the fact that he lacks a theory of human-technology interaction and of technological change. neither does he possess any conception of a technopolitics. for this, we have to turn our attention to the work of stiegler. for stiegler, the dnts represent nothing less than an epochal technological transmutation, that is to say a mnemotechnological (concerning the technologies of memorization and information and communication more generally) transmutation no less decisive and disruptive than the invention of writing at the dawn of western civilization and printing at the dawn of modernity. it represents a new, that is to say third phase in what the french linguist sylvain auroux calls grammatization, as the process of formalization and externalization of human language, the two earlier phases being that of alphabetization and writing (stiegler 2014a, 54) . as such, dnts usher in a wholly new episteme in the sense of michel foucault and allow for totally new epistemologies in the sense of gaston bachelard (stiegler 2014b, 148) . they will totally reconfigure the human mindset, like writing did in ancient greece at the time of plato, as classicists like ong, goody and havelock have shown (ong 2012; goody 1977; havelock 1986) , or like printing did from the early fifteenth century onwards, as elisabeth eisenstein has pointed out (eisenstein 2012) . they are also on the way of reconfiguring our neuronal structures, changing our brain structure, as neurologist and psycholinguist maryanne wolf has argued, from 'reading brains' to 'digital brains', just like writing turned the 'oral brains' of our pre-literate ancestors into 'reading brains' (wolf 2010) . more directly, they also furnish a new 'political organology' (see below) that has yet to be 'appropriated' politically. stiegler has developed an organological theory of human, technology and society interaction, which i will sketch very briefly here. this general organology conceives of human evolution and history as technogenic processes involving three organ systems: (1) psychosomatic organs, (2) social organizations and (3) technical organs (stiegler 2013a, b, c, 419-20) . changes in the technical organs always induce de-functionalizations and subsequent re-functionalizations in the psychosomatic and social organs, which-in the course of evolution and later during history-are involved in a constant process of adoption of (or adaptation to) new technologies. the relations between these three organ social autonomy and heteronomy in the age of ict: the… 291 systems are of a transductive nature, meaning that they only take shape within and from out of their relation to each other. what is most important in the current context is that the relations between these three organ systems constitute circuits of desire, of libidinal energy, given that the technical organs and the social organizations give shape to the drives residing in the psychosomatic organs (stiegler 2013b, 320) . now, the technical organs, stiegler argues, can both intensify the binding of drives into libidinal energy, supporting processes of sublimation and psychic elevation, and cause their decomposition, which leads to desublimation and psychic regression. as such, every organology constitutes a libidinal economy. a political organology would consider the conditioning effects of the technical organs, or in other words the technical milieu, on the formation of political affects, most importantly on what aristotle in his political writings called philia, or collective desire, as the conditio sine qua non of all political life. now, for stiegler, the fact that technical organs, i.e., technologies of all sorts but most explicitly so-called mnemo-or psychotechnologies, can both positively and negatively condition libidinal economies, is related to the fact that they are what he calls pharmaka, a greek word that means both poison and medicine. as compensations for the 'original lack' [défaut originaire] of intrinsic attributes characteristic of human beings, technical pharmaka can both aid and impede, both support and undermine aspects of those beings. they are both toxifying and curative. that is to say: given the fact that they are constitutive of the human being's thrown and projective being-in-the-world, they have an autonomizing as well as a heteronomizing potential (stiegler 2013a, 421-2) . this pharmacological conception of technologies has affinities with andrew feenberg's idea of technical ambiguity (feenberg 2002, 53) but is more firmly rooted in an 'onto-anthropological' understanding of what the human life form as a technical life form is. as instruments for political subjectivation, technical pharmaka like dnts can both support politicization and depoliticization, both emancipation and docilization. they can both elevate and 'dumb down' collective intelligence by supporting either short circuits ('egoistic' circuits of drive) or long circuits of individuation (producing desire and sociality). what dnts 'are'-and here stiegler is in agreement with feenberg-depends to a large extent on how they are adopted by individuals and collectives. it may be argued that berardi's diagnosis exclusively emphasizes the proliferation of short circuits that exhaust libidinal energy and induce drive-based behavior (i.e., capturing libidinal energy into short loops of immediate gratification that tendentially induce frustration in subjects), thereby acknowledging only the toxic tendency and disregarding or at least neglecting any thought of a therapy-other than that of creating zones of human resistance outside of the 'system'-that would precisely be based on an emancipatory and autonomizing adoption or appropriation of dnts that would counter its toxic, heteronomizing tendencies. stiegler stresses that autonomy exists only in an intimate relation with technical heteronomy, on the condition, that is, that it is adopted intelligently, reflexively and with care, which assumes a practice, that is to say a therapy, a sociotherapy, or in short: a politics (stiegler 2013c, 41, 45) . dnts, as stiegler argues again and again in all of his writings, can truly function as a technical milieu creating long circuits and supporting a new social autonomy. this presupposes, however, a collective appropriation of that milieu, so that it becomes an associated milieu instead of a dissociated milieu, the latter being the dominant situation today. in fact, dnts are ideally suited for this, certainly so if compared to the older analog information and communication technologies like radio and television. to give some idea of that: dnt's are characterized by multilinearity, which allows for demassification and desynchronized access (think of podcasts for instance), by annotability, which allows for tagging and the bottom-up creation of metadata, by hypermediality, which means that they can handle all levels of grammatization from texts to genomic sequences, and most importantly by bidirectionality, which allows receivers to be senders and vice versa (stiegler 2006, 219) . stiegler's assessment of the current impact of dnts on the general intellect, however, is closer to the view of berardi than to those of hardt and negri, for instance. he is much less pessimistic however. in fact, the dnts are for stiegler nothing less than the way out of the state of deep intoxication that our current mnemotechnical milieu suffers from as a result of its annexation by consumerist and cultural capitalism. it sometimes even looks as if dnts represent, for him, a kind of heideggerian saving power, if only we were able to succeed in carrying through what he refers to sometimes as a 'pharmacological turn' of this pharmakon. concurring with the analysis of berardi and fundamentally disagreeing with the views of hardt and negri, however, stiegler contends that instead of tendentially autonomizing and empowering the multitude because of the increasing independence of the general intellect from capitalist control, in reality the general intellect appears to be the object of an intense process of proletarianization today that seems to disempower it and rob it of its autonomy, producing a regression of the collective intelligence of the general intellect that he refers to as a state of 'systemic stupidity' (stiegler 2010, 47) . instead of fixed capital migrating to living labor (the immaterial means of production increasingly residing in the brains of cognitive laborers), thereby granting it more autonomy as hardt and negri claim, stiegler states that through generalized automation as exteriorization and short-circuiting of psychic and cognitive functions in the dnt, we cannot but admit that the multitude's collective intelligence is becoming increasingly proletarianized (ibid., 45). instead of a growing commonization and autonomization of the multitude, what seems to be the rule nowadays is cognitive proletarianization and psychic heteronomization of the singularities that make up the multitude. so-called cognitive capitalism in fact destroys cognition, forcing workers to adapt their cognitive apparatus and capacities to a digital technical milieu that ruthlessly imposes the imperatives of profit and competition. it is true that dnts enable the 'cooperation between brains' (lazzarato) but so far they have predominantly served capital in controlling this cooperation and capturing its fruits (ibid., 47). however, this is a pharmacological situation and as such it is anything but hopeless. while still functioning largely as technologies of capture and control (as analyzed by berardi) , at the same time the dnts are gradually beginning to be transformed into the conditions for the emergence of a wholly new associated milieu that can function as the support of a therapeutic countermovement able to fight the proletarianizing tendency. phenomena like free software, peer-to-peer, wikipedia, wikileaks, anonymous, and many other commons-based collaborative projects can be understood as being the first movements in that direction, movements that are characterized by stiegler in terms of deproletarianization. the hackers and their anti-protestant-although not necessarily anticapitalist-ethics of voluntary cooperation, sharing, passion and care with respect to digital work (as expounded by pekka himanen in his well-known bestseller the hacker ethic) are the exemplary heroes of this countermovement (himanen 2001) . social autonomy and heteronomy in the age of ict: the… 293 what is lacking in stiegler, however, is a class-based analysis of this pharmacological situation in terms of an account of the possibilities for recomposition of the general intellect. such an account should be developed, i claim, because it seems unrealistic if not totally illusory to put too much trust, as stiegler does in his writings, in the initiative of governments or representatives of today's public institutions, to promote and support the emergence of alternative modes of production and collaboration beyond the consumerist model, that can break with the current hegemony (stiegler 2006) . in an all-out class war of capital and the state against the laboring multitudes, which is currently waged with an unprecedented brutality and cynicism, calling for a public power to positively intervene in the situation and prescribing a sociotherapy in terms of a positive pharmacology seems more than a bit naive. such a therapeutic project should and can only emerge from 'below', i.e., from the multitude itself, or more realistically from its dissident and least proletarianized factions. unfortunately, there is no space here to embark on a compositionalist pharmacological analysis of today's dnts. for that reason i will necessarily have to limit myself here to proposing a few questions that could guide such an analysis. it is clear that dnts by themselves, left within the confines of the market economy, will never bring about true social autonomy, but only enforce the toxic, desublimatory, heteronomizing tendency that berardi and also stiegler rightly diagnose. what is needed is a political project of adoption in terms of a therapy and this 'therapy' must intervene at a systemic level and aim for a new organization of society, no less! a society that would be truly intelligent and autonomous in the sense that it, as the late andré gorz put it nicely in one of his books, paraphrasing a famous dictum by karl marx, should create the conditions 'in which the full development of each person's ability is everyone's aim' (gorz 2010, 109) and in which production would serve human development instead of human development serving the production of surplus value (ibid., 113). in light of the critical diagnoses offered by berardi and stiegler, the following questions could lead a pharmacological analysis of class composition in the current situation. first of all: how can workers and 'deconsumerizing' citizens employ the digital pharmakon itself against the hegemonic tendencies it now supports? how can dnts be appropriated or maybe newly designed so that they can be used to struggle against the constant acceleration of online life-and as a consequence also of offline life-that they now everywhere support? how can they be repossessed for the purpose of 'recapacitation' (amartya sen) of the cognitariat as the subject of the general intellect? how can the digital pharmaka be changed so as to slow down life and shape the conditions and the time for reflection, critique and a more free and autonomous disposition of our individual and collective time? how can the digital pharmaka be changed so as to foster commonality and solidarity instead of atomizing and individualizing us (think also of social networks like facebook and myspace here)? how can we change the underlying algorithms-the technical codes so to speak (not necessarily but possibly in the sense of feenberg)-that constitute the technofinancial automatisms servant to capital that berardi writes about? how can the digital pharmaka be appropriated or redesigned so as to become the supportive technologies of what stiegler has called an 'otium of the people', i.e., as technologies of the self and others, of care of the self and care of the other in the sense of michel foucault, instead of promoting competition and increasing automation, heteronomization and carelessness? how can these pharmaka be creatively re-appropriated to struggle against the disaffection, disaffectation and libidinal exhaustion and how can they become the instruments of new modes of critical and 'deep' attention? how can they become inducive to/ engaged in processes of commonization and the formation of 'collective desire for the collective', instead of increasing individualization? how can they be remade to reconnect subjectivities with the social fabric they still remain part of yet hardly experience anymore? all these questions suppose that we should not only learn the 'art of living with icts (information and communication technologies)', but that we should also learn to fight, produce, commonize and live in common, i.e., collectively manage our collective existence, with icts. 'the art of living with icts' should in any case not be understood in an adaptationist sense, as the necessity of having to cope with something inevitable, of having to get along with it, of having to adapt ourselves to it. instead we should try to adapt those technologies to what we, as socio-technical creatures, collectively decide to be a life worth living-i.e., in the sense of adopting and creatively appropriating them as weapons (in the sense of gilles deleuze) for (re-)conquering our collective autonomy in the face of an increasingly totalitarian capitalism bent on controlling subjects more and more through what lazzarato has most recently described as 'machinic enslavement' (lazzarato 2014, 23-38) . that is the most urgent question, i would like to suggest, with respect to the question of the 'art of living with icts'. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the soul at work precarious rhapsody. semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation after the future the printing revolution in early modern europe the immaterial. knowledge, value and capital. calcutta: seagull books multitude. war and democracy in the age of empire the muse learns to write: reflections on orality and literacy from antiquity to the present the hacker ethic and the spirit of the information age puissance de l'innovation. la psychologie économique de gabriel tardre contre l'économie politique signs and machines. capitalism and the production of subjectivity grundrisse. london: penguin cognitive capitalism. cambridge and malden the porcelain workshop. for a new grammar of politics. los angeles: semiotext(e) orality and literacy. the technologizing of the word la télécratie contre le démocratie social autonomy and heteronomy in the age of ict: the… 295 for a new critique of political economy pharmacologie du front national. suivi du vocabulaire d'ars industrialis par victor petit de la misère symbolique what makes life worth living. on pharmacology the hyperindustrial epoch per toeval filosoferen proust and the squid. the story and science of the reading brain he currently teaches philosophy and ethics at the department of philosophy and science studies, part of the institute for science, innovation and society (isis) at the radboud university. he has published on themes in the philosophy of technology and innovation ajiss capitalism and class in the gulf arab states adam hanieh new york: palgrave macmillan, 2011. 266 pages. to label adam hanieh’s capitalism and class in the gulf arab states an afterstudy of the 2008 financial crisis is a grossly unfair assessment. while the book does explore the implications of the gulf states’ financial slump, it also provides a nuanced analysis of their class structures and relation to the global capital system. the exponential growth of the gulf cooperation council (gcc) states is the book’s main subject; however, hanieh dexterously avoids the common errors involved in the region’s economic analysis and thus adds to the corpus of literature pertaining to both the gcc and the wider global economy. the class structures and wealth prevailing in the gcc are often seen as an outcome of the states being oil rich. hanieh problematizes this narrative by positing that this wealth and structuring is not “accidental” and that while oil is undeniably important, it is not the sole reason for the region’s situation. he urges the reader to look beyond the hydrocarbon wealth, because “much like its desert cousin, the mirage – what visitors actually see in the oil-fueled boom is not the full picture” (p. 2). hanieh’s choice of viewing the gcc holistically, instead of addressing specific nation-states, is significant. the “internationalization” of the local economy and class structure results in the dissolution of class boundaries among the states and paves the way for capitalism. but at the same time, however, capitalism needs to be valorized in a coherent and material time and space. this valorization has taken the special form of the regional gcc and becomes the study’s focal point. this regionalization has displaced “power upwards to the regional scale, weakening the ability of the individual member states to control the movement of goods and capital within the intra-gcc space” (p. 104). the author also problematizes the “rentier-state” theory through a marxian framework. he urges the reader not to consider the state, and particularly the states of the gulf nations, as a “thing” or an automatic reflection of the capitalist class, but rather as “a particular expression of class formation” (p. 12). this also implies that the state has greatly facilitated the development of the gcc’s prevailing “hot-house” economy (p. 15). the study’s regional nature culminates in the analysis of “khaliji” capital. in the gulf states, the internationalization of capital manifests itself in a regional form as the “circuits of capital are themselves elaborated at the rebook reviews 117 ajiss303-for hasan_ajiss 6/14/2013 3:38 am page 117 gional scale” (p. 103). the latter half of the book concentrates on the boom during the post-2000 and pre-2008 period, in which all the circuits of capital, namely, productive, commodity, and finance, were informed by khaliji capital. construction and manufacturing, in particular, formed “key moments around which capitalist class formation preceded in the productive circuit over the post-2000 period” (p. 111). the saudi-emirati axis is identified as the main spatial zone in which this accumulation took place. the impact of this capital is not simply confined to the gcc, for it has very real implications for the wider middle east. in fact, the aftermath of the american invasion of iraq and the implementation of the bremer laws has resulted in a mass influx of khaliji capital into the region. hanieh contends that the flow of capital is currently being analyzed through the neo-liberal, positivist framework of the world bank and the international monetary fund, which “obfuscates the fact that capital is not a sum of money, but rather a social relation grounded in the extraction of value” (p. 152). thus the “development of class and state throughout the middle east is deeply wrapped up in the formation of khaliji capital” and should be understood from a regional perspective (p. 164). the author skillfully implicates the gulf states in the 2008 financial crisis by labeling them as “junior partners” integrated into the production of the global capital system. in the wake of the 1973-74 rise in oil prices, this excess cash (or petrodollars) fuelled the “financialization” of the capital system, thereby placing these states squarely in the middle of the particular form that the “financialized”/internationalized global market has assumed. according to him, the gulf states also facilitated the consolidation of american hegemony as a financial/political powerhouse. the gcc, particularly saudi arabia, colluded with the united states following the spike in oil prices to maintain the role of the american dollar as the major currency in the circulation of debt. furthermore, the debt trap in which most countries of the south found themselves was a direct result of the processes taking place within the gulf region. hanieh posits that the class formation in the gulf region has serious implications because it is so intimately tied to the larger global market. the gcc’s centrality means that its working class has the potential to significantly threaten the global accumulation of capital, which is partly why the working class of these states consists of temporary, migrant workers with no citizenship rights. this is coupled with the redirection of oil revenues to merchant families, who have subsequently formed a nexus with the state through alliances with the ruling families. the consolidation of the ruling class is 118 the american journal of islamic social sciences 30:3 ajiss303-for hasan_ajiss 6/14/2013 3:38 am page 118 book reviews 119 crystallized alongside the development of the capital circuit in the region, as the largely migrant labor becomes increasingly alienated. in conclusion, hanieh’s incisive analysis of the economic realities confronting the gcc and their correlation to the global market offers a fresh perspective on the economic woes of the contemporary world. the author’s estimation of the 2008 financial crisis and his constant emphasis on the “interdependent” nature of global capital (with special reference to the gcc) compels the reader to understand capitalism as an enterprise that cannot sustain itself within the boundaries of the nation-state. while the specifics of the future might be uncertain, it remains clear that the class structuring of gulf states will remain oriented toward the accumulative tendencies of global capital. junaid s. ahmad assistant professor, faculty of law and policy lahore university of management sciences, lahore, pakistan ajiss303-for hasan_ajiss 6/14/2013 3:38 am page 119 book reviews 149 global trap by hans-peter martin and harold schumann. london: zed books ltd., 1997. this book presents a most readable perspective on economic and social trends in the coming century. though retaining a european focus throughout, the mate rial spans the world and supports arguments that are of relevance to individuals in whichever continent they may live. the authors describe an incessant march toward globalization in finance and industry, a march that is forcing political change upon a europe that is simply unprepared, a march toward the global trap. opening the book, the reader finds himself in san francisco’s fairmont hotel, an oasis of luxury in a desert of mere wealth, where the world’s leading thinkers and elder statesmen have gathered to discuss the future of our planet for an appropriate fee. a most plausible economic horror story follows. in the not-too distant future, machines will replace humans in so many spheres of industry that there will be sufficient work for only 20 percent of the developed world’s pop ulation. in this 2080 society the 20 percent shall surround themselves with elec tronic security and wire fences and the 80 percent will be doped with welfare payments, trivial game shows, and other such “tittytainment.” amusing catch phrases spice global trap, trivializing yet somehow succeeding in summariz ing a whole worldview. one immediately recognizes “macworld versus jihad” as the much predicted confrontation between free market capitalism and islam. the authors’ main concerns are expounded in a serious manner. they discuss the nature of the massive modem conglomerate whose control lies beyond the reach of national government. moving their production to the least expensive locations, these seemingly anonymous entities by default produce their wares in those countries where environmental protection and employee rights are at a minimum. in another discussion, one’s attention is turned to the speculator whose activity impacts upon so many significant areas of modem life. much attention is paid to the rapidly widening gap between the rich world and the poor world, a gap which threatens the survival of both. in a sobering por trayal of one possible european future, the barriers are raised against floods of cheap imports and of immigrants wishing’that they too could share the living standards of the rich world. but the immigrant finds himself in the midst of a different kind of economic nightmare, a world in which life on a human scale is no longer possible or profitable. in which the individual is enslaved in mortgage debt, works at maximum output, or, does not work at all. feeling that they no longer have a voice in their own destiny, the indigenous population turns toward radical political solutions, toward the protectionist, the xenophobe, and the fas c i s t does any of this sound familiar? of course, the genre of doom and gloom has a long pedigree, but this is not intellectual pornography for those awaiting the end of the world. there is little, if any, wild extrapolation of current trends in order to predict future despair. instead, the authors present well-researched fact to support their forecast of what might be if solutions are not found in time. 150 the american journal of islamic social sciences 15: 1 in 1996, the wealthiest 358 individuals on the planet owned more than the poorest 2.5 billion. this is a truth that should shock us. it is not the fault of any one person but rather of the system, of the unfettered free-market capitalist sys tem whose values are permeating the globe. and what hope is there of financ ing a modem welfare state when, in a country like germany today, many large corporations pay less tax than they did ten years ago despite making higher prof its? the questions that arise in this book are far-reaching and affect the lives of individuals especially in the rich countries. the rich world knows luxury and therefore has the capacity to miss it, the poor world doesn’t. is europe serious ly expected to compete with low-wage chinese sweatshops? which eu citizen wants his or her mother to work for 25 cents an hour? europe and the west in general simply do not have the stomach for the fight. i wholeheartedly agree with much of the authors’ diagnosis. something should indeed be done to address the risks of the derivatives time-bomb that ticks underneath the global financial market and to calm the foreign exchange roller-coaster that makes international investment so difficult to plan. with huge bets beiig placed in the financial casino, and with such complex interlinkages between the institutions in those markets, it will take just one default at the wrong moment, just one little war, to bring the whole structure crashing down. ultimately, lovers of doom and gloom will be disappointed. the authors pro pose some credible solutions to the problems that they foresee, including a form of european democracy in which the european commission is elected by the european parliament and in which national parliaments allow citizens of other eu member states to speak on european issues whenever they are debated; a european monetary union that provides a stable trading block that rivals america and japan; and european trade unions that better represent the interests of the worker against the multinational companies. with these measures in place, the people of europe will trust their decision-makers and move together toward a stronger foundation for political and economic progress. some of the authors’ proposals immediately strike home. i. too, feel that polit ical decisions should be made at as local a level as possible, not by anonymous persons who sit at the center of a european superstate. action does seem war ranted to limit the use of off-shote tax havens by multinationals and wealthy individuals who wish to avoid paying their fair share of tax. but using selective trade barriers against those developing countries who exploit their labor force and environment? well, if exploitation means using children on twelve-hour shifts or pouring untreated poison into rivers, i can again sympathize, though most rich countries do not have a history of employee rights or environmental care of which to be proud. yet, for all these proposals, i am left with a feeling that the finger of blame has not been pointed at a major player in this whodunnit. is europe’s failure to “europeanize civil society” really one of the chief culprits? are european mon etary union and a tax on currency speculation really the cure for its monetary ills? as a muslim i believe that one of the central injustices of the modem world is the practice of usury, a primary evil to be eradicated before second-order problems can be addressed. to ignore usury in an analysis of the world’s ills is to ignore a fundamental cause of this injustice, yet nowhere in this book does book reviews 151 the subject appear. the importance of usury seems to have been forgotten despite its ovemding impact upon the modem financial system. with this one reservation, i recommend global trap to all those who concern themselves with the momentous changes that europe and the world seem sure to face within a generation. tariq el-diwmy financial consultant united kingdom microsoft word 07 gender_reveal party.docx international journal of child, youth and family studies (2020) 11(2): 82–93 doi: 10.18357/ijcyfs112202019520 the gender reveal party: a new means of performing parenthood and reifying gender under capitalism astri jack abstract: this article explores the popularization of gender reveal parties and considers what they can tell us about current societal expectations around gender, parenthood, and consumption. gender reveal parties are events in which expectant parents reveal, or even learn, the sex of the child-to-be through a surprise display of something pink or blue, typically using innocuous means such as confetti, balloons, or a coloured cake. however, methods for revealing fetal sex have become increasingly bizarre and dangerous, involving firearms, car fires, and, in at least one case, an alligator. this article examines digital media depictions of gender reveal parties and their aftermath; discusses sexing technologies and diversity in biological sex and gender; looks critically at how capitalism and the white neoliberal state have constructed the gender reveal party as a performative event for parents-to-be; and explores the physical and affective violence done to individuals, families, and the natural environment by gender reveal parties. keywords: gender reveal, gender, parenthood, capitalism, biological sex astri jack ba is a master’s student in the school of child and youth care at the university of victoria, 3800 finnerty road, victoria, bc v8w 2y2. e-mail: astrijack@uvic.ca international journal of child, youth and family studies (2020) 11(2): 82–93 83  during her third pregnancy in 2006, louise a. gosbell (2016) found herself routinely fielding question about the fetus’ gender by well-meaning friends and family. because she had already had two girls she was often asked if she was hoping that her third child would be a boy, and if she would be disappointed with another girl. gosbell found these questions upsetting but brushed them off by telling the inquirers that she had chosen not to find out the sex of the child in advance, to which many would respond, “well, it doesn’t matter if it’s a boy or a girl, so long as it’s healthy” (p. 100). these interactions that gosbell recounts illuminate several social narratives that frame parenthood, family, gender, and ability. among these narratives are assumption of binary sex and gender (preves, 2013), the conflation of sex and gender (fausto-sterling, 2013), the script of “family balancing” (seavilleklein & sherwin, 2007), ableist discourses and a centering of productive citizenship (burman, 2017), and expectations around a mother’s role in fetal and child development (burman, 2017). at the same time that gosbell (2016) was defending her decision to not find out the sex of her unborn child, a new cultural phenomenon was about to arrive in north america. gosbell’s pregnancy and the casual conversations — with embedded complex discourses — that she had around the sex of the baby predated the popularization of a photo-worthy event wherein all these discourses could climactically come together: the gender reveal party. in 2006, when gosbell was pregnant with her third child, the number of times the search phrases “gender reveal” and “gender reveal ideas” appeared was negligible, but google trends (2018) noted that in 2010 there was an uptick in searches. over the next eight years, the search terms would skyrocket in the united states with the number of searches for each phrase respectively averaging 60,500 and 165,000 in march 2019 (wordtracker, 2019). the premise of a gender reveal party is that the expectant parents will hold a party at which the sex of the fetus is announced through a surprise display of something pink for a girl or blue for a boy. it is typical for expectant parents to not know the sex of the child and to have the obstetrician write down the sex and seal it in an envelope. the envelope is then taken to a person or professional who will assemble the materials for the “reveal”. reveal examples include cakes that are coloured on the inside, confetti cannons, coloured balloons that emerge from a box, or more dramatic and dangerous means. this article will provide an analysis of the sociocultural conditions under which expectant parents reify gender difference and perform “good” parenthood through gender reveal parties. i will discuss gender, biological sex, and sexing technologies; provide a survey of the ways the developmental model of childhood has placed parents and children under a social and state microscope; identify the impacts of social media and capitalism on how parenthood is performed; and analyze the sociocultural purpose of gender reveal parties by exploring their representation in online videos. international journal of child, youth and family studies (2020) 11(2): 82–93 84  gender, sexing technologies, and disability the term “gender reveal party” is a misnomer. while i have jokingly referred to them as “genital reveal parties”, they actually proclaim the likely sex of a fetus based on either or both of two non-invasive prenatal tests: (a) an ultrasound scan to detect the presence or absence of a penis, or assess the direction of the genital tubercle, at or after 12 weeks gestation (odeh et al., 2009); and (b) a maternal blood test to identify the fetus’s chromosomes, as early as 4 weeks gestation (de jong et al., 2010). amniocentesis can also be used to test the fetus’s chromosomes, but because it carries a higher risk to parent and fetus than non-invasive prenatal testing does, it is now generally reserved as a method of confirming a suspected chromosomal abnormality (de wit et al., 2017). because biological sex is composed of a combination of chromosomes, genitalia, internal reproductive organs, sex hormones, gametes, and secondary sex characteristics (ferber et al., 2013), these tests cannot guarantee, on their own or in combination, a biologically male or female child (seavilleklein & sherwin, 2007). preves (2013) reported that, out of every 2,000 births, one or two babies are born with genitalia unaligned with “socially accepted norms of sexual anatomy” (p. 24). while the likelihood of accurately determining a fetus’s sex increases if both a chromosomal test and an ultrasound scan are consulted, a fetus with ambiguous genitalia could easily be assessed as phenotypically male or female in utero but be deemed intersex after birth. additionally, because only one or two of the six components that make up biological sex are generally examined during a pregnancy, it sometimes happens that an intersex child (1% to 4% of all births1) is born when a boy or girl is expected; in many cases, a person will not know they are intersex until puberty or later, or they may never know (preves, 2013). while determining the sex of a fetus is, ultimately, a best guess made by a healthcare provider, gender is an even more slippery and mutable category (burman, 2017). sex and gender are distinct categories, but they are not completely discrete: rather, they exist in a mutually informed and complex relationship with one another (fausto-sterling, 2013). unlike sex, which is based on biological characteristics made meaningful by culture, gender is a personal, affective, nd socially constructed category that cannot be properly applied to an individual without their input (ferber et al., 2013). gender identities include man/boy, woman/girl, and any of myriad trans and nonbinary genders. as such, a gender reveal party is, at best, a biological sex reveal party and, at worst, an event that contributes to the establishment and maintenance of a strictly gendered social order (motzkau, 2009; preves, 2013) into which a transgender or intersex infant may be born. the more gender reveal party videos i watched, the more disturbing i found them. i was startled by the number that demonstrated disappointment when the child’s sex was revealed. one example 1 the wide range in the estimated number of intersex people is due to varying opinion on what constitutes “intersex”. while ambiguous genitalia is one of the most easily spotted examples of intersex, there are numerous other forms; those may impact, among other things, chromosomes, reproductive organs and gametes, hormone production, and the body’s response to hormones (thyen et al., 2005). there is debate, especially in the area of variation in hormone production and hormone response, about who meets the criteria for being considered intersex, resulting in a wide range of estimates for the number of intersex people (davis, 2015). international journal of child, youth and family studies (2020) 11(2): 82–93 85  showed an expectant mother and her two children popping silver balloons to reveal blue confetti. the mother gasps, scrunches her face, and yells disappointedly, “it’s a boy!?” meanwhile, her teenaged daughter begins to cry beside her, presumably because she had been hoping for a sister. while the disappointment in this video was obvious and awkward, to an uninvolved observer the over-the-top reaction might have bordered on humorous. another, more sinister, video showed two parents and a toddler opening a box that was supposed to release pink or blue balloons. instead, rainbow balloons emerged. the parents did not share my delight at this flutter of queer glory — their upset at not seeing pink or blue was palpable. the mother looked shocked and the father balled up his fists and shook his head, saying, “i can’t believe this.” the toddler, instead of being excited by the miraculous appearance of balloons, silently and anxiously looked at the parents, as if trying to figure out how to react. these two videos, as well as thousands of others, demonstrate that to many families discovering the sex of the child in this way may be exciting, but can have unexpected emotional impact. the evolution of sex-selection technologies adds a layer of complexity to the already fraught social underpinnings of gender reveal parties and the assumed correlation of sex and gender. while infanticide has a long history of use as a sex-selection method, it, along with sex-selective abortions, is largely seen as unethical across the globe (seavilleklein & sherwin, 2007; whittaker, 2011). having said that, there are still a significant number of sex-selective abortions and infanticides worldwide and across cultures; however, greater access to more covert forms of sex selection may obscure the rates of sex selection among wealthier populations (vogel, 2012) and inaccurately suggest that communities of colour are the primary perpetrators of sex selection. indeed, sex-selection technologies have advanced tremendously for white prospective parents who, on average, have greater access to wealth and healthcare technologies. these newer technologies are generally non-abortive, such as the microsorting of sperm by x and y chromosomes followed by in vitro fertilization (seavilleklein & sherwin, 2007). we can infer that a person who seeks sex-selection technologies when they are trying to get pregnant is likely assuming that the eventual child’s biological sex and gender will align, and that the child will behave in particular gendered ways associated with their sex that fulfil prescriptive societal expectations of male and female behaviour. many of the tests used to sex fetuses are also used (sometimes primarily; de wit, et al., 2017) in detecting chromosomal differences such as down syndrome (kaposy, 2013). while the ethics of abortions based on fatal and nonfatal chromosomal difference in fetuses is beyond the scope of this article, i would like to briefly consider how forces that influence parental decisions around gender also come to bear on ability and disability. slater (2013) observed that children with disabilities disrupt the “normal child” ideals inherent in the developmental model of childhood (turmel, 2004). as such, a parent who chooses not to terminate a pregnancy that will produce a child with a disability can be framed as unruly for not upholding the tenets of social order that underlie developmentalism (turmel, 2004): specifically, they are failing at the ableist expectation that parents should produce productive citizens who will contribute to the capitalist state. international journal of child, youth and family studies (2020) 11(2): 82–93 86  returning to gosbell’s (2016) experience of fielding questions about the sex of her unborn child, if a pregnant person truly does not have a sex preference but finds out that there are fetal “abnormalities”, the gravity of the statement “it doesn’t matter if it’s a boy or a girl, as long as it’s healthy” is brought into stark relief. performing parenthood under capitalism in the early 1900s, the emergence of the developmental model of childhood invited science, the state, and an increasingly educated public to scrutinize the minutiae of child-rearing and family life (turmel, 2004). this scrutiny was done in the name of ensuring a “normally developed child” (turmel, 2004, p. 420) who would progress along specific physical, emotional, and social trajectories believed to result in a productive and responsible adult (burman, 2017). such thinking, far from having disappeared, is still with us a century later. iantaffi (2009) argued that parents, especially mothers (or, more specifically, birthing parents), are constantly being monitored by the people around them. additionally, birthing parents and primary caregivers (often mothers) bear the burden of being the primary locus of judgement by their peers, care professionals, and the government, based on what burman (2007) calls their perceived “success or failure in promoting [their] child’s development” (p. 139). parents can find themselves having to contend with the advice or admonishment of family, friends, and even strangers, not to mention medical professionals, who are also susceptible to trends in public opinion. these observers are armed with popularized ideas about all facets of childrearing, and feel that closely monitoring the behaviours of pregnant people and new parents is their social duty (burman, 2017). among myriad other things, parents are expected to ensure optimal attachment with their newborns (though how they are to achieve this is highly debated; burman, 2017). they face overt criticism if they do not successfully adapt to fluctuating trends regarding infant feeding, such as determining the socially acceptable age to stop breastfeeding, or conforming to trends or the latest studies pronouncing bottle, breast, or formula as the optimal way of ensuring proper child development (burman, 2017). parents must also contend with childcare advice being delivered through online content via bloggers, opinion pieces, and parenting apps, all of which allow for an unprecedented turnover in parenting trends on topics such as optimal disciplinary methods for ensuring resilient children, and the benefits or evils of sleep training (burman, 2017). increasingly invasive social media and self-help apps are additional sources of guilt for parents and pregnant people (johnson, 2014). parents and expectant parents are under social pressure to use what brown and webster (2004, as cited in johnson, 2014) called “socio-technologies” to consume and then publicly reproduce images of ideal parenting (johnson, 2014). these technologies bring with them: a reminder to take your folic acid; a selfie of your sister-in-law drinking a green smoothie, accompanied by a status update letting you know that she is walking to her mamas’n’babies yoga class; a professional photograph of your friend’s peacefully smiling, plump baby with a pink headband, complete with giant silk peony, artfully placed on its bald head international journal of child, youth and family studies (2020) 11(2): 82–93 87  (“i just got this on etsy!”); and, of course, a video of the climactic cake-cutting moment at your friend’s pinterest-perfect pink-and-blue-mason-jar themed gender reveal party. while there is nothing inherently untoward about a mamas’n’babies yoga class, and although taking a folic acid supplement during pregnancy is a verifiably good idea (de-regil et al., 2015), the exposure of new and expecting parents to the flood of curated content coming from advertisers, celebrities, and other parents on social media has become the primary means of constructing and “communicating ideal motherhood” (chae, 2015, p. 504). bound up in the construct of ideal motherhood is an expectation that good parents are those who are, at minimum, middle class, a position that byrne (2006) argued is inextricably linked to whiteness, thus positions the ideal parent as white. in 1899, american economist thorstein veblen (as cited in currit-halker, 2017) coined the term conspicuous consumption, which takes the form of overt displays of wealth through items like fancy watches and sports cars. currid-halkett (2017) noted that, as the middle class in the united states flourished, black and latinx people have increasingly been able to demonstrate conspicuous consumption. she argued that, in response to this, wealthy and middle-class white people have turned to inconspicuous consumption as a new means of positioning themselves as the elite. in this case, inconspicuous consumption might take the form of only eating organic foods during pregnancy, attending yoga classes at a high-end studio (in a predominantly white neighbourhood), and being able to take the time off work to be able to breastfeed your child. nonwhite parents are able to literally buy their way into the good graces of a society that espouses neoliberal values through particular kinds of consumption (mukherjee, 2011). in this case, nonwhite parents can make purchases to bring them closer to an idealized parenthood by emulating the inconspicuous spending habits of the white elite. however, many of these forms of inconspicuous consumption require ongoing financial commitment (such as yoga classes) and are not sustainable by lower-income families, white or non-white. this is where the gender reveal party comes in: it provides a contained and finite way for expectant parents to signal upward class mobility, at a smaller scale but in much the same manner as celebrations like weddings have long been used to signal a family’s prosperity (bloch et al., 2003). while the conspicuous consumption required to purchase a flashy car may be considered economically irresponsible for a lower-income family, “getting ready for baby” is seen as a responsible allocation of funds. throwing a gender reveal party may allow less wealthy parents to inconspicuously project affluence in a way that is socially acceptable, demonstrates “good” parenting, and does not entail ongoing financial commitments, like hiring a nanny, that would be hard to maintain. parents-to-be may also regard money for non-permanent items like food and napkins as well spent because the evidence can be posted to social media outlets such as facebook and instagram, which have become important venues for demonstrating “ideal motherhood” to others in one’s social circle (chae, 2015). interestingly, the purchasing of consumer goods rises after the sex of the fetus has been disclosed (barnes, 2015). in her discussion of the impacts of sex determination on the consumption patterns of pregnant people, barnes (2015) argued that ultrasound scans have impacted the ways international journal of child, youth and family studies (2020) 11(2): 82–93 88  fetuses are understood, and are used as a tool for “learning to see who exists in the world” (haraway, 1997, as cited in barnes, 2015, p. 372). that is to say, an ultrasound scan can serve to make the pregnancy feel more “real” (barnes, 2015, p. 372), which elicits particular kinds of consumption by the pregnant person and their friends and family. this assessment aligns with the results of a study conducted in the wake of the popularization of fetal sexing technologies in the 1980s: winestine (1989) reported that women who chose not to learn the sex of the fetus were more likely to focus on the state of being pregnant, and thought of motherhood as a future state, while those who chose to learn the sex of their fetus by way of amniocentesis were more likely to be preoccupied with “the object of the pregnancy” (p. 1021), that is, the baby. gender reveal parties and masculinity gender reveal parties are highly gendered affairs not only in that they prepare the parents for the particular social and economic expectations associated with raising a boy or a girl, but also in the expectation that parents will perform gender at the party itself. while pinterest, with its predominantly female user base (gantz, 2013), is replete with handmade pink and blue theme and reveal ideas, there is also a phenomenon of fathers-to-be revealing the fetus’s sex through overthe-top displays of masculinity. when a friend of mine and her fiancé were expecting a baby, their gender reveal party involved the fiancé and his group of military friends donning their army fatigues, building a snow wall, and the father-to-be shooting a paintball gun at it. i was initially surprised at the violent tone of this reveal. however, i was easily able to find several videos online that also made use of paintball guns and firearms as part of the gender reveal. at a gender reveal party in louisiana, a father-to-be displayed his machismo by prying open the jaws of a live alligator (rm videos, 2018). once they were opened wide enough, he dropped in a watermelon. the alligator crushed the watermelon to reveal that it had been filled with blue jelly. i find reveals like these, couched in a particular kind of violent masculinity, to be quite haunting. i find myself left with this question: once the baby is born, will gender roles be enforced as violently as the sex was revealed? “just an excuse for some harmless fun!” i have heard repeatedly in conversation that expectant parents host gender reveal parties because they are “just an excuse for some harmless fun!”. however, there are ample examples of gender reveal parties being obviously and immediately harmful, including: a “burn-out” reveal in australia in which coloured smoke came off the tires of a car, but also resulted in the car bursting into flames (dixon, 2019); and an arizona reveal wherein the father-to-be shot a target filled with blue explosives, leading to a 47,000 acre wildfire and 8 million dollars in damage (avagnina, 2018). even in the absence of car explosions and wildfires, gender reveal parties are not harmless. we live in a world where sex and gender matter a great deal as evidenced by: the rapid production and honing of sex-selection technologies (seavilleklein & sherwin, 2007), new and expectant parents international journal of child, youth and family studies (2020) 11(2): 82–93 89  gathering online claiming to be suffering from pathological “gender disappointment” on learning the sex of their child (duckett, 2008; whittaker, 2011), and the prevalence of the idea that “family balance” can only be achieved through having equal numbers of male and female children (whittaker, 2011). a woman in a care profession told me that her husband and son had a special bond that she did not have access to because she doesn’t know “what it is like to have a penis” (personal communciation, april 24, 2019). this is an example of the amount of power some give to genitals in dictating not only the kind of life they expect a child to have, but even what kind of relationship a parent of a particular sex can have with that child. even more telling than whether or not a parent expresses a preference for having a boy or a girl are the realities that the child may face depending on their sex and gender. the 2005-2006 virginia transgender health initiative survey reported that nearly 45% of transgender adults had experienced gender-based violence, and 28% had made at least one suicide attempt (goldblum et al., 2012). the canadian trans youth health survey, which took place from october 1, 2013 to may 31, 2014, found that 70% of transgender youth reported having been sexually harassed, and one in three did not have an adult in their family they felt they could talk to (saewyc et al., 2015). in 2010, research conducted by the native women’s association of canada documented 582 cases of missing or murdered indigenous women and girls (special committee on violence against indigneous women, 2014); in the 1993 violence against women survey, 39% of canadian adult women reported having been sexually assaulted at least once since the age of 16 (statistics canada, 2006). such societal ills provide a sobering context for the practice of holding gender reveal parties, which are laden with complex social discourses that take them out of the realm of “just some harmless fun”. international journal of child, youth and family studies (2020) 11(2): 82–93 90  references avagnina, g. 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(2019, april 23). 50 of 50 keywords for 'gender reveal'. retrieved from https://www.wordtracker.com/search?query=gender%20reveal facta universitatis series: economics and organization vol. 17, no 4, 2020, pp. 385 396 https://doi.org/10.22190/fueo200907028t © 2020 by university of niš, serbia | creative commons licence: cc by-nc-nd review paper comparative analysis of developmental concepts of social entrepreneurship in europe and the usa1 udc 005.961:005.914.3]:364-3(4+73) miljana talić*, maja ivanović-đukić university of niš, faculty of economics, serbia abstract: the paper presents a comparative analysis of the dominant theoretical concepts and models of social entrepreneurship development in continental europe and the united states. the initial assumption of the paper was the differences in the model of capitalism that are present in these parts of the world, and the dominant theoretical concepts determine the differences in the form of manifestation of social entrepreneurial activity and the degree of population involvement in its implementation. empirical research, with the aim of testing this assumption, was conducted on a sample of 50,000 social entrepreneurs from 25 countries. the results showed that there are no significant differences in the degree of involvement of the population in social entrepreneurial activity between europe and the usa in the initial phase. in the operational phase, there are differences in the degree of involvement of the population in social entrepreneurship between europe and the usa, but they are also present between eastern and western europe, which means that they are not predominantly conditioned by theoretical concepts and models of social entrepreneurship, but by other factors. key words: social entrepreneurship, social enterprises, social innovations, start-up development phase, operational development phase of the se. jel classification: l31 received september 07, 2020 / accepted october 26, 2020 corresponding author: miljana talić * phd student at university of niš, faculty of economics university of niš, faculty of economics, trg kralja aleksandra 11, 18000 niš, serbia e-mail: tmiljana@hotmail.com 386 m. talić, m. ivanović-đukić 1. introduction many countries had a problem with unemployment in the 1980s, which they could not solve with the existing mechanisms of social policy. new solutions needed to be found that would allow certain social groups to be introduced to the labor market (certo & miller, 2008). as a possible solution to this problem, social enterprises began to be established. social enterprises were innovations in the public sector whose primary goal was primarily the care of socially vulnerable groups and the training of „people who are disadvantaged in society and cannot be self-employed.“ (raičević & glomazić, 2012, p. 7). initially, social enterprises were founded and financed by the state, but very quickly members of civil society (citizens, informal groups, associations, etc.) self-organized. they independently created social enterprises in various legal forms to enable employment of people who are long-term unemployed and facilitate their inclusion in social flows (hjorth, 2013; monzon & chaves, 2017) or offer goods /services to the most vulnerable social groups, at relatively low prices or completely free and made it easier to overcome the institutional vacuum (kolin & petrušić, 2008). these individual initiatives involved finding new and original ideas for solving social problems, starting a business while providing all the necessary resources and bearing the risk of failure of such a job. in other words, they had all the elements of entrepreneurial activity, so they are beginning to be considered a „form of social entrepreneurship“ (austin et al., 2006; zahra et al., 2009; elkington & hartigan, 2008). the benefits of implementing an individual entrepreneurial initiative in the social sphere to solve social problems are being noticed by many international institutions, so they are starting to work on their promotion and development (hjorth, 2013). these measures have resulted in the emergence of a large number of social enterprises and entrepreneurs (european commission, 2013). the increase in the number of entrepreneurs with social goals in practice begins to draw the attention of scientists and „leads to the development of the theoretical concept of social entrepreneurship“ (johnson, 2000; thompson et al., 2000). as a concept that uses non-governmental organizations, market-based approaches to address social issues, social entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly accepted and is being applied worldwide. however, under the influence of the specific characteristics of the environment in which it develops, social entrepreneurship begins to take different forms in certain parts of the world. the most obvious differences occur in the development of social entrepreneurship in continental europe, on the one hand, and the united states and the united kingdom on the other. according to some authors, one can even speak of different models of social entrepreneurship (bacq & janssen, 2011), while others agree that it is the same concept with certain variations (hjorth, 2013). the subject of this paper is to present the similarities and differences of the "european" and "american" model of social entrepreneurship through a comparative analysis of theoretical concepts and forms of manifestation of entrepreneurial activity in the social sphere. the aim of this paper is to examine whether there are significant differences in social entrepreneurship in these parts of the world. the paper will first present the theoretical concepts of social entrepreneurship and the dominant schools that are present in the literature in europe and the united states. then, a comparative analysis of the practice of social entrepreneurship on both sides of the atlantic will be done and the historical factors that shaped different conceptions of social entrepreneurship will be analyzed. finally, using statistical methods, based on gem data, comparative analysis of developmental concepts of social entrepreneurship in europe and the usa 387 it will be examined whether there are significant differences in the development of social entrepreneurial activity in europe and the united states. 2. literature review 2.1. different theoretical concepts of social entrepreneurship in europe and the usa social entrepreneurship is a relatively new concept. in its theoretical explanation, there are significant differences between individual authors and institutions (dacin et al., 2010). differences in the explanation of the concept of social entrepreneurship appear, first of all, as a consequence of different understandings of entrepreneurship itself. as it is known, entrepreneurship can be viewed as a set of personal characteristics of individuals entrepreneurial spirit or as a set of the activities entrepreneurial process (ivanović-đukić & radosavljević, 2019, p. 152). the first group of definitions explains social entrepreneurship from the aspect of personal characteristics of entrepreneurs. in that sense, a social entrepreneur is most generally defined as an individual who is able to find original ideas for solving social problems, provide the necessary resources and start a business in order to create value for society. the second group of definitions explains social entrepreneurship as a set of activities performed by a social entrepreneur. in this sense, social entrepreneurship is “a process of the value creation by combining resources in new ways” (mair & marti, 2006, p. 37). in addition, there are differences in the understanding of the essence of social entrepreneurship that have conditioned the emergence of: schools of social innovation and schools of social enterprises (dees & battle anderson, 2006). the school of social innovation arose from the theories of entrepreneurship developed by josef schumpeter (schumpeter, 1934). the focus of this approach is innovation, i.e. “finding new and better means to solve social problems by the individual” (dees & battle anderson, 2006). accordingly, a social entrepreneur can be defined as an innovator a person who reforms or revolutionizes traditionally established models of creating social value in the direction of better use of resources to create greater social impact (dees & battle anderson, 2006; peredo & mclean, 2006; sharir & lerner, 2006; thompson et al., 2000; nicholls & cho, 2006). while the primary goal of social entrepreneurial activity is the creation of added value for society by individuals and the introduction of sustainable changes for a society that take precedence over profit creation (mair & marti, 2004; weerawardena & sullivan mort, 2006). the focus of this school is an individual, a social entrepreneur when they consider him an activist of social change. thus, one person who is the bearer of social change, in schumpeter's sense, is a key driver of social entrepreneurship even if a larger number of people can be involved in the creation of its organization (dees & battle anderson, 2006). on the other hand, the school of social enterprises advocates the creation of organizations that will simultaneously achieve a social mission and generate income (defourni & nissens, 2008, p. 3). a social entrepreneur is a visionary who is able to identify opportunities from the environment and use the resources of a certain group of citizens to achieve “a social mission in an economically sustainable way and find innovative solutions to social problems of their community that are not adequately met by the local government” (sullivan mort et al, 2003; dearlove, 2004; roberts & woods, 2005; sharir & lerner, 2006; chell, 2007). the primary goal of social entrepreneurs' activities is to achieve a social mission (all social activities that can be non-profit) in an economically sustainable way, if the business performs activities that generate profit, it must be reinvested in solving social problems (defourni & nissens, 388 m. talić, m. ivanović-đukić 2008). thus, according to this school, the primary role in the social economy is played by social enterprises (citizens' associations), while social entrepreneurs have a secondary role (skoll, 2008). the school of social enterprises is more accepted in europe (defourni & nissens, 2008, p. 3), while in the usa the school of social innovations is dominant. interest in social enterprises in the united states is present only among non-profit organizations working on the establishment of social enterprises to use funds from international funds intended to finance these economic entities (basq & janssen, 2011). 2.2. different practices of social entrepreneurship in europe and the usa the development of social entrepreneurship in practice, in addition to dominant theoretical concepts, is greatly influenced by the institutional environment in which the activities of social entrepreneurs take place. the institutional environment is defined by legal regulations, administrative procedures, social policy and other measures implemented by the state. the institutional environment is specific for each country, so there are certain differences in the development of social entrepreneurship. the biggest differences appear in the concept and manner of development of social entrepreneurship in continental europe on the one hand and the usa and the uk on the other, and they are largely conditioned by the characteristics of capitalism and the role of government. for example, the american model of capitalism is based on individual financial success, short-term financial gain, and media coverage. not much attention is paid to economic differences. poverty is seen as a reflection of laziness and irresponsibility. for these reasons, “unemployment benefits are very low, there is no compulsory health insurance or family allowance” (albert, 1991). on the other hand, the model developed by rhineland, which is present in continental europe and japan, gives greater importance to collective success, encourages long-term orientation and strives to reduce economic disparities in society. the european tradition considers the poor man a victim, not a culprit, so in most european countries there are a large number of forms of social assistance for the most economically vulnerable categories of the population and highly organized social insurance (basq & janssen, 2011). these two very different forms of capitalism lead to a different approach to the development of social entrepreneurship. as the governments of most countries in europe implement a larger number of social policy measures to reduce social exclusion and poverty, all initiatives that help solve these problems are encouraged and supported. social entrepreneurship is considered one of the priorities, so most countries provide various forms of financial and institutional assistance in the direction of its development (they push its development). figure 1 shows the sources of income of social enterprises in europe, where public funds play a significant role. on the other hand, in the united states there are no direct state incentives or institutional measures to support the development of social entrepreneurship. it is considered an instrument for creating a welfare state. through the media, work is done to raise public awareness of its role and importance, but its development is based on the voluntariness and individual initiatives of individuals (dees & battle anderson, 2006). given that there are more incentives to start social entrepreneurial activity in europe, it can be expected that a higher percentage of the population in europe is involved in social entrepreneurial activity in the start-up phase compared to the usa and the uk. therefore, our first hypothesis is: comparative analysis of developmental concepts of social entrepreneurship in europe and the usa 389 h1: percent of people involved in social entrepreneurial activity in the start-up phase is higher in europe, compared to the usa & uk. fig. 1 revenue streams for social enterprises in europe source: european commission (2015) a map of social enterprises and their eco-systems in europe. luxembourg: publications office of the european union in addition to the characteristics of capitalism and the role of the government, legal regulations and dominant theoretical concepts affect the characteristics of organizations as a form of manifestation of entrepreneurial activity with a social mission. according to the school of social innovation, which is dominant in the u.s., the legal form of an organization founded by a social entrepreneur can be different, and the organization itself can be nonprofit or for-profit. for austin, stevenson, and wei-skillern (2006), as well as for mair and marti (2004), “social entrepreneurship should not be limited to any specific legal form. according to these authors, the choice should rather be dictated by the nature of social needs and the amount of resources required.” for mair and marti (2004) an important element is the entrepreneurial spirit that gives social initiatives their entrepreneurial nature. this perspective has resulted in the emergence of various hybrid organizational forms that can: be independent, generate profit, hire people and hire volunteers, adopt innovative strategies in search of social change,” etc. “the advantages of these hybrid organizations include, among other things, higher market response rates, higher efficiency and innovation rates, as well as higher resource mobilization capacity” (haugh, 2005; dees & battle anderson, 2006). given that in the united states, social entrepreneurs have much greater opportunities to take advantage of opportunities from the market, it can be expected that a large percentage of initiated social jobs will survive the initial problems and move from the start-up to the operational phase. our next hypothesis is: h2: percent of people involved in social entrepreneurial activity in the operational phase is higher in the usa & uk compared to europe. 390 m. talić, m. ivanović-đukić in contrast, in europe, the forms of entrepreneurial organizations and the legal forms they can receive are precisely defined. all organizations founded by social entrepreneurs are considered part of the so-called “third sector”, are embedded in the field of social economy and can be: cooperatives, citizens' associations, foundations and mutual benefit societies. two types of definitions can be found in european literature: conceptual and legal. international organizations as well as research centers have provided conceptual definitions. for example, the oecd defines a 'social enterprise' as "any private activity carried out in the public interest, organized by an entrepreneurial strategy, but whose main purpose is not to maximize profits but to achieve certain economic and social goals and which has the ability to bring innovative solutions to problems of social exclusion and unemployment" (oecd, 1999). the european commission's definition in the 2011 strategy paper entitled "social business initiative" explains: rather than making a profit for its owners” (brouard & lariviet, 2011). a comparative overview of these characteristics of social enterprises is given in table 1. table 1 comparative overview of social enterprise in the united states and europe europe united states mission creation of social value revenue generation types of social enterprise few many common organizational type association/cooperative nonprofit focus human services all nonprofit activities activity of most ses market based market based help from the government substantial insignificant iy source: authors' work based on a literature review emes network researchers have developed a common definition of a social enterprise that should fit into the different national contexts of individual eu countries. they list the criteria that an organization needs to meet in order to be considered a social enterprise. on the one hand, “four criteria are stated that reflect the economic and entrepreneurial dimensions of the organization: (1) continuous activity of production and sale of goods and/or services; (2) a high degree of autonomy; (3) a significant level of economic risk; and (4) the minimum amount of work paid.” on the other hand, five criteria are listed that unite the social character of an entrepreneurial initiative: “(1) an explicit goal for the benefit of the community; (2) an initiative launched by a group of citizens; (3) decision-making power that is not based on capital and ownership; (4) participatory nature including all actors of the activity; and (5) limited profit distribution” (defourni & nissens, 2008). using this definition as a starting point for identifying social enterprises, significant differences in the number of social enterprises in european countries can be observed. table 2 provides an overview of the estimated number of social enterprises in the eu and non-eu countries, the number of social enterprises per million inhabitants, as well as the estimated number of employees in these enterprises. comparative analysis of developmental concepts of social entrepreneurship in europe and the usa 391 table 2 estimated number of social enterprise in eu and non-eu countries country year estimated number of ses number of ses per million inhabitants estimated number of employees eu countries austria 2015 approx. 1,535 approx. 174 n.a. belgium 2017 18,004 1,530 572,914 bulgaria 2015-2017 approx. 3,700 approx. 525 26,000 croatia 2018 526 128 n.a. cyprus 2017 190 22 n.a. czech republic 2018 3,773 356 n.a. denmark 2018 411 71 n.a. estonia 2016 121 92 1,603 finland 2018 1,181 214 approx. 52,500 france 2015-2017 approx. 96,603 1,414 >1,187,249 germany 2017 77,459 936 n.a. greece 2019 1,148 107 n.a. hungary 2016 15,855 1,621 72,642 ireland 2009 3,376 699 >25,000 italy 2017 102,461 1,694 894,800 latvia 2018 approx. 200 approx. 103 n.a. lithuania 2016-2017 3,476 1,237 n.a. luxembourg 2017-2018 928 1,546 24,055 malta 2018 31-62 65-130 n.a. netherlands 2015-2016 5,000-6,000 290-350 65,000-80,000 poland 2016-2019 29,535 768 428,700 portugal 2013 7,938 771 145,734 romania 2015-2017 6,317 323 17,117 slovakia 2014 3,737 687 n.a. slovenia 2017 1,393 674 15,063 spain 2017 9,680 208 >91,500 sweden 2009-2016 approx. 3,000 approx. 296 n.a. non-eu countries albania 2018 379 132 2,000-2,500 iceland 2017 258 740 1,488 montenegro 2018 150 241 < 500 north macedonia 2013-2015 551 266 n.a. norway 2016 250 47 n.a. serbia 2012 411 59 4,273 turkey 2016-2018 1,776 22 n.a. united kingdom 2007-2017 30,753 464 353,357 source: european commission (2020) social enterprises and their ecosystems in europe. comparative synthesis report. available at https://europa.eu/!qq64ny legal definitions cite the national governments of each state to establish clear criteria for entities that can be considered social enterprises, and they vary from country to country (basq & janssen, 2011). also, organizations and instruments of support for their development differ. however, there are some elements that are present in most eu countries that provide the basic infrastructure for the development of social entrepreneurship. first, there is legislation in the field of social entrepreneurship. legal regulations define the most important conditions that should be met by the subjects of the social economy, their goals, business principles, forms of organization, establishment procedures, etc. then, in most https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/calculation-customs-duties/rules-origin/introduction/list-noneu-countries_en https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/calculation-customs-duties/rules-origin/introduction/list-noneu-countries_en https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/calculation-customs-duties/rules-origin/introduction/list-noneu-countries_en https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/calculation-customs-duties/rules-origin/introduction/list-noneu-countries_en 392 m. talić, m. ivanović-đukić countries, state bodies (ministries, councils, etc.) have been formed that are responsible for implementing measures to create a stimulating environment for the development of social entrepreneurship. these bodies work on strategies and implement policies for the development of social entrepreneurship, work on promoting and supporting social enterprises (through media promotion of the role and importance of social enterprises, providing better access to funding sources, creating institutions supporting social enterprises, etc.). also, the activities of non-governmental organizations that are active in the field of social economy are stimulated. all these measures lead to the creation of a stimulating environment for the development of social entrepreneurship (mitrović & mitrović, 2019). 3. methodology 3.1. sample, model and variables gem (global entrepreneurship monitor) data from 2015 (analysis of social entrepreneurship was performed at that time, while other reports do not contain this data) are used for the analysis (bosma et al., 2016). our sample includes a total of 25 countries: of which 10 are eastern european countries, 13 are western european countries, the uk and the usa. in accordance with the standard gem methodology, each country provides answers for at least 2,000 entrepreneurs, so that our sample includes over 50,000 social entrepreneurs. respondents of the gem database consist of individuals aged 18-64 years. according to gem, a social entrepreneur is defined as “an individual who initiates or currently leads any type of activity, organization or initiative that has a particular social, environmental or common goal” (bosma et al., 2016). there are two phases in the development of social entrepreneurial activity: start-up phase and operational phase. the start-up phase implies the initial entrepreneurial activity and refers to new companies (up to 3.5 years old). this phase is characterized by a number of challenges associated with starting a new business, so many businesses fail in the first few months of business and do not reach the next phase. those companies that have existed for more than three and a half years are in the operational phase. this multi-stage procedure is useful for assessing the state of entrepreneurship at various points. in order to examine whether there are statistically significant differences in the degree of population involvement in social entrepreneurship in the usa and europe, a multivariable analysis of variance (manova) was performed. the variables in the model were the percentage of those involved in se at individual stages in different parts of the world. 3.2. results and discussion the results of descriptive statistics are shown in table 3. it can be seen from the table that the average values for the degree of involvement of the population in social entrepreneurship in the observed regions are approximately uniform. in the start-up phase, the average value in western europe is 4.05%, in eastern europe 3.85%, and in the usa & united kingdom 4%. the highest degree of involvement is in hungary (9.7%) and the lowest in bulgaria 0.6%. eastern european countries have the largest deviations from the average. comparative analysis of developmental concepts of social entrepreneurship in europe and the usa 393 table 3 descriptive statistics mean sd min. max eastern europe involved in se, start-up phase 3.28 6.18 0.6 9.7 involved in se, operational phase 3.14 2.23 0.7 6.9 involved in social goal, start-up phase 1.44 3.78 0.3 5.8 involved in social goal, operational phase 1.64 2.18 0.3 3.9 western europe involved in se, start-up phase 4.05 4.29 0.8 7.4 involved in se, operational phase 4.90 6.3 1.5 10.3 involved in social goal, start-up phase 2.39 1.13 0.5 3.2 involved in social goal, operational phase 3.13 2.37 0.9 5.5 sad &united kingdom involved in se, start-up phase 4 2.85 2.3 5.7 involved in se, operational phase 6.3 3.83 4.2 8.4 involved in social goal, start-up phase 2.4 2.21 1.1 3.7 involved in social goal, operational phase 4 3.33 2.5 5.5 source: authors' work based on: bosma et al. (2016) global entrepreneurship monitor 2015 to 2016: special report on social entrepreneurship. global entrepreneurship research association. in the operational phase, the average involvement in eastern europe is 3.13%, in western europe 3.9%, in the usa & united kingdom 6.3%. the highest degree of inclusion is in luxembourg (10.3%), and the lowest in bulgaria 0.7%. in order to check whether there are statistically significant differences in the degree of involvement of the population in social entrepreneurship in certain phases, manova was done. the results are shown in table 4. table 4 degree of population involvement in social entrepreneurship in europe and the usa eastern europe western europe us & uk f p-value partial eta sq. bonferroni test involved in se, start-up phase 3.28 4.05 4 .59 .623 .01 ns* involved in se, operational phase 3.14 4.90 6.3 4.46 .005 .08 1-2, 1-3, 2-3 involved in social goal, start-up phase 1.28 1.75 2.4 .47 .562 .02 ns* involved in social goal, operational phase 1.46 2.49 4 4.05 .008 .07 1-3,2-3 ns non-significant differences source: author's own work as it can be seen, there are no statistically significant differences in the degree of population involvement in social entrepreneurial activity in the start-up phase between eastern europe, western europe and the us & uk. our first hypothesis has not been proven. when it comes to the operational phase, there are significant differences, both between europe and the us & uk, and between eastern and western europe. this result points to the conclusion that theoretical concepts of se (dacin et al., 2010) and characteristics of capitalism (bacq & 394 m. talić, m. ivanović-đukić janssen, 2011) are not the key cause of differences in the involvement of population in social entrepreneurship in europe vs. usa. the analysis of the factors that predominantly influence the development of social entrepreneurship will be the subject of future research. conclusion the field of social entrepreneurship is characterized by great diversity from the point of view of defining the concept and its application in practice. in addition to discrepancies in different regions, the distinctions are particularly pronounced in the understanding of this concept in different countries and institutional contexts. this differentiation is especially visible when comparing this type of entrepreneurship in europe and the usa. despite the unique understanding of the essence of the concept of social entrepreneurship, there are significant differences in its development in europe and the united states. differences appear in the theoretical explanation and understanding of the essence and in the models of its development in practice. the paper explains the "school of social innovations" and the "school of social enterprises", as theoretical concepts that explain the essence of social entrepreneurship from different aspects. also, the differences that occur in the way the concept is applied in europe and the usa are explained. comparing social enterprises, it was found that in many areas where the united states has difficulties with social entrepreneurship, europe has a better solution and vice versa, which leaves space for mutual learning. however, our empirical research on a sample of 25 countries and over 50,000 social entrepreneurs showed that significant differences in the degree of involvement of the population in social entrepreneurial activity do not exist in the initial phase. in the operational phase, there are differences in the degree of involvement between europe and the united states, but differences also exist between eastern and western europe, which means that they are not predominantly conditioned by theoretical concepts and development models of se, but by some other factors. references albert, m. 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(2009). a typology of social entrepreneurs: motives, search processes and ethical challenges. journal of business venturing, 24(5), 519-532. https://www.researchgate.net/journal/1750-8614_social_enterprise_journal https://www.researchgate.net/journal/1750-8614_social_enterprise_journal 396 m. talić, m. ivanović-đukić komparativna analiza razvojinih koncepata socijalnog preduzetništva u evropi i sad u radu je izvršena komparativna analiza dominantnih teorijskih koncepata i modela razvoja socijalnog preduzetništva u kontinentalnoj evropi i sad. polazna pretpostavka rada bile su razlike u modelu kapitalizma koje su prisutne u ovim delovima sveta, a dominantni teorijski koncepti uslovljavaju razlike u obliku manifestacije socijalne preduzetničke aktivnosti i stepenu uključenosti stanovništva u njenoj implementaciji. empirijsko istraživanje, sa ciljem testiranja ove pretpostavke, sprovedeno je na uzorku od 50.000 socijalnih preduzetnika iz 25 zemalja. rezultati su pokazali da ne postoje značajne razlike u stepenu uključenosti stanovništva u socijalnu preduzetničku aktivnost između evrope i sad-a u početnoj fazi. u operativnoj fazi se javljaju razlike u stepenu uključenosti stanovništva u socijalno preduzetništvo između evrope i sad, ali su one takođe prisutne između istočne i zapadne evrope, što znači da nisu dominantno uslovljene teorijskim konceptima i modelom razvoja socijalnog preduzetništva, već nekim drugim faktorima. ključne reči: socijalno preduzetništvo, socijalna preduzeća, socijalne inovacije, start-up faza razvoja, operativna faza razvoja se key: cord-0046809-l4jls9ew authors: jagodzinski, jan title: art|education: in the service of designer capitalism date: 2020-05-05 journal: pedagogical explorations in a posthuman age doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-48618-1_7 sha: c95209a429abea180950f03ef6d8abed04446ac9 doc_id: 46809 cord_uid: l4jls9ew this chapter furthers the question of creativity as introduced in my previous chapter. i argue that by-and-large creativity in art and its education is being rethought to meet the requirements of our current economic condition that supports designer capitalism. the creative industries have successfully generated a subject position that demands a coming together of art, technology, and knowledge to answer to the information age of the twenty-first century. creativity in art education is following this trend. i end this essay with another view of creativity with the hope that it may be an alternative that some teachers are willing to follow. the question i ask in this chapter is just what kind of creativity are artists, and teachers of art being called on to perform where not only 'logocentrism' dominates (in the two senses that this word implies: a form of reason and rationality that is being 'branded' on the body via corporate logos), and an erosion of what are called 'traditional' arts that have become more and more forgotten. every traditional art now must embrace forms outside its usual purview. a whole new set of artistic fundamentals have emerged to make this possible. olivia gude (2004) offers a partial list: appropriation, juxtaposition, recontextualization, hybridity, layering, gazing, text and image interaction, and representin' it seems that there is no time left in the curriculum for traditional studio practice, especially as we approach the end of secondary education where portfolio preparation is very specific and technological innovation is encouraged in international art baccalaureate programs. perhaps the charge of being 'backwards' is most often heard regarding traditional arts since a digital aesthetics seems to be sweeping through schools. the globalization of the marketplace though designer capitalism requires a shift in educational curriculum and reform, and that is what is precisely taking place globally as new flexible workers are needed. as martin heidegger (1993) once put it, this is the creation of 'standing reserve' of laborers for the twenty-first century. in the 50th anniversary issue of studies· in art education, the leading scholarly journal in the field in the united states, enid zimmerman (2009), a respected american art professor wrote a comprehensive essay on creativity in art education, examining the various ways in which the field had taken up the concept. it was a useful exercise since it provided the parameters and limitations as to its theorization by those who set policy and leadership. in her conclusions and recommendations, zimmerman takes note that globally asia and europe have embraced creativity and recommends that, as a concept, it should continue to be leveled. creativity should be understood in all-inclusive terms available to everybody, rather than an exclusive endeavor confined to a small coterie of people. creativity is then beckoned to do yet another task undertaken by classroom teachers. zimmerman calls on a shift from artistic talent and self-expression to, not surprisingly, reconceptualizing its new role in the twenty-first century in the following way: she writes, "[i)t is apparent that students need to be prepared for a new information age and that educational interventions in art education for all students that foster creative thinking, imagination, and innovation are important for generating solutions to real life problems both now and in the future. […] researchers and practitioners need to conceive of creativity as multidimensional with consideration of how cognitive complexity, affective intensity, technical skills, and interest and motivation all play major roles" (394). such an agenda seems reasonable. it has so much commonsensical force as it questions what seems like a sacrilege: self-expression, genius, excellence, and the exclusivity of masterpieces. but, perhaps the call for such a paradigm shift is precisely the kind of subject position demanded of the educational system by designer capitalism's global need for a flexible subject who can problem solve and innovate? john hartley's (2005) edited book, creative industries, provides a good account of why 'creativity' has become the overwhelming road to economic growth and success. creative industries refer to the "conceptual and practical convergence of the creative arts (individual talent) with cultural industries (mass scale), in the context of new media technologies (icts) within a new knowledge economy, for the use of newly interactive citizen consumers" (5, author's emphasis). richard florida (2002) identifies a 'creative class,' which is not large numerically as a service class, but provides the dynamics for growth and change, as well as the temper of the times. richard latham (2002) has identified the way youth have been seduced into the new media industries (especially video game enterprises) where they have been both exploited and made obscenely rich from their creative passions. the new flexible self is modeled on artists, musicians, professors, and scientists who have always set their own hours, dressed as they pleased and worked in stimulating environments. never 'forced' to work, the difference between play and work disappears. work is play and play is work. such a model becomes the new subject position for the no-collar workplace where the hierarchical system of control, at least in the north american context, is replaced by new forms of self-management, peer recognition, and pressure, as well as intrinsic forms of motivation. john hartley calls this 'soft control,' where what looks like independent work, flexible schedules, and bonus incentives shape the workplace. however, job security (tenure, for example) is traded in for autonomy. incentives are given for more production, and there are opportunities to increase one's skills, an ability to grow and to shape the content of one's work. the expectation is that any student graduating today will have several employers throughout their careers; hence, the portfolio, like the artist, has become a necessity to 'present' oneself (a euphemism for 'selling' oneself like an itinerant worker). it should (again) be no surprise why enid zimmerman's call to level creativity for everyone in recognition that in today's world creativity belongs to the working of global capitalism in its designer mode to encourage technology, lifestyle, and entertainment. when it comes to 'designer creativity,' there is really no shortage of it: just open any television channel, or if you want the pure product in north american you can watch donald trump's the apprentice (the celebrity version) where brutal capitalist competition is made into a game, but this is compensated by celebrity players (hollywood stars, musicians, sports figures, cooking chefs) winning money for their favorite charities. in this game 'everybody' wins. donald trump's logo is made more prestigious and the celebrities are not seen as narcissistic and filthy rich, but kind and caring people trying to help the poor and support those with misfortune. this is an old ploy of capitalist deceit that comes back to the nineteenth century in the victorian novels of charles dickens. it is also a strategy that won trump the white house in 2016. entertainment, business, and politics (finally) became indistinguishable and out in the open. trump showboats, lies, trash talks allies, stages military parades to the economic limits that are possible, golfs, provokes the press and journalists, hosts visiting dignitaries at his resort, mar-a-lago, florida, flies where he needs to on air force one (which will soon be redesigned to his satisfaction), eats hamburgers to show he 'too' likes fast food, and has many of his staff and trusted employees lunch and dine at the trump tower on a regular basis. it is a profile of a millionaire living like a billionaire on taxpayer's money to make him even more money. in short, the presidency of the united states has become an entertainment factory. his ratings are based on how many eyeballs he can keep glued to his twitter account, fox news network, and right-wing newspapers and internet sites, as well as his wooed evangelical christian communities (estimated roughly to be 25% of the population!), who hypocritically turn a blind eye to all his misdeeds and moral transgressions. they are quite happy making a pact with the devil. any evangelicals who call this hypocrisy out are seen as a deviant fringe. if all this is not convincing enough, one should revisit james cameron's avatar, the greatest grossing film of all time and watch the way a new post-colonial fantasy is able to reinstate a particular global imaginary. avatar is a cross between the american fantasy of pocahontas and kevin costner's dancing with wolves. the natives (the navi) are saved by a castrated white savior (he is unable to walk), who learns to tame a dragon so that he can be recognized as their leader. the only choice the natives have is to be saved by humans or be destroyed by them. the fantasy of hybridity, as 'going native' in the manner of french artist paul gauguin, comes full circle as the hero now biologically transforms into a native to have sex with the chief's daughter. now that's creative! the $2.77 billion dollars of profit upon its release was also the highest grossing film of all time. art education's response to the creative mandate in the march issue of art education (2010), edited by enid zimmerman on the theme 'considering creativity,' the eight articles chosen from the forty submitted provide a confirmation of designer capitalism's thirst for creativity. aside from olivia gude's article, which i will mention more below, all of the articles support a redefinition of creativity that will meet designer capitalism's demand where technology (see bryant 2010) , science/engineering (see costantino et al. 2010) , and digitalization (see shin 2010 ) are put to use in art education. these are all well-meaning projects, sincere in their attempt to revamp the art classroom for the twenty-first century. after all, art educators cannot ignore the media, the new technologies, or the 'frameless' digital image, which itself requires a re-theorization as to what an image can 'do,' one of the themes that run throughout this book. what is does show, however, is that the best creative minds in this field are caught by the 'pragmatism' that drives the student consumer mentality around the need to move in the direction of 'edutainment,' a sense of gratification to fill any perceived lack. digitalization heads toward graphic design and creative problem-solving. the breaching of the borders between art and science is a key issue. as the lead article, through her seven points that characterize the creative persona, kerry freedman (2010) articulates the strongest case for revising the meaning of creativity in this special issue of art education. when followed and sold as a package, it confirms the marketability of creativity. how can i say this about what seems to be such a solid well-thought-out agenda? it is precisely such an agenda that drives (triebe) corporate global designer capitalism, and unquestionably, if such an agenda (or one closely resembling it) is not followed, then our students will have no jobs and positions. they will not be ready to creatively participate in the economic world. in this sense, we are held accountable to it, or feel we are letting our students down. i go through her seven points to advertise their urgency and to raise questions: creativity depends on critical reflection: 'critical' here refers to self-reflective discontent. whether its environmentally conscious artists like chakaia booker or korean artist ji yong-ho, who both recycle rubber tires: the material becoming both a fetish and a passionate attachment, to make all kinds of strange, grotesque, and ferocious dragons, sharks, minotaurs, unicorns, and beasts in ji yong-ho's case; or public sculptures and personal statements on physical scarring that people go through as they become judged by their class, race, and labor in booker's artwork. freedman mentions both of these artists as being 'critical.' we can point to a further example, not mentioned by freeman, but which makes a similar 'critical' statement: the masterminds of fcuk designer clothes, whose economic interests seem to be on the opposite ends. both exemplars are driven by conflict and controversy. in the environmentalist case, this draws more people into the gallery on the grounds of awareness; in the latter case, wearing fcuk clothing sends the message of being sexy and different out into the public domain. capitalism's schizophrenia is driven by creative conflict. this is a tough pill to swallow since a number of artists and educators, myself included, have placed a lot of credibility on the need for critically resistant art. my point here is to worry precisely how such critically resistant art is part of what drives (in the freudian sense of 'drive,' trieb) the capitalist machinery as well. fcuk is just one example. recall oliviero toscani's controversial socio-political photographs to sell benetton line of clothing discussed in chapter 2. i found johanna drucker's (2006) sweet dreams: contemporary art and complicity to be most revealing in the way that critical self-reflexion is very much part of the art market game. in brief, it is "complicit" in celebrating the exuberance of visual culture. the rhetoric of the avant-garde as being critical of the social order is long past. "works of fine art are capable of sustaining contradictions, performing oppositional or resistant functions while simultaneously serving mainstream interest. fine art frequently is also both what it claims to be (independent thought, discrete from the other form of cultural expression, a separate domain of alternative values) and what it pretends not to be (bound up with the values of the status quo and the ideological system that sustains it)" (17). throughout her book, she questions the legacy of criticism and any claims to moral superiority. such an ideological stance has already been hijacked by designer capital. luc boltanski and eve chiapello (2005) new spirit of capitalism outline such historical 'progress,' where creativity was hijacked and put to capitalist ends. suhail malik (2013 malik ( , 2019 , as well, provides a similar claim throughout his three-part lecture series in 2013; namely that contemporary art functions through negation; it is a hegelian move that avoids any turn to affirmation, which a deleuzian approach to art would provide. pamela fraser and roger rothman's (2017) beyond critique: contemporary art in theory, practice, and instruction provides a review as to what has happened to 'critique' historically since the frankfurt school. "post-critique begins with the identification of limitations (subjective, personal, plural [institutional] ) and it never ends-because limitations may shrink and shift, but they can never be made to disappear entirely" (5). this assessment is closer to the more affirmative position of deleuze and guattari who maintain that it is a 'problematic' that is at stake. sometimes, in visual and media education, the notion of a 'big idea' identifies such a problematic that artists throughout the ages have struggled with since all such 'problems' are set by historical, social, political, and ethical limitations. the current problematic has to do with the anthropocene, for instance, where the question of agential forces by both nonhuman and inhuman (ai) must be considered. this is unprecedented in 'human' history. in sum, drucker's focus was on analogue artists in the 1990s caught by visual culture. in the previous chapter, i suggested (following maurizio lazarrato's videophilosophy) that a critical intervention may be possible-but already this involves quite a different understanding of how 'critique' might perform in the capitalism of electracy, one where neuro-receptivity of the brain comes into play. digital and video art turn the axis from traditional arts to modulating the image, its speed and time dimensions requiring interventions that innovate and disrupt technologies of cybernetic control. lev manovich (2002) and mark hansen (2004) , along with warren neidich, would support such a direction as they all attempt to rethink the way brain activity and reception as managed by designer capitalism might be disrupted. such a direction has yet to have any traction of significance in our secondary schools at the time of this writing. creativity is based on interests: this second point hardly needs articulation since the days of small inventors and patent acts have intensified into today's 'possessive individual,' the gaming and computing corporations that guard their patents against the free software movements (fsm). tapping into desire is designer capitalism's greatest asset. to change the orientation of interest here, something that freedman does not mention would be to recognize creativity based on interests that are not just self-interests, but global interests such as fsm that sets the agenda in a completely different direction, which is against designer capitalism's greed for empire building. or, in the case of covid-19 pandemic, price gouging for indispensable respirators, surgical masks, and personal protective equipment (ppe) could be curbed, and companies federally asked to retool to manufacture such scare resources. in short, interests are obviously, hierarchically, and politically set. freeman mentions kevin warwick's cyborgian experiments on himself as inspired by the television sci-fi series, dr. who as an example of a creative thinker. but this seems pale when compared to the thousands of obsessed asian students, mostly in japan, korea, and singapore who go penniless and hungry so that they can use up their money to build their own personal robots and compete in robot fairs sponsored by sony, mitsubishi, hyundai, and the global robotic industry in general where contracts and awards are given to the most successful. this is not to deny that game-like activities where youth build robots and learn to operate them are somehow a bad thing. no. my point is simply that such activities are being perverted by a robotic industry controlled by major corporations, which make free access, or the sharing of success of youth robotics unavailable to all. what interests are beings served becomes the ethical qualifier. creativity is a learning process: freedman notes that creativity is autodidactic. while this piggybacks on the notion of self-interest as the previous trait number 2, it identifies what has become the mantra of the most advanced forms of schooling by parents who want their children to succeed in a capitalist environment. it is an agenda pushed by charter and private schools as well as corporations in general-and that is: 'learning to learn.' lifelong learning draws on the rhetoric of the active self-initiated and self-regulated learner exploring in a learning environment where the teacher is a facilitator. 'leaning to learn' is meant to enable the student to adapt to the information society. there is no escape from this. parents feel that there is no other choice in the matter but to make sure that their children get the very latest and best technological 'toys' in the school environment. happiness and well-being are considered part of the permanent communication needed for the social learning process. the old expression for this was "whistle while you work." this now means wearing your earplugs attached to your cell phone when you 'create' in the workspace or classroom. the sony walkman is a distant memory. the fierce competition to enter the best schools and universities to make this happen has already been discussed in previous chapters. creativity is functional: again, it becomes impossible for art schools and educational departments to think the 'unthought' of creativity-that is, creativity that isn't caught by the framework of economy of functionality. even what is 'useless' must become useful; otherwise, it remains non-productive. it cannot be graded on some established scale to identify achievement. the distinction between what was once a divide between play (capitalist leisure) and work (labor) has blurred, if not vanished. in an information designer society, this has collapsed into edutainment-playful work or workful play (see colman 2008 colman , 2012 . the awkward sound of 'workful' indicates that the creative task has to first tap desire (moore 2010: 27 uses the term "play-bour"). everything one does today has to be performative: 'learning to learn' as playful work that, in the last instance, must be proven to be functional, useful, and effective. anyone applying for research funding learns this quickly. the invention of a wheel without its functionality cannot be called a 'wheel' as was the case in the great inca, aztec, and mayan civilizations. creativity is a social activity: this rather obvious trait has interesting implications in designer capitalism for it becomes obvious that the lone inventor, patent maker, or 'da vinci like' genius can no longer be functional. genius is usually co-opted within the corporation. it now takes a marketing team, a production crew, and fan cultures created around some idol or passion to be seen and heard, otherwise forget it. even so-called indie productions become swallowed up into larger collaborative networks to ensure competition and presence (it's called market share). when it comes to designer education, creativity as a social activity is cast in environmental terms. the classroom now becomes the designed environment that facilitates learning so that students can pursue their passions independently through technological means such as internet, game-like curricula, and research via global access to information. the teacher becomes the facilitator. what has emerged from this mentality is the so-called makerspaces spearheaded by a 'maker movement' where inventive 'free play' can go on via new technologies to develop technical literacy. a great deal has been written on this new movement that finds itself institutionalized mostly in universities, libraries, galleries, and museums that clearly show that these spaces are geared toward the entrepreneurial market (ratto 2011; ramsay and rockwell 2012; hatch 2013; rosenfeld-halverson and sheridan 2014; reider and elam-handloff 2018) . this is largely a do-it-yourself (diy) movement whose sustainability depends on how regular these spaces are used, maintained, and result in productivity. the bottom line, any major initiative that shows promise is generally scooped up by larger tech-companies, a way to incorporate new talent and keep ideas being fresh. the 'slave-like' robotic making mentioned earlier, also a diy endeavor, is mitigated in these more accommodating places where the technology is available for play. as paolo virno (2004) has argued, communication and cooperation have become the very fabric of capitalist production. it is félix guattari (1984) who breaks with this kind of organizational thinking through his exploration of the 'transversal,' which can produce different forms of (collective) subjectivity that break down the dominant mode of individual and the group. so the question of 'social activity' that informs creativity should never remain naively unquestioned. creativity involves reproduction as well as production: this is the deal breaker of designer capitalism, the dividing line between economic and non-economic status of creativity. words like classic, innovative, nostalgic, traditional, and original begin to infest the concept of creativity as it is taken up within knowledge production and functionality. it is a question of how 'reproduction' as 'repetition' is theorized. under designer capitalism, repetition and reproduction remain caught by innovation. economic grounds determine whether the product or any new commodity will succeed or not; thus, some projects are dropped immediately since they are not economically viable. freedman draws on the polish philosopher edward nęcka, a psychologist at the jagiellonian university, to make a claim for a number of levels of creativity that range from no conscious employment of knowledge to eminent use of knowledge. applied to education, the more the knowledge use, the better to achieve accomplishment and satisfaction. here, we have the dividing line placed as high as it can go. on the other side of the fence is the non-productive scribble where 'repetition' can introduce difference that does not repeat the same. opposed to the non-sensical scribble is the accounting of cognition at the level of the signifier that guarantees or rather assures the success of completion. the difference between the 'figural' ('scribble') and the figurative (signified complex cognition) has been explored extensively by lyotard (2011) showing just how the 'line' at the figural level can be 'taken for a walk,' as paul klee famously said, allowing for new letters of the alphabet to be developed rather than being confined to alphabetic standardization or to acceptable chinese characters. such a grasp of how line communicates affectively has been attributed to neuroaesthetic developments where some people actually 'feel' line with their bodies (marks 2018) . the return of repetition bringing with it a true 'difference' that breaks with production is a thesis gilles deleuze (1994) develops in his complex book, difference and repetition. deleuze called this return of repetition with a difference as an event. and, whereas 'original' has lost flavor in post-structuralist thought, it is precisely the 'unprecedented event' as theorized by alain badiou (2005) , a contemporary french philosopher, who has revived creativity proper (see jagodzinski 2010). finally, freedman ends with: creativity is a form of leadership. leadership has become a key signifier in designer capitalism. leadership on trump's apprenticeship television program-as project managerleads to either failure or big profit pay off, being fired or praised for the brilliance of the creative act-that is, the 'risk taking' as freedman praises. creativity under the leadership signifier is measured by the potential of who and how many followers-that is, people who are influenced by the creative act. we fall back once more on an economic model. leadership, especially when it comes to ceos of companies and corporations, is the creative position. the company makes it or breaks it depending on the team assembled. the expectation is that the ceo knows where to take the company 'forward,' and is able to keep it as flexible as the individual subject needs to be in a global competitive environment. the leader and the team assembled as measured by some task are the usual formula here. there is creativity and then there is creativity probably nothing that i say in this chapter can or will change the trajectory of art and the way it is taught as it presses up to designer capitalism's demands. enid zimmerman (2009) in her historical review of the concept points out on several occasions the many disagreements as to just what creativity 'is.' this should not be too surprising, since creativity is not a thing, but its reification within different phases of capitalism is necessary to put it to economic use by making certain that the educational institution will support the fantasy necessary to sustain a nation's economic growth. jobs depend on it, the nation's prosperity, the value of its currency, and so on. the increase in postdoctoral positions and phds for artists is yet another indicator that the mantra of 'learning to learn' becomes a question of survival in a capitalist world. parents, students, and professors are not exempt from it, but are held hostage to it. the advancement of chartered schools to promote the flexible, neoliberalist performative subject is well on its way. multi-tasking is a euphemism that hides the requirement that workers work more efficiently and cost-effectively, often being driven to distraction. lifelong learning is yet another euphemism. it basically means lifelong career jobs are a thing of the past; expect to lose your job at any time; and be prepared to reskill as companies need to perpetually restructure to remain globally competitive. we should be reminded that while art education is almost forced to aid and abet designer capitalism to remain viable as a 'subject' area in an age of accountability, the marriage between science and capitalism is equally entrenched when it comes to designer drugs. pharmaceutical scientists are trained and contracted to work, not on drugs for the newly resistant strains of malaria, tuberculosis, and respiratory infections that killed, for instance, 6.1 million people in underdeveloped counties in 2001, but on creating lifestyle drugs for impotence, obesity, baldness, and wrinkles. of the 1223 new medications introduced in 2001, only one percent was developed for the illnesses in poor countries. viagra sales totaled more than one billion dollars in the first year alone (smith 2009 ). have things changed since the turn of the century? hardly. creativity remains abundant, put always for-profit ends. the jury is still out when it comes to a vaccine for the covid-19 pandemic. any mention of an experimental drug that may be helpful to alleviate symptoms is immediately bought up, its price spikes. trump pushing hydroxychloroquine to ward of the coronavirus despite its dangers and ineffectiveness is a case in point. the research 'race' for a vaccine, or vaccines globally will lead to pharmaceutical windfalls. my key point has been simply to argue the way art and design are taught, by-and-large, supports and abets capitalism. the signifier of creativity has been mobilized to ensure this situation. it requires that education be held hostage when it comes to the pressure to make sure that art (mostly as design) remains useful so that employment for its graduates can be found. creativity directed elsewhere seems to be unfashionable, and a total waste of time for students as clients. it is the central paradox of teaching in what is perceived to be a 'useless' subject area unless it leads toward and assures a place in the myriad of practical possibilities: interior designer, animator, game industry illustrator, makeup artist, fashion designer, teacher, and so on. the one exceptional essay within the art education special on creativity was by olivia gude (2010) . it was the only essay that dared think the unthinkable-namely the unproductive side of art that targets difference as such, the singularity of the students. as with freedman, i would like to take each of gude's points to show how they potentially offer a redirection from designer capitalism that she has been engaging in. anxiety: in her first act of description, gude reflects on an exchange that took place between student and teacher, wherein the student doesn't know what to 'do' despite the openness of the project. a few weeks later, there is a further reflection by the same teacher on the lackluster paintings that emerged by those same 'dispirited' students. "both teacher and student are feeling anxiety-uneasiness, apprehension, psychic tension" (32). this situation clearly relates to freedman's 2nd characteristic regarding interests. anxiety may not be the best way to define this incident. to be anxious is to have some object, abstract thing, or person just 'too close' so that one cannot bear to have in come any nearer or the body will faint/freak in some way. no. i would say here the concern is with the demand of the teacher. what is the teacher's desire, and why can't the student somehow match it? and further, why can't the teacher match the demand of her students? there is a missed exchange. something is missing between them that i will come back to. resistance: in her second act of description, gude reflects on a number of teenagers refusing to engage in open discussion on what they can project into a 'multi-branched inkblot.' here, gude gets closer to how anxiety is generated as she maps out the potential hindrances to a response: not wanting to look stupid in front of peers, not wanting to upset the teacher, not knowing just what the teacher expects, thinking that the exercise is too silly in relation to serious art, and so on. something is missing here as well, but here resistance also relates to freedman's 2nd point. cultivating creativity: act three is gude's resolution to the dilemmas presented by the anxieties and resistances students bring into the classroom. "immersion, wonder, and not knowing" (33) are the psychological bye-ins achieved when there is trust, empathy, and an atmosphere that is free of immediate judgment in place within the classroom and among the students and their teacher. gude's spiral workshop, held on saturdays, and hence outside a school setting, sets up an alternative space, which she frames with her own set of themes and experimentations she calls 'principles of possibility.' her curriculum, however, is emergent; it begins with many useless activities based on surrealist games. put in my terms, these are the figural dimensions of arting, what klee called "taking a line for a walk" mentioned earlier. this is not simply production (freedman's 6th point). only in this way are signifiers unhinged from their moorings. the most difficult part of remaining open to the world is avoiding the cliché, which infests life through habituation and repetition. gude brings up anxiety once again when discussing students who then begin to really engage in their own personal becoming, overcoming roadblocks, dead ends, and then facing perhaps unbearable anxieties that they must cope with. it is here that a different formation of leadership (freedman's 7th characteristic) is raised that speaks to a community of witnessing, including the teacher. this is an engagement that has nothing to do with the usual 'art critique.' it is a way the class pulls together to engage in conversation and push onward. here, different bodies interact in different and unusual combinations so that a new synergy might take place. gude has the advantage of home court, not having to be caught by the school's institutional constraints through her spiral workshop, which can be found online. it was stated many years ago by laura chapman (1982) that schools tend to produce "instant art" and "instant culture" if there is no attempt made to break the spatial and temporal patterns of the structured classroom. you reproduce institutionalized art. it is always a creative endeavor to rearrange the curriculum, the art projects, and materials and vary one's approach. however, what i think is missing in the debates on creativity is the profound recognition as to what creativity actually is all about, what zimmerman, despite her comprehensive review, cannot name. creativity when not captured as a 'thing' or a 'describable process' is the spirit of life itself. it is the becoming of things, the changes that are continually taking place, nonstop. creative life itself, without capture, is zoë, and zoë is the becoming of things constrained only by the symbiosis of what surrounds them. it is what deleuze (2001) called a life or pure immanence. captured and made functional zoë becomes bios. the withholding of judgment by gude in her spiral curriculum is what allows her classes to have 'life.' death is allowed in as failure is celebrated. no grades here that appear on a report. the students have not been dispirited. but what if they fail in their creative processes? it is precisely them failing and letting themselves down, not having to listen to the demand of the teacher that opens the potential of creativity. those students pay attention to such a demand only when the teacher's voice becomes psychically healthy. they know she is there to help them through life, holding their spirit intact, so to speak. creativity is really the spirit within one. that is what should be cherished. to the degree it becomes packaged and caught by the demand of the other (teacher, business, clients, priests), creativity will be repressed through anxiety and resistance. i see gude's pursuing a much healthier road for art education than the persistence of designing a creative subject for economic gain. but, hers is not the direction art education is pursuing. for anyone who has read agamben's (1988) updating of michel foucault's biopower will quickly realize how creativity as biopower is manipulated within designer capitalism. the never-ending vitriolic debates on health care in the united states are an obvious example where insurance and pharmaceutical companies and the neoconservative agenda that support them deal in death in the name of life. creativity that deals with death is all around us. its necrophilic roots (lushetich 2018; mbembe 2019) penetrate within our very being wherever we look, yet we cannot think the 'unthought' of creativity that would offer education an escape from the schizophrenic madness of pronouncing judgment, time and time again within the hierarchies of representation that preserves and captures creativity to feed the machinic desire of global designer capitalism. i say as art teachers we should turn our attention to 'life' with its failures and ignore the demand made on us by the pressures of capital. it leads our students more to sickness rather than health. being and event (o the new spirit of capitalism the third culture: beyond the scientific revolution intelligent thought: science versus the intelligent design movement a 21st-century art room: the remix of creativity and technology instant art, instant culture: the unspoken policy for american schools any-space-whatevers: affective game topologies play as an affective field for activating subjectivity: notes on the machinic unconscious an interdisciplinary design studio: how can art and engineering collaborate to increase student's creativity? art education difference and repletion pure immanence: essays on a life (a. boyman, trans.) sweet dreams: contemporary art and complicity the rise of the creative class: and how it's transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life beyond critique: contemporary art in theory, practice, and instruction rethinking creativity: a definition to support contemporary practice transversality postmodern principles: a 21st century art education. art education playing, creativity, possibility. art education new philosophy for new media the maker movement manifesto: rules for innovation in the new world of crafters, hackers, and tinkerers the question concerning technology badiou's challenge to art and its education: or, art cannot be taught-it can however educate!. educational philosophy and theory consuming youth' vampires, cyborgs, and the culture of consumption iconoclash·beyond the image wars in science, religion and art the aesthetics of necropolitics discourse, figure (a. hudek & m. lydon on the necessity of art's exit from contemporary art (parts 1-3). talk series, artists space & talks on the necessity of art's exit from contemporary art the language of new media i feel like an abstract line the international political economy of work and employability developing things: notes toward an epistemology of building in the digital humanities critical making: conceptual and material studies in technology and social life makerspaces. mla commons collections, digital pedagogy in the humanities: concepts, models, and experiments sparks of genius: the thirteen thinking tools of the world's most creative people the maker movement in education taking digit creativity to the art classroom: mystery box swap critical notice: engaging peter mclaren and the new marxism in education new millennium south korea: neoliberal capitalism and transnational movements internet invention: from literacy to electracy a grammar of the multitude: for an analysis of contemporary art forms enseits von kunst beyond art: a third culture net condition reconceptualizing the role of creativity in art education theory and practice 1 issn e. 2776-3285 p. 2776-3366 religious socialism gives birth to a dynamic world: a critical review of dialectical materialism and historical materialism anindya puspita* prince of songkla university pattani campus, thai mueang, thailand anindya.p@psu.ac.th *correspondence: anindya.p@psu.ac.th a b s t r a c t s a r t i c l e i n f o this study discusses indonesian scholar, abdullah bin nuh, criticism on karl marx’s materialism concept. he argued that this theory is a symbiosis of capitalism and secularism that lead to communism. the theory aims to refract the existence of god and may produce authoritarian and dictatorial rulers. the researcher used a qualitative approach with the literature review method. nuh's essay on islam and materialism firmly explores and scrutinizes marx’s historical and dialectical materialism by employing several approaches including philosophical, scientific, and scientists’ opinions. according to nuh offered a new balanced concept that is also in harmony with religion, which is religious socialism that has to be freed from atheism and materialism. article history: received 12 mar 2022 revised 18 apr 2022 accepted 02 may 2022 available online 15 may 2022 ____________________ keywords: abdullah bin nuh; dialectical materialism; historical materialism; karl marx; socialism. introduction the main argument of this study is to reveal the weaknesses and the dangers of karl marx’s dialectical and historical materialism theory that can threaten the global community harmony. with émile durkheim and max weber, karl marx are known as the founders of modern sociology (antonio 2011). marx's philosophy has been widely disseminated by his followers. his philosophical concept was slightly influenced by his predecessors, one of them was hegel. both of them were attempted to reformulate and reproduce contemporary historical thinking using normative power towards transhistorical values (sartori 2014). in addition, karl marx also proposed communism, which was developed based on hegelian philosophy as its substantive principle. marx adopted hegel's philosophy of using reason to create a rational state and slightly combined it with criticism of modern social conditions. marx's communism is arguably a hegelian product because it refers to the philosophical point of view and a summary description of the developing reality of the goal to be achieved (berki 1990). today, the world's intellectuals are extremely anxious about the transformation of ideas initiated by marx (oizerman 2017; siebert 1983). one of them is historical materialism's influence in causing global conflicts. in one of their studies, eric herring and doug stokes unveil that the acts of religio education journal homepage: https://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/religio/index e-mail: religio.education_journal@upi.edu religio education, volume 2 (1) (2022) 21-33 e r mailto:asepabdulaziz1993@gmail.com mailto:asepabdulaziz1993@gmail.com mailto:asepabdulaziz1993@gmail.com https://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/religio/index puspita, religious socialism gives … | 22 issn e. 2776-3285 p. 2776-3366 global terrorism and wars are caused by a mix of critical realism and historical materialism (herring and stokes 2011). in political terrorism, historical materialism is exploited as a substantive theoretical instrument to enhance a history specifically. on the other hand, critical realism has a role to develop theoretical and methodological underlying assumptions or an essential source of criticism and reciprocal reinforcement. roy calls this an 'underlabourer' (bhaskar 1998). this study supports the hypothesis that radicalism and global terrorism are on the rise, and that they pose a significant threat to the life of state sovereignty, which was born under the influence of marx's ideology (haron and hussin 2013; orhan 2010). the indonesian nation is a nation of diverse tribes, cultures and languages (candra et al. 2020), raden abdullah bin nuh (hereinafter is referred to as nuh) is a muslim scholar and patriotic indonesian hero who participated in the struggle for indonesia's independence from colonialism. in his work islam dan materialisme (nuh 2015), nuh criticized marx's mindset that was saturated with materialism ideology so that the root of this term, communism, refracted god's existence, which contradicts religious teachings (levin 1997). in line with nuh, hawne hasan hama in his study, entitled a comparison between marxism and islamic state’s salafi jihadism, compared marxist orthodoxy theory with salafi’s ideology of an islamic state. according to him, marx's theory has similarities and differences with the current salafi’s ideology. both started their revolutions with minorities and did not believe in making concessions to achieve their objectives. the difference is their revolution goal. in this case, salafi gave birth to the islamic state, while marx created the communist state. the result of these two ideas has long been regarded as an authoritarian political ideology rife with aggression (hama 2019). despite the fact that marx's theory has been widely criticized by scientists and other philosophers, scientific practitioners in this century, including indonesian scholars, have paid close attention to it (carver 1972; chitty 2011; choat 2016; cocks 1983; doel 2008; farihah 2015; graham 1993; horii 2017; hudis 2004; jordan and macmillan 1967; megill and park 2017; niemi 2011; van ree 2020; sinn 2017). this study does not claim that nuh's ideas in islam and materialism are the most precise, since it is believed that it is less ethical, and theories will be crucial to evolve in the future as globalization and technology advance. furthermore, this approach is not intended to monopolize information. in this study, nuh argued that if marx's materialism is allowed and disseminated into the modern society's mindset, nuh's in-depth study and examination would affect undermining the state system and transforming modern society's behavior and perspectives on religion. as mentioned above, herring discovered evidence-based on scientific analysis proclaiming that terrorism is often exploited as an instrument of the capitalist (herring and stokes 2011). capitalism is a transitional dynamic in which some members of the capitalist ruling class, comprised of a coalition of capital owners and administrators, state elites, and larger social elites, attempt to fight or work with the dynamics of transformation to protect and advance their interests (maher and thomson 2011; mckeown 2011). it is similar in islamic teaching where well-known muslim scholars, both classical and contemporary, such as aththabri, ibn katsr, al-qurthub, sayyid thanthawi, and others believe that materialistic existence is dangerous to a muslim's identity because it keeps them away from allah (ath-thabari 1994; thanthawi 1987). in agreement with nuh, lebowitz (2011) demonstrated that capitalist globalization must be confronted by socialist globalization because its effect on the global community is enormous (lebowitz 2011). nuh's religious socialism is comprised of four main steps that strengthen the argument. first, it reveals marx's fallacy in seeing substance as the primary source of life. second, nuh provides criticism and rebuttal to dialectical and historical materialism. third, he develops new theories about pure religious socialism, free from atheism and materialism. finally, the phenomenon of the rise from atheism to theism. by using the “critic from inside” approach, he 23 | religio education, may 2022, volume 2, issue 1, 21-33. issn e. 2776-3285 p. 2776-3366 attempted to rectify marx's understanding by using the opponent's argumentative viewpoint and the study knife of philosophy, science, sociology, and scientific opinions. this study can provide a significant contribution by providing new interpretations and novelty related to the concept of a new product, which is religious socialism that can straighten out marx's philosophy, which is destructive to divine spiritual values. methods this article tries to present a critique of mark's concept with his materialism concept, and nuh proposes a new theory in the form of a religious socialism concept that is free from atheism and materialism ideologies. so that the right approach used by researchers is a qualitative approach with a literature review method. results and discussion material in a scientific point of view according to nuh, marx's materialism is based only on a tangible matter, which is the essential constituent of the world, and only its forms, processes, or aspects reached by the senses are considered truly exists. it implies that the universe exists as a result of substances and is not created by god (nuh 2015). nuh believed marx's ideas were based on an axiom or an assumption in which a meaningful condition is constrained by the physical world or material elements. the quran mentions the creation of the universe and one of the hypotheses that are almost in line with its standardization is the big bang theory, which was proposed by albert einstein and later confirmed by hubble's experimental research when he invented the telescope (afifah, ayub, and sahidu 2020). according to this theory, the universe was a solid matter, erupted (period of separation), and then transformed into a plume of smoke (sada 2016). several famous muslim scientists have weighed in, including ibn rushd, who is known for his cosmological theory. according to him, the universe was not created all at once; rather, the act of creation has been ongoing since azaliy (the age of nothing) and continues to this day (alkhalq al-mustamir). creation cannot be perfect all at once, particularly when it comes from something that did not exist before (creatio ex nihilo). therefore, evolution must be interpreted as the transformation of one element into another (mustofa 2018). it was found that nuh employed seven approaches to criticize marx's idea of materialism, including physics, chemistry, philosophy, genetics, physiology, psychology, biology, and the opinions of leading scientists to show that material is not the end of it all. nuh started his argument by quoting louis pasteur's theory of disease germ. the assumption of marxism law of “created into existence in its own" was refuted by this study. louis pasteur was the first scientist to note the virulence of microbes' ability to harm their hosts and was the first to discover the connection between germs and disease (solunke 2018). louis pasteur (1822-1895) is regarded as a leading scientist who ushered a new age in biology and medicine (berche 2012). thanks to his contribution, a new discipline of medical specialization was developed in france in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rise to a new clinical and laboratory term called la pathologie infectieuse (contrepois 2002). his experimental study started with crystals of a fermented wine byproduct. in his study, he discovered that living microbes play a role in the fermentation and decay processes. pasteur's theory questioned spontaneous generation theory. his observation of the epidemic in silkworms is allowing him to pinpoint the role of certain germs in infectious diseases. the discovery of the cholera vaccine was the catalyst for the development of immunology. because of this, louis pasteur is widely credited as the father of anthrax and rabies vaccines. according to nuh, pasteur's experiment has rebutted charles darwin's the origin of species (1859), which became one of marxism's main arguments. in this case, his simple pumpkin experiment not only put an end to the concept of living and puspita, religious socialism gives … | 24 issn e. 2776-3285 p. 2776-3366 non-living things but also laid the foundation for the law of biogenesis. despite the fact that pasteur's study was strongly criticized and denounced by other scientists, he stands firm in his convictions. louis pasteur is a devout christian who believes in god as the creator of all living things(gillen and iii 2008). pasteur's findings support nuh's claim that life can only come from life and the general law that rules the universe of beings is not “happened on its own" law as the materialists claim. nuh second approach is genetics. genetics is closely related to studies of heredity and cytology in science. according to nuh, genetics has revealed the fact that when an offspring inherits certain traits, it also possesses individual differences. for nuh, genetics has revealed the presence of a complex hereditary system and the enormous power of these tiny genes that determine the condition of all body cells and provide animate beings with traits and personalities. he argued that it is ludicrous that all of this happened by chance as marxists believe. this discovery strikes at the heart of darwin's theory of evolution as well as materialist atheism. nuh's idea is supported by a cytologist named painter who can prove that the genes of the hypothetic factor have a role in the transition of traits from parents to their children along chromosomes (nuh 2015). the complexity of the gene inheritance mechanism has inspired scientists to further pursue discoveries. one of them is eduardo c. lau's preimplantation genetic process, which is a method for determining the genetic status of embryos produced by in vitro fertilization (ivf) before pregnancy (lau 2012). another example is a study that demonstrates the complexities of parental genotype inheritance by crossing certain traits (atnaf, mohammed, and zelleke 2013). nuh believed that the empirical evidence provided by experts has opened the global view that it is unlikely for the dynamic process of genetic inheritance to happen just like that (dudley 1973; hamilton 1964; jeevan et al. 2020; maita, mareovich, and peralta 2014; natarajan et al. 2020). nuh’s third approach is from physiology where he asked materialists to look at the human digestive system. nuh noticed a perfect and orderly mechanism that all food of different types is chemically extracted, and then the beneficial nutrients are delivered to the cells in the body in a calculated and sufficient manner so that each cell received only what is required, gradually transforming into bones, hair, teeth, nails, nerves, and so on. the eye, as a soft and delicate visual instrument, is made up of several parts. if one of the parts is disrupted, the vision will be impaired. even though the thickness is entirely no more than thin parchment, the net over the eye of the reflective lens consists of nine layers. the final layer is made up of 30 million rods and three million cone-shaped parts and bars, all of which have their cones neatly arranged. then, why do the rays of light fall on them backward? according to nuh, it proves that there is a creator who has fitted the visual apparatus behind the web with millions of sensitive nerves to allow for chemical separation. in this case, michael p. w. grocoot agrees with nuh that advancement in medical research is inextricably linked to progress on the frontiers of human survival. he argued that the study of human physiology in extreme environments is extremely beneficial (grocott 2008). in another study, garcoot believed that technological advancements can create translative models and integrative human physiology (grocott and montgomery 2015). the translational study is one of the keys to potential success that can benefit human health (apiou-sbirlea et al. 2015). the physiology study is similar to what nuh understood. for him, a great design that neatly follows complex rules confirms the existence of a creator who did construct the perfect mechanism. in addition, nuh also used a metaphysical approach to dissect marxism. nuh used a straightforward analogy to prove the existence of a creator who is not a part of the universe's material elements. a chair is used as a seat and is made up of various materials such as wood, iron, nails, glue, and so on. however, we can all agree that the carpenter, not the chair's constituent parts, was the one who is responsible for its creation. if it is analyzed further, it 25 | religio education, may 2022, volume 2, issue 1, 21-33. issn e. 2776-3285 p. 2776-3366 could be seen that the wood is made up of basic elements such as oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen, and that the material elements of these basic elements are atoms, and that the atomic material is made up of proton, electron, and so on. this atomic number is the most fundamental scientific substance that science has discovered in this century by observational scientific methods (nuh 2015). nuh further explained that the answer to all questions about the substance that comprise everything will be god. one modern scientist, sigmund freud (1856-1939), a professor in the field of neurological science who studied the nervous system and all of its disorders, demonstrated the theory of hysteria and its treatment by hypnotic suggestion. with jean charcot, a pathologist and neurologist from france, he attempted to prove that the cause of hysteria is paralyzed hysteria caused by hypnotic suggestions. the experiment result was reported in his book studien uber hysteric in 1893. his book explores the idea that hypnotic suggestions can help people with hysteria (nerve disease, mental movement, and sensation disorders). then, he refined his study in his next book, die traumdeutung, that was published in 1900, followed by psychopa thologie des alltagslebens in 1904, and finally drei abhandlungen zur sexualtheorie in 1905 (nuh 2015). die traumdeutung explains the perception of dreams where freud believes that it is an important element in psychoanalysis. the sections of dreams that are remembered are symbols of unconscious mental behavior occurring during sleep when the will is no longer active and conscious self-control is temporarily stopped. the founder of modern psychology, sigmund freud, studied the human mind and claimed that the subconscious mind dominates the conscious mind (k j sibi 2020). sigmund freud's idea is in line with azadkhan's analysis who suggested that psychoanalytic theory can be applied to reading texts to discover the significance of meaning within (niaz, stanikzai, and sahibzada 2019). nuh argued that sigmund freud is a scientist who was influenced by charles darwin's theory. therefore, according to freud, humans are materialistic animals. nuh criticized freud's viewpoint by looking at islamic teachings on the elements of oneself and humans. in islam, humans are neither angels nor devils, though their degree of evil can often degenerate to be worse than the devil and vice versa. islam encourages its followers to be balanced in all things. even if it is for the sake of nobility, islam does not tolerate imbalance because all facets of islam must be considered inseparably. this is indicated in the words of the prophet muhammad: "la rahbaniyyata fil islam" means there is no monasticism in islam. from an islamic perspective, humans are made up of bodies, purpose, and spirit. islam opposes some extremist groups' viewpoints on sexual activity, which they consider to be a despicable act. in fact, to avoid harming society and oneself, islam allows several things like eating, drinking, and even having sex within safe limits. this is confirmed in the quran surah al-a'raf (7) verse 32. allah permits adornments as long as it is practiced in a wise, disciplined, and orderly manner. to conclude his critique of sigmund freud's view, nuh clarified some of the observations made by western and european intellectuals about the supernatural. nuh quoted the book of william james, a wellknown psychologist, the varieties of religious experience that recounted an incident in which he had contact with supernatural entities in 1884. furthermore, erik j. dingwall, the author of the unknown is it nearer? that tells a story about meeting someone who had died in 1917. in indonesia, according to literature, general ahmad yani's mother was said to have seen him coming to visit her in central java at the exact moment he was killed by communists in lubang buaya, jakarta. nuh's view on historical and dialectical materialism in islam dan materialisme, nuh argued that marx's ideas can be summarized into at least seven propositions. 1) the signs of a community's uniqueness in terms of politics, social life, and culture are a function of how people carry out the economic process. 2) history is shaped puspita, religious socialism gives … | 26 issn e. 2776-3285 p. 2776-3366 by a series of class struggles in which people compete for economic interests that are incompatible with one and another in the face of scarcity. 3) feudal systems have vanished due to the rise of a middle class whose economic interests are dependent on trade expansion in industrial factory-made goods. 4) according to marx's predictions, the capitalist industrial society will eventually perish under the circumstances that are produced by itself. 5) amid a crisis, the proletariat (poor) is increasingly self-aware and persists in being stimulated, resulting in a peculiar process for self-destruction: the proletariat (poor) is increasingly self-aware and persists in being stimulated, eventually controlling the means of output in a worsening crisis as a result of unemployment. 6) the existence of leninism (expansion and addition) to marxism, according to which the collapse of capitalism's system occurs not only as a result of a prolonged recession that causes unemployment but also as a result of competition for trade and capital expenditure due to narrow markets that lead to global monopoly intervention. in such a situation, the working class would then attempt to seize power and impose a socialist agenda headed by communists. 7) once the socialist state who are working on behalf of the industrial proletariat in a stage of "dictatorship of the industrial proletariat” is in control, productivity will continue to grow without interruption and real income will rise to the point that true communism is possible. according to nuh, this hypothesis is very likely to come true because socialists would eradicate it due to the contradictions that have existed in capitalism since its creation. karl marx has been predicted in several of his books. furthermore, nuh attempted to assess the validity of marx's historical materialism theory, according to which history is described as a society's social, political, religious, and mental state as a result of its circumstances and economic processes. this economic situation is influenced by energy and the means of production. therefore, the means of production is the primary driving force behind human history (farihah 2015; oittinen 2015; peck 2016). according to marxism, the real foundations that rest based on relations of production are the social, cultural, political, religious, historical, and other aspects of relations since this production relationship determines the type of ownership rights that applies in society and it is the one who determines the process wealth distribution. meanwhile, the essence of politics, law, thought, and religion is determined by the manner of ownership rights and the distribution of the means. thus, according to marxism, there are two types of resistance in society. the first is the resistance between the growth of the productive forces and the ownership right relationship, which becomes an impediment. the second is a class contradiction between a class that defends the productive forces and another that preserves old relations in which the latter contradiction is the result of the first (nuh 2015). as a result, according to marxism, victory is always on the side of the new since the means of production are the driving force of history. in this case, nuh used the birth of a state as an example to try to rectify marx's historical materialism. of course, marxists would argue that economic conditions and class opposition play a role in the birth and development of a state. the winning class would then establish a political instrument, the government, to defend its economic interests and preserve its status. therefore, a state is established to safeguard certain classes. nuh believed that the birth of a state may be founded on recognition of the value of working together to solve all of life's problems. nuh cited egypt as an example of a country where its people worked together to arrange all aspects of irrigation as a result of river floods. thus, a state was created to direct people through life and to manage all operations that are difficult but essential for public life. the egyptian clergy held a high place in the state apparatus, not because of their social status, but because of their role as a result of their superior competence over the common people. aside from the concept of collaboration in problem-solving, another principle is the presence of religious influence, human inner satisfaction, and so on. 27 | religio education, may 2022, volume 2, issue 1, 21-33. issn e. 2776-3285 p. 2776-3366 some scientists, such as karl federn, criticized historical materialism, claiming that history would proceed in an infinite stream where nobody knows the beginning of the end. since history lacks a terminus a quo, it is difficult to determine which of its components is a thesis, antithesis, or synthesis. in agreement with federn's assessment, in his scientific analysis, dr. jordan demonstrated that the idea of historical materialism is ambiguous. further, he argued that marx's philosophy adopted plekhanov’s and lenin's philosophy in the formulation of the theory (jordan and macmillan 1967). in his work, the theory and practice of communism, carew hunt claimed that marx’s historical theory would only have a fictitious effect on history. the normandy victory, for example, would be viewed solely as a synthesis of roman and anglosaxon cultures or as a thesis whose antithesis and synthesis are the plantagenet and tudor periods, which is obviously incorrect and fatal. nuh also sensed a danger when history was being evaluated using marx's theory. he believed that this action would not provide an objective standard of measure with sense and rationale of actions or ways of working or doing something in history. furthermore, nuh also challenged marx's extremist attitude towards historical materialism, where marx stressed once again in his book, the critique of political economy, that two variables are present in production: productive forces and relations of production. according to marx, the latter factor is originated from the former factor, giving the idea that productive forces and relations of production are the primary causes of the formation of history. whereas, according to nuh, other factors are more significant than marx's theory, which is the spirit of thinking and the desire of the human will. he argued that the productive forces evolve automatically by discoveries resulting from human thoughts and wills. nuh's argument was supported by koestler: “marxian society has a basement-production, and an attic-intellectual production; the staircase and the lifts are missing”. in reality, marx was aware that there is an interconnection, which is a link between the upper and lower sections. marx dismissed this study even though if his experiment succeeds in establishing the connection, it will be clear where the validity of marx's theory lies, whether it can be accepted or completely dismissed. on the other hand, antonio labriola expressed a different viewpoint, questioning the validity of marx's historical materialism theory. labriola is referring to the natives of north america and the fact that they did not achieve a degree of civilization because europeans introduced wheat and domestic animals, which did not exist priorly. furthermore, nuh’s included another driving force in the flow of historical transition, which is the birth of great people all at a certain time. he used isaac newton, a prominent physicist who invented the law of universal gravitation after being inspired by an apple falling on his head, as an example. nuh argued that marxists tend to hide this fact from the public because it will destroy the existed economic theories, as hessen, a marxist, did. another flaw in marx’s historical theory, according to nuh, is that karl marx was not considered an expert in his field. as it has been known karl marx was not a real historian and he just cited several scientific theories from many experts. the fact that karl marx was not a great historian may have reduced the legality of his work and the degree of confidence it has among intellectuals. apart from historical materialism, karl marx developed dialectical materialism, which is marx's school of philosophy states that there is a dynamic relationship between matters and the general nature of change and its radical character and that everything that has reality is in the process of changing itself. according to marx, it consists of opposing forces of motion that bind everything while also transforming everything into something else. in this case, nuh employed science to demonstrate the fallacy of marx's theory, as stated in the previous discussion. nuh declared unequivocally that neither the element nor the supreme cause of the universe could be obtained from matter itself, but it could be obtained from some other cause puspita, religious socialism gives … | 28 issn e. 2776-3285 p. 2776-3366 and that natural forces would decide the course of their inclination. to make the concept to be easier to understand, nuh compared it to the creation of chairs. wood, iron, glue, and other materials have to be used to make chairs. despite the fact that these components make up a chair, it is the chair maker who makes the chair a chair. therefore, according to nuh, dialectical materialism is incompatible with science, which has proved its validity and reality. to summarize the study, nuh's perspective on marx’s class theory is presented. it is considered important because marx's philosophy has hypnotized many countries around the world, including indonesia. in his theory, there are at least two classes, which are socialism and communism. according to marxist, communism is a stage of social progress that follows socialism. communism is characterized by an abundant economy in which the state as a restraining force is considered unnecessary because class animosities have vanished. therefore, the values that can be applied throughout the communism phase are, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” marxists believe that it will be accomplished when socialism has existed. according to marx, socialism is a level of society with the following characteristics: a) abolition of class, the solution to the class system by creating a classless society, b) the transfer of political apparatus into the hands of the proletaries (workers, peasants, poor, etc.) by establishing a dictatorial government capable of realizing the historical task of socialist society, c) nationalizing the state's resources and capitalist means of production, making them the property of the entire society; d) distribution based on the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." several studies focus on the ideals of marx's communism have been conducted by several intellectuals (burkett 1999; campbell 2012; engels 1925; marx and frederick engels 1969; struhl 2007; sullivan 2005). nuh disagreed with marx's class theory, as well as socialism and communism. he based his criticism on many warning signs if marx's philosophy is realized. according to nuh, one of the risks is the emergence of an absolute dictator, whose power is uncontrollable by all, leading to fears that a cult that is defying the dictator will emerge. it happened in the past during the dictatorial reign of firaun. in islam dan sosialisme, it can be seen that nuh’s idea is in line with muslim intellectual mirza mohammad hussain who claimed that in islam, moral orientation is clearly etched on the conscience of society, while in the marxist system, there is only utilitarianism (the spirit of finding benefits) wrapped in a thin veneer of politeness moralism that is almost invisible. nuh also criticized the dictatorial regime's existence that would be followed by a system of terror. in such regime, oppression and tyranny will be rampant and the dictator will use the slogan "defend the people" to show their authoritarian stance. on the other hand, the state apparatus and the police will be instructed to use their power solely for personal gain. the nationalization of mass production sources and means will be another threat. of course, this goes against islamic teachings, which preserve each individual's property rights. from atheism to theism in nuh's work entitled bebaskan dunia dari kehancuran, there is a quote from a western writer who was desperate for the complete moral failure of an atheist materialistic culture. s. c. hacket, in his book the resurrection of theism, expresses an interesting viewpoint, arguing that there is a weak but growing movement from atheism to theism. sir richard gregory, in his book religion is science and civilization, agrees with hacket and claims that: “the two main factors that have influenced human development at all levels of civilization are religion and science. science is stingingly important for our lives in the light of commitment to high ideals, and religion defines the essence of life for the vast majority of humanity, so both should find a common ground for work.” sir richard gregory's argument, according to nuh, confirmed that there is no disagreement between science and religion. gregory believed that faith and empirical science 29 | religio education, may 2022, volume 2, issue 1, 21-33. issn e. 2776-3285 p. 2776-3366 are not mutually exclusive. intellectuals who subscribe to religious ideologies and schools sometimes claim themselves as scientific humanists. they believed that the true good resides in human improvement that can be achieved through educating human reason and contributing various scientific benefits. this idea contradicts marxist beliefs that consider religion as a drug for the mind in a mystical and ritualistic context and according to nuh, this is a general heresy. as a result, most modern american and european societies rejected god's presence, which is a tragedy. descartes, in line with gregory, argued that science is a method to distinguish between truth and falseness until it is obvious. this statement indicates that descartes was one of those who believed in the existence of god. in his book science in our lives, ritchie galder claimed that the historical conflict was not between science and religion, but between science and obscurantism that opposes the advancement of knowledge and denies anything that is in opposition to the current system. nuh recognized that the world could revert to religious teachings. it is proven by albert einstein's theory of relativity in 1905 that demonstrates that humans cannot perceive the universe objectively from the outside, but only relativistically because humans are a part of it. planck and hainsberg, in agreement with einstein, explained that humans cannot perfectly describe the universe in a rational, empiric manner. according to nuh, understanding religion safely and purely, and putting science in its place is the only way to free europe and the united states from the danger of materialism. religious socialism gives birth to a dynamic world religious teachings, according to nuh, contradict the principles and theories of atheism and materialism because they reject non-material entities such as the existence of the spirit and others. these principles give birth to human understanding that concludes that allah is a result of human creation, allah is created by imagination, and allah cannot be separated from human imagination (patrick l. gardiner, feurbach, 1969). however, it should be noted that nuh does not rule out liberalism, imperialism, and science. nuh argued that under president soekarno, indonesia was a powerful attempt to merge socialism with the core of religious teachings regarding the belief of one almighty god. as a result, religion was not considered wishful thinking, but rather as a focal point for many people's lives around the world. in contrast to indonesia, socialism in european countries is compelled to be founded on atheism and materialism, causing fear and concern in modern european society about god's presence and having a dual sense of religion. on the one hand, they concluded that religion has a positive impact on the projection of human existence. however, religion also often turns people away from failing to realize human needs, causing humans to personify their meaning against god. in this case, nuh had an ideal concept that can represent the distinctive characteristic of indonesian ulama thought, as part of an effort to return the world to its original state that stands on the principles of peace, tolerance, and integrity that is to remove the ideology of atheism and materialism from the grand concept of socialism in any form so that the encounter will give birth to a concept of religious socialism that is in line with the values of islamic teachings. nuh provided a new conceptual framework for the development of a dynamic and religious world, namely that is by strengthening socialism theory while eliminating atheism and materialism ideologies. through a comprehensive analysis, nuh believed that pure socialism, which is free from atheism and materialism and is in line with religious teachings, will bring peace and prosperity for the global society with high religiosity. therefore, religious socialism will create a dynamic world. puspita, religious socialism gives … | 30 issn e. 2776-3285 p. 2776-3366 conclusion raden abdullah bin nuh criticized karl marx's theoretical framework that he claimed to be destructive and condensed with philosophical materialism. according to nuh, it will threaten the generated ideology and will disrupt the global community's harmony by denying the existence of god, contradicting religious teachings, and dangerous for muslims because it keeps them away from allah. to counter this, nuh proposed "religious socialism" as a new philosophical paradigm for the development of a dynamic and religious society. this idea strengthens the construction of socialism theory by eliminating atheism and materialism. through a comprehensive analysis, nuh believed that pure socialism, free from atheism and materialism and compatible with religious teachings, would bring peace and harmony in the life of a globally religious community. nuh's "religious socialism" consists of four major steps: first, exposing marx's fallacy in seeing material as the primary source of life; second, nuh criticizes and rebuts the concepts of dialectical and historical materialism; and third, new concept about pure religious socialism that is free of atheism and materialism; and fourth, the phenomenon of the rise from atheism to theism. references afifah, gusti, syahrial ayub, and hairunnisa sahidu. 2020. “konsep alam semesta dalam perspektif 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“at-tafsir al-wasith lil quran al-karim.” 516. 43 epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences the rise and fall of the european dream joseph w.h. lough department of economics, university of california, berkeley, usa abstract the european dream is often portrayed as the benign if not benevolent counterpart to the fading american dream. yet, as economic historian joseph lough shows in this essay, the european and american dreams are linked by more than their shared embrace of free market capitalism. in this essay professor lough exposes the darker side of the european dream, a side first expressed in the 1990s, but now fully revealed in europe’s conflict with greece. as professor lough shows, this dark side of the european dream was already present at its birth in the 19th century, when gwf hegel allegorized its birth and diffusion through a story about the self-moving substance that is subject. this story has received mathematically rigorous validation through convergence theories of today’s neoclassical and neoliberal economists. yet is total domination by this self-moving substance inevitable, much less desirable? professor lough shows how europe could adopt an alternative, more sustainable european dream to meet today’s pressing challenges. key words: europe, european dream, hegel, robert lucas, karl marx, capitalism, eu, european central bank, wto, world bank, imf 44 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences introduction in the mythology that enshrouds the european dream, europe fashions itself a benign if not benevolent force, gradually enlarging itself at no member’s expense and to all members’ advantage. and, yet, throughout the 2000s this mythology has suffered from a steady series of reversals, of which greece is only the latest. the european is often contrasted to the american dream in a comparison that nearly always favours europe. the european dream emphasizes community relationships over individual autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation, quality of life over the accumulation of wealth, sustainable development over unlimited material growth, deep play over unrelenting toil, universal human rights and the rights of nature over property rights, and global cooperation over the unilateral exercise of power (rifkin 2004:3). so wrote american economic and social theorist jeremy rifkin in 2004 in his appropriately enough titled book the european dream. what i would like to suggest here is that the european and american dreams have always born a far more intimate relationship to one another than either most europeans or most americans care to admit. at the very least they are wed together by their shared dependence on an economic system that in the final instance begs agnosticism over the fates of those whose lives, for better or worse, are governed by its mediations. on its surface the european dream casts a profile that, while irresistible and, so, inevitable, is inviting but never forceful, always giving more than it takes and never eliminating the good that preceded its arrival. nineteenth century german philosopher gwf hegel is the herald of this benevolent spirit, occupying territory only when it is invited and, even then, only when it finds in its beloved object a narcissistic image of itself. yet, if hegel is its herald, then surely the european dream’s economist is the university of chicago’s robert e lucas, jr, the elder statesman of neoliberal orthodoxy. for it is lucas (and not francis fukuyama) whose rigorous mathematical modelling shows why and how the european dream must, of necessity, gain complete and final supremacy over all the earth. the intimate relationship between the european and american dreams goes beyond the economic system they share. when in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, great britain unwillingly ceded rights over the world economy to its former colony, the bargain included a clause that required the us to underwrite the twin fatalities — world wars i and ii — that lay just barely beyond the horizon. when great britain and germany destroyed one another’s industrial capacity in world war i, it fell to the united states (and more specifically to jp morgan) to re-establish their industrial ca45 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences pacity. and when they did so again barely twenty years later, again it was the united states that, for admittedly less than completely benevolent reasons, stepped in to bail them out. the european dream was, in this sense, stamped “made in u.s.a.” its fortunes were tied to the returns on america’s already vast and growing neo-imperialist holdings. should these falter, the dream could easily morph into a nightmare. what follows is a highly stylized account of the european dream. fellow economists will likely find it too thin on data and models. policy makers will likely find it too thin on historical and institutional detail. on both counts, i am inclined to agree. yet, notwithstanding these disabilities, the following account has value. for i believe that it does successfully explain the dark side of the european dream, not as a momentary or ephemeral anomaly, which, during better times, will dissipate in the warmth of the sun, but as a feature necessarily immanent to the european project as such. having cast its lot with the weal and woe of economic efficiency, the driving force behind economic growth, europe cannot help but discipline those whom it judges less efficient; greece today, portugal tomorrow, but eventually each and every community that fails to fall into line. this was the logic that nearly two centuries ago hegel already perceived and portrayed allegorically in his story about the ever-narcissistic self-moving substance that is subject. karl marx then picked up on hegel’s verse, translating it first into a story about every oppressed class in history, but finally into a story about the self-generating and regenerating powers of capital itself. in its earlier form, marx hailed every working class as the emancipatory agent of history. in its final form, however, marx perceived in this subject a picture of domination debilitating precisely on account of its success. the course of our account proceeds as follows. we will first review the broad historical contours that led, first to the transfer of title from great britain to america, but then the re-gifting of this title back to europe and to the world in the closing decades of the twentieth century. our aim here is to show how the european dream was always already tied to economic mechanisms and processes that, at least initially, were loudly disavowed by its architects. we then proceed to a critical assessment of the hegelian trope out of which the european dream first emerged. as i have shown elsewhere, this trope begs to be interpreted in a light cast on it by the rigorous mathematical modelling of contemporary neoclassical and neoliberal economists. if, as i contend, hegel’s story about the self-moving substance is an allegory, it may be valuable for us to explore the economics behind this story. to this end i show how robert e lucas, jr’s rigorous mathematical modelling casts light on and so sets in relief the topography of this otherwise opaque hegelian trope. in our concluding section i explore some alternatives to what has often been cast as the inevitable, inescapable trajectory of the european dream. is europe and its 46 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences dream destined to tumble headlong down the hole it has created, or might there be another path forward towards the fulfilment of an alternate european dream? our story begins more ominously with the twin fatalities, world wars i and ii, and dream that emerged out of its ashes. the long boom and its sequel many economists have described the broad contours of the twentieth century global economy (frieden 2006; brenner 2006; arrighi 2009). for the narrative that follows, i am depending principally on robert brenner’s economics of global turbulence (2006) and jeffrey frieden’s global capitalism (2006). these accounts are important for our purposes because they establish the historically and socially specific character of the european dream. with roots extending as far back as the eighteenth century, this dream owes its specific form to two factors: the massive destruction of human and fixed capital in the european wars of 1914-1945 and the unprecedented transfer of wealth from great britain to the united states over the course of this same period. the massive destruction of capital brought europeans to adopt a cynical view of the political and economic institutions that had left their nations vulnerable to these twin catastrophes. the unprecedented transfer of wealth from great britain to the united states meant that following the european wars the united states was operating at near full industrial capacity, enjoying near full employment. but this also presented a huge dilemma. with europe’s economies a complete shambles, where would the economic growth come from sufficient to purchase the commodities being pumped out at a record pace by the united states’ economy? for the moment, demand from domestic consumers was sufficiently robust to sustain the united states’ unprecedented growth. yet, without global consumer demand no one was so foolish as to believe that such growth was sustainable. all told, the us sent roughly $13.5 billion to europe to rebuild its industrial capacity and sent another half billion to japan to do the same (frieden 267). for our purposes the volume of us aid is less significant than what such aid signified: the transfer of global economic power from great britain and germany to the united states and the transfer of the rights to regulate global markets from london to washington (arrighi 284-285). of course, as giovanni arrighi has noted, this transfer of rights was long in the making. by the turn of the century smart british money was already heavily invested in a booming us economy (arrighi 270). the british drive to compete with germany over armaments production only accelerated this trend. by the end of the great war, arrighi notes, “most of the $9 billion of us net war credits was owed by . . . britain and france; but more 47 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences than 75 per cent of britain’s $3.3 billion of net war credits was owed by bankrupt (and revolutionary) russia and had to be largely written off ” (arrighi 271). when added to the astronomical debt great britain accumulated during world war ii, the combined total helps to explain why us treasury official harry dexter white and not his famous british counterpart, john maynard keynes, held all the cards (and keynes none) when the two nations sorted out the financial order that would govern global commerce following the war (frieden 256-259). still, it is noteworthy how europe spent its $13.5 billion reconstruction money, not only or even primarily on aid earmarked for its gutted private industrial sector, but on a huge infusion of capital destined to create and reinforce a major expansion of europe’s social franchise. indeed, in what counts as one of the greatest ironies of the post-world war ii epoch, europeans spent us aid on social goods that no american president or congress would ever spend on their own constituencies. and herein europe created a constellation of social efficiencies — in education, transportation, health care, and housing — that would eventually give its nations a competitive edge against their erstwhile patrons, the citizens of the united states of america. for eventually europe’s and japan’s industrial base recovered. and when they did european and japanese goods, heavily subsidized by the vast social franchise that their nations erected following the war (almost entirely with us dollars), began to compete successfully against us manufactured goods. in this sense, the european dream was clearly stamped “made in u.s.a.” what happened next came as an entire surprise only to those who believed (mistakenly it turns out) that the global economy had outgrown its dependence upon sound keynesian macroeconomic principles. once again, ironies abound. at the very moment that one nobel prize winning economist after another were delivering “exultant obituaries on destructive capitalist economic instability” the bottom fell out of the market (brenner 1). arthur okun, a top kennedy-johnson advisor, had just declared recessions “obsolete” and “preventable, like airplane crashes” (cited in brenner 1). even supposing that okun was correct in principle, neither he nor anyone in charge of monetary or fiscal policy in the us could have prevented germany and japan from taking advantage of their relative competitive advantages over the united states and consequently driving prices down on global markets. as robert brenner points out, however, what was at issue in this global competitive cycle was not the rise of european at the expense of us industry. what was at issue was the rates of profit investors enjoyed worldwide who suddenly discovered that the decline in profit margins brought on by global competition hit all national economies simultaneously (brenner 122-142). the long downturn had begun. 48 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences if the european dream took shape in the aftermath of world war ii’s unprecedented destruction of human and fixed capital, the first faint flickers of the nightmare that was to follow appeared at the very moment when europeans were making that dream a reality. the first real shock to europe came in 1971 in the form of a troubling devaluation of the us dollar, a response to declining rates of profit, escalating unemployment, and declining purchasing power. fearful of suffering at the polls in the upcoming election, president nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. the results were instantaneous: a 10 per cent drop in the dollar’s value, which, in effect, imposed a 10 per cent import tax on foreign producers (frieden 341). suddenly consumers in japanese and european markets found it more economical to purchase us manufactured goods. momentarily the us economic decline was halted. yet since it was based neither on an increase in efficiency nor a decline in costs, the fix was temporary. and so set in a decade-long decent into what economists were beginning to call “stagflation,” a simultaneous increase in inflation, but without the benefit of economic growth. of course throughout this american drama, member nations in the european common market did not sit idly by. in 1979, after nearly a decade of bickering, but fearful that they too could be socked with monetary instability, ec members formed the european monetary system, a precursor to the european union’s future common currency (frieden 371). japan, by contrast, enjoyed few avenues through which it could recapture efficiencies lost through global competition. as robert brenner notes, “by early 1975, both industrial output and capacity utilization were downmore than 20 per cent from their levels of early 1973. by the end of 1975, manufacturingemployment (in terms of hours) had fallen by no less than 12 per cent from its level of 1973” (brenner 171). germany faired equally poorly throughout the 1970s. as brenner notes “because german exports actually fell with the collapse of world growthand demand, manufacturing profitability dropped 23 per cent” (brenner 180). between 1973 and 1979, [germany’s] manufacturing gross capital stock grew less than one third as fast as it had during the 1960s and early 1970s, plunging to an average annual rate of just 2 per cent (1.85 per cent between 1975 and 1979), compared to 6.4 per cent between 1960 and 1973, and manufacturing investment stagnated, continuing a trend that had begun between 1969 and 1973. such a profound drop in the growth of capital stock and investment sapped the economy’s vitality (brenner 180). the quest upon which all of the global economies set out in earnest was how to restore these 4 to 6 per cent growth rates to which global competition had laid waste over the course of the preceding decade. monetary union and currency de49 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences valuation were but partial, temporary, and ultimately unsustainable solutions. what was needed was an actual increase in productivity itself. the response to this need for increases in productivity has a name. it was chairman of the us federal reserve board paul volcker. in 1979, volcker increased short-term interest rates from 10 to 20 per cent and with this adjustment “stagflation” came to an end (frieden 372). not to be outdone, the world’s other leading industrial powers quickly followed suit (frieden 373), but at a prohibitively high cost. by the summer of 1982, the us economy, subjected to the monetarist medicine since 1979, was reeling from the resulting recession. pulled down by record high real interest rates, capacity utilization plummeted and manufacturing profitability fell10 per cent below its level of 1978, leaving it 54 per cent below its level of 1973 andmore than 70 per cent below its level of 1965. unemployment (at 11 per cent), bankruptcies, and bank failures reached levels hitherto unapproached during thepostwar epoch (brenner 195). similar consequences followed in europe’s largest industrial economy, germany, where “the return to full capacity utilization was thus accompanied by an 8.4 per cent rate of unemployment, almost double the 4.8 per cent rate that prevailed at the end of the 1970s” (brenner 231). more ominously, reports brenner, “the increase of the manufacturing capital stock, already sharply reduced in the 1970s, fell significantly further, to an average annual rate of just 1.4 per cent between 1979 and 1990, from an already low 2.0 per cent between 1973 and 1979” (brenner 231). the long downturn in the us nevertheless differed, at least initially, from the long downturn in europe. where the us economy picked up efficiencies by eliminating the social safety net for millions of american families, citizens of europe were not as yet prepared to elect political leaders who, in their judgment, would reproduce the social inequalities and political instabilities on which most europeans still blamed the twin catastrophes of the early and mid twentieth century. better to sacrifice a modicum of efficiency than risk economic inequality, social unrest, and perhaps even war. and, no doubt, it was in part this difference between the us and great britain, on the one hand, and continental europe, on the other, that accounts for the profoundly different experiences of the 1990s enjoyed by nations on one side of the channel and the other. where the us and great britain forged ahead, deregulating markets, reducing tax burdens, and eliminating social safety nets for the most needy members of their communities, most europeans were still sufficiently mindful of the social causes for world wars i and ii to cast votes to maintain their costly social welfare systems. eventually, however, the apparent rebound and stability of the us economy during the 1990s had the effect of convincing even the hard-nosed germans that 50 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences some measure of neoliberal tinkering with their social welfare state combined with an easing of taxes and regulations could do much good without causing too much harm. thus, with america and great britain in the lead, the so-called “washington consensus” eased its way also into europe. at this point in the story, many scholars would want to call attention to the three events that punctuated the first decade of the twenty-first century: the bursting of the dot com bubble in 2000, the terrorist attack on the us pentagon and new york world trade center in 2001 and the great recession of 2006. yet, from our vantage point these events are far less important than the collapse of soviet-style communism in 1989 and the subsequent spread of neoliberal orthodoxy among successor republics during the 1990s and 2000s. even if we acknowledge a relationship among these events — such that, for example, the efficiencies earned by neo-colonialist invasions in the 1990s are somehow held distantly responsible for the rise of radical islam — what is noteworthy about the world’s response to these fatalities is how closely they hew to a neoliberal line drawn up in washington. neither the collapse of tech stocks in 2000 nor the great recession of 2006 provoked anything close to the glass-steagall banking act of 1933. nor did the terrorist attack upon the centers of us military and commercial power bring policy makers to question the wisdom of neo-imperialist policies throughout the islamic world. to the contrary, as george steinmetz has noted, these fatalities instead provoked a further assault on the freedoms, liberties, wages and benefits of working families in the us. the efficiencies won by these repressive policies, what steinmetz calls “authoritarian post-fordism” (steinmetz 2003), were no doubt quite substantial. but, notwithstanding the flood of critiques authored by mainstream economists of the policy choices leading up to 2006 (krugman 2009; stiglitz 2010; sachs 2009; reich 2008), there is no evidence that the social and political fragmentation or violent global responses to neoliberal policies has led policy makers to question the essential soundness of the path they have chosen. to the contrary, as the social, political, and economic fabric of communities from the baltics to the balkans, from greece to syria, and from western china to pakistan comes unraveled, policy makers have responded by tightening the screws even further. at what cost to the european dream? gwf hegel’s dream if the european dream has an author it would probably be the 19th century german philosopher gwf hegel. if it has an economist, that economist would probably be the university of chicago’s robert e lucas, jr. both hegel and lucas theorize a world 51 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences where antagonism gives way to understanding, war gives way to commerce, and the anarchy of competing laws, cultures, languages, and regulations gives way to a singular, uniform, yet highly differentiated and flexible universal system of complementary laws, regulations, and understandings. lucas does not so much challenge hegel’s dream as lend it mathematical rigor and substance. historically, of course, europe is an anomaly. how likely was it that europe, the backwater of global civilization, where each hamlet constituted its own miniature kingdom and where the uniformity of laws and regulations vanished with the retreat of rome; how likely was it that this polyglot of languages, regulations, political fiefdoms, cultures and religions would in less than three centuries grow into the dominant force operating in the world? one popular eighteenth century answer to this question was penned by arguably that century’s most famous economist, adam smith. according to smith, global convergence was a matter of simple, straightforward economic efficiency. those nations enjoying the greatest advantages in efficiency would clearly and easily win out in the competition among nations over those that were less efficient. eventually these less efficient nations would either fall into line, adopting the same efficiencies operating in the leading nations, or they would be conquered and disappear. this answer did not sit well with gwf hegel. for it seemed to offer no explanation for the ultimate goal of such productive activity — mere global supremacy? — or for the reason why, after centuries and millennia of less than efficient production, societies should suddenly feel that this was their sole or primary aim. through a life-long study of other peoples and places around the globe, hegel was keenly aware of the spectacular diversity of ways and understandings human beings engaged with and interpreted their worlds. clearly something unprecedented was taking shape in europe. europeans now occupied all corners of the globe. their command of the natural and theoretical sciences was without equal in history. could such global dominance be credited simply to superior efficiencies or superior military might? did might make right? such questions inspired hegel to delve deeper into the question of global convergence. adam smith had answered these questions pragmatically. human beings have a “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (smith 25). nor was smith the least curious over why they enjoyed this propensity. “whether [it] be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given; or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to enquire” (smith 25). for hegel, by contrast, such an assertion appeared to place efficiency in the role of dictating right, a position that only decades later would be vigorously 52 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences defended by british utilitarians such as jeremy bentham and john stuart mill. was it possible that freedom was subject to necessity, reason to utility, mind to matter? no, it was not. in fact, hegel speculated, reason and right had always been the driving force behind human development. yes, whenever communities met they exchanged. what they exchanged, however, was far more than the goods they had produced. they also exchanged cultural artifacts, traditions and understandings about how things worked; they exchanged and compared religious and moral ideas, and they shared specific judgments respecting the beautiful and the good. efficiency belonged in this mix, but it was far from the sole or even the primary determining factor. to illustrate this point and to distinguish his interpretation from those now on offer by french and british political economists, hegel called attention to the private producer, the private member of civil society. in civil society, each individual is his own end, and all else means nothing to him. but he cannot accomplish the full extent of his ends without reference to others; these others are therefore means to the end of the particular [person]. but through its reference to others, the particular end takes on the form of universality, and gains satisfaction by simultaneously satisfying the welfare of others (hegel 1991:220). on first blush, hegel’s view appears to differ little from smith’s. the division of labour creates efficiencies for all concerned (smith 6). for hegel, however, since it is only when we act with and for others that we realize efficiencies, the universal takes precedence over the individual. the selfish end in its actualization, conditioned in this way by universality, establishes a system of allround interdependence, so that the subsistence [subsistenz] and welfare of the individual [des einzelnen]and his rightful existence [dasein] are interwoven with, and grounded on, the subsistence, welfare, and rights of all, and have actuality and security only in this context (hegel 1991:221). moreover, not only does individuality, whether by itself or with others, lack the universal vantage point necessary to appreciate how all individuals work together, individuality, hegel finds, is ultimately self-destructive. particularity in itself [für sich], on the one hand indulging itself in all directions as it satisfies its needs, contingent arbitrariness, and subjective caprice, destroys itself and its substantial concept in the act of enjoyment; on the other hand, as infinitely agitated and continually dependent on external contingency and arbitrariness and at the same time limited by the power of universality, the satisfaction of both necessary and contingent needs is itself contingent (hegel 1991:222). what is still missing, according to hegel, is a grasp of the whole, of all of the mutual dependencies, of their effects on one another, and an appreciation for the shared goal toward which this whole is moving. in this situation, the interest of the idea, which is not present in the consciousness of these members of 53 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences civil society as such, is the process whereby their individuality [einzelheit] and naturalness are raised, both by natural necessity and by their arbitrary needs, to formal freedom and formal universality of knowledge and volition, and subjectivity is educated in its particularity (hegel 1991:224). that is to say, the individual comes to understand that his or her freedom is predicated upon grasping how his or her actions are related to the actions and knowledge of those with whom he or she has to do. and this, in turn, is predicated upon the education or training that enables individuals to appreciate this universal. for clearly, it is not the individual labourer or even the individual merchant who grasps this universal. as illustrated by the difficulty british political economists displayed thinking about anything beyond private enterprise, members of civil society could only appreciate that they were dependent on one another; not how or why. this, for hegel, helped to explain why education was so critical an element in economic growth and integration. education, in its absolute determination, is therefore liberation and work towards a higher liberation; it is the absolute transition to the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life, which is no longer immediate and natural, but spiritual and at the same time raised to the shape of universality (1991:225). here then is the european dream. but to what end? it was in answering this question that hegel differentiated himself most decisively from french and british political economists for whom the production of wealth was reason enough to justify work. not so hegel. the universal and objective aspect of work consists, however, in that[process of ] abstraction which confers a specific character on means and needs and hence also on production, so giving rise to the division of labour. through this division, the work of the individual [deseinzelnen] becomes simpler, so that his skill at his abstract work becomes greater, as does the volume of his output. at the same time, this abstraction of skill and means makes the dependence and reciprocity of human beings in the satisfaction of their other needs complete and entirely necessary. furthermore, the abstraction of production makes work increasingly mechanical, so that the human being is eventually able to step aside and let a machine take his place (hegel 1991:232-233). at first hegel’s analysis seems nearly identical to smith’s. the division of labour leads to the simplification of each task. such simplification makes it possible to develop machines to replace human labour. yet, where smith’s analysis leads no further than the relatively greater wealth produced on account of these efficiencies, hegel sees another, more commendable goal: freedom from the necessity of work. that such a goal cannot be appreciated from the vantage point of the individual labourer or merchant, that all she or he sees is the immediate task set before her or before him, is credited to their inability or reluctance to consider the universal in light of which alone the system as a whole makes sense. reason was always driving this process from the beginning of time. yet, in order for us to grasp this reason we 54 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences needed first to climb outside of ourselves, educate ourselves, and so gain a vantage point from which to view the whole. but how should we characterize the whole from whose vantage point this comprehensive, integration of all social, political, and cultural reality was taking shape? elsewhere hegel identified this vantage point as the self-moving substance that is subject. everything turns on grasping and expressing the true, not only as substance, but equally as subject. . . . further, the living substance is being which is in truth subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. . . . it is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual (hegel 1977:10). like nearly all nineteenth century european thinkers, hegel was eager to establish that europe was not an anomaly. europe was the end of history, its culmination, its goal. yet, in order to establish this fact, it was necessary to show that the appearance of europe enjoyed ontologically fundamental status. europe was not an afterthought. it was not the accidental product of self-interest, however enlightened. rather was europe — its integration, its rationality, its coherence, and increasingly the global scope of its imperial conquests — this europe was substantive, irrefutable proof of the self-moving substance that is subject, the patron of european exceptionalism. we will return to this hegelian trope in a moment. suffice it to say, however, that stripped of its metaphysical pretentions, hegel’s analysis falls not far from contemporary theories respecting global economic, social, and political convergence. and perhaps no theorist tells this part of the story better than robert e lucas, jr., elder statesman of the university of chicago’s neoclassical empire. lucas adds mathematical rigor since i have already covered the intimate relationship between lucas’ and hegel’s interpretive frameworks elsewhere (lough 2014), i will limit my remarks here to lucas’ discussion of economic convergence in an essay titled “some macroeconomics for the twenty-first century” (lucas 2002). in this essay lucas aims to model the tendency of incomes around the globe to converge. according to lucas, this convergence shows that from an initial singularity limited to great britain in 1800, nearly all nations will by 2020 experience incomes and economic growth converging upon a universal, global singularity. nor is lucas unaware of the mechanisms driving all nations toward this convergence. like hegel, lucas grants education and 55 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences knowledge pride of place. “an economy departs from stagnant equilibrium and begins to grow when the world stock of knowledge attains a critical level” (lucas 100), writes lucas. moreover, the growth and income of any individual economy depends upon the growth exhibited by the whole. “the probability that a stagnant economy begins to industrialize depends on the level of world income, which in turn depends on the past experience of the growing economies” (lucas 101). even when the rate of convergence begins to slow toward the end of the 20th century, this is “only because there are so few people left in stagnant, pre-industrial economies. according to the figure [reproduced below], almost 90 per cent of the world is now growing” (lucas 102).hegel’s self-moving substance is becoming both actual. it has become in truth substance. several assumptions underlie lucas’ model, which he has adopted and revised from robert tamura (1990, 1994, 1996). in a manner consistent with hegel’s interpretation, lucas allows that “knowledge produced anywhere benefits producers everywhere” (lucas 103). lucas also finds parente and prescott’s observations respecting political interference helpful. “governments in the unsuccessful economies can adopt the institutions and policies of the successful ones, removing what paraente and prescott (1994) call ‘barriers to growth’” (lucas 103). lucas’ model also emphasizes “diminishing returns and the flow of resources: high wages in the successful economies lead to capital flows to the unsuccessful economies, increasing their income levels” (lucas 103). yet, for lucas, “the much more interesting implication of the model is that convergence is unconditional” (lucas 104). “it predicts,” writes lucas, 56 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences “that sooner or later everyone will join the industrial revolution, that all economies will grow at the rate common to the wealthiest economies, and that percentage differences in income levels will disappear” (lucas 106). but what is perhaps most noteworthy about both hegel’s and lucas’ descriptions of global convergence is what they do not tell us. neither, for example, explores the human cost entailed in convergence. for presumably as all communities converge into a globally extensive, rational, and comprehensive totality, cultural and legal differences, linguistic idiosyncrasies, purely local customs and practices — call them “barriers to growth” — will have either to be rationalized or eliminated. nor are we without some knowledge as to what might be entailed in the elimination of these barriers. for such is the story of colonialism in the 18th and imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. there are reasons why great britain is the lone nation experiencing growth in 1800 and why patterns of diffusion of growth in the 19th and 20th centuries follow fairly closely the paths hewn by imperial conquerors. between 1800 and 2020 — between t1 and tn — entire civilizations and whole peoples will be eliminated from the face of the earth in the creation of what could be called the european dream. marx’s bad dream at the very point where lucas’ model shows a dramatic uptick in the diffusion of the industrial model and a rapid increase in global economic convergence — during the first half of the 19th century — karl marx was taking a second look at hegel’s self-moving substance that is subject. until that point, marx had been fairly certain that the self-moving substance that hegel identified was not the weltgeist or world spirit of history, but was instead the dialectically material underclass of every generation, clashing with and then superseding its retrograde oppressor. it was not the spirit that was first differentiating itself from and then returning to itself; it was the industrial working class. whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet finally on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, establishes his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalization, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective. a being who is objective acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. he creates or establishes only objects, because he is established by objects —because at bottom he is nature. in the act of establishing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of “pure activity” into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, establishing his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being (marx 1988: 153-154). 57 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences from this vantage point, marx might have agreed with lucas, except that where lucas theorizes the global movement and universalization of capital, marx theorizes the global movement and universalization of objective, object-creative, labour. or so marx thought in 1844 when he penned his economic and philosophical manuscripts. by 1867, however, marx had changed his tune to one far more in harmony with lucas’ theory. where in 1844, marx had viewed labour as the self-moving substance that is subject, the globalizing and universalizing force of history, by 1867 he agreed with lucas and credited capital with this role; or, more specifically, he credited the value form of capital. [value] is constantly changing from one form [the money form] into the other [the commodity form], without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. if we pin down the specific forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value in the course of its life, we reach the following elucidation: capital is money, capital is commodities. in truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. . . . but now, in the circulation m—c—m, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms (marx 1982: 255,256). and why is this change of mind significant? it is significant because whereas marx in 1844 was just as transfixed by the european dream as any 19th century european thinker, by 1867 he was far less enamoured. yes, as lucas would later prove with rigorous mathematical modelling, capital was knitting together all social, economic, political, and cultural reality into a comprehensive, universal, yet dynamic and highly differentiated, rational whole. yet, by 1867 marx was far less certain that this was a good thing. indeed, by 1867 marx was inclined to feel that this was not the good news, but the bad news. if, as we have suggested, the european dream projects a benign universalism that gently embraces all social and cultural forms into its benevolent emancipatory narrative, we now know that this narrative has a dark side. in the decades following world war ii, awash on a sea of cheap and easy capital, it was easy for europe to downplay this less than benevolent dimension of its dream. europe after all was already well on its way to shedding its pre-war colonial holdings and transferring the responsibilities of global security to the united states of america. moreover, unlike the american dream, which only with great reluctance expanded its social franchise to include the elderly, unemployed, children and the poor, europeans by contrast warmly embraced a sweeping social franchise that included education, health, housing, transportation and retirement security for all, apparently without 58 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences the least awareness that these goods were available to them only by leave of their larger than life free market benefactor, the united states of america. it was therefore only as europe’s and japan’s economies recovered and their goods began to compete successfully against goods “made in u.s.a.” that downward pressures on wages and prices began to place downward pressures as well on europe’s extravagant social franchise. the first faint signs of this dark side of the european dream came to light in the 1980s when downward pressures on wages and prices not only brought student and labour unrest back to the streets of europe, but lent to this unrest a right-wing, explicitly neo-fascist tilt. jean-marie le pen’s front national was only the most visible, but also the most benign, of these reinvigorated neo-fascist movements whose overall effect on voting patterns was that they pushed all political platforms sharply to the right. they made nationalism, racism, and anti-semitism respectable again. when in the 1990s the neoliberal gospel spread throughout newly liberated eastern europe and russia, the wide swath of destruction it left in its path — unprecedented unemployment, crime, government corruption, and social upheaval (klein 2007:275-354) — were loudly trumpeted as the price newly capitalist nations had to pay to gain entry into the growing club of free market nations. not even a genocidal war in south central europe — the consequence of a decade of privatizations, deregulation, auctions of public assets, plant closures, and inconceivably high unemployment (roland 2000; lowinger 2009)— were sufficient to bring europe’s caretakers to question the neoliberal inflection of their new economic policies and regulations. political culture in western europe and the eurozone were shifting violently to the right. the social fabric of eastern and southern europe was coming unravelled. and, yet, the response of the eu, the world bank, the imf and the wto was not debt relief or forgiveness, but more privatizations, more austerity, and more auctions of publicly owned assets. obviously this is not what is generally meant by the “european dream.” and, yet, if the story we have outlined here is correct, then the european dream was always already deeply indebted to an economic project with a very low tolerance for difference. the self-moving substance that is subject that enveloped the globe in the decades following world war ii appeared at first blush benign if not benevolent. yet, as marx pointed out already in the 1860s, its ultimate aim was far less innocent. it would stop at nothing short of total global domination, which now, according to lucas, it has very nearly achieved. 59 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences an alternative dream this is not to say that matters might not have turned out differently. consider, for example, the declining rates of profit investors enjoyed when in the mid1960s germany and japan got back into the game. as the french economist thomas piketty has recently reminded us, rates of growth beyond 1 per cent are an historical anomaly (piketty 72-73). even lucas, whose neoliberal credentials are beyond dispute, willingly admits as much, when, in the conclusion of his afore-mentioned essay, he asks: how did the world economy of today, with its vast differences in income levels and growth rates, emerge from the world of two centuries ago, in which the richest and the poorest societies had incomes differing by perhaps a factor of two, and in which no society had ever enjoyed sustained growth in living standards? (lucas 106) assuming for the moment that a sufficient number of policy-makers enjoyed a similar epiphany at the outset of the 1970s, and assuming that rather than search for ways to sustain the 4 to 6 per cent returns investors enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s they instead opted for a redistribution of efficiencies downward and outward, it would then have been theoretically possible for workers in the developed world to ease their way into hegel’s fantasy of stepping aside and letting machines take their place. the result surely would have been an initial overall contraction in global economic growth, a leveling off at piketty’s recommended 1 to 1.5 per cent growth annually (piketty 74-75). and, yet, the effect might have been a fresh lease on freedom. or let us further suppose that, as jeremy rifkin has postulated, the european dream “emphasizes community relationships over individual autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation” (rifkin 3). such, i would argue, are admirable ideals. nor were they lacking from the blueprints proposed at the creation of the european dream. yet, within the framework of neoclassical economics, every purely local particularity, every cultural specificity, every legal or regulatory exception, introduces an efficiency-sapping distortion into the overall system. communities are fine things. yet, when parents show a preference for children or the elderly over work, or when traditional religious holidays or local celebrations intrude upon the working day, they necessarily draw upon efficiencies created elsewhere. lucas’ growth model shows that whenever we emphasize community relationships over individual autonomy, this emphasis introduces distortions into normal patterns of growth. social, legal, and cultural particularities pose “barriers to growth.” readers will recall how much we heard in the 1970s and 1980s about the 60 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences burdens social programs, taxes, and government regulations placed on economic growth. no doubt, there was much truth in these claims. and, yet, our response need not have been a reduction of the tax burden shouldered by industry or wealth, a reduction in social spending, or an easing of government regulation. our response might have been that, since they contributed to a world worth sharing, such burdens were well worth the 4 or 5 percentage points of growth that their elimination would produce for investors. or, let us take another, more contemporary example: greece 2015. again, we could subject european policy toward greece to a cynical machiavellian rational choice matrix, where politicians in france and germany and managers of the european central bank and world bank calculate the political and economic costs of debt relief or forgiveness and stack these costs up against the floods of refugees and the price-tag of possible military operations that almost certainly will result from imposing further austerity measures on greece. this, as we have seen, is the dark side of the europe dream, where investor returns and corporate welfare are protected at all costs, even if they threaten the viability of europe itself. an alternative would be to reinforce and protect the administrative mechanisms in greece charged with enforcing the tax code and collecting revenues from its oligarchs. combined with targeted debt relief or forgiveness, such policies might bring us closer to something approximating rifkin’s european dream. in this case, however, the net efficiencies lost or earned are much clearer. for, as gerard roland has shown, there is a huge cost to be paid where weak governments insufficiently protected from oligarchic corruption and crime are granted charge over the affairs of state (roland 328-334). when, by contrast, we strengthen public institutions and independent governing mechanisms, contrary to predictions based on neoliberal assumptions, society earns huge net efficiencies in return. conclusion the european dream, i have argued, is inseparable from the dream of universal global hegemony after which it was initially modelled. hegel’s allegory is now greece’s nightmare. ignoring this fact will not make it go away. nor will it prevent this nightmare from spreading first to the volatile regions on europe’s periphery, but then and finally to europe’s core states as well. the question is: how shall we then proceed? let us assume for a moment that marx’s reinterpretation of the hegelian trope is in most points accurate. let us assume that lucas’ rigorous mathematical modelling captures this point. only as we eliminate cultural, social, religious, and 61 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences legal particularities, only as we fashion a comprehensive, integrated, rational, and completely unified world; only then will the entire world benefit from the efficiencies that today only some small number of individuals enjoy. but let us also assume, with lucas, that the ultimate goal of our collective productive activity is not this or that good, this or that service or benefit, but is instead, as marx showed, value itself. and, with this in mind, let us now ask how much value is sufficient for any individual investor. how many zeros would any of us add to the value of our investment portfolios? how much is enough? it was in recognition of the validity of these questions that an aging marx was brought to reconsider the formula to which he owed his fame: the labour theory of value. in fact, marx had lifted this formula more or less directly from the pages of none other than adam smith. the value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities (smith 1776:47). but whereas marx had once counted this an ironclad law, as sure and irrefutable as any law of physics, the aging marx now questioned its immutability. why, in spite of extraordinary technological advances, had human beings not seen fit or even capable of stepping aside, as hegel had imagined, and installing machines in their place? was it simply a matter of time? eventually human beings would cash in on the efficiencies of mechanization. or was something else impeding this final step towards freedom? but then it occurred to marx that if the human appetite for value was infinite and yet their capacity to work finite, then they never will reach that point when more will be enough. as already noted, 1 or 1.5 per cent growth may be the maximum rate our world can sustain (piketty 74-75). yet clearly our appetites for value are such that only rates of 4 to 5 per cent or greater will satisfy our desire, even if such rates of growth end up destroying our communities and eventually our planet. to what then shall we credit this ultimately self-destructive compulsion for more? marx believed he had an answer, but it was an answer that overturned everything he had written up until that point. let us suppose, suggested marx, that we are not the author of this insatiable appetite. let us suppose rather that hegel was correct and that his self-moving substance that is subject is in fact the author of this bottomless compulsion for more. upon what does this irrepressible subject feed? what propels it forward uncontrollably until it has destroyed everything in its 62 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences path? and then it hit marx right between the eyes. the answer was labour. hegel’s self-moving substance feeds upon labour. as this is so, reasoned marx, the only sure way to rid the earth of this self-destructive compulsion for more is to deny it the labour it requires to reproduce. freedom would come not from the realization of labour, not from its universalization, but from its gradual and final elimination. the realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. . . . this realm of natural necessity expands with our development, because our needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these needs expand at the same time. freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized communities, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature (marx 1991: 959). what follows may strike many of us as a highly un-marxian solution: not world revolution, not elimination of the bourgeoisie, not seizing and socializing the means of production. “the reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite” (marx 1991:959). what would the european dream look like were europeans to adopt this conspicuously un-marxian solution? a provisional answer to this question might look as follows. consider, for example, the efficiencies europeans adopted following world war ii: a vast, extensive social welfare system to ensure that no individual ever again became so desperate as to see in nationalism or fascism a solution to their political or social ills; a public transportation system designed not to feed the insatiable appetites of private oil producers, but designed instead to serve the transportation needs of its citizens; health care for all, publically financed and readily available; virtually free education and vocational training; affordable and safe housing for all; and old age security second to none. from the vantage point of hegel’s self-moving substance all of these goods must count as unacceptable inefficiencies dragging the entire system to a screeching halt. yet, from another vantage point, all they entail is simply a redistribution of efficiencies from the top of the income hierarchy to the middle and the bottom, from regions that produce these efficiencies more easily to regions where efficiencies are much harder to come by. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with japan and europe back in the game, it surely would have been theoretically possible to interpret the decline in rates of profit not as a signal to reduce corporate taxes, deregulate industry, and restrict the social franchise, but, to the contrary, as an indication that the post-war expansion of the social franchise was achieving its intended goal: more individuals than ever before enjoying sufficient leisure and wealth to attend institutions of higher learning; 63 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences more individuals than ever before working fewer hours for better compensation; more individuals enjoying better health and taking more time to spend with their friends and families than ever before in history. surely these goods were well worth the 4 to 5 percentage points growth transferred to achieve such spectacular results during the twenty years that followed world war ii. but the same might be said today. are instability and war on europe’s periphery worth the 4 to 5 percentage points of growth purchased at the expense of europe’s most needy members and neighbours? is the spread of neo-fascism in france, germany, and eastern europe the price europeans must pay to satisfy investor demands for more? that european efficiencies could theoretically be redistributed downward and outward has never been in doubt. the quality of life so closely associated with the european dream need not be sacrificed to the bottomless compulsion for more. indeed, among the hallmarks of the european as distinguished from the american dream, is that by sharing its efficiencies more widely it was able to create efficiencies in education, transportation, health care, and industry foreclosed upon in america by its restricted social franchise. austerity by contrast disables the very institutions and instrumentalities upon which true efficiency depends. weaker central governments, as gerard roland has shown, are less equipped to fulfil the very functions upon which commerce relies to create its efficiencies. weak central governments are more vulnerable to the kinds of oligarchic rent-seeking opportunities that are the hallmark of inefficiency. moreover, wherever publically regulated economies prove themselves unable to satisfy the most basic human needs, wherever the social franchise is restricted or eliminated entirely, underground grey and black market alternatives appear in their place — markets whose beneficiaries are not the communities served, but the efficiencies seized by their underground purveyors (roland 265-286). what if, by contrast, europe were to set itself the task of shortening the working day and so liberating its citizens from the compulsion to produce and consume more? what if europe were to free itself from its bondage to the self-moving substance that currently manages its affairs? within decades, perhaps within years, we could see such an outbreak of freedom not witnessed in europe since the decades following world war ii. efficiencies transferred downwards and outwards would begin immediately to express themselves in the kinds of social security that alone are nationalism’s and fascism’s most sure antidote. and far from chasing europe’s many disenfranchised outliers into the waiting and open arms of vladimir putin and his network of underworld thugs and warlords, europe might instead inspire a fundamental transformation that spreads even to this empire of oligarchs. just as fascism feeds upon fear and want, so freedom feeds upon freedom. where 64 joseph w.h. lough epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences austerity begets the fear and want upon which fascism feeds, efficiencies redistributed downward and outward feed the freedom that alone has the chops to oppose systemic oppression. and, yet, i at least am not very hopeful. the current leadership in europe — the eu, the wto, the world bank, and the imf — are so thoroughly under the spell cast by hegel’s dream (or nightmare)that they would prefer the complete collapse of europe, its descent into social, political, and economic anarchy, to the redistribution of efficiencies that i have described above. even in sarajevo, bosnia and herzegovina, in in its cantonal seats of authority, where the political leadership should from past experience know better, efficiencies are being redistributed not from the top downward, but from the bottom up. instead of shortening the workday, the workday is being lengthened, and rather than protecting the few remaining dignities that workers enjoy, these instead are being sacrificed in the name of wealth production at the top. bosnia and herzegovina is no exception. the same could be said all across europe and all along its periphery, where, as a direct consequence, nationalism and neo-fascism are everywhere on the rise. but it is precisely here that true statesmen and true stateswomen must distinguish themselves, step out and let their voices be heard, even or specially when such speech exposes them to danger. europe’s future cannot be grounded in the obsessive compulsion for more. this future is unsustainable. rather must it be grounded in the gentle yet steady philosophy of enough; enough for me, enough for you, enough for everyone. this, i take it, lies at the heart of the european dream. 65 the rise and fall of the european dream epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences references arrighi, giovanni. 1994. the long twentieth century: money, power, and the origins of our times. new york: verso. brenner, robert. 2006. the economics of global turbulence: the advanced capitalist economies from long boom to long downturn, 1945-2005. new york: verso. frieden, jeffry. 2007. global capitalism: its fall and rise in the twentieth century. new york: w.w. norton & company, inc. hegel, g.w.f. 1991. elements of the philosophy of right. translated by h.b. nisbet. new york: cambridge university press. hegel, g.w.f. 2004. phenomenology of spirit. translated by a.v. miller. new york: oxford univer sity press. klein, naomi. 2007. the shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. new york: picador. krugman, paul. 2009. the return of depression economics and the crisis of 2008. new york: w.w. norton and company. lough, joseph. 2014. “the subject of rigorous mathematical economic modeling: critical reflec tions on gwf hegel and robert lucas, jr.” tranzicija/transition (16:33). pages 1-16. lowinger, jake. 2009. economic reform and the ‘double movement’ in yugoslavia: an analysis of labor unrest and ethno-nationalism in the 1980s [dissertation]. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university. lucas, robert e. jr. 2002. “some macroeconomics for the twenty-first century.” lectures on eco nomic growth. pages 97-108. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. marx, karl and frederick engels. 1988. economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. trans lated by martin milligan. amherst, ny: prometheus books. marx, karl. 1982. capital: a critique of political economy. volume one. translated by ben fowkes. new york: penguin books. marx, karl. 1991. capital: a critique of political economy. volume three. translated by david fernbach. new york: penguin books. piketty, thomas. 2013. capital in the twenty-first century. translated by arthur goldhammer. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. reich, robert. 2008. supercapitalism: the transformation of business, democracy, and everyday life. new york: vintage books. rifkin, jeremy. 2004. the european dream: how europe’s vision for the future is quietly eclipsing the american dream. new york: penguin. roland, gerard. 2000. transition and economics: politics, markets, and firms. cambridge, mass.: the mit press. sachs, jeffrey. 2009. commonwealth: economics for a crowded planet. new york: penguin. smith, adam. 1776. an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. volume one. london: w. strahan; and t. cadell, in the strand. steinmetz, george. 2003. “the state of emergency and the revival of american imperialism: to ward an authoritarian post-fordism.” public culture (15:2). pages 323-345. stiglitz, joseph. 2010. freefall: america, free markets, and the sinking of the world economy. new york: w.w. norton and company. changing societies & personalities, 2022 vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 https://doi.org/10.15826/csp.2022.6.1.161 received 22 december 2021 © 2022 thomas f. remington accepted 17 march 2022 tremington@fas.harvard.edu published online 11 april 2022 essay ordoliberalism revisited thomas f. remington emory university, atlanta, ga, usa harvard university, cambridge, ma, usa abstract the recent publication of kenneth dyson’s book conservative liberalism, liberalism, ordo-liberalism, and the state offers an occasion to reconsider the body of ideas known as ordoliberalism. the books reviewed here represent much of the most recent scholarship in english on the subject. in this essay, i undertake two tasks: first, to clarify what the term properly refers to and in particular how it is related to “neoliberalism,” and, second, to consider its influence on postwar german policies and institutions. i argue that much of the recent discussion of ordoliberalism and neoliberalism overlooks important differences between early ordoliberal thinking and the ideas associated with neoliberalism. over time, as neoliberalism evolved and particularly as it became an ideological justification for policies and institutions justifying the accumulation of concentrated market power, these differences have become wider even as they have been obscured by misreadings of ordoliberalism. a better understanding of ordoliberalism can also provide insights relevant to the contemporary debates about the crisis of liberal democracy and capitalism. is it in fact a “third way” for ordering an economy, an alternative to neoliberalism and socialism? keywords ordoliberalism, liberalism, neoliberalism, democracy, capitalism i. introduction the publication earlier last year of kenneth dyson’s book conservative liberalism, liberalism, ordo-liberalism, and the state (2021) offers a welcome occasion to reconsider the body of ideas known as ordoliberalism. the books reviewed here represent much of the most recent scholarship in english on the subject. in this essay, i undertake two tasks: first, to clarify what the term https://changing-sp.com/ changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 11 properly refers to and in particular how it is related to “neoliberalism,” and, second, to consider how much influence it had on postwar german policies and institutions. a better understanding of ordoliberalism can also provide insights relevant to the contemporary debates about the crisis of liberal democracy and capitalism. is it in fact a “third way” for ordering an economy besides neoliberalism and socialism? ordoliberalism is little known outside a few scholarly circles. some american students of antitrust theory, such as daniel crane and herbert hovenkamp, have discussed it and related it to other branches of thinking about antimonopoly law (crane, 2013). historians of postwar german economic reconstruction treat it as a source of some intellectual guidance for the architects of the “social market economy,” of which it formed an integral element (abelshauser, 2004; haley, 2001; murach-brand, 2004; nicholls, 1994; streeck, 1997, 2010). students of european competition law continue to debate its ideas and the degree to which they have influenced the competition enforcement regime in the european union (akman, 2012; gerber, 2001; quack & djelic, 2005). during the eurozone debt crisis following the great recession, ordoliberalism again aroused furor when many blamed germany’s resistance to easing the terms of restructuring southern european debt on its ordoliberal heritage. the latter issue is the major impetus for the edited volume ordoliberalism, law and the rule of economics of hien and joerges (2017). unfortunately, relatively little of the ordoliberalism literature has been translated into english. to the extent the term is used in scholarly literature, it is usually conflated with, or subsumed as a german variant of, a larger neoliberal current of thought associated with figures such as friedrich hayek and chicago school economists1. i believe this seriously mischaracterizes ordoliberalism and obscures its relevance. ii. the origins of ordoliberalism ordoliberalism originated in the 1930s at the university of freiburg, germany. ordoliberalism was a legal and economic theory to defend competition—and all its benefits to society—against the threats posed by state socialism or by the consolidation of market power in cartels and monopolies. ordoliberalism’s core comprised a group of legal and economic scholars—walter eucken, franz böhm, and others—reacting against the spread of cartels and trusts throughout the capitalist world, the establishment of state socialism in russia, and the anti-democratic impulses that accompanied both (fear, 2006; nicholls, 1994). at the time, germany was completely dominated by cartels, more even than other capitalist countries. german cartels controlled 100% of coal production, 90% of steel, and exerted similar levels of control over many other branches of industry. cartels’ defenders claimed that they stabilized capitalism against the threat of ruinous overproduction leading to crashes, but their opponents saw them as harmful both to political and economic freedom for raising barriers to entry for small businesses, for example, and wielding 1 peacock and willgerodt (1989) is a useful compendium of several ordoliberal essays. a concise summary of some of eucken’s thinking in english is eucken (1951). https://changing-sp.com/ 12 thomas f. remington power over government. the triumph of cartels continued into the nazi period, when hitler forced all big businesses to join cartels (schweitzer, 1964). eucken took a position as professor of economics at the university of freiburg in 1927 and remained there until he died in 1950. at freiburg eucken met böhm, who was then working in the weimar government ministry that dealt with the regulation of cartels. the two shared an antipathy against the power of cartels and concentrations of market power generally. an economist devoted to grounding economic theory in historical evidence, eucken grasped how hard it was for governments to check the abuses of monopolists. as he noted, “abuse” was itself a vague term (a problem that bedevils antitrust litigation to this day), and corporate entities always acquire substantial political influence. therefore, the state must act to prevent the rise of entities with market power, not fight them after the fact: it is not in the first instance against abuses of existing power bodies that economic policy should be applied, but rather against the rise of power bodies altogether. otherwise, it will have no chance to solve the problem (eucken, 2004, p. 172). his colleague, franz böhm, declared that society must not put the principles of the freedom of contract and rights of property ahead of the freedom to compete: “jus publicum privatorum pactis mutari non potest” [a public law cannot be changed by private agreements] (böhm, 1928/1960, 1933). the ordoliberals fought the refusal by many economists to look squarely at factual data. they recognized that economic theories were powerful tools, but they did not accept that theories worked independently of their social setting. eucken insisted that economists take account of historical circumstances in which economic forces play out. this required that economists lift the curtain to recognize the constant struggle of power interests, masked by ideology, often brutal, among concentrated centers of market power (eucken, 2004). economic history, eucken wrote in 1947, is a history of the abuse of power. and power, he wrote, is power, whether in private or state hands. power is the antithesis of freedom, which—following kant—he argued should be the moral foundation of the society; freedom is not a goal in itself but a means to serve “eigenverantwortliche menschen” [free self-responsible people] (eucken, 2004, p. 178). eucken always insisted that economic and political power were inextricably tied together. over history, state rulers fought to dominate the economies of their countries. guilds fought against outsiders, consumers, and landowners. the history of economics is a history of the abuse of power, he wrote, although to varying degrees in different economic orders. the key question was who was abusing whom, and how (eucken, 2004). eucken and böhm founded the journal ordo after the war, continuing to propound ordoliberal ideas. the “ordo” element referred to the idea that the legal framework ensuring market competition and market freedom should be embedded in a constitutional order to protect market competition and prevent concentrated economic power from encroaching on freedom. the state had an obligation, böhm insisted, to interfere with the freedom of contract and rights of property when they infringed on the freedom of individual producers and consumers. to protect property in the name of efficiency would “etablierung des rechtes des stärkeren, eines kommerziellen faustrechts” [establish the power of the mightier, a commercial right of changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 13 the fist]. such a right of the fist of course was precisely what appealed to communists, fascists, and radical libertarians alike. such thinking repulsed the ordoliberals, who had watched as the russian bolsheviks imposed a totalitarian economy on their subjects and as hitler imposed a mandatory cartel system on germany (schweitzer, 1964). whether under the nazis or the soviets, such monopolistic organizational forms denied freedom both in the economic and the political realms. and while they succeeded in preventing crises of overproduction and mass unemployment, they failed to foster either social justice or technical innovation (müller-armack, 1947/1982). for the ordoliberals, therefore, a market economy where the state protected individual freedom by ensuring competition and preventing the rise of concentrated market power was the only guarantee of both economic prosperity and elementary social justice. the ordoliberals were influenced by american progressive doctrines that giant concentrations of economic power threatened both political and economic freedom, as a 1928 essay by böhm on private power concentrations makes clear (böhm, 1928/1960, 1933). but whereas in the united states, where the pro-competition doctrine’s influence faded after the 1970s under the influence of the chicago antitrust school, which insisted on efficiency as the sole criterion of social well-being, ordoliberal ideas became a major influence on the design of german economic institutions following world war ii. iii. ordoliberalism’s core precepts how ordoliberalism is related to neoliberalism is contentious. to some degree confusion over this point is understandable. the freiburg school ordoliberals had close relations to the group of economic thinkers associated with the mont pèlerin society that formed in 1947 2. eucken was an original member of the group. moreover, hayek himself moved to the university of freiburg in 1962, taking the chair formerly held by eucken; the ordo yearbook became almost entirely a creature of hayekian neoliberal thought; and the walter eucken institute at freiburg became part of the mont pèlerin’s “institutional machinery,” as angela wigger puts it in the hien and joerges volume (wigger in hien & joerges, 2017, p. 170). confusion therefore between the stream of thought identified as neoliberalism and the body of ordoliberal thinking reflected in the freiburg school and the designers of germany’s “social market economy” in the 1950s and 1960s is understandable. it is also the case, as the studies reviewed here show, that both streams of thought were themselves highly diverse and often self-contradictory, and both underwent continuous evolution as new generations of thinkers and issues arose. certainly, it is fair to say that the bodies of thought termed neoliberalism and ordoliberalism did and do overlap. however, the ordoliberals did not consider themselves to be neoliberals3. as eucken put it, “the term ‘liberalism’ or ‘neoliberalism’ is sometimes applied to my 2 the mont pèlerin society originated as a group of thinkers dedicated to advancing free-market liberal principles in the face of widespread support for collectivist and keynesian ideas. the group continues to exist. among its notable figures have been friedrich hayek, george stigler and james buchanan. 3 in addition to dyson, an authoritative german-language study on the ordoliberal philosophy persuasively making this case as well is föste (2006). https://changing-sp.com/ 14 thomas f. remington ideas, but it is a poor fit” (eucken, 2004, pp. 374–375). although they had strong ties to the laissez-faire liberals (whom they called “paleoliberals” or “stone age liberals”), the ordoliberals insisted on treating capitalism as embedded in the social and political environment in which it operates (föste, 2006, p. 346). it generates power inequalities that can threaten both political and economic freedom. for this reason, the ordoliberals insisted that laissez-faire is not the same as full competition4. they did not elevate economic freedom above political freedom. rather, the ordoliberals advocated firm government protection of market competition. rent-seeking would be inevitable if market agents thought they could win government administrative support for restricting market rivals. fairness and freedom, not efficiency, were ordoliberalism’s basic principles. thus, there are significant differences between ordoliberalism and neoliberalism. over time, especially as the neoliberal philosophy associated with hayek, friedman and stigler developed, these differences became wider, yet they were almost entirely obscured. today, as neoliberalism has been used as the doctrinal justification for pressures to dismantle government controls over trade, labor relations, finance, market regulation, public goods, redistribution and social protection policies in all spheres, and blamed for the surging economic inequality witnessed in the united states and many other countries, it is useful to reconsider ordoliberalism. ordoliberalism’s early instincts have significant implications for us today as we confront the crises of market capitalism and liberal democracy. for this reason, to bury ordoliberalism under the broad mantle of neoliberalism is to ignore the points that the early ordoliberals considered most important. briefly, these can be summarized as follows: a. an economy consists of a set of closely interrelated elements. to isolate one issue—trade policy, for example, or social policy—and deal with it separately from its interaction with all other elements will never succeed in solving that problem. more likely it will create more problems, leading to still more interventions. under some conditions, a keynesian full employment policy is justified, but it would have been better to have avoided the mistakes (such as a deflationary policy) that led to a spiral of deflation and mass unemployment, because a full employment policy can lead to inflationary pressure, and then to price controls that expand and distort the ability of prices as a system to enable rational decision-making by economic actors. consequently, it is necessary to think of the economy as a system, or a comprehensive order, and to set in place the rules that will govern that order. rather than intervening on an ad hoc basis each time a crisis arose, the state’s role is to establish and enforce basic principles. the core issue, eucken wrote, is not the “quantity” of state intervention, but rather the “quality” of the intervention (eucken, 1951, p. 95). from the very beginning, the ordoliberals emphasized the importance of a constitutional legal framework for the economic order; they chose the term “ordo” from roman law to reflect that crucial point (böhm et al., 1937/1989, 1937). 4 eucken (1938, p. 57): “teils sehnt man die frühere zeit zurück, verwechselt laisser faire und wettbewerb und sieht nicht, daß das laisser faire oft gerade zur beseitigung der wettbewerbsordnung und zum emporwuchern monopolitischer gebilde führte.” [in part one longs for the former time, confuses laisser faire and competition, and does not see that the laisser faire often led to the elimination of the competitive order and to the proliferation of monopolistic entities.] changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 15 they recognized that government may be called upon to correct market failures, but argued that an order set up to prevent such failures was better than a sequence of ad hoc policy measures that create new problems requiring yet more ad hoc interventions. these rules need to be set in constitutional law so that the state can enforce them as part of the orderly functioning of the market system. b. market competition is the only way to protect the freedom of individuals as economic and political agents. it is preferable to forfeit the (purely apparent) efficiency gains of monopolies, trusts, and cartels before they form rather than to risk allowing them to acquire stifling market power. in direct contrast to the chicago antitrust school, therefore, the ordoliberals believed that competition itself must be the objective of economic policy. the strong state must act to enforce the rules of competition and to block the formation of large concentrations of market power before they arise, not afterward. c. the market economy must serve not only efficiency, but also social justice. as eucken himself put it repeatedly: “how can a modern industrialized economy and society be organized in a humane and efficient way?” (eucken, 1951). unlike the neoliberals, the ordoliberals always insisted on the normative foundations of the market economy. their emphasis on the importance of establishing an explicit constitutional foundation for the market economy derived from their conviction that the economy must serve society, not the other way around. freedom for ordoliberals was the basis of morality. d. perhaps most importantly, they held that throughout history, concentrations of market power always ally with concentrated political power to suppress both economic and political freedom. these freedoms in the economic sphere extend not only to would-be entrepreneurs who are squeezed out of a market, but to workers as well as their freedom to choose the place and conditions of their employment is constrained, and of consumers, whose range of choice is narrowed. in the political sphere, they lead to totalitarianism; for the ordoliberals in the postwar federal republic, the establishment of a soviet-type planned economy next door in east germany provided a close-hand example of the difference between a state socialist planned economy and a market economy in the west. concentrated economic power always seeks ideological justifications, so we must always look behind the curtain of ideology to identify the power interests deploying them5. therefore, while some government power is required to enforce the rules of a competitive order, excessive government power is just as oppressive as a laissezfaire policy. laissez-faire as a policy had failed no less than the centrally planned nazi or soviet economic models in solving basic questions of freedom and order; both ended up suppressing freedom in favor of market power (eucken, 2004). laissez-faire, eucken wrote, “permits misuses of freedom of contract to destroy freedom” (eucken, 1951, p. 37). such words, needless to say, would never be uttered by a neoliberal. 5 “auch wir nationalökonomen müssen den vorhang lüften, welchen die interessenten-ideologien vor die wirtschaftlichen machtballungen und machtkämpfe ziehen” [we economists too must lift the curtain that the ideologies of interested parties draw in front of the economic concentrations of power and power struggles] (eucken, 1947, p. 306). https://changing-sp.com/ 16 thomas f. remington for eucken and böhm, in short, the question of the distribution of power was central to their analysis. like the framers of the american constitution, they recognized that state power must be sufficient to check the abuses of power by private interests, but not so great as to infringe on the freedom of private interests and citizens to act in such a way as to further socially desirable objectives, such as prosperity and justice. “the problem of economic power,” wrote eucken, “can never be solved by further concentrations of power” (eucken, 1951, p. 36). it is but a few steps removed to the american pluralist school of the mid-20th century, which saw in the competition of organized interests a “dispersion of inequalities” that resisted such concentration of either private or state power as to infringe on individual rights (cf. dahl, 1961, 1982). the question of power—the inevitable pursuit of state power by powerful private interests—was recognized in early writings of such chicago economists as george stigler and the early public choice school writers. over time, however, the neoliberals only saw the abuse of government power by rent-seeking interests as arising from the poor, the minorities, the labor unions, and democrats; never were they willing to defy their corporate sponsors by suggesting that as corporate power grew larger, more concentrated, and more politically adept, it was the “winners” of market competition that would seize government power to protect monopoly rents, not the losers6. iv. perspectives on neoliberalism vail, blyth, and slobodian each offers a distinctive perspective on neoliberal doctrine. mark vail’s book argues that liberalizing national policies in france, germany and italy in recent decades were not in fact applications of neoliberal theory. this is the basis for his characterization of their economies as “illiberal.” he ascribes these deviations to the influence of national intellectual traditions on elites. he offers shorthand descriptions of each—“french statism, german neocorporatism, and italian clientelism” (vail, 2018, p. 5 and passim). vail is strongest on france. he is less knowledgeable about germany, and his treatment of italy is somewhat cursory. most of the book is based on interviews, although he has conducted some research into original, secondary, and journalistic sources as well. vail believes in the power of ideas to influence policy through their effect in guiding the outlooks of policymakers. therefore, in his framework, when the simple, universalistic doctrines of neoliberalism were understood and applied in particular national settings, it was the intellectual traditions of those countries’ national elites that adapted neoliberalism to their own national circumstances. slobodian also emphasizes the global outlook of neoliberalism but makes a different point. for slobodian, neoliberalism has always had a global perspective, and has always aimed at establishing a political order conducive to its free-market, 6 this insight, articulated in respect of the post-communist economic reform experience of russia and other east european systems by joel hellman in 1998 (hellman, 1998), would have been consistent with the ordoliberals’ view of history but was entirely alien to the neoliberals. i will return to this point below. in her book democracy in chains, nancy maclean shows that james buchanan justified denying equal access to education for blacks on the grounds of the primacy of private property rights and states’ rights, effectively joining public choice theory to southern segregationism (maclean, 2017). changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 17 laissez-faire ideology. its major proponents, from the very start, toyed with various notions of world government or at any rate world free trade regimes, with varying levels of success. slobodian illuminates a particular center for the global outlook in the neoliberal tradition, which he calls the “geneva school,” a rival to freiburg or chicago as a home to this strand of neoliberalism. their objective effectively was to make the world safe for capital. slobodian skillfully traces the continuity of the global framing of the neoliberal doctrine from its origins to the present day. he treats ordoliberalism as part of this project: “i argue that we can understand the proposal of the geneva school as a rethinking of ordoliberalism at the scale of the world. we might call it ordoglobalism” (slobodian, 2018, p. 11). however, i believe this represents a serious misreading of ordoliberalism. blyth pursues a different line of argument. blyth treats the doctrine that economic austerity is necessary to squeeze out inflationary forces and restore healthy economic exchange as a malign and “dangerous idea.” he characterizes it as generally unworkable, anti-democratic, and punitive toward those least able to bear the burden of fiscal and financial austerity, while benefiting banking interests and others. often it has a strong moralistic dimension as well. while blyth is undoubtedly correct that austerity policies have distributional effects, he overlooks the point that any fiscal and regulatory policy does as well. if neoliberalism’s simplistic faith that government is bad, the market good, that as property rights are established, the rule of law will follow along with productive investment and broadly shared prosperity, is flawed, likewise so is the notion that any alternative to austerity will automatically benefit both economy and society. blyth maintains a singular focus on the history of the idea of austerity, but slights the political and economic contexts in which it is applied. economists who imagine that their theories give them ready-made policy solutions to a crisis of hyper-inflation wherever it occurs are obviously vulnerable to the empirical evidence that their remedies fail more often than not. but by the same logic, we must be wary of equally simplistic faith in the virtues of public spending. if a government is in bed with its cronies, public spending is likely to make both the cronies and the politicians richer without raising the standard of living of the rest of the society. under conditions of high inequality in the polity and the economy, any simple policy formula will be applied so as to benefit those with economic and political power. unlike vail or slobodian, mark blyth (2013) deals in detail with ordoliberalism. he even pays it a backhanded compliment: “by way of summing up so far, germany provided a postwar home for austerity arguments in the form of ordoliberalism, the instruction sheet for how to run a late-developer, high-savings, high-technology, export-driven economy. it’s a great instruction sheet—so long as you are indeed the late-developing, high-savings, high-technology, and export-driven economy in question. if you are not, as the periphery of the eurozone is finding out, then it’s a one-way ticket to permanent austerity” (blyth, 2013, p. 151). this is too pat. netherlands, denmark, sweden, and switzerland all have higher shares of foreign trade in gdp than germany without having ordoliberal traditions, and all have more strongly positive trade balances. meantime, us foreign trade as a share of gdp is https://changing-sp.com/ 18 thomas f. remington far lower than any of them, and is negative, although neoliberalism has had a much greater impact in the united states. therefore, it is inaccurate to claim that germany’s ordoliberalism’s tradition works only in germany because it is germany. because history shapes both the creation and operation of institutions, it is extremely difficult to separate the effects of institutional arrangements from the conditions under which they arose. if this applies to ordoliberalism and neoliberalism, it applies with equal validity to state socialism and keynesianism. vail’s treatment of ordoliberalism and of germany is one-sided. he emphasizes the importance of the corporate organizations of labor and employers but makes no reference to the social partnership principle or the ways in which it has facilitated price and wage restraint, joint investment in skill, and the embodiment of balanced representation by labor and business in institutions such as labor courts and enterprise governance. he overstates the dominance of big business and understates the importance of the mittelstand, the sector of smalland mediumsized firms, often specializing in niche products for export markets, which has been important both to germany’s economic success and to its social stability. vail’s survey of german economic and social institutions overlooks a number of crucial features, such as the social insurance system and its important link to institutions of coordinated investment in skill. the treatment of ordoliberalism lacks important detail, such as its relationship to the principle of the social market economy. although vail emphasizes the dualism between labor market insiders and outsiders, he makes no effort to explore ways in which germany has sought to incorporate outsiders into the system of social partnership. the absence of any comparative metrics for assessing the levels of poverty, unemployment, and inequality in germany relative to levels elsewhere leaves an inaccurate impression of germany’s economic system. although vail is interested in the “institutional and ideational manifestations” of ideas (vail, 2018, p. 5), he has not actually explored the primary sources. at the same time, like blyth and slobodian and other authors reviewed here, his emphasis on the power of ideas leaves him unequipped to consider how neoliberal doctrines in many countries—the united states and russia, among others—are used as instruments for rent-capture by powerful corporate interests. v. ordoliberalism and neoliberalism the two edited books differ somewhat in scope. the subject of mirowski and plehwe’s book the road from mont pèlerin: the making of the neoliberal thought collective (2015) is neoliberalism. the editors frame ordoliberalism as neoliberalism’s german version. dieter plehwe’s introduction argues that the neoliberalism originating with the mont pèlerin society should be seen as a “thought collective,” rather than a coherently bounded philosophy (mirowski & plehwe, 2015, p. 4). this is a similar approach to kenneth dyson (2021), who also sees ordoliberalism as an open-ended, evolving tradition rather than a defined school of thought, and as part of a larger movement that he terms “conservative liberalism.” both stress the ways in which germany’s ordoliberals parted company from the mps neoliberals and, as plehwe changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 19 puts it, “succeeded in developing an alternative third way to the keynesian welfare and planning state right after world war ii—the social market economy” (dyson, 2021, p. 27). therefore, although the mirowski and plehwe volume tends to treat ordoliberalism as part of a larger stream of neoliberal thought, it is a distinct variant of it, and one which became increasingly distinct as the chicago school of thinking gained ground from the 1950s. of the essays in the mirowski and plehwe volume, the one most specifically devoted to ordoliberalism is by a scholar based in germany who wrote his dissertation on ordoliberalism, ralph ptak. ptak’s view is largely negative. he associates the ordoliberals with german traditions of patriarchy and authoritarianism. he attempts to argue that their belief in a strong state was “akin” to nazi ideology and to carl schmitt, the nazis’ legal apologist. they held, in ptak’s view, a “fundamental skepticism toward democracy” (mirowski & plehwe, 2015, pp. 125). such influence as they had was thanks to american occupation as well as “massive neoliberal propaganda” disseminated through “veiled multilayer networks” (mirowski & plehwe, 2015, pp. 121–122). since the early days, moreover, it has tended to evolve into an anglo-saxon version of neoliberalism. ptak has studied ordoliberal texts and archival documents but dyson’s much more extensive research in the primary sources and archives refutes much of ptak’s critique. despite the frequent charge that the ordoliberals drew their belief in the strong state from carl schmitt’s doctrines (this charge recurs in werner bonefeld’s chapter in the hien and joerges volume, and in writing by michel foucault, among others), this is in fact an error. the ordoliberals, like most other european intellectuals, observed the failure of the parliamentary system of the weimar republic, and concluded that a stronger executive institution was needed to stabilize a parliamentary democracy. charles de gaulle drew the same conclusions in his 1946 bayeux proposal for a new constitution, which underlay the successful mixed constitutional forms of the fifth republic. germany adopted a “constructive vote of no confidence” into the constitution of the federal republic, hardly an anti-democratic provision, and one which has successfully prevented the constant fall of weak coalition governments characteristic of some other european democracies. likewise, ordoliberals were hardly alone among intellectuals—hannah arendt is a good example—who feared the potential that a “mass society” lacking the fabric of a civil society would succumb to totalitarianism. likewise, the damning charge that the ordoliberals were tainted by nazi associations breaks down upon closer examination. it is the case that a number of ordoliberals had ties to the nazi party at an early stage, before the 1930s. a later ordoliberal, wolfgang müller-armack (who coined the term “social market economy” after the war) was a nazi party member from 1933. another early figure in the freiburg group, hans großmann-doerth, remained a nazi party member through the war. this led eucken and böhm to cut off relations with him. krystallnacht in 1938 shocked eucken and böhm. both refused to serve the nazi regime; böhm was stripped of his teaching duties at freiburg, and both https://changing-sp.com/ 20 thomas f. remington joined a resistance circle in freiburg and helped in the drafting of the bonhoeffer memorandum. wilhelm röpke was dismissed from his university position and forced to leave the country; likewise, alexander rüstow fled the country. eucken resisted rector martin heidegger’s efforts to impose a “führerprinzip” at the university, and, at a time of intense political pressure, spoke out against celebrations of irrationalism and moral relativism (dyson, 2021, pp. 56–66, 425–432). as early as 1932, eucken wrote against a dictatorship that imposes a “total” state serving as a “substitute for religion”. it was precisely against such a regime that state power is needed to protect individual freedom against oppression by governing elites (dyson, 2021, p. 36). three of the freiburg ordoliberals were arrested for anti-nazi activity. in his private papers, eucken compared the ordoliberals to the tradition of galileo, cicero, and socrates, who put up heroic intellectual resistance to tyranny. in 1944, eucken joined with another colleague from the resistance circle and drafted a study to serve as a blueprint for rebuilding the economy after the war. it was in this atmosphere that eucken turned to a deeper study of kant, schiller and tocqueville, seeking a conception of individual freedom that could counter the temptations of romantic nationalism. much of the criticism of ordoliberalism presented in the vail, slobodian and blyth books lacks adequate historical context. the authors tend to apply present-day standards of judgment without sufficient appreciation of the collapse of liberalism in europe in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. the appropriation of militant nationalism by totalitarian fascists and nazis and of collectivism by communists, the fall of weak democracies, and the loss of social bearings all led to a wide-ranging search for new foundations for a viable liberalism. slobodian’s understates how powerfully nationalism had fueled antidemocratic and antimarket movements throughout europe, favoring fascist forms of corporatism and cartels. for example, wilhelm röpke—whom slobodian reveals to be viciously racist in later decades—defended free trade in the immediate post-war period as the most effective constraint on the reemergence of german nationalism and monopoly capitalism (dyson, 2021, p. 36). the ordoliberals’ defense of free trade represented a direct response to the ruinous nationalism that resulted in world war ii. we must remember that the ordoliberals were engaging with their times, not with ours7. ordoliberals were not alone in the mid-20th century in seeking principles for an international order that could protect peace, justice, equality, and freedom. for that matter, immanuel kant had looked to an international federation of republics, even a form of “world cititzenship,” guaranteeing basic individual freedom in his essay “eternal peace” of 1795. the internationalist perspectives of the mid-20th century can hardly be reduced to the conspiratorial working of a neoliberal technocratic elite. if this soil nurtured the seeds of contemporary globalization, as slobodian argues, it also fostered the contemporary international human rights, anti-colonial, and democratization movements. although we no longer consider soviet-style central planning a viable alternative to the crises of capitalism, for many in the 1930s, it offered a vividly 7 walter eucken quoted schiller: “live with your century, but do not be its creature; serve your contemporaries but given them what they need, not what they praise” (dyson, 2021, p. 64). changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 21 present model, debated vigorously throughout the world. the british aristocratic socialists sidney and beatrice webb wrote a much-discussed book presenting the soviet system as a new civilization (webb & webb, 1936). our memory of that time has faded. we are preoccupied with the failures of the capitalist system in the face of multiple financial crises and recessions, and its apparently inability to cope with the existential threat of climate change. but political support today for a communist revolution to deal with these and other crises has disappeared. we are therefore apt to underestimate the attractions of the planned economy for western intellectuals in the 1930s and wonder at the large amount of attention the ordoliberals paid to it as they developed a model of capitalism that was neither laissez-faire, nor cartel-dominated, or overtaken by state central planning. to fail to appreciate these historical circumstances is therefore to miss the real contribution that the ordoliberals made. the mirowski and plehwe volume includes two useful accounts of the relationship of the chicago school to neoliberalism, one by rob van horn and philip mirowski and another by rob van horn. rob van horn contrasts the worries of the early generation of chicago economists, such as frank knight and henry simons, about the dangers that monopolies and corporate power more generally posed to market economies and political democracies. in a little pamphlet published in 1934, simons—who studied with eucken—wrote that the great enemy of democracy is monopoly, in all its forms […] the representation of laissez faire as a merely do-nothing policy is unfortunate and misleading. it is an obvious responsibility of the state under this policy to maintain the kind of legal and institutional framework within which competition can function effectively as an agency of control. thus, the state is charged, under this ‘division of labor’, with heavy responsibilities and large ‘control’ functions: the maintenance of competitive conditions in industry. (simons, 1934, pp. 3–4) latter-day chicagoans, of course, rejected this view. they held that no matter how damaging monopoly power might be to social welfare, any effort by government to curb it would produce even worse effects. they regarded the older progressive view that only government power could curb the concentrated influence of trusts, monopolies and cartels as outdated, even pernicious. van horn shows that the shift in chicago school thinking about corporate power occurred between the late 1940s and late 1950s. these economists persuaded themselves that competitive forces are always at work—based on the deductive logic that if monopoly power to extract rents in a market is available, a competitor will always enter that market to claim a share of those rents. as friedman put it, the “workings of competition are devious and hidden” (cited in van horn, mirowski & plehwe, p. 219). forgotten were the analyses of public choice scholars about the ways in which those with monopoly power will expend resources to capture government administrative power in order to preserve those rents, if doing so is less costly than investing in risky efforts to improve productivity. https://changing-sp.com/ 22 thomas f. remington vi. ordoliberalism and the eurozone debt crisis the hien and joerges (2017) volume provides more background on ordoliberalism itself, but its contributions are rather cursory. their main focus is the influence of ordoliberal thinking on german responses to the eurozone debt crisis. the impetus for the volume is the widely held view that ordoliberalism was the intellectual ground for germany’s resistance to more generous terms for restructuring the debt of southern european countries. most of the contributors to the volume, however, have relatively little to say about ordoliberalism itself. essays by bruno amable and by arnaud lechevalier discuss french intellectuals’ interpretations of ordoliberalism; stefano solari discusses the italian reception of ordoliberalism; william callison discusses the view taken by the united states, including by timothy geithner, who attributed germany’s “old testament” rigidity and moralism to its religious and ordoliberal tradition. a chapter by kenneth dyson presents a balanced treatment of ordoliberalism as a tradition, which he expounds at much greater length in the recent book. a few essays—notably by angela wigger, who treats ordoliberalism as nothing more than a “foundational myth” for germany’s social market economy, with little actual impact on german policy; by philip manow, for whom germany’s welfare state is directly contradictory to ordoliberal principles; and by brigitte young, who argues that germany’s policies had little to do with ordoliberalism and a great deal with german national self-interest—dismiss its influence as marginal at most. other writers ascribe more influence to ordoliberal thought. josef hien writes that the “deep grammar” of ordoliberalism is “crypto-protestant values” (hien & joerges, 2017, p. 262). hien does acknowledge, to be sure, the more generally recognized influence of catholic social thought on the “social” ordoliberals, notably alfred müeller-armack, who saw “social market economy” as a deliberate effort to marry the liberalism of the freiburg school with a theoretical and practical commitment to the principle that the economy must serve to raise living standards and opportunity for all sections of society. this emphasis created a constant dynamic tension in the evolution of ordoliberal thinking and in its impact on policy between the “liberal” and “social” wings of the movement. they disagreed, however, more over emphasis than fundamental principles. as dyson again points out, this divergence also reflects the gap between general economic principle and their application to specific policy issues. like other political and intellectual movements, the ordoliberals had their purist and pragmatic wings (something like the tension between the “fundis” and the “realos” among the green party in the 1980s). eucken was never particularly adept at addressing specific policy issues, whereas others in the movement, such as alfred müller-armack welcomed engagement in them in order to apply general principles to the extent circumstances permitted8. 8 alfred müller-armack was an economist who strongly argued that an economy should serve social justice; he therefore rejected the laissez-faire conceptions of most neoliberals. during the war, he advised the german government but fell out with the regime and began turning his attention to the principles of a postwar economy. it was he who coined the term “social market economy,” reflecting his conviction that a market-oriented competitive economy must serve the larger good of society. changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 23 the contribution by stephan pühringer in the hien and joerges volume argues that ordoliberalism became an important “guiding principle” for german policymakers at a number of turning points in the postwar period. therefore, in his view, after the debt crisis erupted, the german response reflected not so much the return of ordoliberalism as its application to new problems. ordoliberal thinking had remained strong in a number of policymaking centers, such as think tanks and economics departments and key media outlets such as the frankfurter allgemeine zeitung, and embedded in a broader international network of neoliberal thinkers (pühringer, in hien and joerges, 2017, pp. 144–158). in this respect, his position is akin to that of other writers reviewed here who tend to downplay the specific theoretical points of the ordoliberals in favor of their membership in the larger international movement of liberals. to some degree, this position therefore understates both the specific contributions of ordoliberal ideas to early german postwar reconstruction and to its institutional legacy. nonetheless, pühringer is surely right in demonstrating the continuing relevance of ordoliberalism, which, as dyson and other authors observe, is part of the “operational code” of german economic thinking (dyson, 2021, p. 89). other contributors declare that ordoliberalism’s influence on german institutions was minimal, a matter of myth-making and propaganda. albert weale rejects the notion that ordoliberalism influenced the social market economy, or indeed that the social market economy shaped germany’s economic miracle. whatever successes germany enjoyed, he claims, owed to allied pressure for the currency reform, for the cdu’s decision to adopt a comprehensive employment-based old-age pension system in 1957, and to collective bargaining between organized labor and organized employers (weale in jien & joerges, 2017, pp. 237–239). running through the hien and joerges book, the mirowski and plehwe volume as well as the books by vail, blyth and especially slobodian, is the persistent claim that ordoliberalism was antidemocratic. like ptak, some of the authors attribute ordoliberals’ call for a strong state to carl schmitt’s nazi-inflected “political theology” (bonefeld in hien & joerges, 2017, pp. 273–288). others note that ordoliberals feared the potential that mass democracy could assume authoritarian or totalitarian forms. still others claim that ordoliberalism was anti-pluralist because of its concern that strong interest groups sought to capture the state to advance their purposes. thomas biebricher claims that the ordoliberals wanted to “de-pluralize” democracy and replace it with “technocracy” (biebricher in hien & joerges, 2017, p. 113). michel foucault, cited by several of the authors in the hien and joerges volume, interpreted ordoliberalism as statist and technocratic. for maurizio ferrera, the ordoliberals were “obsessed” by anxiety about pressure from “special interests,” that needed to be “caged” through market institutions (ferrara in hien & joerges, 2017, p. 116). albert weale argues that ordoliberalism stressed, “in a partial form, a few elementary, but essential, economic truths.” however, while frugality and productivity are important to advancing prosperity, by themselves, they cannot solve europe’s larger problems. for these, “europe needs the true democrat to marry the schwabian housewife” 9. here again is the premise that 9 weale in hien and joerges (2017, p. 244). the swipe at the “swabian housewife” is a reference to a stereotype that angela merkel liked to use at the height of the crisis, referring to the virtues of frugality. https://changing-sp.com/ 24 thomas f. remington ordoliberalism offers only the discipline of the marketplace and the strong hand of a paternalistic, elitist, and technocratic state as its political theory. the same critique underpins slobodian’s book, which argues that neoliberalism represents an effort to “encase” and “inoculate” market capitalism against democracy. the accusation that ordoliberalism is antidemocratic does not hold up to closer scrutiny. for one thing, it elides any distinctions among mass democracy, pluralism, interest group politics, parliamentary democracy, and the likelihood of state capture by oligarchs in a liberalizing state. it is hardly anti-democratic to point out that those groups amassing immense market power will use it politically to suppress any threats to their position either politically economically. no more vivid example of this phenomenon exists than in the deployment of the accumulating power of immensely wealthy conservative and corporate interests in the united states to suppress the voting rights of african-americans, to block any movement to protect workers’ interests or enforce environmental protection laws, to expand the provision of public goods, and to weaken the enforce of market regulation of financial markets. under these conditions—described and foreseen by the ordoliberals—is it antidemocratic to argue that only robust market competition can prevent the amassing of great market power and thus lead to the suppression of both political and economic freedom? yet this point, that concentrated market power will always join with political power to suppress freedom, was fundamental to eucken and böhm’s writings and runs through them from the beginning. this was the premise on which they based their consistent position that a comprehensive constitutional order to protect competition is requisite both to prosperity and to social justice. likewise, to believe that policymaking should be based on facts and reason is hardly to cede power to “technocrats.” in fact, one of the consistent themes of the ordoliberals is that economics has to look squarely at empirical data, and not rely only on pure deductive axioms; in this they differed from hayek or the later chicago school economists. they also argued against the “historical school” in german economics, which held that as conditions changed, so did basic principles of economics. using this reasoning, many of the historical school argued that the rise of large-scale industrial and financial power, deploying all the resources of modern technology—such as railroads and telegraphy—were an inevitable stage in the evolution of capitalism. these views, shared both on the right and left by figures such as rockefeller, morgan, debs and lenin, were roundly rejected by the ordoliberals (as they had been by louis brandeis in the united states). there was no historical inevitably for the rise of giant trusts, monopolies, and state capitalist structures, eucken and böhm insisted. even the seeming efficiency gains realized by larger economies of scale were nugatory in view of the inevitable tendency of the monopolist to claim rents by suppressing rivals and risk rather than to raise efficiency. only competition could ensure a continuous stream of pressure for innovation, they held10. most of the books reviewed here ignore this argument. 10 likewise, louis brandeis argued in 1913 that when a monopoly is efficient, it will absorb the benefit, not the society. for the same reason, if we observe higher earnings on the part of a monopolistic firm, we should not interpret it as a sign of greater efficiency (brandeis, 1913). changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 25 vii. ordoliberalism and conservative liberalism kenneth dyson has studied ordoliberalism for many years. he seeks neither to praise nor to bury it. he has no particular ideological ax to grind and does not seek to interpret ordoliberalism in such a way as to support an argument about the impact of neoliberalism. his study is (to my knowledge) the most authoritative available in english11. dyson places ordoliberalism in the historical context of the “conservative liberal” tradition, which includes such figures as louis brandeis in the united states. he seeks to refute the idea that ordoliberalism is a peculiarly german phenomenon, reflecting german traditions and applied largely to specific german conditions. dyson certainly shows that ordoliberalism plays a key role in the myth-making of german postwar history. separating myth and memory from actual history is difficult. both ordoliberalism’s champions and enemies position themselves on this issue. some skeptics believe that its role was mainly myth and pr, as do some of its critics; some of its champions consider it a real force, far more than a myth, while others sympathetic to it consider its effects relatively marginal or limited in time to few early years in the postwar period. dyson takes a middle ground on both points. he takes pains to show the limits of ordoliberalism’s actual influence on policy. he points out, for example, that for all their emphasis on the necessity of a sound currency and price stability to enable all agents in the economic process to make rational decisions about the use of resources, the ordoliberals had surprisingly little to say about the role of a central bank. the establishment of a strong, independent central bank in 1948 owed little to ordoliberal influence (dyson, 2021, p. 377). they offered little guidance regarding monetary policy, or even fiscal policy. they “lacked a theory of public goods” (dyson, 2021, p. 400). many of the difficult policy choices german faced were influenced by ordoliberalism, if at all, only when figures associated with ordoliberal thinking accepted pragmatic compromises to their principles, generally by accepting a larger degree of autonomy for the collective bargaining institutions of labor and employers, a more comprehensive system of social insurance, more government intervention to stabilize employment and the balance of payments, and political compromises as the price of european integration. often the purists in the movement opposed them. however, both in the early years and later, the fundamentalist and pragmatic wings of ordoliberals agreed on basic principles and values (dyson, 2021, p. 400). dyson sees the importance of ordoliberalism above all in its insistence on moral values as the foundation of the market order, that a market economy must serve a larger good than private gain. one dimension of that normative position was based in kantian universalism, another in catholic social thinking about the just society. these strands of moral philosophy found their expression in the notion of the “social market economy,” which has proven to be much more workable than most observers thought 11 wilga föste’s book (2006) grundwerte in der ordnungskonzeption der sozialen marktwirtschaft, offers a comprehensive review of the basic theories underpinning the social market economy concept. it therefore covers ordoliberalism in depth. it gives little attention, however, to the relationship of ordoliberalism to german or european policies and institutions, focusing rather on an exhaustive description of the values of freedom, equality, and justice as they are reflected in the social market economy philosophy. https://changing-sp.com/ 26 thomas f. remington possible at the time. note that this means that if ordoliberals can be criticized for reflecting the social conservatism of the mittelstand, with the priority it gives to social attachments to family and community, they cannot be simultaneously be criticized for treating individual self-interest as the highest good. dyson admires their moral integrity but shows dispassionately that they were silent or self-contradictory on many points, and that their actual influence as a result was relatively limited. he acknowledges that ordoliberalism has been surrounded by a somewhat self-congratulatory mythology, but he does not for that reason dismiss the myth as false or unjustified. as he notes, many of the latter-day decisions made by germany’s policymakers have been more influenced by american institutional economics than by older ordoliberal theory, and he points out that many of the great problems facing germany—and other countries— today must find answers from other sources. these include problems such as global climate change, economic inequality, corporate governance, and the quality of public life. yet he concurs that whatever the defects of ordoliberalism may be, laissez-faire liberalism is far more vulnerable to criticism, given the fact that it has served as ideological justification for a massive “accumulation of privileges of wealth, income, and access to office” that characterize the united states and some other capitalist democracies (dyson, 2021, p. 442). as thorough as dyson’s study is, it tends not to emphasize sufficiently the importance the ordoliberals assigned to competition as the best way to prevent accumulations of market power that would invariably become threats to both economic and political freedom. they treated competition as the antithesis of compulsion through public or private monopoly, and as a precondition of freedom12. in direct contrast to hayek, for example, or the chicago school, they argued that the rules of a market order do not emerge organically or spontaneously; they are the products of human institutional choice. economic order emerges through market coordination, but the rules ensuring fair and free competition themselves must be established and enforced by government. these basic propositions are not discussed in most of the works reviewed here, but were fundamental to all their writings from the start (for example, böhm et al., 1937). moreover, these principles influenced german and european antimonopoly enforcement bodies, such as germany’s monopolkommission and bundeskartellamt and the european commission’s competition authority. many interpretations treat germany’s postwar institutional order as dominated by corporate business interests (angela wigger, for example, writes that germany has taken “a permissive approach to economic concentration to sustain fordist accumulation structures by means of large corporations”) (wigger in hien & joerges, 2017, p. 177). certainly, in the immediate postwar years, the iron and steel and coal cartels were extremely powerful, deriving their power not only from their control over industrial resources critically needed for rebuilding but also by the corporatist ties with the centralized labor unions in their sectors. the ordoliberals, and erhard, fought hard to minimize their influence, both in germany, and then at the european level (abelshauser 2004, p. 166 and passim). it is more than a little ironic that the american occupation 12 cf. böhm et al. (1937), and in eucken’s many writings. changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 27 authorities, who had ardently backed most of erhard’s market-oriented policies, turned in the opposite direction once the korean war broke out. a memorandum from john mccloy on march 6, 1951, demanded “a significant modification of the free market economy” and direct government intervention into production, prices, and currency in order to serve western war needs, making further us assistance conditional on german’s compliance with its demands. erhard made minimal concessions to appease the united states, confining cartel arrangements to the mining and metallurgy industries. in recent decades, industrial concentration has in fact declined, in contrast to the united states13. meantime, the mittelstand of small and medium-scale firms, which contribute over half of german value-added and over one third of total turnover, continuous to remain crucial. germany’s principle of social partnership is an element of the social market economy ideal, which contains ordoliberal ideas as well as an elite consensus that social peace is required to avert polarization and extremism as well as to achieve the collective commitment to high productivity that enables germany to succeed in a globally competitive economy. ordoliberalism is not the source of the social partnership model, but it influenced some of its major institutions. viii. ordoliberalism and german postwar institutions the federal republic’s first economic minister, ludwig erhard, was strongly influenced by ordoliberal thinking and brought both eucken and böhm into his government. however, erhard drew on ordoliberal thinking selectively, basing his decisions on his own judgment about how and when to apply principles to immediate problems. a practical thinker rather than a theoretician, erhard combined a firm set of doctrinal inclinations with a forceful personality, a gift at articulating his thinking publicly, and a politician’s pragmatic instinct about when to compromise and when to stand firm. in contrast, ordoliberal theoreticians such as eucken and böhm tended to view policy issues in a more abstract philosophical light. it was under erhard that the ordoliberal philosophy had its maximum impact on government policy, although eucken, böhm, and other ordoliberals frequently opposed him on particular issues. erhard remained in power through 1966, serving as chancellor in the last three years of the period. in 1966, the government changed hands and a new social democratic government entered government. although the new government retained many of the initial institutional choices made by the cdu government, they introduced a number of policies drawn from keynesian theory. they saw their program as building on, not overturning, the paradigm established in the first two decades. as the spd leader karl schiller put it, their vision was a “synthesis of freiburg imperative and keynesian message” or a “magic triangle” that “incorporated concepts of the keynesian model, the freiburg school, and the neoclassical synthesis 13 see monopolkommission (2018); heidorn and weche (2021); wambach and weche (2018). note that as in the united states, markups have risen across all industries, although they have risen more for firms in more concentrated branches and those with higher market power. however, profit margins are not rising when weighted by revenue shares. https://changing-sp.com/ 28 thomas f. remington for economic policy decisions”14. consequently, it is not the case that germany adopted a keynesian program at any point. germany has selectively employed policy measures aimed at boosting productivity, growth and employment without greatly expanding public sector employment or redistributive fiscal and social policy measures. its system of social insurance remains firmly based in employment, but over the decades has expanded both coverage and financing to include more state budget subsidies and, most recently, a growing element of private provision (such as the “riester pensions”). the change in german institutions has been continuous and adaptive, very different from the perspective presented by some analysts who believe that there was an initial equilibrium that subsequently broke down under the strain of inflation in the 1970s, globalizing pressures for liberalization or reunification (cf. streeck, 2010; thelen, 2014). crucial elements of the social partnership principle are institutionally embedded. one is germany’s apprenticeship system, called “dual education”, under which schools and firms share responsibility for providing technical and vocational education under a system of relations balancing cooperation and competition between business and labor (remington, 2018). other features of industrial relations also work to realize the broad principle of “social partnership” between labor and capital, which is embedded in multiple institutions. over time it has evolved incrementally, loosening in some respects as corporatist elements have given way to more flexible labor markets, and tightening in others as the courts have defined the rights of employees and employers more concretely. one of the most distinctive forms of the principle is germany’s co-determination system, under which workers are guaranteed representation on the governing boards—both the management board and supervisory board—of firms, as well as the enterpriselevel works councils. co-determination has been regularly modified and extended (streeck & hassel, 2004, p. 103). workers’ right to participate in the selection of the director of a firm, granted by federal law, was upheld by the constitutional court over strong objections by business. the system of labor courts, which adjudicate labor disputes and are composed of representatives of business, labor and government, constitute another element of the social partnership principle (streeck, 1984). because collective bargaining has been relatively successful in balancing wage and price restraint, the ordoliberals’ insistence on price stability has been realized for the most part without imposing fiscal or monetary austerity. austerity has never been an instrument or goal of german economic policy15. the objective of the social market economy is to ensure that sacrifices and gains are shared widely. moreover, so far at least, social partnership has not produced stasis or declining productivity. rather, as abelshauser argues, it encourages the sharing of the gains of productivity growth among workers and employers (abelshauser 2004, pp. 431–433). 14 “synthese von freiburger imperativ und keynesianischen botschaft.” (quoted in abelshauser, 2004, p. 413; cf. katzenstein, 1987, p. 112). 15 a point erhard often made. see, for example, ludwig erhard (2020, p. 331). to be sure, following the maastricht treaty, germany adopted a constitutional limit on national debt (the so-called “debt brake”). this has not required policies of austerity, however, because economic growth has enabled the budget to avoid running a structural deficit since 2012 and to reduce the state debt. changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 29 although the social partnership concept is not based in ordoliberalism, it is part of the broader social market economy philosophy, and in practice has worked to constrain wage-price pressure and thus to maintain price stability. because it has constrained competition between labor and business within a cooperative framework, it has helped to preserve the constitutional protections for equality of political rights. establishment of the new postwar policy paradigm in the late 1940s represented a sharp break from past systems, although the new system certainly adapted some older elements of germany’s political economy while introducing new features grounded in ordoliberal theory. since then, germany has not adopted a new policy paradigm16. germany’s liberalization in the late 1940s laid the foundations for a system that retained fundamental features of the original postwar system while adjusting it to new demands. 70 years later, germany’s postwar performance compares favorably to any other advanced capitalist democracy with respect to concrete outcomes such as the growth and distribution of incomes, employment and labor force trends, the quality of public goods, the extent of poverty and deep poverty, the vigor of electoral democracy, and the protection of political rights. germany has not sacrificed equity to efficiency under the pressure of european integration, globalization, automation, social change, or unification or succumbed to polarization and extremism. polarization and extremism are present in germany, as they are elsewhere in europe, but are nowhere near american levels. growth has generated widely shared prosperity, as the ordoliberals hoped, reinforcing the stability of the original democratic compact. ix. “early winners” one final point. it is regrettable that the architects of market liberalization in russia and other post-communist countries never took germany’s postwar reconstruction as a source of usable ideas. to be sure, germany’s wartime economy differed from that of the soviet-type communist systems; the hitler regime had imposed high centralization of control but not full nationalization of property relations. on the other hand, the suppression of workers’ rights, consumption, entrepreneurship and market exchange under a totalitarian mobilization regime might have been considered at least somewhat relevant as a comparison. moreover, the ordoliberal doctrine that economic and political freedom must rest in a competitive order that is formed and enforced by the state could have been considered useful guidance. in the event, however, the post-soviet architects of reform and their western advisors never referred to ordoliberal theory. their theory rested rather on simple neoliberal dichotomies—private property rights must replace state ownership; market exchange must replace central planning; politicians serve special interests, never the public good, therefore government’s role must be minimized (for example, boycko et al., 1995). the concern of the reformers lay in preventing inflationary spending pressure, not in creating or protecting competition among producers. 16 i use the term policy paradigm in the sense in which peter hall defines the term: a major change of course entailing not only a shift in the policy instruments and operating procedures of government, but a significant alteration in the basic hierarchy of policy goals as well (hall, 1993). https://changing-sp.com/ 30 thomas f. remington although they recognized the immense concentrations of market power held by soviet industrial enterprises, most reformers believed that a greater threat to reform than monopoly power was the large monetary overhang and repressed demand that would drive up prices. therefore, tightening monetary and fiscal policy coupled with deregulation of prices would cure the harms done by monopoly (kroll, 1991). moreover, some believed, giant enterprises were potentially more efficient than their daughter enterprises and would be attractive targets for private investment. market competition would follow of its own accord so long as privatization and the emergence of a new, private sector proceeded unimpaired (broadman, 2000; johnson & kroll, 1991; joskow et al., 1994; leitzel, 1994). as james leitzel put it, “industrial concentration is not an important reform issue, irrespective of its detrimental impact on the russian economy” (leitzel, 1994, p. 46). this position was justified by the faith that “with free enterprise, barriers to entry will largely disappear.” market reform would do “much of this work automatically” (leitzel, 1994, p. 49). although major firms might seek protection from being forced to privatize, they were more likely to be seeking “better terms for privatization.” the possibility that monopolistic firms might prefer to invest in seeking protection from competition by allying with sympathetic political forces to taking entrepreneurial risk was ignored. rather, reformers simply assumed that once property rights were established, competition would spontaneously arise and dissipate monopoly rents. that corporate managers and politicians would prefer to share rents by blocking competition seems not to have occurred to the reformers. in fact, from the very beginning, liberalization was fatally compromised by manipulation on the part of insiders. spontaneous privatization of state assets began well before shock therapy. numerous small firms sprang up, often using the premises, materials, and labor of state enterprises. large state enterprises and even entire ministries began to reorganize themselves into corporate forms such as “concerns” and “associations” to be able to engage in profit-seeking activity without risk of failure (johnson & kroll, 1991, pp. 289 ff.). the notorious loans-for-shares scheme and the dominant influence of the yeltsin-era oligarchs, continuing into the era of putin’s “silovarchs,” vividly demonstrate the continuing validity of hellman’s insight (aslund, 2019; dawisha, 2014; treisman, 2007). observing the tendency for the “early winners” of reform to become the real obstacles to liberalization, joel hellman published a prescient article in 1998 showing that it was not the initial “losers” from market reform—industrial workers and urban consumers—who were the greatest threat to liberalization, but rather the “early winners” who most profited from arbitrage opportunities in the market and used their privileged positions to shut out competitors (hellman, 1998). by ignoring the theories and experience of establishing market economies in post-world war ii germany, the post-soviet reformers failed to recognize that, given the enormous distributional implications of entering a globally competitive marketplace, it was far more advantageous for those who acquired ownership and control rights to use their market power to ally with those in government who could protect their streams of rents than to restructure their enterprises. they had no incentive to create a rule-of-law regime so long as they could use their power to extract rents and to share a portion of changing societies & personalities, 2022, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 10–34 31 them with their allies in government. some awareness of ordoliberal theory might have awakened the reformers to the fact that power relations always shape the operation of a market economy. by itself, liberalization does not create a level playing field for market participants. ordoliberal principles do offer a third way to pure laissez-faire neoliberalism as well as to state socialism. as the ordoliberals themselves emphasized, behind ideologies stand power interests. therefore, just as neoliberalism has been placed in the service of predatory rent-seeking by corporate interests in the united states and elsewhere, ordoliberalism in practice would need to be backed by a set of interests whose power resources were evenly enough balanced that they shared a stake in an order that encouraged competition under an agreed set of rules. however, far from implying the suppression of pluralism by a strong state, a market order based on the dispersion of power across society would be the strongest guarantee against the threat posed by concentrated market and political power. a government in such a system would treat the market economy as an instrument for serving the public good rather than as an end in itself. references abelshauser, w. 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(1936). soviet communism: a new civilization (vols. 1–2). longmans, green. https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2018.1450776 https://desmarais-tremblay.com/resources/simons%20henry%20c.%201934%20a%20positive%20program%20for%20laissez%20faire.pdf https://desmarais-tremblay.com/resources/simons%20henry%20c.%201934%20a%20positive%20program%20for%20laissez%20faire.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/13563469708406299 https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199573981.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199573981.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107282001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2006.10.013 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2006.10.013 https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190683986.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190683986.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10273-018-2368-6 paper title (use style: paper title) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 1 islamic finance and the new technology challenges department of international economic relations, university of economics, varna, bulgaria, kamdzhalov@ue-varna.bg abstract— islamic finance, as a new economic paradigm based on ancient principles and rules, needs to embrace the new it opportunities in order to be up to date with the contemporary financial industry. this process will become a “bridge” between the past and the future of socially responsible financing. the world’s financial and economic environment in our days is marked with immense inequality and imbalance. with the emergence of the global capital structures, solely ruled by the principles of the financial markets, the main focus of the economy shifted from real entrepreneurship to a form of capital bureaucracy. the financialization of the economy is a crucial phenomenon of contemporary capitalism, which could lead the world economy nowhere. structures such as hedge funds, venture capitals and private equities create no real value. the main objective of such financial management firms is short term profits. by cutting costs (firing workers, reducing investments etc.) they have harmful impact on the companies they invest in. in order to evade deleterious effects on the economy, caused by the financialization, an interest free environment and financial technology (fintech) development need to be implemented. islamic finance as a no-interest based intermediary can be fully embedded in such processes. by nature the islamic mode of financing excludes the dealing with debt and purely monetary activity. the digital disruption can bring independence, shrink costs, and improve services as a whole. blockchain is the technology which provides the contemporary base for development of the fintech. on one hand it enables maximum security of transactions and on the other it energizes crowdfunding. in the islamic finance context of the profit and loss sharing paradigm, the new disruptive technology has the potential to reduce the risk and to increase productivity. in the end by increasing trust, blockchain and islamic finance can mitigate debt-based financing. keywordsislamic finance, blockchain, financialization, fintech, crowdfunding. i. introduction inequality is a major concern in society. from social and economic perspective inequality is a wide researched area of study. this topic has attracted the attention of many scholars, scientists and writers. since the time of david ricardo and after that karl marx many bright minds (and others not so prominent) have touched upon the theme. inequality is a fact which is so important that it needs to be discussed in depth and observed not only by philosophers, economists, sociologists etc. but from all who can share their thoughts on it. politics are deeply influenced by the same phenomenon. if the members of the society exploit the natural and production goods unfairly, this will lead to uncertainty and unsustainable growth. there is always conflict between different social classes on how to distribute wealth. in our day, in the era of widespread information, disruptive information technology provides a significant opportunity to enhance the discussion and take action towards solving the problem. we need calm observations and analyses of all statements and facts related to the economic, political and social mechanisms that might answer the question of wealth distribution and social justice. without a doubt inequality is a matter of perception. there are no scientific clues as to what its ideal state should be. it is more or less a philosophical category. nevertheless, to achieve such a state in which the economy is growing and wealth distribution is fair, we need a well balanced mix of policies and institutions. the contemporary world’s financial and economic environment is marked with immense inequality and imbalance. with the emergence of the global capital structures, solely ruled by the principals of the financial markets, the main focus of the economy shifted from real entrepreneurship to a form of capital bureaucracy. the financialization of the economy is a crucial phenomenon of the contemporary capitalism, which could lead the world economy nowhere. structures such as hedge funds, venture capitals and private equities create no real value. the main objective of such financial management firms is the short term profits. by cutting costs (firing workers, reducing investments etc.) they have harmful impact on the companies they invest in. islamic finance has principles that makes it very close to social finance like risk sharing and calls for social justice and welfare. there are solid and undeniable evidences in islamic history for financing the social sector using islamic financial tools like zakat (obligatory charity) sadaqa (voluntary charity) and waqf (perpetual endowment) [1]. the aim of this research is to elaborate probable opportunities of the islamic finance, combined with the latest information technologies, to mitigate the harmful effects on the economy, caused by financialization. islamic finance as a socially responsible activity could be used to shrink such negative economic effects. the core principles of asset-based financing, combined with disruptive technologies such as blockchain present new challenges to contemporary financing. ii. financialization and islamic finance the phenomenon “financialization” arises after the collapse of the bretton woods agreement. according to noam chomsky in the mid 1970s, after years (1945 – 1975) of miroslav kamdzhalov mailto:kamdzhalov@ue-varna.bg ejif – european journal of islamic finance first special issue for ejif workshop http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 2 unprecedented economic growth in the developed capitalist counties, the economic situation changed. the financial system prevailed over production and sustainable development. the finance was freed, speculation boomed, huge amounts of capital started going into speculation against currencies and other paper manipulations, and the entire economy became financialized [2]. chomsky was probably the first voice to signal the problem that was the immense power of the financial institutions. after the financial crisis in the usa from 20072008, the consequences of the financialization became apparent and many economists started to address this issue. what exactly is the phenomenon financialization? why is it so important? gerald epstein defines financialization as: “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies” [6]. the financial sector is vital to any economy. without investment there is no development. but the devil is in the details. here we do not deal with the normal banking activity where a financial institution lends money on purpose to create value. structures such as hedge funds, venture capitals and private equities create no real value. the main objective of such financial management firms is the short term profits. by cutting costs (firing workers, reducing investments etc.) they have harmful impact on the companies they invest in. the capitalist economy is considered a structure which comprises different spheres of activity – namely production, circulation, and distribution – among which production is dominant [7]. production creates value. finance as a part of circulation does not create value. the effects of financialization increased after the appearance of a global spread of financial markets. bank behavior is derived from market-related financial transactions. speaking of value we should mention mariana mazzucato and her term “value creation – value extraction”. even big multi-national companies, which create value in a similar way, extract value. with different, mainly financial techniques such as tax-evasion, share buy-back, they feed the financialization of the economy. rather than reinvest they transfer capital to the closest group or individual shareholders. the social, economic and political impact of value extraction is huge. prior to the 2007 financial crisis, the income share of the top 1 per cent in the us rose from 9.4 per cent in 1980 to a staggering 22.6 per cent in 2007. since 2009 inequality has been increasing even more rapidly than before the 2008 financial crash. in 2015 the combined wealth of the planet’s sixty-two richest individuals was estimated to be about the same as that of the bottom half of the world’s population – 3.5 billion people [8]. we can see a similar process depicted in figure 1. inequality is rising almost everywhere, but at a different pace: 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 1 9 8 5 1 9 9 0 1 9 9 5 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 5 2 0 1 0 2 0 1 5 india russia europe china us-kanada figure 1: top 10% income shares across the world, 1985– 2015. source: world inequality report 2018 this inequality is born from debt one whose burden is carried by the middle class. the working people are encouraged to experience more and more debt. this, no doubt, will lead to a financial bubble which was the cause for the last world financial crisis. the governments rescued the financial institutions responsible for this economic crash with public resources. financialization as a phenomenon of the advanced capitalist economies has enormous influence on banks, nonfinancial enterprises and households. more and more nonfinancial enterprises are involved in pure financial activity. we observe a huge increase of the financialization of the productive sector. there are many examples of that. in the 2000s, the us arm of ford made more money by selling loans for cars than by selling the cars themselves. over the same period ge capital, the finance arm of the enormous general electric group, made around half of the whole group’s earnings [8]. let us remember what islamic finance means. definitions vary from very narrow (interest-free banking) to very broad (financial operations carried out by muslims). here we deal with the type of financial operations governed by the sharia. from here the following definition of ‘islamic financial institutions performing islamic financial operations’ can be derived: islamic financial institutions are those, whose objectives and operations are firmly based on the principles of the quran and the sunnah. in this way they differ from the conventional institutions (be they muslim as well), which do not have such considerations or concerns. this definition exceeds the mere equalization of islamic financing with ‘interest-free’ banking. it allows for operations which can or cannot be interest-free, but are still influenced by certain islamic principles to be taken into account. such principles include the avoidance of riba (usury) and gharar (uncertainty, risk, and speculation), the focus on halal (religiously permissible) activities, as well as in general the search for equity and other moral and religious purposes. there are two aspects of islamic finance that must be clearly distinguished: ejif – european journal of islamic finance first special issue for ejif workshop http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 3 • the first is the philosophy of risk sharing – the lender must share the risk with the borrower. the fixed interest rates determined in advance (in the case of conventional banking) guarantee return on investment to the lender and that they are taken up by the party receiving the loan. from islamic point of view these interest rates are seen as exploitative and socially unproductive. the preferred financing method is sharing both the profit and the loss (pls). • the second is the encouragement of economic and social development by means of specific business practices and through zakat (alms). most of but not all islamic institutions have a board of religious advisors, whose opinion regarding the acceptability of new methods is highly sought after. essentially their function is carrying out a religious audit of the activities of the bank. the islamic financial principles ensure the preservation of the contractual agreement and the balance between the borrower and the lender for the sake of mutual benefit. every islamic financial transaction suggests direct involvement in asset efficiency (in some cases this can be realized with a special purpose vehicle spv). the investors have clearly defined rights and obligations specified in the financial agreement’s predetermined parameters, which ensure return on investment proportionate to the amount of money invested by each party. the sharia law forbids the trade with debt as a means to acquire interest (riba), the use and transfer of economically inactive assets without ramification, as well as contractual uncertainty. interest-free forms of financing are deemed acceptable only if they do not involve pork, alcohol, gambling or pornography. according to the sharia, profiting from and paying to use a particular asset is permissible if both parties adhere to the pls principles. the very same principles stipulate that returns are not guaranteed but are realized if there is income. to sum up, the main difference between both methods of financing is that while conventional financing usually only aims at maximizing profit, within the confines of a given regulatory frame, islamic financing is also governed by particular social and moral tenets. there is a plenty of space for social impact financing in order to diminish poverty and inequality in the world economy. in this context, the islamic financial instruments can be considered in line with the same objectives and requirements social impact investments that generate social and economic benefits. biancone and radwan [9] considered that unconventional financing alternatives provided by islamic finance can be used in impact investing. impact investing and islamic finance are highly complementary as both of them upholding rigorous moral and social criteria for investments and emphasize on inclusiveness. some authors [4] see a correlation between economic growth, islamic finance and financialization. unlike financial capitalism or financialization, islamic financing is purely a real goods financing. no financing can find its way to the islamic system without passing through the production and exchange of real goods and services. such asset-based activity is fundamental for economic growth and real value creation. islamic financing is essentially connected with the goods and commodities market and it is limited by the volume of finance required by actual transactions that take place in this market. islamic financing is limited by the size of the transaction in the goods and services market whether it is done by means of sharing, sale or lease contracts. this makes islamic modes of financing direct and strongly linked to real physical transactions. sharing modes are only possible for productive enterprises that involve real-life businesses that increase quantity or improve quality or enhance usability of real goods and services. such businesses generate a return that can be distributed between the entrepreneur and the financier. even the sale-based modes are those that involve actual physical exchange of commodities from one hand to another whereby financing is measured only by real sale of commodities and can only be provided to the extent of the real value of the goods exchanged. the same thing also applies to leasing where leased assets are the pivotal thing around which financing is built. iii. blockchain and islamic finance the revolutionary uniqueness of blockchain technology is the reliability and trustiness of information transferring. with its self-controlling peer-to-peer algorithms users can be sure that the system would reject any malicious attempt. the other key feature of this technology is its decentralization, which can change the world in a disruptive way, much like the internet and smart phones are capable of doing. the intermediation of a third party is gone which automatically shrinks security risks. the blockchain became popular with the development of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. this is only a single feature of the technology. except currency, blockchain enables contracts and applications. this provides an opportunity for wide application in the social, economic, health, art, etc. areas of society. with this technology immediate digital currency payments as well as more complicated financial contracts are possible. any currency, financial contract, or hard or soft asset may be transacted with a system like the blockchain. furthermore, the blockchain may be used not just for transactions, but also as a registry and inventory system for the recording, tracking, monitoring, and transacting of all assets. a blockchain is quite literally like a giant spreadsheet or ledger for registering all assets, and an accounting system for transacting them on a global scale that can include all forms of assets held by all parties worldwide. thus, the blockchain can be used for any form of asset registry, inventory, and exchange, including every area of finance, economics, and money; tangible and intangible assets [10]. many authors [12] depict blockchain as a genealogical tree. but at the same time they clarify that genealogy is not sufficient to explain all the features of the technology. blockchain uses cryptography and hashes extensively for data protection and deterring hackers. the key concepts of blockchain are bitcoin, peer-to-peer network, cryptography and hash functions, and ledger. encryption is the process of converting plaintext into incomprehensible text, called ciphertext. decryption is the ejif – european journal of islamic finance first special issue for ejif workshop http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 4 reverse process of turning back the incomprehensible ciphertext in to plaintext. the encryption algorithms used by bitcoin mining are hash functions. a hash function is a function that maps data of any size to data of a fixed size. the values returned by a hash function are called hash values or simply hashes. a cryptographic hash function allows one to verify easily that some input data maps to a given hash value. however, the reverse – when the input data is unknown is practically infeasible as it requires reconstructing the input plaintext from a hash value. in other words, hashing is a one-way operation. another notable attribute of a hashing function is that a minor change in the input plaintext will result in a completely different hash value. this feature is desirable for safeguarding information as any tiny change to the original data by a hacker results in a visibly different hash. that is why blockchain is such a reliable technological tool. there are three categories (generations) of blockchain: • blockchain 1.0 cryptocurrencies • blockchain 2.0 – smart contracts • blockchain 3.0 applications blockchain 1.0 stands for the decentralization of money and payments. blockchain 2.0 stands more generally for the decentralization of markets. it is concerned with the transfer of many other kinds of assets beyond currency using the blockchain; from the creation of a unit of value through every time it is transferred or divided. the information (bitcoin or else) transferred trough blockchain is not saved somewhere in a folder. the transactions are recorded in a ledger, which uses the resources of a large peer-to-peer network to verify and approve each transaction. the operations run on computers provided by volunteers around the world, hence there is no central database to hack. this type of distribution together with public appearance (anyone can view it because it resides on the network) and the above-mentioned encryption guarantees the security, decentralization and efficiency of the blockchain. in the context of efficiency we should point out the relatively low number of transaction per second. but this is the cost paid for the balance between decentralization, security, and scalability. islamic finance is a socially responsible and ethical financing method. is there compatibility between islamic finance and blockchain? the answer is not unambiguous. if we take into consideration bitcoin or any other criptocurrency, the answer should be negative on the forgoing question. the islamic scholars still have not come to a decision on this issue. if we take into consideration asset-based principles in islamic finance, then probably, according to sharia, criptocurency is not permissible. but the focus here should be on the potential of the blockchain technology to fund start-up projects on peerto-peer basis. with its decentralization, security and scalability it brings value and encourages entrepreneurship. the key word in both islamic finance and blockchain is “trust”. the sharia prohibits contractual uncertainty and deceiving methods. the global ledger of the blockchain works under a similar direction: it keeps information truthful thus creating an environment of trustworthiness. in the preblockchain world trust in transactions came from individuals, intermediaries, or other organizations acting with integrity. because we often cannot know our counterparties, let alone whether they have a reputation for integrity, we have come to rely on third parties not only to vouch for strangers, but also to maintain transaction records and perform the business logic and transaction logic that powers commerce online. these powerful intermediaries—banks, governments, paypal, visa, uber, apple, google, and other digital conglomerates—harvest much of the value [11]. one possible way to embed blockchain in islamic financial activity is by using smart contracts. smart contracts are a complex suite of software codes with components designed to automate execution and settlement of contractual agreements. they are programmable contracts which self-execute the stipulations of an agreement when predetermined conditions are achieved. once two or more parties consent to all of the terms within the contract, they cryptographically sign the smart contract and deploy it to a distributed ledger. when a condition specified in the code is met, the program automatically triggers a corresponding action. by lack of any direct human involvement, a deployed smart contract on a distributed ledger could make contractual relationships more efficient and economical with potentially fewer opportunities for error, misunderstanding, delay or dispute [5]. following the principles of islamic financial contracts, we would compare them to the aforementioned smart ones. in the case of mudaraba or musharaka contracts there is a reliable and trustworthy opportunity for crowdfunding. in general, crowdfunding is used to finance start-ups, small and medium enterprises, expansion projects and capital increase. it is also used to finance all works, creative ideas and works of art such as films and charity projects such as relief campaigns and others. it is based on the principle of social solidarity to serve an idea or a project, and the redistribution and better utilization of financial resources. this is in line with the essence of islamic finance, which is considered a revolution in the financing methods in the islamic world if properly invested [13]. when a mudarib for instance needs funding for his startup or already functioning business, blockchain technology could provide such support. sukuk as a main contemporary method of fundraising for infrastructure projects and business development in islamic financing is possible to be integrated in smart sukuk contracts. hussein elasrad [5] stated that, the smart sukuk structure has strived to use the blockchain and boost efficiency, transparency, reduce the cost and make it possible for small and medium enterprises, social impact projects, groups and associations to issue their own sukuk using the new technology. the world’s first innovation in smart sukuk was introduced by blossom finance. the facility endeavored to change the conventional ways of sukuk issuances using the blockchain. blossom’s smart sukuk uses ethereum blockchain smart contracts in order to strengthen the efficiency and make it a ejif – european journal of islamic finance first special issue for ejif workshop http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 5 globally acceptable sukuk. the most significant feature of smart sukuk is standardizing and automating the accounting. legal and overhead payments of conventional sukuk offerings are all fully backed by a licensed legal entity in the issuing country [5]. we could emphasize too on shrinking of the financialization effects, as an addendum of such assertion. the conventional sukuk issuance is delivered by powerful institutions and government agencies and despite the core principles of the islamic finance there is a possibility for short term profit striving and rising of the inequality. as is visible on the following chart (figure 2), income inequality is highest in the middle east. 0 20 40 60 80 figure 2: top 10% national income share across the world, 2016 source: world inequality report 2018 good application of the blockchain could also be observed in zakat administering. zakat is one of the main pillars of the islamic economy and the basic principle of distribution of social goods. it relies on both approaches voluntary in the form of alms and obligatory, to tackle poverty and social inequality. here there is a divergence with conventional, secular-type economies, where the issue of social well-being is a matter of a government-run macro-economic approach through the collection of population taxes. the islamic approach to taxation policy involves taking social policy management out of the government's reach. this lack of government regulation, relative to decentralization in the blockchain technology, leads us to the conclusion that blockchain can be used successfully in zakat practice. according to some authors [5] there is already obligation for muslims linked to cryptocurrency. the amount of zakat is calculated at 2.5% of liquid assets held for at least a full year: gold, silver, cash, savings, investments, rent income, business merchandise or profits, shares, securities, and bonds all qualify as part of the calculation. since cryptocurrency like bitcoin qualifies as a liquid asset, muslims must take care to include their cryptocurrency assets in the calculation for their zakat obligation, as well as to keep track of how much cryptocurrency they’ve held for a full year, since assets held for less than one year need not be included in this calculation. iv. conclusion as set out herein, we can conclude that there is an extensive interconnection between financialization of the economy, blockchain and islamic finance. based on common principles the last two can work in symbiosis in order to mitigate the negative effects on the economy and so to all society. the implementation of the new information technology in islamic financing is not only vital for the future of socially responsible financing. the advantage is that it will bring more trust and business prosperity, especially in the middle class. blockchain as a new disruptive technology is a tool for relieving the economy of financial “illnesses”. blockchain has a potential to return the entrepreneurship back to life. on the other hand, islamic finance, based on its own fundamental principles (real asset-based activity, money is not asset, they are just means), could support the process of sustainable economic development. the institution of profit-loss sharing by definition excludes speculative motives in an investment so that the interests of borrowers and lenders in a common project are met. crowdfunding supported by blockchain could thrive and thus develop sustainable growth. references [1] p. p. biancone, and m. radwan, “social finance and financing social enterprises: an islamic finance prospective”. european journal of islamic finance, 2019. [2] n. chomsky, “chomsky: understanding the crisis markets, the state and hypocrisy”. foreign policy in focus, 2009. (available at https://fpif.org/chomsky_understanding_the_crisis_markets_the_state_a nd_hypocrisy/). [3] f. alvaredo, l. chancel, t. piketty, e. saez and g. zucman, “world inequality report”. world inequality lab, 2018. [4] a. el-galfy and k.a. khiyar, “islamic banking and economic growth: a review”. the journal of applied business research – volume 28, number 5, 2012. [5] h. elasrad, “blockchains for islamic finance: obstacles & challenges”. mpra paper no. 92676, 2019. (online at https://mpra.ub.unimuenchen.de/92676/) [6] g. epstein, “financialization and the world economy”. northampton, ma: edward elgar publishers, 2005. [7] c. lapavitsas, “profiting without producing: how finance exploits us all”. verso, 2013. [8] m. mazzucato, “the value of everything making and taking in the global economy”. penguin publishing, 2018. [9] p. p. biancone and m. radwan, “social finance and unconventional financing alternatives: an overview”. european journal of islamic finance, (10). 2018. [10] m. swan, “blockchain: blueprint for a new economy”. o’reilly media, inc., 2015. [11] d. tapscott and a. tapscott, “blockchain revolution: how the technology behind bitcoin is changing money, business, and the world”. penguin publishing, 2016. [12] x. wu and w. sun, “blockchain quick start guide”. packt publishing, 2018. [13] p. p. biancone, s. secinaro and m. kamal, “crowdfunding and fintech: business model sharia compliant”. european journal of slamic finance, (12). 2019. ejif – european journal of islamic finance editorial team editor in chief prof. paolo pietro biancone, university of turin, italy editorial board prof. dian masyita, university of padjadjaran, indonesia prof. abdulazeem abozaid, qatar faculty of islamic studies, qatar prof. ahmad aref almazari, king saud university, saudi arabia prof. marco meneguzzo, università degli studi di roma "tor vergata", italy prof. buerhan saiti, istanbul sabahattin zaim university, turkey prof. nidal a. alsayyed, inayah islamic finance research institute, usa prof. roberta aluffi, university of turin, italy prof. ghassen bouslama, neoma business school, campus de reims, france prof. nazam dzolkarnaini, salford university, uk prof. kabir hassan, university of new orleans, usa prof. khaled hussainey, university of plymouth, uk prof. rifki ismal, university of indonesia prof. tariqullah khan, hamad bin khalifa university, qatar prof. ali khorshid, icma centre reading university, uk prof. amir kia, utah valley university, usa prof. laurent marliere, université paris-dauphine, france prof. federica miglietta, university of bari, italy prof. hakim ben othman, university of tunis, tunisia prof. mohamed ramady, king fahd university of petroleum and minerals, saudi arabia prof. mamunur rashid, nottingham university, malaysia prof. younes soualhi, international islamic university, malaysia prof. laurent weill, university of strasbourg, france . international journal of economics and financial issues issn: 2146-4138 available at http: www.econjournals.com international journal of economics and financial issues, 2016, 6(2), 607-616. international journal of economics and financial issues | vol 6 • issue 2 • 2016 607 the political economy of financial regulation policies following the global crisis hale balseven* department of public finance, faculty of economics and administrative science, akdeniz university, antalya, turkey. *email: halebalseven@akdeniz.edu.tr abstract this paper analyses the efficiency of financial regulation reforms that are being supported in a variety of theoretical approaches after the 2007/2008 global crisis. the main challenges that prevent the efficiency of the reforms are; (i) maintaining the basel approach that is argued to have led to the financial crisis, (ii) its limited content, (iii) its lack of global and national financial infrastructure, (iv) not being designed in a framework that comprises the macro policies. due to the reasons mentioned above, this paper argues that the regulation policy can neither fulfill its stability role nor its distributive role and that in this way, it restructures forthcoming crisis, not the financial sector. in order to prevent crises, a critical approach is required on the mode of regulation of the economy and a reorganization of capitalism is necessary on a larger scale. keywords: government policy and regulation, financial crises, crisis management jel classifications: g18, g01, h12 1. introduction the 2007/2008 global crisis has indicated a big decline in the world economy with regards to many economic indicators such as economic growth, the increase of unemployment and public debts. while growth rates were 4% and 2.6% for developed countries before the global crisis in the year 2007, these ratios have fallen respectively to −2.2% and −3.8% (unctad, 2013. p. 2). while the unemployment rate was lower than 5% in the unites states of america (usa) in the year 2007, it has reach its peak level with 10% at the end of the year 2009 and could only fall back to 7.6% by mid-2013. as to the european union, the unemployment rate that was 7.2% in the year 2009 reached 11% in the year 2013 (unctad, 2013. p. 11). the bailout policies of states devoted to private financial institutions have increased the monetary base as well as the debt burden of states. the results of these policies might be observed in the financial statements of central banks. between august 2007 which marks the beginning of the crisis and the end of 2012, the financial statement of the federal reserve bank of the usa grew by 221% while the financial statement of the european central bank grew by 241% (unctad, 2013. p. 113). during the post-crisis period, regulations concerning the financial system have become a current issue since the global crisis, which had led to the related economic problems, had derived from the financial sector to a large extent. although the tools and methods used were differing, regulations had been supported by a large academia, in order to prevent a similar situation in the future (caprio, 2013; daripa et al., 2013; epstein, 2010; baker, 2010; davis and karim, 2010; wade, 2009; persaud, 2008). financial regulation means the establishment of institutions and rules concerning financial markets by public authorities, with the purpose of orienting sources in the direction of certain objectives, due to the regulatory function of state. together with globalization, nowadays the related institutions and rules are being established under the financial governance structure of international governance institutions such as the international monetary fund (imf) the world bank (wb), the world trade organization (wto) and the financial stability board (fsb), besides national states. thus, financial regulations shall be examined within their financial governance structure. this situation requires comprehensive political transformations on national as well as global levels. balseven: the political economy of financial regulation policies following the global crisis international journal of economics and financial issues | vol 6 • issue 2 • 2016608 although the necessity to strengthen the financial system with financial regulations is being accepted by a large academia after the global crisis, studies shall be conducted to understand how much progress has been made in this field, what have been the impacts of these practices on the financial sector since the crisis, what shall be the characteristics of financial regulations to prevent the repetition of similar crises? in order to answer these questions, the development of theoretical approaches on financial regulation has first been addressed in this paper. then, policy implementation topics during the period following the global crisis have been examined. when the variety of financial market institutions and instruments is considered, financial regulation policies have to be addressed on a comprehensive scale. during the post-crisis period, academicians and policy makers have started to focus on a large discussion which also comprises the basel standards and policy proposals have come to the agenda in this field. this paper does not address in detail all the regulation proposals and their theoretical basis. in accordance with the objective of the paper, particular importance has been attached to the implemented regulation policies and their efficiency as well as their impacts on the financial sector. the practices in the usa and england have been basically explained, while a limited focus has been given to the differences in policy implementations among countries, in order to keep the dimensions of the paper at a certain level. 2. financial regulations in the historical and theoretical framework as a practice of the interventionist role of the state in the economy after the second world war, financial regulations have been widely used, the capital controls being in the first place. however, in the 1970s the monetarist approach has been accepted as the effective economic theory and in this respect, the role of the state has been defined as just providing the continuity of the system and strengthening competitive markets (friedman, 1988). in this framework, the decrease of state interventions in financial markets have been brought to the agenda with financial liberalization policies and this process led to the gradual elimination of financial regulations. the theory of practices aimed at eliminating financial regulations is based on the financial repression analysis. the analysis argues that financial markets and financial market structures play important roles in economic growth and development. increasing the interest rates to their balance level with financial liberalization would orientate the savings from non-productive actives to the banking sector and make it possible to use them in more productive fields. according to this theory, during this process the increasing savings provide a more efficient use of sources for investment purposes. furthermore, the liberalization of credit markets which were being held under pressure would enable the development of financial markets and the diversification of market instruments. a financial deepening to be realized in this way and the monetarization of the economy would ensure the economic growth and the development of the financial system (mckinnon, 1973). after the crises experienced in the 1990s, new-keynesians have started to bring the first comprehensive criticisms on the financial liberalization theory. according to these theoreticians, crises might be explained with fundamental market failures of the system, not with market disruptions and deficiencies defended by liberal economists. according to stiglitz, financial markets are commonly defined with market failures. according to this approach, markets are encompassed with uncertainty, lack of information and risks and therefore the efficient markets hypothesis1 of the neo-classical theory which suggests that the existing information are reflected on the prices is not valid (stiglitz, 1985). as to stiglitz, this market failure is due to the fact that the social risk is not equal to the private risk in these markets. in other words, the market cannot price efficiently the private risk. in this case, if the market is left to its own devices, it would accumulate more risks than it is socially effective. according to stiglitz, market participants that focus much on short time periods and tend to a large extent towards the way other market participants would act can be cited as examples to those situations which are an indicator of market irrationality. as to stiglitz, the systemic risk that emerges as a result of financial decisions made under the influence of these speculative structures and the blockage this risk causes are the most important justifications of interventions such as taxes or regulations aimed at capital flows (stiglitz, 1998). besides stability, the keynesian approach also focuses on the income distribution impacts of financial regulation. although the market ensures the efficient resource allocation that is possible under the ideal conditions, the income distribution ensured by the market might not be efficient. therefore, according to stiglitz “one of the most important objectives of state interventions to financial markets is to restore misallocations” (stiglitz and uy, 1996. p. 250). following the global crisis, it might be observed that a consensus has been reached on the recognition of a market failure in the financial sector which necessitates the state intervention, although its degree might vary from one country to another. however, as pointed out by picciotto (2009), the spreading of formal regulation has a national focus but these regulations have been developed as an international process through regulators and experts that develop the principles and standards. at the same time, some of these rules have been developed by international governance institutions such as the imf, the wb, the wto and the fsb. thus, the crisis has opened a new door for many researchers into the analysis of the objectives, functions and contradictions of these institutions and their economic governance rules. these rules and institutions are commonly related with politics and power relations. especially, the old discussion on power relations in finance, which dates back to kindleberger (1988) has become even more vital in today’s world where money and trade get globalized increasingly. in this framework, it has been argued that the failure of the financial governance system in regulating the power of the financial sector has been another characteristic of the financial crisis. the arbitrage power of big banks, investment institutions and hedge funds, 1 the efficient market hypothesis assumes that financial markets would continually establish equilibrium asset prices based on the available information concerning the main economic indicators. balseven: the political economy of financial regulation policies following the global crisis international journal of economics and financial issues | vol 6 • issue 2 • 2016 609 necessitates that these enterprises undertake an extreme risk on the existing liquidity (dimsky, 2010). these risks are the risks of each economy and even more, the risks of the global system. the approaches that are based on this framework argue that the reason of the financial crisis is not just a financial market failure. according to these approaches, failure is at the centre of the economic mechanism. the state has implemented free market policies and transferred its auditing and regulation power to the banking lobby and organized business environments. transferring the regulative function of the state to these groups-which are denominated as the predictor class by galbraith has led to the uncontrolled growth of financial derivatives, tax heavens, investment strategies (carry trade) which benefit from the regulative arbitrage and the interest rate difference which is used in the foreign exchange (fx) market (galbraith, 2009). another approach which has become prominent with its crisis theories during the post-global crisis period is the marxist approach. this approach analyses the nature of the capitalist system, which is prone to crises, and the role of the state in this system. it brings up to the agenda a perspective suggesting that the global crisis is not just a regulation crisis, but that it is the global crisis of the capitalist system (bonefeld and holloway, 1995). according to this approach, the capital has to be re-allocated continuously to productive investments in order to maintain its level and widen. the widening of the capital is the descriptive phase of the global accumulation phase, during which the capital is in search of new areas in order to realize the surplus value or the profit (sawaya, 2010). if the capital cannot find ways to continue its valuation process in the real production area, fictive valuation mechanisms shall be created. at this phase, the role of the state in reshaping capitalist social relations as a whole becomes prominent. in this sense; “a regular intervention of state managers, the establishment of international regimes and institutions” (burnham, 2001) gain importance. consequently, according to this approach, approaches that focus on the circularity of the financial system that is targeted by the speculation or regulation policy based on imperfect knowledge have to rely on the criticism of the capitalist system. 3. financial regulation reforms the fact that the model implemented in the world starting from the 1970s with the gradual deregulation of markets has commonly led to crises in developing country groups has been attributed to the inadequacy of institutions in the related countries and their failures in policy implementation. on the other hand, it has been commonly argued that the reason of the 2007/2008 global crisis experienced in the developed economies where these problems are assumed as non-existing has arisen from formal regulation policies that are based on the basel model. since 130 years, this model has caused a bank panic in western countries for the first time. the theoretical framework and practices on which this approach is based are to a large extent, the different forms of micro-prudential regulations that lean on the efficient market hypothesis. however, during the 2007/2008 crisis, it has been observed that even though financial agents act in accordance with the micro-prudential approach, they cannot guarantee the stability of the system as a whole (baker, 2010). the global crisis has established an increasing consensus on the fact that the regulations related to the auditing and monitoring of each bank based on basel model are necessary but not sufficient for financial stability at the micro level (davis and karim, 2010) and macro-prudential regulations have been brought to the agenda. macro-prudential instruments are designed according to the risk contribution each institution makes at a certain time at the system-scale or according to how to total risk evolves in time (borio, 2009). instruments of the first type include instruments such as capital requirements, insurance premiums. instruments of the second type concern the establishment of counter-cyclical capital buffers for banks and financial institutions. they have for objective to bring a restriction on extreme risk taking and herding. they are devoted to decrease the immanent circularity of the financial system. following the global crisis, the basel committee on banking supervision has put into practice a higher capital requirements (increasing the quality and level of capital) and leverage ratio (constraining leverage) in the framework of basel iii (table 1). also, the committee has put into practice some rules having for objective to strengthen the liquidity supports (mitigate of systemic risk) of financial institutions that are active at the international scale. to this end, it has brought two instruments to measure the liquidity risk (the liquidity coverage ratio and the net stable funding ratio). especially, net stable funding ratio would encourage banks to use long-term sources which are more stable than short term funding instruments (saidenberg, 2011). a macro prudential element of the basel iii capital framework is the requirement that in good times, banks should build up buffers – a capital conservation buffer and a countercyclical buffer that can be drawn down in periods of stress (the bank for international settlements [bis], 2011. p. 112). the global crisis has contributed to the inclusion of swap and derivative markets to the regulation basin in the usa for the first time. with new regulations in the framework of the consumer protection act, swap dealers or swap market participants have become subject to new regulations and reporting requirements. this law has also included over the counter derivatives within the regulative framework. in order to resolve the insufficiency of auditing in financial markets following the crisis, some regulations have been made in order to improve the financial infrastructure. broad reforms on the financial infrastructure have been realized in the uk. following the global crisis, the uk has been one of the countries that was at the centre of criticisms concerning the inadequacies and failures of the financial stability authority (fsa) which is its own financial monitoring and auditing institution. the fsa has been abolished since it was being criticized for not being able to prevent the credit inflation and the boom that followed it and the risky transactions of banks. instead, two regulative authorities have been established. these institutions are the financial conduct authority (fca) which balseven: the political economy of financial regulation policies following the global crisis international journal of economics and financial issues | vol 6 • issue 2 • 2016610 has been established in april 2013 as an independent board and the prudential regulation authority (pra) that would function as a department of the central bank. the fca is responsible for protecting the investor, improving market integration and encouraging efficient competition. the pra is principally responsible for monitoring financial service companies (banks, insurance companies, big investment companies) and ensuring the stability of the english financial system. pra is composed of the financial policy committee (fpc) and the special resolution unit (sru). the fpc, which has been established in the year 2014, has for main objective to define, monitor and decrease the systemic risk. it has two powers; giving orders and recommendations to the pra and fca for establishing the macroprudential instruments. these instruments are the counter-cyclical capital buffers, sectoral capital requirements, the time-varying leverage ratios. on the other hand, the sru is a special resolution regime that has been brought for bankrupt banks with the banking law in the year 2009 (dariels and thornton, 2015). the sru has brought to the system a safety net that might decrease the costs that financial institution bankrupts would impose on the public sector. the interventions made by the states in the bankrupt of important financial institutions during the global crisis have resulted in big losses for tax payers. as in the uk, it is expected that an efficient authority (the resolution authority) might prevent these losses within the dispute resolution regime. thanks to these regulations, the central bank has acquired more control on the functioning of the financial system in england. furthermore, together with the new institutions, the authority responsible for the auditing of the financial service sector has been clearly defined (bank of england, 2009). 4. evaluation of financial regulation reforms 4.1. basic principles of financial regulations as seen in global crisis, intense competition among mega-banks forced bank management into extending leveraged activities, through financial innovation and the use of off-balance sheet trades leading to continuous expansion of available credit. especially, financial institutions in the usa and uk developed strategies so as to increase their profits by carrying out high leveraged financial transaction. provided the financial sources through securitization and financial derivatives are excluded from balance sheet, the firms’ leverage ratio will not reflect the truth (uzun and yıldıran, 2013). however, basel iii leverage ratio of 3% of non-weighted assets is widely seen as very weak constraint on bank risk seeking. furthermore, the leverage ratio is consigned to being a mere monitoring benchmark rather than as a frontline regulatory requirement (avgouleas and cullen, 2014). at the same time, the approach based on basel standards has been frequently criticized due to its complexity. according to caprio table 1: financial regulations on financial sector financial sector regulation theoretical base policy actor banks prudential regulation microprudential market failures moral hazard, too big to fail, incomplete contracts, information frictions, co-ordinations problem, failure of risk management basel i (capital ratios) and basel ii (capital requirement) basel iii (higher capital requirement: the minimum requirement of common equity increases from 2% to 4.5% of risk-weighted assets. leverage ratio: non-risk-based leverage ratio. likidity supervisory standard: a lcr and a net stable funding ratio) macroprudential regulation regime systemic risks capital conservation buffer (at 2.5% of common equity) countercyclical buffer (at 0-2.5% of common equity) investment banks, insurance companies, hedge fuds, money market funds markets failures markets capital flows otc markets swaps and derivatives capital controls improve transpareny monitor over-the-counter and swaps boom-boost cycle information failures speculative motive bis consumer protection act (us) financial infrastructure fsb fca versus pra (fpc, sru) resolution authority fpc financial research office coordination systemic risks information failures global level uk capital buffers, capital requirements, time varying leverage ratios (uk) collecting data on financial system, consumer protection act (us) esa systemic risks european financial markets (eu) sources: author. lcr: likidity coverage ratio, otc: over the counter, fsb: financial stability board, fca: financial conduct authority, pra: prudential regulation authority, fpc: financial policy committee, sru: special resolution unit balseven: the political economy of financial regulation policies following the global crisis international journal of economics and financial issues | vol 6 • issue 2 • 2016 611 (2013) who perceives crises partly as a direct consequence of the basel standards’ approach, although capital ratios that are risk weighted are especially the main source of complexity in this approach, this topic has not been discussed during reforms. according to caprio (2013. p. 32), giving a priority to simple rules might make a difference. restrictions on the debt-to-income ratio and the loan-to-value ratio and upper limits on credit expansion and fx debts might be efficient for restricting price inflations during the expansionary phase of the economy. a well-designed “contingent convertible debt requirement” might provide a continuous support to tax payers who deposit funds in the bank. more importantly, this requirement might serve to control banks that attempt to increase their risks even at high capital levels. what is even more important is how capital ratios based only on equities would isolate the economy from banking crises. macroprudential regulations are fictionalized on the banking system. however, the sources of the risk treated by macro-prudential regulations and their transmission mechanisms have to cover all the elements of the financial system, including intermediaries, markets and the infrastructure (hartman, 2010). although reducing the risks posed by financial institutions that are systemic in a global context is seen as a high priority by the international regulatory community, basel iii does not fully address the externalities or spillover effects that these financial institutions generate (bis, 2011). basel approach, which does not regulate big financial institutions other than banks, creates an asymmetric structure. it is indicated that especially together with the new regulations, important financial institutions are still not dissuaded from the risks they bring to the financial system and that the consumer protection law that has been prepared after the global crisis in the usa has created some adverse incentives in this respect. this law is being criticized since it does not establish a regulative structure by predicting to regulate investment banks, insurance companies, pension funds and money market funds as banks. however, these institutions have played important roles during the crisis by creating credit (richardson, 2011). the financial crisis might be characterized as an example of the final stage of the boom and bust pattern may have had its origin at least in large part-in the development of new financial product (colander et al., 263) by these institutions. this issue has a vital importance on the ground massive failure of risk management. stulz (2009) presents the detail analyses on how world’s largest financial institutions has failed to carry out its responsibilities on risk management since the collapse of long-term capital management. however, according to stulz (2009. p. 60) effective risk management does not provide a guarantee against failure. “even in companies with the best risk management people and systems, large losses can and will occur as long as taking risk of large losses increases expected profits sufficiently for top management to be willing to take risk.” in the meantime, insurance companies and hedge funds are the firms for which regulatory instruments and objectives differ sharply from those appropriate to banks. for instance, insurance companies tend to have very different risk characteristics from those of banks, particularly regarding likidity (bis, 2011. p. 78). in order to make an important progress on this topic, a model has been suggested to measure the contribution of a financial institution to the systemic risk. then these measurements might be used in the model for determining dissuasive mechanisms such as taxes to be implemented to these institutions (acharya, 2010). imf supports the view that co-risk models can help policy makers to better regulate institutions. also, imf accepts that in the fact of cross-market and cross-country linkage more attention should be paid to the systemic implication. imf proposed a risk-based regulation. this approach based on instituting “systemic-riskbased capital surcharges,” applying levies that are related to institutions’ contribution to systemic risk, or even limiting the size of certain business activities (imf, 2010. p. 63). the main problem of monitoring global systemic linkages is non-existency of relevant data2. imf admits of priority in such agreements in with gathering of relevant data. this might possible for a country by itself to undertake effective surveillance of potentially crossborder systemic linkage (imf, 2009. p. 105). as a tool for systemic risks, capital controls came to the agenda for the first time after the crises experienced in the 1990s following the financial liberalization, in what concerns the capital flows that have been canalized to developing countries (epstein et al., 2008). financial governance institutions have emphasized the negative aspects of capital controls but it has been observed that this approach has been moderated during the global crisis. imf’s new “institutional approach” with the global crisis recognizes the need to regulate capital flows. according to this approach, it has been suggested to re-use counter-cyclical regulations against capital inflows and outflows. this approach change has not been reflected on recommendations at the national level. it has been argued that financial deepening is more efficient than regulative interventions against the dangers of cross-border financial activity (gabor, 2015. p. 3). capital controls that have not been brought to the agenda due to their possibility to weaken financial integration might be functional for a steady growing financial sector and financial stability. actually, it is necessary to create a good balance between financial integration and financial stability. thus, taxes or regulations aimed at capital flows should be design according to the dynamics of risk in the market. 4.2. functioning of the financial system; openness, transparency, accountability according to a report studying the main issues concerning the efficient implementation of macro-prudential regulations entitled “a progressive program for economic recovery and financial reconstruction” (2008. p. 17); “for any serious regulatory reform to work, however, at least two conditions must be met. first, financial institutions must come under much more significant regulatory oversight that demands absolute transparency in operations to avoid fraud and other forms of financial malpractice. 2 an initiative has just started for harmonization of key otc derivatives data (bis, harmonization of key otc derivatives data elements, consultative report, september 2015). balseven: the political economy of financial regulation policies following the global crisis international journal of economics and financial issues | vol 6 • issue 2 • 2016612 second, the financial regulatory institutions must have the capacity, authority and desire to implement and enforce these.” absolute openness and transparency in the financial system operations is the most important obstacle in the implementation of regulative reforms. nowadays it is possible to avoid many regulations brought to the banking system by keeping the accounts off-shore. it is possible to abstain from financial regulations by tending towards other markets where these regulations are inadequate and making some short-term loaning/borrowing or offbalance sheet transactions. large banks typically draw substantial income from shadow banking activities. some of the risks of these activities are still not being addressed because of call for a high degree of coordination across regulatory agencies, both within and across national boundaries (bis, 2011. p. 79). the global crisis, during which all these mechanisms were operative, showed that the system based on formal monitoring and auditing was inefficient. the basel committee focuses on the information of the regulator or auditor. when the dynamic structure of finance tends towards unofficial operations, the regulator shall use the discretionary power given to it and go beyond the static regulation rules and catch them. such a discretionary power shall be designed together with accountability. another important focal point of regulation shall be to increase openness in the banking system. the basic functions of the regulator shall be to ensure that banks give more information, to have them guarantee the accuracy of this information and to apply penalty rules in case of inadequate and wrong information (caprio, 2013. p. 35). as in the uk, the establishment of new institutions holding more auditing power and responsibility in the financial infrastructure would secure the attainability of information and enforce the auditing structure. nevertheless, in order to ensure openness and take into consideration national discrepancies, it seems necessary to shape the global infrastructure together with national practices. especially developing countries shall have the elasticity to start different practices that are convenient to their own economic and financial structures. 4.3. financial infrastructure after the 2007-08 crises the most important change in the governance of international financial standards has been the transformation of the financial stability forum (fsf) into the fsb, so as to comprise the g20 countries. in addition to g7 countries, the fsf included the representatives of institutions such as the imf, the wb, bis. although the fsb has become more inclusivist under its new organization after global crisis in order to coordinate the international regulations, it still excludes many developing countries from the decision making process. besides, two important problems concerning the efficiency of the institution in financial regulation are indicated; 1. while the new organization of the fsb can prevent direct capture against the criticisms concerning the regulatory capture area where the regulation loses its efficiency under the pressure of powerful actors, the problem continues since members are not represented equally 2. the fsb does not bring a more efficient and effective mechanism for financial monitoring and auditing. the main objective in the establishment of the fsb is to prevent that crises decrease efforts aimed at encouraging international financial standards and that international financial regulations get even more divided (helleiner, 2010). moreover, the rules of the global financial system as well as the rules of international financial governance institutions that are not easy to handle and shape the functioning dynamics are forming an obstacle to the regulation policy. especially, the rules that have been put into force by economic governance institutions after bretton woods seem to have restricted the policy space of national authorities. this situation reveals that regulations have to be designed within the global financial governance structure. for example, the rules of international governance institutions concerning financial infrastructure have restricted to a large extent a possible division in financial regulations. the wto financial services agreement reached in december 1997 (gatt), restricts national policy preferences by bringing comprehensive and binding obligations to liberalize international economic flows (picciotto, 2007). according to the rules taking place in the general agreement on trade in services annex covering financial services, if a country has committed to give permission to certain activities of foreign financial institutions, it cannot impose any prudential regulation (ghosh, 2010; gallagher and stanley, 2013). similarly, the trade in services agreement puts countries into a position precluding financial regulation, although some financial market failures exist. this agreement is assumed to be kept as confidential and classified information for 5 years after its entry into force. the financial services in the draft agreement have been defined in the most comprehensive manner. in this respect, the agreement comprises stock market operations, asset management, brokering, derivative market activities, financial information supply and consultancy services and similar activities, besides banking activities. with regards to the functioning of the global system, the most ideal situation would be to make regulations under an approach on which an agreement has been reached at the international level in order to minimize the regulative arbitrage opportunities and maintain the national market share. this situation is the most important justification forming the inconvenience of applying in a single country specifically regulations and generally capital controls. the regulated actors have the capability to tend towards prohibited activities in non-regulated areas. in order to decrease the interests in tending towards the other side of the financial system or other locations, it is more efficient to consider capital controls continually as a variable rather than to perform capital controls and abolish them (caprio, 2013. p. 37). nevertheless, global regulations shall be designed so as to include national discrepancies. since no progress could be made in counter-cyclical regulations after the crisis, it is expected that boom-bust cycles, which are the main source of the problem, get repeated in the future (persaud, 2008). these regulations, especially controls on capital inflows and outflows, are of vital importance in developing countries which are more subject to balseven: the political economy of financial regulation policies following the global crisis international journal of economics and financial issues | vol 6 • issue 2 • 2016 613 capital inflows and outflows. in these countries, the banking system does not incorporate toxic assets and shadow banking transactions compared to countries where the financial sector is developed. global regulations have to take into consideration such national discrepancies. here the essential point is that even though developing countries have an adequate accounting, monitoring and auditing system as well as a legal infrastructure, basel standards do not constitute an appropriate capital standard as a prudential instrument against the volatility of capital flows for those countries. one of the most important inadequacies of these standards is that they misevaluate the risk characteristics of developing countries. standards do create some incentives for the banks of those countries towards taking extreme risks. the fact that those countries do not have a competitive capital market is another factor that suppresses the benefit of a capital standard for banks. therefore, it has been argued that deposit requirements might be beneficial in those countries (rojas-suarez, 2008. p. 252). similarly, caprio (2013. p. 29) advocates that not making any change in basel standards approach would bring more severe crises in the future. according to him, priority shall be given to increase the role of asian and developing countries in the basel committee for making a change in the regulation approach. a new group (the bali committee) responsible for the macro-prudential regulations shall be formed with these countries. this group shall remove risk weighting and adapt simple, un-weighted capital and leverage ratios. in this framework, it is possible to argue that designing together capital controls and prudential domestic regulations under the umbrella of global governance, by making distinctions according to the structural characteristics of countries might increase the efficiency of both policy instruments and decrease application costs. 4.4. the necessity of a broader perspective although there is a general consensus in bringing back the regulation policy after the global crisis, in order to control speculations with micro and macro instruments, reforms have been terminated with moderate revisions and the finance sector continued to expand following the crisis (ghosh, 2014). as seen from the table 2, the magnitude of global capital markets sustained to grow during 2000s after a moderate decline in global table 2: main indicators on global financial system (2000-2013) (billion dollars and in percent of gdp) year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 global capital markets1 150,437 130,341 152,327 165,130 194,462 241,089 221,494 242,264 256,900 259,212 273,768 286,584 world gdp 33,291 33,123 32,163 36,319 41,257 44,595 48,434 54,840 61,218 57,920 63,074 70,220 72,105 75,470 global capital markets (in percent of gdp) 467.7 358.9 369.2 370.3 401.5 439.6 361.8 418.3 407.3 369.1 397.7 379.7 banks banks assets 47,834 57,315 74,435 95,768 104,712 103,755 107,774 113,735 121,946 126,744 bank profitability (in percent) return on assets uk2 0.9 0.6 0.7 0.5 0.7 0.8 0.5 0.4 −0.4 0.0 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.2 usa 1.22 1.12 1.42 1.43 1.33 1.33 1.33 1.13 0.33 0.23 0.93 1.23 1.43 1.63 return on equity uk2 14.0 9.2 10.9 19.0 10.97 11.8 8.98 6.2 −10.3 −0.1 6.9 6.1 3.4 4.2 usa 14.02 12.92 15.02 15.83 13.23 12.73 12.33 10.53 3.33 1.73 6.93 9.63 11.63 13.23 capital adequacy (in percent) regulatory capital to risk-weighted assets uk2 11.8 12.2 12.5 12.4 12.7 12.8 12.9 12.6 12.9 13.3 15.94 15.7 17.1 19.6 usa 11.75 12.45 12.55 12.75 13.23 13.03 13.03 12.83 12.53 13.93 14.83 14.73 14.53 14.43 bank capital to assets uk2 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 7.0 6.1 6.1 5.5 4.4 5.4 5.4 5.1 5.5 6.3 usa 8.25 8.95 9.05 9.05 10.33 10.33 10.53 10.53 10.53 9.63 12.7 12.2 12.0 11.8 world export9 6.0 2.4 −13.3 14.0 5.2 1.8 uk export of financial services 20 19 20 28 37 42 51 74 72 58 53 62 59 62 usa export of financial services 22 21 24 27 36 39 47 61 63 64 72 78 76 83 sources; imf, global financial stability report 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015. datas for the export of financial services; http:// unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/tableviewer/tableview.aspx.; data for bank capital to assets ratio between 2010 and 2013; datawordbank.org april. [last retrieved on 2015 dec 19]. 1sum of the stock market capitalization, debt securities (bond and equities) and bank assets, 2june, 3september, 4december, 5march, 6november, 7includes mortgage banks and building society, 8before tax, 9unctad, trade and development report, annual percentage change. imf: international monetary fund, gdp: gross domestic product balseven: the political economy of financial regulation policies following the global crisis international journal of economics and financial issues | vol 6 • issue 2 • 2016614 crisis. the global capital markets grew faster than world gross domestic product (gdp), as a result of this, the ratio of gdp remained high levels, and reached at highest level in 2002 as 467.7 in percent of gdp. the global capital markets held assets that are worth almost 4 times more than world gdp (table 2). the growth of global capital markets from 2002 to 2013 is also shown in figure 1. the risks that rapid growth of capital markets and expansion of lending were further exarcerbated by the nature of financial institutions lending and investment strategies. the growth of fx and financial derivatives has changed widely of institutional peculiarities of world economy. for example, while the volume of the daily fx transaction was only 82 billions dollars in 1980, has reached to 5345 billion dollars in 2013. this extraordinary growth of the fx transaction is nearly nothing to the with the growth of the financing in trade. the ratio of the export in fx transaction which shows the part of fx transaction using financing of the exports is only 2.4 in 2001 and even drops more after and the level is only 1.7 in 2013 (table 3). the growth of over-the-counter derivatives in between 2001 and 2013 is nearly 7 times and almost unaffected by the crisis. table 3 shows a rapid rate of growth to a value of almost 693 trillion dollars in 2013. related to this growth, according to bryan and rafferty (2011), there is a momentum in accumulation that exists beyond bubbles and lax regulation. they noted in bryan and rafferty (2011. p. 213-214). in financial markets where institutions are looking for yield and to diversify asset portfolios, derivatives were especially attractive. with exchange rates and interest rates volatile, cash itself being necessarily denominated in a particular currency embodies significant risks. with interest rates on us trasury bonds pushed to low levels, their rate of return was not compensating for the risk of a volatile dollar. trading in derivatives and securities became the predictable response and investment in household income streams provided a new site for investment opportunities. the acquisition of derivatives as part of the strategy of diversification itself generated an innate search for yield. the effect of the global crises on especially us and uk bank profitability is spectacular during the global crisis, but short-lived. related to bank profitability, both return on assets and return on equity declined considerably in the uk and usa. especially in the uk, the rates declined in between 2007 and 2008 from 0.4 to −0.4 and from 6.2 to −10.3 respectively. in the uk and the us, the ratio of return on equity has recovered rapidly since 2010. while the return on assets in the us has reached at pre-crisis level since 2011, the rates in the uk has not reached pre-crisis levet yet (table 2). the evidences on the impacts of regulation policies on banks shows that roughly half of the drop in cross-border claims of bank can be attributed to regulatory changes (imf, 2015. p. 67). at the same time, banks in the us have strengthened of their capital ratios following the publication of the us stress tests in early 2009 as shown in the table 2. on the other hand, global indicators on bank assets indicate a growing trend in uk and us since 2010. figure 1: global capital markets and world gross domestic product (billion dollars) 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 20 02 20 03 20 04 20 05 20 06 20 07 20 08 20 09 20 10 20 11 20 12 20 13 global capital markets world gdp table 3: main indicators on capital flows, global fx markets and derivatives (2000‑2014) (billion dollars and in percent of gdp) year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 fdi net inflows uk 122.1 53.8 25.5 27.6 57.3 252.6 203.6 209.5 253.4 14.5 66.7 27.0 46.7 35.0 fdi net inflows us 321.2 167.0 84.3 63.7 145.9 138.3 294.2 340.0 322.7 153.7 259.3 257.4 232.0 287.1 portfolio equity net inflows/uk 191.7 22.5 2.3 32.6 3.5 12.4 −18.2 −20.1 71.7 72.8 −10.8 −13.9 −11.7 48.0 portfolio equity net inflows/us 193.6 121.4 54.0 33.9 61.7 89.2 145.4 275.6 126.8 219.3 178.9 123.3 239.0 −67.4 otc derivative1 99,755 127,564 169,678 220,058 281,493 369,906 516,407 683,725 604,622 582,655 647,547 639,396 692,908 fx turnover/daily 1239 1934 3324 3971 5345 fx turnover/annual2 307,500 483,500 831,000 992,750 1,336,250 world export4 7885 7614 7994 9323 11,310 12,870 14,849 17,307 19,747 15,783 18,713 22,178 22,446 23,114 world export/fx turnover 2.4 2.3 2.0 1.8 1.7 world export3 −1.0 5.0 6.0 11.0 5.0 8.0 6.0 2.4 −13.3 14.0 5.1 2.0 2.6 world output growth3 4.0 1.5 1.8 2.5 4.1 3.4 4.0 4.0 1.5 −2.1 4.1 2.8 2.2 2.4 sources: unctad, world investment report, 2001, 2006, 2010, 2014; for porfolio equity net inflows and fdi net inflows: worldbankdata.org; for fx and derivatives: bis triennial survey 2013, april. 1global otc derivatives markets consist of fx contracts, interest rate contracts, equity-linked contracts, commodity contracts, credit derivatives and other derivatives; data shows an amounts outstanding, the end of june, 2daily fx turnover multiply by 250, 3unctad, trade and development report, annual percentage change, 4imf, world economic outlook, goods and services. fx: foreign exchange, imf: international monetary fund, gdp: gross domestic product, fdi: foreign direct investment, otc: over-the-counter balseven: the political economy of financial regulation policies following the global crisis international journal of economics and financial issues | vol 6 • issue 2 • 2016 615 moreover, the cross-border financial services are the biggest source of foreign currency and profitability in developed central capitalist countries within the global governance structure. the export of financial services in both uk and us grows almost continual after slight decline in 2009 (table 2). this situation necessitates to explain the post-fordism developments in the structural dynamics of economies and to understand the new accumulation strategies of the capital. the usa and england have been the countries where the established financial institutions have taken the highest advantage from cancelling the restrictions on capital inflows and outflows and transactions. the financial institutions of these countries have successfully colonized new international markets and they have sent profits to their own countries. the growth of derivative markets and especially securitization have turned money forms into commodities and rendered possible their sales. thus, finance has become a new process of value creation (christophers, 2013. p. 236). in those countries, an important part of the growth in the profits of the financial sector has been based on the demand arising from overseas countries (christophers, 2013. p. 264). according to caprio (2013), in spite of the role played by international capital flows and macro policies during the crisis, regulators of the international financial system would not be able to take a significant result unless an improvement is made in those areas. the basic structure which guarantees the stability of the global system in the short-term might be ensured in the mid-term with an inclusivist regulation where the real and financial sectors take place together. at this stage, indirect suggestions such as the tobin tax which restrains directly the cross-border mobility of finance or slows down the financial sector and creates some time and policy space for nation states, is an efficient instrument in global regulation. such instruments are also crucial for distribution purposes (balseven and ve erdoğdu, 2005; erdoğdu and balseven, 2006). in spite of the international framework settled on bank, basel iii indirectly canalize to the systematic risk born by internationally active banks. there should be restraint on excessive bank competition and tightening of prudential regulation and also a curb on financial product which are deemed difficult to evaluate and monitor. many developing countries less sophisticated financial systems escaped the contagion effects from the crisis in more elaborate financial systems of the west. unlike usa, developing countries do not have shadow banking systems of any size nor did their bank hold complex toxic assets. this could be partly resistance of them from crisis and creates self-restraint (chowdhury, 2015). this opens up policy agendas about strategies to identification and being held in limited size of financial products that prevent extending leveraged activities in developed countries through financial innovations. lastly, the most frequently mentioned issue in both literature and policy implementation is power relation in finance hard to find solution in the future (balseven, 2010). the institutional foundations of becoming dominant of finance can be find in the policies implemented since 1980s in uk and usa. these policies have been reshaped of economies in the framework of post-bretton woods rules, as already suggested. 5. conclusion the 2007/2008 global crisis seems to be the most striking evidence of our century, exposing the unrealistic nature of the auto-regulative financial market model. the instability and crisis caused by non-regulated financial markets or financial markets that have not been sufficiently regulated have demonstrated that the financial regulation issue is not inherent to developing countries. the financial reforms made in the financial sector following the global crisis have been shaped so as to strengthen financial standards with a comprehensive practice, without making any division in the international financial system. on the other hand, what has been less discussed is whether the related standards are efficient or not. especially, the new basel standards, which are one of the most important novelties of regulation reforms, are being criticized for having rendered even more complex a structure that was already complex. reforms that continued the approach based on basel standards have made moderate changes and new additions in the institutional structure. basel standards shall involve a simpler and more efficient approach. furthermore, in order to be efficient, the regulation policy shall comprise all the instruments and markets and shall regulate the national and global infrastructures together. another topic which was less prominent in discussions concerning financial regulation theories and practices following the crisis is capital flows and macro-economic policies. the problem is not just a regulation issue. no matter how well financial regulations are designed, an efficient implementation is only possible when consistent macro-economic policies accompany it. references a progressive program for economic recovery and financial reconstruction. 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(2013), theoretical fundamentals of 2008, global financial crisis: influence of finance and accounting approaches on the crisis. akdeniz, i̇.i̇.i̇.b. dergisi, 27, 63-76. wade, r. (2009), from global ımbalances to global reorganisations. cambridge journal of economics, 33, 539-562. world bank. (2000), entering the 21st century, world development report 1999/2000. washington, dc: wb. ijibec international journal of islamic business and economics international journal of islamic business and economics av a i l a b l e a t h t t p : / / e j o u r n a l . i a i n p e k a l o n g a n . a c . i d / i n d e x . p h p / i j i b e c / issn: 2599-3216 e issn: 2615-420x article info article history: received : 25 feb 2018 accepted : 15 may 2018 published : 1 june 2018 keywords: ibn khaldun, karl marx, work, surplus value, necessity. jel: b11 b14 abstract this paper aims to compare the two great minds of ibn khaldun and karl marx in terms of their similaritiesand differences. in term of similarities, ibn khaldunsuggests the fall of empire sovereigntywhich is in linewith karl marx’s idea of the destruction of capitalism. according to karl marx, the development of modes of production from time to time is a necessity. whereas, ibn khaldun in his book of al-muqaddimah argues thatthe fall of empire sovereignty is rooted in the nature of its power. marx assumes that the capitalistsystem ‘inevitably’ will continuously foster the surplus value, while ibn khaldun states that the nature of power is about pursuing luxuries.this research applied descriptive comparative and qualitative approach.the study concludes that there are some similarities between ibn khaldun and karl marxalthoughthere are more distinct differences. this is because of the following factors:(1) life background, (2) assumption used by both figures, (3) social state of the society, and (4) influence of the previous scientific thoughts. the difference in the course of economic conception -work, surplus value, and the law of necessity-lies in the paradigm which both concepts use. ibn khaldun applies induction approach bysummarizing the general case of many historical events and disappearance of the former empires. whereas, marx uses class conflict approach as the basis for his theory. as its implication,similarities ofthese concepts do not necessarily require the same paradigm. a review of economic thought of the preceding figures should apply a contextual approach, that is, from the condition of the relevant figure. a comparative study: the economic thoughts of ibn khaldun and karl marx singgih muheramtohadi faculty of islamic economic and business, uin walisongo semarang email: singgih.muheram@gmail.com mailto:singgih.muheram@gmail.com international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 452 1. introduction comparative studies of ibn khaldun are oftenperformed, either in the form of journals or research (bachelor thesis or graduate thesis). however, most of these comparativestudiesuse sociological and political perspectives.this is because the explanations of political sociology are scattered almost in all parts of the book of al-muqaddimah.both of ibn khaldun and marxusean empirical approach to explaining the laws of social development. this empirical approach explains the society through visible or tangible symptoms. prior to the ibn khaldun era,social literature was less viewed from an empirical perspective.they rather viewed it asreligious, philosophical, ethical, and legal perspectives. muhammad abdullah enan in the book of ibn khaldun biography states: although al farabi and ikhwanus shafa discuss it from philosophical and scientific perspectives, ibn khaldun discusses it from a sociologicalperspective and expresses it practically, and his artwork follows his new methods. in this case, he is truly original (enan, 2013: 149). al-muqaddimah actually contains the law of humankind history. it covers various aspects about the formation of societies, the influence of geography and climate to the developing communities, two kinds of communities (nomads and settled communities), the rise and fall of empires, human activities in pursuing life (work), and lastly about the methods of science which are derived from the qur’an and as-sunnah, empirical method, reasoning, and etc. al-muqaddimah is fairly the same as madilog (tan malaka) inwhich it includes the explanation of epistemologythrough logical discussion, empirical method, and then discussion of the dialectical law that occurs in society. the difference lies in the fact that tan malaka wrote books based on the pre-existing theories. therefore, madilog is only considered as a study of logic, dialectic, and materialism theories (yudda, 2008: 165). whereasal-muqaddimahis mostly discussingthe result of inductive reasoning about the past realities, especially during the rise of states and its impact. in explaining the destruction of a state, ibn khaldun is almost identical to marx’s argument about the destruction of a capitalist system. it encompasses the commencestage of destruction, the early stage of the formation of capitalism system, followed by the expansion of ‘surplus value’. when the expansion of surplus value is closer to the climax point, all parties will feel disappointed. after that, the system will be collapsed. the stages of destruction, (both ibn khaldun -with his theory of the destruction of empiresand marx -with his theory of the destruction of capital system-, are almost similaryetnot the same. furthermore, ibn khaldun and marx apply economic approach on how the economy influences social development. here, the author exploresthe similarities, differences, and comparison between the two figures. in their discussion of economics, both explain about work, surplus value, and the law of necessity. they assume the same argument that work is about the labor process when the workers add value to the commodity. this “value” comes from the worker, and it is given to the other parties who pursue the ‘surplus value’ produced by other people. this ultimately leads to their own destruction, that is inevitable. frequently, this narrative is casually equated.however, this paperexplains the difference between the two narratives developed by both figures. one narrative is about the destruction of capitalism entering the revolutionary phase, and another narrative is about the destruction ofempireswhich has been run more than three generations. 2. methodology this research is a comparative study which aims to identify and examine the similarities and differences between two or more groups in a way to compare the two studies or thoughts of each international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 4 53 figure or variable. a comparative research is a descriptive study which searches for cause and effect answers by analyzing the causative factors of the emergence of a particular phenomenon (nazir, 2005: 58). this study applied descriptive and analysis approach. the descriptiveapproach described an object by using words to be clearly understood. whereas, the analysis approach scrutinized an object by using various ways such as reasoning, comparison, and scientific perspective. the author described the thoughts of ibn khaldun and karl marx from the relevant literature. the analysis used several approachessuch as historical approach (background), comparison, and modern socio-economic theories. 3. discussion a. the background of ibn khaldun’s life ibn khaldun alhadramy is one of the founders of social sciences, living between the year of 1332 and 1406, with aphenomenal work of al-muqaddimah. he came from the environment of ulama (muslim scholars and leaders who have expertise in islamic sacred law and theology) and hafiz (muslims who have completely memorized the qur’an).from his early age, he waskeen on writing. he initiated the notion of a “value” of work, long before david richardo. also, hisidea of price equilibrium was advanced long before the birth of adam smith. he was born in tunisia, north africa; the northernborder was the middle sea and across from spain. his family was an immigrant from andalusia. his family previously worked for the muwahidun dynasty, before spain was subdued by the christian rulers (enan, 2013: 19). his family lineage was a royal officer, started from his great-grandfather and his grandfather. whereas his father did not occupy any royal position,instead,he pursuedfiqh, philology, and poetry (enan, 2013: 20) al hadramy, part of his name,indicated that he was a descendant of hadramaut yemen. he was one of the descendants of a prophet’s dearest friend. like the arab family at that time, he was also familiar with the family lineage in a detailed hierarchy (sanad). this considerably influenced his writings in al-muqaddimah. as he stated that genealogies werethe pre-eminence of ashabiyyah (enan, 2013: 134). he explained the civilization in cordova cities which then he compared it to tunisia and egypt (a region in north africa). hislanguage style usedpopular and simple language that was easy to understand. his position as the personal secretary of abu salim, a sultan in morocco, hadtrained his language skills, (enan, 2013: 137). undoubtedly, he understood the details of work division in the royal environment. in the era of ibn khaldun, the territory of tunisia was occupied by the hafsiyyun dynasty. the east region was egypt that previously occupied by the fatimiyyahdynasty, while the northern region was the government center that previously occupied by the umayyah dynasty. his lifetime was after the end of the crusades. at that time, dynasties in the middle east emerged and reached glorious era which then experienced a shrinking power, nomore than 150 years. geographically, the conditionof tunisiawas no different from other north african regions. it was resided by groups of city dwellers, inhabitants in small settlements, northern berber people (turks) who inhabited the grasslands, and nomadic (bedouin). in this period, the bedouin groups were known for their strong tribal solidarity and courage since they lived in the wildlife. ibn khaldun’s time span was after ibn taimiyyah, well-known for majmu ‘fatawa book which contained the concept of price formation in the market. at that time, a currency -dinar and dirhamwas printed with the royal stamp. book keeping and administrative systems were well-conducted, and historical writing was also conducted. al-muqaddimah mentioned that author was considered as any other professions such as poets and singers. international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 454 the thoughts of ibn khaldun could not be separated from the social-political situation at that time. from the thoughts he poured in al-muqaddimah, we can conclude that what he wrote was a social condition in the north african desertduring that period. however, his style of writing was considered as a new style. in this period, ‘knowledge’ (al-’ilm) was identical with the ‘fixed’ knowledge. undoubtedly, knowledge in social dynamics and social development did not receive much attention. for example, a philosophy which investigated the essence of everything in life was considered asa ‘fixed’ knowledge. therefore, many scientists praised the book of al-muqaddimah and its influence on the sociological writing style in europe. arnold j toynbee mentioned almuqaddimah as a historical philosophy in which its undoubted privileges everlasted wherever and whenever. this was related to the philosophy of the history of power cycle, in which every power constantly experiencedrise and fall. b. the background of karl marx’s life marx lived between the year of 1818 and 1883 in prussia, and he passed away in london. at that time, europe experienced industrial revolution where large-scale industries required a lot of man power, and liberalismrose.marx came from a jewish family yet he was skeptical towards religion. the thought of feurbach became the starting point of marx’s criticism of religion(soeseno, 1999: 75). in one of his writings, marx declares that religions do not create the mankind but men create the religions (ibid). he was an activist of the labor movement, a writer,and an academician. his works included the german ideology, the communist manifesto, and das capital. in berlin, he joined the hegelian youth group, a dialectic philosopher. hegelian dialectic explained the constant contradiction between one idea and another so that an improved ideawas created from another idea. marx agreed on some parts ofthe hegelian dialectic; he argued that dialectic did not occur in ideas but it occurred in the real life such as class conflict between the capitalist class and the working class (soeseno, 1999: 65). the contradiction between ideas occurred in the mankind history (hegel), yet marx suggested that the history of societies until the present day was about the history of class conflict. generally speaking, the thought of the young hegelian’s was more materialist (atheistic) rather than idealist as hegel himself believed (farihah, 2015). furthermore, marx learned a great deal about the principle of development through the idea of contradictions and conflicts that he gained from hegel (zeleny, 2004: 76). marx’s life was almost the same as charles darwin, and by then marx had read about darwin’s theory of evolution. marx followed darwin’s theorythatthe origin of man and his history was the highest product of organism (soeseno, 1999: 227). according to darwin, species evolved because of their survival to nature, as well as from other predatory attacks. marx seemedto draw this claim into the law of human history (nitecki 1992: 212). at that time, the movement of socialism had been common in europe. this movement was a protest movement against social inequalitybetween the capitalist class and the working class. this ideology was embraced by a group of socialist who aspired to restore the society regardless ofthe ownership of production factors. marx and fredich engels were involved in revolutionary activitiesin france. many commentators believed that what marx diswas ‘marrying’ the economic thoughts of socialism and hegelian. marx experienced failuresfrom his movement activities hence he turned to a more serious research in 1849 in england (soeseno, 1999: 166). he observed the working conditions in the british industries. the results of this observation were eventually poured into the book of das capital, a book which contained the stages of destruction of capitalism. international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 4 55 c. the principle differences of background and thought ibn khaldun is a muslim scholar, undoubtedly, the recitation of the qur’an and sunnah flourish his writings in the book of al-muqaddimah. in each chapter of the book he writes, he always ends it with a praise statement to god. diametrically, it distinguishes his writing with any other thinkers of the 19th century. in the development of knowledge, this century is known as the atheist age when the existence of god isquestioned. all the previous theories related to religion were changed according to the materialist ideas. biological science was previously known by the islamic world aslife science which was based on the creation of a body, either species or man, created directly by god. however, biological science-although the same object with life science-was then referred to the theory of species development which called the theory of evolution. furthermore, the theory of evolution was later adopted by marx as the basis of his theory.there is a similarity between marx and darwin about the struggle for life and the struggle to survive. the marxian concept is formulated based onthe class struggle. marx states “darwin’s book is very important and serves as a natural scientific basis for the class struggle in history” (harris, 1981: 233). ibn khaldun and marx have many similar views such as using induction methodas well as a historical description and analysis to formulate a social theory based on material sources (hanafi, 2004: 161). ibn khaldun stands on the civilization history which he sees it from the destruction of islamic dynasties. subsequently, he compiled a book about the rise of empires and the fall of empires.whereas, marx roots his writings on the social reality of europe, that is, the labor exploitation by the capitalist groups. he reviews the prerequisites of the destruction of capitalist society in term of socio-economic conditions. having said that, the object of ibn khaldun’s thought is economic civilization built by the empires, while the object of marx’s thought is the industrial societies in western europe in the 19th century. the background of their thoughts is certainly different from the present time. the current conditions are too complex to be viewed by the past observation. in the industrial sector, manufacturing industry is increasingly developed. however, labor welfare varies between the past and present times. yet the most important element of labor revolution lies on the point where unreasonable labor exploitation reaches ‘class consciousness’ phase. today’s situation is also different from the past monarchywhere a country solely depends on the decision of a king. today, there are many powers outside the king such as opposition, parliament, and mass media. this is surely different from the time ibn khaldun wrote the book of al-muqaddimah, although, some of ibn khaldun’s conceptions are still relevant to the present time such as the correlation between civilization development andthe increasing demands of service and expertise jobs (architecture, art, etc.). when a society experiences a chaos state, basic needs are more important compared with another type of needs such as serviceand expertise. d. the theory of working 1) the principle of working according to ibn khaldun the distinctive feature of medieval muslim scholars -in this case is ibn khaldun-and modern european scholars -in this case is marx-is that muslim scholars generally classify science into two things: (1) the naqliyya science, knowledge which cannot be attained by reasoning because it involves the almighty allah and supernatural beings based on the qur’an and as-sunnah; and (2) the aqliyyah science, knowledge which can be obtained through logical reasoning (saiful, 2015: 231) ibn khaldun extensively explains sovereignty and destruction of empires by rooting to ‘human nature’. according to ibn khaldun, human nature needs to ‘eat and drink’ from birth to international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 456 death. ibn khaldun explains that allah provide everyhuman need as stated in qur’an jatisiyah / 45 verse 13 and ibrahim / 14 verse 32 (khaldun, 2000: 447). according to ibn khaldun, ‘the hands of man lie upon the whole universe and everything in it, in which god made man as his vicegerent, a caliph upon the face of the earth’ (khaldun 2000: 448). god gives human life through the rain to grow plants and crops to produce fruits. god also created cattle to produce milk, leather, meat, and so on. everything is provided in nature. the mankind is obliqued to utilize and manage the resources given by god such as producing raw goods into valuable goods, managing farm field, raising livestock for commercial or selfconsumption, carpentry, or other related business activities which require ‘work’. according to ibn khaldun, ‘work’ contains a value. work makes a low-value material or invaluable material into a higher value material. accordingly, work is a process of adding value to a particular material (khaldun, 2000: 450). in arabic, work is called ‘aisy, while the place / type of work is called ma’isyah. aisyh is a musytarak word which meansa word with several meanings. it can be defined as a work or life. this is because ‘aisy makes life (al hayah) possible(khaldun, 2000: 451). mankind possesses such human nature to exploit the natural resources. accordingly, ibn khaldun states that the most ‘primordial’ type of work is agriculture, which then followed by carpentry. agriculture was first introduced by prophet adam whilst the second prophet, prophet idris, introduced carpentry. agricultural technique precedes carpentry technique because agriculture is a very simple process in which it requires a simple knowledge (khaldun, 2000: 452). as we know, farming is generally about cultivating and maintaining. whereas, carpentry includes a lot more complicated knowledge compared with agriculture. the third type of work is trading (tijarah). ibn khaldun tends to view trade as a negative activity because it is identical with persuasion, forgery, dishonesty, and so on. nevertheless, trade is a legitimate activity since islam allows it as long as it does not illegally take other people’s goods. these three types of work are indeed needed by the mankind. whilst other types of work are not necessary because they are not needed in life. for example, servants, treasure seekers, and even governments are not a natural way of making a living (khaldun, 2000: 451). referred to the aforementioned statement, ibn khaldun classifies two major types of work namely the work which directly related to the fulfillment of life and the work which is not directly required for the existence of human life. this reminds us of the two economic sectors namely real sector and nonreal sector. the real sector is an economic activity that is directly related to livelihood and the fulfillment of human needs. in the event of a crisis, the state will be able to survive as long as food supplies, food security, services, and trade sectors are still abundant. 2) the principle of work according to marx marx, like ibn khaldun, hefirst explains the essence of laborbefore further describes the economic concept. this is because work is making a human life. according to marx, man is the following development of ape species. biologically, human is just like any other species who needs to live, needs food and drink. marx’s conception returns humans into their early stage oflife, that is, hunting and gathering before the establishment of land ownership system. man exists because of working hence work is the real essence of a humankind. in the relation to nature, man is seen as a working being. for that reason, marxian views the essence of a man as a homo laboran (hadiwijono, 1980: 120). the influence of darwinian thought on the life ofspecies has considerably influenced marx, because just like darwin, marx views a man in the relation to ‘stomach’ affairs. a mancannot fulfill his own needs alone unless he lives in a group. living in a international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 4 57 group also occurs in most species in which they are familiar with the division of labor. in contrast to the species which only requires a simple work division, humans need a more complex work division in their life. for example, fishing requires different groups of people to create nets, create boats, catch the fish, sell and distribute the captured fish to the broad communities. accordingly, work division and the use of production modes are naturally existed in the everyday life (marx, 2009: 117) there is a historical aspect within the scope of work since work is passed down from one generation to the next. following this, technology is developed to facilitate work process. the next generation continuously improves the existing technology. furthermore, people need ethics to regulate their social gathering. the establishment of ethics is not about the search for ideas of ‘good and bad’;marx argues that it cannot be separated from economic infrastructure. according to marx, ideas are abstract which cannot change society; materials do change the society (martono, 2014: 45). human adaptation to their material environment, through labor, is a part of working / economic relationship (johnson, 1994: 135) in the beginning, there was no such private ownership of the land. people directly workedin the communal land; this was the initial phase of socialism. subsequently, private ownership was introduced as the antithesis of communal ownership; this was the time when social life was divided into two contrasting categories namely the landowners and labors (marx 2009: 293).the polarization between the landowner and the landless is caused by the inability to protecttheir property from the enemy threat. in this pattern, farmershave no longer a rice field,however,they still can work for the landowners or feudal groups in which some of the yields belong to the landowners (two, 2008: 94).the ownership system over factors of production is the beginning of human alienation towards work. in the previous phase,people manage, plan and enjoy the natural resources (smith and raeper 2000: 118). however, the phase of land ownership leads to the isolation of people from their human nature, because they can no longer plan or enjoy the results of their own work (smith and raeper 2000: 118). in the feudal system, there is a legal ownership over a vast land by one family, and many slaves cultivate the land for the landlord. in this point, the production relation takes place between the landlords and their slaves. the landlords occupy the upper structure in the social stratification, while the slaves occupy the lower one. the landlords have a certain relationship with the governments; the slaves cannot directly receive the results of their work because all their ‘value’ of work are devoted for their landlords (soeseno 1999: 17). the feudal phase has gradually transformed into a capitalist system as it has occurred in europe (especially england) with the invention of the spinning machine which enables people to quickly produce commodities. the need for the increasing production requires more labors in the industrial sectors. as a result, labor groups emerges. marx emphasizes the history of modes of production, the means of production, and the relation of production that has shifted from one stage to another. the development of modes of production influences the society during the initial phase of modes of production (hunting and gathering phase) and the phase of communal land and forests. there is no such social stratification at this phase. following this, modes of production have changed into a settled agricultural system which creates land ownership and enables social stratification. the phase of private ownership creates a relationship between masters and slaves which is known as the feudal phase. at this stage, people are completely alienated from their own work. they do not receive anything from their work. religion still receives an attention before the advent of the industrialization phase. modes of production are about creating commodities on a massive international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 458 scale, organizing labors, and production relations between capitalists and labors. this phase forms urban communities, mostly are groups of workers, who work for hours to earn much lower wages than their actual ‘value’ of work. (maksum, 2015: 155) 3) the comparison between ibn khaldun and marx in viewing the principle of work the main difference between marx and ibn khaldun is the basis they use to observe society. when ibn khaldun views the emergence of empires, he observes how a group of people controls such sovereignty over a territory. he learns that sovereignty is based on ashabiyah (tribal solidarity). the high “value” produced by the worker has no effect onthe establishment of a sovereignty. nevertheless, the inequality of economic distribution and the wealth accumulation which are done by a few people may lead to power bankruptcy. marx does not observe ashabiyyah or social bonding/coherence factor (borrowing durkheim’s term) which leads to the state establishment. instead, he uses conflict approach (not coherence approach) in which conflict (dialectical relationship) between the landlord and worker (slave, labor) is the root of the law and norms formation, facilitating the relationship between landlord and slave. in some of his statements, he states that darwin is his inspiration. this means that conflict over economic resources is innate of species. it is also understood by tan malaka in the madilog book. the concept of struggle for lifeis a concept that inspires many theories, even spencer from the liberalist economic groupuses this conceptto justify that poverty in africa is the impact of a defeat of competitions. the use of “the struggle for life” concept is highly controversial to discuss society. the conception of work by marx and ibn khaldun still survives the present day, and it relatively can be used as a philosophical basis. this is because the concept of work by these figures is based on metaphysical assumptions (beliefs). for example, work in marxian conception assumes the development of the human species. one seeks work by farming, trading, or being an employee, essentially to fulfill life just like a species forage for food. whereas, ibn khaldun views work as optimizing potentials in managing natural resources by processing raw material into a useful thing. it is based on the common sense and logic given by god, and also nature provided by god. this can be found in various forms in the modern life such as in the field of mining, carpentry, agriculture, and etc. 4) the theory of surplus value by ibn khaldun a) accumulation of surplus value by ibn khaldun according to ibn khaldun,benefit is the “value” of their work. if one does not work, then the value = 0. each benefit contains a value that can be exchanged with other objects, equivalent to the ‘work’ value. the ‘work’ value is equivalent to the demand level for the product. the more demands of a product, the higher valuethe product generates. a trader earns the value from the difference of purchasing and sales. therefore, the value depends on one’s work; the more efforts and worksone performs, the more “value” he/she generates. ‘value’ is always generated from work while bureaucratic positiondoes not generatesuch value. by using the power of position, one can obtain “value” which is generated by others especially trade-related activities that have plenty of farmland and sales. the big traders need to approach the authorities in a way to secure their trade activities. therefore, having such position may gain wealth in a short time (khaldun, 2000: 460-461) this is still relevant to the current situation where capitalist requires the investment international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 4 59 security from the government. some of them perform lobbying in an effort to get a license for land clearing, mining, and etc. access to the relevant officials helps to facilitate business developmentas well as to get government’s protection. nevertheless, the context is different between the past and present times when the distribution of power in tunisia at that period was only centralized in one person. the highest position is occupied by the king, for which no other power cannot regulate him. whereas, the lowest positions are occupied by those with absolutely no influence at all (khaldun, 2000: 461). therefore, “position” constitutes a social stratification within a kingdom. it includes people with hierarchical positions in which each level has a particular influence, depending on the level of positions to the king. such influence can be obtained from having a relation with the ‘clan’ or king’s extended family, or it can be obtained from having certain positions. this influence has the ability to obtain ‘value’ (profit) from other parties. because the wealthowners who are keen on helping the needs of community require suchpower to protect them -besides prestige-that can be obtained from having a close relationto the king, close friends of the king,or social solidarityin which the king honors it. in his shelter, they can calmly and peacefully live, free from enemy attacks;if they do not possess any of it, they will get exposedby all forms of deceit and legal excuse. ibn khaldun interprets the above verse that onewith a higher position can lead men to work more actively, the rulers may protect them from various dangers (from barrack or bedouin attacks), the governance system may provide fruitful benefits, and this governance may enable law and religion enforcement. the characteristic of ibn khaldun’s writings lies on the fact that he sometimes uses full of ‘positive’tone but some other times describes in a ‘negative’ tone. this can be seen when he describes bedouin communities that they are born from nature, brave, strong, and bold in facing any situation. however, elsewhere in the same book he has writen, he describes bedouin communities asuncivilized people. likewise with his writings related to the government. on one hand, he says much about the fruitful benefits from the ‘hierarchical structure of the government. on the other hand, he describes the ‘negative’ side of the government. b) the accumulation of surplus value by karl marx surplus value is one of three central issues in karl marx’s thought, in addition to the theory of class struggle and the theory of dialectical materialism (wiraman, 2014: 9). marx is much inspired by the previous theories. his opinion of materialism is based on the conception of feurbach, his opinion of dialectics based on hegel, and his opinion on value is more from david ricardo. whereas, the idea of socialism in europe has evolved long before das capital. marx has previously read economic thoughts of adam smith, david ricardo, and so on (soeseno, 1999: 90) marx considers hegel’s philosophy in terms of conflict. however, darwin’s influence on the thought of survival of the fittest is more interesting. this is because conflict does not occur in the competing idea, but rather the struggle for economic resources. marx criticizes the absolute idea of hegel that manifestation of the state is the result of partial idea, therefore, the absolute idea overcomes the partial idea (pals, daniel l 1996: 133). this does not pay much attention to the idea of abstraction but it pays attention to the concrete matter instead. one of the main attention is the surplus generated by the workers. the notion of surplus value sees the value of work from the duration of work, type of work, and quality of work. a commodity is not only about the value resulting from its advantage, but also the value resulting from the magnitude of the work done by the workers . the number international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 460 of commodity produced by the workers is greater than the amount of wages paid to them. as a result, there areprice differences between the actual value generated by the workers and the amount of value provided by the investors to them. according to marx, the ideal situation occurs when there is a balanced relationship between workers and employers. on one hand, employers have the capital to mobilize commodities. on the other hand,workers have the rights to decide such cooperation. in fact, the workers are willing to ‘sell’ their children and underage youth to work (marx, 2009: 198). moreover, children work for 24 hours without a break, etc. (soeseno, 1999: 188) in this point, the ‘value’ produced by the worker is being cheated. the greater number of workers used in an industry, the greater the value is being generated. having said that, the capitalist party takes much bigger profit from it. c) the comparison of surplus value accumulation of values in the royal system is about a misuse of tax and gift distribution. this is due to the absence of triaspolitica in which the king plays an absolute rolewithout any institution overseeing him. this accumulation comes from the farmer’s taxes which the government uses to pay the army, police, ministers, and qadhi (courts). whilst the rest of the money goes to the luxuries facilities of the royal family. in addition, such royal positions enable them to receive gifts from the wealthy merchants. at that time, there was no corruption concept to consider this collecting prize activity as an abuse of power. prizes were given to maintain a good relationship with the rulers in a way to secure their business. the accumulation of value in the 19thcentury industries is done by paying wages under the actual ‘value’ of work. workers work for more than half a day but their wages is only enough to meet their basic needs. the capitalist groups gain their wealth from the difference of the value of work done by the workers and value that the capitalists give to the workers. the accumulation of value by the government to increase their luxury is equivalent to the accumulation of value by the capitalist groups to increase their profit. as a result, it creates a gap between the bourgeoisie (capitalists and government) and the proletariat. in the current context, the value of work refers to 8 hours per day and the amount of the regional minimum wage (umr) which is based on central and local government regulations. the measurement is conducted by measuring incomes minus expenditures; the rest is equivalent to surplus value. profit from investors is the interest from the shares they invest in a company, and the obtained interest is generated from the net profit. in the year of ibn khaldun, the king often received various taxes and gifts. today, such rewards are considered as corruption (bribery). it was certainly possible for the king and his officers to receive many gifts in the old days when there was no rule forbidding him. nevertheless, it is no longer possible except by stealth. although regulation has been established, there are many government officers with a fantastic wealth far above their salary and benefits. 5) the law of necessity a) the law of necessity on the destruction of sovereignty: ibn khaldun’s thought the law of necessity is the belief that society will develop from one stage to another, from one condition to another. one stage is naturally followed by the next stage which can be predicted. this is one ofthe similarities between ibn khaldun and marx. despite the importance of a governance, the nature of governance often possesses a negative side. a fair use of power is an ideal form of governance, but in reality, the use of power is often manipulated for their own interests (khaldun, 2000: 462). historically, ibn khaldun international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 4 61 argues that the age of an empire is likely the same as the human age, that is, it never lasts for more than three generations (120 years). the first generations are the founding fathers who have the characteristics of the knights, modestly, and away from extravagance. this is because their life is still filled up with the wildlife spirit (brave, wild, and modest). contrary, the next generations start to pursue a luxurious life and wasting taxes, yet they still have the character of their predecessors. the third generations are the worst of all in which they spend a huge expenditure for paying salary and their own luxury; they neglect the life of the knights (khaldun, 2000: 208-209). according to ibn khaldun, the destruction of a state occurs through several causes (khaldun, 2000, 205-206): 1) the distribution of power is in the hands of one person. when a king concentrates power only in his hands, he sets aside others and ruins solidarity. in fact, solidarity is the beginning of the kingdom establishment. 2) the creation of a state carries out luxuries because everyone is not only satisfied with basic needs. when the basic needs are met,other needs emerge. this includes the need for luxury. as a result of the high demand for these luxuries, expenditures outweigh incomes. for that reason, other budget allocations are cut, for example, the military budget. the consequence of cutting this budget is riskingthe state security and defense. 3) the negative character of a settled culture: a) lazy, lavish, and extravagance b) the loss of ancestor living habits: wandering, robbing, exploring, and searching for self-determination. b) the law of necessity on the destruction of capitalism: karl marx’s thought referring to marx, the law of necessityis rooted in the inevitability of conflict between the bourgeoisandproletarian class.these two classes are constantly in conflict with each other. marx applies social conflict theory which assumes intergroup relationships are not functional (every person plays his/her social functions) nor coherent (every person is attached to his/ her social group) as it is generally understood,but the nature of social relationship is actually a conflict. the proletarian revolution is rooted in the understanding that the relationship between the capitalist bourgeois class and the proletarian working class is not a work division-related relationship;it is a contradictionary relationship instead. this assumes that the contradictions in hegel’s dialectics are not contradictionson a conceptual level, but it is class contradictions. (enan, 2013: 438).revolution occurs when a situation reaches a certain point where the workers are aware of their positions (class consciousness) due to the individual crisis. those points are derived from the ‘mistake’ that the capitalists surely have made, that is, they reduce the price as low as possible for their market expansion in a way to ensure their commodities are accepted and won the market. if the price of commodities falls, the volume of production should be increased in order to maintain profits. market expansion causes the shift from agriculture to industry, or from feudal phase to industrial phase. this gradually leads to a cheaper labor market. when the labor force in the industrial sector increases, whilst the bourgeoisie are unable to prosper their workers, it causes the working class can no longer afford their needs; this is due to the extremely cheap labor system (soeseno 1999: 173) international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 462 the stages of social development, from the pre-communist phaseto feudalism and then to capitalism phase, are inevitable stages. the destruction of private property by the socialist movement is also a necessity in history. marx views that the destruction of capitalism is isolated to ethical judgment, it is a necessity instead (soeseno, 1999: 51). c) the comparison of the law of necessity almost in line with marx’s argument, the accumulation of ‘value’ in the form of taxes and gifts leads to royal’s luxuries which later induce bankruptcy. the luxuries of the high position officers are not about ‘like or dislike’, but it is a matter of dignity. therefore, the creation of a kingdom is due to the strong social attachment of a powerful tribe. they establish a kingdom and entrust one of them as a king. nevertheless, the next offspring is no longer one tribal tie as beforedue to the issue of jealousy and unequal distribution of ration. subsequently, it comes to the phase of defiancewhich weakenings the state. dynasties always rise and fall, causing other to rise yet experiencing the same condition as the previous dynasty. accordingly, the shift from one dynasty into another dynasty is a kind of cycle that keeps circulating. this distinguishes with marx’s argument in which the destruction of capitalism due to the accumulation of surplus value is the end of the story. according to marx, the destruction of capitalism is due to the nature of the capitalist system which always seeks for profits. the profits are derived from surplus value generated from the workers. the more workers, the more value it generates. this is in line with ibn khaldun’s opinion that the destruction of empiresis because of the nature of the rulers who always waste the state money. marx ‘blames’ the production relationship, while ibn khaldun blames one’s psychological nature. both claim that this ‘mistake’ (contradiction) is natural and necessary. the factors of the destruction of a state by ibn khaldun are sociological, economic, and psychological factors. the destruction of a state is not only caused by economic factors, economic factors are only one of the several factors. moreover, ibn khaldun explains the psychological factor of the bedouin group in a much larger portion than the destruction of a state. in chapter ii of al-muqaddimah, ibn khaldun explains the difference between the bedouins and the settled communities. bedouins tend to be brutal, have the potential to conquerand develop a territory (later establishan empire). ibn khaldun does not talk about the destruction of economic sector in destroying the state. contrary, ibn khaldun argues that the destruction of astate will destroy the economy because of the lack of wealth protection. the carpentry industry will also collapse due to the lack of demands. according to ibn khaldun, the population and securityof the state will elevate the economy because of the increasing demand for the product. this is different from marx in which the economic infrastructure builds the superstructures such as law, ethics, social institutions, and etc. the work relation and the modes of production determine the types of community. moral and religion are addictions or media against the alienation between individuals and works. whereas, ibn khaldun assumes that religion and law are alienated from economic activity. it is not the product of human alienation, but it is the magnificent rules directly from god. today, capitalism is not confined to a particular place, a few investors, and worker-related issues; it is much more complex which involves many investors who own shares in a company. in the modern society, the state is also influenced by the concept of trias politica in which the role of state leader (king or president) is overseen by parliament. the economic system is not only determined by real business sector, but also stock market sector. in the situation of a chaotic state, the stock sector is greatly impacted by the fleeing investors abroad. this is almost similar international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 4 63 toibn khaldun’s argument that the destruction of a state determines the economy, especially trade sector. whilst, it does not have much influence on the agricultural sector. ibn khaldun argues agriculture is the simplest sector which allows everyone to take part in it. ibn khaldun’s thought on the destruction of a stateis also relevant that the royal family’s extravagance and public distrust leads into bankruptcy. this is relevant to the fact that corruption disables the state to obtain incomes (taxes) and ultimately the state will be collapsed as it can not pay for any development works. 4. conclusion the thoughts of marx and ibn khaldun have some similarities, despite the different paradigms and the use of induction method inconstruing a law. marx uses darwin’s theory as the basic assumption of the nature of work. whilst, ibn khaldun views work as using all potentials given by god to seek his grace. for example, managing nature into useful things. observing marx and ibn khaldun’s thoughts, an academician will not be able to examine one’s thoughts apart from one’s contexts. this is because one’s thoughtsare inseparable from his/her activities, situations, social development, and knowledge. despite both figures have similarities, in terms of the necessity of socio-economic development, their thoughtsare built upon two very different paradigms. one cannot take both ideas of marx and ibn khaldun in one package -to explain the essence of work, the theory of surplus value and the necessity of socio-economic development-without first examining the paradigm used by both thoughts. some parts of marx and ibn khaldun theoriesare still relevant until today, but some other parts are not. the relevant and applicable parts occur in the macroscope, but not in the microscope. for example, theory of the destruction of a state by ibn khaldunis relevant in the macro scope that the destruction of a state starts from financial problems. however, a state with a stable budget condition may be hit by a monetary crisis which later causing the soaring prices in the market and unaffordable price to the public. this condition may subvert a regime such as the may 1998’s revolution. likewise with marx, many things can be applied in the macro scope based on marx’s thoughts, including surplus value. for example, labor demonstration is due to a lack of workers’ salary and welfare. the decreasing labor salary means the increasing surplus value. in this point, the workers will eventually experience class consciousness andlabor movement in the macro scope. however, this condition only occurs locally. it does not change the foundation of the modern capitalist economic systems. in many cases,the disputes between workers and employers can be solved through negotiation or mediation by a third party (for example from the governmental element). references akbar, t. s. (2015). manusia dan pendidikan menurut pemikiran ibn khaldun dan john dewey. jurnal ilmiah didaktika, 15(2), 222-243. dua, m. (2008). filsafat ekonomi: upaya mencari kesejahteraan bersama. yogyakarta: kanisius. enan, m. a., & khaldun, i. (2013).his life and work.penerjemah: machnun husein, biografi ibnu khaldun, jakarta, zaman. farihah, i. (2015). filsafat materialisme karl marx (epistimologi dialectical and historical materialism). fikrah, 3(2), 431-454. hadiwijono, h. (1980). sari sejarah filsafat barat.yogyakarta:kanisius. hanafi, h., & faqih, m. (2004).islamologi 2: dari rasionalisme ke empirisme. yogyakarta: lkis. harris, c. l. (1981). evolution: genesis and revelations: with readings from empedocles to wilson. international journal of islamic business and economics, 2(1) june 2018, 5 1 6 464 suny press. khaldun, i. (2000). muqaddimat ibn khaldūn. tran. ahmadie thoha, jakarta,indonesia: pustaka firdaus. magnis-suseno, f. (1999).pemikiran karl marx: dari sosialisme utopis ke perselisihan revisionisme. gramedia pustaka utama. martono, n. (2014). sosiologi pendidikan michel foucault: pengetahuan, kekuasaan, disiplin, hukuman dan seksualitas. jakarta: rajawali pers. marx, k. (1909). das kapital (vol. 1). рипол классик: a critique of political economydas kapital: a critique of political economy. washington dc, usa: regnery publishing. nitecki, m. h., & nitecki, d. v. (eds.).(1992). history and evolution.suny press. pals, d. l. (1996).seven theories of religion (p. ix294). new york: oxford university press. purwanto, b. (2008). perspektif baru penulisan sejarah indonesia. jakarta: yayasan obor. smith, l., & raeper, w. (2000).ide ide filsafat dan agama dulu dan sekarang.kanisius. wirawan, i. b. (2012). teori-teori sosial dalam tiga paradigma (fakta sosial, definisi sosial dan prilaku sosial) edisi pertama. jakarta: kencana prenadamedia group. zeleny, j. (2004), logika marx: analisis dalam kapital marx, kritik marx terhadap hegel, keberadaan praxis nalar. jakarta: hasta mitrahasta mitra. localizing islam in the west: mazrui’s journey from the study of african politics to global cultures ahmed ali salem abstract ali mazrui attempted to correct many misunderstandings of islam in the west and demonstrate its closeness to and impact upon western civilization in several ways. for example, islam is a fellow monotheistic religion, has preserved and added to the greco-roman legacy, preceded mercantilism and capitalism in hailing free trade and hard work, and modeled the western view of a tripartite world in the second half of the twentieth century. mazrui’s interest in studying islam was originally part of his general exploration of postcolonial africa. although trained in mainstream political science, which emphasizes materialism, he quickly realized that culture is a powerful key to understanding politics. from this cultural optic, mazrui began to interpretatively revive islam as a powerful factor in african politics and highlight its values as capable of improving african conditions. his most celebrated work, namely, the 1986 television series “africa: the triple heritage,” was in part a call to reconsider islam as a major foundation of african societies. his cultural studies helped him gain new constituencies among the larger muslim community and then go global. his global studies upheld islam against both marxism and racism, which helped him escape the narrowness of afro-centrism and broaden his concept of panahmed ali salem, an associate professor at the institute for islamic world studies at zayed university, uae, has a ph.d. (political science) and an m.a. (african studies) from the university of illinois at urbana-champaign, and an m.a. from the graduate school of islamic and social sciences. he has authored and edited fifty books, book chapters, journal articles, and conference and seminar papers in both arabic and english. his research interests include theories and methods in international relations, islamic reform thought and movements, islamic-western and arabafrican relations, and conflicts and cooperation in africa and the arab world. africanism to include not only sub-saharan africans and their arab neighbors to the north, but also the arab neighbors to the east and diasporic africans as well. in this paper, i use many of mazrui’s publications that discuss various islamic issues in africa, the west, and globally. introduction ali mazrui died on october 12, 2014, but was survived by invaluable knowledge and students committed to building on his insights. he is highly esteemed as a towering scholar of african politics and culture, which he was, but only a few recognize his scholarly contributions to localize islam in the west through a meaningful presentation of islamic civilization and values to sometimes rather misinformed westerners. thus, i argue, he promoted a better understanding of islam in the west. however, i would first like to address the origins of his interest in the study of islam, arguing that it was a part of two larger transitions in his scholarly career: first, from an exclusive focus on politics to a broader one on culture, and second, from a limited focus on africa to one on the globe. his cultural and global works culminated in his long directorship of the institute of global cultural studies at state university of new york at binghamton from 1991 until a few weeks before his death. in a previous work, i counted over 100 of mazrui’s publications on various islamic issues in africa and around the world.1 i use many of these sources and many others in this paper, which is arranged in three sections: (1) islam in mazrui’s journey from political science to cultural studies, (2) islam in his journey from african to global studies, and (3) his scholarly contributions to localizing islam in the west. islam in mazrui’s journey from political science to cultural studies mazrui studied political science, particularly international relations, at british and american universities, where he obtained the graduate degrees that would open up to him the hitherto closed gates of africa’s higher education institutions. specifically, he was appointed professor and then department head at uganda’s makerere university, which he could not join as a student. mazrui did not subscribe to the discipline’s mainstream in either theoretical or methodological terms. in terms of theory, he hardly used grand theories – a fashionable trend in the scientific study of politics at western academies since the 1960s’ behavioral revolution in the social sciences,2 which turned salem: localizing islam in the west 45 political scientists away from their social roles as public intellectuals.3 his writings include no abstract theory testing or building, nor any attempt to reach law-like, universal generalizations. instead, he opted deliberately to focus on africa’s conditions and problems with the goal of contributing to their resolution.4 as a result, and unfortunately for the profession, he never became a star in any professional political science circles,5 and his ideas, although thoughtprovoking, were barely debated in the field’s journals and conferences. nor were his postcolonial ideas often discussed by postcolonial theorists.6 however, they did provide fertile grounds for discussion for those involved with african studies. in terms of methodology, mazrui was unquestionably a master comparativist, although he did not restrict his works to that subfield of political science conventionally called “comparative politics,” which excludes international relations. nor did he use quantitative analysis or frame his comparisons according to certain prescribed models, such as “most-similar” or “most-different” cases.7 instead, mazrui invented unique and artistic taxonomies and typologies. but since they were hardly guided by conventional classifications, they never entered the profession. he also coined new terms and used mundane language, instead of the peculiar jargons that alienate non-specialists – his main addressees, indeed.8 more significantly, mazrui never embraced the materialism and logical positivism9 that prevailed in political science at the peak of behaviorism and decisively excluded norms, cultures, and other ideational elements as unobservable, immeasurable, and thus irrelevant.10 he had a different point of view, one that not only held culture as relevant, but also as more important than economics and security, in terms of serving as a powerful key to understand politics.11 it was from this cultural optic that he began to interpretatively revive islam as a powerful factor in african politics. mazrui’s first encounter with islam as a cultural force in international politics occurred in his analysis of the place of africa in egypt’s four circles of foreign policy under nasser, namely, the arab, african, islamic, and global circles in this order.12 he soon posited islamic impacts on africa’s domestic politics, bearings on sub-saharan culture,13 and political culture more specifically.114 thus, he called for employing islamic values in establishing a stable democracy in sudan after the 1964 popular revolution that overthrew military rule15 and balancing cultures in uganda that experienced cultural confrontations under idi amin (r. 1971-79).16 after the cold war, mazrui continued to call for using islamic values to achieve such desirable goals as democratizing 46 the american journal of islamic social sciences 33:3 kenya,17 empowering the blacks in post-apartheid south africa,18 and pacifying somalia.19 he noted that islam is the fastest growing religion in sub-saharan africa and that the area’s muslims are no less in number than those in north africa, reminding us that nigeria has more muslims than egypt, the most populous arab country.20 he also found muslims to be the most numerous religious group in africa, thus making the latter “the first continent in the world to have a muslim plurality, if not an outright muslim majority.”21 in this respect, islam is a unifying force, as it is shared by north africans and the black peoples who live south of the sahara.22 mazrui’s most celebrated work, namely, the television series “the african: a triple heritage,”23 was in part a reconsideration of islam’s impact on africa. his main argument is that african identity is the result of a unique combination of indigenous, islamic, and western impacts.24 this idea has developed into a whole school of thought, to which mazrui continued to contribute intensely; hence, his rich writings on its manifestations in spirituality,25 language,26 art,27 play,28 state,29 the slave trade,30 and even the struggle against the spread of aids in africa.31 in short, culture was a double-edged sword in mazrui’s scholarship, an exit gate from mainstream political science and an entry gate into the world of islam and its impact on africa. it helped him gain new constituencies among the larger global muslim community and go global. islam in mazrui’s journey from african studies to global studies unlike mazrui’s unambiguous detachment from mainstream political science, he never detached himself from african studies. rather, he remained one of africa’s most prolific writers on its pains and prospects, and was therefore invited to speak about them at such prestigious events as the bbc reith lectures in 1979, in which he addressed “the african condition.” nevertheless, he was unwelcome in some african studies circles, mostly for ideological reasons, but sometimes for racial ones as well. islam was a part of mazrui’s responses to both challenges, and this expanded his interests from african studies to global studies.32 on the ideological front, mazrui was a firm liberalist at a time when western or western-style educated elites in africa, including nationalist leaders and social scientists, were mostly outspoken marxists or at least leaning to the left. indeed, liberalism was the most enduring impact of his study of political salem: localizing islam in the west 47 science in the west.33 mazrui annoyed his fellow african political scientists and anticolonial comrades by attacking marxism not only as an alien ideology in africa, but also as malignant when compared to liberalism. the liberation of africa, he asserted, would remain incomplete if it were not coupled with the liberation of africans.34 mazrui maintained this liberalist view not only in the face of marxists, but also in his critique of certain islamic juristic opinions, as discussed below. although liberalism originated in the west, mazrui was by no means selling out to the west. to the contrary, on many occasions he criticized it for failing to uphold liberalism, such as the united states’ censorship of his metaphorical description of karl marx as “the last of the great jewish prophets” in his 1986 television series. mazrui’s liberalist commitment notwithstanding, he promoted islam as africa’s best anticolonial force. like marxism, islam’s communalistic and anti-accumulative spirit stimulates radicalism; but unlike marxism, islam can easily combine economic and political radicalism on the one hand and social conservatism on the other hand.35 also unlike marxism, islam is capable of producing both rebellious leaders and committed followers willing to die as martyrs, either combatively or submissively, for the sake of just causes.36 thus, mazrui presented islam as africa’s most powerful anticolonial force.37 for example, islam enabled east africans to preserve kiswahili in the face of encroaching colonial languages, especially english,38 even as it was being secularized at the hands of missionaries, traders, and state bureaucrats.39 islamic education also played an important role in “decolonizing modernity” in africa.40 in addition, islam presented a serious challenge to the colonially imposed domination of christianity in africa’s public affairs. islam’s nearbesieging of christianity, he argued, is the price that the latter had to pay as a result of its strong connection to european colonialism.41 in the post-cold war era, islam continued to furnish a foundation for resisting extra-regional involvement in africa. for example, many muslims in africa resisted the un-supported policy of reduced fertility because they suspected that it was a western plan to preempt their empowerment.42 moreover, mazrui stressed that the sweeping trend to adopt legal codes from the shari‘ah in northern nigeria at the beginning of this century was not only “a passionate protest against the political and economic marginalization of northern muslims,” but also “a form of cultural resistance to western education and the wider forces of globalization.”43 mazrui found islam to be a reliable resistance force both inside and outside of africa. for example, it was a major source of inspiration in the pales48 the american journal of islamic social sciences 33:3 tinian struggle against the israeli occupation, the 1973 arab-israeli war,44 and the popular revolution in iran, which he hailed as an anti-imperialist movement and defended in public fora against the united states military intervention, namely, carter’s 1980 failed hostage rescue mission.45 the ideological challenge to mazrui faded significantly after the cold war, and african leftists began to highlight and even celebrate his contributions, as manifested, for example, in recent works of the council for the development of social science research in africa.46 more persisting, however, was the racial challenge. racism in african studies is based on two opposing notions: eurocentrism and afrocentrism. on the one hand, eurocentrism underpinned the field at its inception47 and resurfaced during the 1980s in the “neoclassical developmentalism” that dominated the africanist discourse and portrayed africa as wracked by coups, chaos, carnage, drought, diseases, state corruption, and coercion.48 afrocentrism, on the other hand, emerged as a response to the former and established itself on the nostalgic literatures that romanticized and glorified africa, produced by diasporic and sub-saharan philosophers, poets and activists, such as cheikh anta diop (d. 1986), wole soyinka (b. 1934), and w. e. b. du bois (d. 1963), respectively.49 mazrui was, of course, an unyielding foe of eurocentrism, but never subscribed to afrocentrism. this became a source of suffering for him, especially when his afrocentric critics despised him openly as an arab, as if he were not sufficiently african.50 he, however, regarded his arab ancestry as a testimony to his embodiment of africa’s triple heritage, and thus a source of pride.51 arabs provided africa with more than migrants such as mazrui’s ancestors; they carried islam to africa and linked the continent to both arabia and the massive world of the indian ocean, which was an “islamic sea” for centuries.52 they also transmitted the arabic words that did so much to enrich such indigenous african languages as kiswahili, hausa, and somali, making them more effective linguistic unifiers of africans.53 in modern times, arabs have been africa’s economic supporters and antiimperialist partners; hence, mazrui’s repeated call for arab-african rapprochement and cooperation. on the one hand, this rapprochement is needed because the colonialists succeeded, at least partly, in dividing africans and arabs and portraying the latter as just other colonialists of africa. one result of this was africans killing arabs, such as during the 1964 revolution in zanzibar against the ruling omani elite.54 on the other hand, arab-african cooperation is particularly meaningful in the current post-cold war order that victimizes africans economically and arabs militarily.55 common victimization is not the only basis of that cooperation; rather, mazrui suggests salem: localizing islam in the west 49 50 the american journal of islamic social sciences 33:3 a common identity as a more solid foundation. arabia, he noted, had been an integral part of africa before the red sea separated it geographically. he invited both arabs and africans to bridge this split politically; hence, his unique concept of afrabia.56 mazrui also noted that islam is highly appreciated by many people of african origin in north america and the caribbean because they see it as a movement of religiosity and pan-africanism.57 in the united states in particular, islam has become the ideology of notable african-american groups fighting white supremacy, such as the nation of islam, an influential group in american politics.58 for this group, islam was not only a religion but also the firm foundation of black nationalism. in short, mazrui upheld islam against both marxism and racism, and islam, in turn, helped him escape the narrowness of afrocentrism and broaden his concept of pan-africanism to include not only sub-saharan africans and their arab neighbors to the north, but also their arab neighbors to the east and diasporic africans as well. mazrui’s contributions to localizing global islam in the west for mazrui, islam is a universal religion and way of life. its universality entails the obligation on muslims to spread it globally, and he did his part in this regard by converting a few followers of indigenous african religions, bequeathing his name to them as a religious “father,” and keeping in relative contact with them until he left east africa to pursue his higher education in england.59 in the west, where he lived most of his life, his missionary activities took a different form: having noted that islam was spreading steadily and, at the same time, that many westerners were highly prejudiced against it, not the least because of the centuries-long tradition of misrepresenting islam and muslims,60 mazrui made it his mission to combat islamophobia (which, he thought, replaced negrophobia in the west) and localize islam there by demonstrating its closeness to and impact upon modern western culture, as well as its usefulness to contemporary western societies. hence, his definition of the term islamic studies.61 on the one hand, he made the following observations during the mid1990s: islam is the fastest growing religion in north america. in france, islam is becoming the second most important religion numerically after catholicism. culturally and politically, some muslims in britain have been experimenting with an islamic parliament of their own, and others are demanding state subsidies for muslim denominational schools. in the federal republic of germany it has been belatedly realized that the importation of turkish workers in the 1970s was also an invitation to the muezzin and the minaret to establish themselves in german cities. australia has discovered that it is a neighbor to the largest muslim country in the world in population (indonesia). australia has also discovered an islamic presence in its town body-politic.62 on the other hand, mazrui found western literatures on islam guilty of two sins: omission and commission. while omission refers to ignoring fundamental facts about islam, thus inhibiting an accurate understanding of it, commission denotes the distortion of islamic beliefs, practices, and history, thus igniting westerners against muslims.63 mazrui, who sought to present islam to them on its own terms and from the muslim viewpoint, made five arguments. first, muslims historically preserved the greco-roman legacy upon which the west established its modern civilization. had they not done so, the west could have remained in its dark ages and european modernity may not have emerged. mazrui, however, stressed that muslims did not only transmit that legacy but added to it, made their own philosophical and scientific contributions, and established a god-focused civilization dissimilar to the later, gold-focused civilization of the anglo-saxons.64 second, islam is similar to judaism and christianity in its semitic, and particularly abrahamic, origin. it completed, not contradicted, these religions and preserved their monotheistic core. it is therefore three religions in one.65 moreover, islam was the first protestant movement, as prophet muhammad (peace be upon him) preceded martin luther (d. 1546) and john calvin (d. 1564) in uncovering the distortions of christianity and called for reforming it by reviving its true basics.66 islam and protestantism share a number of values and practices, such as rejecting all forms of intermediary between god and worshippers, and clerical hierarchy and corruption. islam takes this a step further by rejecting the divinity of jesus, who is otherwise dignified as an honored prophet.67 third, islam hailed free trade and hard work well before capitalism did. mazrui argued that islam harmonized the belief of predestination and the obligation to work hard. the prophet advised each believer to behave as if he or she were going to live forever, and as if he or she were going to die tomorrow … [he] believed in a free-trade, or mercantile economy in which commodities and money would experience unimpeded interaction in a free market. he has been opposed to price control of any sort. he seems to have trusted the forces of supply and demand to act as the only barometer on the basis of which price was to determine its rightful level.68 salem: localizing islam in the west 51 but islamic capitalism is distinct in two respects. on the one hand, islam obliges the rich to pay the poor an annual zakat, or a percentage of their wealth. “zakat is among the earliest forms of structured personal taxation in human history, modest as it is in percentage terms.”69 on the other hand, it regulates, on ethical bases, distribution and consumption, not only production.70 the islamic version of mercantilism was also superior to that of europe. prophet muhammad was a trader and praised honest traders, but warned against cheating and exploiting the needs of the poor. he distinguished clearly between legitimate profit and illegitimate interest.71 nevertheless, muslims did not adhere to this model for long, as their economy regressed into a form of what marx called the “asian mode of production,” although with little negative impact on their flourishing civilization.72 the only european mode of production that islam has never known is feudalism, because islamic laws of inheritance made it impossible for large estates to continue to be owned by one person for a long time.73 fourth, aspects of islamic culture that westerners regard as medieval have prevailed in their own culture until fairly recently.74 for example, westerners were bewildered by the depth of muslim anger against salman rushdie’s islam-defaming novel the satanic verses (1988), and, in defense of the freedom of expression, protested the ban imposed by muslim countries, although they used to ban morally repugnant novels well into the 1960s. western intellectuals argued that as an artist, rushdie had the sacred right and even duty to go wherever his imagination led him in his writing. yet until the 1960s lady chatterley’s lover was regarded as morally repugnant under british law for daring to depict an affair between a married member of the gentry and a worker on the estate.75 mazrui’s own metaphorical description of marx as “the last of the great jewish prophets” in his 1986 television series was censored in the united states. another notable example of islamic cultural elements prevailing in modern western culture is the latter’s worldview, during the cold war, which, as mazrui argued, was modeled on the medieval islamic worldview according to which the world comprised three abodes: the abode of islam (i.e., domains under muslim sovereignty), the abode of agreement (i.e., domains of nonmuslim sovereigns in treaty relations with muslims), and the abode of war (i.e., all other domains). after world war ii, the west appropriated islam’s traditional tripartite view of the world and simply substituted itself for islam. for much of the cold war, the world comprised the following categories: dar al gharb or dar al 52 the american journal of islamic social sciences 33:3 maghrib (the abode of the west) instead of dar al islam; dar al harb (the abode of war, essentially the communist world); and dar al sulh or dar al ‘ahd (the abode of peaceful coexistence, the third world). the third world paid tribute to the west in the form of the debt burden and other forms of economic exploitation in a modern version of the tribute paid by the dar al sulh to medieval muslim rulers.76 fifth, islam’s values and way of life are far more humane than most westerners realize, and should therefore be appreciated. muslims are often criticized for not producing the best, but they are seldom congratulated for having standards of behavior which have averted the worst. there are really no muslim equivalents of systematic nazi extermination camps, nor muslim conquest by genocide on the scale perpetrated by europeans in the americas and australia, nor muslim versions of rigid apartheid once approved by the south african dutch reformed church, nor muslim equivalents of the brutal racism of japan before the end of world war ii, nor muslim equivalents of pol pot’s killing fields in cambodia, nor a muslim equivalent of the racist lynching culture of the old south in the united states, nor a muslim version of stalinist terror in the name of five year plans. nor can islam be blamed for the only world wars in human history.77 thus, mazrui invited western societies to take advantage of islamic teachings in order to rid themselves of moral evils and social crises. for example, islam provides avenues of sobriety that can minimize drunkenness and drug addiction – two main ills of contemporary western societies. he stressed the importance of this value to the west in the light of predominant individualism that prevents the state from infringing upon individuals’ rights, even if they pose a danger to themselves or to others.78 muslims in the west are in an excellent position to help their communities benefit from islamic values. they should engage neighbors, friends, and civil societies in constructive dialogues on islam-based practical solutions to local problems, not only abstract concepts and principles. on the other hand, they are invited to benefit from western liberal values and spread them to other muslims – another mission of mazrui’s islamic studies. according to mazrui’s ijtihād (independent, informed interpretation of islam), liberal values on issues of women, slaves, and other historically oppressed people are truly islamic. he argued, for example, that polygamy is, in fact, forbidden, rather than forgiven, by the qur’an, because the latter permits polygamy only if a man can treat all of his wives absolutely equally, which is humanly impossible.79 the gender revolution in islam, however, was salem: localizing islam in the west 53 aborted because, he argued, the doors of ijtihād were closed. as a result, “the harem developed and became more secluded as a more aristocratic version of islam developed.”80 but he was confident that new technology, and the worldwide web in particular, would in time blow all discriminations against women totally out of social existence. the new technology will pass a death sentence on the tradition of the harem... the traditional forms of seclusion of women will not long survive a technology in which women can declare their presence and in time assert their rights.81 for another example of mazrui’s liberalist ijtihād, he argued that islam favors not only the emancipation of slaves but also the abolishment of the institution itself. however, muslims failed to accomplish this target at an early period of their history for the same reason they failed to declare polygamy illegal – they turned loyalist and aristocratic. this royalization under the umayyads and the abbasids gave class and status among muslims a new lease on life. slavery became part of the interplay between servitude and privilege in the succeeding millennium of muslim history. a new ijtihad against servitude, a new fatwa against slavery, had to wait for the ulama of the twentieth century.82 although mazrui did not meet the training and qualifications of a scholar practicing ijtihād,83 he was not the kind of public intellectual who would hide his opinions from fear of being accused of blasphemy, which some of his critics had already done.84 to the contrary, he was sympathetic toward those courageous muslim thinkers who engaged in it and were persecuted for that reason, such as the sudanese intellectual mahmoud muhammad taha, who was put on trial and executed in 1985.85 in lieu of conclusion: the story continues attracted to the study of politics, mazrui refused to study the shari‘ah at alazhar as his father, the grand judge of mombasa, once wished. along with many other young and aspiring africans and muslims in the mid-twentieth century, he thought that such an activity seemed to have little, if any, relevance to modernizing societies and provided no promising career path.86 studying the modern sciences in the west was so appealing an idea that it enticed such emerging intellectual giants as ismail al-faruqi (d. 1986), abdelwahab elmessiri (d. 2008), and mona abul-fadl (d. 2008), who later became adamant advocates of islamic epistemology and methodology.87 54 the american journal of islamic social sciences 33:3 had ali mazrui followed his father’s advice, he might well have become a prominent scholar of islamic studies in a traditional sense, which he, of course, was not. but he became a professor at an islamic university, namely, the graduate school of islamic and social sciences in virginia, usa. his scholarship on islam world studies met the university’s unique mission, namely, approaching islamic studies from social science perspectives and, at the same time, approaching the social sciences from the islamic studies perspectives. i am proud to have been a fruit of this collaboration. endnotes 1. ahmed ali salem, “the islamic heritage of mazruiana,” in the scholar between thought and experience: a bibliographical festschrift in honor of ali mazrui, ed. parviz morewedge (binghamton, ny: institute of global cultural studies, 2001), 63-101. 2. james dougherty and robert pfaltzgraff, contending theories of international relations: a comprehensive survey (new york: longman, 1996), 33-35; michael haas and henry kariel, approaches to the study of political science (scranton, pa: chandler publishing company, 1970), 15-16. 3. david easton, “political science in the united states: past and present,” in discipline and history: political science in the united states, ed. james farr and raymond seidelman (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1993), 291-310. 4. the separation between area studies (including african studies) and the disciplines (including political science) is an american tradition and now a worldwide model, one that fundamentally subdues the former to the latter. see, for example, an attempt to justify african studies research as beneficial to the disciplines in robert bates, v. y. mudimbe, and jean o’barr, eds., africa and the disciplines: the contributions of research in africa to the social sciences and humanities (chicago: the university of chicago press, 1993). 5. seifudein adem, “postcolonial constructivism: ali mazrui’s theory of intercultural relations?” africa review of books 11, no. 1 (march 2015): 4. 6. seifudein adem, “ali a. mazrui: the postcolonial theorist,” african studies review 57, no. 1 (2014): 135-52. 7. arent lijphart, “the comparable-cases strategy in comparative research,” comparative political studies 8, no. 2 (1975): 158-77. 8. alamin mazrui, “prologue: ali mazrui and his critics,” in race, gender and culture conflict: debating the african condition, ed. alamin mazrui and willy mutunga (trenton and asmara: africa world press, 2004), 1-4. 9. on logical positivism, its critics and applications in the social sciences, see paul diesing, how does social sciences work?: reflections on practice (pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh press, 1991). salem: localizing islam in the west 55 10. vendulka kubalkova, “foreign policy, international politics, and constructivism,” in foreign policy in a constructed world, ed. vendulka kubalkova (london: m.e. sharpe, 2001), 22; samuel barkin, “realist constructivism,” international studies review 5 (2003): 329. 11. ali a. mazrui, cultural forces in world politics (london: james currey; portsmouth, nh: heinemann; nairobi, heinemann, 1990). 12. ali a. mazrui, “africa and the egyptian’s four circles,” african affairs 63, no. 251 (1964): 129-41. 13. ali a. mazrui, “the semitic impact on black africa: arab and jewish cultural influences,” issue: a journal of opinion 13, no. 3 (1983). 14. ali a. mazrui, “religion and political culture in africa,” journal of the american academy of religion 53, no. 4 (1985). 15. ali a. mazrui, “religion and democracy in the first republic of the sudan,” makerere journal 11 (december 1965). 16. ali a. mazrui, “religious strangers in uganda: from emin pasha to amin dada,” african affairs 76, no. 302 (1977). 17. ali a. mazrui, “the black intifada? religion and rage at the kenya coast,” journal of asian and african studies 4, no. 2 (1993). 18. ali a. mazrui, “towards re-africanising south africa: an islamic perspective,” extracts from a presentation made at the international conference “islam and civil society in south africa,” sponsored by the university of south africa and the united states institute of peace, held in pretoria, south africa, august 1994. 19. ali a. mazrui, “crisis in somalia: from tyranny to anarchy,” in mending rips in the sky: options for somali communities in the 21st century, ed. hussein m. adam and richard ford (lawrenceville, nj, and asmara: the red sea press, 1997). 20. ali a. mazrui, “islam in sub-saharan africa,” in the oxford encyclopedia of the modern islamic world, vol. 2 (new york and oxford: oxford university press, 1995); ali a. mazrui, “the world of islam: a political overview,” journal institute of muslim minority affairs 11, no. 2 (july 1990). 21. ali a. mazrui, “african islam and islam in africa: between exceptionalism and marginality,” american journal of islamic social sciences 26, no. 3 (summer 2009): iii-iv. 22. ibid., i. 23. ali a. mazrui, “the africans: a triple heritage,” a co-production of wetatv and bbc-tv, 1986; ali a. mazrui on ‘the africans: a triple heritage (ann arbor: ann arbor public library, 1987). 24. on the origins of this notion, see mazrui, “ali mazrui and the triple heritage,” 21-26. 25. ali a. mazrui, “the split soul of a continent,” michigan alumnus (sept.-oct. 1986). 26. ali a. mazrui and alamin m. mazrui, “language in a multi-cultural context: the african experience,” an international journal (special issue on language and education) 6, nos. 2-4 (1992); ali a. mazrui and alamin m. mazrui, the 56 the american journal of islamic social sciences 33:3 power of babel: language and governance in the african experience (oxford: james currey; nairobi: east african educational publishers; kampala: fountain publishers; cape town: david philip publishers; chicago: the university of chicago press, 1998). 27. ali a. mazrui, “islam and african art: stimulus or stumbling block?” african arts 27, no. 1 (jan. 1994). 28. ali a. mazrui, “africa’s triple heritage of play: reflections on the gender gap,” in sport in africa: essays in social history, ed. w. j. baker and j. a. mangan (new york and london: africana publishing company, 1987). 29. ali a. mazrui, “the triple heritage of the state in africa,” in the state in global perspective, ed. ali kazancigil (aldershot, uk: gower, 1986). 30. ali a. mazrui, “comparative slavery and africa’s triple heritage: indigenous, islamic, and western systems,” keynote address at the world conference on “slavery and society in history,” kaduna, nigeria, march 26, 1990. 31. ali a. mazrui, christianity and islam in africa’s political experience: piety, passion and power (washington, dc: georgetown university center for muslim-christian understanding, 1996). 32. for a different point of view that portrays mazrui as globalist from the beginning of his intellectual career, see adem, postcolonial constructivism, 4. 33. on the liberalist foundation of political science in the west, see james ceaser, liberal democracy and political science (baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, 1992); david ricci, “contradictions of a political discipline,” in discipline and history: political science in the united states, ed. james farr and raymond seidelman (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1993), 165-78. 34. on the heated debates between mazrui and his leftist critics, see alamin mazrui, prologue, 5-9. 35. ali a. mazrui, “the sacred and the secular in east african politics,” cahiers d’etudes africaines 13, no. 4 (1973). 36. ali a. mazrui, “islam, political leadership, and economic radicalism in africa,” comparative studies in society and history 9, no. 3 (apr. 1967). 37. islam has always been an anticolonial force, though sometimes subtly through non-militant means, especially after the brutal crashing of the jihad movements that resisted the colonial invasion of africa. for examples of jihad by other means in colonized africa, see andrew roberts, the colonial moment in africa: essays on the movement of minds and materials, 1900-1940 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1990) chap. 4. 38. ali a. mazrui, “islam and the english language in east and west africa,” in language use and social change: problems of multilingualism with special reference to eastern africa, ed. w. h. whilteley (london: oxford university press, 1971). 39. ali a. mazrui and pio zirimu, “the secularisation of an afro-islamic language: church, state, and marketplace in the spread of kiswahili,” journal of islamic studies 1, no. 1 (1990). salem: localizing islam in the west 57 40. ali a. mazrui and teshome wagaw, “towards decolonising modernity: education and culture conflict in eastern africa,” in the educational process and historiography in africa (paris: unesco, 1985). 41. ali a. mazrui, “christian power and muslim challenge in africa’s experience,” indian journal of politics 12, no. 3 (december 1978); ali a. mazrui, “african islam and competitive religion: between revivalism and expansion,” third world quarterly 10 (april 1988). 42. ali a. mazrui, “islamic doctrine and the politics of induced fertility change: an african perspective,” in the new politics of population: conflict and consensus in family planning, ed. jason l. finkle and c. alison mcintosh (new york: the population council, 1994). 43. ali a. mazrui, “shariacracy and federal models in the era of globalization: nigeria in a comparative perspective,” american journal of islamic social sciences 26, no. 3 (summer 2009): 41. 44. ali a. mazrui, “oil power, palestine, and the political resurrection of islam,” paper presented at the 18th annual meeting of the african studies association, san francisco, 29 october – 1 november, 1975; ali a. mazrui, “oil power and the steady rise of islam,” sunday nation (23 april 1978). 45. seifudein adem, postcolonial constructivism, 4. 46. see, for example, the following codesria publication: africa review of books 11, no. 1 (march 2015). 47. see, for example, analyses of french and british colonial knowledge of africa that paved the way to emerging african studies in the united states as a highly racialized enterprise, in william g. martin and michael o. west, eds., out of one, many africas: reconstructing the study and meaning of africa (urbana: university of illinois press, 1999) chaps. 1, 2, and 4. 48. paul t. zeleza, manufacturing african studies and crises (nashville: lightning source, 1997), chap. 7. 49. see a criticism of this afro-centrism in kwame a. appiah, in my father’s house: africa in the philosophy of culture (oxford: oxford university press, 1992). 50. see, for example, wole soyinka’s criticism of mazrui’s tv series “the africans,” in alamin mazrui, prologue, 15. 51. ali a. mazrui, “africa’s triple heritage and i,” africa events 2, nos. 7-8 (julyaugust 1986); ali a. mazrui, “the legacy of life and death: africa’s triple heritage in a personal context,” africa notes (february 1997). 52. abdul sheriff, dhow culture of the indian ocean cosmopolitanism: commerce and islam before the coming of the europeans, trans. from english into arabic (abu dhabi: emirates center for strategic studies and research, 2013), chap. 13. 53. ali a. mazrui, african islam and islam in africa, ii-iii. 54. see a critique of the colonialist narratives of the omani sultanate in zanzibar, and mazrui’s comments on the 1964 revolution, in ahmed ali salem, “the his58 the american journal of islamic social sciences 33:3 toriography of the omani sultanate of zanzibar and arab-african rapprochement: reflections and annotated bibliography,” encounters 1, no. 1 (october 2009): 141-73. 55. ali a. mazrui, “global apartheid?: race and religion in the new world order,” in the gulf war and the new world order: international relations of the middle east, ed. t. y. and j. s. ismael (gainesville: university press of florida, 1994). 56. ali a. mazrui, “afrabia: africa and the arabs in the new world order,” ufahamu 20, no. 3 (1992). 57. ali a. mazrui, “religious alternatives in black diaspora: from malcolm x to the rastafari,” caribbean affairs 3(1) (1990); ali a. mazrui, “global africa in flux: the dialectic of diversity in black world,” in african presence in the americas, ed. carlos moore, tanya r. saunders and shawna moore (trenton, nj: africa world press, 1995). 58. ali a. mazrui, “african factor in the u.s. (part one),” africa events 9, no. 7 (july 1993); ali a. mazrui, “north american muslims: rising to the challenge of a dual identity,” islamic studies 34, no. 4 (winter 1995); ali a. mazrui, “between the crescent and the star-spangled banner: american muslims and us foreign policy,” international affairs 72, no. 3 (july 1996). 59. ali a. mazrui, “religion and political culture in africa,” journal of the american academy of religion 53, no. 3 (1985): 830. 60. see a passionate criticism of this practice in edward w. said, covering islam: how the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world (new york: vintage books, 1997), 3-35. 61. following the american academic tradition of defining islamic studies, i use this term rather broadly to include islamic history, society, and politics, not only islamic religion and theology. for insightful, recent discussions of this tradition, see mumtaz ahmad, zahid bukhari and sulayman nyang, eds., observing the observer: the state of islamic studies in american universities (london and washington: the international institute of islamic thought, 2012), especially chaps. 2 and 3 by sayyed hossein nasr and john o. voll, respectively. 62. ali a. mazrui, “north american muslims: rising to the challenge of a dual identity,” islamic studies 3, no. 4 (winter 1995): 451. 63. ali a. mazrui, “islam and islamophobia: conflicting images in a eurocentric world,” in islamic political economy in capitalistic-globalization: an agenda for change, ed., masudul a. choudhury, m. z.abdad, and muhammad s. salleh (kuala lumpur: utusan publications and penang, 1997), 92. 64. ali a. mazrui, “hegemony: from semites to anglo-saxons,” alternatives 11, no. 1 (january 1986). 65. ali a. mazrui, “hegemony,” 92-95; ali a. mazrui, “islam and the end of history,” the american journal of islamic and social sciences 10, no. 4 (winter 1993): 513-14. 66. ali a. mazrui, “islam and islamophobia,” 92-93. interestingly, mazrui made no similar argument on islam as the first jewish haskalah (reformist) movement. salem: localizing islam in the west 59 67. mazrui, “islam and islamophobia,” 94-98; mazrui, cultural forces, 73-76. 68. mazrui, “islam and islamophobia,” 96-98; mazrui, cultural forces, 75-77. 69. mazrui, cultural forces, 78-79. 70. ibid., 67-69; mazrui, “islam and islamophobia,” 96-97. 71. mazrui, cultural forces, 81. 72. ibid., 76-77. 73. ibid., 68. 74. ali a. mazrui, “islamic and western values,” foreign affairs 76, no. 5 (september-october 1997): 120. 75. ibid., 123; mazrui, cultural forces, 83. 76. ali a. mazrui, “globalization, islam, and the west: between homogenization and hegemonization,” the american journal of islamic and social sciences 15, no. 3 (fall 1998): 6-7. 77. ali a. mazrui, islam, western democracy and the third industrial revolution: conflict or convergence (abu dhabi: the emirates center for strategic studies and research, 1998), 8-9. 78. mazrui, “islam and the end of history,” 533. 79. mazrui, “islam and islamophobia,” 102-03. of course, other scholars argue against this interpretation, given the practice of the companions and that the relevant qur’anic verse speaks in the imperative. in linguistic terms, this establishes license, not prohibition. 80. mazrui, “islam and the end of history,” 533. 81. mazrui, islam, western democracy, and the third industrial revolution, 22-23. 82. mazrui, “shariacracy and federal models in the era of globalization,” 51. 83. for those qualifications, see muhammad h. kamali, principles of islamic jurisprudence (cambridge, uk: islamic texts society, 1991), 374-77. 84. mazrui, cultural forces, 10. 85. mazrui, “african islam and competitive religion,” 515. 86. on the absent link between traditional islamic education and economic employment in the african context, see lamin sanneh, the crown and the turban: muslims and west african pluralism (boulder and oxford: westview press, 1997), 118-19. see also a review of this book by ahmed ali salem, “review of the crown and the turban: muslim and west african pluralism,” american journal of islamic social sciences 15, no. 2 (1998): 141-46. 87. see, for example, isma’il al-faruqi, tawḥīd: its implications for thought and life (wyncote, pa: international institute of islamic thought, 1982); abdelwahab elmessiri, “the gate of ijtihad: an introduction on the study of epistemological bias,” in epistemological bias in the physical and social sciences, ed. abdelwahab elmessiri (london and washington: international institute of islamic thought, 2006) p.68; mona abul-fadl, islam and the middle east: the aesthetics of a political inquiry (riyadh: international islamic publishing house, 1990). 60 the american journal of islamic social sciences 33:3 religiosity in islam as a protective mechanism against criminal temptation ab&llah h. m. al-khalvah the goal of this paper is b examine the extent to which religiosity, within the islamic context, can be viewed bs an effective mechanism against criminal temptation. to accomplish this, we will a) review the theories and literatwe concerning the religion-crime relationship, b) dis cuss the meaning of the religiosity concept in order to highlight essential feaof religiosity in islam that make it a valuable force in crime con trol within a muslim society, and c) present a thorough discussion of cer tain elements of islamic ideology that conshin criminal behavior. theoretical antecedence the relation of religion to other social phenomena has received a great deal of attention from social scientists. given the variations of the ideological and philosophical backgrounds underlying most schools of sq cia1 thought, theme is no single view of the impact of religion. for ex ample, ibn khaldiin ([d. 14061 1981) views religion, through its effect on social cohesion and cooperation, as a primary factor in the rise and fall of societies. marx (tucker 1978), in his analysis of capitalism, recog nizes the importance of religion as a control mechanism and considers it an effective instnment utilized by the bourgeois dass to maintain its dominance over the proletariat. on the conttary, weber (1958) views the entin= capitalist system as a by-product of protestantism. but it is perhaps the functional theorists who highlight the i m p o w c e of religion on the creation and maintenance of social order. they consider religion to be the basis and source of social values and norms by which people are united and their behavior and activities are regulated murk heim 1951). however, due to the increasingly secular nature of modem abdullah h. m. a l m i a h is an bssociate professor of sociology, imam muhammad ibn sad islamic university, riyadh, saudi arabia. 2 the american journal of islamic social sciences 1 1 : 1 societies, some social scientists assume that religion "would gradually diminish in importance or else become less capable of influencing public life" (wuthnow 1988). according to wuthnow (1988), "much of the re search on religion was informed by the assumption that secularization was an inevitable trend." recently, that assumption has been challenged (douglas 1983; stark et al. 1985). within the criminological tradition, however, it has been the social control theorists who considered religion in their analysis of crime prevention. social control theorists asked why and how people conform to the rules of society. that is, what are the mechanisms that constrain people from committing delinquent behavior? ( h h n 1991). the two durkheiman concepts of social integration and social regulation are taken by social control theorists as a theoretical frame of reference to deal with these questions. durkheim, in his classic suicide, investigated the social conditions preventing people from committing suicide. to him, suicide is a function of weak social integration and social regulation. as society succeeds in integrating individuals into its social institutions (i.e., reli gions and family) and providing them with cultural norms that regulate their behavior, their "insatiable desires" are controlled and the proper means to achieve these desires are defined. the result is that suicide rates, as well as other forms of delinquent behavior, decline. the concept of social integration and social regulations are not mutually exclusive in the durkheiman sense. on the one hand, social integration is enhanced by rules of conduct that make social institutions more of a presence in peoples' consciousness. on the other hand, social regulation may be ef fective, provided that there is a high degree of social integration. that is, people would have to feel attached to a group in order to follow volun tarily its norms and rules (krohn 1991). social control theorists have used these two concepts in their exami nation of crime control. there are, however, variations regarding their analytical treatment of one or both concepts. for example, social dis organization theorists highlight the importance of social institutions in integrating and regulating individuals. focussing their analysis on the community level, they see the overall social disorganization of a commu nity as a function of the ineffectiveness of specific institutions. lander (1954) and maccoby et al. (1958) provide strong evidence to substantiate the assumptions of social disorganization theory. the social bond is another branch of social control theory that seeks to explain what makes people refrain from engaging in criminal behavior. the main features of the theory were specified by nye (1958) and hitschi (1969). for nye (1958), delinquency results from the absence of control, which itself comes from the socialization pmess through which indi viduals learn to distinguish right from wrong. behavior, in this perspec tive, is controlled indirectly by one's affectional ties to significant others al-khalifah religiosity as a protective mechanism 3 (i.e., parents, friends) and directly by punishment. himchi (1969) views social bonds, by which he means the ties that attach people to the con ventional social order, 8s the factor underlying the confotmity of juveniles to the social order. social bonds consist of four interrelated elements attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. the more effective ties people maintain with others (attachtnents), and the higher their desire to follow conformist behavior (commitments), they will spend more time in conventional activities (involvement) and stmgthen their attitude to wads conformity (beliefs). in the remaining perspectives of social control, (i.e., self-concept theory, self-derogation theory, and the deterrence perspective), the unit of analysis of the control mechanism shifts from the social or aggregate to the psychological or individual level. for example, self-concept theorists see the prosocial self-concept as a mechanism that constrains an indi vidual from engaging in delinquent behavior (reckless 1961; 1973). the self-derogation theory, which follows the symbolic interaction assump tion, predicts that an individual will behave in a manner in which a nega tive attitude (the result of nonconformist behavior) is minimized, while a positive attitude, which results from conformitive behavior, is maxi mized (kaplan 1980). the deterrence perspective, which is based on utilitarian assumptions, considers individuals to be rational actors who strive to maximize the benefits of their action and minimize the cosfs of their behavior. to deter people from committing crimes, therefore, they advocate the use of severe punishment as an effective instrument to con trol crime. if the cost of the punishment outweighs the potential benefit of the criminal act, people eventually will be d e t e d from engaging in criminal behavior (beccaria 1764, tittle 1969; waldo and chiricas 1972). the impact of religion on crime has been the subject of many em pirical research undertakings since the days of durkheim. on the whole, these studies have been guided by the assumption that religious institu tions determine social conformity to g m t degree. as burkett et al. (1987) state, "most researchers are motivated by sincere and specific interest in the identification of causal processes linking religion as a source of con ventional social control to deviant involvement." despite the variations in techniques (i.e., bivariate vs. multivariate) employed to investigate the religion-crime relationship, and the ways in which the concepts of reli gion (i.e., religiosity scale, religious commitment, church attendance, church membership, participation in religious activities, availability of religious places, catholicism, and islam) and crime (i.e., self-reported vs. officially reported criminal behavior, general vs. specific crime rates, seri ous vs. minor delinquency, recidivists vs. nonrecidivists) are measured, the empirical evidence of many studies found that, generally speaking, religion has an inverse influence on criminal behavior. moreover, this is true regardless of the religion in question (i.e., pretzel 1973; bwkett and 4 the american journal of k h i c social sciences 11:l white 1974; hi& and albercht 1977; stark et al. 1982; burkett et a t 1984; stack et al. 1983; martin 1984; p e t t e r n 1991; welch et al. 1991; cfcp 1992; al s a w 1412/1992; a1 $an?‘ 1993). even though religiosity is found to influence criminaf behavior regardless d the religion in question, it can be argued that the inverse relationship between religiosity in islam and criminal temptation should be stronger and more p m o d than in other social and cultural con texts. this umtention is based on the unique nature of the concept of reli giosity in islam. islam is not only a religion: it is a comprehensive set of social, economic, and political doctfines that are to govern and regulate all aspects of human life. to clarify this issue as well as the distinctive effect of religiosity in islam on criminal behavior, we now turn our atten tion to defining the concept of religiosity in islam. the concept of religiosity in islam as noted above, social scientists have paid considerable attention to religiosity in their analyses of social issues. however, little c exists on how the concept should be defined and employed. in part, this is due to the fact that social scientists do not agree on “what kind of phe nomena can be called religion.” (blotch 1985). more importantly, how ever, humanity’s religions differ greatly in their emphasis on various values and behaviors as well as on the extent of their reach (garth 1979; b l a h 1985). given these considerations, a clear definition of this concept as it applies to islam has to be developed before a discussion of its rela tion to criminality is undertaken. as religiadty in islam is a multidimen sional concept covering a wide range of beliefs and practices and is based on the assumption that a person’s ideals and conduct are intertwined, its general meaning can be subsumed under two interrelated dimensions: 1. the belief (or covert) dimension, which represents an individual’s full and sincere belief in god as the creator of the univetse and as the only one worthy of worship, and one’s belief in his angels, books, messengers, the day of judgment and the here after, and in fate. 2. the conduct (or overt) dimension, which emphasizes the degree to which the belief dimension of religiosity is reflected thmugh out the believer’s daily behavior and actions via the full obedi ence and compliance to god’s commands and the avoidance of those acts and behavior forbidden by god. islam, as both a doctrine and law, is seen to “dominate and permeate every minute of the moslem’s life.” (groves et al. 1987). an individual’s al-khalifah religiosity as a protective mechanisn 5 religiosity ought to be reflected in all of his/her normal daily activities, for these are scaled and regulated by the limits of acceptable behavior. accordingly, every action (verbal, nonverbal, or intended) is gmuped into one of five classes: commended, recommended, legally indifferent, repto bated, or forbidden (bakri 1979; aref 1988). thetefore, worship in islam includes all of these aspects of beliefs and practices equally. it is not confined to the mere belief in god, the regular performance of five daily prayem, giving zakat, fasting during the month of ramadan, or con ducting war against oppression, but extends its realm to atenas of inter actions and relations within and outside the family circle (i.e., enjoining good and tefraining fmm evil, education, frequent recitation of the qur'an, telling the ttuth, fulfilling trusts, being kind to parents and rela tives, keeping pmmises, doing good deeds, avoiding evil, treating neigh bors, orphans, the poor, and wayfares properly and taking care of their possessions). worship is also maintained by avoiding behavior deemed forbidden (i.e., eating pork, drinking alcohol, taking interest in monetary dealings, out-of-wedlock sexual relations, telling lies, and engaging in magic, envy, and dishonesty). in addition, the qur'an and hadith contain rules and guidance for personal and interpemnal conduct in many aspects of life (i.e., marriage, divorce, manner of speech, general posture towards otheb, and mannem of walking, working, eating, and sleeping) (al-katan, 1980; a1 sm-' 1993). given this wide range, muslim social scientists who seek to me8sute religiosity have found it necessary to construct a comprehensive scale to capture religiosity dimensions. a framework of some sixty or more items is employed to reptesent an individual's overall religiosity (a1 wi 1985; a1 $m-' 1993). having defined the concept and delineated its unique fea tures within an islamic context, the question now becomes "what is it about religiosity in islam that makes it a pmtective mechanism against criminal temptation?" in response, it m be stated that such religiosity puts considerable constmints on criminal temptation. the processes and mechanisms by which religiosity influences criminality are: a) the islamic perception of law; b) the islamic perception of crime; c) the islamic per ception of punishment d) islamic rituals and social cohesion; and e) other islamic protective m e a s w . the islamic perception of law. the utilitarian, positivistic, and radical as sumptions underlying most modem laws may have overlooked the impact of how people viewed the nature and the source of law on criminality divine or human law-and the power and capability of those making the law to enforce it (mursi 141311993). on the contrary, islamic law seeks to motalize legal action and formalities by placing them in the context of religion and morality (ares 1988), with the result that law is perceived by its adherents to be divine in nature and not made by a particular group 6 the american journal of islamic social sciences 11: 1 of people. this religious petception of the law increases the law’s impor tance and credibility as well as the d e g m of its objectivity and respecta bility, factors that make adhemce to it and its applicability, in some stab, rationally grounded @i& 1969; bakri 1979; aref 1988). for instance, al qurtubi (1967) inclicab that when the ”law of equality” was prescribed by god, during the early days of islam, muslims had no difficulty in accepting it, for it was god’s law. in this regard, m m i (1413/1993) argues that there is no force in the social defence arena stronger than the actor’s solid belief that the reward and the punishment for a given conduct is related, first of all, to god. in a more general sense, there can be no separation between law and religion in islam, as pointed out by gibb (1949). law is the external con cept of religion. from this follows an important characteristic of islamic law: the spirit by which its judgments are made. in framing its defini tions, therefore, the ethical aspect is paramount, and no legal judgment can be in conflict with it. this is a very important point for, as aref (1988) puts it, “human behavior is so complex that to control it in a com prehensive way, there must be an integrative synthesis of religion, morality and law.“ the islamic perception of crime. one distinguishing feature of islamic ideology concetning crime is its view that crime is a violation of god‘s law and thus is directed against god before the immediate victim (bakri 1979; al sa‘id 1412/1992; al san?‘ 1993). crime in general is seen as the action of nonbelievers (a1 samiliiti 1990) or of those with weak faith, which makes them vulnerable to criminal temptations (qadri 1985). religiosity is seen as the s o w e of conformity and, as a result, a pmtec tion against criminal behavior. islam prohibits all minor and major of fenses, mischief, unlawful deeds, aggression, and sins. it warns societies that ignore these prohibitions and allow them to spread among the people that they will suffer decline (al-katan 1980). it seems clear that a reli giously oriented person would abstain from criminal activity and would consider it below hi&er dignity to commit any criminal act (qutb 1980). the islamic perception of punishment. through our discussion of the effect of religiosity in islam on criminality, it is clear that islam emphasizes indirect protective measures rather than ditect punishment. but, most importantly, the concept of punishment has a unique feature: a religious dimension that allows one’s avoidance of punishment to increase one’s conformity to the islamic social order. in this case, punishment is considered to be of two types: divine and worldly. divine punishment is what awaits each individual who failed to live in accotdance with the shari‘ah but managed to escape punishment during his/her lifetime. this divine punishment is viewed as severe and eternal, al-khalifalr religiosity as a rotective mechanism 7 for those who are guilty of violating the law of god and sought to es cape the day of judgment. worldly punishment, on the other hand, is applied by the state to those who violate social rules and morality. such punishment can be divided into two subcategories: fixed and discretionary. fixed punish ments are those defined as such in the qur’an and the hadith. they are referred to as the crimes against the five necessities (i.e., the preservation of religion, life, intellect, offspring, and property) that islam, through its religious commands and prohibitions, seeks to protect in order to realize its main objectives. the main sources of islam have specified both the crime and the punishment, based on the individual’s degree of guilt, in tent, relevant circumstances, and the weapons used. crimes of this sort include homicide, highway robbery, adultery, theft, fornication, and per sonal injury. the death penalty and other physical punishment measutes are specified for these crimes. discretionary punishments allow the judge sufficient leeway in the determination of punishment, for the exact punishments have not been specified in the islamic sources. one example is drug trafficking, which carries the death penalty in saudi arabia. saudi jurists passed this law on the grounds that it would serve as a detemnt to protect society from this crime and its negative effects. the “worldly” punishment, although designated as such, is given reli gious substance. punishment is applied publicly. in addition, it fulfills a specific function (i.e., preventing the criminal from committing future crimes) and a general function (i.e., preventing people, including the criminal, from committing crimes) (krohn 1991). islam consides punish ment as a way to purify criminals of their sins so that they will not be punished in the hereafter. if their repentance is sincere, they will be em powered to resist future criminal temptations. social scientists such as tittle (1969) found that the certainty and seventy of punishment lowered crime rates in the united states. the fact that divine punishment is seen as certain and severe (eternal punishment) allows religiosity in islam to function as a major protective mechanism against criminal involvement. islamic rituals and social cohesion. sociologists have long acknowl edged the significance of social cohesion in constraining criminal beha vior (durkheh 1951; reppetto 1974; genevie et al. 1987; a1 khalifah 1413/1993). social cohesion, as viewed by durkheim, is a precondition for the effectiveness of social regulation. in other words, people have to feel attached to a collectivity in order to observe its rules willingly. al though collectivity, generally speaking, is seen to be a function of reli gion, in islam its relationship with religion may be more pronounced: islamic rituals embrace the feeling of community which it is thought modem societies have lost and that crime, among other 8 the american journal of islamic social sciences 11: 1 social problems, has replaced. in an important sense, the islamic communities possess a moral climate that should result in a lower level of crime and/or delinquency. (stark et. al 1982) most forms of worship in islam, aside from their religious functions (i.e., attachment to god and the enhancement of modity), are perfomed in public (al-katan 1980). this helps to develop an environment of com munal piety. for example, muslims a encouraged to pray the five daily prayers in public and together. clearly, such a practice has more than a purely religious fundton: it is a mechanism to bring people together and enhance their social bonds. it is also a tool that makes “religious influ ences permeate the culture and the social interactions of people in ques tion” (stark et al. 1982). another example is giving alms, representing one fortieth of one’s possessions for an entire year, to the needy. this helps to preserve a sense of community. in addition to easing economic hardship, it shrinks the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” and thus curbs any tendency towads conflict between the two groups. other islamic protective measures. it is generally assumed that indi viduals have potentially insatiable desires, which means that they are vul nerable to c b i n a l temptations. to control these desires, durkheim (1951) asserted that cultural norms are needed to define limits and the proper means of satisfying them. without such norms and means, people will behave as they please to satisfy their desires (krohn 1991). islam has accounted for these deviant desires and impulses that de mand satisfaction and recognizes that each desire can be satisfied through appropriate and inappropriate means. in short, it can be said that while islam forbids certain methods of satisfying human desires, it also provides specific means &ugh which they can be satisfied. as we have seen in our conceptualization of religiosity, islam provides suitable norms to gov em such desires and impulses, defines the means by which they can by satisfied (mmi 1413/1993), and, more importantly, places these norms and means in the context of religion so that their acceptability and effec tiveness is enhanced. in this context, it can be seen that islam only forbids that which is a religiously inappropriate beahvior to a specific need or desire. for example, an individual’s sexual urges can be satisfied in a number of ways (i.e., marriage, adultery, masturbation), but only marriage is con sidered it is therefore encouraged, while the other two are forbidden. another example is the accumulation of wealth, a desire that can be satis fied through hard and honest work, theft, robbery, buying and selling ttarrsactions, taking i n t e a , and many other ways. however, islam deems honest buying and selling ttslnsactions and honest hard work to be the appropriate means, and this outlaws the others on the grounds that they 9 either violate a person's rights (i.e., theft, robbery) or lead to monopoly and the inevitable negative consequences (i.e., taking intemst). islam assigns very crucial protective roles to the family and its insti tutions, for it is the first social institution raporrsible for socializing young people and integrating them into society. by setting and pmenting a good islamic example in their daily behavior and interaction with others, the parents' islamic ideals, values, and teaching can have a signifi cant impact on the behavior of their children. through a process of inter nalizing the fundamental social values, children come to be an integml and effective part of their society. examples that highlight the family's central importance as the social agent that links young people to society in accordance with islam can be taken from the commands and recom mendations concerning the basis of family f o m t i o n as well as the regu lations that determine the duties, rights, and expectations of the pamts and of each other. for instance, males are encouraged to marry to religiously oriented females, and fathers are encouraged to seek reli giously oriented men to marry their daughters (siibiq 1985). the message underlying such tecommendations concerns not only the futute sfability of the family, but also how the children will be raised. as a further protective measwe, islam makes it obligatory for every one, in accotdance to his ability, to "enjoin what is good and forbid what is evil." this is a vital mechanism that makes people reinforce each other's conformist behavior. moreover, it exerts tremendous psychological pressure on deviants by reminding them frequently and constantly that they should conform to islamic norms. such a practice "inculcates in the people love for virtues and abhorrence of vices." accordingly, it consti tutes "a bulwark against most crimes" (al-rasheed 1980). conclusion in this paper, we have seen that religiosity, in an islamic context, serves as a mechanism that shields people from criminal temptaticm. by placing the concept of law in the realm of religion, seeing a crime as a violation of god's law before seeing it as a violation of a person's rights, being aware of the certainty and severity of punishment in the afterlife, as well as the other mentioned socially protective measures, criminality is kept to minimum among muslims. it follows that islam provides a unique social control petspective, one that has accounted for the main parameters underlying the mechanisms of social control: religion, moral ity, and law. the interdependence of these factors not only gives a ra tional meaning by which muslims can evaluate their goals but, more importantly, specifies all moral means at various levels of human life (i.e., economic, political, and personal) h u g h which they can realize their goals. 10 the american journal of islamic social sciences 11 : 1 references a m , m. 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(1969): 408-23. jai | journal of accounting and investment, vol 19 no. 2, july 2018 deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility: social investment on luwu indigeous society rahmawati* abstract: this research deconstructed the values contained in the concept of corporate social responsibility (csr) which is used by company for social investment aimed at prospering the community. in fact, consideration on such investment is merely for the profit and reputation of the company. the logos in this research is capitalist which is still the ideology of csr so that deconstruction is conducted using symbol value of kedatuan luwu (pakka and payung ri luwu). the reality of corporate social responsibility is still on the implementation of handling negative impact caused by company activity. the company operates still with the purpose of maximizing profit which is still filled with material factors based on capitalist ideology. the deconstructed value is the value of profit that is taken into consideration is material in social activities that lead to the concept of capitalism. the intended profit should be the profit that becomes the economic impact of the activity so that the company earns profit and reputation done with dignity before the community and god. the methodology used was qualitative with the paradigm of postmodernism by deconstructing the indigenous symbols of kedatuan luwu by including "ade" and "sara" as the order that should be applied in the implementation of csr to be accepted by local indigenous people. the result of this research was obtained after the researcher deconstructed the concept of csr proposed by elkington about triple bottom line (people, planet and profit), and analyzing triyuwono's deconstruction result by adding prophet and god to csr concept. from our analysis we found that conflicts between companies and indigenous people were due to the concept of csr that only emphasized the impact of profit, planet, people, prophet and god were not enough if the way to implement and interact with the local community is still capitalist. therefore, this study found that its solution is by destroying the logos of capitalism and deconstructing it using the traditional philosophy of kedatuan luwu "pattuppu ri ade'e pasanre ri sara'e. the philosophy means that whatever conducted in tana luwu must be based on the luwu customs and should not be contrary to the religion. keywords: corporate social responsibility; profit; capitalism; reputation; deconstruction introduction the implementation of csr, in reality, still uses capitalism ideology which is contradict with philosophy embraced by each local indigious community, so that it results in conflict (rudito, 2013). other facts also indicate that the company still operates aiming to maximize profit which is still contain with material factors based on capitalist ideology (tan, 2009; yuan, 2011; idowu, 2012). in the development of csr researches recantly, derridean states that company social responsiblity program is still ambiguos by conducting two functions at once. ambigious here means that the main purpose of a department of accounting, sekolah tinggi ilmu ekonomi muhammadiyah palopo, jl. jend sudirman km. 03, binturu, binturu, wara selatan, binturu, wara sel., kota palopo, sulawesi selatan 91922, indonesia *correspondence: n rahmawati345@yahoo.co.id this article is avalilable in: http://journal.umy.ac.id/index.php/ai doi: 10.18196/jai.1902100 citation: rahmawati. (2018). deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility: social investment on luwu indigeous society. journal of accounting and investment, 19(2), 176-193. received: 15 january 2018 reviewed: 30 january 2018 revised: 22 march 2018 accepted: 12 april 2018 copyright: © 2018 rahmawati. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. mailto:noorsharoja@um.edu.my mailto:noorsharoja@um.edu.my http://journal.umy.ac.id/index.php/ai http://journal.umy.ac.id/index.php/ai/article/view/3706 http://journal.umy.ac.id/index.php/ai/index rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 177 company is to maximize the profit, on the other hand, it also wants to do csr activities which is pro to social factor, so that between pro profit or pro social cannot be conducted at once because it is more dominant on consideration of gaining profit. meanwhile, the csr is conducted merely to improve the company’s reputation (triyuwono, 2016). the company social responsibility is an accountability of negative effects resulted from mining by the company. this treatment is intended to restore the nature and culture that have been harmed. however, nature recovery by the company such as reforestation and others cannotrestore the forest as previous condition. it also happens to endemic that has been extinct. these kinds of situations take place in mining consession areas. in terms of the implementation of accountability is confusing as well, since the company still focuses on the fulfillmen of profit-oriented for the sake of survival of the company. foreign company such as pt. vale should no longer take advantages from its social activities (padgett & galan, 2010). considering the danger of capitalism values which have entered society life values through company’s system, then i tis important to conduct the deconstruction of csr concepts which is in accordance with country’s visions and values contain in the national principles (freeman & hasnaoui, 2011). new concept of csr need to include stakeholder approach and local wisdom values. the deconstruction conatining those values will resulted in the concept of csr which is fair and nurturing the society. hence, this principle is used to create new model and include the indigius community in the center so that they will no longer be marginlaises. it is in line iwth a research conducted by triyuwono (2016) who has decosntruceds csr values and included religious values (god and apostles) as the foundation and the aim of conducting csr. the implemantation of deconstruaction by triyuwono (2016) based on the facto n the indigeous society where the company manager also contributed in various activities related to religious event was still leaving conflicts. therefore, a depth study needs to be done with a new deconstruction in which there should be a value included in the implementation of csr. the value is local wisdome which becomes the philosophy of of luwu indigious society since its ancestor, “pattuppu ri ade’e pasanre ri sara’e”. it means that everything that will be conducted under payung ri luwu or luwu kingdom should be based on luwu’s traditions and religion. hence, the difference of this study comapred to the previous study is that the values of tradition/culture and religion cannot be separated from the implementation of csr. literature review and research focus stakeholder theory accommodates indigeous society as one of stakeholders who get the direct impact of company activities. this study is arranged in a framework which presents justice values and rights of indigeous society in the concept of company social responsibility. this framework will be adescription of research development stage until it becomes a concept. this concept strings a new concept which presents the rights of indigeous society. there is always a conflict between the company and the society rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 178 since the society considers that the company does not fulfil their rights suitably. on the other hand, the company will minimize its loss by creating real and social values, a business case can be handled with social strategy. social values through csr can be implementedin various business. mcwilliams and siegel (2001) state that the company should use csr not merely for reputaion improvement strategy, but also as part of giving the rights that should be dedicated to the indigeous society (carroll, 1994; garriga & mele, 2004; lepoutre & heene, 2006). the role of csr in forming social justice company strategy in improving reputation is the social responsibility of the company. surrounding communities and a better investor protection, higher level of democracy, more effective governent service, higher quality rules, pers freedom, and commitment for environment policy. being consistent with stakeholder approach, the company not only responsible to their stock holders, but they also need to consider the significance of other stakeholders who can influence of being influenced by organizational goals achievement (freeman, 1984). during the last decade, social responsibility has gained importatnt meaing in academic literature. the concept of csr has been studied tremendously during the last decades. however, both researchers and practitioners are still far from identifying the theoretical framework which is applied in general dan can be relied on to explain issues related to the activities of various comapnies. davis (1973), for example, defines csr as "the company's consideration from and respond to; issues beyond the requirements of economic, technical, and company legal boundaries to achieve social and environmental benefits along with the traditional economy". to study the "dark" side of csr, the researcher interviewed prof. iwan triyuwono who previously also deconstructed the concept of csr. according to triyuwono: "philosophically csr is now still a capitalist, secular because the company still prioritizes profit maximization, people and the planet that all three of them are still materialistic". according to the informant and some of his researches on the concept and implementation of csr, they are still contained with the values of capitalism. this has led to conflicts between indigenous society and corporate managers, because the values they hold are different. until now there are still frequent collisions. according to the company they have given a lot in the form of csr activities to the community, but the indigenous society feels that it is merely for the mask of the company because there are still society, like the dongi society, which is treated unfairly. triyuwon's research (2016) deconstructed the triple bottom line (tbl) more holistically with piety deconstruction, his research presented prophets and god as the main entities to be added to the tbl approach to pbl. deconstruction of csr is also intended to be able to accommodate stakeholders holistically not just stockholders (triyuwono, 2016). rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 179 through the more holistic approach of stakeholders, the researcher develops the approach so that the company performs its social responsibility not merely for accountability or corporate reputation, but also with the sincerity of giving without expecting anything so that it is released from capitalist shackles which is opposite from mutual respect and humanitarian nature of surrounding indigenous society or other stakeholders. researches over the past few years show that csr debate has shifted from passive compliance state which is based on the rule of law and public morals to compliance of proactive involvement with social issues. companies involved in social activities is simply as one of strategies as a social agent in the society (husted & allen, 2007; jamali & mirshak, 2007; margolis & walsh, 2009; mcwilliams, siegel & wright., 2006; smith, 2003; waddock & graves, 1997). although csr can be applied in various forms, sizes and business sectors, but in fact, the csr practices are dominated by large companies (hillary, 2000). mcwilliams and siegel (2001) argue that csr is defined as a social corporate action outside the company's interests and as required by law. in terms of its development, the theory of csr theory has been investigated by carroll (1994), and its approach by garriga & mele, 2004), and its terminology strategy by lepoutre and heene (2006). the series of previous research explain that the company has conducted csr program but the community has not get justice. therefore, the researcher raised a focus of research on the concept of csr in accordance with the heart of indigenous society to karunsi'e dongi in sorowako. this research focuses on answering research question: rq: how is the concept of csr able to accommodate the rights of indigenous society who is still marginalized? research method this study used qualitative methods with postmodernism paradigm by deconstructing the concept of csr which is still capitalism and developing a concept that is closer to the hearts of indigenous society so that the social investment conducted by the company presents forever in society even though the company has stopped operating. deconstruction used in this study was the deconstruction adopted from derrida steps as follows: the first step was transforming the concept with the law regulations, based on the existing reality. the second was accommodating the items of indigenous society's rights. third was exploring the assumptions of marginalized rights. fourth was assembling the linkage or sequence of reality. this step was used in deconstructing the model of social responsibility. fifth was creating a new model of fair social responsibility disclosure and accommodate the rights of indigenous society (al-fayyadl, 2005). piliang (2005:14) states that democracy can be formed in writing and difference, describing a world of signs and the world of texts released from various foundations of truth, in order to create textuality condition or rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 180 symbol which is dynamic or productive. in this case, local wisdom is not an opposition against national, but it works as an alternative; not a big countercurrent, but multiple channels; not a monolithic, egoistic, and microfascist movements such as regional autonomy in general, but fractal, which is concerned with the lines of relationships, networks, and synergies of small currents, to become a force conversation in national-scale. in addition, according to piliang (2005), for derrida, the concept of being and truth which become the foundation of every text, is now replaced by concepts of game, interpretation and pure sign, which is the sign without the foundation of truth, the moment of truth (transcendence) is now taken over by the moment of apparition (imanensi), the metaphysical world is taken over by the world of the text, the world of dogma is taken over by the world of free interpretation, which does not allow the moment of truth to find its place. the purpose of dismantling the foundation and the centers, as understood by derrida, is to create the opening moment or moment of openness that is an openness to all possible forms (images, texts, discourses) that during this time is unable to develop due to the foundational and centers restrains. the implication is that this study will fundamentally change the conventional view by reviving the local culture on the concept of csr. result and discussion haron, yahya, chambers, manasseh and ismail (2004) suggests that social disclosure can provide good information such as news about companies operating in harmony with the environment and society, employee training programs or waste management policies being carried out. social disclosure may also have negative information that provides information where the company's operations harm the environment, such as the inability to control or reduce pollution or the failure to solve social problems. one of the mine's inherent impacts is the health impact. figure 1 presented the type of diseases that are sufferd by many people in the mining area. . figure 1 kinds of diseases and the number of patients sorowako source: csr planning of pt.vale. 2011 rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 181 one of the above data is a real proof that indigenous society domiciled around mining companies are receiving enormous effects in terms of health, so being paid by anything is meaningless. social responsibility to the society and the environment becomes an issue that should be disclosed by the company in its sustainability report. social and environmental information reports have been developed in several concepts such as gray (2002: 687). the current nomenclature includes terms such as triple-bottom-line (elkington, 1997), corporate social responsibility (gray, owen & adams, 1996), social accounting (mathews, 1993), sustainable development (bebbington, 1997), mega accounting (mathews, 1997), and social and environmental accounting/accountability (gray, owen, & maunders, 1987; rahmawati & said, 2017). csr is considered a western phenomenon since research results have been concentrated mainly on studies in developed countries. there are some constraints faced by csr disclosure practices in developing countries where the institutions, standards and systems that support csd in developing countries are relatively weak (kemp, 2001). as an example of csr conducted by drinking water companies, aqua, by donating funds actually charged to consumers, actually positioning companies not as a party that runs csr but it only functions as a collector which then channel the funds back (mediator). chambers, chapple, moon, and sullivan (2003) show a number of arguments that could explain the low levels of csr in developing countries: csr is a function of economic wealth. civil society in developed countries stimulates csr by generating greater community demands and expectations of business responsibility. the western government is more advanced compared to developing countries and thus it encourages greater csr, although if it is explored further, the implementation of csr is still loaded with materialistic values, efficiency considerations that lead to the interests of capital owners only, so that it still contains capitalist values. besides that, the company performs csr is in fact because of considerations as an analytical tool related to the value of companies in the capital market, both in terms of profitability and visibility and reputation of the company. companies make profitability as a benchmark both in csr implementation and management decision making related to additional fund from capital market, book value, leverage, riskiness (measured by stock price volatility), company's assets' merit, capital expenditure, and whether the company operates in industry is sensitive to the environment or not (clarkson, 2008; cho & patten, 2007). bigger companies and more profitable companies have more resources to devote to csr disclosure. companies with high profits are more likely to attract public attention and regulation so that they are more likely to use csr disclosure to satisfy activists and regulators. companies that need to access the capital markets for additional funds are more likely to disclose csr information in order to eliminate apprehensions that there might be potential liabilities concerning to csr issues. in indonesia, the implementation and recognition from the company’s social and environmental reporting is relatively new and has become the most popular terms since the mid-1990s. corporate social responsibility and disclosure have been the subject of substantial academic accounting research. disclosure of csr can be defined as information that the company rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 182 discloses about the environmental impacts of company activities and company relationships with stakeholders (campbell 2004; gray, javad & sinclair, 2001). the profitability concept becomes the final goal of the capitalist profit (profit) is the excess revenue over the related expenses for activities over a period of time. terms with the same meaning include 'income', 'earning', and 'margin'. lord keynes said that 'profit is the engine that drives the business enterprise'. every business must earn enough profit to survive and grow over a long period of time. however, the term 'profitability' is not synonymous with the term 'efficiency'. profitability is an efficiency index and is considered a measurement of efficiency and management guidance for greater efficiency. although profitability is an important benchmark for measuring efficiency, the level of profitability can not be taken as the ultimate proof of efficiency. the company considers profit and efficiency a lot in conducting csr (gibson, 1998. brigham, gapenski and ehrhardt (1999) assumes that profitability is a net result of various managerial policies and decisions, and the level of profitability is the result of net operations of securities a combination of liquidity, asset management and debt management greuning (2005) considers that profitability indicators generally mean "indications" about how the company's profit margins associated with sales, average capital and own equity capital. collase (2009) assumes that the company’s profitability is an attitude to get results as a consequence of its effort.this aspect is often expressed with the help of the ratio between this result and sales (or production). stefea (2002) considers that profitability is a "competence of profitable activity to generate higher revenues from expenses. the profitability indicator is known as the profitability ratio or the accumulated margin”. companies that invest in csr activities aim to maximize their reputation without disclosing the information of the activity (see: hasseldine, salama & toms, 2005; toms, 2002). although it seems a little utilitarian and strategic, it is generally accepted that the companines engaged in csr activities usually involve disclosure related information because of their contribution to financial performance (orlitzky, schmidt & rynes, 2003; barnett, 2007) or market value (mackey, mackey & barney, 2007). this is because corporate social responsibility disclosure (csrd) is helpful to assess the appropriateness between social values implied by csr activities and social norms of legitimacy (dowling & pfeffer, 1975). belkaoui and karpik (1989), argue that the underlying cause of a positive relationship between social disclosure policy and profitability is management knowledge. they argue that managers who have the knowledge to make their company profitable also have the knowledge and understanding of social responsibility. this might explain the higher levels of csr disclosure by profitable companies. giner (1997) argues that managers of profitable company are more likely to provide more voluntary csr disclosures in annual reports to support their own current continuing positions and to improve current and future compensation rates. rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 183 according to stakeholder theory, the economic performance of a company influences management decisions to engage in corporate social or environmental reporting or disclosure. when companies do not perform well, economic demands are more prioritized over social and environmental responsibility expenditures. in addition, these kinds of companies tend to lack of financial ability to disclose more information to meet the needs of various corporate stakeholders (ferreira, branco & moreira, 2012). stakeholder theory postulates a positive relationship between economic performance and the level of decisions by company to engage in csr reporting. profitable companies are more likely to reveal more information to filter themselves out of less profitable companies (busch & hoffmann, 2011). previous empirical researches on the correlation between corporate environmental performance and profitability have reported mixed results (freedman & jaggi, 1994). some attempt to examine the implications of profitability on environmental issues; other examine the long-term relationship between social performance and the company's environment and company performance, using percentage changes in three pollution stages and various accounting ratios as an empirical proxy for environmental and corporate performance (freedman & jaggi, 1994). an inverse relationship between environmental and corporate performance is in accordance with the orthodoxy associated with traditional economic philosophy that describes this relationship as an exchange between company profitability and works on environmental responsibility (freeman, 1984). company visibility concept as a “mask” for capitalists company visibility refers to how responsible behavior is perceived by the community from stakeholders. fombrun and shanley (2000), describes the fluctuative value of company frauds in reputation/visibility as a reputation capital, which increases risks every day when the company is in interaction with stakeholders, whether it is a customer buying a product or an investor buying a stock. expected return are not delivered, the impairment of companies’ reputation manifest themselves in forms of revenue, the decreasing ability to attract financial capital and reducing attractiveness to current time and potential employees (fombrun & shanley., 2000). in other words, if a company loses stakeholder’s trust or company’s visibility in public, it will be ruined. according to griffin (2008) social responsibility is one of the main components of corporate visibility management together with crisis and reputation management. this view is supported by hawkins (2006), who argues that 'the overall goal of csr is to build a more sustainable approach into the company's operating ethos and to promote this policy to attract customers and consumers using theoretical value for csr linkage and corporate visibility, when corporate actions are assessed by various stakeholder groups, reputations are built according to their respective value priorities and the motives are assumed by the company. rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 184 there are two types of visibility in which organizations can vary, each has different implications for the organization's response to institutional pressure. in doing so, it needs to identify the conditions where those various forms of visibility meet that pressure. there are two types of visibility in which organizations can vary, in which each has different implications for organizational responses towards institutional pressure. a company with greater generic visibility has organizational characteristics such as high reputation, status, and prominence that makes the company more widely known in the community. in contrast, specific domain visibility arises from specific organizational characteristics (eg, employment relations or environmental impacts) that can expose companiess to a greater degree of institutional pressure associated with specific domains, such as those provided by non-governmental organizations (ngos) and activists. stakeholder’s controls on particular domains become more possible, companiess with greater generic visibility increasingly pay more attention to their vulnerability to sanctions, making compliance more possible. thus, the greater the level of supervision to attend a particular domain, the less the difference will be occured to which generic and domain-specific visibility leads to compliance. to understand how institutional pressures of corporate influence are visible, we deviate from previous research that has focused on how company characteristics (such as size, performance, and reputation) affect visibility effects. as stakeholder oversight on specific domains becomes more possible, companiess with greater generic visibility will pay more attention to their vulnerability to sanctions, making compliance more possible. many studies show that it is difficult for companies that invest in csr activities to maximize their reputation without revealing the activity's information (toms, 2002). although it seems a little utilitarian and strategic, it is generally accepted that companiess engaged in csr activities usually involve disclosure related information because of their contribution to financial performance (orlitzky, schmidt & rynes, 2003; barnett, 2007) or market value (mackey, mackey & barney, 2007). this is because csrd is helpful to assess the suitability between implied social values by csr activities and social norms of legitimacy (dowling & pfeffer, 1975). according to stakeholder theory, the economic performance of a company influences management decisions to engage in company social or environmental reporting or disclosure. when companies do not perform well, economic demands take precedence over social and environmental responsibility expenditures. in addition, such companiess tend to lack the financial ability to disclose more information to meet the needs of various corporate stakeholders (ferreira, branco & moreira, 2012). stakeholder theory postulates a positive relationship between economic performance and the level of decisions by companiess to engage in csr reporting. profitable companies are more likely to reveal more information to filter themselves out of less profitable companies (busch & hoffmann, 2011). previous empirical research on the relationship between corporate environmental performance and profitability has reported mixed results (freedman & jaggi, 1994). some attempt to examine the implications of rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 185 profitability on environmental issues; other examine the long-term relationship between social performance and the company's environment and company performance, using percentage changes in three pollution stages and various accounting ratios as an empirical proxy for environmental and corporate performance (freedman & jaggi, 1994). an inverse relationship between environmental and corporate performance is in accordance with the orthodoxy associated with traditional economic thinking that describes this relationship as an exchange between corporate profitability and working on environmental responsibility (freeman, 1984). highly profitable companies will increase their disclosure levels, in order to reduce agency costs in general, to avoid giving bad signs to the market and to justify profits in order to avoid political costs (giner, 1997). many studies have confirmed the positive effects of variables on public disclosure (eg: haniffa & cooke, 2005; naser & hassan, 2013; thompson & zakaria, 2004). moreover, from the perspective of corporate social disclosure, he argues that companies with good economic performance can dedicate more funds to social matters and reveal more about them. roberts (1992) uses this argument to confirm the effect of profitability on disclosure. in addition, he empirically states that companies that take more social action are the ones that are more profitable. as a result, high profitable companies are also expected to disclose more information about human resources. previous research has documented a positive correlation between economic profitability and disclosure. profitability gives company directors the freedom and flexibility to implement more responsible social programs. the most empirical studies have found the correlation between csr disclosure and corporate profitability to be unconvincing at best. some investigations found no connection (eg: hackston & milne, 1996; richardson & welker, 2001). this pattern, however, seems unlikely to be confirmed for islamic countries, probably because of different accounting cultures (suwaidan, al-omari & hadad, 2004). the concept of equity capital as reasons for efficiency and reduced csr funding the cost of the company's equity capital is motivated by the following considerations: first, the cost of equity capital is the internal rate of return (or the discount rate) that the market applies to the company's future cash flows to determine its current market value. in other words, it is the required level of return given the market perception of the company's riskiness. if csr is perceived to affect the riskiness of an enterprise, then socially responsible companies should benefit from lower equity financing costs. second, an effective corporate governance, and in certain strict disclosure standards, lowers the cost of equity capital through decreasing the problem of institutional asymmetry and information (botosan, 1997; hail & leuz, 2006; chen, chen & wei, 2009). tobin q is the ratio of the company's market value to equity. a company with a high dividend ratio and a low tobin q ratio indicates that it does not have much opportunity to invest and develop again, which means the company does not need much funding (lamont, polk & saa-requejo, 2001). rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 186 the low market for book ratios shows that market value is lower than the book value of a company. if the market value is higher than the book value, the value of the company's shares will be undervalued. under these undervalued conditions, many investors usually tend to buy companies’ stock (sukamulja, 2005). sofyaningsih (2011), states that the implementation of investment decisions is strongly influenced by the availability of corporate funds that can come from internal and external funding. companies experiencing capital constraints tend to lose investment opportunities in strategic activities (hubbard, 1998; campello, graham & harvey, 2010), including inventory investments (carpenter, fazzari & petersen, 1998), and investments in research and development activities (himmelberg and petersan, 1994; hall and lerner, 2010). from the comments about the relation of capital constraints to investment capability, it can be concluded that capital constraints can reduce and even eliminate opportunities for investment. companies with better costs show lower csr scores than on capital. today, the awareness of corporate social responsibility in recent years has grown. companies have been urged to accept responsibility for business effects that impact society. this responsibility is not limited to shareholders and creditors but also to public in general and other stakeholders. although many studies have investigated the correlation between csr and value creation, some have focused on the important role of csr in creating benefits for companies (eg: derwall & verwijmeren, 2007; goss & roberts, 2011; chava, 2010). there are several reasons why investors will pay attention to the company's csr strategy. first, corporate activities that can affect long-term financial performance with the creation of potential value (ioannou & serafeim, 2011; groysberg, healy, nohria, & serafeim, 2011; previts & bricker, 1994). in addition, more investors are using csr information as an important criterion for their investment decisions, what is now known as "investment of social responsibility". furthermore, companiess with better csr performance are more likely to disclose their csr activities to the market for their long-term focus signal and differentiate themselves (spence, 1973; benabou & tirole, 2010) (dhaliwal, li, tsang, & yang, 2011). in turn, csr activities report is: (a) improving transparency around the social and environmental impacts of companies, and their governance structures and (b) able to change internal management practices by creating incentives for companies to manage their relationships with key stakeholders such as employees, investors, customers, suppliers, regulators, and civil society better (ioannou & serafeim, 2011). deconstruction the concept of csr that is deconstructed is a concept that still uses triple bottom line (tbl) or 3p (people, planet and profit) concept introduced by john elkington in 1988. this concept has prioritized the interests of shareholders (stockholders). the evolution of shareholder to stakeholdercentered according to droguett is a capitalism-evolved style and they based on the industrial world (droguett, 2015). the concept of elkington (1988) is illustrated in figure 2. rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 187 figure 2 csr concept according to elkington (1988) elkington's (1988) model is considered still loaded with the value of materialism (capitalism) with the main goal is profit maximization to the shareholders. therefore, the model was deconstructed by triyuwono added two very important things included in the concept, they are prophet and god as the real owner (triyuwono, 2016). triyuwono's deconstruction model is described in figure 3. furthermore, the model introduced by triyuwono which included the prophet and god showed that it did not fade the conflicts that occurred between the company with the local indigenous peoples or mining areas. having examined from the existing phenomena, indigenous peoples have lost the freedom to manage forests, paddy fields, fields that have become mining concessions that make them marginalized from in terms of the economic, social and cultural side. the entity that is damaged and must be accounted for is adat (ade'). according to zabados (2011) that the concept of csr is still ambiguous among profit seeking and pro social. based on that fact, the researcher deconstructed triyuwono model by adding ade '(local wisdom) and eliminates profit into new csr concept, it is also in line with padgett (2000) that companies should no longer seek profit in their social activities. the new model formulated by researchers is presented in figure 4. companies in managing the profit, planet and people must not contradict with the ade 'and sara' that are particularly for the welfare of the earth as a form of worship to allah and his prophets. this is in accordance with the constitution exists in kedatuan luwu pattuppu ri ade'e pasanre ri sara'e. the constitution of luwu unity is "pattuppu ri ade'e pasanre ri sara'e”, from the religious side triyuwono (2016) has deconstructed from the 'sara' side or religion so as to include god and prophet as a concept in csr. with the nomenclature and study of symbols and philosophy in luwu unity, the deconstruction with derrida's view is that indigenous peoples are not figure 3 csr deconstruction accroding to triyuwono (2016) people planet profit csr people planet profit csr prophet god rahmawati / deconstructing the concept of corporate social responsibility journal of accounting and investment, july 2018 | 188 figure 4 the deconstruction model of csr and local wisdom by the researcher marginalized. thus ade '(custom) and sara should be included as part of the csr concept. this is a result of the study that it turns out that between indigenous peoples and companies conflict is not due to the material provided by the company but the ways of implementing csr that are not in accordance with their cultural values. (anaada, 2013; bao, 2013). conclusion the purpose of this study is to find the concept of csr that is able to accommodate the rights of indigenous society who are still marginalized. the concept of csr has given a better idea of conflicting views on corporate social responsibility. some of the reasons companies do social responsibility just as a 'mask' just because considering the profit factor of the shareholders who are the main reasons for them to operate. reputation or visibility is still the reason they conduct csr. whereas business organizations should operate with the consent of society to serve constructively the need to achieve community satisfaction. csr programs conducted by companies aiming at reputation for the capitalists are contradict with the culture and cultural values embedded in the luwu indigenous society, thus being deconstructed using the values and meanings contained in (umbrella and pakka) with the meaning of sheltering, maintaining balance and fairness. the value should be the basis for the implementation of csr rather than consideration of material value. references al-fayyadl, m. 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(2011). integrating csr initiatives in business: an organizing framework. journal of business ethics, 101(1), 7592. doi: 10.1007/s10551-010-0710-z key: cord-0043718-fucyt0zc authors: yoshikawa, toru; chua, gavin title: covid-19 and japanese shareholder activism: brief respite for japan’s self-healing concrete date: 2020-05-22 journal: asian bus manage doi: 10.1057/s41291-020-00122-2 sha: 38085ecee4b527568cf777405e3f2b9eb9f2d651 doc_id: 43718 cord_uid: fucyt0zc extrapolating from modern international understanding of corporate japan’s distinct form of managerial capitalism, we elaborate on the growing momentum of shareholder activism in japan leading up to the covid-19 health crisis, so as to inform the subsequent discussion on the relevant primary considerations that belie the future direction of shareholder activism in japan post-covid-19. on an initial logical extrapolation, it appears probable that covid-19 could mark the peak of japanese activism. however, it is crucial to acknowledge that the success of japan’s managerial capitalism have also declined, which poses a question on to which direction japanese corporate governance may be shifting. finally, we point out how corporate japan’s impeding market developments will provide a useful case-study for global financial discourse. the covid-19 health crisis has catalyzed a demand-side, real economy-led economic downturn, throwing financial markets around the world into a period of considerable uncertainty and volatility. equity capital markets are not exempt, and shareholder activists' ability to shrewdly navigate the turbulent storm will be tested. we canvas the corporate terrain leading up to the covid-19 health crisis, and then present some considerations from both the outside investor's perspective and the corporate insider's perspective. finally, we discuss a possible direction of shareholder activism in japan and the future japanese market-sensitivity to international corporate governance norms. prior to covid-19, there was an almost unanimous acknowledgement of the tremendous momentum behind shareholder activism (both confrontational and quiet), as an expression of shareholder primacy, in japan (buchanan et al. 2012) . this is unsurprising given the abundance of public companies with solid performance, undervalued stock prices, excess cash reserves, vulnerable capital policies and often insulated management. in 2019, japan was the most-targeted non-us jurisdiction, with local records of 19 activist campaigns, $4.5 billion in capital deployed, 58 public companies targeted, 22 shareholder demands for board representation and 14 proxy fights (activist insight 2020). as observed by many researchers (e.g., ahmadjian and robins 2005; yoshikawa and mcguire 2008) , incremental convergence between japan's insider or stakeholder-oriented corporate governance system and anglo-american shareholder-centric model had been occurring slowly but surely, partially catalyzed by the bubble economy collapse and the globalization of capital markets. per the reflexive nature of market development, the growing success of early shareholder activists, coupled with attendant legal and regulatory developments, laid the groundwork for the current boom in japanese shareholder activism, prominently led by paul singer's elliott management, daniel loeb's third point management and yoshiaki murakamirelated parties. the movement was further buttressed by prime minister shinzo abe's corporate governance reform initiatives through the stewardship code and corporate governance code. nonetheless, certain crucial structural impediments remained, pushing back against complete convergence. first, the complex corporate governance situation stemming from japanese firms' unique capital structures must be appreciated. a byproduct of its war-era, bankbased economy, cross-shareholdings among affiliated firms meant that a portion of a public company's shares would be held by the company's banks, customers, suppliers, and other friendly partners. this leads to a structural conflict of interest, since such stable shareholders wearing two hats would often prioritize ongoing business relationships and stable business ties over high investment returns, decreasing pressure on firm's profit performance and cash returns (via dividends or share buybacks) and reinforcing managerial independence (yoshikawa and mcguire 2008) . second, as discussed by many observers (e.g., ahmadjian and robins 2005) , group-focused loyalties and identities persist in corporate japan's mental universe, leading to a stakeholder-oriented model. though cracks had begun to emerge with the increasing acceptance of shareholder value maximization rhetoric, certain setbacks to the activist momentum (e.g., murakami's 2006 arrest for insider trading) potentially offered a rare glimpse into japan, inc.'s closing ranks. this cultural bias has translated into a practical constrain on the usual activist strategies seen in more divisive equity capital markets like the us. covid-19 and japanese shareholder activism: brief respite… thus, pre-covid-19, corporate japan was undergoing a transitionary period that was potentially a crucial determinant of japan's future corporate governance norms. the covid-19 health crisis could not have come at a worse time. deep-rooted cultural change requires time for truly lasting cracks to cement, and this pandemic-catalyzed economic downturn looks to stop the winds in the activists' sails. momentum, once lost, can be hard to regain. no doubt, for certain ongoing high-stake corporate tussles (e.g., softbank and elliott management), the concurrent decline in real economy performance and liquidity will bring tensions to a head. but for the vast majority of activist actions, the heightened volatility and economic uncertainty will pose drastic challenges (gottfried and donahue 2020), notwithstanding increased opportunities from lowered valuations (topix 500 plunged 31% from 52-week highs, similar to s&p 500's 35% plunge from 52-week highs) and potential target firm vulnerability due to relatively weaker shareholder rights plans (koh et al. 2019) . first, the inherent nature of this real economy-led economic downturn means that firm preservation, not shareholder value maximization (since cash distributions adversely impact a firm's liquidity), will be at the forefront of companies' peripheries. japan's unique capital structure of cross-shareholdings and stable shareholdings will only exacerbate such concerns, since a proportion of the listed company's shareholders will have the exact same skin in the game. therefore, such conflicted shareholders may lend immediate managerial support now, in hopes that it may lead to reciprocal support. as such, shareholder activists may soon find that the support they can count on (e.g., domestic institutions) in proxy fights are now diminished during this period, as management distraction concerns and further instability exacerbation outweigh any potential benefits. second, on the ideological front, usual activists' inefficiency arguments against cash-hoarders during prosperous times will now be poignantly countered with the raw experience of resiliency during these turbulent times (lewis 2020). on a micro-scale, there is no doubt that covid-19 has the real potential to represent the inflection point for shareholder activism in japan, as market mood turns against corporate outsiders. but whether this subsequently manifests in reality depends much on the surrounding circumstances that prevail long past covid-19. first, given the fact that the japanese market has long matured, and growth opportunities are increasingly scarce, the viability and sustainability of japan's managerial capitalism may simply no longer hold true. capital inefficiency due to managerial preference to lock in capital within the firm will generate ever-increasing agency costs. second, the post-war-era agency cost hedges no longer operate to the same extent. for example, the economic incentive systems (lifetime employment, seniority-based wages) designed to align managerial interests within the company have eroded over time (yoshikawa and mcguire 2008) , coupled with ever-increasing reliance on temporary workers, as a creative adaptation of japan's existing employment institutions, to cope with greater market pressures. thus, the short-term inefficiencies of managerial capitalism may no longer produce long-term economic growth (to the same extent) given the modern circumstances of japan's economy. on a macro-scale, the corporate discussions to follow provide an interesting casestudy for global discourse. the current hot potato in the financial realm surrounds the proper primary purpose of a company: should it be a purely profit-seeking private entity or should it resemble quasi-public entities focused on broader stakeholder considerations and thus indirectly, economic growth? the covid-19 aftermath will produce unique invaluable research domain to better discern the resiliency of japan's stakeholder-model economy (e.g., the number of japanese corporate insolvencies vis-àvis the u.s.) and thus contribute to discussions on comparative corporate governance. on a glass half-full approach, one could even posit that the timing of this black swan event could not be better, as the arguments for both potential points on the pareto frontier can now be discussed adequately and frankly before significant transitionary costs are incurred as japan (and many other economies) may be further shifting to a marketbased, shareholder-oriented model. after all, there is no universal method for economic efficiency, and much stems from strategies tailored to a countries' current comparative institutional advantages. activist insight. 2020. the activist investing annual review a clash of capitalism: foreign shareholders and corporate restructuring in 1990s japan hedge fund activism in japan: the limits of shareholder primacy harvard law school forum on corporate governance land of the falling 'poison' pill: understanding defensive measures in japan on their own terms japan's corporate cash-hoarders have moment in the sun. financial times change and continuity in japanese corporate governance microsoft word 7. exporting eu liberalism eastwards by lynn tesser epiphanyepiphanyepiphanyepiphany journal of the faculty of arts and social sciences international university of sarajevo issn 1840-3719 / no. 2 spring 2009 ©2009, international university of sarajevo, faculty of arts and social sciences. all rights reserved. exporting eu liberalism eastwards lynn tesser international university of sarajevo a central ideological justification for central and east european (cee) countries joining key international institutions lies in what aleksander smolar and magdalena potocka named the last great myth of 1989: the return to europe (smolar and potocka 12). yet, the very idea of europe is fraught with contradiction and complexity for having represented diverse things over the course of several centuries – from christendom to the balance of power system. nevertheless, western europe acquired a monopoly on the term during the cold war, limiting the ‘europe’ of ‘return to europe’ fame and fortune to its positive characteristics: wealth, democracy, market economies, human rights, and civilization. what the ‘return to europe’ as an ideology ultimately means is the re-unification of the two formerly separated parts of geographical europe, with the drab, less well off, and more traditional ‘east’ mirroring the sparkling, rich, and modern ‘west.’ at the immediate end of the cold war, the return trip meant first and foremost re-establishing civil society to ensure individual and societal freedoms. the emphasis on civil society was a legacy of communism, a time when the formal realm of politics was not only out of reach for most, but taken to be inherently corrupt. the idea of forging a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism also gained ground to avoid the empty consumerism of the former and the coerciveness of the latter. the second path towards europe, one that would gain in prominence as indigenous civil society and third way ideologies faded, was through joining all key pan-european and international organizations: the osce, oecd, nato, eu, and exporting eu liberalism eastwards 121 the council of europe (coe).1 among these, the eu stands out for having the most extensive demands for reform, namely the requirement that incoming states adopt the acquis communitaire. along with the idea of returning to europe, ‘democracy and markets’ rose in importance as ideological staples of cee’s transformation. the emphasis on markets and democracy had both domestic and international catalysts. domestically, both were taken to be the sources of west european peace and prosperity, an assumption that gave these ideas the shiny patina lost decades ago in the west. internationally, democracy and markets were celebrated globally after the end of the cold war. their promotion was not limited to europe, but extended also to u.s. foreign policy. yet, the difference between the ‘markets’ stressed by the neoliberal washington consensus and those stressed by brussels was indeed stark. while the former wanted states excused from the process of creating markets, the latter preferred an institutional makeover for states to create a new framework within which to embed emerging markets (bruszt 128). to be sure, the rise of democracy (and democratization) in cee has attracted far greater scholarly attention than liberalism. in 1989, the central question was how to develop democracy and capitalism simultaneously with international institutions understood as a way to further consolidate democracy and markets already created by domestic forces. later, one group of scholars began to emphasize the influence of institutions and consequently questioned whether the nature of the integration process (particularly via the adoption of the eu’s aquis) might lead to the unfortunate export of the eu’s infamous ‘democratic deficit’ to cee (holmes, grabbe, grzymala-busse and innes). other scholars predicted that the eu accession process would help create a group of ‘dependant democracies’ in place of mature eu member states (jacoby). 1 certainly, emphasis on creating civil society has continued through the involvement of international institutions. lynn tesser 122 the few existing studies on liberalism, on the other hand, focus on the domestic determinants of liberalism with some attention given to international financial institutions’ influence in laying the ground for market economies (szacki, suda and musil, frankel paul et al). this article will illustrate that there is much more to liberalism in the postcommunist context than has been acknowledged. a sizeable effort has indeed emerged to transplant a relatively coherent liberal ideology to the region, one exported not merely through the conditionality of international financial institutions, but also through the conditionality and socialization of organizations like coe, oecd, nato, osce, and eu. socialization and membership conditionality have been the two methods of bringing eu liberalism to central and east european countries (kelly 2004 19). used to the greatest extent by the osce which admitted most cees relatively quickly after 1989 and several countries during the cold war, normative pressure or socialization involves efforts to get cee elites to change policy in line with postcold war norms without making membership conditional on doing so. beyond creating the post of the osce high commissioner on national minorities (osce hcnm) in december 1992 as a conflict prevention measure, one that helped raise the organization’s profile once the eu began to consult the osce hcnm on a regular basis, the osce used other means to influence minority policy that fit within the rubric of normative pressure: (1) the establishment of field offices (or missions) within countries thought to have the potential for conflict to monitor treatment of minorities and to interact regularly with officials, (2) short-term visits by experts and/or elites from other osce member states to determine the extent to which these countries adopted policies in line with osce guidelines (kelley 2004 17) (3) declarations and official statements evaluating current policies that might also indicate recommendations for future changes as well as the formal statement of norms in official documents such as the copenhagen document or the framework convention, and (4) dispatching teams of legal experts to provide advice during the exporting eu liberalism eastwards 123 policy-making process (kelley 2002 14). particularly unique to the osce’s methods has been the establishment of missions that bring a small number of people in to work on a daily basis with local officials on a variety of issues - not merely concerning human and minority rights, but also on topics such as strengthening independent judiciaries, the rule of law, and independent media. conditionality, on the other hand, has been used more by the coe, especially by the eu, and occasionally by nato - though the coe also used normative pressure to coax cees to adopt policies in line with post-cold war norms. conditionality creates greater incentives to change given linkages to membership in europe’s most prominent international institutions. eu conditionality has involved: (1) promises of aid and trade preferences, (2) monitoring and benchmarking (i.e. the submission of yearly progress reports that rank applicants’ success in meeting membership requirements, other reports and decisions made at meetings requiring specific action by candidates, evaluations prior to formal accession negotiations to identify discrepancies between eu and national law), (3) accession negotiations that involved deliberations over 31 chapters as well as ongoing benchmarking and monitoring (kelley 2002 14) and (4) declarations from the presidency and resolutions from the european parliament along with other official declarations and demarches urging reform (kelley 2004 19). my use of the term ‘conditionality’ generally refers to either nato and especially to eu membership conditionality. eu liberalism as a ‘stealth ideology’ eu liberalism has three components: (1) the ‘standard’ liberal emphasis on individual rights, the rule of law, constitutional democracy, freedom, and market economics, (2) a rather unconventional support for minority rights (by contemporary norms), and specifically concerning the eu (3) a seemingly schizophrenic emphasis on economic integration that involves, first bringing down borders for the free movement of people, goods, capital, and services between lynn tesser 124 member states, and second, market regulation to diminish the social downsides of capitalism. while many would question whether minority protections are indeed ‘liberal,’ they are nevertheless included for two reasons: (1) post-cold war minority rights are heavily indebted to individualistic cold war human rights doctrine, and (2) some liberals supported the idea of minority rights prior to the second world war. the work of will kymlicka has done much to change how minority rights are conceptualized by claiming that formally unilingual and seemingly liberal countries such as the u.s. are inherently assimilationist. clearly, eu liberalism is much more than mere ‘markets.’ this may be why it is something of a ‘stealth ideology’ – a deeply-transforming politico-economic program that has not yet been fully represented in political discourse or considered by scholars. it is strikingly divorced from the locally grown notions of civil society and the ‘third way’ from 1989, which raises the question of whether it can be successfully incorporated. concerning the two contradictory elements in eu liberalism’s third distinguishing feature, liesbet hooghe and gary marks have referred to each as ‘projects’ forming the basis of official eu discussion concerning the organization’s future trajectory since the 1980s. first is the ‘neoliberal project’ spurring competition between governments to create the most attractive conditions for firms and investment – thus, in a sense, getting states ‘out of markets’ way (or at least out of firms’ way). second is the ‘project for regulated capitalism’ that increases eu regulation over the single market for the purpose of mitigating capitalism’s negative social outcomes. the pursuit of these projects, in effect, exchanges national governments’ control over their individual domestic markets for eu regulation over the enlarged market. some would argue that doing so ultimately increases domestic governments’ control in the first place through allowing regular and legitimate involvement in their neighbors’ domestic affairs (moravscik 485-6). while both sit uneasily together, these two projects indeed reflect the contradiction in liberalisms mixing a high regard for ‘negative liberties’ - rights that keep exporting eu liberalism eastwards 125 governments and others from coercively interfering in individuals’ lives – with varying degrees of support for ‘positive liberties’ – state entitlements aimed at increasing equality of opportunity. mark pollack rightly notes that the neoliberal project has had greater emphasis as primary eu treaties have made the creation of the single market a high priority even while also mandating its regulation (pollack 268). eu liberalism is an ideology that has essentially developed outside of cee and has at least two primary sources: (1) the effort to create a harmonized european market among rich, highly developed west european economies, and (2) west european concerns about post-cold war security that sparked the development of the post-cold war minority rights regime exclusively for cee states. the requirement that cee economies adopt single market policies and the post-cold war minority rights regime then leads to the question of what happens when, in jerzy szacki’s words, such ideas “are transported to entirely different conditions from those in which they originated” (szacki 12). ironically, eu liberalism is the polar opposite of the ideology orienting the drive to create ethnically homogenous states during and after the second world war, an ideology strongly favoring state support for particular nationalities. while political liberalism may indeed be less appealing for state-possessing majority nationalities as it fractures majority rule, more problematic for the region are the implications of eu liberalism’s export: (1) a sizeable shift away from official state support for particular nationalities stemming both from the minority rights regime and anti-discrimination principles embedded in the four single market freedoms (free movement of people, goods, capital, and services), and (2) the frequent disjuncture between rhetoric and reality in regard to anti-discrimination principles, one that can diminish the credibility of liberal values. for example, western europe is not required to adhere to the postcold war minority protection regime, and while cee has been brought into the eu’s market regulation scheme, older member states have been keener to protect lynn tesser 126 sensitive industries there than to diminish the social and economic dislocations of capitalism. considering western europe’s post-second world war ‘velvet revolution,’ mark lilla reminds us that this half of the continent only grudgingly accepted liberalism over the course of decades, an acceptance that was anything but preordained, and only likely condoned because of economic growth and adequate social-welfare policy’ (lilla 133). as the west european precedent suggests, economic growth and social welfare were key to the acceptance of liberal values. a great deal of hope in cee rests on the eu to deliver an increased standard of living and overall economic development in cee. yet, there has neither been an emphasis on social protection in exporting eu liberalism nor has the region ever come close to west european levels of development historically – with the exception of the czech lands and hungary. david good’s comparative analysis of cee countries’ historical economic growth, after all, indicates that cee’s position relative to other european states from 1870 to 1989 remained relatively unchanged (good 50). when combined with eu liberalism’s illiberal export, such conditions do not bode well for liberalism’s future in much of the region. the illiberal rise of eu liberalism without a doubt, many cee citizens desired political and economic change along liberal lines after 1989 including: (1) the creation of pluralist party systems; (2) the recognition of human rights in order to ensure basic individual freedoms; and (3) the creation of market economies. domestic support for some of the ‘standard liberal’ elements in eu liberalism no doubt existed. less popular, however, was the idea of minority rights as well as of substantially reducing state control over capital markets and especially land markets in favor of foreign investment. rogers brubaker, katherine verdery, and others have shown why national majorities did not embrace minority rights after the end of the cold war, all exporting eu liberalism eastwards 127 of which used nationalism as a way to establish their respective states’ de facto independence. retaining state control over land and capital flows runs along the same lines to protect ‘national’ interests. the emergence of eu liberalism began with various aid programs and institutions: the creation of the european bank for reconstruction and development (ebrd), imf aid, and a new program called poland and hungary: assistance for restructuring their economy (phare). eu member states created the ebrd in 1990 to provide aid to cee in the form of technical assistance, policy advice, security offerings, and equity investment. the conditions of its receipt emphasized political over economic reform: respect for basic human rights, acceptance of a multiparty system, respect for the rule of law, free but secret elections, and finally policies laying the groundwork for market economies. imf conditionality was more expressly economic with the receipt of financial assistance conditional on the country’s performance and adherence to a previouslyagreed upon timetable of reforms comprising a market-creating program. though varying for each cee country, the primary elements of mandated reforms included: privatization, substantial trade liberalization, restrictive credit and monetary policies, rapid and almost complete price liberalization, the reform of banking and financial systems, tight fiscal discipline (including near total elimination of price subsidies), and changes in incomes policies (senior nello 84-5). given that the early postcommunist governments had a stronger preference for neoliberal economic reform (as the opposite of and seemingly necessary antidote to communist economics), the imf program met with approval. though the effects of markets would soon lead to economic and social dislocation, at least at the outset the ebrd and imf-driven reforms had social support. finally, phare became the primary aid program for cee. it was originally aimed at providing non-returnable financial assistance to poland and hungary for the express purpose of helping these countries go from planned to market lynn tesser 128 economies and was quickly expanded to encompass all cee states.2 application to phare had conditions similar to the ebrd: the establishment of a multiparty political system, respect for human rights, the organization of free elections, and the creation of market economies (maresceau 12). promoting minority rights divergence between cee desires and international institutions’ conditionality began, however, with the emphasis on minority rights. while liberals and others in cee countries supported the idea of providing minorities with basic human rights, the emphasis on minority protection came more from west european states noting, first, that ethnic conflict over minorities was a key security threat after the erosion of the u.s.s.r.’s control over cee, and second, that such conflict could potentially destabilize western europe through the westward movement of refugees and immigrants. heather grabbe has noted, in fact, that unrestricted immigration from eastern countries essentially replaced the threat of a soviet invasion as western europe’s key security concern, at least with respect to the east (grabbe 2000 520). it was thus of paramount importance, from the perspective of these countries, to provide incentives to encourage cee minorities to stay put – though much less so for state-possessing nationalities. the primary international organizations working on the minority rights issue were the osce and the coe. the osce’s 1990 paris summit demonstrated clear commitment to liberal values in committing member states to the following actions: to hold free and fair elections, to respect the rule of law, to uphold the rights of national minorities, to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, and to promote free markets (weitz 1992). likewise, the coe required prospective member states to “accept the principles of the rule of law and of the enjoyment of all 2 after a july 1989 meeting of the g-7, the european commission was given the task of coordinating the phare program. exporting eu liberalism eastwards 129 persons within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms.”3 while the osce played a greater role in developing the contemporary minority rights regime, the coe put more effort into developing uniform criteria and has had more leverage on cee states concerning its implementation. not only did several cee countries join the osce long before 1989 (bulgaria, romania, and poland joined in 1973), but the osce’s power to realize the regime in cee was mitigated by its status as a traveling conference. it only began to metamorphasize into an international organization after rising to the challenges of the immediate post-cold war era. by the mid-1990s, the osce and the coe had developed a distinct minority rights regime, one that centered around three standard-setting documents: the osce’s 1990 copenhagen document, the osce’s 1991 geneva report, and the council of europe’s 1995 framework convention for the protection of national minorities. defined as “individuals belonging to national minorities,” the benefactors of new european norms would have rights to: define their identity, have full access to human rights accorded to all, be equal before the law and thus free from state-sponsored discrimination, and to maintain and develop their own culture. the regime that emerged was essentially the product of two radically opposed views on minority protections. on the one hand, statist-oriented countries such as greece, france, bulgaria, romania, and slovakia demanded that these rights be framed in individualistic human rights language. on the other hand, countries with significant numbers of ‘kin’ abroad such as hungary and germany promoted more extensive protections to discourage those identifying themselves as hungarians and germans from moving to their respective ‘mother’ states. for hungary in particular, it was a matter of keeping hungarians living in areas that had previously belonged to hungary. the former view clearly prevailed as primary 3 article 3 of the council’s statutes quoted in weitz (1990 50). beyond this, a key membership requirement was that each state’s delegation to the council must be composed of representatives from all prominent political parties. lynn tesser 130 post-cold war treaties referenced ‘individuals belonging to national minorities’ rather than to ‘national minorities.’ yet, it is possible to take a more collectivist view given that several of the rights delineated are actions that usually occur in the presence of others - for example, the right of cultural preservation through festivals and publicly-celebrated holidays, the use of minority languages in the private and public spheres, and the ability to create organizations (tesser 486). though the coe and osce put a good deal of effort into developing post-cold war standards on minority protections, the existence of genuine pressure to adopt them might seem questionable given the minimal enforcement mechanisms at the council’s and especially the osce’s disposal. yet, pressure did exist, stemming from the fact that most cee states very much desired eu entry and membership in the coe became a de facto prerequisite for joining the eu by 1993 (switalski 27). this setup thus provided the coe in particular with the leverage to persuade cee elites to adopt such policies. however, it is also true that the eu’s rhetorical support for minority rights was belied by two things: (1) west european states were not under similar pressures; making it quite ambiguous whether human rights really mattered to the eu (sadurski 5), and that (2) germany has been a key sponsor of eu expansion eastwards, a leading european power that itself defines de facto membership on ethnic blood ties. germany’s influence, in fact, has led the eu-15 to favor parties with the strongest pro-western attitudes while not making a great deal of their nationalist politics. promoting the single market as for minority rights, cee societies were not enamored of all single market freedoms equally, especially ending formal state control over land and capital markets allowing foreign ownership. the central and eastern eurobarometer, in fact, indicates a general lack of support for foreign ownership in the region ranging exporting eu liberalism eastwards 131 from 64% against in lithuania (in 1993) to a low of 24% against in hungary (in 1993), with hungary unusually open to foreign firms in the 1990s - though less so to foreign land ownership. pressures to take on the characteristics of the eu’s single market arose around the same time as the emergence of the new european minority rights regime. in fact, early eu involvement with cee countries had far more to do with the promotion of the single market than with human or minority rights. the eu made numerous bilateral agreements – europe agreements – with cee states to establish formal trade relations, east-west cooperation, and to promote the practices of the single market – particularly the free movement of goods, capital, services, and labor across borders over a ten-year period, ultimately helping to restructure cee economies to bring them more in line with the eu’s single market (de weydenthal 1992 25). yet, the commission made it clear in a 1990 announcement that the purpose of the agreements was not to lay the grounds for accession, but instead to develop incentives for reform in cee countries and to protect eu interests. requirements for being considered a candidate for a europe agreement signaled clear intention to promote reforms in line with eu liberalism: “the introduction of the rule of law, the respect for human rights, the establishment of a multi-party system with corresponding free and fair elections and finally, the introduction of a market economy” (european information service). according to the agreements, the desired integration of the european market mandated that cee countries alter existing laws to conform with eu law; albeit without requiring these countries to give evidence of their immediate success (cernat 9). for the most part, the europe agreements promoted anti-discrimination policies by laying down reciprocal rights for the eu and cee countries to establish firms and other enterprises on each other’s territory (de weydenthal 1992 25). however, there were key exceptions. while existing member states offered lynn tesser 132 favorable trade terms – with the eu making concessions to cee before the latter reciprocated, sensitive eu-15 industries such as agricultural products, textiles, coal, and steel were protected from cee competition. customs duties on cee products from these sectors would be eliminated at a slower rate than on other imports. beyond that, cee countries had to open their respective markets to heavily subsidized west european agricultural products non-tariff barriers – regulations involving labeling information and the specific ways plants and animals are handled that – have often kept cee goods from circulating freely in the single market. indeed, the eu appears the most ‘socialist’ when it aims to protect the interests of older member states. a perfect example concerns eu control over steel production in poland. preston keat’s insightful article on an agreement between the polish government, polish steel manufacturers (85% of which had been owned or controlled by the government), and the eu presents strong evidence for an ‘eu socialism’ in older member states’ interests that runs against the principles of eu liberalism. while cautious market forecasts predicted an increase in the domestic demand for steel from 2000 to 2010, the settlement limits domestic production to 13.5 million tons by 2002, thus reducing profits that might otherwise have been made. the agreement ultimately leads to a decrease in production that is not driven by market forces, but because of a deal made to keep all steel plants (even inefficient ones) functioning. along with financial help from the eu, the polish government offsetting this loss of potential profit by investing $2.5 billion towards modernization in nearly all the country’s 24 steel plants between late-1998 and 2005. while approximately 40,000 steel workers would be laid off, they would receive more than ample benefits compliments mostly of the eu. keat sums up the situation accordingly: “… what the eu deal really does is legitimate some form of systematic government intervention in the industry that might otherwise not have occurred. it also highlights the fact that organized interests in western europe were able to get what they wanted – reduced competition from poland” (keat 219). in exporting eu liberalism eastwards 133 summary, the regulation of capitalism in a broader europe, often to the tune of older eu members’ preferences, belies the non-discrimination rhetoric intended for candidate countries. eu hesitation in offering membership and later delaying candidates entry certainly did not help matters. after being asked when poland would become an eu member, for example, poland’s former foreign minister władysław bartoszewski signaled just this much by indicating that the science fiction writer stanisław lem would be more likely to know (bartoszewski 71). the eu has indeed used various methods to stall the expansion process that have, at times, delivered a great deal of frustration to applicant states. the eu signed the europe agreements beginning in 1991, after all, not merely to lay the basis for formal association and stimulate liberalization, but also to essentially put off the question of whether these countries would be allowed to join. when requesting formally that their progress towards possible membership be assessed in september 1992, hungary, poland, and czechoslovakia received a rather ambiguous response with nothing concrete on the possibility of their entry (de weydenthal 1993 29). though the eu sent progressively stronger positive signals beginning in 1993, the primary stalling tactic in the second half of the 1990’s was to continually push back the projected date of entry, or even more frustrating for the candidates, to change the requirements of admission. combining minority rights and single market freedoms in the pre-accession process only during the june 1993 european council summit in copenhagen did more concrete promises for accession emerge. though no timetables were established, nor were specific countries invited to begin accession negotiations, the council provided a clear statement of intent: “accession will take place as soon as an associated country is able to assume the obligations of membership” (bulletin). the essential conditions for joining established at copenhagen signal that eu liberalism, lynn tesser 134 building off the conditionality of the europe agreements and the emerging minority rights regime, had indeed taken shape in the simultaneous emphasis on minorities and markets: (1) the existence of stable democratic institutions including rights, respect for, and protection of minorities as well as the rule of law; (2) the presence of a market economy capable of withstanding competitive pressures; and (3) the ability to take on all of the requirements that come with membership, including monetary, economic, and political integration. shortly afterwards, the eu launched the 1994-1995 pact for stability for the purpose of encouraging cee states to reach formal agreements with their neighbors concerning the treatment of minorities as well as borders (smith 122). at the same time, the eu began to lay the grounds for accession by developing a specific preparatory framework for entry. the ‘pre-accession process’ increased the amount of pressure on cee hopefuls to harmonize with eu law and policy. during the first half of the 1990s, prospective members were only to make some effort in approximating eu law. this began to change with the european commission’s 1995 publication of the white paper on the “preparation of the associated countries of central and eastern europe for integration into the internal market of the union.” the white paper’s purpose was to present guidelines to help associate countries prepare for potential membership – specifically to help cee countries undertake reforms the commission deemed essential for the functioning of the single market. prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of nationality, the white paper emphasized implementing the four main single market freedoms concerning goods, services, people, and capital (white paper). pressure to adopt single market policies increased with the development of agenda 2000 in 1997, a commission document meant to satisfy council demands for creating a monitoring process for candidate states. agenda 2000 was the commission’s effort to present “in a single framework the broad perspectives for the development of the union and its policies beyond the turn of the century” exporting eu liberalism eastwards 135 (agenda 11). it reiterated some of the copenhagen goals in delimiting three areas of concern: (1) democracy and the rule of law, (2) human rights, and finally (3) respect for minorities. interestingly enough, agenda 2000 stressed human and minority rights more than the development of the single market. this was likely due to concern over cee candidates’ ‘hot spots’ – russians in estonia and latvia and particularly hungarians in slovakia – as well as continued concern over the region’s roma. cynics claimed that doing so would give the eu means to delay the expansion process. at the same time, pre-accession dictated that candidate countries would be subject to reports on their progress. in july 1997, the commission published its opinions (avis), documents outlining the extent to which the entrants had met the copenhagen criteria and the steps needed to completely fulfill them. to simplify matters, the eu created the accession partnerships to bring the different forms of pre-accession assistance into one package, prioritizing those areas acutely in need of work. thereafter, eu demands became more explicit and aid was directed exclusively toward meeting the requirements of accession (grabbe 1999 15). at the same time, the eu made an effort to more outwardly express its drive to promote liberal values. following revisions undertaken in the 1997 amsterdam treaty, the treaty on european union states: “the union is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principles which are common to member states” (laffan 341). particularly with the accession partnerships, phare became explicitly concerned with helping candidates to adopt the aquis, rather than to meet more general political and economic objectives established by the entrants themselves (grabbe 1999 16). later, additional aid programs were created to help applicants meet the demands of pre-accession: the structural adjustment program for agricultural and rural development (sapard), the pre-accession structural instrument (ispa) (concerning structural policies), and later community assistance lynn tesser 136 for reconstruction, development, and stabilization (cards) for albania and the states of the former yugoslavia (maresceau 35). while the accession partnerships do not have a base in any treaty or bilateral agreement (as they are entirely eu-initiated), they have made the copenhagen conditions “quasi-legal” by creating a series of sanctions and a control procedure and have ultimately become the main documents orienting cee-eu relations (grabe 1999 17).4 heather grabbe rightly notes that the accession partnerships hold limited understanding of how market economies should appear, uniformly minimizing the role of varied social actors in industry and the economy in general along anglo-american neoliberal lines (grabbe 1999 21). conclusion the 1990s witnessed the rise of eu liberalism in cee, a ‘stealth ideology’ promoted primarily through the conditionality of key international institutions that remained quite unknown to societies uncertain of all the policy changes needed to ‘join europe.’ its emphasis on minorities and border-effacing markets indeed runs quite contrary to ideas of civil society and the ‘third way’ emerging at the immediate end of communism – not to mention the drive to create ethnically pure states of the 20th century. nevertheless, cee elites’ and societies’ desire to ‘return to europe’ – a return essentially defined by west european elites and key international organizations – would mean adopting a program of specific reforms laid out by the west and designed, to a large extent, to satisfy west european interests in furthering the single market and preventing population flows from the east. at least up until the time of entry, the asymmetrical nature of the eu-cee relationship contributed to eu liberalism’s illiberal transfer with eu member states acting as ‘players in the game’ who simultaneously had the power to determine who 4 heather grabbe rightly notes that the accession partnerships hold limited understanding of how market economies should appear, uniformly minimizing the role of varied social actors in industry and the economy in general along anglo-american neoliberal lines (grabbe 1999 21). exporting eu liberalism eastwards 137 gets what and who does not. with the publication, first, of the avis describing economic and political conditions in these states up until may 1997, and second, the commission’s regular reports on the status of each country’s preparations, this reporting procedure not only further entrenched the hierarchy of west over east, but also influenced relations among the applicants. the pendulum swung from candidate countries sometimes uniting against eu criticism, and at other times dividing over the different degrees of reform deemed necessary in each state. at the same time, and indeed through much of the 1990s, a debate ran among eu member states over the development of a two-tier eu with ‘core’ states pursuing the integration project further and ‘periphery’ states maintaining greater sovereignty. for cee, the implications of this key debate for incoming states were interpreted as a coerced ‘choice’ between being firstand second-class european states - as the eu-15 ruled out flexible options for the new cee states, only further calling into question the validity of the eu’s alleged anti-discrimination principles (smith 108). despite the nature of the process, accession negotiations finally opened in 1998 between the eu and six states – hungary, slovenia, cyprus, poland, estonia, and the czech republic. six other applicants followed – bulgaria, romania, latvia, lithuania, malta, and slovakia – when negotiations opened with this second group in 2000. they were completed in december 2002 – with the exception of bulgaria and romania which eventually joined in 2007. for the most part, cee candidates were expected to adopt the eu’s acquis wholesale, leaving many cee states to set up offices charged with the task of approving and implementing eu law without having to endure lengthy parliamentary debate. the speeding up of the process of harmonizing with eu law has been particularly important in spurring concern that the eu is exporting its democratic deficit to cee. the bigger worry lies in the illiberal export of eu liberalism, particularly through extending europe’s minority rights regime only to cee countries, the lynn tesser 138 haphazard application of anti-discrimination policy of the single market (mostly in cases not harmful to ‘older’ member states’ sensitive sectors), and that the four single market freedoms that do not mix well with the after-effects of the drive to create ethnically pure nation-states. bringing down borders for free movement, particularly concerning land purchases, can revitalize fears concerning sovereignty over formerly contested land areas that experienced population expulsions – a key part of the drive to create ethnically pure nation states.. in this way, the single market freedoms can lead to questions over who owns what and potentially also questions about sovereignty. works cited “agenda 2000: stengthening and widening the european union.” brussels: european commission, 1997. bartoszewski, władysław. above divisions: selected speeches and interviews july december 2000. warsaw: ministry of foreign affairs, 2001. bruszt, laszlo.. “making markets and eastern enlargement: diverging convergence,” in the enlarged european union: diversity and adaptation, ed. peter mair and jan zielonka. london: frank cass, 2002. bulletin of the european communities, vol. 26, no. 6, 1993. cernat, lucian. “can regional integration arrangements enforce trade disciplines?.” paper presented at the young scholars conference on the impact of europeanization on politics and policy in europe, university of toronto, 2004. de weydenthal, jan b. “czechoslovakia, hungary, and poland gain associate membership in the ec.” rfe/rl research report, vol. 1, no. 6, 1992. _______. “ ec keeps central europe at arm’s length”. rfe/rl research report vol. 2, no. 5, 1993. european information service. european report external relations no. 1578, april 12, 1990. frankel paul, ellen, fred d. miller, jr., and jeffrey paul. liberalism and the economic order. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1993. exporting eu liberalism eastwards 139 good, david f. economic transformation in east and central europe: legacies from the past and policies for the future. london: routledge, 1994. grabbe, heather. “a partnership for accession? the implications of eu conditionality for the central and east european applicants.” european university institute working paper no. 99/12. florence: european university institute, 1999. ____________. “the sharp edges of europe: extending schengen eastwards.” international affairs, vol. 76, no. 3, 2000. ____________. “how does europeanization affect cee governance? conditionality, diffusion and diversity.” journal of european public policy, vol. 8, no. 6, 2001. grzymala-busse, anna and abby innes. “great expectations: the eu and domestic political competition in east central europe.” east european politics and societies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2003. holmes, stephen. “a european doppelstaat?” east european politics and societies, vol. 17, no. 1, 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in the enlargement of the european union, ed. marise cremona. oxford: oxford university press, 2003 lynn tesser 140 moravscik, andrew. “preferences and power in the european community: a liberal intergovernmentalist approach.” journal of common market studies, vol. 31, no. 4, 1993. pollack, mark a. “a blairite treaty? neoliberalism and regulated capitalism in the treaty of amsterdam.” in european integration after amsterdam: institutional dynamics and prospects for democracy. ed. karlheinz neunreither and antje wiener. new york: oxford university press, 2000. senior nello, susan. “the impact of external economic factors: the role of the imf.” in democratic consolidation in eastern europe: international and transnational factors (vol. 2). ed jan zielonka and alex pravda. oxford: oxford university press, 2001. smith, karen e. “the evolution and application of eu membership conditionality.” iin the enlargement of the european union. ed marise cremona. oxford: oxford university press, 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changing societies & personalities, 2019 vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 6–21 http://dx.doi.org/10.15826/csp.2019.3.1.057 received 6 october 2018 © 2019 aurea mota, peter wagner accepted 11 january 2019 aureamotta@gmail.com published online 1 april 2019 peter.wagner@ub.edu article the rhino, the amazon and the blue sky over the ruhr: ecology and politics in the current global context1 aurea mota centre for the study of culture, politics and society at the university of barcelona, spain peter wagner catalan institute for research and advanced studies; university of barcelona, spain ural federal university, yekaterinburg, russia abstract the past half century has witnessed major socio-political transformations across the globe. the end of formal european colonialism, basically achieved except for small pockets in the aftermath of the carnation revolution in portugal in 1974, was followed by the demise of the soviet union in 1991 in parallel to the one of keynesian organized capitalism in the northwest and of “state-led development” in much of the south, but also the rise of asian economies, starting with japan and now featuring china. the subsequent era of globalization and individualization was short-lived and has given way to the notion of a “multi-polar” globe marked by the at best half-intended withdrawal of the us from hegemony and the loose association of brazil, russia, india, china and south africa under the name of brics. what has not changed across this half century is the depletion of the earth’s resources and the pollution of the environment. this article retraces the rise of ecological issues to become a global concern, and it does so by relating shifting 1 work on this article has received funding from the european research council (erc) for the project “trajectories of modernity: comparing non-european and european varieties” (tramod), based at the university of barcelona as erc advanced grant no. 249438; from the consortium humanities in the european research area (hera) for the project “the debt: historicizing europe’s relations to the ‘south’” (hera joint research programme “uses of the past”); and from the russian science foundation (rsf) for the project “varieties of modernity in the current global constellation: the role of the brics countries and the global south” (grant no. 18-18-00236), based at ural federal university in yekaterinburg. https://changing-sp.com/ changing societies & personalities, 2019, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 6–21 7 introduction the past half century has witnessed major socio-political transformations across the globe. the end of formal european colonialism, basically achieved except for small pockets in the aftermath of the carnation revolution in portugal in 1974, was followed by the demise of the soviet union in 1991 in parallel to the one of keynesian organized capitalism in the northwest and of “state-led development” in much of the south, but also by the rise of asian economies, starting with japan and now featuring china. the subsequent era of globalization and individualization, associated with the “washington consensus” and neo-liberalism in politico-economic terms, was short-lived and has given way to the notion of a “multi-polar” globe – a counterintuitive image that will need to be rethought – marked by the at best half-intended withdrawal of the us from hegemony and the loose association of brazil, russia, india, china and south africa under the name of brics. what has not changed across this half century is the depletion of the earth’s resources and the pollution of the environment. this article retraces the rise of ecological issues to become a global concern, and it does so by relating shifting interpretations of the issue to assignments of political responsibility. taking a global perspective and focusing on asymmetries, the article is situated in the context of the debate about “ecological debt”, exploring the notion that the early industrializing countries are indebted to those countries, from which they drew their natural – and also human – resources and on whom they imposed the negative external effects of industrialization (for a recent overview, see warlenius et al., 2015). the concept of “ecological debt” arose from within environmentalist social movements from the 1980s onwards, including at major global environmental debates such as the rio earth summit in 1992. to some extent, it has also been taken up in academic debate, mostly either in economic and financial terms, trying to calculate the debt, or in legal and moral terms, trying to assess responsibilities and needs for remedy. beyond these terms, the focus is here on political and social aspects of the ecological crisis in a global context, in which interconnectedness has considerably increased, thus also ecological relations with their specific asymmetries have become more dense, interpretations of the issue to assignments of political responsibility in the changing global context. emerging from a comparative research project on brazil, south africa and europe, it draws its examples from these regions, but aims at developing a more general argument about the current impact of historical power asymmetries on ways of dealing with the ecological crisis. keywords brazil, climate change, ecology, europe, industrialism, responsibility, south africa https://changing-sp.com/ 8 aurea mota, peter wagner but in which states remain the key actors and the only ones potentially able to assign responsibilities. to assign responsibilities, one needs to provide an interpretation of the problem that is both adequate and convincing. to resort to remedial action, actors have to be capable of acting according to such interpretation. in the current global constellation, the consequences of resource depletion and environment destruction keep being experienced to highly different degrees across world-regions, even though the threats to living conditions on the planet have become global. however, any plausible interpretation will identify a large discrepancy between the sites of causes and the sites of consequences, making effective action difficult to achieve. one of the paradoxes of the current situation is that this discrepancy at the core of the current ecological crisis tends to become more problematic the more accountable state governments are to the domestic citizenry, as we will try to show. emerging from a comparative research project on latin america, southern africa and europe, this article draws its examples mostly from these regions (for more detail, see mota & wagner, 2019, on which this article builds), but it aims at developing a more general argument about the current impact of historical power asymmetries on ways of dealing with the ecological crisis. let us add immediately that, for want of better terms, we will sometimes use the expressions “global south” and “global north” to identify spaces and actors, even though they do not neatly describe the current global divide (for reflections on locations in global space, see wagner, 2016). considering the brics members brazil and south africa, for instance, one needs to add, first, that these countries are the base of companies in the areas of agriculture and mining that operate in rather the same way as those with a base in the north; and, second, that these relatively powerful members of brics have themselves acquired some capacity to displace conflicts elsewhere in the south, a move otherwise more characteristic for northern societies. a truly global issue what we now call environmental concerns used to be very local issues. industrial factories and urban agglomerations were sites of high emissions of pollutants. these pollutants usually stayed close to the sources of emission and caused environmental impact there, mostly endangering human health. the air pollution in london in 1952, called the great smog, using the neologism coined by combining “smoke” with “fog” in the early twentieth century, was among the first events that both caused a public outcry and triggered quick and rather effective action. obviously, it was not the first one to cause major health effects. air and water had increasingly been used to dilute pollutants, but in many cases the pollutants only become less easily perceived, but not necessarily less poisonous, especially over the longand medium-term. furthermore, when the people whose health was affected were from the lower classes, such as mineworkers or agricultural workers, their situation used to cause little concern and even much less action. thus, the reason why the london event stood out in terms of publicness and action was that it took place in a capital city of metropolitan europe. as changing societies & personalities, 2019, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 6–21 9 such, it also was an important event in terms of emerging discrepancies in perception and interpretation that would persistently haunt the environmental debate. after the great smog, environmental issues rose quickly to become an important part of public debate in europe. in 1960, the social democrat candidate for head of government in west germany, willy brandt, included into the national election campaign the slogan about “the blue sky over the ruhr”, a river in the main coal and steel region of the country, referring to the ambition to reduce air pollution. thus, he made environmental concerns a key issue of the national policy agenda (we return to this campaign below)2. in 1962, rachel carson published her book silent spring in the us, pointing to the large-scale consequences of the use of pesticides, even far away from the source. in 1972, the club of rome published its report limits to growth, emphasizing the risk of depleting the natural resources of the planet earth, thus developing a fully global perspective on the consequences of industrialization. these two last-mentioned books are often referred to as turning environmental issues global, the one in terms of large-scale damaging impact on the environment, the other in terms of resource extraction. in 1986, the accident in the nuclear power station at chernobyl (soviet union, now ukraine) had radioactive fall-out that stretched far beyond given state borders. from the 1990s onwards, and increasingly so, the effects of emitting so-called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere have moved into the centre of attention. by now, climate scientists largely agree that there is a long-term change of the planetary climate due to humanmade emissions. current environmental phenomena like the increasing number and strength of hurricanes, or the steady rise of average temperatures in some world-regions are attributed to humanmade climate change. with this debate, a point has been reached where a diffuse global phenomenon, not traceable to a single source like a nuclear power station, has a diffuse global impact. thus, the identification of causes and the assigning of responsibilities has become as complex an issue as the assessment of damages. at the same time, there has been a drastic increase in the significance of the problem, namely the risk of making large areas of the planet uninhabitable together with the long-term nature of the process and the difficulty of halting it, not to speak of partially reversing it. climate change has become a prime example for demonstrating the high degree of interconnectedness of world-regions today. shifting responsibility: the rhino and the amazon it is peculiar, though, that the apparently recent “globalization” of ecological issues along the main lines of debate was preceded by a specific north-south discourse. after 150 years of industrialization in the north and domestication of northern flora and fauna, well-intended northern observers recognized that nature was at risk in the south. an early example is the engagement of the german veterinarian and zoo 2 the social democrats lost this election, but brandt remained their candidate and was successful in 1969. during his period of office, the government adopted a comprehensive environmental programme, passed several laws for the protection of the environment, and created a federal agency for the environment. https://changing-sp.com/ 10 aurea mota, peter wagner director bernhard grzimek and his son who focused on the serengeti region in what is now tansania. they did not deny the marvels of civilization, including industrial civilization, but underlined that everything humanmade could be reproduced whereas natural wildlife, once extinct, could not3. their film “serengeti shall not die” from 1959 was a great public success and won the us academy award for documentary feature in that year. it had the form of a documentary and an appeal, suggesting the need for outside intervention, thus implying that the local authorities – both colonial and post-colonial – would neither have the intention nor the capacity to do so. this kind of northern ecological discourse that focuses on southern regions that require intervention for reasons of environmental protection has since then become very common. two of its more recent examples, addressing latin america and southern africa, are the amazon rainforest and the rhinoceros. the amazon region contains the largest contiguous area of rainforest on the globe. it is inhabited by a great diversity of fauna and flora, with many species being unique to the area. furthermore, it acts as the “lung” of the planet by reducing the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere. thus, there are good reasons to see the region as of global interest, and not of interest for brazil and neighbouring countries alone. at the same time, the forest is threatened by deforestation and dispossession of small land-holdings to allow for large-scale agricultural use and for mining. in the course of these acts, the livelihood of indigenous communities is also threatened. it is common to see reports about the threats to the rainforest and their global impact in northern media. often it is accompanied by the observation that the national authorities – with brazil at the centre – are unable or unwilling to stop the destruction. however, it is less often added that much of the invasive production is oriented towards exportation to the north, the incentive thus being provided by northern economic “pull”. nor has the fact been much observed that the close connection of the brazilian environmental movement with the governments led by the workers’ party (pt) under president luiz inácio lula da silva (2003–2011) and, to a somewhat lesser extent, his successor dilma rousseff (2011–2016), resulted in a considerable slowing down of deforestation. something similar can be said about rhino poaching in south africa, in which there has been a sharp spike over the past years. eighty percent of the 80,000 rhinocerosses in the world live on south african territory. while in 2007 thirteen of them were killed, the number rose to 1,214 in 2014 and has not fallen below 1,000 since. the spike is connected to rising demand for rhino horn, in particular in asia where it is believed to have aphrodisiac and medicinal qualities. the demand is driven, in turn, by rising incomes in asia and by the fact that, with greater market integration across the globe, such demand is relatively easy to meet in today’s world. while the rise in killings has been associated with corruption of government officials, south africa did intervene quite forcefully in suppressing poaching and has been able to stabilize the rhino population (bale, 2018). 3 in some way, they may be proven wrong at some point: human hubris has started entertaining the idea of “de-extinction”, that is reproducing extinct animal species based on retrievable dna information. changing societies & personalities, 2019, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 6–21 11 if we look at northern discourse on these topics, we recognize that brazil and south africa are seen as being responsible for key aspects of global sustainability. at the same time, especially the left-leaning governments of pt in post-military dictatorship brazil and the african national congress (anc) in post-apartheid south africa have been critically observed with regard to their capacity of enhancing economic activities. in the latter regard, the material, substantive core of naturalresource extraction and land dispossession disappears behind the numerical, statistical contribution of these processes to economic growth. thus, these governments are placed under the dual prerogative of protecting nature for the whole globe’s sake, on the one hand, and enhancing economic performance, on the other. they risk being criticized of neither doing the one nor the other to the required degree. to paraphrase what former president dilma rousseff, then still in office, once said to the spanish newspaper el país: here ”they detain you for having a dog and for not having a dog” (jiménez barca, 2016). northern complacency: the blue sky over the ruhr in these discourses, europe holds multiple positions. first of all, its voice is the one of the guardian of the common good. europe recognizes the peril of environmental destruction and urges for action. this voice is often not free of paternalistic, neo-colonial overtones: it is europe that recognizes the necessity, and it is the south that does not fully recognize it and/or fails to efficiently act according to this insight. secondly, europe may contribute to solving the issue, but it would do so voluntarily, since this is not within its responsibility. this is so for two reasons. first, both the right and the responsibility for environmental protection action resides with the sovereign powers over the respective territory. and even in global terms, secondly, the responsibility to act lies elsewhere because europe has already done its duty (for the general shift in discourse within european development policy, see karagiannis, 2004). the london air is relatively clean because effective action was taken in the clean air act of 1956 and its followers. the sky over the ruhr is blue again, and one can even swim again in the river after 46 years of bathing prohibition (iww water centre, 2017). generally, air and water quality has considerably improved in europe since the beginnings of explicit environmental policies. materials are more and more recycled for re-use; and energy production is increasingly based on renewable sources. statements like the above can be found abundantly in official publications from the local level of municipalities to the supranational one of the european commission. and they are largely true. they allow european governments at all levels to present themselves “at the forefront”4 of all action to save the planet and to improve human living conditions on it. however, this discourse is also extremely complacent. it seems to say, true, we have created the problem due to industrialization, but we 4 see, for instance, the european commission on the paris agreement to combat climate change: “the eu has been at the forefront of international efforts towards a global climate deal”. retrieved from https:// ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/international/negotiations/paris_en https://changing-sp.com/ https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/international/negotiations/paris_en https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/international/negotiations/paris_en 12 aurea mota, peter wagner have also recognized it in time and, there where we are responsible, have largely resolved it. at the same time, the discourse ignores – or claims to ignore, since the knowledge is not lacking at all, – that the reasoning only holds if the results of environmental policies are attributed to individual world-regions and their state actors and, at the same time, the chains of action that cause environmental damage are ignored. if we look again at the case of the ruhr river, the first successes were reached by using so-called end-of-pipe technologies, such as filters placed on the chimneys of coal-fired power stations and steel production plants, but they were very limited. breakthroughs in the improvement of environmental quality were achieved when the german iron and steel industry was largely closed down. in public and scholarly debate, such closing down of plants was seen as part of a general tendency towards “de-industrialization”, a radicalization of the earlier theme on the transition towards “post-industrial society”5. within germany, de-industrialization and the concomitant improvement of environmental quality were accelerated with the dismantling of industry in the former german democratic republic from 1990 onwards. globally, though, there is no evidence of de-industrialization at all. global industrial output has been steadily rising over the past decades, with the only exception of a rather minor dip in 2009, namely with the onset of what is now called, with western bias, the great recession after the default of lehman brothers in the us. however, the sites of industrial production have changed radically, being almost stagnant in europe after a steep decline in 2010, at only slightly higher levels in the united states after three years of decline from 2007 to 2009, and uninterrupted growth at high rates in china6. thus, rather than “de-industrialization” what happened was industrial relocation from sites in the formerly so-called “advanced industrial societies” towards other regions, predominantly in asia (in a way, already starting with japan much earlier), but increasingly also elsewhere. the observation of these shifts has given rise to the term “emerging economies” and also to the acronym brics, followed by the creation of an association between those five countries, indicating a possible shift in economic power relations. our concern here, though, is that the industrial relocation also entails an externalization of environmental damage. at a closer look, namely, the improvement of environmental quality in europe, is directly related to the deterioration of environmental quality elsewhere. while producing less, europe remains a high consumer of industrial products, and they are produced elsewhere with most of the environmental charge arising at the site of production or earlier at the site of extraction of raw materials. the sky over the ruhr is blue because iron and steel for industrial products used in germany are no 5 the “post-industrial society” theorem already arose during the 1960s, but it was then seen as a relative shift from employment in the industrial sector towards the third, or service sector. under assumptions of high general growth rates, typical of the 1960s, the advent of “post-industrial society” did not necessarily mean less industrial employment in absolute terms. in contrast, “de-industrialization” is at least partly a crisis discourse, as it requires adaptive measures often not welcomed by those concerned (for a recent discussion see pichierri & pacetti, 2016). 6 south africa had high growth until 2009, but considerable lower ones since then. brazil had moderate growth rates before 2009, and faced a second recession in 2016. changing societies & personalities, 2019, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 6–21 13 longer produced in germany. such externalization occurs across the whole chain of production and consumption7. thus, europe uses an enormous amount of global soil for the production of foodstuffs required to feed animals for european consumption of meat. decades after the end of formal colonialism, it keeps “occupying” space outside its own territory for its needs and purposes. at the other end, china used to accept a large part of european recyclable waste materials since the early 1990s, mostly paper and plastic. but it has recently refused to continue to do so, taking european policy-makers by surprise and without any effective response. it is an indication that relations of power have started to change to such extent that externalization becomes more difficult. climate change and historical injustice the problematic of asymmetric externalization becomes particularly clear when one looks at the debate about climate change and policy action with regard to it. this is so because the global dimension is immediately central with regard to the contemporary consequences of the instrumental transformation of the earth. let us briefly summarize the argument introduced earlier. industrialism in all its aspects – mass production, mass consumption, transport infrastructure – is the main cause for climate change and its likely consequences in terms of deteriorating living conditions on the earth. it was developed by the early industrial powers in northwestern europe and later north america for their own benefit, but dependent on the creation of an atlantic division of labour involving african labour and american soil in the european “take-off” of industrialism (this is a broad debate, see recently stråth & wagner, 2017; mota & wagner, 2019). when the environmental effects of industrialism were recognized from the 1960s onwards, they were seen as health risks caused by pollution in the vicinity of industrial production and consumption. remedial action through environmental policies was effective, but it stayed close to these sites. in addition, the emerging new global division of labour from the 1970s onwards entailed the dislocation of heavily polluting industries as well as naturetransforming extractive industries to other parts of the world. this is the constellation that we have outlined. for a long time, it was largely assumed that it could be analysed in politico-economic terms, underlining not least that the industrial dislocations were an important cause for economic growth in the so-called “emerging” societies and the dangers to the environment a “price to pay” for this growth. then, “externalization” would be nothing else then the application of market logics. the “comparative advantage” of many societies of the south would then be the fact that they have the soil available to provide the north with raw materials and foodstuff, as well as to dump the garbage of the north. the earnings from these activities might lead these societies to “emerge” in the future and then deal on a par with the earlier industrialized societies. once climate change comes into the picture, 7 stephan lessenich (2016) coined the term “externalization society” for a constellation, in which one type of society systematically shifts the negative consequence of its production and life-style onto other societies. https://changing-sp.com/ 14 aurea mota, peter wagner however, that interpretation, doubtful as it always was, can clearly no longer be sustained. climate change radically alters the perspectives for the future. as such, it imposes an interpretation that recognizes that the instrumental transformation of the earth is strongly related to past domination and appropriation. therefore, the interpretation of the issue as temporal is what is new in the present. “modernist” and colonial discourse had relegated the colonized societies to a “not yet”, had denied them coevalness in the present, as anthropological and postcolonial scholarship has long critically pointed out (e.g., fabian, 1983; chakrabarty, 2000). the argument had been displayed in a variety of forms – reaching from immaturity to be overcome by education to the missing institutional preconditions for an industrial take-off. it did not normally include the notion that the “backwardness” was induced by the relation of domination between colonizers and colonized (as dependency theory would underline). whatever the past had been, the discourse of the “not yet” suggested an exit from this situation in the future. but the climate change debate has altered this situation: because of the urgency, so the argument goes, emissions in the south cannot be allowed to rise to northern levels. apparently, the benefits of industrialism that were historically reaped by the “advanced” societies need to be denied to the “emerging” societies for the sake of keeping the earth inhabitable. thus, societies that had been confined to the “not yet” during colonization and the hegemony of modernization discourse are now condemned to a “never”. if so, in this respect, historical injustice could no longer be remedied in the future. as of today, the debate on climate change has two official points of reference. the state of knowledge on the phenomenon is monitored and summarized by the international panel on climate change (ipcc), which by now brings together the common assessment of the overwhelming majority of competent scientists in the field, opposed only by a small number of persons who deny the existence of climate change or at least of its humanmade nature. and the state of action has been formulated in the so-called paris agreement of december 2015, by now signed by almost all states on the globe and in effect since november 2016. the paris agreement is in many respects an amazing achievement. it brings together the almost entire global political community to agree on a complex scientific diagnosis, itself operating with considerable degrees of uncertainty and indeterminacy, and to accept the urgency of acting in common by radically limiting the so-called greenhouse emissions, and thus avoiding significant future increases in global temperatures. all signatories of the agreement, furthermore, commit themselves to quantitatively specified targets for emission reduction. the agreement does not foresee any mechanism to enforce these targets, but it includes not only a monitoring process, but also further steps to be taken to increase the target levels and to concretize them in line with future observations and estimates on climate development by the ipcc. next to praise, the agreement has also received criticism, mostly because of setting the targets too low and lacking enforcement mechanisms. while both of these critical observations are pertinent, emphasizing them risks losing out of sight the enormous change in discourse brought about by the contract. with this document, changing societies & personalities, 2019, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 6–21 15 the international political community moves away from the assumption that all states are equal and are equally called upon to act in this highly urgent matter. rather, it is recognized that “developing countries” need to take longer in reaching the moment when emissions will fall, and it commits “developed countries” to provide resources for developing countries to protect themselves from, or compensate, damage due to climate change. even though the agreement avoids being explicit, this is de facto a recognition of historical injustice done by developed countries to developing countries8. a sense of this may have provoked the fury of us president donald trump, his announcement of the withdrawal of the us from the agreement, and the insistence that a better deal for “america” was needed. the problems with the agreement reside less in its quantitative insufficiency and its non-binding nature, because both of these are recognized within the agreement itself. germany, for instance, which prided itself to be “at the forefront” even within europe, is falling behind in reaching its self-set target objectives for 2030, and there are calls by politicians to be more “realistic”. but this falling behind has triggered a wide critical debate with reference to the paris agreement. the fact that the commitment for 2050 has been explicitly made within a formal international agreement makes it discursively difficult to just renounce fulfilling it. thus, this implementation hesitancy was expected and is part of the explicit monitoring and adjustment process set in motion by the agreement. the more crucial problems reside rather in that which is significant yet not formally recognized. three such elements are rather easily identifiable at a closer look. first, the paris agreement counts emissions according to the territorial site where they occur. this seems reasonable in light of the fact that governments can control more easily what occures on their territory. however, this way of accounting attributes the emissions for products always at the site of their production, not of their consumption. this means, as hinted at above, that the commodities exported from china for use in europe are “counted” in the environmental balance sheet of china, whereas it would be more appropriate to count them there where the realization of their value occurs (using sadian’s 2018 terminology). in the externalizing “consumer societies” of the north, the difference between “consumption emissions” and “territorial emissions” is considerable (mcmanus, 2015). secondly, there is a rather great reliance on voluntary action in the agreement, certainly due to the fact that the explicit and specified commitments fall short of what is considered necessary. however, voluntary action by unspecified volunteers is difficult to achieve, in particular in situations, in which the advantages and disadvantages fall to different actors. we can give one example that also goes back to a theme addressed earlier. globally, it should not be too difficult to renounce the exploitation of some oil reserves, given that oil is at the moment rather abundant and that the climate objectives foresee an exit from the use of fossil sources of energy. it is a much more difficult question to decide, which reserves are to be exploited and 8 the wording is “common but differentiated responsibilities”, paris agreement, preamble and article 2.2, 4.19, 4.3. the notion goes back to debates at the stockholm and rio de janeiro environmental summits of 1972 and 1992 respectively. https://changing-sp.com/ 16 aurea mota, peter wagner which not, given that they are found in states of very different forms of government and levels of wealth and inequality. reasonably, one should aim at renouncing the exploitation there where important counter arguments to it exist. this is the case in ecuador, where considerable exploitable oil reserves were discovered in a territory that is both an important natural reserve – a rainforest area of very high biodiversity – and the area, in which two indigenous “isolated” societies live, the yasuní national park. the government of ecuador headed by then president rafael correa proposed in 2007 that the area would be left untouched if the international community provided half the income that the state would renounce. the proposal was active until 2013 when correa withdrew it after only a tiny fraction of the requested money had been promised (murmis & lorrea, 2015; see also encyclopaedia britannica, 2018). the reserves are currently exploited by the ecuadorean national oil company petroecuador. hardly any northern volunteer felt a sense of responsibility for contributing to reach this sensible and rather feasible objective. thirdly, quite understandably given its nature, the agreement underestimates the possibilities of displacing the issue. once signed, and even before, many of those concerned by it started considering what can and needs to be done to continue doing the same and living the same way. a case in point is the german motor industry. cars built by nominally german manufacturers are predominantly up-market products, which contain numerous special features. they are rather heavy and expensive, but are successfully sold on world-markets to more well-to-do customers. it had been known for a long time that it would be difficult to make these cars meet more strict emission standards. successive german governments intervened at the european commission to avoid standards getting too tough, but this was apparently not successful enough. in 2015, the us environmental protection agency detected devices to manipulate emissions under test conditions and started investigating the cases. at the current moment, numerous legal cases are still ongoing in various countries. considerable fines have already been imposed. however, little attention has been given to the increased number of casualties and illnesses due to air pollution and the contribution of millions of cars to climate-change emissions. all of this was happening while the international negotiations that would lead to the paris agreement were ongoing. environmental action under adverse circumstances thus, as we see, environmental crime in europe is very much “white-collar” crime. it happens in the managerial offices of the large companies, and the intention is to secure sales and profits despite existing regulations that aim to protect the environment. as the car emission scandal shows, some of this activity is truly criminal, and once discovered, it is being prosecuted by the competent judicial institutions. while some executive officers violate environmental laws, others merely ignore or neglect the rising environmental concerns. they pursue projects of resource extraction or of environmentally and/or socially detrimental agricultural production, often on large scale and with high impact. much of this activity is planned in the changing societies & personalities, 2019, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 6–21 17 north but executed in the south. thus, the politics of externalization operates by a territorial displacement of conflicts. environmental protection laws in brazil and south africa are today very similar to those in europe. the high degree of global interconnectedness has given many environmental threats a global significance, as argued at the outset of this article, and it has also facilitated the rise of global environmental consciousness. the – relative and temporary – success in slowing down deforestation in the amazon region and protecting the rhino in southern africa is testimony of the strength of environmental action in the south. but such success is achieved under highly adverse circumstances. illegal deforestation and illegal killing of rhinos happen every day. these are not whitecollar crimes; they are committed by local people, often in need of the resources being made available through those deeds. as a consequence, a picture emerges, in which the combination of poverty and social inequality with the inability of southern states to enforce their laws, in particular in more remote regions, are seen as the cause of uncontrollable anti-ecological activity. put like this, the issue is firmly placed in the south, and the north is nothing but a concerned onlooker. however, this is a highly distorted picture. true, in some cases deforestation and poaching are driven by local interests. in many more, however, a global chain of responsibility is attached to them. this is particularly clear in the cases of assassinations of environmental activists, an increasingly frequent phenomenon, of which knowledge and awareness have risen not least thanks to the systematic reporting of the uk-based daily newspaper the guardian. in most of these cases, the killers acted not on their own behalf but for the interest of companies, often with a base in the north, developing large-scale agricultural or mining projects (watts, 2018). thus, the picture above, while not false, needs to be placed into a larger frame, in which two elements of the global context become visible: the capacity of northern societies to displace environmental damage to the south while maintaining corporate profits and general way of life, and by and large the incapacity of southern societies to effect a similar displacement, because very often there is no space in reach, towards which the conflicts could be displaced. little innovation on the path to “social progress” as hinted at above, the ptand anc-led governments after the end of dictatorship in brazil and of apartheid in south africa embarked on rather ambitious programmes of social transformation (for detail, see mota & wagner, 2019). in particular, the socialpolicy programmes have reduced poverty and – to a minor extent – social inequality and have created a new “middle class” among the formerly poor and excluded. at the same time, these programmes showed social limits due to the lack of addressing the entrenched structures of inequality that date from the long historical periods of formal hierarchy and exclusion. for our purposes here, we underline further limitations inherent to the projects of political transformation as designed by these actors. one pillar of the transformative programme in both countries was economic growth. such growth was meant to increase tax revenue, and a part of this revenue https://changing-sp.com/ 18 aurea mota, peter wagner was to be redistributed with a view to alleviate poverty and enhance the income of the lower classes more generally. given the world-market conditions in the early twenty-first century, economic growth in brazil and south africa could mostly be achieved through the intensification of ecologically “heavy” production in the primary and, to some extent only, secondary sectors. in brazil, one even talks about a “re-primarization” of the economy after the relatively successful industrialization through import substitution policies earlier in the twentieth century (paulani, 2016). this observation concerns the production side, and another problematic feature emerges from the consumption side. a considerable part of the social-policy programmes consisted in increasing the amount of money in the hands of the lower classes. this emphasis has some sound reasons. on the one side, handing out monetary benefits is relatively easy. it does not place high demands on public administration. on the other side, it is immediately positively perceived by the beneficiaries. thus, it is likely to enhance “mass loyalty” towards the government, according to a widespread theorem in political science (see already narr & offe, 1975, for an overview). however, the increased availability of money leads to an increasing demand for consumer goods, especially durable consumer goods. both in brazil and in south africa, private cars have come to be seen as a sign of upward social mobilty, enhancing life satisfaction and serving as a status symbol, the latter particularly in south africa. in production and even more so in use, though, cars are a significant contributor to environmental damage. this aspect of the political transformation, therefore, has generated negative ecological side-effects. the alternative would have been to achieve social progress by placing the emphasis on the improvement of public infrastructure. this objective could as well have been financed by the revenues from economic growth, but it would have required the development of the relevant administrative capacity, and not all of it would possibly have been as immediately recognizable as a benefit as the increasing availability of money. we need to underline that both the ptand the anc-led governments have invested considerably in public infrastructure, thus we talk about an imbalance rather than an absence. and this imbalance is more pronounced in brazil than in south africa, where significant effort has been made to improve the infrastructure in the residential areas of the black african population, systematically disadvantaged by the prior apartheid governments. nevertheless, the imbalance is telling for the overall design of the political transformation. we want to illustrate this in the form of an anecdote, of which, though, we have good reasons to believe that it is true. the first large demonstrations against the pt-led governments in brazil were the protests against the rise of the fare in urban public transport in june 2013. these protests became significant because they were the beginning of a larger series of protests that ended breaking the hegemony that the pt programme of political transformation had acquired over more than a decade. known as movimento passe livre (free fare movement), the protests started out as a clear single-issue contestation, and as such they could have been addressed rather easily. even before the rise of these protests, a proposal had been made by a leading member of the pt to keep the fares stable by subsidizing the cost of public transport through raising the changing societies & personalities, 2019, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 6–21 19 gasoline tax. the proposal came fully budgeted, demonstrating its feasibility and even calculating the effect on the official inflation rate, of constant concern for governments, to be minimal. nevertheless, it met full and immediate rejection by the pt presidency, even refusal to discuss it. an unholy alliance from the late 1970s onwards, sociological value research suggested that material values would give way to post-material values once material needs are largely satisfied (inglehart, 1977 and elsewhere). this has been seen as another step of “modernization” and was congruent with the ecological debate, assuming a linear trend towards greater ecological consciousness. like for other general aspects of global social change, there is considerable validity to this insight. at the same time, the picture gets distorted owing to the fact that the survey research findings, on which the theorem is based, work with data from individual societies that are treated as if they were moving separately across global history9. as we have shown throughout this article, though, this is not at all the case. to again provide a larger picture, we need to, on the one hand, read the findings on the move to post-materialism as something that has indeed to some extent – which should not be exaggerated either10 – taken place among the global rich, who live predominantly, but not exclusively, in the north. and they live there with the “false consciousness” of having changed their societies and ways of life by having improved the quality of the environment and decreased their burden on the planet, while as a matter of fact they continue to live over the means the planet can sustainably provide and have displaced the immediate effects of this way of life on the global poor. framed as an evolutionary theory of modernization, on the other hand, the findings, without intending to do so explicitly, also sustain the expectation of the global poor that they would first reach the level of material satisfaction that the rich have now to later move to post-material values. in south africa, for instance, where the benefits of material affluence had formally been denied to the majority of the population for a long time, any suggestion of “jumping over” the material phase is easily denounced as a new form of neo-colonial imposition. in a very implicit way, such evolutionary staging is expressed in the assumption of the paris agreement that the peak of greenhouse emissions will occur later in the “developing” countries than in the “developed” ones. it is difficult to object to such assumption, since it marks a recognition of historical injustice, as argued above. but at the same time, it shies away from any attempt of a more profound rethinking of the ways, in which material needs can be met, a rethinking that is urgently needed. the capacity of the north to displace its ecological impact to other regions of the globe combines with the incapacity of the south, until now, to develop a different 9 such methodological nationalism, it needs to be underlined, is not a conceptual assumption in this approach, but an effect of data and methodology. 10 the average per capita use of resources and impact on the environment remains considerably higher in europe than in most other parts of the world, with the main exception of the united states. https://changing-sp.com/ 20 aurea mota, peter wagner path to social progress than the one regionally taken in the north earlier to an unholy alliance that endangers the living 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(2018, 2 february). almost four environmental defenders killed each week in 2017. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/ environment /2018/feb/02 /almost-four-environmental-defenders-a-week-killedin-2017 https://changing-sp.com/ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/andes-to-the-amazon/2015/feb/09/we-can-start-leaving-the-oil-in-the-ground-right-now-heres-how https://www.theguardian.com/environment/andes-to-the-amazon/2015/feb/09/we-can-start-leaving-the-oil-in-the-ground-right-now-heres-how https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement http://doi.org/10.1177/1368431015600018 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/02/almost-four-environmental-defenders-a-week-killed-in-2017 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/02/almost-four-environmental-defenders-a-week-killed-in-2017 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/02/almost-four-environmental-defenders-a-week-killed-in-2017 key: cord-0046812-5vnrll1v authors: jagodzinski, jan title: introduction: the paradoxes and worries in contemporary times date: 2020-07-04 journal: pedagogical explorations in a posthuman age doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-48618-1_1 sha: cde6e1dcb70464e040f5d0a572672113dfa33bd8 doc_id: 46812 cord_uid: 5vnrll1v in this introduction, i attempt to map out what i have previously called ‘designer capitalism.’ the way media and technologies in a digitalized world structure existence in what gilles deleuze called ‘control societies’ and theorists like bernard stiegler continue to develop through an expansive theory of technics, more specifically through his two-volume work on symbolic misery. in many respects, this introduction is consonant with gregory ulmer’s theorization of ‘electracy,’ which crops up now and again throughout the chapters that follow. ulmer develops his own ‘electorate transversal,’ a remarkable combination of spinoza with nietzsche where pain and pleasure (or sadness and joy) as experiences are theorized within this changed contemporary digitalized world. my emphasis, however, rests with deleuze and guattari who play a dominant position throughout this book. in this introduction, i review several important developments to grasp ‘designer capitalism,’ the most prominent being ‘the stack’ by benjamin bratton and ‘surveillance capitalism’ by shoshana zuboff. both help us grasp the power of platform capitalism and the place of big data in it. this forms a backdrop to my own involvement with south korean culture and my concerns with (art) pedagogy, technology, and visual media in the chapters that follow. the last part of this introduction offers a hint of what becomes more and more apparent as the book progresses: the questions that surround the anthropocene, which is explored in the third part of this book, stated sensationally as ‘the end of the world’ as we know it. event should not go unnoticed. what climate advocates desire, and those of us who argue against the inequalities of a capitalist system are being realized, at least during this special moment of the event: air and cruise ship travel is down, meaning less pollution filling our skies and oceans; dolphins have been spotted in venice canals now that boat traffic has stopped; emission of toxic nitrogen dioxide drastically cut in beijing has saved lives; the economy has tanked forcing governments to think in more 'socialist' terms, even in the united states where, with reluctance, those who must stay home and isolate because of the virus, or who have had their small businesses suspended as the service sector is placed on hold are to receive (reluctantly) monetary benefits of some kind, which will never be enough. concerns for the aging and at-risk populations (homeless, disabilities, the unemployed, and the uninsured) have entered the public discourse via government spokespeople, if only by recognition. the anthropocene era has its first 'confirmed' global case, so to speak. as numerous ecologists and environmentalists have shown, zoonotic diseases have increased due to the constant destruction of ecological niches and biodiversity (vidal 2020) . we now live in an era of chronic emergency and global bioinsecurity, an unprecedented turn from 'business as usual,' and an ontological turn that is only beginning to be recognized. the oeuvre of bernhard stiegler (2010 stiegler ( , 2014 stiegler ( , 2015 stiegler ( , 2018 is crucial here as he maps out the capture of 'tertiary memory' via contemporary digital grammatization. covid's nonhuman agency, a 'classical' case of biopolitics infused with biopower (following foucault), requires an account of "noopolitics of psychopower," supplanting foucault's 'care of the self' (heideggerian sorge) with soin (the care of something or somebody) (stiegler 2016, webpage) . unquestionably, the technological marvels of digitalization, the so-called third industrial revolution that is constantly 'progressing' in computer speed, the constant upgrading of smart technologies, and commodity capitalism since the 2018 economic crash in the united states (so many thought that this was the knell toll of capitalism!) were steadily recovering globally, but with covid-19 the knell tolls once again, it seems. trump gloated as his corporate tax cuts increased profits through right-wing conservative 'trickle-down economics.' the problem is that very little 'trickles down.' the top 1% simply become richer as they buy back their own stock with new profits. financial capital reigns along with a state capitalism. yet, a global recession is now at hand, and markets are sent into a fever pitch; presidential hopefuls like bernie sanders present this uncomfortable truth to many americans. it seems technocratic governments are pervasive globally. with the ascendency of trump, with the help of russian electoral interferences and cambridge analytica, there is no pretense left that this was not the case, and state and business have become one. trump has begun to privatize government under his oligarchy; he has attorney general william barr, an evangelical, in his pocket, along with ivanka, jarred, and his sons in tow. trump has infused us politics with a sycophant gop under his brand of bullying, temper tantrums, and above all a new means of communication for political advantage: the twitter platform that targets his minions of followers and believers in the 'cult of trump.' it's a machinic assemblage capturing affect to divide and polarize their country: you are either a trumper wearing your red hat and shouting 'make america great again' at his rallies, or a non-trumper or even a never-trumper is in danger of being scorned by the president of the united states, maligned and then fired. quite extraordinary. too many have pointed out the fascism of trump and his white house with west wing figures such as steven miller, a known xenophobe and white nationalist, advising him regarding immigration policy. but his train keeps rolling along. the experiment known as 'democracy' is slowly fading as the judicial branches in countries like the united states, poland, and hungry are usurped of power. trump and senate republican leader mitch mcconnell continue to stack as many conservative judges as they can muster. the us supreme court as an impartial body for the people has lost its credibility with the appointments of neil gorsuch and brett cavanaugh. this was always a tenuous question ever since the supreme court, with the help of conservative judges, spearheaded by antonin scalia, and then joined by william rehnquist and clarence thomas, sided with bush against al gore in the 2000 us presidential election concerning the 'hanging chads' of punch cards in the florida election, which eventually resulted in the country's turn to conservativism, a turn away from climate reform and warmongering on iraq that assured bush jr. a second term. chief justice john roberts has favored the trump administration, exempting trump for his indiscretions to interfere with court trails (especially regarding the trial of roger stone), yet castigating chuck schumer, democrat senate minority leader, for questioning the political bias of the supreme court. adam cohen's (2020) book, supreme injustice, charts the history of the ups and downs of the court's record. according to alain badiou (2019), a mere "264 people have the same amount of money as a total of 7 billion other people" (15). capitalist ethics and corporate responsibility, as jean-pierre dupuy (2014) has long argued, come too late and too little as politics has been overshadowed by business management. luciano floridi, director of the digital ethics lab at the university of oxford, provides a wide-ranging discussion on information ethics, concluding that ai is a force for the good when used responsibly via a 'soft ethics. ' floridi (2002) has been on the forefront on what has been called the philosophy of information (pi) (floridi 2002) . the turn is toward computational methods to shine new light on philosophical problems. any philosophical question, he states, can be repositioned as being informational or computational. information is this case is organized into three domains: first, information as reality; that is, information is ontological and corresponds to the philosophy of communication. second, information is also about reality. this descriptive link addresses semantic information with actual objects and concepts. it covers the philosophy of the linguistic sciences. third, there is information for reality. this last domain is pragmatic, which is operational in character where philosophy of computing science comes into play. floridi's (2011) neologism for this pi paradigm is "demiurgology." this is a comprehensive and ambitious philosophy that is to harness the powers of ai for human well-being. floridi draws from the greek word demiourgos, which literally refers to a 'public worker,' an artisan who practiced his (sic) craft or trade for public use. a demiurge is an artisan who extends ontic powers of control, creation, design, and so on over oneself through a variety of dimensions. floridi has ethics, genetics, neurology, narratology, and physiology in mind. but, this is not all. this ontic power must be extended to society as a whole: culturally, politically, economically, and religiously. if that is not enough, floridi also includes the domains of natural and artificial environments that require physical and informational care of humanity's use. hence, the combination of these three forms of information is to provide for a comprehensive ethics informed by computing sciences. it is the ultimate anthropocentric dream of stewardship of the planet. if only it was that easy! as if there will be no bad actors like cambridge analytica in the future! despite floridi's plea and vision for ai's use for a social good, ethics are breached daily by platform capitalism. machine intelligence is the new 'means of production' for capitalism. the trajected irony here appears complete: keep replacing workers with automated ai technologies until there is no more need for them. if there are no workers, then there is no longer the need for profit to be made. the success of this technological revolution leads to the very elimination of profit and accumulation. the capitalist machine will then 'stop' its relentless cycle of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. such a trajectory is but one claim by accelerationist theorists like nick land. alex williams and nick srnicek (2014) state in their may 14, 2013, manifesto in section 21: "we declare that only a promethean politics of maximal mastery over society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or achieving victory over capital." their idea is to revamp technology and develop an accelerationist politics for a post-capitalist society built on self-mastery and self-criticism that completes the enlightenment project, a more rational society. perhaps the nihilistic realism of ray brassier (2007) is the best example of such a philosophy. such a scenario seems to be a farce and should generate skepticism. for instance, the fascist tendencies of twentieth-century futurism with its celebration of technology are well known, as if technological control was possible (noys 2014) . given the covid-19 pandemic, where there are shortages of intensive care units (icus) and respirators in rich countries like the united states, the idea of generating a 'rational' society that will come together for the common good seems far-fetched as the panic buying of food and (of all things!) toilet paper, beach gatherings (rather than practicing isolation and distancing), and major airline carriers gouging passengers for seat prices to fly home seem to be impossible behaviors to outright stop. significant global unity is an unrealizable goal. sadly, nationalism increases only when an outside invader threatens borders. perpetual war presents this paradox in countries like israel where the right-wing government of benjamin netanyahu (likud-national liberal movement) has managed to enrich the country's economy at the expense of its democratic ideals. but what if the invader is molecular, invisible, not burdened by identity politics, and knows no borders? the capitalist perpetual machine is like the 'glorious' train in snowpiercer; it seems to go on without end, yet it needs the children of the lumpenproletariat to run it; or as karl marx put it in the grundrisse (the divisions of machines): [it is] "an automatic system of machinery … set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself" (1993, 692) . the scene is not changed in contemporary times: the brightest young minds end up as programming engineers for platforms such as google, amazon, microsoft, facebook, hyundai, and sony. creon is 'eating his children' yet again, as i have argued in another context (jagodzinski 2008) . even the best hackers of the free and open source movement (richard stallman) or the maker movement are persuaded by wealth and the good life, and are drawn into the corporate world once their wares have been recognized and their 'startups' lucratively bought up. a television series like mr. robot is an exception in this case, giving the hacker a paranoid profile, flawed by schizophrenia; or in deleuze and guattari's (1987) terms, a schizophrenic who has insight into the capitalist system itself (jagodzinski 2016). gregory ulmer (2005 ulmer ( , 2012 ) developed a neologism for such changes: electracy, and jan holmevik (2012) brilliantly shows how a "hacker noir" is possible. of course, there are many dystopian sci-fi movies where the revolutionary underground must work with an undetected networked communication system that flies under the radar of state surveillance, as in blade runner 2049. such is the projection of globalized and monopolized capitalism with the tyrells of the world sitting on top of their pyramidal and ziggurat-like buildings of the future as in what has become a 'blade runner world.' or, better still, living in floating cities in the clouds above the earth as in the netflix sci-fi series altered carbon. but what of the replicants? …. and the terminators? is there a clamor that goes unheard? of course, all of this can be viewed as a farce. workers will not be eliminated just yet, merely constantly enhanced and supplanted with economically viable ai; the auto industry via the 'toyotism' of taïch ohno already provides the paradigmatic model. but more to the point, as discussed below, we all have already been harnessed into a 'matrix world' to keep the supercomputer operating, supplying it with the battery power it needs to keep running. south korea, asia's fourth largest economy and twelfth largest in the world, a country that i draw on throughout this book, is dominated by family-owned conglomerates-the chaebols, who shape the country's economy and have their hand steering the country's political elections, as well as its industries. both hyundai and samsung ceos have been involved in scandals to bring down president park geun-hye. this is but one incident of many around the world. the nation-state is constantly weakening, unable to provide the social services to its electorate. designer capitalism, as i have called it elsewhere (jagodzinski 2010), has the uncanny ability to target and cater to select populations' desires, needs, and wants, using big data, the 'new' oil, that is able to mobilize algorithms with greater and greater specificity. the oxymoronic term, spoken in complete irony as 'mass customization,' sees to it that 'prosumer society' sustains itself by cybernetic feedback loops that prevent the horizon line for the next cycle of goods to be sold from ever closing. it is a perpetual machine: everything now becomes 'smart' or 'personalized' with 'digital assistants' to help manage the increasing complexity of social life. amazon's delivery system of goods and wal-mart's innovations in supply chain logistics pretty much assure that the commodification of goods will be sustained via on-time deliveries. as jeremy rifkin wrote in 2014, this is an age of access, but access limited to a privileged population globally, and even within this privileged group, the access divide to technology is obvious as to who is 'wired.' we are our own oppressors, as maurizio lazzarato (2015) reminds us, as debt and credit climbs. platform capitalism, as nick srnicek (2017) aptly maps out, comes in many forms: advertising platforms (google, facebook), cloud platforms (to rent out hardware and software), industrial platforms (converting traditional manufacturing into internet connections), product platforms (transforming traditional goods into services-like spotify), and lean platforms (these are businesses that require minimal ownership such as airbnb and uber). together, they are able to cater to a broad crosssection of users: "customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects" … (43). as intermediary digital infrastructures, they further empower this range of users "with a series of tools that enable to build their own products, services, and marketplaces" (ibid.). to increase network activity and generate more data, free products and services are offered. through cross-subsidization, platforms expand their reach, and in this way, a 24/7 platform is able to constantly garner users and dredge up data, a perpetual machine that never sleeps. what srnicek did not elaborate in his short book has been brilliantly explored earlier by benjamin bratton's (2016) the stack, subtitled "on software and sovereignty." bratton provides a comprehensive grasp of the contemporary computerized global situation as a megastructure (the titular stack) through six layers: earth, cloud, city, address, interface, and user. from the earth, the geological demands for computing are harnessed through materials. the cloud layer names the sovereignty of platform capitalism such a google and facebook, whereas the city layer is the lived experience of cloud-computerized daily life, as explored, for instance, by simon gottschalk's (2018) concept of the 'terminal self.' with the address layer, bratton tackles identification as a form of management and control, with the interface layer coupling users to computers. finally, user layer refers to human and nonhuman [i prefer inhuman as we shall see] agents that also interact with computational machines. the dispositif bratton maps out is the new form of governance and sovereignty that has blanketed the globe with dire political consequences, "a possible new nomos of the earth linking technology, nature and the human" (bratton, in terranova 2014b: 390) . bratton presents a form of accelerationism as well. there is some hope for a 'red stack,' as tiziana terranova (2014a) presents it, which would require the reappropriation of fixed capital in the age of the networked society, based on the use of technology for a commons, thereby overturning this capitalist nightmare through a new currency (such as bitcoin), social networks that increase participation and education, and via bio-hypermedia that try to refigure subsumption of the human body made possible by a myriad of wearable smart devices so as to generate a new breed of imaginary apps via maker movements and artistic movements like electronic disturbance theatre who develop hacker apps to skirt border controls (dardot and laval 2019) . the question emerges as to how a nonhuman other, like the current pandemic virus, so easily disrupts and puts to flight this established dispositif of capitalism to such an extent that it begins to collapse? a red stack would have to rethink the established assemblages by recognizing the nonhuman and inhuman (ai) emergent interactions for any future hope for a commons to be imagined. the implications of bratton's 'stack' are alarming. it is remarkable that shoshana zuboff's (2019) seven-hundred-page book on 'surveillance capitalism,' which works out the politics of 'the stack,' yet makes no mention of bratton's extraordinary achievement! if bratton's analysis is dense and theoretically difficult, zuboff's makes what's afoot more accessible. from my point of view, zuboff analyzes how designer capitalism has now morphed into 'surveillance capitalism' (or cognitive capitalism) via the pervasive influx of algorithmic platforms. zuboff offers this as a shift in emphasis given the capitalist digital platform's emphasis on big data that changes the capitalist 'game' ever since the dot-com bubble burst took place at the turn of the twenty-first century. "surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as 'machine intelligence,' and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that i call behavioral futures markets" (2019: 14, original emphasis). this dependency on platform mediation is addictive. when facebook crashed in the los angeles county and in other us cities for a few hours in the summer of 2014, many americans called their local emergency services at 911! (mosendz 2014) . and what of love when it comes to platform capitalism? i am reminded of anna longo's (2019) study of algorithmic dating online to find the perfect partner and the risks involved. i quote her first paragraph in length as it captures so well as to what is at stake in contemporary postmodern order. once, the purpose of knowledge was to give form to reality; then its aim became the production of possibilities; now it has become nothing but a risk manager. once, we were producers; then we became consumers; now we are products. once, the body's strength was exploited to produce goods; then the energy of desire was exploited to consume goods; now one's creativity is exploited to produce the self as a commodity. once, we had children; then we desired children; now we have become children. once, love was a pact of mutual support; then it was a desire; now it is the price at which we sell ourselves. once, machines were a means to our ends; then they were the ends for which we were the means; now they are oracles that interpret signs and whose prophecies we interpret. once, we were in a disciplinary society; then we were in a society of control; now we are in a risk society. (longo, online) we search google only to have google searching us; we naively thought that digital services were free, but it is us who are 'free' to be used by capitalist platforms. digital surveillance capitalism is a perfect form of 'algorithmic governmentality' with a surprising inflection of pastoralism (cooper 2020) . the focus is on populations shaped by well-defined signifiers according to the usual sociological litany: age, gender, sex, race, religion, district, state, and so on. this way cities can be surveilled and gerrymandered, even entire societies evaluated by intergovernmental agencies like the organization for economic co-operation and developments (oecd) and world bank to asses loan risk, and so on. with covid-19 amongst us, now it becomes even more worrisome as an invisible enemy is evoked, national emergency declared, and 'war' measures are talked about. trump even bloats himself as becoming the new 'fdr' to politicize the pandemic. recession and depression are on the horizon as the trump administration continues to use 'disaster capitalism' (klein 2007) to benefit the corporations (especially travel, entertainment, and pharmaceutical sectors) at the expense of the working poor (less than 20% of american workers will receive assurances of paid sick leave), an economic play that has repeated itself often enough despite alternative economic visions as generated by the most left progressive voices (like us presidential hopeful bernie sanders), and even the more moderate ones who advocate for 'progressive capitalist' policies like nobel laureate recipient in economics, joseph stiglitz (2019). zuboff, in effect, presents us with an inverse panopticon model of the discipline society and a better mapping of foucault's biopower that deleuze continued to articulate as a 'society of control' with its refinement of the third phase of social cybernetics (deleuze 1995: 180) . surveillance also applies to the entertainment industry in such an account (andrejevic 2007). only a very few are elevated to be read, watched on screens, and heard: actors, singers, writers (mostly popular fiction writers, not academics who form a very small and (perhaps) insignificant voice in the larger picture), politicians, newscasters, and talk show radio hosts. state surveillance and its capitalist platform counterpart divide society into those who are watched and those who are the watchers (sitting behind the scenes). the entertainment factor must not be forgotten as 'work becomes play.' trump's success cannot be imagined without the performative aspects of his rally speeches (recall hitler practicing his facial expressions in the mirror, and the passion and vigor of his speeches). affect (as emotion) has been captured through our screen cultures. nature seems to have become culture or second nature as some critics have put it, like the fable of the king, or usually his daughter, who lives in a golden cage. she must disguise herself and go out among the peasants to experience 'true' nature and 'real' life. but, in the contemporary scenario, the virtual and actual have already collapsed into one large infosphere so brilliantly captured by sci-fi films such as existenz and valerian and the city of a thousand planets. google-incubated pokémon go, an interactive mobile game, uses a smart phone's gps data and location tracking that sets kids chasing and capturing these 'creatures' electronically. jason wallin (2018) persuasively argues that the experience of 'real' animals has taken a back seat to these virtual imaginary ones. well-documented scientific studies now on 'emotional contagion' (kramer et al. 2014) show how facebook is the perfect platform to manipulate emotion. long-lasting moods like depression as well as happiness can be transferred through networks. what is unnerving is that such emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people and with the complete absence of nonverbal clues. the amazing bbc television series black mirror is perhaps as good as it gets to show these near-future technologies that plunge us into dystopian worlds that are being shaped at the unconscious bodily levels through the ecological assemblages shaped by desire as the intra-actions of human, nonhuman, and inhuman agencies. covid-19, for example, is an intra-action of the virus with the human, discourses on china (especially conspiracy theories of them inventing a synthetic virus to ruin the global economy), role of politics, news channels, fear, and so on. covid-19 is not 'just' a virus but an emergent dispositif of intra-actions that shape the global noosphere. nature (nonhuman), culture (human), and technology (inhuman) as an assemblage shape an array of differences that structure those who are most vulnerable to those least, including which animals are to be consumed according to 'westernized' standards. so, 'wet markets' that serve the poor for much of africa and asia that include pangolins, live wolf pups, scorpions, civets, salamanders, crocodiles, and so on, are now prohibited or perceived as the next source of a pandemic. one of the contributions zuboff makes in her book, which parallels such theorists as bernhard stiegler's (2010) concern over the transmittance of 'tertiary memory' or mnemotechnics via media technologies, is the "industrialization of memory" in terms of the "division of learning in society" (176) that is produced. knowledge is shaped by google and company by reducing it to its lowest common denominator: as information, or as 'facts' within well-defined narratives that can be 'communicated.' these narratives are then deeply politicized. controlling and steering the 'narrative' shape public opinion and affect. narratology as a scholarly pursuit has exploded, as each group and culture enlist the repertoire of its storytelling to establish its identity. who distributes such knowledge, who decides which information is distributed, and who ultimately decides which knowledge is to be made available become the contested questions. knowledge distribution, authority, and power triangulate to determine what screen-platform technologies are able to shape a consuming public. such public experience is easily shaped and manipulated as we have seen in countries like the united states and italy who have networks to spread their ideology as 'opinion' rather than news: trump's the fox network, or silvio berlusconi's media s.p.a (gruppo mediaset); his family still owns more than a third share of italy's largest commercial broadcaster. as bratton (2016) puts it, these 'social bubbles' generate new forms of "doctrinal cognitive fundamentalisms" (239). and, rifkin (2014) notes on the 'end of the nation states': "the deregulation and commercialization of the world's telecommunications and broadcasting systems is stripping nation-states of their ability to oversee and control communications within their borders. global media companies are establishing a worldwide network of communications that bypasses political boundaries altogether and, in the process, changing the fundamental character of political life on earth" (223). such is the state of affairs in 'democratic' countries where media shapes thought and behavior below the level of consciousness-at the level of affects, feelings, and emotions. in deleuze (1992) terms-we are now reduced to 'dividuals'-or 'digital subjects' (goriunova 2019) , where behavior patterns crunched by the algorithms provide insights as to what desires and needs are so as to both stabilize and hedge a futures market, a form of divination as joshua ramey (2018) argues. deleuze and guattari's (1987) body without organs (bwo) is now read as so many data points. they become "values, dynamically re-instantiated correlations, rules and models, shreds of actions, identities, interests, and engagements, which are put into relation with each other, disaggregated, categorized, classified, clustered, modelled, projected onto, speculated upon, and made predictions about" (goriunova 2019: 133) . the bwo now becomes the 'digital subject' as mediated by ai technologies. "digital subjects are future orientated. computationally, they span different spatio-temporal scales; they can differ in length of alphanumerical strings, in complexity, in forms of composition and proposition, in proximity of evaluated parameters, in number of units, in frequency of occurrence, and in types of future they propose" (133). a digital subject never corresponds to a classically constituted individual: "it is always more and less than a human" (133, original italic); that is, inhuman. they are "pulled together in plastic aggregates of subjects, which are sets of associations, propositions, and probabilities" (134). the picture that emerges is like star trek's transporter system: as if an individual (as a bundle of big data) could potentially be totally deconstituted into 'bits,' which could then be reconstituted in another place via a computational infrastructure; although impossible now, the principle is the same as this now happens in 'real' time via facetime, skype, and many other forms of tele-imaging. zuboff (2015) offers yet another frightening scenario to what is already a dark picture, which she calls the big other. "surveillance capitalism thus qualifies as a new logic of accumulation with a new politics and social relations that replaces contracts, the rule of law, and social trust with the sovereignty of big other. it imposes a privately administered compliance regime of rewards and punishments that is substituted by a unilateral redistribution of rights. big other exists in absence of legitimate authority and is largely free from detection or sanction. big other may be described as an automated coup from above: not a coup d'état but rather a coup des gens" (83). in this scenario, ai is now running us. "unlike the centralized power of mass society, there is no escape from big other. there is no place where the other is not" (82). this inhuman big other is not the symbolic big other of psychoanalysis popularized by slavoj žižek (1989) . in my terms, it is inhuman rather than nonhuman. as bratton (2016) warns, google's famous mission statement to organize the world's information has dire consequences. it "changes meaning when the world itself is seen as being information, such that to organize all the information is to organize all the world" (87). such an apparatus of planetary-scale computing enables a "full-spectrum governmentality" (101). google is basically building a contemporary tower of babel. besides scanning every possible book that google could get its hands on (with or without copyright), their project is one of universal translatability. google translate attempts to make this a reality-to smoothly translate any language into any other, where all surviving languages form a lingua franca. this is now superseded by babel fish in their attempt to link all their communication platforms together: google talk, hangout, google plus messenger, and other communication tools. this is again a crass form of knowledge translation, hardly poetic, but certainly useful on certain pragmatic levels. it shows, however, the gap between algorithmic ai and a human translator who must grasp structures of feeling and thought in another tongue, something ai is far from doing. google's pagerank sorts the results of search queries, while facebook edgerank automatically decides in which order users get their news feeds; there are a host of other programs whose functions are equally specific: appinions, klout, hummingbird, pkc, perlin noise, cinematch, and kdp select. john durham peters (2015) sums google up in his chapter, 'god and google': "google inherits the narrative of the priestly class that discerns the universe, renders order out of chaos, answers our entreaties, and invites us to take part in manic arts of divination. … google is a clergy defined by its control over the means of inscription and retrieval -as clergies and priesthoods always have been" (333-334). basically, google has become the big other of surveillance capitalism, materializing, reifying, and concretizing žižek's symbolic lacanian big other. mark andrejevic's (2013) 'infoglut' provides a review to show how the market forces see the 'brain' as the frontier to be mined so that its advertising engineers can write the music and make us dance accordingly; the 'emotional' brain, which is habitually structured and easily manipulated shows a plasticity for constant change. giorgio griziotti (2019) maps this out in 'neurocapitalism,' in a section "what foucault could not predict" (166-170) has become standard fare now. through neurosciences, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and robotics, the dichotomies (separation) between humans and machines, nature and cultures have become a continuum, with 'genetic capitalism' around the corner as "the perfect complement to the qualitative ranking algorithms" (171), closing the circle of "political, social and biological domination over the whole of society" (ibid.). the covid-19 vaccine, estimated to be 18 months away at the time of this writing, will prove to be a test as to whether the pharmaceutical sector will score unprecedented profit. neuroplasticity leads to 'brain-hacking.' it sets the tone for experimentation; millions of dollars are spent on negative political adds in the united states because they are effective. it is no longer a question of 'facts' (if there ever were naked facts), but manipulating the narrative, reaching the next level of 'spin' doctoring. colin j. bennett (2015) has pretty much mapped out how such micro-targeting works in the way affect is channeled. so much for the self-determination of the people's will in a democracy, a tentative experimental myth that never was, but has now become obviously apparent, and no longer hiding in the shadows. all this is done without direct coercion, entirely self-authorized. it addresses as to how and why deleuze and guattari (1987) maintained that the masses are always subject to oppressing themselves, transferring their hopes, fears to dictators, cult figures, and priests to their own detriment. desire, which itself is revolutionary, can easily lead to fascism-that is, desire turning on itself when its revolutionary trajectory becomes blocked. we see this phenomenon over and over again; yet it seems today especially pernicious in countries like the united states and britain. the utopian impulse of 'make america great again' and brexit is bringing back the mythic glory days of us leadership and uk's colonial rule and self-sufficiency. these populist movements become a way to mobilize repressed desire by the working classes in both countries. some, however, claim that such movements are not entirely negative, presenting the promise of a renewed democracy (eklundh and knott 2020). hillary clinton and jeremy corbyn become despised for blocking their utopian ideal-that is, their desire which escapes their social conditions. fascism signifies the blocking off desire. coming from 'below' it turns into a love for the state by its supporters for the form of power the state creates (trump is a 'businessman' not a washington politician. he is draining the 'swamp' and so on). in this way, 40% of the country that are his 'base' supporters ignore his pathology. boris johnson's performative rants and acting out were also dismissed by 40% of the population that voted in the conservatives to ensure brexit. as deleuze and guattari (1983: 367, 380) maintain, fascism reveals both sides of desire: both its revolutionary form and its self-destructive suicidal one as they can no longer be distinguished. the gop now blindly follow trump as do the conservatives blindly follow johnson as each leader makes the necessary purges for those not following party policy and loyalty. alain badiou (2019) calls this new development, 'democratic fascism.' both leaders have been severely criticized for their mishandling of the covid-19 pandemic. both are politicizing the pandemic for their own gains. trump, for example, attempted to secure a future vaccine development by the german pharmaceutical firm curevac exclusively for the united states, as reported by die welt. big data is some sort of big other where a flat ontology emergeswhere everything is harvested (extracted), including 'data exhaust,' seemingly inconsequential data that then is crunched to see if it reveals new unseen useful correlations. the big other as "a ubiquitous networked institutional regime that records modifies and commodifies everyday experience from coasters to bodies, communication to thought, all with a view to establishing a view to establishing new pathways to monetization and profit" (zuboff 2015: 81) . it appears that object-oriented ontologies (ooo), like that of graham harman (2018) , seem perfectly suited to surveillance capitalism (and its cognates: designer capitalism, neurocapitalism, cognitive capitalism) with its parade of never-ending objects as infinite data information along its flat ontology. i am reminded here of alexander r. galloway's (2013) explicit critique as to how such theory supports the spirit of post-fordist capitalism. while it may have brought on the ire of some, the question remains as to why there is such a close connection, if not a mirroring between object-orientated computer languages such as java or c++ and philosophies of speculative realism such as bruno latour, quentin meillassoux, and alain badiou's numerology (existing outside of history), and more to the point, especially graham harman focus on non-relationality. bratton (2016) for one is not so convinced: "flatness here refers not to ontology or the withdrawal of objects, but their functional communication and their mechanically withdrawn relations" (205). yet, harman's 'aesthetics of allure,' which posits the transference of communication at a distance, seems to suggest otherwise, quite different than bratton's recognition that "relationality between things … exceeds the relations they might already possess as natural objects" (ibid.). this last claim is consistent with theorist of assemblage theory like deleuze and guattari. in this sense, there would be a distancing from ian bogost's (2012) 'alien phenomenology' with his flat ontology maxim: "all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally" (11). zuboff's big other is also a 'realist notion.' she maintains an external world exists independently of ourselves and our languages, thoughts, and beliefs. as zuboff (2015) puts it: "big other is the sovereign power of a near future that annihilates the freedom achieved by the rule of the law. it is a new regime of independent and independently controlled facts that supplants the need for contracts governance, and the dynamism of market democracy. big other is the 21st century incarnation of the electronic text that aspires to encompass and reveal the comprehensive immanent facts of market, social, physical, and biological behaviors" (81). ai becomes the new god that divines reality. can it get any gloomier? yes, it can! paul b. preciado (2013) outlines what she calls the pharmaco-pornographic era, which builds on foucault's analysis of biopower as the introduction of new chemical, pharmacological, prosthetic, media, and electronic surveillance techniques for controlling gender and sexual reproduction. in her scenario, we find ourselves in the strange landscape of the opiate barons of the dystopian film series, into the badlands. i am exaggerating, of course, but we are taken to extraordinary 'architectures' of the medical professions where cybernetics meets the neurosciences, meets the genetic sciences, meets the biosciences, and so on. in the twenty-first century, analytic companies such as gns healthcare amass data from genomics, medical records, lab data results, mobile health devices to provide information about users to health insurance companies. it then becomes a question of manipulating the costs of health insurance given the different categories of applicants. data collected about one's emotional stability, happiness, and the likelihood of having a baby influences the job market in terms of hiring, being retained or promoted. perhaps one of the most frightening figures of such machinic production is oracle, the largest consumer data broker acquiring any number of data companies: datalogix, bluekai, addthis, and crosswise. it lists 100 data providers in its directory, providing some 300,000 different data categories that may be assigned to consumers. the oracle data cloud provides information to visa and mastercard (christl 2017) . it is a social hyperobject that can't be fathomed and would seem to satisfy zuboff's description as an instance of the ai big other, raising the anxieties of control, a narrative that is repeated in the terminator film franchise and the television series on the other side of the ledger is the 'life' of inorganic matter that is being put to use for the development of ai: lithium and silicon being especially important minerals, but all kinds of rare minerals as well are required for the production of smart technologies. jussi parikka (2015) has called this development the 'anthrobscene' as technological waste accumulates. he shows how closely media is wedded to nature. natureculture has now become a common trope to be used when dealing with the new phase the earth is entering given the added global input of anthropogenic labor by our species. as ai slowly pushes into the realm of wetware and, as developed above, smart technologies are continually used to harness life of the human species for capitalist ends on the grounds that this offers a 'better' life, the distinctions between 'life' and machine have effectively disappeared. gilbert simondon's basic insights overcoming hylomorphism, and his notions of individuation and creative invention that link technology, culture, and organization, as furthered by the numerous writings of luciana parisi (2013 parisi ( , 2017 , lead to a machinic understanding already nascently developed by deleuze and guattari in the 1970s. what the human 'becomes' is shaped by these forces-both organic and inorganic as harnessed in various capitalist assemblages. the category 'human' has had a long history of exclusions and what is being prepared for in the future is no exception as transhumanism dovetails with the current modes of global capitalism. such pronouncements like timothy morton's (2009) 'ecology without nature' that has received so much attention seem short sighted/sited/ cited as the excess of nature can never be controlled, although that is the grand narrative that is shaped today. our species extinction is certainly a strong possibility, and an apocalypse is not out of the question, which i have struggled with elsewhere (jagodzinski 2018). this side of the problematic, namely discourses that are not fixated on 'life,' has received less attention. given this situation, something else has emerged that now draws our attention. elizabeth povinelli's (2016) notions of geontology and geontopower were developed to mark a distance from foucault's biopower and achille mbembe's necropower to recognize that the event of the anthropocene in late settler liberalism has shaped a "distinction between life and nonlife" (4), which itself seems to be a looming dichotomy. a form of death has emerged that ends in nonlife -"the extinction of humans, biological life, and, as is often put, the planet itself" (8). this "takes us to a time before the life and death of individuals and species, a time of the geos, of soulessness" (9). nonlife as geos (as the inorganic and inanimate) takes on this added nuance. it conveys the paradox of human extinction, yet at the same time, the planet (geos) will simply continue on without us. we see this in 'atopic' areas like chernobyl, the korean demilitarized zone (dmz) between north and south korea, and (as mentioned earlier) the effects of halting human production on the climate during the covid-19 pandemic. one might just as well call these developments afterlife. this predicament of bios (human life) is analyzed by povinelli through three figures of geopower: the desert, the animist, and the virus, the last one being the most prescient given covid-19. these seem to be three diagnostic and symptomatic levels of entanglement between life and nonlife. carbon forms the central imaginary of the desert so as to restabilize the life vs. nonlife distinction. the desert stands for denuded life (perhaps bare life) that can be revitalized through technologies. the fossil plays a special role here: not only by way of fossil fuels like oil, but also by the possible reviving of extinct animals through fossil dna via bioengineering. the figure of the animist (indigeneity) presents no distinction between life and nonlife; rather, it is a bridge figure. lastly, the virus has the terrorist as its central imaginary, a disruption of life and nonlife in such a way that the dichotomy itself is put into doubt. the obvious figure here is the zombie: the living dead who mark the existential crisis of late liberalism. a pandemic like covid-19 changes the landscape into the 'walking dead' where a paradoxical reversal takes place: the anxiety of not becoming infected disrupts the everyday routines of life, which slowly begin to transform into nonlife. in this view, our species horizon is closed via extinction, unless a contingent event takes places that can initiate global transformative change. given the pandemic, the outcomes are far from certain. the chapters that follow draw on this backdrop that has been presented here in various direct and oblique ways. my experiences in korea are very much part of the interface between popular culture, media, and visual art as related to my (mis)understandings of korean culture. gilles deleuze and félix guattari created concepts that offered me significant ways throughout this book to theorize the 'wired' world in a 'post-way.' we have been launched into an era of big other algorithmic governmentality where art, media, and education demand more of us than ever before to grasp our condition in the twenty-first century. we are immersed in a society of 'control,' which is overshadowed by the anthropocene: a tension between posthumanist projections of planetary control and a posthuman unknown, better to be called an ahuman unknown (maccormack 2020) that points to species extinction. we all are digital subjects (dividuals); the electronic body that we possess is constantly captured by and within the circuits of data. this 'shadow electronic self' remains visible, ready for categorization by facebook's lookalike audiences advertising service, and a host of other devices to position and track our movements. rosi braidotti's (2019) excursions into critical posthumanities are perhaps indicative of where we must proceed in the future. perhaps this book has some worth when considering such a direction? references andrejevic, m. 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architecture: computation, aesthetics, and space after nature: the dynamic automation of technical objects the marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism testo junkie: sex, drugs, and the biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era (b. penderson, trans.) politics of divination: neoliberal endgame and the religion of contingency the zero marginal cost society: the internet of things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of capitalism platform capitalism technics and time symbolic misery the catastrophe of the sensible biopower, psychopower and the logic of the scapegoat the neganthropocene people, power, and politics: progressive capitalism for an age of discontent red stack attack! algorithms, capital and the automation of the common red stack attack! algorithms, capital and the automation of the common internet invention: from literacy to electracy avatar emergency destruction of habitat and loss of biodiversity are creating the perfect conditions for diseases like covid-19 to emerge interrogating the anthropocene: ecology, aesthetics, pedagogy, and the future in question # accelerate: manifesto for an accelerationist politics (2013) reprint the sublime object of ideology big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization the age of surveillance capitalism: the flight for a human future at the new frontier of power panji mulkillah ahmad* universitas gadjah mada, indonesia indi hikami universitas gadjah mada, indonesia biko nabih fikri zufar universitas gadjah mada, indonesia appridzani syahfrullah universitas gadjah mada, indonesia abstract youtube is a digital platform that allows content creators to stream their videos in exchange for money earned through the youtube partner program mechanism, motivates many people to join youtube. however, what they do not realize is the hidden effect youtube brings in the form of alienation experienced by youtube content creators as digital labour. this article discusses this phenomenon of alienation experienced by digital labours. using a qualitative approach with a descriptive research design, it offers a narrative research strategy to examine the narrative and discourse of alienation of content creators on youtube. the unit of analysis of the study is the content of youtube creators as digital labour. the findings show that youtube is mainly a vehicle used by digital capitalism for the sake of profit accumulated by exploiting content creators from the videos they make. content creators receive disproportionate or even no financial compensation from youtube for the videos they produce for youtube. as a result, youtube content creators as digital labour experienced alienation from their work, their work activities, from themselves as a human species and from other humans. * corresponding author: panji mulkillah ahmad department of law science, universitas gadjah mada, indonesia email: panjimulkillah@mail.ugm.ac.id digital labour: digital capitalism and the alienation of youtube content creators journal of asian social science research 2021, vol. 3, no. 2: 167-184 https://cassr.net/jassr/ © the author(s) 2021 article 168 journal of asian social science research vol. 3, no. 2 2021 key words alienation, youtube, digital labour, digital capitalism introduction it is not exaggerating to say that the advanced development of science and technology has brought a tremendous impact on all aspects of human life. such development that stands out is the convergence of two entities: technology and communication. long before the age of the internet, it is already known that telecommunication equipment in the form of a telephone, for example, is the result of this convergence at its first foray. as time progressed, the convergence produce other products which are more advanced than before. the variety of platforms we encounter today is the result of this long process of creating new and better technologies now and then. in these platforms, the interaction among humans is a duplication of the embodiment of interaction in cyberspace. in this sense, castels (2004) refers to a network society as a society whose social structure is made up of networks supported by microelectronics-based information and communication technology. in more detail, castles (2004) explains that the network society is formed from three processes: the technological revolution, the restructuring of capitalism, and the socio-cultural movement. the process of exchanging information becomes one of the keywords of the network society. this model society is a society characterized by information that flows through global networks at an unprecedented speed (redshaw 2020). the flow of information on the internet goes so fast as a result of the duplication of human interaction being transferred to the virtual realm. this can be seen from the high number of mobile phone users around the world, which is statistically around 48% of the total world population. almost half of the world’s population has a cellphone and interacts there and the virtual world becomes a noisy space due to interactions that occur non-stop for 24 hours. on the other hand, van dijk (2006) distinguishes different characteristics between network society and mass society. the significant differences include, according to van dijk, network communities are more heterogeneous and more individualistic considering their connectedness due to existing networks, whether it is the internet or more specifically social media. digitization also has impacted the economy so that the term digital economy appears. according to turban (2002), the digital economy, also known as the internet economy, the new economy, or the web economy, refers to an economy based largely on digital technologies including digital 169panji mulkillah ahmad et al. communication networks (internet, intranet, etc.), computers, software, and other related information technology. the digital economy also has characteristics that are different from that of the conventional economy. according to potts (2016), the digital economy can be digitized and tracked, connected to the internet which then connects assets, suppliers, workers, and policymakers. another characteristic is that the digital economy operates by sharing, personalizing customers, and creating direct relationships between buyers and sellers. these characteristics provide convenience for the community. in addition to the convenience obtained by the owners of capital, the convenience for the public in accessing the internet and a wide selection of products are the main attractions for conducting transactions. however, there are several obstacles when it is used for conducting conventional shopping transactions. the internet has now also turned into product windows and spoils the eyes of the people who are constantly thirsty for their consumptive desire. as a result, the digital economy has a strong capitalistic style and capitalist domination that will never stop even though times have changed to the digital era (fuchs 2014). the velocity of money in the virtual realm occurs in an astonishing number and grows higher every year. data from statista state that the revenue received by e-commerce in 2020 reached 4.2 trillion dollars, a three-fold increase from 2014 which was recorded at only 1.3 trillion dollars. the largest turnover of money occurs in e-commerce. for example, ebay revenue alone in the first quarter of 2021 amounted to 3.2 billion dollars. in 2020, amazon’s revenue reached 386.1 billion dollars. digitalization has also created in the world’s top companies that profit at a fantastic rate. three of the top five companies in the world today are companies that are closely connected to the internet. however, the money circulation on the internet is not only generated by e-commerce alone but also by various social media platforms. facebook as a social media platform, for example, is included in the world’s top companies that generated 870.5 billion dollars in 2020. social media platforms can turn into giant companies with huge profits. although these social media platforms are downloaded and used for free, profit-taking is a common motive behind the creation of such platforms (elder-vass 2016). this article analyses youtube, one of the most popular digital platforms in the world. it provides youtubers (the video content creators on youtube) with opportunities to produce videos on youtube in exchange for dollars earned through the youtube partner program mechanism. this 170 journal of asian social science research vol. 3, no. 2 2021 motivates many people, including media corporations, to make youtube their main platform for showing their videos. youtube’s economic potential is in line with the indonesian government’s agenda to encourage young people to engage in the digital economy. according to president joko widodo (2017), the potential money from the digital economy sector in indonesia could reach us$ 130 billion in the 2017-2022 period. what is not conveyed behind this big lure is that there is a hidden alienation experienced by content creators as digital labour. this article aims to uncover this alienation and to prove that youtube as a digital platform is not just a space of expression, but also a capitalistic profitoriented corporation. in doing so, this article uses a qualitative approach with a descriptive research design and uses a strategy narrative research (ollerenshaw and creswell 2002) to analyse the narrative and discourse alienation of creator content on youtube. the rich narrative and discourse on digital labour who experience alienation as a social phenomenon is much interest of this research. the unit of analysis of this research is youtubers as content creators who have unconsciously experienced alienation as long as they continued to create content. youtube and digital capitalism youtube is the largest video on demand platform today, which was founded in 2005. it has the slogan “broadcast yourself” with an ambition to be a place of expression through video. at first, users or content creators only made youtube-like social media in general, as a space for self-expression. then in 2007, youtube introduced the youtube partner program (ypp) which allows youtubers to receive funds in return for the videos they upload with a certain mechanism. in addition to ypp, youtube then provides support to creators in the form of youtube academy and youtube ambassador. the ypp is given to content creators to motivate them to monetize their videos on youtube. while the role of youtube academy is to improve the quality of videos and channels, the youtube ambassador is to inspire other people/creators to be more successful in monetizing their activities on youtube (labas and yasmine 2017). the main way to earn money from youtube is with ypp. to be able to join ypp, the content creator’s videos must be watched by the public for 4000 hours for 12 months, and have a minimum of 1000 subscribers. later, the youtube team will review the channel of the content creator that has met the requirements. the content creator must then register for google 171panji mulkillah ahmad et al. adsense at a later stage. from here, content creators can earn money from ads and subscribers from youtube premium (2019). regarding the ypp money payment scheme, from videos uploaded by content creators and serving ads, google pays 68 per cent of its adsense revenue to content creators. a youtube channel can earn an average of us$0.18 per view or the equivalent of us$18 per 1000 views (geyser 2021). according to social blade (2021), world-class content creators such as pewdiepie that has 110 million subscribers are estimated to be able to earn up to us$6.3 million per year. meanwhile, in indonesia, atta halilintar, who is estimated to be able to earn up to us$1.2 million per year, is considered the content creator with the largest number of subscribers estimated at around 23.6 million. the great content creators who have earned a lot of money from youtube have motivated many people to become youtubers. the ministry of education and culture of the republic of indonesia even regards content creators as professionals and discusses the opening of a vocational study program in content creation at schools or universities (kemendikbud ri 2019). youtube has turned into a serious thing to work on. initially, content creators used youtube as social media in general, as a space for content creators to express themselves. however, along with the increased turnover of money on youtube, the motivation of creators becomes material and fame (labas and yasmine 2017). youtube is an audiovisual social media platform, which was created as a for-profit corporation. youtube can only exist with the creative activities of its content creators, whatever the motivation of content creators and viewers (idealism, fame, money, information, alternative entertainment, etc.). youtube’s role and position are on the logic of capitalism and follow the rotational speed of capital (swara 2014). to understand better the political-economic logic of youtube as a platform for digital capitalism, it is necessary to first explain what is meant by digital capitalism. according to schiller (1999), digital capitalism is an epoch in which digital media becomes the means of production and central control of an increasingly supranational market system. capitalism can operate effectively on a global scale through digital network technologies. various internal contemporary companies also operate based on this digital capitalism management. it is also characterized by private ownership of digital networks to generate commercial profits. pace (2018) concludes that digital capitalism is the accumulation of processes, sites, and 172 journal of asian social science research vol. 3, no. 2 2021 moments in which digital technology mediates the structural tendencies of capitalism. one of the industries that developed in the era of digital capitalism is social networking sites (sns) such as google, facebook, and youtube. the way sns makes a profit is not like the conventional way of selling goods or services to consumers. sns reaches a large number of viewers or users, and at the same time sells their personal information data to advertisers for the benefit of the company. sns performs tracking and information gathering, turning collective subjectivity into profit (bolano and vieiral 2015). the manifestation of youtube as a platform for digital capitalism is seen from the benefits they get. youtube has 2 billion active users, with 38 million channels worldwide. from that audience and content creator market, in 2019 youtube revenue from its ads reached 15.1 billion us dollars from advertising, which is an increase of 408 per cent in 7 years. this is not counting from youtube premium and the youtube music service (dean 2021). this article argues that the relationship between content creators and youtube is a capitalistic production relationship. karl marx stated that there is an alienation experienced by workers in a capitalist production relationship. the next section will reveal the capitalist relationship found in the relationship between youtube and its content creators. alienation of youtube content creators as digital labour alienation in the marxist perspective the concept of alienation is closely related to marx and engels’s analysis of work. in german ideology, marx and engels stated that work is a conscious productive activity, which transforms and organizes nature so that man “produces the means of his survival” to fulfil human needs, as “the production of material life itself”(marx and engels 1932). work has different characters depending on the relations of production in society such as slave labour, feudal labour, and wage labour. the form of wage labour that exists today can only apply to a capitalist society, and cannot apply to a society of slavery or feudalism. as marx argued: “work is a natural condition of human existence, a condition of material exchange between man and nature, completely independent of the form of society. on the other hand, exchange-value labor is a specific and social form of labour” (marx 1859). 173panji mulkillah ahmad et al. in a capitalist society, work is divided into two forms. the first is ’work’ that is an activity to produce products that have a use or usevalue and are determined qualitatively. here, work aims to meet human needs. the second is ‘labour’, an activity that creates value that is only measured in quantity. labour exists as a historical form of organizing work in capitalism. in this form of labour, the activity becomes alienated (marx 1859). work that takes the form of labour is alienated because the product produced is not solely for the fulfilment of human needs but also produces surplus value for the capitalist (marx 1859). workers produce commodities that are then sold by capitalists to make a profit. however, the capitalist does not redistribute the profit to the workers who made it because the production of the commodity is considered the property of the capitalist. workers only get wages as compensation for the labour they provide. yet it is only through labour that a commodity can have value because only workers can produce value in that commodity. capitalists, machines, and raw materials cannot work on their own so they cannot produce value in a commodity. the capitalist exploitation of workers is based on this theft of surplus-value. thus, exploitation and alienation have a close relationship. alienation is both a condition and a result of exploitation. both are the foundation of capitalism, in addition to private property rights and the commodification of labour (fisher 2015). work in a capitalist society is not devoted to meeting human needs, but to capital. labour opposite capital “is alienated labour” and capital opposite labour “is alienated capital” (marx 1857). marx further elaborates alienation in the economic-philosophical manuscripts of 1844. he mentions four situations in which workers are alienated: 1) alienated for his work; 2) alienated from work activities; 3) alienated from himself as a human species, and 4) alienated with other humans (christ 2015). digital labour in digital capitalism what about alienation in the context of digital capitalism, especially on youtube creator content? to answer this, it is necessary to examine the concept of labour in digital capitalism. this is to show whether the activities of youtube creators are included in marx’s concept of work. there are two types of labour. first, material labour that produces products for human material needs (clothing, food, shelter, etc.), and 174 journal of asian social science research vol. 3, no. 2 2021 second, immaterial labour that produces immaterial products such as information, knowledge, and social relations (hardt and negri 2004). in the age of the internet, labour that produces information through digital media is called digital labour. humans with their brains organize experiences in such a way to create symbolic representations, social relations, artefacts, and social systems (fuchs and sevignani 2018). as fuchs (2015) describes, digital labour on social media platforms such as youtube has several characteristics as follows: 1. digital labour on social media produces meaning, content, communication with other users, and social relationships; 2. social media corporations monitor, store and review all online activities of users. corporations have profiles about their users’ activities, interests, interactions, and social relationships. personal data is sold as a commodity; 3. advertising on social media targets users based on their interests and personalization; and 4. algorithms play a role in regulating the placement of targets, prices, and the number of advertisements on social media. as conventional labour in capitalist production in general, digital labour in digital capitalism cannot be separated from the process of exploitation and alienation. in the context of digital labour in social media, fuchs (2012) explains: corporate social media sell the users’ data commodity to advertising clients at a price that is larger than the invested constant and variable capital,” making it partly the users and partly the corporations’ employees that “create the surplus-value contained in this commodity. the difference is that the users are unpaid and therefore – in monetary terms – infinitely exploited. in their study of facebook, fuchs and sevignani (2018) view that activity on social media has alienated humans. they think that activity on social media is a productive work (to make commodities) that alienates humans from four aspects: labour, work activities, oneself as a human, and other humans. 175panji mulkillah ahmad et al. first, the alienation of workers from their labour. marx explained that workers produce commodities that are not under their control or decisions. the capitalist determines the decision. the capitalist, not the worker, then owns the commodity, which is ironically the result of the workers’ production. here, there is a separation between workers and their products. marx (1884) said: the alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. the life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force. second, the alienation from work activities. because the workers’ products have been separated from them, the workers in carrying out work activities are not based on their own decisions. workers carry out products based on market and capitalist decisions. workers lose their creativity and freedom, and work activities are only a condition to be able to obtain food and other necessities. marx (1884) said: “his work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. it is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs”. third, the alienation of the worker from him or herself as a human species. humans are species that live as part of nature with animals, rocks, air, light, and so on. alienated labour makes workers no longer live as species, and live only as individuals. his life activities are merely used as a means for his physical existence. marx (1884) stated: in tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him. fourth, the alienation of workers from other humans. in the capitalist system, human relations change from social relations to money exchange relations. this is a consequence of the previous three aspects of alienation (marx 1884). 176 journal of asian social science research vol. 3, no. 2 2021 alienation of youtube content creators what about youtube content creators? we view that youtube content creators are alienated from these four aspects. youtube content creators are alienated from their work, due to the exploitation youtube makes on content creators. this is because content creators produce more value than youtube takes. content creators in producing videos use work tools such as cameras, voice recorders, computers for video editing, which are owned by themselves and not provided by youtube. content creators also devote their labour which is not provided by youtube, to work on scripts, corroborate with directors, producers, actors, camera people, doing editing, and so on. youtube does not make its own videos. youtube only acts as a platform provider that accommodates all the creativity created by content creators (ulya 2019). indeed, when a content creator’s video is uploaded on youtube, it contains the name of the content creator’s channel as a person who made the video. however, as explained by wasko and erickson (2009), youtube is trying to invite people to become content creators with monetization bids. people then do not realize that what they have uploaded on the platform belongs to youtube according to its slogan “broadcast yourself (as long as the content it’s ours)”. as seen from the statistics, it turns out that not all content creators are involved in ypp. a total of 84.2% of channels have fewer than 1000 subscribers (geyser 2021), which means the majority of content creators do not qualify for monetization. youtube does not pay them for their videos. in addition, content creators who are not or have not joined ypp do not receive copyright protection on their content (ulya 2019). the outpouring of their labour is not compensated, while youtube reaps such large funds. in this context,it is clear that the content creators on youtube or youtubers are alienated from their products. they are alienated from their work activities. unlike factory or office workers who work under orders from superiors, youtube content creators invisibly produce videos without being ordered by anyone. they also do not have employer-defined work hours. therefore, that content creators appear to have the freedom to make videos voluntarily, without coercion. nevertheless, today’s youtube phenomenon suggests otherwise. the youtube content creators are not ordered by anyone to make videos. it is their decision whether they want to produce videos of comedy, music, dramas, or podcasts. however, not all types of videos can invite 177panji mulkillah ahmad et al. viewers in large numbers. many youtube channels are only watched by a few viewers so their creators cannot invite advertisers through adsense and do not earn any money from the videos they have made. youtube has an algorithmic system that recommends to viewers based on what is trending on youtube and based on viewers’ interests from their viewing history. the ability of youtube’s algorithm to direct what viewers should watch indirectly directs content creators about what videos they should make to earn money. this algorithm plays a significant role because, in 2018, youtube’s chief product officer said that 70% of watch time on youtube was spent watching videos recommended by the algorithm (cooper 2021). several indonesian content creators have exposed the problems of youtube’s algorithm in their videos. some of them have ended their careers on youtube because they viewed youtube as an unhealthy ecosystem. skinnyindonesian24, a content creator who has worked for 10 years and finally ended his channel in 2020, said: if we look at the current youtube system… rewards in terms of views, subscribers, likes, comments… these rewards are given to content whose content for me is not the best. there is a lot of good content out there that ends up being invisible. youtube, if we look at the old days, gave voice to the voiceless. our voices can be heard because we upload them to youtube. now the voices of people like us are dead because the entire spotlight is on the voices of great people. youtube used to be cool, now it is just a business… moreover, does this system benefit you? no, it benefits people who have money. it seems that youtube provides work time flexibility for content creators. however, this is wrong. the content creators who make youtube their source of livelihood cannot simply disappear from youtube. a content creator who has been inactive for 6 months will be de-monetized if his or her viewers and subscribers’ time decreases. the content creators are forced to continue making videos for youtube if they do not want to lose their source of livelihood. that way, content creators must work continuously in producing video content without a clear working time (ulya 2019). the youtube content creators are distorted in terms of free time and work time. this is inseparable from the nature of work in digital capitalism which steals more value; not only did they steal formal work but also 178 journal of asian social science research vol. 3, no. 2 2021 value. working time remains work time, while leisure time is converted into work time. digital technology allows capitalism to prioritize capital accumulation by breaking through space and time (novianti and wulandari 2017). it makes youtube content creators alienated as a human species. the content creators can only be recognized as long as they are productive in making content for youtube. they make the digital platform youtube the world they live in. ultimately, the content creators are alienated from other humans. this sounds contradictory to the reality that youtube makes collaboration between fellow content creators easier. given the technical and social features of the unique social media platform, it has helped the formation of the involvement of its community members, thereby attracting the interest of its users to collaborate and produce media products that are creative, expressive, as well as original homemade (jenkins 2009). however, a thorough and clear investigation reveals a different reality. because the spirit of capitalism as an economic system is based on the recognition of individual rights, including private property rights as rand (1967) asserts, the collaboration between content creators, in this case, is not interpreted as an intention to build class solidarity but for the sake of profit needs that lead to capital accumulation. social relations have now been hegemonized into production-based economic relations. this is reflected in various collaborative efforts among youtube content creators that prioritize cooperation which is encouraged by two motives. first, to increase social and financial capital. for example, aldi taher in ananta rispo’s video entitled “aldi taher bikin rigen marahmarah.” in the video, aldi taher clearly states that he earned three million rupiahs for his participation in deddy corbuzier’s podcast. this can be interpreted as a profit-based collaboration if viewed from the point of view of aldi taher as the speaker. he wanted to collaborate with deddy corbuzier for financial capital. regarding deddy corbuzier as the host, he spent three million rupiahs as capital to increase his social capital, considering that aldi taher was a rising figure at the time. moreover, deddy corbuzier received financial benefits from his collaboration with aldi taher for his podcast content. therefore, the collaboration between deddy corbuzier and aldy taher was not based on social relations among digital labour, but financial dan social capital. social capital is not merely non-material profit. when a person gets wider exposure as a result of his broadening and growing social capital, the impact is that his or her valuation increases. this valuation can then 179panji mulkillah ahmad et al. be materialized in the form of his or her contract rate as a public figure or an increasing number of viewers on his youtube channel, which leads to profits from advertising. in indonesia, the term “social climbing” (panjat sosial or pansos) then emerged as an effort to increase social capital. to be well-known, a novice content creator increases the number of viewers of his or her video by collaborating with top content creators with more social capital than him or her. this has resulted in criticism such as from vngnc that criticizes youtube rewind content carried out by content creators in indonesia. in its video entitled “wtf indonesia: the finale episode,” vngnc said: “and all of you who follow youtube rewind, indonesia is funny, every year wanting gold, glory, and fame.” this criticism is not without reason as the collaboration between content creators is at large motivated by profit-taking (vngnc 2018). currently, media corporations are shifting the position of individual content creators. around 30 of 50 youtube channels that have the most subscribers in the world are media corporations such as t-series and wwe (2021). in indonesia, 9 out of 10 youtube channels with the highest number of views are owned by media corporations, most of which are television station companies such as rcti, trans7, and indosiar (2021). youtube appears to be increasingly leaning towards corporate media over individual content creators. this is because media corporations can produce videos in large numbers regularly, and are watched by millions of people. due to this, individual content creators are transforming by adopting the company’s way of working. they recruit staff into their team to work as scriptwriters, editors, camera people, and so on. they include atta halilintar, ria ricis, baim paula, gen halilintar, deddy corbuzier, and raditya dika whose channel rankings on youtube indonesia are at the top. this kind of youtubers who recruit working staff can no longer be called digital labour. in marx’s perspective as described above, the youtubers who own the big channels like the above-mentioned ones do ‘work’ but not ‘labour’. on youtube channels owned by media corporations or individual youtubers, the context of digital labour refers to workers who are subordinated to the owners of these giant channels. these workers are subordinated to the channel owner, do not have full control of the channel, and are not fully entitled to the profits generated by the channel. they are digital labour who are exploited and, therefore, alienated. alienation is experienced by youtube content creators as digital labour. nevertheless, this alienation does not mean it will last forever. fuchs and sevignani propose a remedy to this alienation: the content creators substitute the 180 journal of asian social science research vol. 3, no. 2 2021 logic of capitalism with the logic of the commons and transform digital labour into playful digital work (fuchs and sevignani 2013). conclusion this article has shown that youtube is one of the platforms of digital capitalism. the production relationship that operates between youtube and content creators is capitalistic. youtube accumulates profits by exploiting content creators from the videos they make and upload to the platform. the majority of content creators are digital labourers who receive disproportionate financial compensation from youtube or do not even receive financial compensation at all for the videos they produce for youtube. as digital labour, the youtube content creators have been alienated in four aspects: alienation from their work, their working activities, from themselves as a human species, and from other humans. this article certainly leaves some interesting questions to be discussed further as consequences of the alienation experienced by youtube content creators as digital labourers: can 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(https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/ypp_whatis-ypp_video#strategies-zippy-link-1). 184 journal of asian social science research vol. 3, no. 2 2021 key: cord-0046451-wehyny8n authors: royo, sebastián title: introduction: spanish banking—how do we explain a history of fragility? date: 2020-06-28 journal: why banks fail doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-53228-2_1 sha: 3d3e5b60b3d7ae2eb519e62a66944da28fd0532f doc_id: 46451 cord_uid: wehyny8n this introductory chapter outlines the framework of analysis to explain why banking systems have been unstable in spain, with a particular emphasis on the 2008 banking crisis and the 2012 financial bailout. it applies the framework developed by calomiris and haber (fragile by design: the political origins of banking crises & scarce credit. princeton, princeton university press, 2014), and argues that spanish institutions could not prevent opportunities for the development of rent-seeking coalitions between populist and bankers. this has led to less stable banking system (i.e., more crisis prone) that has provided less abundant credit. the chapter also places the book in the context of the wider literature on financial systems and varieties of capitalism, describes what is unique about this book, and examines the structure of the spanish banking system. this book examines the "fragility" and historical crises proneness of the spanish banking system, with a particular focus on the most recent banking crisis that followed the global financial crisis of 2008. it borrows and builds on the arguments developed by calomiris and haber (2014) who have argued that banking systems arise from a process of political bargaining: every country's banking system is the result of what they call a game of bank bargains -a game in which actors with differentiated interests come together to form coalitions that will determine how banking systems are created and how they will operate: "banks' strengths and shortcomings are the predictable consequence of political bargains and those bargains are structured by a society's fundamental political institutions" (p. x). 1 each country is different: it has different rules of the game, specific players with distinctive interests, governments who get different shares of the benefits, and coalitions that forge specific "bank banking 1 in their magisterial comparative analysis of banking systems that focuses on the united states, england, canada, mexico, and brazil, calomiris and haber invite other scholars to test their framework "against additional country cases" (2014, p. 25) hoping that other scholars would evaluate their interpretations by comparing them with detailed narratives of other countries. this book takes that invitation and applies their framework and arguments to the spanish case. the bargaining power of the parties that participate in the bargain. finally, political circumstances influence innovations, which shape the development of new financial services and instruments. the main argument of the book is that political circumstances influence bank banking bargains , and that they, in turn, define the types of banks that emerged in the country. it seeks to explain banking goals and how they are shaped by political bargains, not the extend of regulation, but rather on the goals that give rise to regulation (p. 14). in regard to the most recent spanish banking crises of 2008, the main hypothesis is that this financial crisis was first and foremost the outcome of a political bargain. a central argument of this book is that politics matter, and that political factors are central to understanding why spain has suffered repeated banking crises. it starts from the premise that banks are not just institutions run and controlled by technocrats who make mistakes, and also that banking crises are not merely the results of such mistakes, or incompetence, bad luck, or moral shortcomings. on the contrary, this book shows how politics (understood as the political institutions that structure the incentives of economic and social actors) influence bankers' decisions, their operations, and the regulatory framework in which they operate. indeed, political institutions and politics structure the incentives of actors involved in banks, from bankers to shareholders, depositors, debtors, to regulators. in other words, banking crises are the consequence of banks' characteristics and the political circumstances in which they operate (see calomiris and haber 2014) . as we will see below, financial crises are devastating. despite this, and this is the puzzle that this book seeks to address, in countries like spain these crises have been persistent throughout history and governments have been unable, or unwilling, to make sure that banks either limit their risk exposure and/or have sufficient capitalization. when governments deal with banking decisions, they often face conflicts of interest, and different groups will have distinctive preferences and leverage (based on their wealth and power) to influence those decisions. the way(s) in which governments resolve or mediate those conflicts, and the resulting coalitions that emerge from the bargaining process, will largely determine the strength (or fragility) of the resulting banking structure. governments are indeed essential because they regulate banks, they enforce contracts, they use banks as source of finance, and in the case of bailouts, they allocate losses among creditors. but other groups (e.g., bankers, shareholders, depositors, debtors, taxpayers) also have 'skins in the game' and have a stake in the performance of banks. the interplay of these actors (what calomiris and haber call the "game of bank bargaining ") will lead to coalitions that will determine bank entry rules, the degree of competition in the sector, credit flows, credit conditions, banks' activities, and the allocation of loses. different bank structure configurations have different beneficiaries and losers among those stakeholders, and the outcome of the political struggle among them will determine the role that they will play in the financial system. this book seeks to explain how this struggle/bargaining process (what they call the "banking games ") has played out in spain in order to explain how banking rules have emerged in the country, and how the players have operated under those rules (calomiris and haber 2014, pp. 12-15) . to do so, the book traces the coevolution of banking and politics in spain over time, with a particular focus on the two decades that preceded the 2008 crisis; and it seeks to test calomiris and haber's hypotheses (2014, p. 453) : democracies are more conductive to a broad distribution of bank credit than autocracies; democracies with liberal institutions are more conductive to broad distribution of credit and the absence of banking crisis than those in which bankers form coalitions with populists; and government safety nets tend to destabilize banking systems, and they arise as a result of political bargains, not for economic efficiency reasons. in other words, it will test the hypothesis that stable democracies, like spain's, with weak institutions that cannot prevent opportunities for the development of rent-seeking coalitions between populist and bankers tend to have less stable banking system (i.e., more crisis prone) and tend to provide less abundant credit. on the contrary, democracies with strong institutions that prevent rent-seeking tend to have stable banking system that provides higher levels of credit. financial crisis has very serious and lasting consequences: banking collapses impact borrowers and can make credit more scarce, thus forcing businesses to cut back on investment and possibly reduce their workforce; individuals may also have to hold back on purchases and reduce their consumption; and they often lead to bailouts in which taxpayers have to pay to rescue the banks. as a result, unemployment increases, economic growth collapses, deficits and debt spiral, and currencies crash. often, they also lead to political crises, as governments collapse. reinhart and rogoff (2009) have looked carefully at the consequences of financial crises. according to their seminal study, stock prices fall by more than 50% on average over more than three years; real estate markets fall by 35% over six years; economic output declines on average 9% over two years; and unemployment rises by 7% over more than four years (reinhart and rogoff 2009, p. 466) . moreover, financial crises also have serious political consequences on domestic politics, political stability, and governance survival: in spain, for instance, the socialist government that was in power at the time of the crisis was voted out in 2011, and subsequent elections have led to the collapse of the two-party system and increasing fragmentation of the party system, which has made the formation of governments far more difficult, and consequently, the country has had 4 general elections in 4 years (between 2015 and 2019). finally, they can also lead to domestic or international conflict, as it happened with the european union (eu) during the 2008 euro crisis. therefore, it is crucially important to explain why crises occur. yet, financial crises have become an unfortunate recurrent fact of life, and no country seems immune. following the collapse of the bretton woods system in 1971, one of the most consequential economic developments of the world economy has been the globalization of finance. according to the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd), gross cross-border capital flows rose from about 5% of world gdp in the mid-1990s to about 20% in 2007, or about three times faster than world trade flows. while there have been many befits from this growth (e.g., in economic growth, investment, efficiency, or living standards), it has also led to increasing number of financial crises. according to the world bank's global financial development database between 1976 and 2011, there have been 131 crisis years for oecd countries. during that period, only 3 countries, australia, canada, and new zealand, have not experienced a systemic banking crisis. and spain is one of the oecd countries with the highest number of crisis ( fig. 1.1) . however, the world bank's classification is considered restrictive because it only measures systemic crises that result in multiple bank failures, or a systemic pattern of distress across a large number of financial institutions, and thus does not account for all episodes of financial in stability (see copelovitch and singer 2020, pp. 25-28) . for this reason, scholars also use the classification of banking crises developed by reinhart and rogoff (2011) , which is broader as they consider two types of events: , 1976 -2011 (source world bank, global financial development database. from copelovitch and singer [2020 "bank runs that lead to the closure, merging, or takeover by the public sector of one or more financial institutions," or "if there are no runs, the closure, merging, or takeover, or large scale governance assistance of an important financial institution (or group of institutions), that marks the start of a string of similar outcomes for other financial institutions" rogoff 2011, p. 1680) . under this classification, spain also stands out for the number of banking crises (see fig. 1 .2). while the focus of this book will be on banks 3 and banking crises defined as either "systemic insolvency crises or systemic illiquidity crises" (calomiris and haber 2014, p. 5) , when looking at the more recent performance of the spanish banking system, it is very important to (reinhart and rogoff classification) . oecd, 1976 (source allen and rogoff 2011 . from copelovitch and singer [2020 distinguish between the large banks and the cajas (savings and loans): the large banks performed relatively well while the cajas suffered from a somewhat traditional financial crisis. according to their argument, these crises occur when banking systems are vulnerable by virtue of the way in which they have been constructed (they are "fragile by design"). an analysis of banking crises shows that they typically take place either when banks have exposed themselves through high risks in their lending and investment, or when they have inadequate capital balance to absorb losses. examining the case of spain, this book confirms that such crises happen as a result of political choices, and that banks' crises reflect the structure of spain's political institutions. this book seeks to explain why banking crises occur, focusing on the particular case of spain, a country with a long tradition of banking crises. it seeks to delve into the discussion of why some countries are more prone to banking crises than others. it is different from other research that has examined the consequences of banking crises. it rather looks at the political factors that shape the configuration of banking systems, and attempts to isolate the political and structural factors that lead to crises. the variation in the market structure of banking systems is rooted in policy decisions and political bargains, many of which took place decades ago. the book focuses largely on the structure of the spanish banking sector and the rules for allocating credit as the key explanation for banking instability in spain. hence, it analyzes the political coalitions that formed around particular configurations of banks, and it examines the incentives that lead banks to take on too much risk, which can take many forms. in spain, as we will see, in the years prior to the 2008 global financial crisis in order to increase their profitability and market share, banks and cajas extended increasing amounts of credits to real estate developers and mortgage seekers, many of them with shaky or little credit histories and ultimately many of them required a massive bailout. the most recent banking crisis took place in the midst of one of the worst economic recessions in spanish modern history (prior to . indeed, the financial and the economic crises were so intertwined that is impossible to explain one without the other. between 1996 and 2007, the spanish economy was one of the fastest growing and the most successful economies in europe. high levels of immigration, low interest rates, and the liberalization and modernization of the spanish economy all contributed to this spectacular performance. this success, however, came to a halt in 2008, and in the winter of 2013, spain was still suffering the effects of a very painful economic crisis. as we will examine in chapter 4, the great recession that began in 2008 has been blamed on global capital imbalances, inadequate central bank policies, greed, the failure of institutions, faulty risk assessment models, or the pervasive belief that 'this time was different,' that we had found the cure against the business cycle, and that housing prices would go on rising forever. however, while the global economic crisis has been a significant contributing factor in this downturn, this book shows that domestic factors largely help account for spain's current economic problems. the crisis in spain took place in the context of two larger transformations. first, a socioeconomic transformation was driven by globalization (with the downward pressure that it has been exerting on wages), as well as the introduction of new technologies (with its impact on the labor market). changing family structures, the decline of unions, the erosion of civil society, and educational gaps also impacted the socioeconomic fabric of the country. in addition, the economic crisis took place in the context of the unraveling of the national fabric. after decades of authoritarianism, the democratic transition of the late 1970s that culminated with the 1978 constitution seemed to settle many of the divisions that had torn the country for centuries. the crisis, however, exposed the fragility of that settlement and battered institutions, political parties, the establishment, and national elites. indeed, the crisis had an earth-shattering effect in spain at all levels: economic, political, institutional, and social. there have been different interpretations of the causes and culprits for the crisis. most of the analyses on the economic crisis in spain have concerned themselves with phenomena like mismanaged banks, excessive debts, the bubble in the real estate sector, or the loss of competitiveness (royo 2013; ortega and pascual-ramsay 2013; quaglia and royo 2015; molinas 2013; barrón 2012) . others have sought to explain the crisis as a by-product of globalization and/or european monetary union (emu) integration because it eliminated exchange rate risks in a way in which investors in the southern countries accepted lower yields (bermeo and pontusson 2012; kahler and lake 2013; armigeon and baccaro 2012; cameron 2012) . this led to massive capital inflows toward the periphery that fuelled booms that turned into bubbles (in the case of spain, particularly in the real estate sector), causing massive current account deficits. when the global financial crisis hit these countries, the bubble burst and investors refused to continue financing these deficits, which exposed these uncompetitive economies. by focusing on a particular dimension of the crisis, the financial crisis, this book seeks to contribute to the debate about the causes of the crisis in spain and seeks to complement those analyses (royo 2013) . it moves beyond the above explanations and seeks to focus in particular on the crisis of the spanish financial sector. in particular, it focuses on the interplay between politics and banking. this book seeks to explain why the spanish banking system has been historically so unstable, 'fragile,' and crises prone. it focuses on the intertwined connection between politics and banking in spain, and it looks at the historical relationship between the economic power of spain's largest financial institutions and the political power of successive spanish governments. building on the approach developed by calomiris and haber (2014) , the book analyzes the coalitions, institutions, and regulations that have shaped banking in spain. it shows how, through strategic bargains with successive governments and central bankers, large spanish banks came to dominate the spanish economy and how they retained their power even as the political system changed dramatically. indeed, banks in spain obtained regulatory concessions and privileges from governments in exchange for providing funding and channeling credit to politically popular causes. this led to a rent-seeking system in which politicians and bankers shared the spoils extracted from other sectors of society. furthermore, this historical analysis will help contextualize the changes in spain's national financial system (nfs) and the extent to which it was affected by the international financial crisis of the mid-2000s. it also addresses the following question: what factors explain the way in which the spanish financial system has been affected by the crisis and has reacted to it? in spain, banking exposure to wholesale markets has increased significantly over the last decade and, therefore, has become "marketbased banking," with significant implications for the character of credit provision and the nature of the spanish nfs . the lower reliance on bank lending proved to be beneficial at the beginning of the crisis. while most market-based systems faced further problems in the wake of the lehman brothers collapse, spanish banks performed relatively well. however, the crisis eventually had a major impact, once more "traditional" problems with government debt and lending emerged. this book analyzes this reversal and explains its causes. prior to the crisis, spanish regulators placed emphasis upon preexisting regulatory and supervisory frameworks, which initially shielded the spanish financial system from the direct effects of the global financial crisis. this contributed to their initial positive performance compared with their european counterparts. however, as in ireland, the collapse of the real estate markets eventually led to a traditional banking crisis fueled by turbocharged lending on the liability side of the spanish bank's balance sheets. the global financial crisis and the subsequent credit crunch had a simultaneous effect: on the one hand, it reduced banks' ability to borrow and therefore to continue lending, thus leading to the collapse of the real estate sector; on the other, the property collapse contributed to reduce banks' ability to borrow. in order to explain the recent spanish financial crisis, this book also focuses on the following factors: first, the regulatory framework; second, the institutional features of the banking system, including the role of the bank of spain (bos); and third, the impact of macroeconomic developments, notably the real estate bubble. this book argues that the outcome is historical and contingent: there have been other causal independent variables of spanish political and economic life that can be wielded to explain the crises. moreover, the spanish banking system has not only been crisis prone, but it also has a troubling record of providing relatively small amounts of credit to business enterprises. while the main focus of the book will be on banking crises, it also examines another weakness of the spanish banking system, namely its traditional inability system to provide enough credit relative to the size of the country's economy, and argues that this shortcoming is also the result of political choices (for comparative data, see calomiris and haber 2014, pp. 7-8) . not surprisingly, spanish small and medium enterprises (smes) often complained that banks were indifferent to their credit needs and not disposed to lend them money. 4 fishman (2010) highlights that the average annual rate of increase in credits to the economy during the period 1990-1998 was a mere 8.77% in spain (as a point of contrast, it reached more than twice in portugal-18.41%). and as a result small spanish manufacturing firms were being forced to finance their growth and development largely through their own internal resources: the internal funds ratio for small manufacturing firms in the fishman also notes that comparatively, lower access to funding also had an impact on innovation expenditures in spain during the 1990s, a factor that hindered productivity growth, as noted in chapter 4. for instance, innovation expenditures as a percentage of total "turnover" between 1996 and 1997 were only 1% by spanish manufacturing firms vs. 2.5% average in the eu-15, and the average annual increase in gross fixedcapital formation between 1989 and 1999 was 2.8% vs 2.1% in the eu-15. this was aggravated by the fact that spanish policy-makers preferred to use the eu funds for other purposes such as infrastructural improvements, and the spanish state's contribution to gross domestic capital formation was also concentrated in public infrastructure (fishman 2010) . the modern roots of this shortcoming are in the legacies of the authoritarian regime (fishman 2010) . according to calomiris and haber (2014, p. 47) , under such regimes returns to equity holders are high, loans to insider firms are subsidized, governments and banks insiders extract significant rents, and periodic fiscal firms result in expropriations. banks in autocratic regimes tend to allocate credit to insiders (which leads to what they call a "rent-distribution system"), and depositors are reluctant to put much of their liquid wealth into the banking system because they earn less than they would through other investments. this leads to a system of underdeveloped banks, a crony banking system that allocates credit narrowly and leads to scarce credit, which is self-reinforcing because it largely lacks the institutions that enforce contract rights: for instance, these countries and banks tend to lack adequate credit analysis, efficient property and commercial registers, and reporting services (they develop them when they have to make loans to unrelated parties and when they need to be able to sanction debtors for non-payments). in such autocratic systems, banks are less willing to incur the costs to develop these institutions/resources that can facilitate arm's-length lending, and may even oppose them if they would erode their rents and/or facilitate such lending by others. finally, these systems tend also to be unstable and lead to frequent crises because of the lack of constraints on the autocrat's authority (which may give him/her incentives to expropriate the banks when he/she has financial needs) and the tendency on the part of bank insiders to lend to their nonfinancial enterprises and rescue them, particularly during economic crises. indeed, spain was characterized by comparatively high costs of credit and high return on financial assets throughout the 1980s and 1990s (see pérez 1997, pp. 12-18) . according to the european commission's bach project, the average cost of investment finance for spanish firms was high compared to other countries. prior to the full establishment of the single market and the emu, and in the absence of perfect capital mobility across borders, these higher costs were attributed to the comparatively scarcity of capital in spain. but the problem was even deeper. investment costs not only were higher but they were also unresponsive to economic conditions (even when macroeconomic variables like public debt, inflation, or public deficit improved, which they did throughout the 1980s and 1990s); the costs were still high; and the cost of investment finance was also high in relation to the rate of return (ror) on investment: spanish firms experienced a very negative leverage effect, 5 which meant that spanish firms were decreasing the profitability of their equity when they borrowed to invest in productive capacity, job creation, or technological innovation, and therefore, it was a strong disincentive for investment. in spain, the costs of finance were largely determined by the rates charged by banks on credit, because banking loans were the principal source of external funding for spanish firms. the comparatively higher costs of investment finance behind the strong negative leverage effect in spain have also been attributed to macroeconomic policies, and particularly the high levels of public spending and public deficits, because monetary policy had to compensate for the lack of financial restraint, which had a "crowding-out" effect (see footnote 14) . pérez (1997) challenges this interpretation and shows that fiscal deficits had a structural component, that they were not comparatively high, and that there was also a limited degree of variation in credit rates: when deficits rose, the level of credit rates barely changed. other scholars (torrero 1989 ) have attributed banks' capacity to charge higher interest rates in the 1980s to the lack of leverage of spanish firms who were desperate for credit at a time of crisis and high indebtedness. when economic conditions improved in the second half of the 1980s, they decreased their borrowing and increased their self-financing. yet, banks were still able to continue raising interest rates (and profit margins) by focusing on creditors who did not face external competition and could pass the higher costs to their consumers (i.e., utilities and service ventures). however, pérez (1997, p. 20) shows convincingly that the reason for this behavior was "the existence of an oligopolistic financial structure" that allowed spanish banks to increase their costs and earnings in the middle of a severe recession, which had a significant impact on the high financial costs borne by spanish firms in the 1980s. this oligopolistic structure persisted for over a decade, despite a process of financial liberalization undertook by the financial system. pérez (1997, pp. 21-22) shows how the credit deregulation process that started in the late 1970s was not accompanied by the introduction of any significant competition into the spanish financial market, even when foreign banks and domestic savings and loans were allowed to expand their activities, because they still faced operational constraints during the 1980s that prevented them from exerting downward pressure on credit rates. not surprisingly firms responded in the late 1980s by reducing their recourse to financing. an under-bank situation has significant social and economic costs for any country, as several studies have shown that lower levels of financial development impact physical capital accumulation, economic growth, technological progress, job creation, and social mobility (i.e., king and levine 1993; taylor 1998) . they also impact the investment behavior of firms. as a result, countries suffer lost investment opportunities and competitive disadvantages: potential entrepreneurs and investors are starved for credit, while bank cronies have plenty of access to funds. in the case of spain, the high costs of capital shifted the burden of adjustment in the 1980s toward spanish firms and intensified a bias against investment in productive capacity. the book shows that the scarcity of credit (or under-banking) has also been a result of the structure of spain's political institutions. in addition, this book shows that banks' crises happen as a result of political choices, and that they reflect the structure of spain's political institutions. it argues that a fundamental reason for both the 2008 financial crisis and the economic crisis is rooted in the process of institutional degeneration that preceded the crisis (see ferguson 2013). it seeks to explore the consequences that the institutional degradation has brought to the spanish economy. the world bank's world governance indicators provide relatively detailed, survey data-based assessments of the operation of political systems. the database contains six variables: (1) control of corruption, (2) government effectiveness, (3) political stability and absence of violence, (4) regulatory quality, (5) rule of law, and (6) voice and accountability. out of the six, three-(1), (5), and (6)-can be considered direct measures of democratic quality, whereas the other three-(2), (3), and (4)-can be rather seen as measures of government efficiency. in the spanish case, all three democratic quality variables showed little improvement between 1996 and 2008, and the corruption one even deteriorated. meanwhile, the three government efficiency variables-political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, and regulatory quality-also exhibited deterioration between 1996 and 2013 (see fig. 1 .3). moreover, although freedom house still scores spain 4 out of 4 for an independent judiciary, it also highlights deficiencies in the country's safeguards against official corruption (scoring it 3 out of 4) and stresses that: although the courts have a solid record of investigating and prosecuting corruption cases, the system is often overburdened, and cases move slowly. for instance, among other high-profile proceedings during the year, in may 2018, after 10 years of investigation, the courts handed down convictions for 29 of the 37 people indicted over their alleged involvement in the illegal financing of the pp from 1999 to 2005. the party itself was found to have benefited from the schemes and was ordered to pay a e240,000 ($280,000) fine. 6 this book argues that the process of institutional degeneration led to a spanish version of crony capitalism characterized by the misgovernment of the public; an outdated and inadequate policy-making process; an inefficient state; and an often corrupt and inefficient political class. mismanaged banks, excessive debts, bubbles in the real estate sector, or competitiveness losses are all symptoms of an institutional malaise that intensified in the years prior to the crisis. indeed, we cannot understand the bubble in the real estate sector, the loss of competitiveness, or the financial crisis without referencing the institutional divergence in the rule of law between spain and the eu core. as analyzed in great detail in chapter 7, the real estate bubble, the competitiveness divergence, and the financial crisis are all rooted on the rule of law divergence. moreover, it was this institutional divergence that made it difficult to implement the reforms that emu demanded (and that the financial bailout ended up imposing in the country). chapter 7 seeks to examine the causes of spain's 'stationary state' and argues that they are in large part the result of 'laws and institutions.' they are the problem, and the economic crisis was a symptom of the institutional degeneration (ferguson 2013, pp. 8-10). therefore, this research also builds on and develops further the institutional approach by ferguson (2013), and acemoglu and robinson (2012) , identifying the distinctive institutional features that underline countries' economic success (or lack thereof). it shows that the economic success spurred by the country's modernization and european union membership was not sustained because the governments (at all levels, local, regional, and national) became less accountable and responsive to citizens. in terms of causal mechanisms between institutional degradation and economic crisis, it shows (following acemoglu and robinson's terminology) that institutions across the country became more 'extractive' and concentrated power and opportunity in the hands of only a few. indeed, political and economic institutions came short in empowering and protecting the full potential of spanish citizens to innovate, develop, and invest. they did not foster the degree of 'creative destruction' that is vital for innovation and sustainable growth, and instead, they promoted an unsustainable model based on a real estate bubble. finally, institutional deterioration made it difficult to implement the economic reforms required as members of a monetary union. political and economic institutions resisted reforms because they would jeopardize the existence of the extractive rent-seeking mechanisms that became the main source of rent for the economic and political elites that controlled them. in sum, the book seeks to examine the structure of the spanish financial system with particular emphasis on the last two decades to answer the question: why has spain not been able to construct a banking system that avoids banking crises? in doing so, it analyzes in particular the basis of the financial system's apparent success during the 1997-2007 period, and then, it examines the imbalances that made that success unsustainable, and ultimately led to the financial bailout. the book also looks at its consequences of the financial crisis. finally, based on the analysis of the spanish experience (both within the eu/emu and during the crisis), it draws some lessons that would be of interest from a normative standpoint. this book contends that the performance of the spanish financial system was largely driven by institutional and political factors. it examines the rules and institutions that have shaped spanish banking, focusing, in particular, on the role that politicians and governments (calomiris and hager's "banking games") have played. it offers an alternative to stateand market-driven conceptions of financial regulation and reform, and examines the accommodation between private bankers, politicians, and central bankers in spain. it examines the political coalitions that have shaped the structure of the spanish financial system, and the consequences that these trade-offs had during the recent economic and financial crisis. in addition, the book also examines the development of the sovereign debt crisis in spain. initially, it had a 'good' banking crisis and it was only hit by the sovereign debt crisis as late as mid-2011. spanish banks suffered a traditional banking crisis from late 2010 onward. as the crisis intensified, spain's banking sector could not escape its dramatic effects. deteriorating economic conditions, the implosion of the real estate market, the dependence on wholesale funding, weaknesses in the regulatory framework, and the role of the bos all help to explain this reversal. in the end, the spanish government resorted to european union (eu) financial aid in order to recapitalize its banks. the book argues that the distinctive features of bank business models and of national banking systems in spain have considerable analytical leverage in explaining the different scenarios of the crises. this 'bank-based' analysis contributes to the flourishing literature that examines changes in banking with a view to account for the differentiated impact of the global banking crisis first and the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone later. the book also addresses the impact of european integration on a southern european/peripheral economy. the recent experience of the country shows that eu and emu membership have not led to the implementation of the structural reforms necessary to address the country's economic weaknesses (i.e., dependency on the constructions sector and the erosion in competitiveness). on the contrary, the book will make the case that emu contributed to the economic boom, which was fueled by consumption and record-low interest rates, thus facilitating the postponement of necessary economic reforms (royo 2013) . indeed, the spanish experience shows that the process of economic reforms has to be a domestic process led by domestic actors willing to carry them out. finally, the book explores one of the core questions facing the new europe, namely the sustainability of the emu in the context of sharp differences in economic performance and levels of competitiveness. spain shows the pitfalls of monetary integration for less competitive economies, used previously to high inflation and high interest rates. these countries are likely to experience an explosion in consumer spending and borrowing, because lower interest rates and the loosening of credit will likely lead to a credit boom. this development resulted in further losses in external competitiveness, together with a shift from the tradable to the non-tradable sector of the economy, which had a negative impact on productivity. how can these issues be addressed to make emu sustainable? first, the focus is on spain. there are very few books published in english that examine the spanish financial sector, and almost none that examine the crises proneness of the sector from a historical perspective looking at institutional and political factors. second, the book examines the distinctive performance of spain's financial sector during the recent 2008 global financial crisis. indeed, initially during the first years of the global financial crisis, one of the few unexpected surprises was the positive performance of the spanish financial sector. contrary to their counterparts all over the world, at the beginning of the crisis, spanish banks appeared to have escaped the direct effects of the global financial crisis, and it is important to understand why. there is consensus that the stern regulations of the bos and its countercyclical provisions played a key role in this outcome. it also made it so expensive for financial institutions to establish off-balance sheet vehicles, which had sunk banks elsewhere, that spanish banks stayed away from such toxic assets. however, the deepening economic crisis would eventually catch up with spanish banks and cajas and spain was ultimately forced to request a financial bailout. this reversal needs to be explained. furthermore, the book offers an alternative to state-and market-driven conceptions of financial regulation and reform, and examines the accommodation between private bankers, governments, and central bankers in spain. indeed, by looking at the latest crisis from a historical perspective and examining the historical fragility of the spanish banking system, the book offers an alternative explanation to the recent financial crisis in spain. a lot of the focus in explaining the crisis has been on the corrupt business practices and the greed of bankers (particularly in the cajas de ahorro). others have focused on the inherent characteristics of banks that make them vulnerable to panics. following calomiris and haber (2014) , this book focuses on the politics of banking and it shows that the crisis was a result of human agency. the structure of spain's financial system was the product of the country's culture, history, and the political system, yet the crisis has been the outcome of domestic political conditions and domestic political bargains between competing (and sometimes cooperating) interests mediated in the political arena. it shows how emu and cheap wholesale financing encouraged bankers (particularly in the cajas ) to engage in aggressive lending to the real state sector. despite the bos's countercyclical regulatory framework, the capital requirements proved insufficient and banks were able to rely heavily on borrowing. ultimately, that proved to be fatal for many of them. the book also integrates the spanish financial european integration experience and analyzes the effects of financial integration in (relatively) new democracies in europe. the spanish experience within the european union (eu) and the emu offers one of the few instances in which integration took place in an economic, political, and institutional context markedly different from that of the other european states. at the same time, the book evaluates the impact of eu/emu accession on the spanish economy and financial sector. while initially successful, emu membership brought its own problems for the spanish economy. the spanish experience with eu/emu integration illustrates the economic, social, institutional, and cultural challenges of this undertaking and will provide useful lessons for other countries. while integration has had very positive effects, the process of integration has also brought significant costs in terms of economic adjustment, loss of sovereignty, and cultural homogenization. furthermore, eu/emu integration does not guarantee success. indeed, spain suffered a severe economic downturn between 2008 and 2013 and experienced serious budgetary and fiscal problems that hampered economic growth and are likely to impact the spanish economy and financial sector for the foreseeable future. the financial sector is a crucial actor to account for these challenges. finally, at a time in which there are increasing doubts about the future of emu, this book sheds light on the impact of monetary integration on a 'peripheral' economy, with a particular focus on the financial system. it shows that in the case of spain, emu membership contributed to prevent capital flight and helped to avoid a repetition of the attacks on the peseta. without the euro, the huge trade deficit that countries like spain experienced prior to the 2008 crisis would have led to massive capital flight, a devaluation of the peseta, an inflationary spiral, increases in interest rates and the risk premium (with the associated impact on the cost of the debt), and the implementation of more restrictive monetary and fiscal policies. however, the spanish experience also shows the pitfalls of monetary integration for less competitive economies with an inflationary history. these countries are likely to experience an explosion in consumer spending and borrowing, because lower interest rates and the loosening of credit will likely lead to a credit boom, driven by potentially over-optimistic expectations of future permanent income, which in turn may increase housing demand and household indebtedness; and lead to overestimations of potential output and to expansionary fiscal policies. the boom also led to higher wage increases, caused by the tightening of the labor market, higher inflation, and losses in external competitiveness, together with a shift from the tradable to the non-tradable sector of the economy, which had a negative impact on productivity. in the end, the insufficient responsiveness of prices and wages, which did not adjust smoothly across sectors, led to accumulated competitiveness losses and large external imbalances. in this regard, the book stresses the need to implement supply-side reforms to bring labor costs down, through wage restraint, payroll tax cuts, and productivity increases, in order to make the country's economy more competitive. banking crises theories have focused on three main factors: the structure of banks (they focus on liquidity risks arising from the mismatch between illiquid and long-term loans a liquid and short-term liabilities); interbank connections (they focus on the problem of externalities, when banks fail to take into account the spillover effects created by their integration in a banking system); and human nature (human errors motivated by excessive optimism or excessive fear). calomiris and haber (2014) , however, show that the problem with these theories is that they fail to "explain why banking crises are equally likely across all countries and all of recent history" (pp. 480-81). according to them, the problems that these theories identify are not sufficient conditions for causing banking crises, and the crucial factor that determines whether the problems identified by these theories will result in a banking crisis is political: the choices made by politicians, often motivated by their short-term interests. these political choices will determine the degree of safety nets and prudential regulation, which in turn will influence banks' decisions. in addition, the degree of generosity of the safety net, and/or the level of appropriate prudential regulation, will influence whether banks are more or less cautious in how they manage their risk. for instance, if the safety net is too generous, and/or prudential regulation is insufficient, it is more likely that banks will be less cautious in their management of risk and vice versa. finally, politics can also lead to shocks (from war to political transitions) that will influence approaches to bank risk. in the end, the structure of the banking system, and its susceptibility to adverse shocks, is an outcome of politics and political outcomes, which shape the rules under which banks operate and determine the context to which they are subject (2014, pp. 483-84) . furthermore, the economic literature has paid considerable attention to the economic factors associated with sovereign debt crises. one of the most extensive studies of financial crises highlights a strong causal link between banking crises and sovereign defaults in developed and developing countries (reinhart and rogoff 2009 ). kaminsky and reinhart (1999) also highlight the link between banking crises and balance of payment crises (the so-called twin crises). they found that financial liberalization often precedes banking crises, and also that problems in the banking sector typically precede a currency crisis-in other words, the currency crisis often deepens the banking crisis, activating a vicious spiral. according to these analyses, economic crises occur as the economy enters a recession, following a prolonged boom in economic activity fueled by credit, capital inflows, and accompanied by an overvalued currency. these accounts, written by economists, draw our attention to banking crises and balance of payments crises as the precursors of sovereign debt crises. the accounts are, however, devoid of political analysis and do not explain the initial causes of banking crises and balance of payment crises. in the political economy literature, several complementary explanations account for the occurrence of sovereign debt crises, mainly in developing countries. these explanations can be articulated either at the international level, whereby the focus is on external factors that caused the crisis, or alternatively at the national level, whereby the focus is on the domestic factors that caused the crisis (for a similar macro-meso distinction, see germain 2012) . at the international level, different authors have pointed out a variety of factors that can fuel sovereign debt crises, namely the impact of capital liberalization (stiglitz 2000) ; the activity of bond markets (mosley 2003) and financial innovation, especially financialization (hardie 2011) ; the spread of neoliberal ideas (major 2012) ; and the lack of a proper hegemon in the international system (kindleberger 1973 )more recently in the european union (mabbet and schelke 2015) . finally, skocpol (1979) seminal comparative work on social revolutions argued for structural analysis and emphasized the effects of transnational and world-historical contexts upon domestic political conflicts. while some elements of an economic and/or financial crisis can certainly be explained by international factors-such as financial liberalization-these factors are basically the same for all countries, especially within the relatively homogenous regional block of the euro area. hence, they are not well suited to explain differences in the outcomes of the sovereign debt crises across countries. these background factors fueled the sovereign debt crisis, but domestic factors better explain different dynamics of the crisis across countries (see jabko and massoc 2012; haggard and mo 2000) . this book is also situated within the broader literature about the comparative political economy of spain's financial system. some scholars have sought to place the politics of financial reform in spain in a historical context. sofía pérez (1997) and arvid lukauskas (1997) have already challenged the widespread assumption that international market forces alone explain domestic financial reforms in spain. both claim that in that country domestic politics played an even larger role than international pressures. pérez contends that domestic elites, particularly a group of reformers within the central bank, seized on liberal economic arguments and developed new patterns of accommodation with private bankers to promote reforms. she emphasizes the oligopolistic nature of the sector, arguing that this system generated significant costs for spanish firms outside the finance sector. lukauskas also examines the role of public officials in the evolution of financial regulation in spain, but he is more favorable to the spanish political class. he claims that they undertook financial liberalization, despite opposition from powerful groups, to achieve political goals; democratization gave them a strong incentive to improve economic performance through financial reform in order to compete for votes. he attributes their banking policies to an electorally based desire to secure economic outcomes, such as growth, pleasing the median voter. more recently, in another seminal piece, robert fishman (2010) has also analyzed the economic consequences of spain's banking system and has shown how that country's poor employment performance has also been rooted in the financial system. fishman argues that the spanish policy-makers' approach was molded by the country's path to democracy, which shaped the political handling of banking and of financing for smes. in addition, this book is positioned within the varieties of capitalism (voc) debate about liberal market economies and coordinated market economies (hall and soskice 2001) . according to the voc literature, spain is characterized by strong strategic coordination in financial markets, but not so in the field of labor relations (royo 2008) . in this regard, some have claimed that spain is moving toward the anglo-saxon model because the lack of articulation of the spanish institutional model precludes the evolution toward a coordinated market economy-cme (see molina and rhodes 2007) . the analysis of the spanish experience during the crisis confirms the thesis that coordination is a political process. it shows that institutional change is a political matter and how successful coordination depends not only on the organization of the social actors but on their interests and strategies. indeed, in a context of structural changes, we have to examine the political settlements that motivate the economic actors, and we need to look at the evolving interests of capital and the structural and political constraints within which economic actors define and defend their interests (royo 2000 (royo , 2008 . furthermore, theoretically, the book builds on and develops further the literature on voc, highlighting the bank bargains and the role of certain domestic political economy institutions in the development of the crisis. while financial capitalisms have converged toward deregulation as a result of the combined processes of globalization and european integration, this book shows that differences persist. indeed, in the case of spain, the crisis has led to extensive regulatory intervention that has served to reinforce the pre-existing model. methodologically, it 'dissects' the sovereign debt crisis into three interconnected crises: the banking crisis, the fiscal crisis, and the balance of payment crisis, examining the 'anatomy' of each crisis paying particular attention to the interplay of domestic political economy institutions therein. according to the standard typology of the varieties of financial capitalism, nfss can be divided into 'bank based' and 'market based' depending on the dominant sources of nonfinancial-company (nfc) finance (zysman 1983 ). this literature focuses on national systems as governments and/or nfcs as agents of change. indeed, the transformation of nfss is largely seen in terms of the rise of shareholding capitalism and a move away from bank-financed capitalism-an analysis which points to the implications of the end of 'patient capital' for other elements of the national variety of capitalism. according to this view, banks are static, so any changes in their activities, and the implications of those changes, are largely neglected. in other words, it tends to overlook the important role of banking and banks and their contribution to change (hardie and howarth 2013) . this book seeks to address this shortcoming by focusing on agency (the operation of spanish banks) in order to explain changes in national financial (and specifically banking) systems during the global financial crisis (quaglia and royo 2015) . yet, while the focus is upon the activities of banks, it is also necessary to understand the institutional framework that has shaped banking activities in spain. moreover, an obvious additional starting point to investigate the importance of national-level institutional factors in how the sovereign debt crisis played out is also the literature on voc (for comprehensive analyses, see amable 2003; hancké et al. 2007; hall and soskice 2001; schmidt 2002 ; for a review, see jackson and deeg 2008) . these works have examined the main components of voc, namely industrial relations institutions; education and training systems; corporate governance and systems of corporate financing; product markets; social protection systems and welfare states; and public intervention in the economy. this literature has generally focused on the anglo-saxon and continental voc, characterizing them, respectively, as 'liberal market economies' and 'coordinated market economies.' the southern european countries have been overlooked or placed in a residual category of 'southern european' or 'state-led' model of capitalism (schmidt 2002; della sala 2004; royo 2008) . the literature on voc is of limited utility in explaining the dynamics of the economic crisis in spain, because it inaccurately predicts similar outcomes among countries with similar institutional frameworks. for instance, in the academic literature, italy and spain are often grouped together in the same variety of 'southern european' capitalism. consequently, one could have expected similar outcomes from the crises in the two countries. however, spain experienced a full-fledged sovereign debt crisis resorting to euroarea financial assistance for its banks, whereas italy did not. indeed, spain experienced a severe banking crisis including the bailout of a number of the country's banks which substantially increased the public deficit and debt. by contrast, italian banks, with one exception, did not experience such significant losses and they needed no recapitalization by the government (quaglia and royo 2015) . to be fair, this literature was not developed to explain sovereign debt crises, but rather to tease out institutional complementarities that can enhance or hinder the competitiveness of national economic systems in the world economy. from a political economy standpoint, this book also challenges the interpretation according to which the responses of european countries to the pressures associated with globalization and the process of european integration are uniform. contrary to this prediction, this book shows that in spain globalization and european integration have promoted rather than undermining alternative domestic responses. while technological changes, capital market integration, and post-industrialization have affected the balance of power between governments and private actors and have triggered new political realignments, they have also influenced the interests and strategies of the actors and have led to new strategies and patterns of change. these developments have led to particular economic policies and preferences, but they have also precluded the implementation of alternative policy options, and they have often hindered the necessary reforms. the literature on domestic political economy institutions and economic policies (e.g., thelen 2004; mahoney and thelen 2009 ) is also of relevance for this research, in particular those works that have looked at the interaction between domestic and external factors in economic policy. some authors have examined the effects of 'internationalization' and 'liberalization' on domestic political economy institutions, such as financial markets (pérez 1997; deeg and luetz 2001; thatcher 2007 ) and systems of corporate finance and governance (deeg and pérez 2000) . other authors have highlighted the role of the state and domestic political institutions in framing globalization (weiss 2003) , and more generally in political economy (schmidt 2009 ). this book is grounded in the comparative historical analysis literature. it seeks to offer a historical grounded explanation of the 2008 economic crisis in spain, and it is concerned with causal analysis (the causes of the economic crisis) while emphasizing processes over time. this book builds on these contributions and stresses the agency of domestic actors in shaping nfs change. it uses a comparative historical analysis approach to explain the financial crisis. this holistic analysis will contribute to a more complete understanding of the national varieties of financial capitalism. lastly, this book is also placed within the financial stability literature. a large body of literature has examined the impact of capital flows on financial crises. many have concluded that global capital is the most likely culprit of banking crisis: reinhart and rogoff (2009) look at the historical pattern that connects capital inflows, large current account deficits, asset bubbles, excessive indebtedness, sovereign borrowing, and financial crises. chinn and frieden (2011) examine the causes of financial crisis, like the 1994 mexican crisis, the 1997 asian crisis, or the 2008 global financial crisis, and attribute to capital inflows the economic boom that fueled the financial exuberance that ultimately ends in a financial crisis. portes (2009) emphasizes distortions in the allocation of capital as it is channeled through financial intermediaries and banking institutions. schularick and taylor (2012) analyze long-terms patterns of financial instability and find that the single most important determinant of banking crisis is domestic credit growth, and that capital inflows go hand in hand with credit booms. other scholars, however, have found a weak link between capital inflows and domestic credit growth (amri et al. 2016 ), while others have found a weak causal link between capital inflows and banking crises and no significant correlation between capital inflows and bank credit, showing that credit booms appear to be a separate channel of financial instability (copelovitch and singer 2020) . they show that, while sustained capital inflows can be dangerous by linking current account deficits and large capital inflows to distortions in the allocation of capital, there are many cases (like australia and new zealand) in which large capital inflows, asset bubbles, and macroeconomic imbalances do not result in banking crises. furthermore, capital does not always flow from surplus to deficit countries (e.g., the united states where two-thirds of capital inflows arrive from countries with which the united states does not run a large current account deficit) (pp. 185-86). these authors show, as we will see below, that larger capital inflows are associated with reduced bank capital levels only at high levels of market/ban ratio (p. 68). finally, caballero (2016) has also examined the association between capital inflows and banking crisis and found out that the impact is driven by debt flows and portfolio equity. another stream of this literature led by kindleberger and minsky's classic financial stability model looks at the stages of financial crises. their model can be summarized in five different stages: displacement, boom, overtrading, revulsion, and tranquility (see kindleberger 1996; minsky 1982a, b) . according to this model, the crisis starts with an exogenous shock to the economic system that impacts profits and opportunities in at least one sector (displacement ). economic actors take advantage of this opportunity(ies), which lead to the second stage, a boom, that in turn increases the money supply. the economy accelerates, which leads to the third stage, overtrading, caused by over-borrowing, over-consumption, and/or over-investment. when some insiders try to capitalize from this boom and sell out to take their profits, it leads to the fourth stage, revulsion. at that stage, when economic actors realize that the market cannot continue growing, any shock can turn into a stampede. finally, the last stage, tranquility, takes place when investors move to less liquid assets, trade is cut off, or a lender of last resort provides sufficient liquidity (kindleberger 1996, p. 15) . this model provides a systematic interpretation of the anatomy of the spanish financial crisis. as we will see throughout the book, the stages of the model can be traced in five episodes of the turmoil: financial liberalization policies; credit growth; over-borrowing, over-consumption, and over-investment; financial distress and crisis; and financial rescue. furthermore, the financial stability literature also examines how we can achieve financial stability in a world of cross-border banking, and whether governments can still produce this public good at the national level in today's globalized financial markets. in this regard, the examination of the spanish case confirms schoenmaker's financial stability trilemma (2008, 2011) . schoenmaker examines the trade-off between financial integration and national financial autonomy and argues that financial stability, financial integration, and national financial policies are incompatible. any two of the three objectives can be combined but not all three; one has to give. spain tried to achieve all three and failed. in order to address this trilemma, schoenmaker supports transferring powers for financial policies (regulation, supervision, and stability) further to the european level. this would imply a european-based system of financial supervision. avgouleas and goodhart (2015) have analyzed bail-in processes that involve the participation of bank creditors in bearing the costs of restoring a failing bank to health as an alternative to the unpopular bailout approach. the bail-in tool involves replacing the implicit public guarantee with a system of private penalties. they show the benefits and the disadvantages of this approach. the analysis of the spanish case confirms the downsides of the bail-in approach and shows how bail-in regimes do not eradicate the need for injection of public funds where there is a threat of systemic collapse because a number of banks (in the spanish case cajas ) simultaneously entered into difficulties. the book is also situated in the literature on financial instability caused by defaults on mortgages. goodhart et al. (2010) explore financial instability due to a housing crisis and defaults on mortgages. they build a model that shows how tight money reduces prices and quantities traded. while government support to banks in crises stabilizes the economy, when banks become risk-loving, a subsequent crisis becomes even more extreme. their model helps account for the risk-seeking behavior of spanish financial intermediaries in 2004-06 that ultimately led to the combined collapse of the housing and (nearly) financial markets. jiménez et al. (2014) and maddaloni and peydró (2011) have also shown how low interest rates may lead to a search for higher yields, encouraging banks to soften their credit standards, thereby increasing both the volume and average riskiness of supplied loans; and maddaloni and peydró (2011) have found that lower overnight interest rates induce lowly capitalized banks to grant more loan applications to risky firms and "to commit larger loan volumes with fewer collateral requirements to these firms, yet with a higher ex post likelihood of default." moreover, goodhart et al. (2012) look at regulatory design. they compare different potential financial externalities and examine how to regulate them. they recognize that "trying to lean against the wind to reduce the credit expansion and house prices in the boom via regulation is not easy" (p. 42) because the boom (as shown in the spanish case) brings large increases in asset prices, and higher prices deliver higher capital gains to owners of the assets. at the same time, while these home price gains improve the equity of mortgage holders and lower the loan to value ratio on their mortgages, they also improve bank capital ratios because the mortgages are less risky and because the home price gains raise bank equity. all these effects show the difficulty during boom periods, as it happened in spain before the crisis, of trying to impose higher loan to value requirements, to raise capital standards, or to lift margin requirements on repo loans enough to slow down credit expansion and try to reduce house price appreciation. these authors show that the most effective ways to address these issues are through dynamic provisioning rules and liquidity requirements that may help slow mortgage credit growth and thus lower the relative price of house prices. however, their model shows, as confirmed by the spanish experience, that changes to capital rules, progress on revising other regulations such as liquidity, margin requirements, or time-varying provisioning rules, have a limited impact, as capital alone is unlikely to be sufficient to contain the problems arising during a crisis, as it happened in spain. many studies have also examined how monetary policy drives bank risk-taking and have focused specifically on the overall failures of the ecb's monetary policy. jiménez et al. (2014) have shown how monetary policy affects the composition of the supply of credit, in particular with respect to credit risk. they have analyzed the impact of lower interest rates on banks' risk-taking and have found that a lower overnight interest rate induces banks to engage in higher risk-taking in their lending and encourages lowly capitalized banks to grant more loan applications to risky firms than highly capitalized banks. moreover, they have found that when the overnight rate is lower, applications granted by lowly capitalized banks also have a higher ex post likelihood of default. 7 their analysis suggests that when the monetary policy rate is lower, the intensity of risk-taking is not simply the result of more lending by capital-constrained banks, but is also consistent with risk-shifting (see also rajan 2006; allen and rogoff 2011) . their findings are consistent with other studies that have shown that monetary and macroprudential policies may not be independent (goodhart 1988; stein 2012) , while others have found, as noted before, that credit booms have the highest ex ante correlation with banking crises (see schularick and taylor 2012; gourinchas and obstfeld 2012) . these findings support the attribution of new responsibilities to central banks in the realm of macroprudential supervision (diamond and rajan 2012) . while it is unquestionable, as examined in chapters 3 and 7, that the loose monetary policies of the ecb (see fig. 1.4) had an impact on the housing bubble, it is important to emphasize that monetary policy alone did not cause the crisis. indeed, the initial growth of mortgage risk and the decline in prudential regulation preceded the ecb's loose policies, furthermore, although monetary policy can contribute to the overpricing of real estate assets and the development of bubbles, banking crises require first that banks invest in those overpriced and risky assets, and also that they back those investments with insufficient capital (see calomiris and haber 2014, p. 271) . therefore, it is not enough to just account for weaker lending standards and prudential regulatory failures; these banks' decisions need to be explained. moreover, we also have to explain differences among banks/cajas because not all banking institutions behaved the same way: most cajas were far more aggressive and reckless in their lending practices than banks. these differences also need to be accounted for. this book builds from those analyses, to show that "banks bargains" created the institutional framework that allowed cajas to lend recklessly and provided the incentives to do so. finally, in their recently published book, copelovitch and singer (2020) examine why some countries are more prone to systemic bank crises than others, and what makes banks vulnerable under contemporary conditions. they also study banking focusing on politics, but rather than studying the political and public policy preferences of bankers or their political contributions, they focus on the political decisions that shape the structure of financial markets. in particular, they analyze two variables: foreign investment into a country and financial market structure (e.g., markets in securities-especially stocks). according to them, banks are embedded in financial markets that are the result of government choices, and they operate in an environment that is shaped by those choices, which in turn would determine their resilience or crisis proneness. copelovitch and singer analyze economic and banking-sector data from 1976 to 2011, for the 32 countries in the oecd, and they argue that systemic bank failures are more likely when substantial foreign capital inflows meet a financial system with well-developed stock markets. 8 this is so because banks take on more risk in those environments, which makes them more prone to collapse. they emphasize that it is not just a matter of a few rogue bankers engaging in excessive profit-hunting, but rather the by-product of the historical development of markets, which creates conditions ripe for crisis. they show that while some countries like canada (which has always had small, regional stock markets and is the only oecd country without a national stock-market regulator) have been able to accommodate and channel capital inflows productively throughout the economy, in others like germany these capital inflows have led to their banking system to go awry. according to them, this difference is based on the fact that a large securities market is a form of competition for the banking sector, to which banks respond by taking greater risks because they both compete for the business of firms that need to raise money. in countries where the stock markets are small and unsophisticated, there's not much competition and firms go to their banks to financing. however, when stock markets are well developed, banks do not want to lose customers and they assume larger risks. they show that canadian banks do not face a competitive threat from stock markets the way banks in the united states do, and hence, they can still be conservative and remain competitive and profitable; by contrast, german national-scale banks have been feeling pressure from a thriving set of regional banks, and they looked at stock markets to improve their competitive advantage and bolster their profits through securities investment, leading to many banking blowups in the last two decades. in order to address these sources of instability, they advocate for macroprudential regulations for banks to ensure that they are holding enough capital to absorb any losses they might incur. as it relates to spain, copelovitch and singer claim that the spanish experience validates their hypothesis. first, they confirm that large capital inflows measured by either net or gross portfolio flows are not always associated with banking instability: spain was a country with low levels of gross inflows, and yet it experienced frequent banking crises (p. 34). second, they use the case of spain in 2003 (with a market/bank ratio of 0.39 in 2003) and compare it with sweden in 1981 (with a market/bank ratio of −3.75) in order to illustrate the substantive significance of their results and to calculate the predicted effect of a 1.5 standard deviation increase in gross portfolio flows on the probability of a banking crisis. they find that "for spain 2003 the baseline predicted probability of a crisis is 3.2 percent and the estimated first difference effect of a 1.5 standard deviation in gross portfolio flows is extremely large (48.0 percent) and significant at the 95 percent confidence level" (p. 56). 9 these results confirm their theory that capital inflows are destabilizing only in more securitized financial systems. in other words, capital inflows influence the propensity of banks to take on greater risk, through the assumption of greater insolvency risk and/or through a reduction of capital reserves, depending on the country's domestic financial market structure: at low levels of market/bank ratio. and capital inflows have no correlation with bank capital levels and vice versa. in sum, according to them, capital inflows trigger banking crises not because they cause credit booms, but because they lead banks to reduce the capital holdings and lend to riskier lenders (p. 73). this book has chosen an historic and institutional approach that considers the objectives of policy-makers and social actors, as well as the way that they interpret existing economic and political conditions. this approach allows the researcher to examine the ways institutions structure the relations among actors and shape their interests and goals, thus constraining political struggles and influencing outcomes (steinmo et al. 1992, p. 2) . from a methodological standpoint, and following calomiris and haber (2014, p. 452) , the book is a case study that studies a sequence of events in a particular country, spain, over long periods of time. it emphasizes the role of narratives in causal inference. this historical analysis allows us to explore the roots of the country's banking problems as well as the antecedents and timing of key banking decisions. this is an appropriate approach to identify causal patterns and develop "'structural narratives' which combine the logic of economics and political bargaining with a careful examination of the specific historical events in individual countries." the aim is to show evidence of the key factors that contributed to economic, political, and financial history. while this approach has limitations (i.e., it is based on causal inferences, and being a case study it may not be necessarily representative), it builds on calomiris and haber's comparative analysis by emphasizing the role of narratives in causal inference, insisting on the value of narrative evidence, and reinforcing the applicability of the identified patterns to other cases. in this book, the focus is on the institutions that shape the incentives of individuals and groups. institutions are crucial because they set the "rules of the game." they determine the capacity of coordination among political and economic actors, and they encourage them to form coalitions to advance common interests. institutions are also responsible for establishing standards and setting rules, and also for monitoring, rewarding, and/or sanctioning behavior (depending on the case). while banks operate within existing institutional constraints, these institutions are constructed as political solutions to political problems, they are the result of political deals, and they evolve as a result of shifting political and economic circumstances. the problem arises when these political institutions create incentives to develop coalitions that may be detrimental to the wellbeing of a country. the book also examines coalitions : it looks at domestic coalition (cleavage) formation (lipset and rokkan 1967; moore 1967) . the benefited group will gain more political power by way of economic leverage and strategic incentives (rogowski 1990) . but individual actors are also important because they shape outcomes and they have the ability to identify opportunities for forming coalitions and implementing innovations. indeed, individuals in central positions of power (for instance, in government and/or regulatory agencies) can make a difference for banking outcomes. government leaders should remember that banks and capital markets are also mediated by public institutions and political decisions. politics are not only desirable but also inevitable in dealing with the political and economic effects of banking crises. this book wants to contribute to this discussion by taking recent changes in the spanish political economy as a point of departure. it seeks to explore the relationship between institutions and the interests of economic actors and their experiences. coalition bargaining is a political process, and strategic actors with their own interests design institutions (thelen 2004) . institutional change is a political matter because institutions are generated by conflict, they are the result of politics of distribution, and hence they are politically and ideologically construed and depend on power relations (becker 2009 ). institutions are important for banks because they influence interests and impact coalitions, and in a context of structural changes, we have to examine the political settlements that motivate the economic actors. finally, most of the research material for this project has been gathered in spain. in order to pursue this analysis, the author conducted an extensive review of the secondary literature and has interviewed scholars, economic actors, and policy-makers. the author has conducted interviews with leaders of the spanish banking sector, as well as leaders and representatives of the main political parties. in addition, the author has interviewed former and current high-ranking officials from state agencies: ministry of economics, the bos, the european commission, and the european central bank (ecb). finally, the author has conferred with leading scholars and specialists in politics, finances, and economics in spain and the united states. finally, primary and secondary sources of data come from the libraries and records of selected spanish government departments and international institutions, like the ecb, the world bank, the oecd, and the international monetary fund (imf). financial system 1986 --2005 since spain joined the european union (eu) on january 1, 1986, the spanish financial system (sfs) has been adapting to the european context of which it is part. 11 the regulatory organs of the sfs are all the institutions with competences to dictate legal norms (i.e., the government, congress, and the ministry of economy), while the supervisory organs are the bos and the national stock market commission (comisión nacional del mercado de valores, cnmv). the bos is the central supervisory institution. regulated by the 13/1994 law of autonomy of the bank of spain (which has been subsequently partially modified), the bank is in charge of the supervision of all credit institutions. it shared some competences with the autonomous communities, which also had supervisory power over the savings banks (cajas de ahorro) and credit cooperatives. finally, the comisión nacional del mercado de valores (cnmv), created by the 24/1988 law, has been the institution in charge of supervision and inspection of stock markets and the activities of legal and physical people involved in these markets. most of the cajas were established in the nineteenth century as pawnshops with the support of the catholic church and/or local municipalities, with the aim to redistribute their profits through social work (they dedicated a significant portion of their provisions, typically over 20% to social causes) (see güell 2001) . overtime most of them came under the control of the regional and local governments who often used them to advance their political agendas. they were regulated by both the national government (in charge of the basic norms) and the autonomous communities' governments (in charge of the application and development of the rules established by the central government). political institutions (parties and unions) participated in the governing bodies of the cajas . as noted throughout the book, the distinctive regulatory framework that separates cajas from commercial banks was a crucial factor in explaining the differences in performance between the cajas and commercial during the 2008 crisis. indeed, in the last decades cajas made a push to increase their market share, and they expanded aggressively beyond their traditional markets competing with traditional commercial banks to offer real estate loans. when the real estate bubble collapsed after 2007, many of them accumulated billions of euros of loans at risk of default and were forced to require state support. prior to the liberalization of the late 1980s and 1990s, the sfss (like those of greece and italy) was typical credit-based mediterranean system, characterized by extensive interventionism, state control over the banking system, and underdeveloped capital markets (pérez and westrup 2010) . the role of financial institutions was to provide funding to contribute the process of economic development and industrialization (pérez 1997; lukauskas 1997) , and bank deposits were turned into low-interest credit for industrial enterprises and the government (deeg and pérez 2000) . the oligopolistic nature of the sector generated significant costs for spanish firms outside the finance sector (pérez 1997) . the liberalization of the sector started in the second half of the 1980s, driven by the country's integration in the european community and the subsequent european single market program. in spain's case, the process of financial liberalization was also part of the bos's effort to achieve effective disinflation (pérez and westrup 2010) . the european integration process, and particularly the creation of the single market and the european monetary union, has been a driving factor in subsequent developments. while financial regulations were still the responsibility of the national governments, in reality over the last two decades there has been a harmonization process throughout all the member states. this process led to the liberalization, modernization, consolidation, and opening up of the system. in spain, the regulation and supervision of the sfs seek two main objectives: to guarantee the correct functioning of its markets and to protect the consumers of financial services. regulation, defined as the development of the norms that rule the activities of financial markets and institutions, has to be distinguished from supervision: the guardianship of the fulfillment of the norms. the regulatory organs of the sfs are all the institutions with competences to dictate legal norms, i.e., the government, congress, and the ministry of economy, while the supervisory organs are the bos and the national stock market commission (comisión nacional del mercado de valores, cnmv) (see fig. 1 and liabilities prior to the crisis. credit institutions concentrated approximately 94% of the credit process, which illustrates the high relative weight of financial intermediation in the spanish economy. indeed, the sfs was considered as highly bankarized (bancarizado) given the strong direct or indirect weight of credit institutions, particularly banks and cajas . yet, the degree of financialization 12 of the sector was relatively low prior to the crisis and the majority of banks' assets were loans to customers, and a significant part of bank assets involved spanish government securities, which were considered among the safest possible asset investments. this relatively low degree of financialization of spanish banks (like italian and greek ones) can be explained by the slow evolution of the nfs and spanish banks' reluctance to change a business model that has been consistently successful for decades. based on hardie and howarth's banking typology (2013), corporate finance in spain cannot be considered 'market based. 13 indeed, european central bank (ecb) data show that assets are really very much not market based. according to the ecb, data customer loans as a percentage of assets were 67.31% at the end of 2007, a much higher percentage compared to other countries, such as the uk, germany, or france. this would place spain very low on the market-based banking category. furthermore, securitization provided collateral for about 20% of bank lending in spain prior to the crisis. this was actually moderately high in comparative terms (for instance, in france it was only 1%). thus, a lot of the spanish credit boom was fed by the securitization of liabilities, which allowed spanish banks to lend more. this was not off-balance sheet, but the result (increased lending) was similar to what we saw in other countries like the uk (although about 50% less in gdp terms). thus marketbased banking was still pretty important to spain. according to the imf, at the end of 2007, cross-border liabilities as a percentage of gdp represented only 60.6%, a much lower figure than that of countries such as 12 financialization is defined as the trading of risk, and it is operationalized by looking at spanish banks' assets (i.e., the size of the trading book and the presence of toxic assets) and liabilities (i.e., the funding base of banks), their reliance on wholesale market rather than retail deposits for funding, the securitization of lending, and the use of structured investment vehicles (sivs). 13 the concept of "market-based" banking (mbb) considers the extent to which the banks' ability to supply credit to the economy is driven by market pressures on both the asset and liability sides of their balance sheets. france (157.6%) or germany (143.3%). international liabilities as a percentage of total liabilities represented 24.1% (versus 66.1% in the uk or 77.7% in ireland). finally, prior to the crisis, according to the bos data, on the liabilities side spanish banks were traditionally very active in capital markets, relaying particularly on the interbanking markets for their funding (on average about 20% of the total), while cajas and credit cooperatives, which were more successful capturing resources from their customers were not so dependent on those markets (only around 7%). spanish banks lent more than what they got in deposits, which forced them to rely on wholesale markets to fill the gap. this forced them during the crisis, as we discuss throughout the book, to rely heavily on the ecb. as mentioned above, the crisis of the financial system in spain led to a european bailout in 2012 (see royo 2013) . as part of its historical analysis of the spanish banking sector, this book seeks to explain how that banking crisis happened. the main detonator that led to the bailout was bankia's rescue, which highlighted concerns that the level of provisions that spanish banks had taken against distressed property portfolios was too low. at the same time, concerns about the fiscal situation of the country (public debt had doubled since the crisis started from 35.5% of gdp at the end of the first quarter of 2008 to 72.1% at the end of the first quarter of 2012) and the interconnectedness between sovereign issuer and banks (the infamous "doom loop") pushed spanish yields up and led to growing concerns about the need for a bailout. in the end, the intensification of the financial crisis led to a deepening sovereign crisis, and since spain's banking system was perceived as systemically important for the eurozone because the country had about 450 billion euros of deposits from foreign companies and individuals, the european (and imf) leaders decided to intervene. prior to the bailout, investors perceived those concerns and they were punishing spanish banks and spain's sovereign. the performance of spanish banks' stock reflected those worries as well: between mid-march and the end of june of 2012, santander and bbba's stock declined about 30%. at the same time, spain's cost of borrowing kept increasing and the spread on spanish ten-year bonds over german bunds hit new european highs in late may 2012, climbing to 511 points, while yields of ten-year bonds moved above 6.5% (reaching 6.9% on june 14), and moving closer to the 7% level that was widely considered unsustainable, and which led to bailouts for greece, portugal, and ireland. yet, despite these alarming signs, as late as spring 2012, the spanish government and pm rajoy insisted that the country would not need international bailout for its banks. on april 12, mr. rajoy stated that "talking about a rescue makes no sense… spain is not being rescued; spain can't be rescued. there is no intention and no need and so spain will not be rescued." rajoy was also on record stating that "we are not going to let any regional government fall, or any bank fall, because they can't … if that happens the country will fall." 14 this followed the repeated statements of the members of the government that spain would not take any form of international rescue. by early june 2012, however, it was becoming clear that despite all the denials, a rescue was inevitable and that spain would in fact need a financial bailout. the government's attempts to force the eu and bce's hands (the budget minister, cristobal montoro, responded to a question about whether spain needed a bailout with a veiled threat: "those with the most interest in whether spain does all right are the holders of debt, who have to be repaid in full and have that right," and minister guindos was on the record stating that the battle for the euro was going to be waged in spain 15 ), and its insistent demand for help from its european partners only exasperated them and intensified concerns in european capitals that it was only considerations over the political stigma associated with a bailout, rather than the policy constraints that brussels would include on it, that was keeping the spanish government from accepting aid that was on the table. spain's risk premium-the difference between its bond yields and those of germany-continued soaring after the bankia nationalization, adding pressure to the government, and bankia's shares plunged. by june 5, the severity of the situation was finally creeping in and the government was already admitting (in the words of mr. montoro) that given the high perceived risk of its sovereign debt, spain did "not have the doors of the markets open," and this despite the fact that it was planning to auction up 2 billion euros of bonds that same week. mr. rajoy, for his part, continued insisting on the need for a banking union and eurobonds, stating during a senate session that europe "needs to support those that are in difficulty … the most important thing is we have a problem of financing, of liquidity and debt sustainability." 16 germany still refused to provide aid unless there was a formal request from the spanish government. finally, on saturday, june 9, following a few days of fierce official negations, the government asked the eu for funds to recapitalize its struggling banking sector at a conference call between the eurozone's 17 finance ministers. it agreed to accept a bailout of up to $125 billion, nearly three times the $46 billion in extra capital that the imf said it was the minimum the banking sector needed to guard against the deepening of the country's economic crisis. the decision also aimed at quelling rising financial turmoil ahead of the greek parliamentary election scheduled for june 17. this decision made spain the fourth and largest european country to agree to accept emergency assistance (albeit in this case only for the country's financial sector). the european statement on the aid gave few details, which initially allowed the government to claim that it was not a "rescue" package, and that it was not subject to the conditionality and supervision by the troika (eu, imf, and ecb) that characterized the other three rescue packages of greece, ireland, and portugal. in spain, the announcement was made by minister guindos, which caused a political storm and forced pm rajoy to give an impromptu press conference the day after, on sunday, june 10, before he departed to watch the spanish football national team play a eurocup game in poland. guindos announced that "what we are asking is financial support, and this has absolutely nothing to do with a full bailout," and added that the terms of the emergency loan would be "very favorable," and that "the problem that we face affects about 30% of the spanish banking system." 17 the amount of the financing was expected to be completed after the two consulting firms had been hired to look at the bank accounts published their audit report on june 21. the funds would be channeled through the spanish bank bailout fund, the frob, and the 16 see "spain makes explicit plea for bank aid," financial times, june 5, 2012. spanish government would ultimately be responsible and had to sign the memorandum of understanding and the conditions that came with it. the market's response to the bailout package was initially sanguine. while observers praised the decisive pre-emptive action of european leaders (something relatively unusual during the crisis), and the fact that the aid was directed to the banks and that the amount was much larger than estimated to give some margin in the case of further need, there was disappointment regarding the failure to inject the money directly into the banks as equity. 18 the model proposed for the aid failed to recognize the crucial link between sovereign debt and the banks. spanish banks accounted for a third of spanish sovereign bonds, nearly double the tally before the crisis started (they had purchased 83 billion euros between december 2011 and june 2012). as in greece where the sovereign debt dragged down the banks, this made them very vulnerable to a potential sovereign debt crisis, which was becoming increasingly more likely in spain, thus intensifying the "doom loop." consequently, after an initial market rally, the spanish bond continued jumping higher and reached a new record, very close to 7%, just four days after the announcement of the bailout, demonstrating that investors were growing increasingly anxious about spain's ability to pay back its debts. the 2010 banking crisis in spain confirms a long-standing tenant: banks or banking systems collapse when they meet two conditions: they take on too much risk in their loans and investments, and they do not have sufficient capital on reserve to absorb the losses associated with their risky investments and loans (calomiris and haber 2014, p. 207) . indeed, the cause of the 2012 crisis in spain was rooted in policies that eroded underwriting standards and weak prudential regulation. as we will see later in the book, the banking crisis affected in particular a set of financial institutions, the cajas (savings and loans, s&l). indeed, with a few relatively small exceptions, the spanish financial crisis has been a crisis of the cajas. these institutions borrowed short term from depositors and then lend long term on fixed-rate mortgages. 19 the success of this model, however, was based on two conditions: low inflation volatility and discipline from depositors who would withdraw their deposits if the managers acted imprudently. however, by the 2000s, the context in which these institutions operated had changed markedly and the 2007 global financial crisis hit them hard because they were very dependent on wholesale funding. yet, government protection of cajas (part of the bank bargains that we will examine) had insulated them from the consequences of their own risk-taking and facilitated the reckless decisions that led to their downfall. when the real estate market collapsed after 2007, wholesale funding dried up and their funding costs skyrocketed, which caused significant problems because they had to pay more for capital, and they held mortgages that (many of which went into default as a result of the crisis) still earned only low fixed interest rates of return. this brought several of them to the point of insolvency. if their vulnerability, driven by their high reliance on the real estate market and wholesale funding, had been recognized and addressed in the years prior to the crises through cajas ' closures, shrinkage, or consolidation, the crisis for the cajas would have been significant but not as devastating as it ended up being. as losses started to pile up the spanish government, supervisory agencies should have shut down insolvent ones or forced them to raise additional capital. yet, they ignored or minimized the signs and looked the other way, postponing the day of reckoning. but in doing so, they ensured that the final outcome would be much worse. in many spanish cajas , there was a failure of risk management, which led to an increase in risky lending and to inadequate levels of capital cushions. the question remains how it was that so many cajas ended up making so many risky loans while maintaining insufficient capital to protect themselves against insolvency. what were the processes by which cajas ' portfolios became increasingly risky, and by which increased risk in bank assets was not adequately matched by increasing amounts of capital in reserve. this book will argue, following calomiris and haber (2014) , that institutional and regulatory frameworks favored both the government and other privileged actors' access to finance at the expense of an environment conducive to a stable banking system. indeed, political institutions have structured the incentives of bankers and political and economic actors to form coalitions that shaped regulations and policies in their favor this institutional framework was the result of political choices that made it vulnerable, because prudent lending practices continued being influenced by the desires of the groups that were in control of the government, who often channeled credit to groups that were considered politically crucial. therefore, it is not surprising that banks have been fragile and crises prone. the book continues in chapter 2 with an overview of the origins of the spanish banking system prior to the twentieth century. it shows the role of the state in the development of the spanish banking system, and how financial mismanagement contributed to the decline of the country prior to the twentieth century. it also examines the 'bank bargains' that took place during that era, which ultimately led to the development of a fragile banking system and recurrent banking crises. chapter 3 examines the evolution of the spanish banking system in the twentieth century and analyzes the causes of the mid-1970s and early 1980s banking crisis. it shows how the banking sector was transformed and modernized, growing from an underdeveloped structure into a comparatively modern sector. however, successive governments continued establishing institutional and regulatory frameworks that favored both the government and other privileged actors' access to finance at the expense of an environment conductive to a stable banking system which ultimately led to a systemic baking crisis in the 1970s. chapter 4 analyzes the overall economic crisis that started in 2008 in spain. it is impossible to disentangle the 2008 banking crisis from the overall economic crisis that affected the country at the same time. as the economic crisis intensified, spain's banking sector could not escape its dramatic effects. this chapter looks at the performance of the spanish economic throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twentieth century. it examines the reasons for the success of the spanish economy in the 1990s and provides an overview of the main causes of the 2008-2013 crisis and the governments' responses. chapter 5 analyzes the impact of the global crisis on the sfs between 2008 and 2010. it shows that, overall, the performance of the largest spanish financial institutions was positive. the chapter examines why and outlines some lessons from the spanish experience. it contends that this response was largely driven by institutional, political, and cultural factors. finally, the chapter considers the spanish experience within the framework of the voc literature. while financial capitalisms have converged toward deregulation as a result of the combined processes of globalization and european integration, this chapter shows that differences persist. indeed, in the case of spain, the crisis led to extensive regulatory intervention that served to reinforce the pre-existing model. chapter 6 examines the subsequent impact of the economic crisis on the sfs, as well as the banking bargains that ultimately led to the financial bailout. in addition, it focuses on the following variables: deteriorating economic conditions; the implosion of the real estate market; the dependence on wholesale funding; weaknesses in the regulatory framework; and the role of the bos. most of the analyses on the crisis in spain have concerned themselves with phenomena like mismanaged banks, excessive debts, the bubble in the real estate sector, or the loss of competitiveness. others have sought to explain the crisis as a by-product of emu integration. chapter 7 moves beyond those explanations and argues that a fundamental reason for the economic and financial crisis is rooted in the process of institutional degeneration that preceded the crisis. it analyzes the deteriorating performance of spanish institutions to explain that reversal. the concluding chapter provides an overview of the main arguments to explain the fragility of the spanish banking system. it 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and divergence in latin america internationalisation and economic institutions: comparing the european experience how institutions evolve: the political economy skills in germany, britain, the united states and japan la formación de los tipos de interés y los problemas actuales de la economía española states in the global economy: bringing domestic institutions back in governments, markets, and growth: financial systems and politics industrial change changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.15826/csp.2017.1.2.011 article apologia of modernity victor martianov institute for philosophy and law, ural branch of the russian academy of sciences, yekaterinburg, russia. abstract the article considers key factors and directions of the value-institutional evolution of modernity as a political project. it is argued that the movement of humankind towards the globalised world paradoxically turned not into a denial, but rather into a consistent radicalisation of the axiological political foundations of modernity. the thesis of the axiological unity and institutional diversity of global modernity is advanced in opposition to the concept of pluralist modernity as a rhetorically veiled civilisational approach. it is asserted that the constant self-adjustment of the central value system of globalised modernity is carried out in the context of a non-simultaneity effect, providing grounds for discussions about the insurmountability of pre-modern cultural barriers and traditions of different civilisations. the conclusion is justified that the success of the globalisation of modernity is contingent upon the possibility of building out the already existing world economy to include world politics, since the economic assimilation of the world by capitalism has largely outstripped the counterbalancing possibilities of its global political regulatory and compensatory systems, contributing to the intensification of conflicts and various inequalities. the increasingly intensive interaction and interdependence of humanity at the global level first implies the creation of ethical mechanisms of world politics based on concern for the interests of humanity as a whole. in seeking the solution to this problem, it is increasingly necessary to go beyond archaised political forms and the logic of decision-making that relates to territorial nation-states. in the discussion about the ethical and political values and institutions of the global, second or late modernity, the positionsof those subjects capable of presenting a moral game to humanity – received 6 june 2017 © 2017 victor martianov accepted 21 august 2017 martianov@instlaw.uran.ru published online 29 september 2017 153changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 2 open, egalitarian, universal, cosmopolitan approaches for solving general problems – will be a priori strengthened. keywords modernity, globalised modernity, radicalisation of modernity, global economics, world politics, capitalism, liberal consensus, postmodernism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, collective action the fundamental importance of modernity as a central problem for the social sciences cannot be overemphasised. according to the figurative expression of e. hobsbawm, it was during the twentieth century that 80% of the earth’s population finally parted company with the middle ages and stepped into modern society. this is a society oriented toward the scientific mastering of nature and freedom to control one’s own destiny. modernity is the most ideological problem of the social sciences, the response to which is used to designate all other axiological, ontological and notional hierarchies. while we are all located in modernity, its constantly changing face can be seen differently depending on the historical stage of a particular society and the subject of its interpretation. while sharing some common features, the versions of modernity of the 18th and 19th centuries and at the beginning and end of the 20th century can be differentiated in a number of key aspects. it is the dream of all political and philosophical doctrines, state power apparatuses and social forces to exert an effective intellectual monopoly over modernity, due to the concomitant ability to legitimatise certain topical socio-political, cultural and economic orders. however, it is impossible to furnish a universal definition of a continuous or unfinished modernity (habermas, 2005) within which one is located without also presenting that position within the coordinates of the socio-political, economic and historical context in which the observer thinks. at the same time, the reflection of one’s own social engagement and partiality naturally turns into a falsification of any universal concepts and systems of legitimacy that appeal to modernity. the political project of modernity presents itself as a globally dominant, historically heterogeneous and far from exhausted political and historical project. since modernity is an unfinished project, it cannot be thought of as a whole or as the subject of a final historical outcome. however, we can learn a lot about the modernity, contemporary society and ourselves if we are able to understand the internal changes that the value-institutional political order of modernity has undergone over the past several centuries. concerning the genesis, transformation, possible alternatives and threats to the dominant political project of modernity, we can formulate the following interrelated sequence of theses. i historically, the political project of modernity came to supersede the ancien régime (old order), showing the construction of the social order for the first time and justifying 154 victor martianov its autonomy from the unchanging divine order. traditional societies are fundamentally distinguished from their modern equivalents in terms of the rate of social change. before modernity, the rate of change was so small that during one generation the changes were almost invisible, creating a general illusion that no changes at all had taken place since the creation of the world. therefore, the speed of change in contemporary society – in which, in fact, only the habitual way of life changes, i.e. its rituals, symbols and values – can seem almost like blasphemy from the point of view of pre-modern social groups. the speed of social change makes it clear that all societies are explicitly constructed. as a result, the main object of criticism of modernity is the uncovering of its ontological and axiological variability as well as the constructed nature of different social forces, interpreted in the context of the sacral tradition as inauthenticity, simulacrality, deconstruction, denial of god, distortion of sacred foundations, etc. nevertheless, it can be remarked that tradition differs only in the sense that the drawing up of its design is lost in a historical timescale. abolishing the earthly order is justified by the fact that it is a copy of the divine; consequently, every social evil has an apologia on the basis that everything real is reasonable. however, unpredictable results may ensue from citizens and social groups legitimising their right to change the political order. thus, the political order of modernity resurrects the scenario of the construction of the tower of babel, in which the final goal of achieving the ideal (divine) order has not been lost, but is constantly divided due to the conflicts of alternative perspectives produced by constantly transforming social groups as analogues of biblical languages. hence the insurmountable theoretical uncertainty and incompleteness of modernity as the mobile constellation of modern utopias and ideologies and the impossibility of their integration into a metanarrative, which hope j.-f. lyotard associated with the state of postmodernism (lyotard, 1979). a natural way of being for a modern society consists in permanent modernisation as a set of continuously improving changes. the desire for continuous innovation in itself is becoming a key – and perhaps the only – distinctive tradition of modernity: ‘modernisation is a “way of existence” in modernity, and it cannot end, at least until “modernity” is complete.’ (kapustin, 1998) in this case, in order to correspond to the prevailing principles of the maximisation of collective usefulness, any innovations must be publicly controlled and legitimated by being the object of a wide, constantly confirmed dynamic consensus of key social groups. therefore, modernisation is a continuous process, carried out under fundamentally incomplete conditions of freedom and in the absence of social forces that can achieve a zero sum victory once and for all. furthermore, this process is not identical to the movement towards an ideal final state, which often seems to be embodied in one or another political reality. the modernist project announced the universality of the human mind and the intelligibility of social and moral laws, leading to weber’s disenchantment of the world. in the ethical field, it is the project of independent rational substantiation of morals (macintyre, 1981); in the political sphere, the universal legislation of reason. at the heart of the political project of modernity lies the desire to develop universal political legislation for all mankind. the problem is that the class differentiation of the modern society presented a set of diametrically opposed versions of morality and reason, 155changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 2 which are the result of the free self-determination of peoples, each of which, while striving for universal legislation, is at the same time an expression of particular political interests. an objective (universal) normative rationality (common goals, values, ideals) of the monologic political mind thus becomes impossible. however, without integral instrumental rationality, expressed in terms of the rules of the game – conflict and interaction of social interests – society itself, seen as an institutional, process-based compromise of interests, becomes impossible to sustain. it is for this reason that increasing attention has been paid both to new disciplinary practices and to dialogue – communication of social forces, mechanisms for achieving sustainable agreements (conventions) expressed in various democratic mechanisms and institutions (elections, referenda, direct participation of citizens in making power decisions: demonstrations, rallies, jury trials, citizens’ gatherings, public hearings, etc.). under the conditions of modernity, the political community for the first time developed a fundamentally incomplete system of methods for resolving internal conflicts that allow for periodic review of the terms of the social contract, i.e., dominant social forces are given legitimacy for a limited time period. this allows the abandonment of extreme political interactions, in which the winner takes all, in favour of a system of political decision making related to cooperative, dialogical, solidary strategies of various social forces that allow the interests of different parties to be taken into account and society changed in a non-violent way. modernity is often criticised by contemporaries both from the left, and from the right. now as the iron cell of conformism (h. marcuse), then as the tyranny of the egoistic mind, leading to a dehumanising depreciation of human existence as well as to totalitarianism. thus, it seems that the real situation is more complicated. in achieving more rapid thematisation, modern theories and collective practices sharply increased the sensitivity of society itself to political problems of power, hierarchy, resource distribution, justice, freedom and solidarity in the context of unavoidable contradictions of group interests. these are political problems that have always existed; however, it is only under the glare of contemporary theoretical optics that they have become the focus of attention, bringing their historical character to light. in this way, it is shown that these problems are not eternal and can, in principle, be variably resolved by active constituents of the political order. ii during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most classics of european social thought analysed modern society at the ontological level according to the concepts of universal transition: from agrarian feudalism to industrial capitalism (k. marx), from traditional to modern society (m. weber), from organic to mechanical solidarity (e. durkheim), from community to society (f. tönnies), from military to industrial society (h. spencer), etc. thus, almost all the classical socio-political macro-theories that comprehend the transition to modernity – and the condition of modernity itself – are built on the identification of evolutionary stages of development thus forming a type of binary time code, one of whose branches has a privileged position with respect to the future, and the other personifying the past. while this transition actually did take 156 victor martianov place on a global scale, the modernist project historically did not end there, setting in motion complex processes of internal differentiation. in institutional terms, modernity is expressed in the complexity of the social subsystems – economics, politics, science, art, etc. – each of which acquires a certain autonomy, with its own value system and language of description. at the same time, modernity does not entirely displace previous social relations. the value system of modernity functions in parallel with the previous norms of social regulation, gradually coming to displace and replace them. thus, along with reciprocal and distributive exchanges, patrimonial political order and patron-client relations of elites of different levels, are formed civil nation-states, a self-regulating market, rational bureaucracy, mass parties, trade unions, civil organisations, representative bodies of government, etc. in all modern societies, without exception, we can observe the simultaneity of coexistence and the imposition into various spheres of life of reciprocal (gift-exchange, family, clan), distributive and market relations, as well as a long-term, gradual change in their correlation in favour of the latter. new social norms and regulators seldom replace the old all at once. typically, this displacement takes the form of a transplant, when the values of modernity at the institutional level are partially mixed with those of an obsolete cultural tradition. thus, the displacement of old values in the historical perspective creates transitional institutional effects, which are often erroneously explained in terms of the cultural and civilisational specifics (uniqueness) of a particular society. now, the problem of global transformation of the model of national, class-industrial and predominantly western modernity into the late, post-national, cosmopolitan modernity is at the centre of discussions. in the world as a whole, the national model of modernity, which derives habitual everyday life from historical social ideals and utopias, is becoming increasingly irrelevant for describing the actual socio-political and cultural regimes of a large part of mankind in the twenty-first century. transformations of the basic national model of modernity were facilitated by: – the saturation points of global markets and intensification of non-market competition, leading to the crisis of idealised capitalism; – another technological revolution related to automation and robotics; acceleration of the dynamics of changes in late-modern societies without economic growth or mass labour; – transformation of the social structure of society and the principles of its stratification, ever less connected with the market; – an increase in the internal heterarchy and heterotopy of territorial nationstates due to various internal and external challenges; – multiplication and strengthening of non-governmental political subjects in the globalised world (tnk, city networks etc.). however, despite convincing criticism, modernity remains the basic political model for the relevant description and legitimisation of global cultural and economicpolitical reality, which has not yet been pushed to the periphery of history by alternative political projects. for this reason, despite the constantly observed institutional and axiological changes, leading researchers emphasise that when we refer to the realities of our society we are nevertheless dealing with modernity, 157changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 2 be it the singular modernity of f. jamieson, the fluid modernity of z. bauman, the hyper-modernity of a. turena, the cosmopolitan, second or late modernity of u. beck or a. giddens’ concept of radical modernity. in the globalised world, the intensity of intellectual challenges to modernity is growing from the side of the post-industrial, post-ford, networked information society, knowledge society, etc. (postfordism, 2015). however, the main challenge is not merely institutional, but a more universal value-ethical challenge, whose sources are more widely defined. as a result, none of the concepts that claimed a global alternative to modernity were able to displace it from the dominant positions. these include postmodernism, post-industrialism, communism, alterglobalism, world empire (m. hardt & a. negri), religious fundamentalism, civilisational theories, theories of autarky and isolationism and a variety of utopian and traditionalist projects (fishman, 2008). it should be noted that the most heuristic critical challenge to the political paradigm of modernism was issued by postmodernism. persuasive examples of the axiological and methodological criticism of the theories of modernity can be found in the works of j. baudrillard, j. derrida, j. deleuze, j.-f. lyotard and others. for example, jameson argues that the intellectual map of modernity has largely developed its heuristic potential in social theory terms, to all intents and purposes becoming a synonym for capitalism. however, in throwing a real challenge to modernity, postmodernism itself failed to become a global utopia, merely morphing into the instrumental cultural logic of late capitalism (jameson, 1991). over time, postmodern theories, which initially claimed to represent a global alternative to the value core of modernity, came to be reabsorbed into it on the basis of critical self-reflection. postmodernism revealed and studied the dark side of modernity from a theoretical perspective (j. baudrillard). postmodern theories turned out to be heuristically strong in the study of various kinds of breaks, boundaries, peripheries and cultural contradictions of the political project of modernity, connected with criticism and challenges directed by various peripheries (geographic, economic, cultural) at the prevailing values and centres. however, postmodernism was unable to offer a global postmodern political project, since it lacks the ability to generate universality and totality in the area of values and aims. the hierarchical values and principles of a political attitude, structured around the criticism of any overwhelming periphery of centrism, proved to be unrealisable in practice. one of the networks or communications must remain ordering and dominant; otherwise, we are only dealing with a radical anarchism connected with a denial of the need for society as such. thus, if modernity is connected with individual and collective liberation as well as conscious and goal-oriented transformation of the world, postmodernism turns into forced reactive strategies connected with the adaptive accommodation of individuals and their groups to social, technological and axiological changes, over which they, in fact, do not exercise any power. the formation of the analytical model of late modernity is carried out against the background of a historical non-simultaneity effect, at a time when some regions of the world are entering the postindustrial stage of modernity, while others are merely living through the process of being forced to play catch up with modernisation and the institutional adaptation to modernity in the form of nation-states. the classical 158 victor martianov programmes of social knowledge of the original era of modernity were oriented towards the nation-state as the legitimate political form of its practical embodiment. it is for this reason that marx could still draw upon english political economy, german philosophy and french utopianism. under the conditions of globalised or late modernity, any national schools or theoretical models of social knowledge lose their self-sufficiency. nations become only private or special in comparison with universal laws, which are relevant only to the extent that they apply to humanity as a whole. at the same time, some popular theories, especially in the field of economics, continue to use ontological modifications of the classical transit discourse no longer in substantiating the transition to it, but in describing the very formation and subsequent transformations of modernity. for example, d. nort, d. wallace and b. wyngast describe modernisation as a transition from the natural state to the open access society, carried out by means of a transformation of the interaction of elites. the latter cease to be closed and begin to be guided by impersonal rules (north et al., 2009). a similar course of thought is present in d. acemoğlu and d. robinson, who describe the history of modernisation as an institutional transformation of societies in which extractive institutions are dominant, to societies with a predominance of inclusive institutions (acemoglu, robinson, 2012). however, more insightful and more convincing in this discourse are the optimistic ideas of r. inglehart and k. welzel based on many years of global sociological surveys on the transformations taking place in the value systems of modern societies. they consist in a justification of the general transition from the material survival values guaranteed for the majority of citizens during the deployment of the early industrial modernity to the postmaterial values of self-realisation, associated with post-industrial societies (inglehart, welzel, 2005). in a radical and idealised form, the concept of universal transition was applied by the apologist of the end of history f. fukuyama, who attempted to argue that all modern societies move “naturally” in the direction of the domination of the market and liberal democracy (fukuyama 1992). supporters of the movement towards the flat earth and end of history present rationales for the ethical and political unification of mankind, with globalisation being interpreted as the erasure of pre-modern cultural differences (j. bhagwati, t. friedman, i. wallerstein, a. maddison, a. touraine, v. inozemtsev, f. fukuyama and others). accordingly, continuing modernity can be adequately explained only from within its own value coordinates. and the more we are unable to explain the observed diversity in the logic of modernity itself, the more it will not turn out in the framework of the more localist and irrational discourse of civilisation that modernity has supplanted into the field of history. finally, there have been enough productive and, perhaps, too hasty attempts by z. bauman and u. beck to model a late-modern society from the latest – however unstable – trends, individual signs and changes in the outlook (bauman, 2000; beck, 1992). in this same connection, there are concepts that predict the turn of modern society towards new mechanisms of self-organisation. such include, for example, concepts of the post-industrial society, post-fordism (s. lash, j. urry et al.), the network society (m. castells, a. bard, et al.) and information society (d. bell, e. toffler, f. webster, v. inozemtsev, et al.) – all of which had a significant impact on public 159changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 2 opinion at the end of the twentieth century. however, these theories turned out to be too hastily grounded in some peripheral tendencies in social development, which consequently turned into utopias with overvalued social expectations. theories of the information society, knowledge society or creative class turned out to be somewhat naively optimistic, a pie whose slices were not intended for dividing equally among all societies and classes, and implying a rather more rapid transition to the future than the actual capabilities of even the most advanced modern societies. iii in its most general form, the value kernel of the political project of modernity represents the historically mobile construction of interrelated narratives that organise the institutional space of a post-traditional society. first, it consists in an aggregate of modern ideologies/utopias, as well as the conflict inherent between their value justifications, representing the dynamics of the clash of social forces rooted in capitalism. this research tradition relies mainly on the classic works of k. marx, k. mannheim, a. gramsci, h. marcuse, f. jameson and others, in which the appearance and transformation of modernity is due to the new social ontology of capitalism and the class structure of society that it engenders. the basic modern political narratives are comprised of capitalism, liberalism and nationalism. capitalism generates a constant increase in resources and assigns the dominant stratification of society into economic classes, each determined by its relation to the market. the strategy of obtaining moral and political compensation for the negative externalities and social costs of capitalism is implemented in the form of a constantly-revised liberal consensus (i. wallerstein) appearing as a fundamental fusion within the institutionally implemented liberal normative field of different versions of conservatism, socialism and left-right radicalism. finally, the territorial national state acts as the dominant political form, combining the principles of territorial sovereignty, power apparatus and citizenship. the nationstate permits the establishment of an acceptable balance between the market and the various background, non-economic factors that provide for its existence – which factors capitalism and its theories prefer to bracket out. this consists in a combination of capitalist production, exploitation, competition and the accumulation of capital with the institutional consolidation of a broad list of inalienable guarantees, rights and freedoms of citizens. the concept of democracy, most consistently worked out in the habermasian idea of communicative consensus, bears responsibility for the coordination and reconciliation of conflicting collective interests in a given modern society. the comprehension and legitimation of the constant changes of modern society as social norms are represented by the concepts of progress and revolution. the immanent theory of progress (modernisation) institutionally represents the differentiation of the new autonomous (self-referential) subsystems of an increasingly complex society, involving a delegation of the functions of social regulation and the power to produce norms. these narratives form the value and functional unity of modernity along with the basis for its self-description, reproduction and legitimation of the social order. 160 victor martianov however, under the conditions of the historical evolution of modernity, each of the indicated narratives undergoes substantial changes. the narrative of liberalism demonstrates a tendency to abandon the liberal consensus of collective political interests a) on the basis of modern ideologies and b) within individual nations in favour of shaping the contours of global liberal ethics based on agreement on universal human rights and freedoms and the development of moral conventions for maintaining the legitimacy of post-national political institutions. a negative trend running in parallel to this is the loss of ideological content on the part of the liberal consensus. it thus begins to express itself, not at the level of ideology, but at lower rhetorical levels, e.g. those of common sense, populism and pragmatism. the narrative of democracy is undergoing an evolution, with the principles of the dictatorship of the majority, the mobilisation of the masses and the expansion of the circle of citizens endowed with political rights giving way to problems of the coexistence of a multi-component society, access to civil rights and equal opportunities for citizens and immigrants. the evolution of the narrative of nationalism is connected with the movement from the sacralisation of territorial sovereignty to extraterritorial principles of open law and cosmopolitanism. territorially organised nations in a flat world (t. friedman) lose credibility in the field of developing dominant political values. under conditions of reflexive modernity, global openness of borders and increasing mobility, the process of legitimation inevitably shifts from nations to humanity as a whole. thus, the political logic of nation-states no longer corresponds to the increasingly intensive interaction and interdependence of humanity at the global level. the transition to late modernity is characterised by a kind of disintegration and loss of legitimacy on the part of normative nationalism in terms of unity of individual rights, collective autonomy of citizens and territorially limitations to sovereign space. the factor of space as a sacralisation of limited territory ceases to be significant. accordingly, all nations as territorial communities are experiencing an increasing deficit of legitimacy. the same assertion relates to nationalism supporting territorial political communities as well as to concepts of sovereignty in terms of the historical, ethnic and linguistic proximity of members of the territorial community. in this way, the historical realisation of the utopia of national modernity in the form of nation-states for the greater part of humanity simultaneously turns into its profanation as a consequence of the loss of the transcendental dimension to the political sphere. in addition, if nationalism emerged as a historical means for integrating and internally unifying a heterogeneous political space during the centralisation of large states, now it can also be rethought as a way of protecting a particular society from the global expansion of the world economy, which polarises national communities and increases their dependence on external factors, actors and contexts of interaction. for a certain historical period, the effects of modernisation served to obscure the moral limitations and inhumane goal-orientedness of the capitalist world-system. the complete globalisation of capital and technological revolutions devaluing working people make it necessary to reconsider the classical narrative of capitalism associated with constant geographical expansion and market competition in favour of its rental models (martianov, 2017). 161changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 2 it should be especially noted that the value kernel of the political project of modernity is ambivalent: it is simultaneously a method of explanation, but also of remoralisation/legitimisation of practices within capitalism. modern ideologies and utopias are designed to mitigate the permanent moral deficit provoked by capitalism under the conditions of the expansion of the limited model of homo economicus, which is absolutely inadequate for keeping society from decay (martianov, 2017). in turn, capitalism tends to identify itself with modernity by reducing it to neutral theories of modernisation, progress, development, specifically designed to mask the absence in it of any social goals and collective hopes (jameson, 2009). thus, capitalism does not have a general political goal or any socially utopian horizon and cannot therefore produce effective self-legitimation that relates to society as a whole. therefore, capitalism has to resort to palliative options of non-economic justification of its economic practices, primarily to an identification with modernity as the embodiment of the idea of the infinity of progress. nethertheless, the original logic of the expansion of capitalism in terms of colonialism and progressorism [term introduced by the strugatsky brothers] was subsequently subjected to substantiated criticism. equally critical was the expansion of capitalism into all spheres of social life, which went beyond the limits of market exchanges, giving rise to the total commodification of all other social relations. in this context, the ideological genesis of political modernity is evident from the crisis in christian morality, which was caused by the birth and development of the capitalist world-system. first emerging in sixteenth century europe and subsequently developed through the cycles of bourgeois revolutions, processes of colonisation (westernisation) and globalisation of cultural, economic and mass media communications, the principles of the capitalist world system, freed from the limitations of traditional christian morality, gradually came to embrace the whole world. founded by liberal consensus, the concept of human rights and freedoms has emerged as a distinctively post-traditional means by which christian values in their humanistic interpretation can coexist with the functional logic of capitalism, which is largely built on the systematic violation of these values. modern ideologies were used to substantiate hybrid intellectual constructions reconciling christian principles of charity, equality, brotherhood and mutual assistance with the values of the market, competition, personal success, the endless accumulation of capital and the class inequality of people inherent in the social relations of the era of capitalism. as a consequence, the axiological field of modernity is characterised by a duality that is not inherent in traditional societies: the gradual separation and autonomisation of private and public spheres in such a way that christian morality still prevails in the field of private life, while the rules of the public sphere are determined by the more limited pragmatic or utilitarian morality of homo economicus. as an effective strategy for the constant ethical self-correction of modernity, theories of justice are advanced in the field of political philosophy that allow a utopian dimension to be maintained. in terms of theories of justice in modern political thought, the theory of repair of late modernity is gaining popularity in the context of maintaining the legitimacy of the status quo. however, from a future perspective, it is not the discourse of repair (j. alexander), a return to an ethics of virtue (a. macintyre) or the 162 victor martianov preservation of some universal model of modernity (f. fukuyama) that is required, but the fundamental ability to construct ever more universal political and ethical grounds for modernity’s existence. iv concerning the continuing internal unity of the political project of modernity, it is possible to assert its axiological integrity despite (or perhaps because of) the variability of its institutional implementation. modernity can thus be viewed as an open constructor of values and the various possibilities for their interaction, including institutional. however, the presence of an axiological interpretation space neither abolishes the conceptual unity and finality of the value set of modernity, nor its hierarchical structure. otherwise, the very confirmation or recognition of the political project of modernity as a holistic concept and/or phenomenon would be extremely difficult if not impossible (wagner, 2008). in the course of the historical evolution of modernity, it is possible to observe the successive processes of its disengagement with the european version, which has nevertheless continued to assert itself as canonical and the only correct one in the discourses of colonialist theories that refer to catching up with modernisation, westernisation, civilisation and transitology. postnational modernity, then, consists in a geographical extension to the whole world of its original european model, which has rid itself of its particular cultural and historical content and traditions in favour of political ideas and institutions that have become universal. at the global level, post-national modernity jettisons its nontransitive, unique features in favour of such properties that are actually universalisable through building on any previous traditions and cultures. however, while postnational modernity may be normatively universal, in terms of an institutional plan for the realisation of its value kernel it is quite heterogeneous. this competition of institutional versions of modernism is a prerequisite for its flexible, nonregulatory and competitive development throughout the world. the non-simultaneous development of modernity in different parts of the world was conditioned by the fact that, in addition to the european version, all the later versions of the institutionalisation of a modern society already had ready-made models of modernity to which reference could be made in entering into various cultural conflicts and interrelations. thus, if the initial cultural-historical nucleus of modernity was determined by the west, then, concerning the growing cultural indifference of post-national modernity, it can be subsequently argued to have achieved autonomy from path dependence (dependence on the previous development), something that is confirmed by many examples of the effective modernisation of states and regions culturally different from europe. in searching for the social laws of modern society, the globalisation of modernity confirms the greater relevance of the formational argumentation approach of the hegelian-marxist philosophy of history than the positions of the civilisational theories (ch. taylor, s. huntington, p. buchanan, j. thompson, etc.), which emphasise the importance of cultural differences between societies. moreover, attempts to synthesise the formational and civilisational approaches into a third entity, for example, taking the 163changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 2 form of the sociocultural approach embodied by the concept of multiple modernities (s. eisenstadt, j. arnason, w. schluchter, b. wittrock, etc.) are heuristically less satisfactory and methodologically more contradictory (eisenstadt 2000). the main methodological problem of these theories is that ideas based on the idea of a particular civilisational norm necessarily describe the entire diversity of societies that fit into them only as temporary deviations. as a rule, however, deviations do not disappear in the course of time, but continue to accumulate, while the legitimacy of the norm itself is not questioned, including also for the civilisation that spawned its historical model; nevertheless, it inexorably retreated more and more from it. undoubtedly, during the expansion and intensification of modernity there are receding waves and rejectionist reactions to excessively rapid processes of catching up or the authoritarian modernisation of the semi-periphery and periphery of the capitalist world-system. at the same time, it is tempting to counter-modernise these waves and adopt reactionary positions proving the existence of irresistible cultural differences and advocating a return to tradition along with an apologia for the civilisational uniqueness of specific societies, which determines the inapplicability of modern values to them. however, acknowledging the challenges of modernisation is by no means the same thing as repudiating modernity per se. the thesis of multiple modernities presupposes the preservation of pre-modern cultural differences in the value system of modernity, turning into a civilisational approach that only uses the modernist conceptual apparatus and rhetoric for its effective refutation. this approach attempts to integrate the universalism of the values of modernity – the background patterns of human development that go beyond the limit of any civilisation – with the obvious difference between cultural environments and models for their realisation. the vulnerability of the methodological compromise inherent in the concept of multiple modernities consists in modernity in the form of competition between various cultural programmes being transformed into an attempt to present some particular societies as civilisational models of modernity, determined by the historical and cultural characteristics of world civilisations. however, this does not mean that modernity abolishes the historical civilisations that preceded it; on the contrary, civilisations become modern without losing their irresistible cultural differences. thus, the multiplicity of modernity is transformed into a conserved set of civilisations in the era of modernity, comprising an aggregated set of unconnected modernities. it seems that in reality the fundamental conflict between modernity and individual culturally-based civilisations is essentially impossible since under the conditions of modernisation the previous cultural differences invariably depart to the periphery of public life. the cultural norms of modernity may have first appeared in the west, but this does not by any means imply colonisation and westernisation when spreading beyond it. however, the acceptance of market values, liberalism, democracy, human rights, progress, etc. is not equivalent to an undermining of the foundations of any nonwestern culture: these pose a challenge to any previous traditional culture, including those of the western tradition. therefore, the increasingly popular culture-centric concept of multiple modernities results in a fundamental conceptual stretch – cultural 164 victor martianov factors refer to significant pre-modern differences in human communities, but are unlikely to retain such a form under the conditions of global modernity (martyanov 2010). in this context, any culture is important, but cultural versions cannot be considered as dominant explanatory factors within modernity, whose cultural anamnesis comprises the history of the west, albeit freed from its particularity. it seems that the problem of the influence of cultural factors in the context of global modernity is more complex. the difficulty lies in the fact that each society seeks to pick up more subtle sociocultural settings conducive to an effective combination of market and state regulation in the implementation of modern values, taking into account the dependence on prior cultural development. here the adjustment of the cultural environment to the deployment of modernity in a concrete historical society consists solely in a particular problem that is overestimated on the increase and located by the proponents of multiple modernities at the centre of their conceptual constructions. the problem is that the global deployment and intensification of modernity are carried out under the conditions of historical non-simultaneity of different societies. this gives rise to intellectual speculations about the insurmountability of cultural barriers and traditions of different civilisations, although in fact the cultural unity of any modern nation-states was formed simultaneously with their economic and political consolidation and did not precede it at all. moreover, globalisation processes affecting politics, culture, economy and law in the modern world dominate the secondary reaction to these processes, expressed in attempts at the cultural, ethnic, religious fragmentation of the world. therefore, drawing on the resources of further development in pre-modern discourses – historical analogies, civilisational approach, traditionalism, fundamentalism and cultural genetics, insurmountable identity or models of ethnonationalism – appears as an increasingly effective enterprise. globalised modernity presupposes the ability of a particular society to live in accordance with transnational, universal political rules, while still in the process of developing them; to think from universal human positions, taking into account more universal laws and background factors that go beyond the limits of sovereign territoriality and historical national myths to embrace all of humanity. if the national version of modernity appears as the institutionalisation of a liberal utopia, then the movement towards a post-national modernity turned paradoxically not into denial, but a radicalisation of its value bases. for example, a. giddens views globalisation as the process of modernity’s axiological radicalisation, encompassing the whole world, as it transitions from its limited origins to the mature version (giddens 1990). this transition is characterised by the growing dynamics of social changes and the triumph of individuality, radically exempt from external regulators and expressed by the growth of conscious or “reflective” sociality that comes to replace the social order regulated by society. globalisation appears as mega-trend, increasingly adopting a non-western view, embracing the world as a whole and challenging the customary system of nation-states. global modernity is less and less consistent with the cultural, geographic and historically classical theories of modernisation, trying to build the universal modernist hierarchy of the world on a global scale, where the countries of the centre of the world system will set the example of the end of history for the ever-lagging periphery, which 165changing societies & personalities, 2017 vol. 1, no. 2 strives towards capitalism, democracy, nation-state formation, rational bureaucracy, autonomy of the individual, separation of power and property, etc. when common ideological universals are realised in practice in different regions of the world, institutional invariants of the fusion of liberalism, democracy, nationalism and capitalism inevitably arise within modernity. however, the transfer of the model of a specific national modernity in an unchanged form to any other sociocultural reality is impossible. for example, political norms in the foundation of a united europe differ fundamentally and in many respects deny the original principles of the european nation-based modernity. therefore, it is inevitable that the organisation of a political society will be transformed into the form of sacralisation of the territoriality of nationstates in favour of more universal projects that presuppose the whole world and all mankind as their place of action. it seems that the intermediate stage of the movement from nation-states to the global politics of modernity can be the strengthening of the regulatory role of intercountry associations, for example the european union, various customs and currency unions, free trade zones, common markets, etc. thus the axiological and institutional integration of humankind implies a weakening of the geographical and political centre in global politics. the centre will function not as an economic monopoly or a political hegemon, but rather as a place for the accumulation of resources and the imposition of hierarchies and networks across different areas. the centre will be less capable of expressing itself institutionally, but more at the level of general rules and objectives, i.e. axiologically. v from the perspective of its further development, the political project of modernity simultaneously faces significant obstacles and challenges while at the same time its potential for maintaining its global dominance is undiminished. in the context of the complex processes of modern globalisation, one of the key axiological challenges involves the possibility of completing the already existing capitalist world economy to conform to a world politics. the increasingly intensive interaction and interdependence of humanity at the global level requires the creation of more effective world political mechanisms for the regulation of issues concerning the interests of mankind as a whole. this problematic preserves the utopian dimension of modernity, its openness to the future and capability of further value-institutional improvement and dominance in relation to any alternative projects. presently, increasingly archaic territorial political institutions govern the economically globalised world. the economic integration of the world has far outstripped the political and ethical. the globalisation of the value bases of modernity thematises the ethical foundations of the limited interests and strategies of nation-states. global politics assumes the alignment of the political, economic and legal space of nations, while allowing the maximum cultural diversity: ethnic, religious, linguistic, etc. for the first time in human history, global modernity contains the possibility of creating a global politics in which the political domain loses its external space, i.e. the one that is traditionally populated with potential enemies. 166 victor martianov potentially, any country and any communicative association – even individual people – can become initiators and conveyors of more universal principles of modernity. in the global political discussion about dominant values players will have a greatly strengthened a priori position who are able to present to humanity the most egalitarian, cosmopolitan variants of solutions for general problems, i.e. those problems emanating from the long-term interests of all mankind and not primarily to the benefit of individual elites, classes, nations or regions of the world. such idealistic logic does not always bear direct and tangible dividends to the actors and societies that initiate it; moreover, these actors often stipulate material costs that are only paid off symbolically. as, for example, in the case of the ussr, which helped the world national liberation movements and raised its own periphery to the level of the metropolis. the new task of states that have lost their habitual functional status of key modernisers is not so much the control and distribution of resource flows, but rather the provision of infrastructure to support the necessary conditions for the individual and collective modernisation of society, which is expressed in the concept of the service state. effective connection to global modernity and the world economy assumes the path of organic modernisation. here the driving force of social changes is associated with the creation of institutional opportunities for expanding the available range of the selfrealisation of citizens in the context of the increasing influence of post-material values. any nation can improve its position in the world system not only in economic terms, but also in terms of caring about a common future in which there is a worthy place for everyone (martianov, fishman, 2010). the future comes first of all as an ethical turn towards a new value system. we do not know what the future will be, but we can know how it should be. elements of global political ethics are currently being developed in alternative globalisation, communitarian, cosmopolitan, environmental, anarchist and technocratic discourses, including those directed against the costs of the dominant neoliberal model of modern globalisation. in particular, the work of researchers including s. george, a. buzgalin, b. kagarlitsky, a. callinicos, e. laclau, c. mouffe, f. jameson, s. žižek and others, who advocate alternative mechanisms for the globalisation of modernity, also obtains a significant ethical charge through its adherence to a neo-marxist or post-marxist vision of the globalised world. however, this kind of ethics is typically built on opposition to the secondary costs of globalisation, acquiring the character of extremist endeavours seeking to turn the history of mankind back to some idealised fork at which it left the true path of development, whether that be fundamentalism, terrorism or extremism. in reality, such criticism, exaggerating all the complexity and duality of the development processes of the modern world, only strengthens its objects. references acemoglu, d., robinson, j. 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(2010) rossiya v poiskakh utopiy. ot moral’nogo kollapsa k moral’noy revolyutsii [russia in search of utopias. from a moral collapse to a moral revolution]. moscow: ves’ mir. 168 victor martianov north, d., wallis, j., weingast, b. (2009) violence and social orders a conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. postfordizm: kontseptsii, instituty, praktiki [postfordism: concepts, institutions, practices] (2015). eds. m. iltchenko and v. martianov. moscow: rosspen. wagner, p. (2008) modernity as experience and interpretation. a new sociology of modernity. oxford: polity press. key: cord-0047670-agugpk21 authors: sakwa, richard title: greater russia: is moscow out to subvert the west? date: 2020-07-15 journal: int polit doi: 10.1057/s41311-020-00258-0 sha: 520f17c80234f50230a4ec1a529e432e2343fbc1 doc_id: 47670 cord_uid: agugpk21 russia today is presented as out to subvert the west. the chosen means are meddling in elections and sowing discord in western societies. russia in this imaginary looms over an unsuspecting west, undermining democracy and supporting disruptive forces. no longer couched in terms of the cold war struggle between capitalism and communism, this is a reversion to great power politics of the rawest sort. however, is this analysis correct? is vladimir putin out to undermine the west to achieve his alleged goal of re-establishing some sort of post-soviet ‘greater russia’ imperial union in russia’s neighbourhood, to weaken the atlantic power system and to undermine the liberal international order? the paper challenges the view that russia is trying to reconstitute a soviet-type challenge to the west, and provides an analytical framework to examine the dynamics of russian foreign policy and on that basis assesses russia’s real rather than imaginary aspirations. it has become orthodoxy that russia under an embittered and alienated vladimir putin is out to subvert the west. the chosen means are taken to be meddling in elections and sowing discord in western societies. the various special operations include propelling donald j. trump to the white house and fixing the brexit vote in 2016 (snyder 2018 ). putin's russia in this imaginary looms over an unsuspecting west, undermining democracy and supporting disruptive forces (shekhovtsov 2017; umland 2017) . from this perspective, post-communist russia is up to its old tricks, with the image of the russian bear threatening the honour of a defenceless europe dusted off from the crimean war and the era of the great game in the late nineteenth century. no longer couched in terms of the cold war struggle between capitalism and communism, this is a reversion to great power politics of the imperial sort. it also represents the application of the weapons of the weak, since russia by any definition is but a shadow of the former soviet union, with less than half the population and an economy at most one-tenth the size of that of the usa. is this analysis correct? is putin out to undermine the west to achieve his alleged goal of re-establishing some sort of post-soviet union in russia's neighbourhood and to weaken the atlantic power system so that the liberal international order is eroded from within? in other words, is russia today a revisionist power out to create a greater russia? before attempting an answer we need to define our terms. what does it mean to be a revisionist power today, and how can a strategy designed to 'subvert' be analysed and measured? some fundamental methodological problems render study of the question inherently difficult. how can revisionism and subversion be measured? how can the specific actors involved in such actions be identified and disaggregated? at what point do normal policy differences between states become an existential challenge to an existing order? the answer will take four forms, each of which further defines the question. first, an assessment of the charge of russian subversion and the various approaches that can be used to examine the simple but endlessly complex question: is there a new quality to russia actions that build on soviet era 'active measures' to denigrate and ultimately to destroy an opponent. this requires an examination of the logic of russian motives and policy-making, including examination of the structure of the international system and the dynamics of russian international politics, which will be presented in the second section. third, an assessment of some of the kremlin's subversive behaviour in recent years, examined in the light of the earlier sections. fourth, analysis of the character of russia's challenge assesses whether russia today really is an insurgent and revisionist power. is russia really out to subvert the west? much of the american political establishment believe that this is the case. a comprehensive list of russian sins is presented by biden and carpenter (2018) , including tyranny at home, the violation of the sovereignty of neighbours, meddling in the affairs of countries on the road to nato membership, 'soft subversion' through electoral interference in the usa and france, the manipulation of energy markets and the 'weaponisation' of corruption. in his warning not to overreact to the chinese challenge, zakaria (2020, p. 64) notes that its actions, such as stealing military secrets and cyber-warfare, 'are attempts to preserve what china views as its sovereignty'. however, these actions are 'nothing like moscow's systematic efforts to disrupt and delegitimize western democracy in canada, the united states and europe'. why do russia's actions in his view fall into an entirely different category? one answer is that it is a question of political culture. the study of moscow rules by giles (2019a, p. 23) argues that russia's 'instinctive rejection of cooperative solutions is reinforced by the belief that all great nations achieve security through the creation and assertion of raw power', and this in turn means that russia believes 'that the insecurity of others makes russia itself more secure', predicated 'on the dubious principle that there is only a finite amount of security in the world'. elsewhere (giles 2019b) sums up the policy implications in ten key points, which together do not leave much room for diplomatic manoeuvre or even engagement with such a wily adversary who 'takes a very expansive view of what constitutes russian territory'. treating it as an equal by normalising relations, as during barack obama's reset, 'delivered entirely the wrong messages to moscow' (giles 2019a, p. 25) . there can be no common ground with such an existential foe, and any substantive engagement smacks of appeasement. a second perspective focuses on russophobia, which builds on the political culture notion of some inalienable and ineradicable essence to russian behaviour. the concept of russophobia is often used to discount what may well be legitimate criticism of kremlin policies, but it nevertheless accurately conveys an approach that denigrates not only russia's leaders but the people as a whole (mettan 2017; tsygankov 2009 ). in an interview in may 2017 former director of national intelligence, james clapper argued that russians 'are almost genetically driven to coopt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical russian technique' (koenig 2017) . the work of smith (2019) complements that of foglesong (2007) on longstanding american anxieties about russia. smith argues that recurrent bouts of russophobia are prompted by what he calls the 'russia anxiety', a long-term pattern of thinking and sentiments about russia that alternate between fear, contempt and disregard for the country. the cycle began in the sixteenth century when russia joined the nascent european international society. anxiety that russia threatens western civilisation was accompanied by various versions of 'fake history', as in the publication in nineteenth-century france of russia's 14-point plan for world dominationthe testament of peter the great. this forgery is just one example of what smith calls the 'black legend' of russian history: the idea that aggression, expansionism and authoritarianism are inherent features of russia's national character. smith aims to demonstrate that russia is far from exceptional, and instead its behaviour is predictable and in conformity with traditional patterns of a country defending its national interests, or as zakaria argues with reference to china, its sovereignty. the major exception was the soviet period, but this in many ways ran against russia's national identity and represented an imposition based on chance and contingency. in his view, russia today is doing no more than any other state, and its external actions are no more egregiously malevolent than any other. a third approach looks at soviet legacies and systemic characteristics. from this perspective, russia has undergone an 'unfinished revolution' (mcfaul 2001) , allowing the soviet era anti-western and anti-democratic forces to regroup after the fall of communism. this particularly concerns the so-called siloviki (the security apparatus and its acolytes), as well as the transformed soviet apparatchiks who became the core of putin's model of statist oligarchic capitalism. this 'crony capitalism' spreads its subversion by abusing western legal and financial institutions for their own malign purposes (belton 2020; dawisha 2014) . despite the change of regime and the end of old-style ideological confrontation, the soviet system in certain fundamental respects has reproduced itself. this is why the repertoire of tactics is sometimes described as a continuation of soviet era 'active measures' (aktivnye meropriyatiya) (rid 2020) . these are designed to undermine 'support in the united states and overseas for policies viewed as threatening to moscow, discrediting us intelligence and law enforcement agencies, weakening us alliances and us relations with partners, and increasing soviet power and influence across the globe' (jones 2019, p. 2) . the term is now used indiscriminately to encompass disinformation and cyber activities as elements of a sustained strategy undertaken by the soviet and now the russian security services to undermine an enemy by exploiting divisions and the vulnerabilities of competitive and open democratic societies. the communist international (comintern) was established in march 1919 to spread the revolution globally and prompted the palmer raids in november of that year in the usa as part of the first red scare. during the cold war there were plenty of times when moscow tried to influence us politics (haslam 2012 (kengor 2018) . in 1983 kgb agents were instructed to help defeat reagan in his bid for re-election. the soviet goals outlined above hold to this day in conditions of renewed cold war, and this is why the term has regained currency (abrams 2016) . this is understandable, given the long history of cold war conflict and renewed confrontation. what is striking, however, is that most soviet actions were inept and remarkably ineffective (robinson 2019) . we can also add that today such actions are also intensely counterproductive, arousing the hostility of the authorities against which they are directed and discrediting what may be legitimate policy differences with these countries. political opponents are tarred with the brush of 'collusion' with an external enemy, as was the case during the second red scare in the post-war years overseen by senator joseph mccarthy. this is also the case, as we shall discuss below, in the 'russiagate' collusion allegations, asserting that trump worked with moscow in 2016 to get himself elected (sakwa 2021) . the question then becomes: why does russia do it? is it part of a single and coordinated strategy of subversion using covert means, reflecting an overarching doctrine? this is where the fourth approach, the ideational, comes in. from this perspective, the struggle between communism and capitalism has given way to the conflict between democracies and autocracies, with the latter developing a repertoire of techniques to keep democracy at bay (hall and ambrosio 2017) . each tries to subvert the other using a range of instruments, while advancing soft power agendas (sherr 2013) . since at least 2004 russia has been concerned with preventing what it calls 'colour revolutions', in which civil society is mobilised by western agencies to achieve regime change (horvath 2011 (horvath , 2013 . this was the issue addressed by valerii gerasimov (2013) , the chief of the russian general staff, in his landmark article. the lesson of the arab spring, he argued, was that the rules of war had changed. viable states could quickly descend into armed conflict and become victims of foreign intervention and sink into an abyss of state collapse, civil conflict and humanitarian catastrophe. the article was a response to what was perceived to be new forms of western 'hybrid warfare'. he noted that 'frontal engagements of large formations of forces at the strategic and operational level are gradually becoming a thing of the past. long-distance, contactless actions against the enemy are becoming the main means of achieving combat and operational goals'. he identified eight features of modern hybrid warfare that were applied to subvert states and to gain control of territory without resorting to conventional arms. regime change could be achieved by the use of civil methods such as propaganda, funding and training of protest groups, and information campaigns aimed at discrediting the opponent. he stressed that the 'very rules of war have changed', arguing that non-military means such as the 'use of political, economic and informational, humanitarian, and other non-military measuresapplied in coordination with the protest potential of the population', can exceed 'the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness, and 'that the open use of forces-often under the guise of peace-keeping and crisis regulation-is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict'. gerasimov discounted the element of popular protest against corrupt and authoritarian systems in the middle east, north africa and post-soviet eurasia and instead framed these events as part of the radicalised west's regime change strategies. following the russian actions in crimea and the donbas in 2014, the term 'hybrid warfare' was applied to russia's use of mixed methods (propaganda, disinformation, information warfare and special forces) to achieve what came to be known as a 'nonlinear' military operations (fridman 2018) . what gerasimov had identified as the western strategy against russia was now interpreted as the blueprint for the kremlin's attempts to destabilise its neighbours and western democracies. as for motivation, this is where a fifth approach comes in, focusing on questions of identity and russia's search for status in a competitive international environment. from this perspective, the idealism of mikhail gorbachev's 'new political thinking' in international relations in the late 1980s 'offered a global mission that would enhance soviet international status while preserving a distinctive national identity'. in this way, the soviet union could forge a 'shortcut to greatness' by winning great power status not through economic might and military power but through normative innovation and the transformation of international politics (larson and shevchenko 2003) . this instrumental view of ideational innovation is challenged by english (2000) , who stresses the long-term maturation of an intellectual revolution in soviet thinking, which then carried over into russian debates. as we shall see, there are many layers to russia's foreign policy identity, although there is a clear evolution away from an initial enthusiasm for all things european and alignment with the west towards the stronger articulation of a great power version of russian national interests. these great power aspirations have been interpreted as a type of aspirational constructivism directed towards the identity needs of domestic audiences rather than the expression of an aggressive policy towards the historic west (clunan 2009 ). status issues are important (krickovic and weber 2018) , but they have to be understood as part of a larger ensemble of motivations within the structure of international relations. the final approach focuses on the structural characteristics of international politics, whose specific post-cold war manifestation will be examined below. briefly put, defensive neorealism argues that in an anarchic international environment states typically seek to preserve the status quo to maintain their security by preserving the balance of power (waltz 1979, p. 121) . offensive realists focus on the maintenance of hegemony in the international system and the struggle to prevent usurpation (mearsheimer 2001, p. 21) . revisionism assumes that the balance of power does not adequately guarantee a state's security, hence it seeks to change the balance of power; or that is assumes that the balance of power has changed enough to mount a challenge to the status quo. in russia's case, classical neorealism of either type would accept regional hegemony, with offshore balancing an adequate mechanism to ensure that it did not mount a global challenge. however, the liberal internationalism that predominated after 1989 makes no provision for regional hegemony of any sort, hence russia was unable to exert the sort of influence to which it felt entitled, and hence its revisionist challenge was manifested in attacks on georgia in 2008 and ukraine in 2014. this, at least, is the liberal structural perspective, and even the defensive realist position has guarded against any reassertion of russia's great power ambitions, hence the concern to ensure that ukraine was distanced as far as possible from any putative russian 'sphere of influence' (brzezinski 1994 (brzezinski , 1997 . how are we to adjudicate between these six different presentations of russian interests and concerns? what is the standard against which we can measure the dynamics of russian identity formation and foreign policy? is putin really trying to create a 'greater russia' by not only challenging the established powers but also by waging a covert war to shape electoral outcomes while destroying the foundations of democracy itself? undoubtedly, certain cold war practices of propaganda and covert influence campaigns have been revived, while some (such as deep espionage operations) never stopped, accompanied now by 'black cash' flows (untraceable and illicit payments) to sympathetic movements, cyber-enhanced intelligence operations and outright cyber-warfare. some of this predates the cold war and is part of traditional statecraft, some is part of revived cold war confrontation, while some is new and takes advantage of developing social media and communication technologies. together they reflect the logic of conflict stopping short of kinetic military action. what is the character of the conflict? we argue here that this is a structural feature of post-cold war international politics. two very different and incommensurate models of post-cold war order were advanced after 1989 (sakwa 2017a, pp. 12-19) . the logic of expansion made perfect sense from the perspective of what came to be seen as the 'victors' at the end of the cold war. the long-term adversary had not only renounced the ideology in whose name the struggle against capitalist democracy had been waged, but the country itself disintegrated. this really did look like 'the end of history', with no sustained ideological alternative to capitalist modernity on offer. from the first, the logic of expansion was opposed by russia, the continuer state to the soviet union. from moscow's perspective, the end of the cold war was a mutual victory-the triumph of the new political thinking that had matured in various academic institutes and think tanks (bisley 2004; english 2000) . this is why the logic of expansion was countered by the logic of transformation, the view that the end of the cold war offered a unique opportunity to move beyond ideological confrontation between and within states. the idea of revolutionary socialism and class war would give way to a politics of reconciliation and all-class development. this is more than a 'shortcut to greatness' or a strategy for status advancement (although it is both of these), but a proposal for a structural transformation of the conduct of international politics. this demand lies at the base of normative developments in international law over the last century as well as in various peace and environmental movements today. there are plenty of credible realist arguments to dismiss such transformative approaches as hopelessly idealistic, but repeated financial and pathogenic shocks and the enduring threats of environmental catastrophe and nuclear annihilation provide the continuing impulse for transformative thinking (lieven 2020) . this relates to a key point at the heart of russian post-communist self-identity-the ambition to join not the west as it exists within the accustomed binaries but a transformed west where cold war antagonisms are structurally transcended. after 1989 the stated russian ambition was to join the political west as it existed at the time, defined as the embodiment of the democratic ideal, the rule of law, defensible property rights, and above all the realm of freedom and independent associational life. however, because of the way that the political west evolved during the cold war, when the larger political civilisation, termed after the cold war the liberal international order, melded with the atlantic power system, for a large part (but not all) of the russia elite this became impossible. the power system at the heart of the liberal normative order endows us power with a unique character. the hegemonic aspect provided a range of international public goods, including the framework for economic globalisation. however, this was accompanied by the practices of primacy, which we can credibly describe as dominion, an ascendancy that has spawned a vast literature describing the usa as an empire (indicatively, bacevich 2003; johnson 2002; mann 2005) . russian leaders from gorbachev to putin insisted that the cold war westwhat in russian parlance became known as the 'historic west'-would have to change with the end of the cold war to become a 'greater west'. this was effectively the condition for russia to join the expanded community, but in the end it turned out impossible for both sides to make the necessary adjustments. the greater west would not have to repudiate hegemony-that was too much even for a demandeur state such as russia to ask-but moscow's leaders did seek a change in the terms of dominion through the creation of what it insisted should be a mutually inclusive security order. hegemony was to a degree acceptable as long as it was constrained by the system of international law grounded in the post-1945 international system, represented above all by the united nations. russian neo-revisionism challenges dominance in its various manifestations (empire, primacy, exceptionalism or greatness), but can live with constrained hegemony. in sum, the fundamental post-cold war process in the russian view was to be mutual transformation, whereas the western view envisaged a straightforward process of enlargement. in the context in which the main antagonist had itself repudiated the ideology on which it had based its opposition to the historical west since 1917, and which in 1991 disintegrated as a state, the atlanticist pursuit of expansion and its accompanying logic of dominion was understandable (wohlforth and zubok 2017) . victory in the cold war and the disintegration of the historic enemy (the soviet union) not only inhibited transformative processes in the historic west but in the absence of a counter-ideology or an opposing power system, encouraged the radicalisation of its key features (sakwa 2018a) . the original liberal world order after 1945 developed as one of the major pillars (the soviet union was the other) within a bipolar system and was initially a relatively modest affair, based on the un charter defending the territorial integrity of states (although also committed to anti-colonial national self-determination), multilateral institutions, open markets that was later formulated as the 'four freedoms' of labour, capital, goods and services, accompanied by a prohibition on the use of force except in self-defence. after 1989 the liberal world order, as the only surviving system with genuinely universal aspirations, assumed more ambitious characteristics, including a radical version of globalisation, democracy promotion and regime change. the framing of the 'historic west' against a putative 'greater west' repeats the recurring russian cultural trope of contrasting 'good' and 'bad' europes or wests, 'with which russians can seek to make common cause in domestic power struggles' (hahn 2020 ; see also neumann 2016) . as the historic west radicalised, it also enlarged. on the global scale its normative system, the liberal international order, made universalist claims, while its power system (dominion) in europe brought nato to russia's western borders and drove the european union deep into what had traditionally been russia's economic and cultural sphere. this would be disruptive in the best of circumstances, but when it became part of the expansion of an atlantic power system accompanied by the universalising practices of the liberal international order, it provoked a confrontation over ukraine and the onset of a renewed period of confrontation that some call a new cold war (legvold 2016; mastanduno 2019; monaghan 2015) . in the absence of ideational or institutional modification, let alone innovation, after 1989, there was 'no place for russia' (hill 2018, p. 8 and passim) in this new order. does this mean that russia has become a revisionist power, out to destroy the historic west? russia's ambition has in fact been rather different, but in the end no less challenging: to change the practices of the power system at the core of the historic west. once mutual transformation was no longer an option and the idea of a greater west receded (although it remains a residual feature of russian thinking), russia turned to neo-revisionism, a rather more modest ambition to change practices rather than systems (sakwa 2019) . this was the culmination of an extended thirty-year period of experimentation. contrary to the view of the russian power system as some immutable and unchangeable malign force (lucas 2008 (lucas , 2013 , the first and second models outlined above, foreign policy and more broadly russia's engagement with the historic west since the end of the cold war has evolved through four distinct periods. periodisation is an important heuristic device and in methodological terms repudiates the view that there is some enduring essence to russian foreign policy behaviour, with 'active measures' seamlessly transferred from the soviet union to post-communist russia. it is important to note that the periodisation outlined here is layered. in other words, each phase does not simply give way to the next, but builds on and incorporates the earlier one, while changing the emphasis and introducing new elements. the first period in the early 1990s was characterised by an enthusiastic westernism and embrace of liberal atlanticism (kozyrev 2019) . in conditions of catastrophic social and economic conditions at home and assertions of us hegemony and dominion abroad (although exercised rather reluctantly in bosnia and elsewhere at this time), this gave way to a more assertive neo-soviet era of competitive coexistence, masterminded by the foreign minister from january 1996, yevgeny primakov, who between september 1998 and may 1999 was prime minister. his assertion of multipolarity, alignment with india and china (the beginning of the ric's grouping) and foreign policy activism received a harsh rebuff in the nato bombing of serbia from march 1999. putin came to power in 2000 in the belief that the two earlier strategies were excessive in different directions, and through his policy of 'new realism' tried to find a middle way between acquiescence and assertion. gorbachev-era ideas of 'normality' were revived, and putin insisted that russia would be a 'normal' great power, seeking neither favours from the west nor a privileged position for itself (sakwa 2008) . this strategy of positive engagement was thrown off course by the expansive dynamic of the atlantic power system, including the war in iraq in 2003, nato enlargement and the libyan crisis of 2011. as for russia, the commodities boom of the 2000s fuelled an unprecedented period of economic growth, accompanied by remarkably successful reforms that transformed the russian armed forces (renz 2018) . these fed ideas of russian resurgence and appeared to provide the material base for a more assertive politics of resistance. when putin returned to the kremlin in may 2012 the new realism gave way to the fourth phase of post-communist russian foreign policy, the strategy of neo-revisionism. already in his infamous munich speech in february 2007, putin (2007) objected to the behaviour of the us-led atlantic power system, but in substance the fundamentals of the new realist strategy continued. now, however, neo-revisionism challenged the universal claims of the us-led liberal international order and resisted the advance of the atlantic power system by intensifying alternative integration projects in eurasia and accelerating the long-term 'pivot to asia'. by now moscow was convinced that the normative hegemonic claims of the liberal international order were only the velvet manifestation of the iron fist of american dominion at its core. russia, and its increasingly close chinese partner, stressed the autonomy of international governance institutions, insisting that they were not synonymous with the universal claims of the liberal international order. this, in essence, is the fundamental principle of neo-revisionism: a defence of sovereign internationalism and the autonomy of the international system bequeathed by the yalta and potsdam conferences of 1945. this is accompanied by a rejection of the disciplinary practices of the us-led hegemonic constellation, including democracy promotion, regime change, humanitarian intervention and nation building (what gerasimov identified as western hybrid warfare) (cunliffe 2020) . in effect, this means a rejection of the practices of us-led international order, but not of the system in which it operates. putin defends a model of conservative (or sovereign) internationalism that maps on to a ternary understanding of the international system. on the top floor are the multilateral institutions of global governance, above all the un (in which russia has a privileged position as permanent member (p5) of the security council); on the middle floor states compete and global orders (like the us-led liberal international order) seek to impose their hegemony; while on the ground floor civil society groups and civil associations try to shape the cultural landscape of politics (such as groups trying to push responses to the climate catastrophe and nuclear threats up the global agenda). putin and his foreign minister, sergei lavrov, condemn the liberal order for not living up to its own standards. as lavrov (2019) argued, 'how do you reconcile the imperative of defending human rights with the bombardment of sovereign states, and the deliberate effort to destroy their statehood, which leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people?'. this is the neo-revisionist framework, which exposes the gulf between hegemonic principles and practices of dominion. it is revisionist to the degree that it repudiates the application of us dominion to itself, but is willing to work with that hegemony on major international issues as long as russia's status as an autonomous diplomatic interlocutor is recognised (lo 2015). neo-revisionism is the natural culmination of a policy stance torn by two contradictory positions. the revisionist impulse seeks to reassert russia into an international system in which great power diplomacy after the end of the cold war in 1989 had given way to a hegemonic universalism that by definition repudiated the traditional instruments of great power diplomacy, such as spheres of influence, great power summitry and grand bargains. on the other side, russia remains a conservative status quo power intent on maintaining the post-1945 international system, which grants it the supreme privilege of p5 membership as well as providing a benign framework to advance its model of sovereign internationalism. this is a model of world order favoured by china, india and many other states, wary not so much of the hegemonic implications of the liberal international order but of the power hierarchy associated with the practices of dominion. this is the framework in which russia (and china) can engage in globalisation but repudiate the universalist ambitions of the power system with which it is associated. with the usa under trump withdrawing from multilateral commitments to focus on bolstering its ascendancy in the world of states (the second level), russia (and china) inevitably stood up in defence of multilateralism, in which they have such a major stake. this is far from a revisionist position, and instead neo-revisionism defends the present international system but critiques the historical claim of the liberal international order to be identical with the multilateral order itself (sakwa 2017a) . of course, the us-led liberal order has indelibly marked international society, but this does not entail a proprietary relationship to that society (dunne and reut-smith (2017). russia emerges as the defender of the international system as it is presently constituted, but at the same time advances an alternative (non-hierarchical) idea of how it should operate. on occasion this may entail revisionist acts, such as the annexation of crimea, which from moscow's perspective was a defensive reaction to a western-supported putsch against the legitimate authorities in kiev (treisman 2016 ), but they are not part of a consistent revisionist strategy. both at home and abroad russia is a status quo power. putin railed against the west's perceived revisionism in both aspects, but the main point of resistance is the element of dominion at the heart of the atlantic power system. in both respects there is no evidence that russia seeks to destroy the international system as presently constituted. this structural interpretation, in which incompatible models of international politics contest, is overwhelmingly rejected by the partisans of what can be called post-cold war monism. from this perspective, there is only one viable order, the one generated by the usa and its allies. there can be pluralism within that order, but not between orders. this monist perspective is challenged by some recent international relations literature (acharya 2017; flockhart 2016) and of course by states defending a more pluralist understanding of the international system (for example, english school approaches, buzan 2014). in practical terms the monist imperative, when couched in liberal order terms but rather less so when applied in the language of trumpian 'greatness', renders russia the structural equivalent of the soviet union, or even the dreaded image of tsarist russia. this leads to a fundamental category error. russia is not a 'revolutionary power' in the sense defined by henry kissinger (2013, p 2), a country that can never be reassured of its security and consequently seeks absolute security at the expense of others. napoleonic france or hitlerite germany were determined to overthrow the international systems of their times to create one more suited to their needs. russia today is a conservative power, alarmed by the way that the international system that it had helped create at the end of the second world war became radicalised after the end of the cold war. critics argue that this radicalised version of liberal hegemony was 'bound to fail', since its ambitions were so expansive as to classify as delusional, and which in the end provoked domestic and external resistance (mearsheimer 2018 (mearsheimer , 2019 . russia's neo-revisionism after 2012 sought to defend the autonomy of the multilateralism inaugurated by the victorious powers after 1945 and was ready to embrace the 'hegemonic' goals of the liberal order as presented in the cold war years, but came to fear the revisionism implicit in the 'exceptionalist' ideology of the post-cold war version of the liberal order, especially when it was accompanied by what was perceived as the aggressive expansion of the dominion of the unipolar atlantic power system. in the context of the distinction between the hegemony of the liberal international order and the dominion of the atlantic power system, both russia and china reaffirm their commitment to the normative principles underlying the international system as it developed after the second world war. these include the primacy of state sovereignty, territorial integrity, the significance of international law and the centrality of the united nations (wilson 2019). however, both are challenger powers in two respects: first, in questioning the assertive universalism that was radicalised at the end of the cold war, including various practices of humanitarian intervention and democracy promotion, accompanied by regime change strategies; and second, dissatisfaction with the existing distribution of power in the international system, hence challenge american primacy and hegemonic practices. this combination of commitment to the international system but challenges to the pre-eminence of a particular order in that system is what renders the two states neo-revisionist rather than outright revisionist powers. to label them as such is a category error, with grave and dangerous policy consequences. this error has now become enshrined doctrinally. the us national security strategy (2015) already warned that washington 'will continue to impose significant costs on russia through sanctions' and would 'deter russian aggression'. trump's proclaimed intention of improving relations with russia provoked a storm of hostility in which republican neo-conservatives and democrat liberal internationalists united to stymie moves in that direction. this is why the us national security strategy (2017, p. 25) , at the end of trump's first year in power, warned against the 'revisionist powers of china and russia', ranked alongside the 'rogue powers of iran and north korea' and the 'transnational threat organisations, particularly jihadist groups'. the national defense strategy (2018, p. 2) also identified russia and china as revisionist states, seeking 'to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model-gaining veto authority over other nation's economic, diplomatic and security decisions'. the emergence of challengers undoubtedly came as a shock for a power and normative system that had enjoyed largely unquestioned pre-eminence. responses to that shock range from intensified neo-conservative militarism, democratic internationalist intensification of ideological struggle to delegitimise russia's aspirations, as well as an increasingly vocal 'realist' call for a return to the diplomatic practices of pre-cold war sovereign internationalism. the first two responses make common cause against russia's perceived revisionist challenge and have mobilised a network of think tanks and strategies against russia's instruments of subversion. the far from exhaustive list presented here indicates the scope of moscow's armoury of subversion, as well as the methodological and practical problems in assessing their scale, motivation and effect. the first is support for insurgent populist movements in the west. russia rides the wave of populist and nationalist insurgency, but it does not mean either that russia is the main instigator or beneficiary. the russian leadership has long complained about the 'hermetic' character of the atlantic power system and thus welcomes the breach in the impregnable walls of rectitude created from within by the various national populisms of left and right. in other words, moscow perceives national populist insurgency as a struggle for ideational pluralism within the liberal international order, but above all as allies in the struggle for geostrategic pluralism against the monism of the atlantic power system. russia supports some of these movements, but not to the extent of jeopardising the existing structures of the international system. once again, the tempered challenge of neo-revisionism predominates over the insurrectionary behaviour that would characterise a genuinely revisionist power. the alliance for securing democracy identified at least 60 instances of russia funding political campaigns beyond its borders, although many of the cases are circumstantial (foer 2020) . in his notorious interview with the financial times on the eve of the osaka g20 summit in june 2019, putin asserted that 'the liberal idea' has 'outlived its purpose' as publics turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism, but he immediately brought in the structural context: ' [liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over recent decades' (barber and foy 2019, p. 1) . the kremlin has gone out of its way to identify with right wing (and occasionally left wing) 'populists' who argue for a revision of the eu's relations with russia, including a dismantling of the sanctions regime. thus, in the 2017 french presidential election putin welcomed the head of national rally (formerly the front national) marine le pen to moscow, a move that still attracts widespread condemnation in france. earlier, a russian bank had made a €9.4 million loan to her party. even this needs to be seen in context. putin's favoured candidate in the 2017 french presidential election was not le pen but the more conventional social conservative françois fillon. when the latter's campaign as the nominee of the traditional gaullist party imploded, moscow was left bereft of a mainstream candidate calling for a revision of the post-cold war dominion strategy. as for the funding for le pen, the loan was called in prematurely, and the bank was closed down as part of the central bank of russia's attempt to clean up the financial sector. as for italy, the leader of the lega (formerly lega nord) party, matteo salvini, was one of the strongest advocates of resetting relations with russia as he entered government following the march 2018 elections as part of the coalition with the five star movement. the relationship was no more than a 'marriage of convenience', with moscow only engaged to the extent that it could advance the goal of weakening the eu's sanctions regime (makarychev and terry 2020) . in a subsequent scandal, one of salvini's closest associates and the president of lombardy russia, gianluca savoini, was taped talking in the metropol hotel in moscow about an illicit scheme to funnel funds through oil sales to support the league's electoral campaigns (nardelli 2019 ). on his visit to the vatican in july 2019 putin met with the national populists, or otherwise put, the geopolitical revisionists. this was his third meeting with pope francis, and putin sounded more catholic than the pope: 'sometimes i get the feeling that these liberal circles are beginning to use certain elements and problems of the catholic church as a tool for destroying the church itself' (horowitz 2019) . the substantive issue remains. national populists in the west repudiate much of the social liberalism that has now become mainstream, but most also reject the geopolitical orthodoxy that in their view has provoked the second cold war with russia. on that basis there is clearly common cause between the populist insurgency in europe and the kremlin. for defenders of the liberal order, this commonality turns the populists into a moscow-inspired fifth column. the old division between capitalist democracy and communism after the cold war has given way to a new binary, between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. the fundamental divide shifts on to new ground, which can variously be seen as one between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, which is a variant of the tension between revived nationalist movements opposed to the erosion of state efficacy by neoliberalism within the framework of globalisation. many share concerns about the influx of refugees and fear even greater flows of migrants in the future, which in their view will erode the civic and cultural bonds of western societies. national populists challenge cosmopolitan liberalism (eatwell and goodwin 2018) and thus align with the cultural conservatism that characterises the neo-revisionist period in russian foreign policy (robinson 2017) . in this new political spectrum, russia emerges as an ally of the patriots and the anti-globalisers and is condemned for funding and variously supporting the antiliberal insurgency in the west. whole institutes (such as the political capital institute in hungary headed by péter krekó and the henry jackson society in london) are devoted to exposing these links and the various alleged illicit cash flows and networks. there are certainly plenty of lurid tales and examples of european politicians who have been supported by factions in russia without being transparent about these links. however, the common anti-liberal platform with moscow is only part of the story. the geopolitical factor is no less important, with both left and right populists rejecting elements of us dominion in the atlantic security system, and question the wisdom of the inexorable drive to the east that inevitably alienates russia. here they make common cause with international relations realists as well as pragmatists like george kennan, who in 1998 warned of the deleterious effects on european security of moscow's inevitable response to nato enlargement (friedman 1998) . today these groups are in the vanguard in calling for an end to the sanctions regime, which in their view misses the point-that russia's actions in ukraine and elsewhere after 2014 was a response to the provocative actions of the atlantic power system in the first place. in other words, anti-liberalism is only one dimension of the putative alliance between national populism in europe and moscow. geopolitical revisionism is perhaps the most important one, and thus national populist movements incur the wrath of the national security establishments. in the uk this led to the creation of the integrity initiative and its various european and american affiliates, sponsored by the shadowy so-called institute of statecraft, funded by the british state. there is a third dimension-in addition to geopolitical revisionism and anti-cosmopolitanism-in the putative alignment of national populism with moscow, and that is the question of pluralism. post-cold war liberalism entered a paradoxical turn that in the end forswore the fundamental principles on which it is based-tolerance and pluralism (horsfield 2017) . in a situation where the liberal idea faced no serious domestic or geopolitical opposition, it became radicalised and thus eroded its own values. the us-led liberal international order, as suggested above, posed as synonymous with order itself. there could be no legitimate outside to its own expansive ambitions. the counterpart to universalism is monism, which eroded the coherence of liberalism in domestic and foreign policy (sakwa 2017b (sakwa , 2018b . this helps explain why relations with the eu deteriorated so drastically after 2004. the influx of east european countries accentuated monism by embracing the security guarantees offered by american dominion. extreme partisans of this view have little time for the hegemonic normative agenda and view the eu as just part of the atlantic alliance system, and not necessarily the most important one. they radically repudiate gorbachevian ideas about a common european home or a greater europe from lisbon to vladivostok and condemn those who suggest rapprochement with moscow as 'trojan horses' (orenstein and keleman 2017) , the name of a series of atlantic council reports exposing russian contacts in the west. for them, security guarantees from washington are the priority. thus, pan-continental ideas gave way to an intensified atlanticism, and dominion prevailed over hegemony. one manifestation of this was the polish-inspired eastern partnership, which in the end became an instrument for the expansion of the eu's geopolitical influence in its neighbourhood, provoking the ukraine crisis in 2014 (mearsheimer 2014) . the european neighbourhood policy thereafter became more differentiated and thus accepted the pluralism that it had earlier been in danger of repudiating. in short, geopolitical revisionist forces are at play in europe and the usa, and russian neo-revisionism makes common cause with them to the degree that they offer more pluralist perspectives on international politics and challenge the monist dominion of the atlantic power system, but the degree to which moscow supports let alone sponsors this challenge to the post-cold war order is questionable. this links to a second form of russian subversion, namely collusion with anti-establishment figures. the most spectacular case of this is the charge that moscow colluded with trump to steal the 2016 presidential election. after nearly two years of work, in march 2019 the robert mueller special counsel report into russiagate boldly asserted that 'the russian government interfered in the 2016 election in sweeping and systematic fashion' (mueller 2019, vol. 1, p. 1) . however, it then rather lamely conceded that 'the investigation did not establish that members of the trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the russian government in its election interference activities' (mueller 2019, vol. 1, pp. 5 and 173) . once again reinforcing the geopolitical concerns underlying charges of russian subversion, the instigators of russiagate became the heart of the 'resistance' to the president. alongside credible concerns about his impact on american democratic institutions, they also opposed the rapprochement with russia that trump had proclaimed as one of his campaign goals. in his major foreign policy speech delivered at the mayflower hotel in washington on 27 april 2016, trump argued that 'i believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with russia-from a position of strength-is possible. … common sense says this cycle of hostility must end. some say the russians won't be reasonable. i intend to find out'. trump promised that america would get 'out of the nation-building business and instead [focus] on creating stability in the world' (transcript 2016). this represented a radical rethinking of foreign policy priorities, and although some of the themes had sounded before, together they challenged the foundations of the post-cold war international order. they also suited russia, since the expansive atlantic system had increasingly become a matter of concern in the kremlin. this geopolitical coincidence of interests intersected with domestic us political conflicts to create russiagate, which stymied putative moves towards a new détente. the third subversive strategy imputed to russia is cyber-warfare in various forms. there are plenty of cases of russian hacking, including the attack on the german parliament in 2015, which the german chancellor angela merkel condemned as 'outrageous', noting that it impeded her attempts 'to have a better relationship with russia' (bennhold 2020) . she had been equally outraged when she discovered that her office had been bugged by the nsa. in france, 2 days before the secondround presidential vote on 7 may 2017 20,000 campaign emails from the emmanuel macron campaign were uploaded to pastebin, a file-sharing site, and then posted on 4chan, an anonymous message board. the macron team denounced russia for a 'high level attack', but even the atlantic council reported that the relevant french security agency 'declared that no conclusive evidence pointed to russian groups', and 'that the simplicity of the attacks pointed toward an actor with lower capabilities' (galante and ee 2018, p. 12) . the regulation of hostile cyber activity is crucial, especially when accurate attribution is so difficult and 'false flag' attacks so easy. this applies to the key russiagate charge that russian military intelligence (the gru) 'hacked' into the server of the democratic national committee (dnc) and the democratic campaign congressional committee (dccc) and released embarrassing materials to wikileaks, the web-based investigative site founded by julian assange in 2006. the publication of the emails was allegedly coordinated in some way with the trump team. the material revealed that the dnc opposed the campaign of the independent left-leaning senator from vermont, bernie sanders, to ensure clinton's nomination. the hackers also gained access to the emails of clinton's campaign director, john podesta, following a successful spearphishing email sent on 19 march 2016. the 50,000 podesta emails exposed clinton's ties with wall street bankers, high speaking fees and apparent hypocrisy in condemning privilege while enjoying its benefits. the russian hackers undoubtedly sought to mine political intelligence, but whether they intended specifically to help trump is more questionable. the mueller report detailed the specific gru cyber-warfare units which hacked the clinton campaign and the dnc and then released the emails through russian-sponsored cut-outs, guccifer 2.0 and dcleaks, as well as wikileaks. these were 'designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 us presidential election and undermine the clinton campaign' (mueller 2019, vol. 1, p. 36) . strikingly, the fbi or mueller never conducted forensic examinations of their own and instead relied on crowdstrike, a private contractor hired by the democrats to examine their servers. the material was then published, according to the report, through dcleaks and guccifer 2.0, 'fictitious online personas' created by the gru, and later through wikileaks. mueller argues that guccifer 2.0 was the source of the emails and that he was a persona managed by russian operators (mueller 2019, vol. 1, p. 47 ). mueller alleges that assange worked for or conspired with russian agencies, but assange states unequivocally that the russian government was not the source of the emails, and (surprisingly), he was never questioned by mueller. the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity (vips) group argues that the dnc emails were physically downloaded and then transferred (by unknown persons) to wikileaks rather than being extruded via an electronic download (binney and mcgovern 2017) . in congressional testimony in december 2017 crowdstrike president shawn henry (2017 admitted that he could not confirm that material had actually been exfiltrated from the dnc servers. the fourth major subversive strategy is disinformation as well as media manipulation. the internet research agency (ira) based in st petersburg deployed sock puppet accounts (trolls) and their automated versions (bots) to influence public debate by sharing accounts and voicing divisive opinions. these allegedly shaped voter preferences and depressed turnout among some key constituencies, above all people of colour, in the 2016 us election. the us intelligence community assessment (2017, p. 1) on 6 january 2017 accused russia of trying to undermine american democracy and charged with 'high confidence' that putin personally ordered 'an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the us presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the us democratic process, denigrate secretary clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency'. the ica was issued in the name of 17 intelligence agencies, although later it became clear that it had been prepared by a 'hand-picked' group selected by office of the dni head, james clapper (full transcript 2017). the senate select committee on intelligence (2020, vol. 4, p. 6) in april 2020 issued its fourth report in its russia investigation arguing that 'the ica presents a coherent and well-constructed basis for the case of unprecedented russian interference in the 2016 us presidential election', a view that is at odds with most commentary on what is usually considered a slipshod and poorly sourced document (for a summary of critiques, see mccarthy 2019, 2020; gessen 2017). the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 prompted a new wave of criticism of russia's disinformation efforts. the strategic communications and analysis division of the european external action service, colloquially known as euvsdisinfo, identified a 'trilateral convergence of disinformation narratives' being promoted by china, iran and russia (jozwiak 2020) . the work of euvsdisinfo work was examined by the reframing russia group at the university of manchester (hutchings and tolz 2020) . they examined the specific stories that had been identified as disinformation, and took a broader look at reportage of the pandemic on russian television, in particular on channel 1. they found that 'there was little sign here of the coordinated pro-kremlin "conspiracy theory propaganda" flagged by euvsdisinfo'. they went further to note that its misrepresentation of russian covid-19 coverage was 'troubling' in two respects. first, through 'omission', with sentences taken out of context and 'rephrased in the form of summaries and headlines which make them sound particularly outrageous'. the second way is through 'blatant distortion'. for example, euvsdisinfo claimed that sputnik latvia stated that 'covid-19 had been designed specifically to kill elderly people', whereas in fact the article had ridiculed such conspiracy theories and highlighted 'their idiocy'. reframing russia questioned euvs-disinfo's methodology, assuming that 'random websites without any traceable links to russian state structures' were analogous to state-funded media agencies, and that all were part of a coordinated kremlin-run campaign. it even included 'conspirological, far-right websites which are actually critical of putin'. they conclude that 'euvsdisinfo's headlines and summaries border on disinformation'. examination of the source material 'cited by euvsdisinfo demonstrates that the russian state is, in fact, not targeting western countries with an organised campaign around the current public health crisis'. they ask how a situation was created in which 'an eufunded body set up to fight disinformation ends up producing it'. reframing russia advances two hypotheses to explain how things could be got so wrong. the first is 'a profound misunderstanding of how the media in neo-authoritarian systems such as russia's work', with not everything managed by the kremlin. second, 'the outsourcing of services by state institutions to third parties without a proper assessment of their qualifications to do the required work', in the case of euvsdisinfo, research is outsourced to some 400 volunteers, who are 'operating in a post-soviet space saturated … by anti-russian attitudes'. it is in this context that a burgeoning literature examines possible responses. an article in foreign policy in july 2019 argued that 'moscow now acts regularly against us interests with impunity'. the question, in the view of the author, was how to rebuild deterrence-'how to get putin to start fearing the united states again'. the problem was defined in broad terms: 'how to convince putin that he can't afford to keep trying to disrupt the global order and undermine the united states, the west, and democracy itself'. the charge list was a long one: over the last decade, putin has provoked washington again and again: by invading georgia, annexing crimea, attacking ukraine, assassinating opponents at home and abroad, and interfering in elections throughout the west. in each case the underwhelming us response helped convince putin that he could get away with more such behaviour. to 'get putin to start respecting the united states again' such measures as toughening sanctions, strengthening military alliances, and conducting more assertive diplomacy were recommended (geltser 2019). simpson and fritsch (2019) , former wall street journal writers who founded fusion gps, the agency that in 2016 hired christopher steele to prepare the infamous dossier on trump's links with russia, insisted that britain needed its own mueller report to investigate russia's role in the brexit vote. they argued that such an enquiry was 'essential to halt russia's attack on britain's democracy' (simpson and fritsch 2019) . the kremlin watch program (2019) of the prague-based european values center for security policy suggested 20 measures to counter 'hostile russian interference'. a pentagon assessment in june 2019 argued that the usa was ill-equipped to counter 'the increasingly brazen political warfare russia is waging to undermine democracies' (bender 2019) . a 150-page study prepared for the pentagon's joint chiefs of staff argued that the usa was still underestimating the scope of russia's aggression, including the use of propaganda and disinformation to sway public opinion in europe and across the globe. the study also warned against the growing alignment of russia and china, which were opposed to america's system of international alliances and shared a proclivity for 'authoritarian stability'. the authors argued that domestic disarray impeded the usa's ability to respond (department of defense 2019). natalia arno, the head of the free russia foundation, agreed with the report's finding and argued that 'russia is attacking western institutions in ways more shrewd and strategically discreet than many realize' (bender 2019) . the pentagon report recommended that the state department should take the lead in devising more aggressive 'influence operations', including sowing division between russia and china. the study analysed what it called 'gray zone' activities, the attempt by putin's regime to undermine democratic nations, in particular those on russia's periphery, through 'hybrid' measures, falling short of direct military action. however, although warning of moscow's alignment with beijing, the report recommended cooperation with russia in key areas such as strategic nuclear weapons. one of the authors, john arquilla of the naval postgraduate school, argued that ronald reagan's offer in the 1980s to share research on ballistic missile defence (bmd) should be revisited. the report suggested that while elites and the people broadly supported putin's foreign policy and the striving for great power status, this was liable to weaken when faced by socio-economic problems. inevitably, forces seeking to break the liberal hegemony at home will make common cause with an external power that is also interested in breaking that expansive hegemony. russia looks for friends wherever it can find them, and seeks a way out of the impasse of the post-cold war security order. however, it is important to stress the limits to that alignment. if russia were a genuinely revisionist power, then it would make sense to ally with any force destructive of the old order; but as argued above, russia is a neo-revisionist power-concerned with changing the monist practices of post-cold war liberalism, but not with changing the international system in its entirety. this means that russia is quite happy to work within existing structures as long as monism can be kept in check. the struggle against 'fake news' and 'russian disinformation' threatens the pluralism at the heart of traditional liberalism. that is why the investigation into the alleged collusion between the trump camp and russia in the 2016 presidential election was more damaging than the putative original offence. when policy differences and divergences in value preferences are delegitimated and couched in binary cold war terms, then the atlantic power system is in danger of becoming dangerously hermetic. immunity to new ideas, even if they come from a traditional adversary, weakens resistance to domestic degradation. we are now in a position to assess whether putin really is out to subvert the west, as suggested by the us intelligence community, much recent commentary and numerous strategic and doctrinal statements. the 'black legend' charge underlies the russiagate allegations of russian interference in the 2016 us and other elections. such accusations are based on the view that a fundamental gulf has opened between the worldviews of the russian leadership and the western community. there are some grounds to argue that this is the case, although this needs to be placed into the broader framework of the evolution of russian foreign policy since the end of the communist era and into the theoretical context of how russia sees the international system, as described earlier. above all, as the historic west moved into an era of expansive 'hegemonism', russia (and china) were inevitably categorised as hostile nations. they had the motive and heft to fight back. lavrov (2019) condemned the way that the 'rules-based order' substituted for international law, while the expanded institutions of dominion encircled both countries. challengers to the radicalised liberal world order become subversive by definition. russia is a challenger power but it is not insurrectionary. in other words, it is far from the soviet position of seeking to advance the ideology of revolutionary socialism, of which 'active measures' were one of the most specific manifestations. further, russia is not a revisionist power out to destroy the foundations of the international system as it has taken shape since 1945, but it is neo-revisionist, challenging the practices of the us-led atlantic order within that system. as a conservative status quo russia finds itself challenged by the radicalisation of the historic west that it had hoped to transform at the end of the cold war. concurrently, russia's identity as a great power means that it resists the dominion element. it could live with the more modest liberal hegemony of the cold war years (and in fact, one of the layers of russia's foreign policy identity still wants to join it), but the combination of radicalised hegemonic universalism and the expansive logic of the power system rendered dominion unacceptable. russia condemns the atlantic system for its revolutionary radicalism, manifested in what is perceives to be western revisionism. russia thus finds itself divided from the historic west on a range of policy issues, but not ultimately by commitment to the post-1945 international system. this is why moscow welcomed trump's post-atlanticist declarations, since he offered an alternative to the neo-conservative militarism and democratic interventionism of the post-cold war era. shackled by russiagate, trump was not able to deliver much and in fact the sanctions regime and other forms of neo-containment were intensified. in this context, six observations can help us examine the problem of greater russia and subversion. first, it is misleading to see direct continuity between the ussr and russia. russia no longer embodies an alternative ideology and is in fact a status quo power in both ideational and territorial terms. russia is also comparatively far less powerful. if at its peak in the early 1970s soviet gdp reached 58 per cent that of the usa, today russia's at most is ten per cent of america's. russia's defence spending in 2019 was the fourth largest in the world, but at $65 billion this is less than a tenth of the usa at $732 billion (38 per cent of total global military spending) and less than a quarter of china's $261 billion (sipri 2020). cold war patterns have been restored, but the dynamics of this confrontation are very different even though some of the procedural rituals of mutual excoriation have returned (monaghan 2015) . however, russia does claim to represent an alternative to the historical west in three ways: as the defender of conservative sovereign internationalism, where states interact on the basis of interests, although norms are far from repudiated; as a socially conservative civilisation state with societal dynamics of its own (coker 2019; tsygankov 2016) ; and as a european power with a stake in creating some pan-continental framework, while at the same time advocating the establishment of some sort of greater eurasian unity. all three open up lines of fracture that russia seeks to exploit as a challenger but not as an insurrectionary power. in particular, at the civilisational level the identification of the west with the atlantic system is challenged. this is a process that is advancing in any case within the atlantic system, with the eu global strategy (2016) talking of 'strategic autonomy'. the election of trump later that year prompted merkel (2018) , to argue that europe could no longer rely on the usa to protect it. the french president emmanuel macron (2019) argued that the corollary of the growing atlantic divide was rapprochement with russia. critics argue that russia exploits this division and seeks to widen it, and in structural terms they are right. any breach in the monist wall will be welcomed by any leader in moscow. it is along this line that charges of russian subversion lie. second, unlike the former soviet union where policy was coordinated by the central committee and politburo, today russia is far from monolithic. the layered phases mean that elements of at least four types of russian engagement with the west coexist and operate at the same time, although with different intensity. as noted, these range from atlanticist engagement, competitive coexistence, new realism to neo-revisionism. commentary on contemporary russia assumes that it behaves like a unitary actor, with putin serving as the unique demi-urge with nothing better to do than ceaselessly monitor and manipulate global malign activities. this is indeed a manifestation of western 'narcissism', and as paul robinson (2020) asks 'where does all this nonsense about putin wanting to destroy democracy come from? it certainly doesn't come from anything he's ever said'. russia is a vast and complex country with a vigorous public sphere with plenty of relatively autonomous interests and actors. institutionalised political pluralism is constrained, but not all roads lead to the kremlin (sakwa 2020) . for example, the national populist vladimir zhirinovsky, the head of the liberal democratic party of russia, has hosted six conferences of far-right politicians since 1992, many attracted by the anti-western language deployed by much of the russian elite. they provide an alternative narrative that often coincides with the kremlin's positions, but this does mean that there is an unbreakable alliance between the two (moldovanov 2019). as the reframing russia team argue, not every outlandish comment in russia's public sphere can be attributed to the kremlin's propaganda and disinformation department. equally, we may add, not every oligarch is 'putin's crony', bent on advancing the kremlin's malign agenda. this attribution and alignment fallacy is why, among other reasons, sanctions against alleged regime-associated individuals will not achieve the desired effect of changing russian policy, since they are based on a flawed understanding of how russia works, as well as the category error noted above about the structural sources of russian foreign policy. third, russian behaviour is located in the matrix of the changing dynamics of the atlantic power system, the liberal international order and global power shifts (karaganov (ed.) 2020). russia is certainly alienated from a particular system that claims to be universal, as well as concerned about the advance of a power system to its borders. the liberal international order may well have been 'doomed to fail' because the key policies on which it is based are deeply flawed (mearsheimer 2019) . spreading liberal democracy around the globe was benign in intent but disastrous in consequence (walt 2019) . the illusions generated by exaggerated claims of exceptionalism meant that the us 'squandered' cold war victory (bacevich 2020) . russia's reaction is just one to an order whose response to the end of the cold war was to exaggerate the dominion factor and thus undermined its normative hegemony. fourth, russia has returned as a power critical not only of the atlantic hegemony but also of the values on which it is based. at the st petersburg international economic forum (spief) in june 2019 putin talked of the failure of the 'euro-atlantic' economic model and argued that 'the existing model of economic relations is still in crisis and this crisis is of a comprehensive nature' (putin 2019b) . here and on other occasions he condemned the atlantic powers' use of sanctions as a form of economic warfare. on the eve of spief on 6 june, putin and china's leader, xi jinping, announced the upgrade of their relationship to a 'comprehensive partnership of coordination for a new era', accompanied by a joint statement on global strategic stability (xinhua 2019) . there is a tension between the expansive liberal hegemony and countries and social movements who question the identification of liberalism with order itself. liberalism ultimately generates antinomies, which are not mere correctible aberrations but systemic flaws of the liberal paradigm itself. these above all concern the question of taming the power of capital and dealing with inequality and citizen marginalisation. moscow does not identify itself with these radical critiques, and its criticisms ultimately have a superficial and reversible character. russia does not stand outside the contradictions of contemporary liberalism, having entered its own liberal era at the end of the cold war in 1989. that layer in its identity is far from nugatory. russia's experience of liberalism is distinctive, characterising the 1990s as a time of liberal excess, yet the putin system is permeated with neoliberal ideas and even liberal aspirations. his critics in russia from the left and right condemn the antinomies of the system, whereas putin simply points out the power and cultural contradictions of post-cold war liberalism. fifth, the struggle for geopolitical pluralism after the neo-revisionist turn in 2012 is accompanied by a programme of cultural conservatism, opening the door to alignment with europe's national populists. in condemning what he took to be the rampant social liberalism, accompanied by merkel's 'welcome culture' in 2015 visà-vis the influx of refugees, putin (2019a) sought to bolster support among social conservatives in europe. as political and social liberals united against putinite russia, it appeared that the impasse could only be broken by bolstering conservative (if not outright reactionary) movements in europe. a european change of heart would allow a rapprochement without russia having to change its domestic or foreign policies: 'it would be 1989 in reverse. this time it would not be russia but europe to go through a traumatic conversion to foreign ideas' (maçães 2019) . russia would be rescued from isolation and policy-makers could once again turn to the creation of a 'greater europe', reducing russia's dependence on china and strengthening its position vis-à-vis the usa. this is the foundational argument about russia being out to subvert the west, and there is some truth in it-but not in the linear way it is usually interpreted. the alignment is situational and the geopolitics takes precedence over ideological alignment. sixth, as the russiagate affair demonstrates, russia acts as the scapegoat for problems generated by domestic contradictions. in that case, russian 'meddling' helped explain how the most improbable of candidates was able to win against an experienced politician, hillary clinton, with a long record of public service, to pull off 'the greatest political upset in american history' (green 2017, p. 236) . this impeded the democratic party from coming to terms with its own shortcomings, and the country from addressing its ills. this perhaps is the greatest subversive effect achieved by russia. as far as we know, this was not achieved deliberately, although there is the view that russia fed information 'to have the west believe what the kremlin wants the west to believe' (mccarthy 2019, p. 166). even more cunningly, perhaps they were feeding misinformation to steele to provoke a counter-intelligence investigation that would incapacitate the trump presidency and set the democrats off on a wild goose chase that prevented them from reforming and reconnecting with the real concerns of the american people. if the latter is the case, then the operation was a brilliant success. the struggle against presumed russian 'active measures' does more damage to western political institutions and the legitimacy of western normative hegemony than the putative subversive activity itself. the security services and spy agencies of course continue to battle it out behind the scenes, but mccarthyism is as destructive today as it was in the 1950s. russia has returned as an international conservative power, but it is not a revisionist one, and even less is it out to subvert the west. russia certainly looks for allies where it can find them, especially if they advocate the lifting of sanctions. when macron (2019) argued that it was time to bring russia out of the cold, arguing that 'we cannot rebuild europe without rebuilding a connection with russia', his comments were welcomed in moscow, although tempered by a justifiable scepticism. the putin elite had earlier welcomed trump's election, but in practice relations deteriorated further. the foreign policy establishment is deeply sceptical that the eu will be able to act with 'strategic autonomy'. above all, russo-western relations have entered into a statecraft 'security dilemma': currently, we are again faced with a situation in which mutual intentions are assessed by washington and moscow as subversive, while each side considers the statecraft employed by the other side as effective enough to achieve its malign goals. at the same time, each side is more sceptical about its own statecraft and appears (or pretends) to be scrambling to catch up (troitskiy 2019 ). in the nineteenth century, russia became the 'gendarme' of europe, and while putin repudiates the country assuming such a role again, russia has undoubtedly returned as an international conservative power. maintenance of a specifically historically determined definition of the status quo is the essence of its neo-revisionism: a defence of traditional ideas of state sovereignty and of an internationalism structured by commitment to the structures of the international system as it took shape after 1945. russia resents its perceived exclusion from the institutions of atlantic dominion (above all nato); but is not out to destroy the international system in which this competition is waged. thus, anton shekhovtsov (2017) is mistaken to argue that russia's links to right-wing national populist movements are rooted in philosophical anti-westernism and an instinct to subvert the liberal democratic consensus in the west. in fact, the alignment is situational and contingent on the impasse in russo-western relations and thus is susceptible to modification if the situation changes. moscow's readiness to embrace trump in 2016 when he repeatedly argued that it made sense to 'get on' with russia indicates that western overtures for improved relations would find the kremlin ready to reciprocate. in 2017 the kremlin sent washington various ideas on how to move out of the impasse in us-russian relations, but given the 'russiagate' allegations, the white house was in no position to respond. the same applies when in 2019 russia was invited to resume full voting rights in the parliamentary assembly of the council of europe (pace), which the kremlin embraced even though powerful domestic neo-traditionalist and eurasianist voices counselled against. russia is not out to subvert the west but seeks to change it. for the defenders of monist enlargement, this is just as bad. resistance at home and abroad to the post-cold war western order has exposed unexpected fragilities and insecurities, hence the turn to the language of 'resilience' (for example, eu global strategy 2016). given its strategy of resistance, russia in turn becomes the object against which resilience is tested, becoming one of federica mogherini's 'five principles' (2016) , creating yet another barrier to normal diplomatic relations. in fact, the structural model outlined in this paper suggests that russia does not seek to create a greater russia through subversion let alone physical enlargement, although all leaders since the end of the cold have tried to make the country a great power. this raises the fundamental and still unresolved question: is russia still interested in joining a transformed west? or has it realised that the only way to retain great power status and sovereign decision-making is to remain outside the west? joining the transformed west meant the attempt to create a 'greater europe', what gorbachev had earlier termed the common european home. for defenders of the existing west, this is perceived as threatening its existing values, norms and freedoms, and perhaps more importantly, also the existing hierarchy of international power; but for russia, it is a way out of the perceived geopolitical impasse and offers a common developmental strategy. the west is faced by a choice 'between containment and engagement on mutually agreed terms' (trenin 2016, p. 110) . incompatible understanding of the political character of the historical epoch provokes an intense barrage of propaganda from all sides, with mutual allegations of political subversion and interference. the interaction of hegemony and dominion on the one side and multiple layers of identity on the other provides fertile ground for incomprehension and the attribution of sinister motives, provoking the statecraft 'security dilemma' identified above. russia maintains a neo-revisionist critique, but this does not mean repudiating improved relations with a post-dominion west. the country increasingly pivoted to the east and strengthened its alignment with china, but this does not mean that russia seeks an irrevocable break with the west (monaghan 2019). this is why it seeks improved relations with the eu and the usa if a satisfactory formula for restored contact can be found. 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anti-russian lobby and american foreign policy greater russia: is moscow out to subvert the west? crafting the state-civilization post-soviet neo-eurasianism, the putin system, and the contemporary european extreme right the hell of good intentions: america's foreign policy elite and the decline of us primacy theory of international politics are russia and china revisionist states an abiding antagonism: realism, idealism, and the mirage of western-russian partnership after the cold war china, russia agree to upgrade relations for new era the new china scare: why america shouldn't panic about its latest challenger. foreign affairs conflict of interest the author declares that there is no conflict of interest. microsoft word 963-article text-4425-1-15-20220612 rev available online at: http://journals.researchsynergypress.com/index.php/ijmesh international journal of management, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities (ijmesh) issn 2580-0981 (online) volume 5 number 1 (2022): 133-144 corresponding author azkiya.nisa01@ui.ac.id; m.regina@ui.ac.id; euis.pd75@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.31098/ijmesh.v5i1.963 research synergy foundation urban spetacle of motivational quotes and skyscraper photo in instagram stories azkiya nisa1, maria regina widhiasti2, euis puspitadewi3 1 department of literature, faculty of humanities, universitas indonesia 2 department of literature, faculty of humanities, universitas indonesia 3 department of architecture, faculty of engineering, universitas persada indonesia yai, indonesia abstract rapid technology advancements, particularly social media instagram, have brought people’s daily lives and urban environments into the domain of visual culture. instagram’s young users were sharing motivational quotes adopted in activities and work using a skyscraper as a background. the trend of encouraging quotes and skyscraper photographs exemplified the community’s orientation, which referred to a lifestyle or a typical phenomenon of indonesian urban culture. this article intended to investigate the image of society by using instagram to post encouraging phrases and patterns of space productionconsumption using images of buildings taken by young people. purposive sampling was used to track the snapgram of young employees who are also fresh graduates. to enrich the research outcomes, the data was processed utilizing the social semiotic methodology and a qualitative approach. guy debord’s spectacle of society (1967) theory and the postmodernist perspective are also discussed. according to the findings of the paper, there are attempts to achieve a higher lifestyle as a representation of urban society through the uploading of images of work and buildings. on the one hand, an idealized and artistically portrayal of communal life and urban space existed, while on the other side a city with a dense population is ignored. this study is limited to the social media platform instagram and the jakarta metropolitan area in indonesia. there has never been a conversation about the convergence of urban settings with social media as a spectacle before. keywords: postmodernism, skyscraper, motivational quotes, spectacle, and urbanism this is an open access article under the cc-by-nc license. introduction “beloved those who sit down. beloved the stranger and his wife, the neighbor with sleeves, neck and eyes. beloved be the one who has bedbugs. the one who wears a torn shoe in rain. the one who keeps vigil over the corpse of bread with two matches. the one who catches a finger in a door. the one who doesn’t have birthdays. the one who lost his shadow in a fire. beloved be the one who is hungry or thirsty, but has no hunger with which to satisfy his thirst, no thirst with which to satisfy all his hungers. beloved be the one who works daily, nightly, hourly, the one who sweats from pain or shame, that one who goes, ordered by his hands, to the movies, the one international journal of management, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities (ijmesh), vol. 5 (1), 133-144 urban spetacle of motivational quotes and skyscraper photo in instagram stories azkiya nisa, maria regina widhiasti, euis puspitadewi 134 who pays with what he lacks, the one who sleeps on his back, the one who no longer recalls his childhood.” the poem “stumble between two stars” (1937) by césar abraham vallejo mendoza the poem's quote serves as an introduction to the case study that the author will examine in this paper about the current rhythm of modern society, which includes increased production, job hunting, and money hunting, among other things. a poem criticizing modern life, specifically a lifestyle that must be a la mode or contemporary in order to meet the demands of the times. the urban situation is defined by active participation in life and the performance of social functions. community orientation is then centered on progress toward development, employment competitiveness, and economic expansion, which then relates to a lifestyle or a typical urban phenomena known as hustle culture. hustle culture, according to balkeran (2020), was a phenomena that existed prior to the industrial revolution's work safety laws to perpetuate worker exploitation and terrible working conditions. hazardous working conditions, low pay, and lengthy work hours are among them. people believe that achieving professional goals through hard effort is the most significant component of life. workers put themselves in a psychological situation to constantly trying to achieve more and to live an always-on lifestyle. users of social media, particularly instagram, adapt this mentality and work ethic to develop their self-image. many causes contribute to hustle culture, one of which is the blurring of work-life boundaries due to digital distractions. advances in technology have since blurred the border between work and personal life, particularly with the arrival of the internet, when emails can be checked from anywhere, documents can be transmitted at any time, and calls must be answered at odd hours, sometimes even late at night. the difference nowadays is that hustle culture is recognized as a lifestyle by the younger generation, and it is all about self-branding, which is inextricably linked to social media as a vehicle for various types of content distribution, particularly instagram. caldeira et al. (2018) claim that instagram can be used to represent oneself through the visibility of images in one's account. however, the presence of instagram users on social media has the potential to be co-opted and legitimized by authorities, particularly capital owners and other actors who benefit from the hustle culture phenomenon. the major goal of this study is to explore the building of public image through production and consumption patterns in inspiring accounts, which are subsequently adopted by other instagram users, as well as the trend of youngsters sharing skyscraper photographs to instagram. many accounts even discuss job productivity advice and incorporate or change famous lines to make them 'motivating' and 'inspirational,' such as "good things happen to those who hustle." and "rise and grind," as well as the hashtag #thanksgoditsmonday. these statements are then altered by instagram users, who utilize them to show off their activities or job via instagram uploads. however, there is a trend in his work uploads that involves or uses a skyscraper as a backdrop or vista. the trend of uploading skyscraper backgrounds is enlivened by fresh graduates who have just graduated and got jobs. they distributed overtime work activities accompanied by views from the top floor of the building to show production patterns. in addition, the presence of one of jakarta's international journal of management, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities (ijmesh), vol. 5 (1), 133-144 urban spetacle of motivational quotes and skyscraper photo in instagram stories azkiya nisa, maria regina widhiasti, euis puspitadewi 135 newest malls, ashta, in the sudirman scbd district, has boosted the craze for tower photography. space, or space in architecture, is one of the cultural goods produced as a result of social management, according to alma (1980). furthermore, toscano (2017) states in his research that the public space, such as instagram, is used to recreate numerous everyday life narratives. they investigate cities and public locations, share their findings, and create new pictures and experiences. as a result, social media may capture the dynamism of metropolitan places and reshape them. thus, the major objective of this article is to explore the building of public image through production and consumption patterns in motivational accounts, which then adapted in the trend of young people uploading photographs of skyscrapers to instagram, based on the backdrop of the occurrence that occurred. in addition, how do uploading motivational quotes and skyscrapers become a representation of the urban community. this study is significant because it addresses a critical issue that frequently affects young workers. this article can give new perspectives on the hustle culture issue in order to avoid burnout and new insights into how the system is trending on youth-oriented social media accounts. furthermore, how young people use big structures to establish self-identity and as a statement that they are a part of society and urban culture. as a result, the posts on young people's instagram accounts will become subject of a city's representation and identity. literature review personal branding through hustle based on literature review, the hustle culture phenomena has been ingrained in the metropolitan community's identity. female creative workers in australia, according to idriss (2021), employ the hustler image to negotiate personal aims and ambitions in order to be accepted by society through ethno-entrepreneurship. one of the areas used by its users to enliven this situation is social media. carter (2016) also cites two categories of instagram influence, one of which is social media users' use of branding and hashtag hustling to sell themselves. personal branding by influencers or instagram users, according to jacobson (2020), generates always-on-the-job-market persons with professional identities. creating a new urban identity aside from hustling culture, there has also been studies into the image construction of metropolitan areas. according to stevens (2021), us instagram influencers use black identity and culture as commodities to gain cultural and economic capital through attractive urban settings. according to eldik et al. (2019), social media plays a role in migrant urban identity negotiations. self-esteem and youth empowerment are linked to self-identification as a member of the city. influencers in rotterdam develop urban identities that include cultural movements such as football and hip-hop for their local audience, according to another article by eldik, et al (2019). kertamukti (2019) examines at instagram stories that illustrate middle-class identity building through the habit of having fun, which is subsequently seen as an indication that they are in a different social class. commodification of space as a spectacle several researchers have also conducted discussions about the commodification of space as a spectacle. gerrard and farugia (2015) look at how homelessness is discussed in public settings and illustrate how representations of poverty, aesthetic politics, and consumerism are all intertwined. international journal of management, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities (ijmesh), vol. 5 (1), 133-144 urban spetacle of motivational quotes and skyscraper photo in instagram stories azkiya nisa, maria regina widhiasti, euis puspitadewi 136 according to smith (2019), the ideological depiction of a landscape is employed as a form of selfbranding or a commodity exchanged on instagram. according to mercer and mayfield (2015), the monetization of space is carried out through melbourne culture's creative practices, such as art festivals and constructing spectacle venues. it is utilized to revitalize the urban economy while also distinguishing cities from one another. research method this qualitative study employs textual studies and the social semiotic technique to examine the meaning of motivating phrases, trends, and skyscrapers as depicted in tiktok users' videos. gunther kress and theo van leeuwen's book social semiotics (2006) examines the practice of marking by humans in certain socio-cultural situations, as well as the system of meaning formation in a medium like speech, writing, and images, which can include visual, verbal, auditory, and movement. according to previous research conducted by arindita (2017) using the social semiotic method, celebrity andien aisyah used the instagram account @andienippekawa, which he purposefully created after becoming a mother, to post photos of his daily life with children in order to gain recognition as an ideal mother from the wider community. according to widianingsh et al. (2021), representation may help establish personal branding by creating symbols that are tailored to the parts of montoya's personal branding creation. prishandani (2021) also mentioned that interpreting pictures may be used to conduct semiotic multimodal investigations. possessive phrases, persuasive statements, and proverbs are among the verbs present in each image, according to the research. in addition, guy debord's spectacle of society theory is used in literature. for example, horta (2016) investigated the body positive narrative through the commodification process for capitalist purposes, which was one of several studies that used this idea. andreas (2016) looked at the geyajan calling demonstration, which was posted on social media to help people develop their self-image as an object by separating themselves from other users (distinction). apart from instagram, other social media platforms, according to karuaningsih (2022), are a spectacle for the transmission of ideology concerning role models and living standards for teens, notably the sultan's hedonistic lifestyle. purposive sampling was used to obtain data by identifying the unique qualities of postings from instagram user accounts that were relevant to the study's goals we use a qualitative approach and a constructive paradigm in order to gain an in-depth understanding of a problem rather than a surface description of a large population sample. we set out to take the issue from the individual who then bridged the problem in general with contextualization to give space in a particular way in each case. the corpus under investigation consists of instagram stories or snapgram from four instagram accounts with the status of workers in jakarta with an age range of 23-25 years representing youth and fresh graduates. one instagram user is male and the other three users are female. findings and discussion the productivity paradox in youth job uploads the hustle culture depicted in instagram user uploads is indeed more concerned with the public image exhibited on social media than the legitimacy of the photo. modern conditions in the producing side of society, according to debord (2004), exist as a huge accumulation of spectacles. all things that were once life principles have been reduced to mere representations or images. the spectacle is the polar opposite of life, a self-contained movement of non-living matter. people use instagram as a show to fight for the highest level of fame with all of the photographs they create, international journal of management, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities (ijmesh), vol. 5 (1), 133-144 urban spetacle of motivational quotes and skyscraper photo in instagram stories azkiya nisa, maria regina widhiasti, euis puspitadewi 137 but they leave themselves as objects since they have no true claim to themselves. the following is an example of a quote on a motivational account which was later adapted by instagram users: according to the preceding image, posts with the hashtag #thankgoditsmonday offer insights or thoughts on parts of the economy and productive activities, or these inspirational quotations are compelling invitations to select a fast pace and try harder in professional life. when an instagram user is assigned to work and is in his rented apartment, the quote is displayed on his laptop wallpaper. on the user's laptop background, there is an encouraging quotation that reads: “think positively. network well. exercise daily. eat healthy. work hard. stay strong. build faith. worry less. read more. be happy. volunteer free. relax often. love always. live forever” the user gets a positive feeling and a liberating impression from the inspirational phrase in figure 1. positive thinking, such as "think optimistically," is emphasized in the hustler mindset as a key to success (hill, 2020). the user's interpretation of the quotation, which encompasses inspiration in all aspects of his life, is to live the best life possible. healthy habits are also encouraged, ranging from elementary activities such as "eat healthy" to tertiary activities such as meditation or yoga "relax frequently." the quotation on his laptop wallpaper appears to be a reflection of himself, and it's an attempt at positive self-talk and pseudo-psychological techniques to break through limiting beliefs and notions. according to lan et al. (2018), pseudo-psychological demonstrations can have a significant impact in shaping problematic understandings within a science and raise questions about its wider impact. when the quote is paired with other parts, such as a photo in its entirety in a snapgram collection with the title #rumahkedua (second house), the instagram user's professional activities in his firm are revealed. if he looks at the context of the photo while in a leased property to meet his work needs, this motivation can be used as an orientation to increase his work performance. in poetry quotations, activities like "exercise well," "work hard," "stay strong," "develop faith," and "read more" are meant to improve physical stamina and attention span through hard effort. selffigure 1. the #thankgoditsmonday hashtag search includes productive activities and motivational work quotes which were later adapted by instagram user international journal of management, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities (ijmesh), vol. 5 (1), 133-144 urban spetacle of motivational quotes and skyscraper photo in instagram stories azkiya nisa, maria regina widhiasti, euis puspitadewi 138 empowerment refers to the social, health, spiritual, intellectual, and mental aspects of one's life that are focused on the quote. the snapgram depicts how a person creates a work environment in his resting area or private space using quotes from laptop wallpapers as a medium. rapid advancements in electronic communication technology have reduced the necessity for face-to-face communication in business, work, and other human relationships, according to hill (2018), technological platforms enable individuals and businesses to monetize products, services, advice, and the personalities of workers and consumers in new ways. financial independence for kids is no longer limited to office space or other public settings, but rather begins in the home. this is paradoxical because it demonstrates how the home can be used as a work setting while still allowing for personal life. this plainly demonstrates that there is no clear distinction between professional and personal spaces in the hustle culture phenomenon. another irony is how the attitude represented by motivational slogans becomes the tradable value for social mobility when the photo is shared to the social networking platform instagram. young people who work not only want to work hard, but they also want to use social media to establish their identity and significance. workers use technology in the form of social media platforms to create their ideal persona as a professional worker while online. instagram users' production tendencies are displayed to other users. according to debord (1967), the spectacle "unifies and explains a wide range of apparent phenomena." the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events are central to the media and consumer society. the importance of productivity in the workplace is captured in this snapgram. the portrayal of the post's and work's success is more important than the verification of the man's own success. the adolescents on instagram believe that the only thing standing in their way of success is laziness, and that if they work hard enough, they can change the world. this relates to poisonous positivity; if the upload becomes a spectacle, the value of the hard effort is swapped and absorbed. other people who watch will be as successful as him who got a job in a huge company if they follow this quote. the only road to happiness, or the peak of happiness, is to live by these values. although the quote's message appears to be pleasant and innocuous, the application of these ideals can be harmful. this toxicity will lead to people believing that positive things must be avoided in addition to negative things, which is extremely political given that there were previously positive and negative constructs, active and passive, production and consumption. instagram users will then judge their self-worth based on the productivity they generate, and how this ties to the industrial revolution, which pitted humans against machines. as a result, instagram users' image construction is influenced by their work ethic. in contrast to workaholism, users feel compelled to brag about their workload and even laugh about it. users are broadcasting how hard they work and how occupied they are to the rest of the world. they want to demonstrate that they work harder than other users and that no one can beat them because it is a skill. this phenomenon therefore relates to the irony that those instagram users who praise work should not waste time submitting photographs and comments if they are truly busy. this behavior can then be compared to systemic issues like poverty. according to the author, thinking optimistically, working hard, and never giving up would not cure the problem. ven for one, two, and small societies that are successful or are said to be successful, they cannot represent the millions of societies that have failed economically. even if those who are successful fall into the successful category, they are not a representation of the majority. international journal of management, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities (ijmesh), vol. 5 (1), 133-144 urban spetacle of motivational quotes and skyscraper photo in instagram stories azkiya nisa, maria regina widhiasti, euis puspitadewi 139 this can lead to the use of class differences as a strategy to maintain the status quo and avoid variety of thought. the monetization of happiness or consumption-production activities themselves follows the positivity narrative through published work activities. the omnipresent reinforcement that the lives of employees on instagram are the representation orientation of urban and modern culture is then referenced in this happiness narrative. according to mckechnie (1974), urban lifestyles are more likely to value high-density living, diverse interpersonal relationships, and cultural diversity. the pleasant and happy existence of the metropolitan community is far from reality, leading to the legitimacy of an elite group that dominates and does not require change like other social classes. skyscrapers as an indicator of urban society henri lefebvre (1991) writes in his book the production of space that space is not only something that may be consumed, but also exploited as an instrument of power by the ruling classes to obtain control over space that is expanding. social relations produce space, and social space is a result of social ties (lefebvre, 1991: 26). furthermore, according to debord (2006), "spectacle is the apogee of ideology because it fully reveals and manifests the core of all ideological systems, such as poverty, enslavement, and the negation of actual life." spectacle preserves the traits of materialism by representing reality through the technical mediation of signs or signs, such as buildings. baecham (2016) also demonstrates how the spectacle notion is utilized to demonstrate the ruling class's authority, and how the building is used as a symbol of luxury, popularity, prosperity, control, and military force to the populace. megaprojects are designed to demonstrate extraordinary urban development while also encouraging economic growth and attracting foreign capital investment. the increasing rate of urbanization in recent decades, particularly in emerging nations, has resulted in a rise in the construction of tall structures around the world. cities all over the world compete to construct the world's tallest structures, with some even holding competitions to construct the most iconic and magnificent tall structures. figure 2 depicts a building in jakarta that serves as an urban space. these structures serve as a sign of hegemony and authority. instagram users then employ this luxury architecture style as a means of self-promotion. high-rise architecture has its origins in religious structures such as egypt's huge pyramids or middle ages churches. the infatuation with large structures continues to rise today, and it is a symbol of the times. this obsession with tall buildings is still growing today and is a sign of the architectural manifestation of capitalism and power (elshawanty, 2020). space is increasingly being commodified and subject to short-term investment, income generation, and long-term urban development. here are some examples of snapgram by users showing office space in a tall building in jakarta: international journal of management, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities (ijmesh), vol. 5 (1), 133-144 urban spetacle of motivational quotes and skyscraper photo in instagram stories azkiya nisa, maria regina widhiasti, euis puspitadewi 140 several photographs depicting the perspective from a tall office building can be found in figure 2. this magnificent construction is regarded as a status symbol and promotes people's yearning for space. people post images of towering structures not simply because they admire them, but also because they are thought to confer "status." people who have access to high-rise buildings are regarded as "cool" or "exclusive." buildings are portrayed visually and then used in social media to emulate popular cultural trends. the public space is then commodified for private use and produced to fulfill the needs of consumption and production through various and spectacular designs. as a result, there are symbols that depict the metropolitan way of life.. figure 2 depicts a collage of selfies and views of tall office buildings, demonstrating that space is no longer viewed solely for its utility in the workplace, but also for its aesthetic value. they enhanced the beauty of the view of the towering structure by adding effects or filters. the lofty building can subsequently be viewed as a representation of instagram users' supremacy. the pervasive affirmation is tied to civilized beings since they feel close to the city as a civilization and are regarded an advanced society when contrasted to rural communities, notably in the first shot, which juxtaposes a view of the skyscraper with a selfie of herself. according to figure 2, the work space no longer serves as a place to work, but rather as a creation of the users' identities as workers. when photography is shared, according to van dijk (2008), it serves as a tool for identity development. in addition to skyscrapers, one mall in jakarta, ashta district 8 in the scbd business district, has become the focus of instagram users' attention. the shopping center in the heart of this tower creates a picturesque ambience reminiscent of new york. in addition to being a renowned cafe, ashta district 8 is a popular ootd and instagramable location. according to febriyanti (2018), managers and netizens use instagrammable sites to disseminate images of tourism artifacts via the figure 2. skyscraper uploads by instagram users international journal of management, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities (ijmesh), vol. 5 (1), 133-144 urban spetacle of motivational quotes and skyscraper photo in instagram stories azkiya nisa, maria regina widhiasti, euis puspitadewi 141 official instagram account in order to increase tourist interest. instagram users can communicate through their appearance by curating their self-image and constructing their own identity through the images and videos they take and choose to post/share on their account (seibel, 2019). this can also be seen in figure 3, which depicts how consumer activities, particularly in the ashta 8 scbd building's open spaces, define an urban lifestyle. the lifestyle shown is a modern one, with wide glass windows and a minimalist, industrial, futuristic building design to give a wonderful impression. the building's dominant hue is gray or black, which represents intelligence, the future, elegance, and refinement. modern or urban society, according to wirth (1938), is a component of modernity. a culture that is individualistic, rational, with technical developments, forsaking tradition, and a tendency toward instant and fast items characterizes the modern lifestyle. furthermore, instagram users in figure 2 shoot photos with their spouses and close friends, demonstrating an affective attachment that is perceived as a transactional relationship through space consumption patterns. as a result, both photographs depict the tendency of big structures or skyscrapers as proof of being a part of a city civilization. however, the spectacle always generates paradoxes or ironies, such as how it attempts to replace reality with current illusions and perceptions that may not necessarily reflect the true state of urban space and society. the image of office workers in high-rise buildings therefore becomes one of the orientations or standards of a prosperous and ideal society. this ignores the fact that these workers gambar 3. upload of ashta 8 scbd sudirman building by instagram users international journal of management, entrepreneurship, social science and humanities (ijmesh), vol. 5 (1), 133-144 urban spetacle of motivational quotes and skyscraper photo in instagram stories azkiya nisa, maria regina widhiasti, euis puspitadewi 142 are merely corporate slaves who use tall buildings as symbols of a better, contemporary, strong, and best society urban society in order to enhance the aesthetics of their workplaces. the aesthetics of the metropolitan community's working life appears to encompass the exploitation of energy and time, which can lead to additional issues such as burnout. the irony resurfaces when these workers are paired with instructors who work in older, less contemporary school facilities, particularly in rural areas, where wages are low and fluctuate with the economy. when compared to office employees in skyscrapers, the teaching profession will appear more essential, significant, and noble. conclusion instagram allows users to create identities as professionals and members of urban culture. instagram uploads become symbolic consumption, and users associate the architecture with their preferred identity imagination. the buildings in the background demonstrate that what is cool and current is a way of life or a way of life in a city. this is similar to responding to the desire of recent graduates to work in a city center office and for others to enjoy the city lifestyle. the photo's aesthetics must be scrutinized in order to demonstrate how the pattern of production and consumption would always favor one side, namely the capital and power owner. the focus of urban space then shifts back to object-oriented development. on the other side of city, this can lead to irony. instagram, therefore, becomes a criterion for classifying or dividing active-passive, or current-ancient society, forming a community-gated or elite group. the irony also applies to the outlying slums, which are ignored and relegated in metropolitan space, yet are made present and real by depictions of jakarta as a sophisticated city comparable to new york. as a result of this need, a trend has emerged in which buildings are constructed solely to elicit a spectacular effect, which is a trademark of modern spectacle to achieve a surprise effect in its representation. modernization initiatives are carried out by acquiring land in city villages and then attempting to establish a gated community while ignoring other consequences. the different parties in society should be able to connect with their own culture and history through urban space and architecture. the concept of modernity and universality via development that mimics global development must be re-examined, keeping in mind that space must be addressed according to its own particular character. limitation & further research this study is limited to dki jakarta's city space, which has seen a rising tendency during the pandemic. the conditions that arise in urban environments as indicators of urban community identity are only described qualitatively in this study. further research is needed to determine how the impact of trends that become identities for urban youngsters should be studied in depth.. references altman, i. 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(1938). urbanism as a way of life. the american journal of sociology, vol. 44, no. 1 (jul., 1938), pp. 1-24, published by: the university of chicago press stable. url: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2768119 accessed: a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 45 le grand voyage: a great journey to liberate islamic accounting education from utilitarianism and secularism arista fauzi kartika sari 1 rahmawati 2 harun al-rasyid 3 1,2,3 accounting department, islamic university of malang, indonesia email: aristakartika@unisma.ac.id doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.26675/jabe.v4i1.6402 abstract: the aim of this study is to release students of islamic accounting course from secularism and capitalism. this research uses dialogic approach to raise the awareness of criticalmuslim students. the philosophical values of the french movie entitled “le grand voyage” were taken as method of analysis. the reality of islamic accounting students who are secularist and capitalist was then metaphorized into this film. the results of this study showed that the students could find not only material values, but also emotional values and spiritual values in accounting. there are several values that can be seen from the students’ story telling: material value , altruism value, love value, and spiritual value. it is hoped that this article could give an overview to islamic accounting educators to provide accounting course accompanied by islamic substance of tawheed. keywords: hijrah islamic accounting education, metaphor, secular, capitalist introduction the film "le grand voyage” tells about a young man's transcendental process while traveling from france to mecca to accompany his father on a journey to pilgrimage by car. the trip took 1 week with a distance of 4,898 km. the film is about the clash between a devout man of his faith, le pere, and his thoroughly secularized son, reda, who does not have a clue about the meaning of islam. le pere, representing people who were educated with the islamic sultanate system, emerged with a hard-hearted and conservative figure dealing with the rules. he even still speaks moroccan arabic to his children during their lifetime in france. contradictively, reda is a stubborn, liberal and secular young man who was born and raised in france. reda’s character more or less depicts the current condition of islamic community which tends to be secularistic. a stubborn, liberal and secular, reda is reflexion of students who are taking islamic accounting courses who are also secular because capitalism is inherent in the reality of accounting. mulawarman (2012) explained that students prefer anything from the "west"; so in the end it is the western mindset that they embrace as a form of modernity. the eastern method is inferior to them who are from the east . journal of accounting and business education p-issn 2528-7281 e-issn 2528-729x e-mail: jabe.journal@um.ac.id http://journal2.um.ac.id/index.php/jabe/ a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 46 in their journey, the father and the son met a man named mustapha, a french-speaking turk who helped them at the border. le pere did not show his entusiasm when he met mustapha who said he wanted to join them on pilgrimage. le pere thought mustapha has bad intentions towardsthem. on the contrary, reda is very fond of mustapha who has indulged his curiosity as a liberal and secular teenager. islamic accounting students are familiar with the utilitarian value inherent in conventional accounting. utilitarian does not teach sincere values, it only assumes something is good if it brings benefits or contribution in the end without the process. this is depicted at the time when reda who welcomed the presence of mustapha realizedthat mustapha shows bad intentionby stealing le pere’s money after taking reda out for a night of drinking. secularism and utilitarianism are inherent in students’ life as long as they study conventional accounting and later when they study islamic accounting they are still attached to these values. islamic accounting education should liberate an educational process (kamayanti, 2011). by liberation it is intended to free students from being prisoned in the value of capitalism which is wrapped up by secularism and utilitarianism. the concern is the condition when students are studying islamic accounting while capitalism is still inherent in their mindset. it gets worse, if the value of capitalism is covered up in the name of sharia. efferin (2015) stated that science and technology, including accounting, were created to shape arrogant people. why? the answer is because now there has been a complex and multidimensional crisis, where science is often built with submission to dogma, rationality, empiricism, and objectivity to the point that it often makes a secular science with religion. mulawarman (2008) stated that, the mainstream thought that is developed in accounting is inseparable from the dominance of the secular scientific paradigm which is characterized by three main things, namely self-interest, power, and relativity that are wrapped up with capitalism. religion or spirituality is considered to have no place in the development of accounting science. if the conventional accounting only deals with struggling on how keep transaction journals and repoting financial statements, which eventually arrive at preparing fundamental information for stakeholders to make a decision, how should learning in accounting sharia be conducted? islamic accounting education is not sufficient if it only teaches about halal and haram transactions based on the qur'an and hadith, the difference between usury and profit sharing, or how to prepare financial statements. islamic accounting is not just an accounting science preceded by theword “sharia”. accounting cannot only be seen as a tool/practice that is free of value, neither can islamic accounting. if accounting is only seen as a tool, then the mindset of students will be oriented towards achieving the technical capabilities of islamic accounting based on technical understanding. ideally, having a commitment to "sharia" means having a commitment to islamic values that underlies all life practices. the technical learning process will create students only posses technical understanding of islamic accounting, such as journaling, sharia financial statements reporting, and the worst will create pragmatic islamic accounting students. pragmatism in islamic accounting education research was carried out by sari, triyuwono, and djamhuri (2016) , which explained that technical islamic accounting learning will produce students who think pragmatically, just knowing about halal and haram, islamic financial reporting as well as lack of understanding of non-material values in an accounting transaction . if the material presented is still in the capitalist capacity that is defined, then the consumers (in this case are the students) will also be “sharia” human capitalists . pragmatic islamic accountingis also explained by triyuwono (2012), who stated that accounting that is modified as needed with islamic values is used for practical needs. in the end, it does not pay attention to the basic sharia values that are deep and the results only creating a pragmatic sharia business world. the main aspect of rahmatan lil'alamin in islamic accounting has finally become negated because it focuses on technical learning of islamic accounting. such learning conducted by educators is done separately between intellectual intelligence, emotional intelligence, and spiritual intelligence, but focuses more on intellectual intelligence. this means that islamic accounting learning has been reversed, has been "misguided" (triyuwono, 2010), where intellectual intelligence is considered as the content, while mental a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 47 and spiritual intelligence is considered as the skin. such education is also what ultimately causes students to think secularly. indeed, islamic accounting presents to deconstruct modern accounting (triyuwono, 2006). triyuwono delivered the epistemology of sharia accounting through paired epistemology: "islamic accounting seeks to contribute to accounting as a business instrument while supporting the discovery of the nature of self and the purpose of human life. giving mindset accounting as one of the instruments to "unite with god" (ber manunggaling kawula gusti). that is, islamic accounting is not only the bussiness instrument, but also to unite with god, which is the almighty to whom human beings will return (lillahi wa inna illayhi raaji'uun) " looking at the epistemology presented by triyuwono, accounting science and spiritual values should be expected to contribute to sharia business entities and at the same time direct to discover the nature of self and the purpose of life. islamic accounting education is not only about learning the development of sharia business practices, but also as one of the ways and provisions for returning to allah. the substance of islamic values is the unity, not the secularity. malang islamic university whose education system is based on the islamic values of ahlussunnah waljamaah, surely teaches various islamic values in its education process. however, based on the researchers' initial observation, there is still a secularism and utilitarianism which ends in the pragmatism in the mindset of students in islamic accounting courses taken from conventional accounting courses. students’ understanding about islamic accounting is still limited to the contract -akad used; and they are still struggling to understand the accounting material in shariah form. in conclusion, the beginning of the researcher turned out that islamic accounting students do not understand integrated islamic values that are "fundamental" in islamic accounting . technical learning will lead to banking style 1 learning models (thomson & bebbington, 2004), that can kill critical awareness, even though islam is a critical religion. banking-style learning is therefore not in accordance with the spirit of islam. understanding the importance of islamic values and objectives is the first compulsory awareness for teachers and students. it is very alarming when students studying islamic accounting courses still adopt the inherent values in conventional accounting, because it can shape them to be pragmatic sharia students . this research will describe the process of “hijrah” sharia accounting students to leave secularism and utilitarianism through the process of education of critical-islamic awareness by using a film metaphor entitled "le grand voyage". based on the explanation described above, this paper becomes interesting, because this research is in the field of islamic accounting education, was conducted at the islamic university of malang which is inspired by islamic values. this research can contribute to add references about awareness in the field of education, especially islamic accounting education. rebele & e. kent st. pierre (2015) stated that research published in the top accounting journals has been stagnated. the research published in the accounting journals relates to limited group of topics, uses similar research methods, and is based largely on the same underlying theories. motivation in this study is education method in this research can be used by islamic accounting teachers to liberate their students from secularism and utilitarianism. before teachers liberating the students, they have to liberate themselves first, about the substantive of islamic accounting. besides, the journey of students to attend college is also a "great journey", since the mindset of students as agents of hijrah is formed. hijrah form of islamic accounting education is a process of emancipation through dialogue without being stuck in the stiffness of textbooks and the numbers in accounting. the research question posed by the researcher is "how does the process of hijrah 2 of the islamic accounting students take placeusing the le grand voyage metaphor?. 1 students as a passive recipients of information must be filled in like a deposit 2 hijrah for the sufis and also the scholars of jurisprudence as an inner strength in setting aside everything other than allah from the heart. (nu online, 2018) http://www.nu.or.id/post/read/92567/pengertian-hijrah-dalam-kajian-tasawuf http://www.nu.or.id/post/read/92567/pengertian-hijrah-dalam-kajian-tasawuf a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 48 literature review research about islamic ethics in accounting education also conducted by ahmad & ahmed (2017). the research shows that incorporating islamic ethics principles (integrity, sincerity, and righteousness) into accounting education will be a significant contribution towards generating ethical accounting students. sharia foundation of islamic ethics is good principles, valid, and reliable to enchance accounting education quality. kamla (2015) has conducted a research about critical muslim intellectuals’ thought (cmis’). he illutrated how cmis’ thought based on postcolonial perspectives of cultural hybridity and second modernity can enrich and inform critical accounting research attempts to develop an emancipatory accounting project. this paper demonstrates that cmis’ thought and methodology can contribute to challenging the domination of western/conventional accounting and its claims to objectivity, neutrality and universality. in particular, the paper highlights how cmis’ enlightened approaches to hermeneutics; their emphasis on spirituality, ethics and liberation theology; their radical epistemological and methodological research and education agendas offer outwardlooking alternatives to developing accounting thought. the study about islamic accounting education has been carried out by triyuwono (2015b) who deconstructed islamic accounting education which was allegedly secular, became an education with the main character of islam, tawhid. the result stated that the structure of the curriculum, the substance of the subject, the structure of the self and the process of education, the structure of the relationship between the teacher and students and the community need to be integrated into a single form of unity leading to taqwa. in aother study, triyuwono (2013) explores the nature of islamic accounting in terms of its function and objective based on the perspective of khalifatullahfilardh go beyond the worldly life. islamic accounting functions as an instrument of doa (prayer) and dzikr (remembering god) for awakening god consciousness. kamayanti and rahmanti (2014) also wrote in their article about islamic financial management learning which is often trapped in pragmatism; so it was constructed based on islamic critical awareness using a dialogical approach. as a result, students can critically practice islamic financial management that have shied away from syariah value and propose alternative solution. methods this research is revealed through a story about an exemption which is the empirical result of dialogue obtained from the learning process between researcher and students. data were collected from recordings and assignments for one semester in the islamic financial accounting class of the accounting study program 2017/2018 academic year at malang islamic university. data taken were in the power point presentation format and tasks. this research is used to raise awareness of the critical-islami student using dialogic technique proposed by freire as the educational value of love, humility, hope, and confidence (kamayanti, 2012). however, if freire stop at the level of love of the world, then in this study, love is transcended towards love for god. the method of analysis in this study takes the philosophical values of the film "le grand voyage" which is metaphorized with the reality of islamic accounting students. it is possible to use metaphor as an approach of analysis in an accounting study as explained by llwellyn (2003): "... metaphor provides both a "way of thinking” about organizations and a "way of seeing" ... metaphor theorizes through linking the unfamiliar to the familiar; it creates meaning and significance through "picturing" or "image-ing" the world. " a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 49 llwellyn explained that the use of this approach will form a level of metaphor-based knowledge or what he calls metaphor theorizing, so that it can create meaning and significance through the depiction or imagination of the world. metaphors in accounting research are also explained by armenic and craig (2009): "metaphors about accounting are important because they affect what people understand about accounting phenomena and concepts." this research employs metaphor for it can make it easier for readers to understand the explanation of reality and accounting concepts in a more simple way. an example of accounting research that uses metaphors is the one conducted by kusdewanti et al. (2014), which used “bantengan dan topeng malangan” to describe the reality of indonesian accounting resistance to the "power" that is currently at war. there are also writings from triyuwono (2015) who used ball metaphors to conceptualize performance in arema football clubs. sari (2016) also made metaphorical research of the triangle hijab as a concept to fight corruption. this study uses the summary of values implied from the film "le grand voyage" about the migration of a young man metaphorized to see a reality of the hijrah process of sharia accounting students. the process of hijrah that becomes a metaphor is taken from the words or actions of the characters reda and his father, le pere. based on the explanation, the results of this study are arranged with a narrative style, which by creswell (2007), has a specific focus and contextual. this narrative style has been carried out by kamayanti (2012), who uses a dialogical approach to build the (prospective) awareness of accountants through love. results secularism in islamic accounting at the beginning of the journey, reda who was unwilling to take his father to mecce for the pilgrimage, drove the car at a high speed. he wants to get to his destination immediately, though he knows it is a very long distance to travel.. his father told him to be careful, but reda didn't kristen to him. until one day his father wanted reda to park his car when he was at customs for a passport check. "i have to pray," his father said. "now?", asked reda with an expression of confusion . "be patient, we are now in customs," he continued. "then why?", answered his father. "this is not a place for prayer," answered reda. his father sighed and looked at reda while saying, "you believe in god?" hearing his father's answer, reda just stayed and finally parked the car. (lloyd, 1972) freire states that in order for the colonized to understand that they are being colonized it is necessary to make an effort to change naive consciousness into critical awareness. that is, even before starting aks (islamic financial accounting), this awareness effort is a trigger for dialogical learning processes. like reda who secularized worship with world activities, islamic accounting students are actually also being "colonized" by unconscious secularism that has been carried away in accounting. the lecturer started the course by giving a question to the students regarding the difference of islamic accounting from traditional accounting to kow the students’ initial understansing about accounting. almost the whole class mentioned money, figures, debit and credit, calculators, financial statements report in answering the quesrion. based on their initial answer, money, it indicated that accounting students in the 6th semester have been closely tied to the idea that accounting has to do with. accounting could not be separated from money, since money has taken much of their attention ever since they were in college. the materialistic nature of money has led students to be materialistic as well. after that they continued the answer with things related to money, such as numbers/figures, debit and credit, calculators, financial statements report; all of which were their world in undergoing lectures in accounting. an understanding of conventional accounting was answered, then i asked thestudents to describe islamic accounting. things which came up from their minds were "halal labels, islamic banks, al-qur'an and hadiths, iqtishad cooperatives (islamic cooperatives in unisma), akad/contracts, mosques (as a place) for zakat management”. it can be conluded that students have understood the difference between islamic and conventional accounting, but only skin deep knowledge. according to the students goods a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 50 without halal labels do meet sharia rules since they associated shariah with halal labels. islamic financial institutions, such as islamic banks and sharia cooperatives, are now being intensified to be built in indonesia in a n attempt to be an islamic economic center. al-qur'an and hadith are used as guidelines for islamic accounting. the next question i asked them was their purpose of studying in college. they just kept silent a while until some saidfinn to get a diploma and to make our parents happy." but, faisal, one of the students replied shyly: "for worshipping", he said. surprisingly, his answer was responded with laughter from others students. one of them even suggested him to go to islamic boarding school. i came closer to him and asked him why he said so.. then he replied to get knowledge and god bless. alhamdulillah, this is the answer i wanted to hear from the students. it can be concluded that secularism indeed stays in students’ mind. in other dialog with students when discussing conventional accounting subjects, such as introduction to accounting i, introduction to accounting ii, and so on, i asked the students whether they saw the relationship of the subject with religion. whether god exists in those subjects mentioned. the class was in silence and they looked at each other in confusion. salma, one of the students, said no for the answer. i tried to provoke their thought by asking them why religion exists. i asked them whether god exists in religion subject. confidently they said a yes in unison. i then told them that if they thought that god exists in religion subject but not in others it meant that they were secularist. 3 , that they separated the world and the life after no one disagreed. islamic accounting education is brought from the conventional secular accounting education system which has forgotten the nature of god's creation of human beings as found in qs 51:56 "and i (allah) created not the jinn and mankind except that they should worship me(alone)". capitalism in islamic accounting "i feel honored to meet such a devout person like you. today’s people only care about money. they don’t even think of god any more. here in turkey people only work for money whivh in turn oly generates more power”, said mustapha, a person whom they met on their journey to mecca and wanted to join them. reda likes mustapha as he realizes that mustapha cacn give him what he can not get from his father, a freedom. until one day mustapha takes him out for a night for drinking and ended by stealing hi father’s money. the incident does not even change reda’s character who still keep being selfish and materialistic.. reda is angry when his father just gives the money for them to go home to a beggar woman. he can not understand the reason undeerslying his father’s deed. they then in involve in a serious squabble. the story illustrates the circle of capitalism. wealth only belongs to those who have a lot of money and power. nowonder if such people treat money as their god (in small g) and money is the goal of life of the capitalist. capitalism according to triyuwono (2006), is not value-free, because during the process of its creation it involves human beings who have personality and are full of interests. the main values inherent in modern accounting are egoistic and materialistic values that are embedded in utilitarian values. so this is where islamic accounting is present to deconstruct modern accounting. islamic accounting as a business instrument also supports the discovery of the nature of self and the purpose of human life. at the beginning of the islamic accounting lesson, there were two students who could not take courses, because they were late. the following week they met me to ask me do write their names on the attendance list by telling me excuses for their absence. 3 secular is separate material aspects as one of human needs with substance as spiritual beings. or can be split between the world and the hereafter, where nature is actually something that is a unity. for example, separating worldly knowledge from the science of religion, separating material things from the spiritual. the concept of tawheed, should all these things are inseparable (triyuwono, 2015b) a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 51 sardi, one of the late coming student begged on me not to cross his name on the attendance since he had been absent before and the absent would affect his grade. it turned out to me that all his efforts was to save his grade.. the similar thing happens to mustapha, one of the character in le grand voyage, who lies to reda and his father and deceits them as well for the sake of money. in his book, triyuwono (2012) states that if accounting is formed by the environment in a capitalist environment, then the information conveyed also contains capitalist values. then the actions and decisions taken also contain capitalist values, so the reality created by accounting is also capitalist reality. "you are accounting students, aren’t you?". after explaining the material on the slide , i asked students. "yes ma'am," they answered. "if so, you are the reality of accounting right?" "yes ma'am," they replied again. i just looked at them, "so, we’re capitalist?" said one of the students, and the other was silent. "i didn’t say it, but your friend did" i replied. "what kind of capitalism, ma'am?" asked giman. "we're not a company," he continued. "is capitalism only takes place in the company? no. capitalism also exists in our everyday lives. okay, are you capitalists or not. ask your hearts, huh?" i gave a break to students to get ready. "the most important interest of the company is profit, money what is the main interest of students?" a moment of silence, they thought, then there were some students who answered , "a grade, ma’am." with hesitation. "yes, your interest or your ego is value. that is the first characteristic. the second is materialistic, if the company’s materialistic character is profit oriented, wat about you? is it the gpa oriented?" they nodded. "the last one is utilitarian. utilitarian is when something is considered correct it if it brings utilities (material benefit) for himself, and without seeing how the process takes place what is important is to get a grade. am i right?” they just stared at me. "why do you just keep quiet?" i asked them. "i was thinking ma’am, why do i feel like that?" sarmi answered with a smile. "yes ma'am, i'm also asking my heart." surya answered. "so what do you feel?" i asked them again. sarmi answered cautiously, "i am capitalist ma'am." capitalistic accounting will form a capitalistic network of power. the net power is profit. you could say that the profit becomes a worship or pseudo god for the capitalists. making pseudo orientation of human life orientation, and turning to the power of god. this reality makes people forget the creed "laa ilaa ha illa allah" that there is no other god than allah. discussion liberating process "there is something i want to ask" said reda, "why don’t you take a flight to mecca? that's much easier." the father replied, "when sea water rises into the sky, it will lose its saltiness to become pure again." "i mean it", said reda to confirm his father's answer. "sea water evaporates as it rises to the clouds, and when sea water evaporates, it will become fresh water . that's the reason why it's better to take a pilgrimage on foot than to ride a horse, and it's better to ride a horse than to drive a car, and it's better to drive a car than to take a boat, and it's better to take a boat than to take an airplane.” islamic accounting is created technically and philosophically. technically, islamic accounting exists because of the growing development of sharia business entities in indonesia. philosophically, islamic accounting was created to free the net of power of all capitalism (triyuwono, 2012) , which was obtained from conventional accounting that was not value-free. before stepping on islamic accounting material, students are first made aware of this capitalist reality. this a great journey, not for travelling "why don't we stop in milan? maybe i will never see it." asked reda. "what are you going to do in milan?" replied his father. "i don't know ... taking photos, seeing the sights, going around the city," said reda. "do you think we are tourists? stop in every city we go through?" a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 52 reda's father has a great mission to mecca, which is to perform the pilgrimage. so why doesn't he take the plane to get there faster? because he wants to enjoy every second of his journey, to make it holy and clean again when he arrives at the baitullah. reda, on the contrary, his only purpose is to accompany his father. the goals of college students are also varied. their goal is to conquer the world, to get prosperity, or in other words to become rich. this goal makes them forget the purpose of human creation by god, namely to worship him. worship in a narrow sense is like doing shalah, zakat, fasting, hajj, and so forth. the goal of worshipping is to achieve prosperity in the afterlife. "is it distinguished like that for the purpose of the world and the hereafter?" i asked the student. "yes" everyone answered at the same time. i told them that it was really a shame if they thought that way; that worshipping were only do prayer, fasting, give charity, and the like. for the moment the class was in silence and i let them to think. i then asked them to calculate the 24-hour time they had in a day. “ok, class as accounting students you must be good at working with numbers. you have 24 hours a day, and you have to pray five times a day, don’t you? how much time do you spend for each prayer?” "5 minutes mom," ayu replied. "only 5 minutes? let’s say 10 minutes. 10 minutes multiplied by 5 is closer to 1 hour. that is the time you spend to pray in a day including all the sunnah prayers and dhikr. what about qur’an recitation? 3 hours?" "hahahahaha, it’s too long ma’am. one hour is more than enough, ma’am" sarman answered. "then how much? 2 hours? ehm, let’s make it 2 hours. so, how many hours doyou spend your time for worshipping? 3 hours, right? then added with the night prayer (tahajjud prayer) for about an hour”. "how much is the total? 4 hours, isn’t it? in 24 hours you spend 4 hours for worshipping, for the purpose of the afterlife. and the rest is 20 hours used for worldly affairs. oh, i see? whereas the afterlife is much longer than the world, it is the eternal life. astaghfirullah. how long do we live in this world, 65 years? 70 years? " "nobody knows, ma’am, it could be just an hour." ayu replied. "well, how longdid the prophet muhammad live in this world? 63. if we live longer than the prophet muhammad did, it means we get a life bonus from allah, so that we can do worshipping will be longer." i replied. "allahmdulillah ... what a pity it is; 20 hours for the worldly affairs compared to 4 hours for the afterlife. what do you think?" i waited for the students’ response. “what can we do, ma’am?” asked ayu "we must redesign our life’s goal and focus all the efforts for worshipping, ma’am." siti answered. "yes, that's right, set the afterlife as our gol in life and all we do must lead to the afterlife. innamal a'malu bin-niyat, “indeed all actions are based on the intention”. intend your study for worship, work for worship. so it is no longer secular, wordly affairs are mingled with the afterlife affairs.. the world is a place to find provisions for the afterlife, so don't jus spend 4 hours for the hereafter. the world is not a place for traveling, just to have fun, nor a place to get wealth. all students agreed that life should lead to the afterlife happiness.. the hijrah process does not stop here. as discussed earlier, secularism is also found in other subjects such as religion and conventional accounting courses. "well, if in islamic accounting we can discuss about allah, about blessings, about worship, why can’t we do that in conventional accounting courses? have you ever discussed the bless of profit in conventional accounting courses?" some students laughed, and some answered, "absolutely no, ma'am." "yes, i can not agree anymore with you that there is no discussion about the bless of profit except a discussion about profit maximization. you have learnt how to maximize profit. how could it happen? do you think there’s no place for god in conventional accounting? do you think that it happens because it has to? when you study islamic accounting, islamic economics, religion you are aware that god is there. what do you think about god when you study introduction to accounting 1 and 2? do you think that god is also there? " the student just kept silent. "who created the knowledge?" i asked. "allah." replied the student. "well, accounting is also part of science, who created accounting science?" i asked. "allah." replied the student. "then why, in conventional accounting, ia-1 and ia-2 it feels strange or even taboo when discussing god, and bless in the profit?" a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 53 "the lecturer never discusses about allah, ma’am," said budi. "there is one lecturer who is associated with religion, mr. anwar. if he teach early, it was connected with islam," continued ayu. "alhamdulillah. so, what do we have to change so as not to be secular in education anymore?" i tried to provoke the students. "the education has to change," said budi. cheers and applause filled the room. i smiled happily and gave two thumbs up to budi. the current education system that secularizes religion from science makes students also secular. science, or in this case conventional accounting relies on rationalism (true by definition) and empiricism (observable), which is different from religious science which is not all rationalized. changes in the education system as conveyed by al-faruqi which is adapted by suyuthi (2012), that the biggest task of a muslim is "solving education problems". so, he declared "there will be no hope of a true revival of the muslims unless the education system is changed and mistakes are corrected ... dualism in the world of muslim education, dualism in the form of islamic and secular education system must be stopped and eliminated. both systems must be united and integrated." critical-islamic thinking "why is going to mecca so important? why is mecca so special? "reda asked his father. "we've come this far and now you're just interested in asking? mecca is the main holy city for muslims. people come from all over the world. it is the legacy of prophet ibrahim as." his father approached reda, and continued "hajj is important. it is the fifth pillar of islam. all capable muslims must carry it out before they die to purify their souls. we all will die later. we are only guests in this world. the only thing i fear is to die before carrying out hajj. and without you, i will never succeed. may allah bless you. i learned a lot from this trip." "so do i." reda replied while smiling. the question raised by reda to his father began to raise his awareness, or his interest in islam. citing freire's statement through the writings of kamayanti and rahmanti (2014), that in order for the colonized to understand that they are being colonized, an effort must be made to change naive consciousness into critical awareness. in this case the colonized are students in the reality of their accounting knowledge, who unconsciously have imprisoned the mindset of students. it is through this critical islamic thinking that will be used to free the islamic consciousness of students over capitalism that encompasses its reality, which is enveloped in a materialistic, selfish, and utilitarian way. the above discussion has proven that islamic accounting students have realized the existence of materialistic, selfish and utilitarian values in themselves. to free them, i used videos and "suburban cases", and asked them to analyze the accounting and the values carried in it. figure 1. suburban cas a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 54 based on the suburban case above, students were asked question regarding what banawir got from selling herbs. students are given 5 minutes to read and answer. "do you notice the accounting practice in what mr banawir does?" i asked the students. they try to digest, and answer. some said "yes", and some said "no". students who answered "yes" were based on the fact that mr banawir is selling herbs. that is an accounting practice.." that the man selling herbal medicine is an accounting practice. how does he get the capital? from nature; it is provided by the nature. then the herbs is sold. that's accounting practice.” after talking about accounting in the suburban case, i asked my students to mention what profit or obtained by mr. banawir, alhamdulillah, that all their answers were what i wanted from them: blessings, rewards, helping others, feeling happy, grateful". "is that the only profit that mr. banawir got? are you sure you?" i asked the student. they thought hard to answer. "you forget one important thing, but i'm glad if you forgot this important thing. what is that?” they were still confused looking for the answer. "you forget mentioning money as one of the profits he got, alhamdulillah." after i said that the whole class was thundering, aware of their shortcomings, about money, which usually always sticks in their minds, but this time they can forget about it. "wow, you successfully made us forget about money. hurray we were not capitalist." budi shouted excitedly at me, and was followed by his friends. after i gave the case, then i showed them a video. the video tells about a man who, although he is not a rich person, is very concerned about his surroundings. he often gives money to needy children until they could go to school, help grandmothers push carts and sell, distribute food to a starving dog, and water flowers that almost died on the side of the road. he does not want to be rich, but he is "rich" with the love he gives to the surrounding environment. the student's job is to observe the main character and what values are captured from the video. today's meeting was closed with a task next week to look for accounting practice and its value in students’ daily life. here are some of the results: story telling #1 was from sonia: on october, 3th i was returning home from college when i saw a cat was in pain near my boarding house., i came closer to the cat, and i saw a bleeding wound in its body. i was panicked and knew nothing about what i should do. i was so sorry seeing the weak and helpless cat. i immediately called my friend to accompany me to take the cat to the veterinarian. arriving at the house of pet the doctor immediately handled it and the doctor said this cat had to be operated because the nipples were scratched and there was a maggot on the nipples. i asked the vet to do his best to save the cat. i spent idr 810,000 of mysocial gathering money to take care of the cat. actually, i wanted to use the money to buy daily needs, but by being able to help the cat i was happy. value added: i felt so happy because i could see that the cat was healed. that is the added value that i got. i felt satisfied. a.f.k, sari, rahmawati, h, al-rasyid /journal of accounting and business education, 4 (1), september 2019 55 based on the two stories about above, there are several values that can be seen. first, the material value, namely the expenditure that sonia spent to treat the cat, and that hadi spent to be given to an old beggar and to buy a jacket. second, the value of altruism shown by the two students. they are more concerned with the interests of other creatures rather than their own interests. third, the value of love. fourth, the spiritual value of inner satisfaction by giving help treat sick cats and an lob woman. for hadi, he was also because he could get a jacket at a cheaper price. conclusion the dialogical approach raises a lot of student awareness. divine or spiritual awareness arises when discussing the presence of god in conventional accounting courses and religious science courses. awareness of emotional values and spiritual values has also been produced. that accounting is not only about how to record journals, financial statements reporting and provide them as information for stakeholders, but more deeply, in every accounting reality there is a value that follows it, not only material value, but also non-material. emotional values such as love for fellow creatures of god, the value of altruism that leaves self, and the spiritual value of gratitude and inner satisfaction have given grace to all nature. even so, the limitations of this research lie in the inability to capture the results of research which are the results of the dedication of students are carried on permanently by students and so on. it cannot be sure that this glorification will be permanent in the mindset of students, but it can be sure that the process of this dedication is real. this kind of process can be carried out on all types of courses, not limited to sharia accounting only. dialogic approach in learning will be very good if it is done on conventional accounting courses, as a preventive step against secularism and capitalism. story telling #2 by hadi (directly presented before the class): "last saturday i was on my way to buy a jacket, when i saw an old female beggar sleeping on a used rice sack. " i felt sorry seeing that beggar as she reminded of my grandmother at home. i could not imagine if it happened to my grandma. i then decided to give my money to her. not though,, but hopefully it could be a help. " "where does it take placeis that?" i asked. "near the city station, ma’am. well, after that i went to a shop. i saw a jacket that i liked. however, when i looked at the price tag, my money was not enough, to buy that jacket, because i have given some of it to the beggar. so i decided to go back to the boarding house to take some more money. on my way home i stopped by to another shop to look at some jackets there. lucky me! there was a jacket that was exactly the same as the one i wanted, and this jacket was also at a discounted price, ma’am. finally i bought it and now i am wearing it”. i saw a happy look on his face. "cieeeee," his friends said, and followed by hand claps from them. 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(2015b). filosofi tauhid: mendekonstruksi pendidikan akuntansi syariah yang sekuler. workshop nasional kurikulum akuntansi syariah, 1–20. the american journal of islamic social sciences vol. 8, no. 3, 1991 557 book review merchant capital and islam by mahmood ibrahim. austin: university of texas press, 1990, 246pp. this book, based substantially on the author's doctoral dissertation (ucla, 1981), presents an economic interpretation of the early hi tory of islam. by studying the trends and consequences of pre-islamic makkah's commercial activities, it seeks to bring out both the material bases of the rise of islam and the element of continuity between pre-islamic makkah and early islamic history. the author bases his work on the following postulate: the development of merchant capital in sixth-century makkah allowed it to become the dominant political and economic power in arabia. the most successful wielder of this status, the banii umayyah, eventually consolidated its position as the wielder of authority. the growth of commercial capitalism, which caused social lofbid., 4 7. 558 the american journal of islamic social sciences vol. 8, no. 3, 1991 transformations within makkah and made the effective regulation of its external relations a necessity so as to safeguard its commercial interests, resulted in the development of several institutions, such as sadaquh (charitable offerings), rifaduh (support), siqiiyah (providing water to the pilgrims to makkah), ilfif (a pact guaranteeing safety and safe-conduct), hums (those people inhabiting the harum at the time of the prophet’s appearance who observed rigorous religious taboos), and hi& (confederacy). however, institutional development in makkah proved inadequate to the demands created by rapid economic progress. the resultant problems gradually formed the material basis which caused the advent of islam. islam, in turn, sought to promote makkah’s commercial capitalism through, for example, the concept of a monotheistic god’s absolute and everlasting authority, which solved the problems associated with the breakdown of pre-islamic makkah’s tribal authority, and through its concept of an ummah which transcended tribal barriers and made social and economic mobility possible. after suggesting that islam suited the interests of makkah’s merchants, the author surveys early islamic history using commerce as his point of reference. he argues that already during the reign of ‘uthm5n, the pre-islamic merchant class (the “traditional segment”) had virtually monopolized the state machinery and made it an instrument for promoting its commercial interests. this policy was continued by the umayyad state with great success. the assertion of the traditional segment’s economic interests, however, came to be bitterly opposed by those muslims who owed their position only to islam (the ”new segment”) and not to any pre-islamic factors. ‘umar, during his reign, tried to balance these contending parties. however, during the reign of his successor ‘uthmiin, members of the new segment became so disenchanted with his policies that they murdered him. this group later identified with ‘ali. as ‘ali’s coalition was a collection of groups with different interests, some of them left and became known as the khawlrij . the victory of mu‘lwiyah over ‘ni during the arbitration after the battle of siffin cleared the way for the former to undertake the internal reconquest of the ummah and represented the final victory of the traditional segment. this is the substance of ibrahim’s argument. the book ends with an epilogue which briefly alludes to some subsequent historical developments in the umayyad and the early ‘abbasid periods. he concludes that although islam lent itself to the promotion of commercial capitalist interests during its first two centuries, its spirit was in fact neither capitalistic nor feudalistic, although historically it has been able to adapt itself to the dominant social forces. the following observations may now be made. the thesis that the advent of islam is essentially a product of the socioeconomic situation created by the american journal of islamic social sciences vol. 8, no. 3, 1991 559 the development of commercial capitalism in makkah is essentially a nateration of montgomery watt’s ideas? ibrahim’s work does, however, mark an advance due to its greater detailing of makkah’s commercial milieu, the rise of islam within it, and its tracing of continuities of pre-islamic commercial trends into islamic times. however, while ibrahim’s reconstruction of the process whereby the banii ‘umayyah gradually acquired economic and political power in makkah and then used it to establish the ‘umayyad caliphate is noteworthy, his attempt to link the advent of islam with the development of merchant capital is rather unconvincing. for instance, he does not explain why, if islam was so eminently suited to the makkan merchants’ interests, did they so bitterly oppose it until the end?2 perhaps more importantly, as patricia crone pointed out in her current polemic against watt’s view on the nature of makkah’s trade, if islam was a product of makkan commerce and its attendant problems, why was it first accepted in medinah, a city in which makkah’s economic conditions did not exist?3 ibrahim’s account of the first civil war is, on the whole, disappointing. the substance of his interpretation follows the arguments of martin hinds4 and m. a. shaban5 and does not add anythmg significant to them. throughout, the explanation is reduced to the conflicting economic and social interests of the new segment and the traditional segment and, while it is recognized that the “conflict . . . was within an islamic framework,” no effort is made either to explicate this framework or to give it any importance. ~~ ‘for watt’s other works, see: muhammad at mecca (oxford: oxford university press, 1953); islam and the integmtion of society (london: oxford university press, 1961); muhummud, prophet and statesman (oxford: oxford university press, 1964); and muhammads mecca: history in the qurizn (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1988). zpatricia crone, meccan tmde and the rise of islam (princeton: princeton university press, 1987), 235. 31bid. while crone’s argument that if islam emerged in response to the needs of makkan trade it would not have been accepted first in medinah (where economic conditions were very different) is valid, her further assumption that because makkah’s merchant class rejected islam because it could not solve those very problems is not valid. this can be shown by pointing out the fact that the solutions provided by islam were opposed by the rich makkan merchants who were intent upon maintaining their current status at the expense of solving makkah’s larger economic problems. but, pace ibrahim, to say that the prophet’s mission could offer a solution to makkah’s economic problems is not the same, however, as saying that it was suited to the interests of the rich makkan merchants nor that his mission was itself inspired by these conditions. 4m. hinds, “kufan political alignments and their background in the mid-seventeenth century a.d.,” international journal of middle east studies i1 (1971): 346-67. also see his article “the murder of caliph ‘uthmin,” international journal of middle ehst studies 111 sm. a. shaban, islamic history: a new interpretation (cambridge: cambridge university (1972): 450-69. press, 1971). 560 the american journal of islamic social sciences vol. 8, no. 3, 1991 the discussion, moreover, is often very vague. for example, he notes that the conflict between the new segment and the traditional segment “was expressed in two opposing views of the office of the caliph and its powers” (p. 166), but nowhere does he explain what these two opposing views of the nature of the caliphate may have been. when summing up the new segment’s stand following ‘uthm5n”s murder, the author writes: “in essence the new segment said that the traditional segment should accept the entire transformation brought about by the death of ‘uthman” (p. 169). but as to what this “transformation” may have been, and whether it was brought about immediately on the caliph’s death or not, the reader is left to draw hidher own conclusions. unfortunately, the author displays a tendency to indulge in oversimplifications and sweeping generalizations, especially in the epilogue. this adds nothing to his originality, but does detract from the worth of this book. one is moreover struck by the author’s overriding concern to link all developments to economic causes, a concern which sometimes results in rather crude and misleading interpretations. thus, for instance, ‘umar its policy of ameliorating the conditions of the mawfizi (freed slaves) is inaccurately accounted for exclusively in terms of the commercial expansion which occurred during the time of the umayyad caliphate. this condition then necessitated their fuller participation in the copmunity’s life so as to enable commerce to maintain its accelerated activity (pp. 191 ff). comments on al ma’miin’s religious policy are rather more curious: his victory in the civil war against his brother “brought another threat against the landowners when he adopted the mu‘tazili dogma and began to enforce their doctrine of the ‘createdness of the qur’an’ . . . the most vehement opponent of the mu‘tazilah and the doctrine of the ‘createdness of the qur’an’ was alpnad b. hanbal . . . himself a petty landlord” (p. 192). how the theological tenets of the mu’tazilah could threaten landed interests is accounted for by the suggestion that postulating a “created,” and thus a temporally limited rather than eternal, qur‘an could possibly extend the scope for the exercise of caliphal authority. this authority, when brought to bear on taxation, could then adversely affect the interests of the landowning classes (p. 193)! in opposing this doctrine, ibn hanbal, “himself a petty landlord,” was thus in fact defending landed interests. this reviewer has no wish to deny that helpful light can often be shed on sociopolitical and sometimes also on intellectual and religious problems and developments by referring to relevant economic factors. in general, however, the influence of economic factors is far more subtle (even if and when it is substantial) than a simple one-to-one correspondence (of the kind the author attempts with reference to al ma’miin’s religious policy, for instance, or more generally with the rise of islam itself) would allow. furthermore, the influence of economic or, for that matter, of any other factors on given the american journal of islamic social sciences vol. 8, no. 3, 1991 561 historical developments has to be clearly demonstrated rather than merely suggested or asserted. to conclude then, it may be stated that although this book addresses an extremely important period in the history of islam, its one-sided perspective precludes it from making an important contribution to our understanding. however, it does have the merit of emphasizing and trying to trace historical continuity between the pre-islamic and early islamic periods. its interpretation of early islamic history in terms of economic factors and developments could also have been useful if, in highlighting their role, other factors as well had been considered for the purposes of historical accuracy and interpretative balance. muhammad q. zaman institute of islamic studies mcgill university montreal, quebec, canada maxwell and fleming 56 expropriating privacy: the public persona of the pandemic unhoused fer g maxwell t o r o n t o m e t r o p o l it a n u n iv e r s i t y and vic toria fleming yo r k u n iv e r s i t y abstract during the winter of 2020, toronto resident khaleel seivwright, began to construct small mobile shelters to provide insulation and privacy to unhoused residents living outdoors. conditions produced by the covid-19 pandemic increased demand on the city’s already underfunded and strained shelter system, subsequently accelerating development of encampments in parks throughout the city. from the outset, these “tiny shelters” served as a flashpoint in public discourse on the question of the relative health, safety, and beauty of unhoused privacy. drawing on media coverage of seivwright’s case, we address the question of the private persona as it emerges in relation to the unhoused, and to the practices of violent expropriation which daily police their existence. by examining the news discourses produced about sievwrights tiny shelters, we interrogate how sievwright’s public persona came to represent encampment residents as well as himself subsequently emerging as a boundary subject mediating the contradictory relations immanent to domesticity: between public and private space and public and private identity. our analysis asks how the limits of privacy are actively imposed and managed under capitalism: who is allowed to have domestic space, where is that domestic space allowed to exist, and crucially what public personas emerge in relation to practices departing from the normative bounds of capitalism’s public/private distinction? using critical discourse analysis (cda), we examine the ways in which public personas are mediated by individuals and media institutions at the same time as addressing how personas themselves intervene in this process. cda directs us to ask how personas are constituted through language. this emphasis on persona as both outcome of relations of power and as mediator in its own right permits us to address figures who are conventionally denied personas while simultaneously complicating and challenging the meanings behind domesticity within capitalist cities. key words unhoused; housing; space; critical discourse analysis introduction the winter of 2020 saw toronto carpenter khaleel seivwright undertake a project to construct small, mobile shelters for the city’s unhoused residents. with the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic, toronto’s underfunded and overloaded shelter system experienced an increase in demand as many toronto residents faced an intensification of their economic precarity. between 2018 and 2022, the number of people using toronto’s shelter system increased from 6,600 to 9,700 (gibson 2022; hune-brown 2019). yet, due to the cramped conditions of most shelters in toronto, many unhoused people expressed concern regarding the health and safety persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 2 57 of the shelter system fearing greater exposure to the covid-19 virus (boucher et al. 2022). consequently, these dynamics accelerated the emergence of encampments of unhoused people in parks throughout the city. encampments, also known as tent cities, are erected to support a larger group of unhoused people who collectively construct alternative forms of housing using items, such as tents, on either publicly or privately owned land (boucher et al. 2022). as boucher et al. (2022, p. 2) note, encampments “often form without official authorisation and thus violate local bylaws [. . .] in canada, these bylaws have engaged significant charter litigation and human rights analysis” yet their continued enforcement “harm[s] encampment residents in canada and violate[s] international human rights law.” seivwright’s tiny shelters project responded to the scale of both the housing crisis as well as the pandemic in an attempt to afford toronto’s unhoused residence a warm space to live until the city developed and enacted a longer-term and sustainable solution. with seivwright’s announcement of his tiny shelters project on gofundme, housing activists, housed toronto residents, toronto’s local news media, as well as others began supporting his initiative. as such, through seivwright the double crisis of housing and the pandemic became articulated as an emergent and imminent political issue. yet, within a matter of months, the city filed an injunction against seivwright and his tiny shelters demanding the cessation of his project. these issues of access to housing and the enforcement of legal distinctions between public and private property raise the question of unhoused peoples’ capacity to practice public and private persona: how does the social production of and access to space mediate persona? looking at news media discourse on seivwright’s tiny shelter project, we use the concept of the boundary subject to illustrate the social relations shaping the production of public and private space as well as the persona’s capacity to navigate between and across these sites. as a boundary subject, seivwright’s public persona helps manage a housing crisis which denies the unhoused personas by virtue of their exclusion from private property. we argue that critical discourse analysis’ (cda) concern with language’s mediation of political possibility holds the capacity to capture these dynamics. our analysis explores the representation of the relative transparency between public and private space, the scale of tiny shelters vis-a-vis the availability of public urban space in the city, and the risks immanent to the construction of “makeshift” shelters emphasises the need to think through the constitutive social relations through which space is produced, and persona comes to matter. theoretical framework persona studies emerged in dialogue with arendt’s work on the private, the public, and the social. arendt (2000) argued that the political transformations of modernity could in part be understood through the erosion of the barrier between what she called the "public" and "private" realms. looking to classical antiquity, she contended that ancient greece demonstrated a strict separation between matters of private interest and matters of political interest. political action could here constitute an outstanding difference from the normative features of everyday life because concern for such things was safely ensconced in the privatelyheld home and hearth of a slave owning elite. for these fortunate citizens, concern for the labour required for their own reproduction could take a backseat to the concern for their free expression in the political realm (p. 186). yet this crucial division was torn asunder by the rise of the modern capitalist state and its concomitant public organisation of the life process itself (p. 197). the state of nature which enlightenment political philosophy expounded upon imagined a shared social space as the basic condition of life and therefore defined the private as a necessary retreat from this (p. 191). social space, which arendt argues emerged from the collapse of these two distinct spheres of life, fatally blended the private construction of self with the public construction of self. this collapse, theorists of persona argue, enabled the production of persona as the public constitution of individual selfhood. persona refers to a conception of the self-emerging maxwell and fleming 58 from the individual's navigation of private and public modes of (re)presentation. tracing the concept through literary, psychoanalytical, and sociological modes of the early twentieth century, marshall and barbour (2015) argue that persona describes "the peculiar relation between the individual and the social in its production and enactment by individuals" (p. 2). they posit persona as constituted by different registers of performance which, articulated to different audiences, variously "allow the social to move into the territories of the previously private and intimate" (p. 6). persona studies demonstrates a marked theoretical sympathy with the project of cultural studies, insofar as both attempt to foreground the agency of the subject vis-a-vis the social relations within which they find themselves enmeshed. de certeau's notion of strategy and tactics informs persona studies' questioning of the "strategies foregrounding versions of public and private presentations and how these relate to the individual celebrity negotiating his/her position within institutions and the broader culture" (barbour et al. 2017, p. 7). reference to de certeau, together with arendt's own implicit identification of public and private realms with particular spaces, draws attention to how persona emerges in relation to the social production of space. walter benjamin (2005, p. 733-34) demonstrates this in view of the bourgeois parlour rooms of the late-nineteenth century. a new capacity for the consumption of leisure goods, driven by the primitive accumulation of pre-capitalist cultural practices, the production of commodities and the emergence of a new middle-class to enjoy them, funneled all manner of pre-capitalist aesthetic forms into the front rooms of emergent bourgeoisie. looking over these pristine, slip-covered and glass-encased objects, benjamin argues the visitor to these homes might feel unwelcome; the room sought to reflect the outside world inwardly in object form. benjamin articulates how the privacy of the modern capitalist subject is experienced not as a lack "privation" in arendt’s terms (p. 191) but as excess. but as with so many of the cultural forms he examines, benjamin looks back on these parlours with a melancholic eye, arguing that the increasingly rapid circulation of commodities eventually effaced the real and imagined membrane between these crowded rooms and their exterior environments, exemplified and harried on by the austere steel and glass surfaces of modernist architecture – environments in which it became impossible to leave a meaningful trace of one's presence (2005, p. 734). the spatial turn in marxist thought goes some length to develop a theory of how such transformations of the private realm come to be mediated by space, arguing that the subject does not navigate space so much as they are thoroughly and dialectically entwined with it. in the words of one of marxist spatial theory’s principal thinkers, henri lefebvre (1991, p. 179), "symmetries, interactions and reciprocal actions, axes and planes, centres and peripheries, and concrete oppositions" spin out of the material exchange between the body and its environment immanent to practice. building on lefebvre, neil smith (1984) emphasizes that the production of space also involves the production and integration of distinct spatial scales including the individual’s relation to their immediate urban, regional, national, and global context (p. 180). this production of scale is understood not as a pre-given natural quality but as a contingent set of relations which emerges historically. what this means for the study of persona is that the individual's negotiation of public and private realms of presentation must be thought in terms of the navigation of particular spaces and the relations constituting and connecting these: the physical, conceptual, and imaginative dimensions of a given space both emerge from and condition the practices through which particular kinds of persona come into being. drawing on the insights of marxist spatial theory, we can consider how the relation between the public and the private, and thus the individual subject's capacity to navigate these in their presentation of self, are mediated by transformations in the material and discursive spaces they inhabit. though the constitution of self on digital platforms have often been characterised in both promotional and critical literature as delocalised, a number of scholars draw attention to the dialectical relation between platforms, the spatial contexts within which they are used, and the social relations which produce them (farmaki et al. 2020; kitchin & persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 2 59 dodge 2011; ash et al. 2018). but beyond consideration of digital persona production, attention to the dialectical entwinement of self and space is demanded by the present neoliberal regime of capital accumulation in which the rapid development and trade of land punctuates decades of violent urban redevelopment. in the context of the city of toronto, where the average rent is unaffordable to nearly half of all renters (connelly 2022), with chronic underinvestment in social housing amidst booming private housing stock development (lehrer et al. 2010), alongside an overcrowded shelter system and rapid rises in deaths among the unhoused (hunt and caseletto 2022), access to private space has become a particularly scarce, though no less important, mediator of subjects' capacity to survive, much less to actively cultivate public and private persona. by interrogating the social relations shaping the production of public personas as well as the spaces they navigate and inhabit, we are able to illustrate the ways in which certain public personas gain traction by mediating between different social groups, institutions, spaces, and/or discourses. in the case of seivwright, his public persona came to fruition at the point of mediation. although seivwright likely did not intend to become a public persona through his tiny shelters project, in some instances, personas are developed regardless of authorial intentions (moore et al. 2017). while persona studies have focused more directly on analysing the self-construction of a private persona for public consumption (barbour et al. 2017; humphrey 2017), our intention is to highlight the ways in which the emergence, construction, and movement of public personas often evade the author of the personas ability to manage their public image. in some instances, such as the case with seivwright, his public persona extended beyond self-constructed images and narratives developed for social media platforms and entered other venues of public discourses, such as news media, precisely because of the mediating capacities afforded to his public persona. as such, star and griesemer’s (1989; 2011) conceptualisation of boundary objects are a useful way to think through the mobility and fluidity of seivwright’s public persona. according to star and griesemer, boundary objects have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognisable, a means of translation. the creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining a coherence across intersecting social worlds (1989, p. 393). however, although we understand objects as “a social configuration or ensemble of social relationships,” (jameson 1991, p. 137) public persona should not be viewed as an object wholly external to its subject. bishop and waring (2019) were the first to identify the notion of a boundary subject as distinct from yet related to boundary objects in their analysis of the role of a patient’s subjectivity during the discharge process at clinical facilities. by conceptualising the boundary subject, bishop and waring were able to include the patient themselves as an integral component to the coordination of their care. borrowing from bishop and waring, we extend the idea of a boundary subject to persona studies in order to capture both the social relations which underpin the construction of personas as well as acknowledging the relative autonomy some subjects maintain in shaping and directing their public personas. by framing public persona as a boundary subject, we can demonstrate the embeddedness of personas in the social worlds and spaces in which they are made in an attempt to move away from the prioritisation of concerns of individualism as the driving force informing their production. theories of the discursive production of subjectivity elucidate the relative autonomy afforded to boundary subjects in the production of their own public persona. building on antonio gramsci’s (1971) contention that class struggle necessitates the capture and maintenance of control over the limits of political possibility, theories of discourse identify the communicative techniques by which certain relations and the possible futures immanent to them become elided and closed off (fairclough, 2003, p. 45). discourse refers simply to “a maxwell and fleming 60 particular way of representing some part of the world” (fairclough, 2003, p. 17). different discourses include or leave out, imagine or deny, abstract or concretise different aspects of a given subject as a direct efflux of the interests of their authors (fairclough 2000, p. 17). persona studies has typically attempted to locate the agency of the individual in the discursive construction of their public self. developed in relation to a tendency in cultural studies, persona studies theorise the collective agency of the audience vis-a-vis the mediatised production of meaning. marshall et al. (2015, p. 295) write that persona studies focuses on the “agency of the individual” in relation to these same processes of communication. though consideration of collective and individual agency is of course an important part of any theory of social relations, we call attention here to the necessity of considering the mutual interpenetration and co-constitution of the individual and the social. we are interested here in tracing the social relations which structure and mediate these two entwined categories. while marshall and barbour (2015, p. 2) characterise persona as the study of “the relation between the individual and the social in its production and enactment by individuals,” the marxist spatial thought described above, together with norman fairclough’s development of a critical materialist study of discourse, makes difficult any claim to the individual as discrete from and enacting the social. our intervention attempts to address persona as not only “presentation and performance” (marshall & barbour 2015, p. 2) but also as a form of representation. in so doing, we are able to highlight the discursive orientation of representation while subsequently elucidating the social relations which always already underpin the construction of personas. method for this research, we culled articles from several canadian news outlets, ranging from local to national news media, including the globe and mail, the toronto star, blogto, toronto city news, now magazine, and toronto life. through the collection of these sources, we were able to capture how seivwright’s tiny shelter initiative as well as his public persona moved between regional and national scales while also highlighting any discrepancies that could emerge from each publication's coverage. as seivwright addressed an acute local crisis within toronto, we included a variety of locally based news sources. we queried factiva and google news for mention of “tiny shelter”, “tiny shelters”, “khaleel seivwright” and “seivwright” between october 2020 and october 2021, collecting for analysis all forty-two articles returned through this process. this period of time was selected because it includes both the launch of the tiny shelters project and the announcement of its (forced) conclusion. we selected the search terms used as they constituted necessary components of the discourse on seivwright’s shelters and by extension provided us with access to the discursive negotiation of his public persona. news media’s capacity to pull together and coordinate relations between different discourses made it a crucial pathway through which the discursive relations constituting sievwright’s persona flowed. in the case of the sources we have selected, the interdiscursivity of news media bridges relations between the privacy of the unhoused, pandemic social distancing policy, and urban redevelopment to construct seivwright’s public persona. in order to pull apart and explore these relations, we use norman fairclough’s framework for conducting critical discourse analysis (cda). cda clarifies how the relation between social events and social actors is mediated by the networking of social practices through discourse. texts relate to particular orders of discourse through three primary social practices: action, representation, and identification (fairclough 2000, p. 22). each practice is objectified in a different aspect of the internal and external relations between texts: genre (action), discourse (representation) and style (identification). action implies a social relation between elements, which we found in the mixture of different genres present in the news media sampled here. from journalistic investigation of the city’s management of sievwright’s homes, to editorial commentary on these actions and the broader context of the entwined pandemic and housing crises, seivwright’s persona was persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 2 61 actively positioned as a boundary subject navigating through disparate social groups and discursive sites. news media discourse on sievwright enabled the establishment of a communicative relationship between toronto’s municipal government and housing advocates without the involvement of the unhoused, who were actively excluded from participation by virtue of their material conditions. as a boundary subject, sievwright’s public persona moved between antagonistic social groups, such as the toronto municipal government and housing advocates. news media, then, operates as a confluent and intertextual site grouping together various relations which influences the construction and contextualisation of public personas. representation describes the elements themselves exemplified for us in news coverage positioning interviews with seivwright, housing advocates, toronto residents, and representatives from the municipal government alongside reports regarding the inaccessibility of housing produced by the city or non-profits within a single location. the interdiscursivity of news media therefore makes it a useful site to interrogate the social relations shaping the production of public personas. we look at how coverage of sievwright mediates the relation between discourses on unhoused domesticity, the entwined crises of housing and the covid pandemic, and the municipal government’s management of both. finally, identification constitutes some undertaking, commitment to, or judgment of these elements exemplified here in news media’s construction of seivwright’s public persona as a representative of the unhoused, and thus of structural issues associated with housing and the pandemic. as such, the utilisation of sievwright’s public persona as a representation of the discourses of both the unhoused and the housing crisis in toronto illustrates not only the influence of news media discourse on the construction of the public persona, but also how the relation between privacy and access to property within capitalism crucially shapes individual agency, determining which subjects can emerge as public personas in the first place. constructing seivwright’s persona the social event we are examining is the construction and subsequent destruction of the encampments in toronto throughout the covid pandemic. sievwright emerged as a public persona which mediated the public-ness of the unhoused residents of these encampments. through sievwright, the encampments were articulated as a social, economic, and political issue which linked a network of actors in response, including the toronto municipal government, housing advocates, toronto residents, as well as others. because of the context of domesticity and its close link to capitalist property relations, sievwright stood in as one of the social actors for the unhoused. emerging from our analysis of these texts are three primary themes which we describe as follows: transparency, scale, and temperature. each relates broadly to the spatial dimensions influencing the production of public and private personas, emphasising how the capacity to register as persona in news media discourse necessitates material practices objectified in and emerging in relation to the spaces in which they occur. successive readings of lexical and semantic relations within and between texts paid particular attention to the presence of private space as a condition of the private and public persona, locating in this social relation three kinds of practices mediating the transparency of the borders between public and private space, the perceived scale of the private vis-a-vis the public, and the temperature requirements subtending the private. moreover, the themes identified draw out the role seivwright’s public persona played as a boundary subject where his persona served to articulate the urgency and immediacy of the housing crisis as well as the pandemic to broader audiences. as the city of toronto amplified their efforts through legal measures to remove seivwright as a central figure in public discourses of the encampments, the loosely linked relations between housing advocates, the city, as well as encampment residents began deteriorating resulting in an amplification of violence enacted by the city towards encampment residents. seivwright’s public persona, as a maxwell and fleming 62 boundary subject, served to at least temporarily bridge the interests of these groups in an attempt to address the severity of the housing crisis during the first year of the pandemic. transparency the first theme we identified throughout the news discourses analysed was the varying degrees of transparency – meaning the spatial and linguistic capacity to be known and/or unknown – afforded to seivwright and encampment residents. the contrasting degrees of transparency afforded to these subjects illustrates the relationship between private space and the production of public personas – that is, one’s public persona is crucially mediated by their relation to private property. seivwright’s status as a once-unhoused, now secure resident of toronto positioned him as an external subject intervening in the city’s limited response to the housing crisis. early coverage of his efforts positioned him as such an individual actor by taking note of some biographical details, including his age and occupation. for example, the earliest article on the tiny shelters, published in blogto, wrote: winter is notoriously difficult for underhoused residents in cities like toronto, where temperatures reach deadly lows and shelters are almost always at capacity….with a global pandemic now thrown into the mix, further compounding what was already a raging affordable housing crisis, advocates are growing concerned for the safety of vulnerable toronto residents — residents who, thanks to covid-19, are more vulnerable than ever before…a 28-year-old carpenter has devised what seems like a suitable solution, at least for now, while government officials work to increase permanent affordable housing for all (o’neil, 2020). other coverage characterised seivwright as a singular representative of the unhoused, one whose perspective on his own shelters could have a determining effect on the city’s housing policy. toronto star columnist sean micaleff (2021) emphasised seivwright’s contention that his shelters be a “temporary solution to the housing crisis”, while a profile of local artist rajni perera (ansari 2021) included seivwright’s efforts as an example that “people in power are listening to activists'' (despite the fact that the city had actively suppressed seivwright’s capacity to intervene). through the news media’s construction of seivwright’s public persona the housing crisis became articulated as an urgent political and economic issue where his persona started operating as a boundary subject between the city of toronto, encampment residents, housing advocates, as well as with local, provincial, and in some cases, national media. seivwright’s public persona was used to both contextualise the growing housing crisis during the pandemic as well as cut across social groups normally at odds with each other. at least temporarily, seivwright’s public persona participated in the translation of the housing crisis to a range of other social actors in toronto, including news media. through seivwright’s public persona acting as a boundary subject, a bridge was erected between these disparate groups and spaces. one set of practices mediating the transparency afforded to seivwright operated concretely through the spaces of the encampments themselves. we use the term spatial transparency to refer to the architectural and institutional dimensions of space which support particular discourses of the self, including but not limited to the public and private persona. benjamin’s analysis of the bourgeois parlour paid particular attention to how its relation to public space shifted with a growing sense of alienation produced by the expanded circulation of commodities and its architectural corollary in the relative visual transparency afforded by modernist buildings. an example of transparency in the case we analyse here is given in news discourses placing the relations between the interiors and exteriors of encampment dwellings in contradistinction to the interiors and exteriors of the city’s shelter system. across the texts analysed here, the city of toronto is continually quoted as identifying seivwright’s efforts as “interfering with efforts to relocate people indoors” (gibson 2021). persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 2 63 seivwright’s tiny shelters provided a degree of opacity for unhoused people to maintain a sense of privacy outside of the city’s purview, which would have been inaccessible to them in the shelter system. enclosed on all sides by wood and insulation, and thus impermeable to vision from the outside, the tiny shelters limited the city’s capacity to record and manage the mobility of the unhoused people within their most intimate, ostensibly private spaces. a toronto star interview with one unhoused woman contrasted the sense of privacy afforded by the tiny shelters with that found in the city shelters: the idea that these shelters are safer than encampments is false. [. . .] it’s a feeling that many living in encampments share with jewel, because having each other feels more secure. […] in her last three weeks at the park, she lived in one of khaleel seivwright’s tiny shelters, and had her first full night’s sleep in months. that sense of security wasn’t the same at the bond [a city shelter]. on her first day, when staff did her intake, they didn’t ask her any questions about prescription medication, medical needs, allergies, health conditions or mental health, including if she’d had thoughts of suicide. she also shared that most shelters in the city aren’t safe for women, disabled people, people in the lgbtq community, or people of colour -and as a queer, disabled woman, she’s faced sexual violence, drug abuse and homophobia in shelters around the city. (salhia 2021). the kind of inspection described here is mediated by the tiny shelters’ location on public land as the threshold for entrance to these warm beds is not defined or demarcated by interviews, bag checks, quiet hours, and other surveillant practices used within the shelter system. the city, in response to the encampments operating in public space and outside of normative municipal housing practices for the unhoused, actively positioned seivwright’s tiny shelters and the encampments broadly as dangerous, illegal, and ultimately a threat to the public enjoyment of these now occupied parks. for example, emma tietel writes in the toronto star, “local carpenter khaleel seivwright’s tiny shelters are dangerous, they [city officials] say. living outside in general is dangerous, they say.” (teitel 2022). liam casey, reporting for the globe and mail, wrote, the city’s response to encampments takes into consideration the health and wellbeing of those living outside and the broader community needs,” he said [. . .] “the city cannot force people to come inside and avail themselves of the many services offered by the city but living in an encampment in a city park is unhealthy and illegal. note here the emphasis on “broader community needs” which, left vague, identifies some proximate activities threatened by the use of public land for private space. these dangers were explicitly articulated as a threat to the physical security of the housed as well as the economic security of the local tourism sector in statements by ontario premier doug ford. paraphrased in the toronto star (gibson 2021) premier ford argued that “homeless people should leave the camps and accept spaces in the shelter system. while acknowledging fears about the system, from assaults to theft, he [ford] cited the optics of encampments on past and future tourists.” finally, the spatial mediation of the relation between the public and private spaces navigated by the unhoused was accompanied by linguistic practices which rendered their domestic lives opaque. only a handful of articles referenced encampment residents by name, and only one of these endeavoured to elaborate the personal history of encampment dwellers to the same extent as was afforded seivwright. here, seivwright’s status as a boundary subject is emphasised through the absence of any personal or social details of the unhoused people who he has come to represent. for example, an op-ed published in the toronto star, uses the experience of jewell, “a 50-year-old, queer, disabled woman who has been experiencing homelessness since the end of 2019” to relate some of the risks of violence and trauma maxwell and fleming 64 immanent to toronto’s shelter system (salhia 2021). general disinterest in the domesticity of the unhoused was particularly apparent when compared with pronounced biographical interest in seivwright. evidenced by kozak writing for the globe and mail, khaleel seivwright, 28, a native torontonian and professional carpenter, is building tiny shelters for homeless people living outside in toronto this winter. [. . .] mr. sievwright once spent five months living in a tent in vancouver and knows first-hand some of the immense challenges facing homeless people (2020). yet, when it came to discourses on the encampments circulating within toronto city hall, residents were not afforded the same anonymity present in news media coverage, as the city spent months laying out plans to clear about two dozen people from a homeless encampment in a popular park [. . .] building dossiers on those living there [emphasis ours] and involving hundreds of municipal workers in the process, internal documents reveal. [. . .] the city also compiled aerial maps of all the tents in the park, each identified with a number and related to each resident (casey 2022). even discussion of this openly surveillant activity on the part of the city neglected use of names, still referring to affected unhoused people under the anonymous group identity of the “encampment resident” (casey 2022). thus, while biographical detail could be afforded to seivwright, no such effort was made in the representation of the unhoused. rather, seivwright’s public persona operated as a boundary subject through which the unhoused came to be known without affording them a public persona or the private space which necessarily subtends this; thus, further illustrating the bounded relationship between the ability to produce a public persona and access to private space. scale mirroring smith’s conceptualisation of the production of scale (1984), seivwright’s public persona mediated different scalar hierarchies within the city. here, scale pertains to the relative size of the homes within these parks, the amount of space the encampments take up within the park itself; the scale and size of the crises of housing and the covid pandemic; and finally, anxieties about the limits of the production of relative space within the city. coverage of seivwright’s tiny shelters elevated their scalar qualities beyond concerns with private space to concerns with how private space dominates and shapes the development of urban space more generally. at the same time, seivwright’s status as an individual actor was continually transcended via constant comparisons between his lone initiative and municipal policy. these themes emerge through coverage of seivwright which continually characterises him as an individual good samaritan producing homes on his own time with materials supplied by charity – a figure of humble means but substantial determination. a toronto star editorial (heinonen 2020) describes him as a “scarborough-based carpenter who took matters into his own hands'' – a relative outsider, putting his skills as a craftsman to work in service to others. micaleff, in the star, registered awe at the apparent speed and effectiveness with which seivwright acted: “[he] saw a problem and acted quickly. for that, he’s a hero” (2021). a hero who, like david and goliath, is made compelling by the substantial difference between the size of the issue and the capacities of one individual. in contrast to the news discourses which continually stressed the singular and yet significantly meaningful intentions behind seivwright’s contributions, coverage repeatedly referenced the relative smallness of spaces afforded to unhoused people. here, seivwright’s public persona is amplified through the immensity of his task whereas public acceptance of unhoused people occupying his tiny shelters is contingent on the continued emphasis of their small size. the globe and mail, reporting on seivwright’s shelters, devoted attention to the smallness of the structures both in terms of their spatial footprint and their cost of production: persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 2 65 the tiny shelters, complete with a small, double glazed window and hand-built insulated door, resemble the basic structure of a typical home, allowing someone to sit and lay down, but not high enough for a person to stand in. the structures are constructed with basic building materials including 2 x 6 pieces of lumber, plywood, and various layers of insulation, and will keep an occupant warm in temperatures well below freezing (kozak 2020). much is made here of the shelters’ resemblance to a conventional private home; they map more cleanly to established bourgeois norms of domesticity than do tents or even the city’s shelters. on the other hand, the shelters’ small size and economical production suggests they offer little disruption to the established fiscal and scalar hierarchy of the city; they might slot neatly into spaces currently unused for profitable development. the significance of seivwright’s endeavor, and the accordant smallness of the structures he built was addressed as a helpful creative solution to an overloaded shelter system. one op-ed columnist wrote in the toronto star that seivwright’s tiny shelters highlighted the limits of the municipal government’s capacity to address the entwined housing and pandemic crises, arguing that “with toronto’s economy in a covid – lockdown restrictions – swoon, there’s only so much money to address the myriad social needs for which the city is responsible [. . .] where would 2,000 more beds be carved out? where would the money come from?” (dimanno 2020) discourse also emphasised that the shelters offered a technical solution to the presumed limits of affordable space available in the city. this was particularly pertinent in relation to the question of the use of park space with a number of texts emerging from the assumption that public parks’ intended and therefore central use should be for the leisure practices of the city’s housed population. tracy cook, the city’s deputy manager, was quoted in an article on seivwright’s shelters articulating a vague threat posed by encampment residents to leisure practice, emphasising in a powerpoint presentation concerning “encampment work – proposed next steps” that “we’re all concerned with encampments come spring.” the emphasis on seasonality here suggests that the encampments are an imminent danger to leisure practices in the city’s parks as the weather improves. the city’s chief communications officer, brad ross, similarly represented the unhoused encampment residents as existing outside of and in tension with their proximate housed community. ross was quoted in the globe and mail arguing that the city “has taken extraordinary measures to help those people experiencing homelessness and is trying to strike a balance between the homeless and the community” (casey 2022). the unhoused appear here as the obverse of the housed, a relationship defined by a fundamental tension which is the city’s task to manage. this discourse on the perceived disruption of the use of leisure space ultimately found expression in the terms of the city’s settlement with seivwright which prevented him from “placing or relocating shelters built on ‘city-owned land or otherwise creating a nuisance or interfering with the city’s rights in violation of the city of toronto municipal code” (salem 2021). parks, then, became off-limits to seivwright’s shelters. with the city’s injunction on seivwright, the city clearly articulated a central anxiety around his intervention in the housing crisis, namely the erection of privately-owned spaces within public land. “under the terms of the settlement,” the toronto star (salem 2021) noted, “mr. seivwright confirms he has no ownership interest [emphasis ours] in the tiny shelters.” the anxieties over the limited affordances of public space for private housing evident in this discourse is subtended by an absolute conception of urban space. texts observed here continually voice anxiety about the question of how much space is actually available for housing. generally, the news media discourse that we observed posited that use of public park space for unhoused privacy constitutes an ultimate limit on the production of private space. within the slim spatial margin for development, only the relative smallness of seivwright’s homes could mediate the vast and (presumably unaddressable) needs of the unhoused. this limit was articulated most firmly by mayor john tory, who argued that “the firm way, and frankly the compassionate way, [to deal with the issue] says these encampments can’t remain without being acted on in public parks” (gibson 2021). discourse on the size of the encampments, then, maxwell and fleming 66 reasserts that there is in fact a distinction between private and public spaces which enabled seivwright’s public persona to emerge as a boundary subject mediating the hostile relationship between the city of toronto and unhoused residents. temperature the third theme gleaned from news discourses of seivwright speaks to the limitations of a public persona mediating the housing crisis within the city. we use the concept of temperature to highlight three interrelated aspects of the discourses surrounding the tiny shelters: the perceived risks immanent to seivwright’s shelters, the city’s (un)willingness to accept the shelters in public space, and the limitations of an individual persona to articulate, manage, and mediate these political questions as a boundary subject. the warmth requirements of the human body mediates both supportive and antagonistic discourses on seivwright’s homes. on the one hand, we found that texts continually took note of the tiny shelters claimed capacity to heat at 20 degrees celsius using only body heat. for example, victoria gibson, in the toronto star wrote, “on a gofundme page, seivwright wrote that the structures were designed to be ‘mainly heated by body heat,’ and stay around 16 c in temperatures of -20 c.” (gibson 2021). yet on the other hand, numerous texts registered alarm at the tiny shelters as supposed fire hazards referencing as support the fire-related death of one encampment resident who was not housed in one of seivwright’s homes. the city of toronto’s official position was “that the encampments are dangerous, that they pose a fire hazard, and that they endanger lives” (heinonen 2022). in stating this, the city demarcates what is perceived to be acceptable and unacceptable forms of danger for encampment residents. although unhoused people have referenced several dangers found within the shelter system, the city’s position on the illegality of the encampments suggests a relative acceptance, or perhaps, normalisation of the threats within official shelter systems. the representation of fire in this discourse thus does two things: it highlights the management of temperature as a necessary condition of the private persona. and second, it actively gates access to warmth and, by extension, privacy by continually dictating the spatial and temporal parameters of the unhoused’s capacity to generate warmth – namely, that it be provided in the shelter system or not at all. lastly, the discourse on fire articulated the perceived risks attendant with seivwright’s status as a small enterprising producer. toronto’s fire chief jim jessop was repeatedly quoted as cautioning against the unregulated construction of seivwright’s shelters. one article followed the observation that “there has been no link made between seivwright’s shelters and the site of the [fire] fatality” with a quote from jessop noting that the fire “underscored the dangers of makeshift shelters” (gibson 2021). a limit to the aforementioned david and goliath construction of seivwright’s persona, then, is his ostensible inability to ensure safety relative to the institutional mechanisms afforded to urban planners and private developers. seivwright was continually framed as one man who, despite being well-intentioned, acted primarily alone and thus without institutional mechanisms for quality control. discourse on the risk of fire immanent to seivwright’s shelters demonstrates the incapacity of an individual persona to articulate and manage the political question of housing. as the narrative of risk of fire gained traction in news discourse, the illegality of seivwright’s structures became more pronounced. this manufactured tension between the city, seivwright, and the risk of fire is illustrated in an article reported by the toronto star. victoria gibson writes that the encampment discussion hit a flashpoint again in february. the city filed an injunction against seivwright. and days later, a blaze erupted in a corktown park encampment that claimed a life. ‘it highlights the life safety risks of living in these types of structures,’ jessop said at the time. the wooden structure has not been publicly linked to seivwright (gibson 2021). persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 2 67 the injunctions served against seivwright were continually represented alongside the city’s intimations towards fire hazards within the encampments. consequently, the functionality of seivwright’s public persona as a boundary subject began deteriorating the further, he was removed from news coverage. his growing incapacity to mediate between disparate social groups eventually culminated in the accelerated violent and forced expropriation of unhoused peoples from encampments around the city. consequently, seivwright’s public persona stood in as both the ideal subject as well as the limit of political action within the neoliberal city: an entrepreneurial producer whose principled stance made a substantial difference to his community, but whose efforts paled in comparison to the capacities of the municipal government. conclusion public and private personas emerge in relation to space. they are contingent in part on the material social relations within which their subjects are caught up and thus they are substantially mediated by forces beyond the control of the individual. we use the concept of the boundary subject to illustrate the social relations influencing the production of public and private space as well as the capacity for a persona to move between and across these sites. this relation becomes acutely apparent in the construction of seivwright’s public persona as a boundary subject which manages the housing crisis as the unhoused, who are denied personas due to their exclusion from private property, come to be represented through the figure of the principled, enterprising, housed individual. in this paper, we argued that critical discourse analysis holds the capacity to capture these dynamics as it is expressly concerned with language’s mediation of both political possibility as well as its limits. our analysis of the representation of the relative transparency between public and private space, the scale of tiny shelters vis-a-vis the availability of public urban space in the city, and the risks immanent to the construction of “makeshift” shelters in discourses on seivwright calls on scholars working in persona studies not to uncritically reproduce cultural studies’ emphasis on audience agency, but to instead emphasise that because the individual cannot be disentangled from the social, we must think through the constitutive practices from which both of these relations come to matter. works cited ansari, s 2021, ‘vision of hope’, toronto star, 14 march. arendt, h 2000, ‘the public and the private realm’, in baehr, p (ed.), the portable hannah arendt, penguin, new york, pp. 182–230. ash, j, kitchin, r & leszczynski, a (2018), ‘digital turn, digital geographies?’, progress in human geography, vol.42, pp. 25–43, <https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516664800> barbour, k., lee, k & moore, c (2017), ‘online persona research: an instagram case study’, 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(2020). ‘make shelter’, the globe and mail, 9 november, a6. . lefebvre, h 1991, the production of space, blackwell, massachusetts. persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 2 69 lehrer, u, keil, r & kipfer, s, 2010, ‘reurbanization in toronto: condominium boom and social housing revitalization’. disp the planning review, vol.46, pp. 81–90, <https://doi.org/10.1080/02513625.2010.10557065> machin, d & mayr, a, 2012, how to do critical discourse analysis: a multimodal introduction, sage publications, london. marshall, p.d & barbour, k 2015, ‘making intellectual room for persona studies: a new consciousness and a shifted perspective’, persona studies, vol. 1, pp. 1-12, <https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2015vol1no1art464> micallef, s 2021, ‘carpenter’s tiny shelters a missed opportunity for city’, toronto star, retrieved september 9, 2022 <https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/02/27/toronto-carpenterstiny-shelters-for-the-homeless-were-a-missed-opportunity-for-the-city.html>. moore, c, barbour, k, & lee, k 2017, ‘five dimensions of online persona.’ persona studies, vol.3, no.1, pp. 1-11. o’neil, l 2020, ‘a toronto carpenter is building insulated mini-shelters for homeless people’, blogto, retrieved september 9, 2022 <a toronto carpenter is building insulated minishelters for homeless people>. rice, c 2006, the emergence of the interior, routledge, abingdon-on-thames. salem, z 2021, ‘man who built shelters for homeless agrees to shutdown’, toronto star, retrieved september 9, 2022 <https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/08/28/manwho-built-tiny-shelters-for-torontos-homeless-will-no-longer-do-so-after-reachinglegal-agreement-with-city-of-toronto.html>. salhia, m 2021, ‘the reality for toronto’s homeless is that shelters don’t feel safe. what i, a suburbanite, learned from an encampment resident’, toronto star, retrieved september 9, 2022 <https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/06/22/the-reality-fortorontos-homeless-is-that-shelters-dont-feel-safe-what-i-learned-from-anencampment-resident.html> smith, n 2008, uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space. 3rd ed, university of georgia press, athens. star, s.l 2010, ‘this is not a boundary object: reflections on the origin of a concept’. science, technology, & human values, vol.35, pp. 601–617, <https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243910377624> star, s. l & griesemer, j. r 1989, ‘institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in berkeley’s museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907–39’, social studies of science, vol.19, no. 3, pp. 387–420, <https://doi:10.1177/030631289019003001 > tietel, e 2021, ‘doug ford should help dig the city out of this hole instead of digging cars out of snowbanks’, toronto star, retrieved september 9, 2022 <https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2022/01/18/doug-ford-shouldhelp-dig-the-city-out-of-this-hole-instead-of-digging-cars-out-of-snowbanks.html>. ferg maxwell toronto metropolitan university and victoria fleming york university abstract key words introduction theoretical framework method constructing seivwright’s persona transparency scale temperature conclusion works cited note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original page images. see 32252-h.htm or 32252-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32252/32252-h/32252-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32252/32252-h.zip) the stages in the social history of capitalism[1] by henri pirenne in the pages that follow i wish only to develop a hypothesis. perhaps after having read them, the reader will find the evidence insufficient. i do not hesitate to recognize that the scarcity of special studies bearing upon my subject, at least for the period since the end of the middle ages, is of a nature to discourage more than one cautious spirit. but, on the one hand, i am convinced that every effort at synthesis, however premature it may seem, cannot fail to react usefully on investigations, provided one offers it in all frankness for what it is. and, on the other hand, the kind reception which the ideas here presented received at the international congress of historical studies held at london last april, and the desire which has been expressed to me by scholars of widely differing tendencies to see them in print, have induced me to publish them. various objections which have been expressed to me, as well as my own subsequent reflections, have caused me to revise and complete on certain points my london address. in the essential features, however, nothing has been changed. a word first of all to indicate clearly the point of view which characterizes the study. i shall not enter into the question of the formation of capital itself, that is, of the sum total of the goods employed by their possessor to produce more goods at a profit. it is the capitalist alone, the holder of capital, who will hold our attention. my purpose is simply to characterize, for the various epochs of economic history, the nature of this capitalist and to search for his origin. i have observed, in surveying this history from the beginning of the middle ages to our own times, a very interesting phenomenon to which, so it seems to me, attention has not yet been sufficiently called. i believe that, for each period into which our economic history may be divided, there is a distinct and separate class of capitalists. in other words, the group of capitalists of a given epoch does not spring from the capitalist group of the preceding epoch. at every change in economic organization we find a breach of continuity. it is as if the capitalists who have up to that time been active, recognize that they are incapable of adapting, themselves to conditions which are evoked by needs hitherto unknown and which call for methods hitherto unemployed. they withdraw from the struggle and become an aristocracy, which if it again plays a part in the course of affairs, does so in a passive manner only, assuming the rôle of silent partners. in their place arise new men, courageous and enterprising, who boldly permit themselves to be driven by the wind actually blowing and who know how to trim their sails to take advantage of it, until the day comes when, its direction changing and disconcerting their manoeuvres, they in their turn pause and are distanced by new craft having fresh forces and new directions. in short, the permanence throughout the centuries of a capitalist class, the result of a continuous development and changing itself to suit changing circumstances, is not to be affirmed. on the contrary, there are as many classes of capitalists as there are epochs in economic history. that history does not present itself to the eye of the observer under the guise of an inclined plane; it resembles rather a staircase, every step of which rises abruptly above that which precedes it. we do not find ourselves in the presence of a gentle and regular ascent, but of a series of lifts. in order to establish the validity of these generalizations it is of course needful to control them by the observation of facts, and the longer the period of time covered the more convincing will the observations be. the economic history of antiquity is still too little known, and its relations to the ages which follow have escaped us too completely, for us to take our point of departure there; but the beginning of the middle ages gives us access to a body of material sufficient for our purpose. but first of all, it is needful to meet a serious objection. if it is in fact true, as seems to be usually conceded since the appearance of bücher's brilliant _entstehung der volkswirtschaft_[2]--to say nothing here of the thesis since formulated with such extreme radicalism by w. sombart[3]--that the economic organisation of the middle ages has no aspect to which one can rightly apply the term capitalistic, then our thesis is limited wholly to modern times and there can be no thought of introducing into the discussion the centuries preceding the renaissance. but whatever may be the favor which it still enjoys, the theory which refuses to perceive in the medieval urban economy the least trace of capitalism has found in recent times ever increasing opposition. i will not even enumerate here the studies which seem to me to have in an incontrovertible manner established the fact that all the essential features of capitalism--individual enterprise, advances on credit, commercial profits, speculation, etc.--are to be found from the twelfth century on, in the city republics of italy--venice,[4] genoa,[5] or florence.[6] i shall not ask what one can call such a navigator as romano mairano (1152-1201), if, in spite of the hundreds of thousands of francs he employed in business, the fifty per cent. profits he realized on his operations in coasting trade, and his final failure, one persists in refusing to him the name of capitalist. i shall pass over the disproof of the alleged ignorance of the medieval merchants. i shall say nothing of the astonishing errors committed in the calculations, so confidently offered to us as furnishing mathematical proof of the naïveté of historians who can believe the commerce of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to have been anything more than that of simple peddlers, a sort of artisans incapable of rising even to the idea of profit, and having no views beyond the day's livelihood.[7] important as all this may be, the weak point in the theory which i am here opposing seems to me to lie especially in a question of method. bücher and his partizans, in my opinion, have, without sufficient care, used for their picture of the city economy of the middle ages the characteristics of the german towns and more particularly the german towns of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. now the great majority of the german towns of that period were far from having attained the degree of development which had been reached by the great communes of northern italy, of tuscany, or of the low countries. instead of presenting the classical type of urban economy, they are merely examples of it incompletely developed; they present only certain manifestations; they lack others, and particularly those which belong to the domain of capitalism. therefore in presenting as true of all the cities of the middle ages a theory which rests only on the observation of certain of them, and those the least advanced, one is necessarily doing violence to reality. bücher's description of _stadtwirtschaft_ remains a masterpiece of penetration and economic understanding. but it is too restricted. it does not take account of certain elements of the problem, because these elements were not encountered in the narrow circle which the research covered. one may be confident that if, instead of proceeding from the analysis of such towns as frankfort, this study had considered florence, genoa, and venice, or even ghent, bruges, ypres, douai, or tournai, the picture which it furnished us would have been very different. instead of refusing to see capitalism of any kind in the economic life of the bourgeoisie, the author would have recognized, on the contrary, unmistakable evidences of capitalism. i shall later have occasion to return to this very essential question. but it was indispensable to indicate here the position which i shall take in regard to it. of course i do not at all intend to reject _en bloc_ the ideas generally agreed upon concerning the urban economy of the middle ages. on the contrary, i believe them to be entirely accurate in their essential elements, and i am persuaded that, in a very large number of cases, i will even say, if you like, in the majority of cases, they provide us with a theory which is completely satisfactory. i am very far from maintaining that capitalism exercised a preponderant influence on the character of economic organization from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. i believe that, though it is not right to call this organization "acapitalistic", it is on the other hand correct to consider it "anticapitalistic". but to affirm this is to affirm the existence of capital. that organization recognized the existence of capital since it tried to defend itself against it, since, from the end of the thirteenth century onward, it took more and more measures to escape from its abuses. it is incontestable that, from this period on, it succeeded by legal force in diminishing the rôle which capitalism had played up to that time. in fact it is certain, and we shall have occasion to observe it, that the power of capital was much greater during the first part of the urban period of the middle ages than during the second. but even in the course of the latter period, if municipal legislation seems more or less completely to have shut it out from local markets, capital succeeded in preserving and in dominating a very considerable portion of economic activity. it is capital which rules in inter-local commerce, which determines the forms of credit, and which, fastening itself on all the industries which produce not for the city market but for exportation, hinders them from being controlled, as the others are, by the minute regulations which in innumerable ways cramp the activity of the craftsmen.[8] let us recognize, then, that capitalism is much older than we have ordinarily thought it. no doubt its operation in modern times has been much more engrossing than in the middle ages. but that is only a difference of quantity, not a difference of quality, a simple difference of intensity not a difference of nature. therefore, we are justified in setting the question we set at the beginning. we can, without fear of pursuing a vain shadow, endeavor to discern what throughout history have been the successive stages in the social evolution of capitalism. of the period which preceded the formation of towns, that is, of the period preceding the middle of the eleventh century, we know too little to permit ourselves to tarry there. what may still have survived in italy and in gaul of the economic system of the romans has disappeared before the beginning of the eighth century. civilization has become strictly agricultural and the domain system has impressed its form upon it. the land, concentrated in large holdings in the hands of a powerful landed aristocracy, barely produces what is necessary for the proprietor and his _familia_. its harvests do not form material for commerce. if during years of exceptional abundance the surplus is transported to districts where scarcity prevails, that is all. in addition certain commodities of ordinary quick consumption, and which nature has distributed unequally over the soil, such as wine or salt, sustain a sort of traffic. finally, but more rarely, products manufactured by the rural industry of countries abounding in raw materials, such as, to cite only one, the friezes woven by the peasants of flanders, maintain a feeble exportation. of the condition of the _negociatores_ who served as the instruments of these exchanges, we know almost nothing. many of them were unquestionably merchants of occasion, men without a country, ready to seize on any means of existence that came their way. pursuers of adventure were frequent among these roving creatures, half traders, half pirates, not unlike the arab merchants who even to our day have searched for and frequently have found fortunes amid the negro populations of africa. at least, to read the history of that samo who at the beginning of the eighth century, arriving at the head of a band of adventuring merchants among the wends of the elbe, ended by becoming their king, makes one think involuntarily of certain of those beys or sheiks encountered by voyagers to the congo or the katanga.[9] clearly no one will try to find in this strong and fortunate bandit an ancestor of the capitalists of the future. commerce, as he understood and practised it, blended with plunder, and if he loved gain it was no affairs but rather in that of a primitive conqueror with whom violence of appetite took the place of calculation. samo was evidently an exception. but the spirit which inspired him may have inspired a goodly number of _negociatores_ who launched their barks on the streams of the ninth century. in the society of this period only the possession of land or attachment to the following of a great man could give one a normal position. men not so provided were outside the regular classification, forming a confused mass, in which were promiscuously mingled professional beggars, mercenaries in search of employment, masters of barges or drivers of wagons, peddlers, traders, all jostling in the same sort of hazardous and precarious life, and all no doubt passing easily from one employment to another. this is not to say, however, that among the _negociatores_ of the frankish epoch there were not also individuals whose situation was more stable and whose means of existence were less open to suspicion. indeed, we know that the great proprietors, lay or ecclesiastical, employed certain of their serfs or of their _ministeriales_ in a sporadic commerce of which we have already mentioned above the principal features. they commissioned them to buy at neighboring markets the necessary commodities or to transport to places of sale the occasional surplus of their grain or their wine. here too we discover no trace of capitalism. we merely find ourselves in the presence of hereditary servants performing gratuitous service, entirely analogous to military service. nevertheless commercial intercourse produced even then, in certain places particularly favored by their geographic situation, groups of some importance. we find them along the sea-coast--marseilles, rouen, quentovic--or on the banks of the rivers, especially in those places where a roman road crosses the stream, as at maastricht on the meuse or at valenciennes on the scheldt. we are to think of these _portus_ as wharves for merchandise and as winter quarters for boats and boatmen. they differ very distinctly from the towns of the following period. no walls surround them; the buildings which are springing up seem to be scarcely more than wooden sheds, and the population which is found there is a floating population, destitute of all privileges and forming a striking contrast to the bourgeoisie of the future. no organization seems to have bound together the adventurers and the voyagers of these _portus_. doubtless it is possible, it is even probable, that a certain number of individuals, profiting by circumstance, may have little by little devoted themselves to trade in a regular fashion and have begun by the ninth century to form the nucleus of a group of professional traders. but we have too little information to enable us to speak with any precision. the operations of credit follow much the same course. we cannot doubt that loans had been employed in the carolingian period, and the church as well as the state had occupied itself in combating their abuses.[10] but it would be a manifest exaggeration to deduce from this the existence of even a rudimentary capitalistic economy. everything indicates that the loans which we are considering here were only occasional loans, of usurious nature, to which people who had met with some catastrophe, such as war, a fire, or a poor harvest, were forced to have recourse temporarily. thus, the early centuries of the middle ages seem to have been completely ignorant of the power of capital. they abound in wealthy landed proprietors, in rich monasteries, and we come upon hundreds of sanctuaries the treasure of which, supplied by the generosity of the nobles or the offerings of the faithful, crowds the altar with ornaments of gold or of solid silver. a considerable fortune is accumulated in the church, but it is an idle fortune. the revenues which the landowners collect from their serfs or from their tenants are directed toward no economic purpose. they are scattered in alms, in the building of monuments, in the purchase of works of art, or of precious objects which should serve to increase the splendor of religious ceremonies. wealth, capital, if one may so term it, is fixed motionless in the hands of an aristocracy, priestly or military. this is the essential condition of the patronage that this aristocracy (_majores et divites_) exercises over the people (_pauperes_). its action is as important from the social point of view as it is unimportant from that of economics. no part of it is directed toward the _negociatores_, who, left to themselves, live, so to speak, on the fringe of society. and so it will continue to be, for long centuries. landed property, indeed, did not contribute at all to that awakening of commercial activity which, after the disasters of the norman invasion in the north and the saracen raids on the shores of the mediterranean, began to manifest itself toward the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the eleventh. its preliminary manifestations are found at the two extremities of the continent, italy and the low countries. the interior seas, between which europe was restricted in her advance toward the atlantic, were its first centres of activity. venice, then genoa and pisa, venture on the coasting trade along their shores, and then maintain, with their rich neighbors of byzantium or of the mohammedan countries, a traffic which henceforward constantly increases. meanwhile bruges at the head of the estuary of the zwyn, becomes the centre of a navigation radiating toward england, the shores of north germany, and the scandinavian regions. thus, economic life, as in the beginning of hellenic times, first becomes active along the coasts. but soon it penetrates into the interior of the country. step by step it wins its way along the rivers and the natural routes. on this side and on that, it arouses the hinterland into which the harbors cut their indentations. in this process of growth the two movements finally meet, and bring into communication the people of the north and the people of the south. by the beginning of the twelfth century it is an accomplished fact. in 1127 lombard merchants, journeying by the long route which descends from the passes of the alps toward champagne and the low countries, reach the fairs of flanders. if the feeble and precarious commercial activity of the carolingian period was sufficient to create gathering-places of merchants at the points most frequented in travel, it is not difficult to understand that the steady progress of economic activity from the end of the tenth century would result in the formation, at the strategic points of regional transit, of aggregations of like character but much more important and more stable. the surface of the land, the direction and the depth of the streams, determining the routes of commerce, also determined the location of the towns. indeed, european cities are the daughters of commerce and of industry. unquestionably in the countries of old civilization, in italy or in gaul, the roman cities had not completely disappeared. within the circle of their walls, which had now become too large and were filled with ruins, there gathered, around the bishop resident in each of them, a whole population of clerics and monks, and beside them a lay population employed in their service or support. in the north, one found the same spectacle at the centres of the new dioceses, at thã©rouanne, at utrecht, at magdeburg, or at vienna. but here was no trace, properly speaking, of municipal life. a certain number of artisans, some of them serfs, a little weekly market for the most indispensable commodities, sometimes a fair visited by the merchant-adventurers of whom we have spoken above--this is the sum total of economic life. but the situation changes from the moment when the increasing intensity of commerce begins to furnish men with new means of existence. immediately one discovers an uninterrupted movement of migration of peasants from the country towards the places in which the handling of merchandise, the towing of boats, the service of merchants furnish regular occupations and arouse the hope of gain. if the old cities disadvantageously placed at one side from the highways of travel continue in their torpor, the others see their population increase continuously. suburbs join the old enclosure; new markets are established; new churches are built for the new comers; and soon the primitive nucleus of the town, surrounded on all sides by the houses of the immigrants, becomes merely the quarter of the priests, bound to the shadow of the cathedral and submerged on all sides by the expansion of lay life. much that at the beginning was the essential is now nothing more than the accessory. the episcopal burg disappears amid faubourgs.[11] the city has not been formed by growing with its own forces. it has been brought into existence by the attraction which it has exerted upon its surroundings whenever it has been aided by its situation. it is the creation of those who have migrated toward it. it has been made from without and not from within. the bourgeoisie of the oldest towns of europe is a population of the transplanted. but it is at the same time essentially a trading population, and no other proof of this need be advanced than the fact that, down to the beginning of the twelfth century, _mercator_ and _burgensis_ were synonymous terms. whence came these pioneers of commerce, these immigrants seeking means of subsistence, and what resources did they bring with them into the rising towns? doubtless only the strength of their arms, the force of their wills, the clearness of their intelligence. agricultural life continued to be the normal life and none of those who remained upon the soil could entertain the idea of abandoning his holding to go to the town and take his chances in a new existence. as for selling the holding to get ready money, like the men of a modern rural population, no one at that time could have imagined such a transaction. the ancestors of the bourgeoisie must then be sought, specifically, in the mass of those wandering beings who, having no land to cultivate, floated across the surface of society, living from day to day upon the alms of the monasteries, hiring themselves to the cultivators of the soil in harvest time, enlisting in the armies in time of war, and shrinking from neither pillage nor rapine if the occasion presented itself. it may without difficulty be admitted that there may have been among them some rural artisans or some professional peddlers. but it is beyond question that with very few exceptions it was poor men who floated to the towns and there built up the first fortunes in movable property that the middle ages knew. fortunately we possess certain narratives which enable us to support this thesis with concrete examples. it will suffice to cite here the most characteristic of them, the biography of st. godric of finchale.[12] he was born of poor peasants in lincolnshire, toward the end of the eleventh century, and from infancy was forced to tax his ingenuity to find the means of livelihood. like many other unfortunates of all times, he at first walked the beaches on the outlook for wreckage cast up by the sea. then we see him, perhaps by reason of some fortunate find, setting up as a peddler and travelling through the country with a little pack of goods (_cum mercibus minutis_). at length he gathers together a small sum, and one fine day joins a troop of town merchants whom he has met in the course of his wanderings. thenceforward he goes with his companions from market to market, from fair to fair, from town to town. having thus become a professional merchant, he rapidly gains a sufficient sum to enable him to associate himself with other merchants, charter a boat with them, and engage in the coasting trade along the shores of england, scotland, denmark, and flanders. the company is highly successful. its operations consist in carrying to a foreign country goods which it knows to be uncommon there, in selling them there at a high price, and acquiring in exchange various merchandise which it takes pains to dispose of in the places where the demand for them is greatest and where it can consequently make the greatest gains. at the end of some years this prudent practice of buying cheap and selling dear has made of godric, and doubtless of his associates, a man of important wealth. then, touched by divine grace, he suddenly renounces his fortune, gives his goods to the poor, and becomes a monk. the story of godric, if one omits its pious conclusion, must have been that of many others. it shows us, with perfect clearness, how a man beginning with nothing might in a relatively short time amass a considerable capital. our adventurer must have been favored by circumstances and chance. but the secret of his success, and the contemporary biographer to whom we owe the story insists strongly upon it, is intelligence.[13] godric in fact shows himself a calculator, i might even say a speculator. he has in a high degree the feeling, and it is much more developed among minds without culture than is usually thought, for what is practicable in commerce. he is on fire with the love of gain. one sees clearly in him that famous _spiritus capitalisticus_ of which some would have us believe that it dates only from the time of the renaissance. here is an eleventh-century merchant, associated with companions like himself, combining his purchases, reckoning his profits, and, instead of hiding in a chest the money he has gained, using it only to support and extend his business. more than this, he does not hesitate to devote himself to operations which the church condemns. he is not disquieted by the theory of the just price; the decretum of gratian disapproves in express terms of the speculations which he practises: "qui comparat rem ut illam ipsam integram et immutatam dando lucretur, ille est mercator qui de templo dei ejicitur". after this, how can we see, in godric and any of those who led the same sort of life, anything else but capitalists? it is impossible to maintain that these men conducted business only to supply their daily wants, impossible not to see that their purpose is the constant accumulation of goods, impossible to deny that, barbarous as we may suppose them, they none the less possessed the comprehension, or, if one prefers, had the instinct for commerce on the large scale.[14] of the organization of this commerce the life of godric shows us already the principal features, and the description which it gives us of them is the more deserving of confidence because it is corroborated in the most convincing fashion by many documents. it shows us, first of all, the merchant coming from the country to establish himself in the town. but the town is to him, so to speak, merely a basis of operations. he lives there but little, save in the winter. as soon as the roads are practicable and the sea open to navigation, he sets out. his commerce is essentially a wandering commerce, and at the same time a collective one, for the insecurity of the roads and the powerlessness of the solitary individual compel him to have recourse to association. grouped in gilds, in hanses, in _caritates_, the associates take their merchandise in convoy from town to town, presenting a spectacle entirely like that which the caravans of the east still furnish in our day. they buy and sell in common, dividing the profits in the ratio of their respective investments in the expedition, and the trade they carry on in the foreign markets is wholesale trade, and can only be that, for retail trade, as the life of godric shows us, is left to the rural peddlers. it is in gross that they export and import wine, grain, wool, or cloth. to convince ourselves of this we need only examine the regulations which have been preserved to us. the statutes of the flemish hanse of london, for example, formally exclude retail dealers and craftsmen from the company. moreover, the merchant associations of the eleventh and twelfth centuries have nothing exclusively local in their character. in them we find bourgeoisie of different towns, side by side. they have rather the appearance of regional than of urban organisms. they are still far from the exclusivism and the protectionism which are to be shown with so much emphasis in the municipal life of the fourteenth century. commercial freedom is not troubled by any restrictive regulations. public authority assigns no limits to the activity of the merchants, does not restrict them to this or that kind of business, exercises no supervision over their operations. provided they pay the fiscal dues (_teloneum, conductus_, etc.) levied by the territorial prince and the seigneurs having jurisdiction at the passage of the bridges, along the roads and rivers, or at the markets, they are entirely free from all legal obstacles. the only restrictions which hinder the full expansion of commerce do not come from the official authority, but result from the practices of commerce itself. to wit, the various merchant associations, gilds, hanses, etc., which encounter each other at the places of buying and selling, oppose each other in brutal competition. each of them excludes from all participation in its affairs the members of all the others. but this is merely a state of facts, resting on no legal title. force holds here the place of law, and whatever may be the differences of time and of environment, one cannot do otherwise than to compare the commerce of the eleventh and twelfth centuries to that bloody competition in which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sailors of holland, england, france, and spain engaged in the markets of the new world. we shall conclude then that medieval commerce, at its origin, is essentially characterized by its regional quality and by its freedom. and it is not difficult to understand that it was so, if one bears in mind two facts to which attention should be drawn. in the first place, down to the end of the twelfth century, the number of towns properly so-called was relatively small. only those places that were favored by a privileged geographical situation attracted the merchants in sufficient number to enable them to maintain a commercial movement of real importance. after that the attraction which these centres of business exerted upon their environs was much greater than is ordinarily imagined. all the secondary localities were subject to their influence. the merchants dwelling in these last, too few to act by themselves, affiliated themselves to the hanse or gild of the principal town. the flemish hanse, which we have already instanced, proves this fully, by showing us the merchants of dixmude, damme, oudenbourg, ardenbourg, etc., seeking admission into the hanse of bruges. in the second place, at the period we have now reached the towns devoted themselves far more to commerce than to industry. few could be cited that appear thus early as manufacturing centres. the concentration of artisans within their walls is still incomplete. if their merchants export, along with the products of the soil, such as wine and grain, a quantity of manufactured products, such, for example, as cloth, it is more than probable that these were for the most part made in the country. admit these two statements, and the nature of early commerce is explained without difficulty. they account in fact both for the freedom of the merchants and for that character of wholesale exporters which they exhibit so clearly and which prevents our placing them in the category in which the theory of urban economy claims to confine them. contrary to the general belief, it appears then that before the thirteenth century we find a period of free capitalistic expansion. no doubt the capitalism of that time is a collective capitalism: groups, not isolated individuals, are its instruments. no doubt too it contents itself with very simple operations. the commercial expeditions upon which its activity especially centres itself demand, for their successful conduct, an endurance, a physical strength, which the more advanced stages of economic evolution will not require. but they demand nothing more. without the ability to plan and combine they would remain sterile. and so we can see that, from the beginning, what we find at the basis of capitalism is intelligence, that same intelligence which georg hansen has so well shown, long ago, to be the efficient cause of the emergence of the bourgeoisie.[15] the fortunes acquired inn the wandering commerce by the parvenus of the eleventh and twelfth centuries soon transformed them into landed proprietors. they invest a good part of their gains in lands, and the land they thus acquire is naturally that of the towns in which they reside. from the beginning of the thirteenth century one sees this land held in large parcels by an aristocracy of patricians, _viri hereditarii_, _divites_, _majores,_ in whom we cannot fail to recognize the descendants of the bold voyagers of the gilds and the hanses. the continuous increase of the burghal population enriches them more and more, for as new inhabitants establish themselves in the towns, and as the number of the houses increases, the rent of the ground increases in proportion. so, from the commencement of the thirteenth century, the grandsons of the primitive merchants abandon commerce and content themselves with living comfortably upon the revenue of their lands. they bid farewell to the agitations and the chances of the wandering life. they live henceforward in their stone houses, whose battlements and towers rise above the thatched roofs of the wooden houses of their tenants. they assume control of the municipal administration; they and their families monopolize the seats in the _ã©chevinage_ or the town council. some even, by fortunate marriages, ally themselves with the lesser nobility and begin to model their manner of living upon that of the knights. but while these first generations of capitalists are retiring from commerce and rooting themselves in the soil, important changes are going on in the economic organization. in the first place, in proportion as the wealth of the towns increases, and with it their attractive power, they take on more and more an industrial character, the rural artisans flocking into them _en masse_ and deserting the country. at the same time, many of them, favored by the abundance of raw material furnished by the surrounding region, begin to devote themselves to certain specialties of manufacture--cloth-making or metallurgy. finally, around the principal aggregations many secondary localities develop, so that all western europe, in the course of the thirteenth century, blossoms forth in an abundance of large and small towns. some, and much the greater number of them, content themselves perforce with local commerce. their production is determined by the needs of their population and that of the environs which extend two or three leagues around their walls and, in exchange for the manufactured articles which the city furnishes to them, attend to the food supply of the urban inhabitants. other towns, on the contrary, less closely set together but also more powerful, develop chiefly by means of an export industry, producing, as did the cloth industry of great flemish or italian cities, not for their local market,[16] but for the european market, constantly extensible. others still, profiting by the advantages of nearness to the sea, give themselves up to navigation and to transportation, as did so many ports of italy, of france, of england, and especially of north germany. of these two types of towns, the one sufficient to themselves, the other living upon the outside world, it is unquestionably the first to which the theory of the urban economy applies. direct trade between purchaser and consumer, strict protectionism excluding the foreigner from the local market and reserving it to the bourgeoisie alone, minute regulations confining within narrow limits the industry of the merchant and the artisan; in a word, all the traits of an organization evidently designed to preserve and safeguard the various members of the community by assigning to each his place and his rã´le, are all found and all explained without difficulty in those towns which are confined to a clientage limited by the extent of their suburban dependencies. in these one can rightly speak of an anti-capitalistic economy. in these we find neither great _entrepreneurs_ nor great merchants. it is true that the necessity of stocking the town with commodities which it does not produce or cannot find in its environs--groceries, fine cloths, wines in northern countries--brings into existence a group of exporters whose condition is superior to that of their fellow-citizens. but on inspection they cannot be regarded as a class of great professional merchants. if they buy at wholesale in foreign markets, it is to sell at retail to their fellow-citizens. they dispose of their goods piecemeal, and like the _gewandschneider_ of the german towns, they do not rise above the level of large shopkeepers.[17] in the towns of the second category we find a quite different condition. here capitalism not only exists but develops toward perfection. instruments of credit, such as the _lettre de foire,_ make their appearance; a traffic in money takes its place alongside the traffic in merchandise and, despite the prohibition of loans at interest, makes constantly more rapid progress. the _coutumes_ of the fairs, especially those of the fairs of the champagne, in which the merchants of the regions most advanced in an economic sense, italy and the low countries, meet each other, give rise to a veritable commercial law. the circulation of money expands and becomes regulated; the coinage of gold, abandoned since the merovingian period, is resumed in the middle of the thirteenth century. the security of travellers increases on the great highways. the old roman bridges are rebuilt and here and there canals are built and dykes constructed. finally, in the towns, the commercial buildings of the previous period, outgrown, are replaced by structures more vast and more luxurious, of which the _halles_ of ypres, with their faã§ade one hundred and thirty-three metres long, is doubtless the most imposing specimen. in the presence of these facts it is impossible to deny the existence of a considerable traffic. moreover documents abound which attest the existence in the great cities of men of affairs who hold the most extended relations with the outside world, whoh the outside world, who export and import sacks of wool, bales of cloth, tuns of wine, by the hundred, who have under their orders a whole corps of factors or "sergents" (_servientes_, _valets_, etc.), whose letters of credit are negotiated in the fairs of champagne, and who make loans amounting to several thousands of livres to princes, monasteries, and cities in need of money. to cite here merely a few figures, let us recall that in 1273 the company of the scotti of piacenza exports wool from england to the value of 21,400 pounds sterling, or 1,600,000 francs (metallic value);[18] in 1254 certain burgesses of arras furnish 20,000 livres to the count of guines, prisoner of the count of flanders, to enable him to pay his ransom.[19] in 1339 three merchants of mechlin advance 54,000 florins (700,000 francs) to king edward iii.[20] extensive however as capitalistic commerce has been since the first half of the thirteenth century, it no longer enjoys the freedom of development which it had before. as we advance toward the end of the middle ages, indeed, we see it subjected to limitations constantly more numerous and more confining. henceforth, in fact, it has to reckon with municipal legislation. every town now shelters itself behind the ramparts of protectionism. if the most powerful cities can no longer exclude the stranger, y impose upon him a minute regulation, the purpose of which is to defend against him the position of their own citizens. they force him to have recourse in his purchases to the mediation of his "hosts" and his "courtiers"; they forbid him to bring in manufactured articles which may compete with those which the city produces; they exploit him by levying taxes of all sorts: duties upon weighing, upon measuring, upon egress, etc. in those cities especially in which has occurred the popular revolution transferring power from the hands of the patriciate into those of the craft-gilds, distrust of capital is carried as far as it can go without entirely destroying urban industry. the craftsmen who produce for exportation--for example, the weavers and the fullers of the towns of flanders--try to escape from their subjection, to the merchants who employ them. not only do the municipal statutes fix wages and regulate the conditions of work, but they also limit the independence of the merchant, even in purely commercial matters. it will be sufficient to mention here, as one of their most characteristic provisions, the forbidding of the cloth merchant to be at the same time a wool merchant, a prohibition inspired by the desire to prevent operations that will unfavorably affect prices and the workman's wages.[21] but it is not solely the municipal authority which attacks the speculations born of the capitalistic spirit. the church steps forward, and under the name of usury forbids indiscriminately the lending of money at interest, sales on credit, monopolies, and in general all profits exceeding the _justum pretium_. no doubt these prohibitions themselves attest the existence of the abuses which they endeavor to oppose, and their frequency proves that they did not always succeed. it is none the less true that they were very burdensome and that the pursuit of business on a large scale found itself much embarrassed by them. the increasing specialization of commerce embarrassed it much more. at the beginning the merchants had devoted themselves to the most various operations at once. wandering from market to market, they bought and sold without feeling in need of centring their activity on this or that kind of products or commodities, but from about 1250 this is no longer the case. the progress of economic evolution has resulted in localizing certain industries and in restraining certain branches of commerce to the groups of merchants best suited to their promotion. thus, for example, in the course of the thirteenth century the trade in fine cloth became a monopoly of the towns of flanders, and banking a monopoly of certain merchant companies of lombardy, provence, or tuscany. thenceforward commercial life ceases to overflow at random, so to speak. it has a less arbitrary, a more deliberate, and consequently a more embarrassed quality. these limitations resting upon commerce have resulted in turning away from it the patricians, who moreover have become, as has been said above, a class of landed proprietors. the place which they left vacant is filled by new men, among whom, as among their predecessors, intelligence is the essential instrument of fortune. the intellectual faculties which the first developed in wandering commerce are used by these later men to overcome the obstacles raised in their pathway by municipal regulations of commerce and ecclesiastical regulations in respect to money affairs.[22] many of them find a rich source of profit by devoting themselves to brokerage. others in the industrial cities exploit shamelessly and in defiance of the statutes the artisans whom they employ. at douai, for example, jehan boinebroke (1280-1310) succeeds in reducing to serfdom a number of workers (and characteristically, they are chiefly women) by advancing wool or money which they are unable to repay, and which therefore place them at his mercy.[23] the richest or the boldest profit by the constantly increasing need of money on the part of territorial princes and kings, to become their bankers. it will be remembered that it was lombard capitalists who furnished edward iii. with money to prepare his campaigns against france,[24] and, quite recently, the history of guillaume servat of cahors (1280-1320) has shown us a man who, setting out with nothing, like godric in the eleventh century, accumulates in a few years a considerable fortune, supplies the king of england with a dowry for one of his daughters, lends money to the king of norway, farms the wool duties at london, and, unscrupulous as he is shrewd, does not hesitate to engage in shady speculations upon the coinage.[25] and how many other financiers do we not know whose career is wholly similar: thomas fin at the court of the counts of flanders,[26] the berniers at that of the counts of hainaut, the tote guis, the vane guis, at that of the kings of france, not to name the numberless italians entrusted by the popes with the various operations of pontifical finance, those _mercatores romanam curiam sequentes_ among whom are found the ancestors of the great medici of the fifteenth century.[27] in the course of the fifteenth century this second class of capitalists, courtiers, merchants, and financiers, successors to the capitalists of the hanses and the gilds, is in its turn drawn along toward the downward grade. the progress of navigation, the discoveries made by the portuguese, then by the spaniards, the formation of great monarchical states struggling for supremacy, begin to destroy the economic situation in the midst of which that class had grown to greatness, and to which it had adapted itself. the direction of the currents of commerce is altered. in the north, the english and dutch marine gradually take the place of the hanses. in the mediterranean, commerce centres itself at venice and at genoa. on the shores of the atlantic, lisbon becomes the great market for spices, and antwerp, supplanting bruges, becomes the rendezvous of european commerce. the sixteenth century sees this movement grow more rapid. it is favored at once by moral, political, and economic causes; the intellectual progress of the renaissance, the expansion of individualism, great wars exciting speculation, the disturbance of monetary circulation caused by the influx of precious metals from the new world. as the science of the middle ages disappears and the humanist takes the place of the scholastic, so a new economy rises in the place of the old urban economy. the state subjects the towns to its superior power. it restrains their political autonomy at the same time that is sets commerce and industry free from the guardianship which the towns have hitherto imposed upon them. the protectionism and the exclusiveness of the bourgeoisies are brought to an end. if the craft-guilds continue to exist, yet they no longer control the organization of labor. new industries appear, which, to escape the meddling surveillance of the municipal authorities, establish themselves in the country. side by side with the old privileged towns, which merely vegetate, younger manufacturing centres, full of strength and exuberance, arise; in england, sheffield, and birmingham, in flanders, hondschoote and armentiã¨res.[28] the spirit in which is now manifested in the world of business, is that same spirit of freedom which animates the intellectual world. in a society in process of formation, the individual, enfranchised, gives the rein to his boldness. he despises tradition, gives himself up with unrestrained delight to his virtuosity. there are to be no more limits on speculation, no more fetters on commerce, no more meddling of authority in relations between employers and employed. the most skillful wins. competition, up to this time held in check, runs riot. in a few years enormous fortunes are built up, others are swallowed up in resounding bankruptcies. the antwerp exchange is a pandemonium where bankers, deep-sea sailors, stock-jobbers, dealers in futures, millionaire merchants, jostle each other--and sharpers and adventurers to whom all means of money-getting, even assassination, are acceptable. this confused recasting of the economic world transfers the rã´le played by the capitalists of the late middle ages in a class of new men. few are the descendants of the business men of the fourteenth century among those of the fifteenth and sixteenth. thrown out of their course by the current of events, they have not been willing to risk fortunes already acquired. most of them are seen turning toward administrative careers, entering the service of the state as members of the councils of justice or finance and aspiring to the _noblesse de robe_, which, with the aid of fortunate marriages, will land their sons in the circle of the true nobility. as for the new rich of the period, they almost all appear to us like parvenus. jacques coeur is a parvenu in france. the fugger and many other german financiers--the herwarts, the seilers, the manlichs, the haugs--are parvenus of whose families we know little before the fifteenth century, and so are the frescobaldi and the gualterotti of florence, or that gaspar ducci of pistoia who is perhaps the most representative of the fortune-hunters of the period.[29] later, when amsterdam has inherited the commercial hegemony of antwerp, the importance of the parvenus characterizes it not less clearly. we may merely mention here, among the first makers of its greatness, willem usselinx,[30] balthazar de moucheron, isaac lemaire. and if from the world of commerce we turn toward that of industry the aspect is the same. christophe plantin, the famous printer, is the son of a simple peasant of touraine. the exuberance of capitalism which reached its height in the second half of the sixteenth century was not maintained. even as the regulative spirit characteristic of the urban economy followed upon the freedom of the twelfth century, so mercantilism imposed itself upon commerce and industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. by protective duties and bounties on exportation, by subsidies of all sorts to manufactures and national navigation, by the acquiring of transmarine colonies, by the creation of privileged commercial companies, by the inspection of manufacturing processes, by the perfecting of means of transportation and the suppression of interior custom-houses, every state strives to increase its means of production, to close its market to its competitors, and to make the balance of trade incline in its favor. doubtless the idea that "liberty is the soul of commerce" does not wholly disappear, but the endeavor is to regulate that liberty henceforward in conformity to the interest of the public weal. it is put under the control of intendants, of consuls, of chambers of commerce. we are entering into the period of national economy. this was destined to last, as is familiar, until the moment when, in england at the end of the eighteenth century, on the continent in the first years of the nineteenth, the invention of machinery and the application of steam to manufacturing completely disorganized the conditions of economic activity. the phenomena of the sixteenth century are reproduced, but with tenfold intensity. merchants accustomed to the routine of mercantilism and to state protection are pushed aside. we do not see them pushing forward into the career which opens itself before them, unless as lenders of money. in their turn, and as we have seen it at each great crisis of economic history, they retire from business and transform themselves into an aristocracy. of the powerful houses which are established on all hands and which give the impetus to the modern industries of metallurgy, of the spinning and weaving of wool, linen, and cotton, hardly one is connected with the establishments existing before the end of the eighteenth century. once again, it is new men, enterprising spirits, and sturdy characters which profit by the circumstances.[31] at most, the old capitalists, transformed into landed proprietors, play still an active rã´le in the exploitation of the mines, because of the necessary dependence of that industry upon the possessors of the soil, but it can be safely affirmed that those who have presided over the gigantic progress of international economy, of the exuberant activity which now affects the whole world, were, as at the time of the renaissance, parvenus, self-made men. as at the time of the renaissance, again, their belief is in individualism and liberalism alone. breaking with the traditions of the old rã©gime, they take for their motto "_laissez faire, laissez passer_". they carry the consequences of the principle to an extreme. unrestrained competition sets them to struggling with each other and soon arouses resistance in the form of socialism, among the proletariate that they are exploiting. and at the same time that that resistance arises to confront capital, the latter, itself suffering from the abuses of that freedom which had enabled it to rise, compels itself to discipline its affairs. cartels, trusts, syndicates of producers, are organized, while states, perceiving that it is impossible to leave employers and employees longer to contend in anarchy, elaborate a social legislation; and international regulations, transcending the frontiers of the various countries, begin to be applied to working men. i am aware how incomplete is this rapid sketch of the evolution of capitalism through a thousand years of history. as i said at the beginning, i present it merely as an hypothesis resting on the very imperfect knowledge which we yet possess of the different movements of economic development. yet, in so far as it is exact, it justifies the observation i made at the beginning of this study. it shows that the growth of capitalism is not a movement proceeding along a straight line, but has been marked, rather, by a series of separate impulses not forming continuations one of another, but interrupted by crises. to this first remark may be added two others, which are in a way corollaries. the first relates to the truly surprising regularity with which the phases of economic freedom and of economic regulation have succeeded each other. the free expansion of wandering commerce comes to its end in the urban economy, the individualistic ardor of the renaissance leads to mercantilism, and finally, to the age of liberalism succeeds our own epoch of social legislation. the second remark, with which i shall close, lies in the moral and political rather than the economic field. it may be stated in this form, that every class of capitalists is at the beginning animated by a clearly progressive and innovating spirit but becomes conservative as its activities become regulated. to convince one's self of this truth it is sufficient to recall that the merchants of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are the ancestors of the bourgeoisie and the creators of the first urban institutions; that the business men of the renaissance struggled as energetically as the humanists against the social traditions of the middle ages; and finally, that those of the nineteenth century have been among the most ardent upholders of liberalism. this would suffice to prove to us, if we did not know it otherwise, that all these have at the beginning been nothing else than parvenus brought into action by the transformations of society, embarrassed neither by custom nor by routine, having nothing to lose and therefore the bolder in their race toward profit. but soon the primitive energy relaxes. the descendants of the new rich wish to preserve the situation which they have acquired, provided public authority will guarantee it to them, even at the price of a troublesome surveillance; they do not hesitate to place their influence at its service, and wait for the moment when, pushed aside by new men, they shall demand of the state that it recognize officially the rank to which they have raised their families, shall on their entrance into the nobility become a legal class and no longer a social group, and shall consider it beneath them to carry on that commerce which in the beginning made their fortunes. footnotes: [1] this article represents the substance of an address delivered at the international congress of historical studies held in london, april, 1913. [2] first edition in 1893. [3] _der moderne capitalismus_ (1902). [4] r. heynen, _zur entstehung des capitalismus in venedig_ (1905). [5] h. sieveking, "die capitalistische entwickelung in den italienischen stã¤dten des mittelalters", _vierteljahrschrift fã¼r social-und wirtschaftsgeschichte_ (1909). [6] davidsohn, _forschungen zur geschichte von florenz_, iii. 36; a. doren, _die florentiner wollentuchindustrie_, p. 481. [7] a. schaube, "die wollausfuhr englands von 1272", _vierteljahrschrift fã¼r socialund wirtschaftsgeschichte_ (1908), pp. 39 ff. _cf._ f. keutgen, "hansische handelsgesellschaften", _ibid._ (1906), pp. 288 ff. [8] _cf._ h. pirenne, _les anciennes democraties des pays-bas_, pp. 11 ff. [9] i. goll, "samo und die karantinischen slaven", _mitteilungen des instituts fã¼r oesterreichische geschichtsforschung_, vol. xi. [10] a. dopsch, _die wirtschaftsentwickelung der karolingerzeit_, ii. 274. i cannot, however, accept the thesis of mr. dopsch on the importance of commerce in the carolingian period. the extremely interesting texts which he has assembled seem to me to establish the existence of a sporadic commerce only. [11] of course all the new towns did not grow up around an episcopal residence. many of them, especially in the north and particularly in the low countries, had as their primitive nucleus a fortress (ghent, bruges, ypres, lille, douai, etc.). but my purpose here is merely to recall the broad outlines of the subject. [12] see on this subject the interesting article by w. vogel, "ein seefahrender kaufmann um 1100", _hansische geschichtsblã¤tter_ (1912), pp. 239 ff. [13] "unde non agriculturae delegit exercitia colere, sed potius, quae sagacioris animi sunt, rudimenta studuit arripiendo exercere." [14] one finds already in the twelfth century lenders of money undertaking veritable financial operations. see h. jenkinson and m. t. stead, "william cade: a financier of the twelfth century", _english historical review_ (1913), p. 209 ff. [15] _die drei bevã¶lkerungsstufen._ [16] the _livre de la vingtaine d'arras_ (ed. a. guesnon) says, in speaking of the merchants of that town, in 1222, "emunt non ad usum civitatis, sed ut exportent et discurrant per nondinas longinquas et per lombardiam". [17] g. von below, "grosshã¤ndler und kleinhã¤ndler im deutschen mittelalter", _jahrbã¼cher fã¼r nationalã¶konomie und statistik_ (1900). [18] a. schaube, "die wollausfuhr englands vom jahre 1273", _vierteljahrschrift fã¼r socialund wirtschaftsgeschichte_ (1908), p. 183. [19] a. duchesne, _histoire des maisons de guines, d'ardres et de gand_, p. 289. [20] rymer, _foedera_, vol. ii., part iv., p. 49. [21] for an example, see espinas and pirenne, _recueil de documents relatifs ã  l'histoire de la draperie flamande_, ii. 391. [22] j. kulischer, "warenhã¤ndler und geldausleiher im mittelalter", _zeitschrift fã¼r volkswirtschaft_, etc., xvii. (1908). [23] g. espinas, "jehan boine-broke, bourgeois et drapier douaisien", _vierteljahrschrift fã¼r socialund wirtschaftsgeschichte_ (1904), pp. 34 ff. [24] for the relations of the capitalists with the english crown see: whitwell, "italian bankers and the english crown", _transactions of the royal historical society_, xvii. (1903); and bond, "extract from the liberate rolls relative to the loans supplied by italian merchants to the kings of england", _archaeologia_, xxvii. (1840). _cf._ hansen, "der englische staatscredit unter kã¶nig edward iii. und die hansischen kaufleute", _hansische geschichtsblã¤tter_ (1910). [25] f. arens, "wilhelm servat von cahors als kaufmann zu london", _vierteljahrschrift fã¼r socialund wirtschaftsgeschichte_ (1913), pp. 477 ff. [26] v. fris, "thomas fin, receveur de flandre", _bulletin de la commission royale d'histoire de belgique_ (1900), pp. 8 ff. [27] schneider, "die finanziellen beziehungen der florentinischen banquiers zur kirche", _schmollers forschungen_, vol. xvii. [28] pirenne, "une crise industrielle an xvi^e siã¨cle", _bulletin de l'acadã©mie royale de belgique_, classe des lettres (1905). [29] r. ehrenberg, _das zeitalter der fugger_, i. 311 ff. [30] j. f. jameson, "willem usselinx", in am. hist. assoc., _papers_, ii. [31] see, in cunningham, _the growth of english industry and commerce in modern times_, p. 618, this citation from p. gaskell: "few of the men who entered the trade rich were successful. they trusted too much to others, too little to themselves." let us recall here that the founder of the largest industrial establishments of belgium, john cockerill, was a simple workman. see e. mahaim, "les dã©buts de l'ã�tablissement john cockerill ã  seraing", _vierteljahrschrift fã¼r socialund wirtschaftsgeschichte_ (1905), p. 627. essential concepts in sociology anthony giddens and philip sutton cambridge, uk: polity press, 2014. 240 pages. my review of this book is not the outcome of my simple reading of it, but of translating it into arabic. its 240 pages identify and discuss sixty-seven essential sociological concepts, most notably those core concepts and ideas that allow sociologists to make sense of societies, even though our understanding of these concepts is constantly evolving and changing. the two sociologists have arranged their book in the following sections – working definition, origins of the concept, meaning and interpretation, critical points and, continuing relevance – and its contents into ten themes. between the first theme of “thinking sociologically” and the last theme of “political sociology,” a variety of other themes are discussed, among them “structures of societies,” “interaction and communication,” “health, illness, and the body,” and “crime and social control.” the authors use this arrangement to provide a portrait of sociology through its essential concepts, ranging from capitalism, identity, and deviance to citizenship, the environment, and intersectionality. the concepts of each theme are arranged alphabetically so that they may be analyzed, discussed, and debated. sociological literature shows the important relationship between concepts and theories: given that concepts are labels that refer to relations or descriptive properties, they are not statements and therefore are neither true nor false. they simply furnish the vocabulary of a theory and identify its subject matter. when concepts are interrelated in a scheme, a theory begins to emerge. 94 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page 94 in essence, two factors motivated me to write this review. first, this book covers the analysis and discussion of the essential concepts of contemporary sociology. i have a strong interest in concepts, for during my academic carrier i have invented some concepts for arab sociology based upon the arab social milieu particularly in the maghreb (e.g., the other underdevelopment and conspiring bilingualism) and my personal intellectual curiosity has led me to create the concept/theory of “man: the three-dimensional being.” second, i wish to provide access to sociologists in particular to get familiar with all of the sociological concepts presented and discussed in this book, for the wealth of information contained in it is bound to widen the horizons of both them and their students and improve their understanding and explanation of things and phenomena. the book, written in a clear and jargon-free style, introduces a careful selection of essential concepts that have helped shape – and continue to do so – sociology and other disciplines. going beyond the usual brief dictionary-style definitions, the authors offer an extended discussion of each concept that locates it both in its historical and theoretical contexts, explores its main meanings in use, puts forward some relevant criticisms, and points out to readers its ongoing development in contemporary research and theorizing. such an organized profile may allow one to say that this book is not only a brief dictionary of sociological concepts, but also a thought-provoking reference work that makes an important contribution to the knowledge acquisition of basic constituents of sociology itself as a scientific discipline. as mentioned earlier, all sciences are born and achieve legitimacy once they first develop concepts and then use them to derive theories. sociology sees that the relation between the two is very close, for concepts offer researchers the vocabulary that may result in the emergence of a theory as well as the determination of its subject matter. this book is a strong cross-checking intellectual exercise of the state of sociology today. focusing on sixty-seven sociological concepts through the above-mentioned analytical frame of the five-scale method offers readers adequate knowledge about the state of both the new and old sociological concepts and, consequently, about the current state of the discipline itself, since a given discipline core concepts reflects its current state. by underlining the pluses and the minuses of each concept, particularly in the sections of (critical points and continuing relevance), the authors implicitly evaluate the discipline of contemporary sociology as a whole. despite their numerous criticisms of many concepts, they have not cited any of them as irrelevant to modern sociology. this is in line with the title’s implicit meaning, where the book reviews 95 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page 95 adjective essential is taken to mean necessary. in other words, all of the concepts reviewed in the book remain necessary and valid. given the large number of concepts reviewed, i decided to choose only a few in order to familiarize the readers with how the authors have discussed them. this presentation is strictly limited to the authors’ views expressed in item 4 (critical points) and item 5 (continuing relevance) of their five-item scale method of analysis. consequently, i offer below a brief summary of their views of the following sociological concepts: ideal type, structure/agency, risk, intersectionality, social models of disability, and citizenship. giddens and sutton summarize the criticisms of max weber’s (d. 1920) concept of ideal-type as follows: norbert elias (d. 1990) believed that sociologists should study “real types” or empirical cases instead of spending a lot of time constructing ideal-types. yet, the authors point out that the problem with ideal-types has to do more with how they are used rather than with the concept itself. ultimately, ideal-types are good heuristic tools that stimulate research and help one gain better understanding and explanation of social phenomena. the main criticism of ulrich beck’s (d. 2015) risk theory comes from its exaggeration. for instance, neither empirical research nor europe’s green political parties, for instance, support his claims. furthermore, some critics see risk theory as being rather naïve about the concept of risk because it varies across cultures. in terms of concept relevance, recent global social changes have led more to states of uncertainty and less reliance on habitual ways of life. consequently, sensitivity to risk appears to be increasing, which is compatible with judith green’s remarks that the concept of risk has been very useful in her field of medical sociology. the new concept of intersectionality raises criticisms among sociologists: how many inequality and identity categories can be included in the analysis using this specific concept? this gives rise to the “et cetera problem,” whereby “etc.” is added to class, gender, and “race” to indicate the presence of other influential factors involved in the process of intersectionality. the second criticism derives from the question as to whether the different forces are of equal weight in terms of shaping people’s lives. this concept’s continuing relevance has become more important not only in understanding the differentiated experience of poverty, but also of social life as a whole. as a result, some sociologists have recently suggested that social policy must take into account intersectionality if legislation designed to ensure equality is to have a realistic chance of success. 96 the american journal of islamic social sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page 96 according to the authors, the concept of citizenship is coming under a great deal of criticism. its very conceptualization by t. h. marshall (d. 1981) is british made, a post hoc description rather than a genuine explanation. furthermore, this conceptualization does not clarify why civil rights had to lead to political rights, which then had to lead to social rights. many indicators show that citizenship is never firmly established, for it can potentially be reversed. following the financial crisis of 2008, many governments cut back on public spending, which led to a change in the content of social citizenship. but despite this, giddens and sutton believe that the concept of citizenship remains sound. a current political debate is rethinking how to enable citizens to become more active as a means of reinvigorating politics and community life. advocates of the social model concept as providing solutions to physical and intellectual disabilities are faced with numerous criticisms. some assert that it pays no attention to the often painful or uncomfortable experience of the impairment itself. as such, others argue that intellectual or physical impairment makes it impossible for people to participate fully in society and that social changes cannot remove this reality. on the other hand, its proponents call for it to be strongly supported because there appears to be no forthcoming alternative to challenge it. the use of this model has transformed the concept of disability itself in societies. as such, the emergence of the sociology of disability was made possible only after introducing the concept of the social model. in the analysis of the concept of structure/agency dichotomy, the authors show that pierre bourdieu (d. 2002) sides more with the structure through his concept of “habitus,” whereas giddens’ structuration theory sees agency as of more importance. while these two sociologists insist on the inevitable interaction between the two, giddens remains silent on those elements that enable agency to influence and even chage the structure. in my opinion, this silence is likely due to the sociologists’ lack of an epistemological outlook that views agency as a full cultural being (having language, thought, religion, knowledge/science, cultural values and norms).1 these cultural symbols (cs) permit humans to both establish and change the structures of their societies. neglecting the crucial importance of cs in the contemporary social sciences has led their paradigms to look at man as homo economicus or homo politicus or homo sociologus, but not as homo culturus, which is basic to conceive of the very emergence of the three other paradigms. i end this review with the discussion of the concept of science in contemporary sociology. in the past, this particular concept has faced criticism book reviews 97 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page 97 by philosophers of science. the phenomena of “scientific revolutions” are no longer considered to be only the outcome of accumulative scientific discoveries; rather, according to thomas khun (d. 1996), they could be the result of surprising new paradigms because scientific revolutions occur when a scientist goes beyond a given paradigm and replaces it with a new paradigm. ibn khaldun’s (d. 1406) invention of his new science (‘ilm al-‘umrān albasharī [the science of human civilization]) can be cited as a reliable example, for he established it after strongly criticizing the existing paradigms of muslim historians. as such, his new paradigm, represented by his muqaddimah’s vision, is divorced epistemologically and intellectually from the paradigms of others in the field of his time and before. endnote 1. m. dhaouadi, cultural sociology within innovative treatise: islamic insights on human symbols (lanham, md: university press of america, 2013), mahmoud dhaouadi professor of sociology university of tunis, tunis, tunisia 98 the american journal of islamic social sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page 98 340 the american journal of islamic social sciences vol. 6, no. 2, 1989 book review islam and society in southeast asia edited by taufik abdullah and sharon siddique, singapore: institute of southeast asian studies, singapore, 19/fl. knowing one another: shaping an islamic anthropology merry/ j.jyn davies, london and new york: mansell publishing limited, 1988, 189 pp. books by muslim scholars which raise theoretical issues in society and politics also raise hopes of a welcome trend because they are so rare. in the books under review we hear authentic muslim voices. the authors make an interesting counter-poise, muslims in the west and muslims in southeast the american journal of islamic social sciences b l . 6, no. 2, 1989 341 asia. a self-conscious, anti-west, combative posture is struck; although in the case of davies, a british muslim, this may simply mean the zeal of a convert. both books suggest the breaking of new ground, indeed dzrvies prom ises to “shape” the discipline of anthropology. islam and society in southeast asia attempts to fill an important gap in the study of islam in an area which contains the world‘s most populous country-indonesia. the 13 chapters have been contributed by distinguished professors, mostly indigenous; and some are very distinguished, indeed, like professor kamal hassan of malaysia and abdurrahman wahid of indonesia. the subjects, too, are topical and compelling: the modernization of women and the problems of the nahdhatul ulama in indonesia. we are told why the muslim masses reject westernization: “thus, the life-styles of muslim elites, socialism, capitalism and western civilization are all interrelated. of the three factors, it is perhaps the lik-styles of the elites that has had the greatest impact upon the muslim mind. it provides “tangible proof“ to the masses of the “evil” of western civilization and foreign ideologies ... it is expressed at the level of the houses the elites own, the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the parties they attend. whether it is true or not, tales about these elites are almost always inter-woven with lurid lore about their decadent habits with the emphasis upon their sexual misdemeanors. that is why, if islamic groups opposed to existing regimes ever succeed in mobilizing the people on behalf of their puritanical concept of islam it would have been partly because of their con demnation of the alleged moral decadence, the materialistic life-style of the elites-since it is an issue that has so much potential mass appeal” (“islamic resurgence: global view” by chandra muzaffar, p. 15). the elements of islamic revivalism as seen from southeast asia are sum marized thus: “islamic resurgence has been inspired by the following factors: (a) disillusionment with western civilization as a whole among a new muslim generation (b) the failings of social systems based on capitalism or socialism (c) the life-style of secular elites in muslim states (d) the desire for power among a segment of an expanding middle class that cannot be accommodated politically (e) the search for psychological security among new urban migrants (f) the city environment (g) the economic strength of certain muslim states as a result of their new oil wealth; and (h) a sense of confidence about the future in the wake of the 1973 egyptian victory, the l!j79 iranian revolution and the dawn of the fifteenth century in the muslim calendar” (ibid, p. 21-22). the role of the &ma is highlighted in islamic revivalism and the check ing of westernization in the concluding chapter: “the continuity of religious traditions and their fortification against western onslaught was largely the work of ‘ulama and other orthodox functionaries who ran muslim educa tional institutionsmaktabs and mudmsahs (muslim educational institu 342 th american journal of islamic social sciences vol. 6, no. 2, 1989 tions). despite the cost it entailed, it was no mean achievement” (“islamic resurgence” by obaid ul haq, p. 338). there is useful material in this book and some harsh commentary on the present teachugs of islamic studies: “teachmg materials are of poor quality and textbooks are outdated” (“dimensions of islamic education” by kamal hassan, p. 47). equally important-and more telling-“many muslims feel the need to obtain islamic education, but the social reality shows that only products of secular education are assured of a better future” (ibid). it is therefore a pity that the excellent material which could have filled a gap in islamic studies has been so poorly edited and shaped for this volume. chapters are not numbered and errors abound. curious omissions are noted: for example, the debate with the japanese anthropologist nakamura regar ding indonesian society is conducted by wahid without reference to the stan dard literature on indonesia by clifford geertz. the book has no index and its binding is unsatisfactory, the pages tending to become unglued. most of the papers are written years ago and appear dated (wahid’s paper is an answer to the analysis of the nahdhatul ulama’s congress of june 1979 by the japanese anthropologist nakamura). more important, there is no theme or frame for the contents of the book. neither the foreword nor the introduction discuss the individual papers and nor do they attempt to relate the papers to each other. some of the excellent material, so ideally placed to fill an important gap in islamic studies, is therefore lost in the confused and loose editing. in knowing one another davies attempts to contribute to “a movement that seeks to ground the quest for knowledge in the eternal principles of islam.” this book is an attempt to contribute to that movement by offering a defmi tion of islamic anthropology” (p. ix). the late isma‘il al fariiqi’s seminal work, as indeed the title of his work, “islamization of knowledge”, is reflected, though not acknowledged, in much of the argument. the book maintains “the essence of isl& is universal, and anthropology will equip muslims with both self-knowledge and the understanding to treat non-muslims with tolerance” (inside flap). an admirable ideal; but perhaps the author should have included muslims also in her sphere of tolerance. for she condemns and rejects the entire gamut of muslim scholars in a list that reads like a muslim united nations, a who‘s who of muslim social scientists: nur y h a n (thk), the harvard professor, at the one end and khurshid ahmad (pakistani), a deputy amir of the jamaat-i-islami, at the other; also included are isma‘il al faniqi (palestinian), ilyas ba-yunus (usa), talal asad (british), soraya altorki (arab), abdullah laroui (moroccan) and aziz azmeh (syrian). the rejection is based on misquotes and grossly incorrect representa tions. k. ahmad and n. naqvi, the two most active islamic economists, are attacked: “islamic economists, who are anxious to produce a body of work, fall back upon a system such as western economics to fill their con the american journal of islamic social sciences vol. 6, no. 2, 1989 343 ceptual void” @. 79). their position is vociferously the opposite of where davies places them. altorki and laroui are also criticized, again unfairly, for exactly similar failings. @. 164-6). while the above may wish to comment upon davies’ interpretation of their work let me record a response to her comments on mine by taking just one example. i am accused of defending “western anthropology” which [her quotes] “promotes an enabling tolerance and openness to other people” and this “is most demeaning” @. 49). but this is yet another gross misrepresen tation, as the title of my book toward zslamic anthropology (1986) suggests. well, before davies’ concern with the subject, i was involved in raising the issue of an islamic anthropology (defining islamic anthropology) royal an thropological institute news, no. 65, 1984). while acknowledging the un disputed contributions of western anthropologists i had concluded “the emergence of an islamic anthropology . . . will act as a corrective to the notorious ethnocentricity of much of western anthropology” (discovering islam: making sense of muslim history and society, 1988: 214). indeed western anthropologists have warned me of the consequences of challenging the metropolitan academic culture of the west: “given the power of the dominant academic discourse, ahmed simply runs the risk of alienating his erstwhile tutors and being marginalized by their superior posi tion in their own world” (“orientalist discourses” by b. street in localizing stmtegies, ed. r. fardon, 1989, p. 253. also see the attempt at “marginaliza tion” by an ”alienated” tutor, r. bpper in man, vol. 23, no. 3, september 1988 and my reply in man, forthcoming). so davies’ general and deliberately misleading condemnation of muslim social scientists does not make apparent sense. but there is a certain method in the madness. the book appears as a paean, a tribute, to the author’s “friend and men tor, ziauddin sardar, without whom nothing would be as it is” @. x). the guru has already acknowledged the disciple in his own book, zslamic futures (1985), as the one “who prepared the index” @. xi). her book, moreover, is published by mansell in the “islamic futures and policy studies” series, the editor of which is sardar. this coziness is touching. but there is an ele ment of over-kill: of the six books advertised on the back jacket three are by sardar, so are eleven references in the bibliography and, proving that a disciple is rarely bound by the conventions of subtlety, davies promises yet another sardar publication in her last footnote in her last chapter. sardar quotes stud her book. davies appears to have embarled on the task of pro pagating the guru; the strategy of attacking other potential gurus to clear the way thus makes sense. the tone fluctuates from high-sounding academic references to popular western television programmes. the title of the introduction, “to boldly go where no man has gone before”, is from star trek; so is the subtitle, “the 344 the american journal of islamic social sciences vol. 6, no. 2, 1989 anthropological enterprise”. james t. kirk finds honorable mention in the text and index. this reflects both the substance and style of davies. the content is as vacuous as star trek and the results far less amusing. this is kam-anthropology (note the title, knowing one another, chapter 2 is “en chained in being” and so on). indeed an appropriate title for the book could have been adapted from another star trek film, “the wrath of the guru”. for a book claiming to discuss islamic anthropology the absence of elkholy and mahmof, both writing on islamic anhpology, are strange omis sions in the bibliography (sardar, we noted, although not an anthropologist, has eleven references). incorrect criticism is backed by poor editing (my sur name, “ahmed* is “ad” in the text and index and “ed” in the bibliography, “ernest” gellner in the bibliography and “ernst” in the text and index, “khur shid” ahmad in the text and bibliography and “kurshid” in the index, “na quib” in the text and “naqvib” in the index, for examples). this is a crude exercise in cult-buildmg, a clumsy demolition job, with no concrete sugges tions, no theoretical frames, for a way of looking at or analyzing muslim societies. within a few years of his death faniqi’s venture, the “islamization of knowledge”, appears to be in shambles. for the most part confusion and lack of direction mark the work of muslim scholars. but perhaps the spirit of debate and enquiry that his work has generated is what he wanted; it is the first step on the path to knowledge. akbar s. ahmed faculty of oriental studies university of cambridge, u.k. change of address insure continued delivery of miss by informing us of your address change fill out and send in the card at the back of this issue today face politics jenny edkins new york: routledge, 2015. 230 pages. over the last decade, public discourse in europe and north america has been overwhelmingly in favor of banning the face veil (niqab). politicians like jack straw in the uk or john charest in québec have commented on its putative hindrance to community integration due to its covering of the face. so a book entitled face politics would seem to offer some insights into this anti-niqab dynamic. a quick perusal of the index for “niqab,” “islam,” and “muslim women,” however, comes up unexpectedly empty. what, then, is “face politics” book reviews 105 ajiss33-1_ajiss 12/30/2015 12:59 pm page 105 and how can an academic discussion about the “face” not mention niqab, arguably one of the most burning issues of “face politics” this century? the book is a profound, intellectually challenging, sometimes dense, and yet empathetic and beautifully written exploration of how contemporary western politics is predicated around individuality and the separatedness of being, signified by the idea of the face as a “window onto the [individual’s] soul” (p. 165). because she believes that “a politics that makes the face is a politics that produces the person as an object” (p.7), the author wishes to propose a different concept of the face, that of a mask hiding our inseparable connectedness, and concludes that such an alternative would lead to a profoundly different, and better, political society, one symbolized by the concept of the tango. indeed, the tagline on the dedication page is “if the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a politics,” from french philosopher gilles deleuze and psychoanalyst félix guattari’s 1980 book a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. in the preface, edkins explains how she came to write this book, which began as a far simpler “project on the contemporary politics of the portrait photograph in the west” (p. xv). she was intrigued by the posters of people missing after 9/11 that were posted around new york and the artist sebastião saldago’s 2003 exhibition of images of refugee children in camps. she wanted to know what “portrait photographs do. why are they so powerful in the western imaginary? why are they used so often? what response do they prompt, what political action? (p. xv).” her interest in the new york posters spun off into an inquiry about missing persons more generally, and the current book grew out of a shift from an interest in images of the face to a “more substantive exploration of face politics” (p. xv). questions about portraits and photographs of faces, about the impact of “digital photography, moving images, smart phones, facebook pages” on portraiture led edkins to ask questions like: aren’t new media artists now exploring altered ways of making faces – generic faces, reconstructed faces – or even obliterating the face? does this go alongside a new concept of the person, and new political possibilities? …what is the face in the photograph? why the face or headshot? why obliterate the face? what is the face anyway?” (p. xvi). to answer these questions, edkins, a scholar of international relations, delves into neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, visual studies, and art theory. along the way she explores philosophical concepts such as the nature of being, what makes a person or an individual, and how the face relates to indi106 the american journal of islamic social sciences 33:1 ajiss33-1_ajiss 12/30/2015 12:59 pm page 106 viduality and becomes a basis for political society. the beauty of the book is her accessible writing style, empathy with the reader as well as the subjects whose portraits, photographs, and/or selves she writes about, and honest selfdisclosure about her own reactions to “the face.” face politics is not jargonistic; however, due to the depth of its philosophical enquiry, its argument is sometimes complex. edkins begins by noting the face “is paradoxical” (p.1): we pay attention to reading each other’s faces – reading people’s moods, personalities and origins into their facial appearance. we search for clues as to who the persons opposite us may be and what they may be thinking … on the other hand, the importance of the face … is often traced to a particular historical and geographical juncture. in the european imagination, the face came to prominence in painting with the beginnings of portraiture in the renaissance and enlightenment periods … historians of art have drawn a connection between the rise and spread of portraiture and the rise of the concept of the individual – or rather, at least at first, the individual propertied male – as the building block of european political organisation. (pp. 1-2) face politics includes an introduction and four chapters, with the last part of chapter 4 serving as a summing up and conclusion. in chapter 1, “faces in photographs,” edkins explores what happens when we look at photographs of faces using several artistic exhibitions, including suzanne opton’s soldier face (photographs of returned american soldiers with their heads lying vertically on a table and displayed controversially on billboards); robert lyon’s intimate enemy (a book with photographs of perpetrators and victims in rwanda’s genocide; without captions saying which photograph is of which kind of person); and ly daravuth’s messengers (a 2000 exhibition in phnom penh), mixing up (without saying who is who) photographs of children who used to be messengers for the khmer rouge with contemporary children dressed as messengers. all of this is designed to destabilize the idea that we can “read character, experience, or emotion” (p. 8) from the face. chapter 2, “moving faces,” takes us into neuroscience, including what happens to people who have paralyzed faces that cannot show emotion (mӧbius syndrome), exploring scientific evidence as to whether or not we can read emotion from facial expression, the science around people’s ability to mirror facial emotional expressions, and artistic work exploring a connection between humans and inanimate objects. chapter 3, “from face capture to face blindness,” begins with the growing phenomenon of face-capture software and its book reviews 107 ajiss33-1_ajiss 12/30/2015 12:59 pm page 107 implications for political control, and then moves into a discussion of scientific and artistic work on the overstated ability of computer software and people to recognize faces and physiognomy. it ends with a discussion of the science of face blindness, those people who struggle or cannot recognize even family faces. finally, chapter 4, “facelessness: another politics?” opens with a study of facial disfigurement, its impact on the person and those around them, and scientific and artistic attempts to help people cope through plastic surgery (i.e., artists painting portraits of the process of the plastic surgery). after analyzing the experience, science, and art around face transplants, the chapter’s final section, “face, personhood, and politics,” concludes the entire book. there is obviously much to respond to in such a multifaceted and wideranging book. let me finish by returning to what prompted my interest in the book in the first place: face politics and the niqab. by using the word burka on one page, nestled in between her discussion of facial disfiguration and face transplants, edkins does refer to the face politics of muslimah face coverings. presenting the burka as somehow related to how cosmetic surgery reveals the face to be a mask, the burka’s apparent facelessness produces the trauma of not being able to see the mask (face) of a person, which is normally what we rely on to conceal “the awful way in which we are all ultimately unfathomable to each other.” (p. 159). the burka thus “exposes our fear of our own precarious subjecthood” (p. 160). to give such short shrift to one of western society’s most pressing questions is surprising. in other chapters the author deals extensively with statements made by people suffering from mӧbius syndrome, face blindness, facial disfigurement, face transplants, and so on. so why not discuss the experiences of those who wear the niqab? to be fair, she does state clearly that this book is meant only as an introduction to what is obviously an immense topic requiring further research (p. xvii). yet to place her brief discussion of the burka in a section on facelessness demonstrates that she herself is still writing about the “face” from inside a western paradigm, even as she tries to envisage a politics of the face that is about empathy and connectedness as opposed to separation. niqabis can experience facelessness in western society, including among fellow muslims attuned to western concepts of the face, akin to how others react to facial disfigurement (p. 148), but not among a muslim community attuned to the normality, even meritoriousness, of covering the face. we can learn to interact with a niqabi on a level that does not require access to the face. we can even learn to recognize her, read emotion from her, and feel connected to her. 108 the american journal of islamic social sciences 33:1 ajiss33-1_ajiss 12/30/2015 12:59 pm page 108 an alternate politics of the face need not see a face covering as “exposing precarious subjecthood,” but rather as encouraging connectedness through nonfacial means. of course the authoritarian nature of many contemporary muslim-majority societies and political movements seeking to impose this practice raises questions about what kind of politics face covering can lead to, and whether more progressive alternatives are also possible, as edkins has asked in face politics. there are evidently rich possibilities in using her work for questions related to muslim women and face politics in muslim-majority and western societies. kathy bullock director of research, the tessellate institute lecturer, university of toronto, mississauga, on, canada book reviews 109 ajiss33-1_ajiss 12/30/2015 12:59 pm page 109 editorial this issue of the american journal of islamic social sciences features two important articles: sarah marusek’s ethnographic study of a grassroots islamic movement in lebanon reconfiguring (even resisting) secularism and neoliberalism, and madiha tahseen and charissa s.l. cheah’s empirical study of the formation of american muslim adolescents. also featured is an extended interview with the renowned anthropologist, talal asad. marusek’s study of the interaction of an islamic movement within secular, liberal, and neoliberal structures and practices is innovative and thought-provoking. it shows how certain shi‘ite clerics and leaders are able to adapt but also simultaneously resist neoliberalism while providing services to the poor, in particular the downtrodden shi‘a population of lebanon. the intellectual posture of these movements, she highlights, seeks to separate the rationalistic procedures and procedures of modernity from what they insist are still religious values. but straddling “forces of materialism and spirituality,” marusek argues, “need not inevitably yield a gospel of wealth. indeed, these forces may even coalesce into a decolonial project.” the lebanese “shi‘i movements,” she concludes, “are each critically engaging with secular liberalism and neoliberal capitalism on their own terms, in profoundly interesting, complex, and contradictory ways.” this is an illuminating study which alludes to the contradictions and limits of embedding religious values and rationality in neoliberal and secular structures and practices, which themselves are inevitably instilling their own values and rationality as they must in order to be fully efficient on their own terms. the struggle, the author suggests, is ongoing and worthwhile. tahseen and cheah’s study investigates the relationship between mental and social health of the american muslim youth and their identity. this carefully constructed empirical study confirms the assessment long felt by american muslim leaders and thinkers: that the healthiest and most advi the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 justed youth are those that are stronger in their religious identity while also being well-adjusted and at home in american society. my conversation with talal asad took place in the heady days of the arab uprisings, before their fate was sealed by the regional autocrats. it is reproduced here with minor changes. many of its concerns are not specific to the political upheaval and optimism of the time, but are long-standing academic concerns that the events of those years certainly threw into sharp relief. most people seem to now have forgotten that the arab uprisings were first and foremost about the painful injustices and inequalities inflicted by the neoliberal policies of world powers that have played havoc with the region since at least the 1980s. from neoliberalism and capitalism, the conversation moves to issues of islamic political tradition, rebellion, and governance, to biographical vignettes from both of our lives, ending finally with the question of islamic tradition as a way to combat the contemporary nihilism of the material as well as intellectual trends of our times. ovamir anjum, editor, american journal of islamic social sciences imam khattab chair of islamic studies associate professor, department of philosophy and religious studies affiliated faculty, department of history university of toledo, toledo, oh manley and bishop: the tragedy of leftist reformism in the caribbean tristan scott 2t1 university of toronto fas human geography, geographic information systems, environmental studies the caribbean and latin america has been home to numerous leftist and populist political experiments during the 20th century, most of which have in turn experienced some level of retaliation from the capitalist global north. jamaica under michael manley and grenada under maurice bishop are two such examples, and both can be evaluated for their choice in pursuing relatively moderate, reformist left-wing policies – neither of which permanently dismantled capitalist institutions in their respective states. yet, both countries were ultimately subject to destabilization efforts from the capitalistic global north, which sought to maintain its political and economic hold over the region. this paper examines leftist reformist policies (as opposed to revolutionary policies) in jamaica, and grenada, and observes how even the most moderate economic policies looking to curb capitalism’s most harmful negative externalities are still viewed as a near-existential threat by institutions in the global north. a b s t r a c t keywords: michael manley, maurice bishop, caribbean socialism, reform vs revolution, capitalism, colonialism b i o tristan scott is a recent graduate from the university of toronto, majoring in human geography, geographic information systems, and environmental studies. tristan’s academic interests include urban planning, data analytics, history, and political science, particularly as it concerns the intricacies of left-wing politics and neoliberalism. © 2021 tristan scott caribbean studies students’ union, canada https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cquilt/ this work is licensed under the creative commons attributionsharealike 4.0 international license. to view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 73 (january 20, 2022 / 09:38:44) 122864-1b_caribbeanquilt_vol7_rev.pdf .73 74 c. b. davies & m. jardine, “imperial geographies and caribbean nationalism: at the border between ‘a dying colonialism’ and u.s. hegemony” (2003). ibid. ibid. ibid. f. ambursley, “jamaica: the demise of ‘democratic socialism’”. new left review, 128 (1981), 76. 1 introduction as a historically colonized and racialized region of the world, the caribbean has been subject to the influence of foreign actors, particularly those residing in the global north. as the concepts of empire and colonial rule became untenable in the post-second world war era, capitalism as a means maintaining wealth accumulation in the periphery rose to the forefront. through management infrastructures such as the u.s-built and global north-supported bretton woods institutions, former colonies such as those in the caribbean would have to take on liberal economic policies such as structural adjustment programmes, privatization, and initiate a reduction of market regulations. if a newly independent caribbean state had any hope of developing while also maintaining cordial relations with the wealthy global north, they would have to sacrifice any ideas of formulating alternative, nation-specific forms of governance. in addition, with the united states emerging as the hegemonic power of the west after the second world war, it was given relatively free reign to impose its own economic ideals over much of the global south. by extending the influence of american monopolies, controlling supply chains, wielding its advanced and mobile army, and flooding the region with american products, the united states turned the caribbean and latin america into its own personal “backyard” – a region firmly in its sphere of influence. with capital flows replacing the territorial boundaries associ ated with the empires of the past, the united states successfully recreated a form of economic imperialism in the present. although world history is marked by numerous violent and revolutionary attempts at breaking the bonds presented by political and economic colonialism, the caribbean has been noted for attempting change via moderate reformist methods. this paper will examine jamaica under the michael manley government and grenada under maurice bishop and the new jewel movement, arguing that reformist methods in the global south, despite their tendencies toward upholding capitalistic institutions, are seen as being just as threatening as their revolutionary counterparts in the minds of global north actors. jamaica before and after independence: alexander bustamante and the state jamaica prior to independence was grappling with the final vestiges of overt colonialism and was largely subject to the influence on alexander bustamante. according to ambursley, the bustamante industrial trade union (bitu), which held control over much of jamaican industry after the second world war, was routed to defend the interests of both british and american capitalists. indeed, it was under the management of bustamante himself that the bitu threatened a worker strike against clement atlee, then prime minister of the united kingdom, who proposed nationalizing two of the 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 (january 20, 2022 / 09:38:44) 122864-1b_caribbeanquilt_vol7_rev.pdf .74 75 ibid. j.r. mandle, patterns of caribbean development: an interpretive essay on economic change (routledge, 1982). ibid. ibid. ibid. f. ambursley, “jamaica: the demise of ‘democratic socialism’”. new left review, 128 (1981): 76. ibid. ibid. “jamaica vs. the transnationals: battle over bauxite,” nacla report on the americas, 12:3, (1978): 17-25, ibid 6 island’s sugar monopolies. paired with the influence of bustamante, jamaica’s path to industrialization would be based upon the policy of “industrialization by invitation” (idi), devised by st. lucian economist w. arthur lewis. wanting to shift the caribbean away from its primary export of agriculture, lewis called for creating an economic atmosphere that was attractive to foreign investment, therefore kickstarting industrialization. caribbean leaders would be required to keep wages low to entice existing companies. lewis also recommended the creation of a caribbean-wide industrial development corporation and an industrial development bank, with the former providing investment to the region while the latter offered loans to companies. lewis appeared to envision a firmly capitalistic economic order for the region, where industry and wealth provided by europe and north america would “trickle down” to locals. with caribbean governments tagging on their own tax incentives for prospective businesses, the region adopted idi policies across the 1950s. the process of industrialization was therefore attached to the movements of foreign capitalists, who had the space to operate across the caribbean virtually free of charge. it must be mentioned that the welfare of caribbean labourers goes unaddressed in lewis’ policy. attempts at improving the material well-being of workers would therefore be a secondary or nonexistent goal in the eyes of capitalists such as lewis and bustamante. michael manley and the liberation of jamaica via reformist means with financial downturns and widening wealth inequalities occurring throughout the 1960s, jamaica’s people’s national party under michael manley won the 1972 election. manley adopted the phrases of “betta mus come” and “power to the people”, signalling that his party would be adopting a populist edge in their management of jamaica. initial social and economic reforms included universal secondary education, lifting bans on black liberation and marxist literature, and the initiation of nationalization programmes. manley also announced his intentions to renegotiate bauxite and alumina royalty agreements with canadian and american corporations. in addition, a levy upon bauxite was applied country-wide, raising tax rates by 480% by 1975, amounting to a total increase from $2.50 to $14.51 per tonne. international goals included the formation of the international bauxite association, which would bring together numerous global south countries. finally, manley voiced his support for black liberation movements across the african continent. 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 (january 20, 2022 / 09:38:44) 122864-1b_caribbeanquilt_vol7_rev.pdf .75 76 c. edie, “domestic politics and external relations in jamaica under michael manley, 1972–1980,” studies in comparative international development, 21(1), (2007): 1–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02717364 democratic socialists of america. (n.d.). what is democratic socialism? https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-isdemocratic-socialism/ m. bolton, “‘democratic socialism’ and the concept of (post)capitalism,” . the political quarterly, 91(2), (2020): 334–342. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923x.12830 democratic socialists of america. (n.d.). what is democratic socialism? https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-isdemocratic-socialism/ g. graham, democratic political tragedy in the postcolony: the tragedy of postcoloniality in michael manley’s jamaica and nelson mandela’s south africa. (routledge, 2018). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315444529 ibid. ibid. 16 topping off his shift away from the capitalistic norms established by british colonists and bustamante, the pnp published its “thirteen principles of democratic socialism”. manley particularly noted that his democratic socialist ideal for jamaica “…was the philosophy that best gives expression to the christian ideal of equality of all god’s children”. as evidenced by the ambitious reforms of the early 1970s, the manley government had the aim of redistributing wealth and supporting liberation movements worldwide, all of which fall in line with the leftist goals advocated by the pnp’s version of democratic socialism. however, a question yet remains: did the goals of manley and the pnp truly fall within the bounds of democratic socialism, and perhaps most importantly, were they conducive to eventually dismantling capitalism in jamaica? democratic socialism and social democracy the democratic socialists of america define democratic socialism as a system in which “…the economy and society should be run democratically – to meet public needs, not to make profits for the few”. similarly, bolton states that democratic socialism looks to dismantle the concept of private property while ensuring that production is run democratically by workers in an alliance with the state. as such, the needs of workers and of society at large, rather than those of a capitalist or a group of shareholders, are to be emphasized and supported. as a form of socialism which depends upon democratic consensus, democratic socialism is opposed to state-based, centrally planned forms of socialism, commonly found in marxist-leninist communist states such as the soviet union and cuba during the 20th and 21st centuries. in detailing the erosion of democratic socialism in jamaica, graham states that michael manley’s reforms were firmly moderate and non-revolutionary, with no calls for seizing control over jamaican capital. capitalism under the pnp would instead seek to “domesticate” capitalism through nationalization, the establishment of welfare infrastructure, and the creation of rural cooperatives. manley looked to forge a “third path” for jamaica, one which differed from both traditional neocolonial models of capitalism and the state-based marxist-leninist form of communism. as such, it could be argued that the form of democratic socialism implemented by the manley government was instead a form of social democracy, which calls for wealth redistribution, social safety nets, and government economic intervention as a means of countering the often-harmful 18 20 21 22 19 17 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 (january 20, 2022 / 09:38:44) 122864-1b_caribbeanquilt_vol7_rev.pdf .76 77 a. lavelle, the death of social democracy: political consequences in the 21st century. (routledge, 2008) ibid. ibid. f. ambursley, “jamaica: the demise of ‘democratic socialism’”. new left review, 128 (1981): 76. ibid. a. lavelle, the death of social democracy: political consequences in the 21st century. (routledge, 2008) ibid. c. edie, “domestic politics and external relations in jamaica under michael manley, 1972–1980,” studies in comparative international development, 21(1), (2007): 1–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02717364. a. lavelle, the death of social democracy: political consequences in the 21st century. (routledge, 2008), 13. 23 consequences of capitalism and markets. capitalism as an economic system would therefore not be overthrown, but instead retooled to serve the needs of working-class jamaicans. therefore, there is no indication that manley’s form of “democratic socialism” would have ever brought about the true diminishment of capitalism and the onset of socialized control for working class jamaicans. manley’s methods were not truly “revolutionary” in any meaning of the term – there would be no violent overthrowing of jamaica’s economic order nor an ousting of american and global north influence from the island. additionally, citing the austerity measures taken by france, britain, sweden, and germany, lavelle states that social democratic governments ultimately capitulate to capitalistic pressures, either from within the government apparatus itself or from capitalist influence elsewhere. citing callinicos, lavelle argues that social democratic reforms are prone to significant reactions from big business, including capital flight, which can destabilize a government. such a point can be observed in the eventual demise of the manley government and the reactionary responses seen towards their bauxite levy, which resulted in domestic business circles moving their wealth abroad. as a result, capital inflow as a measure of the island’s gdp shrank from 9.7% to 0.9% as countries looked elsewhere for profit maximization. additionally, the us moved to support the political ambitions of the liberal capitalist jamaica labour party, while american media initiated a smear campaign against the jamaican tourism industry. by undercutting two of jamaica’s largest industries, tourism and mining, the nation was left economically devastated. such an economic situation rendered manley’s reformist goals impossible to meaningfully achieve. lavelle notes that within a functioning social democracy, constant economic growth for financing its robust social programs is an absolute necessity. therefore, social democrats and reformist socialists such as manley often fall into a “catch-22”, where they attempt to declaw capitalist institutions while simultaneously attempting to maximize the funds that can be siphoned from them. countries such as the european nations analyzed by lavelle or jamaica under future liberal capitalist politicians often eventually end up sidelining social democratic reforms and choosing the opposing path of neoliberalism: the promotion of a strong free market via tax breaks, privatization, and deregulation. the post-manley period, which saw the opposing jamaica labour party ascend to rule under edward seaga, turn to the free market and the global north for fixing jamaica’s financial woes. agreements were struck with the international monetary fund, 25 27 28 29 26 24 30 31 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 (january 20, 2022 / 09:38:45) 122864-1b_caribbeanquilt_vol7_rev.pdf .77 78 d., austin, “vanguards and masses: global lessons from the grenada revolution,” learning from the ground up: global perspectives on social movements and knowledge production. (2010): 175-191. ibid. ibid. g.m. telleria, “vanguardism and the vanguardist organization: a study of the sandinista national liberation front and its rise to power,” latin american policy, 8, (2017): 27-40. https://doi.org/10.1111/lamp.12115 ibid. ibid 32 regulations on companies were diminished, and austerity measures were introduced, resulting in sizeable cuts to jamaican social programs. seaga’s neoliberal goals aimed to create a “good business climate” in jamaica by any means necessary, even if the result was a decline in social well-being. it can therefore be determined that jamaican social democracy, or “democratic socialism” as termed by manley himself, may have been doomed from the start, and would not have eroded jamaican capitalism. the structural problems inherent in jamaican social democracy were further compounded by its position as an industrializing, majority-black, and formerly colonized state in the global south. unlike the industrialized and often formerly imperialist nations of europe and north america, jamaica lacked the international prestige and leverage required to go against british and american interests that were intent on exploiting the country’s resources and claiming most of its wealth. by observing the problems associated with social democracy, we see that the reformist policies of the pnp may have ironically moved jamaica towards neoliberalism, which would have ultimately served the needs capitalists, given time. however, sensing danger, domestic and foreign actors quickly looked to dismantle manley’s relatively docile policies regardless. it becomes clear that even a measured, reform-based attempt at curbing the negative externalities associated with capitalism politics will result in significant backlash from global north actors. grenada’s new jewel movement: revolution via reform manley’s attempt at achieving democratic socialism via reformist means can be contrasted with the new jewel movement (njm), a marxist-leninist organization which overthrew the previous regime via revolutionary means while maintaining elements of capitalism during their rule. before the revolution, eric gairy served as prime minister of grenada. his reign was noted as being rife with corruption, electoral fraud, and the usage of a paramilitary force which terrorized political threats and the island’s citizens. it must be mentioned that the njm, led by maurice bishop, initially attempted to bring about a leftist government via democratic means, wishing to uphold the electoral institutions that were, at least in theory, baked into the fabric of the relatively new country. it was only after multiple failed attempts at unseating the incumbent gairy that the njm turned towards vanguardism: where a political party serves as a community’s sole centralized backbone for driving class struggle and a future revolution. such parties are tightly centralized, with members required to strictly follow the party resolutions. it was through such an organizational model that the njm under bishop was able to remain unified against the increasingly brutal and erratic actions taken by the gairy government. 33 35 36 34 31 30 37 32 33 34 35 36 37 (january 20, 2022 / 09:38:45) 122864-1b_caribbeanquilt_vol7_rev.pdf .78 79 n., phillip, “women in the grenada revolution, 1979-1983,” small axe, 11(1), (2007): 39-66. d., austin, “vanguards and masses: global lessons from the grenada revolution,” learning from the ground up: global perspectives on social movements and knowledge production. (2010): 175-191. r. burtenshaw, grenada’s revolution at 40. jacobin, february 9 2019). https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/grenada-revolution-maurice-bishop-reagan marxists internet archive. (2018). “stagism”. encyclopedia of marxism, 2019. j. brierley, “a review of development strategies and programmes of the people's revolutionary government in grenada, 1979-83”. the geographical journal, 151(1), (1985): 40-52. doi:10.2307/633276 ibid. ibid. ibid. 38 in addition, the njm also focused their efforts on uplifting the material and political conditions affecting women through the progressive women’s association (pwa). although not initially viewing their fight through a socialist lens, the pwa advocated for employment opportunities, improved working conditions, and wages for women. rather than purely attaining change along economic lines, bishop acknowledged the identity-based wants of the pwa and incorporated them into the revolution. looking to keep the party strong, the prg did not tolerate the existence of multiple women’s liberation groups, stating that a plurality could allow for cia and other negative infiltration that could undermine the revolution. the adoption of vanguardism in the grenadian contrast gave the njm, and eventually the people’s revolutionary government (prg), a thoroughly revolutionary edge, which would eventually allow for a liberated grenada to be fully unshackled from the racial and economic bounds provided by capitalism and allow for a transition to communism. it must be noted that although the njm considered itself a marxist and leftist political party, it pursued a mixed economy, recognizing that grenada did not yet have the economic development required to fully bring about communism . it can therefore be argued that although the gairy government was overthrown through revolutionary means, the transition to communism would be done via reformist methods. as such, bishop’s government bears some level of resemblance to manley’s attempt at implementing social democracy in jamaica. although both countries in their experimentations with leftist politics ultimately kept their capitalist institutions intact, the njm did so within the context of a centralized revolutionary government. the marxist-leninist idea of “stagism” would evidently rule, where grenada goes through a capitalist-tolerant phase until the economy was adequately developed and a significant proportion of the population was educated. only then would full worker control over the means of production be viable without undermining the well-being of the state. in terms of agricultural developments, bishop’s goals appeared tied to improving the material well-being of grenadians at the most basic level. goals included implementing price freezes upon staples and increasing the consumption of locally-grown products. according to brierley, economic policy was seen in the creation of a “tri-sectoral” strategy, where grenada’s public, private, and cooperative sectors would work together towards common goals. although the prg was indeed left-wing, such an economic choice resulted in private corporations remaining firmly in place. to the astonishment of observers, the prg saw an unemployment decrease from 49% before the revolution to 14% by 1983. furthermore, in contrast 39 41 42 40 43 44 45 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 (january 20, 2022 / 09:38:45) 122864-1b_caribbeanquilt_vol7_rev.pdf .79 80 to other nations in the western hemisphere that saw declines during and after the 1970s recession, the island saw levels of sustained economic growth between the years of between 1979 to 1983. however, despite grenada’s relatively capitalist-friendly approach, the united states and surrounding caribbean nations still observed bishop’s government as a threat to neoliberal hegemony in the region, resulting in an american-led invasion in 1983 and the toppling of the prg. conclusion in observing the similarities and differences between jamaica under michael manley and grenada under maurice bishop, we recognize that political developments in the caribbean are largely tied to the wants and whims of the global north, largely due to the region being part of “america’s backyard”. although both countries have attempted to implement reformist methods that either would have resulted in the maintaining of capitalism or a gentle movement away from it, both saw significant backlashes from global north actors. the us-led invasion of grenada and the economic troubles experienced by the jamaican pnp both acted as warnings to global south and caribbean countries during the late 20th century. leftist policies that erode the neoliberal capitalistic hegemony will not be tolerated under any circumstances. as of 2021, both jamaica and grenada are managed by conservative, centre-right governments that adhere to the capitalistic policies which their predecessors sought to dismantle. for now, it appears as if the economic preferences of the global north reign supreme across much of the caribbean. it remains to be seen if leftist political forces can regain the level of prominence they once held in decades past and once again challenge the global north for regional sovereignty. 45 (january 20, 2022 / 09:38:45) 122864-1b_caribbeanquilt_vol7_rev.pdf .80 81 “jamaica vs. the transnationals: battle over bauxite,” nacla report on the americas, 12:3, (1978): 17-25. ambursley, f. “jamaica: the demise of ‘democratic socialism’”. new left review, 128 (1981): 76. austin, d. “vanguards and masses: global lessons from the grenada revolution,” learning from the ground up: global perspectives on social movements and knowledge production. (2010): 175-191. bolton, m. “‘democratic socialism’ and the concept of (post)capitalism,” . the political quarterly, 91(2), (2020): 334–342. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923x.12830 brierley, j. “a review of development strategies and programmes of the people's revolutionary government in grenada, 1979-83”. the geographical journal, 151 (1), (1985): 40-52. doi:10.2307/633276 burtenshaw, r. grenada’s revolution at 40. jacobin, february 9 2019). https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/grenada-revolution-maurice-bishop-reagan davies, c.b. & jardine, m. imperial geographies and caribbean nationalism: at the border between “a dying colonialism” and u.s. hegemony (2003). democratic socialists of america. (n.d.). what is democratic socialism? https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/ edie, c. “domestic politics and external relations in jamaica under michael manley, 1972–1980,” studies in comparative international development, 21(1), (2007): 1–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02717364. graham, g. democratic political tragedy in the postcolony: the tragedy of postcoloniality in michael manley’s jamaica and nelson mandela’s south africa. (routledge, 2018). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315444529 lavelle, a. the death of social democracy: political consequences in the 21st century. (routledge, 2008), 13. mandle, j.r. patterns of caribbean development: an interpretive essay on economic change (routledge, 1982). marxists internet archive. (2018). “stagism”. encyclopedia of marxism, 2019. phillip, n. (2007). “women in the grenada revolution, 1979-1983,” small axe, 11(1), (2007): 39-66. telleria, g.m. “vanguardism and the vanguardist organization: a study of the sandinista national liberation front and its rise to power,” latin american policy, 8, (2017): 27-40. https://doi.org/10.1111/lamp.12115 works cited (january 20, 2022 / 09:38:45) 122864-1b_caribbeanquilt_vol7_rev.pdf .81 salûsy, al-, alî ahmad, al-iqtishâd al-islâmiyyah wa qadhâyâ al-fiqhiyyah almu’âshir”, bayrût: muassasah al-rayyân li al-tauzî wa al-nasyr, 1997. suhadak, analisis expected return serta faktor yang memengaruhinya, jakarta: arthavidya, 2005, tahun 6, no.1. usman, muhammad, pengaruh dividen payout ratio, return on equity, earning growth terhadap price earning ratio pada perusahaan perbankan, dalam journal ekoma, september, 2001. yarnest, analisis pengaruh faktor fundamental terhadap return saham perusahaan food & beverage yang listed di bej, dalam jurnal ekonomi, 2001, tahun 5, no. 2. artikel/makalah: anastasia, njo, ‚analisis faktor fundamental dan risiko sistematik terhadap harga saham properti di bej‛, jakarta: jurnal akuntansi dan keuangan, 2003 november, vol. 5, no. 2. ahmad, ausaf, ‚towards an islamic finacial market‛, jeddah: paper, islamic development bank, 1997. dualeh, sulaiman abdi, ‚islamic securitisation: practical aspects‛, jenewa: paper paper world conference on islamic banking, 1998. fama, eugene f., ‚efficient capital market ii‛, dalam journal of finance, 1991 december. ---------------, ‚efficient capital market: a review of theory and empirical works‛, dalam journal of finance, 1970, may. ---------------, jensen, roll f., ‚the adjustment of stock price to new information‛, new york: international economic review, 1969, february. lestari, murni & christianti, ari, ‚analisis pengaruh nilai saham yang beredar, struktur modal, risiko pasar dan suku bunga terhadap return saham di bej dengan pendekatan model dinamis: studi kasus pada sektor aneka industri tahun 1996 – 2002‛, jakarta: jurnal riset akuntansi dan keuangan, 2005, vol.1 no.1. relevansi prinsip ekonomi islam dalam pembinaan umat islam indonesia mu’min rauf abstract: relevance principles of islamic economics in developing of indonesian muslim. this article starts from a paradox in the economic conditions that occurred in indonesia. on the one hand, indonesia has most all natural resources (the sda) which is relied upon by a number of countries. however, it can not be used to create prosperity. this article hypotizes that capitalism system is one of the reason. therefore, it needs one system as a solution. this article concerns that islamic economy supposed to be in both capitalism and socialism. this concept is appropiate for indonesia. keywords: islamic economy, muslims, sharia abstrak: relevansi prinsip ekonomi islam dalam pembinaan umat islam indonesia. artikel ini berangkat dari sebuah kondisi paradoks di bidang ekonomi yang terjadi di indonesia. di satu sisi, indonesia memiliki hampir semua sumber daya alam (sda) yang dijadikan andalan oleh sejumlah negara. namun, di sisi lain sumber daya alam tersebut tidak mampu dimanfaatkan untuk menciptakan kemakmuran. artikel ini meletakkan sebuah hipotesis bahwa salah satu penyebabnya adalah sistem ekonomi yang dibangun selama ini cenderung pada sistem kapitalis, sehingga diperlukan satu sistem sebagai solusi. arikel ini menegaskan bahwa ekonomi islam yang berada di antara dua kutub: kapitalis dan sosialis, merupakan sistem yang tepat dikembangkan di indonesia. kata kunci: ekonomi islam, umat islam, syariah naskah diterima: 16 juli 2010, direvisi: 5 november 2010, disetujui: 11 november 2010.  himpunan ilmuwan dan sarjana syariah indonesia (hissi). jl. ir. h. juanda 95, ciputat, jakarta. e-mail: muminrauf@gmail.com mu’min rauf: relevansi prinsip ekonomi islam142 pendahuluan indonesia adalah negara yang kaya. demikian ungkapan yang seringkali disampaikan oleh para guru/pendidik, terutama pada tingkat pendidikan dasar. bukan hanya itu, lirik sejumlah lagu-lagu nasional juga menyatakan hal senada, menyanjung negeri ini sebagai negara elok nan permai, kaya nan amat subur, aman nan makmur sehingga menjadi pujaan bangsa lain. pernyataan-pernyataan itu sesungguhnya tidak keliru. harus diakui bahwa sumber daya alam indonesia memang sangat beragam, kesuburannya pun tidak diragukan sehingga tongkat kkayu yang dipancang pun tumbuh menjadi tanaman. sumber daya alam dan kesuburan yang menjadikan bangsa-bangsa lain berjaya ada di negeri ini. gas dan minyak bumi yang mengantar negara di kawasan timur tengah ada di indonesia mulai dari balikpapan, blok cepu, blok ambalat, sampai natuna.1 karet, coklat, dan kelapa sawit, yang merupakan komoditi non migas yang mengantar malaysia pada kemakmuran juga ada. belum lagi logam mulia berupa biji emas, batu bara, besi, nikel, timah, dan lainlain.2 di sektor pertanian indonesia bahkan pernah masuk dalam jajaran negara swasembada beras, di sektor perikanan indonesia adalah negara maritim.3 dan tentu saja, populasi penduduk yang demikian menempatkan indonesia sebagai pasar yang menjanjikan di sektor industri. meski demikian, sumber-sumber itu tidak kunjung menjadikan masyarakat indonesia hidup dalam kemakmuran. sebuah kenyataan yang tidak dapat dibantah bahwa justeru lebih dari 50% penduduk negeri ini hidup dalam kesulitan bagai kehidupan sebagian masyarakat negara tandus di afrika. buktinya, sejumlah anak-anak menderita gizi buruk dan masyarakat kelaparan, persentase rakyat 1 minyak dan gas indonesia adalah kontributor utama dalam perekonomian indonesia. ipa optimis akan potensi yang besar untuk kegiatan eksplorasi baru. menggali potensi migas indonesia, diakses pada tanggal 15 januari 2010 dari http://www.gatra.com/2010-04-26/artikel. php?id=137136 2 indonesia menempati posisi produsen terbesar kedua untuk komoditas timah, posisi terbesar keempat untuk komoditas tembaga, posisi kelima untuk komoditas nikel, posisi terbesar ketujuh untuk komoditas emas, dan posisi kedelapan untuk komoditas batubara. potensi pertambangan non migas (mineral) yang cukup menjanjikan ditunjukkan oleh hasil penelitian fraser institute yang menyatakan bahwa prospek mineral di indonesia menduduki peringkat 6 (enam) teratas di dunia. direktorat jenderal statistik ekonomi dan moneter bank indonesia, peta sektor pertambangan indonesia, http://www.jurnal-ekonomi.org/2008/07/17/ 3 sebagai negara maritime, indonesia mempunyai pesisir dan laut sepanjang 81,000 kilometer. angka ini setara dengan dengan 14% dari seluruh pesisir di dunia. ekosistem kelautan yang dimiliki oleh indonesia sangat bervariasi dan mendukung kehidupan kumpulan spesies yang sangat besar. indonesia memiliki hutan bakau yang paling luas, dan memiliki terumbu karang yang paling spektakuler di kawasan asia. tuan kelana jaya, ada apa dengan pengelolaan umber daya alam indonesia? http://www.jurnal-ekonomi.org/2004/04/22/ al-iqtishad: vol. iii, no. 1, januari 2011 143 pendahuluan indonesia adalah negara yang kaya. demikian ungkapan yang seringkali disampaikan oleh para guru/pendidik, terutama pada tingkat pendidikan dasar. bukan hanya itu, lirik sejumlah lagu-lagu nasional juga menyatakan hal senada, menyanjung negeri ini sebagai negara elok nan permai, kaya nan amat subur, aman nan makmur sehingga menjadi pujaan bangsa lain. pernyataan-pernyataan itu sesungguhnya tidak keliru. harus diakui bahwa sumber daya alam indonesia memang sangat beragam, kesuburannya pun tidak diragukan sehingga tongkat kkayu yang dipancang pun tumbuh menjadi tanaman. sumber daya alam dan kesuburan yang menjadikan bangsa-bangsa lain berjaya ada di negeri ini. gas dan minyak bumi yang mengantar negara di kawasan timur tengah ada di indonesia mulai dari balikpapan, blok cepu, blok ambalat, sampai natuna.1 karet, coklat, dan kelapa sawit, yang merupakan komoditi non migas yang mengantar malaysia pada kemakmuran juga ada. belum lagi logam mulia berupa biji emas, batu bara, besi, nikel, timah, dan lainlain.2 di sektor pertanian indonesia bahkan pernah masuk dalam jajaran negara swasembada beras, di sektor perikanan indonesia adalah negara maritim.3 dan tentu saja, populasi penduduk yang demikian menempatkan indonesia sebagai pasar yang menjanjikan di sektor industri. meski demikian, sumber-sumber itu tidak kunjung menjadikan masyarakat indonesia hidup dalam kemakmuran. sebuah kenyataan yang tidak dapat dibantah bahwa justeru lebih dari 50% penduduk negeri ini hidup dalam kesulitan bagai kehidupan sebagian masyarakat negara tandus di afrika. buktinya, sejumlah anak-anak menderita gizi buruk dan masyarakat kelaparan, persentase rakyat 1 minyak dan gas indonesia adalah kontributor utama dalam perekonomian indonesia. ipa optimis akan potensi yang besar untuk kegiatan eksplorasi baru. menggali potensi migas indonesia, diakses pada tanggal 15 januari 2010 dari http://www.gatra.com/2010-04-26/artikel. php?id=137136 2 indonesia menempati posisi produsen terbesar kedua untuk komoditas timah, posisi terbesar keempat untuk komoditas tembaga, posisi kelima untuk komoditas nikel, posisi terbesar ketujuh untuk komoditas emas, dan posisi kedelapan untuk komoditas batubara. potensi pertambangan non migas (mineral) yang cukup menjanjikan ditunjukkan oleh hasil penelitian fraser institute yang menyatakan bahwa prospek mineral di indonesia menduduki peringkat 6 (enam) teratas di dunia. direktorat jenderal statistik ekonomi dan moneter bank indonesia, peta sektor pertambangan indonesia, http://www.jurnal-ekonomi.org/2008/07/17/ 3 sebagai negara maritime, indonesia mempunyai pesisir dan laut sepanjang 81,000 kilometer. angka ini setara dengan dengan 14% dari seluruh pesisir di dunia. ekosistem kelautan yang dimiliki oleh indonesia sangat bervariasi dan mendukung kehidupan kumpulan spesies yang sangat besar. indonesia memiliki hutan bakau yang paling luas, dan memiliki terumbu karang yang paling spektakuler di kawasan asia. tuan kelana jaya, ada apa dengan pengelolaan umber daya alam indonesia? http://www.jurnal-ekonomi.org/2004/04/22/ miskin demikian tinggi, pengangguran demikian banyak,4 dan katanya negara ini mempunyai utang sangat besar.5 menurut data badan pusat statistik, sebagaimana dikutip kompas, jumlah penduduk miskin sampai bulan maret 2010 berjumlah 31,02 juta jiwa atau 13,33% dari jumlah keseluruhan rakyat indonesia. meskipun jumlah ini turun dari tahun sebelumnya, yaitu 32,53 juta jiwa, laju penurunan angka kemiskinan jauh lebih lambat dari tahun sebelumnya di periode yang sama.6 kondisi yang paradoks itu, diakui atau tidak menunjukkan bahwa pasti ada yang salah dalam menangani, mengurus, dan menata perekenomian negeri ini. hipotesis ini—jika dikatakan demikian—kemungkinan ada benarnya. setidaknya, diskusi, perdebatan, dan sejumlah talk show yang digelar di pelbagai media menguatkan hal itu. bahkan sejumlah ekonom dengan lugas menuding sistem ekonomi tertentu yang dijadikan model oleh indonesia selama ini merupakan dari biang kerok yang menyebabkan masyarakat tak pernah sempat menikmati kekayaan negerinya sendiri. di tengah keterpurukan ekonomi nasional, sistem ekonomi islam muncul sebagai fenomena baru. berawal dari kepeloporan ikatan cendekiawan muslim se indonesia (icmi), sejumlah anak bangsa berhasil mendirikan bank muamalat pada tahun 1992. diakui bahwa lembaga finansial ini berjalan di tengah pesimisme (under estimated) sejumlah pihak. namun sejumlah keraguan berhasil ditepis setelah sukses melewati krisis monoter yang menghantam perekonomian nasional pada tahun 1998. ia tetap berdiri kokoh dengan pertambahan aset pada tahun 2000, di antara reruntuhan sejumlah bank konvensial yang bangkrut baik bank milik pemerintah maupun swasta. memang, krisis keuangan yang menghancurkan dunia usaha menjadikan bank muamalat menanggung kerugian rp 105 miliar, tetapi dalam waktu satu tahun bank syariah pertama di indonesia ini sudah memperoleh keuntungan. ekuitas perusahaan pun berlipat hampir 10 kali 4 berdasarkan data survei tenaga kerja nasional tahun 2009 yang dikeluarkan oleh bappenas, dari 21,2 juta masyarakat indonesia yang masuk dalam angkatan kerja, sebanyak 4,1 juta orang atau sekitar 22,2 persen adalah pengangguran, sekitar 2 juta orang diantaranya berijazah diploma (pengangguran akademik). kompas.com, tantangan perguruan tnggi; angka pengangguran akademik lebih dari dua juta!, (kompas.com edisi kamis, 14 januari 2011). diakses tanggal 16 januari 2011 http://edukasi.kompas.com/read/2010/02/18/16344910. 5 sebuah laporan menyatakan bahwa hngga agustus 2010, total pinjaman luar negeri indonesia (pemerintah-swasta) mencapai us$ 191 miliar, pinjaman tersebut, sebanyak us$131,4 miliar (68,6 persen) dari negara-negara kreditor, us$24 miliar (13 persen) dari organisasi keuangan internasional dan us$35,4 miliar (18,4 persen). berapakah utang indonesia untuk amerika? http://bisnis.vivanews. com/news/read/187866 (diakses pada tanggal 16 janari 2011 dari http://edukasi.kompas.com/read/ 2010/02/18/16344910 6 kompas, kemiskinan kian merisaukan, senin, 12 juli 2010, h. 1 mu’min rauf: relevansi prinsip ekonomi islam144 dari rp 39 miliar di 1998 menjadi hampir rp 966 miliar di 2008. pada tahun lalu, bank muamalat mencatat return on equity sebesar 33 persen. sementara penyaluran pembiayaan terlihat dari peningkatan portofolio penanaman dana sebesar 22 persen dari rp 8,62 triliun di 2007 menjadi rp 10,52 triliun di 2008. hal ini menunjukkan bahwa sistem ekonomi islam khususnya perbankan syariah tidak lagi menjadi alternatif melainkan sebagai pilihan yang setidaknya setara dengan lembaga finansial yang lain. sehubungan dengan itu, artikel ini akan memaparkan prinsip-prinsip ekonomi islam yang tergali dari sumber ajaran islam, alquran dan hadis. pada bagian terakhir, akan memaparkan pula keselarasan antara prinsip-prinsip tersebut dengan kultur masyarakat di indonesia yang diakui atau tidak merupakan bagian dari pilar penting dalam menopang perbankan syariah sekaligus menumbuhkan kepercayaan masyarakat. prinsip ekonomi islam meski mengenalkan diri sebagai agama sehingga menyiratkan kesan ritual secara dominan, islam sesungguhnya merupakan konsep ajaran yang utuh dan menyeluruh. islam tidak meletakkan garis pemisah antara urusan dunia dan akhirat atau profan dan transenden untuk meletakkan keduanya secara dikotomis. islam justru mengajarkan adanya keterkaitan antara keduanya sehingga tidak mungkin mengutamakan salah satu untuk meninggalkan yang lain. pelajaran moral yang sering ditekankan oleh islam lebih awal adalah bahwasannya dunia ini hanyalah tempat menanam sementara akhirat adalah tempat menuai. islam juga tidak mengajarkan untuk mengutamakan satu aspek kehidupan dan mengabaikan yang lain di satu sisi. karena itu, islam tidak membenarkan penganutnya untuk menjalankan ritual setiap saat dan di sisi lain mengabaikan kegiatan-kegiatan ekonomi. sebuah riwayat menuturkan bahwa ‘umar ibn alkhaththâb pernah membentak seseorang yang setiap saat di masjid dan tidak perduli dengan kebutuhan ekonomi untuk diri dan keluarganya. bahkan hal ini ditegaskan secara eksplisit sebagaimana yang ditemukan pada q.s. al-qashash [28]: 77:                                                 al-iqtishad: vol. iii, no. 1, januari 2011 145 dari rp 39 miliar di 1998 menjadi hampir rp 966 miliar di 2008. pada tahun lalu, bank muamalat mencatat return on equity sebesar 33 persen. sementara penyaluran pembiayaan terlihat dari peningkatan portofolio penanaman dana sebesar 22 persen dari rp 8,62 triliun di 2007 menjadi rp 10,52 triliun di 2008. hal ini menunjukkan bahwa sistem ekonomi islam khususnya perbankan syariah tidak lagi menjadi alternatif melainkan sebagai pilihan yang setidaknya setara dengan lembaga finansial yang lain. sehubungan dengan itu, artikel ini akan memaparkan prinsip-prinsip ekonomi islam yang tergali dari sumber ajaran islam, alquran dan hadis. pada bagian terakhir, akan memaparkan pula keselarasan antara prinsip-prinsip tersebut dengan kultur masyarakat di indonesia yang diakui atau tidak merupakan bagian dari pilar penting dalam menopang perbankan syariah sekaligus menumbuhkan kepercayaan masyarakat. prinsip ekonomi islam meski mengenalkan diri sebagai agama sehingga menyiratkan kesan ritual secara dominan, islam sesungguhnya merupakan konsep ajaran yang utuh dan menyeluruh. islam tidak meletakkan garis pemisah antara urusan dunia dan akhirat atau profan dan transenden untuk meletakkan keduanya secara dikotomis. islam justru mengajarkan adanya keterkaitan antara keduanya sehingga tidak mungkin mengutamakan salah satu untuk meninggalkan yang lain. pelajaran moral yang sering ditekankan oleh islam lebih awal adalah bahwasannya dunia ini hanyalah tempat menanam sementara akhirat adalah tempat menuai. islam juga tidak mengajarkan untuk mengutamakan satu aspek kehidupan dan mengabaikan yang lain di satu sisi. karena itu, islam tidak membenarkan penganutnya untuk menjalankan ritual setiap saat dan di sisi lain mengabaikan kegiatan-kegiatan ekonomi. sebuah riwayat menuturkan bahwa ‘umar ibn alkhaththâb pernah membentak seseorang yang setiap saat di masjid dan tidak perduli dengan kebutuhan ekonomi untuk diri dan keluarganya. bahkan hal ini ditegaskan secara eksplisit sebagaimana yang ditemukan pada q.s. al-qashash [28]: 77:                                                 dan carilah pada apa yang telah dianugerahkan allah kepadamu (kebahagiaan) negeri akhirat, dan janganlah kamu melupakan bahagianmu dari (kenikmatan) duniawi dan berbuat baiklah (kepada orang lain) sebagaimana allah telah berbuat baik kepadamu, dan janganlah kamu berbuat kerusakan di (muka) bumi. sesungguhnya allah tidak menyukai orang-orang yang berbuat kerusakan. (q.s. al-qashash [28]: 77) keseimbangan yang demikian selaras dengan tuntunan-tuntunan yang ada di dalam alquran dan hadis sebagai sumber utamanya. kita tentu tidak mungkin mengulas keselarasan itu dalam pelbagai aspek. yang menjadi fokus penulis di dalam kajian ini adalah prinsip-prinsip ekonomi yang diajarkan oleh allah melalui alquran dan sunah rasul-nya yang akan dikaitkan dengan keselarasannya dengan kultur masyarakat indonesia. prinsip pertama, harta adalah milik allah (al-mâl mâl allâh). semua apa yang ada di atas bumi ini merupakan milik allah swt. pernyataan yang demikian atau yang semakna dengannya berulangkali ditegaskan di dalam alquran. pada q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 284, misalnya, allah swt. menyatakan, “milik allah-lah seluruh yang ada di langit dan di bumi‛. menurut quraish shihab kata ‚lillâh” yang mengawali ayat ini secara harfiah berarti milik allah. namun demikian para pakar tafsir tidak memahaminya terbatas pada kepemilikan semata tetapi juga berarti pengenalan diri-nya sebagai pencipta, pengelola, dan pengatur-nya. artinya, seluruh jagad raya adalah ciptaan allah, milik-nya, dan di samping itu, ia mengelola dan mengaturnya, sehingga semua tunduk kepada-nya. di sisi lain, perlu juga dicatat bahwa penempatan kata itu pada awal kalimat mengandung makna pengkhususan, sehingga kepemilikan, penciptaan, dan pengelolaan alam raya, hanya oleh allah semata-mata, bukan selain-nya. kalau ada selain-nya yang dinamai memiliki atau mengelola, maka itu adalah atas restu atau izin-nya, dan yang demikian itu hanya bersifat sementara. bisa jadi apa yang dimiliki dan dikelola meninggalkannya, atau dia yang meninggalkan apa yang dimiliki dan dikelolanya itu.7 prinsip bahwa semua apa yang ada adalah milik allah dan manusia sebagai pihak yang mendapat kepercayaan untuk mengelolanya, melahirkan konsep pertanggungjawaban. sekecil apapun harta yang diberikan, maka ia tidak lepas dari pertanggungjawaban mengenai dua hal. pertama, dari manakah harta itu diperoleh dan kemana jua dimanfaatkan. rasulullah menegaskan: 7 muhammad quraish shihab, tafsir al-misbah, h. 613. mu’min rauf: relevansi prinsip ekonomi islam146 dua kaki seorang hamba tidak dapat bergerak pada hari kiamat hingga ia ditanya tentang empat hal. tentang umurnya, untuk apa ia gunakan. ilmunya yang mana saja yang telah ia amalkan. hartanya darimana ia mendapatkannya sekaligus ia gunakan untuk apa. dan tubuhnya untuk apa ia manfaatkan. (h.r. al-tirmidzî)8 dalam soal sumber, allah swt hanya membenarkan manusia mendapatkannya dengan sumber yang dibenarkan dengan cara yang benar. darat, laut, dan perut bumi adalah sumber yang disediakan oleh allah. manusia bebas mengeksploirasi dengan cara yang benar, antara lain dengan tidak merusak dan merugikan pihak lain. demikian pula dalam soal pemanfaatan. allah telah mengaturnya melalui ayat-ayat dan hadis nabi. dengan demikian, manusia semestinya tidak memperlakukan harta yang ia miliki seenak kemauannya sendiri. allah swt telah menetapkan aturan mengenai hal itu dan keberhasilan untuk mempertanggungjawabkannya harus mengacu pada sejumlah aturan-aturan yang telah ditetapkannya itu. memanfaatkan harta yang diperoleh dengan cara yang benar merupakan wujud kesyukuran, dan allah berjanji akan menambahkannya dengan jumlah yang lebih banyak (q.s. ibrâhîm [14]: 7). janji ini pada dasarnya dapat diilustrasikan dengan teori kepercayaan dua pihak. bukankah sebuah perusahaan senantiasa menawarkan kerja sama kepada mitra yang dapat dipercaya, yakni mitra yang senantiasa menjalankan tugas sesuai perjanjian yang telah disepakati dan mempertanggunjawabkannya secara jujur. sebaliknya, memanfaatkan harta yang diperoleh dengan cara yang benar, apalagi yang diperoleh dengan cara yang terlarang, maka allah tidak memberkahinya, dan tentu pertanggungjawabannya tidak akan diterima. prinsip pertanggungjawaban di hadapan allah inilah yang tidak ada di dalam sistem ekonomi kapitalis sehingga cenderung tidak terlalu mempersoalkan cara mendapatkan harta dan pemanfaatannya. prinsip kedua, kebutuhan akan bahan pokok merupakan tanggung jawab kolektif (dhamân al-hâjî kifâyah likulli fardh fi al-mujtama’). di dalam ajaran islam masyarakat harus memberi jaminan keamanan akan kebutuhan pokok bagi individu. yang dimaksud dengan kebutuhan pokok adalah apa yang biasa disebut dengan sandang, pangan, dan boleh jadi juga papan. kecukupan dalam hal ini adalah terpenuhinya hal tersebut dalam batas minimal. realisasi dalam realitas, hendaknya memastikan bahwa tidak ada individu di dalam masyarakat yang kelaparan, semua individu mempunyai pakaian yang cukup untuk menutup 8 diriwayatkan oleh imam al-tirmidzî dan menilainya dengan hasan shahîh. al-iqtishad: vol. iii, no. 1, januari 2011 147 dua kaki seorang hamba tidak dapat bergerak pada hari kiamat hingga ia ditanya tentang empat hal. tentang umurnya, untuk apa ia gunakan. ilmunya yang mana saja yang telah ia amalkan. hartanya darimana ia mendapatkannya sekaligus ia gunakan untuk apa. dan tubuhnya untuk apa ia manfaatkan. (h.r. al-tirmidzî)8 dalam soal sumber, allah swt hanya membenarkan manusia mendapatkannya dengan sumber yang dibenarkan dengan cara yang benar. darat, laut, dan perut bumi adalah sumber yang disediakan oleh allah. manusia bebas mengeksploirasi dengan cara yang benar, antara lain dengan tidak merusak dan merugikan pihak lain. demikian pula dalam soal pemanfaatan. allah telah mengaturnya melalui ayat-ayat dan hadis nabi. dengan demikian, manusia semestinya tidak memperlakukan harta yang ia miliki seenak kemauannya sendiri. allah swt telah menetapkan aturan mengenai hal itu dan keberhasilan untuk mempertanggungjawabkannya harus mengacu pada sejumlah aturan-aturan yang telah ditetapkannya itu. memanfaatkan harta yang diperoleh dengan cara yang benar merupakan wujud kesyukuran, dan allah berjanji akan menambahkannya dengan jumlah yang lebih banyak (q.s. ibrâhîm [14]: 7). janji ini pada dasarnya dapat diilustrasikan dengan teori kepercayaan dua pihak. bukankah sebuah perusahaan senantiasa menawarkan kerja sama kepada mitra yang dapat dipercaya, yakni mitra yang senantiasa menjalankan tugas sesuai perjanjian yang telah disepakati dan mempertanggunjawabkannya secara jujur. sebaliknya, memanfaatkan harta yang diperoleh dengan cara yang benar, apalagi yang diperoleh dengan cara yang terlarang, maka allah tidak memberkahinya, dan tentu pertanggungjawabannya tidak akan diterima. prinsip pertanggungjawaban di hadapan allah inilah yang tidak ada di dalam sistem ekonomi kapitalis sehingga cenderung tidak terlalu mempersoalkan cara mendapatkan harta dan pemanfaatannya. prinsip kedua, kebutuhan akan bahan pokok merupakan tanggung jawab kolektif (dhamân al-hâjî kifâyah likulli fardh fi al-mujtama’). di dalam ajaran islam masyarakat harus memberi jaminan keamanan akan kebutuhan pokok bagi individu. yang dimaksud dengan kebutuhan pokok adalah apa yang biasa disebut dengan sandang, pangan, dan boleh jadi juga papan. kecukupan dalam hal ini adalah terpenuhinya hal tersebut dalam batas minimal. realisasi dalam realitas, hendaknya memastikan bahwa tidak ada individu di dalam masyarakat yang kelaparan, semua individu mempunyai pakaian yang cukup untuk menutup 8 diriwayatkan oleh imam al-tirmidzî dan menilainya dengan hasan shahîh. auratnya, dan tentu semestinya tidak ada individu apalagi keluarga yang tunawisma sehingga harus hidup terlunta-lunta dan menggelandang. kecukupan dalam tiga kebutuhan primer itu dapat dinilai berdasarkan ukuran yang jelas. dalam soal sandang, setiap individu mempunyai tiga pasang baju, satu untuk dipakai, satu disimpan, dan satunya dicuci. kemudian dalam soal pangan diukur dari kecukupan makanan setiap hari, sementara dari segi papan diukur berdasarkan ketersediaan tempat tinggal yang dapat melindungi mereka dari terik matahari dan air hujan. dalam rangka menunaikan jaminan ini alquran sebagai pedoman hidup membuka saluran yang beragam, mulai dari bantuan sosial yang bersifat wajib seperti zakat sampai yang bersifat sukarela seperti infak dan sedekah. zakat mâl ditentukan kadar (persentase) dan waktunya, tetapi infak dan sedekah dapat dilakukan setiap saat. standar kelaikan seseorang untuk berinfak pun telah diisyaratkan di dalam alquran. pada q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 219, allah merekam hal ini sebagai bagian dari masalah yang dipertanyakan pada muhammad, ‚mereka bertanya kepadamu muhammad tentang apa yang harus dinfakkan, katakanlah yang lebih dari keperluan, yakni yang mudah dan yang dinafkahkan tidak dengan berat hati.9 setiap manusia yang telah memiliki harta lebih dari cukup, maka ia harus berinfak. makna kata cukup di sini jangan dikaitkan dengan sifat rakus yang dimiliki manusia, karena jika demikian maka tidak akan pernah ada manusia yang merasa harta yang dimilkinya sudah cukup. kecukupan di sini juga dalam arti kebutuhan minimal. pakaian misalnya, oleh ulama dianggap cukup ketika seorang individu mempunyai tiga potong pakaian. logikanya, ada yang dikenakan, ada yang disimpan, dan ada yang dicuci. kemudian dalam soal makanan jika individu sudah dapat makan dengan menu sederhana tiga kali sehari. jika hal tersebut telah dipenuhi, dan masih ada lebih maka yang bersangkutan sudah memenuhi syarat untuk berinfak. tidak ada tempo untuk menunggu, berinfak setelah menjadi orang kaya. di sinilah antara lain perbedaan antara zakat dan infak. zakat menunggu masa hawl (kurun waktu) dan nisab (akumulasi harta) sementara infak tidak. hal ini tentu saja tidak sulit dilakukan selama ada kelapangan dada. karena itu, alquran menggunakan kata al-‘afw dalam mengungkap hal ini. kata tersebut antara lain kelapangan. makanya pemberian maaf juga disebut dengan al-‘afw, karena pemberian maaf juga berangkat dari kelapangan dada, sama 9 muhammad quraish shihab, tafsir al-misbah, vol. i, h. 468. mu’min rauf: relevansi prinsip ekonomi islam148 dengan infak.10 orang kaya raya pun tanpa kelapangan dada, ia akan enggan untuk berinfak pada sesamanya. alquran juga menegaskan dengan jelas sasaran infak, zakat dan sadaqah yang sering digambarkan dengan istilah al-mustadh‘afîn. mereka adalah kelompok yang tidak berdaya, termasuk oleh sistem ekonomi yang tidak memihak padanya.11 catatan untuk tidak mempersempit sasaran infak dan sedekah harus dijadikan cetak biru dalam hal ini sebab nampak ada kecenderungan ke arah sana. infak dibatasi pada penggunaan harta untuk tujuan yang berkaitan langsung dengan ibadah seperti pembangunan sarana ibadah. pandangan ini keliru, karena sasaran infak meliputi wilayah yang luas, perbaikan sarana ibadah, pembangunan fasilitas umum, bahkan sampai pada capacity building seperti pemberian bea siswa atau dana pendidikan untuk anak-anak yang tidak mampu.12 penyempitan sasaran infak akan selalu menyuguhkan kabar buruk seperti adanya anak-anak yang menderita gizi buruk, kriminalitas demi sesuap nasi, sampai pada tindakan bunuh diri karena keputusasaan. prinsip yang terkesan idealistik di atas pernah terwujud dalam sejarah islam, tepatnya pada masa pemerintahan ‘umar ibn ‘abd al-‘azîz. meski kekuasaannya relatif singkat, sekitar 30 bulan, dan menerima tampuk kepemimpinan dalam kondisi ekonomi yang morat-marit, namun ia berhasil mewujudkan prinsip tersebut dalam bentuk kemakmuran dan kesejahteraan masyarakat yang mencengangkan.13 pada masa pemerintahannya, zakat, infak, dan sedekah yang terkumpul di bayt al-mâl berlimpah. ia bahkan menyerukan, ‚siapa saja yang masih memiliki utang dan tidak bisa membayarnya, maka diharapkan datang ke bayt al-mâl untuk dibayarkan, dan siapa saja pemuda yang ingin menikah tapi tidak punya mahar sebagai mas kawin, maka datanglah ke bayt al-mâl‛. sepanjang masa kekuasaanya, rakyat hidup aman, tentram, dan damai, tidak ada ketakutan karena ancaman kekurangan dan kelaparan. alokasi dana bayt al-mâl tidak hanya sebatas membantu orang miskin. sejarah mencatat bahwa kejayaan pada masa pemerintahan ‘umar ibn ‘abd al 10 al-ragib al-asfahani, mufradat alquran, beirut: dar el-marefah, 2005, h. 342. 11 muhammad quraish shihab, tafsir al-misbah. 12 yusuf qardhawi, anatomi masyarakat islam, terj. (jakarta: pustaka al-kautsar, 1999), h. 223. 13 ketika diangkat menjadi khalifah, umar bin abdul aziz mengumpulkan rakyatnya dan mengumumkan serta menyerahkan seluruh harta kekayaan diri dan keluarganya yang tidak wajar kepada kaum muslimin melalui baitul mal, mulai dari tanah-tanah perkebunan di maroko, pelbagai tunjangan yang berada di yamamah, mukaedes, jabal al-wars, yaman, dan fadak, hingga cincin berlian pemberian al-walid. lihat, sayyid quthb, keadilan sosial dalam islam, (bandung: pustaka bandung, 1984), h. 311 al-iqtishad: vol. iii, no. 1, januari 2011 149 dengan infak.10 orang kaya raya pun tanpa kelapangan dada, ia akan enggan untuk berinfak pada sesamanya. alquran juga menegaskan dengan jelas sasaran infak, zakat dan sadaqah yang sering digambarkan dengan istilah al-mustadh‘afîn. mereka adalah kelompok yang tidak berdaya, termasuk oleh sistem ekonomi yang tidak memihak padanya.11 catatan untuk tidak mempersempit sasaran infak dan sedekah harus dijadikan cetak biru dalam hal ini sebab nampak ada kecenderungan ke arah sana. infak dibatasi pada penggunaan harta untuk tujuan yang berkaitan langsung dengan ibadah seperti pembangunan sarana ibadah. pandangan ini keliru, karena sasaran infak meliputi wilayah yang luas, perbaikan sarana ibadah, pembangunan fasilitas umum, bahkan sampai pada capacity building seperti pemberian bea siswa atau dana pendidikan untuk anak-anak yang tidak mampu.12 penyempitan sasaran infak akan selalu menyuguhkan kabar buruk seperti adanya anak-anak yang menderita gizi buruk, kriminalitas demi sesuap nasi, sampai pada tindakan bunuh diri karena keputusasaan. prinsip yang terkesan idealistik di atas pernah terwujud dalam sejarah islam, tepatnya pada masa pemerintahan ‘umar ibn ‘abd al-‘azîz. meski kekuasaannya relatif singkat, sekitar 30 bulan, dan menerima tampuk kepemimpinan dalam kondisi ekonomi yang morat-marit, namun ia berhasil mewujudkan prinsip tersebut dalam bentuk kemakmuran dan kesejahteraan masyarakat yang mencengangkan.13 pada masa pemerintahannya, zakat, infak, dan sedekah yang terkumpul di bayt al-mâl berlimpah. ia bahkan menyerukan, ‚siapa saja yang masih memiliki utang dan tidak bisa membayarnya, maka diharapkan datang ke bayt al-mâl untuk dibayarkan, dan siapa saja pemuda yang ingin menikah tapi tidak punya mahar sebagai mas kawin, maka datanglah ke bayt al-mâl‛. sepanjang masa kekuasaanya, rakyat hidup aman, tentram, dan damai, tidak ada ketakutan karena ancaman kekurangan dan kelaparan. alokasi dana bayt al-mâl tidak hanya sebatas membantu orang miskin. sejarah mencatat bahwa kejayaan pada masa pemerintahan ‘umar ibn ‘abd al 10 al-ragib al-asfahani, mufradat alquran, beirut: dar el-marefah, 2005, h. 342. 11 muhammad quraish shihab, tafsir al-misbah. 12 yusuf qardhawi, anatomi masyarakat islam, terj. (jakarta: pustaka al-kautsar, 1999), h. 223. 13 ketika diangkat menjadi khalifah, umar bin abdul aziz mengumpulkan rakyatnya dan mengumumkan serta menyerahkan seluruh harta kekayaan diri dan keluarganya yang tidak wajar kepada kaum muslimin melalui baitul mal, mulai dari tanah-tanah perkebunan di maroko, pelbagai tunjangan yang berada di yamamah, mukaedes, jabal al-wars, yaman, dan fadak, hingga cincin berlian pemberian al-walid. lihat, sayyid quthb, keadilan sosial dalam islam, (bandung: pustaka bandung, 1984), h. 311 ‘azîz meliputi pesatnya perkembangan ilmu dan peradaban. pembukuan hadis yang pertama kali dilakukan pada masa pemerintahannya dengan menggunakan dana dari bayt al-mâl, demikian pula pembangunan sarana pendidikan. demikianlah, keberhasilanya selalu dirujuk sebagai representasi kejayaan dinasti bani umayyah. karena itu pula sebagian ulama mendudukkannya sebagai khalifah alrâsyidah yang kelima, sejajar dengan empat sahabat lain abû bakar, ‘umar ibn khaththâb, utsmân ibn ‘affân dan ‘ali ibn abî thâlib. prinsi ketiga, mewujudkan keadilan ekonomi diantara individu di dalam masyarakat. dalam sistem ekonomi islam, keadilan sosial harus direalisasikan agar tidak terjadi kesenjangan antar individu atau antar kelompok di dalam masyarakat. islam tidak menginginkan adanya ketimpangan taraf ekonomi yang terlalu jauh. konsep ini melahirkan, pemberian peluang kerja yang sama dan standar penggajian yang tidak timpang. islam tidak menghendaki adanya individu yang memonopoli sektor tertentu sehingga peluang individu lain tertutup. islam juga tidak menghendaki monopoli atas profesi sehingga di satu sisi ada yang menjalankan tugas ganda, di sisi lain sejumlah individu yang sebenarnya juga mempunyai keterampilan menjadi tuna karya. jika negara tidak memperhatikan hal ini maka imbasnya bukan hanya pada kemiskinan sebagaian warganya, tetapi juga banyak potensi yang tidak terberdayakan. standar penggajian pun sepantasnya tidak membuka potensi terjadinya kesenjangan sosial. di satu sisi profesi tertentu diberi imbalan yang begitu tinggi dan di sisi lain profesi tertentu diapresiasi dengan imbalan yang begitu rendah. keseimbangan dan keadilan harus diperhatikan karena jika hal tersebut terjadi maka terlalu banyak dampak negatif yang berpotensi lahir. konflik-konflik yang muncul pada masyarakat, kebanyakan karena tidak adanya keadilan atau keseimbangan bidang ekonomi. di indonesia, hal ini nampaknya harus mendapatkan perhatian besar karena senang atau tidak demikianlah fakta-fakta yang kita saksikan. dalam kontek pengembangan ekonomi berbasis syariah, hal ini merupakan tantangan karena ketidakadilan yang terjadi justru lahir dari sistem yang telah di bangun dalam masa yang panjang. artinya, populasi kaum lemah yang demikian tinggi di negeri ini bukan kaum lemah (dhuafâ’) akan tetapi lebih pantas dikategorikan sebagai al-mustadh’afîn, yakni orang-orang yang dilemahkan oleh sistem, atau bahkan sikap kita sendiri di dalam hidup bermasyarakat. yang terakhir ini boleh jadi ditunjukkan lewat sikap orang-orang kaya yang apatis atau bahkan tertawa atau mencela melihat orang miskin, berebutan zakat atau bahkan mencuri hanya untuk sesuap nasi. sikap yang demikian sungguh keliru dan tidak sesuai dengan prinsip ekonomi islam. khalifah ‘umar ibn khaththâb mu’min rauf: relevansi prinsip ekonomi islam150 pernah menghadapi kasus seorang pembantu mencuri, lalu setelah diinterogasi diketahuilah sebabnya bahwa ia melakukan semua itu karena majikannya tidak memenuhi kebutuhan-kebutuhanya. tindakan umar selanjutnya, tidak menghukum pencuri melainkan mengancam sang majikan bahwa kelak jika kasus itu terulang maka sang majikan yang akan menerima hukuman potong tangan. semangat dari tindakan umar ini patut dikembangkan dan dijadikan teladan baik oleh pemerintah maupun pelaku usaha yang mendapatkan nasib yang lebih baik. prinsip keempat, menghormati milik individu (ihtirâm mâl khâsh). pengakuan atas kepemilikan individu yang merupakan prinsip ekonomi dalam islam merupakan bukti bahwa ajaran islam selalu selaras dengan nilai-nilai kemanusian. harus diakui bahwa hasrat untuk memiliki merupakan karakter yang dimiliki oleh setiap manusia. karena itu, sistem ekonomi sosialis yang menempatkan harta kekayaan sebagai milik negara merupakan sistem yang tidak manusiawi. meski demikian, islam juga tidak menyetujui sistem kapitalis yang memberi peluang kepada orang-orang tertentu untuk mengumpulkan harta kekayaan sebanyak-banyaknya, namun di sisi lain membiarkan yang lain dalam kemiskinan. artinya, sistem ini sangat berpotensi melahirkan kesenjangan sosial yang sangat lebar. yang kaya makin kaya dan miskin makin miskin. bukti bahwa islam menghormati hak kepemilikan individu tergambar dalam sejumlah aturan yang terkait dengan harta benda. islam, misalnya, menetapkan ancaman potong tangan bagi pencuri, mengatur hak-hak individu dalam soal pembagian harta warisan. bahkan dalam sebuah ayat, allah menegaskan bahwa kaum laki-laki dan perempuan sama-sama mempunyai hak pribadi untuk menguasai dan memanfaatkan harta dari usaha-usaha yang mereka lakukan. oleh karena itu, seseorang yang meninggal karena mempertahankan harta bendanya (milik pribadi), maka matinya dinilai syahid, ‚siapa saja terbunuh untuk mempertahankan hartanya maka ia syahid (man qutila dûna mâlih fa huwa syahîd)”. hanya saja, hak kepemilikan individu bukan tanpa batasan. islam tidak menghendaki kebebasan seperti yang terjadi dalam sistem kapitalis liberal. prinsip kelima, kebebasan memilih profesi (al-hurriyah fî iktisâb al-‘amal). islam memberi kebebasan bagi penganutnya untuk menentukan nasibnya sendiri termasuk dalam memilih usaha dan profesi yang bakal digeluti. meski demikian, islam juga tetap mengajarkan satu pedoman bahwa talenta setiap orang berbeda-beda dan hendaknya memilih profesi berdasarkan keahlian yang dimiliki. pada q.s. al-lail (92): 4 allah menyatakan, ‚inna sa’yakum lasyattâ”, dan ayat lain allah menegaskan, ‚kullun ya’malu ala syâkilatihi”. pilihan profesi yang tepat ini sangat penting. rasulullah mengisyaratkan kegagalan yang membayangi al-iqtishad: vol. iii, no. 1, januari 2011 151 pernah menghadapi kasus seorang pembantu mencuri, lalu setelah diinterogasi diketahuilah sebabnya bahwa ia melakukan semua itu karena majikannya tidak memenuhi kebutuhan-kebutuhanya. tindakan umar selanjutnya, tidak menghukum pencuri melainkan mengancam sang majikan bahwa kelak jika kasus itu terulang maka sang majikan yang akan menerima hukuman potong tangan. semangat dari tindakan umar ini patut dikembangkan dan dijadikan teladan baik oleh pemerintah maupun pelaku usaha yang mendapatkan nasib yang lebih baik. prinsip keempat, menghormati milik individu (ihtirâm mâl khâsh). pengakuan atas kepemilikan individu yang merupakan prinsip ekonomi dalam islam merupakan bukti bahwa ajaran islam selalu selaras dengan nilai-nilai kemanusian. harus diakui bahwa hasrat untuk memiliki merupakan karakter yang dimiliki oleh setiap manusia. karena itu, sistem ekonomi sosialis yang menempatkan harta kekayaan sebagai milik negara merupakan sistem yang tidak manusiawi. meski demikian, islam juga tidak menyetujui sistem kapitalis yang memberi peluang kepada orang-orang tertentu untuk mengumpulkan harta kekayaan sebanyak-banyaknya, namun di sisi lain membiarkan yang lain dalam kemiskinan. artinya, sistem ini sangat berpotensi melahirkan kesenjangan sosial yang sangat lebar. yang kaya makin kaya dan miskin makin miskin. bukti bahwa islam menghormati hak kepemilikan individu tergambar dalam sejumlah aturan yang terkait dengan harta benda. islam, misalnya, menetapkan ancaman potong tangan bagi pencuri, mengatur hak-hak individu dalam soal pembagian harta warisan. bahkan dalam sebuah ayat, allah menegaskan bahwa kaum laki-laki dan perempuan sama-sama mempunyai hak pribadi untuk menguasai dan memanfaatkan harta dari usaha-usaha yang mereka lakukan. oleh karena itu, seseorang yang meninggal karena mempertahankan harta bendanya (milik pribadi), maka matinya dinilai syahid, ‚siapa saja terbunuh untuk mempertahankan hartanya maka ia syahid (man qutila dûna mâlih fa huwa syahîd)”. hanya saja, hak kepemilikan individu bukan tanpa batasan. islam tidak menghendaki kebebasan seperti yang terjadi dalam sistem kapitalis liberal. prinsip kelima, kebebasan memilih profesi (al-hurriyah fî iktisâb al-‘amal). islam memberi kebebasan bagi penganutnya untuk menentukan nasibnya sendiri termasuk dalam memilih usaha dan profesi yang bakal digeluti. meski demikian, islam juga tetap mengajarkan satu pedoman bahwa talenta setiap orang berbeda-beda dan hendaknya memilih profesi berdasarkan keahlian yang dimiliki. pada q.s. al-lail (92): 4 allah menyatakan, ‚inna sa’yakum lasyattâ”, dan ayat lain allah menegaskan, ‚kullun ya’malu ala syâkilatihi”. pilihan profesi yang tepat ini sangat penting. rasulullah mengisyaratkan kegagalan yang membayangi ketika satu urusan ditangani oleh bukan ahlinya idzâ wussida al-amr ilâ ghayr ahlih fa intazhir al-sâ’ah. meski hasil kerja keras dinyatakan sebagai milik pribadi, namun seperti disebutkan pada prinsip pertama, pemilik harta yang hakiki adalah allah swt. jadi kepemilikan seseorang atas harta bendanya hanyalah kepemilikan dalam arti semu. kebebasan untuk memperlakukan harta pribadi ini dibatasi oleh aturan yang telah ditetapkan oleh pemilik harta yang hakiki. karena itu, seseorang tidak boleh bertindak seenaknya tanpa memerhatikan aturan-aturan yang telah ditetapkan, tetapi juga tidak dipasung sedemikian ketat sehingga manusia tidak memiliki ruang gerak sama sekali. kita dibatasi oleh ketentuan halal dan haram yang sudah jelas termaktub di dalam kitab suci dan sabda rasulnya. satu contoh kaitannya dengan perolehan harta misalnya, islam tidak boleh melakukan proses transaksi yang menganut unsur riba. islam juga tidak membenarkan aktifitas ekonomi yang mengandung unsur monopoli yang bisa mengekploitasi kebutuhan manusia. untuk itu, islam tidak membernarkan jual beli dengan cara menimbun barang (al-ihtikâr). prinsip keenam, pengembangan potensi ekonomi yang integral. prinsip ini berarti bahwa islam menghendaki pengembangan ekonomi dilakukan dengan mengembangkan segala potensi yang ada. maksudnya, islam tidak membatasi potensi tertentu untuk diberdayakan melainkan merekomendasikan agar semua potensi ekonomi yang halal untuk dikelola dengan cara-cara yang benar. alquran memberi isyarat untuk mengembangkan pertanian, industri, pertambangan, kelautan, perdagangan, telekomunikasi, peternakan, komersialisasi jasa, dan sebagainya. semua itu harus dikembangkan secara simultan. pengalaman rasulullah saw ketika tiba di madinah penting untuk diungkap, yakni ketika meletakkan dasar-dasar ekonomi. ketika ia berkumpul dengan para sahabatnya, ia bertanya kepada sahabat dari kalangan anshar, ‚wahai kaum anshar, di mana pasar kita, mereka menjawab, pasar kami ada di daerah bani qainuqa (kawasan pemukiman kaum yahudi)‛. ternyata di pasar tersebut banyak praktek riba, monopoli, dan pelbagai macam penyelewengan. akhirnya, rasulullah membawa masyarakat ke satu tanah lapang dan mengatakan, ‚di sinilah pasar kita. di tempat itulah mereka membangun pasar. mereka bertransaksi dengan cara islami sehingga semakin ramai seiring perjalanan waktu membuat pasar bani qainuqa sepi dan tutup. demikianlah di antara prinsip-prinsip ekonomi islam yang diramu dari ungkapan-ungkapan kitab suci dan hadis rasulullah. kita harus yakin bahwa dengan menegakkan keenam prinsip itu dalam kegiatan ekonomi nasional kita, insya allah kondisi bangsa ini bakal dapat bangkit dari keterpurukan, mengikis mu’min rauf: relevansi prinsip ekonomi islam152 kesenjangan sosial dan menyelesaikan setidaknya sebagian problematika yang ada. relevansi ekonomi islam dalam pemberdayaan umat di indonesia hasil sensus penduduk yang dilaksanakan pada tahun 2010 menunjukkan bahwa umat islam di indonesia mencapai sekitar 85,1% dari 240.271.522 penduduk indonesia.14 angka tersebut menunjukkan bahwa umat islam indonesia merupakan komunitas muslim terbesar di seluruh dunia. hanya saja kabar gembira dari aspek kuantitas ini tidak sebaik kabar pada aspek kualitasnya, karena seperti tersuguhkan dalam kenyataan, keluarga yang termasuk dalam kategori miskin (al-dhu’afâ) didominasi oleh saudara-saudara kita dari kaum muslimin. dalam kontek inilah ditemukan relevansi ekonomi islam dalam upaya pemberdayaan umat. lebih dari itu, terapan ekonomi islam dalam hal ini menjadi kewajiban atas dasar dua hal, pertama kewajiban menjalankan ekomi berbasis syariah dan kewajiban memberdayakan umat di sisi yang lain. dilihat dari beberapa aspek peluang itu terbuka lebar sejak 20 tahun terakhir. dari aspek politik misalnya, keberpihakan pemerintah pada pengembangan ekonomi syariah telah muncul sejak adanya restu pemerintah mendirikan bank muamalat yang dipelopori oleh ikatan cendekiawan muslim indonesia (icmi) pada tahun 1992. bukan hanya sampai di situ, pada masa-masa berikutnya, keberpihakan itu menunjukkan perkembangan yang semakin baik seiring dengan perkembangan bank syariah. hal ini terlihat jelas pada sejumlah indikator seperti pengembangan regulasi yang dibutuhkan termasuk perumusan paying hukumnya. kemudian dari aspek respon masyarakat, nampaknya ekonomi islam menemukan momentumnya. hal ini terkait dengan ketidakpercayaan masyarakat pada sistem ekonomi yang dibangun sebelumnya. seperti diketahui bahwa sistem ekonomi kapitalis ala barat tidak berhasil mengantar masyarakat indonesia pada tingkat kesejahteraan, dan hal ini bukan lagi tesis yang membutuhkan pembuktian, melainkan telah menjadi kenyataan yang hidup dan dialami. artinya, dari segi respons masyarakat, ekonomi islam kini hadir membawa harapan baru bagi masyarakat. peluang terbesar pengembangan ekonomi islam ditemukan terkait dengan keselarasan antara prinsip ekonomi islam yang telah dijelaskan di atas dengan problematika ekonomi yang dihadapi bangsa ini. bukan rahasia lagi bahwa 14 sumber: the world factbook, central intellegence agency (cia); diakses pada hari sabtu tanggal 15 januari 2010 jam 17.41 wib di https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-facebook/ geos/id.html al-iqtishad: vol. iii, no. 1, januari 2011 153 kesenjangan sosial dan menyelesaikan setidaknya sebagian problematika yang ada. relevansi ekonomi islam dalam pemberdayaan umat di indonesia hasil sensus penduduk yang dilaksanakan pada tahun 2010 menunjukkan bahwa umat islam di indonesia mencapai sekitar 85,1% dari 240.271.522 penduduk indonesia.14 angka tersebut menunjukkan bahwa umat islam indonesia merupakan komunitas muslim terbesar di seluruh dunia. hanya saja kabar gembira dari aspek kuantitas ini tidak sebaik kabar pada aspek kualitasnya, karena seperti tersuguhkan dalam kenyataan, keluarga yang termasuk dalam kategori miskin (al-dhu’afâ) didominasi oleh saudara-saudara kita dari kaum muslimin. dalam kontek inilah ditemukan relevansi ekonomi islam dalam upaya pemberdayaan umat. lebih dari itu, terapan ekonomi islam dalam hal ini menjadi kewajiban atas dasar dua hal, pertama kewajiban menjalankan ekomi berbasis syariah dan kewajiban memberdayakan umat di sisi yang lain. dilihat dari beberapa aspek peluang itu terbuka lebar sejak 20 tahun terakhir. dari aspek politik misalnya, keberpihakan pemerintah pada pengembangan ekonomi syariah telah muncul sejak adanya restu pemerintah mendirikan bank muamalat yang dipelopori oleh ikatan cendekiawan muslim indonesia (icmi) pada tahun 1992. bukan hanya sampai di situ, pada masa-masa berikutnya, keberpihakan itu menunjukkan perkembangan yang semakin baik seiring dengan perkembangan bank syariah. hal ini terlihat jelas pada sejumlah indikator seperti pengembangan regulasi yang dibutuhkan termasuk perumusan paying hukumnya. kemudian dari aspek respon masyarakat, nampaknya ekonomi islam menemukan momentumnya. hal ini terkait dengan ketidakpercayaan masyarakat pada sistem ekonomi yang dibangun sebelumnya. seperti diketahui bahwa sistem ekonomi kapitalis ala barat tidak berhasil mengantar masyarakat indonesia pada tingkat kesejahteraan, dan hal ini bukan lagi tesis yang membutuhkan pembuktian, melainkan telah menjadi kenyataan yang hidup dan dialami. artinya, dari segi respons masyarakat, ekonomi islam kini hadir membawa harapan baru bagi masyarakat. peluang terbesar pengembangan ekonomi islam ditemukan terkait dengan keselarasan antara prinsip ekonomi islam yang telah dijelaskan di atas dengan problematika ekonomi yang dihadapi bangsa ini. bukan rahasia lagi bahwa 14 sumber: the world factbook, central intellegence agency (cia); diakses pada hari sabtu tanggal 15 januari 2010 jam 17.41 wib di https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-facebook/ geos/id.html keterpurukan ekonomi indonesia disebabkan oleh monopoli sebagai turunan dari sistem ekonomi kapitalis, ketidakberimbangan potensi yang dikembangkan, distribusi hasil yang tidak merata, rekrutmen dan serapan tenaga kerja yang tidak proporsional dan lain-lain. prinsip ekonomi islam dalam hal ini datang sebagai antitesis pada tataran teoritis sekaligus sebagai pengganti yang tepat bagi sistem kapitalis yang melahirkan sejumlah akar-akar problematika yang dimaksud. penutup sistem ekonomi islam yang telah menunjukkan geliat perkembangannya selama dua dekade terakhir tidak hanya relevan dengan upaya pemberdayaan umat islam tetapi juga relevan untuk dikembangkan dalam upaya recovery ekonomi nasional secara umum. dikatakan demikian karena sejumlah prinsipprinsip yang merupakan simpulan dari alquran dan hadis nampaknya tepat untuk menjadi obat penawar atas problematika yang sudah akut di dalam sistem ekonimi nasional yang selama ini telah berjalan. konsep bahwa seluruh harta merupakan milik allah secara hakiki, dan manusia hanya memilikinya dalam pengertian semu, serta keyakinan adanya pertanggungjawaban tentang asal dan pemanfaatannya kelak merupakan hal yang secara signifikan membedakan antara ekonomi islam dengan kapitalis dan sosialis. pengejawantahan prinsip utama ini tidak sampai membatasi individu untuk mengakumulasi kekayaan, selama dengan cara dan pemanfaatan yang benar. kemudian prinsip lainnya seperti jaminan dan tanggung jawab kolektif atas pemenuhan kebutuhan pokok masyarakat, perwujudan keadilan ekonomi antar individu, kebebasan memilih profesi (al-hurriyat fî iktisâb al-‘amal) serta pengembangan potensi ekonomi yang integral semuanya mengarah pada terciptanya masyarakat yang secara ekonomis jauh dari ketimpangan. [] pustaka acuan buku: asfahânî, al-, al-râgib, mufradât alqurân, bayrû: dâr el-marefah, 2005. qaradhawî, yûsuf, anatomi masyarakat islam, terj, jakarta: pustaka al-kautsar, 1999. quthb, sayyid, keadilan sosial dalam islam, bandung: pustaka bandung, 1984. shihab, muhammad quraish, tafsir al-misbah, jakarta: lentera hati, 2006. website/artikel/media massa the world factbook, central intellegence agency (cia); diakses pada hari sabtu tanggal 15 januari 2010 jam 17.41 wib di mu’min rauf: relevansi prinsip ekonomi islam154 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/ the-world-factbook/geos/id.html http://bisnis.vivanews.com/news/read/187866. http://edukasi.kompas.com/read/2010/02/18/16344910. http://edukasi.kompas.com/read/2010/02/18/16344910. http://www.gatra.com/2010-04-26/artikel. php?id=137136. http://www.jurnal-ekonomi.org/2004/04/22/. http://www.jurnal-ekonomi.org/2008/07/17/. kompas, kemiskinan kian merisaukan, senin, 12 juli 2010. 138 the american journal of islamic social sciences l 5:3 false dawn: the delusions of global capitalism by john gray. london: cranta publications, 1998. 234pp. the natural counterpart of a free market economy is a politics of inse­ curity. if 'capitalism' means 'the free market,' then no view is more deluded than the belief that the future lies with 'democratic capital­ ism' .... the free market cannot last in an age in which economic secu­ rity for the majority of people is being reduced by the world economy ... a reform of the world economy is needed that accepts a diversity of cultures, regimes and market economies as a permanent reality. no one would blame the reader of the above paragraph from jumping to the conclu­ sion that they were reading the words of a defunct socialist critique or even of a ranting leader of some east asian nation devastated by the current financial crisis. criticism does not necessarily have to come from without. the fact that western economic thought has within its fold a spectrum of views and schools of thought should make us realize that self-criticism also has been a very important factor in the evolution of western economics. in this very timely book, john gray, professor of politics at oxford university and a for­ mer insider to the (now subsiding) current wave of the new right, presents the following central thesis: the dynamics involved in the process of globalization, which is technologbook reviews 139 i d l y driven, creates and nurtures new forms of indigenous capitalisms that, in turn, inter act with other forms to create new variations in a never-ending process of change. to his c d i t , gray does not fall into the category of the prophets of doom and gloom who only seem to see the international economic system’s negative effects. his book high lights an important fact in relationships: they are two-way processes. in the eight roughly equal chapthat make up the book, gray convincingly argues the case for a reformed mind-set, particularly of the anglo-saxon, american-led proponents of global fiee mar kets (not excluding socialist critics and leaders of east asian nations), to accept the real ity that the future ushers in a pluralist view of markets and economic systems. the existence of social markets in both europe and asia, and the way they have interacted with the anglo-saxon model of free markets-being influenced and influenc ing institutions and policies throughout the world-are presented effectively to support his central thesis. his book also is relevant because it appears at a time when the asian miracle is being seriously d e b a t e d as the currencies and economies of many east and southeast asian countries, once praised for their apparent inability to make mistakes in economic growth and development, are now in the middle of what seems to be a rather long decline. on the surface, it seems that these events merely support propagators of global free markets. however, on closer analysis, gray’s thesis sheds new light on how these events can and should be seen. moreover, he provides a very different future sce nario for the global economic order. he sets the foundations of his thesis in chapter one by referring to polanyi’s “great transformation” of mid-nineteenth century england, which led to the creation of the free market. he argues convincingly that these events were and remain an “anglo-saxon sin gularity.” a combination of events consisting of political, legal, and social change, togeth er with the intellectual climate of england for at least the preceding three centuries, engen dered the free market economy with all of its very localized assumptions about humanity and society, as opposed to the social market economy, which was and still is found in much of europe and, with some variation, in asia. while the latter placed market exchange as part of social life and hence, was socially embedded, the former viewed mar kets not only as a separate and distinct sphere of social life but as one that conditions and dominates the whole of society. unlike conventional wisdom, gray views regulated mar kets as natural, while free markets are seen as a creation of state power and are a product of artifice, design, and political coercion. hence, they are centrally planned. in chapter -0, “engineering free markets,” he presents three examples in con temporary society where free-market engineering experiments were put into practice: thatcherite britain, labourite new zealand, and president de gortari’s mexico. while admitting their partial success, gray deplores the resulting tremendous social costs. contrary to popular belief, the state’s role actually became greater in the periods con cerned. state-led reforms and changes ironically led to a weakening of the state by destroying many intermediary social institutions and informal social control mechanisms of community life. being an insider to the thatcher experiment in britain, gray presents his lengthy interpretation of the ideas, events, and policies that became features of conservative britain. a critic of gray would point to his apparent oversight of the successes of thatcher’s policies. this is probably true, but one does not see the blatant ideological biases that can be found in many other available writings. his point, and this is argued factually, is that-through state coercion and power, as well as changes to employment laws and the welfare system-family life was uprooted; income inequalities widened; crime rates increased, and health and education provisions, and hence the quality of life, were affected severely. these, in tun, created an inherent instability within the 140 the american journal of islamic social sciences 15:3 conservative government structure, leading to its humiliating defeat in 1997 and demonstrating the dynamics at work between laissez-faire economics and sociopolitical stability. similar examples of the destruction of social cohesion could be seen in the neoliber al policies of labourite new zealand (1984-w), which, according to gray, created a social underclass. to counter right-wing arguments that universal welfare systems create laziness and dependency syndromes, gray convincingly points to the fact that this under class is not so easily found in such countries as austria, norway, canada, and even in the “old” new zealand. he clarifies that it is the dependency attitude, and nor the welfare system, that creates the underclass. in the case of mexico, gray argues that the reforms and bail-out pushed by the united states were undertaken to protect its interests and to spare it from the social and economic problems that certainly would have spread to its shores if aid were not fothcoming. also, the bail-out packages were provided to ensure the success of the neoliberal experiment and the political project of free markets, while simultaneously ensuring american domination of the mexican economy. similar argu ments are made with reference to the bail-out package given to south korea and why it was not so “urgent” to secure similar aid for indonesia. having discussed some of the fallacies surrounding global free markets in chapter three, “what globalization is not,” gray seeks to show the link with globalization. he provides possible defmitions of globalization, starting by seeing it as the “world-wide spread of modem technologies of industrial production and communication of all kinds across frontiers-in trade, capital, production and information.” globalization also implies the international networking of economies, making societies more linked with and dependent upon world markets. according to gray, the underlying idea in all these mean ings is that of &localization-in other words, what you know and how you live is affect ed by and affects other nations and peoples. this last point, gray argues, negates the sim ple view that globalization is a trend leading to homogeneity. global markets and the ben efits derived from them are dependent on differences between economies and nations. the evolutionary outcome of interaction via globalization is to engender novel types of capi talism, rather than to have one type dominate the global system. he takes the skeptics of globalization to task for failing to appreciate the differences in today’s global economy as compared to the pre-1914 era, and for their futile attempts to resuscitate an outdated european social democracy based on an unworkable “conti nental keynesianism.” he criticizes promoters of globalization for seeing global mar kets, represented by transnational corporations, as “akin to perfect competition” and all the unrealistic assumptions that go with it. the nation-state and transnational corpora tions, both important players in the game today, must act in a globalized world of “anar chic capitalism,” where all options are uncertain, a situation leading to a very unstable system with insecure societies. how his main thesis of accepting a variety of capitalisms as a reality would make the system any less volatile could have been elaborated further, as this would at least have made his position clearer when compared with those of the skeptics and the boosters. in chapter four, “how global markets favour the worst kinds of capitalism: a new gresham’s law?,” gray posits that in global free markets, designed after the american model, other types of markets, including the social markets of europe and asia, will be at a systematic disadvantage. this causes him to modify gresham’s law of bad money tending to drive out good money to “bad capitalism tends to drive out the good.” in this drama of good vs. bad, world markets, especially the international mobility of financial capital, would lead to a competitive downgrading of regulatory and welfare sys tems by sovereign states in order to stay competitive. american free markets, according book reviews 141 to him, have an advantage in that they no longer bear the burden of social costs, unlike european social market economies. in the long-run, social markets may be as productive as free markets, but in the short-run they cannot be cost-competitive unless they modern ize and reform to stay in the global market. this is not to say that social markets are any less rational than free markets, just that they are more costly to maintain due to their internalization of many social costs that are not even counted in the free market or, at most, are treated as externalities. thus gray views social democracy as incompatible with global free markets, giving the 1994 demise of sweden’s social markets and the case of contemporary germany as examples of social market economies that are fast reforming in order to compete successfully within the global free market. in any society where markets are a manifestation of core institutions, such as those emphasizing local community and the democratic state and hence seen as subservient to society, that particular society will be at a disadvantage in the global free market. however, while social markets are made unviable, free-market economies also will be transformed during their interaction within the global economy due to the inher ent instabilities created by the system itself. chapter five, “the us and the utopia of global capitalism,” and chapter six, “anarcho-capitalism in post-communist russia,” look critically at two enlightenment ideologies: liberalism (as promoted by the united states) and soviet marxism. rather than west vs. east, gray sees the cold war as a family quarrel between two western enlightenment ideologies, which resulted in the former’s triumph over the latter. to gray, the project of a single global market is the united states’ universal mission and, in the neoconservative mold of the 1980s, has established itself as the unofficial american civil religion. he rightly points out that the luissez-fiiire philosophy that seems to be at the base of the american-led global free market agenda is an irony, for american history is replete with examples of state dominance. in addition, trying to represent the united states as a country with a history of min imum government requires “considerable imagination,” and he cites numerous instances in american history where the state not only intervened in economic activity (e.g., the opening of the western frontier) but also in personal liberty, as seen in the imposition of prohibition during the early twentieth century. even reaganism is shown to be a species of state-led capitalism. despite these historical facts, american-style free markets are not only seen as merely one way of wealth creation, but as the only way that represents the universal value of human freedom. gray immediately points to the fallacy of this view by referring to the performance of asia’s newly industrializing countries (nics) where, according to him, attempts at modernization were and still are being carried out, but not necessarily according to the mold of american free markets. while efficiency and productivity criteria were given prominence in the united states during the 1980s, these criteria also created a breakdown in society and social val ues. all of the adverse effects experienced in thatcherite britain could be found, but in even greater magnitude. when social cohesion breaks down and when social costs are high, the resulting social unrest renders unworkable a rights-based society, one in which law and order are the only social institutions in society. gray emphatically argues that law and order alone cannot substitute for the social institutions destroyed by free markets, such as the family and employment security. fukuyama’s thesis is criticized for over looking that, prior to 1920, history and wars were not based on the two strands of enlightenment ideology. the fact that anyone would try to explain world and human his tory in the above context demonstrates arrogance and disrespect for other cultures and civ ilizations. huntington’s thesis also is taken to task for its unmistakable, albeit slightly less, americocentric bias. while his definition and categorization of civilization is problemat 142 the american journal of islamic social sciences 15:3 ic, huntington is still guilty of representing “the west vs. the rest“ view, where, as in hollywood movies, the west is always the good guy. even the term rhe west is problematic, and gray demolishes the myth of its univer sality and uniqueness. using demographic facts, gray posits the view that the united states (and countries in western europe) will soon be a post-western nation due to sig nificant changes in its population structure. as for religion, gray states that whereas most western european countries can be categorized as post-christian, religion and even reli gious fundamentalism still thrive in the united states. he concludes that just as other nations will have to transform themselves in the era of globalization, the united states, despite its dominance, will have to accept the reality of change and undergo change or risk being marginalized. such a view, he mentions, will be hard to understand for those who view power as dominance. the second western enlightenment utopia i s found in russia. gray discusses both of the failed experiments in twentieth-centuy russia both bolshevism in 1918, which tried to abolish capitalism and the peasant community, and american-style free market shock thera py in 1991 leading to what gray calls a “mafia-dominated anarcho-capitalism,” failed mis erably. both experiments had tremendous social and human costs: millions penshed from famines and repression in the communist era, and around 45 million people have fallen into poverty since the 1991 reforms. nevertheless, gray is optimistic concerning russian attempts to develop indigenous capitalism since 1994. despite the extremes of the two experiments, he maintains that social cohesion in russia is still strong due to its rich nalurd and human resources as well as its cultural and traditional values. he sees the future of a wn-western eurasian russia as a very positive event that will enrich the plurality of nations in the world, and as one that does not necessarily have to have an anti-westem economy. having built his conceptual framework and then analyzing some of the different vari eties of western capitalism, gray turns to asia in chapter seven’s “occidental twilight and the rise of asia’s capitalisms.” to support his optimistic assessment of the rise of asia, gray contrasts the 1850 episode of imperial britain forcing greece to meet the demands of a wronged british national in greece, to the 1994 incident where the singa pore court snubbed attempts by the american administration to influence its decision to cane michael fay, an american student convicted of writing graffiti in a public place. while this example shows the inability of any one nation in today’s world to dominate all countries and affairs, it may be a little premature to generalize and conclude that the pow e h l nations (including, and especially, the united states), is unable and unwilling to be the policeman of the world. there have been numerous counterexamples to show that uni lateral action and pressure has been applied successfully, although the mechanism is more “talk and economic sanctions” than military action. it is quite apparent that japan is seen very favorably by gray. japan exemplifies a case where maiernization was not taken to mean westernizatioa both marxist and neo classical economic theories are said to have only a very limited relevance when it comes to explaining economic life and behavior in japan, which, according to gray, has suc ceeded in building its capitalist economic system on its own social order, traditions, insti tutions, and values. even the fact that the japanese economy has experienced almost no growth since 1990 is seen positively as a sign of a nation defying the conventional view that there can be no development and progress without growth. in this, gray points to the very interesting concept of the “stationary state” of the classical economists, especially john mill, who viewed it as an opportunity to “raise the quality of life without unending economic growth.” how japan responds to its present problems and whether it will be able to maintain its japanese identity is something that will certainly support or disprove the above proposition. book reviews 143 while japan is praised, china under mao’s cultural revolution is seen as a failure because it implicitly tried to westernize via the soviet model, instead of trying to build an indigenous chinese capitalism. while mao’s period is seen as having great social and human costs, the post-i979 modernization efforts under deng xiaoping, and now jiang zemin, are seen as indigenous attempts to find solutions based on chinese traditions and history and centered around the all-important family institution. gray sees singapore’s (and taiwan’s) models of guided capitalism as the best examples to follow, and concludes that american-style liberal democracy will have no place in china. just as there is no one unique western capitalism, there is no one unique asian cap italism. according to gray, “indian capitalism is different from that of countries whose principal religious inheritance is confucian, buddhist or muslim.” he also sees no rea son to assume that liberal democracy and free markets are necessary conditions for eco nomic development. what is needed is the ability to control risk, security from crime and corruption, good public service, and common institutions that give a sense of member ship and participation. all of these are readily found in every asian society. gray thinks it may be possible for asian nations to have the benefits of economic progress without suffering the breakdown of social institutions, for asian societies tend to adopt a rela tively institutional view of seeing markets as no more than means to wealth creation and social cohesion. this praise for the asian miracle is being seriously challenged by the present finan cial crisis. krugman’s hypothesis seems, on the surface, to be gaining ground (except for krugman himself, who now is looking more sympathetically at the economies he once criticized). the whole issue of asian values, originally propounded by singapore’s lee kuan yew, as superior to westem values and supported by the success stories of the asian nics, is now being blamed for causing asia’s downfall. an article in the economist (25 july 1998) discusses how, in light of the crisis, the asian value of strong family ties is equated with nepotism, the importance of social ties and friendship with cronyism, and consensual management decision making all leading to corruption and wastage. despite putting a blanket over gray’s over-optimistic assessment of a s i a t o his credit-his cen tral thesis of economies constantly having to reform, which also will have to happen in asian economies, thus actually supports his views. in chapter eight, “the ends of laissez-faire,” gray reiterates his proposition that technological advancement is creating a truly global economy and, in the process, con stantly mutating varieties of capitalism compete with each other. these then evolve into new (and possibly) more unstable and alienating forms of capitalism, which seemingly are unable to avoid what schumpeter called the “wave of creative destruction.” the rise of asian capitalisms disproves the enlightenment prediction of the prominence and domi: nance of western free-market capitalism. one reason for the failure of laissez-faire mar ket philosophy is its inability to recognize and acknowledge the importance of social val ues and culture as factors that determine market interactions. if in the past imperial britain was able to force its system on others and thus maintain the status quo, today’s global economy does not allow the united states to do the same. in addition, the united states seems more reluctant to assume this imperial role. according to gray, the creation of new varieties of capitalism will force the present regime of free markets to fracture and fragment into new forms of capitalism or risk marginalization. he further stresses that global luissez$aire, which only has been in vogue for the last two decades, must be seen as a moment in the history of the emerging world economy, not as its end-point. technology-led globalization will force all players, whether nations or transnational corporations, to accept and depict the diversity of a more plural world. similarly, if the rules of the global free market are not reformed to match the needs . 144 the american journal of islamic social sciences 15:3 of emerging economic powers, they will be flouted constantly, which only engenders greater tension and instability in the global market. gray agrees with many western and eastern scholars and leaders that there is an urgent need to provide a reformed framework for the global regulation of currencies, cap­ ital movements, trade, and environmental conservation if there is to be any hope of sur­ vival and meaningful interaction. rather than the misnomer of"deregulation," proper reg­ ulation ( or regulation that takes into account the diversity of existing cultures and values) is required. however, gray is correct in his statement that such a development would require american support and commitment, which does not seem to be forthcoming. while even the world bank in its 1997 development report acknowledges the role and importance of an effective state in achieving sustainable economic and social development, other players (i.e., the international monetary fund and the united states) have not been as forthcoming in this regard. it is not too difficult to see why there is resistance to calls for "enlightened'' reforms, as such undertakings would cause a deterioration of the present system's power structures. this, however, is the paradoxical nature of the situation. failure to accept the reality of diversity, interaction, and change will lead to greater efforts to establish free mar­ kets. in tum, these efforts will feed on the player's instability and ultimately lead to change. where technology is the master of nations, including the dominant powers of today, the market's freedom from social and political control have not advanced human freedom. gray concludes, rather pessimistically, that unless reforms are undertaken and diversity is accepted, the age of globalization will be remembered as another tum in the history of servitude rather than as one promoting human development, which it has the potential to do provided that all countries accept the propositions of diversity, plurality, equality, and mutual respect. despite, or maybe in spite of, the publication of this book at a time when the global free-market ideology seems to have been given a new lease of life, false dawn is cer­ tainly recommended reading. well documented and referenced, the book also provides muslim scholars and islamic economists a way to involve themselves in the current debate on globalization, global markets, and the muslim world. while globalization in its present forrn and leadership still can be considered a manifestation of domination by the rich and powerful-as well as a process of secularization having at its core the ideology of secularism-muslim scholars should use the book as a reference source of contempo­ rary western writing in their efforts to promote islamization. mohamed aslam haneef department of economics international islamic university malaysia selangor, darul ehsan, malaysia 136 the american journal of islamic social sciences 15:3 globalization: theory and practice by eleonore kojhan and gillian youngs, editors. pintel: 1996. xii + 339pp. globalization is a subject about which it is very easy to write copiously and badly. this is inevitable, given its literal implication of change in everything humanity holds dear, thereby eluding encapsulation within any single paradigm, theory, or perspective. legions of authors, however, not deterred by this fact have elaborated on their uniquely true reading of the outcomes of this phenomenon, so many carefully avoiding serious crit icism of the idea in so doing. now, as the millenium nears, whole populations are certain in their knowledge that globalization is here, but very few individuals can claim credibly to know what it is, how it works, and where it will take us. one useful approach to doing justice to so broad a topic within a single volume is to engage the services of several authors, each dealing with those facets of globalization for which they are best equipped. this is the approach taken in the work under review, where the talents of 23 individuals have been pooled. the downside is the risk that no tangible . concept of globalization will emerge from the various contributions and that the reader will be left unconvinced that so many disparate treatments describe the same subject. editors kofman and youngs exhibit some sensitivity to this problem and, to their credit, designed their book to encompass a sizable part of the intellectual territory of glob alization. from the vantage points of geography, politics, and international relations, as well as sociology, law, and even epistemology, each author shares his or her view of glob alization in action. if, at times, the view is from quite a distance or obstructed by fore ground issues of only indirect importance, this is compensated for by the novelty of the perspectives offered. as far as intellectual coverage is concerned, a stronger economic content is notable by its absence, for although economists have their say on the subject nearly everywhere else, the intimacy between politics and economics (as opposed to cap italism) in the context of globalization deserves every attention. kofman and youngs are anxious to position this work as part of the “second wave” of serious and scholarly research on globalization, although in so doing they tend to assume that the “first wave” (presumably consisting of descriptive or historical narra tives) yielded a solid enough foundation on which to build. the fact remains that the very hypothesis of globalization has its detractors, and in their introduction, the editors fail to convince the critical reader of globalization’s conceptual or empirical validity. similarly, several later chapters could easily be rewritten without recourse to “the g word,” for they are more useful as perspectives on postlmodernism, capitalism, interhationalism, internationalization, or regionalism, to name only a representative selection. although many participants in academic discourse comprehend globalization in its particular manifestations, others, myself included, prefer that its elaboration on a holistic level should be featured just as often. the tendency to work within the “glob alization of ...” framework, rather than “globalization is ...,” eventually may obscure vital truths of the same variety as a failure to see the forest shrinking due to focused interest in the growth of individual trees. a book such as this should, by its close, clar ify what globalization is not, in order to demonstrate the theory’s tractability. this would serve the additional purpose of countering those who write globalization off as fantasy, or worse, as a conspiracy to revive the fortunes of authors exhausted on other intellectual fionts. unfortunately, despite its ostensible commitment to the “is” approach, a good deal of globulizution is intent on describing the more readily circum scribed incidents of an ineffable force. book reviews 137 none of this is to say that the book fails to be informative, interesting, or challenging, however, for at times it is focussed very precisely on globalization or k t s of alternative globalizations. youngs, in a short chapter on discourse in international relations, insightful ly observes that globalization need not be “real” to have a serious social impact, not only in an academic sense but also in the empirical realm. not only may the idea give rise to the reality, but it creates a new lens through which to review existing knowledge. scholte makes a valuable contribution to “beyond the buzzword,” and the book might usellly have start ed with this chapter, or at least pivoted around it as a means to provide a point of reference, both conceptually and analytically. in actuality, pinning its political colors to the mast, globalizution begins with a critique by peterson, not of globalization per se but of the fem inist paradigm peterson fears may be ignored in its exploration and engineering. the issue of gender is a recurring one in the book, a fact that sets it apart from the mainstream. i would only suggest that it could be more tightly integrated with the title theme. the volume’s four-part organization, covering aspects of theory and academic practice, geopoliticalllegal questions, gender concerns, and problems for the developing world, might deter the interested reader seeking an angle not obviously covered by one of these cate gories. as stated above, however, a great deal of ground is covered, and the^ are sure to be fruitful leads for scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. smith’s discussion of the thteats and opportunities to sustainable development on small island states, for example, offers insights about the prospect for meaningful participation by peripheral nation-states withii the institutional framework of international governance. in “selling nafta: gendered metaphors and silenced gender implications, “ marchand reveals mechanisms that obscure or discard the views of the minority or the unempowered in toplevel decision-making pro cesses, which should resonate with the experiences of social scientists, commentators, and activists concerned with a wide range of issue-areas. in a related chapter, runyan discusses the potentially destructive competition between groups marginalized in this manner by clearly delineating the darker implications of globalization-as-capitalism. given the predilections of the authors and the editors, it is not surprising that rela tionships between nation-states receive the most comprehensive treatment. the level here, as with the majority of the book (the latter part of which is more closely concerned with case-studies), is mainly in the realm of theory. where this coverage comes with a revi sionist intent it is less satisfying, as authors seeking to break down older models tend to over-reach, possibly due to their inability to give full expression to their ideas in the book’s confined space. although globalization is intended in large measure to link the pathways of schol ars concerned with international political phenomena from within divergent paradigms, the chapters explicitly devoted to this effort may very well be the least effective. however, the book also deals with theory relating to interstate relations in the spirit of reconsidera tion, rather than rejection, subject to altered assumptions about the international order. in these articles, the tone of commentary regarding the fate of the state as an institution of governance is surprisingly even, considering the enthusiasm and despair emanating in equal measure from globalists and anti-globalists. williams’ “rethinking sovereignty” is a good example of what this book does well, as it takes an idiosyncratic but considered view of sovereignty under pressure and shows it to be capable of transformation and thus more robust than expected. appraising the book as a whole, one welcomes the freshness of approach but yet remains frustrated at the absence of a conscious continuity with respect to the “big picture.” there is certainly common ground, in that no author finds its unnatural to compose his or her thoughts in the language of globalization. however, this ultimately undermines the collection’s credibility. strengths lie in the book’s entirety and its various parts, allow 138 the american journal of islamic social sciences l 5:3 ing for the tendencies mentioned above-the entirety offers such a breadth of access to its eponymous theme, and it is a serious and necessary effort to advance theoretically within and across disciplines. structurally, however, the reader cannot help but wonde.r whether a less ambitious canvassing of viewpoints, with the benefit of greater freedom and space afforded fewer authors, might not have generated a more solid sense of the logic behind the challenges that the world is equipping itself to meet. for those already well-versed in the globalization debate, from discourses as diverse as business strategy, literary criticism, and media studies, there is a generous amount of material that will help to further the inde­ pendent development of existing perceptions. however_ this work should, on its own terms, elaborate a model that can be treated as a datum, refining and augmenting its con­ stituent parts, and informing those to whom globalization remains indefinite. it is unfortunate that the net result here might confirm the suspicion that each of us experiences our own globalizations and always have, only by other names. globalization, as observed more than once in this book, exists as an idea that is independent of the phys­ ical world. ideas very frequently seed ideologies. the authors and editors of this book comprehend globalization as an empirical force and as a concept, but are reluctant toques­ tion the extent to which they believe in globalization in either sense. this precaution would prevent globalization from resolving into an end, even if an unwanted one, rather than a means to ends not yet perceived. globalization must not be wheeled out automati­ cally whenever we encounter social change that evades explanation, or when we prefer not to explain that change in other terms. it is still too early for books such as this to dis­ pense with debate and opposition to globalization, both in theory and practice. brent burmester department of international business university of auckland auckland, new zealand editorial the issue before you features important studies that offer new ways to understand the modern and exogenous forces, such as territorial nationalism and neoliberalism, that have shaped muslim societies and islamic discourses over the last two centuries. luke peterson’s “palestine-israel and the neoliberal ideal” argues for theorizing the palestinian-israeli conflict not primarily as a nationalist or cultural conflict, but as a casualty of neoliberalism. among the chief motivators of the now infamous duplicity of the british in the course of the first world war, peterson suggests, were the region’s economic benefit and natural resources. peterson argues – against the conventional understanding of neoliberalism as a largely post-1970s phenomenon that reversed the doctrine of managed capitalism in the immediate aftermath of the second world war – that british policies even during the first world war can be fruitfully characterized as a kind of neoliberalism. indeed, he notes that neoliberal economics has a structural affinity to imperialism, for they are both ideological and require an expansive military and propaganda apparatus. in both phenomena, a small elite seeks to master regional and international economies for its own benefit. both thrive at the cost of local political autonomy and governance. moreover, both exploit war as a profitable opportunity. this interesting study seeks to bring together three strands of argument – neoliberalism as imperialism in the origins of the conflict; the precepts of contemporary, international neoliberalism; and the global, neoliberal characteristics of contemporary palestine-israel – to bear on a fresh understanding of the forces that affect this momentous conflict. dwight haase’s response invites us to expand the scope of the framework proposed by peterson. david warren’s “for the good of the nation: the new horizon of expectations in rifaʿa al-tahtawi’s reading of the islamic political tradition” offers a careful reading of the works of al-tahtawi (d. 1873). the career of this al-azhar-trained reformist scholar, and later an administrator and educator under muhamad ali, coincided with the establishment of the printing press in 1822 by the relentless albanian modernizer of ottoman egypt. ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page v warren’s argument is nothing short of a challenge to eurocentric historiography, which has often seen al-tahtawi’s politics as a failed attempt to assimilate the ideas of the french enlightenment and the 1830 revolution between the monarchists and the constitutionalists. he demonstrates that whereas al-tahtawi was indeed inspired by the nationalist cult around the memory of napoleon bonaparte (the conquering despot he wished to see in his own patron, muhammad ali), he did so from his own grounding in islamic political tradition, in particular as articulated by al-ghazali (whose works were among the first to be published in egypt). al-tahtawi sympathized with a strong, enlightened despot rather than those who sought to place constitutional limits on his actions, a dispute that he saw played out in both france and egypt. warren alerts us to the classical islamic roots of his understanding and, even more remarkably, to the crucial selectivity, transformation, and innovation that this scholar introduced. among the most significant was his embrace of egyptian territory as the marker for the ummah, which was then, using traditional materials, infused with sanctity and religious authority. he deems the old islamic ideal of the ummah electing the ruler to be impractical, but maintained a role for the ummah (now understood as the national community with a unified will) to offer consultation to the monarch. his concern for legitimating political life through the will of the community was not (merely) a borrowing from europe, but was grounded in (and a response to) premodern islamic debates. the function and scope of social and political education also changed. in the past, the ulama had written “mirrors” for princes to instruct them in etiquette, religion, and the ways of politics in an attempt to ensure prosperity for the kingdom and the lands of muslims. al-tahtawi, warren astutely observes, expands this genre to now instruct the entire nation for its own prosperity. the ulama had traditionally taught men their religion either for general piety or as part of the educational practice to reproduce themselves; however, they were now charged with instructing them in the service of the nation. a second set of innovations, warren suggests, were introduced in the notion of time and history. the arc of history had been understood primarily in religious terms as being cyclical, namely, as the periodic rise and fall of this or that contender. even the great mongol invasion had been ultimately domesticated into this narrative. for al-tahtawi, time opened up to entirely new horizons, to vistas of progress into the unknown, with the egyptian nation under an enlightened despot catching up to the company of rival euvi the american journal of islamic social sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page vi ropean nations. so powerful was this vision that it has not yet fully dissipated among islamic or islamicate thinkers. warren’s contribution is all the more significant for bringing insights from studies in classical political islamic thought together with a careful rereading of a crucial early modern figure – a figure who produced his own innovative work through a similar bridging of a thousand-year-old tradition to his contemporary world. last but not least is imtiyaz yusuf’s forum article, “nationalist ethnicities as religious identities: islam, buddhism and citizenship in myanmar,” which offers a thoughtful historical analysis of the ongoing tragedy of myanmar’s systematic ethnic cleansing of the rohingya muslims. the story will sound familiar to many: an ethno-nationalist movement aligning itself with a powerful religion to produce a culture of radical exclusivism directed against a minority. in this case, the religion being yoked for nationalist chauvinism is buddhism and the targeted minority is the rohingya muslims. racism, a loathing for the “dark-skinned” rohingya by other burmese ethnicities, is the enabling factor that facilitates the necessary task of dehumanization prior to mass killings, just as anti-semitism did for the nazis and white supremacy continues to do in europe and the united states. ethnonationalism, racism, and the general support for islamophobia from the most powerful centers of the world are the elements (familiar to western muslims as well) that make up the heinous crime against the rohingya people, which some international bodies are describing as genocide. eschewing rhetoric and hyperbole, and always careful to remind us that this is not a buddhist problem so much as a modern ethnonationalist curse, yusuf draws on his considerable expertise on the conflict’s historical and ideological dimensions to provide a most enlightening historical account of the unfolding tragedy. directly following this editorial are an errata for professor brown’s article in 34.3; a few minor errors were regrettably left uncorrected in the proofreading process. *** this is the third issue of this journal under a new editor (myself) and a new and illustrious editorial board. some members of the editorial board raised an important issue in reference to our issue 34:3 on the theme of “islam and homosexuality.” they noted that the two articles presented the conservative islamic position, which rejects the homosexual act. my own editorial added to the impression that the journal takes a theological or ideological position on such issues. editorial vii ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page vii this is simply not the case. beyond the journal’s well-known mission of the reform of islamic thought and the concern to put social-scientific scholarship in conversation with islamic textual scholarship, the journal has no ideological filters. my job as editor is to attract and publish the best and most consequential scholarship to advance disciplined knowledge in service of the aforementioned mission. the editor’s own religious or personal views simply do not determine the content of what gets published. it has been the tradition of this journal, as well as a wider practice, that the editorials to themed issues tend to be more substantive, expressing the editor’s own vision of the nature of the contributions and the stakes involved. the editorials accompanying such thematic issues, then, clearly do not represent the views of all members of the editorial board. the board members, in fact, are selected to represent a broad spectrum of scholarly interests and viewpoints and, as a consequence, are unlikely to be unanimous in any view or judgment. the issue included two well-researched and well-argued pieces that advance the discussion of islam and homosexuality, a debate that for over two decades has been underway in academia with particular intensity. i am confident that the quality of both pieces is such that no serious researcher on the subject writing in any language will overlook either mobeen vaid’s assessment of the existing discourse on the qur’anic teachings on the subject or jonathan ac brown’s meticulous presentation of the traditional hadith discourse. *** this is how our trade works. over the course of the next few years, perhaps even decades, articles like these will be read by other scholars (mostly graduate students buried in books, or rather in gigabytes of pdfs), whose list of readings will include hundreds of studies on the subject. they will, ideally, read these contributions alongside many others, looking not to be converted to one position or the other, but to develop their own judgment based on a fair reading of all sides. detached from the original context of the twenty-first century in which these studies are produced, future scholars will read these and other studies in their own contexts. they will remember those studies seen as worthy and rigorous and will, in turn, recommend them to their own disciples. by the standards of this slow and painstaking winnowing and sifting of arguments to arrive at the truth, good scholarship always wins. as a journal, we can do no more than encourage and publish good scholarship. viii the american journal of islamic social sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page viii western academics have always studied islam through the lens of their most recent and ever-changing concerns, fads, and aspirations. this is, of course, not limited to western scholars; however, the power differential between western and traditional muslim institutions has created relatively unilateral lines of influence and prejudices. the rise of hyperindividualism and fluidity in sexual behavior in twenty-first-century euroamerica have inevitably colored the concerns of scholars in the same way that european trends over the last two centuries affected western scholars as well as westernized muslim thinkers’ concern for the lack of constitutionalism, democracy, rational law, science, secularism, or the presence of this or that institution in islam. none of this is, in itself, reason enough to dismiss all such scholarship. it is a testament to the value of disciplined scholarship, however, that all those scholars who have approached the study with rigor, whatever their own pet ideologies and feelings, have often contributed to the growth of our collective knowledge of islam and to the challenging of long-standing but indefensible fallacies. michael cook and patricia crone’s iconoclastic work hagarism: the making of the islamic world (1977), for instance, postulated that having been born as a jewish heresy somewhere in arabia, islam as we know it was a much later construct. the careful work of the same disciplines to which crone and cook belong, however, steadily challenged or decisively disproved most pieces of that argument. crone’s posthumously published note, while reasserting her disbelief in islam, acknowledged that upon actually reading the qur’an in the early 1990s – years after writing hagarism and much else – she was shocked by a number of discoveries. these included that the qur’an was remarkably non-violent for its context and that contemporary muslim reformists’ contentions (she names mahmud shaltut), which she had previously dismissed as misleading apologetics, were, in fact, right.1 the point of retelling this anecdote is that if one is disciplined enough (which enforces a measure of self-criticism), even flawed approaches may advance scholarship and are open to self-correction. more importantly, under the right circumstances, they challenge us to think better. and this is why all the ever-changing ideologies and sensibilities that the orientalists and their muslim disciples have brought to bear on the study of islam have not rendered their work worthless. it is for this reason, and for my own commitment to god and his blessed name of al-ḥaqq (the truth), that i find it wrong and harmful to silence those with whom i diseditorial ix ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page ix agree. not unlike the imperial courts and private salons of abbasid baghdad at its height, an academic journal like ajiss must be committed to showcasing all sides of the argument, if only to encourage the discovery and constant refinement of truth. endnote 1. patricia crone, the qur’anic pagans and related matters: collected studies in three volumes, vol. 1, ed. hanna siurua (leiden: brill, 2016), xiv. ovamir anjum, editor, american journal of islamic social sciences imam khattab chair of islamic studies associate professor, department of philosophy and religious studies affiliated faculty, department of history university of toledo, toledo, oh errata in the production of ajiss 34:3, a few errors were introduced into professor jonathan brown’s article “a pre-modern defense of the hadiths on sodomy.” corrections are provided below, with our regrets. p. 6: “of al-khara’iti” should be romanized p. 6: al-isbahani (not al-isbahabi) p. 8: lam yaṣiḥḥā (not lam yaṣiḥ) p. 9: delete “while” from “while kugle admits” p. 20: allāh (not allāḥ). p. 34, n.1: dar al-kutub al-‘ilmiyyah (not dar al-kitab al-‘ilmiyyah) x the american journal of islamic social sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 am page x 103book reviews brand islam: the marketing and commodification of piety faegheh shirazi austin: university of texas press, 2016. 281 pages. brand islam: the marketing and commodification of piety examines the growing business of muslim merchandise, ranging from food products considered ḥalāl (permissible) to children’s dolls that represent devout muslim behavior through sartorial choices such as modest clothing and the wearing of the veil. faegheh shirazi illustrates how a growing muslim market often intersects, in both problematic and intriguing ways, with capitalism. using an extensive survey of case studies, illustrations, and diverse muslim communities (iran and indonesia are often cited), the book provides a useful exploration of the question of muslim consumption and contributes to larger discussions surrounding material religion. in chapter 1, shirazi begins her investigation into these topics by discussing the problem of islamophobia and how it may influence muslims to seek out markers of religious identity, thus influencing the market. her definitions of xenophobia, islamophobia, and islamoparanoia are useful, although i felt myself wanting a richer discussion of how these trends intersect with white supremacy, colonial politics, and misogyny. symbols— especially the veil and the mosque—can be used, as other scholars have shown, to generate anxiety in non-muslim populations. although shirazi is less interested in how these symbols are used to shore up white, male, christian, or secular authority, she employs them to show the ways in which islamophobia and radical, literalist islamic rhetoric feed off each other. the manipulation of this rhetoric is even used when non-muslims make concessions in an effort to improve relations with muslims, such as queen elizabeth’s 2010 visit to the uae, when she covered her hair. as shirazi points out, “sheikh yasser burhani, one of egypt’s leading islamic scholars, jumped on the queen’s gesture as justification for furthering an oppressive, fundamentalist salafi islamic position” (p. 32). the ways in which the body—in this case a white, regal body—is used in debates surrounding islam and modernity is at the crux of this book. halal food and the economy surrounding its production, monitoring, and distribution is the focus of chapter 2. as shirazi points out, modernity has had an effect on religious modes of eating and drinking, “while it is 104 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 not unusual for religions to establish dietary restrictions, what is unusual is the unprecedented demand for and global marketing of religiously sanctioned foods in the twenty-first century” (p. 39). the chapter begins with a detailed discussion of religious rules surrounding the consumption of food, which includes the designations of ḥarām (forbidden), ḥalāl (lawful), and the often less-discussed mashbūh (essentially, an intermediary category). mashbūh, or “doubtful food,” includes food and drink that would be ḥarām under normal circumstances, but changes categories under special circumstances, such as in the case of a patient who must take a life-saving medicine that contains alcohol (p. 40). the chapter provides a rich discussion of halal foods and the economy surrounding these products, including issues of manufacturing and transport. while interesting, the real value in this chapter lies in shirazi’s examination of certification standards and, in particular, the questions of who determines what is halal and what happens when there is a disagreement on these determinations. because islam is not a monolithic tradition, but one that contains numerous legal schools and countless ulema (religious figures who make judgments on social matters, including the designation of halal), there is predictably much disagreement on the halal question. as shirazi writes, “islamic clerics often put forward contradictory interpretations of what is and what is not halal. indeed, an item deemed halal by one set of fatwas might be considered haram according to another” (p. 49). compounding this issue are others, including the time limits placed on halal certification and, more importantly, the influence of the market on the determination of halal. this last issue is perhaps of most interest to scholars thinking about the commodification of religion, for the production of counterfeit halal and part-halal foods (such as the 50% halal products pointed to in this chapter) is a growing problem. more importantly, what happens when competing muslim markets challenge each other? the most interesting case explored by shirazi is indonesia, which has national halal standards and a self-monitoring system that passes by the over forty foreign halal certification ruling organizations (p. 52). the only shortcoming that i voice here is that shirazi could be more attentive to the economic realities of indonesia. it has the largest muslim population in the world and an isolated geographical location, factors that likely influence the move to have a self-regulating body (the mui) alongside any religious considerations. shirazi argues that, “by rejecting all halal certifications except those issued by the mui, indonesia’s government has created a religious monopoly through which economic gains are tightly controlled and ma 105book reviews nipulated” (p. 66). when she describes this as a “disturbing precedent,” i am not sure that the larger economic and political realities of this southeast asian nation are being fully considered. chapter 3 also examines the halal food industry and in particular focuses on the slaughtering practices that include worship (‘ibāda), the blessing of the animal (bismillāh), and numerous rules surrounding halal meats. the question of contamination, either through non-halal meats such as pork or through non-halal permissible meats (such as beef that is not halal) is also taken up in this chapter. here we see the challenges muslims who follow halal guidelines face in the marketplace. how they determine what is truly halal is a more difficult question than one might assume. many of these challenges lie in areas less often discussed in the academic literature, and it is to these details that we owe a great debt to shirazi, whose intricate discussion of halal issues is so needed. one concern is the prohibitions against consuming blood and plasma. as the author explains, these rules are dictated by the qur’an, but difficult to follow, for reasons she points out: “to date, no specific testing has been developed to detect blood plasma in food products. islam prohibits consuming the blood of any animal, even if that animal has been slaughtered by halal standards. therefore, the presence of plasma in meat products makes them unsuitable for muslim consumers” (p. 87). chapter four focuses on the halal toy industry, which includes items such as dolls, board games, and educational toys. dolls provide a particularly interesting case, representing issues such as the legislation of proper dress for girls, anxieties over sexuality, and political ideologies that have characterized barbie as, for instance, according to saudi religious authorities, a “jewish toy,” representing decadence, revealing clothing, and the perversion associated with the west (p. 91). it is perhaps the theological questions these dolls pose that are the most interesting; as shirazi asks, what is halal about a toy serving as a religious teaching tool? in the case of the muslim barbie and its various copycats, shirazi remarks, “the toy that is purely the creation of man cannot be muslim because a toy does not follow a religion. in other words, a muslim is a person who is obedient to allah and also follows the religion of islam. a doll is not in the same category as humans; thus the man-made doll cannot be muslim” (p. 94). the larger theological issues this points to—most explicitly the threat of shirk, or the association with other things than allah—is not fully addressed, but surely would be provocative for a group of students using this book in a university-level course. the great variety of these toys, which include afghan, iranian, emi106 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 rati, and bosnian versions, among others, points to muslims’ desires to have religious commodities in their lives. putting the theological questions aside, the halal toy market demonstrates the power of material islam in the lives of many muslims, including children. in chapter five, shirazi turns her attention to halal skin care and cosmetics. brand islam products must fulfill a number of requirements for observant muslims. among these, the contamination of beauty items with pork products or other non-halal materials is paramount. one of the points made in this chapter that is particularly important for scholars interested in islam and modernity is the expansion of the halal category to these nonfood items. as shirazi points out, “fewer than fifty years ago, no one voiced particular concerns or much consideration of halal products. in muslim majority nations, the average muslim looked upon the concepts of halal and haram as primarily pertaining to food, such as pork and its derivatives, and alcoholic beverages” (p. 116). the expansion of the halal category is in in part due to the realities of the emerging global market and the exponential growth of such products, which are often mass produced and imported into local communities. as this chapter points out, with items containing the foreskins of circumcised infants (p. 119), the placental material of sheep (p. 120), and skin-cell proteins from aborted fetuses (p. 122), these are well-founded concerns, and not just for the muslim consumer. another topic of interest in this chapter is the islamic legality of certain cosmetic products. as shirazi explains, a hadith of prophet muhammad that prohibits tattoos would also prohibit the practice of permanent eyeliner and eyebrows, which function as tattoos (p. 133). in another example, iran has launched anti-lipstick campaigns that discourage females from “face painting” (p. 143) and liken lipsticks to weapons that originate in the west to corrupt islam (p. 143). chapters 6 and 7 examine islamic clothing—halal fashion, sportswear, and lingerie. the topic of islamic fashion is a growing field of interest for scholars, with studies by emma tarlo, annelies moors, and reina lewis that look at issues involving the fashion industry, styles of veiling, and muslim anti-fashion campaigns. shirazi’s analysis of islamic fashion is enriched by her inclusion of visual material, including numerous advertising images, that show how women’s bodies are commodified, displayed, and at times disguised in the name of halal fashion. her brief but cogent discussion of naming, slogans, and islamic key words in the promotion of brand islam is of particular interest to scholars studying the ways in which arabic and other languages are deployed politically. shirazi quotes one advertising 107book reviews campaign that includes the phrase, “faith, modesty, style & inspiration. promote your faith, uphold your modesty, define your style and be an inspiration to others” (p. 172). such coding promotes the idea that sartorial choices involve female agency and promote the idea that what an individual muslim female wears may even reflect the level of her piety. in the subsequent chapter, which focuses on sportswear and lingerie, shirazi continues this discussion. as she points out, the market has recently opened up to islamic sportswear and has been especially rich with sports hijabs, which can be worn at the gym, on the running trail, or in professional sports. in soccer (for non-americans, football) female muslim athletes have made noticeable strides; fifa even changed its rules, allowing for the wearing of the hijab on the field (reversing an earlier policy that argued the hijab would endanger the player). soccer is not alone in the expansion of sports to include more muslim athletes. as shirazi points out, in 2008 the manufacturer of the soccer hijab known as resportone “designed a head veil suitable for use in taekwondo,” which was followed by more versions for formula 1 racing and go-carting (p. 183). brand islam is growing in step with the growing number of muslim athletes, including female sports enthusiasts. other items that shirazi discusses in this chapter include lingerie, which is only a halal issue when it comes to advertising. however, the fact that lingerie is popular with muslims should be no surprise given that sexual relations between a husband and wife are promoted within islam. the chapter concludes with an interesting discussion of amulets, which may include items with arabic script from the qur’an. this is one of the many places where the marketplace wins over islamic sensitivities about cultural superstitions. as shirazi points out, the jewelry industry and use of talismans and amulets reflect the desire among many muslims to have public displays of their religious commitments, whether they are halal or not. this last point is one of the many strengths of this volume. brand islam is not just reflective of the growing power of the capitalist system, muslim commodities, and a globalized religious marketplace; it also tells us something about the ways in which islam is very much a material religion, engaged in bodily practices that are both symbolic of piety and of the choices afforded by modernity. if i have one critique of shirazi’s book, it is that she did not include more discussion of the issues raised by talal asad and others concerning the secular and the modern in the lives of muslims and the world of brand islam. asad’s critique of approaches to religion that over-emphasize belief 108 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 over human activity—including material practices such as consumerism— is apropos here. how does commercial activity function as a corrupting influence on religious traditions—seen in the production of counterfeit halal foods? belief does not always trump the desires created by the local and world market, as shirazi shows in this study. lastly, asad’s contention that we are all “conscripts of modernity” is a point made by brand islam, for it is evidence that muslims are subject to the same mechanisms or power as other human communities in the contemporary world. sophia r. arjana assistant professor of religious studies western kentucky university, bowling green, ky beyond secular liberalism: islamic activism in lebanon sarah marusek abstract while many scholars have focused on questions of nonor post-secularity vis-à-vis the “modern nation state,” fewer have asked what kind of decolonial redemption is possible under global neoliberal capitalism today. this is precisely the question i seek to address in this article by analyzing the contemporary ideas and practices of the charities affiliated with what is collectively known as the islamic resistance movement in lebanon. based on almost two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork in lebanon on the charities affiliated with the three main shi'i activist movements loosely comprising the islamic resistance movement—hizbullah, al-mabarrat association, and imam al-sadr foundation—i describe how all three are selectively resisting some aspects of secular liberalism while accepting others. however, by employing a decentered approach to my analysis, i also highlight how their negotiation with secular liberalism is on their own terms, thus ultimately presenting a challenge to western hegemony. these charities employ multiple conceptions of rationality, including religious rationality and a range of liberal and even neoliberal economic principles; but by centering their project on faith, islam, and resistance, these charities reproduce what i call “resistance subjectivities,” allowing the islamic resistance movement to present unique challenges to western secular modernity. introduction a place like al-sāḥa traditional village in the southern suburbs of beirut is an interesting example of a contemporary islamic negotiation with secular sarah marusek, phd, is currently a ges post-doctoral research fellow at the university of johannesburg and will be a research fellow at the university of leeds from spring 2018. she is author of the forthcoming book faith and resistance: the politics of love and war in lebanon (pluto, 2018). 2 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 liberalism. al-sāḥa, meaning “the square,” generates income for al-mabarrat association, a network of shi‘i islamic charities in lebanon. the complex consists of a restaurant, hotel, market, library, playground, prayer rooms and event conference hall,1 and its structure recreates the rural landscape of nineteenth century christian mount lebanon, albeit interwoven with contemporary islamic ideas and communal practices. throughout my field research in lebanon, i attended numerous meetings, conferences and events at al-sāḥa for an array of islamic and social justice causes, marking it as a hub of solidarity. mona harb (2006, 10) argues that al-sāḥa offers pious entertainment—a safe space providing an “environment complying with pious muslim practices.” however, she also asks if this kind of pious entertainment will ultimately lose “its moral authority and legitimacy by accepting the market logic of consumption” (ibid., 11). indeed, by 2012 a luxury spa and gym were being added to the complex2—but this consumption is still mediated by faith and supports essential social services. as such, al-sāḥa challenges the hegemonic project of secular modernity by prioritizing faith and selectively incorporating liberal ideas and practices. while this and other types of religious negotiations with the contemporary world may prove to have some secularizing and/or liberalizing effects—perhaps even taking on neoliberal hues—it would be a methodological mistake to allow such tendencies to obfuscate all the complexities and contradictions that make them distinct from the western secular liberal project. wael hallaq (2013) argues that the “modern nation state” also has secularizing effects, but ‘the secular’ as a concept of state neutrality that is inclusive of religion (taylor 2011) is not the same as the western project of secularism, which forcefully exports a non-neutral framework in violent ways (asad 2003).3 the same came be said of the ‘liberal’ and ‘neoliberal’—they do not necessarily equal their “isms” (liberalism, neoliberalism). in fact, when the starting point of analysis is de-centered from the west, liberal and neoliberal policies can still contribute to a decolonial project. by liberalism, i mean the western political and economic project envisioning abstract individuals who have rights and are guided primarily by what is identified as instrumental rationality (rather than religious or moral rationality) with intervention from the state to regulate this system and guarantee some form of redistributive justice (rawls 2001, 2005). what is strictly ‘liberal’, however, refers only to certain characteristics of this conceptual framework and practice. similarly, by neoliberalism i mean not only an economic and political system based on laissez-faire capitalism, but also an entire set of beliefs and practices—an ideology (rupert 2015). neo 3 liberalism as a project is imagined to reproduce itself without state intervention, creating new hierarchies that are supposedly neutral of class, gender, race, and other differences, but which are not in fact neutral at all (rose and miller 1992). nevertheless, neoliberal policies can still be integrated into alternative frameworks, such as an islamic one. in this way, pointing out the neoliberal tendencies of religious movements does not necessarily mean that they are fully aligned with the hegemonic system of neoliberal capitalism, namely the economic expression of neoliberalism based on the washington consensus (stiglitz 2008).4 capitalism itself—meaning any system of social relations that is based on private ownership, where some own capital and others must sell their labor to earn capital—can take on many forms, including those that are islamic (taleqani 1983; baqir al-sadr 2000). decolonizing these concepts means to de-center the west as the master referent that signifies their meanings (sayyid 2003, 2014), creating a pluriversal epistemology of the future (mignolo 2011). scholars are increasingly turning their attention to how contemporary religious movements are interacting with local and global economies (bompani and frahm-arp 2010; daher 2016; dreher and smith 2016). these studies show how deliberately incorporating faith into everyday social practices is a complex and contradictory political project that can be expressed in different ways. while hegemonic understandings of western modernity privilege reason over faith as a preferred way of knowing, critical studies of islamic movements in the middle east have raised awareness of how a politics of piety is decidedly modern (mahmood 2005; deeb 2006). this article builds on recent studies of how lebanese muslims are negotiating (with) secular liberalism and neoliberal capitalism (deeb and harb 2013) by exploring the different ways that the islamic resistance movement in lebanon reproduces what i call a resistance subjectivity: a faith and commitment to the cause of revolutionary islamic activism. this allows them to negotiate with secular liberalism from a de-centred (decolonial) position, creating new configurations. in this article, i first explain the resistance underpinnings of three different yet overlapping islamic activist movements in lebanon. the first two are hizbullah and al-mabarrat association, the well-known charitable foundations of the islamic resistance movement. however, i also discuss the intellectual contributions of religious activist imam musa al-sadr, as well as focus in detail on the divergent legacy of his imam al-sadr foundation, the third (lesser known) movement. i expand upon previously published work on resistant rationalities (marusek 2016) but take my analysis towards marusek: beyond secular liberalism 4 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 decolonial horizons by exploring the ideas and practices that sustain the vast system of social services of all three movements, focusing at length on the imam al-sadr foundation. ultimately, i show the similarities and differences in their approaches which result in multiple resistance subjectivities. based on interviews, participant observation, academic literature, media, and documents collected during almost two and a half years of fieldwork in lebanon, i examine how faith and rationality seamlessly intermingle in their work. thus, in a sense, i further “de-mystify” islamic activism by exploring how these charities are actively negotiating with secular liberalism and neoliberal capitalism on their own terms, embracing some aspects of these two frameworks but not others.5 building on the insights of italian marxist antonio gramsci and his sophisticated concept of hegemony, this article aims to illustrate how islamic negotiations with hegemonic ideas and practices in lebanon can be diverse, contradictory, and unique, ultimately creating multiple and divergent counter-hegemonic forces. background on shi‘i activism in lebanon the charities affiliated with hizbullah, al-mabarrat association, and the imam al-sadr foundation mostly (but not exclusively) provide social services to lebanese shi‘a, similar to the sectarian character of the lebanese state and a majority of the country’s social institutions (hamzeh 2004; cammet 2014). these charities comprise a vast network across the south and east of the country, operating schools, hospitals, orphanages, mosques, libraries, and other community institutions, as well as income generating programs. two religious clerics were particularly key to the emergence of these vast charitable networks: imam musa al-sadr (b. 1928) and ayatollah muhammad hussein fadlallah (1935-2010), the latter who established al-mabarrat association. furthermore, both religious scholars were contributors to the revolutionary activism that also inspired hizbullah. referring to these social institutions as ‘charities’ is somewhat misleading, as western understandings of charity bely their important political and cultural roles. benthall and bellion-jourdan (2009) illustrate that islamic charities are ubiquitous around the world, and clarke and tittensor (2016) seek to make some of these islamic charities “visible” to the global humanitarian sector positioned in the west. the latter authors explain, for example, that identifying islamic aid organizations in the united kingdom has proven difficult because they do not identify as such and employ a different discourse. by seeking to locate these charities within the western imagination, even one dedicated to “development” and “humanitarian 5 aid,” my concern is that this ultimately misrepresents the islamic resistance movement in lebanon. accordingly, my own engagement with these social institutions moves beyond the hegemonic paradigms of development and humanitarian assistance. although sometimes the charities may employ similar discourses, they are starting from a decidedly non-western position in the same way that they de-center liberal and neoliberal frameworks. despite spending only eighteen years in the country, the iranian-born activist and cleric imam al-sadr (b. 1928) inspired the oppressed shi‘i communities of southern and eastern lebanon to take control of their own lives by calling their situation what it was: destitute. before his arrival in lebanon, shi‘a were suffering on multiple fronts. in the decades following lebanon’s independence in 1943, lebanese shi‘a experienced extreme political neglect under the country’s sectarian system and feudal relations,6 which traboulsi (2007, 115-119) notes also had negative economic consequences. furthermore, as hamzeh (2004, 13) points out, much of the country’s wealth was located within the urban centers and most shi‘i populations were living in the rural areas in the south or to the east in the bekaa valley,7 regions that the lebanese state had historically ignored (harik 2005). one lebanese explained to me how when he was growing up, being a shi‘i was almost comparable to being an untouchable under the caste system in india.8 he said that it was simply not an identity that he or any other shi‘a would dare to publicly embrace.9 only after imam al-sadr arrived in lebanon in 1960 and called attention to this collective poverty did shi‘a become more politicized. ajami (1986) describes how imam al-sadr successfully adopted a religious discourse evolving from themes of disinheritance and deprivation, appealing to leftist and marxist-oriented lebanese. similar islamic discourses were developing elsewhere in the region during this time, especially to counter the rise of communist parties, for example in iraq (baqir al-sadr 2000; sankari 2005) and iran (shariati 1980; taleqani 1983). however, although many thinkers were inspired by the islamic revolutionary current, these discourses were also in dialogue with other postcolonial activists, challenging a wider range of sectarian, political, economic, racial, colonial, and imperial hierarchies. ali shariati, known as the ideologue of the 1979 islamic revolution, supported the post-colonial movements in algeria and cuba while also philosophically engaging with the writing of contemporary radicals, including jean-paul sartre, che guevara, and frantz fanon. indeed, he translated many of these authors’ texts into persian, even exchanging letters with fanon to argue that religion should play a role in postcolonial struggles where the societies were marusek: beyond secular liberalism 6 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 traditionally pious (abrahamian 1982, 25). imam al-sadr was a friend of shariati (norton 2005, 198), and he too believed that contemporary “politics, administration, markets and construction were not built on the basis of faith, they drifted from its path and turned into colonialism, looking for new markets, cold war periods… etc.”10 one lebanese shi‘i scholar who was active in the socialist movement during the 1970s told me, with some frustration, that while the communists had failed to reach these communities, al-sadr succeeded by employing a religiously-inspired marxism.11 imam al-sadr would regularly travel throughout southern lebanon in order to speak to people on the ground, listening to and connecting with them. he instilled courage and dignity among shi‘a through sermons, grassroots work, and an array of social and political institutions.12 in 1974, imam al-sadr, together with gregoire haddad, a greek catholic archbishop, created the party of the deprived to provide services to the needy throughout southern lebanon regardless of sect (moussawi 2011, 201-211). however, during the outbreak of the civil/international war (1975-1990), this soon evolved into a shi‘i militia and then ultimately into a political party known as the amal movement. imam al-sadr made frequent and bold overtures to christian leaders in lebanon, establishing a body to represent shi‘i islamic interests known as the shi‘i islamic supreme council in hazmieh, a christian area southeast of beirut, as a model of coexistence. indeed, when war erupted in 1975, imam al-sadr delivered a remarkable speech against sectarian violence, telling lebanese: “i declare that if a bullet is fired at a christian neighborhood, it is as if it was fired at my house, at my bosom, at my own child. if any well wisher tries to stop this calamity, tries to extinguish this fire of war, it is as if he has extinguished the fire in my house, on my door, on my pulpit.”13 imam al-sadr also established the technical institute of jabal amil, a school to provide students with technical and vocational training; imam al-sadr research center, a think tank in beirut; and imam al-sadr foundation, a social service institution in tyre. however, after imam al-sadr mysteriously disappeared during a visit to libya in 1978, lebanese shi‘a split into several factions: many continued to follow his amal movement under the lawyer nabih berri, whose “secular” leadership guided amal away from its islamic revolutionary roots (although the party is now politically aligned with the resistance); some liberalized imam al-sadr’s project through the center and foundation he had established; and when israel invaded southern lebanon for the second time in 1982, others launched a new armed movement called hizbullah, or the party of god. these followers also went 7 on to develop many more social institutions under the auspices of hizbullah. similar to imam al-sadr, hizbullah’s official discourse employs a language of empowerment. the party publicly communicated its existence in 1985 with the ideologically powerful “open letter,” written for the “downtrodden in lebanon and in the world,” emphasizing the liberatory potential of islam and citing the 1979 iranian revolution as an inspiration to action.14 this concept of revolutionary resistance is critical to any understanding of hizbullah’s ideology and aspirations. the qur’an refers to two different types of resistance captured in the arabic word jihād, the party’s second pillar (qassem 2005). although it is often misunderstood, the word literally means “struggle,” both inward and outward. as el-hussein (2008, 402-403) explains, resistance is also a form of jihād, with key lebanese clerics supporting both the military resistance against israel’s occupation as well as ṣumūd, or steadfastness, which is a more “passive resistance manifest in a refusal to leave the land”. however, hizbullah further expands upon this concept of jihād because the party believes oppression refers not only to those suffering from political or religious marginalization but also to economic exploitation. in this way, hizbullah’s resistance framework seeks to locate itself within the margins from the position of the poor and oppressed, much like christian liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor (gutiérrez 2003). fawaz (2000, 25-26) explains how, according to the party: the victims of oppressive structures are not hopeless, desperate individuals but rather active subjects who are resisting oppression—they are only ‘perceived as weak’ (mustaḍ‘afīn). they therefore can enroll in organizations, and in doing so join a ‘resistance society’ which ‘fights’ the ‘oppression’ and misery heaped on them by unjust social structures. this new language is above all challenging people’s perceptions and hopelessness consciously through rewording and redefining their position and role in the society. saad-ghorayeb (2002, 17) similarly argues that the party has islamized its understanding of oppression, whereby the suffering experienced from exploitation and poverty becomes an islamic virtue, translating class struggle into religious terms. indeed, according to hilal and moussawi (2007, 15), hizbullah is a religious party with a total societal perspective and comprehensive doctrine. marusek: beyond secular liberalism 8 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 the charities affiliated with hizbullah offer a wide range of programs that deliver social and financial assistance, build infrastructure, and provide education and health care. flanigan and abdel-samad (2009, 15) divide hizbullah’s social program into four main organizations: jihad al-bina, a service and construction agency founded in response to “repeated israeli assaults on different parts of lebanon;”15 islamic emdad charitable committee, a branch of the imam khomeini relief foundation in iran primarily serving the remoter areas of southern lebanon that have been subject to israeli bombardments and regions where government services are scarce;16 martyr’s foundation, supporting the families of those killed in military operations, including both civilians and fighters; and foundation for the wounded, helping those who have been injured in military operations. as i have previously discussed (marusek 2016), although ayatollah fadlallah was never officially connected to hizbullah, he was an important spiritual leader for the wider resistance community; his network of charitable institutions, al-mabarrat association, continues to serve many supporters and members of hizbullah.17 sayyid hassan nasrallah, the current leader of hizbullah, describes the relationship as follows: there is no organizational link between the leadership and decision-making process of the party and [ayatollah fadlallah]. however, apart from the organizational aspect, sayyid mohammad hussein has a very special position in what we call the ‘islamic scene’ in lebanon—a position he earned thanks to his high level of education, personality, broadmindedness, and his secular, social, and organizational activities throughout the years… undoubtedly, there is a feeling of common fate between hizbullah and sayyid mohammad hussein, due to our common spiritual and intellectual way of thinking and the historical relationship that exists between us. (cited in noe 2007, 136) accordingly, ayatollah fadlallah and his network of charities must also be included in any discussion about the cultural production and reproduction of a resistance subjectivity.18 the resistance subjectivity positions the believer within the peripheries to struggle with the marginalized. accordingly, ayatollah fadlallah (2011, 103) argued that islam approved of rebelling against injustice in everyday lives, suggesting that those who adopted a position of neutrality “in the case of oppression in political systems where the weak are dominated or persecuted in the name of preserving an effective rule of law,” or in systems 9 “founded on monopoly, manipulation, cheating, usury or corruption and built through stealing, bribing, depriving oppressed people of their rights” would be subject to god’s punishment when positive or conclusive actions could have been taken instead (ibid.). ayatollah fadlallah further emphasized that “salvation in this world and in the next is directly linked to the way society conducts its life and the relations within society;” therefore, any political system must be based on the three principles of love, justice, and mercy (ibid., 40). he also explained how, “god’s relation with man is one of the sources of his strength that continues to charge him with the power to grow and develop, to renew life around him and move it forward” (ibid., 23). thus, one’s love of god is what saves humans from feeling weak in the face of tyranny (ibid., 29). ayatollah fadlallah founded al-mabarrat association in 1978 as a charity and social service organization to care for the orphans created by lebanon’s long and bloody civil/international war. however, the association’s “efforts later widened to include the care of the disabled and people with special needs, in addition to the poor and needy. it also provides education (both academic and vocational) and healthcare for all people.”19 today, its affiliated charities reach nearly all of the regions of lebanon, and according to its press officer, it is the largest charitable institution in lebanon.20 indeed, thousands of students have “graduated from the association’s schools, institutes, and orphanages, and the number of people who have benefitted from its humanitarian, social and educations services” over last three decades has reached into the tens of thousands.21 unfortunately, israel’s 2006 war against lebanon destroyed many of these charitable institutions.22 furthermore, people affiliated with both hizbullah and al-mabarrat association explained to me that they had negative experiences with western journalists and scholars after the war, at the very same time that the us was listing additional charities affiliated with hizbullah as terrorists.23 as a result, outsider access to the resistance charities has become increasingly difficult in recent years and i studied them informally by attending events; interviewing affiliated scholars, politicians, and volunteers; and speaking to media workers and parents of children attending the schools. my in-depth research on the methods and standards of particular programs focused only on the imam al-sadr foundation, which was completely welcome to outside researchers, despite also being targeted by israel during the 2006 war. imam al-sadr established the foundation in 1962 and after his death it has remained in the hands of his family, unaffiliated to either the amal movement or the resistance charities, despite their marusek: beyond secular liberalism 10 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 historical connections. i interviewed managers and employees working on education, health, social care, finance, research, and the management of the foundation. faith, rationality, resistance the charitable institutions of hizbullah and al-mabarrat association both produce and reproduce faith in the resistance, ultimately creating a resistance subjectivity that decenters their starting position, allowing them to negotiate with secular liberalism on their own terms. during my fieldwork, i was told by several supporters of the resistance that faith in god connects humans to other people and faith in the cause unites all supporters of the resistance.24 indeed, these charities instill faith in many ways, even simply by delivering essential social services that would otherwise be unavailable. in an interview with fawaz (2000, 63), hajj kassem alleik, the general director of jihad al-bina, describes how: “the resistance society is our vision. it is the task to build a society that will refuse oppression and fight for its rights. all the rest—water provision, garbage collection, agricultural training—is only a working strategy.” as dr. ali fayyad, a lebanese member of parliament for hizbullah, who previously served as the head of one of its think tanks, further explained to me: the institutions of these charities—the hospitals, medical centers and schools, as well as the other institutions to help the wounded or poor people—if you want to study or analyze the construction of these religious institutions, you will find it completely modernized. they depend on administration, computer systems, and evaluating models like the iso (international organization for standardization) and the other [international] sources of evaluating. you will never find aspects of religion in these things. and then you have to ask about where is the religion in these institutions or these organizations? you will find it in the values, which are leading the ways. the values are the cause, and where to aim. but about the rules, about the procedures, about the systems, these are rationalistic.25 fayyad went on to stress that religious rationality is key: being “controlled” by faith while “respecting” the mind. in this way, religious rationality is the space where two knowledges intertwine. robinson (2012) turns to literature to explain these two ways of knowing: “when a writer knows about his character, he is writing for plot. when he knows his character, he 11 is writing to explore, to feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own.” for me, this begins to describe religious rationality. research participants told me that this trait makes the work of the resistance charities effective and highly respected by both locals and international aid agencies. the research of flanigan and abdel-samad (2009, 56) also finds that supporters of the resistance charities want to work for the cause because they believe in it, making hizbullah efficient because “of the motivations of its social-service employees. many of them are volunteers with a strong belief in the morality of their work.” they are inspired to work to the best of their ability—not for the money, but rather for the cause. one journalist, who is a member of hizbullah, suggested that this strong faith is why so many people volunteer for the various charities affiliated with the resistance—including his mother-in-law, who distributes money for al-mabarrat association. or why his wife’s brother, who is currently studying journalism, decided that he wants to work with hizbullah’s media department because he thinks that the $1,000 monthly salary he would receive from the party would have more blessings for him than a $5,000 salary from elsewhere.26 however, the journalist also admitted that not all supporters of the resistance think this way; for example, many people who work at hizbullah’s al-manār television station complain about their low salaries. while he himself is critical of lebanon’s overly materialistic society, including among many shi‘a, he and others i spoke with also saw the struggle for material wealth in today’s world as familiar and human. combining the forces of materialism and spirituality need not inevitably yield a gospel of wealth. indeed, these forces may even coalesce into a decolonial project. for example, deeb’s (2006) study of women’s involvement in the resistance charities emphasizes that both material and spiritual progress are part of being modern. through charitable work, the women participate in the construction of and interpretation of religious discourses, a dynamic that is modern, cosmopolitan, and pious. in a later study, deeb (2009) looks at the islamic figures who inspire lebanese shi‘a involved in the resistance charities, showing how faith is the guiding principle even when negotiating a materialist world. in its original arabic form, shī‘at ‘alī means the followers of imam ali, whose son imam hussein died heroically in the battle of karbala, while the remaining women and children under the leadership of hussein’s sister, sayyida zaynab, were taken captive and held as prisoners. deeb examines (ibid., 246) how both imam hussein and “the reinterpreted version of sayyeda zeinab” as an activist community leader “are held up as examples of ideal piety and public service, as specifically marusek: beyond secular liberalism 12 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 shi‘i models for living a moral lifestyle.” in this way, participating in charitable work enables shi‘a to embody resistance in their everyday lives. thus, charitable work itself is seen as an act of resistance—an idea that is reinforced when the us designates hizbullah charities as terrorist and israel targets the social institutions affiliated with the resistance.27 a publication issued by al-mabarrat association after the 2006 war vows, “our will of benevolence shall prevail!”28 ayatollah fadlallah also insisted that successfully rebuilding the charitable institutions destroyed during the war would “represent a triumph of knowledge over the desire to destroy.”29 flanigan and abdel-samad (2009, 63) further argue that the resistance culture is also evident in other charity and service publications. for example, they cite this quotation by the head of hizbullah’s islamic health committee, dr. karam karam: the services provided by the islamic health committee strengthen the heroic efforts of fighters and reduce their worries about who will take care of those who support them. this network is a shield that protects the resistance fighter and assures those in need and protects those fighting for dignity, for the country and for sovereignty. meanwhile, religious rationality also influences the mission of these charities, because their aim is to establish sustainable communities that will not abandon the land—resistance in the form of ṣumūd. the comprehensive package of services the charities offer is one illustration of this.30 the goal is not economic empowerment for its own sake, but to empower the resistance, as fayyad explained: here in lebanon, the shi‘i charities are parts of our battery against the occupation and the external challenges. because our society, or hizbullah and the amal movement, and all of the shi‘i movements, they believe we need a strong society to win our war against the occupation. from this point of view, there is a revolutionary dimension to these charities. there is a resistant dimension to these charities. we don’t mind for the poor people to be rich, but this is not the cause of these charities.31 a sustainable resistance thus requires a systemized approach to the individual and the community, both of which are always interlinked. this was apparent during an event i attended at al-mabarrat association’s lady khadija orphanage in the southern suburbs of beirut to commemorate the 13 birth of the prophet muhammad.32 during the ceremony, prayers were recited, the young orphans performed several dance routines,33 and ayatollah fadlallah’s son sayyid ‘ali read a sermon. after the ceremony, the audience was ushered through an exhibition of sculpted scenes of the prophet muhammad’s life, featuring life-like papier-mâché figures. upon exiting the exhibition, there was a giant wall of paper and guests were encouraged to write personal messages to the orphans in order to remind them that they belong to the resistance community. by rationalizing social services through the lens of faith and resistance, this decolonial move helps to continuously reinforce the importance of maintaining a resistance subjectivity in everyday lives. a liberalizing resistance unlike the vast network of charities associated with hizbullah and al-mabarrat association, the imam al-sadr foundation is quite distinct, both politically and geographically. indeed, this was frequently pointed out to me by many employees, and yet the foundation has thus far not received much scholarly attention. according to my own analysis of the foundation’s ideas and practices, it appears to embrace the ideals of economic and political liberalism though still mediated through a faith-based and communal lens.34 the foundation works mainly in the south, with a research center in beirut. its main cultural compound in tyre, a coastal city in southern lebanon, contains several buildings within a small but beautifully enclosed space, with greenery and trees surrounded by an elegant and modest wall located right next to the mediterranean sea. the architecture was consciously designed to produce an environmentally friendly and open atmosphere. the foundation’s academic program is run by the rihab al-zahra school and has three sections: kindergarten, elementary education, and special education. in addition, there are vocational programs available both in tyre and beirut. also located in the compound is an orphanage run by the foundation, as well as a health clinic which has satellite branches across southern lebanon. and finally, the foundation runs several rural development and income generating programs. according to mohammed bassam, the head of research and development,35 the imam al-sadr foundation’s three main goals are participation, empowerment, and ownership—all paradigmatic liberal concepts, but when applied by the foundation they also draw on faith, spirituality, and a remarkable commitment to all humans. in this way, the foundation is giving these concepts new values—embracing a universalism to aspire towards marusek: beyond secular liberalism 14 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 rather than one to enforce. bassam described the foundation’s notion of empowerment as the freedom or power to question, and then to decide for oneself what kind of commitment to make. he said that this kind of outlook invites all participants into the political process by transforming the concept of ownership into being about one’s own future as well as the future of the community. for example, some of the foundation’s projects are designed to have an exit strategy, reaching a point where they can be handed over to the community to manage. also, the foundation usually charges a nominal fee for its services, because if people are paying a small amount for something, then they feel more justified in making demands from these services (hizbullah services are free for members while nonmembers pay a cost, and al-mabarrat association charges a more significant fee). many of the imam al-sadr foundation’s employees mentioned that it feels more like a family than a workplace. this is partly due to the fact that rabab al-sadr, imam al-sadr’s sister, runs the foundation and her children are also involved, working either as employees or consultants. but as one of the curriculum developers also noted, even in the classroom, the atmosphere does not seem teacher-student oriented because everybody is so friendly: “i have three or four hundred students, so you have at least two hundred kisses and two hundred hugs every day. and it’s all impacted by ustadheh mrs. rebab,36 you know how she deals with them.”37 she further explained that rebab al-sadr is very friendly with both the children and all the employees, and so this naturally influences how the others behave as well. according to a manager of the education department, one result of this environment is that many of the orphans “keep coming back to ask about their social workers or supervisors or the other girls they studied and lived with. also the workers, even after they leave they come back to communicate and check on things. there is like this family that builds up after time—not only between the children, but also between the children, social workers and teachers.”38 although imam al-sadr founded the resistance movement for shi‘a lebanese in the 1960s and 1970s, many employees of the foundation were eager to differentiate themselves from the resistance charities (hizbullah and al-mabarrat association), which they said are stricter in their interpretations of islamic ideas and practices. many described the foundation as more open—bassam even called it “avant-garde”.39 nijad charafeddine, the general manager, pointed out that he did not specify one religion (namely islam) in his responses to my questions “because [he] really believes in the human aspect of any religion.” he also later stated, “i, as a muslim, i can 15 not be a muslim if i am not a christian; and i cannot be a muslim and a christian if i am not a jew.”40 in another example of this openness, one of the education managers said, “we see [lebanese] as human beings. we see them as proper names who have some work to do, who want to have some influence in their society and what is the output or outcome of this identity, not how do they believe or how do they act.”41 another employee of the health program indirectly criticized the lebanese system where political parties are affiliated with charities, saying that many people give to charity with an expectation of receiving something in return, “whether this giving back is something political, religious, or a social commitment.”42 as one of the curriculum developers also noted: “in some schools they try to put religion into everything. for example, they say there is something in the qur’an that tells us how to share equally. we don’t do it in this way, by forcing things. instead it comes naturally.”43 she further explained how she herself comes from a strict religious family going back several generations, and in fact she even wears a conservative chador.44 but while she was working on the religious curriculum, her father, who is a shaykh, told her to just concentrate on developing the children’s moral selves rather than making them memorize morality from the qur’an. this helped her to rethink tools of assessment as well: one of the most important things if you are working with a religious curriculum is the last part, the self-assessment or the motivation. at the end, what am i going to do? okay, usually in the most religious, let’s say the islamic schools, they make a paper and pencil test, they memorize the parts from the qur’an. but at the end what kind of person do you have? maybe at the other schools they memorize more of the qur’an and they look more religious, but let’s say at the end the impact on students is just the paper and pencil test. here we have more things for them.45 this kind of philosophy—focusing on the internal motivations or intentions for performance—diverges somewhat from the resistance charities, which embrace the public performance of shi‘i islamic rituals, ranging from prayer to fasting to participating in ashura commemorations.46 shaery-eisenlohr (2008) also notes in her own research, which includes the amal movement, that what defines a good citizen among many shi‘a in lebanon is often directly linked to religiosity. and although the standards vary between the different parties, she finds that the leaders of hizbullah, marusek: beyond secular liberalism 16 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 amal, and the followers of ayatollah fadlallah all connect being a good citizen to pious behavior. there was also a distancing by employees when it came to the imam al-sadr foundation’s vision. as one of the curriculum developers explained to me, the foundation is more concerned with professional development than are other charities.47 the foundation also describes itself a quality-oriented organization; so even though it maintains a modest budget and a limited program, charafeddine argued that what it offers is the best: at many other foundations, such as mohammad hussein fadlallah or hizbullah or amal, they have big budgets, they’re huge but maybe they need this for politics, or political issues, or for whatever issues, they need to go wide. they need to have followers from bekaa and south and east and whatever. maybe, but here at the foundation, we seek perfection. and when you want to perfect something, you have to go in depth and not in width. you cannot diversify—we say in arabic, mneshr, or scatter all of our work. no, you have to have roots and cultivate and always aggregate.48 nevertheless, there remain many convergences between the imam al-sadr foundation and the resistance charities. indeed, it is important to note that the foundation has an official referral system to send people to al-mabarrat association when it is unable to provide the necessary services itself. islamic orthodoxy and religious holidays are also honored by the foundation, with the teachers organizing activities during islamic holidays for the students to act out the formal ceremonies and make speeches.49 furthermore, i was told that the foundation was trying to refocus more attention on islam in its teaching and daily activities. as two of the managers of the education department explained to me, they recently created a new program: the elementary school [now] has two sessions a week: one session for the qur’an and one for islamic studies. but it (the ethos) is not limited to the two sessions that you teach them—the whole day, how the teachers work with the students and how much you are here with them. yeah. it’s a whole program.50 while this piety is still a public behavior, it is not necessarily linked to particular islamic rituals. as they further clarified: 17 the faith is an act, so it is not just to read the qur’an or to read the prayers. it should be through our doing—it is a way of life. we say that islam is a way of life, not just a religion, and most of the hadiths are about that, which is that islam is a dīn al-‘ām, or a public religion: how to behave around people, how to act and interact, how to be honest, how to suppress when you face, maybe, some anxiety or something. how to do it, when to say it, and when not. and how to show the righteous things at the right place and at the right moment.51 correct religious behavior is important, as it relates to all aspects of one’s life. thus, similar to the charities of hizbullah and al-mabarrat association, the imam al-sadr foundation is a dynamic and modern social institution that incorporates faith as a value or guiding principle. indeed, there is a complex system of teacher evaluation that requires an incredible amount of time and resources to manage. as one of the managers of the education department reasoned, the foundation cannot just rely on student test scores, because if you only count those then “here the teachers at the foundation would be all failures because our students come from the fringes and the underprivileged areas” of southern lebanon.52 in turn, the foundation’s teachers also comprehensively assess the students based on “the process, the progress, and the performance.” so, similar to hizbullah, the imam al-sadr foundation recognizes the importance of international standards in the management and evaluation of its institutions. however, in reality, the foundation’s curriculum is a mix of various influences: the foundation starts with the lebanese curriculum and then adds to it from different resources like the american, belgian, and moroccan curricula. indeed, the foundation often adopts a highly pragmatic approach in creating programs that benefit the community. negotiating neoliberalism and faith some of the imam al-sadr foundation’s distancing itself from hizbullah and al-mabarrat association is political, but as noted above, there are also many similarities between them. indeed, the work of all these charities tends to converge in relation to economic policy, because to varying degrees they all promote liberal economic ideas and practices that are related to empowerment, capacity building, and sustainability, while their work is also mediated by faith, religious rationality, and communal commitments. that said, because they are starting from a de-centered position, the definitions marusek: beyond secular liberalism 18 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 of these terms are not fixed: the goal of empowerment viewed through a resistance lens is not monetary gain but a stronger resistance. thus, differing from marei (2016) and daher (2016), i do not believe that adopting neoliberal characteristics is in itself necessarily in alignment with neoliberalism as a political project, so long as a resistance subjectivity is still being reproduced, where a commitment to fighting oppression is multidimensional. thus, in a sense, these charities have merely re-mystified today’s supposedly demystified liberal economic norms,53 where religious rationality and faith meet instrumental and formal (systemic) rationalities. of course, the western project of secular liberalism was never truly disenchanted, because this framework depends on myths of its own, especially its claim to universalism (asad 2003). however, despite its continued status as a counterhegemonic movement, potential supporters of the resistance have questioned whether it has now become too entrenched in the neoliberal capitalist system. deeb and harb (2013, 59) find that some shi‘a of the vanguard generation—those who chose to publicly embrace their religion when ‘shi‘i’ was an identity of inferiority—“find both the wealth in the newfound community and the consumption practices of youths disturbing”. this raises questions about the movement’s level of commitment to the margins. as one unaffiliated young shi‘i marxist explained to me, before the assassination of former lebanese prime minister rafiq hariri in 2005, the political alliance between the sunnis and shi‘a meant that the former quietly permitted hizbullah to keep its arms in exchange for agreeing to sunni dominance over the economy. however, the situation has since changed and aspects of hizbullah, or at least in the areas that are strongholds of the resistance, are now increasingly adopting neoliberal capitalist forms and practices.54 indeed in beirut’s southern suburbs and in southern lebanon today, there are numerous western fast-food restaurants and other means of corporate consumption and entertainment.55 one supporter of the resistance recounted how when he was thinking about buying a car, one of his close relatives, who is very pious, told him to buy an american-made jeep instead, because the trend then was to buy jeeps.56 banners of imam al-sadr and other resistance figures now compete with advertisements for massive corporations like kentucky fried chicken, with slogans like “finger lickin’ good!” printed in english, selling an americanized version of what fast food is. furthermore, funding for hizbullah comes not only from charitable muslim institutions like zakāt and khums, but also from iran and diaspora lebanese shi‘a who own capitalist businesses abroad. when i questioned 19 fayyad why the resistance is not more focused on the possibility of new economic relations, he suggested that this was a weak point for all islamic movements, because “they are not concerned enough about the economic issues.”57 the decision not to directly confront neoliberal capitalism is partly because economic relations are subordinate to the political goals of the resistance charities. on the other hand, the imam al-sadr foundation’s cause appears to be more focused towards liberalism, where the goal is economically and politically empowering the communities in southern lebanon. in other words, the political project of the foundation diverges from that of the resistance charities, and hence the deliberate distancing noted earlier. we can understand this better by thinking of italian marxist antonio gramsci’s (2005) notion of hegemony. gramsci argued that a bloc secures hegemony by articulating the ideas and beliefs of what he called “common sense” in ways that resonate with the populace, but mobilize them in new directions. here the ideologies comprising “common sense” can be conservative or progressive and are open to multiple interpretations. these ideas are fragmentary, fluid, heterogeneous, and contradictory; they are the historical accretion or sedimentation of multiple and various beliefs from religion, folklore, science, art, language, and philosophy. in this way, hegemony is never a fixed and unified position, but instead an unstable product; hence the possibility for forces challenging the hegemony of western secular liberalism to integrate liberal, or even neoliberal, principles. viewed through a gramscian lens, liberalism becomes one set of ideas among many, both in lebanon and elsewhere, that competing blocs can transform by articulating them in unique ways. thus, while the imam al-sadr foundation is employing the same liberal framework as the resistance charities, referencing the same ideas, it does so to realize a different political goal. the resistance charities see economic empowerment as a means to an end—to create a stronger society from which to resist—whereas for the imam al-sadr foundation, empowerment is the only end. the foundation is promoting a liberalized version of the resistance subjectivity, empowering people as individuals in order to better their collective lives.58 and combining these sometimes-contradictory goals—working within neoliberal capitalism while also resisting its social contradictions—ultimately creates certain tensions within the foundation’s work.59 while the imam al-sadr foundation’s vision is somewhat removed from corporate capitalism, these tensions are evident in its 2004 publication called the arabic glossary of development terms, sponsored by the world bank and the united nations economic and social commission for marusek: beyond secular liberalism 20 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 western asia. the publication is divided into various sections, consisting of, but not limited to, community development, environment, gender, human development and empowerment, human rights, international conventions, microfinance, management, and public finance and economy. the glossary is quite comprehensive and many of the terms’ definitions align with neoliberalism, placing the regulatory responsibility on the individual or private sector rather than the state. a small selection of these terms include: comparative risk analysis, deliverables, free trade zone, good governance, human capital, incentive, market failure, performance indicator, risk assessment, stakeholders analysis, strategic framework, and transparency. however, the publication also defines other important terms that challenge neoliberalism, such as: collective rights, commodification, fordism, gender studies, labor relations, orientalism, participatory research, semiotics, subaltern, and third way, as well as key islamic economic concepts. thus, while the neoliberal terminology does dominate this publication, the inclusion of these latter terms still leaves open the possibility for creating an altered interpretation of the dominant neoliberal framework, presenting a counterhegemonic alternative. indeed, many of the income-generating programs that the foundation supports do not even earn money. as charafeddine explains, “we always try to make ourselves remember that we are not working to make money; we are working on faith, on commitment, on the appraisal of our community.”60 therefore, many projects operate at a loss to provide necessary services and/or serve as vocational training. similar tensions are evident elsewhere. in 2011, the imam al-sadr foundation was the recipient of pro-bono work by booz & company,61 a massive us-based firm that provides global management consulting.62 the company, working through lebanon’s central bank, provided recommendations for the foundation as a corporate social responsibility service; however, it completely disregarded the role of religion or faith, ultimately secularizing the foundation by excluding any reference at all to its islamic character, and instead directing it even closer towards neoliberalism. for example, the strategic objectives include focusing on an “innovative service portfolio targeted” to women by both expanding and reconfiguring the services currently offered; establishing visibility through “strong brand recognition;” and seeking peer recognition as “a pioneer, innovative, high-impact, and thought leader (awards, professional recognition, peer benchmarking, etc.).” other recommendations include a formal rationalization of the foundation by creating a hierarchy of specialists under a chief executive officer and separating the income generating programs as a distinct commercial 21 organization; empowering the board of directors to oversee “cooperate governance” as well as planning and management; and focusing more attention on performance based outcomes, for example, the employment prospects of beneficiaries. the “execution roadmap” for achieving these recommendations includes a five-year strategic plan for the foundation and three-year plans for the various “business units” the consultancy had designated. although the imam al-sadr foundation did not solicit these recommendations, a manager explained that it has indeed taken them seriously, implementing a new human resources department to better management practices at the foundation.63 but as noted above, despite the disparate influences, the foundation does appear to have a pragmatic approach that somehow remains loyal to its particular vision (a more liberalized resistance subjectivity). i was specifically told that the foundation would not consider raising revenue through profitable ventures that contradict this vision, even when this would deliver more financial resources to expand its services. the head of its income generating program told me that although others keep raising the prospect “to create or to build gas stations, actually i’m always against this, because it’s not in our culture.”64 nevertheless, the foundation does accept supplementary funding from neoliberal institutions like the world bank and the united states agency for international development (usaid).65 at the same time, the foundation’s keen interest in sustainable development, which applies equally to people, planet, and profit, and its history of participatory practices also suggest that any proposed changes to its operations would probably need to be acceptable not only to its board of directors and investors, but also to the people on the ground, as well as the foundation’s employees (see charafeddine 2008). conclusion the resistance movement in lebanon inspired a marginalized population into action, creating social institutions to empower lebanese shi‘a in their struggle against various forms of oppression. today this social force has evolved into overlapping movements that are dynamic, diverse, and contradictory, each presenting a decolonial challenge to western secular liberalism in unique ways. however, while the discourse of these movements is highly critical of neoliberal capitalism, neoliberal ideas are still shaping their ideas and practices, with differing results. although the imam al-sadr foundation appears to more openly embrace many liberal and neoliberal policies, its commitment to creating a faith-based alternative to the western project of secular liberalism helps to counter the latter system’s inequalities. marusek: beyond secular liberalism 22 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 on the other hand, the resistance charities are embracing liberal principles to help finance military and cultural resistance. although tolerating some of the neoliberal capitalist outcomes may serve a higher purpose, its effects on the population are still tangible, increasing economic inequalities. according to a journalist who supports the resistance, while sayyid hassan, the current leader of hizbullah, sets the perfect example for living a non-materialistic life—asceticism long being valued in shiism (moin 2005)—he believes that lebanese society, including the shi‘a, is still not ready for this way of being.66 in order to get there, he thinks that they first need a “mental revolution” away from favouring materialism (their extreme attachment to clothes, mobile phones and cars—often western and/or corporate) to prioritizing faith.67 while contemporary islamic ideas and practices are currently responding to this need for a “mental revolution,” by offering an alternative faith-based social project, one which develops more community oriented and critical thinkers, there remain many challenges that will undoubtedly impact the “total societal perspective and comprehensive doctrine” that hizbullah, in particular, wants to offer. today, the economy in lebanon is largely sustained through remittances from lucrative capitalist businesses in africa, north america, and latin america. this helps the shi‘a to finance increased material consumption and the building of large houses, even mansions, throughout southern lebanon, sending a powerful message to israel that the resistance is thriving, not retreating. however, the exploitation that is needed to sustain this kind of lifestyle, and which is counter to the ideology of the resistance, is not fully visible from lebanon and remains unchallenged. the absence of a wider counter-hegemonic economic program inside lebanon, where local industries are based on faith and religious rationality and actively confront the negative social contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, is clearly apparent. but this should not deflect from the fact that these shi‘i movements are each critically engaging with secular liberalism and neoliberal capitalism on their own terms, in profoundly interesting, complex, and contradictory ways. endnotes 1. throughout my fieldwork, i visited al-sāḥa often to attend events and meetings, and over time i noticed that in the restaurant the managers visited each table to ensure that everything was okay and asked for a personal assessment of the dining experience, an extremely unusual practice in lebanon 23marusek: beyond secular liberalism and hardly necessary to gain a competitive edge in a market they already hold a monopoly over. the restaurant then communicates with customers who have provided written feedback through text messages, wishing them blessings during islamic holidays. 2. observations during fieldwork in lebanon during 2012. 3. this builds on the more sophisticated arguments developed in jackson 2017. 4. the washington consensus refers to the set of laissez-faire economic policies that western institutions imposed on developing countries around the world as conditions for international aid. 5. this refers to weber’s notion of disenchantment, or the conceptual separation of religious rationality and scientific rationality in western thought. see koshul 2005. 6. the arrangement privileged maronite christians because the french-directed census in 1932 construed the christian populations to be larger than the sunni or shi‘i populations combined, and as a result the subsequent government was divided in a manner favoring the maronites, who always hold the office of the president. the next position of power is the prime minister, always allocated to a sunni. and finally, a shi‘i serves as speaker of the parliament. at the time of independence, parliamentary representation was allocated as a 6:5 proportion favoring christians to muslims. over the years, this power sharing agreement became even more unequal as the lebanese society experienced a demographic transformation. although lebanon has not conducted an official census since 1932, norton (2007) and deeb (2006) both suggest that the demographic changes since then have led to relative declines in the christian populations and an increase in the shi‘i population. stewart (1996, 491) argues that shi‘a had likely become the largest minority group in lebanon by 1975. 7. hamzeh (2004, 14) also explains that this eventually changed only as a result of the insecurity during the civil/international war when many southern shi‘a emigrated to the cities in the 1960s and 1970s, with the majority residing in squatter settlements in the southern and eastern suburbs of beirut, a destitute region, which came to be known as “the belt of misery”. 8. observations during fieldwork in lebanon in summer 2011. 9. for a beautiful biographical recounting of being shi‘i during this time, see al-shaykh 2009. 10. imam al-sadr, “lebanon’s wealth lies in its citizens.” lecture delivered at kabbouchiyeh church in beirut, lebanon, february 1975. translation into english provided by louay h. charafeddine on june 17, 2010. 11. observations during fieldwork in lebanon on september 20, 2011. 12. most institutions in lebanon, both then and now, are sectarian due to the political pact agreed after the country gained independence from the french in 1943. 24 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 13. “the hidden imam,” a 2005 documentary about the life of imam musa al-sadr produced by al-manār. 14. the iranian revolutionary guard corps even deployed forces to the baalbek region of lebanon to train hizbullah’s military forces (wright 1990, 109). 15. imad atalla interview with kassem alleik, “guilty by association: jihad al-bina’s reconstruction terrorism,” publio: culture at the boiling point 3 (2008). 16. during a visit to southern lebanon, a young woman told me that although there are collections boxes for the emdad committee across lebanon, its operations are organized from iran. see http://www.emdad.ir/. 17. the united states designated ayatollah fadlallah as a terrorist because of his political support for the resistance. 18. even many lebanese christians agree that hizbullah and al-mabarrat association are the only true resistance charities in lebanon. observations during fieldwork in lebanon on may 8, 2012. 19. from “in defiance of the israeli aggression, charity will persevere: a report on the institutions of al-mabarrat association destroyed or damaged in the last war on lebanon” (july 2006). i also received preparatory notes made for this publication containing more detailed information about the charitable programs and the destruction resulting from the war. documents collected during fieldwork in beirut in summer 2010. 20. meeting with the press office of al-mabarrat association during fieldwork in beirut on january 21, 2010. 21. documents collected during fieldwork in beirut in summer 2010. 22. both imam al-sadr foundation and al-mabarrat association published details of the extent of damage and destruction, aiming to raise funds to repair and rebuild; information here presented from documents collected during fieldwork in beirut in summer 2010. see also hani bathish, “orphans, disabled still bear brunt of israeli attacks on al-mabarrat charity,” the daily star, february 17, 2007, http://www.dailystar.com.lb/news/lebanon-news/2007/feb-17/51035-orphans-disabled-still-bear-brunt-of-israeliattacks-on-al-mabarrat-charity.ashx; “why they died: civilian casualties in lebanon during the 2006 war,” human rights watch, september 5, 2007, https://www.hrw.org/report/2007/09/05/why-they-died/civilian-casualties-lebanon-during-2006-war; mirvat ammouri, “social group rejects bias in efforts to assist needy,” the daily star, october 19, 2007, http://www. dailystar.com.lb//news/lebanon-news/2007/oct-19/46351-social-grouprejects-bias-in-efforts-to-assist-needy.ashx; and ana maria luca, “waiting for another war,” now media, december 6, 2009, https://now.mmedia.me/ lb/en/reportsfeatures/waiting_for_another_war. 23. the charities and organizations affiliated with hizbullah that the us treasury department lists as “specially designated nationals” or sdns include: 25marusek: beyond secular liberalism the martyrs foundation, assisting those wounded in wars as well as the families of martyrs; emdad committee, assisting children, mainly orphans and the poor; jihad al-bina, building social and humanitarian infrastructure; waad rebuild, managing the massive reconstruction efforts after the 2006 war against israel; al-nour broadcasting, the party’s radio station; and finally al-manār, the party’s television channel. 24. most of these were informal exchanges with media workers in television studios or at my home, as i was often doing filmed interviews with media affiliated with the resistance movement. 25. interview with dr. ali fayyad during fieldwork in beirut in june 2012. 26. observations during fieldwork in beirut on july 7, 2011. 27. israeli generals have called the targeting of civilian infrastructure the “dahiyeh doctrine”. see amos harel, “analysis: idf plans to use disproportionate force in next war,” haaretz, october 5, 2010, https://www.haaretz.com/ analysis-idf-plans-to-use-disproportionate-force-in-next-war-1.254954. 28. “in defiance of israeli aggression, charity will persevere.” 29. bathish, “orphans, disabled still bear brunt,” february 17, 2007. 30. see, for example, the martyr’s foundation: http://www.shaheed.com.lb/. 31. interview with fayyad during fieldwork in beirut in june 2012. 32. observations during fieldwork in beirut on february 3, 2012. 33. these kinds of performances help to link the children to the community and are common at many charitable events. for example, there was a similar performance at an iftār organized by al-mabarrat association in 2011 during ramadan to raise funds for the charity. observations during fieldwork in lebanon on august 9, 2011. 34. as one of the managers said, “i’m very, very, very, very liberal.” interview with a manager at the imam al-sadr foundation in july 2010. 35. the descriptive account was shared over several interviews with mohammed bassam, head of research and development for the imam al-sadr foundation, in sur between 2009 and 2017. 36. in arabic the word ustādh (m) or ustādha (f ) means professor, but is also often used as a term of respect for others, especially strangers and elders. 37. interview with an employee of the education department at the imam al-sadr foundation in july 2010. 38. interview with managers of the education department at imam al-sadr foundation in sur in july 2010. 39. interview with mohammed bassam at the imam al-sadr foundation in sur on june 24, 2010. 40. interview with nijad charafeddine, head of the income generating program, at the imam al-sadr foundation in sur in july 2010. 41. interview with managers of the education department at imam al-sadr foundation in sur in july 2010. 26 the american journal of islamic social sciences 35:1 42. interview with the head of nursing at the imam al-sadr foundation in sur in july 2010. 43. interview with an employee of the education department at the imam al-sadr foundation in july 2010. 44. the chador is a full length islamic covering for women, usually in black, that is held under the chin by hand or fastener and is worn by many women in the islamic republic of iran and some shi‘a in southern lebanon. often, but not always, women are required to wear the chador to enter mosques and shrines. 45. interview with an employee of the education department at the imam al-sadr foundation in july 2010. 46. observations during fieldwork in lebanon 2009-2012. 47. interview with an employee of the education department at the imam al-sadr foundation in july 2010. 48. interview with charafeddine in july 2010. 49. ibid. 50. interview with managers and employees of the education department at imam al-sadr foundation in sur in july 2010. 51. ibid. 52. ibid. 53. this is nothing new, and it is not only religious movements that have been “re-mystifying” liberalism. in the mid-twentieth century, artists crafted surrealism and abstract expressionism as an attempt to re-introduce myth into their everyday lives because the rational world had let them down. these artists were looking to shake up the formal rationality of the social systems under bureaucracy and capitalism. art critic robert hughes even describes the german painter max ernst’s work as “akin to an act of terrorism.” see “the threshold of liberty” from the shock of the new documentary television series by robert hughes produced by the bbc in association with time-life films and rm productions in 1980. 54. observations during fieldwork in beirut on august 8, 2009. 55. some believe that the party has allowed for these restaurants and forms of entertainment to open in the areas aligned with the resistance so that shi‘a would not have to travel elsewhere to consume such products, thus keeping the community more tightly knit. 56. observations during fieldwork in beirut on july 7, 2011. 57. interview with fayyad during fieldwork in beirut in june 2012. 58. another useful framework to differentiate the capitalist aspects of the resistance charities and imam al-sadr foundation’s embrace of a more liberalized project is offered by sayyid (2003, 41-46). turning to semiotics, he explains how islam is a master signifier (never without a signified) whose meaning is 27marusek: beyond secular liberalism bibliography abrahamian, ervand. 1982. “ali shari‘ati: ideologue of the iranian revolution.” merip middle east report, 102 islam & politics: 24-28. ajami, fouad. 1986. the vanished imam: musa al sadr and the shia of lebanon. ithaca: cornell university press. al-shaykh, 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simultaneously reinforcing political expediency and self-interested power. moreover, it is not only trump who uses noir imagery provocatively to shape his political image. the media have also participated in crafting images of trump as either entertaining disruptor or more darkly destabilising. as responses to crises of capitalism, corruption, and social fracture, noir narratives provide critical ways of investigating periods of disequilibrium and their resurfacing in the present. analysing the production, expression, and reception of trump’s political persona through the historical and discursive structures of noir underscores the salience of the study of persona to reveal underlying fissures in current american politics and society. key words noir; persona; u.s. politics; donald trump; mediated identity; hardboiled detective fiction this essay considers the political persona of donald trump as mediated by the imagery of hardboiled detective fiction and film noir. as responses to crises of capitalism, corruption, and social fracture, noir narratives provide critical ways of investigating periods of disequilibrium and their resurfacing in the present. trump’s campaign for the u.s. presidency has confounded the traditional power bases of the political establishment and disrupted norms of political discourse. the decision to analyse trump through a noir lens also emerges from the differing ways in which both trump and mainstream media have depicted this disruption of political norms in terms we might readily associate with noir. while the media have alternately presented trump as entertaining provocateur or more dangerously destabilising, trump has cast his political persona as defiant outsider, exposing a dark vision of american vulnerability. analysing the production, expression, and reception of trump’s political persona through the historical and discursive structures of noir underscores the salience of the study of persona to reveal underlying fissures in current american politics and society. drawing from john cawelti’s analysis of the transformation of noir as a mode of interrogating the cultural myths that it embodies, i analyse the persona of trump as fake hardboiled hero and examine how trump’s rhetoric plays on, and benefits from, themes of citizen estrangement while persona studies 2016, 2 (2) 91 simultaneously reinforcing elite networks of power. both trump and the media use noir imagery provocatively to shape his political image. i examine to what extent these representations of his political persona sensationalise trump or turn him into a caricature that avoids deeper questioning, and how noir’s psychological framework may help to explain the appeal of trump’s political persona among his supporters. as a narrative and analytical mode of social criticism, noir provides a medium for investigating darker views of reality and human nature through character study and sociological investigation. through what he refers to as noir’s “transformational grammar,” a “term rhetoricians use to refer to the ability to intuit the meanings below the visible surface,” christopher wilson argues that “[n]oir allows its writers to interrelate deep structures of a political landscape—often to sort out its audible or silent voices—or to sense a hidden social syntax beneath public discourse” (489). applying this conceptual framework, my analysis involves not just the role of noir as narrative vehicle, or its relevance as social critique, but also its function as mode of inquiry into the construction of trump’s political persona and its discursive layers. trump’s persona as hardboiled anti-hero through noir’s dual functions to expose and critique social realities, i examine how trump’s political persona draws from and deforms the archetypal image of the hardboiled protagonist, and how demythologising this revision of the genre’s code and symbolism serves as potent social analysis. wilson observes that “[n]oir is perhaps best understood as a mode of examining the connections between outer, elite networks of power that struggle for dominance and the interiorized (and phantasmal) states of citizen estrangement that come to life within that struggle” (488). originating in the pulp magazines, formalised in interwar literature, and then further popularised in noir films of the 1940s and 50s, the hardboiled protagonist has continued to find resonance in contemporary american cultural production. as conceived by raymond chandler or dashiell hammett, the hardboiled hero is a tough-talking outsider who operates at the margins of law and civility as he navigates a corrupt society. frequently a private investigator with “no qualms about violence and questionable attitudes toward women,” he is willing to break the rules and to use violence if necessary in order serve his own code of justice (cober-lake). on at least a surface level, trump appears to reference and play upon established conventions of the hardboiled tradition in crafting his political narrative as selfreliant outlaw hero: here comes the guy who is all rage against reason, action rather than armchair deliberateness, a brash-talking, shoot from the hip truth-teller who is not afraid to go where others won’t. in their introduction to the first edition of persona studies, p. david marshall and kim barbour observe the “enormous activity and energy in the production, construction, and exhibition of personas” that has “led to this intensive focus on constructing strategic masks of identity” (1). donald trump is an example of someone who is profoundly aware of his own role in creating and “performing” this strategic public self. in his cover article in the atlantic, “the mind of donald trump,” dan mcadams observes how “trump seems supremely cognizant of the fact that he is always acting. he moves through life like a man who knows he is always being observed.” trump’s adoption of the hardboiled persona reflects various performative strategies. john corner has argued that political personhood is mediated in three primary ways: iconically (displaying the “demeanour, posture and associative contexts of the political self”), vocally (“such that the significance of what is said becomes more interfused with how it is said and the rademacher 92 political and the personal are thus more closely articulated”) and kinetically (the “political self in action and interaction”) (388). notably, trump uses all three approaches—iconic, vocal, and kinetic—to fuel his noir narrative and present himself as hardboiled protagonist. within this self-fashioned narrative, he confronts a failed and corrupt political system, comes into conflict with representatives of the official machinery, uses street-smart vernacular to shoot straight with those who feel disenfranchised from the political establishment, and is a man of action— constantly moving and doing—rather than contemplating. trump is not only absorbed with his public image or celebrity, but with shaping his political personality through confrontations that capitalise on perceived weaknesses in ways that he believes bolster his own comparative strength and status. “i never had a failure,” trump said in one interview, despite his repeated corporate bankruptcies and business setbacks, “because i always turned a failure into a success” (barbaro, "what drives donald trump?”). for example, as part of the cover and in the content of his 2015 book crippled america: how to make america great again, trump comments on the process of carefully curating the persona to be profiled on the cover of this book: “some readers may be wondering why the picture we used on the cover of this book is so angry and mean looking. […] in this book we’re talking about crippled america. unfortunately, there’s very little that’s nice about it. so, i wanted a picture that reflected the anger and unhappiness that i feel, rather than joy” (ix).i figure 1: cover image for crippled america noting that “people say that i have self-confidence,” trump contends that he has just been carefully building a case to defend himself against myriad potential critics; including the “relentless and incompetent naysayers of the left,” politicians who are really “losers,” lobbyists “lining their pockets,” “biased media,” “illegal immigrants” who have “taken jobs that should go to people here legally,” lawyers and judges who “recklessly appointed themselves,” and a presidency and executive branch marred by “incompetency beyond belief.” in response to their criticism of ideas such as building a huge wall along the mexican border, trump contends, “i have proven everybody wrong. everybody! […] i’m not playing by the usual status-quo rules […] i am telling it like it is” (crippled america 9). reading trump’s persona through the mediating function of noir exposes and demythologises “the hidden social syntax” within the discursive model. to examine trump’s political persona through the mediating function of noir as narrative and analytical mode also demonstrates intersections with broader cultural and political discourses around gender, race, and citizenship. as justin cober-lake observes in his review of christopher breu’s hard-boiled masculinities, “these [hardboiled] men aren’t simply literary archetypes, they both influence and persona studies 2016, 2 (2) 93 represent conceptions of masculinity that play out in the real world.” in a similar fashion, trump’s performance with these rhetorical strategies, as constitutive of his political persona, has public and political significance beyond questions of self-representation. through differing modes of “generic transformation,” john cawelti considers how appropriating the conventional genre elements of noir and applying them in an altered context allows us to perceive these traditional forms and images in a new way (504). he identifies the hardboiled tradition—“a pattern of narrative known throughout the culture and presented in many different versions by many different tellers”—as an important part of the popular mythology of american identity (499). yet, as cawelti suggests, the significance of testing, challenging, and even subverting the traditional conventions of genre coincides importantly with times of cultural transition. using the 1974 film chinatown as an example (this period referencing another time of deep distrust and upheaval in american politics), cawelti notes that despite how “close a resemblance” chinatown bears to the hardboiled formula, the film “deviates increasingly from the myth until, by the end of the story, the film arrives at an ending almost contrary to that of the myth” (501, emphasis added). it is my contention that we could say this similarly of trump’s adoption of the hardboiled archetype and the noir narrative he has used to justify his political persona; despite resemblance to the myth, “there is something not quite right, something disturbingly off about it” (499). while trump constructs his political persona in ways that play to the image of the hardboiled protagonist, the underlying syntax simultaneously undercuts key facets of this symbolism, challenging trump’s control over its communication and signification. by evoking and distorting noir’s challenge to the status quo, its suspicion of systems of power and questioning of dominant norms, trump maintains that he is simply exposing truths no other politician has the guts to acknowledge. in fashioning this political persona, trump deliberately revises the popular conception of the hardboiled hero as brash-talking rebel at the margins of a corrupt society, instead using nostalgia over “lost greatness” to justify violence and to assert political expediency as a means of self-interested power. employing cawelti’s modes of generic transformation, i consider how trump’s surface play and performance of his hardboiled political persona undermine conventional symbolism and meaning to reinforce a political construction “almost contrary to that of the myth” (cawelti 501). in this way, noir mediates the construction of trump’s political persona in ways that challenge and destabilise his dominant self-narrative. if we think of noir as both a style and as a mode of seeing the world with suspicion that something hidden, often something darker, lies beneath the surface, then we can see how trump’s noir styling of his persona coupled with a noir methodology invites us to interrogate the construction of this persona and to expose veiled meanings. in what ways is trump’s political persona a “narrative of falseness and fiction” and how does the rhetoric of noir mediate this construction? i want to concentrate on three particular aspects of his self-fashioned “strategic public identity” (marshall and barbour 4): 1) hardboiled toughness; 2) the use of nostalgia; 3) the american success myth and biggest “losers.” cawelti observes how one way that a genre’s conventional meaning is demythologised and shown to embody an “inadequate and destructive” myth is by deliberately invoking the basic characteristics of a traditional genre, but in ways that subvert its original meaning (507). as i have suggested, trump’s tough guise plays on the established conventions of the hardboiled archetype. psychologist dan mcadams comments that trump’s political narrative “is saturated with a sense of danger and a need for toughness. […] the world is a dangerous place. you have to be ready to fight.” mcadams identifies that many questions have been raised about trump’s “use of inflammatory language, his level of comfort with political violence.” he observes: “at campaign rallies, trump has encouraged his supporters to rough up protesters. ‘get ‘em out of rademacher 94 here,’ he yells. ‘i’d like to punch him in the face.’ from unsympathetic journalists to political rivals, trump calls his opponents ‘disgusting’ and writes them off as ‘losers.”’ this rhetoric reinforces trump’s conception of his political narrative as one shaped by his pre-emptive strikes against a series of potential threats to his image or position. be tough, or suffer the consequences in this lost, dingy world is how hardboiled protagonists of noir see their options. ken hillis contends that these characters’ performances are less about the existential ideal of being able to decide and assert their own subjectivity in a tough world than “commodity-identities” (brands, if you will) that come at the price of their own emptiness and loss of connection (hillis 31). within this view, noir toughness reflects the individual’s relative impotence, the view of oneself as up against a crushing, overwhelming opponent—of wealth, of industry, of governmental power. while this perception of hardboiledness may help to explain trump’s appeal to the disenfranchised (largely male, largely whiteii) voters who support him, it does little to coincide with the reality of his own class position and constant expressions of superiority and social dominance. the performance of toughness in noir—what hillis refers to as a “masking of the self” and a strategy frequently depicted as “making do”—is a surface posture, a defensive “mask-as-identity” that is intended to buffer oneself against the difficulties of achieving self-importance due to unequal access to economic opportunities and failed expectations (8, 31). within this classical noir paradigm, then, hardboiled toughness is a persona that masks perceptions of powerlessness and loss. as hillis writes, “[d]onning a tough persona, or performing it obsessively so that it becomes the self, compensates for having internalized the belief that one has failed [to be fully in the know]” (30). similarly, noir narratives often focus on the intersections between common citizens and powerful figures intent upon perpetuating or extending their social domination, “quite often tracking ‘little people’ who tried to tap into such a circuit but ended up being caught in its corruption” (wilson 488). yet, the noir appeal of hardboiled toughness stemming from failure within the capitalist endeavour, or finding oneself struggling and marginalised within it, seems particularly incongruous with trump’s narrative, by which business/capitalist success and net worth is equated with the moral superiority of “winners” and justification for dominating others. within trump’s paradigm, aggression provides further justification for ensuring social dominance, rather than its refutation. much of the way trump’s discourse subverts the image of hardboiled “defender of the little guy” that he ostensibly emulates in crafting his political persona has to do with issues of agency. the noir hero’s alienation and anger stem largely from the limits of individual agency against a corrupt world of consolidated power. the hardboiled protagonist is excluded partly out of rebellion, but partly also out of his exclusion by the power-brokers. the noir protagonist’s rootlessness, his physical and emotional lack of connection, are related to an anxiety of place, an awareness not only of injustices but of the personal inability to alter those realities. while these perceptions of frustrated agency and authority to remedy failed expectations may be reflective of many of trump’s supporters, there is little indication of trump’s sympathy or ability to relate. “for the most part,” biographer michael barbaro quotes trump as saying, “you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect” (“how donald trump mastered twitter”). while trump incorporates the rhetoric of outsider rebel to his political persona, he simultaneously accords himself absolute agency. defending why “so many millions” tuned in to hear him in the primary, pre-nomination debates, he boasts, “why do you think people tuned in? to hear the nasty questions? to watch a bunch of politicians trying to pretend they are outsiders (like i truly am) so they can be more successful? the fact is that i give people what they need and deserve to hear—exactly what they don’t get from politicians—and that is the persona studies 2016, 2 (2) 95 truth” (crippled america 8). the underlying subtext is not one of rebelliousness against systemic power, but rather the boastful assertion of authoritative knowledge writ large. in examining this relationship between the self and the social in trump’s construction of his individual narrative, mcadams likens trump’s political persona to that of that of jung’s archetypal warrior. mcadams observes [the warrior’s] “typical response to a problem is to slay it or otherwise defeat it; his greatest fear is weakness or impotence. the greatest risk for the warrior is that he incites gratuitous violence in others, and brings it upon himself.” similarly, jj jonas notes that “[t]his archetype helps us to set and achieve goals, overcome obstacles, and persist in difficult times, although it also tends to see others as enemies and to think in either/or terms. the warrior is relatively simple in their thought patterns, seeking simply to win whatever confronts them, including the dragons that live inside the mind and their underlying fear of weakness” (“twelve archetypes”). jung, however, posited that there is also a “shadow” archetype, which reflects the unknown or hidden dark side of the personality. this shadow uses warrior skills of toughness “for personal gain without thought of morality, ethics, or the good of the whole group,” and is “active in our lives anytime we feel compelled to compromise our principles in order to compete, win, or get our own way. […] it is also seen in a tendency to be continually embattled, so that one perceives virtually everything that happens as a slight, a threat or a challenge to be confronted” (“twelve archetypes”). this association of trump’s persona with the warrior archetype, then, reveals both his persona as strategic mask—the effort to “impress and conceal” (through his self-narrative of relentless winner)—and a darker side of subjectivity (the shadow) that his persona cannot fully obscure (jung, qtd in marshall and barbour 4). nostalgia, loss and the american success myth i want to connect these conceptions of the warrior and its shadow with the uses of nostalgia and the success myth that also form prominent subtexts mediating trump’s noir-like narrative and persona. cawelti refers to the demythologising function of nostalgia that is “powerfully evoked” but in a way that simultaneously undercuts its supposedly comforting message, revealing instead an “inadequate or destructive myth” (507). trump embeds as a key facet of his political persona his capacity to “restore” the american dream, the assurance that he will “make america great again” (crippled america 8). if nostalgia draws from the “sense that something important that one once possessed has been lost” (gilmore 121), trump has built his political persona around the image that he is uniquely capable of restoring this ineffable imaginary, this missing object of “greatness”—whatever that might mean. richard gilmore observes that nostalgia pervades film noir because it underlies the genre’s characteristic desperation and violence: wild risks are taken because of a desperate faith that the game can be won, that the lost thing can be recovered. the ‘thing’ in the idea of nostos is home, or, more accurately for film noir, some romanticized idea of what would constitute a sense of finally being home. i am using home now for as a word for feeling like you are where you belong. […] one longs for this precisely because one feels its absence. (121) noir’s hardboiled protagonists identify with that sense of loss and alienation, the fracturing of the subject between where it is and where it aspires to be.iii in noir, this sense of loss is not confronted directly, but rather projected onto another who can be assigned responsibility or absorb the blame for this absence or failure. hillis similarly argues “the noir world indicates how modern notions of subjectivity […] are deployed to reject the explanation of the power of fate (frequently suggested in these films as equal to gender and class position) in favor of rademacher 96 instrumental notions of personal failings. this displacement leads to the constellation of class and gender-ridden ‘blame the victim’ strategies on view within noir” (11). in constructing his political persona, trump actively leverages this combination of nostalgia and racial/gendered/xenophobic anxiety, projecting responsibility for this lost sense of power and subjectivity on a host of “othered” antagonists. noir can function as both “trenchant social analysis” and “thinly veiled ethnic and/or class resentment” (wilson 504). within this dual mode, intersections with broader cultural and political discourses around gender, race, and citizenship manifest a “potent but often unconscious estrangement from civil society, typically expressed through the white detective’s phantasmal border work with threatening racialized or gendered others” (wilson 487).iv trump’s constant promise to “bring back” things that have been “lost” represents american possibility as defined by external threats and the need to defend against powerlessness in the face of them. he claims, “i’d bring back waterboarding. i’d bring back a hell of a lot worse” (democracy now). in externalising the “pervasive sense of loss among many of his supporters— the belief that the changes molding modern america have marginalized them economically, demographically, and culturally,” and placing blame elsewhere, trump’s use of nostalgia allows him to “evoke a hazy earlier time when american life worked better for the overwhelmingly white, heavily blue-collar coalition now drawn to him” (brownstein). in this manipulation and expansion of a sense of powerlessness in the face of circumstance, trump reinforces the deepening of social and economic anxieties and divisiveness often reflected in noir. as ronald brownstein observes: the growing groups long eclipsed in american life have no idealized past moment they are longing to restore. a young hispanic lawyer or middle-aged professional woman might not think they are treated equally today, but few are likely to believe people like them enjoyed more opportunities decades ago. the same is true for other racial and religious minorities, gays and transgender people. for all of these groups, the past that trump evokes is one that kept them subordinate, in the shadows, or worse. just as in classical noir the hardboiled hero’s tough exterior is a posture against his awareness of his relative lack of social power. his external projection of that anger and frustration onto women and others reflects his own deeply divided subjectivity and self-misrecognition over the limits of agency. that is, the hardboiled protagonist struggles with the conflict between internal desires and what he (or, rarely, she) is outwardly able to achieve. by manipulating this sense of powerlessness and loss in the crafting of his political persona, trump directly undermines the meaning of the hardboiled narrative he seems to adopt. robert reich maintains that “the economic stresses almost a century ago that culminated in the great depression were far worse than most of trump’s followers have experienced, but they’ve suffered something that in some respects is more painful—failed expectations. […] add fears and uncertainties about terrorists who may be living among us or may want to sneak through our borders, and this vulnerability and powerlessness is magnified.” in turn, trump has leveraged these lost expectations not out of identification but to define a political persona based around “restoring” social dominance and winning. “by winning,” franklin foer comments, “trump means asserting superiority. and since life is a zero-sum game, superiority can only be achieved at someone else’s expense.” in “crime, guilt, and subjectivity in film noir,” winfried fluck describes three versions of the noir protagonist that each define issues of guilt and responsibility differently. in the first, the one we would most closely associate with the “self-reliant outlaw hero,” the hardboiled protagonist only masquerades as a lawless tough guy but is never at any real risk of moving over to the dark side. rather, his apparent contempt for the law is actually an expression of his persona studies 2016, 2 (2) 97 strong inner-directedness and striving for autonomy (401). under this view, the performance of toughness in noir is indeed a “masking of the self” (hillis 8). since society is regarded as irredeemably corrupt, the noir hero is left alone to find another source of worth and selfrespect. his dilemma “is how to adapt methods and skills from the semantic field of ‘badness’ without becoming corrupted by them” (fluck 387). within this conception, the hardboiled noir protagonist “never lacks self-knowledge and never loses control over his role-play” (fluck 401). yet in appropriating this narrative of self-preservation and conflating it with selfinterest, trump both distorts and loses control over it, demonstrating it as a contrivance that begins to fall apart. absent any connectivity to the real social drivers that underlie the noir persona that he constructs, it becomes virtually an empty or malleable sign, open to be defined by emotion, impulse, and contingency. in turn, rather than affirming the warrior archetype, trump exposes the shadow-warrior aspects of his persona. by focusing on winning as an end in itself, “without thought of morality, ethics, or the good of the whole group,” trump’s warrior narrative fails to tell us much about what he actually believes in or “where he might direct his energy and anger […] beyond winning at any cost” (mcadams). while trump has sought to posit all sorts of suspicious externalities and malevolent subterfuges that are subverting his political success, to cultivate a narrative that individual business success will beget success for the country, and to incriminate others as losers and failures, these narratives have progressively spun out under his inability to control his own destructive impulses. elaborating on the emptiness of trump’s “warrior-ness,” mcadams comments: “it is as if trump has invested so much of himself in developing and refining his socially dominant role that he has nothing left over to create a meaningful story for his life, or for the nation.” gatekeepers and trump’s noir persona as gatekeepers of public political identities, the media have played a powerful role in the construction and mediation of trump’s persona. it is not only trump who uses noir imagery provocatively to shape his political image. media images frequently present trump through distorted angles, extreme close-ups, dark lighting, and contrasting light and shadow characteristic of noir (see figure 2). at the same time, by benefiting from the promotion of (source: damon winter/new york times) (source: andrew hamik/ap) (source: nick cote/new york times) (source: gage skidmore) rademacher 98 figure 2: media images of trump trump-as-spectacle, the media have also been self-interestedly complicit in facilitating trump’s narrative and hardboiled political persona, and in turn have further substantiated its mutually exploitative and publicly noir character. trump has maintained that his relationship with the mainstream media is symbiotic: “the cost of a full-page ad in the new york times can be more than $100,000. but when they write a story about one of my deals, it doesn’t cost me a cent, and i get more important publicity. i have a mutually profitable two-way relationship with the media—we each give each other what we need” (crippled america 11). he’s argued that journalists are “like sharks, hoping i’ll put some blood in the water. i try to oblige” (crippled america 149). and he’s claimed that even when the press is negative, it still enhances his “brand”: i don’t mind being attacked. i use the media the way the media uses me—to attract attention. once i have that attention, it’s up to me to use it to my advantage. […] so sometimes i make outrageous comments and give them what they want—viewers and readers—in order to make a point. i’m a businessman with a brand to sell” (crippled america 11). by so unabashedly representing his political persona as a negotiated construction, a kind of “deal” (“deals are my art form” art of the deal 3) that he orchestrates with the press, trump emphasises its discursive nature. in contrast to the hardboiled protagonist who holds true to a core set of values as a mainstay in an unreliable world, trump’s “resignifications of identity” rely on “playing” and “performing” to what sells (marshall and barbour 5). numerous analysesv have commented both on trump’s unusual media dominance and the way that the mainstream media have cultivated trump’s political rise in the pursuit of their own ratings. referring to him as “arguably the first bona fide media-created presidential nominee,” harvard political scientist thomas patterson found remarkable “that the media seemed to give him front-runner status even though he was not atop the polls and was far down the fundraising list,” which was vastly more coverage than his rivals. neal gabler reflects that “trump was indeed gaining ground. but here’s the thing: he was gaining ground in some measure, probably a large one, because the media were awarding him disproportionate coverage. it was yet another post-modernist twist: the media jacked up by their own jacking up.” notably, the media benefited the most from trump’s most outrageous or incendiary statements. cbs chairman les moonves said trump’s candidacy “may not be good for america, but it’s damn good for cbs.” (politico). gabler further comments that “[p]romoting trump, creating trump, makes the msm [mainstream media] relevant again. whatever damage it does to our politics is, apparently, a small price to pay for higher ratings.” for both trump and the media, his persona has been perceived as a product, a marketable commodity, and its performative sensationalism as good business. this symbiosis between trump’s self-interest and the media deepens the noir picture of america. the noir symbolic of trump’s persona and of his candidacy are further confusingly embedded in american political culture because he invites a chicken and egg problem. the new york times’ mark leibovich questions: “was trump the logical byproduct of a cancerous system in which american democracy has mutated into a gold rush of cheap celebrity, wealth creation, and narcissistic branding madness? or has he merely wielded the tools of this transformation— his money, celebrity and dominance of the media—against the forces that engendered this disgust in the first place?” that is, trump’s persona of aggressive disruptiveness can be alternatively read as emblematising both sides of noir. on the one hand, it can be conceived of as a brazen willingness to oppose the old-guard establishment and entrenched political power. on the other, it can be seen as further substantiation of trump’s own media-embeddedness and persona studies 2016, 2 (2) 99 exploitation of his pre-campaign wealth and power. as jill lepore suggests, “trump is the last person to credibly claim to be an outsider. he is a media emperor, tweeting from his tower.” in promoting his seemingly unscripted and instinctual style (what mcadams has referred to as “the very best weaponry for an entertainment industry”), both trump and the media play off his strategies of volatility, unpredictability, and immediacy. john corner categorises three broad cultural and performative dimensions of mediated political persona. the first, political publicity, projects politicians favourably or unfavourably depending upon ideology and party affiliation. we could associate this with political “spin.” the second, interactive newsmaking, involves politicians (or their surrogates) participating in news commentary. and the third, what he calls “journalistic revelation” is when stories emerge (often without any political cooperation at all, or through leaked information) which are critical of a politician (395). what is notable is the way that these categorisations try to delineate the borders of privacy (the private self of the politician) from the public and performative persona. part of the performative noir aspect of trump’s persona is his brash expression of the seemingly private in the most public of ways. noir is a mode that claims to look beneath the surface to show us the murkiness underneath. trump both externalises and embodies this dark confessional. what would typically be repressed (in a conventional candidate and citizen) is exposed and capitalised on, both in an effort to bolster trump’s own brand (and its relationship to political persona), and also to benefit media ratings. through the almost constant mediated promotion of both his political and private self (via twitter and other social media), trump further muddles the public/private delineation. trump’s use of social media as a more direct and unfiltered method of communication with the public, as compared to conventional media, can in some ways be seen as democratising. however, he more frequently uses it derisively, not as a form of connection but of imposition. “i can let people know they were a fraud,” he argues. “i can let people know that they have no talent, and that they didn’t know what they were doing. you have a voice” (barbaro, “how donald trump mastered twitter”). commenting on trump’s forceful use of his @realdonald trump tweets as personal and political weapon, oren tsur et al analyse his “proclivity for using twitter to launch personal attacks on specific individuals” (“twitter takeover”). according to the new york times, over the past 16 months and nearly 4000 tweets, trump has aimed insults at as many as 282 different targets (lee and quealy). on many occasions his social media bursts have gone far beyond his followers to dominate the news for days. promulgating his hardboiled outsider role, he has tried to both use and get around the constraints of mainstream media, reconfiguring himself as his own gatekeeper within this participatory online culture as forms of “revelation and performativity that allow the social to move into the previously private” (marshall and barbour 5).vi moreover, trump’s distinctive on-screen rhetoric and body language have provided particularly strong evidence both of his effort to present an aggressive public posture in line with his hardboiled persona and of the way he has frequently distorted and lost control over this public persona. in each of the three presidential debates, he was easily provoked into personal attacks profoundly unrelated to public governance. his derogatory comments about television personality rosie o’donnell, or his under-the-breath, but on-camera critique of clinton as a “nasty woman” are cases in point. in the second “town hall” style debate, he physically shadowed clinton around the stage in a manner that seemed aimed at projecting dominance to throw her off her game. however, this instead resulted in him appearing predatory, more insistently uncomfortable and out-of-place rather than forceful. his facial rademacher 100 expressions also fail to contain his private disdain, contrasting with the focused sarcasm of the hardboiled protagonist, whose private life and internal subjectivity remain firmly guarded. despite the importance of persona to articulate the relationship between the “individual and the social” (marshall and barbour 1), the media have tended to evaluate trump’s persona in ways that neglect this broader dynamic and that thus distort his influence, assigning him too much agency or too little. cawelti observes how the resurfacing of noir reflects shifts in culture or exposes the limitations of its myths. if trump’s political persona reflects in many ways a resurfacing of noir in its unbridled exposé of self-interested expediency, it also reflects new indeterminacies and uncertainties over how to respond. as mark leibovich comments: “what i saw was polite routines and traditions breaking down as the political order reoriented itself around a new center of gravity.” burlesque is one strategy that has transformed noir and encouraged us to reconsider and adapt its contemporary role to comment on and critique social reality (cawelti). under this formation, the characteristic toughness and vison of the hardboiled protagonist are “undermined through irony or parody and shown to be insufficient” (506-7). early in trump’s presidential candidacy, especially, there was a tendency among many pundits to read trump as nothing more than a joke—a clown or buffoon. leibovich notes the media’s “fear of abetting a circus,” and his own prior conception of trump as a “cartoonish demagogue.” in perhaps more benevolent fashion, maureen dowd comments, “i enjoy trump’s hyberbolic, un p.c. flights because there are too few operatic characters in this world. i think of him as a toon. he’s just drawn that way.” alternatively, trump’s economic and political abuses of power and moral decrepitude have been depicted in terms of a destructiveness and evil that eludes any moral complexity— “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul” (mcadams). yet, in envisioning trump as either a laughable buffoon or an all-powerful villain, to what extent do these representations merely sensationalise trump or turn him into a caricature that avoids deeper questioning of what is behind the “strategic mask”? various analysts have noted the seeming emptiness of the self behind trump’s persona. in his biography of donald trump, michael d’antonio reports “it was donald trump playing donald trump. […] there was something unreal about it.” leibovich states that “trump might be the single most self-involved yet least introspective person i have ever met in my life, in or out of politics. […] it’s unsettling to encounter a prospective leader whose persona is so conspicuous and well-defined and yet whose core is so obtuse.” reflecting on his political campaign and persona, trump himself frames it in these terms: “some people think it will be good for my brand. […] i think it will be irrelevant for my brand” (leibovich). this hollowness suggests one of the central ways trump discredits his persona as a hardboiled protagonist. rather than hardening himself externally because of the internal loss of trust in a world gone awry, trump empties this existential malaise of its meaning, making it all about marketed image and brand identity. moreover, persona studies affirms its relevance not only through what the construction of trump’s persona reveals about the inner trump (whoever that may be), but also in the interplay with the wider cultural and political discourses of our time. one psychological argument that may underlie support for trump is voyeuristic pleasure in seeing trump break the rules and “get away with” things that frustrated individuals might feel guilty for expressing themselves. for those who oppose him, there may also be selfcongratulatory pleasure in his take-down, the moral superiority that affirms someone else’s guilt and one’s own relative innocence.vii yet, in noir-like realities, “closure” remains elusive; even if individual crimes can be solved, “the inequities in the status quo commonly remain in place” (wilson 487). even if we could solve all the mysteries of trump, the underlying social and persona studies 2016, 2 (2) 101 political fractures which have substantiated his rise would not miraculously go away. “in noir,” as nicholas seeley highlights, “the problem is not an individual: the problem is the world.” the mediation of trump’s political persona through the cultural imagery of noir communicates the significance of this identity as both emblematic of a noir-like context and a call for how a noir mindset is needed to examine difficult underlying realities his candidacy has exposed. as metacritical modes, both persona studies and noir narratives provide potent vehicles for contesting surface meanings and laying bare hollowed out rhetoric. persona studies invites us to investigate and articulate “the play of persona historically and in contemporary culture” (marshall and barbour 1) from a point of suspicion with respect to the public self. similarly, at its best, noir—as a mode of investigation—“changes what we think we know or think we can hear; it rewrites the lines of causation we think we can discern” (wilson 489). taken together, both can remind us of abuses of power, but also the importance of culture that questions the imposition of meaning and authority and defiantly keeps those in play. end notes i notably, trump published a paperback version of this same text eight months later, entitled great again: how to fix our crippled america, with a cover markedly less noir and more symbolically nationalistic. what i find especially interesting about this is how, with no change to their textual content, these covers could be so diametrically different within an eight-month span. ii a december 2016 washington post analysis found that trump’s supporters skewed male, white, and low-income. the male-female gap was 19 percentage points (47% men versus 28% women) (cited in “who are donald trump’s supporters, really?”, the atlantic 1 mar 2016). similarly, a washington post-abc news poll suggests that trump's supporters are not just overwhelmingly white. they are also largely male. in the post-abc poll, nearly two out of every three people supporting trump were men (“what we mean when we say donald trump’s supporters are ‘struggling’” washington post 13 may 2016). iii the data on white male trump supporters cited above (endnote 4) may also help explain why trump's supporters are so nostalgic for bygone times. a recent poll by the pew research center found that three out of every four people supporting trump said life in america was better "for people like them" 50 years ago. among all voters, fewer than half agreed (cited in “what we mean when we say donald trump’s supporters are ‘struggling’” washington post 13 may 2016). iv see also rabinowitz 2002; entin 2010; auerbach 2008; breu 2006. v the examples are too numerous to cite. for an interesting overall analysis, see: “the case against the media. by the media”: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/caseagainst-media.html. vi of interest, too, is jill lepore’s argument that “as social media ties loosen the old, elitist bonds on politics with their immediacy and increased participation, they reach a point where they outpace our ability to process the information they provide. as a result, they subvert rather than aid in our understanding” (gabler). in what has often been referred to as “post-truth” culture, individuals are trying to process so much information from so many different sources, that they can’t effectively prioritise what’s true. noir emerges in a context of moral and http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/case-against-media.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/case-against-media.html rademacher 102 epistemological uncertainty that seems to be deepening in our times, and of which trump is just one prominent example. vii in an effort to explain why the “dramatizations of self-dissolution” of film noir should be so popular, fluck suggests that “one reason for the appeal of the ‘low’ may be sought in the fact that it permits the articulation of impulses that may still be considered ‘extreme’ but are nonetheless ‘tempting.’ fluck notes, “film noir has a highly performative dimension that invites pleasure in imaginary participation without actual emotional involvement” (404-5). works cited abrams, jerold. "space, time, and subjectivity in neo-noir." the philosophy of neonoir. ed. mark t. conrad. lexington: university press of kentucky, 2007. 7-20. print. auerbach, jonathan. "noir citizenship: anthony mann's 'border incident.'" cinema journal 47.4 (2008): 102-20. print. barbaro, michael. "pithy, mean and powerful: how donald trump mastered twitter for 2016." web. 5 october 2015. ---. "what drives donald trump? fear of losing status, tapes show." the new york times. web. 25 october 2016. breu, christopher. hard-boiled masculinities. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2006. print. brownstein, ronald. "trump's rhetoric of white nostalgia." the atlantic. web. 2 june 2016. cawelti, john. "chinatown and generic transformation in recent american films." film theory and criticism (1992): 498-511. print. cober-lake, justin. "hard-boiled masculinities." pop matters (2016). web. collins, eliza. "les moonves: "trump's run is damn good for cbs"." politico. web. 29 feburary 2016. corner, john. "mediated persona and political culture: dimensions of structure and process." european journal of cultural studies 3.3 (2000): 386-402. print . davies, william. "the age of post-truth politics." new york times. web. 24 august 2016. detrick, paul. "donald trump's win on super tuesday proves he's terrifyingly real." reason.com. web. 5 march 2016. dowd, maureen. "trump the disrupter." new york times: sunday review. web. 8 august 2015. edsall, thomas b. "purity, disgust and donald trump." the new york times. web. 6 january 2016. ehrenfreund, max. "what we mean when we say donald trump's supporters are struggling." the washington post. web. 13 may 2016. entin, joseph. "'terribly incomplete things': no-no boy and the ugly feelings of noir." melus 35.3 (2010): 85-104. print. fluck, winfried. "crime, guilt and subjectivity in film noir." amerikastudien/american studies 46.3 (2001): 379-408. print. foer, franklin. "donald trump hates women." web. 24 march 2016. gabler, neal. "how the media overthrew politics." moyers and company. web. 6 july 2016. giddens, anthony. modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. stanford: stanford university press, 1991. print . gilmore, richard. "the dark sublimity of chinatown." the philosophy of neo-noir. ed. mark t. conrad. lexington: university press of kentucky, 2007. 119-136. print. hillis, ken. "film noir and the american dream: the dark side of enlightenment." velvet light trap 55 (2005): 1-18. print. jonas, jj. the twelve archetypes. n.d. web. persona studies 2016, 2 (2) 103 lee, jasmine and kevin quealy. "the 282 people, places, and things donald trump has insulted on twitter: a complete list." the new york times. web. 23 october 2016. leibovich, mark. "donald trump is not going anywhere." new york times. web. 29 september 2015. lepore, jill. "the party crashers: is the new populism about the image or the medium?" the new yorker. web. 22 february 2016. marshall, p. david and kim barbour. "making intellectual room for persona studies: a new consciousness and a shifted perspective." persona studies 1.1 (2015): 1-12. print. mcadams, dan. "the mind of donald trump." the atlantic (2016). web. patterson, thomas e. pre-primary news coverage of the 2016 presidential race: trumps; rise, sanders' emergence;, clinton's' struggle. 2016. web. "post-truth politics: art of the lie." web. 10 september 2016. rabinowitz, paula. black and white and noir. new york: columbia university press, 2002. print. reich, robert. "an american fascist." chicago tribune. web. 8 march 2016. schuler, jeanne and patrick murrary. ""anything is possible here": capitalism, neo-noir, and chinatown." the philosophy of neo-noir. ed. mark t. conrad. lexington: university press of kentucky, 2007. 167-182. print. seeley, nicholas. noir is protest literature: that's why it's having a renaissance. web. 27 april 2016. siegel, lee. "the selling of donald j. trump." the new york times. web. 9 september 2016. thompson, derek. "who are donald trump's supporters, really?" the atlantic. web. 1 march 2016. "trump leads gop charge embracing torture: i'd bring back a lot worse than waterboarding." democracy now. web. 8 february 2016. trump, donald. crippled america: how to make america great again. new york: simon and schuster, 2015. print. trump, donald with tony schwartz. trump: the art of the deal. new york: random house, 1987. print. tsur, oren et al. "the data behind trump's twitter takeover." politico. web. 29 april 2016. wilson, christopher. "when noir meets nonfiction." twentieth-century literature 61.4 (2015): 484-510. print. microsoft word kiki sanjaya 2 e-journal of cultural studies may 2017 vol. 10, number 2, page 7-12 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 7 compassionate capitalism in hotel industry in ubud, bali i wayan kiki sanjaya1 i gede mudana2 email: kikisanjayabali@gmail.com1, gedemudana@pnb.ac.id2 abstract this present study analyzes the success of the practice performed by the investors in hotel industry using the ideology of the compassionate capitalism. the study was conducted in ubud as the habitus of the investors in hotel industry. the area has the characteristic of tending to be resistant and strongly bound to customs and traditions, and is skeptical to the gradual modern impact. the problem of the study is what the practice of the compassionate capitalism performed by the investors of hotel industry in ubud like. the study is intended to identify the form of the practice performed by the investors in hotel industry in ubud as a tourist destination, gianyar regency, bali. the qualitative-interpretative method was used. the data were collected using observation, interview and documentation techniques. the data were analyzed through data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing using the theories of cultural studies which are eclectically related. the result of the study identifies that the investors in hotel industry in ubud perform their practices by: (1) using the company social responsibilities (csr) as the basis for performing their practice in hotel industry; (2) adopting the local genius stated in the community-based tourism, cbt). the finding of the study indicates that the investors use the structural pattern of the compassionate capitalism which adapts to capitalism in the case study of hotel industry. keyword: investor, practice, compassionate capitalism, and hotel industry background the background of the study is the fact that a great deal of investments in the forms of international, multinational and local hotels have been made in ubud since 2005. on the one hand, there has been a phenomenon that ubud has the rural atmosphere and highly strongly maintains customs and traditions; on the other hand, it is often less resistant. in addition, the success achieved by the investors in constructing hotels in ubud is surprising; however, this leads to a critical analogy. the critical analogy appears when the practice performed by the investors is separable from the jargon of the atmosphere of tourism in ubud, including the people’s resistance and being free from any conflict taking place as illustrated by what happened to the four season sayan in 2002 and kupu-kupu barong hotel in 2015. e-journal of cultural studies may 2017 vol. 10, number 2, page 7-12 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 8 this present study is urgent for several reasons. first, it is interesting to explore the fact that there has not been any answer to the pattern in which the investors perform their practice in hotel industry in ubud which seems not to be covered by the journalists and to be hidden through the idiom of the company’s secret. second, from the perspective of cultural studies, what is performed by the investors leads to a critical way of thinking to see the elements of the investors’ interests as the subject of the study and to defend the marginalized people, namely the local people living in ubud. the references which were raised to support the study had been chosen and studied based on closeness to the present study and several basic points, namely the investors, the practice which the investors perform and hotel industry. one of the references is the study which was conducted by purnaya (2015) and mudana (2005). purnaya (2015) stated that the bali tourism development corporate (btdc) in nusa dua could not be separated from the relation of power in the area. he also stated that there was an important point that the practice of power performed in the development of btdc in nusa dua within a period of time could be clearly observed. what is written by purnaya is a very close reference used in this present study. it is accepted and this present study is intended to identify whether what has been done by the investors in ubud who do the same thing as what has been done to develop btdc in nusa dua in developing hotel industry. the second reference is the study conducted by mudana (2005) entitled “pembangunan nirwana resort (bnr) in tanah lot area: hegemony and the people’s resistance at beraban village, tabanan, bali”. he was interested in raising this topic as the local people disagreed with the construction of the bnr hotel at that time. he observed every issue which led to the conflict between the local people and the bnr hotel management. the local people asked that the bnr hotel implemented the concept of tri hita karana (the axis of balance among the environment, man and spirituality). furthermore, mudana importantly informed that as the new order government was collapsing, the bnr hotel management and the local people were getting more harmonious. research method the data are analyzed descriptively, qualitatively, and intepretatively. the result of the data analysis is presented using words in the form of an extended text. this process covers the attempt made to understand the problems of the study through thick description (geertz, e-journal of cultural studies may 2017 vol. 10, number 2, page 7-12 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 9 1992:45). the result of the study is presented using the scientific language which can be easily understood, as the result of the study tends to be qualitative. discussion hotel management is prescribed in the decree of the minister of post and telecommunication number km.94/hk.103/mppt-87. it is intended to make sure that the hotel guests are safe and secure (muljadi, 2016: 60). from the view point of cultural studies, hotel industry is the domain where the investors perform their practice which is then used as a business commodity. the main products they sell are rooms, foods, beverages and recreation. the main concept in the present study is that hotel industry is a service business trading (trade-in service) and customers satisfying business. the current economic phenomenon is that the capitalists keep open free trade. they compete against one another with the same ideology, namely making their companies grow and develop in accordance with the theory of marx (in sutrisno & putranto, 2005: 21) concerning the liberal-capitalism which is hereinafter referred to as the capitalism model marx (passionate capitalism). from the point of view of cultural studies, the ideology of capitalism which refers to the pattern of passionate capitalism is regarded as the same as neo imperialism in modern economy. what is pointed at by neo imperialism is not too vulgar as in this condition if man adheres to the ideology of neo classic as “homo eoconomicus”, he will calculate rationally based on their interests and desires. in short, capitalism is identical with the theory of a game. one guesses the strategy used by and the game played by another. he/she does his/her best to increase the benefit with different types of scenes (parsoon in sutisna and putranto, 2005: 54). being promising and open, the hotel industry is critically assumed to be able to be controlled by the capitalists with their strong capitals. the shareholders are involved in the hotel subsector for the sake of profit as what occurred during the colonial era. however, the shareholders only focus their attention to the economic sector (balipost.com, 2015). i made sukarjana, one of the agents of the investors, who used to work as a general manager, as far as what unfair role is played by the investors in hotel industry for the sake of benefit is concerned, stated as follows. [“…although the investors have a lot of money, they will still borrow money from the banks which are their partners. their objective is to manipulate the income tax …the more benefit is gained the higher the income tax reduction will be; however, if they e-journal of cultural studies may 2017 vol. 10, number 2, page 7-12 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 10 borrow money from the bank, automatically they may be free from the tax reduction as it is subtracted with their loan …” (interview on 5 august 2016). from 2015 to 2017 the conventional model of capitalism has been denied in ubud. such a denial has led to a clash. the investors and the agents who manage the hotels in ubud area have been intimidated. in 2002 the access to the four seasons sayan hotel was blockaded by the local people. the kupu-kupu barong hotel management was intimidated in 2012 as it was found to have deviated from the developmental regulation. in addition, in 2015 the four seasons hotel was also reported by the stakeholders for legalizing the weeding event of gays. the investors especially those who are involved in hotel industry in ubud have an opportunity to exist again. they have the opportunity to invest and keep legalizing capitalism through the act of tourism number 10 of 2009 and the doctrine of the united nations organization and the guidance of oecd. the point was that they should collaborate with the local people to perform post colonialism referred to as the ideology of compassionate capitalism. this model has been successfully performed by the investors in ubud area. one of the strategies employed to perform capitalism is adopting it as the recorded compassionate capitalism. the csr given to the local people exemplifies this. when the present study was conducted at padang tegal, kedewatan and tegallantang almost all the hotels gave csr to the local people. csr can be in the forms of donations for any traditional ritual, monthly contribution and the recruitment of the local workers. they are trained and appointed hotel employees. puri wulandari hotel, ritz calton madapa and griya shanti villas and spa give csr to the local people. from the perspective of cultural studies and the theory of compassionate capitalism, although the investors still gain benefit from the businesses they undertake, they socially share it with the local people as stated by pilliang. the other benefit gained by the investors is that they are protected by the local people when they have problems. this argument can be proved by what had happened at kupu-kupu barong hotel, where there was a conflict between the hotel management and bunutan traditional village which was settled through the assistance provided by kedewatan traditional village which had been “funded” by the hotel through its csr (tribunnews.com.2015). e-journal of cultural studies may 2017 vol. 10, number 2, page 7-12 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 11 conclusion and suggestion ubud adopts and performs the local genius in their people-based tourism. the adoption of the local genius can be seen from the hegemony of the local people in the form of the structure of the hotel buildings in ubud. puri wulandari hotel, maya ubud hotel, ritz calton madapa hotel and griya shanti villas and spa exemplify this. the good intention of the investors to appreciate the local culture has turned out to cause their businesses in tourism industry to exist in ubud. the city hotels in ubud keep being scorned by the traditional village. even firm actions have also been taken, leading to the deconstruction of the hotel floor and structure. the evitel hotel and zen hotel exemplify this. no hotels which adopt the local culture have been deconstructed. what is performed by the investors through compassionate capitalism has caused them not to deviate from the act of tourism. in relation to this, head of the department of tourism of gianyar regency, anak agung dalem jagadhita, when he was interviewed on 12 august 2016, informed: “… so far from the hotels observed in ubud area nothing has been found to be black listed from the department of tourism of gianyar regency …”. it turns out that the ideology of compassionate capitalism has been performed since 2000s. puri wulandari, as a star hotel constructed in 2000s, is recorded as the first hotel which has been in existence until now. the owner is a balinese. in practice, the ideology which is referred to by the star and non-star hotels is compassionate capitalism. it has been structured (patterned) in ubud area. from the perspective of cultural studies, the ideology of compassionate capitalism performed by the investors and their agents cannot be separated from the simulation of what is proposed by parsons (in sutrisno and putranto, 2005:58). however, what is proposed by parsons has been adopted and adapted by the investors and applied to the local people under the traditional village. in brief it is suggested that those who are involved in the development of tourism in ubud should refer back to the community-based tourism ‘cbt’ as what it is originally defined. if not, cbt will be pseudo-awareness and ubud will be similar to the other tourist destinations. acknowledgements in this opportunity the writer would like to thank all the supervisors for supervising the process of completing this e-journal; they are i nyoman darma putra, i wayan ardika, and i gede mudana. e-journal of cultural studies may 2017 vol. 10, number 2, page 7-12 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 12 bibliography adiputra, mariana. 2013. “pemberdayaan masyarakat miskin di hotel suly resort, yoga dan spa melalui yayasan bali global ubud-bali” (tesis). denpasar: program magister kajian pariwisata universitas udayana. mudana, i gede. 2005. “pembangunan bali nirwana resort (bnr) di kawasan tanah lot: hegemoni dan perlawanan di desa braban, tabanan, bali” (disertasi). denpasar: program doktor kajian budaya fakultas ilmu budaya universitas udayana. muljadi, a.j. 2012. kepariwisataan dan perjalanan. jakarta: rajawali pers. petras, james. 2014. menelanjangi globalisasi. jakarta: kreasi wacana. purnaya. 2014.“relasi kuasa dalam pengelolaan resor wisata nusa dua, bali” (disertasi). denpasar: program doktor kajian budaya program pascasarjana universitas udayana. sutrisno, mudji dan hendar putranto. 2005. teori-teori kebudayaan. yogyakarta: pt kanisius. s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 64-80 p i e r r e b r u n o t h e c a p i t a l i s t e x e m p t i o n 1 translated by john holland a discourse without loss b elow is the matheme of the capitalist discourse:2 the matheme is constructed by inverting the terms found in the places of the semblance (or of the agent) and truth in the discourse of the master:  is now in the position of s 1 and vice versa. the direction of the arrow between  and s 1 remains unchanged, so that, in the capitalist discourse, it now moves from the top to the bottom. as a final modification, the arrow that had gone from a to s 1 moves from a to . the consequences of these changes require some comments. pleasure, like unpleasure, is a physiological reality. jouissance is of a different order; if it does not not exist without the body—the body as organism—it also does not exist without knowledge. in skipping the barrier of jouissance, it also skips an obstacle, the nature of which gives rise to a promise that can be kept only through annihilation. jouissance is a “negative substance.” this means that by speaking, i destroy myself as thing and that this self-virtualization would provide me with jouissance precisely if i were not, as a candidate for jouissance, annihilated by this very candidacy.3 how can we get out of this—infernal—circle, even though those tormented by satan (and this may well be satan’s hope) have the chance to participate in jouissance through his dark side; this dark side, in turn, is not as bad as vanity, abandonment, or an emptiness of affect, to use the most common vocabulary. the central thread of this questioning has been woven in and out through the space/time of thought, and the relief, even the enthusiasm of the postwar period was degraded through its emphasis on the absurd, the herald of which was albert camus, in the rebel. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 65 §§§ the milan lecture, in june 1972, entitled, “on the psychoanalytic discourse,” introduces the matheme of the capitalist discourse; through it, lacan, brings out this impact of this use of language and suggests a way out of this nightmarish moebius strip, provided that we are able to seize upon this exit. perhaps an example—an unusual one for this context—may help us grasp what is at stake in this problem. in an analytic session, you go deliberately against freud’s advice not to look for information about how things “really” happened, and say to a female analysand, “you could ask your mother about this.” during the next session, she tells you, “i couldn’t ask my mother anything,” and then adds, “it’s like the time when my mother asked me, ‘whom do you prefer: your father or me?’” nothing could stop her from hearing the analyst’s speech as coming from the other of the transference. the analyst’s enunciation was reduced to the mother’s, who, by her question, had closed the child up in a transferential cage: either you prefer me, or you don’t really love me. for this analysand, to ask the mother anything, no matter how small, meant answering in a way that she had not wanted to do at the time: i prefer you. as a result, she could only see her analyst as her mother’s ally. the analyst, whom she had wanted to become her liberator, became her jailer. by starting with this slippage (which was not as unfortunate as it may seem, since it helped the analysand to say something new about the closing-off of her relation with her mother) we can look for the prototype of the exit from the capitalist discourse. how? let’s examine things more closely. the demand contained in the analyst’s initial suggestion has its own signification: this demand can be understood “objectively” by approaching it simply in terms of its vocabulary and syntax. the analysand, however, hears it on a plane that is not empty, and which modifies its “objective” signification, so that following this suggestion would be the equivalent of accepting what she has always refused the mother: to mold herself into a transferential relation with her that would not be exclusive, but would take precedence over others. this is not far from this analysand’s remark that she had thought that the analyst was asking her, indirectly, to treat her relation with him as more important than everything else. let us say that every signification is heard on a plane that always affects the message: a meaning [sens] is produced that was not contained in the signification. the “skidding of the signifier” means that the latter is received on a plane that is always itself slippery. it is slippery because receiving a message is a function, on the one hand, of its content and its emitter, and on the other hand, of the relation between the receiver and the emitter, a relation called transference. if we consider this fact in all its breadth, we conclude, as lacan notes, that it is possible to make a word say something very different from what it says. someone who claims to be an atheist can be shown to believe in god, or—and this is my example— psychoanalytic theory can be shown to say something that is, in reality, the opposite of what one thinks it says, etc. now, although in my first example, this sliding may seem to be a disadvantage—perhaps an unacceptable one—for the treatment, bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 66 it is really quite the contrary. through this misunderstanding, the subject can preserve, or rather bring into existence, the margin of indeterminacy that will enable her to grasp the forced choice of alienation and make it the symptomatic means of her emancipation. for the neurotic, this will be through the separation produced by the fantasy; for the psychotic, it will be through the specific space that authorizes him/her to have a delusion. true separation can be encountered, however, only once the fantasy has been dismantled and “stabilized in a delusional metaphor.”4 what does this have to do with the capitalist discourse? it takes us to the very heart of the question: hollywood films, such as the truman show or being john malkovitch, portray people’s efforts to escape from a virtualization that seeks to program them entirely; this virtualization turns a stage or film set into reality, and thus reduces it to nothing more than the application (in the mathematical sense) of a linguistic function forged by an other. it is as if the capitalist discourse were capable of turning itself into a universe: me, clone; you, hologram. escaping from this virtualization involves making the barrier of jouissance—which the capitalist discourse has scrapped—function again. in psychoanalytic terms, this would dissolve the drive into the unconscious. from jean baudrillard to the multimedia artist, tony oursler, the theme of the cunning triumph of virtualization has now been fully sketched out. this may also be what a psychoanalyst, jean-claude maleval, is aiming at when he uses the expression, “foreclosure of reference.”5 i myself especially like the french children’s show, bonne nuit les petits [good night, children], in which oscar, the nephew of nounours, the teddy bear, turns himself off with the remote control; this shows us that virtualization can only succeed through the initiative of the agent who is also its object. let us look at it from a different perspective, that of orwell’s 1984. winston smith begins to fall in love with what he ascribes to big brother: both the command to submit to a sacrificial castration and its enactment. here it seems as though love itself, the emotion of love, can emerge alchemically from an annihilation to which one consents. this is not a baseless notion, provided that we see that this transformation of the emotion does away with big brother, since big brother is nothing other than the great persecutor as such.6 as we have seen, the unrestrained skidding of the signifier is connected with the fluctuations of all signification. let’s examine this in terms of meaning [sens]. how can this be understood? in this lecture, lacan reminds us that s 1 , the one of the signifier, rotates through each of the places in the discourse: those of the semblance, the other, the production and the truth. because it can be translated from one discourse to another, a meaning [sens] can be born. this thesis is found explicitly in “l’étourdit.”7 meaning, as distinct from signification, implies that the signifier can be translated. there is meaning only to the extent that there exists something that is outside a purely denotative language; this “outside” is speech itself, inasmuch as it supposes a subject. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 67 a question can be raised here. was lacan correct to use the term, “discourse,” in describing the functioning of capitalism? a first error must be eliminated here—let us remember that a discourse is not a set of words, but, in the phrase “capitalist discourse,” designates the social bond that stems from the domination of the capitalist mode of production. in a way, the term “discourse” has been substituted for that of “mode of production,” and throws light on certain aspects of the latter. nevertheless, does the absence of the disjunction that is internal to jouissance discredit the expression, “discourse,” in the lacanian sense? this objection is more difficult. in order not to respond too hurriedly, i will simply remark that the barrier of jouissance is not really the condition sine qua non of discourse. another condition stands in this place: as lacan reminds us in this lecture, there is no discourse that is not of the semblance [semblant]. the unchecked skidding of the signifier allows us to exit from the aporia of jouissance, but discourse, because it involves the semblance, prevents this skidding from becoming so uncontrolled that it would destroy the bond assured by the function of language. if language gives prominence to the skidding of the signifier and the signifier’s claim to make an absolute meaning of the whole, the semblance [semblant] or sens blanc [white meaning], is different; its separation from these tendencies allows us exchanges that can have an acceptable level of misunderstandings. the objective of theater is to make this semblance implode, or rather to reveal the conditions that allow it to function, conditions that would otherwise remain unperceived.8 it happens that, in the capitalist discourse,  occupies the place of the semblance. if the absence of the barrier of jouissance has a major consequence for this subject, the very fact that it occupies the place of the semblance has a stabilizing effect: it enables the discourse to ward off the inordinate skidding of the signified. the semblance is what, despite the complete impossibility of jouissance and of the slipping of the signifier, enables language, through discourse, to create a bond and ensure a regulation and circulation of jouissance; it is able, in principle, to distance us from the specters of mania or of a passage à l’acte, both of which are ways of putting an end to this bond. the price of this is the conventionality and artificiality of linguistic exchange, which makes the search for the truth of meaning into a bargain; we get it at a cut price. there is a touch of the vacuum when truth goes on sale. in this context, i would like to introduce another unusual but, i hope, suggestive example: the pharmacist plays a major role in this discourse, for the capitalist subject believes that this figure can reveal what s/he desires. surprisingly, the pharmacist becomes important by refusing to sell a product.9 through this trick, the capitalist discourse demonstrates its superiority in its grasp of desire. it substitutes desire for need, which it does not satisfy; the proletarian, who would like to have public housing, is offered an estate, thereby placing the consumer as subject in command. from then on, the subject’s desire—as consumer and customer—becomes the effect of the reformulation—or interpretation—of the demand by the other, the pharmacist, who is located in s 2 . in the matheme of the capitalist discourse, this circuit goes from  to s 2 , by way of s 1 , and thus by means of a master signifier. this principle of authorbruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 68 ity is concealed (since it is under the subject), but it is always necessary, in order to certify the kind of knowledge that is in question. in experimental psychology, its trace can be found in the stockholm syndrome as well as in those chilling experiments that show how submission to authority can turn almost anyone into a torturer. in the matheme, the rising diagonal of the arrow that goes from s 1 to s 2 points to this power, which can be found at any moment. throughout history, only the discourse of science forged by descartes’ dubito, sum has been able to make it totter or tremble, without abolishing it. the arrow, a→ , is found in both the capitalist and the analytic discourses, but it functions in them in completely opposed ways.10 in the analytic discourse, it is marked by an impossibility. in the capitalist discourse, however, surplus-jouissance (a) is supposed to saturate the lack-of-jouissance [manque-à jouir]. whereas the capitalist discourse promotes the submission of knowledge to a masked authority, the discourse of the analyst writes a permanent disjunction between the master signifier and knowledge, a disjunction that could only be removed if jouissance were to fill up the place of the signifier.11 one can note, finally, that in the analytic discourse (as in the other three original discourses), one place—truth—has a special status. in the four discourses, you can start out from this place, but you cannot reach it, since the two arrows move away from it. this inaccessibility of truth in discourse does not mean that it does not exist. truth exists. it speaks, but you cannot speak it. the capitalist discourse, on the other hand, is constructed in order to miss this inaccessibility of truth. not only is the place of truth accessible, but it must also be passed through in order to reach knowledge. truth, in the capitalist discourse, has the same status as it does in astrology; it cannot be falsified. the capacity of the mathemes to generate such readings and consequences may be surprising, and this is especially true of the capitalist discourse, which seems a bit cobbled together. lacan himself emphasized that these mathemes only “imitated mathematics, and he sought later, in topology, to find a means of judging that is not subjected to the caprices of language; it is nevertheless true that the choice of a (mathematized) writing is, in itself, a choice in favor of science.12 writing, with its terms, its signs, its punctuation, its rules for placement in space, imposes orientations and leads to conclusions that limit, a priori, the skidding of the signifier, on the condition that one resists any instrumentalization—which would finally be magical—of writing. it is therefore false to say that psychoanalysis, as popper claimed, is unfalsifiable (an objection that freud had already perceived). if it creates a problem, it is by always being falsifiable, up to the point when it ends. indeed, the end of analysis could be called the end of the jouissance that comes from falsifying it: will and determination then become the notch of desire, the indestructibility and discontinuity of which are not recognized. it would not be too extreme to say that the analytic discourse is constructed on the principle of the inaugural and irremediable loss of jouissance, and that the nostalgia for falsifiability is only the ghost of this loss. the capitalist discourse presents itself as a discourse that has no loss and no entropy. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 69 in this discourse s 2 is the slave-servant, whose knowledge can be activated. the relation s 1 → s 2 (the diagonal arrow that goes from the bottom left to the top right) can be transposed onto the capitalist/worker couple, since what intervenes in production is the savoir-faire of the labor force: the highly variable degree of the worker’s skill, which goes from the status of being semi-skilled to that of engineer. if the s 1 does not possess knowledge, what gives it the capacity to command? the answer is financial power. the worker obeys and produces. s/he produces what marx discovered the secret of: surplus-value. we know that for marx, whom no one challenges on this point, capitalism is characterized by the fact that laborpower has become a commodity, just like wheat or iron. thus, with capitalism, surplus-jouissance (a) takes the form of surplus-value. surplus-jouissance also calls to mind freud’s lustgewinn, the “yield of pleasure,” and already in freud, this yield makes up for the structural failure of jouissance, as is demonstrated by the fact that humor produces a lustgewinn.13 mehrwert, then, is the extra value produced by the salaried worker, throughout the working day, after having first reproduced the value or his/her labor-power. in order to reproduce her/his ability to work (education, food, lodging), a worker needs to create a value of, let’s say, four daily hours of labor. if s/he works eight hours, however, the difference—eight minus four—constitutes the mehrwert. in this sense, capitalism precedes and conditions psychoanalysis by providing the means of shaping jouissance through value. this value is exchange-value, not the use-value that must be renounced in order to make the primitive accumulation of capital possible. something makes our ears prick up here: it is the “surplus,” the gewinn (yield), rather than the lust (pleasure). lacan retroactively introduces into marx’s discovery of surplus-value the element that explains the capitalist discourse’s efficiency. without this substitution of surplus-jouissance for surplus-value, it is impossible to explain the gap between the “real” economy (which follows the principle of surplus-value) and the economy that functions through financial globalization. surplus-value, indeed, only constitutes the motive force of the capitalist mode of production as long as it enables there to be jouissance; if it did not do so, no one would care about it. yet who gets off? a marxist could retort that the proletarian sells his/her laborpower simply in order to survive: “eat to live rather than live to eat.” “the jouissance that you’re talking about,” this marxist might say, concerns the capitalist. this objection cannot simply be brushed off, for it comes from the real of the class struggle. however, the “cunning” of the capitalist discourse involves interesting the proletarian in jouissance, and in order to do so, it transforms the proletarian into a consumer, a capitalist subject: the  is in the place of the agent. thus, money no longer serves as an instrument of measurement or as the general equivalent; instead, it is only valuable to the extent that it engenders itself or seems to engender itself, in a parthenogenesis that excludes the productive process. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 70 marx, according to lacan, completed the capitalist discourse by giving it “its subject, the proletarian, thanks to whom the capitalist discourse is flourishing wherever the marxist state-form prevails.”14 this rather daring judgment rectifies his assessment two years earlier, in the other side of psychoanalysis, that the soviet system functioned through the discourse of the university: knowledge, taken as a unified whole, was its agent, and the “new man” was supposed to be produced.15 in my opinion, this judgment is correct, but the later collapse of this system gives support to the later thesis. concerning this collapse, it would be comic, but fair, to argue that with the dissolution of the soviet union, the capitalist discourse experienced its first real defeat. why not say that the soviet system was the supreme stage of capitalism, for its axiom did not call the functioning of the capitalist discourse into question? the extortion of surplus-value did not stop. it was distributed differently, and apparently—or, in any case, according to the ideology—s 1 and s 2 , the capitalist and the worker, were no longer in an antagonistic relation: the former tried to get people to work too much, and the latter to diminish the amount of labor. otherwise, the slogan, “we are all capitalists” sapped the soviet system like the “old mole.” since the system was never able to acknowledge that this was its slogan, jouissance tended to get a lot of bad publicity; the proletarians had to renounce it in order to have a better future, while the bureaucracy transformed itself into a bureaucracy of jouissance. in all this, there are strategies for obtaining jouissance. what differentiates them is how one conceives of two couples within the discourse: with  – s 2 , we have the proletarian whose desire gives in to surplus-jouissance (work more to get off more)16 and the worker as producer (work less in order to be less exploited); the other couple is  – s 1 , since the capitalist is also sundered [scindé] between the one who recuperates surplus-value and commands the process, and the one who, as subject, consumes.17 once this relation has been established, it cannot be revoked. the worker (in s 2 ) can go on strike, but the capitalist, in s 1 , cannot. the capitalist philanthropist or patron will never go so far as to indict the capitalist discourse itself. on the other hand, the capitalist can put him/herself in the ascetic position of subject, without thereby modifying the process. if the proletarian withdraws, as far as possible, from the position of subject of consumption, this will not have much of an effect. it is obvious, finally, that within the framework of the capitalist discourse, the proletarian’s increase in consumption, which involves going against the grain of the capitalist mode of production, never dries up the production of wealth. from this, one must conclude that only the strike, a work stoppage, can constitute the symptom. one must also conclude that highlighting the contradiction between and s 2 reveals not a splitting but a sundering. since this is the case, finding the key to this discourse implies recognizing that the necessity of surplus-jouissance is founded on the status of jouissance as a “hole that must be filled” (“radiophonie,” 434). bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 71 marx fills this hole through surplus-value. this is why lacan says that mehrwert [surplus-value] is the marxlust, marx’s surplus-jouissance. surplus-value is the cause of desire, which the capitalist economy makes into its very principle, that of extensive production. now, if capitalist production—the cycle m-c-m (money— commodity—money + money)—implies that consumption is always increasing, then this production would come to a sudden stop if it actually led to a consumption that could procure jouissance; consumption would then be halted, production would slow down, and this cycle would end. if this is not the case, it is because this economy, through a reversal that marx had not foreseen, produces a lack-ofjouissance [manque-à-jouir]. the more i consume, the greater the gap between jouissance and consumption becomes. thus there is a struggle involving the distribution of this surplus-value, which “only induces those who are exploited to act as rivals on principle, in order to shelter their obvious participation in the thirst of the lackof-jouissance” (“radiophonie,” 435). pareto, one of the theorists of neoclassical economics, forged an exquisite expression: the “ophelimity” of a glass of water. on the basis of an incontestable observation—that a drinker takes less pleasure in a third glass of water than from the first—pareto deduces a law: the value of the water decreases in proportion to its consumption. the opposite law, however, governs the capitalist economy. beyond drinking without thirst, this law can be stated as follows: “the more i drink, the thirstier i get.” the choreography of love as we have just seen, in the capitalist discourse, the accessibility of truth is combined with the disjunction between the places of truth and the production (on the bottom left and right). this suppression exonerates the capitalist discourse from a requirement that was believed to constitute all discourses. the other structural characteristic that we have examined is the creation of an arrow, a→, which does not exist in the discourse of the master, from which the capitalist discourse derives. this arrow is also not found in the discourse of the hysteric, and although it does appear in the discourse of the analyst, it is marked explicitly by an impossibility. only in the discourse of the university, which has a special kinship with the capitalist discourse, does this arrow function. within this framework, we can now approach another aspect of the capitalist discourse. as lacan stated on january 6, 1972, in le savoir du psychanalyste [the knowledge of the psychoanalyst]: “what distinguishes the discourse of capitalism is this ― the verwerfung, the rejection, the throwing outside all the symbolic fields... of what? of castration. every order, every discourse that has capitalism in common sets aside what we shall call simply the matters [choses] of love. it’s for this that, two centuries after this sliding [glissement], let’s call it calvinist—why not?—castration has finally stormed back in, in the form of the analytic discourse” (je parle aux murs, 96). bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 72 the heart of this statement is its connection between the setting aside of “matters of love” and the foreclosure of castration; before we approach it directly, a few remarks can place it in perspective. first, according to lacan, love is what makes up for the nonexistence of the sexual relation (whereas the mere addition of man + woman would give one access to a jouissance that is primary and absolute). there is no sexual relation because of castration, and the acceptance of this nonexistence can authorize a contingent sexual encounter.18 the foreclosure of castration, on the contrary, has a very different consequence: it makes the sexual relation possible (which can then be indicated by the arrow, a→, which can be read as “a woman fulfills a man”). in consequence, love, as something that makes up for this impossibility, becomes obsolete. the mechanics of sex would then become the physics of love, and there would be no need to differentiate sex and love; a manual of sexology would be the same as the map of tendre.19 what is more subtle and difficult is an equivalence that lacan posits in “l’étourdit,” a text from the same year (1972): “death [la mort] is love [l’amour].” this reminds us, of the romance of iseut and tristan, in which death does indeed signal love. either there is love or there is death. or again, if love, which makes up for the nonexistence of the sexual relation, is an inaccessible outcome, death will do quite nicely; only it will have the power to make up for the situation in which castration has left us. let us note, to strengthen this reading, that lacan attributes this equivalence between love and death to freud. what appears more directly in freud’s work, however, is the equivalence between death and jouissance. this has an intrusive effect of double exposure. if, for freud, jouissance is impossible for the living being, and is always lost (whatever the status of primary jouissance may be), the sole virtue of love, as distinct from desire, is that it brings with it the promise of a substitute that overcomes this loss. its narcissistic structure lends itself to this, including in its lethal foundation, since anyone can get bogged down in seeking this specularity of love. as for the other term involved, the foreclosure of castration is distinct from that of the name-of-the-father, the expression upon which lacan had based the distinction between psychosis and neurosis. he uses the arrow, a → to indicate a subject that is completed by its surplus-jouissance, in an asymptotic countability. at the limit of this countability, we can hope to have an unbarred subject: the “new man,” who will soon be joined by the most precious capital, woman. what must be seen, indeed, is that the cycle money-commodity-more money, which marx had so impeccably taken apart, is homologous to the easter computus; by virtue of money, capitalism virtualizes all living things through coining. in such an economy, even the cost of death would serve for something, and, in contrast to freud’s interpretation, the world would be loveless, with the exception of a religious love for that highly abstract other, the capitalist system. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 73 what is in question here is the status of death. on the side of psychoanalysis, this is the for-nothing that makes it equivalent to the for-nothing of love, thwarting any full counting of the real (what would it cost to buy the universe and who would want to buy it?). on the side of capitalism, death would be transformed into a substance through its commodification, founded on an unlimited linguistic virtualization; the real would be equal to reality and the sexual relation would be necessary as the law by which the world works. this world would be nothing more than the reflection of the sexual relation. as a result, when lacan speaks of how castration storms back in through the analytic discourse, we should take him at his word: castration, as revealing the absense of the sexual relation, only becomes for itself with freud. it had already been indicated, more or less, through the oedipus complex, which was not, however, enough to permit the bejahung (the yes to....) of castration, even if this consent is already present with language. with the coming of capitalism, everything concerning the action of castration is foreclosed from discourse, starting with “matters of love”: this could cause difficulty for the oedipus complex itself. to mention sexual criminality, which, in changing forms, has always constituted something of the scandal of mores, there are two ways of struggling against it: reintroducing castration or transforming the oedipus complex into law. the effectiveness of the second solution is limited; only an acceptance of castration can enable the subject to accept such a law. in counting on law, one ends up forging a pseudo-castration, which would be complete and total. this pseudo-castration would only feed the misunderstanding of sexual difference, since it would reduce the feminine to a binary negative term in relation to the masculine. the foreclosure of castration does not mean the manufacturing of psychotics, for it also concerns neurotics, pushing both of them to seek in power— either as masters or as those who benefit from the latter’s trusts or entailments—a way to keep castration foreclosed. can the hysteric and the obsessional neurotic be said to foreclose castration? freud, in his case history of the wolf man, threw light on the foreclosure of castration in a way that can accommodate neurosis.20 this suggests that castration cannot be brought wholly and totally into the field of the symbolic. the capitalist discourse transforms this partial restriction into a general rule. it must be insisted that a misunderstanding of castration is a structural, and not an accidental, part of the castration complex. such a misinterpretation is inevitable when femininity is not apprehended as being beyond castration. being beyond it means that castration is necessary, but not sufficient. now let us examine the context. lacan mentions a poem by paul fort: “if all the girls in the world wanted to join hands, all around the sea, they could make a round.”21 lacan does not content himself with pointing out that the “girls” themselves never dreamed of this. unlike boys, they do not need to make a circle: a circle, for example, of officers or even a freudian circle. boys go around in circles because they are afraid of finding themselves alone with one girl. for this reason, it is up to the girl to separate the boy from his circle, from his “masse.” nothing is bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 74 missing from this choreography of love, not even the fact that before she succeeds in taking a boy out of his circle, a girl goes together with another girl, whom she will then leave on the sidelines, as soon as she has accomplished her abduction, when she will have kidnapped a boy. if girls tend to go “two by two,” this has its foundation in what lacan, in his “guiding remarks for a convention on female sexuality,” refers to as a jouissance that is “enveloped in its own contiguity.”22 in this respect, feminine homosexuality could be particularized as a relation of other to other, and not of same to same. this is the case with the relation between lol v. stein and tatiana, in marguerite duras’ novel, the ravishing of lol stein.23 how are these “matters of love,” when they are approached from the feminine side? first of all, there is a gap between it and freud’s conception of eros, as it is found especially in civilization and its discontents: “eros and ananke [love and necessity] have become the parents of human civilization too. the first result of civilization was that even a fairly large number of people were now able to live together in a community.”24 here, eros proceeds by means of vereinigung, to make it one that we know well: unification. it contributes to civilization, by constituting circles that become larger and larger, going from the clan to humanity. in freud’s words: since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closely-knit group, it can only achieve this aim through an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt. what began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group. if civilization is a necessary course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then—as a result of...the eternal struggle between the trends of love and death—there is inextricably bound up with it an increase in the sense of guilt (civilization and its discontents, 133). according to lacan, love does the opposite: it dissolves the circle by removing an element from it. he thus envisions “matters of love” as a disunification, and situates love more on the side of thanatos than of eros. the mythography of eros is not at all unilateral. claude lévi-strauss deserves recognition for having emphasized the positive character of the oedipal prohibition in the elementary structures of kinship: “if these modalities can be subsumed under the general term of exogamy...this is conditional upon the apperception, behind the superficially negative expression of the rule of exogamy, of the final principle which, through the prohibition of marriage within prohibited degrees, tends to ensure the total and continuous circulation of the group’s most important assets, its wives and its daughters.”25 however, lévi-strauss thereby covers over matters of love in his own way. he reduces women to values or goods and neglects exoandry, in which men leave their group and join their wives’ bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 75 group. this kinship structure should take priority, as soon as women are considered as subjects, rather than as goods. the feminine requirement of a minus-one (which may serve as the basis of its monandry) and of an “homoinzun”26 who will be her own, rather than being a boy from the regiment, is not symmetrical with masculine exogamy. we will understand this distinction better if we remember that in order to bear leaving the circle, a man needs to transform a woman—the one who has chosen him—into woman, quite simply by locating the name-of-the-father in her. this is a law: in order for a man—in this case, a neurotic man—to be able to attach himself to a woman, he must discern a paternal signifier in her. this is how he deals with the trauma of the encounter with the other sex.27 in psychosis, this transformation of a woman into woman cannot be effected through the name-of-the-father as operator and therefore implies that man himself must become woman, “the woman that men are missing,” without whom, let us add, they are doomed to remain in the circle (which the psychotic will not fail to denounce) (“on a question,” 472). for a woman, it should be emphasized that she awakens the man by separating him from the group. this dissymmetry between masculine exogamy and a woman’s choice of a man is a part of the dissymmetry between what is generally attributed to man—the fantasy of the vereinigung—and what a woman reveals: love as an election, which implies a dissolution. we know the extent to which, for freud, the question of understanding femininity was both decisive and insoluble. he considered anatomical and psychological determinations to be insufficient and concluded with an observation that—although it does not give us a positive definition of what a woman is—does provide a differential assessment: a woman differs from a man because she is not a woman from the moment of her birth, but becomes one. man as being is opposed to woman as becoming. this is freud’s final lesson. why did freud, who had written about the choice of love-objects, not try to define women through their mode of choosing them? in any case, this is what lacan did. it can even be claimed that, in the sexuation table in encore, lacan provides a matheme for this mode of choice: the wall—erected by language—between the sexes can be crossed over from left to right—from the phallic side to the side that is notwhole—by following an arrow: → a (encore, 78). lacan’s comments on this arrow leave us in no doubt about how he schematizes mens’ choice of a love-object: “he is unable to attain his sexual partner, who is the other, except inasmuch as his partner is the cause of his desire” (encore, 80). after this, if we had the idea—and may god protect us from this—that there is a symmetry between the sexes (which would suppress their differences) we would expect a woman’s love-choice to be written as a →; this could be the matheme for the masculine cliché of woman as seducer. this is not at all, however, what lacan writes. through her choice of sexual partner, a woman inscribes herself in the phallic function:  woman→ ф. yet, on the other hand, she has a relation with the other, not through the intermediary of the a, but as radically barred. it does not seem risky to me to read the arrow, bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 76  woman→s() as indicating the feminine choice in love: it dissolves the set by extracting an element from it. beyond this, it should be noted that the capitalist discourse introduces the arrow, a →, in terms of the possible, as if the movement went from the not-whole to castration, and as if we could read it as a sketch of a supermarket of love and desire, offered up for the subject’s consumption. thus the capitalist discourse forecloses castration and, when all is said and done, also calls sexual difference into question. the capitalist discourse is jungian. this consideration opens up a path for assessing how this setting matters of love aside can be related to castration in the capitalist discourse. lacan, in his “guiding remarks for a convention on female sexuality,” recognizes the anti-entropic effects of feminine homosexuality, as they can be observed, for example, in the précieuses. he also notes in passing that the précieuses differed from the cathars, who in sundering good absolutely from evil, anticipated the capitalist paradise, or—and this may be the same thing—fueled a millenarianism, the effects of which are not always cheering. among the précieuses, who organized themselves in salons at the beginning of the seventeenth century, there is no doubt that women took the initiative in choosing a love-object. according to the classical analyses, such as paul bénichou’s, men who were admitted into the salon had been taken from the group of knights.28 this is a fair, if cavalier view. knights were gradually disappearing, thanks in part to the précieuses (and had, of course, been given their deathblow by cervantes, who had mocked the knight errant’s desire to preserve chivalry singlehandedly). in the salon, such knights were taught how to speak, rather than to kill or rape. it may well have been this “borrowing” of men to which molière objected, but this does not discredit the mode of choosing love-objects that the précieuses promoted. they are a perfect example of the civilizing work of women, which freud had glimpsed: the dissolving of the group of men and the constructing of a community that acted through dissemination. the amazons, the other example that comes to mind, raise thornier questions. they are known through greek mythology, beginning with homer. historians have said less about them, since they do not know who their historical prototypes were, or even whether they existed. one journalist-historian, lyn webster wilde, in on the trail of the women warriors, hypothesizes that they had been displaced from the southern to the northern edge of the black sea and beyond, towards ukraine, where numerous tombs of female warriors have been found.29 in this connection, i find it interesting that the oldest tomb (around 1200) of a female warrior to have been discovered was in colchis, in present-day georgia, the home of medea. the latter was accused of killing her two sons, just as certain greek authors had accused the amazons of infanticide. whether or not this is the case, there is one constant in this mytheme: the women chose the men whom they have defeated in battle, after which there was a celebration, the feast of roses, where each woman married the man whom she had conquered. the best-known of the amazons is penthesilia, bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 77 their queen, who fell in love with achilles at the siege of troy, and would have done anything to defeat him and take him away from the circle of the greeks. if, according, of course, to ancient greek authors, this circle represented the progress of civilization, then it is interesting that it was a barbarian who introduced matters of love into civilization. this is the paradox in which thanatos civilizes eros, which giorgio agamben seeks to account for in his stimulating work, homo sacer. in the myth, it is penthesilia who is defeated and dies; achilles, defeated in his turn by his love for her, embraces her, a rather sensational case of male necrophilia. heinrich von kleist’s play, penthesilia, reverses this situation by having penthesilia kill achilles. once he is dead, she eats him raw, having the honesty to do so herself, instead of giving this task to her dogs, as artemis had done with actaeon. how many a maid will say, her arms wrapped round her lover’s neck: i love you, oh so much that if i could, i’d eat you up right here; and later, taken by her word, the fool! she’s had enough and now she’s sick of him. you see, my love, that never was my way. look: when my arms were wrapped around your neck, i did what i had spoken, word for word: i was not quite so mad as it might seem.30 in such a context, it can be said that “a kiss, a bite,/the two should rhyme” (kleist, 145). the radical character of these actions provides a luminous insight into the mysterious cannibalistic primary identification (“medusa’s head,” 103). these women, in the throes of disgust, and whom penthesilia judges correctly to be mad, are not exempt from a condition that we find in bulimia: bulimics eat the father again and again, because they have not dared really to eat him, as penthesilia does. we know that in psychosis this “remake” of primary identification can take the form of psychotic ingestion. a moment ago, i mentioned agamben’s homo sacer, which is as important a reference now as michel foucault’s the birth of the clinic was in the 1960s. this book discovers a logical paradox that can only be solved topologically. homo sacer refers to a very specific roman law, which agamben found formulated in festus: the sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. it is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that “if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide.” this is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred.31 bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 78 agamben thus brings out a contradiction: death is a judicial punishment on the condition that it not take the form of a judicial punishment. now, to understand the logic at work here in as simple a way as possible: an element is subtracted from a set in such a way that it becomes impossible to reintegrate it into any set at all. this logic is the same as what presides over a woman’s amorous choice of a man. once achilles has been chosen by penthesilia, he can no longer be the greek whom he had once been.32 notes 1. this is a translation of the chapter entitled “la dérogation capitaliste” from pierre bruno, lacan, passeur de marx: l’invention du symptôme (toulouse: érès, 2010) 201–224. 2. this uses the schema of discourse from “television” which differs from the writing of the discourses found in “radiophonie” in the use of the crossed arrows. the specific matheme of the capitalist discourse can be found in lacan in italia. see jacques lacan, television: a challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment, ed. by joan copjec, trans. by denis hollier, rosalind krauss, and annette michelson (new york: norton, 1990) 13, jacques lacan, “radiophonie,” in autres écrits (paris: seuil, 2001) 403–447, and jacques lacan, “du discours psychanalytique,” in lacan in italia 1953 1978 (milan: la salamandra, 1978) 40. 3. the definitive form of this thesis may perhaps be found in lacan’s caracas seminar of august 1980: “what language can do best is to prove itself to be in the service of the death instinct.” see nicolas francion, almanach de la dissolution, (paris: navarin/seuil, 1986). 4. jacques lacan, “on a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis” in écrits: the first complete edition in english, trans. by bruce fink, héloïse fink, and russell grigg (new york: norton, 2006) 498. 5. jean-claude maleval, “elements pour une apprehension clinique de la psychose ordinaire,” janvier 2003. retrieved from <http://w3.erc.univ-tlse2.fr/pdf/elements_psychose_ordinaire. pdf>. 6. orwell, who worked as part of the british secret services after spending the spanish civil war in the international brigades, was not unambiguous in terms of his choice of camp. 7. “this touches on the fact that meaning [sens] is never produced except through the translation from one discourse to another.” jacques lacan, “l’étourdit,” in autres écrits, 480. 8. [see pierre bruno’s analysis of bertolt brecht’s saint joan of the stockyards in lacan, passeur de marx, 85-98 (translator’s note).] 9. [in france, pharmacists still have a role in suggesting medications to their customers (translator’s note)]. 10. in his book, comment taire le sujet [how to silence the subject], serge lesourd emphasizes the rising diagonal of a → and relates it to the matheme for perversion, thus connecting capitalism with the epiphany of a subject who is “capable of experiencing jouissance without any constraints.” without discussing directly this identification of the two mathemes, i would note that in the matheme of perversion, the ◊ of alienation/separation is placed between a and , rather than an arrow that is oriented in a single direction. it bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 79 should also be recalled that, according to lacan, perversion involves a logical protest that goes against normalizing identifications. see lesourd, serge, comment taire le sujet ?: des discours aux parlottes libérales. (toulouse: érès, 2006) and jacques lacan, le séminaire de jacques lacan. livre vi, le désir et son interprétation, 1958-1959, ed. by jacques-alain miller (paris: la martinière, 2013) 569. i thank marie-jean sauret for pointing out this passage to me. 11. in this respect, moreover, the discourse of the master, as the discourse of the unconscious, shows us the impossibility of commanding knowledge, while the analytic discourse works to “grip this [impossible] real.” 12. this writing can, moreover, be independent of any transcription of the spoken word, as can be seen in the use of the little arrows in quantum physics. see richard feynman, qed: the strange theory of light and matter, (princeton: princeton university press, 1985). 13. sigmund freud, the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud (london: hogarth press, 1953-1974), xxi (1960): “jokes and their relation to the unconscious,” 28. 14. jacques lacan, je parle aux murs: entretiens de la chapelle de sainte-anne, ed. by jacquesalain (paris: seuil, 2011) 96. 15. jacques lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis, ed. by jacques-alain miller, trans. by russell grigg (new york: norton, 2007) 206. 16. [this is a play on nicolas sarkozy’s campaign slogan during the presidential campaign of 2007: “work more to earn more” (translator’s note).] 17. [for a discussion of “sundering,” see pierre bruno’s article, “hyde and seek,” in this issue of s (translator’s note).] 18. jacques lacan, on feminine sexuality: the limits of love and knowledge, ed. by jacquesalain miller, trans. by bruce fink (new york: norton, 1998) 145. in further references, this text will be cited as encore. 19. jacques lacan, “the freudian thing,” in écrits: the first complete edition in english, 339. 20. marie-jean sauret, malaise dans le capitalisme (toulouse: presses universitaires du mirail, 2009) 171–213. i am, of course, not unaware that certain analysts consider the wolf man to be psychotic. 21. paul fort, “the round,” in jardin illustré de fables et de poésies: édition bilingue français/ anglais, trans. by jean-pierre lefeuvre (paris: publibook, 2011) 141. 22. jacques lacan, “guiding remarks for a convention on female sexuality” in ecrits: the first complete translation in english, 619. 23. marguerite duras, the ravishing of lol stein, trans. by richard seaver (new york: pantheon, 1986). lacan’s reading of this work can be found in “hommage fait à marguerite duras du ravissement de lol v. stein,” in autres écrits. 24. sigmund freud, xxi (1961): “civilization and its discontents,” 97. 25. claude lévi-strauss, the elementary structures of kinship, ed. by rodney needham, trans. by james harle bell and john richard von sturmer, (boston: beacon press, 1969) 479. bruno: the capitalist exemption s8 (2015): 80 26. “hommoinzun” is a play on “au moins un [at least one],” which introduces a reference to homme, man. 27. in “medusa’s head,” freud describes what he calls the “apotropaic” function: an image of castration, as terrifying as it may be, is better than the unthinkable confrontation with a hole that has no boundaries, which would be an absolute absence. see sigmund freud, xviii (1955): “medusa’s head,” 274. 28. paul bénichou, morales du grand siècle, (paris: gallimard, 1948). 29. lyn webster wilde, on the trail of the women warriors: the amazons in myth and history, (new york: thomas dunne, 2000). 30. heinrich von kleist, penthesilea: a tragic drama, trans. by joel agee (new york: harper perennial, 2000) 146. 31. giorgio agamben, homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life, trans. by daniel hellerroazen, (stanford: stanford university press, 1998) 71. 32. in psychoanalysis, there is the example of an element that serves as exception to the set: this is the real father, who as agent of castration, re-imposes the primacy of the living being over language. 126 the american journal of islamic social sciences 19:2 the new mamlukes: egyptian society and modern feudalism amira el-azhari sonbol syracuse, ny: syracuse university press, 2000. 292 pages. amira el-azhari sonbol has written an outstanding socio-politico-eco­ nomic analysis of the egyptian government and society over the last three centuries. this book brilliantly debunks the oriental despot model of analysis that has been imposed on scholarly studies of muslim societies. she achieves this with the aid of a "study of popular discourse." she emphasizes the need to relearn what culture is all about by examining how egyptians see themselves and their own relationships. she finds that egyptian society has not been static, waiting to be transformed from the outside, but dynamic, following its own cultural evolution. along the way, she notes the importance of distinguishing islamic revival from radicalism and terrorism. sonbol argues that eighteenth-century egypt has been misunderstood, forced into the absolutist mold that more properly characterizes today's egypt. eighteenth-century egypt reflected "social maneuverability" and the "rule of law." in the 19th and 20th centuries the egyptian state sought, with partial success, to establish itself as the "active creator" of law and order. a new form of mercantilism emerged that went beyond the mere con­ trol of imports and exports to the manipulation of all aspects of production and exchange to the benefit of the elites. in the nasser era, elements of socialism and nationalism were employed in the advancement of what was actually a form of state capitalism, in which the elites sought to extract rent from their hold on power. it was a feudal compact, in which the state's "right" to political allegiance was "reciprocated by the state's 'duty' to guarantee the security of the nation and provide its people with" the neces­ sities of life. sonbol critiques the translation of khassa as elite and 'ammah as gen­ eral pub i ic. the khassa are the people of power, wealth, and distinction, only one part of which retains hegemony at any given time. the khassa are too diverse (ruling elites, the military, and the business classes) to be considered an aristocracy. from time to time the ulema, the intellectuals and the pro­ fessionals have been their allies in legitimizing their power. the so-called modernization of the arab world has only been a strengthening of patriarbook review, 129 another element of duality, instituted in the twentieth century, was the division of crimes into two classes: social and political. this gave the state the power to crack down on the political opposition. even the public space was divided "into areas of usage by particular classes." the one exception was, of course, the mosque, which set the stage for the islamic resistance. the economic interests of the khassa always predominated, colored by the slogans of the particular movements of the moment. sonbol quotes milo­ van djilas' characterization of tito's yugoslavia as equally appropriate to nasser's egypt, that "socialist ownership" is really "ownership by the polit­ ical bureaucracy." a segment of the khassa had implanted itself in that bureaucracy and thus, it was no wonder that in economically stagnant egypt entrance into the civil service was perceived as the path to upward mobility. similarly, sadat's "liberalization" was not to undermine egyptian socialism, but simply "to facilitate the khassa 's trade monopoly with the outside world." ultimately, islam has an indispensable role in the cultural effort to end the duality in egyptian society. it was the pressure from the muslim brotherhood that forced the nationalist parties in egypt to communicate in arabic rather than french or english. today, sonbol concludes, egypt has estab lished a versatile civil society that can no longer be ignored by its political leaders. i would propose that the islamic movement in egypt, and elsewhere, must not waste this opportunity, and must avoid the trap of employing islamic jargon to mask a continuation of mercantilist policies and feudal structures. i mad a. ahmad presideat, miaaret of freedom institute bethesda, mary land changing societies & personalities, 2018 vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 143–160 http://dx.doi.org/10.15826/csp.2018.2.2.034 received 16 april 2018 © 2018 victor martianov accepted 5 june 2018 martianovy@rambler.ru published online 1 july 2018 article revolution and modernity1 victor martianov institute for philosophy and law, ural branch of russian academy of sciences abstract revolution simultaneously legitimises and denies the coordinate centre of the political order of modernity. it is difficult to describe the historical evolution from the early industrial, class-national forms of political organisation to late or global modernity other than in terms of a low-intensity revolution in the rate of social change. on the other hand, this permanent modernisation is not revolutionary in the sense that the periodic splits of elites, colour revolutions, coups and national liberation movements do not in and of themselves make demands for fundamental change in the value-institutional core of the political order of modernity. the potential for a new revolution can be consequent only on a repudiation of modernity in favour of an alternative political project having a greater capability for universalisation and totalisation. if, in legitimising its liberal consensus and nation-state models as the dominant political format of their synthesis, capitalism is the value-institutional quintessence of the political order of modernity, it is precisely in challenges to capitalism, the liberal consensus and nationalism that provide the most obvious means for crystallising revolutionary movements. from such a perspective, capitalism increasingly comes up against the global limits of its expansion, with class ideologies degenerating into a fragmented, technologically-intermediated populism, and nationstates experiencing increasing pressure from alternative political formats (city networks, multinational corporations, etc.) as they attempt to preserve the model of the social state. while various discourses and social groups profess to play the role of revolutionary utopias 1 the article is prepared with the support of rfbr grant no. 18-011-00211 “social consensus in russia: mechanisms for ideological and institutional regulation”. https://changing-sp.com/ 144 victor martianov and subjects, in essence, their ability to present a totalising alternative to late modernity remains an open question. a utopian systemic challenge to modernity, connected with a morally more justified configuration and associated hierarchy of legitimate violence, is yet to emerge, whether from within modernity or some source external to it. it is demonstrated that in the long term a serious (and possibly revolutionary) correction of the political order of modern societies will be capable of producing a rental transformation of capitalism and an expansion of the rent-class stratification mechanisms associated with precarisation, along with a reduction of social mobility trajectories and the prospects of active social groups. keywords revolution, violence, political order, legitimacy, modernity, late modernity, centre-periphery, global economics, political subject, consensus, rental society, precariat the political project of modernity as a permanent revolution? since all the ideological coordinates of the basic liberal consensus (immanuel wallerstein) are by definition reducible to it, revolution can be seen to form a sacred reference point in the political project of modernity, a kind of event analogue of the nativity of christ in christian chronology. in this constructed history, revolution appears freed from all references to divine prescriptions in the guise of the common will of the people regarding their common destiny. therefore, as ortega y gasset aptly notes, “…referring to the uprisings of medieval peasants and burghers as the precursors of the revolutions of modern times testifies to a complete absence of historical intuition. between them there is almost nothing in common. in rising up against his feudal masters, a medieval man was rebelling against the abuses of those masters. the revolutionary, conversely, does not rebel against abuses, but against the order of things” (ortega y gasset, 2016, p. 133). a revolution may create a heterarchy in which alternative sources of power are the condition for meaningful social changes but it is unable to maintain a stable political order associated with the daily regulation of the conflictual space of individual and collective freedom. as a result, “…the entire history of modernity as the story of different societies faced with the ‘absolute independence’ of the individual can be represented as a series of successful and unsuccessful attempts to achieve and maintain public order” (kapustin, 2010, p. 587). revolution is an initiating event for the political order of the new and newest times. however, it cannot provide final answers to the question of how the modern political order may be subsequently maintained. this order is one in which the initial principles of maximising both collective and individual autonomy entail endless contradictions and engender a mass of conflicts whose resolution can only be achieved with the institutional support of a hierarchy of values and interests in society. changing societies & personalities, 2018, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 143–160 145 a study of the history of the political order of modernity reveals a constant revision and re-creation of social hierarchies along with associated compromises. as a metaphor, revolution refers to an instant transfiguration, transmutation, resurrection and a new life; it appears as a chiliastic dream of a collective and instantaneous transition to an earthly paradise, or, in later ideological forms, a rational plan for the realisation of a utopia. however, revolution never definitively establishes anything in the constant movement and renewal of generations, social groups, technological structures, and the dominant configurations of values and interests. therefore, the revolution never reaches its final goals, which are ostensibly connected with a total change in relations between man, society and state. the stratification of revolutionary agents in the course of revolution leads to the attainment of the most radical goals being determined by terror, purges and mutual annihilation of the revolutionaries, who seek to monopolise the revolutionary ideology as the new basis of power. if the monopolistic claim of the revolutionary subject is successful, the new political order will become totalitarian; however, a compromise is more typically established between the outgoing and rising classes, with any social contradiction entailed by the former tending to be replaced by another inherent to the latter. in any case, the temporal unfolding of the revolution invariably involves the instrumental incorporation of the revolution by the revolutionary political subject into new structures of political hegemony. in their attempts to fix and routinise the achievements of the revolution, the subjects of revolution seize the coercive apparatus of the state; however, in so doing, the revolutionaries are themselves inevitably overtaken by the logic of the reproduction of the political order, transforming them into a new bureaucracy. if the usual political order is based on the legitimisation of violence, then the revolution appears both as the foundation of modernity and as an ineliminable challenge to it. the revolution confirms in practical terms the primary liberal thesis that the social order is not eternal but is the work of human hands. however, this is also why, being divided between finite and imperfect people, it cannot become finalised or its laws remain absolute and unchanged. for this, people would have to live forever, without the succession of generations or the movement of history. the revolution generates a modern political order, which offers alternative and morally more convincing grounds for violence than those operated by the estate-monarchical ancien régime. exemplary, classical revolutions concerned the demolition of the ancien régime, which did not possess the internal conditions and mechanisms for reform in the course of growing systemic contradictions of the changing social structure and background in which christian values were being eroded by new practices introduced by capitalism: “the policy of the medieval ‘petit bourgeois’ was to counterpose the privileges of the nobility with exactly the same privileges. city guilds and communes were famous for their narrow, suspicious and selfish spirit – even more so than feudal lords” (ortega y gasset, 2016, p. 138). in other words, the revolution is inevitably rethought during the process of the institutionalisation of modernity. from the initiating event, it is more confidently interpreted from the position of the new liberal consensus as political extremism, which threatens the modern political order. in this way, modernity is simultaneously https://changing-sp.com/ 146 victor martianov constituted by a legitimisation and a denial of the revolution, which, in destroying the ancien régime, brought it into existence. institutional modernity, then, is wholly derived from the revolutionary event that engendered it. revolution appears as the transcendental centre of modernity, to which, however, it does not belong completely, and therefore eludes attempts at complete control. however, at the same time, the above-noted centre legitimises this order from a sacred-symbolic space in which everyday and routine legitimation procedures lose their power. moreover, the question of a destructive/creative incursion or a return of this sacrosanct centre to the political order of modernity always remains open. in connection with this, the political order of modernism, as an epiphenomenon of the revolution, constantly strives to gain independence from it with the help of all kinds of institutions and procedures that aim to ensure its repeatability, its immutability and its self-identity outside of historical time. with a more detailed examination of contemporary political ontology, it can be noted that the ineradicable contradiction between the modern political order and revolution is not necessarily fatal. it can be said that, following the establishment of the revolution-event, modernity represents the same revolution, but a low-intensity revolution, unfolding across a long period of historical time. this is the undulatory or wave-like revolution that continues after the big bang that caused it and is associated with the endless changes and reconfigurations of the value-institutional core of the emergent society. however, if the basic legitimacy of the political order of modernity always refers to the revolution, to the fact that we continue to live within this unfolding historical event mediated by many years and generations, then an obvious question arises: in what can a revolutionary change consist here and now against the background the fact that modern society is based on the tradition of progress – of constant improving changes – as a social norm? modern societies may no longer require total revolutions. more important is the search for subtler socio-cultural adjustments that determine the effectiveness of the progress of each particular society. in such a system of coordinates, the absolute can only consist in change itself as a value. modernity counterposes the new morality of change to the customary morality of tradition, while at the same time strongly defending itself against any other radical changes that could undermine the new world. according to the thought of jean baudrillard, modernity “gives rise to a crisis of values and moral contradictions. thus, as an idea in which a whole civilisation recognises itself, modernity assumes a regulatory cultural function and thereby surreptitiously rejoins tradition.” (baudrillard, 1985, p. 424). here arises the image of modernity as a new tradition of controlled changes in the turbulent social order. in such a context, the true revolution will consist in a total rejection of the political project of modernity. since it is only revolution that can become a new absolute event (filippov, 2006, p. 108), superseding modernity in favour of a totalised alternative, an event that rejuvenates the very system of modern ideological coordinates that is substantiated by the liberal consensus. in the meantime, in place of total rejection, it is possible to observe predominantly limited utopias caused by the internal contradictions of modernity, which are, however, changing societies & personalities, 2018, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 143–160 147 unlikely to consist in its potential alternatives. these include, for example, the logic of postmodernism, acting as a method of intellectual self-criticism and self-correction of late modernity (martianov, 2012). the only revolution became a possibility within the new linear timeframe of modernity, in which there exists a utopian discourse concerning a possible alternative future capable of being realised in the space of collective freedom. this contradicts previous cyclical concepts of time, in which the future is predicated by the present, and the recurrence of historical cycles does not entail significant differences that would allow the past to be distinguished from the present and the future as fundamentally different states of society. at the political centre of the ancien régime was the pre-ordained divine tradition; this is essentially what was refuted by rationally utilitarian and liberal modernity. all the subsequent revolutions within modernity were naturally limited in character, since either comprising the victories of nations in the struggle for sovereignty and independence; or were presented as counter-revolutions in the form of partial kickbacks to the ancien régime; or they only led to a rotation of the elites and an upgrade of the existing version of modernity in the given society. this is the case irrespective of whether we are discussing the version of late modernity, ideas about multiple modernities or the alternative project of soviet modernity. in all cases, we are dealing with invariants within the self-referential system of modernism, which draws its legitimacy from the original act of its creation. this even applies, for example, in the case of the ussr, when the rational interpretation of the revolution as a whole still fits into the logic of liberal consensus in terms of its radical socialist invariant. moreover, the currently observed colour revolutions taking place under the conditions of late modernity do not assume an analogous level of system development of the alternative political project, being essentially a discourse of cultural reconstruction, whether involving the logic of optimisation, reform or correction of the liberal consensus and capitalist ontology, but never implying a direct repudiation of the latter. therefore, neither the struggle for sovereignty and periodic collapse of empires nor political upheavals or transition to different version/model of modernity can properly be referred to in terms of revolution, any more than the dozens of other cases of political convulsion taking place in specific modern societies. this is true even if the results of the latter, thanks to symbolic politics and the construction of another collective memory, become a palliative reference point in the chronology of the new political regime. thus, in fact, humanity has not yet experienced any new revolutions since the pulling down of the ancien régime. significant transformations of individual societies were associated primarily with a global transition to modernity and then to its late value-institutional versions. against this background, the historical transformation of the project of modernity is yet to lead to its revolutionary displacement of the alternative political project, despite all the fundamental differences between earlyindustrial, class and national modernity variants and its later versions taking the form of second, global, radical, fluid or singular modernity. in abandoning reliance on tradition, the value centre of the political order of modernity acquires a multifaceted character, which becomes the subject of https://changing-sp.com/ 148 victor martianov permanent coordination and recognition by key social groups. institutionally, it is constantly adjusted under the influence of parties, regions, ideologies, classes, states and endless co-ordination procedures: the activities of bodies of different branches of government, elections, referendums, public-political and trade union activities, mass communications, international interactions, etc. all these subjects of influence are in themselves ambivalent: they can support, change and/or destroy the basic liberal consensus that lies at the foundation of modernity. moreover, all these particular entities themselves claim ideological representation of the whole. therefore, in modern nations, the centre is always divided and implicit, being the subject of constant discussion or bargaining. however, any danger, catastrophe or external threat leads to a mobilisation of society, during the course of which the value centre is manifested and consolidated. the post-revolutionary stabilisation of a modern society is achieved by means of a consistent differentiation and empowerment of the subsystems of society in terms of the private conflicts that arise within them. here, it is necessary to ensure that the latter are solved at the lower and middle levels, not generalising and not ultimately covering the entire social system (luhmann, 2006). the paradox consists in the fact that the constant accumulation of internal contradictions never reaches a critical level. in every subsystem of society – politics, economics, law, art, etc. – special mechanisms for coordinating interests and facilitating partial, gradual changes that prevent revolutionary scenarios are being elaborated. on the basis of this modern political order, feudal political power was divided into autonomous spheres, in which private ownership, for the first time, became relatively independent of power (i.e. power ceased to be directly equivalent to ownership). as a result, politics as a zero-sum game, in which the winner takes all, became a means of permanently reconciling social interests within a preestablished time period (ankersmit, 2002). complicated procedures for instrumental, day-to-day legitimation of the political order of modernity, e.g., elections, referendums, rotation of elites, reconciliation of class and/or civil interests, turn the revolution into a ritual political reference point. the possibility of revising the conditions of social consensus through the political participation of citizens and the rotation of elites significantly reduces the severity of conflicts and limits the possibilities for their totalisation. an important role in smoothing political contradictions is played by the division of modernity into elective and functional bureaucratic elites, which allows the day-to-day, rational-functional goals of the state apparatus to be combined with the setting of strategic goals related to a reconciliation of the interests of the dominant social groups. the processes of systemic differentiation naturally lead to modern citizens being increasingly unwilling to place high hopes in the revolution under the conditions of a growing autonomy within private life and the structurally autonomous subsystems of modern society that limit the political sphere. nevertheless, the modern political order always contains the seeds of future revolution. appeals to the revolution in the context of legitimising and rhetorical power (in the case of its opponents, critical and practical) reveals the utopian space of the political order of modernity, proving that it is still capable of further improvement in public laboratories and unpredictable social experiments – and changing societies & personalities, 2018, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 143–160 149 therefore, in principle, a candidate for early abolishment in favour of an alternative project. therefore, the revolutionary challenges – whether cultural, economic, political – simply cannot accumulate in a sufficient volume for their own revolutionary resolution. a flexible political order either eliminates the initial causes of social unrest or actively incorporates new social forces. if it fails in this, a general reconfiguration takes place, during which meaningful social groups achieve recognition and places at the common table, thus establishing a new equilibrium. from this perspective, if the revolution consists in a disruption of the state, then it is only natural if the political logic of the state and the revolution are embroiled in insoluble conflict. according to the latest theories of the revolutionary process, it is not so much the historical class struggle as an elementary crisis of legal competency or a default on obligations to the population on the part of the government that in most cases becomes the mechanism by which broad social movements and revolutions uncontrolled by the elites are launched (goldstone, 2012; skocpol, 1979). in the first instance, the triggering factors tend to be default, malfunction, disintegration and delegitimisation of the state (political order). the revolution appears in the form of the establishment of a total self-organisation of society in the transition to a new social equilibrium by means of collective practices and institutions. a space of collective freedom for the realisation of various political utopias arises together with a new state assembly. here, an appeal to preservation of the political order (constitution, law, tradition) as a basic, unconditional value is directly comparable in terms of conferring political legitimacy with revolutionary calls for overthrowing this order. moreover, values associated with maintaining order prevail in the eyes of citizens under conditions of stability and the competency of the state; that is, during the overwhelming majority of history, except in situations of crisis and the collapse of states. in this context, locking in the results of the revolution is always connected with compromises, with the collapse and/or betrayal of utopias in favour of reaction and various conservative kickbacks. trade-off solutions, in principle, do not suit any of the social forces; however, they eventually allow them to be reconciled with them in exchange for ending the debilitating struggle between asserting a new utopia or maintaining the old order. sooner or later the state is once again recognised as an indispensable public good and a kind big brother. in the context of the interconnected world economy of late modernity, substantial doubts concerning the possibility of a classical revolution at the scale of individual states are raised due to their growing global interdependence. national communities are increasingly becoming only private moments in the movement of more general background processes associated with an accumulation of the contradictions inherent in capitalism as well as demographic, technological and institutional transformations entailed by late-modern societies. in this situation, it makes little difference what kinds of social forces in a particular society invoke and uphold the mechanisms of social change, whether these be counter-elite, marginalised, precarious, working class, middle class, liberation movements, different minorities, etc. from this perspective, a given state can be considered as merely an initial platform for the permanent global revolution. this key idea was carried by the political https://changing-sp.com/ 150 victor martianov thought of the left throughout the entire twentieth century. actually, the problem is of a rather different nature, viz. whether it is possible to initiate a revolution under conditions when the elites and the majority of citizens are as close in terms of their human qualities, their initial rights, education, morals and opportunities as never before in history? accordingly, the revolution, both as a concept and as an event, is increasingly seen in metaphorical terms. as such, it is subject to constant deferment, which becomes comparable to eternity. at the same time, mechanisms for procedural legitimisation of changes within the tradition of modernity are strengthened in the form of a permanent reconfiguration of the value-institutional core of late-modern society for the purposes of self-preservation and the prevention of constantly arising conflicts, challenges and threats. the crisis of late-modern subjectivity: from class-consciousness to the schizophrenic subject the spectre of the revolution, always hovering over the political order of modernity, draws its strength from the fact that any citizen can potentially exercise his or her inalienable right as a member of a political society to represent his interests in his personal capacity, take actions and make attempts to change the political order. for the most part, this allows the hegemonic disciplinary mechanisms to be effectively ignored or bypassed along with the regulatory procedures of political representation designed to control the political energy of the masses, which, strictly speaking, also constitute the routine institutional framework of the political order of modernity. active citizens and social groups that represent themselves and do not need intermediaries or representatives thus comprise the revolutionary political core of modernity. these are the kantian adult citizens who dare to be guided by their own minds and to act without external permits and approvals, without power of attorney and without guarantors. this individual and collective political action, proceeding according to the logic of the revolutionary rupture with approved actions and procedures, perforce reveals the constructed and conventional nature of the political order that presented itself as monolithic and unchanging in its tautological discourse. of course, on the part of the beneficiaries of a particular political order, uncontrolled political activity and/or mobilisation of the population by non-system actors is traditionally represented as rioting teenagers, freaks, office plankton or fifth columnists, i.e. as the actions of those who reject political maturity and/or expose their conscious or unconscious dependence on foreign interests. on the other hand, the logic of street democracy is structurally analogous to the logic of a given present government, when it is shown by new leaders of public opinion that the official representatives of the people, by acting in their own, particular – not popular – interests, have lost legitimacy. thus, it is obvious that direct democracy cannot ensure the effective functioning of complex and geographically dispersed political communities of modernity, in which representative mechanisms of expression and the harmonisation of collective interests predominate. however, the latent changing societies & personalities, 2018, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 143–160 151 mechanisms of direct democracy come to the fore in a situation in which a political order based on representation is faced by a revolutionary crisis (bikbov, 2012). the revolution assumes as its key feature the emergence of alternative sources of political order (heterarchy) as a result of the rise and subsequent fall of mass political subjectivity (kapustin, 2015, p. 7). alternative subjects are directly connected with the permanent threat of revolution in the course of expanding and intensifying conflicts already present in society. therefore, the dominant elite seeks to discredit any non-systemic political subject by describing it with the help of a variety of marginal and peripheral non-norm codes, whereby other actors appear as terrorists, extremists, cynics, agents of influence, youth manipulated by such agents, as lacking the necessary competencies, etc. however, even when proclaiming the pathology or death of a revolutionary political subject, the state cannot stop the movement of history. the disciplinary logic of desubjectivisation and depersonalisation, as an attempt to build a total biopolitics of power, will only lead to a growth in the accursed share of things (baudrillard), which attracts to itself all that is excluded from the discourse of power as an indispensable element of the antinomy of power. as a result, the emergence of a revolutionary situation, in which “the revolution can be understood not as a reversal of the top and bottom, when the subordinate group or ‘lower classes’ suddenly intercept power or become ‘the elite’, but as an uprising of those segments of the population who are convinced that they are bearers of the idea of the state or ‘raison d’état’” (hestanov, 2012, p. 58). the current pessimism in assessing the possibility of a future revolution is closely connected with the problem of the disintegration of effective collective action, the political subject and the capacity of states themselves under the conditions of late modernity (rossiya v poiskakh ..., 2016, pp. 78–104). the paradoxical consequences of a state strategy that seeks to monopolise political subjectivity, thus creating new actors in the revolutionary logic of heterarchy (martianov, 2009), coexist with a number of other processes leading to an overall weakening of political subjectivity in late-modern societies. socio-political, economic and cultural forms are increasingly breaking away from the everyday experience of individuals. this gap between the individual and society, leading to an increasing inaccessibility and unknowability of the latter, is compensated by ideology and mythology, whose significance as a connecting link of individual preferences and collective prescriptions can only increase. as a result of the revolution, society came to accept experimental social practices and concepts that previously took place at its periphery and were the object of ridicule, its carriers ignored, suppressed or persecuted. however, in the situation of the reconfiguration of the social structure, these excessive, heretical, marginal and even criminal notions turn out to be in demand by a new political order (lobovikov, 2015). the revolution realises the structural possibilities into which the society has already matured, but at the same time it continues to think of itself in terms of the relations and hierarchies of social interests and groups, whose configurations and relationships experience ever greater deformations. on the one hand, a stalemate situation arises when modernity fails to accumulate sufficient contradictions for the political order to be disturbed by revolution https://changing-sp.com/ 152 victor martianov despite the many individual conflicts by which the society may be permeated at local, national and global levels. on the other hand, when differentiation and complication occur in contemporary societies, the disintegration of public spaces makes it difficult to maintain the usual hierarchies and instead promotes revolutionary heterarchies. simultaneously, alternative axiological grounds for the political order and common good arise and a search for new ways of assembling sociality and principles of stratification is set into motion. small groups and groups with weak social ties begin to have more effective identities and cultural codes than blurred economic macroclasses deprived of their former political subjectivity. the natural result of these transformations is the spread of the schizophrenic type of social subject, which loses its ability to effectively organise its interests over the course of history. the schizophrenic postmodern subject loses the ability to perceive time and think historically. accordingly, it cannot deliver utopia, because it lacks desires or hopes that underpin collective action according to the utopian impulse (jameson, 2004). the space of history is entirely obscured by the space of culture that simulates history. accordingly, the actions of schizophrenic subjects (consumer class, creative class, middle class, etc.), taking place within a culturally coded space that cannot be taken for reality itself, turn out to be the actions of a predominantly symbolic order that do not – and cannot – lead to changes in the socio-political reality. as a result, they lose the ability to capture social changes in time or create revolutionary utopias oriented towards the future as an alternative to the present. however, from the standpoint of preserving the political order, the insensitivity of such a subject to the past or the future is interpreted positively, as a sign of its freedom in the present, despite occluding the entire chronological horizon of possibilities. summarising the interim result, we can say that revolutions do not create the political, economic and cultural order of modernity directly. formulating more precisely, we can remark that revolutions create new individual and social subjects, which, by virtue of their extrinsic nature relative to the ancien régime, are able to create a different order. however, the formation and strengthening of the new political order will inevitably be associated with the transformation and extinction of revolutionary actors. the ability to create utopias is the historical mission of a kind of political demiurge, who, by virtue of their extrinsicality to the old and new orders – their intermediacy – feel themselves to be all-powerful within that specific historical moment. but the revolution in its deployment instantly corrects and dismisses its creators, as, for example, the democraticallyand republicanistically-inclined french aristocracy of the second echelon: “in the terror of 1793–94, the internal horror of the jacobins was externally manifested: they saw their terrible mistake and wanted to correct it with the guillotine, but, no matter how many heads they chopped off, they still bowed their own to the strength of the ascending social stratum. everyone bowed to that which overpowered the revolution and reaction, which flooded the old forms and filled them with itself, because it was the only active and modern majority; sieyès was speaking more accurately than he knew when he said that the third estate was ‘everything’. the third estate – or commoners – were not born in the revolution, but were ready with their own traditions and customs, which were alien to changing societies & personalities, 2018, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 143–160 153 the other tune of the revolutionary idea. they were treated roughly by the aristocracy and kept in third place; liberated, they trampled the dead bodies of their liberators to introduce their own order” (herzen, 1946, p. 410). accordingly, the ability of the political order of late modernity to prevent revolution is straightforward, not least due to the rapid erosion of the former social classes of the demiurge. the extrinsic – whether to pre-modernity or to modernity – political subject disappeared; the present domineering subjects consist wholly within modernity. and for as long as the unpredictable revolution fails to wrest some people from modernity, they will lack a sufficiently strong collective subjectivity, since this only arises during a revolution. until then, political utopias will not appear, because utopias do not precede revolutions, but are formulated during their process by new actors. undoubtedly, prior to the outbreak of a revolution, there are political change discourses as, for example, the work of rousseau, voltaire and the encyclopaedists; however, these can serve only as preliminary material for revolutionary utopias. nevertheless, the landmark “sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind” was only written by nicolas de condorcet at a time when the french revolution was in full swing; in general, key modern ideologies took shape only as a result of subsequent reflection on the revolutionary transition to a new social state. thus, the prospect of a revolutionary alternative to modernity is closely related to the possibilities for continuing the reproduction of ideologies and utopias that totalise social reality within the structures of group experience. totalisation generates an image of society that is oriented towards the re-creation of its integrity. this is true even if the received cognitive coordinates of society are recognised by other interpreters as subjective, vulnerable and ideological. the creation of ideologies and utopias as a means of cognitive mapping, allows the subjectivity and identity of a particular social class to be recreated, including through the construction of its social coordinates relative to other classes. conversely, the logic of preventing revolution is manifested in the form of attempts to remove conflict and class content from politics, replacing them with various palliatives in the form of homo economicus, metaphors of the natural market and various theories of modernisation. this tendency involves the introduction of universal standards into all areas of life, releasing them from historical traditions and cultural contexts. however, a closer look proves that, on the one hand, the theory of modernisation and democratic/market transition, and, on the other hand, civilisational discourses on the insurmountability of cultural differences and ruts of tradition, are merely forced palliatives of class ideologies in the situation of the weakening and schizophrenisation of the established political subjects of modernity. these discourses do not exist as a means to understand the particular societies in respect of which they are applied, but rather in order to make them more similar to other societies acting as a target sample. or, alternatively, they serve to justify the unavoidable differences from the target societies, which by virtue of their uniqueness also free themselves from an understanding of their society from a comparative-historical perspective. thus, the idea of modernity presented in a neutral form as modernisation, i.e. the permanent achievement of an increasingly modern state of affairs, is analogous to an endless https://changing-sp.com/ 154 victor martianov cul-de-sac for a society entirely lacking in utopias that go beyond economic (capitalism) or cultural (civilisation) determinism. however, if (a) capitalism in (b) legitimising its liberal consensus and nation-state as the dominant political format of their synthesis, comprises the value-institutional quintessence of the political order of modernity, it is precisely in challenges to (a) capitalism and (b) the liberal consensus and nationalism that the most obvious means for crystallising revolutionary movements are presented. it seems that in late-modern societies, these challenges and the corresponding ideological/utopian formats under the conditions of stagnation are increasingly likely to be determined by economic means. the geographic and technological expansion of the capitalist world system during a particular historical period (the glorious thirty from 1945– 1975) made it possible to smooth out internal class contradictions through extramarket regulation and compensation for the costs of capitalism in the form of the welfare state and an expanding middle class. however, under the conditions of suspended economic growth, robotisation and a decline in the status of working people, such stabilisers cease to compensate for the growing costs and noneconomic challenges to capitalism associated with the growth of the unemployed and the precariat, as well as a decrease in the ability of states to perform protective functions for these sectors of citizens. in his influential book one-dimensional man, herbert marcuse concluded that “underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colours, the unemployed and the unemployable. they exist outside the democratic process; their life is immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. thus, their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not.” (marcuse, 1964, pp. 260–261). over half a century after these words were written, social forces that are ostensibly trying to torpedo it in the name of these or those alternatives continue to mature within global modernity. these social forces comprise a wide range of radical movements (fundamentalists, alternative globalists, anarchists, new luddites, environmentalists, different minorities, etc.), usually constructing their ideological niches in the form of private utopias aimed at solving private challenges, problems and contradictions in modern society. it seems that in the context of this process there will be an increasingly diverse cultural determination of group interests and collective actions as well as the value of the social status and social capital of its participants. however, the particular nature of the criticism of modernity becomes the chief problem of the global revolutionary movement. political ultra-projects do not permit the possibility of a total alternative to modernity, to all intents and purposes replacing it with a discourse of justice, restoration of a balance of interests, or discourses related to the repair of modernity, but ultimately only strengthen the political order that constantly incorporates those movements into the mainstream and periodically satisfies protest demands. this problem is not resolved by the efforts of leftist forces against the backdrop of global challenges to resuscitate familiar ideological coordinates and class struggle from the times of national-industrial modernity (kagarlitsky, 2017, p. 264–265). if changing societies & personalities, 2018, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 143–160 155 the lives of the majority are ipso facto significantly affected by the consequences of revolution, the field within such potential changes may take effect is becoming less and less directly related to politics. under the conditions of late modernity, the revolutionary potential of social change is increasingly fuelled by the possible consequences of the implementation of non-political, private utopias. this occurs, for example, when biomedical or technological progress replaces human workers in production processes, resulting in capability for work no longer comprising the basic usefulness resource of the majority of the population in the sense of providing automatic access to various benefits. technological progress, a sharp increase in life expectancy (and consequently, in the number of disabled and old people), universal basic income, unlimited sources of energy and the management of biological mutations can have unexpected political consequences comparable to the class revolution in terms of transforming the political order and the principles of its stratification. the new revolution as the problem of a political alternative to late modernity revolution feeds on utopia as the energy of the future. thus, revolutions are caused by utopian discourses associated with social forces, whose constituents would like to expand their rights and opportunities by gaining control over their own destiny. however, under the conditions of late modernity, the utopian dimension is experiencing increasing difficulties in comparison with those alternatives that make their appeal to the past and the present. the future, in common with the metanarratives associated with its justification, is increasingly being viewed as something vague, suspicious and unconvincing. as a result, it turns out that “a revolution in the usual sense is no longer possible, since there are no intentions for a break with the past and associated breakthrough into the future, dynamism is suspicious, and violence is unacceptable” (puchkov, 2017). the problem of the possibility of a new revolution is not only that the value of order/stability is almost always perceived to be more fundamental than the value of change. it consists in the search for an alternative that would be attractive to active social forces, which would lead to a conscious rejection of the liberal consensus of modernity that, in one version or another, continues to dominate. alternatives to this consensus at the present time are generally limited to partial utopias in which, instead of recognising and discussing real social and economic problems, conflicts and interests, a process of continuing mythologisation takes place. for example, this may be seen in the (conservative) form of reasoning based on the concept spiritual bonds or (liberal) calls for the redistribution of social hierarchies and resources in favour of some minority or other. alternatively, it may be seen in the form of calls for the destruction of the social order, which often emanate from peripheral social forces or requirements that actually become ends in themselves under conditions vaguely referred to in terms of some alternative future. this leads not so much to an overcoming of modernity as to various kickbacks from modernity, conceded in favour of the archaising and strengthening of pre-modern and anti-modern values, https://changing-sp.com/ 156 victor martianov practices and institutions, especially in societies drifting from the centre of the capitalist world-economy towards its margins and periphery. here, the question of the global subject of the revolutionary changes of late modernity and its moral advantages with respect to the hegemons also remains unclear. negation of the political order results in a transcendence of the act of cultural disavowal or revolutionary breakdown itself. despite the growing social base from which revolutionary demands are being issued, those ideological options for the liberation of human nature from the normative order of late modernity not related to a return to the ancien régime are yet to acquire a systemic character. the ability of ultra-movements to organise systemic collective action in the context of a crisis of class subjectivity and a general decline in political subjectivity in the consumer society raises multiple questions. the repudiation of ideological meta-narratives, whether from class struggle – or even from the more blurred cultural hegemony – in favour of agonistic democracy (mouffe, 2000, pp. 80–107), actually dissolves the political subject in cultural discourses, depriving him of the necessary initial political ontology. here another question naturally arises concerning the social regulators of a possible post-modern society, since, in the field of mechanisms of cultural domination, late modernity is permeated with an effective mixture and eclecticisation of its entire previous ideological heritage. it turns out that late capitalism is rather successful at commodifying and expanding into fields of non-economic regulators, such as morality, law, art and politics, which are potentially capable of producing alternative non-capitalist hierarchies and orders of social life. finally, in favour of the political order of late modernity against the backdrop of weak alternatives, there is a strong practical argument: never before in history have such a large proportion of the population had such opportunities to exercise individual freedom as in the present. consequently, contemporary revolutionaries lose the struggle for the interpretation of human nature and the generation of normative ideas concerning the desires and purposes of human existence (jameson, 1983, pp. 1–14). thus, it is becoming increasingly difficult for new utopias entering the field of political imagination to challenge the capitalist order underpinned by the developed mass consumer culture with a call for collective political action. therefore, the growing stagnation of global capitalism paradoxically leads to demands for a disciplinary and regulatory strengthening of the political order of nation-states. this is due to the latter being seen as counterbalances to growing discontent with the transformation of the capitalist global economy associated with rising unemployment, a precarious labour market and the intensification of various forms of geographical and social inequality. it can be observed that the most significant threats to the political order of modernity are generated for and by itself: “western modernity – first the european manifestation, then the american – has for centuries maintained the conviction that it is nothing more than contemporaneity in action and that its goal is not the effective mobilisation of resources, but rather the replacement of traditions with reason.” (touraine, 2014, p. 99) indeed, universal reason in politics proved impossible, disintegrating into its various conflicting and class-based variants. against the backdrop of the crisis between economic classes and within instrumental reason, ideas concerning the guaranteeing changing societies & personalities, 2018, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 143–160 157 of commonality, universality, justice and progress on a new round of globalisation are once again returning to political nations; meanwhile, global modernity is facing ever more insoluble challenges. as a result, a future revolution may ensue from the exhaustion of the communication and dialogue opportunities for key social actors: “a revolution begins with the negation of the other and ends with the disintegration or destruction of the negating actor; only chaos or absolute power can follow it” (touraine, 2014, p. 112). the possibility of an active, including revolutionary, return of peoples to direct participation in their common history and collective destiny under the conditions of late modernity remains an open and debatable political issue. however, when the mass apathy of a schizophrenic consumer subject is combined with endless modernisation as a mode of living under the conditions of modernity, the revolutionary utopia disappears over the event horizon. a global crisis having the potential to envelop many modern societies and launch uncontrolled events seems extremely unlikely; its genesis from the contradictions of capitalism, which have already existed for 500 years, is also rather doubtful, although the corresponding forecasts are issued with enviable consistency (wallerstein et al., 2013). it is suggested that the possibility of a new revolution can be realised only on the basis of a putative repudiation of modernity in favour of an alternative political project having a greater capability for universalisation and totalisation. if, in legitimising the liberal consensus and nation-state as the dominant political format of its synthesis, capitalism is the value-institutional quintessence of the political order of modernity, it is precisely in challenges to capitalism, the liberal consensus and nationalism that provide the most obvious means for crystallising revolutionary movements. at present, despite postmodernist criticisms, the crisis of the market model of capitalism and mass democracies, the weakening of the social state and other challenges to the political order of late modernity all relate to internal transformations or the archaisation of modern societies rather than any real alternative. finally, the global scale of late modernity also requires another scale to be achieved by its potential revolutionary subjects. if the modern revolution was initiated in key european polities, then revolution, as an alternative to late modernity, presupposes a transnational rise in political subjectivity together with a corresponding coordination and institutionalisation that transcends territorial states. this presupposes the emergence of an effective counterbalance to the current global economy in the form of a future global policy, which, being subordinated to the interests of the leading national states, is still very much in its infancy. while various discourses and social groups profess to play the role of revolutionary utopias and subjects, in essence, their ability to present an alternative to modernity remains an open question. thus, a utopian systemic challenge to modernity, connected with a morally more justified configuration and associated hierarchy of legitimate violence, is yet to emerge. in the long term, a serious (and possibly revolutionary) negative correction of the political order of modern societies will be capable of producing a rental transformation of capitalism and an expansion of the rent-class stratification mechanisms associated with precarisation, along with a reduction in the social mobility trajectories and other prospects of active social groups. the present global exhaustion of the market-based https://changing-sp.com/ 158 victor martianov development model, which is oriented towards the infinite expansion of profit, reveals the contours of a future society without economic growth (policy challenges, 2015). robotisation has in no way compensated for the costs of technological progress in terms of filling society with superfluous people, while simultaneously turning them into increasingly dangerous classes: the precarious, the unemployed and the various minorities concealed in public policy blind spots or openly ignored by the state (ford, 2015). the discovery of resource limits applying to free, self-regulating markets leads to an increase in protectionism and nationalism, leading to the tendency to replace market competition mechanisms with the forceful redistribution of markets and resource chains. in an increasingly entrenched society without mass labour, mass taxpayers or profitable capital, the resource crisis affecting the social state model is exacerbated. the depletion of its resource base is accompanied by a growth in statedependent social groupings. as a result, a rental political order is formed, in which market communications are replaced by hierarchical models of distributive exchanges, which are increasingly controlled by the state. social stratification increasingly depends not on market-based class formation, but on the access of citizens and social groups to the distribution of rental resources as regulated by the state. these trends lead to the dominance of rent-seeking economic behaviour (davydov & fishman, 2015). mass behaviour associated with the search for rents that have a guaranteed status is increasingly becoming a more profitable strategy than risky entrepreneurial activity or the desire to take advantageous positions within a shrinking and increasingly unreliable labour market. paradoxically, the most urgent challenge faced by existing mechanisms for coordinating collective interests is the archaisation or simulation of modernity, in which neo-patristic, neo-patrimonial models of political order unite power, law and property. a potentially revolutionary situation arises when modernity turns into a new non-modernity that is incapable of transforming itself or effectively responding to the constantly arising challenges and threats of the volatile contemporary society. this situation becomes especially clear at the periphery of global capitalism. here, the beneficiaries of peripheral capitalism strive to preserve the established political order, in which the radicalisation of various contradictions is intensified by their nonsolubility. to this end, political elites may attempt to freeze fluid contemporaneity (z. bauman), something that is impossible by definition. such rigid and non-modular institutional states can, as a rule, only be reversed by revolutionary means. therefore, the likelihood of a revolution is higher on the periphery of the global system, where, as a consequence of a variety of subtle sociocultural configurations, contemporary societies lack the flexibility demonstrated by the countries of the centre. finally, in the course of its development, the revolution always goes beyond the 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(2015). retrieved from: http://www. oecd.org/economy/policy-challenges-for-the-next-fifty-years.pdf puchkov, p. (2017). sovremennyye “revolyutsii” / revolyutsiya i sovremennost’ [modern “revolutions” / revolution and modernity]. retrieved from: http://gefter.ru/ archive/21809#anchor1 martianov, v. s., & fishman, l. g. (eds.) (2016). rossiya v poiskakh ideologiy: transformatsiya tsennostnykh regulyatorov sovremennykh obshchestv [russia in search of ideologies: the transformation of value regulators of modern societies]. moscow: political encyclopedia. skocpol, t. (1979). states and social revolutions: a comparative analysis of france, russia and china. cambridge university press. touraine, a. (2014). ideya revolyutsii [the idea of revolution]. sotsiologicheskoye obozreniye, 13(1), 98–116. baudrillard, j. (1985). modernité [modernity]. encyclopaedia universalis. paris: encyclopaedia universalis, vol. 12, 424–426. http://www.oecd.org/economy/policy-challenges-for-the-next-fifty-years.pdf http://www.oecd.org/economy/policy-challenges-for-the-next-fifty-years.pdf http://gefter.ru/archive/21809#anchor1 http://gefter.ru/archive/21809#anchor1 gender, politics and islam therese saliba, carolyn allen, judith a. howard, eds. chicago and london: university of chicago press, 2002. 354 pages. though women’s studies and islamic studies have not often met in scholarly discourse, gender, politics and islam is evidence that they should. this book is a testament to the breadth and quality of scholarship in muslim women’s studies. all of its articles originally appeared in signs: journal of women in culture and society, of which therese saliba, carolyn allen, and judith a. howard, previously served as editors and associate editors. saliba’s competent introduction summarizes the articles and promptly debunks simplistic understandings of muslim women and their lives, and book reviews 107 highlights their diverse and complex engagements with religion, politics, society, and culture. not only does this introduction speak for and to nuanced understandings of islam and muslims, it also links feminist struggles transnationally and explicitly positions itself against the exceptionalism of muslim women. although all nine chapters were previously published, this volume merits separate publication for several reasons. first, it promotes good scholarship on muslim women. second, it undoubtedly will reach a larger audience as a collection than as individual articles. this audience includes not only those outside academia, but also academics who might not normally read specialized women’s studies journals – many in the field of islamic studies, traditionally defined, for example. moreover, the book could be used effectively in teaching islamic studies and women’s studies; indeed, some of its articles are already being used this way. though the articles were not written for a general audience, many could easily appeal to the interested nonspecialist. finally, these serious, scholarly essays complement each other and represent a breadth of disciplinary approaches (e.g., literary studies, sociology, history, anthropology, and political science), geographical regions (e.g., iran, pakistan, palestine, lebanon, yemen, bangladesh, and canada), and issues (e.g., legal rights, religious rituals, political empowerment, reception politics, and islamic feminism, among many others). despite this breadth, each essay speaks extremely well to at least several others and highlights muslim women’s strategies and practices of crafting spaces for action and engagement in politics and society. valentine moghadem’s “islamic feminism and its discontents: towards a resolution of the debate” provides an overview of iranian women’s many contrasting positions in relation to their rights in the islamic republic. she also draws useful comparisons between u.s. liberal feminists and iranian islamic feminists, thereby providing an analysis of current trends, issues, and debates. “the politics of feminism in islam,” by anouar majid, continues this inquiry into women crafting a feminist theory and practice that engages islam. like moghadem, he sees a positive side to iran’s islamic feminist movement, as it resists “the effects of global capitalism and contributes to a rich egalitarian polycentric world” (p. 87). in “the power paradox in muslim women’s majales: north-west pakistani mourning rituals as sites of contestation over religious politics, ethnicity and gender,” marie elaine hegland explores what 108 the american journal of islamic social sciences 21:1 she calls women’s “paradoxical power” derived from doing ritual religious work. hegland uses a definition of “fundamentalist” women that is at odds with many of the other articles, which makes an interesting point of comparison. julie peteet treats activist mothering practices among palestinian women in refugee camps in the west bank and lebanon in “icons and militants: mothering in the danger zone.” comparing and contrasting locations of activist mothering, she shows women’s strategies for political involvement through their mothering practices. gabriele von bruck’s “elusive bodies: the politics of aesthetics among yemeni elite women” contextualizes the performance of gender through women’s bodies among the elite of sana`a. based on her research showing how bodily adornment practices constitute women’s personhood and social identity, she argues that women’s gender roles should be distinguished between married and unmarried women. these three anthropological articles are followed by elora shehabbudin’s strong contribution, “contesting the illicit: gender and the politics of fatwas in bangladesh.” shehabuddin marshals empirical evidence gathered during field research and convincingly weaves it into a theoretical discussion showing how women engage with law, society, politics, and culture. she argues that the debate over fatawa in bangladesh is not a matter of islamism versus secularism, but rather of how social control is exercised over the lives and bodies of poor, rural women. s. m. shamsul alam’s study, “women in the era of modernity and islamic fundamentalism: the case of taslima nasrin of bangladesh,” outlines the bangladeshi context in which nasrin worked and which is likely unfamiliar to most readers of signs and of this volume alike. though this piece is weaker than others in the volume, as a reception study it is a good companion to the preceding and following articles. amal amireh’s “framing nawaal el saadawi: arab feminism in a transnational world” should be required reading in classrooms dealing with muslim women, literature in translation, and cross-cultural issues more generally. much of the “knowledge” about arabs and muslims, women specifically, in europe and north america is transmitted through the extremely mediated translations of writers like saadawi. to confront the politics of translation, publication, and reception of arab and muslim writers and their works is one of the most important tasks incumbent upon all of us in the field today. amireh’s article represents a major shift in how book reviews 109 arab and muslim writers, and women in particular, are read in different contexts. “muslim women: negotiations in the third space” by shahnaz khan complements amireh’s engaged reading practice. framing her study with postcolonial theory and the notion of a “third space” that can be opened up within canadian multiculturalism for muslim women, khan uses material from interviews with two muslim women in order to illuminate her points convincingly. one drawback to the collection is that the extensive footnotes demarcating the authors’ uses of terminology and concepts can become overbearing at times. though they are interesting and helpful in gauging an author’s stance and for teaching purposes, editing these within the collection would have made the book more accessible. additionally, why does the word gender, but not women, appear in the title? not all of the pieces engage with gender as a concept, though they all treat questions related to women and many deal explicitly with feminism. in addition, it might have been useful to highlight more prominently when each essay was originally published (though the dates do appear in small print). despite these minor criticisms, this book makes an important contribution to the fields of women’s studies and islamic studies and heralds stimulating new developments in muslim women’s studies as well. michelle hartman institute of islamic studies mcgill university montreal, canada 110 the american journal of islamic social sciences 21:1 kemandirian aparatur sipil negara (asn) melalui literasi keuangan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ mailto:gambarialiyu@gmail.com │ │ the religion of islām how it was rapidly grow, spread and continued even until after the prophet's (may god bless him and grant him peace) death (yahya, 2004). within a few decades, islām spread to the entire world including africa, and reached spain in the west and india in the east. the author discuses about the roles of the arabs, who had been tending their flocks in the desert just a few decades ago, were now the rulers of an empire due to the reason, traditions and awareness and they had acquired through religion of islām. this was the fastest growing empire increasingly. within 100 years, the muslim empire spread over an immense area and firmly established itself in different areas. in this huge geographic area, many different religious denominations existed side by side. most of them, however, were composed of christians and jews. from the above literature review, it’s clear that the present study, the researcher intended to have bridge the gap up on it. therefore, this present study the role of elijah muhammad in the spread of islam in the modern america has critically analyzed in the in this paper. │ │ ebcid:com.britannica.oec2.identifier.articleidentifier?articleid=42913&library=eb&query=null&title=nation%20of%20islam#9042913.toc ebcid:com.britannica.oec2.identifier.articleidentifier?articleid=33729&library=eb&query=null&title=wallace%20d.%20fard#9033729.toc │ ebcid:com.britannica.oec2.identifier.articleidentifier?articleid=50305&library=eb&query=null&title=malcolm%20x#9050305.toc ebcid:com.britannica.oec2.identifier.articleidentifier?articleid=2519&library=eb&query=null&title=louis%20farrakhan#9002519.toc │ │ │ │ faye.indd s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 10 & 11 (2017-18): 180-194 e s t h e r f a y e i l n ’ y a p a s d e r a p p o r t s e x u e l … ou pire: the discourse of capitalism o u pire, … or worse? what is it that could possibly be worse … and worse than what? and why not write the worst? … ou pire is the title of jacques lacan’s nineteenth seminar of 1971-1972. anticipating these same questions from his audience, lacan begins with a comment on his choice of the adverbial form of ‘pire’ for his title. as an adverb, lacan explains, “worse” calls for a verb, a verb from which it has been separated, its absence represented by the three dots of the ellipsis that precede the words “or worse.” these three dots, lacan explains, is something you see used in printed texts to mark or create an empty place—something, a word, and in this instance a verb, that should be there has been deliberately omitted. and so lacan goes on to say: “my title underlines the importance of this empty place.” why? because it is the only way of catching something with language that is not of language; in other words, something of the real. in this middle period of lacan’s teaching—the late 60’s to early 70’s—when he began to elaborate a theory of discourse as a logical writing of the structure of relations between speaking beings—that is, as a social bond that takes the real of jouissance into account—for this is what is really at stake in discourse, he concluded that the only way language can say something about the real is by allowing this empty place to be preserved … with the use of language. this empty place is what a saying [“un dire”] preserves as act: “ that one might say remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard” [“qu’on dise reste oublié derrière ce qui se dit dans ce qui s’entend ” (“l’étourdit” 5). lacan arrives at the term “un dire”—the saying that he will bring into play in … ou pire—by tipping over the first letter of the word “pire” and then, to make it function as argument in logic, converting “dire”—to say—into “un dire”—a saying. with a particular saying—il n’ y a pas de rapport sexuel, there is no sexual relation—one of a related series of sayings lacan was formulating around this time, the real that is proper to psychoanalysis and which the ellipsis indexes, the real as the impossible to say, the real as unsayable, is thus marked with language. lacan warns that in trying to dodge this saying you can only say worse (… ou pire 11-12). using propositional and modal logic lacan undertook in … ou pire to elaboesther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 181 rate this saying—there is no sexual relation—and that of another, one that would be a response to it, that would moreover not try to get out of it and thus say worse. this saying is “y a d’ l’ un” or rather yad’lun (turning it into a one saying)—there is something of one, the one all alone not the one of union. there is something of one that can function as a placeholder for the hole of the real. a singular one, a master signifier that as letter names the singularity of the subject’s jouissance identity. but the worse has already been forgotten in what has been said in what is heard. i am referring to the saying of the capitalist discourse, the matheme of which lacan wrote only once in a lecture he gave in italy in 1972 (“du discours psychanalytique”). and this saying worse is precisely the effect of the capitalist discourse’s foreclosure of the impossible real of the sexual non-rapport, that is, the foreclosure of the saying that sustains the emptiness brought into real ex-sistence through the operation of language on the living being—castration. my argument here is that the reality this foreclosure generates is far worse—ou pire—than the impossible real of the lack of the sexual relation. castration is not fantasy, it is real (lacan, the sinthome 107) we know that there is a general and deeply held belief in the existence of the sexual relation. it is a universal dream, we could say, the dream of eros, the principle of union, of two making one that lacan calls in …ou pire a gross mythology he was determined to exorcise. an archaic version of such a belief can be seen in the comic fable recounted by the poet aristophanes, one that has taken on mythological status, when he takes his turn at the table in plato’s symposium to speak on the topic of love. in it, he derives the ancient and powerful desire of one human being to join up with another in what he calls human nature—a powerful drive to reunite what was once original nature, expressing itself as a “seeking to make one out of two, to heal the state of man.” to heal, in other words, the cut perpetrated by zeus as punishment for mankind’s hubris in attacking the gods that divided the original unity or oneness of human beings. the significance of this little story that makes a myth of subjective division, is that each half of the severed being is destined to always look for their original other half. in other words, the desire of two to become one again is the very expression of an ancient need which aristophanes called desire and the pursuit of the one love. myth, as russell grigg explains, “is a kind of logical instrument for resolving contradictions.” there is a logical contradiction at the heart of the myth that insists as “a point of impossibility.” in other words, at the heart of any myth we find an unsayable real—the impossible real for which lacan gave the modal formulation “that which never ceases not being written in the unconscious.” as such this real cannot be reduced or resolved but, as lacan says, it can be marked as such—it can be circumscribed. which is precisely what a myth does—it is a circumscription. or as grigg puts it: “the myth is a fictional story woven around a point of impossibility, or the real,” and its function is to provide “a fictional papering over for esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 182 the impossible, real kernel around which the myth is constructed and for which it was originally formulated” (grigg 55). now we might take aristophanes’ mythical story of a primal unity and the desire it leaves behind, of seeking to make one out of two as comedic fiction, as a comical treatment of a point of real that cannot be resolved, the point of real in this case being the impossibility of making one from two, in other words, of establishing the sexual relation. when people say, i say what i mean, or i always speak the truth, we should not forget the saying that underpins such statements—it is that there is a sexual relation, that is, that it exists. there is however a non-comedic outcome of such a saying, one that stems precisely from the foreclosure by the capitalist discourse of the impossible real of the sexual non-rapport, a saying that takes us to something worse. i will return to this. castration is however not a fable, it is not a fiction, it is not a myth—it is real. it is the real effect of language on the living being, an effect that precludes any possibility of there being a sexual relation. what does this mean? as lacan says in “…ou pire, compte rendu du séminaire 1971-1972,” there is no measurable relation [rapport], that is, there is no calculable ratio of sexual jouissance that can be universalized between speaking beings (lacan 549). the non-rapport of the sexes is integral to the very fact that a human being is a speaking being, an être parlant. “i have also defined the sexual relation as that which ‘doesn’t stop not being written.’ there is an impossibility therein. it is also that nothing can speak it—there is no existence of the sexual relation in the act of speaking” (lacan, encore 144-45). and it is sexual jouissance itself, that is, the jouissance that is our lot because of castration, which is simply the cut of the signifier, which bars access to the sexual relation (lacan, … ou pire 31). the subject, as supposed to the signifier which represents it for another signifier, the support of itself as parlêtre, can appear qua subject only on the basis of loss, the loss of an absolute form of jouissance that does not exist (there is no other of the other). and yet, although irrecoverable, the subject will seek to recover what does not exist through the very means, that is through the symbolic and imaginary semblances of language that effected this primordial loss in the first place. exiled from the sexual relation, that is, from the possibility of establishing a sexual relation with the other, of making one from two, the subject will attempt to seek compensation via the surplus jouissance objects around which their drive will turn endlessly in fantasy. imagining the possibility of overcoming castration, yet memorializing its very impossibility in this attempt to make up for it—in fantasy—the subject does not know they are already enjoying, in their symptom and in their affects, “everything that marks in each of us the trace of his exile.” as speaking beings we are exiled from the one of the sexual relation, condemned to the semblance of a sexual relation in and through discourse, to the contingency of an encounter “that momentarily gives the illusion that the sexual relation stops not being written […]—an illusion that something is not only articulated but inscribed […] by which, for a while—a time during which things are suspended—what would constitute the sexual relation finds its trace and its mirage-like path in the being who speaks” (lacan, encore 145). esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 183 to grasp this notion of exile, and of the sought for illusion that the sexual relation can be written in the unconscious, it is necessary to say something more about the lacanian concept of the unconscious. what follows here is i believe pertinent to my later discussion of the capitalist discourse. the german word that has been translated as the unconscious gives a clearer idea of its true sense in freud: das unbewusste. although the adjectival form from which this noun has been formed, ‘bewusste,’ can be translated as conscious, and unbewusste therefore as unconscious, its first listed meaning derives from the verb “wissen,” ‘to know,’ to have knowledge of, and correlatively unbewusste ‘to not know.’ i am making something of this etymology because i want to emphasize the fundamental characteristic of the unconscious—of a knowledge that is unknown, that is, unknown to the subject. unknown, not only in the sense that, as freud explained, one can only assume the existence, or rather ex-sistence, of the unconscious—it is a postulate, a necessary one however; it can only be supposed on the basis of the traces left behind from the first encounters with the other, traces that appear in a camouflaged way in the formations of the unconscious—dreams, bungled acts, slips, that is, lapses of the tongue and pen, forgetting and, of course, symptoms and affects as i referenced earlier— but unknown also in a much more fundamental way. as lacan was able to show, freud’s conceptualization of the primary repressed, das urverdrängung, constitutes the unconscious as a hole, a kernel of emptiness. this kernel is not merely repressed knowledge; it is knowledge as radically irrecoverable. it took someone like lacan to draw out the radical nature of this primary repressed as the primordial object foreclosed to the human subject, topologically both outside and inside the subject at the same time—as ex-timate. this truly radical concept of the unconscious as a knowledge in the real is fundamental to (but as beyond) the very constitution of the unconscious as the discourse of the other, the unconscious structured like a language, the more usual understanding of the lacanian unconscious. the unconscious as a place of unconscious knowledge without the subject is what lacan’s concept of lalangue references, a kind of un-known knowledge in which signifiers as unchained symbolic elements carry something real, namely the real of jouissance. an early sense of this real dimension of the unconscious can be seen in lacan’s eleventh seminar the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. there he speaks of the unconscious as an opening and closing: as a split, a gap, an interval in time, an unborn, a non-realized, and yet through this a-temporal gap some-thing speaks— ça parle. it speaks, not i speak (the four fundamental concepts 22-23).1 although not formulated expressly by lacan at this time, in 1964, the notion of the unconscious speaking without a subject will eventuate in the recognition that it is jouissance that is spoken, and most saliently in the symptom as an event of the body: “what speaks, whatever it is, is that which enjoys itself as body, that which enjoys a body that is lived” (… ou pire 151). and yet what is also born in the gap of this unknown knowledge is the very possibility of desire: from that which presents itself as a lack in being comes a want to be—(manque à être)—to be that which was foreclosed to the subject qua subject on entry into the game of language. lacan uses pascal’s esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 184 wager about the existence or non-existence of god to make the point that we have no choice but to enter the game of language, of heads or tails, money or your life, death or life, a game in which we have always-already lost (d’un autre à l’autre). and it is this loss that has the status as the real of a jouissance presumed lost to the subject, that is the cause of both the subject’s unconscious desire and their compulsion to repeat—to repeat what lacan in seminar xvii refers to as the ruinous search for the lost jouissance of themselves as living beings, even to the point of going against life itself! what is to be noted here is that the unconscious comes at this time to be theorized by lacan as an apparatus fitted out by language for the repetition of jouissance. for what necessitates repetition, the engine of desire, the search for a sexual jouissance that would be restored to the subject, is precisely a point of impossibility in the very structure of discourse, the very thing that the capitalist discourse forecloses. although lacan never discarded the concept of the subject as a being spoken by language, but also essentially as a being who speaks, an être parlant—“the human being, called thus undoubtedly because he is only the humus of language” (the other side of psychoanalysis 51)—in his later teachings he invented a new term for this being in whom speech and jouissance are inseparable—parlêtre. written as one word parlêtre glues together two words—‘parler’ to speak, and ‘être,’ being. but together these also evoke the phrase, par lettre, by the letter, alluding thus to the real element carried in the signifier by the speaking being. this real element is the foundation of the saying that lacan elaborates in his seminar … ou pire—yad’lun, there is a one-all-alone. there is something of one, a master signifier that represents the subject at the level of its singular mode of jouissance. with parlêtre ,lacan introduced a subtle but significant shift in the concept of the unconscious and simultaneously in the concept of the subject of the unconscious. for the parlêtre now becomes the very name of this subject of the unconscious in its real dimension. an unconscious no longer to be understood simply as the unconscious structured as a language, as the discourse of the other, but the unconscious as real.2 the parlêtreunconscious is the real subject with a body that enjoys itself, for the most real of the subject is as enjoying substance; this is an unconscious that enjoys [jouit], and in enjoying [jouissant] speaks: “i speak with my body and i do so unbeknownst to myself” (encore 119). apparolé to the capitalist discourse “the subject, who is called human, no doubt because he is only the humus of language, has only to apparoler himself to this apparatus,” to the structure immanent in speech (lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis 51, modified trans.).3 discourse, if we are to follow lacan, is a logical writing of little letters that inscribe a particular social bond that represents the relations of speech and jouissance between subjects as speaking beings. and it does so—each discourse doing so differently—as a way of making up for the fact that there is no possibility of a sexual relation, for there is no natural social/sexual relation between subjects, and none such especially beesther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 185 tween what is fundamentally at stake for all subjects, the jouissance specific to the discourse in which they are apparolés. lacan’s neologism apparolé is fundamentally equivocal. the french word parole refers to the function of speech and language in the constitution of the subject and evokes the sense of the subject as fitted out in and by language, thus putting the emphasis on the status of language as semblance. but the prefix ‘a,’ this little letter that alludes to lacan’s objet petit a, announces something beyond semblance—the real that as remainder of the operation of language functions nachträglich as cause, the cause of the speaking being, the parlêtre. to be apparolé is thus the condition of being fitted out in the terms of the specific discourse(s) one inhabits but also essentially characterises the position of the subject in discourse in relation to their real. as the ‘a’ indicates, to be apparolé is not merely the condition of being apparelled, as with an item of clothing that one can adorn oneself in and take off at will; language has effects that go beyond the semblances that construct our reality: “the subject is not only represented by language … he is in addition produced as an effect, a real effect of language which transforms the organism” (soler, vers l’identité 32). language, in other words, touches the real. turning now to the capitalist discourse (if it is a discourse) to which subjects are apparolés, i now ask: what exactly are the effects of this discourse on subjects and what might qualify it as producing a worse saying? the capitalist discourse has recently received increasing attention from a number of lacanian psychoanalysts and my discussion of it here is indebted to their insights. lacan had commented on capitalism sporadically from early in his teaching but it was only in 1968, understandable given what was happening in the world at the time, that he began to examine it more concertedly.4 a few years later, in a lecture he gave at the university of milan, “du discours psychanalytique,” he mathematized capitalism as a discourse for the first time and in so doing indicated in what ways it challenged not only the very status of discourse but in particular the psychoanalytic discourse, or as he had formulated it a little earlier, the discourse of the psychoanalyst. in this lecture lacan laid out what he considered to be the foundation stone of psychoanalytic discourse—that it is founded on the play of signifiers, namely that the signifier slips in relation to meaning—le jeu des signifiants, ça glisse au sens. with the verb “slip” we hear the possibility of making a blunder, a lapsus which, as lacan states in “preface to the english-language edition” of seminar xi, indicates the presence of the unconscious, the unconscious as real (lacan, “preface” vii). the practice and effectiveness of psychoanalytic discourse depends on this very possibility, on the possibility of the parlêtre analysand slipping up in speaking, a slipping made possible by the fact that there is no signifier whose meaning is assured. hence the possibility of the analysand saying something more or less than intended, and saying something that unbeknownst to them touches a real. a psychoanalytic session relies on this possibility in speech, of a slip falling from the lips of the analysand and thereby revealing an unintended sense—in meaning and direction. speech takes the analysand towards something real, the real of their jouissance. esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 186 it is this very principle of language’s equivocity that is not only the fundamental condition of psychoanalytic discourse, it is also, said lacan, what characterizes what we, that is psychoanalysts, refer to as man. but it is a fact that psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic practice has shown us the radical character of the effect of the signifier in this constitution of the world. i do not say for the being who speaks, because what i called this skidding [ce dérapage, slip-up] a moment ago, this sliding which is done with the signifying apparatus … this is what determines being in the one who speaks. the word being has no other meaning outside of language [emphasis and ellipsis in original]. but the radical effects of language go even further than constituting the world and the being that speaks. the play of signifying slippage disrupts any possible natural or harmonious relation between man and his objects and this is evident in the fact that not only is the signified not primary, before it is produced in the wake of the signifier—and lacan quickly added that we would be rushing too quickly if we think that the purpose of language is to produce the signified and signification— “there is something more primary than the effects of signification.” what could be more primary? we are assured, said lacan, of the presence of a subject in the real if we have before us a subject who is capable of using the signifier as such, which means, to make use of the play of the signifier not to signify something but precisely to deceive us as to what there is to be signified. so in lacan’s view, the primary purpose of the signifier is not to produce sense or signification, and it is not even to re-present the subject that is supposed to the signifier, that is as a barred subject represented by a signifier for another signifier and as therefore lacking-in-being, but to produce a real subject, a subject in which there is a jouissance proper to it—in other words, a parlêtre. to produce in other words, the parlêtre-unconscious. that is, i hasten to add, if the particular discourse to which the subject is apparolé will allow it. i say this because of what lacan then goes on to say in relation to the capitalist discourse. we are in the time of crisis because something no longer goes around, something has stopped turning. this is not the crisis of the discourse of the master, as many are still banging on about, that is, a crisis in the failure of the position of the father in current social arrangements, for the discourse of the old pater-master has already given way to that of the university. the crisis we face is due to the fact that the capitalist discourse turns only on itself; there is no movement possible from it to any of the other discourses and, moreover, the movement internal to the capitalist discourse is fundamentally different from that in the other discourses. what the four discourses lacan named have in common—the discourse of the master, the hysteric, the university and the analyst—is that they each turn on a common point of impossibility, the impossibility of the sexual relation. i stress this condition of impossibility for it is this that allows these discourses to rotate and thus turn from one to the other, and it is precisely this condition that is foreclosed in the capitalist discourse. in each of the four discourses something remains impossible; something is barred from being brought into the field of semblance. esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 187 this is the effect of castration as real. in this sense alone the capitalist discourse cannot be considered a true discourse that constitutes a social bond. each discourse consists of the same four little letters—s1, s2, a, and $—that rotate via a quarter turn to the left and, starting from the bottom left, occupy in turn the four fixed places in the structure—those of truth; agent/semblance/desire/symptom; the worker/other/jouissance; and product/surplus jouissance—whichever letter that occupies the place of agent (in the top left position), giving the discourse its name. the barrier of jouissance determines that the product or surplus jouissance of the discourse, (surplus jouissance, mehrlust in german, which lacan exposed as being what is really at stake in marx’s concept of surplus value, mehrwert) can never meet up with the place of truth underlying the place of agent/semblance/desire (d’un autre à l’autre 172-173). the circle cannot be closed; there is an unbridgeable barrier. and precisely because of this, castration is brought into play each time a discourse shifts from one discourse to the next, the turning revealing the unconscious truth that underlay the agent of the previous discourse and that now through the turning occupies the place of agent.5 esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 188 to repeat: it is precisely this barrier of impossibility that the capitalist discourse disables. in the discourse of the capitalist, the truth incarnated in the master signifier is now not only directly accessible to the subject—note the downward vector from the divided subject in the place of agent to the master signifier in the place of truth—but also that this master must be passed through in order to reach the scientific/technological knowledge—note the vector from truth to knowledge—through which surplus jouissance embedded in the products of capitalism flow to the subject—note the vector from product to agent. in none of the other discourses does the product of surplus jouissance, in whatever letter it is embedded, be that s1, s2, $ or object a, come directly to the subject. that happens only in the capitalist discourse and this is precisely the effect of the foreclosure of castration. in the capitalist discourse, it is the masked master, the brand names of the capitalist market, as stiijn vanheule nominates this master to be, that occupies the place of truth—an inversion of the discourse of the master, the very discourse that is also equated with the structure of the unconscious. this has far-reaching consequences—to the status of the subject as well as to the endurance of social bonds. within the logic of the other four discourses we can see that loss is incurred from the very outset because the one in the position of agent has to go via the other, the place where their desire hopes to meet up with some knowledge about the jouissance of their lost being, for this is the question being raises for the subject. but the product resulting from this operation is never all the jouissance that was aimed for, only a more and/or less of jouissance—surplus jouissance. even more disturbing to the subject is the fact that desire can never make this not-all jouissance product reach the place of the agent’s unconscious truth; there is, as i have already noted, a barrier constituted by the only jouissance permitted to subjects as speaking beings. so in the social bonds constituted within the terms of this logic, the subject remains necessarily divided from the truth of their singular mode of jouissance, divided from, in other words, the proper name of the singular jouissance of their symptom; the singular way in which they have, in these four discourses, made up for the fact that there is no sexual relation. however, within the logic of the capitalist discourse the subject does not have to go via the other in the hope of meeting up with a knowledge of their jouissance and of thereby creating some form of social bond. seeking an answer to the question of their subjective division and to the dissatisfaction it may generate, the subject in the capitalist discourse is directed to seek it directly via the master signifiers of capitalism. any possibility of a bond with the other is necessarily via this master. but what is arrested through the rupturing of the social bond between agent and other is the very possibility of the equivocity, that is, the play of signifiers, lacan regarded as so fundamental to the definition of man as a speaking being. the capitalist discourse goes around and around continuously like a roulette table, apparently unstoppable, and the effect of this is that the necessary impasse of the non-rapport is no longer an obstacle. at the same time then that capitalism necessarily cultivates ersatz forms of dissatisfaction and discontent, it offers a fantasy of esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 189 completeness. the capitalist discourse is in fact predicated on making the sexual relation exist. its fundamental yet deceptive promise is that we can have all we desire, that satisfaction via the objects of surplus jouissance is attainable. the subject, as irène foyentin has remarked, is thus reduced to what she/he desires—the objects of surplus jouissance that pull the subject into consumption—not that he/she desires (foyentin 59). desire does not have to pass via the signifiers of the other to be there confronted with the enigma of the other’s desire and the question in turn of the subject’s desire. instead the promise of the realization of the sexual relation now comes to the subject as homogenised and collectivised objects of consumption, these ready-made gadgets of capitalist production that we as subjects reduced to our status as consumers are commanded to enjoy. desire is in effect reduced to demand. as colette soler has argued, capitalism has no interest in the truth of the subject’s desire and the singular jouissance that desire aims at. rather its sole interest is in managing the jouissance of the capitalist subject by feeding the pseudo-desire it creates with “lathouse” objects that render the subject anonymous to itself. in line with the psychoanalytic understanding of perversion, the only universal right capitalism is interested in is the right to enjoy—jouis—encore, encore! and the encore is guaranteed through the cunning of the capitalist discourse. the jouissance of consumption can never be satisfied, frustration is built into the very principle of its logic: the more i consume, the more i need to/have to consume. as apparolé to the capitalist discourse, the subject is thus reduced to the status of proletarian (soler, “sujets apparolés”). it was marx, as lacan pointed out, who must be credited with having revealed the truth of capitalist discourse as the proletariat: “the proletariat means what? it means that work is radicalized at the level purely and simply of merchandise, which means that it reduces the worker himself to the same rate” (d’un autre à l’autre 172-173). a proletarian is thus a subject reduced to the same unit value of the merchandise they produce, for the effect of the absolutization of the market is to reduce all life “to an element of value.” as renata salecl has noted: the prediction is that in the future almost everything will be a paid-for experience in which traditional reciprocal obligations and expectations— mediated by feelings of faith, empathy and solidarity—will be replaced by contractual relations in the form of paid memberships, subscriptions, admission charges, retainers and fees. (salecl 29) in other words, as proletarian, the subject becomes a mere body whose primary purpose is to consume the gadgets—whether these are objects or so-called life experiences—produced by the capitalist machine, and to be consumed by them. reduced thus to the equivalence and value of objects, the modern subject as proletarian is left with very little with which to form a social bond, for the body on its own is not enough with which to create a social bond (soler 2011, 35, citing lacan 1975 [1974], 177-203).6 so it is not surprising that the bonds of love as well as ties to place have become precarious, for as lacan said: esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 190 what distinguishes the discourse of capitalism is that the verwerfung, the rejection—the rejection outside of any symbolic exchange, with what i already said it has as consequences. the rejection of what? of castration. all order, all discourse that akin to capitalism leaves aside what we simply call the things of love, my good friends.” (the knowledge of the psychoanalyst 103) conclusion colette soler has written about the precarity of what she calls the generalized proletariat, those who having lost their relations of solidarity with each other are thereby more exposed to insecurity and loneliness. this is surely a worse. but what is perhaps even worse is what this precarity (and not just dissatisfaction and frustration) can lead to—to the appeal of a one of union—“by which i designate the identification of the other with the one” (lacan, television 23)—a fundamentalist one that has shown itself to be murderous towards others. lacan may have questioned whether the discourse of psychoanalysis would survive,7 but he had the certainty of presentiment that something worse would be born from the capitalist discourse—to which he gave the name pst. spelled out, these letters form the word “peste,” the french word for plague or pestilence, an ironic reference to what freud believed he had brought to the united states with psychoanalysis.8 the pst would truly be a pestilential discourse, a scourge in the service of the capitalist discourse. it would be the worse of a jouissance taken to the extreme already manifest in rising levels of hatred, religious intolerance and racism. with capitalism’s foreclosure of castration and its co-optation of scientific universalism, the singularity of subjects as embodied in their fundamental symptom is at stake. the homogenization of subjects as equally free to consume, the only freedom capitalism is interested in, and the extreme individualism to which we are pushed, can only result in more and more segregation. the building of walls is the logical attempt to make up for the social bond that is in default in today’s world, described by colette soler as the logic of segregation.9 slavoj žižek has also noted this: … age-old fixations, and particular, substantial ethnic, religious and cultural identities, have returned with a vengeance. our predicament today is defined by this tension: the global free circulation of commodities is accompanied by growing separations in the social sphere. since the fall of the berlin wall and the rise of the global market, new walls have begun emerging everywhere, separating peoples and their cultures. (žižek 7) the fascination with populist nationalisms gaining momentum in the world today is premised on this logic. a single quote from a speech by donald trump alerts us to the resurfacing of an old danger: that of the murderous exclusionism of extreme nationalism and its potential to end in fascism through its elevation of the volk, constituted as such in identification with a mad master—“the only important thing is the unification of the people, because the other people don’t mean anything” (cited in müller).10 this would truly be the return of the real as peste. i wrote at esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 191 another time of the drama of nazism as the fascination of sacrifice on behalf of a fuehrer and of the ego ideal the leader incarnated.11 although trump is not hitler, perhaps we can see something of the latter’s discourse resurfacing in the trumpism of make america great again. this is the danger of a discourse about which lacan had already in 1964 thought necessary to warn us. at that time, he spoke of the “drama of nazism” as a re-enactment of “the most monstrous and supposedly superseded forms of the holocaust,” the resurgence of which the predominant forms of historical critique (hegelian-marxist) could not account for. i believe we are witnessing such a resurgence again—think of the privileged world’s responses to the forced mass movements of peoples; the terror and terrifying conditions in which those who cannot flee live; and the formation of one nation politics around the world: brexit; donald trump; pauline hanson; australia’s detention camps; etc. in my view, what lacan said at the very end of the last session of seminar xi to account for the resurgence of “the holocaust” still holds good today: … the offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice is something to which few subjects can resist succumbing, as if under some monstrous spell. ignorance, indifference, an averting of the eyes may explain beneath what veil this mystery still remains hidden. but for whoever is capable of turning a courageous gaze towards this phenomenon—and, once again, there are certainly few who do not succumb to the fascination of the sacrifice in itself—the sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this other that i call here the dark god. (the four fundamental concepts, 275, emphasis in original) as we know, the ideal of purity and non-division at that time required the enslavement and extermination of all those others who were seen to threaten the unity of the one people, das volk. those who threaten this fantasy of the imaginary unity of “the other and the one,” the mystical one crudely brought to life by aristophanes as “the beast-with-two-backs” (lacan, television 23), have to be expelled, for their very existence disrupts the fantasy of the one body. dissent, not merely dissatisfaction, we could say, is built into the very structure of discourse, but only if the barrier of impossibility created by the castrating effect of language is sustained. the capitalist discourse removes this barrier; foreclosing castration, foreclosing the impossibility of the sexual relation—as happens in psychosis—it is difficult to see how, despite the clear evidence of protests around the world in response to the excesses of capitalism, the discourse of capitalism itself could be made to shift to another that would expose its truth. the only chance for the proletariat cast adrift without ballast and driven to distraction by their quest for lathouse objects is, i argue, via the wager of the unconscious—the unconscious that psychoanalysts take responsibility for making ex-sist12—and of its symptom that incarnates the singular real of the subject’s response to the non-rapport of the sexual relation. we have this chance because, as colette soler has argued, the parlêtre is not all apparolé to discourse. as living beings effected and affected by language, not all of esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 192 the subject’s being is ensnared by language. and this not all is essential if a subject is to emerge in the real, not just one apparolé to the discourse they inhabit. this not all ex-sists in the real of the symptom, in the opaque jouissance conveyed by the letter of the symptom. the symptom is not the real, for the real is impossible and the symptom is necessary, but it is the closest thing there is in the parlêtre, who is pas tout apparolé to the capitalist discourse, that preserves something of the empty space that is foreclosed in the capitalist discourse. only such a subject with a symptom that stands against the dominant discourse has a chance of resisting the push to join up with the empty plus de jouir objects of capitalism. for joining up is tantamount to the suicide of the subject—a subject who in search of the social bonds which capitalism cannot provide is thus easy prey to the increasingly loud calls of populist nationalisms to sacrifice him or herself to the dark god of the one leader, the one nation. in contrast to the push to the one of the one-volk, the psychoanalytic premise of the not all—another way of saying that there is no sexual relation—and of the singular one as condition for the symptom—yad’lun— is, i believe, the ethical and political antidote to the … or worse ushered in by the capitalist discourse. works cited braunstein, n. a. “le discours capitaliste: ‘cinquième discours’? anticipation du ‘discours peste,’ ou peste,̀ ” savoirs et clinique 2:14 (2011): 94-100. faye, esther. “a solid hatred addressed to being,” analysis 15 (2009): 3-19. foyentin, i. “tous prolétaires?” mensuel 15 (2006): 59. grigg, r. “beyond the oedipus complex.” in reflections on seminar xvii, jacques lacan and the other side of psychoanalysis. eds. j. clemens and r. grigg. durham & london: duke university press, 2006, lacan, jacques. du discours psychanalytique, conférence à l’université de milan le 12 mai 1972, lacan en italie 1953-1978. édition la salamandra, 1972. –––. “l’étourdit.” scilicet 4. paris, éditions du seuil, 1973. –––. the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the seminar of jacques lacan book xi. trans. a. sheridan. new york & london, w. w. norton & company, 1981. –––. preface to the english-language edition of seminar xi [1976], the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the seminar of jacques lacan book xi, trans. a. sheridan. new york & london, w. w. norton & company, 1981. –––. television [1974]. trans. d. hollier, r. krauss, a. michelson. new york & london, w. w. norton & company, 1990. esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 193 –––. the seminar of jacques lacan, on feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge, book xx encore 1972-1973. trans. b. fink. new york & london, w. w. norton & company, 1998. –––. … ou pire [1975]. compte rendu du séminaire 1971-1972. in autres écrits. paris, éditions du seuil, 2001. –––. le séminaire de jacques lacan livre xvi d’un autre à l’autre 1968-1969. paris, éditions du seuil, 2006a. –––. le séminaire de jacques lacan livre xviii, d’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant 1971. paris, éditions du seuil, 2006b. –––. the seminar of jacques lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis, book xvii (19691970). trans. r. grigg. new york & london, w. w. norton & company, 2007. –––. le séminaire livre xix … ou pire 1971-1972. ed. j-a. miller. paris, éditions du seuil, 2011. –––. the knowledge of the psychoanalyst, seminar 1971-1972. trans. m. plastow. éditions de l’association freudienne internationale, publication hors commerce, 2013. –––. the sinthome, the seminar of jacques lacan book xxiii 1975-1976. trans. a. r. price. cambridge, uk; malden, ma, usa, polity press, 2016. –––. “la troisième—intervention au congrès de rome” (31.10.1974/3.11.1974), lettres de l’école freudienne 16 (1975): 177-203. müller, j-w. “capitalism in one family: the populist moment.” lrb 23 (dec. 1) 2016. salecl, renate. on anxiety. london & new york, routledge, 2004. 59; citing jeremy rifkin, the age of access 2001. 29. soler, colette. les affects lacaniens. paris, puf, 2011. –––. lacan—the unconscious re-invented. trans. e. faye & s. schwartz. london, karnac books, 2014. –––. “sujets apparolés au capitalisme.” mensuel 94 (2015a): 8-14. –––. vers l’identité, cours 2014-2015, collège clinique de paris, éditions du champ lacanien (2015b). vanheule, s. “capitalist discourse, subjectivity and lacanian psychoanalysis.” frontiers in psychology 7 (dec. 2016): 1-14. žižek, s. “who can control the post-super-power capitalist world order?” the guardian (may 2014). notes 1. this could also be translated as “that there is a saying ….” esther faye: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel s10 & 11 (2017-18): 194 2. for an excellent introduction to this shift in the conceptualization of the unconscious, see soler, lacan—the unconscious re-invented. 3. as bruce fink, the translator of seminar xvii notes, the punning of lacan here is untranslatable. i have decided however not to use fink’s translation of “s’apparoler” as “speechify,” preferring to keep the french because of the way it condenses both “speech” and “apparel,” nor his translation of “appareil” as “fittings,” seeing more value in using a word that is closer to the french “cet appareil-là” at the same time as its sound is closer to “s’apparoler.” 4. the year 1968 is famous for being a time of generalized revolt and social disturbance in many parts of the world and especially in france. the possibility of a real revolution marked a crisis for capitalism and the socio-political regimes that sustained it and were sustained by it. lacan engaged seriously with the question of capitalism as a discourse from his sixteenth seminar, d’un autre à l’autre until his nineteenth … ou pire, as well as in the series of talks at st anne that coincided with this latter seminar, known as le savoir du psychanalyste [the knowledge of the psychoanalyst], some of which have been included in the published edition of … ou pire. 5. the truth from which the agent is barred from knowing is represented by each one of the letters that in turn occupy the place of truth and that thereby function as the particular cause of the agent’s unconscious desire. 6. in 1974, lacan would say that even though we are so captured/captivated by gadgets these could still function as symptoms, for example, the car as like a false woman—“une fausse femme”—that is, it has phallic value. 7. this was discussed by lacan in la troisième in 1974, but was also raised in his talk in milan in 1972, as well as in other texts. 8. lacan may have also intended with pst to evoke the four horsemen of the apocalypse, harbingers of the last judgment, the name for one of these being pestilence. see braunstein’s remarks on pst as the pestilential discourse in the service of capitalism. 9. see soler, vers l’identité, see esp. session 6 may 1975, as well as in other of her writings. 10. on the power of fascination in the relationship between subjects identified with each other via identification with a leader, see s. freud, group psychology and the analysis of the ego (1921c), se xviii, ch. 8 being in love and hypnosis. 11. the paper to which i refer is “a solid hatred addressed to being.” 12. on the responsibility of the discourse of the analyst in making the unconscious ex-sist, see esp. lacan, television, 14. 33 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 33 learning by doing: formulating macroeconomic policy under various forms of capitalism charles l. vehorn1 and craig a. waggaman2 abstract the purpose of this paper is to describe two different pedagogical experiments employed in a course on global capitalism. first, the course incorporated interdisciplinary team teaching (an economist and a political scientist). second, the course created a team project, which allowed the students to actively address the varieties of capitalism in a policy setting. specifically, students experienced the political and economic role played by the international monetary fund (imf) on the world stage by participating in a simulated imf executive board meeting. the course was unique in the sense that it had dual (student and faculty) teams. we found that team teaching offered us the opportunity to go beyond our specific disciplines and present to students a world that is more complex than any one discipline can capture. students told us that this active learning experience gave them an engaging opportunity to think about the perspective of others.3 key words: macroeconomic policy, team teaching, interdisciplinary course jel classification: a22, e60 introduction comparative political economists have been studying the various forms of capitalism for many years (hall and thelen, 2009). while these researchers identify and examine the institutional nuances that differentiate capitalism in one country from that of another country, most undergraduate students view capitalism as one homogeneous system of economic organization. how can teachers engage students in a way that dispels this misconception of capitalism’s uniformity? showing students how different capitalistic countries address similar economic problems in different ways could enhance students’ global perspective and provide them with an understanding that certain economic problems have more than one solution. these problems may even require an understanding of more than one discipline and an ability to go beyond one’s preconceived intellectual boundaries of possible solutions. the purpose of this paper is to describe a team-taught interdisciplinary course on global capitalism that included a student team project to foster an active learning environment. specifically, students experienced the political and economic role played by the international 1 associate professor of economics, department of economics, radford university, p.o. box 6952, radford, virginia, 24142. 2 associate professor of political science, department of political science, radford university, p.o. box 6945, radford, virginia, 24142. 3 this research was partially supported by a grant from bb&t to enhance the study of global capitalism universitywide through course development, a speakers’ series, and other activities that encourage students to think about the dynamic nature of a global economy. we would like to thank colleagues who provided comments when this paper was presented at the 23rd annual conference, teaching economics: instruction and classroom based research, robert morris university, february 16-18, 2012, moon township, pa. 34 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 34 monetary fund (imf) on the international stage by engaging in a simulated imf executive board meeting. as suggested by wingfeld and black (2005), active as opposed to passive learning can enhance students’ perception on the usefulness of a course. students in this course responded favorably to the team-teaching aspect of the course as well as the executive board meeting. the idea of a simulated executive board meeting came from the economist on the team who had worked at the imf for 16 years as a senior economist in the fiscal area, and had attended many executive board meetings. the political scientist on the team, a political philosopher, was intrigued with the idea because he had taught students about the imf from an international relations perspective, but was on the outside looking in. it was hoped that this “learning by doing” project would give students a deeper perspective of the imf and its role on the international stage. the course itself was an upper-level special topics class, cross-listed in economics and political science, so that both economics and political science students received credit in their respective majors. there were no prerequisites, but most of the students had been exposed to principles of economics. the first week of the class was spent refreshing students to relevant concepts related to capitalism and the global economy. (see appendix i for a list of readings, topics covered, and grading.) blending instructional experiments two different pedagogical experiments were combined in this course. first, the course incorporated interdisciplinary team teaching (an economist and a political scientist). both participated in the classes, with one assuming the lead role (depending on the topic) and the other asking questions. kohler and trice (2009) found that students are more engaged with two teachers in the classroom. letterman and dugan (2004) noted that student outcomes are improved in terms of achievement levels in analysis and judgment. second, the course created a team project, which allowed the students to actively address the varieties of capitalism in a policy setting. so the course was unique in the sense that it had dual (student and faculty) teams. literature on interdisciplinary team teaching eisen (2000) noted that team teaching is slowly gaining more attention, spurred on by students with more diverse learning styles, advances in learning technologies, and growth of the teamwork concept in business and elsewhere as a way to stimulate better product design and to solve problems creatively. one way that education can respond to these new demands of students is to provide them with more diverse teaching through teams. while a team-taught course can take many different forms, davis (1995) pointed out that such courses depend heavily on collaboration. his four assessment criteria are: planning, content integration, teaching, and evaluation of students’ performance. the extent of collaboration in any team-taught course can be determined by ranking each criterion from low to high, in what davis called the “continua of collaboration.” equal weight should not be given to each criterion, however. shibley (2006) argued that planning was the most important in achieving success in the case studies he analyzed. in his view, a well-planned course can help resolve teaching issues and prevent them from occurring in front of the students. the successful courses in his case studies all incorporated ways to resolve conflicts. while the instructors may want to spend most of their time on the content of the course, the success of the course was more highly correlated with planning. murata (2002), who 35 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 35 studied team teaching at the high school level, also found that planning was a crucial factor in team effectiveness. of course there are many ways to plan a team teaching endeavor. hatch and rich (2005) noted that at one end of the continuum a course could be designed by a faculty team, but delivered in serial segments by individual instructors; at the other end of the continuum a course could be designed by a faculty team and delivered by that same team. they favor courses designed and taught by the same faculty, as well as favoring the alignment model of teaching effectiveness proposed by wuff (2005), which integrates professor, student, and content into an alignment strategy that includes effective communication through rapport, structure, engagement, and interaction. two examples of interdisciplinary team teaching in economics are given in cavigliaharris (2003) and wade and stone (2010). caviglia-harris taught the economics component in a course on environmental perspectives that combined economics, ecology, and philosophy. she noted that students found economics interesting to learn when it was directly applied to the other components of the course, e.g., the linkage of prices (high gas prices), markets (reduced demand for gas guzzlers), and environmental policy (curbing green house gasses). wade and stone taught a course entitled health – sociological and economic perspectives. they found that the students were able to integrate the two perspectives cogently into research papers. both studies also discussed institutional constraints to interdisciplinary team teaching. it has been found that one constraint is the compartmentalization of disciplines, which makes it harder to find faculty willing to be open to another discipline’s approach. also, it is difficult for college administrators to give sufficient support to multiple teachers in a classroom when resources are constrained. in general, the literature on team teaching focuses on what the team members should do to make the team effort a successful learning experience for their students and how that learning experience can be captured from the students to demonstrate effectiveness. literature on student engagement through a team project many researchers (hansen, 2006; rassuli and manzer, 2005; and wingfield and black, 2005) believe that student engagement is enhanced by moving from the passive learning model, where the instructor lectures and students take notes, to more active learning. an active learning model could include classroom debate, real-world simulations, games, formation of teams, or even participation in planning the course. creating teams that enable students to work together in a learning project generates more active student engagement. as oakley, et al, 2004 pointed out, collaborative learning has many benefits. but to realize those benefits teams need to be coached because students do not initially possess the necessary skills, such as project management, time management, and conflict resolution, as well as how to communicate in a team setting. rassuli and manzer (2005) found that students perceived improvements in their learning (problem solving, understanding, and communicating) through a team experience. students also believe that active learning enhances their preparation for future careers (wingfield and black, 2005). this belief appears sound because a team environment is employed in many work situations. nearly 80 percent of organizations employ some type of workplace teams (hansen, 2006). the team model, however, can become overly complex. in their mba course, leon and tai (2004) implemented a team approach on projects for business clients. the students quickly learned that they would be held accountable for the common goals of faculty and the clients. this approach aligned the students’ incentive structure and produced output of a high quality. 36 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 36 the major drawback was the cost associated with implementing this structure (in terms of soliciting clients, time demands of faculty, information technology requirements for sophisticated business modeling, etc.). coordination of the teaching team while we were “learning by doing” at the time, it appears that we touched on the four elements discussed in davis (1995) as well as the major components of the alignment model for effective teaching. we began by devoting a whole summer to planning for the course. the planning process included developing the content and sequence; determining the set of readings; drafting a detailed syllabus with topics to be covered for every class; and deciding on who would take the lead in presenting the various topics (roughly switching every week). thus we knew before the course began who would be playing the lead role, the “sage on the stage,” as described by press and stephenson (2009); and who would be playing the supporting role by asking questions or briefly highlighting the material with a different perspective. the students in class also asked questions and raised issues. sometimes there were disagreements among students, but not to the extent of a major controversy. for example, some students thought the industrial countries should be doing much more to alleviate world poverty; others though that the industrial countries were doing enough by providing assistance to implement the “washington consensus.” we found that even though our two disciplines may have different approaches, we were both dealing with the fundamental issue of how we live. in addition to detailed planning, content integration, and determination of teaching roles, we also created an assessment tool to obtain student feedback, discussed subsequently. the imf executive board project the imf plays a key role in global capitalism by (i) monitoring the economies of its 187 member countries (called surveillance), (ii) lending to countries in economic difficulty (but with conditions attached to ensure a high probability of repayment), and (iii) providing technical assistance to member countries in three main areas – monetary, fiscal, and economic statistics. this technical assistance is often requested by countries to help fulfill the conditions of a loan program. a team of imf staff economists visit each country every 12-18 months to conduct an article iv consultation, also referred to as a surveillance mission. based on their field work, a staff report is prepared on the country’s current macroeconomic policies (monetary, fiscal, and international trade) and submitted to the executive board. the executive board discusses the report and issues a consensus view on the country’s current economic strengths and weaknesses. we selected india as a country with good growth prospects, but some underlying issues that, in the imf’s view, should be addressed. eight teams were created and each class member was given a copy of the staff report on india (found at imf.org under the country info tab). the teams included the imf staff and executive directors representing various countries that had different approaches to capitalism – from liberal market economies to more highly coordinated economies. discussion of the varieties of capitalism in the context of global capitalism was a main component of the course, which included both political and economic dimensions. (e.g., frieden, 2006, and hall and thelen, 2009). selecting teams representing countries with different approaches to global capitalism was an attempt to tease out the interplay between politics and economics. while imf staff members are primarily economists, the executive board combines economics with political issues as the board members interact to represent their respective constituencies. 37 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 37 students’ assessment of the project the teams met six times during the last 10-15 minutes of class to discuss the imf staff report (summarized in appendix ii) and how their team would respond to the report, based on the view of capitalism in the countries representing their constituency. in each meeting a specific topic was addressed (also detailed in appendix ii) as stepping stones toward full preparation for the executive board meeting. the two instructors acted as coaches during these team meetings to help students see the position of the country or group of countries that they represented. we were not going to hold the executive board meeting until each team understood their role and was prepared to articulate it. the meeting was held in a separate room around a large conference table with each executive director sitting at the table and the rest of the team sitting behind the executive director. the imf staff began by presenting their main findings of their report and then each executive director responded to the report. the staff then responded to the questions and criticisms of the executive directors and then the floor was open for discussion. the imf staff’s presentation was based on their own view of india’s situation, but several of their recommendations were similar to the recommendations present in the actual imf staff report. many students raised interesting points that indicated their level of engagement with the issues had risen from the first team meeting. the imf staff responded well to the pressure of defending their report, and the executive directors, for the most part, accurately followed the positions of their respective countries (see the list of countries in appendix ii). at the next class students were given an assessment form which asked them to explain the two most important things they learned from the group project, which they did not know prior to working on the project. analysis of their assessment revealed four distinct themes of learning: how the imf works; gaining different perspectives; political versus economic reasons for decisions; and working in groups. from table 1 (which presents a summary of students’ comments in these four themes), it is clear that some students learned certain institutional aspects of the imf. but more importantly, some learned to think about the perspective of others; and they considered it to be one of the most important things that they learned from the simulated executive board meeting. table 1 student responses to simulated executive board meeting (main themes and summarized comments) viewing how the imf works students learned: how the imf conducts business, about the imf from a good hands on experience, about the influence of imf on world politics and economics, that the imf can be an intruding organization in the affairs of a country, how countries form coalitions to prevent imf intrusion, that the imf had round table discussions and called countries out, the importance of group work within an organization like the imf, that the less developed countries, unfortunately, have the smallest vote shares, how countries can disagree when the imf recommends liberal market policies that may not work in that country (african countries for example), how the washington consensus affects the imf. 38 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 38 gaining different perspectives students learned: what works for industrial countries does not always work for third world countries, how prior views can change during an informed discussion, about different concerns based on a country's perspective, about third world and first world conflicts, about the variety of country perspectives (including political views), how each country has its own culture and solutions to problems within that culture, how certain countries feel certain ways, how countries could view the same economic conditions differently based on their own experiences, that the exercise was a good opportunity to learn different views at one time, how hard it is to reach a consensus among nations with different perspectives. contrasting political versus economic reasons for decisions students learned: that the decisions often ended up being formulated based on political influence, that political agendas and beliefs sometimes get in the way of economic issues, that it is important to not only look at the economics, but the politics and culture too. working in groups students experienced: a team atmosphere that really engaged everyone in both political and economic issues, the role played by various countries favoring different varieties of capitalism, how much time, preparation, and competence is needed to have a board meeting, the importance of being fully ready to defend your position, ways to anticipate possible questions or oppositions rather than just preparing a statement, that some groups did not get 100% participation. conclusions team taught interdisciplinary courses offer potential relief from two problems that affect contemporary undergraduate education. the first is the increasing compartmentalization of disciplines and its contribution to the erosion of liberal arts education. the second is the tendency to replace the search for the truth about the whole of existence with reductionist ideological thinking that closes students to the intellectual and moral complexity of contemporary life. political economy historically was a field of study that combined politics, economics, philosophy and history. while there are good reasons for separating these disciplines in the modern university, there are also good reasons for occasionally bringing them back into sometimes uncomfortable contact with each other. beyond the vocational requirements of a discipline-based education, it is important that undergraduate students understand that there are universal questions and assumptions about human beings that lie beneath the surface of the methodologies of their major fields. political theorists and economists have different approaches and emphases, to be sure. yet in the final analysis, we each study how human beings live with 39 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 39 one another in order to secure those things which make their lives full and happy. team teaching asks one to return to important basic questions of their disciplines that sometimes get lost as we become more and more “professional” in outlook and research interests. compartmentalization of disciplines adds to the temptation to provide answers perhaps too quickly to many of those basic questions that undergraduates should be asking seriously, sometimes for the first time in their lives. embracing answers to difficult questions too dogmatically leaves the social scientist or policy-maker unable to confront the complexity and constant changes that are part of the human experience. they refuse to accept creative solutions to problems that seem to run contrary to the “sacred texts” of their ideology. in our class, for example, we had a number of lively discussions which revolved around the idea of the “washington consensus” and whether that idea was applied too rigidly by the imf in its policy recommendations to large numbers of very diverse countries. a rational person always accepts new evidence and is willing to change hypotheses based on a more complete understanding of the reality they are dealing with. in conclusion, we would suggest that team-taught interdisciplinary classes are not a silver bullet. the professors should bring different perspectives into the classroom, but also open minds. they need to show vulnerability to each others’ expertise and opinions. they need to choose texts and assignments that broaden and challenge the boundaries that they may be used to in their regular classes. in our case, students were asked to read economic history, political philosophy, “varieties of capitalism” literature, and participate in a final exercise where they had to make decisions based on evidence that was provided them in an imf case study. the course was designed to show students that intelligent political economy and effective public policy requires both an understanding of permanent questions faced by human communities at all times and a sensitivity to the particular problems and cultural contexts faced by individual countries at specific points in their histories. references caviglia-harris, jill l. 2003. “introducing undergraduates to economics in an interdisciplinary setting.” journal of economic education, summer: 195-203. davis, james r. 1995. interdisciplinary courses and team teaching: new arrangements for learning. phoenix, arizona: american council on education and oryx press. eisen, mary-jane. 2000. “the many faces of team teaching and learning: an overview.” new directions for adult and continuing education, 87: 5-14. frieden, jeffry a. 2006. global capitalism: its fall and rise in the twentieth century. new york: w.w. norton & company hall, peter a. and kathleenthelen. 2009. “institutional change in varieties of capitalism.” socio-economic review, 7: 7-34. hansen, randall s. 2006. benefits and problems with student teams: suggestions for improving team projects.” journal of education for business, 82: 11-19. hatch, deborah h. and susan rich. 2005. “aligning in team teaching.” in donald h. wuff, (ed.), aligning for learning: strategies for teaching effectiveness boston: anker publishing company. pp. 95-105. kohler, patty and john trice. 2009. “twice as nice: using co-teaching as an instructional strategy.” the teaching professor, august/september: 6. leon, linda a. and lawrence s. tai. 2004. “implementing cooperative learning in a teamteaching environment.” journal of education for business, may/june: 287-293. 40 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 40 letterman, margaret r. and kimberly b. dugan. 2004. “team teaching a cross-disciplinary honors course: preparation and development.” college teaching, 52: 76-79. murata, roberta. 2002. “what does team teaching mean? a case study of interdisciplinary teaming.” the journal of educational research, 96: 67-77. oakley, barbara, richard m. felder, rebecca brent, and imad elhaii. 2004. “turning student groups into effective teams.” journal of student centered learning, 2: 9-34. preves, sharon and denise stephenson. 2009. “the classroom as stage: impression management in collaborative teaching.” teaching sociology, 37: 245-256. rassuli, ali and john p. manzer. 2005. “teach us to learn: multivariate analysis of perception of success in team learning.” journal of education for business, 81: 21-27. shibley, ivan a. 2006. ”interdisciplinary team teaching: negotiating pedagogical differences.” college teaching, summer: 271-274. wade, bruce h. and jack h. stone. 2010. “overcoming disciplinary and institutional barriers: an interdisciplinary course in economic and sociological perspectives on health issues.” the journal of economic education, 41: 71-84. wingfeld, sue s. and gregory s. black. 2005. “active versus passive course design: the impact on student outcomes.” journal of education for business, 81: 119-125. wulff, donald, h. 2005. “using the alignment model of teaching effectiveness,” in donald h. wuff, ed. aligning for learning: strategies for teaching effectiveness, anker publishing company, boston. pp. 3-15. appendix i list of course readings baumol, w. j. and blinder, a. s. (2009). macroeconomics: principles and policy. (macroeconomic update – the economic crisis. 1-3. mason oh: south western cengage learning. blanchard, o. (2009). “the perfect storm.” finance & development, june, 37-39. crowe, c. and meade, e. e. (2007). “the evolution of central bank governance around the world.” journal of economic perspectives, 21: 69-90. deaton, a. (2008). “income, health, and well-being around the world: evidence from the gallup world poll.” journal of economic perspectives, 22: 53-72. eichengreen, b. (2000). “the crisis of (confidence in) global capitalism.” critical review, 14: 69-85. frieden, j. a. (2006). global capitalism: its fall and rise in the twentieth century. new york. w.w. norton & company. goodfriend, m. (2007). “how the world achieved consensus in monetary policy.” journal of economic perspectives, 21: 47-68. haggard, s. (2003). varieties of capitalism: the institutional foundations of comparative advantage. edited by peter hall and david soskice. book review. business history review. hall, p. a. and thelen, t. (2009). “institutional changes in varieties of capitalism.” socioeconomic review, 7: 7-34. 41 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 41 hall, p. a. and gingerich, d. w. (2004). “varieties of capitalism and institutional complementarities in the macroeconomy.” discussion paper 04/5. max planck institute for the study of societies. islam, s. (2004). “russia’s rough road to capitalism.” foreign affairs, 57-66. knell, m. and srholec, m. (2007). diverging pathways in central and eastern europe. in d. lane and m. myatt (eds.), varieties of capitalism in post-communist countries. new york: palgrave macmillan: 40-62 lane, d. (2007). post-state socialism: a diversity of capitalisms? in d. lane and m. myatt (eds.), varieties of capitalism in post-communist countries. new york: palgrave macmillan: 13-39. o’hara, p. a. (2004). “cultural contradictions of global capitalism.” journal of economic issues, 38(2): 413-420. polany, k. (1944). the great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time. boston: beacon press. roemer, j. e. (2009). “changing the social ethos is the key.” the economists’ voice, july. rossini, g. (2003). robert gilpin (2002) the challenge of global capitalism. the world economy in the 21st century. book review. economic notes, 32: 105-106. stiglitz, j. e. et al. (2006). “taming global capitalism anew. the nation, april 17, 1-12. vehorn, c. l. and hashemzadeh, n. (2009). “the international monetary fund: part of the problem or part of the solution?” journal of global business issues, 3: 137-145. vehorn, c. l. and kasturi, p. (2008). the global meltdown: prospects for india’s economy. the india economy review, v, december, 52-63. vogel, s. k. (2006). japan remodeled: how government and industry are reforming japanese capitalism. ithaca: cornell university press. topics covered • how has global capitalism evolved? • causes of the global capitalism meltdown • issues and concerns with global capitalism • can global capitalism be managed? • should global capitalism be managed? • asian models of capitalism • capitalism in post-communist countries • poverty, inequality, and globalization • international financial (governing) institutions (ifis) • objectivism note: j. a. frieden’s book, global capitalism: its fall and rise in the twentieth century, served as the textbook for the course and provided the underlying organizational structure to the sequence of topics covered (see above for reference details). grading students’ course grade was based on four elements: a mid-term exam (25%), a comprehensive final exam (45%), the simulated imf board meeting (15%), and class participation (15%). both the mid-term and final were take-home essay exams, graded by both instructors. when the two 42 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 42 instructors had a different view of a student’s exam, they met to resolve the differences and agree on the grade to be given. appendix ii imf board meeting india’s macroeconomic policies (article iv consultation) a brief summary of the current economic situation in india (as described in the imf staff report) is the following: ► after an average growth of 8.75 percent over the past five years, india gdp is projected to grow only 6.25 percent this year (2008/2009) and further decelerating to 5.25 percent next year (2009/2010). ► inflation is expected to rise to from 6.2 percent to 7.8 percent this year (2008/2009), but drop off next year. ► the general government deficit is expected to increase from 5.8 percent of gdp to 9.9 percent of gdp this year (2008/2009). next year’s projection is a slight decline to 8.8 percent of gdp. ► the money supply grew by 20.8 percent last year (2007/2008). based on the above trends and the article iv staff report, each team meets for the last 10-15 minutes of class over several class periods to prepare its remarks for the executive board meeting. the meeting begins with the imf staff presenting [3-5 minutes] to the executive board: (i). an analysis of the current situation, and (ii). a set of possible policy options. each executive director then responds [3 minutes] to the staff report based on the perspective of the region that he or she represents. the imf staff representative will respond to executive director comments; and then the floor is open to a general discussion. note: it is up to each executive director to specify any other relevant information (e.g., quantitative) with regard to current economic activity. team meetings: issues to address first meeting get to know the other members of the team talk about the project in general terms. second meeting do you understand the situation in india and the necessity to review current macroeconomic policies? 43 | journal for economic educators, 14(1), summer 2014 43 third meeting talk about the role of your country (or region) in general terms is it sympathetic to the washington consensus? how does your country (or region) view the influence of global capitalism? fourth meeting talk about the role of your country (or region) in specific terms do you agree with the imf staff assessment? start to prepare your comments on the imf staff assessment. think about questions to ask about the staff report. who will be your executive director (the one that sits at the table)? fifth meeting we will discuss how the actual board meeting will unfold. finish preparing your comments on the imf staff assessment. formulate your questions to ask about the staff report. sixth meeting prepare an outline of your comments and questions. settle any last minute issues so that the whole team is prepared for the board meeting. countries or constituencies represented – in addition to the team representing the imf staff, the other teams represented the following countries or groups of countries: china, india, united kingdom, united states, east african countries, small european countries, southern latin american countries. there were 5-6 students in each team. toward the shari'ah paradigm of islamic economics: the beginning of a scientific revolution by muhammad arif* i. introduction the major critics of islamic economics: this paper attempts to respond to the critics who, on various grounds, oppose the development of islamic economics. the author feels that a scientific response to these critics is the responsibility of the islamic economists. it is believed that such a response would be educational for the critics and their followers. it would enable them not only to understand the scientific nature of islamic economics but would also allow them to appreciate that the development of the shari'ah paradigm ofislamic economics is, in fact, the beginning of a scientific revolution in economics. given the bases of their arguments, these critics of islamic economics can be classified into the following three schools of thought. 1) the adjusted capitalism school: according to this school the fundamental principles of the islamic economic system are the same as those of capitalism. in support of this assertion they point out that like capitalism, islam also allows the right to private property, free enterprise, and market economy. they, however, acknowledge that certain adjustments need to be made in capitalism to bring it in conformity with islamic principles. they hold that these adjustments should be made according to islam's distinction between haram and halal, and islam's teachings in financial and fiscal areas; namely, riba and zakat. according to this school, if these areas of capitalism are adjusted according to islamic requirements, then the adjusted form of capitalism will be nothing but the islamic economic system. thus this school holds that the conventional economic theory, *muhammad arif research department, state bank of pakistan; currently a ph.d. candidate in economics. clark university, worcester. ma 01610, usa. 79 with only a few adjustments, is fully capable of generating the islamic economic system. hence, they see no scientific justification for the development of islamic economics toward the creation and establish­ ment of an islamic economic system. 2) the conventional school: this school believes that there are major discrepancies between islamic economics and the conventional economic theory. these discrepancies are an evidence that islam's teachings cannot be transformed into an economic system which will be consistent in its functioning and structure. thus the adherents of the conventional economic theory are opposed to the development of islamic economics, and hold that conventional economics is the only scientific basis for creating and establishing a workable economic system. 3) the sectarian diversity school: according to this group, islamic economics lacks a scientific basis; and is merely a reflection of certain religious beliefs. the adherents of this school point out that efforts to develop islamic economics will result in intellectual chaos because of the following two reasons: a} islamic economics lacks a scientific basis b) the existence of different sects in islam in view of these perceived problems, this group holds that islamic economics will be plagued by a diversity of opinion and will be dominated by sectarian influences. thus, they are opposed to the development of islamic economics, as to them, an effort in this area is an exercise in futility. we find that the adherents of the adjusted capitalism school do not see any difference in the fundamentals of the islamic economic system and capitalism. here we disagree with them. we claim that, fundamentally, islamic economic system is very different from capitalism. as a matter of fact, it is the existence of these fundamental differences that provides the scientific justification for the development of islamic economics. in section ii, we will discuss this scientific justification in detail. the adherents of the conventional school do understand that the fundamentals of islamic economic system are very different from the fundamentals of capitalism, but despite this fact they are not ready to accept this reality that islamic economics deserves to be developed in its own right. their lifetime training in conventional economics, and their intellectual dependence on the western economists demands loyalty to conventional economics. they demonstrate this loyalty by opposing the development of islamic economics. but their opposition has no scientific basis; and therefore, we will discuss the case for the development of islamic economics starting in section ii. 80 key: cord-0037078-893cckyz authors: price, jason d. title: desire and the law: creative resistance in the reluctant passenger and the heart of redness date: 2017-07-16 journal: animals and desire in south african fiction doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-56726-6_5 sha: 2890eb789dd3fa1cfba363174b669535026cac62 doc_id: 37078 cord_uid: 893cckyz this chapter offers a critique of animal rights approaches for their weakness in relying on the passage of laws, and in depending upon their proper administration by legal authorities to attempt the protection of animals. where some thinkers espouse an animal rights perspective, this chapter argues that postcolonial desire is vital to protecting communities in ways that rights discourse and the law cannot in the context of the biopolitical workings of the state and globalized capitalism. drawing from deleuze and guattari’s work on desire and the law in kafka (1986), the chapter considers the potential of desire to offer creative alternatives, outside of legal discourse, toward the protection of animals and the larger community. additionally, it recognizes how indigenous environmental knowledge and notions of desire offer ways of relating to animals that can challenge capitalist instrumentalization. by zakes mda portray communities that struggle to protect themselves, their lands, and the animals with which they dwell from being used and abused to turn a profit for businesses. both novels portray competing claims for land as business proposals attempt to develop potential tourist locales by disenfranchising their current inhabitants through the rhetoric of western notions of "development." as in chap. 4, the role of desire as "eating" appears here as government officials are bribed by business owners to approve their land-development proposals, and at the cost of sacrificing the homes, protection, and interests of the local inhabitants of these lands. these stories perform what graham huggan and helen tiffin identify as " [o] ne of the central tasks of postcolonial ecocriticism" as they "contest-also provide viable alternatives to-western ideologies of development" (27) . the capitalist proposals for wealthy tourist destinations continue in a colonialist view of these lands as blank spaces awaiting appropriation and transformation into capital. this chapter explores how characters in both novels successfully work within and beyond the law to prevent the destruction of particular environments which they have come to know intimately. the protagonist of the reluctant passenger, an environmental lawyer, critiques the political scene that the novel sets up involving unethical environmental rulings and other legislation influenced by big business and bribery. heyns' novel highlights many environmental concerns, particularly the legal status, or lack thereof, of animals (specifically baboons) in south africa. as the protagonist struggles to help maintain the nature preserve for the troop of baboons at the request of his client luc tomlinson, the novel portrays luc's experiences dwelling with the baboons, demonstrating his great respect for their lives and culture. similarly, camagu, the protagonist of the heart of redness, argues against the development of the small village he has grown to love into a gambling city. offering a more ecocritical alternative to the tourist town, camagu expresses his view, informed by qukezwa's political analysis and knowledge of local culture and nature, that the town developed by outside businesses will offer little work or profit for the townspeople and be detrimental to their environment. in contrast, he proposes a smaller measure of a resort built with local materials by the villagers appealing to a different type of tourist who "like[s] to visit unspoiled places for the sole purpose of admiring the beauty of nature and watching birds without killing them" (239). these novels consider the available avenues for opposing the late capitalist thrust to transform all the world and its inhabitants into objects that are available for consumption and for turning a profit. the communities in these works offer ways of thinking about promoting sustainable futures against the overconsumption of the environment associated with most capitalist development projects. as animals are valued highly by the characters in both texts, heyns' and mda's novels argue persuasively for sustainable futures for the humans and animals (and in heart of redness also the flora) that are part of their communities. characters in both understand community in a broader sense, including humans and non-humans, and recognize that they are all potentially disposable in the logic of profit-seeking capitalists. where some approaches to the stories espouse an animal rights perspective, i argue that an ethics of sustainability and a biopolitics informed by deterritorialized or postcolonial desire, here specifically the desire for animals, is essential to protecting communities in ways that rights discourse and the law cannot guarantee. in the reluctant passenger, the protagonist, an environmental lawyer named nick morris, somewhat contradictorily dislikes the ungovernable or disorderly aspects of the environment and animals. for example, he has a discussion with his friend and fellow lawyer, gerhard, about masturbation that turns into an analysis of romantic poets where morris discloses that he masturbates to the lake district of england. in response, gerhard encourages him to consider blake's poetry and to "try the tiger next time" (173). nick explains his disregard for unruly nature: i am not a tiger type of person, and such fantasies as i have tend towards the tame. for this reason my involvement in the ever-deepening intrigue surrounding luc tomlinson's baboons was as unusual as it was unwelcome. as far as i'm concerned, the environment should behave itself if it wants us to look after its interests. as a matter of fact, the lake district is just about my notion of an ideal environment: well-mannered, contained, placidly packaged, officially protected and signposted. (173) as the novel progresses and nick becomes increasingly involved with luc tomlinson and the case for the baboons, the lawyer discover the law's limited ability to protect the animals. " [t] he rights of animals are a much debated area in law" (259) is the best that nick can offer in response to luc's query about protecting the baboons in a legal manner. where the law fails them, i'm interested here in how and why the characters work to protect the baboons extralegally. in light of nick's discomfort with "wild" or untamable nature (or zoe) and his sexual fantasies about ordered and "contained" environments, his reassessment of the unmasterable aspects of the world including his own desires and "self" leads him to break several laws in the course of rescuing the baboons with luc later in the story. where nick once lived a life of abstinence to avoid the messiness and feelings associated with a sexual relationship, he ends up having sex with luc in his house while the rescued baboons they have secured in the second floor of his house dirty, rearrange, and otherwise mess up his home, which had once been so clean and ordered as to appear uninhabited. this scene indicates the importance of a positive appraisal of desire to protect animals in relation to the limits of legal or animal rights approaches, positions which i analyze below. in the animal gaze: animal subjectivities in southern african fiction, wendy woodward reflects on the interiority and sense of "self" of the animals in southern african fiction, including the reluctant passenger and the heart of redness. for her, these literary representations of animals do important work toward changing the way we think about animals and their rights. woodward argues that animals have subjectivities, so they should be recognized in the south african constitution and be accorded rights. in support of her animal rights approach, she draws from martha nussbaum's philosophy of "moral agency," a philosophy which, as i'll discuss later, braidotti criticizes heavily early on in transpositions. for example, woodward recounts how martha c. nussbaum critiques utilitarian approaches to rights which position animals as having "moral standing." she summarizes the utilitarian position through a quotation of nussbaum: because they are subjects of social justice "if a creature has either the capacity for pleasure and pain or the capacity for movement from place to place or the capacity for emotion and affiliation or the capacity for reasoning and so forth (we might add play, tool use, and others), then the creature has moral standing" (362). nussbaum quite rightly argues for the importance of the agency of the nonhuman animal; in moral agency, then, the animal is active in this sphere, whereas "moral standing" is conferred on the nonhuman animal for the characteristics he or she embodies. (woodward 68) this preference for active instead of passive qualities in "moral agency" over standing or capacity is certainly a more interesting approach regarding the question of animal morality because agency suggests a recognition of the moral life and behaviors of animals, yet "moral agency" still suggests that animals should be granted rights because they have similar agency to that of humans. élizabeth de fontenay also critiques this position in without offending humans: a critique of animal rights: without useless brutality toward metaphysical and legal humanisms, a pathocentrist perspective does in effect allow us to establish the fact that the moral community is constituted not only by "moral agents" capable of reciprocity, apt to enter into contracts with full knowledge of what this means, but also by "moral patients," which includes certain categories of human beings and animals. (67) fontenay's argument here is that this approach to rights from the perspective of "agency" leaves out some humans and animals from being protected because they do not possess this agency. she further critiques this in her response's to peter singer's philosophy, arguing that such rights approaches are "offensive" to humans as they run the risk of sanctioning the poor treatment of non-normative humans, such as those with different mental abilities who may not necessarily be included in the category of "moral agents." posthumanist accounts of subjectivity, such as rosi braidotti's nomadic subjectivity, that involve a radical immanence, offer a fluid notion of the subject where subjects are interdependent, existing in assemblages with other humans and the non-human, instead of a fixed view of subjectivity in the liberal individual tradition. the law constructs dominant, discursive subjects which fail to do justice to or fully account for the fluidity and complexity of our subjectivities. braidotti argues: the becoming-animal axis of transformation entails the displacement of anthropocentrism and the recognition of trans-species solidarity on the basis of our being environmentally based, that is to say: embodied, embedded and in symbiosis … "life," far from being codified as the exclusive property or the unalienable right of one species-the human-over all others or of being sacralized as a pre-established given, however, is posited as process, interactive and open-ended. (99) while woodward does discuss deleuze and guattari's becoming-animal briefly at times, she looks for more human qualities or attributes of human subjectivity in the animals in the literature she analyzes, which approaches a kind of becoming-human of the animal. rights discourse, while oriented toward protecting animals from violence, ends up humanizing animals, leaving this political approach perhaps less effective than other creative options. braidotti also critiques martha nussbaum's universalism (after kant), which assumes a stable humanist subject. nussbaum's formulation seems to view animals as fixed, individual subjects who possess agency, whereas the vital materialist deleuze views both subjectivity and agency as dispersed, interdependent, and the subject as a process in assemblage. braidotti also critiques nussbaum's position for the way she tries to intimidate new or experimental approaches and philosophies by asserting that they are relativist. another problem with universalism is the failure to appreciate local knowledges and hence a tendency toward a monocultural, dominant view of the world. woodward, however, nicely avoids this by recognizing and analyzing the importance of shamanist traditions and the indigenous knowledges of south african peoples. in essence, woodward's somewhat humanist approach and the posthumanist approach i espouse are after the same goals-the protection of animals-although her project seems limited to that particular kind of life that possesses "moral agency," whereas mine seeks to protect the community in a broader sense. that is, i am concerned with the protection and improvement of the conditions and treatment of animals, the environment, and the others of man that have been excluded from man's central position in humanism and therefore viewed more easily as disposable because of the negative valuation of difference that results in racism, anthropocentrism, and phallogocentrism. while the reluctant passenger and the heart of redness offer a view of animals as deserving of rights, and the reluctant passenger engages in this discourse of rights more directly, both novels also offer more creative ways of thinking about sustainable futures. thus they call for working inside the law and also other creative ways of protecting the animals, human and non-human, of their communities. for braidotti, sustainability consists of multiplying subjectivities "not for profit" and increasing the possibilities of positive attachments. a significant part of her project entails establishing a positive view of zoe, in contrast to negative views of it espoused by agamben and others. for braidotti, the others of man-women, native others, animals, earth others, and so on-are closer to zoe, whereas man is closer to bios or discursive life (104). she explains that [w] hereas "life" or bios has been conceptualized as a discursive and political notion ever since aristotle, zoe is the non-or pre-human "outside" of the polity. it has been rendered in figurations of pejorative alterity as the "other of the living human", which means the inhuman or divine and the dead … . against this forensic turn in contemporary philosophy [agamben's association of zoe with death, for example], … [is] the need to cultivate positive political passions and ethics of affirmation. (transpositions 265) she also explains how zoe disrupts a "unitary" vision of the subject-a non-humanness at the heart of the human that flows through bodies. this sustainability perspective replaces one of rights, as she argues: "the notion of co-dependence replaces that of recognition, much as the ethics of sustainability replaces the moral philosophy of rights" (123). in contrast to a rights perspective that argues that animals be included in the community and be granted protection because of their similarity to humans under our notion of humanism and the law, this approach of co-dependence recognizes that the "human" has never been human, never existed independently, but always depends on a relation with the non-human. part of nussbaum's approach to animals also includes the argument "that animals be recognized as subjects" (13). thus woodward bases her "rights" approach to animals on their subjectivity, and therefore their being subjects in the law. cary wolfe argues that this approach to protecting animals is not sensible: i think we would all agree that an admirable desire of humanism would be to respect the standing of at least some nonhuman animals and to protect them from exploitation, cruelty, and so on. but the attempt to articulate that desire, which is an admirable one, in terms of the rights framework ends up foreclosing and undercutting that desire by reinstating a normative picture of the subject of rights that ends up being humanist and anthropocentric through and through, that ends up with a being that looks a lot like us, so that, in the end, nonhuman animals matter because they are just a diminished version of us. it seems to me self-evident that trying to think about the value of dolphins in terms of their being diminished versions of homo sapiens makes no sense. ("after animality" 186, emphasis added) for wolfe, rights approaches then inevitably begin to look for human characteristics in animals as a means of securing their protection. while his reading of the law and animal rights perspectives often focuses on the work of derrida, specifically derrida's essay "before the law" from which he derives the title of his book on biopolitics, wolfe's emphasis on the "undercutting" of desire is something worth taking up from deleuze and guattari's perspective. both derrida, and deleuze and guattari, write about kafka's the trial, which includes the story entitled "before the law," as a starting point for, or in the course of, their thinking about the law and what it means to be "before the law." wolfe spends much of his work on biopolitics describing derrida's position, noting, for example, the lack of response in law as, constructed in the technicity of language, its automatic nature leads merely to reaction. yet in this interview he emphasizes "desire" in relation to the law. as this project has explored the role of desire throughout, deleuze and guattari's writing about desire and the law, specifically their kafka: towards a minor literature, adds another fold to biopolitical thought. while he doesn't consider deleuze and guattari's writing about kafka, and therefore their specific writing about the relationship of their vitalist project to the law, wolfe does address how deleuze's work, which might seem at first to promote the equality of all life in an affirmative biopolitics, is useful in terms of biopolitical thought. he explains how a pragmatic application of deleuze's philosophy bypasses the potential problems of an affirmative biopolitics: "by a pragmatist account, philosophy for deleuze, as paul patton puts it, 'is the invention or creation of concepts, the purpose of which is not accurate representation' but rather to provide 'a form of description which is immediately practical,' one 'oriented toward the possibility of change'" (before the law 93). in other words, while their ethics of affirming zoe might appear to promote the flourishing of all life, this is not an accurate portrayal of life but instead a practical politics for resisting dominant thought, capitalist logic, and the consumption of everything that lives. desire poses a more direct and revolutionary threat-one that works outside of the rationality of the law, an authority which currently excludes most animals from the community. that is, rather than appeal to the authority or work within the confines of the law which has rendered animals in their current position, which has, through its exclusionary violence, failed to protect them, staying with that desire and its productive nature offers opportunities for working toward this protection in new ways, outside of the law. in kafka: toward a minor literature, deleuze and guattari argue more specifically against the law as a means to justice. they offer a corrective to the view that the law secures justice: "where one believed there was law, there is in fact desire and desire alone. justice is desire and not law" (kafka 49). this perspective on law agrees with wolfe's discussion of the "undercutting" of desire that pertains to rights approaches. the law, when viewed as the only outlet to protect animals, "undercuts" desire, then, by reterritorializing desire into the existing legal framework, appealing to its authority or authorities, thereby undermining its revolutionary potential. or more specifically, for deleuze and guattari, the law does not undercut desire but instead is one of two kinds of desire: the transcendental law or the schizo-law. they argue: we should emphasize the fact of these two coexistent states because we cannot say in advance, "this is a bad desire, that is a good desire." desire is a mixture, a blend, to such a degree that bureaucratic or fascist pieces are still or already caught up in revolutionary agitation. it is only in motion that we can distinguish the "diabolism" of desire and its "immanence," since one lies deep in the other. nothing preexists anything else. it is by the power of his noncritique that kafka is so dangerous. (60) in other words, for them, the law itself doesn't necessarily undercut desire, but the law perhaps is one arena where desire is either reterritorialized or takes off on a line of flight. the non-critique here gestures to the potential of desires to transform to positive ends or conversely to become violent. continuing their reading of the trial, they argue: from this point on, it is even more important to renounce the idea of a transcendence of the law. if the ultimate instances are inaccessible and cannot be represented, this occurs not as a function of an infinite hierarchy belonging to a negative theology but as a function of a contiguity of desire that causes whatever happens to happen always in the office next door … if everything, everyone is part of justice, if everyone is an auxiliary of justice … this is not because of the transcendence of the law but because of the immanence of desire. (kafka 51) this position radically calls into question nussbaum's moral universalism, or "universal rights," as it is revealed that law is just an arena of sorts for desire that springs forth from the immanence of the body. desires that are not reterritorialized, that remain schizo-law, are therefore specific to the singularities of the material assemblages "next door" and, as they privilege deterritorialized desire and schizophrenia throughout their work, schizolaw provides the possibility for political action against dominant thought and dominant constructions of desire which have resulted in the failure to protect particular members of the community. 1 what's at stake in this understanding of law as nothing but desire is the realization that a rights approach needs to be backed up by the desire to enforce it for it to work toward the protection of animals or the environment. the import of deleuze and guattari's insight into the law, however, is that the law itself is empty, is nothing but desire. in other words, and i'll discuss this further in my treatment of the novels below, if the desire to protect animals, the environment, humans, and so forth does not exist in the exercising or administration of the law, the law itself (and the passing of more laws ad infinitum, even) will surely fail to protect them and ensure their futures. if those positioned as authorities of the law are colonized by oedipus and their desires are therefore reterritorialized by capitalism, the laws themselves will not stand a chance against the disposing of these others for the accumulation of pleasure and profit by the arbiters of the law. if the law is really desire and its officials are colonized by capitalism's definition of desire as lack that must be filled through consumption and accumulation, their authority in the law enables the potential of capitalist desire to render all that lives "disposable" to their personal interests and make everything available for consumption and profit in a logic of exchange. thus it becomes all the more important to theorize desire differently and to think outside of capitalist logic which defines desire as lack, viewing desire instead as an opportunity to make ethical attachments toward sustainable futures. since what appears to be law is really desire, if we take that observation seriously, decolonizing desire or resisting its colonization toward a postcolonial desire then becomes a significant intervention into the political field as part of a project to protect the others and the environments of our communities. since capitalism bombards us with its definition of desire constantly, portrayals of what i'd like to call "postcolonial desire" in these novels offers a line of flight away from capitalist logic: a field of desire which can reorient one's sense of self and relationships to others, animals, and the environment woodward argues that animals can be focused on in literature and writing because human rights have been secured in south africa. she writes: now that human rights appear to be in place in a democratic south africa-even while much of our racialised history remains intact-writers can represent animals more expansively without engendering criticism of foregrounding animals at the expense of humans. white writers in particular may have felt constrained not to portray animals as ethical subjects when the majority of south africans were without rights. (14) to be sure, the putting in place of human rights is a significant achievement, and yet, as she seems to acknowledge here in recognizing that the "racialised history" has not changed much with the advent of rights, the securing of these rights doesn't radically alter the state of affairs or ensure the protection and improved treatment of those now granted rights. additionally, the secondary consideration of rights for animals continues to privilege the human over the animal, ensuring the continual deferment of protections for animals. similarly, calls for the addition of more kinds of right, like elke zuern's argument for the case of "socioeconomic rights' (66) as part of human rights, while certainly important in their attempt to redress economic inequality and its violence, which much current rights discourse overlooks, require their enforcement by the authorities of the law. zuern summarizes her research: south africans argue "that freedom can only be realized when civil, political, and socioeconomic rights are protected and enforced" (xii). the phrasing of this observation gets to the heart of the matter in that the passage of the rights in law, if we agree with deleuze and guattari, guarantees nothing without an accompanying schizo-desire that would desire to protect the community. to further extend these rights to animals, then, without thinking desire differently toward a postcolonial desire does little to protect them or the locations where they dwell. where the recognition of rights is important in a legal sense, poor conditions obviously still persist for many of those who are now extended rights in south africa. for example, the poor conditions for miners which led to the strikes at many mines, including the marikana platinum mine in august 2012 where several strikers were shot by the police, are evidence that the putting in place of human rights has not guaranteed the protection of south africans formerly left outside the law's protection during apartheid. deterritorializing and decolonizing desire is a necessary part of any approach to protecting the inhabitants, human and non-human, of south africa. the law "manifestly lacks balls" (260), as gerhard puts it in the reluctant passenger in his summary of luc's description of the law as a "eunuch." michelè pickover reveals evidence of this powerlessness of the law throughout animal rights in noting the complicity of the law with corporate interests. she explains how in many animal protection issues such as vivisection, factory farming, the trade in wild animals, and conservation, the government officials who oversee and make laws protecting animals are often also involved with the corporations; or indeed in many cases, such as factory farming, corporations are often left to follow the laws on their own, without any oversight. for example, she writes: "the south african government either lacks the political will or the resources to police and regulate the industry" of trophy hunting, and she notes that "[t]he truth is that trophy hunting promotes a culture of violence and guns. this is in direct opposition to the needs of south african society, which is desperately trying to free itself from its violent past" (48). she also describes how this instrumentalization of animals continues in an apartheid legacy: "wild animals were exploited to fund the apartheid war, the secret agencies, the special forces and the individuals connected to them. it is no secret that the nationalist government and its military machinery were involved in the illegal trade in ivory" (51). these obvious conflicts of interest in the form of a desire to extract a maximum profit from animal bodies and being charged with the task to protect them speaks to the many ways in which the law is compromised through its colonization by capitalist desire. as pickover's reporting on the exploitation of bodies during apartheid reveals, authorities often acknowledge or disavow the rights of others and choose to administer the law as it suits their agendas and financial interests. this problem-that the access to rights and to the protections of the law are made to depend on those administering it (perhaps best described in kafka's "before the law" with the countryman seeking access to the law from the doorkeeper)-was most obvious during the apartheid regime with the passing of laws denying the rights of black south africans. in the context of this discussion of the law being colonized by capitalist desire, perhaps the most pertinent of these laws limiting the rights of black south africans were those acts which prevented or hindered these communities from acquiring decent paying jobs, ensuring that the white community would benefit financially. in the reluctant passenger, the villainous judge conroy describes these financial benefits of apartheid to morris upon telling him of his former plan to hand over the fortune he collected from corrupt dealings as a lawyer: "you no doubt imagine yourself too morally fastidious to benefit by money derived from an evil regime. i need hardly point out that for decades every white south african to a greater or lesser degree benefited by the policies and practices of that regime" (404). heyns' and mda's novels shed light on many of these problems as they portray the corruption that informs environmental rulings: the heart of redness describes the conflict of interests of the government official deciding on the development project for qolorha by the sea; heyns' novel in particular describes the government's collusion in the abuse of baboons in vivisection. to return briefly to mda's the mother of all eating, discussed in chap. 4, it is the messenger's desire which takes off on a line of flight and threatens the power and privilege exercised by the man and his fellow government's officials, who are colonized by the reterritorialized desire of capitalism. the man's attempt to stop the messenger's revolutionary behavior, which i've referred to in chap. 2, acknowledges the way in which capitalism colonizes desire: the people don't have any leadership that will create a critical awareness in them, that will open their eyes. whenever new leadership emerges, even if it begins as honest leadership, it is swallowed by the culture of eating, and becomes one with it […] the people are doomed to … [an obvious kick, and a scream] okay, okay, i admit … it will take a very small thing to spark action in them, and to arouse them to an anger that has not been seen before. (35) the man tries to quell the messenger's revolutionary desire by attempting to convince him that his behavior and the position of the people is one of impotence, as is the case for humans in relation to the gods in oedipus. his descriptions of the people as "blind" recall the "blindspots" of plumwood's discussion of what happens as a result of the colonizing force of reason, and his observation that "honest" leadership may be colonized by the culture of eating confirms her argument about the colonization of political systems as well. after experiencing the violent kick from the messenger, however, the man acknowledges that the desire of the people is what he lives in fear of as it resists his easy management and control. indeed, it is what is threatening his life at this point in the play as the messenger refuses his bribes, and he fears that this desire has the potential to change the state of affairs, threatening to unseat and remove all the corrupt officials who "eat" the community. south african author michiel heyns, whose lost ground won him the sunday times fiction prize in 2012, has also received accolades for his translations of south african literary criticism and literature from afrikaans into english, such as marlene van niekerk's agaat. he also currently maintains a blog entitled books and dogs, where he writes often about his dog simon and dogs in literature ("michiel heyns"). heyns has written previously about the potential of affect to challenge and threaten the cool reason often exercised in the violent treatment of animals and others in his earlier novel, the children's day (2002) . his second novel, the reluctant passenger (2003), features a white south african middle-class environmental lawyer, nick morris, who takes on a case for luc tomlinson and a troop of baboons. the subjects of law, rights, and desire discussed earlier come into focus in the story as the protagonist becomes more involved in the case for the baboons. at the beginning of the novel, morris detests the unmasterable and disorderly aspects of himself and the environment. heyns' offers a critique of reason and mastery as morris is frustrated by any disorganization or things that don't adhere to the norms of human rationality or reason. for example, morris wishes he was an accountant as he originally planned, where the world is neatly divided and ordered into columns of debits and credits. he also resents his neighbor's dog, who shits on his lawn, and he chooses to live a celibate life with his girlfriend so he won't have to deal with the messiness of sex or love. in an early scene, the dog actually knocks him into a pile of shit as morris attempts to clean it up to restore cleanliness to his yard. in response, morris violently wipes the shit all over the dog's body, viewing animals in a pejorative sense as mere producers of dirt and filth. morris prefers order and is a perfect employee under capitalism, an ideal manageable subject of capitalist biopolitics, as he is never late, is apolitical, and maintains neatness and order above all else. he makes all attempts to master and control his animality through regimes of culture, and he seeks to avoid encounters with his own nonhuman life or zoe (including his desires), as well as encounters with nonhumans and the nonhuman world. in addition, his concerns for the neatness of his lawn and property cause him, rather comically, to forget to vote in the 1994 democratic elections. almost all of his life is ordered and he attempts to master or control it completely. as braidotti says of the dominant understanding of consciousness, he lives in fear of zoe: relentlessly vital, zoe is endowed with endurance and resilience … zoe carries on regardless: it is radically immanent. consciousness attempts to contain it, but actually lives in fear of it. such a life force is experienced as threatening by a mind that fears the loss of control. (nomadic subjects 110) he also lives a rather sedentary lifestyle alone in a large house in a gated community, and he seems to have little life or connection to the world outside of working, with the exception of meeting his one friend, gerhard, an openly homosexual fellow lawyer who embraces zoe by, for example, discussing his sexual encounters and desires openly, engaging in sexual acts in public, and often being late for meetings and work for love-related and other reasons. the novel centers on a case morris takes up when a kind of hippie wild-man character, who turns out to be the wealthy luc tomlinson, comes into his office asking him to take his case to protect the baboons and the private reserve where he lives with them. in animal rights in south africa, michelè pickover begins with a striking story about a baboon who worked for the railroad, and as a service animal for a disabled railway man, to counter the negative view of baboons and their limited protections in the law: in most provinces in south africa baboons are classified as vermin or 'problem animals'. taking advantage of this status, in 1999 several businessmen devised a plan to build a slaughterhouse in limpopo province to kill wild-caught baboons by electric shock and then process them into salami, polony, and tinned meat for consumption in central africa and eastern europe. baboon body parts, such as hands, teeth, and tails, would be exported to asia as aphrodisiacs. (2) the baboons in heyns' novel are classified in a similar violent, disposable status and therefore luc and nick's initial attempts to protect them through legal means are fruitless. luc's father threatens to build a resort at the reserve partly because it is a business venture and he is a capitalist, and partly because of a long family feud. where nick morris initially wants nothing to do with the case, his friend gerhard encourages him to be less reserved and to experience more of the uncertain, unpredictable, and non-normative aspects of life, like the dirty, unkempt luc and the baboons. as the novel unfolds, the protagonist learns about himself as he learns more about baboons, appraising them as a worthy case, suggesting the interconnectivity of a positive appraisal of the non-humanness of subjectivity and of the non-human world. as he embraces zoe as a positive passion, instead of a negative one which disrupts his orderly world of progress as he had before, he comes to value the complexities of the world in its open-ended becoming. he moves from being someone who fails to ever examine his own sexual feelings for the sake of order and not wanting to be inconvenienced by them, and who detests the disorder and dirt that animals bring into his life, like his neighbors' dog, to a person who finds himself having sex with his client, luc, in his home while the troop of baboons they've saved from a vivisection lab tear apart his furniture and cause havoc to the upstairs of his house. the novel's title and image on the cover, explained in the first pages, offers a suggestive description of zoe. morris describes: i once saw a man transporting his rottweiler in a shopping trolley through a no dogs allowed area: the beast was clearly well trained, and stayed put, but you could see that all it really wanted to do was chew the wheels off all the trolleys in the universe. (11) this image emphasizes the zoe of the animal and how it is maintained in consumerist culture or oedipalized for the benefits of human shoppersthe dog is thus a reluctant passenger. as braidotti writes, challenging the idea that dogs are only dirty, "[d]ogs are not only messy, but also openly sexual. they unleash a reservoir of images for sexual explicitness and even aggression, as well as unbridled freedom: they are a vehicle for zoe" (104). like the dog in morris' story, he himself is also reluctant as he somewhat hesitantly moves in the other direction from a bios-centred life to embrace zoe: at first, he is discomforted and bothered by the presence of luc and the thought of taking on the case for the baboons. as morris ends up exploring his sexual desires with luc tomlinson, he recognizes that the messiness of life which is part of his own subjectivity, or the zoe which flows through him, is connected to this non-human force of life in animals. he adopts a view of life and of the subject that correlates with ecofeminism "which asserts the fundamental interconnectedness of all life … [and which] offers an … ecological ethical theory for women and men who do not operate on the basis of a self-other disjunction" (2-3). he begins to care for the baboons, luc, and his neighbors' dog, which he formerly detested, when they plan to euthanize the dog because they are leaving for australia and no longer have a use for it, like the guard dogs in disgrace, to protect their property. the reluctant passenger reveals throughout the legal case for the baboons and through the behavior of various judges, lawyers, and government officials that the workings of the law are really the workings of desire. for example, we learn that luc desires protection of the baboons, and the protagonist, morris, begins to care for the case at first because he desires luc as the narrative later confirms. and it is gerhard's embracing of zoe and his encouraging of the protagonist to take pleasure in the world in its becoming that leads him to take on the legal case for the baboons. in other words, morris doesn't take on the case at first because he legally has to-the law doesn't require that he accept the case or that the baboons be protected, and indeed he appraises it as not much of a case at first. yet his desire, which is before thought, compels him to venture out to the preserve to meet luc and the baboons. further evidence of the law actually being desire is the revelation toward the novel's end that the authoritative figure judge conroy has been controlling most of the plot through underhanded deals, bribes, and so on-many of the same tactics that he and other judges used during the apartheid regime. having lost the woman he loved, joyce tomlinson, to the wealthy brick tomlinson, luc's father, while living a modest life to complete his law degree, conroy spends the rest of his life seeking revenge for the lack of consummation of his desire for joyce. we learn that he manipulates brick to propose the business development of the baboon's land, persuades luc to seek out legal recourse to protect the reserve, and controls many of the other events of the plot. as he tells the protagonist of his manipulations, nick queries: "so even in the capacity of puppet i was not indispensible?" (403). as conroy's actions reveal, he disposes of others consistently through his authority as judge for his own profit and to exact his private revenge. as these behaviors bear out, what appear to be the workings of the law are actually the workings of desire. another example of this occurs in the resignation of the director of nature conservation and development as he does so because he's blackmailed with the threat that his affair with his secretary will be revealed to his wife if he doesn't resign. thus the regulation of desire that pertains to the family is exploited here as capitalist desire attempts to reterritorialize the director's desire to protect the animals and environment. deleuze and guattari explain that [t] hese two coexistent states of desire are the two states of the law. on the one hand, there is the paranoiac transcendental law that never stops agitating a finite segment and making it into a completed object, crystallizing all over the place. on the other hand, there is the immanent schizo-law that functions like justice, an antilaw, a 'procedure' that will dismantle all the assemblages of the paranoiac law … to dismantle a machinic assemblage is to create and effectively take a line of escape that the becoming-animal could neither take nor create. thus the attempt to control or limit desires, to force people into dominant subjectivities and fit the world nicely into concepts or categories, becomes a paranoiac attempt to limit schizo-law. this desire to master the world is also something jane bennet challenges via adorno's critique in his "negative dialectics," where he theorizes that violent behavior results from the frustration that humans experience when the world does not fit their concepts (14). conroy's behavior and description of his motivations confirm his paranoid and narcissistic attempts to reterritorialize desire via his position as authority and arbiter of the law. especially interesting here also is that like her son luc, joyce tomlinson is closer to zoe in her embracing of desires as she often promotes luc's free-spiritedness. in contrast, conroy is colonized by oedipus, which defines his desire as lack in that his life is devoted to filling the lack created by joyce's marriage to brick, and to a lesser extent his desire to acquire wealth for the manipulation of others. conroy acquires wealth mostly for the purpose of attempting to separate joyce and brick. joyce, however, largely disregard's capitalism's lure as it seems she loves brick for himself, not for his finances. of course, brick's extreme adoption of capitalist logic leads him to view the baboons and their land as an opportunity for profit, and, anticipating this behavior, conroy manipulates him into the business venture. the novel thus points to the precarious biopolitical situation for those seeking protection from the law when its arbiters are colonized by capitalist desire. in other words, conroy's lack of joyce in his life and his use of his position to accumulate wealth jeopardizes the protection and futures of south african communities, making "disposable" those his position was created to protect. the desires of luc, morris, and the other characters who assemble to save the baboons, however, work to challenge these capitalist and narcissistic desires outside of the limitations of the law. as the novel reveals towards the end, conroy occupies a god-like position in his manipulation of the plot. his desire for mastery suggests an extreme form of the kind of control and disgust for vagueness and untidiness that the protagonist exhibited earlier in the novel. as the protagonist and conroy approach a relationship of mentor and mentee, heyns positions the development of the protagonist's character as dependent on his relationship to desire or zoe. at one end of the spectrum, the side of transcendental law, sits conroy, whereas nick's best friend and fellow lawyer, gerhard, embodies "immanent schizo-law" or desire and zoe as positive. conroy describes his frustration with the failure of his plan, that even after rendering brick to a state of poverty he still has not separated joyce from brick, blaming this on the incalculable nature of humans: "[a]gain i failed to take into account the inconsistency of human beings. joyce … was moved by his destitution to side with him" (404). joyce's exceeding the mastery of conroy's control suggests the ungovernability of foucault's homo oeconomicus from the birth of biopolitics, as cary wolfe describes: in opposition to what foucault calls homo juridicus (or homo legalis)the subject of law, rights, and sovereignty-we find in this new subject, homo oeconomicus, "an essentially and unconditionally irreducible element against any possible government," a "zone that is definitively inaccessible to any government action," "an atom of freedom in the face of all the conditions, undertakings, legislation, and prohibitions of a possible government." "the subject of interest," foucault writes, thus "constantly overflows the subject of right. he is therefore irreducible to the subject of right. he is not absorbed by him." (before the law 23) conroy thought he could control her, assuming that she loved her husband for his money, that she was colonized by capitalist desire, but she desires her husband for himself. even from his position of authority in the law, conroy cannot master joyce's desire or tame it to direct it toward himself. the protagonist, morris, also presents challenges to power and government that pertain to foucault's homo oeconomicus as he has broken numerous laws and no longer attempts to master his own desires. in addition, conroy offers in this scene his desire for an oedipal relation to the protagonist based on their similar orderliness and strict discipline: as you know, i had been taken with your dissertation some years ago … and now, i thought … you could take the place of the son i never had … you reminded me of myself at your age: ascetic, high-principled, civilised … for the first time my sterile obsession with avenging myself on the world for what i had missed yielded to a vision of what i might yet have. (404) here, conroy's knowledge of the protagonist's homosexual act with luc upsets his oedipal ambitions of fatherhood. more specifically, morris' acting on his sexual desires with luc caused him to miss his appointment with conroy-the first time the protagonist ever missed or was late for an appointment-frustrating conroy's ambitions of mastery. frida beckman's discussion of homosexuality in deleuze's thought acknowledges how in addition to non-human sexuality, "[a]nother way of exploding the anthropomorphic, heterosexual, familial, and oedipal organisations of sexuality is found in homosexuality" (16). she continues explaining that "[h]omosexuality, as verena andermatt conley notes, is seen here not as an identity, but as a becoming" (16). morris' now positive appraisal of desire, which also motivates his protection of the baboons (who express sexual desire themselves), therefore enables the freedom from conroy's complete mastery of most of the characters in the novel from his position as an authority of the law. morris embraces his homosexual desires, instead of repressing or avoiding desire as he does at the beginning of the novel, in a way that enables a becoming away from the fixed identity of the subject of rights or the subject of capitalism that conroy might have otherwise mastered. conroy's description of his ideal new society built on "wisdom of authority" also includes biopower in the form of "death squads" (404), biopower being that which foucault argues derives from a desire to govern and control homo oeconomicus. indeed, conroy describes his position of mastery here in a way that confirms his paranoid attempts to maintain and control desire. after suggesting that he wasn't trying to get joyce back, he comments: what i resolved to do was to achieve mastery over myself and others, partly through self-control, partly through control of them. and whereas control of the self is a matter of discipline, control of others is a matter of money. of this, as i have remarked, i soon had large sums, thanks to my contacts in countries officially hostile to south africa. (401) here, conroy confirms the manipulation of his position of authority to exact his revenge, and along the way treating others, the land, and indeed the country of south africa as disposable in service to exercising his personal grievances. in short, he adopts a relation to others of "eating," as discussed in chap. 4. while early on in the novel the protagonist, like conroy, attempts to live an exceedingly controlled and ordered lifestyle (and this is in large part why conroy views him as an ideal candidate for his mentorship), his embracing of zoe, perhaps especially his embracing of his homosexual desire, frustrates the mastery and control of conroy's plan. the protagonist's decision to embrace zoe as positive then becomes revolutionary as it creates a line of escape from the mastery and instrumentalization of the humans, animals, and environment of south africa exhibited in the apartheid regime's practices. baboons before the law at one point in heyns' novel, after the baboons have been stolen from their home, luc tomlinson appears at morris' office to discuss the legal case for saving the baboons and their land from his father's business plans to set up a luxury resort there at cape point. the conversation that the characters engage in about the legal status of the baboons reveals the problems that the law has in deciding on the status of animals, an issue fontenay discusses in her chapter entitled "between possessions and persons." luc expresses his desire to get a "court order" (259) for the baboon,s to which morris responds: "before i can get a court order i need to establish that somebody's rights are being infringed" (259). luc argues that it is obvious that the "chacs'" (chacma baboons') rights aren't being respected, noting how they've been taken away for medical testing and vivisection, an issue i'll return to later. the protagonist replies: "the rights of animals are a much debated area in law" (259). at this, luc replies angrily at morris: "i'm not interested in any fucking debate. anybody who isn't unbelievably stupid or dishonest knows what we're doing to the animals … it just suits us to come up with debates. the law is … ." morris attempts to finish luc's sentence, offering "an ass?", to which luc replies: "i was thinking of something more useless, like a … a eunuch" (259). their conversation about the law continues, describing how the law protects only certain people through their metaphor of eunuchs as morris remarks, "they guard the sultan's harem," and luc replies: "yeah. great if you're the sultan, not so great if you're not" (259). the discussion of the law in terms of eunuchs and harems continues to develop the theme of sexuality in the novel, and also points to the exclusionary nature of the law, as it only protects those who are considered as belonging to the community. the discussion of the harem and the sultan also perhaps highlights the discriminatory nature of the law's privileging some and excluding others. the protagonist attempts to end the conversation about the law and what can be done for the stolen baboons in a way that suggests he's exhausted all available avenues to help them. he remarks: "well … for better or for worse, the law, for all its shortcomings, is all we have to help us here" (259). such a position, that we can only work within legal discourse to improve the state of affairs for animals, greatly limits the political potential for addressing the problems facing them. as wendy brown and janet halley suggest, "rights cannot be fully saturated with the aims that animate their deployment … they retain a certain formality and emptiness which allow them to be deployed and redeployed by different political contestants" (9). in this sense, the affect and enthusiasm for protecting gets cut short when rights are viewed as the only avenue of intervention. brown and halley further explain the potential of critical theory for considering opportunities for politics and justice outside of legalistic frameworks, which the characters in reluctant passenger eventually take up in seeking extralegal, creative approaches: "[c]ritique [in contrast to legalism] hazards the opening of new modalities of thought and political possibility" (28). where the protagonist, who lives most of his life according to society's normative rules, who lives extremely discursively or "by the book" as it were, seems to be giving up on the case for the baboons when they reach a dead end legally, his friend gerhard intervenes, responding to morris' claim that the law is all we have: "not necessarily" (259). gerhard continues critiquing the lack of power that pertains to the law: "but where, as mr. tomlinson has pointed out, the law so manifestly lacks balls, we may have to rely on our own … devices for a remedy" (260). the characters' desires for one another-gerhard is sexually attracted to luc, flirting with him, and, as the consummation of luc and morris' relationship bears out later, they desire each other as well-and for the baboons, especially luc's, result in their hatching a plan to save the baboons, outside the parameters of the law. as a lawyer for luc and the baboons, morris employs some blackmailing of his own to win the case for the baboons and the preserved land, with the help of a fellow lawyer and her husband, and the rest of the group which have rallied round the cause, including gerhard, morris' former girlfriend, and others. as a result they are able also to reinstate mr. haartshorn, the original director of nature conservation and development, who testified in the case that he was blackmailed with evidence of his extramarital affair and bribed into resigning after writing a report denying brick tomlinson's business proposal for the land under question. morris and his team also use some compromising pictures of minister stanford from what are revealed to be sex parties for ministers during the apartheid regime, which involved their raping of young men in military uniforms at a building in rocklands, the preserve of the baboons (163). the photos were given to morris by joyce tomlinson, and later we learn, at the recommendation of judge conroy, to influence the minister's testimony so that he confesses that haartshorn gave him the report denying development prior to resigning. the trial results in haartshorn unseating the man who, in the old regime's pocket, replaced him and approved the proposal. for conroy, this is a victory because it caused a large financial loss for brick tomlinson by preventing the development of the land. however, the baboons are still rendered unprotected after the ruling as they are stolen and taken to the vivisection laboratory, and bulldozers appear at the nature preserve. thus even the legal ruling that uncovers the corruption and decides in favor of the baboons cannot protect them from the extralegal means of the capitalist desire to dispose of and turn a profit from them and their land. heyns portrays in morris a character who transforms his negative feelings about sexuality and animality into positive passions to work for the protection of the baboons, even outside the realm of the law. how do we think outside of dominant thought and beyond its closures? when faced with the limits of law, the characters' desires compel them to think differently. braidotti explains that deleuze and irigaray bank on the affective as a force capable of freeing us from hegemonic habits of thinking. affectivity in this scheme stands for the preconscious and the prediscursive: desire is not only unconscious but remains nonthought at the very heart of our thought because it is what sustains the very activity of thinking. our desires are that which evades us, in the very act of propelling us forth. (nomadic subjects 40) thus desire and affectivity enable gerhard, luc, and nick to think differently, outside the parameters of the law, to devise a plan to protect the baboons. woodward argues about luc's appeals for the rights of baboons throughout the narrative that "luc coaxes the reader to accept the concept of baboons as 'creature[s] … of moral standing' within modernity, to refer back to nussbaum's argument" (78). she further concludes her chapter on baboons by noting that "the moral agency of baboons … has not been acknowledged by the south african constitution, which does not incorporate the subjectivity or even sentience of nonhuman animals" (90). while heyns' novel certainly points to the lack of legal status for baboons, the reluctant passenger in my view more strongly argues that it is necessary to think beyond the law, and acknowledges the role that desire can play in this thinking differently. that is, by acting on their desires for the baboons' protection, and for nick morris by embracing zoe as positive instead of attempting to master it in a negative relation, these characters ensure the protection of the baboons that the law cannot always guarantee. as talal asad argues in "what do human rights do? an anthropological inquiry," rights do not always guarantee the protections they describe. he argues: human rights discourse may not … always be the best way (and it is certainly not the only way) to help remove oppression and relieve suffering among human animals, as well as non-human animals, or to preserve the world's natural and cultural inheritance. working in hospices, providing comfort for the traumatized, the sick, the destitute, helping to rejuvenate depressed neighborhoods, are among the activities that help to relieve human suffering. such commitments remain outside the imperative of the law. (51) in light of heyns' novel, we might add rescuing baboons from vivisection and hiding them in one's house to asad's list of the ways we can protect and prevent the suffering of non-human animals. although the reluctant passenger focuses on the life of an environmental lawyer, it emphasizes that we have creative options for responding to animals outside of legal means, options that exist "outside the imperative of the law" (asad) . as i've discussed in previous chapters, desire works across species boundaries, and again in the reluctant passenger an animal's desire and a human's desire for animals leads to the protection of the animals and their habitat. after nick and the adonis-like luc tomlinson walk naked with no deodorant on to meet the baboons (so as not to scare them off), petrus, the alpha male chacma baboon, takes a sexual interest in the protagonist: "'bloody amazing,' said luc, almost admiringly. 'you must have really potent pheromones.' he added with an unconvincing affectation of concern, 'i'm afraid he wants to fuck you.'" (84). as his attentions turn to another baboon, petrus does not consummate the sexual exchange in what would surely be his domination of morris, who fears petrus' great strength and doesn't want to engage in sex with a non-human animal, but the sexual arousal that the protagonist and his pheromones caused in petrus turns out to be the reason that luc, the self-proclaimed friend of the baboons, initially finds the protagonist attractive sexually as well. the passage in heyns' novel suggests the transversal nature of desire as it works across species and indicates the role that pheromones might play in sexual attraction. like the desires that involve lahnee o, minke, and corsicana in tanuki ichiban, and the whale caller and sharisha in the whale caller, here again animals' desire and humans' desire for animals ensures the protection of the animals. the desire that arises out of assemblages (and not transcendental law) enables justice: "transcendent and reified, seized by symbolical or allegorical exegeses, it [the abstract machine] opposes the real assemblages that are worth nothing except in themselves and that operate in an unlimited field of immanence-a field of justice as against the construction of the law" (deleuze and guattari 87) . thus the law is not the house of justice; instead, justice dwells in the potential of desire that results from the immanence of our bodies and relations to others in assemblage. of importance here is that this assemblage includes "black" south africans as well in the figure of nick's colleague and her husband mhlobo, who works at the mail & guardian and who supports the case for the baboons as he helps to discover the underhanded deals of the government officials. this environmentalism of the novel is therefore not a "white" or colonial conservationism but a postcolonial ecocriticism that benefits the larger community of south africa. heyns' novel portrays how the desires of an assemblage of human and non-human actors works against the mastery and control of dominant logics-a postcolonial desire that presents lines of flight out of the paranoid and narcissistic managements of the law and against the "eating" or instrumentalization of the community. gerhard's plan to retrieve the baboons from the vivisection ward demonstrates the creative potential of desire to work for the protection of others beyond the realm of the law. the group learns that the evil former apartheid government scientist now turned scientist for a corporate interest, colonel and doctor johanna van der merwe, performs vivisection on the baboons and also has a project of "rehabilitating" homosexuals to heterosexuality. pickover also highlights the horrifying fact that this testing on animals was done often to develop drugs and chemical weapons to dispose of and control those humans who opposed the apartheid government, and woodward notes this from pickover's work as well. pickover explains that this information came out in the trc hearings as she quotes dumisa ntsebesa who chaired them: when animals are being used by scientists for experiments to manufacture chemical and biological weapons, then society should condemn such experimentation in the strongest terms … even more alarming is the fact that the people who were using their research skills and knowledge to manufacture murder weapons, were people in white coats with stethoscopes hanging out of their pockets. these people are normally associated with preservation of life. that is the most repulsive feature of the evidence that has come before us. (133) ntsebeza's response to learning of the vivisection and the creation of weapons to destroy humans speaks to the biopolitics involved in this case as he notes that those who are supposed to aid in maintaining life end up being the administrators of death. in response to van der merwe's two projects, which render animals and non-dominant sexual desires (which upset her normative visions of the human and white nationalism) disposable to the control and mastery of science for the profit or benefit of the corporation and a particular vision of the nation-state, gerhard devises a plan to distract her by offering himself up as a victim for her experiments so that the other members of the assemblage might sneak into steal the baboons away. in offering his body, gerhard renders himself vulnerable and lets himself be "eaten" by the state, sacrificing his body in exchange for the protection of the baboons. gerhard explains that van der merwe "was a medical officer in the south african defence force" and during that time she "was in charge of some highly controversial experiments" (268). after mhlobo informs nick about van der merwe's horrifying science experiments, and creation of drugs and weapons to harm the black community, nick meets van der merwe, dubbed "the black widow," in a gay bar to set up the appointment where gerhard will be "rehabilitated." van der merwe expresses her views on sexuality here in a way that confirms her attempts to limit desire and to exercise biopolitical control over the south african population: "[i]n terms of all three of these paradigms [science, her womanhood, and christianity] the function of the human species is to procreate itself responsibly" (288). she continues offering here a speciesist perspective: "i believe, of course, that as the bible tells us, we have been instructed and empowered to rule over creation. the human being is the crown of creation, and as such is entitled to use the rest of creation for his benefit-within certain limits, of course" (289). such a view of animals confirms religion's role in attempting to separate humans and animals, something i've also discussed as it is portrayed in the whale caller. van der merwe continues to explain her convoluted arguments, at times insisting on the "naturality" of her positions while at other points explaining the need for science to correct nature after the fall of man. immediately prior to nick's meeting with the black widow, mhlobo informed him that one of the scientist's projects was to sneak birth control into foods that black south africans commonly eat as a way to control their populations. here van der merwe explains her position after nick queries: "isn't breeding natural?" (290). she replies: it's natural only in the sense that the procreation of rabbits and chickens is natural. nature in that sense is an accident, without plan or purpose. that is the creation over which the lord gave us dominion. the higher nature is guided by divine wisdom as manifested through science and technology, and informed by a sense of individual and national identity. here van der merwe clearly dehumanizes black south africans given that her eugenic project to control the population's sexual reproduction is discussed in terms of rabbits and chickens in this case, and she thereby establishes a hierarchy where whites are superior to black south africans. as the conversation turns to her project of making gay men straight, she explains that she takes it as her calling "to tell them what they should be, and to help them assume their rightful identities" (291). such a perspective demonstrates an attempt to control desire and subjectivity, limiting sexuality to only normative and procreative practices that might benefit the state in a fantasy of white nationalism. thus human and animal sexualities-these desires-threaten her biopolitical ambitions and ideal vision of the nation. as it turns out, van der merwe, in a sense, rapes gerhard "in the interests of science and the nation" by using a probe on him that was used to give baboons erections to extract their semen for use in experiments to develop birth control for the black population. gerhard's risking of his life, body, and perhaps sexual orientation for the baboons demonstrates a personal sacrifice that results from his desire for their protection. we learn later that the "reorientation" is unsuccessful as he admits having sex with his lover, clive, directly after the experiment, and perhaps gerhard is not as distressed from the experience with the black widow as one might assume as he seems to view it as a challenge. as the assemblage of people risk their lives and wellbeing for the baboons, it's clear that they've gone well beyond the law to ensure the animals' protection. in addition, nick's development of character emphasizes the novel's perspective that embracing zoe and desire as positive is a necessary intervention toward the protection of communities. no longer the solitary, sedentary, order-loving, manageable subject of complicit consumerism and model capitalist laborer, morris becomes political. he deals with the complexities and ungovernable aspects of life, including his sexuality, and multiplies his attachments around a common goal of a sustainable future, not just for the environment and baboons, but also toward social reforms of the legal system through removing those "eaters" of the country from their positions of authority in the government-sustainable futures for the social conditions of south africa. like morris and the assemblage of characters who work against the business proposal to "develop" the land and remove the baboons from their home in the reluctant passenger, camagu, the outsider to the village of qolorha-by-sea and protagonist of zakes mda's the heart of redness (2000), works to protect the community and environment of the village. mda also won the sunday times fiction prize for this novel, which describes how camagu and many of the other villagers, especially qukezwa, argue against the gambling city that is proposed to develop the small village he has recently made his home and come to love. offering a more sustainable alternative to the tourist town, camagu expresses his opinion, which he learns from qukezwa, that the town developed by outside businesses will offer little work or profit for the townspeople and be detrimental to their environment. as in the reluctant passenger, the association of big business with the law is revealed as the developers' attempt to intimidate the villagers' opposition with claims of their connections to the government: "how will you stop us? the government has already approved this project. i belong to the ruling party. many important people in the ruling party are directors of this company" (201). here we see another instance of the political systems that might check the instrumentalization of a community failing as a result of their compromised positions and colonization by a capitalist logic of desire. the audacity with which the developers assert their power demonstrates their impunity as they abuse their positions of authority and elite status in administrating the law: they do not seek to protect the people and animals of the village as the law might happen to prescribe. instead, the developers use their position of power to secure their personal wealth at the expense of the well-being of the community, continuing a practice of "eating" of the community in viewing it as disposable for their personal gains. somewhat similar to the reluctant passenger, where the character development of the protagonist is situated on a scale of zoe-between his embracing its uncertainties in the example of gerhard and controlling or mastering it in the example of conroy-camagu's character in the heart of redness also develops in relation to desire. in this case, how he apprehends it as oedipal, capitalist and as a lack or as positive, productive, and ethical is manifested through his thinking about his relationships with women and the environment: whether he sees the casino development's potential violence to the environment as totally beneficial to the community and views women as existing for his sexual pleasure, or by contrast, taking a more critical position, considers other more positive ways of relating to women and the environment. his interest in relationships with two women of the village indicate his growth as a character as he is at first interested in bhonco's daughter, xoliswa ximiya: a teacher who no longer lives in the village, fetishizes the us, deplores local traditions, such as the practice of dyeing the face with ochre ("the redness" of the novel's title), and sees the advancement of the community toward a greater likeness of western civilization as worth the sacrifice of the environment and animals of the village. as the novel progresses, camagu finds that he more strongly desires qukezwa, daughter of zim, who demonstrates an exceptional knowledge of and intimacy with the environment, the flora and fauna of the village, and local history and traditions. particularly important here as well is the believers' expanded notion of community beyond the "human" that is evidenced in particular characters' devotions to their horses, camagu's refusal to kill the snake of his totem that appears in his bedroom, and especially zim's love of and communication with weaverbirds. in contrast to the developers' plan, and based on the insight into "development" he learns from qukezwa, camagu proposes a smaller measure of a resort built with local materials by the villagers appealing to a different type of tourist who appreciates nature, but not for trophyhunting purposes. camagu's alternative proposal, importantly, does not disregard the fact that the villagers' lives would benefit from some increase in funds. that is, as i discussed in chap. 3 by quoting huggan and tiffin (20), he is not against "development" in and of itself. instead, he is against those forms of development that position the developers in a parasitic relation to the environments and communities they develop, where they can better control and manipulate the community through their inclusion into the global capital system. his proposal is certainly one of development as well. the important difference is that the proposal is developed so as to benefit the community as it values local flora and fauna, knowledge, and labor, rather than devastating it as the capitalist casino and theme park certainly would. the villagers of qolorha are largely divided into two groups: believers and unbelievers. the believers are descendants of the followers of the prophetess nongqawuse back in the times of the cattle-killing movement in the 1850s. 2 as the novel jumps back and forth from the colonial past to the present, at times seamlessly, colonial and neocolonial themes are developed in relation to the environment and sustainability. the believers are more traditional in their return to and appraisal of customs of the past and, as espoused by zim, a prominent believer, they are against the development of the tourist casino. however to be sure, mda does not portray these two groups as totally at odds or pure in their difference: the groups are more complex because some of the unbelievers value the traditions of others and have a mode of believing in unbelief, for example. these divisions along lines of belief, which were exploited by the british colonizers in a divideand-conquer strategy, offer a critique of the present political divisiveness that becomes a distraction and more about self-interest and pride than working toward a sustainable future and protections for the community. the heart of redness emphasizes the variety of temporalities and historical influences experienced in the present of south africa. as mbembe explains, "everything happening today is [not] simply a rerun of a scenario …. [t]oday's shift … is … toward the underground channels" (73). indeed, we've seen this underground market of animal trafficking in tanuki ichiban in chap. 4. in this sense, while i've gestured throughout the project to how the "new" south africa continues to be similar to the past violent organizations of society, mbembe makes clear that the new negative modes of relation and extraction are somewhat different in adopting this underground fashion. mbembe continues to explain how, [i] n this intermeshing of temporalities, several processes co-exist; there are processes tending to make peoples view the world in increasingly like ways, and at the same time, processes producing differences and diversities. in short, contradictory dynamics are at work …; it is too easy to reduce these dynamics to simple antagonism between internal and external forces. (73) this suggestion to avoid oversimplifying the more complex and nuanced interactions of the present organization of society is particularly useful for assessing the dynamics and influences at work in mda's novel: his observation that different, diverse perspectives are occurring, as well suggesting ways out of the culture of sameness and the status quo. as i've been describing how characters seek extralegal means to protect their communities, the heart of redness aligns with mbembe's conclusion about the dynamics of the current moment where the state is no longer viewed as "the best instrument "for ensuring the protection and safety of individuals, for creating the legal conditions for the extension of political rights" (73). the leading unbeliever, bhonco, and his daughter view all signs of "development" and "progress" imposed by corporations as beneficial for the future of the village. as evidence of this, bhonco discontinues some of the adornments of his traditional clothing and begins wearing business-style suits. as braidotti describes, late capitalism endangers not only biodiversity but also human and cultural diversity: [disregard for biodiversity] also threatens cultural diversity by depleting the capital of human knowledge through the devalorization of local knowledge systems and world-views. on top of legitimating theft, these practices also devalue indigenous forms of knowledge, cultural and legal systems. eurocentric models of scientific rationality and technological development damage human diversity. the plans to make the village of qolorha by the sea into a casino would not only render the environment unsustainable but also dominate the culture and non-dominant, indigenous knowledge, such as the ways of fishing and other environmental lessons that the american-educated camagu is continually learning from the villagers throughout the novel. alongside this are the high esteem that bhonco's daughter holds for the us, the country where camagu got a degree, only to return for the elections of 1994. camagu attempts to correct this view of the us as a land of progress by describing the prevalent racism and imperialist practices that he experienced in everyday american life and foreign policy. in his essay on the heart of redness, byron caminero-santangelo argues that the novel positions "cosmopolitan bioregionalism" as a mode of resistance to western development: if capitalism in its various phases has made space out of place, stripping away prior signification (deterritorializing) and reshaping in order to facilitate control and exploitation, then the process of imagining or reimagining a "place" entailed by bioregionalism can be one means of countering threats of exploitation, environmental degradation, and disempowerment. such a concept perhaps resonates with the idea of "smooth space" discussed earlier as a resistance to striated or mapped-out and managed space of the state. yet bioregionalism seems to offer a more specific, intimate knowledge of place and may therefore be a concept better suited to resisting the neocolonial power enacted against particular people, flora, and fauna. its cosmopolitanism challenges the isolationism or "ecoparochialism," to use nixon's term, of some bioregionalisms that adopt a view of place as separate from a broader world, or that ignore the historical and other conditions that are involved in the composition of place as a "process" (296). this cosmopolitanism is especially important in a south african context as it takes note of larger world processes, upsetting particular nationalist imaginaries and their rhetorics of purity that might attempt to deny or elide past violences, histories, occupations of land, and so forth, such as afrikaner white nationalism in south africa. as caminero-santangelo argues, "[n]otions of purity are debunked in the heart of redness not only in respect to identity and culture, but also in terms of the category of nature" (297). a cosmopolitan bioregionalist perspective makes clear how particular rhetorics of purity deployed to claim a place as home or to determine the limits of community are undermined by a broader view of international movements, material processes, relations, and so on. marisol de la cadena's concept of "indigenous cosmopolitics" presents perhaps an even more apt concept for considering the notions of politics at play in the heart of redness, given the emphasis on indigenous knowledge throughout the novel. much of her writing in her essay about differing worlds and worldviews concerning the prospect of a mining development and its potential devastation of a mountain called ausangate in the andes parallels the varied logics and arguments about development in qolorha in mda's novel. for example, bhonco shows disdain for many traditional practices and knowledges privileging western development, while qukezwa and her father zim have intimate relationships with non-human animals, and great respect for the environment and the indigenous knowledge of the xhosa. like caminero-santangelo's reading, which emphasizes the open-endedness of the novel, its privileging of continued dialogue and its refusal to uphold any one character's or group's-believers and unbelieversperspective as the truth or right view, de la cadena emphasizes plural perspectives on nature and politics rather than the one universalizing understanding that often elides other ways of knowing. she argues that despite indigenous knowledge that conceives of the "earth-being" (or mountain in non-indigenous parlance) called ausangate as significantly agentive, there are no guarantees that this knowledge will determine the decision people arrive at regarding the question of development: pluriversal politics add a dimension of conflict and they do not have guarantees-ideological or ethnic (cf. hall 1996) . people-indigenous or not, and perhaps ethnically unlabeled-could side with the mine, choosing jobs and money over ausangate, either because they doubt or even publicly deny its being a willful mountain, or because they are willing to risk its ire for a different living. ausangate's willfulness could be defeated in the political process-some would embrace it, others would not-but its being other than a mountain would not be silently denied anymore for a pluriversal politics would be able to recognize the conflict as emerging among partially connected worlds. and although i would not be able to translate myself into nazario's ontology, nor know with him that ausangate's ire is dangerous, i would side with him because i want what he wants, to be considered on a par with the rest, to denounce the abandonment the state has relegated people like him … to denounce the mining ventures that do not care about local life. (362) de la cadena, while situated outside of the world of indigenous knowledge, nonetheless promotes respect for it as she recognizes its potential-in the threat of agency from ausangate's ire-to challenge the instrumentalist views of nature offered by western biopolitics and development rhetoric. the heart of redness offers a similar perspective on "earth-being's" agency through indigenous knowledge that bhonco and other developers often elide or dismiss as backwards. for example, the qukezwa who married twin in the past explains that "we never kill the snake of the spring. if we did, the spring would dry out" (22). later, in the present of the novel, her namesake tells camagu about the agency of a specific snake, gqoloma, who lives in the prophet nongqawuse's pool: "when it pays a visit … moving from the pool at the gxarha river to another pool at the qolorha river … it causes havoc in its wake, like a tornado. it destroys houses. it uproots trees" (152). camagu also respects his people's customs when he prevents hotel workers from killing the snake that appears in his room because it is his totem. in contrast, xoliswa, who adopts western knowledge as universal, dismisses indigenous knowledge as nonsense: "what can we say about a man who believes in a snake?" (161). earlier her father bhonco and others too dismiss the believer's respect for indigenous trees and animals as "foolish" and "madness," and takes a homogenous view of nature in suggesting that native trees could easily be replaced with "civilized trees" (146-7) . the heart of redness's indigenous cosmopolitics positions indigenous knowledge as frustrating bhonco's attempt to deploy as a universal a western definition of politics as reserved exclusively for humans and his attempts to uphold a human/ nature binary. the "animist materialism," harry garuba's phrase, expressed in characters' spiritual views of these flora and fauna suggests a mode of resisting their instrumentalization. where bhonco reads them as lacking in use value-"these plants are of no use at all to the people. they are good neither as wood nor as food" (93)-qukezwa and other characters' animism values the animals and plants on their own accord. as garuba argues of animism, "objects thus acquire a social and spiritual meaning within the culture far in excess of their natural properties and their use value" (267). the reading of desire in the novel offered here aligns with cosmopolitan bioregionalism, animism, and indigenous cosmopolitics. where cosmopolitan bioregionalism offers a notion of place as process rather than defined space, this project focuses on challenging the defining or limiting views of subjectivity, desire, and other concepts that are also more processual. indigenous cosmopolitics emphasizes "non-representational affect" as key to its expanded notion of politics; theorizing desire, as one mode of affect, as a political potential to resist such exploitation coincides with these other concepts' emphasis on place and indigenous knowledge as modes of resistance. the ethics of sustainability that informs camagu's development of a cooperative calls into question the capitalist notions of western development. he discusses his cooperative with dalton, the trade store owner: i am talking of self-reliance where people do things for themselves. you are thinking like the businessman you are … you want a piece of the action. i do not want a piece of any action. this project will be fully owned by the villagers themselves and will be run by a committee elected by them in the true manner of cooperative societies. (248) his description confirms that his motive is "not for profit" but for creating more positive passions, more joyful lives for the villagers than the current work some of the villagers perform as workers in the mines, service workers at hotels, and the potential jobs that would come from the casino. the narrator describes these workers as receiving racist treatment at the hands of white tourists and also receiving poor wages. camagu makes his opinion of the casino proposal as an unsustainable option clear at one of the meetings the villagers have with the developers. "it is of national importance only to your company and shareholders, not to these people!" he yells. "jobs? bah! they will lose more than they will gain from jobs. i tell you, people of qolorha, these visitors are interested only in profits for their company. this sea will no longer belong to you. you will have to pay to use it" (200). part of the loss from these new jobs will include the devaluing of local customs, knowledge, and labor, and the inclusion of the work done by villagers into the economy of exchange in capitalism that translates into profit for the western developers. camagu's desire is clearly for the people, and this desire for the community stems from his initial desire for qukezwa and his knowledge of its importance to her. his anti-oedipal desire therefore counters the capitalist desire of the developers. as mentioned earlier, camagu arrives at his position on the proposal for the casino resort after his discussions with qukezwa. indeed, the arguments he voices at the village meeting with the developers are those she expressed to him earlier. having a ph.d. in "communication and economic development" (29) from the us, camagu at first finds the casino proposal unproblematic. in fact, early in the novel he adopts more of a capitalist logic of desire as lack and it is qukezwa's teachings that change his views about desire and his relation to others. at the novel's outset, camagu is about to leave south africa to return to the us for a job in economic development, and yet it is his desire that derails his trip, it is desire that brings him to qolorha. as in the whale caller, mda here distinguishes the protagonist's desire from narcissistic desire. after hearing the song of a funeral singer, a "makoti" (28), he cannot get her out of his mind: he becomes breathless when he thinks of her. he is ashamed that the pangs of his famous lust are attacking him on such a solemn occasion. but he quickly decides it is not lust. otherwise parts of his body would be running amok. no, he does not think of her in those terms. she is more like a spirit that can comfort him and heal his pain. a mothering spirit. and this alarms him, for he has never thought of any woman like that before. (28) while all of his relations to women previously are of a selfish nature and about accumulating sexual pleasure for himself, and he is ethically deficient in this regard as he pays his servant to have sex with him in a way that the narrator compares to the rape of a slave by her master (28), his desire for this woman is not of a self-serving kind; it is this desire for her that motivates him to seek her out again in qolorha. thus, while he is self-interested and narcissistic in his use of others for sexual pleasure at the novel's beginning, he comes to approach desire differently after this experience with the makoti and after learning from qukezwa. in contrast to the earlier one-sided affairs of camagu's lust and use of women, both he and qukezwa have sexual dreams about each other: "mutual dreams. messy dreams" (171). this transformation of his relation with women from a position of dominance to a mutual relationship brought about by qukezwa suggests that she is a feminist character. indeed, harry sewlall dubs her "the quintessential ecofeminist" (113), for her thorough knowledge of the plants and animals of her habitat, her challenges to the patriarchal traditions of the villagers, her dressing in traditional garb, and her educating others in the village about the environment and living in a sustainable way. yet, as caminero-santangelo convincingly argues, the novel's characterization of qukezwa is not an idealization of the indigenous as some critics hold, since she is more complex, transformed by history and cultural contact: "such characterizations [of qukezwa as the idealized ecofeminist] suggest that mda reinforces the notion of an unchanged indigenous ecosystem that existed before the impact of colonialism and advocates for a return to an indigenous, properly ecological relationship between human and nonhuman nature." in other words, qukezwa sees the similar logics of oppression at work that seek to disenfranchise animals, women, and others from a position of full standing and as deserving of the protections of the community. her ecofeminism becomes clear, especially in the scene where she seeks to defend her environmentalist practices of killing some foreign water-depleting trees before the council of elders, challenging the lower legal status afforded to women in traditional xhosa laws by gesturing to the laws of the "new" south africa that prevent gender discrimination. qukezwa's role as a mother to heitsi and her teaching him to swim in the sea at the novel's end demonstrate a particularly south african feminism that embraces motherhood as a political act, a mode of feminism in the country that as zoë wicomb explains differs greatly from the largely negative view of family roles in western feminisms. her teaching her child to swim in the sea, in relation to which she has played perhaps the most significant role in protecting it from being stolen from the community by the developers, confirms her feminism as a robust ecofeminism. qukezwa also plays a role in deterritorializing camagu's once capitalist desire as he no longer narcissistically spends his time seeking his own pleasures and profits at the expense of others. animals seem to play a role in this transformation of sexual desire as he, rather like the whale caller, achieves orgasm seemingly incidentally in the presence of an animal and in response to song, in this case while he and qukezwa both ride on the horse gxagxa: "[h]is pants are wet … . it is not from sweat" (152). at this point in the novel, camagu becomes enthralled with qukezwa, especially her singing rather than with her looks. in fact, the more "civilized" and western potential love interest xoliswa is known for her beauty which rivals that of models. after their ride on gxagxa, "[h]e remembers … when she sang him to an orgasm" (174). like nick morris in the reluctant passenger, at first he fears this different kind of non-human desire and seeks to maintain control over this zoë: "he must get away from these surroundings that are haunted by qukezwa's aura. he must fight the demons … he must try to be in control" (149). as he is "spellbound" and not in a dominant position of control as in his previous sexual experiences where he used women, the scene indicates a more positive experience of desire. this horseback ride, apparently, results in qukezwa's pregnancy-a strange, non-normative chance pregnancy that occurs incidentally during a fully clothed ride. conceived at this moment of non-human desire and intensity, without sexual intercourse, while atop a horse, their child heitsi figures as a future for the community where desire will continue to offer new ways of thought and creativity to resist neocolonial threats. while dominant culture might view such an act as dirty, weird, or something to be prevented, or even as a sort of violence to the horse, mda's novel indicates that the relationship between qukezwa and gxagxa is positive and ethical: "they love each other, gxagxa and qukezwa … . her father lives in this horse. she wouldn't dare do anything shameful in its presence … . she gives it the same kind of respect" (275). her sensual encounter with camagu while riding gxagxa in this regard is not "shameful" or pejorative but perhaps a moment of shared intensity and love between humans and animals. earlier, qukezwa draws attention to the colonization of camagu's thought that results from his american phd in economic development and highlights how this colonization informs his initial reaction to the proposal for the casino resort: vathiswa says they made you a doctor in the land of the white man after you finished all the knowledge in the world. but you are so dumb. white man's education has made you stupid. this whole sea will belong to tourists and their boats and their water sports. those women will no longer harvest the sea for their own food and to sell at the blue flamingo. water sports will take over our sea! (103) like nongqawuse, qukezwa desires to protect her community, a community which includes animals, plants, and the people of qolorha. after camagu argues that the village will be paid for this, and that the development will create jobs, she further challenges his thinking: what do villagers know about working in casinos? … . i heard one foolish unbeliever say men will get jobs working in the garden. how many men? and what do they know about keeping those kinds of gardens? what do women know about using machines that clean? well, maybe three or four women from the village will be taught to use them. three or four women will get jobs. as for the rest of the workers, the owners of the gambling city will come with their own people who are experienced in that kind of work. (103) thus it is qukezwa who is responsible for protecting the community, alongside the changed camagu, who decides to stay in qolorha instead of leaving for the us for his own financial gains, a decision to stay in south africa that nick morris makes as well in the reluctant passenger. therefore anthony vital's claim that "the united states is represented also as providing the central character with the economic understanding that protects the local from outside exploitation" (306) seems to fail to recognize qukezwa's knowledge and influence on camagu's thought and desire. qukezwa's assessment of the proposal is accurate, and the way in which the proposal is framed to benefit the community works just like traditional colonial logic of the civilizing mission, where the colonizer's behavior is presented as a benefit for the people, when really its goal is to further disenfranchise them so that the politicians and developers can "eat." mda points to this colonial history as well in portraying george gray's taking of the xhosa's land in return for "civilizing" them. this ethics of sustainability in the heart of redness is not one of moral universalism but instead one that acknowledges the importance of local or indigenous knowledge. harry sewlall describes the novel's representation of this knowledge by pointing to the importance of the local court's treatment of qukezwa for cutting down foreign trees: what emerges at the village trial of qukezwa is that the indigenous people of this land have always had their own laws to protect the environment. while qukezwa's actions are considered criminal because there are no laws proscribing wattle trees, there are traditional laws in place which allow the destruction of noxious weeds and plants, such as the mimosa. (114) the novel highlights multiplicities of perspectives, times, and values concurrently, as mentioned in the contrasting positions of the believers and unbelievers, but also in dalton and camagu's different plans for the village as either a cultural tourism site or a nature tourist site. the administration of the local laws of the amaxhosa reveals that the elders of the village who make rulings do not view the law as static or transcendental. for example, although the "old law" (213) regards any woman not married as a minor, they listen to the unwed twenty-year-old qukezwa's arguments against this law: "[i]n the new south africa where there is no discrimination, it does not work" (213). at this, the chief replies: "now she wants to teach us about the law" (213). while bhonco's daughter xoliswa ximiya is officially a teacher, it is qukezwa who becomes a more active teacher in the community. as mentioned earlier, bhonco and his daughter xoliswa eurocentrically denigrate most traditional customs and practices as "backward" and "uncivilized," embracing instead many western and american ideas about lifestyle, the natural world, and development. this extends to local flora and fauna, as bhonco asserts: "we want to get rid of this bush which is a sign of our uncivilized state" (92). zim and his daughter qukezwa, by contrast, follow traditional xhosa customs, practice indigenous environmental knowledge, and greatly value local biota, rejecting many of the western ideas introduced into their community. qukezwa and zim's embracing of tradition challenges bhonco and xoliswa's eurocentricism, yet it too is not without problems. in her chapter that focuses in part on heart of redness from her "wilderness into civilized shapes:" reading the postcolonial environment, laura wright reads some characters' engagement with traditions in mda's novel in terms of bhabha's notion of "colonial mimicry," arguing that they "rely on imagined identification with a now inaccessible and uninhabitable past, while simultaneously subverting and parodying that past in an attempt to monetarily benefit from its value as a marketable commodity" (21-2). she explains the problems of this exploitation of tradition in john dalton's obviously business-oriented and self-interested plans for a cultural village as she notes camagu's view of such a packaging of tradition as "inauthentic" and as "deny[ing] the value of contemporary xhosa culture" (50). wright also astutely observes how dalton's planned last-minute heroics by withholding the letter he secured declaring the village a protected heritage site is an example of a "colonial mentality that indigenous peoples were not capable of caring of themselves" (53). however, she also has problems with qukezwa's drawing from xhosa traditions. wright views qukezwa's focus on tradition and removal of invasive plants as taking part in a postcolonial tendency of "ineffective … attempts at establishing various prelapsarian-and imaginary-african edens, impossible landscapes that are somehow uncompromised by their postcolonial status" (23). while she argues that both the believers and unbelievers attempt to borrow and invent traditions in ways that are appropriative, qukezwa's attempts to "recreate" (51) tradition seem to occur without such appropriation. like bhonco, zim seems somewhat extreme, but in the other direction, in his embracing of past traditions, selectively deploying them at times in the imaginary fashion that wright identifies in order to emphasize his difference and purity from bhonco as when, for example, he shaves off his eyebrows. however, qukeswa's drawing from tradition and indigenous knowledge, and perhaps from nongqawuse's future-oriented biopolitics, is free from this edenic imaginary and approaches instead an attempt to serve the best interests of the community by exercising an ethics of sustainability. in this sense, qukezwa's breaking the traditional laws to cut down certain invasive and water-extracting trees might be seen as more in line with the extralegal efforts of the characters in heyns' reluctant passenger to protect their community and the baboons. perhaps the difference in readings comes here from wright's attempts to read the plants in mda's novel as metaphor: "plants function as metaphors for colonizers and colonized peoples, and the invasive species that characters seek to eradicate generate no hybrid entities" (14). the fact that there are no hybrid plants is surprising and supports wright's view nicely. however, there are issues with such a metaphorical reading. after acknowledging that the killing of invasive plants can be read in a literal sense as well, wright goes on to emphasize the plants as metaphor as she attempts to read qukezwa's killing of plants as a "shortsighted solution to white intrusion": "removing all invasive plant species not only would be impossible, but also such an action can only operate on a metaphoric level" (51). reading the invasive plants in a literal sense instead of as a metaphor for colonizers, we might appreciate qukezwa's environmental conservation efforts to preserve her community's water further. reading these scenes of the killing of flora and of community exclusions in terms of biopolitics enables more careful attention to the different kinds of life under consideration and the ethics of hospitality that pertain to them. wright's reading of qukezwa's biopolitical management of flora as metaphor also seems to ignore differences between kinds of life and the idea that qukezwa does not seek to remove all whites from the community in a xenophobic fashion. in fact, it is bhonco who seeks to remove dalton and other non-xhosa people by deploying a purist and prelapsarian rhetoric, as i discuss below, when he attempts to expel those from the community who disagree with his position on the casino development or who otherwise frustrate his ambitions. if bhonco is extreme in his disdain for local flora and fauna, and in his willingness to sacrifice indigenous plants, animals, and knowledges for english ones, zim is somewhat extreme in his love of all that is traditional and disdain for the foreign. yet quekezwa does not kill some of the foreign trees to restore an eden or out of a xenophobic impulse but out of concern for the community's water supply. bhonco's concerns seem more self-centered and short sighted. he becomes a kind of nationalist manager when he threatens camagu's membership of the community in response to camagu's anti-development arguments: "who are you to talk for the people of qolorha? … you talk of our rivers and our ocean. since when do you belong here? or do you think that just because you run after daughters of believers, that gives you the right to think you belong here?" while seeking to win the argument for the development, bhonco attempts to do so by excluding camagu from the community and from being a subject of rights in the community, enacting a biopolitics that threatens to remove those who are not pure enough, not xhosa enough. qukezwa doesn't seek to banish all the plants from the region, just those that greatly diminish the water supply and threaten the ability of other plants to survive. while she initially emphasizes that the trees she cut down are "foreign trees!" she explains that she did so because they are like the inkberry, which "destroys everything before it!" (215). bhonco attempts to discern and charge qukezwa with xenophobia by picking up on the "foreign" in her explanation: "are you going to cut down trees just because they are foreign trees?" asks bhonco indignantly (216). in her reply, qukezwa explains that she is not against trees just because they are foreign; instead, she kills the trees that harm the community. making biopolitical decisions about what must be sacrificed for the future of the community, qukezwa explains to the elders why she cuts certain trees and doesn't cut others: the [foreign] trees in nogqoloza don't harm anybody, as long as they stay there … . they are bluegum trees. the trees that i destroyed are harmful as the inkberry. they are the lantana and wattle trees. they come from other countries … from central america, from australia … to suffocate our trees. they are dangerous trees that need to be destroyed. (216) in reply, bhonco asserts that the traditional law doesn't allow for the killing of these foreign trees without permission, and qukezwa argues for the law to be changed because the wattle tree "uses all the water" (216). the law doesn't allow for the killing of the inkberry without permission either, yet everyone knows its harmful qualities and allows its cutting anyway, without the law's approval. qukezwa argues that this is the extralegal precedent for her actions, explaining: "[the wattle] is an enemy since we do not have enough water in this country" (216). in this scene, qukezwa decides to remove those plants that threaten the community's future, just as the earlier believers killed the cattle, effectively stopping the viral spread of the european lung sickness that was decimating their cattle and horses. the opening of the novel also confirms that the environmentalist efforts of the xhosa have been successful in securing a sustainable present: "indeed, qolorha-by-sea is a place rich in wonders. the rivers do not cease flowing, even when the rest of the country knells a drought. the cattle are round and fat" (7). described here as wonders, perhaps alluding to the magical realism of the novel and its prophets, the report on the state of the animals and environment suggests that environmentalist practices have created a sustainable relationship with the land where other parts of the country suffer water shortages. the comment about the healthy cattle follows the positive assessment of waters in qolorha, suggesting that the cattle-killing movement and the sustained interest in conserving water has in some measure helped to sustain the environment and the future of the community. bhonco, conversely, upholds the law at all costs in this case, further proving that it is desire which is actually in the place of law. although the ruling of the elders is interrupted by a fire that burns a few of the villagers' homes, the elders mostly disagree with bhonco as it's clear that he is just interested in punishing qukezwa because she is a believer, and zim's daughter at that. rather like judge conroy in the reluctant passenger, who seeks to use the law to abuse his rival brick tomlinson, bhonco appeals to the law in hopes of seeing zim punished for his daughter's crimes: "why doesn't he stand up like a man and take the rap?" (214). bhonco's desire is reterritorialized, seeing as he has no problem with the development of the casino city, which would break these laws, a project which the developers reveal involves the killing of many of the village's trees: "how can we call it a grove when we're going to cut down all these trees to make way for the rides?" in response, the other developer remarks: "[w]e'll plant other trees imported from england. we'll uproot a lot of these native shrubs and wild bushes and plant a beautiful english garden" . in contrast to the developers and bhonco, whose desire is self-interested, and who arbitrarily upholds the law when it suits him (and it is perhaps significant in this regard that bhonco's frustrations with his inability to secure his old-age pension from the government is a frequent sore spot for him throughout the novel), qukezwa's actions are motivated by a desire to protect her community; in this instance, specifically the local plants and water supply of qolorha. as the history of the amaxhosa wars with the british colonists and qukezwa's killing of colonizing plants make clear, the response to new things and deciding on their belonging to the community or not often involves a consideration of how these new people and things harm or "eat" the community, or if they further protect it. bhonco at times wants to expel dalton, descendent of a british colonial officer, and camagu, who at times he calls a foreigner. he decides that these "outsiders" do not belong to the village community in relation to how their presence or absence would personally benefit him, not the larger community. he has repeated arguments and later a violent encounter with dalton, for example. the racial inflections of dalton's status in the community highlight the various modes of biopolitical management at work in qolorha and demonstrate characters' anxieties about belonging and their relationship to the land as "home." these concerns about who belongs and who doesn't, how many, who belongs most, and the desire for a space that makes it feel homely according to a particular imaginary or fantasy recall the discussion of "nationalist managers" and homely space in disgrace in chap. 2. camagu has the most obviously ambiguous relationship with the community of qolorah as home and, indeed, with south africa. he doesn't feel at home in johannesburg, in part because he can't dance the toyi-toyi (the freedom dance of the struggle) because he was exiled for 30 years and never learned it (28), which results in his being excluded from a number of employment opportunities. in qolorha, he embraces his totem animal, a snake, in a way that impresses the villagers by showing them that he is like them and belongs. roman bartosch, through a citation of harry garuba's definition of "animist materialism," argues that camagu's respecting his totem animal is a "deliberate re-traditionalisation as described by garuba" and suggests that "he is calculating ('i have gained more respect […] since they saw i respect my customs')" (bartosch 170) . while this is an interesting reading, it neglects to consider that camagu respects the snake first, and only later understands the influence it has on others' perceptions of him. a calculating gesture would suggest more deliberate and perhaps insincere performing of respect. camagu, by contrast, seems genuinely joyful to have encountered his totem animal: "camagu is beside himself with excitement. he had never been visited by majola, the brown mole snake that is the totem of his clan … . he is the chosen one today" (98). where not knowing how to dance the toyi-toyi prevents camagu from belonging and imagining himself at home in the city, his ability to respect the customs of his people and his affective response enables a kind of assertion of belonging and imagining of a homeland in qolorha. the descendent of a colonial official, dalton too attempts a certain imagined relation to the community in denying this legacy. he replies "'it is not true! it is not true!' " to bhonco's point that "he is a descendant of headhunters" (168). while he is a "white man of english stock," he has an "umxhosa heart" (8), and zim argues that "dalton is not really white … it is just an aberration of his skin. he is more of an umxhosa than most of us" (147). dalton's particular imagined relationship and belonging to the community, through knowledge of the language and participation in its rituals such as circumcision, performs a rhetoric of belonging that attempts to ignore or elide the colonial past. yet he still benefits from his position of white privilege in south africa in belonging to the "white" community, and even continues some racist practices against the villagers, as when he makes bhonco ride in the back of his truck, a common mode of segregated, racist travel practiced by white men during apartheid: "the old man [bhonco] struggles to climb into the back of the bakkie. even though dalton is alone in the front seat, customs do not die easily. dalton can see a hint of anger on the elder's face" (141). in this sense, dalton imagines a relationship to both communities: the white nationalist community and the xhosa village. he also seeks to establish a connection to the land through his marriage to an afrikaner-the afrikaner "belongs to the soil. he is of africa"-and asserts to his friends who are leaving south africa: "this is my land. i belong here" (139). these imagined relationships to land and community through certain kinds of belonging and nationalism often demonstrate the kind of willful cognitive dissonance that characters take on in order to feel at "home" as they navigate their relationships to the past, to the land, and to the community. the imagined relationships also reveal the violence that results from certain rhetorics of "home" as characters often seek to exclude or treat poorly those they deem not "pure enough" or foreign. foucault observes this violence in the racism of biopolitics: [r]acism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is … a biological-type relationship: 'the more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, … the more ias species rather than individual-can live, the stronger i will be, the more vigorous i will be. i will be able to proliferate. the fact that the other dies does not mean simply that i live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer. (255) foucault explains in this discussion that the death he's discussing is not just literal but also "indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on" (256). bhonco's seeking to expel certain "impure" characters from the community that thwart his ambitions of wealth and social climbing to an elite status through westernizing himself, the environment, and the community exhibit this kind of racist bipolitics. his attempt to get zim and qukezwa punished legally, weakening their political standing, and indeed his risking of the community's water and the lives of the animals through attempting to stop the environmentalists, evidences a violent biopolitics that continues in a racist, colonial legacy. camagu's presence in the village is obviously not a problem initially when bhonco welcomes him energetically as a westernized south african and because he thinks camagu might marry his daughter. as it becomes clear that camagu's desire is for qukezwa instead, bhonco argues that he and dalton should be expelled from the community for their not being "pure" amaxhosa or their not being born in qolorha. however, this logic of exclusion based on categories only suits his desire for "development" and what he thinks will be his personal benefit and profit. indeed, he often disavows the importance of local knowledge, allowing western notions of "development" and civilization to inform his thinking about biopolitical decisions. in building his case against qukezwa for destroying the water-depleting trees, he argues that it is unjust to absolve her when "white tourists" were recently arrested for "smuggling cycads" and boys were also punished "for killing the redwinged starling, the isomi bird" (216). the elders reply to bhonco's argument by noting the difference of life under consideration here: "shall we now be required to teach revered elders like bhonco about our taboos? it is a sin to kill isomi. yes, boys love its delicious meat that tastes like chicken. but from the time we were young we were taught never to kill isomi … . we only desired them from a distance" (217, emphasis added). the traditional laws and words of the elders here express a desire for animals that respects their lives and membership in the community and results in the community protecting them from being eaten. the passage highlights the differing models of desire at work in qolorha as the indigenous notion of desire frustrates the view that capitalist desire is a universal or the only way to desire animals. this other way of desiring challenges the tourists and those who seek only a relation to the animals of eating, thereby showing capitalist desire to be but one way among other, different possibilities. the passage reveals that not only have the xhosa in the heart of redness long had their own environmental laws, as sewlall suggests, but also they've long had their own ways of desiring animals. in contrast to bhonco, qukezwa, evaluates newcomers to the community in relation to the harm they may cause or, alternatively, their ability to further protect and sustain the community. indeed, qukezwa works for the white dalton and begins a romantic relationship with the non-xhosa, camagu, that results in a hybrid child and future. bhonco's attempts to expel camagu and dalton from the community, as well as his approval of the sacrifice of the non-human life of qolorha for the casino city, suggests that his approach to the law relates to what derrida calls an autoimmunitary problem. wolfe writes about the need to deconstruct species and race as a way to prevent this problem: "[r]ace and species must, in turn, give way to their own deconstruction in favor of a more highly differentiated thinking of life in relation to biopower, if the immunitary is not to turn more or less automatically into the autoimmunitary" (56). in other words, bhonco's use of these categories at times as a way to challenge the membership of these others in the community risks the sustainability of the community in the expelling of its diversity, especially considering that it is dalton and camagu who, with the assemblage of other community members, ultimately successfully resist and prevent the development of the casino city. wolfe discusses the desire for sameness that pertains to the law, and how derrida's notion of "hospitality" can challenge this problem in its ethical response to the other: [t] he reason that this [the ideal of unconditional hospitality] is crucial to biopolitical thought is that it keeps that zone of immunological protection from automatically turning to, as derrida puts it, an autoimmune disorder. the idea is that once you start drawing lines between humans and animals, aryans and jews, muslims and christians, that is always going to lead to the runaway train process of an autoimmune disorder. so eventually, you know, how aryan is aryan enough? how christian is christian enough? how human is human enough? how "proper," to go back to heidegger, is proper enough? the horizon of unconditional hospitality as something to strive for is precisely calculated to remind you that whatever those lines are that you are drawing have to be always taken under erasure, even as, pragmatically those lines have to be drawn and are drawn all the time. ("after animality" 184) bhonco's desire to expel particular members out of the community then evidences this kind of autoimmune disorder as he accuses people of not being xhosa enough at times when it suits him and, at others, of not being civilized enough. in essence, bhonco seeks to improve himself, and to that end approves of the casino city, not recognizing its neocolonial nature, and thus advocating the sacrifice of the local land, animals, and other members of his community for the building of the casino. in contrast, the other characters consider sacrifice in terms of the protection of their community, including its human and non-human members. qukezwa responds differently to the biopolitical problems of protecting her community-with hospitality. wolfe quotes derrida's description of hospitality: "'pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other'" (before the law 92). rather than write off or automatically exclude foreigners from the community, qukezwa responds ethically to camagu and the other new arrivals to qolorha, including flora and fauna. to be sure, she does not welcome everything in an unconditional hospitality because to do so, as wolfe observes, would be to become apolitical and unethical: "[d]iscrimination, selection, self-reference, and exclusion cannot be avoided, and it is also why the refusal to take seriously the differences between different forms of life-bonobos versus sunflowers, let's say-as subjects of immunitary protection is, as they used to say in the 1970s, a 'cop out'" (103-4). qukezwa clearly exercises discrimination in deciding which plants, animals, and people are welcome to be part of her community and which aren't, often on the basis of their colonizing or harming the life and futures of the other members of the community. toward the novel's end, the community stops the casino development when dalton gets a court order declaring qolorha a "national heritage site" (269), something camagu had suggested earlier in response to the developers' "how will you stop us?" the location's history of nongqawuse's prophecies that led to the cattle-killing movement renders it worthy as a potential site deserving protection. as dalton protects the community in a roundabout legal way, mda's novel provides another example of how desire exists where we think there is law to protect communities. camagu and dalton, in their desire to protect the community, think that this alternative way to ensure the casino development will not go through. thus, in addition to qukezwa's ethical response to protecting her community, nongqawuse's prophecies, her desire to protect the community in thinking toward the future that led to the cattle-killing movement in the 1850s in response to colonization that brought with it lung disease for the cattle, disease for the amaxhosa's crops, and the starvation of many of the amaxhosa, while tragic, continues to protect her people via the national heritage site enabling further sustainable futures. laura wright observes this as well: if there is any hope to be had, the polyphonic and temporally simultaneous structure of the text seems to suggest, it is in the cyclical and nonlinear nature of history wherein nongqawuse can be read at once as the cause of a people's destruction in the past and, through her cultural cachet as such a figure, their salvation in the present and as the girl whose failed prophecy in 1856 is fulfilled late in the twentieth century. (54) 3 although following the prophecy of nongqawuse was devastating for the amaxhosa, mda offers it as an ethical attempt to bolster the immunity of the community. j.b. peires explains the biological conditions that resulted from the colonial contact and led to the cattle killing: an important cause of the cattle-killing was the lungsickness epidemic which reached xhosaland in 1855. cattle mortality was as high as one half to two thirds in some places, and many xhosa lost all their cattle. the great believer chief phatho, for example, lost 96 percent of his 2500 cattle … the xhosa began to believe that their cattle were rotten and impure, and that they might as well kill them since they were probably going to die anyway. (312) in this light, part of the logic that informs the movement is the attempt to limit the spread of the disease, to prevent it from attacking all the cattle. another aspect of the logic of sacrificing the cattle involved the hope that it would remove the british colonists: cattle-killing was born partly out of xhosa frustration at colonial domination and partly out of the hope awakened by the news that the russians had beaten the english … . among the many predictions that circulated at the time was one to the effect that the english, like all other evil things, would be swept away in the great storm which would precede the resurrection of the dead. (peires 316) peires also explains that, alternatively, many also believed the sacrifice would amend the conflicts and bring peace between the british and the amaxhosa nation. perhaps the greatest reason for the british "success" in colonizing the amaxhosa, then, is this cattle disease that "was brought to south africa in september 1853 by a dutch ship carrying friesland bulls" (peires 70) as it functioned essentially as a kind of biological weapon in the war between the british and the amaxhosa. the slaughtering of the cattle in an attempt to prevent the spread of this disease is an exercise in biopolitics. as wolfe notes in critiquing affirmative biopolitics that fail to consider the difference of life-those approaches that view all life as equal-such an approach isn't practical (or perhaps desirable) given the destructive nature of some life forms: "[d]o we extend 'unconditional hospitality' to anthrax and ebola virus, to sars?" (before the law 93). in the heart of redness, environmentalist characters often perform a biopolitics and hospitality that is not always affirmative but discriminates and seeks to eliminate the lung sickness, water-depleting plants, and neocolonial developments that would decimate the community. in the face of such an attack on the immune system of the community, king sarhili's decision to follow the words of the prophetess exercises an ethical attempt to protect and sustain the community. of course, as history bears out, the situation and decision were devastating: one of the figures offered for the drop in the human population of the xhosa people from the cattle killing is an estimated loss of 40,000 over a twoyear period. also, 400,000 cattle were slaughtered and the xhosa lost 600,000 acres of land to the british (peires 319). these tragic figures highlight the vulnerability of bodies that humans and animals share. they also point to the great dependence of the community on these non-human others for survival. emphasizing our limited knowledge, and that to act at all we can only respond with a conditional hospitality, wolfe writes of biopolitics: we must choose, and by definition we cannot choose everyone and everything at once. but this is precisely what ensures that, in the future, we will have been wrong. our 'determinate' act of justice now will have been shown to be too determinate, revealed to have left someone or something out. (104) while the cattle killing may appear to have been "wrong" from the perspective of today as it can be seen as being responsible in part for the devastation of the amaxhosa community-peires notes that some view it as a mass suicide, although he clearly disagrees with this view-in light of the biopolitical decisions exercised by qukezwa in the present of the heart of redness, mda situates the movement as an attempt to act politically and ethically to protect the community. mda's novel emphasizes, as peires also argues, that the tragic deaths of the amaxhosa community were caused by the colonizing disease of lung sickness as well as the colonizing british, both of which established a relationship of "eating" these communities. just like the development project of the casino city, which attempts to colonize and devastate the community, the british colonization during the cattle-killing movement was geared towards ruining the amaxhosa nation: the cattle-killing cannot be divorced from the colonial situation which was imposed on the xhosa in 1847 by sir harry smith … it should be remembered that the essential objectives of grey [sir george grey] were identical to those of smith and of colonial rule generally: to destroy the political and economic independence of the xhosa, to bring them under british law and administration, to make their land and their labor available to white settlers, and to reshape their religious and cultural institutions on european and christian models. (peires 313) peires' passage describes an organization of labor and the community that would be replicated in a slightly new form by the international development company's proposal. yet by deterritorializing desire away from the narcissism of colonization and global capitalism toward a postcolonial desire, one for the benefit of the members of the community, qukezwa and the others of the assemblage, including camagu and dalton, work to fend off the disposal of the community by an international development corporation, exercising an ethical biopolitics that continues in the tradition of the prophetess, and, for the time being, she temporarily secures her community's protection and its potential for a future. in addition to the government officials who support the casino in the heart of redness, chief xikixa, who is charged with protecting the land where it "is illegal to build within a kilometer of the coast," also puts his own profits and pleasure ahead of the community. he gives the land away to wealthy white people and "some well-to-do blacks," some of whom build "right on the seashore," for bribes such as a "bottle of brandy" and later on "cellphones and satellite dishes" (68). these products of globalized capitalism bring the village of qolorha into the global economy, threatening the life and future of the community as it is rendered exchangeable for a cheap price, and for the pleasure and profit of a few. in both heyns and mda's novels, the commodification of the lands of local communities and the disposing or harming of the interests of their residents, human and non-human, are thwarted through what i'm describing as the postcolonial desire of an assemblage of characters, a desire for the community in a broad sense that disrupts and resists the colonizing ambitions of capitalism and its adherents. as braidotti argues, in the context of biotechnology, zoe exceeds capitalist control: "nature is more than the sum of its marketable appropriations: it is also an agent that remains beyond the reach of domestication and commodification" (transpositions 47). if capitalism seeks to commodify all of life and proliferate its logic of desire of lack through colonizing the unconscious, postcolonial desire describes a potential of desiring machines that escapes, resists, or undoes this colonization in a line of flight away from capitalism's reterritorialization of desire, reassembling communities around an ethics of sustainability instead of an accumulation of personal profit. where some global capitalists see an opportunity in the "under-developed" lands or villages to secure a profit at the expense of destroying and devastating its inhabitants, the resistances offered by these human and non-human assemblages disrupt the capitalist machine and, for the time being, protect the futures of their homes. in both the reluctant passenger and the heart of redness, the laws passed to protect these communities repeatedly fail to do so, often as a result of the compromised position of those tasked with upholding the law. while these authorities, judges, and politicians seek their own profit at the expense of the community, they reveal their colonization by capitalist logic. through weaving the history of the cattle-killing movement into the narrative about the present-day proposed casino city, zakes mda emphasizes the colonial legacy in which global capitalism operates and continues in the practices of capitalists and government officials from developed countries and their counterparts in "developing nations." heyns' novel focuses more specifically on protecting a troop of baboons instead of protecting a larger community of human and non-humans, as in mda's novel. nonetheless, the critique of the capitalist development of the baboon's home in the nature preserve also undermines the workings of the apartheid regime more broadly, in this case the animal testing and other exercises in biopower of the apartheid state on south african bodies. for both novelists, then, the explicit violence exerted on communities, on bodies, and on the land in the pasts of colonialism and apartheid reappears in a subtler and more nuanced fashion in the present of late capitalism through the weakened and compromised administration of the law which fails to fully protect communities from the threats of disposal and violence. mda and heyns represent desire as a resistance to this neocolonial threat that might better protect these communities and their futures from being consumed by the capitalist machine. notes 1. see jacques derrida, "before the law," in acts of literature, ed. derek attridge (new york, ny: routledge, 1992), 181-220. derrida also emphasizes this emptiness in noting the lack of an origin for the law in "before the law:" "what is deferred forever till death is entry into the law itself, which is nothing other than that which dictates the delay … what must not and cannot be approached is the origin of difference: it must not be presented or represented and above all not penetrated. that is the law of the law, the process of a law whose subject we can never say, 'there it is,' it is here or there" (205 peires. in the dead will arise, peires details how although extremely tragic for the amaxhosa, nongqawuse's prophecies and the decision to slaughter cattle resulted from extreme circumstances of british colonization and disease. the slaughter of most of the amaxhosa cattle, then, offers an example of a biopolitical issue. for example, peires writes "that the cattle-killing was a logical and rational response, perhaps even an inevitable response, by a nation driven to desperation by pressures that people today can barely imagine. i further believe, and i trust that the book will demonstrate this too, that the cattle-killing would not have been so fatal an error had it not been for the measures of governor grey, which first encouraged and then capitalized on the movement" (x). the unfortunate coincidence of increased pressure from british colonization and the lung the amaxhosa's decision to slaughter their cattle as a way to preserve their remaining community. as peires and mda's novel bears out, the decision to slaughter the cattle after the telling of nongqawuse's prophecies therefore figured as an attempt to secure the futurity of the amaxhosa people, even while it ultimately caused so many of them to die their alternative proposals prevent the immediate "development" of the casino, which would surely spell the ruin of the community, rendering it unsustainable. mda seems to acknowledge that this approach of ecotourism is not exactly the most radical approach either, as his later novel, the whale caller what do human rights do? an anthropological enquiry environmentality: ecocriticism and the event of postcolonial fiction what is sex? an introduction to the sexual philosophy of gilles deleuze nomadic subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory after animality, before the law: interview with cary wolfe left legalism/left critique in place: tourism, cosmopolitan bioregionalism, and zakes mda's heart of redness indigenous cosmopolitics in the andes: conceptual reflections beyond 'politics kafka: toward a minor literature. translated by dana polan before the law without offending humans: a critique of animal rights 17 march 1976 lecture explorations in animist materialism: notes on reading/writing african literature, culture, and society the problem of ideology: marxism without guarantees the reluctant passenger. jeppestown: jonathan ball postcolonial ecocriticism: literature, animals, environment mda, zakes. fools, bells and the habit of eating: three satires mda, zakes. the whale caller in african literature: an anthology of criticism and theory the dead will arise: nongqawuse and the great xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856-7 animal rights in south africa. cape town: double storey books ecofeminism in zakes mda's the heart of redness situating ecology in recent south african fiction: j.m. coetzee's 'the lives of animals' and zakes mda's 'the heart of redness to hear the variety of discourses before the law: humans and other animals in a biopolitical frame the animal gaze: animal subjectivities in southern african narratives wilderness into civilized shapes: reading the postcolonial environment the politics of necessity: community organizing and democracy in south africa article 4-2 1 marx and technology joseph i. fernando assumption university of thailand karl marx had spent more than three decades (1849-1883) in england, the land of the industrial revolution. steeped in philosophy and political economy, marx became more and more aware of the exploitative nature of capitalism. he was committed to the discovery of an alternative to capitalism which would be in keeping with the worth and dignity of human persons. marx’s attention was drawn to technology as technology in the hands of capitalists led to greater exploitation of workers. marx was certainly a pioneer in the philosophy of technology. his painstaking analysis of the relation between the machinery and the worker and a host of other revelations concerning the use of machinery in the capitalist system are impressive. this article is an attempt to understand marx’s philosophy of technology. 1. the development of machinery marx begins his analysis of machinery and modern industry1 by quoting john stuart mill who says in his principles of political economy: “it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”2 that is not the aim of the capitalist application of machinery. machinery is intended to cheapen commodities by lengthening that portion of the working day, which the labourer gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist. it is a means for producing surplus value. in manufacture or cottage-industry, the revolution in the mode of production begins with the labour power, whereas in modern industry it begins with the instruments of labour. marx’s first enquiry is, what is the difference between a machine and the tools of handicraft? some call a tool a simple machine, and a machine a complex tool. they do not see an essential difference between the two and give the name of machine to the lever, the screw, the wedge and so on. in fact, every machine is a combination of these simple powers. for marx, from the economic standpoint this explanation is worthless because it lacks the historical element. another explanation of the difference between tool prajñâ vihâra, volume 4, number 2, july-december, 2003, 1-17 © 2000 by assumption university press 2 and machine is that man is the motive power of a tool and in the case of a machine the motive power is something different from man; such as an animal, water, wind and so on. according to this explanation, a plough drawn by oxen would be a machine, while a circular loom, which worked by a single labourer, weaved 96,000 picks per minute (at the time of marx in england) would be a mere tool. this loom, though worked by hand, would be a machine if worked by steam. marx goes on to say that fully developed machinery consists of three essentially different parts: the motor mechanism, the transforming mechanism, and finally the tool or working machine. the motor mechanism puts the whole in motion. it either generates its own motive power like the steam engine or it receives its impulse from some already existing natural force like the windmill from wind. the transmitting mechanism, composed of fly-wheels, shafting, pullies, gears and so on regulates the motion, changes its form where necessary and divides and distributes it among the working machines. the motor mechanism and the transmitting mechanism put the working machines in motion. the working machines as such is that part of the machinery with which the industrial revolution of the 18th century began. we find the working machine proper under altered forms, the tools used by the handicraftsman or manufacturing worker. instead of being human implements, they are mechanical implements. the entire machine is either only an altered mechanical edition of the old handicraft tool, as for example, the power-loom or the working parts fitted in the frame of the machine are old acquaintances like saws in sawing machine and knives in a chopping machine. the machine, which is the starting point of the industrial revolution, supersedes the worker, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools, and set in motion by a single motive power. 2. the effects of machinery on the labourer a. appropriation of supplementary labour-power by capital the machinery does not require muscular power. it becomes a means of employing labourers of slight muscular strength and those with incomplete bodily development, but whose limbs are supple. the labour of women and children is the first thing needed by capitalists who use 2 prajñâ vihâra 3 machinery. machinery, the mighty substitute for labour and labourers became a means for increasing the number of wage labourers by enrolling every member of the worker’s family without distinction of age or sex. compulsory work for the capitalist robbed children of their play and the worker of his free labour at home within moderate limits for the support of the family. “the value of labour-power was determined, not only by the labour-time necessary to maintain the individual adult labourer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. machinery, by throwing every member of that family on to the labour market, spreads the value of the man’s labour-power over his whole family. it thus depreciates his labour-power. to purchase the labour power of a family of four workers may, perhaps, cost more than it formerly did to purchase the labour power of the head of the family, but in return four days labour takes the place of one, and their price falls in proportion to the excess of the surplus-labour of four over the surplus-labour of one. in order that the family may live, four people must now, not only labour, but expend surplus-labour for the capitalist. thus we see, that machinery, while augmenting the human material that forms the principle object of capital’s exploiting power, at the same time raises the degree of exploitation.”3 machinery also changes completely the contract between the labourer and the capitalists, which formally fixes their mutual relations. taking the exchange of commodities as basis, marx’s first assumption was that capitalist and labourer meet as free persons, as independent owners of commodities, one with money and means of production, the other labour-power. but now the capitalist buys children and youth under age. previously, the worker sold his own labour-power as a free agent. now he sells his wife and children; he has become a slave-dealer. the capitalist’s greed for exploitation is the cause of employment of children. in spite of legislation in great britain children sold to act as live chimneysweeping machines exceeded 2000 when marx was in england. children and women faced physical deterioration as machinery subjected them to the exploitation of the capital. the mortality rate of the children of the workers was enormous during the first few years of their life. the cause of the death-rates was principally due to the employment of the mothers away from their homes, and to the neglect and maltreatment consequent on her absence. there arose natural joseph i. fernando 3 4 estrangement between mother and children, as a consequence intentional starving and poisoning of the children. the revolution in the mode of cultivation had led to the introduction of the industrial system. immorality was on the rise as women were away from their home; children were left pining at home. marx says that the moral degradation caused by the capitalistic exploitation of women and children has been thoroughly depicted by f. engels in his lage der arbeitenden klasse england. by the excessive addition of women and children to the ranks of the workers, machinery at last breaks down the resistance which male operatives in the manufacturing period continued to oppose to the despotism of capital. b. prolongation of the working day if machinery increases the productiveness of labour i.e. shortens the working-time required in the productiveness of a commodity, it becomes in the hands of capital the most powerful means for lengthening the working day beyond human endurance. in the form of machinery, the tools of labour become automatic, moving and working independent of the worker. the automaton, as capital in the person of the capitalist is endowed with intelligence and will. it is animated by the longing to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by man. this resistance is lessened by the apparent lightness of machine work, and by the more docile character of the women and children employed on it. the productiveness of machinery is inversely proportional to the value transferred by it to the product. the longer the life of the machine, the greater is the quantity of the products over which the value transmitted by the machine is spread, and less is the portion of that value added to each single commodity the active lifetime of a machine is dependent on the length of the workingday or on the duration of the labour process multiplied by the number of days for which the process is carried on. in the lengthening the working day the exploitation of double the number of workers demands, not only a doubling of the constant capital which is invested in machinery and buildings, but also of that which is invested in raw material. the lengthening of the working day allows production on a large scale without any change in the amount of capital invested in machinery and buildings. there is not only an increase in surplus value, but the outlay to obtain it diminishes. this takes place with every lengthening of the working day. on the one hand, the 4 prajñâ vihâra 5 development of the factory system fixed a constantly increasing portion of the capital in a form in which its value is capable of continual selfexpansion. on the other hand, it loses both use-value and exchange-value whenever it loses contact with living labour. marx quotes a cotton magnate in support of his view: “when a labourer lays down his spade, he renders useless, for that period, a capital worth eighteen pence. when one of our people leaves the mill, he renders useless a capital that has cost £100,000.”4 thus the increased use of machinery makes a constant increase in lengthening the working day desirable. machinery produces relative surplus value not only by directly depreciating the labourpower, and by indirectly cheapening the same through cheapening the goods that enter into its reproduction; but also by converting the labour employed by the owner of that machinery into a labour of a higher degree and greater efficacy, by raising the social value of the article produced above its individual value. this enables the capitalist to replace the value of a day’s labour power by a smaller portion of the value of a day’s product. when the use of machinery is a monopoly, the profits are exceptional, and the capitalist, by prolonging the working day increases the magnitude of profit. a remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry is that machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working day. “hence, too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital.”5 c. intensification of labour in production as the use of machinery spreads and the number of workers habituated to machinery rises, the rapidity and the intensity of labour increase as a natural consequence. so lengthening of the working day went hand in hand with increasing intensity of factory labour. where labour was repeated day after day with unvarying uniformity and lengthening of the working day became compatible with a lower degree of intensity. the shortening of the working day increased the degree of intensity of labour. when the workers revolted against the lengthening of the working day the english parliament was compelled to shorten the working day. consequently the capitalist lost the production of surplus joseph i. fernando 5 6 value he was used to getting by the prolongation of the working day. but the capitalist engaged himself in the production of relative surplus value by hastening on the further improvement of machinery. at the same time there was a change in the nature of relative surplus value. generally, the mode of producing relative surplus value consists in raising the productive power of the worker, in order to enable him to produce more in a given time with the same expenditure of labour, “labour time continues to transmit as before the same value to the total product, but this unchanged amount of exchange value of each single commodity sinks. otherwise however, so soon as the compulsory shortening of the hours of labours takes place.”6 thus great impetus is given to the development of productive power and to economy in the means of production. this imposes on the workers increased expenditure of labour in a given time, heightens tension of labour power and condensation of labour to a degree that is attainable within the limits of the shortened working day. the condensation of a greater mass of labour into a given period is really greater quantity of labour. in addition to measure of extension, labour now acquires a measure of its intensity. “the denser hour of the ten hours working day contains more labour, i.e. expended labour power than the porous hour of the twelve hours’ working day.”7 marx is interested in the question: how is the labour intensified? the first effect of shortening the working day is due to the law that the efficiency of labour power is inversely proportionate to the duration of its expenditure. what is lost by shortening the duration is gained by the increasing tension of labour power. the mere shortening of the working day increases to a great degree the regularity, uniformity, order, continuity and energy of labour. the shortening of the hours of labour creates the subjective conditions for the condensation of labour by enabling the worker to exert more strength in a given time. with the shortening of the working day, machinery becomes in the hands of capital the objective means, systematically employed for squeezing out more labour in a given time. this is done in two ways, by increasing the speed of the machinery and by giving the workers more machinery to tend. the shortening of the hours of labour called forth such an intensification of the labour as is injurious to the health of the worker and to his capacity for work. 6 prajñâ vihâra 7 3. the factory the body of the factory is machinery organized into a system. machinery by annexing the labour of women and children augments the number of human beings who form the material for capitalistic exploitation. it confiscates the whole of the worker’s disposable time by immoderate extension of the hours of labour and its progress, which allows for enormous increase of production in shorter periods, serves as a means of systematically getting more work done in a shorter time, of exploiting labour power more intensely. in the automatic factory, the collective labourer or social body of labour appears as the dominant subject, and the mechanical automaton as the object. in reality, the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, coordinate with the unconscious organs of the automaton and together with them, subordinated to the central moving power. the central machine from which the motion comes can be described not only as an automaton, but as an autocrat. along with the tool, the skill of the worker in handling it passes to the machine. in the factory, there is a tendency to reduce to one and the same level every kind of work that has to be done by the minders of the machines. though the old system of division of labour is thrown overboard by machinery, it is remoulded and established in a more hideous form of capital as a means of exploiting labour power. the life-long specialty of handling one and the same tool, now becomes the life-long specialty of serving one and the same machine. “machinery is put to a wrong use, with the object of transforming the workman from his very childhood, into a part of a detail machine. in this way, not only are the expenses of his reproduction considerably lessened, but at the same time his helpless dependence upon the capitalist, is rendered complete. in handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. there the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. in manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. in the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workmen who become its mere living appendage. the miserable routine of endless drudgery and toil in which the same mechanical process is gone through over and over again, is like the labour joseph i. fernando 7 8 of sisyphus. the burden of labour, like the rock, keeps ever falling back on the worn-out labourer.”8 factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost. it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and snatches away every bit of freedom on bodily and intellectual activity. the lightening of labour becomes a sort of torture since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. it is no more the worker who employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour employ the worker. “the separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour is finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery. the special skills of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the master.”9 the material conditions under which factory labour is carried on are detrimental to the workers. all the sense organs are injured in an equal degree by the artificial rise in the temperature, by the dust-laden atmosphere, by the deafening noise. there is danger to life and limb among the thickly crowded machinery. marx accuses the factory system in the hands of the capitalist of robbery: “economy of the social means of production, matured and forced as in a hothouse by the factory system, is turned in the hands of capital, into systematic robbery of what is necessary for the life of the workman while he is at work, robbery of space, light, air and of protection to his person against the dangerous and unwholesome accompaniments of the productive process, not to mention the robbery of appliances for the comfort of the workman.”10 4. the conflict between worker and machine the conflict between the capitalist and the wage labourer goes back to the very origin of capital. with the introduction of machinery the worker fought against the instrument of labour itself, the material enbodiment of capital. he revolted against this particular form of the means of production, as it is the material basis of the capitalist mode of production. it took very long for the workers to learn to distinguish 8 prajñâ vihâra 9 between machinery and its employment by capital, and to fight not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used. when the instrument of labour takes the form of a machine, it becomes a competitor to the worker. the self-expansion of capital through machinery is directly proportional to the number of the worker whose means of livelihood are destroyed by that machinery. the entire system of capitalistic production is based on the fact that the worker sells his labour-power as a commodity. division of labour specializes this labour power by reducing it to skill in handling a particular tool. as soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, the exchange value along with the use-value of the worker’s labour power disappear making the worker unsaleable. that section of the working-class rendered superfluous by machinery floods the labour market and reduces the price of labour power below its value. “when the machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the operatives who compete with it. where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and felt by great masses. history discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the english hand-loom weavers, an extinction that was spread over several decades, and finally sealed in 1838. many of them died of starvation, many with families vegetated for a long time on 2½ d. a day. on the other hand the english cotton machinery produced an acute effect in india. the governor general reported in 1834-35: ‘the misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. the bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of india.’”11 machinery is continually introduced in new fields of production. so the character of independence and estrangement, which the capitalist mode of production as a whole gives to the instruments of labour and to the product as against the worker, is destroyed by the means of machinery into an antagonism. thus, with the advent of machinery the worker for the first time violently revolts against the instrument of labour. the instrument of labour strikes down the worker. this direct antagonism between the machinery and the worker comes out most strongly, whenever newly introduced machinery competes with handicrafts or manufacturers. but even in modern industry the constant improvement of machinery and the development of the automatic system has analogous effect. joseph i. fernando 9 10 machinery not only acts as a competitor who gets the better of the worker, but always makes him superfluous. it is also a power antagonistic to him, and as such capital makes use of it. it is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes and revolts of the workers against the autocracy of capital. the steam engine was from the very first an antagonist of human power; it enabled the capitalist to turn a deaf ear to the growing claims of the workers who threatened the nascent factory system with a crisis. marx quotes nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer who gave the following evidence before the trades union commission, with regard to the improvements made by him in machinery and introduced in consequence of the widespread long strikes of the engineers in 1851: “the characteristic feature of our modern mechanical improvements is the introduction of self-acting tool machinery. what every mechanical worker has now to do, and what every boy can do, is not to work himself but to superintend the beautiful labour of the machine, the whole class of workmen that depend exclusively on their skill, is now done away. formerly, i employed four boys to every machine. thanks to these new mechanical combinations i have reduced the number of grown-up men from 1500 to 750. the result was a considerable increase in my profits.”12 5. lack of compensation for the workers displaced by machinery marx observes that bourgeois political economists like james mill, john stuart mill and others insist that all machinery that displaces workers, necessarily and at the same time, sets free an amount of capital sufficient to employ the same displaced workers. marx argues to the contrary as follows: “suppose a capitalist to employ 100 workmen, at 30 a year each, in a carpet factory. the variable capital annually laid out amounts, therefore to £3,000. suppose, also, that he discharges 50 of his workmen, and employs the remaining 50 with machinery that costs him £1,500. to simplify matters, we take no account of building, coal, &c. further suppose that the raw material annually consumed costs £3,000 both before and after the change. is any capital set free by this metamorphosis? before the change, the total sum of £6,000 consisted half of constant, and half of variable capital. after the change it consists of £4,500 constant (£3,000 raw material and £1,500 machinery) and 10 prajñâ vihâra 11 £1,500 variable capital. the variable capital instead of being one half, is only one quarter, of the total capital. instead of being set free, a part of the capital is here locked up in such a way as to cease to be exchanged against labour power: variable has been changed into constant capital. other things remaining unchanged, the capital of £6,000, can in future employ no more than 50 men. with each improvement in the machinery, it will employ fewer.”13 he makes it clear that it is not machinery as such, but machinery in the service of capital is to blame for displacing the workers. “it is an undoubted fact machinery as such, is not responsible for setting free the workmen from the means of subsistence… machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labour, but, when in the service of capital lengthens them; … in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labour; … in itself it is a victory of man over the force of nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces; … in itself it increases the wealth of the producers but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers.”14 for the bourgeois economist any employment of machinery, except by capital, is an impossibility. with him, exploitation of the worker by the machine is identical with exploitation of the machine by the worker. 6. the impact of modern industry on manufacture, handicraft and domestic industry a. removal of cooperation based on handicraft and on the division of labour machinery does away with cooperation based on handicrafts and with manufacturer based on the division of handicraft labour. “an example of the first sort is the mowing machine; it replaces cooperation between mowers. a striking example of the second kind is the needlemaking machine. according to adam smith, 10 men, in his day, made in cooperation, over 48,000 needles a day. on the other hand a single needlemachine makes 145,000 needles in a working day of 11 hours. one woman or one girl superintends four such machines, and so produces near upon 600,000 needles in a day, and upwards of 3,000,000 in a week.”15 joseph i. fernando 11 12 b. adverse impact of the factory on manufacture and domestic industries the development of the factory system changes the character of production in all the other branches of industry. the principle of the factory system is of analyzing the process of production into its constituent phases, and of problem solving by application of mechanics, chemistry and other sciences. this principle of the factory becomes the determining principle everywhere. machinery finds its way into the manufacturing industries. the organization of the manufacturing industries based on the old division of labour is destroyed and constant changes are made. unlike in the manufacturing period, the division of labour is based on the cheap labour of women, children and unskilled labours. cheap labour is found not only in the factories, but also in domestic industry which is converted into an outside department of the factory. marx laments that the exploitation of cheap labour process is carried out flagrantly in modern manufacture than in the factory. it is because the technical foundation of the factory system which is the substitution of machines for muscular power, and the light character of the labour are absent in manufacture. moreover women and children are exposed to poisonous and injurious substances. 7. modern industry and agriculture marx draws our attention to the changes in agriculture affected by modern industry. agricultural machines replace labourers. modern industry in the field of agriculture annihilate the peasant, the bulwark of the old society and replaces him by the wage labourer. as a result, the desire for social changes, and the class antagonisms are brought to the same level in the villages as in the towns. the old-fashioned methods of agriculture are replaced by scientific ones. capitalist production completely destroys the bond of union, which held together agriculture and manufacture. in agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the control of capital means destruction of the producers. the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting and impoverishing the labourer. the social organization of labour process is turned into an organized mode of crushing the worker’s individual vitality and freedom. the dispersion of the rural labourers 12 prajñâ vihâra 13 over large areas breaks their power of resistance while concentration increases that of the urban operatives. all progress in capitalist agriculture not only robs the labourer, but robs the soil as well. all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. “the more a country starts its development on the foundations of modern industry, like the united states, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. capitalist production develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.”16 to sum up, in marx’s perception, the following are the effects of machinery on the labourer: appropriation of supplementary labour-power, prolongation of the working-day, intensification of labour, the inhuman conditions in the factory, the conflict between the worker and the machine, lack of compensation for the workers displaced by machinery, removal of cooperation based on handicraft and on the division of labour, adverse impact of the factory on manufacture and domestic industries and finally the negative impact of modern industry on agriculture especially robbing the soil of its fertility. marx’s critique of technology is a part of his critique of capitalism. the key to his critique of capitalism is his theory of surplus value that explains how capital grows by consuming living labour. labour-power produces surplus value. the exploitation of the surplus value is the basis of capitalism. labour power is provided by living human beings who have their own needs and aspiration. capitalism separates labour and the satisfaction of human aspiration. for marx, labour is the most essential characteristic of human life. labour is physical commerce with nature. it is in labour man creates himself and nature which is the object of his activity. marx depicts how alienation and dehumanization takes place in capitalism. alienation means the subjugation of man by his own works. alienation is the process in which man deprives himself of what he really is, of his own humanity. the worker’s own labour and its products become alien to him. labour is treated as commodity, which means the worker himself has become a commodity. he is forced to sell himself at the market price. paradoxically, the more wealth the worker produces, the poorer he gets. it is not only the product of the labour that is alienated from the joseph i. fernando 13 14 worker, but labour itself is alienated as it is not a means of selfdetermination but of dehumanization. he works for the sake of keeping himself and his family alive. labour is no more a specifically human activity through which he realizes his essence as a human being, but a means to satisfy his biological needs. he is alienated from other human beings as well and social existence is impossible. the commodification of the worker means that he is turned into a thing, deprived of a free and human existence. the capitalist is reduced to an abstract money-power. marx writes in his economic and philosophical manuscript “my power is as great as the power of money. the attributes and essential strength of money are those of myself, its owner. it is not my own personality, which decides what i am and what i can afford. i may be ugly, but i can buy the prettiest woman alive; consequently i am not ugly, since money destroys the repellent power of ugliness. i may be lame, but with money i can have a coach and six; therefore i am not lame. i may be bad, dishonest, ruthless and narrowminded, but money ensures respect for itself and the possessor. money is the supreme good, and a man who has it must be good also.”17 alienation of labour paralyses man’s personal life, species life and community life. capitalism, which breeds alienation, is interested exclusively in surplus value. “capital cares nothing for the length of the life of labour-power. all that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working day. it attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.”18 being forced to sell his labour-power the worker hardly has time to develop himself as a human being. he faces the tragic reality of technology, which is at the service of the capitalist. “the fulfillment of humanity is not, in marx’s view, a matter of attaining some final imagined perfection, but of freeing man forever from conditions that hamper his growth and make him the slave of his own works.”19 marx envisioned the cessation of alienation in socialism. “the working class has conquered nature; now it must conquer man” (marx in the people’s paper, 18 march 1854.)20 to conquer man is to create conditions wherein men control their labour forces and the results of their actions cannot turn against them. socialism does not mean essentially 14 prajñâ vihâra 15 abolition of material poverty or the luxurious consumption of the bourgeoisie, but the abolition of alienation by doing away with the division of labour. the liberation of humanity does not mean simply the satisfaction of material needs but achieving a full and multifaceted life for all. marx stood for the abolition of the division of labour, which not only crippled human beings physically and spiritually but also condemned them to a lifeless monotony and one-sidedness. the cardinal task of socialism is to enable everyone to develop their abilities to the fullest in the social context. for marx, the essential difference between capitalism and socialism is that in the former human beings are degraded into things and in the latter they recover their subjectivity. in the capitalist division of labour one is forced to do a particular activity from which there is hardly an escape. one is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd or a critic and must remain so for the sake of livelihood. whereas in the socialist society none has a particular sphere of activity and one can specialize in what one wishes. as marx would say, it is possible for one to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, to rear cattle in the evening, to criticize after supper without becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. this sounds utopian. we do not find such a thing happening in socialist countries. on the one hand, the credit goes to marx, a pioneer, for undertaking a study of the relationship between capitalism and technology and of the dehumanizing effects of capitalist technology. his analysis exposes the inhuman nature of capitalist technology. we are drawn to appreciate marx’s concern for fellow human beings, especially the working class whose labour-power was bought by the capitalist to increase the surplus value toward accumulation of wealth. on the other hand, we may ask ourselves how valid would be marx’s expectation that in the socialist societies dehumanization of labour created by capitalism would cease to exist. there is hardly any evidence that the socialist societies have solved the problems of alienation of labour. with state ownership of the means of production, planning has been introduced. so the workers are no longer at the mercy of the capitalist bosses. they may enjoy job security, health care, education and other social benefits. but other thing like organization of labour process, technical division of labour, rigid joseph i. fernando 15 16 control of management and so on are like in capitalist countries. in other words, the basic causes of alienation, division of labour and wage-labour exist in socialist countries. marx was optimistic that technology would cease to be a means of alienation in a socialist society. but this dream of marx remains still utopian as we know from socialist experiments. humankind is yet to learn how to handle technology responsibly. humankind is yet to learn how to share the resources of the world equitably. humankind is yet to learn what it means to be human. 16 prajñâ vihâra 17 endnotes 1karl marx, capital, vol. i, progress publishers, moscow, 1986, chapter xv. 2marx writes in the footnote: “mill should have said ‘of any human being not fed by other people’s labour,’ for, without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.” 3capital, vol. i, p. 373. 4ibid., p 379. 5ibid., p. 382. 6ibid., p. 384. 7ibid., p. 387. 8ibid., p. 389. 9ibid., p. 398. 10ibid., pp. 398-399. 11ibid., p. 406. 12ibid., pp. 401-402. 13ibid., p. 411. 14ibid., pp. 413-414. 15ibid., p. 415-416. 16bastian wielenga, introduction to marxism, centre for social action, new delhi, 1977, pp. 77-78. 17quoted from leszek kolakowski, main currents of marxism, vol. i, oxford university press, 1978, p. 139. 18capital, vol. i, p. 253. 19leszek kolakowski, main currents of marxism, vol. i, p. 265 20ibid., p. 284. joseph i. fernando 17 nature of capitalism , cu ei , v c <34 1 kjccvove. gi~' ' = ft£>u 3^^ the social questio n—i v nature of capitalism by dom virgil michel, o.s.b., ph.d. st. john*s abbey, collegeville, minn . 1936 wanderer printing co* st. paul* minn. ’vfl'.f all rights reserved imprimi potest : f* alcuin deutsch, o.s.b., abbot nihil obstat: alexius hoffmann, o.s.b., cens. dep. imprimatur .* 4* joseph f. busch, bishop of st. cloud may 16, 1935 the social question series four nature of capitalism by dom virgil michel, o.s.b., ph.d. st. john's abbey, collegeville, minn . our sunday visitor library huntington, indiana 1936 wanderer printing company—st. paul, minnesota contents page l historical kinds 5 2. freedom from restrictions 10 3. capitalism today 15 4. great changes wrought 20 5. effects on individual life 24 6. social effects 28 7. concept of ownership 32 8. corporation ownership 37 9. concentration of power 42 deaticfifted l historical kinds the term capital , from which capitalism gets its name, has various meanings. it was first used in the domain of commerce and then meant an interest-bearing sum of money. as used in accounting today it means “the amount of property owned by an individual or corporation at a specified time, as distinct from the income received during a given period/' but its most general meaning today is the one it has in the general field of economics. in that sense the word capital refers to all economic goods that are used in the production of other goods over against goods that are used for personal needs or enjoyment. in this latter sense, which is by far the more usual one today, it would be mere repetition or tautology to speak of productive capital, unless a person wished to distinguish between capital that is actually producing an income and other capital that is intended to produce income but actually does not happen to be doing so by reason of the failure of one or several of the conditions under which capital can actually produce economic values. in the loose talk that is necessarily floating about very abundantly in times of depression like ours, the term capitalism is often identified with the present system of industrial manufac5 ture, that is, with the system of economic life that has been developing with increasing pace from the beginnings of the industrial revolution down to our own day, or at least to the year 1929. capitalism is then identified with largescale industry, or with the hiring of labor as a commodity on the market, or some other characteristic factor that is considered peculiar to our own day. the proper term to use for our present system of economic manufacture is not capitalism but rather industrialism, or better still, technological industrialism over against the older home-factory type of industry. but this statement does not mean to imply that we cannot use the term capitalism for our present economic system. for our whole life of today is not only colored but wholly permeated and dominated by what can only be rightly termed by that name. all this may sound very confusing at first blush. but the confusion will disappear when we remember that while our present industrialism is little more than a century old, the capitalism of our times has had a continued though changing existence that goes back to the twelfth or thirteenth century, and has had its predecessors in ancient rome and greece and god only knows where else. in comparison with capitalism, modern industrialism is but a very recent development of homo oeconomicus . '‘both capitalism and wage employment are much older than industrialism in the sense in which the term is used in this article/' writes 6 g. d. h. cole, "‘and there were many factories before there was a factory system based on mechanical power. but industrialism can be said to have begun when machinery driven by a central supply of mechanical power became the typical method of manufacturing production. for from that point industry replaced commerce as the directing force of economic life, and the scale of production and the forms of business organization came to be determined by the growth and character of mechanical power' ’ (“industrialism” in the encyclopedia of the social sciences,) insofar as capitalism is a dominant characteristic of the entire period of modern history, with the latter part of the middle ages included, it might be defined as a system that invests money for the sake of gain or profit. historically there are three kinds of capitalism: commercial, industrial, and financial; and the order in which they are here mentioned is the order of their appearance as well as the order of the successive dominance of each new type over its predecessor. 1) commercial capitalism, in the days of thomas aquinas (the thirteenth century) this •type of capitalism was in full swing. to it various towns on the mediterranean or the adriatic owed their importance; and it received considerable impetus from the crusades. thomas aquinas condemned the taking of interest on any loan of money that was to be used for purposes of consumption. but he enunciated and ap7 proved the primary principle of commercial capitalism: “he who loans out money transfers the ownership of the money to him who borrows. hence he who has borrowed the money holds it at his own risk, and is obliged to restore it fully. whence the one loaning out the money may not demand more. but he who commits his money to a merchant or a craftsman after the manner of an association, does not transfer the ownership of his money to the other; it remains his. whence it is at this man's risk that the merchant negotiates with the money or the craftsman works. hence the man may lawfully demand part of the gain accruing from it as from something belonging to him." what commercial capitalism meant historically is evidenced from the shipping activities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and after, when america was discovered, southern africa rounded, and the whole world encircled by intrepid navigators. another development at this time, especially in england, can be called agrarian capitalism, in which large owners of the best farming land closed the land to their tenants and entered upon commercial sheep-grazing for greater profits out of the sale of wool. 2) industrial capitalism . this arose with the industrial revolution and the advances of technology. while it gave increased impetus to world commerce, the latter became but an ex8 tension of industrialism and was considerably under its dominating influence. 3) financial capitalism . this is a contemporary phenomenon that developed fully only in the twentieth century. the captain of industry is replaced by the money baron, and industry has by force of circumstance come under the dominance of those who control our money. later articles will be touching upon some of the aspects here sketched in brief. 9 2. freedom from restrictions it would be wrong to claim that modern capitalism arose out of a reaction against the fossilized restrictions of the guild-system, as has been done. the truth of the matter is rather that modern capitalism is just as old as the guilds, whose last vestiges disappeared in the eighteenth century. in fact the medieval guilds arose rather in conjunction with the commercial capitalism of the day. trade in the eleventh century was chiefly built up on foreign commerce; however, it took only a small distance at that time to make one place “foreign” to another. the local traders soon formed associations or guilds, and by the twelfth century these merchant guilds began to acquire a monopoly in commercial trading. individual unorganized merchants could not compete with the guild merchants, who prevented them from access to the foreign markets. gradually the merchant guilds also began to exert influence on governments in their own favor. craft guilds appeared about 1100 and by the thirteenth century were organized everywhere. they established regulations regarding the material or qualities of the objects to be made and sold by the craftsmen, and regarding weights and measures, just prices, wages and hours, and 10 qualifications of the craftsmen. members of the craft guilds began to assume the exclusive right to exercise the respective crafts and to receive more and more protection for themselves and their trades from governments. the local craft guilds enforced a boycott on foreign competitors as well as on non-members. they first gained recognition and protection from governments, gradually attained autonomy from local political authority, and by the middle of the fourteenth century had acquired great political power in many towns. while there was considerable individual freedom within the limits set by the guilds, the whole situation was quite different from that of the industrial liberty of a later day. “from an economic point of view the guild system was clearly anti-capitalistic. with no place for individual initiative or the entrepreneurial spirit, it was incompatible with the capitalist idea of profit making. it made it impossible for the artisan to reinvest his savings or his profits in business, since its volume was prescribed by the guild regulations" (henri pirenne) . but as the guild system grew, even the handicraft guilds were in some ways dependent on foreign commerce, both for raw materials and for marketing of their goods. as a result, on the one hand, domination over the guilds by the large merchants grew, and, on the other hand, guilds that tried to retain their independence made ever minuter regulations regarding their 11 membership and their activities. they even appointed supervisors who look much like the walking delegates of our labor unions. fraud was thus prevented to a great degree, but personal initiative was also annihilated, and the guilds became increasingly the exclusive privilege of the few. by the sixteenth century their economic importance had been reduced more and more by the progress of capitalist industry and enterprise. in the meantime the power of the capitalists had grown by leaps and bounds. the example of the great fugger family illustrates this strike ingly. the elder fugger, a master weaver in suabia, south germany, moved to augsburg in 1380 and became a merchant. he prospered, and his grandson jacob (1459-1525) shows the full results thereof. his activities were far-reaching and successful, yet he was constantly urged by the one purpose of making profit as long as he could. he perfected the vast organization of the fuggers, which was truly international, saw that it remained in the hands of only male members of the family, and combined admirably the activities of international merchant, banker, and industrial enterpreneur. he had loaned vast sums to governments, so that in a sense rulers were his subjects. when he died in 1525, his firm was the wealthiest in existence. in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries high state officials became partners in capitalistic enterprises, and governmental power was used to further their economic advantage. here we 12 already have the principle of government protection of the rights of vested interests—a principle later openly declared by the laissez-faire theory. some commercial companies, like the english east india company, were in fact governments of their own, with territories, armies and fortifications under their direct authority. the legalized piracy of english and spanish freebooters in the reign of elizabeth completes the picture. murder and theft in the interests of commerce were no longer deemed sinful. capitalism thereby attained full freedom from the restrictions that characterized the guild system, from government control and regulation, and finally from ethical considerations. the ground was well prepared for the doctrine of laissez-faire , according to which the general public good was best attained if each individual was most bent on looking out for himself, and in which the government had no further duty than to protect the individuals in the pursuit of their own best economic advantage. the freedom from these various restrictions opened the way to the positive liberties of individual initiative and competition, to complete freedom of contract and bargaining power for all human individuals. but there was still the restriction set by competition between successful rivals, with which much economic expense was connected. for a long time, this competition continued to the benefit of the consumer. however, the natural restriction to gain and profit set by such competition was overcome gradually 13 as the period of financial capitalism advanced, under which the control of capital and of markets was made almost complete by combines and by mutual understandings, and the competitive economic rivalries, so injurious to the ultimate goal of business because often very expensive, were reduced to a minimum. the restriction set by competition thus yielded more and more to the unrestricted power of monopoly. 14 3. capitalism today there is much confusion evident today in regard to the nature of capitalism almost every time a group of persons begins to discuss its pros and cons. generally such a discussion emphasizes the so-called evils of capitalism, and the group often divides into those who consider capitalism so abominable that nothing but its abolition will satisfy them, and those who acknowledge some evils in present-day capitalism but maintain that these evils do not arise out of the nature of the thing but rather out of the perverseness of some men who are engaged in capitalistic enterprise. usually the discussions get nowhere for the reason that the term around which the discussion centers has not been defined satisfactorily in advance. to do that, however, is not so easy. webster's international defines capitalism in its economic sense as a "system in which capital or capitalists play the principal part; the concentration of capital ; the power or influence of capital, as when in the hands of a few." obviously these definitions are not adequate for debate. what is the "principal part" that is played by capital or capitalists? how does the "concentration of capital" operate? or "the power of influence of capital ... in the hands of a few"? there is need of a more detailed explanation of 15 what is meant by capitalism before the notion can be used as a working basis for discussion as to its merits in our life. for such an explanation recourse must be had to something more than dictionaries; at the very least, to encyclopedias, or books and articles that make it their point to explain the nature of capitalism. in these there is a fairly unanimous opinion as to what goes to make up capitalism. capitalism is by no means merely a system of private property, nor merely a system of mammonism as practiced by a few unethical individuals. it is specifically an economic system that rests on the priority of production over consumption for the purpose of rationalized profit in a free market and free money system. it uses the large-scale machine production of today as its method of manufacture and is characterized by the almost total separation of the means of production from the labor-energy used in connection with the machinery, and it stands professedly for fullest freedom of contract and bargain on the part of all human agents connected with the productive enterprise. far from being merely a system of material activity, it includes an intellectual or spiritual attitude, a philosophy of life and a scale of values. the following paragraphs will elaborate on this concept of capitalism. most important in any definition of capitalism is the spirit that acknowledgedly pervades 16 it. this spirit, it has been properly said, is dominated by three ideas: acquisition, competition, and rationalization. the avowed purpose of capitalism is the acquisition of wealth, which in our own day, means chiefly the accumulation of money. the dominant objective of all capitalistic enterprise is profit, and ever increasing profit. this aim is quite different from that of gaining a livelihood, which was the dominant motive in pre-capitalistic systems, particularly in the handicraft economy of feudal times. in the latter all thought and action were centered about human beings and their needs, in particular the right of all to a decent livelihood. in capitalism all these considerations are subordinated to the aim of indefinite profit for those who survive in the competition. the system is based on the idea of freedom of all parties concerned, and of a universal competition between them, in which the best men will win out. each industrial enterprise is in itself a small arena of competitive factors in which the different groups attain success one over the other by superior abilities or powers of survival. the machinery bought for the erection of a plant, the materials needed, the labor hired —all are sought on the open market where competition is the rule and where all contracts, whether of purchase of materials or of hiring of labor, are the result of the bargaining action of free individuals pitted one against the other. 17 theoretically, production thus occurs only through the willing cooperation, regulated by free contract, of all groups, especially of the two major groups of capital and labor, one of which is in possession of all the tools and materials necessary for production, while the other is in possession of the necessary human energies, both brain and brawn. practically, however, the willing cooperation becomes a bitter struggle by each group to attain its own maximum interests, with the scales weighted heavily in favor of those who own or control the materials and machinery. in a similar way the capitalistic ideal of individual ownership by all men remains in the sphere of theoretical possibilities, while practically the entire system moves ever more towards ownership and control by the few. the idea of rationalization is entirely dominated by the motive of profit. everything connected with capitalistic enterprise is rationally calculated in detail as to its being a contributory factor to profits and earnings. whatever does not fit in with the objective of increased profits is excluded, whatever works towards such increase is fitted into the system. “the economic nature of capitalism is historically bound up with the development of technology/' it has been well said. capitalism has enjoyed its high esteem in our civilization because of the enormous increase in production that was made possible by the technological advances of methods and machinery that have 18 marked our times since the beginning of the industrial revolution. capitalism depends not only on a high degree of productivity for success, but also on constant improvement and perfection. unless the productive curve goes constantly upwards, it is in danger of losing out if not of collapsing altogether. why this is so, will be touched upon in a later article. 4. great changes wrought in the present series i am not concerned with what is such a fashionable pastime today: criticism of capitalism. that is being reserved for the next series on the social question. no evaluation of capitalism can be justifiably attempted before one has made a complete survey of what capitalism stands for and has accomplished. this is an almost impossible task within the limits of a few short articles. it is moreover more than difficult because of the impossibility of separating out from our life of today those elements that are due to capitalism as such from those that are due to general scientific and technical progress, or are due to the general developments of industrialism. these various aspects of our civilization are linked into an organic whole, together with the phenomenon of democracy, to form what might be called the capitalistic-industrial civilization of the past century. it is this “thing” i shall be referring to as “capitalism” in the next few articles; and i shall refer to it as it developed in our own country, since we acknowledgedly represent modern capitalism at its best or in its truest nature. even here, however, its achievement has also depended on a factor that now no longer exists, our receding frontier of unoccupied land and resources. 20 this factor was somewhat paralleled for the rest of the capitalistic countries by the so-called backward nations of africa and asia, which for european countries took the place of our undeveloped frontier. the dominant force in capitalistic development has undoubtedly been the incentive given to its leading men by the profit motive. this does not mean that profit was sought for its own sake only, but very often rather for the sake of that which was made possible by wealth: increased power and wider control. the attitude of production for profit is anything but static or fossilizing in its effects. it is highly inspirational and dynamic. profit cannot all be used by those who make the profit for satisfying their human needs, much of it is left over for further investment. consequently the capitalistic system has grown up with the ideal of constantly greater expansion of business and greater profits, with further investment of these, and so on. the impetus thus given to economic life has been so much part of our mentality until recent years that it was hard to imagine the kind of life led before the fuller development of capitalism had arrived. whether the dynamic nature of capitalism was instrumental in the vast advances made in technology, the harnessing of mechanical power unto the service of machinery, or whether the technical progress made the dynamic developments of modern capitalism possible, it would be hard to decide. the two went hand in hand 21 and are two outstanding characteristics of capitalism. invention of new mechanical devices and perfection of older ones progressed with their use in industry, and industry grew and expanded with their application. it is this combination that gave us our vast industrial machinery with its productive possibilities exceeding the fondest dreams of the men of an earlier age. it has given us all the development that has gone with the use of coal-steam power and later with hydro-electric power. to it we owe all our means of rapid transportation by land, water and air, and the means of almost instantaneous communication by telephone, telegraph, and wireless. it has made the world a single vast market, and has, so to say, placed all the world at the feet of all men both in regard to news and happenings and in regard to the products of nature and of man, raw as well as finished materials. such world-wide expansion and large-scale production necessarily meant great advances in systematization and organization. these have resulted in a high degree of efficiency, unknown to other times, which despite its many scorning critics today has untold possibilities for good. one effect of this is the extreme division of labor and functions in our modern plants; which allows a man to become a productive factor with almost no previous experience. another phenomenon is that of concentration in its various forms. there has been progressive merging of smaller business with the larger cor22 porations, increasing combines, chain stores, and the like; concentration of industrial energies as well as of financial capital. another form of concentration has been the enormous growth of cities, the rapid transfer, of the bulk of population from the countryside to the city. in the financial realm the growth and expansion of industry has given great impetus to the credit system of business transactions. this credit system has in turn been very influential towards increasing industrial and commercial activities. the entire system of financial credit connected with our banking system and the relative ease with which individual and corporation could avail themselves of its advantages was also something unheard of on such a vast scale in days gone by. the individual, moreover, used the credit system in purchasing for consumption and for family use. not the least development and characteristic of our day is the system of instalment buying. with this we must close our enumeration without having by any means exhausted the characteristic changes wrought by modern capitalism. in two further articles we shall mention some of the general effects of these in individual and social life. 23 5 . effects on individual life in an exposition of the effects of capitalism on individual life over against its effects on social life, no strict line of demarcation can be traced. whatever affects the life of the individual must have its repercussion sooner or later on the social weal, and what effects the social life of a community must necessarily have its effects on the individuals making up that community. hence the general scope of this article and that of the next will necessarily overlap. the distinction between the two will be one of emphasis rather than anything else. especially in times of depression like the present, we are prone to forget what the developments of our capitalistic civilization have meant for the individual. but any picture of capitalism would be false if it were to be drawn from conditions that have historically been abnormal rather than the rule. there is no disputing the fact that the standard of living of the average man, both in city and in country, was improved greatly in the last century over that of earlier periods in human history. millions of persons in our day are in possession of ordinary implements of domestic life that were undreamed of luxuries before. the sewing machine, washing machine, bathroom accommodations, the radio, kitchen ranges. 24 heating plants, electricity, then farm machinery, the automobile, the telephone, are but a very few of the modern devices that have entered into the average home, so that the total absence of all of these has become, not an exception merely, but almost unheard of. while new devices do create new needs instead of satisfying all wants, the possibilities of an enrichment of life and a lifting of the individual out of much of former drudgery are only in their infancy. no matter what turn our form of civilization may take, the immense increase in the comforts of life that the future may bring to man will always have had their origin in the capitalistic industrialism of which we are speaking, and in which we are still living. machine manufacture of books together with the exigencies of modern life has made the literacy of the ordinary man almost a necessity. it has well been said that "charlemagne might be illiterate but the humblest factory manager cannot enjoy that luxury" and the statement must be extended to those beneath the factory manager. literacy, whether resulting actually for weal or for woe, is in itself an undoubtable blessing, and only the progress of the past century has brought it within the reach of every man. one of the many results of the new possibilities opened by technology has been the wholesale multiplication of public libraries, both through public funds and through private endowments. 25 modern industrialism has given many opportunities to individuals to improve their position in life. before its arrival the fixity of social strata had begun to disappear. industrialism furnished the opportunity for the liberated individual to rise in accordance with his abilities and his zeal. not only did the multiplication of machinery greatly increase the productivity of human labor; it also gave the average unskilled laborer an opportunity he never before enjoyed. the skilled laborer of the past was indeed to a great extent displaced or deposed from his former privileged position, but machinery has also given rise to a new class of skilled workmen. then it has been in the spirit of modern industry to employ talent wherever it could be found, and a lowly social origin was no hindrance to recognition and reward of ability. moreover with industrial capitalism the possibility arose for the first time of small investments of savings by the common people. the rise and multiplication of corporations made it possible for the small saver to invest bit by bit in stocks and bonds, or to purchase government bonds, instead of having to store away his savings in some corner and leave them lie there idle, since the only use to which they could formerly be put also meant their being used up. similarly the way was opened to provision for the future by the vast increase of insurance policies of all kinds, insurance to forestall accidents, sickness, or death, or to provide a legacy for children at their maturity, etc., etc. 26 the standardization of products, also, was not without its advantages. mass production not only put many new articles into the hands of millions, but also established the practice of fixed prices, of buying and selling at the same price for all, regardless of person or rank. it definitely put an end to the haggling and bidding that still* is the ordinary way of making a sale in great sections of the orient. another lasting benefit to mankind that has resulted from the technical and scientific progress of our day is the improvement in medical care and treatment. the untold medical advantages and benefits of our day have moreover been spread far and wide by the erection of public and private hospitals, by research centers like the carnegie institute and the mayo foundation. there is no part of the world in which • people have not received the benefits and blessings of this research and progress, which would not have been possible without the material and scientific progress that characterized the cap' italistic civilization of our day. i am only too well aware that for many the term capitalism today is like a red rag to a spanish bull. and our depression has brought it about, that for every advantage one can mention as resulting from it, people are ready with a hundred answers of "yes, but . . or "on the other hand." just for that reason it is necessary for us not to forget that side of the picture which by reason of present conditions is likely to be either ignored or minimized. 27 6. social effects not everything that may be considered an advantage from the individual's standpoint, is also a benefit to the social weal. for the latter must take into account not only one or a few individuals but all that make up the community in question. in the same way not everything that may be considered a disadvantage from the individualistic point of view is really detrimental to the social weal. the social good must include the satisfaction of the basic needs and wants of all the individuals, yet it must always strike a golden mean between the unlimited advantages of some individuals and the harm of others, at least such harm as arises out of a lack of supplying the fundamental needs of human nature in their regard. especially in the matter of judging of the social effects of anything, regard must be had to what is happening to the average number of individuals after the basic needs of alt have been supplied. among the outstanding social effects of present-day civilization are the undreamed of facilities for intercommunication between men: the means of rapid transportation, covering huge distances in relatively short periods of time, and the almost instantaneous flashing of news from one end of the world to the other. although 28 these facilities may be abused by men of power and of no scruple, they are in themselves of peculiar social advantage. in fact they form, for many a man of today, the outstanding argument that our boasted platform of rugged individualism is no longer workable. certainly the jungle law of “each man for himself and may the strongest win,” is made impossible by its necessary self-destruction in a society that is willy-nilly knit together all over the world into a single large economic family. men may not like the new situation, but it is in full harmony with the christian viewpoint, and it can be changed only by scrapping the material progress made in the means of modern transportation and communication. to these means must be added the fact that capitalism has taught us high ability in exact methods of planning and equipment, with application of all the exactness of mathematics and science, and first-class power of organizing and planning for long-time activities, which when used for social purposes should be productive of untold good. there arc also shadows in regard to the social effects of modern civilization, shadows even of darkest hue. their occurrence has often called forth the bitterest attacks upon our “entire system.” no one can deny their existence, although the question remains whether these shadows were a necessary accompaniment of that system. it seems to have been inevitable, in our industrial capitalism as it developed historically, 29 that the separation of the workman from h*s tools and his workshop and the separation of his work from his home should develop to the utmost. labor thus becomes merely a commodity on the market to be sold or left to stagnate like any other marketable goods. this condition has undoubtedly redounded to the benefit of the employing class and to the exploitation of the laboring class. in fact, it has given rise to an ever greater distinction of classes ending in the extremes of the capitalist and the proletariat. as a result of this condition, together with the concentration necessary to large-scale production, we have had a vast migration of men from farm to city in the past generations, the heaping up of human beings in congested cities with all the evils, moral as well as physical, of the slum. in a similar way the small shopkeeper has been increasingly displaced by the ever expanding larger corporations. the small owners in ever greater numbers have joined the independent craftsmen of an earlier day to swell the ranks of those who hire out their abilities for wages or salaries. at least while adjustments are being made from one condition to the other, a good deal of human misery is often entailed and seems inevitable. the laborer’s condition of dependency upon others for making a living is aggravated by the periodical disemployment that seems to be a part of our system. karl marx had pointed out long ago that in the capitalistic scheme there 30 must be chronic periods of disemployment, which he attributed to the constant displacement of human labor by improved machinery. besides this technical disemployment there seems to be another that is economic in origin and which gives us our cyclic depressions with an ever-increasing unemployment on a large scale. this, too, critics point out is a necessary effect of our present system of capitalistic industrialism. it lies in the dynamic nature of capitalism, they say, to overshoot its mark. since pioduction is for profit, concentration and expansion and monopoly continue, until a stage is arrived where profit can no longer increase. size then becomes inefficient and unwieldy. the period of rising profits and of price inflation having broken down gives place to deflation, to closing down of plants and laying off of wageearners as well as of salaried men. once the ball starts rolling down hill it gathers momentum and the depression cycle is upon us, maybe until death do us part. any mention today of the advantages or disadvantages of capitalism is highly controversial. do the "injustices" of it lie in the very nature of capitalism or industrialism? could we have all the undoubted advantages of it without its accompanying evils? or does the separation of the former from the latter mean the extinction cf capitalism? that is a question of critique, into which we may venture in another series. for the present we shall continue in further articles to examine the nature of capitalism in more detail. 31 7. concepts of ownership one of the many changes that took place with the historical development of capitalism concerns the notion of ownership and the position property holds in the social scheme of life. it may not be an exaggeration at all to call this the most far-reaching change of all in its consequences, and to consider the privileged position of property in our life as the most fundamental aspect of our civilization and its basic structure. in the middle ages, it will be remembered, ownership was trusteeship. properties were held as possessions entrusted to the owners by god, to be administered in accordance with the purposes of god. hence the manner in which the duty of wealth, especially of superfluous wealth, was at all times stressed both by the fathers of the church and by their successors in the middle ages, in particular by thomas aquinas. that some change in these ideas had to take place in a civilization that was successively giving up its belief in christ and then in god goes without saying. again, the conception of ownership in the middle ages was connected up with human labor or personal expenditure of energies, in spite of the fact that ownership of properties was to a great extent a matter of inherited status in life. the basic argument of aquinas, for instance, for 32 private possessions over against common ownership by all was, that private ownership alone provided an adequate incentive for man to put forth his best efforts. private ownership was thus justified because it alone furnished an adequate safeguard against personal idleness and social indifference. it is interesting to note that the title to ownership based on human labor has been neglected or minimized to an astounding extent in modern textbooks of ethics, even among many writers who avowedly follow the traditions of christian thought and consider the christian thinkers of the middle ages as their direct forerunners. how did this change take place? the answer is given in one word, individualism—the growing individualism of the modern period of human history, in which it has been the dominant keynote for several centuries. it is this same individualism that was such a powerful factor in the development of industrial capitalism, as of practically every “ism” of our times until the swing of the pendulum in the other direction became noticeable in terms of socialism and communism. as the structure of medieval society gradually broke down there disappeared with it the inherited status of fixed strata of social life and the relatively fixed division of occupations. the outstanding characteristics of these fixed strata had been their respective duties and privileges. in the rising new order, more prominence was 33 accorded to those whose power lay in their wealth, above all the merchant capitalists. the privilege of inherited status was beginning to yield to the privilege of material wealth. john locke (1632-1704) was a prominent sponsor of the fundamental human rights of life, liberty, and property. his basic defense of property was still labor, the fact that an owner had put his own labor into the things he called his own. david hume (1711-1776), the philosophical successor of locke in some ways, said that property existed "to bestow stability of possessions and to insure the peaceable enjoyment of what one may acquire by his fortune and possessions." in this statement we should note the reference of property, not to the stability of social welfare as such, but rather to the enjoyment and permanent possession of one's own fortune. here we have a clear statement of the privilege of ownership in terms of individualism, and the purpose of ownership as that of individual enjoyment of what is possessed. no wonder that with the increase of individualism property began more and more to captivate men's minds and hearts. "nothing," said the english jurist, william blackstone (1723-1780) "so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property." in mentioning these instances and commenting on the trend of events, the article on "property" in the encyclopedia of the social sciences 34 says: '‘property was made the cause of prosperity, the advance of culture and the progress of mankind/' still adam smith (1723-1790), the founder of the classical school of economics, with which laissez-faire is inseparably connected, continued to hold that "the property which every man has in his own labor" is "the original foundation of all other property." yet, other property there was, and as it increased the imperceptible change reached its culmination. with the final supersession of handicraft industry by the factory system, ownership was divorced from labor, and the supremacy of absentee ownership was ushered in. property now existed in its own right, and governments existed for the sake of protecting property. "any government is good if it respects private property and the liberties bound up with it." in the growth of our own country the declaration of independence, which emphasized personal human rights, was in a sense superseded by the constitution of 1789. it is interesting to note that the latter was framed by the capitalists of the time, i.e., the merchants and large land owners over against the small land owners and the non-owning workers. they thought principally of regulating commerce, coining money, and governmental protection of property against foreign and domestic attack. and it was only in the bill of rights appended to the constitution upon pressure that further personal rights such as freedom of religion, speech, assembly, press, etc., were added. 35 there is no doubt that de facto the supreme right in our civilization is the right of property, or private ownership; and that the supremacy of the right of ownership is the outstanding feature of industrial capitalism, so much so that all privilege is made dependent on it. the trend of development in capitalism during the past century or two is definitely correlated with the rising supremacy or absoluteness of the right of property. 36 8. corporation ownership one of the outstanding characteristics of modern capitalism is the immense growth and importance of corporations in our economic life in the manner in which this growth has deveh oped, it is one of the chief forms of concentration pointed out in a previous article of this series, a corporation can be defined as any group of individuals transacting business under a common name, i.e., owning property, distributing profits among the members, etc. the existence of a corporation is independent of the life of the individuals making it up, since new members can always join and old ones drop out without changing the nature of the corporation. the debts of the corporation generally do not create any indebtedness in the individuals as such. a number of the american colonies started as associations or as governmental corporations which gradually changed into political entities. there were about fifteen to eighteen business corporations in existence before the adoption of the constitution in 1789. it was the growing industrial revolution that gave great impetus to the development of corporations insofar as the expansion of economic activities demanded ever larger units of operation. the growth has been especially rapid since 37 the civil war, at first there were many legal hindrances to it, but these were abolished or sidetracked as the demand for the larger corporation form of business organization made itself felt more and more. one of the chief developments of corporation life as it exists today is the formation and prominence of holding companies. a holding company may be defined as "any company having share capital which owns securities of one or more other companies." in conjunction with the turn of events that shall be dealt with in the next article, the pivotal point in holding companies has switched from ownership of one company by another to control. for a long time there were no general laws in any of our states permitting the owning of stocks of any one corporation by another. specific exceptions, however, existed by special legal permit, even while the general prohibition lasted. but in the late eighties a sudden relaxing of law set in, and the example set by some states was soon followed by others. by 1929 there were thirty-nine states in the union that authorized the formation and existence of holding companies. "thus in a period of forty years the holding company, which has been regarded as undesirable and contrary to public policy except under unusual conditions, was made by most states an acceptable and legal practice" (bonbright and means, article "holding companies" in the encyclopedia of the social sciences) . 38 the holding company has rightly been called the most successful device invented in the field of economics for combining the property of several corporations under one center of control and management. it is especially through this means that many corporations, which were at first entirely independent of each other economically, have been formed into one unit or ‘ 'combine/ ' when a holding company owns a portion of stock in another corporation, its control over that corporation is usually out of proportion to the amount of stock it owns, since it will always vote as a solid bloc while the other stockholders, some of them usually widely scattered and out of touch with one another, will not have the same agreement and common action. control and ownership of a holding company is greatly increased by so-called pyramiding of holding companies. that is, holding company a owns a bare majority of stock in company b —just enough stock to give it controlling ownership over b. company b in turn owns just such a minimum controlling stock in company c, and company c similarly in company d. by this pyramiding, company d is entirely under the control of company a, although the latter may own but a smallest share of stock in company d. “a pyramid involving three holding companies will allow, say, a one-million dollar investment in a top holding company to control a billion-dollar operating company. the investment necessary for control may be made even 39 smaller by issuing non-voting common stock or stock with limited voting power' ' (bonbright and means) . the holding company as a means of industrial organization is but a recent phenomenon of the development of industrial capitalism. it has all the power for good or for evil that is inherent in all concentration. the experience of a generation or two has already indicated some of the uses that can be made of concentrated power, though the many possibilities inherent in the holding company device are still in the domain of mental speculation. many persons are not aware of the extent to which the development of corporations has meant the concentration and combination of vast properties under a single legal personality. for instance, the american telephone and telegraph company is said “to control more wealth than is contained within the borders of twentyone of the states in the country" (berle 8 means, the modern corporation and private property ) . again, it is said of the two hundred largest non-banking corporations that “their combined assets amounted to eighty-one billions of dollars, or, as we shall see, nearly half of all corporate wealth of the united states" according to statistics of jan. 1, 1930 (ibid.). there is another side of this development that has been stressed and greatly publicized; namely, the fact that with the growth of corporations there has also been an increasing ownership of 40 stock by more and more of the rank and file of the people. this movement has been heralded as a great boon because it means increasing democracy of ownership. but with this constant dispersing of ownership of stock, the final development of capitalism has also grown apace: the increasing separation of control from ownership, or the increasing concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. of this we shall treat in our next and last article of the present series. 41 9 . concentration of power the last development of our day in capitalism is that of the concentration of all economic power into ever fewer and fewer persons. this development goes hand in hand with the almost imperceptible change that constitutes the transition from industrial to financial capitalism. we have seen how with the advent of the industrial revolution the notion of absentee ownership gained prominence. but the absentee owner for a long time retained all the power of final management and control that went with ownership in general, just as he received the major profits of the industrial enterprise. now when popular investment in stocks began to take place, which was a way of scattering ownership far and wide among the people, the power of control and management should ordinarily also have scattered in the same way. such a scattering of controlling power, however, might have been very detrimental to the proper functioning of a highly organized enterprise. this outcome was forestalled by a change that gradually took place which can only be called the separation of central control from general ownership. “as early as 1865/' says a writer, "we find the germ of the modern conception of corporate power—the belief that the rights of the partici42 pants as well as the technical conduct of the business must be subject to managerial discretion/' this ''germ of the modern conception of corporate power/' the subjection of ownership rights to managerial control, has developed into a full-grown tree that has spread its branches from the atlantic to the pacific. even where the power of control is still nominally in the hands of share owners, the actual wielding of this power is in the hands of a small minority, in fact of a select few. "in other words," say berle and means, "ownership continually becomes more dispersed; the power formerly joined to it becomes increasingly concentrated; and the corporate system is thereby securely established. this system bids fair to be as all-embracing as was the feudal system in its time" ( the moderncorporation and private property . new york, 1933). "it is evident," writes pope pius xi in quadragesimo anno , "that in our days not alone is wealth accumulated, but immense power and despotic economic domination is concentrated in the hands of a few, and that those few are frequently not the owners, but only the trustees and directors of invested funds, who administer them at their good pleasure. this power becomes particularly irresistible when exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, are able also to govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying so to speak the lifeblood to the entire economic body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very 43 soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will.” one of the chief means that brought about such great concentration of control is the pyramiding of holding companies described in the previous article. another potent means of this same effect is the interlocking directorate, which has become increasingly widespread with the growth of our ever more complex corporation system. an interlocking directorate is established when one or more members of a board of directors, managers, or trustees of one corporation hold the same position in another corporation or in many others. once started, interlocking directorates grew by leaps and bounds. they increased to such an extent that in 1929, e.g., "the partners and directors in one investment banking house, two trust companies, and three national banks, all in new york city, held over 2,400 directorships in corporations with combined assets of $74,000,000,000, which is equal to twenty per cent of the assets of all american corporations” (means, article "interlocking directorate,” encyclopedia of the social sciences). it was the establishing of such relations between industrial corporations and large banks that put industry under the control of our financial barons, and helped to produce the giant mergers that characterize our financial capitalism of today. under the circumstances it was still abstractly possible for those in control to manage a cor44 poration for the best interests of all stockholders, but a director interested in many and varied corporations could hardly feel for each one the same personal interest that the shareholders had in their own corporation. the resulting division of interest between those who owned and those who controlled was greatly helped by legalized devices that put ever more controlling power into the hands of directors. thus, e.g., the control of managers or directors is today often almost absolute over all stock. they have power to change or amend the corporate charter, the original scope of the enterprise, the contributions exacted from shareholders, or the relative risks between participants. they can disfranchise existing stock, at least in effect and indirectly by issuance of new stock of double voting power. they may not sell poor stock to their own corporation, but they may use their inside knowledge of the trend of events to sell their own stock or buy more shares for their own profit, regardless of the interests of the general shareholders. in the eyes of the law they have a trust to fulfil to the corporation and they are legally amenable for any default in this trust. but their trust extends only to the corporation as such and not to its stockholders who may be left out in the cold at any time by various devices without legal redress. "the usual security holder in america," write berle and means, "is thus slowly being 45 reduced by these devices and interpretations to a point where he becomes a petitioner for the wages of capital . . . the corporate system has done to capital what the factory system did to labor. as the factory system separated control from labor, so the corporate system has separated control from ownership/' no wonder that it has been said time and again that the concentration of power in modern financial capitalism knows only one parallel or rather one outstripping rival—the economic absolutism of soviet russia. no wonder, again, that this rival has sometimes been dubbed state capitalism. of the middle ages it has been said that the church was dominant over all life with her spiritual power, and that political power later overcame the dominance of the church. today economic power is dominant in our civilization perhaps as no power has been dominant in any other civilization. that is the final outcome of the development of historical capitalism for us of today. 46 by the same author: st. thomas and today comments on the economic views of aquinas. 15c postpaid pamphlets on the social question: i. human rights, 15c postpaid. ii. ownership, 15c postpaid. iii. labor and industry , 15c postpaid. iv. the nature of capitalism, 15c postpaid. v. critique of capitalism (in press). vi. ideals of reconstruction (in press). vii. reconstruction schemes (in press). viii. money and the common good (in preparation) . ix. the theory of state (in preparation). the wanderer printing co., 128 east tenth st., st. paul, minnesota . . it is a pleasure to commend “der wanderer” and “the wanderer,” two publications which are issued within the territory of our archdiocese with our cordial approval. the place which they have gained in the field of catholic journalism is a guarantee of their fitness to be welcomed in every catholic home.” >f john gregory murray, archbishop of st. paul . " the catholics who read ‘‘the wanderer” regularly will find it a most reliable guide in all religious and social questions that today puzzle so many of our people. i hope and trust that the pastors of our diocese will do all they can to secure readers for your very thorough and thoroughly catholic paper.” joseph f. busch, bishop of st. cloud. . . all things considered, “the wanderer" is the best weekly that comes to my desk. to me its weekly visit is a real joy.” rev. f. x. lasance, cincinnati, o. * the wanderer is a modern catholic political and economic review. it presents the informed catholic viewpoint on all matters of public interest. the news of the week is covered in a well rounded-out survey combining the news recorded with editorial comment. there are, in addition, seven columns per week of editorials on the views and trends of the day. a page is devoted to articles of interest to the family; there is a literary page; local news and ecclesiastical news is treated briefly on the last page. in no other catholic publication in america will you find a greater variety of interesting reading and informative matter. you owe it to yourself to investigate the wanderer. for sample copies write to; wanderer printing company 128 east tenth street, st. paul, minn. •'1. 104 ssb/trp/mdm 2019 (75):104-111 | issn 1012-280 | e-issn 2415-0495 © creative commons with attribution (cc-by) published by the ufs http://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/trp how to cite: steÿn, d. 2019. different values lead to alternative approaches to the land debate in south africa. town and regional planning, no.75, pp. 104-111. prof. das steÿn, research fellow, department of urban and regional planning, university of the free state, p o box 392, bloemfontein, south africa. phone 051 4012893, e-mail: <steynjj@ufs.ac.za> different values lead to alternative approaches to the land debate in south africa das steÿn doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2415-0495/trp75i1.11 peer reviewed and revised october 2019; published december 2019 *the author declared no conflict of interest for this title or article abstract in south africa, two traditional cultures, namely the african and the european cultures, meet, each with its own historical view on what land is and how to govern it. this situation is complicated by modernist ideological thinking represented by capitalism and communism. goudappel’s urbanistic concept1 is used to show how ideological thinking influences theory and practice when contemplating the land issue. this answer is not a single approach, but a multiple view on land which allows for different regions, each with its own solution coupled with its cultural background, in order for all the different peoples in this country to have a place in the sun. therefore, this article gives a theoretical explanation that there are different value systems that influence the approach to possible solutions of the land issue in south africa. keywords: autonomous regions or city states, land debate, modernist thinking, south africa, traditional values verskillende waardes lei tot alternatiewe benaderings tot die gronddebat in suid-afrika in suid-afrika het die europeseen die afrika-tradisie mekaar ontmoet. elkeen het ’n eie historiese beskouing van grondbesit en hoe om dit te bestuur. met die opkoms van die modernistiese ideologiese denke is hierdie siening oor grond beïnvloed deur onderskeidelik kapitalisme en kommunisme. goudappel se urbanistiek konsep sal gebruik word om aan te toon hoe ideologiese denke die teoretiese denke maar ook die praktiese denke oor grond oorheers. die oplossing lê nie in ’n enkele beleid oor grond nie, maar in ’n verskeidenheid van verskillende streke waar elk met ’n eie oplossing na vore kom wat pas by die kulturele agtergrond van die verskillende volke in hierdie land om vir elkeen ’n plekkie in die son te besorg. hierdie artikel is dus ’n teoretiese uiteensetting dat daar verskillende waardesisteme is wat die benadering tot moontlike oplossings van die grondkwessie in suid-afrika beïnvloed. sleutelwoorde: grondkwessie in suid-afrika, modernistiese denke, onafhanklike streke of stadstate, tradisionêle waardes litumelo tse fapaneng li tlisa mekhoa e mecha ea ho lekola lipuisano tse amanang le lefatshe naheng ea afrika borwa naheng ea afrika borwa, meetlo e mmeli ea ma-afrika le ma-europe e kopane, mme moetlo ka mong o ikemetse nthleng ea kutloisiso le tsamaiso ea lefatshe. maemo ana 1 in the 1960s, goudappel began his search for meaning in the field of traffic engineering. when appointed as professor at the technical university of eindhoven in 1970, he developed the urbanistic concept (steÿn, 2011: 1-13). a thatafatsoa ke mokhoa oa boinahana oa kajeno, o iponahatsang ka bokapitale le bokomonisi. mehopolo ea litoropo ea goudappel e sebelisitsoe ho bontsha hore boinahano bo ka susumetsa mekhoa le meetlo e amanang le lefatshe. karabo ena hase eona fela e ka fanoang, kaha hona le maikutlo a mangata mabapi le taba ea lefatshe, a bileng a thusang libaka ka ho fapana ho fihlela litharollo ho latela maemo le meetlo ea tsona e ikhethileng, ele hore batho ka ho fapana hoa bona ba fumane sebaka sa tulo. ka hona, sengoliloeng sena se fana ka thlaloso ea hore hona le mekhoa e fapaneng e susumetsang litharollo tse tlisoang mathateng a shebaneng le lefatshe naheng ea afrika borwa. 1. introduction in the southern part of africa, two cultural traditions confronted each other on the issue of land. the main players are the african2 cultures that share a common kind of background, as they all derive from roughly 1000bc from a common area in central west africa (diamond, 2006: 388) and the western culture introduced by the dutch and the english (steÿn, 2015: 238-260). a third view on land, namely that of modern-day utopian thinking preached by humanism with its two siblings, capitalism and communism, has a strong influence on both traditions. for the purpose of this article, these two groups that reject traditional thinking will be grouped together as modernists. thus, both the african idea of communal ownership of land and the western idea of private property are under pressure to change from the ‘noncultural’ way of viewing the world. goudappel’s (1985) urbanistic concept, which distinguishes 2 in this article, african culture will refer mostly to the bantu-speaking black population of south africa and will not include the khoikhoi or the san. their claim to land as being the “first indigenous people of south africa” will have to be dealt with differently. they were herders and hunters, respectively, who did not settle in one place for a long period of time and who were pushed from the land by both black and white settlers. http://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/trp http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2415-0495/trp75i1.11 das steÿn • different values lead to alternative approaches to the land debate in south africa 105 between three levels of thinking, namely ideological, theoretical and practical, will be used as a means to understand and unravel the land issue that is presently in the limelight in south africa. 2. goudappel’s urbanistic concept as methodological approach after the 1968/1969 student revolution in europe, it was very difficult to discuss subjects at university, because anything immediately became a political issue and all other dialogues were pushed aside. in response to this, goudappel (1985: 179-180) developed the urbanistic concept as “a systematic inventory and classification of the elements that rule our active interventions through physical planning and as a vehicle for understanding the patterns in man’s relationship with his environment”. with this concept, goudappel distinguishes between the world of thinking and the world of doing. he found that there are three levels of thinking: ideological, theoretical and practical. the question ‘why’ relates to values underlying this issue; the question ‘how’ relates to the realm of the theory, and when the question ‘what’ is answered, the problem is mostly on the practical level (steÿn, 2011: 2). goudappel lists these three levels as the ideostructure, the superstructure, and the infrastructure levels of thinking, respectively. for him (goudappel 1985: 180), “the infrastructure is the physical appearance of things and phenomena, the superstructure being theorizing and organizational thinking and the ideostructure dealing with the ideals and values which direct human activities”. this means that no viewpoint, theory or action is value free. this concept will be used to understand south africans’ thinking and discussing the land issue. one cannot argue about ideological differences, which are value issues. how can one tell somebody to believe in something else? on the theoretical level, one can argue about practical issues and compare different solutions. on the practical side, one can put the real issue on the table and discuss it in depth. this article is thus one traditional christian afrikaner’s3 view on the issue of land as there are no objective approaches to land, according to goudappel. 3. some thoughts on traditionalism and modernism baudet & visser (2017: 9) found that traditionalists (conservatives) believe that society should focus on the sociocultural conditions of political freedom and the religious roots of human experience. this type of solution focuses on the human being as part of a greater whole. modernists favour a political philosophy based on human thought on progress, reform, and the protection of civil liberties. they focus mainly only on one aspect of human life – freedom. for them, the state is the vehicle that will produce the utopian society. for the liberals, freedom will come through the individual’s freedom to participate in a capitalist free market system that the state must guarantee, and that offers equal opportunities to all. for the communist, it is a freedom where the state will provide equality and brotherhood of all citizens, and where “the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association” with the real communist community (marx & engels, 1989b: 68). for the traditionalists baudet & visser (2017: 10), it is about the responsibility of the individual in society for the well-being of the cultural environment, the human measure in an industrial mass society, integrity, the social conditions for the constitutional state, and the protection of the environment. it is not about a new religion that evaluates the present from abstract ends in society, but one 3 other traditional afrikaners might differ from this view, as modern afrikaners have a variety of value systems. that views present and past issues that are important for the cultural well-being of man and society. the cambridge advanced learner’s dictionary (walter, 2009:1544) defines tradition as “a belief, principle or way of acting which people in a particular society or group have continued to follow for a long time, or all these beliefs etc. in a particular society or group”. culture is defined as “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time”. a traditionalist is “someone who believes in and follows the traditional ideas”. according to this dictionary, modern is “of the present or recent times, especially the period of history since the middle ages”. for communism, it is a call for the freedom, equality and brotherhood of all citizens which the state will provide. for capitalism, it is the freedom for each individual to participate in an open market. 4. levels of thinking 4.1 ideological thinking on land (ideostructure): why people think differently in south africa, the modern ideology of liberalism and capitalism influences both the african and the western traditional thinking on the land issue. van niekerk (1993b: 3) found that many black and white south africans avoid facing the deeply embedded differences between the african and the western world views and warned that “unless we recognise and acknowledge them, we cannot hope to develop the skills to handle them”. in africa, the bantu-speaking group (including southern africa’s blacks) can be distinguished from other language population groups in africa such as the niger-congo, hamites, nilotic, semitic, khoikhoi, san and westerners, on linguistic and cultural grounds (pauw, 1970: 49). for traditional bantu-speaking africans, land is sacred, because it belongs to the earth spirit as well as to the ancestors and the living (van der borght, 2009: 2). the land is ruled by chiefdoms whose head 106 ssb/trp/mdm 2019 (75) is a chief; he is responsible for the good government of the tribe and for the control of land. he can directly approach the tribal ancestors, spirits of dead chiefs. this means that land cannot be sold or disposed of without the consent of the whole family, and the whole family includes the living, the spirits of the ancestors, and the unborn (van niekerk, 1993a). in the west, all the people who were once under the rule of the roman empire were subject to the codification of roman law through the lex duodecim tabularum,4 which contained rules of private, public and procedural law in 450 bc and was used for the next 600 years (bouckaert, 2010: 9). this set the way of thinking in the west that owning property concerns ownership and possession of things, which could be movables or immovables (bouckaert, 2010: 10-12). this distinction between absolute right that can be defended against everybody and relative rights that can only be invoked against a specific person influenced even modern european mainland law, on which south african law is based, especially roman dutch law. for christians, the ownership and the use of land are deeply related to man’s calling to stewardship of land. for vorster (van der borght, 2009: 92), ownership and stewardship are two sides of the same coin. modernist thought is represented, on the one hand, by the individual thinking of the capitalist, who views land as an asset that can be used and developed to produce a profit for the owner. on the other hand, communism sees land as a means of production that should be in the hands of the state. both these groups have a utopian vision of the future where everybody is in a better socio-economic position in a global world and there is a belief in cultural relativism. the one group is mostly driven by greed and the other by need. 4 law of the twelve tables (450bc) was the first codification in roman law and formed the basis for roman law for nearly 1 000 years (bouckaert, 2010: 9). for economists, the powers conveyed by ownership of land are “the powers to use and manage the land, powers to transfer or alienate it, and powers to take the income or rent from its use” (scott, 2008: 5). different kinds of property rights such as rights over mineral resources, rights over fugacious resources, and rights over wood-based resources can be associated with ownership. although capitalism has been refined since the time of adam smith, john locke and david ricardo, many economists still “view land as simply one of the means of production, subject to the same laws of the market as any other input” (mccusker, moseley & ramutsindela, 2016: 17). on the other hand, frederick engels (marx & engels, 1989a: 92), in his principles of communism, writes that “private ownership will also have to be abolished”, while marx (marx & engels, 1989a: 125) states that “the theory of communism may be summed up in the single sentence: ‘abolition of private property’. through state ownership of property and “state capitalism”, workers of the world communist regimes benefited little from economic development; only the elite profited (vorhies, 1991: 100). 4.2 theoretical thinking on land (superstructure): how people think differently according to vorster (in van der borght, 2009: 82), africans traditionally do not relate to the concept of individual land ownership that excludes other people from any landholding in private land. the right of the community to the property is regarded as of more value than the individual rights. van der borght (2009: 2) found that, for traditional african people, land is owned by god. land cannot be traded as private property, nor for the state to control, but rather for the control by local chiefs. van niekerk (1993b: 35) refers to the nigerian nobel prize winner wole soyinka who wrote that the “recognisable western cast of mind, a compartmentalising habit of thought” contrasts with the “assimilative wisdom of african metaphysics”. westerners think analytically (a and non-a cannot be the same), while in the tradition of africa opposites are not mutually exclusive. the living and the dead are connected in ways that the west does not understand. in a book based on his dd thesis, dominee, are you listening to the drums?, van niekerk (1982) shows that rational conclusions do not always play in the minds of people; there are also “those deep, often irrational – or extra-rational – surgings which one sees functioning in the life of states, nations and groups” (van niekerk, 1982: 1). black poetry of the 1970s shows how “some poets reject the white city while maintaining a deep affinity with the black township, even in its suffering and misery” (van niekerk, 1982: 110). modern thinking has changed traditional thinking and a considerable variety of thought on land can be distinguished among the african people. white south african traditionalists, especially afrikaners, view ownership and possession of things (including property) as an absolute right that can be defended against everybody. the south african law on property was taken over from the roman and roman-dutch laws on property (bouckaert, 2010: 10; hunt, 1973: 152). this juridical approach to land was tempered by die christian approach where man as landowner is viewed as a steward of god who is the absolute owner of the earth (verbrugh, 1985: 17; nijkamp, 1980: 14-150). the individual now has the responsibility to look after the land and pass it on to future generations in a sustainable fashion (beatley, 1994: 4-145). land is thus viewed as the personal responsibility of a steward. although all capitalist theorists support the idea of a free market, they differ on its operation. for smith and ricardo, it was about individual rights, while lock also considered the labour theory of property (mccusker et al., 2016: 13-14). das steÿn • different values lead to alternative approaches to the land debate in south africa 107 for the latter, the right to land was mediated by production for the market (beatley, 1994: 192). in the 1970s, neoliberal thinking was behind the cure for the ailing economy of that time, with their turn to the market deregulation and free trade as the solution to all problems (mccusker et al., 2016: 16). since then, the world bank (wb) and the international monetary fund (imf) would be key players on how countries must develop their economies, with the emphasis on private ownership of land. in the communist world, lenin elaborated on marx’s work on peasantry and believed that they could be primary suppliers of food. he also elaborated on the concept of differentiated peasantries (mccusker et al., 2016: 19). trotsky was suspicious of the peasants because of their individualism (mccusker et al., 2016: 21). stalin cut this theory formulation on the role/ position of the peasants short by his forced collectivisation from 1929 to the late 1930s. in south africa, bundy (1988) elaborated on the topic of the peasantry. the last two groups want to solve the problem on a global scale. 4.3 practical thinking on land (infrastructure): what people think differently one of the modern so-called “urban legends” is that all whites are colonists or settlers. in reality, both whites and blacks are settlers. the united nations (un) has designated the khoi and the san as the first indigenous nations in south africa (steÿn, 2015: 226). because people elect to view history from a chosen perspective, it is not all that easy to determine what the truth of the matter is. it will mean various things to various people. the two traditional thinkers on land possess the largest proportion of the land in south africa. this occurred mostly by taking possession of any land not cultivated by indigenous peoples to be considered terra nullius, no-man’s-land, conquering land or buying land. in terms of present thinking, different groups may question the transactions, but, according to international law, the land was mostly lawfully acquired. each of the two modernist groups have a different view on how land should be reformed in south africa. for the capitalist-oriented group, all land must be in private hands. this led to clashes with the traditional leaders, especially the zulu king, who will not give up their land. for the socialists, the freedom charter of 1955 calls for “land to be shared among those who work it” (doe, 2005: 12). some revolutionaries believe that the land belongs to the blacks, and ignore the disputed historical development of south africa (kruger, 2016). capitalism has moved from nationalist capitalism to international capitalism. the wb and the imf sold the idea that a global free market and open borders would solve all economic problems. gone are the days when, according to adam smith in his 1776 book the wealth of nations, capitalism was viewed as a competitive free market with no participant in the position to dominate the market. on the international scene, capitalism produced a large number of millionaires and a number of billionaires who own property and businesses in their country of origin. this later developed into international capitalism, and multinational companies started to dominate markets. however, in the 1980s, a new kind of billionaire emerged, the oligarchs who have no shareholders or home nation and are “internationalized beyond any nation states’ wildest dreams” (armstrong, 2010: 230). they “reshaped public discourse through well-funded think tanks and media empires, as well as increasing influence within universities” (mcquaig & brooks, 2013: 96). most of them do not stay in any country long enough to pay income tax or they evade income tax by putting their money in tax havens. neither is democracy or dictatorship a hindrance for these new global oligarchs. they use the babblers (politicians) as a front not only to do their dirty work, but also to protect them (steÿn, 2014: 270-271). oxfam (2016) calculated that: • in 2015, merely 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people – the bottom half of humanity. • this figure is down from 388 individuals as recently as 2010. • the wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44% in the five years since 2010 – that is an increase of over half a trillion dollars ($542bn) to $1.76trillion. • in 2017, oxfam calculated that, at present, merely eight people own the same wealth as half the world’s population. the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (even in the western world and in communist countries). capitalism and communism have no meaning in the world of the super-rich. communism started off as anarchistic, with people such as kropotkin and boukanin who did not believe in private property, but only wanted to overthrow the present regime (van den berg, 1989: 137-149). castells (1992: 73-75) argues that communism failed in russia, because it could not deliver the goods it promised. china moved from being a communist country that opposed capitalism to one that embraces property rights, profits, and free-market competition, but does not respect human rights. only a few poor communist or communist-influenced states still survive. in cuba, the average monthly salary is roughly $30 (r450) and, in venezuela, the inflation rate is 10 million % (imf, 2019). at a conference in london, prof. robert compton (2018) found that there are roughly 3.5 million zimbabweans in south africa (half a million legal and three million illegal). the general well-being in these countries that do not respect private ownership of land is thus not very high. 108 ssb/trp/mdm 2019 (75) 5. other issues in the land debate the real issues to be addressed in south africa are not land reform, but poverty and how to solve it. after 25 years of governance and due to the failure to deliver their promises, the anc uses other issues to distract the voters in south africa. this section deals with a few issues that should be mentioned in the debate on land. 5.1 poverty the most important issue to be addressed in south africa is poverty. poverty will not be solved if land is expropriated without compensation. in a paper dealing with power and corruption in south africa at the 2014 sapi conference, steÿn (2014: 268) showed that the vast majority of people do not get out of poverty, due to abuse or betrayal by people with political and financial power. for jacobs (1985: 34), the basics for getting out of poverty are urbanisation and education. the african national congress (anc) government failed in both, as people urbanising only became urban poor without jobs, mostly on social grants. in his 1978 book i write what i like, steve biko showed that there is a relationship between reading, understanding the world, and being able to change the world (aitchison, 2018). in this same article, aitchinson refers to a progress in international reading literacy study (pirl) 2016 literacy test on 13 000 south african grade 4 children that found that south africa scored last of the 50 countries tested. at university level in 2017, the statisticiangeneral, pali lehohla, found that “the proportion of black students progressing at universities was higher in the 1980s than it was in 2017” (gumede, 2017). at both school and university level, blacks are worse off after 25 years of anc education. for hall (2002: 8), the solution for south african cities with informal hyper-growth “is that the urban economy fails to keep pace with the population growth”. his solution is “first to get the birth rate down,5 which means education, above all education for girls” (hall, 2002: 8). steÿn (2014: 274) elaborated on this issue and on how brazil brought its fertility rate down. 5.2 governance mthethwa (2013: 2-3) found that bribery, fraud and embezzlement are the most common forms of corruption. people experience lack of service delivery on all levels of life, while politicians make promises and shift the blame. turok (2019: 222) found that, for a country to attract and sustain foreign investment, it must show that it is stable, well managed, and disciplined, with zero tolerance for corruption and maladministration, and that locals, visitors, property, and investments must be safe. what do politicians do to fix these problems? after 25 years of anc rule, apartheid, colonialism and racism are blamed for the poverty and the widening gap between rich and poor. the easiest way out is to expropriate property without compensation; this will help solve all problems. the socialist approach will only solve the problems of politicians to keep or gain political power in this country. it will not solve the above issues. mumford (1946: 327) concluded that, for a sound civilisation to function, it is not so much individual ownership of land that is important, but security of tenure. according to him, this enables continuity of use, encourages permanent improvements, and permits longrange efforts. the problem is that tenants are then in the hands of the politicians of the day. 5 in the 1904 south african census (3.9 million blacks, 1.2 million whites, 0.5 million coloureds, and 0.2 million asians), approximately 5 million people increased to roughly 58 million in 2019 (47.3 million blacks, 4.1 million whites, 5.1 million coloureds, and 2.3 million asians). this gives a growth rate of 1115% for blacks, 241% for whites, 940% for coloureds, and 816% for asians over a period of 109 years. 5.3 land reform and land restitution the anc came into power in 1994 and embarked on a policy of state-led land reform and land restitution. the target was to redistribute 30% of white-owned land by 1999 (later moved to 2014) (mccusker et al., 2016: 2). this was a process of ‘willing-buyer, willingseller’. in 2015, only roughly 8% was redistributed and some black farmers even sold back to white farmers (mccusker et al., 2016: 2). jeffery (2018), head of policy research at the institute for race relations (irr), found that only 8% of the 76 000 successful valid land claims in 2013 wanted their land restored; the remaining 92% wanted money instead. response to a question what is the “best way to improve lives” in 2016, the irr also found that 73% of black people saw “more jobs and better education” as the “best way”, while only 1% thought it was “more land reform”. hall (2009: 248) found that what distinguishes agrarian reform from land reform, is that the former goes far beyond the redistribution of land by restructuring both production and the markets. for hall (2009: 250), it is “on the one hand, subdivision of farming units and transfer of ownership of these to smallholder producers and on the other, the call for a stronger state role in securing tenure, including the question of whether the state should retain some role in holding land and investing public funds in administration of land rights, in order for the poor to gain access to land without the cost and risk associated with private ownership”. this is similar to lenin’s new economic policy, which allowed limited private enterprise, while the state retained control of the economy (singh, 2016: 44). scholtz (1962: 293) describes this collectivization of land in russia as nothing less than expropriation of land without compensation. when this did not provide enough food, stalin (1928: 33) started his first five-year plan, forcing peasants to das steÿn • different values lead to alternative approaches to the land debate in south africa 109 • new use of technology, particularly to increase rural production and productivity; • the growth of city capital. thus, rural areas are mostly poor or rich supply regions, which are inherently overspecialised with wildly unbalanced economies that are fragile to distant markets (jacobs, 1985: 63). we can perhaps learn from the taiwanese government who transferred agricultural land from ownership of feudal-like landlords to the peasants who worked the land (jacobs, 1985: 99). the government, in paying the expropriated landlords, required that part of the payments be invested in light industry. what kind and where was left to the former landlords as long as the investment is in taiwan (jacobs, 1985: 101). this will help create the needed jobs in the cities as long as many of the regulations on economic development are scrapped, the country moves to a more capitalistic approach, and there is less government intervention in the economy. 5.5 land is more than simply land land is not something like gold that has an international price that is constant to its weight (one ounce). people tend to view land as uniform, but numerous factors influence the use and value of land. land can be used as rural farmland or urban land, with different values, depending on the location and zoning or potential use. the use of rural farmland is determined by soil type, rainfall, and climate. in some areas, 40 hectares is necessary for one sheep, while in others 40 sheep could be kept on one hectare. the price of one hectare of vineyards or other permanent crops such as pecan nuts with water rights can be up to 700 times or more than one hectare of karoo grazing (pienaar, 2015). similarly, one hectare in sandton city is worth nearly a million times more than one hectare in rural northern cape. land in the former homelands of transkei or kwazulu, with its high rainfall, are worth many times that of the karoo or even dryer areas on the west coast. as a whole, out of 186 countries, south africa is the 43rd driest country in the world, if average rainfall is taken (index mundi, 2019). the country does not have an average rainfall in all areas. some places have much more rain than others, and these differences are normally indicated in the carrying capacity per large stock unit per hectare. thus, to say that whites own 70% of the land area means nothing in terms of the value of the land. water-rich areas such as transkei (about 45 000 km2) might be worth more than the entire karoo (roughly 395 000 km2), which is 8.7 times as big. the farmer on the land must have the knowledge and capital to get the produce off the land. in his book the great south african land scandal, dr philip du toit (2004) shows what happened to many productive farms that have been handed over under the government’s restitution and redistribution programmes. these farms became desolate. he argues that south africa needs the 35 000 farmers who feed the people of this country. in western countries, people do not demand land, although they are landless, but they are employed in other sectors. in the united states of america, farms employ only 2% of the population, while the rest of the population work elsewhere (du toit, 2004: 267). 6. conclusion south africa cannot have a ‘onesize-fits-all’ solution to land. with its 11 official languages, this country needs at least as many approaches to the land issue. there should be a place for the different traditions to bloom in this country. in a less known book the question of separatism, jane jacobs (1981: 11-16) shows that, when the french-speaking canadians urbanised, wealth increased and when they reached a city-sized population, culture bloomed. she found that a french culture on canadian soil and part of the canadian economy is not surrender all livestock, machinery and land to collective farms. up to 10 million peasants died during the famine of 1932-1933 or in the slave labour camps of the gulag (singh, 2016: 44). courtois, werth, panné, paczkowski, bartošek & margolin (2004: 206) give a figure of 6 million people dying from famine, 720 000 people executed for resisting it, and 7 million entering the gulag. all russian farmers became servants of the state, owning neither land nor livestock (scholtz, 1962: 296). manji (2006: 141) shows that some different political issues confront africa, a changing world where tenure must be secured, even for women, while full, private property rights can lead to indebted small farmers being replaced by agrarian business corporations. thus “a network of land law reform, linking the local and the global in important new ways, has served to place the formalization of land relations at the centre of the new law and development” (manji, 2006: 142). 5.4 economics and growth jacobs (1985: 34) distinguishes between passive economies and city economies. passive economies do not create economic change themselves but instead respond to economic forces of city economies. they can be national or rural economies that lack the all-important function of import-replacing as a function in the real life of a city. in her book cities and the wealth of nations, jacobs (1985: 39) argues that “economic life develops by grace of innovating; it expands by grace of import-replacing. these two master economic processes are closely related, both being functions of city economies.” cities where import-replacing occurs release five great economic forces, namely: • enlarging city markets for new and different imports; • increased number and kind of jobs in the import-replacing city; • increased transplant of city work into non-urban locations as older enterprises are crowded out; 110 ssb/trp/mdm 2019 (75) sustainable (jacobs, 1981: 20-24). just as she believes that city states are the driving force of city economies, she also believes that peaceful and mutually beneficial separation will be good for both parties. where cultures form city populations, they must have some form of self-determination or they will be suppressed by the majority. traditionalists raise their children within the family and the community, and these ties are important for them. for both black and white traditionalists, there must be areas where they can do so. for the traditional zulus, the ingonyama trust represents the embodiment of traditional zulu land, held in the hands of their king for the zulu nation. during a visit to kwazulu-natal, president ramaphosa met with king zwelithini and assured him that the government would not touch land under the trust (van diemen, 2019). some traditional afrikaners still believe that history is not written by man, but by god (steÿn, 2015: 278-283). as such, they believe that future generations will continue to seek freedom for the afrikaner among the diversity of peoples in south africa, where every individual carries his/her own responsibility and lives according to his/her own calling. for the creation of jobs, the country will need more capitalistic areas such as ‘free cities’ or ‘city states’ like singapore, with low government intervention and low taxes to create jobs for neighbouring communities. there could even be areas where socialism or communism could be exercised if people choose to do so. the government must merely help and allow people who do not agree to these policies to move out of the areas they do not like. for south africa, this will mean considering a new political dispensation, where the country consists of different autonomous regions or city states.6 just as the soviet union could not persist after 6 this means that these areas are selfgoverning and not subject to a central controlled system of land management such as spluma. each autonomous area will make its own rules, according to that area’s culture and value system. the fall of communism and broke up into 15 different states,7 south africa as a single country cannot persist after the new dispensation in 1994. article 235 of the constitution of the republic of south africa allows for self-determination: “235. self-determination. the right of the south african people as a whole to self-determination, as manifested in this constitution, does not preclude, within the framework of this right, recognition of the notion of the right of self-determination of any community sharing a common cultural and language heritage, within a territorial entity in the republic or in any other way, determined by national legislation” (rsa, 1996: 31). south africa could identify and delineate several formal and functional regions, according to glasson’s (1978: 39) definition of a planning region where each should be “an area which is large enough to enable substantial changes in distribution of population and employment to take place within its boundaries, yet which is small enough for its planning problems to be seen as a whole”. there should be a variety of 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(ed.). 2009. the cambridge advanced learner’s dictionary. 3rd edition. cambridge: cambridge university press. https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/pcpipch@weo/oemdc/ https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/pcpipch@weo/oemdc/ https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/pcpipch@weo/oemdc/ _goback ijhs, e-issn 2597-4718, p-issn 2597-470x, vol. 3, no. 1, september 2019, pp. 96-106 international journal of humanity studies http://e-journal.usd.ac.id/index.php/ijhs sanata dharma university, yogyakarta, indonesia 96 american dream as reflected in david mamet’s glengarry glen ross sindhy sintya mianani airlangga university sindhysintya@gmail.com doi: 10.24071/ijhs.2019.030109 received 29 june 2019; revised 16 august 2019; accepted 26 august 2019 abstract david mamet is one of the greatest modern american playwrights whose works have dominated the stages during the twentieth century. his work entitled glengarry glen ross is a great echo of the world about the businessmen in the united states. this study is devoted to the analysis of david mamet’s glengarry glen ross based on marxism point of view, in which it focuses on the power praxis portrayed within its story. by so, this study scrutinizes how american dream creates unethical and immoral american corrupted society in mamet's glengarry glen ross and how the notion of american dream is being challenged. the findings of this study show that the salesmen’s choices, preferences, wants and desires are affected by ideological practices. these ideological practices represent the production of corrupted ideology for the notion of american dream is being reduced and merely a utopian notion. thus, eventually, david mamet’s glengarry glen ross displays a deeper conception that the salesmen or working class people in general, are the subjects of the capitalism. keywords: marxism, american dream, capitalism introduction the notion of american dream is as old as the very foundation of america itself. it also becomes the belief that leads the innumerable immigrants to america who expected a better life as american dream itself claims “that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (jefferson, 1776, p. 1)”. as they feel exhausted from the tyrannies and muffling limitations of the old world, thought of the new continent offers a land of opportunities and redemption for their dreams. but from the very beginning, the ignorance, prejudice and greed inherited in human nature starting to deter the true meaning of the dream, thus turning it into a nightmare. thus, one might claim that american dream has been reduced for it is corrupted since the outset, despite the fact that there has always been a controversy over whether it was corrupted originally or diverged and reduced from its true essence and eventually become corrupted. mailto:sindhysintya@gmail.com ijhs, e-issn 2597-4718, p-issn 2597-470x, vol. 3, no. 1, september 2019, pp. 96–106 97 realizing this phenomenon, some authors express their criticism and cynicism toward american dream. such criticism and cynicism can be seen from f. scott fitzgerald’s the great gatsby (1925), arthur miller’s death of a salesman (1949), john steinbeck’s the grapes of wrath (1962), and david mamet’s glengarry glen ross (1984). all of these literary works revolve around the reduced and corrupted notion of the american dream during the period of the great depression in 1920s till 1930s. this period witnesses the decline of america‘s great power leading to the state where america deals with a wave of suspicious and corruption emerged among its people. being affected by this condition, everyone simply only cares about his/her own interest, regardless of all normal communal issues. each individual looks for the fulfillment of his/her aspirations and hopes regardless to their values, ethics, and other people’s desires. it is said that the source of the corruption of the notion of american dream is none than the ideology of american system itself. given such issues, david mamet as one of the important playwright who experienced these social problems, wrote his work entitled glengarry glen ross. mamet's play reflects his extreme engagement with some of the american unresolved concerns. mamet shows his views to be as anti-capitalist playwright. mamet’s glengarry glen ross is deemed as the awareness of the ideology of the dominant class in which the issue of struggle for life in the bossiness is evident. it is a portrait of a battle for survival as well as struggle in which the salesmen long for a dream of being free. in addition to that, glengarry glen ross are also full of businessmen deprived of any human warmth and compassion and are constantly steeped in an atmosphere of fear, greed, and ruthlessness. in other words, the higher the pressure, the lower the ethics are. his play, then, is said to able to express his concerns regarding this matter by giving such valuable criticism of materialism and greed that echo in american society. david mamet’s glengarry glen ross is a play telling the story of real estate salesmen in america. the play is considered as mamet’s most noticeable work for it has win three obies, a new york drama critics award, the outer critics award for distinguished playwrighting, a joseph jefferson award, the society of west end theatres award, the pulitzer prize, also some numerous nominations for academy awards for screenwriting. thus, david mamet is also deemed as a “seminal figure in contemporary american drama whose gift for acute social observation, depth of moral vision, and continuing productivity account for his broad critical respect” (begley, 2004, p. 4). moreover, as bigsby (2004) suggests, that in a utopian society such as america, only the past and the future offer a true form. in between, is a provisional world in decline, reaching for a perfection beyond immediate reach, existing between impure nostalgia and importunate hope. therefore, mamet’s glengarry glen ross can be said as the embodiment of a preoccupation with rootlessness which feels both as discontinuity with the past and the failure of connection with the present. glengarry glen ross depicts the essential role of the business ethic in shaping american values. thus, as a result, moral dilemma becomes the main issue in this play, for people are trapped between their desire to possess the land or gain from its sale and their longing for old value systems. this condition give the illusion of the glorious past and a utopian future, compared to the devastating ijhs, e-issn 2597-4718, p-issn 2597-470x, vol. 3, no. 1, september 2019, pp. 96–106 98 conditions of the present time, functions as a defense mechanism, employed to avoid the confrontation of the horrifying reality of their existence. given this premise, this study attempts to analyze david mamet’s glengarry glen ross in the light of power praxis and its relation to the american dream using marxism theory. by doing so, the corrupted and reduced notion of the american dream and its principles express a contradiction between reality and what befalls. the enchantment of the american dream, then, comes to the extent that they the splendid dreams of the past are juxtaposed with the utopian future promised by the american dream. literature review marxism theory was founded by karl marx, a german philosopher and friedrich engels, a german sociologist. in the beginning, this economic theory is called as ‘communism’ rather than ‘marxism.’ this theory was first introduced in communist manifesto on 1848. its aim is to bring about a classless society based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. while other philosophies seek to understand the world, marxism seeks to change it. marxism sees progress as coming about through the struggle for power between different social classes. it views history as something ‘motored’ by the competition for economics, social, and political advantage rather than succession of power or gradual process. it is also believed that . . . society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of monetary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of destruction has cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. and why? because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. the productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary they have become too powerful for these conditions by which they are fettered, and so as soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property (marx & engels, 1985, p. 86). marxist theory also argues that the way ones think and experience the world around is either wholly or largely conditioned by the way the economy is organized. under a medieval, feudal regime people will have thought and felt differently from the way that we think and feel now, in a capitalist economy that is, an economy in which goods are produced, the ‘mode of production’, by large concentrations of capital and then sold in a free, competitive, market. what marx believes, then, is developed into the marxist model of society which sees society constituted by a base or material means of production, distribution, and exchange and a superstructure consisting ‘cultural’ world of ideas, art, religion, law, etc. by such notion, marxism also pays attention to the exploitation of one social class by another, seen especially in modern industrial capitalism. the result of this exploitation is alienation which is the state which comes about when the worker is ‘de-skilled’ and made to perform fragmented, repetitive tasks. along with this fact, marx adds that “for exploitation, veiled by ijhs, e-issn 2597-4718, p-issn 2597-470x, vol. 3, no. 1, september 2019, pp. 96–106 99 religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” his statement, then, can be said to justify that the capitalist goals and questions of profit and loss are paramount. workers are also beret of their full humanity and in other words, become things. method in order to obtain a comprehensive overview of the research problem, this study utilizes marxism approach. this approach embodies the notion that a society consists of two classes namely base and superstructure. thus, to examine the two mentioned society classes, the main method of data analysis called the method of thick description was employed. the thick description method was originally presented by geertz (1998, pp. 1253-1278) to examine the cultural ideas behind a cultural phenomenon. this method is used to compensate for the close reading method developed by new criticism by linking the cultural codes in the text analyzed by reconstructing the various practical and socio-cultural structures surrounding the text, which is not explicitly referred to by the text (budianta, 2006, pp. 10-11). analysis of research data is also reinforced by the hermeneutic method developed by paul ricoeur (klemm, 1983, pp. 74-108). ricoeur’s notion on hermeneutic theory, suggests that the ultimate goal of an interpretation is to understand the nature of the discourse, the aspects relating to the text, the process of textual understanding, and the subjective conditions in the understanding of the text. with regard to these points, interpretation is said to achieve adequate results. findings and discussion a brief review on marxism marxism theory was founded by karl marx, a german philosopher and friedrich engels, a german sociologist. in the beginning, this economic theory is called as ‘communism’ rather than ‘marxism.’ this theory was first introduced in communist manifesto on 1848. its aim is to bring about a classless society based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. while other philosophies seek to understand the world, marxism seeks to change it. marxism sees progress as coming about through the struggle for power between different social classes. it views history as something ‘motored’ by the competition for economics, social, and political advantage rather than succession of power or gradual process. it is also believed that . . . society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of monetary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of destruction has cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. and why? because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. the productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary they have become too powerful for these conditions by which they are fettered, and so as soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property (marx & engels, 1985, p. 86). ijhs, e-issn 2597-4718, p-issn 2597-470x, vol. 3, no. 1, september 2019, pp. 96–106 100 marxist theory also argues that the way ones think and experience the world around is either wholly or largely conditioned by the way the economy is organized. under a medieval, feudal regime people will have thought and felt differently from the way that we think and feel now, in a capitalist economy that is, an economy in which goods are produced, the ‘mode of production’, by large concentrations of capital and then sold in a free, competitive, market. what marx believes, then, is developed into the marxist model of society which sees society constituted by a base or material means of production, distribution, and exchange and a superstructure consisting ‘cultural’ world of ideas, art, religion, law, etc. by such notion, marxism also pays attention to the exploitation of one social class by another, seen especially in modern industrial capitalism. the result of this exploitation is alienation which is the state which comes about when the worker is ‘de-skilled’ and made to perform fragmented, repetitive tasks. along with this fact, marx adds that “for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” his statement, then, can be said to justify that the capitalist goals and questions of profit and loss are paramount. workers are also beret of their full humanity and in other words, become things. summary of david mamet’s glengarry glenn ross the first act of the play consists of three scenes all taking the place setting at a chinese restaurant. the flamboyant atmosphere of the chinese restaurant is significant since it ironically represents that the corrupt base of business hides under its delicate surface. glengarry glen ross begins with shelly levene, the oldest of the salesmen, trying to convince williamson to give him premium leads. in fact, it might be odd for the readers, at their first confrontation with the words like lead and sit, to determine what these words actually refer to. yet, mamet gradually reveals in the course of the play that a lead is an appointment with a prospective client, that a sit is the actual confrontation and that the board is the office salesmen’s graph charting the four salesmen’s relative success. moreover, it becomes clear that there are two sets of leads which include premium leads that are more likely to win and non-premium or ordinary leads that are almost worthless and most probably fail. as levene’s flattering and then threatening of williamson come to no conclusion, he grabs at bribing him as a last resort which of course fails since he cannot afford it. following the first scene, the second scene represents moss and aaronow discussing the unfairness of mitch and murray towards them after all their honest services for the company. in the following moss suggests that they should break into the office, steal the leads and sell them to jerry graff who directs a rival company. jon tuttle explains coveting the power and income of mitch and murray, who reap the profits of others’ labor and admiring the savvy of jerry graff, who went into business for himself. thus, it is safe to say that on this scene moss actually casts himself in the role of executive and doles out the dirty work of breaking into the office to whoever is desperate enough to be his minion. moss’ act is said to prove that the salesmen not only swindle the gullible clients, but also they cheat on each other whenever they get a chance. moss cunningly tries to persuade aaronow to commit the break-in and when he does not give up to his temptation, moss threatens that aaronow would be an accomplice, willy-nilly, since he listened to the plot. ijhs, e-issn 2597-4718, p-issn 2597-470x, vol. 3, no. 1, september 2019, pp. 96–106 101 in the third scene, roma delivers a confusing monolog to a total stranger, named lingk, sitting in the next booth, in order to inveigle him into buying worthless land. roma philosophizes about the freedom of the individual and creates the illusion that the individual must be a risk-taker. then, he subtly connects the freedom of the individual, the capability of taking risks and security to buying land. it clearly anticipates that lingk will be duped into buying a little worth property. it is quite evident from the way he builds on conviction in the power of the individual to achieve his goal which is selling worthless land. this act is simply intended to coax and disorient lingk, or in short, to trap him. by subtly distorts the meaning of the individual that lingkt has in mind and equates taking risks with being independent, roma pretends that he is totally indifferent to selling land. yet, he implicitly points out that buying the land he offers is the first step to be independent. his statement, however, is inherently paradoxical since whereas he asks lingk to believe in himself, roma urges him to put his trust in him and let roma decide for him. the second act of the play shows the ransacked office the morning after the break-in. baylen, a police detective, is present in the office to interrogate the staff. as roma anxiously enters the office and asks about the stolen contracts, it becomes clear that he has closed the sale to lingk in the previous act and is now worried about his documents. however, williamson assures him that his contract has been filed and sent to downtown. meanwhile, levene enters the office jubilantly announcing that he has just closed a deal with the nyborgs. having been interrogated by the detective, moss furiously humiliates levene while roma applauds his recent success. then, roma all of a sudden sees lingk outside the office and immediately enlists levene to improvise a show to distract lingk from cancelling the contract. however, the improvisation fails because williamson intervenes and assures lingk that his check has been cashed. thus in the end, lingk escapes the trap and roma furiously turns at williamson and warns him that he owes him a cadillac. levene inadvertently, through a lapse of tongue, reveals to williamson that he is the one who ransacked the office. moreover, the worse comes to the worst when williamson viciously tells levene that the deal with the nyborgs is dead since they are “nuts”. as levene leaves to be interrogated by the detective, roma tells williamson that he and levene work together as a team and from that time on he keeps his commissions plus fifty percent of levene’s commissions. the play ends as roma heads out to the restaurant to hook another gullible customer. american dream as reflected in david mamet’s glengarry glen ross at the beginning, the play dramatizes four desperate salesmen who work with a real estate office in chicago which is supervised by a cold manager, williamson, who hands them out leads and sends them out to persuade gullible customers to buy worthless land in florida. as the story progress, the play also demonstrates how for these men all human relationships are narrowed down to business transactions and how their lack of morality drives them to commit robbery under the guise of free enterprise. with the idea that the difference between robbery and chicago salesmanship is only a difference of degree, these hardboiled real-estate salesmen have no moral consciences. what they are selling has no value tracts of undeveloped land which cannot be developed. the only commodity that has value for them is the “lead,” the contact with the potential ijhs, e-issn 2597-4718, p-issn 2597-470x, vol. 3, no. 1, september 2019, pp. 96–106 102 buyer. some leads are valueless, the value of the lead depending on the wealth and gullibility of the client. levene: i'll tell you why i'm out. i'm out, you're giving me toilet paper. john. i've seen those leads. i saw them when i was at homestead, we pitched those cocksuckers rio rancho nineteen sixty-nine they wouldn't buy. they couldn't buy a fucking toaster. they're broke, john. they're cold. they're deadbeats, you can't judge on that. even so. even so. alright. fine. fine. even so. i go in, four fucking leads they got their money in a sock. they're fucking polacks, john. four leads. i close two. two. fifty per… . . . levene: moss, jerry graff, mitch himself...those guys lived on the business i brought in. they lived on it...and so did murray, john. you were here you'd of benefited from it too. and now i'm saying this. do i want charity? do i want pity? i want sits. i want leads that don't come right out of a phone book. give me a lead hotter than that, i'll go in and close it. give me a chance. that's all i want. i'm going to get up on that fucking board and all i want is a chance. it's a streak and i'm going to turn it around. (pause) i need your help. (pause). williamson: i can't do it, shelly. (pause). levene: why? williamson: the leads are assigned randomly... levene: bullshit, bullshit, you assign them... what are you telling me? williamson: apart from the top men on the contest board (mamet, 1984, 1.1.84-103). however, despite their impoverished morality, from the beginning of the play, it is clearly perceived that the salesmen are under severe pressure more than any other time since half of them are on the verge of failing the selling target. in order to encourage the salesmen to work harder, mitch and murray, as the heads of the company, have declared a sales contest according to which the top seller wins a cadillac, the runner-up wins a set of steak knives, while the other two will get fired. little did these salesmen know, the competition is just a disguise to gain profit as much as they can, thus, driving these salesmen crazy. moss: to say “i'm going on my own.” ‘cause what you do, george, let me tell you what you do: you find yourself in thrall to someone else. and we enslave ourselves. to please. to win some fucking toaster...to...to... and the guy who got there first made up those [rules]. ijhs, e-issn 2597-4718, p-issn 2597-470x, vol. 3, no. 1, september 2019, pp. 96–106 103 . . . moss: something. to pay them back. (pause). someone, someone should hurt them. murray and mitch . . . someone should rob the office. aaronow: huh. moss: that's what i'm saying. we were, if we were that kind of guys, to knock it off, and trash the joint, it looks like robbery, and take the fuckin' leads out of the files...go to jerry graff (long pause). aaronow: what could somebody get for them? moss: what could we get for them? i don't know. buck a throw...bucka-half a throw...i don't know...hey, who knows what they're worth, what do they pay for them? all told...must be, i'd... three bucks a throw...i don't know. aaronow: how many leads have we got? moss: the glengarry...the premium leads...? i'd say we got five thousand. five. five thousand leads. aaronow: and you're saying a fella could take and sell these leads to jerry graff. moss: yes (mamet, 1984, 1.2.114; 147-162). the way these salesmen behave under the so called “lead” illustrates that capitalism is indeed entangled in the highly competitive atmosphere which revolves around ones’ survival. these salesmen are left with no other choice except to privilege their own self-interest over the failure of others. furthermore, it is mandatory to pay attention even though the system encourages these salesmen to act independently, not all of them experience the similar degree of freedom. in fact, they are nothing but a machine. roma: i swear it's not a world of men it's not a world of men, machine it's a world of clock watchers, bureaucrats, officeholders what it is, it's a fucked up world there's no adventure to it. (pause.) dying breed. yes it is. (pause.) we are the members of a dying breed (mamet, 1984, 2.1.432). such exploitation on mamet’s glengarry glen ross, then, indicates how business is elevated to the level of a sacred ritual under capitalism. when business transactions are all that matter, greed and avarice permeating the life of these salesmen, hence force them to be always closing through fabricating false stories ijhs, e-issn 2597-4718, p-issn 2597-470x, vol. 3, no. 1, september 2019, pp. 96–106 104 and deceiving their clients in order to secure their top place on the board and more importantly, to win the cadillac which is the prize to their so called ‘survival’. the four salesmen depicted in glengarry glen ross put their faith in the american dream and as they struggle to push each other away, through selling more pieces of worthless land, they unconsciously sell themselves to the dream. thus, in selling not only land, but also their souls, they become self-interested individuals who discard all moral consciences. this dehumanized salesmen, as explained by roma is called as a queer, a condition in which a justification of wrong acts are considered as something ordinary. roma: you think you're queer...? i'm going to tell you something: we're all queer. you think that you're a thief? so what? you get befuddled by a middle-class morality...? get shut of it. shut it out. you cheated on your wife...? you did it, live with it. (pause). you fuck little girls, so be it. there's an absolute morality? may be. and then what? if you think there is, then be that thing. bad people go to hell? i don't think so. if you think that, act that way. a hell exists on earth? yes. i won't live in it. that's me. you ever take a dump made you feel you'd just slept for twelve hours...? lingk: did i...? roma: yes. lingk: i don't know (mamet, 1984, 1.3.1-12). what mamet portrays in his play, then, indicates that there are privileged individuals. to put it another words, the capitalist system hypocritically announces that all individuals share the same degree of freedom and have the equal chance to get successful while in fact the holders of capital usually escape the law which is supposed to punish the law-breaker. under such a system, in which there is not such a thing as fixed morality, each individual learns to adopt the kind of morality that is in accordance with his or her interests. as a result, it is not morality that checks the behavior of the individual, but greed and the dictates of business transactions that shape and define morality. while american dream clearly states that it is . . . a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position (adams, 1931, p. 216). somehow, this notion is no longer reflected in glengarry glen ross. this situation tragically reflecting the failures of american society which no longer encourages situation ethics and relativistic morality as stated in american dream. it is inevitable that the myth of the american dream clearly alters the salesmen’s ethic and morals, for they no longer hold the belief that playing fair will save them from getting the steak knives. it is precisely because of their conviction in the ijhs, e-issn 2597-4718, p-issn 2597-470x, vol. 3, no. 1, september 2019, pp. 96–106 105 fairness of unrestricted competition that the salesmen in glengarry glen ross behave unscrupulously and justify it as a mean of marketing skill. glengarry glen ross, eventually, is deemed as a criticism toward the reduced and corrupted american dream for its cynicism is delivered passionately through its characters. the four salesmen, though, try hard to win by cheating, proved that what they have done are merely futile attempts to rebel against system, in this case capitalism, for they have no power against the superstructure elements manifested in the characters namely mitch and murray, the bosses of the real estate agency. conclusion the american dream is an ideology among the infinite ideologies dominating americans’ ways of life. american dream is also an example of a well-constructed notion for it exists from the very beginning of america and yet withered with the passage of time. tough, it aims at the weak point of the human nature that is a dream of better life, the concept of the american dream in david mamet’s glengarry glen ross exposes the ways american dream as an ideology tie itself to americans’ real existence and subvert reality in less suspected ways. in mamet’s glengarry glen ross, american dream tend to offer itself as the reality and despite the fact that one cannot escape the influence of it entirely, american dream is nothing but an the hinders of logical thinking and thereby leads to scheming acts. by such findings, it is safe to say that american dream, as reflected in glengarry glen ross, is a reduced and corrupted ideology. references adams, j. t. (1931). the epic of america. boston: little brown & co. begley, v. (2004). a poetics for thugs. in l. kane (ed.), the art of crime: the plays and films of harold pinter and david mamet. new york: routledge. bigsby, c. (2004). david mamet. in c. bigsby (ed), the cambridge companion to david mamet (pp. 1-41). new york: cambridge university press. bigsby (2004). david mamet: all true stories. in h. bloom (ed), modern critical views: david mamet (pp 163-202). philadelphia: chelsea house publisher. billington, m. (1994). mamet turns to the world of salesmen. in l. j. trudeau (ed.), drama criticism, vol. 4 (pp. 229-230). detroit: gale. brucher, r. (2000). pernicious nostalgia in glengarry glen ross. in l. kane (ed.), david mamet’s glengarry glen ross: text and performance (pp. 211225). new york: garland publishing inc,. budianta, m. 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(1994). public issues, private tensions: david mamet’s glengarry glen ross. in l. j. trudeau (ed), drama criticism, vol. 4 (pp. 334338). detroit: gale. stafford, t. j. (2000). visions of a promised land: david mamet‟s glengarry glen ross. in l. kane (ed.), david mamet’s glengarry glen ross: text and performance (pp. 185-194). new york: garland publishing inc. 2 town and regional planning 2021 (79):2-5 | issn 1012-280 | e-issn 2415-0495 how to cite: kuhn, j. 2021. commentary and book review. order without design: how markets shape cities. town and regional planning, no. 79, pp. 2-5. © creative commons with attribution (cc-by) published by the ufs http://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/trp mr jens kuhn, town planner and former manager: housing land and forward planning, cape town city council, po box 1410, milnerton, 7441. phone: 072 810 4650, email: <jenskuhn@kingsley.co.za> order without design: how markets shape cities commentary and book review by jens kuhn, november 2021 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2415-0495/trp79i1.2 during the many years of working in the field of planning and housing at municipal level, i often had flashes of insight that i classified as ‘realistic’, those being a reappraisal of the very specific situation on which i am working from a ‘land market’ point of view. whether it was working at shielding urban agricultural land from use-change; building low-cost (and restitution) housing in district six, or, fighting to retain low-income families in gentrifying areas, at the back of my head there was always a sense that after us officials have left said flashpoint, ‘markets’ will undo it all again. in fact, markets will return urban form back to what is ‘normal’ under capitalism. these ‘flashes of insight’ remained disjointed and poorly articulated, mainly because i did not really want to confront my opponent: my ‘undoer’! yet i thought of my opponent as being common sense all the same. what is best about bertaud’s book is that it takes these disparate flashes, develops them, and places them into a much larger and more coherent picture. suddenly, all those small instances of common sense are woven together into a grand and, i would say, very convincing description of cities indeed. 1. land economic his grand picture is of course economic, more precisely ‘land economic’.1 his analytic approach to planning and urban management is econometric. he favours quantification and evidence. by giving us a dynamic way of thinking about urban quantities, he prepares planners for the expanding information and computer age. this contrasts with the sociological conception of a city whose mode of analysis would be antropological – favouring identity and values. or, closer to home, an aesthetic conception that analyses and understands the cities in terms of urban design. the last-mentioned conception comes in for severe criticism throughout bertaud’s book. his claim is that the ‘design’2 approach to understanding and managing cities has caused untold inefficiencies and price distortions in urban settlements worldwide. town and regional planning as a discipline has its roots in two historic traditions: aesthetics, being architectural and environmental psychology, and political, with its two legs being law reforms in health and housing, and revolutionary utopian thought. this explains the almost exclusive preoccupation with ‘physical appearance’ and with ‘politics’ by planning’s educational curricula. currently, the near absence of ‘economic’ training in planning schools is palpable. micro-economics teaches shorthand concepts such as supply-demand. said concepts 1 this is distinct from say harry w. richardson’s “regional and urban economics” (1978), penguin books) which attempts to bring ‘distance’ and ‘location’ into goods and services pricing theory. 2 he uses the word design, with its norms and standards, rather than planning, because planning as such remains indispensable to the operations of his economic city. title: order without design: how markets shape cities author: alain bertaud publisher: the mit press isbn: 9780262038768 date: 2018 http://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/trp http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2415-0495/trp79i1.2 kuhn 2021 town and regional planning (79):2-5 3 may be abstract and by no means a precise calculator for commodity prices, but they do build a keen intuition for dynamism and for an appreciation of fluidity in the world. if unencumbered, prices trend towards equilibrium, resources tend to be allocated better than if done by a central authority, and so on. planners are fully aware that cities are always in a state of flux, and yet are applying only static mechanisms such as regulations, policy, statutory plans, and so on for consideration. none of them cope with fluid or changing contexts. none of them cope with the 10 000 choices ordinary people make in their lives. bertaud steps into this gap by giving us a useful and concise ‘urban economic model’ with which to consider cities. what is this economic conception? in his model, cities are a spatial concentration of human beings for the primary purpose of ‘work’ and working together! productivity ‘per capita’ rises tremendously when people work closely together, compared to when working in isolation. these natural efficiency gains are what hold urban systems together in the first place. the justification for accepting this view of the origin and purpose of cities is that primary cities in every national economy contribute a larger share of ‘product’ to national gdp than is their share of the nation’s population. or, seen from below, a doubling of a city’s population leads to a 15% rise in productivity ‘per capita’ (p. 144). these findings have been near universal. to optimise this ‘working together’, jobseekers and employers must find each other with the least amount of trouble. skills and technology must connect with each other as the economy shifts and changes. manual and skilled labourers must rapidly find the places at which they are needed, in the moment. to capture this idea, bertaud refers to cities as “labour markets”,3 and the overriding task of urban management must be to ensure that this marketplace of labour functions as efficiently as it can. if that gets done, urban 3 nothing to do or be confused with the realms of ‘labour unionisms’ or ‘labour legislation’. productivity is always enhanced. this already makes us appreciate that urban growth (i.e. population increases) should neither be interfered with nor be wilfully boosted or suppressed. where the labour marketplace does get interfered with, distortions result – its attempt to return to equilibrium gets blocked, and thus wages are artificially trapped at too high or too low a level! 2. land consumption population increases require more space. or, as family incomes increase, so more living space is demanded. the way this is supplied by a well-functioning market is via the “land consumption” process, as bertaud calls it. it is the process whereby land is converted from raw land into human living space, or from low-density urban areas to high-density areas;4 or from office buildings into residential units. in the capitalist world, this ongoing conversion process accounts for the ever (re)shaping of our cities. where this is not the case,5 huge inefficiencies get cast in stone, which market forces can only correct over many generations, if ever. the next task for urban managers is to ensure that ‘land consumption’ is permitted to operate smoothly. again, this means lifting regulatory interferences (including any statutory spatial plans) or any bottlenecks that may arise. land prices and fluctuating people/ per hectare densities are mediators of the land-consumption process. these mechanisms continually match the supply of living space with the demand for it. again, any encumbrances mean that the equilibrium cannot be (re)established properly, meaning that land prices are stuck either too high or low, as the case may be. urban densities, in turn, are out of sync with what households and companies demand. stated differently, living and working spaces are inefficiently ‘allocated’ when their demand cannot find its supply level. bertaud offers an 4 industrial and commercial, or workspace, is obviously similarly converted. 5 among other examples, bertaud uses apartheid south african cities to argue the point. important insight, namely that “land [is unlike a] commodity” (p. 222). if you have no money, you go without a cell phone; if you have no money, you still require a space to stay. this sets the land-pricing process apart from commodity-pricing theory of standard economics. 3. land regulation as with a free-market economy, which is inconceivable without essential state regulation (on say contract enforcement; property rights enforcement, and so on), bertaud’s city cannot be built entirely by the free market. land consumption and labour markets only function when municipal governments supply those public goods that markets cannot provide. these are roads (or movement routes) and open space, and this is the core function of planning. a second important function of planning is to keep an eye firmly on the urban management tasks mentioned earlier. planning must ensure that their operations continue smoothly in the face of urban scale increases, of changes in family income, and the arrival of new technologies. the book provides indicators whereby to monitor their functioning. timeous interventions for sidestepping bottlenecks are essential to allow for a renewed round of productivity growth and efficiency. particularly appealing about the economic view of the city to me is that it is ‘democratic’. the choices people make: be it where to live and how much space to rent; what type of accommodation to build and where; what job to accept or decline; what mode of transport to use, and so on, all feed into a “... spontaneous spatial equilibrium created by the sum of uncoordinated, individual decisions ...” (p. 27). this balance is the most rational (re)allocation of space (as a resource) and, by extension, the most optimal form/shape for a city. any policy proposal must be assessed against what it means for this automatically participative process.6 by that standard, a master 6 bertaud is not arguing in favour of an absolute deregulation of urban space. 4 kuhn 2021 town and regional planning (79):2-5 plan would be undemocratic in that it takes upon itself all household and company decisions. it decides on behalf of the many. that has material implications (losses/costs) for those who are being decided for, and for urban form as a whole. bertaud’s book gives several appealing models whereby to monitor cities. one looks at the role of state compared to the private sector in supplying space, and their relationship to population size. it is given in a very useful flow-chart format (p. 84). this helps judge how much urban expansion is required and what amount is the responsibility of the state. a second is a recapitulation of the classic location-theory models to predict land prices from the centre of a city (p. 98). these allow us to judge whether prices are ‘right’ in actuality (and with it whether densities are ‘right’ per location). his recapitulation deploys the models from a ‘pricedetermining’ angle, rather than a ‘location-choice’ point of view. this is really refreshing and useful for urban management. thirdly, he offers very appealing and simple spatial indices for, urban mobility and affordability, which are essential for managing urban performance. historically, urban economics served the ‘firm’ and its imperatives. bertaud works in the service of urban managers. 4. implications and lessons 4.1 mobility the key to detecting faults and efficiencies in the labour market is by securing ‘mobility’. in south africa, the impulse has always been to bring jobs and residences into closer proximity, thereby minimising the cost and time expended on commuting. since mobility is viewed as the antithesis hereof, it has been badly neglected. bertaud would not disagree with this stance but thinks of mobility in much wider terms. for instance, if all people in a metropolitan area were employed within a 1-km radius of their home, and so could walk or cycle rather than commute to work, it would amount to an extreme ‘labour-risk’. the reason for this is that, if the structure of the economy were to change for some reason, and jobs and skills were spatially redistributed as a consequence, the urban workforce would be unable to adjust. the labour market would be stalled. in bertaud’s terms ‘mobility’ is to city as ‘circulation’ is to the organism. slow them down and death approaches. mobility distributes energy (i.e. human labour) to where it is required in each moment, and a rapid enough reorganisation of the physical city to meet the new labour demands cannot be brought about by the state or private sector. moreover, easy access to alternative jobs by workers allows them much greater choices associated with job satisfaction and wages. employers obtain a larger recruitment pool, from which to draw the right skills in accordance with changes in technology. however, greater mobility is accompanied by more pollution, congestion, noise, cost, and so on. but this is not infinite. bertaud’s one norm is that people should not (and if ‘choice’ were available, would not freely) commute for over an hour, per journey, to work. this hour might be 40kms on a train or 2kms on foot. distance depends on mobility, and since the goal is to open up the widest possible jobs choice for all workers, commuter flow is the most important feature for the labour market. in history, those cities that secured mobility went on to a new round of growth and welfare. those that did not, stagnated or declined into a congested and dysfunctional labour market. contemporary notions of ‘death-of-distance’ or of digitally ‘working-from-home’, if taken too seriously in policy circles, risks stalling a city’s economy for another round. if mobility is critical to the functional city, how does planning monitor or estimate it periodically? sticking to simplicity, bertaud suggests that the best way is to calculate the number of jobs reachable within 60 minutes from selected points. this would factor in transport mode, congestion, cost, distance, and routing. to generate an overall city mobility index, the various measures are weighted and summed. as any of these factors change (by transport investments, jobs redistribution, or naturally), the measure alerts us to a rise or fall in jobs reachable. the object of policy is to maximise the pool of jobs reachable from each point. with such a model not only can urban management track mobility (data allowing, even in real time), it can also test the consequence of various policy options such as increases in fuel cost; building a new freeway interchange, and using trains vs taxis as the primary mode for access to jobs. in all of this, a crucial feature is movement-space or room-to-move. how much space has been lost to illegal squatting in road/rail reserves in south africa? what does that mean for mobility, now and in future in each city? the instinct is to build more and wider roads. while very important, other means bertaud recommends carpooling, opening under-used bus lanes, parking tariffs, and so on. but what might they each contribute to aggregate urban mobility? it is never quantified as an index! 4.2 affordability a similar quantitative approach is proposed for the conversion of land into living and working space. every family and firm is confronted with the same choice in respect of shelter or workspace. that is making a trade-off between rent, floor area, and location.7 the specific choice being made is what bertaud views as the household’s ‘affordability’. this is in contrast to south africa where ‘affordability’ is mostly regarded as a monetary threshold (incomes of <r3 500 per month, or r10 billion assigned for rdp houses annually), leaving us without a general indicator of urban affordability, per city. he recommends a simple ‘price-to-income ratio’ (pir) index, to be maintained and monitored by planning. this ratio is the median price of a dwelling to the median (annual) income of a household, in a said city. a ratio of ≤3 is deemed 7 obviously, when race-based policies, zoning restrictions, statutory plans, or density prescriptions are imposed, this decision process is curtailed or even nullified entirely. kuhn 2021 town and regional planning (79):2-5 5 affordable. the vast majority of world cities have a much higher ratio; yet families falling below this index continue to live in said cities. how does this happen? the answer is densification.8 families simply consume less living space (floor area) to cope with rents or move further away from high land prices. once again, the ‘land-consumption’ process must not be impeded. 4.3 policy a lesson is that planners and urban policymakers must disabuse themselves of the notion that setting urban densities is a policy issue. it would be like trying to prescribe a ceiling to land-prices to ensure ‘access’ to the city. like land prices, densities must be allowed to rise, fall and stay put according to the dynamics and demands set in the land-consumption process, per location. any policy regulation on this matter will distort, or worse, stall the process. the same message applies for floor area ratios. they are not independent norms to be set by policy, but signals subordinate to the demand and supply process allocating living and working space. if nothing else, permitting a third house on a single residential erf, ‘as-of-right’, is a densification victory for the market, not for the regulator. empirical surveys have shown that land-use policy and urban edges invariably push the pir index upwards. tracking a city’s household income profile has a purpose other than to calculate the pir. it can predict whether market pressure for densification is likely to be expressed vertically (higher rise walk-ups) or horizontally (infill squatting and dense informal areas). medium-sized walk-ups will only be delivered if the median income rises, since land is ‘capitalised’ with loan funding to be repaid! if the median income drops (as urbanisation proceeds), the form of densification shall be horizontal, with implications for congestion and ‘social unacceptability’. since land and building cost play a vital role in 8 densification in all variations of the term: building heights, cramped apartments, dense shacks, shared rooms. this instance, and since burdensome (or his ‘binding’ – p. 303) regulations push prices up, it is important to also maintain a property price profile for the city. if a real-estate market can supply living space cheaply and without encumbrance, then vertical densification is favoured. this has already been demonstrated in many well-located ex-rdp housing schemes. this dynamic has been studied in considerable detail in cape town and south africa, and so is well understood. the integrated human settlements framework (ihsf)9 concentrated specifically on quantifying the housing ‘demands’ of the lower-income segments of the population, while the ease of doing business survey (edbs)10 was a comparison between south african cities in respect of their bureaucratisation, or red-tape imposed cost. in a further effort, it might be helpful to ascertain the precise share of property prices attributable to ‘regulating’, and what lifting them may contribute to realising the ihsf, via the market. the ihsf was heavily invested in the state as agent of housing supply. 5. conclusion in sum, bertaud’s message is: rather than redesigning the city to meet its future needs, resort to quantified monitoring. in that endeavour, the state must retreat from participating in the marketplace (building houses; setting density targets, and so on) and start using software tools to track ‘labour-market’ performance, the efficacy of the ‘land-consumption’ process, and ‘mobility levels’ in our cities. the processing software is available by now; the information sources and data are at hand. bertaud gives us the mathematical formulae and theories to do the job. within planning, a transition from design to technology is now critical, much like the transition from horse-drawn cart to motor vehicle was essential to the ongoing productivity of ever-growing cities. 9 integrated human settlements framework. 2015. city of cape town. 10 https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/data/ exploreeconomies/south-africa _goback changing societies & personalities, 2021 vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 63–82 https://doi.org/10.15826/csp.2021.5.1.122 received 8 november 2020 © 2021 nadezhda k. radina, daria s. belyashova accepted 10 march 2021 nradina@hse.ru published online 19 april 2021 dashha19@yandex.ru article digital political participation of western and eastern parts of germany residents (based on change.org online petitions) nadezhda k. radina daria s. belyashova national research university higher school of economics, nizhny novgorod, russia abstract the article shows the results of a study aimed at finding the determinants, which describe the petitioning activity of the residents of the western and eastern parts of germany. the research material consists of 1,036 petitions from the german-language segment of change.org during the period of 2012–2018 (322 petitions from eastern part of germany, 714 petitions from western part of germany). a thematic classifier based on the analysis of electronic petitions was created. it subdivided all the petitions into 18 thematic groups, for example, human rights, animal protection, culture, politics, migration issues, proposals for reforming certain areas of life, transport system, internet, protection and support for people with disabilities and rare diseases, financial questions, environmental protection, housing issues, weapons/spirits/tobacco/drugs, healthcare, elderly people, education, sports, sustainable development. statistically significant differences between western and eastern territories were found only in the animal protection thematic group. it is stated that the bipolar construct east/west rooted in the historical logic of the legacy of socialism and capitalism on the german territories could not explain the logic of the petitioning activity of the contemporary germans. moreover, the historical heritage/separation factor is found in the socio-economic problems of the regions, but it is not critical while determining the values and civic activism of german people. https://changing-sp.com/ 64 nadezhda k. radina, daria s. belyashova introduction contemporary germany has a complex of territories that are both connected and divided historically. the unification of germany at the end of the 20th century formed a unique platform that allows researchers to study and compare the processes occurring in the western and eastern parts of germany in the context of historical (namely socialist) heritage and at the same time in the context of the formation of modern relations between european territories. the purpose of this article is to conduct a comparative analysis of digital political participation of residents of the western and eastern parts of germany in the form of online petitions to discuss the role of historical experience in shaping modern civil action strategies of the studied territories. the problem of the division of germany can be presented in a variety of contexts: centuries-old fragmentation of territories, mismatch of the borders of the germanlanguage space with state borders, absence of a unified capital for a long period, confessional division of german lands into the protestant north and the catholic south, etc. (rogozhin, 2011). throughout its existence, germany experienced not only regional, confessional, etc. “disintegration”, but also an especially acute split of the national identity of the population after the second world war (shultse, 2007). the reunification of germany in 1989 was “epoch-making” (weidenfeld & körte, 1991); it opened up opportunities for new searches in identity-building (klein, 2014; korotetskaya, 2012). at the same time, the period of existence of the east germany (officially the german democratic republic), and the west germany (officially the federal republic of germany), according to researchers, formed rigid ideological and political borders that divided the east and the west of the country, the so-called “mental barrier” appeared in the minds of germans, which differentiated all germans on the basis of their belonging to the lands of the gdr or frg (kauganov, 2013; poptsov, 2015). the last thirty years of the coexistence of german territories, have undoubtedly changed the self-awareness and self-perception of a united society, however, researchers looking at economic, cultural, political, psychological, social, etc. differences between the eastern and western lands do not give an unambiguously positive answer to the question of “equalization”, “achievement of similarity” or complete integration of territories. comparing eastern and western parts, researchers study: • socio-economic and demographic problems, which, as a rule, are more acute in the eastern lands, namely unemployment (semerikova, 2014), labour productivity (burda & severgnini, 2015); health (prütz et al., 2014), birth rates (klüsener & goldstein, 2012; vatterrott, 2011); education and iq (roivainen, keywords germany, online petition, electronic petition, digital political participation, change.org acknowledgement the work was supported by the grant of the russian foundation for basic research (no. 18-011-00140-а) changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 63–82 65 2012); cultural problems (including the problem of “second-class citizens”) (ushkevich, 2003), etc.; • problems of internal migration from the eastern to western part and within eastern lands (heiland, 2004; sander, 2014), as well as the impact of external migration on regional imbalances (scherr, 2013); • problems of decentralization and recentralization of the german federal system (wollmann, 2017), including the problem of “levelling” of the territories (lavrovskiy, 2001), territorial inequality (best, 2011; zawilska-florczuk, 2011), and the reproduction of neocolonialist relationships between eastern and western lands (klyuter & klyuter, 2001). only a few researchers express optimistic or non-trivial ideas (for example, in favor of the eastern territories) reproducing the context of comparison of the eastern and western lands (klüsener & goldstein, 2012; zawilska-florczuk & ciechanowicz, 2011). the majority of them, however, state that the rapprochement of east and west within the borders of one country is slower than it was expected with the unification of germany in 1989 (the process of unification of germany: 9 november 1989 [fall of the berlin wall] – 3 october 1990 [german unity day]). researchers approach comparative studies of the western and eastern parts of germany in the political sphere even more carefully, since the question of the “soviet legacy” is still very delicate (molodikova & lyalina, 2017). electronic petitions and digital political participation in this study, a comparative analysis focuses on the field of digital political participation of german population in the form of creating and supporting electronic petitions. in modern political science, political participation is one of the main theoretical categories and is defined as an activity whose main purpose is to influence the actions of the authorities (golbraykh, 2016). researchers distinguish between conventional (regulated by law, legal) and non-conventional (rejected by most of the society for religious, moral and other reasons) forms of political participation (malinovskiy, 2013). conventional forms include participation in elections, petition signing, meetings with political functionaries, legal strikes, demonstrations, etc. unconventional forms include participation in unauthorized demonstrations, illegal strikes, seizure of official buildings, traffic blocking, pickets, etc. (lamprianou, 2013). with the development of information technologies and digital political communication, offline political participation has also “grown” into digital forms of activity. researchers focusing on different forms of digital political participation (van deth, 2014) believe that there is no fundamental difference between online and offline activity. they distinguish between offline forms of political participation, hybrid forms, universal forms (such as electronic petition, whose digital format is determined exclusively by information technology), and those typical only of the online format (online commenting, reposts, links, in exceptional cases, even “likes”, etc.). considering that the electronic (online) petition is a universal form of political https://changing-sp.com/ 66 nadezhda k. radina, daria s. belyashova participation combining online and offline forms, digital activity allows online petitions to reach a new level of publicity, to become a more effective instrument of political influence (lindner & riehm, 2009). in contemporary research, online petitions are seen as a form of democratic innovation and a way to involve new populations in civic engagement (demushina, 2016). a number of analytical works convincingly prove that online petitions represent informative material for studying civic initiatives, political culture, various forms of civic resistance, etc. (berg, 2017). online petitions are submitted or filed on the internet using special portals, which can attract the widest public attention possible to the problem (lin, 2012). in addition to national resources for creation of online petitions and organizing polls, there exist international ones that operate in various languages, such as the online platform change.org (halpin et al., 2018). methods and materials this study is based on the concept of digital political participation understood as actions taken by ordinary members of the political system to influence the results of its activities. we use thematic mapping of petitions with the antconc software (analysis of lexical units in electronic texts), hierarchical cluster analysis, and χ2 criterion (chi-square of pearson) to determine statistically significant differences between numerical indicators. the empirical base of the study was extracted from the online platform change.org using the tools written in the python programming language. it consists of german-language texts related to germany. the total empirical base includes 1,036 petitions and covers the period since the creation of the german-language version of the platform change.org (from 2012 to march 2018). 322 petitions were originated in the lands of east germany (brandenburg, mecklenburg-vorpommern, saxony, saxony-anhalt and thuringia, berlin) and 714 petitions in the lands of west germany (baden-württemberg, bavaria, bremen hamburg, hesse, lower saxony, north rhine-westphalia, rhineland-palatinate, saarland and schleswig-holstein). among all the petitions filed, 193 petitions received the status of “victory” (63 petitions from the eastern part of germany and 130 from the western part). we have chosen the digital resource change.org due to the fact that this international platform for creating electronic petitions is one of the most popular non-governmental and publicly available online petition platforms in germany as in many other countries. results submitting petitions and collecting votes for petitions is a common practice of civic activism in germany. in accordance with the basic law of the federal republic of germany as amended on 17 july, 1975 (article 45c), a special petition committee was created in the federal republic of germany. complaints and requests forwarded to the bundestag go directly to the petition committee whose representatives consider changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 63–82 67 the complaints received. however, a petition must collect at least 50 thousand votes in order to be in the spotlight of the petition committee. the non-governmental german-language version of the platform change.org was launched in july 2012 and currently has more than 3.5 million users. any internet user can create a petition or sign the petition for which one is ready to cast one’s vote on the change.org platform. to create a petition, one must register on the website or log in to the website from a facebook1 account. no limit of votes has been established to determine the success (victory) of the petition – it all depends on the specific problem and the conditions for its resolution. after collecting votes and organizing a public relations campaign on social networks, the creator of the petition passes it to the authorities to solve the problem. if the problem is resolved, the author of the petition marks it as successful/completed on change.org. thus, submitted petitions reflect the aspirations of the population, and those supported reflect the willingness of the authorities or business to resolve a range of problems formulated in the petitions. classification of petitions we identified, classified, and grouped keywords to create a thematic classifier from the collection of downloaded petition texts using the antconc software. as a result, eighteen thematic groups united by a common problem were identified: • human rights (recht, unterstützung, demokratie, etc.); • animal protection (hund, tier, wolf, zirkus etc.); • culture (eastsidegallery, weimar, bach, kultur etc.); • politics (politik, der europäische feiertag, etc.); • migration issues (flüchtlinge, integration, etc.); • proposals for improvement of certain areas of life (sommerzeit, zeitumstellung, verbraucherschutz etc.); • transport system (bahn, verkehr, flughafen, etc.); • internet (livestreamgarantie, teamviewer, network etc.); • protection and support for people with disabilities and rare diseases (hilfe, behinderung, erkrankungen, etc.); • financial issues (geld, discounter, grundeinkommen etc.); • environmental protection (ozeane, abgas-skandal, etc.); • housing issues (bezahlbare wohnungen, bgb-vorschriften etc.); • weapons/alcohol/tobacco/drugs (kleinwaffen, todesopfer, freies verkaufsrecht, die spätis, alkohol, tabak etc.); • healthcare (krankenversicherung, psychologische hilfe, medizinische kontrollinstanz etc.); • elderly people (ghettorenten gerechtigkeit, gegen einsamkeit im alter, senioren etc.); • education (ganztagsschule, studenten, grundschule, etc.); • sports (olympischer sportbund, sport etc.). 1 facebook™ is a trademark of facebook inc., registered in the u.s. and other countries. https://changing-sp.com/ 68 nadezhda k. radina, daria s. belyashova • sustainable development (toxicsubstances, windenergieanlagen, gefahrengutlagers etc.). this thematic classifier was used to divide the petitions into thematic groups: all the petitions were assigned to one or another thematic group with the keywords used in the petition (one of eighteen). petitions that ended up in the “human rights” group included appeals calling against any discrimination. animal protection petitions called for humane attitude toward animals. the “culture” group addressed problems associated with the preservation of historical and cultural heritage objects (galleries, theaters, museums, historical parks, squares, reserves, etc.). the “politics” group included petitions related to both domestic and foreign policies of the state. “migration issues” combined petitions in support of refugees, as well as petitions against the policy of “open doors”, etc. the group “proposals for improvement of certain areas of life” included petitions to cancel the clock being put forward daylight saving time in germany, ban the installation of garbage bins in front of the houses, cancel fireworks on new year’s eve, etc. the “transport system” group included petitions of the respective subject. the “internet” group included petitions about video games, creation of the south park application for android2, change of twitter3 interface and others. the group “protection and support for people with disabilities and rare diseases” comprises petitions on the social protection of these population categories. the “financial issues” group combined petitions related to the state budget system (equitable financing, minimum wage, basic income, etc.). the “environmental protection” group included petitions on limiting the negative impact of human activity on nature (limiting atmospheric emissions, preserving forest complexes and marine ecosystems, etc.) the “housing issues” group included petitions on affordable housing, speculation in residential and commercial real estate, on rent increase, laws to promote housing cooperatives, etc. in the group “weapons/alcohol/tobacco/ drugs” were petitions on restriction of arms sale, free sale of alcohol and tobacco, legalization of marijuana, etc. the “healthcare” group included petitions representing a set of medical measures aimed to strengthen and preserve the mental and physical health of citizens of the federal republic of germany, make the quality medical care accessible, and expand preventive measures in the field of health. the group of “elderly people” included petitions calling for social protection of citizens of elderly for insurance of their high standard of living (clubs for older people, reduced retirement age, programs against loneliness in old age, etc.). the “sports” group included petitions related to change of olympic sports rules, exclusion of wrestling from olympic disciplines, ban of pepper spray at football stadiums, preservation of men’s teams in tennis, etc. the “education” group included appeals for recruitment of teachers to elementary schools, introduction of “nature management and environmental protection” course into kindergarten curriculum, maintenance of educational forums, winter holidays for all students, etc. the “sustainable development” group was made of petitions with proposals for improvement of environmental and technological profile of people’s lives: resolution to 2 android™ is a trademark of google inc., registered in the u.s. and other countries. 3 twitter™ is a trademark of twitter inc., registered in the u.s. and other countries. changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 63–82 69 the problems of working at hazardous nuclear power plants in belgium, health threat of toxic substances and pesticides, expansion of wind generators, and protection of people living nearby on the electricity routes, etc. based on the identified eighteen topics, all german-language petitions territorially associated with germany were retrieved from change.org archives (1,036 petitions), divided into eighteen groups and analyzed in the context of lands (modern territorial units of germany), taking into account the historical division of east/west germany. subjects/themes of filed petitions: eastern and western parts of germany for the period from 2012 to 2018, the number of online petitions created on change.org varies significantly across federal lands. three groups of territories are distinguished: territories where the activity of creating and promoting petitions on change.org is low, medium and high. federal states with low petition activity: mecklenburg-vorpommern (13 online petitions), saxony-anhalt (15 online petitions), free state of thuringia (16 online petitions), brandenburg (18 online petitions), saarland (12 online petitions), the free hanseatic city of bremen (10 online petitions), the free state of saxony (42 online petitions), rhineland-palatinate (37 online petitions), schleswig-holstein (32 online petitions). territories with medium activity: baden-württemberg (98 online petitions), lower saxony (80 online petitions), the free hanseatic city of hamburg (72 online petitions), hesse (62 online petitions). areas with high activity in creation and promotion of petitions: berlin (218 online petitions), north rhine-westphalia (178 online petitions), the free state of bavaria (133 online petitions). it follows that the total number of petitions filed in eastern germany is 322 petitions, and in western germany is 714 petitions. this disproportion is due to the population, since the population of the western part of germany is four times bigger than the population of the eastern part (wollmann, 2017). at the same time, there is a significant differentiation in the number of requests in the eastern part of germany: a high concentration of online petitions is in the capital of berlin (218 petitions), and 104 petitions (one third of the total) fall on the rest of the land (see figure 1). figure 1 petition activity of the eastern german lands (number of petitions) (%) 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 mecklenburgvorpommern saxony-anhalt thuringia saxony brandenburg berlin https://changing-sp.com/ 70 nadezhda k. radina, daria s. belyashova berlin is a unique territory in germany that is highly focused on the advancement of online requests (it is also a territory integrating socialist and capitalist heritage). in the western part of germany, creating online petitions on change.org seems to be even more (see figure 2). figure 2 petition activity of the western lands of germany (number of petitions) (%) 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 bavaria badenwurttemberg bremen hamburg hesse lower saxony north rhinewestphalia rhinelandpalatinate saarland schleswigholstein a comparative analysis of the petitions in western and eastern parts of germany representing thematic groups in accordance with the classifier presented above confirms that the problems motivated the creation of online petitions are similar in east and west. statistically significant differences (p<0.05) between online petitions created by residents of the western and eastern parts of germany are present only in relation to petitions for animal welfare: the theme of animal welfare is a priority for seven western federal lands. in the eastern part of germany, the theme of “animal welfare” is also popular, but it is just one of many significant problems, while in the west it is a leading one. when comparing statistically insignificant differences between the reasons for petitioning of western and eastern lands, the regional specificity is obvious, which, without statistics, can be attributed to speculation. however, the list of eastern lands “special petitions” (petitions on housing issues: petitions against weapons/alcohol/tobacco/drugs, petitions on the elderly/ senior citizens), and the list of petitions typical only of western lands (petitions on education, sports, sustainable development of society) are evidently different. the challenges of the eastern (“survival”) territories contrast with the challenges of western (“development”) territories. these signs seem to preserve the deprivation motives in the description of the eastern lands and the super-prosperity motives of the description of western ones; however, the identified differences do not look convincing enough against the background of the dominant similarity of the territories. subjects/themes of winning petitions: eastern and western parts of germany petitions registered on change.org and their voting indicators reveal the character of the public problems of territories being more or less supported (and shared) by other residents. at the same time, online petitions with the status of “victory” indicate the interests of those institutions and groups who are the recipients of electronic communications and have the power to “execute petitions”. by analyzing the winning changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 63–82 71 petitions, one can obtain information on the spheres and problems of public life in which the real interaction between the authorities and citizens is localized. in the entire collection of online petition texts from eastern part of germany, more than half are attached to the city of berlin (63 of 322 filed electronic petitions have the status of “victory”, which is 20%, that is, every fifth petition). the winning petitions were from the thematic groups “animal welfare”, “human rights”, “preservation of cultural heritage”, “migration issue”, “politics”. however, the number of votes did not become a factor affecting success. for example, the petition aiming to develop the south park application for android was implemented, although the appeal received the smallest number of votes (33). example of a winning petition: fs (id1518168) 09.05.2014 (33 participants) „eine south park app für android!” (south park application for android)4. example of a winning petition: nico trinkhaus (id3664055) 29.06.2015 (463,969 participants) „lassen sie raju, den weinenden elefanten, in freiheit leben!“ (let raju, the crying elephant, live in freedom)5. the largest campaign among the winning petitions is the campaign for freedom of taking photographs in public places (555,232 participants). in the eastern lands of mecklenburg-vorpommern and saxony-anhalt, the two winning petitions (concerning financial issues, social protection of vulnerable groups, as well as the protection of animals and migration problems). in the lands of thuringia and brandenburg – three winning petitions per each (animal welfare, migration issues and financial issues). in saxony – four (petitions on human rights, migration issues, etc.). let us consider the frequency of winning petitions in the eastern part of germany in a comparative context by subject (see figure 3). figure 3 comparative analysis of topics of winning online petitions on change.org in the eastern part of germany (%) 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 filed petitions victorious petitions note. 1 – human rights; 2 – animal protection; 3 – culture; 4 – politics; 5 – migration issue; 6 – proposals for improvement of certain areas of life; 7 – transport system; 8 – internet (games, internet, networks); 9 – protection and support for people with disabilities and rare diseases; 10 – financial issues; 11 – environmental protection; 12 – housing issues; 13 – weapons/spirits/ tobacco/drugs; 14 – healthcare; 15 – elderly people 4 https://www.change.org/p/south-park-digital-studios-llc-comedy-central-eine-south-park-appf%c3%bcr-android 5 https://www.change.org/p/lassen-sie-raju-den-weinenden-elefanten-in-freiheit-leben https://changing-sp.com/ https://www.change.org/p/south-park-digital-studios-llc-comedy-central-eine-south-park-app-f%c3%bcrhttps://www.change.org/p/south-park-digital-studios-llc-comedy-central-eine-south-park-app-f%c3%bcrhttps://www.change.org/p/lassen-sie-raju-den-weinenden-elefanten-in-freiheit-leben 72 nadezhda k. radina, daria s. belyashova the ratio of submitted and winning petitions shows not only the ranking of actual problems of the regions, but also the consistency of activity of those who submit petitions and vote for them and those who are authorized to fulfill the requests of the petitioners. in the eastern part of germany, petitions in favor of animal protection and petitions about financial problems are becoming outstanding in terms of the likelihood of their victory. addressees authorized to solve the problems of petitioners eagerly respond to problems of finance and animal welfare (the winning percentage of petitions for financial concerns and animal welfare among all petitions is higher than the percentage of petitions created for finance and animals). example of a winning petition on animal protection: laura pastoors (id12539674) 14.10.2017 (23,228 participants) „gegen den abschuss von 6 welpen in thüringen“ (against the execution of 6 puppies in thuringia)6. example of a winning petition on financial issues: wendula strube (id826358) 28.10.2012 (792 participants) „die praxisgebühr von 10,00 euro pro quartal ersatzlos streichen“ (practice fee of eur 10.00 per quarter is cancelled)7. social protection issues for people with disabilities are also supported in a 1 to 5 ratio: every fifth petition on this subject has received the status of “victory”. here is an example of a winning petition on protecting people with disabilities: lebenshilfe (id7437110) 30.06.2016 (71,290 participants) „teilhabe statt ausgrenzung von menschen mit geistiger behinderung!“ (inclusion instead of marginalization of people with intellectual disabilities)8. problems related to housing, weapons (including alcohol, smoking and drugs), as well as healthcare, did not find support from the recipients of the petitions. being representatives of the authorities, as a rule, they showed much less interest in petitions on environmental issues, the internet and transport. petitions on migration issues, human rights, politics or the preservation of cultural heritage were supported by representatives of the authorities of the eastern part of germany, but the likelihood of their support was generally lower than that of popular topics. example of a winning petition on migration issues: daniel zeller (id7326347) 18.06.2016 (12,862 participants) „familie brkiss aus potsdam braucht dauerhaftes bleiberecht!“ (potsdam’s brkiss family needs permanent residency)9. example of a winning petition on politics: david caspers (id11842012) 20.03.2017 (18,800 participants) „gegen alternative fakten im wahlkampf – mehr informationen für deutschland!“ (against alternative facts in the election campaign – more information for germany!)10. 6 https://www.change.org/p/gegen-den-abschuss-von-6-welpen-in-th%c3%bcringen 7 ht tps://w w w.change.org/p/die-pra xisgeb%c3%bchr-von-10 00 -eur-pro-quar tal-ersatzlosstreichen 8 h t t p s : // w w w. c h a n g e .o r g / p / t e i l h a b e s t a t t a u s g r e n z u n g v o n m e n s c h e n m i t g e i s t i g e rbehinderung 9 https://www.change.org/p/familie-brki%c4%87-aus-potsdam-braucht-dauerhaftes-bleiberecht 10 ht tps: // w w w.change.org /p/gegen -alter nati ve -fak ten im -wahlkampfmehrinfor mationen f%c3%bcr-deutschland?redirect=false https://www.change.org/p/gegen-den-abschuss-von-6-welpen-in-th%c3%bcringen https://www.change.org/p/die-praxisgeb%c3%bchr-von-10-00-eur-pro-quartal-ersatzlos-streichen https://www.change.org/p/die-praxisgeb%c3%bchr-von-10-00-eur-pro-quartal-ersatzlos-streichen https://www.change.org/p/teilhabe-statt-ausgrenzung-von-menschen-mit-geistiger-behinderung https://www.change.org/p/teilhabe-statt-ausgrenzung-von-menschen-mit-geistiger-behinderung https://www.change.org/p/familie-brki%c4%87-aus-potsdam-braucht-dauerhaftes-bleiberecht https://www.change.org/p/gegen-alternative-fakten-im-wahlkampf-mehr-informationen-f%c3%bcr-deutschla https://www.change.org/p/gegen-alternative-fakten-im-wahlkampf-mehr-informationen-f%c3%bcr-deutschla changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 63–82 73 therefore, the recipients of the online petitions on change.org related to the settlements of the eastern part of germany, (the authorities, as a rule) willingly support petitions to protect animals, to resolve financial issues and petitions on the social protection of people with disabilities. every fifth electronic petition created to address such issues was most likely to receive support. the total amount of the winning petitions in the western part of germany for the study period is 130 (130 of 714 filed electronic petitions have the status of “victory”, which is 18% representing every fifth petition, as in the east). the most frequent topics of the winning petitions are “animal welfare”, “culture”, “migration issue”, “human rights” and “proposals for changing certain areas of life”. most online petitions were implemented in the federal lands of north rhine-westphalia (30 petitions), lower saxony (22 petitions), bavaria (21 petitions) and hamburg (12 petitions). in the remaining lands, fewer than 10 successful campaigns were recorded. the least support among users was received by the petition, which was submitted to change.org in support of firetv av-receiver modems. example of a winning petition karl wester-ebbinghaus (id12807029) 29.11.2017 (9 participants) „amazon: vollständige unterstützung von firetv stick (2017) an technisch geeigneten av receivern!“ (amazon: full firetv stick (2017) support on technically suitable av receivers)11. a comparative analysis of submitted and winning online petitions posted on the non-governmental resource change.org from the western part of germany shows the following results (see figure 4). figure 4 comparative analysis of topics of winning online petitions on change.org in the western part of germany (%) 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 filed petitions victorious petitions note. 1 – animal protection; 2 – politics; 3 – human rights; 4 – migration issue; 5 – proposals for improvement of certain areas of life; 6 – environmental protection; 7 – culture; 8 – financial issues; 9 – internet (games, internet, networks); 10 – transport system; 11 – sustainable development; 12 – education; 13 – protection and support for people with disabilities and rare diseases; 14 – healthcare; 15 – sports 11 https://www.change.org/p/amazon-vollst%c3%a4ndige-unterst%c3%bctzung-von-firetv-stick2017-an-technisch-geeigneten-av-receivern https://changing-sp.com/ https://www.change.org/p/amazon-vollst%c3%a4ndige-unterst%c3%bctzung-von-firetv-stick-2017-an-techni https://www.change.org/p/amazon-vollst%c3%a4ndige-unterst%c3%bctzung-von-firetv-stick-2017-an-techni 74 nadezhda k. radina, daria s. belyashova two topics – animal welfare and sports – are most likely to resonate with addressees of petitions (the first group). there are few petitions devoted to sports topics (11 petitions, 5 of them won), whereas popular problems of animal welfare among residents of the western part of germany turned out to be even more popular with the recipients/addressees of petitions (usually representatives of the authorities) of the western part of germany (every fourth petition with the status of “victory” belongs precisely to petitions defending animals). example of a winning petition on animal protection: stefanie braun (id1015513) 15.02.2013 (60 participants) „dr. tonio borg, eu-kommissar: verbietet kosmetika die an tieren getestet werden!“ (dr. tonio borg, eu commissioner: prohibit animal-tested cosmetics!)12. example of a winning petition about sports: felix schatter (id1012226) 12.02.2013 (6,757 participants) „deutscher olympischer sportbund: votum gegen den ausschluss des ringens von den olympischen disziplinen“ (german olympic sports confederation: vote against exclusion of wrestling from olympic disciplines)13. the next group brings together online petitions, which have approximately the same percentage of created petitions, and winning petitions: petitions for human rights, migration issues, culture, education, social protection and sustainable development. example of a winning petition about the problems of education: jan waldmann (id1304857) 17.09.2013 (5,058 participants) „uni hamburg: lassen sie uns nicht mit einem unfertigen uniabschluss zurück. unsere zukunft hängt davon ab!“ (university of hamburg: do not leave us with incomplete higher education, our future depends on it!)14. the third group of petitions contained problems that were less often supported in comparison with the frequency of their creation and posting online on change.org. this group includes petitions about political issues, ecology, finance, the internet, transport and healthcare. comparing online petitions on change.org related to the federal republic of germany, it should be noted that the share of winning petitions in the total array of identified petitions is quite large: in fact, in the western and eastern parts of germany, every fifth petition posted on change.org gets the status of “victory”. the recipients of online petitions (usually representatives of the authorities) both in the western and eastern parts of germany act in approximately the same way: the dominant support for petition activity of the inhabitants of germany relates to animal welfare. petition recipients also tend to help people: in the east (mainly in the capital), they usually resolve financial issues and social protection issues, whereas in the west, they support petitions about human rights, migration issues, cultural, educational, social protection, and sustainable development issues. at the level of winning petitions, the differences between eastern and western lands increase. in addition to the expressed interest in the field of animal welfare, 12 ht tps://w w w.change.org/p/dr-tonio-borg-eu-kommissar-verbietet-kosmetika-die-an-tierengetestet-werden?redirect=false 13 https://www.change.org/p/deutscher-olympischer-sportbund-votum-gegen-den-ausschlussdes-ringens-von-den-olympischen-disziplinen-2 14 h t t p s : // w w w. c h a n g e .o r g / p / u n i h a m b u r g l a s s e n s i e u n s n i c h t m i t e i n e m u n f e r t i g e n uniabschluss-zur%c3%bcck-unsere-zukunft-h%c3%a4ngt-davon-ab https://www.change.org/p/dr-tonio-borg-eu-kommissar-verbietet-kosmetika-die-an-tieren-getestet-werde https://www.change.org/p/dr-tonio-borg-eu-kommissar-verbietet-kosmetika-die-an-tieren-getestet-werde https://www.change.org/p/deutscher-olympischer-sportbund-votum-gegen-den-ausschluss-des-ringens-vonhttps://www.change.org/p/deutscher-olympischer-sportbund-votum-gegen-den-ausschluss-des-ringens-vonhttps://www.change.org/p/uni-hamburg-lassen-sie-uns-nicht-mit-einem-unfertigen-uniabschluss-zur%c3%b https://www.change.org/p/uni-hamburg-lassen-sie-uns-nicht-mit-einem-unfertigen-uniabschluss-zur%c3%b changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 63–82 75 which combines the supported petitions of the east and west, the western and eastern petitions with the status of “victory” differ in the breadth of topics. in addition, in the east, two of the three petitions territorially connected with the capital (berlin) receive the status of “victory”, while in the west, the winning petitions are distributed more evenly among the cities. thus, the social (but more often the state) machine supports socio-economic differences as an element of inequality between regions, dividing germany into east and west (among the recipients of the petitions there are also representatives of business, not just representatives of state authorities). does petition activity reproduce the historical division of germany into west and east? answering the question whether petition activity reproduces the historical division of germany it should be acknowledged that it is not reproduced, as the analysis on the materials of submitted petitions shows. first, civic activism associated with the creation and promotion of petitions is characteristic of all territories of germany. second, when classifying the themes of petitions (the problems articulated in them), western and eastern lands represented thematically close groups. the integration of the territories is proved by the results of the clustering of german federal lands according to their thematic preferences in submitting electronic petitions, which allows us to distinguish six groups of federal lands (groups of mainly mixed east-west type) (see figure 5). figure 5 groups of federal lands united by a common theme of electronic petitions 0 5 10 15 20 25 8 16 6 7 3 5 12 13 14 15 11 10 9 2 1 4 mecklenburg-vorpommern schleswig-holstein freie und hansestadt hamburg hessen berlin bremen sachsen sachsen-anhalt nordrhein-westfalen freistaat thüringen saarland rheinland-pfalz niedersachsen baden-württemberg bayern brandenburg https://changing-sp.com/ 76 nadezhda k. radina, daria s. belyashova the first group (the upper one in the figure) consists of the federal lands of mecklenburg-vorpommern (east), schleswig-holstein (west), hamburg (west) which demonstrated a priority to political issues. thus, residents of mecklenburg-vorpommern created petitions aimed to liquidate the eurosceptic and right-wing conservative party alternative for germany. in schleswig-holstein, petitioners protested against the pegida movement. foreign policy petitions prevailed in hamburg. the second group is represented by the single state of hesse. during the period covered in the study, the topics “animal welfare” (17.7%), “politics” (17.7%) and “human rights” (17.7%) turned out to be popular among residents of hesse who submitted electronic petitions. the third group includes the federal lands of berlin and the free hanseatic city of bremen with the most frequent topic of electronic petitions being “human rights”, which involves the fight against racism and racial discrimination, the problem of gender identity, fight against violence against women and children, etc.). both territories are represented by modern metropolitan cities; however, all thematic groups are present in berlin and in bremen (a city with low petitioning activity). there are no online petitions on animal welfare, internet problems and a number of other topics. the fourth group is represented by the federal lands of the eastern part of germany only – saxony and saxony-anhalt – where migration issues lead in petition activity. according to the quotas for the distribution of refugees across federal lands of the federal republic of germany for 2016, 5.08% of refugees arrived in saxony and 2.83% in saxony-anhalt (the western land of north rhine-westphalia accepted most of the refugees [21.21%]) (becker & gurkov, 2016), however, this number of immigrants was enough to provoke protests of the local inhabitants of these lands. most of the online petitions in these lands were submitted in support of the reception of refugees (as a response to the anti-migration speeches of fellow citizens), and the creators of the petitions insisted on preventing the deportation of citizens living for a long time in germany. the fifth and largest group includes the federal lands of north rhine-westphalia, thuringia, saarland, rhineland-palatinate, lower saxony, baden-württemberg, bavaria. the cluster consists of western and eastern lands (thuringia) and is united by the common priority theme of “animal welfare”. the last, sixth group is represented by one eastern federal land, brandenburg. brandenburg is the only land in germany where the “transport system” is the leading issue. the thematic mixing in the groups of western and eastern lands convinces us that not the historical heritage, but the modern factors influence the petitioning activity of the inhabitants of the federal republic of germany. online-petition activity of the eastern and western parts of germany: discussion petitions filed on non-state platforms (without control through registration), especially in the case of multiple voting in their support, reflect the urgent problems that the population faced. an analysis of the problems reflected in the petitions helps the changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 63–82 77 outside observer in determining the quality and living conditions of the petitioners, as the texts of petitions disclose in detail: “he that is warm thinks all are so”. statistically significant differences between the western and eastern lands (a higher number of petitions for animal rights and for ecology, petitions about sports, sustainable development and education, etc.), may be indirect evidence of a higher standard of living in the west of the country. residents of the western territories can afford to worry about the future (ecology, protection and rights for all, including animals) while the eastern ones are still struggling with the problems of the present (housing issues, transportation problems, etc.). nevertheless, the study showed that simply dividing west and east is not enough to interpret the differences in petitioning (civilian) activity of german population. statistically significant differences only formally differentiate between west and east; a more detailed analysis indicates differences between territories within the western and eastern parts. if we abandon the logic of “west/east” (interpretation by means of the historical legacy of capitalism/socialism), what other logic can be used to understand the reasons for the classification revealing the problems of the inhabitants of germany? is it the logic of regional features? urbanization? migration crisis? economic inequality of territories? the so-called donor lands (according to the german model of regional alignment – hesse, bavaria, and baden-württemberg) have a medium or high petition activity. the key problem that worries their population is the protection of animals. nevertheless, a number of regions with lower socio-economic indicators also ended up in the group with federal donor lands. the economic factor explains why donor regions were in this group of petition activity (they actively defend their rights and are concerned about the situation of the most discriminated group in the society – animals), but it does not explain why some of the less economically prosperous territories adhere to the same line of behavior in the field of creating petitions. regional features also only partially reveal the reasons for territories to fall into one group of petitioning activity. for example, hamburg, mecklenburgvorpommern and schleswig-holstein are neighboring lands; the thematic proximity of their petitions is probably explained by the general problems of the “northern territories” of germany (border, frontier territories). however, other border and northern territories do not share the guidelines of the “hamburg group”. at the same time, the fifth (largest) group uniting a significant number of lands does not fit into regional explanation. migration problems can be divided into problems of refugees and problems of partially integrated migrants. the analysis of quotas for migrants does not explain the reasons for the lands that commonly create petitions on migration issues. at the same time, the fourth group (saxony and saxony-anhalt) shows similar indicators for total numbers of unemployed (high rates) and unemployed migrants (low rates) (khrishkevich, 2016). probably, the migration theme (in its contradictory sound) is largely due not so much to the situation and the presence of migrants as to the sociohttps://changing-sp.com/ 78 nadezhda k. radina, daria s. belyashova economic status of the territory (economically successful territories are more patient toward migration issues). the urbanization factor is especially evident when analyzing the formation of the third group (berlin and bremen). these are not just urbanized territories, but student cities with a pronounced liberal ideology. perhaps their petitioning profiles are determined not by economic, frontier, or migration problems, but by social characteristics and intellectual traditions. thus, the results of the present study confirm the need to study economic inequality of germany territories (sirotin, 2008), including the analysis of the regions outside the east/west dichotomy (heiland, 2004; klüsener & goldstein, 2012; sander, 2014), as well as integration aspects of the inhabitants of germany (roivainen, 2012; zawilska-florczuk & ciechanowicz, 2011). conclusion when constructing the research design, initially, the east/west dichotomy was used as the focus in the study of the petition activity of the territories (federal lands) of contemporary germany. it was assumed that this dichotomy would explain the quantitative and qualitative differences in the petition activity of the population. as a result of the study, it was discovered that the east/west bipolar construct, rooted in the historical logic of the legacy of socialism and capitalism in german territories, cannot explain the logic of the petition activity of modern german residents. in the western and eastern parts of germany, the population is actively creating petitions (and posting them on the change.org non-governmental international petition platform), the content of the appeals is determined by a set of problems: the general socio-economic well-being (or disadvantage) of the territory, urbanization, regional features (the role of the frontier territories), the solution of migration issues in the context of the economic problems of the region, etc. statistically significant differences between online petitions created by residents of the western and eastern parts of the federal republic of germany are present only in relation to petitions for the protection of animals (in the western part of germany, animal protection is a key topic). the share of winning petitions in the total body of petitions is large; both in the western and eastern parts of germany, every fifth petition posted on change.org receives the status of “victory”. online petition recipients (government and business representatives) in both the western and eastern parts of germany are more likely to support petitions protecting animals. in addition, the winning petitions in the eastern part of germany support the solution of social protection problems, while in the western part of germany they support the solution of migration problems and address issues of education, culture, social protection and sustainable development. at the level of winning petitions, the differences between the eastern and western parts are increasing; in the east, petitions linked to the capital (berlin) are more likely to receive “victory” status, while in the west, winning petitions are distributed evenly. changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 63–82 79 nevertheless, according to the results of the study, the historical heritage/ separation factor is taken into account in the socio-economic problems of the regions, but it is not decisive in determining the values and civic activism of german residents. references becker, a., & gurkov, a. 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(2011). one country, two societies? germany twenty years after reunification. warsaw: ośrodek studiów wschodnich. https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-studies/2011-02-15/one-country-twosocieties-germany-twenty-years-after https://doi.org/10.4054/mpidr-wp-2011-013 https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-studies/2011-02-15/one-country-two-societies-germany-twenty-years-after https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-studies/2011-02-15/one-country-two-societies-germany-twenty-years-after persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 99 “escape to impersonality”: persona in h.g. wells’ experiment in autobiography aar on greenber g sc ho o l o f t he a r t in s t i t u t e o f c h ic a g o abstract this article reads h.g. wells’ experiment in autobiography (1934) through the lens of persona studies to situate life writing in the context of (post) human rights, biopolitics, and surveillance capitalism. carl jung’s concept of persona pervades wells’ writing and life. persona, for wells, is the path towards the “impersonality” that is essential to humanity’s evolution. wells recognized that personas are plural, inconsistent, and evolving performances whose fictional unity, if enacted deliberately without self-delusion, can serve real ends—such as the prolific creative and intellectual work that earned him four nominations for the nobel prize in literature. further, wells presents life writing as a human right: the right to tell our own stories, access our own records, represent the personas which we elect, and enjoy the freedom to evolve from one persona to the next. a persona’s double movement, poised between the personal and the impersonal, the individual and the world, the biological and the historical, represents both the form and content of wells’ experiment in autobiography. if wells gives us reason to hope amidst a global pandemic, the specter of world war iii, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and climate catastrophe, it is that these existential threats help us answer the question, “what will come after man?” to consider the answer is not to give up on humankind. on the contrary, to imagine non/post human lifeforms is essential in defining human rights and securing a human future. key words h.g. wells; experiment in autobiography; multiple personality; biopolitics; surveillance capitalism at the age of sixty-eight, h.g. wells published experiment in autobiography (1934), where he reflects on a life of “personal achievement” while paradoxically attempting an “escape to impersonality”—an escape which, wells believed, should “distinguish the modern civilized man from all former life” (wells 1934, pp. 10; 707). on the one hand, wells unapologetically celebrates vanity and egoism as “unavoidable” in autobiography since, he writes, “our own lives are all the practical material we have for the scientific study of living” (1934, p. 347). however, experiment in autobiography reflects neither wells’ attempt to exalt his personal life nor to neglect it. rather, he tells his life story as a “way to power over that primary life” of “individual immediacies” and “everyday things” that once subsumed the pre-modern personas of “philosophical, artistic, creative, preoccupied men and women” before they could emerge from the waters of primitive survival “to breathe in a new fashion and emancipate ourselves from long accepted and long unquestioned necessities” (wells 1934, p. 2). wells’ experiment maps an emerging “new land” where personas transcend the demands and limits of quotidian life to greenberg 100 travel through personal egos towards an ultimately impersonal “new world” where “individual aims will ultimately be absorbed” (wells 1934, pp. 2-3). a persona, for wells, is the path towards the impersonal that is essential to humanity’s evolution. the concept of persona, which wells’ borrows from the psychoanalyst carl jung, pervades experiment in autobiography—and his life generally. “throughout my life,” wells writes, “a main strand of interest has been the endeavour to anchor personas to a common conception of reality” (1934, p. 532, emphasis original). he cites several of his own works, including the 1915 novel the research magnificent, where “this theme of the floating persona, the dramatized self, recurs at various levels of complexity and self-deception” (1934, p. 532, emphasis original). for wells, personas are dynamic and possibly fictional, although their consequences are real, as they filter perception and motivate certain life paths over others. a persona does not exhaust or comprehend one’s entire being, wells reflects, yet it establishes a “ruling system of effort” (1934, p. 2) that organises a life with purpose that makes it worth living. “my persona may be an exaggeration of one aspect of my being, but i believe that it is a ruling aspect,” he observes: “it may be a magnification but it is not a fantasy. a voluminous mass of work accomplished attests its reality” (wells 1934, pp. 10-11, emphasis original). thus, through creative and intellectual labour, reified in works of science and art, drifting individuals with “floating” performative personas “anchor…to a common conception of reality”. wells’ jungian persona resembles pico della mirandola’s concept of “chameleon” humanity in oration on the dignity of man (1496). considering the human’s place in the great chain of being according to aristotle’s tripartite division between vegetative, sensitive, and rational life, pico orates, whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. if they be vegetative, he will be like a plant. if sensitive, he will become brutish. if rational, he will grow into a heavenly being… who would not admire this our chameleon? (della mirandola 1496, p. 225) pico’s versatile human persona enjoys the freedom of becoming whatever it invests in, even as it remains anchored to what wells calls “a common conception of reality”—in this case, aristotelean ontology syncretised with platonism and other systems. according to wells’ paraphrase, “a persona, as jung uses the word, is the private conception a man has of himself, his idea of what he wants to be and of how he wants other people to take him” (wells 1934, p. 9, emphasis original). complicating the notion of persona as an outward-facing, public performance—“in classical greece, ‘persona’ was…the mask that was to create the actor’s fictitious personality” (carpi 2011, p. 180)—wells’ interpretation of jungian persona is primarily a “private” and inward “standard by which [one] judges what he may do, what he ought to do and what is imperative upon him. everyone has a persona. self conduct and self explanation is impossible without one” (wells 1934, p. 9, emphasis original). like wells, founders of the emergent field of persona studies including marshall and barbour reprise jung to posit persona as a “strategic form of communication” (marshall & barbour 2015, p. 2) and a “performance of individuality” (marshall et al. 2020, p. 3). however, instead of conceiving a persona’s performativity as social dissimulation, wells represents persona, first, as the key to one’s private relationship with oneself. accordingly, his draft for the rights of man (1940), which set the table for the united nations’ “universal declaration of human rights” (1948), includes prescient protections for personal privacy: all registration and records about citizens shall be open to their personal and private inspection. there shall be no secret dossiers in any administrative persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 101 department. all dossiers shall be accessible to the man concerned and subject to verification and correction at his challenge. (wells 1940, p. 9) wells believed it was a human right to entertain and represent diverse personas; to access, inspect, and correct any public records concerning oneself. in brief, he believed that life writing is a human right: the right to tell our own stories, access our own records, represent the personas which we elect, and enjoy the freedom to evolve from one persona to the next. for, again, “our personas grow and change and age as we do” (wells 1934, p. 9, emphasis original). a decade after publishing experiment in autobiography, while researching for his doctorate in science in 1942, wells, began a sort of memoir of my ideas and impressions of the contemporary world crisis… and i wrote without restriction or limitation. i did this to sustain a certain order and consistency in my mind amidst the wild rush of events, and the only reader i had in mind was myself. from this accumulation i drew material for articles and discussion. (1944, p. 7) besides the resultant articles and discussions, wells eventually refined the accumulated material into '42 to ’44: a contemporary memoir upon human behavior during the crisis of the world revolution (1944). analogous to his claim in experiment “that human life as we know it, is only the dispersed raw material for human life as it might be” (1934, p. 11), in '42 to ’44 wells reflects on the life-writing process of contemporary memoir as an experimental accumulation of material for future revision: “i began to accumulate material; material accumulated upon me, some of it turned itself inside out and ceased to be what it had been, some changed from significance to extreme unimportance” (1944, p. 35). congruous with his persona represented in experiment, wells again makes space for variation alongside consistency: “the persona may of course have its own unconscious phases and variations, but it is at least pervaded by an impulse towards consistency”. '42 to ’44 keeps faith with jung’s concept of persona: “jung…first styled this wabbling working self we imagine for ourselves the ‘persona’, and it remains the best word for it. our personas are what we pretend and intend to be in the sight of our set or society (wells 1944, p. 172, emphasis original). as before, wells seizes persona as a lynchpin fastening personal life to impersonal human rights. recognising that “an extraordinary amount of unhappiness has been and still is caused in the world by the failure to recognize the fluctuating quality of personality” (wells 1944, p. 173), wells “insist[s] upon a man’s right to learn and adapt his conduct to what he did not understand before” (1944, p. 56). more than a matter of personal happiness, allowing personas the right to fluctuate and grow is key to human survival “in this age of adaptation or death” (wells 1944, p. 56). reflecting on the purpose of his experimental autobiography, wells declares, “a biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked” (1934, p. 10). the passive past tense (“was made and worked”) belies wells’ current persona, the autobiographical experimenter, who is making and working in real time, speaking in the first person in the present and future tense, experimenting with multiple personas to represent truth and attain universal impersonality, even as he “realize[s] how difficult an autobiography that is not an apology for a life but a research into its nature, can become” (wells 1934, p. 348). wells thus anticipated what shoshana zuboff has called our current “age of surveillance capitalism” where big data’s predictive analytics undermine a person’s “right to the future tense as a condition of a fully human life” (2019, p. 331, emphasis original). she asks, greenberg 102 what happens to the right to speak in the first person from and as my self when the swelling frenzy…set into motion by the prediction imperative is trained on cornering my sighs, blinks, and utterances on the way to my very thoughts as a means to others’ ends? (zuboff 2019, p. 29) as in pico’s oration four centuries earlier, for wells human dignity includes the right to represent whatever personas one elects. bearing the right to speak in the first person, wells’ persona is private yet publishable, individual yet pluralistic, and preserved in records yet open to the future. wells observes how the achievement of a coherent persona, necessary to represent oneself in daily life as well as in autobiography, takes time and continuous struggle. and as i turn over old letters, set date against date, and try and determine the true inter-relation of this vivid memory with that, it grows clearer and clearer to me that my personal unity, the consistency of my present persona has been achieved only after a long struggle between distinct strands of motivation, which had no necessary rational relation one to another and that, at the period of which i am writing, this unity was still more apparent than real. (1934, p. 349, emphasis original) unlike his self-deceiving characters with floating personas unanchored to reality, wells recognises how the memories and records of his life complicate and expand rather than dissolve his evolving multiple personas, whose unity may be fictional but which are real nonetheless. the emergence and preservation of moments that contradict or transcend wells’ predominant e pluribus unum persona render his life story more nuanced, yet also more awkward and challenging to narrate from a stable point of view. in his words, the simple attractive story i am half disposed to tell, of myself as an ugly duckling who escaped from the limitations and want of understanding of his… family…to discover itself a swan…is made impossible by two things: an awkward trick my memory has had of stowing away moments of intense feeling and vivid action quite regardless of the mental embarrassment their preservation may ultimately cause my persona, and an analogous disposition already noted, on the part of my friends and family to keep letters i have written. (1934, p. 350-351, emphasis original) memory, records, and letters preserve the persona’s lifelong continuity while paradoxically exposing its apparent unity as fictional performance. wells finds that most “normal” persons delude themselves into preserving “personal unity” by telling themselves “fanciful stories” to “rationalize…inconsistences” (1934, p. 349). still experimenting with this pejorative sense of persona a decade later in ’42 to ’44, wells cites an example: the straying curate comes home insisting on the ‘higher purity’ of nudism and ‘natural’ love, with a deep, if perhaps unpublished, scorn for the meretricious bonds of matrimony. in that way the old persona elbows its way back to recover control and put a moral face on life again. it is rationalization among the ruins after the fact. (1944, p. 173, emphasis original) in contrast to such post-facto moralizing personas, future-facing persons will not force a delusional unity from their many distinct personas but instead “recognize the ultimately persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 103 irreconcilable quality of these inconsistencies…to make a deal between them” (wells 1934, p. 349). what might such a deal look like? perhaps like pico’s dignified human chameleon; or the interdisciplinary imagination that inspired margaret cavendish to cross-pollinate hybrid personas in poetry, philosophy, and science fiction; or walt whitman’s freedom to declare “i contain multitudes”? wells made a “deal” between his own inconsistent personas as rational scientist and intuitive artist. as a poor, hungry undergraduate student, “wells presented the world with a persona which combined aspects of the artist and the scientist” (draper 1987, p. 438). michael draper remarks that each aspect of this interdisciplinary persona represented “distinct social roles” for wells, whose “best works of fiction were written during the period when he was struggling to combine the subject matter of the scientist with the creative response and selfexpression of the artist” (1987, p. 438). wells recognized that personas are plural, inconsistent, and evolving performances whose fictional unity, if enacted deliberately without self-delusion, can serve real ends—such as the prolific creative and intellectual work that earned him four nominations for the nobel prize in literature. he reflects in experiment, a persona may be very stable or it may fluctuate extremely. it may be resolutely honest or it may draw some or all of its elements from the realms of reverie. it may exist with variations in the same mind. we may have single or multiple personas and in the latter case we are charged with inconsistencies and puzzle ourselves and our friends. our personas grow and change and age as we do. and rarely if ever are they the whole even of our conscious mental being. (1934, p. 9, emphasis original) allowing for fluctuation and multiplicity nourished wells’ personal growth as well as his scientific and creative output. if, in the 1930s, wells was still puzzling over inconsistencies of his multiple personas, and indulging the creative struggle between his roles as scientist and artist, ’42 to ’44 is clearer about the limited role of his persona as it emerges alongside, if not from, the social and professional roles open to his abilities and ideological disposition: it is my rôle to observe things and work out their riddles; not to achieve things; the two jobs demand different and almost incompatible qualities; i have little or no ability in managing people and my ideas are averse to the impertinence of ‘getting people to do things’ when they do not fully understand what they are doing. (wells 1944, p. 35) the former tension between scientist and artist has resolved into a clear personal tendency towards the role of the observer/riddle-solver over that of the achiever/people-manager. wells fashioned this persona after nietzsche’s zarathustra, whom he quotes in the epigraph of ’42 to ’44: “and all my thought and striving is to compose and gather into one thing what is a fragment and a riddle and a dismal accident” (wells 1944, front material). for zarathustra, as for wells, the human condition would be unbearable if homo sapiens were “not a poet and a solver of riddles and the saviour of accidents” (wells 1944, front material). as wells’ experimental autobiography and contemporary memoir illustrate, life writing is the genre par excellence for saving accidents and gathering riddling fragments into coherent unities afforded by persona. by the mid-1940s, wells represents a persona who knows himself, his strengths and weaknesses, better than he did a decade prior. this evolution may represent the success of his greenberg 104 interdisciplinary career and the syntheses he achieved through science fiction, as much as it reflects a disillusionment with attempts to apply impersonal world-revolutionary ideas in personal practice. for instance, wells recalls the tragicomic scene of coordinating a group of world leaders in 1939 to draft a declaration of universal human rights: these ten people had embarked upon the most important job human beings have ever attempted. they had, with their eyes open, engaged to draft a fundamental law for the unification of mankind, nothing less. yet, even at our meetings, after an hour or so of discussion, only a novelist could describe how eagerly they adjourned for tea and what urgent engagements demanded early departures and excused late arrivals. (1944, p. 38) beyond an emblem of all-too-human banality of bureaucracy where tea takes precedence over declarations of human rights, wells’ account reveals the inevitable entanglements of biopolitics. a decade prior in experiment, he characterized modern life as a gradual liberation from, or at least de-emphasis of, the existential exigencies of bare life. by the 1940s, he has witnessed world politics threaten his personal survival and that of the species, while leaders put their personal lives before the impersonal species-level survival on which their personal futures depend. in 1934, wells dreamt of achieving “a hitherto undreamt-of fullness, freedom and happiness within reach of our species” or else “perish[ing] within a very limited time” (1934, p. 12). in ’42 to ’44, he writes, “so i remain what i was ten years ago, a world revolutionary, except that the undreamt-of thing has happened and it is all coming true, and more than true” (1944, p. 57). appearing in a chapter entitled “the plain truth about the communist party” in part ii of the memoir, entitled “how we face the future”, the “undreamt-of thing” which has happened and proven true is undefined. certainly, as wells is sheltering from germs, bombs, and bullets in london, he cannot mean that the “undreamt-of thing” is either humanity’s fulfilled happiness or its sealed doom. rather, wells must mean that the existential choice is more imminent—and more personal—than ever: “it has been my luck to be consistently missed by bombs… so that i can still sit in the same study…saying things men, often for excellent reasons, hesitate to say in this age of adaptation or death” (wells 1944, p. 56). he knows his “conceit” is “entirely irrational, as though there was some magical quality, some gift, to account for my immunity”—yet he reasons that such delusion boosts morale: “the germ or the bomb or the bullet or the tottering wall that will finish me may be almost ready for me, but until it really gets me i shall go on in my conceit” (wells 1944, p. 57). in other words, as long as a persona recognises itself as irrational and subject to change, then its drive towards personal consistency can serve humanity’s evolution through an impersonal future. if wells’ persona did not imagine his immunity in the face of germs and bombs, he could not transcend immediate personal danger to focus on the longterm survival of the species. even in the nineteenth century, wells was facing a future where the versatility of the human chameleon’s multiple and rapidly evolving personas was both key to our survival, adaptation, and evolution, as well as a threat to our humane future. that is, while a lack of personal unity threatens to disperse the raw material of human experience beyond comprehension or utility, conversely a persona or species unwilling to imagine lifeforms beyond itself is doomed to perish. thus, the question t.h. huxley’s biology class opened in wells’ mind—“what will come after man?” (wells 1944, p. 9)—paradoxically represents a foundation of human rights, as he recounts on the first page of a contemporary memoir. persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 105 accordingly, daniela capri analyzes wells’ science fiction novel the island of doctor moreau (1896) through the lens of “the persona/human being dichotomy” to grasp the bioethical implications of “an ever-changing concept of ‘persona’ that is extended by the new cloning experiments and by the recourse to organ transplantation” (carpi 2011, p. 178). the mad scientist doctor moreau vivisects animals to create human-like chimeras whose ethical and legal status as persons with rights is as ambiguous as their hybrid ontology. the new persona that emerges from moreau’s laboratory should be protected by new rules that recognize their diversity,” carpi argues, “while the only law we perceive in the text is an instrument of the new scientific power on the island” (2011, p. 185). this is a risk and limit of wells’ cultivation of multiple personas: while an openness to the evolving performative dynamism of personas may yield new scientific wonders and interdisciplinary excellence, it may also result in a brave new world where hybrid personas, not subject to human rights, proliferate faster than ethics, law, and humanity can keep up. however, this is not to say that laws could or should constrain the evolution of personas. on dr. moreau’s island, the sayers of the law’s privative bans on undesirable animalistic behaviour are a mockery in place of positive principles for personal growth: not to go on all-fours; that is the law. are we not men? not to suck up drink; that is the law. are we not men? not to eat fish or flesh; that is the law. are we not men? not to claw the bark of trees; that is the law. are we not men? not to chase other men; that is the law. are we not men? (wells 1896, p. 107) conversely, wells’ autobiographical experiment seeks to represent a plurality of personas, preserving their diversity while subordinating them to “the newer ruling system of effort” (wells 1934, p. 2) instituted by his currently predominant persona. experiment in autobiography rejects dictating delusional unity upon a person’s multiple personas, yet wells advocates for the development of a flexible, strategically fictionalized persona to subordinate the multiple, inconsistent “personal affections” and “everyday things of life” that do not—and need not—reconcile with the prevailing persona. a persona need not be true to be effective. it represents more an elective, pluralistic, dynamic system for present and future living than a single story dictated towards a foregone conclusion. it is a principle of selection. wells explains, a persona may be fundamentally false, as is that of many a maniac. it may be a structure of mere compensatory delusions, as is the case with many vain people. but it does not follow that if it is selected by a man out of his moods and motives, it is necessarily a work of self deception. a man who tries to behave as he conceives he should behave, may be satisfactorily honest in restraining, ignoring and disavowing many of his innate motives and dispositions. the mask, the persona, of the happy hypocrite became at last his true faces. (1934, pp. 9-10, emphasis original) the hypothesis of wells’ autobiographical experiment is that the fittest personas of the future will strive through what is personal (and what is more personal than autobiography?) towards what is impersonal: namely, “a racial synthesis” of all humanity that absorbs individual persons into “the greater life of the race as a whole” (wells 1934, p. 3). for wells, prioritising the species is compatible with celebrating individual personas and even indulging in “the pleasures, the very real pleasures, of vanity” (1934, p. 3). the unapologetic—and ultimately altruistic—embrace of vanity in the context of experimental life writing evokes the sixteenth-century essais of michel de montaigne. in the essay entitled “of greenberg 106 vanity” montaigne anticipates wells’ conviction that a persona serves as a “personal criterion” (wells 1934, p. 9), a principle of selection, standard of judgment, and guiding system for self conduct and social accountability. the french essayist writes, i find this unexpected advantage in the publication of my manners, that it in some sort serves me for a rule. i have, at times, some consideration of not betraying the history of my life: this public declaration obliges me to keep my way, and not to give the lie to the image i have drawn of my qualities, commonly less deformed and contradictory than consists with the malignity and infirmity of the judgments of this age. (montaigne 1580, pp. 260-261) further, montaigne predicts wells’ recognition that, while excessive misguided vanity is delusional, nevertheless an egotistical autobiographical persona may be ideal for connecting with others and therefore paradoxically approaching the universal impersonality of the whole human race. montaigne imagines a stranger reading his essais then wanting to meet the author. he is pleased to think that his life-writing persona will have given the stranger a great advantage: for all that he could have, in many years, acquired by close familiarity, he has seen in three days in this memorial, and more surely and exactly. a pleasant fancy: many things that i would not confess to any one in particular, i deliver to the public, and send my best friends to a bookseller’s shop, there to inform themselves concerning my most secret thoughts. (montaigne 1580, p. 262) again, this reflects the negotiation of publishable privacy, the creation of personas who attain an impersonality necessary to realize “that new world, that greater human life, which all art, science and literature have foreshadowed” (wells 1934, pp. 6-7). a generation following montaigne, and three centuries before wells—both of whom personified a monistic, psycho-spiritual-somatic worldview—rené descartes bifurcated the fluid ancient ontology, represented by pico’s dignified human chameleon, into a dualism of mind and body. historicizing the proliferation of rightless personas in wells’ the island of doctor moreau, carpi remarks, “cartesio marks a schism with a well balanced concept of persona through his distinction between ‘res cognitans’ and ‘res extensa’…. with cartesio the persona is reduced to a pure act of self-knowledge: ‘cogito ergo sum’” (2011, p. 180). wells’ rejection of such dualism is key to understanding his autobiographical experiment with the “process of generalization by which the mind seeks an escape from individual vexations and frustrations, from the petty overwhelming pains, anxieties and recriminations of the too acutely ego-centred life” (wells 1934, p. 706). it is not by attempting to transcend one’s sensual, animalistic ego or to outlaw individual vanity and vexation that “a particular human” can attain universal humanity. for that, one must “subordinate” yet “continue to value everyday things, personal affections and material profit and loss, only in so far as they” support one’s current persona—“and to evade or disregard them in so far as they are antagonistic or obstructive to that” (wells 1934, p. 2). again, in accommodating the spirit of the creative science fiction experimenter as well as the “irrelevant necessities” (wells 1934, p. 6) of embodied human life, wells’ experiment in autobiography conditions personal as well as impersonal evolution. on the one hand, wells finds humanity on an unprecedented precipice of danger and opportunity: persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 107 there is a hitherto undreamt-of fullness, freedom and happiness within reach of our species. mankind can pull itself together and take that now. but if mankind fails to apprehend its opportunity, then division, cruelties, delusions and ultimate frustration lie before our kind. the decision to perish or escape has to be made within a very limited time. (wells 1934, pp. 11-12) on the other hand, he observes continuity between traditional worldviews, ontologies, and personas—and modern personas’ journey towards impersonality. he writes, “the idea of creative service to the world-state towards which the modern mind is gravitating…[in] its releasing and enveloping relation to the individual persona is…almost precisely the same” as the “religions and conduct-philosophies of the past”—except “the increasingly monistic quality” of “modern consolation systems” differs from the “matter-spirit dualism, which has haunted human thought for thousands of generations” (1934, p. 706, emphasis original). wells’ modern monistic persona recognises itself as an embodied, vain, vexed individual—the offspring not of a privative law but of an elective “ruling system of effort”— “and the desire to live as fully as possible within the ruling system of effort becomes increasingly conscious and defined” (wells 1934, p. 2). wells intends not to dissolve the bonds between incompatible personas and their ruling systems but rather to satisfy “this powerful desire for disentanglement” which reflects “the common experience” of writers, artists, and researchers whose work prepares “that new world, that greater human life, which all art, science and literature have foreshadowed” (wells 1934, pp. 6-7). wells’ modern persona excels at autobiography and desires to disentangle, without disintegrating, the many personas who constitute “a world state” (wells 1934, p. 556). persona is the “tendency” and “ruling system” that organises human life, and wells represents himself as the paradigmatic arch-persona, one whose lifelong tendency has been to study tendency. from quite an early age i have been predisposed towards one particular sort of work and one particular system of interests. i have found the attempt to disentangle the possible drift of life in general and of human life in particular from the confused stream of events, and the means of controlling that drift, if such are to be found, more important and interesting by far than anything else. i have had, i believe, an aptitude for it. the study and expression of tendency, has been for me what music is for the musician, or the advancement of his special knowledge is to the scientific investigator. my persona may be an exaggeration of one aspect of my being, but i believe that it is a ruling aspect. (wells 1934, p. 10, emphasis original) experiment in autobiography is not the conclusive record of a life but rather its ongoing “study and expression” of personas. metacognitively, wells conceives his present life-writing persona as just another persona, such that it reveals more about his evolving personal desires, judgements, and projects than it does about some unrufflable ego: so that this presentation of a preoccupied mind devoted to…seeking a maximum of detachment from the cares of this world and from baser needs and urgencies that distract it from that task, is not…what i am, but only of what i most like to think i am. it is the plan to which i work, by which i prefer to work, and by which ultimately i want to judge my performance. (wells 1934, p. 9) greenberg 108 by recognising the critical importance—and the futility—of detaching one’s persona from worldly and personal cares, wells achieves two inseparable aims, one personal, the other impersonal: first, “to reassure myself during a phase of fatigue, restlessness and vexation” and, second, to catalyze “world revolution” (wells 1934, p. 705). in other words, for wells, persona is the crux between personal part and impersonal whole. one should disentangle but could never divorce the two: my ruffled persona has been restored and the statement of the idea of the modern world-state has reduced my personal and passing irritations and distractions to their proper insignificance. so long as one lives as an individual, vanities, lassitudes, lapses and inconsistencies will hover about and creep back into the picture, but…this faith and service of constructive world revolution does hold together my mind and will in a prevailing unity, that it makes life continually worth living, transcends and minimizes all momentary and incidental frustrations and takes the sting out of the thought of death. (wells 1934, p. 705, emphasis original) not the achievement of impersonality but its lifelong pursuit is the essence of wells’ persona and his experimental autobiography. experiment thus studies and expresses a double movement, a persona who disentangles individual life from life in general to prepare for their ultimate rapprochement: “the stream of life out of which we rise and to which we return has been restored to dominance in my consciousness, and though the part i play is, i believe, essential, it is significant only through the whole” (wells 1934, p. 705). this persona’s double movement, poised between the personal and the impersonal, the individual and the world, the biological and the historical, represents both the form and content of wells’ experiment in autobiography. as he conceives it, “my story therefore will be at once a very personal one and it will be a history of my sort and my time. an autobiography is the story of the contacts of a mind and a world” (wells 1934, p. 12). four decades later, michel foucault corroborates wells’ historical narrative: that as modern life became disentangled from the exigencies of survival, biological self-preservation, which was “once the whole of life, has become to an increasing extent, merely the background of life” (wells 1934, p. 2). foucault locates the origins of this biopolitical process in the renaissance, which “was nothing less than the entry of life into history…that is, the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques” (foucault 1978, pp. 264-265). accordingly, wells suggests that life-writing personas do not so much separate the “biological” from the “historical” as they bring these “into closer and more exact relations” (wells 1934, p. 11). such relations are the hypothesis and result of experiment: this work, this jewel in my head for which i take myself seriously enough to be self-scrutinizing and autobiographical, is, it seems to me, a crystallization of ideas. a variety of biological and historical suggestions and generalizations, which, when lying confusedly in the human mind, were cloudy and opaque, have been brought into closer and more exact relations; the once amorphous mixture has fallen into a lucid arrangement and through this new crystalline clearness, a plainer vision of human possibilities and the conditions of their attainment, appears. (wells 1934, p. 11) persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 109 wells thus personifies “the modern escape to impersonality” (1934, pp. 706-707) not by abandoning the embodied, sensual world of personal vanities and vexations, but rather by “power[ing] over that primary life which, though subordinated, remains intact” (1934, p. 3). hence, for example, his focus (again anticipating foucault) on histories of sexuality, which “should be at least the second theme, when it is not the first, in every autobiography, honestly and fully told. [sexuality] insists upon a prominent rôle in the dramatizations of the persona and it will not be denied (wells 1934, p. 348, emphasis original). notwithstanding his desire to foreground sexuality in experiment, wells' persona ironically suppresses its erotic drives, as he admits in a postscript to experiment edited by his son, g.p. wells, and published posthumously half a century later as h.g. wells in love (1984). there, wells writes of “the lovershadow” as “the inseparable correlative to the persona, in the direction of our lives. it may be deprived of all recognition; it may be denied; but it is there” (1984, p. 54, emphasis original). wells planned for the postscript’s posthumous publication to set right the record of his life, fully and honestly, with details that, in 1934, would have been fatal to his public persona as a loyal husband, dispassionate scientist, and moral voice of human rights. this postscript does not tell the main story of my life. it is the story of a broad strand in my life that had to be turned away from the reader in the original experiment in autobiography… all the main lines of my development were given in the autobiography except for one suppression; that the lover-shadow by which my persona was sustained was no longer definitely represented in it after 1900. the careless reader was left to suppose and almost lured to suppose that the loyal support and affection of jane [i.e., wells’ second wife, amy catherine robbins] and my own conceit of myself was sufficient to sustain my nervous and imaginative balance. (1984, p. 112, emphasis original) on the contrary, the carapace of wells’ self-conceit—his predominantly rational, dispassionate, loyal persona—had to crack to accommodate the lover-shadow. the postscript includes what wells’ omitted from experiment and ‘42 to ’44: namely, that he justified his polyamorous affairs by representing them, according to his modern mind-body monism, as one with his world-revolutionary persona in pursuit of impersonality. finding his persona forging a logic between sexual desire, human rights, and world revolution, wells reflects in the postscript how he hungrily sought to sate his “inachieved desire roving involuntarily among the girls and women of my widening acquaintance” (1984, p. 57). with a tinge of self-mocking irony and hindsight that suggests he was misguided to seek transcendent impersonality through lust, wells recounts how “old nature, whispering in my blood,” persuaded him that some girls and women “might have it, must have it, in their power to give me at least a transitory ecstatic physical realization of my persona that i had not yet attained” (1984, p. 57, emphasis original). whether wells posthumously indicts himself as no better than the “straying curate” whose hypocritical persona he mocked in ‘42 to ’44, or whether he continues to believe that extramarital affairs advance the same pursuit of the impersonal on which he hinges universal human rights, the postscript’s inclusion of sexuality illuminates wells’ formation and negotiation of various fluctuating personas as he faces the future. experiment in autobiography finally represents “the modern escape to impersonality”— “an escape from first-hand egoism and immediacy, but…no longer an escape from fact” (wells 1934, pp. 706-707). it is a journey through multiple individual personas towards “the less personal activities now increasing in human society”—activities which have led wells to “a participation in the greater life of the [human] race as a whole” (wells 1934, p. 3). readers of greenberg 110 wells’ experiment will experience with him the uncertain hope of human possibility, the “change from egoism to a larger life [which] is…now entirely a change of perspective” (wells 1934, p. 706). writing in between the first and second world wars, wells was understandably skeptical about humanity’s “will and power” to undertake the changes necessary to avoid civilization-ending catastrophes resulting from delusional egoism: for escape, vast changes in the educational, economic and directive structure of human society are necessary. they are definable. they are practicable. but they demand courage and integrity. they demand a force and concentration of will and a power of adaptation in habits and usages which may or may not be within the compass of mankind. (wells 1934, p. 12) one way to expand “the compass of mankind” is autobiographical experimentation that inspires without prescribing diverse personas, remembering past lives to face the future. in the second chapter of experiment in autobiography, entitled “persona and personality,” wells considers the payoff of his “personal achievement” (1934, p. 10): “i have shown that human life as we know it, is only the dispersed raw material for human life as it might be” (1934, p. 11). he makes no promises, yet entertains some pessimism, about the future personas who might come to shape this raw human material. in the fate of homo sapiens (1939), wells laments, there is no creed, no way of living left in the world at all, that really meets the needs of the time… all the main religions, patriotic, moral and customary systems in which human beings are sheltering today, appear to be in a state of jostling and mutually destructive movement, like the houses and palaces and other buildings of some vast, sprawling city overtaken by a landslide. (1939, p. 291) indeed, the shaping of raw human material in the twenty-first century appears as misguided and dangerous as in any preceding century. zuboff defines surveillance capitalism as “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales” (2019, front material). beyond the dilemma that social media companies monetize users’ attention and data without informed consent, zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism seizes “critical human rights” and is as threatening “to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth” (2019, front material). to escape the danger and seize the opportunity of shaping raw human material, wells turns to autobiography, since “the directive persona system is of leading importance only when it is sufficiently consistent and developed to be the ruling theme of the story” (wells 1934, p. 10, emphasis original). as we navigate the twenty-first-century proliferation of hybrid personas, increasingly exaggerated and divided by social media that cynically exploits human nature in exchange for impersonal connection with so-called friends, experiment in autobiography lends perspective and hope—hope that it is possible to celebrate our diverse individual personas and to tell our own stories in the first person while also practicing “faith and service of constructive world revolution” (wells 1934, p. 705). in 21 lessons for the 21st century, yuval noah harari considers “people who spend countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves” (2018, p. 306). through the posturing performance of narrowly cultivated public personas, “a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles, and tense silences becomes a collective of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners, and smiling faces” (2018, p. 306). persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 111 to be sure, wells would not advocate to include all such “everyday things of life” (wells 1934, p. 2), lest it overwhelm “my personal unity, the consistency of my present persona” (wells 1934, p. 349, emphasis original) and exacerbate the “feeling of being intolerably hampered by irrelevant necessities” (wells 1934, p. 5). however, wells might concede with harari that “99 percent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self” (harari 2018, p. 306)—with this caveat: that our present personas, without self-delusion, carefully elect the one percent of our experience that does become part of the story of the self. among the actionable insights of experiment in autobiography is the possibility of representing many personas and narratives under a united “ruling system of effort” (wells 1934, p. 2). the risk of investing in a single system or persona is a descent into nihilism when that system or persona disintegrates. in harari’s words, “to have one story is the most reassuring situation of all. everything is perfectly clear. to be suddenly left without any story is terrifying. nothing makes any sense” (2018, p. 6). wells prepared for this danger by establishing a persona’s freedom and right to “grow and change and age as we do” (wells 1934, p. 9). surveying the failed arch-narratives of previous centuries, harari observes, “we are still in the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger, after people have lost faith in the old stories but before they have embraced a new one” (2018, p. 18). in such a moment, autobiographical experimentation represents, far more than personal vanity, nothing less than a declaration of human rights. wells presents an alternative to false binary choices between biology and history, science and art, or private individuals and public humanity. to attain a persona at home in the world, a person must begin with their own narrow perspective. essentially this autobiography treats of the steady expansion of the interests and activities of a brain, emerging from what i have called a narrow-scope way of living, to a broader and broader outlook and a consequent longer reach of motive… more and more consciously the individual adventurer, as he disentangles himself from the family associations in which he was engendered, is displayed trying to make himself a citizen of the world. as his persona becomes lucid it takes that form. (wells 1934, pp. 347-348, emphasis original) at the start of experiment in autobiography, wells predicts his persona’s evolution from a confused mortal individual to an “undying” and purposeful collective: “the story will begin in perplexity and… culminate in the attainment of a clear sense of purpose, conviction that the coming great world of order, is real and sure” (1934, p. 13). this attainment of clarity and purpose results not despite but because of wells’ imminent loss of “individual life…with time running out and a thousand entanglements delaying realization. for me maybe—but surely not for us” (1934, p. 14). wells finally achieves his “escape to impersonality” (wells 1934, p. 707), yet far from abandoning his individual persona, his autobiographical experiment concludes with a return to its humble origins: so ends this record of the growth and general adventure of my brain which, first squinted and bubbled at the universe and reached out its feeble little hands to grasp it, eight and sixty years ago, in a shabby bedroom over the china shop that was called atlas house in high street, bromley, kent. the end. (wells 1934, p. 707) reprising his experiment a decade later in '42 to ’44, wells celebrates his personal consistency and the realization of predictions he made in autobiography: “in that book i make certain greenberg 112 criticisms and forecasts, and i see no reason in anything that has happened since to modify them. they might have been written yesterday instead of nine years ago” (wells 1944, p. 59). however, while editing the posthumous postscript, g.p. wells took a page from his father’s book to challenge this consistent persona. the son describes the editorial challenges that surfaced in places where his father had revised “sections written years before and especially when these involved the modification of earlier judgments. in such cases i have generally given priority to the earlier version, written while the events were relatively fresh in his mind” (g.p. wells 1984, p. 20). while the postscript lends fullness and honesty to wells’ life story by publishing what was suppressed, nonetheless editorial discretion demands the suppression of certain personas and personal variations in the name of coherence. for example, to prove his consistency, if not his prophecy, while absolving himself of the need to modify previous statements, wells reiterates in '42 to ’44 that ten years prior in experiment, “i gave reasons for fearing that russia may relapse towards a bigoted oriental despotism if it persists in its exclusive attitude towards western ideas” (1944, p. 59). wells would take no pleasure to learn that such predictions have proven true in the seventy-six years since his passing. nor would he take heart from the anti-scientific politicization of public health that has plagued humanity’s response to the latest pandemic. as the end of '42 to ’44 warns, the germ, the virus, can adapt itself to new occasions within the life span of a single human being. only the hard-thinking man with the microscope, working without haste and without delay, can hope to anticipate and avert that attack upon mankind… knowledge or extinction. there is no other choice for man. (wells 1944, p. 212) beyond performing a consistent yet evolving persona, why did wells consistently revisit patterns and predictions from his life and times across the experimental autobiography, contemporary memoir, and postscript—and why should we revisit his experiences today? according to david c. giles, “recognising a type, or pattern, in what jung calls ‘humanity’s constantly repeated experiences’ is clearly a matter of interpretation, but doing so may be an important task for persona researchers” (2020, p. 23). if wells gives us reason to hope amidst a global pandemic, the specter of world war iii, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and climate catastrophe, it is that these existential threats help us answer the question, “what will come after man?” to consider the answer is not to give up on humankind. on the contrary, to imagine nonhuman lifeforms and forms of life, which “type of persona is not really considered in the foundational persona studies literature” (giles 2020, p. 25)—whether extraterrestrials, posthuman cyborgs, genetic chimeras, or impersonal humanoids who transcend the old personas of “man” as we know them today—is essential in defining human rights and securing a human future. only once we are free from the delusions of personal unity can we unite in an “escape to impersonality”. works cited carpi, daniela. 2011. “the beyond: science and law in the island of doctor moreau by h. g. wells”. in: carpi, d. ed. bioethics and biolaw through literature. berlin, boston: de gruyter, pp. 178-187. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110252859.178 draper, michael. 1987. "wells, jung and the persona”. english literature in transition, 1880-1920 30, no. 4: 437-449. muse.jhu.edu/article/374770. persona studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 113 foucault, michel. 1978. “right of death and power over life,” in the foucault reader, ed. paul rainbow (new york: vintage books, 2010), pp. 258-272. giles, d.c. 2020. “a typology of persona as suggested by jungian theory and the evolving persona studies literature”, persona studies, 6(1), pp. 15–29. doi: 10.21153/psj2020vol6no1art997. harari, yuval noah. 2018. 21 lessons for the 21st century. ireland: random house publishing group. marshall, pd & barbour, k. 2015. “making intellectual room for persona studies: a new consciousness and a shifted perspective”, persona studies 1(1), pp. 1-12. marshall, pd, moore, c. & barbour, k. 2020. persona studies: an introduction. hoboken: wiley blackwell. mirandola, pico della. 1496/1956. “oration on the dignity of man”. in cassirer, e., petrarca, f., kristeller, p. o., & randall, j. h. . the renaissance philosophy of man. chicago: university of chicago press. montaigne, michel de. 1580/1877. essays. united kingdom: reeves and turner. wells, g.p. 1984. h.g. wells in love: postscript to an experiment in autobiography. ed., g.p. wells. boston and toronto: little, brown and company. wells, herbert george. 1896. the island of dr. moreau. united kingdom: garden city publishing company. —. 1934. experiment in autobiography. discoveries and conclusions of a very ordinary brain (since 1866) (1934; republished 1967). philadelphia and new york: j. b. lippincott. —. 1939. the fate of homo sapiens: an unemotional statement of the things that are happening to him now, and of the immediate possibilities confronting him. united kingdom: secker and warburg. —. 1940. the rights of man (republished 2017). new york, vintage. —. 1944. '42 to ’44: a contemporary memoir upon human behavior during the crisis of the world revolution. london: secker & warburg. —. 1984. h.g. wells in love: postscript to an experiment in autobiography. ed., g.p. wells. boston and toronto: little, brown and company. zuboff, shoshana. 2019. the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. new york: public affairs. aaron greenberg school of the art institute of chicago abstract key words works cited volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 33 susana bandieri conicet-ipehcs (argentina) araceli almaraz el colegio de la frontera norte (mexico) business families in southern patagonia: from the end of the 19th century to the first decades of 20th century abstract the groups of settlers who arrived in punta arenas in southern patagonia in the second half of the 19th century, established the trade in hunting products, leather and exotic feathers. they organized the first companies as trading houses between individuals and friends. the capital accumulation of these immigrants promoted take-off and productive control based on external trade routes, an evidence of prior connections abroad. from 1881, the multiplication of some family companies boosted out controlling branches and suppliers of value productive chains through different association to foreign groups encouraged by the offer of land concessions. partnership by friendship and family also added anonymous societies with a shareholder scheme including family members. the major article’s goal is to analyze first family business in this context, through a genealogy business approach. theoretical concepts and method used here include debates of economic history and entrepreneurial history focused on family business. the core is social and commercial structures for understanding the family continuity, and also business survival in specific contexts. we elaborate three intertwined commercial and family genealogies that worked first in punta arenas before 1908 and later in argentina. and, we analyze strategies by family members of second and third generations achieved for survival, and configuration of the braun-menéndez behety business family. we relate some findings to the connections between punta arenas economy and european capitalism; interregional connections; the family as a sociocultural dimension in entrepreneurship; management innovations in rural contexts and the pathways followed to establish the firsts mother-firms in austral patagonian area. keywords: businessmen; patagonia; family business; mother-firms; business genealogies corresponding author: e-mail: almaraz@colef.mx received 17 october 2019 accepted 1 april 2020 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non-commercial-no derivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-comercial re-use and distribution, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered or transformed in any way. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb mailto:almaraz@colef.mx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 34 introduction business groups were established in argentine patagonia to lead regional development, based on the diversity in political, economic and social strategic activities and social alliances, including those of family nature. this article analyzes the origin, development and expansion of the family business in punta arenas, a port locality, through the first companies established in strait of magellan (chile) and the argentine patagonia. with a simple example of family and non-family investments, we will see how a small group ventured into the most varied activities at the regional level until it led to a national emporium of warehouses. the following questions lead the research: what elements made possible the origin of family businesses in the patagonian region between 1868 and 1908? how were the family businesses of the braun and menéndez behety strengthened since the commercial merger of 1908? and what elements they arranged for a successful first generational succession? we found our theoretical and methodological basis on the history of business. the assumption is that some groups of businessmen in peripheral regions such as argentine patagonia had different institutional support to settle in the area. besides the concessions that allowed productive and commercial takeoff, is necessary to talk about the important group of settlers and businessmen who arrived in the second half of the 19th century and how they developed the first productive activities to sustain the capital accumulation. the second moment came with livestock and the production processes, altering with that the local productive organization. the durability of some first companies and the continuity of families depended on the rapid participation of members of the second generation, and the marriage, exports and control of value chains in punta arenas. therefore, adaptability depends on the parental structure and personal relationships with representatives of the governments of chile and argentina. the http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 35 third generation exemplifies the victory of family businesses successions whose members implemented internal specialization-diversification strategies associated with a familycontrolled corporate government. an important element of these early stages was the rise of one of the most important family companies, la anónima, which remains in force until today in south of argentina. our findings are that the organization carried out by the first groups of european immigrants established in the strait of magellan reflects the abilities to visualize and guide regional productive development trough commercial alliances at national and international levels; we must see the land concessions as a key to increase foreign capital stock and the global connections; a simultaneous impulse of local branches and global markets to make possible the control of local productive chains with a few number of suppliers; a high specialization and innovation in livestock in early 20th century familiarly controlled; an entrepreneur dynamic to forming limited partnership, collective business, specifically family business, organized as anonymous societies and combined with informal commercial agreements to reduce transaction costs. this article concludes in the 1930s when generational relay from third to fourth generation of business families occurs. this confirmed the importance of social and parental structure for continuity and perdurability of business despite the conditions in communication channels, population and a changing political context. i. business and family the complexity of family ventures and their continuity over time has been studied from unique approaches. the relevance to identify, characterize and analyze businesses that have been controlled by family groups has been discussed in the last decade by fernández and lluch, (2015, 19-21), and fernández-roca and gutiérrez (2017); these authors focused on european http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 36 and latin american cases to debate organizational structures, management and internationalization of family business. in latin america, studies on the presence and continuity of family in business remain an exercise in construction. barbero and lluch (2015, 220), have discussed “family capitalism” where the strategic is: ownership by at least two members of one family, at least two family members in the board of directors, members of over one generation controlling property rights, and the companies managed and controlled by original families. however; the heterogeneity of family businesses and trajectories in latin america (latam ahead), implies unique ways and origins that led to theoretical and methodological challenges. to historians studying latin american companies is essential to move forward definitions allowing understand the configuration of family business, business family and business group. it is necessary to highlight the territorial and historical contexts in the analysis of changes and perdurability of family business. cerutti (2015, 152), recognizes the overlap between business family and business group, pointing out guide-companies (mother-firm) that born and endure linked to business families and contribute to business development and dynamic of specific economic spaces. we study the family business structures evolution. to cerutti (2015), nuclear families articulate with others to control businesses and generations. the author´s perspective is based on the regional and historical dimension of business and parental ties. other studies focused families, their early ventures, and family management. here, the parental structure of companies and its continuity are the unit of analysis. the success or failure of family businesses does not directly associate the configuration of business families, but the continuity of family’s networks and transmission of business and knowledge to successors can provoke accumulation of capital and new business (almaraz 2018, 82-85). this approach uses as control variables the number of generations and businesses created by successors. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 37 considering structures of family businesses and business networks understanding the business family configuration, and also like barbero and cerutti, starting when two or more generations exist. a constant concern to almaraz is the configuration of business families in late capitalism of latin america (almaraz and serrano 2016), and how foreign business groups and modern firms overcame, joined and / or changed the native business groups if there was. this work added discussions about latin family groups, specifically to argentine approaches where major of family over the non-family firms has evidenced by barbero and lluch.1 this work also has proposed to adjust the balance around of heterogeneity of family businesses and avoid assumptions about their inevitable failure in argentina. the theoretical justification took a major step in the historical analysis of economic, and social structures in latin america. the family is a structure that allows facing risks. when considering on the one hand, the principles of veblen's institutional economic theory we are recovering the notion of human action as an economic activity that transforms and evolves by being influenced by structures of social meanings and behaviors (veblen 1965; figueiras and morero 2013). therefore, we assume that a family business represents a social and economic structure that is organized and culturally transformed. we consider that institutions and their evolution affect the behavior and performance of family businesses as north proposes from the new institutional economy (1990), then they are changing in part respond to institutional scope. and also, we assume that in family businesses there are transaction costs that are not contractual or commercial (untraded), permitting them to survive. then should study in the long run to specify its features and influence in the business perdurability. 1 to these authors between 1918 and 2010, family firms outperformed non-family firms in the largest argentine companies’ group, participation percentages ranging between 60% and 80% (barbero and lluch 2015, 242). lópez (2011) also analyze argentine firms focusing in agribusiness sector. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 38 i.1. conceptual bases and methodology we base our analysis theoretical basis of veblen's economic institutionalism and some north’s ideas about uncommercial transaction costs applied to the study of the family business following the next categories. ethnic business origin, family business structure as a core of social links,2 relational capital, family business extension, family corporate governance and generational succession, and institutional scope. these concepts proposed to analyze the continuity of social structure and business perdurability. the study focused in first on the configuration of initial businesses in the patagonian area when produced the settlements. it´s continued with a long-run observation of businesses to rebuild business genealogies family ties linked that. the methods used were biographical and historiographical following the general perspective of entrepreneurial historians (gilbert 2003 and 2009; fernández and lluch 2015; cerutti 2015; moyano 2015; almaraz and serrano 2016), and also making a triangulation of facts of individuals and structural to understand institutional conditions in family and land legislation levels. the primary and secondary sources were biographies, public registers, directories, newsletters and yearbooks, personal letters, and specialized bibliography. ii. the scenario of argentine patagonia: santa cruz and tierra del fuego. the study of business groups begins when production networks established, but it is rare to rethink them from the early stages when they emerge. in the austral area of patagonia emerges in 1868 as a budding economic space when arrived foreign settlers to implement business 2 regarding family business structure, we following the next classification: i) nuclear family businesses whose shareholder structure is only direct parental ties, ii) extended family businesses where shareholders have direct and indirect parental ties, and iii) composite family businesses where core group of shareholders is a family but it includes partners who have no parental ties (almaraz 2018). http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 39 activities. the "productive network", as defined by cerutti (2015, 154), at patagonian area must understand since it began the first stage. in this section we show the coming of some settlers and how they created the former business in this region. historical studies on peripheral societies and poor industrialization such as chile and argentina in the middle of the19th century, argue that expansion of several chilean economic sectors towards argentine patagonia presented at least until the 1920s, and others show that was until 1930s-1940s (martinic 2001a). and until a few years ago some others findings achieved by researchers of argentine economic historians affirmed as an indisputable fact that set of patagonian territories had incorporated into national and international economic system with exclusive atlantic orientation through raising of sheep and get-selling of wool as activities that displaced from the pampas plain due boom in cereals and recovery of beef. however, beyond territorial limits -provincial and / or national-, becomes evident links with outside markets businessmen (bandieri 2001 and 2013). the business association of these agents represented multiple forms of capital accumulation and linkages with investors and shareholders from other countries. had persisted to affirm of an "autarkic region" (martinic 1972, 1975 and 1976; barbería 1991 and 1995) integrated by santa cruz and tierra del fuego, accepting that the economy was significantly to chilean area of magallanes and its capital city punta arenas because of production of sheep and wool. hence, must be nuanced these limitations and inaccuracies lighting the many international business contacts founded and the wide range of productive activities during and after the largest stage of land concessions. this article focused to recognize the imprint of first settlers without ignoring that its abrupt arrival generated deep conflicts with the native communities. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 40 ii.1. institution of land grants and arrival of foreign groups chilean government promoted new settlers at the end of the 1860s. the border treaty between argentina and chile (signed in 1881) and the creation of national territories of santa cruz and tierra del fuego (in 1884) were foundations to new measures and to promote the distribution of expropriated land to indigenous communities and to register the first magellan settlers in southern patagonia (bandieri 2005; bandieri and blanco 2009; bandieri 2018). specifically, in the carlos maría moyano government (1884-1887) contacted buyers in santa cruz to complete the leases and / or buy low-cost public lands in patagonia. in 1885, moyano got permission to grant grazing lands to malvinenses who wanted to settle in the continental area. this encouraged sheep producers of british such as waldron brothers and wood & tomas greenshields, who occupied south and center areas of santa cruz (coronato 2018). likewise, the concession of lands between important groups of punta arenas (chilean town) delivered fiscal lands to malvinense investors in northern tierra del fuego island. some beneficiaries were juan hamilton, thomas saunders, hyle and ness from falkland, and settled local merchants such as josé nogueira (portuguese origin) and josé menéndez (spanish origin). for "activating the formation of a patagonian land market" in the 1890s, argentine government began an intense campaign in europe to sell land implementing express advertising strategies. a contract signed in 1888 between president carlos pellegrini and adolfo grünbein, who was a german lender and broker land living in buenos aires, gave authorization considering the special law (no. 3,053) approved in 1894 to sell lands. this law endorsed a direct sale for one million hectares in unbeatable conditions to buyers. the agents interested could opt for lands in chubut or santa cruz, latter being the area where significant transfers took place. they distributed the lands transferred by grünbein among 21 buyers, 14 of them corresponded to http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 41 livestock companies installed already in different areas of chile and santa cruz (bandieri 2006 and 2018).3 these land concessions had an important impact on santa cruz and tierra del fuego. at the end of the 19th century punta arenas became the most dynamic point in southern chile because of its strategic position. it was the only interoceanic communication between puerto montt and the magellan region until before 1915, at the opening of the canal of panama. these structural conditions influencing the groups linked to economic dynamics of strait of magellan to transfer wool and frozen sheep meat for sale in european markets through magellanic port. at the beginning of the 20th century, the participation of merchants from punta arenas expanded rapidly. some of them become owners and / or tenants of new fiscal lands at tierra del fuego island and santa cruz, argentina. to speed up the settlements, president roca installed a telegraph line between cabo vírgenes and punta arenas, while the chilean government eliminated all customs taxes to transform punta arenas into an economic capital of a vast region that, over the international limits, extended from payne to cape horn and from chubut to tierra del fuego (map 1). also, at the end of the1910s, strait of magellan had its greatest commercial boom; 50% of the sheep sent to foreign markets came from argentina (martinic 1975, 305). 3 adolfo grünbein, married with sofia seeber, was a land broker. he supported to the augusto link & co. started up in 1886, —german company dedicated to export and foreign trade—, the bank of antwerp, and the farmers juan hamilton and tomas saunders. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 42 map 1 influence area of city-port of punta arenas (century xix and first decades of xx) source: http://www.estrecho-de-magallanes-punta-arenas/mapa.htm one important fact is that the land concession stage favored the first foreign inhabitant groups in the magellan region. but how do they established in previous decades and how they developed commercial abilities to establish agreements in outside markets in europe? a general answer is that the relational capital accumulated by them carried out to establish political contacts in chile and argentina and to achieve incipient internationalization, which forcing to relativize the cited notion of autarchy. although some of the first commercial networks become weak in 1868, they permitted to seek markets outside the region and to organize the production. while foreign investments had effects not only in the nascent installed capacity, but in new associations for exploring and exploiting commercial routes abroad. some individuals and families became success agents and their companies advancing throughout the 20th century overcoming to adverse local conditions as we'll see ahead. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb http://www.estrecho-de-magallanes-punta-arenas/mapa.htm volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 43 iii. businessmen: 1868-1908 from punta arenas to most austral area of argentine patagonia, men like josé nogueira rua, elías and mauricio braun, and josé maría menéndez arrived by the same period. in a short time, they become important merchandise and businessmen. but where did these characters come to the magellan region? what elements defined the first commercial, social and personal alliances in punta arenas? were their ventures a key piece in the emergence of new business associations to improve regional productive development? only they responded temporally to foreign demand of products or directed their offers in foreign markets? since the 1860s most foreign settlers arrived at punta arenas from spain, switzerland, portugal, france, germany, falklands and great britain. the multicultural landscape at the territory of magellan (ethnicity bases) helped them to establish commercial networks and new political ties —after the concessions occur— with officials and legislators from chile and argentina, as bandieri has pointed out (2015). then, some agents promoted the expansion of their local businesses and a structure as a definition of their companies and speed-up connecting with capitalism abroad. the next three business genealogies offer some clues. the groups arrived between the decades of 1870 and 1930, their businesses had a family organization in the majority and among all of them they started up the family business network braun-menéndez behety. iii.1 from portugal to punta arenas: the “sea lion” captain josé nogueira rua (1845-1893) was born in via nova de gaia, a small and humble rural town of porto, portugal. without educational instruction and the age of 12 approximately, he embarked on a sailboat towards havana (martinic 2001c, 19). after passing through rio de http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 44 janeiro, montevideo, buenos aires and el callao, he arrived at punta arenas at 21 years old (1866) to try his luck. he had no capital, no family, and only he had the knowledge gained during his marine vessel’s trips (lafuente 2015, 10). for martinic. (2001c, 26-27), the first contact of josé nogueira to local activities in punta arenas enjoy hunting of sea lions “of two hairs”.4 he had knowledge of boats but learned to hunt because of his friendship with luis piedra buena, an argentine neighbor. this rough activity projected to josé nogueira who rapidly upgrading his local economic position. then nogueira could extend its first commercial networks to foreign markets and buy his first ship "anita", and integrate his fleet of vessels that later included to "san pedro", "san josé", "ripplig wave", "martha gale", "rescue", "express" and " pichincha". the next step carried out simultaneously the development of hunting with the sale of products. it allowed the portuguese to establish the josé nogueira & co. a warehouse that operated between 1869 and 1874. the firm included trade of "general stuff" and sale of naval items. the collaboration with one of the most important interoceanic companies in the region, called compagnie maritime du pacific, helped nogueira to join his firm shipping services. (martinic 2001c, 59). this learning process will be decisive in his career. combined these early activities with the rescue of shipwrecked loads called "raques". later started timber trade, parking and, cabotage services. in 1876, almost a decade after arriving, specialization distinguished josé nogueira’s career in maritime activities focused on sea hunting, commerce and specialized services. in this year his fleet had an important mission to sheep’s transportation to punta arenas. when end border disagreements between chile and argentina in 1881, the economy of punta arenas intensified because of raising rates of population and a number of firms established. they domiciled some 4 this activity started by real compañía marítima founded in 1789 in puerto deseado, north of punta arenas in the argentine (barbería 1994). http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 45 companies in valparaíso —an important regional business hub— where many businessmen in patagonia could take part as shareholders and earn profits to get new companies. it applies to say that route from punta arenas to valparaíso opened the new ties with europe.5 after offering his services to the first farmers, nogueira considered another activity the getting of land concessions and an alternative route of commercial projects from sheep breeding. its possibilities of expansion depended on sound investments (own resources) and the relational capital accumulated until that moment to successful political lobby. thus, in 1881 he got directly the first of three land concessions on the north bank of pescado river. as a visionary, nogueira introduced administrative innovations to get money: the formalization of land transferences to next partners must be through a social firm to establish an effective mode to capitalization. we would define the role of his partners and the terms of the collaboration in the new society. for the first concession he started up the nogueira & co., in partnership with juan hurtado. the following year (1882) he constituted the tierra del fuego sheep farm co., to establish the peckett harbor a first high farm in getting have wiring. to install the cabo negro farm, josé nogueira invited as partner to elías braun and in partnership with him also supplied top meat through the braun & nogueira co. (martinic 2001c). this association was the beginning of a long relationship between nogueira and braun’s family members that resulted in marriage jose nogueira and sara braun. by the 1880s, nogueira was a successful businessman in the commercial, maritime and farm activities, and was the beginning in mining exploration. to merge his commercial networks, he avoided intermediaries and controlled directly internal and external distribution and supply 5 this area, absolutely peripheral in the agro-export structure of argentina and chile, centered in the ports of buenos aires, in the first case, and of valparaíso and concepción (martinic 1972; 1975 and 1976; barbería 1991 and 1995). http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 46 routes. in chile, nogueira had nine suppliers established in valparaíso and two more in concepción and talcahuano (martinic 2001c, 66-67). the nogueiras’ international networks included suppliers and buyers from uk, uruguay, germany, france and portugal. to fulfill all commercial commitments, nogueira turned to "attorneys" -legal representativestake decisions allowed in his name6. closely nogueira’s collaborators were dr. thomas fenton an export agent and commercial promoter, mauricio braun who was his apprentice and later nogueira's agent and partner, walter curtze, and thomas greenshields. in 1885 josé nogueira associated to ramírez and fuhrmann to do mining activities, also to ramírez, braun and mancilla. unlike commerce and shipping firms, he only was as a capitalist partner. the mining concessions that nogueira got "américa" (transferred by juan manuel frías), "anita", "san pedro" and "san josé", while encouraged to his collaborator mauricio braun to getting the mining belongings "sofía", "sara" and "ana". although mauricio not yet related to nogueira as family, the relationship of trust between the two allowed him to expand his possessions and save transaction costs based on friendship. in 1886, nogueira showed his management and business capabilities when restructured his main business. he contacted the french specialist gastón blanchard, who had been a collaborator of the a. trouillé co. a company established in valparaíso. firstly, nogueira dissolved the josé nogueira & co., to replace it with the nogueira & blanchard co., which registered 80 thousand pesos paid in equal parts by the partners in 1887. internal changes involved the creation of commercial, maritime and representation sections. the management was by juan blanchard, mauricio braun, and walter curtze respectively, while gastón blanchard was the general manager (martinic 2001c, 113). it should be note that reorganization 6 rarely the literature on entrepreneurs has discussed about legal representatives in latam, despite of they are very important characters in business accompaniment, performance and business success. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 47 was blunt in nogueira's businesses. by then the shipping activities were emerging as an important local and foreign business niche. nogueira’s practices allow us to identify another two important agents: the concessions broker and the land broker. they were key for agricultural and livestock activities. the firsts conducted lobby to get land contracts, and the second were allies for the operation of farms. once got the concessions, nogueira formalized new companies, as anonymous, to transfer land and exploit them. for example, after the second concession got by nogueira in 1889 in tierra del fuego (equivalent to 180 thousand hectares), he started up the sheep farm company of tierra del fuego (lafuente 2015, 78). in the same year nogueira contacted to cattle-financial group waldron & wood co. represented by mont e. wales to reallocate titles and make up in 1890 the land of fire farming co. (based in london).7 in coordination with nogueira, mauricio braun got another concession for 170 thousand hectares. unfortunately, the partners not found immediately and nogueira contacted again to group waldron & wood co. two years later they accepted the terms of transference land and started up the philip bay sheep farming co. in similar conditions as before company, being braun the principal (martinic 2001b and 2001c). these two operations of nogueira confirm his assumption about a previously planned land petition, and the strong trust between he and braun. the greatest of nogueira's successes presented in 1890 upon receiving the third concession for 1,009,000 hectares. this unluckily coincided with growing deterioration of jose's health. in 1891, josé worsened affecting both business and family relationships (martinic 2001b, 88, 2001c, 138). in 1892 the scenario for nogueira aggravated when unexpectedly gastón blanchard, his partner and friend, dead. a surprising decision came when josé instructed his 7 in the company nogueira was one of five shareholders, contributing £ 250,000. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 48 attorneys and partners to start the liquidation of the nogueira & blanchard co., setting a term not exceeded six months from july of that year (martinic 2001c, 139-141). before the end of 1892, nogueira caused surprise again when agreed the session of a third of grand concession to his friend and partner ramón serrano montaner, who was the "concession broker". the one who was now part of nogueira's family, mauricio braun, asked his brother-in-law to stop the liquidation. without success in the negotiation, braun had to advance in the company´s liquidation but not to lose the company, proposed to juan blanchard buying the share holds to get the transfer of the company. the braun alternative finally proceeded after nogueira’s death, who was his mentor, partner and friend. tenacity and perseverance that became a commercial and an economic legacy must distinguish nogueira. in his best moments nogueira, instances from chile and brazil as a distinguished citizen. his productive achievements and projection of local development were indisputable (martinic 2001c). one of nogueira's social relations impacting in business durability was her marriage to sara braun, mauricio's sister. besides allowed increasing his relational capital in the political sphere at the highest levels. braun’s family was respectable and known in a political environment. the celebration of the nogueira and braun marriage was in 1887 and finished in 1892. nogueira´s marriage had no descendants. his widow and brother-in-law. as a petition of sara, reproduced the capital, business companies, and land. in consequence, sara braun became in the greatest heiress. this projected the second generation of braun’s family, including to josé menéndez, who was the nogueira's business rival in punta arenas (table 1). http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 49 table 1. the business genealogy of josé nogueira period productive activities as founder type of networks building type of capital accumulated skills 1866 — social: no family and friendship links when he arrived at punta arenas (age 21) business: - — marine 18671876 commercial and early international projection hunting sealion trade of feathers and wild skins raque social: local friendship property: landowner commercial: local buyer (indigenous) and abroad buyer, local and abroad seller business: owner financial relational (friendship) commercial marine deal maker visionary 18761882 shipping by sea local livestock from 1876 to 1882 through innovative management methods foreign commerce social: trust personal land: land applicant and landowner commercial: local and abroad seller service provider: local and abroad maritime shipping employer: local and foreign specialized workers business: owner financial relational commercial political deal maker visionary applicant of land concessions shareholder businessman 18861890 specialization of own business with an internal reengineering and new partnerships exploring in mining getting concessions social: trust personal, 2nd marriage and family land: land applicant, landowner, land grabber service provider: local and abroad commercial, maritime shipping, representing farm: sheep breeder, employer of foreign specialized workers business: owner, partner in formal societies (foreign and local), land brokers’ informal partner, land intermediaries’ formal partner, mining intermediaries’ formal share, friendship partner financial commercial relational (friendship, parental and political) applicant of land concessions innovative visionary shareholder businessman http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 50 period productive activities as founder type of networks building type of capital accumulated skills 18901892 searching new profits by land concessions social: trust personal and family land: land applicant, landowner, land grabber service provider: local and abroad commercial, maritime shipping, representing farm: sheep breeder, employer of foreign specialized workers business: owner, partner of formal societies (foreign and local), land brokers’ informal partner, land intermediaries’ formal partner, mining intermediaries’ formal share, friendship and family partner financial commercial relational (friendship, parental and political) applicant of land concessions shareholder businessman source: authors’ elaboration. synthesizing, the last name nogueira did not continue, although the companies formed by josé survived because of the intervention of his widow sara and mauricio braun. mauricio was a member of the heiress's nuclear family, and also his position was important because he had worked in the nogueira business network. this succession was successful because the family structure continued by the successor family, who was the main administrator of a network of merged companies. the corporate governance changed in the minimum, and totally in the property. a branch that allowed continuity followed the second generation of these two families. nogueira's brother-in-law followed his legacy in business, endured the main firm and advanced in his business career, taking advantage of the social network in which, he already took part. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 51 iii.2 the braun hamburger family after settling in telsen, a town in the russian empire —today republic of latvia— elías braun and sofia hamburger emigrated to hamburg, then to london and finally to south america. in 1872, the family of five members arrived at buenos aires,8 where a chilean diplomat offered to elías braun basic goods to settle in the south`s country. like other families, families’ braun received 24 hectares and 12 additional for each child over 14 years old. the context for the settlement in southern chile will be the first institutional resource used by the head of the braun family, as nogueira did. individuals and groups take advantage of the institutional environment. meanwhile, the institutional effects revealed in social continuity and the organizational in business. because of this, as implied in the first section of this article, business families and family businesses are units that led to analyze institutions —in the long term— and sociobusiness behavior. in 1874 elías arrived at punta arenas, where had access to housing materials, one cow, one mare and food for the first six months (lafuente 2015, 128). originally braun dedicated to sale leather, wool and ostrich feathers. these activities permit us to infer his first contact with josé nogueira. historical references show that elías braun installed a small hotel —the kosmos— and also worked to extract coal. they strengthened their relationship when elías started a business to merchandise imports from europe through the braun and co. and receiving financial support from nogueira. later in 1881, both started up the braun & nogueira co. to supply meat (martinic 2001b). as previously mentioned, in 1889 josé nogueira and elías braun ventured into livestock sharing land. the settlements built a small context for business 8 the children sara, mauricio and oscar were born in telsen, and ana was born in paraguay. the three minors, fanny, mayer and juan were born in punta arenas (lafuente 2015, 18). http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 52 in punta arenas, which was conducive to consolidate an internal network of owners and businessmen. mauricio braun hamburger, the second son of his family, was a provisional employee used as a child in the bloom, schröeder & co. and later in the josé menéndez’s stores. in 1880 (15 years old), he became a formal employee at the nogueira’s company. without knowing it, braun would become nogueira's trusted staff. he worked as a sales agent, in representation of nogueira’s company and partner in the nogueira & blanchard co. nogueira was also his teacher, friend and later brother-in-law. being yet young, braun started his own business, although with nogueira’s approval. in 1885, his boss encouraged mauricio to apply for concessions of land and mines, placing them next to those of nogueira. in 1888, mauricio established the scott & braun co. to manage the la fortuna sawmill and two others: río seco and tres brazos. in 1889, taking advantage of nogueira's relational capital, mauricio got 170,000 hectares to be exploited in santa cruz and san julian areas. in 1890, mauricio established the braun & guillaume co. and two years later he joined to the cameron campbell co. in partnership with james campbell, and john cameron (scottish) hired as a sheep specialist by nogueira’s farms. in the same period, without apparent nogueira's vigilance, braun got the representation of new york life insurance at punta arenas. the greatest business opportunity for mauricio came in 1893 with his sister sara braun widowed of josé nogueira. she became the wealthiest and youngest businesswoman in the region. to follow the succession of inherited assets and capitals, mauricio legally represented sara as she wanted. the peckett harbor farm was the most profitable of nogueira's commercial primaries. mauricio managed it between 1893 and 1897 as requested by sara. from 1898 onwards, oscar braun administrated this farm. the family is an institution that collaborates http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 53 with the endurance of companies. in addition, nuclear families strengthen control, as did the second generation’s braun. with the death of his brother-in-law, mauricio concluded the transfer of the nogueira & blanchard co., agreed with juan blanchard. once proportions corresponding to nogueira and blanchard widows were paid. the old firm changed its name to braun & blanchard co. to restart activities that were still in force (martinic 2001a, 152-153 and 2001b, 98). if josé dissolved the josé nogueira & co. to restructure it implementing the commercial and shipping sections and later to started up the nogueira & blanchard co. —in collaboration to juan—, then the third firm braun & blanchard co. —reorganized by the successor mauricio braun— represents the perdurability of the two early business. the changing of this company is a succession of names and associates where braun is the last and also the successor of nogueira by kinship. this organizational example confirms that durability of a company does not require the same corporate name, the importance is how shareholders control the company; it sustained the survival process when the roots maintained but adapting to new circumstances. some trajectories also are perdurable by external buyers. here the business perdurability associates to continue the braun’s family sustained it by marriages of the second generation. business trajectories depended on the management capabilities of sara and mauricio braun. also, decisions taken by them around the large concession of one million hectares were crucial to family continuity. the interdependence between the social and the commercial is so strong in the family businesses of the secondgeneration braun and depended on the nuclear members. with a few months braun's brothers rushed the constitution of new company to make effective the commitments gained by josé nogueira. in 1893 was organized the "operating society of http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 54 tierra del fuego” (onwards setf —acronym in spanish—). the capital was one million pesos divided in 2,000 shares. sara braun gained 350 shares; mauricio braun on his own and representing to juan blanchard, and elias and oscar braun acquired 425; josé menéndez gained 200; guillermo wilms 100; cruz daniel ramírez 100; gustavo a. oehninger 100; and ramón serrano montaner 100 shares.9 in the negotiation with the british duncan fox co., peter h. mc clelland was the president and mauricio braun manager-director. the setf became one of the most relevant companies in the austral region for decades. in this business braun developed corporate transformations and perfected the rural management capabilities introducing the figure of “farm stay administrator”, which was considered by martinic (2001b, 107) as a new “executive labor institution in rural stewardship”. the company came to own 1,700,000 hectares and 12 million sheep in the fields on both sides of the magellan strait and international chile and argentina border, generating multiplier effects on the businesses of braun’s family and promoting an integrated diversification process during the following decades. the setf became a mother-company in braun’s family and joined another local family. in 1895 mauricio married josefina menéndez-behety, josé menéndez’s daughter. the marriage has 10 children. carlos, alejandro and oscar braun menéndez-behety took part in family businesses, contributing to the configuration of a strong business family. in 1896 braun was pointed as consul of the u.s. in the magellan area; the same year stubenrauch & braun loading dock society could not reinforce shipping services converting the local dock in a multiservice platform. during this period the braun & blanchard co. already had a fleet of 6 ships.10 9 as a result of the agreement between braun’s brothers and ramón serrano montaner who was nogueira’s friend and broker land and owner of third part of great concession. 10 fifteen years later, the maritime section of this company, offered too passenger cabotage, freight transport, as well as ship rescue services eliminating the old “raque” carried out by private boats since 1860s at magellan strait. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 55 the commercial section expanded to ports río gallegos (1896), santa cruz (1899) and san julian (1900), all in national territory at this moment, then santa cruz province. braun had shareholders outside family businesses which included electric light company punta arenas (since 1897) and bank of punta arenas (since 1900). in banking, braun took part in the opening process and later as a shareholder and also served as vice president in the first board. during next periods 1903-1909 and 1913-1932, he was the bank president. braun also managed the braun & blanchard co. which absorbed the bonacich hnos. & co. in 1899 to control activities of assembly and reparation to his fleet of ships (martinic 2001b and 2001c). between 1903 and 1904, braun managed the transfer of new lands to attract settlers and boost livestock farming in association through the aysen industrial society and the baker-mauricio braun operating co. the transition to the 20th century meant to mauricio braun the incursion into new activities. the opportunities go beyond the search for land the federal government encouraged that at the end of the 19th century at tierra del fuego area. since 1905 braun visualize in the refrigeration industry a niche of opportunities. this year he formed the south american export syndicate associated to english backing through the houlder brothers & co., bermúdez & co., and other british partners (martinic 2001a, 199-200). braun also ventured into whaling in partnership whit owner of the bruyne, andersen & co., 11 and since 1906 through the own firm the magellan whaling co., in which alejandro menéndez behety and josé menéndez (brother-inlaw and father-in-law), among others, also took part as shareholders. the building sector, 11 following nogueira's footsteps, society was made possible by the inclusion of adolfo andresen who was the expert in the "whaling" activity and knew how to handle modern technology. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 56 mauricio created at the same year the braun & foretich co. associating with natalio foretich, who was a croatian building specialist. the expansion of the second-generation businesses to which mauricio braun belonged advanced in the number of businesses. for this he used the extended family, but especially third parties. this was so because braun's children in 1910 decade were not of age to be part of the business. braun's trajectory shows how the management of social relations accompanied the management of new businesses and the management of a local network of suppliers. when braun completed land transferences and concluded the inclusion of the philip bay sheep farming co., into setf (1906), he finishes his participation in this company. then braun started a new stage in business as a land grantee in argentina. his sister sara continued doing business associated to farm activities in chile and later in argentina. she formed the livestock and commercial corporation "sara braun". shareholder structure in its company was a nuclear family business type to control the business. while mauricio braun in less than one decade became an important landowner and industrial. was lessee of 461,288 hectares, and leaser of 175 thousand hectares using the name of third parties in argentina. the tordillo rocks co. (san julian union) applies to get concessions in the san julian area in 1907. in partnership with alejandro and josé menéndez behety, braun, also gained in 1908 the stock package of pastoril society glencross and bought the farms el librún and la carlota. while the santa cruz trade union society managed the creation of the southern patagonia sheep farming co. (martinic 2001b). by 1908 mauricio braun's business career has already merged, but the best was yet to come for him and the braun and menéndez behety families. the same year mauricio agreed with josé menéndez the merger of a commercial branch, applying a social capital for 1.5 million http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 57 argentine pesos. the companies of the braun and menéndez behety until 1908 did not expand to argentina because the place of residence of the two the families was punta arenas. this was a family strategy for expanding outside chile. as a result of this agreement they created the import and export corporation of patagonia anonymous society operating with a council in buenos aires and attended at punta arenas. this is the moment of birth of la anónima. josé menéndez was the first president of new company and as vice president mauricio braun, while juan blanchard was director in the first place, and pablo dietert and alejandro menéndez behety alternated as directors, and esteban ferrari as general manager (martinic 2001b). table 2. first stage of business genealogy of mauricio braun 1874-1910. period productive activities as founder type of networks building type of capital accumulated skills 1874-1880 — social: family. he arrived in punta arenas being a child (age 9) business: - relational (parental) — 1880-1888 sawmills manager in supervision of josé nogueira insurance social: family and trust personal land: landowner business: apprentice, owner in first company, partner in formal societies, land brokers’ informal partner, land intermediaries’ formal partner, representing, friendship partner relational (parental) apprentice business assistant applicant of land businessman 1888-1892 livestock sector social: family and trust personal business: owner, partner in formal societies, land intermediaries’ formal partner, friendship partner relational (parental) and commercial applicant of land concessions businessman http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 58 period productive activities as founder type of networks building type of capital accumulated skills 1893-1906 testamentary succession officer shipping and commercial livestock sector refrigeration industry bank and light services social: family, trust personal, marriage land: landowner, land grabber service provider: local and abroad commercial and maritime, bank, light manufacture: family business, partner in formal societies (local and foreign), business: owner, partner in formal societies, land intermediaries’ formal partner, friendship partner mining intermediaries, member of board farm: sheep breeder, employer of foreign specialized workers relational (parental), financial, commercial, and political applicant of land shareholder businessman 1906-1910 (with address at chile and argentina) commercial whale's hunt livestock sector social: family and trust personal land: landowner, land grabber service provider: local and abroad commercial and maritime, bank, light manufacture: refrigerator industry business: owner, partner in formal societies, land intermediaries’ formal partner, friendship partner, merge business relational (parental) commercial political union applicant of land shareholder businessman source: authors’ elaboration. braun had taken part as a founding partner and / or partner in 48 companies (31 in chile and 16 in argentina) with two mother-companies: the setf and la anónima. the braun’s associations continued in alliance with suppliers through the formal partnership. for example, http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 59 in 1910 braun had an association with the founder of “minerva” workshop maestranza active since 1897to take the control in reparation of machinery and not to depend of external services. the reconstruction of braun’s business genealogy permits to identify the important milestones in the business career of mauricio and the networks operating between 1874 and 1910 (table 2). the durability of family businesses depended on mauricio braun's associations with his sister sara and his partner josé blanchard. la anónima, which functioned as a merge commercial company, positioned a new era of business and the continuity of the braunmenéndez behety lineage since 1908. the same table shows that companies merged and acquired by braun were formal suppliers, but they did not operate as a family association. iii.3 asturians in punta arenas josé maría menéndez menéndez (1846-1918) was born in santo domingo de miranda in asturias, spain; from there embarked towards havana at 14. historians show that in 1866 he got a position as "bookkeeper" (accountant) in buenos aires in a naval hardware store called corti riva & co. and also in the german company etchart & co. in 1875 he traveled to punta arenas representing to last one for recovering a debt from josé piedra buena, who owned a commercial office dedicated to different branches (lafuente 2015, 12-15; martinic 1971, 1920). this event was crucial in the business life of this spanish visionary, as we can see later. the references consulted show that menéndez paid the pedro debt to be in charge of his commercial store, which he would register as josé menéndez & co.12 josé (33 years old) got married to maría behety chapital, who was a daughter of félix behety and maría chapital, a basque-french origin family. 12 piedra buena was the master of josé nogueira in the hunting of sea lions. it can be explained the rivalry between nogueira and josé menéndez. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 60 since 1878 josé menéndez and family arrived at punta arenas, chile. his first activities were the hunting sea lions and rescue of ships "raque" like few others in the town. menendez also offered maritime services and traded feathers and wild skins, making agreements with indigenous people. between 1880 and 1881 menéndez borrowed a sawmill named "union" for two years. associated with federico arnald and josé montes,13 josé also managed the hotel del puerto. between 1882-1885, enabled the ranch of san gregorio (lafuente 1996). through this farm, he developed a successful livestock system that gave him local economic and social prestige. because of his local achievements, in 1892 menéndez was appointed vice consul of punta arenas (martinic 2001b, 72). later josé started up another farm associated to francisco bilbao through the bilbao & co. this farm at tierra del fuego called primera argentina (1894) and had 80 thousand hectares. the institutional context of land concessions encouraged to commercial agents to take new risks and seek shareholders in the locality and europe. in 1897 menéndez also took part in the constitution of the electric light company of punta arenas being partner of mauricio braun, juan blanchard and walter curtze, among others. in this company he was the first board’s president. two years later, josé gained 100,000 hectares in concession to the name of his sons alejandro and josé, which allowed him to start the second argentina (later maría behety farm stay); josé took advantage of concession legislation and international market context and turned it far in one of most modern in fuegian area. to be more efficient, josé menéndez introduced advance machinery as modern shears for shearing sheep (martinic 2001b, 116-118). in 1907, almost in parallel to mauricio braun, josé introduced to punta arenas the refrigeration industry through the refrigerating company of 13 josé montes was the daughter's father-in-law. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 61 patagonia. and in 1908, as it mentioned, achieved the merger of his commercial branch with mauricio braun. a relevant fact to josé’s family and himself was the death of his wife maría behety in 1910. according to available biographical information, maria's forced josé to divide properties and actives among members of his nuclear family and to make up a new society organized as a nuclear family business. this succession can see as a strategic transfer of property rights because of the constitution of livestock and commercial corporation menéndez behety and likewise considered an indicative of continuity of family bases and the nascent of a family office. for this reason, the typology of family a business is important. the new nuclear family business was the basis of continuity. in this family group the mother —maría behety— was a capital contributor and therefore could inherit, although she has not been a founding partner in business. in her perspective, only the nuclear shareholder can save the family. table 3 shows josé menéndez business and a different style from josé nogueira and his son-in-law mauricio braun. table 3. the business genealogy of josé menéndez 1875-1910. period productive activities as founder and in collaboration type of networks building type of capital accumulated skills 1875 employed to recover a debt social and business: - he arrived temporally to punta arenas (age 29) commercial accounting 18781881 hunting of sea lion trade of feathers and wild skins raque sawmills (c) lodgings (c) social: trust personal and family business: apprentice, owner in first company, partner in formal societies, land brokers’ informal partner, land intermediaries’ formal relational (parental), commercial, financial and political partner businessman http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 62 period productive activities as founder and in collaboration type of networks building type of capital accumulated skills partner, representing, friendship partner 18821908 livestock sector refrigeration industry bank and light services social: family and trust personal land: landowner service provider: local and abroad commercial and maritime, bank, light manufacture: family business business: partner in formal societies, land intermediaries’ formal partner, friendship partner farm: sheep breeder, employer of foreign specialized workers relational (parental) commercial financial political partner applicant of land businessman 19081910 commercial whale's hunt livestock sector social: family and trust personal land: landowner, land grabber manufacture: family partner in formal societies business: owner, partner in formal societies, land intermediaries’ formal partner, family business, merge business farm: sheep breeder, employer of foreign specialized workers relational (parental) commercial financial political partner applicant of land businessman shareholder source: authors’ elaboration. jose menéndez trajectory was so compact in terms of formal collaboration networks. family and friendship linkages appeared as part of the majority of his companies. the heritage of a wife's family it was crucial in that regard to last part of his business life. to finish the period 1908-1910 menéndez only took part in 10 companies, being the most important the anonymous society importing and exploiting corporation of patagonia known as la anónima (a merger http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 63 of the josé menéndez & co. and braun & blanchard co.). the last menéndez mercantile participation was in 1916, two years before his death. this businessman adds in total 16 participations as a founder, in which nine also do mauricio braun. iv. two family groups and one business family: 1908-1935 in punta arenas, the first group of settlers established since the second half of the 19th century until 1900 supported the first business activities and promoted slowly the family association. if punta arenas gained importance in trade and exports not all initial businesses enduring the next decades. established groups initially experienced informal and limited partnership small businesses and then emerging gradually collective societies between two or more partners according to local and markets. when the range of action was broadened and more partners were included, it was that new types of firms emerged, with different structures, including family-type ones. in decades 1901 and 1920 had transformations suffered by businessman rooted in this region allowed some of them to remain active. despite the geographical distance, the transport conditions and the peripheral condition in the commercial routes and political sphere, some settlers accumulated capital and developed bases to continue as family businesses. unlike other contexts in latam that experienced arrival of foreign groups for settlement with participation of "land brokers", punta arenas evidenced the valuable of foreign ties and foreign families. their members build commercial agreements with abroad to strengthen trade routes and achieve the expansion of economy in the southern patagonian region; first in chile, and then in argentina. the differences in the composition of business groups and local trajectories show multiple ways to control value chains of production and distribution in europe to accumulate capital. the three business genealogies reconstructed in this article related to control of the internal market and the foreign trade expansion process. among the initial http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 64 businessmen at punta arenas were henry reynard, josé nogueira, rodolfo stubenrauch, guillermo bloom, l. l. jacobs and juan hurtado, and as the blanchard brothers, mauricio braun, josé menéndez and josé montes and their families, among others. iv.1 towards the second generation of businesses family businesses at punta arenas, chile experienced the first stage of growth between 1868 and 1881 based on commercial business to export hunting products, leather, and the increase the exotic feather traffic. with the offer of land concessions at the end of the 19th century, the rise of livestock began another phase of the local dynamic. by 1892 the companies of josé nogueira and josé menéndez represented 36.1% of total commercial traffic (martinic 2001b, 90). for period 1913-1918 punta arenas had: “[…] four commercial banks, 200 industrial and artisan establishments, over 400 commercial offices and many others [business] dedicated to the hotel industry; 300 cattle ranches ... and countless minor agricultural properties, and dozens of livestock companies, shipping, fishing, mining and oil businesses, communication by telephone, electricity and insurance, representing large capitals and investments [...]” (martinic 2002, 84). some changes in assignation land legislation between 1903 and 1905, encouraged an incipient union of ranch owners through the “committee for defense of the interests of the pioneer farmers”. two years later, the owners of farms started up the society of estancieros unidos de última esperanza (1905), with participation of josé menéndez, stubenrauch and mauricio braun (martinic 2001b). according to revised documents, the collaboration between mauricio braun and josé menéndez started in 1906 in the whale of magellan co. two years later produced the merger of their commercial companies to operate in argentina through the la anónima, giving rise in http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 65 1908 a new family business of an extended type with two nuclear family business. next generations will start up anonymous societies and take a further step towards the configuration of a strong business family. the new century will be a new époque to braun business family, to shareholders, oriented by the expansion and combination of three types structure in family business: nuclear, extended and composed. a notable fact in menéndez family was the division of properties in 1911 through the menéndez behety livestock and commercial corporation as successor of the josé menéndez & co., after to maría behety´s death. the new society represented a type of family control that favored the durability of commercial livestock, maritime, mining and sawmill activities in chile, and the control of shares by family members. after josé menéndez was death, all sons-in-law were added to the family company. according to the anuario de sucesos 1919-1920 published by e. gómez & company (1919, 732) the firm´s board in 1918 included to alejandro, josé, alfonso and julio menéndez-behety, and mauricio braun (josefina's husband), arturo gómez palmés (herminia’s husband), and francisco campos (maría's husband). in this way, the second generation of the braun-menéndez-behety became part of la anónima, merged it as the largest family business in the region. while the nuclear structure transformed in one of extended type. before finishing his career in business, josé menéndez was a partner of the next formal companies: sociedad rural de magallanes (1912), industrial, and livestock society of magallanes and fishery company of magallanes (1914), and insurance company "la austral" (1915). the final company was the last branch of the business family. sara braun remained active in business creating family-type businesses, especially in the branch of cattle; in 1914 she established the "sara braun" livestock corporation in punta arenas, as a nuclear familyhttp://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 66 type company.14 the society of estancias "la armonía" was one of those organized by sara braun, although it was a composed family-type company, in which his brothers-in-law alejandro and josé menéndez-behety, as well as casimiro gómez were part of the board. figure 1. total mercantile societies created by mauricio braun and josé menéndez (1875-1949) source: author's elaboration. in summary, mauricio braun and josé menéndez took part in 82 companies (figure 1), coinciding in 9 since 1897. and mauricio braun between 1904 and 1908, was part of founders and shareholder groups in 34 companies, in which 20 were based on chile and 14 in argentina. those businessmen lived a key moment to enforce development of southern patagonia, becoming the pillars for next generations of business families and anonymous societies. iv.2 continuity of the braun-menéndez behety family in argentina and the firsts decades of a business family rooted to la anónima after the mergers of companies that gave life to la anónima in 1908, atlantic ports of río gallegos, santa cruz, san julian, comodoro rivadavia and puerto madryn established the first 14 the board included elías braun father and her brothers mauricio, oscar, mayer and juan (ruffini 2017, 47). http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 67 commercial subsidiaries. from there, the progressive penetration of this company in the patagonian interior began with new offices that secured the supply of food and agricultural production, and acquisition of building materials. the success of la anónima was teamwork and coordination, which had positive effects from the early stages. the company's capital increased 300 percent only in the first six years. when finish the first decade, la anónima had increased its capital over 1,000 percent and had arrived at 30 establishments in the south of argentine patagonia functioning as matrixes or subsidiaries. the management functioning with a central, but each office had autonomy to solve own problems and decision making immediate, due to communication context of the time. although in 1914-1915 maritime traffic in the magellan port had serious problems when opening the panama canal provoking contraction in commercial flows, the world war i represented a new opportunity for primary merchandise trade to patagonia. then the region increased its presence in international wool markets and offering courier services. a big mistake was during the last years of world war, when bigger patagonian producers starting a speculation of wool stocks, encourage by constantly growing of demand. those actions caused indebtedness that extended when finished the bonanza period. the due imposition of customs duties in patagonia between the ending of 1918 and by1919, businesses in southern chile had negative effects in cabotage routes, part, in shipments of meat and wool to argentine and chilean ports that had monopolized the freight handling. in 1920 la anónima experienced a reduction in the loans gotten by argentine and anglo-south american banks, so must explore domestic credit schemes and sales "to trust", as was usual. according to the expansionist policy in times of crisis, the members of the second generation agreed to http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 68 establish in 1922 a second refrigerator named s. a. cooperative refrigeration society of puerto deseado, being alejandro menéndez behety and mauricio braun the ceos. la anónima also installed another commercial agency in buenos aires dedicated to maritime affairs and purchases. in 1918, argentine federal government granted legal status to the company. then la anónima turning into an argentine company. the proprietary shareholders and general management moved to buenos aires,15 settling in a classic building of the av. roque sáenz peña, in the heart of city porteña, which opened a new stage in the company´s history and family braun-menéndez behety, in coincidence josé menéndez death this year. in 1920 the situation did not improve because the livestock boom reversed. the fall of international currencies that came from wool and sheep meat affected la anónima, leading to members of families to implement new changes. one of most important was the abolition of dividends from 1920. was until 1928 that profits returned in 1.5%; by 1931 were 3%, but in 1932 back down to 2%. the 10% paid between 1910-1919 never returned. another effect of the wool market contraction to the constant exploitation of rural employees who were not organized and did not have any labor protection.16 the climate of rural conflicts in chile and argentina increased at the same time that the police severely repressed by police with the consent of farmers and merchants (fisch 1933; bayer 1972; bonaudo and bandieri 2000). the braun-menéndez behety family reacted to this crisis implementing organizational changes in la anónima. contrary to what we might think, at end of second decade of the 20th century, josé menéndez jr. and mauricio braun carried out new investments and implement changes in 15 the build of new headquarters was inaugurated being director mauricio braun and vice president alejandro menéndez behety. 16 the control of seasonal work has been possible due to large concentration of livestock and strong monopoly of trade, also the population had not labor alternatives. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 69 commercial strategy introducing a cooperative scheme. headquarters and supply centers in punta arenas, and connection centers with england, germany, spain and other offices abroad, would be to import products to patagonia and some products were acquired from northern chile and nascent argentine industry. members of the second generation of the braun-menéndez behety family invested in vessels to control regional trade as it was in the past. in 1922 the company had four cargo ships and other 17 vessels. likewise, shareholders approved the constitution of public limited company, argentine refrigeration company of tierra del fuego (1917) having the support of most important cattle farmers in southern patagonia as shareholders.17 this was a modern refrigerator installed in the port of rio grande to operate using a collective model and to benefit all investment farmers. the basis of family structure did not change although included no family members.18 the company consolidated in a short time. the first year the new company processing almost 150,000 animals and shipping 1,000 tons of meat sold in england markets. other products sending to us were leather, tallow and visors. by 1929 la anónima already showed an excellent recovery; it had 10 commercial houses in the territory of santa cruz, 10 in chubut and 3 in río negro, and as agencies in magallanes chile-, new york, london, barcelona and berlin, and an allowed capital of 20 million in sealed gold.19 as the regional crisis was overcome, the company also showed renewed economic vitality. then were integrated the companies astilleros río de la plata, astarsa (naval, railway and road constructions branch), austral (aerial branch and communication), emecé (publishing 17 the company had farms as anonymous shareholders to link more local people to rise exports. 18 alejandro menéndez behety was the president of board, mayer braun vice president, and as directors francisco campos torreblanca (son-in-law of josé menéndez) and josé montes thurler. while dr. carlos menéndez behethy was a trustee. 19 revista argentina austral, 1929. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 70 industry), and other linked to insurance, financial, real estate, tourism, selling agricultural machinery and medical help services (barbería 1995,71). the company ships were part of fleet named enosis -greek word meaning "union”-. it departed every month to southern seas loaded with the most varied merchandise to supply to la anónima subsidiaries. simultaneously, the firm worked as distributor of fruits, wool and meat, transported and banker offering replacement credits to primary production becoming (jaca 1941 and 1968). also, become to an active participant in community life of patagonian localities. all collaborated to install electrical services, telephones, hospitals, schools, radio stations, airlines, etc. on june 10, 1933, la anónima celebrated its first 25 years with the second generation in command. also, the board included members of nuclear and extended family being the first time the members of third generation sharing in it.20 next decades the family members of braun-menéndez behety worked around mothercompany. in 1935, la anónima incorporated the section of interoceanic agencies with regular routes to transfer of cargo and passengers to different continents.21 in response to the growth company were incorporated social activities to allow their employees (called "collaborators") feeling as part of "enosis family". the vacations and entertainment for the firm's staff promoted trough company social clubs, and including the castle in villa elisa, at buenos aires. a scholarship system was also organized for the employees' children. la anónima edited to its own advertising magazine named “argentina austral”, published from 1929 to 1968 (ruffini 2017). the goal to those years was each subsidiary supplied all items of a large general store, 20 mauricio braun, alfonso, alejandro and armando braun menéndez. 21 in 1950s were constituted next companies: austral airlines (1957), it was the second commercial airline after aerolineas argentinas; later came the chilean interoceanic navigation company (1958) as a branch of blanchard section; and the maritime company of punta arenas anonymous society in which a member of menéndez behety family was the ceo (1958). http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 71 complemented with a skillful credit policy that allowed the company to keep its clientele secured. in summarize, mauricio braun remained active and forming companies until 1949. he died in 1953 when family successors fully integrated la anónima. the continuity to third generation will be analyzed in forward studies, for here is the evidence of continuity in international connections, and familiar strategies associated to successful succession. extended nuclear and family ties were not only strategic for business continuity and learning, but for establishing a family corporate government visible in alternating positions in the directories. mothercompanies since first stages experienced a vertical integration model, also with his own new suppliers to control production and distribution chains as in the past. the deepest crisis resolved to implement expansion and include practices to control markets and encourage the use of loyalty. the original families of braun and menéndez behety in punta arenas and their next generations exemplify a path towards settlement and internationalization at a stage in the evolution of capitalism that required significant supplies of raw materials and food. the first step was the settlement of families, the context of the transferring of land and the agreements between chile and argentina. after decades, studies on families who arrived after 1870s to punta arenas, started up more businesses in argentina, this does not mean that punta arenas was more important than tierra del fuego or vice versa. they visualized a regional development encouraged commercial links with europe and a new form to expand around the world very early in the 20th century. this article reopens a discussion to global connections from latam. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 72 v. contributions to the study of inheritance, family businesses and business families the genealogical business reconstruction presented in this article offers evidence on european immigration in the accumulation process and the building of productive links in southern patagonia. the institutional context was the “colonization laws” and agreements between chile and argentina on austral patagonian area. consequently, the arrival of european groups improved schemes of learning as part of emergence of abroad commercial networks. they expose the permanence of families and constitution of family businesses with variations of global markets since middle of the19th century. the first businesses were informal, through collective, and limited partnerships led by founders. the succession of braun-menéndez behety groups with the company’s local survival has observed in some business branch family and access to new activities like the refrigeration industry linked to livestock sector. adaptation and complex organizational systems processes were linked to business expansion. these show the trends of global economic demand in sheep meat derivate and its local impacts were technological and foreign linkages. as regards of abroad connections, the local families became in promoters and had commercial links with agents in england, france and germany, and another one. in case of institutional frameworks, patagonian families responded to foreign demand and influenced them. the local and national political and social alliances were as important as international trade networks to get permits and lands. the first groups endowed to resources to inhabit the patagonian area, arrived and found natural resources used by indigenous groups to commerce mining and shipping sea services. the second productive embryo was the transport to enlarge regional accumulation based on exports and third the fridges. first two generations of family business networks were built on friendship, marriages, and formal partnership. 1860s-1870s period complemented rapidly to nascent exploitation of http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 73 breeder sheep in last decades of this century. people such as josé nogueira and members of menéndez and braun families, stand out by skills as visionaries and promoters of investments and introduces of technological tools, communications, lighting and banks. they implemented a rural management through innovative practices in livestock activities. the management and adaptation to local conditions produced the arrival of european technicians and technological changes which reinforcing the early accumulation process despite a double peripheral position of patagonia in america and europe. the built of commercial agencies, farm stays and the boat fleets are important evidences. the land concession laws, started in the 1880s by chile and argentina, projected unique forms of transferences and collaboration between new settlers and european partners. the ways to get and enable land had at this moment diverse management win-to-win styles. the three business genealogies allow to distinguish: i) leadership to control the production value chains without intervention of intermediaries as local suppliers in part through mother-companies, ii) absorption by co-participation of companies, iii) family partnership and friendship partner following formal agreements in associations and social enterprises, iv) introduction of figure of rural ceo, v) land brokers and formal land intermediaries, vi) accumulation of capital to reinvest by purchase and / or lease agreements post-grant with financial companies and individuals, vii) productive diversification and new value chains associated to livestock. the family member’s successors of braun’s family managed since the early 20th century some mother-companies: braun & blanchard co., setf that included livestock, shipping and a commercial services, and the refrigeration industry, and la anónima a merge of commercial branch of braun and menendez-behety businesses and the most important to third and next generations whose members grew with it. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 74 after the expropriation of land to natives’ groups and started official allocation of concessions, the immigrants should secure an efficient exploitation scheme. this goal led to the purchase of machinery and equipment for breeding, processing and packing of sheep products, and the hiring of pawns and specialized sheep-men. in the commercial and distribution chains ship fleets ensuring buyers in different countries. mauricio braun and josé menéndez controlled shipyards and machine repair shops to reduce maintenance costs and the family businesses help to control and reduce other transaction costs as negotiations vis-à-vis or signing of special agreements. adding foreign partners as shareholders or buyers, the first and second-generation members supported the mutual learning and ensured future diversification of their commercial societies. to understand the family continuity and survival of businesses, it needs family a researching of networking, for this reason, rebuilt three business genealogies. families like nogueira-braun were disintegrating, and the heirs must take the control of continuity. family disintegration by death can be a problem for survivors who have no commercial experience, so it can lose control. it can also be a problem when the family size is small. fortunately, to business perdurability with nogueira’ firms, his widow had the support of her brother. and mauricio that had been his brother-in-law's apprentice could ensure survival. in the menéndez family, the second generation made lineage continuity possible through marriages. meanwhile, the durability of the companies by the sons-in-law and the children who worked together and alternating positions in the family business directories. intellectually, maria behety was a visionary by stipulating in her will the division of family actions and assets for business durability. and sara braun was a visionary when she relied on her brother to inherit the businesses of nogueira. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 75 in summary, the business trajectories in the southern patagonia between the end of 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries conducing to argue that: a) the friendship as a trust value to start a business in adverse conditions b) the attorneys and concession land brokers and applicants as trustworthy individuals help to expand the relational capital of the petitioners c) the austral patagonia area endorsed the interchanges of food and natural resources starting links abroad for the continuity of capitalism in latam d) the financial accumulation of the first groups of immigrants established in punta arenas promoted takeoff and a productive control based on commercial, national and international alliances e) the multiplication of some family companies was carried out controlling branches and suppliers in the value productive chains through different associations f) the emergence of new agents and management practices in latam; in this case followed the specialization in sheep farming and increase in concessions g) the crisis opened opportunities to family groups h) the structure of the first family business is very important to understand the configuration of business families i) the new generations started up family’s business contributing to configurate a strong braun business family business genealogies are elemental to business historians. they permitted to apply the biographic method, compile registers of companies, and personal information, as the patagonian groups were addressed in this article. the study of family business and business families undoubtedly offer hints to debate about perdurability and continuity in business http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 76 succession. the continuity of families is part of a socio-cultural process that imbricate to survival, learning (circulation of knowledge), trust and local economic development. the family business is an institutional structure as veblen's arguments and is a receptive agent of institutional context as north argue. to study the family business composition in the long run, reinforce the importance of family environment in the building of capacities and businesses propagation. finally, the business families configured upon to remoteness of austral patagonian between last decades of 19th and early 20th centuries, as another in latam, are part of the capitalist history and they need to be more in debates and comparative analysis. references almaraz, araceli. 2018. “la empresa familiar y las familias empresariales en méxico. una propuesta teórica.” in familias empresariales en méxico, sucesión generacional y continuidad en el siglo xx, coordinated by araceli almaraz, and luis alfonso ramírez, 47-84. méxico: colegio de la frontera norte, second edition (on line). almaraz, araceli, and eloi serrano. 2016. “latin american economic history, business history and economics of enterprise: current trends.” jesb, journal of evolutionary studies in business, 1(1): 95-115. doi: 10.1344/jesb2016.1.j006. bandieri, susana, coord. 2001. cruzando la cordillera... la 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anuario ceeed 1:43-72. e. gómez & compañía. 1919. anuario de sucesos 1919-1920. guía general de chile, informaciones generales de comercio, industria importación, exportación, roles comerciales, industriales y profesionales, año ii. valparaíso: e. gómez, editores. figueiras, alberto josé, and hernán alejandro morero. 2013. “la teoría del consumo y de los ciclos en thorstein veblen.” revista de economía institucional, 15(28): 159-182. jaca, juan rodolfo. 1941. “la cap adquirió el frigorífico de río grande en t. del fuego.” revista argentina austral xiii (122): 17. jaca, juan rodolfo. 1968. “la actividad industrial de d. alejandro menéndez behety.” revista argentina austral, 434:14-19. lafuente, horacio. 1996. “los reyes de la patagonia.” todo es historia 350: 8-22. lafuente, horacio. 2015. tres reyes y una dama. buenos aires: literarte. lópez, andrés. 2011. “las empresas transnacionales en argentina: del modelo agroexportador a las reformas estructurales.” in el impacto histórico de la globalización en argentina y chile: empresas y empresarios, edited by geoffrey jones, and andrea lluch, 101-131. buenos aires, argentina: editorial temas. martinic beros, mateo. 1972. magallanes, síntesis de tierra y gente. buenos aires, argentina: f. de aguirre. martinic beros, mateo. 1975. las actividades iniciales de josé menéndez, 1875-1885. punta arenas, chile: instituto de la patagonia, serie monográfica 8. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb volume 5, number 2, 33-79, july-december 2020 doi.org/10.1344/jesb2020.2.j076 online issn: 2385-7137 cope committee on publication ethics http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb creative commons license 4.0 79 martinic beros, mateo. 1976. “la expansión económica de punta arenas sobre los territorios argentinos de la patagonia y tierra del fuego, 1885-1925.” anales instituto de la patagonia 7:5-42. martinic beros, mateo. 2001a. “patagonia austral: 1885-1925. un caso singular y temprano de integración regional autárquica.” in cruzando la cordillera... la frontera argentino chilena como espacio social, coordinated by susana bandieri, 459-486. neuquén: argentina [segunda edición] educo –editorial universitaria, serie publicaciones cehir-unco. martinic beros, mateo. 2001b. menéndez y braun. prohombres patagónicos. chile: ediciones universidad de magallanes. martinic beros, mateo. 2001c. nogueira el pionero. punta arenas: ediciones universidad de magallanes. martinic beros, mateo. 2002. breve historia de magallanes. punta arenas: ediciones universidad de magallanes. moyano, daniel 2015. desde la empresa. firmas familiares y estructura empresarial en la industria azucarera tucumana, 1895-1930. buenos aires: prometeo libros. north, douglass c. 1990. institutions, institutional changes and economic performance. cambridge: cambridge university press. ruffini, martha 2017. la patagonia mirada desde arriba. el grupo braun-menéndez behety y la revista argentina austral (1929-1967). rosario: prohistoria. sociedad anónima importadora y exportadora de la patagonia. 1929. revista argentina austral i (2). veblen, thorstein. 1965. teoría de la empresa de negocios. buenos aires: eudeba. originally published in english: theory of business enterprise (new brunswick: transaction books, 1904). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non-commercial-no derivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-comercial re-use and distribution, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered or transformed in any way. http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/jesb http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 203 is communication really food? epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences are we what we buy and what we consume?: crisis of identit y in hanif kureishi’s the decline of the west ali gunes karabuk university, turkey abstract this paper explores in hanif kureishi’s short story the decline of the west the harsh economic recession or what he calls in the story “a financial crash” and its inevitable crippling negative impact on the social life in general and on individual life in particular, especially in the wake of the collapse of wall street back in 2008, which has obviously changed the way of living for millions of people across the world, specifically in western societies in europe and north america. in so doing, the paper is divided into two parts. in the first part, it debates that the capitalism as an economic system has radically transformed not only the traditional commercial and financial system, but it has also given rise to the construction of consumption culture, which has eventually altered the ways people across the world used to live, together with their perception of life and identity. this view of identity has closely been related to personal happiness, satisfaction, comfort, and freedom, along with the social status and prestige in one’s life. as the second part of the paper argues, however, this view of identity has faced far-reaching crisis in the wake of the economic downturn since 2008 as represented in the life, view and identity of kureishi’s fictional character mike in the story after he is fired from his job in a bank. having lost his job, mike finds himself financially unable to keep his personal material comfort and satisfaction, meet the demands of his family and maintain his social status and prestige as in the past. hence his sense of self and stability falls apart; he loses his soul, as well as his vision of “the future” and eventually wants to “die” to rid of his psychological frustration and chaos. key words: capitalism, consumer culture, materialism, financial crisis, identity 204 a. gunes epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences this paper explores in hanif kureishi’s short story the decline of the west (2010) the harsh economic recession or what he calls in the story “a financial crash”, along with its inevitable crippling negative impact on the social life in general and on individual life in particular, especially in the wake of the collapse of wall street or global financial crisis during 2007-2008, which has obviously changed the way of living for millions of people across the world, specifically in western societies in europe and north america. in doing so, the paper is divided into two parts. in the first part, it debates that the capitalism as an economic system has radically transformed not only the traditional commercial and financial system since the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, but it has also given rise to the construction of consumption culture, which has eventually altered the ways people across the world used to live, together with their perception of life. this perception of life has closely been related to personal happiness, material satisfaction, comfort, freedom and more choices, as well as to the social status or prestige in one’s life: that is, this view of life has become a lifestyle, a way of living, an identity thoroughly associated with the level of prosperity and possession in the postmodern period. in its second part, however, the paper argues how this view of identity has faced far-reaching crisis in the wake of the economic downturn since 2007 as represented in the life, view and identity of kureishi’s fictional character mike in the decline of the west after he is fired from his job in a bank. having lost his job, mike finds himself at once financially unable not only to keep his personal material comfort and satisfaction and maintain his social status and prestige but also to meet the demands of his family as in the past. once he finds himself incapable of upholding his level of “buying” and “spending” power, therefore, mike feels insecure and lost, so that his sense of stable self falls apart, and he loses psychologically both his soul and firm ground under his feet, as well as his vision of “the future”, and eventually he wants to “die” to rid of his psychological disturbance and frustration and chaos (kureishi, 2010, p. 405). consumerism, unquestionably entwined with capitalism, is one of few crucial issues which visibly affects the daily life in the postmodern society, constantly shaping and re-shaping social structures and institutions, along with habits, perceptions and identities by imposing its hegemonic and controlling grip on individuals and group lives and behaviours(lasch, 1979; smith, 1986; mckibben, 1989; suzuki , 1997; baudrillard, 1998; beaud, 2001; emerald, 2004; malpas, 2005; dittmar, 2007a; todd, 2012; chotiudompant, 2013 and jansiz, 2014). as oed defines it, consumerism is an act of “the buying and using of goods and services” or “the belief that it is good for a society or an individual person to buy and use a large quantity of goods and services” (2010, p. 312). for encyclopaedia of science, technology, and ethics, it is “a way of life combining high level of material affluence with an emphasis on symbolic and emotional meanings associated with shopping and possessions” 205 are we what we buy and what we consume? crisis of identity in hanif kureishi’s the decline of the west epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences (2005, p. 538; emphasis added). douglas and isherwood (1996) succinctly describe consumerism as the possession of a product for the purpose of meeting certain needs as well as a part of social system which explains the desire to work for retaining goods with the aim of forming a relationship with other people in society (qtd in jansiz, 2014, p. 78). finally, suradech chotiudompant (2013) argues that “consumerism is a crucial issue nowadays because we need to consume not only to meet our basic needs but also to satisfy our wants, which are increasingly complex and hard to distinguish from the former. we need to consume…to create our identity, to state our political standpoint or to quench our insatiable desires” (p. 83; emphasis added). as seen in these definitions and arguments above, consumerism in the first place is merely linked to the satisfaction of basic material needs and demands of everyday life in which individuals simply buy and consume certain goods and use services as part of their daily lives and in which individuals basically also tend to accumulate material goods for the future to secure their lives. in this respect, consumerism is simply defined and shown as an inevitable act and part of life in its normal routine way to sustain life activities by meeting our basic needs, along with satisfying our desires in life. however, as the critics above and many others elsewhere point out, consumerism is not a naïve activity or issue in life to deal with in its ostensible meaning but has deep social, cultural, and ideological meanings generated by capitalism particularly as for the identity politics and formation because the “high level of material affluence” with its “symbolic and emotional meanings associated with shopping and possessions” on both social and personal levels is clearly identified not only with the material standing of a particular society but also with the lifestyle and way of life of an individual personal (fromm, 1978; mccracken, 1990; rose, 1996; arnould and thompson, 2005; vignoles, regalia, manzi, golledge, and scabini, 2006; kasser and kanner, 2004; malpas, 2005 and dittmar, 2007b).consumerism or consumer culture, which is very much stimulated by capitalist economic system worldwide through various means of communications such the advertisements such as tv, mass media, billboards, internet, online-shopping and so on, obviously bombard us every day to buy and consume commodities more and more by creating an interactive relationship in the markets: we depend on the commodities in the market just as much as the commodities in the market depends on us as individuals. in this inseparable relationship, what we buy and consume eventually shapes our way of life, organize our lifestyle, perception of life and our world view, as well as our social status and prestige in the late capitalist mass consumer period even sometimes beyond our knowledge and control, so that goods and services that we purchase and use give shifting and constant new meanings to our life and make us feel good and happy in our daily lives (mckibben, 1989; cook, 1992; andersen, 1995; suzuki, 1997 and cross, 2000). as for this “symbolic” and ideological meanings behind consumerism, 206 a. gunes epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences which obviously create a sense of who we are, for example, james b. twitchell (2002) argues that “the one unambiguous result of modern capitalism, of the industrial revolution, and of marketing…is: in the way we live now, you are not what you make. you are what you consume” (p. 1).moreover, danielle todd (2012) also sees a profound relationship between consumerism and identity politics and formation which, she argues, is firmly “tied to the creation and production of a sense of self ”, and for her, “products are imbued with a greater significance than what their primary function may be.” in her view, “today, it is virtually impossible to buy any product not embedded with certain symbols of identity acquired by the buyer knowingly or otherwise. recognizing this, it is possible to draw the conclusion that consumption functions as a way to create a sense of self ” (p. 48). in the consumer society, finally, jean baudrillard (1998) regards consumerism as the system of sign in the saussurian and lacanian sense or as a kind of motivation that he argues has its own language or code in which the identities of postmodern consumers are programmed and constructed without being sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious of this “language” and “code”: the circulation, purchase, sale, appropriation of differentiated goods and signs/objects today constitute our language, our code, the code by which the entire society communicates and converses. such is the structure of consumption, its language, by comparison with which individual needs and pleasures are merely speech effects (pp. 79–80). this quotation clearly tells us that commodities we buy and the way we use them are not just simple products but they have their own “language” and “code” which allows us to communicate with the outside world and vice versa, in which we are located into the pool of various complex meanings and relationships through the way we purchase and the way we consume. in the first place, how we are seen by the outside society is, in fact, decided and constructed as in the symbolic order of lacan by the “language” and “code” of “goods” which we buy and consume, yet in this process, the great truth behind the “language” and “code” of “goods” is never told, but the “language” and “code” of “goods” knowingly or unknowingly construct us as subjects in a way that we get used to leading this kind of life in time. hence there seems no escape from the “language” and “code” of “goods”, as well as from their untold own ideology always imposed on consumers. in the second place, what is suggested in the quotation above is that consumption on the personal level creates a sense of who we are and thus is closely bound up with our innermost desires and “pleasures” as in the freudian pleasure principle: the continuous pursuit of pleasure and happiness in the commodities we buy and consume in our daily lives. what we consume causes us to feel ourselves personally in different ways. the goods we consume, the clothes we wear, the house we own, and the car we drive visibly touch our subconscious realm – feeling, emo207 are we what we buy and what we consume? crisis of identity in hanif kureishi’s the decline of the west epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences tion and aspiration – and thus influence the way we feel and act. such a feeling boasts our subconscious desires and gives us a sense of identity in which we perceive the life in accordance with what we purchase and what we spend. in this view of identity, there is always stimulating to spend more and more to remain in the intensity of happiness and satisfaction. these commodities become part of us and vice versa. as baudrillard (1998) argues, therefore, the postmodern consumer is apparently placed under the influence of such a feeling into an “array of sham objects, of characteristic signs of happiness, and then waits . . . for happiness to alight’ (p. 31). likewise, “sham objects” also become the source of “happiness” and “pleasure” for mike in kureishie’s the decline of the west. he represents mike in a way that he acts in line with the demands of capitalism and consumer culture, in which he immensely enjoys the power of “buying” and “using goods”. simply, mike’s philosophy of life is that “everyone should have what they want whenever they want it” (kureishi, 2010, p. 407). since he is working for a bank and makes good money, therefore, mike noticeably becomes able not only to meet his own personal and family needs and make himself and family comfortable and happy whenever he wants but also to achieve a kind of social standing and prestige that position him at once into a discernible social situation where he is given an identity and place as an individual by the others outside. what is of vital importance for mike with his material affluence in the late capitalist period is to keep his current level of unavoidable power of buying and consumption in which he will able to manage to continue personal happiness, satisfaction, and freedom and keep his good social standing and esteem in his life. that is, mike has ideologically been taught by the postmodern economic system and consumer culture in the 1980s and 90s that “capitalism was flourishing and there was no finer and more pleasant way to live but under it, signing and spending” (p. 404; emphasis added). in the decline of the west, mikeworks for a bank. he has a good job and makes good money, even though he, aged 45, works twelve hours every day. the money he earns avails him of opportunity to lead a luxurious, comfortable material life, a life in which he is able to satisfy not only his own basic needs but also that of his family in line with the demands of consumer culture in the early decade of the twenty-first century. as soon as the story opens, the reader is immediately given the impression about the life mike and his wife imogen lead. once he arrives home in the prosperous outskirts of london from his job in the bank, for example, mike is always used to looking forward to “the door into the warm hall, hearing voices of his wife and children, and seeing that the cat come down the stairs to rub itself against him” (p. 401). he has a five-storey house with “off-street parking, overlooking a green” (p. 401), and also he, together with wife, has decorated a “hyper-shiny dining-room table where he liked to have supper and talk with his friends” in their 208 a. gunes epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences spare times (p. 402). in addition to this, mikeis “seriously planning more work on the garden as well as the rest of house”, and he had already built “a shed” for “the boys to play music in, fitted with a tv, drum-kit and sound system” (p. 402). moreover, why mike urgently desires to enlarge his garden has two reasons. first, “as [mike’s] boys liked to point out, other children at their schools lived in bigger places; their fathers were the bosses of record companies or financial advisors to famous footballers. mike, in corporate finance, was relatively small-time,” and secondly, his friends have been constantly “improving their properties. it was a natural law: you never lost money on a house” (p. 402). as seen in the quotations above, having a comfortable and luxurious house evidently stands for personal material power, happiness and satisfaction. hence it is this stimulation that psychologically forces him to go ahead and expand the scope of what makes him and his family happy and satisfied in their lives. what is more, these quotations also suggest that there is an implicit social and ideological pressure on mike and his children in that he strives to give a message to the outside world about his identity and social standing that he has enough material power and affluence to accommodate himself properly into an acceptable place in his social and cultural environment. as in the marxist world view, it is the spirit of time – social, cultural and political factors – which knowingly or unknowingly constructs the human identity, and thus mike feels himself obliged to carry out what is socially, culturally and ideologically demanded of him in the early decade of the twentieth-first century: that is, he should achieve “continuous material improvement” (p. 404). as for mike’s social material position, another sign of “continuous material improvement” in the decline of the west is that his two sons tom and billyare part and product of consumer culture. their education and the goods they demand give an idea about the family’s material position, and kureishi portraits them in a way that they become representatives of almost all the children across the world today. mike’s sons are “attending private schools” (p. 404), which puts him and his children at once into a different but higher social status achieved by mike’s level of earning and consumption because today not many families are able to afford to send their children to “private schools” in the world. “as well as attending private schools”, mike’s sons also take “tennis, spanish, piano, swimming, signing and karate lessons” in accordance with their status, and they, like children of well-off families, “frequently attended the cinema, the theatre and football matches” (p. 2). given the fact that private education institutions have dramatically increased, along with the increase in the number of their students in recent years across the world, the situation of mike’s children is not surprising and unusual but part of the general state of affairs in the postmodern era. in order not to fall behind other children around him, mike feels it necessary to participate in the competition for the education of his children. sending children to “private schools” sometimes overtly and sometimes cov209 are we what we buy and what we consume? crisis of identity in hanif kureishi’s the decline of the west epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences ertly means good education and then good job in the future, so that many families tend to send their children to “private schools”, even though it requires hard work and a respectable amount of income and material wealth to achieve this purpose. however, the deep meaning and implication behind is that the education at “private schools” also illuminates the power of money and spending of a particular family associated with its social identity, position and prestige because “private schools” become a sign of who mike is; he is judged and categorized in a way that he is different from the others, who are unable to send their children to “private schools”. finally, the demands of mike’s sons never end. like children of many contemporary families, they are in a music band and thus want to take the “guitar lesson”, yet they first need “guitar, an amp and a microphone”(p. 407).as seen in these quotations above, what mike, now unemployed, is required to do for his sons entails the material affluence and consumption, yet all these objects “private school”, “guitar lesson”, “guitar, an amp and a microphone” have their “language” and “code” in the baudrillardian sense which give an ideological and cultural message to the outside world about mike’s lifestyle and identity, along with that of his sons. it is not only mike’s sons who enjoy a luxurious life but also his wife imogen who also becomes a sign and “language” of high material standard through her life style in the decline of the west. as soon as the story begins, imogen immediately gives the reader an impression as if she was a queen and had servants at her service all round to clean her house and cook for her. first, she is seen in the hall as “carrying gin and tonic”, and the reader learns that she is used to having “bath” everyday as part of her life at home (p. 401). moreover, the narrator tells us that imogen has “never knowingly ingested anything non-organic” (p. 402), and she always “appeared to dress in diamonds and gold when at lunch with her friends” (p. 406) and continuously asks her husband for “a new computer” (p. 407). as seen in these quotations above, imogen is different from a traditional woman who had satisfied herself with what she had, who had not been demanding and who had led a normal simple life, yet imogen’s life apparently seems comfortable, luxurious and expensive, and she seems to have been captivated by this kind of life. without a certain level of money, the life she leads is not possible. not only does it require money and material prosperity, but it also entails continuous spending or consumption. having taken all these quotations above into consideration, mike, as an annoying sculptor in the decline of the west refers to, is “the cult of money” (p. 404): he earns money and spends it extravagantly. it is what he is culturally and ideologically required to do by capitalist consumer culture: in the eyes of an annoying sculptor, mike is what he earns and what he spends. mike’s way of life and worldview, together with that of his family, have been shaped very much by this culture, which has constantly inculcated them with an idea that “there was no finer and 210 a. gunes epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences more pleasant way to live but under it [capitalism], signing and spending.” under this perception of life, mike and his family members have continuously desired to improve further their material affluence and conditions not only to satisfy their basic material needs but also to retain their social position as culturally and ideologically requested by the postmodern world view. this shiny and luxurious lifestyle is very colourful, talismanic and captivating, and what mike buys and how he consumes is obviously imbued with a greater significance than their primary meanings and functions may be. that is, the way he purchase and the way he consumes function as a means to create a sense of mike’s self, in which he is called “the cult of money”, or he just calls himself “the delivery man” (p. 407). these attributions evidently form mike’s worldview and the identity assigned to him, and he, like many of us, is just a mechanical money-making machine, which replaces his true spiritual identity inside. as for this view of identity, adem caylak (2011, december 12) argues that “the production relationship of capitalism and the system of its values regard everything in life from the materialistic point of view and [thus] ignores what should dominate human life – morality and virtue”, and in such a system of relationship, he continues to state that “being just and good is not given priority; instead, earning much money and attaining power are accepted as success in today’s world.” in such a view of identity, mike is nothing but the one who helps capitalism to sustain and further improve its existence in an enthralled way because the level of consumption is, in fact, the measure of the economic system – his value is what we buys and consumes. in addition, as in baudrillard’s words above, each goods mike buys and each activity he conducts become “signs”, “codes”, and “language” or what i call an ideology by which he communicates with the larger outside world; he gives the outside world different messages where he fits with the social, cultural and political structure of the outside physical world. besides, whether or not they are aware of it, the identities of mike and his family members are also very much constructed and controlled by the capitalist consumerist lifestyle, so that mikeis psychologically, culturally and ideologically shown and mesmerized in the 1980s/90s that “capitalism was flourishing and there was no finer and more pleasant way to live but under it, singing and spending” in the globalized postmodern world. however, this “finer and more pleasant way to live” under capitalism by “singing and spending”, gets into serious trouble at once when “capitalism was cracking under the weight of its contradictions as the marxists had predicted”, and kureishi radically questions the view of the fragile identity constructed by the forged perception of capitalism and of its ingrained consumer culture through the life and views of mike in the decline of the west: that is, “if there was no comfort, what then were consolations of capitalism?” (kureishi, 2010, p. 408)for the continuation of their existence, as seen here, capitalism and consumer culture had to advertise and propagate implicitly the ideology of “comfort” to show that the capitalist eco211 are we what we buy and what we consume? crisis of identity in hanif kureishi’s the decline of the west epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences nomic system was able to achieve a constant stable growth, low unemployment and low inflation, which would have made individuals happy, comfortable, and prosperous in their lives. hence it is obvious today and represented in the story that this ideology has gradually become in time a way of life and eventually a view of identity, forcing individuals unconsciously to buy and consume goods more and more so as to be comfortable and happy in their lives, even though sometimes they did not need to do so. thus, kureishi illuminates in his short story how this perception of ideology or way of life and identity mike has experienced excessively so far in his life are, in fact, false, lie, fragile and vulnerable. mike eventually comes to realize this fact once he is fired from his job in the bank and forsakes almost everything behind: that is, the promise of constant stability by capitalism has been a big veiled lie. indeed, there is a close relationship between the dismissal of mike from his job in the bank and the financial crisis which took place in 2007/8 with a wave of bank nationalisations across north america and europe possibly due to international trade imbalances, the higher credit rate, the deterioration in export earnings and weak stock markets, lax lending and so on (wolf, 2010; sorkin, 2010; stigliz, 2010; peters, 2012). this financial crisis, though it had started mainly in north america and europe, has eventually turned into a global financial crisis, throwing economies around the world into a great recession since the great depression of the 1930s (wolf, 2007; reinhart and rogoff, 2009). among many crippling negative impacts of this recession on the economics around the world are deep uncertainties, panic and worry about the future, yet what has been alarming for some time is the sharp increase in the rate of unemployment after many employees across the world had been sacked from their jobs, leading them not only to lose their proper income but also to be deprived of their power of “buying and spending”, which had given them a sense of who they are in the capitalist market economy. eventually, there has been a major shock to the consumer culture, which not only sustains the capitalist economy on track but also gives an impression to the consumers that the economy is moving steadily in its stable way. this economic slump was also a blow to the identity because consumer culture had often propagated through various means of advertisements the view that there has been close relationship between money and identity or between the “buying and spending” power and identity since the advent of the capitalist economic system in which consumers are identified with what they buy and what they consume. hence when this relationship becomes unbalanced, the capitalist economic system, which mainly dominates the economies today around the world, momentously suffers a situation of crisis and paralysis. once the basis of this view is significantly undermined and crumbled across the world, therefore, consumers finds themselves in a state of identity crisis and thus become very fragile, restless, hopeless and pessimistic about future in their lives; their existence and expectations fall apart and crumble away, leaving their place to a sense of misery and 212 a. gunes epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences fragmentation in life (jansiz, 2014). in the decline of the west, similarly, kureishi represents such kind of fragmented and crippled identity through the life of mike in the wake of his dismissal from his job in the bank. mike, like many employees across the world, becomes the victim of the “financial crash” of 2007-2008 when “the financial system was out of control” in the british society in the early decade of the twenty-first century (kureishi, 2010, pp. 407, 401). when the story of the decline of the west opens, the reader learns at once the news that mike has been fired from his job in the bank. as soon as he enters home, he appears to the reader in shock and crisis; he wants to “give his wife the news straight away”, yet she does not pay attention to him but continues her life as usual (p. 401). with the crippling and disturbing feeling of his dismissal in his mind, he strives to get involved in things to remove himself from the psychological disturbance, so that he immediately gets “a frozen meal from the freezer” and puts it “in the microwave. waiting for it to heat up, he poured himself a glass of wine” and blankly stands “at the long windows which overlooked the garden” (p. 401). moreover, mike cannot control himself but desires to engage himself further with other activities, so that he “switched on the garden lights and, looking out at the new deck where last summer they’d held barbecues” (p. 401), and then mike sees “three £20 notes imogen had left for the cleaner. mike picked one of them up and looked at it closely. how had he never noticed what sardonic little mona lisa smile the blinged-up monarch wore, mocking even, as if she pitied the vanity and greed the note inspired” (p. 402). as seen in these quotations above, it is obvious that mike seems very much confused, frustrated, fragmented and fallen apart in views because the means job and money which had added meaning to his life and identity in various ways have gone out of his hand, leaving him in a great limbo. he strongly feels an urgent need “to be cheered up tonight” for letting his frustrating and disturbing feeling disappear (p. 403), so that mike endeavours to keep himself busy doing other things just to drown his sorrow. in addition, his frustration also increases further once he looks at one of £20 notes and then perceives for the first time “language” and message which communicate with him. the paper money simply stands for exchange of goods, yet at the same time it is closely associated with the power of “purchase and spending”, together with a sense of who we are and of social status. thus, mike, in this “sardonic” and “mocking” situation, perhaps comes to realize the real meaning lying behind the paper money: that is, the paper money is not naïve but actually a sign which provides us knowingly and unknowing with a sense of self: we are actually what we buy and what we consume, yet this sense of identity, as in the case of mike, is a false identity in which he also becomes the victim of consumer culture under the perception that he is free and comfortable and has more options when he buys and consumes. 213 are we what we buy and what we consume? crisis of identity in hanif kureishi’s the decline of the west epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences mike’s crippled sense of identity may derive from three reasons. first, now he feels unable to sustain his own personal luxury and comfort. although he had worked hard and long hours, he, like many people around the world, had enjoyed it fully. but now he comes to realize that his luxurious and comfortable life was fake and apparently subjected to fragility, so that what capitalism and consumer culture have pledged – “comfort”, happiness and satisfaction – was deception and illusion. secondly, he is a father and has responsibility for his family because his two sons and luxury addict, acquisitive wife are so demanding in their way of life and thus always want to have whatever they want a new “guitar, an amp and a microphone”, as well as “ a new computer”, and so on. these demands obviously put him under huge burden and pressure because he is unable to fulfil their habitually never-ending demands since he is unemployed now and is also in debt; he is psychologically intimidated and worried about his material weakness because he has already declined in his power of “buying” and “spending”, even though his family does not know yet. the third reason behind his frustration and crush is also the view that mike seems to have lost his social status and standard in society. this situation is clearly seen in his rumination, while roaming aimlessly from one room to another in his house: “there in the semi-darkness, gripping and ungripping his fist, he wondered whether he might go mad with fury. he knew he would be shut out now from the company of those he knew and liked, becoming a sort of ‘disappeared’” (p. 405). as seen clearly in this quotation and in many others throughout the story, the “financial crash” causes obviously not only the collapse of the dream-like polished life, but it also gives an idea that what individuals identity or social statushave gained through the material improvement and purchasing is not a real but a transitory and false one, so that once individuals encounter reality and lose a bit of what they have materially gained, they immediately find themselves in panic and crisis and lose their sense of security and their centre of self in life. hence mike realizes “how easy it was to fall…suddenly [it] would be best…to die” for making away with his psychological frustration and unhappiness instead of living in such a crippling misery and frustration of his downfall (p. 405). eventually “the financial crash” leads mike and his friends to think of different alternatives until the economic downturn recovers because they seek to survive the crisis as much as possible. for example, some of mike’s colleagues state “their intention of becoming gardeners until the recession lifted; apparently the only requirements were an empty head and a desire to develop your muscles. others had said they might be forced into teaching. mike, at forty five, had no idea what he would do. first he had to lose everything” (p. 403). as seen in this quotation, there may be possibility to turn back to the traditional way of life in which there seems not much risk. one can earn his/her living as long as his/her muscles are strong enough 214 a. gunes epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences to work. but what is so dangerous today is that people, like mike, cannot manage to do so because their abilities are dulled and thwarted very much by the capitalist market economy in which they are considered machines to consume. mike, for instance, has fallen apart in his view of life, as well as in “his idea of future” (p. 401), so that he cannot recover himself and decide what to do “until the recession lifted.” it is loss of his sense of ability and centre, yet towards the end of the story, mike also starts to think of finding “a smaller place, sharing the household duties, like everyone else” in life (p. 408). that mike and his colleagues, like many other people across the world, think of alternative way of life and earning in the postmodern era because capitalism is full of its “contradictions” and thus is unreliable, fragile and vulnerable to outside negative forces. in this respect, the traditional way of life seems an alternative, even though it is not an easy option today. what was the reason which has forced the current capitalist economic to undergo crisis and recession? the answer is given by mike in the story: “…like many people, mike had also worried whether the present catastrophe was punishment for years of extravagance and self-indulgence; that that was the debt which had to be paid back in suffering” (p. 404; emphasis added). it is easily seen in mike’s own life, as well as in the lives of his family members. as the narrator informs the reader, for example, mike’s house is full of “paint cans, broken children’s toys, a decade’s worth of discarded purchases and bags of credit card receipts” (p. 405; emphasis added). alone this quotation is, in fact, enough to show us the level and magnitude of consumption in the postmodern period. in conclusion, consumerism in its simplistic naïve meaning is closely related to what zygmunt bauman (2007) calls “a happy life”, and “indeed, the society of consumers is perhaps the only society in human history to promise happiness in earthly life, and happiness here and now and in every successive ‘now’; in short, and instant and perpetual happiness” (p. 44). thus, today individuals pay much attention to the charm of this temporary “happiness”, so that consumerist society, entirely bound up with the view of capitalism based on the perpetual “profit”, always stimulates the idea that the more we buy commodities and the more we consume them will uphold our happiness and satisfaction in life. however, consumerism, as jean baudrillard and danielle todd have argued above, is far beyond the mere act of “buying” and “consuming”; it is a way of life; it is an ideology in which commodities we buy and consume have symbolic meaning, “language” and “code” which actually not only tell us who we are as a person but also fits us into society and culture where we are judged and branded in the eyes of the others. in this respect, our identity is constantly constructed and re-constructed by what we buy and what we consume, so that we are stimulated in a perpetual way to spend more and more on commodities since they will ultimately enable us to increase not only personal happiness and satisfaction but also social status as seen in the life of mike in the decline of the 215 are we what we buy and what we consume? crisis of identity in hanif kureishi’s the decline of the west epiphany: journal of transdisciplinary studies, vol. 8, no. 2, (2015) (special issue) © faculty of arts and social sciences west. as discussed above, on the other hand, this kind of identity and social status is subjected to be fragile and vulnerable to possible negative conditions in the economic system. as kureishi represents it in the story through the life of mike, possible negative economic imbalances may bring about disappointment, anger, frustration, worry about the future and a sense of weakness once the power of “buying” and “consuming” declines. when his power of “buying” and “consuming” declines, 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(2004). state of the world 2004: the consumer society. new york: w. w. norton. 3 © creative commons with attribution (cc-by) published by the ufs http://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/trp town and regional planning 2022 (80):3-5 | issn 1012-280 | e-issn 2415-0495 how to cite: kuhn, j. 2022. theorising urban space. town and regional planning, no. 80, pp. 3-5. mr jens kuhn, town planner and former manager: housing land and forward planning, cape town city council, po box 1410, milnerton, 7441. phone: 072 810 4650, email: <jenskuhn@kingsley.co.za> theorising urban space commentary by jens kuhn, 24 march 2022 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2415-0495/trpxxx a reply to ... a critical lefebvrian perspective on planning in relation to informal settlements in south africa by marie huchzermeyer, published in town and regional planning, 79, pp. 44-54. henri lefebvre’s prime contribution to theorising about society was to bring on board the concept of “space”, or perhaps more correctly, geography. well into the 1940s marxian analysis of capitalism remained wedded exclusively to time, that being the large-scale currents of change in history. the effect of urban and regional form, and its role in the reproduction of capitalism, received no mention because it complicated and fragmented marxist analysis immeasurably. unlike space, time can be treated as the same and regular, no matter where you are. spatial structure differs significantly from one location to the next. lefebvre’s was insistent, however, that no critique of capitalism is viable without incorporating the decisive role played by spatial form. capitalism periodically reconfigures regions, imposing a new form. this is essential for its survival. but the new form has a strong reciprocal impact on how the next generation of capitalism itself looks. it gets adjusted for another round for profit-taking. incorporation of space as a variable in marxist analytics would thus have to account for both what kind of space gets produced and how it then constrains the further evolution of capitalism. nowadays, this theoretical insight lies idle once again, mainly because marxism, and its central motive of defeating capitalism, is quite out of favour. neo-marxism has let go of that motive to concentrate instead more directly on human emancipation. this is to be achieved through suitable reforms rather than a displacement of capitalism. a focus on reform has meant that critical social theorists have gradually become indistinguishable from the establishment-left within most domestic politics. moreover, whether working from inside or outside the systems of power, a pre-occupation with micro adjustments to legislative frameworks, in order to achieve rather general goals such as social justice, gender equality, welfare provisions and so on, have resulted in a ‘forgetting’ of space once again. obviously, in the course of policy debates, reference to space is frequently made in the form of ‘disadvantaged townships’, ‘informal areas’, or even specific locations. yet these references are in the ‘passive’ mode: they get used as empirical examples as to why existing policy remains inadequate. they argue that such urban places are what they are because they have been neglected by existing instruments of urban policy. in the spirit of an inclusionary city thus, they should be upgraded and supported unconditionally. such spaces are thus never regarded as ‘active’, namely as agents in their own making, as stamping their will on the political economy of the moment. one can view them as not having been ‘left out’ at all but rather as simply ‘different’ to the dominant land policy-machine, that being capitalism’s planning frameworks. in other words, unlike the establishment-left, such places remain emphatically ‘outside’ the system. as lefebvre suggests, they may, in fact, desire to remain outside, and as such are concrete and physical expressions of noncapitalism, of alternative social arrangements essential for some people’s survival. in that sense, they come into view as a third mode of city-production, alongside private real-estate development and state-driven delivery. huchzermeyer does us a great service in picking up this neglected thread of social theory. in lefebvrian terms, one would have expected slovo park’s leaders to push back fully against the standardising force of state-produced space. but they did not. instead, we note a selective resistance. in as far as land-layout and location go, they did resist, but in respect of securing external capital investment and utility servicing, they did not. the community had been fully focused on appropriating something material from the system: services, rights-in-land, funding, and so on. these are also the entitlements promised by the socioeconomic rights movement! but does such selectivity preserve lefebvre’s hope of retaining an alternative to capitalism? or, in neo-marxist terms, does such selectivity retain spontaneity, self-organisation and self-management, and an opposition to features of modern town planning? put more abstractly: does such selective resistance draw communities into capitalism’s ambit, thereby extinguishing hope, and their very means of survival? in http://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/trp http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2415-0495/trp79i1.2 4 kuhn 2022 town and regional planning (80):2-5 my interpretation, it does not. yet it does contain lessons both for social theorising and for planning practice. to explicate the lesson for planning practice, a quick detour into economics is needed. by examining the survival strategies employed by the extremely poor communities in india’s chittagong slum more closely, the western trained economist mohammad yunus uncovered the potential power of ‘social collateral’ among those whom formal banks had rejected. these were people left without the opportunity to benefit from the gains offered by the formal economic system on account of having no material collateral – not even a donkey or a sewing machine. what they did have is social solidarity. that is, they had the will and agency to vouch for each other and to repay tiny loans on each other’s behalf should individuals fail to meet their obligations. that demonstrates community solidarity well beyond political rhetoric. it is a sign of collective commitment and, one could say, a much better definition of ‘community’. the condition was, however, that loans had to be available from lenders to whomever the savings group put forward. this simple deal tied a social process to a banking procedure, both of which had operated in complete isolation previously. orthodox economic theory teaches that loans must be backed up by material collateral of some kind, while savings groups knew that all they ever had was each other. in establishing the grameen bank thus, yunus stepped out of the formal logic of finance capital, giving birth to a new kind of banking.1 a sceptic might fairly ask at this stage: is this not just capitalism’s method for extending its homogenising influence? not quite, i would argue. in the same way that the joe slovo community drew selectively on the formal cityproduction process, the grameen communities drew finance from the market, but retained the right to determine who gets a loan. 1 toulmin, s. 2001. return to reason. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, pages 63-65. viewed in this way, one notices a weakness in our urban theory. is the observation made by mohammad yunus in economics awaiting us in planning via huchzermeyer’s ‘inquisitive transductive planner’? to a considerable extent, her article already points us in that direction. in spatial planning terms, one might thus rephrase yunus’ challenge thus: how can communities2 in informal areas lock into the wealth and productivity of formal urban environments, and do so by drawing on, and offering, their agency/resources3 but without loosing their spatial practices? armed with this question, the inquisitive planner may simply stumble upon an institutional arrangement (like yunus’ innovative bank) needed to handle “deals” between differing modes of space production. the economic analogy is, of course, meant simply to open up a line of thought in planning. since money is uniform, unlike space, there are hardly any complications of uniqueness in economics. nonetheless, inventing appropriate institutions to cross the formal/informal seam in urban environments is something local planners ought to pursue, and future incarnations of spluma, and activists, must attend to. turning to theorising: an important point to note is that the grameen bank did not seek to replace capitalism. it simply sought to bring to millions of poor some of the fruits of a powerful financial system. and it did so without shattering their networks of trust or mutual support. no doubt, this development lies at the base of india’s current economic growth. secondly, the grameen bank treated the poor as responsible human beings with whom one can transact, not as objective referents. since any transaction is 2 in this instance, ‘communities’ are defined as collectives that are willing and able to commit and mutually support each other over time. it does not refer to populations of people who happen to be living in a geographic place, as defined by outsiders. 3 not resources they are ‘entitled to’ (but do not yet have), according to the human rights lobby. a give-and-take, it naturally comes with the loss of some autonomy in respect of informality. but which aspect of informality exactly: site selection, layout determination, self-redevelopment? it may be either or all depending on the specific case. conversely, residents of an informal area may thus, by definition, be unable to appeal to the formal sector for an adjudication in, say, an internal land-use dispute, because, in the formal world of land use, disputes are typically settled via the enforcement of a prescribed policy rule. moreover, self-management means simply that. at present, critical social theory has no room for such concessions. if anything, it dreams of pushing back the homogenising influence of the modern neoliberal state and comforts itself that such sentiments amount to support for the poor. defending informality is then used as one way of countering neoliberal’s spread. with such an approach, however, the poor are implicitly treated as pawns in a different struggle: one in which they are engaged by neither the system nor the theoreticians who counter the system. to repeat, informal areas hereby become points of reference in the human rights discourse and thus remain, apparently, without their own agency. this is one weakness of any meta-narrative, or of theorising at the super-local scale. furthermore, at the level of standard politics, the demand for individual human rights and liberties is bound to prevail over calls for community self-determination, because the referent is less precise, namely a generic segment of the population – the informal sector! referring to a category of people is politically much safer than pointing to a specific location for upgrading. and thus politics side-lines the question of space as best it can. in this instance again, space made passive. planning practice has, by dint of circumstance, partially avoided such a dilemma. it is hardly possible to be involved in actual planning without being specific about the piece of geography and population at play. treating space in passive terms is only available to philosophers of planning. kuhn 2022 town and regional planning (80):2-5 5 huchzermeyer’s proposal that planners should be more ‘inquisitive’ about the mechanics of spontaneous settlement production (and i would add their operations) and how they facilitate alternative forms of human networking, human survival, and so on, is not misplaced. such an enquiry into ‘spatial practice’ takes us to the point where space, via its residents, gets viewed as an active player in city-building. such a curiosity is not limited to informal areas though. frequently, formal sector planners are themselves unaware of how their daily application of rules, standards, and land-use rights produce certain environments and not others. typically, their diagnosis as to why a plan or layout cannot be fully realised is because it has not been adequately legislated or codified. the plan’s distortion is rarely regarded as being due to a different dynamic springing, and pushing back from the specific location’s people. being alert to ‘spatial practice’, even in this instance, may yield surprising and new insights. huchzermeyer’s particular brand of research into planning practice is welcomed and should be emulated as a matter of urgency. language circle: journal of language and literature 14(1) october 2019 p-issn 1858-0165 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id e-issn 2460-853x 103 the realization of the bad impact of early capitalism in oscar wilde’s “the happy prince” nor holis faculty of humanities diponegoro university, semarang, indonesia email: olis.nor93@gmail.com ratna asmarani faculty of humanities diponegoro university, semarang, indonesia email: ratna_asmarani@yahoo.com abstract living under feudalism and capitalism seems very good for those who were born from rich people. it is because they do not have to struggle of their life and would get everything as desire. meanwhile, it is very hard for poor people because their live is worse and if they do not struggle of the life they might die. “the happy prince” is the story that shows how the feudalism and early capitalism work in the society. people live contradictory under those systems. fortunately, since the capitalism applies, the poor people find new hope. their laborpower is paid so that they are to feed themselves and the family. besides, they work for the capitalists’ happiness. this new term of live is not a big different from feudal system. the payment for the poor who work is a very little difference that makes the poor happy. this research aims to describe how the feudalism and the early capitalism work in the short story. using the sociological approach as to the evidences of the feudalism and the early capitalism system in the story is chosen to describe the impacts of those systems toward society. the result of this research shows that poor people accept the system of capitalism than the feudalism. it is because their labor-power is paid. this condition is different from previous system (feudalism) that makes poor people are getting worse because they must work freely. keywords: feudalism, early capitalism, contradictory life. introduction critic to the literature is needed to find the social condition of the works’ age clearly. according to schram & steet through their article (1984) that literature is the portrait of social phenomena. therefore, reading the literature is way to understand what things happen in the society. literature records all aspects or elements of the social environment. it is the one of characteristic of literature production that it is the portrayal of tragedy with distinctive intellect of imagery. (sumbul, 2014). “the happy prince” is the short story written by oscar wilde in the queen victoria reign. by the short story, it is able to get the meaning of the era. it captures the phenomena and social condition because the literature is not something fallen from the sky. its process is connected to the background of its creators. “the happy prince” tells about gold statue with jewels and little swallow. the short story serves the controversial and attractive issues. it presents the poverty and the child labor of the luxury victorian age. when the prince was live, he could not see real situation because all people around him made him busy with the party, playing, and dancing. they built the high wall to separate the prince’s life and the low society. therefore, the prince knew that the condition is good as he get in the palace. to see the deepest vision of the story that critics to the social phenomenon on the working class against capitalized upper class and the practical of capitalism itself. for language circle: journal of language and literature, 14(1) october 2019 104 example, the young king or prince who lives happily in the palace with high wall so that he is unable to see the whole condition of his people. meanwhile, after his death, his people situate the prince’s statue above the city so that he is able to see all the aspects of his people’s situation like poverty, child labor and slavery caused of capitalism (wilde, 1909, p. 1). meanwhile, “the happy prince” short story is the story that captures the social condition of the age when it was written. it conveys information about the whole condition of the age. high contradictory to the aesthetic aspect of the literature, it might be said about the critic of the era. according to damono (1978) the short story is made for entertaining and understanding about society. hence, it is able to make the reader understand many aspects by reading it deeply. it is also needed some theories such as psychoanalysis, feminism, capitalism and so on depends on the issues. the researcher tries to prove the realization of bad impact of early capitalism in “the happy prince” by oscar wilde. the social condition that becomes to be focused is the early capitalism and feudalism practice to the society. it would be discussed based on the evidences such as the idea that presented in the conversation and symbols in the story. methodology this research deals with a short story entitled “the happy prince” that written by oscar wilde during victorian era. literature research methodology is applied to this research in order to explain the question based on question research above. the contextual method would be used to this research. the researcher applies the extrinsic element to the story. the method of collecting data is library research where the researcher gains the data from reading the book and the short story itself. the primary data is from oscar wilde’s short story entitled “the happy prince”. the researcher decides the relevant data from the story through the dialogue and monologue. those data would be interpreted to find the social condition of the era by applying the extrinsic elements (theories) that have correlation with the research question. theoretical review it is already stated above that certain theory is needed to understand the short story and to read it deeply in order to find the issues. those theories are based on the problem of the research. “the happy prince” is the short story that coveys many ideas of the society. one of the ideas of the story that become the focus of this research is about feudalism and the existence of early capitalism. theory of feudalism feudalism is kind of abstraction which is derived from some facts of early european history. the term of feudalism is invented in eighteen century. it primarily is not only about the economic system or social system but the government method. therefore, feudalism is caused of the power of economic of the land owners and this term is not talking about the state and the citizen but the lord and vassals. basically, feudal is the conceptual of basic sovereignty and social contrast and political military arrangement between lords of the middle ages and the vassals. the concept of feudalism feudalism is the dominance structure that is controlled by the monarch or other lords to maintain their power toward the society of their claimed region. it was usually done by making political affair with the local leaders. it is a way of structuring society around and relationships derive from holding of land in exchange for service or labor. the lords would grant the vassals for various services. those services provide protection to the lord in maintaining their power or in other word the vassals protect the domination of the lord. the important of this protection would stem from the way in which feudalism develop. therefore, the feudalism system creates problem to the slavery because they language circle: journal of language and literature 14(1) october 2019 p-issn 1858-0165 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id e-issn 2460-853x 105 who were in high position of the society were able to take and throw the slave or labor at will. during this system, the international trade slave was common and it made the lower people even more at the bottom. (davis, 2008, p. 46). king was the leader of feudal system because the king owned all the land and the country so that he was able to decide to whom the land would be leased. he would allow and trust tenants to lease land for him after they swear an oath of fealty to the king at all the times. they then known as barons and they had powerful and complete control of the land they leased from the king and automatically wealthy. meanwhile, the barons who were also known as manors became the executor of the feudal system. as the lord, they were completely able to control of the land and to establish their own system of justice and minted their own money and set their own taxes as well. the land that had been leased, the barons had to serve the royal council, pay rent and provide the king with knights for military service to save them (okey, 1986, pp. 21-22). barons also had to provide lodging and food when the king and other royal council travelled around his realm. based on the article entitled medieval life-feudalism and the feudal system that edited by scott michel rank and uploaded on history website, the knights that provided by the barons as for military service also had to protect the barons and their families from everything that threaten them. the position and the power of the king and the barons were absolutely saved and become rise because the knights would be loyal to protect them. the knights also able kept as much of the land as they wished for their own personal use and distributed to the villains or serfs. even they could get as much as they wished, they were not as rich as the barons. meanwhile, the serfs were given land by the knights because they belonged to poor people. they had to serve and provide the knights’ needs such as food and other services with free labor. they had no right to speak and were not allowed to leave manors. even for getting married, they had to ask their lord’s permission. the bad impact of feudal system the feudalism as the dominant of political practices brought the stability power among lords. serfs forced to support the infrastructure by providing essential goods and services. this was the combination of with a system that organized to protect and to maintain a steady balance of the people in high position. the true advantages of this system were felt by the lords and their associates. feudalism as the instrumental for social order provided some unity and security in local areas but there was no strong central government to enforce laws fairly. therefore, the king would accede to the barons to have power (davis, 2008, p. 57). it was because there was no central power that controlled the system, it was easy to use force, violence and lies to get one’s way. according to the article that written by campbell community school entitled you decide… feudalism: good or bad?, it was probably the war happen among lords because the different interests. hence, the feudalism often did not treat people equally or let them move up in society. special treatment would only be received by them who were born from lord or royal families without effort or earning it and people born as serf were supposed to remain serf. therefore, serfs were not allowed to leave lord’s lands. they had to work a whole life. they worked for three or four days a week as a payment to the lords or vassals for allowing them to farm for themselves on other days. their movement and daily activities were restricted because they could not leave the land without permission. the early of capitalism the concept of capitalism started to change the feudal system around nineteenth century in europe. it is believed that the renaissance impact to the system cause this language circle: journal of language and literature, 14(1) october 2019 106 period created great revival of art, science, literature and human freedom. other aspect that that plays a role to the transition from feudalism to capitalism was the new trade option of the modern economic system. the internal war happened because there was no central role of the system. the concept of capitalism emerged as key concepts designed to european since the feudal system ended. the term of capitalism is the option of social action in order to structural imperative. capitalism is defined as a stock of resources or production factors that controlled by individual capitalist combines with other factors such as labors. as in marxist, political economy formulated social relationship between capitalists who have properties over the means of production and wage-labors who only have labor-power to sell in the market. therefore, this concept of ‘capital’ is not the factor of production but it describes the component of social relationship (holton, 1985, p. 15). it remains the question whether the capitalism view as a system of exchange relation or system of production relations. in fact, the capitalism do not deny those term it requires both exchange and production as the social activities and it might be seen as of primary casual significance. the implication of those options is to consider the place of the market and market relations within the economy and society. capitalism is seen as the system of exchange which relies on market exchange of communities through the price for those who centralized the exchange or distribution to the constitution of society hence, it appears as free market transection between private interests of capitalism term (holton, 1985, p. 16). the relationship between society and the market principle can be seen by the alternative way that the capitalism is not only as the market for the product but also for its labor-force. the concept of slavery exists in different form as wage-labor. the wage-labor is not seen as optional to capitalism but it is a fundamental component of it. this is the transformation of the western world from the last system to the wage-labor capital relation. “this turn shifts historical analysis away from a concern for market exchange and commerce towards change in the relationship between labors and social organization of production” (holton, 1985, p. 16). analysis “the happy prince” was written by the author of victorian era, oscar wilde. the story tells about the gold statue of the prince and the swallow. the swallow helps the prince to spread the value things over his body to poor people. in the end of the story, the swallow die and the statue becomes worthless so people get it down and burn it. “the happy prince” is about the sacrifice of two there are the prince who give away all his value things and the swallow that stay and behind to carry out the prince’s wishes and forget its journey to stay with. as has been mentioned above that the literature as the media for recording the social phenomena, “the happy prince” describes social condition of the victorian era. the story is able to convey the about the luxury life, prosperity, slavery, and poverty. the analysis would try to describe two questions below: the practices of feudalism and early capitalism in oscar wilde’s “the happy prince” short story this part is going to explain the evidences of feudal system and capitalism in the story. feudalism is the system is the dominance structure that is controlled by the monarch or other lords to maintain their power toward the society of their claimed region and the labors work for them without paying. meanwhile, the capitalism is defined as a stock of resources or production factors that controlled by individual capitalist combines with other factors such as labors. the labors of the system get payment based on their work. in other word, the labors only have their labor-power to sell to capitalists. here some evidences of the system in story. language circle: journal of language and literature 14(1) october 2019 p-issn 1858-0165 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id e-issn 2460-853x 107 i lived in palace where there were no sadness. in the daytime i played with my friends in the garden, and in the evening i danced. there was a high wall round the garden. but i did not know what lay on the other side (wilde, 1909: 5). the statement above is told by the prince. he seems regretted of the past that he could not able to see the real social life of his environment. he used to play and dance and his life was always happy because he lived in the place in the highest class. people who were born from the noble class get happiness by enjoying everything automatically without any effort or earning. “play” and “dance” are the described as the enjoyment and happiest activities and those were done by the prince every day. it means, prince as the lord do not need to work or everything to get his life better. the high wall means the line to separate between high class and low class. the prince was unable to see outside the palace when he was life because there is high wall so that the prince only knew the beautiful life. this fact is the way how feudal works in the society. those who live in high social class seem do not what to know the problem of low society. all they want is happiness and everything they want without earning. in the next paragraph the story, wilde described that the poor people become the free labor or they work for the lord without payment. the labors work for lord’s pleasure and they could not leave the lords. “she is making a dress for one of the queen’s ladies, for dance in the palace” (wilde, 1909, p. 6). high social class is identically with glamour and luxury life. they do not have to make an effort or hard work because the labor feudal system they were born to satisfy their desire. living in the system, the lords also do not let the slaves or labors leave from them. in the next lines, the prince tells the swallow that the woman sad because her son is sick and she could not give him the food but she still does to make the dress. the rule, applied in feudal system, the salves or labors are not allowed to leave the lord even they do not pay in cash but the live itself as the payment. the woman could not stop making dress because she lives inside the system as a poor. prince tells the little swallow about the young writer who tries to finish his work in the next day. the young writer is forced to write a story but he does not have spirit because he is weak and hungry. he also could not set the fire to make his body warm in the winter because he does not have wood. the occurrence describes the situation of poor people who have to struggle for their life. this is a vivid description of contradictory situation of living under the system. it is very hard for people but lords to survive even to fulfill their basic need such as food and comfort place. this part tells that someone has to produce or create thing to maintain their life as well. the poor people live with limit facility so their production is being stuck. production is the part of capitalist activities. but still in this condition, the young is represented as poor people whose skill and ability seem not to be appreciated. it is such a fate that they have to give good services and satisfy people’s desire who live above their class. the situation of the young writer implies that the production activity become absolute condition in living. they have to create things in order to sell it to save their life. “‘someone likes my stories!’ he cried happily. ‘this is a gift from someone who has read my books. now i can finish writing this story” (wilde, 1909, p. 11). living under capitalist system, they have to be able to produce things as commodities. “book” is defined as their product to sell in market place. the book should be able to compete among others so they would get the feedback. reciprocal is the concept of market place where people should have property or power to be sold. still, the case of the capitalism of the story could understand from the little girl who sells the ages. the little girl sells the eggs for his father. she does not get money because language circle: journal of language and literature, 14(1) october 2019 108 the eggs felt and when she goes home, her father would hit her because she comes without money. hence, in the story, the father is represented as the person who has private property or capitalist. it is because he has property, he manages how the girl work and pay her when he thinks the girl does right way. the working class is represented by the girl. she does not have anything but her wage-labor power to sell in order to save her life. she would follow the rules, made by her masters and she always spends her time for working to get money for them as represented by her father in the story. “her eggs have fallen on the ground and they are broken. she has no money to take home. her father will hit her.” (wilde, 1909, p. 12). it seems very clear the exploitation labors of capitalism system for profit purpose at the regulation of market-price apparently as independence of such exploitation in the story. the workers must do and avoid what their masters’ desire. they would have reward when they give the masters advantages and they would get punishment for their mistakes. the situation of the poor people under capitalism is also described from the little swallow’s story. it tells the prince about the condition over the country. in capitalism, the condition of the rich people and poor people are sharply contradictive. the rich people are shown as people who always happy with full of food and comfort house. meanwhile, it would be very hard to get the bread for people of low class. he saw the rich eating and drinking in their beautiful houses. he saw the poor people sitting at the gate. he flew into the dark street and saw the white faces of hungry children with sad eyes. under a bridge, two little boys were lying close together to keep warm. ‘we are so hungry!’ they said. ‘you cannot lie there!’ shouted a guard. (wilde, 1909, p. 14). the cases give the reader clue regarding the general situation of different social classes though this story. wilde describes the main phenomenon of the society under capitalism. the riches are able to have many things as they want. besides, for those who live in low society class, they only able to sell their power to work for the rich and for those who does not have anything even the power for working, they would get anything like having bread to eat. moreover, wilde shows the fact of real capitalist in this story. they respect to other rich people because the rich could be colleague in order to get profit. in the end of the story, wilde describes that the prince statue turns to be uninteresting. it does not have the value things anymore and it is not as important as in previous to the capitalist. hence, the statue is pulled down by them because the statue has no bargaining value anymore. meanwhile, it is the description how the system works. they would change the position of the prince because the prince could not make the system work well. the point is that the leader should be able to support the capitalism. in this situation, the trading system is the way to live or survive. prince gives his all wealth to them (the poor) freely or without returning back so he dies and his position is replaced by someone else who is able to control the system well. the bad impacts of feudalism and early capitalism to the low people in oscar wilde’s “the happy prince” short story the feudal system or capitalism that applies in society would have negative impacts for those who were born as the poor. the happy prince statue is the iconic condition of the society. the statue is an iconic of prosper situation of the society. therefore, when the statue does not have beauty thing it is replaced. this phenomenon tells about the system’s impact in the society. the happy prince is like the utopia that tries to hide the reality of the country. other impacts of those systems in the story would be discussed below. language circle: journal of language and literature 14(1) october 2019 p-issn 1858-0165 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id e-issn 2460-853x 109 feudalism is the system that regulates people and considers the social class to determine the position and portion in acting. when people live as the poor, they have to work for the lord freely and it assumes as their fate. there is no big different from capitalism. the poor people experience the same things but in this system their work is paid. therefore, inequality is always experienced by them as poor people. the first inequality is described when the prince talks about the real condition of his people to the swallow for the first time. implicitly, the prince says that all people were born as the same and they should be equal. “but even that poor heart can feel, and so i cry” (wilde, 1909, p. 5). in feudalism, this thing does not happen. wealth and lands are the consideration of people they should belong to be. the poor people under feudal system must work for the lord as without being paid as a form of reciprocity because the lords give them permission for them to live in certain area. the poor people are still able to live in the country but even though they work very hard they could not welfare their own life. as the prince’s story about the society that the one of poor woman makes dress for the queen’s ladies but she could give her son good food. she is only able to have the lowest quality from the nature or the country. her life is representing to other poor’s life of the country. they face a very hard situation and there is no choice. they must work very hard without getting cash or such food but they still do that because the system is not allowed them leave from the lords. the sadness and starving are not having attention from the riches or the lords. in the situation that described by the prince in the story is about the little girl as the labor of his father. this part situation is clearly shows how the capitalism works. capitalist build the system based on trading. they who have money or property would compete with other i the market place for the profit. the poor people who have nothing but power for being labor are only able to sell their power to the capitalist. this description has no much difference from the feudal system. the different is that the poor people are paid for their working. the transition from feudalism to capitalism creates new hope to the poor people. it seems as fresh air because they are paid under the capitalism. as has been shown of the little girl story, she is very happy when she have worth stone. she would bring it home and her father would not hit her of the broken eggs. the girl as a labor would try to make her father (a man who has properties) happy because when her father happy she would she would have reward. it is exactly how the capitalism works over the society. the labors would be happy if they are able to fulfill the capitalists’ desire. working for the capitalist means they have to do what the capitalists’ desire. the capitalists’ goal is getting profit. hence, the poor believe that working for the capitalists and help them in realizing their goal is not that bad. other impact of both feudalism and capitalism is constitution or the rules of living. unfortunately, the executors stand for the rich people because the rich people are able to pay them. the constitution of course would help them to accommodate their interests. in the end of the story, wilde shows that the lords and other rich people always try to make their life happy without considering the poor’s life. “we must make an order that birds cannot die here” (wilde, 1909, p. 16). the statement shows the power of rich people help them to make their life well. they could support and maintain their position by the regulation as desire. as the result, the contradictory life between rich and poor is getting clearly. the more powerful rich people, the more weak of poor people. conclusion “the happy prince” is the story that tells about the effort of the rich people to hide the social facts. they put the happy prince statue language circle: journal of language and literature, 14(1) october 2019 110 above the city as icon of prosperity and happiness. they would show that there is nothing happening in the city but the happiness. in fact, “the happy prince” describes the true reality in the society. there are many people who live in poverty around the city and their life is being denied by those who drive the system. the result is the ironic of the statue as the icon of the city because the people live contradictory of the city. the feudalism creates the poverty and makes it worse. the rich leader of the city and other lords would not let their labors to leave them. the labors work freely for the rich and it is very common because they let the poor people live in the city. moreover, capitalism shows as the replacement system in the city. the condition of people during the transition seem good than before. their labor-power are appreciated and paid. this condition makes the poor people happy and they assume that they should make the rich people happy to have payment. they happily sell their power to fulfill capitalists’ desire. in other word, the concept of capitalism is accepted by them. references damono, s. d. (1978). sosiologi sastra: sebuah pengantar ringkas. jakarta: pusat pembinaan dan pengembangan bahasa departemen pendidikan dan kebudayaan. davis, k. (2008). periodization and sovereignty: how ideas of feudalism and secularization govern the politics of time. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. holton, r. j. (1985). the transition from feudalism to capitalism. new york: st martin’s press, inc., okey, r. (1986). eastern europe 1740-1985: feudalism to communism. london: routledge. rank, s. m. (2019). medieval life-feudalism and feudal system. accessed on june 16, 2019 at https://www.historyonthenet.com/medieval-life-feudalism-feudal-system. sümbül,y. (2014). ‘wilde’ time: a marxist reading of oscar wilde’s “the happy prince”. no. 19. pamukkale: pamukkale university journal of social science institute. schram, d., & steet, g. (1984). the psychology and sociology of literature: in honor of elrud ibsch. vol. 35. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. cam pbell com m unity school. you decide… feudalism: good or bad? downloaded on 16 june 2019 at www.cam pbell.k12.ky.us wilde, o. (1909). the happy prince, the happy prince and other fairy tales, new york: brentano’s the anthropology of chinese capitalism in southeast asia: from culture to institution? michiel verver and heidi dahles abstract this article outlines the contours of the scholarly debate on ‘chinese capitalism’ in southeast asia. this multidisciplinary domain is business and entrepreneurship-oriented, and concerns the ethnic chinese who have migrated from southern china to southeast asia and have come to play a dominant role in the region’s economies over the centuries. the debate revolves around the competing assumptions that ethnic chinese business success in southeast asia relies either on ethnic affiliation and shared cultural values, or on strategic deployment of resources, power relations and institutional co-optation. we distinguish four perspectives on ‘chinese capitalism’, and argue that the concept of culture holds the debate hostage in the divide between essentialism and anti-essentialism. the promise of an ‘anthropology of chinese capitalism’ resides in matters of perspective, therefore, rather than in the theoretical concept of culture itself. we advocate a liaison amoureuse between business anthropology and institutional theory. keywords: chinese capitalism, southeast asia, business anthropology, culture, institutions page 1 of 22 jba 2(1): 93-114 spring 2013 © the author(s) 2013 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 94 introduction business anthropology has been, and is being, developed primarily in europe and the united states, but what about in other parts of the world?1 let us be blunt about it. there is no such thing as a ‘business anthropology of southeast asia’; nor is there an economic, applied, or whatever other kind of anthropology of the region. worse, a number of prominent scholars have observed that there is not even an ‘anthropology of southeast asia’ (halib and huxley 1996; king and wilder 2003) in terms of a clearly delineated field of practice organized in a geographical area surrounded by unambiguous boundaries – physical, political, or cultural. the work of anthropologists in the region has been of a highly specialized nature – focusing on particular problems (‘ethnic conflict’), a particular subject area (‘rice agriculture’), single peoples (‘the peoples of borneo’) or states (‘the study of thailand’). conversely, anthropologists are prominently represented among those who identify themselves, and are identified by peers, as southeast asian scholars. historically, the field of southeast asian studies as a regional discipline accommodates a multitude of disciplines and subject areas that do engage the economic dimension, but rarely put business or entrepreneurship centre stage. as halib and huxley diagnose in their seminal introduction to southeast asian studies, this regional field of studies is dominated by western concepts and theories ‘grounded firmly in traditions that emphasize cultural interpretations of the region and processes of modernization’ (1996: 6). culture being a prominent concern, it does not come as a surprise that the boundaries of the region have been fiercely debated among southeast asian scholars. the area that may be defined in terms of southeast asia roughly covers the south-eastern region of the continent of asia, including the lands that lie to the south of china and to the east of india (hill and hitchcock 1996: 11). whereas southeast asia as a ‘geopolitical imagination’ is to a large extent a product of us cold war politics, in which southeast asia was played off against the ‘chinese threat’ (glassman 2005: 802), the region is in fact characterized by a pronounced religious, cultural and ethnic diversity that came into being long before european colonial powers encouraged and facilitated the settlement of (predominantly chinese and indian) migrants. for many * acknowledgements: the authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the netherlands organisation for scientific research (nwo) science for global development department (wotro) through the cambodia research group, as well as the constructive comments of two anonymous reviewers. verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 95 centuries, there was a considerable mobility of traders and merchants, religious travellers and scholars, and adventurers and explorers, within and across the region. colonialism enhanced these flows of human capital. a factor of great significance in these cross-regional movements are the ethnic chinese who came to populate coastal ports, the mining areas in southern burma, the malay peninsula, western borneo, and the large rice growing areas such as the mainland southeast asian plains and large cities (kuhn 2008). the study of the ethnic chinese constitutes a separate domain which partially but not completely converges with the field of southeast asian studies, but which is more businessand entrepreneurship-oriented than either anthropological or regional studies of the region (cf. king and wilder 2003: 11-12, 19-20). this domain shows a measure of coherence in that scholars seem to agree to disagree about the role of culture in ethnic chinese business and entrepreneurship. the ensuing debate accrues to what we will label as an ‘anthropology of chinese capitalism’, the contours of which this article makes an attempt at outlining here. such a discipline has to be understood in terms of a multidisciplinary approach to economic relations embedded in the ethnically and culturally diverse economies of the region. this article is structured as follows. first, we zoom in on the concept of culture which constitutes the very fundament on which anthropology as an academic discipline is built and which also fuels the debate about ethnic chinese business and entrepreneurship. second, we review academic literature on ethnic chinese business in southeast asia and abstract various perspectives of ‘chinese capitalism’ that differently perceive of the relationship between culture and business. third, in the discussion section, we revisit the chinese capitalism debate, in particular the deployment of the concept of culture, and advocate a liaison amoureuse between business anthropology and institutional theory. the predicament of culture between the 1960s and 1990s, the highly developed and – mostly – chinese-dominated economies of east and southeast asia accomplished exceptionally high growth rates by pursuing an export-oriented model of economic development. analysts outdid themselves in superlatives to capture the grandeur of this ‘asian miracle’ that changed the established international division of labour. the phrase asian century was coined to encapsulate the belief expressed by asian leaders that the 21st century would be ruled by chinese-dominated asian economics, politics and culture. indeed, the role of china in the region is remarkable. in terms of the sheer volume of investments, acquisitions and development aid, china has established itself as a powerful competitor and threat to western hegemony. the often prominent role of the ethnic chinese in economic development and, currently, as promoters of china’s economic interests journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 96 in the countries that take them in as sojourners and immigrants, has fuelled an academic debate about the factors underlying their economic importance. as has previously been the case with social science literature on business and the economy in southeast asia, the debate about chinese business in southeast asia is multi-disciplinary – including historians, sociologists, management scholars, social geographers and anthropologists – and focuses primarily on the relationship between culture and the economic sphere. the debate revolves around the competing assumptions that ethnic chinese business success in southeast asia and beyond relies either on ethnic affiliation and shared cultural values, or on strategic deployment of resources, power relations and institutional co-optation. as such, the debate has to a large extent evolved into a pendulum swinging between the bashing of culture, on the one hand, and its celebration, on the other, as an explanatory factor for our understanding of chinese business strategy. the academic debate as a whole seems hard-pressed to go beyond the divide between essentialist and anti-essentialist understandings of culture and, more fundamentally, beyond ‘holistic’ thinking that perceives culture – often conflated with ‘a people’ – as a more or less stable, coherent and internalized set of values, norms and tacit knowledge that arrays or even determines people’s behaviour. as we will argue at length below, the debate is held hostage by this preoccupation with the concept of culture – anthropology’s major contribution to the debate – and hence does not progress towards a more in-depth understanding of ethnic chinese business in the region. we hold, however, that the promise of anthropology resides in matters of perspective rather than in the theoretical concept of culture itself. the concept of culture does not just ‘haunt’ anthropology’s engagement with the chinese capitalism debate; it is also to be found lurking in the discipline’s involvement in organization and business sciences. anthropology has had its fair share of constructing societies or cultures as integrated wholes, as holism – the stronghold of anthropological thinking – has often been understood in terms of describing social arrangements as closed systems (jordan 2003: 53, 87) or ‘primitive isolates’ – as critics of the functionalist school would say (redfield 1955: 25). since the 1980s however – perhaps as a reaction to the functionalist, structuralist and materialist schools whose truth-claims on the nature and form of culture were far from modest – anthropologists have largely refrained from ‘macroanthropologies’ on how cultural or social systems influence behaviour (ortner 1984; hannerz 1986). as moore and sanders (2006: 6) argue, ambiguity, fragmentation and conflict have become truisms in anthropology, while the idea of a structure or system – that is to say, a coherent model of social reality – is perceived as contradicting the ‘countless inconsistencies and the indeterminate nature of lived life’. verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 97 ironically, the very moment that anthropology attempted to move away from culture as an analytic category, other disciplines started adopting it (moore and sanders 2006: 17). within organization and business studies, the concept of culture has been extensively borrowed from anthropology (smircich 1983: 339). particularly popular has been the definition of ‘organizational culture’ as a system of shared symbols and meanings as developed by symbolic anthropologists (smircich 1983). this approach addresses the problem of social order and cohesion. it therefore appealed to both organizational scholars and practitioners, since they are equally concerned with how to ‘create and maintain a sense of organization, and how to achieve common interpretations of situations so that coordinated action is possible’ (smircich 1983: 351). accordingly, the static definition of an organization as a stable system or bounded whole with fixed boundaries which ‘has a culture’ (smircich 1983: 347) has dominated the early work of those scholars adopting the anthropological concept of culture (e.g. hofstede 1991). it is only when business anthropology emerged as a distinct perspective in the mid-1990s that the close relationship between managerial needs and analytical approach was disrupted. what may have been the ‘anthropology of businesses’ at first has now developed into a multidisciplinary approach, with anthropology as the lens through which businesses are viewed in terms of lifeworlds comprising everyday practices and processes of organising, sense making and meaning making ‘from below’ and ‘from within’. business anthropology distinguishes itself by an approach that acknowledges organizations in terms of processes of doing business and, thereby, contributes to an understanding of business culture as ambiguous and fragmented, changeable and entrenched with unequal power relations and conflicting interests (dahles 2004). anthropologists have had to learn to accept fragmentation, ambiguities and vagueness as the condition of their field of study and to exploit this experience for writing more adequate studies of what happens in the organizational or business arena (see bate 1997). in this sense, business anthropology has been a response to mainstream organization studies that oftentimes portrayed culture in an essentialist and static manner. considering the promise of ethnography in business and organization studies (ybema et al. 2009; locke 2011; czarniawska 2012), the anthropological approach seems increasingly appreciated. this, however, leaves open the question as to what anthropology’s promise is at a conceptual-theoretical level. in the remainder of this article, we argue in favour of engaging the concepts of culture and institution, and correspondingly plead for a cross-fertilization between anthropology and institutional theory within the organization and business sciences. perspectives on chinese capitalism inspired by max weber’s work on confucianism, efforts have been made journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 98 to interpret ethnic chinese economic accomplishments in terms of ‘confucian capitalism’ or ‘chinese capitalism’ (redding 1990). chinese capitalism has often been described in terms of a communal and informal form of capitalism in contrast with the liberal capitalism based on individual achievements that emerged in the west. chinese capitalism is believed to be rooted in colonial times when – due to population pressure, political turmoil and poverty in china, on the one hand, and tales of burgeoning opportunities overseas, on the other – many chinese left their homes in the coastal provinces of southern china to make a living in other parts of southeast asia (kuhn 2008). this collective historical background generated discourses of the sojourner, middleman, and diasporic entrepreneur (barrett 2012: 3-5). however divergent these discourses may be, they imply that beyond migration lie experiences of displacement, host community hostility, racial discrimination, and limited opportunities for upward mobility. conversely, they also entail fresh prospects stemming from new economic niches and capital accumulation, by engaging in middlemen occupations and split loyalties stemming from ambivalence towards the country of residence (kuhn 2008). in diaspora, livelihoods are easily jeopardized, so that the reliance on family and shared ethnicity for labour, capital, information and transactions may be the only viable option for minority immigrants. from this it has been argued that chinese familism has facilitated the growth of their enterprises and the emergence of ethnic business networks – extending across the globe and providing the glue for what has come to be denoted as the transnational chinese community (redding 1990; weidenbaum and hughes 1996; tsui-auch 2005: 1191). although various studies stress the operational limits of this reliance on family and ethnic ties in business (e.g. kiong 2005), early academic accounts have been rather celebratory of the alleged economic success of the ethnic chinese. in addition to the idea of success, the concept of culture has played a significant role in the ways in which chinese economic activities have been viewed by scholars. it has, however, been questioned whether many ethnic chinese business people share bonds based on a common ethnic identity. contesting the existence of an ethnic chinese community based on a common culture, the institutional literature shifts focus away from community towards network-based benefits (yeung 2000: 187-189), claiming that ethnic chinese businessmen accumulate social capital by maintaining membership in a number of partly-overlapping networks which enables them to evade failing vertical linkages, such as uncooperative bureaucrats. this social capital based on personal trust provides the ‘institutional thickness’ that characterizes (ethnic) chinese business networks in a globalizing business environment (yeung and olds 2000: 15-16). in the burgeoning literature contributing to this debate, four perspectives can be discerned: the culturalist, instrumentalist, verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 99 institutional and transnational approach to chinese capitalism (dahles 2010). in each of these, two questions that are at the heart of the chinese capitalism debate are answered differently. first, ‘how do the ethnic chinese in southeast asia do business and why in this particular way?’ and second, ‘what is the role of ethnicity in all this?’ these two questions are highly intertwined and the analytic haze this entanglement causes forecloses a clear view of the relationship between business conduct and ethnicity. let us now take up each of these four perspectives. the culturalist perspective a culture-based approach to chinese capitalism arose in the fields of business studies and economics in the 1990s, when various explanations for the success of the ‘asian tiger economies’ were put forward. business gurus spoke of ‘bamboo networks’, ‘chinese commonwealth’, and ‘global tribes’ to describe chinese businesses. these businesses are supposedly rooted in a confucian tradition and are able to develop their business ventures by operating through the family firm and guanxi networks – that is, networks built on reciprocal social relationships and informal trust. this institutional embedding has enabled them to avoid state intervention. a similar argument has been put forward by fukuyama in his book titled trust, in which he argues that ‘confucian moral education’ places the family above all other social ties. fukuyama claims that in ‘low-trust societies’ such as the chinese, the internalization of such ethical principles replaces state-directed law as the basis for social order (fukuyama 1995: 56, 84). these kinship-based loyalties, moreover, supposedly accommodated the revitalization of the corridor between southern chinese provinces such as fujian and guangdong, the area from which most of the ethnic chinese in southeast asia have migrated throughout the centuries, and the settlement societies of east and southeast asia where they now reside (ibid., p. 92). redding’s provocatively entitled the spirit of chinese capitalism sets forth a similar culturalist argument, arguing that, driven by confucian values, overseas chinese exhibit a distinct form of capitalism of which the most salient features include paternalism (resulting in a strong vertical order and disciplined behaviour), personalism (resulting in horizontal cooperation based on reciprocity), and insecurity within the societal environment (resulting in defensiveness and mistrust, especially towards governments) (redding 1990: 184). it is not so much the content of such interpretations of chinese capitalism, but rather their culturalist reading which has evoked strong criticism. in stressing the importance of cultural factors in economic dealings, culturalist scholars agitate against economists who remove culture from their accounts (redding 1990: 12-13). however, critics rightly point out journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 100 that they carry the argument too far and turn to an equally simplistic culturalist side, thereby essentializing ethnic culture as if it were shared by a community, stable through time and defining social behaviour (ooi and koning 2007: 108). ‘chineseness’ in the culturalist perspective is taken for granted as the de facto stimulus in economic conduct and, in so doing, an essentialist understanding of ethnic cultural identity is revealed. this shows affinity with talcott parsons’ (1960) understanding of the concept of culture, and his theory of action which builds on the idea of the internalization of cultural norms, values, symbols and roles as constitutive of a person’s orientation towards action. this view of culture is adopted by culturalist scholars, who thereby detach cultural values from a relational and hierarchical setting, as if the chinese have somehow packaged a value-system back in china and proceed to deploy it wherever they reside, however many generations down the line after migration, or in whatever socio-political context. this view still bears on the academic debate about chinese capitalism. the instrumentalist perspective scholars applying the instrumentalist perspective are at the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to the different approaches to chinese capitalism. instrumentalists play down issues of culture and stress the rationally acting economic agent as driving capitalist endeavour, arguing that chinese do business the same way as westerners if conditions are comparable (chang and tam 2004: 33). consequently, all keycharacteristics of chinese capitalism – that is, the importance of cultural values, family business, guanxi networking and the footloose character of chinese enterprises – are trivialized. first, gomez and benton argue that culture is hardly relevant since people tend to go at it alone in the economic sphere (2004: 2). rather than creating the misconception that the ethnic chinese would facilitate business ties through common ethnic descent, they stress heterogeneity in chinese business; dividing lines exist on the basis of firm size, level of assimilation into southeast asian societies, generations, and different relationships with the state (gomez and hsiao 2001: 2). second, instrumentalist scholars oppose the notion of guanxi networking as the quintessential mode of organizing among chinese firms (gomez and benton 2004: 17). chang and tam argue that organizational imperatives rather stem from the need to survive within market conditions, not from some mythical chinese modus operandi based on confucianism (2004: 28). third, the family-centred make-up of the typical chinese firm has a ‘dark side’ (kiong 2005: 46). personalism, paternalism, centrality of decision-making and informality commonly result in disputes and disintegration. gomez and hsiao (2001) show that the family loses control over the enterprise due to issues of succession and inheritance, feuds between family members leading to division, and the desire of younger generations for more transparency and verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 101 bureaucratization. finally, the footloose character of chinese capitalism is questioned by observing that second and third generation migrants are rooted in their country of residence both politically and economically, and neglect ethnically based organization (gomez and benton 2004: 17). moving from business practice to ethnicity, instrumentalists imply that there is nothing chinese about chinese capitalism. they argue that culturalist academics and politicians alike create a false image of the ethnic chinese as ‘others’ opposed to the native communities of southeast asia and, in so doing, amplify ethnically-based nationalist discourse. kwok (1998: 125), for instance, states that such a ‘discourse on chineseness’ is not descriptive but ascriptive, and acquires ‘the status of conventional wisdom’ by means of what jamie mackie designates the ‘essentialist fallacy’ (2000: 238). as a reaction to culturalist ‘othering’, critical scholars such as suryadinata (1997: 5-6) claim that the ethnic chinese of southeast asia are in fact southeast asians rather than chinese, and that through ‘southeast asianization’ or ‘acculturation’ only a minority remains ‘overseas chinese’. he portrays the ex-colonial states of southeast asia as ‘state-nations rather than nation-states’ with an actual multi-ethnic character and an imagined nationality built on notions of indigenous culture which exclude immigrant minorities. based on a number of widely acknowledged work on ethnic identity – such as barth’s thesis on boundaries (1969), cohen’s work on the manipulation of symbols (1974), anderson’s notion of imagined communities (1983) and eriksen’s ‘us’ versus ‘them’ classifications (2002) – it is understood that ‘“actual” ways of conduct and identifications within an ethnic category, and (re)presentations of ethnic identity do not necessarily correspond’ (koning and verver 2012: 4). constructivist accounts have often portrayed ethnic identities as ‘manmade’ political instruments and ideological constructs, rather than as culturally embedded ‘entities’. scholars have agitated against essentialized notions of ethnic identity, deconstructing them and proving ethnic identity to be unstable, contingent and context-dependent. instrumentalist scholars take this argument to its extreme. in criticizing the essentializing tendency of the culturalist perspective, instrumentalists deconstruct the idea of an essential ‘chineseness’. the notion of ethnic identity is placed in the domain of the imaginary, whereas the actual conduct of people is claimed to have nothing to do with ethnicity. this separation of practice from discourse, however, contradicts the observation that reified presentations of ethnicity are ‘sticky’ and often resurface in social categorizations underlying behaviour (koning and verver 2012). the institutional perspective the culturalist scholars’ inclination towards explaining economic conduct by referring to internalized cultural values, and the instrumentalists’ journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 102 tendency to prioritize economic rationality and label culture a farce, are brought together by institutional scholars who make use of granovetter’s notion of embeddedness. granovetter observed that ‘attempts at purposive action are instead embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations’ (1985: 487). this embeddedness in social relations renders both culture and capitalism dynamic, and this is the central tenet of the institutional perspective. much in this vein, hamilton pleads for a perspective that acknowledges that the organization of economies flows primarily from people’s capitalist activities, and secondarily from the institutions framing these activities (2006: 9). people take things for granted in deciding their course of action because they participate in institutionally defined ‘lived-in spheres of life’, such as politics or the family (hamilton 2006: 10). these institutional environments, however, do not determine action but rather provide resources for economic activity. as such, hamilton views capitalism as a dynamic process characterized by competition and power struggles, as well as by continuous organizational change. chinese business practices implying patriarchy and personalism are adaptable features, changing shape in various politico-economic settings (hamilton 2006: 3). adhering to a similar view, yeung (2004) interprets ‘chinese capitalism’ as a form of organization which is rooted in cultural values of chinese society, but which has evolved and adapted in the southeast asian context. by analysing the impact of globalization on chinese economic institutions, yeung arrives at a ‘hybrid capitalism that is defined by its incomplete, partial and contingent transformations’ (2004: 9). although familism and guanxi relationships remain firmly in its foundations, therefore, transformations have changed their character. yeung describes how business networks have become international, while knowledge and experience are gained from education abroad (2004: 68). he holds that chinese firms engage more and more with non-chinese actors in order to acquire capital and exploit markets, transcend traditional guanxi networks, professionalize management, heighten transparency and credibility, and slacken family and paternalistic control (yeung 2004: 4682). in the institutionalist approach, ethnicity is treated neither as the internalization of pan-chinese cultural values, as the culturalists claim, nor merely as a tool in the hands of the state to create a false social divide, in the way that the instrumentalists hold. instead, ethnicity is depicted as a dynamic resource in the hands of both the state and the entrepreneur. dahles and ter horst (2006, 2012) temptingly illustrate this dynamic with respect to the cambodian silk-weaving industry, contending that, although the industry is historically dominated by the ethnic chinese through knowledge and networks, silk products embody a sense of khmer authenticity. paralleling such claims of authenticity, the silk producers are portrayed as khmer and the silk traders as chinese, irrespective of the observation that silk producers are often of chinese verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 103 descent as well. ethnicity, then, is a resource in the socio-historical organization of the industry and in legitimizing its ethnic outlook. ‘chineseness’, as a template, is institutionalized in the economic position of the middleman and wholesaler, rather than pointing towards some primordial affiliation. in any case, ethnicity should not be treated as an identity feature residing within individuals or groups, but rather as a resource at the disposal of individuals, groups, and ‘others’ within the social environment. the institutional perspective of chinese capitalism thus integrates aspects of the culturalist and instrumentalist perspectives in a somewhat nuanced manner, while at the same time leaning towards the practical and socially organized, and putting less emphasis on discursive and representational dimensions. these dimensions of chinese capitalism are fully acknowledged in the transnational perspective, as we will now see. the transnational perspective ong and nonini’s ungrounded empires (1997) and ong’s flexible citizenship (1999) propose the notion of a footloose chinese capitalism like that brought forward by the culturalist perspective, while simultaneously building on a combined marxian and foucauldian legacy (ong 1999: 19). it is marxist in the sense that capitalist motives are seen as ‘absolutely transcendental’ (ong 1999: 7) and the driving force in shaping meaning and practice in other spheres of life (ong 1999: 16). it is foucauldian in the focus on subject-making through ‘regimes of truth’ about ‘chinese capitalism’ and ‘chineseness’, which are seen as objectified and reified, rather than neutral, categories (ong 1999: 69). ong deploys the notion of ‘regime’, in which she distinguishes the nation-state, marketplace and family, as different ‘institutional contexts and webs of power’ that try to discipline subjects through regulation and normalization of attitudes and behaviour (ong 1999: 113). within ‘late capitalism’, characterised by interconnected and rapidly transforming sites of doing business, ‘diaspora chinese’ entrepreneurs flexibly accumulate wealth across borders, thereby challenging those ‘regimes’ that are more localized social orders. chinese business culture, with family business and guanxi networking as its crucial characteristics, has become increasingly useful since these ties make it possible to cut across national boundaries and link business people in different places (nonini and ong 1997: 21). these practices, however, should not be mistaken for authentic chinese cultural features as the culturalist scholars perceive them, but rather as discursive constructs used in the ‘celebratory narratives of chinese business success’ (nonini and ong 1997: 21). the theme of ethnic chinese as operating transnationally is a common thread in the debate on chinese capitalism. the culturalist and the transnational perspectives stress the abilities of business people to escape state disciplining (through ethnic cultural and social capital). journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 104 conversely, instrumentalist scholars argue that chinese business is locally patronized. in between these extremes, institutional scholars point towards the local adaptability of an originally trans-local mode of social organization. ong (1997: 172-173) ascribes to the ethnic chinese a freedom of movement, and to nation-states (both in southeast asia and in china) a fear or rejection of such movement. however, one should be wary of celebratory accounts of the duality of the globe-trotting agent and the eroding grip of the nation-state. transnational practices are always embedded in local power mechanisms, cultural constructions and economic relations. ethnic expressions and acts respond to situated relationships and hierarchies; they are never free-floating but imply a degree of ‘social closure’ (guarnizo and smith 1998: 13). in stressing flexibility, inventiveness, and the politics of identification, the transnational perspective of chinese capitalism resonates with the instrumentalist appeal for ‘deconstructing essentialisms’ that trivialize the role of ethnicity in human conduct. as outlined earlier, these essentialisms take the form of objectified identity constructs. however, doing away with essentialisms misses out on understanding essentialising practices in ethnic identity politics. the transnational perspective to chinese capitalism, showing affinity with a foucauldian cultural studies approach, focuses on this reified ‘second nature’ of sociality. ‘chineseness’ is not taken as a primordial entity, in the way that culturalist scholars claim, but rather as a discursive entity in which truth and power intersect. the cultural characteristics of ethnic identity (confucianism, family values, guanxi, and so on), then, are treated as ‘discursive tropes’ that are used in both the state’s nationalist agenda and by chinese entrepreneurs to negotiate a path towards economic success and social well-being (nonini and ong 1997: 9). the major pitfall of this view of ethnicity as a postmodern grab bag of cultural characteristics is that it overemphasizes agency in selfpresentation while neglecting the critical role of social ‘others’. as yao cautions (2009: 255), identification is ‘also about collective demands, cultural obligations and communal acceptance’. this is especially relevant in southeast asia where ethnic relations and state policies attached to them have been tense from time to time. ethnic culture freed from racial connotation – such as the idea that ‘a black american or a white new york jew can become chinese by eating ‘chinese food’’ (yao 2009: 259) – is a utopia that the transnationalist perspective to chinese capitalism fails to acknowledge. culture and race are always conflated in notions of ethnic identity. therefore one may claim that ong and nonini reinforce an essentialist understanding of ethnicity, albeit in a discursive, rather than primordial, way. nevertheless, the transnationalist perspective to chinese capitalism does convincingly argue that one should not merely look at how ethnic culture and identification shape social action (as is overdone by the culturalists and rejected by the instrumentalists), but also at how representations of ethnic culture and identity are used to give meaning to verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 105 and legitimize actions and viewpoints. a summary of the diverse viewpoints is presented in table 1 below. table 1: perspectives of chinese capitalism. chinese capitalism perspectives culturalist instrumentalist institutional transnational business culture determines economic behaviour minor role in economic behaviour dynamic interplay between cultural institutions and capitalist opportunities discursively deployed in economic endeavour business– nation-state relationship culture ignores the nationstate nation-state controls business cultural institutions embedded in local powerstructures capitalist behaviour escapes state control market opportunities hardly mentioned determining economic behaviour reshaping cultural institutions inspiring discursive deployment of culture ethnicity ethnic cultural identity and practice as lasting and coherent culture being irrelevant ethnic culture as a dynamic resource in the interplay with social organization ethnic culture and identity as ‘politics’ to negotiate capitalist behaviour towards a liaison amoureuse between business anthropology and institutional theory the chinese capitalism debate is caught in a dichotomy of constructivist versus essentialist approaches to culture, moving in circles from primordial essentialism (culturalist perspective), to deconstructing essentialism (instrumentalist perspective), and back to essentialism through a discursive detour (transnational perspective). not unlike how brubaker and cooper argue for the concept of identity (2000: 10-11), culture as an analytic category runs the risk of meaning either too much, in the sense of a bounded and stable set of characteristics that ‘resides’ within an ethnic group, or too little, when seen as fluid, multiple, journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 106 manipulated, etcetera. relatedly, the pendulum swinging between essentialism and anti-essentialism forces a false choice between ‘an acultural analysis of power and an apolitical analysis of culture’ (friedland and alford 1991: 254). in other words, culture is either presented as straightforwardly determining business practices without much regard for individual agency (culturalist perspective), or as only manipulated by agents in order to secure power and interests (instrumentalist and transnational perspectives). there is no progress towards an understanding of culture as dynamic and constantly changing; instead it is viewed as either explanans or explanandum. a truly dynamic conceptualization would acknowledge that culture sometimes arrays behaviour and is sometimes manipulated, that culture changes throughout time and space, and that culture stands in interrelation to other dimensions in business organizations. we believe that reconceptualising chinese capitalism as an institution – or better, as subject to processes of institutionalization – opens up this possibility of dynamism, and avoids versions of ‘holism’ and essentialism that cling to the concept of culture to rebound time and again. an institution, as a starting point, may broadly be defined as an informal or formalized organizing principle that is shared by a collective and is enacted through both action and thought (cf. durão and lopes 2011: 363). institutional templates manifest within a broader social setting – organizational field or society – and over time acquire a takenfor-granted status that arrays and disciplines the behaviour of organizational actors (greenwood et al. 2008). apart from avoiding the burdensome legacy of the concept of culture within the chinese capitalism debate, the concept of institution has the advantage of incorporating cultural, social and material dimensions of business organization within a single framework. scott (2008: 48), for example, notes that institutions are ‘made up of symbolic elements, social activities and material resources’. culture, then, is a resource in processes of institutionalization which stands in a dynamic interrelationship with social and material dimensions – sometimes converging and reinforcing each other, sometimes conflicting with each other. this interrelationship appears through analysing the ‘organizational framing of business-related activities’, as do ‘larger structures of power, as well as the limits and opportunities of individual agency’ (moeran and garsten 2012: 13). both anthropology and organizational institutionalism have been internally divided over the ontological status of culture. within institutional theory the definition of culture – as one of the pillars in processes of institutionalization – has shifted. whereas culture was long interpreted as a more or less coherent system of norms and values that human actors internalize, within what has been labelled the ‘new institutionalism’, culture came to be seen as a cognitive phenomenon that revolves around the production of scripts, rules, classifications and legitimizations (powell and dimaggio 1991). scholars came to explore verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 107 culture as external semiotic frameworks and shared knowledge, as opposed to internalized beliefs as in the ‘old institutionalism’. in anthropology, a comparable yet different shift has occurred in the ontology of culture. since postmodernism and poststructuralism took root in the 1980s and 90s, scholars moved from delineating ‘a culture’ as ‘a people’ to understanding it as ‘a political process of contestation over the power to define key concepts, including that of ‘culture’ itself’ (wright 1998: 14), rather than as a bounded and fixed ‘thing’. however, whereas organizational institutionalism remained a study of cultural systems – inferring the existence of culture from macro-organizational patterns – the shift from culture as internalized beliefs to external frameworks in anthropology implied a shift to agency as well. roughly, anthropology shifted focus from how culture ‘produces’ behaviour to how people’s behaviour ‘produces’ culture (moore and sanders 2006: 17). currently, in as much as institutional scholars hardly acknowledge the ‘politics of culture’, anthropologists have somewhat overblown the postmodernist argument. taken together, however, culture can be perceived as a resource in processes of institutionalization that are dynamic rather than fixed precisely because culture both arrays social behaviour and yet can be negotiated and manipulated in interaction. dynamism is a crucial notion in processes of institutionalization, which manifests itself in the relationship between cultural and social dimensions, but also in the dialectic between agency and structure, and in bridging micro and macro levels of sociality (mohr and white 2008). thus, framing ‘chinese capitalism’ as an institution must not be taken as an attempt to make truth-claims about a supposedly fixed nature and form of how those southeast asians with chinese roots organize business life – this would be little more than essentialism in another disguise. whereas the analytic focus should be on institutionalization rather than ‘the institution’ as such, the notion of chinese capitalism is useful as a ‘heuristic device’ (yeung 2004: 1) or, alternatively, as a ‘conceptmetaphor’ that aims to maintain rather than resolve ambiguity by preserving ‘a tension between pretentious universal claims and particular contexts and specifics’ (moore 2004: 74). anthropology is well-positioned to assure this sense of ambiguity and specificity. we believe that the merits of integrating anthropological and institutional approaches extend beyond the debate about chinese capitalism in southeast asia, and beyond conceptualizing culture. within the organization and business sciences – despite obvious parallels in perspective and interests – anthropology and institutionalism have hardly engaged in cross-fertilization. however, as much as the concept of institutionalization may advance the anthropology of business organization, so might an anthropological approach deal with some persistent lacunas which exist within organizational institutionalism, and which have been pinpointed by leading scholars in the field. institutionalists largely adhere to a quantitative methodology which, journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 108 firstly, makes it hard to grasp meaning: it is much easier to count structures and organizational forms than it is to measure meaning systems. … if we are to take seriously the ideational aspects of institutions, we need to move, however slightly, away from strictly positivist research and incorporate interpretivist methods that pay serious attention to the subjective ways in which actors experience institutions.’ (suddaby 2010: 16). second, although institutionalists do acknowledge that institutions and actions are interlinked and that institutionalization is a dynamic process, they have in fact had persistent difficulty in capturing agency and, relatedly, the processual and ‘everyday’ character of organizational behaviour (powell and colyvas 2008: 277). this is largely due to the tendency of institutionalists to focus on the macro-structural outcomes rather than the actual process of institutionalization (zilber 2002: 235), as so omitting the relative power and interests of actors in the politics of maintaining order (clegg 2010). an anthropological perspective would certainly contribute to understanding institutionalization by emphasizing the situated practices and meaning-making by individual agents, without which any broader social order is by definition inexistent. as such, zilber – one of the few organizational institutionalists who explicitly deploys an ethnographic methodology – comes to the conclusion that ‘it is the continuous enactment of practices and meanings by organization members that constitutes and maintains institutions’ (2002: 251). conclusions to end on a positive note, scholars in the field of institutional analysis have recently answered the plea for an integrated perspective in organizational studies with regard to another one of anthropology’s hallmarks – the importance of historical context. the concept of ‘legacies of the past’ has been applied in order to address societal transformations as a function of the social, cultural, and institutional structures created under past regimes that persist in the present period. proponents of this approach argue that dominant social, cultural, and political forces at work in the larger society are rooted in power struggles that evolved throughout history and currently shape the identity of new institutions. turning to the field of international organizational and business studies, we believe that the concept of legacies helps capture the role of businesses, not in terms of passive recipients of institutional resources ‘but as actors involved in both the construction and reconstruction of such resources within and across national contexts’ (morgan and quack 2005: 1765). it is in this context that the analysis of ‘institutional legacies’ has been proposed. as firms internationalize they have to deal with increasing diversity in both their organizational practice and institutional verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 109 environment and may draw ‘on ‘sleeping’ nearly forgotten institutional legacies as a resource for their institutional change projects’ (morgan and quack 2005). a comparative perspective on chinese capitalism in southeast asia reveals the ways in which both long-standing and newly created institutional legacies are strategically employed, abandoned, even silenced, before being revitalized in cross-border ventures under rapidly changing and ambivalent institutional regimes. in the final analysis, the concept of chinese in southeast asia is not rooted in a homogeneous and static ‘community’ with ‘a culture’, but one which comprises multiple loyalties and at the same time is rapidly being transformed into a loosely connected patchwork of partly diverging, but nevertheless interrelated and internally heterogeneous, sub-communities. it is clear that community is identified, not as a shared ethnic culture, but in the situational and contextual terms of a common, though diverse, history that comprehends ancestral roots in china and a shared migratory past, as much as it is identified as a shared colonial experience that generated diverging legacies for the post-colonial nation states to build on (dahles 2010; 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yeung, h. w. c. 2004 chinese capitalism in a global era: towards a hybrid capitalism. london and new york: routledge. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 114 yeung, h. w. c. and k. olds 2000. ‘globalizing chinese business firms: where are they coming from, where are they heading?,’ pp. 1-30 in h. w. c. yeung and k. olds (eds.) globalization of chinese business firms. houndmills, basingstoke: macmillan press. zilber, t. b. 2002 ‘institutionalization as an interplay between actions, meanings, and actors: the case of a rape crisis center in israel.’ academy of management journal 45 (1): 234-254. michiel verver is a phd candidate in the department of organization sciences of vu university amsterdam (the netherlands). his research interests include entrepreneurship, family business and state-business relationships among the ethnic chinese in southeast asia (and in cambodia in particular). he has published in cross-currents: east asian history and culture review and in entrepreneurship & regional development: an international journal (co-authored with juliette koning). he may be reached at m.j.verver@vu.nl heidi dahles is professor in international business & asian studies at griffith business school, griffith university, brisbane (australia). her research interest is in the ethnic and cultural dimensions of asian business and the intricacies of cross-border business ventures. she has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals. among her recent books are capital and knowledge: changing power relations in asia (co-edited with otto van den muijzenberg, 2003) and multicultural organizations in asia (co-edited with loh wei leng, 2006). heidi is reviews editor for the journal of business anthropology and editor-in-chief (with ooi can seng and juliette koning) of the open access journal asia matters: business, culture and theory. she may be reached at h.dahles@griffith.edu.au mailto:m.j.verver@vu.nl mailto:h.dahles@griffith.edu.au persona studies 2015, 1.2 31 crafting a work persona in 1970s petroleum geology brian beaton abstract taking inspiration from a 1972 study by allan sekula that concerned everyday shifts in subjectivity among a set of industrial and technical workers, this paper looks at work persona production in petroleum geology, a profession at the centre of the global oil industries and oil capitalism. persona production is part of how petroleum geologists explain themselves and their controversial work to one another, and how they manage individual celebrity within their expert community. taking as its data source obituaries and death notices that circulated inside the profession over the course of the 1970s, the paper concentrates on a specific persona created by petroleum geologists as part of their ritualized mourning practices. findings presented within the paper show that obituaries and death notices were used to collaboratively craft a work persona that is thoroughly disconnected from energy politics and controversy: the imagined figure of the petroleum geologist that emerges is someone who is rugged, righteous, loving, fraternal, and deeply connected to nature. the stakes of this research concern not only work personas and their histories, but also the material underpinnings of contemporary cultural production and ongoing debates over energy forms and futures. key words occupational culture, oil, work persona, scientific communication, energy politics introduction in the early 1970s, before he was a renowned documentary photographer, filmmaker, and essayist, and before he had a long and storied career associated with the california institute of the arts (valencia, calif.), allan sekula (1951-2013) self-identified as a young performance or “action” artist. in his artistic practice, sekula combined creative expression with site and process-specific activities—a technique that would never entirely leave his work despite its many changes over time. in the winter of 1972, sekula made a black-and-white photographic study of a large aerospace facility in san diego, california. never formally titled, the study came to be known as untitled slide sequence. according to sekula, this particular project drew its intellectual inspiration from three sources: the concern with the relationship between work and everyday life among sociologists and social theorists (e.g., erving goffman, emile durkheim, max weber); the “social documentary” tradition within american photography and its major practitioners (e.g., walker evans, dorthea lange); and from radical theater and its provocateurs (e.g., bertolt brecht, jean genet) (sekula and risberg 236-51). sekula’s study involved the following: one late afternoon, the young artist crossed onto the grounds of a private aerospace beaton 32 facility called general dynamics convair division. sticking close to the perimeter of the facility, sekula positioned himself with a hand-held camera on the concrete pedestrian walkway that connected general dynamics to the employee parking lot and the street. every employee who worked at general dynamics had to make use of that walkway to leave the company’s property at the end of the workday. it was the only way of departing from the facility to the various beach and hillside neighborhoods that make up the san diego area. sekula photographed the workers as they streamed out of work en route to their cars. in choosing that particular spot and time, sekula ultimately produced a study of the facility’s workers at the exact moment when they crossed over from being machinists, typists, clerks, secretaries, managers, and aerospace engineers to being something else: neighbors, family members, friends, strangers, and other types of quotidian social actors. unlike sekula’s next project, aerospace folktales (1973), which had a much stronger narrative component (sekula followed engineers from lockheed martin back to their homes and recorded them in their kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms as a means to make sense of them as social creatures), this first project at general dynamics involved the young artist acting like a security camera—documenting the various aerospace workers from a fixed position. but after a short period of photographing the workers, sekula was stopped by the facility’s actual security system—human guards—and forced to leave the property (sekula and risberg 241). sekula had never asked for permission to be there; he was engaged in unauthorized research or what might be called tresspassitory ethnography. this technique, however, allowed sekula to capture an exceptionally intimate, unusual, and complex portrait of 1970s aerospace workers, and to capture some of the tensions between individuality and social standardization that so often mark cultures of work. unlike the “lab studies” of scientists, technologists, and allied experts that came to be popularized that same decade, also by way of southern california, sekula’s idiosyncratic approach allowed him to capture some of the relationships between the workers and their work without reducing his subjects to stock, one-dimensional figures that exist only in what might be called “9-to-5 time.” inspired by sekula’s untitled slide sequence, this paper focuses on a different set of 1970s workers and on a different kind of crossing over or transitional moment. it specifically looks at petroleum geologists—the people who work inside the oil industries and help sustain, though the extraction of materials internal to our planet, contemporary societies scattered across the surface of our world. through a string of scientific, technical, and industrial processes, petroleum geologists search for and retrieve what eventually becomes the endless array of materials (e.g., plastics, gasoline, etc.) without which present-day life as currently constituted would instantly collapse in many places. general histories of petroleum geology have shown how petroleum geologists convinced oil companies of the potential for science to create wealth and value, as well as traced how work practices inside petroleum geology shifted from relatively crude forms of surface analysis to data-driven techniques of deep exploration and discovery (owen). this paper focuses on the petroleum geologist as a scientist-subject. specifically, it examines how petroleum geologists working in the 1970s crafted a collective work persona to make sense of their group self, to explain their controversial work to one another, and to manage individual celebrity within their community of scientific experts. methods, sources, scope to produce this study of persona production in 1970s petroleum geology, i took as my data source obituaries and death notices, a form of cultural record that other historians have used effectively to learn about the values and sensibilities of specific categories of actors or the “zeitgeist” of pre-selected periods of time (see hume; fowler) but not, to my knowledge, to study occupational self-presentation and display. although customarily written as singular remembrances of individual lives, obituaries and death notices can also function as something like a biographical “snapshot” or “portrait” of whole communities at exact chronological persona studies 2015, 1.2 33 moments when looked at in the aggregate. i focused on the obituaries and death notices (n=297) published in one of the leading english-language petroleum geology journals between 1970 and 1979: the american association of petroleum geology’s aapg bulletin, a peerreviewed u.s. publication that adheres to the formal codes of a normative geoscience journal with proprietary industry investments (i.e., a journal that supplies knowledge to industry). the obituaries and death notices within the aapg bulletin are biographical works that are written by petroleum geologists about other petroleum geologists; they circulate inside the petroleum geology community as an event-specific practice of self-authoring and as a form of ritualized remembrance. what i discovered in carrying out this research is that the sources in question yield a trove of “open data,” including data about intimate health issues, occupational risks, personal habits and interests outside of working life, character traits, and social relationships. despite this diversity and range of data in the obituaries and death notices, the imagined figure of the scientist-subject that emerges from 1970s petroleum geology is heavily organized into a discernible persona: a romanticized, blameless, faith-driven man (over 99% of the memorials published in the 1970s profiled a male scientist) who works until the bitter end in what can be a dangerous field— a rugged man driven by a love of natural environments and by a strong sense of homosocial kinship. as a public self that circulated semi-privately only within the profession, the image of 1970s petroleum geologists that emerged from the pages of the aapg bulletin was one of a hardy, grounded, and companionable man who combined the morality of an altar boy with the muscular know-how of a boy scout. the question of whether this particular persona actually animated or currently animates scientific practices within petroleum geology exceeds the scope of the research and analysis presented here, as does the question of whether this persona actually affected or currently affects the material availability of energy resources. instead, this paper first outlines the petroleum geologist persona as it came to be crafted throughout the 1970s within this specific set of records and then discusses what cultural work this persona performed within this particular scientific community. collaboratively crafting a work persona micropublicly in the 1970s, the aapg bulletin ceremonially placed what the journal calls its “memorials” in the space following the original research papers and just before the "reviews" section that detailed recent publications in the geosciences. this positioning suggests that the memorials had a liminal or in-between status— they were personal, but at the same time still tied to professional practices. but each memorial was shorter than a formal research paper, making them closer in length (and appearance) to the journal’s book reviews. and much like book reviews, the memorials were commonly organized around a stock formula, which was comprised of five general parts. the typical memorial began by announcing the death of the scientist in question, usually with a short opening paragraph that summarized the manner of dying. the various deaths recounted largely stemmed from illness and disease intermixed with some unexpected deaths by accident. something else frequently included within this opening section was a longer physiological history of the scientist, providing intimate details about the subject’s prior bouts with illness and injury. in the 1970s, heart attacks were reported as the dominant cause of unexpected death (e.g. newcombe; vogel; blair et al.; feruson; carpenter and patton; crunk; slocum; caylor; gow). in terms of accidental deaths, various helicopter crashes and plane crashes are mentioned, as well as car crashes and falls. interestingly, a number of accidental deaths described within the memorials appear to have been work related. for instance, more than one helicopter or plane crash involved small aircraft traveling for the purposes of geological surveying or fieldwork (e.g., reeves; palmer; nanz). according to one such memorial, "the cause remains speculative, but from analysis of crash-site debris, it appears that the helicopter hit a large boulder on the ridge, then tumbled hundreds of feet down a steep slope" (mann et al. 1903). the inclusion of these kinds of details, however, does not appear to have been a micropublic critique of the risky conditions within the profession of petroleum geology. the beaton 34 profession’s methods and practices are not explicitly criticized within the memorials that specifically document work-related accidents. instead, such details are part of a larger “diedwhile-working” trope undergirding the memorials more generally, regardless of how the scientist in question actually died. beyond work-related accidents, other examples of this trope include a geologist who "died with his lecture notes in his hand" (lintz 1416); another one who "died with his boots on...still working on drilling deals in utah and wyoming" (curry 2234); one who “saw the exciting results from the first line of data just before he was stricken” by "a massive cerebral hemorrhage" (worzel 2192-94); and another who "suffered a severe heart attack" while "presenting a paper on his favorite topic" (link et al. 1953). more than one geologist died at the field's major annual meeting or in close proximity to that meeting (e.g., wissler; mason et al.). in addition, more than one geologist is said to have died just before, or immediately following, the publication of new research (e.g., houston and boyd; braunstein). these commemorations, as rituals operating just inside the personal lives of scientists but just outside their professional lives, were insistent on the centrality of professional identity even in this intensely vulnerable and intimate moment of death and dying. not only did these memorials bring intimate and personal details into the profession within the pages of the journal, they also extended and embedded professional identities into the embodied lives of the scientists. after announcing the death, the typical memorial then offered a short account of the individual’s upbringing. a major theme that emerges across the memorials from the 1970s is religion. examples include a geologist described as having been raised by “a school teacher turned pastor” (armstrong 1573); one described as “the son of a baptist minister” (keller 1576); and another as “the son of a methodist clergyman” (conselman, “heroy” 2537). along these same lines, many of the dead petroleum geologists are said to have maintained a close relationship with a denomination of the christian church over the course of their lifetimes and scientific careers. examples include a geologist described as having lived dutifully by “christian principles” that “endeared him to all” (rouse 601); one described as having been “first and foremost…truly a christian” (dickey 1543); and another remembered for his “christian virtues,” which were “evident in his decisions and actions” (mackey 2165). one geologist was a “regular attendant at [church] services when not in the field” (kirk 170). another geologist is described as having used a “‘country preacher’ style” when giving talks at “local, regional, and national geologic societies” (braunstein 2301). thus, in this liminal space just inside the personal and just outside the professional, petroleum geologists imbued themselves with a sense of godly purpose and piety. the scientists represented themselves as having lived mission-driven lives in the service of something larger than oil companies, something divine and otherworldly. what petroleum geologists do for a living is not only rooted in morality, but also perhaps directed and sanctioned by incontrovertible forces, according to the representational logic of these tributes. the third part of a typical memorial was directly informed by instructions that were given by the aapg bulletin, which expressly asked authors to emphasize the subject’s contributions to the field of petroleum geology. the bulletin provided the following guidelines: memorials fittingly record the loss of an association member by death and should include a good glossy photograph of the deceased, with a short caption generally limited to the name. the high cost of printing and an increasing number of memorials have made it necessary to restrict the length to 500 words. a memorial should stress particularly the member's professional contribution to geology. (wengerd 1856) these instructions were typically enacted by listing what oil companies, universities, and consultancies had employed the scientist in question; by noting any major oil discoveries; and by identifying people’s major research areas. here, the petroleum geologist’s life was squarely reckoned as a professional life. in no way were the memorials devoid of occupational content. persona studies 2015, 1.2 35 instead, occupational content was sandwiched inside a larger rendering that situated workplace identity as a central component of a broader selfhood. following the public re-telling of the deceased’s employment history, the fourth component of the typical memorial described the person’s temperament, character, and personality. in doing so, the memorials reveal what traits were valued, at least micropublicly, within this particular scientific community. scientists who were generous, curious, sympathetic to others, and quiet were particularly well regarded. the resulting effect is that the petroleum geologists are made to appear as not only helpful, but also as non-intrusive. the extractive, nature-altering character of their everyday scientific work is submerged into an image of affability, benignity, and nurturing. in addition to discussing the person's character and temperament, this section of the typical memorial catalogued the person's hobbies and interests outside of work. the bulk of the hobbies mentioned in the 1970s pertain to the outdoors. highly cited activities include fishing, hunting, nature photography, camping, backpacking, hiking, and bicycling. put simply: there was a collective attraction to and valuation of “outdoors” that bridged the professional and personal practices of self within this particular community of scientific workers. the scientists are presented as land protectors, stewards, and shepherds in a manner that ultimately obfuscates just how much of their professional work is tied to probing, removing, wresting, drilling, and draining. the profusion of details describing the salutary and reciprocal ties between the scientist and his natural environment verge on cliché: one geologist is described as having “loved the outdoors” and to have “regularly supplied visiting friends with oranges and grapefruits from his yard” (borden 1793), while another is remembered for having had his own private property “dedicated and posted as an official tree farm” due to his “passion for the outdoors” and to “preserve the beauty of his mountain environment” (verville 1225). in a similar manner, another geologist is described as having had “an intense interest in the outdoors and wildlife, and in the ranch which he loved. he was a member of the audubon society, a proponent of strict land management, and a self-taught expert on feed grasses” (begeman 128). another geologist is remembered for having taught others about “the pleasures of nature’s gifts—and of the importance of treating those gifts with reverence and responsibility” (mcculloh 119). according to their memorials, petroleum geologists do not work in a controversial extractive industry lurking deep within oil capitalism and within larger debates and contestations over how people and the planet should and can interact but, instead, work in and through an embodied sense of love, closeness, and connectedness with nature. the typical memorial then closed with a short list of the person's surviving family members, and with a direct expression of feeling on the part of the individual author(s) who researched, composed, and published the account. these expressions of feeling are often quite simple and straightforward. as expected, highly cited feelings include "a sense of deep personal loss" and "sadness" as well as "gratitude" and "regret." other times, however, the feelings expressed appear more complicated and even awkward—due in part, perhaps, to the micropublic form of feeling in which the person writing the memorial was engaged. these expressions of feeling were constrained by the particular modes of masculinity that were privileged within the profession. such expressions were also constrained by the fact of their appearance within one of the field’s major scientific and technical journals. it also seems reasonable to presume that some of the dead scientists might have had contested legacies or might have been part of on-going controversies within the profession. questions of who to remember and how to remember them were likely connected to occupational politics within the field. another complicating factor was the demographics of the profession. with the exception of just one instance— a memorial published for micropaleontologist esther richards applin (maher 596-7)— every memorial published in the aapg bulletin during the 1970s involved a man writing about another man. this homogeneity within the profession seems to have produced specific effects on the field’s grieving practices and collective self-authorings, exacerbating what was perhaps an already uncomfortable exercise. one scientist writes: “it is difficult to write objectively…because to know erich well was to find oneself personally beaton 36 intrigued by his character and personality” (taylor 2141). speaking of a different petroleum geologist in strikingly similar terms, another scientist writes: “it is hard to write objectively…for one inevitably becomes emotionally involved with the man’s character and personality” (penn 2470). according to yet another memorial: "men don't usually think or speak of 'loving' other men, but in [this] case the word comes very close— certainly we were awfully, awfully fond of him" (conselman, “tompkins” 1511). discussion in the provocative photographic study that allan sekula produced of 1970s aerospace workers leaving their worksite (and shedding their work personas) at the end of an ordinary workday, sekula reminds us that cultures of expert work fundamentally hinge on larger circulations of people moving into and out of their workplace selves. sekula’s larger argument was that making critical sense of work and labour formations requires starting with the knowledge that workplace cultures are sites where professional and extra-professional identities collide and intermix, even in scientific, technical, and industrial fields that frequently have a pretext of depersonalization. the nearly 300 memorials published by the aapg bulletin in the 1970s offer a collective portrait of petroleum geologists in their own words, selfauthorings, created in the aftermath of a specific category of event (death) and during a moment of tremendous significance for petroleum geology as a field. oil had seeped deeply into american life by the 1970s. looking for oil was a major industry unto itself. oil also figured heavily in other industries and within everyday culture. by 1970, a list of the ten largest u.s. corporations included three oil companies; it also included three automobile manufacturers (pursell 106) whose technological makings were entirely reliant on petroleum and encouraged further petroleum usage. oil was also important to what were, at the time, still new and emerging ideas and industries. for example, one of the key actors within the early history of biotechnology was a lab-made microorganism that could break down oil spills. efforts in the 1970s to gain patent rights to that specific, oil-related organism (i.e. to make it a marketable commodity) played a significant role in establishing the legal framework for what would become, in the 1980s and 1990s, the biotechnology sector (rajan 6). in this regard, oil figured heavily within efforts to make and commodify new kinds of life. it was also crucial to the advent of personal computers and network technologies. one of the earliest u.s. microchip manufacturers, the firm texas instruments (ti), began as a maker of geodetic instruments used for the exploration of oil (chandler 30). likewise, some the earliest efforts to make computers interlink and network involved experts who had previously worked on the layout of oil pipelines (abbate 59). amid these developments, the worldwide environmental movement and the 1973-74 oil crisis spurred widespread critique of oil companies (merrill). it also led to the cultural revival of a “running out of oil” discourse that had first surfaced in the early twentieth century (olien and olien 119-140). by the 1970s, americans had come to perceive themselves as confronting new types of material limits (bailey and farber 4). oil was at the centre of many such discussions, and therefore petroleum geologists were too. the particular work persona crafted by petroleum geologists in the 1970s through their obituaries and death notices was certainly not a simple reaction to these broader events and developments, yet neither can this specific work persona be conceptualized as something wholly uninformed by wider currents of culture and politics. the persona that emerges from obituaries and death notices in 1970s petroleum geology expressly, even aggressively, distanced petroleum geologists from any external controversy; it conjured an image of themselves, for themselves, by themselves that thoroughly, even theatrically, removed the everyday work of petroleum geologists from energy politics, from debates about oil dependency, and from critiques of global economies predicated on mass extraction. but this particular persona also distanced petroleum geologists from the cycles of dependency and interdependency that would have knowingly rested on their shoulders. people living in the 1970s, as now, needed petroleum geologists. rather than create a persona that acknowledged persona studies 2015, 1.2 37 the trickiness of their footing in society, and the stickiness of their social positioning in a world wedded to oil and troubled by its future, what petroleum geologists created instead, through mourning in print, was a remarkably unified front or screen that adhered to repetition and rhetorical simplicity: a persona organized around overlooking and assuaging tensions, something square and safe and straight, something likeable-by-design, non-threatening, agreeable, and comforting. this particular persona also seems to have helped manage and mitigate any celebrification within the profession. it enfolded everyone, even stars, into what looks to have functioned as a group standard, social template, or ideal. one interpretation is that petroleum geology was simply less oriented around, or willing to tolerate, celebrities within their profession in the manner of, say, astronomy (e.g., edwin hubble, carl sagan), biomedicine (e.g., jonas salk), physics (e.g., albert einstein, stephen hawking), and the like. but something else seems to have been accomplished as well. the effect of this particular persona appears, in retrospect, as almost protective in its logic(s): no single scientist is made famous or unique enough to be blamable for what petroleum geologists do. individual identities are absorbed back into a larger figuration that remains difficult to pick apart and probe in terms of individual complicity; distinctions between the scientists are muted and muddied by the overwhelming power of the persona and its rote, formulaic telling and retelling. these ritualized, scripted forms of mourning in print extended professional commitments into the realm of the personal and physiological all while extending the personal and physiological into the pages of an otherwise technical publication. the typical memorial published in the aapg bulletin in the 1970s performed a valuing of a specific version of the scientist-subject: stoic, quiet, attached to landscapes, working to the bitter end, and driven by faith, brotherhood, kinship, and environmental care. they were reckonings of a scientist-subject working in oil that accounted for his life as godly, fraternal, and on the side of nature. in them, petroleum geologists forged themselves as an “imagined community” of more-than professionals, and collaboratively crafted a work persona grounded in valor and virtue— despite working in what, for many outsiders, was and still is a controversial extractive industry with dubious claims to any higher purpose beyond enabling oil capitalism. in addition to the repetition and simplicity built into the texts, the memorials reveal a scientific community marked by, or at least invested in projecting, a tremendous level of homogeneity, not just in terms of gender. the memorials also reveal (or perform) a scientific community marked by remarkable degrees of whiteness, heterosexuality, christianity, and bourgeois values. to look, then, at obituaries and death notices from 1970s petroleum geology is to engage with a performance of dominant culture, in anthropological or sociological terms, but also to engage with a culture of dominance— one wholly organized around finding and retrieving oil, extracting something from the planet so that it can be processed and monetized. but to look at these notices is also to engage with science as a service: a community of experts working on-demand in a “boom and bust” industry that has not always appreciated scientists and their abilities to create wealth and value. along these same lines, a complex form of codependency almost certainly informed how 1970s petroleum geologists marked the passing of life. what an “altar boy” crossed with a “boy scout” ends up sounding like, both then and now, as a manufactured presentation of self, is a figure grounded in obedience, protocol, duty, and selflessness (i.e., someone worth knowing, someone worth trusting, and someone worth employing). through the aapg bulletin, petroleum geologists that died in the 1970s each departed in roughly the same way, but also did so as someone for whom “9-to-5 time” was but one fraction of a larger social, psychological, and interpersonal repertoire. each of the individual subjects captured within the aapg memorials may have worked in the business of oil, but each was also far more than merely an oil worker. thus, a key part of how petroleum geologists collectively made sense of their world and work was by putting into words and performing this particular beaton 38 surplus of subjectivity, and by diligently documenting these extra-professional aspects of their lives. in these memorials, petroleum geologists clearly wanted to know themselves as more than petroleum geologists, and they worked hard through awkwardness and feelings to conjure themselves as more than professional workers, albeit along very particular scripts, boundaries, and guidelines. the scientists represented themselves as multi-dimensional scientist citizens with families, hobbies, faith, leisure pursuits, and avocations, in addition to (if not surmounting) their identities as petroleum geologists. at the centre of oil capitalism and oil science, according to petroleum geologists working (and dying) in the 1970s, was a fleshy, embodied economy of homosocial and person-planet attachments that continuously crisscrossed work-life divides and transcended the economy of tools, instruments, ideas, theories, debates, controversies, facts, and counter-facts that populated their “9-to-5 time.” conclusion work personas vary. they can be individual or collective. they can also be ongoing— requiring continuous maintenance and stewardship— or they can be event-specific, one-off, periodic. for instance, a promotion at work might lead someone to rework the persona they coordinate on social media platforms. a company-wide reorganization might spur an in-house project team to present themselves and their work in new ways, or return to old ways, depending on perceived management preferences— using reports, presentations, websites, and enterprise software platforms to make a new mask or resurrect an old one. on the other end of the spectrum, a long-time executive might leave a personal website unchanged for years, broadcasting the same travel photos and professional development certificates as the day she began, broadcasting a type of consistency, reliability, evenness. this paper looked at one type of work persona production, with a focus on 1970s petroleum geology and on practices of collective self-authoring in the wake of death within a community of scientific experts. while individual petroleum geologists crafted and managed individual personas, as well as other collective personas (at conferences, annual meetings, etc.), the routine inclusion of obituaries and death notices in one of the profession’s major scientific and technical journals provided an opportunity for petroleum geologists to write about themselves to themselves. writing and publishing memorials allowed petroleum geologists to engage in self-presentation and self-authoring within a relatively managed access environment (i.e., semi-privately, although not in any official sense) and, in doing so, the scientists in question inadvertently shared a significant amount about how they wanted to view themselves. several things make this case of work persona production worth adding to the growing literature on personas and self-display. for starters, this paper provided an example involving a uniquely controversial group of workers. today, petroleum geologists continue to work at the heart of the oil industries and thus in the midst of messy debates about hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), and at the centre of controversies surrounding major oil spills and oil transport methods such as multinational pipelines. depending on one’s views about the relationship between oil and recent u.s. war-making, american petroleum geologists also arguably work deep inside u.s. geopolitical strategy. looking, then, at when and how petroleum geologists make sense of themselves and at how they engage in self-display among themselves opens up new possibilities for critically engaging with a set of workers who hold a considerable amount of quiet power. what new conversations might be possible about energy forms and futures were ardent critics of oil capitalism and oil-driven war-making to confront the surreal reality of how petroleum geologists wish to be viewed and view themselves? petroleum geology also has a unique significance within our socio-material world. regardless of one’s environmental politics or personal thoughts about energy forms and futures, what petroleum geologists do has the ability to impact “downstream,” across space and time, cultural production elsewhere, including practices of self-display and persona production in other domains: nail polish, mascara, and hair gel each contain petroleum products, and cloudpersona studies 2015, 1.2 39 based software services underpinning many social media platforms run on very real energy grids. indeed, one of the reasons why our world “works” the way it does, and one of the reasons that persona production has found the material means to intensify and multiply across social domains, is because of who petroleum geologists are, what they do, and how they engage in individual and aggregate sense-making in not just their field sites and labs, but also in sites like living rooms, backyards, churches, hospital emergency rooms, and funeral parlors. the case of petroleum geologists reminds us that work personas are not always about work alone and that work personas in one social domain have the ability to affect other social domains. directions for future research might include broadening the temporal scope of this paper to chart whether and how the imaginal figure crafted by 1970s petroleum geologists as part of their group mourning ritual(s) has changed or stayed consistent over time. it would also be fruitful to map commonalities and differences between the self-display tactics that manifest in petroleum geology and those that manifest in other occupational realms, both around mourning but also around other key moments of individual and group sense-making. doing so would further illuminate what is or is not novel about petroleum geologists, and potentially reveal broader cultural patterns around work and workplace persona production. in addition, some important and unique questions that arise from this work are whether and how persona production affects resource availabilities. the material underpinnings of contemporary life are created in part with the help of a human infrastructure involving the people who find and retrieve, for a living, the material(s) in question. as allan sekula pointed out more than forty years ago, expert work is carried out by people who toggle back and forth between expert and lay subject positions, not by people who live, work, and die trapped in “9-to-5 time.” in the case of petroleum geology, routinely inhabiting a figuration something between an “altar boy” and a “boy scout,” at least micropublicly, may in fact be a critical component to how petroleum geology and oil 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has been argued that the workers from the caribbean who participate in the temporary agricultural workers program are should consider themselves fortunate to be given such an opportunity. i argue that this assertion is problematic because it overlooks the hardship the workers face in canada as a result of their non-citizen status. i also examine the fact that many of the workers enlisted in the sawp are forced to migrate for a living wage due to poor economic conditions in their countries of origin, and that these conditions are a direct consequence of unequal trade policies and structural adjustment programs. finally, i demonstrate canada’s complicity in benefiting from these programs. the canadian agricultural industry the sawp is a temporary labour program that brings foreign workers to canada for periods between six weeks and eight months annually in order to resolve labour shortages in the agricultural sector. as a result of this labour shortage, the canadian government employed a variety of stop-gap measures during the period between 1945 and 1965 (preibisch and binford 9). while helping to ease the shortages, these measures upheld a decidedly racist immigration policy that denied temporary visas or permanent residence to people of colour (preibisch and binford 9). a transnational approach to viewing the issues affecting migrant farm workers allows for a global perspective. to provide for themselves and their families, migrant farm workers were forced to painfully separate from their families and their communities for months every year and to lead temporary, transnational lives. for them, leading a transnational work life is not necessarily a luxury, a privilege, or an act of political resistance. it is a means to an end; it is survival (hennebry 2). the un convention on the rights of migrants defines a migrant worker as a “person who is to be engaged, is engaged or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a state of which he or she is not a national” (unesco; hennebry 2). those who migrate temporarily for work are typically referred to as “temporary labour migrants” or “overseas contract workers” and are generally defined as people who migrate for a limited period of time in order to take up employment and send home money. accordingly, “migrant workers” have become an important labour resource in the global economy (hennebry 2). many of the workers enlisted in the canadian sawp are forced to migrate for a living wage due to poor economic conditions in their native countries. as professor edmonds highlighter in one of his lectures, the poor economic conditions in these countries are attributed to globalization and global restructuring through structural adjustment programs (saps) that are part of the requirement from international financial institutions such as the international monetary fund (imf) and the world bank. saps are policies pushed by the imf and the world bank in poor countries as conditions for receiving loans or for obtaining lower interest rates on existing loans caribbean quilt ǀ 2020 56 (edmonds). saps not only create unequal trade policies between countries such as jamaica and the united states but also provide an unfair economic shift of responsibility from the corporations involved to the most vulnerable, e.g. farmers and the poor working class in jamaica. moreover, saps force the production of crops for their profitmaking value rather than for the benefit of the farmers, i.e. cash crops. (edmonds). therefore, workers accept poor employment conditions out of economic necessity and because of limited opportunities for social mobility in their home countries, as can be seen in countries as such as mexico and jamaica. indentured servitude in “interrogating racialized global labour supply: an exploration of the racial/national replacement of foreign agricultural workers in canada,” kerry preibisch and leigh binford argue that the 1965 white paper and the reformed immigration act passed in 1966 abolished the most racist clauses of the indian act, paving the way for the recruitment of jamaican workers as well as workers from other caribbean countries like trinidad and tobago and barbados in 1968. this also allowed workers from mexico to enter the program in 1974 (preibisch and binford 9). since its inception, the offshore program has grown continuously. in 1998, ontario farming operations recruited 5,233 workers from mexico and 6,937 from the caribbean to work primarily as fruit, vegetable and tobacco pickers, but also in greenhouses, nurseries and canning factories. growers in simcoe, tillsonburg, st. catharines and leamington each attracted more than 1,000 foreign seasonal workers in 1998 (bauder and cobin 2). the majority of migrants are men from poor households, with little education and often in the position of supporting large families. the sawp has been a resounding success for canadian growers because offshore indentured workers enable agribusiness to expand and secure large profits. being indentured means that migrant farm workers are bound to specific employers by contractual agreements for the duration of their contracts. this set up and the regulations that accompany it result in a number of negative impacts on sawp workers. first, they are legally prevented from unionizing. consequently, they do not enjoy access to the same rights and protections as workers with status. additionally, because they are bound to specific employers, they must ensure that the employer is happy with them so that they can keep their works. this ensures that foreign workers not only work hard, even when they are ill and/or injured, but also that they remain submissive. for instance, migrant farm workers are forced to agree to growers’ requests for long working hours, labour through the weekend, suppress complaints and avoid conflicts, if they want to stay out of “trouble” and to be offered renewed employment the following season (preibisch and binford 10). indentured servitude has enabled a multimillion dollar enterprise for employers in the agricultural industry in canada. sawp workers have communicated clearly that being tied to specific employers makes it difficult, if not impossible, to seek out better workplaces. consequently, employers are enabled to offer poor wages and inadequate working conditions. this system of unfair advantage essentially makes the migrant farm workers “unfree” (chowdhury p.9). the labour regime in canada chris ramsaroop, a labour advocate with justice for migrant workers, argues that, besides the contract, this state of being unfree is reinforced through a climate of fear that is pervasive among the migrant farm workers community. that is, being temporary labour and tied to a specific octavia andrade-dixon racialized emotional labour 57 employer has made migrants removable, replaceable and exploitable. the threat of expulsion and/or repatriation from the program prevents farm workers from protesting because the idea has been planted in their minds that if they do protest, they will be replaced by new migrant farm workers. this demonstrates that, in addition to being unfree, migrant farm workers are viewed and treated as disposable commodities. both growers and the canadian government have successfully instituted a labour regime in which migrant farm workers are continually exploited (bauder and cobin 4). in “canada’s creeping economic apartheid”, grace galabuzi shows that the canadian government’s immigration policy is, in reality, a labour market immigration policy (galabuzi). under this immigration policy, migrants are allowed entry into canada to serve a particular labour market need. in this sense, the labour market need is in the agricultural industry. it is worth noting that this need is different from other labour market needs in that it only requires additional labour for limited periods of time per year. existing policy suggests that employers in the agricultural industry view migrant farm workers as “matter-of-fact features” of the industry as well as economic elements and “insurance policies” for the prosperity of the canadian economy (bauder and cobin 7), with little consideration for the needs of the actual workers. for example, the importance of migrant farm workers for canada’s continued economic stability is often conveyed in quotes from growers suggesting that “our industry wouldn't survive without them” (bauder and cobin. 7). the focus is on the canadian perspective, and not on mutual benefit. moreover, by using the term “them,” the grower creates a distinction, othering them as different from “us”. according to audre lorde, this distinction of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy that relies on outsiders as surplus people (lorde 118). this lack of concern for the workers strengthens the view that migrant farm workers are essentially “unfree” in canada. racialization of the seasonal agricultural workers program in “globalization and the mexican-canadian seasonal agricultural worker program: power, racialization & transnationalism in temporary migration,” jenna hennebry argues that the sawp participates in the processes of racialization and the unequal treatment of non-european groups, even though the program was meant to improve the prosperity of both canadians and migrant farm workers (hennebry 59). for example, public discourse in the early 1960s suggested that caribbean workers were not biologically suited for the climatic conditions of canada and, therefore, that they would be unable to live in canada year round. it was also purported that, if migrant farm workers were allowed to immigrate, they would “create racial problems” in canadian communities (hennebry 59). hence, migrant farm workers could only be admitted as temporary workers under strict mobility and employment constraints (hennebry 59-60). migrant workers were presented in a manner that portrayed them as racially inferior and better suited than canadians for strenuous, seasonal farm work. in a similar vein, an article by harald bauder and margot corbin, “foreign farm workers in ontario: representations in the newsprint media,” surveys media narratives about migrant farm workers in ontario daily newspapers between the years 1996 and 2002. the results show that the media depicted migrant farm workers as “others” in canadian society. mthe articles also made connections between migrant farm workers and crime, implying that there is a structural link between workers recruited under the offshore program and criminal behavior (bauder and cobin 10). caribbean quilt ǀ 2020 58 in another study, yasmin jiwani demonstrated that the media contributes to demonization of racialized persons by identifying their racial background when sharing the information is simply not warranted (5). jiwani characterizes this representation as “mediated racism.” mediated racism functions in several ways, the most obvious being through the association of specific groups of people with specific actions (4). this parallels henry giroux’s argument that the public’s preoccupation with linking people of colour with violence and crime is encouraged by the media’s narrative framing (177). as further stated by jiwani, the continual linking of people of colour to crime is largely due to the underrepresentation of people of colour in the media, as only 2.6% of people employed in major dailies in canada are people of colour (5). therefore, it is not surprising that newspaper articles tend to reflect the public’s preoccupation with criminal behavior and people of colour. the perceived threat of racialized persons results in a public preference for migrant workers to be employed and housed in rural communities where they are secluded and their activities are limited to labour activities on the farm. the public’s fear is exacerbated by the media’s language, leading to the raising of cultural barriers that contribute to the segregation of migrant farm workers in host communities. in addition, migrant farm workers are not in a position to influence governments, employers, and other intermediaries who have significant control over their daily lives or the parameters of their migration (hennebry 2006, 3). in “when place becomes race,” sherene razack contends that a racial hierarchy exists in canada. this racial hierarchy is built on the foundation of “white settler society.” white settler society is based on the myths created by white settlers in order to establish their claim that the lands they colonized and settled on belong exclusively to them (razack 3). in a canadian context, part of the mythology claims that white settlers came to canada and shared the land equally with the indigenous inhabitants and that, after, these settlers singlehanded developed the land, essentially making it theirs over time. over time, the myth developed to protect the interests of white settler in the face of more recent migrations into the country. now, white settlers view themselves as the original inhabitants of canada, whose benevolence in opening up their doors is being taken advantage of by third-world refugees and migrants who threaten overwhelm them (razack 4). these mythologies, coupled with the mediated racism, have been used to further construct migrant farm workers as “others” in canadian society. likewise, the segregation of migrant farm workers who are confined to the farms on which they work speaks to their isolation from canadian society. notably, geography is an essential tool in the construction of racial hierarchies (razack 7). the space in which migrant farm workers are housed becomes a one “shaped by capitalism in a class system” (razack 8). migrant farm workers are confined to rural communities where contact with white settler society is limited. when they do cross the boundaries into white settler societies, they are often harassed or, worse, assaulted by white canadians (bauder and cobin 18). compounding their grievances, growers and others consider mexican workers “closer” in appearance to the canadian population, which “naturally” makes them more desirable workers (preibisch and binford 29). for example, one administrator commented that the concentration of mexican workers in leamington was due to the “closer association” between mexicans and the region’s southern european-origin growers (preibisch and binford 29). employers also face community pressure to hire “brown” (mexican) workers as opposed to “black” (caribbean) workers because mexican workers, are closer in complexion to the white canadians and therefore more acceptable (preibisch and binford 29). consequently, racism is clearly illustrated in the communities’ as well as the growers’ concerns with black caribbean workers. octavia andrade-dixon racialized emotional labour 59 little attention has been given to the issues and right protections for migrant farm workers. for this reason, it is hard to conclude a conversation on the racialization of the sawp without mentioning the work of chris ramsaroop and gabriel alladua of the advocacy group, justice for migrant workers, for the assistance they have been giving to the migrant farm workers community. justice for migrant workers (j4mw) is a voluntarily established group that aims advocates for non-status workers who enter canada through the sawp. to achieve its mission and goals, the organization educates workers about their rights and creates spaces for workers to dialogue free of repercussions (lecture. march 15, 2018). the primary mission of j4mw is to highlight the invisibility, marginalization of and discrimination against migrant farm workers, and to connect the struggles of the workers with the processes of globalization, structural adjustment, rural displacement and how they relate to the apartheid system that still exists in canada. the organization does this by encouraging migrant farm workers to organize amongst themselves to achieve equality. unfortunately, in our lecture of march 15, 2018, the presenter, chris ramsaroop, did not delve into the issue of advocacy for equitability for female migrant workers. it would have been especially interesting in light of the 199 women that were employed in the sawp in 2003 and the 227 who were employed in 2004. the lack of clear representation of the plights of female migrant workers is what suzan archer mann describes as the “hierarchicalization of oppression” in her article on simultaneous and multiple oppressions, where one from of oppression is treated as more fundamental than the other (mann 2). nevertheless, the organization is important because of its transnational nature. it considers the economic strains of sending migrant workers from countries such as jamaica and mexico to canada, as well as canada’s complicity in benefiting from the poverty in these countries. the j4mw stresses its most important work involves considering the families left behind by migrant farm workers. conclusion while the sawp officially aims to improve the economic prosperity of both canada and the migrant workers, the program also operates under a labour regime a processe of racialization that contribute to the unequal treatment of migrant farm workers. hennebry’s research on the sawp demonstrates that migrant farm workers are particularly valuable to capitalist accumulation due to their restricted freedom and relative powerlessness in the agricultural industry in canada (hennebry 59). moreover, canada’s complicity in benefiting from the program can be attributed to the fact that sawp provides canadian employers with easy access to marginalized labour from third world countries. for example, foreign workers grew to 52.4% of the labour force and supplied 45% of total hours in 2000 in the two provinces hiring 90% of the workers: ontario and quebec (preibisch and binford 10). furthermore, we saw how notions that migrant farm workers were not biologically suited for the climatic conditions of canada have been used as a labour strategy for denying migrant farm workers their rights and a path to permanent residency. these are evidence of the racialization of the program and labour regime used to continually exploit migrant farm workers in canada. the idea that foreign labour is racially inferior assumes that foreign labour is best suited for the primitive, labour-intensive work required on farms. this flawed reasoning legitimizes the constraints of workers’ freedom and the poor working conditions under which they toil. migrant farm work is viewed as a personal choice, and the workers are seen as fortunate. caribbean quilt ǀ 2020 60 this, of course, does not take into consideration the families that are left without a child, parent, partner or sibling for part of the year. it also neglects the emotional turmoil caused by separation. additionally, migrant farm workers must endure a lack of control over the duration of their contracts, an absence of overtime pay, a high level of social isolation and virtually no possibility of obtaining permanent residency in canada (preibisch and binford 10). certainly, workers benefit from their seasonal employment in canada despite the harsh working conditions. the wages paid in canadian dollars allow farm workers to pay for better education for their children and provides the opportunity for social and economic mobility in their countries of origin. however, the workers’ enrolment in the sawp is more often than not a compelled choice rather than an enthusiastic one. it is largely due to the gap between rich countries, such as canada, and poor countries, such as jamaica. it is a form of coercion that pushes thirdworld people to seek work in the first-world countries for lack of options closer to home. thus, it is not a matter of being fortunate, but of a lack of more lucrative options. octavia andrade-dixon racialized emotional labour 61 works cited bauder, harald & corbin margot. “foreign farm workers in ontario: representations in the newsprint media. chowdhury, fariah (2012). turning factory floor and farm fields into sites of incarceration: unmapping the production of deportability through canadian immigration raids. excerpt: unpublished ma thesis. university of toronto. edmonds, kevin. “the global plantation: migrant” farm workers in canada”. lecture march 15, 2018. galabuzi, grace-edward (2001 may). executive summary in canada’s creeping economic apartheid: the economic segregation and social marginalization of racialised groups. toronto: the centre for social justice (pp. 3–5). justice for migrant farm workers: http://justicia4migrantworkers.org/justicia_new.htm lorde, audre (1984). excerpt from, age, race, class and sex: women redefining difference. in, audre lorde, sister outside: essays and speeches by audre lorde (pp. 115). berkeley. the crossing press. mann, susan archer. “simultaneous and multiple oppressions. in doing feminist theory: from modernity to postmodernity.” (2012): (pp. 178-180). new york: oxford press. preibisch, kerry and binford, leigh (2008) ‘interrogating racialized global labour supply: an exploration of the racial/national replacement of foreign agricultural workers in canada,’ canadian journal of sociology, 44(1), pp. 5-36 razack, sherene h. (2002). excerpt from introduction: when place becomes race. in s.h. razack (ed.), race, space and the law: unmapping a white settler society (pp. 1–15). toronto: between the lines. yasmin, jiwani (2016): racism and the media: http://www.stopracism.ca/content/racism-andmedia zach ruiter. (2016) “migrant workers say they’re canada’s modern day slaves”. toronto now. september 27. available at: https://nowtoronto.com/news/migrant-workers-canada%27s-modernday-slaves/ http://justicia4migrantworkers.org/justicia_new.htm http://www.stopracism.ca/content/racism-and-media http://www.stopracism.ca/content/racism-and-media https://nowtoronto.com/news/migrant-workers-canada%27s-modern-day-slaves/ https://nowtoronto.com/news/migrant-workers-canada%27s-modern-day-slaves/ living with intensity europe’s journal of psychology, 7(2), pp. 395-398 www.ejop.org happiness, growth, and the life cycle richard a. easterlin edited by h. hinte and k.f. zimmermann oxford university press, 2010 reviewed by vlad glăveanu ejop editor social psychology, lse, st clements, houghton st, london, wc2a 2ae; e-mail: v.p.glaveanu@lse.ac.uk life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment samuel johnson (1776) the human being in pursuit of happiness is an ancient philosophical theme, revealing perhaps a perennial truth about us as individuals, as a species, and also about our societies. consumerism, capitalism, globalisation. terms we use to define the economic order in today’s world, or at least a ‘western model’ of it. where does happiness fit into this money-based equation? can wealth or growth make us happy, or, better said, are they sufficient to make us happy? these are all questions situated at the core of richard easterlin’s concerns and reflected in the volume ‘happiness, growth, and the life cycle’ (oxford university press, 2010; edited by h. hinte and k.f. zimmermann). what is important to know about this book from the start is the fact that it addresses a variety of audiences beyond those purely interested in economic science. its approach reflects a social science perspective and, as such, it is of interest for students of many disciplines, and, significantly for us here, for psychologists at large. easterlin’s work represents an exemplary attempt to integrate economic and social psychological knowledge resulting in the enrichment of both. unsurprisingly, the author is considered a founding father of behavioural economics and the economics of happiness. ‘happiness, growth, and the life cycle’ is a book that summarises key findings in these areas and leaves us not only with answers, but also with some important questions to think about. http://www.ejop.org/ happiness, growth, and the life cycle 396 the extensive research programme presented in the volume, bringing together major publications authored by easterlin, and updating them, was born out of a profound personal interest. trained as an economic historian, the author was intrigued for a long time by the question of whether modern economic growth really does bring about an increase in human happiness, as most economists firmly believed. his prestigious work in this field over the last decades has received increasing attention from the scientific community, manifested in a serious of distinguished awards, among them the iza prize in labor economics (2009). his name became associated with several interesting phenomena, such as the ‘easterlin hypothesis’ or the cohort size hypothesis and, most notably, the ‘easterlin paradox’ or the happiness-income paradox. the paradox and its attempted resolution are explored at length in ‘happiness, growth, and the life cycle’. in essence, this paradox refers to a difference between cross-sectional and time series results with regard to the relationship between income and happiness. a consistent set of findings, reflecting a broad geographical and historical range, point to the fact that people with higher income report, on average, higher levels of happiness. however, this relationship is no longer significant over time. explanations for this contradiction are sought by easterlin and his collaborators in the interplay between subjective variables, such as material aspirations, and objective ones, such as level of income. through these, the author manages to go beyond traditional economic models and enlarge them with psychological and social mechanisms. in fact, the book repeatedly challenges deep seated assumptions and biases, starting with the rather artificial distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ date (e.g. income indicators vs. selfreports of well-being). easterlin’s analyses and interpretations move towards a complex picture where gdp measures alone tell us little about people’s lives and their sense of happiness. as the author agrees, so-called ‘objective’ variables (money, family status, etc.) do no help us predict happiness over the life cycle if we have no information about the psychological processing of ‘objective’ conditions. the book is structured in four main parts, an introduction by the editors, several chapters on ‘growth and happiness’, chapters on ‘life cycle happiness’ and finally an epilogue. the introduction and the second section are fundamental in setting the scene. a single glance over the titles reveals the grand questions of the whole book: ‘does economic growth improve the human lot?’, ‘will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all?’, etc. interestingly, these questions guide the interrogation of various datasets in order to ‘test’ the theory and accumulate as much and as varied empirical evidence as possible. for instance, chapter 4 ‘lost in transition’ addresses the relationship between wealth and happiness in the context of post-communist, eastern european countries. the third section, concerned with happiness across the lifespan and the differences between genders and between europe’s journal of psychology 397 generations starts with some intriguing facts: while men and women seem to be, on the whole, equally (un)happy, a closer look at different life stages shows that women start life happier than men, but end it less happy. explanations are found again beyond pure economic reasoning in the satisfaction (and safety) derived from partnerships and family life. perhaps the last chapter (chapter 11) from this section is the most fascinating one, promising from the title rather immodestly to ‘explain happiness’ by building a conceptual framework that would reconcile several important empirical findings presented throughout the book. contrasting rather sharply a psychological view of well-being, the ‘setpoint theory’ and its emphasis on hedonic adaptation, with an economic one, revolving strictly around income and an unshakable trust that ‘more is better’, easterlin paves the way towards a ‘better theory of well-being’. this theory is not a classic compromise although it is in the end situated between the two models and their bottom up / top down approaches. the author’s theoretical construction relates aspirations, adaptations and attainment (life circumstances) with a domains view of happiness and under a dynamic conception of the life cycle. its merits are incontestable and, among them, the capacity to bring happiness back to what people have (in ‘plural’, not only in terms of income), what they would like to have and what they think they had and will have. as such, all through the book, essential links are made between economics and psychology. for one, it becomes clear how both disciplines share a number of similar concerns regarding the constructs they use. the case in point is the highly praised and equally contested notion of well-being or that of happiness. specialists from both fields are interested in issues of reliability (is happiness something that varies from day to day, from minute to minute?), of validity (are people capable to assess their level of happiness? are they truthful when they report it?), of standardisation (are reports comparable? are they biased by strong cultural influences?) and presentation (how are questions and answers formulated? what is the order of their presentation?). overarching is a common interest in ‘relative’ factors, in the perceptions or aspirations of people, in the way things are appreciated rather than just the way they ‘are’. this has been for decades the bread and butter of psychologists and interdisciplinary fields like behavioural economics cannot possibly ignore such differences. however, there are perhaps areas over which economists (like richard easterlin) and psychologists would not see eye to eye. somehow problematic for example is the almost interchangeable use of concepts: happiness, subjective well-being, life satisfaction, affect, etc. in the book. using happiness as a proxy for subjective well-being and evaluating it through measures of overall life satisfaction and satisfaction with finances can certainly be disputed. at any rate, the author makes a strong case for this terminological grouping and employs consistent measures in his numerous studies. on the topic of measures, again, readers familiar happiness, growth, and the life cycle 398 with the methodological intricacies of psychological studies will perhaps look suspiciously at gallup poll style evaluations asking people directly to evaluate their ‘overall’ state as either ‘very happy’, ‘fairly happy’ and ‘not very happy’. on the other hand they would appreciate though the large sample sizes these surveys work with. trade-offs such as these are inbuilt in the way social sciences operate. in any case, it is interesting to note other methods mentioned by the author for evaluating subjective well-being, especially the ‘self-anchoring striving scale’, devised by cantril, in which scales are built by participants themselves. in the end, the book makes extensive use of psychological theories and concepts and, most importantly, makes intelligent use of them in ways that potentially broaden their scope for both economists and psychologists. among them: loss aversion, interdependent preferences / social comparison, habit formation / hedonic adaptation, etc. particularly, easterlin used and tested angus campbell’s conceptual framework of happiness and life domains, which to a large extent constitutes the backbone of his own theory. certainly some might argue that other theories of well-being and also of human motivation in general could have been useful for this discussion. maslow’s theory of needs for instance is not mentioned although the conclusions reached here about how easily or not certain needs (financial, social, etc.) are ‘saturated’ has the potential to clarify previously postulated relations between basic and superior forms of motivation. drawing from such a rich theoretical and empirical background, ‘happiness, growth, and the life cycle’ was bound to reach important conclusions. the core ones are certainly thought-provoking in the wake of the recent global financial crisis: economic growth does not lead, in the long term, to an increase in subjective wellbeing; there is an urgency to redirect our focus from economic goods to other domains that enrich our lives, such as work, health and family; the ‘common bias in individual and governmental decision-making’ towards economic gain needs to be redressed, etc. in light of this, the book offers, ultimately, an important wakeup call of a very practical nature, an invitation for us all to rethink our habits, our preferences, our policies. of course, there is equally a strong sense that more research is needed, that greater conceptual clarity is needed and that psychologists, economists and other social scientists should work more frequently together to unpack the mechanisms that shape and change societal and individual norms and the aspirations of people. this highly informative book, written in a clear language and addressed in the end to both specialist and non-specialist audiences, makes a great contribution towards a dynamic and contextual understanding of human well-being in a moment in our collective history when such understandings are not only necessary but also long overdue. 55 continuities in capitalism: exploitation of indentured and migrant labour *** kevin de silva is a third year student at the university of toronto. he is completing his undergraduate degree in political science and caribbean studies, winning in 2010 the united network of indocaribbean toronto youths (u.n.i.t.y.) scholarship. he is a member of the caribbean studies students’ union, and is chief editor of caribbean quilt. he has also contributed to the stabroek news in guyana on issues concerning environmental politics and diaspora. *** “indentureship” is a legal, contractual agreement which defines a particular, temporally structured relationship involving capital interests and labour. the practical, historical results of such a contract required of labour its submission and unwitting acceptance of a subaltern state, ensuring the dominance of capital. in short, indentureship was a conceived as a legal compulsion demanding economic operationalization with punitive measures for those who resisted. if one accepts the practical implications of indentureship in these terms, one implicitly assumes a moral or normative position, that is, one automatically understands such a system to be reprehensible, exploitative, and “wrong.” this position however is easy to take: since the period of indenture is in the caribbean over, and since diasporic labour populations have been constituted under nation-states as “freemen” contemporarily, with the benefit of hindsight, a seemingly “clearcut issue” becomes fodder for arm-chair criticisms of past practices, institutions, and norms. yet the capitalist framework which underpinned this system still readily persists with only reticent moral condemnations of it. destroying temporality, that is, viewing indentureship as a past phenomenon in its character, destroying regionalism, that is, viewing features of indentureship only in the purview of a quintessentially caribbean quilt | 2011 56 caribbean experience, and destroying the nation-state as a level of analysis (ignoring flows of labour divorced from any meaningful origin elsewhere globally) all become central in viewing history as a continuing, discursive process, rather than merely a sum total of dead events irrelevant to the present age. this paper will argue that indentured labour, though nonexistent in the caribbean today and less apparent in the rest of the world, continues structurally in the form of migrant labour. the intention of this argument is to re-infuse and expand normative considerations beyond any nationalist or cultural limitations. similarities between the two processes seemingly detached from one another can be brought to light by analyzing firstly persisting economic modalities then secondly persisting social modalities in the cases of the caribbean, india and the united arab emirates. persisting economic modalities: contrasting pre & post indenture india basdeo mangru describes indian government policy during the period of indentured emigration as “largely influenced by the laissezfaire theory of administration… [with] minimum government interference in the pursuit of individual economic interests and few restrictions on the movement of goods, labour and capital.”1 the indian government policy today, adapted formally in 1991, is one that stresses this continuance of the laissez-faire attitude in neo-liberal terms: freeing up markets, the redirection of government expenditure away from public services in favour of infrastructure which in turn is meant to guide and regularize capital movement, as well as privatization, competition and the promotion of foreign direct investment. this economic schema, aside from myths which stress the newness and uniqueness of it and its “globalization” presently, can be found in its earlier incarnations during the 19th century: “nineteenth century globalization involved increasing transfers of commodities, people, capital and ideas between and within continents. the most straightforward measure of integration is simply the growing volume of these international flows.”2 kevin de silva – continuities in capitalism: exploitation of indentured & migrant labour 57 india itself has historically been home to what is termed “surplus labour” (that is, a large swath of the population which, because of the inability of the land to accommodate more people”3) requires their literal outflow in the form of migration and economic operationalization. the latter point refers to the lack of an ability to compete agriculturally within the nexus of capitalist accumulation against capital-intensive foreign goods (such as british textile outputs in the 19th century). hence, a once agrarian population is pressured onto the labour market to satisfy the demands of industrial production elsewhere off of the hinterland. although indebtedness was prevalent during the time of indentureship with “the ownership of…land passed to money-lenders; and as the traditional cultivators lost their land, the number of landless peasants increased,”4 contemporary india also suffers the ills of indebtedness as a tool of economic, and in turn, social control. migrant labour may at a glance seem to imply a type of “freeness” due to its spatial dimension; however “neo-bondage” compels workers into an equally subaltern state as the historicized indentured worker since they are not in a position to bargain in favour of what they deem reasonable payment for their work. neo-bondage specifically refers to the practice of a jobber “tying in prospective labourers through loans/ advances given during the lean season before the start of the seasonal employment relation.”5 this effectively means that throughout the actual period of work, labourers are paid a minimal amount with the promise of the full amount to be doled out at the end of the campaign. here, an obvious problem can be anticipated: that is in practice, labourers often do not receive accurate payment for their productive output, specifically through employers consciously manipulating the numbers to be paid to workers. moreover this veiled practice leads to another problem since only a minimum amount is paid during the period of seasonal employment, indebtedness may, and often does accrue without the labourers knowledge, forcing him or her to stay on even longer in order to simply pay off their debt.6 walter look lai notes a central push factor for migratory indentureship from 1860 to 1879 was geographic as well as environmental, that is, “intense famine caused by crop failures or the caribbean quilt | 2011 58 ravages of nature (drought or floods)”.7 these events seem, wrongly of course, relegated to the historical sphere, yet noting the continuing harshness of the indian landscape becomes imperative to understand the phenomenon of migrant labour today. look lai in the historical record notes famines in regions such as bengal, bihar, and orissa, places which contemporarily are persisting sites for mass droughts, occurring as often as once every five years.8 the ilo points out that since agriculture is largely dependent on “precipitation and distribution of rainfall” recurrence of drought “reduces the purchasing power of [a] large segment of the population;”9 again leading to the need for migration. related to the reality of famine here is of course impoverishment, and the pre-indenture period was unfortunately not the only time in which poverty in india was rampant. it has been calculated as recently as 2004 that 27.4% of india (more than a quarter of india’s population) is under the poverty line.10 the central argument favouring categorizing indentured labour as a uniquely exploitative phenomenon is its legal implications. on the one hand, the institutionalization of ‘unfreedom’ in the form of a contractual obligation became socially normalized for labourers, in other words, coercion or exploitation did not seem at the time necessarily evident or apparent. since the relationship was in its scope theoretically an agreement between two “equal” parties, an interpretation of “unfreedom” might have been felt, but not clearly discerned or understood by those involved. nevertheless a contemporary interpretation of such a practice adamantly posits not only exploitation, but a relationship in many ways reminiscent in character to that of slavery. in order to expand this normative position it becomes necessary to situate terms such as freedom and unfreedom differently, outside of legal parameters exclusively. neo-bondage, although not in any way related to the law, can be interpreted as a means of ensuring a cycle of subordination within a new framework, namely the market-system. this is not to say that during the indentured period the market did not exist, but it was coupled by many forms of pre-capitalist behaviour; the use of corporal punishment to discipline the workforce is but one example. kevin de silva – continuities in capitalism: exploitation of indentured & migrant labour 59 by stringently regulating the pay cycle of employees, as well as manipulating the sum total of money owed to the worker and coercing them into longer work cycles, neo-bondage in the form of indebtedness can be seen as promoting a type of “unfreedom” even when such a relationship is neither legally impelled nor implied. in other words, the market as well as the underground economy (which is merely a reflection of the former’s existence) is its own enforcing mechanism demanding strict labour control and subordination. weber’s analysis of capitalism as an “iron cage” is part of this reading surely, but in a more concrete sense labour movement itself is determined not so much by the law as it is by the demands of capitalist production, demands which in a very real sense enforce subservient social roles to those apart of its lowest rung. persisting social maladies: comparing the historical caribbean to the modern uae plantation society can be described not only capitalist but also as a “total institution”.11 this categorization takes the plantation as a space of seemingly effective hegemony in the form of hierarchical and authoritarian structures that over-arch and over-lap, subordinating docile bodies to its rule. in the case of the indentureship period, it in many ways was a continuation of the period of slavery in a new disguise, with the same economic imperatives at the base of the system. haraksingh for example states “the assumptions and premises of slavery continued to inform management attitudes.”12 take a large factory in look lai recounts the description of a british writer, edward jenkins: manchester, or birmingham, or belfast, build a wall around it, shut in it's people from all intercourse, save at rare intervals, with the outside world, keep them in absolute heathen ignorance, and get all the work you can out of them, treat them not unkindly, leave their social habits and relations to themselves, as matters not concerning you who make money from their labor, and you would have constituted a little community resembling to no small degree, a sugar estate village in british guiana13 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/manchester http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/birmingham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/belfast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/guyana caribbean quilt | 2011 60 the freedom of movement, something which may be overlooked and understated, was for the indentured worker severely limited as s/he was expected to stay on the estate at all times. the consequences of disobeying this rule were “floggings and beatings” as well as “arbitrary fines and court sanctioned imprisonment.”14 the limiting of space and saturation of the labourer with ceaseless work, hardship, and suffering must have created a culture somewhat adapted to severity. nevertheless, the restriction of space also entailed the institutionalizing of a perpetual psychological torture for individuals who certainly must have had a yearning for their freedom. according to haraksingh, the driver also played a central role in the domination of the indentured worker, but not exclusively by physical means. the driver was able to command production because of his close ties to the “manager’s ear” forcing indians to act compliantly, and also because of his ability to dole out tasks with varying degrees of difficulty, in turn “enhancing their earnings.”15 look lai notes that subjugation was further enhanced by the low wages indian workers received (“in 1871…about 40% of male indentureds did not earn as much as $1.20 a week”).16 this fact though seemingly detached from political/social control, was, in my view intimately tied to it. that is, maintaining low wages forced indians to continue their servitude and labour for subsistence, with death following by both starvation and poverty if they did not accede to the dominating planter class. beating so-called “difficult” labourers, disallowing or preventing access to legal means of compensation, dwellings which were cramped and putrid, a lack of proper nutrition and sustenance as well as the continuation of poverty generally were all inherent features of indentured life in the 19th the uae, now one of the most developed countries in the world according to the hdi (human development index), has risen as a world leader in finance as well as “development” for three primary reasons: oil, construction, and migrant labour. the government, pragmatically realizing that oil, because of its finitude needs to be instrumentally used as a means to an end in order to avoid a potential boom-bust cycle, has century. with such a brutal historic record taken into account, it becomes instructive to contrast these realities with the contemporary case of migrant work in the united arab emirates. kevin de silva – continuities in capitalism: exploitation of indentured & migrant labour 61 invested instead in longer-term mass construction projects. already many of these spectacular sites have garnered attention on the world stage: its man-made islands the palm jumeirah, its indoor ski resorts, the burj dubai, now the tallest man-made structure in the world, as well as a whole host of other hotels, skyscrapers and tourist attractions such as its own, unique version of disneyworld and even louvre museum. yet, as is often the case with postcard imagery, the shining, glittering exterior of any metropolis or nation-state superpower hides it’s structurally related, opposite actuality, its grimy, sordid underbelly. during the indentured period, it was reported that when the reality of the confined journey was realized by those boarding the ship, many desperately committed suicide by jumping into the hughli river.17 such circumstances are unfortunately not relegated to history’s dustbin. the bbc in 2005 reported the case of arumugam venkatesan, a migrant worker who hung “himself from the ceiling fan in his room in his labour camp” due to inhuman living conditions.18 one can imagine many more cases that are unreported, a testament to labour camps with “85 men in a nine-roomed house…bedrooms sleep[ing] eight, sometimes 12 people…bathrooms…squeezed into cupboards and shared by 25 men.19 the horror however is intensified in that these labour camps are often nowhere near the locations in which actual work takes place, but are instead situated in the desert sand, where the “wind fills the air with sand and dust that choke the lungs and sting the eyes.”20 a strong parallel between the historical plantation and the contemporary case of the uae is the stifling of resistance and the disallowance of labour unions. according to human rights watch migrant workers “comprise nearly 90 percent of the workforce in the private sector…and are denied basic rights such as freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.” 21 this inconceivable dismissal reveals the true concern of the emeriti government: to create a society mirroring a combination of las vegas and singapore, a site of concentrated capital physically embodied in a completely bourgeois class. here the goal is the capitalist utopia, the dominating and hegemonic ideological and economic concern of the neoliberal era. human rights watch highlights elsewhere “unlawful recruiting fees, caribbean quilt | 2011 62 broken promises of wages, and a sponsorship system that gives an employer virtually complete power over his workers.”22 again, although no formal legal provisions are utilized to ensure subservience, these “extra-legal” means do entail severe exploitation. nor is there a need for an enforcement mechanism of subjugation when one must cope already with “sweltering humidity…well above 32 degrees centigrade [perpetuating]…heat related illnesses”, and employers “failing to pay for electricity, garbage and sewage collection in labour camps” as well as threatening deportation for striking.23 though courts have formally called for the implementation of certain labour standards to be followed by employers, their refusals to acquiesce with such declarations are themselves commonplace practices in the united arab emirates. in his book, in defense of lost causes, slavoj conclusions žižek argues that the present neoliberal period is giving rise to a “growing apartheid,” a widening separation between labour and its connection to a nation-state which would ensure at least an elementary level of legal protection against outside abuse. slavery as well as indenturship are in my view early forerunners of such a thesis. the modern phenomenon of the export-process zone, or “fenced-in factories” outside any clear political jurisdiction are signifiers of transportable, interchangeable, and heavily guarded islands of freefloating capital. they impose, symbolically and literally, a type of purgatory onto a labouring citizenry that possess political rights only in an illusory sense, since they are, after all, owned and controlled by foreign agents, and not meaningfully connected to and protected by the polity they were born into. žižek notes: “since, sometime very soon, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the majority of the rural population, and since slum inhabitants will compose the majority of the urban population, we are no way dealing with a marginal phenomenon.”24 some questions emerge: is such a pattern sustainable? what will happen to migrant labourers in countries such as the united arab emirates after the “boom of building” subsides? can we not view kevin de silva – continuities in capitalism: exploitation of indentured & migrant labour 63 slavery/indentureship and migrant labour as related institutionally, as “historical bookends” within the same overall capitalist schema? in order to even attempt to answer these questions fully one must, to restate, destroy temporality. one should not read history as detached or distant, meaningless and dead. one should instead trace its continuities, its changes and the cloaks its “movers” have adapted in charting a specific course. if indentured labour can be read as a cloaked “slavery,” then, as this paper has argued, migrant labour certainly can be read as a continuation of indentureship. notes 1 mangru, basdeo. "indian government policy towards indentured labour migration to the sugar colonies." benevolent neutrality: indian government policy and labour migration to british guiana, 1854-1884. london: hansib pub ltd, 1987. 162. 2 guillaume daudin, matthias morys and kevin h. o’rourke. "globalization, 1870-1914." university of oxford department of economics discussion paper series (2008): pp. 2. 3 bisnauth, dale. "chapter three: crossing the kala pani." settlement of indians in guyana, 1890-1930 . peepal tree press ltd., 2001. pp. 38. 4 ibid. pp. 39. 5 lerche, jens. "a global alliance against forced labour? unfree labour, neoliberal globalization and the international labour organization." journal of agrarian change, vol. 7 no. 4 (october 2007): pp. 439. 6 ibid. 7 look-lai, walter. "chapter 2: push factors and migration trends in india and china." indentured labor, caribbean sugar: chinese and indian migrants to the british west indies, 1838-1918. the johns hopkins university press, 1993. pp. 25-26. caribbean quilt | 2011 64 8 salve, dr. w.n. labour rights and labour standards for migrant labour in india. <http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/condtrav/pdf/rdwpaper22a.pdf>. pp. 7. 9 ibid. 10 patnaik, utsa. "poverty and neo-liberalism in india." centre for economic studies and planning, jawaharlal nehru university (2006): pp. 17. 11 beckford, george. "plantation society: toward a general theory of caribbean society." savacou (1976): pp. 8. 12 haraksingh, kusha. "control and resistance among indian workers." dabydeen, david. india in the caribbean. hansib/university of w blication, 1987. pp. 67. 13 look-lai, walter. "chapter 5: life and labour on the plantations: the indians." indentured labor, caribbean sugar: chinese and indian migrants to the british west indies, 1838-1918. the johns hopkins university press, 1993. pp. 121. 14 ibid. 15 haraksingh, kusha. "control and resistance among indian workers." dabydeen, david. india in the caribbean. hansib/university of w blication, 1987. pp. 69. 16 look-lai, walter. "chapter 5: life and labour on the plantations: the indians." indentured labor, caribbean sugar: chinese and indian migrants to the british west indies, 1838-1918. the johns hopkins university press, 1993. pp. 132. 17 indo caribbean: news views and information. indian arrival in the caribbean. may 2003. <http://www.hansib-books.com/root/icn3.pdf> 18 bbc news | south asia. migrants' woes in dubai worker camps . 10 february 2005. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4249223.stm>. 19 ibid. kevin de silva – continuities in capitalism: exploitation of indentured & migrant labour 65 20 world socialist website. the plight of the uae’s migrant workers: the flipside of a booming economy. 9 november 2007. <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/nov2007/duba-n09.shtml>. 21 human rights watch. "uae: address abuse of migrant workers." 28 march 2006. <http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/03/28/uae-address-abuse-migrant-workers>. 22 —. uae: exploited workers building ‘island of happiness’. 2009 may 2009. <http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/05/18/uae-exploited-workers-building-islandhappiness>. 23 world socialist website. the plight of the uae’s migrant workers: the flipside of a booming economy. 9 november 2007. <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/nov2007/duba-n09.shtml>. 24 žižek, slavoj. in defense of lost causes. new york, london: verso , 2008. pp. 424. s: journal of the jan van eyck circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 22-38 s a m o t o m š i č l a u g h t e r a n d c a p i t a l i s m i n this time of crisis, interest in marx’s economic thought has once again found its way to the core of international political-economic debates. only a good decade ago, many voices claimed this figure’s attempts to think the capitalist mode of production no longer sufficed to explain our financialised technocapitalist societies, but he has now made a triumphal comeback from the annals of political philosophy. in the same move, another old alliance that had vanished from the political agendas, freudo-marxism, has now re-emerged, reformulated through its lacanian developments. marx and freud, the critique of political economy and psychoanalysis (one could also write, the critique of libidinal economy) are no longer treated as ways of thinking that belong to some tamed “cultural heritage” (which is to claim that they do not need to be taken seriously). instead, they are resuming their roles as critical and radical voices, addressing the question, in all its necessity and complexity, of how to break out of capitalist structures. the official transcription of lacan’s seminar d’un autre à l’autre, which contains his most direct contribution to the critique of political economy, was published in 2006, only a little more than a year before the outbreak of yet another fundamental crisis of capitalism. the seminar in question, too, was a crisis seminar, held in the turbulent moment of 1968-69, directly after the student and workers’ protests, which had reached their well-known climax in may 68. yet lacan’s seminar contains more than a confrontation with the political events of its time. it also performs a widereaching reorientation of the critical project known under the slogan of the “return to freud.” in this reorientation, which, it is true, stretches back to lacan’s “excommunication” from the international psychoanalytic association, marx slowly replaced the authority of ferdinand de saussure, and consequently, the political implications of the theory of the signifier prevailed over the epistemological value of structural linguistics. put differently, the science of value supplemented the science of signs, and the intricacies of discursive production1 became the main preoccupation of lacan’s thought. 1. in its double aspect, which comprises production of subjectivity and production of enjoyment. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 23 despite being openly reserved toward the revolutionary slogans or the proclaimed goals of the worker-student alliance, lacan sided with the movements by determining the sources of the structural opposition to the social rebellion. the theory of discourses, developed in the aftermath of may 68, could therefore be read both as lacan’s theory of crisis as well as his theory of revolution. its pivotal point is the link between structure and instability. lacan strives to think the real consequences of discursive logic by examining the contradictions, dynamics and impossibilities inherent in every structural order. it is within this perspective that his notorious response to the revolutionary students and critiques of structuralism should be read: “… if the may events demonstrate anything, then they demonstrate precisely the descent of structures into the street.”2 “structure i[n] the street” intertwines the space of discursive relations with the site of political action, which, according to the agents of may 68, escapes the determinism of structural laws. lacan’s formulation, on the other hand, argues that events, be they social or subjective, political or traumatic, are realisations of structure; they are above all logical events, an assertion that does not simply suggest that they are overdetermined by a set of rigid relations. lacan persistently argued against the dichotomy of structure and event, because this opposition depends on an oversimplified conception of both terms, a double misunderstanding. just as structure is no stable and invariable compendium of necessary relations, event is no pure and mystic “outdoors,” which would intervene out of the blue in order to bring about a sudden transformation. for psychoanalysis, there is some kind of event-character pertaining to structures as such, and one can thematise the emergence of events only by conceptually linking structure and instability. lacan’s theory of discourses thus pushes structuralism toward the logic of instability, whether this instability is called crisis, revolution or event. what matters is that all these cases necessitate a more sophisticated and critical notion of structure. consequently, this reorientation brings about a fundamental reinvention of structuralism, which now begins to designate a science of the real,3 a science whose privileged epistemic object is precisely instability. in this framework lacan introduced and deployed his controversial thesis that there was a wide-reaching homology between marx’s deduction of surplus-value and freud’s attempts to theorise the production of enjoyment. the production of value in the social apparatus and the production of enjoyment in the mental apparatus follow the same logic and eventually depend on the same discursive structure. this move confronted lacan’s “return to freud” in the midst of a capitalist 2. lacan’s intervention following michel foucault’s lecture “qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ? [what is an author],” in dits et écrits (paris: gallimard, 2001) 848. 3. in the concrete case of lacan’s teaching, a science of the structural real. see, for instance, the following remarks: “structure is thus real. in general, this is determined by means of convergence toward impossibility. this is why it is real.” and further: “let us say that, in principle, it is not worth speaking of anything other than of the real, in which discourse itself has consequences. call it structuralism, or not. last time i called it the condition of seriousness.” jacques lacan, d’un autre à l’autre (seminar xvi, 2006) 30-31. henceforth cited in the text as seminar xvi. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 24 crisis with a more general deadlock that freud had already stumbled upon in his theoretical and clinical work: the production of jouissance against the background of a psychic conflict, a tension between opposing demands or heterogeneous instances in the mental apparatus. one of freud’s greatest merits consisted in the fact that he no longer conceived of enjoyment as a more or less insignificant sideeffect of satisfaction, which would signal the decrease of bodily tension once the satisfaction of a need, desire or drive had taken place. instead, he recognised in enjoyment a product emerging directly from the increase of tension. one merely needs to consult freud’s writings in metapsychology (for instance, repression, instincts and their vicissitudes or beyond the pleasure principle) in order to become aware that freud associates the production of enjoyment with the intensification of tension. the more the unconscious tendency demands satisfaction, the more the mental apparatus works on creating the conditions for satisfaction. however, this satisfaction does not take place at the end of this process—it is inscribed in the process itself. the unconscious tendency constantly demands more enjoyment, and consequently, more psychic labour. already from freud’s earlier works, such as the interpretation of dreams or jokes and their relation to the unconscious, it becomes apparent that unconscious labour performs an endless task of satisfying an insatiable demand. it is no surprise, then, that lacan at a certain point described the unconscious with the expression “ideal worker,” a worker that does not “think, judge or calculate”4. yet complications emerge even in this seemingly automatic factory that is the unconscious. for psychoanalysis, libidinal economy never follows the machine-like model. instead, it is always articulated around a fundamental deadlock (e.g. repression), and the actual source of enjoyment should be sought precisely there. already in freud, this deadlock was contextualised both epistemologically and politically: it triggered the “scientific project” of psychoanalysis by becoming its privileged object, but it also provided specific insight into the mechanisms that support the social mode of production. it is not exaggerated to claim that das unbehagen im kapitalismus, discontent in capitalism, would be the more appropriate title of das unbehagen in der kultur, discontent in culture, since one can hardly ignore that freud never speaks of some abstract culture, but precisely of industrial societies marked by insatiable consumerism, intensified exploitation and recurring breakdowns, economic depressions and wars. the nexus of the epistemological and the political problematic that accompanied the freudian theory of the unconscious suggests that capitalism belongs among the crucial problems for psychoanalysis and that clinical practice constantly confronts the pathologies of what one could call the capitalist mode of enjoyment. lacan brought out this point in the following emphatic remark: “the more saints, the more laughter; that’s my principle, to wit, the 4. jacques lacan, television: a challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment, ed. by joan copjec, trans. by denis hollier et al. (new york: norton, 1990) 16. henceforth cited in the text as television. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 25 way out of capitalist discourse—which will not constitute progress, if it happens only for some” (television 16). the relation between psychoanalysis and capitalism could hardly be situated in a more openly antagonistic way. psychoanalysis is the envers of the capitalist discourse, its conflictual flipside and inversion—which means its internal border and the point where the capitalist discourse can be destabilised, sabotaged and inverted. this clearly does not mean that psychoanalysis already stands outside capitalism, or that it possesses positive knowledge of how to break out of its forms of domination. but it does suggest that the imperative of psychoanalysis, as it was invented by freud and reinvented by lacan, consists in not shying away from direct confrontation with capitalism and in pursuing the line initiated precisely by marx’s critique of political economy: to destabilise the appearances that sustain the capitalist mode of production and to mark the point, from which the capitalist social link can be envisaged in its irreducible contradiction. in lacan’s words, “without any doubt, the worker is the sacred place of this conflictual element, which is the truth of the system” (seminar xvi 39). to mobilise this conflictual element—namely the subject that both marx and freud encountered in productive social labour and in unconscious labour—against the capitalist strategies of exploitation is the shared effort of psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy, which is why no psychoanalyst can be indifferent to the question: how can the exit from the capitalist discourse be brought about for all? this for all is indeed crucial, since it demands that psychoanalysis force the juncture of the singular with the universal, rather than remaining in the apparent autonomy and self-sufficiency of clinical experience. the impossibility of the psychoanalytic profession, which freud had already spoken about seems to redouble and intensify when confronted with this challenging political task.5 on the other hand, lacan’s remark contains a sobering moment for everyone else: there is no such thing as an easy way out, an exit from capitalism for one, some or many. claiming the opposite would mean to fall back into an extremely problematic dichotomy between inside and outside, and consequently, to identify the exit with a metaposition. this would then amount to an even more problematic fetishisation, according to which psychoanalysis, for instance, would be considered the “great outdoors” of the logic of capital, a small oasis of authenticity within the vast capitalist desert. lacan’s critical stance is clear: psychoanalysts must restrain themselves from becoming self-sufficient, self-absorbed or self-centred, for these are precisely the key features that will abolish the radical and critical character of their discipline and 5. “here let us pause for a moment to assure the analyst that he has our sincere sympathy in the very exacting demands he has to fulfil in carrying out his activities. it almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. the other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.” the standard edition of complete psychological works of sigmund freud, vol. xxiii, trans. james strachey (london: vintage, 2001) 248. henceforth cited in the text as standard edition, followed by the volume number. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 26 integrate it into the logical frameworks of the dominant social discourse. a case of such assimilation is well known, the international psychoanalytic association, which can mockingly be called the “professional insurance plan against analytic discourse” (television 15). the institution, created by freud in order to be the official guardian of his epistemic invention, soon became an institutionalisation of the resistance against the most revolutionary insights of psychoanalysis. by searching for a way out of the capitalist discourse, the task of psychoanalysis becomes embedded, from the very outset, in a significantly broader context than the supposed intimacy of the analyst’s office. in the apparent clinical withdrawal from the social structures, the latter are most effectively at work. they re-emerge in the patient’s speech, as well as in the structure of his or her libidinal economy. capitalism is inscribed in the mental apparatus—this was already freud’s insight, when he found the best metaphor for unconscious desire in none other than the capitalist, meaning that psychoanalysis began with a fundamental critical and political insight rooted in the rejection of the opposition “unconscious—conscious” or “private—social.” the unconscious is no archive or reservoir of unclear representations and forgotten memories; it is a site of discursive production. consequently, what matters most in the unconscious is not the “explicit content” of memories and signifiers, but what happens to them, the procedures that manipulate the material, and which can be approached in a logical way. freud famously broke this logic down to two central symbolic operations—condensation and displacement—for which lacan provided a linguistic translation: metaphor and metonymy. but for freud the unconscious processes were all about a specific form of labour. operations like condensation and displacement are no simple automata; they demand a labouring subject, which, in the given regime knows only one form, labour-power. hence, to talk about unconscious labour is far from innocent. freud refers to the same economic reality and to the same conceptual apparatus as marx. the important freudian insight would thus be that the unconscious is no neutral or transcendent space of thinking: its mechanisms and the corresponding mode of enjoyment depend on the same structure as the social mode of production. lacan named this predominating structure the master’s discourse, a discourse that he first identified with the logic of the signifier, which comes down to his famous definition “the signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier.” to these three discursive elements lacan later added the surplus-object, a. however, for the master’s discourse the same conclusion needs to be drawn as for the unconscious. it may be the oldest discourse, yet it does not function in the same way in different historical contexts (slaveholder societies, feudalism and capitalism). why is this the case?—because its four elements (master-signifier, s 1; knowledge, s 2; subject, ; and surplus-object, a) know different “personifications” (as marx would put it) in different modes of production. this point can be read along with the remark, from the communist manifesto, that the “history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”—and not of class struggle.6 marx and engels were cautious 6. see karl marx, selected writings (oxford: oxford university press, 2000) 246. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 27 enough not to make of class struggle a trans-historical invariable, which would simply assume different concretisations in different historical epochs. they even write that capitalism resolves previous class struggles and replaces them with the capitalist struggle between two social classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. capitalism “simplifies” class struggle by making the non-relation that supports society fully visible in the split into two opposing camps, while past societies were still engaged into multiple class conflicts. again, this does not imply that capitalism revealed the true essence of past struggles but that it fabricated something entirely different from the existing social inequalities and introduced new modes and strategies of exploitation, which introduced new social structures, etc. to repeat, both class struggle and the master’s discourse turn out to be empty concepts, if we detach them from their social concretisations. they do not designate some ahistorical essence of history or positive entity; they stand for the inconsistency, contradiction or instability that traverses each concrete historical mode of production but which is also transformed together with the mode of production.7 the feudal lord cannot be compared with the modern capitalist, even if he can be associated with the same discursive articulation or with the same insatiable tendency of exploitation etc. class struggle designates for marx and engels both the structure of the social link and the distortion of this structure. in other words, class struggle is an empty concept precisely because it designates structural instability and even instability as structure, thereby rejecting the essentialist readings, where structures are said to form an enclosed and stable order. homologically, lacan’s notion of the master’s discourse, too, envisions the instability in the relations of domination and not some eternal master, which would remain identical throughout history. one could therefore reformulate marx and engels by saying that all history is the history of the master’s discourses. in lacan’s translation of the classical marxian problematic, the master’s discourse should be taken as a formula of nonexistence rather than existence—namely of the nonexistence of the social relation, on the background of which other social links become possible (such as the hysteric’s discourse, which lacan associates with various political revolutions, the university discourse, which is linked with modern science, or finally the analytic discourse, which concerns psychoanalysis but should not be limited only to that framework).8 going back to the quotation from television, we can ask ourselves who or what is the enigmatic saint that lacan associates with the exit from the capitalist discourse. let us consider the lines that precede the quoted excerpt: a saint’s business, to put it clearly, is not caritas. rather, he acts as trash: his business being trashitas. so as to realise what the structure imposes, namely 7. in the last instance, marx’s term “mode of production” is homologous with lacan’s notion of “discourse.” but the “mode of production” without specification (“slaveholder,” “feudal,” “capitalist” etc.) clearly does not say anything. 8. for the deduction and elaboration of the four discourses, see jacques lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis (seminar xvii), trans. russell grigg (new york: norton, 2007). tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 28 allowing the subject, the subject of the unconscious, to take him as the cause of the subject’s own desire. in fact it is through the abjection of this cause that the subject in question has a chance to be aware of his position, at least within the structure. for the saint, this is not amusing (television 15-16, translation modified). the task of the analyst consists in “realising what the structure imposes.” but the realisation of structure also means its destabilisation, by detecting and circumscribing its internal impossibility, contradiction and disclosure. in doing so, the analyst enables the subject to become aware of its position within the given regime of production, namely that the subject is constituted as pure split, in the case of capitalism, as commodity labour-power.9 marx already showed that labour-power is marked by inconsistency, because it is both one commodity among others and the only commodity that can produce other commodities. in this respect, he assumed the same position in relation to the proletariat that freud did toward his neurotic patients: he was their analyst, in the sense that he dissolved (the actual meaning of analysis) the layers of appearances and fetishisations in order to reach the point where structure is realised in nothing other than the subject’s inconsistency. in labour-power the contradictions of the commodity universe are knotted together—this is the actual critical point of marx’s labour theory of value, to which we shall return further below. the realisation of structural imperatives requires transference, in which the analyst assumes the position of the cause of the analysand’s desire and thereby establishes the libidinal relation that sustains the analytical economy. here, a certain displacement is at work, since the analytical situation achieves something that otherwise remains unknown to the subject: it creates the conditions in which the subject can openly confront its own status in the broader social reality: “to be aware of his position, at least within the structure.” this is why psychoanalysis does not aim at doing charity (caritas), i.e., creating the conditions, in which the subject would be reintegrated into the given social frameworks. charity is a form of love, which does not seriously problematise the regime that created the conditions requiring charity. what lacan calls trashitas contains a more subversive tendency, which aims to subvert the regime of domination by repeating its contradictions within the analytic situation. yet should the task of analysis consist in more than mere repetition of existing deadlocks, it needs to prevent the development of transference into yet another “love-relation” (caritas) and instead orientate the subject toward the point where its act will transform the established mode of enjoyment. targeting this transformation means working on a possible resistance against capitalism. lacan provided different names for this analytic goal—the pass, traversing the fantasy, identification with the symptom—which all envision the same structural shift: transformation of the subject (“the pass”), defetishisation (“traversing the fantasy”) and organisation of structural contradiction (“identification with the symptom”). 9. see jean-claude milner, clartés de tout (paris: verdier, 2011) 90. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 29 in all these cases the realisation of what (the capitalist) structure imposes will widen the gap that allows the commodified subject to be transformed into a “sainttrash,” the counterpart to commodity. one subversive aspect of trashitas, transference, thus consists in its rejection of the only love that capitalism cultivates for its impoverished subjects (caritas). of course, by practising trashitas, psychoanalysis risks strengthening the dependency of the analysand on the analyst, which is why lacan incessantly repeated that the analyst should never identify with the object of transference. the risk of transference lies in the analysand’s fetishisation of the analyst as a “subject supposed to know,” to recall lacan’s formulation; by identifying with this figure, the analyst would indeed end up in self-fetishisation, turning psychoanalysis into yet another form of capitalist domination. the analyst is merely a provisional love object, and the end of analysis inevitably coincides with the dissolution of transference. psychoanalysis should thus envision the subject’s confrontation with capitalism and strive to bring him or her to the point where an apparently private symptom can be recognised as a concrete manifestation of the general economic framework. there is no private suffering, and to cure concretely means to cure from capitalism. this would be the basic difference between psychoanalysis and other psyprofessions. psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy all engage in the practice of caritas and thereby mystify the actual position of the subject within structure. the association of laughter with the exit from capitalism is another surrealist moment in the citation from lacan’s television. laughter as a weapon against capitalism seems to suggest that capitalism might be structured like a joke, and the envisioned universalisation of laughter –“the more saints the more laughter”—would mean the downfall of capitalism. should psychoanalysis teach us how finally to laugh at capitalism? much of the effectiveness of capitalism surely concerns the fact that it is more successful in causing anxiety than laughter. while nietzsche wrote that all the gods died of laughter when one of them claimed he was the only one, will the same fate strike capital, once everyone starts laughing at its advocates, who never get tired of repeating that we live in the best possible world or that we need to tighten our belts because we have been living beyond our means? “the more saints the more laughter” evidently means “the more ‘abjects’ the more politics,” a politics carried out with a somewhat different humour than the one proposed by the capitalist class. for the saint’s laughter is not the only laughter lacan talked about. it is the inversion of the capitalist’s laughter, which lacan stumbled upon in marx’s capital: marx introduces this surplus value almost guilelessly (…) after taking some time, when he lets the person involved, namely the capitalist, speak. (…) marx allows him to take his time to develop this apologia, which appears to be nothing if not honest, and there marx points out that this spectral figure he confronts, the capitalist, laughs. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 30 this feature, seems superfluous, nevertheless struck me when i first read it. it seemed to me then that this laughter is properly something that refers to what, at that very moment marx is unveiling, namely what concerns the essence of surplus-value. (…) what i am unveiling in the passage has, of course, not been noted until now (…) i mean the conjuncture of laughter with the radically eluded function of surplus-value (…) in short, there and elsewhere, i mean in the radical function hidden in the relation of production to labour, as well as elsewhere, in another, deeper relation, where i am trying to lead you with the help of surplus-enjoyment, there is something like a fundamental gag, which is located strictly speaking in this joint, where we have to drive our wedge when the relations that are in play in the experience of the unconscious, understood in terms of its most general functioning. (seminar xvi 64-65) the capitalist hijacks laughter by imposing his own idea of humour. the matching passage in marx is to be found in the section on the production of absolute surplusvalue, the chapter on labour and its valorisation, where marx lays out most openly his correction of the political-economic labour theory of value, a correction that displaces the accent from the all-too-simple claim that “labour is the source of value” to the more sophisticated association of the source of value with the contradictions of the commodity form: in fact, the seller of labour-power, like the seller of any other commodity, realizes [realisiert] its exchange-value, and externalises [veräussert] its usevalue. he cannot take the one without giving the other. the use-value of labour-power, in other words labour, belongs just as little to its seller as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who sold it. the owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power; he therefore has the use of it for a day, a day’s labour belongs to him. on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power can remain effective, can work, during a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller. our capitalist foresaw this situation, and that was the cause of his laughter. the worker therefore finds, in the workshop, the means of production necessary for working not just 6 but 12 hours. (…) the trick has at last worked: money has been transformed into capital. every condition of the problem is satisfied, while the laws governing the exchange of commodities have not tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 31 been violated in any way. equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. for the capitalist as buyer paid the full value for each commodity, for the cotton, for the spindle and for the labour-power. he then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities: he consumed their use-value.10 what the capitalist exploits is not simply labour but a specific structural feature, the minimal gap between use-value and exchange value. he mobilises the alienating dimension of the commodity form and turns this alienation into a privileged source of value. in doing so, he successfully implements labour-power as the commodified version of the subject. however, the commodity form is clearly not the only form of alienation. a much more fundamental level of alienation is labour as such. more precisely, what the english translation of marx calls “alienation” is in german called entäußerung, externalisation. by choosing this notion, marx literally repeated something that hegel already wrote in phenomenology of spirit, when he ranked labour and speech among processes of constitutive alienation, processes that do not simply cause alienation, but which simply are alienation in action. however, capitalism is the first mode of production in history that rigorously organises the creation of value around this alienating character of labour and speech, in other words, of discourse.11 the critical importance of the labour theory of value that marx adopted from his predecessors in political economy (adam smith and david ricardo) consists in a highlighting of what the classics had failed to understand. for them, the labour theory of value was meant to situate labour as the source of value, next to selfinterest (or what freud called “human narcissism”). however, marx recognised the insufficiencies and mystifications of this simple approach. for him the source of value is not labour but exploitation (among others of labour), and more fundamentally, the exploitation of alienation that inevitably marks all forms of human activity. and one should not forget that in this productive process, the mystification of exploitation (what marx calls fetishism) plays a role that is just as important as exploitation. there is no exploitation without its ideological mystification, which strives to make exploitation socially invisible. several readers of marx have thus mistakenly concluded that he is merely rewriting adam smith by adding more drama, which is false. instead, marx provided the epistemic conditions that enable one to envision, behind the social exploitation of concrete men, women and children, a more fundamental exploitation of structural contradictions. with this move marx also succeeded in isolating an entirely different form of subjectivity. unlike the non-alienated and abstract subject of private interest in classical political economy, 10. karl marx, capital, vol. 1, trans. ben fowkes (london: penguin books, 1990) 300-301, translation modified. henceforth cited in the text as capital i. 11. or as alenka zupančič has recently claimed, capitalism is the first mode of production, to have transformed the nonexistence of a social relation—a social non-relation— into the privileged source of profit. see alenka zupančič, “sexual is political?” in samo tomšič and andreja zevnik eds., jacques lacan between psychoanalysis and politics (london: routledge, 2015). tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 32 the subject of alienation and exploitation is no psychological or pathological (narcissistic) subject, no subject supposed to possess positive knowledge of its private interests and of market laws. political economy remains centred on consciousness and cognition. on the other hand, the subject discovered by the critique of political economy, is non-psychological, non-individual and an ‘abject’ of knowledge; it is a subject of truth, which marx targeted by introducing notions and procedures such as alienation, exploitation, contradiction and class struggle into the efforts of economic thought to elaborate a scientific theory of value. let us remain with the quoted excerpt from capital a bit further. marx continues to address the problematic of alienation in the following way: by turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorisation process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if its body were by love possessed’. (capital i 302) marx openly exposes two levels of alienation, the constitutive and the constituted, when claiming that what capitalism does is incorporate living labour into a lifeless thing. we should keep in mind that this incorporation, which is also mortification, does not simply target the production of commodities, but also and above all the transformation of living labour into labour-power, a measurable and calculable commodity, which, despite all asserted equality in exchange, assumes an exceptional status within the capitalist universe. while living labour has often been interpreted in a vitalist way, one should nevertheless consider that marx’s expression does not envision some non-alienated positive substance, but precisely the aspect of labour that, according to hegel, makes of it a process of constitutive alienation. instead of “living labour” one might as well write “living alienation,” alienation that has not yet assumed the formal envelope of the commodity form. the predicate “living” is misleading because it suggests a vital horizon beyond alienation, a state in which labour would be liberated of alienation. but alienation is above all decentralisation and externalisation. it does not have the exclusively negative and tragic connotation of a “subjective drama,” that the vitalistic readings persistently denounce. as marx, freud and lacan have more or less implicitly argued, alienation should be transformed from tragedy to comedy. only through this transformation can something like a political mobilisation of subjectivised negativity—subjectivity without predicates and/or imaginary features such as “race,” “gender,” “nationality” etc. (all cases of constituted alienation)—be achieved and the class struggle effectively actualised in the confrontation of two classes. (we can observe, today more than ever, that class struggle is most often a “one way street,” “class struggle from above,” as it has also been called.) tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 33 when talking about the capitalist’s laughter, lacan hints that no one ever seriously considered that the structure of jokes might reveal something about the scope and the effectiveness of capitalism. this is not entirely the case, since such a consideration can be found in none than freud’s book on jokes, which is filled with economic comparisons and where the central object of discussion is nothing other than lustgewinn, surplus-enjoyment, the psychoanalytical homologue to surplus-value. here is an exemplary comparison of the unconscious with capitalism, where the economic tendency toward saving re-emerges in the psychogenesis of jokes: i may perhaps venture on a comparison between psychical economy and a business enterprise. so long as the turnover in the business is very small, the important thing is that outlay in general shall be kept low and administrative costs restricted to the minimum. economisation (sparsamkeit) is concerned with the absolute height of expenditure. later, when the business has expanded, the importance of the administrative cost diminishes; the height reached by the amount of expenditure is no longer of significance provided that the turnover and profits can be sufficiently increased. it would be niggling, and indeed positively detrimental, to be conservative over expenditure on the administration of the business. nevertheless it would be wrong to assume that when expenditure was absolutely great there would be no room left for the tendency to save (spartendenz). the mind of the manager, if it is inclined to saving (ersparung), will now turn to economisation (sparsamkeit) over details. he will feel satisfaction if a piece of work can be carried out at smaller cost than previously, however small the saving may seem to be in comparison with the size of the total expenditure. in a quite analogous fashion, in our complex psychical business too, economisation in detail (detaillierte ersparung) remains a source of pleasure, as may be seen from everyday happenings. (standard edition viii 156-157, translation modified) the unconscious engages in budget cuts and there is one insight that brings freud particularly close to social economy: once business runs smoothly and expands with success, the tendency to economise turns toward the reduction of labourcosts. the system invests in the “division of labour” in the sense that it strives to prevent its political organisation. the entire liberal economic model with its fantasies of homo oeconomicus and private interests is destined to implement a system of values that would counteract the political tendencies of labour movements. when it comes to disorganising labour, no expenditure is too high, for as soon as the conflict between capital and labour would externalise in production, it would push class struggle into the midst of social reality and increase the costs and losses. so what freud calls the “economisation over details” in fact concerns a multitude of strategies, which will support the interiorisation of the capital-labour conflict, the most successful interiorisation being precisely the creditor-debtor relation, as marx’s reinterpretation of primitive accumulation has shown. here, the indebtedness of the system is “outsourced” to the multitude of political subjects and socially tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 34 implemented as the new “holy spirit,” the social link, in which the subject can participate only under the condition that he or she assumes the commodity form. in another passage, freud describes the tendency toward saving in the following way: “‘saving (ersparung) in expenditure on inhibition or suppression’ appears to be the secret of the pleasurable effect of tendentious jokes” (standard edition viii 119, translation modified). the success of jokes, but also of capitalism, lies in the minimisation of investment for inhibiting and repressing counter-tendencies. once resistance is neutralised, the mechanism appears to run smoothly and the economic apparatus can exploit the sources of enjoyment without restrictions. we should be attentive to what freud says here. he does not claim that social repression is abolished and the unconscious tendencies can find their uninhibited way into the realisation of their “creative potentials.” he remarks something much more sophisticated, namely that the unconscious conflict undergoes a transformation—the libidinal economy meets no internal resistance. this neutralisation of resistance is embodied in lacan’s already-mentioned notion of the ideal worker, which now stands for labour without the moment of resistance; labour merges entirely with production and willingly executes the imperatives of capital. neoliberalism in fact created the conditions for such an ideal worker to emerge in the social context: the entrepreneur, the economic figure that freud places alongside the capitalist in interpretation of dreams.12 in a scenario in which the labourer has become a small entrepreneur, the capitalist does not need to invest in suppressing conflictual social movements or the organisation of labour. this is no longer necessary because this expenditure has successfully been delegated onto the labouring subjects: their main task is to work on themselves, impose self-discipline, stand in mutual competition, and in doing so they provide the best service to the system. the capitalist worldview, which adds private property and the egoistic pursuit of private interests to apparently universal political categories such as freedom and equality (thereby excluding fraternité, a non-narcissistic love as the foundation of a non-capitalist social link)—strives to create the conditions in which inhibition and suppression would be entirely delegated onto the subjects, and exploitation turned into self-exploitation. now, if both capitalism and the exit from it are structured like a joke, what types of jokes are at stake in both cases? or differently put, what tension in jokes do these situations of laughter address? there are two notable freudian examples, which thematise capitalist reality directly and contextualise the peculiar character of the capitalist’s humour. one is the well-known joke about salmon mayonnaise. a poor guy borrows a certain amount of money from his wealthy friend, after explain12. see standard edition v 223. i engage more extensively with the quotation in question in the capitalist unconscious. marx and lacan (london: verso, 2015). see also mai wegener, “why should dreaming be a form of work?” in samo tomšič and andreja zevnik, jacques lacan between psychoanalysis and politics (london: routledge, 2015). tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 35 ing his situation. the friend lends the requested amount only to find the poor guy shortly after in a fancy restaurant eating salmon mayonnaise: “what? you borrow money from me and then order yourself salmon mayonnaise? is that what you’ve used my money for?” “i don’t understand you,” replied the object of attack; “if i haven’t any money i can’t eat salmon mayonnaise, and if i have some money i mustn’t eat salmon mayonnaise. well, then, when am i to eat salmon mayonnaise?” (standard edition viii 50) the joke is labelled cynical because the accused person displaces the accent from the reproach that “in his circumstances he has no right to think of such delicacies at all” (ibid.). behind the apparent mocking of the creditor’s moralism, the debtor is in fact revealed as the one who is trapped in the creditor’s fantasy: means of subsistence, yes, luxury, no. the reproach is, thus, that the debtor has violated the unwritten rule, according to which he is not allowed to live beyond his means, and if he borrows money, it must be in order to repay his creditors, and not to spend it on personal enjoyment. the cynicism of the debtor can be translated into direct speech: “i can’t deny myself what tastes good to me, and it’s a matter of indifference to me where i get the money from to pay for it. there you have the explanation of why i’m eating salmon mayonnaise on the very day you’ve lent me the money” (ibid. 52). freud rightly remarks that the translation abolishes the conditions of a joke—in the given case the minimal displacement in the debtor’s reaction to his creditor’s reproach: “i will not finance your enjoyment”—and turns it into a piece of cynicism. we can observe why such direct confrontation would not be funny, while also revealing complete impotence in face of the reproach: “in your position you have no right to enjoy.” it would in fact legitimise the capitalist fantasy that the poor personify the subject of enjoyment. we can recall that marx comes upon this fantasy when he criticises the “politicaleconomic tale” (myth, fiction) of primitive accumulation, which provides the genesis of the capitalist and the labourer. in some distant past, to recall the story, there have presumably been two sorts of people, the elite, who renounced enjoyment and accumulated the first wealth, and the “lazy rascals,” who spent “their substance, and more, in riotous living” (capital i 873), i.e., who have, as today’s advocates of austerity incessantly repeat, lived beyond their means and ended up possessing merely their labour-power, the capacity of their bodies to produce other bodies (commodities). so, what was, according to the political-economic tale, originally a subject of enjoyment has progressively been transformed into an indebted economic subject, who is forced to enter the market and assume the commodity form as the sole support of social relations. according to classical political economy, enjoyment produces debt, which is not false in itself, for marx’s correction of the political-economic tale of primitive accumulation remains within this claim, but with a crucial correction. marx first rejects the fantasy of the subject of enjoyment—there is no such “thing” as a subject of enjoyment, this subject is indeed an ideological fiction, which provides a basis for the problematic capitalist “morality,” the abstinence theory, which argues for the birth of wealth out of renunciation tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 36 of enjoyment. marx’s second correction consists in situating enjoyment correctly. the latter is no quality or action, pertaining to some presupposed and in the last instance fictitious subject, but a feature of the system. it is capital, which enjoys, and it enjoys under the condition of pushing its subjects deeper into indebtedness. to return to freud’s joke, the debtor would disarm himself if he responded with open cynicism, for then he would walk straight into the ideological trap that the creditor’s reproach had ready for him. he would admit that all he wants is “enjoyment without boundaries.” vivre sans temps mort, jouir sans entraves was also the demand of the revolutionary students in 1968: life without boredom, i.e., without abstract capitalist time, which forces everyone into an automatized process of production; and enjoyment without restrictions, i.e., without capitalist morality, according to which surplus-enjoyment follows from self-imposed abstinence. but the goal of capitalism is to raise everyone into a regime, in which they will enjoy (in) exploitation and thus become something like ideal masochists. this makes of capitalism a far more obscene form of domination than any previous historical form of the master’s discourse. in this respect capitalism comes close to what freud analyses under the category of obscene jokes, or more precisely, smut. financial capitalism or neoliberalism openly displays its systemic obscenity, and it is also no surprise that in this era the critical voices of political economy are entirely overshadowed by the unanimous voice (laughter) of what marx had already envisioned with the term “vulgar economics”: in m-m’ we have the irrational form of capital, the misrepresentation and objectification of the relations of production, in its highest power: the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it is taken as logically anterior to its own production process; the ability of money or a commodity to valorize its own value independent of reproduction—the capital mystification in the most flagrant form. for vulgar economics, which seeks to present capital as an independent source of wealth, of value creation, this form is of course a godsend, a form in which the source of profit is no longer recognizable and in which the result of the capitalist production process—separate from the process itself—obtains an autonomous existence.13 the obscenity of vulgar economics consists in the fetishisation of the highest capitalist abstraction—capital itself—which is equivalent to the self-fetishisation of capitalists as producers of value and vulgar political economists as scientists of value (this branch of “positive” science falls also statistics, one of the central factors in the distortion of social reality behind abstract numerical data). incidentally, marx shows that this condition displays the two tendencies that freud ascribes to a certain type of tendentious joke: violence and obscenity. the cynical joke remains stuck in this perspective. there is, however, another tendency, which goes against 13. karl marx, capital, vol. iii, trans. david fernbach (london: penguin books, 1992) 516-17. tomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 37 the established mechanism and which makes an unusual exception to freud’s classification, the sceptical joke, with the rightly famous example: two jews met in a railway carriage at a station in galicia. “where are you going?” asked one. “to cracow,” was the answer. “what a liar you are!” broke out the other. “if you say you’re going to cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to lemberg. but i know that in fact you’re going to cracow. so why are you lying to me?” (standard edition viii 115) freud immediately recognises in this verbal absurdity a complication, which contains a valuable epistemological lesson with direct political implications for a noncynical notion of critique: but the more serious substance of the joke is the problem of what determines the truth. the joke, once again, is pointing to a problem and is making use of the uncertainty of one of our commonest concepts. is it the truth if we describe things as they are without troubling to consider how our hearer will understand what we say? or is this only jesuitical truth, and does not genuine truth consist in taking the hearer into account and giving him a faithful picture of our own knowledge? i think that the jokes of this kind are sufficiently different from the rest to be given a special position. what they are attacking is not a person or an institution but the certainty of our knowledge itself, one of our speculative possessions (ibid.). while the capitalist’s joke targets persons, more than anything else, the sceptical, or one could also say the critical-political joke, attacks and problematises the structure behind them. if marx claimed in a letter to engels that capital was the biggest bomb ever dropped on the head of the bourgeoisie, we could justifiably claim that it was also an attempt to produce the deadliest joke in history (one can think of the matching monty python sketch), to create something like a politics of comedy, or at least to ground politics on a non-capitalist humour. indeed, in marx, but also in lacan, the notion of critique comes to overlap with comedy. critique qua comedy: this would be the marxian discontinuity in the history of critique, its first revelation being that the capitalist’s laughter concerns the fact that a web of social appearances (freedom, equality, property and the hypothesis of private interest) successfully camouflages the constant invention of ever-new forms of inequality, which help to keep profits growing. both the critique of political economy and psychoanalysis assume a status that is homologous to that of the sceptical joke: one that appears absurd from the perspective of the dominant regime of knowledge and thought, but which, nonetheless, sabotages the joke called capitalism. the political explosive that freud’s sexual aetiology of neuroses and his theory of sexuality dropped on the head of bourgeois puritanism also consisted in demonstrating that libidinal economy comes down to constant deviations, without a natural sexual norm in the background. enjoyment is not so much a sign of perversion as the privileged indicator that there is no such thing as normative sexuality. capitalism has been only partially successful in intetomšič: laughter and capitalism s8 (2015): 38 grating these lessons, for what it cannot digest is the point that lacan so vehemently accentuated: “there is no sexual relation.” capitalism needs fetishist fantasies of positivity, vital forces and creative potentials, for only in this way can it sustain the illusion that everything works just fine in this best of all possible political worlds, and continue making exploitation acceptable for the majority of its subjects. key: cord-0043238-ncl8fge8 authors: adler, anthony curtis title: what’s the deal? trump, fichte’s closed commercial state, and the perverse dialectic of neoliberal risk date: 2020-05-08 journal: fudan j doi: 10.1007/s40647-020-00281-8 sha: 307ae5d641cd095e55412f4e0888788c5dfcb261 doc_id: 43238 cord_uid: ncl8fge8 the following paper seeks to understand donald trump as a “dialectical image” for the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. trump’s management style, as described in his art of the deal, combines a fetishizing of entrepreneurial risk as a “lifestyle” with the insistence that it is not the entrepreneur but his targets who are ultimately exposed to risk. this suggests that we might understand the elevation of “deal-making” to a lifestyle as a characteristic of modernity that, with neoliberalism, is increasingly coming to the fore. such a critique of modernity, i further argue, is anticipated by fichte’s closed commercial state with its intriguing dialectic of risk. i conclude by arguing that trump’s politics marks the rise of a new, specifically american style of fascism—one that demands identification not with the state as supra-individual collective, but with an impersonal system governing over individual lives and rendering them precarious. the presidency of donald trump, whose hyperbolically self-promoting business style has made him an object of public fascination since the 1980s, has already given rise to a vast body of writing. in addition to the two biographies published prior to the 2016 election (kranish and fisher 2016; johnston 2016) , this ever growing literature includes not only several books published by mainstream trade presses (wolff 2018; johnston 2018) together with myriad newspaper articles and essays in public affairs magazines, but a growing body of academic literature dedicated to analyzing his psychology and personality type (hearn 2017; martin and krause-jensen 2017; fuchsman 2017; allcorn and stein 2018) , rhetorical style (jamieson and taussig 2017) , political practice (agnew and shin 2017; siegel 2017) and the relationship between his political and business career as well as to exploring his rise to power in light of broader trends in american as well as global politics (papalia 2017; michels 2017; massing 2018) , transformations in the landscape of mass media (andrejevic 2016; wells et al. 2016; werber 2017; johnson 2018; fürst and oehmer 2018) , and the dialectic of late capitalism (hearn 2017) . the vast range of different analytic perspectives that can be cast on the phenomenon of trump, most of which prove illuminating and nearly all of which register a feeling of trauma, suggests the extent to which this phenomenon itself not only represents a significant, perhaps ominous political event, but offers a singular illumination of the present situation. indeed, if the phenomenon of trump brings the present conjuncture into an unprecedented focus, it is precisely insofar as the situation of the present is not merely of the present, but issues from, and indeed carries over, the contradictions of the past-contradictions that are dialectical, in the sense of walter benjamin, insofar as they reveal an order of emergent temporality, of the time of the event as one might say, that is radically discontinuous with the continuous order of progress. indeed, the emergence of nearly every new celebrity phenomenon, when it is not just a matter of a new celebrity filling out an existing type but a new type of celebrity instantiated in an utterly singular individual, gives rise to a kind of uncanny feeling, especially among those who are not quite "with it"-who lag behind in becoming aware of popular culture. in a single moment, that which had appeared impossible, having no place in the world, not only suddenly seems inevitable and necessary, but draws everything else into its field of attraction, allowing other things to appear only in relation to it. a modal logician might, of course, still insist that there could be a possible world without lady gaga, obama, or trump: but this world, this absolutely singular world in which we exist-and we have never quite had the luxury of existing in another, merely possible world-has become utterly unthinkable without them, since the entire horizon of sense has come to be warped around the facts of their existence as if around a black hole. with trump, this feeling has not only assumed a vastly greater, and fundamentally traumatic, intensity, but is qualitatively distinct. this is in part because the seeming triviality of celebrity phenomena, and indeed of everything, however enormous its impact, which has been relegated to the sphere of private life (e.g., the personal computer, social networking), serves a function similar to that of the stage's proscenium: it creates the illusion of a safe distance (the distance, indeed, of illusion) in relation to what is in fact threateningly close. many, such as inglis (2010) , have recognized that celebrity (as opposed to fame, renown) is characteristically modern, or indeed, as rojek (2004) argues, ineluctably woven into the fabric of contemporary society. but perhaps the phenomenon of celebrity itself, together with all that is subsumed within its orbit, might be regarded not simply as a consequence of modernity, but as a "coping mechanism," a reaction formation, that, as such, has itself made it possible to survive the condition of modernity and postmodernity. it is a way of processing historical change itself, insofar as it has already reached a feverish and traumatic pitch of intensity, into safer, less threatening forms: a cutification of historical time, as it were. the continuum-breaking irruption of the new becomes novelty-an object of contemplative pleasure, enjoyment, intrigue, fascination. with trump's election, however, it is as if, in a single blow, the world of celebrity, which had already begun to rub up against the other world of the reality show, had suddenly become absolutely, immanently-dangerously-real. since trump was already a celebrity in the 1980s, and indeed, as a celebrity businessman, already straddled two worlds and unsettled the protecting veil of illusion (and it is instructive, in this way, to take note of the two domains over which he claims his tasteless mastery: television and architecture-intimately related and yet polar opposites), his ascent to politician, indeed to "leader of the free world," involves a second-order shock, a second-order event: it is as if the entire order bound up in the phenomenon of celebrity has become the only thing it never could have been before: real. the enormity of this event must be recognized for what it is. whatever else happens, and it is perhaps still too soon to tell, this has already happened: the logic of celebrification, transforming the event into novelty-the "domestication" and "cutification" of historical time itself-having served as the principal shock absorber for the shocks of modernity, has, in a shocking and sudden fashion, failed. there is now only celebrity, or no celebrity. celebrity has become a quantitative, rather than qualitative factor, as is made evident when one considers how the various ranking schemes organizing social media allow a hitherto impossible comparison between, say, a teenage girl in topeka, kansas live-feeding videos of her cat to her ten "followers"-or even the cat itself-and lady gaga with her millions of minions. before we thought of celebrities as outliers, deviations from a human norm; now we think of even ourselves as failed celebrities. there are now only monsters, little and big; no one, and perhaps nothing-not even animals (one thinks of cecil the lion)-that are still able to exist at all if they exist outside the monstrations of media. and hence there is also no reality-authoritative, serious, secure-beyond the veil of celebrity, save perhaps in the most intimate, disgusting facets of daily life. it is in this way that we might make sense of the recent somewhat hyperbolic talk about "post-truth." it is not that correspondence truth has suddenly disappeared from the world, or even that the norms guiding most forms of praxis and discourse have been undermined. rather, what has happened is this: previously, media interfaced with the real by way of a strata of authorities who, themselves media figures and celebrities, were nevertheless able to set up a protective barrier between the mediascape and the realscape by offering an authorized, authority-bearing opinion. regardless what this opinion was, and whose interests (state, corporate, ideological) it represented, its demonstrative authoritativeness, buttressed by serious gazes and steady, stentorian tones, served to keep the two worlds apart: daytime tv might be dominated by all manner of triviality, silliness, melodrama, but, come evening, when the men have returned home from work and families are gathered back together, walter cronkite would remind everyone that, far away, a war was being fought, that their neighbors' sons were dying, that students were protesting, that the world was changing. the shocks of real history, this is to say, were tied back to the comforting continuity of authoritative knowledge, sound common sense, abiding ethical, political, juridical norms, whereas the novelty of the event-always already corresponding to nothing, the event is always already "post-truth"-was relegated to the sphere of the trivial and ephemeral. now, however, this mediating function-called into question from both the top down and the bottom up, squeezed from all sides-has lost much of its efficacy: it is becoming increasingly clear that not only, as the prophets of postmodernity anticipated, is there no outside to the media, but that the qualitative texturing-the topographic distinctions-within the mediascape have been flattened out, such that they remain mere quantitative signifers of qualitative differences, akin to the markings on a topographic map. the following paper does not claim to offer an exhaustive, definitive analysis of the phenomenon of trump, but rather seeks to encounter the vertiginous movement of event-full history by bringing into focus trump as a dialectical image for the contradictions of the present situation. perhaps the most fundamental methodological principle of this investigation is the belief, grounded in the remarks of the previous paragraphs, that, in order to gain access to the dialectical torsion at work, it is necessary to start out by juxtaposing something seemingly trivial and ephemeral with that which brings the further-reaching historical horizon into view. hence i will attempt to read trump starting from what might seem like an unlikely constellation: on the one hand, his board games and, on the other, fichte's highly philosophical political-economic treatise on the closed commercial state, a text which may be regarded as the founding document of economic nationalism insofar as it defends the necessity of restrictions on commerce, going far beyond the tactics of mercantilism, not in terms of the comparative advantages to be gained by one party over another, but in terms of what is absolutely necessary for the sovereign nation state to exist. even though the "economic nationalism" of trump and bannon shares almost nothing concrete with fichte's proposals, it does draw, at least at an ideological level, on principles that find very pure expression in fichte's treatise. this is nowhere so clear than in trump's infamous promise to "build a wall and make mexico pay for it." this expresses the very essence of fichtean closure-fichte too believes he can make other countries pay-hollowed out into a purely rhetorical gesture. this is, needless to say, only one possible approach to the complex phenomenon that is trump and trumpism, and yet its seemingly willful arbitrariness is precisely what is methodologically demanded: only a chance point of departure can offer a point of access to that which relentlessly undermines all the resources of sound political, juridical, scientific reasoning. among so many other firsts, one suspects that donald j. trump, 45 th president of the usa, is not only the first head of state of a world power to have hosted his own reality show but can also claim the distinction of having not one, not two, but at least three board games consecrated to his name: "donald trump: the game," "i'm back and your fired," and the "apprentice board game." given that the first of these predates his reality tv show "the apprentice" by 15 years, this suggests a certain telos driving the peculiar phenomenon that is donald trump-it could even seem as though, if the survival-format reality show had not existed, trump would have had to invent it. 1 the fulfillment of donald trump is to become the game-master, the dealer-the house. and yet this is perhaps not quite as simple as it might seem: the house is the structure, the system, the law. those who play the game are submitted to contingency; they must compete with one another and are exposed to all the moods that go with the ups and downs of fortune. the house-the system, the structure-by contrast, like the divine beings of which the german poet friedrich hölderlin writes, feels nothing, experiences nothing. if it is possible to occupy the position of the house, it is only by becoming inhuman; incapable of human pleasure. trump, however, seems to want it both ways: he wants to be the house, free of risk but also free of joy, and he wants to be a winner, the biggest winner. he wants to be both the dealer and the one who deals consummately with that which has been dealt. precisely this double desire is articulated throughout trump's the art of the deal. from its first pages, trump claims that his animating desire-the ultimate good orienting all his choices and actions-is neither wealth nor even (as one might suspect now more than ever, and which is certainly in fact the case) power: i don't do it for the money. i've got enough, much more than i'll ever need. i do it to do it. deals are my art form. other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. i like making deals, preferably big deals. that's how i get my kicks (trump and schwartz 1987) . 1 regarding the significance of trump's career as reality tv host, see ouellette (2016) , hearn (2016 hearn ( , 2017 and kavka (2018) . general studies of reality tv, and its transformative impact on american society, include hill (2014) and deery (2015) , as well as the edited collection by murray and ouellette (2004) . but perhaps the most profound and trenchant reflection on reality tv, with regard to the 1971 show an american family, appears in baudrillard's simulacra and simulation: "ideal heroine of the american way of life, it is, as in ancient sacrifices, chosen in order to be glorified and to die beneath the flames of the medium, a modern fatum. because heavenly fire no longer falls on corrupted cities, it is the camera lens that, like a laser, comes to pierce living reality in order to put it to death" (1994). deal-making is an end in itself. i do it to do it-which is to say, following aristotle, "deal-making" belongs among the activities that can coherently be pursued for its own sake; that is not merely a means to an end, but an end in itself. it determines a form of life in the fullest sense. in the first book of the nicomachean ethics, aristotle speaks of three ways of life that hold a special prominence, gathering together and illuminating our varied paths as human beings upon the face of the earth: the life of pleasure, the political life (the life of honor or of virtue), and the contemplative life. (aristotle 2002) each of these lives is oriented around a "good" that can coherently present itself as the meaningful, and meaning-giving, end of human action. by contrast: "the life of money making is a type of compulsory activity, and it is clear that wealth is not the good being sought, since it is instrumental and for the sake of something else." (aristotle 2002 ) for trump, it would seem, deal-making is a fourth kind of life. it is worth taking a few moments to consider this claim, and indeed to take it seriously; far more seriously than it might at first seem to merit. if deal-making can be subsumed, as species to genus, under one of aristotle's existing three lives, then trump's claim that deal-making can be done just for the sake of doing it would not amount to much. yet perhaps things are not so straightforward, and the deal-making life cannot be easily subsumed under aristotle's rubrics. let us suppose, to begin with, that deal-making is merely part of the active life, the political life; the agora, the place of assembly in democratic athens, was nothing else than a market place. if deal-making is a political activity, and even in the highest sense, then it is, nevertheless, of a peculiar, and peculiarly modern kindperhaps almost unrecognizable to aristotle. it must be understood in terms of the modern reconception of politics in terms of a social contract-a social contract that is not merely foundational, but constantly being renegotiated, with political life the continual conflict between contracting parties. but there is also another possibility: aristotle does not include the life of the artist among the three prominent lives; he cannot imagine, as can we moderns, creativity and artistic production not only as something done for its own sake, but as a life that can claim a dignity and significance equal, or perhaps greater, than that of the politician or thinker. so we might say, rather, that the life of deal-making is a version of the creative life, made possible, as hannah arendt (1998) had argued in the human condition, by the post-classical ascendance of homo faber. or finally, drawing together these two points, we could even say that deal-making exemplifies the way in which political life is transformed through the rise of homo faber. yet this conclusion does not seem quite adequate, either, since as hannah arendt argues, the modern world is characterized by the rise of homo laborans and the suppression of both the life of making as well as activity. we cannot then discount the possibility that deal-making belongs also, or perhaps principally, to the life of pleasure and even the life of contemplation. if indeed deal-making is a kind of art, a kind of artistic life, it is characterized by a fastness and looseness, an openness to the moment. you can't be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you've got too much structure. i prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops… there's rarely a day with fewer than fifty calls, and often it runs to over a hundred. in between, at least a dozen meetings. the majority occur on the spur of the moment, and few of them last longer than 15 min (trump and schwartz 1987) . whereas the artist, as conceived by aristotle, brings forth the form, contemplated beforehand, by working upon the material, the deal-maker, a master improviser, makes it up as he goes along; open to what is given, playing with what is given, making the best of every situation. 2` art has become play. if aristotle's technē, as heidegger (2002) argues, is a kind of epistēmē, involving knowledge of the form that is brought forth into the presence in the act of making, then deal-making involves a peculiar knowledge, quite different from knowledge of forms (of the generic, universal, eternal). the deal-maker gains knowledge of the situation. the essence of the situation is the conflict, the polemos, that plays out with every decision; that gets played out in every deal. in the words of heraclitus's famous fragment: πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους. war is father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others free (heraclitus 1979) translated into trump: "the deal is the leader; it shows the winners and the losers." the deal-maker is the one who to the greatest degree possible experiences the deal; who partakes of the pleasure of deal-making, of living as close to the center of the deal as possible. perhaps, then, if deal-making constitutes an autonomous, self-sufficient, prominent mode of life, it is because it gathers together all the other possibilities of life (politics and activity more generally, artistic creation, knowledge and contemplation, and pleasure) into a single mode of life that is, or at least seems to be, capable of managing, dealing with, the modern condition. the deal-maker claims at once to master the fluidity of modern life and to submit pleasurably to this fluidity, to experience it as pleasure. if the first chapter of the art of the deal marches us through a week of vertiginous deal-making, the second chapter, titled "trump cards," as if bringing a bit of order to the chaos, will describe the elements of the deal. it is not clear that deal-making can be taught: "more than anything else, i think deal-making is an ability you're born with. it's in the genes." still, deal-making is not gambling; the deal-maker confronts the contingency of the moment, but he does not submit to chance. people think i'm a gambler. i've never gambled in my life. to me, a gambler is someone who plays slot machines. i prefer to own slot machines. it's a very good business being the house. it's been said that i believe in the power of positive thinking. in fact, i believe in the power of negative thinking. i happen to be very conservative in business. i always go into the deal anticipating the worst. if you plan for the worst-if you can live with the worst-the good will always take care of itself (trump and schwartz 1987) . the deal-maker at once submits to the deal, experiencing its vertiginous play, and yet indemnifies himself against all risk. by imagining, and even living with, what, under the given circumstances, would be the worst deal, the deal-maker is able to elevate himself beyond true risk. but of course ultimately the worst deal, the ultimate trump card, is death itself. the only way to indemnify the deal-maker against even this risk is to live only for the sake of the pleasure of the moment. closing the chapter, trump writes: i don't kid myself. life is very fragile, and success doesn't change that. if anything, success makes it more fragile. anything can change, without warning, and that's why i try not to take any of what's happened seriously…the real excitement is playing the game… if you ask me exactly what the deals i'm about to describe all add up to in the end, i'm not sure i have a very good answer. except that i've had a very good time making them (trump and schwartz 1987) . here, the paradoxical nature of deal-making as a form of life, a manner of living, reveals itself most fully. the deal-master tries to experience the deal and master the deal at one and the same time. he tries to master the deal by forethought, anticipation of risk, and yet the greatest degree of forethought brings us before a risk, a fragility to things, that cannot be surmounted. so it would seem the deal-maker must live for the present; the life of the deal is not a life of art, of creativity, but a life of pleasure. the temporal horizon of the deal-maker collapses into the present. and yet it is also not clear if the deal-maker can ever actually experience the pleasure of the moment. "it never stops, and i wouldn't have it any other way. i try to learn from the past, but i plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. that's where the fun is. and if it can't be fun, what's the point." (trump and schwartz 1987) one can only live in the moment, but the moment only exists in the future. ultimately, fun is had only in the past: the life of deal-making lives fully in a present that only ever exists in the future, and only ever knows that it has lived at all by looking back at all the fun it has had. fun, in fact, is not something we feel, something we enjoy, but something that is made, bought, had: the commodity form of pleasure. in the last pages, i have tried to show that trump's deal-maker, his deal-making as a way of life, exemplifies the paradoxical temporality of life under late capitalism. one might speak, in this way, of a psychopathology of everyday life, though perhaps in a sense that owes as much to heidegger as to freud. what is most interesting about this account is that it shows the pathology from the side of the winner, the absolute winner. usually, capitalist pathologies start from the side of the "losers"; failed salesmen, drug addicts, compulsive gamblers, neurotics of all shapes and stripes. 3 now, it is possible to see that the pathology of the loser is merely a special case, and limiting case, of the pathology of the winner. yet what interests me above all is the way in which this pathology already manifests itself in fichte's thought-and not simply as a private quirk, an idiosyncrasy, but as the constitutive horizon of german idealism, and even of modern philosophy as such; a horizon that continues to play itself out not only in hegel, schopenhauer, and nietzsche, but even in heidegger… this is not meant as a critique ad hominem; it speaks to the greatness of a thinker to bring forth the ruling characteristics of the age, even if this is itself pathological. a more far-reaching version of this argument could be sketched out as follows: whereas for aristotle luck and chance mark the limit to causal explanation and hence to the rational articulation of what is (things can be said to happen by chance, yet chance is not a cause in its own right), modern philosophy (as is clear in empiricism) will begin to regard contingency as a primary and positive source of knowledge. the tension between necessity and contingency, as also between autonomy and heteronomy, comes to the fore. german idealism regards this tension as generative, productive, and ultimately seeks a systematic reconciliation. heidegger, in turn, following schelling and nietzsche and also hölderlin, returns to this tension but makes it irreducible, fundamental, starting with his "existential" analysis of thrownness and projection. the most recent philosophical encomiums to "radical contingency" must themselves be seen in this light the current paper will restrict itself to addressing only one piece of this puzzle, though, indeed, a very important piece. for indeed fichte recognized, with greater clarity than most if not all of his contemporaries, that the experience of life as a "game of chance" is the constitutive horizon of the present age. yet at the same time he rejected both the hegelian conviction (which even certain forms of marxism would continue to hold on to) that this game is stacked in the direction of progress, as well as schelling's belief that a purely ideological mastery of the game would suffice. for fichte, by contrast, the gaming quality of modern life demanded one last gamble that could only play itself out on the world-historical stage; an extraordinarily risky "play" that will bring the game to an end. the only way to master the game is to finish it. in the eighth and final section of the third and final book of the closed commercial state, fichte, having presented what he regards as an absolutely compelling case for a proposal that, if carried through, would bring the ills of the world to an end, turns in anticipation to the question that must necessarily come to preoccupy all those whose philanthropic measures are rejected and mocked by the very ones they most wish to help: why won't they just do what i say? 4 after observing the incapacity of the "great part of mankind" to follow out an argument presented as a series of deductions from first principles, he proceeds to set forth the true reason why the ideas he has proposed are "most profoundly displeasing to so many, who cannot bear to think of the state of things at which they aim." it is a characteristic feature of our age, standing in sharp relief to the seriousness and sobriety of our ancestors, to wish to play and madly swarm to and fro with its fantasy, and since there are few other means available to satisfy this play-urge, it has a strong inclination to turn life into a game (fichte 2013) . for fichte, this tendency is not itself something blameworthy, but rather "a necessary step, induced through nature alone, on the path that leads our species forward," suggesting that while, like schiller's speiltrieb, it is rooted in something innate, its manifestation has a decisively historical character. nor, moreover, is its primary manifestation aesthetic or even intellectual. rather, the primary expression of this tendency, where its effects prove most pernicious, is in the sphere of economics: as a consequence of this tendency, one never wishes to obtain anything by following a rule, but instead to have everything through cunning ruses and luck. acquisition and all human commerce should resemble a game of chance. one could allow these men to have, keeping to the straight and narrow, the very things they hope to gain through intrigues, cheating, and chance, save on the condition that they now be content with it for the rest of their lives. they would then not want it. it delights them more to strive for things cunningly than to possess them securely. it is these people who incessantly call out for freedom-freedom of trade and acquisition, freedom from supervision and policing, freedom from all order and morality. whatever aims at strict regularity and at things taking a firmly ordered, thoroughly uniform course will appear to them as an infringement on their natural freedom. such people must be repelled at the very thought of an arrangement of public commerce in which swindling speculation, accidental profits, and sudden wealth would no longer occur (fichte 2013 ). this tendency, fichte goes on to claim, gives rise to a frivolity more concerned with present enjoyment than future security, and whose "life wisdom for individuals, and its politics for states, consists only in the art of getting out of the present jam, with no care given to the future difficulties that one is thrust into through the remedy that was taken. for such frivolity the security of the future, which one promises to it and which it never itself desires, is no valid substitute for the unbridled freedom of the moment that alone entices it" (fichte 2013) . it is hard not to appreciate the prescience and force of fichte's diagnosis, and not least of all since it would seem as though, even if the emergence of a complex apparatus of regulative structures and the welfare state might give the appearance of progress, these measures appear in the end not only as reactive and insufficient, but have proven incapable of resisting the triumphant march of neoliberalism, which, especially in the shape given to it by hayek and the chicago school, has turned the anarchic power of chance, now elevated and scientifically legitimated as a power of spontaneous self-organization, into the ultimate principle of things. precisely because fichte regards the fundamental tendency of his age not as one countervailing factor among others in a progressively unfolding historical dialectic, but as an extreme horizon in which the very possibility of any sort of goal-directed action is called into question, he must reject the view of the political, given brilliant expression two decades later with hegel's elements of the philosophy of right, as the reconciliation of the freedom and particularity of the individual with the abstract universality of the state. thus, the closed commercial state itself proposes a social arrangement in which the economic existence of every individual is completely regulated by the state, which grants to each individual not only the right to pursue a certain defined economic activity (extracting produce from this piece of land, pursuing this specific trade) but guarantees that, in return for their labor, they will be able to provide themselves with the necessities of life. citizens will be forbidden from freely engaging in economic activity with foreign entities, and indeed travel abroad will only be permitted to scholars and artists. even though this vision of the state might seem perversely anti-modern, fichte indeed regards it as the culmination of the historical process of modernity: the emergence of the sovereign nation state reveals a tendency toward closure, and yet the merely juridical closure of the westphalian state is not enough, and must be supplemented by complete economic closure. in a powerful and prescient analysis of the global order of colonial relations, fichte argues that these are not only fundamentally exploitative, but that they must ultimately lead to the complete destitution of weak nations, which, as a result of trade imbalances, will ultimately be compelled to sell their own sovereignty to the highest bidder. the closed commercial state consists in three books: the first offers a rational deduction of the ideal arrangement of economic relations, culminating in a theory of property as the exclusive right to a certain kind of activity. the second concerns the "history of the present," arguing, in effect that europe originally constituted a single vast system of trade, and yet was in the process of dividing itself off into nation states. here, he claims that mercantilism itself represented a series of halfmeasures undertaken in pursuit of economic closure. if one were to consider the passage cited above with a view only to the argument pursued in the first two books, fichte's reasoning would seem peculiar if not altogether bizarre. on the one hand: there would seem little or no point in offering a proposal that is so contrary to the spirit of the age and its tendencies. on the other hand: if the tendency of the present age is toward closure, then this would not only suggest that the present age is more serious than might first seem to be the case, but that indeed the relation of the playful and the serious, as modes of existence, is more complex than fichte's closing words suggests. or perhaps indeed, if playfulness is itself a necessary step driving the species forward, then this might imply that the playful wheeling and dealing man of the present is in fact the agent of world history's very serious intentions, whereas fichte's economic philosophy, in all its ponderous heavy teutonic seriousness, is a non-starter. such considerations, it would seem, must lead us to the path taken by hegel who, moreover, saw with great clarity the totalitarian tendencies of fichte's seemingly consequent liberalism. the third book of the closed commercial state, however, moves in an altogether different direction. here, fichte proposes nothing less than a kind of trick for catalyzing a chain of commercial closures. this trick, introduced under the title of "politics," goes as follows: one of the dominant economic powers in the world will suddenly carry out a "money operation" that involves replacing all the gold currency used within its borders with a national currency, made of a material that is at once cheap and yet impossible for private parties to counterfeit, whose value is fixed, and whose validity is guaranteed, by the state. the first state that does this will reap tremendous benefits, instantly nearly doubling its wealth, since its gold will be freed up from its function as a domestic means of exchange. it will be able to acquire tremendous military power, which it can and must use for the sole purpose of claiming the natural boundaries needed for a self-sufficient economic existence. other states, seeing this, will follow, though they will benefit less than the first. eventually, all states will be compelled to close themselves off economically just to survive. it can hardly escape us that fichte's "money operation" consists in an enormous (and seemingly mad) geo-politico-economic wager. if the first country to close itself off can reap the greatest benefits, it is only because it has exposed itself to the greatest risk. i do not think it could have escaped fichte that the "money operation" might have instantly led to an immediate and disastrous political crisis. fichte does not spend much time on these risks, but this is not because he does not take them seriously, but rather because he is concerned above all with "selling" his proposal to those who are in a position of power. he, we might say, is convinced that the danger that the present world faces is so great that only this sort of gamble could lead us back from the abyss. what he fears most of all is that the very economic conditions which allow for a noble, free, truly human existence will be destroyed. in the best tradition of the philosophers, he is afraid for philosophy, for the dignity of contemplative human reason. and yet it is precisely the characteristic of the present age, its love of risk and gambles and tricks and cunning, that makes fichte's world-historical wager possible. only a world that loves to gamble could find a statesman crazy enough to gamble everything. but what is the payoff: peace on earth-among states and within each state's own territory. an abrupt end to the dynamism of history; the substitution of the madness of history with a gentle, stable progress based on the peaceful, but very limited interactions of nation states, each with its own welldefined, rich national character. once this system has become universal and eternal peace is established among the different peoples, there is not a single state on the face of the earth that will have the slightest interest in keeping its discoveries from any other, since each will only use these for its own needs inside its boundaries, and not to oppress other states and provide itself with superiority over them. nothing, it follows, will prevent the scholars and artists of all nations from entering into the freest commerce with one another. the public papers will no longer contain stories of wars and battles, peace treaties or alliances, for all these things will have vanished from the world. they will only contain news of the advances of science, of new discoveries, of progress in legislation and the police, and each state will hasten to make itself home to the inventions of other (fichte 2013) . almost two centuries before francis fukayama, and more than a 100 years before kojeve, fichte envisions the end of history. and yet the end of history will not be brought forth more or less of its own accord through the ruse of history, driving forward through suffering and contradiction toward the absolute, but through the ruse of fichte. perhaps, had fichte not existed, another great thinker would have figured out the "money operation"-yet whoever discovers it, and however long this takes, it will always involve an event that intervenes in the existing order of things, catalyzing a chain reaction of occurrences that will leave the world utterly transformed. 5 this event is not destined or necessitated in any way; it is an intervention and an invention: a fundamentally new kind of currency, imposed from the top down, introducing a new kind of numismatic regime, a new sovereignty beyond all sovereignty. 6 for fichte, true property must issue in free activity. he indeed believes that the fundamental error of all existing theories of property consists in the fact that "one posits the first, original property in the exclusive possession of a thing." against this, his theory maintains that "the first and original property, the basis of all others, [consists] in an exclusive right to a determinate free activity." (fichte 2013 ) but if we take this idealistic theory of property, already developed with great consequence, seriously, then we might ask: how is it that the human race appropriates its own history, such that it can become most fully the property of itself in its historical existence-or such that, indeed, its historical existence could be the very event of self-appropriation. this is a vital question, a necessary question, since without this historical self-appropriation human freedom would amount to nothing. the thought of the early "humanistic" marx still operates within the horizon of this question, and it is perhaps still even at work in heidegger's ereignis-the propriative event. here, however, the difference between fichte and hegel comes into striking view. for hegel: history is the ongoing process by which absolute spirit appropriates itself, passing from dunamis to energeia. it is in just this sense, indeed, that hegel could have never actually entertained an "end to history" in any simple sense. for fichte, by contrast: the highest appropriative event is the wager of the philosopher-statesman; the wager to end all wagers, and hence end a history that has been characterized by chance. there is in this way a kind of platonism at work in fichte: the philosopher is the one who, owing nothing to the world in which he was born, precipitates an event of conversion; the first in the chain of liberating actions. human beings can only take ownership of their historical existence, hence of their humanity, by acting in a decisive way against the riskiness in which their existence is enmeshed. and yet such a decision, which need in fact only happen once and can originate with one visionary, is itself risky to the highest degree. it is only possible as the highest wager. the secret motto of fichte's closed commercial state is, one could almost say, the hōlderlinian bon mot, coined 2 years later, that heidegger, writing in the wake of the devastation of the second world war, draws on in the question concerning technology: "wo aber gefahr ist, wächst das rettende auch"-where the danger is, there too is salvation, the saving power. yet this must give us pause: fichte offers a powerful and prescient critique of the form of life that, now more than ever, has come to prevail under the conditions of capitalism. but he also succumbs to the conceit that it would be possible to play the game and master the game at the same time, to expose oneself to risk while indemnifying oneself against risk. one might claim that risk-taking has no essential value for fichte: i do not think this is so, however. speculative thought is risk-taking thought; the speculative desire of the philosopher is of a piece with the characteristic of the age. indeed, fichte recognizes as much when, claiming that many wrongly blame poetry and philosophy for the frivolousness of the age, he remarks that poetry and philosophy are not responsible for this phenomenon, but merely serve, in the case of the former, "to divert [it] toward something else than life," and, in the case of the latter, to challenge "it to the extent that it concerns itself with life." this can only mean that, in its proper domain-beyond the sphere of ordinary life-philosophy remains playful. precisely this is the bad faith-the pathology-of capitalism as a form of life, which, moreover, assumes ever more complex and concrete forms with the emergence of new and ever more intricate ways of monetizing risk. capitalism fetishizes risk, and yet, the more that precariousness becomes the general condition, the more that capitalists are able to profit from a risk in which they no longer has to partake. the paradox of this pathology, however, is as follows: the more relentlessly the "losers" at the game of life find themselves exposed to this precariousness, the more they struggle to find a perspective for their own lives according to which they can become masters of the risk to which they are exposed. contemporary forms of life are characterized by this dualism, which itself functions as ideology regardless the particular forms it assumes. let us consider, once more, donald trump's reality show, "the apprentice." this genre of reality show should be thought of as a perverted brechtian drama. brecht's plays sought to present the human condition, with its relentless struggle for survival, in such a way that we could realize that this is not a fateful tragic condition to which we are condemned, but a historical reality that we have created for ourselves. the reality show turns this on its head: the struggle for survival appears, on the one hand, as purely the effect of the artificial contrivances of the show, which has forced people together into a confined space to compete in contrived challenges, and yet at the same time elevates this very artifice to a law of fate. it says, in effect: we must struggle against each other because the celebrity game-master tells us we must do so. we must submit to the celebrity game-master because everyone who is not a celebrity, everybody who is a nobody on the way to becoming somebody, must want to be a celebrity. yet watching the reality show grants a pleasure that is denied to the participants; they are perhaps on the way to becoming celebrities, they have even been granted a little piece of celebrity, but they cannot identify with the game-master. we, however, who are watching, we who are not even participants in the game, we who are bigger losers than the biggest loser, can nevertheless identify completely with the celebrity game-master passing judgment on the winners and losers. "you're fired"-i knew it, we think to ourselves; that apprentice did such a bad job. she deserved to lose. now they'll know who'se the boss! if there is a uniquely american style of fascism now in the offing, it consists at heart in this logic of identification. it is a fascism, in other words, that no longer depends on the suppression of the individual in the name of communitarian or collective values-values which, however, cynical their deployment by the propagandists of the ruling elite, nevertheless retain strong rhetorical force among the multitude. donald trump, at once master of the game and master-player, offers the perfect point for a new mode of identification, in which we identify ourselves not with the state, the collective, by sacrificing our claim to individual autonomy and rights, but rather identify ourselves, in our atomized individuality, with the system that governs our lives, dispenses with our lives, without either demanding sacrifice or offering the hope of rediscovering our individuality in the universal. we take pleasure in the system, live vicariously through the system, even though this itself inevitably condemns us, however much fun we have along the way, to lose. 7 it is in this sense that we can understand trump's economic nationalism. on the one hand, it is the very opposite of fichte's; it has nothing to do with securing economic rights and economic justice through even a limited recognition of the responsibility of the state to provide its citizens with the possibility of a livelihood sufficient to allow for a dignified, fully human life. it has nothing to do, even, as some in the alt-right might have it, with the "cultural" integrity of the nation state. rather: trump's economic nationalism follows from the elevation of the president to the "deal-maker-in-chief"; economic relations between nations, this is to say, are mere occasions for the leader to show off his deal-making prowess, and this, in turn, serves to allow for popular identification with the one who is able to play the game, enjoy the game, and master it at the same time; who can keep on playing the game and yet can never lose. in the case of trump, of course, this identification itself only happens through various exclusions: of the racial and ethnic and sexual, of foreigners, of "liberals," of women who refuse objectification, and now of the elderly, the urban poor, and those with "preexisting conditions," all of whose lives, in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, have become expendable in the rush to "reopen" the economy. while it is this aspect of trump's political style that has provoked the greatest degree of public outrage, it also suggests a point of vulnerability in the logic of late capitalism. for what it reveals, above all, is that it is still largely impossible to identify with the system, to take pleasure in the system, without these gestures of exclusion. it might be tempting to claim that this is because the logic of exclusion is itself structurally necessary to the system. yet while it may well be the case that capitalism at once depends on and gives rise to stratifications that fall outside the strict logic of class conflict, the tendency of capitalism remains directed at the dissolution (at least at the level of the explicit, public ideology) of all "qualitative" distinctions, since these will inevitably stand in the way of the maximization of profit. what trump has made clear, in a particularly brutal fashion, is that, while it is increasingly necessary to identify with the system, since all other forms of life have become hollowed out and can no longer offer a path to enjoyment and happiness, it is also, at least for a broad section of the population, impossible to identify with the system in its outermost purity and abstraction. to become "relatable," to become "livable," the system must again become precisely what it no longer is: a nation, an ethnicity, a race. thus, in the eyes of many, the system has become divided into two systems, one good, one evil: the radically impersonal system of capitalism itself impersonated in the ethno-racial state and ultimately in the felicitous and happy image of the businessowner-trump himself is a small businessman grown to monstrous proportions-and the radically impersonal system of the deep state, impersonated in the scheming agent, the journalist, the cultural-marxist jew. the need for this impersonation, and the surge of explicitly exclusionary idioms back into mainstream national politics, itself results from the failure of the project of division and identification that, since the end of the second world war, conservatism in the united states and england has pursued: of the good system of life-affirming, creative entrepreneurial capitalism versus the bad system of totalitarianism and government regulation. yet the complete failure of trump to do anything, beyond adventuresome grandstanding in the global arena, to challenge the unfettered dominion of corporate interests suggests that the ethno-racial and nationalist impersonation of capitalism is just a mask for neoliberalism, which remains in force. this circumstance is dangerous to the highest degree, but it also discloses an internal, structural contradiction within late capitalism that may well also offer a certain hope. it reveals the ultimate incapacity of capitalism to reproduce the ideological conditions of its survival. funding not applicable. interpretative essay: fichte's monetary history spatializing populism: taking politics to the people in italy empty vessel and sum of all projections the jouissance of trump. television & new media the human condition nicomachean ethics (trans: sachs albany: suny press. fuchsman, ken. 2017. the presidential campaign that astounded the world: a psychohistory of donald trump and the 2016 american election twitter-armies', 'earned media' und 'big crowds' im us-wahlkampf 2016: zur wachsenden bedeutung des nachrichtenfaktors öffentlichkeitsresonanz trump's "reality die frage nach der technik (1953) the art and thought of heraclitus (trans: kahn, c. e.) reality tv. london: routledge a short history of celebrity donald trump, disruptive technologies, and twitter's role in the 2016 american presidential election disruption, demonization, deliverance, and norm destruction: the rhetorical signature of donald the making of donald trump it's even worse than you think: what the trump administration is doing to america trump, fernsehen und das neue camp trump revealed: an american journey of ambition, ego, money, and power how martin luther paved the way for donald trump donald trump and the triumph of antiliberalism reality tv: remaking television culture the closed commercial state: perpetual peace and commercial society from rousseau to fichte the trump show. television & new media celebrity. london: reaktion books political norms, constitutional conventions, and president donald trump the art of the deal individuality, freedom and socialism: the british idealists' critiques of the fichtean state how trump drove coverage to the nomination: hybrid media campaigning fire and fury: inside the trump white house adler is professor of german and comparative literature at yonsei university's underwood international college, where he has taught since conflict of interest the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. vii is deglobalization real? and what can we do about it? in 2009 the economist noted that, contrary to the accepted dogma that globalization was irreversible, “the integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front.”1 is our world entering a phase of deglobalization after experiencing decades of globalization, and should we welcome the change? as globalization has furthered the spread of “western” liberal and consumerist culture and knowledge across the world, would deglobalization create genuine room for a renewal, restore the wisdom of ancient cultures, and enable us to solve the problems of spiritual nihilism, inequality, oppression, and ecocide? or, would it be merely a superficial change, combining the worst aspects of modern hedonisms and traditional oppressions? if the rise and consolidation of autocratic capitalism and ethno-nationalism in the contemporary world are any intimations, the portents of deglobalization are ominous. is deglobalization good, bad, or simply inevitable? what might be done about it? adjusting to the new world order may be a matter of life and death for many peoples, ways of life, cultures, ideas, and institutions. several bodies of scholarship—including that by historians, social scientists, political philosophers, economists, and most of all, a rejuvenated scholarship of islam—will need to be engaged in order to answer this question. no foresight is possible without hindsight. we have no view of the future without a view of the past. after nearly half a century of the fierce storm of globalization that caught the muslim umma unawares and unprepared, the winds are beginning to change. divided into the petty states the colonizers had carved out to better control and exploit it at the end of the second world war, the muslim world became a petri dish for various secular nationalist ideologies and chess board for superpower proxy wars over the following quarter of a century. despite notable early efforts by the leaders of the fledgling states, like the organization of islamic cooperation (est. 1969), without a strong center, leadership, and shared vision the muslim world found itself like a rudderless ship as cold war politics gave way to neoliberal politics. the new unipolar world order, which came to be known in the 1990s as globalization, may be coming to a close, leaving the world with a different set of winners and losers than the one it then found. apart from multinational corporations and economic and political elites in the global north, its “winners” included elites and even sections of the middle classes in certain previously impoverished post-colonial nations, editorial viii the american journal of islam and society 37:3-4 such as china and india, where deep moral and social rot has accompanied economic modernization. their relative success in exploiting the fruits of globalization was enabled by a few shared characteristics: these were large economies that had already developed stable and strong (but not necessarily just or good) political institutions. although muslim countries by and large have not fared well in any respect, globalization nevertheless has been a blessing in disguise for muslim populations (as any calamity necessarily must be for the believers!). it interconnected different parts of the muslim world as well as enabled the emergence of sizeable muslim communities throughout the global north. state-controlled national media gave way to satellite and social media, facilitating deep recognition of the shared values and suffering among the muslim masses—as well as the development of global muslim discourses and debates. the economic and political forces that facilitated these globalizing changes are now giving way to an emerging multipolar world order which is all but certain to reverse many key aspects of globalization. will this change bring relief and honor to the community of the blessed prophet, or will it further impoverish it, reversing the meager gains made thus far and aggravating the inequity and oppression? the muslim ulama, intellectuals, and social scientists would do well to recognize the threats and opportunities offered by the coming epoch, the better to furnish visions and roadmaps for a collective future for the umma. let us first consider the phenomenon of globalization, the challenges of defining which reflect on the difficulty of defining and detecting deglobalization. introductory literature on globalization identifies it as a historical phenomenon that has occurred in variously interrupted phases. the last two phases of globalization, namely the long nineteenth century ending in the 1930s and the more immediate phase starting in the 1980s, both had deeply disruptive implications for much of the world. the former augured if not comprised western europe’s colonial grasp and the latter the american world order expressed in the form of global capitalism centered in the us. the concept of globalization remained deeply contested even when nearly everyone agreed that it was underway; scholars widely disagree about whether it is a single process or a name for multiple processes, and about what those processes are. one core set of definitions converged on globalization as an intensification of worldwide social relations and the world market, often at the expense of weakening local and national connectedness.2 the term globalization was coined in the 1960s, but it took the world by storm in the 1990s after the fall of the berlin wall. in the wake of the second world war, the united states and the soviet union stepped ix into the vacuum left by the british and french colonial empires, with the us as the new hegemon, the united nations as the diplomatic arm of the new pax americana, and the us dollar as the new standard of exchange. the cold war was widely understood as an ideological conflict between two versions of modernity: atlantic modernity (alternatively, the early developers’ modernity) that championed capitalism; and the ultramodern reaction to that modernity, which arose in continental europe and came to power in the form of the soviet union. the cold war was the era of politics over economics. the nation-state form consolidated throughout the world primarily because the victors of the second world war judged underdevelopment and ideological rebellions to be the foremost threats to this order; they created global institutions to support states to implement development programs. this economic model of state-managed capitalism, also known as developmentalism, had been proposed by john menard keynes in the wake of the disasters caused by an earlier phase of unbridled capitalism that had led to the great depression in 1930s. the reaction to keynesian economics by big business in the 1970s led to the master plan that gave birth to another phase of globalization, namely when in the 1980s the two most powerful economies in the world (the uk under thatcher and the us under reagan) campaigned against a government role in economics. this economic model inspired by neoclassical economics or neoliberalism, also known as the washington consensus, demanded optimal environment for capital investments including deregulation, elimination of tariffs and public services, privatization, and stern property rights. it saw its heyday in the 1990s and 2000s until the great recession of 2007-2009. a new multipolar era is reluctantly on the rise.3 in liberal democracies of the global north, ultranationalist politics has embraced the anti-globalist agenda for both economic and cultural reasons and scored remarkable electoral victories whose effects are unlikely to be reversed. the alignment of white supremacy, economic nationalism, anti-immigration, and islamophobia has created a tsunami of right-wing anti-globalism, which has overtaken the strong leftist anti-globalism that long produced deep economic, social, and ecological critiques of the phenomena unleashed by globalization. profoundly damaged by globalization, muslim states stand on the brink of political collapse. on the one hand, repressive autocracies in the muslim world show unprecedented and open disregard for the interests of their own populations and muslims globally; on the other hand, muslim minorities elsewhere face increasing and unprecedented persecution. editorial x the american journal of islam and society 37:3-4 renowned israeli journalist and scholar elizabeth tsurkov summed up eloquently in a tweet in june 2020, “25 years after srebrenica, muslim lives have never been as devalued as they are now: genocide in china, ethnic cleansing in burma, repeated chemical attacks & extermination by torture in syria. in 25 years, we will probably reflect on this era of unchecked impunity with horror.” how we got here is an open secret. the stage was set during the cold war, when the two superpowers treated these nascent states as a geopolitical chessboard. in consequence, muslim countries were especially unprepared for the onslaught of global corporations looking for cheap labor and new markets. as local businesses were decimated, the windfall of profits from global business fell into the hands of the easily corruptible elite constrained by weak or nearly non-existent national institutions. as big money consumed politics in most of the developed world, in the developing countries global capitalism far more easily destroyed any semblance of political self-determination and fanned endless crony capitalism, exacerbating inequalities and igniting all kinds of old and new tribal conflicts. the key power of politics (be it democratic or autocratic)—that is, to redistribute resources and constrain global and local forces—diminished everywhere. among the unintended but world-transforming effects of this phase of globalization, which happened to coincide with the rise of the internet, was the mobility of labor, knowledge, and most of all, sensibilities and desires. as people moved for work, global corporations established themselves in underdeveloped but politically stable countries for cheap labor; the internet wired the world; and satellite tv penetrated community and family structures with the religious and cultural ideas of late modern liberal-capitalist consumerism (the most anti-community, individualistic culture on the planet). it seemed the world was becoming a village (albeit one defined by the mores of hollywood).4 another instance of the unintended consequences of globalization was the phenomenon of al jazeera, which spawned many competitors. this first semi-independent news channel based in the small, fossil-fuel-rich gulf emirate of qatar, which hired former cnn and bbc journalists to revolutionize news in the arab world, offered a global and relatively balanced coverage from a liberal, globalist perspective served with a side of open dialogue and debate, along with critiques of regional autocracies and cultural conflicts. among other factors, the possibility of political criticism by citizens and oft-silenced voices reconfigured the political agency of ordinary people. a number of these globalizing trends, along with the xi out-of-control inequities and humiliations compounded for decades by neoliberalism, culminated in the arab uprisings of 2011. their aftermath, unsurprising, produced an equally powerful autocratic counter-revolution backed by the american and israeli right wing. the end of the nation state returning to the global stage, let us ask how the world has been transformed by globalization. many scholars see globalization as having eroded or fundamentally transformed the nation-state, the political system that is conventionally thought to have originated with the westphalian treaty of 1648. it empowered europe to advance far beyond the old power centers of the world, and spread to the non-western world through colonialism and anticolonialism. the erosion of the nation-state, then, is to be classified as an epochal change, not as one of the garden-variety upheavals and revolutions that occur every few years and decades. among the many who consider the rise of globalization, internationalism, and neoliberalism as tantamount to the end of the nation-state as we knew it, one is the french scholar (and head of un peacekeeping missions 2000-2008) jean-marie guehenno, who presciently argued soon after the fall of the berlin wall in a book that came out in 1993—the same year that european union was established—that something fundamental had begun to change about the west: “1989 marks the close of an era that began not in 1945 or 1917, but that was institutionalized thanks to the french revolution, in 1789. it brings an end to the age of the nation-states.”5 what is more, he contended, there can be no democracy without a nation. just as the roman empire succeeded the roman republic, so our new age is an empire whose citizens “constitute less and less of an entity capable of expressing a collective sovereignty; they are mere juridical subjects, holders of rights and subjected to obligations, in an abstract space whose territorial boundaries have become increasingly vague.”6 his words, which might have been seen as alarmist at the time, are worth reproducing at length: this revolution of the laws of power first occurred in the world of business: the end of the cold war now permits it to expand into the political sphere; the whole industrialized world, from washington to tokyo, passing through brussels, is discovering that the rules of power are changing. we believed that it was enough to replace nations with supernations, as a large enterprise absorbs a smaller one. we are beginning to realize that, as it changes in scale, power changes its nature. … the political editorial xii the american journal of islam and society 37:3-4 organization that the enlightenment bequeathed to us is only one episode in human history, the means that we found, at a certain stage in our development, to establish freedom in a political order. this definition of freedom will not survive the particular conditions that presided over the birth and the flourishing of the nation-states. we must, then, understand the rules of this new age, not in order to fight against it—that would be a wasted effort—but to save what can and must be the idea of freedom.7 a nation, he contends, was a distinctly european idea; it is not a social group, nor a religious group, nor racial or ethnic; it is “the product of a unique combination of historical factors, and can never be reduced to a single dimension … it brings people together not for what they are but for the memory of what they have been.” in fact, “a nation has no other definition but historical.” yet, it is not a tribe; “a nation, in the european definition of the word, is first of all a place; that is to say, a territory defined by precise frontiers.”8 given this, it is no wonder that the idea of nation is an ephemeral one. “products of a european mold,” writes guehenno, addressing his fellow europeans but the observation applies equally to colonized minds everywhere, “we are used to considering the nation as a political form that is self-evident, a kind of natural culmination of all societies. it is time to realize that the idea of the nation that europe gave to the world is perhaps only an ephemeral form, a european exception, a precarious transition between the age of kings and the ‘neo-imperial’ age.” globalization—although he didn’t quite use the word—would endanger the idea of local solidarity that is the basic condition of politics and democracy. less than three decades later, after an avalanche of scholarly requiems for the best days of american democracy or democracy itself, we are none the wiser about the deep paradoxes of globalization. what we are sure about is that the new generation that has grown up everywhere is more profoundly disillusioned by the world than any in recent memory. thanks to the imminent ecological collapse and crushing inequalities that can be strongly linked to global capitalist activity, the grounds for disillusionment have rarely been this strong. moral and existential worries about globalization notwithstanding, we must also attend to scholarship attempting to theorize it. one of the prevailing interpretations of globalization has been that “today’s emerging overlapping jurisdictions of national states, supranational institutions, and novel private global regimes” resemble the pre-nation-state (european) world, “the multifaceted political geography of the feudal order.”9 xiii dutch-american sociologist saskia sassen sees globalization as a “foundational change” in the complex system of nation-states, one characterized by states’ “growing interdependence and the formation of global systems.” this change, she argues, is occurring in the enormously complex and powerful structures of the nation-state, “the unit that has absorbed all major building blocks of society over several centuries.”10 in other words, the nation-state is too big to fail, to simply vanish—in the developed world anyway. it is rather transforming, becoming the locus of and broker for the transformations that are occurring. the “denationalizing” processes that are identified as globalization coexist and compete with older processes. as we think about deglobalization, sassen’s insight should prompt us to think of it not as the rebirth or restoration of the centrality of the nation-state, but as a complex and open-ended set of numerous processes and negotiations whose outcome is uncertain and up for grabs. the scholarship suggests that whereas the post-globalization world is not likely to return to the pre-globalization world of nation-states, what it will look like and who the winners and losers will be is not predetermined. it will depend on how the battles are fought, city by city and region by region. deglobalization: engines and apprehensions one body of literature concerned with deglobalization equates it to the decline of worldwide us hegemony and the transition from a unipolar world to a multipolar world in economic, political, and even cultural realms. in a 2012 report, the national intelligence council, washington’s top intelligence agency, concluded, “by 2030, no country … will be a hegemonic power … largely reversing the historic rise of the west since 1750. asia will have surpassed north america and europe combined in terms of global power, based on gdp, population size, military spending, and technological investment. china alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the united states a few years before 2030.”11 historian alfred mccoy argued in his 2019 article, titled “the end of our world order is imminent,” that “at least 200 empires have risen and fallen over the course of history, and the united states will be no exception.” the reasons that mccoy offers include, apart from so-called irrepressible forces of history, more specific developments such as the rise of china (which mccoy believes is likely to be ominous for anyone concerned with human rights and the rule of law), and, greatest of all, climate change. another body of scholarship is focused on technology and its economic and military impact. german economist and founder of the world editorial xiv the american journal of islam and society 37:3-4 economic forum klaus schwab speaks of the “fourth industrial revolution.” the first in this series of fundamental social transformations was the 18th-century industrial revolution driven by steam power, the second by electricity in the late 19th century, and the third the digital revolution of the late 20th century. the fourth such transformation, schwab contends, will be even greater. us military strategist and historian t.x. hammes argues that one major outcome of the fourth industrial revolution will be deglobalization.12 as labor cost advantages and technological differences in manufacturing decline, energy production will become local rather than dependent on oil, and every region now will be able to produce locally, leading “to major declines in the global movement of trade, services, and investments—in short, deglobalization.” economic growth will now be “focused in regional markets as opposed to interregional or global trade.” applying the highly influential idea proposed in the 1990s by harvard business school’s michael e. porter, which hinges the competitive advantage of nations on clusters of interconnected firms, supplies, related industries, and institutions (rather than, say, raw materials, political system, or military muscle), hammes portends that “business will make more money by producing and selling both goods and services regionally and even locally than globally.”13 militarily, hammes argues, us interventionism and policing will have to be dramatically reversed as relatively small actors will be able to reproduce offensive warfare technologies and alter the military posture of great powers. the case for deglobalization before there was occupy wall street (protesting growing inequality) and black lives matter (protesting police brutality and systemic racism) to shake up the heartland of global capitalism, there was the battle of seattle in 1999, when over 40,000 protestors gathered to protest globalization. “the organizers,” writes finance scholar noah smith, “were a hodgepodge of groups—unions worried about competition from cheap foreign labor, environmentalists worried about the outsourcing of polluting activities, consumer protection groups worried about unsafe imports, labor rights groups worried about bad working conditions in other countries, and leftists of various stripes simply venting their anger at capitalism.”14 the debate between globalists and antiglobalists has raged for the last few decades, and neither side has won a decisive victory. globalization has doubtless increased the total wealth manifold, but if its moral justification was lifting the poor out of poverty, its record is dismal. as berkeley economist pranab xv bardhan concluded in his article authored just before the great recession of 2007, “does globalization help or hurt the world’s poor?”, its actual effect on poverty elimination is unimpressive. true, many have been lifted out of poverty in china (70 to 27%), india (63 to 42%), and indonesia (55 to 11%) in the last few decades, but the majority of that change had occurred prior to the acceleration of globalization in 1980s: out of 400 million in china who presumably crossed the poverty line, 300 million had already achieved that by 1987 as a result of state reforms and expansion of infrastructure. similarly, in india and indonesia, the change can be attributed to other factors such as the green revolution.15 understood as the global expansion of capitalism, globalization has not in itself helped the poor. it has, instead, produced enormous inequalities with a few colossal winners and many, many losers. however, the further consequences (beyond economics) are far greater and far more complex. they have been felt in cultural, social, political, and ecological spheres. the last of these is perhaps the only domain in which the impact can be scientifically and precisely measured. the destruction of the planet’s environment is also the longest lasting and, by all imaginable standards, the most decisive factor in both evaluating globalization’s performance and judging its future. the paradox is that whereas global capitalism has singlehandedly aggravated the problem of global warming and other ecological degradations, global cooperation and scientific cooperation appear to be indispensable in mitigating some of its effects. politically, global capitalism seems to have undermined democracy, accountability of elites, and the power of politics everywhere, even if the effects of other aspects of globalization (such as enhanced movement of people, ideas, and information) are less clear. leading philosophers expressed worry—if not horror—at what globalized capitalism seems to have done to democracy and decent life. not long after guehenno’s book, british philosopher john gray authored false dawn: the delusions of global capitalism, one of the most compelling critiques of the globalized version of free market capitalism, which defended keynesian economics as being necessary to a social democracy within the nation-state. free market or “invisible hand” economics, gray contended, is a dangerous ideology proven false over and over. it is always engineered by coercive power, and engenders enormous human suffering. “the truth is that free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political editorial xvi the american journal of islam and society 37:3-4 expression.”16 ironically, then, “encumbered markets are the norm in every society, whereas free markets are a product of artifice, design and political coercion.” if free market is a coercive process within the nation-state—a community of shared history, interests, and destiny—what kind of hell must be fired up in order to make the world a free market? the 2020 report of un’s department of economic and social affairs (desa) warns, “rising inequality had created discontent, deepened political divides and can lead to violent conflict.”17 the report also notes the dangerous rise of populism or ethno-cultural nationalism in large democratic economies. scholars remain split on whether the rise of nativism is caused by economic or cultural factors.18 the number of migrants worldwide grew from 36 million in 1991 to 191 million in 2005, rising to 272 million in 2020.19 in both the us and the uk, “the most consistent single predictor of how people voted were educational levels” rather than income, which suggests a cultural explanation. globally, confidence in the united nations and in international actors and cooperation at the global level is declining (the percentage of those ‘not confident’ rose from 40 to 48 between 2000 and 2010).20 to conclude, while important, economics cannot alone explain the major shift toward antiglobalism in the countries of the global north.21 scholars have long argued that the worst effects of globalization were not economic inequality and coercive institutions, but far deeper: the ubiquitous mistrust of all by all in a world where misery is designed by none but felt by most, the degradation of social life, the degeneration of democracy into an empty promise, and the rise of angry groups looking for scapegoats to blame. sociologist zygmunt bauman wrote, “an integral part of the globalizing processes is progressive spatial segregation, separation and exclusion.” an instance of what he meant can be witnessed in any city in the developing world where the rich few live in gated communities that reproduce the global north’s most decadent neighborhoods, whereas the urban poor as well as rural masses experience an earthly hell of pollution, disempowerment, and religious and spiritual dislocation. what is more, terrorism, ultra-nationalism, religious fanaticism, and other forms of tribalism were believed to be an integral product of globalization. “neo-tribal and fundamentalist tendencies,” bauman wrote, “which reflect and articulate the experience of people on the receiving end of globalization, are as much legitimate offspring of globalization as the widely acclaimed ‘hybridization’ of top culture—the culture at the globalized top.”22 xvii among the most compelling and long-standing advocates of deglobalization is filipino sociologist, environmentalist, and politician walden bello. the ultimate problem in bello’s view is capitalist-industrialist overproduction, which in turn was the result of a number of factors that coincided after world war two, such as “post-war consumer demand, the reconstruction of europe, us military spending, and rapid economic development in the decolonized world,” the very same factors that created in the us “the golden age of capitalism.”23 this honeymoon ended in the twin crisis of stagnation and inflation which keynesian economics could not anticipate or explain. to solve the problem of overproduction, the capitalist elite pursued three solutions: neoliberal restructuring, globalization, and financialization. to deal with overproduction and declining profits, semi-capitalist and non-capitalist areas such as china were brought into the global market to provide cheap labor, raw materials, and new markets. this only increased productive capacity and overproduction. financialization, namely credit creation and speculation (a process known since antiquity in its essential form as usury) became more intensified, as marx noted, to the possessor of money capital, the process of production appears merely as an unavoidable intermediate link, as a necessary evil for the sake of money-making. all nations with a capitalist mode of production are therefore seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the intervention of the process of production.24 this led to the financial crisis and the great recession of 2007-2009, and reignited keynesian economics in the obama era—but more significantly, started the turn of the global elite toward deglobalization. among the crucial factors contributing to the instability of globalization, bello suggests, is dependence on foreign markets and overproduction. globalized capitalist economy is fragile, prone to crises, and ultimately destructive because it is held together by long, thin threads rather than the short, thick ropes of regional economics.25 the case for deglobalization in the form of economic nationalism or regionalism has been made from both the left and the right. the right has turned against economic globalization due to the loss of jobs and the rise of migrant workers, both skilled and unskilled, from the developing world, and the shipping of jobs to emerging, cheap markets and the consequent loss of jobs and status (granting the temporary windfall from the fortuitous golden age of capitalism mentioned above)—in addition to the ideology of american independence and exceptionalism. meanwhile, the left is editorial xviii the american journal of islam and society 37:3-4 concerned with ecological concerns, labor rights, and the erosion of democracy that wolin has called the rise of inverted totalitarianism. the conservative case: deglobalize to save true free market, community, and/or national character let us start with a sample of conservative critiques from the united states, the heart of capitalism. political scientists divide the conservative opposition to globalization into a few categories. the critiques are numerous and some mutually exclusive. there are the libertarian free-market champions who point out, in agreement with leftist critics (and correctly), that global capitalism is not actually a free market but a rent-seeking deal between government and big business; the global access to cheap markets thus secured frees the latter from having to face free and fair competition from the market. less radical conservatives, while supporting capitalism and growth, simply seek “to slow down the pace of change to mute adverse consequences on workers and communities supported by globally less-competitive markets.” social conservatives who value community, family, and social mores view globalization with less complacence, as they fear the destruction of community, solidarity, and republican virtues when people are subjected to the impersonal forces of the global market. james rogers sums up their concerns eloquently: the cost of the market system in this view is the loss of solidarity among people. different commentators emphasize different aspects of these social costs. one lines emphasizes the idea that the commodification of labor destroys ties of solidarity between people in local communities. there is a direct version of this view, that the market, and the anonymity between producer and consumer, necessarily leads us to treat other people as means rather than as ends in themselves. some also add that the market creates a semiotic environment that changes how we think of people whom we do see in daily life. social life becomes depersonalized and exchange oriented as a result. isolation and anomie results. others draw attention to the spatial size of the global market: unlike pre-modern markets, the argument goes, the sheer size of today’s globalized economy makes producers and consumers strangers to one another. only price serves as intermediary between one person and other. this prevents the ability to tailor economic transactions to serve the needs of specific individuals, as could be done in the face to face transactions in local markets. this change also then undermines the possibility of sustaining real xix communities, even at the local level: local production is production for consumers who could be thousands of miles away. the intimate relational component of the local market is lost in the modern market system in this view.26 more than harm to the local community and solidarity, economic nationalists (another type of conservatives) worry more about the deterioration of the national character through immigration and the increasing power of global institutions to determine policy and culture; this last tendency can be best captured in the nationalist worries evident in brexit. the two types of worry are not mutually exclusive, but they are distinct, for american national capitalism prior to globalism had already decimated local community and family solidarity and ethical norms. it is already evident that libertarians, communitarians, and economic nationalists agree on little even when in agreement on their opposition to globalist ideology. the left-liberal case: deglobalize to save the environment, democracy, and (non-western) local cultures and economies over the last five hundred years, as the sociologist immanuel wallerstein famously argued in his world-systems theory, the world has remained sharply divided between the capitalist center (the atlantic world, sometimes called the global north) and the global periphery (sometimes called the global south). the impact of globalization has been inordinately greater on the latter, especially those nations that lack the institutional and political capacity to withstand the invasion and temptations of global capital and the ruinous swings of the market. to recapitulate the leftist case against deglobalization, let us first return to a view from the periphery, the filipino sociologist walden bello, who popularized the term deglobalization in his 2004 monograph by that name where he offered a multifaceted case for deglobalization. in a 2008 essay he argued that “the dynamics of global capitalism are inherently ecologically disruptive.” in his more recent book capitalism’s last stand: deglobalization in the age of austerity, he develops his earlier arguments in light of the fateful events of the intervening years and contends that “deglobalized non-capitalist economic arrangements appear to be a key part of the solution to the challenge of climate change and other forms of environmental degradation.”27 as global capitalists resist government-imposed measures such as imposing mandatory carbon caps, the elites in the emerging economies of the global south show “little editorial xx the american journal of islam and society 37:3-4 willingness to depart from the high-growth high-consumption model inherited from the north.” if keynesianism envisioned managed capitalism constrained by democracy, leading american political philosopher sheldon wolin argued that the neoliberal world order envisions managed democracy constrained by the economic maximization of multinationals. to wolin, globalization is not a leaderless, inevitable process, but the result of the global superpower’s slide into what he calls “inverted totalitarianism,” driven by the neoconservative elite under whose influence the newly triumphant post-cold war united states embraced an “imaginary of power” rather than one of constitutional principles and democracy and through the spectacle of total power projected globally through its one thousand military bases (projected virtually through the satellite media, as in the two gulf wars) and, finally, the interminable global war on terror declared after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. the global pursuit of superpower through these and other means undermined democracy and constitutional constraints at home: inverted totalitarianism marks a political moment when corporate power finally sheds its identification as a purely economic phenomenon, confined primarily to a domestic domain of “private enterprise,” and evolves into a globalizing co-partnership with the state: a double transmutation, of corporation and state. the former becomes more political, the latter more market oriented. this new political amalgam works at rationalizing domestic politics so that it serves the needs of both corporate and state interests while defending and projecting those same interests into an increasingly volatile and competitive global environment.28 this is not merely about the united states: there is something inherent about the scale at which globalization forces us all to think and learn that makes it opposed to any kind of participatory politics, including democracy. the constant refrain of pundits is that the people must be educated about the issue they happen to be experts of or focused on at the moment—and the list of such topics, each of which requires prolonged mastery of a field, easily runs into thousands. this inevitably leads, in the best circumstances, to the “rule of experts”; it also means that the information necessary to make even modestly informed decisions is based on abstracted information packaged and repackaged for easy consumption by those who are masters of delivery, not necessarily of the particular subject matter. this facilitates the rise of celebrities and populism, rather than engaged participatory politics and of leaders able to inspire and empower the best and suppress the mobs’ worse xxi impulses. the knowledge on which even the most informed people act under such conditions is highly abstract rather than natural, palpable, and multidimensional, in contrast to the knowledge one has about one’s immediate surroundings, family, and community. finally, perhaps the most important human consequences of globalization are cultural and religious. to muslims, as to those concerned with other ways of life (such as the chinese, the indians, the africans, and as it turns out, to many citizens of the global north themselves), globalization has posed an unprecedented cultural threat to what they value most about their respective ways of life. euroamerican societies, threatened by immigration from the very lands their corporations have devastated, have only begun to taste the poison they have handed out over the last two centuries. thoughtful scholars have begun to realize the challenge of cultural annihilation that the current phase of globalization presents to non-western societies. renowned anthropologist clifford geertz once wrote, “we seem to be in need of a new variety of politics, a politics which does not regard ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or regional assertiveness as so much irrationality, archaic and ingenerate, to be suppressed or transcended … it depends on developing a less simplistically demonizing, blankly negative attitude toward it as a relic of some savage or some early stage of human existence.” geertz was too naïve if he thought a better attitude, becoming more educated, could solve the problem of cultures, languages, ways of life, and means of living being destroyed by globalization. elsewhere he noted a dilemma: the world is “growing both more global and more divided, more thoroughly interconnected and more intricately partitioned, at the same time. as the one increases, so does the other.”29 how could it be that whereas as other ways of life are being annihilated or fundamentally transformed, as people become more westernized, they are also becoming more divided? globalization is not producing a harmonious village; as people are learning to speak the same language and acquiring the same desires and competing after the same things, they are becoming aware of inequalities and injustice in the same way. open questions while globalization’s engine may have been economic, its real presence and long-term effects are ecological, social, psychological, affective, political, and cultural. people’s sensibilities, expectations, loves, fears, feelings, sources of information, depth and range of relationships, household sizes, editorial xxii the american journal of islam and society 37:3-4 familial conduct, rate of marriage and children, devotion to family and community, impact on the environment, and knowledge and practice of religious rituals, all have been deeply transformed. the most indisputable effect of globalization has been the rapid and unsustainable acceleration of ecological degradation. those in the global south both resent and admire those in the north, hankering after the same lifestyle. this is objectively impossible. americans make up 5% of the world’s population and consume nearly 35% of the world’s resources. even the rise of new economies is largely dependent on the lusty consumers in the global north. modern liberalism and capitalism are inextricably dependent on a consumerist lifestyle, that is, one in which consumption is a way of life, the right to which americans militantly demand. if these conditions of individualistic, materialist life are extended to the 70-80% of humanity still living in more traditional cultures—ones on which our continued existence depends and yet ones that are deeply threatened—it would quite simply require several other planets. in addition, the anthropogenic climate change that is directly and inextricably linked to industrialization and modern life has already drastically damaged the planet. threats such as global pandemics, as they become more frequent and serious, thrive on frequent global circulation of labor and capital, and may singlehandedly sound the death knell for globalization. yet, paradoxically, solving the ecological problems, natural disasters, and global pandemics, which do not respect cultural or national boundaries, requires a global cooperation which deglobalization threatens. the knowledge that is needed to sustain increasing global population is being produced and consumed globally. globalization has enabled the intensification of interaction between cultures; and even under the hegemony of western liberalism, non-western cultures have found new voices. even as critics point out that these refurbished cultures are often mirror images of or superficial reactions to western cultures, the opportunities that globalization (in particular, the internet and the social media) have afforded for dialogue, reassertion, and new kinds of solidarities appear to be unprecedented and powerful. how must muslim ulama and opinion leaders—the heirs of the prophets—respond to a profoundly changing world? no inexorable laws of social science can decide the result; only the divine will, which rewards right reason and right action. with prophetic action, the specter of (de)globalization can, god willing, be turned into a new, auspicious beginning so our collective future may be better than the unreal present, in which unspeakable harms are visited upon a new muslim group every day and, like lambs xxiii endnotes 1. walden bello, capitalism’s last stand: deglobalization in the age of austerity (new york: zed books, 2013), 1; “turning their backs on the world,” the economist, february 19, 2009, https://www.economist.com/international/2009/02/19/turning-their-backs-on-the-world. 2. manfred steger, globalization: a very short introduction (oxford: oxford university press, 2009), 8-9. 3. leading expert eric helleiner notes that while holding on to the us dollar as their currency reserve for the time being, the new economic powers are taking gradual but definitive steps to replace the current us led global world order. this contrasts to the post-ww2 conference at bretton woods when the us led victors deliberately designed a new order from scratch. see, for instance, his lecture “legacies of the 2008 global financial crisis,” youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr_yhvpc_gu&t=3185s, starting at 45:00 (accessed 24 august 2020). 4. this story was told with characteristic paltriness by nyt journalist thomas friedman in books such as the lexus and the olive tree: understanding globalization (new york: farrar, straus, & giroux, 1999) and the world is flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century (new york: farrar, straus, & giroux, 2005). 5. the end of the nation state (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1995), x. 6. ibid., xii. 7. ibid., xiii. 8. ibid., 4. 9. saskia sassen, territory, authority, rights: from medieval to global assemblages (princeton university press, 2006), 27. 10. ibid., 401. 11. cited in alfred mccoy, in the shadows of the american century: the rise and decline of us global power (chicago: haymarket books, 2017). 12. t.x. hammes, deglobalization and international security (amherst: cambria press, 2019), xiii. editorial lined up for slaughter, the rest stand in utter confusion, each pushing the other toward the blade as they all inevitably inch toward it. ovamir anjum, co-editor, american journal of islam and society imam khattab endowed chair of islamic studies professor, department of philosophy and religious studies affiliated faculty, department of history university of toledo, toledo, oh xxiv the american journal of islam and society 37:3-4 13. ibid., xiii. 14. noah smith, “the dark side of globalization: why seattle’s 1999 protesters were right,” the atlantic, january 6, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/ business/archive/2014/01/the-dark-side-of-globalization-why-seattles1999-protesters-were-right/282831/. 15. pranab bardhan, “does globalization help or hurt the world’s poor?” scientific american, march 6, 2006, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-globalization-help-o-2006-04/. 16. john gray, false dawn: the delusions of global capitalism (new york: the new press, 1998), 17. 17. united nations department of economic and social affairs (desa), “world social report 2020: inequality in a rapidly changing world” (united nations, 2020), 20; www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/wp-content/uploads/ sites/22/2020/02/world-social-report2020-fullreport.pdf. 18. ibid., 51. 19. the report notes, “a backlash against globalization has been a key component of recent populist rhetoric in developed countries. it is likely that inequality, together with labour market insecurity and other economic considerations, along with cultural and demographic factors, have all played a role in the rising of populism.” united nations world migration report 2020, https:// www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf. 20. us desa, “world social report 2020,” 167. 21. world migration report 2020, 52. 22. zygmunt bauman, globalization: the human consequences (cambridge: polity press, 1998), 3. 23. ibid., 4-5. 24. karl marx as quoted in bello, capitalism’s last stand, 8. 25. bello, capitalism’s last stand, 23. 26. james r. rogers, “understanding the conservative split over globalization,” law and liberty, december 20, 2017, https://lawliberty.org/understanding-the-conservative-split-over-globalization/. 27. bello, capitalism’s last stand, 164. 28. sheldon s. wolin, democracy incorporated: managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism, new ed. (princeton: princeton university press, 2018), 238. 29. richard a. shweder, “geertz’s challenge: is it possible to be a robust cultural pluralist and a dedicated political liberal at the same time?” in law without nations, ed. austin sarat, lawrence douglas, and martha merrill umphrey (stanford: stanford university press, 2011), 185-231. doi: 10.35632/ajis.v37i3-4.1940 journal of accounting and investment vol. 21 no. 3, september 2020 article type: research paper liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach virginia nur rahmanti1* and tjiptohadi sawarjuwono2 abstract: research aims: accounting as a product of western thought is believed to be loaded with masculinity values such as egoism, rationalism, materialism, and objectivism. the western perspective of social reality runs counter to the islamic philosophy of religiosity. capitalism in pragmatic accounting has led to religiocultural anomalies that have resulted in injustice, domination, and the formation of a class society. this study aims to liberate accounting from masculine characteristics by using islamic values. design/methodology/approach:the effort to liberate pragmatic accounting in this study is in line with the thoughts of ali ashgar engineer (1999). he uses islamic theology as a fundamental in carrying out the liberation. at the methodological stage, this research uses historical studies (historical research) which is extended by phenomenology. apart from being aimed at identifying islamic values, historical research is also applied to find out how these values are used to criticize pragmatic accounting. meanwhile, the phenomenological methodology is used to understand how religious values can create prosperous accounting. research findings: the results showed that monotheism, justice, brotherhood, benefit, balance, gratitude, sincerity, and blessings are islamic values that are often used by researchers to criticize pragmatic accounting. analysis of a collection of empirical articles also proves that pragmatic accounting is indeed full of masculinity. by using business as an accounting metaphor, internalization of islamic values is proven to be able to create a prosperous business. thus, the internalization of islamic values will be able to liberate accounting from masculinity. theoretical contributions/originality: this research is expected to provide insight into accounting studies using a different approach to previous research, namely by using the basis of islamic theology. keywords: accounting; masculinity; religious; theology; islam; liberation. introduction accounting is justified by critical researchers as a science contributing to the flourishment of capitalism. chiapello (2007) sees that accounting tent to be deifying financial market and prioritizing shareholder’s’ interest as the materialization of neoliberalism-loaded financialization. in addition, farjaudon (2013) perceives that accounting standard setting process has also been penetrated by the fundamentals of capitalism that triggers inter-classes hegemony. according to carrier (2005: 443), accounting as a science has been criticized since the 20th century is that it refers to economic redefinition as a study that focuses on price shaping, which affiliation: 1 student of doctoral program of accounting department, universitas airlangga, east java, indonesia. 2 department of accounting, faculty of economic and business, universitas airlangga, east java, indonesia. *correspondence: virginia.nur.rahmanti2017@feb.unair.ac.id this article is available in: http://journal.umy.ac.id/index.php/ai doi: 10.18196/jai.2103161 citation: rahmanti, v.n., & sawarjuwono, t. (2020). liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach . journal of accounting and investment, 21(3), 492-513. article history received: 07 july 2020 reviewed: 8 august 2020 14 jul 2020 14 aug 2020 revised: 13 august 2020 30 jul 2020 19 aug 2020 accepted: 19 aug 2020 mailto:virginia.nur.rahmanti-2017@feb.unair.ac.id mailto:virginia.nur.rahmanti-2017@feb.unair.ac.id http://journal.umy.ac.id/index.php/ https://journal.umy.ac.id/index.php/ai/article/view/9271 https://journal.umy.ac.id/index.php/ai rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 493 ends in rejection of intrinsic value whatsoever, such as religions and ethics, so there is no other form of justice but the market itself (mulawarman & kamayanti, 2018). the internalizations of capitalistic value in accounting is evident in its theoretical framework consisting of its objectives, qualitative characteristics, assumptions, principles, and limitations (kieso, jerry, & terry, 2011:17). it is clearly stated that the objective of financial reporting is providing information about the activities of entities beneficial for investors, and creditors. this confirms that accounting prioritizes capital holder’s wellbeing (bryer, 2000; catchpowle et al., 2004; chiapello, 2007) over the stakeholders’ wellbeing. accounting’s market orientation is the impact of rationality superiorization, which leads to materialistic psyche. affirmed by burrell and morgan (1979:25) that positivism, widely accepted by accountants, is an accounting perspective brimful of rationalism in discerning social reality. the most phenomenal “pragmatic accounting” model of recording referring to conventional accounting – is double-entry bookkeeping. funnell and robertson (2011), in mention of yamey (1949), confirmed that the said bookkeeping contributes to the development of capitalism. it is ostensive in the use of ledgers closely related to profitloss account. this system is certainly based on secularism. sawarjuwono (2002) in accounting is magic? shows how accounting recording supports capitalism. the word “magic” appertains to the ability of accounting to convince information users concerning the trust of economic reality it created. the relative truth in the reality is engineered through the flexibility of accounting treatments in the absence of negative manipulation, so it very close with both institutional and individual interests. secularism is the nucleus of masculinity inherent in pragmatic accounting. its traits, i.e. egoism, rationality, materialism, and objectivity, opposes the altruism, intuitiveness, spiritualism, and subjectivity of islam. the antithesis of the values is caused by hierarchical distinction between islam and the west in value creation. ahmad (2020) stated that, as west creates value from social interactions, islam relies on god-guided thoughts, the real source of truths. hence, ahmad (2020) confirmed that islamic values are the most applicable reference for human behavior. this study attempts to liberate pragmatic accounting from its masculinity using islamic values. different from other religions, islam provides a comprehensive guidance for human in their material and spiritual lives (ahmed & barikzai, 2016). islamic monotheism, the tawhid, the recognition that god is the core of human life, is able to create social order (choudhury, 1989). in other words, values brought by islam certainly brings virtues for human. its teaching, in addition to becoming the distinguishing point from other religions, has been attested of shaping a more altruistic human way of thinking. asserted by sarker (1999), haniffa and hudaib (2007), and asutay (2008), happiness according to capitalism lies in the achievement of wealth maximization, but islam teaches that falah is the goal of life, i.e. success in life and the hereafter. therefore, integrality in islam bring positive implications for social welfare. this is the rationale of this research for using islamic values in liberating pragmatic accounting. rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 494 “value” is both purpose and perspective. in the context of islamic teaching, tawhid, ‘adl, amanah, and ubudiyah are core values underlying human activities (ahmad, 2020). the should also be used as the understructure of all scientific development; as by choudhury (1989), who uses islamic values as the center of all science. tawhid as the core of islamic theology does not only teach the unity of god but also the unity of mankind (engineer, 1999:11). tawhid as a concept always use the quran to create justice and virtue (al-‘adl wa al’ahsan). the islamic concept of justice called as ‘adl in the quran means equal distribution including the distribution of wealth (engineer 1999:60). this contradicts capitalistic view, which is oriented more on elite groups, similar to pragmatic accounting, which prioritize the welfare of capital holder (shareholders and creditors). by referring to the paradox between western and islamic values, we believe that the latter can liberate accounting from masculinity. there are many researchers who have attempted to combine accounting and spiritual aspect; they are nurindrasari, triyuwono, and mulawarman (2018), fauzia (2018), soediro and meutia (2018), urumsah, wicaksono, and hardinto (2018), jurana and khairin (2017), kusdewanti and hatimah (2016), kamayanti (2016), farhan (2016), muchlis and sukirman (2016), or indriasari (2015), who used islamic values as the antithesis for capitalism. however, the studies used islamic values in a partial way in criticizing pragmatic accounting. therefore, this research tries to use a more comprehensive islamic values in liberating accounting through historical studies on several researches. furthermore, in criticizing the masculine value of accounting, past studies only used islamic values without proving that islamic value internalization really creates a better social condition. using transcendental phenomenology, this research addresses the shortcoming by trying to answer the questions of (1) what religious values frequently used in critical studies on accounting, (2) how the religious values are used to criticize pragmatic accounting’s masculinity, and (3) how religious values can liberate pragmatic accounting from its masculinity. to answer the first two problems, we apply historical study in analyzing a number of empirical articles, and the third problem is answered by applying transcendental phenomenology through in-depth interviews with selected informants. there are not many researches that criticize pragmatic accounting using the awareness of the subject in an activity and use business activity – as employed in this research to prove that islamic value internalization is able to liberate pragmatic accounting from masculinity – as the metaphor of accounting. this research is divided into six chapters. as the first chapter will set out critical studies on pragmatic accounting’s masculinity, the second will elucidate islamic fundamental values as the antithesis of masculinity. methods incorporated to complete this research will be presented in the third chapter. the results and the analysis will be presented separately in the fourth chapter so that information about the process of liberating pragmatic accounting is better delivered. finally, this research will be concluded in the last chapter. rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 495 literature review 1. the masculinity of pragmatic accounting masculinity is frequently analogized as the power to colonize human (davie, 2010), evidenced by the penetration of accounting to indian workers in 19th to 20th century. in the context of accounting, gender and role differences are frequently used to voice criticism (haynes, 2017). the biological gender between male (masculine) and female (feminine) are implemented in critical studies on accounting, as in gallhofer (1998); hammond (2003); haynes (2017); and nichols, robinson, reithel, and franklin (1997). how masculinity is attached in accounting can be explained by understanding the role of a culture in shaping its members’ mindset. it is justified that accounting science is the product of western culture. eliot (1948), as quoted by kohzadi and azizmohammadi (2011), stated that culture is a way of life. according to plog and bates (1976), culture is any faith, habit, behavior, or artifact used by community members to live in their realm and live with others transmitted from generation to generation through learning processes. in anthropology it is believed that civilization is shaped from assumptions about the core of culture (mulawarman & kamayanti, 2018). anthropology is defined as a study on human’s historical evolution (hasegawa, 2010), not limited to physical evolution but encompassing the combination between humanity and social science. the relation between masculinity and western culture is explained by capra (2000: 144) as follows. “westerners traditionally put masculinity over femininity… western tradition even established a static order… causing overemphasis on the “yang” or the masculinity of human nature: active, rational, competitive, aggressive… the “yin” – or female – mode of awareness that can be described as intuitive, religious, mystical, devotion, and spiritual…” the quote implies that masculinity is closely related to rationality endorsement. burrel and morgan (1979) stated that at epistemological level positivists tend to look for order and causal relationship between elements in contemplating what happens with the social world. hence, complex social realities are reduced by them as causal relationship that can be rationalized. such endorsement has given birth to materialism that has always been oriented to material gains. thus, the masculinity of accounting is the product of a culture. meanwhile, there is a strong relationship between culture and power. how the two are related can be explained through a phenomenon about the belief or tendency of scientists concerning western’s political and economic systems that produce what we call as westernization. the capitalism-loaded western culture (abdurahim, 2013; chiapello, 2007) with its superiority assumption has reached all areas, including accounting. the agent of capitalism proliferation, i.e. the umbrella of masculinity, uses corporatocracy as well as education. accounting has become an example of how it serves as the agent that replaces eastern culture with western. due to accounting. the rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 496 previously collective, helpful and cooperative, tolerant, and cordial eastern people have become individualistic and materialistic. this cultural shift occurs for there is an assumption that western culture is the center of knowledge, which is the impact of rationale superiority. accounting is misunderstood as a “value-free” recording tool. this statement becomes incorrect when we refer back to studies on culture and masculinity above. that statement will become even more mistaken if we believe that accounting is the agent capitalistic value dispersion. the world’s faith on the absolute truth of pragmatic accounting is the indication on the successful western’ hegemony. even muslims, who believe that god is the source of truth, are trapped by the accounting-manufactured truth. sawarjuwono (2002) asserted that this false truth is crammed with interests that is very likely to produce injustice. the theoretical framework of accounting, particularly in the purpose financial reporting, clearly signifies the masculinity of accounting through capital holder’s interest prioritization. in spite of its definitive context mentions that financial reporting is purported to help stakeholders in their decision making, accounting breaks the definition by putting stockholders and lenders’ interest on the top priority. this confirms sawarjuwono (2002) that accounting is not interest-free. the market-oriented pragmatic accounting (mulawarman & kamayanti, 2018) tend to prioritize the interest of capital holders by presenting quality financial report. therefore, it is not surprising if pragmatic accountants always try to maximize corporate profit or assets. elite-oriented westernization conceivably causes religio-cultural alienation (engineer 1999: 24, 60). justice, one of the teachings of islam, is called as ‘adl and qist, an equitable distribution, including wealth distribution. in economic context, one of the western concepts that opposes to justice value is the use of interest. allah forbids usury, as stated in the quran surah number 3 verse 130, surah number 4 verse 161, and surah number 2 verse 275 to 278. pragmatic accounting is closely affiliated with usury practices as reflected in the use of “interest cost” account in profit-loss report. there are many accounting products that apply interest as the consequence of debt; say the accounting treatment for bonds and money orders. this is not a problem for positivists because they believe “the truth of accounting”, a truth coming from rationality but not the real truth coming from allah swt. by referring to pragmatic accounting’s spiritualistic value negligence, it can be concluded that secularism is the antecedent of masculinity. we believe that islamic values are able to liberate accounting from the enmeshment of masculine traits. it is not an easy thing to break the status quo of pragmatic accounting, whose truth is universally recognized. nevertheless, this attempt is very meaningful considering that accounting is believed to be loaded with values. if pragmatic accounting practices are ignored, it is not impossible that it pushes easter culture farther away. culture is closely related to value, as expressed by bozeman (1975) that: rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 497 “civilization and culture both refer to the overall way of life of a people that involve values, norms, institutions, and modes of thinking to which successive generations, in a given society, have attached primary importance”. the decimation of eastern culture by western culture also refers to the changes from religious and collective to secularistic and individualistic. finally, this phenomenon will cause social disaster such as injustice, oppression, and the birth of segregated society. 2. the “strength” of islamic values as the antithesis of masculinity values in contrast to masculinity, (tong, 1991) has introduced (western) feminism as a form of struggle against male oppression. feminism as the opposite of masculinity is actually not a truth. kamayanti (2013) asserted that feminism is also a term native to western thinking, so it is still full of capitalistic values. if capitalistic values were created from local customs and traditions, islamic values came from god as the only source of truth (ahmad, 2020). she then explained the different thought evolutions between the west and the east (see figure 1). the evolutions contrast each other. western thoughts believe that values are shaped by traditions and localities, which then developed into social habit and behavior, where people’s behaviors refer to something perceived as the truth. when those perceived to be true materialize into people’s behavior, at that time values are created. thus, western’s thought evolution is inductive. on the contrary, values of eastern culture were derived from the believe that all things come from the words of god and that those coming from god’s words are the real truths. ahmad (2020) refers to it as the “divine guidance”, which grows into universally accepted values that guide human behavior. continuing his explanation about value, ahmad (2020) mentioned that there are four core values of islam that serve as the foundation of human activity; they are tawhid, ‘adl, amanah, and ubudiyah. even though he did not explain tawhid in detail, we can predict why tawhid is considered as one of the core values. tawhid is an attestation that allah is the only one deserving human’s reverence because allah is the true source of truth. as the core of islamic theology, it is interpreted as god’s unity and unity of mankind (engineer, 1999). this statement implies that the evidence of tawhid is not only praying routines but also human civilization that complies with islamic values. in relevance with ahmad (2020), engineer (1999:11) asserted that the concept of tawhid is very close to justice and virtue (al ‘adl wa al’ ahsan). the quran teaches humankind to be fair and bring virtue at all times. this command is stated in the quran surah number 16 verse 90, “allah orders justice and good conduct”, and surah number 5 verse 8, “be just; that is nearer to righteousness”. the surahs above highlight the link between justice and taqwa (righteousness and piety). taqwa is the concept of human piety to allah swt by doing his commands and avoiding what he forbids. the surahs implies that taqwa cannot be simply defined as rituals; it also means doing god’s command, including upholding justice. a person cannot be said understanding islamic teaching and its essence if he still put the concept of socio-economic justice aside (engineer, 1999:39). rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 498 in order to uphold justice, islam requires that wealth must not be controlled by elites. allah even condemns and will punish those who accumulates wealth (the quran surah number 9 verse 34 and 35, surah number 17 verse 16. this concept, according to (rahmanti, kamayanti, & mulawarman, 2013), is called flow concept. contrasting the flow concept, the capitalism-oriented western thinking is brimful of stock concept, the accumulation of wealth on certain groups. the ordination of wealth is potential to create oppression, as accounting that promotes stockholders’ interest over the stakeholders’ through profit and asset maximization. the greed of accounting over wealth is the reflection of its masculinity. kamayanti (2013) characterizes masculinity as aggressiveness and rationality, while heidhues and patel (2012) relate masculinity with the inclination to material success. all of the masculine traits are embedded in the “body” of pragmatic accounting. hence, we can conclude that masculine values are the primogenitor of injustice, which opposes islamic values. as ahmad (2020) understood that tawhid, ‘adl, amanah, and ubudiyah as the core values of islam, dusuki (2008) delivered the idea of hassan (2002) that islamic values include honesty, perseverance, justice, honor to law, virtues, patience, tolerance, and truth. according to kamla (2009); maali and napier (2010), islamic values cover accountability, equality, justice, morality, responsibility, and social justice. therefore, islam has many virtuous values as the guideline for muslims in their behavior. research method the purpose of this study is to liberate pragmatic accounting from masculinity suing islamic values. the attempt is done through two methodological phases. to answer the first two questions, i.e. (1) what religious values frequently used in critical studies on accounting and (2) how the religious values are used to criticize pragmatic accounting’s masculinity, we apply historical study in analyzing a number of empirical articles. špiláčková (2012) revealed that “the main task of historical research is to gather all available information and sources as to a particular topic, and subsequently to classify, arrange, clarify, evaluate, elaborate and publish them by means of scientific methods. the articles were compiled from jurnal akuntansi multiparadigma (jamal), a journal specific to themes of locality, spirituality, and culture, in the publishing period of 20152019. the journal is also rich of research articles with various perspective and methodology, which adds the researchers’ knowledge in how pragmatic accounting should be criticized. to answer the third problem, i.e. how religious values can liberate pragmatic accounting from its masculinity, we conducted exploration using phenomenology to reveal informants’’ awareness. there are three informants involved in this study; they are female muslims engaged in service, manufacture, and trade business. they were selected upon meeting two main requirements: muslim and having been running the business at least one year. the first requirement is expected to provide the researchers with information about islamic values applied by the informants in running their rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 499 business. this process also serves as a confirmation (triangulation method) of the value exploration stage used in the first method, i.e. historical study), so the data validity improves. the second requirement was used to ascertain that the islamic values believed by the informants have been applied in their business activities. we used business as the metaphor of accounting since both have similarities in certain aspects. the three informants understand the cycle of their business. they were selected not only due to their agreement to share information but also due to the researcher’s consideration after observing their track record from starting the business until this research was conducted. the researchers even have records on the business’ epiphanies. to keep the informants’ anonymity, the researchers use their initials in referring to them. they, r, s, and d, have agreed the use of voice recorders and even allowed the researchers to observe the running of their business. this convenience has allowed the researchers to use phenomenology. transcendental phenomenology focusing on awareness was applied in this phase. kamayanti (2017:153) mentioned that the stages of transcendental phenomenology analysis technique are noema, noesis, epoch, intentional analysis, and eidetic reduction. noema is a phenomenological term referring to visible awareness. epoch, or bracketing, refers to concentration on certain findings for further analysis to identify how such findings happen. different form noema, noesis refers to awareness due to experiences at certain times (allraum) and certain places (welzeit). intentional analysis sees how noesis shapes noema. in other words, it leads to a reason behind the occurrence of actions or behaviors. eidetic reduction, the final stage, reveals the condensation of the entire process of interpretation. following the collection, the data was then analyzed in several stages. first, the researchers identified the islamic values through historical study on recent articles. second, how the values are used to criticize pragmatic accounting were understood and analyzed to support the research premises that islamic values as the antithesis of masculinity can lead to a better social condition. this phase was concluded by liberating pragmatic accounting from masculinity using islamic values. this is relevant with engineer (1999), referred to as theological framework-based liberation. thus, the implementation of phenomenology in this research also functions as triangulation for research data validity improvements. result and discussion result in the highlight of the research stages above, we mapped the historical study-based articles to identify islamic values frequently used in critical studies on accounting. we took a number of articles during the publishing period of 2015-2019. the detail of the map is available in table 1. in order to be selected, the articles must fulfill the main requirement of relating accounting with islamic spirituality. rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 500 table 1 the map of current studies no volume/ number title keywords value coding author islamic value 1 vol. 9 no. 3 islamic welfare-based performance measurement concept interpreting the concept of economic activities as forms of reverence to god, peacefulness, material fulfilment for others and the universe ibadah (worship or reverence to god), peacefulness, material distribution justice nurindrasari et al. (2018) tawhid, justice, brotherhood, maslahah (public interest), balance, gratefulness, sincerity, blessing 2 vol. 9 no. 1 the behavior of business people and entrepreneurs in applying islamic transaction principles perspective difference between informants concerning brotherhood, justice, maslahah, and balance brotherhood, justice, maslahah, and balance fauzia, (2018) 3 vol. 9 no. 1 maqasid sharia as a performance framework for islamic financial institutions maslahah, rahmatan lil 'alamin, and khalifatu fil ardh maslahah, tawhid (soediro & meutia, 2018) 4 vol. 9 no. 1 are religiosity and organizational culture significant in reducing frauds? religious values can prevent frauds tawhid (urumsah, wicaksono, & hardinto, 2018) 5 vol. 8 no. 1 liberation of educator accountants’ mindset through science philosophy and spiritual learning god as the single truth, spiritual values are the core of science, urgency of accounting purgation tawhid (jurana & khairin, 2017) 6 vol. 7 no. 2 building prophetic accountabilities prophetic accountabilities contain the element of ibadah, life that enlightens, amar ma’ruf nahi munkar, sacral genesis of divinity ibadah (kusdewanti & hatimah, 2016) 7 vol. 7 no. 1 phobi(a)ccounting: poeticization and reflection of haqiqa accounting is inseparable from tawhid concept tawhid (kamayanti, 2016) 8 vol. 7 no. 1 schleiermacher’s romantic hermeneutics concerning profit in the muqaddimah of ibnu khaldun earnings are incidentally gained profits, which are the compassion of allah swt. grateful (farhan, 2016) 9 vol. 7 no. 1 the implementation of maqasid al-sharia in corporate social responsibility at pt bank muammalat indonesia the concept of guarding assets emphasizes stakeholders’ and customers’ welfare stakeholder’s’ welfare (muchlis & sukirman, 2016) 10 vol. 6 no. 2 when [accounting] science glorifies the spirit of love accounting can recover its beauty and sincerity with the energy of love, so its actors [accountants] can harvest love and blessing sincerity, blessing (indriasari, 2015) rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 501 to improve data validity, we also conducted an empirical research through in-depth interviews. the informants’ identity is detailed in table 2. table 2 informant’s identity no. name (initial) business fields business age 1. r service (daycare) 4 years 2. s manufacture (japanese food restaurant) 14 years 3. d trade 10 years the first informant is r, a young mother who has been running a daycare business since 2016. based on the increasing number of customers, her business develops quite well. she employs five people who work as child attendants. we give unstructured questions to her during the interview to reveal how islamic values “guide” her running the business. the following is the transcription of her responses. “i do business for {material and life blessings}. to me, much money is {useless in the absence of god’s blessing}. i want to help mothers who cannot look after their children because they have another duty (working) to do. we do not know their (mothers’) reason of not being able to leave their job. in fact, one of the mothers is a single parent; she has to work.” “thank god, i have five employees who help me. they are like {my family to me}. some of them are married, but some of them are not. {i feel happy} when they can provide for their family from what they get from this business, so i do my best to make them feel comfortable and stay. about their salary, i never feel that i have to pay them with the same amount of money every month. if we get more income, i give them bonuses in forms of either money or voucher. my point is that for me happiness is when i see my employees happy, {feeling comfortable working here and staying}. if i am being authoritarian, i can get maximum income, but {it is not} my orientation.” we visited r many times to find the best time and moment to talk. every interview session took a long time until we finally found how islamic values that she believes can help her running her business. after the interviews with the first informant was concluded, we continued to visit s to collect data. she has been running a japanese fast food business for fourteen years. using the same questions, we received the following responses. “saboten (her restaurant) had branches outside java, managed using (conventional) franchise system. during the fourteen years of operation, we have been experiencing {downs and lows (in profit)} due to, i think, inappropriate system. after some analyses, i found out that there was something wrong with the system; our system was {not franchisor-friendly}. rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 502 i also found that the trend of our turnover indicates low performance. then i started to learn about {islamic business model} and was interested to apply it. now saboten’s franchise system uses {syirkah with profit sharing}. thank god, now we are improving a lot. most of the employees are females. although some of them had to resign due to marriage or children, most of them stay.” saboten is a restaurant business that transformed form conventional business to shariacompliant one. the owner also has changed into a more religious person. s admitted that, after learning about it, she believed that the islamic system is better than the conventional. aside from providing peacefulness, the new system is also successful in increasing the performance of all branches. the last informant is d, the owner of a large-scale trade business. her products are even sold abroad. as with other informants, the researchers have a close friendship with d, so it was easy to explore spiritualistic values behind her awareness. the following is the excerpt of the interview with her. i started my business not only to prosper myself and my family but also {to help others}. honesty and responsibility are my codes. i am a native malang citizen (javanese) who always admires javanese philosophy. one of the principles that i always apply is “do not look up too high and do not look down too low. more or less the meaning is that we must not push ourselves too hard to achieve big things and that we must be grateful when the {business is low}”. “about income, i talk much with my employees. their income and comfort matter the most to me. during this pandemic (covid-19), businesses are collapsing, but we think hard {about how} to survive so i do not need to lay them off. in fact, that they make charities is something that gives me goosebumps. they saved some portions of their salary for the charity. they saved some portions of their salary for charity; they said that their salary is more than enough. after interviewing all informants, we analyzed and related the data with the third research problem, which is how the internalization of islamic values upheld by the informants helped them in their businesses that are not oriented only on materialism. following the phenomenological analysis technique, which includes noema, noesis, intentional analysis, and eidetic reduction, the results of the analysis are presented in the following table 3. rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 503 table 3 the sequence of phenomenological analysis technique no. noema epoch noesis intentional analysis eidetic reduction 1 i do business for {material and life blessings} to me, much money is {useless in the absence of god’s blessing}; … but {it is not} my orientation if i am being authoritarian, i can get maximum income r runs her business not only to maximize material gains but also to find blessings by helping others business dies not necessarily be related with wealth; blessings are the main key in business they are like {my family to me} {i feel happy} when they can provide for their family from what they get from this business for me happiness is when i see my employees happy, {feeling comfortable working here and staying} doing business also means providing for many people, so it is through business people can get life blessings blessed life means useful for others 2 during the fourteen years of operation, we have been experiencing {downs and lows (in profit)} due to, i think, inappropriate system. now saboten’s franchise system uses {syirkah with profit sharing}. since then i was interested to learn about {islamic business model} running business using islamic concept is more profitable and reassuring islamic concept is the best; profit sharing is perceived to be fairer; when we orient our life to the hereafter, material welfare follows after some analyses, i found out that there was something wrong with the system; our system was {not franchisorfriendly} 3 i started my business not only to prosper myself and my family but also {to help others} businesses are collapsing, but we think hard {about how} to survive so i do not need to lay them off we must not push ourselves too hard to achieve big things and that we must be grateful when the {business is low} d’s main goal in doing her business is to improve the welfare of others life must be beneficial for other; employees are the main stakeholders in fact, that they make charities is something that gives me goosebumps. they saved some portions of their salary for the charity their income and comfort matter the most to me. discussion in this stage, we conducted analyses on two research sources, i.e. empirical articles and interview results. the analysis on the former was conducted to identify spiritual values and to understand how the values are used to criticize pragmatic accounting’s masculinity. the analysis on the later was conducted to show how the values can help rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 504 the informants with their business. we expected that the analyses can prove that islamic values as the antithesis of masculinity can liberate pragmatic accounting from its masculinity. 1. how can islamic values alter masculinity? referring to the selected articles mentioned in table 1, we identify islamic values found in them. after the process completed, the analysis was continued to discussion on how islamic values are used to criticize pragmatic accounting. we started the analysis on the first article. it criticizes the concept of balanced scorecard measurement usually applied in the management accounting study. the author believes that this concept opposes human essence as the welfare disseminators, so the most appropriate measurement concept (as a part of economic activity) is by perceiving that the concept is a form of reverence to god that is materialized into distributive justice. thus, the successfully mapped values are tawhid and justice. using the second article, we attempted to understand perception about islamic principles from different informants. in line with this research, the article uses business as accounting metaphor. the study on the article provided us with information that brotherhood, justice, maslahah, and balance are values closely related with business. therefore, the values will be closely related with studies in accounting science domain. the third article criticizes the basic framework of sharia that should refer to maqasid sharia, i.e. sharia values or objectives. the author thought that the stagnation of islamic financial institutions’ growth in indonesia is caused by theoretical framework uniformity between conventional and islamic financial sector. hence, maqasid sharia, which is full of maslahah and tawhid values, is believed to be the most appropriate concept. maslahah is sensed as anything related to virtues. the analysis on the fourth article was conducted to show that islamic values can reduce frauds, such as those in financial report manipulation. referring to the author’s way of thinking, fraud triangle, consisting of incentive, opportunity, and rationalization, is no longer considered as the main trigger of fraud. instead it is triggered by failures in the internalization of spiritual values into accountants. the author proceeded by stating that tawhid is a key to reduce fraud. using this study on pragmatic accounting masculinity, we believe that accounting serves as the agent of capitalism proliferation. this is proven by the fifth article, which concluded that science can change the way people think. the research found changes in informants’ mindset after attending courses on spirituality. in relation with accounting, the researcher revealed that accounting as science needs to be purified by moving the mindset toward a faith that god is the only truth. still in critical atmosphere, the sixth article tried to formulate a new concept of accountability as a resistance to the conventional concept used in pragmatic accounting. the researcher then proposed prophetic accountability as a concept that considers accountability activities are parts of ibadah. this concept runs counter to pragmatic accounting’s accountability, which sees stakeholders as the center of accountability. rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 505 the standpoint that accounting is inseparable from tawhid is also proposed by the seventh article. the author expressed the fear of pragmatic accountants as a phobia to “other” forms of accounting, as in relating it with religious aspect. the research exemplified that pragmatic accounting is a secular science that opposes islamic core teachings. one of the topics in accounting mostly criticized is profit-loss account. many researchers believe that mistakes are present in accounting profit concepts. as in the eighth article, which used the thought of ibnu khaldun, a muslim philosopher, the author defined earnings as incidentally gained profits so that profits are the compassion of allah swt. opposing the definition, accounting sees earnings as a numerical concept in forms of subtraction of income by costs; all of which are purely present due to human activity. once again, through the research pragmatic accounting claims itself a secular science. accounting studies also cover social activities such as csr particularly in islamic financial institutions (ifi). there are many researchers who start criticizing the pseudo meaning of csr in islamic financial sector. ifi tend to see that csr invalidates their sharia-compliant status. the tendency comes from an assumption that stockholders are the main stakeholder. the ninth article countered it by concluding that the wellbeing of stakeholders (not stockholders) and customers are the focus of ifi’s existence. the tenth article criticizes the rigidness of pragmatic accounting. the author believes that the energy of love can scrape off the dogma and the rational, empirical, and objective traits of pragmatic accounting so that accountants enjoy love and blessing. in the research love refers to human’s obedience to god. in other words, tawhid is believed can reduce pragmatic accounting’s masculinity. the analysis on the compiled articles provided us with information about religious values that are frequently related with critical studies on accounting; they are (1) tawhid, (2) justice, (3) brotherhood, (4) maslahah, (5) balance, (6) gratefulness, (7) sincerity, and (8) blessing. they appear to be the antithesis of masculinity. table 3 concludes the paradox between the two value sources. table 4 the paradox between masculinity and islamic values no. masculine islamic values 1 secular tawhid; gratefulness; blessing 2 egoism justice 3 individualism brotherhood 4 greed maslahah 5 materialism balance 6 aggressiveness sincerity the discovered islamic values are relevant with islamic theology proposed by engineer (1999), who explained that tawhid is the believe of god’s unity and the unity of mankind. no unity without brotherhood. engineer (1997: 7) also asserted that ‘adl (justice) and ahsan (virtue) are main concepts in the quran. in support to the view, nawab haider naqvi, a pakistani economist also stated that the believe to god automatically calls for justice enforcement (engineer, 1999:7). balance and maslahah rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 506 were also promoted by engineer (1999:60) in the context of social balance, which can only be maintained if social wealth is equally used to provide for the society in a normal sense. balance as a value is also mentioned in the quran, surah al-qashash verse 77: “but seek, through that which allah has given you, the home of the hereafter; and [yet], do not forget your share of the world. and do good (to others) as allah has done good to you. and desire not corruption in the land. indeed, allah does not like corrupters.” referring to the verse, islam requires that humans do not orient themselves only to material happiness which are frequently expressed as material ownership maximization. through this verse allah swt reminds us the hereafter is the ultimate goal of life. in addition to identifying religious values, the analysis on the articles is also useful to provide descriptions about how the values are used to criticize pragmatic accounting. the values are used as a tool to criticize pragmatic accounting from various accounting vantage points such as measurement concept, conceptual framework fraud, the role of science in changing mindset, criticism on accountability and profit, secularism of accounting, and the substantial of csr activities. the analysis results strengthen this study in that (1) pragmatic accounting is really full of masculinity, so (2) accounting needs to be purified through (3) islamic religious values. therefore, the values are keys to liberate pragmatic accounting from masculinity. 2. revealing awareness to liberate pragmatic accounting this stage of analysis was conducted to understand how islamic values successfully identified in the previous stage serve as a guideline for the informants in running their business. in conjunction with the results of the analysis in the previous stage, islamic values implied from the interview are tawhid, justice, brotherhood, blessing, honesty, responsibility or amanah, gratefulness, and sincerity. this proves that data validity has been achieved through the application of triangulation between library research and interview. before proceeding with phenomenological analysis, there are reasons why we used accounting as the metaphor of business. table 5 presents the reasons. the metaphorical process will prove how the internalization of islamic values in informants can create a prospering business so that the process of liberating accounting form masculinity can be done by altering masculinity with islamic values. table 5 metaphors between business and accounting no. business (pragmatic) accounting 1 in general business is assimilated with profit-seeking activities oriented to profit maximization 2 is a part of economic activities is a part of economic activities 3 has both internal and external supporting stakeholders has both internal and external supporting stakeholders 4 has many profit-maximizing strategies has many profit-maximizing policies rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 507 business and accounting are similar in their objective. in general business activities are always related with profit attainment, similar to pragmatic accounting that aims at profit maximization to accommodate stockholders’ interest. in business, there are many strategies to win the competition. the most popular one is michael porter’s idea, which consist of cost leadership, differentiation, and focus. similar to accounting, it has numerous policies for profit maximization, as in earnings management, which has various ways to “beautify” companies profit such as taking a bath, income minimization, income maximization, income smoothing, and timing revenue and expense recognition. furthermore, both business and accounting are parts of economic activities related to the use of economic sources. besides having internal stakeholders, i.e. employees and investors, business has external stakeholders, i.e. government, creditors, and customers. while accounting’s internal stakeholders are employees and management, its external stakeholders are government, creditors, and stockholders. those are the reasons that underpins the use of business as the metaphor of accounting. based on the transcendental phenomenology analysis consisting of noema, noesis, intentional analysis, dan eidetic reduction (refer to table 4), it is evident that business built upon islamic values positively affect the social ecosystem. r, s, and d who built their business on the foundation of tawhid and blessing do not make materialistic aspects as their main goals. in addition to having positive effect on employees’ welfare, the spiritual values in fact enhances the performance of their business, as marked by the satisfaction of their customers. this finding confirms the statement of choudhury (1989) that tawhid is able to bring social order to the society (choudhury, 1989). on the contrary, when a business is run by relying on masculinity, the business owner will certainly be obsessed to maximize profit, asset, and other materialistic wealth. pragmatic accounting, which is currently believed as a truth, is really thick with masculinity. the transcendental phenomenology analysis on the interviews with the three informants has revealed that the internalization of islamic values is able to replace the secularistic, egocentric, individualistic, greedy, materialistic, and aggressive masculinity. therefore, one of the efforts of liberating pragmatic accounting is by internalizing islamic values, i.e. tawhid, blessing, justice, brotherhood, maslahah, balance, and sincerity, in the entire parts of accounting as well as by reforming its conceptual framework. for engineer (1999), liberating eastern civilization from westernization is a must. he refers to it as jihad against power arrogance, injustice, oppression on the weak, asset accumulation, and concentration of wealth. the western culture hegemony does not only give birth to various pictures of injustice but also create class society. this contradicts the vision of islam in brotherhood and equality (engineer 1999:76). westernization and developments oriented to a group of elites do not root from local society and culture which cause religio-cultural alienation. in addition to justice issues, engineer (1999:11) also asserted that tawhid is the core of theology. as a liberator theology does not only speak about the unity of god but also mankind unity. rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 508 accounting as the product of western civilization causes social disorders, so liberation becomes an urgency. the existing pragmatic accounting is in a status quo, which provides comfort for elites through maximization of profit, equity, and asset as reflected in financial reports. similarly, mulawarman (2014) stated that profit figure in profit-loss reports is the center of accounting interest for the satisfaction of owners, stockholders, and investors. materialism is also reflected in the balance sheet politics (mulawarman, 2014), in which “liabilities” post is effectively used by owners and management (internal stakeholders) to distribute “profit” to creditors (external stakeholders) to enjoy tax benefit from government. involving creditors is also beneficial for the management since, as external parties, they do not have the right to control the company as investors do. the same also applies for “cash” post as an element of balance sheet and cash flow report. there are tradeoffs between management and owners, stockholders, or investors. mulawarman (2014) further explained that, in management’s interest, cash ownership means control and intervention over the company’s operation. for external parties, cash ownership by the company indicates the potential of earnings distribution for itself in form of dividend. another indicator of masculinity is also reflected in equity in that, according to mulawarman (2014) the values reflected in equity are used more for the wellbeing of owners and investors (shareholders), not the stakeholders. this condition, according to engineer (1999), is the refection of wealth concentration on elite groups. islam forbids such behavior as mentioned in the quran verse number 59 verse 7 that “… it will not be a perpetual distribution among the rich from among you”. a society in which some of its members exploit other members who are weak and oppressed cannot be called as islamic society. the secularity in pragmatic accounting only features rational strength, so materialism is regarded as the best parameter for success and happiness. the material success leads to material sufficiency for capital holders. this is the reflection of egoistic and individualistic masculinity, while greed and aggressiveness are reflected in the politics of financial reports as explained above. aggressiveness toward wealth is highly palpable in one of accounting policies, the earnings management. this “earnings manipulation” technique in fact makes earnings a “simulacrum” 1 that obfuscates the real value of earnings using images. the liberation of pragmatic accounting from masculinity can be done by internalizing islamic values into the corpus of accounting, as indicated by the success of the informants in creating prospering business (as the metaphor of accounting). the conceptual framework of accounting as the foundation of pragmatic accounting is the first basic thing that must be reformed considering that the conceptual structure formulates the objective of financial reporting, its qualitative characteristics, elements, assumptions, principles, and hindrances. at the first level, the objective of financial reporting is to provide information about the activities of an entity that is useful for the decisions of investors, debtors, and creditors (kieso et al, 2011). the tycoons are referred by engineer (1999) as elite groups where wealth is concentrated. masculinity is 1 the term “simulacrum” was used by jean baudrillard to refer images that replace true reality; the image is even separated or detached from the reality (kamayanti, 2016:156). rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 509 very sensible in the financial reporting’s statement of objective. hence, liberation must be carried out by internalizing islamic values of tawhid, justice, brotherhood, and maslahah so that accounting benefits wider societies, not only the industrialists. value reformation must also be done in elements other than conceptual framework, e.g. assumption. one of the assumptions in pragmatic accounting report is monetary unit since financial reporting only covers information measurable in the unit. islam teaches that wealth is not the real source of happiness but teaches balance between life and hereafter happiness. therefore, monetary unit assumption must be replaced with islamic value assumption such as material and immaterial balance as well as blessing. the internalization of islamic values in pragmatic accounting is expected to produce a new accounting that is more altruistic for the attainment of maslahah. conclusion pragmatic accounting is believed to be built on masculinity-filled capitalism. as a foreign product of western culture, accounting tends to be egoistic, rational, materialistic, and objective. these traits eventually lead to religio-cultural alienation in forms of injustice, oppression, and class society. even though accounting has claimed itself a reporting tool that supports stakeholders’ decision making, its financial reporting has deviated from its objective by prioritizing the interest of capital holders, i.e. stockholders and lenders. in its essence, accounting is not a value-free “tool”. accounting as the product of culture has the power of supporting certain concepts. in the context of pragmatic accounting, it supports the development of capitalism as an agent. this makes the reconstruction of pragmatic accounting an urgency. masculinity runs counter to altruistic, intuitive, subjective, and spiritualistic islamic values. this opposition is caused by differences in value evolution hierarchy between the west and islam. as masculinity is derived from people’s or local traditions, islamic values were born from thoughts guided by allah swt, the divine guidance. thus, islamic values must not only be the guideline for human behaviors but also be the epicenter of all science. through the application of historical studies on several empirical researches published in jamal, we found that islamic values used in critical studies on accounting are tawhid, justice, brotherhood, maslahah, balance, and sincerity; all of which oppose masculinity. the values were used by some empirical studies to criticize the masculinity of pragmatic accounting in, for example, measurement concept conceptual framework, fraud, the role of science in shaping mindset, criticism on accountability and profit concepts, secularism of accounting, and criticism on the substances of csr activities. the findings support this research in that pragmatic accounting is indeed full of masculinity, so it needs to be purified using islamic religious values. to understand how the islamic values can become the liberator for pragmatic accounting from its masculinity, this research uses business activity as its metaphor since both have similarities in multiple aspects. phenomenology was then applied to rahmanti & sawarjuno liberating accounting with a religio-cultural approach journal of accounting and investment, 2020 | 510 reveal informants’ awareness concerning the internalization of islamic values in the management of their business. through an analysis consisting of noema, epoch, noesis, intentional analysis, and eidetic reduction, we conclude that the internalization of islamic values has led the informants toward better business management, which is not oriented only on profit but also on social welfare. referring to the fact, the masculinity of pragmatic accounting must be replaced with islamic values so that it can release itself from the trap pf materialism. the process must not stop here. in order to ensure that islamic values are truly inherent in the spirit of accounting, the conceptual 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(2018). pentingkah nilai religiusitas dan budaya organisasi untuk mengurangi kecurangan? jurnal akuntansi multiparadigma, 9(1), 156–172. https://doi.org/10.18202/jamal.2018.04.9010 yamey, b.s. (1949). scientific bookkeeping and the rise of capitalism. the economic history review, 1(2&3), 99-113. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1949.tb00108.x https://doi.org/10.18202/jamal.2018.04.9010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1949.tb00108.x europe and the arab world samir amin and ali el kenz london: zed books, 2005. 166 pages. concise, succinct, and informative, this book skillfully elucidates and assesses the patterns, prospects, and complexities of arab-european relations contextualized in a globalizing (read “americanizing”) world. it also identifies the ambiguities and limitations of social movements and struggles within the arab world, as well as their implications for mutual relationships (p. vi). the authors’ main thesis is that both global capitalism and the american determination to construct a “new” middle east in its own image have undermined the possibilities of domestic reforms and external realignments in most arab countries. american hegemonic influence, together with the growing sway of politicized islam on public life, have added more limitations and constraints to other failures to transform the underlying economic and political structures defining the relations between members on both sides of the mediterranean. the book comprises four chapters: three written by amin (chapters 1, 2, and 4), and one (chapter 3) by el kenz. the first chapter is a critical survey of conditions in the arab world in general and that of the arab “state” in particular. amin designates the latter structure as a manifestation of “mameluke power,” reflecting a complex traditional system that has merged the personalized power of warlords, businessmen, and men of religion (p. 3). the arab state, he argues, has never really embraced or understood modernity. egypt, syria, and the ottoman empire underwent a first phase of ineffective modernization during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. the second phase was associated with the populist nationalism of nasserism, baathism, and the algerian revolution between the 1950s and 1970s. with the end of this phase, a multiparty system gave way to a paradoxical regression into the mameluke type of autocracy (pp. 10-12). whereas europe broke with its past, which allowed for its modern progress, the arabs have not. amin identifies modernity with such a historical break as well as with secularism, the differentiation of religion and politics, the emancipation of women, and the rest of the term’s conventional elements (pp. 2-3). he criticizes currents “claiming to be islamic” (p. 6), particularly those of the wahhabi type, viewing islamic militant groups as manifestations of a revolt against “destructive” capitalism and “deceptive” modernity (p. 6), more interested in sociopolitical issues than in matters of theology. amin dismisses iran as being no different, although he provides no details (p. 8), and 106 the american journal of islamic social sciences 23:2 views non-governmental organizations (ngos) as smokescreens reflecting postmodern capitalist interests (pp. 31-38). he writes that postmodernity offers a “scholarly” version of an ideology of capitulation to such interests, while “good governance” offers its popular counterpart (p. 38). also discussed are the socioeconomic conditions of individual case studies of key arab countries and the palestinian struggle against israeli occupation chapter 2 focuses on international policy issues and the european states’ geopolitical interests. by examining the extent of these interests’ autonomy in light of american hegemony and whether they are compatible with socioeconomic development in the arab world. amin concludes by stressing that final global strategic decisions are made by the united states, while europe simply plays the role of an auxiliary (p. 73). both, however, represent an “imperialist” condition in their own way (p. 71). chapter 3, by el kenz, presents an extensive analysis of the euromediterranean barcelona project, the role of globalization and regionalization in developing asymmetric relationships, and the ensuing disillusionment. the project is seen as nothing more than a “defense” agreement aimed at protecting europe against possible social, political, and cultural “overflowing” from the countries south of the mediterranean (p. 82). el kenz perceives europe as seeking the same objectives as the united states, but in a more “civilized,” less “brutal” way (p. 82). he concludes that the barcelona process is one of large-scale corruption of political leaders, for it ties them down as domestic and regional representatives of neoliberalism’s global goals and policy objectives. (p. 124). chapter 4 concludes the book by asserting that europe is an integral part of the interrelated agenda of liberal globalization and american hegemonism in the service of the interests of dominant capital (p. 136). the agenda’s association with democratic slogans and political rights, while ignoring their socioeconomic counterparts, serves more to undermine the credibility of democracy, which is cynically seen as a tool of manipulation and “double standards” raised against an opponent regime to weaken it while swept under the rug when an ally is involved (p. 137). this study offers much in terms of critical analysis of the dynamics of global capitalism. however, imbued with a clearly visible dose of marxist analysis, its approach sometimes carries with it the inertia and baggage of dogma. this detracts a bit from what otherwise is an insightful piece of work. for example, it does not deal adequately with the pressing issue of how leftists or marxists could perceive a transformed relationship with disparate islamic currents or how both social forces could coalesce to engender change book reviews 107 that would meet the material, spiritual, and cultural needs of arab and muslim societies. the authors’ perhaps justified hostility toward “islamic” movements, which had linked up in an unholy alliance with the united states during the cold war era, render them incapable or unwilling to see the difference that iran makes (p. 8). in their marxist view, an islamic system can only reflect a new “comprador” power (p. 8). yet the problematic should perhaps be approached more in sociological, rather than in metaphysical, terms camouflaged and couched in socioeconomic discourse. otherwise, one may fall into dogmatic fallacies – being so obsessed with social contradictions that forms of cultural struggles are considered superfluous and “imaginary,” thus ignoring their complementary and dialectical connection (p. 9). it does not occur to the authors that iran’s islamic revolution may actually reflect a shift to the left of conventional sunni sociopolitical thought. perhaps it may be a harbinger of a new and different relationship between islamic revolutionary movements and social and liberationist groups, one that is crucial and necessary if neoliberalism is not to end up being the sole global player, with its opponents divided and conquered. change in the arab world requires a united front of all social forces. intellectuals, therefore, should not be the source or instruments of divisions, whether driven by inertia or dogma; rather, they should be the source of visionary leaders. amr g. e. sabet docent, department of political science university of helsinki, finland 108 the american journal of islamic social sciences 23:2 the “right way”: moral capitalism and the emergence of the corporate ethics and compliance officer steven sampson abstract under the influence of u.s. government regulations, enforcement of antibribery laws and embarrassing corruption scandals, major global corporations have realized that unethical conduct may affect not only their reputations but also their profits. this development has given rise to a new position within the traditional management team: the ethics and compliance officer (who differs from the established corporate social responsibility function). based on field research in the compliance industry, this article describes how the moralization of firms has led to the emergence of a new corporate function: the ethics and compliance officer. it further describes how ethics and compliance officers learn their craft and how they cope with their role as moral compass of firms that need to compete in a global market where ethics may be viewed as a cost that inhibits profitability. keywords morality, business ethics, compliance, moral capitalism page 1 of 22 jba special issue 3: 65-86, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 66 introduction: morality and economy during a four-day conference of ethics and compliance professionals, held in atlanta in 2014, i was part of a group of 50 participants who had paid an extra us$250 each for a special half-day field visit to coca-cola headquarters.1 our goal was to learn about the company’s compliance program. we were welcomed by the head of coca-cola’s ethics and compliance department, who reminded us of coke’s brand slogan: “the real thing.” but the compliance chief also revealed that coke has a second slogan: “the right way.” she then explained how coca-cola, certainly the world’s most well-known and long-established brand, sold in 207 countries, has become a prototype for the ethical business regime. without “the right way,” we were told, there could be no “real thing.” the example of selling coke around the world gives us a vivid picture of the apparent fusion of global commerce and ethical practice in a multinational firm. selling soft drinks is now an ethical project. how did this happen? how has ethics become such an integral part of modern global capitalism? this article is about the process of moralizing capitalism and the way in which ethics and compliance officers learn their craft. in particular, i will try to use ethics and compliance as a window to understanding the ethical developments in modern global capitalism and neoliberalism as such. i will do this by first outlining the process of moralization, and then describing how morality enters the everyday world of modern corporations in the form of ethics and compliance organization. finally, i will suggest certain avenues of how anthropologists might understand moral projects within business, viewing ethics not as a ploy or tactic, but as an essential part of today’s global economy. with every new corporate scandal, policymakers and other observers invariably call for more ethics, transparency and moral responsibility in the modern corporation. such appeals certainly arose with enron in 2001, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2014 volkswagen emissions scandal, and the recent leak of the so-called “panama papers.” on first sight, it appears that morality and ethics―doing the right thing, corporate social responsibility, and so on―are something new, an innovation. ostensibly, we would then have to explain how ethics has recently penetrated the operations of the firm. we would be describing a process of “moralization.” such a discussion would be somewhat 1 earlier versions of this paper were presented at the panel on policy language held at the 2014 american anthropological association meetings and at the panel on business ethics at the swedish anthropological association meetings in 2015. i wish to acknowledge the valuable comments by participants at these meetings, as well as by the two anonymous reviewers from the jba. financial support for my research on compliance was provided by a grant from the swedish research council (vetenskapsråd). sampson / the “right way” 67 misleading, however. in fact, discussions of the market economy’s moral character and the influence of moral and ethical considerations in market practice have a long history (hirschman 1982; fourcade and healy 2007). one might instead remark on the increasing salience of moral and ethical considerations as an integral part of business practices. social anthropology offers an alternative approach to the issue of whether moral and ethical considerations are a recent addition to business life. anthropologists begin with the premise that all economic systems have moral components: there are socially approved and disapproved ways of producing, distributing and consuming resources, and in every society, there are certain goods, services or exchanges that ought not, indeed must never, be commodified (gifts and parental care for example). anthropologists studying the norms and limits of exchange in primitive or peasant societies have relied on the concept of “moral economy.” breaching this moral economy, as we learn from the works of james scott (1976, 1985), e.p. thompson (1971), karl polanyi (1956), marshall sahlins (1972), and many others, can lead to sanctions, conflict, or even social revolt. all economies are thus moral economies in so far as they rely on moral precepts and norms for their functioning (this does not rule out calling them “political economies” as well). norms of reciprocity (gouldner 1960; mauss 1967) are the most well-known of these moral precepts. but norms of “fair exchange,” “accountability,” “trust,” or “efficiency” can operate as well. such norms certainly exist in the modern redistributive welfare state, where citizens contribute to the collective in the form of taxes so that certain vulnerable groups―as long as they are legally or morally entitled―can obtain essential services. breaches of this modern moral economy, in the form of tax evasion, bribery, or welfare benefits fraud, are more than just legal violations; they carry moral weight. now the term “moral economy” means very little unless we can specify what an immoral or amoral economy might look like. maybe an economist, using a theoretical model of exchange and cost/benefit, could construct such a model. perhaps this model might be based solely on mutual advantage or contract. but, as an anthropologist, i cannot think of any economic transaction that would be devoid of moral precepts, moral expectations, admonitions against moral breach of standards and rules, notions of fair play, efficiency or even “honor among thieves.” research on fiddles and cheats at work in the uk, or the culture of thieves in russia, describes the moral elements within these shadow economies. there is honor, moral honor, even among thieves and swindlers. contracts may be legal documents, but they are also moral ones, which is why they must be signed, or at least affirmed with the proverbial handshake. while debate over capitalism’s moral dimensions goes back several centuries (hirschman 1982), some discussions have assumed that capitalist economies, with their ceaseless accumulation and dispossession journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 68 (harvey 2004), are somehow devoid of morality. today’s anti-capitalist activists often talk as if they want to restore a moral order that capitalism has destroyed, invoking images of community, equality and solidarity that ostensibly existed in the recent past. this kind of rhetoric has existed for over two centuries, as hirschman pointed out (see also fourcade and healy 2007).the question here is not whether capitalism as a system should be norm-based, that is, more than just the sum of contracts and exchanges. rather, it is about what kind of norms should operate. for proponents of the market economy, the morality of the capitalist firm should be restricted to its moral obligations to shareholders; hence, milton friedman’s famous dictum (1970) that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profit.” the idea that capitalism is without morality, and that the penetration of ethics is somehow new, is specious. readers of this journal who sit for just a few minutes in any group of modern capitalists, be it a board meeting, a sales conference, or in a bar after work, will quickly identify a variety of moral discourses, especially centered on the proper way to do business. the morally “proper” way, as our business colleagues would have it, may not be the legal way, of course, but there is certainly a moral discourse involved. the ideology of business ethics assumes some kind of overlap between legal norms and a moral code operating within the firm and its employees. this overlap would be embodied in a company code of conduct, for example. once in a while, however, the moral code and the legal code clash. and we obtain the stories of how certain firms and/or managers, in their own moral enclave, swindled, cheated or bribed. this clash between the ideal and the actual, between the informal norms and formal structure, between the moral and legal―this is the stuff of anthropology. but from a business ethics perspective, it poses a different sort of problem. there is apparently, a right and wrong way to be a capitalist. in ideal terms, the right way to be a capitalist involves, firstly, following established laws and regulations. but it also includes following certain accepted moral and ethical codes (the right culture) and making ethically justifiable or accountable decisions. this discourse of the right and wrong way to do business is not new. it has existed long before the founding of the discipline of business ethics, which itself is now decades old. as andrew stark notes in an article from 1993, “there are more than 25 textbooks in the field and 3 academic journals dedicated to the topic. at least 16 business ethics research centers are now in operation” (quoted in hoffman et al. 2014: 669), and one major textbook on business ethics is now in its fifth edition (ibid.) with the publicity of various corporate scandals of the 21st century, where the volkswagen emissions scandal in 2015 and the panama papers leak are but the most recent additions, the urgency of ethics within sampson / the “right way” 69 businesses seems to have become more pressing. mark schwartz, a leading business ethics scholar and co-editor of a major textbook (hoffman et al. 2014: 676) notes that “the range of illegal and unethical activity taking place is extensive and includes corruption, bribery, receiving and giving gifts and entertainment, kickbacks, extortion, nepotism, favoritism, money laundering, improper use of insider information, use of intermediaries, conflicts of interest, fraud, aggressive accounting, discrimination, sexual harassment, workplace safety, consumer product safety or environmental pollution’ (schwartz 2013).2 what we might call an “ethical turn” in modern business is not simply a result of scandal or pressures for increased transparency. state authorities are also taking their tasks more seriously. hence, modern business enterprises now risk prosecution by the u.s. or uk governments for corruption or tax evasion, and these legal risks are aggravated by reputation nightmares that can be magnified by social media in a matter of hours. corporations have thus painfully recognized that they need to acknowledge both moral and legal guidelines. they need to respect laws simply in order not to risk prosecution. but they also need to be transparent and accountable to preserve their public image. they need internal codes and standards in order to eliminate temptations to unfair competition and to protect fragile corporate reputations from bad publicity and lawsuits. moreover, corporations need employees who understand these laws, guidelines, codes and standards so that they can act appropriately. managers and employees need to learn that failing to respect these laws, guidelines, codes and standards may have immense consequences. acting immorally may mean gigantic monetary penalties for the company, or even jail time for managers or executives. capitalism, still ruthless and cutthroat as it is, is now an openly moral, or perhaps “moralized,” economy. there are good and bad ways to do business; there is fair and unfair competition; there are level and uneven “playing fields.” and, at the state level, there is an increasing frequency of “enforcement actions” by the u.s. department of justice or the uk serious fraud office. and thanks to government surveillance, the whistleblower or the wikileak, the bad guys can occasionally get caught and punished. they have realized a need for a special kind of person who can impart to others “the right way” to do business. the intensification of global trade and financialization over the past two decades has been one of the factors behind this ethical turn. the change is centered on the state’s more active pursuit of illegal corporate behavior and corruption, especially as corporations pursue global profits and boardrooms become dominated by financial institutions rather than by individual founder-owners. these governmental campaigns for more 2 schwartz and other business ethics scholars cite a host of other ethical issues connected with life in organizations, which are not necessarily a concern to ethics and compliance officers: for example, moving production overseas, or pursuing affirmative action policies. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 70 ethics in business are pushed by non-state actors with moral or transparency agendas, such as environmental ngos, financial transparency ngos, or the un global compact for csr. more important, however, is the fact that firms themselves now realize the penalties that can be incurred when accused of unethical behavior―penalties that carry with them not just legal sanctions but losses due to “reputation risk.” in short, firms that act unethically can not only face prosecution and fines. they can see their stock value decline by billions of dollars (volkswagen); they can go bankrupt from astronomical fines and legal costs; and their ceos can go to prison (arthur anderson, enron, and others). this threat from both prosecution and reputation has resulted in the emergence of a particular specialist within the firm―the specialist in charge of respecting the gamut of legal, ethical and moral rules and regulations set by others and by the management; a specialist who ensures proper conduct, integrity, and whose job it is to enhance the firm’s moral and ethical fiber, both within the organization and in its relations with other firms and with society. the duties of this specialist go beyond the legal office (the general counsel) that most firms have. it is more than just legal advice to the board of the kind: ‘will we go to jail if we do this?’ “do the right thing” i am instead talking about a relatively new kind of function, known as the “ethics officer,” “ethics and compliance officer,” or “chief ethics and compliance officer” (abbreviated eco, cco, or ceco, with the field often called e&c). the job of the eco, unlike the general counsel, is not simply to avoid prosecution or keep executives, managers, or sales staff out of jail. it is to encourage employees to do the right thing. the e&c staff should not be confused with the csr team, which relates to the firm’s link with society; nor do they necessarily handle issues of corporate citizenship, even though these specialists may be found in the same department. the ethics officer certainly evaluates risk, as does the financial officer, but for the e&c officer it is “reputation risk” rather than financial risk which is at stake, and particularly, the risks to reputation caused by breaches of integrity by employees, sub-units or contractors. the eco is thus considered to articulate the moral core of the company, its mission, or “values.” if capitalism is now acknowledging or even promoting its morality, it is the ethics and compliance officer who is at the forefront of this campaign. for the researcher, the compliance officer can thus be seen as a window towards understanding contemporary capitalist morality. in a world of demands for accountability following revelations of scandal, where firms are being accused of (or admit to) swindling and bribing for hundreds of millions of dollars, of covering up illegal or unethical transactions, of simple bad conduct, the firms need to have a sub-unit that can pursue or assure some sampson / the “right way” 71 level of integrity, the “right way.” they need a unit that establishes, promotes, and then monitors the relevant laws, guidelines, codes and standards that everyone must adhere to, even third-party suppliers. this activity is called the “compliance function,” and it is headed by a compliance officer. let us therefore look more closely at the ethics and compliance officer. e&c officers have now taken their positions inside the firm’s infrastructure, alongside human resources, the legal office (general counsel), and the internal audit office. the formerly tripartite executive known as the c-suite (chief executive, financial, and operation officers) is now augmented by the chief compliance officer. the compliance function in a firm is often subsumed under what are called the “soft areas” of business operations, known as governance, risk, and compliance (grc). grc contains functions such as csr, diversity management, and risk assessment, including reputational risk, as well as ethics and compliance issues. the term “compliance” takes on different connotations in various languages, sometimes remaining in english (in denmark and germany), but on other occasions translated as the french conformité, romanian conformitatea, or swedish efterlevnad (lit. live-after/according). as a profession and field of discourse, ethics and compliance have certainly become popular. one can find a compliancedictionary.com on line; the wall street journal now has a weekly “risk and compliance” blog. and with the hundreds of ethics and compliance jobs advertised on-line, we are left with a single conclusion: compliance has arrived.3 the world of compliance over the past two years, largely through attending training sessions, conferences, and unstructured interviews with compliance officers, i have tried to learn what it is like to be an ethics and compliance officer in the post-enron era.4 like any ethnographer entering a new “tribe,” my initial task was to try and decipher the language of compliance by listening and conversing with trainers, presenters at conferences, leaders of compliance associations, and especially vendors selling compliance “tools” (for instance,. software/consulting). i have therefore attended compliance conferences and instructional seminars of the ethics and compliance officers association and the society for corporate 3 linkedin search criteria yield the following under “ethics and compliance”: 1172 positions open, “ethics and compliance” + specialist: 32515 positions; “chief compliance officer”: 370 positions. (oct. 19, 2015). monster.com had 915 jobs listed under “ethics and compliance.” 4 enron, by the way, had what at the time was a highly praised code of conduct, which was later available for sale on ebay, in mint condition, for us$15; former enron officers now, reborn as ethical guardians, often speak at compliance and fraud examiner conferences. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 72 compliance and ethics. i have endured endless power-point checklists of ethical do’s and don’ts by lawyers, accountants, fraud investigators, trainers, and company compliance officers. i have been to training courses and seminars, generally costing as much as us$1200 per day, and obtained limited access to magazines with subscription rates of us$1000 a year. i also read websites and magazines such as compliance insider, compliance week and compliance professional, textbooks such as compliance 101, and training brochures such as “dealing with your grc demons,” and “fighting compliance fatigue.” i have participated in compliance simulation games and perused brochures and software proffered me by compliance vendors and consultants.5 and to participate, i also wrote articles in compliance publications/websites about how we anthropologists view the concept of culture (sampson 2014a, 2014b). my research was piqued by the fact that one of the most common expressions used in the field is that of “the culture of compliance.” for compliance professionals, this “culture” combines values, attitudes and practices. “building a culture of compliance” requires engaging employees with the company values and creating a climate of trust; hence the mantra, launched by the ceo of ford motor company: “trust is the new black”. what encompasses this domain of ethics and compliance? as most compliance specialists underscore, it has a dual character. it consists, first, of respecting externally (external to the company) imposed laws, regulations and standards (“what we have to do to keep us out of jail”). typically, these compliance obligations have to do with financial reporting to regulatory authorities, obeying anti-bribery laws, showing that the firm has a compliance policy, and conforming to industry standards. this legal/regulatory framework―whether national, eu, or industry-based―involves penalties for not complying. compliance in this sense carries no connotation that the firm, team, or manager agrees or supports the laws or rules to which he or she is complying. at the firm level, compliance is expressed through training and respecting the company codes of conduct, in areas such as conflict of interest, “facilitation payments,” or hospitality. beyond mere compliance, however (“doing things right”), e&c also has a further, normative aspect of ethics, to “do the right thing.” ethics and compliance officers, therefore, are supposed to pursue an ethical mission: they are the ethical watchdogs of their companies, ensuring that employees, managers, and even the board follow the company’s code of conduct, and that potential abuse is detected before the company is subject to investigation or its offices raided by the fbi (or, as one 5 for one such game, called the global business ethics challenge, see http://impactonintegrity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ioi-gbec-2015english.pdf. tools and training are supplied by large accounting firms such as pwc and kpmg, and by specialist ethics and compliance firms such as red flag or lrn. a large compliance gathering would have about 100 such vendor booths. http://impactonintegrity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ioi-gbec-2015-english.pdf http://impactonintegrity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ioi-gbec-2015-english.pdf sampson / the “right way” 73 company counsel described it, “before being visited by people carrying guns and with initials on the back of their windbreakers”). a breach of ethical standards that becomes public knowledge (or is leaked by a disgruntled, whistle-blowing employee) brings with it reputation damage. customers may now assess the moral quality or image of people with whom they do business. in such cases, clients, customers, or partners may decide to take their business elsewhere. well-known examples of compliance breaches here are exposés of dangerous working conditions in bangladesh textile factories or the vw misrepresentation of its diesel emissions. in this light, ethics and compliance is therefore intimately involved with risk assessment, and the principal risk here is reputational risk. among compliance officers, in ethics training and at meetings of compliance professionals, the prevailing understanding of unethical behavior is that it is largely about “good people doing bad things.” they do bad because they did not know it was bad. in this self-understanding, the sociopaths have largely been weeded out by the human resources department, before being hired or along the way. in this understanding, the firm has the occasional bad apple, but bad apples are not the source of ethical breaches. the explanation for breaches is a culture of noncompliance, a culture whereby top management has not communicated its integrity standards strongly enough: top management has not had the proper “tone at the top.” or perhaps employees are afraid to report ethical abuse because there is no encouragement from management or no safe, anonymous whistleblower channel. from a compliance perspective, the “good people doing bad things” discourse means that explanations for occurrence of bribery, corruption, slush funds, personal trips, speed payments, conflicts of interest, double bookkeeping, or embezzlement can be attributed to poor communication from the top, inadequate incentives to avoid or report bad behavior, or to simple temptation. these are the notorious grey zones. it is these grey zones that can be ironed out if the firm has a “robust ethics and compliance program” (to use the common phrase) with clear messages and continuing training. in this optic, people in the modern firm are basically competent and good, employees are ethical, and ethics and compliance officers the most ethical, the very conscience of the company. this is perhaps why, at a recent gathering of e&c officers, all 1,500 of us stood up for a minute and simply applauded ourselves for pursuing this struggle to do good. it is why a leader of one compliance organization insisted to me that ethics and compliance officers “lose sleep at night”―not because they are ambitious for profits, but about doing the right thing. e&c officers are the embodiment of this new ethical turn in modern business. they are apparently burdened by their moral mission. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 74 origins of ethics and compliance regimes how did all this moralization of capitalism get started? in the u.s. and europe, it appears that the impetus for the moral company comes from two well-grounded fears: fear of government prosecution and/or fear of loss of reputation in a world where social media are so powerful. in the united states, the rise of the compliance industry is generally attributed to the u.s. government’s 1991 “federal sentencing commission guidelines,” and specifically chapter 8, which covers sentencing for corporate/organizational crimes, and which were revised in 2004 as a result of the sarbanes-oxley act.6 the federal sentencing guidelines specify that an organization or company convicted of violating federal criminal or financial statutes can receive a reduced penalty if it demonstrates that it had a “robust compliance program.” the sentencing guidelines thus mandated that firms be ethical, and specifically, that they establish “an organizational culture that encourages ethical conduct”. according to the guidelines (section 8b2.1), such a robust compliance program must have seven basic elements: (1) the organization shall establish standards and procedures to prevent and detect criminal conduct. (2) the organization's governing authority shall be knowledgeable about the content and operation of the compliance and ethics program and shall exercise reasonable oversight with respect to the implementation and effectiveness of the compliance and ethics program (i.e. board responsibility). (3) avoid using any individual whom the organization knew, or should have known, has engaged in illegal activities or other conduct inconsistent with an effective compliance and ethics program. (4) communication and training of employees in the compliance and ethics program. (5) monitoring and auditing to ensure the compliance program is followed, including whistleblower arrangements. (6) incentives to act in a compliant manner, with sanctions and appropriate disciplinary measures for engaging in criminal conduct and for failing to take reasonable steps to prevent or detect criminal conduct. (7) after criminal conduct has been detected, the organization shall take reasonable steps to respond appropriately to the criminal conduct and to prevent further similar criminal conduct. under u.s. federal law, a company caught, for example, bribing a foreign 6 see chapter eight at http://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelinesmanual/2015/glmfull.pdf. for an overview, see findler and warnecke (2008). http://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manual/2015/glmfull.pdf http://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manual/2015/glmfull.pdf sampson / the “right way” 75 official to obtain a contract would receive a certain number of points on the government's “culpability index.” however, its sentence would be reduced if could show that it had set up a viable ethics and compliance program; a company flouting or not having such a program would receive more culpability points and risk additional financial penalties, fines, or even imprisonment for the guilty ceo (see sections 8c24(d) and 8c25(b)). using the compliance program as a lever, the federal government, the securities and exchange commission, and the u.s. department of justice are now empowered to negotiated criminal sentencing agreements. these deferred prosecution agreements and nonprosecution agreements can be used with companies suspected of bribing, tax evading, making illegal contributions, slush funds, price fixing, and other crimes. under such arrangements, a fine of several millions of dollars can be reduced to a few thousand dollars. in addition to this “carrot,” there is also a “stick”: a strengthened government whistleblower program grants generous rewards to employees who reveal crime in their companies, up to 30 per cent of the total amount of the violation. under this program, the u.s. government has paid out millions of dollars to individual whistleblowers, including a us$30 million award (in september 2014) and us$10 million in april 2016.7 in 2014, the government whistleblower program received 3,600 such whistleblower tips, rising to nearly 4,000 in 2015.8 since august 2011, 22 whistleblowers have received us$54 million in rewards.9 the federal sentencing guidelines, now enhanced with new laws on financial reporting, ceo personal responsibility, and whistleblowing reward incentives (the sarbanes-oxley and dodd-frank acts) along with enhanced enforcement of the foreign corrupt practices act―and now in the uk, the uk anti-bribery act―have led to a new emphasis on ethics and compliance within corporate management in both the u.s. and abroad. according to most compliance experts, the initial mood was one of “compliance” rather than “ethics.” that is, it was based on formally complying with the laws and regulations in order to avoid prosecution. compliance was based more on a fear of doing things wrong rather than on a moral awakening to do things right. companies began to realize that they needed to ensure that their employees acted ethically, that they would follow rules, regulations and codes of conduct, that they would report violations of these through internal hotlines, and that managers 7 sec announces largest-ever whistleblower award, sept. 22, 2014. https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/detail/pressrelease/137054301129 0 cftc announces whistleblower award of more than $10 million, april 4, 2016. http://www.cftc.gov/pressroom/pressreleases/pr7351-16 . 8 see https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/reportspubs/annual-reports/owbannual-report-2015.pdf 9 ibid. https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/detail/pressrelease/1370543011290 https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/detail/pressrelease/1370543011290 http://www.cftc.gov/pressroom/pressreleases/pr7351-16 https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/reportspubs/annual-reports/owb-annual-report-2015.pdf https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/reportspubs/annual-reports/owb-annual-report-2015.pdf journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 76 would not retaliate against them. as compliance departments were established, the ethical dimension began to make its impact. today, most major companies now have e&c departments who conduct risk assessments, formulate codes of conduct, ensure that these codes are actually read and respected by employees, and who evaluate potential ethical dilemmas that might face their company. siemens has over 600 compliance officers, coca cola 500, united technologies 500, johnson and johnson 240. the role of siemens is prominent here, precisely because the company was found guilty of corruption under the foreign corrupt practices act, with a fine of us$800 million (including disgorgement of profits).10 today, siemens’ compliance program―with its slogan of “prevent, detect, respond” on its web site―is considered a model to be followed. according to the siemens website, it received 653 compliance complaints or queries in 2014, of which 195 resulted in disciplinary action.11 who are these compliance officers? of those i have interviewed at conferences and heard speak at workshops, both instructors and professionals seeking certification, the vast majority are lawyers who have worked within the firm. others are audit officers, fraud investigators, and hr professionals. unlike law, finance, management or accounting, ethics and compliance is a new field, which is not (yet) a formalized field of study at most business schools so that, at best, the new compliance officers has had a course in business ethics at college. ethics and compliance is thus learned on the job, or through in-house training, or short courses and conference seminars. a compliance officer must acquire a complex package of skills: knowledge of laws, regulations and codes of conduct; awareness of risky business practices in the branch of business they are in (pharmaceuticals, for example, would have different risks from defense contracting, retail sales, or financial services). in addition, they need to know how to communicate ethics to the rest of the employees without being patronizing or intimidating. they need to make sure that their employees know the compliance framework, and that they themselves are acting in an ethical manner. however, more than these organizational skills, ethics officers are supposed to have certain personal qualities. most of them are younger women (below 45) trained in law, and in this new field they must learn to assert their ethical authority over older men, especially engineers, financial officers, and those in the sales force. this more 10 siemens ag and three subsidiaries plead guilty to foreign corrupt practices act violations and agree to pay $450 million in combined criminal fines (https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2008/december/08-crm-1105html); siemens to pay $1.34 billion in fines (new york times, dec. 15, 2008). the siemens penalties also include repayment of illicit profits (disgorgement), such that the most cited penalty amount for the siemens case is 800 million dollars. 11 see http://www.siemens.com/about/sustainability/en/coretopics/compliance/management-facts/ https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2008/december/08-crm-1105-html https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2008/december/08-crm-1105-html http://www.siemens.com/about/sustainability/en/core-topics/compliance/management-facts/ http://www.siemens.com/about/sustainability/en/core-topics/compliance/management-facts/ sampson / the “right way” 77 established group may find ethics and compliance an unnecessary burden, a cost of doing business “out there,” “in the real world.” the job of the compliance officer is to implant a culture of ethics in the organization. hence, they must possess, and reflect, a high degree of integrity. they must act by example. expansion and professionalization beginning with financial services and the rest of the private sector, public organizations in fields such as health, education, city administration and utilities have developed their own ethics and compliance programs. the impetus here is not so much ensuring profitability, or avoiding financial or reputation risk, but to improve the workplace climate, prevent losing federal grants or contract,s and prevent litigation by disgruntled employees, clients, patients, or other user groups who might feel mistreated or abused. the health care compliance association (hcca), bringing together both public and private healthcare providers, was established in 1996, and now has over 3000 members. many hcca formed the core of what would become the society for corporate compliance and ethics, now with 15,000 members.12 with fear of prosecution and of reputation risk, the compliance field has expanded to pursue professionalization, beginning and advanced training, compliance officer certification, and other indices of credentialization typical of any new profession. there are now competing compliance officer associations in the united states and abroad with thousands of members. there are frequent ethics training courses, and an entire certification system with programs enabling one to become a certified e&c officer at beginning, advanced, sectoral, and international levels. there are e&c software companies (one of which, appropriately, is called “red flag”) selling a diverse range of services: due diligence investigations to vet third party contractors, training programs for antibribery law, employee monitoring systems to ensure that employees have actually read the company code of conduct and not just clicked through it, and so on. there is now an iso standard for compliance programs, 196002014, as well as an anti-bribery iso, no. 37001 currently in its final approval stages.13 a few universities and business schools now offer a master’s degree in ethics and compliance, while compliance professionals can read various blogs and magazines, such as compliance insider or compliance week, or the foreign corrupt practice act blog (fcpablog.com) to learn about the newest compliance enforcement actions. compliance 12 see http://www.hcca-info.org. for another example, see the state of illinois guide to health care compliance at http://www.icahn.org/files/healthtech_management_services/field_guide_to_ healthcare_compliance_manual_final_01062016.pdf 13 see https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:19600:ed-1:v1:en and http://www.iso.org/iso/iso37001 http://www.hcca-info.org/ http://www.icahn.org/files/healthtech_management_services/field_guide_to_healthcare_compliance_manual_final_01062016.pdf http://www.icahn.org/files/healthtech_management_services/field_guide_to_healthcare_compliance_manual_final_01062016.pdf https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:19600:ed-1:v1:en http://www.iso.org/iso/iso37001 journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 78 association meetings that i have attended have had from 500 to 1,300 attendees with dozens of presentations and workshops. smaller training courses lasting four or five days and costing about us$1,500 have had 3060 participants. at each of these meetings, participants can earn credits or points toward e&c certification which can be placed on a résumé. the e&c field is now so specialized that there are separate ethics and compliance meetings for those working in higher education, energy/utilities, and health care. compliance is now what we anthropologists might call an “assemblage” (ong and collier 2005 ), although i would rather term it a “package” of norms and practices―a package that travels (sampson 2010, 2015). the traveling is facilitated by compliance officer organizations that market their ethical project as good for business, and that promote the need for skills and competencies in ethics and compliance and, therefore, a certification regime. the package is also promoted by the vendors, who market ethics and compliance tools as a risk-reduction solution in an environment where large multinational companies need to control the practices of all their employees, and where noncompliance can be extremely costly. governments are also promoting ethics and compliance, and highlighting the essential roles and responsibilities of the compliance officer. to this end, the u.s. department of justice offers an anticorruption resource guide for firms, along with its official reports on corruption prosecutions and publicizing whistleblowing stories and statistics.14 the oecd, world bank debarment program, and the uk serious fraud office, which enforces the comprehensive uk bribery act, are all starting similar compliance programs encouraging firms to come forward and self-disclose. firms themselves are doing their utmost to avoid, preempt, or reduce federal fines for financial irregularities. compliance is hot. on the other hand, compliance officers also note that there are still those who view ethics and compliance as an obstacle to doing business. the e&c industry’s task is to convince skeptical businesses, especially small firms, that investment in ethics is good business. one survey, for example, concluded that firms with ethics programs made sixteen per cent more profits over a ten-year period than firms without them (ethics resource center 2014). some of the skepticism comes from within the ranks of e&c professionals, who explain that the image of ethics as “just talk” has limited its impact. it is only when ethics is applied, they say, using tools and skills inside an organization, and applied by the competent ethics and compliance officer, that ethical precepts become genuine compliance. the role of ethics and compliance professional 14 a resource guide to the u.s. foreign corrupt practices act (https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/fcpa/fcpa-resource-guide.pdf) https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/fcpa/fcpa-resource-guide.pdf sampson / the “right way” 79 associations, then, is to promote their members as business professionals, rather than as ethicists wagging their fingers and telling sales teams or engineers that “you are not allowed to do that.” the task of compliance officers is to avoid this kind of stigma, even while they themselves insist that they must have a higher ethical sensibility. at one compliance panel that i attended, for example, a compliance officer working for a travel and tourist firm explained that she herself could never receive a free trip. she would feel compromised. her fellow travel agents, of course, took several such trips a year as part of their work, but as a compliance officer such perks would be off limits. as a relatively new profession within the business community, with compliance sometimes being imposed on companies following a plea bargain, e&c officers must also be able to sell their financial value to management. compliance officers must ensure that they can enter the csuite, that the board takes them and their tasks seriously, in a situation where the board only wants them to “put out fires.” this trend, sometimes called “compliance 2.0,” is much discussed in the compliance training literature (greenberg 2014). hence, one of the major challenges discussed by e&c organizations, trainers, and professionals is to show others that e&c is not simply mere ethics―that is, doing the right thing―but that it is good business. this view is usually promoted with examples of “the costs of noncompliance”: the spectacular fines or jail terms imposed by the government on wayward companies, or the hundreds of millions spent in penalties and legal costs to fight misconduct accusations in federal courts.15 inside the firm, however, compliance officers are often without sufficient resources to ensure that their programs will actually work. the monitoring, record keeping, training, and updating of employees on the latest laws, standards, codes, or regulations―the policies and procedures―can be costly in employee time and operating expenses. several codes of conduct or policies may be operative at the same time. changes in a single area, such as “gifts and hospitality,” need to be transmitted, and translated down to front line employees in all the branches of a firm that may have thousands of employees and hundreds of subcontractors. in a complex, global business climate, compliance officers complain about being unable to keep up with the daily changes in laws, regulations, standards and codes, much less reflect on the ethical and compliance risks they entail. when requesting additional resources―for example, new data processing or document management systems―they need to reaffirm 15 avon corporation, for example, was assessed us$135 million for bribes in china to obtain licenses. (see http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/avon-resolveslong-standing-fcpa-scrutiny-byagreeing-to-135-million-settlement.) yet avon did not even make it to the “top ten list” of anti-bribery enforcement, with siemens at us$800 million; see the “fcpa professor” blog at http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/fcpa-101#q17 http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/avon-resolves-long-standing-fcpa-scrutiny-byagreeing-to-135-million-settlement http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/avon-resolves-long-standing-fcpa-scrutiny-byagreeing-to-135-million-settlement http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/fcpa-101#q17 journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 80 their position internally, to show that ethics and compliance also produces a return on investment similar to that added by the legal office, it, or hr. the moral compass the ethics and compliance officer is not simply another part of the firm’s management team. more than other employees, and resembling accountants, the e&c officer has an obligation to adhere to public values of trust and honesty. like accountants, they are supposed to represent the highest ideals of their profession, respect public values of accountability and trust vis-à-vis the authorities, while at the same time being loyal to the company. greenberg (2014) thus speaks of the “privatisation of compliance,” in so far as compliance officers become tools of government anti-bribery enforcement. the ethics and compliance officer now has a responsibility to government as well. ethics and compliance is now devolved from the government to the ethics and compliance department and the e&c officer. the chief compliance officer is supposed to have independence within the firm. however, there are pressures and costs. the cco herself may be vulnerable to government investigation and may be compelled to reveal misconduct. the cco does not have the kind of attorney-client privilege that the general counsel has with the board. the career and legal risks here are obvious. when such conflicts of interest occur, a company accused of financial crimes can elect not just to fire their e&c officer for incompetence, but can even take her to court. e&c officers even have a special job insurance to protect them against litigation, as they do not qualify for the standard director’s and officer’s liability insurance (known as d&o). to add to these pressures, the government can also impose fines if they view a cco as having acted in an illegal manner for not revealing company misconduct to sec investigators.16 pressures indeed. “culture of compliance” and “tone at the top” with these pressures, how do e&c officers demonstrate their moral compass? how do they convert cold-blooded conformity to laws, regulations, rules and standards―compliance―into “doing the right thing”? one way is by speaking the right way. two major tropes in the compliance industry, tropes which occur repeatedly, are “culture of compliance” and “tone at the top.” i have chosen these the two phrases because, in hours and hours of compliance meetings and pages and pages of articles, they were uttered most frequently and in various contexts. 16 the u.s. securities and exchange commission imposed a $25,000 fine on a compliance officer for poor implementation of compliance, i.e., failing to prevent embezzlement by a firm’s president; see killingsworth (2015). sampson / the “right way” 81 search for these two terms on google, and we obtain up to 400,000 hits for each of them. the culture concept is a pervasive part of organizational and management thinking. in everyday management consulting, and at meetings of those who teach or are learning about the compliance profession, culture is viewed as a set of values, attitudes and practices. as one compliance officer insisted, “we are in the behavior business.” from a compliance perspective, cultures can therefore be “strong” or “weak,” “proper” or “improper.” instituting an ethics and compliance program, therefore, is viewed as an intervention, a culture change. a statement about culture also involves invoking a company’s “vision” with catchwords such as “excellence,” “quality,” or “communication.” in one seminar that i attended, the compliance trainer asked our group: “how many of you in this room have integrity as a value?” with culture being so important, the compliance officer’s task is to promulgate these key values to the employees and engage them in the vision, a process often referred to as “onboarding.” ethics and compliance is thus a kind of vehicle that one enters, sometimes reluctantly. compliance professionals are well aware that organizations based on rules and regulations alone do not create an engaged work force. it is the organizational culture―“the way we really do things around here,” to use a catch phrase―that governs how employees act in their everyday practice. this culture as practice trickles down from middle and senior management in the form of behaviors to be imitated or as informal instructions as to how (or how not) to really get things done. the ethics and compliance officer interferes in this trickling down process by promoting codes of conduct and clarifying the grey zones.. in organizations, the culture is grounded in the way employees are rewarded or punished by superiors when they meet or breach key values. thus, compliance officers are aware that simply diffusing the code of conduct will not in itself create the desired culture. something more is needed: employee engagement. compliance officers thus talk of creating what they call “a strong culture of compliance.” one of the most common expressions was “making the culture part of your company’s dna”―certainly a strange mix of nature and nurture. embedding these values in employees of a global company is certainly a challenge. there are differences of language, skill, and attitudes among those working for global firms. engagement and loyalties vary among the dedicated managerial staff, the front-line sales force, the temporary and part-timers, and the outside contractors. compliance officers speak of how difficult it is to reach those who are in the field, typically the sales force which is paid on commission, and which finds itself encouraged or even forced to cut corners (by giving bribes, and so on) in order to make sales or import goods. “how do you walk away from a sale?,” they lament. “how can you let your imported goods sit there in journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 82 customs?” issues like these arise continually between compliance officers in the home office and the field staff “out there” in the world. ethical commitment is impossible without management commitment, the proverbial “tone at the top.” lack of tone at the top was the cause of enron’s demise: it had an award-winning code of conduct and an exceptionally competent board, but there was no management commitment to ethics. the tone at the top mantra is another way of saying that top management must show a genuine commitment to ethics and compliance in order for employees to engage with the company’s ethical code. besides tone at the top, firms also need a “message in the middle,” or “tone in the middle,” such that middle managers and field staff will be involved. in this optic, ethics and compliance is not just the e&c officer’s responsibility alone. it is everyone’s responsibility, beginning with senior management. one of the challenges for the e&c officer is thus to prevent an “e&c silo” in the organization. as one compliance officer explained: “you have to think of yourself as a citizen of your organization.” a company legal officer intoned: “i think we have a doctor phil moment here. it’s all about relationships.” how do compliance officers actually learn to implement an ethical culture in their organizations? how do they make sure that there is a tone at the top? one way is by cautionary tales: at training sessions, some lasting a few hours, others for as long as five days, we hear what happened to firm a when its hospitality payments got out of control, to firm b when its chief financial officer was arrested for breach of the foreign corrupt practices act, when firm c entered the european market and ran afoul of eu privacy laws, or when a whistleblower revealed to the sec that his company d was fudging its books. besides cautionary tales about the costs of noncompliance, these training sessions consist of sets of checklists. there are lists of what to remember, what to do, how to do it, what to look out for, how to involve the sales force, how to involve middle managers, how to get the board to take your work seriously, and, most importantly, how to diffuse ethics and compliance so that it becomes an integral part of the company’s culture. in the meantime, the most recent corporate scandal (vw at the time of writing) becomes a teachable moment. accomplishing these goals is a difficult task for the compliance officer. for most of them, it is not their first job, but it is their first job in compliance. compliance requirements and compliance teams are also new and expanding. there is no older generation of compliance officers to learn from about how it was “in the old days.” at a recent annual meeting of the society for corporate compliance and ethics, the 1,300 attendees were presented on stage with four individuals who, it was said, “were the founders of the compliance profession.” these founders were young enough to be still working, for compliance is barely 20 years old, and it has only taken off only in the last decade. one of these “founders” sampson / the “right way” 83 exclaimed: “accounting and law are thousands of years old. you people are pioneers.” all modern firms and public organizations must deal with ever changing government regulations, new demands for product quality and control, and ambitious personnel who have their own career aspirations. for this reason, compliance officers are constantly seeking out the latest pedagogical tools, courses, software to make their jobs easier, to simplify the kinds of data or measurements needed (the search for “metrics”), and to demonstrate to senior management that they are indeed doing their jobs right and generating revenue. the softness of ethics and compliance makes it difficult for e&c officers to demonstrate their value. they need help. and there are numerous vendors who can offer such help, from software to in-house training courses to due diligence assistance. for hundreds or thousands of dollars, these vendors will not only offer training, they will design a complete compliance program, and operate the company’s whistleblower hot line, taking over the compliance function in some cases. without being bombastic, we can call this the “outsourcing of ethics.” conclusion: moral capitalism? with the ethics officer and compliance discourse, we have an assemblage in the making. we are witness to new relations between employees and their firms, relations based not on contracts and performance, but on degrees of ethical adherence to codes, laws and standards. employees in modern capitalist firms and in public organizations must be flexible and career oriented. but they must also be loyal and engaged. the compliance officer must act ethically―not only vis-à-vis the firm in which she is employed, but possibly to the united states department of justice. the activities of the firm must now be grounded not only on profitability but on a code of conduct, on morally sanctioned actions. we are witnessing the construction of a moral universe inside the firm―its moralization. ethics and compliance is the right thing to do; and the ethics and compliance officer the moral compass. listening to the manager from coca cola tell us what she called “war stories from compliance,” learning that coke was both ‘the real thing” and ‘the right way,” and that coke was now spreading its ethics and compliance culture to all its partners in the 207 countries in which it operates, one can only conclude that capitalism and morality now share the same bed. that morality and ethics now pervade modern capitalism hardly means that capitalist practice has become ethical. incidents of outrageous corporate scandals, bribery, and corruption have not abated. we can only guess what the panama papers will reveal as the 11 million documents are examined. a us government prosecutor for anti-corruption, speaking journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 84 at an anti-corruption review conference (in october 2014) complained that the number of firms that continue to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes is simply “stunning.” a conspiracy theory of ethics and compliance would say that ethics and compliance is just talk and window-dressing, if not smoke and mirrors. yet the conspiracy approach is a little too neat. modern capitalism is constructing its own morality with its own theory of human agency, with “good people doing bad things,” and its own theory of building “strong cultures” and “cultures of compliance.” as modern firms demand a specific kind of worker with a specific kind of skill set, it needs workers with a particular kind of moral skill set, those who know the costs of violating laws, regulations, and codes. it needs workers who can identify those grey zones and risk areas that might cost the company a lot of money or loss of reputation, and loss of their jobs or even jail time. we often believe that the entrance of moral considerations into social life is some kind of positive sign, that morality is some kind of brake on ruthlessness. in this optic, capitalism can be softened around the edges with a bit of corporate social responsibility, a code of conduct, and an anti-bribery policy. it devolves on the ethics and compliance officer to carry out this “softening” task. capitalism is not moral, certainly, but it has become moralized. the ethics and compliance officer is the agent of moralization, the one who 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http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadfile&recordoid=520 4644&fileoid=5204645 sampson, steven. 2014b. fighting fraud with sociology. impact on integrity. http://www.soc.lu.se/en/stevensampson/publication/5204649 sampson, steven. 2015. the anticorruption package. ephemera: theory and politics in organisation 15: 115-23. schwartz, mark s. 2013. developing and sustaining an ethical corporate culture: the core elements. business horizons 56: 39-50 (reprinted in http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/conf_proceedings/cf300/cf322/rand_cf322.pdf http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/conf_proceedings/cf300/cf322/rand_cf322.pdf https://www.worldcat.org/title/gift-forms-and-functions-of-exchange-in-archaic-societies/oclc/343645&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/gift-forms-and-functions-of-exchange-in-archaic-societies/oclc/343645&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/global-assemblages-technology-politics-and-ethics-as-anthropological-problems/oclc/53932585&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/global-assemblages-technology-politics-and-ethics-as-anthropological-problems/oclc/53932585&referer=brief_results http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadfile&recordoid=5204644&fileoid=5204645 http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadfile&recordoid=5204644&fileoid=5204645 http://www.soc.lu.se/en/steven-sampson/publication/5204649 http://www.soc.lu.se/en/steven-sampson/publication/5204649 journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 86 hoffman et al. 2014). scott, james. 1976. the moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in south asia. new haven: yale university press scott, james. 1985. weapons of the weak : everyday forms of peasant resistance. new haven: yale university press thompson, e. p. 1971. the moral economy of the english crowd in the 18th century. past and present 50: 76-136. volkov, michael. 2014. redefining the relationship of the general counsel and chief compliance officer. in greenberg, transforming compliance. pp., 56-68. steven sampson is professor (emeritus) of social anthropology at lund university. he has studied ngos, the anti-corruption industry and most recently the ethics and compliance in private firms. he can be contacted at steven.sampson@soc.lu.se. mailto:steven.sampson@soc.lu.se possessed by the zeitgeist: inspiration and prophecy in the business of fashion kasper tang vangkilde abstract the ability to foretell the future―and, as such, to conquer and determine it―is an essential preoccupation of contemporary business, which supposedly distinguishes the winners from the losers. the business of fashion is perhaps the case in point, being inherently concerned with continually staking out new paths into the future. in this article, i explore how fashion designers deal with this imperative through processes of seeking inspiration, constituting a distinctive “technology of prefiguration” by which the designers come to enter a prophetic condition. rooted in an animistic mode of being, this attests to a shamanic practice, which entails the designers becoming possessed by a zeitgeist and, hence, turning into prophetic agents with particular visions of the future. the world of fashion is, in this sense, populated by entities and processes not commonly associated with modern business, in that animistic tendencies, jumping things, spiritual beings and shamanic efforts enable the designers to attain otherwise unattainable prophetic viewpoints. underlying this argument is a more general ambition to open up our conception of business, as i suggest that business anthropologists may do well to uphold a profound naïveté in their methodology, which may essentially challenge and revise our assessment of modern capitalism. page 1 of 23 jba 4(2): 178-200 fall 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 179 keywords the future, inspiration, prophecy, prefiguration, animism, shamanism, fashion “you always have to be in the zeitgeist. you know?” catherine pauses and looks at me, as if she wants to make sure that i am not completely lost. “yeah, in the time spirit,” i respond briefly, trying not to interrupt her flow of speech. we are engaged in a conversation about fashion and, in particular, what it is that makes a good fashion designer. and catherine, a fashion designer by training, has quite a few things on her mind. “so, you have to have this feeling for this time spirit in a way, because then you know basically what people are going to like in maybe one year.” now, i probably look more puzzled, thinking hard about what she is actually saying. catherine senses my puzzlement immediately. she elaborates: if you know a lot about what is happening in the world, you can also already imagine how things might be in one or two years’ time. there are a lot of trend reports and things like this, but it’s not only this. you have to kind of feel it or take it in. indeed, the ability or endeavour to anticipate the future and, in the same process, to bend it in a particular direction is an essential preoccupation of modern western business. this is nothing new, of course. about 20 years ago, business gurus gary hamel and c. k. prahalad emphasized in their bestseller competing for the future (1996), a book notoriously “not about catching up” but “about getting ahead” (ibid. x), that “[e]very company is in the process of becoming―of becoming an anachronism irrelevant to the future, or of becoming the harbinger of the future” (ibid. xi). for this reason, a number of sustained efforts to prefigure the future so as to “colonize” it strategically prevail in business organizations: big data analytics, user-driven innovation, design thinking workshops, prototyping, coolhunting and trendspotting are just a few examples of diverse kinds of “technologies of prefiguration” (see jiménez 2013), which seek to explore and capture, here and now, what is yet to come. the future, in a nutshell, is both a potentially valuable and highly contested space. as we all know, a defining characteristic of the future is precisely that it is so hard to foretell and, thus, inherently uncertain. the business of fashion is no exception. in fact, as the economist richard caves argues, creative industries are essentially characterized by a “nobody knows property,” which denotes the fact that no one can know with certainty how consumers will respond to new products. demand is, as such, highly uncertain and success unpredictable (2000:2-3; see also moeran 2005:172-173). in this respect, catherine, as well as other fashion designers, clearly believe that trend reports, market research and the like journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 180 will only take you so far (see also entwistle 2009:138). instead, “you have to know the time spirit,” as rebecca, another fashion designer, contends. “you have to have a feeling for the time, or era in which we’re living.” her reason seems clear enough: “some people are doing foresight research to tell what is going to happen, and i think that a good designer should have just a feeling, so that when he sees something he knows that maybe it could become important. just a feeling about the time and what is going to happen.” referring to a zeitgeist is certainly not uncommon among fashion designers, and the notion has been much debated in fashion research as an explanation of fashion changes. in the most cited but also most clichéd interpretation, it has been suggested, for instance, that hemlines tend to drop during economic depressions and rise during economic booms (cf. entwistle 2000:63-64). apart from such a problematic, simplistic and reductionist theory, herbert blumer famously argued that fashion is a result of a process of collective selection in which designers, buyers and other agents make significant choices about which designs to create, buy and promote. although highly competitive and secretive, these agents make surprisingly similar choices, which, according to blumer, are due to their immersion in, and responsiveness to, “a remarkably common world of intense stimulation” (1969:279); that is, “a ‘spirit of the times’ or a zeitgeist” (ibid. 283). the key point remains, however, that the zeitgeist is exclusively discussed as an analytical concept rather than as an empirical reality which is considered serious business by a range of agents―not least by catherine, rebecca and other fashion designers. should we not then, as anthropologists, take descriptions of it just as seriously as anything else? in this article, i intend to do this by focusing attention on fashion designers’ persistent concern with becoming inspired. drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in hugo boss, a leading european fashion company,1 i shall argue the following: processes of inspiration constitute a distinctive technology of prefiguration by which fashion designers enter a prophetic condition. or, to put it differently, the sustained endeavour to become inspired is a particular way of dealing with the imperative of modern capitalist business to anticipate an inherently uncertain future. this entails two main processes. first, inspiration serves to impose a spatial distance on existing things and phenomena, allowing designers to envisage a fashion collection from a new perspective. second, inspiration serves to impose a temporal distance on the present, enabling designers 1 the fieldwork was conducted over eight months in 2007. puzzled by the fact that fashion designers face the challenge of being creative in highly specific time interval―for instance, in season―i gained access to hugo boss for the purpose of exploring how creativity, itself a “fashionable” phenomenon in the late modern world, unfolds in practice. vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 181 to see―or see from―a future point in time. recalling the etymology of the term “in-spiration,” meaning the blowing of spirit into a subject or the possession of a subject by a superior power (cf. salamon 2005:48), i contend that these processes are deeply rooted in an animistic condition of being―that is, a tendency to perceive nonhuman entities as being alive―which forms the basis for a shamanic practice by which the designers become possessed by the zeitgeist―and, as such, turn into prophetic agents with particular visions of the future.2 now, if this sounds somewhat radical, it is indeed my point. following certain recent trends in anthropology, i subscribe to the view that we ought to be careful not to substitute surprising things and phenomena encountered in fieldwork with recourse to more familiar conceptions, thus explaining our surprises away (see e.g. henare et al. 2007a; latour 2005). while it is surely possible to analyse and, in a sense, deconstruct the zeitgeist as an obvious articulation of the romantic trope of “the creative person,” representing a sort of emissary of the divine (negus & pickering 2004:3-4), such an analysis would fail to take seriously what the designers themselves take seriously, relegating their experiences, perceptions and beliefs to mere romanticism; that is, they may think and say this, but i, as an anthropologist, know better (see also willerslev 2007:181-182). as the key objective of anthropology is, i believe, “to open up the world, rather than to seek closure” (ingold 2008:84, original emphasis)―that is, to continually explore “new possibilities for thinking about experience” (jackson 2013:88)―it is imperative that we uphold a profound naïveté and refrain from limiting in advance our understandings and conceptions.3 indeed, this may be particularly crucial in business anthropology, which tends to focus on contexts and activities that are “deceptively familiar” (krause-jensen 2013:43). in what follows, this methodological strategy shall lead us to see a world of business awash with entities and processes―animistic tendencies, jumping things, spiritual beings, shamanic practices, prophetic agents―which deeply challenge and revise our common assessment of what modern capitalist practices entail; and, as such, of what it, more generally, means to be modern. even hard-core business may be in-spired. 2 while a few studies have argued that “sources of inspiration are essential for continuing creativity” (eckert & stacey 1998; see also mete 2006), the processes of inspiration remain largely a black box in research on fashion. 3 as bruno latour emphasizes: “we have to resist the idea that there exists somewhere a dictionary where all the variegated words of the actors can be translated into the few words of the social vocabulary. will we have the courage not to substitute an unknown expression for a well-known one?” (2005:48, original emphasis). journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 182 capacitating spaces―and relating to the world as continuous birth for fashion designers, just about anything can be a source of inspiration. or so, at least, it appears. we know, for instance, that giorgio armani was once inspired by the mountains of mongolia and china (davis 1992:128), john galliano by different images from the time of napoleon (mete 2006:284) and elsa schiaparelli by salvador dalí’s lobster telephone (ibid. 286). one could, therefore, easily be fooled into believing that the particular place to become inspired is not important. this is, however, far from the case. in fact, discussions about where to go on so-called “inspiration trips” can be fairly intense, as fashion designers tend to find it critical to be in the right place to become inspired―and the right place often differs not only from season to season but also from designer to designer. for the creative director of boss orange, a more casual brand in hugo boss, places with second-hand stores and street markets are particularly inspiring: “i don’t go to the chic places to see people who are dressed in gucci, prada or whatever. this doesn’t give me anything really. okay, people are well-dressed, but the new is not there. the new is always in the second-hand places.” i shall return to this rather intriguing and somewhat paradoxical statement about the new being in the second-hand places. for now, it should merely be noted that even if anything can potentially be inspiring, some places are believed to be significantly more inspiring than others. such places, i suggest, can be seen as a kind of “clusters of inspiration” in that they are perceived to constitute particularly dense agglomerations of sources of inspiration. the point is that when the designers are probing into such clusters of inspiration, these places come to function as capacitating spaces, to rephrase a pair of terms put together by alberto corzín jiménez (2003); that is, they come to capacitate or enable the designers to do things that would hardly be possible otherwise. or, to be more precise, they come to function in this way if the designers are open to it. in the following, i shall give this point ethnographic substance by turning to a group of five talented fashion designers, employed for half a year at hugo boss to work on a specific innovation project.4 early on a wednesday morning in february, i meet up with the fashion designers. in a presentation for the creative director a couple of days ago, the designers have received the discouraging message that their work is by no means progressing as expected. in fact, they are completely off track, having more or less misunderstood their task. left with no clear 4 i have described this project in much detail elsewhere, although for a different purpose (see vangkilde 2013). here, i therefore limit the description to a brief snapshot of one the inspiration trips in order to delve more deeply into inspiration in particular. vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 183 idea on how to proceed with the project, the designers now find that they need to get away from the office in order to seek new inspiration. and since milan, one of the world’s most famous fashion cities, is nearby, we decide to spend the day here, visiting museums, bookstores, furniture shops, fashion stores, restaurants and bars. as such, we are all in a good mood, highly excited about what the day might bring. having visited the first museum, we discover a bookstore, as well as a store offering clothing, arts and crafts, right next to the museum. when we enter the stores, the designers walk around more or less separately, looking carefully at all the different things. not all of these are, of course, equally exciting, as some of them are almost ignored while others are seen as much more fascinating. among the latter are not merely shoes, bags, clothes and other fashion accessories but, just as often, or perhaps even more so, things of a quite different nature. katja, for instance, is very interested in a book which she finds really cool. she shows me a few pages of it, in which pictures of cd covers from hard rock and heavy metal bands are surrounded by pictures of entirely different things, such as a flower, a teddy bear, a puppet, or the like. she explains that she really likes this unusual and surprising combination, and louise adds that it is always so exciting when you see something that you have not seen or thought of before. after some time, we continue on to another museum, which is hosting an exhibition called “the new italian design.” this exhibition presents a wide range of designers in such areas as product design, food design, graphics and much more, and, again, the designers are highly enthusiastic. as in the stores, it is not merely things like handbags, jewellery and other accessories that attract the designers’ attention. rather, it is more often other kinds of design that they find truly fascinating. one creation, in particular, called un seconda vita―a second life―inspires rebecca. at first glance, the creation shows a broken bowl, but broken in a particular way so that each of the broken pieces becomes a small plate. rebecca says that she really likes this idea of something getting a second life, and she ponders over whether it could be applied to clothing as well. she tells me that she will indeed think more about this. in much the same way, various other creations become sources of possible new ideas, because they are found to be quite exceptional. after a few hours, we decide to turn our attention to milan’s famous shopping areas. since our plan is flexible, we spend the next hours going from shop to shop, looking at all sorts of things, including furniture, antiques, interior design, books, art, expensive designer clothes and mainstream fashion. we visit all those stores which, for one reason or another, attract our attention; for instance because of a great amount of weird stuff in the window, an unusual interior design, or something else. in these stores, the designers eagerly explore and discuss a large number of things, both the minor details and the overall construction of what they journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 184 examine. in this respect, looking and touching are not always enough, as certain items of clothing must even be put on in order to see how they really look and feel. let this brief description suffice to emphasize that the designers demonstrate a quite extraordinary attention to everything and everyone around them; people, things, buildings, sounds, smells etc. according to the creative director, this kind of attention is apparently an inherent part of his personality: “as a person, i am very curious. i see how people are dressed, what they are doing, how they are, and what they want to communicate in the way that they are dressing. so, i am always looking left and right, and sometimes it is too much. i have to admit that it has happened more than once that people have come up to me and said: ‘do you have a problem?’ but the reason has always been that i was just attracted by a pair of jeans, a pair of shoes or whatever.” this heightened attention is precisely what we see turned on to its utmost level of intensity in milan. as the designers go from shop to shop, and street to street, they carefully observe and explore a range of people and things, activating all their senses in the process. things are touched, materials smelled, people observed, and so forth. in a sense, they appear much like a kind of “urban hunter,” tirelessly in pursuit of things, pictures, atmospheres and other constituents that could provide food for thought, as it were. as tim ingold stresses, people who hunt for subsistence generally have a very intimate knowledge of the landscape and its plant and animal inhabitants (2000:111). importantly, hunters are also often associated with an animistic way of being (see, for example, ingold 2000:111-131; viveiros de castro 1998; willerslev 2007). as one of the earliest notions in anthropology, animism is traditionally known to denote the human tendency to endow nonhuman entities with human characteristics (descola 1996:87; willerslev 2007:2). ingold points out, however, that the distinctive feature of the animist ontology is not so much the recognition that life is in things but rather that things are in life, caught up in a never-ending process of coming into being (2007:31). as he elaborates: this [animism as a condition of being] could be described as a condition of being alive to the world, characterised by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux, never the same from one moment to the next (ingold 2006:10). in this condition of being, in other words, the world is a nascent world, continuously about to disclose itself for what it is. and this condition, ingold goes on, is not just characteristic of animists in such regions as amazonia or siberia, but can also be seen among painters, as described by vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 185 merleau-ponty. the painter, according to merleau-ponty, does not observe a pre-formed and complete world with the purpose of representing it. quite the contrary, he relates to it as though it were continuously being born; that is, “as though at every moment the painter opened his eyes to the world for the first time” (ibid. 12). i cannot conceive of a more accurate way of describing the heightened sensitivity and responsiveness of the designers in milan. creations in museums, clothing in fashion stores, people in the streets and so on are sensuously explored in every possible way, as if nothing like it has ever previously existed. while i was surely inclined to see entities―fixed and complete, however odd or remarkable they appeared―the designers always saw potentials, constantly exploring what things might become rather than what they were. crucially, this is not just a matter of being “attuned to an impressive degree to modern developments,” as blumer has it (1969:279), but of relating to the world in a very particular way. like many other hunters (ingold 2000:51), the designers are present at the continued birth of the world―that is, at the fact that things are alive―for which reason they are not turned in upon themselves, but open to the world around them (cf. ingold 2007:31-32). catherine explained this to me surprisingly clearly: “i think that it is very important to always look at things in a new way and never take things as they are. you have to be really openminded, and i think that you always have to, you know, look at everything that is happening around you, take everything inside in a way.” is catherine not a true animist? a designer has to be open-minded, never taking things as they are, always approaching life as a process of ongoing generation. as such, we get a first hint of why the creative director’s statement about the new being in second-hand places may not be so paradoxical after all; even used things, and perhaps used things in particular, are alive and undergoing continuous growth. now, two points should be clear. first, the designers’ sensuous immersion in clusters of inspiration bears testimony to the profound significance of space in processes of seeking inspiration. becoming inspired cannot just happen anywhere, but needs to be initiated in a particular somewhere. the designers clearly find it crucial to get away from their everyday surroundings and immerse themselves in settings marked off from the ordinary, meaning that clusters of inspiration occupy a liminal position which renders it possible to turn them into spaces of “undreamt-of opportunities” (see hastrup 2004:92). however, and this is the second point, such spaces emerge not as a simple effect of their liminal positions, but take form through the designers’ distinct mode of relating to them: that is, as continuous birth. the designers’ sensuous immersion in―and, not least, heightened responsiveness to―the ongoing generation of the world transform the clusters into a kind of magic space, journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 186 a site “through which one can reappraise well-known spaces and imagine other textures of life’ (ibid. 111). it is in this sense that the clusters of inspiration come to serve as capacitating spaces, if one is open to it; that is to say, they capacitate the agents immersed in them and being open to the continued birth of the world to become truly inspired. what this entails more precisely is, however, yet to be clarified. jumping things―and the experience of being attracted in milan, it is clear that not everything is considered fascinating and inspiring. some things are more attractive than others, almost irresistibly drawing the designers’ attention to them. in one way or the other, these things are stimulating and extraordinary, somehow standing out from the mass of other things. as art historian james elkins notes, it is almost as if certain things possess such an irresistible effect that they tie us to them by little wires (1996:19). he puts forward the rather provoking idea that, instead of saying that humans are doing the looking, we might just as well argue that objects are trying to catch our eyes, their gleams and glints being a sort of hook that snares us. thus, to go on an inspiration trip and immerse oneself in museums, stores or similar contexts is to be “like fish who like to swim in waters full of hooks’ (ibid. 20). of course, the designers are the ones in pursuit of things but, to turn our customary assumption upside down, suggesting that things catch our eyes rather than, or just as much as, our eyes capturing things is, i believe, a thoughtprovoking yet apt invitation in the light of the above animistic condition of being. in the ethnographic studies, some of the most intriguing instances of animate things concern stones. nurit bird-david describes, for instance, how a man from the nayaka, a hunter-gatherer community of south india, relates that his sister-in-law was one day sitting under a tree when suddenly a stone jumped into her lap. the man then points at the stone because it was exactly this stone and not just any stone which had proved its ability to jump (1999:74; see also ingold 2000:97). indeed, to a western ear, such an experience may sound strange, really strange, but it is perhaps more common than we tend to think. is it merely a coincidence, for instance, that the creative director argued that he was attracted by a pair of jeans or shoes, thus ascribing the force of the attraction more to the jeans and shoes than to himself? moreover, the un seconda vita creation also appeared to approach rebecca as much as she was approaching it, since she was not looking specifically for this creation, but was rather drawn to it amongst the bulk of other creations. as such, the things perceived to be inspiring were always described as either wild, crazy, attractive, eye-catching, and so on, always causing a stir and thus capturing their attention. could it be, then, that the inspiring things were not simply in life, as described earlier, but even jumped onto the designers just as the stone had jumped onto the nayaka woman? vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 187 on the face of it, such an idea may perhaps appear outlandish, evidently challenging basic modernist conceptions and certainties which carefully separate subjects from objects, humans from things (see, for example, latour 1993). as ingold argues, it is customary for people in the west to conceive of life as a distinct qualifying attribute; that is, a property which only some entities and not others are believed to possess (2000:96). it follows, then, that insofar as the properly modern way of dealing with things is to perceive them as not possessing the property of life, belonging to the sphere of “lifeless” things separated from “lively” humans, they are naturally incapable of jumping. clearly, the designers are not positioned outside but within such modernist conceptions, and, admittedly, none of them spoke explicitly about inspiring things “jumping onto” them. however, this was what the creative director did say at one point: “i really go through the things,” he said. “i let these things jump on me. i am absolutely open-minded. whatever is coming, is coming.” the famous british fashion designer, alexander mcqueen, similarly recalls how he once became inspired by a peter arnold orchid photograph when he stumbled upon the orchids in a one of his coffee-table books. or, perhaps more to the point, the orchids stumbled upon mcqueen. because, as he explained, these orchids “were so striking and strange that they leaped out at me” (quoted in armstrong 2007:361, emphasis added). while this indicates that the different structural positions between the designers on the floor and a creative director in charge significantly influence how they articulate what, the statement about jumping things is essentially a description of how inspiring things actively respond when one engages with them―a point which also the designers emphasize when they describe these things as wild, eye-catching, crazy, and so on, thus possessing a force of attraction. the question is, however, how are we to take such descriptions and experiences seriously, given our modernist inclinations?5 the nayaka (bird-david 1999), as well as the ojibwa (hallowell 2002[1960]) and the yukaghirs (willerslev 2007), may give us a clue. for them, life is not a property that entities may or may not possess a priori to their engagement in specific fields of relations. rather, it is the other way around: things are perceived to be alive, some of them even to be persons, as and when and because people engage in and maintain relationships with them (bird-david 1999:73). in other words, the quality of life is revealed not as an a priori property but after-the-fact; that is, life is a property of particular fields of relations and not of entities as such (ingold 2000:96-98; willerslev 2007:116-118). it is, therefore, mistaken to 5 by taking it seriously, i mean not to dismiss the description as pure nonsense or explain it away by claiming that the creative director and the designers must clearly be talking in metaphors or articulating a romantic trope of artistic creation, as also stressed earlier. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 188 assume that these people perceive nonhuman entities, in general, as animate any more than we, as moderns, do (hallowell 2002[1960]:24; willerslev 2007:116-117). rather, the important difference is that they see all entities, human and nonhuman, as potentially animate. when inspiring things jump onto, or actively respond to, the creative director and the designers then, we ought not to take it to mean that they perceive of particular things as belonging to a category of the animate in a general sense. rather, following their animistic tendencies, things are experienced to jump or respond, as, when and because they are involved in specific fields of relations and actual engagement. to put it differently, things are alive, jumping and responding, not as outward expressions of life as an innate property, but as the effects of being bound up together with the creative director and the designers in concrete contexts of practical engagement. animism, as rane willerslev argues, is not “an explicitly articulated doctrinal system for perceiving the world,” but rather “something that emerges in particular contexts of close practical involvement” (2007:8). this still leaves us, though, with two questions. why are some things more attractive or inspiring than others? and what, in fact, does it entail that things are alive, jumping and responding when engaging with them? engaging with things―and seeing from a new perspective if animate things emerge in and through their close practical engagement with the creative director and the designers, it follows that an answer to these questions must be sought in a thorough exploration of this engagement. in an interview with lisa, one of the designers from the trip to milan, this comes up rather suddenly as she looks at my recorder and says: “another area of knowledge which i think is important is to be able to make a connection; for instance, if i see a recorder, to be able to imagine it or to translate it into a shirt.” i have absolutely no clue as to what a shirt inspired by a recorder would look like. but it should be clear that the engagement between lisa and the recorder cannot be entirely understood as an act of bricolage (lévi-strauss 1966), as so many other discussions of creativity and design have it (see, for example, friedman 2001; louridas 1999). lisa does resemble a bricoleur in the sense that she engages “in a sort of dialogue with” the recorder in order “to discover what [it] could ‘signify’” (lévi-strauss 1966:18). she may also be claimed to interrogate an already existing “set of tools and materials” (ibid. 17). but, like the creative director always visiting second-hand stores, the point is not that she reorganizes these elements and thus creates an unprecedented combination between a recorder and a shirt. this should be even clearer when we listen to catherine, who does not zoom in on my recorder, but on a lamp: “i could also take that lamp over there and say, ‘okay, this is my inspiration.’ you can get something out of it. it is no problem. you vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 189 can do a collection with this lamp as an inspiration. it just has to be your inspiration. i could see, for example, big white tops, and then really thin trousers. it is just an example, and that would run through. and then this round shape of it, you could try to have this as a topic going through as well. i would do big tops with thin trousers, and then i would find something else. i think that this round shape could be included as well.” this is hardly a bricoleur who speaks, not even if we recall the point that bricolage is not only a technical but also an intellectual activity (ibid.). the engagement between catherine and the lamp is not one of reorganization, producing transformation or newness through an act of combining the lamp with tops and trousers. rather more like the engineer who, as lévistrauss emphasizes, “is always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed” (ibid. 19), catherine seeks to envisage a fashion collection in a new way. at issue, then, are both elements of bricolage―that is, working with signs already established―and elements of engineering―that is, pointing towards concepts yet to come. so how are we to conceive of the engagement between catherine and the lamp? in his book on the nature of seeing, intriguingly entitled the object stares back (1996), elkins takes as his starting point the common assumption that seeing is “just looking;” that is, we open our eyes, light comes in, and we see the world. seeing is, in this way, a passive, unthinking act, which builds on the idea that the observer and the object are two separate entities; the observer looks at the object as if from a detached position (ibid. 17-19). elkins contends, however, that all of this is a lie. there is no fixed observer, no fixed object and no such thing as “just looking.” in fact, the reduction of seeing to a formula with a looking subject and a seen object is far too simple (ibid. 35). rather, the observer and the object are entangled in the sense that the former’s gaze shoots out towards the latter from which light travels back to the former, altering the one and the other in the process (ibid. 43). this may sound a bit knotty, but elkins emphasizes that seeing is essentially a reciprocal process. his argument goes something like this: when i look at someone, and this someone looks back at me, i watch how he or she responds to me so as to gain an updated sense of myself. as i see, i therefore also see myself being seen, which is to say that i see myself from the point of view of the person that i am seeing (ibid. 70-71). now, elkins’s thought-provoking point is that this process includes objects as well. in brief, objects grow eyes and stare back: each object has a presence―a being and a face of its own―and if we take that seriously (not as a vague intuition but as a fact of vision), then the world is full of eyes. seeing is being seen, and the world is so crowded with things that see and stare that we can stand to be aware of only a tiny fraction of them: more would overwhelm us (ibid. 12). journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 190 elkins argues, in other words, that seeing is not just something that we do but something that happens to us (ibid. 35). when we look at an object, it looks back, as it were, and we come to understand something, not merely about the object but also about ourselves. for instance, looking at a book may give us information about the book but, at the same time, it may also remind us of the particular point in time when we were interested in that book (ibid. 74). to see is, in a nutshell, also to be seen. although elkins is solely concerned with the nature of seeing, his line of reasoning may provide us with an idea as to how we might construe the designers’ broader sensuous engagement with things around them. catherine tells us that she could easily take the lamp as her source of inspiration. in fact, it would cause her no problems, since she could see big white tops, thin trousers and something with a round shape. like the sensuous engagement with things in milan, she explores the lamp carefully―its colour, its materials, its construction, and so on―and, in this process, the lamp stares back, as it were, making a difference to how catherine envisages a fashion collection. the question seems to be: what is it that the lamp says? in a paper intriguingly entitled “can the thing speak?”, martin holbraad suggests that things may be said to have their own language―“thingese,” he calls it―which consists of their material characteristics. these, he emphasizes, “can dictate particular forms for their conceptualization” (2011:18), meaning that things may yield their own concepts and speak for themselves, if you will (ibid. 17-19). as catherine explores the lamp, it stares or speaks back in a way that calls into question our common (modern) distinction between concepts and things (see henare et al. 2007b). the design of the lamp and its material characteristics yield a concept of its own in the sense that the lamp provides a distinctive perspective on how a fashion collection may be envisaged. as a kind of effect of the lamp, catherine sees big white tops, thin trousers, and something with a round shape. in this way catherine enters into a practical engagement with the lamp, whereby she explores it with all her senses, and whereby she comes to see herself being seen, to follow elkins’s reasoning. in a sense, she comes to see herself from the point of view of the lamp; or, to be more precise, she comes to see a possible new fashion collection from this distinct perspective.6 the lamp, un seconda vita and other things are thus being both “looked at” and “looked from” in the same process, with the effect that they come to constitute distinct perspectives from which a fashion collection may be envisaged. as such, the engagement is not a one-way relatedness, as the designers are not approaching things as passive objects for their explorative gaze. quite the reverse, things are perceived as being alive, caught up in a continuous birth, for which reason 6 i thank morten axel pedersen for being the one who first suggested that catherine was looking from the point of view of the lamp. the way in which i have pursued this idea is, however, my responsibility alone. vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 191 the engagement is a two-way responsive relatedness characteristic of an animistic condition of being. as bird-david describes what she calls an “animistic epistemology,” epitomized in the phrase that the nayaka are “talking with” things: “talking with” stands for attentiveness to variances and invariances in behavior and response of things in states of relatedness and for getting to know such things as they change through the vicissitudes over time of the engagement with them. to “talk with a tree”―rather than “cut it down” [the modernist epistemology]―is to perceive what it does as one acts towards it, being aware concurrently of changes in oneself and the tree. it is expecting response and responding, growing into mutual responsiveness and, furthermore, possibly into mutual responsibility (1999:77, original emphasis). this kind of animistic epistemology characterizes also the designers. their close practical engagement with a lamp, a recorder, un seconda vita, and so on is likewise one of “talking,” in that the designers are highly attentive to the ways in which these things respond as they come closer to them, look carefully at them, touch them, smell them, and so forth. in this sense, things are, to quote elkins, “no longer just things out there to be seen but also places where i can think about seeing and being seen” (1996:70). in brief, they constitute points of view which stare and talk back. all of this is momentous. when the designers pursue new inspiration, they enter into mutually responsive engagements with a range of things. this entails that, in the process of exploring these things, they come to see themselves from the perspective of those things; or, to be more precise, the things come to represent distinctive points of view from which they can envisage potentially new fashion collections. the key point is, thus, that the things afford (cf. gibson 1979) distinctive possibilities in the engagement with them; that is, they form part of a “circuit of affordances,” as moeran has aptly termed it (2014), in that they afford particular forms of conceptualization (holbraad 2011:18). although the designers engage with all things in this manner due to their animistic tendencies, only certain things stare or talk back in ways that firmly capture their attention. these things possess this force of attraction because the forms for their conceptualization―that is, their distinctive points of view―allow the designers to impose a spatial distance on current things and phenomena, enabling them to see a fashion collection in an unprecedented way. this suggests, finally, why the creative director is so excited about second-hand stores; for in these stores, things and signs established in the past are carefully interrogated (bricolage), and precisely because they constitute uncommon perspectives, they enable him to “cut” his existing points of view and thus move beyond present-day canons (engineering). the inspiring things are, journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 192 therefore, always jumping or responding, being wild, crazy and extraordinary, as the two-way responsive engagement with them grants access to new perspectives. connecting with the zeitgeist―and entering a prophetic condition while the engagement between the things and the designers may perhaps appear somewhat fetishistic (see e.g. ellen 1988; hornborg 2006) as the former not only respond to but exert a significant effect on the latter, i shall now argue that the designers become possessed, not so much by particular things, as by a distinctive spirit: namely, the zeitgeist. there is, as such, a quite intricate relation between immersing oneself in concrete material surroundings and connecting with a spiritual realm. in what follows, i seek to clarify this relation. to get at this issue, we shall begin with the intriguing observation that the designers clearly find numerous things to be inspiring as we tour milan. so how can they determine, as sociologist patrik aspers asks, “among the things that they are inspired by, what actually to do” (2006:749)? faced with this question, it is typical to hear designers object that “this is so difficult to talk about” (see also ibid. 750). in addition, they often refer to a certain bodily feeling, which might be described as a kind of “gut feeling” or “fingerspitzengefühl” (cf. aspers 2001:45-46; entwistle 2009:131). listen, for instance, to lisa: “you have to have a certain feeling about trends. you have to have a sensibility to see which things exist right now, so that you can say that ‘now, it is enough about those things; now, we need to have something new.’ yeah, a special sense maybe.” this special sense or feeling may call to mind pierre bourdieu’s notion of practical sense or “feel for the game,” which denotes the “capacity for practical anticipation of the ‘upcoming’ future contained in the present” (1990:66). this capacity is produced by experiences of the game and its structures (ibid.), and one could presumably argue that good designers acquire such a capacity by being so engaged in the field of fashion that an anticipation of the future becomes possible. this is, in fact, what sociologist joanne entwistle argues in an analysis of fashion buyers at selfridges department store. these buyers rely not only on codified forms of knowledge and rational calculation, but also on what entwistle describes as tacit aesthetic knowledge: “an expressive and embodied knowledge derived out of a historical and collective disposition, or fashion habitus” (2009:139, original emphasis). in the present context, however, i think that there is more to it than that. recalling the statements at the beginning of this article, catherine explained, for instance, that “you always have to be in the zeitgeist,” since this enables you to “know basically what people are going to like in maybe one year.” rebecca said more or less the same thing, and vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 193 they both argued that connecting with the zeitgeist is possible if one is highly attentive to the world, knowing much about what goes on in the present. now, does this amount to what bourdieu calls “a feel for the game” and what entwistle terms “tacit aesthetic knowledge”? although such concepts might prove illuminating in certain ways, the resulting analysis would essentially suffer from a crucial flaw: namely, that of too quickly substituting an unfamiliar expression―that is, the zeitgeist―for a familiar one―a feel for the game (latour 2005:47-49). hence, instead of explaining away the zeitgeist, i suggest that we hold our sense of wonder in suspension so as to seize on it as fertile analytical opportunity, thus adopting a strategy of “purposeful naïveté” (henare et al. 2007a:2). in this endeavour, we shall listen carefully to the creative director. in a presentation inside hugo boss, he addressed the issue of how he decides what to do: “it comes quite automatically for me. i don’t have a crystal ball. i just have a feeling that tells me what is right, or what i think is right, and what is not right. […] “in a way, it’s just to follow the wave, because, from my point of view, a designer is a kind of shaman. it is a person who has a possibility of catching something which is not really visible; something which is in the air, which everybody can breathe, but which only some people have the possibility, or the faculty, of translating into reality, into real and concrete things. […] “so, it is very esoteric, untouchable elements which we have to put inside and provide. and i know very well that this is difficult to understand but, believe me, it’s also very difficult to explain, because we’re talking about fresh air, or at least a feeling. it’s not mathematics or physics. i strongly believe that there are energies in nature which are moving things, which are not visible, and which few people have the chance to catch. that is the reason why i make the comparison between the designer and the shaman, because the shaman is also a person who moves from the regular level to another level in order to catch what is there and bring it back.” here, the creative director provides us with another, more detailed, account of the zeitgeist, although he does not use precisely this term.7 as untouchable and invisible yet in the air as something everybody can breathe, but only few people are able to capture and translate into tangible things, the zeitgeist is not embodied in particular material objects, as the notion of fetishism would suggest (ellen 1988:218). nor is it perceived as a person and manifested as a human, an animal or some 7 he used the term in various other statements, however, arguing, for instance, that “we follow the wave, the spirit of the time, which is, in the end, the same thing.” journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 194 other concrete entity, as numerous anthropological studies of spirits have shown (morris 2006:15). rather, as a very distinct type of spirit, the zeitgeist is an omnipresent medium in which we are all essentially immersed as we continuously breathe it, not unlike the air, wind and weather which we likewise cannot touch but only touch in, as ingold describes it (2007:29). we simply are in the zeitgeist. but if this is so, what is it that makes certain people like the designers able to connect with it, and others not? with his analogy to shamans, the creative director gives us a clue worth pursuing. in the anthropology of religion, shamanism has been widely debated but is commonly known to denote a spirit-medium, with the ability to serve as a bridge between the spirit world and the human world (morris 2006:17-18). as defined by ioan lewis, a shaman thus represents “an inspired prophet or leader, a charismatic religious figure with the power to control the spirits, usually by incarnating them’ (quoted in ibid. 18). as spirits speak through a shaman, spirit possession is an intrinsic part of the shaman’s capacity to master the spirits (ibid. 24). importantly, eduardo viveiros de castro elaborates that this capacity rests on a particular mode of knowing: animism (2004:468-469). it is only by, first, perceiving an animate world and, second, exploring it through a relational stance―that is, by entering into a reciprocal engagement in order “to take on the point of view of that which must be known” (ibid. 468)―that shamans come to be possessed by the spirits and, thus, to know and control them by adopting their perspectives. shamanism presupposes, in other words, an animistic mode of knowing which essentially grows from the knower’s reciprocal relatedness with the known (bird-david 1999:78); that is, it entails “close and immediate relationships with the divinities or the spirits” (morris 2006:23). the designers’ acute attentiveness to, and two-way engagement with, everything and everyone around them constitutes an animistic mode of knowing, which, i contend, forms the basis for a shamanic practice by which they connect with the zeitgeist. since the zeitgeist is an omnipresent medium flowing through us all, humans and nonhumans, it follows that it can be known or mastered only by attending to and exploring everything carefully. in fact, catherine stated rather clearly that connecting with the zeitgeist comes about by being highly attentive to the present, just like the creative director argued that he is “always looking left and right.” in milan, the designers likewise displayed a heightened sensitivity to, and entered into mutually responsive engagements with, a multitude of things. as “something which is in the air, which everybody can breathe,” as the creative director explained, the zeitgeist is at once everywhere and nowhere but not, however, accessible to anyone. rather, connecting with it hinges on the designers’ animistic condition of being according to which things are not only alive and active but explored and known through a mutual responsive engagement with them; that is, through a particular mode of relating which not only the designers make vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 195 happen but also happens to them. the zeitgeist, i argue, appears precisely in and through this reciprocal relatedness by which the designers, in their exploration of various things during inspiration trips, “open” themselves to the forces or perspectives of the world around them. their animistic inclinations thus underlie a shamanic practice which makes them inspired. the key point of this is not only that the designers gain a finetuned sense of what is happening, but of what is going to happen. “if you know a lot about what is happening in the world,” as catherine said, “you can also already imagine how things might be in one or two years’ time.” in this sense, the future is not detached from the present, but closely linked to it, so that the designers, when connecting with the zeitgeist, essentially become stretched out, as it were, between different points in time (cf. nielsen 2011:398). or, as kirsten hastrup describes the prophetic condition: “while situated in the ‘old’ world, prophets give voice to a ‘new’ one” (1989:224). the connection with the zeitgeist thus entails that the designers come to see, or see from, a future point in time. hence, they can determine what to do and, as a distinct yet not detached temporal moment, the future informs decisions and actions here and now; that is, the present is reimagined from the perspective of the future (see also miyazaki 2006; nielsen 2011). importantly, however, this reimagination ought not to be from a too distant future. as often stressed by the designers, they must be ahead of the market but not too much ahead, because this will lead to fashion collections that consumers are not ready for. they should, therefore, not to be one pace ahead but only half a pace, as the advertising professionals in moeran’s ethnography have it (1996:138). as such, their challenge consists of freeing themselves from the present while remaining anchored in it (hastrup 2004:194), imposing a temporal distance which allows them to see the present from the perspective of the future but also, in a sense, to see the future from the perspective of the present. to be possessed by the zeitgeist is, i contend, to occupy such a prophetic condition. foretelling the future―and upholding a profound naïveté a popular saying, famously stated by abraham lincoln, has it that “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” in a discussion of “the voice of prophecy,” edwin ardener likewise emphasizes that prophecies are not about predicting the future, but about foretelling it; that is, a prophet not merely discovers a new reality, but conceptualizes and defines it (1989). this is precisely what is considered an imperative in modern capitalist business, permeated as it is by a “create/innovate or die” mantra (jeanes 2006:127), impelling companies to continually stake out new paths into the future. in fact, the ability to foretell the future―and, as such, to conquer and colonize it―is apparently what distinguishes the winners journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 196 from the losers. the business of fashion is perhaps the epitome of, or even model for, this conviction (see löfgren 2005), given that its very raison d’être is to establish a discontinuity with what exists. in this article, my argument has been that fashion designers approach this imperative by seeking inspiration, based on an animistic mode of being and involving a possession by a zeitgeist. while the inspiring things enable the designers to see a fashion collection from a new perspective, thus imposing a distance in a spatial sense, the possession by the zeitgeist makes them able to see, and see from, a point in the future, thus imposing a distance in a temporal sense. catherine, for instance, may envisage a collection from the point of view of a lamp, but, in order to know if this viewpoint is worth pursuing, she needs to engage with, and open herself to, the multitude of perspectives around her in order to connect with the zeitgeist and see from the future. in this way, processes of inspiration amount to a distinctive technology of prefiguration―a mode of delving into and foretelling what is yet to come―by which the designers become able to act under a condition of inherent uncertainty. in a nutshell, they come to obtain prophetic points of view. more generally, this attests to the ways in which humans tend to engage with certain nonhuman others, particularly spiritual beings, in contexts of high uncertainty. rather than representing “an idle metaphysical tenet,” animism denotes a distinctive mode of relating to nonhuman others, which “can be put to systematic and deliberate use” (viveiros de castro 2004:469). importantly, the analysis presented here explicitly challenges any modernist assumption which strictly separates inert objects from active subjects, lifeless things from lively humans―and, by implication, associates animistic inclinations with pre-moderns only. because “is it really true,” alf hornborg asks, “that we, modern “westerners”, do not animate the objects around us?’ (2006:22, original emphasis). the fashion designers, i believe, provide us with a clear answer, demonstrating how animism (together with shamanism) unfolds under certain circumstances of practical engagement (hallowell 2002[1960]:24; willerslev 2007:8). this, indeed, should caution us against undue exotization of those people portrayed as “animists.” even modern capitalist business thrives on animist and shamanic practices. underlying this argument is what i take to be an essential (business) anthropological ambition to learn how the involved agents themselves perceive their endeavours. if, to us, the designers’ account of a zeitgeist, or the creative director’s experience of jumping things appears somewhat odd, if not even nonsensical, the problem is ours and not theirs (see also henare et al. 2007a:6). the point is, then, to probe ever more deeply into our astonishment and seize on it as an analytical opportunity to challenge our common understandings. such a strategy of “purposeful naïveté” (ibid. 2) is not least significant in business anthropology where a vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 197 core methodological task is, to quote jakob krause-jensen, “to maintain a constant awareness of the differences that underlie the surface similarity in the often-identical […] concepts used by the ethnographer and the informants” (2010:20). as a notion, the zeitgeist was of course familiar to me but, as a being in the world, it was entirely unfamiliar, let alone the animistic mode of relating by which to become possessed by it. business anthropology, i think, will do well to uphold a profound sense of naïveté which will open up, rather than close down, our conception of the world of modern business―of what it is composed and what it is like to be in it. this is, perhaps, the very purpose of a business anthropology. references ardener, edwin. 1989. the voice of prophecy. further problems in the analysis of events. in the voice of prophecy and other essays (pp. 134154). oxford: basil blackwell. armstrong, lisa. 2007. the diary of a dress: alexander mcqueen shares the saga of how one of his inspirations―a peter arnold orchid photograph―evolved from simple sketch to production nightmare to a stunning gown fit for supermodel naomi campbell. in the fashion reader, edited by l. welters and a. lillethun (pp. 361-363). oxford & new york: berg. aspers, patrik. 2001. markets in fashion. a phenomelogical approach. stockholm: city university press. ----------. 2006. contextual knowledge. current sociology 54 (5):745-763. bird-david, nurit. 1999. 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critiques. cultural anthropology 21 (2):147-172. moeran, brian. 1996. a japanese advertising agency. an anthropology of media and markets. london: curzon. ----------. 2005. the business of ethnography. strategic exchanges, people and organizations. oxford & new york: berg. ----------. 2014. the business of creativity. toward an anthropology of worth. walnut creek, ca: left coast press. morris, brian. 2006. religion and anthropology. a critical introduction. cambridge: cambridge university press. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 200 negus, keith, and michael pickering. 2004. creativity, communication, and cultural value. london, thousand oaks, california & new delhi: sage publications. nielsen, morten. 2011. futures within: reversible tme and housebuilding in maputo, mozambique. anthropological theory 11 (4):397-423. salamon, karen lisa g. 2005. possessed by enterprise. values and valuecreation in mandrake management. in magic, culture and the new economy, edited by o. löfgren and r. willim (pp. 47-55). oxford: berg. vangkilde, kasper tang. 2013. in search of a creative concept in hugo boss. in exploring creativity. evaluative practices in innovation, design, and the arts, edited by b. moeran and b. t. christensen (pp. 69-95). cambridge: cambridge university press. viveiros de castro, eduardo. 1998. cosmological deixis and amerindian perspectivism. journal of the royal anthropological institute 4 (3):469488. ----------. 2004. exchanging perspectives. the transformation of objects into subjects in amerindian ontologies. common knowledge 10 (3):463484. willerslev, rane. 2007. soul hunters. hunting, animism, and personhood among the siberian yukaghirs. berkeley, los angeles & london: university of california press. kasper tang vangkilde is associate professor at department of anthropology, school of culture and society, aarhus university. his main research interests are within the fields of business, organizational and design anthropology, with particular emphasis on processes of creativity, branding, management and organization. he holds a ph.d. in anthropology (2012) from the university of copenhagen and is at present mainly responsible for the specialization in “innovation, organization and work” on the master’s degree programme in anthropology at aarhus university. as member of the steering committee of the research network for design anthropology, he is co-editor of the forthcoming design anthropological futures (bloomsbury academic, 2016). he can be reached at etnkvangkilde@cas.au.dk mailto:etnkvangkilde@cas.au.dk s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 96-124 j o h n h o l l a n d t h e c a p i t a l i s t u n c a n n y i n may 1972, during a lecture entitled “du discours psychanalytique [on the psychoanalytic discourse],” delivered at the university of milan, jacques lacan announced to his listeners that “the crisis, not of the discourse of the master, but of the capitalist discourse, which is its substitute, has begun.”1 the capitalist discourse is a “modern” modification of the discourse of the master, and in making this statement, lacan was marking out certain limits of a particular trajectory of his teaching, one that had enabled him to develop his theory of the four discourses: a theory of the ways in which jouissance and the unconscious inhere within particular social practices. this article seeks to provide a broad sketch of the workings of the fith, capitalist discourse, lightly etching in certain arguments that would deserve to be developed more fully elsewhere. i shall argue that this discourse is a particular mode of the compulsion to repeat, and gives rise, at its heart, to an experience that could be called a capitalist uncanny. let desperate by such a compulsion, the “capitalist” will make an attempt to impose stability upon this movement by recreating the weltanschauung of his/her predecessor, the master. such efforts, however, will be rendered vain by the confrontation with the force of a new superego. 1. discourse and ideology the fith of lacan’s discourses immediately raises the question of how a discourse can be called “capitalist.” a discourse is a particular social formation in which the existence of speech establishes places from which one can act; to define capitalism as a discourse is to relate it to the internal logic of this structure. the precondition for answering this question is an understanding of what discourse itself is. the particularity of lacan’s discourse-theory can be approached by examining how it differs from its closest theoretical “relation”: the lacanian-inspired ideology-analysis initiated by slavoj žižek and others. their treatment of ideology diverges somewhat from lacan’s discourse-theory, most notably in their account of the relation between fantasy and reality. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 97 in his relatively early work, žižek set out certain premises of a valuable and subtle theory of ideology; his essay, “che vuoi?,” which appeared in the sublime object of ideology, the first book that he published in english, can, for the present purposes, be taken as the founding act of this theory.2 by drawing on lacan’s graph of desire and emphasizing the role of fantasy, he produced a theory of the way in which jouissance and the unconscious insinuate themselves into configurations of signifiers, configurations that involve conceptions of society, economics, politics or sexuality. one of the starting-points of žižek’s analysis is his treatment of the limits of the work of louis althusser, for whom ideology “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” a relationship that is established when agents of the ideological state apparatuses “hai[l] or interpellat[e] individuals as subjects.”3 žižek states that …the crucial weakness of hitherto (post-)structuralist essays in the theory of ideology descending from the althusserian theory of interpellation was to limit themselves to the lower level, to the lower square of lacan’s graph of desire—to aim at grasping the efficiency of an ideology exclusively through the mechanism of imaginary and symbolic identification.4 althusser’s formulations involved only the first two of the four levels of the graph of desire, the ones dominated by the symbolic and imaginary. žižek’s innovation is therefore to show how the third and fourth levels, which bring in jouissance and the unconscious, affect ideology. according to žižek, the person who interpellates us opens up, without knowing that s/he is doing so, a dimension that has nothing to do with consciousness; contained within this call is the che vuoi?—what do you want—addressed to us by the s(), the point of impasse, of silence, of “inconsistency” in the other (123). because of this unknown and uncalculated dimension of the call, an ideology finds the source of its power in the unconscious and jouissance; “the last support of the ideological effect (of the way an ideological network of signifiers ‘holds’ us) is the non-sensical, pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment,” which is “structured in fantasy” (124). fantasy thus becomes one of the principal elements of ideology. it stages a relation between two terms ( ◊ a), a relation that provides an answer to the che vuoi? this response tells me what the other wants of me, and therefore what i myself want. as conceived in this way, fantasy becomes linked inextricably with another category: reality. žižek follows lacan in presenting fantasy as the frame by which we perceive reality; the “fantasy framework” provides the coordinates by which we choose the particular elements of our “reality” that become important to us, the elements that we include in our account of what occurs around us (47).this strict connection between fantasy and reality is one of the most fruitful aspects of žižek’s theory of ideology; it marks a radical departure from any conception of ideology as a “false consciousness” that can be dissipated by a fuller understanding of reality. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 98 their linkage becomes a powerful tool for explaining the stasis of ideology, the persistence of highly problematic ideologies, in which we claim no longer to believe. this connection also provides ideology-analysis with a reliable way of locating the coordinates of fantasy within any particular ideology. although both  and a are fundamentally ungraspable, their position can be found by paying close attention to the ways in which people describe their experiences of reality. in “che vuoi? ” the most important example of the ideological functioning of the object a is the figure of “the” “jew” in anti-semitic corporatist ideologies, which contend that all elements of society should function in harmony, in the way that the organs in a healthy body supposedly do. “the jew” becomes the scapegoat for the inevitable failure of such a conception, the explanation of why society is actually “split by antagonistic struggles”; for anti-semites, this figure becomes a sort of “fetish,” a foreign body that “marks the eruption of enjoyment in the social field,” and therefore serves as a perfect example of the object a (126). “reality” becomes the principle that enables analysts of ideology to locate the constituents of the fantasy. like the theory of ideology, lacan’s work on discourse also seeks to specify the unexpected implication of the subject and jouissance within our everyday lives; in this case, it looks for them less in the various networks of “ideas” than in a series of social practices. this change of focus will sometimes involve radical reformulations of the roles played by fantasy and reality. the elaboration of the four discourses, and later of the capitalist discourse, marks something of a change in lacan’s teaching: until that moment, he had devoted himself to theorizing a specific practice—that of psychoanalysis—in its autonomy; whenever he referred to historical or social questions, he had done so only to illuminate analytic practice. his theory of discourse, on the other hand, is based on a sort of wager: that the letters that he had elaborated in order to think through psychoanalysis can also throw light upon other practices, which may differ radically from it. as he argues, “through the instrument of language, a certain number of stable relations are established, inside which something that is much larger and goes much further than actual utterances (énonciations) can, of course, be inscribed.”5 lacan’s wager, in developing a theory of these positions, involves an hypothesis that concerns history: that the letters by which he formalized analytic experience can also illuminate social relations that existed long before freud invented analytic practice. in comparison with the complexity of terms that he had employed with the graph of desire, his approach to discourse is radically simplified, and even minimalist, for he uses only four terms: , a force that exists outside the symbolic, and about which we can only learn retroactively, through the signifiers that it underlies; s 1 , the signifier that represents the subject; s 2 , the network of signifiers upon which s 1 intervenes; a, the surplus-jouissance that cannot be lodged within the s 2 . not only do all the letters—i(a), m—that had designated the imaginary in the graph of desire disappear, but also the very term that marks the point of impasse within holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 99 the unconscious— s(), the signifier of the lack in the other—is not written as such. its absent presence can only be inferred by means of the changing relations within the four terms used in writing the discourses. these letters can occupy four places, which neither disappear nor change their order in the movement from one discourse to another:6 in the discourse of the master, which was, in historical terms, the first to emerge, one encounters a series of relations in which the signifier represents the subject for another signifier, to which surplus-jouissance is added. he writes it in the following way in “du discours psychanalytique” (40): here, the s 1 occupies the place of the agent, the s 2 of the other, the a of the production and  of truth. the three other discourses are then made to appear through what lacan, in the other side of psychoanalysis, calls a quasi-mathematical operation of “circular permutation,” by means of a series of counter-clockwise rotations: when s 2 becomes the agent, the discourse becomes that of the university; the analytic discourse emerges when the a serves as the agent; the discourse of the hysteric occurs when  acts as agent (39). each discourse is marked by a series of vectors, which indicates the ways in which one term acts upon and establishes a “relation” with another; each is also, however, characterized by incapacities and impossibilities, where these relations fail, either completely or in part. here will be found one of the most important differences between lacan’s discourse-theory and the ideology-critique inspired by his teaching: the discourses show the way in which specific social practices render particular functions of the psyche unavailable for us when we find ourselves caught up in them. the discourse of the master is particularly important in the present context, both because it will mutate into the capitalist discourse, and because its manner of operating will place it in stark contrast with some of the theoretical assumptions of ideology-analysis. the master who dominates this discourse is a figure who operates not only in hegel’s master-slave dialectic, but also, and more importantly, in classical philosophy and especially in aristotle’s thought. although lacan only formulated this discourse and its operation in 1969, he was preoccupied with the master throughout his teaching, and in the ethics of psychoanalysis, he refers specifically to the nicomachean ethics, a work that tells us much about the master’s metaphysical, epistemological, and libidinal stance; the master, as lacan argues, derives his authority to command by “enter[ing]…and submit[ting] to an established and eternal ‘order’ which has been set in motion by the ‘unmoved mover.’”7 holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 100 within the theory of discourse, this master intervenes upon the slave, establishing a relation of command and obedience, hierarchy, and domination. if, in d’un autre à l’autre [from an other to the other], lacan had referred to the master as a “dumb ass [con],” he progressively delineates a more complex status for him, first in the other side of psychoanalysis and then in encore, showing that if this figure is separate from knowledge, he nevertheless embodies a somewhat sinister epistemological position.8 in sketching out the master’s role in the seventeenth seminar, lacan emphasizes that his power derives from his definition of himself as being “identical with his own signifier” (90). this very simplicity enables him to intervene switly upon the slower-moving slave, who is encumbered by the complex relations of signifiers that constitute knowledge. animated by a desire for “things [to] work,” the master commands the slave to do his bidding. he would like, in particular, to take possession of this knowledge and to have it used for his own purposes. as lacan says, this knowledge is to be “transmitted from the slave’s pocket to the master’s— assuming that they had pockets in those days”; in this way, the slave is gradually dispossessed of “this knowledge in order for it to become the master’s knowledge,” an operation that would pave the way for the establishment, first, of classical philosophy and then of the discourse of the university, in which the s 2 takes the place of the agent (22). at the center of the discourse of the master is a cluster of psychic and libidinal positions: the slave’s transference towards the master, and the latter’s exclusion of his own jouissance in favor of his ability to control the slave. in intervening upon the slave’s knowledge, the master unfortunately acquires a position of great psychic significance for the slave. with the master’s advent, the slave loses a more or less direct relation to his own body, which becomes the master’s property (89). as a result, from the slave’s perspective, the master’s action comes to stand in for the primal loss of an unmediated relation to his body, a loss that we all experience, and which lacan, in the four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis, had called “alienation.” alienation designates, first, the operation of primal repression and then of secondary repressions, in which the living being has to make a “forced choice” between its own being and “meaning,” which lacan would later write as s 2 . this being, in consenting to being represented by these signifiers, loses not only a direct access to its body, but also a specific signifier with which it had identified and which can be written as s 1 , and which is no longer accessible to consciousness. this operation can be represented as follows:9  holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 101 the master, in making the slave submit to him, brings the s 1 to bear upon an “already constituted” field of knowledge, a set of signifiers that are “already articulated with one another” (other side, 15). through its operation, the master signifier will come to stand in for the signifier that has already been eclipsed by primal repression, the term that “freud defined by placing it between the enigmatic parenthesis of the urverdrängt” (90). in this way, each signifier that is part of the slave’s “headless knowledge” acquires a new resonance, precisely because it has come to refer to the signifier that had been “split off” from the others. this resonance exacts a heavy price upon the slave, for it binds him in a transferential relation to the master. in conjunction with this new relation, the , “the subject as divided, emerges” in the place of the “truth of the master” (15, 90). this  becomes the subject-supposedto-know for the slave and the master acquires a power over him because something in this master is presumed to know about his unconscious. this transference, just as much as the master’s ability to punish the slave, seals the latter’s submission to him. despite the subjective roots of the slave’s subservience, the master is not all-powerful; not only are there limits to his ability command the slave, but this very capacity is based upon an acceptance of severe restrictions on his own psyche. the master’s discourse is marked by both “impossibilities” and incapacities or even “impotences [impuissances]” (encore, 16). the impossibility inheres in the relation between the master signifier and knowledge; although it is true that the signifier’s intervention has an enormous psychic effect upon the slave, from the master’s own perspective, its results are inevitably disappointing. although the master may want things to function smoothly, what his experience will show him is that this will not occur through his commands, either in the field of knowledge or in more practical matters. as lacan asserts, “it is effectively impossible that there be a master who makes the entire world function. getting people to work is even more tiring, if one really has to do it, than working oneself. the master never does it” (other side, 74). nothing is less certain than that the slave elaborates knowledge expressly at the master’s command, in part because the master signifier, when it first intervenes upon the slave, acts upon a “network” of knowledge that has already been formed (13). if the slave brings forth any further knowledge, it is not as a result of a successful command from the master, but because the structure of the discourse has instituted a transference that is directed to , rather than to s 1 .10 the impuissance that inheres within the discourse of the master will have an even more far-reaching effect, for it will render inoperative, within this discourse, the relations upon which žižek’s first formulations of ideology-analysis depend. if the vectors in the discourses mark the existence of certain sorts of connections, which allow an agent, for example, to act upon an other, and for this other to produce a third element, there is, on the contrary, a “barrier” between surplus-jouissance, located in the place of the production, and the , the master’s truth. because of this barrier, “the master is castrated” (97). if the slave is bound by transference to the master, the latter, in turn, “is only able to dominate” him “by excluding” both phallic jouissance and the fantasy that serves as its precondition, from his experience; holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 102 he does so, in part because this jouissance could expose him both to the subversive effects of the sexual non-relation and to the contradictions inherent within his own particular desire (97). such an exposure would sap his ability to dominate the slave, for this ability depends upon his capacity to define himself as identical to himself. this conclusion, as lacan notes, is unexpected, for “what people usually say” is the opposite: “that jouissance is the privilege of the master” (22). the master, however, is radically unlike the primal father in freud’s totem and taboo, just as he differs from the term that figures in lacan’s mathemes of masculine sexuation: , the at-least-one element that has not submitted to castration. if fantasy does not operate for the master, then this structural particularity raises a question about the role of reality in his discourse: how can reality manifest itself here, if it has been defined as what frames a psychic formation that no longer operates? if the master has no fantasy, then what kind of reality does he have? to my knowledge, lacan never gives an explicit answer to this question, but i shall argue that he provides an implicit response, and leaves us the coordinates that can enable us to understand the character of the master’s reality.11 this reality will turn out to be the opposite of the one that lacan describes in encore as being approached through “apparatuses of jouissance”; instead, it can be conceived of as a particular variation of the reality principle, one in which the hope of refinding the hallucinated object of satisfaction has disappeared (55). certain indices concerning the master’s relation to reality can be found in encore, in the passage in which lacan discusses what he calls a “conception of the world,” an expression that he employs as a way of rethinking freud’s remarks about the weltanschauung (41-43). in his essay, “the question of a weltanschauung,” in the new introductory lectures on psycho-analysis, freud defines a weltanschauung as “an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.”12 the expression that interests lacan in this definition is “fixed place,” and he will take up freud’s formulations by employing the term, “world,” in a way that is reminiscent of alexandre koyré’s use of it: it denotes a stable aristotelian cosmology and metaphysic, which is based upon a bounded system of spheres, in which the master himself comes to be located at its “center.”13 lacan’s interest in the “world” and the topological qualities of the sphere is of long standing, and an important aspect of his concern with them derives from their connection with a particular understanding of what reality is. he occupied himself with the sphere because it permits a clear and simple demarcation between inside and outside, one that provides the condition for what he calls “cosmological thinking” in his seminar, problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse [crucial problems for psychoanalysis]: a form of thought that is characterized by an adequation between macrocosm and microcosm, in such a way that the latter comes to be seen as the result of the former, and will correspond to it point-by-point. this microcosm can be conceived of in several ways: “as subject, soul, ηούς (nous),” while the determiholland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 103 nant macrocosm can be called “reality” or the “universe.”14 the sphere thus becomes the basis of a theory of knowledge in which reality can be divided into a thousand separate atoms, each of which will exist in a more or less perfect correspondence with the mental presentation that we make of it. it is this sort of epistemology that underlies the master’s position; he locates himself at the center of the system of spheres and bases his power upon his “clearsighted” access to reality, the condition of which is his acceptance of castration. as lacan argues in encore, the stability of the conception of the world as a series of spheres is guaranteed by “a view, gaze or imaginary hold” that remains outside the system: that of the unmoved mover, who has set the spheres in motion. the master is able to occupy the center of this system because he defines himself as the figure who is able to discern and submit to this external and constitutive gaze; in lacan’s words, “some-one—a part of this world—is at the outset assumed to be able to take cognizance of” this gaze and the imaginary hold that it provides (43). lacan’s use of the expression “take cognizance” is significant, for it denotes an operation that is the condition for the master’s assumption of his status, an operation that will have a crucial effect on the ordered set of knowledge. this expression is not at all absent from freud’s work, for it is a central element of his concept of disavowal, with the crucial difference that, with the latter, it is always marked by a sort of negation, a “refus[al] to take cognizance” of something. this is the case with fetishism, for example, which arises when a boy refuses “to take cognizance of the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis.”15 by contrast, the master’s affirmation, his action of taking cognizance is much less familiar to us as a concept than disavowal; it had to wait until 1972 to be formulated, in encore, and it is marked by what is, for us, the radical strangeness of the master’s exclusion of his own jouissance, an exclusion that is unfamiliar for us and is difficult for us to grasp. the master’s taking of cognizance is not the symmetrical opposite of the budding fetishist’s refusal to do so. the latter refuses to recognize what is empirically available to him in sense perceptions; the master, however, acknowledges something that is never present to the senses as such: something of which the gaze as object a—which lacan defines as “unapprehensible”—is itself the index (four fundamental concepts, 83). the master recognizes not a sense-perception, but a logical position that is located beyond the object a: this position is that of the unmoved mover, which stands outside, and thus constitutes an exception to the system of spheres. for the master, this figure has the status of the at-least-one element outside castration——and his acknowledgement of it becomes something like the primordial bejahung, the “judgment of attribution” that marks him as radically castrated and constitutes his position as master.16 the master can then claim that he has the “right” to command others because he believes that his affirmation—his bejahung—is a sign of his strength. as a consequence, he claims to be unlike the fetishist; he supposedly does not allow psychic holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 104 and libidinal concerns to prevent him from affirming the correctness of his perceptions. he presents his own subjective and libidinal impasses as virtues, by using his “clear-sighted” perception of reality as the source of his power. such a choice gives the master a very particular relation to the freudian “reality principle.” lacan had always argued that, as he says in the ethics of psychoanalysis, “the world of perception is represented by freud as dependent on the fundamental hallucination without which there would be no attention available”; reality would not interest us if we did not believe that we could locate in it an hallucinated representation of what has once satisfied us (53). the master, however, seeks to approach the reality principle more directly, in a way that is not oriented by the search for an hallucinated satisfaction; in freud’s words, his goal is to “form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and…make a real alteration in them,” without needing this world to be “distorted” by his own jouissance.17 if this construction of the master’s fundamental epistemological position is correct, then it will affect our understanding of his connection with the slave’s knowledge. his conception of the world provides him with a relation to reality that underlies his domination of the slave and determines his relation to knowledge. he himself knows “nothing,” for he does not occupy the place where knowledge is to be found; his position as bearer of the master signifier does, however, enable him to intervene upon and judge this knowledge: to prescribe the characteristics that the signifiers in this set should possess. the master becomes a sort of “policeman” of reality: he patrols the border between reality and our presentations of it, acting to ensure that each signifier corresponds to its atom of reality. he thereby upholds the preeminence of reality over the knowledge that presents it. this species of surveillance becomes an integral part of the process by which the master takes possession of the slave’s knowledge, and will thereby gradually enable the discourse of the university to emerge, in a form that lacan characterizes, in the other side of psychoanalysis, as a “pure knowledge of the master, ruled by his command” (104). the discourse of the master thus presents us with a social practice that has constraining effects upon the unconscious and libidinal positions of its participants. the position of the master does not correspond directly with the graph of desire, which presents relations of speech in which fantasy plays an almost necessary role; the master’s exclusion of fantasy and his very different relation to reality are not parts of a theory of ideology based upon the graph. this significant difference will bring us back to the question with which i began this discussion: what is the capitalist discourse and what does it mean to qualify a discourse as “capitalist”? for the moment, an answer to this question remains impossible, but several preliminary observations can be made. first, with the capitalist discourse, it is not at all clear that the two mainsprings of the lacanian theory of ideology, fantasy and the reality that it frames, will be able to operate at all. if the capitalist discourse is the modern “substitute” for the discourse of the master, then in spite of the radical differences between the two, it is uncertain that it reholland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 105 stores the operation of the fantasy. the capitalist mode of production would then be obliged to gain and keep its hold on us by some other means. second, it is also uncertain that the “capitalism” in question in this discourse is even fundamentally a mode of production. as we shall see, when lacan defines the structural particularity of the capitalist discourse, he does so by emphasizing the very specific character of the jouissance and the unconscious relations of those who are entrapped within it; he claims that it is marked by a foreclosure of castration. any direct or indirect connection between this “capitalist” characteristic and the capitalist mode of production will therefore not be apparent from the start. it would itself have to become the object of an investigation. 2. the capitalist discourse lacan, indeed, himself required a fairly long time to define the particularity of both the capitalist discourse and the specificity of the jouissance that is to be found within it. in the other side of psychoanalysis, he sometimes locates capitalism within the discourse of the master, positing that marx’s worker is a direct descendant of hegel’s slave; just as “the slave will, over time, demonstrate [the master’s truth] to him,” so the worker will spend his/her time in “fomenting [the capitalist master’s] surplus-jouissance” (107). lacan’s writing of the capitalist discourse as such, and the rather spare comments that he made about it, would have to wait another two years, until 1972. they will enable us to take the measure of both the similarity and the difference between this discourse and that of the master. what these two discourses have in common, as the seventeenth seminar suggests, is the way in which surplus-jouissance is produced. unlike the discourse of the master, however, “capitalism,” for lacan, institutes a series of relations in which this force of the plus-de-jouir makes the unconscious—to the extent that the latter can be grasped in terms of signifiers—cease to operate. this radical change has several consequences: a compulsion to repeat that may never cease and new forms of the superego and the trauma. the two discourses share a common account of the production of the plus-de-jouir, one that lacan had begun to formulate as early as november 1968, before he had even presented his theory of discourse. he gave his first exposition of this concept in the opening sections of his seminar, d’un autre à l’autre, by means of a reference to marx’s account of surplus-value. for marx, the production of a surplus-value is synonymous with the creation of capital. in the second part of volume i of capital, marx sets himself the task of tracing “[t]he [t]ransformation of [m]oney into [c]apital” and thus of showing how money, which had been exchanged in both the ancient and the medieval worlds, had mutated into something that would become the basis of a new mode of production.18 in this new mode, the capitalist uses the money that is at his disposal in order to buy both the means of production and labor-power. the latter is purchased at its current exchange-value, but its use-value holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 106 oten proves to be much greater; in the course of a day, workers may produce a value that is, for example, “double what the capitalist” has paid them (301). the capitalist appropriates this “increment or excess” and the appearance of this new “surplus-value” is crucial: marx locates in it the point at which money is changed into capital and the element upon which capitalism is founded (251). the capitalist appropriates this new value that has been produced, and uses a part of it to repeat and expand the process. he buys more material and hires more workers in order to obtain an even greater surplus-value, thus instituting a process that could, in theory, continue forever. within this system, the production of surplus-value “takes place only within [a] constantly renewed movement. the movement of capital is… limitless” (253). lacan’s claim that marx was the inventor of the symptom is well-known.19 it could just as well be argued that he was also the inventor of the concept of the compulsion to repeat; the capitalist mode of production’s continual pursuit of profit becomes the endless movement of an infernal machine. within the domain not of the psyche but of economics, marx delineated a process by which the production of something new would institute a sort of automatism, a structural necessity in which this new value “forms of itself the starting-point for a new cycle” (253). in d’un autre à l’autre, lacan’s recognition of this structural necessity becomes the basis of a new definition of the genesis of the objet petit a. in this seminar, he no longer―as he had done earlier, in seminars such as anxiety and the four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis―uses the mathematical term, “remainder,” as a way of theorizing this object (four fundamental concepts, 154). he ceases to treat it as an element of the real that has been let over from the process of transforming the latter into signifiers, and instead, referring explicitly to marx, defines it as a real object that is gradually produced by the repeated elaboration of signifiers. playing upon the french translation of mehrwert, surplus-value, as “plus-value,” he dubs the object a as the plus-de-jouir, a “surplus-jouisance,” and argues that the production of the object a is “homologous” to that of surplus-value (d’un autre, 29, 45–46).20 just as labor produces surplus-value, so the gradual establishment of knowledge― the elaboration of a set of traits, each of which fixes a part of our jouissance and satisfaction―produces something else: a certain kind of precipitate or sediment (180). the latter would not exist if there were no process of creating signifiers, but it is not itself a signifier: it cannot give rise to meaning by being enchained with other signifiers. this generation of knowledge is a process that is repeated many times, and with each repetition, more of the precipitate is generated, with the result that ater a certain point, it coagulates into a consistent object, which stands in relation to knowledge as a surplus-jouissance. this object, as some of lacan’s formulations make clear, does not comfort us and palliate our lack; instead, he links it explicitly to freud’s concept of the death drive. it is produced by the “renunciation of jouissance,” a renunciation that is presented less as a deliberate choice than as a consequence of a structural impossibility: that of translating jouissance into signifiers. the attempt to do so inevitably results in holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 107 the loss of a part of it, a loss that gradually solidifies into the plus-de-jouir. the result of this renunciation is that the surplus-jouissance assumes the status of a cause of the “discontents of civilization” (40). this direct reference to civilization and its discontents indicates the profound connection between this jouissance and what freud formulated concerning the superego. in this work, freud had argued that the effect of what the standard edition translates as the “renunciation of instinct” is the “erection of an internal authority”―the superego―that watches over and torments the ego.21 the repetition that characterizes the production of surplus-value in marx thus provides lacan, in the opening sessions of d’un autre à l’autre with a way of beginning to rethink the death drive. although this conception of the object a was presented shortly ater the events of may 1968, an understanding of some of its mortal effects would only come during the winter and spring of 1972, in the course of several presentations that were made outside the framework of his regular seminar. here, he began to speak of a fith, “capitalist” discourse, a paradoxical one, for its very existence disrupts the logic of discourse. this discourse is marked by precisely the action that is unavailable to the master in his own discourse: the appropriation of surplus-jouissance. lacan pinpointed one of the central characteristics of the capitalist discourse in an aside that he made in the course of a lecture given january 6, 1972 to the interns at the at hôpital de sainte-anne. there he claims that “what distinguishes the discourse of capitalism is this―the verwerfung, the rejection, the throwing outside all the symbolic fields… of what? of castration. every order, every discourse that has capitalism in common sets aside what we shall call simply the matters of love.”22 then, four months later, in a lecture delivered in milan entitled “du discours psychanalytique,” lacan continued these reflections by providing a writing of the structure of the capitalist discourse (40): this writing shows that this discourse is a mutation of that of the master; the foreclosure of castration is written as an inversion of the two terms that are located on the let side of the latter—s 1 and —so that the place of the agent is now occupied by the  and that of truth by the s 1 . one of the major effects of this inversion is the breaking through of the barrier between a and , which characterizes the discourse of the master. because the  has ceased to be located in the position of truth, and is found, instead, at that of the agent, the plus-de-jouir can reach it directly. the , rather than the capitalist, appropriates surplus-jouissance, and the gap between subject and object is thereby abolished. if, in the discourse of the master, the a had been rendered so radically unavailable that the  could obtain no sense of it, here it is too fully present. the  is violently “completed” by its object, and through this encounter, castration ceases to exist. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 108 this foreclosure of castration—the inundation of the  by the a—is the opposite of the situation that lacan had described in the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, in his discussion of the trompe l’oeil, as the “taming” of the gaze. in that seminar, in telling the anecdote concerning the hellenistic painters, zeuxis and parrhasios, he was concerned with showing the result of the introduction of castration—of the -φ—into the object a. ater zeuxis had painted a bunch of grapes that was so convincing that birds tried to eat it, parrhasios painted “a veil so lifelike that zeuxis, turning towards him said, well, and now show us what you have painted behind it” (103). the revelation of the trompe l’oeil—that there is nothing behind the veil—however, has a calming effect upon this impulse; it reduces the invasive quality of the wish to look, thereby lessening the violence of a tendency that, when let to itself, would have the “effect of arresting movement and…of killing life” (55). the trompe l’oeil thus introduces a mode of castration that is not as radical as what determines the master’s position; the  has access to a, while also maintaining a distance from it, so that it is not overwhelmed by the libidinal object. in the capitalist discourse, on the other hand, the relation between the  and the a is precisely the opposite: the a is unmarked by the -φ, and the  is stricken by the encounter with it. since this subject is not the psychological “subject” of consciousness, but is, instead, related to the unconscious and its chain of signifiers, it is “stricken,” however, in quite a particular sense. what is stunned and overwhelmed is the very status of the unconscious; the absence of castration will involve something like the disappearance of unconscious formations. this disappearance can occur because one of the roles of castration is to enable jouissance to be ciphered into what we can apprehend as the signifiers of the unconscious. such a role is implied by lacan’s very broad claim that every signifier ciphered by the unconscious refers to castration and has a phallic “signification.” the latter term, as he explained, is to be understood in the sense of the fregean “bedeutung”; it concerns a word’s reference and denotation.23 each signifier can be taken to refer directly to castration, for that is the action that has made its production possible. castration enables the unconscious to generate signifiers by introducing a distance with respect to the overpowering quality of jouissance; if jouissance is too present, there is no need—or possibility—of symbolizing it. such symbolization can only take place when this jouissance is lessened, and this is what castration does, at the cost of leaving the subject with a jouissance that can only be experienced as “insufficient” (encore, 105). in other words, signifiers denote castration in part because the latter constitutes the condition for their possibility. it is within this context that one of the implications of the inversion of the s 1 and the  starts to become apparent. in the discourse of the master, the slave’s sinister subjection to the master’s supposed unconscious is based upon the formula that lacan used frequently in order to describe one of the fundamental structures of unconscious formations: the signifier represents the subject for another signifier. in this formulation, the problematic term is not “signifier,” for in analysis, we can apholland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 109 prehend very specific signifiers directly; we extract them from our dreams and our parapraxes, connect them with other signifiers, and thereby learn something about a desire whose existence we may well not have expected. the term that has a more difficult status is “subject,” for we can never have direct access to it. in explaining it, lacan frequently uses the aristotelian term, “hypokeimenon,” for it underlies the signifying chain, but its nature is fundamentally different from that of any signifier, and therefore its existence can only be a logical “supposition”; we can infer that it exists because of the effect of our encounter with the chain (other side, 13). it is a force that would seem to generate signifiers through a chiffrage, a ciphering, of jouissance; only by examining the chain can we form any hypothesis concerning its jouissance, an enjoyment that would seem to derive a part of its satisfaction through the very process of ciphering. none of these signifiers, however, is identical with the subject and none can encapsulate it; each of them tells us something about it that seems too partial that it ends up being little more than a “lie” about this subject. in the capitalist discourse, the consequence of the inversion of the s 1 and the  is that the signifier no longer represents the subject for another signifier. the capitalist discourse disarticulates the subject from both this signifier and knowledge. as a result, the  now precedes the signifier that had once represented it and ceases to be the subject of the unconscious; knowledge, in turn, is no longer presumed to be touched by such an unconscious. within this discourse, the unconscious ceases to operate. if this is the case, then we can answer in the negative the question of whether fantasy functions within the capitalist discourse. fantasy exists no more here than it does in the discourse of the master, but for a very different reason. the master knows nothing about his fantasy because the point of arrest between a and  prevents these two terms from communicating. what is paradoxical in the capitalist discourse is that it is precisely the absence of this point of arrest that renders the fantasy inoperative. the vector, a → , does not write the relation between the divided subject and the “external” object in which it locates its “being.” instead, it writes a violent breach of that delicate relation of “externality.” what had been the subject of the unconscious encounters the jouissance of the death drive; overwhelmed, it becomes merely an empty place. as a consequence, not only castration, but also much of the psychic apparatus of which the fantasy had been part are now abolished; this abolition renders the operation of this discourse very different from that of the graph of desire. in the graph, the fantasy had provided an answer to the question, che vuoi?, posed by our dim sense of the existence of the s(); when, however, the unconscious ceases to confront us with signifiers that disturb us because of their enigmatic quality, the s() disappears, along with any need to provide a response to it. the answer given by the fantasy provides us with a supple way of dealing with our castration, for it allows the -φ to be “switched from one of its terms to the other”: from  to a and holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 110 then back.24 with the foreclosure of this castration, not only the fantasy but also the very reason for its existence disappear. in a context in which the unconscious and fantasy cease to exist, one may wonder what would be the status of knowledge in the capitalist discourse, since it would no longer be linked to a supposed subject. in what follows, i will suggest that such knowledge can take various forms, which will have in common only the cutting of this link with the . as a first approach to its status—one that highlights its disconnection from the unconscious—let us imagine how a cognitive psychologist might conceive of one of the phenomena that has served as a foundation of analysis: the dream. this psychologist could well isolate in a dream elements that we would call signifiers, but s/he would not assume that they point enigmatically to an ungraspable term that underlies them, and about which we can only know partially and imperfectly. instead, this network of signifiers would be taken to be little more than the day’s residues, which are now being “processed” and laid to rest by the giant computer that is our mind. the elimination of the stopping-point between the a and the  in the discourse of the master has another consequence: it transforms the capitalist discourse into a sequence that, once one enters it, will become extremely difficult to exit. in the other discourses, these points of arrest between the places of the production and of truth help make it possible for anyone who is traversing a particular discourse to pause, take a distance from it, and try to move into another discourse. with the capitalist discourse, this pause does not occur. because of this change, one can move, without impediment, from starting-point back to the same point:  → s 1 → s 2 → a → ….25 this discourse thus “succeeds” in a way that the other discourses, marked as they are by the impasses between production and truth, do not. it reproduces, in the field of the psychic and the social bond, the limitless movement that characterizes capital; both domains are dominated by the same sort of infernal machine. once the circuit has been traversed and one returns to the beginning at , nothing favors one’s escape from this discourse and everything leads one, instead, to repeat the same path that has only just been taken. commenting on this circular motion in “du discours psychanalytique,” lacan notes that the inversion makes the discourse “work like a charm, like skids that have been fully greased, but that’s just it: it goes too fast, it consumes itself [ça se consomme], and it does this so well that it uses itself up [ça se consume]” (48). a sequence that moves faster and faster until its very efficiency leads to collapse and destruction: what lacan is describing can easily be understood as a specific mode of what freud calls the compulsion to repeat, and thus of the death drive. in “the uncanny,” freud describes this repetition as “the constant recurrence of the same thing,” a recurrence that points towards “a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic quality.”26 our entrapment within the capitalist discourse can take on a similar character; the sense of being caught within its continual movement constitutes a part of its nightmarish quality. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 111 if the capitalist discourse is indeed a form of the compulsion to repeat, then it can only be characterized as one in which the passion for ignorance is particularly aggravated, because of the destruction of the signifier’s capacity to represent the subject. freud, in elaborating his conception of this compulsion in beyond the pleasure principle, had been seeking to resolve a problem that had been brought to the fore by soldiers who had been traumatized during the first world war: they dreamed repeatedly about the experiences that had traumatized them. freud theorized that this constant repetition in dreams was part of an attempt to “bind” the trauma: to symbolize it, to translate something of it into signifiers, thus depriving it of some of its force.27 what distinguishes the capitalist discourse from the process that freud theorized is the way in which the former disables the attempt to transform trauma into signifiers. if one of the hallmarks of freud’s uncanny and the death drive is a compulsion to repeat, then one can speak of a capitalist uncanny in which repetition and jouissance take a very particular form. repetition does not enable the real to be symbolized; instead, this discourse becomes the site of an uncanny repetition in which a traumatic jouissance keeps recurring and can never be symbolized. in the capitalist discourse, the , rather than being the hypokeimenon, thus becomes the place of the trauma that is inseparable from this repetition.28 the vector, a → , writes this capitalist uncanny: the traumatic overwhelming of the subject by jouissance occurs over and over because this subject, wrenched out of its position as what is represented by the signifiers, is unable to lessen the force of the trauma by transmuting it into new signifiers. in this discourse, the endless movement of the machine becomes the machine’s very raison d’être and traumatic jouissance becomes the fuel that enables this repetition to continue. in treating capitalism as a discourse in which a signifier ceases to represent the subject for another signifier, lacan is departing somewhat from freud’s own formulations. as samo tomšič remarks in his analysis of the homology between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance, freud frequently approached the ciphering effected by the unconscious in terms of metaphors borrowed from the field of capitalist production; he used expressions such as “traumarbeit, dream-work, witzarbeit, jokework, etc.” this could be read as implying that the proletarian is precisely the “subject of the unconscious” and that the unconscious is an eminently capitalist enterprise (“homology,” 99, 111). i would like to take a slightly different tack, by suggesting that the capitalist discourse marks lacan’s departure from these formulations of freud’s. at least insofar as it delineates the conditions under which the unconscious ceases to operate, and is, indeed, rendered impossible, the  can now no longer be employed in just this way. if the  becomes the mark of a new form of trauma, the a becomes that of a new form of superego. at the beginning of d’un autre à l’autre, in sketching out the way in which surplus-jouissance is produced, lacan had likened it to freud’s account of the genesis of the superego in civilization and its discontents. the plus-de-jouir acts holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 112 as a superego, and this superego can function, for example, as the voice, which is linked to a call that lacan characterizes in a famous passage in encore: “the superego is the imperative of jouissance—enjoy!” (7). this object calls upon us to pursue an “absolute” jouissance, an injunction that is impossible for castrated figures to obey. this command, as lacan argues at the end of his seminar d’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant [on a discourse that would not be of the semblance], is “the origin of everything that has been elaborated in terms of moral conscience”; the push towards an unreachable jouissance comes, paradoxically, to clothe itself in a voice that demands that one obey traditional morality (178). in the capitalist discourse, surplus-jouissance also acts as superego, but its role is different, for it commands us to submit to a jouissance that has ceased to be impossible. because the command, “jouis!” or “enjoy!” is no longer a “correlate of castration,” it becomes imbued with a devastating power (encore, 7). the subject, in encountering the a, is required to lend itself to—to become the habitation of—a jouissance that contains too much excitation, and is therefore more or less impossible to bear. in this way, jouissance itself becomes a sort of authority, to which the subject is compelled to submit, and the effect of which will be traumatic.29 3. capitalist knowledge at this point, it still remains unclear why this discourse is qualified as capitalist. a compulsion to repeat has been initiated by surplus-jouissance, a term that is homologous to surplus-value, which itself begins a different process of repetition; the latter occurs within the infrastructure. this homology does not, in itself, suffice to enable us to qualify this discourse as specifically “capitalist” in the economic sense. if lacan’s discourses are attempts to theorize the fate of the unconscious and jouissance within specific social practices, then does this discourse provide us with a way of understanding the effect of certain capitalist structures? as a first, approximate, response to this question, one can consider  and s 2 as two aspects of the proletarian. the , overwhelmed and deprived of everything—especially its status as the term that underlies a chain of signifiers connected with the unconscious—has no recourse other than to solicit the capitalist, s 1 . submitting to the latter’s orders, the proletarian becomes a “worker” in the place of knowledge, thus producing surplus-jouissance, which will then lead to a repetition of the cycle. one way of theorizing the process by which this knowledge can become related to capitalism as a mode of production is provided by capitalist thinkers themselves. they do so through their concept of the homo œconomicus, the “subject” that they believe would be the correlate of capitalism in its various forms: one that obtains satisfaction by acting on the market. christian laval, in l’homme économique: essai sur les racines du néoliberalisme [homo œconomicus: an essay on the roots of neoliberalism], his intellectual history of the genesis and consequences of this concept, has shown how, for capitalist thinkers, a market cannot exist unless each participant holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 113 in it—each instance of homo œconomicus—has elaborated a sort of capitalist knowledge: a catalogue of what provides satisfactions or causes pain.30 the basis for such a catalogue was given its classical expression by jeremy bentham, at the beginning of his book, an introduction to the principles of morals and legislation: “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. it is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”31 building upon this foundation, each economic actor will rank the degree of satisfaction that various objects provide him or her, a procedure that is made possible by considering them purely in quantitative, rather than qualitative terms (laval 159). according to bentham’s notorious calculus of pleasures and pains, the “value” of any object is its “force,” the intensity of the satisfaction or sense of discomfort that it provides (bentham 29). this value can be calculated in a quasi-mathematical fashion by taking into account the intensity and duration of the pleasure or pain that is expected, along with its “certainty or uncertainty” and its “propinquity or remoteness” (29). as bentham states, whenever people have had “a clear view of their own interest,” they have always followed precisely this practice (32). in other words, such calculations are supposed to provide the basis for all trade and contracts (laval 158). the medium of such exchanges is money, which becomes the means par excellence of measuring the intensities of anticipated satisfaction in a way that would correspond to bentham’s calculus of pleasure. armed with such a conception of self-interest, individuals would be able to compete with each other in the market, each seeking to accumulate as much satisfaction for him/herself as possible. homo œconomicus, the figure who arranges the objects that provide such satisfactions according to their “values” is, as samo tomšič remarks, a purely “psychological” subject.32 calculations are conscious and satisfaction is judged on the basis of criteria that make no appeal to the split subject. such satisfaction, indeed, is not complicated by the considerations of any insuperable gaps between need and demand, between demand and desire, or between desire and jouissance; in the formulations of the earliest utilitarians and the classical economists, the object that i ask is, in effect, the one that will satisfy, in a seamless and unproblematic way, the goals that i have set for myself. for example, “jewelry…and fine clothing” will, without any great difficulty, succeed in “making us loveable or impressive” (laval 159). the goals of being loveable or impressive are not, in turn, considered to harbor discontents within themselves, discontents that would then render them less satisfying than had been foreseen.33 homo œconomicus, in cataloguing of objects in terms of the degree of satisfaction that they procure, shows us one of the principal forms taken by capitalist knowledge; grouped together, these rankings of intensity of satisfaction can comprise one of the most important and widespread instances of the s 2 in the capitalist discourse. as laval has noted, however, such a catalogue can only be constructed under one condition: all such objects are to be considered to be commensurable holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 114 with each other (158). in order for them to be compared, they must all provide a satisfaction—or a pain—that differs only in degree, and not in quality; certain satisfactions must not be so fundamentally different from the others that they can no longer even be compared with them. for psychoanalysis, this necessary commensurability of the satisfactions included within capitalist knowledge must be considered as one of the weakest elements of the capitalists’ formulations: it does not take into account the incompatibility between the pleasures recorded in the catalogue and surplus-jouissance. if the objects in this catalogue can be measured and ranked in a way that is considered to be fundamentally unproblematic, then they have the status of signifiers. lacan argued that each signifier in the place of knowledge has something like the status of a 1; the more that we speak of it within an analysis, the more it has the appearance of a relatively clear and distinct entity and it can therefore be theorized as a positive integer. on the other hand, surplus-jouissance stands radically apart from such a catalogue of satisfactions, for lacan has explicitly theorized, there is a non-relation between the signifiers collected in s 2 and the object a. the two are precisely incommensurable with each other. the object a, rather than being like a positive integer, is something like an irrational number; its boundaries, instead of having an integer’s distinctness, can never be marked out fully, and can only be written with an endless and nonrepeating decimal, such as 0.618 (d’un autre, 131).34 a number possessing this quality cannot be written in terms of a relatively neat proportion with other numbers; it thereby falls outside the utilitarian attempt to relate the numerical values of anticipated satisfactions to each other. for it, bentham’s calculus of pleasures and the various systems of currency would be nothing more than so many procrustean beds, which can only misapprehend the character of its jouissance. such systems are unable to take into account a surplus-jouissance that overwhelms the subject. if the preceding account of the functioning of the capitalist discourse is more or less correct, then it enables us to entertain some rather dire hypotheses concerning the effects of the calculations made by homo œconomicus. when the unconscious functions, every attempt to cipher jouissance into a knowledge about our satisfaction must necessarily miss a part of what is being aimed at, and the result is the production of the plus-de-jouir, which is linked to the death drive and the superego. the elaboration of capitalist knowledge made through utilitarian calculations of interest is necessarily cruder than the operations of the unconscious; what these calculations miss regarding jouissance is far more radical and therefore one may suppose that the production of surplus-jouissance—the violent embodiment of what cannot fit into knowledge—will be accomplished with an even greater rapidity and efficiency. if surplus-jouissance must remain alien to the catalogue of satisfactions, then one can well wonder about the particular forms through it will manifest itself in this discourse. if the object a is set apart radically from our usual satisfactions, then it is holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 115 not at all clear that consumer objects come to embody it and that the fith discourse is fundamentally a way of theorizing a “drive of consumption.”35 in most cases, consumer products would seem to be more closely related to the catalogue of capitalist knowledge than to surplus-jouissance; since the arrival of consumer capitalism, peoples’ calculations have come to be occupied more and more with the satisfaction that such items are expected to bring. the object of surplus-jouissance would presumably, for the most part, be somewhat different: it would be located anywhere the four objects of the drives—the breast, feces, the gaze and the voice—have taken up residence. if the consumer object may sometimes harbor the object a, the latter may also be found in a thousand places that have nothing to do with consumption. the distinguishing feature of this surplus-jouissance, instead, will be that it lacks lack; the inversion of the positions of s 1 and  enables the latter to encounter an object a that is not marked by the -φ. in 1968, lacan had suggested that this surplus-jouissance provides us with a way of conceiving of the superego, as freud had presented it in civilization and its discontents: it is produced through a structural “renunciation” of jouissance. lacan’s somewhat later formulations about the capitalist discourse place freud’s work in a certain perspective: they show the extent to which freud both grasped and fell short of understanding various mutations in the social bond. despite his important formulations about the production of the superego, he had perhaps not anticipated some of the effects of capitalism; the constant self-purification and radicalization of this mode of production may well have made certain of its features clearer to us now than they had been to him in 1930. freud had argued that civilization is based on an “internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closelyknit group,” but which can be “disturb[ed]” and imperilled by the aggression that arises from the death drive (133, 112). such formulations do not take into account the way in which capitalism seeks to transform this aggressiveness into an integral part of the system: universal competition, in which we are all compelled to take part, and the effect of which can only be psychic violence. perhaps more importantly, freud does not quite see the way in which this superego, created by the attempt to renounce the aggressive drives, not only creates a sense of malaise in us but also becomes the precise element that makes the repetition of the discourse possible. the object-superego ensures the death of the subject and the impossibility of the unconscious, thus allowing our minds to be colonized by a capitalist theory of knowledge and a new production of the object. for this discourse, our discontent is our excessive, tormenting jouissance, which enables capitalism to perpetuate itself. 4. looking into you if the plus-de-jouir, the superego’s push towards a jouissance that is not marked by castration, is not usually located in the object of consumption, this does not mean that it is rarely present in our everyday lives. on the contrary, it can be found everywhere, and can catch us at any time. one of the areas where we can learn holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 116 about this object is art and literature; these fields constantly mark out a place for it, soliciting its attention and charting its effects. don delillo’s cosmopolis36 takes as its theme the financial forces that now dominate the capitalist mode of production, but it is also a complex meditation upon the capitalist discourse itself. if lacan had imagined that this discourse could end up in exploding, delillo’s novel presents us with what is perhaps a somewhat optimistic dramatization of this event (du discours psychanalytique, 48). it also, and more importantly, shows, both in its themes and its form, the production of a lethal surplus-jouissance that has the potential to destroy the subject. this jouissance manifests itself not only in the novel’s characters, but in the very process of reading it. finally, it also approaches the difficult question of the relation of continuity and discontinuity between the master and the capitalist. it shows the latter’s doomed attempt to lend stability to this discourse by continuing and extending the master’s weltanschauung. the feverish attempt to ensure that language corresponds to an ever-changing reality will, however, have the opposite effect: it will induce a vertigo that will help precipitate the capitalist’s collapse. these processes, and the novel itself, begin with an activity that will finally become enmeshed within the capitalist discourse: reading. eric packer, the novel’s main character, is dominated by a sense of malaise. he is tormented by insomnia, finds “every act” to be “self-haunted,” and feels that the “palest thought carried an anxious shadow”; ruling out any psychic source of this dread, since “freud is finished,” he can only try to stabilize his reactions by “read[ing] his way into sleep” (6, 5). he thus becomes a sort of stand-in for those who read the pages of delillo’s own novel. a literary text is a very particular elaboration of knowledge, in the sense in which this term has been used throughout this essay: it consists of a set of signifiers which are articulated with each other in complex ways. well before the appearance of the object a as surplus-jouissance, packer discerns some elements of jouissance in these literary arrangements of knowledge: less in the meanings that may be produced, but in their very appearance upon the page, which calls upon the reader to look at it. when he reads a poem, his feelings “float in the white space around the lines,” and he is enchanted by the appearance of “spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper” (66, 5). what calls out to packer when he reads a text is a series of abstract shapes: the “eloquence of alphabets” (24). with these abstract letters, we are not far from lacan’s reminder that the alphabet began as representations of commonplace objects; the capital, “a,” for example, was first the drawing of the head of a bull or cow, which was then turned upside-down, and gradually ceasing to be an image, became an abstract figure.37 now, as we read, it is as if the very abstractness of the letters grasps our attention and draws us into a text, soliciting us to continue reading. such reading is an activity: it mobilizes a part of our bodies—our eyes—as well as something that is incorporeal—the gaze—which is connected with our jouissance and which may well show its first inchoate stirrings at the initial moment of our encounter with a text. what packer does not note, in looking at the volumes of holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 117 poetry, is that if our attention is to continue to concern itself with the text, our minds must work upon these letters; letters fix words, and as we move through the text, we subject them to a deciphering that turns them into sentences. in certain cases, this grammatical structure will enable us to give these sentences a relatively simple signification, but such words will also confront us with enigmas to which it will be more difficult to respond. if a text acts upon us, it will have particular effects that we cannot calculate from the beginning; what cosmopolis itself will suggest is that the capitalist discourse can involve a specific mode of reading. even before this mode reveals itself, however, cosmopolis shows us another, rather surprising aspect of reading; its suggests that the lover of literature’s initial fascination with a text is not as different as we might hope from a financier’s interest in a very different arrangement of knowledge. eric packer is a speculator, and his concern with poetry is dwarfed by his interest in the columns of numbers that formalize the fluctuations in the “value” of currency and goods on international markets. in his opinion, “it was shallow thinking to maintain that [the] numbers and charts” that record the fluctuations of capital “were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets” (24). instead, for those who believe that goods provide satisfaction and that money measures the latter, these numbers are irradiated by the jouissance that they condense within themselves; “data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process” (24). such jouissance exerts an attraction both upon those who read these data and those—located in the s 2 of the capitalist discourse—who work to formalize it. money is already an abstract entity, and such knowledge-workers, who focus on its importance, experience a certain jouissance in formalizing it even further and increasing its abstractness; this is part of what replaces the jouissance of ciphering, the process by which something of our unconscious comes to be symbolized. this formalizing is eric packer’s particular interest; inhabiting the place of the capitalist, s 1 , he commands his workers to elaborate knowledge. such knowledge concerns, in particular, the relative values of various currencies, but it also extends to other areas. certain employees, for example, analyze security threats made against packer, putting under a microscope each movement that he may make in order to assess his vulnerability to an attack. packer, in turn, shows a particular interest in critiquing the limits of such analyses, pointing to their blind spots and pushing his employees to expand and deepen their analyses. in hearing his security analyst announce with certainty that “our system’s secure—we’re impenetrable… there’s no vulnerable point of entry,” packer immediately pinpoints the weak spot in this expert’s knowledge: “where was the car last night ater we ran our tests?” (12). for packer, knowledge and its formalization never reach a point where they can be complete. what complicates his project is an inheritance from the discourse of the master, for he seeks to use his position as capitalist to recreate and extend the master’s “world.” he attempts to locate capitalist financial patterns within a system of “spheres”; he holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 118 then induces his workers to show that such patterns respond to the same sort of analysis that the natural world does and conform to mathematical patterns that can be found in nature. the most advanced techniques of formalization are put at the service of discovering a system of correspondences, a method that one of his former employees will describe: you tried to predict movements in the yen by drawing on patterns from nature…. the mathematical properties of tree rings, sunflower seeds, the limbs of galactic spirals…. the way signals from a pulsar in deepest space can describe the fluctuation of a given stock or currency…. how market cycles can be interchangeable with the time cycles of grasshopper breeding, wheat harvesting (200). one of the consequences of this newly formalized reintroduction of the master’s system is the very approach to language that lacan had criticized: the assumption that there is an adequation between it and reality. packer’s concern with this correspondence, however, will manifest itself in a particularly violent way, since he seeks to make the world exist in a situation that is radically different from the one in which the master commanded the slave. the master had inhabited a world that was believed to be fundamentally stable and eternal, and in which it was not difficult to grasp a reality that did not change. packer’s relation to reality is very different: his goal is to render it as unstable and mutable as possible: to intervene upon it, altering it with each new “advance” in technology and financial capitalism. such constant mutation, however, brings about a radical instability in the language that is supposed to exist in adequation to reality; each time that an atom of reality changes, the signifier that had corresponded to it is rendered more or less obsolete. as a consequence, packer finds himself preoccupied by the conviction that particular common nouns or compound nouns should be destroyed and then be replaced with words that would be more fully adequated to the most recent reality. at the beginning of the novel, he brings his dissatisfaction to bear upon the word, “skyscraper,” which disturbs him because of its anachronistic quality. in the contemporary world, where such towers are the norm rather than a rarity, there is no longer any sky that can be “scraped” in such a manner; the word belongs only “to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born” (9). similarly, the expression, “automated teller machines” seems out-of-date; it is “aged and burdened by its own historical memory,” suffering because it retains a reference to “fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts,” both of which belong to a past that has now become so distant that even mentioning it seems irrelevant (54). indeed, in the course of the novel, the common nouns, “walkie-talkie” and even “computer,” among others, come in for the same criticism (102, 104). by the end of the book, it is apparent that this vertiginous procedure has become so generalized that no common noun can escape it; any of them can become the object of packer’s automatic suspicion and will to destruction. when he enters the building where he will die, he notices that “a man lay dead or sleeping in the vestibule, if this is still a word” (182). the willed impermanence of reality has a corrosive effect holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 119 upon both a language that packer would like to make into its mere reflection and the capitalist’s attempt to perpetuate the master’s world. a project of such complexity must inevitably encounter stumbling blocks, and both the thematics and the form of the novel give body to a violence that is produced by failures and impasses of formalization; the attempt to revivify the master’s world leads to catastrophe. cosmopolis takes place on the day when the limits of packer’s system of calculation become apparent and bring him to a ruin that is not merely financial. having been “borrowing yen at extremely low interest rates and using this money to speculate heavily in stocks that would yield potentially high returns,” he has let himself vulnerable to the eventuality that the value of the yen would rise; “the stronger [it] became the more money he [would] nee[d] to pay back the loan” (84). he has done so because every element of his complex system of formalization has led him to believe that “the yen could not go any higher”; nevertheless, “it did go higher time and again,” and in this result that he had deemed to be impossible, he discerns the failure of his own process (84). cosmopolis thematizes the results of this failure: the repetitive workings of the machine of calculation results in the production of a plus-de-jouir that is marked by a lethal violence. this object is the gaze, and it arises with a strength and violence that seems directly connected with the novel’s repeated concerns with formalization and destruction; it is as if the elaborating of knowledge has been precipitating a kind of sediment, which now assumes consistent form, in the look of a former employee, richard sheets. the latter describes with great lucidity the effect upon him of packer’s method of formalization. “you made this form of analysis horribly and seductively precise,” and its very complexity destabilizes workers, causing a sense of vertigo in them: “your system is so microtimed that i couldn’t keep up with it. i couldn’t find it. it’s so infinitesimal. i began to hate my work, and you, and all the numbers on my screen, and every minute of my life” (200, 191). while falling gradually into madness, sheets became more and more fascinated with packer himself, becoming the steady, determined presence through which something of the ungraspable and “evanescent” object that is the gaze can flash out (four fundamental concepts, 77). he becomes dominated by the impulse to seek packer out, and all the technology that the latter has used to show himself has had the effect of catching sheets’s gaze: “i used to watch you meditate, online…. i couldn’t stop watching…. i watched every minute. i looked into you” (delillo, 198). this look is not the tamed gaze, the intensity of which would be lessened by castration. instead, it is marked by violence and aims at packer’s destruction; in comparison with it, the gun with which sheets shoots him is little more than the tool by which this look can meet its goal. richard sheets’s look is the surplus-jouissance of the capitalist discourse. if one effect of this method of formalization is to locate sheets as marking the place of the object a, another is to put packer in the position of the . the financier embraces his own destruction; having, at the beginning of the novel, located the quesholland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 120 tion of where the limousines are kept at night as the limit of his security experts’ knowledge, packer places himself on a trajectory that leads to this place, where, as if by chance, he falls into the hands of his murderer. sheets, himself, struck by this coincidence, remarks, “we want to know why you’d willingly enter a house where there’s someone inside who’s prepared to kill you.” packer, as his antagonist surmises, could only have experienced “some kind of unexpected failure. a shock to your self-esteem” (190). the financier’s response is that “i couldn’t figure out the yen” and therefore “became halfhearted,” and determined, as sheets says, to “bring everything down” (190). in this way, packer marks himself out as the , the place of the element that will be annihilated by the force of surplus-jouissance. this encounter is an instance of the capitalist uncanny: the experience of the violent shock of the a and the , an overwhelming of the subject that carries with it undertones of horror. in the case of cosmopolis, this repetition goes beyond that of the novel’s plot, in which packer thinks obsessively about the fall of the yen and recurrently bets his and other people’s funds on it. it also comes to involve the reader, whose look will acquire something of the violence associated with the plusde-jouir. if, in much of the novel, eric packer stands in for the reader, experiencing the way in which the attraction of black marks on a white page draws him/her into a text, by the end, richard sheets becomes the figure who embodies the violence of reading. cosmopolis is a text—and it is not the only one—that leads us to read within the capitalist discourse, and to do so is, finally, to become a part of the destruction that reigns at the end of the novel. reading this novel is a process in which packer’s very preoccupations teach us what to look for as we read; if, at first, the abstract beauty of the novel’s letters played a part in capturing our attention, we are gradually drawn into a would-be world in which even the bizarre theory of the adequation between reality and language, which is a part of capitalist knowledge in this novel, can have a constraining effect upon us. reading can become violent, in part, because it comes to be touched by the will to destruction that is characteristic of packer’s approach to language: the determination to efface the existence of an entire series of words that no longer corresponds to the reality that he is struggling to bring into existence. his constant concern can affect the way in which we read this novel; his will to obliteration becomes part of our own way of approaching the words on the page. to read cosmopolis is to imagine that the words that we see before our eyes at any particular moment can cease to exist. this process can also, however, be extended; to follow, page ater page, the main character’s determination to “bring everything down” is also to imagine that such destruction could be applied to a very particular proper name: “eric packer” itself can disappear. at the end of this novel, this will to destruction, as applied to packer, becomes divorced from any attempt to maintain the capitalist’s “world” and becomes a jouissance that can be imputed to the process of reading. eric packer’s self-engineered death is designed to call to the gaze; my thesis is that it has the potential to attract the reader’s look, the small, incorporeal element that is distinct from the eye, holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 121 and which becomes the invisible incarnation of the reader’s jouissance. the will to destruction that the reader has been “trained” to apply to the “obsolete” vocabulary becomes detached from the “world” and brought to bear upon parker himself. within the fiction, the murderous gaze of richard sheets comes thereby to stand in for that of the reader. the more the reader imagines such a destruction, the more fully does his/her own look come to be represented by, and even to identify itself with this look.38 within the capitalist discourse, the activity of reading, like the most common activities of everyday life, thereby becomes marked by violence. this violence is the inevitable result of the annihilation of the subject that had been represented by one signifier for another. notes 1. jacques lacan, “du discours psychanalytique” in lacan in italia/lacan en italie (19531978), ed. by giacomo contri (milan: la salamandra, 1978) 10. 2. the following discussion of žižek’s work is necessarily very partial. for example, it does not take into account later developments of this theory of ideology, including his increasingly complex engagement with marxism. it also does not enter into his discussions of the symptom, his important treatments of the act, or his own considerations on discourse. for more extensive examinations of his ideology-analysis, see ronan de calan and raoul moati, žižek, marxisme et psychanalyse (paris: presses universitaires de france, 2012) 47–100; fabio vighi and heiko feldner, žižek: beyond foucault (basingstoke; new york: palgrave macmillan, 2007) 29–40. 3. louis althusser, “ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation),” in lenin and philosophy and other essays, trans. by ben brewster (new york: monthly review press, 1972) 162, 173. 4. slavoj žižek, the sublime object of ideology (london: verso, 1989) 124. 5. jacques lacan, the other side of psychoanalysis [seminar xvii], ed. by jacques-alain miller, trans. by russell grigg (new york: norton, 2007) 13. when lacan speaks here of “relations,” he is referring to the ability of a particular term to act upon the next term in the series: a master, for example, commands the slave, who then produces the plus-de-jouir. such relations, if they occur, are indicated by vectors. the term, “relation,” is thus used in a somewhat different sense than it is in lacan’s later discussions of the sexual relation, or rather, lack of it. in the latter sense, the term refers, instead, to questions of the logical commensurability or incommensurability of certain terms. this is not to say, however, that the discourses are untouched by problems of commensurability; knowledge and surplus jouissance are incommensurable with each other. 6. jacques lacan, on feminine sexuality: the limits of love and knowledge, ed. by jacquesalain miller, trans. by bruce fink (new york: norton, 1998) 17. 7. jacques lacan, the ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 [seminar vii], ed. by jacques-alain miller, trans. by dennis porter (new york: norton, 1986) 22. 8. jacques lacan, le séminaire, livre xvi: d’un autre à l’autre 1968-1969, ed. jacques-alain miller (paris: seuil, 2006) 385. since the master and the slave are, first of all, historical roles held by men, i have used the masculine pronoun for both throughout this discussion. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 122 9. see colette soler, “the subject and the other (ii),” in reading seminar xi: lacan’s four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: including the first english translation of “position of the unconscious” by jacques lacan, ed. by richard feldstein, bruce fink, and maire jaanus (albany: suny press, 1995). this venn diagram marks a further formalization of the diagram that appears in jacques lacan, the four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis, ed. by jacques-alain miller, trans. by alan sheridan (new york: norton, 1978). also see bruce fink, the lacanian subject: between language and jouissance, (princeton: princeton university press, 1995). there is an especially useful discussion of primal repression in fink’s article “alienation and separation: logical moments for lacan’s dialectic of drive,” newsletter of the freudian field. 4.1 & 2 (1990). 10. it is here that one can locate the imposture that lies behind the best-known depiction of the master’s relation to the slave’s knowledge: plato’s portrayal of socrates’ dialogue with the slave in the meno. claiming that the slave already possesses a knowledge of incommensurable numbers, but has simply forgotten it, socrates asks him a series of questions that are supposed to lead him to remember it. however, as lacan remarks, the slave is simply answering what “the questions already dictate as their response,” and perhaps more importantly, a true master could not ask these questions, since he is defined precisely as lacking the knowledge that they presuppose (other side, 22). 11. for a discussion of the master’s relation to reality, see john holland, “la fin du monde,” psychanalyse. 28 (2013): 62–66. 12. sigmund freud, the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud (london: hogarth press, 1953-1974), xxii (1964): “the question of a weltanschauung,” 158–84. 13. alexandre koyré, from the closed world to the infinite universe (baltimore: johns hopkins, 1957) 41–2. 14. jacques lacan, “séminaire xii : problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 1964-1965,” n.d., staferla, 75. available at <http://staferla.free.fr/s12/s12%20problemes.pdf>. 15. sigmund freud, xxi (1961): “fetishism,” 153. 16. jacques lacan, “on a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis,” in écrits: the first complete edition in english, trans. by bruce fink, héloïse fink, and russell grigg (new york: norton, 2006) 465. in this écrit, the bejahung concerns the judgment that the signifier of the name-of-the-father exists, and is thus directly opposed to the psychotic’s verwerfung, foreclosure of this signifier. although the master has no access to fantasy, he can affirm the existence of a gaze through the vector that goes directly from a to s 1 in the writing of this discourse in “du discours psychanalytique.” 17. sigmund freud, xii (1958): “formulations on the two principles of mental functioning,” 219. 18. karl marx, capital: a critique of political economy, trans. by ben fowkes (london: penguin books in association with new let review, 1981) 245. 19. for example, see jacques lacan, le séminaire de jacques lacan, livre xviii, d’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant 1970-1971, ed. by jacques-alain miller (paris: seuil, 2006) 164 and pierre bruno, lacan, passeur de marx: l’invention du symptôme (toulouse: érès, 2010) 227–254. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 123 20. for fuller discussions of this homology, see samo tomšič, “homology: marx and lacan,” s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 5 (2012): 98–113. also see alenka zupančič, “when surplus enjoyment meets surplus value,” 155–178, and juliet flower maccannell, “more thoughts for the times on war and death: the discourse of capitalism in seminar xvii,” 195–215, both of which can be found in jacques lacan and the other side of psychoanalysis: reflections on seminar xvii, ed. by justin clemens and russell grigg (durham: duke university press, 2006). 21. sigmund freud, xxi (1961): “civilization and its discontents,” 40. 22. jacques lacan, je parle aux murs: entretiens de la chapelle de sainte-anne, ed. by jacquesalain miller (paris: seuil, 2011) 96. see also pierre bruno, “the capitalist exemption,” in s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 63-79. 23. jacques lacan, le séminaire, livre xix: ...ou pire, 1971-1972, ed. by jacques-alain miller (paris: seuil, 2011) 55. for frege, the “bedeutung” of a name is its reference, as distinguished from its sense. because the planet venus was referred to as both the “morning star” and the “evening star,” frege argues that “the bedeutung of ‘evening star’ would be the same as that of ‘morning star,’ but not the sense.” gottlob frege, “on sinn and bedeutung,” in the frege reader, ed. by michael beaney, trans. by michael beany (oxford: blackwell, 1997) 152. 24. jacques lacan, “the subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconscious,” in ecrits: the first complete translation in english, trans. by bruce fink, héloïse fink, and russell grigg (new york: norton, 2006) 699. 25. see marie-jean sauret, “psychopathology and fractures of the social bond,” s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 38-62. 26. sigmund freud, xvii (1955): “the uncanny,” 238. 27. sigmund freud, xviii (1955): “beyond the pleasure principle,” 62. 28. for a different view of the relation between capitalism and trauma, which highlights the increasing fragility of the psyche and the difficulty of surmounting trauma in the contemporary world, see colette soler, l’époque des traumatismes/the era of traumatism, ed. by diego mautino, trans. by berti glaubach and susy roizin (rome: biblink, 2005) 68–73. 29. another consequence of the capitalist discourse is its radical incompatibility with the other jouissance, which is related to the pas-tout and femininity (encore, 71-74). the particularity of the feminine is that it offers a way to go beyond the phallus and castration. the capitalist discourse would seem to lay a trap on this path; in preventing the advent of castration, it also eliminates the possibility of surpassing the latter. 30. christian laval, l’homme économique: essai sur les racines du néolibéralisme (paris: gallimard, 2007) 159. for a žižekian treatment of homo œconomicus, see heiko feldner and fabio vighi, critical theory and the crisis of contemporary capitalism (new york: bloomsbury, 2015) 42–60. 31. jeremy bentham, an introduction to the principles of morals and legislation (oxford: clarendon press, 1907) 1. available at <https://ia700406.us.archive.org/0/items/princmoralsleg00bentuot/princmoralsleg00bentuot.pdf> 32. samo tomšič, “laughter and capitalism,” s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 8 (2015): 22-37. holland: the capitalist uncanny s8 (2015): 124 33. as a result of the ever-increasing radicalization of capitalist practices over the course of the last two centuries, bentham’s successors have, of course, found themselves obliged to explain why the implementation of their suggested policies has not let us all awash in joy. such attempts have not stopped with marginal utility theory, and have, in recent years, involved the creation of more and more complex epicycles in an attempt to save the appearances of capitalist utilitarianism. my article “la fin du monde,” 68-74, discusses recent work by gary becker and luis rayo, who have used evolutionary biology and psychology to explain the stubborn persistence of unhappiness. 34. for more on irrational numbers in lacan, see guy le gaufey, hiatus sexualis: du nonrapport sexuel selon lacan (paris: epel, 2013) 13–32 and guy le gaufey, “towards a critical reading of the formulae of sexuation,” trans. by cormac gallagher (2008), available at <http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/le-gaufey.pdf>. 35. pietro bianchi, “from representation to class struggle: reply to samo tomšič,” s: journal of the circle for lacanian ideology critique 5 (2012): 120. 36. don delillo, cosmopolis: a novel, (new york; london; toronto: scribner, 2003). 37. jacques lacan, “séminaire ix: l’identification, 1961-1962,” n.d. session of december 20, 1961. available at <http://staferla.free.fr/s9/s9%20l%27identification.pdf>. 38. this account of the violence of reading within the capitalist discourse emphasizes its origin and growth in terms of a problematic of reading that is internal to cosmopolis: the relation between, on the one hand, the attraction exerted by the letter, and, on the other, a meaning that is concerned with, and encourages thoughts about the destruction of elements of language. one can also mention a simpler and more commonsensical aspect of the reader’s destructiveness: i suspect that many readers find packer to be a reprehensible character and are rather pleased when sheets murders him. article 4-2 18 peer to peer: from technology to politics to a new civilisation? michel bauwens mbauwens@skynet.be, http://users.skynet.be/michel.bauwens a specter is haunting the world: the specter of peer to peer. the existing economic system is trying to co-opt it, but it is also a harbinger of a new type of human relationship, and may in the end be incompatible with informational capitalism. i. technology 1. peer to peer as technological paradigm business and technology watchers would have a hard time of avoiding it, as peer to peer is everywhere these days. peer to peer is first of all a new technological paradigm for the organisation of the information and communication infrastructure that is the very basis of our postindustrial economy. the internet itself, as network of networks, is an expression of this paradigm. as ‘end to end’ or ‘point to point’ network, it has replaced both the earlier hierarchical mainframe form, but also the client-server form, which posited a central server with associated dependent computers, associated in a network. instead, in a peer to peer network, intelligence is distributed everywhere. every node is capable of receiving and sending data. the first discussion note below explains why this peer to peer mode makes eminent sense in terms of efficiency, as compared to the older models. it should be noted that, just as networks, peer to peer can come into many hybrid forms, in which various forms of hierarchy can still be embedded (as with the internet, where all networks aren’t equal). but the very reason i’m using peer to peer is of course the promise of true equality, something that is not so clear when one uses the more generic term of ‘network’. this first section deals with the expressions of peer to peer in the field of technology. distributed computing is now considered to be the next step for the worldwide computing infrastructure, in the form of grid computing, 18 prajñâ vihâra, volume 4, number 1, july-december, 2003, 18-52 © 2000 by assumption university press 19 which allows every computer to use its spare cycles to contribute to the functioning of the whole, thereby obviating the need for servers altogether. the telecommunication infrastructure itself is in the process of being converted to the internet protocol and the time is not all too far away where even voice will transit over such p2p networks. in the recent weeks, telecom experts have been able to read about developments such as mesh networks or ad hoc networks, described in the economist: the mesh-networking approach, which is being pursued by several firms, does this in a particularly clever way. first, the neighbourhood is “seeded” by the installation of a “neighbourhood access point” (nap)—a radio base-station connected to the internet via a highspeed connection. homes and offices within range of this nap install antennas of their own, enabling them to access the internet at high speed. then comes the clever part. each of those homes and offices can also act as a relay for other homes and offices beyond the range of the original nap. as the mesh grows, each node communicates only with its neighbours, which pass internet traffic back and forth from the nap. it is thus possible to cover a large area quickly and cheaply.” (http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm? story_id=1176136) moreover, there is the worldwide development of wireless lan networks, by corporations on the one hand, but also by citizens installing such networks themselves, at very low cost. here’s a description of what is happening in hawaii, where a peer to peer wireless network is covering more than 300 square miles: now people all over the island are tapping into wiecking’s wireless links, surfing the web at speeds as much as 100 times greater than standard modems permit. high school teachers use the network to leapfrog a plodding state effort to wire schools. wildlife regulators use it to track poachers. and it’s all free. wiecking has built his network through a coalition of educators, researchers, and nonprofit organizations; with the right equipment and passwords, anyone who wants to tap in can do so, at no charge.” (http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,38492,00.html) michel bauwens 19 20 a recent article in fortune magazine uncovered yet another aspect of the coming peer to peer age in technology, by pointing out that the current ‘central server based’ methods for interactive tv are woefully inadequate to match supply and demand: “essentially, file-served television describes an internet for video content. anyone—from movie company to homeowner—could store video on his own hard disk and make it available for a price. movie and television companies would have tons of hard disks with huge capacities, since they can afford to store everything they produce. cable operators and satellite companies might have some hard disks to store the most popular content, since they can charge a premium for such stuff. and homeowners might have hard disks (possibly in the form of pvrs) that can be used as temporary storage for content that takes time to get or that they only want to rent—or permanent storage for what they’ve bought.” (http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml& doc_id=208364 ) in general one could say that the main attractivity of peer to peer is that it will seamlessly marry the world of the internet and the world of pc’s. originally, ordinary pc users who wanted to post content or services needed access to a server, which created inequality in access, but with true peer to peer file sharing technologies, any pc user is enabled to do this. 2. peer to peer as distribution mechanism the last story points to yet another aspect of peer to peer: its incredible force as distribution mechanism. indeed, the users of personal video recorders such as tivo are already using file sharing methods that allow them to exchange programs via the internet. but this is of course dwarfed by what is currently happening in the music world. again the advantage here should be obvious, as in this mode of distribution, no centralizing force can play a role of command and control, and every node can have access to the totality of the distributed information. the latest estimates say that: “worldwide annual downloads, according to estimates from places like webnoize, would indicate that the number of downloads — if you assume there are 10 songs on a cd – is something like five times the total number of cds 20 prajñâ vihâra 21 sold in the u.s. in a year, and one-and-a-half times the worldwide sales.” (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/06/13/liebowitz/index.html). the original file sharing systems, such as napster, audiogalaxy, and kazaa, still used centralservers or directories which could be tracked down and identified, and thus attacked in court, as indeed happened, thereby destroying these systems one by one. but today, the new wave of p2p systems avoid such central servers altogether. the most popular current system, an expression of the free software community, i.e. gnutella, had over 10 million users in mid-2002, and as they are indeed distributed and untraceable, have been immune to legal challenge. 3. peer to peer as production method p2p is not just the form of technology itself, but increasingly, it is a ‘process of production’, a way of organising the way that immaterial products are produced (and distributed and ‘consumed’). the first expression of this was the free software movement launched by richard stallman. expressed in the production of software such as gnu and its kernel linux, tens of thousands of programmers are cooperative producing the most valuable knowledge capital of the day, i.e. software. they are doing this in small groups that are seamlessly coordinated in the greater worldwide project, in true peer groups that have no traditional hierarchy. eric raymond’s seminal essay/book “the cathedral and the bazaar,” has explained in detail why such a mode of production is superior to its commercial variants. richard stallman’s free software movement is furthermore quite radical in its values and aims, and has developed legal devices such as copyleft and the general public license, which uses commercial law itself to prohibit any commercial and private usage of the software. “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. to understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. more precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:. the freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). michel bauwens 21 22 . the freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). access to the source code is a precondition for this.. the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).. the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). access to the source code is a precondition for this.” (2) less radical, and perhaps more widespread because of this, is the open source movement launched by the above-mentioned eric raymond, which stipulates that the code has to be open for consultation and usage, but where there are restrictive rules and the property remains corporate. together, even in a situation where the software world is dominated by the microsoft monopoly, these two types of software have taken the world by storm. the dominant server of the internet (apache) is open source, but more and more governments and businesses are using it as well, including in mission-critical commercial applications. most experts would agree that this software is in fact more efficient than its commercial counterparts. what is lacking today is the spread of userfriendly interfaces, though the first open source interfaces are coming into existence. please also remember that peer to peer is in fact the extension of the methodology of the sciences, which have been based since 300 years on ‘peer review’. scientific progress is indeed beholden to the fact that scientists are accountable, in terms of the scientific validity of their work, to their peers, and not to their funders or bureaucratic managers. and the early founders of the free software movement where scientists from mit, who exported their methodology from knowledge exchange to the production of software. in fact, mit has published data showing that since a lot of research has been privatised in the u.s., the pace of innovation has in fact slowed down. or simply compare the fact of how netscape evolved when it was using open source methods and was supported by the whole internet community, as compared to the almost static evolution of internet explorer, now that it is the property of microsoft. 22 prajñâ vihâra 23 the methodologies initiated by the free software and open source movements are rapidly expanding into other fields, witness the movements such as the royalty-free music movement, the open hardware project (and the simputer project in india), opentv and many much more of these type of cooperative initiatives. i would like to offer an important historical analogy here. when the labour movement arose as an expression of the new industrial working class, it invented a whole list of new social practices, such as mutual aid societies, unions, and new ideologies. today, when the class of knowledge workers is socially dominant in the west, is it a wonder that they also create new and innovative practices that exemplify their values of cooperative intellectual work? 4. peer to peer in manufacturing? we would in fact dare to go one step further and argue that peer to peer will probably become the dominant paradigm, not just in the production of immaterial goods such as software and music, but increasingly in the world of manufacturing as well. two recent examples should illustrate it. lego mindstorms is a new form of electronic lego, which is not only produced by lego, but where thousands of users are themselves creating new building blocks and software for it. the same happened with the aibo, the artificial dog produced by sony, which users started to hack, first opposed by sony, but later with the agreement of the company. this makes a lot of sense, as indeed, it allows companies to externalise r&d costs and involve the community of consumers in the development of the product. this process is becoming generalised. of course, work has always been cooperative (though also hierarchically organised), but in this case, what is remarkable is that the frontier between the inside and the outside is disappearing. this is in fact a general process of the internet age, where the industry is moving away from mass production to one production or ‘mass customisation’, but this is only possible when consumers become part and parcel of the real production process. if that is the case, then that of course gives rise to contradictions between the hierarchical control of the enterprise, vs. the desires of the community of usersproducers. this is the same tension as between free software, a pure peer to peer michel bauwens 23 24 conception, and the more liberal interpretation of open source, which can be used by established companies to extend their development, but still under their overall control and within the profit logic. 5. some preliminary considerations one has of course to ask oneself, why is this emergence happening, and i believe that the answer is clear. the complexity of the post-industrial age makes centralised command and control approaches, based on the centralised control, inoperable. today, intelligence is indeed ‘everywhere’ and the organisation of technology and work has to acknowledge that. and more and more, we are indeed forced to conclude that peer to peer is indeed a more productive technology and way of organising production than its hierarchical, commodity-based predecessors. this is of course most clear in the music industry, where the fluidity of music distribution via p2p is an order of magnitude greater, and at marginal cost, than the commoditybased physical distribution of cd’s. this situation leads to an interesting and first historical analogy: when capitalist methods of production emerged, the feudal system, the guilds and the craftsmen at first tried to oppose and stop them (up to the physical liquidation of machines by the luddites in the uk), but they largely failed. it is not difficult to see a comparison with the struggle of the riaa (recording industry association of america) against napster: they may have won legally, but the phenomenon is continuing to spread. in general, we can interpret many of the current conflicts as pitting against each other the old way of production, commoditybased production and its legal infrastructure of copyright, and the new technological and social practices undermining these existing processes. in the short term, the forces of the old try to increase their hold and faced with subverting influences, strengthen the legal and the repressive apparatus. but in the long term the question is: can they hold back these more productive processes? in the second part, we see how the peer to peer paradigm of technological organisation, is paralleled by similar forms of organisation in human society, which are of course enabled by the technological 24 prajñâ vihâra 25 substrate we have just been discussing. indeed, it would be quite difficult to sustain a worldwide networked political movement, or the free software movement for that matter, without the enablement that the technology is providing. ii. social organisation and culture 1. peer to peer in politics our description of free software and open source has already described an important shift, from technology to a new and soon dominant form of social organisation. if we open our eyes, we can see the emergence of p2p as the new way of organising and conducting politics. the alterglobalisation movement is emblematic for these developments. they are indeed organised as a network of networks they intensively use the internet for information and mobilisation and mobile (including collective email) for direction on the ground their issues and concerns are global from the start they purposely choose global venues and heavily mediated world events to publicize their opposition and proposals. here is a quote by immanuel wallerstein, ‘world system’ theorist and historian, on the historic importance of porto alegre and its network approach to political struggle: “sept. 11 seems to have slowed down the movement only momentarily. secondly, the coalition has demonstrated that the new antisystemic strategy is feasible. what is this new strategy? to understand this clearly, one must remember what was the old strategy. the world’s left in its multiple forms communist parties, social-democratic parties, national liberation movements had argued for at least a hundred years (circa 1870-1970) that the only feasible strategy involved two key elements creating a centralized organizational structure, and making the prime objective that of arriving at state power in one way or another. the movements promised that, once in state power, they could then change the world. this strategy seemed to be very successful, in the sense that, by the 1960s, one or another of these three kinds of movements had managed to arrive at state power in most countries of the world. however, they michel bauwens 25 26 manifestly had not been able to transform the world. this is what the world revolution of 1968 was about the failure of the old left to transform the world. it led to 30 years of debate and experimentation about alternatives to the state-oriented strategy that seemed now to have been a failure. porto alegre is the enactment of the alternative. there is no centralized structure. quite the contrary. porto alegre is a loose coalition of transnational, national, and local movements, with multiple priorities, who are united primarily in their opposition to the neoliberal world order. and these movements, for the most part, are not seeking state power, or if they are, they do not regard it as more than one tactic among others, and not the most important.” (source: http://fbc.bingham ton.edu/commentr.htm) this analysis is confirmed by michael hardt, co-author of empire, the already classic analysis of globalisation that is very influential in the more radical streams of the anti-globalisation movement:”the traditional parties and centralized organizations have spokespeople who represent them and conduct their battles, but no one speaks for a network. how do you argue with a network? the movements organized within them do exert their power, but they do not proceed through oppositions. one of the basic characteristics of the network form is that no two nodes face each other in contradiction; rather, they are always triangulated by a third, and then a fourth, and then by an indefinite number of others in the web. this is one of the characteristics of the seattle events that we have had the most trouble understanding: groups which we thought in objective contradiction to one another—environmentalists and trade unions, church groups and anarchists—were suddenly able to work together, in the context of the network of the multitude. the movements, to take a slightly different perspective, function something like a public sphere, in the sense that they can allow full expression of differences within the common context of open exchange. but that does not mean that networks are passive. they displace contradictions and operate instead a kind of alchemy, or rather a sea change, the flow of the movements transforming the traditional fixed positions; networks imposing their force through a kind of irresistible undertow.” (http://www.newleftreview.net/nlr24806.shtml) 26 prajñâ vihâra 27 here is also a description by miguel benasayag of the type of new organisational forms exemplified in argentina: “les gens étaient dans la rue partout, mais il faut savoir quand même qu’il y a une spontanéité «travaillée», pour dire ce concept là. une spontanéité travaillée, cela ne veut pas dire qu’il y avait des groupes qui dirigeaient ou qui orchestraient ça, bien au contraire. quand arrivaient des gens avec des bannières ou des drapeaux de groupes politiques, ils étaient très mal reçus à chaque coin de rue. mais en revanche, une spontanéité «travaillée» en ce sens que l’argentine est «lézardée» par des organisations de base, des organisations de quartier, de troc... c.a.: lézardée, c’est un maillage? m.b.: oui, c’est ça, il y a un maillage très serré des organisations qui ont créé beaucoup de lien social. il y a des gens qui coupent les routes et qui font des assemblées permanentes pendant un mois, deux mois, des piqueteros. il y a des gens qui occupent des terres...donc cette insurrection générale qui émerge en quelques minutes dans tout le pays, effectivement elle émerge et elle cristallise des trucs qui étaient déjà là. donc c’est une spontanéité travaillée; c’est à dire que quand même il y a une conscience pratique, une conscience corporisée dans des organizations vraiment de base. c’est une rencontre du ras-le-bol, de l’indignation, de la colère populaire, une rencontre avec les organisations de base qui sont déjà sur le terrain. j’étais en argentine quelques jours avant l’insurrection. et il y avait partout des coupures de routes, des mini insurrections. et ce qui s’est passé, c’est qu’il y a eu vraiment comme on dirait un saut qualitatif: les gens en quantité sortent dans la rue et y rencontrent les gens qui étaient déjà dans la rue depuis très longtemps en train de faire des choses. et cela cristallise et permet de faire quelque chose d’irréversible. »(http://oclibertaire.free.fr/ca117-f.html) what is significant is that the argentinean demonstrators seemed to reject the whole political class, not just the established parties but also the left-wing radicals who wanted to speak for them and ‘centralise their struggles’, clearly opting for various forms of self-organisation! so here, the often decried anti-politics have a whole different context, not as a sign of apathy, but as a sign of rejection of hierarchical forms. also related is the extraordinary rapid resurgence in argentine of barter systems, based michel bauwens 27 28 on the local exchange trading systems, which in a very short time succeeded in mobilising hundreds of thousands of argentinians. some prospectivists, like the french thierry gaudin, have spoken of the need for such p2p survival networks, only means to survive the storms generated by the speculative financial economy. a report from the canadian security intelligence service has paid particular attention to the innovative organising methods of the alterglobalisation protesters, and to their use of technology: internet before and after the event and cell phones during the events. it concludes that with these innovations, established police powers have great difficulty to cope: “cell phones constitute a basic means of communication and control, allowing protest organizers to employ the concepts of mobility and reserves and to move groups from place to place as needed. the mobility of demonstrators makes it difficult for law enforcement and security personnel to attempt to offset their opponents through the presence of overwhelming numbers. it is now necessary for security to be equally mobile, capable of readily deploying reserves, monitoring the communications of protesters, and, whenever possible, anticipating the intentions of the demonstrators.” another example of p2p functioning is the network of independent journalists indymedia, which refuse to nominate ‘spokespeople’, and thus have been described in similar way: every node of the network is equally representative. of course, these networked forms of organising are not the sole preserve of the left, just as the forms of industrial organisation where avidly used by the nazis, who ideologically wanted to revert to an earlier age, witness the intensive way that the al qaeda forces have used networked technologies, networked forms of organisation etc.. as i have described in an earlier french-language issue on that particular subject. (unpublished, available from mbauwens@skynet.be). here’s an example of p2p organising at the extreme right, amongst the fastest growing radical religion today, the odinists: “today, the number of white racist activists, aryan revolutionaries, is far greater than you would know by simply looking at traditional organizations. revolutionaries today do not become members of an organization. they won’t participate in a demonstration or a rally or give out their 28 prajñâ vihâra 29 identity to a group that keeps their name on file, because they know that all these organizations are heavily monitored. since the late 1990s, there has been a general shift away from these groups on the far right. this has also helped odinism thrive. odinists took the leaderless resistance concept of [leading white supremacist ideologue] louis beam and worked on it, fleshed it out. they found a strategic position between the upper level of known leaders and propagandists, and an underground of activists who do not affiliate as members, but engage instead in decentralized networking and small cells. they do not shave their heads like traditional skinheads or openly display swastikas.” (http://www.splcenter.org/cgi-bin/goframe.pl?refname=/intelligence project/ip-4q9.html) this last development allows a smooth transition to the next, perhaps unexpected description of peer to peer as a new emerging concept in the field of spirituality. 2. peer to peer in spirituality let us start with a revealing quote, from june campbell, a female practitioner of tibetan buddhism, who has been the ‘secret consort’ (lover) of the well-known tulku kali rinpoche, as she describes in the very interesting testimonial book, ‘traveler in space’. it shows the tension between what are perhaps valuable psycho-technologies, which can bring new forms of human awareness, but also how they are embedded in hierarchical, even feudal, forms of organisation: “tricycle: how did misogyny help male monastic practice? campbell: in the very popular text of milarepa’s life storywhich all lay people and monastics read—there are many expressions of ambivalence about women: how women are polluting, how they are an obstacle to practice, that at best women can serve others and at worst they are a nuisance. at the same time, women are transcendentalized into goddesses, dakinis, female aspects of being that men must associate with in order to reach enlightenment. on the one hand, the monastic boys were cut off from women, from maternal care, from physical contact, from a daily life in which women played nurturing and essential roles, and this whole secular way of life was michel bauwens 29 30 devalued in favor of a male-only society. and yet these boys grew into practitioners who needed women, either in symbolic form or real women as consorts, to fulfil their quest. so even misogyny, which was extensive in the monasteries, was used as a way of helping these young men in their practice. in order for patriarchy to survive, women had to be subjugated.” (http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ int2002-02-08.htm) to make a long story short: june campbell describes in her book how the tibetan system puts woman in submissive positions, and because it does not honor their place in the spiritual system, and does not recognise the sexual needs of the male lama’s, it obliges women to enter into secret, hypocritical, and subordinate sexual relationships. but this is just one example of what happened on a massive scale in the late sixties, seventies and eighties. there was a massive spiritual hunger in the west (the demand), a supply in the east, but which was embedded in hierarchical and feudal relationships. if at least in their own countries these spiritual leaders where beholden to the controlling influence of tradition and convention, this was not the case in the west, and many devotees willingly gave up their critical and independent thinking only to be exploited by a whole series of ‘scumbag guru’s’ (david lane’s neural surfer website had a whole site on them, with extensive documentation of their misdeeds). thus in the nineties arose a critical counter-movement, expressed in books such as “the guru papers” by the kramers, and in a critique of the hierarchical assumptions of eastern spiritualities. as a result, there has been the emergence of a great number of circles, which are based on peer to peer relationships, where a number of spiritual searchers, which consider themselves to be equals, collectively experiment and confront their experiences. this has been elaborated into a methodology by john heron in his book “cooperative inquiry” and also in the important new book by jorge n. ferrer, revisioning transpersonal theory: a participatory vision of human spirituality. (suny, 2001.) “ferrer argues that spirituality must be emancipated from experientialism and perennialism. for ferrer, the best way to do this is via his concept of a “participatory turn”; that is, to not limit spirituality as merely a personal, subjective experience, but to include 30 prajñâ vihâra 31 interaction with others and the world at large. finally, ferrer posits that spirituality should not be universalized. that is, one should not strive to find the common thread that can link pluralism and universalism relationally. instead, there should be emphasis on plurality and a dialectic between universalism and pluralism.” (http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/watch/ferrer/index.cfm/xid, 76105/ yid,55463210) 3. global knowledge exchange and new cooperative social practices on the internet “left-leaning intellectuals have long worried about the way in which our public space shopping malls, city centres, urban parks, etc. have become increasingly private. other liberals, like writer mickey kaus, have emphasised the dangers to civic life of pervasive economic inequality. but the web has provided small answers to both these conundrums. as our public life has shrunk in reality, it has expanded exponentially online. acting as a critical counter-ballast to market culture, the web has made interactions between random, equal citizens, far more possible than ever before.” (http://www.andrewsullivan.com/text/hitsarticle.html?9,culture) the internet is a real revolution in human affairs. isn’t it indeed amazing that millions of people are freely producing and exchanging information and knowledge on the web? we are not talking of the thousands of companies that are doing it out of marketing viewpoints, but on the amazing emergence of this new form of intellectual cooperation that we are witnessing on such a massive scale. there have of course been various explanations for this. wellknown has been the essay on cybercommunism by richard barbrook, which explains the phenomena as a ‘gift economy’, while most business or economy oriented analysts have stressed the notion of an attention economy, which basically states that in a context of abundance, which characterises the information environment that is the internet, the only way to gain influence, is to gather the attention, in fact the only scarce good in a networked environment, and that this requires the giving out of knowledge and expertise. thus, shumpei kumon, the president of the michel bauwens 31 32 global communications institute in tokyo, has introduced the notion of the wisdom game. in short, he explains the changing nature of the rules used to distribute power in a society. in tribal and agricultural societies and feudal societies, whose nature was tributary (the social surplus was extracted by the permanent threat of force), social power depended on military strength, which allowed the dominant to extract a tribute. with capitalism, it was wealth itself that became the vehicle of power. rome was rich because it was strong, but america is strong because it is rich. but in the information society we have a twist: paramount becomes the role of ‘influence’. first of all, influence through the mass media (where of course private ownership plays a role in who can afford these type of massive investments), and it can be said that the vietnam war was not lost by the u.s. due to inferior military force, but because it lost the propaganda wars. but of course, increasingly this influence will be wielded through the internet, and an often-cited early example of this was the use of the medium by the zapatistas. in a knowledge-based economy, he says, there are emergent powers that are based on influence and brain power. again, this struggle for influence (or reputation) can only be a result of giving out information. there are thus strong incentives to share. in his own words: “the new social game that begins to prevail in the era of informatization is the game of wisdom, in which the goal is to acquire and exercise wisdom or intellectual influence by disseminating and sharing information and knowledge. some people call this the game of “reputation.” this contrasts with old games of wealth and prestige.” (4) david ronfeldt and john arquila, have also stressed the changing nature of power dynamics. in the print age, where information is still a scarce physical good, power is based on the control of those information streams, and it gives rise to the bureaucratic form of organisation. in a networked environment, characterised by overabundant streams of information, which are potentially accessible to everybody, power is the result of access and participation in the network itself, and it gives rise to a ‘cyberocracy’. ronfeldt and arquila have developed the notion of a new kind of politics, noopolitics, based on these ‘immaterial’ struggles for the hearts 32 prajñâ vihâra 33 and minds. a probably similar interpretation, which i have yet to read as i write this essay, is alexander barden’s “netocracy”. but one author goes in fact much further than this, stephan merten of oekonux.de, a site that wants to promote the free software paradigm as the example for other social practices, and eventually, as the central paradigm of a new type of society. he, in my opinion, correctly argues that the internet is not an exchange economy at all, because in fact, each produces according to his capabilities and desires, and each takes according to his needs, which is the very definition of communism by karl marx. he also notes that the original gift economy was also a form of oppression, because these gifts created obligations for those who received them, something that is not the case on the internet. two important aspects of these new social practices on the internet, which involve millions of users, and not just the thousands of programmers active around free software, is that the process is cooperative, and free. dutch academic kim veltman introduced the important and increasing role of cooperation as basic to the unfolding of civilisational forms: “major advances in civilization typically entail a change in medium, which increases greatly the scope of what can be shared. havelock noted that the shift from oral to written culture entailed a dramatic increase in the amount of knowledge shared and led to a reorganization of knowledge. mcluhan and giesecke explored what happened when gutenberg introduced print culture in europe. the development of printing went hand in hand with the rise of early modern science. in the sixteenth century, the rise of vernacular printing helped spread new knowledge. from the mid-seventeenth century onwards this again increased as learned correspondence became the basis for a new category of learned journals (journal des savants, journal of the royal society, göttinger gelehrten anzeiger etc.), whence expressions such as the “world of letters. the advent of internet marks a radical increase in this trend towards sharing. “(http://erste.oekonuxkonferenz.de/dokumentation/texte/veltman. html) a similar assessment of the evolution of cooperation, by scientist and evolutionary psychologist john stewart, who actively states that michel bauwens 33 34 cooperation is an evolutionary factor and that the next step for humanity should logically be a cooperative planetary organism: evolution’s arrow also argues that evolution itself has evolved. evolution has progressively improved the ability of evolutionary mechanisms to discover the best adaptations. and it has discovered new and better mechanisms. the book looks at the evolution of pre-genetic, genetic, cultural, and supra-individual evolutionary mechanisms. and it shows that the genetic mechanism is not entirely blind and random. evolution’s arrow goes on to use an understanding of the direction of evolution and of the mechanisms that drive it to identify the next great steps in the evolution of life on earth the steps that humanity must take if we are to continue to be successful in evolutionary terms. it shows how we must change our societies to increase their scale and evolvability, and how we must change ourselves psychologically to become self-evolving organisms organisms that are able to adapt in whatever ways are necessary for future evolutionary success, unfettered by their biological or social past. two critical steps will be the emergence of a highly evolvable, unified and cooperative planetary organisation that is able to adapt as a coherent whole, and the emergence of evolutionary warriors individuals who are conscious of the direction of evolution, and who use their evolutionary consciousness to promote and enhance the evolutionary success of humanity.” (at http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/ reviewcomplexity.pdf ) if cooperation is part of evolution’s arrow and of the unfolding of the civilisational process, cannot the same can be said about the notion of free availability of goods and services? this has been explained in a underestimated book by a french philosopher, jean-louis sagotduvauroux, who wrote the book, “pour la gratuite”. the author stresses that many spheres of life are not dominated by state or capital, that these are all based on free and equal exchange, and that the extension of these spheres is synonymous with civilisation-building. here’s a quote: le rapport gratuit est quand même très différent du rapport marchand, même si le rapport marchand aboutit toujours à un rapport non marchand, à l’usage: quand vous achetez un abricot, il n’est qu’une pure marchandise au moment où vous hésitez entre lui, la pêche ou la 34 prajñâ vihâra 35 grappe de raisins, mais une fois que vous l’avez acheté et que vous le mangez, c’est votre capacité à apprécier son goût qui entre en jeu. la gratuité, c’est un saut de civilisation. a un moment donné, notre problème n’est plus de savoir si, oui ou non, notre enfant va aller à l’école, mais bien comment on va définir le rôle de l’éducation, assurer la réussite scolaire de chacun… les interrogations gagnent en qualité, en ambition, elles créent du lien social. la société a montré qu’elle savait étendre le champ de la gratuité à des domaines qui n’étaient pas donnés au départ, qui n’étaient pas donnés par la nature, par exemple avec l’école publique ou la sécurité sociale. dès lors, il m’a semblé que faire reculer la frontière, identifier les lieux où on peut repousser la limite de ce qui est dominé par le marché et libérer des espaces du rapport marchand, c’était une possibilité très importante, très concrète, très immédiate. cela ne renvoie pas à des lendemains ou des surlendemains qui chantent; ça peut se faire tout de suite et permettre ainsi d’expérimenter déjà une autre forme de rapport aux personnes et aux choses. la gratuité, rappelons-le, un bien vaut avant tout par son usage et n’a qu’accidentellement une valeur d’échange. «(http://www.peripheries.net/g-sagot1.htm ) 4. a new culture of work and being pekka himanen has examined another cultural aspect of peer to peer, based on his analysis of the work culture of the free software and hacker communities, in his book about “the hacker ethic”. in this book, he compares the protestant work ethic defined by max weber in his classic “the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism”, with the new mentality of hackers. a quote from the blurb: “nearly a century ago, max weber articulated the animating spirit of the industrial age, the protestant ethic. now, pekka himanen together with linus torvalds and manuel castells articulates how hackers* represent a new, opposing ethos for the information age. underlying hackers’ technical creations such as the internet and the personal computer, which have become symbols of our time are the hacker values that produced them and that challenge us all. these values promoted passionate and freely rhythmed work; the belief that individuals can create great things by joining forces in michel bauwens 35 36 imaginative ways; and the need to maintain our existing ethical ideals, such as privacy and equality, in our new, increasingly technologized society. this same aspect is discussed in a discussion note below by kris roose, who distinguishes the ‘secondary culture’, described originally by max weber, where one works, many times unpleasantly, to make a living and buy oneselves pleasures, and the tertiary culture, where the work itself becomes an expression of oneself (the ‘self-unfolding’ process described by stephan merten of oekonux, see below) and a source of direct pleasure. richard barbrook and other writers of a manifesto for ‘digital artisans’ had already described some of the elements of this culture as well: 4. we will shape the new information technologies in our own interests. although they were originally developed to reinforce hierarchical power, the full potential of the net and computing can only be realised through our autonomous and creative labour. we will transform the machines of domination into the technologies of liberation. 9. for those of us who want to be truly creative in hypermedia and computing, the only practical solution is to become digital artisans. the rapid spread of personal computing and now the net are the technological expressions of this desire for autonomous work. escaping from the petty controls of the shopfloor and the office, we can rediscover the individual independence enjoyed by craftspeople during protoindustrialism. we rejoice in the privilege of becoming digital artisans. 10. we create virtual artefacts for money and for fun. we work both in the money-commodity economy and in the gift economy of the net. when we take a contract, we are happy to earn enough to pay for our necessities and luxuries through our labours as digital artisans. at the same time, we also enjoy exercising our abilities for our own amusement and for the wider community. whether working for money or for fun, we always take pride in our craft skills. we take pleasure in pushing the cultural and technical limits as far forward as possible. we are the pioneers of the modern.” (http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/hrc/theory/digitalartisans/t.1.1.1) but hackers are not in fact the only one’s exemplifying those values of working for passion, based on self-unfolding of one’s creativity 36 prajñâ vihâra 37 and desires, and in the context of peer-based relationships. a whole new generation of youngsters have shown to be ready for such social practices, as shown in a book like “the industrialisation of bohemia” and exemplified for a short number of years in the dynamism of the internet start-ups, before they were destroyed by the shorttermism of their venture capital backers. we are in fact talking about new ways of feeling and being! in our previous paragraph of peer to peer-based forms of political organising, we quoted miguel benasayag, who is the philosopher who is going furthest in identifying a new cultural substrata that makes p2p practices possible. (he has of course been influenced by the paradigmatic work of what we could call the ‘founding p2p philosophers’, gilles deleuze and felix guattari, whose first chapter of their classic “milles plateaux” is dedicated to a description of the ‘rhizome’, a complete peerbased network...) “c’est pourquoi nous pensons que toute lutte contre le capitalisme qui se prétend globale et totalisante reste piégée dans la structure même du capitalisme qui est, justement, la globalité. la résistance doit partir de et développer les multiplicités, mais en aucun cas selon une direction ou une structure qui globalise, qui centralise les luttes. un réseau de résistance qui respecte la multiplicité est un cercle qui possède, paradoxalement, son centre dans toutes les parties. nous pouvons rapprocher cela de la définition du rhizome de gilles deleuze : «dans un rhizome on entre par n’importe quel côté, chaque point se connecte avec n’importe quel autre, il est composé de directions mobiles, sans dehors ni fin, seulement un milieu, par où il croît et déborde, sans jamais relever d’une unité ou en dériver ; sans sujet ni objet.» “la nouvelle radicalité, ou le contre-pouvoir, ce sont bien sûr des associations, des sigles comme attac, comme act up, comme le dal. mais ce sont surtout et avant tout une subjectivité et des modes de vie différents. il y a des jeunes qui vivent dans des squats et c’est une minorité de jeunes -, mais il y a plein de jeunes qui pratiquent des solidarités dans leurs vies, qu n’ordonnent pas du tout leur vie en fonction de l’argent. cela, c’est la nouvelle radicalité, c’est cette émergence d’une sociabilité nouvelle qui, tantôt, a des modes d’organisation plus ou moins classiques, tantôt non. je pense qu’en michel bauwens 37 38 france, ça s’est développé très fortement. le niveau d’engagement existentiel des gens est énorme. » (http://www.peripheries.net/g-bensg.htm) this is clearly a description of a new existential positioning, a radical refusal of power-based relationships and a clear departure from the old oppositional politics, where the protesters where using the same authoritarian principles in their midst, than those of the forces they were denouncing. here are some further quotes, which highlight the new ‘radical subjectivities’ “contrairement aux militants classiques, je pense que les choses qui existent ont une raison d’être, aussi moches soient elles...”rien n’existe par accident et tout à coup, nous, malins comme nous sommes, nous nous disons qu’il n’y a vraiment qu’à décider de changer. les militants n’aiment pas cette difficulté; ils aiment se fâcher avec le monde et attendre ce qui va le changer.” “c’est toujours très surprenant: la plupart des gens ont un tas d’informations sur leurs vies, mais “savoir”, ça veut dire, en termes philosophiques, “connaître par les causes”, et donc pouvoir modifier le cours des choses.” “oui, l’anti-utilitarisme est fondamental. parce que la vie ne sert à rien. parce qu’aimer ne sert à rien, parce que rien ne sert à rien.” “on voit bien cette militance un peu feignante qui se définit “contre”: on est gentil parce qu’on est contre. non! ça ne suffit pas d’être contre les méchants pour être gentil. après tout, staline était contre hitler!” (http://www.peripheries.net/g-bensg.htm) iii. new zones of conflicts, new alternatives 1. peer to peer in a hierarchical world: conflict within individuals new subjectivities are arising, that desire self-unfolding of their creativity and peer-based working relationships. new cooperative production and distribution methods and p2p organisation forms are arising, often based on the free exchange of knowledge. but is the world ready for it? here is a quote that expresses what happens when a new p2p soul enters an existing organisation, giving voice to the dehumanising aspects of current forms of social organisation: “whether it is in response to us sensing that a new possibility exists for us on the horizons of our current ways of being, or whether it is to do with us sensing an 38 prajñâ vihâra 39 increasing lack, is difficult to say. but, which ever it is, there is no doubt that there is an increasing recognition that the administrative and organization systems, within which we have long tried to relate ourselves to each other and our surroundings, are crippling us. something is amiss. they have no place in them for us, for our humanness. while the information revolution bursts out around us, there is an emerging sense that those moments in which we are most truly alive and able to express our own unique creative reactions to the others and othernesses around us (and they to us), are being eliminated. in an over-populated world, there seems to be fewer and fewer people to talk to and less and less time in which to do it.” (http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds/) in fact, the current form of enterprises are of course still thoroughly hierarchic and authoritarian despite the many changes to networked and team-based forms of work, which stand in tension with the hierarchical format. this was described in the 1988 classic by robert jackall, “moral mazes”, in fact an in-depth anthropological study of the modern enterprise format: “when managers describe their work to an outsider, they almost always first say: ‘i work for [bill james]’ or ‘i report to [harry mills].’ and only then proceed to describe their actual work functions . . . the key interlocking mechanism of [modern corporate culture] is its reporting system. each manager . . . formulates his commitments to his boss; this boss takes these commitments and those of his other subordinates, and in turn makes a commitment to his boss . . . this ‘management-by-objective’ system, as it is usually called, creates a chain of commitments from the ceo down to the lowliest product manager or account executive. in practice, it also shapes a patrimonial authority arrangement that is crucial to defining both the immediate experiences and the long-run career chances of individual managers. in this world, a subordinate owes fealty principally to his immediate boss. “moral mazes goes on to describe how bosses use ambiguity with their subordinates (and other moreor-less unconscious subterfuges) in order to preserve the power to claim credit and deflect blame, which tends to perpetuate the personalization of authority. unlike a straight, max weber style bureaucracy, which is procedure-bound and rule-driven, a michel bauwens 39 40 patrimonial bureaucracy is a set of hierarchical fiefdoms defined by personal power and patronage.” here david isen’s describes the crucial shortcoming of the present system: “when there is good news, credit flows up — so the boss, personifying the organization, looks good to superiors. then credit flows up again. when there is bad news, it is the boss’s prerogative to push blame onto subordinates to keep it from escalating. bad news that can’t be contained threatens a boss’s position; if bad news rises up, blame will come down. this is why they shoot messengers. so it’s easier to ignore bad news. thus, jackall’s chemical company studiously ignored a $6 million maintenance item until it exploded (literally) into a $150 million problem. “to make a decision ahead of [its] time risks political catastrophe,” said one manager, justifying the deferred maintenance. then, once the mess had been made, “the decision [to clean up] made itself,” said another relieved manager.” (http://isen.com/archives/990601.html) or here is french sociologist philippe zafirian who describes a more general unease with the current system. “depuis plusieurs années, les enquêtes nationales ne cessent de nous indiquer une nette dégradation des conditions de travail, telle que les salariés la vivent et la déclarent. les enquêtes sociologique de terrain le confirment: c’est à un phénomène de vaste ampleur que nous avons affaire. les individus au travail souffrent et ils l’expriment. on pourrait certes débattre des moteurs internes de cette souffrance: tous les chercheurs ne sont pas d’accord sur ce point. mais il me semble qu’une réalité s’impose, par son évidence et son importance : les salariés plient sous la pression, elle les écrase. la pression n’est pas simple contrainte. toute personne se développe en permanence, dans sa vie personnelle, dans un réseau de contraintes. les indicateurs de cette pression, nous les connaissons bien : débit, rendement, délais clients, challenges, pression des résultats à atteindre, précarité de la situation, organisation de la concurrence entre salariés, salaire individuel variable… on y relève à la fois la reprise de vieilles recettes tayloriennes, mais aussi quelque chose de nouveau, de plus insidieux: la pression sur la subjectivité même de l’individu au travail, une force qui s’exerce sur son esprit, qui l’opprime de l’intérieur de lui-même, 40 prajñâ vihâra 41 qui l’aliène. mais il existe une autre facette de la situation actuelle: la montée de la révolte. celle-ci transparaît beaucoup moins dans les statistiques; elle s’extériorise moins en termes de conflits ouverts. toutefois, pour un sociologue qui mène en permanence des enquêtes de terrain, le fait est peu contestable. on peut pressentir l’explosion d’une révolte d’une portée équivalente à celle qui a secoué la france à la fin des années 60, début des années 70, lors des grandes insurrections des o.s (red: ‘ouvriers specialises’)., quelles que soit les formes d’extériorisation qu’elle prendra. la révolte n’est pas simple réaction à la pression. elle a des causes plus profondes. elle renvoie d’abord à une evolution profonde, irréversible, de la libre individualité dans une société moderne. elle touche enfin à ce phénomène important: à force de devoir se confronter à des performances, à des indicateurs de gestion, à une responsabilité quant au service rendu à l’usager ou au client, les salariés ont développé une intelligence des questions de stratégie d’entreprise. ils jugent, et d’une certaine manière comprennent les politiques de leurs directions, voire en situent les contradictions et insuffisances. mais il leur est d’autant plus insupportable d’être traités comme de purs exécutants, des machines sans âme et sans pensée propre, d’être en permanence mis devant le fait accompli. je pense que notre époque connaît un véritable renversement: bien des salariés de base deviennent plus intelligents que leurs directions et que les actionnaires, au sens d’une pensée plus riche, plus complexe, plus subtile, plus compréhensive, plus profondément innovante.» the citation from zafirian also points out the opposite problem from the one we introduced at the beginning of this section, and is thus not only about the pain of p2p souls entering old-style procedurial or patrimonial hierarchies, but also the opposite, the pain of the more traditional sectors of the population faced with the new demands of a hypercompetitive enterprise. these changes have been described in the already classic “le nouvel esprit du capitalisme” by luc boltanski and ève chiapello and show how a system has moved from a use of bodies to the demand for the engagement of the ‘whole ‘being’ of the new knowledge workers, an internalising of the priorities of the enterprise. but at the very moment that, since the eighties, the priorities of companies michel bauwens 41 42 have shrunk to the generation of only profits for the shareholders, this creates a tension with the value systems of the individuals. the new forms of peer to peer based work will of course have to accommodate the many different wishes and needs of various sectors of workers, and honor their differences. worth exploring are the different systems that indeed honour the different value systems, as pioneered by clare graves, the different schools of spiral dynamics, temenos from ray harris, and other integrative systems. 2. collective conflicts and the new enclosures two dominant spheres (we will not discuss the surviving precapitalist forms of social organisation) presently co-exist. the dominant sphere of commodity-based capitalism, and the new sphere of cooperative exchange. as they are driven by different logics, it is clear that this is an emerging and important conflict zone. the central problem is that most of the existing peer to peer emergence is based on the surplus created by the present economic system, and that many forms of peer to peer live from the wealth created by this system, being unable to sustain themselves independently. i am personally not convinced yet that peer to peer can sustain itself economically, and so are many of its proponents. this is the reason why many peer to peer oriented theorists point to the need of a ‘generalised citizen wage’, which would replace all existing transfers (unemployment, etc.) and allow for a generalisation of peer to peer activities, based on the surplus generated by the money economy. so, how will these different spheres indeed co-exist? there are in fact three hypotheses of their co-existence, conflict, or dominance: 1) will the cooperative sphere swallow the competitive sphere (thesis of stephan merten); 2) will they co-exist (richard barbrook, eric raymond) 3) will the competitive sphere completely eat the cooperative sphere. the latter is the thesis of jeremy rifkin’s age of access which is an attempt to describe the ways in which the economy is trying to swallow the cognitive and cultural spheres. 42 prajñâ vihâra 43 2.1 extending the cooperative sphere and replacing informational capitalism since peer to peer is functioning so well in the sphere of producing software, the pre-eminent form of social capital, and since our whole economy is becoming dominated by ‘immaterial processes’, what could be expected is that practices arising out of this new cooperative sphere would ‘infect’ the total economy. this thesis is the most radically expressed by stephan merten of oekonux, who calls for a gpl society, where the principles behind the general public license would gradually be extended to the whole society. here’s an extensive quote: as i tried to explain free software is not based on exchange so neither is a gpl society. how a gpl society may look like concretely can’t be determined fully today. however, at present there are many developments, which already point in that direction.. one development is the increasing obsolescence of human labor. the more production is done by machines the less human labor is needed in the production process. if freed from the chains of capitalism this development would mean freedom from more and more necessities, making room for more processes of self-unfolding be it productive processes like free software or nonproductive ones like many hobbies. so contrary to capitalism, in which increasing automation always destroys the work places for people and thus their means to live, in a gpl society maximum automation would be an important aim of the whole society.. in every society based on exchange which includes the former soviet bloc making money is the dominant aim. because a gpl society would not be based on exchange, there would be no need for money anymore. instead of the abstract goal of maximizing profit, the human oriented goal of fulfilling the needs of individuals as well as of mankind as a whole would be the focus of all activities.. the increased communication possibilities of the internet will become even more important than today. an ever-increasing part of production and development will take place on the internet or will be based on it. the b2b (business to business) concept, which is about improving the information flow between businesses producing commodities, shows us that the integration of production in the field michel bauwens 4.3 44 of information has just started. on the other hand the already visible phenomenon of people interested in a particular area finding each other on the internet will become central for the development of selfunfolding groups.. the difference between consumers and producers will vanish more and more. already today the user can configure complex commodities like cars or furniture to some degree, which makes virtually each product an individual one, fully customized to the needs of the consumer. this increasing configurability of products is a result of the always increasing flexibility of the production machines. if this is combined with good software you could initiate the production of highly customized material goods allowing a maximum of selfunfolding from your web browser up to the point of delivery.. machines will become even more flexible. new type of machines available for some years now fabbers are already more universal in some areas than modern industrial robots, not to mention stupid machines like a punch. the flexibility of the machines is a result of the fact that material production is increasingly based on information. at the same time the increasing flexibility of the machines gives the users more room for creativity and thus for self-unfolding.. in a gpl society there is no more reason for a competition beyond the type of competition we see in sports. instead various kinds of fruitful cooperation will take place. you can see that today not only in free software but also (partly) in science and for instance in cooking recipes: imagine your daily meal if cooking recipes would be proprietary and available only after paying a license fee instead of being the result of a world-wide cooperation of cooks. “the same type of ideas have been developed in great detail by michael albert and other proponents of ‘participatory economics’: “the underlying values parecon seeks to implement are equity, solidarity, diversity, and participatory self management. the main institutions to attain these ends are council democracy, balanced job complexes, remuneration according to effort and sacrifice, and participatory planning.” (http://www.parecon.org) the key question is of course, how do we get from a to b? 44 prajñâ vihâra 45 if it is true that the current form of informational capitalism is already creating enough surpluses to sustain such cooperative practices, it is also clear that most of them are not making money by themselves. currently, p2p programmers are often academics, students, or have other sources of income. thus, the current weaknesses of the model are that: 1) the hacker themselves are a varied bunch of individuals, with many different political positions, their only common point is their preference for the free flow of information and knowledge 2) peer to peer in the technological sense is the domain of technology-savvy hackers who have the same ‘absorptive capacity’ to collaborate on software projects; it is and remains a technological elite. nevertheless, the partisans of this approach are convinced that the nature of work in informational capitalism is already such that the ‘cooperative work’ of the knowledge workers is already expropriated, and that this situation can be reversed. this issue is effectively addressed by a group of social and economic thinkers, such as yann moulier boutang of the magazine multitudes, and other partisans of the universal social wage. they are strongly associated with the thinkers around tony negri, himself an offshoot of the autonomous marxism movement in italy, and with participants such as maurizio lazzarato, who just wrote a new book on the french philosopher gabriel tarde (title: “puissances de l’invention: la psychologie economique de gabriel tarde contre l’economie politique”), one of the pioneering thinkers of the immaterial economy, writing at the end of the nineteenth century!! “the modes of production and communication of knowledge lead us beyond the economy. we are beyond the necessity of socialising intellectual forces through exchange, division of labour, money or exclusive property. this does not mean that the relations of power between social forces are neutralised in fact, they show up as fertile matings or fatal shocks beyond the market and the exchange of wealth. this means that unavowed ethical nature of economic forces resurfaces powerfully as a single mode of “economic regulation” at the very moment in which economic production is subordinated to intellectual production.” (http://www.moneynations.ch/topics/euroland/text/ lazzarato.htm; http:/ /www.emery.archive.mcmail.com/public_html/immaterial/lazzarat.html) michel bauwens 45 46 in terms of strategies or tactics, these new schools of militancy no longer advocate revolution (or reform) but a diagonal approach. negri himself often refers to the roman empire and the rise of a counter-empire in its midst. when the christian movement arose, they were totally incomprehensible to the roman establishment, and themselves did not fight the empire (‘give unto caesar, etc..’), but instead, created a countersociety. when the empire disbanded, they were simply ready and the sole counterforce to survive intact. thus these new politics advocate a ‘diagonal’ and ‘hic et nunc’ approach of creating alternatives. ‘résister c’est créer’. 2.2 resisting informational capitalism of course, not everybody believes in this optimistic scenario. for many others, it is simply a matter of resisting the encroachment of the private sphere and to defend these new commons. a good spokesman for this strategy seems to be jeremy rifkin. according to rifkin and others, the extensive method of capitalist expansion, based on the geographical extension of its influence, as in colonialism or imperialism, is indeed over, and we are entering an intensive epoch, where the system is going deeper inwards, incorporating and transforming culture as a commodity. rifkin describes attempts such as leasing and other forms of paid access, and seems to describe the need for a defensive strategy, exemplified by the ‘exception culturelle’ in france, or movements such as slow food. his mantra is: defend the sphere of intimacy against the sphere of efficiency. but one thing is clear, traditional commodity-based and industrial capitalism does not know yet how to fruitfully incorporate the new sphere, although it will continuously try, but so far, as illustrated by the dotcom collapse, it has failed, says john perry barlow, himself a libertarian, and if i’m not mistaken, at one time a member of the republican party: “the whole dot-com thing was an effort to use 19th and 20th century concepts of economy in an environment where they didn’t exist, and the internet essentially shrugged them off. this was an assault by an alien force that was repelled by the natural forces of the internet.” (john perry barlow) (http://news.com.com/2008-1082-843349.html) 46 prajñâ vihâra 47 another example may be lawrence lessig, author of the war of ideas. he situates the field of struggle in the following ways: 1) the very architecture of the internet. as it originally embodied the peer to peer values of its founders, it is precisely this end to end architecture that has to be preserved in order to protect the integrity of its common infrastructure 2) the freedom of speech and association of the internet could be endangered by the encroachment of private interests, who start to monopolise portals and media sites, and can use copyright to silence many voices. thus, it is very important to defend the existence of the new digital commons that is the internet, against any attempts to privatise or disband it. 2.3 integration in informational capitalism of course, this is still a very likely scenario, as the system has shown its extraordinary capacity to integrate any challenges to its hegemony. this is the process that is best described by jeremy rifkin’s age of access, and that would entail a transformation of commoditybased capitalism towards a system based on ‘access’ to digital resources, and dominated by subscriptions, leasing systems, and the like. but if they eventually succeed and this cultural sphere is indeed taken over completely, the consequences would be quite negative, says rifkin, and with him jordan pollack: we will never own anything anymore, we will always be dependent on all kinds of licensing. “it seems to me that what we’re seeing in the software area, and this is the scary part for human society, is the beginning of a kind of dispossession. people are talking about this as dispossession that only comes from piracy, like napster and gnutella where the rights of artists are being violated by people sharing their work. but there’s another kind of dispossession, which is the inability to actually buy a product. the idea is here: you couldn’t buy this piece of software, you could only licence it on a day by day, month by month, year by year basis; as this idea spreads from software to music, films, books, human civilization based on property fundamentally changes.” (http://www.edge.org/documents/day/day_pollack.html) michel bauwens 47 48 this position is echoed by libertarian john perry barlow, cofounder of the electronic frontier foundation: “: i’m spending an enormous amount of my time stopping content industries from taking over the world—literally. i feel like we’re in a condition where private totalitarianism is not out of the question because of the increasingly thickening matrix of channels of communication owned by the same companies that own content, that own web properties, that own traditional media. in essence, they’re in a position to own the human mind itself. the possibility of getting a dissident voice through their channels is increasingly scarce, and the use of copyright as a means of suppressing freedom of expression is becoming more and more fashionable. you’ve got these interlocking systems of technology and law, where merely quoting something from a copyrighted piece is enough to bring down the system on you.” (http://news.com.com/2008-1082-843349.html) of course, this situation can also be described positively, in the sense that the hierarchical based forms of industrial capitalism, are being supplemented and partially replaced by the more humane peer to peer relationships. this is the position expressed by eric raymond, who advocates the use of open source software by the business community, and even by richard barbrook, who in his essay on cybercommunism stresses the co-existence and cooperation of the profit-driven system on the one hand, with the gift economy on the other hand and integrates it in his tenth paragraph of the manifesto for digital artisans, cited above. 2.4 digital commons (section to be developped: struggles around the new enclosures and the ‘digital commons’) 48 prajñâ vihâra 49 bibliography p2p technology peer to peer: sharing over the internet. bo leuf. addison wesley professional; isbn: 0201767325 p2p society the future of ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world. by lawrence lessig. random house, 2001. jonathan rauch, kindly inquisitors and david brin, the transparent society each of these books contain compelling arguments for allowing decentralized social processes to regulate dangerous knowledge. in rauch’s book, he outlines the dangers of attempting to outlaw speech about ideas that are considered unacceptable, and in brin’s, he outlines the dangers of trying to limit the use of information gathering tools to a narrow class of acceptable users. in each case, they conclude that adversarial processes will limit the damage, and maximize the value. they deserve to be widely read and discussed. (note from david reed) webliography p2p technology the advantages of a p2p computing architecture explained by intel url = http://www.intel.com/ebusiness/products/peertopeer/ar010102.htm the p2p identity scheme unveiled by the liberty alliance (nokia, sun) against the passport scheme of microsoft url = http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992550 mit papers on open source, perhaps the best collection, with many papers crossing over from technology to social, business, and organisational characteristics url = http://opensource.mit.edu/online_papers.php p2p business how proprietary software and open source work together url = http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3416—283153-0,00.html p2p organisation co-creating personal and professional knowledge through peer support and peer appraisal in nursing. thesis submitted by janet c.e. quinlan for the degree of phd of the university of bath, 1996 url = http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/jquinlan/titlepage.htm michel bauwens 49 50 p2p spirituality participation, organization, and mind: toward a participatory worldview david skrbina. carpp thesis 2001. url = http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/davidskrbina/summarycontents.htm cooperative inquiry is a pioneering methodology for peer-based spiritual experimenting, developed by john heron, now in new zealand url = http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~jnheron/page2.html p2p society a defense of the open spectrum idea: airwaves are not physical property url = http://www.reed.com/openspectrum/ discussion notes 1. why p2p is a stronger model, both technologically and organisationally, than the hierarchical pyramidal modes – a contribution by kris roose definition each form of organization implies two information streams: from observation point towards decision point, and from decision point to execution point. observation and execution most often coincide, and anyway are much closer -in informational distanceto each other, than each of them to the central decision point. in an hierarchic organization model the first stream goes bottom-up, the second stream topdown. by gathering information at the top, only there we find a complete view of reality and decisions can be made more easily. in a peer-to-peer organization information freely flows from point to point. at each point a global view can be attained. the decisions can be made in global discussion, without the need of a central node. other considerations 1. on decision making one can discern three way of decision making, three ways of problem solving: (1) selection, (2) compromise and (3) integration. in selection, one alternative is selected out against the others, considered as “wrong” or “impossible”. in compromise a rapprochement is made between the alternatives, basically for psychologcial reasons: each contributor has the feeling that, although not completely, his views were at least partially taken into account, and nobody is the winner. in integration every detail of the contributions is taken into account, and all apparently unreconcilable were transformed (reformulated, retroduced to their essence) as to enable a peaceful and constructive combination of all elements. every contributor feels happy and motivated —at least if he agrees to redefine some of his contributions—, and the result has a much higher probability for success than if just one of the options had been chosen. although hierarchical organization doesn’t exclude integration in se, 50 prajñâ vihâra 51 the distance between information source and decision level is so big, that view transformations and secondary motivations (hidden agendas) can be added to the decision making process. as the concerned themselves only participate very poorly in the decision process, the decisions can be taken without complying with the “bottom”. e.g. every war is started against the will of the large majority of the concerned. in p2p the conclusion is more likely an integration, because everybody has the same possibility of participation in the decision making, and can protest when his contribution is not (enough) taken into account. 2. the intermediary agents / brokers as well goods as informations very often are not produced or available where they are needed. this distance allows a host of intermediary agents to settle them in a profitable situation. by creating a lack they create a control situation, and often take enormous) profit without adding value to the products. factors that enable lack creation include material and psychological distances, classified information (e.g. address lists), “licences”, etc. it can easily be calculated that the most important part of the price includes profits of brokers, taxes, etc. builiding a hierarchy also is a kind of parasitism. p2p is a way to reduce this phenomenon to the minimum. 3. the capacitating technology these high forms of communication are only possible with a technological substrate. sociocultural progress in general always implies material substrates. this is often forgotten in politics. noospheric conditions are only possible with the kind of technology internet procured us. 4. progress by hypes sociocultural evolution often makes progress by hypes. all of a sudden, a clear defined concept appears, and divulges at the velocity of light. everybody gets the meaning at once, and those concepts are quickly integrated into the existing social culture. so was, e.g., the notion of “participation” in the 1968 student revolts.”human resources” is another example, as were “evaluation”, “functional evaluations” (‘functioneringsgesprek’). “p2p” seems to be such a good sounding concept. 2. peer to peer needs to be complemented by integration technologies and integrative attitudes – a contribution by kris roose another application is the integrative communication style in an optimal relation. this style, described —in dutch— on http://psy.cc/9510.html , is not only a communication technique, but rather a series of fundamental attitudes towards each other. these attitudes are trained during the communication training. in fact, by disussing human relations and cooperative creativity, we leave the field of p2p. although p2p is an essential paradigm for human interaction and organization, more profound considerations on the integration process should be useful here — or at the begin of the text. these integration philosophy stems from two starting-points: michel bauwens 51 52 1. factual integration (the integration of needs and desires). a dynamic system only can reach equilibrium when the needs of the participating elements are maximally fulfilled. the nonfulfillment of any needs creates a source of disequilibrium that will challenge the structure as long as needs stay unfulfilled. integration is an advantage, not only for each element as such, but for the group as a whole. the whole cosmic evolution can be seen as one long journey towards global integration. the basic law, that in fact underpins all forms of moral and ethics, is: “each action must aim at a maximal integration of the needs of all concerned”. 2. conceptual integration (the integration of ideas). the probability that a diverging idea holds some useful information and intuition is indefinitely higher than the probability that a diverging idea is completely wrong. hence, to make decisions by choice is always erroneous, even if supported by wisdom or a majority. the probability that a thesis is right (“true”, although i prefer “plausible”) increases with the number of divergent contributions that are integrated. 3. the wisdom game – a contribution by kris roose in my own work, i distinguish between secondary and tertiary culture and it seems clear that the concept of the wisdom game is typical of a tertiary culture. in a secondary culture, there is a non-integration (or just a low integration) between earning and feeling happiness. one has to do things, often not captivating in themselves, to earn money, and then we can use this money to purchase agreeable things. on the other hand, the internet offers immediate reward (creativity, proudness, the kick of interacting with great systems). this explains perhaps why so many people -from hobbyists to hackersare prepared to work hours and hours on the net without any financial reward: just for the fun of it. but in the meanwhile they create a thesaurus of information, knowledge advancement and artworks. their game starts growing horribly real. furthermore, if “influence” is defined as the global effect of non-hierarchical interactions, it is a good measure for synergetic processes. i think that information (facts, knowledge, psychologcial skills) was also paramount in hierarchical organization. the strength of the managers is a function of their informational superiority. one can try to increase this superiority, but also to decrease the information and the feeling of a global view in the lower regions of the organization: top secret, control of media, limited education, prohibition of meetings, “divide et impera”, etc. 52 prajñâ vihâra 01_(1-54) liberation.pmd liberation theology: the latin american christian response to transnational capitalism tavivat puntarigvivat mahidol university, thailand abstract latin america is a clear case of how the power structure shapes the destiny of a continent. with the arrival of europeans in the new world in the fifteenth century, the period of modern history began for latin america with a continent plentiful in natural and human resources, and the seemingly less generously endowed northern anglo america. but five centuries later, while anglo america has become the leader of the wealthy first world, latin america has fallen into the desperate poverty of the third world. the cause of this sharp contrast is to be found in the unequal relationships and power structures that have existed from the very beginning of the modern history of the americas. liberation theology emerged in latin america in the 1970s as a response to the structural oppression of the third world by the first world. liberation theology has brought hope to the poor and the oppressed amid the revolutionary atmosphere of the latin american continent. latin america is the only third world continent where the majority of people are christian. because of this, liberation theology is regarded as a third world christian response to the social injustice under transnational capitalism. latin american historical experience and the history of liberation theology in the light of the political-economic realities of latin america will be explored in this work. these include socio-political as well as doctrinal aspects such as the hermeneutics of the poor, the dependency theory, and the belief in salvation within history. i. the latin american experience the divergence of the two basic historical trends in the new world is paradoxical: anglo america and latin america. latin america at the prajna vihara, volume 15, number 2, july-deceber, 2014, 1-54 1 c 2000 by assumption university press __ __ ~ beginning enjoyed all the advantages of natural endowment. it was latin america that supplied huge quantities of gold and silver bullion to europe, grew the tropical products needed by the northern european market, and possessed a large native labor force for the mines and farmlands. yet the seemingly less generously endowed and inauspicious anglo america developed steadily from the colonial period onward, while latin america emerged from that period dependent and underdeveloped, and has remained so until today. in this section, i will explore briefly the history and experience of latin american peoples, from the early native americans to the present day latin americans, and the theories behind the contrast in power between latin america and anglo america, and the subsequent underdevelopment of latin america. a. the early native american experience when christopher columbus first landed in the bahamas, he reported that the gentle arawaks showed “as much lovingness as though they would give their hearts...they remained so much our friends that it was a marvel”. “they are well-built people with handsome bodies and very fine faces”. but this same columbus soon was writing back to spain: “from here, in the name of the blessed trinity, we can send all the slaves that can be sold... should your majesties command it, all the inhabitants could be taken away to castile, or made slaves on the island...for these people are totally unskilled in arms”. “they ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them”. and “with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want”.1 in 1495 columbus shipped five hundred native americans to spain. only three hundred survived the voyage to spain, and most of them died within a few years because of european diseases for which they had no immunity. on the large island of hispaniola (presentday haiti and the dominican republic) columbus ordered each native american of fourteen years or older to bring one of his hawk bells filled with gold dust to his forts once every three months. when a native american brought his or her tribute to the forts, he or she was given a copper token stamped with the month, to be hung around the neck. with that they were safe for another three months while collecting more gold. whoever was caught without a token was killed by having his or her hands cut off. the gold quotas in hispaniola proved impossible of fulfillment. the amounts recovered were quite inadequate, and those who tried 2 prajna vihara __ __ ~ to escape to the mountains were hunted down with dogs and killed. the demoralized arawaks often committed mass suicide, killing themselves with casava poison. within two years about half of the island’s population, estimated originally at 125,000 to 500,000, had died. by 1515 only 10,000 were still alive, and twenty-five years later the entire race had become extinct.2 thousands of years of isolation left the native americans technologically and biologically vulnerable. by 1500 they had reached the technological level that western europeans had in 1500 b.c. and middle easterners in 3500 b.c. although the plants domesticated by the native americans are so numerous and fruitful that today they provide almost half of the world’s total food supply, they themselves never developed their cultivation techniques beyond the bare minimum of day to day necessity. isolation and native beliefs also made them psychologically vulnerable. the aztec ruler, montezuma, mistakenly greeted hernando cortes as a god, paid homage to him and offered his throne and possessions. “our lord...you have to come to your city, mexico... i was in agony...with my eyes fixed on the region of the mystery. and now you have come out of the clouds and mists to sit on your throne again”.3 in reply to such a magnanimous assessment, on march 1519 cortes invaded the great aztec empire in mexico. landing on the mainland coast with an insignificant force of 600 men, 16 horses, 13 muskets, and a few cannon, he was able to conquer a wealthy empire with a population of tens of millions. in 1531 francisco pizarro conquered the highly organized inca empire of peru with a band of only 180 men, 27 horses, and 2 cannon. other native american societies outside the aztec and inca empires lacked the population and organization to offer serious large-scale resistance. hence the rapid white expansion in the new world with periodic armed clashes and scattered colonization wherever the land or mineral resources were sufficiently attractive. by the end of the sixteenth century the spaniards became familiar with the entire coastline of south america from the west indies south to tierra del fuego and north to the gulf of california. likewise in north america, francisco de coronado and hernando de soto led wide-ranging expeditions across what was later to become the southern part of the united states, from florida to the grand canyon. at the same time french explorers like robert la salle, english explorers like david thompson, and american explorers like lewis and clark opened up the northern and western parts of north america, while the portuguese were taking over tavivat puntarigvivat 3 the vast brazilian land in south america.4 the native americans had no immunity against the diseases the european and african newcomers brought with them. this posed as serious a problem as the brutal exploitation by the europeans. the first epidemics which were the most deadly occurred well before the period of massive exploitation. the population catastrophically declined by epidemics as well as by brutal exploitation. this included a fall in the indigenous population in mexico from a possible high of 25 million in 1519 to 6.3 million in 1548, and finally to 1.07 million by 1605. in peru the depopulation was from a possible maximum of 7 million to 1.8 million by 1580.5 after destroying the native ruling establishment, the spaniards were able to force the native americans to provide the heavy labor needed for the mines, where conditions were disastrous for both health and morale, and also labor for the haciendas--two of the three backbones of latin america’s economy. the third, the coastal plantations, had to depend on imported african slaves because of the scarcity of the native american populations in the coastal regions. when the portuguese established the first sugar plantations on the american mainland in brazil, they found the indigenous population quite inadequate as a labor force, so they imported slaves from africa.6 what is clear is that this european conquest led to a deterioration of living condition for the great majority of the native americans in latin america. some may argue that the aztecs and the incas had been subjected to forced labor by their imperial authorities before columbus. but the fact is that they had experienced it within their own social and cultural context, which had continually preserved their own integrity and civilization. after columbus they were exploited to near extinction by the arbitrary european invaders who cared nothing about the continuity of the indigenous races and cultures. the native americans have suffered under these demoralizing circumstances in latin america up to the present time. b. latin america v. anglo america when ask the question of why the initially affluent latin america ended up as a dependent third world continent and the seemingly less generously endowed anglo america became the center of the developed world, there are a number of theories that may explain it. one theory suggests that the answer is to be found in the different levels of economic 4 prajna vihara __ __ ~ development among colonial metropolitan centers. this position contends that during the colonial period, anglo america was subjected to economically highly developed metropolitan centers, namely, britain and france, whereas latin america was controlled by the dependent economic structures of spain and portugal. during that time, both the spanish and portuguese economies were dependent on the northwestern european countries. despite their having an unprecedented lead in exploring the new world, the iberian states could not adequately take advantage of the new opportunities because of their retarded economies. northwestern europe consequently won control over the trade between spain and her colonies, despite the declared monopoly of the spanish imperial trade. the imperial monopoly could not be enforced because spanish industry could not meet the demands of their american colonies. with a similar retarded economy, portugal lacked a home market and an industry to absorb the new wealth accumulated from her colonies in asia and the americas. this theory of the iberian economies’ subordination to northwestern european states explains why latin america was exploited by the northwestern europeans rather than the iberians. but in itself it does not explain why latin america should have become for many generations afterward an exploited third world continent. the theory proposed by l. s. stavrianos is more convincing.7 according to this theory, anglo america’s economic development and latin america’s underdevelopment are to be explained by the nature of the domestic colonial economies, rather than by the transmission of the economic conditions of their european metropolitan centers. the anglo american economic structure, from the very beginning, progressively developed into a diversified and independent economy capable of further development. after their independence, anglo america (the united states and canada) successfully industrialized their countries and emerged as part of the newly developed first world. the latin american economic structure, on the other hand, was from the very beginning confined to a monoculture plantation economy, subordinate to metropolitan centers. as a result, latin america__with its 33 countries and half a billion population__has only been capable of economic growth but without overall economic development. tavivat puntarigvivat 5 __ __ ~ c. roots of latin american underdevelopment the mines, haciendas and plantations of latin america were the envy of northern europe and anglo america. yet, because of the latin american dependent economic structure, the profits from the mines, haciendas and plantations enriched northern europe and anglo america far more than they did indigenous latin america. the mining industry had very few links to the rest of the local economy. the enormous bullion shipments from latin america contributed very little to the overall economic development of the continent. a plantation economy by its very nature as dependent upon overseas demand was incapable of generating overall indigenous economic development. only a few crops were grown, and this was determined by the price in metropolitan markets rather than by the needs of the local economy or population. under the latin american dependent economic structure, the northern europeans and the anglo americans served as the middlemen, transporting varied commodities and services, including manufactured and agricultural goods, fish, shipping, capital and technical expertise. they not only gained most of the profits from the trade but also developed broad-based economies at home with a self-generating development capability. in contrast to the broad-based, self-generating economies of northern europe and north america, the monoculture plantation economy of latin america served as a relatively static resource for the dynamic economic growth of the european states and eventually led the continent to the status of the third world. monoculture meant the inefficient use of natural as well as human resources. it meant unemployment for a good part of each year, as well as inefficient performance during the work seasons. neither slave labor nor tenant labor was highly productive, since there was little reward or incentive to stimulate production. heavy capital investments for the growing and processing of a given crop also made it difficult to shift or to diversify. these various factors explain why plantation societies were capable of economic growth, or increased output of any particular crop, but not of any real economic development. the end result was that the most profitable latin american colonies of the past are now among the most underdeveloped third world countries in the world, while the least profitable colonies, the anglo americas, have become the leader of the first world. 6 prajna vihara __ __ ~ ii. the history of liberation theology under the unequal relationship between the first world and the third world, latin americans have recently sought to understand and explain their own situation of underdevelopment and poverty. social scientists took a leading role in articulating the economic and political structures of latin america and naming their own realities. in so doing, they declared intellectual and cultural independence from those in the advanced industrialized countries. after centuries of resistance, the church or parts of the church followed suit. instead of interpreting christianity in the traditional way, an increasing number of clergymen adopted the methodology of critical social analysis in their interpretation both of christianity and of the latin american situation. these clergymen emerged as liberation theologians. by working with poor people in christian base communities amid the atmosphere of social revolution in the last few decades, they have created a significant theological movement, namely, liberation theology, which contributes to one of the most important developments, as i see it, in the history of christianity. a. early historical development of latin american clergy from its first appearance in the new world, the catholic church was part of the overall colonization of the native american peoples by spain and portugal. some of the early missionaries, however, protested against the cruelty of the conquest. the most well known was bartolome de las casas, who came to hispaniola in 1502. las casas became a dominican priest in 1512. although he himself had indigenous slaves, he struggled on their behalf. in the sixteenth century, some dominican bishops were outstanding in their defense of the native americans. the bishop of nicaragua, antonio de valdivieso, was even killed in 1550 by one of the governor’s henchmen. today’s liberation theologians regard this early generation of bishops as their precursors.8 during the years 1808 to 1824 many countries in latin america declared their independence from spain and portugal. the independence movement was led by the local elites, who were largely motivated by a nationalist ideology. the poor served in the armies that struggled for independence, but they received little benefit. the independence struggle brought a severe crisis to the catholic church. many bishops sided with the spanish, and the popes made pronouncements against the indepentavivat puntarigvivat 7 dence struggle in 1816 and 1823. the vatican only began to recognize the new states in 1831. during the independence struggle, however, some clerics such as hidalgo and morelos supported the independence movements. after independence, the church became tied to conservative parties that battled against liberal parties in almost all countries. as a result of independence and attacks from liberal governments, the catholic church was in a situation of chronic weakness and crisis. one consequence is that most latin american countries have never produced sufficient clergy and have depended on a steady flow from europe. today the catholic clergy in several countries__guatemala, nicaragua, honduras, venezuela, panama, bolivia__is around 80 percent foreign. protestant missionary efforts began late in the nineteenth century. liberal governments often regarded protestants as representing “modernity” and used them for countering catholicism. despite impressive growth rates protestants have remained a minority, and most latin americans continue to see themselves as catholic. during the first half of the twentieth century latin american catholicism emerged with a new strength. the catholic action movements were growing among workers and students. in 1955 bishops from all over the continent met in rio de janeiro for the first plenary meeting of celam (latin american bishops’ conference). they were also beginning to recognize and analyze the deep social problems of the continent. b. the emergence of liberation theology the crisis in latin american societies and the effect there of the vatican council ii and its aftermath had a great impact on the catholic church. beginning in the 1960s, many priests, catechists, and sisters working at the local level began to raise questions about the social and economic order. certain political events, such as the cuban revolution and the repression in brazil in the early 1960s, began to raise questions about the role of the church in latin america. during the cuban revolution christians played no important role in the overthrow of the batista dictatorship. the cuban government and communist party were officially atheist. there was virtually no theological linkage between christianity and the revolution. in the late 1960s, however, cuban bishops began to present a positive theological interpretation of the revolution. inspired by cuba’s example, rural revolutionary 8 prajna vihara __ __ ~ movements arose in venezuela, guatemala, peru, and some other countries in latin america. in response, the kennedy administration launched the alliance for progress, which combined development aid with an upgrading of armies and police to counter the revolutionary movements. under president juscelino kubitschek (1955-1960), the brazilian government sought to solve the problems of economic development. the president himself used christian language such as calling social injustice “a great sin against christ”. the catholic church joined the government in their unsuccessful efforts to solve the economic problems of the rural northeast. at the same time, peasant leagues were becoming militant, and university students were working directly with the poor. paulo freire, an educator in the northeast, developed a new method for teaching literacy through a process of conscientizacao (conscientization, or consciousness-raising). catholic action movements of students, workers and catholic intellectuals became involved. some christians began to utilize marxist social analysis. meanwhile, the army became alarmed by the growing grass-roots militancy and staged a coup in march 1964. many intellectuals, politicians, and popular leaders had to flee the country, and the church was largely silenced for almost a decade. in 1962, with the initiative of pope john xxiii, the second vatican council was held in an open atmosphere. in the council’s plenary sessions and working groups, progressive theological ideas and proposals were legitimized. the council led latin american catholics to take a much more critical look at their own church and their own society, and they began to ask questions that took as their starting point the socio-economic conditions of contemporary latin america. in 1965, camilo torres, a colombian priest, formed an organization called the united front which linked together peasants, workers, slum dwellers, professional people, and others to pressure for basic change in that country. shortly afterward, he joined the revolutionaries of the eln (army of national liberation) and was killed in combat amid the revolutionary atmosphere of the mid-1960s. latin american social scientists were beginning to question the ideology of “developmentism” and proposed a new approach to the root problem of underdevelopment, which was known as the “dependency theory”. it was developed largely by latin americans as a kind of declaration of cultural and intellectual independence. at the same time, a group of eighteen third world bishops issued a statement with a positive view of revolution. this statement of the “bishops of the third world’ became tavivat puntarigvivat 9 a starting point for the movement of priests for the third world in argentina, peru, colombia, mexico, and elsewhere. this radicalized clergy played an important role since they were in more direct contact with the majority of poor people. in august 1968 about 130 catholic bishops met in medellin, colombia, for the task of applying vatican ii to latin america. the medellin meeting was the second plenary meeting of celam (latin american bishops’ conference); the first had been held in rio de janeiro in 1955. they denounced “institutionalized violence” and referred to it as a “situation of sin”. in several places the documents supported the “base community” movement. few such communities existed then, but they would soon become very widespread. one of the advisors at medellin was the peruvian theologian gustavo gutierrez. gutierrez outlined a “theology of liberation” in a talk in chimbote, peru. that may mark the first use of the expression in latin america.9 during 1970 there were many conferences on the topic. in 1971 gutierrez and hugo assmann, a brazilian theologian, published full-length books on liberation theology. the socialist popular unity coalition won national elections in chile in 1970 and president salvador allende sought to carry out significant reforms. many groups of christians joined the socialist parties and movements. when the first sketches of liberation theology appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, several ways to basic structural change in society seemed possible. despite the death of che guevara in bolivia in 1967, revolutionary movements were on the rise in several countries. the 1970 election victory of salvador allende and his coalition held out hope that basic structural change could be obtained through peaceful elections. similar coalitions were organized for elections in venezuela and uruguay. in response to these progressive movements of the 1970s, the united states staged strong counterrevolutionary strategies. military coups led to repressive governments in brazil (1964), bolivia (1971), uruguay (1973), chile (1973), and argentina (1976). moreover, existing military governments shifted rightward in peru (1975) and ecuador (1976). repressive military rule continued in paraguay and most of central america. only in mexico, colombia, venezuela, and costa rica did formal democracy remain, but those governments were ready to utilize harsh repression. after the medellin conference the new progressive theological ideas spread rapidly throughout the continent. each year hundreds of 10 prajna vihara __ __ ~ priests and sisters were taking courses in celam’s own training program. in 1971, however, things changed. the belgian jesuit roger vekemans set up a research center in bogota, colombia, and in collaboration with the ambitious bishop alfonso lopez trujillo began to attack liberation theology and propose an alternative kind of social analysis and theology. at the same time, lopez trujillo cultivated contacts in the vatican and among latin american bishops in an effort to capture the administration of celam. in november 1972 lopez trujillo was elected secretary-general of celam. he then collapsed the several celam training institutes into one, which was located in colombia where he could oversee it. the celam agencies became a platform for attacks on liberation theology. the most important development within the church during this period was the quiet, steady growth of base communities. base communities are a primary embodiment of liberation theology. in brazil alone it is estimated that there are more than seventy thousand such communities with a total membership of two and a half million people. phillip berryman has defined church base communities as small lay-led communities, motivated by christian faith, who see themselves as part of the church and who are committed to working together to improve their communities and to establish a more just society.10 early in this century in europe, the belgian priest joseph cardijn began a new approach to young working people. he began holding small group meetings that emphasized not doctrine but action to solve people’s problems, such as unjust wages, or union struggles. the method was summed up in three words “observe-judge-act”.11 participants would observe by discussing the relevant facts, judge by deciding whether the situation was in accord with the gospel, and agree to act in some way, however, small. this movement thrived in latin america during the 1950s. in 1957 in a community called barra do pirai near rio de janeiro, bishop agnelo rossi began training people to be catechists. the first nationwide pastoral plan (1965-1970) of the brazilian bishops was calling for subdividing parishes into “base communities”. by the end of the 1960s the base-community model had gained wide acceptance. at medellin the bishops stated that the church should become present in small local communities, forming a core community of faith, hope, and charity. celam (latin american bishops’ conference) training institutes in chile, colombia, and ecuador spread the ideas and methodology of “base communities”. two priests, jose marins, a brazilian, and edgard beltran, a tavivat puntarigvivat 11 colombian, traveled full-time giving courses on “base communities” throughout latin america. christian base communities were widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. they have continued their activities in solidarity with the poor until the present time. base communities provided a space in which people could meet in an atmosphere of respect and reaffirm their own faith and hope. they became a space where poor people could “speak their word” and where they heard that god was on their side. such quiet work, however, provoked a violent response, and church representatives came under attack. in brazil repression had been heavy since 1968, especially in the poor northeast. there was an attempt to assassinate archbishop helder camara of recife in 1969, but no serious investigation was conducted by the authorities. other priests in rural areas were arrested, jailed, tortured, or expelled. in chile the brutality of the pinochet coup (1973) provoked a wide-ranging response. in bolivia, uruguay, and paraguay church involvement in human rights activities led to serious conflicts with governments. in argentina bishop enrique angellelli was killed in 1976. in latin america as a whole, between 1964 and 1978, 41 priests were killed and 11 “disappeared”. in addition, some 485 were arrested, 46 were tortured, and 253 were expelled from the countries where they worked.12 the puebla conference in 1979 seemed to provide bishop lopez trujillo and his allies, including some vatican officials, with the occasion for delegitimizing liberation theology. the puebla conference, however, turned out to be a clash between three groups of bishops. the first were those conservatives who stressed hierarchical authority and doctrinal orthodoxy and who attacked liberation theology. the second were those liberation theologians who stressed base communities and the church’s mission for the poor and structural change. the third and the largest group might be called centrist. with the conservatives this group shared a concern for church authority, and with the liberation theologians a conviction to defend human rights, at least in extreme circumstances. the final document that emerged was inconclusive, and each of the three groups could find positive elements in it. in 1979 a broad grass-roots movement led by the sandinista national liberation front (fsln) overthrew the somoza dictatorship in nicaragua. this was the first revolutionary government in latin america in twenty years. in contrast to the cuban revolution, christians played important roles in the anti-dictatorial struggle in nicaragua. similar revolutionary movements were going on in el salvador and guatemala. the 12 prajna vihara __ __ ~ united states, in its attempt to stop revolution, supported the salvadoran regime and created a counterrevolutionary army (contras) to attack nicaragua. during this period, church leaders played an important role in defending human rights, especially archbishop oscar romero of el salvador, who became known as the “voice of the voiceless”. latin american liberation theologians are indeed more conservative in doctrinal expression than many catholic liberals in europe and north america. the challenge comes from a way of doing theology in which the starting point is the situation of the poor. systematic attacks on liberation theology within the church began around 1972. the so-called “ratzinger letter” (“instruction on certain aspects of the theology of liberation”, issued in august 1984) represents the major objections to liberation theology from the vatican. ratzinger’s critique is itself a highly condensed summary of more than a decade of criticism of the latin american church. his position is that “hearts” must be converted before structures are changed, not the opposite way. liberation theologians, however, do not believe that structures must be changed first. rather, they argue that “hearts” are converted as people join together in solidarity to struggle for a more just world. meanwhile, political and economic situations in latin america have changed. by the mid-1980s elected civilian governments replaced most military dictatorship. humiliated by its defeat in war with britain over the malvinas/falkland islands, the argentine army was forced to withdraw from politics. uruguay, peru, bolivia, ecuador, and honduras also returned to civilian rule. el salvador allowed elections, and guatemala returned to civilian rule through an election in late 1985. but these civilian governments were faced with a deepening economic crisis all over latin america created by foreign debt. in august, 1985, the cuban government hosted a meeting at havana of some twelve hundred delegates from all over latin america, among whom were some one hundred catholic priests. during his closing address premier fidel castro read a message to the conference from cardinal paulo evaristo arns of sao paulo which stated that latin american governments’ most basic commitments were to their people, not to their creditors. arns’ message has been well received by most latin american people. during july and august, 1988, many of the world’s leading theologians gathered at maryknoll, new york, to honor gustavo gutierrez, the “father of liberation theology”. the occasion marked the twentieth anniversary of the medellin conference, gutierrez’s sixtieth birthday, and tavivat puntarigvivat 13 publication of the 15th anniversary edition of gutierrez’s classic, a theology of liberation. the original essays from this unprecedented gathering, published as the future of liberation theology, are a unique, multifaceted examination of contemporary liberation theology.13 c. liberation theology as critical reflection and solidarity with the poor in the late 1950s and early 1960s, paulo freire, a brazilian educator, set a model for engagement with the poor through the method called “conscientization” (concientizacion in spanish, or conscientizacao in portuguese). this method dealt with one basic problem in the base communities of teaching peasants to read and write. through the process of conscientization (or consciousness-raising), freire assumed that the peasants were actually intelligent adults, that they only lacked the linguistic tools for reading and writing. hence, they used words and images from the social reality of the peasants’ world such as their crops, tools, customs, land tenure and the problems they were facing. freire argued that conventional pedagogical methods treated people as empty recipients into which knowledge could be deposited. freire and his associates, by contrast, assumed that even poor people are active agents in their own social and political life. using a socratic technique that moved from effects (their own poverty) to cause (the power structure) in society, they brought poor people to a critical consciousness.14 the experiment ended when the military staged a coup in 1964, and freire himself had to leave brazil. however, his ideas and methods spread rapidly as people attended his lectures in chile, where he worked with the agrarian reform agency. he also gave talks in such places as the language and culture training center run by ivan illich in cuernavaca, mexico. freire argues that latin american poor people, like all human beings, are rational and political animals and have the capacity to enjoy or exercise freedom. he believes that through a conscientization process, poor people can decide by themselves what is best for them and how to achieve it. freire himself has worked with socialist and revolutionary governments in tanzania, guinea-bissau, and angola. freire’s pedagogy contributed to the way latin american liberation theologians dealt with their solidarity with the poor. as gustavo gutierrez has pointed out, “theology is reflection, a critical attitude. theology follows; it is the second step”.15 in liberation 14 prajna vihara __ __ ~ theology, critical reflection and solidarity with the poor come first, theology, second. liberation theology is an interpretation of christian faith out of the suffering, struggle, and hope of the poor. poverty is seen as a product of the prevailing social structure. liberation theology is, therefore, a critique of social, political and economic structures and the ideologies sustaining them__including the use of religious symbols. it also includes a critique of the church hierarchy from the angle of the poor.16 the critique of ideology, as gibson winter sees it, involves a hermeneutics of suspicion, an attempt to deconstruct a prevailing ideology in order to trace the interests that sustain it and the societal realities which it conceals.17 as gutierrez has pointed out: it is for all these reasons that the theology of liberation offers us not so much a new theme for reflection as a new way to do theology. theology as critical reflection on historical praxis is a liberation theology... this is a theology which does not stop with reflecting on the world, but rather tries to be part of the process through which the world is transformed.18 or as another peruvian priest put it: as we see it, a perhaps faulty presentation of the christian message may have given the impression that religion is indeed the opiate of the people. and we would be guilty of betraying the cause of peru’s development, if we did not stress the fact that the doctrinal riches of the gospel contain a revolutionary thrust.19 critical reflection always plays the inverse role of an ideology which rationalizes and justifies a given social and ecclesiastical order. for liberation theologians, the whole climate of the gospel is a continual demand for the right of the poor to make themselves heard. iii. hermeneutics of the poor whereas philosophy provided tools for classical theology, social theory provided analytical tools for latin american liberation theology. tavivat puntarigvivat 15 liberation theologians have constructed their interpretations by utilizing the social sciences, particularly marxist social analysis, latin american history, and contemporary philosophical hermeneutics, but they have continually returned to dialogue with the poor concerning their social realities. in the 1979 puebla conference, the latin american bishops (celam) spoke with the language of the “situation of social sinfulness”, “preferential option for the poor”, and “social justice as the kingdom of god”. liberation theology emerged from work by priests, pastors, nuns and lay catechists in the christian base communities and mass organization of the poor in latin america. contrary to the traditional church, which has supported social injustice by its links to the establishment or its silence about the unjust social system, liberation theologians have attempted to assume their responsibility for this structural injustice by working with the poor and the oppressed. reading the bible together has been an essential part of life in the base communities. from a hermeneutical perspective, liberation theology is an attempt to read the bible and key christian doctrines with the eyes of the poor. it is at the same time an attempt to help the poor interpret their own faith in a new way. the poor learn to read the scripture in a way that affirms their dignity and selfworth and their right to struggle together for a more decent life. the disciplined inquiry of a community of those who are committed to the struggle for justice and peace is, according gibson winter, religious social ethics. religious social ethics has the task and privilege of opening the horizon of possibilities in a people’s struggle for justice and peace. these open horizons disclose possibilities of commitment and action. at this threshold, only a people can decide whether to continue in complicity with injustice or to begin resistance.20 as john raines understands it, people in base communities find the meaning of their life and are able to name their own reality. in latin america, the church of the people has discovered that it is crucial to join the people where they are__especially if where they are is deeply enmeshed in despair__and encourage them to name their reality. no one else can do our naming for us. in speaking and in being heard and 16 prajna vihara __ __ ~ responded to, we gain confidence, broaden our perspective, and begin to believe in our right to protest. the listeners support those who have just found voice in their task of liberating themselves from silence, from humiliation, from dependency and feelings of being incapable of self-direction. that is what the biblical command “love thy neighbor” means. real charity is finding out how much the rest of us can learn from the poor and then letting them teach us.21 from this experience came the idea of the hermeneutical privilege of the poor: a true reading of the bible required the participation and perspective of the poor. orthopraxis (right doing) comes before orthodoxy (right knowing). ideas must be reconsidered in light of praxis which is the proving ground of all theory. this approach naturally led to an emphasis on certain themes and interpretations of the bible. as gutierrez has asserted, all the political theologies, the theologies of hope, of revolution, and of liberation, are not worth one act of genuine solidarity with exploited social classes.22 leonardo boff, a brazilian former franciscan theologian, has defined hermeneutics as the science and technique of interpretation by means of which we are enabled to understand the original meaning of any writings (or realities) no longer immediately comprehensible to men and women of today.23 they understand the bible in terms of their experience and reinterpret that experience in terms of biblical symbols. in theological terms, this is called the “hermeneutical circle”__interpretation moves from experience to text to experience.24 the function of theology as critical reflection on praxis has become more clearly defined in recent years. for liberation theologians, it has its roots in the first centuries of the church’s life. they argue that the problem they pose is both traditional and new. between us and the bible, more than two thousand years intervene. people’s conceptual framework has changed, and words have acquired new meanings. some passages are no longer comprehensible to people today. therefore, hermeneutics plays an important role in the interpretation of the messages in the bible. however, there are at least two ways of interpreting the bible: metaphysicalontological hermeneutics and socio-political hermeneutics. the traditional christian church interprets the bible from the metaphysical and ontological point of view. this interpretation has betavivat puntarigvivat 17 come the ideology of the establishment to sustain the existing unjust social system. for example, if jesus’ words about the poor being blessed and captives being liberated were interpreted only “spiritually” to mean inward poverty and the liberation from personal sin, this interpretation would serve an ideological function to maintain an unjust system. liberation theology interprets the bible from a socio-political perspective. it makes use of marxist social analysis in its interpretation of the bible, and this brings a new dimension to the meaning of the bible. the methodology of liberation theology is thus dialectical analysis, as leonardo boff puts it: dialectical analysis examines conflicts and imbalances affecting the impoverished and calls for a reformulation of the social system itself, in order to secure symmetry in the system and justice for all its members... liberation theology holds that this is the analysis that better answers to the objectives of faith and christian practice. and it is here that use is made of the analytical instrument devised by marxist tradition.25 liberation theology owes its methodology and social analysis to marxism in its interpretation of the bible and its understanding of contemporary situations in latin america. but roger lancaster has a somewhat different idea on this point. he claims that marx himself was influenced by pre-marxist socialism. and pre-marxist socialism was influenced by the biblical message. for example, the marxist idea that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” was derived from the early church in the book of acts (2:44-45, 4:32). so in this sense, marxism owes its worldview in part to the early church. liberation theology is, according to lancaster, closer to pre-marxist socialism than marxism itself. in his prologue, “theses on a philosophy of central american history”, lancaster summarizes the central message of liberation theology: liberation theology knows that the salvation of the poor is the common project of two faiths, marxism and christianity. and the theology of liberation itself emerges at the moment of contact between the old religion and marxism. but the religion of hope is not thus merely some me18 prajna vihara __ __ ~ chanical “new syncretism” of each, blending two old faiths to make a new one, as one might graft two trees together to make one. rather, it only makes explicit what was implicit in the old religion. there is nothing “radical” about it. it sees itself as the most traditional and conservative version of christianity, and takes the communism of the original church as its central message. this is its image of the past: an unbroken chain of oppression, running right up to the present. the bible chronicles that history and future of the poor, on their long march to god and communism. the original message of christ was revolution. if that message was lost, suppressed, or driven underground, it is the sacred charge of the orthodox to revive it.26 lancaster’s claim that liberation theologians took the original message of christ__to do justice to the poor and the oppressed__as their central message, and especially that socialism originally took the form of communalism in the early christian church might be disputed, but it is undeniable that liberation theologians today have utilized the marxist dialectics of class analysis and class struggle. the poor and the oppressed, according to gutierrez, are members of one social class that is being exploited by another social class. an option for the poor means a new awareness of class confrontation. it means taking sides with the dispossessed. it means entering into the world of the exploited social class, with its values and its cultural categories. it means entering into solidarity with its interests and its struggles.27 some liberation theologians have even made a quite obvious use of marxism in their social and economic analysis. for example, in his book the ideological weapons of death, franz hinkelammert, a german economist who has worked for twenty years in latin america, follows closely marx’s analysis of fetishism in capital. human beings at first produced “use-value” for their own subsistence such as a crop to eat. later they began to produce goods for their “exchange-value”. thus fetishism begins: human beings are dominated by the commodities they produce. commodities become “subjects” while human beings become objects. those who produce commodities__workers__are alienated from what they produce, hence their exploitation in their work and wages. matters only become worse, with “money fetishism” and “capital fetishism”.28 tavivat puntarigvivat 19 a. historical consciousness of the defeated liberation theologians see that history has been written by the victors, the dominating classes. historical consciousness has been made up and structured on the ideology of the dominant classes. history’s winners, according to gutierrez, have sought to wipe out their victims’ memory of the struggles, so as to be able to snatch from them one of their sources of energy and will in history: a source of rebellion.29 the winners have killed memory in the losers, so that now everyone’s consciousness of history is that of the victors. but rereading history means remaking history. it means repairing it from the bottom up. the aim of rereading history from the viewpoint of the defeated is a revision of this historical consciousness__especially the historical consciousness from the standpoint of the native americans, slaves, and other marginalized groups. as leonardo boff has pointed out, the purpose of this endeavor is to give latin american peoples a genuine historical consciousness, without which they will remain rootless and deprived of the support needed to nourish their struggle for liberation.30 this approach is uncovering new sources, and permitting new interpretations and outlooks very different from the official interpretation of the major events in the history of latin american peoples. in his book philosophy of liberation, enrique dussel, an argentine philosopher, theologian and historian, has philosophized critically upon the historical consciousness of the metropolitan center. dussel argued that thought that takes refuge in the center ends by thinking it to be the only reality. outside its frontiers is nonbeing, nothing, barbarity, and nonsense. ontology, the thinking that expresses being__the being of the reigning and central system__is the ideology of ideologies, the foundation of the ideologies of the empires, of the center.31 he made explicit his philosophy of domination by referring to contemporary power structures: the empires of the center__england and france as colonial powers, nazi germany, and later the united states with its central intelligence agency (cia)__thus once more possess an ontology that justifies them, a subtle ideology that gives them a “good conscience”.... philosophy again becomes the center of the ideological hegemony of the dominating class.32 20 prajna vihara __ __ ~ dussel sees it as necessary to start historical analysis from the perspective of center/periphery, dominator/dominated dissymmetry, and from this dissymmetry to reinvestigate the history that has been written until now. from a historical, empirical viewpoint, dussel argues, “if this philosophy (of liberation) is critical, if it criticizes the system, then this system must criticize it, must persecute it”. philosophers who practice it have been targeted for bombings; they have been dismissed from their universities, expelled from their homelands; they have been condemned to death by the agents of imperialism, fascism, and the extreme right. b. poverty as oppressed condition the term “poverty” sometimes has ambiguous implications. it has both positive and negative meanings. often people tend to be confused by the implications of what poverty means. some may argue in the positive sense that poverty as material austerity could lead to rich spirituality and that rich people with self-indulgence may be poor in spirituality. this is true if poverty is among the free choices people could choose to live with. for example, if someone who has a middle-class standard of living chooses to live in a self-disciplined life with fewer material goods or takes a “vow of poverty”, this is his or her free choice. on the other hand, if someone who belongs to an underclass, who lacks the basic necessities of life such as adequate nutrition, clean water to drink, basic medical treatment when sick, a reasonable place to stay, and basic education was told to be happy with what he or she has for the sake of a “high spirituality”, this would be an ideology that conceals social oppression. liberation theology would argue that the material standard of living of the vast majority of poor and oppressed people needs to be raised to a decent level. then and only then will these people have the ability to choose to live either in their ordinary way or in voluntary poverty in their personal pursuit of high spirituality. the religious meaning of poverty should not be used to confuse this distinction between forced poverty and voluntary poverty. gutierrez has defined the term “poverty” as material poverty, the lack of material goods and services necessary for maintaining life as a human being. many christians, according to gutierrez, often mistake material poverty as a religious ideal-it is taken as austerity or detachment from the material world. for the well-to-do christians, taking voluntarily a step of self-discipline or self-control from material indulgence is probtavivat puntarigvivat 21 ably a good thing to do. but for millions, or even billions, of people who lack the basic material means of living necessary to life due to exploitation and oppression, it is a very different story. to force the majority of the world’s population economically to live in dehumanizing material poverty is certainly not the purpose of christianity. under the circumstances of the world’s poverty today, gutierrez has argued, to talk about spiritual richness and poverty is a misleading conception__it is an ideology intended to maintain the unjust social structure. this misleading conception portrays the cases of the rich who are spiritually poor as well as the poor who are spiritually rich. it is an ideology meant to keep the poor in their social class, without rebelling against it, in the hope for the reward of a life in heaven. to be a complete human being, the basic necessities of this life need to be met. to be a complete human society, a fair distribution of wealth needs to be effected. otherwise, it is only to play with words-and with people. as gutierrez foresees, social classes, nations, and entire continents are becoming aware of their poverty, and when they see its root causes they will rebel against it. in christian terms, poverty is an expression of sin-a negation of love. it is not an interior detachment from the goods of this world. it is therefore incompatible with the teachings of jesus and the coming of the kingdom of god-a kingdom of love and justice. poverty is opposed to pride, to an attitude of self-sufficiency. so poverty needs to be taken as a commitment of solidarity and protest. christian poverty has meaning only as a commitment of solidarity with the poor, with those who suffer misery and injustice. for gutierrez, one cannot really be with the poor unless he or she is struggling against poverty.33 according to gutierrez, if the ultimate cause of man’s exploitation and alienation is selfishness, the deepest reason for voluntary poverty is “love of neighbor”. christian poverty, an expression of love, is solidarity with the poor and is a protest against poverty. christians, therefore, do not choose to become poor out of a love for the ideal of poverty, but rather so that there will be no poor. poor people today are the oppressed and the exploited ones__the ones marginalized in society, the members of the working class and underclass, struggling for their most basic rights, in a country struggling for its liberation. poverty is different from the classic “renunciation of the goods of this world”. 22 prajna vihara __ __ ~ c. kingdom of god as struggle for justice for liberation theologians, christ is the temple of god. the christian community is a temple, and each christian, a member of this community, is a temple of the holy spirit. to cite a few passages from the bible: “surely you know that you are god’s temple, where the spirit of god dwells. anyone who destroys god’s temple will himself be destroyed by god, because the temple of god is holy; and that temple you are” (1 cor. 3:16-17): “do you not know that your body is a shrine of the indwelling holy spirit, and the spirit is god’s gift to you?” (1 cor. 6:19). furthermore, not only each christian is a temple of god, every human being in history is the living temple of god. the “profane”__that which is located outside the temple-no longer exists. according to gutierrez, if humanity__each human being-is the living temple of god, we meet god in our encounter with men and women, and in our commitment to the historical process of mankind.34 according to the bible, to oppress the poor is to offend god, because what is done for others is done for god. to exploit the worker and to delay the payment of wages are to offend god: “you shall not keep back the wages of a man who is poor and needy, whether a fellowcountryman or an alien living in your country in one of your settlements. pay him his wages on the same day before sunset, for he is poor and his heart is set on them: he may appeal to the lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin” (deut. 24:14-15; cf. exod. 22:21-23).35 from these biblical messages, liberation theologians further develop that to love god is to do justice to the poor and the oppressed. christians find god in their encounter with the poor, the marginalized, and the exploited. an act of love towards them is an act of love towards god. as gutierrez has pointed out: to know yahweh, which in biblical language is equivalent to saying to love yahweh, is to establish just relationships among men, it is to recognize the rights of the poor. the god of biblical revelation is known through interhuman justice. when justice does not exist, god is not known; he is absent.36 according to the bible, yahweh “deals out justice to the oppressed. the lord feeds the hungry and sets the prisoner free. the lord restores tavivat puntarigvivat 23 sight to the blind and straightens backs which are bent; the lord loves the righteous and watches over the stranger; the lord gives heart to the orphan and widow but turns the course of the wicked to their ruin”. (ps. 146:7-10). accordingly, love of god is unavoidably expressed through love of one’s neighbor__especially the poor and the oppressed. to struggle for justice for exploited people is to love god. as gutierrez sees it, to sin is to refuse to love, to reject communion and brotherhood, to reject the very meaning of human existence. the bible indicates that where there is social justice and righteousness, there is knowledge of god; when these are lacking, it is absent. “there is no good faith or mutual trust, no knowledge of god in the land”. (hos. 4:1-2; cf. isa. 1). according to gutierrez, the concept of neighbor needs to be reinterpreted within the socio-economic context: as it has been insisted in recent years, the neighbor is not only man viewed individually. the term refers also to man considered in the fabric of social relationships, to man situated in his economic, social, cultural, and racial coordinates. it likewise refers to the exploited social class, the dominated people, and the marginated race.37 this point of view is beyond the individualistic relationship. it is also necessary to avoid the ideology of an individualistic charity. charity today is, according to gutierrez, a “political charity”. often, to offer food or drink in our day is a political action. it benefits socially those who perform this political ritual of individualistic charity. it benefits temporarily only a few poor people without solving the root cause of their poverty. true charity needs to be a radical change in the unjust social structure so that justice is established and all benefit from it. from this new dimension of critical reflection in the interpretation of the bible, liberation theologians place the emphasis on the “kingdom of god”. for them, the central messages of jesus are not god, nor the church, nor jesus christ himself, but the kingdom of god. the kingdom of god is justice for all poor and oppressed people. the struggle for justice is the struggle for the kingdom of god. jesus himself was born poor. he chose to live with poor people for his whole life. and his message is to establish the kingdom of god__to bring justice to the poor and the oppressed in society. as gutierrez has pointed out: 24 prajna vihara __ __ ~ conversion means a radical transformation of ourselves; it means thinking, feeling, and living as christ-present in exploited and alienated man. to be converted is to commit oneself to the process of the liberation of the poor and oppressed, to commit oneself lucidly, realistically, and concretely. it means to commit oneself not only generously, but also with an analysis of the situation and a strategy of action.38 and as leonardo boff puts it: in contact with the poor, who constitute a whole exploited social class, a person experiences a genuine encounter with the lord and makes a commitment to justice, which is the prime characteristic of the kingdom of god.39 the kingdom of god necessarily implies the reestablishment of justice in this world. christ reveals himself to humankind by identifying himself with the poor. to place oneself in the perspective of the kingdom of god means to participate in the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed. equally important, the process of liberation requires the active participation of the oppressed themselves. from socio-political hermeneutics, social injustice is the result of social structures rather than of people’s intentions. in his book marx and the bible, jose miranda, a mexican liberation theologian, calls this social injustice “institutional robbery”. he claims that most of the exploitation today is legal. private ownership under monopoly capitalism is a form of legalized and institutionalized robbery. he also asserts the biblical presupposition that excess wealth is unacquirable without violence and spoliation. therefore, almsgiving is nothing more than the return of what has been stolen, and thus the bible calls it justice. according to miranda, there is a relationship between social analysis and faith in the bible. where social analysis says “structural poverty”, faith will say “structural sin”. where social analysis says “private accumulation of wealth”, faith will say the “sin of selfishness”.40 in liberation theology, another central theme of the messages in the bible is in the relationship between god and the poor. yahweh is the god who breaks into human history to liberate the oppressed. god intervened in human history to free the oppressed and establish justice on earth. this is the purpose of god’s interventions tavivat puntarigvivat 25 in human history. to know god is, therefore, to do justice to the oppressed and the poor. from socio-political hermeneutics of the bible, sin is incarnated in the unjust economico-political structures and in the ideology which sustains them. sin has become structured in the unjust and dehumanized social system whose essential expression is the oppressive law. however, sin and evil, which were later structured into a human social system, are not inherent to humankind and history. they began one day through a human work and can one day be eliminated. so there is hope to change it. as gutierrez sees it: other religions think in terms of cosmos and nature; christianity, rooted in biblical sources, thinks in terms of history. and in this history, injustice and oppression, divisions and confrontations exist. but the hope of liberation is also present.41 the socio-political hermeneutics of the bible demands “praxis” to the point of being identified with the poor and the oppressed in their struggle to establish justice, or the kingdom of god, in society. liberation theologians agree with karl marx that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”.42 the future of history belongs to the poor and the exploited, and true liberation lies in the praxis of solidarity with the oppressed. d. human rights from the third world perspective when the carter administration (1977-81) in the united states made human rights43the center of its foreign policy__particularly with regard to the third world, juan luis segundo, a liberation theologian from uruguay, asserted that the root of human rights violations was to be found in the impossible conditions laid on third world countries by the rich countries__conditions which could only be maintained by repression. hence, it was hypocritical for the first world, especially the u.s. administration, to criticize the third world regimes that carried out the repression.44 latin american theologians insisted that one should not simply speak of “human rights” in general but of the “rights of the majorities” or the “rights of the poor” whose rights were constantly being violated by the oppressive social, economic, and political structures. they pointed to 26 prajna vihara __ __ ~ the need to develop an alternative language, because they saw in liberal western discourse about human rights “idealist” language. instead of simply accepting the western notion of human rights, with its focus on individual rights, which could easily become an ideology masking the daily suffering and death of the poor majority, latin americans should develop a new language about human rights. they insisted that the most basic human right is the right to life and consequently the right to the means of sustaining life, that is, land and employment. liberation theologians insisted on the “rights of peoples” and pointed to the “universal declaration of the rights of peoples” made in algeria in 1976. this declaration stressed the rights of peoples to self-determination, to their natural resources, to the common patrimony of humankind, to a just compensation for their labor, to choose their own economic and social systems, and to speak their own language. the 1948 united nations universal declaration of human rights also include economic and social rights.45 third world representatives regard the western conception of human rights as narrowly individualistic since it ignores or downplays the most basic rightthe right to survival and life, which is essentially connected to the right to work. latin american theologians have sought to move the human rights issue beyond denouncing abuses, like torture, abduction, and murder to question the very development model that provides small elites with luxurious lives while the majority live in dehumanizing conditions. liberation theologians are intellectuals. they produce books and articles and take part in conferences. they differ from traditional theology and academics in having a connection to grass-roots base communities and popular movements. in antonio gramsci’s terms, they are “organic intellectuals”__intellectuals whose work is directly connected with popular struggle. as phillip berryman has pointed out, liberation theology is both theory-for-praxis (it has input to grass-roots movement in the form of theory and methods) and theory-of-praxis (its questions and insights come from involvement with the poor).46 iv. dependency theory liberation theologians have challenged the western idea of “development” by their well-known dependency theory. that theory, though disputed by many economists, is as follows: underdevelopment in the third world is structural and was caused by the development of the first tavivat puntarigvivat 27 world. first world countries, especially the united states of america, japan and western europe, economically dominate and exploit third world countries around the world under transnational capitalist neocolonialism. the rich nations exploit the poor nations by making their whole economy a dependency economy, and also exploit them in terms of their natural resources and particularly their poorly paid labor. this is the unequal relationship between the first world and the third world. in other words, the first world nations develop or progress at the expense of the third world nations. the story of bananas in latin america may serve to illustrate this point. a. the story of bananas: honduras, panama, costa rica and guatemala in march 1974, several banana-producing countries in central america joined together to demand a one-dollar tax on every case of bananas exported. banana prices for producer countries had not increased for the previous twenty years despite high inflation. but the costs for manufactured goods imported from the industrialized countries had constantly increased. as a result the real income of banana-exporting countries had declined by 60 percent. for countries like honduras and panama, at least half of their export income came from bananas. the american banana companies constantly refused to pay the newly demanded export tax. since three large companies (united brands, castle and cooke, and del monte) controlled 90 percent of the marketing and distribution of bananas, they had strong bargaining power. in panama the banana companies suddenly stopped cutting bananas. in honduras the fruit company allowed 145,000 crates of bananas to rot at the docks. finally, costa rica settled the export tax issue with the banana companies for twenty-five cents a case; panama, for thirty-five cents; honduras, with bribes paid to high-ranking officials by companies, eventually agreed to a thirty-cent tax. a u.n. fact-finding commission in 1975 concluded, “the bananaproducing countries with very much less income are subsidizing the consumption of the fruit, and consequently the development of the more industrialized countries”.47 the masses of poor people usually have little power. military dictators, which represent wealthy elites, ruled many latin american countries for much of the last thirty years. in latin america and elsewhere change is difficult because the u.s. and other first world 28 prajna vihara __ __ ~ companies work closely with wealthy local elites to protect their mutual economic interests. the whole country of guatemala was once virtually a dependency of the united fruit company (the former name of united brands). in the 1950s, the company held two-thirds of the usable farmland and monopolized the nation’s railroads in its banana business. in 1954 a democratically elected president, jacobo arbenz, initiated a modest program of agricultural and land reform so that poor farmers could have their own land. feeling threatened by the reform program for their unused land, united fruit lobbied the eisenhower administration to intervene. the cia stepped in and overthrew the guatemala leader, and established a dictatorial regime.48 the u.s. secretary of state in 1954 was john foster dulles. his law firm had written the banana company’s agreements with guatemala in 1930 and 1936. the cia director was allen dulles, brother of the secretary of state and previous president of united fruit. the assistant secretary of state was also a major shareholder in united fruit.49 under the u.s.-backed military dictatorship, the political oppression in guatemala was well-known. on september 1, 1982, cbs news correspondent ed rabel reported: human rights organizations have repeatedly accused guatemalan governments of running deliberate programs of political murder to maintain a grip on power...priests, nuns, labor leaders, teachers, students-anyone who threatened the established order. politicians have always been high on the hit list...a [christian democrat] politician here in this country told me...that more than 120 of his party’s leaders had been assassinated in about an 18-month period.50 latin american theologians suggested that under this unequal relationship between the third and the first world, the proper terms for their relationship were not “advanced” and “backward”, or “developed” and “underdeveloped”, but rather “dominant” and “dependent”. the poor countries have been dominated economically and politically by the rich countries. it is extremely difficult for the dominated countries to develop under these economic and political structures of dependency. their only hope, according to liberation theology, was to break this chain of dependency. tavivat puntarigvivat 29 as gutierrez has pointed out, only a class analysis will enable us to see what is really involved in the opposition between the oppressed and dominant peoples. to understand only the confrontation between countries misrepresents the real phenomena and misleads people because such an approach is rather individualistic than structural. in gutierrez’s terms, the theory of dependency will take the wrong path and lead to deception if the analysis is not put within the framework of the worldwide class struggle. the story of beef in el salvador may provide a clear picture of this global exploitation and class struggle. b. the story of beef: el salvador in the 1950s, almost all beef slaughtered in central america was eaten locally. in 1957 the u.s. department of agriculture (usda) approved building the first beef packing plant in central america, and by the late 1970s three-fourths of central america’s beef was exported. by 1978, central america provided the u.s. with 250 million pounds of beef a year. the u.s.-backed development programs built roads, and provided credit to facilitate the expansion of beef exports. from 1960-1980 over one-half of all the loans made by the world bank and the inter-american development bank for agriculture and rural development in central america went to promote the production of beef for exports. wealthy elites made great profits. but large numbers of poor farmers growing basic foodstuffs were uprooted from their land because agribusiness corporations demanded more and more land to raise beef for export. in el salvador, before the first beef packing plant was opened, 29 percent of rural households were landless. by 1980, one-half of all el salvador’s beef went to the u.s., and 65 percent of the rural households were landless. the poor farmers protested, but the agribusiness corporations succeeded in accusing the peasant activists of being communists. the national security forces trained by the u.s. repressed peasant protesters by using repressive tactics including torture and murder. ronald j. sider has written that: the poor suffered to produce cheap hamburgers for american consumers. since the 1960s, beef consumption within central america has declined 20 percent. the poor cannot compete with us. a study by the pan american health organization showed that between 1969 and 1975 mal30 prajna vihara __ __ ~ nutrition rose by 67 percent among children five years and under. in fact, 50 percent of the children in central america were dying before the age of six-largely because of malnutrition and related diseases. you don’t need communists to tell you that is a bad deal.51 to characterize latin america as a dominated and oppressed continent naturally leads one to speak of liberation and to participate in the process. liberation is, in fact, a term which expresses a new response to the latin american situation. the poor countries in latin america are becoming ever more clearly aware that their underdevelopment is only the by-product of the development of northern american countries__particularly the united states__because of the kind of unequal relationship that exists between rich and poor countries. moreover, they are realizing that their true development will come into existence only with a struggle to break the domination of the rich countries. the story of the border industrialization program in mexico illustrates the domination of the united states over the mexican economy. c. the border industrialization program: mexico from 1942 to 1964 the bracero program attracted the flow of braceros (contracted migrant workers) into the united states. when the program was stopped, 200,000 farm workers were suddenly jobless. the unemployment rate reached 50 percent among the manual laborers in border cities like mexicali and ciudad juarez. u.s. investors proposed the creation of a free trade zone on the u.s.-mexican border. the proposal suggested that u.s. industries would benefit because of their need for cheap labor and mexico would benefit from the transfer of technology and skills and solving its unemployment problem. so the border industrialization program (bip) was established in 1965 with the maquiladora system of twin plants, one on either side of the border. the mexican government granted unprecedented financial incentives to american companies: factories could be 100 percent foreignowned and managed; low taxes on profits and sales were offered, with some mexican states giving full tax exemption; and land could be purchased or leased on favorable terms. american corporations were practically given full discretionary power to conduct business and labor affairs without government interference. the mexican government had considtavivat puntarigvivat 31 ered bip a temporary response to the border unemployment crisis. but in 1972, bip was expanded from the original 12.5 miles south of the border to include all of mexico, opening up the entire country to a new form of colonization of the mexican labor force. rather than solving the massive unemployment problem among male workers in the border area, the program aimed at a new source of cheap factory labor. corporations drew huge numbers of women into the industries. by 1974, there were about 500 maquiladoras operating along the border. they employed some 80,000 people, 85 percent of whom were women, with the majority between 16 and 25 years old. those women came to the border free trade zone from small towns and cities. mexican women were paid less than men because of their sexist disadvantaged position in society and because their wages were considered only supplementary to male sources of family income. maquiladora workers work on average 48 hours a week for the minimum wage of 445 pesos a dayabout 77 u.s. cents an hour. with the recent devaluations of the mexican peso, the real wages of mexican workers have dropped sharply. the national bank of mexico predicted that the maquiladora workforce will reach over half a million in the 1990s. companies frequently require women to sign temporary work contracts to avoid paying increased salaries that go with seniority. they often require a medical certificate indicating that a job applicant is not pregnant, eliminating any expenses for maternity benefits. in their book women in the global factory, annette fuentes and barbara ehrenreich have described the working and health conditions of these mexican workers: workers in electronics plants, which account for 60 percent of the maquiladoras, are regularly exposed to toxic chemicals... in garment factories, which comprise 30 percent of all border industry, chronic back problems, asthma, conjunctivitis, bronchitis and brown-lung are common occupational diseases. with the intense pressure of assembly work, maquila women experience high levels of gastrointestinal disorders, insomnia and menstrual irregularities. bladder problems are common because women cannot use the toilets or drink water freely.52 bip is generally recognized as a failure in terms of the mexican government’s initial expectations. male unemployment along the border 32 prajna vihara __ __ ~ has reached 67 percent; the transfer of skills to the workforce and technology to mexican industry has been minimal; the capital-intensive technology remains in the u.s. what began as a short-term remedy for mexico’s unemployment crisis has only deepened dependency on the u.s. and generated new problems for the mexican people. under the north american free trade agreement (nafta), which includes the united states, canada and mexico, mexican immigration to the united states, according to nafta proponents, will decrease as trade liberalization strengthens mexico’s economy, and consequently, its capacity to create jobs and improve wages. but nafta opponents maintain quite the opposite. they argue that open trade will further uproot poor mexican farmers and put out of business small and medium mexican enterprises unable to compete with u.s. corporations. as a result, millions of mexicans will lose their jobs and many of them will be forced to immigrate to the u.s. according to primitivo rodriguez, who heads the mexico-u.s. border program and american friends service committee, mexico is losing to the united states every year more than 300,000 of her most productive and entrepreneurial women and men, including large numbers of educated, skilled and professional people. they are valuable human resources that mexico has invested in and the country desperately needs them for achieving sound development. behind mexico’s huge immigration is a dramatic capital drain. for the last decade, mexico has sent abroadmostly to the united states-an average of a billion dollars a year in debtrelated payments. it is also estimated that mexican capital flight from 1978-1988 was about $70 billion, while mexico’s trade deficit with the united states for 1991 and 1992 reaches $34.5 billion.53 the income gap between the rich and poor in mexico has grown wider. the 1980 world development report states that: in mexico, where the average per capita income grew in real terms by 2.7 percent a year between 1960 and 1978, the richest 20 percent managed to edge their share of income up from 56.5 percent to 57.7 percent. meanwhile, the poor got a smaller share. in 1968 the bottom 40 percent got 12.2 percent of the income pie; by 1977 it was below 10 percent. the poorest 20 percent saw their share cut from 3.6 percent to below 3 percent. this is not to say that the poor actually had lower incomes. figures show tavivat puntarigvivat 33 that the per capita income of the poorest 20 percent of the people stayed about the same, rising from $183 to about $187 per year. the wealthy 20 percent, on the other hand, saw their incomes rise from $2,867 to $3,722. thus the average poor person saw his or her meager income rise by $4 over a period of eighteen years, while the average rich person added $850 in the same period.54 there was great optimism in latin america in the 1950s regarding the possibility of achieving self-sustained economic development. this would be achieved by means of the substitution of imports, expansion of the internal market, and full industrialization, leading to an independent society. to develop, then, meant to follow the model designed by the advanced countries. in achieving this goal, the social, political, and cultural structures in the “traditional societies” or “transitional societies” of the underdeveloped countries needed to be transformed. a change of attitude, however, occurred in the 1960s. the revealing economic, social, and political realities in latin america have made the ideology of developmentalism obsolete. developmentalism__the concept of economic and modernizing development__among poor nations has been largely promoted by international organizations which are in turn controlled by the first world countries. the rich countries, with their multinational corporations, and their clients of the privileged groups in the poor countries share their mutual economic benefits. hence this global situation is structural. it results in the widening income gap between wealthy nations and poor nations, and between the status quo and the vast majority of poor people in those underdeveloped countries. the story of coffee in brazil illustrates this point. d. the story of coffee: brazil under the unequal terms of trade, rich countries usually threaten new tariff barriers on certain manufactures exported by poor countries. to avoid blame from the international community for imposing tariffs, rich countries ask poor countries to “voluntarily” limit the volume of their exports. “voluntary” quotas can have a devastating impact as was experienced by brazil in her coffee industries. coffee used to provide brazil with approximately one-half its to34 prajna vihara __ __ ~ tal export revenues. brazil’s coffee exports increased 90 percent between 1953 and 1961, but the total revenue earned from coffee dropped by 35 percent. so in 1966 brazil decided to process its own coffee in order to create more jobs and earn more income for its people. but when brazilian coffee captured 14 percent of the u.s. market, the u.s. coffee manufacturers (tenco, general foods, standard brands, and others) charged the brazilians with unfair competition. the u.s. government then threatened to cut off aid to brazil, warning that it might not renew the international coffee agreement (which until recently kept coffee prices somewhat stable). brazil eventually was forced to tax its instant coffee exports, and its coffee industry was seriously damaged.55 from 1968 to 1974, brazil’s economy grew at the rate of 10 percent per year, then dropped to 9 percent per year through 1980. from 1980 through 1987, brazil’s economic growth dropped sharply to only 3.3 percent per year. brazil’s minister of finance admitted in 1972 that only the top 5 percent of the brazilian people had benefited from brazil’s economic growth. by 1970 the richest 1 percent of the population controlled a greater share of the national income (17 percent) than the bottom half (13.7 percent).56 the brazilian government did not challenge a 1974 study that showed that the real income of the poorest two-thirds of the people had declined by more than one-half in the preceding ten years.57 ronald sider has reported that: in 1989, two-thirds of brazilian families tried to survive on less than $500 a month. in 1975, 58 percent of the brazilian children under the age of eighteen were malnourished. in 1980, 40 percent of the total population suffered from malnutrition. today, two-thirds of the total population of 141 million people lack the minimum daily calories. more than 40 percent of the children under five years of age still suffer from malnutrition. during the years 1980-87, 13 percent of all children from 0-4 years old were moderately or severely underweight, and 31 percent of all children between the ages of 2 and 5 suffered from moderate and severe stunting__the result of malnutrition.58 according to gutierrez, there are three concepts of development. in the first, development can be regarded as purely economic. in this sense it would be the same as economic growth. in the second, developtavivat puntarigvivat 35 ment is seen as a total social process, including economic, political, social, and cultural aspects. this view stresses the interdependence of these different factors. in the third, development is seen as liberation from structural domination. it concerns human values: human beings should have control over their own destiny. liberation theology adheres to the third meaning of development, as “liberation”. this approach places the concept of development in a wider context__a history in which humankind takes control of his or her own destiny.59 there are two root causes, according to gutierrez, of the social, economic, political, and cultural problems among the poor nations. first, the dependence of some countries on others: poor countries depend upon rich countries for their “development”. second, the domination of some social classes over others: the privileged or elite class dominate the majority which are the oppressed people in their own countries. the attempts to change the situation within the existing system have proven to be failures. the ruling classes use their legal violence, under the name of “law and order”, against the struggles for justice of poor people. even though most of the struggles of the poor and the oppressed are just for their basic necessities of life-food, shelter, medicine, education-the movements are violently suppressed by the government. gutierrez has pointed out that: development must attack the root causes of the problems and among them the deepest is economic, social, political and cultural dependence of some countries upon othersan expression of the domination of some social classes over others... this analysis of the situation is at the level of scientific rationality. only a radical break from the status quo, that is, a profound transformation of the private property system, access to power of the exploited class, and a social revolution that would break this dependence would allow for the change to a new society.60 the story of the international debt crisis may serve to illustrate the domination of the rich capitalists, through the channels of the international banking system, over the poor countries causing their economic crisis. 36 prajna vihara __ __ ~ e. the international debt crisis: latin america and beyond the debt crisis began with the fourfold increase in the world’s oil prices in 1973-1974 causing a rapid increase in borrowing by underdeveloped countries. western commercial banks overflowing with money deposited by oil-producing nations made huge loans to third world governments. with the leap in oil prices, third world countries needed to borrow huge amount of money to continue their economic growth. in the late 1970s, citicorp chairman walter wriston spoke about the loans taking the optimistic view that “countries never go bankrupt”. many of the loans were, unfortunately, spent on expensive armaments or wasted due to official corruption. faced with budget deficits, most third world governments chose to cut education and health programs rather than their military budgets. the wealthy elites who controlled power transferred their accumulated wealth, amid their country’s poverty, to western commercial banks for reasons of their own financial security and to earn higher interest payments. in 1981 and 1982, while the fifteen largest debtor nations received $81 billion in new loans, the wealthy elites moved $51 billion out of those same countries into swiss bank accounts, u.s. real estate, or other places.61 since the interest rates for the loans were variable rather than fixed, the higher interest rates (partly caused by the u.s.’s huge budget deficit) greatly increased the interest payments on the poor countries. short-term loans that debtor nations received in the mid-1970s at an interest rate of 6.5 percent cost as much as 19 percent when renewed in 1980 and 1981. meanwhile, the prices of their exports, which were basically agricultural products and raw materials, fell approximately 40 percent relative to the prices paid for industrial goods they imported. poor debtor countries now faced widening balance-of-payment deficits as well as trouble paying their debts. to make higher profits during the high-interest-rate years, western commercial banks continued to lend huge sums of money to the third world from 1979 to 1981. in fact, during those two years of high interest rates, commercial banks lent as much to major debtor countries as during the entire period from 1973 to 1979. poor debtor countries now found themselves meeting payments for old debts with newly borrowed money, at much higher interest rates. as a result, their debts piled up even higher, and by the early 1980s they faced severe difficulties in paying even the interest on the debts. tavivat puntarigvivat 37 in august 1982, the mexican government announced that it could no longer pay the interest on its $58 billion foreign debt. shortly afterwards, venezuela, brazil, argentina, and the philippines made the same announcement. the debtor countries were increasingly forced to finance both their old debts and their economic growth out of their export earnings. furthermore, debtor countries were returning $11.3 billion more to western commercial banks than they received in new loans. when paybacks to the imf and world bank were included, the net flow of money (new lending minus payments for debts) for all indebted countries went from a positive $35.2 billion in 1981 to a negative $30.7 billion in 1986.62 this negative transfer of funds, according to the world bank’s annual report, reached $50.1 billion in 1989. the net flow of foreign exchange from the underdeveloped to the developed countries has caused serious problems for domestic investment in poor nations. the result is the stagnation of third world development. but development is crucial to the creation of the new wealth necessary to pay off the debt. so the debt crisis has trapped many poor countries, especially in africa and latin america, in a serious economic crisis, and put off their development prospects. one study estimates that nearly 85 percent of the total increase in the foreign debt of the non-oil-producing countries between 1973 and 1982 resulted from four causes about which they could do nothing: opec oil price increases, the rise in dollar interest rates in 1981-1982, the reduction of third world exports because of worldwide recession, and the abrupt drop in the prices of agricultural products and raw materials exported by third world countries.63 ronald sider reports that: the debt crisis has contributed to the worst economic crisis in latin american histories [sic]. between 1981 and 1988 real per capita income declined in absolute terms in almost every country in south america. in many countries, such as argentina and peru, the drop in national income was greater than 20 percent. living standards in many countries have fallen to levels of the 1950s and 1960s. unprecedented inflation has raged in brazil (934 percent in 1988), argentina, and peru (annual inflation in both reached several thousand percent in 1988). the region is rife with political instability. democratic governments are damaged. in february 1989, venezuelans rioted in caracas 38 prajna vihara __ __ ~ and other cities in protest against austerity measures prompted by venezuela’s debt crisis. three hundred people died.64 faced with the debt crisis, debtor governments drastically cut spending on human services like education, health care, and food subsidies. this resulted in severe increases in malnutrition and illness in poor nations with large foreign debts, as seen in the case of bolivia and other latin american countries which have followed the measurement posed by the international monetary fund (imf). f. the imf measurement and its result: bolivia and others bolivia has been hailed by western banks and governments for its new economic program and fiscal discipline in recent years. the health of the bolivian people has received less attention. a unicef official in bolivia estimated that half of the children born in bolivia die before they reach age one. in 1986, in compliance with an imf stabilization program, bolivia cut its health budget by 67 percent__at a time when 67 percent of bolivia's people suffered from malnutrition.65 third world debt payments have also deprived children of basic education. according to a unicef survey, in twenty-one out of thirtythree poor debtor countries, spending per primary school pupil fell, often sharply, in the first half of the 1980s. bolivia suffered a rise in school desertation from 2.2 to 8.5 percent among primary school-age children between 1980 and 1983. similar drop-out rates are found in barbados and mexico. the director general of unesco, federico mayor, has warned that, “if debt repayment is to take precedence over the necessary investment in the social sectors including education, then [we will suffer] a dangerous erosion of human resources that...might set back the countries of the south by a whole generation or more”.66 a world bank study found that in sao paulo, brazil, real wages of unskilled construction workers fell by over 25 percent between 1980 and 1985. between 1983 and 1985, the minimum wage in brazil fell to only one-fifth to one-seventh the amount necessary to cover a family’s basic needs. from 1976 to 1985, workers in bolivia suffered a 36 percent reduction in purchasing power. in early 1987, the bolivia workers’ union (cob) fought for a monthly minimum wage of $40, which was barely enough for food for a family of four. the government, however, would tavivat puntarigvivat 39 only agree to $25.67 the july 1986 issue of world bank news noted that in chile, the real minimum wage in 1985 had dropped below the 1981 level. the government of mexico between 1982 and 1986 reduced its budget deficit, suggested by the imf, as part of the effort to improve the economy. as a result, unemployment in mexico rose from 4.7 percent in 1982 to 17.6 percent in 1987. real wages in mexico declined about 50 percent between 1980 and 1988. increasing numbers of poor people, particularly poor children, died of starvation or malnutrition-related diseases.68 the international debt problem is not really a banking crisis, ronald sider has pointed out, but rather a development crisis. huge debt payments not only reduce a government’s spending on people's health care and education. they also prevent the capital investment that could provide new jobs and new income in the future. poor debtor economies will continue to decline, essential human services will be cut even more, and millions of people will suffer even greater poverty. under these circumstances, the governments of the rich nations and the oppressive governments of the poor nations create the image of being religious or righteous. traditional religious institutions legitimize oppressive governments by interpreting the religion in a way that sides with the establishment, or simply by being silent or ignoring the social reality and dealing only with metaphysical and ontological aspects of religion. these kinds of religious interpretations serve an ideological function to sustain the status quo and the oppressive structure. hugo assmann had examined the military’s utilization of christian symbols to justify itself. he concluded that it is possible, in concrete praxis with the people, to “repack” religious symbols so that they will aid in dynamizing a “church born of the people”.69 to characterize the situation of poor countries as dominated and oppressed leads one to speak of economic, social, and political liberation. ideas and theories must be reconsidered in the light of praxis or in the real struggle for justice in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. this liberation requires not only better living conditions, but a radical change in the political, economic and social structures for a new way to be a human being. unfortunately, this structural change has oftentimes been faced with the counterrevolutionary effort from the first world metropolitan center, particularly the united states. the case of nicaragua clearly illustrates this point: 40 prajna vihara __ __ ~ g. first world counterrevolutionary effort: nicaragua in 1981 ronald reagan authorized secret cia military support for right-wing guerrillas attacking the new socialist government of nicaragua. the alleged official statement was to stop arms shipments from the soviet union and cuba through nicaragua to the guerrillas in el salvador. later, however, when the contra guerrillas had an army of over ten thousand soldiers and the u.s. could not offer evidence of any substantial arms shipment to el salvador, the reagan administration admitted that it had intended to overthrow the sandinista government. the result has been enormous suffering and massacre in nicaragua. in its brief to the world court, nicaragua claimed that contra violence had killed 2,600 persons; maimed, raped or kidnapped 5,500; and displaced 150,000 civilians.70 nicaragua under the sandinista government had internally retained a market economy, 60 percent of which was in private hands. the sandinista government, according to phillip berryman, had followed the economic strategy of the “structuralist” school of latin american economics, led by economists such as prebisch, rather than a marxist economic program. the sandinista government sought to impose what it called the “logic of the majority” on an economy that operated primarily through market mechanisms.71 however, to end the bloodshed caused by the war with the contra guerrillas, the sandinista government agreed to hold a general election and finally gave way to the government of violeta chamorro which has turned nicaragua back to the capitalist road once again. h. first world critique of liberation theology michael novak, an american theologian, and his associates represent a first world critique of liberation theology. in will it liberate?, novak challenges the marxist conception of history as class struggle. instead he maintains that the chief interpretative key to history is liberty and justice for all. to quote novak: it (marxism) carries within it a self-contradictory principle. on the one hand, it says that history is class struggle. on the other hand, it says that justice ought to prevail. but if the last is true, then the main interpretive key to tavivat puntarigvivat 41 history is not oppression but justice, not struggle but reconciliation.72 he then presents his view of human nature thus: the first step of christian self-identification, therefore, is not solely, “i am oppressed”, but, rather, “i am also essentially (never completely) free and in love with justice”. inherently free and in love with justice, i need bend my knee to no one, may stand erect and proud. i am not merely a victim. i am not merely oppressed. within me i carry the seeds of liberty and justice, and the vision of a world that mirrors these in all its institutions, a world (eventually) of reconciliation in mutual liberty and mutual justice.73 here novak’s argument avoids social reality by entering into the realm of metaphysics. he would tell the oppressed and the poor in latin america that metaphysically they are as free as the oppressors and the elites, so even though their living and working conditions are oppressive, they should still be proud of their own human nature because ultimately all human nature is essentially free regardless of social class. this kind of metaphysical explanation simply conceals social oppression and confuses the poor and the oppressed in order to keep them in their disadvantageous social status. until 1850, latin america and anglo america had comparable per capita incomes. novak argued that the prosperity of the advanced capitalist countries is due to their own innovation and productivity since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the middle of the eighteenth century. latin americans, however, have fallen far behind the north because they do not value the same moral qualities north americans do.74 novak’s approach is overly individualistic: failure or success is primarily due to personal “moral quality”. his individualistic view inevitably leads to ethnocentrism. he also fails to see the oppressive forces behind the unjust economic and power structures that constitute the relationship between the first world and the third world, and between the third world’s ruling elites and the vast majority of poor people. one thing novak might be right about in his critique of liberation theology is that most liberation theologians lack a clear idea of what kind of socialism they are seeking. according to novak, one must consult 42 prajna vihara __ __ ~ socialist experiments in north korea, vietnam, tanzania, ethiopia, hungary, romania, and elsewhere. he argues: many who claim to desire socialism actually desire not a particular set of economic institutions, but “a new man”. they want a society characterized by caring, generosity, compassion and unselfishness. to some extent, they naively combine the picture of a society in which citizens are saintly christians with a picture of socialist economic institutions... the trouble with socialism is that it lacks checks and balances. it does not restrain selfishness. it channels selfishness into the quest for military and bureaucratic power.75 novak misunderstands the dynamic and critical properties of liberation theology: liberation theology represents a struggle of the poor and the oppressed out of their misery under the existing oppressive structures; liberation theologians are struggling for a model of society which learns from the mistakes of western capitalism and eastern stalinism and which serves the reality of their own latin america. joseph ramos, an economist and an associate of novak, has calculated that in latin america, the bottom 40 percent could be brought above the “poverty line” (less than $200 a year annual income) by an expenditure of $16 billion a year. that amount would be equivalent to 5 percent of the gnp or 22 percent of government spending (in the late 1970s).76 but ramos has failed to see the skewed power structure between the wealthy elites and the poor, which determines the distribution of income. a serious redistribution of income inevitably supposes a redistribution of power, which is what most third world people have been struggling for. the redistribution of power would bring about a fairer distribution of wealth. cuba may serve as an example for a fairer distribution of income in latin america. cuba has eliminated the dire poverty that existed prior to the revolution. the whole population of cuba has an adequate diet, is able to work, and has access to medical care and schooling. that is true in no other latin american country. on the “physical quality of life” index (a composite of infant mortality, life expectancy, and literacy) cuba scores 84 as opposed to the latin american average of 71 and the industrialized western countries’ average of over 90. the only latin american country tavivat puntarigvivat 43 to surpass cuba is argentina (85), which has twice cuba’s per capita income. similarly, although brazil’s average per capita income ($702) is higher than cuba’s ($598), the bottom 80 percent of cuban society have a higher income.77 dependency theory tells much about the future of latin american economies. according to phillip berryman, latin america is in its worst economic crisis since the 1930s. the foreign debt ($360 billion in the late 1980s) comprises 40 percent of the continent’s exports. in some countries like peru, living standards have fallen back to the levels of twenty years ago. latin america produces less food per capita than it did forty years ago.78 this situation reinforces the basic ideas of dependency theory that poverty in latin american countries is structural and the only way to cure the situation is basic structural change. and this change, according to gutierrez, is also a process of human emancipation in history: the liberation of our continent means more than overcoming economic, social, and political dependence. it means, in a deeper sense, to see the becoming of mankind as a process of the emancipation of man in history. it is to see man in search of a qualitatively different society in which he will be free from all servitude, in which he will be the artisan of his own destiny. it is to seek the building up of a new man.79 people who engage in this process of human emancipation in history need to be aware of and respond to the global market economic structure as well as to reflect the social and cultural reality of their own countries. since the situation is global and capitalism today is beyond national boundaries, solidarity among people in both the third world and the first world is necessary in the struggle to emancipate people from the domination of monopoly capitalism. the fall of marxist-leninist ideology in eastern europe and the disintegration of the soviet union in 1991 posed a great challenge to the ideas of socialism which liberation theology has been nurturing. the lessons from eastern europe and the former soviet union would help liberation theologians face their own latin american situation with a new sense of reality. and this new awareness would add a new dimension to its dependency theory. above all, liberation theology is not purely marxism. it is rather a form of christianity with marxist social analysis. lib44 prajna vihara __ __ ~ eration theology tends to utilize christianity, marxism, and even some aspects of capitalism (as in the case of socialist market economy of the sandinista government of nicaragua) for the ultimate purpose of the overall well-being of the latin american people and of all human beings at large. v. salvation within history doctrinally the christian church interpreted “salvation” as eternal life after death. this traditional metaphysical view was conjoined with an ethics of charity to alienate social problems. this is a more individualistic approach to salvation. in a more modern interpretation, salvation means “authentic existence” or the self-cultivation of an individual. both traditional and modern views of salvation, then, have less to do with the structure of human community, society, and history. both can be seen as a form of salvation from history. liberation theology has criticized salvation so understood. for liberation theology, salvation primarily includes liberation from political and economic oppression. in other words, salvation is freedom from social sin. it is necessarily socio-political, though not only sociopolitical. this socio-political salvation is virtually equivalent to liberation within history. liberation theologians have wrestled with the tension between the traditional church view of salvation from history and their own concern for liberation within history. yet the tension remains: liberation theologians are not fully satisfied with only social liberation, they seek to include personal salvation as well. for many liberation theologians, salvation means social liberation as well as personal salvation, the combination of which is the fullness of human life within history. in other words, they seek to overcome personal sin as well as social sin. this view could be called salvation within history. i will discuss liberation theology’s concepts of sin and of salvation within history by referring to the works of gustavo gutierrez and leonardo boff. a. social sin and personal sin according to gutierrez, sin is a human, social, and historical reality. on the one hand, sin is regarded as the absence of brotherhood and love in the relationships with other human beings and with god. in this sense, sin is an interior fracture. on the other hand, sin is evident in optavivat puntarigvivat 45 pressive structures, in the exploitation of human beings by human beings, in the domination and slavery of peoples, races, and social classes. sin appears as the fundamental alienation-the root of a situation of injustice and exploitation. unfair wages, exploitation, and starvation are clear indications of sin and evil. sin demands a radical liberation, which in turn necessarily implies a political liberation. gutierrez argues: the prophets announce a kingdom of peace. but peace presupposes the establishment of justice... it presupposes the defense of the rights of the poor, punishment of the oppressors, a life free from the fear of being enslaved by others, the liberation of the oppressed. peace, justice, love, and freedom are not private realities; they are not only internal attitudes. they are social realities, implying a historical liberation.80 sin, according to gutierrez, is both a personal and a social historical reality. it is a part of the daily events of human life, and it is an obstacle to life’s reaching the fullness called salvation. the grace-sin conflict is necessarily and inevitably historical, temporal, earthly, social, and material. the medellin conference refers to the situation in latin america as a “sinful situation”, as a “rejection of the lord”.81 b. social liberation and personal salvation gutierrez argues that salvation is not something otherworldly. salvation is the communion of human beings among themselves and the communion of a human being with god. salvation embraces every aspect of human reality: body and spirit, individual and society, person and cosmos, time and eternity. gutierrez has characterized liberation as having two aspects: exterior and interior. he asserts that: but modern man’s aspirations include not only liberation from exterior pressures which prevent his fulfillment as a member of a certain social class, country, or society. he seeks likewise an interior liberation, in an individual and intimate dimension; he seeks liberation not only on a social plane but also on a psychological.82 46 prajna vihara __ __ ~ again, gutierrez says: the scope of liberation on the collective and historical level does not always and satisfactorily include psychological liberation. psychological liberation includes dimensions which do not exist in or are not sufficiently integrated with collective, historical liberation.83 gutierrez classifies the concept of salvation into three levels of liberation: the first and foremost is the political liberation of the oppressed people. he said, “in the first place, liberation expresses the aspirations of oppressed peoples and social classes, emphasizing the conflictual aspect of the economic, social, and political process which puts them at odds with wealthy nations and oppressive classes”.84 the second is the liberation of people in history by participation in the creative work of god who transforms people and structures. “to conceive of history as a process of the liberation of man is to consider freedom as a historical conquest; it is to understand that the step from an abstract to a real freedom is not taken without a struggle against all the forces that oppress man, a struggle full of pitfalls, detours, and temptations to run away. the goal is not only better living conditions, a radical change of structures, a social revolution; it is much more: the continuous creation, never ending, of a new way to be a man, a permanent cultural revolution”.85 and the third is the ultimate liberation from sin into complete communion with god. “the word liberation allows for another approach leading to the biblical sources which inspire the presence and action of man in history. in the bible, christ is presented as the one who brings us liberation. christ the savior liberates man from sin, which is the ultimate root of all disruption of friendship and of all injustice and oppression”.86 gutierrez has concluded the three levels of liberation as follows: in dealing with the notion of liberation..., we distinguished three levels of meaning: political liberation, the liberation of man throughout history, liberation from sin and admission to communion with god... these three levels mutually affect each other, but they are not the same. one is not present without the others, but they are distinct: they are all part of a single, all-encompassing salvific process, tavivat puntarigvivat 47 but they are to be found at different levels.87 these three levels of liberation are interdependent, and they merge into one history. for gutierrez, there are not two histories, one profane and one sacred; rather there is only one human history. but this history is a conflictual one, a history of conflicts of interest, of struggles for justice, a history of exploitation of human beings, of aspirations for liberation.88 boff agrees with gutierrez in that salvation and liberation are distinct, but they are united. the intimate relationship between love of god and love of neighbor helps us to understand the intimate relationship between salvation and liberation. both are not identical, but each is present in the other. they are always together and cannot be separated. but boff still posits a dualism between salvation and liberation. for boff, liberation is never full and complete, it always carries a quota of oppression, whereas salvation is total liberation. boff makes the parallel of liberation and salvation with the concepts of body and soul. body and soul are two principles, together forming a single human individual. the principles of body and soul enable us to understand a human being in its unity-in-duality. using this model, boff explains that salvation and historical liberation constitute the unity-in-duality of one single history, just as body and spirit constitute the dual unity of a human being. to quote boff: the concrete human being is a unity-in-duality. body and soul should not be understood as two things making up the one human being. body and soul are two concrete principles, together forming a single thing, the human individual. principles are not things. they are what enable us to understand things__in this case, body and soul are the principles that enable us to understand the concrete human being in its unity-in-duality.89 although boff himself is not so clear about the unity of salvation and liberation, his “theory of one history” (or one reality) makes a contribution to the liberation theology of latin america. as such, his theory is a disturbance to the catholic hierarchy in the vatican. he interprets social oppression as social sin, and applies christian terminology to social structures. salvation is experienced through the process of social liberation. solving the problems of political and economic oppression is part of salvific 48 prajna vihara __ __ ~ process. it seems to me that liberation theology, in its attempt to interpret the bible in terms of concrete historical contexts, faces the tension between social liberation and personal salvation. liberation theology has been criticizing the traditional christian churches in their individualistic and otherworldly interpretation of salvation. yet it cannot be satisfied with liberation within history as the total human fulfillment. although the attempts of liberation theologians, ones like gutierrez and boff, to overcome the tension between salvation from history and liberation within history are not complete, their interpretations have shed some light on the perspective of human fulfillment__salvation within history. i would like to conclude this section by saying that liberation within history is the presupposition of salvation within history. in conclusion, liberation theology in latin america represents a third world christian response to the global market economy. under monopoly capitalism, most third world countries have been economically dominated and exploited by first world countries, through the global market economy. liberation theology has borrowed social theoryparticularly the dependency theory__from the latin american school of social sciences to name the economic and political realities of the continent. it has also utilized marxist social analysis, especially class struggle, to unmask oppressive social structures, both at the local and the global levels. although marxism failed to offer a successful alternative economic system, witnessed in its failure in china, the former soviet union, and eastern europe, it still provides an essential tool for the analysis and understanding of the functions of capitalism today. the failure of marxian economic systems in asia and europe has challenged liberation theology and its ideal of socialism. under this new global situation, liberation theology has been forced to reflect upon itself in the context of the new reality. this, over time, may result in a new dimension to liberation theology. liberation theology probably represents the most systematic religious revival in response to social oppression among today’s world religions. and it is probably, as marc ellis and otto maduro point out, the most significant christian theological development in the twentieth century. tavivat puntarigvivat 49 endnotes 1hans koning, columbus: his enterprise, p.53. 2l. s. stavrianos, global rift, p.76. 3m. leon-portilla, ed., the broken spears: the aztec account of the conquest of mexico, p.64. 4e. bradford burns, latin america: a concise interpretative history (englewood cliffs, new jersey, prentice-hall, inc.,1972), p.14-20. 5m. leon-portilla, ed., the broken spears: the aztec account of the conquest of mexico, p.94. 6the arrivals of europeans and africans in the lands of the native americans contributed to the racial mixture of the population in latin america: the mestizo (the cross of indigenous and white race), the sambos (the cross of indigenous and african race), the mulattos (the cross of white and black), and myriad other interracial combination. 7for more details, see l. s. stavrianos, global rift, pp.90-98. 8for more details on the historical development of liberation theology, see phillip berryman, liberation theology (bloomington, indiana: meyer stone books, 1987), pp. 9-107. 9phillip berryman, liberation theology, p.24. 10ibid., p.64. 11ibid., p.65. 12ibid., pp.100-101. 13see marc h. ellis and otto maduro (editors), the future of liberation theology: essays in honor of gustavo gutierrez (maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1989). 14for more details, see paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed (new york: continuum, 1990). 15gustavo gutierrez, a theology of liberation, p. 11. emphasis in original. 16for a more complete critique of the structure of church hierarchy, see leonardo boff, church: charism and power: liberation theology and the institutional church, translated by john w. diercksmeier (new york: crossroad, 1988). 17gibson winter, liberating creation, p.129. 18gustavo gutierrez, a theology of liberation, p. 15. emphasis in original. 19cited by gustavo gutierrez, a theology of liberation, p. 116. (see “socioeconomic structures of peru”, in between honesty and hope, p.74.) 20gibson winter, liberating creation, p.134. 21john c. raines, modern work and human meaning, p.83. emphasis in original. 22gustavo gutierrez, a theology of liberation, p.308. 23 leonardo & clodovis boff, salvation and liberation, pp 8-9. 24see more details in juan luis segundo, the liberation of theology (maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1988). 25leonardo & clodovis boff, salvation and liberation, p.50. 26roger n. lancaster, thanks to god and the revolution: popular religion and class consciousness in the new nicaragua (new york: columbia university 50 prajna vihara __ __ ~ press, 1988), p.xx. 27gustavo gutierrez, the power of the poor in history, translated from the spanish by robert r. barr (maryknoll, new york, orbis books, 1990), p.45. 28see more details in franz hinkelammert, the ideological weapons of death: a theological critique of capitalism, translated from the spanish by phillip berryman (maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1986). 29gustavo gutierrez, the power of the poor in history, p.20. 30leonardo & clodovis boff, salvation and liberation, p.29. the nova historia da igreja na america latina, in thirteen volumes, is the most complete of this rereading latin american history in the interest of liberation. 31for a more complete perspective on the philosophy of liberation, see enrique dussel, philosophy of liberation, translated from the spanish by aquilina martinez and christine morkovsy (maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1985). 32ibid., pp.8-9. 33gustavo gutierrez, a theology of liberation, p.300. 34ibid., pp.193-194. 35ibid., pp.194, 295. 36ibid., p.195. 37ibid., p.202. 38ibid., p.205. 39leonardo & clodovis boff, salvation and liberation, p.25. 40see more details in jose miranda, marx and the bible: a critique of the philosophy of oppression (maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1988). 41gustavo gutierrez, a theology of liberation, p.174. 42karl marx, early writings (new york: vintage books, 1975), p.423. emphasis in original. 43for the history of and philosophical basis for human rights, see leonard swidler (editor), human rights: christians, marxists and others in dialogue (new york: paragon house, 1991). 44see more details in juan luis segundo, the liberation of theology. 45see phillip berryman, liberation theology, pp.118, 112. 46ibid., p.86. 47“action”, new internationalist, august 1975, p.32. 48annette fuentes and barbara ehrenreich, women in the global factory, p.42. 49ronald j. sider, rich christians in an age of hunger, p.144. 50annette fuentes and barbara ehrenreich, women in the global factory, p.43. 51ronald j. sider, rich christians in an age of hunger, p.137. 52annette fuentes & barbara ehrenreich, women in the global factory, p.31. 53primitivo rodriguez, “we can do more for mexico than a free-trade pact”, in the philadelphia inquirer (january 18, 1993), p.a11. 54ronald j. sider, rich christians in an age of hunger, pp.6-7. 55ibid., pp.113-114. 56phillip berryman, liberation theology, p.123. tavivat puntarigvivat 51 57world bank, world development report 1989, pp.164-65. 58ronald j. sider, rich christians in an age of hunger, p.6. 59gustavo gutierrez, a theology of liberation, p.25. 60ibid., p.26. 61kenneth jameson and peter henriot, “international debt, austerity and the poor”, lee travis, ed., rekindling development: multinational firms and world debt (notre dame: university of notre dame press, 1988), pp.15-56. 62todaro, economic development (1989), p.419. 63william r. cline, international debt and the stability of the world economy (1983: institute for international economics, washington, d.c.). 64ronald j. sider, rich christians in an age of hunger, p.117. 65 jameson and henriot, “international debt, austerity and the poor”, lee travis, ed., rekindling development, pp.15-56. 66cited by james p. grant, state of the world’s children 1990 (unesco), pp.45, 47. 67ronald j. sider, rich christians in an age of hunger, p.119. 68ibid. 69see more details in hugo assmann, “the faith of the poor in their struggle with idols”, in pablo richard et al., the idols of death and the god of life: a theology, translated from the spanish by barbara e. campbell and bonnie shepard (maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1983), pp.194-229. 70ronald j. sider, rich christians in an age of hunger, p.145. 71phillip berryman, liberation theology, p.93. 72michael novak, will it liberate? questions about liberation theology (new york, mahwah: paulist press, 1986), p.109. 73ibid., p.110. 74see michael novak, the spirit of democratic capitalism (new york: simon & schuster, 1982), pp.272-314. 75michael novak, will it liberate?, p.114. 76cited by phillip berryman, liberation theology, p.182. 77phillip berryman, liberation theology, p.184. 78ibid., p.183. 79gustavo gutierrez, a theology of liberation, p. 91. emphasis in original. 80ibid., p.167. 81ibid., pp.167, 175. 82ibid., p.30. emphasis in original. 83ibid., p.31. 84ibid., p.36. 85ibid., p.32. emphasis in original. 86ibid., p.37. 87ibid., p.176. 88gustavo gutierrez, the power of the poor in history, p.52. 89leonardo & clodovis boff, salvation and liberation, p.63. 52 prajna vihara __ __ ~ bibliography assmann, hugo. “the faith of the poor in their struggle with idols”. in pablo richard, the idols of death and the god of life: a theology. translated from the spanish by barbara e. campbell and bonnie shepard. maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1983. berryman, phillip. liberation theology. bloomington, indiana: meyer stone books, 1987. boff, leonardo. church: charism and power: liberation theology and the institutional church. translated by john w. diercksmeier. new york: crossroad, 1988. ______ and clodovis boff. salvation and liberation. translated from the portuguese by robert r. barr. maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1988. bradford burns, e. latin america: a concise interpretative history. englewood cliffs, new jersey, prentice-hall, inc.,1972. cline, william r. international debt and the stability of the world economy. washington, d.c.: institute for international economics, 1983. dussel, enrique. philosophy of liberation. translated from the spanish by aquilinamartinez and christine morkovsy. maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1985. ellis, marc h. and otto maduro (editors). the future of liberation theology: essays in honor of gustavo gutierrez. maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1989. freire, paulo. pedagogy of the oppressed. translated by myra bergman ramos. new york: continuum, 1990. fuentes, annette and barbara ehrenreich. women in the global factory. boston: south end press, 1987. grant, james p. state of the world’s children 1990. oxford: oxford university press, 1990. gutierrez, gustavo. a theology of liberation. translated and edited by sister caridad inda and john eagleson. maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1986. ______. the power of the poor in history. translated from the spanish by robert r. barr. maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1990. hinkelammert, franz. the ideological weapons of death: a theological critique of capitalism. translated from the spanish by phillip berryman. maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1986. tavivat puntarigvivat 53 jameson, kenneth, and peter henriot. “international debt, austerity and the poor”. in lee travis (editor), rekindling development: mulinational firms and world debt. notre dame: universit of notre dame press, 1988. koning, hans. columbus: his enterprise, exploding the myth. new york: monthly review press, 1992. lancaster, roger n. thanks to god and the revolution: popular religion and classconsciousness in the new nicaragua. new york: columbia university press, 1988. leon-portilla, m. (editor). the broken spears: the aztec account of the conquest of mexico. boston: beacon press, 1969. marx, karl. early wrintings. introduced by lucio colletti, translated by rodney livingstone and gregor benton. new york: vintage books, 1975. miranda, jose porfirio. marx and the bible: a critique of the philosophy of oppression. translated by john eagleson. maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1988. novak, michael. the spirit of democratic capitalism. new york: simon & schuster, 1982. ______. will it liberate?: questions about liberation theology. new york, mahwah: paulist press, 1986. raines, john c. and donna c. day-lower. modern work and human meaning. philadelphia: the westminster press, 1986. rodriguez, primitivo. “we can do more for mexico than a free-trade pact”. in the philadelphia inquirer, january 18, 1993. segundo, juan luis. the liberation of thology. translated by john drury. maryknoll, new york: orbis books, 1988. sider, ronald j. rich christians in an age of hunger. dallas, london, vancouver, melbourne: word publishing, 1990. stavrianos, l.s. global rift: the third world comes of age. new york: william morrow and company, inc., 1981. swidler, leonard. (editor). human rights: christians, marxists and others in dialogue. new york: paragon house, 1991. todaro, michael p. economic development in the third world. fourth edition. new york: longman, 1989. winter, gibson. liberating creation: foundations of religious social ethics. new york: crossroad, 1981. world bank. world development report 1989. washington, the world bank, 1989. 54 prajna vihara __ __ ~ ijibec international journal of islamic business and economics international journal of islamic business and economics av a i l a b l e a t h t t p : / / e j o u r n a l . i a i n p e k a l o n g a n . a c . i d / i n d e x . p h p / i j i b e c / ������� �� keywords: (���������"�<��� �"��;( � ������ (����������������������������������� ������������������ ������� ���� � ����������� �$� ���������� ��� �� ����������� >�� ���� ������ ����� ���� �����j������� �$� ���� � � ������ �$� ������� �������������������� � �����$�����������������$��������g����� �����������������$�������������� 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'���������! q�� q���� �8������� 2$����>��%3�̀ �n�b��!����%������� *�� ������"� ��� w�� &� z+�� h�� ����� � ���� )��� ������ � (������� %��� �}� `�#��� � k�� �� %���� ���� empiris. jurnal akuntansi dan keuangan, 4&�+"� /gu� changing spaces of knowledge-based business services in hungary 101 hungarian geographical bulletin 2009. vol. 58. no 2. pp. 101–120. changing spaces of knowledge-based business services in hungary erika nagy–gábor nagy1 abstract recently, the process of networking and knowledge production in business services has been widely discussed in the context of the liberalisation of the services’ market in the eu, and of the integration of the emerging economies into international fl ows resulting in changing spatial division of labour, thus shaping an increasingly diverse geography of business knowledge in europe. although information technologies support the spread of business knowledge, proximity and accessibility ‘still matt ers’ due to the signifi cance of personal contacts in knowledge-based activities, moreover, in new market economies, to the low level of adoption of ict in rural areas and the uneven development of infrastructure. therefore, the spectrum and quality of business services available in smaller (lower-rank) service centres conditioned local/regional economic development, by linking local markets and agents to interregional (international) fl ows in new market economies. in this paper, the fl ow of business-related information and knowledge shall be put in the focus, as an aspect and a source of uneven development and dependence in new market economies, under neoliberal capitalism. the geographical scope of the following analysis embraces hungarian cities and towns as business service centres, highlighting how non-metropolitan urban centres (thus, local economies outside the budapest region) grew increasingly dependent on the capital city-centred knowledge and information fl ows, how such centres were highly diff erentiated by the erosion of local basis for information-based activities, moreover, how this process was reinforced by national as well as by eu-policies, reproducing uneven development and backwardness in peripheral regions of a new market economy. keywords: business services; knowledge economy; global fl ows; new market economies introduction: new market economies in global fl ows it was the very fi rst time in 2004, when several east central european2 county towns appeared in the country reports of international property consulting 1 centre for regional studies hungarian academy of sciences, békéscsaba department; h-5600 békéscsaba, szabó dezső str. 42; nagye@rkk.hu; nagyg@rkk.hu 2 ’east central europe’ (ece) is considered as a product of re-positioning post-socialist countries inside the post-cold war europe by many political geographers (see e.g. young, c.–light, d. 2001; paasi, a. 2001; ziegler, d.j. 2002; jackson, l. 2004). the term has been 102 fi rms. including cities outside the metropolitan region of national capitals in such reports indicated the changing position of smaller regional centres (by european scale, medium size towns) and their regions in global fl ows, primarily, as potential targets for distribution based activities (retail and logistics) and ‘back offi ce’ business services for developers. this in turn rested upon a series of reforms for constructing a framework for highly liberalised market economies, driven by the mechanisms of the fi nancial markets (imf, world bank) as well as by the bureaucratic institutions of the european union during the 1990s (stenning, a.–bradshaw, m. 2004; pickles, j.–smith, a. 2005; harvey, d. 2005). at the time of eu-accession (2004), ece countries were considered ‘established’ market economies, embedded into an increasingly dense network of business relationships3. the role (share) of the region in the international division of labour rested largely on a reasonable combination of advantages of geographical proximity, labour price and quality (skills) and of the stability of legal/institutional conditions. the embeddedness of east central europe into global fl ows through the european market (its core countries) was refl ected by the dominance of eu15 investors in the region, and also by the structure of their investments, focused largely on lower value added elements of the value chain and on distribution-based services (eurostat, 2008; barta, gy. 2005). however, the ‘visegrad four’ that received the earliest and al together the largest impetus of investments amongst emerging (post-socialist) markets were characterised by an increasing sectoral diversity and business relationships, that was refl ected by the rising share of re-invested profi t in fdi and also by the growth of international trade in the service sector. nevertheless, the latt er – particularly, the accumulation of national defi cits in the trade of business services – also revealed the increasing dependence of ece countries on the core regions in terms of business information and knowledge4. in ‘new economies’ the establishment of the market institutions produced a highly centralised structure in information and knowledge fl ows. used widely recently, nevertheless, its boundaries are not clear. the most pronounced bordering process was/is tied to the enlargement of the european union (‘europe as an institute’ [paasi, a. 2001]), however, extending the boundaries of central europe eastward did not involve the post-socialist countries of the east balkan in this geographical (geopolitical) category. thus, east central europe is defi nitely post-socialist, but has uncertain geopolitical boundaries, that are subject to political and academic discourses and have historical (‘pre-socialist’) roots. nevertheless, the ‘visegrad four’ countries, including hungary to be discussed here have been considered as part of ece politically and economically during the past 20 years. 3 statistically, the ‘integration’ process was refl ected by increasing share of transnational corporations (tncs) in gross national products and particularly in export activities (eurostat yearbook 2008 ) 4 magyarország 2007. ksh (hungarian central statistical offi ce), 2008; www.ksh.hu 103 (blažek, j. 2004; nagy, g. 2005; furman, j.l. 2001; korcelli, p. 2005). the emerging information monopoly of capital cities was largely supported by the eu-accession (the equal treatment of eu-based fi rms, eased cross-border transactions, etc.) and the further liberalisation of fl ows of services in the european economic area. changing macro-economic conditions stimulated a new wave of infl ux of capital into the ‘new member-states’, that reinforced centralised spatial structures in the region, through sett ing up new regional headquarters of eu15-based fi rms’ eastward expansion and also by the increasing off -shoring activity of transnational corporations that were focused primarily on metropolitan regions (nagy, g. 2005; furman j.l. 2006; nagy, e. 2007). the centralisation process was supported also by the newly established national bureaucratic institutions to control the distribution of eu-funds, that opened up the way not only for centralising the distribution of such resources (particularly, in new democracies where bargaining power of regions is relatively weak politically and economically)5, but also gave stimuli to the rise of networks of experts centred on the capital city – the emerging ‘class’ of project-related information brokers.6 nevertheless, ‘non-metropolitan’ centres outside capital cites also grew as mediators of information and knowledge. their position was established and reinforced in the transition period (1990s) when local agents (labour, enterprises, and local governments) were forced into permanent adjustment to the rapidly changing (increasingly liberalised) market conditions. in the early 2000s, the dynamism and economic prospects of such centres in the new power structures was defi ned increasingly by the multi-layered networks of relationships, that embraced not only the town/hinterland nexus (based on the control of local agents over diff erent forms of capital), but also on i) changing relations to the capital city as the command centre of market regulation and the mediator of business information and knowledge (gál z. 2000; wágner, i. 2004; nagy, e. 2005) ii) and on organisations i.e. fi rms and institutions driving global fl ows (amin, a.–thrift, n. 2002; harvey, d. 2005). this process was stimulated by adopting neoliberal national policies (e.g. shrinking the public service sector and liberalisation of fl ows) and largely supported by local elites7 seeing their interests in globalisation that manifests in neoliberal urban policies, 5 e.g. the ’new hungary’ program that is the national framework for the distribution of eu (primarily, erdf) funds (2007–2013) was an initiative for a decentralised development policy (rested on nuts 2 regions) in 2005/2006. the program was re-worked several times and its ultimate form is characterised by a strict control exercised by the departments (ministries) of the national government headquartered in budapest, providing only 30% for regional operational programmes. the control of regions (local agents) over erdfresources was limited to particular sectors that rest on ‘local potentials’ (e.g. tourism). 6 aft er the eu-accession, about 3,000 fi rms were identifi ed as the agents i.e. products and re-producers of the ’project-economy’ in hungary (kovách i.–kristóf l. 2005). 7 primarily, the offi cials of the local government in key positions (timár j.–nagy e. 2007) 104 such as supporting the infl ux of fdi into the local economy8 (harris, n. 2002; raco, m. 2005; sklair, l. 2001) and urban rehabilitation projects linked to the development of international tourism (smith, n. 1996; timár j.–nagy e. 2007). intensifi ed fl ows re-shaped the relationships of such urban centres: they were integrated increasingly into global networks characterised by fl exibility and contingency, that made the agents of local economies were increasingly dependent on the fl ows of information and knowledge (castells, m. 2000). in the followings, the fl ow of business-related information and knowledge shall be put in the focus, as an aspect and a source of uneven development and dependence in new market economies – under neoliberal capitalism. the geographical scope of the following analysis embraces hungarian cities and towns as business service centres. these shall be put in the context of the changing and increasingly diff erentiated geography of knowledge-intensive business services and the changing division of labour inside europe (second section). in the third section the emergence and the structural and organisational changes in the knowledge-intensive business service sector shall be discussed in the context of the transition and of the integration of the hungarian economy into global fl ows. the analysis rests on the review of statistical databases (eurostat; central statistical offi ce, hungary), and also on a survey focused on business strategies, activities, and externalising business services amongst users and providers of services in three sample areas in hungary9. in the fourth section, the changing geography of knowledge-intensive business services shall be discussed, as a source for dependence and backwardness. the diverse geographies of knowledge-based business services in widely discussed concepts that interpret the contemporary economy as overlapping, mutually constitutive and constantly changing networks of fi rms, production systems and places (castells, m. 2000; amin, a.–thrift, n. 2001; dicken, p. 2003), the providers of knowledge-intensive business services are con8 probably, the most spectacular process was the infl ux of retail capital in small i.e. nonmetropolitan centres that re-shaped the urban landscape (core areas as well as the fringe) rapidly. retail restructuring was supported by the local government throughout ece to accelerate modernisation of the sector and capitalize it politically in the ‘post-shortage’ societies. 9 the demand-side questionnaire survey was completed in 2001. altogether 181 questionnaires were received and reviewed. the sectoral distribution of respondents corresponded with the structure of the national gdp, and also spanned the urban hierarchy. the survey was focused primarily on the largest urban centres that have dominant role in their region in providing business services. the survey was focused on three sample areas of which, each embodied a type (a model) of regional development. the supply side was ‘mapped’ through structured interviews (37) on the same sample areas. 105 sidered as primary agents (in many cases: gatekeepers) of information and knowledge fl ows. business services provide a framework also for embedding international agents (e.g. tncs’ branches) into local/regional networks: they act as mediators easing governance tensions (e.g. by interpreting regulations, managing fi rm/state confl icts, etc.), bridging cultural diff erences, and help the accumulation and transmission of relational assets and tacit knowledge (related to a particular milieu) (florida, r. 2002; gertler, m.s. 2003; thrift, n. 2006). in this way, business service providers support local economic development by embedding fi rms (branches) entering the local market, improve the local branches’ bargaining power in intra-fi rm relations and involve local agents in international networks (lindahl, d.p.–beyers, w.b. 1999; daniels, p. 1999; dicken, p.–malmberg, a. 2001). recently, the process of networking and knowledge production in business services has been discussed in the context of the liberalisation of the services’ market in the eu, and the integration of the emerging economies into international fl ows, that resulted in changing spatial division of labour. (faulconbridge, j.r. 2006; jones, b. et al. 2008). consequently, the geography of business information and knowledge grew increasingly diverse in europe. nevertheless, diff erent forces and processes were/are at work that stimulate structural, organisational and spatial centralisation as well as decentralisation processes. (i) due to the complex and uncertain business environment, networks are (and will be) considered as sources of creative work (problem-solving services), fl exibility and also stability, that maintain the dominance of small scale businesses in many segments of services. although, networks can (very oft en, do) operate through ict channels involving many experts in a number of interactions, the dispersion of knowledge-intensive services is constrained by the heavy centralisation of business-related decisions (fi rms’ headquarters), the need for personal contact (for mutual trust and understanding of service providers and users), moreover, the concentration of knowledge (senior experts) in a relatively few major institutions – focusing also the opportunities of knowledge spill-over and providing favourable living conditions for the ‘creative class’ (sassen, s. 2000; florida, r. 2002; hughes, a. 2007). (ii) in parallel, technology-based, as well as standardised services are organised in more centralised and hierarchical structures. localisation of such services rests largely on classical cost factors, such as the price of qualifi ed labour, that stimulated outsourcing (in many cases: off -shoring) of such activities (bryson, j. et al. 2004), that targeted also the eastern periphery of the european market. the changing geographies of knowledge-based business services put the economic development of non-metropolitan centres/regions of east central europe into a new context. although, information technologies support the spread of business knowledge, geography (accessibility) ‘still matt ers,’ largely 106 due to the low level of adoption of ict in rural areas, the signifi cance of personal contacts in information-based activities, and the uneven development of infrastructure (transportation; broadband data transmission, etc.) (erdősi f. 2005; nagy, e. 2005; nagy, g.–kanalas, i. 2009). therefore, the spectrum and quality of business services available in small and medium size towns is highly infl uenced (and also indicates the trends of local/regional economic development,) by the linking of local markets and agents to interregional (international) fl ows in new market economies. transition, integration and the development of knowledge-based services in hungary hungary was the scene for a rapid integration into the new ‘neoliberal’ order of the world by the early introduction of a legal and institutional framework of the market economy, large scale privatisation schemes and encouraging (receiving a relatively high amount of) foreign direct investments (fdi). the increase in the number of international agents that entered the market was unprecedented10, however, the investment rush calmed in the 2000s and international agents focused increasingly on (i) extending/stabilising their regional networks (involving domestic sub-contractors, reinvestment, e.g. by developing local/regional service basis) (ii) exploiting human resources locally (e.g. off -shoring knowledge-based services from hungarian fi rms and institutions) and (iii) capitalising geographical potential by distribution-based service developments (retail, logistics) (barta, gy. 2005). property market trends as well as changes in employment and value-added structure clearly refl ected the shift towards services, especially, to information and knowledge-based activities (table 1). in parallel, hungary-based fi rms grew active in east central europe and the balkan increasingly from 2000 onwards11, by exploiting the privatisation process (e.g. in the energy sector and manufacturing) and also by greenfi eld developments (e.g. in the property sector). although, large scale projects were major investments by hungarian corporations, thousands of small fi rms were founded in border regions, relying basically on cross-border links in the service sector (szónokyné ancsin g., 2004). the increasing involvement in international (cross border) issues made hungarian fi rms increasingly dependent on information and knowledge either provided by business service fi rms or gett ing it through informal (personal) networks (nagy, e. 2007). 10 the number of fi rms with foreign capital (foreign share: over 10%) rose from 8 up to 25,000 (1988–1998). by 2007, the fdi in the owners’ equity exceeded 96 billion usd. 11 hungarian capital invested abroad rose from 1,5 billion usd up to 36.2 billion in the discussed period (2000–2007). 107 the market liberalisation process, as well as the entry of tncs resulted in a radical turn in the scale and structure of international relations.12 the process (particularly the restructuring of international business relations) was highly infl uenced also by the entry of hungary into international organisations (oecd, nato, eu). the eu-accession (as well as the programs/projects supporting it) stimulated a development in planning management skills and capacities of business and public organisations (‘learning’ eu bureaucracy), as well as in information-related services (e.g. management consultancy) that provided support for the adaptation to eu-standards. this process was supported also by the programmes13 that targeted the ‘physical’ integration (energy, transport, ict) of the economy in pan-european networks. as a consequence, the global embeddedness of the hungarian economy has been considered amongst the ‘world top 20’ since 199814. whereas crises in 1994 and 1997 did not have a signifi cant impact on the performance of the 12 the export grew from 8 billion usd up to 73.5 billion (1990; 2007), while the national import rose from 10 billion usd to 74 billion (current prices). 13 e.g. phare cbc and ispa programmes. 14 see the calculations of the world bank and the oecd. table 1. the share of services within gross value added in hungary (current prices, 1991–2007) sector name other services finance & insurance business services other services finance & insurance business services sectorcode j-o* j k j-o j k year hungary budapest 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 30.0 33.2 35.2 37.4 35.2 35.5 33.8 33.8 34.8 35.1 37.7 39.5 38.5 37.7 38.7 38.9 43.1 4.1 3.7 4.1 5.6 5.3 5.4 4.5 4.1 3.9 4.0 3.1 3.4 3.7 3.4 4.0 3.9 4.5 9.4 10.8 11.6 12.0 13.6 15.9 14.6 15.0 16.1 16.8 15.6 15.6 15.1 14.4 14.7 15.4 18.0 .. .. .. .. 51.0 51.3 48.5 49.2 50.3 51.7 53.0 53.8 54.5 53.7 55.4 56.8 .. .. .. .. .. 9.4 9.5 8.2 7.9 7.5 .. 6.3 6.6 7.5 7.6 8.2 8.0 .. .. .. .. .. 19.5 21.8 21.0 21.8 22.9 .. 25.4 23.7 23.1 22.9 23.7 24.0 .. * nace codes are used, compatible with eurostat nomenclature. source: national accounts of hungary, 1988–2006. central statistical offi ce, budapest, www.ksh.hu 108 hungarian economy, the global hits from 2000s on (dot-com collapse, rise of global terrorism, the 2007 mortgage crisis, etc.) heavily aff ected it, e.g. by withdrawing investment schemes, slowing down the technology transfer, and by restructuring resources amongst regions (molnár, b.–szépvölgyi, á. 2005). therefore, we may presume, the uneven (spatial) development was governed basically by the global embeddedness of local economies from the late 1990s on. in the early years of the transition (1989–1996), the rapidly changing business environment, such as the liberalisation process and the emerging legal and institutional framework of the market economy stimulated a growing demand for advanced producer services. this process was supported not only by a market pressure for learning and adaptation (consequently, for buying/externalising services), but also by the enterprising ‘rush’15. thus, the increasing demand stimulated a rapid growth in the sector (e.g. in the number of service providers), particularly, in accounting, auditing, management, marketing and legal consultancy. in this period, due to the high uncertainty of market conditions stemming from the ‘post-socialist’ transition process, and from the unsett led business relationships and ethics, personal ties had a specifi c part to play: they supported minimising risks and substituted for a lack of quality control systems and references. business service fi rms of overwhelmingly small scale (employing less than fi ve persons) rested on capitalising the knowledge, professional experience and personal relations of the founders (owners). they were mostly ‘generalists’, providing ‘routine’ services for a wide spectrum of clients supporting their operation, however, they also off ered specialised, knowledge-intensive services for prosperous and innovative partners16. (nagy, e. 2005) as earlier empirical studies17 suggested, in this period, the neoliberal scheme for the post-socialist transition into a ‘market economy’ resulted in an increasing dependence on business information/knowledge and its providers. from the late 1990s on, structural changes, such as the emerging ‘posttransition’ business milieu (i.e. declining infl ation and interest rates and the consolidation of the legal and institutional framework of the national economy), the expansion and increasing regional/national embeddedness of tncs, as well as the improving performance of domestic enterprises stimulated 15 as a result the number of domestic fi rms doubled between 1989 and 1996. 16 interviews made with executives of 37 aps providing fi rms in 2001 suggested that, personal relations and reputation that rested on expertise were the essential elements of fi rm strategies in the early years of the transition. furthermore, expertise was a basis rather for the broadening of the range of services provided than for adapting strategies focused on diff erentiation. 17a questionnaire survey as made in 1993 in szeged, gathering information about the activities and strategies of 57 local service providers in szeged. in 2001, another survey was made in three sample areas in hungary, about the business strategies, activities, and externalising business services amongst users (buyers) of services. 109 growth and also diff erentiation in the demand for advanced producer services. the shift towards an internationally embedded, increasingly information-dependent national economy was a highly selective process and resulted in segmentation of the market for business knowledge and information. the group of users was split up into two major pools: i) an international one of advanced producer services dominated by powerful agents (dominantly, by tncs), however, included also a group of ‘globally linked’, highly adaptive and dynamic domestic small and medium size enterprises in an increasing number, that benefi ted from the dense network of business relationships within major cities and/or in fl exible production enclaves. ii) a ‘static’ cohort of users that relied upon local markets (small, often family-run, enterprises with modest sales revenues suing chiefl y routine services supporting their operations). the growth of knowledge-intensive services, particularly, tax, legal and management consulting, it and hr-related services was driven chiefl y by the transnational and the dynamic domestic groups of users embedded into international networks. however, the demand was segmented also along business activities lines: producer services (in particular, business service fi rms) were highly over-represented amongst the users of a wide spectrum of information/knowledge-based services, while innovative manufacturing enterprises sought for legal and computer services, technical consulting and (more scanty for) r&d from external providers. the above trends stimulated structural and organisational changes in the sector of knowledge-intensive business services. it was a highly dynamic and an increasingly international sector, that was refl ected by the rising amount (and share) of fdi in the sector, and also by the expansion of international service providers18. the increasing complexity of tasks and of the business environment (e.g. the launching of eu regulations in auditing), and the introduction of international standards in the production process spurred the diff erentiation of service providers. there was an increasing gap between the major international agents and domestic (dominantly small scale) fi rms19 as well as within the latt er group, such as between dynamic (adaptive) 18 the share of sector ‘k’ rose from 7,3% up to 22% in foreign direct investments (1996–2007), moreover, the stake of foreign owners in joint ventures was also increasing. (central statistical offi ce, hungary: www.ksh.hu; figyelő top 200, 2007). 19 the ’big four’ has a 42% stake on the market of auditing and business consulting in hungary, as major tncs’ subsidiaries rely on their services due to the complexity of tasks and increasing risks. the choice of service providers (as a strategic decision) is made ‘outside’ the national market, by chief executives in the tncs headquarters. meanwhile, 22 domestic medium size fi rms stabilised their position on the domestic market., they provided services (auditing, consulting) for dynamic domestic enterprises and subsidiaries of smaller international agents (smes). (figyelő top 200, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006; sanoma: budapest.) 110 agents and fi rms pursuing more ‘static’ business strategy, as our 2001 survey suggested. (i) the majority of business service fi rms employed a ‘generalist’ or a ‘mixed’ strategy in the early 2000s, due to their limited access to capital, skilled labour and the lacking ‘critical mass’ of demand for specifi c (information-based) services in their region. (ii) nevertheless, there was a trend toward specialisation, particularly in highly knowledge-intensive sectors, such as engineering consultancy, r&d and computer services. this dynamic (however, rather heterogeneous) group of domestic service providers relied basically on skilled labour, the extensive use of ict in daily routine, business planning and strategic decision-making, and their highly structured professional and business partnerships, that support innovations at fi rm level, that in turn, stimulate growth and structural changes in their region (lindahl, d.p.–beyers, w.b. 1999; nagy, e. 2005). the liberalisation of the market of services, and the eu-accession of new market economies gave further stimuli to structural changes in the organisation of business information fl ows in the 2000s. business services were outsourced (increasingly: off -shored) from east central europe (e.g. legal consulting, risk management, management consulting) by the fi rms of the figure 1. fdi in business services, 2002–2007 source: central statistical offi ce, hungary 2002–2008; www.ksh.hu 111 ‘core economies’, and service providers introducing ‘niche products’ also entered the market (e.g. in public relations and advertisement) (palócz, é. 2005; gereffi, g. 2007; falk, m.–wolfmayr, y. 2008). hungary was also particularly targeted aft er the eu-accession by international fi rms’ strategies that resulted in an increasing involvement in fl ows of business services: foreign direct investment grew dynamically in sector ‘k’ (fig. 1). moreover, the external trade of business services was spurred by the above processes: it exceeded the growth rate of the rapidly increasing national export (about 10% annually) in the post-accession period. nevertheless, the negative balance of trade of business services (in intra-fi rm relations, as well as in international trade) refl ected also the dependence of the national economy on external sources of knowledge and information. a change in this trend was indicated by the positive and improving balance in it-related services (2006–2007), and recently by rising export of r&d activities. the diff erentiation of service spaces in the early 1990s, the geography of the sector was shaped by fl ows resting on the transition of the regulatory system and on the entry of domestic agents on the market en masse. small scale domestic fi rms that responded to the increasing demand relied largely on qualifi ed labour available locally, moreover, social (network) capital accumulated under the centrally planned system. in this way, the capital city, the centres of higher education and of public administration grew as the primary and secondary centres of fl ows of knowledge and information. nevertheless, the emerging hierarchy was challenged by the consolidation of the legal and institutional framework of the national economy, the entry and expansion of international enterprises and by the improving performance of domestic fi rms. in the late 1990s, a dualistic structure emerged on the market of knowledge-based business services (see the previous section), that manifested itself in the geographical centralisation of users and providers of specialised services supporting global embeddedness, moreover, in the information (knowledge) monopoly of the capital city. this increasingly polarised structure was reinforced by the signifi cance of personal relations (contacts) in knowledge exchange, by the high spatial concentration of demand due to the ‘urban bias’ of using such services, and the uneven development of ict and transportation networks. the shift s in the geography of knowledge-based business services were increasingly selective and they have re-organised the hierarchy of urban centres in hungary. to understand the impact of recent changes discussed above, the shift s in the role (weight) of business service centres were analysed. firstly, 112 routine (regularly used) services20 that are heavily dependent on accessibility and face-to-face contact (therefore, refl ect the size of the local/regional market) will be reviewed to reveal the changing status of towns in the urban hierarchy and also the regional diff erentiation of the urban network. secondly, particular groups of specialised services (highly reliant on information fl ow and skilled labour) shall be analysed as key agents of international embeddedness (r&d, soft ware services; fi nancial mediation/brokerage; to go into further details, advertising; management consultancy; market information; management consulting), that all were considered as keys for changing business strategy and sett ing up new (international) market relations by the fi rms we surveyed in 200121. the post-2000 period was put into the focus of the analysis, when hungary was considered as a ‘sett led’ market economy, shown by the changing strategies of foreign investors including service providers in an increasing number (barta, gy. 2005). moreover, shift s in spaces of business services also indicate the spatial impact of the changing position of new market economies in european fl ows, such as off -shoring of knowledge-based activities (gál, z.–sass, m. 2009). the hierarchy of service centres was dominated increasingly by budapest and the surrounding belt of suburban centres (small towns). (fig. 2) this information monopoly emerged along several dimensions, such as i) the concentration of highly specialised service fi rms rested on specifi c skills and knowledge, ii) intra-fi rm division of labour competencies inside the networks of fi rms headquartered in the capital city, and iii) the concentration of international agents of business services in budapest. the capital city’s position was supported also by the fdi in distributive services targeting primarily this region (koós, b. 2004). county towns were scenes of decentralisation of particular service activities (e.g. back-offi ce functions; personal contact points for customers; information collection) (raffay, z. 2005; wágner, i. 2004), but, such processes rather supported than challenged the centralisation process at national level. 20 accounting; auditing; tax and legal consulting; marketing; management consulting; engineering services; advertisement; security services. 21 the selection of towns and cities that were defi ned as nodes of business information fl ow rested on statistical calculations. firstly, the most important business service centres of the country were identifi ed, which were determinant nodes in the number of locally existing fi rms, in the per-inhabitant, as well as in and per-company indices. secondly, the centres of regional importance were clustered, those providing an access to business information demanded by local businesses. the choice of the centres rested on earlier studies, such as a research on ‘regional trajectories of economic restructuring’ (2001), a gravity model of spaces of advanced producer services (nagy e. 2002), and a questionnaire survey focused on the demand for business services in three regions that took diff erent development paths during the transition period (nagy e.–gál z.–molnár b. 2002). 113 the development of business services (through a positive feedback mechanism) was a source of regional diff erentiation of the urban network. the direction and scale of changes in ‘routine’ services rested largely on the size of local/regional economies, the dynamism of development, particularly, on the growth of small and medium size enterprises (smes). the following shift s were characteristic of the changing spaces of business information fl ows: although, the international embeddedness of the national economy was deepened, therefore, the need for information was increasing in the discussed period, the relatively centralised spatial structure of oft -used business service remained, that was refl ected by the increasing share of central hungary (including the capital city and its wider urban region). – figure 2. business service centres outside the budapest region, 2007 source: the authors’ calculation based on the database of central statistical offi ce „cég-kód-tár” 114 fi gu re 3 . b us in es s se rv ic e ce nt re s ou ts id e th e b ud ap es t r eg io n, 2 00 7 so ur ce : t he a ut ho rs ’ c al cu la ti on b as ed o n th e d at ab as e of c en tr al s ta ti st ic al o ffi c e „c ég -k ód -t ár ” 115 the development of routine services was highly dependent on the regional economic milieu: the proximity of tncs (particularly, those involved in manufacturing) embedded into regional networks in the post-fordist industrial enclaves had a basically indirect stimulating eff ect on services. domestic enterprises integrated into international networks shaped by tncs represented a highly structured (diverse) demand for business services and resulted in a relative improvement in the position of the centres, at higher, as well as at lower levels of urban hierarchy (up to 15,000 inhabitants) (fig. 3). the suburbanisation process around the capital city (budapest) had a direct eff ect on the spatial structure of economic activities also in the period 2000–2007: the growing suburbs had an increasing stake in the sector. this process was fed by fdi in services, and also by the rising number of local smes providing business services. it is very likely that this trend was supported also by residential suburbanisation in the form of the fl ight of highly qualifi ed staff of such services from the capital city. most of the small towns in this region have very high penetration rates in oft -used business services, as compared to the countryside centres in the same level of population (fig. 2). in the economically lagging regions, two distinct development trajectories emerged. in the fi rst case, the spatial structure was highly concentrated even in ‘routine’ business service activities, and it has not changed remarkably since 2000. as a consequence, only a few major centres off er business services for a wider region. thus, even basic information for running businesses are not available for local agents, that reinforces the accumulation of backwardness, particularly, in the peripheral regions with poor it and transportation infrastructure (fig. 3). the second type off ers more chances for development, as the access to business information (routine or oft -used services) is available for a wider range of local businesses, due to the larger number and a denser network of small and medium size towns. in this case, the relative closeness of business service centres resulted in bett er provided regions (fig. 3). as far as the urban network as a whole is concerned, the most signifi cant change was the increasing regional imbalance in favour of the capital city’s region. moreover, slightly more than one hundred towns were identifi ed as business service centres supporting the ‘daily routine’ of local enterprises, but this group is highly diverse in terms of dynamism and the spectrum of services provided, and does not have a uniform spatial distribution. in this way, centralisation of capital and organisation in business services manifested spatially as a capital city/national economy dichotomy, as well as problem of accessibility to local markets of business information and knowledge that support the reproduction of backwardness. this process is underpinned by the neoliberal scheme for reorganising the systems of public administration that focus institutions, i.e. qualifi ed labour, knowledge and information into – – – – 116 5–7 major county towns (‘regional centres’ in table 2), stimulating the fl ight of intellectuals form smaller centres, and raising new barriers for being involved in information fl ows. the highly and increasingly concentrated spatial structure of knowledge-intensive business services supporting international market integration and adaptation clearly support the centralisation processes discussed above. the activities listed in table 2 are only sporadic in smaller centres and virtually absent from towns with less than 10,000 inhabitants. local service providers in such small centres are not rooted in the local business environment rather they are focused on a niche of the national market using the possibilities off ered by ict networks. in general terms, the centralisation of knowledgeand information-intensive services was an ongoing process in the group of county towns. the only scene of de-centralisation was the urban region of budapest: 24 small urban centres of the budapest urban region ‘climbed up’ in the hierarchy, they occupy the same position as smaller regional centres (serving areas with 50,000–300,000 inhabitants) outside the budapest metropolitan region – while the capital city has lost of its signifi cance since 2000 (table 2). conclusions construction of global networks of business relationships supported by the improved accessibility of peripheral/semi-peripheral regions and libta bl e 2. t he c ha ng in g si gn ifi ca nc e of c lu st er s (t yp es ) o f s er vi ce c en tr es in s el ec te d ty pe s of k no w le dg ein te ns iv e bu si ne ss s er vi ce s (2 00 0. 2 00 7) (h un ga ry =1 00 % ) c at eg or y m an ag em en t co ns ul ti ng m ar ke ti ng a d ve rt is in g d at ab an ki ng so ft w ar e d ev el op m en t h um an re so ur ce s m an ag em en t ye ar 20 00 20 07 20 00 20 07 20 00 20 07 20 00 20 07 20 00 20 07 20 00 20 07 b ud ap es t pe st c ou nt y* r eg io na l c en tr es (5 ) m ed iu m -s iz ed to w ns (1 4) 60 .8 9. 9 10 .4 7. 3 57 .6 13 .1 9. 2 7. 3 51 .5 20 .0 11 .1 6. 7 52 .7 13 .5 12 .5 7. 3 59 .9 9. 0 10 .9 9. 3 58 .4 12 .2 10 .2 7. 9 62 .3 7. 6 9. 1 9. 6 58 .9 11 .8 8. 9 7. 1 59 .0 11 .4 11 .0 6. 8 55 .1 15 .3 10 .3 6. 3 56 .2 5. 8 10 .2 10 .0 48 .4 8. 8 9. 2 8. 5 to ta l 88 .4 87 .2 88 .9 86 .0 89 .1 88 .7 88 .6 86 .7 88 .2 87 .0 82 .2 74 .9 *p es t c ou nt y is a u ni t of t er ri to ri al a d m in is tr at io n. i nc lu d in g th e ur ba n re gi on o f b ud ap es t. pe st c ou nt y an d b ud ap es t to ge th er co ve r th e n u t s 2 re gi on c en tr al h un ga ry . so ur ce : t he a ut ho rs ’ o w n ca lc ul at io n ba se d o n th e c om pa ny c od e r eg is te r (c ég -k ód -t ár ) 20 00 /4 ; 2 00 7/ 4 of t he c en tr al s ta ti st ic al o ffi c e. b ud ap es t. 117 eralisation of international trade has re-drawn the economic geography of europe: due to the incorporation of ‘emerging economies’ into international fl ows (division of labour), new dimensions of socio-spatial disparities have emerged or became apparent in the 2000s. in this framework, east central european countries (and among them hungary) are considered as open, fl exible and adaptive, and therefore signifi cant target regions of the extension of global business networks. in the past few years, the outsourcing of business and logistics services and the closer integration of local markets (as a continuation of former developments seeking to improve effi ciency) have taken centre stage. as result, corporate relationships have expanded both vertically (in emerging supply/sub-contracting systems) and horizontally (competition; cooperation/alliances of fi rms). this process enhanced the need for businessrelated information about local/regional markets for international agents and also for business knowledge sought by local fi rms to adapt and survive. the growth and expansion of business services that produce and/or mediate such intangible assets re-interpreted (highly diff erentiated) the role of east central european cities and towns. small and medium size towns grew increasingly dependent on external resources (tncs investments; national/eu public resources) for supporting economic restructuring and improving quality of life, due to their scale (i.e. the less diversifi ed economic base and relatively small bargaining power) and being in an early stage of capital accumulation. success in gaining such resources has always been largely dependent on knowledge-related strategies of local agents (fi rms, public institutions) that very oft en lack capacities (e.g. skilled staff , expertise in information management) suffi cient for being involved in information fl ows. the dependence of this group of towns on centres of producing information is enhanced by highly centralised spatial structures in hungary: the budapest region preserved its dominance in information fl ows in the 2000s, particularly, by focusing highly specialised services and strategic functions of fi rm hierarchies. meanwhile, traditional service centres of small scale (below 100,000 residents) are highly diff erentiated by the erosion of the local basis for information-based activities. increasing dependence on the (business) service economy of the capital city was reinforced by national as well as by eu-policies, furthermore, by the defi ciencies in functions and bargaining power of the major county towns due to their relatively small size and lack of regional institutions. in this way, knowledge and information-based activities remain highly centralised and the accumulation of backwardness is maintained, particularly in peripheral regions of the national economy that are hit by accessibility (and adaptation) problems in physical and virtual (ict) terms. thus, an increasingly polarised space of 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(8.) pp. 941–955. ziegler, d.j. 2002. post-communist eastern europe and the cartography of independence. – political geography 21. pp. 671–686. paper title (use style: paper title) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 doi: 10.13135/2421-2172/4581 1 role of islamic finance during covid-19: a study on practical implication of zakat as short-term emergency support system abstract— islamic finance has always been well known for its unique characteristics to deal with finance. however, few countries pay heed on islamic rules and regulations and fewer actually prefer to run based on it, the reason is obvious the oppositional standpoint with capitalism. nevertheless, as the world is facing serious public health crisis like covid-19, and all normal economic activities cease to function properly, conventional finance is facing serious challenges handling this situation. though covid-19 has already been called as great equalizer, not discriminating based on any social, economic, or political strata, under-developing countries are having quite a hard time surviving this crisis, and bangladesh is not an exception, especially the vulnerable community of bangladesh. the objective of this study is to find out the practical implication of zakat as short-term emergency support system for vulnerable community of dhaka north city corporation. to conduct the study, primary source of data was used, following a semistructure questionnaire using quantitative method of data collection, and convenience sampling style was used for limited mobility induced by covid-19 lockdown. the study finds out that the practical implications of zakat are quite useful especially as a short term emergency support system during the covid-19 crisis, this study also finds out that zakat can be used as a tool for building resilience also only if smaller number of zakat recipients are selected. keywords-islamic finance, covid-19, zakat, short-term support system, vulnarable community. i. introduction coronavirus disease or more popularly known as covid19 is a dangerous novel series virus that emerged in november of 2019 from wuhan, china. though it has significant lower mortality rate comparing other viruses of its series, but it is way more dangerous due to its serious level of contagious characteristics. as a result, it is creating far reaching impact on social, political, economic, and religious as well as so many other dimensions throughout the world. as discussions are taking place, days are passing, more and more countries being affected by covid-19 and the death toll rises [1]. international project, research for creating vaccines and medicines by hundreds of governments, thousands of industry researchers and hundred thousand of academic group is taking place, however; any formal institutional approval on any vaccine and medicine is yet to come [2],[3]. the impact of covid-19 is so far reaching that actual estimation of it is out of question. in broader socio-economic, political, financial, religious labels, the impacts are subcategorized from aviation, tourism, education, human rights, politics, corruption, prison, transport, religious practices, food industry, fashion industry, restaurant, religious practice, sports, and even military sector. according to a report of asian development bank, due to covid-19 outbreak, the global economy could possibly suffer from an estimated 8.8 trillion usd [4]. where the world‟s most developed countries are finding it hard to confront covid-19, least developed countries like bangladesh is facing grave dangers, not only because it‟s economic status but also because its capital is the most crowded city in the whole world [5], creating challenges to maintain social distancing, as a result this crisis is creating a new layer of vulnerable community in the city as the normal workflow has come to an end. as reported till november 6th of 2020, a total of 4,17,475 was infected and 6,036 died by covid-19[6]. sharia compliant finance or more popularly known as islamic finance is a financial activity that complies with islamic sharia law for practical implication of islamic economics. the mode of islamic banking under islamic finance is consists of murabahah (cost-plus), ijara (leasing), wadiah (safekeeping), mudarabah (profit-sharing and lossbearing) and musharaka (joint venture), while the social finance mode includes waqf, zakat and qard hassan, etc. all of these instruments of islamic finance are unique in their own attributes, and zakat is not an exception. according to united nations development program, zakat can be an important instrument for supporting emergency program as crisis response and have significant usefulness as short-term emergency support system mitigating the aftermath of covid19 [7]. md. tanvir alam* *graduate student, department of peace conflict and human rights studies, bangladesh university of professionals, dhaka, bangladesh. email: babu.taanvir@gmail.com submitted june 2020, revised december 2020, accepted december 2020 ejif – european journal of islamic finance islamic finance role in the time of covid-19 pandemic, no 16, december (2020) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 doi: 10.13135/2421-2172/4581 2 objectives of this study the objective of this study is to find out the practical implication of zakat as short-term emergency support system in bangladesh by measuring how effective zakat was mitigating the aftermath of covid-19 to the donee. ii. literature review the literal meaning of the term zakat is "that which purifies"[8], it is a form of religious charity but obligatory in nature for who meet the criteria. zakat is one of the five pillars that uphold the religion islam, position as right after praying (salah) as third [9]. in the beginning zakat was a mere socially constructed idea, but as prophet muhammad migrated to city of medina with the very first muslim community, it was made obligatory to the muslims [10]. although zakat is often considered as poverty alleviation approach, the actual implication is beyond that. a recent study by abbas about firm‟s value and zakat potential shows critical insight. using data from yearly financial statement of enormous 227 mining and manufacturing companies, the study revealed that zakat have positive impacts on the profitability of firms [11].however, in this study zakat is considered as conventional tool for using as a short-term emergency support system. islamic finance especially zakat has always been a crucial means to poverty eradication in muslim countries. however a study in early 90s took place in pakistan revealing crucial insight, the cross sectional study was conducted based on random sample survey and identified zakat only as means to temporarily solution to poverty reduction and not an effective method for permanent rehabilitation for poor, the study concluded with few recommendation of modification of contemporary zakat system if to make it more meaningful instrument for poverty eradication [12]. later in the mid 90s, another study on socio-economic development and zakat funds was conducted by anwar, he emphasized on innovative financial approaches for development as most of the muslim countries were facing underdevelopment, he proposed a mechanism to utilize zakat fund for long-term investment for socio-economic development, his mechanism illustrated that there is potential for zakat fund as long term investment for the pace of socioeconomic development especially for under-developing countries [13]. another earlier study such as by thomas and miora in 2005 was conducted in one of the muslim country pakistan, on the role of social welfare by zakat. the study initially showed that zakat provides minimal advantage to the poor community, especially the elderly, the reason behind this poor implication of zakat identified by authors as corruption, favoritism and greed. however, the authors find zakat as a potential tool for social welfare as it ensures rehabilitation and redistribution of wealth [14].another study by nazri et al published in 2012 implied that zakat as an institution to alleviating poverty has lost its pride. the authors suggest that this declining situation can be improved if collaboration with microfinance institutions is considered [15]. after the fall of soviet union, capitalism was spreading its tentacles across the world, leaving its aggressive profit seeking attitude among countries, riba (interest) was becoming prevalent and common practice even in few muslim counties. during the millennium another country in south asia name bangladesh, was facing serious poverty related problems, many five-year plan, three-year plan and two-year plan was initiated but no desired result came out of it. though micro credit and social safety net program relieved little tension but poverty was still at large. during that time islamic finance mainly waqf and zakat was gaining popularity for poverty reeducation because of its multilayer instrumental supporting mechanism including free education, scholarship, medical treatment. a study indicated the absence of formal islamic finance mechanism to reeducation of poverty as a great deal for government of bangladesh; it suggested that government should consider making state-controlled zakat system for ensuring effective poverty eradication tool [16]. later in the year of 2008 during worldwide financial crisis, an influential study was published. the study intends to reveal the primary causes of the financial crises, and identified the reason as inadequate market discipline of the financial system which leads to excessive lending, high leverage and finally the vicious cycle that cause the decline of assets prices and helped to form economic slowdown. the study also finds out that islamic finance can be a proper tool to inject discipline into the system and thus mitigating financial instability and preventing such occurrence from ever happen again, along with that the study recognize the role of zakat as great medium for supporting the poor and vulnerable community that emerged during the crises. however, the study couldn‟t find any suitable mitigating measure from islamic finance instruments to minimize the crises but it did find out the potential role of prevention [17]. another study was conducted in 2010 by laila on zakat and food security. it proposed to achieve food security by mechanism of zakat as an instrument of islamic finance. it argues that zakat can be utilized as an effective instrument against socio-economic problems range from poverty to natural disaster through food security, although necessary modification depending on geographical and social variables should be applied before implementing. the study found positive role that zakat plays over poverty and food security, even empowering poor but that would require strong safely net program integrated with enhanced zakat fund. finally this study suggests that zakat can play vital role in emergency support system if government support is assured [18]. focusing on a broader grey zone, another study was conducted in the next year 2011 supporting chapra‟s statement of islamic finance as disciplined finance. this study argues that diverse islamic economic practices can have a distinct role to play if institutional support is given, however coordination must be assured and to successfully implement and desired scheme, this study also reveals that other islamic finance instruments such as sadaqa, qard hasan can help create social stability [19]. like many other muslim countries zakat is a state administrated matter in malaysia, though it didn‟t happen ejif – european journal of islamic finance islamic finance role in the time of covid-19 pandemic, no 16, december (2020) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 doi: 10.13135/2421-2172/4581 3 overnight, many phases and transformation took place for the zakat institution to reach on this stage. it s to be believed that state controlled institutions can better perform solving state level challenges like poverty, illiteracy, vulnerability and improving capacity building, however actual success depends on several factors including collection of zakat, zakat management, zakat distribution and maintaining sharia rules [20]. while bakar and ghani conducted a study in 2011, they argued zakat as an islamic institution having ties with islamic economics aims to cater for the social welfare of muslim‟s. they suggested that zakat can contribute to improve the minimum quality of life of poor people but to ensure that a proactive mechanism for distribution is prerequisite. their study advised ghazali invented maslahah approach for implementation while measuring standard for minimum quality using abraham maslow‟s human development theory [21]. poverty reeducation has always been a priority in most of the muslim countries, and every time it gains momentary velocity after each economic slowdown or crises, where the islamic finance industry showed promising potentiality by demonstrating growth and development over the past few decades; however its full potential is yet to be realized, moreover it would require to eliminate the gap between islamic finance practice and theory [22]. a study on zakat took place in 2014, this study argued that muslim countries are underestimating zakat as strategy to fight against poverty. while examining the role and impact of zakat on 3 muslim countries, the study finds out many interesting insights. it argues that zakat should be integrated with poverty reduction program to not only elevate poor people out of poverty but also to improve their living standard, however that would require additional islamic finance tools to incorporate with, it also suggests that muslim government body should take zakat as obligatory institution matter not voluntarily and leave it up to citizen, along with hat government should also consider formulating poverty reduction policy at national level and vital stakeholders such as practitioner, researcher, social worker and policy makers should work together for poverty eradication because poverty is a complex challenge and to solve it will require sophisticated approach from all level [23]. an influential study was published in 2016 by beik and pratama, it analyzed the impact of effectiveness of zakat program for alleviating poverty for participating households. the study was conducted based on primary source of data using administrative questionnaire and following interview of around 120 participates, the scale for determining effectiveness were consist of four indices. the study finds out that zakat utilization program has a positive impact over welfare index, it helps to decrease poverty rate and increase income rate for participated households [24]. another influential recent publication by radwan and biancone, provides critical insight on islamic finance as unconventional finance for social finance. they argue that innovative and unconventional ways of social finance are demand of time, but it is hard to discover an effective one because of many challenges including high risk, governance problem, evaluation problem and difficulties of measuring social value; however they propose islamic finance offers wide range of instrument with innovative potentiality, they argue that these instruments can create positive impact on social enterprise development [25]. iii. methodology this study intends to find out the practical implication of zakat as short-term emergency support system during covid19 pandemic outbreak in dhaka north city corporation of bangladesh by measuring how effective zakat was mitigating the aftermath of covid-19 to the donee. the study was conducted based on primary source of data, using semistructured questionnaire following a descriptive quantitative method. the sampling style was convenience sampling because limited mobility due to of pandemic lockdown. the data were collected by both online and physical interview of 100 respondents as both zakat recipient/donee and giver. respondent types zakat recipients (50) & zakat givers (50) data source type primary data source method quantitative method questionnaire semi-structure sampling style convenience methodology iv. analysis and findings the analysis was done in four phases, upon receiving data from both zakat recipients (50) & zakat giver (50). analysis of zakat giver 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 1-2 person 3-5 person 6-10 person 11-20 person zakat giver ` graph 1: number of zakat recipients by giver as the graph 1 shows, among the respondents of zakat giver, 6 respondents gave zakat to 1-2 persons, 14 respondents gave zakat to 3-5 persons, 22 respondents gave zakat to 6-10 persons, and 8 respondents gave zakat to 11-20 persons. suggesting that most zakat giver usually helps around 6-10 persons by giving zakat, and then the most people usually give zakat to 3-5 persons. ejif – european journal of islamic finance islamic finance role in the time of covid-19 pandemic, no 16, december (2020) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 doi: 10.13135/2421-2172/4581 4 28 4 7 11 emerging vulnarable group old vulnarable group relative non-relative graph 2: zakat recipient group type as the graph 2 shows among the respondents of zakat giver, 28 respondents gave zakat to emerging vulnerable group, 11 respondents gave zakat to old vulnerable group, 7 respondents gave zakat to relative and only 4 respondents gave zakat to non-relative, which suggests that most people gave zakat to emerging vulnerable group due to covid-19 crisis, and the next most zakat giver group give zakat to old vulnerable group, while relative receive more priority then non-relative, implying covid-19 as a factor to zakat giving. analysis of zakat recipient 11 19 15 5 1-4 families 5-10 families 11-20 families 20+ families graph 3: zakat from number of families graph 3 shows that among the respondents of zakat recipients, 19 recipients received zakat from 5-10 families, 15 recipients received zakat from 11-20 families, 11 recipients received zakat from 1-4 families and only 5 recipients received zakat from 20+ families. this analysis indicates that most of the zakat recipients usually get zakat from 5-10 families, while the next most zakat recipients get zakat from 11-20, and the least recipients gets zakat form only 1-4 families. however, recipients from only 1-4 families get zakat on higher scale comparing those recipients who gets zakat from first 2 categories. the first 2 categories recipients who get zakat from many families (5-20 altogether) usually receive low zakat from each family comparing the latter category. 26 12 1 8 3 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 most useful useful neutral moderate least useful graph 4: usefulness of zakat graph 4 shows that among the zakat recipients, 26 recipients consider received zakat as most useful during the covid-19 crisis, and 12 recipients consider received zakat as useful, while only 1 recipient considers it as neutral, and 8 recipients as moderate and 3 recipients as least useful. according to the analysis and discussion the final findings of the study suggest;  most zakat givers have a tendency to cover wider population as zakat recipient.  new emerging vulnerable group due to covid19 received more zakat, as zakat giver considered it as a factor to select zakat recipients.  most zakat recipients receive zakat from many families although in smaller amount, while least zakat recipients receive zakat from few numbers of families but in higher amount.  most of the zakat recipients consider zakat as most useful, especially during covid-19 crisis.  although in smaller scale, but selecting fewer zakat recipients from individual zakat giver increase the chance of building resilience for needy people.  zakat acted as an effective immediate but shortterm emergency support system for the vulnerable community.  zakat have successfully mitigated the aftermath of covvid-19 for the emerging vulnerable community induced by coronavirus outbreak in dhaka city. ejif – european journal of islamic finance islamic finance role in the time of covid-19 pandemic, no 16, december (2020) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 doi: 10.13135/2421-2172/4581 5 v. concusion poverty profile of muslim world was already severe before corona‟s arrival. as a result, the outbreak hits hard all the muslim countries especially least developed countries like bangladesh. many new vulnerable groups emerged during this crisis period. but it was a relief that the holy month of ramadan appeared during the crisis with its blessing and unconventional financial instruments. as it already discovered that islamic finance with its diverse instruments have enormous potential for social finance [26]. the study finds out that zakat is indeed effective as a short–term emergency system for venerable community, and have successfully mitigated the aftermath of covvid-19 for the emerging vulnerable community induced by coronavirus outbreak in dhaka city, besides; it can also be used as a tool to build resilience but with modification of it like selecting fewer zakat recipients. the paper has few limitations induced by covid19 restricted mobility affecting data collection process; however, the finding of this study suggests parallel effectiveness of zakat on alleviating poverty as earlier studies like ali and hatta‟s (2014) paper titled as „zakat as a poverty reduction mechanism among the muslim community: case study of bangladesh, malaysia, and indonesia‟ suggested [27]. this paper leaves a trail for researchers to study different aspects of zakat which ranged from studying possibilities of modality of zakat modification as a financial instrument for improve its effectiveness and to wider state-controlled zakat management system for 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[20] ab rahman, azman & alias, mohammad & najib, syed. zakat institution in malaysia: problems and issues. global journal althaqafah. 2. 35-41. 10.7187/gjat122012.02.01., 2012 [21] bakar, m. h. a., & abdghani, a. h. towards achieving the quality of life in the management of zakat distribution to the rightful recipients (the poor and needy). international journal of business and social science, 2(4). 2011 [22] mujahid, syed & adawiah, engku. the potential of innovative financial tools: social impact bond (sib) and sustainable and responsible investment (sri) sukuk, towards the sustainable growth of the islamic finance industry. 2015 [23] ali, isahaque & hatta, zulkarnain. zakat as a poverty reduction mechanism among the muslim community: case study of bangladesh, malaysia, and indonesia. asian social work and policy review. 8. 10.1111/aswp.12025, 2014 [24] beik, irfan & pratama, caesar. zakat impact on poverty and welfare of mustahik: a cibest model approach. afebi islamic finance and economic review. 1. 1-12, 2016 [25] biancone, paolo pietro & radwan, maha. social finance and unconventional financing alternatives: an overview. european journal of islamic finance. 10.13135/2421-2172/2818., 2018 [26] biancone, paolo pietro & radwan, maha. social finance and financing social enterprises: an islamic finance prospective. 10.13135/24212172/3176,2019 [27] ali, i. and hatta, z.a., zakat as a poverty reduction mechanism among the muslim community: case study of bangladesh, malaysia, and indonesia. asian social work policy rev, 8: 59-70. https://doi.org/10.1111/aswp.12025. 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.22617/brf200144-2 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.08.474 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41259525 https://doi.org/10.1111/aswp.12025 ejif – european journal of islamic finance islamic finance role in the time of covid-19 pandemic, no 16, december (2020) http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ejif issn 2421-2172 doi: 10.13135/2421-2172/4581 6 key: cord-0076735-uv91ljip authors: michl, thomas r; tavani, daniele title: path dependence and stagnation in a classical growth model date: 2021-11-19 journal: cambridge j econ doi: 10.1093/cje/beab045 sha: 67d9214df842474b5b085fc68a9b9fb7b742448b doc_id: 76735 cord_uid: uv91ljip this paper embeds a technical progress function in a classical growth model and studies the effects of permanent changes in parameters and temporary shocks such as pandemics. technical change is driven by dynamic economies of scale and responds to distributional forces: the wage share regulates labour-saving technical change and employment regulates its capital-using bias. the model features path dependence in the employment-population rate and the output-capital ratio. population growth and distribution can respond to the employment rate. interpreted through the model, secular stagnation under neoliberal capitalism has been driven by a combination of diminished investment and reduced worker bargaining power more than by slower technical change and population growth. a temporary unfavourable shock to the output-capital ratio will permanently reduce the employment rate. in the fully endogenous model, this will increase the profit share and reduce the rates of technical change, capital accumulation, and population growth. the covid-19 pandemic and recession of 2020 will undoubtedly cast a long shadow in a global economy already suffering from secular stagnation, even after the public health systems of the world eventually learn to manage the virus and the economic policy authorities have contained the most immediate instabilities. this paper addresses what kind of long-term effects we might expect after an event that defies classification as either a pure demand or supply shock. we offer a novel structuralist growth model that features endogenous technical change, population growth, and distribution by combining elements of classical (in the sense of the classical political economists) and keynesian theory. to be sure, the paper is not meant to predict the effects of the pandemic with precision but rather to use this opportunity to advance some potentially useful ideas about the long-term effects of aggregate shocks in structuralist macroeconomic models. labour-augmenting technical change in the long run. these predictions are in sharp contrast to jordà et al. (2020) who offer empirical evidence that pandemics (including the 1918 influenza and the black death) have historically been followed by periods of rising real wages. we believe that their findings are not applicable to a stagnant capitalist economy. one source of confidence in our model's predictions is that it captures many of the stylised facts of the last major shock event, the global financial crisis of 2008, whose legacy has been an era of secular stagnation. indeed, it is precisely because the covid-19 shock has perturbed an already vulnerable form of capitalism that the need for new thinking about the policy challenge has grown so critical. our analysis amounts to building a compact growth model around the technical progress function introduced by taylor et al. (2019) . rather than closing the model with the keynesian assumption of independent investment and saving functions, we study the technical progress function in a suite of classical models to project the effects of both permanent and temporary macroeconomic shocks toward the medium-to-long run. we first take the wage share to be parametric and adopt a conventional wage share closure . we then consider endogenous distribution based on a reserve army effect. since population growth plays a role in the tfr model of technical progress, we progressively complicate the framework by endogenizing the rate of population growth; we finally study a fully endogenous growth model where both distribution and population evolve endogenously. all of these models abstract from very short-run dynamics where suppressing the investment function is inappropriate: any reference to 'short-run' in what follows means 'away from a steady state'. we consider a one-sector capitalist economy in continuous time. as is standard in the heterodox literature, the economy is populated by two classes, workers and capitalists. workers earn wage income that they consume entirely. capitalists earn profit income out of which they consume and save in order to accumulate more capital. let ρ denote the net output-capital ratio (capital productivity), and x be net output per worker (labour productivity): with capital stock k , labour demand n in the economy is ρk /x. further, let π denote the net profit share, and let γ, χ denote the rates of labour-and capital-saving technical progress, both endogenous in what follows. we use net output in order to economise on notation and omit explicit reference to depreciation. the tfr technical progress function uses the profit rate to capture the notion of induced technical change. a more direct and intuitive choice is the profit share (kennedy, 1964; foley, 2003; julius, 2005; zamparelli, 2015) since its complement to one (the wage share) correlates with unit labour costs, providing a precise measure of a firm's savings from any productivity improvements. then the technical progress function is where κ is the capital-population ratio, k /pop , and the hat notation denotes a growth rate. this equation represents a reduced-form approach that combines two theories of technical change that have been widely used in the heterodox literature: dynamic economies of scale following a kaldor-verdoorn law (verdoorn, 1949; kaldor, 1957) and distribution-induced research and development (kennedy, 1964) . the intercept term captures any autonomous technical change. the disadvantage of a reduced-form approach, of course, is that it leaves open some deeper questions about microeconomic and behavioural mechanisms. but an advantage is that it can help interrogate the statistical record, as we do below in section 7 focusing on neoliberal capitalism and stagnation. with the profit share given, the steady-state will be defined by where γ 0 = γ 0 /(1 − γ 1 ) and γ 2 = γ 2 /(1 − γ 1 ). kaldor's (1957) original formulation of the technical progress function featured growth in the capital-labour ratio, rather than growth in the capital-population ratio, as a determinant of technical change. this created a potential stabilizing role for the direction or bias of technical change. rapid accumulation per worker, for example, creates capital-using (marx-biased) technical change that could reduce profitability and contain growth. the tfr formulation, on the other hand, leaves the bias of technical change unspecified except at the steady-state where the output-capital ratio will stabilise. rapid accumulation per person (relative to the steady-state value) only requires that the growth rate of the employment-population ratio, e = n/pop, exceed the growth rate of the output-capital ratio χ. this puts no restriction on χ, and indeed could be achieved with harrod-neutral technical change, χ = 0. therefore, and in the interests of incorporating the tfr function into a classical growth model, we propose an auxiliary assumption that restores kaldor's idea that the direction of technical change can provide a homeostatic mechanism. a functional relationship like achieves that objective. here the ε term has a mean zero (consistent with steady-state growth) and represents shocks to capital productivity that can have any sign. like the tfr function itself, this is a reduced form intended to capture economically meaningful behaviour. importantly, it plays a central role in generating the path dependence that characterises our model, as explained in further detail in the appendix. the economic motivation for this functional relationship is that increases in the employment rate create labour shortages that induce more mechanisation and automation, as argued in robinson (1962) . in a sense, this motivation relies on the intuition behind models of induced technical change such as the one in foley et al. (2019, ch.7) . in this case, during boom periods when accumulation per person is rising and the employment rate is driven up, the system will tend to stabilise through marxbiased technical change. in the converse case, capital-saving technical change will restore profitability. 2 to summarise, our approach to technical change brings together the three main mechanisms that have often been studied separately by structuralist economists. by combining dynamic returns to scale, distribution-led labour productivity growth, and marx-biased technical change, we aspire to apply our approach empirically, as well as contribute to a fuller understanding of the relationships between growth and distribution. accumulation follows the continuous-time cambridge equation in michl and foley (2007) , where β represents the capitalist consumption propensity out of wealth (capital). the accumulation rate g is then: where πρ is the net rate of profit, r, in the economy. the cambridge equation has been motivated as the consumption plan of a class of capitalist agents who are optimizing the discounted sum of the log of consumption (foley et al., 2019, ch.5 ) over an extended intergenerational horizon. it can also be motivated as the bequest plan of capitalists with a pure legacy motive who optimise over their own natural lifetimes but who value their own end-of-life accumulation with the same log utility function (michl, 2008) . in either case, we can think of profit income not consumed as a form of saving, although we could just as easily apply the term investment to this act since in our model there is no other wealth asset to accumulate. in order to avoid the impression that we have privileged saving over investment, let us use the term 'capitalisation rate' to refer to the propensity to accumulate out of wealth, (1 − β). 3 the classical approach in this paper describes accumulation at a high level of abstraction with no distinction made between saving by households and investment by firms with the intention of capturing a limited set of low frequency (say generational periods of 15-20 years) dynamics. in models that do make that distinction (michl, 2016) , the observed capitalisation rate can reflect the interaction of intertemporal preferences (saving) and managerial animal spirits (investment). we think of the two approaches as complements rather than competitors, with the choice between them often depending on judgments about which is fit for purpose. the capitalisation rate is defined as a flow-stock ratio but it will also be useful to consider the flow-flow ratio of net investment to profits, s, which shows up in a familiar growth equation, g = sr . from the cambridge equation above we can see that the capitalisation rate is (1 − β) = 1 − r(1 − s). we use this accounting relationship in the empirical applications in section 7. since we are implicitly including employment, this model will produce a steady-state employment-population ratio. to deal with the fact that the employment-population ratio is bounded above by one, we propose a set of regimes based on how the employment rate affects population growth and distribution. increases in the employment rate can potentially raise the rate of population growth through immigration or pronatal policy. endogenizing population growth makes sense in a global economy characterised by uneven development. advanced countries have global reserves of labour at their disposal. at some point, the world economy may itself make a transition to 'maturity' so that this method of endogenizing population growth no longer makes sense. we model the growth rate of population as a simple affine function of the employment rate up to its upper bound, which captures the fact that, since the employment rate is bounded by one, this model is only relevant in the interval bounded from above by a maximum rate of population growth equal to n + η. similarly, higher employment rates are associated with stronger worker bargaining power and a higher wage share. this is the central premise of goodwinian growth cycle models. 4 in order to capture distributional conflict at low frequency, we model the distribution of income through another simple function of the employment rate, along with basic accounting relations, equations ((1)-(5)) comprise a fully specified growth model. in order to build some intuition that can help explain its comparative equilibrium properties, we ascend through a series of increasingly complex cases to the general model. while each of the four cases we examine can potentially capture or approximate features of real historical episodes, they also facilitate the exposition of the economic mechanisms under study, and in particular the sometimes counterintuitive effects of distributional shocks. moreover, they contextualise the model in the existing literature. the results are summarised below in table 1 that shows the comparative equilibrium properties of the general model described in section 6: some readers may prefer to skip ahead to the corresponding section. in the basic model, we assume that the rate of population growth and distribution are independently given. the system is stabilised by the dynamics of biased technical change. in the endogenous population growth model, increases in employment create pressure to raise the rate of population growth through immigration or pro-natal policy, with no effect on distribution. in the endogenous distribution model, increases in employment create a reserve army effect on distribution, with no effect on population growth. finally, in the complete model, both population growth and distribution are endogenous. the following sections present the models and the comparative statics arising from the various closures in turn. the stability analysis corresponding to each alternative closure is left to appendix a which shows that in each case the model displays path dependence. the table shows the signs of dc/dr where r is the row entry and c is the column entry. a slash indicates that results depend on parameter values. recall that (1 − β) is the capitalisation rate. the bottom row identifies a temporary shock to capital productivity; all other entries refer to permanent changes in parameters. in the most basic version of the model, the employment rate is free to increase and the rate of population growth is constant. thus we can close the growth model with an exogenous population growth rate n =n (4′) and the conventional wage share closure: (5′) in this case, the steady-state solutions (indicated by an * ) are to maintain clarity we will only consider increases in the key parameters (n, γ 0 , π, (1 − β), and ε) despite the fact that in applications we are often interested in negative shocks. a permanent increase in population growth increases accumulation. the mechanism is capital-saving technical change triggered by the decrease in the employment rate from the shock. ultimately, capital-saving technical change increases the profit rate sufficiently to accommodate higher growth. thus, the employment rate will permanently decrease and capital productivity will increase. a permanent increase in autonomous technical change has similar effects. in this case, the employment rate falls due to the more rapid displacement of workers through technical change. again, the employment rate decreases and capital productivity increases in the long run. a permanent increase in the conventional profit share reduces accumulation, perhaps counterintuitively, as is illustrated in figure 1 that shows the technical progress function before and after the shock. the induced effect on the rate of labour-saving technical change depresses growth in the long run. like all classical models, this one is profit-led in the short run (point b in the figure) but over time the reduced wage share relaxes the incentive to economise on labour and sustains a lower rate of accumulation, given the balanced growth condition g * = γ * +n above (point c). the mechanism that reduces accumulation is capital-using (marx-biased) technical change that lowers capital productivity as the bias of technical change responds in the short run to the profit-led increase in accumulation and employment. the increase in employment will remain in place in the long run, as will the decline in capital productivity. a numerical evaluation of such a scenario is presented in figure 2 : following a 5% increase in the conventional profit share at time zero, capital productivity falls monotonically to its new steady-state; the employment rate rises monotonically; while labour productivity growth initially spikes up but then converges to a lower long-run value. the plot of the capital-population ratio in logarithmic scale shows that, compared to the pre-shock trend (the dashed line), κ initially grows faster until it settles onto a slower growth path. this trajectory mirrors the evolution of κ in figure 1 . a permanent increase in the capitalisation rate (i.e., a reduction in β, capitalist consumption normalised by capital stock) has no long-run effect on the growth rate. there is no paradox of thrift in the short run, as in all classical models, but over time the effects of marx-biased technical change would bring the rates of profit and growth back to original levels. as in the previous scenario, the immediate increase in the employment rate provides the impetus for capital-using technical change; the employment rate rises and capital productivity falls in the new steady state. the employment-population ratio is path-dependent in this model since any steadystate has the growth of labour demand equal to population growth, (g * − γ * ) = n, and any point along the line n =n represents a possible solution. in formal terms, the system has a zero root, 5 the hallmark of path dependence (dutt, 1997 (dutt, , 2006 (dutt, , 2010 . temporary shocks to capital productivity will have permanent effects on the employment rate, but no long-run effect on any other endogenous variable. we will present a numerical evaluation of this point, which pertains to the predicted effects of the covid-19 pandemic in the exogenous model as opposed to the endogenous model, in section 8. this property of the model resonates with theories of hysteresis (rowthorn, 1999) that emphasise the role of capital and investment in propagating shocks so that they permanently alter the apparent 'natural' rate of employment. one of the implications of our analysis is that a complete assessment of the 'natural rate hypothesis' needs to take into account theories that can account for permanent hysteresis effects. 6 we retain the conventional wage share assumption but assume that (perhaps beyond some critical level) increases in the employment rate trigger increases in population growth, for example, because of in-migration outpacing out-migration. we can model that by replacing equation (4′) with equation (4). within the space bounded from above by the maximum rate of population growth, the model shares the property of having path dependence, which now involves both the employment rate and capital productivity. since g * = γ * + n * =γ 0 −γ 2π +n + ηe * , we now have the steady-state (ρ * , e * ), will lie on this curve, with any particular position selected by history or initial conditions since the model continues to display a zero root. a permanent increase in autonomous population growth (n) will increase accumulation as before: the mechanism is again capital-saving technical change that increases the profit rate. this shock is likely to reduce the employment rate; this, in turn, will drag down population growth, somewhat attenuating the initial increase in autonomous population growth. since there has been no change in distribution, the rate of labour-saving technical change will eventually return to its original value. a permanent increase in autonomous technical change has similar effects. now, however, its impact on the employment rate will induce slower population growth so that it will not translate one-for-one into long-run growth. as before, both these increases in the growth of the effective labour force (i.e, measured in efficiency units) reduce the employment rate and increase capital productivity in the long run. a permanent increase in the profit share may (again, counterintuitively) lower the steady-state rate of accumulation as before, because it eventually reduces the rate of labour-saving technical change. again, marx-biased technical change will bring the rate of accumulation down. but the adjustment will also involve an induced increase in population growth if the employment rate rises during the transitional period. this should attenuate the decline in accumulation. in fact, if the response of population growth to the employment rate is large, it can actually overcompensate for the decline in labour-saving technical change so that accumulation has to increase. as the sensitivity of population growth to employment increases, the model becomes less constrained by population growth. the conventional wage share model in foley et al. (2019, ch.6) can be seen as a limiting case as η → ∞ and population growth adapts to capital accumulation to keep the employment rate stable. 7 a permanent increase in the capitalisation rate (a reduction in β) will have no effect on the steady-state rate of labour-saving technical change, but it will create a boom that raises the employment rate and rate of population growth. as a result, it will increase the rate of capital accumulation in the long run. marx-biased technical change offsets some of the resulting increased accumulation, but not all of it because population growth has risen and must be accommodated. temporary shocks that increase capital productivity will increase the employment rate as before, but in this case, they will also have a permanent positive effect on capital productivity. the temporary boom in accumulation and employment will generate marx-biased technical change as in the previous case, but these will fade out without returning capital productivity to its original level in order to sustain the new higher rate of population growth. if distribution plays the role of accommodating increases in the employment rate, we can return to equation (4′) and replace equation (5′) with equation (5). this model also displays path dependence. since g * =γ 0 −γ 2 (π + µe * ) +n we find that as in the previous regime, the steady-state (ρ * , e * ) lies on a curve: as before, a permanent increase in autonomous population growth creates capitalsaving technical change, which tends to accommodate the need for more growth by raising the profit rate. however, to the extent that it tends to lower the employment rate and enlarge the reserve army, it raises the profit share, which in turn will attenuate any increase in accumulation by reducing the rate of labour-saving technical change. in the limiting case as µ → ∞ the distribution model becomes e = 1 to accommodate any feasible profit share, and this model approaches the full employment closure of foley et al. (2019, ch. 6) . distributional dynamics alone stabilise the system. a permanent autonomous increase in the profit share (a rise in π), reflecting a shift in the balance of class forces, should increase the employment rate, attenuating the ultimate increase in the profit share. the net increase in the profit share will reduce the rate of labour-saving technical change so that capital accumulation ultimately declines. the mechanism is 'overaccumulation' resulting in marx-biased technical change that reduces the rate of profit sufficiently to accommodate slower labour productivity growth. a permanent increase in the capitalisation rate will raise the employment rate, putting upward pressure on the wage share and consequently on the rate of induced labour-saving technical change. marx-biased technical change will contribute to a decline in the profit rate, but the increased propensity to invest will prevail and accumulation will increase as a result of faster technical change. in each case of a permanent shock, the effects on the steady-state employment rate and capital productivity will mirror those in the previous section. finally, a temporary positive capital productivity shock will increase the employment rate and capital productivity as in the previous section. however, the mechanism which prevents marx-biased technical change from returning capital productivity to its starting value now involves distribution and technical change. a higher employment rate improves the workers' bargaining power and the wage share, incentivizing higher labour productivity growth and raising the long-run rates of profit and accumulation. with a lower profit share, this necessarily requires that capital productivity increases in the new steady state. finally, we can combine the two previous cases into a general case with endogenous population growth and distribution by closing the model with equations (4) and (5). once again, capital productivity and the employment rate will be path-dependent with ρ * = β +n +γ 0 −γ 2π + (η +γ 2 µ)e * π − µe * describing the solution sets. temporary shocks to capital productivity will result in a positive association between capital productivity and employment as before. the comparative dynamics of this hybrid case will combine elements of the previous two cases, depending on parameter values. in particular, the effect of an autonomous increase in the profit share on growth continues to depend on the sensitivity of population growth to the employment rate, since its effects on labour productivity growth, operating through distribution, go in the opposite direction. a complete account of the comparative dynamics of the general model is provided in table 1 which shows the sign of the relevant derivatives. in many cases, it depends on the value of key parameters such as the sensitivity of distribution or population growth to the employment ratio (µ and η respectively). we use these comparative equilibrium properties to interrogate the statistical record in the next section. as we observed above, one particular entry in table 1 stands out: the effect of a change in distribution on capital accumulation ( g). while all the other entries are either unambiguous in sign or zero, the sign of this entry is ambiguous, indicating that accumulation can be either wage-or profit-led. table 2 presents the comparative equilibrium results for distributive shocks in the four cases we have examined, depending on whether distribution or labour supply are exogenous or endogenous. this two-way table makes clear that there is an important connection between productivitydriven wage-led growth and labour supply constraints. the right column of the table shows that an endogenous labour supply-such as in the limiting case of the conventional wage share growth model-is a necessary condition for profit-led growth, given the possibility of a positive response of the long-run growth rate to the profit share. conversely, the left column shows that exogenous labour supply-such as in the limiting case of the classical full employment growth model-is a sufficient condition for wage-led growth, given the unambiguously negative response of the long-run growth rate to the profit share. to put it differently, the possibility for the labour force to expand in response to rising employment strengthens the classical role of profitability in driving capital accumulation, so that long-run growth can become profit-led, while an exogenous growth rate of the labour force, coupled with induced technical change, strengthens the role of labour-saving innovation to counter wage increases in driving productivity growth, so that long-run growth is unambiguously wage-led. while the comparative dynamics exercise reviewed in the previous section gives precise analytical answers to well-defined questions, real economies rarely if ever offer such controlled experiments. structural change ordinarily involves some combination of underlying parameters, just as human illness is typically multifactoral. at best, we can attempt to put together a narrative account that interprets the statistical record through the model. indeed, this is one test of a model's practical value. we consider two broad narratives about the neoliberal capitalist social structure that has risen and predominated over the last four decades. the first, which figures prominently in the orthodox views of secular stagnation, emphasises supply factors, and in particular following alvin hansen's (1939) classic work, slower population growth and an exhaustion of technical change (a similar argument appears in gordon, 2015) . in this approach, demand problems are ultimately a consequence of the difficulty of transitioning to a lower natural rate of growth. the second, which is rooted in structuralist approaches in macroeconomics, emphasises the political and institutional contradictions of neoliberalism itself. while a complete assessment is beyond the scope of this paper because it would require extensive discussion of the relationship between the table shows the signs of dg/dπ in each of the four cases. a slash indicates that results depend on parameter values. the four cells correspond to sections 3-6, beginning in the top-left entry and proceeding in a z-pattern around the table. aggregate demand and accumulation, we can certainly benefit from consideration of these competing narratives within the model. let us refer to these approaches as the supply-side story and the structuralist hypothesis. the supply-side story works through slower autonomous population growth and a lower rate of autonomous technical change. for the most part, these changes have similar effects as they are analytically equivalent to a reduced rate of growth of the effective workforce (i.e. measured in efficiency units). a lower autonomous natural rate of growth raises the employment rate and puts workers in a stronger bargaining position, lowering the profit share. the profit rate must decline to synchronise accumulation with a lower natural rate, partly through lower profits and partly through reduced capital productivity driven by marx-biased technical change induced by the transitional dynamics of employment. depending on the relative strength of the autonomous reductions and the parameters governing distribution and technical change, the effect on n or γ could go either way, but the sum of the two, which governs accumulation, will be negative. some accounts (summers, 2014) of secular stagnation add a decline in worker bargaining power into the mix in the interests of consistency with the wellknown increase in income inequality over the neoliberal era. 8 in this case, they often emphasise some sort of savings glut since high income and capitalist households have higher propensities to save. structuralist economists would probably want to start with the historic shift in class power, or at least make it a central object of analysis. 9 our model incorporates wage-led growth through the technical progress function, but aside from that channel it considers accumulation to be profit-led, and as a result, predicts an increase in the employment rate. the net effect on growth of an increased autonomous profit share is therefore indeterminate, depending on the relative importance of demographic versus technological responses. however, structuralist research on the effects of financialisation has found it to have disincentivised investment, reducing the capitalisation rate in our model. 10 this factor weighs in on the side of reduced growth in labour-saving technical change and/or population as the consequence of a lower capitalisation rate and the resulting slower accumulation. our main proposal then is that a complete structuralist hypothesis would combine rising capitalist class power and the reduced propensity to invest out of profits as characteristic features of neoliberal capitalism. the panel of data assembled mainly from primary sources in table 3 sheds some light on the relative merits of these two narratives (supplementary data). while complete details are provided in an appendix, some salient features of the methodology follow. the employment data refer to the working-age population, 15-64, so that the employment rate corresponds to the headline employment-population rate most often discussed by economists. with the exception of labour productivity growth, all the remaining variables describe a nonfinancial business sector that consolidates corporate 8 in addition, piketty (2014) argues that a rising profit share will accompany capital deepening because the putative elasticity of substitution exceeds one. an important cross-section analysis by karabarbounis and neiman (2014) 10 for structuralist research, see davis (2018) , orhangazi (2008) , or kotz and basu (2018) . conventional researchers who have also found a significant decline in investment include gruber and kamin (2015) and gutiérrez and philippon (2019) . and noncorporate sectors in the integrated macroeconomic accounts of the us. 11 we chose to omit the financial sector due to questions about accounting conventions. the labour productivity measure is the non-farm private business sector index published by the bureau of labor statistics. the output-capital ratio and profit share are measured net of depreciation, and the profit share is net of corporate taxes. the capitalisation rate is measured using the cambridge equation as (one minus) the difference between the profit rate and the rate of accumulation. to measure the accumulation rate, we used the ratio of net investment to capital stock. because the national accounts in the us have adopted the convention of including intellectual property in the capital stocks and investment flows-a questionable practice from a structuralist perspective-we have removed it from both. we have divided the neoliberal era into two periods and four sub-periods, more or less reflecting a structuralist consensus that the first two decades represent the rise of the neoliberal system, and the last two decades represent its descent into secular stagnation, with the global financial crisis of 2008 standing as a temporal fault line as in kotz and basu (2018) . the increased profit share observed in this data set calls into question the view that secular stagnation reflects a shortage of effective workers resulting from demographic and technological trends. this pattern, together with the decline in the employment rate, is at odds with the predictions of the supply story. 12 the decline in the employment rate suggests that at least some of the class polarisation has been induced by labour market slack. the table also includes the flow version of the capitalisation rate, s, to get a more complete view of the declining investment rate. 13 it is striking that by either the stock or flow measure, the capitalisation rate has consistently fallen during the neoliberal era. us 1980 us -2018 variable (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (4)-(1) 1980-1999 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2018 2000-2007 2008-2018 indeed the characteristic pattern in table 3 could well be completely accounted for by the decline in the capitalisation rate evident on the bottom rows: lower employment, population growth, productivity growth, and accumulation combined with a higher profit share. while there is no denying that population growth has a strong autonomous component, it is striking that the big declines there occur after the gfc. similarly, labour productivity also collapses after the gfc, probably as a combination of attenuated distributional pressures and the kaldor-verdoorn effects of slower growth. up to this point, we are inclined to score this for the structuralist hypothesis. to complete the picture, however, we do need to address the differing predictions about capital productivity. while a broad comparison of the early and late stages of neoliberalism supports the stagnationist prediction that a lower capitalisation rate will elevate capital productivity through capital-saving technical change, a more granular view leads to more nuanced conclusions. it is clear that this pattern reflects the difference between the earliest subperiod (column 2), and the latest subperiod (column 6). we do not have confidence that a mechanical implementation of such a simple model makes good sense in this area because the process driving the bias in technical change is in practice inherently stochastic. we should expect the data on capital productivity to be noisy. the supply-side story in its purest form predicts that slower growth of the effective labour force (from either of its components) will induce 'capital deepening' along a pre-existing neoclassical production function or, translated into our model, marx-biased technical change driving down capital productivity. given the uncertainty of the theory and the volatility in the data, 14 we are inclined to reach a scotch verdict of not proven. in sum, we believe that this excursion through the statistical record gives us some confidence in the structuralist account of neoliberalism as interpreted through the model. secular stagnation does not appear to be the result of unfavourable demographic or technological trends, and indeed we would argue that these trends are as much a consequence of stagnation as they are a cause. this is significant because a global economic shock is very likely to play out quite differently if the structuralist view is correct, with serious consequences for the fates of the working classes who are already vulnerable. two numerical plots below show the effect of a permanent reduction in the capitalisation rate-i.e. an increase in the capitalist consumption propensity-in the exogenous vs. fully endogenous model (supplementary data). in the exogenous model, there are permanent long-run effects on the employment rate and capital productivity, while the effects on the (long-run trend of) capital/population ratio and labour productivity growth are only temporary. this scenario is depicted in figure 3 , which plots impulse-response functions corresponding to a 5% decrease in the capitalisation rate at time zero. in the endogenous model, a decline in the capitalisation rate permanently shifts the capital/population ratio onto a slower growth trajectory. the employment rate, labour productivity growth, and the population growth rate converge to a lower steady-state value, while long run capital productivity and the profit share both increase in the long run. figure 4 provides an illustration. we can model the economic shock from a pandemic like covid-19 in several ways. it is clear that it may have negative level effects on the productivity of capital and labour-a form of technical regress. as businesses restart with staffing restrictions imposed by the need for social distancing and health monitoring, fewer productive workers will operate the existing capital stock, producing a lower flow of output. the shock could also reduce the flow of output per worker so that it is closer to being hicks-neutral in character. we have chosen to emphasise its solow-neutral effect on the level of capital productivity in order to produce the stylised simulations presented in the impulse response functions below. we model the pandemic as a temporary reduction in the output-capital ratio due to the interplay of demand and supply forces that are a consequence of the various lockdown measures adopted around the world. in the exogenous model, labour productivity growth initially falls but then returns to its steady-state value, and the same is true for capital productivity. the effect on the trend of the capital-population ratio is also temporary. given path dependence, however, the shock results in a permanent decline in the employment rate. such a scenario is displayed in figure 5 . the fully endogenous model of section 6 paints a much bleaker picture. since both population and income distribution respond to the employment rate-which falls permanently following the shock-the ultimate long-run effect of the pandemic is a combination of lower labour productivity growth, a higher profit share, a lower employment rate, lower capital productivity, lower population growth, and a slower growth of the capital-population ratio. figure 6 provides a visual illustration. it is interesting that the model presented here resolves harrod's existence problem by a synthesis of solow (capital productivity adjusts), marx (population growth or labour-saving technical change adjusts) and kaldor (distribution adjusts) . but the solow mechanism does not depend on the existence of some kind of well-behaved production function since it operates through technical change. it is also interesting that the model can display wage-led growth, despite its classical foundations. this is one consequence of the tfr technical progress function, which has two main implications in the steady-state that are apparent in the exogenous model. first, its kaldor-verdoorn component delivers something akin to a semi-endogenous growth rate γ 0 , related to dynamic economies of scale, that is determined within the model but policy-invariant (see the discussion in tavani and zamparelli, 2017) . 15 second, it is, therefore, the distribution-led component that is ultimately responsible for the endogeneity of technical progress in the long run. in fact, both models with induced bias in technical change (such as julius, 2005) and models with an endogenous rate of labour productivity growth arising from capital-labour conflict (such as tavani and zamparelli, 2021) deliver some form of 'wage-led' results in the long run. 16 another consequence facilitated by tfr's innovative use of the capital-population ratio is that the model is path-dependent in the employment rate and capital productivity. finally, the fully endogenous model with both population growth and income shares responding to employment adds a role to the capitalisation rate in determining long-run growth: such an effect is absent in the exogenous model, but it seems to be borne out by the historical record presented in table 3 and visually illustrated in figure 4 , where a lower capitalisation rate increases the long-run profit share but at the same time reduces long-run productivity growth and the employment rate. 15 even though the underlying kaldor-verdoorn parameter γ 1 features in the composite parameter γ 2 that captures the long-run response of the growth rate to income shares, and therefore this portion of the growth rate is not exactly semi-endogenous, it is in practice: the growth rate of capital stock per capita κ affects the transitional dynamics but not the long-run growth rate of the model. this point can be appreciated by a combined look at the simulations displayed in figures 2 and 3 . in the latter, a shock to the capitalisation rate-which affects capital accumulation independent of the profit share-has no long-run effect on the long-run growth rate; in the former, a shock to income shares delivers permanent long-run effects on growth. 16 classical models with induced bias of technical change are characterised by an upward-sloping relation in levels between the employment rate and the wage share (foley, 2003; julius, 2005) , whereas tavani and zamparelli (2021) as well as foley et al. (2019, ch. 9 ) provide microeconomic foundations for a wage-led growth rate in the long run. we think this model sheds some light on the nature of secular stagnation under neoliberal capitalism. it suggests that the underlying structural changes leading to the rather poor performance of the last decade in particular involve a lower propensity to invest out of profits combined with the weakened bargaining power of workers as reflected in a reduced wage share. this contrasts with an alternative account that emphasises demographic and technological exhaustion as the root causes (gordon, 2015) . in our model, these factors do not explain the stylised facts at all well. we think slower productivity and population growth are as much a consequence as a cause of secular stagnation. path dependence means that even temporary shocks, in particular to the outputcapital ratio, can leave a permanent impression on employment, distribution, technical change, and accumulation. a major shock like the novel coronavirus pandemic could have a discrete negative effect on capital productivity. in our model, such a shock will lower employment rates permanently, and this will create a chain of causation that could reduce the (already low) wage share, depress the (already low) rate of labour-saving technical change, restrain the growth of population because of reduced inward migration to advanced countries, and lower the rate of capital accumulation. the model has been kept compact intentionally and does not include fiscal or monetary policy mechanisms that might be used to repair some of these collateral damages, but it does call attention to their importance beyond short-run stabilisation. or equilibrium indeterminacy of the system. given that the ε terms vanishes in expectations in the steady state, and that the growth rate of the output/capital ratio is proportional to the growth rate of the employment/population ratio, any value of the employment-population ratio between zero and one is compatible with balanced growth. consequently, the model is only capable of pinning down the long-run output capital ratio ρ * as in equation (6), but not the long-run employment/population ratio. as such, path dependence will arise in the sense that different initial conditions on our dynamic variable e will lead to different long-run values for the same variable. as far as the transitional dynamics is concerned, the jacobian of the linearised system around the steady state (remember again e[ε] = 0) has the following structure: where e * is free between zero and one, and ρ * is as in equation (6). the negative trace indicates local stability, while the zero determinant indicates path dependence. the evolution of the employment/population ratio -as long as it remains below one-now obeys:ė while the output/capital ratio once again evolves according to (7) which now of course takes into account that the labour force grows endogenously. the jacobian has again zero determinant, highlighting the linear dependence between the two differential equations and steady-state indeterminacy, and a negative trace, indicating local stability. it is: where e * is free between zero and one, and ρ * is as in the text. if the employment/ population ratio reaches its upper limit, we are back to the previous case of exogenous population growth and its corresponding dynamics. the employment/population ratio now evolves according to: while the output-capital ratio follows (7) taking into account that distribution is now endogenous. as before, the jacobian matrix has zero determinant, given that the two differential equations are linearly dependent on each other: the steady state features once again path dependence. given that ∂ė ∂e | e * ,ρ * = −ϕµ(ρ * +γ 2 )e * < 0 the jacobian has a negative trace and the steady state is again locally stable. in the fully endogenous model, the evolution of the employment-population ratio follows:ė while the output-capital ratio follows (7) taking into account that both population and distribution are now endogenous. given the linear dependence of the two equations, the equilibrium is again indeterminate. the own-partial derivative evaluated at the steady state is ∂ė ∂e | e * ,ρ * = −ϕ [µ(ρ * −γ 2 ) + η] e * < 0 which guarantees a negative trace and is therefore sufficient for local stability. the employment rate is from the st. louis federal reserve economic data base (fred): employment rate, aged 15-64, all persons for the united states, seasonally adjusted, annual. population from fred is working aged population, aged 15-64, all persons for the united states, seasonally adjusted, annual. the rate of labour productivity growth is calculated from bureau of labor statistics, major sector productivity and costs, nonfarm private business, index=100, base year 2012, annual. all data were downloaded from the respective website in april 2020. growth rates of population and labour productivity are calculated using log differences divided by the number of years in the time interval. ratios are simple averages over the time interval. all other data are constructed from the bureau of economic analysis-federal reserve board joint project, integrated macroeconomic accounts of the us downloaded from the bea website and dated march 27, 2020. we used supplementary tables s4.a (nonfinancial noncorporate business) and s5.a (nonfinancial corporate business) to construct series for the consolidated nonfinancial business sector. the output-capital ratio is net value added for the consolidated nonfinancial business sector divided by the adjusted capital stock. the adjusted stock is nonfinancial assets minus intellectual property products for both sectors combined. the growth rate of capital, g, is the ratio of adjusted net investment to the adjusted capital stock. adjusted net investment is net investment of the noncorporate business plus net investment of corporate business minus acquisition of nonproduced nonfinancial assets (intellectual property). the profit share is corporate net operating surplus minus current taxes on wealth, income, etc. (paid) plus noncorporate net operating surplus, all divided by combined net value added. to calculate the capitalisation rate we first compute the net rate of profit, r which is the output-capital ratio times the profit share as described above. the capitalisation rate is computed as 1 − r + g. alternative versions of table 3 were constructed using (i) the extended penn world tables 6.0 downloaded from the growth and distribution, second edition website, and (ii) the ima for the nonfinancial corporate sector separately. these calculations, which were broadly similar to the text except as noted, are available on request. the epwt is less granular (for example, total population rather than working age) and ends in 2014. to run the simulations, we have set the main parameters of the model in order to calibrate the steady state of the exogenous model to us data, and then imposed some arbitrary but small values for the two additional parameters in the endogenous model. from table 3 , the average after-tax profit share for the united states after 2000 is roughly 28%, which we used to fix π in the exogenous model. the average population growth rate for the same period is roughly 1%/year, which we used to fix n. in order to calibrate the parameters determining the growth rate of labour productivity, we reasoned as follows. first, the available empirical estimates on γ 1 pin it down at roughly .5 (foley et al., 2019, ch.9) . second, de souza (2017) provides estimates for γ 2 of about .022 for a panel of manufacturing industries, which translates into γ 2 = .011. we then internally calibrated γ 0 to obtain a steady state value for labour productivity growth of 2%/year, which is roughly the average value in table 3 . in order to initialise the system, we first chose an initial value for capital productivity corresponding to the average output-capital ratio in table 3 , around 36%. given path dependence, we chose an initial condition on the employment rate to obtain a steady state value of 70%, which is about the average found in table 3 . further, we set κ(0) in the exogenous model equal to the average real capital/population ratio in the us between 1967 and 2014 from the extended penn world tables 6.0, i.e. just below 1.85 × 10 3 per person. finally, we set η = µ = .02 to run the simulations following shocks in the endogenous model. the mathematica notebook used for these simulation rounds is available at http://www.danieletavani.com under 'code'. should we reject the natural rate hypothesis? financialization and the nonfinancial corporation: an investigation of firm-level investment behavior in the us real wages and labor-saving technical change: evidence from a panel of manufacturing industries in mature and labor-surplus economies equilibrium, path dependence and hysteresis in post-keynesian models aggregate 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peak: portfolio effects in a growth model with exhaustible resources goodwin cycles and the financialisation and capital accumulation in the non-financial corporate sector martin�s press rowthorn, r. 1999. unemployment, wage bargaining and capital-labour substitution reflections on the "new secular stagnation hypothesis endogenous technical change in alternative theories of growth and distribution labor-augmenting technical change and the labor share: new microeconomic foundations demand drives growth all the way: goodwin, kaldor, pasinetti and the steady state fattori che regolano lo sviluppo della produttività del lavoro induced innovation, endogenous technical change and income distribution in a labor-constrained model of classical growth supplementary data documented in the notes to table 3 and in appendices b and c are available at cambridge journal of economics online. for analytical convenience, assume f (ê) = −χ 0ê , χ 0 ∈ (0, 1) throughout. further, let ϕ ≡ (1 − γ 1 )/(1 + χ 0 ) throughout to economise on notation. we have the following two-dimensional system in the employment/population ratio and the output/ capital ratio:ėwhere the term in square brackets in equation (6) is of course equal to g − (γ + n) and with e[ε] = 0 as explained above. these equations highlight the path dependence, key: cord-0060844-v64rfpvm authors: kučera, dušan title: a historical approach to understanding values and its importance for corporate responsibility date: 2020-07-10 journal: values and corporate responsibility doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-52466-1_4 sha: fa7fc41d16c4674a803b13deee61cf99d3f4ea8e doc_id: 60844 cord_uid: v64rfpvm the chapter situates the desirable and declared value concept of csr (corporate social responsibility) and sustainable development goals (sdgs) with the present regression of moral values in western society and central and eastern europe (cee). the current situation is analysed from a historical perspective and finally described and interpreted as a challenge of capitalism. from a philosophical perspective, the crises of values is caused by a modern dualist conception of the corporate goals. this leads to the separation of economics from the social and environmental context in the interest of pursuing financial prosperity and the related erosion of moral value that has to be restored and applied in practice. addressing the multi-layered issues of values in a neoliberal business environment must be set against the narrow focus on financial indicators and market position which many companies remain fixated on. in connection with business and capitalism, modern history has been characterized by the mistreatment of people across the globe, including industrial-scale slavery, the period of violent colonization, post-colonial injustices and the cruel and highly destructive exploitation of natural resources. naturally, the concept of corporate values (carroll 2009 ) has far-reaching implications. however, the phenomenon of values depends on relationships between people and business partners to promote long-term sustainability and success. the current post-financial crisis situation after 2008, described by sociologists as 'the great regression' (geiselberger 2017) is characterized by many social contradictions and consequences of the climate crises (wackernagel and kitzes 2019, page 2006) . in the corporate context, studies also talk about the 'crisis of capitalism' (harvey 1996; sarkar 2012 ) and associated dislocation, alienation and personal 'feeling of emptiness' (petříček 1997) . the challenges of csr and sustainable business, therefore, is focused on several negative consequences of this capitalist crisis. meeting those challenges has become integral to the un's sustainable developments goals which address the social impacts of poverty, hunger, wars, gender inequality, misuse of human recourses, corporate scandals, and the ecological footprint of the self-centred managerial decision-making processes (sustainable development goals 2015) . for a more in-depth analysis of this crisis, readers are encouraged to consult any critique of the development of neoliberal economic orthodoxy (see crouzet 2001) . although in recent decades, despite the fact that many firms have attempted to find an approach to csr philosophy and sustainability that can be implemented in the organizational structures, managers operate within relentless competitive markets and shareholder pressure to make a financial profit is a central business priority (calhoun 2015) . the original ruthlessness of capitalism has not disappeared. in fact, daily examples from the east and west show how upholding empathetic and sustainable values against relentless neoliberal headwinds remains extremely problematic. for example, the us president, donal trump, uses crude and militant rhetoric when speaking about the economy. the wording of the american president today is similar to wording that generals used in times of war. we hear him talk about the 'weaponization of economic tools' (the economist 2019), and he also uses expressions like 'national emergency', the 'threat to our nation', or 'economic arsenal'. trump talks about how to 'compete', 'fight', 'press', 'beat and defeat american enemies'. such language, i argue, undermines any serious or sustained attempt to assert moral values in business worlds or societies. we follow daily news reporting of america's trade wars with china and the european union, we hear arguments for economic sanctions, and witness daily demonstrations and protests in european cities and growing numbers of victims of the unfolding crisis in capitalism from countless homeless to climate refugees to low paid, insecure 'gig economy' workers. on the south american continent, we note the economic collapse of venezuela and its political consequences, the issues of deforestation and political divisions in brazil, economic and political crises in argentina, chile, cuba, and so on. we can add to this string of crises, the endless war in the middle east, now spreading to african countries which are already struggling with poverty and climate change, and as a consequence we see a growing migrant crisis. the latest blow to the world economy is the consequence of the coronavirus (oecd 2020), which is likely to have emerged from depleted natural habitats and the numerous biohazards associated with wildlife trade, poaching and associated 'wet markets'. in the contexts of such global political and economic developments, we cannot ignore all the negative impacts and short-to long-term consequences of the international trade. the question then is, how can 'values' be defined, understood and applied to a business context, given the magnitude and scope of the various crises of capitalism touched on here? almost every year, fresh evidence of the irresponsible behaviour of companies following individual managerial scandals emerges. a few examples include the 2008 financial crises, pipeline, oil tanker and oil rig spills, such as deep horizon 2010, the nuclear disaster in fukushima (iaea 2015) , and now the coronavirus pandemic. i argue that disasters are often caused by indifference, and a disregard of principles, values and societal responsibilities. the same was true of the reported bank scandals and fraud in the automobile industry, which are always paid for by the consumer or citizen. as business ethics academics, we keep a yearly list of corporate scandals behind which there is conscious managerial irresponsibility (akdeniz 2015) . thanks to the czech origin of the author, this chapter examines dangerous recent trends and developments of capitalism within the cee countries. this area belongs to the regions where there is an increased relativization of democratic values and state institutions, which are nonetheless retreating under various accusations of injustice, unfairness and immorality. the above issues and crises relate to the intricate relationship between the business sphere and the principle value framework. these issues provide an impetus to explore the often-overlooked relationship between economics and philosophy, or the field of social sciences concerned with ethical and moral questions. in economics, it is well understood that there is often a tense relationship between stakeholders and shareholders. this tension depends on the extent to which managers' understanding of csr is rooted in a moral values framework; that would be more likely to support and benefit society. each geographic area has its unique economic history and particular understanding of value which must inform managerial decisions made. the fundamental law of cause and effect suggests that someone will ultimately pay for all the damage caused by irresponsible businesses. however, such consequences will not be ascribed to corporations alone, but to the broader society, and especially, to the poorer, vulnerable or disadvantages groups, who may suffer for many years to come. whilst the profit is private, the cost is public (bell 1996) . related damages to society also include as yet uncosted externalities of 'corporate values', seen in the destabilization of democratic structures (levitsky and ziblatt 2018) , the phenomenal growth of private and public debt and the growth of societal risk (habermas 1973; beck 1992; schreck 2017) . so, what is the role of an academic who teaches and researches business ethics? how can academics alert managers to their more significant social and natural responsibility, such that they are made aware of the consequences of their actions on generations? in this part, i will start by introducing the origins of csr, by presenting the characteristics of the 'spirit of capitalism' as formulated by max weber (2003) , and actualized for the current situation (fleck 2012). according to weber, the western philosophy of capitalism was built on the value system of protestant ethics. he illustrated that christian society internally corresponds with jewish, or other eastern philosophies of values we inherited. the spiritual background and its newly discovered competencies become the content of current analyses, and the search for solutions of managerial failures (kučera 2015) . many problems link to the current 'relativization of values', which was accelerated by a modern and postmodern approach of thought. many researchers critically analyse the so-called post-truth society to point to the negative consequences in the social area and business (asghar 2012; d'ancona 2017; salmon 2018). the claims for value orientation are related to the demands of management and shareholder value. if we want to understand our responsibility for maintaining the value system, we should grasp our position in a historical and social context. especially for engineers, economists and technicians or students of such focused schools on csr, we need to approach some critical milestones and challenges and thus complement current narrow professional educational programs (thomas et al. 2014; norman 2017). here, i talk about the 'value orientation' because there were several fundamental shifts in the meaning of values in the first centuries after the onset of the renaissance. at the time of the renaissance (fourteenth-sixteenth century), the causes of the later division of economics from universal and societal values were born. during this period, western thinking placed economic considerations as an integral part of human society and the church policy. in the middle ages, people believed that all that man did should serve the highest goals and ideals of christianity, a contrast to the later division of economics from societal and spiritual values. we know that even in the middle ages there were 'contradictions' between ideals and realities. let us remember the philosophy of cheating and manipulating written by machiavelli (2010) . however, such behaviour was identified as a sin by christian confession, a misdeed or compromise with evil (mansfield 1998). the modern era, however, begins at the time of the ultimate loss of clerical credibility and the dismounting of the church monopoly. many thinkers began to look for a new conception of the world and the role of man in society. so, which are the main elements that undermined the philosophy of any social responsibility and sustainability? typical features of the renaissance include a concentration on man, human reason and earthly life (anthropocentrism). the renaissance is related to the expansion of individualism and speculative thinking, which remains in direct tension with an emphasis on collectively understood social responsibility. the renaissance development of realism and national identity also developed in tension with the borderless christian conception of europe under the authority of rome and the catholic church. in german reformation, martin luther freed man from the monopoly of the roman catholic church and raised individual living and making decisions in society. however, in protestantism (which max weber sees as the foundation of the spirit of capitalism) the thinking and behaviour of man was inspired by faith in universal values. in contrast to the renaissance focus on people's individual needs (the mechanistic and horizontal dimension of decision-making), the reformation adhered to a vertical dimension of values that distinguishes divisions between 'good' and 'evil', regardless our individual (subjective) opinions or even the opinions of priests. reformation thinking helped spur private entrepreneurship and the development of modern capitalism through faith in absolute values for everybody, and everywhere. the roots of protestant ethics support a personal calling for an ordinary life, based on diligent daily work and trade, for which each individual bore a personal responsibility to the 'almighty' and to whom he would be the subject of ultimate judgment (troeltsch 1997) . i argue that this kind of individual freedom and responsibility provides a foundation for the later development of private philanthropy and csr. protestant ethics tried to solve the changes brought about by the end of the catholic, feudal order of the middle ages and the fact that suddenly absolute kings, or emperors no longer reigned. the responsibility now was to support every citizen and worker in society. in order to understand the current social responsibilities to the future, we need to remind ourselves of other challenges. the lost security of the middle ages led philosophers to find new certainties. the question was: what new certainty did the modern era offer that has gradually become secular? the modern era was characterized by and driven by rationalism, best expressed by rené descartes and his promise to arrive at a clear and distinct truth by critical thinking (descartes 1998) . the apparent result of this rationalism was new and transformative scientific discoveries. nevertheless, we have to remember the so-called cartesian dualism, the division between rational thinking and nature. the endeavour for new knowledge was driven primarily by nations seeking new territory, wealth and power. consequences were that efforts for political and economic supremacy also led to modern colonization and slavery-an unthinkable moral crime within the csr framework today. however, the economic spoils of imperialism and slavery funded many discoveries in mechanics, physics, chemistry, and scientific enquiry more generally. slavery may have brought 'positive' economic benefits, but bore many profound and intractable long-term negative consequences in terms of embedding racist ideology, producing unequal and divided societies and neo-colonial violence that plague the world. the western powers also grew through the cheap labour of slaves and plundering of natural riches (perry 2013) . the general emphasis on natural science and technological progress helped the development of crafts and industrial cities. in order to rebuild the concept of social responsibility, we have first to overcome strict rational and speculative thought, or just mechanical functionality and effectivity. the next challenge of this era is a positivistic confirmation of modern industrial development by the church. we realize the strong influence of the first english economists, politicians, and entrepreneurs in the united states. the economic success of western (colonial) powers was often attributed to god's blessing. since then, we meet an optimistic spiritual motto 'god save the queen' in britain, 'god bless america' in the united states, or 'gott mit uns' in germany at the beginning of world war ii. this religious discourse reflected a supporting spiritual and religious dimension to capitalism with a lack of empathy or recognizable sense of social responsibility by twenty-first century standards. i argue this happened as the religious pillars of colonial capitalism were demanded and accepted as attempts to bring sense, order and a new security frame into a volatile modern world (kučera 2015) . nevertheless, these are also signs that capitalism itself became a part of religion, and money became a new god (tillich 2010) . moreover, this materialist turn overestimated capitalism's moral value and foundation, and under-estimated its destructive potential for those who were its victims. it was also dangerous for and corrosive of the development of any ethical responsibility in social affairs. i have introduced historical developments that show us some of the fundamental thinking that supported and nurtured the roots of an emerging csr concept, or fundamentally disrupted it. if we want to understand csr's philosophical foundations well, rather than simply as a late twentieth-century academic phenomenon, corporate fashion or social demand, we must briefly orientate the debate in relation to some critical foundations of modern thinking. at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the flowering of the industrial revolution throughout the west with all the asocial consequences of modern philosophy based on pure rationalism, utilitarianism and speculative thinking began (allen 2017) . empiricism allowed corporations to ignore the universal value system from the past 1 and to create new values for the modern era according to new experiences and secular norms. the philosophical and social fundaments offered by john locke's 'theory of human tabula rasa' taught that we get all necessary concepts and moral principles only with our life experiences (anzenbacher 2002) . the belief in technological progress (positivism) was born, and is again sanctified by financial results. in the past centuries it was justified by the amount of gold, silver, rubber, coffee, tea, wood and slaves. naturally, this 'modern' concept of constant progress is quite antithetical to respecting diverse cultures, managerial ethics or environmental sustainability. ecology, as a separate discipline, did not exist yet. resources-both human and natural were seen as inexhaustible. there was not much space left for other values because that space was filled with a profit theory accompanied by selfishness (acquaviva 2000) . immanuel kant attempted to prove the limits of such rationalism and empiricism through his criticism of pure and practical reason (kant 1997 (kant , 1998b . to find the essential pillars of social responsibility, he revealed the necessary transcendental differentiation of human thinking, the so-called 'categorical imperative' and thereby radically renewed the framework of social responsibility. he described it in the following words: 'act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law' (kant 1998a) . we see that this is a necessary philosophical root for any frame of social responsibility because kant's goal is to act well. for kant, to act well is an absolute value because universal human dignity is the highest value. in our context, this means that the last goal of social decision-making is the wellbeing and dignity of people. thus, in order to understand the philosophical framework of the csr, one can never become a mere means of achieving economic and corporate goals (jones 1980) . in contrast to kant's universal law is economic utilitarianism, which is well-known for depending more on the effect than on the quality of the responsible behaviour. for the understanding of a more profound context, in every useful publication about the history of philosophy or ethics, a comprehensive overview of modern developments from asocial to social responsibility involving corporations can be found (maclntyre 1998). the industrial revolution took place gradually in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. during this period, agriculture, production, raw materials mining, transport and other economic sectors were fundamentally transformed. in the midst of this transformation, one can understand why humane, cultural and social values were pushed into the background. instead of caring for systematic long-term work, mass production, manufacturing, emphasis on strength and quantity prevailed. in companies, the position of man was reduced to the level of slave (for black) or to cheap worker (for white). in england and the united states, racism and the social status of the lower classes were subordinated to the development of agriculture, construction, engineering, energy and the military. usage of machines includes a steam engine, electrification, assembly lines, mass production and the pursuit of efficient logistics did not allow for discussion about social responsibility in our sense today. we know the terrible consequences of asocial governments and management: social revolts, revolutions and their bloody repression. the gap between wealthy industrial magnates and their workers, the social, educational and health disparities which opened up, provided challenges which have yet to be met (solomon 2016 any qualitatively new and higher level of social responsibility was needed to seek and develop on assumptions other than the ideals of the industrial and technological revolution. the author knows it from his own experience when his whole life was subjected to an official marxist ideology based on materialism. moreover, real socialism was enhanced by a self-proliferating interpretation of leninism and stalinism. historical documents mercilessly confront us with millions of dead victims in siberian labour camps. naturally, this does not forget the european experience enhanced by nazi concentration camps and german labour camps. i ask, what philosophy did the leaders of these practices have? marxism is in direct contrast to the global philosophy of free social responsibility and sustainability. the pre-establishment of cohesion and human rights is in contrast to the socialist reality of the soviet camp (not to mention now communist regimes in latin america). in cee countries, marxism interpreted society according to a model based on base (grundlage) and superstructure (űberbau, see fig. 4.1) . for my context, it is essential to remember that the base contains economy, economic and manufacturing relationships. the social sphere (also culture, law, religion) was not part of the base, but a part of the superstructure which has to grow from that base. it means that manufacturing relationships and production tools are supposed to influence all levels of human thinking and behaviour (marx 2009) . under communism, the cultural, legal and social environment in the ussr and satellite states was subordinated to the revolutionary marxist vision supported with the power of state control. any 'human', social or cultural considerations proceeded from universal moral (democratic) values were persecuted as bourgeois, and hence an old anti-communist ideology. the primary strategy of the socialist economy was oriented on the base-production, energy, economy, coal mining, gas, industry and military. of course, economics also needed experts from different fields. they were described as 'working intelligence', which was involved in the construction of socialism focused on the marxist base. we recall this chapter of cee because we have to deal with the intellectual legacy as well as the practical impact of the introduction of capitalism that happened in the 1990s. social responsibility grows upon private property and personal freedom and democracy (schumpeter 2008). however, under communism, with private companies, nationalized the state supervised everything that happened in society and in statecontrolled companies in the spirit of hobbes's leviathan (hobbes 2017) . any personal initiative and responsibility were met with repression when someone became actively interested in strengthening individual freedom, education and criticism of the asocial and un-environmental practices of communists' regimes. social responsibility for the overall well-being of individuals requires motivation for personal courage, which extends beyond that base and, on the contrary, comes out of the superstructure, which aims to change economic relations and existential conditions. after 40 years of 'actually existing socialism' under the communist ideology of the ussr and eastern bloc states came the revolution, when the 'iron curtain' was pulled down, and a new stage of history started-politically and economically. many culturally and intellectually oriented people have followed the western european tradition of thinking and social responsibility. a specific example was in german model of "sozialwirtschaft" (social economy). however, people in cee were educated and 'persuaded' as marxist. the sociology and anthropology were defined by materialism, positivist rationalism, freud's psychology, natural darwinism and social darwinism (gregory 2000) . the view of man has focused on his physical, economic or biological needs like the "selfish gene" (dawkins 2016). for social responsibility, the influence of social darwinism is crippling because it allows thought patterns based on class struggle, the welcome of the more energetic and the defeat (destruction) of the economically weaker. although this principle is a part of the market economy, many ways of behaviour by management and entrepreneurs proved to be asocial and also scandalous. critically, we must stand up to the logic of capitalism, where only the fittest survive (dickens 2000) . in cee countries, we hear the governments speaking about the growth of gdp as the most important factor of state development (martinez 2019) . according to marxisms we understood that family, marriage, the upbringing of children, moral values, cultural life, free journalism, the education, or the function of conscience, have been ridiculed as a utopia, and not a priority or part of primary economic strategy in cee countries (tabery 2017) . academic studies have sought lessons for social transformation from the failure of the communist economic system (pullman 2011; rusmisch and sachs 2003) , and the negative consequences of socialist ideology are evident in cee countries until today (hardy 2014 ). western relations between economy and social responsibility have also demonstrated their conflicts with neoliberal economic philosophy. we remember the discussion led by milton friedman (1970) , saying that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profit. management education has undergone many stages-from the 'age of commerce' through the 'age of enlightenment', 'scientific management' to management concerning human relations and explicit social responsibility (witzel 2012; crouset 2001) . today we live in the era of 'management gurus', who help us find the value of management by focusing on cultivating human needs. authors such as p. f. drucker, c. k. prahalad, m. porter, g. hammel, focus on the development of 'man', but there is still a gap when it comes to understanding how 'man' can cultivate moral values within organizational contexts that are contained or delimitated by management, financial performances and profits. henry mintzberg and his concept of the rebalancing society between private, public, and plural shifted the managerial outlook further (mintzberg 2015) . likewise, in individual european, american, or asian states, there is a rigid debate and a struggle to understand the value in today's market and a globalized world to which we could agree (yang 2011) . we see that western social policy has also undergone several twistspost-war successes, attempts by french keynesianism using the role of the state, but also a very cold social policy of margaret thatcher in britain. however, people working hard in state-owned factories in the eastern bloc could only envy the growing living standards of their neighbours in the west. western development was also radically slowed down by the financial crisis of 2008. the growing contradictions between the low incomes of workers with excessive pay of top managers gambling with the means of others, have fuelled new resentment, frustration and disappointments. the last years of the twenty-first century have caused new social unrest, new demonstration (i.e., paris yellow vests), and new challenges to european issues of social responsibility and cohesion. to restore the philosophical background of social responsibility, we can use the forgotten value concepts and remnants of cultural values, traditions, and values of human life in the development of the western society both in the east and the west. we have indicated them in previous articles and summarize it at the end of this chapter. for educators in business schools, however, this means to think seriously about incorporating a value philosophy into teaching young managers and entrepreneurs or financiers and economists (schüz 2018) . in recent years, we have come to a very sophisticated concept of csr, challenges of business ethics, the rules of the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd), the united nations global compact, principles for responsible management education (un gc prme), and the agenda 2030 with an application methodology (arruda and norman 2017). also, the european union regulations have undoubtedly contributed to value orientation in business and management, which encompasses the full scope and depth of corporate, social, and political responsibility that are closely intertwined. in this chapter, i tried to open up one central theme-in what historical environments were social values born, and what does this mean for contemporary organizations. the development of human society, which is so strongly influenced by the management of local and international corporations is very dynamic and dramatic. market 'progress' continues under the optimistic 'mechanisms of the market', and the emphasis on 'effective functions' of capitalism carries on (sőderbaum 2008) . maybe some still rely on the 'invisible hand of the market', but also this narrow-minded perspective is critically discussed (kaushik 2011). what we must not forget, however, in the social perspective, first of all, is about man, human society and future generations. individuals live under the conditions of current policy and economic competition. in addition to the company's big social themes, we need to see the growing personal and psychological crises of managers (lane 2000; easterlin 2001) . therefore, the question is again whether we want to help people in companies in any way, or to follow the interests of the owners and top managers only at the expense of the multitude of dependent workers and administrative assistants who are paid only to the extent that they can ensure their livelihoods for themselves and their families. a fundamental value in business would be a fair deal, a partnership agreement, a good position of both parties, and the possibility of confidence based on positive experience, otherwise known as a 'win-win' situation. it means that trade agreements need a value framework (schiller 2003) . a positive signal in this development is that some passages of business and civil law are beginning to realize this. the legal basis of a business partnership and business as a whole uses values that transcend both speculative rationalism and practical experience (empiricism), in addition to romantic dreams of happiness and wealth at the expense of others. therefore, many european laws have included managerial responsibility, maximum transparency, compliance, quality, nature-friendliness and respect for future generations (andreisová and kučera 2017) . if we summarize the uncovering of the roots of capitalistic thought, we see how much work is still waiting for us. topics related to 'values' are always a big challenge in the current capitalist society. rationalists still repeat the practical advantages of trade. empiricists refer to the past or majority practice as an apology to current practices and the statistically reduced realities of business. we continue to follow these approaches in our own countries in discussions with entrepreneurs, managers and students of economics. in the west, but also in the cee countries, concrete steps are being taken towards more responsible entrepreneurial and managerial practices (kučera and müllerová 2017; gasparski 2017) . first the transformation economies have to learn from the moral failures of the communist experiment (pavlík 1999) , second, western society also needs to learn 'how to succeed without selling our soul', and third how to solve the ethical dilemmas in a competitive environment today (frank 2010 ). if we introduced the mechanical model of karl marx ( fig. 4 .2, where the base (economy and production relations) determined the limits of what value scales will we be able to take into account in such an environment? will a simple csr concept that has its known limits suffice? 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capitalism: a different study of political economy sustainable development transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development securing the future of management education: competitive destruction or constructive innovation wojciech gasparski, ethics and the future of capitalism, routledge, 2017. wolfgang schreck, how will capitalism end? verso key: cord-0075684-gam0xd4a authors: okuma, kazuhiro; harada, yuji title: robert boyer, les capitalismes à l’épreuve de la pandémie, la découverte, 2020 date: 2022-03-13 journal: evolut inst econ rev doi: 10.1007/s40844-022-00235-7 sha: 9104899f02781c6fade0f5372647bd2084c413de doc_id: 75684 cord_uid: gam0xd4a robert boyer, a leader in régulation theory, characterizes the crisis provoked by the covid-19 pandemic in his latest book. his analysis centers on the political process in which different groups of entities with heterogeneous interests compete against each other and make compromises, and on the interaction of different processes affecting public health, the economy, finance, and freedom. in this book review, we carefully introduce the main argument in the book (which has been published in french) in english to help readers understand its message, and we consider several points to apply the theoretical conjecture proposed in the book to actual issues, especially in japan. in particular, we investigate the following issues: the actual diversity of national economies from the perspective of the “trilemma,” the current situation of japan as an embryo of the anthropogenetic development mode, and the issue of ecology to scrutinize the future of capitalism. the covid-19 pandemic that started at the end of 2019 did not show signs of convergence. how has the economic crisis provoked by the pandemic affected economic societies? in the longer term, how will the pandemic change various forms of capitalism? in this book (published in french), a luminary of régulation theory (which originated in france) examines the recent economic crisis. whereas many discussions have been proposed with regard to the current crisis, robert boyer builds his own analysis in relation to assertions on the following topics, which he has elaborated over the past two decades: a new mode of development based on the evolution of information and communication technology (ict) (boyer 2004) ; financial capitalism (boyer 2011) ; european integration (boyer 2012b) ; and international regime, including the interaction of different national-regional regimes (boyer 2012a) . boyer (2015) proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework for régulation theory composed of these arguments. 1 he explores the present crisis of the pandemic from the viewpoint of the political economy by freely making use of these claims. this book has insightful implications for diverse issues in the political economy. therefore, this review aims to carefully introduce the book's main rationale in english to help readers understand its message and to assess the potential of its arguments by focusing on actual issues, especially in japan. in chapter 1, boyer points out the ambiguity of the covid-19 crisis, which was not caused by an endogenous economic slowdown, as seen in 2008-which is a significant object of analysis in régulation theory-but rather by political reactions to the sanitary plight that followed the outbreak of the disease. moreover, disequilibria and tensions were produced by a structural shift after the economic relief program executed for the crisis of 2008 in the societies affected by the current crisis, although the present situation has exogeneous and political characteristics. chapter 2 establishes how each country has responded to the pandemic in its own way. the current crisis is unprecedented in the sense that it is expanding around the world, such that decision-making authorities are not allowed to imitate policies that worked well in the past, but are instead forced to seek and learn from mistakes during times of uncertainty. thus, in addition to primarily divergent societies, it is important that each society responds to the pandemic in a distinct way. such a view in terms of the crisis and the response to it is an extension of the recognition shown by boyer (2015) . the success or failure of policy responses to the pandemic cannot be attributed to a simple binary opposition between democratic and authoritarian regimes. it is necessary to examine the formation of social bonds, political processes, and administrative organizations, and their interactions at the intermediate level to investigate the consequences of policies in different countries. chapter 3 deals with fundamental uncertainty. the present situation is uncertain in the sense that we cannot pinpoint the cause of covid-19 in the biological and medical senses. we are facing the question of what decisions to make. there are always profound uncertainties in the financial market, where mimetism is spreading, unlike what conventional economic theories suppose (boyer 2011) . this has also been the case during the pandemic, where private individuals cannot make appropriate choices. instead, governments are expected to both control the spread of infection and to preserve the economy; governments facing deep uncertainty do not rationally pursue new and appropriate methods, but instead gradually imitate one another. thus, credit guarantees by governments, income insurance, and refinancing by central banks and national treasuries have escalated. however, it is interesting that socio-economic regimes do not converge, even under the current circumstances. the "trilemma" among health, the economy, and freedom 2 is addressed in chapter 4. at the beginning of the pandemic, many authorities implemented massive interventions (such as lockdowns and stay-at-home restrictions) against the backdrop of fundamental uncertainty, initially expecting a fairly quick end to the crisis, and a dilemma emerged between public health and economic loss. yet despite expectations, it became increasingly clear that it would take a lot of time to recover from the pandemic, leading to the critical problem of restrictions on individual rights. hence, the dilemma between public health and the economy transformed into a trilemma among the maintenance of people's health, the preservation of production capacity, and respect for individual freedom. countries' responses to this trilemma have been diverse. to break away from it, it is vital to change the hierarchy from shortterm superiority, typically seen in the financial domain, to the medium-to-long term found in public health. in other words, we should abandon the hypothesis of a determination of societies by the economy. the crisis of covid-19 has revealed the limitations of the socio-economic regime in which healthcare and social protection were constantly retrenched before the outbreak of the disease. more concretely, these elements have been regarded as obstacles to good macroeconomic performance, such that the privatization of health insurance and underinvestment in healthcare have created weaknesses and inequality in access to it. what was identified as a dysfunction of the market and capitalist economy has become recognized as a solution to the crisis, and a regime based on the production of humanity by humans could therefore emerge and develop. in this sense, the covid-19 crisis could also be an opportunity to overcome such limitations. chapter 5 deals with the anthropogenetic mode of development that could make society more affluent, ameliorate quality of life, and increase society's resilience by mobilizing resources for healthcare, education, and culture as boyer (2004) argued for this mode of development. whether it will have success depends on the political process of the formation of the majority that affects government policy. although this mode of development has not been considered so far, it has been recognized as an option in the face of the pandemic. nonetheless, there is no guarantee that this mode could be a model of capitalism in the twenty-first century. other forms of capitalism, such as platform and state capitalism, hold sway. in chapter 6, these two types of capitalism are examined in greater detail. varieties of capitalism are one of the main topics that boyer has examined (boyer 2015) . the argument in his recent book is an updated version. the crisis of the pandemic can be regarded as one of the major crises observed since world war ii, implying a rupture of regularity in economic activity and institutional changes in numerous domains. in this context, the existence of transnational platform capitalism and state capitalism has become more evident. the former is typically seen in the us, where transnational platform companies (such as google, apple, facebook, amazon, and microsoft, collectively referred to as gafam, which made a breakthrough since the 1990s) take control of personal information and make use of it. this type of capitalism has further developed in synchronization with the introduction of lockdown policies. in china, the representative of the latter form of capitalism, the communist party-state, has social, economic, and political power over individuals by taking control of e-commerce and social networking services (sns). there is a sort of social compromise between individuals who accept state control of information, and the government, which in turn promises to improve people's quality of life. this type of capitalism is driven by a platform economy governed by the state. in contrast to the two abovementioned forms of capitalism, the european union (eu) has aimed to establish its own socio-economic regime with civic control of information by controlling data usage in the hands of the user. in the diversity of trajectories of regimes with regard to the control of information, each regime has its own hierarchy among the economy, polity, and society. platform and state capitalism seem to coexist in opposition, taking advantage of the covid-19 crisis. the former can be strengthened by further improving the performance of transnational companies during the pandemic on one hand, while the latter is perceived to entail a risk to be undermined due to rising interest rates resulting from the extra issuance of national bonds on the other. chapter 7 explores the transformation of international regime composed of various forms of capitalism. while different economies are more connected due to international openness, evolving competition among regions, and ict expansion, a new international coordination does not yet exist, implying the difficulty of a way out from the economic crisis of covid-19. international coordination is also related to the presence or absence of sociopolitical processes in response to environmental issues. the anthropogenetic development mode, which stresses that healthcare evolves at the national level, would be a competitor of global cooperation for the fight against climate change in terms of political and budgetary choices. thus, the international cooperation is a very difficult situation under ecological constraints. the economic sphere has an advantage over ecology. the issue is that international coordination is not only poor, but also problematic. countries that greatly benefited from formerly stable international relations, such as the uk and the us, increasingly take a nationalistic stance, so that the establishment of new international organizations is no longer pursued. instead, china seeks to take it upon itself to lead the way in an open global economy and international cooperation. however, this implies that it is dubious whether each country can participate in an international regime with equal power, because china has a large bargaining chip over participating countries in the belt and road initiative. covid-19 has ever so swiftly transformed the relationship between international and national relations, affecting the three types of capitalism mentioned above. transnational capitalism encounters obstacles of growing inequality and violating popular sovereignty regarding long-term resilience, because public authorities do not always have the means to ensure profitability and professional competence under the initiative of private companies. state capitalism in china can pursue a technological catch-up strategy against pressure from the us; china's political authority allows it to prevent actors with economic predominance from taking initiative by seizing information. thus, china can execute strong policies for contingent phenomena. european economies, with civic control of information, are forced to technologically depend on transnational companies because they cannot generate a sufficient number of it-related enterprises. although inequality is somewhat reduced within member countries, the gap between the eu's north and south stands out, and the necessary social transfer is not carried out among regions. while democratic control continues to work within each member state, it does not adequately function at the eu level. in this way, covid-19 has exposed the weakness of europe as a transnational power. eu member states are divided into those turning to the us and toward china, operating against the pursuit of a federalist solution to the crisis. the eu is addressed in chapter 8. public health must obey the subsidiarity principle of social policy, so it should be dealt with on a global scale rather than at the eu level. however, unfortunately, the world health organization (who) is still not emphasized. in this context, the pandemic forced the eu to choose between promoting cooperation and member countries splitting up. the eu discussed the establishment of a solidarity fund, but faced difficulty attributed to a structural problem regarding the divergence between northern and southern europe. in addition to such asymmetry among the eu's member countries, questions arise as to whether eu citizens should take on european or national identities, which political coalitions could generate socio-political compromises in each country, and whether the compromises would persist. chapter 9 deals with the breakaway from the covid-19 crisis, which has uncovered contradictions and oppositions that have accumulated along with continued underinvestment in healthcare and education. while each state executes different policies to resolve such problems, it is necessary to synchronize different time horizons, such as covid-19, the economy, and the commons. the success or failure of policies depends on the institutional context of the society involved and the trustworthiness of authorities. digitization and the pandemic have provided different oppositions among individuals, and between capital and labor in the political domain. in contemporary societies where social ties have become increasingly complex, it is difficult to make a large majority of people satisfied in the political domain; as such, governments are inclined to be opportunistic. in this context, opposition between conservatives and liberals is observed in numerous domains. in his book, boyer points out the possibility that a new configuration of capitalism could emerge in the process of recovering from the crisis of the pandemic. the mode of anthropogenetic development would gain support for striving to heal from the pandemic and to fight against inequality. transnational information capitalism bears down on any economy, and weak countries have no means of resisting pressure from the type of capitalism. powerful state capitalism has momentum as a populist regime. both types of capitalism correspond to their own political coalitions and institutional compromise. it is impossible to create an ideal mode of development, regardless of the previous context of society. next, we investigate what implications boyer's assertions have for japanese society. boyer developed his own claims on diverse issues from a realistic angle based on régulation theory. as they have many inspiring implications, we strive to consider several points to apply his theoretical conjecture to actual phenomena, especially in japan. to be more specific, we examine the diversity of national economies from the perspective of the "trilemma" among health, the economy, and freedom (3.1). boyer proposes the anthropogenetic model as one possibility in new modes of development and refers to japan as an embryo of the model; therefore, we investigate whether japan deserves such an evaluation and how japan's circumstances are assessed (3.2). we also address the matter of ecology. the pandemic-which is the main topic of the book-can be seen as a short-term shock on one hand, the environmental issue is a long-term challenge, on the other. however, these two topics share a feature resulting from the accumulation of different activities among individuals in economic societies over time, both requiring significant adjustments to the economy through institutions. thus, it is important for the future of capitalism to cope not only with the pandemic, but also with ecology. as described above, boyer sets up a "trilemma" among health, the economy, and freedom, and focuses on a theoretical possibility for the "trilemma" rather than an analysis rooted in statistical data. he has identified the following patterns with limited information: (1) victory over the pandemic, prudent economic recovery, and giving up certain freedoms have been observed in china and singapore. (2) sacrificing the public health of a disadvantaged part of the population, a rapid return to growth, and respect for individual freedom have been witnessed in the us and brazil. (3) minimizing the pandemic's damage to health, sacrificing the production of traditional goods, and rich and democratic societies built on a pact of broad solidarity have been seen in most countries in the eu (pp. 75-6). based on this framework, one of the authors attempted a simple, tentative analysis in light of the data of confirmed deaths relative to the population from johns hopkins university csse covid-19 data, the quarterly real gross domestic product (gdp) growth rate from the quarterly national accounts of the organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd), and the stringency index from oxford covid-19 government response tracker as proxies of health, the economy, and freedom, respectively. we simply classified advanced western countries, china, and japan into the following five groups in a provisional manner (harada, ikeda, and nishi 2022) : maintaining public health, a sluggish economy, less strict limitations on freedom: denmark, finland, japan, norway g2. maintaining public health, steady economic performance, and strict limitations on freedom: australia, china, new zealand g3. inferior public health, steady economic performance (rapid recovery), relatively strict limitations on freedom and quick relaxation: the us g4. inferior public health, a sluggish economy, strict limitations on freedom: germany, france, italy, spain, the uk g5. inferior public health, a sluggish economy, less strict limitations on freedom: sweden although we only examine one variable each representing health, the economy, and freedom, and we make a provisional diagnosis based on short-term data from the beginning of 2020 to mid-2021, there are the following implications: first, g1-3 correspond to each pattern of the "trilemma," respectively, as shown above. in particular, the us (i.e., g3) has peculiarities whereby its gdp falls steeply in the second quarter of 2020 before recovering quickly, and the value of the stringency index (associated with limitations on freedom) fluctuates rapidly depending on the status of infection and vaccine development. this implies that anglo-saxon countries would exhibit divergent patterns in terms of their response to covid-19, despite the robust group regarding institutional configurations (amable 2003; hall and soskice 2001) (cf. ganesh 2022) . second, g4 and g5 are not included in the types clarified by boyer. g4 is in a state of triple woes rather than a "trilemma." sweden (i.e., g5) is similar to other scandinavian countries in terms of various policies; it seems to deviate from g1 due to a failure to maintain public health. as for the diversity of institutional configurations, g4, suffering from triple woes, is composed of different types of capitalism such as in continental european, mediterranean, and anglo-saxon countries (amable 2003) . this implies that the "european" type of coordination in the wider sense would have a disadvantage in dealing with the crisis. third, g1 includes scandinavian nations other than sweden and japan, characterized by preserved public health and respect for individual freedom. we could regard this group as being in the "anthropogenetic development mode" as mentioned in chapter 5. boyer points out that both scandinavian countries (which offer generous social protections) and japan have the potential for this mode of development. in the next section, we discuss this mode, including the present situation in japan. throughout the book, boyer proposes the "anthropogenetic development mode" as a vision of the future. he explains that facilitating "well-being" with a focus on education, healthcare, and culture will cultivate active and productive human beings and lead to the dynamism of production. boyer, a realist, does not claim that this can be achieved; however, the reader will sense that he mentions it with hope. in that connection, boyer specifically mentions japan as a country that has been "exploring the realization of the anthropogenetic model." comparing japan with the us, he praises the country's longer life expectancy, lower healthcare expenditures (i.e., better health), more opportunities for higher education, better public safety, and relatively low inequality, and then identifies gender inequality as its main challenge. is japan really ahead of other countries in the quest for an anthropogenetic model? long life expectancy and a high level of security, as assessed by boyer, are certainly advantages. however, public investment in education is relatively small, as mentioned by boyer; education spending as a percentage of total government expenditure is 7.8% in japan compared to the oecd average of 10.7%, which is at the lowest level in the oecd (2021). while healthcare costs do not fit within a simple comparison because they depend on the age structure and health of the population, the number of medical doctors per 1000 people in japan is low (2.4 compared to the oecd average of 3.5, 2017) (maeda 2019) . moreover, during the covid-19 pandemic, japan was pushed to the brink of medical collapse despite the relatively small number of infected people, revealing the vulnerability of the japanese healthcare system. education, healthcare, and culture in japan have certainly been held to relatively high standards. the reasons for this may be debated, but there is no doubt that national character and traditions nurtured throughout time are at the root of this. it is widely known that the japanese have historically been highly educated, and their literacy rate has been among the highest in the world since the feudal era. however, as evidenced by the public education budget, it is difficult to say that policy emphasis has been placed on these areas as a political and social consensus in recent years. if this situation continues, even if there are historical strengths, there is no guarantee that they will last. if japan is to continue to move forward as a country that pursues growth based on human capabilities, it will be necessary to reposition the emphasis on education, healthcare, culture, and other activities for the benefit of human beings as an explicit social and political consensus. in japan, the kishida administration came into power in october 2021. the prime minister has referred to a "reconsideration of neoliberalism" and indicated a policy of strengthening "distribution." will his policy lead to the pursuit of an anthropogenic model? it is too early to evaluate this policy, but we can make an observation about the policy debate surrounding it. kishida's distribution policy appears to have faced criticism from two sides. on one hand, there is a criticism that his policy remains within the framework of abenomics, which has already called for wage increases to stimulate consumer demand. on the other hand, the critical argument that a "growth strategy is needed first to obtain funds to distribute" has also increased. "distribution" is quite important, but unless the vision of the society it aims to achieve is presented and shared, the policy might not gain sustained support. in this situation, the concept of the anthropogenetic model, which places distribution in the broader context of development mode, should be able to play a crucial role. now, looking at the anthropogenetic model once again, we find that boyer demonstrates the basic mechanism as mentioned above, but apparently, he has not yet explained the whole picture of the development mode in concrete terms. this is natural since he is discussing a model that may emerge in the future, and there are aspects that should be concretized as reality develops. nevertheless, based on boyer's suggestion, it is an important task for economists to refine the model theoretically and empirically. there are a wide range of issues to be studied. for example, spending on education and healthcare can lead not only to productivity growth (the productivity regime), but also to demand growth (the demand regime), and the challenge is to figure out the overall picture of these aspects. this is a particularly critical theme in the context of large-scale fiscal stimulus for recovery from covid-19. moreover, in the anthropogenetic model, the sectors of education, healthcare, and other domains are expected to expand (see also attali's (2020) vision of the growing "economy of life"), and it will be vital to analyze what this means regarding changes in the industrial structure. in addition, we believe it is important to examine the relationship between the anthropogenetic model and ecological issues, especially the possibility of an anthropogenetic model that integrally enhances the lives of humans and nature. this book highlights the issues of ecology and environment. although not explicitly stated at the level of chapter titles, ecology is discussed in some chapters, including chapter 7. in the concluding chapter, we see a section with the heading "re-embedding the economy in societies and the environment" (p. 184). it is one of the main hidden themes in the book. in addressing ecology, boyer is still a realist. in his idealistic view, it should be "ecology that drives the transformation of all institutional forms" (p. 126). however, he has a harsh perspective of possibilities in reality in terms of who can lead political coordination. moreover, the weakness of international coordination is obvious. he goes on to remark, "in the current configuration, ecological results are the consequence of socio-economic regimes dominated by an economic logic" (p. 126). in this context, japan's recent policy shift toward carbon neutrality may be a case in point, not in the sense of praise for japanese policymakers, but in that the structure of political compromise may be changing globally. as is well known, the recently resigned suga administration declared in the fall of 2020 that japan aims to become carbon neutral by 2050. in april 2021, it also set a target of reducing greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions by 46% by 2030. this marked a major policy shift, given that the previous policy had been limited to a 26% reduction target, emphasizing feasibility. why did this shift come about? the background can be found in the statements made by then-prime minister suga and then-environment minister koizumi, who supported the decision. in his policy speech to the diet in which he made the above-mentioned declaration, suga said, "coping with global warming is no longer a constraint on economic growth. we need to change our way of thinking and realize that proactive measures to combat global warming will bring about changes in the structure of industry and the socio-economy, leading to significant growth." further, koizumi, in his policy speech to a committee in the diet, said, "it is important to recognize that we have entered an era of great competition for decarbonization, as the world is undergoing rapid economic and social transformation, including green recovery. i believe it is essential for japan's growth strategy to acquire technologies and markets in the decarbonization field, which is the largest investment area in the world." as seen in these statements, viewing environmental measures as a strategy for economic growth was the deciding factor in the policy shift. underlying this view was a change in the competitive environment due to global esg investment and enhanced environmental policies in the eu and other countries. in this context, we note, although it is beyond the scope of this review, that the development of esg investment has been driven by the coordinated activities of non-governmental organizations (ngos) and pension funds (see okuma 2019), and the enhanced environmental policies of the eu and other countries are the result of political coordination, symbolized by green parties. this means that japan's policy shift has occurred against the backdrop of the global movement of ngo activities and green politics. this policy shift, which took place without sufficient political pressure from actors within the country, paradoxically shows that these factors can function beyond borders. of course, these global movements are not purely a reflection of ecological concerns, but lie within the realm of compatible environmental and economic growth. boyer understands policy in the context of political compromise and points out the weaknesses of actors in environmental protection. however, with ngos involving pension funds and green politics embracing economic growth, a new "compromise" may emerge. whether this compromise can be viable enough to lead to a new growth regime will be a research question that needs to be addressed. when we shed light on the political potential of ecology based on this understanding, the relationship between ecology and health emerges as an important issue. after the covid-19 crisis, can health-oriented and ecological politics move forward in concert? can they work together to form a growth regime and lead to a new mode of development? boyer warns that "[healthcare] would be rather a competitor of the fight against climate change in terms of political and budgetary choices" (p. 122), but he also refers to "a mode of development combining respect for ecology and the promotion of social rights" (p. 172). as for the relationship between health and the environment, attali (2020) recently proposed the concept of "economy of life." when we return to the history of economic thought, we find the concept of "social common capital" by uzawa (2005) . these frameworks encompass healthcare and environmental protection as a common basis that supports the economy and underlines economic activities to enhance them (i.e., the economy of life or investment in social common capital). can a wide range of actions related to environmental, health, and social interests proceed in concert and create a new compromise between them and economic interests? will this compromise be viable and lead to a new mode of development that emphasizes ecology and humanity simultaneously? these questions need to be addressed. an important aspect of régulation theory is the analysis of crisis. boyer has examined different crises. in this book, he characterizes the crisis of the pandemic by focusing on the political process in which different groups of entities with heterogeneous interests compete against each other and make compromises, and on the interaction of different processes affecting public health, the economy, finance, and freedom. for instance, he raises the different patterns of the "trilemma," the confrontation and coexistence of transnational platform capitalism, state capitalism, and the anthropogenetic development mode. in this review, we carefully introduced the argument in boyer's book in english to help readers understand the book's message, and we considered several points to apply the theoretical conjecture that boyer proposed to actual issues, especially in japan. in particular, we first investigated the actual diversity of national economies from the perspective of the "trilemma." second, we explored the current situation in japan as an embryo in the anthropogenetic model elaborated in boyer's assertions. third, we dealt with the issue of ecology to examine the future of capitalism. these matters need to be investigated in future studies. les financiers détruiront-ils le capitalisme? economica is more equality possible in latin america?: a challenge in a world of contrasted but interdependent inequality regimes. desigualdades.net working paper series 67 overcoming the institutional mismatch of the euro-zone: undetected by conventional economics, favoured by nationally focused politics, fuelled and then revealed by global finance. article prepared for the conference "asian economic integration in transition: learning from european experiences varieties of capitalism: the institutional foundations of comparative advantages book review robert boyer, économie politique des capitalismes: théorie de la régulation et des crises, la découverte the crisis of covid-19 and socio-economic systems: how to overcome the "trilemma" among health, the economy, and freedom international comparison of medical data: oecd health statistics potential mechanisms for the social regulation of economies on global and local scales: an institutional analysis of esg investment and community renewables york publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations on behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest. changing societies & personalities, 2021 vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 https://doi.org/10.15826/csp.2021.5.3.138 received 7 june 2021 © 2021 konstantin d. bugrov accepted 8 september 2021 k.d.bugrov@gmail.com published online 11 october 2021 article colonial revolution and liberatory war: from communist to post-colonial theory (georgy safarov, mao zedong and frantz fanon) konstantin d. bugrov institute of history and archaeology, ural branch of the russian academy of sciences, ural federal university, yekaterinburg, russia abstract the article investigates the intellectual roots of the concept of colonial revolution, which goes back to the 2nd congress of the communist international, examines its importance in shaping the communist political thought and outlines its subsequent transformation in the wake of post-colonial theory. the author starts with analyzing the political ideas of georgy safarov—comintern [the communist international] theorist. he was among the most original thinkers who elaborated the concept of colonial revolution. safarov, drawing from his own experience in central asia, insisted that global capitalism is “retreating to the positions of feudalism” while operating in colonies, treating them as collective “serfs” and lacking any proper social basis save for its own enormous military force. such analogy led safarov to envisage the colonial revolution as a “plebeian” revolt and liberatory war against the inhumane and stagnant colonial order, opening the way for a noncapitalist development with certain assistance from the soviet union. similar ideas were independently formulated by mao zedong in the 1930s. he saw colonial revolution in china as a “protracted war” of liberation and listed the conditions under which victory was possible. however, the subsequent development of a former colony was seen by mao as a transitory period of “democratic dictatorship”. similar ideas of colonial revolution as a liberatory peasant war and “plebeian” movement were developed by franz fanon in the context of his own war experience in algeria. developing the idea of “plebeian”, peasant revolt and justifying the violence as the sole means of ending the rule of colonial power, fanon at the same time differed from the tradition https://changing-sp.com/ 326 konstantin d. bugrov introduction the relationship between marxism and post-colonial intellectual paradigms was scrutinized many times (moore-gilbert, 2001; wolfe, 1997). of course, marxism historically had many faces, and one of them was especially preoccupied with the colonial problematics based on the intellectual legacy of the communist international and, speaking more broadly, the communist thought. after the beginning of the first world war, the radical wing of russian socialist democracy party (bolsheviks) was consolidated around vladimir lenin in the anti-war, defeatist stance; nikolay bukharin was among the first who postulated that the military domination of developed western countries in the colonies is unable to move the colonies forward in a violent but progressive way. at the same time, lenin criticized rosa luxemburg, who thought that, besides revolutions, the era of imperialism cannot produce liberatory wars. to develop his arguments, lenin together with grigory zinoviev published socialism and war (1915/1931), where two types of just wars were defined: revolutionary wars (in respective periods of history, bourgeois states against feudal states, and proletarian states against bourgeois states) and national-liberatory wars; thus, even the war of colonial semi-feudal states against developed imperialist states could be justified: if tomorrow, morocco were to declare war on france, india on england, persia or china on russia, and so forth, those would be “just”, “defensive” wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave-owning, predatory “great” powers. (zinoviev & lenin, 1915/1931, p. 5) it was lenin who developed “classical marxist heritage on the national and colonial question” (white, 1976, p. 173). the russian revolution of 1917 and the political success of the leninist strategy which called for an unconventional support of the 2nd comintern congress (represented by safarov, mao and the others) while describing the independent existence of former colonies. for fanon, the worst consequence of colonial rule is not permanent backwardness but psychological trauma, an inevitable result of a brutal conquest which requires therapy. the author concludes that such conceptual transformation was stimulated not merely by the disappointment in soviet and chinese economic strategies, but also in the geographical and cultural factor which made the reintegration with the former colonial powers preferable to the direct “escape” into the socialist camp. keywords colonial revolution; post-colonial studies; liberatory war; georgy safarov; mao zedong; frantz fanon changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 327 of national-liberatory movements eventually solidified the positions of such ideology and provided the basis for a political experiment, which historian terry martin called an “affirmative action empire” (martin, 2001, p. 1). the foundation of the communist international (comintern) finally formed the communist perspective on the colonial question: the key formula of the 2nd congress of the comintern (1920) was the possibility of direct transition to socialism in colonies. as grigory zinoviev, one of the leaders of the bolshevik party, stated in 1920, from the moment of the revolution in russia, “we can say that china, india, turkey, persia, armenia can and ought also to begin the struggle directly for a socialist order” (white, 1976, pp. 180–181). there were considerable disagreements regarding the political and social strategy of the colonial revolution. lenin insisted that the communist movement in colonies might rely upon the alliance with “bourgeois-democratic liberation movements”, while indian communist manabendra roy argued that support has to be reserved only for “revolutionary movements of liberation” (haithcox, 1971, p. 11). indeed, anticolonialism was a diasporic production, a revolutionary mixture of the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, of situated local knowledges combined with universal political principles, constructed through international networks of party organizations, political contacts between different revolutionary organizations, and personal contacts between activists, generating common practical information with political and intellectual influences. (young, 2003, p. 7) through the 1920s, the comintern was engulfed in disputes on different aspects of the colonial revolution, spurred by the revolutionary events of the second half of the 1920s in china. post-colonial theory is often seen as a product of disappointment in the whole socialist and revolutionary project, strengthened by the demise of planned economy both in the ussr and china. when “uncertainty reigned as to what would follow in the wake of socialism” (mueller, 2019, pp. 533–534), the attractivity of communism per se fell. communist ideas remained among the intellectual sources of post-colonial theory. the key post-colonial thinkers like gayatri spivak not just readily used marxist concepts and ideas, but also referred to lenin, thus provoking harsh critique from figures like neil lazarus and aijaz ahmad, who were attacking post-colonial agenda as a sort of post-modernist attack over “universalism, rationalism and secularism” (ahmad, 2011, p. 37), which was highly valued by classical marxism. another source of discontent is post-colonial theory’s emphasis on culture rather than economy. for instance, benita parry, inspired by leo trotsky’s ideas on “combined and uneven development”, criticized gayatri spivak and other prominent figures from the field of subaltern studies: it is now impossible to overlook a strong impulse in the contemporary postcolonial discussion to find a middle ground between the terms “domination” and “oppression”, to define colonial relationships as generically ambivalent, and https://changing-sp.com/ 328 konstantin d. bugrov to represent colonial locations as always and necessarily the site of dialogue. a tendency to privilege the cultural assimilation sought and achieved by colonial elites over popular resistance to colonial violence is both ahistorical and morally vacant in its detachment from the outrages visited on the dispossessed. (parry, 2002, p. 144) or, as some contemporary marxist critics of post-colonial agenda put it, “exploitation cannot be transformed by producing alternative representations or interpretations” (scatamburlo-d’annibale et al., 2018, p. 153). this article focuses on the history of an important concept that emerged within the vast intellectual heritage of the comintern—the concept of colonial revolution. such historical inquiry allows us not only to learn better the origins and genesis of the intellectual framework within which the colonial system was dismantled, but also to uncover some of the historical roots of the post-colonial thought, and to provide an explanation of its break with the revolutionary and communist thought as it was developed by lenin and the 2nd comintern congress. to proceed with the analysis, we must make one more important distinction between different traditions in the communist thought. we may roughly outline three key lines in which loosely understood communism influenced the theories and ideas about the colonial revolution and subsequent independent development of former colonies. the first tradition could be referred to as hegemonist and is based upon the intellectual legacy of antonio gramsci. even though gramsci himself did not pay special attention to the problem of colonial revolution (he actually saw italy in terms of colonial subjugation, as industrially developed north commanding the peasant south), his reflection on the reciprocal and complex character of political power, described within the concept of hegemony, proved to be quite valuable to describe the experience of colonial rule as well. the gramscian notion of hegemony heavily influenced post-colonial studies in asia and latin america, and, although the source of marxist influence in indian subaltern studies were edward thompson and victor kiernan, it was gramsci who emerged by the late 1980s as one of the key names of the new intellectual current (brennan, 2001, pp. 150–152). gramsci was also interpreted in non-marxist contexts, for example, in the writings of norberto bobbio. still, gramsci belongs to the communist tradition; gramscianism could be considered an intellectual apology for the inability to wrestle the power by means of revolt; rather, it gave preference to a “long march” in order to culturally overweight capitalism. by the end of the 20th century, and with the influential additions by authors like ernesto laclau and chantal mouffe, these broadly understood gramscian ideas became a dominant force in the european left. the second is the orthodox leninist thought represented by different types of the ussr-inspired communist movements across the world, especially in the intellectual production of the different wings of the ruling communist party in the ussr. being definitely sympathetic to the “wretched of the earth”, this version of communism was always ready to turn to them by its other side, namely, the cold and cynical machiavellian calculation of (economic) power. a follower of leo trotsky, changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 329 american communist ted grant stated in 1964: “the idea of leaning on the peasant masses, of the ‘revolutionary elements with nothing to lose’ and of the lumpen proletariat as a revolutionary force, superior to the ‘respectable industrial proletariat’ which has a higher standard of living, as the decisive force in the revolution, is the idea of bakunin and not of marx or trotsky” (grant, 1964). while trotskyism generally dismissed the peasant movements in colonies, its stance was paradoxically close to the intellectual positions of the official moscow, the self-proclaimed death enemy of trotskyism: an arrogant idea of superiority based on its economic strength. the psychological problems in dealing with moscow are summarized in enver hodzha’s diatribes against “khruschevites”: he was blaming the soviet leaders for their arrogant behavior and disdain for albania’s needs. the economic advice from moscow were seen by hodzha as an attempt to humiliate the underdeveloped countries: you are not exact in your planning. the hydro-power station is costing you an enormous amount and you won’t know what to do with the current. likewise, you have planned to build unnecessary factories, like those for steel, timberprocessing, paper, glass, linseed, bread, etc. does albania need all these factories? why are you building the refinery? the question of agriculture is critical, therefore reduce your investments in industry and strengthen agriculture! (hoxha, 1980, pp. 70–71) indeed, the political program of bolshevism in the 1920s shifted to the ambitious task of economic rivalry with the capitalism, which the soviet state pursued with certain, if limited, success. there communism as a science of political-economic domination risked being dissolved in the general stream of modernization theories. immanuel wallerstein remarked: “we could say that the stalinist version of the theory of stages simply changed what state represented the model: the soviet union became the model state instead of great britain. but the idea that there was a model, and that each state must follow more or less parallel routes, was epistemologically the same, notwithstanding the political difference” (stame & meldolesi, 2019). and even though former colonies were seen by red moscow with sympathy in their anti-imperialist struggle, they were treated as inferior in terms of technological and industrial development, way behind the unparalleled soviet power; the understanding of colonial revolutions was deployed to mark the difference between developed (that is, both capitalist and socialist) and undeveloped countries. the third tradition emerged from the more radical understanding of the resolutions of the 2nd comintern congress by the authors especially interested in discovering the condition under which the success of revolution in a colony would depend primarily upon the actual political and military qualifications of the revolutionary movement itself. as laclau and mouffe emphasized, the key moment in the transformation of the leninist paradigm of marxism came when it encountered the endless variety of peripheral popular movements: https://changing-sp.com/ 330 konstantin d. bugrov while implicitly retaining the notion of hegemony as a merely external alliance of classes, the new strategy conceived democracy as a common ground which was not open to exclusive absorption by any one social sector. a number of formulas—ranging from mao’s “new democracy” to togliatti’s “progressive democracy” and “national tasks of the working class”—attempted to locate themselves on a terrain that was difficult to define theoretically within marxist parameters, since the “popular” and the “democratic” were tangible realities at the level of the mass struggle but could not be ascribed to a strict class belonging […] from china to vietnam or cuba, the popular mass identity was other and broader than class identity. (laclau & mouffe, 1985, p. 62) the encounter happened exactly on the premises of the comintern, but there was a serious difference between mao and togliatti. in italy, the communist party operated as a legal force aimed at political struggle, in terms of either the leninist struggle for power or gramscian “long march” for hegemony, while in china the party was engaged in the war against the foreign occupation. this national-liberatory momentum was downplayed or even missing in both leninist and gramscian visions of marxist political philosophy, but for the colonies it was the most important part. the complex interaction of “class” and “mass” in the context of liberatory struggle was the intellectual focal point where the marxism went colonial and, subsequently, postcolonial. it was associated with the violent movements within the new communism, and typically, this intellectual current is characterized as distinctly critical towards both european socialist democracy and the soviet model of leninism. there were debates in latin america between the foquistas or guevaristas and their fewer radical opponents like vania bambirra in relation to how exactly organize a rebellion (briceno ramirez, 2016). the ideas of “urban guerilla” and other radical concepts of partisan war might be seen as by-products of this tradition. it was the tradition which frightened сarl schmitt to such an extent that he devoted a full-scope study, theory of the partisan (2007), to the attack on this tradition, which he saw as the biggest threat to the international order. indeed, it was the partisan, rather than the critically-thinking intellectual or engineering economic planner, that played key role there. the three key traditions of the communist thought developed in the 20th century were considering the revolution of disputed hegemony, economic build-up, and liberatory war. each of them had a certain impact upon the development of the colonial (and post-colonial) agenda. however, originally it was the third tradition that was dealing specifically with the problems of socialist revolution in a colony. this allows to specify the scope of the present article: it deals with the intellectual impact of the third tradition, a certain part of the larger communist (leninist) body of thought which, in its own turn, was a part of the global marxist thought. the theories of the third international were incorporated into the body of anti-colonial liberatory thought already in the 1920s when the attention of the comintern was attracted to asia and, particularly, to china. the development of this tradition was driven forward by the experience of the actual military (rather than political) struggle in the colonies, inevitably merging the concepts of liberatory revolution and liberatory war. thus, the changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 331 issue of colonial revolution—that is, the revolution in an undeveloped country under the military influence of capitalist powers, which is capable of overcoming not merely its own backwardness but also the military superiority of the metropoly—emerged as a problem of liberatory warfare. at that time, the key questions were formulated: first, how could the revolution in a colony succeed both socially (since there is no proletariat) and militarily (since capitalism is powerful)? second, how could a newly emerged state be independent and avoid succumbing to the economic power of imperialists and, so to say, deal with what michael hardt and antonio negri called “the poisoned gift of national liberation”? the body of theoretical works, political proclamations and methodological approaches developed within the comintern during the interbellum was enormous, and this is even more true in relation to anti-colonial and new communism writings of the middle of the 20th century. it is beyond the scope of the present article to cover it all. i would concentrate on three figures of greatest prominence: i start with georgy safarov, a prominent but almost forgotten figure in the bolshevik party of the 1920s who in 1921–1931 elaborated perhaps the most interesting theory of colonial revolution. then i will discuss the political concepts of protracted war developed by mao zedong. the final part of the article deals with frantz fanon and his theory of revolution in afriсa. why these figures? many soviet theorists tried to find in the comintern’s resolutions some ideas about the colonial revolution, but safarov was the first soviet author who took the colonial theory seriously, as well as the most original thinker among soviet intellectuals who discussed the subject; it was safarov who provided the detailed argumentation in support of lenin’s insights about the national-colonial question. in the 1930s, the comintern, following moscow’s political aspirations, oriented itself towards europe rather than asia and africa; and the whole colonial agenda receded into the background. still, the colonial agenda was elaborated by the chinese communists; this subsequent development of the comintern’s ideas regarding the revolution in a colony is researched through the intellectual heritage of mao zedong. after the second world war, a full-scale anti-colonial movement emerged, supported both by the ussr and the revolutionary china. this period provides plenty of figures to choose from. robert young once stressed that theoretical and political identification of post-colonial theory “goes back to the works of frantz fanon and che guevara” (young, 2003, p. 7). unfortunately, fanon’s relations with the preceding comintern and anti-colonial tradition is often overlooked; for instance, in the recent and otherwise illuminating book on fanon’s thought, frantz fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference by azzedine haddour, the comintern legacy or at least lenin’s ideas are not mentioned as if there was no decades of anti-colonial thought and action in the period of the 1920s–1950s based upon the comintern resolutions and subsequent experience of liberatory wars; instead, fanon is directly compared with the “marxist orthodoxy” (haddour, 2019, pp. 160–161; salem, 2018, p. 429). the present article aims, above all, at filling this gap. thus, the three selected figures shed light on the changes which the concept of colonial revolution endured at different times and in different places. we should, however, keep in mind the general problem—the trajectory of the concept’s travel from the communist to post-colonial https://changing-sp.com/ 332 konstantin d. bugrov paradigm of thinking or, in other words, how the concept that originally developed within the third tradition of communist thought became associated with the first, gramscian tradition. of course, there were certain mutual influences between these thinkers: they all were borrowing from the intellectual legacy of lenin and the comintern, in which safarov himself played an important role and which influenced both mao and fanon. however, this article is aimed not at uncovering “intellectual genealogy” (safarov’s influence on mao, safarov and mao on fanon, etc.), but rather at investigating the similarities and differences in the deployment of concepts, originally elaborated in the period of the first world war, russian revolution of 1917 and the foundation of the comintern in 1919. such deployment occurred in different locations and under different circumstances: that is, safarov’s experience of supporting indigenous peoples in their struggle against russian colonists in central asia amidst the civil war; mao’s action in north-western china as an actual military leader fighting japanese invasion; and fanon’s experience in algeria as a leading theorist of the liberatory war against france. no doubt, safarov’s situation was peculiar, since in central asia there was in fact a revolution “from above” rather than a liberatory war; yet in a broader sense, all these cases could be seen as revolutions in colonies, which were theorized with the help of conceptual tools derived from the resolutions of the 2nd congress of the comintern. thus, the article aims to demonstrate how the very idea of revolution in a colony was developed in several important contexts, traveled through several locations, eventually becoming a foundation for the theory of liberatory war and the basis for the counter-hegemonic project of post-colonial theory. in addition, the article aims at considering the problem of relations between post-colonial theory and the communist concept of colonial revolution. therefore, the article makes a special emphasis on fanon’s wretched of the earth (1961/1963) in order to show how the development of the problems of colonial revolution, which mainly took place within the third tradition of the communist thought, was combined with the innovative psychoanalytical approach, thus putting the intellectual tools of the first (gramscian) tradition centre stage in the post-colonial agenda. safarov’s plebeian revolution georgy safarov, a prominent bolshevik since 1908 and an affiliate of vladimir lenin and grigory zinoviev, held important political positions in central asia in 1919–1921 during the years of political and military struggle in the region—he was a member of several governing bodies whose task was to put central asia under the bolsheviks’ control. in 1921, he summarized his practical experience on the theoretical level by publishing a paper entitled kolonial’naia revoliutsiia (opyt turkestana) [colonial revolution (experience of turkestan)]. the following year, he published a book under the same title where he expanded his vision of the subject. safarov’s work was successful, and he tried to solidify his reputation as an expert in colonial and national matters. in 1923, he published natsionalnyi vopros i proletariat [national question and proletariat]. in the subsequent years safarov was somewhat distracted by his participation in the changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 333 struggle for power within the bolshevik party: in 1923–1924 as a staunch supporter of grigory zinoviev, he was among the leading bolshevik theorists attacking leo trotsky. when in 1925 zinoviev became a target for the attacks from joseph stalin and nikolay bukharin, safarov again was at the forefront of the conflict. he played an important role as a member of the so-called “united opposition”, when zinoviev, trotsky and their supporters joined forces. after the defeat of the “united opposition”, he was arrested and exiled to achinsk, but in 1928 he returned to moscow and was permitted to work in the comintern. in 1930, safarov published his paper problema natsii i antiimperialisticheskie revolutsii [problem of nation and the anti-imperialist revolutions]; just as ten years before, the paper was soon followed by a larger volume expanding the key points, entitled problemy natsionalno-kolonialnoi revolutsii [problems of national-colonial revolution]. in 1934, after the murder of sergey kirov, safarov was arrested again and was imprisoned—thus effectively putting an end to his career of a political theorist—until his execution in 1942. what new ideas did safarov bring to the general understanding of colonial revolution elaborated at the 2nd congress of the comintern? he remained fiercely loyal to kautsky’s economic approach to understanding the nation and relied on kautsky’s theory for describing the present-day western nation-states as outcome of the political and economic ascent of the bourgeoisie. in the course of the bourgeoisie’s rise, it consolidated the emerging common market by means of cultural and political control, and, in doing so, disposed of the political domination of feudal elites. however, globalization undermines the basis of nation-states effectively dissolving them within the larger trans-national economic complexes; the contradiction between the global economy and the political superstructures of the nation-states leads to permanent waves of military conflicts among the leading capitalist powers (here safarov follows the analytical works of lenin and bukharin on imperialism). the bourgeoisie’s fight for national independency against the feudal empires used to be progressive, as it was paving the way for new capitalist formation, but nowadays nationalism turns out to be reactionary for reasons explained above. sooner or later, economic progress will destroy national borders, replace national languages with the sole “language of international trade”, and bring about an “american mill of nations” on a global scale. such transition is possible only after the global socialist revolution. these arguments are fully in line with the classical kautskian vision of the national question. however, speaking of colonial issues, safarov takes on a different direction. he argued that colonial rule of capitalist powers over the backward feudal countries did not undermine the basis of feudalism in colonies, but rather strengthened it. contrary to what the european socialist democracy believed colonialism did not have any developmental mission in the colonies. safarov even wrote about the “blockage of economic development of colonies by imperialism” (safarov, 1930, p. 77). although this was, again, a commonplace of leninist thought, safarov masterfully expanded this point by dwelling on his own revolutionary experience in central asia: as he observed, in the colonies, even the social groups exploited by the metropolitan country became privileged oppressors. to be an industrial worker was a privilege in central asia. thus, colonial central asia was suffering from three main types of exploitation: https://changing-sp.com/ 334 konstantin d. bugrov the native feudal elites, the foreign (namely, russian) capital, and the russian settlers who literally seized the land and water from the natives. while at home the bourgeoisie had dismissed feudalism and established formal equality of citizens before the law, in the colonies the situation was absolutely different. colonial rule is based almost solely upon the brutal force—the overwhelming technical-military strength of the imperialists. here “national inequality is simultaneously an estate, political inequality: for one, being a member of the ruling nation, has specific rights and privileges, while the others are stripped of a part of their rights or of any rights—like serfs lacking any rights under the feudal regime” (safarov, 1931, p. 16; my translation from russian—k. b.). for safarov, the settlers and colonizers cannot be the backbone of revolution in a colony, even though they represent more progressive economic orders than the natives, many of whom are still nomadic. the conclusion is clear: the colonial revolution could only be exercised by the natives, who must both eradicate their own comprador and semi-feudal elite and drive the settlers and colonizers off the land. but if there is no native working class, then what social force is capable of being revolutionary within the marxist theory of proletarian revolution? safarov was searching for an answer by reiterating the idea of “plebeian elements” referring both to lenin and to engels and striving to develop a more systematic theoretical approach. safarov laid a special emphasis on this analogy—the imperialists are “attaching” the enslaved colonies to the production of raw materials just as feudal landlords were “attaching” serfs to the land (see: safarov, 1931, p. 104), and putting them into ghettoes. in other words, capitalism, while entering the global market, “retreats to the position of feudalism” (safarov, 1931, p. 93; my translation from russian—k. b). this characteristic was apparently pejorative: the feudal system reproduced by imperialism on a global scale has nothing to do with the progress and must be demolished recklessly. the bourgeois revolution will not redeem the backward areas of the world, and the creation of “ordinary” nation-states with their respective capitalism is impossible for colonies: “what if complete hopelessness of the situation, tenfold the strength of the workers and peasants, opened us a possibility of a different transition to creation of the new prerequisites of civilization in regard to other european states?” (safarov, 1930, p. 79; my translation from russian—k. b.). thus, the revolutionary thrust of the exploited native plebeians is the only solution, for “political superstructure and culture are forming in the process of storm and onslaught of the masses not in a strict compliance with the turtle pace of economic development” (safarov, 1930, p. 78; my translation from russian—k. b.). safarov sums up: anti-imperialist struggle gives birth to a long chain of social changes, political and cultural revolutions, which form the existence of backward peoples. across all the historical leaps and “breaks of gradualness”, the clash between the “lutheran-knightish” and “plebeian-muntzerian” tendencies runs like a red thread. all these preliminary stages of revolutionary development are turning out to be in the final historical account the forms of their convergence with both changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 335 the global socialist revolution and its most important pillar—the first socialist soviet union. (safarov, 1930, p. 95; my translation from russian—k. b.) in other words, colonial revolutions, destructive and purging as they are, will open the way for the colonial nations to integrate directly into the soviet system in their own distinctive manner. of course, safarov did not openly advocate the peasant war; rather, he emphasized the role of the rising proletariat of colonies. however, his favorite analogy, which presented colonies as collective serfs, his frequent references to the “plebeian-muntzerian” movement (traceable, again, to engels’s writings on the peasant war in germany), and his calls for an immediate revolutionary thrust in the colonies were indicators of his sympathy towards the idea of a peasant uprising. the very term plebeian was borrowed by safarov from the works of karl marx and friedrich engels. obviously, marx referred to plebs in a rather ambiguous way (bourdin, 2013). in his recent work, martin breaugh outlines the european tradition of plebeian politics (strangely enough, breaugh excludes marx from the line of plebeian thinkers, while simultaneously including giambattista vico and montesquieu, and he barely mentions lenin or mao at all, let alone safarov): “it arises when people excluded from the res publica transform themselves into political subjects able to act in concert […] the plebeian experience thus confirms the existence of communalist and agoraphile political traditions throughout western political history” (breaugh, 2007/2013, p. 241). santiago castro-gomez adds that during his early years marx was moving away from an abstract, hegelian republicanism towards exactly this kind of plebeian republicanism (castro-gomez, 2018, p. 25). the very manner of describing social structures by means of roman historical analogies is in use even today (ferguson, 2019, p. 15). in turn, engels frequently spoke about “plebeian and proletarian ascetism” of thomas muntzer’s followers in the peasant war in germany: the plebeian opposition consisted of ruined burghers and the mass of townsmen without civic rights—journeymen, day labourers, and the numerous precursors of the lumpenproletariat, who existed even in the lowest stages of urban development. the lumpenproletariat is, generally speaking, a phenomenon that occurs in a more or less developed form in all the so far known phases of society. (marx & engels, 1978, p. 407) engels’s treatise played a pivotal role in making the concept of “plebeian elements” important for the marxist tradition, especially when one talked about the revolutions of the 17th–18th centuries, the period when the working class was absent from the historical scene. the mentions of “plebeian elements” or even “plebeian parties” entangled with the numerous references to the history of the french revolution are abundant in the works of bolshevik political leaders including lenin and trotsky. of course, this concept remained problematic as it was not clearly distinguished from the concept of “petty bourgeoisie”. one of soviet social historians from the 1930s, nikolay lukin, explained the exact composition of these plebeian elements: the https://changing-sp.com/ 336 konstantin d. bugrov waged workers (including seasonal workers), handicraftsmen, street traders and the lumpen-proletariat, that is, “porters, organ-grinders, jugglers, dog-shearers, beggars, etc.” (lukin, 1934, p. 113; my translation from russian—k. b). after achieving independence in the “plebeian-muntzerian” way, how could former colonies evade being dependent upon western capitalism in economic terms and secure themselves against what trotsky later called the “intervention of cheap goods”? (trotsky, 1936/1937, p. 17) safarov responds by referring to marxist classics: the proletariat will help its peasant brothers and sisters in creating a new, socialist economy. surely, such help could be provided by the victorious european or american proletariat, but safarov does not discuss such possibility; after all, that point would mean that the colonial revolution depends upon the european revolution, and that, without the european working class, any revolutionary thrust in the colonies would be futile. thus, safarov envisioned that the soviet union would assist the newly emerging peasant revolutionary countries, just as soviet russia assisted the native peoples of central asia, in the collectivization of the country and industrialization of the cities. thus, bolshevik experience of managing a socialist revolution and the subsequent socialist build-up in a colony became for safarov a pattern for all colonial countries struggling for liberation. in a peculiar way, he brought together the sympathy towards the uncompromising struggle for liberation in colonies and the sheer admiration for the ussr’s growing industrial strength. the rhetoric of violent liberation was intertwined with the vision of industrial power. as modest kolerov has recently noticed, “awareness of the technological and social backwardness of the ussr gave a touch of national liberation to the pathos of the bolsheviks” (kolerov, 2017, p. 129; my translation from russian—k. b.). it was safarov who put together a set of rather unsystematic bolshevik/comintern ideas on colonial revolution to develop a theory of anti-colonial peasant war (though it was never presented as a single theoretical construction, partly due to safarov’s passionate style of arguing). while the very concept of peasant uprising as a way to revolution in a colony was widespread among the bolshevik theorists, safarov diligently devised a suitable analogy presenting the whole revolutionary struggle in colonies as a “plebeian-muntzerian” uprising thought in terms of a peasant war against the feudal regime. safarov drew a totally different conclusion from the one made by manabendra roy, who insisted that the indian revolution was possible only due to the fact that capitalism presumably had done much to develop india’s industry, or the ideas expressed by karl radek in regard to china. he also was the first communist thinker to postulate the grave differences between the colonizers and colonized; the former, even being exploited workers, had a privileged status in a colony. another important aspect of safarov’s vision of the national-colonial revolutions was his position of an external observer. being in the middle of the revolutionary events of central asia, he nevertheless remained an emissary from moscow, and, deliberating on the chinese and indian revolutionary movement, he was still pursuing the soviet political line, that is, any revolutionary movement in the world was seen as inferior in comparison with the safety of the soviet state. from this perspective, the permanent and fierce fight in the colonies could also be seen as changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 337 a tool of providing protection for the ussr on the grounds that the imperialists being busy in colonies would not dare to attack the soviet union. however, in the mid-1930s the whole colonial agenda faded into the background in soviet marxism and in the comintern: the chinese revolution was in the stalemate, and the war in europe was approaching, so for the red moscow the very colonial powers started to be seen as desirable potential allies against the aggressive fascist bloc. in turn, it led to the disappointment in the comintern’s liberatory rhetoric, for most of the colonial world was under the domination of those very “peaceful democracies” whom the red moscow tried to approach as allies. mao’s protracted war while moscow started to pay less attention to the colonies, the struggle in colonies was going on, with china as the largest battlefield. the country nominally united by kuomintang was still suffering from the civil war as neither the military leaders nor the communist party submitted to chiang kai-shek’s rule. soon, internal tensions attracted hostile attention from abroad. since 1931, japan started to invade china, and in 1937 the war was declared openly. the communist forces led by mao zedong, who at the time strengthened his position as the leader of the communist party of china, retreated to the western regions of china in 1935. from the city of yanan, mao ruled the whole shaan–gan–ning border region (since 1936 communists and kuomintang became allies against the japanese). the period of isolation in yanan is considered to be as the most productive in mao’s political career. here, he developed his famous theory of protracted war, a great revive of the peasant war or, as carl schmitt called it, the theory of the partisan (schmitt, 1962/2007). in 1938, a series of lectures of mao zedong were published under the title on protracted war. mao was familiar with the statements of the comintern on colonial revolution and warfare, as well as with the overall leninist approach to the problem of just and unjust wars. mao’s ideas became an important step in the development of anti-colonial thought under the leninist (or the comintern) aegis, especially given the fact that by the end of the 1930s, the moscow theorists were much less interested in the anticolonial struggle than ten years before. unlike safarov, mao was not interested at all in the problem of the indigenous-settler relationships (most probably since china was not colonized by settlers either from the west or from japan), and he did not use the very term “colonial” (let alone “national-colonial”) revolution. but even if mao did not use this word, he surely elaborated the concept, producing a comprehensive analysis of colonial revolution interpreted as a liberatory war and reflecting the chinese communists’ unique experience of protracted partisan war against the kuomintang and japanese invaders. mao’s elaboration contributed greatly to the formation of a new understanding of colonial revolution (already outlined in safarov’s works) as a liberatory anti-colonial war. of course, since 1927, the primary enemy of the communists in china was kuomintang, but soon that political enemy was re-imagined as an agent of imperialists. as mao postulated already in his why is it the red political power can exist in china (1928), https://changing-sp.com/ 338 konstantin d. bugrov regime of the new warlords of the kuomintang remains a regime of the comprador class in the cities and the landlord class in the countryside; it is a regime which has capitulated to imperialism in its foreign relations and which at home has replaced the old warlords with new ones, subjecting the working class and the peasantry to an even more ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression. (mao, 1965a, p. 63) in problems of strategy in china’s revolutionary war (1936), he theorized over the laws of the revolutionary war, which could be either a “class war” or “national war”, in the specific conditions of “semi-colonial china” (mao, 1965a, pp. 179–181). in bankruptcy of the idealist concept of history (1949), mao provided a concluding description of china’s revolution as a liberatory war against the “imperialists” and their “running dogs”: in its first battle, this scientific and revolutionary new culture acquired by the chinese people defeated the northern warlords, the running dogs of imperialism; in the second, it defeated the attempts by another running dog of imperialism, chiang kai-shek, to intercept the chinese red army during its 25,000-li long march; in the third, it defeated japanese imperialism and its running dog, wang ching-wei, and in the fourth, it finally put an end to the domination of china by the united states and all other imperialist powers as well as to the rule of their running dogs, chiang kai-shek and all the other reactionaries. (mao, 1961, pp. 456–457) the fact that certain “running dogs” were at times seen as allies (as was the kuomintang during the struggle against the japanese invasion) did not affect the key ideas of mao’s military-revolutionary strategy. indeed, in his works of the late 1930s, mao examined the possibility of success in a colonial liberatory war. he followed (perhaps unintentionally) safarov in saying that imperialism rules colonies by sheer force; therefore, colonial countries cannot just develop their respective economies under the colonial yoke to a degree when they will become powerful enough to compete with the imperialists. the marxist understanding of power prevented them from considering that the spirit or enthusiasm of uprising to would outweigh the imperialists’ war machines with their technological sophistication. mao’s answer was that, even though japan was stronger in purely military terms, china was much larger and more capable to wage a war of attrition; that is why the liberation war was a “protracted war”. the key issue was to mobilize the mass of peasantry: besides employing trained armies to carry on mobile warfare, we must organize great numbers of guerrilla units among the peasants […] the chinese peasants have very great latent power; properly organized and directed, they can keep the japanese army busy twenty-four hours a day and worry it to death. it must be remembered that the war will be fought in china, that is to say, the japanese army will be entirely surrounded by the hostile chinese people. (mao, 1967, p. 10) changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 339 when the peasant mass entered the battlefield, the preponderance of china in terms of military force would be ensured. however, mao was aware that there were lots of examples when smaller countries conquered larger ones—like in the case of britain against india, or italy against ethiopia. mao made great efforts to explain how china could avoid the same fate as ethiopia or india. when italy attacked, ethiopia proved unable to defend itself, while the expectations of the imperialists’ collective attempt to prevent italy from devouring it also failed. according to mao, the situation in china was different, for it was much more developed economically and socially than india during the british conquest or ethiopia during the italian invasion. in addition, british imperialism was dynamic and rising, while japanese imperialism was declining and decaying. japan was internally weak, mao insisted, and the revolution in japan was an important factor for planning and waging the war of liberation. in speaking so, he echoed the classical approaches of the leninist theory of war. in addition, the international situation by the end of the 1930s had changed totally: the popular movements in the world today are developing on a scale and with a depth that are unprecedented. the existence of the soviet union is a particularly vital factor in present-day international politics, and the soviet union will certainly support china with the greatest enthusiasm; there was nothing like this twenty years ago. all these factors have created and are creating important conditions indispensable to china’s final victory. (mao, 1967, p. 20) thus, the three main factors made chinese victory inevitable: the strategic advantage in resources (or, simply, china was bigger); the internal weakness of japanese capitalism; and the international situation—both the existence of the soviet union and the possibility of anti-japanese coalition. among these three factors, the mobilization and unity of china’s forces was the most important one; the two others (the revolution in japan and international coalition against japan) could reduce the time and costs required for the final victory (see: mao, 1967, p. 107). importantly, mao often stressed that the war against japan would be long and disastrous: even though the final victory would inevitably be achieved, no one could expect a fast and easy victory. the process of the war of liberation here was—just as in safarov’s works—constitutive. however, in the way he envisioned the events to follow after the defeat of the imperialists, mao differed from safarov. by the end of the 1930s, mao embraced the concept of new democracy. he referred neither to lenin or stalin, nor to the comintern’s directives and resolutions (see: smirnov, 2012, p. 383). however, the intellectual roots of this concept are quite clear. in 1928, striving to support the integration of the communist party of china and kuomintang, the comintern proposed the slogan of “people’s democratic dictatorship”. it was heavily criticized by the leftist opposition within the bolshevik party, including safarov. however, the terms of “democratic dictatorship” and “sovietization” were rather vague. new https://changing-sp.com/ 340 konstantin d. bugrov democracy ought both to unite different social groups (that was what the comintern pursued under the banners of “popular fronts”) and to facilitate the accelerated development of capitalism in china. the latter resembled the older comintern politics towards chinese revolution in 1927, when moscow leaders insisted on integrating communists into the kuomintang structure, but at that time with the communist party at the helm, which was seen as the only way out of backwardness and poverty. unlike safarov’s ideas of the national-colonial revolution driving subjugated nations directly to socialism and skipping the phase of the bourgeois republic with the support from the already existing “workers’ state”, mao’s new democracy meant to serve as a specific bourgeois phase of development under control of the communist political force. apparently, the leaders of the chinese communists didn’t believe in any substantial assistance from the soviet state; so, mao prepared not for the skipping of the capitalist phase in chinese history, but for a long period of co-existence and cooperation with their political opponents as well as with the western powers. thus, maoist thought of the 1930s–1940s creatively combined two concepts: the idea of “democratic dictatorship”, which was already permanently present in the comintern’s political assessments since the late 1920s; and the idea of peasant war, which coincided with what safarov wrote about the “plebeian” movement. these key ideas were now reiterated in the light of mao’s own experience of a long peasant war, semi-partisan fighting, and prolonged isolation in yanan, giving birth to the specific concept of peasant war: “the communists’ arrangements for the peasants, and their provisions to the uprooted rural people serving the 8th route army, permitted them to inspire the peasants to see the war as a quest to restore the values of family and village life and to support the great leap from local, self-defensive insurgency to national revolutionary war” (thaxton, 2017, p. 55). most probably, these political concepts also emerged from the influence of earlier sun yat-sen’s thought on democracy (bedeski, 1977, pp. 340–341). this was a distinctly—yet recognizably marxist and, more strictly, communist—maoist concept of colonial revolution and liberatory war. even as the people’s republic of china was affected heavily by the soviet experience since the late 1940s, mao was permanently aware of the undesirable effects of direct intellectual exports from moscow. historically, it turned out that a decisive role was played by the international factor rather than by china’s own mobilization of resources, as the japanese empire was destroyed by the international coalition, though the japanese army was unable to conquer china by force, just as mao predicted. but events went a different way: in developing the strategy of the new democratic revolution, mao zedong expected the support from the usa to rebuild the economy of the new democratic state after the war. instead of lending such support, the usa openly intervened into the chinese civil war on the side of the kuomintang, providing ostensible military and financial help to chiang kai-shek. thus, real support to mao zedong was provided by the soviet union, which assisted in creating a military-revolutionary base in manchuria. (smirnov, 2009, p. 27; my translation from russian—k. b.) changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 341 the resulting changes in political attitudes strongly resembled the ideas which safarov put forward in his problems of national-colonial revolution: the soviet union started to provide massive assistance to drive the chinese economy forward1. for example, the concept of peasant war proved incompatible with the radical land politics of dekulakization, which some of the stalinist factions of the chinese party were trying to pursue (womack, 1982, pp. 135–137). in the 1945 speech entitled on coalition government, mao proclaimed: some people fail to understand why, so far from fearing capitalism, communists should advocate its development in certain given conditions. our answer is simple. the substitution of a certain degree of capitalist development for the oppression of foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism is not only an advance but an unavoidable process. it benefits the proletariat as well as the bourgeoisie, and the former perhaps more. it is not domestic capitalism but foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism which are superfluous in china today; indeed, we have too little of capitalism. (mao, 1965b, p. 283) thus, “new democracy” was rather meant to facilitate the capitalist development under the watch of the communist party. surely, mao distrusted the bourgeoisie, that is why political control had to remain in the hands of the communist party. mao retained his concept of “new democracy”, albeit in a slightly different form. he emphasized in his 1949 work, on the people’s democratic dictatorship: “who are the people? at the present stage in china, they are the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. these classes, led by the working class and the communist party, unite to form their own state and elect their own government” (mao, 1961, pp. 417–418)2. despite the fact that certain party members thought “new democracy” to be a transitory period for a couple of decades, its conceptual apparatus still serves as a symbol of social consolidation and concord in present-day china (see: rudolph, 2021, p. 299). the idea of protracted peasant war, which had liberating, emancipatory and democratic effects by itself, was a step in the same direction as safarov’s plebeian uprising. while the final purpose, besides the national independence, was certainly economic and cultural development, the economic build-up itself was not considered to be a liberatory process; it was understood rather as a firmly controlled capitalist 1 in the 1930s, the soviet union depended on the west for technological assistance, relying upon foreign cadres, technologies and equipment. during the first five-year plan of china, the scale of the task was comparable, yet now all the foreign support came from the ussr, which alone played the same role as the united states and germany together played for soviet industrialization in the 1930s. 156 industrial objects were reconstructed or built from scratch with the soviet assistance (see: hanbing, 2010, p. 157). but while the industrial build-up was underway, the collectivization of the land was halted. 2 mao classified all political regimes in the world as different kinds of dictatorship: that is, the republics under the bourgeois dictatorship, republics under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and republics under the “joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes”. again, he closely followed the leninist patterns in considering any republic as a dictatorship, but added to that his own specific treatment of the concept of the dictatorship of several revolutionary classes, a transitional political regime, which by the end of the 1920s was promulgated in the comintern by joseph stalin and nikolay bukharin. https://changing-sp.com/ 342 konstantin d. bugrov growth under the aegis of the triumphant communist party—a vision rather similar to lenin’s new economic policy, though in the presence of the soviet neighbor it was reshaped heavily. indeed, stalin himself considered the chinese position as a sort of an imitation of soviet russia’s new economic policy, and so did the number of influential chinese party officials; those who insisted on forced emulation of the soviet model were criticized harshly. national independence achieved by means of war rather than economic victory over backwardness was the key idea in maoism at that time. those ideas brought the maoist concept of protracted war close to what safarov envisioned, but there were two conceptual lines that differed in relation to the national bourgeoisie: while safarov believed that the colonial bourgeoisie was feudalized and had to be swept aside, mao—while using the very term “feudalism” in the same pejorative way as safarov did—drew the line between the “good” and “bad” bourgeoisie, allowing for a sort of social consolidation to support independency. of course, these distinctions remained part of the tradition stemming from the resolutions of the 2nd congress of the comintern. despite the differences, both approaches welcomed a broad social movement involving the peasantry and petty bourgeoise, both were demonstratively hostile towards “feudalism”, and both insisted upon the possibility of winning the liberatory war against the imperialists and staging a revolution even in the absence of the revolution in the west. fanon’s counter-hegemony the intellectual and political context in which franz fanon’s writings appeared was quite different, but it bore certain similarities with the experience of safarov in central asia and mao zedong in yanan. fanon’s political thought emerged in the context of the algerian war, which, in its turn, was part of the broader frame of africa’s liberation from colonial dependency. fanon most probably was familiar with the resolution of the first four congresses of the communist international (hudis, 2015, p. 79). in his arguably most influential work, the wretched of the earth, fanon described the process of colonization as brutal subjugation by sheer violence, pointing out that the settlers’ presence in colonies “was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons” (fanon, 1961/1963, p. 36). the conquest is inevitably followed by the psychological trauma, as the new masters turn the colony into a space of delusion. the subjugation strips the colonial peoples of their history: in colonies the settlers made history, and while they drove the social progress, they faced the “torpid creatures, wasted by fevers, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism” (fanon, 1964/1967, p. 51). for fanon, “the colonial world is a world cut in two” (fanon, 1964/1967, p. 38), and to revolt is to discover the grim truth behind the web of words so carefully woven by the imperialists: after centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life—the forces of colonialism. and the youth of changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 343 a colonized country, growing up in an atmosphere of shot and fire, may well make a mock of, and does not hesitate to pour scorn upon the zombies of his ancestors, the horses with two heads, the dead who rise again, and the djinns who rush into your body while you yawn. the native discovers reality and transforms it into the pattern of his customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom […] what they demand is not the settler’s position of status, but the settler’s place. the immense majority of natives want the settler’s farm. for them, there is no question of entering into competition with the settler. they want to take his place (fanon, 1964/1967, p. 58)3. this famous justification of violence is quite similar to the formulas of the comintern thinkers and, in particular, to safarov’s vision of imperialism as a global reactionary force, which subjugates and governs colonies without any popular support, relying solely on its terrifying military strength, on dreadnoughts and airplanes. inevitably, the colonial population, for whom this brutal conquest was aggravated by the psychological trauma, might only rely on violence, according to fanon’s premises. as fanon recognized the violent liberatory war against colonialism as the only solution for colonies, he faced the same question as safarov and mao: how could a colony be victorious against such monstrous war machine? many authors considered the spirit of liberation and enthusiasm to be sufficient for a victory. for instance, kwame nkrumah in his handbook of revolutionary warfare (1969), comparing the overall strength of the imperialists with that of the independent states of africa, was optimistic: “we possess the vital ingredient necessary to win—the full and enthusiastic support of the broad masses of the african people who are determined once and for all to end all forms of foreign exploitation […] against such overwhelming strength organized on a pan-african basis, no amount of enemy forces can hope to succeed” (nkrumah, 1969, p. 23). but fanon, whose connections to marxism made him sensitive to the realistic arithmetic of power, provided much more elaborated argumentation. first, there are powerful rivals of the imperialists representing the socialist bloc, whose industrial and military strength somewhat undermines western military superiority. sebastian kaempf stresses the manichean aspects of fanon’s approach to colonialism presumably borrowed from the writings of jean-paul sartre: “it was along the lines of sartre that fanon came to see a world made up of binaries as well as dialectics, and divided into two compartmental zones: the zone of the coloniser 3 this apology of violence typically attracts students of fanon’s political philosophy; there was a debate on whether fanon unconvincingly supports violence or not. sebastian kaempf summarizes fanon’s views of violence as following: “precisely because colonialism represented a systematic and deliberate form of exploitation and dehumanization, it could only be overcome by force” (kaempf, 2009, p. 140). there is a debate on whether fanon was unconvincingly supporting the extreme violence of not, and some authors argued that “he was not, as is customarily thought, an advocate of the indiscriminate use of violence” (jinadu, 1973, p. 256). l. adele jinadu, for instance, is trying to find an inconsistency in fanon’s analysis: “what fanon probably overlooks, in effect, is the important fact that social injustice is not a defining characteristic of colonial rule. there is no logical contradiction in the notion of an ‘enlightened’ or ‘benevolent colonialism. thus, marx could, with respect to british rule in india, talk of the ‘unconscious’ benefits of colonial rule” (jinadu, 1973, p. 261). unfortunately, jinadu totally overlooks the whole tradition of leninist and maoist thought which develops marxist theory in an opposite way, and which definitely influenced fanon’s own writings. https://changing-sp.com/ 344 konstantin d. bugrov or settler and the zone of the colonised or native” (kaempf, 2009, p. 140). in fact, fanon analyzes the anti-colonial struggle in the context of confrontation between the capitalist and socialist blocs, which both stimulates violence and creates possibilities for liberation, since “all the jacqueries and desperate deeds, all those bands armed with cutlasses or axes find their nationality in the implacable struggle which opposes socialism and capitalism” (fanon, 1961/1963, p. 78). the military and diplomatic confrontation of the two blocs was seen by fanon as an important factor in the liberatory fight of colonies: when mr. khrushchev brandishes his shoe at the united nations, or thumps the table with it, there’s not a single ex-native, nor any representative of an underdeveloped country, who laughs. for what mr. khrushchev shows the colonized countries which are looking on is that he, the moujik, who moreover is the possessor of space rockets, treats these miserable capitalists in the way that they deserve”. (fanon, 1961/1963, p. 78) second, within the very colonialist camp there are forces which cannot support older, militaristic ways of control, preferring milder methods of ensuring their hegemony over former colonies. fanon’s vision of victory in a colonial revolt was different from what mao postulated. while mao expected three factors to play—that is, china’s impressive domestic resources, japan’s internal weakness, and the changing international situation—fanon believed that the victory was possible due to internal changes within the very structure of imperialism. though it conquered the colonies with a “great array of bayonets”, it cannot rely upon sheer strength anymore. surely, the confrontation of capitalism and communism creates new possibilities for colonial liberation, but the key factor is the change within the capitalist order itself. fanon even draws a historical parallel: once german nazism turned europe into a “veritable colony”, and now germany has to pay reparations. however, such payments did not prevent germany from re-integrating into the european economic system; the west was in need of economically healthy and strong germany. the same will happen to the third world: the colonies have become a market. the colonial population is a customer who is ready to buy goods; consequently, if the garrison has to be perpetually reinforced, if buying and selling slackens off, that is to say if manufactured and finished goods can no longer be exported, there is clear proof that the solution of military force must be set aside. a blind domination founded on slavery is not economically speaking worthwhile for the bourgeoisie of the mother country. the monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not support a government whose policy is solely that of the sword. what the factory owners and finance magnates of the mother country expect from their government is not that it should decimate the colonial peoples, but that it should safeguard with the help of economic conventions their own “legitimate interests”. thus, there exists a sort of detached complicity between capitalism and the violent forces which blaze up in colonial territory. (fanon, 1961/1963, p. 65). changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 345 from here, a new strategy of imperialism emerges, replacing bayonets with compromises: “their purpose is to capture the vanguard, to turn the movement of liberation toward the right, and to disarm the people: quick, quick, let’s decolonize. decolonize the congo before it turns into another algeria” (fanon, 1961/1963, p. 70). the thrust was based upon the marginal social groups. as clyde barrow emphasizes, “fanon was the first political theorist influenced by marx to seriously revisit the problem of the lumpenproletariat after the russian and chinese revolutions” (barrow, 2020, p. 87). the weak, greedy and corrupted bourgeois elite, which emerged within the system of colonial rule, will be unable to establish strong and healthy national states (eyo & essien, 2017, p. 69). therefore, colonies will remain economically dependent producers of raw materials, or—to use safarov’s analogy— will be “attached” to particular types of raw materials just as serfs were attached to the land: “the national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for western enterprise” (fanon, 1964/1967, p. 154). moreover, fanon was aware that while colonial rule by force is collapsing, the rising “middle-class bourgeoisie” of former colonies might easily provoke a period of inter-african wars (see: fanon, 1964/1967, p. 186). the african countries, now emerging as formally independent nation-states, will compete with each other, triggering the wave of militant nationalism: “if the national bourgeoisie goes into competition with the europeans, the artisans and craftsmen start a fight against non-national africans […] from nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism” (fanon, 1961/1963, p. 156). of course, imperialists will use tensions between african countries trying to increase their dependency upon former masters, especially in relation to the cultural and ethnic differences of the northern and southern parts of the continent. taking all that into account, fanon envisaged no place for the middle-class in the emerging african states: “the combined effort of the masses led by a party and of intellectuals who are highly conscious and armed with revolutionary principles ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful middle class” (fanon, 1961/1963, p. 175). that’s why he was proposing “african unity”, that is, “a principle on the basis of which it is proposed to achieve the united states of africa without passing through the middle-class chauvinistic national phase with its procession of wars and deathtolls” (fanon, 1961/1967, p. 187). as derek wright puts it, “the continentalist turned white racialisation of black identity to serve the purposes of a spurious cross-cultural unity” (wright, 1986, p. 680). the racial boundaries will become the basis for the creation of a state that will unite the whole continent—though fanon was aware of the differences between the northern and sub-saharan parts of africa, he believed that the common traumatic legacy of colonial rule will contribute to bringing different parts together. in addition, the slogan of the united states of africa surely echoed the slogan of the european socialist democracy of the early 20th century, namely, the united states of europe. this new state will be strong enough to protect itself against the sweeping economic penetration of former colonial powers. of course, that might result in a european blockade, aimed at throwing africa back to the new middle ages and starvation without the access to european technologies, capitals and engineers. the https://changing-sp.com/ 346 konstantin d. bugrov socialist alternative, though fanon was rather sympathetic towards soviet socialism, seemed inappropriate to him as well. he was skeptical towards any sort of the “great leap forward” to spur industrialization in a single country: “let’s be frank: we do not believe that the colossal effort which the underdeveloped peoples are called upon to make by their leaders will give the desired results. if conditions of work are not modified, centuries will be needed to humanize this world which has been forced down to animal level by imperial powers” (fanon, 1961/1963, p. 100). he emphasizes: there is no question of a return to nature. it is simply a very concrete question of not dragging men toward mutilation, of not imposing upon the brain rhythms which very quickly obliterate it and wreck it. the pretext of catching up must not be used to push man around, to tear him away from himself or from his privacy, to break and kill him. no, we do not want to catch up with anyone. (fanon, 1961/1963, p. 314) fanon saw colonial dependence not only as a system of subjugation, which permanently reproduces backwardness, but mostly as a psychological trauma, which means that colonial countries need no economic strategy of development but a psychological remedy. here, the contrast with the communist thought—be it safarov’s national-colonial revolution, or mao’s “new democracy”—is remarkably ostensible. conclusion in answering the question of how the colonial revolution is possible, different authors, following the resolution of the 2nd congress of the comintern, developed similar approaches. the vision of a peasant, “plebeian”, anti-feudal war along with the analysis of internal contradictions within the imperialist camp create for safarov, fanon and other authors the very possibility of victory. fanon thought that the great jacquerie of colonial people against the powerful imperialist exploiters could be won due to the three main factors: the internal changes in the very social organization of capitalism; the specific spirit of freedom that inflames the subjugated (similar to the spirit of the spanish guerillas who fought napoleon); and the confrontation of socialism and capitalism that undermines the positions of the west. this triad is similar to the three factors of victory in mao’s “protracted war” as well as to the broader intellectual framework once set by the comintern thinkers in the interbellum: the combination of factors internal for the oppressed (partisan warfare); for the oppressor (weakness of japan in mao’s writings and domestic changes in western politics in fanon’s texts); and the overall context of international relations, in which the soviet union plays a special role. colonialism was stripped of any progressive connotations and thought to be an ultimate evil perpetuating the backwardness of colonies. thus, colonial revolution was reduced to the liberatory war against colonialism, and as such it no longer depended upon the revolution in the west; it was not even an issue of the colony’s own economic development. changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 347 the social-economic development which was supposed to protect former colonies from an indirect “economic intervention” after the war remained a problem for the concept of colonial revolution all the way from central asia to algeria. everything that soviet and chinese thinkers could advise was forced economic development. safarov thought that the solution was the direct economic support from the soviet state, thus effectively replacing the expectations of the european revolution with the hope for soviet assistance. mao to some extent also relied on the help from abroad; nevertheless, the key issue of “new democracy” was to use domestic capitalists to drive the economy forward under the strict control of the “democratic dictatorship”. later mao also adopted the strategy of the “great leap forward”, and even after that remained faithful to the stalinist-type planned economy. fanon’s dream of a large, united african state standing against the imperialists and reducing the chauvinist tensions resembles the visions of powerful communist states of the soviet union and china. however, he defied the idea of rapid modernization under the aegis of socialism—whether in the form of the “great leap forward” or as a reliance upon the direct soviet aid. fanon also had no trust in the native bourgeoisie. emphasizing the need for psychological change rather than for “chasing someone” technologically and economically, fanon envisioned a different path, the one which eventually led to the emergence of the post-colonial paradigm with its focus upon cultural therapy rather that liberatory action, and on subalternity rather than oppression. such interpretation of fanon’s ideas has been recently developed by ranjana khanna (khanna, 2013, pp. 134–138). arif derlik summarizes it the following way: escaping into the second world of socialism, or “de-linking” from the system, were the only options available, and neither offered a satisfactory solution of the problems faced by colonial and neo-colonial societies. the first implied escaping one kind of colonialism to be entrapped in another, but without the structural integration that came with incorporation in capitalism, which at least brought some benefits with it. the other alternative meant opting out of the system only to be isolated, while leaving the system intact. (dirlik, 2002, p. 435) the formula of “another kind of colonialism” seems to be inadequate to grasp the proper relations within the socialist camp, but those former colonies and semicolonies—for instance, vietnam or cuba—which entered the global socialist system in the 1950s surely were treated within the second tradition of orthodox leninism, in which peripheral former colonies were seen as inferior and undeveloped—the same arrogant approach which enraged enver hodzha in his encounter with the soviet leadership in moscow. regardless of the terms, the “escaping into the second world” was not a simple option to choose or reject; such “escape” demanded certain historical, political and geographical conditions. unlike the soviet and chinese cases, the wave of revolutions in africa and southern asia mostly swept over the countries under direct control of colonial empires, while the soviet union was far away, both geographically and culturally. even the victory in war left former colonies vis-à-vis powerful capitalist countries, which would be able to corrupt and indirectly control the https://changing-sp.com/ 348 konstantin d. bugrov greedy and stupid native bourgeoisie. development of the theory of colonial revolution was mainly connected with the bolshevik party, where it was also used as a part of international politics securing the safety of the soviet union, and with the chinese communist party, where it opened the way for a victorious liberatory war and national revolution. it is important that these two states had a common border and, so to say, were territorially close to each other. fanon’s rejection of accelerated economic modernization as incompatible with the essence of the colonial revolution—the great jacquerie—was not an isolated phenomenon. sanjay seth connects the emergence of post-colonial theory in india with the maoist naxalite movement in india rather than with the overall disappointment in socialism. seth argues that by the mid-1960s, a new way of thinking about revolution had arisen, one more willing to use marxism for a critique of enlightenment, than to see marxism as the culmination and fulfilment of enlightenment rationalism; and one alert to the possibility that anti-colonial nationalism and the nation-states to which it gave birth may not have been the answer of the oppressed to their subordination, but yet another form of bondage to modern european knowledge and its forms of construing politics and community. (seth, 2006, p. 603) the naxalites developed the extreme form of jacquerie but the post-colonial indian thinkers like homi bhabha substituted the maoist organization with the “denial of organizational policy”, as “ambivalence is understood as the extent of politics” (hutnyk, 2003, pp. 484–485). not striving to “catch up with anyone”, unwilling (or unable) to “escape into the second world”, post-colonial thinkers developed a specific strategy of complex relations with the former colonial powers, in which “the humiliated ones” would be able to pursue their own “counter-hegemonist” strategy. these relations were no longer determined by the sheer force of imperialists, and from that point gramscian patterns became applicable to discuss and reinterpret transitional experience (bentouhami, 2014, p. 118). as arif dirlik points out, “this new emphasis helps give voice to the victimized but, in the process of rescuing the colonized from voicelessness, also blurs the depth of the victimization colonialism visited upon its ‘objects’” (dirlik, 2002, p. 433). indeed, nowadays, postcolonial theory is criticized from the position of decolonization for reproducing the colonialist structures of modernity with its strict division of object and subject (tlostanova & mignolo, 2009, pp. 130–132). the theory of colonial revolution, which goes back to the 2nd congress of the comintern, presented colonialism as an ultimate evil, incapable of bringing any progress to its victims. colonial revolution was theorized by those communist authors of the 1920s who were inclined to find conditions under which such action could lead to a victory (safarov was the most consistent there) as a national-liberatory war against the colonial regime that not only galvanizes everything reactionary and feudal in colonies, but also operates on the basis of sheer power—dreadnoughts and airplanes, without a proper social base or consent within the colony. in addition, the possibility to move directly to socialism was provided by the existence of the soviet changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 325–354 349 union, capable to help former colonies in economic, political, and military spheres. to win the war meant to succeed in the revolution, though—most probably—the ideas of safarov and other soviet thinkers were also motivated by the desire to improve the international positions of the isolated soviet state. but with the theoretical and practical triumph of mao, the strategy of a “protracted” peasant war became globally recognized; the theory of colonial revolution as a liberatory war turned out to be the working one. both the ussr and china pursued forced economic development, striving to outperform the capitalists. but as the limits of the second world were unable to broaden endlessly, the theorists of the new revolutions in colonies strove to discover a possibility to re-enter the relations with the former colonial powers. as we saw in the case of fanon’s deliberations on europe’s possible “reparations” to undo the damage done by the colonial regime, the radical break with the ex-masters was followed by entering the relations of hegemony, based on persuasion and consent rather than violent governance by the “great array of bayonets”. these new relations were described in gramscian terms of a long-term struggle over hegemony rather than in terms of forced economic build-up in the form of stalinist industrialization or maoist “great leap forward”. to sum up, the comparison of safarov and mao with fanon shows how the theory of colonial revolution as a national-liberatory war outgrows its initial sphere of use, leading the colonial peoples from the rule of sheer violence either to spaces of socialist planned autarky or to counter-hegemonic hybridity within the globally reaching capitalism. the historical-geographical peculiarities still influence the development of postcolonial studies. today, the post-colonial thought is associated mostly with southern asia and africa, the former colonies of british and french empires, while russia and china as the former “second world” and the key locations in the early development of the theoretical approach to colonial revolution are underrepresented in this field. when post-colonial studies emerged in the 1970s, the soviet communists, who once stood at the roots of this intellectual adventure, definitely lost sensitivity towards colonial issues, as illustrated by aleksander gordon’s book on fanon (gordon, 1977). the subject of this book is the “national-liberatory struggle” rather than “colonial revolution”; the legacy of the comintern is not mentioned at all, while fanon is characterized exclusively as a “humanist”; his apology of violence is downplayed, and he is compared favorably with jean-jacque rousseau. the subsequent collapse of the ussr and severe damage to the reputation of communism changed things dramatically; on the one hand, the former soviet union is studied now among other colonial empires, and on the other hand, the former center of the “second world” became part of the “poor north”, borrowing madina tlostanova’s term. the things are different in china. recently, daniel vukovich pointed at the fact that the very post-colonial agenda in chinese academia is different from the similarly named approaches in south asia or africa: the mainland intellectual political culture (to use a phrase from said) is itself in many ways postcolonial in two fundamental senses. it is deeply concerned with “becoming-the-same” as the modern, advanced west (if not outperforming https://changing-sp.com/ 350 konstantin d. bugrov it and “winning”) and with never forgetting—via education and propaganda institutions—the era of national humiliation, that is, the era of near-colonialism, the collapse of the dynastic system, disunity and chaos, and japanese invasion […] importantly, much of the chinese new left also breaks with a major political plank in western and global political thinking: it is resolutely pro-state and seeks to retain and enhance, not cut back or avoid, state capacity. (vukovich, 2017, pp. 149, 153) there is sound critique of post-colonial paradigm from the chinese authors: it is not wrong that post-colonialism pays attention to “uncovering the secret” and “decoding” western cultural hegemony. the problem is that it unilaterally emphasizes the importance of language on decolonization of thought and addicts itself to discourse, but cares little about the social, political, and economic system and other forms of social practice. (yang & zhang, 2006, p. 293) the growth of china’s technological and economic strength and its increasing “economic colonization” across africa and eastern asia, which is yet to be considered through the lens of post-colonial theory, might become a decisive factor to re-evaluate the concepts of coloniality and dependence in the near future, so some new twists to the century-old tale of colonial revolution are to be expected. references ahmad, a. (2011). on post modernism. the marxist, 27(1), 4–38. barrow, c. w. 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(originally published in russian 1915) http://www.jstor.org/stable/40401942 https://doi.org/10.2307/2170830 https://doi.org/10.2307/2170830 http://www.jstor.org/stable/161245 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11466-006-0009-4 https://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloxxi/congreso/young_15abr03.pdf key: cord-0060864-rzk0idh1 authors: scheiring, gábor title: conclusions date: 2020-08-27 journal: the retreat of liberal democracy doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-48752-2_8 sha: a92b9dd0509286458303aeb337015377dde2d5a6 doc_id: 60864 cord_uid: rzk0idh1 what theoretical and practical conclusions can we draw from the retreat of liberal democracy, the rise of hybrid authoritarian capitalism and the accumulative state in hungary? are the theoretical approaches described in the introduction capable of providing a plausible explanation for the retreat of liberal democracy? how does the accumulative state relate to other, historically existing models of authoritarian state capitalism in an international context? what insights does the causal mechanism of hungary’s authoritarian turn offer for the theory of illiberalism? this chapter attempts to answer these questions. after looking at the causal mechanism from a bird’s-eye view, the chapter summarises the lessons this mechanism presents by drawing the conclusions from the preceding chapters. next, it analyses the international and historical context by analysing the varieties of authoritarian state capitalisms. finally, the chapter concludes with broader theoretical and political lessons. let us face the 'whodunnit' question right away: who brought down liberal democracy? the answer that this book presented is relational. it is not just demagogic political rogues. it is not foreign powers and not merely global capitalism. it is definitely not the masses with a purported anti-liberal serf-mentality. the answer lies in a changing field of power that can be summed up in one long sentence. exploiting the countermovement of the working class that was left behind by the transition, by the liberal elites and by the political left without any possibility to control new capitalist social relations or express their anger using a class-based narrative, the weak but growing national bourgeoisie, propelled by a desire to get on an equal footing with the dominant transnational capitalists, allied with nationalist politicians to prop up capital accumulation, pre-empting the dissent of the victims of the new accumulation strategy with a political cocktail of institutional authoritarianism and authoritarian populism. figure 8 .1 presents an overview of the causal mechanism behind the retreat of liberal democracy and the rise of the accumulative state. the levels of international structures, social mechanisms and institutions, and observable political phenomena are represented separately, with two double lines indicating critical turning points. the figure also presents the most critical policies through which political actors influence deep structural mechanisms. the starting point in the figure is 1990, but this does not mean that the legacy of state socialism is irrelevant. the book and the figure focus on the processes that ensued after the regime change, which are crucial to decipher hungary's authoritarian turn. dependent integration into the global capitalist economy provides the broad international structural background, interacting with domestic political processes and policies. this interaction-the governance of dependence-generates the two crucial social mechanisms overlooked in the literature: the countermovement of the working class and the national bourgeoisie. rooted in misgoverned dependent development, this countermovement created the structural conditions that paved the way for the accumulative state. the political class played a constitutive role in this process. on the one hand, the postsocialist political class failed to institutionalise a social-democratic social coalition to stabilise liberal democracy. this resulted in deficient industrial policies and the formation of a vestigial welfare state. on the other hand, the illiberal right was instrumental in giving political weight to the countermovement of the working class and the national bourgeoisie. international economic integration, without adequate industrial policies, led to domestic economic disintegration and the polarisation of the business class. the national bourgeoisie could not catch up with the international capitalist class, nor could it break into the high value added segments of the market. a weak but growing national capitalist class thus clashed with the power bloc of transnational capital and technocrats, who acquired dominant positions after the regime change and institutionalised the competition state and the simulated liberal democracy. the other crucial mechanism is social disintegration, which happens in the absence of a capacity enhancing developmental state. the working class was not part of the democratic class compromise. workers experienced the transition to capitalism as class dislocation. the vestigial welfare state could stabilise this simulated liberal democracy only temporarily. by the second half of the 2000s, the pension system was no longer suitable for pacifying younger generations, employment and wages stagnated and debt-driven consumption (foreign currency loans) also proved unsustainable. this facilitated the countermovement of the working class and the erosion of the postsocialist liberal hegemony. the leaders of fidesz recognised the strategic opportunity that these two structural processes opened. they used it to fundamentally rearrange the institutional infrastructure and change the dominant power coalition. all this, by emancipating national capitalists and forging a new pact with transnational capital, positioning themselves as representatives of the national bourgeoisie and disgruntled workers. however, after 2010, the new accumulation strategy increased the vulnerability of the working class and the subproletariat. the accumulative state is relying on authoritarian political solutions to prevent a countermovement of the victims of capital accumulation, involving an institutional bricolage to tilt the playing field towards themselves and to hinder political competition (institutional authoritarianism) and exploiting non-class moral hierarchies to legitimise its rule in the lower classes (authoritarian populism). using a wide variety of new empirical data as a result of extensive mixed-method research, the book outlined a causal mechanism-a chain of interlinked causal components-behind the retreat of liberal democracy in a puzzling case, hungary. this causal mechanism is relevant beyond a single case. the book followed the approach of theory-building process tracing, where the empirical analysis of the causal mechanism within a case serves the development of generalisable theoretical knowledge. the intention was not to offer a sufficient-that is, full-causal explanation of the retreat of liberal democracy in hungary but to build a theory that presents a specific set of interlinked causal components behind democratic backsliding in the context of dependent development. what are these theoretically relevant, interlinked components of the causal mechanism? chapter 3 examined the competition state by analysing a new database on the economic policy elite, following the methodology of power structure analysis (domhoff, 2006) . right-wing and left-wing economic policy elites were embedded in the two factions of the capitalist class in different ways. the chapter revealed the existence of robust revolving doors between transnational capital, the banking sector and the left-wing economic policy elite. within the bureaucracy, there is a distinction between the block connected to the western sector, and the one that is tied to the domestic sector, with the former becoming dominant (szalai, 2001, p. 190) . market fundamentalist technocrats were particularly strong on the left. the revolving doors between the right-wing economic policy elite and national capitalists emerged only gradually from the second half of the 2000s. despite these differences, transnational capital enjoyed an undisturbed privileged position between 1990 and 2010 (king, 2007) . the power bloc formed by transnational corporations (tncs) and local technocrats institutionalised the competition state (drahokoupil, 2008a (drahokoupil, , 2008b . globalisation does not happen to the state but is constructed by actors who enter and exit through the revolving doors (cerny, 1997) . the dominance of transnational capital is not only a consequence of its structural power, that is its role in employment and growth. the revolving doors that connect transnational capital and the banking sector with the policy elites translated the structural power of capital into the tactical field of institutional power. the dominance of transnational capital and the careers of market fundamentalist policymakers are closely linked: economic policymakers passing through the revolving doors simultaneously secure power positions for themselves and for transnational capital as well. economic policy experts competed against each other for financially and symbolically profitable relationships with transnational corporations. this ideological bidding war is a struggle for recognition in the symbolic order dominated by transnational capital. thus, transnational capital generates competition between members of the policy elites as well, not only between states. those who proved to be good local managers of the world order based on transnational capital, who understood the language, the cultural codes and technologies of the new symbolic order, had the highest chance of finding jobs at transnational corporations, international banks and financial institutions. under the hegemony of transnational corporations, neoliberal economics is the preferred symbolic currency. in its struggle for recognition, the economic policy elite uses market fundamentalist discourses in the symbolic field of global power (bockman & eyal, 2002; eyal, 2000; gagyi, 2016; szalai, 2001) . bureaucrats, driven by their need to justify their commitment to the west, compete within the state bureaucracy for connection with the transnational, cosmopolitan 'world'. they generate ideologies that they present as the norm, claiming that these are in the universal interest of society. this normalises the hegemony of transnational capital. as konrád and szelényi (1979) highlighted it in their classic work, the intellectuals on the road to class power, intellectuals of every era describe themselves ideologically. this means intellectuals present themselves according to their partial interests. although these interests may differ during specific historical periods, the common interest of intellectuals is always to pose their partial interests as humanity's common interests. chapter 3 showed that the views of market fundamentalists led to a mix of economic policies that provided multiple advantages to transnational capital, limiting the formation of national capital and eroding the financial and social capacities of the state. this ideological bidding war pushed the hungarian state-and most other east-central european states-to behave like the vanguard of neoliberalism, implementing avant-garde neoliberal policies beyond the direct expectations of tncs (appel & orenstein, 2018) . transnational capitalists actively lobbied for tax reductions, fuelling the race to the bottom on taxation. however, transnational capital involved in technology-intensive production supported the development of education and healthcare systems, as well as corporate and state social welfare policies to retain educated labourers. technological tncs also demonstrated more tolerance for trade union activity and provided higher wages than domestic companies. these policy preferences did not always meet with the policies of market fundamentalists. in short, market fundamentalists' competition for recognition led to public policies that went beyond the policy expectations of transnational capital. the competition state was not a developmental state. it did not seek to reorganise or modernise state-owned companies. on the contrary, the competition state's policies were directly responsible for the bankruptcy of a large number of integrated companies. it failed to enforce technology spillover from transnational corporations to the domestic economy. finally, postsocialist policy elites failed to install a capability enhancing developmental state that builds on long-term investments in education and healthcare (evans, 2014) . instead, they relied on a vestigial welfare state to temporarily pacify the victims of the market transition, as per the politics of patience (bohle & greskovits, 2012; bruszt, 1998) . as a consequence, the competition state failed to prevent domestic social and economic disintegration in the wake of dependent international integration. the competition state is, of course, a theoretical construct. the states and governmental practices that exist in reality always show a more complex picture. before 2010, the hungarian state was not a pure competition state; competition for international capital was not the only determinant of its operation. the working class provided external support for the ruling power bloc, which affected government decisionmaking. the national capitalists were also not merely victims of the pre-2010 regime. the initial capital and income redistribution related to privatisation allowed the emergence and wealth accumulation of the hungarian propertied class. however, national capitalists remained weak, and the dominant power bloc lost the external support of the workers. the competition state proved to be insufficient to counterbalance the domestic disintegration rooted in dependent international integration. liberal theories of the market transition suggested that economic liberalisation, privatisation and the abandonment of industrial policy would generate positive processes both in the economy and in society (fischer & gelb, 1991) . market fundamentalists speculated that, by dismantling the socialist economy, deindustrialisation would result in growth in the short term, as higher productivity and profitability of the new transnational capital trickles down and spills over (lipton & sachs, 1992, p. 214) . chapter 4 showed that the expected positive spill-over effect of transnational capital did not happen. contrary to neoclassical growth theory but in line with the structuralist theory of premature deindustrialisation (rodrik, 2016) , the disintegration of vertical relationships in the manufacturing industry not only contributed to the economic crisis after the regime change but also undermined the growth potential of the economy in the long run (blanchard & kremer, 1997) . the financial capacity of the hungarian state declined, while the idea of industrial policy became stigmatised. the lack of industrial policy is a crucial factor behind the misgovernance of dependency. this highlights the need to build theories of democratisation on structuralist economics (amsden, kochanowicz, & taylor, 1994; andor & summers, 1998; evans, 1979; stiglitz, 1999; wade, 2005) , as opposed to neoclassical economics preferred by market fundamentalists. however, dependent integration into the capitalist world economy does not automatically produce domestic disintegration (king, 2000) . burawoy, for example, emphasised that the consequence of integration into the international economy is dis-accumulation (burawoy, 2001, p. 280) . david harvey (2005a) called the international integration of postsocialist economies accumulation by dispossession. technological decline and the increased competition that ensued after the economic liberalisation did cause damage to hungarian-owned companies in the first half of the 1990s. however, from the second half of the 2000s, the technological complexity of tncs increased. this played a significant role in export-driven economic growth and engendered a partial reindustrialisation (barta, czirfusz, & kukely, 2008) . these positive economic effects of transnational capital are not consistent with the strong version of dependency theory but fit in well with the theory of dependent development put forward by cardoso and faletto (1979) and evans (1979) . the weakness of the domestic manufacturing industry has long-lasting adverse consequences for the economy and the polity (ellingstad, 1997; hirschman, 1958; kaldor, 1981; myrdal, 1957; wade, 1990) . the economic sector dominated by foreign investors can manufacture products of high technological complexity for export, while hungarian-owned companies cannot get on an equal footing with transnational capital. national capitalists were pushed back to the labour-intensive sectors and supplied low-value-added inputs (construction, agriculture, tourism, logistics, food), relying on cheap wage labour. in line with the theory of new economic geography and unequal development (fujita, krugman, & venables, 2001; harvey, 2005b) , regional differences were also remarkably high in hungary before 2010. this disintegrated economic structure led to the polarisation of the business class and provided the structural background for the countermovement of the national bourgeoisie. transnational companies carrying out knowledge-intensive manufacturing demand more skilled labour, and they are more tolerant towards trade unions and less opposed to education and welfare services than hungarian companies. by contrast, hungarian-owned companies engage in labour-intensive production, and high wages retard their growth prospects, have less demand for skilled and cooperative labour and are less tolerant for trade unions. unskilled workers are involved in global production networks as cheap and vulnerable workers, often working in companies producing for the local market. in-work poverty is increasing among them, and they suffer from downward mobility (standing, 2010) . the postsocialist political class pacified the victims of the market transition through a robust unemployment benefit system, prolonged state ownership in some sectors and through various forms of early retirement. these policies played a significant role in stabilising the transition, as the theory of the politics of patience suggests (bohle & greskovits, 2012; bruszt, 1998) . this welfare state was far from premature; its expenditures were below the international level in almost all categories, even though hungarian welfare systems had to tackle far more severe social problems than their western european counterparts. the ensuing vestigial welfare state was not hindering liberal reforms. on the contrary, it was their primary safeguard, as it ensured the temporal legitimacy of simulated liberal democracy. these strategies were no longer sustainable in the second half of the 2000s. the financial capacity of the hungarian state was continually decreasing due to the downward tax competition. at this point, politics tried to boost consumption by facilitating private lending. however, this strategy also exploded with the 2008 financial crisis, and it did not provide a solution for the youngest, who had the highest unemployment rates and were thus strongly pitted against the liberal status quo. workers grew disillusioned with the market transition and the political class but not with democracy. as bohle and greskovits concluded in their recent essay, 'the dominant perception proved to be illusory in that it exaggerated the blessings and downplayed the inherent risks of rapid integration' (bohle & greskovits, 2019b) . these structural problems were not limited to public and private debts (bohle, 2018) , encompassing deeper social and economic processes. the chapter highlighted these deeper social and economic processes relying on the so far neglected notion of disintegration, borrowed from earlier waves of latin american dependency and structuralist scholarship (evans, 1979, pp.14-55; hirschman, 2013 hirschman, [1977 ; sunkel, 1973) . the stability of democratic social coalitions in semi-peripheral economies depends on how they use the state to address the tensions emanating from dependency. international integration leads to domestic disintegration if the political class misgoverns dependency. chapter 5 presented the results of a computer-assisted qualitative thematic analysis of 82 interviews conducted in four mid-sized towns in the hungarian rust belt. extending polanyi's theory of commodification and countermovement, the chapter followed a geographically and culturally sensitive class concept. it relied on barrington moore's (1978) notion of the implicit social contract to capture the complex entanglement of economy, culture and changing narrative identity. the results show that socialism institutionalised an implicit social contract comprising morals regarding authority, the division of labour and the distribution of goods and services. this moral framework embedded workers' everyday experience of economic change, as they compared their experience to their past, their future and relevant reference groups. following existing research (bartha, 2011) , the chapter showed that in the early 1990s, the majority of workers readily accepted capitalism and expected their living standards to improve with the arrival of transnational corporations. however, the majority of workers experienced the postsocialist commodification rooted in the market transition as a process of class dislocation. the liquidation of socialist companies hastened the dissolution of local communities, local cultural and sports life and eroded workers' place-based identities. the long-lasting shock of the 'half-life of deindustrialisation' transpired strongly through every interview, long after plants closed down. this echoes workers' experience in deindustrialised towns in the west, where research has found a similar long-lasting degradation (strangleman, 2018) , and fits in well with the research on the everyday experience of austerity (hall, 2019) . the results are also in accordance with the research that has shown that the expansion of the private sector has led to a rise in income inequality (bandelj & mahutga, 2010; mahutga & jorgenson, 2016) , as well as mortality inequality (scheiring et al., 2018; scheiring et al., 2019) . the interviews also revealed that workers' sense of control also waned. large-sample surveys carried out in the first years of the transition confirm this loss of control (simon, 1993, pp. 232-234) . this sense of powerlessness is also similar to the experience of workers in western europe or the united states, as the success of the slogan 'taking back control' during the brexit campaign also shows. the combination of the multiscalar perceptions of injustice, the feeling of being left behind and powerlessness fuelled workers' desperation and overall disappointment with postsocialist capitalism in the second half of the 2000s (pew research centre, 2009). several interviewees saw the working class as the victim of the transition, abandoned by the socialist party and trade unions. the collapse of companies and the concomitant erosion of place-based identities and company communities further contributed to the disintegration of the working class and the decline of the sense of control. the dominant power bloc that institutionalised the simulated liberal democracy and the competition state did not recognise working-class demands as legitimate (buchowski, 2006) , and concentrated instead on identity politics, remedying the grievances of the ethnicised subproletariat (friedman, 2003; gowan, 2001) . the ensuing technocratic and cosmopolitan discourse of democratisation was in contrast with workers' everyday experience (grzebalska & pető, 2018) . the socialist party, governing with technocratic liberals, was perceived to be deeply involved in implementing the commodifying reforms. trade unions were also weak. as a consequence, the symbolism of the class language lost its power. workers' shared experience of class dislocation did not lead to the development of a shared class-based narrative about the market transition. this also means that the conditions for a progressive countermovement to emerge in response to the crisis of neoliberalism were dim-hungary did not experience the rise of movements like the occupy movement in the west or the anti-austerity movements in mediterranean countries (toplišek, 2019) . at this point, the nation became the collective narrative identity that not only provided a sense of community and belonging for those feeling left behind but also gave workers a language to tell their stories about the transition in the first-person plural. the nation as a moral community involves rules about the distribution of power, assets, status and rewards, thus has the potential to act as a discursive container to hold the elements of the implicit social contract. qualitative research among white londoners showed that english nationalism is also associated with a sense of cooperation and community (leddy-owen, 2014). nationalism is a powerful tool to create a perception of commonality of interests and bridge working-class subcultures in different regions, acting as a robust master frame. despite the associations between nationalism and solidarity, the interviews also showed strong indications of a two-pronged exclusion as proposed by the theory of neo-nationalism (gingrich & banks, 2006) . different types of elites appear to threaten the nation as a solidarity community from above, such as transnational capital, cosmopolitans, liberal reformers and corrupt politicians. workers also assessed national and international capital differently. this moral double standard might explain why workers can empathise with the revolt of the national capital against transnational capital, even if this involves high-level corruption or redistribution of resources to the top at the expense of workers. the post-2010 alliance of transnational and national capital and nationalist politicians can exploit these ambivalences of working-class neo-nationalism. some workers also grew increasingly hostile towards the subproletariat comprising the long-term unemployed, precarious workers of the informal economy, migrants and various minorities. thomas, busher, macklin, rogerson, and christmann (2017) found a similar tension between inclusion and exclusion in white working-class communities in a small english town. as barrington moore (1978, p. 35 ) summarised the vast historical experience, 'the person who is being deprived of his or her property by impersonal social forces is often the one most eager to apply severe social sanctions against the idler, even though both of them may be suffering from the same set of impersonal social forces.' this way, neo-nationalism became intertwined with racism. however, as flemmen and savage (2017) also pointed out using survey data, the nationalism of the 'disenfranchised' is anti-establishment nationalism. the interviews analysed in this book also show that anti-elite sentiments and the experience of downward mobility are intertwined with the cultural distinctions that workers are making. the distinction between worthy and unworthy workers is a tool to achieve recognition. fidesz also had a constitutive role in creating a new hegemonic alliance exploiting and feeding workers' neo-nationalist countermovement. szombati (2018) highlighted that the competition between jobbik and fidesz profoundly contributed to the mainstreaming of avant-garde fringe-nationalism in a hegemonic culture in hungarian villages. the migration crisis that hit the country in 2015 also provided an opportunity for fidesz to connect global economic and migratory turbulences (bocskor, 2018) , and the favourable economic environment also contributed the legitimacy of the new hegemonic alliance. however, the interviews have shown that neo-nationalism is an 'emplotted narrative' (somers, 1994) built on the lived experience of the working class as the market transition violated the implicit social contract. neo-nationalism did not arise from a historically determined anti-liberal legacy as some suggest (dawson & hanley, 2016; ekiert, 2012; rupnik, 2016; skidelsky, 2019) . in contrast to the proposition of some elite-based accounts (fukuyama, 2012; müller, 2011) , neo-nationalism is also not just artificially constructed from above by political demagogues. neo-nationalism is a response to the experience of class dislocation. critical modernisation theorists (ágh, 2016; krastev, 2016 ) and world-systems analysts came closer to understanding the relevance of working-class dislocation as a crucial factor behind illiberalism. however, the failure of liberalism to deliver or the structural constraints of the world economy are never directly translated into particular identities and agency. victims never revolt automatically driven by objective indicators of deprivation. remedying this conceptual shortcoming, chap. 5 emphasised the role of lived experience and the implicit social contract (hann, 2010; moore, 1978) . poland was the first country to experience the rise of illiberal right as a countermovement to postsocialist neoliberalism. however, these rightwing populist movements did not challenge neoliberalism but transformed it into a new, nationalist variety, paradoxically co-opting workers into the neoliberal project (gökarıksel, 2017; shields, 2014) . kalb's (2009) fieldwork among polish workers in wroclaw uncovered quite similar processes behind the rise of working-class neo-nationalism as shown in chap. 5 of this book, including community decline, outmigration, criminal privatisations, the perception of powerlessness and the betrayal by formerly trusted political elites. elsewhere, kalb also highlighted the role of hungary in upscaling illiberalism from a national to regional strategy in east-central europe (kalb, 2018) . ost (2006) also described the increasing gap between trade union organisers and increasingly anti-labour liberal politicians. ost (2018) also emphasised the lack of a class-based working-class language as a precondition for the success of illiberalism. he differentiated between the industrial working-class that supports illiberalism and white-collar labourers in large cities that tend to oppose it. hann (2019) identified similar social dynamics in rural areas in central hungary, showing that disillusionment with postsocialist liberals and liberalism is a crucial factor behind the popularity of the right in rural small towns. a new strand of qualitative research in the wake of the trump and brexit shocks has also shown that working-class populism in the united states and united kingdom also reflects rising social and regional polarisation, the sense of being left behind as new regional economic centres emerge (hochschild, 2018; mcquarrie, 2017) . at the intersection of global processes and local political-cultural path dependencies, local instances of the neo-nationalist countermovement take various forms. however, reading these works together, it becomes evident that western and eastern european neo-nationalist populisms share similar roots and are related to the lived experience of class in the context of globalisation. as most eastern european states went further in adapting avant-garde neoliberalism (appel & orenstein, 2018) , they are now the avant-garde of the neo-nationalist countermovement, but the roots are similar (kalb, 2019) . modernisation theorists hoped that privatisation might give rise to a new propertied class that would have a vested interest in political liberalisation, the security of property rights and a predictable political competition; thus it would demand a liberal institutional system and liberal economic policy (balcerowicz, 2002; boycko, shleifer, vishny, fischer, & sachs, 1993, p. 147) . they also hypothesised that dependent industrialisation, through foreign investment, would facilitate democratic consolidation and that a domestic bourgeoisie can be replaced by capitalists 'imported' from abroad. however, chap. 6 pointed out that this 'dependency optimism' and the belief in the inherently prodemocratic, pro-liberal nature of the bourgeoisie was unfounded. chapter 6 relied on dependent development theory (cardoso & faletto, 1979; evans, 1995; wade, 2003) , and differentiated between national capitalists and transnational capital. the national bourgeoisie was not dissolved in the new, global capitalist class (robinson, 2004; sklair, 2001) . the chapter also identified the five major factions of the national bourgeoisie supporting fidesz: (1) political capitalists, (2) committed conservatives, (3) emerging capitalists, (4) co-opted capitalists and (5) passive acquiescing capitalists. political capitalists are party loyalist oligarchs whose accumulation strongly depends on fidesz. their stories can be well analysed relying on state capture theory. however, the other factions of the national bourgeoisie require an approach that goes beyond neo-utilitarian corruption research and the notion of crony capitalism. the money lavishly distributed by the fidesz governments does not explain the right-wing affiliation of committed conservatives. they approach their business on an ideological basis, and political connections were less important in their capital accumulation than in the case of political capitalists. the majority of emerging capitalists are garage entrepreneurs who started small; most of them made their wealth in the socialist second economy, and proudly declare that they did not take part in privatisation. their preference for fidesz is rooted in their economic nationalism, their fierce competition with transnational capital and the economic policies of left-wing governments that were hostile against national capitalists. some co-opted capitalists allied with fidesz because of their economic nationalism as well, while other co-opted capitalist applies a simple cost-benefit analysis and regard the price of dissent too high. finally, the passive, acquiescing group includes capitalists whose political preferences are unknown, but they do nothing to prevent the evolution of authoritarian capitalism, thus in this sense they contribute to the stabilisation of fidesz's power. the chapter also demonstrated that 94% (50 people) of the 53 rightwing capitalists in the database employ unskilled labour, or the technological complexity of the work processes does not play any role in their companies. the concentration of national capitalists in non-tech sectors underscores the highlights of the relevance of analysing the interests of economic actors based on their sector-specific production profiles, as structuralist economists suggested (domhoff & webber, 2011; greskovits, 2003; hirschman, 2013 hirschman, [1977 ; kinderman, 2008) . companies participating in labour-intensive production, or production that does not require technology, have a vested interest in an institutional structure that enhances the vulnerability of the labour force and decreases the tax burden, as they do not require skilled labour, nor do they use complicated technology. national capitalists are also considerably more hostile to wage increase than transnational capital. instead, they are more interested in cutting down educational, healthcare and social expenses. they also place less emphasis on institutional quality (transparency, fight against corruption, predictability), and they strongly oppose unilateral support for transnational capital. national capitalists expect the state to support them in their efforts to successfully compete with tncs. chapter 6 showed that in the second half of the 2000s, the national bourgeoisie turned against the power bloc institutionalising the competition state, and it began to embrace economic nationalism. fidesz actively strived to infuse dispersed dissatisfaction among national capitalists and to organise their political representation. from 2002, fidesz carried out an economic-nationalist turn, sidelined the market fundamentalists who were close to the party before and developed a new programme promising to boost national capital accumulation. thus, the ambivalent relationship between national capitalists and the political right, one of the main characteristics of the 1990s, transformed into mutual support, while the left preserved its privileged relationship with transnational capitalists. therefore, the emergence of illiberal social coalitions, in part, depends on how well semi-peripheral developmental states can mitigate the disintegrating effects of global economic integration. without effective industrial policies, dependent development leads to domestic economic disintegration and might fuel an economic-nationalist countermovement among the domestic bourgeoisie. the polarisation of the capitalist class, that is, the increasing differences between transnational and domestic capital can prompt the domestic bourgeoisie to abandon earlier alliances to seek the protection of illiberal nationalist politicians. world-systems analysts were able to predict the social and political problems arising from dependency (amin, 1977; böröcz, 1999; burawoy, 2001; lane, 2013) . however, they did not always differentiate 1 between the institutional preferences of international and national capitalists, which is best exemplified by wilkin (2016) . in short, the dominance of transnational capital does not lead directly or automatically to the retreat of liberal democracy. the political class has a crucial role, partly due to the way they used the state, partly in connection to how the political class contributed to the emergence of a new class coalition. in contrast to hungary, the main opposition party in illiberal poland, the civic platform (po), has excellent connections to national capitalists and used the state apparatus to facilitate the growth of domestic businesses while in government (naczyk, 2014) . polish governments were more inclined to utilise developmental state policies throughout the transition years (bruszt & karas, 2019; bruszt & langbein, 2019) . therefore, the polish economic elite was less polarised, and there was less room for kaczynski's party to organise disillusioned capitalists. the polarisation of the business class is taking place in the capitalist core as well. the us economy is polarised between the new economy/old economy elite, as well as between domestically oriented and internationally oriented segments, with the two partially overlapping. domestically and internationally oriented capitalists also show divergent interests in russia, the latter being more open to putin's neoliberal opposition (lane, 2017) . future research should analyse in more detail how illiberal leaders can attract the support of locally oriented economic elites outside the globalised economic segments. chapter 7 presented further evidence that the stability of the post-2010 illiberal regime rests, in part, on the support of a broad segment of the national capitalist class, going beyond political capitalists, including emerging co-opted and passive capitalists as well. unable to challenge the dominance of transnational capital (bohle & greskovits, 2019a; gerőcs & pinkasz, 2018) , the national bourgeoisie and nationalist politicians entered into a new class compromise with tncs. foreign capital in the technological sectors is also an important pillar underpinning the stability of the post-2010 regime. incorporating the national bourgeoisie into the dominant power bloc resulted in a tighter fusion of economic power and state power, launching a series of new political instruments to prop up capital accumulation. this new state regime is a reinvention of the historical model of the accumulative state (staples, 1991; wolfe, 1977) , fitting well into the world of authoritarian state capitalisms. the accumulative state replaced the competition state, which rested on an alliance between transnational capital and domestic technocrats and as a growth model, prioritised the extensive accumulation of foreign capital. in the process of constructing the accumulative state, fidesz became a corporative state party. fidesz as an organisation, the state and the channels of interest representation all merged in a strongly corporatist way. loyalty to the political class is the dominant coordination mechanism in the state apparatus. this is fundamentally in conflict with the rationalism of rule-based weberian bureaucracy, the backbone of the developmental state. the accumulative state subordinated the operation of the state to the wealth accumulation of the three main segments of the new power bloc (fidesz, national capitalists, transnational capital). without an autonomous, rule-based weberian bureaucracy, the state cannot implement long-term goals and cannot withstand the short-term pressures from the power bloc. therefore, in contrast to some arguments (györgy, 2017; wilkin, 2016) , the accumulative state is not a developmental state. chapter 7 identified 11 major instruments designed to prop up capital accumulation supporting each segment of the business class. public procurement is the only instrument that primarily favours political capitalists. however, public investments also have a significant role in making up for the dwindling foreign capital; thus, they contribute to stabilising the economy, which favours every capitalist. property rights actions and new surtaxes primarily favour political capitalists, co-opted capitalists and emerging capitalists, but disadvantage transnational capitalists active in non-technological sectors. new revolving doors strengthen the position of political, emerging and co-opted capitalists. direct financial subsidies (special government decisions) also show a decisive move towards increased support for national capitalists, although transnational capitalists also receive more money than before 2010. at the same time, new economic partnerships directly pacify transnational capital. concerning the race to the bottom on corporate taxation, the accumulative state went further than its predecessor, transforming hungary into a veritable tax haven (9% corporate tax). the new flat income tax (15%), as well as the restructuring of social protection, aids the embourgeoisement of the upper middle class redistributing resources from low-income to high-income strata. increasing the supply of low-skilled labour serves the needs of national capitalists. ensuring flexible labour supply and reducing trade union rights are beneficial for both international and national capitalists. the expansionary monetary policy and the strictly enforced austerity regime benefit every segment of the business class. except for the public procurement system, the instruments of the accumulative state are impossible to interpret on the grounds of neoutilitarian state theory. it is a gross misunderstanding to label the accumulative as an illegitimate 'mafia state' (magyar, 2016) , or as pure crony capitalism (tóth & hajdu, 2016) . weberian theories that do not presuppose the anti-business character of the state and the superiority of liberal capitalism are more consistent with the results presented in chap. 7. these approaches emphasise the strengthening of patronage and patrimonialism, without questioning that authoritarian turns are embedded in the structure of capitalism (csillag & szelényi, 2015; sallai & schnyder, 2020; szanyi, 2017) . however, the emancipation of national capitalists and the strengthening of patrimonial political loyalty as a coordination mechanism weakened the autonomous, rule-based bureaucracy thus eviscerating the developmental capacities of the state. long-term development requires investment in human capital and technology. however, after 2010, higher education enrolment rates plummeted, so did the performance of primary and secondary education institutions, the knowledge intensity of the economy and the technological composition of exports. despite the extra resources allocated to national capitalists, the disintegration of the hungarian economy did not decrease, and the gap between the productivity of foreign capital and national capital even increased slightly. the new accumulative state prioritises short-term accumulation focusing on the labour-intensive mode of production of national capitalists. hungary thus remains locked in its role as low-value-added assembly platform in global technological value chains. being involved in labour-intensive production, the accelerated capital accumulation of national capitalists rests on cheap and flexible labour, and access to markets dominated by transnational corporations in nontech sectors. to achieve the accelerated capital accumulation of national capitalists and the embourgeoisement of the upper middle class, the government systematically interfered with the existing structure of property and social rights. the government moved from the vestigial welfare state to a pro-natalist workfare state, dismantled trade unions and all major institutional forms of the interest representation of the socially vulnerable. this economic-nationalist turn went against a significant part of the working class, transnational companies in the non-tech non-tradable sectors and some smaller domestic entrepreneurs, who were in the way of national capitalists. to stabilise the new illiberal hegemony, fidesz adopted an authoritarian strategy combining institutional authoritarianism and authoritarian populism (scheiring & szombati, 2020) . institutional authoritarianism serves to limit the rise of a competitive civic and political opposition by recourse to a hybrid institutional bricolage, which preserves the façade of democratic institutions but tilts the political playing field to the advantage of the ruling party (bozóki & hegedűs, 2018) . authoritarian populist initiatives-such as pro-natalist and workfare policies, the securitisation of the southern border, and moralising social protectionist discourses-spur competition and prevent inter-class alliances, while also fabricate a shared sense of identity by superficially creating looming external threats. these authoritarian populist tactics address real problems, but in a way that represents these problems within a logic of discourse (social darwinism), which systematically pulls them into line with policies and class strategies of illiberal power holders. while most hungarians are critical of the wealth accumulation of the regime, the discursive and policy tactics policies mentioned above have made orbán's politics tolerable to broad segments of the electorate. orbán has successfully polarised politics along the nationalist-cosmopolitan axis, articulating a neo-nationalist vision. after the 2008 financial crisis, the restructuring of global value chains generated an upswing. this was also fuelled by an unprecedented liquidity boom created by the world's leading central banks, which also helped to stabilise the illiberal hegemony by contributing to economic and wage growth. wages and the employment level began to increase; the financial vulnerability of families declined. in turn, the number of precarious jobs increased and income and wealth inequalities skyrocketed. except for the top 10%, the income gap between the west and hungary did not decrease. the value of financial assets held by the richest increased by almost 70%, while the wealth increase of the bottom 80% of society did not significantly exceed 10% between 2010 and 2017. although orbán's illiberal state does not seek to close the structural gap between core and semi-periphery through development policy and does not promote social mobility to help individuals, the regime provides a minimum of social and identarian protection and a sense of belonging to those who live on the 'periphery's periphery'. the combination of the upward economic cycle, institutional authoritarianism and authoritarian populism offers a potent mix to stabilise the post-2010 regime. although fidesz prides itself on breaking with liberalism, and in the realm of political institutions the break is indeed fundamental, the new regime's socio-economic policies have radicalised certain neoliberal tendencies. they abandoned some elements of the pre-2010 accumulation strategy in their economic policies, but at the same time, they also enhanced competition for transnational capital in technological sectors. their social policy underfunds healthcare and education, dismantles universal social protection and curtails labour rights. in this sense, the argument that illiberalism is a new authoritarian form of neoliberalism is an accurate description of the post-2010 regime (bruff, 2014; fabry & sandbeck, 2018; stubbs & lendvai-bainton, 2019) . finally, chap. 7 also showed that the state is not a mere instrument serving capital, as instrumentalist marxists claimed (miliband, 1969) . the political class is a social group with its own interests and internal logic, whose power derives from direct control over the state apparatuses. the political class and the various factions of capital have a conflictridden relationship. to capture the conflict between capitalists and the political class, chap. 7 suggested hirschman's model of exit-voiceloyalty. exit is an option for transnational capitalists, and many of them have been using it in the energy, banking and media sectors. a large segment of national capitalists benefits from the system, therefore they remain loyal. those who do not benefit have so far failed to voice their criticisms. the political class acts demonstratively against national capitalist's expressions of dissent, thus driving up the perceived cost of dissent, which also contributes to maintaining loyalty as a dominant strategy. the interventions of the accumulative state are not a deviation from some kind of natural, liberal equilibrium. it is a way to manage semi-peripheral capitalism, incorporating many elements of the neoliberal agenda into a new authoritarian accumulative strategy. hungary's economic model after 2010 is a form of hybrid authoritarian state capitalism. there is a renewed interest in state capitalism after 2008 as new forms of state intervention became increasingly prevalent (bloom, 2016; nölke, 2014) . however, not all forms of state capitalism are authoritarian. state capitalism relies on significant ownership or control of capital to steer economic development (alami & dixon, 2020) , while authoritarian capitalism is a variant 'state intervention that denies certain individual's fundamental political and economic rights' (sallai & schnyder, 2020, p. 3) . the political economy literature has identified many forms of authoritarian state capitalism. where is the post-2010 hungarian regime located on this map? in what way is it similar to, and how does it differ from other models? table 8 .1 shows the similarities and differences between the varieties of authoritarian state capitalisms according to the structure of the power coalition institutionalising the state and the nature of the accumulation strategy. the table contains ideal types; in reality, the states are more diverse. the bottom line of the table shows how the accumulative state is similar to and different from other authoritarian state capitalism. the variety of authoritarian state capitalism least similar to the accumulative state is the bureaucratic authoritarian state (o'donnell, 1973) . bureaucratic authoritarian regimes were a response to the exhaustion of the import-substitution modernisation strategy to manage the unpopular process of international economic integration, relying on the military's oppressive apparatus. bureaucratic authoritarian systems aimed to open up the closed and corporatist import-substitution model, which relied on the alliance of the national bourgeoisie, the working class and populist politicians. increasing external competition, exports and transnational capital penetration required the exclusion of the popular sector that was activated in import-substituting states and the positive discrimination of transnational capital against domestic capital and workers. thus, the emphasis shifted from domestic capital formation to capital imports. the late-socialist regime in hungary-that implemented economic liberalisation relying on the power of an authoritarian state-was a bureaucratic authoritarian regime (árva, 1989) . by contrast, the post-2010 regime aims to achieve a nationalist correction of the former liberal development model, with more emphasis on domestic capital formation, incorporating national capitalists in the power coalition. moreover, hungary's illiberal state also gives a more profound role to patrimonial organisations than a bureaucratic authoritarian system. in hungary, interpersonal relationships are built on political loyalty in the provision of goods and resources. the accumulative state is not a developmental state either (evans, 1995; wade, 2005) . there are some similarities between the two models: the working class is not part of the power coalition in either of them, both rely on economic interventionism, maintain a repressive labour regime and their accumulation strategies do not rely on military rivalry. however, hungary's illiberal state does not retreat from the system of external dependencies in the world economy. the focus of economic and social policies has shifted to supporting national capitalists, but this does not mean that transnational corporations no longer play a crucial role in the power bloc. also, in many instances, developmental states were often backed by the military (south korea) or received explicit support from the us military (taiwan). the security regime does not play such an essential role in the emergence of hungary's hybrid authoritarian capitalism. and contrary to hungary's regime, developmental states rely on strong bureaucratic traditions and the leader's charisma does not play an essential role in their legitimacy. in hungary, the massive centralisation of state apparatuses increased hierarchical dependencies, and the logic of patrimonialism suppressed the logic of rational, rule-based bureaucracy. bureaucratic autonomy is a crucial component of developmental states, whereas hungary's contemporary illiberal state relies on patrimonial relations. import-substituting, populist state capitalisms (such as peronism), which preceded the latin american bureaucratic authoritarian regimes, are similar to the accumulative state in some respects, but differ in many others (amin, 1991; cardoso & faletto, 1979) . both emerge in response to global economic vulnerability, both give preference to the national capitalists, they have charismatic leaders and patrimonialism is prevalent. at the same time, the working class and the urban and rural poor were essential parts of the power coalition in latin american populist regimes, often referred to as the 'popular sector' (collier & collier, 1991; o'donnell, 1978; oxhorn, 1998) . in the age of nation-building following colonial times, the military also played a more significant role than it does in the orbán regime. the primary goal of economic development in these populist regimes was boosting domestic consumption and production, so there was no need for a repressive labour regime. by contrast, the post-2010 hungarian regime intervenes in the system of economic and political rights at the expense of the working class and the poor in urban and rural areas, in alliance with the national bourgeoisie and international capital. according to barrington moore (moore, 1993 (moore, [1967 ), fascist states can also be considered as variants of authoritarian state capitalism. the political representation of weak but emerging national capital, the repressive labour regime, the emphasis on domestic capital formation, economic interventionism, the central role of a charismatic leader and the primacy of patrimonialism make the fascist state similar to the new accumulative state. however, the hungarian accumulative state is more integrated internationally than the fascist state was, and the role of transnational capital is also more profound. finally, in the first half of the twentieth century, military expansion had a prominent role in economic development, and the military rivalry for external resources significantly influenced economic development. these characteristics are missing in post-2010 hungary, which is a significant difference. because of these differences, post-fascism is a misleading analogy (tamás, 2015) . finally, charismatic leadership and national capital are essential parts of the power coalition in post-soviet hybrid, resource capitalisms, such as russia, ukraine, belarus (king, 2002; kretzschmar, simpson, & haque, 2013; lane, 2007) and in hungary's authoritarian capitalism. both models pursue interventionist economic policies. besides, both putin's regime and orbán's emerged as a countermovement to the chaos caused by neoliberal reforms (appel & orenstein, 2018; orenstein, 2001) . therefore, the importance of foreign capital inflow is smaller in both models compared to their predecessors. a common element is that the bureaucratic capacity of the state is weak and patrimonial and even prebendal relations are strong (csillag & szelényi, 2015) . however, the two systems differ in that putin exercises more power over the oligarchs than hungary's accumulative state. putin consolidated his power by relying on the security apparatuses as an integral part of the power coalition. the international military rivalry is also an essential element of russian resource capitalism. natural resources 2 play the most critical role in hybrid resource capitalism in all the models (kretzschmar et al., 2013) , which is a significant difference compared to hungarian state capitalism. relying on the extraction of natural resources allows the dominant power bloc to constrain the power of transnational capital, which therefore cannot be considered to be a part of the power bloc in russia, contrary to hungary. putin successfully stabilised social conditions compared to the turbulent 1990s, 3 wages increased dramatically, while unemployment remained low. although the right to strike is limited, putin, nevertheless, maintains a partnership with formal trade unions, and there has been no tightening of the labour market as was the case in hungary (christensen, 2016; gimpelson & kapelyushnikov, 2011) . the post-2010 hungarian variety of authoritarian capitalism is most similar to the historical accumulative state, adjusted to the contemporary semi-peripheral context. national capitalists and domestic capital formation play an integral part in both. the labour-intensive national bourgeoisie in the new accumulative state plays the role of agricultural capital of the classic accumulative state. the security apparatuses do not play a role in these models to such a degree as in fascist states. workers are not part of the power coalition either. the accumulation strategy does not rely on the inflow of new foreign capital, and military rivalry or natural resources do not play a significant role. repression of labour and patrimonial coordination is present in both variants of the accumulative state. in sum, hungary's authoritarian capitalism is not an exceptional, hungarian phenomenon. in the world of authoritarian state capitalisms, the hungarian case is not unique. all these varieties of authoritarian state capitalisms emerged in response to some significant economic modernisation challenge, as a result of the alliance between certain factions of capital and the political class, and used suppressive political mechanisms to manage the costly conflicts generated by forced economic modernisation and capital accumulation. the strategies used by hungary's accumulative state follow historical practices of other authoritarian state capitalisms. the state played an essential role in economic development in virtually every variety of capitalism, not just in authoritarian capitalism. however, interventionist state capitalism is not necessarily authoritarian capitalism (alami & dixon, 2020; sallai & schnyder, 2020) . states also play an active, market-making role in democratic capitalisms. as the liberal world order weakens, the alliance between capital and the state is strengthening in many parts of the world, with the model of 'state-permeated capitalism' gaining increasing prevalence (nölke, ten brink, may, & claar, 2019) . this does not necessarily entail a complete authoritarian turn, but it can bring about a democratic decline if the new pact with capital brings new conflicts with the working class and those living on the margins of society. the united states is an excellent case in point. donald trump gave more space to the lobbyists of the business class than any administration ever before, while he successfully maintained the popularity of 'billionaire populism' among his working-class supporters by attacking the technocratic cosmopolitan elite (chua, 2018) . the american state under trump took several steps to boost capital accumulation, such as corporate tax cuts, downsizing obama care, or the trade war against huawei to protect the crumbling us monopoly in high-tech industries (sachs, 2018) . trump's economic nationalism is gaining traction among capitalists, who increasingly see the state as a dominant partner in propping up declining profit margins. the working class pays the price for the increasingly robust oligarchic alliance between capital and the nation-state. in the case of fierce conflicts and sharp polarisation, this growing economic nationalism may lead to democratic backsliding (lieberman, mettler, pepinsky, roberts, & valelly, 2019; mickey, levitisky, & way, 2017) . the quality of democracy has been declining in the united states, according to freedom house scores, with trump himself mingling the concerns of his business empire with his role as president. the united states retreated from its traditional role as 'democracy exporter' (posen, 2018) amid an accelerating decline in american political rights and civil liberties (freedom house, 2018) . with some modifications, the causal mechanism concentrating on the relations between various factions of the business class and illiberal politics could also be applied to the united states. building on three years of empirical data collection, new databases, thorough content analysis and extensive qualitative in-depth interviews, the book followed a mixed-method process-tracing approach. it showed that the accumulative state emerged as a result of a new class compromise in response to the exhaustion of the extensive phase of dependent development. the causal narrative presented in this book is compatible with other explanations that emphasise the role of political elites, cultural heritage or institutions, insofar as they recognise the importance of class dynamics deriving from the structure of dependent capitalism. the notion of the accumulative state is not an alternative to the theory of hybrid regimes, to the sociological versions of state capture theory but a political-economic extension on them. the causal narrative presented here, however, is at odds with theories that deny the role of structural imbalances that dependent development generates. the decline of hungarian democracy is not an isolated phenomenon, nor an exceptional incident, but the local manifestation of a global trend. the structural crisis of dependent liberal capitalism is not merely a postsocialist feature. many other semi-peripheral countries had a similar experience, where the working class was not involved in the democratic compromise, and where the national bourgeoisie had an interest in establishing a tighter relationship with the nation state. these processes of polarisation are particularly robust on the semi-periphery, but the intertwining of capital with the state and the neo-nationalist turn of the working class are present in the core countries as well. for illiberalism to have a decisive breakthrough, the polarisation of both the working class and the capitalist class is necessary. revealing the techniques used to channel these tensions can significantly enrich our understanding of the global crisis of democracy. what are the broader theoretical takeaways from liberal democracy's retreat in hungary? first, recognising political regimes as compromises between conflicting social classes offers a uniquely productive opportunity to analyse the decline of democracy. through the lens of hungary, the book's empirical chapters and the theoretically grounded, causal mechanism demonstrated the power of this approach. this makes relational class analysis highly relevant with a high potential for significant added value to the existing literature. the relational approach to class relies on the joint analysis of economic structure, the state, political agency and symbolic structures channelling the perception and expression of the lived experience of class. individual-level perceptions of class are entangled with the changing economic geography of particular locations, crosscutting general perceptions of injustice in the context of geographically uneven development (hall & savage, 2016; smith, 2010) . at the same time, politics is not merely a servant of the business class. however, the political class is not omnipotent and has to abide by the rules dictated by capitalist structures. second, competitive pressures of globalisation are translated into policy by economic policymakers competing for recognition, which significantly constrains domestic policy autonomy. the strongest pressure to liberalise in hungary did not come from powerful states or from powerful transnational corporations. of course, they had a part in it. but the real pressure came from technocrats and market fundamentalist policymakers competing for recognition by international markets, often going beyond the direct demands of transnational corporations. the revolving doors connecting the business class and the state allow policymakers to use their government positions to showcase their fitness to govern neoliberal capitalism and land well-paying jobs in the private sector. technocrats not only compete with each other for recognition but as decision-makers, they also aggravate the competition between states for capital. the structural root cause of this competition is the free flow of capital as capital controls were lifted in the 1980s (abdelal, 2007) , further amplified by the collapse of the socialist block and the eager desire of eastern technocrats to prove they are good pupils. as long as rewards (investments at the level of states, well-paying jobs at the level of policymakers) are distributed to the winners of this competition, and as long as failure to comply with the rules of the competitive game is severely punished, the pressure to liberalise stays, even if temporary divergence from it is possible (alami, 2019) . viktor orbán's illiberal state is not an exception. orbán goes to great lengths to prove his capacity to withstand pressures from other states-and his actions have proven that there is a possibility to diverge from the washington consensus-but remains an ardent participant in the race to the bottom on taxation. this cemented hungary's role as low-value-added assembly platform in the global production networks of transnational corporations. thus, every progressive political movement must face this competitive pressure as a limitation on progressive policy space, which makes international and european cooperation more urgent. third, the existence of a bourgeoisie is no guarantee for democracy. a weak but growing national bourgeoisie might be particularly prone to support anti-democratic economic nationalism. some historical examples highlight that the state can promote the emergence of an internationally competitive national capitalist class that has an interest in technologically intensive production, which can acquire a greater share of the value added in global value chains. in these cases, the national bourgeoisie may support democracy. it is easier to forge a democratic class alliance in integrated economies than in disintegrated ones. in disintegrated economies, the weak but growing national bourgeoisie might be a strong supporter of illiberal economic nationalism. however, the transnational capitalist bourgeoisie also does not necessarily support democratisation. transnational capitalists in hungary demonstrate spectacular flexibility in adjusting to different state structures. european capitalists played a particularly important role in securing international political backing for orbán's illiberal project. european capital satisfied with the economic opportunities offered by hungary's authoritarian capitalism contributes to the quiescence of the european elite concerning democratic backsliding in hungary. despite the occasional verbal condemnation, europe's political elite seems to be much keener in putting down democratic attempts at redistributing money from top to bottom (syriza) than authoritarian governments ensuring lucrative opportunities for the business class. transnational corporations were able to reach an agreement with the national bourgeoisie by consolidating the role of their hungarian subsidiaries in the global value chains as low-value-added assembly plants. the technological structure of hungarian export deteriorated, and the share of low-and mediumtechnology products increased compared to high-tech assets. transnational corporations did not actively lobby for cuts in education or social services, but they were able to adapt flexibly to the new regime, thus remaining an integral part of the new authoritarian power coalition. fourth, the working class is not inherently anti-democratic and nationalist. the working class provided temporary, external support for the power coalition that institutionalised the competition state. in exchange, the political elite temporarily mitigated the marginalisation of the working class, relying on the politics of patience. the disillusionment of the working class with the political left and its neo-nationalism are results of class dislocations caused by the market transition. the majority of hungarians supported liberal democracy. they did not grow disillusioned with democracy but with dependent capitalism. workers did not vote for authoritarianism but the correction of liberal capitalism. the illiberal politics of fidesz is successful because it is rooted in the lived experience of class dislocation and the lack of a left-wing class-based narrative. fifth, the long-term political consequences of dependency hinge on how domestic political classes govern in such a context. therefore, we need to examine the changing field of local power relations and conflicts to understand why capitalism leads to authoritarian solutions in some countries but not in others. contemporary capitalism is more likely to lead to authoritarianism if capitalists are interested in strengthening the links between the state and economic power at the expense of the power of the masses. there are no universal, historical laws that determine where and when this happens. at the same time, it is clear that some of capitalism's inherent tendencies contribute to the increasing polarisation of society and intensify the polarisation of the business class. more specifically, this book demonstrated that in the case of hungary the exhaustion of the extensive phase of dependent development, managed by the competition state, led to the partial transformation of the dominant power bloc and the rise of a new accumulation strategy and state formation. changing class relations shatter the foundations of democratic interclass coalitions even in core countries but especially in socially and economically disintegrated dependent economies (bresser-pereira & ianoni, 2017; sunkel, 1973; wade, 2003) . in disintegrated economies, the stability of democratic class coalitions between producers of complex mass consumption goods for internal demand, producers in tech-intensive sectors and cooperative skilled labourers is more problematic. nevertheless, states can contribute to maintaining higher levels of integration and thus stabilise democratic social coalitions (evans, 1995) . dependent integration into global capitalism produces illiberal politics if it is misgoverned and the political class fails to establish a capability enhancing developmental state and forgoes industrial policies. the hungarian case illustrates what happens when the state neglects domestic economic interests. lopsided external economic integration led to internal disintegration and to the ensuing revolt of the national bourgeoisie. the postsocialist competition state was too weak, unable to function as a developmental state. it lacked the capacities to counterbalance the natural propensity of transnational companies to disintegrate the economy. simulated liberal democracy meant that the working class was not an active part of the democratic class compromise and hungary's welfare state only functioned as a vestigial welfare state, not as a social investment state. this political failure is an essential factor behind the neo-nationalist countermovement of the working class. the insights for political practice are sobering but not disheartening. the long-term stability of the regime in part depends on its continued ability to maintain support across broad sections of the capitalist class. a tightening of the eu budget and a worsening of the global economic climate could potentially destabilise this alliance. in the same way as the global upswing after the financial crisis helped to stabilise authoritarian capitalism, global or european economic slow-down might pose serious challenges. the world economy has been showing signs of running out of steam in 2019. the coronavirus pandemic was unfolding as the manuscript was finalised. another major global recession seems to be inevitable at this point. it is impossible to tell how the crisis will affect the stability of the regime (march 2020). hungary's healthcare is in shambles as a consequence of a decade of cuts, which could fuel popular discontent. on the other hand, extraordinary crises often strengthen the incumbent leader. moreover, orbán's recent power grab (rule by decree) allows him to evade criticism and stabilise his position. another challenge could come from an opposition movement that organises the victims of accumulation. the 2019 local government election showed the first sign that orbán's opposition can win in major towns (scheiring, 2019b) . the opposition can also exploit the fractures within the national bourgeoisie and hasten the emergence of dissenting capitalists. however, the authoritarian measures employed by the state to suppress dissent have so far successfully hindered the emergence of a capable opposition at every national election. the continually declining organisational capacity of the opposition makes it harder to challenge orbán in an increasingly authoritarian political environment. institutional authoritarianism aims to pre-empt organised dissent by political parties, trade unions and ngos, while authoritarian populism reframes distributive grievances into questions of culture and identity, thus generating conflicts in fields where fidesz can prevail. in short to medium term, the accumulative state in hungary appears to be a conflict-ridden but solid strategy to manage dependent capitalism. the accumulative state enjoys the support of a broad segment of the capitalist class. nationalism remains a more attractive political identity among the working class and the underclass than the technocratic modernisation narrative of international integration. eu subsidies and embeddedness in global value chains provide the regime with a significant source of external funding. the looming global economic crisis, however, could destabilise the illiberal power coalition and the opposition should prepare for this with alternatives and with a political strategy that can attract the victims of the regime, not only urban liberals. the task of the political opposition is to find the most effective political strategy within the structural confines explored in this book. the opposition should be ready to lead hungary back towards a democratic and inclusive development model. the chances are dim, but light shines through the fractures of the illiberal hegemony. i can only offer karl polanyi's words as consolation: uncomplaining acceptance of the reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength to remove all removable injustice and unfreedom. (polanyi, 2001 (polanyi, [1944 , p. 268) notes 1. éber, gagyi, gerőcs and jelinek (2019) , gagyi (2016) and gerőcs (2019) combine the world-systems and dependency theories, and offer a multicausal explanation of the authoritarian turn in hungary. 2. the resource curse is a well-known thesis in political economy, which implies that the abundance of natural resources can be detrimental to the development of a country in the long run, and is more likely to lead to a one-sided economic structure, an oligarchical political system, and contribute to the emergence of authoritarian systems (ross, 2015) . 3. with the exception of the domestic aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. capital rules: the construction of global finance the decline of democracy in east-central europe: hungary as the worst-case scenario money power and financial capital in emerging markets: facing the liquidity tsunami state capitalism[s] redux? theories, tensions imperialism and unequal development the 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uneven geographical development the strategy of economic development a generalized linkage approach to development, with special reference to staples strangers in their own land: anger and mourning on the american right conversations with a polish populist: tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in postsocialism upscaling illiberalism: class, contradiction, and the rise of the populist right in post-socialist central europe post-socialist contradictions: the social question in central and eastern europe and the making of the illiberal right the role of increasing returns, technical progress and cumulative causation in the theory of international trade and economic growth the political economy of sectoral exchange rate preferences and lobbying: germany from 1960-2008, and beyond foreign direct investment and transition postcommunist divergence: a comparative analysis of the transition to capitalism in poland and russia central european capitalism in comparative perspective the intellectuals on the road to class power liberalism's failure to deliver russia's resource capitalism-market vs political signalling post-state socialism: a diversity of capitalisms the capitalist transformation of state socialism: the making and breaking of state socialist society, and what followed the de-coupling of national economic elites from political elites: russia and the uk compared reimagining englishness: 'race', class the trump presidency and american democracy: a historical and comparative analysis prospects for russia's economic reforms post-communist mafia state: the case of hungary production networks and varieties of institutional change: the inequality upswing in post-socialism revisited the revolt of the rust belt: place and politics in the age of anger is america still safe for democracy: why the united states is in danger of backsliding the state in capitalist society injustice: the social bases of obedience and revolt social origins of dictatorship and democracy: lord and peasant in the making of the modern world the hungarian tragedy economic theory and under-developed regions budapest in warsaw: central european business elites and the rise of economic patriotism since the crisis multinational corporations from emerging markets: state capitalism 3.0. houndmills state-permeated capitalism in large emerging economies state and alliances in argentina modernization and bureaucratic-authoritarianism: studies in south american politics out of the red: building capitalism and democracy in postcommunist europe the defeat of solidarity: anger and politics in postcommunist europe workers and the radical right in poland. international labor and working-class history the social foundations of latin america's recurrent populism: problems of popular sector class formation and collective action two decades after the wall's fall: end of communism cheered but now with more reservations the great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time the rise of illiberal hegemony: trump's surprising grand strategy a theory of global capitalism: production, class, and state in a transnational world premature deindustrialization what have we learned about the resource curse? the specter haunting europe: surging illiberalism in the east the war on huawei. project syndicate what is "authoritarian" about authoritarian capitalism? the dual erosion of the private-public divide in state-dominated business systems dependent development and authoritarian state capitalism: democratic backsliding and the rise of the accumulative state in hungary hungarian opposition takes a crucial step, but still a long way to go for the left. the foreign policy centre left behind in the hungarian rust belt: the cultural political economy of working-class neo-nationalism. sociology, forthcoming (special issue: nationalism's futures) deindustrialisation, foreign investment, and mortality inequalities in hungary. manuscript the gendered effects of foreign investment and prolonged state ownership on mortality in hungary: an indirect demographic, retrospective cohort study. the lancet global health from neoliberal disembedding to authoritarian re-embedding: the making of illiberal hegemony in hungary the international political economy of transition post-paternalist political culture in hungary: relationship between citizens and politics during and after the "melancholic revolution rhymes from central europe. project syndicate the transnational capitalist class uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space the narrative constitution of identity: a relational and network approach work after globalization: building occupational citizenship castles of our conscience: social control and the american state whither reform? ten years of the transition keynote address, annual bank conference on development economics mining a productive seam? the coal industry, community and sociology authoritarian neoliberalism, radical conservatism and social policy within the european union: croatia, hungary and poland transnational capitalism and national disintegration in latin america economic elite and society in the new capitalism of hungary impacts of the crisis on the fdi-led development model in hungary: emergence of economic patriotism or shift from the competition state to patronage? the revolt of the provinces: anti-gypsyism and right-wing politics in hungary this is post-fascism. arebetet global, magazine of swedish trade unions hopes and fears: community cohesion and the 'white working class' in one of the 'failed spaces' of multiculturalism liberal democracy in crisis: rethinking resistance under neoliberal governmentality competitive intensity and corruption risks in the hungarian public procurement governing the market: economic theory and the role of government in east asian industrialization what strategies are viable for developing countries today? the world trade organization and the shrinking of 'development space bringing the state back in: lessons from east asia's development experience hungary's crisis of democracy: the road to serfdom the limits of legitimacy: political contradictions of contemporary capitalism sugiyono, metode penelitian administrasi dilengkapi dengan metode r&d, bandung: alfabeta, 2007. yusuf, muhammad dan junaedi, pengantar ilmu ekonomi & perbankan syariah, jakarta: ganeca press. zulkifli, sunarti, panduan praktis transaksi perbankan syariah, jakarta: zikrul hakim, 2003. sistem ekonomi islam: suatu pendekatan filsafat, nilai-nilai dasar, dan instrumental anwar abbas abstract: islamic economical system: a phylosophy approach, basic values, and instrumental. islamic economical system has its’ own system. it is not a combination between capitalism and sosialism. islamic economical system did not put human as a central (anthroposentrism) but as a god servant (âbid) that should serve and carry out the tasks entrusted to the servant (khalîfah). therefore, the economic practice must uphold the values of ownership, the values of justice, freedom, balance, and in accordance with the fraternity and togetherness guided by religious teachings in order to create good personal living arrangements, social and national. keywords: islamic economy, capitalist economy, socialist economy abstrak: sistem ekonomi islam: suatu pendekatan filsafat, nilai-nilai dasar, dan instrumental. sistem ekonomi islam adalah sistem ekonomi tersendiri, bukan merupakan perpaduan dan atau campuran antara sistem ekonomi kapitalis dan sosialis. sistem ekonomi islam menempatkan manusia bukanlah sebagai sentral (anthroposentrism) tetapi sebagai hamba tuhan (âbid) yang harus mengabdi dan mengemban tugas yang dipercayakan-nya sebagai hamba (khalîfah). untuk itu, dalam kegiatan ekonomi harus menjunjung tinggi nilai-nilai kepemilikan, nilai-nilai keadilan, kebebasan, keseimbangan, dan persaudaraan serta kebersamaan sesuai dengan tuntunan ajaran agama agar tercipta sebuah tatanan hidup pribadi dan bermasyarakat serta bernegara yang baik. kata kunci: ekonomi islam, ekonomi kapitalis, ekonomi sosialis naskah diterima: 16 januari 2011, direvisi: 12 juli 2011, disetujui: 21 juli 2011.  dewan syariah nasional majelis ulama indonesia (dsn-mui). jl. proklamasi no. 51, menteng, jakarta pusat. e-mail: anwarabbas62@gmail.com anwar abbas: sistem ekonomi islam: suatu pendekatan filsafat112 pendahuluan manusia mempunyai banyak kebutuhan. zaman dahulu, ketika rumah tangga masih bersifat tertutup, kebutuhan manusia masih bersifat terbatas dan sederhana sehingga setiap keluarga menghasilkan sendiri produk-produk yang dibutuhkannya. tetapi dengan semakin majunya tingkat peradaban, makin banyak dan bervariasi pula kebutuhan manusia. usaha untuk memenuhi kebutuhan tersebut tidak lagi merupakan sesuatu yang sederhana. akibatnya terjadilah ketidakseimbangan antara kebutuhan dan keinginan yang selalu meningkat dengan kemampuan manusia menyediakan alat pemuas bagi kebutuhan dan keinginan tersebut.1 untuk itu, agar kemakmuran masyarakat dan individu tetap tercapai, maka muncullah beberapa sistem ekonomi.2 abad xix dan xx terdapat dua sistem ekonomi yang dominan yang menjadi kiblat bagi negara-negara di dunia yaitu sistem ekonomi kapitalisme dan sistem ekonomi sosialisme. sistem kapitalisme murni, secara relatif, sudah tidak ada lagi dan hanya berlangsung selama 50 tahun pertama abad xix. sejak bagian kedua abad tersebut dan terlebih dalam abad xx sistem kapitalisme murni telah kehilangan wajahnya dan mengalami banyak perubahan sehingga timbullah apa yang dikategorikan dengan "kapitalisme historis" yang bentuk dan jenisnya disesuaikan dengan situasi, kondisi, waktu, tempat serta negara, dan masyarakat yang melaksanakannya. menurut frans seda ada tiga faktor yang menyebabkan dan mempengaruhi mengapa kapitalisme tidak dapat dilaksanakan secara murni di berbagai negara yang menerima atau menyetujui prinsip-prinsipnya, yaitu: timbulnya permasalahan sosial, timbulnya konsentrasi kekuasaan di pasar bebas, dan diperlukannya intervensi negara.3 hal itu menyebabkan di amerika serikat, yang menganggap dirinya sebagai negara kapitalis yang paling murni dan paling besar, 1pandangan ekonomi konvensional menjelaskan bahwa kebutuhan manusia tidak terbatas sementara alat untuk pemuasnya terbatas sehingga muncullah masalah ekonomi yang disebut dengan scarcity (kelangkaan). sedangkan dalam pandangan ekononi islam (sebagian pakar) potensi sumber daya untuk itu cukup tersedia tetapi kemampuan manusia untuk mengolahnya terbatas sehingga timbullah masalah kelangkaan tersebut. jadi, dalam pandangan ekonomi konvensional yang terbatas adalah sumber daya sementara dalam ekonomi islam yang terbatas adalah kemampuan manusia untuk mengolahnya. 2sistem ekonomi ialah seperangkat mekanisme dan lembaga untuk membuat dan melaksanakan keputusan mengenai produksi, pendapatan, dan konsumsi di dalam suatu wilayah tertentu. lihat ramlan surbakti, memahami ilmu politik, (jakarta: penerbit pt. gramedia widiasarana indonesia), 1992, h. 207. 3kompas, 15 september 1992. al-iqtishad: vol. iv, no. 1, januari 2012 113 pendahuluan manusia mempunyai banyak kebutuhan. zaman dahulu, ketika rumah tangga masih bersifat tertutup, kebutuhan manusia masih bersifat terbatas dan sederhana sehingga setiap keluarga menghasilkan sendiri produk-produk yang dibutuhkannya. tetapi dengan semakin majunya tingkat peradaban, makin banyak dan bervariasi pula kebutuhan manusia. usaha untuk memenuhi kebutuhan tersebut tidak lagi merupakan sesuatu yang sederhana. akibatnya terjadilah ketidakseimbangan antara kebutuhan dan keinginan yang selalu meningkat dengan kemampuan manusia menyediakan alat pemuas bagi kebutuhan dan keinginan tersebut.1 untuk itu, agar kemakmuran masyarakat dan individu tetap tercapai, maka muncullah beberapa sistem ekonomi.2 abad xix dan xx terdapat dua sistem ekonomi yang dominan yang menjadi kiblat bagi negara-negara di dunia yaitu sistem ekonomi kapitalisme dan sistem ekonomi sosialisme. sistem kapitalisme murni, secara relatif, sudah tidak ada lagi dan hanya berlangsung selama 50 tahun pertama abad xix. sejak bagian kedua abad tersebut dan terlebih dalam abad xx sistem kapitalisme murni telah kehilangan wajahnya dan mengalami banyak perubahan sehingga timbullah apa yang dikategorikan dengan "kapitalisme historis" yang bentuk dan jenisnya disesuaikan dengan situasi, kondisi, waktu, tempat serta negara, dan masyarakat yang melaksanakannya. menurut frans seda ada tiga faktor yang menyebabkan dan mempengaruhi mengapa kapitalisme tidak dapat dilaksanakan secara murni di berbagai negara yang menerima atau menyetujui prinsip-prinsipnya, yaitu: timbulnya permasalahan sosial, timbulnya konsentrasi kekuasaan di pasar bebas, dan diperlukannya intervensi negara.3 hal itu menyebabkan di amerika serikat, yang menganggap dirinya sebagai negara kapitalis yang paling murni dan paling besar, 1pandangan ekonomi konvensional menjelaskan bahwa kebutuhan manusia tidak terbatas sementara alat untuk pemuasnya terbatas sehingga muncullah masalah ekonomi yang disebut dengan scarcity (kelangkaan). sedangkan dalam pandangan ekononi islam (sebagian pakar) potensi sumber daya untuk itu cukup tersedia tetapi kemampuan manusia untuk mengolahnya terbatas sehingga timbullah masalah kelangkaan tersebut. jadi, dalam pandangan ekonomi konvensional yang terbatas adalah sumber daya sementara dalam ekonomi islam yang terbatas adalah kemampuan manusia untuk mengolahnya. 2sistem ekonomi ialah seperangkat mekanisme dan lembaga untuk membuat dan melaksanakan keputusan mengenai produksi, pendapatan, dan konsumsi di dalam suatu wilayah tertentu. lihat ramlan surbakti, memahami ilmu politik, (jakarta: penerbit pt. gramedia widiasarana indonesia), 1992, h. 207. 3kompas, 15 september 1992. menunjukkan adanya deviasi-deviasi dari sistem ekonomi kapitalisme murni itu.4 begitu juga di jerman, menurut didik j. rachbini, negara tersebut menerapkan sosialis market ekonomi, yaitu suatu upaya pelunakan terhadap sistem ekonomi pasar sehingga mempunyai wajah lebih manusiawi. sebuah inisiatif tidak dikekang agar dinamika masyarakat tumbuh secara optimal tetapi dipihak lain dituntut tanggung jawab sosial untuk meminimalkan bias yang negatif.5 demikian pula halnya di negara-negara yang terkenal dengan sistem ekonomi sosialisme dan komunisme, di negara-negara tersebut terjadi proses transformasi dengan diserapnya sistem mekanisme pasar ke dalam sistem ekonomi mereka seperti terlihat di negara-negara eropa timur dan di cina.6 tetapi meskipun demikian kata umar chapra, ‚negara-negara ini (tetap) gagal pada berbagai tingkat untuk merealisasikan tujuan-tujuan yang hendak mereka capai. banyak diantaranya yang menghadapi ketidakseimbangan makro ekonomi secara serius. bahkan problem-problem yang harus mereka hadapi kian bertambah. kekacauan sosial dan kejahatan juga meningkat, secara umum mereka menghadapi suatu situasi krisis.‛7 mengapa hal itu masih terjadi? chapra melihat hal ini sebagai sebuah konsekuensi alamiah dan dapat diperkirakan secara baik atas suatu cacat struktural yang inheren dalam sistem-sistem itu sendiri. cacat-cacat itu timbul dari konflik dalam tujuan-tujuannya yang berakar pada moral dan agama pada masa lalunya dan pada pandangan dunia dan strateginya sebagai suatu basil dari sekulerisme dan cerminan sebuah pertentangan dengan tradisi-tradisi agamanya.‛8 untuk itu, menurut chapra diperlukan pemikiran kembali sebuah fisafat yang benar tentang manusia. hal ini juga dirasakan oleh para pemikir ekonomi kontemporer lainnya yang menyadari betapa pentingnya kajian ekonomi yang berkarakter religius, bermoral, dan humanis. gunnar myrdal misalnya dalam bukunya yang berjudul asian drama (1968), menyusun kembali ilmu ekonomi yang berkaitan dengan nilai-nilai kemanusiaan, baik perorangan, masyarakat 4contoh deviasi tersebut diantaranya adalah adanya peraturan dan pengaturan yang tidak lagi rnemberikan kebebasan penuh kepada pemilikan perseorangan dan juga karena keterbatasannya sehingga kepemilikan pribadi tersebut semakin terdesak oleh kepemilikan oleh negara dan korporasi. begitu juga motif profit yang mereka jadikan sebagai dasar pijakan dalam berusaha, terusik oleh adanya sistem perpajakan yang semakin rumit dan progresif dan adanya pembatasanpembatasan dalam persaingan seperti adanya undang-undang anti-trust, dll. 5kompas, 20 januari 1993, h. 4. 6didik j. rachbini, ekonomi politik, paradigma, dan teori pilihan publik, (jakarta : ghalia indonesia, 2002) 7m. umer chapra, islam dan tantangan ekonomi, islamisasi ekonomi kontemporer, diterjemahkan nur hadi ihsan dan rifki amar, (surabaya: risalah gusti, 1999), cet. i, h. 8. 8 m. umer chapra, islam dan tantangan ekonomi, h. 8. anwar abbas: sistem ekonomi islam: suatu pendekatan filsafat114 maupun bangsa. hal yang sama juga dirasakan dan dilakukan oleh eugene lovell dalam bukunya, humanomics, dan schumacher dalam bukunya, small is beautiful, economics as if people matered, dan terakhir oleh joseph e. stiglits, mantan anggota dewan penasihat ekonomi presiden bill clinton yang menulis buku, globalization and its discontents. para ekonomi ini menyadari bahwa meniadakan hubungan kajian ekonomi dengan nilai-nilai moral humanis adalah suatu kekeliruan besar dan mencerminkan sikap tidak bertanggung jawab dalam menjaga keselamatan manusia dan alam semesta. untuk itu, di sinilah letak arti pentingnya mengkaji sistem ekonomi islam yang oleh taqiy al-dîn al-nabhânî dilihat sebagai sebuah sistem ekonomi alternatif. paradigma dan nilai-nilai yang terdapat dalam sistem ekonomi ini berakar dan dikembangkan dari ajaran islam yang bersumber kepada alquran dan sunah. filsafat ekonomi islam filsafat ekonomi merupakan orientasi dasar dari ilmu ekonomi yang dapat berlainan antara satu agama dengan agama lain, atau aliran dengan aliran lain karena kerangka referensi yang berbeda. misalnya, orang-orang yang menganut filsafat kapitalisme masih percaya akan adanya tuhan tetapi dalam keyakinannya, tuhan setelah menciptakan alam dan meletakkan hukum-hukumnya tidak lagi ikut campur dengan urusan alam, termasuk dalam urusan ekonomi manusia. semua persolan terserah kepada masing-masing individu. oleh karena itu, manusia dalam pandangan filsafat ini memainkan peranan yang sangat sentral sehingga aliran ini bersifat antropocentrismeindividualisme. paham antropocentrisme ini juga diyakini oleh faham marxisme-sosialisme tetapi bedanya mereka tidak percaya akan adanya tuhan yang telah menciptakan alam dan tidak menekankan pentingnya individu, tetapi lebih mengutamakan kebersamaan atau kolektivitas. bagi mereka semuanya adalah materi dan mereka tidak mengakui adanya sesuatu yang bersifat nonmateri. oleh karena itu, paham mereka juga disebut dengan faham materialisme-sosialisme. ini jelas berbeda dengan filsafat dan keyakinan yang terdapat dalam ajaran islam. islam meyakini bahwa alam semesta ini berikut dengan isinya termasuk manusia adalah diciptakan oleh allah swt. (q.s. al-fâtihah [1]: 2), ‚tuhan yang maha pencipta dan mahakuasa tersebut telah menunjuk manusia sebagai khalifah-nya di muka bumi (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 30). ini artinya manusia telah ditunjuk menjadi ‚wakil dan manajer tuhan di muka bumi‛. oleh karena itu, manusia berkewajiban untuk berbuat, termasuk di dalam mengelola alam ini dan atau melakukan tindakan ekonomi, sesuai dengan keinginan dan ketentuan al-iqtishad: vol. iv, no. 1, januari 2012 115 maupun bangsa. hal yang sama juga dirasakan dan dilakukan oleh eugene lovell dalam bukunya, humanomics, dan schumacher dalam bukunya, small is beautiful, economics as if people matered, dan terakhir oleh joseph e. stiglits, mantan anggota dewan penasihat ekonomi presiden bill clinton yang menulis buku, globalization and its discontents. para ekonomi ini menyadari bahwa meniadakan hubungan kajian ekonomi dengan nilai-nilai moral humanis adalah suatu kekeliruan besar dan mencerminkan sikap tidak bertanggung jawab dalam menjaga keselamatan manusia dan alam semesta. untuk itu, di sinilah letak arti pentingnya mengkaji sistem ekonomi islam yang oleh taqiy al-dîn al-nabhânî dilihat sebagai sebuah sistem ekonomi alternatif. paradigma dan nilai-nilai yang terdapat dalam sistem ekonomi ini berakar dan dikembangkan dari ajaran islam yang bersumber kepada alquran dan sunah. filsafat ekonomi islam filsafat ekonomi merupakan orientasi dasar dari ilmu ekonomi yang dapat berlainan antara satu agama dengan agama lain, atau aliran dengan aliran lain karena kerangka referensi yang berbeda. misalnya, orang-orang yang menganut filsafat kapitalisme masih percaya akan adanya tuhan tetapi dalam keyakinannya, tuhan setelah menciptakan alam dan meletakkan hukum-hukumnya tidak lagi ikut campur dengan urusan alam, termasuk dalam urusan ekonomi manusia. semua persolan terserah kepada masing-masing individu. oleh karena itu, manusia dalam pandangan filsafat ini memainkan peranan yang sangat sentral sehingga aliran ini bersifat antropocentrismeindividualisme. paham antropocentrisme ini juga diyakini oleh faham marxisme-sosialisme tetapi bedanya mereka tidak percaya akan adanya tuhan yang telah menciptakan alam dan tidak menekankan pentingnya individu, tetapi lebih mengutamakan kebersamaan atau kolektivitas. bagi mereka semuanya adalah materi dan mereka tidak mengakui adanya sesuatu yang bersifat nonmateri. oleh karena itu, paham mereka juga disebut dengan faham materialisme-sosialisme. ini jelas berbeda dengan filsafat dan keyakinan yang terdapat dalam ajaran islam. islam meyakini bahwa alam semesta ini berikut dengan isinya termasuk manusia adalah diciptakan oleh allah swt. (q.s. al-fâtihah [1]: 2), ‚tuhan yang maha pencipta dan mahakuasa tersebut telah menunjuk manusia sebagai khalifah-nya di muka bumi (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 30). ini artinya manusia telah ditunjuk menjadi ‚wakil dan manajer tuhan di muka bumi‛. oleh karena itu, manusia berkewajiban untuk berbuat, termasuk di dalam mengelola alam ini dan atau melakukan tindakan ekonomi, sesuai dengan keinginan dan ketentuan yang telah ditetapkan oleh yang diwakilinya dan melaporkan serta mempertanggungjawabkan segala perbuatannya tersebut kepada komisaris besar tersebut (allah swt.) di hari kemudian (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 202). untuk itu, sebagai khalifah manusia harus tahu garis-garis besar dan pedoman yang telah dibuat dan ditetapkan-nya yang terdapat dalam kitab suci dan sunah rasul-nya (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 2). nilai-nilai dasar sistem ekonomi islam implikasi dari filsafat dan keyakinan di atas tentu akan melahirkan sejumlah nilai dasar yang akan mempengaruhi bentuk dan substansi dari organisasi pemilikan dan tingkah laku dari para pelaku ekonomi itu sendiri. ada beberapa nilai dasar yang dapat diturunkan dari keyakinan dan pandangan filosofis di atas. pertama, nilai dasar kepemilikan. konsep kepemilikan dalam islam tidak sama dengan konsep kepemilikan dalam faham liberalisme seperti yang dikemukakan john lock. bagi john lock, setiap manusia adalah tuan serta penguasa penuh atas kepribadiannya, atas tubuhnya, dan atas tenaga kerja yang berasal dari tubuhnya.9 ini berarti kepemilikan yang ada pada seseorang adalah bersifat absolut. oleh karena itu, untuk apa dan bagaimana dia menggunakan hartanya sepenuhnya adalah tergantung kepada dirinya. ini tidak disetujui oleh karl marx. pandangan tersebut, menurut dia, sangat berbahaya karena akan membawa kepada kehidupan yang eksploitatif dan penuh konflik. untuk itu, agar tercipta suatu kehidupan yang baik (tidak ada konflik antar kelas) kata marx, kepemilikan individual terutama kepemilikan terhadap alat-alat produksi harus dihapus karena inilah yang menjadi biang dan membuat kaum proletar atau buruh menderita selama ini.10 berbeda dengan dua pandangan di atas, islam mengakui kepemilikan individual. bahkan di samping itu, islam juga mengakui akan adanya kepemilikan oleh masyarakat dan oleh negara. tetapi kepemilikan tersebut sifatnya tidaklah absolut, tetapi relatif. apa artinya? kepemilikan yang ada pada seseorang atau masyarakat atau negara tersebut bukanlah sepenuhnya milik dan hasil usaha mereka, tetapi itu adalah amanat dan kepercayaan dari tuhan kepada mereka (q.s. al-ra’d [13]: 28, al-fajr [89]: 16) yang harus dijaga, dipelihara, dan dipergunakan dengan sebaik-baiknya (q.s. al-mâ’idah [5]: 7). oleh karena itu, seseorang tidak boleh menghambur-hamburkan hartanya (q.s. al-isrâ’ [17]: 26 9 k. bertens, pengantar etika bisnis, (yogyakarta: penerbit kanisius, 2000), cet. v, h. 111-122. 10paham komunisme memiliki konsep bahwa kepemilikan individual benar-benar dihapus sama sekali dan diganti dengan kepemilikan oleh negara. kalau dalam sosialisme, individu masih boleh memiliki kekayaan selain alat-alat produksi penting. anwar abbas: sistem ekonomi islam: suatu pendekatan filsafat116 27) dan atau mendiamkan hartanya (q.s. muhammad [47]: 38). karena hal itu akan kehilangan fungsi sosialnya dan akan kehilangan multiplier effect dan maslahat dari kehadiran hartanya tersebut. kedua, nilai dasar kebebasan. dalam ekonomi kapitalisme, individu diberi kebebasan yang seluas-luasnya untuk memanfaatkan atau tidak memanfaalkan harta yang dimilikinya. juga untuk masuk atau tidak masuk ke dalam pasar baik sebagai produsen, distributor atau konsumen. dalam bahasa yang lebih ekstrem tidak ada yang bisa membatasi kebebasan seorang individu kecuali dirinya sendiri. hal ini tidak dapat diterima oleh faham sosialisme-komunisme. mereka melihat kebebasan yang seperti itu akan membawa kepada anarkisme. oleh karena itu, kebebasan tersebut harus ditundukkan untuk kepentingan bersama. di dalam islam kebebasan manusia sangat dihormati. namun, kebebasan tersebut bukanlah tidak ada batasnya. hal-hal tersebut direstriksi oleh ahkâm alsyarî‘ah atau hukum-hukum dan ketentuan-ketentuan agama.11 jika hal itu dilanggar maka menjadi kewajiban bagi negara untuk ikut campur. ketiga, nilai dasar keadilan. keadilan yaitu memberikan setiap hak kepada para pemiliknya masing-masing tanpa melebihkan dan mengurangi.12 persoalannya sekarang, siapakah yang berkompeten untuk menentukan hal tersebut? dalam sistem sosialisme dan komunisme, hal itu menjadi otoritas negara, dalam sistem kapitalisme menjadi otoritas individu. sedangkan dalam sistem ekonomi islam, hal itu menjadi otoritas dan kewenangan tuhan (qs. 42; 17). konsekuensi konsep ini dalam kehidupan tentu akan menimbulkan perbedaan. misalnya dalam sistem sosialisme-komunisme yang menjadikan kebersamaan dan kesamarataan sebagai nilai utama, maka kebutuhan dijadikan dasar untuk menentukan sesuatu itu adil atau tidak. mereka berpendapat bahwa suatu masyarakat akan dikatakan adil jika kebutuhan semua warganya terpenuhi, seperti kebutuhan akan sandang, pangan, (dan) papan.13 jika hal itu tidak terjadi maka berarti telah terjadi praktik kezaliman. dalam kapitalisme liberal, konsep keadilan tidaklah didasarkan kepada kebutuhan tetapi kepada kebebasan itu sendiri. menurut konsep ini, adilnya suatu perolehan itu haruslah dibagi menurut usaha-usaha bebas dari individuindividu bersangkutan. yang tidak berusaha tidak mempunyai hak pula untuk 11‘adnân khâlid al-turkmânî, al-madzhab al-iqtishâdî al-islâmî, (riyâdh: maktabah al-sawadi, jâmi‘ah al-imâm muhammad ibn su‘ûd al-islâmiyyah, t.th), h. 144. 12 yusut qardhawi, peran dan nilai moral dalam perekonomian, (jakarta: robbani press, 1995), h. 390. 13 k. bertens, pengantar etika bisnis, (yogyakarta: penerbit kanisius, 2000), cet. v, h. 99. al-iqtishad: vol. iv, no. 1, januari 2012 117 27) dan atau mendiamkan hartanya (q.s. muhammad [47]: 38). karena hal itu akan kehilangan fungsi sosialnya dan akan kehilangan multiplier effect dan maslahat dari kehadiran hartanya tersebut. kedua, nilai dasar kebebasan. dalam ekonomi kapitalisme, individu diberi kebebasan yang seluas-luasnya untuk memanfaatkan atau tidak memanfaalkan harta yang dimilikinya. juga untuk masuk atau tidak masuk ke dalam pasar baik sebagai produsen, distributor atau konsumen. dalam bahasa yang lebih ekstrem tidak ada yang bisa membatasi kebebasan seorang individu kecuali dirinya sendiri. hal ini tidak dapat diterima oleh faham sosialisme-komunisme. mereka melihat kebebasan yang seperti itu akan membawa kepada anarkisme. oleh karena itu, kebebasan tersebut harus ditundukkan untuk kepentingan bersama. di dalam islam kebebasan manusia sangat dihormati. namun, kebebasan tersebut bukanlah tidak ada batasnya. hal-hal tersebut direstriksi oleh ahkâm alsyarî‘ah atau hukum-hukum dan ketentuan-ketentuan agama.11 jika hal itu dilanggar maka menjadi kewajiban bagi negara untuk ikut campur. ketiga, nilai dasar keadilan. keadilan yaitu memberikan setiap hak kepada para pemiliknya masing-masing tanpa melebihkan dan mengurangi.12 persoalannya sekarang, siapakah yang berkompeten untuk menentukan hal tersebut? dalam sistem sosialisme dan komunisme, hal itu menjadi otoritas negara, dalam sistem kapitalisme menjadi otoritas individu. sedangkan dalam sistem ekonomi islam, hal itu menjadi otoritas dan kewenangan tuhan (qs. 42; 17). konsekuensi konsep ini dalam kehidupan tentu akan menimbulkan perbedaan. misalnya dalam sistem sosialisme-komunisme yang menjadikan kebersamaan dan kesamarataan sebagai nilai utama, maka kebutuhan dijadikan dasar untuk menentukan sesuatu itu adil atau tidak. mereka berpendapat bahwa suatu masyarakat akan dikatakan adil jika kebutuhan semua warganya terpenuhi, seperti kebutuhan akan sandang, pangan, (dan) papan.13 jika hal itu tidak terjadi maka berarti telah terjadi praktik kezaliman. dalam kapitalisme liberal, konsep keadilan tidaklah didasarkan kepada kebutuhan tetapi kepada kebebasan itu sendiri. menurut konsep ini, adilnya suatu perolehan itu haruslah dibagi menurut usaha-usaha bebas dari individuindividu bersangkutan. yang tidak berusaha tidak mempunyai hak pula untuk 11‘adnân khâlid al-turkmânî, al-madzhab al-iqtishâdî al-islâmî, (riyâdh: maktabah al-sawadi, jâmi‘ah al-imâm muhammad ibn su‘ûd al-islâmiyyah, t.th), h. 144. 12 yusut qardhawi, peran dan nilai moral dalam perekonomian, (jakarta: robbani press, 1995), h. 390. 13 k. bertens, pengantar etika bisnis, (yogyakarta: penerbit kanisius, 2000), cet. v, h. 99. memperoleh sesuatu.14 oleh karena itu, di dalam teori keadilan liberalis ini, membantu orang yang miskin atau dalam kesulitan sebagai sesuatu yang sangat tidak etis karena mereka mendapatkan sesuatu tanpa mengeluarkan air keringat sendiri.15 sementara dalam islam keadilan dilihat dari sisi kesesuaian dan ketidaksesuaiannya dengan ajaran agama seperti yang telah digariskan di dalam alquranan dan sunah. oleh karena itu, kepedulian kepada orang yang miskin dan tertindas dalam islam akan dilihat sebagai sebuah praktik keadilan karena hal demikian diperintahkan oleh agama (q.s. al-tawbah [9]: 61). sementara mengabaikan hal itu merupakan sebuah praktik kezaliman (q.s. al-mâ‘ûn [107]:1-3). keempat, nilai dasar keseimbangan. sistem ekonomi kapitalisme lebih mementingkan individu dari masyarakat sehingga orang merasakan harga diri dan eksistensinya. orang diberi kesempatan untuk mengembangkan segala potensi dan kepribadiannya, akan tetapi pada umumnya, individu tersebut terkenal penyakit egoistis, materialistis, pragmatis, dan rakus untuk memiliki segala sesuatu.16 hal itu didorong oleh pandangan dan pola hidupnya yang individualistis dan berorientasi kepada profit motive. sementara sistem sosialis lebih mementingkan masyarakat dari individu. roh sistem ini sangat berprasangka buruk terhadap individu. oleh karena itu, pemasungan terhadap naluri ingin memiliki dan menjadi kaya harus dilakukan. akibat dari kedua sistem ini terjadilah ketegangan, disharmoni, dan ketidakseimbangan antara kepentingan individu dan kepentingan masyarakat. dalam islam, masalah keseimbangan ini sangat mendapat tekanan dan perhatian. tidak hanya keseimbangan antara kepentingan orang perorang dengan kepentingan bersama, antara kepentingan dunia dan akhirat, jasmani dan rohani, akal dan rohani, idealisme dan fakta, tetapi juga keseimbangan dalam modal dan aktivitas, produksi dan konsumsi serta sirkulasi kekayaan. oleh karena itu, islam melarang dan mencegah terjadinya akumulasi dan sirkulasi kekayaan hanya pada segelintir orang, seperti terkandung dalam makna surah al 14 k. bertens, pengantar etika bisnis, h. 100. 15bagi malthus persoalan ini tidak hanya berdimensi etis tetapi juga berdimensi rasional karena menurut pendapatnya jika orang miskin tadi dibantu dan sudah mulai hidup sejahtera maka libido seksualnya akan tersalurkan. mereka mempunyai anak yang banyak dan pada titik tertentu, kata malthus pertumbuhan penduduk kan menurut deret ukur (1,2,4,8,16) dan pertambahan produksi makanan menurut deret hitung (1,2,3,4, dst.). maka, jumlah populasi akan melebihi jumlah persediaan makanan yang ada sehingga masyarakat kembali miskin. lihat steven pressman, dalam bukunya, fifty major economist. 16 yusuf qardhawi, peran nilai dan moral dalam perekonomian islam, (jakarta: robbani press, 1997), cet. i, h. 84. anwar abbas: sistem ekonomi islam: suatu pendekatan filsafat118 hasyr [59]: 7) yang artinya supaya harta itu jangan hanya beredar di antara orangorang kaya saja di antara kamu. bila terjadi kesenjangan kepemilikan yang tajam antar individu kaitannya dengan pemenuhan kebutuhan-kebutuhannya, maka berarti telah terjadi praktik kezaliman. untuk itu, negara harus turun melakukan intervensi agar keseimbangan ekenomi di tengah-tengah masyarakat dapat terwujud kembali. begitu juga dalam hal pembelanjaan dan pengeluaran, islam mendorong umat kepada berperilaku moderat, yaitu tidak isyrâf (boros) tetapi juga tidak bakhîl (pelit), dalam orientasi pembangunan, kebijakan yang diambil tidak boleh hanya menekankan kepada pertumbuhan (growth) tetapi juga kepada pemerataan (equity) agar tercipta keamanan dan ketentraman di tengah-tengah masyarakat (stability). kelima, nilai dasar persaudaraan dan kebersamaan. dalam paham sosialisme-komunisme, persaudaraan dan kebersamaan merupakan nilai yang utama dan pertama. untuk itu, agar nilai-nilai tersebut tidak rusak dan tidak terganggu maka kepemilikan individual yang menjadi penyebab terjadinya perselisihan dan persengketaan harus dihapuskan dan digantikan oleh negara. negara yang mengatur produksi, distribusi, dan konsumsi masyarakat sehinga dengan demikian secara teoretis tidak akan ada kesenjangan sosial ekonomi dan permusuhan. di dalam paham kapitalisme liberalisme hal ini tidak terlalu menjadi perhatian. bagi mereka persaudaraan akan dapat terjadi seolah-olah secara otomatis di luar maksud para pelaku ekonomi itu sendiri, karena perekat dari persaudaraan itu bagi mereka adalah kepentingan. hal ini berbeda dengan ajaran islam. kebersamaan dalam islam merupakan indikator dari keberimanan seseorang (q.s. al-hujurât [49]: 10). nilai-nilai persaudaraan dan kebersamaan ini merupakan konsekuensi logis dari penunjukan manusia sebagai khalifah karena penunjukan tersebut bukan hanya untuk orang-orang tertentu saja tetapi adalah untuk semua orang (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 30). dengan demikian, seluruh manusia secara potensial di mata allah dan memiliki status, kedudukan, dan martabat yang sama. oleh karena itu, perbedaan ras, etnik, dan bahasa bukanlah menjadi variabel pembeda di mata tuhan. yang menjadi pembeda bagi allah adalah keimanan dan ketakwaannya (q.s. al-hujurât [49]: 13). untuk itu, islam melarang adanya praktik kezaliman dan ketidakadilan terhadap sesama dan adanya praktik-praktik eksploitasi sumber daya alam tertentu oleh seseorang atau kelompok tertentu. hal tersebut akan merusak nilainilai persaudaraan dan kebersamaan yang digariskan islam. namun, kebersamaan yang dimaksud di sini juga harus dibingkai dengan kebersamaan etis yaitu suatu kebersamaan dalam kebaikan dan ketaqwaan, tidak dalam melanggar al-iqtishad: vol. iv, no. 1, januari 2012 119 hasyr [59]: 7) yang artinya supaya harta itu jangan hanya beredar di antara orangorang kaya saja di antara kamu. bila terjadi kesenjangan kepemilikan yang tajam antar individu kaitannya dengan pemenuhan kebutuhan-kebutuhannya, maka berarti telah terjadi praktik kezaliman. untuk itu, negara harus turun melakukan intervensi agar keseimbangan ekenomi di tengah-tengah masyarakat dapat terwujud kembali. begitu juga dalam hal pembelanjaan dan pengeluaran, islam mendorong umat kepada berperilaku moderat, yaitu tidak isyrâf (boros) tetapi juga tidak bakhîl (pelit), dalam orientasi pembangunan, kebijakan yang diambil tidak boleh hanya menekankan kepada pertumbuhan (growth) tetapi juga kepada pemerataan (equity) agar tercipta keamanan dan ketentraman di tengah-tengah masyarakat (stability). kelima, nilai dasar persaudaraan dan kebersamaan. dalam paham sosialisme-komunisme, persaudaraan dan kebersamaan merupakan nilai yang utama dan pertama. untuk itu, agar nilai-nilai tersebut tidak rusak dan tidak terganggu maka kepemilikan individual yang menjadi penyebab terjadinya perselisihan dan persengketaan harus dihapuskan dan digantikan oleh negara. negara yang mengatur produksi, distribusi, dan konsumsi masyarakat sehinga dengan demikian secara teoretis tidak akan ada kesenjangan sosial ekonomi dan permusuhan. di dalam paham kapitalisme liberalisme hal ini tidak terlalu menjadi perhatian. bagi mereka persaudaraan akan dapat terjadi seolah-olah secara otomatis di luar maksud para pelaku ekonomi itu sendiri, karena perekat dari persaudaraan itu bagi mereka adalah kepentingan. hal ini berbeda dengan ajaran islam. kebersamaan dalam islam merupakan indikator dari keberimanan seseorang (q.s. al-hujurât [49]: 10). nilai-nilai persaudaraan dan kebersamaan ini merupakan konsekuensi logis dari penunjukan manusia sebagai khalifah karena penunjukan tersebut bukan hanya untuk orang-orang tertentu saja tetapi adalah untuk semua orang (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 30). dengan demikian, seluruh manusia secara potensial di mata allah dan memiliki status, kedudukan, dan martabat yang sama. oleh karena itu, perbedaan ras, etnik, dan bahasa bukanlah menjadi variabel pembeda di mata tuhan. yang menjadi pembeda bagi allah adalah keimanan dan ketakwaannya (q.s. al-hujurât [49]: 13). untuk itu, islam melarang adanya praktik kezaliman dan ketidakadilan terhadap sesama dan adanya praktik-praktik eksploitasi sumber daya alam tertentu oleh seseorang atau kelompok tertentu. hal tersebut akan merusak nilainilai persaudaraan dan kebersamaan yang digariskan islam. namun, kebersamaan yang dimaksud di sini juga harus dibingkai dengan kebersamaan etis yaitu suatu kebersamaan dalam kebaikan dan ketaqwaan, tidak dalam melanggar ketentuan-ketentuan agama (qs. al-mâ’idah [5]: 3). hal ini secara ekonomis tentu mempunyai makna dan pengaruh yang positif terutama di dalam membangun hubungan kepercayaan (trust) dan kesetiaan (loyality) dalam bermuamalah dan akan menghindarkan rasa iri atau persaingan tidak sehat serta permusuhan antara sesama yang akhirnya akan merugikan semua pihak. nilai-ilai instrumental ekonomi islam nilai-nilai dasar sebuah sistem ekonomi baru bisa dioperasionalkan hanya bila terdapat basis kebijakan (nilai instrumental) yang mendukung. yang dimaksud dengan nilai instrumental ialah segala sesuatu yang akan menjadi persyaratan bagi pelaksanaan dan terlaksananya sistem tersebut. dalam sistem ekonomi kapitalis, nilai instrumental tersebut terletak pada nilai persaingan sempurna dan kebebasan keluar masuk pasar tanpa restriksi, informasi, dan bentuk pasar atomistik dari tiap unit ekonomi, pasar yang monopolisitik untuk mencegah perang harga dan pada waktu yang sama menjamin produsen dengan kemampuan untuk menetapkan harga lebih tinggi dari pada biaya marginal. sedangkan dalam sistem marxisme, semua perencanaan ekonomi dilaksanakan secara sentral melalui proses yang mekanistik, pemilikan kaum proletar terhadap faktor-faktor produksi diatur secara kolektif; proses iterasi dan kolektivitas ini adalah beberapa nilai instrumental yang pokok dari marxisme.17 dalam sistem ekonomi islam ada beberapa nilai instrumental yang strategis yang mempengaruhi tingkah laku ekonomi seseorang, masyarakat, dan pembangunan ekonomi pada umumnya. pertama, zakat. zakat merupakan bagian dari harta yang harus dikeluarkan oleh seorang muslim bila harta mereka telah mencapai nisab dan sudah memenuhi ketentuan-ketentuan yang ditetapkan oleh syariah (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 2, 176), yang ukuran dan peruntukannya juga sudah ada ketetapannya dari tuhan sendiri (q.s. al-tawbah [9 ]: 60). pasa masa awal islam zakat dihimpun oleh negara dan merupakan sumber pendapatan utama negara. zakat pada waktu itu benar-benar merupakan sarana utama untuk menciptakan keadilan sosial, politik, dan ekonomi. aktivitas ini benar-benar berfungsi menciptakan persaudaraan dan kebersamaan di kalangan umat, karena dana zakat merupakan salah satu pilar penting dari sumber dana jaminan sosial. adanya instrumen ini secara ekonomi tentu memiliki beberapa makna, yakni: (1) zakat mendorong terjadinya pendistribusian pendapatan dan kekayaan dari orang yang berpunya kepada orang yang miskin atau yang memerlukannya, sehingga kebutuhan pokok masyarakat terpenuhi dan 17ahmad m. saefudin, studi nilai-nilai sistem ekonom islam, (jakarta: media dakwah, 1984), h. 66. anwar abbas: sistem ekonomi islam: suatu pendekatan filsafat120 kesenjangan ekonomi bisa dikurangi; (2) zakat secara langsung atau tidak tentu akan mempunyai pengaruh nyata terhadap tingkah laku konsumsi umat dan penciptaan lapangan kerja apalagi bila zakat tersebut dikelola melalui usahausaha produktif sehingga secara sosial, zakat dapat memberikan dampak bagi terciptanya keamanan masyarakat dan menghilangkan pertentangan kelas yang diakibatkan oleh perbedaan pendapatan yang tajam; (3) zakat dapat meningkatkan produktivitas dan daya beli masyarakat dan serta membendung inflasi. kedua, pelarangan riba. nilai instrumental ini sangat terkait erat dengan pemberantasan praktik kezaliman dan ketidakadilan (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 278279). secara sempit penghapusan riba berarti penghapusan eksploitasi yang terjadi dalam utang-piutang maupun jual-beli (tetapi), secara luas penghapusan riba dimaknai sebagai penghapusan segala bentuk praktik ekonomi yang menimbulkan kezaliman atau ketidakadilan.18 secara ekonomi, praktik riba jelas tampak tidak berpihak kepada full employment (terciptanya tenaga kerja penuh) karena sistem riba atau bunga jelas tidak memberi peluang kepada nasabah untuk masuk ke sektor-sektor usaha yang tingkat profitnya sama atau di bawah dari suku bunga yang ada. akibatnya, peluang lapangan kerja menjadi tertutup dan rekruitmen terhadap tenaga kerja menjadi tidak bisa dilakukan. praktik ini diperparah oleh perbankan konvensional yang tidak mau mengambil risiko rugi sehingga mereka meminta jaminan kepada para nasabahnya. kebijakan ini dapat diterapkan kepada kaum yang berpunya karena merekalah yang memiliki jaminan. sementara itu, orang yang miskin meskipun secara teknis mereka lebih layak untuk mendapatkan kredit karena keahlian dan kemampuan yang dimilikinya. namun, karena mereka tidak memiliki apa-apa untuk dijaminkan, maka mereka tidak bisa mendapatkannya. hal ini akan berdampak kepada produktivitas dan efisiensi. di samping itu sistem riba ini secara makro akan meningkatkan inflasi, karena tingkat suku bunga yang dikenakan kepada nasabah jelas akan meningkatkan biaya produksi sehingga secara keseluruhan harga akan naik (inflasi). bila harga-harga secara umum meningkat, maka pasti ada kelompok masyarakat yang terpukul dan akan terkena dampak negatif dari inflasi tersebut yaitu orang yang berpendapatan rendah sehingga tidak mustahil mereka yang semula sebagai muzaki akan jatuh miskin. hal ini disebabkan terjadinya kenaikan harga-harga yang menyebabkan mereka tidak mampu memenuhi kebutuhan-kebutuhan pokoknya. 18mb. hendri anto, pengantar ekonomi mikro islami, (yogyakarta: penerbit ekonomi, 2003), cet. i, h. 39. al-iqtishad: vol. iv, no. 1, januari 2012 121 kesenjangan ekonomi bisa dikurangi; (2) zakat secara langsung atau tidak tentu akan mempunyai pengaruh nyata terhadap tingkah laku konsumsi umat dan penciptaan lapangan kerja apalagi bila zakat tersebut dikelola melalui usahausaha produktif sehingga secara sosial, zakat dapat memberikan dampak bagi terciptanya keamanan masyarakat dan menghilangkan pertentangan kelas yang diakibatkan oleh perbedaan pendapatan yang tajam; (3) zakat dapat meningkatkan produktivitas dan daya beli masyarakat dan serta membendung inflasi. kedua, pelarangan riba. nilai instrumental ini sangat terkait erat dengan pemberantasan praktik kezaliman dan ketidakadilan (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 278279). secara sempit penghapusan riba berarti penghapusan eksploitasi yang terjadi dalam utang-piutang maupun jual-beli (tetapi), secara luas penghapusan riba dimaknai sebagai penghapusan segala bentuk praktik ekonomi yang menimbulkan kezaliman atau ketidakadilan.18 secara ekonomi, praktik riba jelas tampak tidak berpihak kepada full employment (terciptanya tenaga kerja penuh) karena sistem riba atau bunga jelas tidak memberi peluang kepada nasabah untuk masuk ke sektor-sektor usaha yang tingkat profitnya sama atau di bawah dari suku bunga yang ada. akibatnya, peluang lapangan kerja menjadi tertutup dan rekruitmen terhadap tenaga kerja menjadi tidak bisa dilakukan. praktik ini diperparah oleh perbankan konvensional yang tidak mau mengambil risiko rugi sehingga mereka meminta jaminan kepada para nasabahnya. kebijakan ini dapat diterapkan kepada kaum yang berpunya karena merekalah yang memiliki jaminan. sementara itu, orang yang miskin meskipun secara teknis mereka lebih layak untuk mendapatkan kredit karena keahlian dan kemampuan yang dimilikinya. namun, karena mereka tidak memiliki apa-apa untuk dijaminkan, maka mereka tidak bisa mendapatkannya. hal ini akan berdampak kepada produktivitas dan efisiensi. di samping itu sistem riba ini secara makro akan meningkatkan inflasi, karena tingkat suku bunga yang dikenakan kepada nasabah jelas akan meningkatkan biaya produksi sehingga secara keseluruhan harga akan naik (inflasi). bila harga-harga secara umum meningkat, maka pasti ada kelompok masyarakat yang terpukul dan akan terkena dampak negatif dari inflasi tersebut yaitu orang yang berpendapatan rendah sehingga tidak mustahil mereka yang semula sebagai muzaki akan jatuh miskin. hal ini disebabkan terjadinya kenaikan harga-harga yang menyebabkan mereka tidak mampu memenuhi kebutuhan-kebutuhan pokoknya. 18mb. hendri anto, pengantar ekonomi mikro islami, (yogyakarta: penerbit ekonomi, 2003), cet. i, h. 39. ketiga, kerjasama ekonomi. kalau dalam ekonomi kapitalis sangat ditonjolkan masalah kompetisi bebas, sehingga mereka melihat orang lain sebagai kompetitor atau pesaing yang harus ditundukkan. sedangkan dalam sistem ekonomi sosialis terjadi sebaliknya. sistem ini tidak mengenal persaingan karena segala-galanya sudah diatur oleh negara baik di tingkat produksi, distribusi maupun konsumsi. tetapi berbeda dengan kedua sistem ekonomi di atas, sistem ekonomi islam sangat dianjurkan adanya kerjasama dalam semua tingkat kegiatan ekonomi baik pada sektor produksi maupun distribusi dan konsumsi. kerjasama tersebut bisa dilakukan dalam bentuk syirkah, mudhârabah, dan/atau koperasi yang fungsinya, menurut daud ali,19 akan dapat menciptakan kerja produktif sehari-hari dari masyarakat (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 190), meningkatkan kesejahteraan, mencegah kesengsaraan sosial (q.s. âli ‘imrân [3]: 103, almâidah [5]: 3, al-tawbah [9]: 71, 105 ), mencegah penindasan ekonomi dan distribusi kekayaan yang tidak merata (q.s. al-isrâ’ [17]: 16, al-hâqqah [69]: 25 37, 89 : 17-20,107 :1-7), dan melindungi kepentingan ekonomi lemah (q.s. alnisâ’ [4]: 5-10, al-fajr [89]: 17-26 ). dengan adanya kerjasama ini maka prinsip yang kuat membantu yang lemah (q.s. al-zukhruf [43]: 32) dan adanya pembagian kerja dan spesialisasi tentu bisa ditegakkan sehingga kebersamaan, keadilan, dan pertumbuhan serta pemerataan akan dapat diwujudkan. keempat, jaminan sosial. islam memberikan jaminan terhadap tingkat dan kualitas hidup yang minimum (basic needs) bagi seluruh lapisan masyarakat (q.s. al-tawbah [9]: 6). pentingnya jaminan sosial tersebut terkandung dalam ajaran-ajaran yang mengatakan bahwa: (1) manfaat sumber-sumber alam harus dapat dinikmati oleh semua makhluk allah (q.s. al-an’âm [6]: 38, al-rahmân [55]: 10); (2) kehidupan fakir miskin harus diperhatikan oleh masyarakat terutama oleh mereka yang punya (q.s. al-dzâriyât [51]:19, al-ma‘ârij [70]: 24); (3) kekayaan tidak boleh dinikmati dan hanya berputar di antara orang-orang kaya saja. (4) berbuat kebaikanlah kepada masyarakat sebagaimana allah telah berbuat baik kepadamu (q.s. al-qashash [28]: 77), antara lain dengan menyediakan sumber-sumber alam itu; (5) seorang muslim yang tidak mempunyai kekayaan harus mau dan mampu menyumbangkan tenaganya untuk tujuantujuan sosial (q.s. al-tawbah [9]: 79); (6) seseorang janganlah menyumbang untuk kepentingan sosial dan juga untuk keperluan pribadi serta keluarga sebagai unit kecil masyarakat agar dipuji oleh orang lain (q.s. al-tawbah [9]: 262); (7) jaminan sosial itu harus diberikan sekurang-kurangnya kepada mereka 19mohammad daud ali, sistem ekonomi islam, zakat dan wakaf, (jakarta: ui press, 1998), cet. i, h.16. anwar abbas: sistem ekonomi islam: suatu pendekatan filsafat122 yang disebutkan dalam alquran sebagai pihak-pihak yang berhak atas jaminan tersebut (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 273, al-tawbah [9]: 60 ), dan lain-lain.20 dengan melaksanakan ajaran tentang jaminan sosial di atas berarti manusia di samping telah berusaha mendekatkan dirinya kepada allah, membersihkan hartanya, dan membuang sifat riba dan tamak serta egoismenya, dan telah memberlakukan hartanya sesuai dengan ketentuan agama. hal ini akan menciptakan kehidupan yang berkeadilan dan berkeseimbangan yang penuh dengan semangat persaudaraan dan kebersamaan. peranan negara berbeda dengan sistem ekonomi kapitalisme yang sangat memproduksi peran pemerintah dan memberikan kebebasan yang sangat luas kepada para pelaku pasar (swasta) dan sistem ekonomi sosialisme yang mereduksi peran swasta dan memberikan peran yang teralu besar kepada pemerintah atau negara, sistem ekonomi islam berada ditengah-tengah. artinya islam menghormati mekanisme pasar tetapi juga sekaligus memberikan peran kepada pemerintah untuk mendorong para pelaku ekonomi agar berbuat baik dan mencegah mereka untuk tidak berbuat munkar.21 dengan demikian tidak terjadi distorsi alau pelanggaran aturan moral di pasar seperti adanya praktik penipuan, kecurangan, penimbunan dan lain-lain. selain itu dapat mendorong bagi terciptanya pertumbuhan, pemerataan dan stabilitas ekonomi yang mantap. di zaman awal islam peran ini di laksanakan oleh sebuah lembaga independen yang dinamakan lembaga hisbah yang fungsi dan tugasnya seperti dikemukakan oleh a. a. islahi adalah memerintahkan semua yang berada di bawah wewenangnya untuk melaksanakan salat jumat, menunaikan salat wajib lainnya, menegakkan kebenaran, membayar kembali simpanan, melarang perbuatan buruk seperti berkata dusta, tidak jujur, mengurangi timbangan dan takaran, melakukan penipuan pada masalah industri, perdagangan, agama dan sebagainya.22 ini artinya kehadiran pemerintah selain untuk menegakkan mekanisme pasar yang baik juga sekaligus untuk mengatasi kegagalan pasar itu sendiri. semua itu tentunya akan sangat berpengaruh terciptanya kebebasan, keseimbangan, kebersamaan, dan keadilan di tengah-tengah masyarakat. 20 mohammad daud ali, sistem ekonomi islam, zakat dan wakaf, h. 17. 21 ibn taymiyyah, al-hisbah fi al-islâm, wâzhifah al-hukûmah al-islâmiyyah, (bayrût : dâr alfikr al-lubnân, 1992), h. 15. 22a.a. islahi, konsepsi ekonomi ibnu taimiyah, diterjemahkan oleh anshari thayib, (surabaya: pt. bina ilmu, 1997), cet. i, h. 242. al-iqtishad: vol. iv, no. 1, januari 2012 123 yang disebutkan dalam alquran sebagai pihak-pihak yang berhak atas jaminan tersebut (q.s. al-baqarah [2]: 273, al-tawbah [9]: 60 ), dan lain-lain.20 dengan melaksanakan ajaran tentang jaminan sosial di atas berarti manusia di samping telah berusaha mendekatkan dirinya kepada allah, membersihkan hartanya, dan membuang sifat riba dan tamak serta egoismenya, dan telah memberlakukan hartanya sesuai dengan ketentuan agama. hal ini akan menciptakan kehidupan yang berkeadilan dan berkeseimbangan yang penuh dengan semangat persaudaraan dan kebersamaan. peranan negara berbeda dengan sistem ekonomi kapitalisme yang sangat memproduksi peran pemerintah dan memberikan kebebasan yang sangat luas kepada para pelaku pasar (swasta) dan sistem ekonomi sosialisme yang mereduksi peran swasta dan memberikan peran yang teralu besar kepada pemerintah atau negara, sistem ekonomi islam berada ditengah-tengah. artinya islam menghormati mekanisme pasar tetapi juga sekaligus memberikan peran kepada pemerintah untuk mendorong para pelaku ekonomi agar berbuat baik dan mencegah mereka untuk tidak berbuat munkar.21 dengan demikian tidak terjadi distorsi alau pelanggaran aturan moral di pasar seperti adanya praktik penipuan, kecurangan, penimbunan dan lain-lain. selain itu dapat mendorong bagi terciptanya pertumbuhan, pemerataan dan stabilitas ekonomi yang mantap. di zaman awal islam peran ini di laksanakan oleh sebuah lembaga independen yang dinamakan lembaga hisbah yang fungsi dan tugasnya seperti dikemukakan oleh a. a. islahi adalah memerintahkan semua yang berada di bawah wewenangnya untuk melaksanakan salat jumat, menunaikan salat wajib lainnya, menegakkan kebenaran, membayar kembali simpanan, melarang perbuatan buruk seperti berkata dusta, tidak jujur, mengurangi timbangan dan takaran, melakukan penipuan pada masalah industri, perdagangan, agama dan sebagainya.22 ini artinya kehadiran pemerintah selain untuk menegakkan mekanisme pasar yang baik juga sekaligus untuk mengatasi kegagalan pasar itu sendiri. semua itu tentunya akan sangat berpengaruh terciptanya kebebasan, keseimbangan, kebersamaan, dan keadilan di tengah-tengah masyarakat. 20 mohammad daud ali, sistem ekonomi islam, zakat dan wakaf, h. 17. 21 ibn taymiyyah, al-hisbah fi al-islâm, wâzhifah al-hukûmah al-islâmiyyah, (bayrût : dâr alfikr al-lubnân, 1992), h. 15. 22a.a. islahi, konsepsi ekonomi ibnu taimiyah, diterjemahkan oleh anshari thayib, (surabaya: pt. bina ilmu, 1997), cet. i, h. 242. penutup sistem ekonomi islam adalah sebuah sistem ekonomi tersendiri, bukan merupakan perpaduan dan atau campuran antara sistem ekonomi kapitalisme dan sosialisme, karena falsafah, nilai-nilai dasar, dan nilai-nilai instrumental dari sistem ekonomi islam sangat berbeda dengan kedua sistem tersebut. sistem ekonomi islam menempatkan manusia bukan sebagai sentral (antroposentrisme) tetapi sebagai hamba tuhan (abid) yang harus mengabdi dan mengemban tugas yang dipercayakan-nya sebagai khalifah. untuk itu, dalam kegiatan ekonomi yang dilakukannya harus menjunjung tinggi nilai-nilai kepemilikan, nilai-nilai keadilan, kebebasan, keseimbangan, persaudaraan, serta kebersamaan sesuai ajaran agama agar tercipta sebuah tatanan hidup pribadi dan bermasyarakat serta bernegara yang baik. untuk itu, islam telah meletakkan basis-basis kebijakannya berupa: (1) perintah membayar zakat kepada orang-orang yang mampu untuk para mustahiq; (2) melarang praktik-praktik riba (eksploitasi); (3) memberikan jaminan sosial kepada orang yang berhak menerimanya; (4) mendorong terciptanya kerjasama ekonomi tidak hanya antara individu dengan individu atau masyarakat dengan masyarakat lainnya tetapi juga kerjasama antar negara; (5) memfungsikan lembaga pemerintah untuk menjadi polisi sehingga sinergi para pelaku pasar akan dapat mewujudkan dan menciptakan kemakmuran, keamanan, dan keadilan di tengah-tengah masyarakat. [] pustaka acuan buku: anto, mb. hendri, pengantar ekonomi mikro islami, yogyakarta: penerbit ekonomi, 2003. turkmânî, al-, ‘adnân khâlid, al-madzhab al-iqtishâdî al-islâmî, riyâdh: maktabah al-sawâdî, jâmi‘ah al-imâm muhammad ibn su‘ûd al-islâmiyyah, t.th.. ali, mohammad daud, sistem ekonomi islam, zakat dan wakaf, jakarta: ui press, 1998. bertens, k. pengantar etika bisnis, yogyakarta: penerbit kanisius, 2000. chapra, m. umer, islam dan tantangan ekonomi, islamisasi ekonomi kontemporer, diterjemahkan nur hadi ihsan dan rifki amar, surabaya: risalah gusti, 1999. islahi, a.a., konsepsi ekonomi ibnu taimiyah, diterjemahkan oleh anshari thayib, surabaya: pt bina ilmu, 1997. qaradhawi, yusut, peran dan nilai moral dalam perekonomian, jakarta: robbani press, 1995. anwar abbas: sistem ekonomi islam: suatu pendekatan filsafat124 rachbini, didik j., ekonomi politik, paradigma, dan teori pilihan publik, jakarta: ghalia indonesia, 2002. saefudin, ahmad m., studi nilai-nilai sistem ekonom islam, jakarta: media dakwah, 1984. surbakti, ramlan, memahami ilmu politik, jakarta: penerbit pt. gramedia widiasarana indonesia, 1992. ibn taymiyyah, al-hisbah fi al-islâm, wazhîfah al-hukûmah al-islâmiyyah, bayrût: dâr al-fikr al-lubnân, 1992. media massa: kompas, 15 september 1992 kompas, 20 januari 1993 key: cord-0061500-0kzyditr authors: katz, brian d.; chan, stephanie c.; schmidt, daniel; miller, melinda; rehfeldt, ruth anne title: come on up for the rising: a review of biglan's rebooting capitalism date: 2021-03-31 journal: perspect behav sci doi: 10.1007/s40614-021-00283-1 sha: c33356a5f95880f0e6c907cfd9d94981f9cbcb7c doc_id: 61500 cord_uid: 0kzyditr in rebooting capitalism: how we can forge a society that works for everyone, anthony biglan (2020) explains that a free-market and capitalist narrative, sculpted by a coalition of the extremely wealthy, has led to a commonly held myth that the pursuit of individual wealth will improve the overall well-being of the populous. instead, our current economic system and public policies have resulted in cultural practices that increase wealth inequality, incite racial tensions, and destroy the natural world. the book functions as a call to arms for behavior analysts to join a coalition of interdisciplinary professionals with a like-minded mission of creating a nurturing form of capitalism, grounded in behavior science, that improves the quality of life for all people. political parties in the united states. in addition, the brutal murder of george floyd and parallel instances of racially charged police violence evoked national attention and widespread protest. eighty-three percent of americans stated that the country's future is a significant source of stress (american psychological association, 2020) . we are now presented with an opportunity to examine how the current state of our nation and global community have come to pass. through this process of reflection, the time is ripe for behavior scientists to rise up and contribute to systemic change-the call to action in rebooting capitalism. it is relevant to conceptualize our current societal problems within the lens of evolutionary science. in science and human behavior (1953), skinner delineated multiple levels of selection that influence human behavior: phylogenic selection, ontogenic selection, and "a third kind of selection which applies to cultural practices" (p. 430). regarding the mechanisms involved in cultural selection, holth (2016) made clear that group cultural practices are selected in a fashion similar to darwin's natural selection. in a parallel manner, it is the social environment that selects cultural practices. towards the end of skinner's life-equipped with knowledge of the mechanisms of selection-he wrote that the world was in a critical state and lamented the fact that behavior scientists had not done more to shape cultural practices (skinner, 1987) . yet, all is not lost, because skinner's dream to tailor cultural practices through behavior science has carried on in the field of prevention science. according to the national prevention science coalition (npsc), prevention science "focuses on the development of evidence-based strategies that reduce risk factors and enhance protective factors to improve the health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities" (npsc coalition, n.d.) . biglan (2018) reiterated, "the ultimate goal of prevention science is to assist societies in ensuring the social, psychological, and physical well-being of every member of society." biglan explained that we can shift cultural practices and improve overall outcomes for individuals, such as academic achievement, social and emotional competence, psychological and behavioral problems, and physical health by altering environmental distal influences (e.g., income and resources, social cohesion, and physical environment), and proximal influences (e.g., family influences, school influences, and peer influences). the success of this model is exemplified in the prevention of tobacco use through community-wide prevention programs. for instance, biglan, ary, smolkowski, duncan, and black (2000) conducted a randomized controlled trial of a multicomponent, school-based community intervention to prevent adolescent tobacco use. results showed that the intervention was effective at reducing the prevalence of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use among adolescents. in a similar fashion, wilson, o'brien, and sesma (2009) conceptualized prosocial behavior through the lens of evolutionary theory and analyzed altruism on a city-wide scale in the binghampton neighborhood project. through statistical analyses and visual mapping of several dependent variables, wilson et al. concluded that those with the most social support engage in the highest levels of prosocial behavior. in other words, prosociality as a behavioral strategy to improve evolutionary success can be summed up as "those who give to others, get from others" (p. 198) . some influential social scientists, such as pinker (2018) and harari (2014) , argue that we ought to interpret the history of humanity through a lens of progress; that as of the 21 st century, we have made our world a more enriched, comfortable, and inhabitable place. we, on the other hand, argue that evolution does not necessitate progress, and we can do better. in a world in which communities consistently struggle with low income, inequality, deteriorating health, a worldwide pandemic, omnipresent college debt, intensified natural disasters due to climate change, astronomical rates of incarceration, and an untrustworthy media, there are certainly sectors of society in which improvements can be made. we as behavior analysts possess a unique skillset in which our systematic science of behavior has provided us the ability to describe, predict, and influence behavior. thus, we have the keys to the kingdom. rebooting capitalism functions as a call to arms and beckons behavior analysts to join the values to action coalition so that we might facilitate the implementation of behavior science on an unprecedented scale. if now is not the time, when will it be? overview biglan (2020) opens chapter 1 with an overview of evolutionary theory to explain how our current society came to operate, and to introduce the notion that behavior science can be utilized to guide intentional change towards a new, more nurturing form of capitalism. although evolution is commonly discussed in terms of phylogenic selection, biglan emphasizes that "any process that has variation and a mechanism that selects a subset of variants is an evolutionary process," which includes the ontogenically selected behavior of individual organisms and the cultural practices of groups and corporations (p. 18). through this discussion of selection by consequences at different levels (i.e., multilevel selection), the works of evolutionary biologist david sloan wilson are presented and illuminate how each level, or unit of life, interact with and result in the societal practices and problems we observe today-an analysis similar to that of glenn et al. (2016) . biglan explains that wilson's view of multilevel selection is critical to understanding the evolution and maintenance of harmful corporate practices (e.g., tobacco, food, and pharmaceutical industries). these deleterious corporate practices have contributed to increases in well-being for a minority of individuals, and significant decreases in well-being for the overwhelming majority. furthermore, profit and wealth maximization are distinguished as the predominate selecting consequences of our current system of capitalism and led to the development of what is referred to as the "conservative billionaire coalition" (p. 29). biglan provides two ways to target and change these selecting consequences, including fining companies for harmful practices (i.e., the no-profit principle) and increasing the profitability of alternative beneficial practices. however, biglan addresses the notion that simply altering these consequences is not enough. that is, to evolve a society that is prosocial (i.e., most people are working to enhance the well-being of their group), people need to live in a nurturing environment that cultivates prosocial values and actions. even before the turbulent events of 2020, the well-being of americans and global citizens were deteriorating. in evolutionary terms, biglan, johansson, ryzin, & embry (2020) explained that human developmental trajectories are altered by environmental contexts. in particular, environments that contain high levels of aversive control, conflict, and stress lead to a category of development deemed a "fast life" trajectory (p. 5). in contrast, a "slow life" trajectory is comprised of nurturing environments, selfregulation, and psychological flexibility (p. 5). biglan et al. (2020) cautioned that these "fast life" environments lead to increased levels of impulsivity, risk-taking, antisocial and violent behavior, academic struggles, and increased likelihood of mental health problems. perhaps even more costly, "fast life" trajectories also predict poor physiological outcomes such as "the development of inflammatory processes that contribute to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and ultimately premature death" (p. 5). biglan (2020) argues that due to our global free-market capitalist system we moved away from sustainable and nurturing environments, and our overall welfare has been compromised. applicable to the "fast life" paradigm, grant (2010) explained that americans engage in overconsumption of goods and products, and likewise, most developed economies consume unneeded luxury items. according to grant, overconsumption is a function of competitive contingencies and antithetical to sustainability. contingencies of competition and environments featuring aversive control have led to contexts that are damaging to individuals and to the culture at large. furthermore, our current u.s. legal system, and others around the globe, contain a paucity of public policies and laws promoting the well-being of all citizens. in contrast, sanguinetti (2012) informed that experimental and intentional communities utilizing cultural engineering seek to disrupt this damaging "fast life" trajectory by limiting factors such as suburban sprawl, environmental degradation, and a lack of physical activity. in short, these are communities that have been culturally designed through public policy and urban planning with an aim to build nurturing and healthy environments. in chapter 2, biglan discusses people's psychological readiness to engage in committed action towards advancing a more nurturing society. two common barriers that "get in the way of taking effective action to promote the kind of society we want" are presented in the form of avoidance of aversive private events surrounding our current environments and the fact that "we simply don't know what to do" (p. 40). with support from the works of hayes on psychological flexibility and acceptance and commitment training (act; hayes, 2019; hayes & smith, 2005) , biglan provides an overview of the behavioral repertoires that can be cultivated to target such barriers (pp. 40-46) . according to hayes (2019) , "psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations. it's about learning not to turn away from what is painful, instead turning toward your suffering in order to live a life full of meaning and purpose" (p. 15). act builds behavioral repertoires that together contribute to psychological flexibility. thus, biglan introduces the term "personal pragmatism," in which we "persist or change our behaviors not because of what our minds tell us but in light of what seems to be working in living our values" (p. 40). the chapter concludes with evidence that prejudice and discrimination have been, and can be, effectively intervened upon at both the individual and group level through interventions such as cooperative learning and act in school and organizational settings. last, biglan offers suggestions for what individuals can do to advocate for policies and organizations that result in change towards a more nurturing society. in chapter 3, biglan (2020) outlines a five-component framework designed to create a kinder and more compassionate society. the first component consists of establishing an operational definition of the society that we want, with the pursuit of valuing everyone's well-being rather than that of a select few in mind. this definition is supported by the "enormous knowledge that has accumulated about what human beings need to thrive" (p. 66). the critical features of such a society have been identified by biglan through the growing "evonomics" movement (the use of evolutionary science to conceptualize capitalism and human society), as revealed in biglan's book the nurture effect (2015) . the second component in the framework consists of clarifying how prosocial behavior is cultivated in individuals. biglan debunks notions that human beings are inherently self-serving by citing studies by evolutionary scientists illustrating how humans indeed cooperate and work for the betterment of the group given the right environmental conditions. the same evolutionary perspective can be applied to the development of antisocial behavior. although antisocial behaviors are acquired via the social learning processes, biglan reiterates that individuals can still choose to engage in psychologically flexible behaviors that are consistent with prosocial values rather than waiting for a societal shift in values to occur. future research might examine the conditions under which prosocial behavior is most likely to occur, and, if identified, behavior scientists may be able to modify socially significant group practices (e.g., acceptance of vaccinations, use of personal protective equipment, and mask-wearing).the third component of the framework involves utilizing incidence and prevalence data on public health to evaluate how effective our pursuits are in making a more nurturing society. lastly, the fourth and fifth parts of the framework depict what conditions are needed to influence and monitor harmful corporate practices. in addition to the framework charted by biglan (2020) , other scholars have also surveyed systems of prosociality and nurturance. for instance, diller and lattal (2008) provided an in-depth assessment of radical behaviorism and buddhism by discussing areas of consilience between the two domains. for instance, both systems take a pragmatic approach towards human suffering. furthermore, mindfulness (interacting with stimuli in ways that are nonevaluative and presentfocused with sharpened discriminative control) has been integrated into behavior change technologies such as act and has been conceptually analyzed in basic science (hayes & plumb, 2007) . however, the practice of mindfulness stems from the deep history of buddhism and is prescribed within the eightfold path, a set of practices aimed at improving the human condition. diller and lattal (2008) argue that a thorough analysis of how both buddhism and radical behaviorism interrelate may lead to an improved understanding of both and allow for comparison of other ostensibly incongruent philosophical systems. like behavior analysis, buddhism presents functional means for improving the human condition, despite some philosophical differences (e.g., determinism vs. the possibility of free will and achieving socially significant change vs. achieving nirvana). buddhism also emphasizes a slower paced, mindful society that cultivates caring and nurturance for all members. by exploring connections between behavior science and buddhism, a "slow life" trajectory may be obtained, thus preventing all of the ills of "fast life" trajectories. chapter 4 details the need for a coalition of organizations dedicated to building a society that works for the well-being of everyone. biglan (2020) explains that today's society is shaped and maintained by the laser-focused, coordinated actions of the extremely wealthy (p. 82). this conservative billionaire coalition forges an unprecedented level of cooperation to foster support for free-market economic theory, and thus, the coalition accomplishes self-seeking successes but does not act in the interest of the larger society. to bring about positive change and prosperity for all, biglan suggests the need for a new coalition-the values to action coalition. he cites three reasons for the development of a multisector coalition: there are interconnections among societal problems, there are fundamental conditions that underlie societal ills (e.g., poverty and discrimination), and speaking with one unified voice will lead to a greater likelihood of success in creating a collaborative community that works for everyone (pp. 84-91) . furthermore, biglan suggests that the values to action coalition utilize behavior science to inform public policy, as behavior scientists possess the knowledge and skills to construct environments that will allow all individuals and groups to thrive (p. 91). of particular value is culturobehavior science, a growing area of emphasis in behavior analysis focused upon describing and predicting the interlocking meta-contingencies that influence collective human behaviors (see cihon & mattiani, 2019) . in chapter 5, biglan (2020) establishes that business and capitalism can indeed function as nurturing entities, and he provides a structure for how this can be accomplished on a wider scale. it is possible to achieve a nurturing business community, so long as practices result not only in profits, but also benefits to stakeholders (e.g., customers, employers, investors, suppliers and society). the author suggests the use of b-corps (certified corporations that meet standards of social and environmental performance and transparency) and highlights the movement called conscious capitalism, which promotes "purpose-driven business" and affirms the well-being of all stakeholders. by valuing people (e.g., workers, suppliers, consumers), businesses can develop a collaborative environment that is aligned with community building values. finally, businesses can utilize behavior science to promote adaptive work-related behaviors. since the 1960s, organizational behavior management (obm) has used the principles of behavior analysis to improve employee performance (daniels, 1989; wine & pritchard, 2018) . the technologies harnessed in obm are nurturing in that they avoid aversive control and utilize appetitive consequences to alter behavior. in addition to enhanced management practices, biglan (2020) provides several suggestions for the everyday consumer: (1) support business that align with your values, (2) work for a company that aligns with your values, and (3) invest in companies that are values-driven and do not engage in harmful business practices (pp. 109-110). in chapter 6, biglan (2020) declares the u.s. public health system to be "broken" and the worst of any developed nation, as evidenced by a multitude of metrics including inordinate amounts of spending per capita, infant mortality rates, and reduced life expectancies for minority groups (p. 114). the author analyzes the history of our broken system and points to three causes. first, the u.s. health-care industry evolved to maximize profits, in the context of free-market capitalism, with a paucity of systematically delivered positive reinforcement for improved health outcomes. second, the forprofit insurance industry evolved to maximize profits and halt efforts to create a singlepayer system. third, conservative groups became "obsessed" with discontinuing the affordable care act (aca), a law that increased health-care coverage for 20 million americans. biglan suggested that potential sources of this "obsession" included an establishing operation to maximize profits for both health-care providers and insurance companies (pp. 114-116); providing increased coverage, especially for americans with preexisting medical conditions, may serve as an abolishing operation to support of aca due to the potential loss in profits. furthermore, biglan explains that the u.s. public health system has largely ignored the social determinants of health, despite research suggesting that the largest portion of premature deaths can be attributed to unhealthful behaviors, and that stressful social environments, "are the root of most of our health problems" (p. 119). this theme resonates with the work of wilson (2016) , who suggested that we form public policy based upon indicators of quality of life (qol), or the notion that human health, education, freedom from harm, psychological well-being, and ultimately the sustainability of the planet can be measured and used as an alternative to economic measures such as gross domestic product. to improve the qol of citizens given the ever-increasing costs of health care, a provision within the aca can be utilized on a wider scale. the provision states that employers may use up to 30% of the total amount of employees' health insurance premiums to provide outcome-based wellness incentives. with the aid of behavioral economics, incentives can be formulated that result in real shifts in behavior (volpp, asch, galvin, & loewenstein, 2011) . in chapter 7, biglan (2020) examines the ways in which institutions of higher education promote laissez-faire economic theories that deteriorate nurturing environments and prosociality. a movement began in the early 1970s to lobby and persuade u.s. universities to promote "free market theories and values" (p. 139). this lobbying effort followed the influential 1971 powell memo-a memorandum written by an associate justice of the u.s. supreme court regarding the urgency of conservative business interests reexerting influence in american society. this initiative resulted in a diaspora, into all sectors of society, of graduates immersed in free-market theory. the author explains that to reverse this trend, university departments, including law, business, and psychology, must work toward developing nurturing societies by incorporating content on behavior science into curricula. biglan (2020) proposes three reforms to higher education. first, institutions of higher education must focus on solving problems that endanger the nation and the world. however, funding must be directed towards this aim. as of now, less than 6% of federal funding is allocated to behavior science and social science research (p. 142). next, the behavior and evolutionary sciences should be integrated into departments such as law, economics, computer science, and business. last, although it is possible for higher education to be at the forefront of societal change, initiatives that enact effective policies, programs and procedures aimed at improving people's well-being are required. biglan discusses the detriment to well-being caused by the country's current criminal justice system in chapter 8. with the second highest rate of incarceration among all nations and significant racial disparity among those imprisoned, biglan (2020) states that the current u.s. criminal justice system has failed its citizens. biglan condemns a system that, instead of adopting a preventative approach to criminality, relies upon punishment and aversive control. these punitive approaches, conducted in the name of deterrence, have incarcerated individuals, especially monitories, for inordinate amounts of time, and have led to the breakup of families and escalation of poverty. as a result, the recidivism rate in the united states is extraordinarily high at 76.6% (p. 157). in addition, prisons have become increasingly privatized, which may contribute to the relatively high rates of relapse. biglan suggests that efforts be put towards rehabilitation, environment change, and skill-building. in particular, he proposes preventative prosocial and community-based interventions such as the good behavior game and explores corresponding changes in public policies. these recommendations are consistent with holland's (1978) arguments. holland contended that behavior analysts should focus on making changes at the level of cultural systems rather than at the level of the individual. he argued that behavior analysts must work to alter "the system, not the victim" (p. 170), and suggested that we look inwards to assess the degree to which our programmed contingencies maintain social inequality and current class structures. however, on an individual level, biglan suggests that citizens advocate for the utilization of evidence-based rehabilitation practices and the elimination of laws that impede postincarceration adjustment (biglan, 2020, p. 166) . chapter 9 discusses how social media can contribute to environments of competition and hostility. studies have shown a positive correlation between addictive social media use and depression, anxiety, and high stress levels (brailovskaia, schillack, & margraf, 2020) . for example, internet trolling, a malicious online behavior in which a person creates discord and attempts to disrupt an online community, has led to emotional distress in a reported 40% of online users (cheng, bernstein, danescu-niculescu-mizil, & leskovec, 2017, p. 3) . beyond this harm, biglan (2020) asserts that hate and division between groups are exacerbated by the evolution of verbal communities on social media who emit conspiratorial and extreme verbal behavior-capable of provoking violence-and the spread of micro-targeted disinformation campaigns led by political organizations (e.g., cambridge analytica in 2016). meanwhile, internet monopolies such as facebook, google, amazon, or apple evolved with the sole purpose of gaining profits and growing their user bases. an effect of these contingencies is the collection of colossal amounts of data on the behaviors of billions of people. the function of this pervasive data collection is to enhance the effectiveness of advertising and sales through micro-targeting, much like political disinformation campaigns. it is unfortunate that lobbying efforts by leaders of silicon valley monopolies have made little effort to control these practices and have instead supported the environments in which microtargeted disinformation campaigns can prey upon the vulnerable to "stoke their rage" (p. 182). biglan (2020) offers several ideas for overcoming these challenges, including the creation of laws on monopolies applicable to internet titans, campaigns to elucidate microtargeting, and increased funding toward research that investigates the impact of digital marketing on public health. biglan cautions that efforts to limit hate speech may serve as establishing operations that function to increase rates of antisocial behavior. thus, the most important counteraction to hate speech, conspiratorial verbal communities, and proliferation of disinformation is to develop competing contingencies in which prosocial communications are emitted at higher rates and reinforced on denser schedules of reinforcement. biglan conceptualizes this movement as being akin to a race between the forces of division and prosociality. this notion is analogous to vollmer's (2018) conceptualization of differential reinforcement as a "way of life." media groups recently banned president trump's personal accounts, a reaction to his verbal behavior relating to the riots at the capital building on january 6 (conger & isacc, 2021) . more can be done, however. media outlets can differentially reinforce prosocial communication aimed at bringing people together by providing differential durations and rates of media coverage. biglan (2020) emphasizes the urgency of our climate crisis in chapter 10. according to nasa, there is unequivocal scientific evidence pointing to human activity as the cause of global warming. since the 1950s, the rate of warming has been unprecedented and resulted in an increased number of extreme weather events (national aeronautics and space administration, 2019). the wildfires plaguing the american west in fall 2020 are likely a result of global climate change. the degradation of our natural environment, leading to increased frequency and severity of natural disasters, is another important variable in a stressful and fast modern life. environmental scientists such as ehrlich and kennedy (2005) have struggled to find ways to change the relevant human behaviors and biglan (2016) reiterates that behavior science has much to provide in the area of cultural selection. the metacontingencies that maintain the actions of organizations, such as the oil industry, can be analyzed through experimental analyses of cultural practices. following a systematic analysis of the consequences that maintain the cultural practices of organizations and governments, behavior scientists may be able to recommend impactful and practical strategies to the environmental science community. in this chapter, biglan provides broad examples as to how organizations make profits while simultaneously emitting greenhouse gases and deteriorating the environment. he also explains why humans seemingly ignore the long-term dangers of climate change and have yet to take effective, immediate action. solutions to this dilemma include the application of relational frame theory (rft) in developing "verbally constructed descriptions" of the future to motivate and evoke public action (p. 203). the author encourages research investigating ways to reduce carbon footprints and persuade governments to implement effective policies. at the end of the chapter, largescale interdisciplinary programs are proposed, including policy development at the government level, influencing carbon footprints of households and organizations, and community intervention. in the concluding chapter, the author elaborates upon how a political system can work towards the well-being of all citizens. as a self-proclaimed moderate democrat, biglan (2020) analyzes the events that led to the democratic party's loss in the 2016 presidential election. in particular, he cites policies enacted by the clinton and obama administrations that functioned to "embrace wall street" and hollow out the middle class (p. 216). these policies were in support of free-market theory and resulted in further disparity of wealth. the consequence was the election of the trump administration of whom biglan pronounces, "we have run out of adjectives to describe how a terrible a president he is" (p. 221). clearly dissatisfied with trump's presidency, and in search of solutions, the author suggests the creation of a political movement on a scale similar to that of the progressive era or the new deal; a system that works for the well-being of all. biglan suggests several reforms to address immediate concerns of people including an implementation of fundamental reforms to fulfill societal values, a revocation of voter suppression laws, and the reduction of gerrymandering. biglan also advocates for widespread policy reform and the use of science to evaluate the effects of government policies. although the commentary in this chapter may be perceived by some as partisan, the reflections and solutions are inspiring. as biglan states, the united states has developed increased "selfishness, poverty, economic inequality, and discrimination" in the past half century (p. 237). government policies play a crucial role in establishing cultural values and practices that benefit the well-being of all. malott (2016) informed that we can learn much about behavior by studying political leaders. she identified the critical characteristics of effective leaders to include (1) commitment to principle, (2) independence, (3) resilience, and (4) consistency. moreover, malott (2016) examined how leaders function as a group through interlocking contingencies and nonreplicable interrelations, using the cold war as an example. the result of multiple leaders operating under metacontingencies can be regarded as cultural cusps-aggregate products that have far-reaching and significant cultural change. the current government system in the united states often utilizes aversive control to stoke division and fear in a presupposed attempt to gain reelection of leaders. we might ask, is it possible that recent administrations have created cultural cusps that may negatively affect our society and cause the deterioration of public health? for instance, what will be the far-reaching consequences of relating a majority news media to "fake news?" or, how might the relation of mail-in ballots as being "more untrustworthy" than in-person ballots influence future elections? finally, how might the framing of climate change as a "chinese hoax" affect future environmental policies? biglan (2020) functions as a call to arms and provides a comprehensive blueprint as to how we-as individuals-can contribute to the evolution of a society that cultivates caring and nurturance for all people. in the wake of global unrest, teaching people to value themselves and others, through what david sloan wilson refers to as "consilience" (i.e., the convergence of approaches to explain the natural world), may be critical wilson, 2012) . biglan et al. (2020) detailed how prevention sciences have targeted behavioral change processes of scaling up and scaling out to achieve consilience and the evolution of more caring, nurturing societies. scaling up refers "to the process of moving from an individually focused intervention to the application or dissemination of that intervention to affect an entire population," and scaling out involves "creating an impact in sectors of society other than the one in which the intervention or practice originated" (pp. 2-3). rebooting capitalism calls for scaled up and scaled out applications of behavioral interventions such as the good behavior game and act. however, there are many other opportunities for scaled up behavioral interventions in addition to these two. for instance, behavior science can be utilized to decrease racism and prejudice. following the death of george floyd and racial unrest of 2020, mattaini and rehfeldt (2020) reviewed the ways in which the "dark side" of language and relational learning can produce racism, prejudice, and bias. they described the history of aggressive policing and the profound effect it has had upon people of color. mattaini and rehfeldt suggested several systematic cultural-level interventions to change the practices within police forces. these include reducing job stressors, act and behavior skills training to reduce implicit bias, community alternatives for policing, nonviolent social action, and advocacy for specific public policy changes. likewise, matsuda, garcia, catagnus, and brandt (2020) reviewed behavior analytic research that has been conducted on the topic of racism and reported that very little has been done to date. the authors suggested that behavior scientists can contribute to the reduction of systemic racism through investigations of relational framing. the experimental literature has shown that relational training can function to reduce racial bias (dixon & lemke, 2007; mizael, de almeida, silveira, & de rose, 2016) ; however, in some cases, preexisting relations or rules can make forming new contradictory relations difficult (dixon, rehfeldt, zlomke, & robinson, 2006) . according to matsuda et al. (2020) , act is a promising approach for reducing racist behaviors and prejudices. in particular, mindfulness-based interventions that teach people to recognize and notice prejudiced thoughts have been implemented to reduce implicit race and age bias (lueke & gibson, 2015 . in addition, building repertoires of perspective-taking may ameliorate automatic expressions of racial bias. todd, bodenhausen, richeson, and galinsky (2011) found that indicators of racial bias on an implicit association test were reduced in undergraduate participants following a perspective-taking intervention, in which participants were instructed to change perspective between characters of different racial backgrounds presented in a video. finally, values clarification interventions, which encourage individuals to contact oft-delayed and but powerful reinforcers, have shown potential in altering responses on prejudice-related questionnaires (lillis & hayes, 2007) . another area worthy of scaled-up and scaled-out application is the study of propaganda and the rhetoric of political leaders. through functional content analysis (rakos, 1993) , behavior analysts can provide guidance to the populace. this can be done by identifying the function of political rhetoric much in the manner accomplished by rakos. rakos analyzed the stimulus functions of the george h. w. bush administration's narrative published in the new york times in the weeks leading up to the first iraq war. rakos found that verbal stimuli were delivered systematically by the bush administration in a way that was intended to change public opinion for the war. rakos concluded that the bush administration's narrative functioned as propaganda because of the way relational frames were constructed in the rhetoric, thus garnering support for a military defense of kuwait. chan, katz, schmidt, and rehfeldt (2020) recently reported a similar functional content analysis on two opposing speeches delivered by presidents obama and trump on the issue of entering or exiting the paris climate accord. the authors found that the two presidents differed in their use of reinforcer establishing augmentals (reas) and punisher establishing augmentals (peas), thus revealing different motivational tactics to influence public opinion (chan et al., 2020) . the analysis of stimulus functions within political rhetoric, such as that conducted by rakos (1993) and chan et al. (2020) , will aid the public in discriminating political intent. similar analyses may also educate the citizenry as to how language moves people to action. a third potential area for widespread behavior analytic intervention is in the domain of health and disease prevention. rehfeldt and tyndall (2021) surveyed the application of act in the prevention and treatment of chronic health conditions, with an eye toward the role that relational framing in public health messages plays in promoting prevention-related behaviors. normand and bober (2020) further suggested that behavior analysts scale up behavioral interventions in health and fitness by increasing our presence as heath coaches, a practice in which professionals provide individualized services to promote health, wellness, and lifestyle changes. other behavioral interventions designed to promote healthy lifestyles and prevent disease also warrant mention. for example, experimental studies have analyzed how language effects health-related behaviors. these include an examination of the effects of verbal rules on patients' breast self-examinations (meyerowitz & chaiken, 1987) , and the identification of cancerous skin lesions as a function of verbal information about melanoma (critchfield & reed, 2016) . a noteworthy feature of biglan's (2020) text is its evocative function, as it serves to establish novel cultural-level lines of research, analysis and systems change. one sector of society that deserves increased analysis is the public education system. a chapter in rebooting capitalism is devoted to higher education, and a number of school practices are promoted frequently throughout the book. for instance, biglan frequently promoted the good behavior game and positive behavioral interventions and supports, both of which have been shown to prevent crime, drug and alcohol use, suicide ideation, and incarceration (kellam et al., 2011) . unlike in his previous book, the nurture effect (biglan, 2015) , evidence-based academic interventions to "teach children well" (p. 79) are not addressed as frequently in rebooting capitalism. for instance, approaches such as direct instruction (di; stockard, wood, coughlin, & rasplica khoury, 2018) and the comprehensive application of behavior analysis to schooling (cabas) system (greer, 1997 ) have a strong literature base and have been demonstrated to be effective in improving student academic performance. project follow-through, a u.s. department of education experiment with over 200,000 participants that spanned over a decade, underscored the benefits of direct instruction. despite clear results, the public educational system did not change its practices nor utilize di in significant ways (watkins, 1997) . researchers in the field of special education found a correlation between literacy and high-school dropout rates and described literacy as a protective factor against a number of unfavorable outcomes, including high-school dropout (reschly, 2010) . thus, widespread use of evidence-based, academic interventions could potentially alter rates of poverty and inequality, thereby contributing to a nurturing society. the increased polarization of u.s. political rhetoric also warrants discussion. although biglan frequently alluded to individuals with conservative values (e.g., donald trump and the conservative billionaire coalition) throughout the book, the language used to describe and evaluate such individuals may function as aversive stimuli to those who identify as politically conservative. for instance, the introduction of the book begins, "america is in trouble. in the white house, we have a man who almost certainly will go down in history as our worst president. he has appointed many incompetent people, most of whom are working to make matters worse for the majority of americans and ultimately the entire planet" (p. 5). this form of narrative could arguably result in conservative readers dismissing the book and prevent it from reaching a broader audience. as biglan (2020) himself suggests, affirming people's values may increase the likelihood that they will be persuaded to agree with, or at least listen to, those who have opposing viewpoints on significant issues. therefore, reframing the relations between verbal stimuli used to persuade conservative voters to follow the prosocial and nurturing agenda put forth by biglan may have a more significant impact on how effectively our society can reboot capitalism, because conservative voters encompass a large sector. an additional area for future consideration is the influence of artistic, literary, and intellectual activities on the well-being of a society. skinner (1948) emphasized the importance of aesthetic reinforcers in daily life in his imagined utopian society, walden two. unsustainable cultural practices were engineered out of the society, and the efficiency of labor practices were positively reinforced. today, overconsumption of natural resources has made sustainability a key issue. to create a sustainable, steady-state society, grant (2010) persuaded that we should address material overconsumption by increasing allocation of time spent with "resource-light and resource-free reinforcers," such as the performing, visual and literary arts (p. 14). grant also suggested mainstream adoption of bohemian values: a rejection of conventional economic materialism. the values to action coalition presents several opportunities as a starting point for new research aiming to change cultural practices. to begin, in order to recruit new members (including those outside of behavior analysis) to the coalition and promote values-based actions, a study of persuasive verbal behavior is warranted, particularly as it is presented in social media. we might ask, for example, how can relational framing be used to effectively establish prosocial values and evoke certain actions but not others from the populace? what types of formative or motivative augmentals are more likely to move people to action? behavior economics may also help shine on a light on the levels of incentivization and taxation required to alter rates of consumer behaviors. for example, economists and behavior scientists agree that a carbon tax should be used to punish the act of burning of fossil fuels, but what level of tax is required to alter rates of behavior is not known. behavior economic demand analysis may be useful in determining how demand elasticity shifts across varying tax rates, in accordance with reed, kaplan, becirevic, roma, and hursh (2016) , who assessed the demand of ultraviolet tanning across varying tax rates. likewise, disinformation campaigns that flood the internet and social media sites establish a responsibility on the part of skilled teachers to teach discriminations between scientific and pseudoscientific information, or trustworthy versus untrustworthy information. the skill of distinguishing between fact and disinformation on the internet should be taught at all levels from pre-kindergarten through to higher education. in sum, rebooting capitalism provides us with action steps to take towards a more cohesive, nurturing society. these steps are intended for all people, not just behavior analysts. however, in order to move forward in building a more nurturing society, behavior analysts must become an integral member of interprofessional units working to change the interlocking meta and macrocontingencies that govern cultural practices (glenn et al., 2016) . rebooting capitalism is a text that should be read by behavior analysts and could serve as useful supplemental reading for the association for behavior analysis international's culturobehavior science (cbs; n.d.) course sequence, a means by which future behavior analysts are trained to apply behavior science to addressing large-scale societal issues through culture-wide interventions. there are several steps we can take to begin to the save the world. a first step is to read this book. a second step is to reach a broader audience. a third step is to join the values to action coalition and begin committed action towards a values-driven culture. so, come on up for the rising (springsteen, 2002) , and reboot capitalism with the help of behavior science. stress in the time of covid-19: volume two the nurture effect: how the science of human behavior can improve our lives and our world the need for a more effective science of cultural practices the ultimate goal of prevention and the larger context for translation rebooting capitalism: how we can forge a society that works for everyone. values to action a randomised controlled trial of a community intervention to prevent adolescent tobacco use scaling up and scaling out: consilience and the evolution of more nurturing societies tell me why are you using social media (sm)! relationship between reasons for use of sm, sm flow, daily stress, depression, anxiety, and addictive sm use: an exploratory investigation of young adults in germany an analysis of the use of augmentals in u.s. presidential speeches on the paris climate agreement anyone can become a troll: causes of trolling behavior in online discussions emerging cultural and behavioral systems science twitter permanently bans trump, capping online revolt. the new york times does hearing about cancer influence stimulus control? an exploratory study of verbal modulation of stimulus generalization performance management radical behaviorism and buddhism: complementarities and conflicts reducing prejudice towards middle eastern persons as terrorists exploring the development and dismantling of equivalence classes involving terrorist stimuli millennium assessment of human behavior toward consistent terminology in a behaviorist approach to cultural analysis sustainability: from excess to aesthetics the comprehensive application of behavior analysis to schooling (cabasâ®) sapiens: a brief history of humankind a liberated mind. penguin. perspectives on behavior science mindfulness from the bottom up: providing an inductive framework for understanding mindfulness processes and their application to human suffering get out of your mind and into your life: the new acceptance and commitment therapy behaviorism: part of the problem or part of the solution levels of selection: a place for cultural selection the good behavior game and the future of prevention and treatment applying acceptance, mindfulness, and values to the reduction of prejudice: a pilot study mindfulness meditation reduces implicit age and race bias: the role of reduced automaticity of responding brief mindfulness meditation reduces discrimination what studying leadership can teach us about the science of behavior can behavior analysis help us understand and reduce racism? a review of the current literature editorial: rendezvous with truth and discovery. behavior and social issues the effects of message framing on breast self-examination attitudes, intentions, and behavior changing racial bias by transfer of functions in equivalence classes what is prevention science? enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress propaganda as stimulus control: the case of the iraqi invasion of kuwait toward quantifying the abuse liability of ultraviolet tanning: a behavioral economic approach to tanning addiction why we are not acting to save ourselves: act, health, and culture. behavior analysis in practice reading and school completion: critical connections and matthew effects the design of intentional communities: a recycled perspective on sustainable neighborhoods science and human behavior why we are not acting to save the world the effectiveness of direct instruction curricula: a meta-analysis of a half century of research perspective taking combats automatic expressions of racial bias differential reinforcement as a way of life redesigning employee health incentives: lessons from behavioral economics project follow-through: a case study of contingencies influencing instructional practices of the educational establishment human prosociality from an evolutionary perspective: variation and correlations at a city-wide scale consilience: making contextual behavioral science part of the united ivory archipelago quality of life from an evolutionary perspective organizational behavior management: the essentials publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations key: cord-0058167-pthtj78u authors: zhykhor, olena; ryeznikov, valeriy; iafinovych, olena; pohribna, nataliia; miedviedkova, nataliia title: project management in universities under the global pandemic: a focus on finance date: 2020-12-04 journal: integrated computer technologies in mechanical engineering 2020 doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-66717-7_57 sha: 34cfb268341c09b28fdf5bdd996b4fd9b1bd59dc doc_id: 58167 cord_uid: pthtj78u this paper is intended to provide an insight into the importance of project management success in implementing strategies and new financial packages within the context of university education. the discussion will call upon the universities to review and improve their strategies and detailed measures taking into account the international experience and the current situation. this paper builds up on the academic capitalism approach to show how universities can adapt to the new conditions simultaneously being under the continuous onward change processes in the context of ukraine. the paper is structured as follows: first, it reveals the framework of the project management approach application in the university under the changing conditions with focus on the funding and financial aspect. second, it investigates the domestic and international experience of responding to the challenges of the covid-19 pandemic by the universities. it's worth noting that this paper provides an important source to analyze different types of support for solving problems of higher education institutions and students during challenging times. project activity is a strategic development tool designed to create unique results (products, services) that transforms strategies into actions and goals into reality; accordingly, project implementation should affect key areas of the organization's development, defined by its long-term strategy. the general principles of project management are true both for private business and for the public administration sector, however, the introduction of the project approach in a university under the implications of covid-19 pandemic has its own characteristics, on which we would like to focus. the university is a complex system where current global changes require careful preparation, detailed planning and willingness to invest large resources (material, making their own decisions than before. these new realities have created a need and enabled universities to overcome budgetary difficulties, attracting additional financial resources in the educational market. the increasing decentralization of the budget process leads to serious changes in the system of budgeting universities and the conditions of their financial management. fundamental changes in the nature of the university's relations with external entities led to the evolutionary transformations of the university micro-and macro-environment. at present, resistance to the restrictions produces by the covid-19 pandemic and increasing the global competitiveness of universities are the priority areas for the development of education. notably, educational projects are a set of events with a specific goal, limited in time and resources and taking into account the specifics of educational institutions. modern management of an educational project is a special type of management that, one way or another, can be applied to the management of any objects, and not just objects that have explicit project characteristics. methodology. to fulfill the aim of describing and analyzing the project management practices in universities, the article has used the stages of the formula application for the state budget expenditures distribution on higher education between higher education institutions, possible revenue reductions and unexpected costs in ukrainian universities. analysis of legal, professional and regulatory texts has been conducted. these documents provided an important source to analyze different types of support for solving financial problems of higher education institutions and students faced with financial difficulties. also, the analysis of project management practices in the world was done based upon mass media and information available on the websites of universities, with analytical reports on the impact of covid-19 on higher education around the world and strategies developed by universities. the widespread use of project management was a certain response to the challenges of the time, namely the accelerating socio-economic processes in the world, where universities, as other hierarchical organizations, do not have time to adapt quickly enough to the changes. however, under the unprecedented conditions produced by the covid-19 pandemic in the world, there is no other way or second choices. hence, the solution of many problems requires the involvement of professionals from various fields, the creation of global teams, and work in a distributed form. the definition of the project says that it is a set of measures that must be implemented with time and resource constraints to obtain any unique result (changes in the system). so, the development and implementation of new educational programs meets the criteria of the project, while their implementation is an operational activity. at the same time, we may encounter projects that are initially little distinguishable from current operations. for example, the adaptation and application of typical educational programs in different universities is each time a project, because its performers are faced with a new external environment, stakeholders, etc., which makes the final product unique in its own way. however, it is obvious that not all activities in a particular organization can and should be performed in a project form. in the classical project management, two types of the human activity organization are distinguished: operational and project ones. when the external environment is well studied and stable, and the functions of the performers are defined, repeatedly tested in practice and constant, they talk about operational activities. in this regard, universities can restrict itself to classical management methods for solving problems of ensuring the normal functioning of an organization. regularly renewed activities are effective while reproducing the result already repeatedly obtained under similar conditions. infrastructure development is an essential condition for effective introduction of the project management approach at the university. so, a separate structural unit is to be created -the project office performing the functions of the project and program management, which develops the methodological basis for the planned changes. a standard project charter is to be approved normally containing a description of the goals and objectives of the project, an analysis of stakeholders and risks, as well as a network schedule for the implementation of activities. later on, a corporate standard for project management can be established, which defines the relationship of employees involved in the implementation of projects, and also prescribes how, in what sequence and in what time frame it is necessary to perform certain actions when managing a project within the university. improving the skills of project management among the university management with time allows creating a pool of competent employees of various fields for performing projects in various subject areas. in addition, it provides for the university project office to abandon the role of the sole coordinator of strategic initiatives, moving to supervisory and consulting functions after the stabilization of the covid-19 pandemic. it is worth noting that the emergence of a significant layer of employees with skills in project management allows university to formally set strategic goals and select initiatives aimed at achieving them. research universities are a special category of universities, where the most important product of their activities are new knowledge, technologies and competencies, which form the basis of economic and social development. under the current implications of the covid-19 pandemic the ability of society to generate, select, adapt, apply knowledge is crucial for sustainable economic growth and improving living standards. analyzing the features of project management in the university, exploring the specifics of project management under the covid-19 pandemic, we can highlight certain features against the traditional management system. firstly, project management is more focused on meeting the needs of citizens, society and the labor market in quality education, flexibly responds to changing needs and the emergence of new requests under the quarantine requirements. secondly, the project approach stimulates the improvement of the educational services quality by improving educational technologies and financial mechanisms in the field of education. then, the personal activity of the teaching staff is stimulated by involvement in project activities, personal responsibility for the result of work is established, the motivating mechanisms of the teachers' and management activities are being improved. also, there is an effective promotion of innovation in the educational environment of the university, the rapid inclusion of the innovation results in the functional work. and last but not least, at the level of the educational process, methods and means of educational activity are updated, students are involved in project activities, joint work is aimed at obtaining practical results. the feature of the project management in the university covers the transparency principle of managerial procedures for obtaining a synergistic effect in the implementation of interdisciplinary projects. the transparency of management procedures is based, in particular, on the principle of complementarity, within the framework of project management considered as an opportunity to comprehensively solve the problems of one project by including additional results of projects that are an independent object of management of research activities. this mechanism also contributes to the growth of collaborations of the university scientific teams, an increase in the circle of interactions with scientific and educational institutions, large research centers and business structures. financial planning is the key element of financial management of the university, where the development and execution of estimates of units is carried out by their managers, who perform the functions of economists and suppliers. the importance of financial planning as one of the main elements of the strategic management of the university has increased due to the conditions of the covid-19 pandemic. the procedure for determining and distributing the total financial resources of a university is presented as a sequence of management decisions (budget planning). however, the main direction of development is the improvement of the university's financial function, as well as the digitalization of routine processes. all expenses for the maintenance of buildings, dormitories, maintenance of the entire classroom fund (major and ongoing repairs), communication costs, payment internet access is provided by the university centrally. the central budget of the university bears the main burden on financing the remuneration of employees of all categories working at the university. the stable financial position of the university overall involves the following strategic task -creation of financial reserves and accumulated funds (endowment), allowing to survive a one-year or two-year decline in solvent demand, which may arise in education systems, as well as in research organizations. not only the development of the system itself, but also the efficiency and effectiveness of the country's socio-economic development directly depend on the financing of the higher education system. therefore, this issue is the subject of attention of many ukrainian and international researchers, and becomes especially relevant under the limited financial resources against the background of the covid-19 crisis (imf forecasts a 4.9% decline in the world economy in 2020, while real gdp of developed countries will decrease by 8%, and countries with emerging marketsby 3%). global research and practice define a multi-source funding structure for higher education, which consists of public/local, private and other funding. as a rule, public funding is one of the largest parts in the structure of financial resources of universities. at the same time, the financial crisis of 2008-2009 significantly disrupted the sustainability and generosity of public sources of funding for higher education, forcing countries to modernize and further develop forms of funding. the issue of the effectiveness of university funding is becoming increasingly important, so countries are beginning to be more demanding of the higher education institutions' performance and their search for new sources of income. if the older models of financing the higher education institutions were largely based on indicators of the level of activity (for example, the number of students), then in the transformed models attention is paid to the performance [7] . ukraine, like many other countries, features the traditional dependence of public higher education institutions on budget funding. under the chronic shortage of financial resources, expenditures for the maintenance of ukrainian universities are constantly reduced, which leaves little room to develop and provide high quality education. while the funding formulas were introduced (in the 1990s) and reformed (early 2000s) in european higher education systems, the funding mechanism for domestic institutions remained unchanged in ukraine and was based on the number of entrants per full-time position of research and teaching staff using the methods of calculating the approximate average cost to educate one student. in recent years, scientists, representatives of the ministry of education and science of ukraine, the parliament of ukraine have been actively discussing to reform the financing model of the domestic higher education system, which would be consistent with european practices and based on a strategy of higher education. finally, in 2020, ukraine made the transition to "formula" funding. now the total amount of funding provided to the institution of higher education at the expense of expenditures of the general fund of the state budget in the year, is the sum of three components, namely: the amount of funding for stable activities of the institution of higher education; the amount of funding provided depending on the performance and the reserve. each of the components has its own purpose. thus, the financing of stable activities of a higher education institution allows supporting the fixed assets of state institutions of higher education, to carry out systematic work on their logistics. without this, it is impossible to ensure the proper level of development of universities. part of the funding provided depending on the performance of institutions stimulates them to intensify certain areas of their activities, in particular: to develop science, partnership with business, improve the quality of educational services, educate professionals not only in competitive but also in highly demanded by economy fields, etc. according to the newly created formula, the distribution of state budget expenditures on higher education between higher education institutions will take into account the specific performance indicators of each institutionits comprehensive performance. from now on, the actual number of students financed by the state budget is only one of the six indicators (scale of the university, contingent, regional coefficient, indicator of international recognition, indicator of scientific activity, employment rate of graduates) that affect the university budget from the state source of funding. over the next three years, the weight of this indicator will decrease. at the same time, the state encourages universities to maintain their profile, in particular, for technical universities -to support technical specialties by applying an increased index of specialty for them. however, privately owned higher education institutions also have the right to receive funding to educate the students via budget funding in accordance with this formula. the new formula for calculating the amount of budget funding for the universities of ukraine will be introduced in stages from 2020 to 2022, depending on the category of institution (fig. 1 ). in addition, the stages are defined with the application of some indicators of the university. thus, currently the employment rate of graduates is at 1 for all higher education institutions until the system of monitoring the employment of graduates is introduced. it is planned that from 2021 the ministry of education and science of ukraine will monitor employment through an online system. in addition, in 2020, for a gradual transition, restrictions were introduced for the minimum and maximum change in the budget of each university -95% and 120% from 2019, respectively. as to the plan for 2020, 136 higher education institutions of ukraine and 12 of their branches, which have their own estimates, should receive funding according to the formula. at the same time, 94 institutions will receive 100-120% of the 2019 budget, and 54 institutions -95-99% of the 2019 budget. due to the calculation of funding according to the formula in 2020, the budgets of 17 universities of ukraine received an increase in funding from the state budget by more than 15 million uah [9] . under the influence of the covid-19 pandemic, states are forced to revise their budgets for 2020 and beyond in view of the problems of execution of state and local budget revenues in the current year and the need to redirect funds. in such circumstances, there is a likelihood of reducing government spending on higher education. for example, in ukraine in april of 2020, changes were made to the state budget, which in some way affected the higher education system. in particular, they have effectively stopped funding the higher education development fund, reduced programs to support priority research at universities, will not fund a number of renovations of higher education institutions planned for 2020, and "withdraw" funds from the national fig. 1 . stages of the formula application for the state budget expenditures distribution on higher education between higher education institutions in ukraine [8] . research fund. however, the allocations for salaries of university teachers, utilities and scholarships were not reduced [10] . thus, the current and future financial situation of higher education institutions is a cause for concern in terms of both possible revenue reductions and unexpected costs (fig. 2) . the financial situation of a significant number of students has been shaken by the global recession, which prevents them from continuing or starting their studies. thus, the american board of education estimates that the number of entrants in the 2020 academic year will decrease by 15%, including a decrease in the number of international students by 25% [11] . in addition, a significant proportion of international students will be asked about their place of study due to travel restrictions, declining family incomes and ongoing health risks. places to study will be chosen as close as possible to home. for example, the beijing research service found out that more than a third of chinese students change their plans to study abroad [12] . universities around the world are facing a major funding crisis due to the sudden loss of revenues caused by the covid-19 pandemic. the virus is causing immediate financial pain for institutions everywherewith the potential for broader upheaval to follow. the impact of covid-19 on higher education around the world is as follows: universities in australia hit by covid-19 sooner than other universities of the world; -us is most exposed to loss of foreign students, but big campuses with silicon valley partnerships may dominate; northern states of eu are in a better situation than south states; economy of poland has suffered from coronavirus less than most countries, but the drop in foreign demand is predicted; -ukcrisis has exposed limitations of the high-tuition fee model [13] . to overcome the negative situation caused by covid-19, most countries of the world have introduced immediate response packages, which included the developed strategies and recovery plans with specific measures. but the common features for all countries are as follows: the attention paid to foreign students and optional/flexible study conditions (online and in-person studying; the opportunity to start the semester later). the experience of the 2008-2009 crisis showed that public funding of european higher education systems was gradually reduced. most likely, the consequences of covid-19 will lead to the repetition of the same scenario to different degrees for each national system. according to a report by the international university association, almost half (48%) of higher education institutions worldwide said their government/ ministry of education would support their institution in disrupting the educational process caused by the pandemic, 24% said there would be no state support and the rest is unaware. among those that receive support from the government or the relevant ministry, the most common type of support is end-of-school assistance (67%), with other types of support having a much lower share. thus, only 13% will receive financial support from the state due to unexpected losses in the revenue of university budgets. if we look at this issue at the regional level, respondents showed that higher education in europe has the highest rate of support by the government or the ministry of education (over 50%), and africa is the region with the lowest rate of state support (39%). asia, the pacific and america are close to europe in this indicator. at the same time, in both the united states and africa, the largest number of surveyed universities report that their government/ministry of education will not support their institutions (29% in the united states and 31% in africa) [14] . currently, countries are studying, evaluating and implementing various solutions to financial problems for higher education institutions, namely: 1. development of new financial packages to support students (subsidizing educational loans, unemployment benefits and other types of student assistance): delays in payment and interest-free loan are allowed (usa). for example, in march 2020, the us secretary of education announced that all borrowers with federal education loans would automatically receive 0%interest rates for at least 60 days. in addition, each of these borrowers will be able to suspend their payments for at least two months. in new york state, the accrual of interest on government student debt has been suspended [15] ; support for students who have lost their jobs as a result of covid-19 (ireland): students who have lost their job as a result of the pandemic might be eligible for financial help in ireland's "covid-19 pandemic unemployment payment" scheme [16] ; material support for students (poland). taking into account that young people faced with difficult psychological situation and require support at all levels, the university intends to increase the fund of material support for students, given the difficult financial situation of many families [17] ; student support services (uk). some 78 universities of uk will offer in-person social opportunities to students, including outside events and sporting activities, along with government and public health guidance. student support services including mental health support, careers advice, and study skills will be offered in a combination of online and in-person options, while five institutions said they would be available online [18] ; american university also emphasizes, that student services including advising, academic support, and counselling, and the health center will be operational [19] . 2. establishment of higher education funds by higher education institutions, usually through private donations, to support students in the costs they incur in connection with the closure of campuses. 3. creation of state/local funds to help higher education institutions covering their income losses and incurring unexpected expenses caused by the covid-19 pandemic. for example, in the united states, the coronavirus aid, relief, and economic security act (cares) provides for a package of regulations to provide emergency assistance to higher education institutions during a coronavirus pandemic worth $ 14.25 billion. in massachusetts, for example, an emergency fund has been initiated to support public higher education institutions. the bill provides for a budget of $ 125 million [20] . 4. support for daad grant programs (germany). the current situation everyone faces in times of the coronavirus raises many questions, especially for international students in germany. the german academic exchange service (daad) has informed that they will be increasing the use of digital options for the winter semester and start with grants online. this is done to support the process of studying in germany for international students during current difficult times. the global implemented restrictions have made studying abroad a challenging process. using the online scholarship option offered by daad, international students and researchers, who are unable to enter germany because of coronavirus, have the opportunity to apply for the scholarship online. these students can start their scholarship online and afterwards, change to their desired institution after travel restrictions are cancelled. another option is postponing the start of their scholarship for up to 6 months [21] . subject to these conditions and the full inclusion of all university services in the logic of project activities, project management becomes a highly effective mechanism to stimulate the activities of the university under the covid 19 pandemic conditions, being an element of effective decision-making and a conductor of innovative developments in the university practices. the key features of project and program technologies helping the universities to overcome the current challenges of education are the following: systematic vision of the problem via elaboration of a single program of development and functioning; embedding the connected projects in solving strategic problems; interdependence of all indicators of project implementation within the framework of one program; "overview vision" of the desired state of the system (programmed (predicted) values) based on and taking into account the initial state and the current requests. reopening universities during the covid-19 pandemic poses a special challenge worldwide. a set of developed policy measures to the current crisis should help mitigate the negative impact on the university sector. therefore, realizing that the impact of the current crisis will be significant and longlasting, higher education institutions must prepare for financial difficulties by developing a strategy for their activities quickly and decisively adapting to modern conditions. thus, in the process of developing the strategies and detailed measures, universities should pay attention to the following points: â�¢ at least two strategy options should be developed (including optimistic and pessimistic forecasts). according to the each strategy, appropriate measures should be prepared; â�¢ the developed strategy options, as well as the corresponding stages with approximate dates, should be openly accessible; â�¢ universities should offer online and in-person student support services in line with government and public health guidance. first of all it is important for first-year students who need the support much more than others; â�¢ the detailed and perspective governance, as well as the income diversification should become the priority areas. crisis management and risk assessment should be a part of institutional operational planning; â�¢ universities should take into account the social dimension and provide different kinds of support for students whose families suffered from the coronavirus and faced with financial difficulties; â�¢ opportunities offered by digital transformation to find the balance between online and in-person learning should be investigated; â�¢ universities should review funding and make decisions which activities are most important for investing (r&d, developing digitally enhanced learning, support for infrastructure). due to changes in modes of learning and teaching, universities need additional funds for implementing digitally enhanced learning. thus, investment in both skills development and digital infrastructure with the aim to develop new modes of learning and teaching is actual and requires further research. academic capitalism: politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university the application of project management techniques to college and university admissions activities utilizing project management techniques in the design of instructional materials evolution of solar, harvard's client/server-based fundraising management system under control: careful planning and monitoring can help to contain costs in your next school construction project project implementation using a team approach define thematic report: performance-based funding of on the distribution of state budget expenditures between higher education institutions on the basis of indicators of their educational, scientific and international activities more money is for the strong. the ministry of education and science published the distribution of state funding for universities in ukrainian] 10. ukrinform: coronavirus government budget-2020 cuts: it could be worse china's study abroad industry: measured impacts caused by the outbreak of novel coronavirus covid-19 universities prepare for the new post-pandemic world the impact of covid-19 on higher education around the world admission to universities during the coronavirus pandemic icos: information for international students on covid-19 inter slavonic: jagiellonian university will begin the new academic year with remote lectures most uk unis preparing for in-person teaching in 2020, survey finds. the pie news covid-19 (coronavirus): summary information higher education responses to coronavirus (covid-19) studying in germany: the daad is offering an online scholarship option for international students book reviews 117 hidden agendas by john pilger. london: vintage, 1998, 687 pp. those who admire the work of john pilger, journalist and film maker, will find much to enthuse over in hidden agendas, his seventh book. at nearly 700 pages it is lengthy and its list of subjects includes vietnam, east timor, apartheid, english tabloid newspapers, wapping, rupert murdoch, burma, hillsborough, australian aboriginals, kenya, tony blair and new labour, the gulf war, and northern ireland. pilger's primary themes, however, are con­ siderably fewer: media control, globalization, the military, capitalism, and, cru­ cially, opposition to this ideology. 118 the american journal of islamic social sciences 16:2 pilger writes in the introduction: “this book is devoted to slow news” (p. 1). by “slow news” pilger means those stories which have not received serious media coverage. he goes on to note: “when slow news is included, it is more than likely dressed in a political and social vocabulary that ensures the truth is lost” (p. 2). that pilger knows what the truth is, is a central premise of his book. in his bitter criticism of global media coverage of the gulf war, he writes: “the war was not a war at all. it was a one-sided blood-letting. kate adie [bbc reporter], like most of her colleagues, had reported the news, but not the story” (pp. 52-53). pilger’s real concern throughout this book is the story, not the news. this is an unequivocally political book appealing to the educated general reader. a substantial number of notes are employed and there is a useful index, but hidden agendas has no scholarly pretensions. indeed, overall, pilger can be cavalier, even irresponsibly so, with regard to referenc ing. for example, in the following assertion made in the introduction, at least seven claims are made, not one of which is substantiated people rightly regard the “peace dividend” as a bad joke, but what they do not know is that all the nuclear powers are upgrading their nuclear arsenals at such a furious pace that the old cold war might never have ended. the “first strike” nuclear arms programmes set in train by ronald reagan and george bush have not missed a beat under bill clinton; only one relative ly minor air-to-ground missile has been cancelled. otherwise, billions of dollars are being spent on reagan’s favourite star wars anti-missile sys tem, called theatre high altitude area defence, or thaad. in response, the russians are developing their own anti-ballistic-missile system, while both powers collude in the deception that their irresponsibility does not break the abm treaty, signed in 1972. for the americans, whether or not there is a comprehensive test ban treaty is irrelevant; they have now developed a computer modelling believed to be every bit as reliable as an actual test. (pp. 8-9) on a number of occasions a source is given in the text, but there is no addi tional reference. in a chapter on kenya, for example, pilger writes: the british ran concentration camps in kenya in which the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month, june 1954. torture, flogging, forced labour, the denial of rations and the abuse of women and children were commonplace. “the special prisons,” wrote the imperial historian v.g. kieman, “were probably as bad as any similar nazi or japanese establishments.” a former rehabilitation officer noted that “japanese methods of torture” were practiced by one british camp com mandant. (p. 25) book reviews 119 here, the opening assertion is unsubstantiated, the reader is not given a fur ther reference to kieman’s work, and the words of a “former rehabilitation offi cer” also receive no further annotation. pilger’s “slow news” is often grim news, and it is a tribute to his skill as a writer that he can maintain a reader’s interest throughout so relentless and lengthy a catalogue of horrors; however, part of his readability is purchased at the expense of rigorous and consistent annotation. pilger writes well, but there are times when he clearly surrenders to his own impassioned rhetoric. he can be slyly amusing, however, as when he writes of iraqi civilian casualties in the gulf war: “perhaps, like the vietnamese, iraqi civilians were obliterated in order to save them” (p. 49). similarly, he writes of one american state: ‘‘in the state of georgia, always ahead in regression” (p. 71), and his account of an exchange with a salesman at the paris arms fair is savagely amusing: i asked a salesman to describe the working of a “cluster grenade” the size of a grapefruit. bending over a glass case, as one does when inspecting something precious, he said, “this is wonderful. it is state of the art, unique. what it does is discharge copper dust, very very fine dust, so that the particles saturate the objective. “what objective?” i asked. he looked incredulous. “whatever it may be,” he replied. “people?” “well, er ... if you like.” (p. 117) pilger is emphatic in his condemnation of capitalism. a central thesis of hidden agendas is that in britain, the united states, and in much of europe and australia, the policies of the principal political parties have converged into single-ideology states with rival factions, which are little more than brother hoods of power and privilege. linked inextricably with capitalism, media tech nology, he writes, “is promoted as an extension of human consciousness, not as the most powerful tool of a new order controlled by the few at the expense of the many” (p. 9). this is a characteristic statement; pilger has no interest in views which differ from his own. for pilger, media technology is “the most powerful tool of a new world order,” and any other understanding of it is, sim ply, incorrect. he describes the writings of the american “communitarian” amitai etzioni as “psychobabble” and writes contemptuously: “for this great thinker, the root of society’s problems lay not in political and economic prob lems, but in the collapse of the family, in rampant moral confusion and social anarchy.” the trouble with the world was that people had ‘‘too many freedoms” and not enough “responsibility” (p. 83). pilger is even more contemptuous of 120 the american journal of islamic social sciences 162 the work of charles murray, the american social scientist who has written extensively on the concept of “welfare dependency,” arguing that welfare actively promotes unemployment and crime. pilger simply ridicules the ideas of etzioni and murray, never engaging in any debate. for him, there is no point in debate: he is right and they are wrong. whatever the individual reader might think of the ideas of both writers, the lack of respect pilger affords their respec tive arguments points to the book‘s primary flaw: pilger’s persistent belief that political events can be interpreted in a wrong way and in a right way his way. he is critical of christianity, invariably viewing it as a synonym for power, privilege, and corruption, but in common with the large majority of left-wing writers he is charitable about more “exotic” religions. in a chapter on burma, for example, he writes eloquently and sympathetically: the sunlight r e h c t e d through mist reveals a city whose secular life has vanished, leaving buildings the equivalent of chartres and as grand as any thing the greeks raised to their gods. built in the eleventh and twelfth cen turies by kings seeking redemption, this is pagan, the ancient capital of burma and described in its scriptures as its secret heart. (p. 155) western christians, however, are dupes, as are, in fact, the great majority of people in pilger’s world. when discussing the death of princess diana, for example, he suggests that a “false consciousness” has been created in the pub lic by a sinister collective of journalists, p.r. people, and “spin doctors” and then rhetorically asks: “did it occur to those who gorged themselves on her death that the public’s reaction might largely be that of a people despairing at the whole political class, politicians and media alike?” (p. 5 ) . equally, does it not occur to pilger that numerous people might reject his view that their responses were manufactured for them? pilger places himself here, by no means for the first time, in the classic left-wing bind: he is committed to a view of the “public” as decent and intelligent and so can only explain away their foolish behavior (buying the sun, grieving over princess di, playing the lot tery, voting conservative) by constructing in opposition to them an elite group of powerful, ruthless, and very intelligent rulers who effortlessly manipulate them for power and profit. pilger is at his best, and then he is invaluable, in supplying information, not necessarily in analyzing it. his statistical breakdown and contextualization of labour’s 1997 victory is fascinating and is certain to contain surprises for those who do not normally have access to such facts and figures: in the 1997 election, the truth of blair’s “landslide” victory was that it r e p resented fewer votes than john major won in 1992. in inner-city seats, the book reviews 121 vote was less than 60 per cent, extremely low for a british general election. in liverpool riverside it was less than 52 per cent; in the constituency of the future social security secretary harriet harman, who had declined to send her son to school in the area, the vote was 56 per cent. the two mil lion votes labour gained on its vote in 1992 were mainly in middle-class marginals, which delivered more than 100 seats. (p. 85) from this platform he launches a sustained and vitriolic attack on blair’s poli cies and, in particular, on his appointments in the area of social security. the book contains a preface, an epilogue, and nine chapters: “the new cold war,” “flying the flag,” “inside burma,” “australia,” “we resist to win,” ”on the famine road,” “the rise and fall of popular journalism,” “the media age,” and “return to vietnam.” each of these chapters is further s u b divided, so that, for example, chapter 5 , “we resist to win,” contains six sec tions, each of which depicts an instance of resistance, represented by an indi vidual or a collective. there are a number of photographs, most of which are linked to this particular chapter, including those of victims of the hillsborough stadium football disaster, the leaders of the liverpool dockers’ strike, aung san suu kyi, elected democratic leader of burma, xanana gusmao, leader of the east timor resistance from 1882 to 1992, and kelvin mackenzie, editor of the sun (1981-1990). in one of the best chapters in the book, “the rise and fall of popular journalism,” pilger writes of his early days on the mirror, then gives the history of this remarkable english newspaper. it is a moving and ele giac chapter in which he laments the passing of responsible, popular joumal ism embodied by the mirror. the tone changes when pilger moves on to dis cuss the sun, initially the mirror’s rival and then, inevitably, its successor in the tabloid marketplace. the sun embodies everything which pilger dislikes about contemporary journalism, and he is particularly savage about the sun’s owner, the australian rupert murdoch, who emerges as the book’s primary villain. in many respects it is inevitable that murdoch should hold this position in pilger’s book. one of pilger’s central concerns, and few would deny it is a serious con cern, is the increasing monopolization of the media. pilger informs us that “ninety percent of all world news and current affairs now comes to us from fewer and richer and more powerful sources” (p. 531). three agencies: associated press, reuters, and agence france presse, supply most of the world‘s “wire-service” news. in television there are just two agencies provid ing foreign news footage to all the world’s newsrooms: reuters television and world television network (wtn). reuters supplies 400 broadcasters in eighty-five countries, reaching an audience of half a billion people. wtn reaches an estimated three billion people. another two western broadcasters, cnn and bbc world, come second. pilger’s central thesis here is that as 122 the american journal of islamic social sciences 16:2 media control becomes monopolized, the information released to the public will only be that which suits the ideological requirements of the monopoly. as the monopoly, by definition, is capitalist, it will suppress any information which reveals opposition to its hegemony. in some respects, therefore, hidden agendas can be read as an attempt to supply this relentlessly suppressed infor mation to its rightful owners: the public. pilger is skillful at economically presenting essential historical background, as he does in sections on burma and northern ireland, and many of the book’s most successful pieces begin with an introduction to ordinary people whose sit uation pilger then follows with an historical and political contextualization. for pilger, people always come first and even the structure of much of his work mimics his passionate belief that human lives are far more important than the political ideologies to which they are far too often sacrificed. pilger grew up in australia and his views on that country are shrewd and stimulating, particular ly his account of pauline hanson’s election, as a federal independent, on “a provocative anti-aboriginal, anti-immigration platform” (p. 233). pilger notes that hanson’s electorate, the state of queensland, has one of the highest rates of unemployment in australia and that hanson is simply indulging in the time honored political activity of creating scapegoats. however, he also suggests that among australia’s politicians there is a shared anxiety about the threaten ing proximity of asia: at the root of this lies an enduring, subliminal fear of asia: that one day the “hordes” to the north will fall down on under-populated australia as if by the force of gravity. this is not admitted, of course, and often disguised by a constant stream of pseudo-academic literature obsessed with whether or not “we” are “in asia.” most australians, in my view, do not share these anxieties. (p. 254) hidden agendas’ flaws are inseparable from its many virtues. it is impas sioned, informative, courageous, and not totally without hope for the future. among the many suggestions which pilger makes to help reclaim the freedom of the press are for serious journalists to pay attention to the repeal of legisla tion passed since 1979 “which restricts and intimidates the right to report open ly and without fear or favour: the 1981 contempt of court act, the 1986 police and criminal evidence act and the 1994 criminal justice act” (p. 546). in addition, he suggests abolishing the libel laws and instituting legislation, such as exists in france, which prevents huge companies like w.h. smith and john menzies (which have 53 percent of the distribution market) from withdrawing small-circulation magazines and newspapers from sale. finally, he argues for a freedom of information act unfettered by “exemptions”; the establishment book reviews 123 of a public body to provide start-up funds for newspapers, journals, and broad­ casters independent of the monopolists; and a new broadcasting act. the last words of hidden agendas are these: "the fight has only just begun" (p. 610). coming from any other writer but john pilger, such a phrase might seem hol­ low rhetoric, but perhaps the most impressive aspect of hidden agendas is the way in which its sustained critique of capitalism is interwoven with its author's adamant, and ultimately admirable, refusal to accept that socialism has been beaten. for pilger, contrary to francis fukuyama's the end of history and the last man, not only is the fight not over, it has "only just begun." dr kevin mccarron senior lecturer in american literature roehampton institute, london key: cord-0060275-79g8hmjx authors: berglund, oscar; schmidt, daniel title: conclusion: xr, the climate change movement and capitalism date: 2020-09-10 journal: extinction rebellion and climate change activism doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-48359-3_7 sha: 31758f0db2a24a7ebe20a06060b8c57b8958904b doc_id: 60275 cord_uid: 79g8hmjx it may be unwise for a climate change movement to declare itself anti-capitalist if it seeks a broad appeal. however, it is equally untenable for a climate change movement not to engage with capitalism and the political economy since this is where the driving forces of climate change can be found. climate change activists therefore ought to consider how climate change relates to aspects of capitalism, such as growth, trade, profit, property rights, financialisation and class relations. in this book we have sought to explore, understand and contextualise extinction rebellion as political actors. we have done so by putting their tactics, strategy, structure and political demands at the centre of our analysis. we have argued that xr have greatly contributed to the increasing attention paid to climate change by citizens, policymakers and other actors. they have done that through practising civil disobedience in a way that has been hard to avoid and that has created tensions in society as intended. civil disobedience is a battle over legitimacy. xr have captured the zeitgeist of political polarisation and used this to their advantage. this has resulted in fierce critique from a minority but in an increase in concern about climate change amongst the public. it has forced people to take a stance as the model of polarising disruption that xr use intends to. we have shown that xr's lawbreaking protest shares much more with the liberal tradition of justifying civil disobedience than with the anarchist direct action tradition. this is because xr's goals are not anarchist and their direct action is often not prefigurative in that it does not directly seek to enact in the present what it aims towards in the future. instead it seeks to disrupt in a mixture of direct and indirect ways. they share the liberal concern with justifying their disobedience by emphasising that it is a last resort and that it is practised within an overall fidelity to law. the open, conscientious and sacrificial elements of the disobedience along with the reverence for the police shows this liberal, rather than anarchist, ethos in xr's lawbreaking. in exploring xr's views and practices of democracy we found a dissonance between the critique against the lacking democracy in society at large and internal practices that are not particularly democratic. although the movement shares much of the critique of liberal representative democracy that has grown in social movements over the past decades, they deviate from those social movements in how they view the role of internal democracy in that critique. in this sense they break with the prefigurative horizontality of post-cold war social movements. for social movements, practising direct, deliberative and participatory democracy internally has been a way of protesting the lack of true democracy that the liberal democratic state offers. it has been a way of showing what is possible. in doing so, many movements have sacrificed efficient decision-making for democracy. xr do the opposite. they sacrifice democracy for efficiency. the internal structure is officially transparent but in practice opaque. whilst holding assemblies is influenced by the prefigurative horizontal tradition, xr's assemblies are not where power lies and they are merely consultative. that said, anybody is free to set up an xr group and can obviously influence what that group does. this has enabled the movement to grow as quickly as it has. though it is always perilous for scholars to predict the future, we anticipate that the lack of internal democracy is what will eventually lead to xr's decline. when people give up their free time, they want to feel that they can have an influence, that they are being heard and that they are not just foot soldiers. the lack of such influence is in our view likely to lead to a slow decline in activists. one of xr's key demands is nonetheless a democratic one, namely a citizens' assembly on the climate and ecological emergency to overcome the inaction on climate change. the claim is that representative democracy has been co-opted by elites and has proven incapable of addressing the climate emergency that is threatening humanity and civilisation. the assembly would be put in place through sortition and reflect the demography of the population. the assembly would invite experts, listen to their advice and deliberate on solutions. such assemblies have proven efficient in dealing with tough issues, such as marriage equality in ireland, by being able to bypass strong opposition of powerful religious institutions. the idea of a citizens' assembly rests on a rich scholarship on deliberative democracy. we have argued that both the demand of a citizens' assembly and potential policy solutions that such assemblies may produce can be useful tools that render the climate change movement more legitimate. nonetheless, a citizens' assembly on climate change would have to have such extensive remit that it would come up against entrenched powerful interests at the heart of the global political economy. these interests are already what is stopping action on climate change and xr lack an explanation for how a citizens' assembly would be able to bypass them. that is, if the assembly is set up within the current state system, there would be many mechanisms for interested parties to dilute the effect of the assembly. this may be through delegitimising its democratic credentials through a hostile media, lobbying assembly members, lobbying politicians not to adopt recommendations or challenging recommendations in the courts. as such, citizens' assemblies would be more a tool in a broader political movement for action on climate change and climate justice than a solution in itself. lastly, we have critically interrogated many of the claims that xr make as part of their civil resistance model and show how these claims cannot be backed up by social science or any historical record. struggles for social, political and economic justice permeate the history of humanity. unfortunately for those seeking silver-bullet solutions for how to achieve radical change, the very different social, political and economic contexts of these struggles mean that it is futile to draw general lessons of what will work for social movements. we can and should draw inspiration from others' experiences, but always in a way that is sensitive to our own context. there are two main problems with xr's model and the way that it is derived from the civil resistance literature. the first is that it takes a dubious and poorly substantiated claim about numbers that are required to topple dictators in individual countries in the global south and applies this to the fight for climate action that is necessary in all countries, not least in the global north. differences between dictatorships and liberal democracies; national and global struggles; and pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist campaigns are all ignored in this leap. the second problem is that it constitutes a refusal to engage with the type of societal transformation that would be needed. it refuses to engage with the political economy of climate change and how that may be different or similar to what other social movements have been involved in. in exploring these aspects of xr's tactics, strategy, structure and political demands, we have identified four tensions that run through the movement. these tensions are to a varying extent also relevant to the broader and fast-growing climate change movement. the first of these is a tension between reformist and revolutionary aspects of climate change discourses. is climate change activism about putting pressure on the state to mobilise and mitigate and adapt to a changing climate? or is it to deeply transform, revolutionise or replace state structures because the existing ones are seen as unable to engage seriously in mitigation and adaptation? xr's lawbreaking tactics and the demand of a citizens' assembly can be interpreted as both reformist and revolutionary depending on who you ask and which aspects you look at. the civil resistance model, albeit flawed, is designed to be revolutionary, achieve system change and possibly replace the state as we know it, though it is uncertain with what beyond a citizens' assembly. this tension is unneccessary to reconcile. activists with a more revolutionary mindset will bring innovative approaches to the movements whilst it is important not to alienate potential activists who prefer a more reformist approach. the second of the tensions that we identified concerned whether it is tenable for climate change movements to be solution agnostic. through their citizens' assembly demand, xr have to some extent locked themselves into a situation where they do not perceive themselves to be able to legitimately propose policy solutions. unlike the school strikers who have embraced a green new deal, xr leave the climate change policy to a future citizens' assembly. this makes it harder for the movement to contradict those who point to population control or stopping climate migration as solutions. xr in the us have adopted a demand of climate justice. whilst xr in the uk also speak of climate justice and parts of the movement speak of decolonising; climate justice and decolonisation are not as central to xr uk as they are to xr us or other climate change movements in the uk. the important question to ask here is 'what demands can we legitimately make?'. demands that arise from citizens' assemblies do give legitimacy. but so do demands that are based on values of justice and equality. to be sure, xr do not stay away from policy recommendations. banning airport expansions and fossil fuel divestment are prominent policies that xr support. at a local level xr engage even more in specific sustainable policy proposals. we appreciate that there is a reluctance to get behind policies that may be divisive. it can be difficult for an organisation that seeks to be a mass movement because it may limit the people that consider joining. however, agnosticism also carries risks. on the one hand, people may be reluctant to engage with a movement that lacks a more explicit policy agenda as it can seem politically vacuous. on the other hand, xr has become an influential voice on climate change and it is a missed opportunity not to use that voice to actively promote good and just solutions over bad and unjust ones. in a way, this tension plays out in every planned action and messaging and xr have certainly become less solution agnostic than they originally were. the third tension that we have identified is very specific to xr and it concerns their adherence to a specific theory of change. as both nafeez ahmed (2019) and we have argued, there is not much substance to this theory of change. many activists that we have spoken to have taken much of ahmed's critique onboard and it was a stated rationale behind xr bristol's own new strategy document (xr bristol 2020). as social scientists who study social movements that seek radical change, we urge xr to stop peddling the 3.5% claim as well as claims that they have found a secret formula to how to achieve change. instead we encourage xr to further develop their thinking of how they fit into the movement of movements of climate change activism. moreover, we suggest that they broaden their reading beyond the us-based civil resistance literature and pay more attention to gramscian ideas and critical political economy and social movements literature more broadly. the adherence to the theory of change is an increasing tension in xr, but not a particularly creative one. finally, the main tension that runs through all aspects of what xr and other climate change movements are about is the question of capitalism. xr are explicit about anti-capitalism and other 'lefty-language' being outside of their framing (xr 2020). it is common for social movements not to declare themselves anti-capitalist or on the left even though it is evident that they campaign against capital and that they have left-wing values regarding equality and justice. the rationale for this is simple. there is no reason to alienate potential supporters and activists that do not inherently see themselves as anti-capitalist or explicitly left wing. for example, the spanish anti-eviction movement pah campaigns for the right to housing and against banks and financial institutions through various forms of civil disobedience, but stay away from branding themselves as left wing since this could stop right-wing voters who face eviction from joining (suarez 2017; berglund 2018) . in this sense, being anti-capitalist should not be seen as a pre-requisite to join a direct action climate change movement. nevertheless, for a movement that offers as much internal training as xr, more explicit engagement and education around the forces that climate change activists are up against would not go amiss. to conclude this book, we will therefore briefly explore why climate change activists ought to consider the relationship between climate change and capitalism and how xr currently relate to this relationship. the purpose here is not to set out a definitive relationship between capitalism and climate change. there is a vast literature on green political economy that does just that (e.g. koch 2012; wright and nyberg 2015; gough 2017; raworth 2017) . instead, we highlight some ways in which xr already engage with key aspects of capitalism and how climate activists may want to consider those aspects further. there is no lack of implicit critique of capitalism in xr's discourse as these extracts from this is not a drill (xr 2019) show: our government has shattered meaningful democracy and cast aside the common interest in favour of short-term gain and private profit. (xr 2019, p. 2) there are better ways to live, produce and to consume. (shiva 2019) the problem is capitalism. the problem is colonialism. the problem is power. the problem is inequality. the problem is greed, and corruption, and money, and this tired, broken system. (knights 2019, p. 12) they talk about profit and specifically short-term profit. they talk broadly of how we produce and consume. and they connect capitalism, colonialism, power and inequality. some of these issues are particular problems of the capitalism that we live in here and now whilst others are more general for capitalism on the whole. take for example the short-term gain. this concern speaks directly to what has been called 'shareholder value'. it has been identified as a key feature of the more financialised capitalism that has evolved over the last 40 years (van der zwan 2014). it means that short-term share prices have become comparatively more important than long-term profits and business models for corporations that are on the stock market. shareholder value does pose a particular problem for climate change since it favours the short-term interests of investors over the long-term interests of the business and certainly the long-term interests of the planet. whilst the short-termism of shareholder value is a prominent feature of contemporary capitalism, it is perfectly possible to imagine a capitalist society where it plays a much more marginal role as it has done in most of the history of capitalism. an often-repeated green critique of capitalism is that it relies on continuous economic growth and that such growth is impossible to sustain on a finite planet. this critique was first developed in the early 1970s and has since been updated (meadows et al. 2005) . at the time of writing, covid-19 is starting to severely affect the global economy. it is paralysing much economic activity and leading to a global recession. the extent of the economic effects of this public health crisis will show many vulnerabilities in the highly globally integrated capitalism of the twenty-first century. it is already showing a decrease in many sources of co 2 emissions. in that sense it shows aspects of the shock to the capitalist economy that addressing the climate emergency would entail. trade and transport are big drivers of climate change and they would have to decrease sharply in an effort to address the climate crisis. nonetheless, even though growth and increasing trade are central to contemporary capitalism, the economy would still be capitalist even if trade decreased and there was a prolonged recession. private profit, critiqued in the declaration of rebellion in the quote above, is a more essential part of capitalism in all its iterations. it is part of what makes capitalism a distinct mode of production. it is the mode of production that vandana shiva critiques in the other quote above. a mode of production is how we make, consume and trade things. in the marxist tradition, what distinguishes capitalism as a mode of production is that it has two classes (wood 2002; radice 2015) . one class relies on selling its labour and tends to be called 'labour' or 'workers'. the other, much smaller class, owns the means of production and tend to be called 'capital'. that does not mean that capital is free to do what they want. for capital to survive, it needs to be profitable. to be profitable, it needs to be competitive. in order to be profitable and competitive, capital must exploit workers. exploitation here is not necessarily as violent or abusive as it may sound. it merely means that capital has to get more value out of workers than it pays them in wages. otherwise it would not be profitable, and it would lose out to other more profitable businesses. therefore, if you oppose the right or the necessity of capital to make profit at the expense of workers, or indeed nature, then you can call yourself an anti-capitalist since you would prefer a different mode of production. property rights underpin capitalism as a mode of production. the expansion of property rights into more and more spheres of the social and natural world has been an important feature of how capitalism has developed in recent decades. green political economy points to how increased property rights lead to over-exploitation and unsustainable resource extraction. the non-capitalist economies in communist regimes were often no more sustainable than capitalist ones, showing that the state is not necessarily a more sustainable owner of resources and the means of production than corporations are. elinor ostrom, the only woman to ever win the nobel prize in economics, showed that common ownership, neither in the form of the state nor corporations, of resources leads to more sustainable practices (wall 2014) . climate change activists may therefore consider what sustainable ownership ought to look like. challenging property rights in such ways is certainly to engage with capitalism and the political economy. in practice, xr and the broader climate change movement is already contesting the driving forces of climate change in contemporary capitalism. the demands to divest in fossil fuels is the prime example of this. in europe, including the uk, climate change activists have achieved great things over the past two years. they have pushed climate change towards the top of the political agenda and increased awareness, concern and engagement amongst people. this has resulted in governments, international organisations and corporations talking a green language. this represents a victory but also the start of a new battle, namely, to reveal and contest when this new use of green language is merely greenwashing. greenwashing is when practices or actors that are not sustainable are presented as such. for example, an energy company that relies on 90% fossil fuels choosing to highlight its marginal investments in renewable energy in its advertising is greenwashing. as are governments that present themselves as green whilst not taking anywhere near sufficient measures. the european green deal is a case in point. not least, regulations around what is officially considered as green or brown investments should be subjected to scrutiny and contestation by activists. in other words, contesting greenwashing has become an urgent area of contestation for climate change activists and no tactic is as efficient as civil disobedience when it comes to delegitimising the actors that engage in greenwashing. in conclusion then, it may be unwise for a climate change movement to declare itself anti-capitalist if it seeks a broad appeal. however, it is equally untenable for a climate change movement not to engage with capitalism and the political economy since this is where the driving forces of climate change can be found. the flawed social science behind extinction rebellion's change strategy contesting actually existing austerity heat, greed and human need this is not a drill: an extinction rebellion handbook capitalism and climate change limits to growth: the 30-year update class theory and class politics today. socialist register doughnut economics this is not a drill: an extinction rebellion handbook debt revolts: ecuadorian foreclosed families at the pah in barcelona making sense of financialization the sustainabe economics of elinor ostrom climate change, capitalism and corporations this is not a drill: an extinction rebellion handbook dna: strategy v.2.2. london. xr bristol. (2020). xr bristol plan for 2020 men, women, and environmental change in indonesia: the gendered face of development among the dayak benuaq men, women, and environmental change in indonesia: the gendered face of development among the dayak benuaq michaela haug ► haug, m. (2017). men, women, and environmental change in indonesia: the gendered face of development among the dayak benuaq. austrian journal of south-east asian studies, 10(1), 29-46. the increasing penetration of global capitalism, ambitious development efforts, and related environmental change have significantly transformed kalimantan and its indigenous population, commonly referred to as dayak, during the last decades. this article analyzes these processes from a gendered perspective and explores how gender relations among the dayak, who generally are characterized by well-balanced gender relations, have been influenced by what is commonly referred to as ‘development’. a review of the existing literature shows that new asymmetries between men and women are emerging mainly due to different ways of inclusion in new economic systems. based on research among the dayak benuaq, the article shows that far-reaching gender equality has been so far upheld within benuaq society while gender gets interwoven with an increasing variety of inequalities. i argue that in order to capture this complexity, research on the gendered impacts of development should a) aim for a better understanding of the intertwinement of gender with other aspects, such as ethnicity, class, age, or education, b) pay more attention to how these aspects play out in different contexts, and c) differentiate more clearly between gender ideals, norms, and actual practice. keywords: development; environmental change; gender; indigenous peoples; kalimantan  introduction since the last decades, the island of borneo and its societies have undergone rapid and profound change. deforestation and the degradation of the natural environment has been accelerated by the increasing integration of even small communities into the global capitalist economy, the expansion of state control, ambitious plans of national and local governments to generate income and to boost economic growth through natural resource extraction, growing mobility, as well as the increasing commodification of land and other natural resources (cleary & eaton, 1992; padoch & peluso, 1996; tsing, 2005). for the indigenous population, commonly referred to as dayak, these changes often imply the loss of land and other natural resources, increasing dependency on wage labor, and a shift towards life in (semi-)urban centers (cramb et al., 2009; de koninck & bissonnette, 2011; sercombe & sellato, 2007). these transformations (re-)produce diverse economic, political, and social inequalities. this occurs, for example, through new processes of exclusion (hall, hirsch, & li, 2011) as well as through the “adverse incorporation” (hickey & du toit, 2007) in new economic systems. so far, the inequalities most extensively aktuelle südostasienforschung  current research on southeast asia w w w .s ea s. at d o i 10 .1 47 64 /1 0. a se a s20 17 .1 -3 30 michaela haug  aseas 10(1) addressed in this context in kalimantan have been the marginalization of the local population vis-a-vis the state and (trans-)national corporations, increasing economic disparities between local elites and average villagers, and inequalities related to ethnicity (duncan, 2004; fried, 1995; peluso, 2003). the latter are of increasing importance especially since decentralization, when ethnicity gained new prominence within local politics as well as through the revitalization of dayak culture which has partly been directed against claims and demands of migrants from other parts of indonesia, thus fueling violent conflicts in some areas of kalimantan (davidson, 2003; oesterheld, 2004; peluso, 2003; van klinken, 2002). it has further been described how the integration into global capitalism, mainly in the form of commercial logging, mining, and the expanding oil palm industry, leads to conflicts and various forms of resistance (de koninck & bissonnette, 2011; haug, 2014a; potter, 2009). however, what remains unclear is, what role gender plays within these processes and how gender intersects with other elements of multiple and fragmented identities such as ethnicity, education, or age in the (re-) production of various kinds of inequalities. the aim of this contribution is thus to explore these recent processes of environmental and societal change from a gendered perspective. i explore how the lives of men and women have been impacted and how gender relations have been influenced by development. the indigenous groups of kalimantan, commonly referred to as dayak, are of particular interest as they are characterized by far reaching gender equality.1 the limited number of studies documenting the impact of recent economic and environmental change on dayak gender roles, gender identities, and gender relations reveal heterogeneous outcomes. however, their overall tenor is that new asymmetries between men and women are emerging and that women tend to be more negatively affected by this environmental change than men. taking the dayak benuaq as an example, i show that the benuaq have so far upheld far-reaching gender equality despite manifold external influences. i argue that gender is interwoven with a growing variety of inequalities. in order to understand the gendered impacts of development, a complex perspective has to be considered. for example, i view the still prevailing essentialist focus on women as misleading. research exploring the gendered impacts of development must include male perspectives and aim for a better understanding of the intertwinement of gender with other categories of differentiation, such as ethnicity, age, education, or social status and pay more attention to how these play out in different contexts. data for this article was collected during 22 months of field research in kutai barat between 2004 and 2007 and during two shorter periods of field research in 2009 and 2011. my initial research was an integral part of a cifor-bmz research project2, which analyzed the impacts of regional autonomy on the well-being of forest dependent communities. i conducted fieldwork mainly in the three dayak benu1 despite the great linguistic and cultural diversity of the various dayak groups, the available literature supports the general argument that dayak societies are characterized by rather well-balanced gender relations. this will be further elaborated below. 2 the research project “making local government more responsive to the poor: developing indicators and tools to support sustainable livelihood under decentralization” was financed by the german federal ministry for economic cooperation and development (bmz) and carried out by the centre for international forestry research (cifor) in cooperation with the university of freiburg in germany. 31men, women, and environmental change in indonesia aq villages engkuni pasek, jontai, and muara nayan (haug, 2010).3 i used a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, for example, participatory observation, formal and informal interviews, two comprehensive household surveys, and a wellbeing survey. the wellbeing survey, which i refer to below, covered a total of 300 people with equal proportions of young people, parent and grandparent generations, as well as equal proportions of men and women, all of which were chosen randomly. during my research on poverty and decentralization, gender emerged as an interesting aspect that i start to explore in this article. in order to locate the discussion on gendered development in kalimantan within a broader framework, i start this article with a brief overview of the gendered impacts of development in southeast asia before summarizing what is known so far about its impacts in kalimantan. i then turn to my own research among the dayak benuaq, and describe their gender relations and how recent economic and environmental developments have impacted them. finally, i point out relevant questions for further research on the gendered impacts of development in kalimantan. gender, development, and environmental change in southeast asia the increasing penetration of global capitalism into rural areas of southeast asia is supported by national governments as part of ambitious development agendas which often accelerate the extraction of natural resources (e.g., mining, oil palm plantations) and lead to far-reaching environmental transformations. globalization, development, and environmental change are hence deeply intertwined in the daily experiences of men and women living in the rural areas of southeast asia and elsewhere. three different bodies of literature address the gendered impacts of these processes. first, there is a broad feminist scholarship on gender and globalization, which explores how changes implied by globalization impact women, men, families, and gender relations, paying special attention to work relations and the (in)compatibility of productive and reproductive activities (summarized in acker, 2004). a second body of literature, addressing gender and development, can be traced back to ester boserup’s seminal work women’s role in economic development (1970). despite the broad variety of studies that can be found within this category, a great number focuses on women in the global south and/or the gendered impacts of specific development measures and development projects (elson, 1995; stevens, 2000; trankell, 1993). the third body of literature has developed around the gender and environment nexus. ecofeminist approaches that related the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature to patriarchal-capitalistic domination (shiva, 1989) have meanwhile been heavily criticized in academia (archambault, 1993; leach, 2008) but they still seem prevalent in the field of practice. recent work on gender and environment is strongly influenced by feminist political ecology which focuses on gender specific environmental knowledge, the role of gender in determining access to and control over natural resources as well as the gendered nature of environmental politics and social movements (elmhirst, 2011; rocheleau, thomas-slayter, & wangari, 1996). inspired 3 as agreed with the villagers i use pseudonyms for the names of informants but regular names for places and locations. 32 michaela haug  aseas 10(1) by an increasing attention to the physical, sensory, and functional possibilities and capacities of materials (miller, 2005), the materiality of the natural environment and human bodies becomes currently included in research on gender and environment (barad, 2003; elmhirst, siscawati, & basnett, 2015). as development, globalization, and environmental change are intimately intertwined, i do integrate literature from all these strands in my further discussion of gender and development in southeast asia in general and kalimantan in particular. research on gender in southeast asian societies reveals a great diversity and has contributed to challenging dominant assumptions within the anthropology of women and gender. one of these dominant assumptions is the dichotomy of domestic and public brought forward by rosaldo (1974). ethnographies from southeast asian societies have shown that the domestic realm of life can be very powerful, as for example, among the minangkabau in sumatra (sanday, 2002). they have also emphasized that control over economic resources is not automatically associated with higher social status (anderson, 1972; keeler, 1990), and that there are various societies which simply do not make the distinction between domestic and public, like the dayak gerai (helliwell, 1993, p. 268). it is thus not surprising that research on the gendered impacts of development in southeast asia, which largely focuses on women, also reveals a heterogeneous picture: industrialization, urbanization, labor migration, and the increasing market integration of rural areas can have both empowering effects on women and (re-)produce and strengthen gender asymmetries (rydstrom, 2010; williams, 2007). several researchers have emphasized that other factors such as class, age, and education highly influence the impact of development on women’s lives (helliwell, 1993; karim, 1995) and we can assume that the same is the case for men. aiwa ong, studying female factory workers in malaysia, argues that development is very unevenly experienced and distributed; even in the same community some women may benefit while others lose. also, “for the same women the consequences may be contradictory, opening up new possibilities for social and physical mobility and introducing new freedoms, but also imposing new pressures and constraints” (ong, 1987, cited in king, 1999, pp. 161162). research on agricultural modernization and increasing wage labor also shows great complexity: it is mainly young women who leave rural areas in search of wage labor while married and older women stay in (or return to) the village and are more engaged in agriculture (king, 1999, p. 162). the increasing mechanization seems to have different effects on male and female labor. while the introduction of mechanical harvesting and transplanting methods has often tended to displace women from agriculture (scott, 1985; wong, 1987), the mechanization of field preparation has reduced the workload of men (rigg, 1997). ester boserup (1970) has argued that colonial rule and the advance of capitalism have pushed rural women out of agriculture and confined them to the domestic realm. such processes have also been documented for southeast asian societies. for example, robinson (1986) shows how men and women were “co-partners in agricultural production” (p. 65) in soroako, sulawesi, before nickel mining provided employment predominantly to men. several researchers argue that also state development programs as well as ngo programs and projects often (re-)produce gender asymmetries (van esterick, 1995). such programs are often ignorant of the respective societ33men, women, and environmental change in indonesia ies’ understanding of gender or work, customary land tenure systems, and the local gendered division of labor. consequently, they often locate women in the domestic sphere, while they automatically assume men as local authorities and landowners (king, 1999; van esterik, 1995). this ignorance tends to undermine the authority and the rights of women among ethnic minorities and indigenous groups (kleinhutheesing, 1995; siscawati, 2014). gendered impacts of development in kalimantan marginalizing dayak culture to understand how development has encompassed kalimantan, it is crucial to consider the position of kalimantan and its people within the indonesian nation state. during pre-colonial times, the indonesian archipelago was characterized by emerging and declining centers and peripheries. with the advent of colonialism, however, the island of java emerged as a single center while the surrounding islands were increasingly more transformed into the state’s periphery. after indonesian independence and short debates about federalism during the 1950s, the central position of java and the capital jakarta have been further strengthened, culminating in the highly centralistic orde baru (haug, rössler, & grumblies, 2017). while java and javanese culture have been constituted as the “showcase of development” (tsing, 1993, p. 23), the outer islands, like kalimantan, have been constructed as the margins of the state, being “in need of ‘development’” (li, 1999, p. 11). the new order regime (orde baru) consequently represented itself as a government of progress, bringing development to the indonesian periphery and its inhabitants. development (pembangunan) became a crucial discourse (arnscheidt, 2009, pp. 117-124) and the indigenous population became one of that doctrine’s objects. the dayak were classified as one of indonesia’s isolated communities (masyarakat terasing) whose way of living was considered not in accordance with the standards of modern indonesia. the goal of the government was to develop these groups and integrate them into the social and cultural mainstream of the country. in practice, this meant that dayak, as well as other indigenous peoples throughout the indonesian archipelago, faced severe discrimination and assimilation policies (duncan, 2004). these included resettlement schemes, which encouraged dayak to settle in one family houses and partly forced them to destroy their longhouses as these were considered dirty, unhealthy, dangerous, and a breeding ground for communism. the promulgation of the law uu no. 5/1979 on village administration was of major significance in this process. by standardizing village structures as per the javanese model, it destroyed local political institutions and traditional forms of leadership and social organization. further development efforts attempted to eliminate autochthonous dayak belief systems as these were excluded from the official definition of religion. thus, the dayak experienced a heavy pressure to convert either to islam or christianity (henley & davidson, 2007, p. 10). finally, a variety of development efforts aimed to persuade dayak people to abandon swidden agriculture which was considered unproductive and unsustainable. programs to get dayak into wet rice cultivation were often combined with transmigration programs, which were aimed at relieving the population 34 michaela haug  aseas 10(1) pressure on java, bali, madura, and lombok while simultaneously expanding central control and a nationalist vision of development (hoey, 2003, p. 110). transmigration programs created ecological damage (e.g., the 1 million ha rice project in central kalimantan; kartodiharjo & jhamtani, 2009, pp. 47-49) and in several cases contributed to tensions between migrants and indigenous groups (duncan, 2004). the new order government increased state control over natural resources through issuing sectoral laws on forestry, mining, oil and natural gas, irrigation, and fisheries, which all facilitated resource exploitation by state and private interests (lucas & warren, 2000; thorburn, 2004). in kalimantan, natural resources, most notably timber, oil and gas, gold, and coal were extracted to generate national economic growth and to benefit the center (charras, 2005), while benefits for the local population remained limited. instead, customary rights to land and forests were increasingly marginalized, and millions of hectares of communal forests, fallow land, and forest gardens were given to logging companies or converted to commercial agriculture, jeopardizing the livelihoods of the local population (dove, 2006). with the turn of the century, democratization and regional autonomy have brought manifold changes to kalimantan. through the ‘blossoming’ of new administrative units,4 many new political and administrative centers were created throughout kalimantan, endowed with new political authority and new economic opportunities. dayak people – seen as a whole – have been empowered, with some dayak groups becoming ruling majorities in newly created regencies (haug, 2017), and dayak identities becoming (re-)constructed in various ways (widen, 2002). the resource-rich regions of kalimantan further profited from fiscal decentralization and some local governments have undertaken great efforts to improve service provision and local infrastructures. however, not all citizens have benefited equally from these changes. new processes of marginalization on regency and village levels lead to increasing inequalities (haug, 2017). furthermore, democratization and decentralization have not automatically reversed ecologically destructive practices of natural resource exploitation that emerged during the new order (warren & mccarthy, 2009, p. 227). development in kalimantan continues to be focused on the extraction of natural resources and the conversion of forests for commercial agriculture. mining will be of special importance for the future development as the masterplan for acceleration and expansion of indonesia’s economic development (mp3ei) for the period 2011-2025 designates kalimantan as the center for the production and processing of national mining and energy reserves (government of indonesia, 2011). gender (in-)equality, development, and environmental change among the dayak research on gender among dayak societies so far remains limited, fragmentary, and often raises more questions than answers (sutlive & appell, 1991, p. xi). however, despite the linguistic and cultural diversity of dayak societies, the available literature documents the broad existence of well-balanced gender relations. ethnographies describe, for example, far-reaching gender equality among the iban (mashman, 1991), 4 although this phenomenon is found all over indonesia, it is most striking in the outer islands. while between 1996 and 2007 the number of regencies increased by 7.8% in java and bali, it rose by 82% in kalimantan (brata, 2008). 35men, women, and environmental change in indonesia rungus (appell, 1991), gerai (helliwell, 2000), meratus (tsing, 1990), and kenyah (colfer, 1981, 1985, 1991, 2008). this does not mean that dayak societies are free of gender inequalities, but rather that the gender inequalities, if present, are small and often eclipsed by other categories of differentiation, for example, class in central borneo (rousseau, 1991, p. 409). gender asymmetries exist to varying degrees among the different dayak groups and are most often found in the political domain. for example, schneider and schneider (1991) describe gender relations among the selako as rather egalitarian in terms of the social relations between the sexes, however, men tend to be awarded more prestige than women and dominate political and religious positions. the balance between men and women is produced through different practices. while some dayak groups tend to minimize differences between men and women, others perceive them as clearly different but complementary. the ngaju, for example, belong to the latter. for them, ‘male’ and ‘female’ are viewed as opposing domains, which together comprise a “unity in duality” (schiller, 1991, p. 416). appell (1991) argues that among the rungus sex roles are not identical, but they are equivalent and both behaviorally and ideologically of equal importance for societal functioning: “for each skill exhibited by a male, there is an equally important one possessed by the female” (p. 10). tsing (1990), who has worked among the meratus dayak in central kalimantan, has pointed out the discrepancy that can exist between gender imagery on the one hand, and the realm of practice on the other. even though gender symmetry is an important aspect of meratus customary law and no rule or gender stereotype exists that excludes women from political activity, few women hold political office. “the performance standards necessary to create political centrality in meratus forums privilege male talents. [as a result] women, and less assertive men, become the audience for male ‘stars’” (tsing, 1990, p. 98). colfer has conducted research among the dayak kenyah in east kalimantan since the late 1970s (most recently, elmhirst, siscawati, & colfer, 2016) and describes their gender relations as “comparatively egalitarian” (colfer, 2008, p. 183). the high status of kenyah women is essentially linked to their “equality or even preeminence in economic matters” (colfer, 2008, p. 189) and the well-balanced relationship between men and women is further strengthened by the kenyah’s respect for individual autonomy. however, colfer (2008) describes how the equality of men and women in swidden agriculture has eroded through the introduction of chainsaws and outboard motors, as these have altered the relative contribution of the sexes to rice production and as such undermined an essential basis for the high status of women. chainsaws are only operated by (some) men and increased the efficiency of male work, while the tasks conducted by women continue to be undertaken with traditional technology. the outboard motors further decreased women’s autonomy vis á vis men, as women hardly travel alone with the heavy engines. furthermore, government officials and extension specialists repeatedly directed agricultural planning and training towards men, ignoring the strong role of kenyah women in agriculture. while colfer (1985) has initially expressed the fear that these processes will inevitably lead to increasing gender asymmetries among the kenyah, she meanwhile expresses some cautious optimism that kenyah women will retain a relatively high status, mainly due to young women’s passion for education (colfer, 2008). 36 michaela haug  aseas 10(1) migration to urban centers has been an important factor influencing dayak gender relations. so far, this phenomenon has mainly been explored in the malaysian part of borneo as many dayak have moved to the coastal towns of sarawak and sabah. the contributions to the edited volume of hew (2007) show that the experience of moving to town is ambivalent and “often uneven across class, ethnicity, age, marital status and location” (hew, 2007, p. 140). having grown up in relatively gender egalitarian rural environments, many dayak women experience difficulties with the unfamiliar gender hierarchies in muslim dominated urban centers. similarly, sutlive (1991) described the migration of iban into the city of sibu in sarwak which made traditional inequalities in iban society more apparent as “traditional prescriptions and opportunities for achievement . . . have given way to economic and political systems with uneven advantages for males” (p. 497). sutlive also mentions that with urbanization, prostitution has become a new income source for women and that domestic violence seems to have become an issue.5 prostitution and domestic violence are also major issues discussed in a study exploring the gendered impacts of coal mining in east kalimantan where one of indonesia’s largest coal mines (in kutai timur regency) has created far-reaching environmental change, caused processes of urbanization, and lead to an influx of migrants from other parts of indonesia (lahiri-dutt & mahy, 2008). this study shows that women have profited from employment opportunities and infrastructure improvements in and around the mine, but also that “decreased opportunities from landbased livelihoods [led] to a lowering of women’s status within the family and society whilst increasing their work burdens” (lahiri-dutt & mahy, 2008, p. 1). furthermore, alcoholism and domestic violence against women increased. several women experienced an increasing dependency on males and complained about a lack of decisionmaking power at the community level. the study included dayak communities affected by the mine, but it is notable that the majority of informants seemed to be migrant women. the expansion of oil palm as a major driver of economic and environmental change in kalimantan has fostered interest in the gendered dimension of this industry. research in west kalimantan (julia & white, 2012; li, 2015) and with several dayak communities in east kalimantan (elmhirst et al., 2015) suggests that large investments in oil palm have produced new gender inequalities, mainly due to the weak presence of women in public decision making processes, the exclusion of women from formalizing land rights, and disadvantageous labor regimes. elmhirst et al. (2015) and li (2015) further emphasize that the gendered impacts of oil palm can differ highly according to other aspects like age, ethnicity, the availability of land and capital, as well as between smallholdings and plantation schemes. in sum, the number of studies that explore the rapid economic and environmental changes in kalimantan from a gendered perspective is still rather small.6 despite some variations, the common tenor is that new gender asymmetries tend to emerge because of environmental and economic change. 5 it has been argued that bornean societies are characterized by an absence of sexual violence (helliwell, 2001; sutlive & appell, 1991). 6 i have limited this literature review to academic publications and have not included reports and so called ‘grey literature’ from ngos. 37men, women, and environmental change in indonesia maintaining gender equality in the face of change among the benuaq the benuaq belong to the barito linguistic family of southeastern borneo. until the early 20th century, they had a stratified social order which distinguished between nobles, commoners, and slaves. since then, the increasing integration into the monetary market economy and the indonesian national administration produced a new dispersion of power and prestige (gönner, 2002, p. 51; massing, 1981). most benuaq practice an extended subsistence economy (gönner, 2001, p. 171) which is characterized by a combination of swidden agriculture, extracted and cultivated forest products, and additional wage labor. the religious life of the benuaq is dominated by their autochthonous religion (venz, 2012) and christianity, which are connected in a complementary way. gender among the dayak benuaq gender equality represents a contested term, and feminist debates about the ‘equality’ of men and women have produced rather contrary positions. while liberal and marxist feminists perceive gender equality as the social insignificance of sexual differences, radical feminists insist that there are essential differences between men and women and attempt to increase women’s status by reversing those values that favor only masculinity (du, 2002, p. 3). spiro (1980) distinguishes between the “identity” and the “equivalence” meaning of equality. according to the latter, men and women are equal as long as their differences are held to be equally valuable. accordingly, du (2002) defines “a gender egalitarian society as one whose dominant ideology, institutions, and social practices value its male and female members equally, regardless of the roles they play” (p. 9). building on this equivalence meaning of equality, i argue that dayak benuaq gender relations are characterized by a far-reaching gender equality.7 this argument is based on the following observations: specific gender roles do exist in benuaq society, but they are not strictly followed and often overlap. while women do in general more housework than men and often take care of small children, it is not unusual for men to wash their own clothes, to cook, or to take care of babies, toddlers, and older children. both men and women make important contributions to economic production. men and women fulfill equally important roles in swidden agriculture and agroforestry and today both young men and women increasingly seek employment outside the village. men and women do have equal rights and access to land and other natural resources according to customary law. furthermore, customary inheritance law neither privileges male nor female children. similar to the kenyah (see above), the benuaq highly value individual autonomy, and personal authority is based more on age and personality than on gender. the autochthonous religion of the dayak benuaq encompasses both male and female creator spirits. healing rituals 7 gender relations which are not characterized by male dominance have also been termed as gender symmetries when areas of male dominance are opposed by powerful female domains (e.g., dejong, 1998; metje, 1995). the term gender complementarity is often used to stress that male and female complement each other to form a unity, while the adjective egalitarian is used to emphasize the absence of institutionalized hierarchies between men and women. 38 michaela haug  aseas 10(1) are carried out by female and male specialists, while death rituals are conducted by men only. the existence of benuaq terms for polygyny (penuyaang) and polyandry (pemaduq) suggests that both forms of marriage have been practiced in the past. standard today is a monogamous marriage. although sexual relations before marriage are restricted for young men and women, virginity is not valued as among several other dayak groups of central borneo (rousseau, 1991). marriages can be divorced with few problems and neither men nor women experience a decline in status by divorce. the benuaq have a bilateral kinship system. previously, an uxorilocal post marital residence pattern prevailed. today, young couples prefer to set up their own household, given that they can afford to do so. there is no preference for children of any sex, many couples express the wish to have at least one child of each sex. girls and boys have equal access to education, given that parents have the financial means at all to school their children. education is highly appreciated and has significantly increased with the improved availability of primary as well as higher education since decentralization (haug, 2010). female mobility is not restricted but has improved as a consequence of the shift from transportation by river to road. while women seldom travel alone on boats with outboard motors, they enjoy riding motorbikes. during my field work i met several women who use motorbikes to commute on a daily or weekly basis between their workplace and the village. the most significant imbalances between men and women among the benuaq can be found in the political realm. although there are no formal restrictions for women and there are some outstanding female leaders, formal political leadership is mainly in the hands of men. however, women are actively engaged in all kinds of political fora that i attended, for example, the newly created village parliaments (badan perwakilan kampung) or village meetings (musyawarah kampung). so far, i have not found any satisfying explanation for this imbalance. for the meratus, tsing put forward the reason that performance standards necessary to create political centrality privilege male talents (see above), however, this reason seems unsuitable for the benuaq. several of my (male and female) informants argued that women rarely want these positions because formal leaders have to spend many hours, especially during the evenings and often late into the nights, away from their families to attend rituals, meetings, and dispute settlements. these (partly not formal but moral) obligations are seen as conflicting with other tasks, primarily their role as (grand)mothers. the complex intertwinement of gender, age, and education i have argued so far that road construction and the increasing availability of motorbikes have increased female mobility. taking a closer look reveals that age matters as well. while most young people can drive a motorbike, many of those belonging to the elder generation cannot. roads and motorbikes have increased primarily the mobility of young (and middle-aged) men and women. it is also the younger generation that most often engages in wage labor. in many households, the parents (or grandparents) concentrate on swidden agriculture and agroforestry activities while their sons and daughters seek jobs to provide for the increasingly important and more regularly needed cash income. in this context, women and men are integrated differently in 39men, women, and environmental change in indonesia the gendered socio-economic systems of logging activities, coal mining, or oil palm plantations. wage labor for both men and women is often linked to ambiguous experiences. while they are empowered by their earnings and their experiences outside the village, they often find themselves placed in exploitative work arrangements and unfavorable positions within unfamiliar (gendered) hierarchies. imagining young women spraying pesticides on oil palm plantations and young men working in the logging industry, all of which have minimal security standards, illustrates that health risks are different but equally tangible for male and female bodies. the importance of age is also reflected in representations of wellbeing. the wellbeing survey which i conducted in the three research sites revealed that wellbeing varied only slightly by gender but widely by age. while the percentage of people enjoying a good life remained relatively stable in all three generations, the proportion of people who felt they suffered a bad life increased from 33% among the young people to 46% in the parent generation to 56% in the grandparent generation (haug, 2010, p. 153). this trend was extreme in the village of muara nayan, where 95% of the grandparent generation stated that they lived a bad life. instead of providing a better future for their children and grandchildren, the elder generation of muara nayan witnesses them faced with more and more problems, for example, the loss of land to oil palm plantations, the loss of gardens through forest fires, and increasing water pollution caused by nearby open-pit coal mining. the elder generation thus feels especially worried that the general condition in the village is spiraling downwards (haug, 2014c). besides age, education and family relations play an important role in the context of newly emerging inequalities. when the regency kutai barat came into existence in 2001, a large number of office jobs needed to be filled. this provided a great opportunity for the well-educated community members. for example, in the village of engkuni pasek, which has an unusually high level of formal education8 and is located close to the new administrative center, at least 30% of the households had members who got new jobs in sendawar, mainly as civil servants or teachers. men and women enjoyed these new job opportunities equally which were further supported by the close personal links between several families in engkuni pasek and the first district leader rama a. asia (haug, 2017). in jontai, gender was yet again interwoven with other aspects in the context of the logging boom which followed decentralization. people in this village benefited (temporarily) from fee payments and the opportunity to engage in self-organized logging. however, these benefits were distributed very unevenly. as i have shown elsewhere (haug, 2014b, 2017), it has been the (mainly male) village leaders and several ‘tough’ young men who gained the largest profits. benefits from the logging boom were thus not only gendered but largely influenced by age, formal authority, physical strength, and individual characteristics. 8 this can be explained through a catholic missionary school which was founded in this village in the 1950s. 40 michaela haug  aseas 10(1) conclusion and further research the situation in the three study sites shows that gender intersects with age, education, and various other aspects. it further reveals that gender relations among the benuaq have been influenced by state development policies, the growing presence of indonesian national culture, and christian proselytization – all of which are characterized by differing gender concepts and different gender hierarchies. the market integration of small and until recently rather remote communities leads to an increasing inclusion of the dayak benuaq in new economic and social systems which are characterized by different norms, values, and gender hierarchies. gender is thus not only intertwined with ethnicity, age, education, and other elements of multiple and fragmented identities but is also negotiated in increasingly varying contexts. being a man or a woman can have different meanings within one’s family, within the village, in a logging camp, or in a local government office. insights into indigenous concepts of gender, work, and the complementarity of masculine and feminine identities in southeast asia have challenged common notions of gender based on predominantly western concepts. indigenous concepts and perspectives should thus be placed center stage of future research on gender in kalimantan. already in the 1990s, van esterick (1995) argued that women’s ngos in southeast asia have embraced western gender and development discourse (often in order to receive funding) at the expense of local language, concepts, and perceptions. she consequently urged that “terms such as development, work, gender, and equity must all be deconstructed and interpreted through indigenous logic” (p. 257). this is still a cogent demand and should motivate and inspire future ethnographies. research at the nexus of gender, development, and environmental change in kalimantan should pay attention to including men as well. currently, research on the gendered impacts of development still largely focuses on women, with some recent exceptions (großmann, 2015). ngo literature tends to depict dayak women as an especially vulnerable group. this reflects social injustices caused by prevailing gender inequalities in indonesia, but it also demonstrates the need for activists to often simplify complex relations in order to raise awareness for pressing matters and expose social injustices to an audience not familiar with the issues at hand. elmhirst et al. (2015), however, show how revealing it is to overcome “overly simple dualisms such as . . . male capacities and female vulnerabilities” (p. 3). by facilitating links among different activist communities, such a perspective may be enriching for campaigns against gendered injustices. the anthropological interest for the “differences within” (moore, 1993) has gained new affirmation through the recent popularity of intersectionality (lykke, 2010) which represents a crucial approach for most recent studies. as almost all studies on gender and development reveal great ambiguities as well as the intertwinement of gender with other categories of differentiation, future research on gender and development in kalimantan should more consequently address intersectionality and explore the (re-)production of gendered inequalities as intertwined with age, ethnicity, education, class, and other aspects. drawing on the insights by tsing (1990), future research should also carefully distinguish between a) the ideational level (what values, qualities, and characteristics are assigned to men and women?), b) the normative 41men, women, and environmental change in indonesia level (which rights, roles, and responsibilities do men and women have according to a specific normative order?), and c) the level of everyday practice (how are the concepts at the ideational level and the rights and duties expressed at the normative level realized in everyday social practice?). this might lead to an analysis of how new labor arrangements within families and households challenge and change existing gender identities, gender roles, and gender relations, and to what extent this leads to changes in gender ideology, institutions, and social practices. calls to pay attention to the differences amongst women and amongst men, to the discrepancy between ideals and practice, as well as to the contextuality of gender relations have been repeatedly voiced. but this does not mean that they have become any less important. quite the contrary, with the ever more rapid pace of economic, societal, and environmental change, it is of utmost importance to understand the role played by gender in the (re-)production of inequality on one of southeast asia’s most important development frontiers.  references acker, j. 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(1987). peasants in the making: malaysia’s green revolution. singapore: institute for southeast asian studies. about the author michaela haug received her phd from the university of freiburg and is currently assistant professor of cultural and social anthropology at the university of cologne, germany. her research focuses on human-environment relations, processes of political, economic, and social change, social inequalities, gender, and rights to land and forest resources, with a regional focus on indonesian borneo. ► contact: mhaug@uni-koeln.de generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) karl marx a sketch by achille loria karl marx by achille loria authorised translation from the italian with a foreword by eden & cedar paul [illustration: logo] new york thomas seltzer 1920 copyright, 1920, by thomas seltzer, inc. all rights reserved printed in the united states of america _the socialism that inspires hopes and fears to-day is of the school of marx. no one is seriously apprehensive of any other so-called socialistic movement, and no one is seriously concerned to criticise or refute the doctrines set forth by any other school of "socialists."_ foreword by eden and cedar paul foreword it has been said that the professional and professorial exponents of economic science confine themselves to variants of a single theme. usually belonging to the master class by birth and education, and at any rate attached to that class by the ties of economic interest, they are ever guided by the conscious or subconscious aim of providing a theoretical justification for the capitalist system, and their lives are devoted to inculcating the art of extracting honey from the hive without alarming the bees. achille loria is an exception to this generalisation. professor of political economy at turin, and one of the most learned economists of the day, he is anything but an apologist for the bourgeois economy. with the exception of the first volume of marx's _capital_, no more telling indictment of capitalism has ever been penned than loria's _analysis of capitalist property_ (1889). this gigantic work has not been translated, but a number of loria's books are available to english readers: _the economic foundations of society_, 1902; _contemporary social problems_, 1911; _the economic synthesis_, 1914. a biographical and critical study of malthus, in the italian, was rendered into english in 1917 and published in the united states as the opening chapter of a symposium on _population and birth control_ edited by the writers of this foreword. _the economic foundations of society_ has run through five editions in swan sonnenschein's (now allen & unwin's) "social science series." but on the whole loria's works are less widely known in england and america than on the continent, far less widely known than they deserve to be. an exposition of his outlook and a study of his relationship to marx will not only be of interest in themselves, but will help readers to surmount certain terminological difficulties in the _karl marx_. all original thinkers write perforce in a language of their own minting. those of us to whom "surplus value," the "class struggle," the "materialist conception," "economic determinism," have been familiar concepts from childhood upwards, are apt to forget that marx's contemporaries were repelled by what they regarded as superfluous jargon. the first students of kant, the first students of darwin, the first students of all great innovators in philosophy, science, and the arts, have had to master a new vocabulary before they could understand what these writers were driving at; for new ideas must be conveyed in a new speech or by the use of old words refashioned. we cannot understand loria, we cannot appreciate loria's criticism of marx, we cannot grasp the nature of loria's own affiliation to marx, unless we realise precisely what the italian economist means by the speciously familiar terms "income," "subsistence," "unproductive labourers," "recipients of income," and the like. the familiarity of the words makes them all the more misleading to those who do not hold the lorian clue to guide them through the economic labyrinth. does this sound alarming? yet loria's doctrines, like those of marx, like those of darwin, like those of--but we must not say "like those of kant"--are simplicity itself to anyone who is able to survive the first shock of the encounter, to surmount the first agony of a new idea. in our own view the difficulty of economics in large part depends upon the fact that it is either a system of apologetics or else a system of attack. there are, in fact, two conflicting sciences: the economic science of the master class, and the economic science of the proletariat. both are necessarily tendentious, and the conflicting tendencies will remain irreconcilable as long as the class struggle continues. not until that struggle has been fought to a successful issue, not until the co-operative commonwealth has come into existence, can there be a comparatively dispassionate political economy. as dispassionate as conic sections it can never be, for it is biological, sociological, is by its very nature tinged with human interest, and can therefore never be wholly impartial. but many of the contradictions and perplexities of economics are by no means inherent; they are, we contend, no more than confusing reflexes of the class struggle. loria seems to hold a somewhat similar opinion. in _contemporary social problems_ (pp. 99, 100) he writes: "i am inclined to consider political economy and socialism as two intellectual weapons which, for a long time separate and mutually antagonistic owing to the apologetic theories of the one and the subversive utopianism of the other, are drawing closer and closer together as they become more human and the old animosities disappear. perhaps the day is not far distant when the two forces will unite under one standard." to a casual reader this might suggest that loria thinks that the class struggle, that the conflict between orthodox economics and socialism, can be overcome within the framework of the bourgeois economy--that the capitalist old-man-of-the-sea can at one and the same time remain seated upon the back of the proletarian sindbad the sailor, and walk beside him amicably arm in arm as the two climb the mount of human endeavour. but an attentive student of loria's _karl marx_ will realise that when the italian speaks of "a day not far distant," he means the morrow of the social revolution, when marx's promethean work shall have been completed, and when, led by marx "the emperor in the realm of mind," the human race shall have reached "the brilliant goal which awaits it in a future not perhaps immeasurably remote" (infra p. 162). for loria, one of the greatest living champions of the doctrine of economic determinism, sees no difficulty in reconciling that doctrine with a firm belief in the magistral efficacy, at the stage which evolution has now reached, of the deliberate human will. "the economic natural force," writes eduard bernstein (_evolutionary socialism_, p. 14), "like the physical, changes from the ruler of mankind to its servant, according as its nature is recognised." herein is embodied the application in the special economic field of the profound general truth that by scientific study man, the child of nature, learns to control nature, and thereby to mould his own being and social environment in accordance with the dictates of his own enlightened will. similarly loria is far from the rigid economic determinism which would refuse to admit the existence of "ideal" causation, or the possibility in the sphere of sociology of intelligently adapting means to ends. "idealism" is a word which has been soiled by such ignoble use that one really hesitates to employ it; but we must distinguish between idealism and sentimentalism, and between idealism and window dressing. the right sort of idealism is realist idealism, and loria is a realist idealist. he distinguishes clearly between fatalism and quietism, on the one hand, and economic determinism tempered by rationalist guidance, on the other. in _the economic foundations of society_ (pp. 376 et seq.) he writes: "can we say that a doctrine leads to fatalism which concedes a fertile field to human activity, and which only seeks to mark out the limits within which such efforts may be applied? can we give the name of quietism to a theory whose aims lie in the direction of substituting enlightened action, aware of its ends, for blind and ignorant innovation which is powerless to realise its purposes?... turning to consider the great social transformations which alter the structure of property, our theory does, it is true, deny that such movements can be effected before the necessary change in economic conditions has rendered them inevitable; but far from this conclusion leading to the degradation of human nature, it seems to us to inspire the highest sentiments. if we examine the great spontaneous movements that have sought to modify economic conditions before their time, we shall find that they all lacked definite purpose. there was no clear idea of the new order of things to be substituted for the old; on this account these movements were wanting in discipline; they were anarchic, and hence their lack of effect. our theory, on the contrary, declares that it is first of all necessary to learn the nature of the future social system, and, after this knowledge has been acquired, to substitute a co-ordination of effort towards this rigorously determined end for the blind and disorganised attempts that have thus far been made in this direction.... far from leading towards fatalism our theory tends to encourage rational human activity, which alone can prevent, or at least mitigate, the confusion otherwise attendant upon the social metamorphosis.... a wide field is thus opened to human activity, and it is certainly a noble mission for mankind to withdraw social development from the operation of the blind and brutal forces of physical evolution and to submit the process to the kindlier and more civilised action of human reason." the definitive exposition of loria's views is to be found in _the economic synthesis_; but since in his theory of social evolution the effects of increasing population play so notable a part, reference must first be made to his examination of malthus' theory of population. at the outset, however, let us recall marx's attitude to the malthusian doctrine. marx rejected the idea that, for human beings, population tends to grow in such a manner as necessarily to press on the means of subsistence. though he accepted darwinism and had a profound admiration for darwin, as far as the human species is concerned he rejected malthusianism (on which darwinism is based), and wrote of malthus in terms of bitter personal hostility. the animus we may ignore, but the arguments are worth recapitulating. pressure of population, he says, is the outcome of capitalism. on p. 645 of _capital_ marx writes: "the labouring population ... produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relatively surplus population, and it does this always to an increasing extent. this is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone. an abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only, and only in so far as man has not interfered with them." later in the same chapter he says (in effect) that undue fertility is characteristic of poverty-stricken circumstances, and that with improved conditions the population difficulty tends to settle itself. we shall see that loria says much the same thing, and shall consider the assertion presently. at a later date (1875) marx writes somewhat more guardedly. in his _criticism of the gotha programme_ the reference to the malthusian doctrine of population runs as follows: "but if i accept this law [the iron law of wages] as formulated by lassalle, i must likewise accept its foundation. what is this foundation? as f. a. lange showed shortly after lassalle's death, the iron law of wages is founded upon malthus' theory of population, a theory which lange himself espoused. now if the iron law of wages be correct, it is impossible to abrogate it, even if we should do away with wage labour a hundred times over, for not the wage system alone, but every social system, must be governed by the law. upon this foundation, for fifty years and more, economists have continued to demonstrate that socialism could never suppress poverty, which they regard as resulting from the nature of things. socialism, they declare, can only generalise poverty, can only diffuse it simultaneously over the whole surface of society!" does it not almost seem as if marx, by 1875, had, for a moment at least, glimpsed the real difficulty? for if we grant for the sake of argument that the excess of population under capitalism be only a relative excess, if we grant that each historic mode of production has its own special law of population, the question we have to ask ourselves as socialists is, "what will be the law of population under socialism?" may not socialism tend to promote an _absolute_ excess of population? will not naturircumstances, threaten the stability of the system unless the growth of population be deliberately checked? will not the inhabitants of each area have to specify some limit beyond which it is undesirable that the population of that area should increase? ways and means, social and individual, lie beyond our present scope. but in our opinion paul lafargue, henry george, and many others who have written on this question, and who have endeavoured to meet the malthusian difficulty by a simple denial of the facts upon which "parson malthus" grounded his theory, have displayed more zeal than knowledge. as karl pearson wrote thirty years ago: "marx by abusing malthus has not solved the population difficulty"; and we agree with the same writer that "the acceptance of the law discovered by malthus is an essential of any socialistic theory which pretends to be scientific"; but happily it is no longer true that "kautsky seems to stand alone among socialists in accepting the malthusian law and its consequences" (_the ethic of free-thought_, 1888, pp. 438-9). loria's treatment of the subject is closely akin to that of marx, though loria differs from marx in that he speaks with admiration, nay almost with veneration, of the author of _the principles of population_. as regards the main issue, loria contends that while malthus elucidated a profoundly important truth, he erred in respect of many of its applications. in present conditions, i.e., under capitalism, says loria, there is no excess of population over food supply, but merely (in certain countries) an excess of people in relation to the privately owned capital which is able to secure profitable investment. hence, as a result not of over-population but simply of capitalist conditions, we have in addition to the mass of the workers who obtain subsistence, on the one hand an owning class with a superfluity, and on the other a parasitic class of dependents, paupers, semi-criminals, and criminals. he contends, further, that malthus' theory is invalidated by the ascertained fact that, as far as human beings are concerned, an excess of food over population does not necessarily lead to an increase in the birth rate--that a rising standard of life is nowadays apt to be characterised by diminished procreation. speaking of certain postmalthusian applications of malthus' theory, he writes (_contemporary social problems_, p. 79): "some also suggest various physiological expedients--the obscene abominations of the so-called neomalthusians--to limit population. do they not see that there is no excess of mouths to be fed, and that procreation will of itself diminish with the amelioration of the condition of the working classes, without recourse to loathsome and unnatural practices?" in this passage, as repeatedly in his _malthus_, loria fails oddly (for so acute a mind) in his analysis of operating causes. as the result of a rising standard of life--consequent upon improved economic conditions among the proletariat--the workers, we are told (_malthus_, p. 80), "become less prolific." thus the growth of population is "automatically" regulated by economic means, and there is no need to have recourse to "physiological expedients" to limit population. yet he nowhere endeavours to elucidate the working of this economic factor in the biologic field, or to show how it can possibly operate unless precisely in virtue of what he is so strangely and so inconsistently moved to condemn, viz., the deliberate application of increasing physiological knowledge by individual couples in order to regulate the number of their offspring. in a word, by birth control. as far as past stages of economic evolution are concerned, the transition from primitive tribal communism to slavery, from slavery to serfdom and the guild system, and from these to capitalism, loria himself insists that the prime motive force has been the pressure of increasing population on the means of subsistence. thus in _contemporary social problems_ (pp. 128 et seq.) he writes: "we easily understand how evolution takes place in the sphere of economic phenomena provided we steadfastly hold in mind the simple premise that ceaseless increase in population makes necessary the occupation and cultivation of lands ever less fertile, hence requiring more efficacious means of production to combat the increasing resistance of matter. given, therefore, a certain density of population and a certain degree of fertility of cultivated land, there is rendered not only possible, but also necessary, a determinate economic system permitting human labour to attain a commensurate productivity; but population increasing, and the necessity of cultivating less fertile lands becoming urgent, the economic system hitherto existing proves inadequate, since the degree of productivity which it permits to labour is insufficient to combat matter now become more rebellious. as the economic and productive system which corresponded with the preceding degree of the productivity of the soil has grown incompatible with the new and more exacting conditions, it must be supplanted by a better system. then follows an epoch of social disintegration which destroys the superannuated form, from whose ashes a new structure arises; on the ruins of the shattered economic system is erected a new one which allows human nature to become more productive, and is therefore adapted, for a time, to combat the increasing resistance of matter. however, with each additional increment to population, a moment comes when it is necessary to bring under cultivation lands which are still more resistant, and for the development of which the prevailing economic system is found to be inadequate; consequently this system suffers the fate of those which have preceded it, and it is in turn destroyed to give place to a new and superior form." the detailed application of these ideas is one of the main themes of loria's _analysis of capitalist property_. we learn, he says, from history and statistics that capitalistic property (the term is here used by loria in the widest sense to include all the forms of property which render possible the exploitation of one human being by another) is everywhere and at all times due to one and the same cause, the suppression of free land. as long as there is any free land, as long as any man who so desires can take possession of a piece of land and develop it by his labour, capitalistic property is impossible, because no man will willingly work for another when he can establish himself for his own account on a piece of land without paying for it. where there is free land, labour owns the means of production, so that agriculture is carried on by free peasants on small holdings, whilst manufacturing industry (in so far as this exists at such a stage) is in the hands of independent artisans. in these conditions labour is isolated, and isolated labour rarely produces anything more than the labourer's subsistence. the regular supplementary production of "income" is the characteristic feature of associated labour. this brings us to _the economic synthesis_, a work which bears as sub-title "a study of the laws of income." it is, loria tells us, "the complement and the theoretic crown" of all his earlier writings. the meaning he attaches to the word income is, in truth, simple enough; but that meaning is the very core of lorianism, just as surplus value is (for many) the very core of marxism. isolated labour, labour of the kind described in the last paragraph, produces, says loria, first of all subsistence--the bare necessities of life. in exceptionally favourable conditions even isolated labour may produce something more than this, and that something more is income. but as a rule, and more and more as population increases and land of diminishing fertility has to be brought under cultivation, _isolated_ labour fails to produce anything beyond subsistence, fails to produce even that, so that it becomes necessary to have recourse to the superior productivity of _associated_ labour. now for this, since the natural man is averse from associated labour, some form of _coercion_, direct or indirect, is essential; and the history of all the developed economic systems that have hitherto prevailed is the history, in one form or another, of the _coercion to associated labour_. income, in the lorian sense of the term, is "the specific product of associated labour"; i.e., it is the surplus produced by labour because it is associated, over and above what the labourers could have produced in isolation. working in isolation they produce, or theoretically might have produced, subsistence for themselves; associated they produce something more, which is income, and this accrues to those who control and direct the associating force. in primitive tribal communism that force emanates from the collectivity of economic equals, and the "undifferentiated income" is communally owned and consumed. but subsequently "differentiated income," received by non-labourers, makes its appearance. in slave-owning communities, differentiated income goes to the slave owners; in feudal serfdom, it accrues to the baronage; under modern capitalist conditions the dispossessed proletarian masses produce of course their own subsistence, and produce in addition income for the legal owners of land and capital. slave owners, barons, capitalists, are in successive stages the "recipients of [differentiated] income." throughout the history of these economic phases there has been a conflict between the interests of the labourers and those of the recipients of income, taking the form, in times of exceptional stress, of slave insurrections and slave wars, of jacqueries and ruthless reprisals by the baronage, of strikes and lock-outs. here we have one aspect of what loria terms "the struggle between subsistence and income," and this aspect coincides obviously enough with one aspect of the marxist class struggle. the association of labour is the prime cause of labour's enhanced productivity. but while the association increases productivity, the coercion that is requisite to secure association exercises a restrictive influence upon productivity, the restriction being more marked in proportion to the severity of the coercion. thus the crude and harsh coercion of the slave-owning system makes slave labour (in part for psychological reasons dependent upon the mentality of the labourer) less productive than serf labour under the feudal system, wherein coercion was somewhat milder. in modern capitalism coercion, though still very real, is veiled, and for this reason (quite apart from the peculiar advantages of machinofacture) associated labour is more productive under capitalism. it is the superior productivity of each successive system which has rendered it victorious over its predecessor. with the dry light of economic science loria displays for us the working of the type of production dominant to-day, the most effective system of production the world has yet known. such is loria's outline picture of the succession of economic phases. it is impossible here to trace the italian economist's detailed analysis of the causes which lead to the break up of one economic system and its replacement by another. suffice it to say that in his view an important part is played by the action of those whom he calls "unproductive labourers," members of the educated caste living also on differentiated income, on portions of income reallotted by the primary recipients of income, whose interests, in the prosperous phase of any system of income, the educated caste is thus paid to serve. a typical service is that of the priestly order, which is maintained "to pervert the egoism" of the labourers, to delude them into the belief that they are pursuing their own better interests by peacefully and diligently producing income for the master class. but in the declining phase of any economic system (and loria considers that the wage system of capitalism has now, despite its imposing appearance, actually entered its declining phase), the diminution of income curtails the amount available for reallotment to the unproductive labourers. hence from supporters of the existing system they are speedily transformed into its active opponents. these "intellectuals" now make common cause with the labourers, the disinherited of the earth; and the old property system totters to its fall. he writes (_the economic foundations of society_, p. 347): "all revolutions undertaken by the non-proprietary classes alone, without the support of the unproductive labourers, are ... foredoomed to failure. the rebels, divided and disorganised, not at all sure of themselves and uncertain of the ends they would attain, soon fall back under the dominion of the proprietary class.... the ancient economy was not destroyed by the revolt of the slaves, nor was the ruin of the medieval economy effected by the armed uprising of the serfs. these two economic systems did not succumb until the clients of the roman economy and the ecclesiastics of the medieval economy were induced by a falling-off of their share in the constantly decreasing revenues [income] to break their long-standing alliance with the revenue holders [recipients of income] and to lend their support to the final revolt of the labouring classes." to the lorian theory of revolution we shall return in conclusion, after we have discussed the relationships of loria to marx. the theory involves tactical questions of the utmost interest and importance. apart from these, the crux of the problem of transition to the co-operative commonwealth centres, as most thoughtful socialists are coming to see, around the question of the coercion to associated labour. a fundamental part of the socialist outlook is the belief that the existence of a special class of recipients of income, whether these be slave owners, feudal barons, or legal monopolists of land and capital, is not needful to modern civilisation. we affirm that the disappearance of such a class (though that class may have played a necessary part in social evolution) can now be witnessed by the enlightened without a single regret. but what is to ensure the continuance of that high social productivity which will be necessary to the maintenance of general wellbeing? now that our race is at length becoming truly self-conscious, will it be possible "to transform the economic natural force from the ruler of mankind to its servant?" the closing sentences of the _economic synthesis_ show in outline how loria envisages that possibility: "the essential social contradiction can be eliminated, economic equilibrium can be established, only by means of a profound transformation, affecting not merely the process of distribution but also the process of production, relieving this latter process from the coercion which has hitherto environed it and restricted its efficiency; in other words by the destruction of the coercive association of labour and its replacement by the free association of labour. herein is to be found the supreme objective towards which must converge all the forces of social renovation." and in a terminal footnote he adds: "this is now understood by all the most enlightened economists, not excepting the socialists, who point out that a reform which effects no more than the distribution of income among the proletarians, while leaving unaffected the method by which that income is actually produced, would have no more than an extremely restricted and fugitive effect; and that a decisive and durable social renovation must be initiated by a radical metamorphosis in the process of production." we have now to ask, what does loria consider the most important elements of marxist teaching? in his account of the _communist manifesto_ (infra p. 68) he tells us that "this writing contains the whole marxist system in miniature, and ... supplies a critique of all doctrinaire, idealist, and utopian forms of socialism. thus the _manifesto_ voices the two fundamentals of marxism: the dependence of economic evolution upon the evolution of the instrument of production, in other words the _technicist determination of economics_; and the derivation of the political, moral, and ideal order from the economic order, in other words the _economic determination of sociology_--or, as we should express it to-day, historical materialism." on pp. 145 and 146 he tells us that we must "recognise in marx the supreme merit of having been the first to introduce the evolutionary concept into the domain of sociology, the first to introduce it in the only form appropriate to social phenomena and social institutions; not as" an "unceasing and gradual upward movement," but as a "succession of age-long cycles rhythmically interrupted by revolutionary explosions." speaking of marx's "masterly investigation into the successive forms of the technical instrument, of productive machinery," he says that marx may be termed "the darwin of technology.... this physiology of industry, which is now the least studied and least appreciated of marx's scientific labours, nevertheless constitutes his most considerable and most enduring contribution to science." loria wrote his _karl marx_ nearly two years before the publication of william paul's _the state_, of which pp. 2 to 7, the section on "man and tools" is devoted to a restatement of this aspect of marxism; and the italian economist is not acquainted with the thought-trend of walton newbold. as far as the young but rapidly growing and vigorous school of british marxists is concerned, it is certainly no longer true that marx's work as "the darwin of technology" is the least studied and least appreciated of marx's scientific labours. to the class struggle loria does not refer at any length in this essay on karl marx. we have already seen that he recognises the enormous part the class struggle has played in history; but he has throughout life remained the man of science, the man of the study; he has never entered the arena as what the french term a "militant." in 1904, when the italian socialist party wished him to be socialist parliamentary candidate for turin, loria refused on the ground that parliamentary life would interfere with his theoretical studies; and it may be that for these and other reasons he is less keenly impressed than are most left-wing socialists of the profound importance of diffusing among the workers awareness of the class struggle. economic determinism has been sufficiently considered in what has gone before. if in the present study loria says less about it than about some of the other elements of marxism, this is not because he considers it of minor importance, nor because he accepts it uncritically, but because he has devoted an entire volume to the exposition of this aspect of reality. it remains, then, to discuss loria's outlook on the marxist theory of value. it is here that lorianism will be most strenuously challenged by those more enthusiastic disciples of marx who, even if they do not accept the dogma of marx's infallibility, none the less regard the doctrine of value, based on the labour theory of value, as the very heart of marxist socialism. we must remember that it is natural for persons who do not gain their subsistence by applying their labour power to the production of commodities, and whose claim to the title of "workers" will nevertheless hardly be disputed, to question the labour theory of value. bernard shaw, for example, in his pamphlet _the impossibilities of anarchism_, protests that it is "natural for the [manual] labourer to insist that labour _ought to be_ the measure of price, and that the just wage of labour is its average product; but the first lesson he has to learn in economics is that labour is not and never can be the measure of price under a competitive system. not until the progress of socialism replaces competitive production and distribution with individual greed for its incentive, by collectivist production and distribution with fair play all round for its incentive, will the prices either of labour or of commodities represent their just value." leaving shaw to the tender mercies of the orthodox marxists who will not be slow to declare that if he means "value" he should not say "price," and that if he thinks that "price" and "value" are interchangeable terms he is not worth powder and shot, and without ourselves venturing to rush into the fray, we may suggest that our propagandists would be less inclined to make the marxist theory of value an article of faith, "which faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled without doubt he shall perish everlastingly"--if they could realise that the theory is perhaps no more than a difficult point of abstract economic doctrine which is not essential to the use of the conception of surplus value as a means of making the worker aware of the basic character of capitalist exploitation. bernstein explains the matter very well in the book previously quoted (p. 35): "practical experience shows that in the production and distribution of commodities a part only of the community takes an active share, whilst another part consists of persons who either enjoy an income for services which have no direct relation to the process of production, or have an income without working at all. an essentially greater number of men thus live on the labour of all those engaged in production than are actively engaged in it, and income statistics show that the classes not actively engaged in production appropriate, moreover, a much greater share of the total produced than the ratio of their number to that of the actively producing class. the surplus labour of the latter is an empiric fact, demonstrable by experience, which needs no deductive proof. whether the marxist theory of value be correct or not, is quite immaterial to the proof of surplus labour. it is in this respect no demonstration, but only a means of analysis and illustration." the professional economist, however, cannot rest content with these loose formulations. loria feels that there is a void in the marxist system, and it seems to us (though loria nowhere tells us so in set terms) that the lorian doctrine of differentiated income, the most essential part of the italian economist's teaching, is really an attempt to restate the theory of surplus value in a form absolutely proof against enemy attack. be this as it may, the conception, however interesting, is far less easy to convey to the uninstructed mind, and it is unlikely, for propaganda purposes, to replace the simple formula of surplus value. but is it not essential that those who undertake to teach socialist economics should themselves fully understand the objections to the marxist theory of value, and that they should have a clear grasp of loria's alternative doctrine of the nature of capitalist exploitation? let us return, in conclusion, to the lorian theory of revolution. if we may summarise that theory in colloquial phraseology, it is that, while economic evolution must pave the way for revolution, the final stages of revolution have been effected in the past, and can only be effected in the future, through the co-operation of "disgruntled intellectuals." these are the "unproductive labourers" of loria's scheme, who have served as hirelings of the master class during the prosperous phase of an economic system: but in the declining phase of that system, when the diminution of income curtails the amount available for these secondary recipients of income, they turn against the primary recipients, their employers, make common cause with the subject class, and give the death-blow to the old order. this may possibly have been true of the fall of the slave economy, and it may possibly have been true of the fall of the medieval economy; but we do not think it is true that a revolution of the non-proprietary classes under capitalism is "foredoomed to failure" unless these classes secure the support of the unproductive labourers. their support for a genuinely _proletarian_ revolution can hardly be expected, on loria's own theory. the intellectuals who aided in the overthrow of the slave economy, and the intellectuals who helped to subvert the feudal order and to promote the bourgeois and industrial revolution, did so, says loria, in order to maintain their position as "recipients of income," to maintain their position as members of a privileged class. what have such as they to gain from a proletarian revolution, which will abolish class, will put an end to exploitation, will do away for ever with the private appropriation of income and surplus value? we need only turn our eyes eastward to see how such "intellectuals" will hail the revolution of the propertiless. despite the onslaughts of the capitalist powers, the russian socialist federative soviet republic has lived long enough to show the sort of help socialists may expect from the kerenskys. men of this calibre, "people whose interests lie in the opposite direction," even if they "are carried away by the new ideas and enter the lists for the new order of things" (boudin, _the theoretical system of karl marx_, 1918), are aghast when the real revolution comes, and endeavour to lay the red spectre they have helped to conjure up. in truth, a revolution foredoomed to failure would be that of proletarians who should depend in large measure upon the support of disgruntled intellectuals. a serf's life was on the average better than that of a chattel slave; a wage labourer's life is on the average better than was that of slave or serf. but neither the replacement of slavery by feudalism, nor the replacement of feudalism by capitalism, secured the emancipation of labour in any adequate sense of that term. all that a proletarian revolution carried through with the help of middle-class intellectuals is likely to bring about is some form of fabian collectivism or state capitalism--in a word, the servile state. as far as the _productive_ labourers are concerned the revolution would be a sham. the form of the state might be revolutionised, but the authoritative state would endure, and production would be effected, not by the free, but by the coercive association of labour. what loria has failed to recognise is that the conditions of the problem are now radically changed. as he says, in the old revolutions the rebels were divided and disorganised, were not sure of themselves, and were uncertain of the ends they would attain. as far as the workers were concerned, revolt only was possible, not revolution. it is otherwise to-day; and still more will it be otherwise the day after to-morrow. thanks to the new forms of organisation now being worked out: thanks to industrial unionism and the growth of the workers committees and shop stewards movements; and thanks above all to independent working class education, which is forging the new weapons and simultaneously teaching the workers how to use them, which is fashioning the limbs of the co-operative commonwealth within the womb of the capitalist order--thanks to all these things, the workers of the day after to-morrow need not put their trust in the frail reed of the support of intellectuals. once more we raise the marxist slogan and cry: "the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves." and if we modify another marxist watchword, quoted on p. 154 below, that force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one, it is only to say that, while we do not repudiate force (which the skilled accoucheur ever has in reserve), new times bring new methods. the self-educated workers of the future may have no occasion to use force, and certainly need not await the aid of loria's unproductive labourers. for the day draws nigh, and on that day the workers will achieve their own salvation. they will achieve the salvation of all the workers, and indeed of all the world of man; but it will not be all the workers that will actively participate. no more will be possible than that there should be a considerable minority of educated workers. a minority they must inevitably remain until after the social revolution; but a little leaven can leaven a large lump. the midwife of revolution is not force but--independent working class education. in a word, the "dynamogenic function" of which loria speaks (infra pp. 159 and 160), attaches not to poverty but to slavery. the poor have seldom failed to realise their poverty, and poverty when extreme has at times led to revolt; but it is the new realisation of the _slavery_ of wagedom that is organising the workers for the social revolution. by means of marxist education "the proletarian is breaking his chains and entering upon an era of conscious and glorious freedom." do we seem to imply that there is no place in our movement for middle-class intellectuals? such is not our meaning. they have played in the past a rã�â´le of supreme importance, and may still have a notable part to play in the future. but the intellectuals for whom there is a place are not the kind of intellectuals described in loria's theory of revolution, and the rã�â´le of the intellectual is no longer the one which he assigns. it is not those intellectuals who are dissatisfied with their reallotment of income, not those who are discontented with their ration of loaves and fishes, not those who sigh for the vanishing cakes and ale, who will help the coming of the definitive social revolution. rarely indeed, too, is the function of the socialist intellectual the function of leadership. to an increasing extent, under the new conditions, he tends to be no more than the fifth wheel of the revolutionary coach. the right sort of intellectual had a function in the past; it was to help the workers to overcome their division and disorganisation, to help them to be sure of themselves, to help them to clear views of the ends they must attain. that work is afoot. the ferment has been created: created by such men as marx, whose abilities would have secured him ease, comfort, wealth, had he made his peace with bourgeoisdom, but who was a revolutionist by deliberate choice; by such men as engels, a well-to-do manufacturer; by such men as loria himself, a university professor; by such men as the american, scott nearing, who recently forfeited his academic position because he would not keep the class struggle out of his lectures on economics. can it be said that men like herzen, bakunin, and kropotkin, have been, or that men like trotzky and lenin are, the disgruntled intellectuals of loria's theory of revolution? quite apart from leadership under such peculiar conditions as obtain in russia, there is work for socialist intellectuals, the work of promoting independent working-class education, the work of assisting in the spread of the ferment generated by the writings of earlier revolutionary thinkers. our conviction that we ourselves, declassed bourgeois, have a modest function, that though not part of the team, not even spokes of a fifth wheel, we may at least help to complete the outfit as little dogs under the waggon, is witnessed by our translation of achille loria's monograph on karl marx. eden and cedar paul. london, _the centenary of karl marx_. karl marx chapter i it is unquestionably one of the strangest of anomalies exhibited by the polychrome flora of human thought that revolutionary blossoms should so frequently spring from aristocratic seeds, and that the most incendiary and rebellious spirits should emerge from a domestic and social environment compounded of conservatism and reaction. yet when we look closely into the matter, we find it less strange than it may have appeared at first sight. it is, in fact, not difficult to understand that those only who live in a certain milieu can fully apprehend its vices and its constitutional defects, which are hidden as by a cloud from those who live elsewhere. it is true enough that many dwellers in the perverted environment lack the intelligence which would enable them to understand its defects. others, again, are induced by considerations of personal advantage to close their eyes to the evils they discern, or cynically to ignore them. but if a man who grows to maturity in such an environment be at once intelligent and free from base elements, the sight of the evil medium from which he himself has sprung will arouse in his mind a righteous wrath and a spirit of indomitable rebellion, will transform the easy-going and cheerful patrician into the prophet and the revolutionary. such has been the lot of the great rebels of the world, of men like dante, voltaire, byron, kropotkin, and tolstoi, who all sprang from the gentle class, and whose birthright placed them among the owners of property. similar was the lot of karl marx. it would, indeed, be difficult to imagine a more typically refined and aristocratic entourage than the one wherein the future high priest of the revolution was born and passed his early years. he was born at treves on may 5, 1818. his ancestors on both sides had been distinguished rabbis, famed for their commentaries on the scriptures. the father's family was originally known as mordechai, whilst the mother's family, pressburg by name, had come from hungary to settle in holland. his father, an employee in the state service, became a christian, and the whole family was baptised when karl was five years of age. as he grew up, the young man was an intimate in the best houses of the district, and one of his closest friends was edgar von westphalen, who subsequently became a member of the reactionary manteuffel ministry. in 1843 marx married westphalen's sister, the beautiful and brilliant jenny. the match proved well assorted, and was blessed by a love so intense and so unfailing as to lead a certain german pastor to say that it had been ratified in heaven. thus by origin marx belonged to an extremely ancient stock devoted to the accumulation of wealth, whilst his marriage united him to the race of german feudatories, fierce paladins of the throne and of the altar. is it not then truly remarkable that from such an environment, eminently calculated to foster ideas of obscurantism and reaction, there should emerge the most brilliant, most consistent, and most invincible example of a thinker and revolutionary agitator? unquestionably, marx's thought, essentially slow-moving, laborious, and ever subjected to a rigorous process of self-criticism, does not seem at first sight characteristically negational and rebellious. in youth, indeed, he was still no more than the earnest student. engels tells us that he closed his university career at bonn in 1841 by writing a brilliant thesis upon the philosophy of epicurus, while in leisure moments marx penned verses of no mean order. these latter compositions display numerous defects of style; they are heavy and turgid; the movement is sluggish; their sonorous gravity reminds the reader of a company of medieval warriors in heavy armour mounting the grand staircase: but they are none the less distinguished by remarkable profundity of thought, and they may be looked upon as versified philosophy rather than as poetry in the proper sense of the term. in the following year we find marx at cologne as editor of the "rhenish gazette." his editorials, it is true, were at first devoted to harmless topics of general interest; but he soon began to turn his attention to social questions, such as forest thefts, the subdivision of landed property, the condition of the peasantry in the moselle district, and french socialism. to this last doctrine, the editor declared himself adverse, while professing a great personal admiration for proudhon. but the discussion upon socialism revealed to him his own ignorance and incompetence, and induced him to withdraw from the journalistic arena that he might devote himself to study. an excuse for resigning his editorship was furnished in 1843, when the "rhenish gazette" found it necessary to assume an extremely cautious tone in order to avoid the attentions of the police. but, like all the more brilliant and free-spirited among his contemporaries, he soon found himself incommoded by the obscurantism of prussia, and, accompanied by his young wife, he hastened to paris, the city of light, where there shortly assembled a circle of intellectual rebels from all lands--france, germany, england, italy, and russia. the russians predominated, and indeed we learn from marx himself that the most fervent of his disciples at this date were drawn from among the scions of the russian nobility and upper bourgeoisie, who, when they returned to their country, were unhesitatingly to become the sycophants of authority. in this cohort of spiritual rebels he assumed from the first the position of dictator, and none competed for the crown with the revolutionary cã�â¦sar. people were already beginning to talk of the marxists, and the police made a black cross against the name of a parisian cafã�â© where the associates of marx were wont to assemble. he struck up a friendship with heinrich heine, and one day, accompanied by his staff, he paid a formal visit to the poet and declared that the latter ought to divide among the exiles the pension granted him by guizot, to which suggestion heine cynically replied that he could spend the pension more profitably upon himself. marx had a yet closer intimacy with proudhon, with whom he passed long evenings talking about hegel and discussing the problems of socialism; but this friendship was destined ere long to be replaced by fierce hostility, aroused by fundamental differences of opinion. in 1844, in conjunction with arnold ruge, marx founded the "franco-german year book," of which, however, there appeared but one volume, containing writings by marx himself on the philosophy of law and upon the jews, in addition to letters from holland, and articles by engels, heine, freiligrath, and other more or less rebellious spirits. these outward activities represent nothing more than an interlude or partial episode in the series of his essential occupations, science and philosophy. engels' contribution to the "year book," a criticism of political economy, initiated between the two thinkers a friendship which time was to strengthen and to render indissoluble. the first fruit of this friendship was a joint work entitled _the holy family_, a criticism of the philosophy of bruno bauer and his followers (1845), stuffed with sallies and orphic sayings of doubtful taste and still more doubtful value. the young men next turned to a weightier task, a criticism of posthegelian philosophy, which filled two huge octavo manuscript volumes, but has never found a publisher. nevertheless, marx tells us, this enormous labour cannot be regarded as utterly wasted, for it enabled the writers to gain an understanding of themselves, and traced the lines by which henceforward they were to be safely guided through the labyrinth of social investigation. but revolutionary agitation (which marx continued even amid his philosophical meditations), and the editorship of the definitely antiprussian journal "forward," now attracted the hostile attention of the prussian government, upon whose demand, in january, 1845, guizot suppressed the periodical and expelled marx from france. marx removed to brussels, where engels was living, and for the first time devoted himself to prolonged and profound labours. in the year 1847, he published in the belgian capital his book _the poverty of philosophy, a reply to proudhon's philosophy of poverty_, a harsh criticism of the "economic contradictions" of his rival. marx reproached proudhon for complete ignorance of that hegelian philosophy which proudhon tried to apply to economics, and reproached the french socialist yet more for arbitrary and fallacious expositions, for the idealisation of a tortuous series of fantastic categories (division of labour, machines, competition, rent, etc.), declaring that proudhon confined himself in each case to an examination of the good and the bad effects without ever troubling to throw light upon the nature of the phenomena under consideration or upon the course of their formation and development. the criticism is apt, but might well rebound upon marx himself, enmeshed at this epoch in a series of categories whose progressive evolution he arbitrarily asserted. further, marx fiercely criticised proudhon's theory of "constituted value," according to which the reduction of value to labour cannot be effected in extant society, and must be deferred to the future society, fashioned in the brain of the thinker. it is well to point out that marx, though in the first volume of _capital_ he conceives the reduction of value to the quantity of effective labour to be one of the immanent laws of capitalist economy, nevertheless admits in the third volume that in the capitalist economic phase value neither is nor can be reduced to the quantity of labour, and that value as measured by labour is merely an archetype or suprasensible entity, but not a concrete reality. substantially this means that marx's labour measure of value is, after all, not essentially different from the constituted value of proudhon. but amid these unjust or excessive criticisms, marx's book gives utterance to the idea, profoundly true, and at that time practically original, that economic relationships are no mere arbitrary products or derivatives of human will, but are the inevitable issue of the existing condition of the forces of production. the deduction drawn from this is that utopian socialism, which exhausts itself in futile declamations or in yet more futile imaginary reconstructions of the social order, must yield place to scientific socialism, wholly devoted to the analysis of the necessary process of economic evolution and to the possibility of accelerating that evolution. the same idea can be read between the lines of the _lecture on free exchange_ delivered by marx at brussels on january 9, 1849. herein he asserted that socialism ought to declare in favour of freedom of trade, for this, hastening the dissolution of the old nationalities and accentuating the contrast between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, would precipitate the dissolution of the capitalist economy. but the idea is affirmed far more categorically in the _manifesto of the communist party_, the joint composition of engels and marx, published in the year 1848, embodying the first and most decisive formulation of the latter's teaching. even though some of his special theories, subsequently to secure fuller development in _capital_, are but cursorily sketched in the _manifesto_, even though some of these theories (for example, the theory of wages, stated to be the price of "wage labour" instead of being the price of "labour power") are still in an undeveloped and imperfect state, it is nevertheless true that this writing contains the whole marxist system in miniature, and that it supplies a critique of all doctrinaire, idealist, and utopian forms of socialism. thus the _manifesto_ voices the two fundamentals of marxism: the dependence of economic evolution upon the evolution of the instrument of production, in other words the _technicist determination of economics_; and the derivation of the political, moral and ideal order from the economic order, in other words the _economic determination of sociology_--or, as we should express it to-day, historical materialism. this dependence of the political order upon the economic order, leading as it does to the concentration of political power in the hands of those who hold economic power, or in the hands of their representatives and agents, renders absurd the idea of effecting by peaceful political means any amelioration in the condition of the proletarian classes, and indicates to the dispossessed that revolution is their only hope of salvation. to revolution, then, or to the compact federation which can alone pave the way for revolution, the _manifesto_ incites the sufferers of the world with the historic phrase: "workers of the world, unite." the epoch-making significance of the _manifesto_ is not to-day disputed by the most resolute adversaries of that document. it is, in fact, the declaration of rights of the fourth estate, the magna charta of the revolutionary proletariat, the oriflamme of fire and blood, the standard round which the insurrectionary phalanxes have ever since mustered. hardly had the message been launched upon the world when the young leader hoped to translate it into action, for the movements of 1848 and 1849 led the rebel masses to entertain new and bolder aspirations. expelled from belgium, marx first went to paris, and hastened thence to his german homeland, now in a ferment, assuming there editorial charge of the "new rhenish gazette." but although the skill of the able editor was for a brief period successful in saving the barque of the imperilled gazette from the waves of police persecution, a day soon arrived when the situation became untenable. an appeal to the german people published in the columns of the journal advocating a refusal to pay taxes led to its suppression and to two criminal charges against the editor. triumphantly acquitted by the cologne jury, but none the less exiled by the prussian government, he immediately returned to paris, where it seemed to his restless imagination that events were taking a more favourable turn. but france proved a no securer refuge than germany, and the parisian government propounded to our agitator a peremptory dilemma, interment in the remote department of morbihan or exile from france. he was not likely to hesitate in his choice, and indeed at this juncture was glad to accept an invitation from the executive committee of the communist party, then centred in london, to remove with his devoted wife to that great metropolis (1849). chapter ii in london the saddest trials awaited him, for poverty, gloomy companion, sat ever at his board from the day of his entry into the british capital down to the hour of his last breath. one after another of his children died in the unwholesome dwellings of his exile, and he was forced to beg from friends and comrades the scanty coins needed to pay for their burial; he and his family had to make the best of a diet of bread and potatoes; he was forced to pawn his watch and his clothing, to sell his books, to tramp the streets in search of any help that might offer; the day came when, under the lash of hunger, he was compelled to contemplate seeking work as railway clerk, of placing his daughters out to service, of making them governesses or actresses, whilst himself retiring with his unhappy wife to dwell in the proletarian quarter of whitechapel. the severity of these sufferings did much to add a tinge of gall to a character naturally acerb, a character which amid the upheavals and horrors of exile frequently showed itself far from amiable. mingled sentiments of grief and anger fill our minds when, in marx's private letters to engels, we trace the manifestations of this harshness, which left him unmoved by the misfortunes of his dearest friends, which led him to make any use he could of these friends and then to overwhelm them with reproaches and accusations, which showed itself (and this is the worst of all) in a jealous hatred of comrades less unfortunate than himself. deplorable from every point of view was his conduct towards freiligrath and lassalle, in especial towards lassalle, who had shown him the utmost friendliness, had given him ample financial assistance, had entertained him in berlin, had helped him to find a publisher; for marx subsequently censured lassalle's works with much acrimony, beheld his triumphs askance, and commented upon the incidents of lassalle's death in a tone of tepid apology. but you well-fed folk who amid easy circumstances are studying the life of our agitator, be not too ready to blame him, and before stoning him bethink yourselves of all the miseries the exile must suffer, of all the tortures amid which he must bear his cross. vainly did he endeavour by hard work to free himself from the sad restraints of poverty. it is true he was able to place articles with the "new york tribune," writing for this paper essays on political, economic, and financial questions, which secured much appreciation. but the pay was only one pound per article, and he could write but one article a week. collaboration in the production of an american encyclopã�â¦dia, to be paid at the rate of two dollars a page, seemed to promise more ample funds, and with feverish anxiety he devoted himself to the production of articles on the most varied topics, well stored with facts. but this source of income, limited at best, was suddenly interrupted by the outbreak of the american civil war. the loss was not adequately compensated by the possibility of occasionally inserting some poorly paid contribution in a german newspaper like the "new oder gazette" or in one of the viennese periodicals. he was lucky in that certain turns of fortune favoured him from those sources of property and inheritance which he condemned and attacked with such persistence and vehemence. he had a legacy from his mother-in-law; a legacy from his mother; a trifling legacy from an aunt; and wilhelm wolff, a companion in exile, bequeathed him ã�â£800. an uncle in holland, whom he had begged for some trifling help, gave him ã�â£160; from lassalle and freiligrath came generous gifts; and droncke, another companion in exile, gave ã�â£250 to enable him to complete the scientific work on which he was engaged. but none of these casual resources, however extensive, would have saved him from ruin had it not been for the providential assistance of his friend friedrich engels, who applied himself to the care of marx with inexhaustible generosity, and with the tenderness of a woman. engels, indeed, will secure a splendid place in the history of socialist thought, were it only because of the way in which he devoted himself to marx. it was through engels that marx was enabled to continue his studies and to complete the work which is his title to eternal fame. engels, a well-to-do cotton spinner at manchester, gladly responded to his friend's unremitting requests for aid, succouring him in every emergency. engels was an expert upon military topics, and penned articles which marx passed on to the "tribune" and to the encyclopã�â¦dia, articles for which marx was paid; engels sent marx weekly subsidies, and frequently despatched gifts of port wine; he made presents of ã�â£100 or ã�â£150 at a time; and at length, when his business prospered, he gave his friend a regular allowance of ã�â£350 a year. not even these strokes of good luck sufficed, it is true, to restore a satisfactory balance to marx's finances, for he was a bad manager, and the disorder was probably incurable. however, they enabled our thinker to furnish aid to companions yet more unfortunate, to pieper, eccarius, and dupont; they enabled him to escape from the worst extremities of poverty and to establish himself in life under conditions more worthy of an honest and respectable bourgeois. he was able to move from the decayed neighbourhood of soho square and to settle in maitland park road on haverstock hill; it became possible for him to secure a good education for his daughters, to have them taught french and italian, drawing and music; he could weigh the financial status of aspirants to their hands, and could choose lafargue and longuet, who were comparatively well off. he often went to the theatre, and with one of his daughters he attended at the society of arts a soirã�â©e graced by the presence of royalty; from time to time he took his family to the seaside; he liked his wife to sign herself "jenny, nã�â©e baronne de westphalen"; he was well received in affluent circles, and was frequently consulted by the "times" upon financial affairs; finally he accepted the office of constable of the vestry of st. pancras, taking the customary oath, and donning the regulation uniform on gala occasions. nevertheless, neither this final settlement in a foreign land nor the persecution he suffered from the government of his own country could destroy or even lessen his devotion to germany. to the day of his death he remained a faithful child of the fatherland, for which he hoped the greatest of futures. he sang the praises of german music and literature; he delighted in german victories and german expansion; he dreaded a weakening of german protectionism which might strengthen the commercial hegemony of britain; and in 1870 he refused to sign an appeal in favour of peace unless it were definitely stated that germany was waging a purely defensive war. the french and russian exiles in london were indignant, and circulated whispers that marx was a prussian emissary, and had received a bribe of ã�â£10,000. an idle tale! it is true that among german conservatives and among the beneficiaries of germany there could not be found a supporter more sincere and more fervent than was this proscribed rebel. but he was no paladin on behalf of prussian imperialism, as we can learn beyond dispute from a letter he sent to the "daily news" in 1878 denouncing bismarckian ambitions and the bismarckian expansionist policy as a growing peril. yet the supreme aim of his activity and his life enormously transcended the circumscribed range of country and of nation, for he aspired to a loftier goal, to the organisation of the mental and manual workers of all countries so that they might constitute a united revolutionary force. within a brief time of his arrival in the british metropolis he again became the chief, nay the dictator, of a circle to which none could be admitted without passing a severe examination as to knowledge of science in general and of political economy in particular, an examination so rigorous that even wilhelm liebknecht was unable at first to satisfy its requirements, an examination that was physical as well as mental, for the aspirants were subjected (rejoice, shade of lombroso!) to precise craniometrical tests. thus our thinker, crowned as if by divine right with a kind of imperial halo, exercised undisputed sway over the troop of exiles, pieper, bauer, blind, biskamp, eccarius, liebknecht, freiligrath, cesare orsini (brother of the regicide), and even over the revolutionary agitators in germany. soon, however, his mind was invaded and dominated by a yet more ambitious design, for he planned the formation of a society which should unite the proletarians of all the world into one formidable international, to resist the aggressions of capital and to work for the destruction of the capitalist system. it was at first an association of modest proportions, consisting merely of a few revolutionaries assembled in london. marx absolutely refused the chairmanship, contenting himself with the post, ostensibly less important, of delegate for the german section. from the first formation of the new federation marx did his utmost to counteract the influence of mazzini, for mazzini, through the instrumentality of two of his followers, fontana and the elder wolff, wished to inspire the international with his idealist conceptions and to initiate it into the secrets of conspiracy. marx, on the other hand, was unwearying in his efforts to advocate his own view that material interests preponderate, and that these interests must be publicly asserted and defended in the arena of history. soon the federation established branches in france, germany, the united states, and even the latin countries; and this involved for marx, who was really the chief, a mass of work in the way of organisation, and of struggle against those who held conflicting views. everywhere, in fact, he had to encounter trends differing from his own, and differing no less extensively one from another owing to the varying characters of the countries concerned. in germany he had to fight the opportunism of lassalle, a man inclined to compromises and to elastic unions with constituted authority. in france anti-intellectual tendencies were already manifest, so that there was an inclination to restrict the socialist outlook to an aspiration for immediately practical labour legislation of minor importance. in italy and in spain, marx's troubles arose from the anarchist tendencies characteristic of those countries, tendencies fostered by the propaganda of bakunin. as against these divergent aims, marx, with inflexible tenacity, maintained his own programme with the utmost rigour, insisting that it was essential to federate the proletarian forces of the world into an invincible organisation which in all possible ways, by strikes, by parliamentary and legal methods, but also by force should need arise, should deliver onslaughts upon the bourgeoisie and upon constituted authority, should exact concessions of increasing importance, and should ultimately secure a complete triumph. the proletarians of the two hemispheres were not slow to accept the programme; and this man who was himself suffering from actual hunger, now secured a great position as a thinker, so that the operatives of paris, new york, and dã�â¼sseldorf did honour to his name. these activities, however, did not completely interrupt his intellectual labours, for during the period at which we have now arrived he published in the "new york tribune" a series of articles upon _revolution and counter-revolution in germany_ and upon _political struggles in france_. in 1852, in "the revolution," published in the german tongue in new york, there had appeared the article _the eighteenth brumaire of louis bonaparte_. substantially these writings are an application of the materialist conception of history to the more conspicuous events of the recent political history of germany and of france. in addition, marx published in the "tribune" a series of articles of a more distinctively political character, dealing with _the eastern question_, displaying marvellous erudition and a wonderful power of forecasting events. chapter iii nevertheless, the organisation of the proletariat, and his journalistic labours, however intense and however weighty, did not represent in the life of marx anything more than a vexatious parenthesis or a regrettable delay in the fulfilment of the supreme task he had set before himself from the very outset of his life in britain. hardly, in fact, had marx settled down in the wonderful town of london, to the economist so inexhaustible a field for study and experience, than he proposed to rebuild from the foundations the entire edifice of his economic and statistical knowledge, which was at that time comparatively small when contrasted with the vast extent of his preliminary readings in philosophy. in the british museum library, therefore, he plunged into the study of the classical economists of the island realm, showing inexhaustible patience in tracing the earliest and most trifling ramifications of economic science. beginning with the study of the theory of rent, he went on to the study of money, of the relationship between the quantity of metal in circulation and the rate of exchange, of the influence of bank reserves upon prices, and so forth. he then devoted himself to the theories of value, profit, interest, and population. simultaneously he studied without remission statistics, blue books, ministerial and parliamentary concerns. from all this gigantic toil he derived the materials for the writing of the work which was henceforward to be at once the sorrow and the joy of his life. his first intention was to limit himself to a critical history of political economy, or a detailed analysis of the theories which he had so often enunciated, as well as of the lacunae which had become apparent in them. but an unexpected result issued from the mental contact with this huge mass of science and analysis, for he believed that he had made a splendid and startling discovery whereby the sacred theory of profit could be utterly exploded. now, therefore, he outlined the design of his great work, which was to consist of two parts; a first, historico-critical, intended to elucidate the different forms of the theory of profit as expounded by the various british economists; and a second, theoretical and constructive, which was to announce to the world the author's own doctrine. this method of exposition is substantially identical with that followed by bã�â¶hm-bawerk in his _capital and interest_, and it corresponds moreover to the immediate requirements of the investigation, which ought to begin with the study of prevailing opinions and doctrines, and then only proceed to innovation. but a more attentive examination of the question soon convinced marx that this would not be the most efficacious method of furnishing a theoretical reproduction of actualities, since, to this end, we must let the phenomena tell their own tale before we proceed to call to account those who have already analysed them, and before we draw attention to the ways in which their conception of the facts diverges from that which reality, when directly questioned, reveals. the method has ever been preferred by the most gifted theorists, and has been applied by bergson with admirable dexterity in his _creative evolution_. marx, therefore, never weary of destroying and refashioning, inverted his original design, and promptly began the study and analysis of concrete phenomena, to proceed then only to a criticism of the theories of his precursors. it was in accordance with such criteria that he wrote his _criticism of political economy_, of which the first instalment was published at berlin in 1859. the most notable portion of this work is the preface, which contains the first statement of the theory of historical materialism. the relationships of men in social life, says marx, are determined by the conditions of production, are necessary relationships independent of the individual will; these determined relationships constitute the real foundation upon which is erected the legislative, political, moral, and religious superstructure of every age. the relationships of production, or the economic relationships prevailing at a given period, are a natural and necessary outcome of the method of production, or rather of the historic phase of the instrument of production. but sooner or later the further development of the productive forces generates a new configuration in technical method, a configuration incompatible with the prevailing relationships of production, those correlative to the productive order hitherto dominant. there then occurs an explosion, a social revolution, which disintegrates economic relationships, and, by ricochet, disintegrates existing social relationships, replacing them by better economic relationships, adequate to the new and more highly evolved phase of the productive instrument. in broad outline it may be said that economic evolution has exhibited four progressive phases; the asiatic economy, the classical economy, the feudalist economy, and the modern bourgeois or capitalist economy. the evolution of the productive instrument, never arrested in its secular march, will in due course renew the eternally recurrent opposition between the method of production and the relationships of production, rendering these incompatible. once more will come an explosion, the last of the great social convulsions, whereby the bourgeois economic order will be overthrown and will be replaced by the co-operative commonwealth. this new development will close the primary epoch of the history of human society. but the work we are discussing is further noteworthy inasmuch as it reflects a special phase of our author's thought, a thought which never ceased to exhibit a struggle between opposing trends and was ever oppressed by their contrast. the book, in fact, shows marx continually involved in antiquated hegelian machinery, or proceeding through a chain of categories evolving one from another--capital, landed property, the wage system, the state, foreign commerce, the world market. from each of these categories we may infer how the process of their successive development is accomplished. we are led to infer that the wage system is the outcome of landed proprietorship, for the expropriation of the peasant proprietors produces the proletarianised masses offering labour power for sale; and we are led to infer that the constitution of the world market is the crown and the epilogue of modern capitalist economy. in fact, according to marx, the historic mission of capitalism based upon wage labour, whose origins go back to the sixteenth century, is the creation of the world market. the world market is now devoted to the colonisation of california and australia and to the opening of trading ports in china and japan; its creation marks the climax of capitalism's historic mission, and indicates the approaching end of the economic form which was destined to fulfill it. now these ideas, in themselves arbitrary and fantastic, show how marx's thought at that epoch was still in an undecided or amphibious phase, in which the torrid sun of british economic science had not as yet succeeded in totally dispelling the fogs of german philosophy. but another incompatibility lessens the value of the book or diminishes its doctrinal efficacy; for marx, at this stage of his studies, invariably gave to the history of doctrine too preponderant a place, introducing it insistently into the course of his own exposition, which was thus deprived of continuity and weakened in force. further, the book we are considering did not directly bear upon any of the social questions which strongly arouse public interest, but was restricted to the study of two theories whose importance at first sight seems purely academic, the theory of value and the theory of money. marx contended that the value of commodities is exclusively determined by the quantity of labour incorporated into them; he traced the affiliations of this thesis with the work of its first enunciators in italy and in england; but he did not offer any reasoned demonstration of its truth. on the contrary, he frankly recognised that this contention is full of contradictions alike theoretical and practical, contradictions that appear insoluble; but he promised to vanquish them in the subsequent course of his exposition. far more noteworthy is the chapter on money, for it contains a masterly criticism of the quantitative theory of ricardo, and an effective refutation of the "labour notes" idea of bray, gray, proudhon, and others. according to this plan, every producer performing a certain quantum of labour would receive from the state a voucher entitling him to obtain from other producers the result of an equal quantum of labour; but the suggestion implies complete ignorance of the intrinsic conditions of the individualistic economy, wherein each producer creates an object without any certainty that there will be a market for it, or that it represents a real utility and will fetch a definite price. it obviously follows that the producer cannot be sure that he will be able to sell the article which he has produced, or that he will be able to transform it into anything with universal purchasing power; the product has to be baptised or sanctioned by the market, which alone has power to stamp it as useful by purchasing it. now the "labour note" system claims that it can forcibly dispense with the market by supplying to the producer of an article whose utility and saleable value has not been recognised by the market, a universally available purchasing power. the practical outcome of this forcible method is that the producer of a useless article can by means of his "labour note" secure for himself a useful article, whereas the producer of this latter will not in turn be able to exchange his own "labour note" for any object possessing utility; that is to say, the article made by the first producer will find no purchaser, and the "labour note" of the second producer will effect no purchase. this is inevitable, for the proposed reform is inconsistent, eclectic, and incomplete, since it pretends to socialise exchange while maintaining production and distribution upon their old individualistic basis, and overlooks the incongruity of any such supposition. the "labour note" system cannot rationally be instituted until production has been socialised, or until the state shall impose upon each individual the production of a specified quantity and quality of commodities, correlatively imposing upon the consumer the obligation to acquire these. in such conditions, however, we could no longer speak of commodities or of exchange, for these phenomena belong exclusively to an individualistic economy and would have no place in a socialised economy. this means that the reform of exchange by the suppression of profit can only be effected by the suppression of exchange itself, by the institution of the co-operative commonwealth. indeed, robert owen, who proposed the "labour note" system in 1832, and was the most brilliant of its advocates, clearly recognised this difficulty, and understood that the socialisation of production would be an indispensable preliminary to the adoption of the plan. it was the impatience of his disciples which forced him to inaugurate the system within the framework of the capitalist economy by founding the national equitable labour exchange. the logic of facts gave a patent demonstration of the irrationality of the attempt; and owen, saddened and humiliated, was compelled to witness the failure of the new institution. it will readily be understood that these abstruse and abstract investigations, devoid as they are of any tangible connection with the burning problems of property, were not likely to arouse interest among the members of the party. nothing could be more natural than the tone of hopeless discouragement with which the volume was greeted even by the author's most devoted friends. liebknecht, for example, declared that he had never before experienced so great a disappointment. biskamp enquired what on earth it was all about; burgers deplored that marx should have published a work so dull and fragmentary. it is true that the book had a moderate sale; rau quoted it in his treatise; certain russian and american economists made it the subject of profound studies. nevertheless, the publisher refused to proceed with the issue. hardly had this literary bickering come to an end when marx became involved in a violent quarrel with the distinguished naturalist karl vogt, who publicly charged him with setting snares for the german exiles and with having sordid relationships with the police. marx replied with a savage booklet entitled _herr vogt_ (london, 1860). the style of this polemic writing is intolerably vulgar; but in other respects the book is noteworthy, for it contains interesting revelations anent the italian campaign and the relationships between turin and the tuileries. we must remember, moreover, that the accusation here launched against vogt, that he was in the pay of the second empire, was subsequently confirmed beyond dispute, for in 1871 among the ruins of the tuileries there was found a receipt for frs. 40,000 which had been paid over to vogt. but scientific failures, personal contests, persistent and distressing domestic discomforts, seemed to inspire our athlete with renewed strength for the continuance of the work he had begun. nevertheless, profiting by experience, he decided upon a yet further modification in the plan of his book, resolving to defer to its final section all historico-critical disquisitions, and to concentrate his energies upon the positive analysis of concrete reality. further, being prevented by frequent illness from tackling the more difficult themes of pure economics, he devoted these long intervals of comparative leisure to statistical investigations and to the perusal of factory inspectors' reports, of white books and of blue books, and he plunged into the study of the economic history of great britain, so that it became possible for him to interleave the pages of abstract theory, necessarily difficult to understand, with pages that are really living, pages that vibrate with the reflex of reality. at length, abandoning the method he had previously followed of publishing fragmentary essays, he decided to rewrite the work throughout before sending it to press. after several years of incredible labour, the days being devoted to reading in the british museum library, and the nights (for he often went on writing until four in the morning) to literary composition; falling again and again beneath the burden of his cross, but ever rising to his feet once more, thanks to the demon within urging him on and thanks also to the sustaining hand of his incomparable friend; he at length completed his task, and in the spring of 1867 sailed for hamburg with the manuscript of the first volume of _capital_, which he entrusted to meissner for publication. in hamburg he passed pleasant days with dr. kugelmann, a friend and fervent admirer, and with various officials, generals, and bankers; he was visited by a lawyer named warnebold, an emissary from bismarck, who, acting on the minister's instructions, exhorted him "to employ his brilliant talents for the advantage of the german people." before long, however, he returned to london, where he earnestly devoted himself to giving the last touches to his book, which was finally issued from the press in the autumn of the same year. thus was at length given to the world the monumental work destined to revolutionise sociological thought, and to give a new and higher trend, not to socialism alone, but to political economy itself. to sum up its drift very briefly, we may say that the argument follows three chief lines, value, machinery, and primitive accumulation. he set out from the fundamental principle (a principle which the philosopher krause had declared to be as important to political economy as the fall of heavy bodies is important to physics) that the value of products is measured by the mass of labour incorporated into them, and drew the conclusion that the profit of capital is nothing other than the materialisation of a quantity of labour expended by the worker, and is in other words unpaid labour, stolen and usurped income. the worker, that is to say, transmits into the product a value equal to the quantity of labour incorporated therein, but receives from the capitalist a value less than this, a value equal to the quantity of labour embodied in the commodities necessary to reproduce the energy expended by the worker. now the difference between the value of the product (that is to say the quantity of labour transmitted by the worker into the product) and the value of the labour power (that is to say the quantity of labour employed in producing the commodities consumed by the worker) constitute the surplus value which is gratuitously pocketed by the owner of the means of production in virtue of the fact that he is owner. in this way marx attains to the qualitative notion of the income of capital, or explains whereof that income effectively consists. it remains to determine the quantity of income, which cannot be specified unless there have previously been precisely determined the measure and the figure of wages. now though it be true that the growth of accumulation virtually tends to bring about an increase in the amount paid in wages, it is nevertheless within the power of the capitalist to obviate this undesirable event by investing the growing accumulation in the form of technical capital, which by its very nature is without influence upon wages. but the capitalist can do more than this. he can transform into technical capital a part of the capital which has hitherto been utilised in paying wages, thus throwing some of the workers out of employment, or creating an industrial reserve army. this reserve army, on the one hand stifles all resistance on the part of the workers in active employment, keeping their wages at a level which will purchase the barest necessaries, and on the other hand permits to capitalist industry the sudden expansions in times of prosperity which to the capitalist are so desirable and so profitable. thus marx's qualitative investigation is succeeded by a quantitative investigation, so that we learn, not only what surplus value is, but that it is equal to all the excess over and above the more or less limited subsistence of the worker, and that the worker is not merely defrauded of part of the value resulting from his labour, but is reduced to a wretched pittance, happy if he can secure this, and if he be not condemned by the hopeless entanglements of capitalist relationships to submergence in the backwater of the most terrible poverty. the result is that to the favoured recipients of surplus value there is subject a brutalised crowd reduced to a narrow wage, while at a yet lower level there struggles in the morass the amorphous mass of those who are condemned to labour without end. we thus realise, adds marx, how profit is born of capital and is in its turn transformed into capital. but none of the considerations hitherto adduced suffice to make it clear what was the origin of primitive capital, that which first of all gave birth to profit, and consequently cannot be the product of profit. the celebrated section on the secret of primitive accumulation was intended to solve this problem. classical political economy, said marx, regarded the formation of primitive capital as an episode which occurred during the first days of creation. in times long gone by, there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal ã�â©lite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. thus it came to pass before long that the former became impoverished whilst the latter grew wealthy, and the wealthy earned the gratitude of the poor by hiring these to work for them in return for a paltry wage. the theological legend of original sin tells us how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the economic history of original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. we learn that one section of humanity has succeeded in eluding the divine judgment and in procuring for itself bread and cakes by the sweat of others. unfortunately, continues marx, a conscientious questioning of history discloses that primitive capital originated in very various ways, of a character anything but idyllic. until the close of the fifteenth century there existed in england a race of peasant proprietors, nominally subject to the jurisdiction of the great lords of the soil. but the increasing demand for wool which resulted from the expansion of the flemish wool industry, and the increasing demand for flesh meat consequent upon the growth of population, induced the great landowners to destroy an agrarian system by which their returns from rent were rendered practically nil. the free cultivators were brutally evicted from the fields which their ancestors had arduously tilled for centuries past, to be replaced by shepherds and flocks, the crowds of the expropriated hastening to the towns to offer the strength of their arms for hire. here they happened upon a rout of usurers, traders, house-owners, enriched craftsmen, and lucky speculators; and here too were those who had expropriated them, the landowners who had heaped up savings by fair means or foul, but had hitherto been unable to turn their savings to account owing to the restrictions imposed by the corporative economy (guild system). these accepted as a gift from heaven the influx of the proletarian multitude, and were not slow in setting the newcomers to work on behalf of the growing manufactures. modern capitalist industry thus originated in a terrible expropriation of the working population which transformed the independent peasants into an impoverished and hunger-stricken mob. but historic nemesis awaits this society conceived in theft, and marx predicts its disastrous end in the ominous words: "the knell of capitalist property will sound; the expropriators will be expropriated." the fulfilment of the process will be effected by the forces inherent in the mechanism of the capitalist economy. the more extensive the development of that economy, the fiercer becomes the internecine struggle between the individual aggregations of capital, the more extensive become the accumulations of wealth in the hands of capitalists of the upper stratum, and the smaller becomes the number of these; correlatively there takes place an increase in the size of the working and poverty-stricken crowd, the more hopeless and more pitiful becomes its degradation, whilst simultaneously its cohesion grows more compact, for the workers are disciplined and organised by the very process which associates labour in the factory and upon the land. at a given moment, when the number of mammoth capitalists has conspicuously diminished, and when the pullulating mass of proletarians has increased to an immeasurable degree and has been forced down into the most abject poverty, it will at length be easy to the dispossessed to expropriate the small group of usurpers. thus the expropriation of the masses by the few, which greeted the dawn of the contemporary economic order, will be counterposed by the expropriation of the restricted number of masters at the hands of the proletarian masses, and this will triumphantly herald a calmer and more resplendent sunrise. chapter iv a broad outline has now been given of the marvellous work which, whatever judgment we may feel it necessary to pass upon the value of the doctrines it enunciates, will remain for all time one of the loftiest summits ever climbed by human thought, one of the imperishable monuments of the creative powers of the human mind. above all we are impressed and charmed by the magnificent quality of the exposition, in which but one defect can be pointed out, and this was probably imposed by the abnormal conditions under which the author wrote. we allude to the last chapter, the one that crowns the story of the historic expropriation of the workers with the eloquent example of the colonies. logically this chapter should precede the penultimate chapter, wherein marx, from his account of these terrible happenings, casts the horoscope of revolution. it is probable that the inversion was deliberate, for the prophetic call to the proletarian revolution would have been more likely to attract the attention of the censorship had it been placed at the end of the volume. apart from this trifling matter, we cannot but admire the shapely pyramidal construction, the harmonious and flowing movement of the book, which, passing from the most subtle disquisitions upon the algebra of value, deals with the complexities of factory life and machine production, plunges into the inferno of workshops and mines and into the infamous stews of unspeakable poverty, to conclude with a description of the tragic expropriation of a suffering population. the work is a masterpiece wherein all is great, all alike incomparable and wonderful--the acuteness of the analysis, the statuesque majesty of the whole, the style vibrant with sorrow or with indignation according as the author is sympathising with the woes of the poor or scourging the villainies of the mighty, the vast learning, and the torrential impetus of passion. there is a stupendous harmony of irreconcilables, so that, as in the mysterious creations of nature, we find an almost inconceivable association of real symmetry with apparent disorder; an association of minute attention to detail with monumental synthesis, an association of mathematics with history, an association of repose with movement; so that in all its fibres the book seems to be the offspring of an unfathomable and transcendental union between superhuman labour and superhuman pain. nothing, therefore, is more natural or more readily explicable than the phenomenal success of _capital_, a success which has rarely been paralleled in the history of intellectual productions. translated into almost every language (recently even into chinese); eagerly read by men of learning no less than by statesmen, by reactionaries as well as by rebels; quoted in parliaments and in meetings of the plebs, from the pulpit and from the platform, in huts and in palaces--it speedily secured a world-wide reputation for its author, making him the idol of the most irreconcilable classes and of the most contrasted stocks. whereas, in fact, the prophetic announcement of the glorious advent of collective property led to the assembling round marx of all the common people of the west, who hailed him as avenger, as leader, and as seer of the onward march of the proletariat; in such countries as russia, where capitalist development was as yet in its infancy, the bourgeois classes sang the praises of the book which announced the historic mission of capitalism, and thus it was that the idol of the western pã�â©troleurs became in the far east of europe the fetich of bankers and manufacturers. after the first shock of surprise, however, readers turned to the dispassionate analysis of the individual doctrines advocated in the work, and were not slow to bring to light certain gaps and sophisms. to say truth, no sovereign importance can be attributed to any of these criticisms, nor is it necessary to make much of the numerous attacks upon the statistical demonstrations of _capital_. it is undeniable that marx's thesis of the progressive concentration of wealth into the hands of an ever-diminishing number of owners, and of the correlatively progressive impoverishment of the common people, has not been confirmed. it has indeed been confuted by the most authoritative statistics collected since the publication of the book, for these show that the greater recipients of income increase more than proportionally to the medium and lesser recipients, whereas the number of taxpayers in the lowest grades diminishes, with a proportionate increase in the number of those at a slightly higher level. further, as far as this last fact is concerned, there can be no doubt that wages have increased of late, so that they not merely rise above the miserable level of bare subsistence specified by lassalle, but also rise above the level (which is still miserable, though a trifle higher) expressed in the calculations of marx. it is, however, needful to add that the marxist thesis merely points to a general tendency, and does not imply a denial that more or less considerable fluctuations may occur at particular periods. moreover, the concentration of wealth does not find expression solely in the diminution of the numerical proportion between the greater and the lesser recipients of income, but in addition in a diminution of the ratio between the taxpayers and the population and in an increase in the contrast between the wealth of the recipients of income in various grades. further, the most authoritative statistics demonstrate a growing diminution in the ratio between the owners and the general population. again, no one can deny that the contrast between high grade and low grade incomes has of late exhibited an enormous increase; that banking concentration and the sway of the banks over industry (a source of increasing disparity in fortunes) has attained in recent years an intensity which even marx could not have foreseen; and that, subsequently to the publication of _capital_ and to the death of its author, the social fauna has been enriched by an economic animal of a species previously unknown, the multimillionaire, whose existence undeniably reveals an unprecedented advance in capitalist concentration. nay more, after marx's death, agrarian and industrial concentration attained preposterous proportions, such as he had never ventured to predict. in the american union, a single landed estate will embrace territories equal to entire provinces, while industrial capital becomes amassed by milliards in the hands of a few despotic trusts, so that two-thirds of the entire working population are employed by one-twentieth of all the separate enterprises in the country. these statements concern the apex of the social pyramid; but even at the base of that structure the phenomena are far from invalidating the marxist conception to the extent which many contend. correlatively with the undeniable rise in wages (which, moreover, has been arrested of late, and has been replaced by a definite movement of retrogression), there has occurred an enormously greater increase in income, and therefore a deterioration in the relative condition of the workers. there has further been manifest an increasing instability of employment, so that unemployment has become more widespread and more frequent, exposing the working classes to impoverishment and incurable degradation. marx's other theses, however, are open to more serious objection. retracing the thread of his demonstrations with special attention to his study of primitive accumulation, no one can deny the absolute authenticity of the facts he narrated. nor can marx be blamed for having restricted his historic demonstration to england; though in actual fact the expropriation of the cultivators has been carried out everywhere, openly or tacitly, and everywhere this expropriation has been an initial stage in the foundation of capitalist property. even russia, who flattered herself upon her independence of the universal law and upon escaping the fated expropriation of her peasants, russia, whom marx himself, as if in a sudden fit of mental aberration, was on the point of excluding from the sphere of his generalisations, has to submit to the invariable rule, and to witness the transformation of her independent peasant proprietors into proletarians. the constitutional defect of this portion of marx's book is of a very different character. although he tells the story of the expropriation of the cultivators, he fails to explain why such expropriation must always take place, he fails to bring this great historical event beneath the sway of a universal economic theory. now, putting aside the incongruity that a book essentially founded upon logical demonstration should all at once break off that demonstration to turn to a historical disquisition and a simple record of facts, no one has any right to construct a theoretical generalisation upon the bare narration of hard facts without referring these to the general psychological and logical causes which have produced them. it cannot be denied that in this respect marx's demonstration presents a defect which it is impossible to make good. yet more serious criticism may be directed against the theory of the industrial reserve army, the theory wherein marx attempts to sum up the law of population of the capitalist era. for the theory is wholly based upon the premise that the conversion of wage capital into technical capital is competent to bring about the permanent unemployment of labour, or definitively to reduce the demand for labour. now this premise will not hold, for technical capital, by promptly increasing the profit of capital, and by lowering the price of the product in the long run, provides for the capitalist, first of all, and subsequently for the consumer, the possibility of fresh savings, and these in the end create a further demand for labour, so that sooner or later there will be a call upon the active services of the workers who are temporarily unemployed. vain, therefore, is any attempt to make technical capital responsible for the relative excess of population, which technical capital cannot possibly produce, for this phenomenon must be referred to the presence and to the activity of a very different variety of capital, and one not considered by marx, namely unproductive capital. but these criticisms, which after all touch no more than points of detail, are mere trifles in comparison with the incurable contradictions in which the author's fundamental theory is involved. in fact, by a vigorous deduction from his premise that the value of commodities is measured by the mass of labour incorporated in them, marx arrives at the fundamental and logical distinction between constant capital and variable capital. if, however, the value of products be exclusively determined by the mass of labour incorporated in them, it is evident that the capital invested in machinery or in raw material can only transmit to the product a value exactly equal to the quantity of labour contained therein, without adding any surplus, and that it is therefore constant capital; whereas wage capital transmits to the product value equal to all the quantity of labour which it maintains and sets in motion, a quantity which, as we know, exceeds the quantity of labour contained in the capital itself. in other words, wage capital, besides reproducing its own value, furnishes a supplement or a surplus value, and is therefore variable capital. consequently surplus value arises exclusively from variable capital, and is therefore precisely proportional to the quantity of this capital. it further ensues that of two undertakings employing equal amounts of aggregate capital, the one which employs a larger proportion of constant capital ought to furnish a profit and a rate of profit lower than that furnished by the other. but free competition among the capitalists enforces an equal rate of profit upon the capitals invested in the various undertakings, and leads to the immediate abandonment of undertakings requiring a greater proportion of constant capital, and to the correlative expansion of the others. there consequently results an increase in the value of the products of the former undertakings, and a diminution in the value of the products of the latter. this process continues until the value of the respective products furnishes an equal rate of profit to the capitals respectively employed in producing them. value, therefore, though in the first instance it is equivalent to the labour employed in producing the products, necessarily diverges from that standard in the end, and has then an utterly different measure. thus the theory we are discussing is peremptorily refuted, or is reduced to absurdity. from the outset marx is distinctly aware of the existence of this striking contradiction, which emerges in so formidable a manner in the first stage of his investigation; he frankly recognises it, but postpones its solution to the later volumes of his treatise. on the very morrow, indeed, of the publication of the first volume, he ardently set to work once more, and sketched to his friend, in monumental pages, the design of the complete book. just as st. augustine was grieved that the duties of his episcopate deprived him of the hours which he would have preferred to devote to the writing of a volume to be the crown of his _city of god_, so marx was harassed by the thought of the time which the work of party organisation filched from his scientific labours, and it was solely that he might escape from the absorbing engagements involved in the former task that in the hague congress of 1872 he proposed the transfer of the international to new york. but now we unexpectedly reach a "dead point" in the biography of our thinker, for his mental life, otherwise so normal and so brilliant, here suddenly becomes obscured, and is tinged with mystery and enigma. for, on the one hand, marx clearly affirmed, and showed by his actions, that he definitely wished to devote himself to the completion of his treatise, whereas, on the other hand, it is undeniable that after the publication of the first volume of _capital_, he never wrote another line of the book, and that all the posthumous additions to this volume were composed prior to 1867. i do not mean to imply that during subsequent years he gave himself up to inertia or repose, for it was during this period that he wrote all the economic section in engels' booklet against dã�â¼hring; he learned russian; he read the agricultural statistics of numerous countries and the reports on poverty in ireland; he studied the matriarchal system; carried on ingenious discussions with engels concerning carey's theory of rent and bastiat's theory of the cost of reproduction; threw light on the influence of fluctuations in the value of money upon the rate of profit; sketched a mathematical theory of commercial cycles--in a word, his thought-process remained so active that when a certain publisher asked for the right to issue his complete works, he replied, "my works, those which represent my present thought, are not yet written." but the essential work of his life, the work which had been so much cherished and which he again and again turned over in his thoughts, seems, as far as palpable traces are concerned, to have been entirely dismissed from his mind. we thus look on, marvelling and grieved, at the sight of the enfeebled hero withdrawing from the field, what time his banner, whose staff is not yet firmly implanted in the ground, is left as a target for the easy assaults of his emboldened adversaries. there certainly contributed to this intellectual shipwreck the illnesses and the misfortunes from which marx suffered during the later years of his life. his health had been gravely undermined by overwork during the composition of the first volume of _capital_ and during the task of proletarian organisation; trouble from boils alternated with bronchitis, liver disorder, headache, and lumbago. in vain did he seek health in gentler climes, at ramsgate, ventnor, neuenahr, carlsbad, algiers, monte carlo, vevey, and other fashionable health resorts. all attempts at cure proving inefficacious, he had at length to settle down once more in london. in 1881 occurred the death of his wife; while the death of his beautiful daughter jenny, longuet's wife, in january, 1883, was, if possible, a yet more cruel blow. marx never recovered from this last shock; henceforward he was a broken man, the mere shadow of his former self; he passed his time contemplating the portraits of his two dear ones which engels was to bury with him, and he no longer took any interest in the world around him or in the social tumult of which he was the inspirer and the originator. he died suddenly at two in the afternoon of march 14, 1883, while seated in his study chair. the titanic brain, which had given a new world to humanity, which had broken once for all the spiritual and material bondage of mankind, had ceased to live and to vibrate. most distressing of all, he had taken with him to the grave the solution of the formidable enigma which everyone, the vulgar and the thinkers alike, had expected his genius to solve, and which no one else could unravel. it is true that shortly before his death he showed his friend the bulky manuscripts dictated in earlier days relating to the _criticism of political economy_, suggesting that something might be made of this collection. it is also true that engels, faithful executor of his divinity's wishes, devoted himself with splendid zeal to the publication of the manuscripts. but alas what delusion was in store for the admirers of the master! what a russian campaign of disaster organised by enthusiastic lieutenants to the hurt of this napoleon of thought! in 1885, two years after the death of marx, there was published under engels' supervision a so-called second volume of _capital_. but the careless and pedestrian editorship, the long theoretical disquisitions making no appeal to facts for their justification, disquisitions in which the argumentative thread is continually broken, suffice to show that what we have before us is not a book, hardly even a sketch for a book, but a series of casual writings composed for the purposes of study and for personal illumination. moreover, the work is wholly devoted to uninspiring monetary discussions upon the circulation of capital, to dissertations concerning fixed and circulating capital, the formation of metallic reserves, the circulation of commodity-capital, etc. noteworthy, in any case, are the investigations which aim at throwing light on the process in virtue of which there is effected the formation of metallic reserves which remain out of circulation for a longer or shorter period. if, says marx, a certain commodity requires for its production six months of labour, and cannot be sold until two months after its production has been completed, the capitalist, if he is to continue the work of production during the period in which the commodity remains unsold, has need of additional capital which he could dispense with if the sale could be effected immediately after production. but when, at the close of the circulation period, the capitalist resumes possession of the capital first utilised and realises it in money, he has no immediate need of all this capital, but only of the quantity necessary to make good the additional capital which he has invested, that is to say, a quantity of capital equal to the difference between the primary capital and the supplementary capital; consequently the excess remains at liberty, and goes to constitute and to increase monetary reserves. these reserves are formed in addition, and by an analogous process, on account of the wear of machinery; for the portions of value transmitted by the machines to the product and correlative to the wear of these machines are pent up until the day of the complete destruction of the machines or of their necessary replacement. thus the difference between the period of production and the period of exchange of the commodities, and the difference between the period of economic redintegration and the period of technical redintegration of the productive machinery, give rise to the formation of monetary or capitalistic reserves, which become in their turn the source of intricate developments and interesting complications. the book likewise contains a masterly, though wordy and disconnected, account of the circulation of capital. but absolutely nowhere does it touch on or even hint at the theoretical enigma left unsolved in the first volume. solely in engels' preface do we find an announcement that the definitive solution will be furnished in a subsequent volume, and a suggestion that in the interim economists engage in a sort of academic debate, and bring forward their respective solutions. there actually took part in this strange competition, with varying success, conrad schmidt, landã�â©, lexis, skworzoff, stiebeling, julius wolf, fireman, lafargue, soldi, coletti, graziadei, and myself. at length, however, in 1894, appeared the third volume, which was to reveal to an impatient world the desired solution. the solution reduces itself to this. it is true, says marx, that the value commensurate to labour ends by assigning to the capitals respectively employed as constant and as variable, different rates of profit, and that this is radically incompatible with competition. but it is likewise true that products are not actually sold for their value, but for their price of production, which is equal to the capital consumed plus profit at the ordinary rate on the total capital employed. certainly if we consider the mass of products sold, we find that their total price is precisely equal to their total value. but this integral value is not distributed among the various products in proportion to the quantity of labour incorporated in them, but in a lesser or greater proportion, according as the products themselves contain a greater or less proportion of the mean between the constant capital and the total capital; that is to say, the products containing a proportion of constant capital superior to the mean are sold at a price above their value in order to eliminate the deficiency of profit due to the preponderance of the capital which does not produce surplus value; whereas the products containing a proportion of constant capital inferior to the mean are sold at a price less than their value so as to eliminate the excess of profit due to the preponderance of the capital that produces surplus value; whilst only the products containing the mean proportion of constant capital and total capital are sold at a price precisely identical with their value. but it soon becomes apparent that this so-called solution is little more than a play upon words, or, better expressed, little more than a solemn mystification. for when economists endeavour to throw light upon the laws of value, they naturally consider the value at which the commodities are actually sold, and not a fantastical or transcendental value, not a value which neither possesses nor can possess any concrete relationship to facts. it may well be that value as determined by abstract economic theory will not always correspond precisely with value as a concrete fact, for the complexities and the manifold vicissitudes of real life impose obstacles; it may well be, indeed, that to the rigidity of normal value, constituting the type of the relationship of exchange, we ought to counterpose the comparatively transient fluctuations of current value. but it must be understood that no logical fact should stand in the way of the realisation of normal value, for this, conversely, ought to be derived by logical necessity from fundamental economic premises. of a value, indeed, which not only is not realised, but is not logically capable of realisation, the economist neither can nor ought to take any account; he should show in what respect, instead of being the expression of what value is, it is the expression of what value is not and cannot be; he should point out the negation of every correct and positive theory of value. now this value commensurate to labour, value as defined by marx's theory, not merely has its realisation restricted or modified by the vicissitudes of reality, but further, as marx himself is constrained to recognise, is not logically capable of realisation, seeing that it would give rise to results incompatible with the most elementary advantage of those who effect the exchange of commodities; consequently, it is not merely an abstraction remote from reality, but is incompatible with reality; not only is it an impossibility in the realm of fact, but further and above all it is a logical impossibility. thus, far from effecting the salvation of the threatened doctrine, this alleged solution administers a death-blow, and implies the categorical negation of what it professes to support. for what meaning can there possibly be in this reduction of value to labour, the doctrine dogmatically affirmed in the first volume, to one who already knows that the author is himself calmly prepared to jettison it? is there any reason for surprise at marx's hesitation to publish this so-called defence; need we wonder that his hand trembled, that his spirit quailed, before the inexorable act of destruction? despite all, however, genius will not be denied, and even this volume contains here and there masterly disquisitions, enriching the science of economics with new and fertile truths. it will be enough, in this connection, to refer to two theories. the first of these, the theory of the decline in the rate of profit, though not free from objection, is none the less inspired and profound. the second is the theory of absolute rent, a brilliant and acute deduction from the marxist theory of value. this theory, indeed, as we saw just now, leads to the conclusion that value commensurate to labour furnishes an extra profit to the capital which produces commodities requiring for their production an above-average proportion of variable capital. now, where free competition exists, such extra profit cannot continue, and must necessarily be eliminated by a reduction in the price of the product to a point below its value. but when competition is not fully free, there is no reason why such extra profit should not be permanent. now agrarian production requires an abnormally high proportion of variable capital, and consequently agricultural produce, when sold for its value, furnishes an extra profit. but since land is a monopolised element, this extra profit can be permanently assigned to the owners of the soil, because there is no effective competition to prevent their continuing to draw it. there thus comes into existence an absolute land rent, in opposition to or in addition to the differential rent of ricardo's theory. this absolute rent is not due to the varying cost of production in different areas; it is not the exclusive appanage of lands more favourably situated or of lands of better quality; it arises solely from the excess in the value of agrarian produce over its cost of production, and is a general attribute of land per se, in virtue of its quality as a monopolised element. marx acutely studies the manifold varieties of this rent according as it is rendered in work, in produce, or in money; and with sound and far-reaching intuition he deduces from his theory explanations of the intricate agrarian relationships among the various peoples of the globe. nor is this the only gem with which the work is adorned. very remarkable are the pages upon merchants' capital and moneylenders' capital, on their despotic predominance prior to the inauguration of the capitalist rã�â©gime, and upon their inevitable dissolution after the advent of that rã�â©gime. the closing pages, however, seem to breathe a vague weariness, and we find hardly any trace of masterly theoretical discussion of the class struggle, of its origin, of the instruments through which it operates, although this discussion, according to the author's original plan, was to be the monumental crown of the titanic work. thus, however fragmentarily, and thanks to the help of lieutenants and of disciples who were not always adequately instructed, the theoretical treatise, at once the pride and the torment of our prophet, at length arrived at completion. but the reader will not forget that to the positive treatment of his subject, marx always counterposed a historico-critical investigation of the theories of his precursors, and in the more mature design of his work such an exposition was to follow upon the exposition of his own doctrines and to form their apt complement. it remained, therefore, to bring to light this last part of his researches, a duty which was faithfully discharged (after the death of engels) by karl kautsky, with the publication of the _history of the theory of surplus value_, which appeared in four volumes during the years 1905 to 1910. substantially, though publishers have preferred to treat it as a work apart, this book is nothing other than the concluding section of _capital_, announced in the preface to the first volume, where the author tells of a sequel to be devoted to the history of this theory. in the posthumous work marx traces the development of the theory of surplus value through its three essential stages, the prericardian, the ricardian, and the postricardian. to the first of these phases belong the theories of the physiocratic school, whose essence marx grasps with marvellous acuteness, maintaining that the theories in question were the doctrinal reflection of the interests of the rising capitalist class, constrained to pretend that its own economic claims were the logical expression of the advantage of the landed and feudalist classes then politically dominant. particularly noteworthy are the comments on the teaching of adam smith. the second volume contains a searching criticism of the ricardian system, and above all of ricardo's theories of value and of profit. in the third section marx passes judgment on the theories of ricardo's successors, malthus, senior, and john stuart mill, for these writers, says marx, follow the setting sun of bourgeois economic science, follow that science to its now inevitable doom. it was a fixed idea with marx that the theoretical analysis of capitalist relationships had secured its fullest and most adequate expression in the pages of ricardo; he believed that ricardo had supplied the ultimate synthesis possible on these lines; that any further progress of economic science in its bourgeois trappings had become impossible; that its decline amid contradictions and perversions was inevitable; and that economics could only be renewed and reborn when the disintegrated vesture of bourgeois economic relationships had been completely thrown aside to give place to a definitive and superior social form. it is scarcely necessary to point to the sophisms and the arbitrary assumptions upon which this concept is based; but it must be admitted that the poverty, deficiency, and incurable vanity of current economic science increasingly tend to give the theory an awkward semblance of truth. chapter v to-day, now that the fruits of marx's meditations, be it only as the result of the work of collaborators, be it only with many gaps and imperfections, have all been given forth to the reading world, it is at length possible to take a general view, and to pass a dispassionate judgment upon the pre-eminent worth of his writings. the most austere criticism must bow reverently before such gigantic mental attainments as have few counterparts in the history of scientific thought, garnering from all branches of knowledge on behalf of the undying cause of mankind. the most inexorable criticism should recognise in marx the supreme merit of having been the first to introduce the evolutionary concept into the domain of sociology, the first to introduce it in the only form appropriate to social phenomena and social institutions; not as the unceasing and gradual upward-movement outlined by spencer, but as the succession of agelong cycles rhythmically interrupted by revolutionary explosions, proceeding in accordance with the manner sketched by lyell for geological evolution, and in our own time by de vries for biological evolution. with the aid of this concept, strictly positive and scientific, marx triumphantly overthrew, on the one hand classical economic science, taken prisoner by its own notion of a petrified society, and on the other the philosophy of law and idealist socialism which were convinced that it was possible to mould the world in accordance with the arbitrary conceptions of the thinker. looked at in this light, the work of marx presents a new instrument for the use of the philosophy of history and for the use of sociology; and it has contributed no less powerfully to the advance of technological science, thanks to the writer's masterly investigation into the successive forms of the technical instrument of productive machinery. in this respect more than in any others marx may be compared with darwin, and may indeed be spoken of as the darwin of technology: for no one has ever had a profounder knowledge than marx of the structural development of the industrial mechanism, no one else has followed step by step the formation and upward elaboration of productive technique; just as darwin, with invincible mental energy, traced the evolution of animal technique, the development of the functional apparatus of organised beings. this physiology of industry, which is now the least studied and least appreciated of marx's scientific labours, nevertheless constitutes his most considerable and most enduring contribution to science. noteworthy, in especial, and destined to form a permanent and integral part of the economic science of the world, are marx's analyses of money, credit, the circulation of capital, poverty, primitive accumulation, not to speak of the historico-critical investigations into the work of the british classical economists--for here marx, without prejudice to the merits of those who have fought honourably in this difficult arena, will ever remain the most brilliant and most profound commentator. for these mighty and noble contributions, his name will be inscribed in imperishable letters in the history of creative thought. but if his sociological, historical, and technological investigations, if his studies of money, the banking system, and industrial statistics, be so many intellectual jewels of which no praise can be excessive, it is none the less true that his fundamental economic theory is essentially vitiated and sophistical, and that he is himself responsible for reducing it to hopeless absurdity. we arrive, therefore, at this remarkable result: that marx, whose primary aim it was to be a theorist of political economy, and to deal only in subsidiary fashion with the philosophy of history and technology, secured a triumphant success in these subordinate fields; whereas in respect of the fundamental object of his thought, his work was a complete failure. nor can we deny that the very design of marx's work, however marvellous in the michelangelesque grandeur of its ensemble, does not satisfy those who insist upon strictly scientific method, and that in this respect marx stands far below the great masters of positive science. for, however admirable and however great this man who succeeded in subsuming an entire world within the limits of an extremely simple initial principle, and whose life was but the development of an equation which he had formulated at its outset, how far more straightforward and trustworthy, how far more scientific, was the method of darwin, who never formulated any apriorist principles, but, quite free from preconceptions, accepted phenomena in the order of progressive complexity in which life itself presented them. darwin first studied the natural formation of organised beings, then devoted himself to an examination of the larger types, and was finally led to infer their development by evolutionary growth. this method, which follows nature and reflects it, seems far more worthy of respect, far more honest, far more strictly scientific, than the other method, which manipulates the truth, does violence to the truth, in order to accommodate it to hidden ends. there is no reason, therefore, to be surprised that such a flood of criticism should have been directed against this colossus, or that on the morrow of the completion of marx's work the skies of the two hemispheres should have rung with disorderly clamour proclaiming the crisis, nay the failure, of marxism. but that which is less easy to understand, that which discloses the utter immaturity of economic science as well as of contemporary socialism, is that criticism has not been directed against the truly vulnerable point of the system, but has been solely concerned in attacking its better defended and less fragile parts. in fact the scientific and socialist currents partially or wholly opposed to marxism display a strange reverence for his theory of value, or do not venture to attack it, but concentrate their forces against the statistical and historical theories which are the deductions and complements of the marxist theory of value. in this respect the critics of marxism form two very distinct groups. the first of these, the reformist or revisionist school, has a high respect for the master's theory of value, and reiterates it as an indisputable truth; whereas reformists criticise the theory of increasing misery, the theory of the concentration of capital, and above all the catastrophic vision of the proletarian revolution. the writers of this school affirm, and think that in so doing they are setting up an antithesis to marxism, that to await the millennium of the social revolution is futile utopianism; they contend, that the progressive reduction in the number of the wealthy, paralleled by the ceaseless increase in the number of more and more impoverished proletarians, a development which according to marx's vision was to provide the apparatus destined to destroy the contemporary economy, is negatived by an actual tendency towards a more democratic distribution of commodities; and they insist, therefore, that socialism should aim at securing the triumph of its cause by means that are less violent but far more efficacious, namely by social legislation or by reforms tending to reduce inequality. now, without troubling to repeat what i have already said, that the marxist dynamic of the distribution of wealth is far from being as completely negatived by contemporary facts as these critics are pleased to insist, i merely propose to point out that this paying of high honour to reform and social legislation nowise conflicts with the doctrine or with the work of marx, who, on the contrary, was the first to throw into high relief the pre-eminent value of social legislation, devoting classical chapters to the elucidation of its most memorable manifestations. in this light, therefore, revisionism or reformism, far from being a negation or correction of marxism, is a specific application or partial realisation of the doctrine, for it brings into the lime-light one of the numerous sides of that marvellous polyhedron, and deserves credit for having explained and developed this particular aspect of marxism. but revisionism errs gravely in that it wishes to replace the beautiful and complex multiplicity of the marxist system by forcing us to contemplate this unilateral aspect alone. the reformists err in that they fail to see that legislative reforms, though desirable and extremely opportune, are invariably circumscribed by the prepotent opposition of the privileged classes, and can never do anything more than mitigate a few of the grosser harshnesses of the present system--whilst, precisely because they effect this mitigation, reforms tend to preserve an increasingly unstable economic order from the imminent disaster of a destructive cataclysm. if the reformist school mutilates marxism thus violently, by reducing the whole of _capital_ to the paragraphs extolling social legislation, the syndicalists inflict a yet cruder mutilation on the marxist system by tearing a single page out of _capital_, to make of this page the alpha and the omega of their revolutionary creed. it is true that marx, in the thirty-first chapter of _capital_, makes an explicit appeal to force, the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one; but this appeal is not made until it has been fully demonstrated that the social revolution can only be effected at the close of a slow and lengthy evolutionary process which shall have caused complete disintegration of the existing economic order and shall have paved the way for its inevitable transformation into a superior order. now the syndicalists unhesitatingly sponge all this demonstration from the slate, and affirm that the proletarian masses can undertake action at any moment, can violently overthrow the prevailing economic order whenever it shall please them to do so; and they declare that it is needless for revolutionists to keep their eyes fixed upon the clock of history, in order to see if this is about to sound the knell of the present social order. it would be superfluous to demonstrate the absurdity of such a thesis, for the very school which proclaims it has assumed the task of giving it the lie in clamorous accents. for if, as the new apostles of force contend, the proletarian masses can at any moment annihilate the prevailing economic order, why do they not rise against the capitalism they detest, and replace it with the co-operative commonwealth for which they long? why is it that after so much noisy organisation, after so much declamation and delirious excitement, the utmost they are able to do is to tear up a few yards of railway track or to smash a street lamp? do we not find here an irrefragable demonstration that force is not realisable at any given moment but only in the historic hour when evolution shall have prepared the inevitable fall of the dominant economic system? thus whatever they can do, it always seems that the infirm will of the disciples who demand an arbitrary renovation of the social system (whether by legal measures or by force) breaks vainly against the fatality of evolution, and that reformism and syndicalism are merely caricatures, counterfeits, or exaggerations of the many-sided and well-balanced theory of the master, who proposed a threefold line of advance: by social legislation; by the activity of the organised workers; and by revolution. in face of these various forms of neo-marxism, the outcome of mutilations and of one-sided exclusivism, marx redivivus would have excellent reason for repeating his own adage, so thoughtful and so true, "i am not a marxist." however striking the temporary success of these new forms among the crowd or among the learned, we may confidently predict that neither reformism nor syndicalism will definitively supplant the marxist system, which despite all and against all remains and will remain a supreme and invincible force at once of theory and of organisation for the proletarian assault upon the long-enduring fortress of property. the value of marx's work is, in fact, displayed in the most brilliant light by the detailed criticism of the theorists and by the contrast with opposing trends; all the more when we compare the aspect of economic thought and of proletarian organisation before and after the publication of _capital_. for if we study the utterances of thinkers upon these matters during the middle of the nineteenth century, we find that nearly all are dominated by the categorical idea that the social order is of an absolutely immobile character, and that none but a few utopians entertain the thought of changing that order by means of precipitate legislation inspired by their individual preconceptions. in any case, it was an idea common to all, to revolutionists as well as to conservatives, that the poverty of the masses was a negative and distressing residue from the economic system, that it was a purely passive feature of that system which must be accepted with resignation, for it could not exercise any propulsive influence in the general social movement. this is substantially the notion which emerges from victor hugo's _les misã�â©rables_, for poverty is here regarded as an overwhelming mass of suffering for which it is impossible to assign the responsibility; it is looked upon as a load pressing with inexorable cruelty upon suffering humanity, which is unable to respond by anything more effective than complaints and tears. but how utterly different is the notion prevailing in our own days upon this matter. not only is the conviction now rooted in the mind of every thinker that the economic order is subject to unceasing change, is advancing towards predestined destruction; but it is considered certain that the artificer, the demiurge, the most potent factor of this destruction, will be the active resistance, the unrest, the rebellion, of the proletarians in the grasp of the capitalist machine and eager to destroy it. this conception of the dynamogenic function of poverty is the most characteristic feature of the social thought of our day, the feature wherein that thought contrasts most categorically with the ideas of an earlier age. just as the christian sect, represented by gibbon as a mere pathological efflorescence growing on the margin of roman society, is by the better equipped science of our own time looked upon as having been the most potent solvent of the imperial complex and as the ferment generating a new and better life, so the proletarian masses, regarded by the science and the art of the past as a crushed and pitiful appendage of the bourgeois economy, now appear to contemporary science as the most vigorous among the forces tending to disintegrate that economy, as tending irresistibly to create a higher and better balanced form of association. correlatively with this development, whereas the proletarians of other days were content to sulk in their hovels as they contemplated the brilliant gyrations of the capitalist constellation, merely cursing in secret the sorrows of their lot, to-day the workers of the two worlds are advancing in serried ranks to the conquest of a new humanity and a new life. thus the immobility of our fathers has given place to rapid movement; their discouragement and resignation, to rebellious demands; and whereas of old a chasm yawned between the scattered visionaries who entertained dreams of social rebirth and the inert mass of the poverty-stricken, we find to-day that the impoverished are themselves becoming the artificers, the heralds, the pioneers, of the irresistible ascent of humanity towards a juster and better social order. now all this new moral and social world, unknown to our grandparents, the glory and the plague of science, of society, of contemporary life; all this gigantic tumult of ideas, facts, claims, of assaults, wounds, innovating reconstructions; all this marvellous necromancy is the work of one man, a sage and a martyr. all this we owe to karl marx. it measures, concretes, and materialises for us his colossal worth and the omnipotent vastness of his achievement. though science may well and with full right complain of the gaps in his doctrinal system, though life may furnish the most definite refutations of his theoretical visions, and though future history may display forms of which he never dreamed, nevertheless, no one will ever be able to unseat him from his throne, or to dispute the sovereignty which accrues to him on account of his splendid contributions to civil progress. whether praised and accepted, or despised and rejected, by practice or by theory, by history or by reason, he will always remain the emperor in the realm of mind, the prometheus foredestined to lead the human race towards the brilliant goal which awaits it in a future not perhaps immeasurably remote. for the day is coming. and in that day, when remorseless time shall have destroyed the statues of the saints and of the warriors, renascent humanity will raise in honour of the author of this work of destruction, upon the shores of his native stream, a huge mausoleum representing the proletarian breaking his chains and entering upon an era of conscious and glorious freedom. thither will come the regenerated peoples bearing garlands of remembrance and of gratitude to lay upon the shrine of the great thinker, who, amid sufferings, humiliations, and numberless privations, fought unceasingly for the ransom of mankind. and the mothers, as they show to their children the suffering and suggestive figure, will say, their voices trembling with emotion and joy: see from what darkness our light has come forth; see how many tears have watered the seeds of our joy; look, and pay reverence to him who struggled, who suffered, who died for the supreme redemption. opinions: the anthropology of finance one of the more salutory effects of the financial crisis in 2007-8 has been the realization, even by some economists, that numbers do not explain everything and that social forms and relations also play a major part in financial trading. here anthropologists (and some sociologists) have come to the fore. the jba therefore asked a number of scholars to write an opinion piece about different aspects of the anthropology of finance that interested them. here is what some of them kindly contributed. beyond culture and society: prospects for ethnographies of finance daromir rudnyckyj, university of victoria finance has recently attracted an upsurge of interest among ethnographically oriented social scientists and this attention has increased dramatically in the wake of recent financial crises that have swept across europe, the united states, and beyond. much of the recent sociological and anthropological work on finance has built on research that has sought to understand the effects of expert knowledge on human life and ways of living, especially in science and technology studies. social studies of finance have sought to open up the black box of finance to page 1 of 26 jba 2(1): 49-74 spring 2013 © the author(s) 2013 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 50 better understand the practices and assumptions that frame financial action (mackenzie, muniesa and siu 2008; miyazaki 2013; zaloom 2006). in parallel with the accelerating interest in finance in the human sciences, finance has also recently become a focus of popular political mobilization and increased public scrutiny. the occupy movement that emerged in large part in response to government action (and inaction) following the financial crises of the period between 2008 and 2011 makes it evident that finance wields disproportionate influence on human action compared to its outsized influence on human life (juris 2012). while some strategies of social scientific engagement with finance sought to demonstrate the social and cultural dimensions of financial worlds, more recent strategies have analyzed the networks and rationalities that comprise finance today. this essay seeks to raise a set of questions that might guide empirical social scientific work on finance. some recent sociological and anthropological work has identified the cultural forms and social structures that characterize spaces of finance. two distinguished sociologists, donald mackenzie and yuval millo, have documented the history of the chicago board options exchange, a key financial derivatives market. mainly based on interviews with key players and power brokers on the exchange, they deploy michel callon’s performativity theory (callon 1998), which asserts that economics ‘does not describe an existing external “economy,” but brings that economy into being: economics performs the economy, creating the phenomena it describes’ (mackenzie and millo 2003:108). in so doing, they demonstrate how the black scholes theory, originally a hypothetical model to account for the behavior of derivatives traders, increasingly influenced the world that it had previously purported only to describe. they note that ‘the markets gradually altered so that many of the model’s assumptions, wildly unrealistic when published in 1973, became more accurate’ (122). second, traders began to adopt the model as a ‘guide to trading’ (123). the model was no longer just used to describe the options trading market, but was instead actively used by traders to guide their action in the market. thus, they conclude, ‘gradually, ‘reality’ (in this case, empirical prices) was performatively reshaped in conformance with the theory’ (127). in so doing, mackenzie and millo also show how a space purportedly dedicated to the pure exercise of market principles is actually the site of an elaborate array of social codes, mutual obligations, and reciprocity (115-119). noting the importance of social relationships on the exchange, they suggest the irony inherent in the fact that ‘the very markets in which homo oeconomicus appears to thrive cannot be created (if they require the solution of collective action problems, as in chicago) by homines oeconomici. chicago practice (markets created by collective action) contradicts chicago theory, orthodox economics as famously pursued at the university of chicago’ (116). perhaps it should come as no surprise that two sociologists should enter into a space that might be seen opinions: the anthropology of finance 51 as the site for the exercise of pure market reason and find the central object of their discipline: society. an analogous approach is apparent in recent work by the eminent anthropologist arjun appadurai. appadurai seeks to decipher the cultural dispositions that precipitated recent financial crises in the united states. focusing mainly on the practices and orientations of wall street traders, appadurai argues that ‘it is possible to identify a series of magical practices…at the heart of global capitalism and, in particular, of the financial sectors. these practices are premised on a general, absolute, and apparently transcendent faith in the market’ (appadurai 2012:8-9).1 drawing heavily on weber’s famous arguments regarding the spirit of capitalism, appadurai notes that the resurgence of magic runs against weber’s own observations about capitalism. as he points out, weber identified protestant asceticism and the sober disavowal of any worldly manifestations of divinity as one of the key enabling conditions for the subsequent emergence of the spirit of capitalism (2012:8). weber, of course, also identified the elimination of magic by protestant reformers as a key condition of possibility for the emergence of worldly asceticism and ultimately the spirit of capitalism (weber 2001:71). thus, appadurai concludes that the ‘new religion of the market [that] treats the market as the source of certainty’ reverses ‘the weberian logic’ (2012: 9). according to appadurai, the problem is that instead of behaving rationally, the financial actors created the current and ongoing financial crises due to a mystical faith in the market. although not cited, appadurai’s arguments about financial capitalism seem to borrow more from marx than they do from weber. appadurai does not refer to marx in either essay, but the assertion of magic inherent in financial capitalism and his insistence that the market is treated in religious and mystical terms by traders and other actors, evokes marx’s famous arguments about commodity fetishism that were articulated at an earlier moment in the history of capitalism (marx 1977:163-170). the traders and financiers briefly described are depicted as being as mystified by the tools and techniques through which they apprehend the market, such as chartism (appadurai 2011:528), as the consumers of nineteenth century were by the proliferation of commercial merchandise following the industrial revolution. of course, in asserting the apparent magical nature of market capitalism to those who inhabit it, appadurai travels down a path well trod by anthropologists. indeed, the apparently magical nature of the market is evident in work ranging from studies of cargo cults and devil worship (taussig 1980; worsley 1957) to more recent invocations regarding post-colonial ‘occult economies’ (comaroff and comaroff 1 it is instructive to point out that this sentence appears word for word in both the cambridge anthropology and the public culture essays (2011: 527). journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 52 1999). of course, a central concern of such studies has been to show how culture informs economic action. thus, just as the sociologists mackenzie and millo entered into the world of high finance and found society at the heart of the market, appadurai makes a parallel voyage and finds culture in similar sites. it is perhaps predictable that sociologists and anthropologists might enter market spaces and find the orienting objects of their disciplines, but it strikes me that empirical research might be able to offer more to understanding the worlds of finance than to simply identify the social or cultural action occurring therein. in this regard there are three sets of questions that might be useful in developing more robust interdisciplinary work on finance. first, how does one do empirical social scientific research in financial sites? that is to say, what ethnographic techniques are available to conduct ethnographic work on finance? in addressing this question, it would be germane to identifying continuities with previous anthropological modes of investigation and also identifying the sorts of innovations required in empirical research on finance. second, why should anthropology be attentive to finance? in other words, how does attention to finance advance disciplinary knowledge? as such, anthropologists could attend to how empirical work on finance might benefit research programs in other domains of the discipline. given that sites for the formation of expert knowledge – such as laboratories, hospitals, government offices, and corporations – are increasingly prevalent locations for the practice of anthropology, those working in these sites might identify continuities and obstacles to carrying out research in these sites. finally, how does attention to finance enable better understanding of capitalism? given the complexity and sophistication of economic practice, how might ethnographic work on finance contribute to enhancing our comprehension of capitalism today? previous diagnoses of capitalism may not provide the best arsenal of concepts to address the complexity of contemporary capitalism. work on finance might offer new tools to enhance our knowledge of how capitalism has changed. furthermore, proclamations that ongoing financial crises will lead to the ultimate downfall of capitalism, or even widespread policy transformations, are perhaps premature. yet transnational initiatives such as the occupy movement have made financial centers increasingly visible as critical sites of not only economic action, but political expression and ethnographic documentation. given this articulation, as well as an increasing awareness of the effects of finance on human life and action, it would seem an opportune moment for anthropology to consider what intervention the discipline might make. opinions: the anthropology of finance 53 references appadurai, arjun 2011 'the ghost in the financial machine.' public culture 23 (3):517-539. appadurai, arjun 2012 'the spirit of calculation.' cambridge anthropology 20 (1):3-17. callon, michel 1998 'introduction.' in the laws of the markets. michel callon, ed. pp. 1-57. malden: blackwell. comaroff, jean, and john comaroff 1999 'occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the south african postcolony.' american ethnologist 26 (2):279-303. juris, jeffrey s. 2012 'reflections on #occupy everywhere: social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation.' american ethnologist 39(2):259-279. mackenzie, donald a., fabian muniesa, and lucia siu 2008 do economists make markets? on the performativity of economics. princeton: princeton university press. mackenzie, donald, and yuval millo 2003 'constructing a market, performing a theory: the historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange.' american journal of sociology 109(1):107-145. marx, karl 1977 capital: a critique of political economy. new york: vintage books. miyazaki, hirokazu 2013 arbitraging japan: dreams of capitalism at the end of finance. berkeley: university of california press. taussig, michael t. 1980 the devil and commodity fetishism in south america. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. weber, max 2001 the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. london: routledge. worsley, peter 1957 the trumpet shall sound: a study of ‘cargo’ cults in melanesia. london: macgibbon & kee. zaloom, caitlin 2006 out of the pits: trading and technology from chicago to london. chicago: university of chicago press. * * * journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 54 sovereign wealth funds: configuring an ecology of security aihwa ong, university of california, berkeley if the anthropology of finance has shifted from the polemics of exploitation to the pragmatics of capitalism, we are still somewhat influenced by the framing of economics in opposition to politics. our uscentric view of capitalism has been one that is antagonistic to the state, or of the state succumbing to the power of wall street, as in government bailouts of ‘too big to fail’ banks and corporations. conceptually, we have been overly influenced by ‘progressive’ views (marx, polyani, arendt) of the economy and politics as contradictory domains that ought to be resolved into a single entity. anthropologists writing on finance tend to anticipate that (‘over time’) one domain would collapse into the other. either the primacy of capitalism must give way to the primacy of sociality, or the creation of profits subsumed under the creation of social values. as ethnographers, we seem caught in a double-bind of financial wealth versus the human good, and suspended in the conceptual temporality of waiting for the endpoint (miyazaki 2006). a strategic ecology..... there is an alternate way of thinking about the relation of finance and politics fueled by the growth of sovereign wealth funds (swf) in emerging nations. are developing areas of the world simply victims in global capital flows, or are they developing powers to redirect circuits of capital and technology to shape an emerging space of the social good? if so, how do financial techniques form new ‘topologies of power’ (collier 2010)? in other words, how do financial practices shape a strategic correlation of governing and space beyond the nation-state? what new codings of capital are involved in this process of financial ‘reterritorialization’ (deleuze & guattari 1987)? and what kind of political values are being marked? foucault (2007) argues that modern political government is not about establishing singularity, but about strategically engaging multiplicity in conditions of heterogeneity and competition (see lazzarato 2008). his diagnosis of liberalism identifies a ‘centrifugal’ mechanism of security that constantly integrates diverse elements – techniques, institutions, and material resources – as a way of developing ‘ever-wider circuits’ (2007: 45). in other words, governing strategy strategically coordinates diverse agencies, methods, forms and actors to configure a space of security that extends beyond the territory of the state. anthropologists are perhaps conceptually and empirically alert to opinions: the anthropology of finance 55 how flows of practices, objects and actors shape emerging spaces for resolving problems of security and power. as stephen j. collier and i (2005) have noted, for the analyst and perhaps the technocrat, the space of problematization is the space of the assemblage; or the strategic configuration for problem-solving identifies a mix of politics and the economy with external relationships. in this opinion piece, i will discuss how state finance is involved in shaping a novel milieu, or ‘ecology of expertise’ (ong 2005). increasingly, strategies of governing and financial security reflect biological principles for intervening in conditions of variation, selection, and sustainability. an ecology of expertise is built when strategic interactions among flows of capital and technology (re)territorialize and (re)code complex interrelationships between governments and companies, venture capital and research institutions, economic growth and the social good. different domains of value creation are woven into a system of flexible and interdependent relationships, thus implicating them in a shared fate of competition, security, and sustainability. china's ‘superbank’ reconfigures financial flows when it comes to global financial markets, it is informative to contrast governing styles animated by either an ecological logic or a centripetal logic. the european project seems to pursue a centripetal mechanism that circumscribes a closed space for regulation according to norms of good and bad. nations that use the euro pool their sovereignty under a single supervisor to watch over their biggest banks. a journalist reports that brussels ‘has long either ignored financial markets or denounced them as an alien and predatory force.’ but now that the long-term viability of the euro is at stake, there is evolution in the thinking of the brussels bureaucracy.2 by contrast, an ‘anglo-saxon’ or ‘advanced liberal’ approach ‘governs through freedom’ (rose 1999) by retaining individual sovereign powers but focusing on building a transnational (i.e. distributed) common market. the logic is a financial system framed by common membership in the eu block, more or less. in so-called authoritarian asian regimes, a centrifugal logic – expansive, flexible, and attentive to how variation can work together, is also at play. there are forms of financing in the asia-pacific, from illegal financial schemes to legal sovereign funds (ong 2012: 31). here, i analyze the strategic deployment of sovereign funds by different countries that territorialize and code multiple crisscrossing relations of convergence and competition that shape an emerging financial region. a purely business definition of a financial platform assesses the soundness and 2 andrew higgins, ‘after fighting markets, europe now prefers working with them,’ the new york times, december 15, 2012, a8. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 56 scope of their financial activities.3 but th e flexi ble a s s em blage of funds, technologies, and expertise that control the diversity and quality of tradeable assets in east asia is closer to an emerging financial ‘plateau’ (deleuze and guattari 1987) that is challenging american domination of global markets. sovereign wealth funds consist of state-owned investment capital that draws mainly on surplus currency reserves. usually managed by central banks or special state corporations, swf are invested globally in order to benefit the state. after three decades of feverish growth in asian economies, state-controlled reserves have become critical players in shifting global financial flows and markets. the prc is the holder of the largest foreign exchange reserves in world history. at the annual gdp rate of 10%, china has high levels of savings and investment, as well as vast trading surpluses. the ‘superbank’ managing china's financial system is china development bank (sanderson & forsythe 2013). cdb made huge loans that financed the rapid urbanization of the country, and the rise of the property market and public revenues. the superbank has also made sent money around the world to secure china's long-term energy supplies, by financing infrastructural systems in venezuela and african nations. for some time now, chinese foreign exchange assets have bankrolled us bonds, thus helping to keep the american economy running. especially since the 2008 recession, swf from china, singapore, and the middle east have come to the rescue of failing banks and corporations in europe and help shore up debt-burdened countries such as greece. however, budgetary grid-lock in congress has convinced chinese monetary authorities that they need to explore other ways to use their money. affluent asian countries have begun looking for alternative investments to the ultralow-yielding u.s. government bonds as a way to enhance returns on the reserves. sovereign wealth funds from asia are quietly flowing into socalled alternative asset classes or property and infrastructural developments in global cities. in early 2013, china's state administration of foreign exchange (safe) invested through its company gingko tree (also owned by a singapore company), in university housing, water systems, and office buildings in london and manchester, to the tune of over $1.6 billion. a financial observer notes that ‘in fact, it is difficult to walk through the city of london without passing a building at least partowned by a foreign government pension or sovereign fund.’ in other words, london's property market is being supported by sovereign wealth funds from china, singapore, malaysia, qatar, and norway (mcmahon & wei 2013). 3 for a definition by the development bank of japan, see http://www.dbj.jp/en/co/csr/property/platform1.html http://www.dbj.jp/en/co/csr/property/platform1.html opinions: the anthropology of finance 57 besides foreign reserves, another circuit of money flows stems from asian companies. it is no longer the case that publicly traded companies anywhere have to turn to the stock exchanges in new york, london, or tokyo. new asian companies coming on the market are now listed in stock exchanges in hong kong, shanghai, singapore, seoul, and sidney, making them attractive global markets for trading stocks, commodities, and derivatives. it is also the case that asian stock exchanges have less rigorous trading standards than those enforced by regulatory agencies in the us. for instance, the securities and exchange commission (sec) has pressured auditors to investigate possible frauds by some chinese companies which are suspected of double book-keeping. furthermore, chinese laws ban the removal overseas of audit papers, thus preventing western auditors from examining the financial statements of chinese companies. because chinese stocks are considered too risky and volatile for western markets, the drive to de-list them from the new york stock exchange has driven companies to list themselves in asian markets. the relative weakness in regulatory oversight is overlain by the strengthening of technologies in asian financial centers. the triumph of electronics trading worldwide and the sheer volume of public companies in asia create opportunities for governmental action to coordinate trading activities and infrastructures that weave together a critical region of capital flows. hong kong, shanghai, singapore, and sydney have built electronic-trading platforms that greatly expand the volume, scale and liquidity of financial activities across the region. such state investments in high speed technologies thus underpin the rise of asian stock markets that are pulling huge volumes of international trading away from the west. compared to the euro zone, the centrifugal approach in asia accepts diversity in sovereignty and competitiveness in market positions within an evolving commercial ecosystem. an ecology of security another foucauldian intervention is to return capitalism to the problem of population as a bioeconomic problem, i.e. the political challenge of securing conditions of reproduction and security in the midst of diversity and contingency. it should, therefore, not be surprising that swf are deployed not only to mobilize financial markets, but also to grow bioeconomies that can promote values of sustainability. there is a perspective common in anthropology that biocapitalism centers on exploiting peoples and resources in emerging economies (sunder rajan 2006), and that ‘biovalues’ are commodities that threaten the common good (waldby & mitchell 2007). it would be helpful if, instead of thinking of biocapitalism and biovalue as external to the politics of life, we examine the novel conjunction of financial instruments, vitalist practices, and state power in the developing world. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 58 in recent decades, wealthy asian countries have begun to funnel surplus funds toward building biomedical hubs that promise to create security for populations beyond national borders. the most famous center is biopolis, grown from a multi-billion (us) dollar investment by the singapore government. although sited in a tiny island-state, biopolis is oriented outwards, connected to a multiplicity of researchers, institutions, and resources in asia and beyond (ong 2013). in china, state loans and facilities help sustain a private company, the beijing genome institute, that operates the largest ‘sequencing factory’ in the world from its headquarters in shenzhen. western observers have dismissed these ‘bioeconomies’ as purely commercial enterprises, but the drawing together of state finance, biomedical research and corporations is engendering values beyond anticipated profits. such reconfigurations of the economy and politics suggest that we rethink the notion of value that can be engendered through a series of public-private partnerships building on the recruitment of cutting-edge expertise. beyond investments for improving the content of human capital, the larger goal is to act on this capital through a series of techniques ‘to mobilise, solicit, incite, and invest ‘life’ (lazzarato 2008). one technique that intimately connects finance and life is fungibility. in economics, ‘fungibility’ is the quality of a value or good whose individual units can substitute for one another, such as bonds or crude oil. more broadly, fungibility refers to interchangeable or substitutable qualities in the satisfaction of a particular obligation or performance of a particular function. dna becomes fungible when its digitalized form becomes interchangeable with other types of economic, social and political values. but it is not simply the case that dna spreadsheets become the analogy of finance, selling security in uncertain markets. rather, the digitalization of dna is one among many logics that deploy human differences in the politics of managing life through diversity. the noncommoditized dimension of bio-values is the enhanced capacity of biotechnologies to calculate ‘potential biothreats’ (samimian-darash, 2013) and to thus perform as a technology of uncertainty in the region. * * * modern government, ideally, is about building new interrelations between the economy and politics, commodities and populations, between biocapitalism and biopolitics: in other words, about building ecologies of security in which they are entangled and interdependent. above, i have taken an ‘external’ or oblique approach to financial activities, examining not what is within financial markets, but the role of financial flows in animating new ecologies that, by putting into interaction diversity, competitiveness, and sustainability, are generative of values beyond sheer economic gains. on a broader level, a grasp of how contemporary spaces of opinions: the anthropology of finance 59 governing are strategically coordinated but separate domains, illuminates how financial approaches to risk-taking are not limited to arbitraging our future and making us victims of uncertainty. drawn into networks of security, financial mechanisms such as fungibility are productive of potential values for sustaining the social good in confronting the future. hope in finance is possible when we can test claims against incremental gains in experiments that integrate vitalist politics and sustainable growth. references collier, j. stephen j. (2010). ‘topologies of power: foucault's analysis of political government beyond “governmentality.”’ theory, culture and society 26 (6): 78-108. collier, j. stephen and aihwa ong (2005). ‘global assemblages, anthropological problems.’ in global assemblages, edited by a. ong and stephen j. collier, pp. 3-21. malden, ms.: blackwell. deleuze, g. and f. guattari (1987). a thousand plateaus. capitalism and schizophrenia. university of minnesota press. foucault, michel (2007). security, population, territory. lectures at the college de france, 1977-1978. trans. graham burchell. new york: palgrave-macmillan. mcmahon, d. & l. wei (2013). ‘china quietly invests in the u.k.’ the wall street journal. feb. 25, 2013, c1. lazzarato, maurizio (2008). ‘biopolitics/bioeconomics: a politics of multiplicity’ interactivist info exchange, maurizio lazzarato, ‘a politics of multiplicity’ on 2008-01-15 13:47:29. miyazaki, hiro (2006). ‘economy of dreams: hope in global capitalism and its critiques.’ cultural anthropology, 21 (2): 147-172. ong, aihwa (2005). ‘ecologies of expertise: assembling flows, managing citizenship.’ in global assemblages. edited by a. ong and stephen j. collier, pp. 337-353. malden, ms.: blackwell. ong, aihwa (2013). ‘a milieu of mutations: the pluripotency and fungibility of life in asia.’ easts: journal of east asian science, technology & society 7: 1–18. rose, nikolas (1999). powers of freedom: reframing political thought. cambridge: cambridge university press. samimian-darash, limor (2013). ‘governing future potential biothreats: toward an anthropology of uncertainty.’ current anthropology, 54 (1): 122. http://info.interactivist.net/ http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/10/18/0935231 http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/10/18/0935231 journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 60 sanderson, h. & m. forsythe (2013). china's superbank. bloomberg, 2013 sunder rajan, kaushik (2006). biocapital: the construction of postgenomic life. durham, n.c.: duke university press. waldby, catherine and robert mitchell (2007). tissue economies: blood, organs and cell lines in late capitalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. * * * japan at the ’end’ of finance hirokazu miyazaki, cornell university japan’s prime minister shinzo abe’s new economic policy widely, known as abenomics, has led to a dramatic stock market surge since december 2012. after a two-decade long recession and a deflation spiral that has lasted for over fifteen years, the japanese economy seems poised to regain its global preeminence. more significantly, abe’s economic policy seems to offer a model for other nations’ ongoing efforts to recover from the global financial crises of 2007-2008. is japan ’back’, as prime minister abe proclaimed in washington, d.c. on 22 february 2013?4 what is the significance of abenomics for the anthropology of finance? in my recent book, arbitraging japan: dreams of capitalism at the end of finance (berkeley: university of california press, 2013), i have chronicled the professional career trajectories of some of japan’s pioneering derivatives traders since the late 1980s. for the traders i studied, arbitrage, a key concept in financial economics and a wellestablished trading positionality in financial markets, has been a particularly compelling idea. arbitrage is a style of trading frequently adopted by professional traders to take advantage of a market price difference between two theoretically equivalent economic assets (such as a stock market index and futures contracts on the index). arbitrageurs detect arbitrage opportunities by computing the price difference between the two assets in a condition of no arbitrage, a condition in which there are no such arbitrageable price differences. in other words, arbitrage opportunities are defined in relation to their absence. moreover, arbitrageurs see themselves as taking advantage of and eventually eliminating arbitrage opportunities themselves. in this sense, arbitrage 4 ‘japan is back,’ a speech delivered at the center for strategic and international studies, february 22, 2013. http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/pm/abe/us_20130222en.html http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/pm/abe/us_20130222en.html opinions: the anthropology of finance 61 assumes an orientation toward its own end. in arbitraging japan, i demonstrate a variety of concrete manifestations of arbitrageurs’ highly sharpened sense of an end, from their routine switching of investment targets from one market to another (due to the decrease in arbitrage opportunities), to their understanding of tokyo’s downfall as a global financial center (due to its becoming a target of arbitrage itself), to their personal quests for spiritual ends (perhaps as efforts to sustain their own identity – yet another arguably arbitrageable difference). the japanese traders whose professional and intellectual lives i examined in arbitraging japan also have long anticipated the end of arbitrage (for them), and of financial expertise more generally. as one of the traders pointed out to me in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. ’the subprime crisis revealed a simple fact: that is, that finance is nothing but a fraud … as it has turned out, finance was the arbitrage of knowledge gaps between those who know [those in the financial industry] and those who don’t [the public], not arbitrage between markets, and this fact has been revealed’ (miyazaki, arbitraging japan, p. 1). the philosophical and even spiritual elaborations of the idea of arbitrage among the japanese traders i have studied are perhaps extreme, and they are at least partially ironic results of the well-known japanese propensity to master, refine and innovate on imported knowledge, the widely acknowledged engine of japan’s postwar economic growth.5 yet, i suggest that the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 has intensified more generally the sense of the end of financial expertise implicit in financial concepts, such as arbitrage. there is a general sense of the failure of riskbased models of financial calculation and of the broad willingness to embrace radical uncertainty. in fact, abenomics is an example of this broad trend. after all, the core component of abenomics – that is, the large-scale quantitative easing policy that haruhiko kuroda, the new governor of the bank of japan, unveiled on 4 april 2013 – is nothing but an expression of a willingness to acknowledge the failure of conventional monetary policy tools.6 governor kuroda himself has acknowledged that there are limits to the efficacy of monetary policy and of the inflation targeting policy (the target is being set at two per cent), more specifically, to turn the deflationary spiral around. governor kuroda’s new policy is an effort to redeploy standard monetary policy tools in a zero-interest situation in which their efficacy is widely regarded as uncertain at best. in this context, kuroda has emphasized the importance of expectations (that is, expectations that 5 see, e.g., ezra vogel, japan as number one: lessons for america, cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1979. 6 see hirokazu miyazaki and annelise riles, ’re-tooling expectations: abenomics and the politics of quantitative easing,’ unpublished manuscript, department of anthropology, cornell university. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 62 prices will rise in the future), and he has focused on boosting these expectations not only by exponentially increasing the size of quantitative easing, but also by drawing attention to the general role of expectations in the economy itself. in other words, governor kuroda’s new policy calls for more expectations for inflation and economic growth from the market. in this sense, abenomics stands at the end of monetary policy, and governor kuroda’s emphasis on expectations takes for granted the uncertainty not only of the efficacy of his own monetary policy but also of the future of the national and global economy. governor kuroda’s new monetary policy is a dramatic manifestation of what douglas holmes has called the ’economy of words’,7 in which central bankers increasingly focus their policy work on public communication. in light of the ethnographic observations i have made in arbitraging japan, however, governor kuroda’s monetary policy experiment can also be regarded as a manifestation of the financial market professional’s embrace of radical uncertainty and of the end of his own expertise. abenomics then confirms, once again, that financial expertise has come to an end. yet, what makes it particularly interesting for anthropological observers of financial expertise, is the way it projects the end of finance as yet another opportunity for financial imagination and expectation to reorient itself to the future.8 in this sense, abenomics has made japan resurface as a place of general interest where our common futures, financial and otherwise, are beginning to play themselves out. * * * the speculative ethic and the rise of financialism (in honor of carol breckenridge) benjamin lee, the new school for social research, new york in this opinion piece, i will present a framework for analyzing the development of what might be called a ‘speculative ethic’ for contemporary finance capitalism. the term speculative ethic naturally brings to mind weber’s protestant ethic, but it would seem a fairly long journey from weber’s calvinist ascetic to the ‘masters of the universe’ and 7 douglas holmes (2009). ‘economy of words,’ cultural anthropology 24 (3): 381-419. 8 see also hirokazu miyazaki (2006). ‘the economy of dreams: hope in global capitalism and its critiques,’ cultural anthropology 21 (2): 147-172. opinions: the anthropology of finance 63 ‘big swinging dicks’ of contemporary finance. the piece takes as its starting point what might be considered to be an unlikely conjuncture: that of von neumann and morgenstern’s theory of games and economic behavior and max weber’s protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. the connecting idea is that of decision-making under uncertainty. in economics and finance, the phrase decision-making under uncertainty is inevitably connected to john von neumann and oskar morgenstern's theory of games and economic behavior. the impetus for their work was von neumann's interest in poker, especially bluffing, and their axiomization of expected utility laid the foundation for what becomes mathematical finance. the other axis is that of weber’s protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. in much of the recent commentary on weber, the focus has been on his treatment of rationality; jurgen habermas’ theory of communicative action is probably the most prominent example of this line of thinking. what is often overlooked is that, in weber’s account, the motivating force for the instrumental-rationalization of work is the uncertainty over predestination. the calvinist believer cannot in principle know whether he will be saved, and it is his drive to make himself feel certain of god’s grace in the face of existential uncertainty that leads him to become an ascetic capitalist. the calvinist ethic is the first to directly confront uncertainty without the mitigation of ritual, magic, or good works, and in his comparative sociology of religion weber would argue that calvinism was historically unique in its embrace of uncertainty as a fundamental premise and structuring principle. weber’s breakthrough is to place uncertainty (not rationality) as the motivating force in the development of capitalism. these issues come to a head in von neumann and morgenstern’s formalization of expected utility and utility maximization. once von neumann and morgenstern established necessary and sufficient conditions for a mathematical treatment of expected utility, there was considerable discussion about how to relate the axioms to ‘rational’ decision-making. perhaps reflecting the poker origins of game theory, the ‘semantics’ for expected utility involved an agent choosing (i.e. betting) between lotteries with different outcomes, which would then allow for the construction of a ratio-scaled utility function for the agent. the original von neumann and morgenstern treatment presented four axioms: completeness, transitivity, independence and continuity, and it was soon pointed out that there were special circumstances in which some of the axioms seemed to fail, especially when choices between extreme alternatives were involved – such as death, or losing all one’s wealth or reputation. thus, in the basic formalizations presupposed by the development of modern finance, we see an interwining of speculation (betting on lottery outcomes), managing risk (searching for optimal equilibrium strategies), and the inability of risk management to deal with journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 64 existential uncertainty such as situations where one’s life or reputation were at stake. the analogies between poker and finance run even deeper, highlighting the speculative and gambling origins of contemporary finance. game theoretic models of poker and mathematical finance both accept the basic von-neumann and morgenstern postulates, and their practitioners use the notions of optimality and equilibrium to create idealized models of interaction to identify ‘inefficiencies’ (i.e. excessive bluffing, or the mis-pricing of an asset) that can be exploited. yet in both cases, the construction of idealized static equilibrium models of optimal behavior presupposes the existence of dynamic social processes that can only appear as external ‘inefficiencies’ or ‘deviancies’. another line of thinking about decision-making under uncertainty is that of frank knight. in risk, uncertainty, and profit, knight distinguishes between risk, which is measurable uncertainty, – that is to say, unknown outcomes for which there is a known distribution of outcomes, either via a priori calculation or statistical enumeration – and uncertainty, which involves unknown outcomes that lack such ex-ante probability distributions. knight insisted that there was a qualitative difference between uncertainty and risk, and that utility maximization only applied to the latter, in which there were calculable probabilities, and not to the former, which included catastrophic non-insurable singularities and situations ‘in which one’s future (or his life) were at stake.’ the importance of knightian uncertainty is that it expands the notion of decision-making under uncertainty beyond the confines of standard decision theoretic approaches coming from game theory and rational choice. in normal cases of strategic interaction (low limit poker, for example), utility maximization might be a good idealization of the psychological processes involved; but as the stakes rise and personal identification makes the instance into a singularity – how many times in one’s life can one’s life, career, or fortune be at stake? – the possibility of a qualitative break with the norms of strategic rationality and the axioms of expected utility increases. this qualitative transformation highlights the difference between knightian uncertainty and standard approaches to decision-making; it pushes us into the realm of weber’s account of the existential crisis of the calvinist believer, and even of kierkegaard’s leap of faith and the teleological suspension of the ethical. our proposal is to place the rise of purposive-instrumental rationality within the development of decision-making under uncertainty, which we will also expand to include an existential dimension. the latter links the strategic dimensions of purposive-instrumental calculation with the embodied sensibilities of the habitus, and work (‘calling’) becomes the crucial mediation. if we adopt frank knight’s distinction between risk and uncertainty, the instrumental rationalization of work transforms the knightian uncertainty of salvation into the manageable risks of economic opinions: the anthropology of finance 65 activity. the ascetic protestant ethic is, drawing on a distinction made by jackson lears, a ‘culture of (self-) control’ or risk management in the face of a ‘culture of chance’ or uncertainty. most commentators on weber’s religious sociology emphasize the role of rationality in the rise of capitalism and thus focus on the culture of control, the means-end and instrumental rationality of work under capitalist production, thereby reinforcing the ideological downgrading of speculation and cultures of chance. yet it is our contention that cultures of control and cultures of chance interact with each other, with each culture of control (i.e. risk management) creating an image of a culture of chance that lies outside of it (i.e. uncertainty), but which it depends upon for its very functioning. building upon weber's insights, i would like to suggest that there has been an internal development within modern capitalism from its protestant ascetic roots in a production-centered capitalism to a speculative ‘ethic’ embedded within a circulation-centered capitalism. the secularist impulse of modern capitalism creates a new set of ethical principles attuned to a contractual model of society. the retreat of religion from economy and politics opened the door for a utilitarian and instrumental rationality to become a lynchpin in the construction of a contract model of society. the ascension of the civil rights and human rights movements, coupled with identity-based politics, makes life-style differences an increasingly important area of political and social concern. this transforms the conversation about secularism from its earlier focus on the boundaries of religion to the question of how democratic societies should respond to the growing diversity of life-styles and conceptions of the good. once secularism becomes disentangled from a (primarily western) confrontation with religion, the question of how to organize society to respond to competing notions of the good arises in a form familiar to euro-american social contract debates: what arrangement (of, for example, employment, health, and educational opportunities) would be fair to all the concerned parties? in other words, what would a just society look like? in 1971, on the ascending tide of these controversies and drawing directly from von neumann and morgenstern, john rawls published a theory of justice, which so captured the zeitgeist that it became a major force in policy discussions, and not solely within the academe. appealing directly to our intuitions about justice and fairness, it combined notions of social contract, instrumental rationality (in the form of constrained utility maximization), decision-making under uncertainty, and the diversity of life plans and notions of the good. read in this light, john rawls' a theory of justice becomes an articulation of an ‘ethic of fairness’ that ‘generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract’ by introducing what he calls ‘the original position.’ this original position has two components: rational decision makers who choose the ethical principles for organizing society; and a ‘veil of ignorance’, which constrains decision makers by not letting them know what their position journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 66 in society is, or what conception of the good they have. under this condition of secular decision-making under uncertainty, rawls says that rational persons would choose two principles of justice to organize the distribution of rights and obligations in modern society. the second transformation that occurred in the seventies was the ascension of a finance-driven, circulation-centered capitalism. the collapse of the bretton woods agreement, the oil shock of the early seventies, and the rise of derivatives, portfolio theory, and junk bonds transformed finance into the cutting-edge of global capitalism. the fulcrum of profit and power shifted markedly away from the production of commodities toward the circulation of capital. in the sixty-year period from 1947, the finance sector grew from 2.5 per cent of the u.s. gdp to almost eight per cent. but by 2000, the finance sector's share of corporate profits passed that of manufacturing; in 2006, it was almost 30 per cent, while manufacturing comprised 20 per cent, and it is estimated to have recently reached 40 per cent. as any number of commentators has observed, there is an ongoing geopolitical reorganization of the global economy, with nations such as china, india, and brazil producing more and more goods, while the united states and europe increasingly specialize in the allocation and flow of capital. the key discoveries that lay the foundation for modern finance occurred in the fifties and sixties and became the cutting-edge of financial practice in the seventies and onwards. as related in peter bernstein’s classics, capital ideas and against the gods, the linking of financial innovation and speculation transformed finance from a kind of sophisticated alchemy of hunches into a quantitatively driven engine of financial engineering; the advent of huge and expanding pools of mobile, nomadic, and opportunistic capital enabled a new breed of investors to speculate on short-term fluctuations in the prices of other assets. the rise of what might be called the world view of modern finance begins with the axiomization of expected utility in von neumann and morgenstern’s theory of games and economic behavior. this work provides the foundation for harry markowitz’s development of portfolio theory, which when augmented with a formal theory of arbitrage, would form the basis for the standard forms of asset valuation. markowitz’s key insight was to use the formalization of expected utility to construct portfolios of stocks that maximized expected return and minimized risk, given how much risk an investor was willing to take on. this ‘thick’ account of individual interest contrasted with the rawlsian account, in which the veil of ignorance produced what might be called a ‘thin’ account of individual interest.the key development was the creation of what has been called ‘risk-neutral’ valuations; these are constructed by imposing a non-arbitrage condition on the market – that is to say, no asset can have two prices/values that would allow one to buy at the low price and sell at the higher one. the construction of risk-neutral valuations is at the heart of modern finance – efficient markets, value-at-risk, capital asset pricing opinions: the anthropology of finance 67 model, black-scholes options pricing – and the use of the non-arbitrage condition in contemporary risk management is so ubiquitous that it has been called ‘the fundamental theorem of finance.’ the construction of this financial world view has involved two distinct moments of performativity. the first is the creation of a financial imaginary of the market in which individual performative acts of buying, selling, and promises (bets and contracts) are seen as instances of market activity. building upon risk-return models derived directly from von neumann’s axiomization of expected utility, asset prices are seen not as simply reflecting the value of individual companies, but rather as a set of complex inter-correlations (technically known as ‘beta’), which are then seen as constituting ‘the market’. the second step has involved taking this ‘market’ model of asset pricing and then imposing a non-arbitrage condition in order to create the risk-neutral valuations that drive the mathematics of financial engineering and risk management. but arbitrage has a self-cancelling quality. as soon as an arbitrage opportunity arises, traders rush to take advantage of it and close the arbitrage opportunity. if a performative is an act that creates what it refers to or represents, then arbitrage is a kind of negative performativity that cancels the difference that it represents. the combination of performativity and negative performativity creates a picture of an efficient market governed by general equilibrium conditions. but the non-arbitrage condition is also that which creates a financeinternal view of the world in which the social appears as ‘noise’ or exploitable inefficiencies.9 the non-arbitrage condition allows the formulation of general equilibrium conditions for asset pricing and the identification of inefficiencies (i.e. mis-pricings) that can be exploited for profit. in an age when shareholder value has become the mantra of finance, low valuations are mis-pricings that indicate mis-management; management’s goal is to increase shareholder value, which is directly reflected in share price and drives executive compensation. the risk-reward structure of portfolio valuation is now also a part of compensation policies, which rely upon the standard forms of asset valuation (such as capm for stocks or the blackscholes equations for options), and thereby link what at first appear to be only formal and idealized models and valuations with the nature of work itself. indeed, as karen ho points out in her ethnographic account of investment banks, shareholder value and efficiency intertwine to form the 9 traders often speak of arbitrage as a free gift; derrida’s analysis of the gift also imbues it with a self-cancelling performativity. in the christian tradition, the ultimate gift is that of god’s grace, the motivation for which in the calvinist ethic is unknowable and beyond human understanding and calculation. the performativity of ritual, covenant, and contract tracks weber’s move from catholicism to calvinism to modern capitalism, and suggests that there is an existential dimension to decision-making under uncertainty that is not captured by game theoretic approaches, but lies at the heart of the origins of modern capitalism. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 68 fundamental world view of contemporary finance. at the same time, their inculcation in corporate training and their role in compensation creates an ethos of short-term risk-taking and speculation, as indicated by the rise of a trading ethos in ceo ranks of investment banks. the repeated mantra in compensation negotiations is that they must be fair; the problem is to balance risk and return, while also taking into consideration those parts of the company which may supply services necessary for trading (the ‘backroom’), but which are not responsible for actual investment decisions. what these two transformations – the rise of fairness and finance – have in common is that they both occur in a secularizing environment in which a fully contractual model of social relations becomes increasingly dominant. paraphrasing weber, we might say that the performativity of contract has replaced other modalities of sociality, such as that of ritual in the catholic community or covenant among calvinists. the notion of contract has been expanding along two fronts: as a model for society and as a model of economic relations. this notion of the contract looks in two directions simultaneously: one focuses on how we can use a contractual format to acquire wealth, power, security, and autonomy; the other on legitimating tenets that attach these relations to the common good. a look at the discourses that surround the notion of the contract underscores the fact that both models are subsumed under a secular ethic of fairness, which serves as the main principle of legitimation through its attachment to the social good. the rise of what we will call a ‘speculative ethos’ links a secular model of decision-making under uncertainty with its counterparts in modern finance. yet, as in weber’s protestant ethic, work is the point where status, motivation, and identity meet, even as the ideology of efficient markets and shareholder value ties compensation to success in taking risks and speculating. * * * notes on the anthropology of gender in finance melissa s. fisher, new york university anthropological interest in finance has been growing for the past several decades, as the globalization of the economy, speculative stock markets, and new technologies increasingly occupy the minds of financiers, journalists, and social scientists alike. few anthropologists, however, have focused on the gendered subjects, practices, and effects of global finance. during the past decade, particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial opinions: the anthropology of finance 69 crisis, this situation has begun to change. several anthropologists, including myself, have produced fine-grained ethnographic accounts of the gendered norms of wall street. in this sense, anthropologists have considered market actors, such as investment bankers, who have availed themselves of wealth making opportunities. and feminist anthropologists interested in poverty, particularly among women in developing countries, have drawn attention to microfinance and gender. they have attended to the role of gender in neoliberal development institutions, such as the world bank, in which the poor, mainly women, are increasingly viewed as the subjects of financial opportunities. but few, if any, anthropologists have fully linked the gendering of finance ethnographically, in what chandra mohanty has described as the ’one third’ and ’two third’ worlds. rather, anthropologists tend to situate their ethnographic work on gender and finance in one of these two arenas: global capitalist financial spaces, or postcolonial regions. in a different but arguably related divide, few directly connect intimate and global financial spheres, so we know relatively little about how the ‘private’, feminized domains of family, debt, and caring fit within the apparatus and technologies of finance. this essay reflects upon what the anthropology of gender and finance is, and what it might become: which themes, subjects, and actors can we identify to be its present focus? is there a dominant research method? and what are some of the important issues, theories, and methods that are currently under-explored? my intention is not to engage in a complete overview of existing work within the anthropology of finance (see maurer 2013). nor is my purpose to consider all the scholarship belonging to the interdisciplinary field of gender and finance (de geode 2005; griffin 2009; mcdowell 1997; prugl 2012; sassen 1996). this piece also sets aside important work in feminist business history, sociology, and economics (blair-loy 2003; kwolek-folland 1994; nelson 2012). although anthropological studies are in conversation with these various bodies of scholarship, i draw attention to and build upon recent, innovative work within the discipline to signal possible new frontiers of research anthropology’s most significant contribution to the study of gender and finance is its signature methodology, ethnography. anthropologists (and sociologists), as bill maurer (2013) points out in his recent overview of the anthropology of finance, ‘have produced pioneering ethnographies of financial markets, often involving participant observation on the trading floor as well as in corporate offices.’ an important subset of this research focuses on the gendering of elite financial subjects, practices and networks on wall street and the city of london (fisher 2012; ho 2009; zaloom 2006). these works reveal a variety of performances of gender in finance and their relationship to the production of gendered spaces on wall street. for example, karen ho, in her ethnographic study of wall street, illuminates the spatial segregation within firms. ‘front office’ journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 70 workers – mainly elite male investment bankers – are the most valued employees because the company understands that they generate revenue. ‘back office’ support staff, composed of people from middle and workingclass backgrounds, with an over-representation of people of color and women, are far less prestigious (ho 2009: 78-9). caitlin zaloom, in her study of traders, shows how masculine, aggressive risk-taking is crucial to the social and spatial constitution of the marketplace (zaloom 2003). such risk-taking traditionally reaps reward – in money, status, and the construction of a masculine self (zaloom 2006: 93). ethnographic studies of the financial industry in nyc, chicago and london thus reveal the ways the institutions and buildings in global financial cities – wall street investment firms, the chicago board, and merchant banks in london – were and continue to be gendered spaces in which (mainly) men perform hyper masculine performances, part of the male drama of capital that constructs women as inferior, ‘other,’ or ‘invisible’ (mcdowell 1997: zaloom 2006; fisher 2010). women’s entry onto wall street has made that gendering much more visible (fisher 2012). such works provide insight into the gendering of finance. however, ethnographers have not yet examined financiers’ lives ‘outside’ the workplace – for example, their family dynamics, civic obligations, and participation in social movements – and how they affect and are affected by financial practices. my book, a historical ethnography of the first generation of women to build professional careers on wall street, begins to fill some of these lacunae. i argue that over time the women enacted ‘market feminism’, incorporating tenets of american liberal feminism such as equal rights into wall street institutions, practices, and the global marketplace. as such my book opens a new vista on anthropological studies of finance, contextualizing the first generation of wall street women’s experiences, and expertise both within the gendered world of financial markets and the workplace, and also outside that world in the feminist movement that created the very possibility for the women to enter high finance in the first place (fisher 2012). but questions of worklife balance, intimate economies, and sexuality, for example, remain fertile areas of research (blair-loy 2003; wilson 2004). anthropologists are also looking at finance in everyday life – primarily in developing countries. during the past decade, particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, gender and poverty have become increasingly linked. global institutions – the united nations, the world bank and goldman sachs’ 10,000 women project – have taken on the mantle of ending poverty, particularly amongst women in developing countries. in response, a small but growing number of anthropologists have conducted ethnographic studies of neoliberalism, microfinance, and gender (elyachar 2005; karim 2011). as lamia karim (2011: xiii) explains in her ethnographic study sited in bangladesh, the term microfinance ‘refers to a broad range of financial services to the poor such as credit, savings, insurance, and pensions’. initially presenting itself as a opinions: the anthropology of finance 71 social justice project, it is now a financial industry that views poverty as a new realm of profit and accumulation (roy 2012: 105). microfinance actors and institutions thus publicize the ‘empowerment’ of ‘third world’ women who take on micro-loans (karim 2011). ethnographies contrast this idealistic view with portraits of the often detrimental effects of microfinance on the lives of women. indeed, as julia elyachar documents in her ethnographic study of micro-lending in egypt, such practices can produce new forms of discipline on poor borrowers, since they can be imprisoned for failure to pay (elyacher 2005). it is important to look at these two bodies of work next to each other. those studying gender in global finance unpack the cultural work by which financiers produce the apparent separation between the economic system, on the one hand, and gender and society, on the other (de goede 2005). those engaged in the study of gender, development, and microfinance, illuminate the devastating effects of such financial practices and tools. collectively, then, they reveal the often enormous gap between the worldviews and actions of a wide range of financers and the effect their financial practices have on everyday people’s lives, both within and outside the united states (ho 2009; karim 2011). in her work on global finance, karen ho, for example, focuses on the relationship between the values and actions of investment banks, the corresponding restructuring of u.s. corporations, and the construction of markets, specifically financial markets booms and busts (ho 2006: 4). she shows how the severe dislocations social scientists of global capitalism write about – the dismantling of governmental safety nets; the wave of corporate restructuring and massive layoffs; the growing disparity between the wealth and poor – are, as she argues, ‘actualized’ or carried out by wall street actors (ho 2006: 4). her work relies largely upon the anthropological (and sociological) literature on the corrosive effects of global capitalism: for example, the impact of corporate downsizing on middle class managers and their family life in the united states (newman 1989). so (understandably, given the scope of her study), she does not pursue an analytics of financial practices in the sense of ethnographically tracking deal making, corporate restructuring, or the lives and livelihood of those impacted by mergers and acquisitions or downsizing. among studies of microfinance and other finance in everyday life, karim’s work centers on the negative consequences of microfinance on poor, rural women’s lives in, in her case, bangladesh. she addresses the gap between what is known about microfinance institutions from their sponsored research and public events, and their actual practices on the ground (karim 2011: xiv). her work moves us far in the direction of connecting the worldview of financiers and their impact of people’s everyday lives. yet her analysis relies (again, understandably, given the scope of her work) on the documents and public events of microfinance institutions rather than, or in addition to, in-depth fieldwork conducted within such firms. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 72 thus there is an opportunity for anthropologists of finance to ethnographically explore relationships between the gendered values and practices of market actors, the making of new forms of market rule, and the work-family lives of the recipients of old and new forms of financial practices. in particular, anthropologists are well placed to explore financiers and the impact of financialization on a wide range of recipients of various genders and sexualities: not only poor rural female recipients of microfinance loans, but also, for example, women of color in the united states dealing with the foreclosure of their homes; lgbt graduate students coping with staggering student debt; and families strategizing to use a range of governmental and non-governmental services (e.g. unemployment benefits; loans) to survive financially. indeed, as feminist literary scholar rebecca stern points out in her work on the impact of fraud on victorian domestic life, far from being isolated havens from public and private finance, homes are sites of purchase and exchange (stern 2008: 6). and in the contemporary era, inside the walls of homes, families manage childcare, use credit cards to buy furniture, and take on mortgages to finance homes. individual family members may interact with debt collectors, accountants, and/or loan officers working in institutions advertised directly toward ‘people with bad credit’ (see peebles 2010 for a review of the anthropology of debt and credit). anthropology may then be uniquely suited to study the gendered life of finance. in the shift from single to multi-sited fieldwork, anthropologists can and do engage in participation observation that crosses dichotomies like ‘global cities’ and ‘postcolonial regions’, ‘the domestic sphere’ and ‘global markets’ (marcus 1995). multi-sited ethnography thus provides the means to study a nexus of situated and gendered global ideas, institutions, actors and practices that financial projects draw together. anthropologists can stay close to heterogeneous gendered practices of finance, practices that do not fall tidily into the north and south divide. this essay has just begun to scratch the surface of what the anthropology of gender in finance might be. while pointing in some important directions for the future, it has not provided a complete overview of possible research sites, themes, and issues. there is, for example, new financial territory to be understood in terms of gender: for example, gendered subjects and relations in emerging centers of global finance such as singapore and dubai. indeed, the anthropology of gender in finance is not, nor should it be, a cohesive research program with a particular set of theories and intents. instead, it should continue to build upon the analytics and methods of the discipline, as well as engage in interdisciplinary research. given the increased interest – within and outside of contemporary scholarship – in the disparity between the wealthy and the poor and concerns with gender inequality, anthropological studies of gender, class, race, nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality in these sites are perhaps more necessary than ever. opinions: the anthropology of finance 73 references blair-loy, mary. 2003. competing devotions: career and family among women executives. cambridge: harvard university press. de goede. marieke. 2005. virtue, fortune and faith: a genealogy of finance. minneapolois: university of minnesota press. elyachar, julia. 2005 markets of disposession: ngos, economic development, and the state in cairo. durham: duke university press. fisher, melissa. 2010. ‘wall street women: engendering global finance in the manhattan landscape.’ city and society 22 (2):262-85. fisher, melissa. 2012. wall street women. durham and london: duke university press. griffin, penny. 2009. gendering the world bank: neoliberalism and the gendered foundation of global governance. new york: palgrave macmillan. ho, karen zouwen. 2009. liquidated: an ethnography of wall street. durham: duke university press. kwolek-folland, angel. 1994. engendering business: men and women in the corporate office, 1870-1930. baltimore: johns hopkins press. marcus, george. 1995. ‘ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography.’ annual review of anthropology. vol 24, pp. 95-117. maurer, bill. 2013. ‘finance 2.0.’ in handbook of economic anthropology, 2nd revised edition, edited by james carrier. northampton, mass: edward elgar. mcdowell, linda. 1997. capital culture: gender at work in the city. oxford: blackwell. nelson, julie. 2012. ‘are women really more risk-averse than men?’ in institute for new economic thinking research notes #12 (september). newman, katherine. 1988. falling from grace: the experience of downward mobility in the american middle class. new york: free press. peebles, gustav. 2010. ‘the anthropology of debt and credit.’ annual review of anthropology. volume 39, pp. 225-240. prugl. elizabeth. 2012. ‘if lehman brothers had been lehman sisters: gender and myth in the aftermath of the financial crisis.’ international political sociology. 6, 21-35. roy, anaya. 2012. ‘ethical subjects: market rule in an age of poverty’ in public culture 24. durham: duke university press. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 74 sassen, saskia. 1996. ‘towards a feminist analytics of the global economy.’ indiana journal of global legal studies vol 4 no. 1: 7-41 stern, rebecca. 2008. home economics: domestic fraud in victorian england. ohio state university press. wilson, ara. 2004. the intimate economies of bangkok: tomboys, tycoons, and avon ladies in the global city. berkeley: university of california press. zaloom. caitlin. 2006. out of the pits: traders and technology from chicago to london. chicago: university of chicago press. key: cord-0066833-vpwy1dnk authors: bhandar, brenna title: theft in broad daylight: racism and neoliberal legality date: 2021-08-20 journal: law critique doi: 10.1007/s10978-021-09308-9 sha: 525a4264769283afda678d738d94427393947e22 doc_id: 66833 cord_uid: vpwy1dnk in this article the author examines fitzpatrick’s foundational critique of liberal legality and racism, a theme which remained central to his decades-long excavation of modern law’s self-identity. after considering fitzpatrick’s ‘separation thesis’, the author then turns to consider the ways in which neoliberal legality is parasitic upon liberal legal racial formations while at the same time, obscuring the foundational place of race in contemporary capitalism by subsuming material life within its modes of value extraction. a lethal and illegal war in iraq, all the while touting a distinctly more cosmopolitan, democratic, multicultural veneer. this was followed by a turn to the tory-libdemled assault on the racialised and poor in the form of austerity policies. and, unlike the conservative party of yesteryear, today's cabinet is the most diverse in the history of the uk parliament, with asian and black mps undertaking the frontline work of criminalising dissent and protest, setting culture wars afire, and overseeing one of the highest covid-19 death tolls among developed economies. this kind of periodisation carries with it a kind of psycho-affective pull; we want to be able to clearly identify and delineate different racial and racist ideologies and the way they are confronted by and embedded within legal practices, legislation and judicial interpretation. moreover, we are invested in seeing and perhaps even quantifying both progress and regression, so that we can prescribe the next action to be taken, or an approach that will remedy, fix, or perhaps break what feels like a vertiginous cycle of racial injustice, riot, inquiry and report, and policy recommendations. i want to resist this periodisation and instead, focus on peter fitzpatrick's engagement with liberal legality as it appeared in the 1980s, with a view to making sense of contemporary race, racism and neo-liberal legality. i understand that moment, and the intervening time between now and then as more of a variegated, if congealed whole rather than as a story plottable along a linear timeline. taking a conjunctural analysis of the present, i aim to pull at and unravel the threads of contemporary neoliberal legality, race and racism as they present themselves in the 1970s and 80s in order to make sense of how neoliberal legality shapes contemporary forms of racism. while the 'common law right to discriminate on the basis of race', refracted through the rendering of english law as synonymous with the meaning of british national identity itself, is firmly entangled with the vicissitudes of british capitalism across the ages, neoliberal economic policies have reconfigured, in some important ways, the relationship between law, race and racism. beginning with fitzpatrick's foundational critique of liberal legality and racism, i will then turn to consider the ways in which neoliberal legality is parasitic upon liberal legal racial formations while at the same time, obscuring the foundational place of race in contemporary capitalism by subsuming material life within its modes of value extraction. peter fitzpatrick's oeuvre is fundamentally marked by his capacity to excavate the motor force of modern law's self-identity; a force constituted by enlightenment ideals imbricated with the history of empire and myths of civilisational and racial superiority. the piece that forms the focus of this article, 'racism and the innocence of the law' 1 was published in the journal of law and society in 1987. 2 fitzpatrick's main argument here is that the separation of racism, as a fundamental part of 'material life', from liberal legality is central to the production of a 'universalistic ordering' that is at the heart of modern liberalism. the separation of the 'formal rationality of civil society' from 'the substantive rationality of material life' which it must dominate, is a structuring logic of the liberal enlightenment project, at least, as articulated along kantian lines (fitzpatrick 1987) . this universalistic ordering appears in 'terms operatively realized in liberal legality' which are 'ostentatiously opposed to racism' (pp. 121-22). if we 'respect' the terms of separation, that is, if we are not simply to reduce them to something else such as economic relations or treat them merely as a mask for something else, then the only way of integrally linking law with racism is to attack the foundation and show that those very terms of separation are racist. (fitzpatrick 1987, p. 122) here, the seeds of what would become fitzpatrick's argument in modernism and the grounds of law (2001) appear, with the argument that law acquires its identity by both being in opposition to racism, but also, 'taking elements of racism into itself and shaping them in its own terms' (fitzpatrick 1987, p. 122) . 3 the separation of law (universalistic liberal legal ordering) from racism (material life) both constrains and contains the law (fitzpatrick 1987) . this foundational logic of separation heightens racism by constraining law and at the same time rendering it compatible with a claim to 'universalistic competence' (fitzpatrick 1987, p. 122) . the nature of this separation posits black lived experience and racialised people's articulation of and resistance to state racism in an impossible position, outside of the grammar in which law operates. being radically separate from and ordering of material life, law cannot be brought into definitely complicitous comparisons with that life. sympathetic connections between law and racism can be presented as exceptional and remediable, with the exceptional serving to contrast and confirm the great vir-i also managed to capture several volumes before, in a sign of the contemporary university's true state of being, an entire case of books was inadvertently pulped due to the carelessness of an administrator). colleagues and friends near (europe) and far (australia) engaged in feedback and conversation about drafts of the paper that took the form of notes and letters, meetings at conferences, and academic visits. the materials relating to this research also included newspaper clippings of racist discrimination in the fields of housing, immigration and of course employment, which is the main focus of the article. conference proceedings of socialist and anti-racist trade unions and activist scholars, drafts from the likes of cedric robinson who presented a paper in brighton during this period, programmes from the early critical legal conferences in the uk, and papers of his fellow travellers in the field of law (a valerie, an alan) litter his files and provide a thick impression of the type of critical legal scholarship that emerged in the 1970s and 80s and, also, reflect how academics and educators, journalists, trade unions, community workers and politicians were thinking about the relationship between race and the law. footnote 2 (continued) tue of the norm. indeed, the very terms of that separation -terms of universalistic order, terms operatively realized in liberal legality -are ostentatiously opposed to racism. against accusations of racism, then, law's innocence is unassailable. (fitzpatrick 1987, pp. 121-22) fitzpatrick uses the example of lord scarman's report on the brixton riots, which took place in 1981, to evidence his argument. in declaring that britain does not suffer from institutional racism, the very language used by black people to 'encapsulate their experience of law and of state action ' (1987, p. 121) , scarman actively encloses liberal legality off from critical engagement with peoples' lived experiences of it. lord scarman produces a 'closed text' that renders law perpetually innocent (robinson 2019) . the main focus of fitzpatrick's critique is the race relations act 1976. 4 the 1976 act, unlike its precursors, recognised both direct and indirect forms of racial discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services, and in the employment, training and education sectors. it also applied to housing but with some important exceptions for privately let accommodations. the 1976 act was seen as an improvement upon what had preceded it; however, by the time of the brixton riots the limits of the act and its poor record in ameliorating widespread and systemic racial discrimination were evident. fitzpatrick focuses solely on claims related to employment, which made up the vast majority of cases brought under the 1976 legislation. there are two aspects of fitzpatrick's 'separation thesis' that i will draw attention to here. the first is the form of right that structures the race relations act. fitzpatrick criticises not only the individualised nature of how a claim can be brought under the legislation, but how this form of right that presumes the universal, individual subject of law shapes adjudication itself. the claim here, which he distinguishes from broader critical legal studies literature, is not that the individual nature of the right denies the systemic nature of the harm, but that it posits racism as a deviation from the norm. 'the complainant… has the onus of establishing that the norm has been disturbed' (fitzpatrick 1987, p. 124) . one of the effects is the constant denial of the existence of racism in absence of a recognisable intention on the part of the wrongdoer, and instead, the reduction of racial discrimination to another cause that does not disrupt the norm (paranoia, oversensitivity, communication problems etc.…). this form of right and the adjudicative processes that sustain it help produce a 'community of law', one that is bound to particular expressions of nationalism. the 'common law right to discriminate' on the basis of race, implicitly acknowledged in dockers ' labour club and institute, ltd. v race relations board (1974) , is the ground which any positive anti-discrimination legislation tries to upset. the intimations of those who supported brexit, that it would allow the government to repeal the human rights act (and presumably the 2010 equalities act) 5 called upon this long history of english nationalism that equates the right to discriminate on the basis of race, nationality and citizenship with sovereignty itself. as lester and bindman put it in an early critical engagement with race relations legislation, 'the common law does not frown upon racial discrimination' (lester and bindman 1972, p. 26) . fitzpatrick refers on this point to the work of paul gilroy, who, in his contribution to the landmark collective volume the empire strikes back: race and racism in 70s britain (1982) , painstakingly traces how 'racialized portraits of criminality derive a new power from the way the law has reconstituted the political-social field in crisis conditions' (gilroy 1982, p. 147) . the crisis conditions were occasioned by massive unemployment and economic decline, and a re-tooling and hypostasis of racist figures (the 'mugger', see hall et al 1978) with respect to black and asian britons. in relation to one of the more notorious forms of racial violence in the realm of policing, for instance, gilroy argues that: the well-known instance of the 'sus' law was but a single example of a generalized process in which any afro-caribbean youth is assumed to be criminally inclined and anyone of asian appearance is adjudged an 'illegal immigrant' until they can produce acceptable documentation to the contrary. (gilroy 1982, p. 147) it is not difficult to see the resonances and persistence of how these racist tropes are continually renewed in the effort to impose more carceral forms of governance in the current conjuncture, particularly in the context of counter-terrorism measures and the prevailing climate of islamophobia (kapoor 2018) . when gilroy writes that '[t]he common law which was a battleground for black rights as early as 1670 remains powerless to defend the interests of black people today' (gilroy 1982, p. 148) , he is pointing to the constitutive and constitutional exclusion of black subjects from the universal subject of law that is the preserve of the 'freeborn briton' (the object of affection for the many esteemed left intellectuals that gilroy rightfully-if mercilessly-critiques). more than this though, we begin to see the intimate bind between a particular form of english nationalism and an identification with the english common law that places racism within the sphere of right (the 'common law right to discriminate') and racialised bodies beyond the promises of equality, liberty and freedom that characterise english sovereignty. it is important to pause for a moment and to reflect on the background to the race relations act 1976, and the intense focus on the state in critical scholarship engaged with questions of liberal legality, racism and nationalism. the uk of the 1970s and 80s saw a veritable explosion of work on race, emerging from sociology, cultural studies and engagements with critical theory. fitzpatrick's work stands out in the field of critical legal studies, which, in the uk at least, was hardly dealing with questions of race, colonialism and empire during that period, which is perplexing given the social political upheaval of the time. from the 1940s onwards, immigration from formerly colonised and decolonising countries, from the commonwealth, was understood to be a major catalyst in accelerating social change; although as the authors of colour and citizenship: a report on british race relations argued, these processes of change were already underway in the fields of education and housing (rose 1969 ) they write '[t]he redefinition of the immigrants as a separate, problemgenerating group began to take hold and provided the stimulus for the campaign to control their entry into the uk, which eventually became the dominating element in the political debate' (rose 1969, p. 404) . largescale shifts in immigration to the uk exacerbated existing racial and class tensions that played out in the spheres of housing, education, employment and policing. after the notting hill riots in 1958, we see a consistent cycle of government reports, white papers, commissions of inquiry, and recommendations for change happening at regular intervals. accordingly, as we approach the tenth anniversary of the riots that spread across england after the unprovoked police killing of mark duggan in tottenham, london in the summer of 2011, we could look to the inquiry that david cameron initiated in its aftermath, which in any case was not constituted under the official inquiries act, and reflect upon the performative nature of these exercises, and how with few exceptions (the macpherson inquiry being an exemplary one here), inquiries tend to maintain the line of separation between a universalising liberal legality and the material life of racism. in the grenfell inquiry, for instance, we can witness a separation drawn between the legal parameters of the inquiry and the broader questions of class, race and organised abandonment that contributed to the deaths of 72 people. multiple requests by counsel for bsrs (bereaved, survivors and residents) to investigate how race, class and disability were implicated in the criminal levels of negligence involved in the refurbishment of the tower have been met with a response that implies racism, and discrimination on the basis of religion or class must be borne out through explicit conduct or acts in order to enter the remit of the inquiry. 6 fitzpatrick notes how enoch powell's infamous 'rivers of blood speech' in 1968 had 'an immense popular response' (fitzpatrick 1987, p. 129) . reacting to the idea that legislation (in the form of the race relations bill referred to above) could provide positive protections for people of colour in the uk, powell warned whites that this would give black people preferential treatment in the law, whilst also, presumably, infringing the natural liberty and freedom that inhere in english law for truly english subjects to discriminate. it may seem as though powellite racism was an outlier, on the far right of the political spectrum. as avtar brah has noted, however: thatcherism, as you know, was linked to powellism in the previous decade. enoch powell famously, or infamously, talked about young people, black people, asians, saying that they could be born in britain but could never be of britain…. margaret thatcher built on and continued the same kind of discourse. she didn't always use the same language, but it was a very similar discourse. in a 1978 tv interview, she talked about the british people being scared that britain might be 'swamped by people of a different culture' (interview with avtar brah in bhandar and ziadah 2020, p. 35, emphasis in original). racism was not the only common ground between powell and thatcher. while powell is largely remembered for his birmingham outrage, his commitment to neoliberal market economics was perhaps as integral to the formation of thatcherism as the 'keep britain white' ethos. as paul gilroy notes, 'thatcher's honeyed mixture of romantic nationalism and free marketeering provided powellism with a clean uniform, ventriloquising his old populism to compete politically with the resurgent national front' (gilroy 2021, p.14) . the assault on trade unions, corresponding attacks on employment standards and the privatisation of social goods were enwrapped within a populist nationalism that gave cover, if not legitimated, racist discourses of englishness. thatcher's commitment to the freedom to trade above all else, her enduring support of the pinochet regime, and refusal to join the international boycott of south africa during the anti-apartheid struggle can also be placed within the larger context of neoliberal economic thought and its relationship to race. as a member of the mont pèlerin society, powell found kindred spirits in the likes of william h. hutt, wilhelm röpke and others who combined a vision of a globalised free market with limited democracy and racially stratified citizenship (slobodian 2020 ) the values of powell and hutt are particularly clear as they related to the situation of apartheid in south africa. while the 'market is color-blind' and the 'racialised closed-shop' of apartheid was a bar to labour mobility, hutt openly argued for a racially weighted franchise in south africa were apartheid to ever end. 7 but one need not travel so far afield to grasp the relationship between the racial politics of neoliberalism that characterised thatcherism. the geneva neoliberals and their chicago counterparts were committed to remaking the world after the fall of empire and the rise of decolonisation to ensure the imperium of the market; national sovereignty in the decolonised world was despised insofar as it enabled the possibility of democratic reform and restraint of private property and contract law, the fundamentals of neo-liberal, global capitalism (slobodian 2020) . in the united kingdom, neoliberal economic policies, which were thoroughly intertwined with the powellist racism describe above, produced crisis conditions that impacted racialised communities differentially: mass structural unemployment, the weakening of trade unions, the largest sell-off of social housing stock and a post-imperial nostalgia that found an outlet in the launching of war in the falkland islands (hall 1988) . however, considering the legal dimension that inheres in the relationship between race and neoliberal economic policies as they emerge in britain with the election of thatcher is not as straightforward. the international dimension of neoliberalism reflects a vision of a globalised order in which the sovereign boundaries of the nation state do not impede capital flows and the rights of the investor, and democracy is weakened or hollowed out to the point that it cannot pose a threat to the sanctity of private property ownership. in the uk, like the us, neoliberal economic policies were parasitic on the racial order embedded within liberal democratic capitalism, both seeking to include racialised communities who had been previously excluded from the 'freedoms' of the market (gaining access to credit markets, becoming indebted), and intensifying the dispossessive effects of well entrenched structural racism. the racial dimensions of neoliberal legality do not replace or transcend the racial regime produced by liberal legality, but rather, operate in conjunction with it. what is neoliberal legality? proponents of the view that there is such a thing argue that the legal form, in reflecting the material conditions of capitalist modalities of accumulation, has undergone some significant shifts in response to prevailing modes of neoliberal economic policies. one of the most important changes is in the relationship between the juridical sphere and the legal subjectivities it both presupposes and produces (knox 2017) . in other words, the de-collectivised subject in the arena of employment and industrial relations (knox 2017) ; the owner as investor in the private law realm of property (bhandar 2022) ; the consumer rather than citizen in the political sphere (brabazon 2017 ) have all become predominant forms of legal subjectivity. a second aspect of neoliberal legality is the reality of a market society and what it requires. the globalised market order envisioned by the likes of friedrich hayek looks to law to 'shape social relations accordingly and construct 7 'the fact that blacks were the majority population in south africa made the situation exceptionally perilous, in his view. the apparent solution of universal suffrage would only "mean the transfer of power to a new political majority, with no constitutional limitations to prevent retaliatory abuse"' (slobodian 2020, p. 174 , emphasis in original). a specific worldview that enables the market to define the manner in which societies operate in practice' (veitch 2017, p.78) . the competitive free market, counterintuitively for many, demands a legal system that can re-shape social relations in its image. in other words, the laws of private property and contract may have been foundational to the colonial modern liberal legal order but became insufficient to support the transformation of society that neoliberal doctrines envisioned. for my purposes, it is worth emphasising that neoliberalism requires a legal architecture that can advance the objectives of transforming existing commodities and non-commodities into assets (adkins et al. 2020 ) and marketising material life. this legal paradigm relies on the fiction of equal individuals before the law, but also goes further, in its active efforts to incorporate ever more people into legal-economic relations as an entrepreneurial, indebted subject, or an investor, or a mortgagee. as costas lapavitsas has remarked, the 'catalyst of 2007/8 [global financial crisis] was speculative mortgage lending to the poorest workers… in the nineteenth century, it was impossible to imagine global disruption of accumulation that materialised because of debts incurred by the workers, individuals, the poorest…' (lapavitsas 2013, p.2) . what lapavitsas leaves underexplored are the profoundly racialised dimensions of the crisis. as mentioned previously, neoliberal forms of extraction that have elevated the value of household and mortgage debt to global proportions are parasitic on embedded forms of racism and an international order that has never transcended its colonial history. we can think of the subprime mortgage crisis and reverse redlining as a prime example of this phenomenon (chakravartty and ferreira da silva 2012). in resisting the periodisation that places neo-liberalism as being sequentially ordered in relation to liberal democratic capitalism, we can return to fitzpatrick's 'separation thesis' and re-pose this question as one about the line between neoliberal legality and material life. the line has clearly shifted, and with the veil that characterised the divide between the putative public and private realms, upon which the liberal legal order depends, shredded. as remarked upon by many, neoliberalism is characterised by its very capacity to extend the market, through deregulation and privatisation into spheres once considered to fall within the bounds of the public; social goods that at least nominally, are the entitlement of those included within the body politic. these same social goods are the ones that touch us in our most vulnerable, intimate spheres of life: housing and shelter, healthcare, eldercare, social welfare. the line between 'material life' and the 'formal rational world of law' has been eviscerated, rendering even the racially stratified public sphere of social goods open for business. nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of housing. as mentioned above, thatcher's right to buy scheme initiated the largest ever sell-off (privatisation) of social housing stock; its moniker combined the ancient english right to trade, buy and sell with the neoliberal imperative to privatise social goods. the 1980s and even more acutely, the 1990s, witnessed the creation of a legal architecture to enable the privatisation of the management, maintenance and refurbishment of housing stock, and further, the incursion of private finance initiatives into the housing sector (hodkinson 2019) . the deregulation and marketisation of social goods such as housing and the regulatory regimes they are situated within are not simply about 'privatisation' but represents a sea change in how property and property rights are conceived of within neoliberal legal regimes. the financialisation of real estate is a topic that is too extensive to cover in any detail here. suffice to say, it has become central to contemporary modes of capital accumulation. one of the reasons for this is the active intervention of the state, in inflating land values and asset price inflation. in relying on the 'active and continuous' intervention by the state to facilitate financialisation (lapavitsas 2013) , we have witnessed an unprecedented blurring of the lines between private and state actors in the provision of what were once social goods provided by the state. the state is intimately involved in the financialisation of urban development and residential real estate. the line of separation between neoliberal legality and material life, in this case, the locus of social reproduction and shelter, is not so much blurred as reconfigured altogether. thinking about resistance to the financialisation of residential real estate is less a matter of prising back state control, but in understanding the creation of a 'financialised urban governance regime' in which some quasi-state actors 'exercise considerable autonomy' (wijburg 2019, p.210) . we can turn to the specific context of the grenfell tower tragedy to consider how neoliberal legality operated in such a way as to make it difficult to hold any single authority accountable, particularly before the devastating fire occurred. the owner of the building, the royal borough of kensington and chelsea (rbkc), contracted out the management duties to a private tenant management organisation (kctmo), as is the norm with social housing buildings in the uk (hodkinson 2019) . the tmo effectively seemed to exercise a high degree of autonomy in how it managed the building without a corresponding level of responsibility. as mentioned above, it is significant that the residents tried repeatedly to warn the management housing association that they had concerns about fire safety as a result of the refurbishment but were ignored. furthermore, it is clear that at least some residents tried, without any success, to voice their concerns with a number of different corporate actors involved in the refurbishment, but they too were persistently ignored. the fact that dozens of corporate actors were involved in the refurbishment process has created an 'anti-accountability structure'. one after another, the entities and individuals involved in overseeing the refurbishment have inevitably stated that it was someone else's responsibility to ensure the design and materials used were not flammable (hopkirk and dunton 2020) . the fragmentation of ownership interests and contractual liabilities that neoliberal legality accomplishes through such devices as the design and build contract (which governed the refurbishment of grenfell tower) intensifies racial inequities in at least two different ways. one, this legal form is parasitic upon historically embedded relations of marginalisation and subordination, in ways that are specific to each place. for instance, the financialisation of housing requires a legal architecture that affords favourable tax status to entities such as real estate investment trusts, which play a central role in producing insecure tenancies. these tax laws and land planning policies do not ostensibly target, or conversely, exclude racialised communities in an easily legible way. however, while the model of financialised housing relies on greater and intensified modes of abstraction, 8 it also lands in sites that have their own particular histories of racism, class subordination and exclusion. in the case of lancaster west estate, 9 the voices of a multiracial working class including immigrant communities from africa and the middle east, many of whom are muslim, a longstanding afro-caribbean community in the area, europeans and white british residents, and poignantly, those with disabilities, are the people dealing with the effects of a de-regulated, privatised system of social housing provision that is situated within a larger scene of financialised real estate development. the second way in which neoliberal legality obscures racism is not, contrary to the separation thesis put forward by fitzpatrick, to erect a wall between its form and the material life of racism. rather, it is to multiply and compound the interfaces where one comes into contact with the racial dimensions of privatised and deregulated housing, healthcare, social welfare and education. neoliberal legality presents us not with an additional layer of racism to be considered alongside liberal legal ones but presents a multiplication of contact points with a system shaped by market logics and values. neoliberal legality intensifies racism by infiltrating and saturating the sphere of material life with debt, privatised and individualised forms of responsibility, and cultures of anti-accountability at the state/corporate nexus. thus, to recognise and apprehend how neoliberal legal form has, like liberal legality, race hardwired into its substance, requires a different grammar, a different way of seeing, a different sensibility. in the grenfell tower inquiry, we can witness this other grammar at play. now in phase 2, the month of april saw testimony from bsrs read into the record and also given in person. the subject matter of this evidence relates to the information about fire safety provided by the kctmo and rydon, the main contractor responsible for the refurbishment. two witnesses, both racialised workers and social housing tenants, gave their testimony. youssef khalloud, who works in a hotel, knew that one should not 'stay put' 10 in a fire, no matter the circumstances, because they have regular safety drills at his place of work. the other witness, betty kasote, remembers seeing a single notice on the ground floor telling the residents to 'stay put' in case of a fire. the witnesses were asked if they read the link magazine produced by the kctmo, if they read the tenancy handbook when they moved in, or if they saw the glossy one-page leaflet meant to keep residents apprised of refurbishment plans, produced by rydon (the lead contractor), or if they attended the occasional information sessions put on by the kctmo. the implication of this line of questioning is to show that from the point of view of the corporate actors involved, the onus was on the tenants to make themselves aware of fire safety. what were clearly tick box exercises for the entities responsible for a lethal refurbishment become a basis upon which to shift responsibility for safety and security to individual tenants. 11 an audit culture, rather than meaningful engagement with a particular population of residents, confronts individuals who as black, arab, muslim, immigrant, working class have been historically constructed by a liberal legal order as inherently untrustworthy and non-credible subjects. in the evidence of another tenant, a white social housing tenant who was actively involved in attempting to hold the kctmo and rbkc to account for safety failings (many of which foretold the tragedy that unfolded on 14 june 2017), the fragmented nature of responsibility and liability of the actors involved becomes a basis upon which to challenge him. having to make multiple efforts with different parties to try to gain clarity on issues relating to fire safety during the refurbishment, he is cast as a troublemaker. he had to become well versed with the regulations to hold power to account, but this becomes a basis for challenging him on why he directed his questions to particular parties, and why he did or did not write to different authorities regarding specific fire safety-related issues. ed daffarn notes he could not spend all of his time writing to the london fire brigade . one gets the sense from the bsrs testimony, many of whom were labouring under the intersecting axes of race, class, gender, disability, citizenship status, of contemporary social relations, who then had to somehow find the time and energy to fight what were clearly changing and, in some important respects, declining housing conditions created by refurbishment plans of the tower that were taking place as one part of the larger gentrification of the borough; a culture of indifference within the kctmo and rbkc, and a legislative environment that was complex but clearly geared towards deregulation, privatisation and the financialisation of the housing sector. at the time of writing, the fourth anniversary of the grenfell tower fire has just passed. not a single piece of legislation has come into effect to overhaul deficient fire safety regulations; nor to provide adequate financial resources to ameliorate the hundreds of residential buildings still clad in flammable materials. some of these buildings are occupied by owner-residents; leaseholders who have invested everything they have into the purchase of their flats. a neoliberal political programme 11 individual tenants whose first language may not have been english; tenants who work at jobs that do not give them the flexibility to attend information sessions; tenants who had learned that their complaints would not be taken seriously in any event. see grenfell tower inquiry, hearings on 20 april 2021, available here: https:// www. grenf ellto werin quiry. org. uk/ heari ngs/ berea ved-survi vors-and-resid ents-evide nce-20-april-2021. that sacrificed the figure of the noble working-class council tenant on the altar of individual ownership seems to have reached a limit point. no longer the respectable possessive individual deserving of the state's munificence, the realm of the investordeveloper and the multinational corporation has taken precedence as the primary stakeholders in the direction of governmental travel. the legal architectures that financialisation, privatisation and deregulation require have multiplied the points of contact that individuals, households, families, and communities have with a different grammar of economic and political organisation. this is seen in the sheer enormity of the fragmentation of responsibility for the management and lethal refurbishment of the tower, and the number of parties involved. this fragmentation has not only enabled different actors to implicate other entities in the attempts by legal counsel and the grenfell community to hold them to account for grave errors and criminal levels of negligence but reflects a different configuration of state and corporate power vis-à-vis residents in the lancaster west estate. compounded by a modus operandi of tick box exercises and poor practices of data collection on vulnerable residents (particularly as this related to fire safety), 12 the cost-cutting imperatives of rbkc, and a culture of indifference if not hostility towards tenants when it came to dealing with complaints about fire safety (and much else), 13 this configuration produces an 'anti-accountability structure' wherein the potential for catastrophic events was immense, with each individual brought before the inquiry refusing to acknowledge their own responsibility in the structural failure of multiple safety systems. the failures were cultural, structural, individual, corporate, and produced by a particular mode of neoliberal state governance of housing, of the home, the most intimate sphere of daily life. the inquiry has drawn a line of separation between liberal legality, recognising the role of racism and class-based subordination insofar as it can be evidenced by way of explicit, overt or direct acts and omissions. in this way, the parameters of the inquiry re-inscribe the putative innocence of the liberal legal form, separating it off from the very racism and class subordination it entrenches through its maintenance of a fictitious divide between the public sphere of civil society and citizenship, on the one hand, and the sphere of private right on the other. the 'material life of racism' is kept distinct from the very realm (liberal legality) that has played such a fundamental role in constructing and maintaining it. at the same time, shifts to neoliberal modes of governance have eviscerated this divide, revealing the fictitious nature of the public/private divide, but only to compound and multiply the surfaces along which individuals, households, families, and communities come into contact with ever more extractive and punitive rationalities. neoliberal economic policies and the legal architecture they require have always been, at least in the uk, if not globally, part of a racial nationalist project. the buccaneering spirit of neo-liberal, authoritarian brexit britain privileges the force of possessive nationalism over the 12 see the evidence given by david noble, equality and diversity officer for kctmo, 22 april 2021. available here: https:// www. grenf ellto werin quiry. org. uk/ heari ngs/ kensi ngton-chels ea-tenant-manag ement-organ isati on-evide nce-22-april-2021. 13 see the evidence of edward daffarn, referred to above. figure of the possessive individual, peddling the fantasy of an orderly, race-blind meritocratic britain, as antidote to decades-long degradation of working and living conditions. neoliberal legality, parasitic on liberal legal forms of racism, has intensified and multiplied its effects, producing a grammar of power unbound by familiar lines of separation and opposition. the asset economy colonial lives of property: law, land and racial regimes of ownership empires of real estate: neo-liberal legality and the right to housing race, real estate and real abstraction dissent in a juridified political sphere interview with brenna bhandar and rafeef ziadah london: verso chakravartty, paula, and denise ferreira da silva. 2012. accumulation, dispossession, and debt: the racial logic of global capitalism -an introduction second witness statement transcript of hearing racialized geographies of housing financialisation the impact of brexit on equality law racism and the innocence of law police and thieves introduction: race is the prism anatomy of racism hard road to renewal: thatcherism and the crisis of the left policing the crisis: mugging, the state and law and order safe as houses: private greed, political negligence and housing policy after grenfell grenfell inquiry: design-and-build blamed for industry 'sleepwalking towards serious problems deport, deprive, extradite: 21st century state extremism law, neoliberalism and the constitution of political subjectivity: the case of organised labour profiting without producing: how finance exploits us all race and law on racial capitalism, black internationalism and resistance colour & citizenship: a report on british race relations globalists: the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism a concise note on peter fitzpatrick's 'racism and the innocence of the law law, social policy and the neoliberal state reasserting state power by remaking markets? the introduction of real estate investment trusts in france and its implications for state-finance relations in the greater paris region the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 imperial or settler imperative? indigenous reserves as a case study for a transcolonial analysis of british imperial indigenous policy darren reid∗ university of victoria dreid820@yahoo.ca abstract my paper presents a comparative analysis of the development of reserve systems in british north america and western australia across the 19th century. the existing historiography seeks to comprehend the relationship between the british metropole and the colonial periphery, and two opposing frameworks of colonial governance have been developed. one holds that the british empire operated as an interdependent system, in which colonial indigenous policies were determined by overarching imperial imperatives based upon imperial capitalism and liberal humanitarianism. the other holds that the explosive growth of settler communities undermined these imperial imperatives and facilitated governance guided by the settlers’ need for land, labour, and security. this paper seeks to end the tension between these two frameworks by using indigenous reserve systems as a case study for understanding colonial governance. through an analysis of correspondence between local and imperial administrators, this paper argues that the development of indigenous reserve systems reveals an entrenched conflict between imperial and local administrators lasting throughout the nineteenth century, a conflict in which the local governments of british north america and western australia subordinated imperial imperatives of imperial capitalism and liberal humanitarianism to local concerns of security and sovereignty. keywords: settler colonialism; transcolonial history; british policy; indigenous reserves the national histories of western british north america (western bna) and western australiagive ample attention to the indigenous reserve systems of each country, but little attentionis given to transcolonial patterns of dispossession. transcolonial history is a unique approach to the history of colonial governance, which problematizes the idea that historians can understand the course of settler-indigenous relations in any one country from within national boundaries. zoe laidlaw, historian at the university of london, expounds the need to re-examine colonial governance from an international viewpoint. laidlaw argues that the contained national histories of colonization prevent historians from making important connections between colonized peoples, enable modern settler societies to perpetuate dispossession, and allow britain to side-step questions of responsibility for imperial crime (2014, p. 133). transcolonial historical analyses acknowledge that national acts of colonialism, such as the creation of indigenous reserves, are individual instances of a larger phenomenon, and dig deeper into the differences between these to better understand the whole. historians tend to consider british indigenous policy as driven by a dialectic between, on the one hand, a framework of imperial liberal humanitarianism and imperial capitalism and, on the ∗i would like to thank dr. elizabeth vibert for her guidance while writing this paper. 55 mailto:dreid820@yahoo.ca the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 other hand, a framework of settler colonialism.1 yet the reserve systems that coalesced in british colonies by the end of the 19th century contained aspects that contradicted the principles of both frameworks. as a response to laidlaw’s call for transcolonial approaches to colonial governance, this paper seeks to reconcile these two frameworks via a transcolonial comparison of indigenous reserve policy. i argue that, while imperial imperatives guided the development of early 19th century reserves, the coercive forms of reserves that appeared by the turn of the century arose only as settler populations came to prioritize the security of their land and the solidity of their claims to sovereignty over imperial obligations. this paper has three sections. the first section is an exploration of the historiography of world patterns of indigenous-settler relations. the second section presents my own primary research into the processes of developing reserves in western bna2 and western australia, organized geographically. by western bna, i refer to present day alberta, saskatchewan, and manitoba. in the name of feasibility and length, i focused on two nations for the similarity of their contexts: both represent frontiers that were settled after the initial settlement of their corresponding colonies. the third section connects the findings from my research along world patterns, organized thematically. finally, there are brief concluding remarks. terms i use the term “indigenous” rather than “native” or “aboriginal” to refer to indigenous peoples and groups; while it is preferable to refer to the self-designated appellations of any indigenous group, in the context of this paper the purpose is not to refer to specific indigenous histories but to policies and colonial reactions to indigeneity as a concept. historical documents of this time refer to indigenous groups as “natives,” and while i keep this term where necessary, bear in mind the legacy of racist attitudes towards “the noble savage” that is attached to this term. i would also draw attention to the term “indigenous policy.” the term conjures an image of “what the government did with indigenous people,” but this is untrue. policy indicates government intentions, but the indigenous groups involved responded to these intentions in many ways and influenced the outcomes of policy. i will draw attention to divergences between policy intentions and indigenous responses when necessary. the dichotomy of imperial and local also requires a brief note. “imperial” and “local” are not directly antonymous, as the appointed governor of a colony could be just as imperially-minded as any official back in london. to control for the ambiguity in separating imperial imperatives from local imperatives, i define local imperatives against the imperatives established by the british colonial office. for example, if a dispatch from the secretary of state for war and the colonies outlines a specific instruction regarding indigenous policy, then i take that policy as the established imperial policy. likewise, if a dispatch from a colonial governor presents an indigenous policy that is divergent from the established imperial policy, then i take the divergent policy as the established local policy.3 1i refer to settler colonialism as defined by adam barker and emma battell lowman: “settler colonialism can be distinguished from other forms of colonialism—including classical or metropole colonialism, and neo-colonialism—by a number of key features. first, settler colonisers ‘come to stay’: unlike colonial agents such as traders, soldiers, or governors, settler collectives intend to permanently occupy and assert sovereignty over indigenous lands. second, settler colonial invasion is a structure, not an event: settler colonialism persists in the ongoing elimination of indigenous populations, and the assertion of state sovereignty and juridical control over their lands” (barker & battell lowman [2015], “settler colonialism,” para. 1). 2arriving at a succinct name for this area is difficult, given that “central canada” is anachronistic and “prairie british north america” is awkward. “central british north america” would also have worked. 3strictly speaking, there was no such thing as one coherent british imperial policy, since imperial policy was determined by a range of contradictory intentions and desires. however, for the purpose of this paper the documented 56 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 finally, given that reserves have existed for centuries while the subject of this paper is a very specific type of reserve from the 19th century, i propose three distinct terms that should be helpful: unprescribed reserves, prescribed reserves, and institutionalized reserves. unprescribed reserves are simply lands that had been set aside by colonial authorities for use by indigenous peoples with no immediate intention to assert authority over them. consider the royal proclamation of 1763, which reserved land as hunting ground and not for coercive purposes (miller, 2009, p. 69). prescribed reserves are those that have been set aside for indigenous peoples’ use with accompanying caveats, such as agreements to build houses or learn agriculture. for example, consider the reserves created by sir francis bond head in the manitoulin treaty (1836), which stipulated that the indigenous people might live traditionally, “inasmuch as it affords fishing, hunting, bird-shooting, and fruit” (bond head, 1839/1969, p. 350) or request assistance “to become civilized and to cultivate land” (bond head, 1839/1969, p. 352). institutionalized reserves are those in which indigenous people must have lived and where the lives of indigenous people were coercively controlled. this paper focuses on two specific versions of institutionalized reserves: those in western bna after the rise of the 1885 pass system and those in western australia created by the 1905 aborigines act. imperialand localdriven frameworks of colonialism imperial-driven frameworks transcolonial historians have developed two distinct frameworks of british indigenous policy, each opposing the other. the first direction works under the assumption that the british empire operated in a systemic fashion. oxford historian john darwin asserts a framework of empire in which britain created an “octopus shaped” world system with systemic control from the centre (2009, pp. 17-18). darwin’s argument assumes that the colonies acted as auxiliaries to a metropolitan center, with the needs of the metropole determining the governance of the auxiliaries. darwin’s systemic empire framework holds that the governance of the british colonies was principally guided by imperial capitalism and therefore implies that the metropole designed local governments’ indigenous policies to facilitate britain’s capitalist agendas.4 similar work on liberal humanitarianism supports the framework of an overarching, systemic ideology driving colonial governance. andrew armitage, professor of social policy, connects the british assimilationist goal to the 1834 british poor law,5 in that both policies approached nonmainstream groups like indigent britons and indigenous peoples as requiring government programs to assimilate them into mainstream society (1995, p. 4). according to armitage, since the 1834 poor law was a fundamental aspect of liberal humanitarianism, the similarities between assimilation policies and poor law policies indicate that liberal humanitarianism spread from the british metropole outwards to the colonies and that liberal humanitarianism was therefore a systemic ideological influence on colonial indigenous policy. policy (i.e., whatever was written down in an official dispatch) will be taken as the dominant imperial policy 4it is important to note here a distinction between imperial capitalism and colonial or local capitalism. imperial capitalism operates to benefit the metropole, just as darwin argues that the colonies worked to serve imperial interests. colonial or local capitalism operates to benefit the setters of the colony. this means that imperial and local capitalism are not necessarily antagonistic, as a thriving local economy may very well benefit the metropole, but it does require differentiation. this is my own definition. 5the idea of the 1834 poor law was to prevent impoverished individuals from becoming a burden on the state by forcing them to labour in workhouses in return for any social assistance, as well as to reclaim indigent children from the perceived immorality of their parents by providing limited industrial education. 57 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 local-driven frameworks the second direction that transcolonial history has gone works under the assumption that either there never was any systemic control of policy in the british empire or at least that the systemic control had disappeared by the late 19th century. oxford historian james belich argues that indigenous groups across the british empire were initially capable of resisting the advances of imperial capitalism, and therefore imperial capitalism cannot have dictated indigenous policies (2009, p. 225). their ability to resist deteriorated in the second half of the 19th century in the face of massively increasing numbers of settler emigrants from britain, an event he terms “explosive colonization.” belich argues that at the centre of explosive colonization was the “boom mentality” of emigrant settlers, in which british settlers placed the security of frontier borders (i.e., non-confrontational relations with indigenous groups) above their concern for economic or moral objectives. this argument undermines the framework of an overarching imperial imperative driving colonial governance, as these imperatives place economic and moral objectives above concerns of safety and stability (belich, 2009, pp. 225-227). reserves as contradictory to the transcolonial historiography these two frameworks of british transcolonial history, that of an overarching capitalist or liberal humanitarian imperative and that of a local imperative, require us to take a closer look at the purposes of indigenous reserves across the british empire because neither framework can sufficiently explain the institutionalized reserves of the late 19th century. both imperatives demand the inclusion of indigenous peoples within the british system, yet the purpose of institutionalized reserves is to isolate them from it. armitage argues that the general policy of isolating indigenous people upon reserves and forcing them to abide by british law and morality was adopted on an imperial scale by the 1837 report of the select committee on aborigines, and that local governments followed this imperial policy throughout the colonies for over a century afterwards (1995, p. 220). however, a careful reading of the report shows that imperial authorities believed inclusion into british society furthered the “civilizing”6 of indigenous people, and that isolation hampered it. the committee declared that “the relations between neighboring nations must ever be extensive, however great the disparity of intellect or cultivation; and it is very questionable, whether it would be proper to restrain this relationship, when it might be conducted in an enlightening manner” (british parliamentary select committee, 1837/1966, p. 152). furthermore, the report stated that british laws do not apply to indigenous groups, “the whole spirit and principles of which are foreign to their modes of thought and action” (british parliamentary select committee, 1837/1966, p. 80). one may argue that the select committee intended these stipulations to be temporary measures, and armitage points to signs that indicate the intention of imperial authorities to scale back these protections in time. yet if we took these indications for granted, we would be reading history backwards. the isolationism and forced legal and moral policing of the institutionalized reserves that local governments established by the end of the 19th century, and which armitage links to the report of the select committee of 1837, contradicted the imperial directive set down in writing, and so the theory that an overarching metropolitan imperative drove indigenous policy falls short. 6i use the terms “civilize” and “civilizing” throughout this paper to refer to the liberal humanitarian “civilizing mission.” the idea of levels of civilization was rooted in eurocentric enlightenment ideas of progress and was popularized by the marquis de condorcet’s “progress of the human mind,” which categorized ten epochs of civilization, such as formation of hordes, adoption of pastoralism, adoption of agriculture, division of the sciences, decline of science and rise of theology, etc. i refer to this highly unscientific and racist idea as historical context, not as historical fact. 58 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 however, the concept of settler needs for peaceful and secure borders driving indigenous policy also cannot explain the development of institutionalized reserves because an inherent characteristic of reserves across the empire was the intent to raise the “level of civilization” of indigenous peoples, something that was expensive and not required for the needs of boom mentality. amanda nettelbeck, historian at the university of adelaide, argues that the policy of providing rations was an integral aspect of indigenous policy and necessary for the survival of indigenous groups, but was only supported by colonial governments when unavoidable out of the fear that rations would lead to idleness (nettelbeck & foster, 2012, pp. 24-26). reserve overseers in western australia explicitly refused to provide rations to “indigent blacks on stations where able-bodied ones are employed” (western australia aborigines department, 1905, p. 6), and reserves in western bna adopted the strategy of providing rations only in payment for jobs around the reserves (satzewich, 1996, pp. 199-200). this preoccupation with enforcing moral norms on the residents of reserves, which was almost unanimously resisted, is irreconcilable with the settler’ need for reducing confrontation and maintaining peaceful borders. much of the motivation for these polices included financial concerns, but the civilizing concern was emphasized. and so, the theory of boom mentality driving indigenous policy also falls short. this paper analyzes the similarities and divergences within the processes of creating reserve systems in western bna and western australia and proposes a revised framework for understanding british colonization in which reserve systems are not anomalous. this section has outlined the two most dominant frameworks already developed and highlighted their weaknesses in regards to reserves. the next section looks at the contexts of reserves in each colony, weighs the debates between local and imperial administrators, and scrutinizes government reports to distill the essential purposes and functions of institutionalized reserves in each colony. tracing the development of institutionalized reserve systems western british north america armitage’s view of bna indigenous policy corresponds with the current historical consensus. canadian historian jim miller argues that the bna government adopted a “civilizing” policy at the end of the war of 1812, when the state grew less dependant on indigenous military aid, and that this policy became increasingly assimilationist over the decades as settlers came to see indigenous groups as inhibitory to progress (miller, 2009, p. 105). just as armitage sees bna indigenous policy as established once and maintained for a century, miller argues for one progressively assimilationist civilizing policy. i offer a new framework of 19th century western bna indigenous policy as an ongoing debate between two iterations of civilizing policy: active civilizing via social integration and social isolation without civilizing. i argue that a civilizing policy was adopted after the war of 1812, but that this policy was replaced by one of isolationism and control which had nothing to do with a civilizing mission and everything to do with security. this framework accounts for the institutionalization of reserves in 1885, while the previous assumption of one assimilationist policy fails to explain this isolationism. the canadian government established the pass system in 1885, which required indigenous individuals to obtain passes to leave their reserve and effectively institutionalized the reserves.7 the creation of the pass system in 1885 was linked with the 1885 north-west uprising and had roots in the manitoulin treaties of 1836. 7there is a debate among historians as to the pass system’s enforcement: no legislative backing was introduced for the pass system, and so police made arrests based on drunkenness and vagrancy rather than pass violation. however, oral histories support its operation into the 1930s. see carter and hildebrandt, the true spirit and original intent of treaty 7. however, indigenous people did not leave the system unchallenged and repeatedly and often left the reserve without obtaining a pass. see barron, “the indian pass system in the canadian west, 1882-1935.” 59 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 sir francis bond head, lt. governor of upper canada, signed the manitoulin treaties with the assertion that “[t]he greatest kindness we can perform towards these intelligent, simple-minded people, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all communication with the whites” (bond head, 1839/1969, p. 353). the manitoulin treaties are as noteworthy for what they did not include as for what they did include: they did not include any promises to provide religious instruction or education of any kind, but rather encouraged traditional indigenous methods of subsistence via hunting, fishing, gathering, and bird-shooting (bond head, 1839/1969, p. 350). this policy of social isolation without civilizing was a direct departure from the imperial indigenous policy established in 1830, when the then-governor sir james kempt declared that “[t]he rooted aversion entertained by the indians to intermix with the white population, and with other indian tribes, renders it necessary that they should be located . . . in the vicinity of other tribes and of white settlers. by these means . . . their amalgamation with the mass of the population [will] be most efficiently promoted” (kempt, 1834/1969, p. 95). furthermore, kempt had been ordered by the secretary of war and the colonies, sir george murray, to ensure the encouragement “in every possible manner, of religious knowledge and of education generally” (murray, 1834/1969, p. 88). bond head’s repudiation of kempt’s and murray’s policy of integration and education indicates that there was a debate, from the earliest years of policy making, between proponents of active civilizing via social integration and social isolation without civilizing. bond head’s iteration of civilizing policy was not popular with the imperial government. indigenous leaders themselves petitioned the imperial government, with mississauga leader peter jones travelling to london to personally denounce bond head’s policy (binnema & hutchings, 2005, p. 130). secretary of war and the colonies lord glenelg rejected the policy in 1838 and declared that “[t]he view which sir f. head adopted of the future prospects of the indian race differed no less from the opinion of his predecessors in the government of upper canada than from those which i had been led to form” (glenelg, 1839/1969, p. 314). consequently, the signing of the first seven numbered treaties in the north-west territories between 1870 and 1877 followed kempt’s iteration of active civilizing via social inclusion. during the negotiation of treaty no.1 (at the site of modern-day winnipeg, manitoba, in august 1871), indian commissioner wemyss simpson perceived “with much pleasure” that “the indians have evinced a most friendly disposition, and look upon the emigrants and others now passing through their country, not only without distrust, but with evident satisfaction, and we have no doubt but that, by careful and prudent management, these friendly relations may be permanently maintained” (indian branch of the department of the secretary of state for the provinces, 1871, p. 9). this indicates that the intention of the treaty was not to restrict relations between indigenous people and settlers, but to ameliorate them. indeed, simpson’s indian department annual report of 1871 satisfactorily reported that in the province of manitoba, where labours [sic] is scarce, indians give great assistance in gathering in the crops. at portage la prairie, both chippewas and sioux, were largely employed in the grain field, and in other parishes, i found many farmers whose employees were nearly all indians . . . . although serious trouble has from time to time occurred . . . there is no reason to fear any trouble with those who regarded themselves as subjects of her majesty. their desire is to live at peace with the white man, to trade with him, and, when they are disposed, to work for him. i believe that nothing but gross injustice or oppression will induce them either to forget the allegiance which they now claim with pride, or molest the white subjects.(indian branch of the department of the secretary of state for the provinces, 1871, p. 31) the satisfaction with settlers employing and trading with indigenous people shows that the indigenous 60 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 policy behind the numbered treaties followed kempt’s policy of active civilizing via social integration.8 this changed in 1885, when the canadian government’s belief that “nothing but gross injustice or oppression will induce them either to forget the allegiance which they now claim with pride, or molest the white subjects” (indian branch, 1871, p. 31) was shattered by the north-west uprising. several indigenous nations rose against the canadian government in 1885 in response to settler encroachment, and the government abandoned kempt’s style of inclusionary policy to prevent future uprisings. while modern historians acknowledge that the uprising was a justified course of action taken after many attempts at peaceful negotiation, the government at the time saw no justifiable motivation for indigenous groups to resort to violence. in his annual report for 1885, sir john a. macdonald established that the uprising was “due to circumstances over which this department had no control, but which were the result of specious inducements held out to indians of the north-west territories by the leader of the half-breed insurgents and his lieutenants” (canadian department of indian affairs, 1886, p. 7). since there was no official perception of the uprising being the result of any real grievances, the government’s only means of preventing further violence was to address what they did perceive to be the cause of the uprising: communication between indigenous groups and outsiders. consequently, they designed the pass system to control communication. canadian historian sarah carter doubts the indian department’s belief that the indigenous participants in the 1885 uprising had no actual grievances with the government, and she points to evidence of hushed-up criticisms of the government’s poor management of reserves (1990, pp. 130-34). while this perspective is important to think about, my purpose in writing is to trace and compare indigenous policies, and determining if officials believed in their policies is beyond the scope and purpose of this paper. officials first mentioned forcing indigenous people onto their reserves in may 1885, during the north-west uprising, when major-general middleton wrote to lieutenant governor dewdney asking, “[w]ould it not be advisable to issue a proclamation warning half-breeds and indians to return to their reserves and that all those found away will be treated as rebels?” (middleton, 1885/2009, p. 63). dewdney made this proclamation immediately, and three months after the end of hostilities, deputy superintendent general of indian affairs lawrence vankoughnet argued that not just the hostiles, “but all our indians should be required to carry passes,” and prime minister macdonald agreed that “the system should be introduced in the loyal bands as well” (vankoughnet, 1885/2009, p. 64). the second motivation for expanding the pass system was the perception that the indigenous population’s food supplies were being compromised by farmers abandoning their crops. the annual report of 1886 explains that so for many of them . . . having in the excitement of the occasion [the north-west uprising] left their reserve, no seed was planted . . . . as in the case of other bands on reserves, situated in the districts affected by the disturbances referred to, these indians had for the most part to be entirely fed at the expense of the government. [furthermore,] the ease with which employment is obtained and money earned in summer renders many indians careless and neglectful of their crops. (canadian department of indian affairs, 1887, p. 81) carter disputes the government’s position that poor agricultural production was a result of indigenous carelessness and neglect, instead pointing to a multitude of other handicaps, such as poor soil conditions, an inability to relocate to better soil, and rampant equipment shortages (1990, pp. 161-63). however, this report illustrates that the pass system was a measure to ensure sufficient 8it should be noted that indigenous people chose to work for white farmers as a response to food scarcity, not because integration was the policy. policy agreed with indigenous action rather than caused indigenous action. 61 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 agricultural productivity upon reserves, since the government thought agricultural production was being hindered by indigenous farmers leaving their reserves.9 rather than there being one century-long assimilation policy, the adoption of the pass system represents the abandonment of the policy of active civilizing via social integration and the reversion to a policy similar to bond head’s previous policy of social isolation without civilizing. the pass system had different reasons for isolating indigenous peoples than bond head’s manitoulin treaties, replacing his 1836 despair over the indigenous population’s ability to become civilized with the 1885 fear of warmongering and inciteful communication between indigenous groups and the determination to have indigenous groups produce enough food for themselves. nonetheless, it is necessary to appreciate that the institutionalization of reserves in canada was reversion to an isolationist, non-civilizing policy rather than the failure of a civilizing policy. western australia the institutionalization of reserves in western australia developed as a combination of two intersecting forces: settlers’ desire to harness the indigenous population as a source of cheap labour and the increasing settler fear of indigenous people as decimation of kangaroo herds led them to cattle raiding.10 the australian government neither hid nor denied its obsession with utilizing the labour potential of indigenous peoples, for western australia directly refuted the imperial government’s desire for a civilizing-focused indigenous policy by adopting a labour-focused indigenous policy. following the 1837 report from the select committee on aborigines (british settlements), secretary of state for war and the colonies lord glenelg sent a dispatch to george gipps, the governor of new south wales, dated 31 january 1838. this dispatch outlined the indigenous policy that australia was to adopt, which involved creating an office of “protectors of aborigines” and instructing these protectors that “if the natives can be induced in any considerable numbers to locate themselves in a particular place, it will be the object of the protector to teach and encourage them in the cultivation of their grounds” (glenelg, 1839/1970, p. 375). however, when john hutt, the governor of western australia, received these instructions, he ignored them. instead, he created an office of protectors for which he “considered that the object of the appointment of protectors is, that they may guard against and inquire into any cause of complaint which may arise between the white people and the aborigines” (hutt, 1844/1969, p. 371). this was a very different policy from what glenelg had outlined, and hutt acknowledged this in a dispatch dated 15 may 1841, in which he offered several remarks “explanatory of the reasons which have prevailed with me not to adopt, for the present at least, the suggestions contained in these papers, but rather to afford complete trial to the system in force in this colony” (hutt, 1844/1969, p. 380). his predominant argument was that if indigenous people of new south wales were hostile to settlers and needed to be held on reserves, the indigenous people of western australia were entirely friendly. these dispatches illustrate both that western australian indigenous policy from the very beginning centered on promoting indigenous people’s employment by settlers and that the western australian colonial government rejected the imperial desire to institute a system of reserves. unlike the above exploration of western bna, in which reserve policy evolved according to the government’s changing perceptions of indigenous groups, the western australian perception never changed: it was always about labour. instead, institutionalized reserves developed supplemental to the policy of harnessing cheap labour as a structure to take advantage of the indigenous population’s 9not only was the government determined to prevent indigenous people from rising up out of hunger, but they also wanted to limit the expense of providing rations. 10the decimation of buffalo herds in bna also highly impacted indigenous people’s ways of life, but there was not a parallel fear of cattle raids reflected in government correspondence. 62 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 declining access to traditional kangaroo herds. governor hutt’s policy expressed the opposite of lord glenelg’s imperial policy of reforming hunter-gatherers into farmers. hunter-gatherers were to work on settler farms, but they were never meant to start farming for themselves, for there was a strategic use for government rations as motivation to work for settler farmers. by the 1840s, western australia had a defined policy of using the provision and refusal of food rations to attempt to control indigenous actions. in his annual report of 1840, protector of aborigines charles symmons explained that to endeavor to wean the natives from their habits of indolence, and determined system of begging, i have invariably refused money or food without having previously obtained some equivalent service. . . . to evince our disgust at outrages which, however revolting to civilization, have been perpetrated by the natives . . . . i have invariably punished the offenders by banishment from the town, for a limited period, thus depriving them of many of their comforts, and compelling them to seek a precarious subsistence in the chase. (symmons, 1841, p. 3) the carrot and stick were, respectively, government rations and forced dependence on hunting and gathering, though it is important to note that employers, rather than officials, distributed government rations. there was a fear, in accordance with the predominant western understanding of the relationship between poverty and poor relief, that giving out rations freely would demotivate indigenous people from working, and so, as symmons mentioned above, employers would only give rations in exchange for work. unfortunately for the settlers, this policy backfired because of the encroachment of european settlement on the ability of indigenous groups to hunt for subsistence. as settlement grew, the destruction of kangaroo habitat in addition to the overhunting of kangaroo, which was a traditional source of food among the western australian indigenous population, resulted in a growing desperation for food. ideally (for governor hutt), this would have led to a heightened effectiveness of rations in forcing obedience, but the destruction of kangaroo herds resulted in an increase in cattle theft. as early as 1842, settler pastoralists were making the connection between settler encroachment and the steadily increasing indigenous criminality. john hunter patterson, a pastoralist voicing his opinion in the australasian chronicle, argued that it now appears to be established beyond the reach of dispute that the extensive occupation of the territory has produced a scarcity of those plants and animals which constituted the staple articles of their subsistence; and this view is confirmed by the fact, that the depredations of the aborigines have been, hitherto committed with the sole purpose of obtaining food or clothing. in these circumstances it is sufficiently obvious that, before any system can be devised for ameliorating their condition, an adequate provision must be made for supplying them with the first necessaries of life, for it is idle to talk of reforming, or even of restraining, by punishment or otherwise, a starving population. (patterson, 1842, p. 4) this situation forced an alteration to the practice of using rations as incentive, as public fear of and outcry against the rising indigenous criminality necessitated that distributors provide rations to those indigenous people who were fit neither to hunt nor to work, in order to address the root cause of cattle theft. it was found that sick, young, and elderly relatives of indigenous labourers required more food than a labourer could obtain legally, and so in 1878, the government established a daily ration for non-labourers. in accordance with the earlier policy, employers and farmers (rather than officials) would give out these rations (nettelbeck & foster, 2012, p. 29). this change in rations policy illustrates the agency of indigenous workers within a highly restrictive situation, as 63 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 officials were forced to compromise their concerns over idleness and morality as a result of indigenous choices to support their family members rather than blindly obey foreign codes of behaviour that the government sought to force upon them. while delegating the distribution of rations to the employers had the bonus of incentivising indigenous people to work as labourers, it also made them more vulnerable to settler exploitation. awareness of, and advocacy against, the exploitation of western australian indigenous people became a highly visible and contentious issue during the 1880s, when reverend john gribble, lieutenant colonel e.f. angelo, and magistrate r. fairbairn released scathing indictments of the “disguised but unquestionable system of slavery carried on under the protection of the british flag” (churches, 2006, p. 3). these allegations resulted in the appointment of the royal commission on the condition of the natives in 1904, upon whose recommendations the government passed the 1905 aboriginals act and 1905 native administration act. the commission discovered that the same people who distribute rations, charged to the government, for the relief of indigent and other aborigines, benefit themselves by buying at wholesale and charging at retail current prices, issuing about half the allowance, distributing the food cooked instead of raw. (royal commission on the condition of the natives, 1905, p. 22) to combat this abuse, the commission recommended that “the indigent blacks should, as far as practicable, be collected on to a reserve,” and that “the distributors of relief should be responsible persons, preferably government officials” (royal commission on the condition of the natives, 1905, p. 24). in his 1905 annual report, chief protector of aborigines henry prinsep agreed with these recommendations, but lamented that, regarding the collection of indigenous people upon reserves, “i have tried this over and over again, but under the present law i cannot keep them there. they will have their own way and wander where they like” (western australia aborigines department, 1905, p. 6). consequently, the passage of the 1905 aboriginal act included article 12: the minister may cause any aboriginal to be removed to and kept within the boundaries of a reserve, or to be removed from one reserve or district to another reserve or district, and kept therein. any aboriginal who shall refuse to be so removed to or kept within such reserve or district shall be guilty of an offence against this act. (western australia houses of parliament, 1905, p. 4) the complete reversal of policy from governor hutt’s refusal to create reserves to chief protector prinsep’s lobbying for reserves was therefore a reaction to the starvation caused by settler encroachment on indigenous hunting grounds. there was some minimal humanitarian motivation in terms of anti-exploitation advocacy, but the prominent motivation for the confinement of the indigenous population to reserves was the desire to manufacture a dependence upon government-distributed rations as an inducement into employment, as well as the fear of hostility via cattle theft. unlike western bna, where indigenous policy changed in relation to the perceived vision of the place of indigenous people in settler society, western australian indigenous policy never strayed from its focus on settler need for labour, and instead changed in relation to practical and logistical circumstance. transcolonial themes: imperial-local conflict and definitions of civilize the reserve systems that developed in western bna and western australia shared many similarities, enough to suggest that they adhered to the model of british systemic imperialism. yet these reserves also exhibited substantial differences, which would suggest that they adhered to 64 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 the model government driven by local imperatives. this section compares the processes of reserve development to move towards a resolution of this contradiction. a comparative analysis reveals two primary themes that connect the reserve systems in each country: conflict between imperial and local administrators in the purpose and implementation of reserves and investment in the idea of a civilizing mission. imperial colonial conflict in western bna and western australia, indigenous policies vacillated between different points on a spectrum of desired indigenous integration into settler society.11 in western bna, bond head’s manitoulin treaties of 1836 asserted a novel definition of reserves—as places to separate indigenous peoples from settler society—that was forcefully reversed by lord glenelg in 1838. this antagonism is paralleled in western australia by the conflict between governor hutt’s vision of indigenous people as labourers and lord glenelg’s vision of indigenous people as dependants, in which hutt responded to glenelg’s orders to establish indigenous reserves by blatantly refusing to do so. these political tug-of-wars confirm that colonial governance operated within a dialectic of imperial versus local imperative. they also reveal that the outcomes of these tug-of-wars—western bna’s adoption of the pass system in 1885 and western australia’s creation of reserves in 1905—tended to align with local rather than imperial imperatives. consider the moments at which indigenous policy underwent change toward institutionalization. my research showed that in 19th century western bna, indigenous reserve policy become considerably more coercive and institutionalized with the rise of the pass system after the 1885 north-west uprising. the canadian government considered the two causes of the uprising to be conspiratorial communication among indigenous groups and food scarcity. the pass system addressed both issues by limiting communication and preventing farmers from abandoning their crops. in western australia, reserves were explicitly refused in favour of managing settler-indigenous relations via employment, and the institutionalization of reserves was only undertaken in 1905. the commission on the condition of the natives had found a flaw in the rations system: corrupt rations distributors had prevented those unable to work from accessing rations, leading to an increase in cattle theft. reserves aimed to solve this problem by guaranteeing the distribution of rations to those unable to work and served local imperatives by ensuring safety from indigenous cattle raids. in each colony, the moment of institutionalization was predicated upon a threat to settler ways of life, whether that be indigenous resistance in western bna or loss of indigenous labour and increased cattle theft in western australia. considering the political tug-of-wars between local governors and imperial administrators and the timing of institutionalization relative to moments of settler crises, the process of reserve formation cannot support a framework of overarching imperial imperative. however, the institutional reserves of the late 19th century did share that contradictory emphasis on civilizing indigenous people, so let us consider this next. definitions of civilizing of the three essential characteristics of indigenous reserves established in section one—isolation, administration, and the mission to civilize—only two, isolation and administration, align with a framework of settler imperatives driving reserve policy, as they are both means of addressing the violence of resistance and the organization of labour. the concept of civilizing, however, does not align with this framework, since a civilizing mission is expensive and disruptive to peaceful 11 i say “desired” because indigenous groups interacted with settler society for social and economic purposes whether it was policy or not, hence the need to create things like the pass system. 65 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 settler-indigenous relations. if i am to argue that settler imperatives drove indigenous reserve policy, as i do, then i must be able to explain why settlers would condone the expense and disruption of attempting to civilize indigenous groups. in western bna and western australia, civilizing on reserves was attempted through a combination of industrial education and law enforcement. industrial education and law enforcement differed from the civilizing methods of early 19th-century indigenous policies outlined in the 1837 select committee on aborigines. the committee emphasized that the goal of civilizing was to bring indigenous peoples up to the level of europeans, and that this was best carried out via education in all subjects (rather than just an industrial education). furthermore, the committee explicitly dictated that applying european-style laws to indigenous groups would hamper the civilizing mission. instead, colonies were to allow indigenous groups to follow their own laws and continue traditional practices. late 19th-century civilizing, on the other hand, refused to allow indigenous groups to follow their own laws or participate in traditional activities, and provided only an industrial education. the imperial mission of the early 19th-century sought to improve indigenous society regardless of whether indigenous society conformed to settler society, and the local mission of the late 19th-century sought to conform indigenous society to settler society regardless of whether indigenous society improved. therefore, while both early 19th-century imperial civilizing and late 19th-century local civilizing used the same language of civilization, they were doing two different things. local settlers did not condone the expense and disruption of civilizing indigenous groups, because they were not civilizing in the original meaning of the word. they were, more accurately, assimilating indigenous groups, which was a departure from the civilizing mission of the early 19th-century. laidlaw argues that the british imperial imperative of liberal humanitarianism in regards to its civilizing mission did not exist in conflict with local imperatives, but rather that the imperial government abandoned its stance on civilizing around the 1850s. it is commonly accepted that humanitarianism faded throughout the 19th century as scientific conceptions of race developed, and laidlaw’s argument was developed within this context. she points to the british government’s disinterest in challenging settler colonialism as a marker of britain’s complicity in settler colonialism via a “lack of imperial control” (laidlaw, 2014, pp. 137-141). her argument aligns with mine in results, as we both agree that local imperatives drove the institutionalization of reserves in the late 19th century. we disagree only in regards to the antagonistic relationship between the imperial and local governments. laidlaw might argue that my study of reserve systems cannot reveal the subordination of imperial interests to local interests in the late 19th century because the humanitarianism that fueled the reversals of policy in the early 19th century no longer existed. however, i have never claimed that reserve policy hinged upon humanitarianism alone; from the beginning, i have acknowledged that both humanitarianism and imperial capitalism drove imperial interests. consider the difference between laidlaw’s timeline of humanitarianism’s decline and my timeline of reversals in reserve policy. laidlaw argues that as of lord grey’s tenure as secretary of state for war and the colonies (1846-1852), the imperial government had withdrawn from its civilizing mission, yet i have shown that the settler governments only began institutionalizing reserves in 1885 and 1894. before these transitions, colonial reserves retained the imperial vision of civilizing, involving limited law enforcement, freedom to pursue traditional activities, and general education. these early reserves did not expend resources in attempts to enforce european laws or european agricultural practices on indigenous groups, because doing so would go against the imperative of imperial capitalism. therefore, whether liberal humanitarianism had faded by the 1850s or not, my study does reveal the subordination of imperial interests to local interests because local concerns subordinated concerns of imperial capitalism. john comaroff, professor of anthropology at harvard, argues that “civilizing-colonialism” is concerned with spreading ideas of capitalism and liberalism, while “settler-colonialism” is concerned 66 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 with establishing sovereign authority over foreign populations (1997, pp. 181-182). in western bna, the importance of the north-west uprising in institutionalizing reserves suggests that the civilizing characteristics of reserves align with a settler-colonialist need for sovereignty rather than a civilizing-colonialist mission. throughout the second half of the 19th century, western bna faced increasing pressure to establish sovereignty over the west to resist american encroachment. canadian historian desmond morton argues that the united states could have substantiated a claim to sovereignty over western bna if the government had shown a lack of sovereignty via a breakdown in internal order, a movement for secession, or a failure to restrain hostile indigenous groups (1977, p. 6). the north-west uprising, therefore, represented a huge threat to sovereignty which was met with an assertion of power over the indigenous population. asserting power meant not only restricting indigenous people’s movement through the pass system, but also coercively suppressing their cultural difference from the settler society by quashing traditional activities and enforcing european laws. in western australia, a parallel exists in the uncharacteristic adoption of institutionalized reserves in 1905. in section two, i found that the government’s decision to abandon the earlier policy of allowing indigenous people to live outside of reserves changed in the late 19th century, a result of the indigenous people’s declining ability to provide for themselves due to the decimation of kangaroo herds and food-production habitat. by centralizing the distribution of rations, government reserves served as a strategy to control the everyday lives of indigenous people via controlling their access to food, and the institutionalization of reserves asserted settler sovereignty over the indigenous population. the civilizing mission of institutionalized reserves is therefore not at all contradictory to a locallydriven framework of colonial governance, because the definition of civilizing that institutionalized reserves operated upon was different from the definition of civilizing inherent in imperial indigenous policy. the locally-driven framework was a reaction to indigeneity as a threat to settler sovereignty, while imperial indigenous policy was an extension of liberal humanitarianism’s duty to spread enlightenment coupled with imperial capitalism’s financial interests. concluding remarks this paper is a response to laidlaw’s call for transcolonial analyses, mentioned in the introduction, by seeking to understand, on a global scale, the colonial desire to isolate indigenous people within reserves. as a response, it stands largely alone. there are few transcolonial histories written despite the many claims by historians that transcolonial analysis is necessary, and i set forth to write this paper with the intention to provide an example for historians who are new to this topic. transcolonial analysis is not an easy task: it involves juggling temporal, geographical, and thematic structures in a way that is not traditional in historical narrative. no matter the findings of my research, i hope that historians will use this paper to think critically about how to do this sort of analysis. my research found that, despite differences in local context, the institutionalized reserves of western bna and western australia were similar responses to settler concerns over sovereignty, including sovereignty over both land and culture, and that these local concerns over sovereignty subordinated and overrode imperial concerns over liberal humanitarianism and imperial capitalism. these findings are important for several reasons. in the ongoing movement towards reconciliation, it is common for settler-descendants to dismiss histories of colonialism as “something the british did a long time ago.” yet this paper illustrates how violent colonialism was a distinctly local/settler process which must be addressed by locals/settlers-descendants. furthermore, this paper refutes the common perception that colonization was all about land, and therefore reconciliation only involves 67 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 land claims. reconciliation involves land, but it also requires settler-descendants to recognize the violence of the imposition of settler sovereignty, and to acknowledge the historical sovereignties of indigenous nations. 68 the arbutus review • 2017 • vol. 8, no. 1 • http://dx.doi.org/10.18357/tar81201716801 references primary sources bond head, sir f. 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(1977). cavalry or police: keeping the peace on two adjacent frontiers, 1870-1900. journal of canadian studies, 12(2), 27-38. nettelbeck, a., & foster, r. (2012). food and governance on the frontiers of colonial australia and canada’s north west territories. aboriginal history 36, 21-41. satzewich, v. (1996). “where’s the beef?”: cattle killing, rations policy and first nations “criminality” in southern alberta, 1892-1895. journal of historical sociology 9(2), 188-212. 71 urban restructuring in post-war contexts:the case of sarajevo 303 hungarian geographical bulletin 63 (3) (2014) 303–317. doi: 10.15201/hungeobull.63.3.5 urban restructuring in post-war contexts: the case of sarajevo jordi martín-díaz1 abstract the transition from state-socialism to capitalism has not been the only process reshaping the urban landscapes in central and eastern europe but some cities were aff ected by war destructions, like in the caucus region or in the former yugoslavia. the case study of sarajevo, the capital of bosnia and herzegovina, is helpful to understand how the urban transformation is performed in post-war contexts, an arena neglected in the current literature on post-socialist cities. this paper aims at exploring the interplay between postsocialist urban restructuring and the peace-building process. it presents results of a series of fi eldworks conducted in sarajevo in 2010 and 2013. it is argued that in spite of the liberal policies implemented by the international community and the belated physical renewal, the transition from socialism to capitalism has been continuously undermined by the local power reconfi guration carried out during the war. the paper analyses the restructuring policies of the post-war period and its impact on the urban spatial structure. the fi rst two sections focus on the urban restructuring processes of post-socialist cities also in post-war contexts, in which the nature of the internationally-led reconstruction and peace-building is analysed as diff erential processes. finally, both processes are considered in the case of sarajevo in relation to the transformation of its urban structure. keywords: post-socialist cities, post-war reconstruction, peace-building, ethnic territorialisation, sarajevo introduction analysis of urban transformation in cities of central and eastern europe has been high on the agenda in the last decade (e.g. hamilton, i. 2005; stanilov, k. 2007; tsenkova, s. and nedović-budić, z. 2006). it has covered, either comparatively or in case studies, a wide range of topics, like the changes in the urban structure (hirt, s. 2006, 2008; kovács, z. 1994; sýkora, l. 2007), the 1 predoctoral fellow, university of barcelona, department of human geography. montalegre 6, barcelona 08001, spain. e-mail: jordi.martin@ub.edu 304 forces producing the transition (hamilton, i. 2005; tosics, i. 2005), new forms of socio-spatial segregation (marcinczak, s. et. al. 2013; sýkora, l. 2009), or more recently the emergence of gated communities as signifi cant manifestation of such segregation (hirt, s. 2012; kovács, z. 2014). however, cities aff ected by war (like grozny, mostar or sarajevo) have hardly att racted any att ention in the literature about post-socialist cities. the few academic papers available have been produced either from a peace-building perspective (e.g. moore, a. 2013) or with respect to the concept of divided cities (e.g. makas, e. 2011). therefore, this paper explores how post-socialist urban restructuring has been taking place in a post-war context and considers both peace-building and post-war reconstruction literature. it focuses on the case study city of sarajevo, the capital of bosnia and herzegovina, which was the target of a three-and-a-half years siege that ended with the signature of the dayton peace agreement (hereinaft er dpa) in december 1995. beyond the wide and lingering media coverage of the siege, sarajevo has not received any signifi cant academic att ention despite having experienced simultaneously the overlap of several transitions. none or few analyses have considered processes like its economic transition, the reconstruction of the city or the ethnic partitioning performed aft er the territorial organization set at the dpa. from the existing literature considering the city or its urban area during the war or post-war period bollens, s.a. (2006, 2007) focused on the role of urban planning in the construction of multi-cultural societies in conditions of ethnic or nationalist disputes, while anthropologists have published the most signifi cant number of works (armakolas, i. 2007; stefansson, a. 2007; maček, i. 2009; markowitz, f. 2010). in this regard, this paper presents preliminary results of a fi ve-month fi eldwork carried out in the city of sarajevo in 2010 and 2013. several methods have been applied in order to gather information on the urban transformation of the city, such as direct and fl uctuant observation or semi-structured interviews with local and international actors. i argue that despite the liberal policies implemented by the international community and the belated physical renewal, the transition from socialism to capitalism has been continuously being undermined by the local power reconfi guration conducted during the war. the paper is structured in four parts: the fi rst the urban restructuring process of post-socialist cities in central and eastern europe is introduced. subsequently, the focus turns towards internationally-led reconstruction and peace-building processes, as diff erential features of post-socialist cities aff ected by war. the third section focuses on the reconstruction policies in bosnia and sarajevo. finally, the economic restructuring agenda of the international community and its impact on the spatial urban structure is analysed. 305 urban restructuring in central and eastern europe the transition from state-socialism to capitalism resulted from the convergence of internal forces, i.e. eff orts made either by local or foreign actors to dismantle the socialist structures, and external forces, which refer to processes not specifi cally connected to the transition (hamilton, i. 2005; tosics, i. 2005). both forces have been progressively modifying the mechanisms producing the spatial forms for the market allocation, blurring the features of the socialist cities while acquiring the capitalist ones. the analyses of the restructuring produced in post-socialist cities should not be considered as unique in the sense that it followed the global trend of post-fordist de-industrialisation (kovács, z. 1999). thus, contemporary urban restructuring has been characterised by increasing internationalisation both in terms of capital and labour; changing power relations between public and private sector; industrial restructuring and an increasing social and economic polarisation or the emergence of post-modern urban landscapes characterised by new modes of urban culture and consumption (sýkora, l. 1994). these elements of the contemporary restructuring have progressively swept through the central and eastern european countries, having a major impact on the morphological features of their cities, which could be characterised during socialism by compactness, grand scale of public projects, absence of suburbanisation, visual monotony, and the oversupply of industrial areas and undersupply of commercial functions (szelényi, i. 1996). the diff erences in the intensity of integration into the global fl ows as well as the importance of path-dependency have created some regional variations. iván tosics (2005) presented eight sub-types of development in post-socialist cities. he featured the yugoslav cities, from which those from slovenia were excluded, as follows: slow transition towards the capitalist city-model due to armed confl icts, mass refugee movements and destroyed urban centres. very limited capital investments, fi rstly, there was a substantial local investment into illegal or unoffi cial property market. relatively quick privatisation of public housing to sitt ing tenants at the beginning of the 1990s, but deferred restitution, privatisation of enterprises and other public assets due to the war disputes. huge diff erentiation in incomes between the “formal” and the “informal” sectors, and very slow establishment of new type of public control over land market, planning and building process. the outcomes are densifi cation and sprawl through unregulated development, which are running parallel with some elements of the “third world” type of city development” (tosics, i. 2005, p. 73). in this context, while exploring how urban restructuring is performed in a post-war environment, this paper aims at addressing whether sarajevo constitutes a typical yugoslav post-socialist city. before analysing in which 306 way the changes in the urban spatial structure have occurred in the capital of bosnia and herzegovina, the nature of the reconstruction and peace-building processes is presented. urban restructuring in post-war environments when the war ends the reconstruction and the deployment of peace-building missions to sett le cease agreements become central for the future development of the war-torn societies. the reconstruction, defi ned at cambridge dictionary as the building or creation of something that has been damaged or destroyed, implies a recovery of the pre-war status quo. some practitioners and scholars are wary to use the concept reconstruction or rebuilding since pre-war political and societal structures are oft en at the core of violent confl icts. as a consequence, there is a diff erence between physical disasters and war-torn societies since in the former there is a restoration of institutional and physical infrastructures. as krishna kumar (1997) argues, reconstruction has three interrelated elements: the restoration, the structural reform – with the creation or dismantling of organisations, institutions and administrative structures – and the institution building, which involves improving the effi ciency and aff ectivity of existing institutions (kumar, k. 1997, p. 3). a similar approach is used by the director of the post-war reconstruction and development unit (prdu) at the university of york, sultan barakat (2010), who states that reconstruction is a “a range of holistic activities in an integrated process designed not only to reactivate economic and social development but also to create a peaceful environment that will prevent a relapse into violence" (barakat, s. 2010, p. 11). since war-torn societies experience a massive economic downturn and might have previous structural shortages, the role of international aid is determining in this process. among of the main organisations, the world bank assists mainly economic recovery and normalisation, "post-confl ict reconstruction supports the transition from confl ict to peace in an aff ected country through the rebuilding of socioeconomic framework society (...) reconstruction does not refer only to reconstruction of physical infrastructure. nor does it necessarily signify rebuilding of the socioeconomic framework that existed in a country prior to the onset of the confl ict (wb, 1998, p. 14). contrary, the un focuses on the importance of political reform, according to boutros-ghali defi nition of 1995 (barakat, s. 2010). despite being etymologically instable in post-war contexts, there is consensus in defi ning reconstruction as a restructuring process addressing the political, institutional and social conditions which generated confl icts. the comprehensive renewal scope in the post-war reconstruction eff ort is visible in the strategy set to rebuild bosnia. in this sense, the 5 billion usd priority 307 reconstruction of recovery program (prrp) coordinated by the world bank included projects focusing on employment generation and demobilisation support, energy, landmine clearing, telecommunications, transport, education, health, housing, water and waste management, agriculture and industry. the prrp had the challenge to restart economic transition to a market economy in a completely new social and political framework (wb, 1996). another signifi cant feature diff erentiating the transition to capitalism in post-war environments is the development of complex peace-building missions. the aim of these internationally-led operations is eliminating the main causes of confl icts, to promote the security of individuals, social groups and the state, and to nurture features that create the conditions for a stable peace (morphet, s. 2002). the rise of peace-building missions in the 1990s was a consequence of the volatility emerged aft er the collapse of the cold-war geopolitical order. actually, these missions were guided by the general notion that promoting liberalisation in countries aff ected by wars would create the conditions for a stable and lasting peace. as paris, r. (2004) concludes in his analysis of the fourteen peace-building missions developed between 1989 and 1999, this paradigm has not been a particularly eff ective model for establishing stable peace. it oft en created destabilising eff ects in war-shatt ered states while undermining the consolidation of peace or even renewed fi ghting. in the bosnian context, in which the urban restructuring of sarajevo is framed, the peace-building mission had the very same goals, promoting quick political and economic liberalisation as the formula to create a sustainable peace. the mission was coordinated by the offi ce of the high representative (ohr) set as the ad hoc body responsible of supervising and coordinating the civil aspects of the dpa. its role evolved from supervision of the civil organisations and agencies to direct governance (caplan, r. 2004). the empowerment of the high representative was a consequence of the challenges posed by local forces in the implementation of the state and peace-building agendas. hence the ohr directly intervened in most of the spheres of the civil implementation like economic reconstruction and development, resett lement of refugees and idp’s, civil administration, establishment of interim structures or the building of political institutions (donais, t. 2005). sarajevo: geography of war and reconstruction sarajevo’s urban structure refl ects the historically diverse urban growth, produced under the ott oman rule, the austro-hungarian monarchy, the kingdom of yugoslavia and the state-socialist period. the linear expansion towards the west along the valley eroded by the miljacka river has resulted in litt le destruction of its urban heritage (carreras, c. and moreno, s. 2007). during socialist 308 yugoslavia the city experienced the most excessive urban development in its history with a rise of population from 99,000 inhabitants to 244,000 between 1948 and 1975 (hamilton, f.e.i. 1979). in the census held before the war in 1991, the four central municipalities that constitute the city of sarajevo and are considered in the current analysis – stari grad, centar, novo sarajevo and novi grad – had altogether 361,000 inhabitants with a diverse ethnic background: 50 percent defi ned themselves as muslims, 25 percent as serbs, 13 percent as yugoslavs, 6 percent as croats and 4 percent as others2. the transition from socialism to capitalism took a fi rst major step in the former yugoslavia when the law on social capital was passed by the government of ante markovic, in 1989. however, the defeat of communist party by the nationalist parties in the fi rst multi-party elections, celebrated in 1990 at the republican level, stalemated the transition initiated by the yugoslav federal government. the situation in the city of sarajevo during the economic and political crisis of late 1980s and early 90s was features of a weak government (donia, r. 2006). in april 1992, aft er the recognition of the independence of bosnia and herzegovina, the war broke out in the former yugoslav republic, which triggered the lingering siege of sarajevo between april 1992 and december 1995. the siege was part of the strategy of the army of republika srpska to take some of the central areas of the city, causing 11,541 deaths and a wide destruction of its urban fabric. the dpa signed between the presidents of bosnia and herzegovina (alij a izetbegović), croatia (franjo tuđjman) and serbia (slobodan milošević) sett led the framework to end the hostilities and building a peaceful bosnia and herzegovina. despite having been envisioned as a un protectorate in previous peace negotiations, the city of sarajevo was territorially split at the outskirts of the central municipalities between the two entities in which bosnia was divided, the federation of bosnia and herzegovina (fbih) and the republika srpska (rs). aft er the siege the housing sector showed huge devastation through the war. three out of the four municipalities of sarajevo had a rate of building damages between 74 and 96 percent (img, 1999). the city, like the rest of the country, was heavily dependent on external aid in the process of reconstruction. the work to rebuild sarajevo, in fact, did not start with the signature of dpa. by 1994, a team coordinated by william eagleton, named as special coordinator for sarajevo, headed seven action groups with a local counterpart to assess and set an action plan to restore essential public services in the city of sarajevo. local and international cooperation continued during the post-war reconstruction process, with municipalities having architects and engineers working closely with international donors. donor task forces were established 2 current population and demographic data will be available from the fi rst census since 1991 held in october 2013. 309 to coordinate and lead the reconstruction of strategic sectors. the process of reconstruction did not imply a physical renewal since rebuilding of damaged and destroyed buildings had to be restored in the same way. this issue raised diverse visions, with the international donors more willing to use reconstruction to update materiality to new context and needs. the physical reconstruction, considered as the most successful fi eld of the international intervention, had both bilateral and multilateral aid programmes. the four-year prrp was the main multi-donor programme for reconstruction. its goal was to start the recovery process instead of restoring all infrastructures damaged, in order to generate local funds which should progressively replace the dependent aid economy, "it will be essential for the economy a growth momentum that can be sustained in the face of the inevitable future decline in external concessional assistance" (wb, 1998, p. viii). notwithstanding, the lack of aid invested in the industrial sector, which made up 2.3 percent of the prrp’s expenditure (icg, 1999) highlighted the restructuring nature of the programme since it neglected the main economic sector in the former yugoslav republic. the making of post-socialist sarajevo the restructuring initiated by the imf in late 1980s had hardly any results because of the nationalist escalation and fi nally it was halted by the dissolution of the country and the lingering armed confl ict. in bosnia, the political and economic liberalisation agenda was resumed well aft er the signature of the dpa, in a completely new social, political and territorial structure. in a framework of economic and aid dependence, local authorities were in control of the urban governance in the area of sarajevo, and rapidly defi ned the strategies for the future development of the city. therefore, in 1998 the “sarajevo canton development strategy until the year 2015” was passed, with the main goals of making the city a european metropolis, a profi table business environment and a pleasant living environment (ks, 2000). these visions were developed in fourteen points, in which environmental considerations and the promotion of a profi table economy were central (martín-díaz, j. et al. 2014). in the fi eld of economic development the plan identifi ed the introduction of an urban land market, or the strengthening of sectors like banking, fi nancing or those industries acceptable in economic and environmental terms as generating new urban development in the city (ks, 2000). in spite of the apparent commitment to economic and political transition by local powers, international actors were the sole force pushing for the transition to a market economy. actually ethno-national parties continued pursuing wartime goals by political means (leroux-martin, p. 2014), with the ethnic territorialisation or the accumulation by dispossession still being 310 performed. as a consequence, the international community became a very central actor in the governance of the country and the city. in order to solve the stalemate in the reforms set at the dpa, the high representative was granted with executive and legislative power in december 1997. the complexity of this process required overcoming the obstructionism of localised power structured by building of new institutions (donais, t. 2002). aft er the empowerment, the lingering legislative eff ort aimed at fostering the liberal and state-building agenda was started through the privatisation of public assets, the fi scal reform or the att raction of foreign capital (table 1). indeed, the power granted to the ohr found in the resistance of the ethno-parties a continuous force undermining the transition from socialism to capitalism. the poor performance of the economy, with a low capacity to att ract foreign capital despite the international intervention, shows the limits to build a market economy in a context of political instability and lack of local cooperation. in this sense, the foreign direct investment (fdi) exceeded the one billion euros threshold only in 2007, despite the several economic packages enacted by the ohr, while fdi has always been much below the remitt ances amount (wb, 2011). table 1. liberalisation policies in bosnia and herzegovina in the post-war period year law category 1997 fbih house of peoples adopts laws on the privatisation of enterprises, sale of apartments with tenants' rights, and citizens requests in the privatisation process privatisation of public assets 1998 ohr’s decision imposing the framework on privatisation of enterprises and banks in bih privatisation of public assets 1998 ohr’s decision imposing the draft law on the policy of foreign direct investment in bih economic liberalisation 1998 ohr’s decision establishing the privatisation monitoring commission privatisation of public assets 2000 ohr’s decision amending the framework law on privatisation of enterprises and banks by introducing a clause protecting investors privatisation of public assets 2001 ohr’s decision enacting the law on land registry in fbih and rs economic liberalisation 2003 ohr’s decision establishing the indirect tax policy commission fiscal reform 2003 ohr’s decision enacting the law on construction land of the fbih and rs creation real-estate market / privatisation of public assets 2004 ohr’s decision enacting the law on amendments to the law on the indirect taxation system in bih fiscal reform source: information from the ohr database. 311 liberalisation policies in the economy were implemented without considering the local circumstances, causing counterproductive outcomes like those produced in the quick privatisation process of public assets. in this sense the privatisation before institutionalisation (paris, r. 2004) became a tool for the local elites to consolidate their position (donais, t. 2002, 2005). as michael pugh (2005) pointed out in this controversial process, "the clientelist and neoliberal mechanisms for managing investment, shares, and profi ts are dissimilar. but the normative assumptions of the external actors and the interests of domestic elites coincide in extracting profi t from public goods and in fostering opportunities from privatization and discrimination against social ownership" (pugh, m. 2005, p. 467). the land management, in contrast, is an eloquent example of how liberalisation can be adapted to the implementation of the peace-building agenda. hence, the att empts to create a real-estate market were halted aft er the decision by the ohr to restrict land allocation in 1999. the purpose was preventing land allocations aimed at consolidating ethnic territorialisation (thuatail, g. and dahlman, c. 2006), which undermined the policies pursuing the rebuilding of a multi-ethnic bosnia and herzegovina. a central issue in the return of refugees and internally displaced persons (idp's) was the housing repossession, which had been prevented by the nationalist parties in order to preserve the ethnic reconfi guration achieved during the war. as a consequence of the eviction of those who had been sett led temporarily in sarajevo, the process of suburbanisation at the outskirts of the city or on the slopes, which existed already during socialist times, was restarted again in the late 1990s (martín-díaz, j. et al. 2014). aft er the four-year period of land management, the law on construction land enacted by the ohr in may 2003 allowed the privatisation of land (ohr, 2003), starting the major wave of real estate development in the city. most of the new urban projects built since then have been developed in the central areas of the narrow valley in which the city of sarajevo is stretching. they are especially concentrated in the municipalities of novi grad and novo sarajevo, developed during the socialist period. in order to analyse the features of the post-socialist functional transformation 109 new urban projects developed in the post-war period were identifi ed during the fi eld-work, and they were grouped in eight categories3 (figure 1). offi ce buildings represent 39 percent of new developments which is followed by commercial projects (21%), either supermarkets or shopping 3 the elaboration of the data base on new urban projects was produced during fi eldworks through several techniques, such as direct observations and semi-structured interviews. the selected projects are newly developed or redeveloped, with functional change or aesthetical upgrading (e.g. bbi center, photo 1). new single family dwellings were not considered. the qualitative information obtained was confi rmed through historical pictures from the siege (prstojević, m. 1994). 312 centres (photo 2). the third category is formed by multi-family housing (14%) developed in the last few years, mainly by private investors. considering mix-used developments, like the bosmal city centar (photo 3) or the importanne centar, offi ce and commercial projects reach three quarters of new post-war projects, highlighting the tertiarisation of the economy and the development of new modes of consumption. regarding the symbolic projects, temples and memorials count together 15 percent. even if symbolic projects were not quantitatively signifi cant, mosques funded by countries like saudi arabia, turkey or malaysia, have been widespread in the city. with exogenous architecture, like the mosques built with two minarets, these projects are rather controversial but they well refl ect the re-formulation of the city’s identity. most of the new projects have been developed by private investors only a few services, like a couple of schools or the so-called olympic pool, have been funded by some public money. the main developers, thus, are private (both local and international) and projects are oft en built without permit. regarding international investments, capitals from austria and islamic countries are prevalent. investors from malaysia or saudi arabia have been central in the development of the main new projects in the city, like the bosmal city centar or the sarajevo city centar, that were recently opened. fig. 1. location of new urban projects in post-war sarajevo 313 photo 2. new supermarkets in central sarajevo photo 1. the new bbi center in sarajevo photo 3. bosmal city centar in sarajevo (photos taken by the author) 314 considering the pace of transformation, information on sixty-six new urban projects was available at the data base of the sarajevo construction (sc, 2014). most of them have been built since 2005, which highlights the speed of growth of new urban projects resulting from liberalisation policies. these new urban projects have substantially transformed the urban structure and landscape of the four central municipalities constituting the city of sarajevo, leading to the densifi cation of the central areas and an increasing functional diversity so much characteristic for other post-socialist cities like sofi a (hirt, s. 2006), prague (sýkora, l. 2007), budapest (kovács, z. 1994) or belgrade (hirt, s. 2008). these new post-modern architectures have also brought about a signifi cant aesthetic transformation, implying globalisation and rising diversity in the predominantly traditional neighbourhoods. conclusions this paper investigated how the post-war reconstruction and peace-building missions deployed by the international community to rebuild war-torn societies generate restructuring processes following liberal principles. although cities aff ected by wars experience massive urban transformations beyond the physical destruction of their urban fabric, the liberal policies pursued by international organizations hardly consider local contexts. the complexity of the bosnian case, in which the ethno-national parties continued pursuing war goals by political means caused the embedding of the international community in the governance of the country. the development of sarajevo has been featured by succession of crisis since the late 1980s, in which the three-and-a-half year siege destroyed large part of the urban structure at the beginning of the 1990s. considering changes in the urban structure, the transformation of the city can be divided into two periods since the war ended in december 1995. the fi rst period focused on the main post-war challenges. the physical reconstruction was a priority of local and international actors. concurrently, some symbolic projects were built and the management of the return of idp's and refugees resumed forms of suburbanisation that had existed in socialist times. the second period, from 2003 onwards, was the result of the restructuring policies pursued by the international actors as the way to replace the aid dependent economy for a self-sustainable economy. the creation of a realestate market, belated by the strategy of the international community to avoid housing developments that fostered ethnic territorialisation, fi nally triggered a new wave of urban renewal. the emergence of private developers as key urban actors and the functional and aesthetical change characteristic also for other post-socialist cities have been the main features in sarajevo. 315 therefore, the transformation described by iván tosics in the exyugoslav cities (2005) – with slow transition towards the capitalist city-model, the limited capital investments at the beginning, the substantial investment of local people into illegal or unoffi cial property, or a parallel process of densifi cation and sprawl – has been largely identifi ed in the urban development of the city since the end of the war. sarajevo is a post-socialist city because of the political economy operating during state-socialism, and shaping the urban development of the city, since the late 1980s. the city has clearly acquired capitalist features as it was highlighted in the analysis about the changes in its urban spatial structure. however, sarajevo constitutes a particular case in the literature of post-socialist cities. the large transformation caused during the war has been undermining the eff ects of the policies adopted by international actors. there are evidences, like the poor att raction of fdi, pointing towards the current hybrid structure, the political instability and the incompleteness of the transition into a capitalist system. thus, further analyses are required for the bett er understanding of the ongoing transition, in issues such as the dialectics between local and international actors, or the relationship between new urban projects and the socio-ethnic and cultural transformations that started during the siege and are continuously reproduced by local politics and the split between the cities of sarajevo and east sarajevo. acknowledgements: this work has been fi nancially supported by the spanish ministry of education. the author would like to thank zoltán kovács for his invitation to participate in this special issue about post-socialist cities as well as in the eugeo 2013 congress in rome. references armakolas, i. 2007. sarajevo no more? identity and the experience of place among bosnian 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(3): 304–322. wb 1996. bosnia and herzegovina towards economic recovery. washington dc, world bank. 68 p. wb 1998. post-confl ict reconstruction: the role of the world bank. washington dc, world bank 70 p. wb 2011. the migration and remitt ances factbook. www.worldbank.org, accessed 30 may 2014. 318 hungary in maps edited by károly kocsis and ferenc schweitzer geographical research institute hungarian academy of sciences budapest, 2009. 212 p. ‘hungary in maps' is the latest volume in a series of atlases published by the geographical research institute of the hungarian academy of sciences. a unique publication, it combines the best features of the books and atlases that have been published in hungary during the last decades. this work provides a clear, masterly and comprehensive overview of present-day hungary by a distinguished team of contributors, presenting the results of research in the fi elds of geography, demography, economics, history, geophysics, geology, hydrology, meteorology, pedology and other earth sciences. the 172 lavish, full-colour maps and diagrams, along with 52 tables are complemented by clear, authoritative explanatory notes, revealing a fresh perspective on the anatomy of modern day hungary. although the emphasis is largely placed on contemporary hungary, important sections are devoted to the historical development of the natural and human environment as well. in its concentration and focus, this atlas was intended to act as hungary's 'business card', as the country's résumé, to serve as an information resource for the sophisticated general reader and to inform the international scientifi c community about the foremost challenges facing hungary today, both in a european context and on a global scale. examples of such intriguing topics are: stability and change in the ethnic and state territory, natural hazards, earthquakes, urgent fl ood control and water management tasks, land degradation, the state of nature conservation, international environmental confl icts, the general population decline, ageing, the increase in unemployment, the roma population at home and the situation of hungarian minorities abroad, new trends in urban development, controversial economic and social consequences as a result of the transition to a market economy, privatisation, the massive infl ux of foreign direct investment, perspectives on the exploitation of mineral resources, problems in the energy supply and electricity generation, increasing spatial concentration focused on budapest in the fi eld of services (e.g. in banking, retail, transport and telecommunications networks), and fi nally the shaping of an internationally competitive tourism industry, thus making hungary more att ractive to visit. this project serves as a preliminary study for the new, 3rd edition of the national atlas of hungary, that is to be co-ordinated by the geographical research institute of the hungarian academy of sciences. 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(adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice key: cord-0058008-xzaanunt authors: shulzhenko, vyacheslav i.; avsharov, arsen g.; kontsevich, galina e.; sumskaya, marina yu.; savchenko, tatyana d. title: the economy of pleasure in the era of posthumanism: about the metamorphoses of the human potential of the near future date: 2021-02-03 journal: modern global economic system: evolutional development vs doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-69415-9_22 sha: e53cef679bca5cb3b071361c3f82bd5a4852a13b doc_id: 58008 cord_uid: xzaanunt purpose: the article explores the humanistic nature of pleasure economics in terms of unlocking human potential in the ambiguous conditions of posthumanism and the ongoing tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic. design/methodology/approach: the economy of pleasure is seen as a concept with a resource of novelty, manifesting itself in the most divergent regimes of knowledge: politics, poetry, psychoanalysis and, of course, ethics. this allows you to analyze an object from multiple disciplinary positions at once. purely economic discourse is naturally present, but rather in a somewhat indirect form. findings: the economy of pleasure is akin to innovative art practices in art. its appearance can also be considered the generation of a collective traumatic experience gained by huge masses of people in the conditions of modern capitalism. the authors understand the economy of pleasure as a socio-personal creative in the economic sphere, an action with obvious humanitarian intentions. originality/value: the economy of pleasure is becoming a powerful lever of confidence-building in a society so badly undermined in recent decades of rampant consumption. that is why its loci will increase the level of solidarity, without which neither self-organization of society nor elementary civic activism is possible. it is this type of economic creativity that is considered in the article as a priority in the scenarios of the «post-coronavirus» existence of the immediate future of global civilization. the conference, organized by the institute of scientific communications in the fall of 2019 in prague (czech republic), dedicated to the economy of pleasure, was one of the first collective intellectual impulses to challenge the post-humanist culture that is increasingly entering its rights. also, the topic of the speeches seems to be deeply logical, combining many economists into a single scientific field, from various points of view describing the phenomenon of pleasure economics (hereinafter referred to as pe). the reports dealt with various aspects of this phenomenon: from management paradigms and modeling the behavior of participants to the design of the necessary laws on tax liberalization and the role of creative technologies in the pe space. performances in which the very concept of "pleasure in business" was decoded from different sides are highly appreciated: both as a worldview position, as a motive for entrepreneurial activity, and as a measure of revealing entrepreneurial talent. productive communication, in our opinion, was made possible by the fact that the material prepared by almost every rapporteur conceptually affected all of us not indifferent to the future. thinking about him at all times has been updated, especially today, when the future is literally happening before our eyes, and radical changes in everyday life sharply raise the question of the humanitarian foundations of the world to come, with its new ethics and new technologies. we see the pe as the brightest phenomenon of individual behavior in the era of the structural crisis of capitalism, which, on the one hand, led to an increase in social inequality and, on the other, to the establishment of the post-humanism era, with its property of forming new human communities, as well as complex human relationships, in which computer technology and artificial intelligence play a huge role. in this sense, e.g. popkova's reference to the book «economics of present continuous», which sets out the hypothesis about the extreme importance of the temporal (diachronic) aspect in economics, seems very timely to us. it is it that allows you to more adequately measure the magnitude of differences in the level of socio-economic development of various economic systems, as well as more reliably predict their further development. naturally, in this case, this temporal aspect is not of interest to us, but the very fact of reminding us of the «originality» of a given historical time, and therefore of the change of the paradigm of priorities in it, is significant. in addition, we cannot be indifferent to the philosophical concept of institutional human being, which is now again receiving unusual relevance, which is very timely for pe. it contributes to a more accurate identification of the anthropological type that appeals to her -pe -meaning, thereby unexpectedly reviving interest in the symbolic capital described by p. bourdieu at one time. the analysis of the prague reports mentioned above allowed us to conclude that the phenomenon of pe cannot be considered only in the framework of economic discourse. from the very beginning of his appearance, he claimed to be meaningful in different disciplinary fields, at the junction of various fields of scientific knowledge such as, for example, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and even ethnography, which we will still say below. the question also naturally arises about the language of description, since the traditional toolkit, dealing with such objects, does not cope with this task. that is, if you consider pe as a concept that has a resource of novelty, then its manifestations will certainly be revealed in the seemingly most divergent modes of knowledge: politics, poetry, psychoanalysis and, of course, ethics. "in modern ethical concepts," writes d. golynko-wolfson, summing up the studies of a. badew, d. agamben, j. lacan, kant's moral imperative gives way to spinozist ethics of affections, to which philosophy and art constantly appeal today. ethical gesture is now often understood as the position of active, sometimes even fanatical complicity in social processes. this is the ethics of super-effort -irreconcilable, resistive, often doomed and therefore existentially successful "(golynko-wolfson 2016)". at the same time, we note that in purely "economic" works we are talking about an institutional person at best, opposed to the "neoclassical" model of individual choice, summarized in the concept of "economic person" (inshakov 2010) . from the point of view of futurology, such a personality type that forms before our eyes is only one and can withstand entropy processes that threaten even in our native caucasus with compression and reduction of traditional amplitudes. references to the special "ethics of entrepreneurship" cannot satisfy us either. so, the modern french sociologist and philosopher of science bruno latour argues the incompatibility of two models -the "person of culture," which underlies the pe, and the "economic person." the very immersion of man in culture means his inclusion in a certain context, in which politics, religion, technology, landscape are closely intertwined: "culture is part of the knowing subject, and the latter must reconsider the foundations of his own thinking in order to understand the influence of culture on other people. the refusal of such a review often leads to errors" (orekhovsky 2017) . the pe does not have a universal generating and universally applicable principle. it is understood here as one of the types of "humanitarian invention" (m. epstein), which in the era of posthumanism is based on meanings and principles other than before. in one form or another, pe, obviously, always existed in previous civilizations, but only in our time it began to be perceived as a form of specific cultural practice. this creates a new discursive approach, accompanied by new rhetoric, not only, naturally, verbal, but also including the entire variety of modern communication technologies. however, it is impossible to master this discourse as a way of life without buying up the humanistic ideals and values of the anthropocene, the rights of d. golynko-wolfson, now in the days of the rapid spread of the coronavirus pandemic -or in the deepest crisis or, more clearly, in the stage of very painful, especially for older generations, extinction. let us allow ourselves a slight retreat of a historical and scientific nature. the pe is based on the property of a person described by the english economist j. bentham in a situation of making an important (often fateful!) decision to rely on his own feelings, including (and, obviously, not in the last places) altruistic intentions that bear the meaning of kindness and give the personalities exercising it an extremely important sense of their own organic fit in the world around them. the conversation about cognitive psychology seems absolutely timely in this context, because the preferences of people in pe are extremely flexible and depend on the situation. here, in our opinion, it is extremely important to take into account the preferences in the emergence of which memories have a significant role, even if they are often biased. our empirical experience indicates that due to this, due to the fiasco of the idea, the entrepreneur is upset much more than he rejoices in its successful implementation. perhaps this is influenced by the fact that he most often focuses on the only option in the mind, without even thinking about other possibilities, simply ignoring them. also, the utility of the planned product is not always assessed by the entrepreneur, and here past experience is not always a useful criterion. a case or event in life in memory can be distorted by some bright moment or emotion -and then the selection process itself is irrational. pe is akin to innovative art practices in art. its appearance can also be considered the generation of a collective traumatic experience gained by huge masses of people in the conditions of modern capitalism. even after the unexpected comparison that once came to mind, the usual attitude -not always, i admit, positive -generally towards an artistic experiment as such has changed. his nature suddenly presented itself not in the dionysian lacunae of aesthetic, but in the paradoxical reactions of creative personalities to all the crushing material and material dominance in the world around us. the elements that now form this segment of the economy ("pleasures") appear to be a kind of opposition to the infrastructures of creative capitalism, creating a still difficult-todefine alternative to the production of innovative intellectual capital. only note that here it is necessary to realize the new connotations of the concept of "humanism," not to give it to the so-called creative industries and make it an attribute of luxury, as shown in the wonderful film "the best offer," where spiritual rebirth occurs with a typical "capitalist shark," an elderly auctioneer and collector of paintings genius played by jeffrey rush. in this sense, the economy of pleasure visibly gravitates still to the more familiar cognitive capitalism for most of us, which, on the contrary, contrasts accelerationism with confidence in the ability of humanitarian knowledge to transform into a successful creative product. it also has a considerable resource in order to increase the potential of creative skills and abilities so demanded in any of the pe projects. it is time to emphasize here that the potential of pe will become even more tangible if we recall such widespread subcultures today. we understand it to a large extent as a socio-personal creative in the economic sphere, an action with obvious humanitarian intentions, which, incidentally, should be formed by a modern university as well. pe is becoming a powerful lever for building trust in a society so badly undermined in recent decades of rampant consumption. moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that without the restoration of the category of trust, the successful functioning of modern democratic institutions is unlikely to be possible. in this sense, it is the loci of the pe, in our opinion, that will increase the level of solidarity, without which neither self-organization of society nor elementary civic activism is possible. just as inevitably, in our case, all activities that stem from the very essence of marketing and everything related to it are programmed. the specifics are seen to us in his philosophy, reflecting the spirit and values of the coming era of posthumanism. we proceed from the understanding of the pe phenomenon in the future of the continued expansion of the boundaries of industrialization of new symbolic benefits and their transformation into consumer goods. eu, carrying at its core a powerful ethnocultural dominant, obviously opposes globalism. as evidenced by the empirical material we analyzed, the most high-profile and vibrant projects in the pe are most often closely related to the features of mentality, living conditions, landscape, climate, nutrition, leisure, entertainment and even beliefs (shamanism in the cultural industry of siberian peoples). hence the striking difference in the design register of eu of different regions. so, writes french researcher b. miège, in africa they are reduced "to supporting popular music, cultural tourism and fashion, in india -to art, in china -to software, in brazil -to architectural design, and in some european countries -to the expansion of luxury goods, which was related to different categories of design" (miège 2018). it is not surprising that due to such a mosaic presentation of various types and methods of pe as an applied sphere, it is interpreted differently, without finding definitions that suit everyone. but in any case, it seems completely unacceptable to us to exclude pes from the field of creative industries on the grounds that they lack the basis inherent in, supposedly, traditional industrial production. insisting on this, miège just mentioned warns opponents of an inevitable clash "with various kinds of synergy of neo-craft localized industries of heterogeneous symbolic benefits" (miège 2018), which, on the contrary, we consider almost the fundamental sign of the pe. moreover, its proximity to creative industries seems unconditional to us, primarily due to the perception of the pe through the prism of humanitarian discourse, the scientific viability of which ensures the relevance of describing the symbolic nature of these most creative benefits, which is so demanded by society. which, of course, does not eliminate the existing methodological and theoretical doubts related to their production and consumption, as well as the search for areas of research that, as we said at the very beginning, have a pronounced interdisciplinary character. posthumanism has made adjustments to the concepts of demand and sociality of marketing. especially in the latter, the essence of which today is interpreted rather than in the framework of meeting the needs and sociological methods of collecting and analyzing information, as it was only recently, but in the sharply marked differentiation of needs. the markers of this differentiation, only to clarify, now include such concepts as "lifestyle," "ethnocultural and mental orientations," "image," "behaviors," etc. it is not difficult to get an idea of the pe as a type of social marketing that appeals to culture, art, education, health care, religion, sports, leisure, etc., from the list below. such marketing finds its implementation in specific -non-profit (non-profit) forms of entrepreneurship, which are just the foundation of the pe. true, the pe itself does not think about any institutional recognition. in any case, so far, which is indirectly confirmed by her unwillingness to demonstrate at the limit of openness that she is nevertheless a completely different emotional-sensual, mental component of the "other" entrepreneurial concept. it is no coincidence that eu, as an economic and sociocultural phenomenon, declares itself in full voice when british left-wing accelerationists a. williams and n. srnichek publish a book that, in fact, buries humanitarian knowledge, denying him investment attractiveness and high profitability. but it is the high ideals of humanitarian knowledge, in our opinion, that is not so difficult to see the idea of hardly every project in the economy of pleasure. in this sense, the pe still gravitates towards the more familiar cognitive capitalism for most of us, which, on the contrary, contrasts accelerationism with confidence in the ability of humanitarian knowledge to transform into a successful creative product. it also has a considerable resource in order to increase the so-called in any of the pe projects. without setting out in this article the goals of their detailed description, we will name, nevertheless, the most significant of them. firstly, this is the field of education and the dissemination of knowledge. the opening of its own network of art studios, a bureau for the revision of impeding people's installations, consultations to increase personal efficiency, the holding of master classes, where, thanks to inspiring examples and exercises, it is possible to dramatically increase the effectiveness of creative potentials. active, indifferent to someone else's pain people open hospices, create effectively working kindergartens, studios, laboratories of modern dance and much more. or, secondly, in the mountainous villages of the caucasus, which are of interest to tourists with their natural landscape, the originality of flora and fauna, the originality of national cuisine and rites, numerous "guest houses" are created (shulzhenko 2013) . in the sense of benefits, they pursue the creation of a favorable moral and spiritual environment for the families of the owners of such houses to educate the younger generation, acquire intercultural communication skills, and adapt children to modern communicative practices. we do not seem to neglect the serious transformations that marketing itself has undergone at the junction of the 20th-21st centuries. the "marketing modernism" formed by global capitalism was based on the idea of maximizing the satisfaction of material and irrational needs. his idea was the slogan "freedom of consumption!," or, otherwise, that is, the right and possibility of unlimited consumption has become the most important attribute of human freedom. or slightly differently -the wider the boundaries of my consumption, the freer i am as a person in the space of modern society. the established post-humanist culture of such marketing is already perceived by archaism, seriously questioning the very concept of the limitlessness of human consumption, one of the evidence of which is the consolidation of the position of the eu. it was based on the obvious, but not causing in the heyday of "homo economicus" the natural tendency of man to altruism and limited consumption, in no way, we emphasize, not related to limited solvency, but with sharply reduced consumer motivation. she received public identity, cultivating the freedom of consumption antithesis of consumer independence, the fundamental "freedom of non-use." or, probably, more precisely, "freedom of sufficient consumption." simultaneously with the change in consumer reflexes, which seriously affects the purely economic component of marketing, the significance of the communicative and, therefore, psychological components that have always determined the essence of the cultural space has become much more relevant. it is they who are very interesting and multilaterally explored today in the direction of "behavioral economics," which arose at the intersection of interdisciplinary interactions. this is not just a synthesis of psychology and economics, but, above all, a study of not so much empirical material about the processes of decision-making and the implementation of a huge number of humanitarian projects recently, which are covered, perhaps, by the not-so-accurate concept of "pleasure economics." sometimes it seems that the pe is the very means that will help to deeply transform russian society, unlike the western one, which has not gone so far from tradition. here, along with the transformations of society itself, the autoreflection underlying the pe is also in demand -a kind of "prelude" to the realization of the other, which, according to levinas, should be compared even with the "sacrifice" of himself to this other himself. in other words, the pe all the time offers an appeal to ethical, since the very design of the concept of a business project in it closely interacts with the ethical credo of the individual. in the hypothetical variety of scenarios for the "post-coronavirus" existence of a person in exact accordance with the most important ideas, such a plot is not ruled out by us more and more loudly declaring post-humanitarian knowledge. the collective historical trauma experienced by all mankind, the symptoms of which are already acutely felt by some of us, will require various forms of reflection of cultural experience. at least in the same very popular genre of "challenge," which is an internet video created by a blogger on the idea of collaborating. their extraordinary visual embodiment, game form and thematic diversity, even in the absence of a financial component, contributes to the cohesion of people, strengthening their faith in the future. the 21st century, which began with a feeling of an increasing marketing crisis, in which the psycho-ethical component sounded louder and more demanding, by the beginning of its third decade demonstrates a significant variety of forms and types of human factor in the economy of modern society. the age of consumption, with its postulates of happiness, independence, unlimited enjoyment, has apparently exhausted its values, and the time comes to realize other properties and capabilities of human potential. such evidence of the temporality of thinking, which is occupied by many social philosophers and historians, is extremely important for understanding the painful issues of human existence in the modern world. among them is the nature of the economy, which requires radical changes, is aware of the shamefulness and immorality of its previous guidelines. gazprom's signature slogan "dreams come true," in our opinion, is no longer perceived in a material and pragmatic context, but is associated with a person's desire to become more perfect, more mentally clean, more ethically impeccable. this was meant by nobel laureate muhammad yunus in an interview with rbc, speaking of guilt for the capitalization of the capitalist system's profits in spreading poverty, which denies people's altruism, mercy and care (yunus 2020) . at the same time, the culture of entrepreneurship is being suppressed, the opening and development of small, but own business seems to be an incredibly difficult task. all this has the most direct relation to the pe, the essence of which reflects, if you recall the once very popular a. maslow, the highest level of human needs -the need for selfrealization. recent research by university of illinois scientists has only confirmed its enormous importance for millions of people, even if many of them were not satisfied with the most seemingly fundamental needs. we need to also note that the strengthening of the categorical status of the pe in the scientific community is directly related to the post-capitalist world that is becoming before our eyes, more precisely, to one of its main properties-states, which can briefly be defined as "without work." it prompted many representatives of humanitarian and creative professions, the intangible and affective nature of whose work made reality their inevitable drift into precariousness, to find their place in life. the ambitious desire to prove the investment attractiveness of their professional competencies played a clearly non-final role here. thus, as we were able to show, pe being one of the types of innovative marketing deliberately replaces the concept of satiety with the concept of creative dissatisfaction. of course, while still in search of its optimal paradigm of implementation, because each project in this area has a pronounced personal component, sometimes fraught with hoax, sublimation, involuntary falsification. at the same time, maintaining the belief that the creators and creators of the pe will be able to make the era of post-humanism era of mercy. humanitarian knowledge as a (demon) mineral institute and institute: problems of categorical differentiation and integration a new theory of consumption: the economics of pain and pleasure creative industries: searching for the stability of a concept communications actor-network approach by b. latour and the "cultural factor" in the analysis of economic processes coincidence? i don't think: interview with the philosopher yoel regev the shahid: a profile nobel peace prize winner calls capitalism the cause of poverty baltic journal of economic studies 165 vol. 7 no. 4, 2021 corresponding author: 1 private higher educational establishment-institute ”ukrainian-american concordia university”, ukraine. e-mail: oleksandr.romanovskyi@uacu.edu.ua orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3618-2999 2 national pedagogical dragomanov university, ukraine. e-mail: yuliia.romanovska@uacu.edu.ua orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0207-3348 3 private higher educational establishment-institute ”ukrainian-american concordia university”, ukraine. e-mail: internship_wiuu@hotmail.com orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3614-544x doi: https://doi.org/10.30525/2256-0742/2021-7-4-165-175 academic capitalism as a driver of transformational change in the complex system of higher education and science oleksandr romanovskyi1, yuliia romanovska2, oleksandra romanovska3 abstract. the purpose of the work is to study the complex essence of higher education as an integral part of the anthroposphere (technosphere); to define the main fundamental tasks of innovative academic (university) entrepreneurship; to study the main types of innovations initiated by academic capitalism in the higher education system, which can lead to innovative changes and its classification; to determine the main objects of innovation activity in the field of higher education and science and expedient directions of further innovative development of higher education in ukraine; to study the types of innovations in the higher education system. innovative transformations in the sphere of higher education and science are considered by the authors as objectively conditioned transformational changes caused by the environment of academic capitalism. the core of the study is academic or university entrepreneurship based on the market relations spread by academic capitalism in the sphere of scientific and educational activities of universities, research institutes and other institutions and organizations of this field. an important basis of scientific work is the application to national conditions of the triple helix model of innovation of n. etzkowitz on the innovative development of society. scientific novelty consists of the following: the world experience of innovative transformations in the sphere of higher education and science occurring under conditions of academic capitalism is studied; theoretical data for new approaches in understanding of innovative transformations in the sphere of higher education and science which are economic categories and occur under market laws are formulated and offered; new approaches for further innovative reformation of higher education and science under conditions of academic capitalism are offered. a new scientific term of "innovatics of higher education" has been put into circulation. provisions on the uniqueness of the essence of higher education, the main fundamental tasks of innovative academic (university) entrepreneurship, the types of innovations initiated by academic capitalism in higher education that can lead to innovative changes, and their classification of both theoretical and practical importance for the development of domestic science and higher education are proposed. the main objects of innovative activity in the sphere of higher education and science, the corresponding directions of further innovative development of higher education in ukraine, as well as the types of innovations in higher education that can lead to innovative changes are also defined. key words: academic capitalism, entrepreneurial university, innovations, higher education and science, technosphere. jel classification: i21, i25 1. introduction the environment of academic capitalism, which covers virtually the entire sphere of science and higher education, has had both positive and negative effects on them. academic capitalism has sharply accelerated the commercialization of applied research and development results of universities and research institutes and has allowed these organizations and institutions to significantly capitalize their intellectual capital. this has given rise to progressive innovations baltic journal of economic studies 166 vol. 7 no. 4, 2021 and outstanding inventions. for example, there is an intensive innovative development in the higher education system, which can certainly be attributed to the positive influence of academic capitalism on the development of the material, technical, scientific and engineering potential of universities and colleges. on the other hand, the pursuit of profit and the general search for opportunities to commercialize r&d results, mainly the results of applied research and experimental development, leads to a significant decrease in demand and attention to the development of basic science and the search for basic scientific values. this leads to a slowdown in the production of new fundamental knowledge and inhibits the intellectual development of society and leads to a legitimate criticism of the influence of academic capitalism on science and higher education. the excessive entrepreneurial activity of universities in the direction of profits from the development and commercialization of applied research instead of pure science and fundamental research leads to the loss of the position of universities and colleges as "temples of science". however, there are still many truly academic institutions (higher education institutions and research institutes) that continue to conduct the kind of basic research that is difficult to commercialize, but which constitutes true "scientific knowledge", or in other words, human knowledge. this article analyzes innovative changes in the system of higher education and science, an integral part of the anthroposphere (technosphere), caused by the spread of academic capitalism. possible directions and essence of innovative transformations in the sphere of higher education and science are investigated, and the negative influence of academic capitalism on this sphere of public activity is analyzed. the relevance of the topic is related to the need to implement innovative transformations in the system of higher education and science to improve its level, as well as for efficiency and further integration into the european and world system of higher education and science. on the basis of study and analysis of the theory and practice of innovative development of higher education and science systems of the leading countries in the world it is necessary to develop principles, directions and objectives for innovative development of higher education and science in ukraine to create and implement national programs of change in this field. 2. analysis of the main results of previous research and used literature (core sources) on the topic of work the period of "academic capitalism", caused by the commercialization of the results of budgetary and many other types of university research, began after world war ii. the impetus for the rapid development of entrepreneurship in science and education came from one of the best pieces of u.s. legislation, the bayh-dole act, commonly known as the patent and trademark law amendments act (a federal law enacted in 1980). as s. ezell points out, this law "allows universities, nonprofit research institutions, and small businesses to own, patent, and commercialize inventions developed as part of federally funded research programs in their organizations" (ezell, 2019). this was the beginning of the rapid development of applied research, the results of which could be turned into new developments and technologies for further commercialization. historically, academic capitalism emerged in the united states as a particular intellectual subtype (milieu) of the capitalist system. it is characterized by the extension of the laws and rules of the market economy to higher education and science. previously, higher education and science belonged to the non-profit sphere of intellectual activity and were designed to find, generate and disseminate knowledge for the benefit of all mankind. higher education institutions (heis) and scientific institutions (sis) were transformed from "temples of knowledge" into participants in the market of educational and scientific services with its inherent strict economic rules. the definition of "academic capitalism" was introduced in 1997 by s. slaughter and l. leslie (slaughter, leslie, 1997), who offered the following interpretation: "to maintain or expand resources, educators increasingly have to compete for outside money that comes from market research, variously called applied, commercial, strategic, and targeted research, whether that money came in the form of research grants and contracts, service contracts, partnerships with industry and government, technology transfer, or attracting more and more students paying higher fees. it is what the institutional and professorial market or market-like efforts to attract outside money that we have termed academic capitalism" (p. 17). in their books s. slaughter and leslie (slaughter, leslie, 1997), s. slaughter and g. rhoades (slaughter, rhoades, 2009) state the following: "innovative transformations in universities under the influence of the spread of market relations in the humanities spheres of society and the emergence in the second half of the twentieth century of a new type of capitalist relations in scientific, intellectual, technological and educational spheres – academic capitalism. in addition, there is a real opportunity to commercialize the results of r&d, which leads to the rapid development of the university and academic science and technology ". market relations in science and education, the ability to commercialize the results of intellectual activities of universities and research organizations have led to the spread of academic or university entrepreneurship and baltic journal of economic studies 167 vol. 7 no. 4, 2021 the accelerated formation of a favorable innovation climate, that is, the accelerated emergence of innovation and its wide spread in many areas of society. the contribution of innovations developed and implemented by universities and research organizations, for example, to the u.s. economy brought billions of dollars and accelerated the development of applied science and new technologies. gradually, the influence of academic capitalism began to spread to other countries. academic capitalism has transformed higher education and science into an environment of academic innovation. universities and scientific organizations were transformed from "temples of science" into academic innovation entrepreneurial institutions. it is known that j. schumpeter was the first to develop a complete description of innovation processes (he analyzed "new combinations" of changes in the development of economic systems). referring to j. schumpeter's book (schumpeter, 1934), j. fagerberg (fagerberg, 2008) emphasizes as follows: "first of all, he added the definition of innovation (or "development" as he originally formulated it) as new combinations of new or existing knowledge, resources, equipment and so on. second, he pointed out that innovation must be distinguished from invention. the reason schumpeter emphasized this distinction is that he viewed innovation as a specific social activity (function) carried out in the economic sphere and having a commercial purpose, while inventions can be carried out everywhere and without the intention of commercialization. thus, for schumpeter, innovation is new combinations of knowledge, resources, etc. that are attempted (or put into practice) for commercialization. he called this combinatorial activity the entrepreneurial function, and the social agents who perform this function the entrepreneurs" (fagerberg, 2008). later, j. schumpeter (schumpeter, 1976) and h. mensch (mensch, 1979) introduced the term "innovation", which was defined as the embodiment of scientific discovery in a new technology or product. there are many publications devoted both to the problems of academic capitalism and to the experience of commercialization of innovations in university research activities (r&d). however, a comprehensive study of different types, forms, and directions of innovation activity in the sphere of higher education and science, including heis and scientific organizations (sos) involved in the environment of academic capitalism, has not been performed yet. the authors of this work have conducted a longterm study of the best practices of innovative activities of institutions and organizations in the sphere of higher education and science in developed countries. as a result, a new interdisciplinary scientific and applied direction "innovatiсs of higher education" was brought to public discussion by o. romanovskyi & yu. romanovska (romanovskyi o., romanovska yu., 2020; romanovskyi o., romanovska yu., roma novska o., makhdi m.e., 2021). in this paper, the authors offer further development and specification of theoretical and practical provisions of innovative development of higher education, identifying the unique features and functions of higher education in modern society under conditions of academic capitalism. the authors believe that the findings and recommendations of this study are useful for specialists in higher education and science systems in developed countries, as well as in developing countries. a background report prepared for the second global education industry summit, held september 26-27, 2016 in jerusalem, states the following: "reviews the available evidence on innovation in education, the impact of digital technologies on teaching and learning, and the role of digital skills and the education industry in the innovation process, using oecd survey data" (oecd, 2016). "a better understanding of the education industry, including its market structures and innovation processes, will help create a more developed relationship with the education sector. innovation in the industry which develops products and services that can drive innovation in schools does not happen in isolation from what happens in the education sector. only when education systems develop an innovationfriendly culture, supported by an innovation-friendly business environment and policies, will industries begin to engage in risky research and development. governments can support this by fostering a climate of entrepreneurship and innovation in education" (p. 10). in addition, the report emphasizes that: "innovation in the public sector, and in education in particular, can be a major contributor to significant welfare gains. governments provide a large number of services in oecd countries, and these services account for a significant share of national income" (p. 13). important theoretical studies, as well as practical recommendations and original methodology in the field of creating innovative entrepreneurial universities were carried out by the pioneer in this field burton r . clark (clark, 1998, 2000, 2004). theoretical and practical approaches to the problems of innovative development of society under the "triple helix model" proposed by henry etzkowitz (etzkowitz, 2003, 2008, 2019), viale and etzkowitz (viale, etzkowitz, 2010), dzisah and etzkowitz (dzisah, etzkowitz, 2012), cadorin et. al. (cadorin, klofsten, albahari, etzkowitz, 2019), became the fundamental directions of innovative university entrepreneurship development, which significantly increased the role of universities in the innovative development of society. baltic journal of economic studies 168 vol. 7 no. 4, 2021 3. analysis of recent studies and publications considering the latest publications in the scientific literature, it should be noted that an article by s. graek (grajek, 2020) explores how universities are rapidly moving towards digital transformation. the following works are devoted to a critical study of the problems of academic capitalism. in "on academic capitalism", b. jessop highlights the following: "the growing trend toward academic capitalism and profit-oriented entrepreneurial practices in education and research discussed in the paper. this is happening as universities, in different ways and subject to more or less financial, administrative, and ideological pressure, behave less and less like centers of disinterested education and research and more like economic enterprises that seek to maximize their income and/or increase the economic competitiveness of the environment in which they operate". ( jessop, 2018). the article of p. somers et. al. (somers, davis, fry, jasinski, lee, 2018) defines "academic capitalism and a review of the research literature, presents perspectives on academic capitalism in the americas, and discusses the implications of academic capitalism for latin america. estimates of the usefulness of academic capitalism for brazil are given" (somers, davis, fry, jasinski, lee, 2018). in the following article (sigahi, t.f.a.c., saltorato, 2020), the authors conducted a systematic review of the literature on academic capitalism and proposed two classification schemes based on: a) analytical levels (macrostructural, organizational, individual) and actors; b) themes and contributions, research and reflection, building a theoretical framework, research themes and applications, emerging trends. this study can help not only to explore the characteristics of academic capitalism, but also to understand several ways in which neoliberal restructuring in universities. in his work, r . münch describes the most important features of academic capitalism and their impact on science as well as on the evolution of scientific knowledge, and notes that "academic capitalism is at the intersection of research, economic profit maximization, and innovation policy ", and examines the institutional conflicts of interest associated with corporate funding of research. he argues that "academic capitalism is a unique hybrid that combines the scientific search for truth and the economic maximization of profit and turns universities into businesses competing for capital accumulation and businesses into knowledge producers seeking discoveries that can be turned into patents and profitable goods" (münch, 2020). the report "structure of european educational systems 2020/21" provides information about the structure of the pan-european educational systems, from pre-school to higher education, for the academic year 2020/21. it includes national charts and a guideline for reading the charts. it also includes a map illustrating the main organizational models for primary and lower secondary education in europe: " unified structured education", "provision of a common core curriculum", and "differentiated lower secondary education". information is available for 43 european education systems, covering 38 countries participating in the eu erasmus+ program. the content of the report corresponds to the mission of the eurydice network (to understand and explain how the different education systems in europe are organized and how they work) (the structure of the european education systems 2020/21). the work (cai, ma, chen, 2020) considers higher education as an "engine" of innovation and a "catalyst" of sustainability development. the integration of the roles of "innovation engine" and "sustainability catalyst" is best reflected in the participation of higher education in innovation ecosystems. the theme of this special edition examines this topic from a variety of perspectives. this paper outlines a general concept of the relationship between higher education and the innovation ecosystem. a new definition of the innovation ecosystem is given and the three roles of universities in innovation ecosystems are identified based on a synthesis of relevant literature. the purpose of the work is to study the complex essence of higher education as an integral part of the anthroposphere (technosphere); to determine the main fundamental tasks of innovative academic (university) entrepreneurship; to study the main types of innovations initiated by academic capitalism in the system of higher education that can lead to innovative changes and their classification; to determine the main objects of innovative activity in the sphere of higher education and science and expedient directions of further innovative development of higher education in ukraine; to study the types of innovations in the system of higher education that can lead to innovative changes. scientific novelty lies in the following: the authors have studied the world experience of innovative transformations in higher education and science occurring under conditions of academic capitalism; formulated and proposed theoretical data for new approaches in understanding of innovative transformations in higher education and science, which are economic categories and occur under the laws of the market; proposed new approaches for further innovative reform of higher education and science in conditions of academic capitalism. a new scientific term of "innovatics of higher education" has been put into circulation. this study will use research methods such as: dialectical approach to analyze and comprehend the baltic journal of economic studies 169 vol. 7 no. 4, 2021 content and special characteristics of the innovative development of higher education on the basis of new phenomena of academic capitalism, university (academic) entrepreneurship, as economic categories in the system of socio-economic relations and connections of the integral economic system of modern knowledge society; abstraction methods, systemstructural and theoretical-informational approaches will be used to investigate the conditions of formation of new innovative forms of university (academic) entrepreneurship, peculiarities and essence of university business activity and its influence on the financial stability of higher education institutions; the methods of analysis and synthesis will be used to investigate individual innovative approaches and technologies in higher education and to form a holistic picture of the complex innovation activity of the subjects, objects and system of higher education as a whole. research methodology included critical study and awareness of the concept of innovation in higher education, analysis of literary sources, including electronic and computer aids, comparing and checking the feasibility or necessity of introducing different types of innovation, analysis of their effectiveness and the possibility of spread and implementation on objects and subjects of higher education, predicting ways of forming new innovative approaches, methods and technologies. 4. presentation of the main research material undoubtedly, the well-being of the members of a society depends on the level of development of higher education and science in that society. at the same time, higher education and science, as integral interrelated components of human intelligence and the academic freedom of society, stimulate both mutual development and the development of all humanity. since higher education also creates human capital and forms human resources, the development of higher education should be continuous, effective and innovative. thus, the unique characteristics of higher education as an integral part of the anthroposphere (technosphere) can be formulated as follows (figure 1). higher education as an integral part of the anthroposphere (technosphere) the treasury of knowledge is a set of systematized knowledge, acquired skills, innate abilities, as well as practical skills, ways of thinking, professional, ideological and civic qualities, moral and ethical values, and other competencies the educational and upbringing process is the provision of new knowledge (transfer of knowledge) to the citizens of the country and the upbringing of qualities necessary for society with the help of higher educational institutions and scientific organizations open educational, scientific and cultural systems, which have their own structure, purpose, characteristics and principles of functioning, exist and develop under the influence of the external environment (society) section of science in the theory and practice of training for the needs of society, the development of new techniques, methods and technologies the engine of the process of innovative socio-economic human society development the process of searching for new knowledge (scientific activity), the application of knowledge and technology transfer (scientific and technological activity) the sphere of transformative creative human activity the integral part of the economic complex of the country (as a branch of the national economy and its socio-economic system) the object of transformational changes in the environment of academic capitalism integrated subsystem of the overall complex system of education and science figure 1. unique characteristics of higher education baltic journal of economic studies 170 vol. 7 no. 4, 2021 the novelty of the work lies in the fact that the innovative changes in the system of higher education and science are investigated from the perspective of market-oriented transformation, covering all areas of the main actors of this system, namely universities and research institutes. the paper emphasizes that it is under the influence of market economic relations under academic capitalism that all changes in the system of higher education and science, including traditional, creative, scientific, educational, cultural and arts functions, take place. further consider the types of such innovations in the higher education system that can lead to innovative change, and classify them. most of them are directly or indirectly initiated by academic capitalism. innovations in higher education and science can lead to innovative changes of the following types: economic and market, technological, organizational, structural and pedagogical, educational, moral and environmental, cultural and artistic, other innovations caused by global changes, extraordinary and force majeure circumstances. in the context of academic capitalism, the function of academic or university entrepreneurship, which entrepreneurial universities as well as entrepreneurially oriented research institutes perform, is extremely important. the main task of innovative development of higher education in any country is to create the necessary conditions for purposeful business, scientific, educational, engineering and technological activities aimed at the formation of knowledge society with innovation-oriented type of state economy. further, in figure 2, the authors identified and presented the fundamental objectives of innovative academic (university) entrepreneurship. the main objects of innovative activity in the field of higher education and science are presented by the authors of this study in figure 3. the authors defined that the subjects of innovative activity in the sphere of higher education and science are private individuals or legal entities (universities, si, structural units of education and science, etc.), which carry out innovative activities, attract property and intellectual values, as well as invest their own or borrowed funds in the implementation of innovative socio-economic, social and humanitarian activities in the sphere of national projects. in this study it is considered necessary to define the directions of further innovative development of higher education and science in ukraine and, possibly, in other developing countries. these directions of further innovative development of higher education and science may be as follows (figure 4): the fundamental tasks of innovative academic (university) entrepreneurship development and implementation of concepts, methods, technologies, techniques of innovative economic and social development of local communities, regions and the country promoting effective entrepreneurship education and its development contribution to national economic growth, national gdp and competitiveness of countries' economies; development and spread of a new type of entrepreneurial activity in the intellectual sphere (academic entrepreneurship in universities) development of innovative activities of universities wide dissemination (transfer) of new knowledge, r&d results and advanced technologies promoting the financial self-sufficiency and independence of higher education institutions, increasing the level of material support for faculty and staff of higher education institutions the production and capitalization of new knowledge high-quality r&d, followed by effective commercialization of the results the formation of an entrepreneurial mentality in society figure 2. the main fundamental tasks of innovative academic (university) entrepreneurship baltic journal of economic studies 171 vol. 7 no. 4, 2021 objects of innovation activity in the field of higher education and science new experimental developments and innovative solutions of engineering and technical nature, innovative technologies for the production of new products (services) and mechanisms for their formation upbringing, education and training of entrepreneurial mentality and integrated corporate entrepreneurial culture among employees markets for educational and scientific services organizational and technical solutions of an economic, administrative, commercial or other (non-productive) nature that significantly improve the structure and quality of socioeconomic, community and humanitarian activities of the nation (non-productive and social sphere) the infrastructure of higher education and science in the socio-economic, social and humanitarian activities of the nation, university (academic) and intellectual entrepreneurship the cooperation of the "university – industry (business) – government (state)" triad innovative programs and projects new knowledge and intellectual products, educational and scientific services required qualifications of personnel creation of entrepreneurial ecosystems and optimization of the ecosphere of human economic activity figure 3. the main objects of innovative activity in the sphere of higher education and science directions for further innovative development of higher education the introduction of the institution of innovative academic (university) entrepreneurship development of a sector focused on academic entrepreneurship of non-profit and commercial universities with the participation of private capital development of endowment institute for financial support of leading research universities in the field of entrepreneurship granting full autonomy to universities at the legislative level to independently choose a development strategy, areas of statutory activity and achieve financial independence introduction of state (budgetary) and private (independent) project financing in higher education, organization of state support for cooperation between universities and industry (according to h. etzkowitz's triple helix model) the formation of an entrepreneurial mentality in all members of society, improving economic thinking, creative behavior, critical thinking and the development of creative tendencies among citizens of society figure 4. recommended directions for further innovative development of higher education in ukraine and other developing countries baltic journal of economic studies 172 vol. 7 no. 4, 2021 the authors consider academic capitalism, defined in seminal studies by slaughter and leslie (slaughter, leslie, 1997), slaughter and rhoades (slaughter, rhoades, 2009), as well as university entrepreneurship (by burton r . clark (clark, 1998, 2000, 2004) and henry etzkowitz (etzkowitz, 2003, 2008, 2019), as economic categories with its own characteristics related to the capitalization and commercialization of intellectual products, such as new knowledge, technology, teaching methods. it is also considered necessary to study, summarize the experience and describe the theoretical foundations and practical provisions of innovative activity in higher education on the basis of already known innovative activity in this area. it is expedient to allocate theoretical bases and practical provisions of innovative activity in the sphere of higher education as a separate scientific direction. the authors propose to introduce a new scientific direction in the sphere of higher education with a new scientific term innovatics of higher education. the use of the term higher education innovatics is appropriate to designate a separate scientific direction in the system of higher education together with other scientific areas, such as fundamentals of higher education, theory and practice of higher education, economics of higher education, etc. by its definition, theoretical foundations and practical provisions, a new scientific direction in higher education the innovatics of higher education includes a number of innovative changes in the following types of activities inherent in higher education: 1) teaching, training, learning, studying; 2) scientific and r&d activities, new technologies development, construction and design creativity; 3) engineering, technical, informational activities; 4) financial and economic support of the educational process and r&d, operating and business expenses, development and expansion of activities; 5) inventive and patent-licensing activities, technology transfer; 6) academic (university) entrepreneurship; 7) cultural and moral development, upbringing of human values; 8) education of honesty, justice and peacefulness; 9) tolerance, mercy, charity and compassion; 10) sports, recreational, festive and extracurricular activities, and other types of activities of universities, colleges and other institutions related to higher education. thus, innovatics of higher education (as a set of innovations in the whole sphere of higher education) includes innovative changes in almost all areas of higher education to improve and enhance the quality of professionally prepared for today 's community of responsible citizens and university development. they can be useful for the reform of the national system of higher education and for the development of new scientific directions in higher education. the foundations and concepts of innovatics of higher education were researched and developed on the basis of general theories of innovative activity in other spheres of human activity. innovatics of higher education should comprehensively promote the activities shown in figure 5. activities promoted by higher education innovatics to investigate the use and dissemination of innovation flows to contribute in society the need for innovative changes for continuous development, irreversibility of processes of innovation in all spheres of intellectual and economic human activity to promote and prove the benefits of innovation, the impact of innovation on the development of competition in higher education and science, as well as to accelerate and improve the development of higher education and science in the state as a whole to develop mechanisms of human adaptation to innovative changes to examine and propose ways to overcome resistance to innovation in higher education, pedagogical, scientific and engineering activities to study the principles of processes of development and formation of innovations, implementation of new solutions to existing problems to explore the mechanisms of change management figure 5. activities promoted by higher education innovatics baltic journal of economic studies 173 vol. 7 no. 4, 2021 summarizing the comprehensive study of the phenomenon of academic (university) entrepreneurship, it should be noted that innovative and entrepreneurial universities implement their activities in higher education and science under the current market laws of the economic system, interact with the internal forces of society (respond to its challenges and demands) and are under the influence of globalization pressure of the world community. the role of the state in the management of innovative activity in the sphere of higher education and science is important. it is necessary for the state to solve the following most important tasks (figure 6). 1. identify technological and economic core objectives, and develop a plan for macroeconomic transformation that mobilizes society with a unified focus on innovative development. 2. creating the necessary conditions that best facilitate the innovation and investment process. 3. uniting efforts of state bodies and business to support innovative initiatives of universities and subjects of science, stimulation of innovative management in this sphere, as well as spreading of innovations in this industry. support and practical implementation of h. etzkowitz's concept of innovative development of society according to the triple helix model [14–19]. 4. to use and improve the world's best practices in the field of innovative development of higher education and science. 5. active promotion of entrepreneurial intelligence and innovative thinking in society. innovation management should become a consolidated interaction of mechanisms of the state and business. creating conditions for achieving harmony between the interests of the state and the employee in the sphere of higher education and scientific-technical activity is the main task of the state level of management. this level becomes strategic, giving tactical and operational control to new innovative individual firms and specialized structures in higher education and science. at the same time, academic or university entrepreneurship has been noted as one of the main motivators and drivers of innovation in higher education and science sector. summarizing the results of a comprehensive study of the phenomenon of academic (university) entrepreneurship, the authors noted that entrepreneurial institutions of higher education carry out their activities in the field of higher education under the current market laws of economic system, interacting with the internal forces of society (with a response to its challenges and demands) under the influence of the globalization pressure of the world community. the authors argue that innovations in the field of higher education and science should be linked in order to lead to innovative changes. it is reasonable to consider innovative activity of higher education institution in the system of higher education as an economic the importance of the state in the management of innovation in higher education and science creation of necessary conditions for the organization and support of innovation and investment processes combining the efforts of state structures and business to support innovative initiatives of higher education and science subjects, stimulating innovative management in this sphere, as well as disseminating innovations in this industry. implementation of h. etzkowitz's concept of the triple helix model of creative cooperation of the "universities – business – state" triad using and improving the best international practices in the field of innovative development of higher education and science defining technological, economic and basic goals and plans for macroeconomic transformation to mobilize society with a unified focus on innovative development active promotion of entrepreneurial intelligence and innovative thinking in society figure 6. the most important tasks of the state in managing innovation activity in the sphere of higher education and science baltic journal of economic studies 174 vol. 7 no. 4, 2021 category connected with capitalization and commercialization of intellectual products (knowledge, technologies, educational and scientific services, etc.) 5. conclusions innovative development of higher education is crucial. the main scientific achievements of the authors are put forward positions on the uniqueness of the essence of higher education, the main fundamental tasks of innovative academic (university) entrepreneurship, types of innovations initiated by academic capitalism in higher education that can lead to innovative changes, and their classification, both theoretical and practical relevance for the development of domestic science and higher education. the study also identifies the main objects of innovation in higher education and science, appropriate directions for further innovative development of higher education in ukraine and other developing countries, as well as the types of innovations in higher education that can lead to innovative changes. a positive result of the work is a formulated and proposed interdisciplinary study in higher education and science (higher education innovation) that collects, summarizes, and classifies best practices of innovation in many higher education systems and leading universities around the world. this applies to universities as well as to all research institutes and organizations associated with higher education. the system of innovative transformation in higher education is interesting and practically useful for both developed and developing countries. summarizing the comprehensive study of innovation in university education as a factor of sustainable development of society, it should be noted that innovation in higher education is a complex interdisciplinary scientific field, applied directly to the field of knowledge and economic activity. for further research, it is suggested to 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(2020). higher education in innovation ecosystems. sustainability, 12, 4376. available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/11/4376 (accessed august 20, 2021). key: cord-0072800-kvhtqihv authors: espejo, raul title: cybersyn, big data, variety engineering and governance date: 2022-01-04 journal: ai soc doi: 10.1007/s00146-021-01348-0 sha: b169991d1722ed89c1ca47c390d460aede55e92a doc_id: 72800 cord_uid: kvhtqihv this contribution offers reflections about chilean cybersyn, 50 years ago. in recent years, cybersyn, has received significant attention. it was the brainchild of stafford beer, who conceived it to support the transformation of the chilean economy from its bureaucratic history to hopefully create a vibrant and modern society, driven by cybernetic tools. these aspects have received much attention in recent times; however, in this contribution, i want to discuss how working in cybersyn influenced my work after the coup of 1973. perhaps, for me, its major influence was in the management of complexity, through what i refer here as variety engineering and through the viable system model vsm as a paradigm to the management of relationships with implications to enterprises, society and the economy. after the 1973 coup major interest was in technological aspects of cybersyn such as real-time management and its contribution to decision support and executive information systems. in the late 70s i was personally influenced by information management, but by the early 1980s my work moved towards methodological aspects of how to use the vsm. by 1989 i had created the viplan method (espejo, 1989). key questions i attempted to answer were, how to model the complexity of enterprises and their interactions with environmental agents. later on, in the 1990s and 2000s, the main direction of my work was epistemological, ontological and methodological towards second-order cybernetics and relationships. only in recent decades the political transformations proposed by cybersyn have captured the imagination of many commentators. the confluence of social and cultural changes with information technology, data models, artificial intelligence, algorithms and several additional technological developments have challenged the excesses of capitalism, particularly after the banking crisis of 2008–2009. the purpose in this paper is discussing this evolution in the light of those early days in chile. "political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians." hannah arendt my work in organisational cybernetics has evolved from the early work for the chilean government to its application to small and large enterprises in europe and latin america, going to its more mature face today in the context of the world organisation of systems and cybernetics wosc and syncho research. cybersyn developments were guided by salvador allende's election as president of chile in 1970 and conceptually by the viable system model vsm (beer 1972 (beer , 1979 (beer , 1981 (beer , 1985 . the experience in chile helped clarify methodological aspects of how to use management cybernetics to discuss governance in general. my work was at chile's national development corporation. the corporación de fomento de la producción-corfo was created in 1939. in the initial period, it was an overarching and powerful institution that participated in the funding of over 30% of chilean investment in equipment and machinery and 25% of public investment. through many instruments, it played a key role in the process of chilean economic development, including the creation of many key enterprises and playing an essential role in running these (griffith-jones et al. 2018) . following allende's presidential election in 1970, fernando flores was appointed corfo's general technical manager, responsible for a growing number of state owned enterprises, as the country nationalised its industry, particularly of medium sized companies. with my knowledge of corfo's regional activities and the fact that regions were among flores's responsibilities, we had plenty of opportunities to extend our conversations beyond them as we travelled along the country. he was aware of stafford beer's management cybernetics (beer 1966 ) and our conversations evolved beyond the prevailing centralised economic management strategies of the main political parties, into new forms of organisation and management. these conversations were the starting point for an understanding of corfo's possible activities in the new situation. conversations with jorge barrientos, humberto gabella and several others were pivotal at these early stages. these were the people that formed the initial team that stafford met in his first visit to chile in november, 1971 . at that stage my personal knowledge of systemic thinking and cybernetics was indeed limited. early conversations with beer in 1971 helped me differentiate information and communications. i could see the shortcomings of information systems driven by historical data rather than by people's communications and conversations. i also started to pay attention to sensory-motor correlations and circular management as key for decisions (beer 1972) . the practice of real-time started to evolve in my mind, beyond the historic recordings of past events, which in practice meant no more than the accumulation of reports in managers' in-trays. two aspects of my work with stafford have remained in my mind ever since. naturally the vsm was one, which was proposed in his paper about aborting planning in 1969 (beer 1969) before writing brain of the firm (1972) . this model has been central to my work ever since. i will say in this article much more about its methodological and ontological developments. the second one implicit in our conversations throughout the project was a model of capitalism. stafford wrote about this model in june of 1973, as we were approaching the end of the project cybersyn and the coup was inexorably progressing towards the 11th of september 1973. that model of capitalism had been in his mind for some time, but it was in the peaceful environment of las cruces, beach near santiago, where he stayed for more than a month, during his last visit to chile, where he wrote its manuscript, accompanied by a set of cybernetic diagrams. i return to this work in social and economic cybernetics at the end of this paper. current developments in digital technology, particularly big data, artificial intelligence and algorithms, are deeply related to the viable system model, as i explore here related to the concept of variety, which is offered as a measurement of complexity, and to design, which is referred to here as variety engineering. furthermore this model helps explore the embodiment of organisational relationships and visualising possibilities for new forms of social organisation as suggested by the model of capitalism. the paper concludes with reflections about current social developments, driven by digital technology, complexity management, organisational systems and relationships. stafford arrived in chile with a manuscript of the brain of the firm, the first of four books he wrote about the vsm (beer 1972 (beer , 1979 (beer , 1981 (beer , 1985 . he had already handed over this manuscript to allan lane, the penguin press, for publication and i received it from his hands in november 1971, and asked for its translation, copying and distribution to all the early participants in the project. afterwards, i received directly from him a copy of the published version of brain of the firm in february of 1972. it was pivotal to the learning that unfolded in the context of the cybersyn group. indeed this learning was not easy. the group had the benefit of several long sessions with him, where he explained the model. my learning also had the benefit of personal conversations with him about it and the situation in corfo. i shared this understanding of the book with the rest of the team. this was a process of conceptual clarification about its application to the economy, starting from quantified flowcharts of the activities of enterprises in the industrial economy (see fig. 1 ). this was a process of methodological clarification. we all needed this clarification of enterprises as organisational systems. the vsm and its systemic functions -systems 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in his terms-were necessary tools to model (beer 1981) . often, people understood the vsm in brain of the firm as an analogy of the human nervous system, however the team's task was to apply it to government agencies, such as corfo, its industrial committees and their enterprises; the challenge was understanding these agencies and enterprises as recursive parts of an organizational system. 1 how could we see them as integrated systems rather than as fragments of the chilean industrial economy? how could we understand enterprises' resources and managers as contributors to systems 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5? did it make sense to consider the finance department of an enterprise as an operational system (i.e. autonomous system 1)? what was the systemic meaning of an enterprise function, such as quality control, in a manufacturing factory? was this quality function part of system 1 or of system 3, or for that matter of system 4? which activities had to be included in a plant's quantified flowchart? how to observe relationships between people and resources? at an aggregated level it was relatively easy to break down a factory's transformations into input-output activities. the overall modelling became more difficult when it was unclear which one was the system in focus; were we talking of an industrial sector, or a plant within an enterprise; which were the recursion levels of the industrial economy? which resources were focused on the outside and then (i.e. longterm) and which were focused on the inside and now (i.e. short-term)? the answers to these questions, and of a huge number of others, were not explained in brain of the firm. we either asked these questions directly to the model's creator or made the effort to understand and disentangle them by studying the book itself. of course, we did both. however, the team spent significant time trying to clarify the book's ideas. much learning took place and producing answers to these questions was one of my contributions to cybersyn (espejo 1973 ). after the coup in september 1973, i moved to the uk and for many years i developed a strong and most valuable relationship with stafford. he could see that people reading his work were amazed by his insights about communications and complexity, but also were asking for his help to use them. from 1975 to 1985 he wrote three additional books about the vsm and in particular in the last of these books diagnosing the system for organizations (beer 1985) he offered practical guidance to apply the model. this book was well received but still people in companies wanted further support. i got involved in several projects to help in these applications. however, it became clear to me that still more clarification was necessary to make them applicable. the quest for answers to the questions emerging during the cybersyn project required further attention. answering these questions, some of them well structured, others hazy and unclear became part of my research interests too. they gave impetus to my methodological work, which, as i explain later, triggered my work in the viplan method and methodology until today (espejo 2020) . before going deeper into this methodological work i want to explain further developments emerging from the cybersyn project after 1973. previous publications, in particular in beer's brain of the firm second edition (beer 1981) , detailed its four activities; cybernet, the telex network along the country providing electronic communications between industries, enterprises and the government at large, cyberstride, a software for data processing of indices of performance in real time, aimed at alerting workers and managers about significant changes in plants, enterprises and industrial sectors, checo, relating the performance of enterprises and industrial sectors to the macro economy, in particular to visions of their future in the industry and economy, and the operations room, to create a decision environment balancing short-term achievements with long-term trends in an ergonomically designed room for conversations. these four developments of cybersyn are discussed in beer (1981) and i have discussed them in several publications over the past 40 years (espejo, 2008 (espejo, , 2009 (espejo, , 2014 (espejo, , 2017 . commentators have criticized cybersyn as science fiction (see for instance https:// www. wosc2 020. org/ videos), which made visible some of its implementation shortcomings. while some of these criticisms may have been just, many of them failed to recognise that the huge contribution of cybersyn was the viable system model and not its technological prowess. this model contributed then and is contributing today to the management of interactions in our digital societies. it is profoundly imaginative, solid and anticipatory of current developments. cybersyn, and in general the work in chile, helped its consolidation starting from the early 1960s. some commentators have argued that an operations room with ample and comfortable chairs for conversations but without tools to communicate the outcomes of these conversations to the outside world, that is, to communicate policy-makers' decisions to stakeholders, suggested a reduced conceptual design. this shortcoming was captured by a cartoon of the new yorker in october, 2018 (see fig. 2 ). too much display of information and few aspects to communicate decisions out of the room, suggested that the room's design offered a reduced action capacity. for an observer with limited understanding of its cybernetic conception this might have been a fair criticism, which captured the speedy developments of the last few months of the project. however, these shortcomings of the operations room did not invalidate its innovative conception as proved by later developments in europe and elsewhere (bittlestone 2010) . the viable system model, as i explore later in this paper, has remained from those days an important contribution to organisations. furthermore, this model has opened new paradigms for complexity management of uncontrolled 'big data' and furthermore for countering the damages of fragmentation. a significant aspect of cybersyn was its focus on real-time management; this support to managers was the purpose of cyberstride. more than transmitting information cybersyn's design was focused on communications between stakeholders, people and decision makers. the purpose was reporting to managers and policy makers, as close as possible in realtime, productivity and achievement exceptions; indeed in practice data and reports were transmitted with few days of delay; we called this "almost real time". the most significant resources of cybersyn went in the direction of creating "real time" tools. industrial engineers in multiple enterprises and industrial committees were flowcharting their input-output operational activities and agreeing with managers and workers key performance indicators (kpi) to run their enterprises, which required transmitting data through cybernet to the operations room in corfo and then to the national computer enterprise (ecom), for their processing. this processing was done by the cyberstride computer suite and them reported as exception reports to the appropriate decision makers whenever these emerged. after the coup, those of us who were closely involved with cyberstride continued working in its development outside chile. this was a central focus of my work for several years, until the mid 1980's; key issues were further methodological developments to design performance indices and to design and implement software for data processing in microcomputers. by the late 1970s early versions of apple microcomputers were already in the market. significant efforts of some of my students at aston university in the uk helped implementing new versions of the software, now with the name cyberfilter, based on the original cyberstride. progress was made in public and private enterprises and several of them became interested in supporting its implementation in their organisations. by the mid 1980s i created at the aston science park the enterprise syncho ltd; stafford was its chairman for many years. its purpose was further developing and implementing cyberfilter in enterprises such as middlesex local authority in the uk, the plastics division of hoechst ag in germany, hydro aluminium in norway, 3m in europe and others. it became increasingly clear, as implementation of the software was in progress, that these enterprises were more interested in receiving help to model their organisational structures than in the software itself. they wanted methodological help to generate key performance indicators but their main interest was an improved understanding of the cybernetics of their organisations. our clients were mainly large organisations with significant information system departments, possessing computer resources and skills of their own, capable of carrying out software developments without syncho's intervention, however they lacked skills for understanding their enterprises as organisational systems, in short they lacked skills for the application of the vsm, and that became the main focus of syncho's work with them. in parallel to these projects there were several research groups in europe and worldwide, interested in similar technical developments to those anticipated by cyberstride. performance indicators, as had been proposed by the cybersyn project, detecting change in real time were very attractive in those days and became commonplace later on. "executive information systems' ' attracted the interest of several companies and people wanted to further the idea supported by emerging software and modelling technologies. in the uk robert bittlestone (2010) , created the company metapraxis (https:// www. metap raxis. com) and with the advice of stafford in their board they offered information services to large companies and in particular they specialised in implementing management decision rooms worldwide. in the usa, important work related to executive information systems was taking place at the harvard business school (kaplan and norton 1996) at that time. it is in this context of global interest that victor ganón from uruguay, together with a team of local engineers and statisticians, approached stafford to implement a cybernetic project for the management of the country's national government. while they had an overall interest in organisational cybernetics their main focus was on developing competencies for key performance indicators and in particular for the short-term forecasting statistical model that had been used in chile. they made important developments using the bayesian forecasting model (harrison and stevens 1971) to track performance indices in real time for the president's office of uruguay. the book no hay gato: urucib y la transformación del estado (ganon 2019) offers an excellent account of this project, with president julio maria sanguinetti as the main client. though ganon's group had an interest in the overall cybernetics of the government, in the end their main achievement was the implementation of cyberfilter in uruguay. as syncho ltd. was evolving towards the application of the viable system model in enterprises, urucib's was evolving towards the software for real-time management of the country's economy. stafford's work had been related to these developments, however as ganon's work evolved more in the direction of executive information systems beer interest in pursuing the uruguayan project diminished. in the end it was more about management information systems than about the cybernetic transformation of the national economy. it can be argued that it was an important information management project in latin america but failed to see the issues of organisational transformation supported by the vsm. after reading ganon's book and receiving his comments about one of my personal accounts of cybersyn (espejo 2017 ) i replied to him in december 2019 saying; i am left with the impression that the most important achievements (in uruguay) were ciberfiltro and the management center, which in terms of the late 1980s and early 1990s, we called executive information systems (eis). these results impressed me greatly; your communications and conversations with president sanguinetti and the support he gave to the uricib project were very important and perhaps unique for a cybernetic project at the presidential level of a country. discussions in the 7th floor of the libertador building impressed me and showed that you influenced decisions at the national level and most likely that this influence went beyond the presidency, to state companies. however, i did not find discussions and results related to the vsm. it is mentioned in several places but i did not read discussions about its relevance to the governance of uruguay, including its influence on the structural foundations of the country's companies and institutions. it was undoubtedly a templete for the application of an eis, but nothing is said about aspects of variety, 2 explaining how strategies of attenuation and amplification of variety (which you refer to in page 40) could be used to strengthen the influence of employees and workers in the state and business executives. an eis may have helped to develop a more efficient but not necessarily a more effective society and as you recognize at the beginning of the book, cybernetics is the science of effective organization… knowing stafford and his work in chile, i was surprised that he did not insist with you to apply variety engineering as a central aspect of uricib. lack of work on this aspect, which is central to the vsm, reduced the model to an information system and not to an instrument to balance power between the government and companies. in your comment to my cybersyn article, you say that the emphasis on balances of varieties could have ideologized the model and cybernetics. this is not the case: to recognize that the variety of local units in a company is potentially high, and that its management should be facilitated (by amplification or attenuation is not to ideologize the model, but it is to recognize that business managers use tacitly or explicitly strategies to manage their complexity; often they do this with coercive measures of variety reduction, which was what happened in the soviet system …, and it is also what is happening in our neo-capitalist economic system today, which continues to use hierarchies as a strategy to balance varieties. naturally, in the end, as we go for one strategy or the other we make apparent our ideology. in chile cybersyn clearly leaned towards a socialist strategy of managing variety in the communities and companies and that was an option for good cybernetics rather than blind ideology. contrary to the developments in uruguay, syncho's work left in the hands of customers aspects of information management and focused its contribution on cybernetic transformation, in particular on variety engineering and governance. considering the huge latent and actual complexities of social situations, interactions towards achieving desirable purposes and values can benefit from the idea of variety engineering, which helps articulating the notion of power relationships in organisations. 3 for agreed purposes those actors making more situational distinctions and possessing more affordances in organisational interactions have more influence in the outcomes. 'big data' is important in this argument. as zuboff writes "the technology trajectory however is clear; more and more data will be generated by individuals and will persist under the control of others" (zuboff 2015, p75)". 'big data' is proliferating in our moment-to-moment interactions, which are increasingly controlled by digital enterprises such as google, facebook and others. these enterprises are responsible for surveillance transactions in our moment-to-moment choices, actions and decisions. most of the time we are not aware of the extent to which these enterprises are checking transactions through current developments such as simple and advanced artificial intelligence (ai), ubiquitous algorithms, machine learning and also deep organisational learning. proliferation of 'big data', that is variety, can be beneficial but also negative. among beneficial aspects we can argue that the more distinctions we make about a situation the more clear will be for us the options available to reduce, say, the environmental negative impacts of our actions in climate change, or the better will be the detailed management of natural resources or the more focused will be our individual management of health challenges such as covid. but also they can have negative aspects such as biometric mass surveillance of behaviours, face recognition and others with significant ethical implications. in the literature there are references to good and bad data, and their regulation is a significant domain of current research (zuboff 2015, 2019; kahneman et al. 2021) . from the perspective of organisational cybernetics and in particular of the work initiated in chile these aspects of data proliferation and regulation can be studied systemically with variety engineering in the relations between people, organizations and environments, as shown in fig. 3 (espejo and reyes 2011) . this figure shows the imbalances of varieties between the environment, which possesses the largest variety, followed by the varieties of the organization and management (ve > vo > vm). the management of these varieties is principally based in self-organisation and self-regulation, which are responsible for absorbing most of the variety within the environment, organisation and management themselves. the seven horizontal lines before the environment is an impressionistic measurement of the environmental variety that is reduced to three lines before the organisation. this is the residual variety that the organisation has to absorb to manage the environmental complexity. similarly the three horizontal varieties before the organisation is an impressionistic measurement of the complexity that this organisation has to deal with, which is reduced by self-organisation and selfregulation to one, which is the residual variety that management has to deal with to achieve desirable outcomes. variety engineering offers conceptual tools so far unexplored in the social domain. in organisational systems it offers means to discuss the regulation of variety proliferation in relational terms between environment, organisation and management, and thereby explores in more depth, as will be discussed below, relationships and relations between people and technology towards regulating the services and possible abuses of the digital enterprises. this topic deserves a good deal of research, in particular towards the design of more humane and ethical relationships, however, here i illustrate briefly, and in simple terms, how we can benefit today from the conceptual developments underpinning cybersyn, in particular the law of requisite variety (ashby 1964) . for the purpose of managing complexity we use black box and operational descriptions of organisational systems (espejo and reyes 2011) . a black box description is used to measure and manage the relational complexity of management with the organisational system and of this with its environment when there is agreement about the system's purposes; variety is proposed as a proxy to measure today's big data. the black box description is presented in fig. 4 below which assumes individuals sharing the system's purpose. an operational description of the interactions within an organisational system clarifies its relationships and the complexity affecting its performance. these relationships are modelled by the viable system model, as described in fig. 5 . agreement about purposes implies that the black box has a shared observer of its inputs to and of the outputs from the organisational system. this is referred to as first order cybernetics or the cybernetics of the observed system. supplanted by the rewards and punishments of a new kind of invisible hand (zuboff 2015, p 82)" "power is now identified with the means to change the behaviour of people and not with the control of the means of production. privacy rights thus confer decision rights; privacy enables a decision as to where one wants to be in the spectrum between secrecy and transparency in each situation" (idem p 83). on the other hand operational descriptions are focused on the relationships producing a viable system towards achieving its purposes. these relationships are the outcome of mutually reflexive people observing each other's contribution to the construction of this system. this reflexivity is about the cybernetics of observing systems and is an instance of second-order cybernetics. in summary, epistemologically black box descriptions relate to first order cybernetics and operational descriptions to second-order cybernetics. in what follows i argue these two forms of descriptions as complementary. the black box description of fig. 4 shares the regulatory purposes of the regulator (v t ). 4 i apply the idea of black box to organizational systems, whether they are autonomous people, enterprises or nations. the challenge for them is to manage disturbances from their relevant environments (v d), that is, in the context of current digital technology, the challenge is managing the 'big data' of their transactions with others through digital enterprises, such as google, facebook, linkedin and others, whether the 'big data' comes from artificial intelligence applications, algorithms or any other form that affect the system's behaviour. this is a black boxes experiencing environmental buffetings, for which their regulators have to produce responses (v r ). the outcomes (v o ) of these responses to the environmental buffetings are compared with acceptable/desirable states (v t ), that is, with regulated purposeful states. ashby's law of requisite variety tells us that the variety of the black box's outcomes (v o ) is always larger or equal than the ratio between the varieties of disturbances and responses (v o ≥ v d /v r) and, most importantly, that for effective regulation v o should be contained within the variety of desirable states v t . if that is not the case, errors will trigger inquiries, to produce new responses (v r ). these responses can be seen as producing affordances to bring back the black box under control. this simple loop helps to visualise the requirements to bring big data under control. of course often organisational systems lack affordances and therefore environmental disturbances and technological developments override our purposes and values. these failures of regulation are all too common today. from a design perspective, bringing these situations under control requires variety engineering, that is, amplification and attenuation of situational variety, with the support of error detection, inquiries and the design of affordances to achieve desirable performance. these are learning loops. this engineering, is explained in espejo and reyes (2011) and requires: own source 1. attenuating situational variety without destroying the autonomy of the components producing the black box, an issue that we will see is at the core of operational descriptions. this destruction happens with hierarchical structures such as those that existed in the soviet union or most likely exist today in capitalist enterprises. surveillance capitalism produces inequalities between those who control resources and those who need them to satisfy their needs in capitalist societies (zuboff 2020). this is often related to the operation of the markets. this variety attenuating strategy requires increasing as far as practically possible the self-organisation and selfregulation of processes in the environment and also in the black box (see fig. 3 ). this strategy should manage the residual variety in the interactions between the environment and the bb and between this bb and its management (idem). these variety operators could be processes such as actors' coordinating their actions, supported by mutual collaboration and solidarity and trust building within the situation. they are the operational descriptions that are discussed next. indeed selforganisation and self-regulation, deal with most of the variety within problematic situations making more likely that individuals will have requisite variety to deal with a highly reduced residual variety, rather than with the full complexity of an unregulated situation (this circular loop is the meaning of ɔ in fig. 3) . more precisely, selforganisation and self-regulation reduce significantly the required response variety of management and organisations to achieve requisite variety vis-à-vis the organisational and environmental complexities respectively. in today's world of digital technology and big data, residual variety can be an outcome of a symbiotic strategy to make more effective situational interactions and communication. 2. managing residual variety with the support of variety attenuators and amplifiers in between management, organisation and environment (see fig. 3 ). all these are processes that require information filters, communication devices and so forth as is further explained below. learning about the management of residual variety in situations proliferating data is of great significance in surveillance capitalism. they reduce problems for the alignment of situational complexities towards producing desirable transformations. examples of variety engineering can be found in espejo and reyes (2011) (e.g. see p 70). 3. the above strategies are a variety of engineering requirements for the black box to achieve balanced interactions in its environment (see figs. 3 and 4) . the aim for the organisational system is absorbing its environmental complexity through adequate performance. the variety engineering model is a learning model that needs to be in constant evolution supported by new scientific models, technologies and possibly social networks to allow the enterprise to monitor its achievements, latencies and performance. these are indeed concerns of big data management as explored in the viplan methodology below. variety engineering is a requirement for the good governance of organisational systems, at all recursion levels from local enterprises to governments. 4. however, in addition to inner self-organisation and self-regulation in the bb and the environment, the bb balanced interactions with its environment happen in meta-systemic contexts, which we call self-developing reflexive environments (espejo and lepskiy 2020) . this is a cultural contextual environment that provides variety for the interactions in between the organization and its environment and between management and its organization. for instance aspects of national political and economic regulations, changes in social values, trends in innovation and many more provide to different degrees contexts for particular organizational variety balances, which may support variety engineering, or indeed may make it more challenging. an example of this is the case of health in which relational social innovations may reduce the residual variety that needs the attention of the health services. a cultural development which incentivises people's local responses to health problems will reduce their dependence on health services and consequently increase self-regulation and self-organisation in the community and reduce the residual variety that needs the attention of health services. these are meta contextual mechanisms for sustainable development necessary to consider in these discussions. indeed, as i will explore briefly at the end of this paper, this kind of response emerged as necessary at the end of the cybersyn project. this last point makes clear that however useful the black box description of an organisational system is to measure its complexity vis-à-vis the environment, the second description, and more fundamental description, is the 'operational description'. this is the one that recognises the moment-tomoment operations within the organisational system, recognises the interactions of actors among themselves and with agents in their immediate environment (espejo and reyes 2011) and recognises the cultural, contextual meta-systemic operational interactions with their wider reflexive environments (espejo and lepskiy 2020) . in these references we have argued that the bb and operational descriptions are complementary. operational descriptions are descriptions of the relationships producing shared purposes and coordinated actions. they permit discussing its governance and how to improve the management of the interactions of the black box with its environment. this is my understanding of the viable system model after all these years since cybersyn (see fig. 5 ). from the recursive nature of the vsm it can be expected that the evolving organisational systems will contain operational activities consistent with the purposes and values of the bb description, grounded in the intertwining of people and digital technologies of particular significance in the management of environmental complexity. this is a necessary design of mechanisms to manage the complexity of the relationships of social processes in the context of a co-evolving environment. these are the governance mechanisms of a viable system. these governance relationships are explained in fig. 5 . the numbers in this figure are the same as the numbers in the paragraphs that follow: 1. relationship of performance, productivity and latency between actors striving for innovation and producing products, services and externalities with external stakeholders or agents. these are the actors constituting the productivity relationship through policy implementation and those actors constituting the latency relationship, concerned with the outside and then of the organizational system. the latter are relationships in which organisational actors are stretched by stakeholders in the problematic environment. at the extremes this relationship may be controlled by greedy lobbyists, vociferous unrepresentative minorities and conservative bureaucrats or in a more favourable perspective by the viewpoints of empowered autonomous actors, enlightened entrepreneurs and innovative bureaucracies. this stretching puts pressure on both policy makers to invent new responses to changes in the status quo and on stakeholders to recognize their responsibility in triggering this change. 2. relationship of cohesion between all the actors constituting the organization (e.g. policy makers, experts, civil servants, administrators, employees within the primary activities); in the extreme these relationships can be governed by the authoritarian tendencies of those in power, imposing hierarchical relationships, or by the mutual respect among all actors that enables autonomy within a cohesive organization, that is, enable heterarchical relationships. these variety operators could be processes such as actors' coordination of actions with others, their collaboration and solidarity, trust building within the situation and others. 3. relationship of policy making, between policy makers and those actors focused on the outside and then, (intelligence actors) and those actors focused on the inside and now (cohesion actors are all people in the organisational system). policy-makers' role is to orchestrate conversations between both viewpoints and based on the leadership of desirable purposes and values, they should recognise which conversations are necessary to create robust policies. a key role of policy makers is working out who are these relevant people that should participate in policy debates. 4. relationship of inclusion between policy makers and the owners of the organizational system, that is, the people to whom these policy makers are accountable; as president allende said in the case of cybersyn these stakeholders were the people. in particular, these are relationships of inclusion and legitimacy which suggest a relationship of social ownership of the organizational system. 5. relationship of organizational citizenship between the organizational actors and those providing normative context to their activities, for example, those in society who are guardians of societal values. these are the self-developing reflexive environments, constituted among others by metasystemic regulators of the organisational systems. these are the meta-systemic operators constituting the variety operators in between management, organisational system and environment (see figs. 3 and 4) . the overall relationship between the organizational system and stakeholders is the relationship of performance (1), which is constituted by the relationships of productivity and latency. through the relationships of policy (3) stakeholders influence the identity of the organizational system as they elect representatives that reflect their purposes and values. for a more direct influence of the problematic environment in the relationship 4 of fig. 5 , these external stakeholders can directly leverage their power, firstly through their moment-to-moment communications with stakeholders in the system's operational environment (4), who are in productivity relationships (1) within those producing this system and secondly through their dialogues and other forms of engagement with the system's intelligence actors responsible for its latency through the stretching relationship (1). it is apparent that the governance relationships go far beyond the executive information systems which were proposed by cyberstride and urucib. the viable system model evolving from the cybersyn project suggests more fundamental questions rooted in the variety balances of this model. key for data management and problem solving is correcting variety imbalances between managers at different structural levels within the organisational systems and between them and their data environments, that is, these are relationship questions related to variety engineering. in summary for governance: 1. how does the law of requisite variety anticipate the affordance necessary to increase the quality of organisational responses to environmental complexity and regulatory requirements for performance? 2. how to overcome institutional fragmentation through self-regulation and self-organisation towards achieving desirable performance? 3. how can the viable system model support conversational and interactive processes for the creation, implementation and regulation of desirable policies? 4. how can bottom-up and heterarchical interactions, intertwined with digital technology, support selfregulation and self-organisation and the emergence of organisational systems? 5. how can effective interactions make more balanced and equal power relationships in organisational systems? 6. how can we centralise and/or decentralise resources and functions to achieve more effective performance? 7. how can structure and communications enhance the liquidity of an organisational system, that is, change its boundaries to respond more effectively to distributed technological demands? 8. how can we increase the capabilities of an organisational system for adaptation in a changing environment? 9. who are and how can environmental stakeholders be included in policy processes? 10. how can we make governance more sensitive to an organisational system's ecology? beyond cyberfilter and executive information systems my work evolved towards a deeper understanding of the vsm, 5 starting with the viplan method. this evolution had its origin in my work as operations director of the project in chile. the methodological questions i asked to myself while working in cybersyn remained in my mind beyond the technical aspects of real-time. i was fortunate to collaborate with stafford as he was writing the methodological book diagnosing the system for organisations in 1985. at the same time in collaboration with students and colleagues at aston university and syncho ltd. i produced several diagnostic monographs of small organisations in the united kingdom. in particular pm manufacturers (raul espejo 1983 , 1989a was at the core of my work in the viplan method. the detailed application of the vsm to this enterprise helped clarify its application. at the same time i was interacting with peter checkland of lancaster university (checkland 1981) and learned from him the huge relevance of clarifying organisational purposes to measure the complexity of black boxes and study an enterprise's structure; he talked about naming systems. this was the beginning of developing the viplan method to study organisations, which was published in 1989 in my co-edited book "the viable system model: interpretations and applications of stafford beer's model" (espejo and harnden 1989) . the viplan method was introduced in the chapter a cybernetic method to study organisations. viplan was proposed as a method to measure the complexity of an organisation's transformation starting from naming the organisation as a system with inputs and outputs. its emphasis was a black box description. the method started with naming its transformation of inputs into outputs. i proposed the mnemonic tascoi as a shorthand to relate the transformation (t) of suppliers' inputs (s) to actors (a) to produce customers' outputs (c), regulated by owners (o), operating in the context of interveners (i). this initial idea was used to develop in full the viplan method and software (bowling and espejo 1996) . this method was further developed by colleagues and students in hundreds of projects throughout the world. in particular they were used and further developed by two of my colombian colleagues; angela espinosa and alfonso reyes. following angela's initiative at the colombian national audit office cgr , i proposed a project about second-order auditing, where viplan was used in full (bula 2004; espejo 1998; reyes 2001) . this was a significant application of organisational cybernetics in latin america from 1995 to 1998. alfonso was a major contributor in the process of furthering the development of the viplan method. with him i wrote the book organizational systems: managing complexity with the viable system model (espejo and reyes 2011) , which in 2016 was published in spanish by the universities of los andes and ibague in colombia. 6 the methodology i used, at a later stage, at the cgr was the viplan methodology, which i first published in 1993 (espejo and schwaninger 1993) , as a problem solving methodology. it was focused on improving organisational people's interactions to respond to problematic situations. graphically the viplan methodology is built upon two concentric learning loops as shown in fig. 6 (see espejo 2020) . in this methodology: • the cybernetic inner loop contributes to improve the structure of the organisational systems dealing with problematic situations through a circular diagnosis of the quality of conversations and communications, which may produce more or less responsibility, as they deal with issues such a good performance of enterprises or as in the cybersyn case, the better performance of the economy of a country. an adequate performance requires building up good structural conversations, or what we may call here, they need good cybernetics to handle these problem situations effectively. the cybernetic -inner-loop 5 the original focus was on the viplan method, which soon evolved into a methodology (espejo 1993) . the complementarity of the viplan method and the viplan methodology was further developed in reyes (2011, 2016) and more recently in several publications, in particular espejo (2020) . is meta to the stakeholders' problem solving interactions vis-avis a problematic situation, such as climate change! the quality of their communications, relationships and conversations is self-defined in the context of societal and organisational purposes. these structures may either facilitate or inhibit, to different degrees, problem solving processes. the purpose of the cybernetic -inner-loop is to promote good cybernetics, that is, to make organisational communications effective. an improved cybernetics is necessary to produce desirable performance (e.g. social responsibility) and facilitates effective conversations, or in other words it opens the space for including stakeholders in problem situations and therefore for producing better democratic processes. • in the learning-outer loop-participants take advantage of the enabling structures emerging from their inner loop, to engage in processes of continued conversations and learning about relevant situations, including 'big data' challenges. they engage in mutual interactions to achieve agreements upon any changes that they may wish to make to improve these situations. this outer loop is focused on problem situations that need stronger appreciation and better modelling. • the two loops are reflexively related in the sense that as the cybernetics of conversations improve in the inner loop, the participants' appreciation of their problem situations becomes more sophisticated in the outer loop and this better appreciation of situations trigger changed conversations and structures in the inner loop, recursively. in either case the aim is building up self-regulation and self-organisation towards correcting variety imbalances as explained before. the overall management of situational problems is achieving requisite variety through variety engineering. this is a fundamental learning process to consider 'big data' in technological developments, artificial intelligence, algorithms and so forth to increase the influence of people and regulators in countering the surveillance capitalism prevailing today and most likely to influence even more social developments in the future. implementing situational transformation requires correcting variety imbalances in the participants' interactions to achieve desirable purposes. from a design perspective this is the most demanding aspect of problem solving. correcting these imbalances is the approach to give requisite variety to interactions, produce affordances, and therefore a means to move in the direction of improving situations. these are exercises in variety engineering between organisational actors and between them and environmental agents. in other words it is an exercise in complexity management, which, as explained before, is central to today's 'big data' management. through the viable system model current societies and organisational systems can improve this management. cybersyn had at its core the viable system model (vsm), which, as explained above, has continued to evolve over the past 50 years. our increased understanding of complexity management in general and variety engineering in particular as well as the fast development of digital technologies offers new opportunities towards fairer and better societies, but also 'big data' can reduce autonomy, equality and can restrict freedom. in today's digital society, organisational cybernetics offers a revolutionary paradigm to manage these data. in the 70 s our inability to manage complexity made it extremely difficult to achieve people's coordination of actions and the building of responsible trust without interfering in their autonomy. these technological limitations made hierarchical structures more necessary in communist or capitalist organisations. not surprisingly executive information systems were easier and are still easier to implement. they are the most attractive to increase the heavy hand of executives but in the end i suggest that it is the vsm's cohesive function, through recursive structures, that is offering better possibilities to support people's coordination of actions and is increasing the opportunities for horizontal interactions among them to make managers' residual variety manageable. the viable system model offers a paradigm towards understanding autonomy at as many recursive levels as necessary. today's digital technology has the potential to support this paradigm with tools to realise autonomy. as already argued, different degrees of hierarchies were the outcome of poor variety engineering or lack of complexity management strategies, as made apparent, by management with inadequate ideological connotations, both in socialist fig. 6 the viplan methodology and problem situations (adapted from espejo 2020) and capitalist economies. in the former hierarchies had the ideological undertone of input-output matrices, as they aimed at balancing, albeit unsuccessfully, enterprises interactions; in the latter the ideology of the markets has proved to be more successful in managing black box interactions but at the cost of increased inequalities and an unfair distribution of wealth within the organisational systems. it is taking longer to realise that people will look for fairness and oppose capitalists hierarchies. capitalism is arriving at the same conclusions (pikkety 2020). in a global society demanding ethical responses for coordination, trust, fairness, cooperation, collaboration, responsibility for the less well provided and solidarity among nations, these nations are crossing local boundaries and requiring solutions that overcome racial and cultural differences, requiring solutions that overcome among others health, educational, economic and social inequalities. the covid-19 and also the climate crises are making these implications more evident. socially, we need to move in the direction of organisational structures that increase autonomy and regulate variety generation at the local level, as suggested by the self-organisation and self-regulation of variety engineering. this trend is already happening through the multiple mechanisms emerging in internet in the direction of block chains and other technological links that are increasing coordination, perhaps initially with an emphasis in financial coordination but we may expect that, as the demands of sustainability grow, along the united nations proposed sustainable development goals, coordinating the use of natural resources towards climate action, water resources, sanitation and others and other social management goals will require mechanisms to balance organisational interactions (united nations 2018). indeed, the systemic underpinning of these actions are anticipated by the paradigm of the viable systems model. the digital society and the viable system model (vsm) share a focus on complexity as mooted by the cybersyn project that was grounded in variety management (ashby 1964) . in the digital society activities are grounded in technologies with large capacity to create as well as to map all kinds of situational states, that is, 'big data' activities with great capacity for variety proliferation between enterprises, customers and their environments. algorithms, artificial intelligence, 3d printing, engineering services and so forth are making it possible for organisational systems to correct variety imbalances with their environments in real time. rather than dealing with aggregations and averages, these systems match individual but systemic needs through structural and algorithmic models. in other words, on the one hand their services can be tailored to people's specific needs and on the other they can help lift undesirable constraints and abuses of power, like for instance those imposed by hierarchies but also by surveillance capitalism (zuboff 2015, 2019) . people's distributed responses to large environmental challenges should be managed not only at aggregated levels but most significantly at local and individual levels by providers with the support of enabling technologies, adding flexibility and convenience. computer networks are increasing relational performances beyond what was possible in the last century, through better governance and inclusion overcoming institutional fragmentation and isolation. the viplan methodology has been proposed to guide an organisational system to manage its environment's increasing complexity through collaboration and coordination with others, rather than by attempting to go alone in a fragmented fashion. it is in this context that this methodology plays its role. beyond its use as a modelling tool for organisational systems, it is dealing with situations that require flexibility, creativity and adaptability. the vsm's appreciation of structures, relationships and interactions opens the space for participation, democracy, and accountability. cybersyn as a model for democratic viability is offering an opportunity to go beyond 'traditional socialism'; unfortunately it remains a utopia today, even with current progress with digital technology. this utopia is more than technological, it is more a utopia grounded in societies' and enterprises' failure to create desirable relationships, such as heterarchical relationships. people's interactions tend to go along long-term enshrined relationships, that people are not prepared to give up easily. these are social transformations that require imagination and leadership for new relationships. these are situations driven by power structures grounded in centuries of history that people want to preserve. what we are missing today is cultural, ethical and political progress. national opportunism and poor leadership are restricting unnecessarily important relationship transformations. covid-19 is making apparent the need for this progress. perhaps their realisation is too optimistic, but we may expect that different local and global forms of interactions will evolve during this pandemic and will give opportunities for new organisational forms (espejo 2020) . we are increasingly recognising that current social forms need revision. economists are connecting their language to the need for a transactional world, responsible for new organisational forms. particularly now, with covid-19 the anticipation in western societies is that they will experience increasing economic problems which they will transfer to future generations, possibly being an additional factor towards increasing social inequalities (streeck 2016 ; stigletz 2020, piketty 2019). as argued before, societies will have to respond to this challenge with more collaboration and mutual support. new organisational forms will be necessary to manage social and economic complexities and the vsm anticipates an innovative approach to deal with these challenges. my argument has been that cybersyn offered a vision of a new world towards fairer societies. in the 1970s the network and digital societies were decades away. after several decades we need to reflect upon their meanings today, taking into account social, economic and technological developments in a world experiencing pandemics and climate change. beer's imagination was far ahead of the resources and competencies available in the chile of the 1970s. despite those limitations as already argued, cybersyn offered an extraordinary vision. there are times in social history when, in spite of weak embodiments, the utopia of a fairer society with high expectations of solidarity and respect for the less privileged may not be completely farfetched. new scientific ideas, as those triggered by the post second world war macy conferences on cybernetics (kline 2015) that anticipated the cybernetics of cognition (maturana 2002) , complexity (ashby 1964; shannon and weaver 1949) and communications (wiener 1948; von foerster 1984) need today similar creativity and vision. this is the challenge for today's cyberneticians. over the years, after the september 1973 coup d'état, the vision of what was happening in those days has been emerging and creating opportunities for a renovated world. for optimists the last 40-50 years of socio -technological changes are making the longer-term evolution towards a fairer non-hierarchical society more likely. for the less optimistic, this is a misplaced utopia. which kind of society is the vsm allowing us to think about? what does it mean to be a society with good cybernetics? how can we realise autonomy, innovation, cohesion and responsibility? how can it contribute to a society with more respect and less abuse of power among us? these are questions left open for us in the future. briefly, i want to go back to the second aspect of working with stafford in those years. this was a model of capitalism. as already anticipated stafford wrote it in june of 1973, as we were approaching the end of the project cybersyn. he wrote it during his last visit to chile and left the manuscript with me; about 55 pages of text intertwined with a set of evolving and interdependent cybernetic diagrams, which in a rough fashion are integrated and presented in fig. 7 "a cybernetic model of contemporary capitalism"; this is a draft of beer's model. recently this manuscript has been studied by diego gomez-venegas, chilean doctoral researcher at the humboldt university of berlin, who transcribed and re-drew it as a central part of his research. he will be publishing this work in the near future. in my view he has achieved an integration of beer's narrative with its accompanying diagrams, showing beer's work as a multimedia kaleidoscope. i'm leaving to him explaining this document, something that i can anticipate will build a meaningful model for today's world, starting from stafford's discussion of technologies of government, focused on autonomy, homeostatic relationships, metasystems, requisite variety and redundancy of potential command. from the perspective of my work this model provides the framework for a self-developing reflexive-active environment along the lines of an operational description of organisational systems towards a new form of 'neo-socialism'. whether beer's 'model of contemporary capitalism' stands the deeper scrutiny of today's social and economic thinking and policies, is left to be judged by those reading gomez-venegas's discussion of beer's work, however the above cybernetic concepts are invariant to time and help working out mechanisms for a dynamic social developments. mariana mazzucato (2020) has proposed, what she calls 'mission economy' as an alternative model of relations between the public and private sectors, which would benefit from a more explicit recognition of the ideas of good cybernetics, as proposed in this article. but, in general today there is a much more sympathetic view for a socialist economy, triggered by the inequalities of the current capitalist economy and its failure to overcome its implicit poor variety engineering which has maintained a hierarchical structure for the enterprises and economies in societies worldwide. these hierarchical structures are not acceptable in many societies today. piketty's shout 'hurrah for socialism' (piketty 2020) coming from someone within a social democratic tradition, who wrote capital in the twenty-first century (piketty 2014), himself did not anticipate this transformation of his views. from the perspective of this paper, beer's model of capitalism provides a contextual addition to the self-organisation and self-regulation of black boxes and operational descriptions of interactions as discussed earlier in this article. beer's last contribution to cybersyn shows that he was aware that the four components of that project-cybernet, cyberfilter, checo and the operations room-were lacking a cybernetic meta-systemic contexts, which he called a contemporary model of capitalism and which today, with the benefit of more recent developments, lepskiy called third order cybernetics (lepskiy 2019) with an emphasis in self-developing reflexive environments and that both of us, from the perspectives of the viplan methodology and his work, prefer to call ontological cybernetics and social responsibility (espejo and lepskiy 2020) . these developments put an emphasis on cultural contextual environments that provide variety for the interactions between organizations and their immediate environments. it is in these wider social and political environmental contexts, that aspects of global, regional, national and local cultural, political and economic regulations, take account of changes in social values, trends in innovation, technology and many more dynamic environmental evolutions, providing contexts for particular organization's variety balances, which need variety engineering. these are mechanisms that are necessary to consider for sustainable development. indeed, these are necessary considerations to enrich our understanding of a visionary project such as cybersyn. an introduction to cybernetics un modelo cibernético para la dirección del sector industrial decision and control. the meaning of operational research and management cybernetics chichester beer s (1969) the aborting corporate plan: a cybernetic account of the interface planning and action observations on the development of cybernetic ideas in colombia. a tribute to stafford beer chichester espejo r (1983) management and information: the complementarity control-autonomy chichester espejo r (1989b) the vsm revisited organizational fitness: corporate effectiveness through management cybernetics. campus verlag performance management, the nature of regulation and the cybersyn project cybernetic argument for democratic 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cybernetics moment or why we call out age the information age structural coupling and cognition: a history of these and other notions in the biology of cognition cybernetics & human knowing mission economy. penguin, kindle piketty t (2014) capital in the twenty-first century piketty t (2020) ¡viva el socialismo!: crónicas 2016-2020 (d. fuentes second-order auditing practices big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization the age of surveillance capitalism people, power, and profits; progressive capitalism for an age of discontent. penguin, kindle version observing systems. publisher: interpublishers california wiener n (1948) cybernetics: or control and communications in the animal and the machine key: cord-0075196-tbz4xcdm authors: creech, brian; maddox, jessica title: of essential workers and working from home: journalistic discourses and the precarities of a pandemic economy date: 2022-01-27 journal: journalism (lond) doi: 10.1177/14648849211073450 sha: 6e28f0580ea41268da81a5b91d2ac0909b3617d3 doc_id: 75196 cord_uid: tbz4xcdm this article considers how reporting about work during the covid-19 pandemic operated as a field of discourse that challenged the ideological workings of neoliberalism. by documenting the risks and stresses workers of all classes faced during the first year of the pandemic, the reporting began to question neoliberal capitalism as socially unsustainable. drawing on a corpus of 151 long-form articles and commentary, we show how journalistic discourse structured relationships between different classes of workers and implicated institutions for failing to properly mitigate the risks associated with covid-19, even though the discourse largely centered on professionals working from home. as the reporting substantiated the precarities revealed by the pandemic as social facts, it challenged presumptions that undergird neoliberal ideologies, though it remains to be seen whether journalism will discursively re-center neoliberal logics in the wake of the pandemic. on 4 june 2020, a video of new york city police arresting a food delivery driver for violating curfew went viral. someone had ordered takeout during the city's covid-19 lockdown, and as police arrested the driver, he tried to explain he could be out because his work was classified as essential. he was released without penalty, but the moment led to much media commentary, as it symbolized the pandemic economy's absurdity: the fact is the courier wouldn't have had this interaction at all had someone not placed a delivery order close to the end of curfew…ordering food in might be even more necessary in these times of restaurant closures and coronavirus, but when there's a curfew involved, it's outright dangerous. (saxena, 2020: para 4) . the moment draws attention to the risks workers, especially frontline and gig economy workers, have taken on during the covid-19 pandemic. it also speaks to the casual demands individuals make of each other in the digital age, while obscuring technologies and institutions in structuring relationships across worker classes. the covid-19 pandemic is a massive public health crisis that has exacerbated social inequalities, and stories like the opening anecdote have become commonplace, drawing attention to just how fraught contemporary life's demands have become. as the global economy was disrupted and american unemployment reached historic levels throughout 2020, the tenuous positioning of labor classes felt more visible than at any point in recent memory. though many white-collar professionals were able to work from home to avoid exposure, they did so under duress. meanwhile, workers in fields deemed essential bore increased covid-19 exposure risk, often left to choose between navigating risky conditions or unemployment. it is no exaggeration to say americans have had less support from government and private industry during the pandemic than the citizens of other industrialized nations (sarlin and rhule, 2020 ). yet, in reporting about work during the pandemic, the continued refrain is that though the situation is unsustainable, managing it is crucial for individual livelihood and the broader economy's health. news media and journalistic commentary played an important role in synthesizing the economic precarity wrought by covid-19 as a social fact. these texts comprise a discursive field where conditions are made sense of, often in ways laden with prevailing ideological structures. to that end, this article considers how explanatory journalism and commentary worked to make sense of labor inequities during the pandemic. in interrogating this journalism, we show how it sustains certain economic relations by presenting the unequally distributed labor risks and stresses borne by the pandemic as a natural condition that individuals must, and can, deal with to survive, especially as institutional actors have failed to help mitigate risks. neoliberalism, risk, and work preceding the pandemic if anything, the covid-19 pandemic has made apparent the insecurity workers of all classes face. many scholars and commentators have recounted broader cultural shifts under neoliberalism, but decades of policy aimed at shrinking governments' capacity to intervene in the economy and social welfare has created structural conditions constraining pandemic responses (harvey, 2007; watkins, 2020) . neoliberalism has worked as an ideological project limiting the political imaginary, pushing citizens to accept individualized responses to political problems and social crises, imagining themselves as economic agents responsible for their own well-being (brown, 2015) . some commentators have argued because of the pandemic, "neoliberal capitalism has been exposed for its inhumanity and criminality, and covid-19 has shown that there can be no health policy without solidarity, industrial policy and state capacity" (saad-filho, 2020: 482) . as the pandemic continued, perspectives on neoliberalism have grown more complicated, as "in consequence of the pandemic, the vast majority of people find themselves in a similar contradictory position of having to assert their existential interests and fundamental rights in the institutions that subvert them" (šumonja, 2020: 9). the structural conditions that preceded the pandemic persist, and it is worth turning attention to how they position individuals in relation to society. the covid-19 pandemic has shown how risk has become increasingly individualized. risk is an externalized condition of modern existence made legible through forms of knowledge production (giddens, 1990) . but, as beck (1992) argues, the individualized assumption of risk is implicitly connected to the quantification and financialization of social life, offering a means for knowing which institutional responsibilities can be shifted to individuals. the distribution of risk is an exercise in power that has accelerated during the digital era-individuals are offered increased technological control over their own lives, but fewer social resources for exerting that control (dean, 2005; terranova, 2004) . concurrently, various ideological projects have worked to make the individualized assumption and management of risk a common and desirable condition, especially among working professionals. as neff (2012) shows, the assumption of professional precarity among technological workers is often accompanied by the promise of future wealth and opportunity, aligning with the forward-looking, affective goal-setting of ideological neoliberalism (ahmed, 2010 ). an assumption of financial peril often accompanies entrée into the digital economy's more prestigious careers, eliding structural conditions that promise long-term security for only a few (lane, 2011) . such is the root of an entrepreneurial subjectivity that asks individuals to intuit market dynamics and economic logics (szeman, 2015) . the platform economy is one set of material arrangements underscoring the proliferation of an entrepreneurial, neoliberal subjectivity. it takes form via smartphone applications such as uber, doordash, postmates, and taskrabbit, among others, services that match workers with consumers through cloud-based technologies and algorithms (rosenblat, 2018; vallas, 2019) . platforms promise greater control over one's work and finances, but also hide the costs individuals incur to participate, obscuring precarious realities (srnicek, 2016) . though ideologies of hope and aspiration may characterize the professional class, an increasing lack of control over one's employment has become the norm for large swaths of this platform-abetted gig economy (duffy, 2015; moore, 2018) . these workers not only have less control over their working conditions, but are also subject to surveillance that exacerbate unequal relations between workers and customers (rosenblat and stark, 2016) . as (gregory, 2021) discusses, covid-19 has shown how much risk has been shifted to on-demand workers, especially as platforms obscure these risks from consumers. platforms reinforce power imbalances between worker classes, "equipping a purchaser of products and services as 'middle management'," producing a labor "paradigm [that] effectively outsources managerial responsibility away from government and commercial enterprises and onto the individual" levy, 2018: 1214) . the platform economy embodies the neoliberal approach to labor management, especially as companies remove themselves as intermediaries in deference to technologies, thus absolving themselves of the responsibility to provide worker protections (rosenblat, 2018) . because this article considers news reporting about work as a site where neoliberal ideologies circulate, it is worth attending to how journalism works as a discursive field. as phelan (2014) shows, journalistic texts engage in a "market realist" discourse, situating economic conditions as an incontrovertible fact. attending to discourse, particularly the techniques and assumptions that render something common sense, offers a useful means for interrogating neoliberalism's ideological work, particularly as untenable conditions are rendered knowable and manageable (dahlberg and phelan, 2011) . journalistic texts illustrate hall's (2011) insights into the contradictory nature of ideologies: "ideology works best by suturing together contradictory lines of argument and emotional investments-finding what laclau calls 'systems of equivalence' between them" (731). specific journalism genres deploy different epistemological and representational techniques to produce knowledge about events and issues under specific conditions (buozis and creech, 2018) . for covid-19 and work, explanatory reporting and commentary constitute what foucault (1976) calls a "grid of intelligibility," making social reality legible to power and creating a field of discourse that situates individual subjects in relation to that power. journalism's truth aspirations make it a special site of discourse, as it connects verifiable facts to broader narratives, fomenting ideological common sense. as a mode of truth production, journalism works to establish the facts from which broader narratives about american life emanate (dent, 2008) . this is especially true in stories of economic crisis and decline, which valorize working class suffering as foundational to american ideals (kitch, 2007) . news reporting aspires to what barthes (1972) calls "depoliticized speech," performing an obligation to present reality as is (256). however, as van dijk (1988) shows, objectivity operates as a discursive position within journalistic conventions, preserving the authority to articulate reality to public life. though tuchman (1972) calls the performance of objectivity a "strategic ritual" to preserve journalistic independence, it also clarifies journalism's unique role as a discursive field, establishing which facts matter and to whom. interrogating journalistic discourse offers a guide for intuiting material conditions within social life, often in ways that acknowledge the seeming instability of contemporary conditions (fursich, 2009) . at the same time, it is necessary to consider journalism's specific, complicated relationship with work and labor, including the professional precarity reporters confront. throughout the 20th century, news reporting was often hostile to labor (glende, 2020) . as martin (2019) demonstrates, market incentives have encouraged news outlets to pursue more upscale audiences, thus pushing stories of the working class slowly off america's news pages since the 1960s. labor reporting has largely been subsumed under business and economic reporting, reframing work as an abstracted condition to manage (benson, 2005; nerone 2009 ). the conditions that make contemporary journalism precarious can be traced to decisions made in a specifically american context, especially as the work of journalism itself has grown more precarious in the digital age (christin, 2020; deuze, 2007; hesmondhalgh and baker, 2011) . journalists, especially those in digital newsrooms, face a casualization that has only grown as the industry's economic crises become more acute (cohen, 2019) . though journalists faced untenable work pressures during the covid-19 pandemic (finneman and thomas, 2021) , their reporting maintained an almost ideological neutrality when it came to the specifics of work, with journalistic conventions rendering labor a subject of dispassionate interest (martin, 2019) . our analysis focuses on a corpus of reporting comprised of explanatory reporting and commentary about work during the pandemic published across national newspapers, broadcast outlets, magazines, and websites over the course of 2020 and into early 2021. we gathered 151 articles from outlets such as the new york times, the new yorker, new york magazine, the atlantic, the los angeles times, the washington post, propublica, cbs news, nbc news, national public radio, slate.com, wired.com, and vice.com. we chose a sampling of outlets that are national in their ambitions and focused on explanatory reporting not pegged to a breaking news event. most articles were produced by full-time journalists or staff writers, though novelists, essayists, academics, and think tank staff also authored commentary articles. furthermore, we chose outlets whose ideological positioning at least aspires to objective neutrality, though several outlets (slate, the atlantic, vice) at times espouse a preference for liberal policy positions. many of the articles in our corpus possessed a notably gendered component, which we made the focus of a separate study (maddox and creech, 2021) . we read these materials, engaging in hall's (1975) "long preliminary soak" to understand patterns and logics across articles, establishing the consistencies, contradiction, and gaps that characterize an ideological project stretched across texts (15). while hall's "long preliminary soak" metaphor might invite laziness, hall himself presented the term as an opportunity for how "discourse analysts need to 'hear' (must learn to hear) recurring appeals in different contexts" (steiner, 2016: 104) . we identified recurrent forms of reporting and discursive techniques, and considered how they centered certain identities and issues as salient, as well as how they articulated relationships between individuals and larger structural conditions. such an analysis is an ideological critique, examining how journalistic discourse lends representational power and explanatory authority to certain sets of facts. as phelan (2015) argues, ideological critique of mediated discourse has a muddled history; researchers have shied away from explicitly critiquing journalism as productive of inequitable materialist relations. however, it is our contention that by looking at how journalism makes material conditions sensible, we can push beyond normative assertions that witnessing reality alone is enough to address inequities, instead, echoing banet-weiser's (2015) acknowledgement that as journalism makes injustices plain, it becomes a site of continued discursive contest. several epidemiological facts surround reporting about pandemic work, and much discourse works to account for these facts and provide moral and ethical guidance for navigating them. covid-19 has, in the united states, affected browner and poorer communities more than others, and much of the reporting foregrounds this (centers for disease control, 2021; godoy, 2020). furthermore, many essential and frontline service jobs at most risk of covid-19 infection are staffed by individuals who identify as african american, latin american, and asian american (lancet, 2020). in the reporting, these facts coalesce into class divisions inflected with the inequities of race: "the past few weeks have exposed just how much a person's risk of infection hinges on class. though people of all incomes are at risk of being laid off, those who can work from home are at least less likely to get sick. the low-income workers who do still have jobs… are likely to be stuck in close quarters with other humans" (khazan, 2020a: para. 2) . not everyone in the discourse is on equal representational footing, but by attending to whose experiences are foregrounded and how, we can see how this reporting ideologically structures and makes visible class relationships. a significant amount of reporting in the corpus focuses largely on the plight of so-called "essential workers," especially those in minimum-and low-wage jobs that cannot be performed remotely. writing in the atlantic, pinsker, 2020a captures the unequal exposure to risk implicit in the distinction between essential workers and everyone else: in the coming months and years, there will really be two pandemics in america. one will be disruptive and frightening to its victims, but thanks to their existing advantages and lucky near misses with the virus, they will likely emerge from it relatively stable…the other pandemic, though, will devastate those who survive it, leaving lasting scars and altering life courses. which of these two pandemics any given american will experience will be determined by a morbid mix of …demographic predestination-shaped strongly by inequality-and purely random chance (paras 3-4). this sense of implicit inequality pervades much of the corpus, functioning as a condition the reporting works to substantiate or contextualize. the risks faced by lowwage workers are often contrasted against the anxieties and loss of control felt by professionals working from home. perhaps because of this distinction, essential workers are often valorized as the heroes keeping society running. for instance, washington (2020) celebrated houston's grocery workers at the beginning of lockdowns: "these grocers had-right along with their counterparts in emergency services-helped keep their cities running" (para. 9). author and professor park (2020) , who began taking on shifts at her parent's grocery store in new york city, reflected on her experience: "under the new state order, grocery stores were deemed one of the few essential businesses allowed to remain open. our neighborhood would depend on us-i think i can say this without exaggeration-to stay alive" (para 5). these realizations substantiate a reality at the core of the discourse, that the burden of navigating the pandemic "is not distributed equally: besides nurses and doctors, caregivers and delivery people, grocers are on the front lines. they don't get to work from home," and because of this fact, "god forbid that we're anything but grateful" (washington, 2020: para 4) . such assertions often anchor articles that highlight the value of certain kinds of pandemic work, often in a tone that balances hardship and necessity, offering anecdotes illustrating the need for broader societal appreciation of this worker class. one new yorker article in particular acts as a useful case in seeing how valorization is balanced against harsh realities. in it, one new york city bus driver, gronnerman (2020) narrates a viral video the driver recorded for his fellow metropolitan transportation authority workers: "brothers and sisters," he said, standing in the aisle of the bus, "i want to thank you all for stepping up and coming to work today and showing what leadership looks like. we are performing an essential and invaluable task." he reminded his co-workers that they were not only delivering hospital personnel to their jobs. "what about the person that needs dialysis? what about the person who needs regular cancer treatments?" he said. "we are helping all of these people live and survive this global pandemic. he went on, "ordinarily we're not appreciated. we're not valued. let's face it: the squeegee man of the crack era is held in greater regard and higher esteem than a new york city transit bus operator.…" (paras. 2-3). but, as the pandemic started to feel more controlled, bus drivers again became the target of ire: "'we were being lionized as heroic 3 months ago'," gronnerman quotes her source as saying, before denoting all the ways transportation work had returned to "business as usual," as the city's residents continued to "mistreat the people who helped you get through it" (para. 60). compared to other essential workers, gig worker experiences are especially stark. one driver, quoted in a vice article, addressed his instability directly: "all kidding aside we (the drivers) will be in big trouble in a couple of weeks with this virus...we have to work even when sick because we don't make enough to ride it out" (ongweso, 2020: para. 3 ). meanwhile, delivery company doordash touted the daily $.78 fee it would pay drivers to compensate for time spent disinfecting surfaces in their cars (truong, 2020) . reporting focused on delivery and rideshare driver experiences draws attention to how the platform economy exploits precarious individuals while promising economic mobility, a promise made untenable by the pandemic. (fan, 2020) narrates one individual driver's experience: "a young algerian driver, wearing an n95 mask that he had bought online weeks ago… told me, 'i fought so hard to come here, but right now i'm basically a front-line worker in the middle of a pandemic'" (para. 12). another driver, reflecting on how the promise he felt when he first started driving has collapsed, states, "you realize that all the years they are working are actually a gamble...and, when disaster hits, you instantly lose the bet" (para. 14). compared to delivery drivers and frontline employees, laborers in the meat and agricultural industries have a much less visible presence in the corpus, but when they do appear, their working conditions are morally and materially repugnant. for instance, a propublica investigation into meatpacking industry pandemic preparedness claimed in august 2020 that, "more than 39,000 meat and poultry workers have tested positive for covid-19, and at least 170 have died," and found "public health departments across the country received numerous complaints that supervisors were telling workers to come back to work while still symptomatic and threatening to fire them if they didn't" (grabell and yeung, 2020: paras. 12; 40) . meanwhile, vice reported on a tyson pork processing plant in waterloo, iowa where management "allegedly created a…betting game on how many employees would contract the coronavirus…all while encouraging them to work in crowded, unsanitary conditions" (dowd, 2020: para. 2). these workers face abject risks, but are also often granted less interiority in the reporting than others. the less visibility afforded to these laborers creates an inadvertent essential worker hierarchy, with some struggles are highlighted over others. reporting on the seeming inevitability of precarity serves a macabre purpose, establishing how indifferent and inhumane certain work can be. acknowledging essential workers' risks, and contrasting it to the experiences of many working from home professionals, is crucial for contextualizing the middle-class subject at the core of much of this discourse. while reporting about essential workers' experiences largely highlights collective risk, reporting about those who can work from home is much more individualized, psychologized, and, not surprisingly, domestic. the coronavirus remains a threat in this reporting, but is more abstract, beyond the walls of one's home. instead, the psychological and emotional impacts of working from home are centered: managing space with spouses and roommates, keeping focus during zoom calls, setting work boundaries with oneself, and the uneven burdens borne by professional women. (callahan, 2020; compton, 2020; garbes, 2021; thurrott, 2020) . the reporting narrates how work has colonized the domestic spaces and psyches of white-collar professionals and largely focuses on how these workers comport themselves: as employees, as bosses, as technology users, and as consumers of gig economy labor. thus, this reporting discursively centers a presumed middle-class subject as pandemic work's psychic core. these workers are the focus of new routines and imagined futures, where "the 'job' as we know it might never be the same" (khazan, 2020b: para. 4 ) and domestic space becomes "a hectic blend of labor and family life" (para. 7). this formulation, though, presumes a domestic life that can make way for work, but, as cooper (2020) observes, the "structure of life for many parents during the pandemic-more to do at home, kids highly visible during zoom calls, flexible work hours-creates the exact conditions under which biases against mothers get unleashed" (para. 4). adjusting to remote work is understood as a strain, and the stresses are balanced against potential benefits, as "a desolate and lonely experience that often saps creativity and collapses the narrow distance between labor and downtime," is contrasted to "a boon to social life, family life, egalitarianism, neurodiversity, and the planet itself." (thompson, 2020: para. 16 ). much of this reporting frames working from home as an "inevitable" future accelerated by the pandemic. thus, a complicated "work from home" ethos emerges, especially as "bringing a bit of workplace-like structure into the home can feel unnatural" (cauterucci, 2020: para. 10) . several articles assert that even though remote workers labor under untenable conditions, the pandemic poses epidemiological and economic harms individuals must to mitigate and manage (gogoi, 2020; green, 2020) . while examples of bosses and managers with unreasonable expectations fill the corpus, many commentators call for flexibility. though, as green (2020) argues, managers often subvert individual's autonomy regardless of flexibility: one problem people are already encountering: a lot of managers have no idea how to manage remote workers. as a result, they implement bizarrely tyrannical restrictions-telling their staff to leave their webcams on all day, for example, or instructing people to alert their manager every time they leave their desk for a bathroom break...the underlying message is clear (and insulting): we don't trust you to work when we can't see you. managing flexibility, both for individual workers and bosses, is a prominent feature of the corpus, but, as sharma (2014) has noted, flexibility is often a luxury afforded to only a few and often requires access to an unobtrusive technical infrastructure that obscures just how much less flexibility others have. the assumption that one has access to the resources allowing for flexible work often comes off as overtly classist. for instance, one piece of advice for creating boundaries between work and personal life presumes an individual can afford separate devices for work and for socializing: "working on only your work devices, and doing personal stuff on only your personal devicesyour party laptop, if you will-establishes a habit and boundary that reinforces the separation between what each device is for" (herrera, 2020: para. 30) . other reporting, focused on the ways pandemic-induced remote working has accelerated a trend of "more young, well-paid and well-educated people...relocating permanently from big metro areas" to desirable smaller cities with more affordable housing, draws attention to how mobility has been one of the hidden privileges afforded to work from home professionals (marcus, 2020: para. 4 ). despite reporting that presents moving and mobility as a lifestyle choice and privilege, more detailed perspectives reveal a panicked calculus. consider the words of a father and seminary student who left new york city amid rising infections: after he saw the lines at the grocery store, mr. mealer went into "dad-survival mode," he said, loading the family minivan. "i packed all the food we had. i packed all the medicine. i grabbed the fireproof box with our passports. we drove through new jersey and i bought one of those things for the roof that you can put more crap in" (kurutz, 2021: para. 8 ). the implicit panic foregrounds the tension between the felt dangers of living in the pandemic, and the reality that one may have access to resources that help mitigate those dangers. at the same time, and as gregg (2011) demonstrates, the work from home ethos is largely imbalanced along gendered lines, as domestic spaces are often remade to accommodate the affective, subconscious demands of work, placing the onus on women to reorganize home life in the face of work's demands. other articles deepen class divisions by offering ethical guidance for consuming others' labor; that is, guidance on tipping, food delivery, and grocery delivery (chaudhry, 2020; lazarus, 2020; pinsker, 2020b) . the ethics of consuming others' labor are placed in strictly financial terms: "it can be argued that as long as people take on such work willingly, and are treated well and compensated fairly, there's nothing inherently wrong with this...how much of a premium should be charged when some people literally may be putting their lives on the line to get you groceries and toilet paper?" (lazarus, 2020: paras. 4-5) . for those who can afford to consume others' labor, the complicated ethics of that choice are most apparent when it comes to ordering food: i'm not sure there have been any good choices at all: dine indoors, try to keep your mask on whenever a server's nearby. dine outside, make sure the tables are far enough apart. dine at home from takeout boxes an underpaid delivery driver brought to you. do none of these, and your favorite restaurant closes, putting its employees out of work, probably without a sufficient social safety net (canavan, 2021: para. 2 ). that these realizations most readily come in reporting and commentary about food is telling, in that it is a moment where the interdependence inherent in meeting basic needs is most apparent, and that acknowledging this interdependence is an ethical, if individual, imperative. as a counterpoint, other articles direct attention to the casual, sometimes thoughtless ways customers behave, making explicit how easy it is for some to ignore the risks essential workers take on. consider again park's (2020) perspective: two young guys came shopping together but checked out separately. i rang up their identical and respective purchases of instant-ramen-noodle packets and energy drinks. they socially distanced from each other, but one stood less than a foot away from our employee who was packing their bags. they continued their roomie conversation right over the bag-packer's head, as if he wasn't even there….a father and his daughter come into our store every day to buy one or two things, a couple of times a day. they do this out of boredom, i suppose, and i wonder if they realize they are exposing themselves, and us workers, with each trip (para. 12). such a passage carries a clear ethical connotation and evidences an emerging pandemic moral hazard: those privileged enough to avoid risks can do so without taking into account how their actions may place those with fewer resources or less flexibility at risk. when analyzed alongside reporting chronicling remote workers' subjective experience of the pandemic, this commentary makes explicit a dual role occupied by the middle-class subject: wealthy enough to consume others' labor in some cases, while remaining subject to risks and stresses that make their own lives feel untenable. the detail with which news outlets document middle-class and upper middle-class professionals' experience is perhaps a byproduct of the fact these outlets largely produce news for and about wealthier and whiter parts of society (usher, 2021) . in her new york times commentary, anne helen petersen (2020) captures the broader fallacy of centering working professionals: "a vast majority of people who were in 'good' jobs-stable, well-paid, with benefits-before the pandemic have managed to maintain those good jobs. doing the job might have become more difficult, but the job itself has largely remained steady" (para. 22). what is obscured about this class of workers, then, are the systems and infrastructures granting them stability. there is an opportunity to think about work across class, "to make sure that future doesn't just worsen the ever-widening divide in american society between those promised a new vision of the good, balanced life, and those for whom 'flexibility' means effacing your wants and needs and dreams…to the fickle demands of your employer" (para. 25). doing so, though, implicates the institutions, platforms, and corporations whose policies and practices largely structure pandemic work. throughout the corpus, gig economy platforms, corporations, and governmental agencies appear as institutional actors with some degree of responsibility for mitigating pandemic risks. institutional failures are often crystallized in reporting and commentary about the restaurant industry: "the [restaurant] industry and its workers have been left to hang by a thread…2.5 million jobs lost, and countless dead. these failures are rooted in one of america's most toxic core beliefs: that the economy matters more than the people who create it" (canavan, 2021: para. 7) . governmental indifference is a common target, and the reporting draws attention to how institutional inaction courts wide-scale individual risk: "the government called restaurant workers 'essential' to the economy. unfortunately, that designation also meant that they were expendable as bodies encountering a deadly virus" (para. 8). this focus on the consequences of neoliberal policy is rare in american journalism, but can lead one to infer that journalistic conventions and commentary are adjusting to account for systemic conditions (hallin, 2019; phelan and salter, 2019) . if so, this awareness of structural issues appears only occasionally. though institutional responsibilities are acknowledged, dysfunction is often assumed, especially among platform companies. most often, reporting draws attention to the profits delivery companies like amazon, instacart, grubhub, and doordash have enjoyed while not doing more to help their contractors and employees mitigate exposure to covid-19 (marx, 2020; smith and garcia, 2020) . assertions such as "some workers say they have had trouble getting the protective gear they've been promised. they also want the companies to be more transparent about how many employees have fallen ill, or even died, from covid-19" are common (bond, 2020: para. 18 ). tech companies appear as uniquely exploitative actors, the risks their business models place on gig employees taken as matter-of-fact: "some gig workers say the system creates a perverse incentive for cashstrapped contractors to stay behind the wheel, despite the risks to themselves and others they come in contact with" (marshall, 2020: para. 9 ). for remote workers, an individual's boss, as opposed to an entire economy, is more likely to be described as callous. this is best seen in advice directed at managers, often telling them to shift their expectations: "if you are the boss, you need to pump the brakes in 2020 and 2021. anyone who runs a company should recognize that an enormous number of their employees simply cannot be as productive…as they typically are" (kois, 2020: para 4) . such an individually focused appeal, though, has its limits. though it intuits the incentives of an increasingly competitive economy as counterproductive to surviving a pandemic, it focuses its intervention on individuals, asking them to demonstrate compassion, conflating structural incentives with managerial agency. such advice also draws attention to how little agency even white-collar professionals have over their work lives, as captured in the following kicker from , at the end of an article outlining the conditions necessary to counter pandemic-induced burnout: "place fewer demands on people, give them more control over how to handle those demands, and provide support to handle them. all three are within your boss's power" (para. 25). again, the differences between white-collar workers and essential workers is stark, but a lack of autonomy over the risks and the stresses they feel unites their experiences within the discourse. occasionally, the shared lack of autonomy draws attention to the ways governmental inaction places increasing pressure on individuals. catalogs government shortcomings in a way that is worth quoting at length: where employers are unable or unwilling to give people a break, the government could step in. unfortunately, it has failed to do that. as meatpacking workers began dying at the beginning of the pandemic, the trump administration allowed plants to increase their line speeds, making it harder for workers to socially distance. many states still don't have a mask mandate, putting frontline workers at risk. the federal government does not require that private-sector employers provide paid sick leave or family leave (para. 8). this litany of policy failures, though rarely articulated in the discourse, draws attention to the consequences of neoliberalism as a cultural logic and policy paradigm. companies are left to mitigate the crisis for their employees, contractors, and customers, often doing less than they can or should because of profit motives, while individuals are expected to manage their own conditions in novel and innovative ways. the absence of institutional mitigation is a final, unifying theme in the discourse, and one that highlights neoliberalism's failures, but also works to demonstrate how different worker classes are connected. as riley (2021) argues, pandemic-induced "isolation depends on a vast network of cooperative labour that makes it possible...only this collective work allows us to 'isolate'. isolation is thus both an expression of the division of social labour and a class and racial phenomenon resting on specific material conditions" (para. 1). paradoxically, when institutions fail to provide the conditions necessary for survival amid a crisis, the relationships between various classes of workers become more immediately visible. as cartus et al. (2021) write, "it has never stopped being true, at any moment over the past 13 months, that the risk to the most privileged and insulated members of our society is a direct function of the risk that less privileged workers have been forced to assume" (para. 11). institutional apathy is a prevalent undercurrent in the journalistic discourse, as platforms', corporations', and the american government's failures to protect individuals is a recurring theme that makes sensible the social, ethical, and material connections binding disparate classes of workers in the face of absent institutions. the journalistic discourse is itself largely paradoxical, though. reporting drawing contrasts between frontline workers and work from home professionals is foundational to the corpus, while also illustrating tension between the individualistic strains of isolated living and the collective work necessary to better mitigate pandemic risks. though this analysis has focused primarily on class divisions and connections, there is more work to be done considering how reporting on race and gender dynamics drew further attention to the unequal ways precarity and risk are distributed during the pandemic. as we explore in a companion study (maddox and creech, 2021) , untenable conditions have pushed women, especially women of color, out of the workforce, but journalistic discourse has continued to center individual experiences over collective responses or structural critique. focusing on how the reporting makes sensible relationships within the broader economy, we are left considering how modes of journalistic documentation and witnessing are imperfect moral solutions to inequitable conditions, especially in the face of institutions that cannot be compelled, through journalism alone, to act to construct society in more humane ways. as chouliaraki (2008) asks, "can the spectacles of suffering...go beyond wishful thinking and lead to forms of public action?" (831). in the case of covid-19, the question remains unsettled, though the corpus about the conditions workers face does work to substantiate precarity, and corporate indifference to that precarity, as material facts the institutions of public and civic life must address. we are hopeful that, throughout the corpus, a neoliberal focus on individual agency is not the assumed norm, offering potential seeds for a necessary shift in journalistic practice. for instance, framing stories in ways that draw attention to cross-class connections and non-economic relations offers one way of accounting for the ways structural conditions manifest. at the same time, reporting and commentary drawing attention to policy decisions and cultural logics centering a harsh economism as a natural organizing principle for society elucidates the kind of common sense assumptions that have made work precarious, untenable, and dangerous during covid-19. more reporting centering both work's material and structural conditions is needed, especially as the social strains revealed by the pandemic call into question many assumptions that sustain neoliberalism. at its most revelatory, the reporting maps a series of relationships between essential workers, more privileged remote workers, institutional actors, and the economic forces structuring their experiences. though the reporting centers certain subjectivities over others, it also draws attention to how work has been made untenable by larger societal stresses. however, as banet-wesier (2015) notes, journalistic visibility and shifts in journalistic discourse do not automatically translate to larger, structural change. it remains to be seen whether journalistic discourses will fully abandon neoliberal presumptions in the wake of the pandemic, or whether those discourses will shift again, sustaining neoliberalism by casting the conditions revealed by the pandemic as irrefutably unpleasant, but also something society and workers were ultimately capable of weathering. the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article. the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. brian creech  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0986-6842 jessica maddox  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6549-1048 barthes r (1972) mythologies keynote address: media, markets, and economies of visibility in neoliberal times risk society: towards a new modernity. m american journalism and the politics of diversity protesting workers tell amazon, target, instacart. national public radio undoing the demos: neoliberalism's stealth revolution reading news as narrative: a genre approach to journalism studies how to set boundaries with your coworkers, boss and yourself during covid-19 15 march) the responsibility to save restaurants should have never been ours 29 march) moral calculations: pandmeic coverage obscures individual risk and social harm 13 march) how to work from home with your partner without killing each other 21 february) health equity considerations and racial and ethnic minority groups how to order take out safely and ethically. the verge the media as moral education: mediation and action metrics at work: journalism and the contested meaning of algorithms at work in the digital newsroom 24 march) how to not kill your spouse when you are both working from home october) mothers' careers are at extraordinary risk right now discourse theory and critical media politics communicative capitalism: circulation and the foreclosure of politics journalists are the confessors of the public', says one foucaultian tyson plant managers allegedly bet on how many workers would catch covid the romance of work: gender and aspirational labor in the digital culture industries 29 april) the uncertain life of new york city's immigrant uber drivers during the pandemic our company is in survival mode": metajournalistic discourse on covid-19's impact on u.s. community newspapers. 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temporality and cultural politics platform capitalism the surveillant consumer. media wrestling with the angels: stuart hall's theory and method neoliberalism is not dead -on political implications of covid-19 entrepreneurship as the new common sense network culture: politics for the information age 4 may) exhausted, tired and unfocused while working from home? you are not alone 13 may) the coronavirus is creating a huge, stressful experiment in working from home doordash gives drivers an extra $0.78 a day for working during pandemic objectivity as strategic ritual: an examination of newsmans' notion of objectivity usher n (2021) new for the rich, white, and blue platform capitalism: what's at stake for workers? news as discourse the grocers on houston's frontline. the new yorker politics and the pandemic brian creech is an associate professor at the department of journalism in the lew klein college of media and communication at temple university, and director-elect of the media and communication doctoral program. his research focuses on the critical analysis of journalism and public discourse, with a particular interest in technology industries and new media technologies book review: refuge: transforming a broken refugee system urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa66415 doi: 10.11143/fennia.66415 reflections: book review refuge: transforming a broken refugee system elisa pascucci pascucci, elisa (2017). refuge: transforming a broken refugee system. fennia 195: 2, pp. 197–201. issn 1798-5617. can capitalism help refugees? review of the book refuge: transforming a broken refugee system by betts & collier, penguin random house, london, 2017, pp. 266. isbn 9780241289235. elisa pascucci, space and political agency research group (sparg), university of tampere, e-mail: elisa.pascucci@staff.uta.fi less than a year after the beginning of what came to be known as the ‘european refugee crisis’ of 2015, a un officer in lebanon described his work in refugee protection to me as driven by “the idea and the anticipation and the objective that capitalism would benefit refugees at a larger scale than humanitarian delivery can.” the optimistic suggestion that capitalism can help refugees is at the core of alexander betts and paul collier’s book refuge: transforming a broken refugee system (2017). it is by far the most debated book in the field of refugee research and policy published in 2017. other writers have authoritatively taken issues with several aspects of the volume – from its allegedly “ethnocentric” understanding of the dynamics of refugee migration (crawley 2017), to the “prickly” manner in which its critique of humanitarianism and the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) is articulated (hargreaves heap 2017). this review essay will focus on the authors’ claim that an aptly regulated capitalism can help saving a collapsing global humanitarian regime – an increasingly influential paradigm within the “neophile” world of international aid and development (scott-smith 2015). as betts and collier seem to suggest, albeit without fully developing this line of argument, at stake in this global shift is not only the future of refugee governance, but also a possible new legitimacy for global capitalism, one that builds upon and expands traditional notions of “corporate social responsibility”. in other words, refuge intercepts, summarizes, and infuses new confidence into a global trend towards humanitarian innovation through new, globalized “refugee economies”. as this review will discuss, however, claims of novelty hide a far more complex historical reality. the authors of the book are a professor of international affairs and director of the oxford refugee studies centre (betts), and a professor of economics at blavatnik school of government and former director of research at the world bank (collier) – highly influential scholars mostly engaging in policy research. betts in particular has pioneered work on refugee economies, innovation in refugee aid, and extensively consulted for the united nations and national governments. written “for a generalist audience” rather than for an academic one, as the authors explain in the introduction, the book is comprised of two main parts. the first one offers a diagnosis of what is defined as the “global disorder” of the refugee regime. this is described as a crisis of governance that reached its tragic peak with the panic-fueled policies that followed the waves of migration across the mediterranean caused by the arab uprisings and the syrian conflict. the second part of the book is devoted to the authors’ proposal for rethinking this global regime. the first question they address is framed as ethical in nature, and it concerns the ‘duty of rescue’. such ethical imperative, they claim, should be contextualized within a © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 198 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: book review rational acknowledgement of the logic driving states’ decisions, namely comparative advantage and burden-sharing in humanitarian policies. building on this foundation, the central part of the book makes the case for a marriage of humanitarian principles and capitalist economic development. it does so by proposing ways of creating new and more functional ‘havens’ and restoring refugee economic autonomy, as well as new paths to post-conflict reconstruction and recovery and a new, more synergic global governance. most of the proposals outlined rely on the political, legal and operational distinction between refugees and economic migrants. in re-affirming this distinction, the book avoids fully engaging with decades of empirical research that has highlighted the complex, mixed character of contemporary migratory movements within and from conflict zones, as well as the unstable epistemologies upon which migration categories rely (see allen et al. 2017; crawley 2017). as several critics have pointed out, few would disagree with one of refuge’s central claims: that denying refugees the right to work is “a catastrophic error”, as the authors authoritatively claimed in an opinion piece for the guardian (betts & collier 2017a). the point is assertively articulated, emerging from a timely and useful synthesis of the failures of the refugee regime. however, their argument about the need to grant access to labour markets in order to make refugees economically autonomous is not a new one, and is far from uncontested (see crawley 2017). refugee livelihood assistance has preoccupied the international community since the creation of the league of nations in 1919 (eastoncalabria 2015). the link between refugee (and migration) governance, economic development and security has been high on international policy agendas at least since the 1950, when the united nations relief and works agency (unrwa) explicitly sought to facilitate job creation in order to remove palestinian refugees from their relief rolls (talhami 2003, 139). in the last two decades, the social and economic autonomy of refugees has imposed itself as a policy diktat through the language of self-reliance and resilience (easton-calabria 2015; ilcan & rygiel 2015). these last two, however, have proven difficult targets to achieve. the economic autonomy secured by integration in local markets in first countries of asylum is often precarious, unstable and elusive to the point that many prefer the rather basic assistance they receive in camps to the self-reliant destitution they experience after settling in cities (jaji 2012; newhouse 2015). choosing not to engage with the critical literature on these topics, the book focuses instead on two selected case studies, namely syrian refugees in jordan since 2012 and refugee policies promoting economic self-reliance in uganda since the late 1990s. the last one is based on a 3-year research project led by betts at the oxford refugee studies centre. indeed the case study provides interesting examples of refugees’ economic agency resulting in small-scale commercial and entrepreneurial initiatives, from retailers of mobile telephones to young people founding non-governmental organizations (ngos). however, some important questions remain unaddressed. the authors aptly warn against any romanticization of refugee life in uganda, and mention how, in settlements like nakivale, the involvement of refugees in trade and retail businesses has produced inequalities as well. nevertheless, readers are swiftly reassured that the settlement is “at least better than almost every other refugee camp in africa” (betts & collier 2017b, 164). in the context of uganda’s national selfreliance strategy, “young people”, the authors write, “at least have the chance to aspire” (betts & collier 2017b, 164). this statement begs the question of whether, for the majority of refugees in uganda, the examined policies and economic initiatives have produced anything more than widespread, precarious self-employment – what the authors refer to as “cultures of self-help” (betts & collier 2017b, 167). issues like the uneven distribution of land and the consequences of the withdrawal of food rations are listed in a short paragraph, but never actually addressed. the assumption that assistance generates dependency is left unquestioned, and there is no discussion of the studies suggesting that, in several hosting countries across africa, what refugees “tend to see of the drive towards self-reliance is a refusal of unhcr and ngos to provide resources” and an attempt at “saving money on refugee aid” (bakewell 2003, 6). in the case of the syrian refugee crisis in jordan, the authors advance a proposal that promises to address the country’s concerns related to both national security and economic development. central to this move is the transformation of refugees into work force in the context of special economic zones (sezs). sezs are bounded geographical areas where business, trade, and labour are subject to special regulations in order to attract foreign investment. as such, they are spatial technologies that fennia 195: 2 (2017) 199elisa pascucci have historically served to put developing countries’ vast supply of cheap labour to use in the context of export-oriented industrialization. over the last few decades, the idea has been revived and expanded to advanced economies through so-called “hub globalization”, in which significantly relaxed regulation and the facilitated movement of goods and people in specific areas aim to accelerate the transition from industrial to service economies (park 2005). according to the fascinating narrative outlined in the preface to the volume, the authors developed the idea of matching refugees and private companies within sezs while working in jordan in 2015. in particular, they were inspired by the geographical proximity of the za’atari refugee camp and the king hussein bin talal development area (khbtda), a sez that was then operating “below capacity” (betts & collier 2017b, 171). the proposal was promptly taken up by donors and international institutions through the jordan compact, approved during the london conference on syrian refugees of 2016. the international community thus committed to around $2bn in aid and investment for jordan, while the country agreed to issue as many as 200,000 work permits for syrians, and to facilitate investment in at least five sezs. importantly, the european union revised the so-called preferential rules of origin, thereby facilitating the export of products manufactured in jordan, especially in the garment industry. the idea of combining refugee spaces and economic zones, however, is also not entirely new. as betts and collier (2017b, 179) quickly mention, it has been experimented, among other places, in thailand for burmese refugees and in the philippines, where the bataan refugee processing centre, established in 1980, was converted into the bataan technology park in 2014. refuge’s lack of engagement with such historical and empirical precedents should not be overlooked, because it is what allows the authors to express their optimism on the governability of ‘refugeefriendly capitalism’. this optimistic stance is reiterated in the conclusions of the book, where, anticipating potential criticism, betts and collier express their faith in the capacity and willingness of states and corporations to prevent exploitative working conditions for refugees (betts & collier 2017b, 235–236). in this regard, two major points are worth making. first, as noted, attempts to turn refugees into workers, whether within international organizations, public bureaucracies, or large private companies, have happened in the past and continue to happen in the present. their outcomes, however, are often not as clean, orderly, and even progressive as betts and collier’s book seems to assume. unrwa’s early large-scale plans for the employment of displaced palestinians served a primarily political purpose, namely the integration of palestinians into neighboring countries, and stalled in the face of refugee opposition and because “the employment of refugees was five times as costly as maintaining them on relief” (talhami 2003, 139). the success of efforts for the (temporary) economic integration of syrians in jordan, promoted by the jordan compact, has so far been assessed on the basis of the number of work permits issued. as acknowledged by the international labour organization (ilo) in a report published in june 2017, however, what has been measured so far is more likely to be the legalization of previously existing syrian employment, rather than the creation of new job opportunities through economic development (ilo 2017). “work permits”, the report states, “did not bring significant advantages” (ilo 2017, 55). the majority of the syrians involved in the ilo study continued to work with no actual written contract and no social security coverage, and experiences of unpaid overtime were common. even in the presence of improved formal regulations, securing ‘decent work’ for refugees is a much more elusive, complex target than refuge envisages. second, global humanitarianism itself is a material assemblage that generates its own economic relations, as well as relying on and facilitating the production of specific ‘commodities’ – from tents and anti-malnutrition foods to domestic services targeting expatriate aid workers (jennings & bøås 2015; redfield 2013). this material imprint, including the (often precarious) employment the humanitarian sector offers to a growing number of refugees (farah 2010; malkin 2015), has effects that need to be taken into account in any discussion of refugee governance. refuge itself includes examples of this entrenched complexity, which are unfortunately left unexplored. following the new influx of congolese refugees in 2013, the maize-milling business quoted by betts and collier as one of the most successful instances of refugee economic autonomy in uganda ended up having as one of its main clients the local world food program’s relief operations (betts & collier 2017b, 164). these phenomena highlight uneven geographies of development, aid, and refuge, in which policy outcomes are determined not only by donors’ power, humanitarian ethics, and the political and social agency of 200 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: book review refugees, but also by the friction of encounters “that shapes the direction and the form of capitalism as it moves through space” (domosh 2010, 430). refuge provides an agile and readable overview of the intricate crisis of global refugee governance. it is lucid and bold in identifying the “impossible choices with which we present refugees: long-term encampment, urban destitution, or perilous journeys” (betts & collier 2017b, 9). “for refugees”, betts and collier (2017b, 9) write, “these options are the refugee regime”. the book advances arguments that have been and will be widely discussed, and that will continue to influence and likely inform refugee policies in the near future. rather than offering a new cure, however, its proposals are a symptom of how contemporary refugee governance and humanitarianism are deeply affected by what cowen and smith (2009, 40) famously described as the “filtration of geoeconomic logic into the gamut of social institutions and mentalities”. in the sez model advocated by refuge, the incorporation of refugees into the labour force is temporary and not leading to local integration – the preferred ‘durable solution’ remaining return. rather, the syrian refugee crisis is turned into a development opportunity for hosting states, while at the same time giving “a number of multinational corporations” reasons for investing “that partly connect to corporate social responsibility and party to core business interests” (betts & collier 2017b, 172). in other words, refugees help global capitalism at least as much as global capitalism helps refugees. references allen, w., anderson, b., van hear, n., sumption, m., düvell, f., hough, j., rose, l., humphris, r. & walker, s. (2017) who counts in crisis? the new geopolitics of international migration and refugee governance. geopolitics 1–27. 01.06.2017. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1327740 bakewell, o. (2003) community services in refugee aid programmes: a critical analysis. new issues in refugee research working paper no. 82. unhcr evaluation and policy analysis unit, geneva. <http://www.unhcr.org/research/working/3e71f15a4/community-services-refugee-aid-programmescritical-analysis-oliver-bakewell.html>. 19.10.2017. betts, a. & collier, p. (2017a) why denying refugees the right to work is a catastrophic error. the guardian 22.03.2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/22/why-denying-refugeesthe-right-to-work-is-a-catastrophic-error>. 09.10.2017. betts, a. & collier, p. (2017b) refuge: transforming a broken refugee system. penguin, london. cowen, d. & smith, n. (2009) after geopolitics? from the geopolitical social to geoeconomics. antipode 41(1) 22–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00654.x crawley, h. (2017) migration: refugee economics. nature 544 26–27. https://doi.org/10.1038/544026a domosh, m. (2010) the world was never flat: early global encounters and the messiness of empire. progress in human geography 34(4) 419–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132509342367 eas ton calabria, e. e. (2015) from bot tom up to top down: the ‘pre -his tor y ’ of refugee livelihoods assis t ance from 1919 to 1979. journal of refugee studies 28 (3) 412– 436. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fev004 farah, r. (2010) unrwa: through the eyes of its refugee employees. refugee survey quarterly 28(2–3) 389–411. hargreaves heap, s. (2017) refuge: transforming a broken refugee system. refugee history. <http://refugeehistory.org/blog/2017/5/19/refuge-transforming-a-broken-refugee-system> 28.09.2017. ilcan, s. & rygiel, k. (2015) “resiliency humanitarianism”: responsibilizing refugees through humanitarian emergency governance in the camp. international political sociology 9 333–351. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12101 [ilo] international labour organization (2017) work permits and employment of syrian refugees in jordan: towards formalising the work of syrian refugees. ilo regional office for arab states. <ht tp://w w w.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public /-arabstates/-ro-beirut /documents/publication/ wcms_559151.pdf> 09.10.2017. jaji, r. (2012) social technology and refugee encampment in kenya. journal of refugee studies 25 221–238. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fer046 jennings, k . m. & bøås, m. (2015) transac tions and interac tions: ever yday life in the peacekeeping economy. journal of inter vention and statebuilding 9 (3) 281–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2015.1070022 fennia 195: 2 (2017) 201elisa pascucci malkin, n. (2015) my brother’s keeper: the double experience of refugee aid-workers. journal of peacebuilding & development 10(3) 46–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/15423166.2015.1085811 newhouse, l. (2015) more than mere survival: violence, humanitarian governance, and practical material politics in a kenyan refugee camp. environment and planning a 47(11) 2292–2307. https://doi.org/10.1068/a140106p park, b. (2005) spatially selective liberalization and graduated sovereignt y: politics of neoliberalism and “special economic zones” in south korea. political geography 24(7) 850–873. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2005.06.002 redfield, p. (2013) bioexpectations: life technologies as humanitarian goods. public culture 24(1) 157–184. scott-smith, t. (2015) humanitarian neophilia: the innovation turn and its implications. third world quarterly 37(12) 2229–2251. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2016.1176856 talhami, g. h. (2003) palestinian refugees: pawns to political actors. nova science publisher, inc., new york. key: cord-0068035-or3phvw3 authors: murtazashvili, ilia title: does capitalism have a future? a review essay of peter boettke’s the struggle for a better world and daniel bromley’s possessive individualism: a crisis of capitalism date: 2021-10-01 journal: rev austrian econ doi: 10.1007/s11138-021-00558-5 sha: 82be401b12f070453335fe9815ffb1afa60ef549 doc_id: 68035 cord_uid: or3phvw3 in this review essay, i compare and contrast peter boettke’s the struggle for a better world (mercatus center, 2021) and daniel bromley’s possessive individualism: a crisis of capitalism (oxford university press, 2019). each of these books considers the future of capitalism. boettke’s struggle sees capitalism as the only morally and economically justifiable system but that continual effort is necessary to ensure the capitalist enterprise succeeds. bromley’s crisis sees capitalism as a spent force that no longer does what it was meant to do—namely, improve the economic well-being of households. there are surprisingly many points of agreement in these books, most notably a concern for the downtrodden in society and an appreciation for the legitimation crisis confronting capitalism. there are also important differences that will give anyone interested in the future of capitalism much to ponder. boettke sees unconstrained government as the primary threat to legitimacy; bromley identifies the possessive individualism that lies at the heart of our current capitalist system as the source of the crisis. both books make a significant contribution to our understanding of the institutions governing capitalist economies and powerful arguments as we contemplate the future of capitalism. does capitalism have a future? in this review essay, i compare and contrast two books that offer sweeping, insightful accounts of the past, present, and future of capitalism. peter boettke's the struggle for a better world (2021) (hereafter struggle) is an eloquent defense of liberalism-a "doctrine of economic and political life grounded in the recognition that we are one another's dignified equals, and that justice demands equal treatment of equals" (p. 7). liberalism is about power for the people, not the privileged elites. boettke's collection of essays offers a superb defense of capitalism grounded in an appreciation for the way that spontaneous order makes the best use of the human imagination and a deep concern for the damage done when government becomes unshackled leviathan. daniel bromley's possessive individualism: a crisis of capitalism (2019) (hereafter crisis) sees capitalism as a spent force because its concern with improving the well-being of households has been replaced by its singular focus on profiting by what bromley calls "wrangler capitalists" -those capitalists who specialize in buying, selling, and reorganizing businesses (pp. 55-56) . according to bromley, the problem is possessive individualism: an overwhelming concern is to "stay focused on controlling costs," much like what a comptroller does (p. 23). economics used to be concerned with how households provide for themselves but has become preoccupied with the atomistic individual. did, as boettke suggests, and as deirdre mccloskey and art carden (2020) have persuasively argued, liberalism make us better and richer humans? not so, for bromley. we have more stuff, but what about the quality of our working lives? for many workers, the current situation is nothing to gloat about. each author speaks from a position of credibility as a scholar and institution builder. boettke has done as much as anyone to advance contemporary austrian economics. bromley is known for work in the tradition of the so-called old institutionalists, such as john commons. there are important differences between the traditions. for one, austrians and institutionalists differ in their beliefs about general economic truths: austrians think there are such truths but question whether mathematical formalism is the way to find them, while institutionalists, especially the old institutionalists, find such truths chimeral (boettke et al., 2003) . despite differences in their perspectives, these books have much in common. the shared framework should not come as much of a surprise. though institutionalism is sometimes contrasted with institutionalism in economics, austrians, as boettke (1989a) explains, are and always have been institutionalist. austrian institutionalists such as hayek and mises are completely in agreement with the old institutionalists (and the new version) that the structure and scope of economics ought to be concerned first and foremost with "the consequences of alternative institutional arrangements" (boettke, 1989b, p. 78) . simply put, austrian economics is institutional economics (palagashvili et al., 2017) . besides a shared concern with institutions, each of these books recognizes a legitimacy crisis. boettke's struggle begins by noting that trust in public institutions of governance, private institutions of finance and commerce, and social institutions of community are confronting a severe stress test. for example, george floyd's murder cannot be tolerated in a liberal society. rust belt cities such as detroit and pittsburgh continue to grapple with economic malaise, despair, and addiction. true radical liberals, as boettke explains, have inherited a problematic past and face a troubling present. there is no shortage of interesting work pointing out how we are so much better off now than in earlier centuries. but pointing out how economic freedom is associated with wealth does not really explain why there is so much anger, and the fact is that much of the world remains extremely poor. boettke knows not all is well in society, though liberalism is not the problem. bromley's crisis is motivated in part by the recent electoral victory of populist leaders, including donald trump. trump is a grifter, but this surprising victory was not a cause of the crisis. trump, in bromley's words, is "merely a noxious messenger" (p. 232). bromley contends that people are angry because managerial capitalism, with its emphasis on cutting costs, has failed them. john meadowcroft (2019) explains that james m. buchanan was especially concerned with the status of the status quo. so too are boettke and bromley's books. but their understandings of the causes differs. boettke argues that public misconduct, not private misconduct, ruins nations. unshackled leviathan is the problem. for bromley, the problem is capitalism. my goal in this review essay is to consider where these books differ in their understanding of capitalism, their diagnosis of the problem giving rise to the legitimation crisis, and their suggestions about what ought to be done. it is not to choose one argument over another. each of these books masterfully weaves together insights gained through the authors' decades of careful inquiry on the nature of capitalism. each shows a masterful understanding of institutions. i hope that anyone especially optimistic about capitalism will take bromley's critique seriously and that anyone especially optimistic about government's ability to solve the problem will consider carefully boettke's impassioned arguments. the rest of this essay is structured as follows. first, i suggest that an important difference is that struggle focuses on capitalism as exchange of goods and services, while crisis places much more emphasis on the transition from merchant capitalism to industrial, then financial, and then managerial capitalism. by the time we get to managerial capitalism, goods and services are still exchanged, but labor has far less bargaining power under the current system of capitalism than under previous ones. next, i consider differences in how these books conceptualize the problem: boettke's issue is with government, while bromley's is with possessive individualism. finally, i contrast the two authors' advice about the future. boettke's struggle places adam smith at the forefront. one might think this is an obvious starting point since we are concerned with economies. but anyone familiar with the typical phd program's course sequence in microeconomics will know that smith is treated as a footnote in a course devoted mainly to proving one's mathematical chops. but ignoring smith has significant costs, especially if we are concerned with vulnerable people. in boettke's hands, smith becomes a figure much like johnny cash: someone profoundly concerned with the voiceless and the downtrodden. liberalism, as boettke explains, means extending a hand to strangers in order to lift the dispossessed and the desperate out of poverty. 1 smith's wealth of nations argued that individuals should be free from domination and that those who are more powerful should not determine the material conditions of those who have less power because no society can flourish if the greater part of its members are poor and miserable. this is the central theme in the liberal tradition. f.a. hayek understood the liberal project as the abolition of privileges of the few that kept down the many. it is a point made explicitly in the 1956 edition of the road to serfdom "the essence of the liberal position is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others" (1956 [1994] , p. xxxvi). in addition, in the constitution of liberty, hayek states that the "true contrast to a reign of status is the reign of general and equal laws, of the rules which are the same for all, or, we might say, of the rule of leges in the original meaning of the latin word for lawsleges that is, as opposed to the privi-leges" (emphasis original, hayek, 1960, p. 154) . buchanan believed that the struggle for political liberalism is an effort to free individuals from the ruling elite. boettke favorably references mccloskey's why liberalism works (2019) in noting that true liberalism means no racism, no imperialism, no unnecessary taxes, and no slaves at all. 2 boettke's essays (crisis is a collection of essays bookended by a wonderful introduction and conclusion) are exceptionally useful as a corrective to any argument that classical liberalism supports oppressive institutions such as slavery and segregation. others have debunked such arguments (see, for example, fleury and marciano 2018). struggle is not a direct response to those criticisms. rather, it shows that smith was an ardent defender of consent as a general organizing principle and an enemy of privilege as a means of organizing economic activities. but could smith have foreseen the evolution of capitalism? and should we place blame on government when capitalism and democracy seem so intrinsically bound up that it seems impossible to even separate them? 3 bromley's crisis recognizes that the capitalism that smith understood so well has changed a great deal since his time. and we know that the core of bromley's book is to analyze the transition from merchant capitalism to industrial capitalism to financial capitalism and, finally, to the managerial capitalism of today. these gradual shifts are characterized by "the primacy of a central personified medium-the entrepreneur of merchant capitalism, the engineer of industrial capitalism, the banker of financial capitalism, and the wrangler of today's managerial capitalism" (emphasis original, p. 55). 4 bromley's description of capitalism is significant and useful, especially when we consider that smith introduced new ideas about how we think about capital and capitalism. 5 before smith wrote about it, capital was a sum of money that was to be invested or had been invested. but then it became the things themselves -the goods traded. conceptualizing of capital as physical things and capitalism as exchange was a historical sleight of hand, one with important consequences: it makes us lose track of the changes in capitalism since we become concerned with physical things rather than legal relationships and the rules governing capitalism. smith's novel approach to capital and capitalism meant that the conversation about capitalism was often less institutionally rich than it could have been. this does not mean smith had no role for institutions. gary anderson and robert tollison (1982) showed that smith was critical of the english east indian company. smith believed the problem was government failure rather than a market failure. and nathan rosenberg recognized smith's preoccupation with establishing the conditions under which market mechanisms operate most effectively and that tree operation of "certain impulses, motivations, and behavior patterns were calculated to thwart, rather than to reinforce, the beneficent operation of market forces" (1960, p. 569) . institutions, including government ones, are necessary because cooperation is not inevitable. rather, smith's institutionalism, like boettke's, focuses on the political side of the institutions governing capitalism as the problem. 6 thus, when smith speaks of capitalism requiring an appropriate constitutional framework, it is mostly about ensuring that the government limits its activities -a view quite similar to boettke's struggle. bromley, in contrast, is much more interested in the evolutionary stages of capitalism, and the consequences of these shifts. what changes ought we to be concerned with? the rigid hierarchies of precapitalist relations came under pressure as labor's bargaining power improved as a result of plague and warfare in the fourteenth century. by the end of the fourteenth century, most agricultural laborers had become quasi-independent agricultural entrepreneurs who were no longer willing to underwrite wars. copyhold emerged as an institution -and with it, rental contracts to use land replaced in-kind payment for privileges to use land. now lords held the king's land and independent families held the lord's land. copyhold put us on the road to fee simple, the most complete property right. 7 this institutional development enabled the rise of merchant capitalism and the entrepreneur, but much would be lost as capitalism evolved. workers lost control of their means of production (labor) with the rise of industrial capitalism and the factory system and the accompanying separation between owners of capital-commercial land, sophisticated machines, large factories-and owners of labor power. labor then became a commodity to be bought and sold just like any other factor of production. mccloskey's bourgeois dignity (2010) concerns how we talk about entrepreneurs. bromley's concern is with the rise of a body of compliant laborers whose lives are very different from those of entrepreneurs. the factory system was not the only development. financial capitalism-which came because industry at a massive scale required financing on a grand scaleintroduced rapid movement of liquidity around the world. but that was not the end. in managerial capitalism, "the wrangler rules. the entrepreneur of merchant capitalism surrendered his autonomy to the engineer of industrial capitalism. the engineer was soon pushed aside by the money managers and bankers of financial capitalism. now, it seems reasonable to suggest that the financial wizards are answerable to the wrangler. someone very meticulous is now minding the store" (bromley, p. 82 ). bromley then shifts to an argument that scholars interested in collective action will appreciate. he describes firms as hedgehogs and households as foxes. hedgehogs know one thing and foxes know many. households, under managerial capitalism, have to know many things, and some even have to hold several jobs. the firm, however, is an artificial construct with a singular goal: to lower costs. it is for this reason that the hedgehogs dominate the foxes; the foxes have no chance. walmart and amazon are too big to resist. the foxes face a much larger collective action problem, one that is exacerbated by the massive scale of capitalism. boettke's essays do not focus as much as crisis on the historical evolution of capitalism; rather, they focus on the importance of freedom of choice. struggle defends significant figures such as ludwig von mises, hayek, and milton friedman. bromley counters the arguments of the great defenders of capitalism. freedom of choice-not being forced to work a specific job-is a narrow conception of freedom. freedom to choose means little if the choice set, which is shaped by institutions, is not of our choosing. bromley puts it this way: living is good (we have more stuff to consume), but what about work life? capitalism is thriving in some parts of urban areas, but anger with the current situation is especially pronounced in rural areas in the united states, britain, and western europe. and outside of those countries, many countries have experienced little improvement in material conditions in the past several centuries. some workers may enjoy the life of the fox, moving from job to job in the gig economy, but for many, there is despair: "the unavoidable consequence of possessive individualism is that capitalism no longer comprises a source of hope. it has evolved into a system-an 'ism'-without a compelling moral basis for its continuation" (bromley, p. 123) . these books thus differ in what they mean by capitalism: trade in goods and services (in struggle) or trade in labor (in crisis). however, each aspect of capitalism is significant, and so they are in a sense complementary contributions. trade in goods and services has its benefits, though the increase in goods and services available to us comes with greater vulnerability for households excepting their greater consumption choices. together, the books offer profound insight into the productive power of capital and its costs. another reason to praise boettke's and bromley's books is that they move beyond thomas piketty's (2014) concern with the empirical relationship between inequality and capitalism in at least three ways. first, they remind us that any attempt to relate capitalism to inequality leaves out important changes in the nature of capitalism over the past several hundred years. this is significant because unless we understand which capitalism we are talking about, we may misdiagnose the problem. second, boettke and bromley each recognize that anger and illegitimacy are based not on inequality but on vulnerability. they disagree about their source of the problems: for boettke, vulnerability is a result of government or regulation; for bromley, capitalism -specifically, what he calls wrangler capitalism (and before it, industrial capitalism -is the reason households struggle to find meaningful employment). third, it is abundantly clear that the wealth tax suggested by piketty and increasingly supported by politicians is a magic bullet. rather, our focus, if we agree with boettke, is that we ought to be concerned with political institutions (why should we expect that the revenues will be spent addressing the real problems?). and if we agree with bromley, we ought to direct our concern to economic institutions, not simply fiscal policies (why should we expect a wealth tax will solve the problem of vulnerability, if managerial capitalism remains unimpeded?). one term that does not come up much in either book is neoliberalism, and for good reason: the term is often used as a pejorative to criticize a certain group of economists. 8 critics of "neoliberalism" would do well to consider carefully specifying what kind of capitalism they are talking about and whether they have accurately diagnosed the problem they see, and whether it works. 9 bromley's work suggests their concern is not so much with the recommendations of scholars such as friedman as with the specific institutional features of capitalism as we currently experience it, while boettke suggests that the problems they see may be government failures rather than problems with supposedly laissez-faire economic policies. each offers a diagnosis of the problem. in struggle, the diagnosis is public predation. in crisis, it is possessive individualism and the collective action problem confronting workers in their dealings with firms. in chapter 2 of struggle, "economics and public administration," boettke contends that an institutional framework is necessary to realize gains from exchange because of the paradox of government: addressing private predation opens the 8 nick cowen's (2021) perspective offers a compelling and productive framework that eschews the desire to see neoliberalism as a bogeyman standing in for policies one wishes to criticize. 9 for an excellent discussion of the history of the term neoliberalism, see leeson and harris (forthcoming) . they also explain why there is no good reason to see hayek as a neoliberal who only argued for market fundamentalism. some of hayek's writing were very much opposed to state efforts to implement markets, as hayek of course understood the knowledge problem of doing so. possibility of public predation. the fundamental cause of development-as viewed by scholars from mises to mccloskey-is ideas about what to produce and how to produce it, as well as idea about what kinds of rules make savings and capital accumulation safe. that is, idea about how to govern ourselves. chapter 5 of struggle (aptly titled "is state intervention in the economy inevitable?") argues that government intervention in the economy is not inevitable but probable without restraints on government, given that the demand for state intervention is constant. chapter 6 is a clearly written essay that eloquently argues that government overspends because it has too much power. nor is the problem with the people. one of the things that comes out in this book is boettke's deep appreciation for the role of institutions as an explanation of our current situation. as boettke explains, "blaming public unions for asking for improved benefits from their members or blaming elected officials for responding to those demands in order to win votes is like criticizing a wasp for stinging you when you step on its nest. the problem isn't the people; it is the institutional regime that produces the pattern of behavior" (boettke, p. 126) . like bromley, boettke is concerned above all with institutions and their consequences. boettke, as we know from his public administration in the classical liberal tradition (aligica et al., 2019) , written with paul dragos aligica and vlad tarko, is deeply appreciative of vincent and elinor ostroms' vision of public administration. the essays of struggle show the evolution of many of the ideas in the earlier book. in the emergent view of public administration, the idea of a unitary state populated by omniscient and benevolent expert bureaucrats is rejected in favor of a view of government populated by ordinary individuals who have limited knowledge and respond to incentives. this is the ostromian vision. the implication is clear: we ought to adjust our expectations of what to expect from bureaucrats. public entrepreneurs are the ones with the vision required to make changes, though making changes requires that these entrepreneurs and those who they interact with have some autonomy. the problem is not government. our central problem is that government has gotten out of hand and that we have collectively moved away from the ostromian vision of self-governance as the unifying theme of public administration. most turning to crisis, we direct our gaze to the problems arising from capitalism. central to bromley's diagnosis of the problem is the parable of the fox and the hedgehog. as noted above, managerial capitalists are the hedgehogs; households and workers are the foxes. the foxes of the world have to deal with increasing atomization: "in a fully atomized world, the flowering of meritocratic processes then tends to threaten political coherence and a shared sense of purpose within a community. meritocracies reward merit, but they also begin to generate institutional arrangements-public policies-that tend to reinforce such self-interested inclinations" (bromley, p. 16) . bromley points to economics as the dubious enabler of the hedgehogs. economics shifted its concern from organization to the atomized individual. it was originally concerned with how individuals and societies organize to provide for themselves. the two key organizations are the household (which is natural) and the firm (which is artificial). but then formalism took hold, and the maximizing individual became sovereign. possessive individualism is the view that individual rationality and the sanctity of the consumer are the most significant building blocks of the economy. this view overlooks that there had to be organizations in order for there to be something to trade. as far as i can tell, bromley and boettke are fully in agreement on the problems that arise from the max u or "man as machine" approach in much of economics. 11 crisis offers up possessive individualism as the cause of the current dissatisfaction with capitalism. bromley engages a topic of concern to many in the austrian tradition: do markets make us more virtuous than we would otherwise be? 12 bromley summarizes the case that markets make us moral as follows. market economies come to be composed of individuals who are socialized to master the virtuous character traits of market societies. these acquired traits are inevitable consequences of the need to orient one's actions toward mutually advantageous social interactions, which are the reason why societies adopted markets in the first place. bromley's response to the markets-as-moral-spaces argument is that its proponents are concerned only with buyers and sellers seeking to exchange commodities or services in a normal market. however, the desire to engage in market transactions is not itself a virtue, as many exchanges are repugnant and many choices are not good even for the individuals doing the choosing. most significantly, most of these market transactions reapportion wealth rather than create new wealth. any focus on buying and selling is thus incomplete. labor has been commodified, and many workers cling to the belief that they need choice. but workers now have fewer choices and much less bargaining power. the hedgehog dominates under managerial capitalism, and many foxes do not even know it, and when they do, they cannot really do much about it. this is not a problem that arises from government. rather, it is a problem of capitalism; more fundamentally, the problem is that the ideology of possessive individualism has been wielded to justify the institutions that give rise to the anger that has contributed to deplorable phenomena such as trumpism. these books are also an invitation to additional empirical research. bromley offers sweeping critiques of managerial capitalism, with a masterful institutional analysis of our current situation. but many of the contentions are empirical ones. 11 indeed, boettke et al. (2003) contend that only the austrians and old institutionalists truly put people at the forefront of analysis. 12 anyone looking for a response to bromley's criticism would do well to consider ginny choi and virgil storr's do markets corrupt our morals? (2019). does the market erode social capital? mark pennington and john meadowcroft (2008) find that spontaneous order produces bridging and bonding social capital. art carden recently notes that walmart is not as bad as it seems, contrary to corporate dystopia narratives in the tradition of john kenneth galbraith's new industrial state (1967) . while walmart is one of the largest firms in the world by profits, its profits are only about one-tenth of one percent of us gdp (carden, 2021 ). carden's empirical studies provide further evidence that walmart is actually good -there is less hunger (courtemanche & carden, 2011) , more art and leisure , and no decline in social capital, such as club membership, in communities with a walmart . one might see this as empirical evidence in support of boettke, though for reasons noted, bromley is certainly on to something, as the anger with the current work situation is still palpable, despite low prices. it is straightforward to see how bromley and boettke differ. it is certainly true, as boettke claims, that goods being reshuffled and reallocated in response to changes in prices can be a good thing-even a great thing, as we know from amazon prime getting many of us through the covid-19 pandemic or from how the supply lines for toilet paper and paper towels came through despite the hoarding behavior of some customers. but what if we replace goods and services in the above account with workers reshuffled and reallocated in response to changes in prices? after all, the definitive change in capitalism as we moved from merchant capitalism to industrial capitalism is that the worker became a fictitious commodity. foxes are not simply buying goods and services; they are goods and services. the point here is not to choose a side, but to note that the industrial revolution ensured that the question of what is being purchased would become not only about the stuff we want, but about labor. another difference worth noting is about embracing people with open arms. libertarians will love boettke's characterization of welcoming strangers with an open hand. 13 bromley's perspective is a bit more nuanced. the reason why people want to come to countries such as the united states is not that they do not have market freedom. many african countries have an abundance of market freedom, but that is not enough to provide political order. nor is it clear that the open hand comes without costs. george borjas (2016) has made this point in reflecting on immigration. nor is xenophobia or racism the obvious reason why people support trump, as some workers have rational reasons to worry about their situation with inflows of people (murtazashvili et al., 2021) . but this should be clear enough from any economics lesson on immigration, since the argument is about net benefits from immigration, not that every single person is better off with new entrants into the labor force. and we cannot necessarily rely on government to address the challenge that comes with new migrants to a region, as those who are left out do not always feel they have much voice in politics. possessive individualism is part of the reason people want to leave one place; and in their destination, its pernicious effects on politics mean that those people may be subject to the same forces of insecurity and instability brought on by wrangler capitalists. bromley's point is that today's immigrants might be the disaffected rust belt workers of tomorrow, and we ought to spend more time thinking about why the disaffected rust belt workers might be concerned about immigration beyond merely asserting that they are economically irrational or xenophobic racists. struggle leaves no uncertainty about what is not to be done: "there is no justice to be achieved from socialism, only equality in misery and despair as daily life devolves into one of economic deprivation and political terror" (boettke, p. 7). the case is made more fully in boettke's collection of essays titled calculation and coordination (2001) . socialism ought to be eliminated from the menu of potentially desirable organizational forms of economic, political, and social life. chapter 13 ("rebuilding the liberal project") is more constructive in suggesting that the liberal project cannot be saved by repackaging a fixed doctrine of eternal truths. true liberalism faces a threat from conservative movements on the right and socialism on the left. in the us and the uk, the populist threat comes from both the left and right. liberalism above all is about toleration. the answer to populism is toleration. cosmopolitanism is the answer to populism. boettke's argument is a case for freedom to choose. 14 one of the reasons openness is justified is, per julian simon (1981) , that the ultimate resource is human imagination. boettke's concluding chapter provides one of the most eloquent defenses of the liberal society as an open society. libertarian champions of economic freedom would do well to consider boettke's nuanced perspective on the current situation. at best, we have pockets of liberal commerce that raise living standards tremendously. at worst, we have power and privilege. there is a growing concern about global inequality. in the end, the struggle of ideas is about correcting two misconceptions: (1) the rich get rich at the expense of the poor, and (2) the poor do not get rich faster than the rich get richer. critics point to neoliberalism as the problem. boettke explains why we ought not to do that. for bromley, inequality is the intended result of possessive individualism, which compels individuals to pursue a livelihood strategy, including the types of jobs we choose and what we collectively expect of our workers, based on the celebration of rights and the illusory idea of being free to choose. despite many individuals believing that individualism is the only and right way to organize society, they seem not to realize that they are at the mercy of capitalist firms equally committed to possessive individualism, and that when push comes to shove, the capitalists mostly win. consumers, as bromley notes, are often all too eager to denounce china for predatory trade policies while filling up their minivans with abundant clothing, toys, and plastic products from china. lower prices are a good thing. but bromley argues that that is not a good reason, but rather an excuse. the more honest reason why consumers continue the endless quest for bargains is the "enduring culturally prized urge toward persistent lowcost acquisitiveness" (p. 237). bromley is not engaging in marxist false consciousness theorizing. rather, it is an empirical statement that many of the policies individuals support contribute to the vulnerability of workers and that the fact that they have more choice does not eliminate the more general precarity of their work situation. low-cost acquisitiveness has costs. one might of course respond that individualism is not necessarily bad, especially when we think of individualism as inquisitiveness and hard work. certainly the empirical literature finds that individualism is associated with greater wealth (see, for example, williamson and mathers 2011). bromley's criticism is different. freedom has come to mean aggressively pursuing self-interest and desiring to make sure others do not have what we enjoy. possessive individualism is not the social capital that boettke and colleagues have so clearly shown to be significant in responding to crises (boettke et al., 2007) . overcoming possessive individualism -crass individualism -requires us to recognize that we can reconstitute a market economy in the interest of greater equality and other-regarding behavior. the capitalist firm must be transformed into a public trust. however, this will not be sufficient. improved livelihoods will also require that the possessive individual be reimagined. bromley notes that the word "community" is now used to separate us into silos, a practice facilitated by identity politics. rather than separating ourselves, it is crucial to recognize that personhood requires a community that acknowledges one's personhood. it requires engagement. but managerial capitalism denies the relevance of community. mindless and numb workers are the new automatons. ultimately we need exchange on equal terms since under managerial capitalism the fox always loses. these books also discuss the future of economics as a science. one of boettke's contributions is demonstrating the ongoing significance of the classical liberal tradition. economics has lost its way in its search for clever research designs and its focus on mathematics. paradoxically, that makes it challenging for us to understand how people behave since the assumption of maximization eliminates volition (as well as makes challenge consideration of time, uncertainty, and ignorance). bromley is perhaps more critical of economics, especially the kind that sees efficiency as a guide to policy. to quote bromley: "efficiency is not and cannot possibly be a design criterion. the only approach to meaningful institutional change is to: (1) focus on careful diagnosis of problematic settings and circumstances; (2) entertain new ideas that seem most promising in solving a particular problem; (3) embrace the most reasonable of those possibilities; and (4) then undertake ex post monitoring and assessment as the new policies are allowed to run their course" (p. 123). anyone who agrees with peter leeson's (2020) and yoram barzel's (2002) eloquent defense of the idea that maximization is a critical concept to economists ought to consider bromley's explanation why utility maximization cannot provide a guide for human action and why efficiency can never explain why we choose a specific policy. rather, we need to appreciate that the process of institutional change is one of realizing our collective and shared futures through a process of reasoning about what works, what does not work, and how things can be better. 15 is capitalism a liberal emancipatory project worth saving? or is it a spent force? boettke does a masterful job clarifying what capitalism does well, explaining the problems arising from centralized-government intervention in the economy, and reminding us of the evils of socialism. but all is not well in the kingdom. work life is not great, and while nobody doubts that the bourgeois deal contributed to riches, it only made some rich. and anger in places such as the rural united states is not simply a consequence of unrestrained government. capitalism is to blame, according to bromley, but it is not adam smith's capitalism. managerial capitalism puts workers in a bind, and collective action does not favor the fox. despite these differences, there are similarities between boettke's austrian institutionalism and bromley's old institutionalism. each author sees institutions as the central concern for economics. boettke is also a self-professed disciple of mainline economics, which includes public choice (clearly concerned with rules) and the ostroms' polycentric view (also concerned with rules). still, one discerns a richness in bromley's analysis of institutions that one does not see as often in much of the mainline tradition, except perhaps for mccloskey's work and, arguably, boettke's work on socialism. the greatest strength of boettke's essays may be in the institutional criticism of socialism, and bromley's most significant contribution is to discern the institutional problem with managerial capitalism. 16 in my view, these are complementary insights that counsel humility when assessing capitalism and socialism. the institutional approach of these books has profound policy significance. much of the current conversation in the post-covid economy is about infrastructuresome version of a new marshall plan, but for the rich countries. this simplistic application of keynesian reasoning, as these books make so clear, is insufficient because it does not appreciate that the problem is institutional. boettke and bromley differ in their diagnosis of the problem; they agree that institutions are the key, and neither proposes a magic bullet. they understand that the process of institutional change is a struggle. boettke and bromley also appreciate the significance of ideas in the process of institutional change. ideas give rise to beliefs, and changes in beliefs ultimately lead to changes in institutions. their appreciation for ideas, along with history, is too often pushed aside in economics these days. there is an important difference when it comes to spontaneous order. boettke, like the great austrians before him, appreciates spontaneous order. hayek famously divided orders into planned and spontaneous orders. hayek of course followed menger's distinction between organic and pragmatic orders. austrian economists tend to see spontaneous orders as the more interesting aspect of social science, while old and new institutionalists tend to see directed orders as more significant, in part because such orders vary so much. hayek also thought spontaneous order was the most interesting aspect of social science. bromley shows why there is much we do not understand about the planned orders that are so important to capitalist economies and that there is nothing simple about understanding why and how planner orders work. but boettke does not succumb to the view that only spontaneous order is interesting or try to define everything as a spontaneous order. unlike many of the earlier austrians, who were content to praise the virtues of the market, boettke has a deep appreciation for vincent ostrom's insights into public administration and therefore appreciates the problem of explaining the success of directed orders. thus, each book can be thought of as a major contribution to institutionalism, however we define it. anyone interested in the future of capitalism will be better off after reading these books. the books could be read as a defense of markets and criticism of government by an austrian-public choice economist versus an impassioned criticism of capitalism by a disciple of the progressive john commons. but that would be a mistake. each book illustrates a deep commitment to institutional analysis and offers a wealth of knowledge about how to compare institutions. they both put institutional analysis at the forefront of economics, where it should be. there is no max u in either of these impressive books. the perspectives are very much complementary. the battle for the future of capitalism is indeed a battle of ideas, and the ideas in these books give us much to reflect on. capitalist alternatives: models, taxonomies, scenarios. routledge public governance and the classical-liberal perspective: political economy foundations adam smith's analysis of joint-stock companies a theory of the state: economic rights, legal rights, and the scope of the state evolution and economics: austrians as institutionalists austrian institutionalism: a reply calculation and coordination: essays on socialism and transitional political economy the struggle for a better world man as machine: the plight of 20th century economics the political, economic, and social aspects of katrina we wanted workers: unraveling the immigration narrative the reason of rules: constitutional political economy sufficient reason: volitional pragmatism and the meaning of economic institutions possessive individualism: a crisis of capitalism july 2, 1962: the day retail changed forever. american institute for economic research wal-mart, leisure, and culture does wal-mart reduce social capital? public choice supersizing supercenters? the impact of walmart supercenters on body mass index and obesity neoliberal social justice: rawls unveiled predation in state and nation progress by consent: adam smith as development economist. the review of austrian economics the sound of silence: a review essay of nancy maclean's democracy in chains: the deep history of the radical right's stealth plan for america the new industrial state the origins and consequences of property rights: austrian, public choice, and institutional economics perspectives the road to serfdom: fiftieth the constitution of liberty is socialism feasible?: towards an alternative future political capitalism: how political influence is made and maintained anarchy unbound: why self-governance works better than you think logic is a harsh mistress: welfare economics for economists forthcoming). hayek, neoliberalism, and the washington consensus hutt on liberalism, populism, and the constitutional political economy of racism. the independent review: a why liberalism works: how true liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all bourgeois dignity: why economics can't explain the modern world leave me alone and i'll make you rich: how the bourgeois deal enriched the world why are there no austrian social democrats? bonding and bridging: social capital and the communitarian critique of liberal markets american institutional exceptionalism and the trump presidency. the independent review: a wretched refuse? the political economy of immigration and institutions the decline and rise of institutions: a modern survey of the austrian contribution to the economic analysis of institutions the code of capital: how the law creates wealth and inequality some institutional aspects of the wealth of nations the ultimate resource free to move: foot voting, migration, and political freedom economic freedom, culture, and growth acknowledgments i had the idea to write this essay after a book talk by dan bromley at the center for governance and markets at the university of pittsburgh in march 2021. mark pennington served as a discussant for the seminar, and his willingness to engage dan's book constructively was a breath of fresh air. mark's constructive dialogue reminded me how much can be gained by carefully considering work with which we disagree. since i had been reading pete boettke's book at the time, it seemed natural to continue that conversation by comparing and contrasting these books. i thank rosolino candela for encouraging me to write this piece and for offering extensive and thoughtful suggestions on the essay. thanks to nick cowen, rabih helou, and jen murtazashvili reding and commenting on the essay and art carden for sharing some of his recent work on walmart that fit nicely with the themes of this essay. most importantly, thanks to dan and pete for their mentorship over the years and for inspiring so many of us. key: cord-0046811-52gowb10 authors: jagodzinski, jan title: aesthetic wars: between the creative industries and nomadology date: 2020-05-05 journal: pedagogical explorations in a posthuman age doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-48618-1_6 sha: fbcba9d4b2e12f39c17e001981b2ec8f4e3dbd2c doc_id: 46811 cord_uid: 52gowb10 in this chapter, i argue that creativity has been exploited by the creative industries of designer capitalism. i try to show how a different formulation of creativity might be conceptualized by drawing on the nomadic philosophy of deleuze and guattari. i end this essay with a speculation as to where art|education might invest its energies as a field of endeavor to forward a minoritarian political position writing about creativity and art and its education is a very difficult undertaking since so much has been written on the subject. i hope to bring something new to the table concerning creativity by drawing on the philosophy of deleuze and guattari, who trouble philosophical positions that have been taken up by educators and artists in the past including phenomenology, hermeneutics, cognitive theories, and critical theory, each of which has a rich tradition of thought. all these positions continue to define the practices of the arts, education, as well as gallery and museum education. deleuze and guattari build upon and further both freudian and lacanian psychoanalysis, a position that i have supported for many years. i try to show the significance of their philosophy within a digital age of the image that changes the way art and its education has carried on its foundational principles based on representational and cognitive thought. in 2012 korean ministry of culture, sports and tourism declared the twenty-first century to be focused of 'creativity.' under the label 'concept korea,' ministry of culture, sports & tourism chapter 6 aesthetic wars: between the creative industries and nomadology (mcst)/korea creative content agency (kocca) and the council of fashion designers of america (cfda) with support from samsung fashion and design funds (sfdf), formed a two-year partnership to help american and korean designers build competitive businesses at home and abroad. such initiatives should come as no surprise for they speak directly to what is expected in all post-industrialized societies to put the arts to work as tied to the global market economy. recall chung kyung-won's initiative called 'designomics' mentioned in chapter 3. the globalization of the information economy and the internationalization of cyberspace have made culture and creativity a top priority when competing on the global stage. neoliberal capitalist forces, it seems, have captured creativity to continue a consumerist economy through what have become known by the general term the 'creative industries. ' the new capitalist economy of these 'creative industries' (florida 2002 (florida , 2010 hartley 2005) brings together the mass scale of the cultural-entertainment industries with the individual talent of the creative arts to provide national and global distribution of culture as well as niche market designer products. the oxymoron 'mass customization' has now become a possibility. the context for this convergence takes place within the new media technologies (screen digitalized cultures) that are part of the larger 'knowledge' economy for the use of what is said to be 'interactive' citizen-consumers or 'prosumers' who are democratically 'free' to choose what it is they wish to consume, and who they wish to be represented by-such is the pluralist democracy of neoliberal political thought as supported by a capitalist world economy. as my introduction to this book developed, we have now, in the neologism of gregory ulmer (2002) , a literacy that he calls 'electracy,' a portmanteau word that combines electricity with literacy. in a nutshell, we are living through a third stage of communication. just as orality was displaced by print literacy, print literacy is being displaced by electracy. electracy is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic or ideographic writing. jan rune holmevik (2012) maps out how electracy apparatus can be put to use when rethinking the intersections between rhetoric and game theory, via the signifier 'ludology.' the creative industries are all about electracy, a shift to the way the affective body and image structure performance. what is it that images can 'do,' is the order of the day. entertainment is the primary institution of electracy. it is the way entertainment is used to manipulate and steer desire that has become the overarching game of politics. trump is the prime example. twitter use and the spectacularization of his own impeachment, hiring so-called tv lawyers that appear on fox television, assured him that the populace watching will be swayed by the cover-up that was taking place right in front of their eyes, and under their noses, a 'beautiful display' of scam politics. alain badiou (2019) calls it 'fascist democracy.' the creative industries collapse work into play and producer into consumer. in terms of the three communication shifts in behavior historically, play supplants worship (the orality of religions) and experiment (the explorations of science). play works with entertainment, which supplants both religion and science. it is no longer a question of right/ wrong (the moralism of religions), nor the true/false dichotomy of science. these have been supplanted by joy/sadness (usually drawn from spinozian ethics), or in lacanian psychoanalytic terms, jouissance; that is, the ambiguity of pleasure/pain. julian dibble (2007) has called this 'ludocapitalism.' intelligence, knowledge, and creativity define four types of producer-consumers in what is a continuous dynamic spiral of production. first are the creators who form a series of new productive sectors such as advertising and all the different professionals involved (concept creators, photographers, graphic designers, audiovisual technicians, and so on). second are the consulting professionals such as the business and marketing experts, headhunters, personnel managers, and the like. these two levels of the creative industries create 'image worlds' or 'life-styles' and ways to generate desire and seduction as a lack, as to what is missing in your life to make it complete. competition among corporations becomes a form of creative play. the ecology for such creativity is all about relaxing, well-being, free space, open areas, and just the right amount of anxiety to create an atmosphere of expectation to design the next level of commodity (car, watch, computer, chip, television, and so on). gambling and profit maximization replace safe investing and employment creation. the third level of producers consists of consumers who actualize these image worlds that are offered enabling the fourth level of producers to emerge-those who are the personal image makers: personal trainers, personal stylists, clothing stylists, fashion consultants, real estate agents, dermatologists, plastic surgeons, estheticians, designers, interior-architects, self-help professions, and so on. their job is to sell their services to consumers who believe that they can help them get ahead and achieve as new kind of flexible subjectivity needed to survive in such an economy. artists, to survive in this economic climate must learn to be self-promoting entrepreneurs who hire agents to 'push' their wares in galleries and museums. in the 'creative industries' they work in transdisciplinary teams in a complete 'ecosystem' (chip designers, artists, audience research, advertising agencies, finance, and business experts), much like the entrepreneurial teams found in business, and within interdisciplinary networks to develop r&d opportunities for business. artists are given 'free' time as long as they produce (much like professors who are researchers). art has now 'dedifferentiated' itself (lost specialization in form and function); that is, there is no longer artistic genres (painting, photography, sculpture, and so on). it has also 'dedifferentiated' itself from advertising and cooking. it becomes difficult to distinguish the two as in nan goldin's publicity campaign for sncf-the french national railway company, for example, and rirkrit tiravanija's exercise in 'relational aesthetics'-cooking and serving noodles in galleries for art collectors and visitors. relationality itself becomes aestheticized. it's not what you do, but also 'how' you do it. in the third communicative wave of electracy, style has replaced method (associated with literacy) and ritual (the orality of religion). style now becomes an overriding factor when it comes to presentation, dependent of the 'problem' that is at hand. with truth/falsity replaced with joy/sadness, the question is how to affect the body in a way which increases one to 'feel good' or 'be happy'. a great example of this emergence of style has been on becoming a god in central florida (2019), a television series starring kirsten dunst that satirizes the selling of products like amway and mary kay in the 1990s. such displays of 'relational aesthetics' (bourriaud 1998 ) have now become part of the service industry. relational aesthetics, especially as developed by nicolas bourriaud, was targeted to the claims that art via micro-situations in art galleries was able to generate the emotional contact that had been lost due to the distancing effects of digitalized forms of communication, a questionable claim. altermodernity was his way of riffing off deleuze and guattari's notion of the rhizome by introducing his own plant metaphor, the 'radicant' (jagodzinski 2014). art now abandons its prior (industrial) object and shifts to the immaterial form of services. art practices become a gas or liquid that enters like an aesthetic vapor into all facets of lived-life: fashion, design, politics, entrepreneurship, humanitarianism, and the environment (michaud 2007) . aesthetics is primary in electracy, overcoming its expressions as mythology (in oral cultures) and epistemology (in the cultures of literacy, book cultures). aesthetics of designer capitalism override all aspects of life; the earth is for sale as it becomes completely aestheticized by way of a series of communication satellites launched by skysat now owned by google. the surveillance of the earth is now a reality. zygmunt bauman (2007) , a former teacher of mine, points to the 'liquidity' of contemporary art. on his visit to paris in 2006, he cites three artists who were given prominence in galleries all around paris: jacques villeglé goes around paris with a camera and takes pictures of billboards or empty walls that have already been filled in with information. gallery walls now become the city walls. manolo valdes paints or rather collages one thing: a face, always the same face on canvases made of jute or hemp. you cannot tell if these works are being created or in a state of decomposition (destruction). lastly, herman braun-vega paints impossible encounters; that is fragments are taken from historical eras and put together in a comfortable habitation. in all three cases, life and death lose their meaning-bestowing distinctions. for bauman, these are representative arts of liquid capitalism. they are temporal, mark constant change with no particular direction, with a final disposition of the object already built in. the opposition between the creative and destructive arts, between learning and forgetting, forwards and backwards seems to no longer hold. some have called such a direction, after nicolas bourriaud, altermodernism, a global phenomenon where 'information' is constantly reworked through artistic formats. information becomes the 'new ai materiality' for many artists working with the digital. from a deleuzian perspective, kane faucher (2013) tries to make sense of this changed ai reality by maintaining that information for deleuze is the idea and its actualizations; it is a quasi-organizational principle. the idea (as introduced in chapter 2) becomes an information problematic at the virtual level where solutions are never fully exhausted. each solution, as part of a multiplicity, enables a repeated return to the source idea. the unfolding of actualizations gives sense to the event of art. this makes for a problem-solution nexus, not unlike the nietzschean destruction-creation nexus where a meta-state persists, ready for the next actualization. as faucher concludes, "the virtual is a black box filled with white noise, but it is the specific type of noise that is infinitely generative (even if it is governed by rules as much as it imposes a rule set on the process of unfolding)" (90). the kernel to creativity in deleuze's case, following faucher, is that information and noise (as idea, as problematic) are not to be differentiated. "noise may 'disorganize' a system, but it also introduces something new to that system that permits a constant reorganization -if not a reterritorialization that begets new relations that form and break according to a pattern of singularities where what differs repeats, and what repeats must differ" (ibid., emphasis added). in the context of altermodernism, the artist becomes nomadic as a collapse occurs between the specific (local) and the global (universal). cultural landscapes are traversed, blurring artistic identity regardless where they find themselves geographically located. mobility, travel, and trespassing, while all pertinent to these global trotting artists, it is confined to a very small elite. it is also the case that any location is imploded by global communication via the internet. this pertains to both east/ west exchanges happening in major urban areas via signature galleries in seoul, hong kong, berlin, new york, and so on. it could be said that globalization can provide for a great leveling effect. however, nationalistic pressure to represent one's country, most famously at sites like the venice biennale or kassel's documenta festival, presents the paradox of the very idea of altermodernity. exhibitions, live performance events, screen technologies, and learning workshops characterize the spectacularization of contemporary culture. the interface is between artistic practices, communities, education, and industry. what must be added to this is the educational imperative of 'learning to learn,' a tautology which means being a perpetual student needing to 'upgrade.' postdoctoral research has become the new 'standing reserve' (bestand) to use heidegger's term for this 'creative class.' art and its education are asked to abet this capitalist economy, which has become an aesthetic (libidinal) economy. art schools are redesigning their curriculums to meet this demand, and public schools are under pressure to produce this 'flexible subject.' parents, especially middle-class parents who want their children to succeed are held hostage to this demand by capital. in korea, this entails going to the best schools and universities possible and engaging in 'shadow education' and private after-school education. private after-school sector has emerged as the vanguard of unchecked privatization and marketization of education that magnify inequalities. in the united states and canada, this situation is being changed through the privatization of schooling and the greater pressure to establish charter schools so that a specialized curriculum can be developed that is more congenial to these economic necessities. the obama administration was heavily influenced in this direction by bill gates and eli broad, two key players as venture philanthropists and billionaires, who have heavily influenced education via the broad grant program and the gates foundation. under the trump administration, the billionaire appointee betty devos, as his education secretary, is slowly devastating public education through privatization, for-profit universities, totally dismantling any progressive changes the obama administration may have done. in canada, education follows a similar trajectory. the oecd seems to run the agenda as to what is expected of education for the future of globalized capitalism (jagodzinski 2015). while much more can be said concerning the 'creative industries,' the rest of this chapter is to present a 'line of flight' that tries to escape the clutches of neoliberal capitalism and its vampirist thirst for creative blood, a way of thinking of an ethico-political approach to art and its education that tries to escape the 'overcode' of 'designer capitalism' toward a new life economy (holmes 2009 ). perhaps the most important consideration is to recognize that art|education must now come to terms with 'new media' of these creative industries-here i am referring to video, performance, audiovisual, installation and multi-media art forms and the various software programs and interfaces that enable such a contemporary kunstwollen [the will to art] to emerge. the result is a significant paradigmatic change of orientation for the way we have thought about art in general given that (as a commodity) it can now be endlessly reproduced, manipulated, and destroyed, as these 'immaterial' object relations of spectatorship and participation undergo change. the first concern for art|education is that our understanding of the image has to undergo a change from a persistent visual essentialism that defines our field governed by representation and interpretation of images to a recognition that digitalization as information, as a mathematical process, confronts us with a 'frameless' image that is no longer analogical but also inhuman-that is to say, digital. it is machinic vision as already theorized by soviet cinematographer dizga vertov in 1929; a disembodied 'kino eye' that technologically (as soft, hard, and wetware) extends human vision and redistributes the senses, much as 'print' did for enlightened modernism. in terms of electracy fantasy now supplants the 'faith' that governs oral cultures and the knowledge that is the overriding factor in literal print cultures where science is the dominating institution. in contrast to this, art|education in the twentieth century has been sheltered by a humanism, which paid less attention to the techné of art, celebrating and attributing creativity to self-expression and the skill of the 'human' hand. we have now, however, reached a point where the technological mediation of 'making' art can no longer be ignored. the engineering aspects of art have become increasing important causing copyright issues between artists and engineers over the produced installations. what is of particular importance then is the 'staging' of the artwork, especially when it comes to installation. the 'staging' of what the viewer/spectator/reader/listener/interactor/participant experiences by manipulating the environment as a particular assemblage. screen cultures present a moving-image. the body in relation to the image has drastically changed. it becomes choreographed. within the electracy configuration, the totem of orality and the categorizations of literacy become replaced by chora. chora refers to the spaces created through a mood, atmosphere or a stimmung in the german. the medium of video, installation art and the changed urban environment present art|education with the challenge of understanding space|time and body in different terms in relation to the changed technologies and the redistribution of the senses. a completely different understanding of the subject is required from the one that has dominated the west's understanding of identity as the psychological cognitive and rational individual. the 'creative industries' of hypercapitalism are quite aware of the need for this shift in thinking as well, which is why there is an 'aesthetic war' (venn 2010a) that opposes the cultivation of radical interventions and 'monstrous identities' to avoid capture. deleuze and guattari and those who further their theories are part of this opposition for another ethico-politics. let me outline in a very general way the paradigm shift that has taken place with digitalization and the 'new' media (or technological arts). many have called this paradigm shift an 'affective turn' (clough 2007; featherstone 2010; venn 2010b) where consumer culture targets the affective body as well as the body image. the affective body (what deleuze|guattari called body without organs [bwo] in the 1970s) is a moving body without image, which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect. it can override the perception of the imagined body. the affective body is an intrinsic body, a body schema as opposed to an extrinsic body image, yet both bodies are intimately related to one another. affect, in this understanding is an unconscious (non-conscious) phenomena that goes below the level of consciousness. affect is 'half-object and half-subject' (guattari 1995, p. 92 ). as such this body can be at odds with cognition thereby presenting the existential paradoxes, ambiguities, indecisions of everyday life and so on. there is something nonhuman about this affective body since we cannot control this aspect of ourselves as the realm of viruses, bacteria, cell growth, and the etiology of diseases testify. many artists have now explored their 'portraiture' by growing the colonies of bacteria that inhabit each body in a unique way. (i explore bioart in chapter eleven.) deleuze and guattari called this level of reality a 'plane of immanence' at the molecular level-a vital clamor of life. they call it involution rather than evolution for this is where creativity proper happens, where accident, mutation, heterogeneous couplings, interkingdoms can take place producing something entirely new. on this molecular level, there is zoë, energy as free life, which has not been captured as bios … or biopower (as foucault theorized it) where life is contained and constrained (civilized) by the social order and the laws of the state. life in this state has been 'molarized' in their terms, but zoë always leaks out of its confinement. life remain excessive and not controllable by us humans. in the context of this book, i have been equating zoë with chi. the intrinsic body thought this way is not yet organized, it is 'schizophrenic' in the sense that this is a level of sounds, abstractions, and rhythms-what deleuze|guattari called 'multiplicity' and jacques lacan called the real. affective resonances happen between bodies at this level so that something new may emerge. one is drawn in or repelled by another body depending on the molecular chemistry-love, hate, anxiety as lacan once said are the primary psychic states. spinoza identified desire, joy, and sadness as the 'primitive' affects that constitute human behavior. some would refer to this affective level as being 'authentic' because it can't be faked since it is involuntary. in my writings, i have used the term xpression rather than expression for affect; self-reflexion rather than self-reflexion to identify this bodily realm of intrinsic virtuality. affects are not emotions. affects are the intensities of feelingvitality effects, tonalities of the voice and sound. emotion is already processed feeling, an established generalized body pattern like being sad or happy. affects are more abstract, not yet formulated. it is sensation itself, as zoë or a 'bare life' force. giorgio agamben (1998) so why is this so important for art|education? we can begin by saying that affects are sensations that have their own particular logic, a 'logic of sensation' as deleuze calls it, and this logic of sensation-as aisthetics-sets it apart from aesthetics of designer capitalism, which has been the usual playing field for representational art at the level of body image. here we have a different understanding of the image facilitated by the inhuman apparati of digitalization as well as the nonhuman 'biological' body that has no image. it exists at degree zero. deleuze draws on the philosopher henri bergson to comprehend this more processual body in distinction to the body of representational cognition, which explains images through discursive meanings that dominate art history and criticism. this processual body is most affected by threshold affects, a bodily experience that is not subject to chronological time but to a different sense of time-what bergson called durée and deleuze called aion. such time cannot be 'measured' but felt immediately by the intrinsic body's nervous system. it is a phenomenon of the present, consciously registered as an experience that comes either too early or too late since it has already happened at a moment of presence when our bodies undergo such disruption, and we must reflect back on what happened. it becomes a memory of the past. trauma and falling in love are 'events' of this sort, subject to a different 'time' than the measured time of capitalism. with trauma, we cannot remember since the schematic nerval visceral body becomes overwhelmed with stimuli. love on the other hand, the moment of lovers meeting, the first kiss and so on is always repeatedly remembered. we can, however, never pinpoint when precisely this 'love event' happened. we can see that 'creativity' is subject to such an understanding of time. creativity in this account always has happened and we discover it after the fact, even when we cry 'eureka!' (archimedes) the event has already happened. henri bergson offers deleuze a way to understand the complexity of images that are no longer theorized by modernist concepts of representation, but enable us to understand the complexity of the image that is registered below the level of consciousness, in the nonconscious body before it becomes a form with a particular content. this means the pre-conscious image as it is affected by memory and non-chronological time. for bergson the image is never the image of movement, rather the image is movement as such: image = movement. in contemporary screen cultures, the affective nonhuman body is activated directly by the inhuman digital images. this becomes especially evident with digital cameras that are used more to scan the environment to capture a series of moments of time rather than 'stilling' time. just as 'the image is movement' opens up a new dimension of understanding, the understanding of space is also no longer representational as it is perceived 'naturally' through our conscious cognition; rather space becomes more disorientating (the experience of vertigo for example, or déjà vu). it has many possible topological virtual potentialities. such space addresses the many nuances chora [khora] can take and the atmospheric change depending on the haecceities that emerge. we come to one last theoretical concern, and that is to recognize that this 'split' of the two bodies: the conscious body image and the unconscious affective body are relationally informed by one another, however it is the split, chasm, gap or what guattari called the 'transversal' where profound creativity or change occurs, where something new comes into existence. this is not a dialectical process where a 'higher' (aufhebung) state of existence is created that overcomes the opposition or conflict of the 'two bodies,' but what deleuze and guattari call a 'line of flight.' this is a nomadic line, a line that draws one into new unknown territory breaking out from the structure that held it in place. such a line is charged with zoë (free creative life). this means that a threshold has been overcome, something has been released, an escape toward the creation of something new. deleuze and guattari call this 'becoming,' emerging always in this interval between affect and cognition. we can see here that both aspects-the affective and the imagined body are in play relationally. deleuze and guaratti called this the virtual|actual dimensions. both are necessary for art|educators to engage in the capitalist 'aesthetic wars' of control. currently, visual culture remains caught by representational thinking, a humanism which ignores the inhuman and the technological, or recognizes them in instrumental terms as productivity rather than post-productivity (here nicolas bourriaud (2006) has it right) where the release of 'life' is sought for. this dimension of the affective body opens up the potential for creative experience for our own bodies to encounter with new intensities and affects through 'new|old' media. it expands what the body can 'do' and experience. aisthetic experience is a 'temporary event'-a time-image in some case and a movement-image in others depending what is being extracted. deleuze (1986 deleuze ( , 1989 ) wrote a two-volume book on cinema to show how to theorize the difference between the two forms of images. it is the dynamical interface between the body and the image as digitalized screened information that creates an affective response by the viewer| spectator| participant| interactor. video, in particular, can be seen as opening up the pre-individual affect exposing the aisthetic dimensions of the sensible. as a medium, video recording has the ability to slow time down (slow-motion), freeze-frame time, repeat a circuit of time endlessly by looping tracks. maurizo lazzatto (2019) has examined this brilliantly through what he calls "videophilosophy." "video technology is a machinic assemblage that establishes a relationship between asignifying flows (waves) and signifying flows (images). it is the first technical means of image production that corresponds to the generalized decoding of flows" (81-82). perception is opened up through delay, acceleration, and contraction via our intrinsic sensorial embodiment. it requires a disjunction between cognition and affect; that is between body image of 'normative' perception and the proprioceptivity of the non-imaged body to bring about thinking. thinking here is a creative experience-what i call self-reflexion to distinguish it from normative self-reflection only at the cognitive level. lazzarato offers a "cinema 3," building on the work of bergson, deleuze (cinemas 1 and 2), walter benjamin, and inspired by nietzsche. he moves past the optical image to recognize the way time is "crystallized" by the machines in electracy. the vertrovian kino-eye is politicized as a 'war machine.' he uses the word "crystallization" to describe the bergsonian contraction and relaxation of time-matter that produces images (to recall image = movement). all images-including human subjects-are these assembled contractions and relaxations of time-matter. technologies of photography, cinema, video, and electronic media, like the human body as it couples into the various potential assemblages, present various images that are expressions of the power of time in post-fordism (electracy). lazarrato recognizes the "machinic enslavement" that capitalism manages by capturing the asemiotic dimension of affect to manipulate the neurological level; he searches for ways to subvert this capture through video artists like bill viola and nam june paik, to be discussed in chapter 10 and below. his videophilosophy makes visible the onto-aesthetics of asignifying semiotics of electracy. let me offer an example of bill viola as a video artist who recognizes the primacy of affect in image reception, one of the go-to artists for lazarrato. viola tackles the changed media of electracy by claiming that the new forms of (synthetic) image production have to abandon the models of the eye and ear; they need to be redirected toward the models of the processes of thought; that is, the conceptual structures of the brain. he recognizes, like warren neidich (2003; www.artbrain.org) , the realm of neuroaesthetics and its capitalist capture. the quintet of the astonished (2000) is part of a longer series of works called the passions (2000) (2001) (2002) (see walsh 2003) , an exploration of the primary emotions of joy, sorrow, anger, and fear. it is a well known and much-discussed work that illustrates brilliantly how the gap or interstice between imaginary body and the affective body can be opened up through the digitalized media of video. the art-piece shows five people undergoing intense emotional agony. the action unfolds in ultra-slow motion. the scene is shot on 35 mm high-speed film at the extraordinary speed of 384 frames per second (ordinary perception registers 24 frames per second). in chronological time, the action takes 30 seconds but here it is stretched to about 16 minutes, 32 times slower than normal speed. viola's the quintet of the astonished demonstrate a disruption of time, an opening up of the interval between normative perception of cognition and the working of the bodily affects. 'stilled time' that is found in the portrait paintings of the renaissance is the primary material for his 'special-effects' videos. the group portraits are displayed on screens at supra slow motion, which forces viewers to be 'out-of-phase' with themselves as they are caught by the animation of the picture moving in an almost indiscernible pace. spectators become aware of their own motions in front of the screen, as they must become immobile to grasp the changing facial expressions as they appear microscopically on the screen. the affective flow between the video and the spectators begins to take place. however, the change is so slow, each serial shift confirms just how nonhuman the face truly is whether or not the spectator comes at the beginning, middle, or end of the looping video. a zone between the spectator and the screen now becomes a situation, an interactive exchange, which is more than simply a visual field. there is an exchange of energies. the aisthetic force of the situation that arrests the body makes the spectator|interactor realize what is going on behind the reach of the eye alone, beyond mere optical visuality. viola's video productions are exceptional exemplars as to how it might be possible to think of 'transindividual subjectivity' as theorized by gilbert simondon (scott 2014) ; that is, a 'subject-group' following félix guattari (genosko 2002) in relation to the 'disaster culture' of the anthropocene that we live in today. this is a thesis developed by elena del rio (2019), which has compelling merit in relation to an eco-politics that goes beyond identity interests of all possible kinds. transindividual subjectivity and subject-group are two concepts that go beyond individuality or a collective that is a homogenized seriality. transindividual subjectivity happens when a fusion takes place, a common praxis that recognizes common action required by each member of a group caught up in an event. in simondon's view, transindividuality is pure relationality; it is metastable structure in its make-up, subject to change with an event. such an event is contagious, arriving either too early or too late. through the process of 'transduction' in simondon's terms, members are affected. psychosomatic forces and energies circulate between the human and nonhuman in events. transindividuality is therefore not social being. rather, it is an existential mode of 'transductive unity.' it's location dwells in a zone of pre-individual potential that is part of both the individual and the collective. the key here is to grasp affective life (or 'a life' a deleuze put it, pure immanence) that is quite apart from common intersubjective social symbolic functions. it is beyond identification, not caught up in the usual sociological signifiers (race, gender, sex, and so on). del rio shows us through viola's works the path, the deluge, and especially the raft how the process of collective individuation that is triggered by disaster draws on the affective relations that are based on pre-individuals (as already discussed in this chapter) can be the basis for an eco-politics. it is her conviction that the perpetual crisis of the anthropocene requires such a reorientation; an attunement to nature, quite different from object orientated ontology (ooo) of tim morton's (2013) hyperobjects, being perceptually theorized, are impossible to grasp. the pandemic of the covid-19 virus is such a contemporary test today of collective individuation. the final point i simply wish to make is that art|education must begin to grapple with this kunstwollen [will to art] of a changed space and time. for art|education, this means a more complex understanding of image creation and the affects of art in a digital age. it is no longer a question what art means, or what it represents but what the arts do, what experiences they can open up in terms of 'lines of flight.' this is the position elena de rio takes up when she discusses the power of bill viola's the raft as a microcosm of eco-politics. such lines of flight release 'life.' we become more enriched by the world and attuned to it when this happens as opposed to capturing zoë for capitalist ends-in terms of biopower (foucault)-that the creative industries are involved in. the potential future is open in the former whereas the possible future is already closed in the latter. we create a debt society by throwing away things so that we can renew then with a 'better' model. we are told that consumerist societies offer freedom and choice. consumerism is most often assumed as a greed for acquisition, the desire to accumulate more and more things. but this is only part of the symptom of hypercapitalism where everything becomes short-lived and disposable-waste outstrips production. of course, much of this is changing with the realization of 'climate change' being the anthropogenic activity of man (discussed at the end of this book). it is uncertain what art 'is' or what 'it' should be in a global capitalist world where everything converges into a single act of destructive creation or creative destruction to keep the system going. for deleuze at least, it means finding a way to still have 'belief' in this world despite its nihilism and capitalist necrophilia where bodies become dispensable either through layoffs, firing, cheap labor, or outright entertainment as on so many reality television shows. art should be creative for affirmative ends: to open up life … to let zoë escape for new creative ends that are ethically sound in relation to the crisis of ecology that we are in. this is where jacques rancière's (2010) writings speak to me in the role of critical art contributing to the efficacy of 'dissensus.' "dissensus is a conflict between sensory perception [realm of zoë] and the way of making sense of it [cognition]" (p. 139). video art like viola's does create a 'dissensus.' his videos remain ethico-political and eco-political to the extent that a nomadic line opens up to a 'becoming' other (the nonhuman in this case) so that we might be open to other dimensions that enhance life (zoë) to make the imperceptible perceptible. or, the very least, attune us to ourselves and the nonhuman event that is taking place, like the pandemic of covid-19. i would see this as the task of art|education that embraces creativity in its most open potentiality, a creativity that is at odds with the creativity of the 'creative industries.' but this plea is certainly a 'minoritarian one'; to call on deleuze and guattari (1987, pp. 291-309) again, where 'minoritarian art' calls for deterritorizations of identity (fixed images) so that a redistribution of the senses might take place for the benefit of psychic health rather than plunging us more and more into ecological disaster … and death. homosacer (d. heller-roazen liquid arts. theory, culture & society relational aesthetics (s. pleasance & f. woods, trans.). dijon: le presse du reel postproduction culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world the affective turn. durham and london cinema 1: the movement image the time image (h. tomlinson & r. galeta, trans) thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia bill viola with gilbert simondon notes towards a theory of ludocapitalism metastasis and metastability: a deleuzian approach to information body, image and affect in consumer culture the rise of the creative class, cities and the creative class the great reset: how ways of living and working drive post-crash prosperity félix guattari: an aberrant introduction chaosophy creative industries guattari's schizoanalytic cartographies, or the pathic core at the heart of cybernetics inter/vention: free play in an age of electracy the 'relations' of relational aesthetics with altermodernity: revisiting the case of the challenges of art education in designer capitalism: collaborative practices in the (new media) arts videophilosophy: the perception of time in post-fordism art and biotechnology hyperobjects: philosophy and ecology after the end of the world blow-up. photography, cinema and the brain. riverside: d.a.p. and the university of california dissensus: on politics and aesthetics gilbert simondon's psychic and collective individuations. a critical introduction and guide internet invention: from literacy to electracy aesthetics, politics, identity: diasporic problematisations individuation, relationality, affect: rethinking the human in relation to the living bill viola: the passions. london: j. paul getty in association with the national gallery london key: cord-0074513-lngai4p2 authors: wendland-liu, joel title: marxism, u.s. democracy, and lenin’s commune against capitalism date: 2022-02-04 journal: fudan j doi: 10.1007/s40647-021-00342-6 sha: c8589e8f543995b3e3568d83e370724fadb723dd doc_id: 74513 cord_uid: lngai4p2 in his 2016 essay “an american utopia,” fredric jameson appropriates lenin’s concept of “dual power” to ruminate on its potential meaning in the present u.s. context. jameson’s remarks on “dual power” and u.s. politics offer a starting point to explore both the most recent developments in the u.s. and to revisit lenin’s state and revolution fruitfully to review the concept of “the commune” as a post-capitalist political theory. lenin’s work transcends anodyne demands for abstract democracy. indeed, my intervention aims to explore the limits of “democracy” in u.s. political discourse, demanding a reconsideration of leninist political theory. in so doing, the conditions of struggle in the u.s. potentialize the dialectical development of struggles to extend democracy (reform) with struggles to overcome democracy (revolution). zuccotti park near wall street in downtown new york city. he embraces the black panther party, which reshaped u.s. black radicalism in the 1970s, and the historical maroon societies of self-liberated blacks in the era of enslavement, but ignores occupy wall street's mutual aid response to the widespread damage wrought by hurricane sandy to the atlantic coast in 2012, and does not mention the #black-livesmatter uprisings in 2014 (jameson 2016, 4 ). jameson's remarks on "dual power" and u.s. politics offer a starting point to explore both the most recent developments in the u.s. and to revisit lenin's state and revolution fruitfully to review the concept of "the commune" as a post-capitalist political theory that transcends anodyne demands for abstract democracy. indeed, my intervention aims to explore the limits of "democracy" in u.s. political discourse, demanding a reconsideration of leninist political theory. after dismissing occupy wall street, jameson turns to contemplate the judicial system and the healthcare system as potential sites of dual power. in doing so, he fails to note the judicial system's function in harming black and brown people through police killings, racist profiling, over-policing, and mass incarceration, e.g., its well-known historical role in assassinating, imprisoning, and decimating the black panther party, linking state repression of organizations that deploy radical critiques of capitalism with those that militantly confronted systemic white supremacy (burden-stelly 2017). when he underlines the healthcare system as a latent site of dual power, he remarks presciently, "it may not be impossible to imagine crisis situations in which physicians are able to wield social power of considerable significance, in a kind of epidemiological dual structure" (jameson 2016, 17) . such speculation about the judicial and healthcare systems invokes spaces and histories that reveal latent aporias in jameson's thinking. for example, the #blacklivesmatter uprisings in 2014, a national protest against racist police and vigilante abuses that reshaped national discourse about the state's control of black people, is manifestly absent. indeed, because history required that he name the panthers in this essay, it is puzzling that he failed to center the struggle for black freedom in the contemporary moment. 1 this bewildering absence haunts jameson's american utopia imaginary. ignoring the struggle against white supremacy is a particularly non-leninist approach to revolutionary politics . it is a symptom of the u.s. academy's view of #blacklivesmatter generally, as rhetoricians donna hunter and emily polk found in their 2016 study of academic engagement with both occupy and #black-livesmatter. the divisions registered by white reluctance to engage the latter revolutionary militancy derives from racial and class privilege of those who feel more comfortable teaching about the former while ignoring the latter. in addition to noting occupy wall street's network of cultural and institutional affiliations with university radicals, "the overrepresentation of white males in coveted tenure positions illustrates the white privilege that black lives matter challenges. this contradiction makes collective support of the movement more difficult" (hunter and polk 2016, 443) . while this analysis accounts for some dimensions of the absence, it fails to speak to the historical relation of racism to capitalist development and its mulish persistence despite recurring crises (wolff 2020; burden-stelly 2020) . unfortunately, this absence registers as an economism that jameson shares with other north american marxists, such as the late ellen meiksins wood. in delineating the economic from the "extra-economic," meiksins wood mistakenly disentangles the concepts of race and gender from their capitalist and economic moorings and limits them to the political dimension. she writes, "capitalism's structural indifference to the social identities of the people it exploits makes it uniquely capable of discarding extra-economic inequalities and oppressions" (meiksins wood 2002, kindle locations 5545-5546) . 2 she insists that capitalism has overcome the "scarcity" of extra-economic goods and errs in arguing that capitalism has become "indifferent" to racism or gender-based inequalities. lenin regarded these "extraeconomic" goods as central and constitutive of capitalism and could not be separated from the system itself. in a 1916 article on the national question, lenin argues that "while being based on economics, socialism cannot be reduced to economics alone," giving special attention to global struggles for national liberation, in which he included the african american freedom struggle (lenin 1964e, 325; prashad 2020 . 3 indeed, the reductive economism of western intellectuals has led to an ideological elision of class struggle (losurdo 2016, 101-115) . other contemporary u.s. marxists, however, refuse to divest capitalism of its racist building blocks and mechanisms, and, since the 2014 and 2020 #blacklivesmatter uprisings in the u.s., this view has gained a new hearing (davis 2020; burden-stelly 2020; kelley 2017; singh 2016; prashad 2016; marable 2015) . before the term "racial capitalism" became centered in u.s. public discourse, scholar e. san juan jr. theorized racism's dynamic and constantly reassembled relation to capitalism. he argues that the core concept of "race" has a "signifying power [that] comes from the articulation of a complex of cultural properties and processes with a mode of production centered on capital accumulation and its attendant ideological apparatuses." further, "[t]his system depends primarily on material inequality in the appropriation and exploitation of land, labor, power, and means of production by a privileged minority of european origin" (san juan jr. 2002, 143, emphasis added) . the "racial problematic" endures as a set of practices that over-determines the class process of exploiting labor and capitalist accumulation and development (west 1988, 17) . theoretical dislocation of the present concreteness of racism to the historical past erases the special conditions of super-exploitation faced by women of color, men of color, and gender non-normative people of color. such an omission as that which jameson inflicts operates like the marxist version of "all lives matter," because it allows the necessary relation of racism to an exploitative class process function without critique or confrontation. the anti-racist uprisings of 2020 served as a heroic defense of black lives, but also an elemental form with which class struggle appears in the u.s. the second opening that jameson's remarks induce are his references to the healthcare system as a potential site of "dual power" during a major epidemiological crisis. while physicians and other healthcare professionals and mutual aid associations in countries like china, vietnam, laos, and the left-led state of kerala, india moved swiftly to intervene in the covid-19 pandemic, in the u.s., these same professionals were paralyzed by the failed national leadership that downplayed and then politicized the crisis. 4 essentially, they were blocked from playing a "dual power" role by the federal government's ties to capitalism which insists on profit as the motive for action and demands the labor of the working class to function (tricontinental 2020). still, the global covid-19 pandemic prepared the radical terrain of the current stage of the 2020 anti-racist uprising and the struggle against the fascist threat by revealing on a mass scale some critical truths about capitalism. the pandemic exposed a central contradiction of capitalism, its ideology, and its democratic state. workers cannot mix bodily in the workforce without risk of infection, death, and extension of the pandemic, leading to the deaths of over 800,000 u.s. people by the end of 2021. the exploitation of the labor power of workers, the extraction of surplus value, and the functioning of the state, however, cannot occur without the physical presence of tens of millions of workers in productive spaces. for large sections of capital, profit and the accumulation of capital depended on making people return physically to work. thus, the uneven, contradictory, callous, and inept response to the pandemic levied by the u.s. ruling class, exacerbated by the deliberate stupidity and irrationality of the near-fascist trump administration (tricontinental 2020). the pandemic unveiled a new entity known as "essential workers," or laboring people upon whom the functioning of the system, the provision of basic needs of food, shelter, and health depend. some of the "essential workforce" is highly skilled healthcare professionals and economically secure financial professionals. many millions are underpaid, undereducated workers, however, and are disproportionately black and brown people. of the 55 million u.s. workers identified as "essential," approximately half are nonwhite, are likely to be unprotected by a union contract and collective bargaining power, and are paid significantly less than a living wage. in fact, in the food, agriculture, and facility services industries, where workers of color disproportionately outnumber white workers, workers of color earn far less than their white counterparts (mcnicholas and poydock 2020). these workers are typically maligned, abused, and abandoned through racist oppression and other forms of marginalization but in this moment of pandemic proved essential to the rudimentary systemic operations and the lives of the capitalists and the most privileged members of society. linked to this discovery of essential labor is the revelation of what marx calls the secret, hidden truth of capitalism--that labor power produces the value expropriated by capitalists. within days of the announcement of "stay-at-home" orders, when millions were fired, laid off, furloughed, put on temporary leave, or simply moved to online remote work that initially proved far less productive than normal operations, the wealth of current and expected values evaporated. mass unemployment and stingy relief for workers combined with threats of withholding unemployment payments to force workers back to dangerous workplaces exposed the racist-classist nature of state power and its capitalist logic as the essence of u.s. democracy. put another way, these contradictions proved u.s. democracy incapable of addressing the pandemic, the economic collapse, and the violence of white supremacy. this set of contradictions opened the door for major working-class struggles over health and safety in both the private and public sectors. when the trump administration ordered students to return to classrooms in the fall of 2020, threatening to punish schools that refused, the american federation of teachers and the national education association mobilized their members to demand federal standards for health and safety for teachers, school staff, children and their families (goldstein and shapiro 2020) . they created science-based health and safety standards and shared them on a national scale with their members, other school workers, and school families, forcing, in many cases, school districts to scale down plans to open in-school classes. in chicago, for example, a coalition of neighborhoods, families, and teachers fought to maintain virtual classroom settings, rallying in person in the streets and car caravans throughout the summer (issa 2020) . this willingness and ability to assert power stems in part from a shift among the chicago teachers to social movement unionism which proved crucial to their success in their 2012 and 2019 strikes. social movement unionism, according to teacher and union activist lois weiner, sees teachers "[take] leadership in organizing a coalition that looks to mobilize more support within the immediate neighborhood and the larger community" (weiner 2012) . likewise, the nurses' union, longtime proponents of the social movement unionism model, mobilized its membership and coalition partners to pressure state and federal authorities for personal protective equipment and expansion health services for infected patients. nurses marshaled their skills to produce much of this equipment when federal authorities politicized the pandemic and dragged its feet on delivering the equipment. 5 as the pandemic crisis extended from weeks to months, revelations about the police-protected lynching of ahmaud arbery and the police killings of breonna taylor and george floyd ignited another insurgency movement for black lives beginning in may 2020. the north american uprising, surging from may through august of 2020, against racist police brutality quickly advanced from a protest over the targeting of black people with violent police repression to become a blistering criticism of white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and the domination of state instruments of power by the equally corrupt, racist, and fascistic trump administration (kellner 2018) . thus, the uprising became a mass demand to reshape power relations more broadly, wrest control of resources and coercive power from the dominant racist-capitalist minority, and reorder the state's machinery to serve the needs of the majority of the people. in addition, the generalized demand to "defund the police" and replace policing with community-controlled forms of social welfare, public safety, and reparations and restoration indicates the preparation for "dual power" in ways with which jameson seems unequipped to contend. a radical criticism of the police, the vanguard of state repression and violence against the working class, offers a starting point to construct a clear form of dual power. "any real agenda for police reform must replace police with empowered communities working to solve their own problems" (vitale 2017, 66) . approaches to police reform that strengthen the legitimacy of the police through "sensitivity training" and even individualized punishment of "bad apples" strengthen the state's coercive power without necessarily transforming the state from a capitalist state to a proletarian state. incipient conceptions of this necessity were articulated in criticisms of the failure of police reform. one legal activist stated, "[r]eforms do not make the criminal legal system more just, but obscure its violence more efficiently" (purnell 2020) . because state coercive power is history and structurally rooted in white supremacy, the police, reformed or not, will play a violent role in maintaining white supremacy, and black and brown people will remain in danger. activists and organizations, defining themselves as "abolitionists," called for defunding the police and replacing most policing with community-controlled social resources, such as non-police responses to domestic violence, non-criminalized interventions in drug "offenses," eliminating carceral resources and infrastructures in schools, ending immunity from prosecution for police offenders, and massively shifting resources from the police to community services (corder and perez 2020) . such demands, however, when left to state bureaucracies, laws, or other "democratic" processes, become easily swamped by fears of crime and structural inequalities of wealth and power that are fostered by reliance on the state for protection and legitimacy. if these demands cannot be protected from police or right-wing terrorist violence, the state's ability to regain its contested monopoly on power, supported by a wave of media framing of police as the only force for order and protest as the harbinger of anarchy, is fortified. this functioning contradiction results from the nature of capitalist and white supremacist power, but also the over-reliance on legitimated democratic forms, even from the socialist camp. protests and subsequent events in minneapolis, minnesota and seattle, washington revealed these contradictions in detail and point to what "dual power" might look like on the level of public safety. minneapolis police in the 1980s and 1990s were notorious for their racist targeting of nonwhite communities with violence and impunity. violent police actions contributed to the growth of crime and violent clashes with police. in the early 2000s, connections between the police union and white supremacist motorcycle gangs added to the evidence that minneapolis police were unafraid and uninhibited in their use of extra-legal forms of violence and coercion to maintain their power (michaels 2020) . attempts at reform through democratic and legalistic processes met with powerful resistance, though city officials convinced the department to accept extra resources for new racial sensitivity training. in 2020, the slaying of george floyd by five minneapolis officers only became international news after a digital recording of the incident surfaced sparking international protest and the reemergence of the #blacklivesmatter in the streets (cooley 2020) . initial calls for reform by the city's leaders essentially rehearsed the same appeals to smother protest by promising restraints on police excesses that had shaped the urban experience in the 1980s and 1990s. a separate campaign to defund the police department and "reboot" it based on community control and new definitions of public safety was met with massive resistance from conservatives who cried anarchy, media which distorted the aims of the reforms, and even among reformers themselves who feared going too far. the bureaucratic process served as an excuse to block change, for some officials who insisted that even mild reforms would "require navigating a complex labyrinth of city and state laws, police union contracts, and budget issues" (bush 2020 ). congress's refusal to address police reforms after the 2020 elections secured democrats a thin majority signaled the failure of liberal democracy to the decisive advantage of the coercive elements of the state, the capitalist class vested in property rights, and nefarious right-wing political forces. while these struggles unfolded, in seattle in early june 2020, #blacklivesmatter protesters occupied the east seattle police precinct building, forced the police force to flee, renamed the building the "seattle people's department," and established an "autonomous zone" in a portion of the city's capitol hill neighborhood. participants named this takeover the capitol hill autonomous zone (chaz). thousands of people sympathetic to the #blacklivesmatter struggle and angered by police violence the previous month, including an attack on a 7-year-old child and other protest spectators, attended to the occupation of the zone. in this action, they operationalized alternatives to policing and repressive state power. according to one account, "[j]ust as historic protests after floyd's death served as a release valve for deep rage against racist policing and relief from months of pandemic lockdown, the chaz was a flowering of hope that drew thousands in a season of death" (gupta 2020). 6 the zone mirrored past attempts at autonomous social experiments, such as occupy wall street. occupiers built kitchens, educational facilities, child care centers, and other resources for the inhabitants. occupiers made intentional comparisons between themselves to the paris commune and many referenced lenin's political theory outlined in state and revolution. they believed they were creating a non-state alternative form of community and institutional power. 7 in response to this occupation, the city's liberal government combined its forces with the police, the right-wing militias, an unsympathetic media, a hostile business community worried about property values, and the increasingly authoritarian federal law enforcement apparatus to force its closure. the trump administration responded to the anti-racist uprising with fascist tactics. it threatened city and state governments to crackdown on protesters with violence and imprisonment or face waves of federal troops entering their cities. it encouraged police departments to use excessive force, resulting in extreme violence against protesters, including deadly assaults by police vehicles, the use of tear gas and brutal violence against protesters. trump personally encouraged right-wing, white supremacist militias to join the police adding to the brutality of the moment. in may 2020, he tweeted, "when the looting starts the shooting starts," implying both that anti-racist protesters were mere criminals and that he supported police and civilian violence directed at them (southern poverty law center 2020). this appeal to the militant right wing combined with trump's dismissal of the covid-19 pandemic as a "hoax," his appeals to racist rhetoric and policies, notably attack nonwhite immigrants, blaming china for u.s. economic struggles and the pandemic, and his abuse of the u.s. media cultivated conspiracy-driven, paranoia among his followers leading to the january 6th riot at the u.s. capitol building (wendland-liu 2020a, b, c). while the social forces leading the uprising were decisive in defeating trump's bid for reelection, democracy itself is insufficient for eliminating the fascist threat. racist inequalities and brutalities, general powerlessness and exploitation, and ongoing health emergency and climate crisis, and the fear of war did not resolve themselves when trump temporarily fled to his compound in florida. since trump's electoral defeat, u.s. democracy has provided no reforms for these systemic elements of capital accumulation or the fascist threat. the ongoing fascist threat, the collapse of the legitimacy of washington's leadership of global capitalism, and the transparency of the facile u.s. claim to model democracy and human rights on the world stage demands an intervention. my alternative "american utopia" reading of the three recent major revolutionary events--the occupy wall street movement of 2011, the #blacklivesmatter rebellions of 2014, and the may-july 2020 uprising against racist police brutality--insists on announcing the ongoing conjunctural rupture in ruling-class hegemony in the u.s., a crisis of capitalist state power, and mass critiques of state forms of rule or reform. the criticisms of the state by these movements and their organizational forms center on shifting administration of economic, juridical, and political governance from the state to the people. the need for an ongoing struggle to politically empower "essential labor," the urgent need for social solidarity to survive the pandemic, and crisis of u.s. ruling-class legitimacy, many north american radical and marxist theorists remain entrenched in democratic theory, hoping it will offer a salutary response. this latter view depends fundamentally on the formation of majority influence on existing state forms or the modification of those forms to retain their legitimacy (rather than a shift to people's rule or working-class control). by contrast, the combination of riots, permanent protest, staged occupations, and the persistent demand for social solidarity and. the enhancement of working-class capacity to govern demonstrates increasing political sophistication through mass affective affiliation with resistance. it is easy to point to multiple examples of how the u.s. government has deployed rhetoric of "democracy" to justify its imperialist domination of global affairs or to maintain a political status quo domestically. we need not explore these examples much to understand how cynical and empty these usages have been. ongoing u.s. military, economic, and political interventions, which have destroyed so many hundreds of thousands of lives, enacted in the name of democracy have proven to be little more than a mockery of the same. by contrast to this empty rhetoric of democracy, many north american marxists adopt the same language of democracy to name the horizon and goal of socialism-but with, they claim, a deeper or substantive meaning (wolff 2000) . thus, they contrast socialist or radical democracy with capitalist or bourgeois democracy. 8 meiksins wood in democracy against capitalism poses what she sees as the political concept of democracy against the economic concept of capitalism. she does so to deliver a socialist critique of capitalism that shares some leninist features. wood argues that democracy refers to all "extra-economic goods" or "political goods" (meiksins wood 2002, kindle locations 5545-5546) . political struggles around "extra-economic goods," she avers, "remain vitally important, but they have to be organized and conducted in the full recognition that capitalism has a remarkable capacity to distance democratic politics from the decisive centers of social power and to insulate the power of appropriation and exploitation from democratic accountability" (meiksins wood 2002, kindle locations 5413-5415). 9 meiksins wood imagines the socialist transition as contained within "democratic accountability." she further distinguishes democracy associated with socialism and a limited version associated with capitalism--thus, the political form, being separate from capitalist economics, can simply be extended for a greater portion of the population, open a socialist transition, and remain generally unchanged (meiksins wood 2002). her formula is not a complex one: she seeks to project a socialist economics, while preserving political democracy created by capitalist social formations. ironically, her political stance, apart from its egalitarian economics, shares an ideological positioning with the neo-conservative thinker francis fukuyama who insists that democracy aims to hold accountable the state (fukuyama 2016) , suggesting the ideological 8 exploring the motives of north american marxists in adhering to political democracy, whether they lie in a disapproval of, opposition to, or disillusionment with the soviet union, china, cuba, or other states who claimed socialism as a goal is beyond the scope of this paper. 9 meiksins wood insists that capitalism has overcome the "scarcity" of extra-economic goods, and she errs in arguing that while pre-capitalist formations depended on their scarcity (massive civic inequality based on race or gender, for example), capitalism has erased that particular distinction. lenin regarded these "extra-economic" goods as central and constitutive of capitalism and could not be separated from the system itself. convergence of these otherwise diverging points of view. neither emphasize the class character of the state or political order. other north american scholars, who stop short of lenin's injunction to move beyond the limits of democracy, join the call for extensions of democracy based on a perceived division between the political and economic constructed ideologically and structurally within capitalism and its state functions. for example, wolff, despite establishing marxism's ambiguity toward democracy, describes s&r through this lens, writing that its theoretical aim is "a complete or full democracy." wolff adds that marxism's contribution to democratic theory lies primarily within its demand to expand the definition of democracy to include economic processes that marxists define as class (wolff 2000, 113, n. 1, emphasis added). resch asserts that "socialism without democracy is a sham, and socialism without some market mechanisms is impossible to sustain." he applies the formula, constructing an opposition between "participatory democracy" and capitalist democracy, the former holding the latter accountable through an extension of the number of people who oversee economic processes (resch 1992, 14, 30-31) . townshend tactically advocates a reconstruction of lenin to dismiss his demands to overcome democracy to prevent liberals from using his revolutionary ideas to shelve all of the marxist tradition. when the liberals succeed in scorning marxism like this, marxists are denied the ability to make more reasonable demands like "expanding democracy" or to raise reasonable questions about the class structure that limits this expansion (townshend 1999, 70-71) . the mystical figure of democracy, of a particularly extensive sort, renders a system of liberation. a common feature here is the theory of extension: make democracy include economic processes overseen by larger groups of people, and, with some terminological variation, liberation follows in the form of participatory or even socialist democracy. it is, thus, essentially, economic in its aims and aspirations. while lenin had advocated a struggle for democracy, 10 he rejected the implicit conciliation with dominant discourses wherein democracy lies at the end of history. simply put, democracy subverts the revolutionary content of marxist theory by offering the working-class-only limited participation in bourgeois civil society, a role closely linked to the maintenance of its subordination as an object of the capitalist class's agency via the democratic state. in a leninist strain, jodi dean argues, "democratic theory presents ideals and aspirations as always already present possibilities. in so doing, it brings utopia inside, eliminating it as an external space of hope." adherence to democratic theory is a concession that ensnares socialist hope. deans continues, "by internalizing the hope that things might be otherwise, democratic theory destroys that hope: potential problems are solved in advance, through democratic channels. we already know how to get there. we already have the procedures." (dean 2009, 78 , emphasis in the original). revolutionary transformation is foreclosed. for this reason, dean, discontent with a negative critique of democracy and capitalism, looks to the "communist horizon" (dean 2012) . contemporary marxist democratic theory, then, circumvents an issue that lenin foregrounds: the necessity of looking past democracy itself for a radical future. democracy operates appropriately under capitalism; it is, at its most advanced, nothing but the limit of political maturity under capitalist conditions (marot 2014) . its proper function is a contradiction between its ideals and the reality of uneven power relations, mismanagement, incompleteness, and failure. appeals for democracy as the endgame invite persistent inequality, incomplete social development in perpetuum, a halt in historical movement, a submission to the state as it is. dean argues that placing democracy as the final goal of the socialist struggle "presupposes democracy is the solution to the problems of democracy." thus, "it is a dead end for left politics" (dean 2009, 94) . democratic theory, as lenin argued, "keeps everything within the bounds of the bourgeois parliamentary republic" (lenin 1964c, 489) . the tension within marxist theory over the capitalism-democracy-socialism triad invokes lenin's metaphor of democracy as "the shell of capitalism." he wrote, "a democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism" (lenin 1964c, 393) . capitalism inhabits this shell to conceal its relations and hide its core truths within the cover of dynamic political activity, campaigns, and debate. it is the appearance of freedom and dynamism that "insulates" the real power of capitalist domination of the state. the "shell" metaphor describes something more than just an obfuscation, however. capitalism's essential political form is a reflection and synthesis of the contradiction between the dictatorial power of the capitalist class and its massive resources for coercive functions, and the emergent, resistant power of the exploited and oppressed. class relations guarantee that despite its numerical disadvantage, however, the capitalist class enjoys domination in most circumstances within this structure. democracy proved progressive over "slavery" (lenin's interchangeable term for early racial slavery, european-led colonialism, early capitalist development, and autocratic tsarism). 11 following a historical stage model of social development, lenin regarded democracy (and capitalist relations of production) as worth fighting for in 1905 and the early stages of 1917 (lenin, 1962 (lenin, , 1964a . by april 1917, however, democracy stood as a barrier to what could be: an end to the war, land for the peasants, and proletarian leadership of governing entities. here, lenin revealed the general impossibility of extricating democracy from bourgeois class politics. bourgeois ideology and governing tactics make room for "good governance, flexibility, achieving a complex multi-level system, characterized at the same time by bottomup approaches and soft law alongside hard law," which constituted liberal democratic theory and practice (sammaddar 2018, 179) . these instruments for securing capitalist class hegemony recognize and fear the specter of working-class resistance and adopt the tactics, forms, and modes necessary to secure broader cultural and political consent for bourgeois rule. if the shell of democracy hides capitalist exploitation, the totality of this structure refuses any substantial departure between democratic theory and capitalist exploitation. self-government" the limits of democratic theory invite a return to lenin. i do so here in the spirit of indian marxist aijaz ahmad who urged a return to marx because historical materialism's insistence on the centrality of class struggle under capitalism offered the clearest way to both interpret present realities and invite revolutionary transformation (ahmad 2012) . it is in the spirit of this search for clarity from within the marxist tradition that i offer this reading of lenin's state and revolution (s&r) and its injunction to overcome democracy in the struggle to establish a replacement for the capitalist state. i do not offer this reading as if lenin or leninism is the most authoritative thread of marxism or a universal approach socialist theory, but rather as a vehicle for exploring a political means by which u.s. marxist theory may move beyond the discursive limits of self-congratulatory democratic pretense. axiomatic is lenin's call for a break with a democratic theory, because this latter condition remains mired in the contradiction of political democracy's necessarily permanent limitations, a structural totality that is capitalistic. democracy functions as a determining political frame that is the inseparable instrument of capitalist totality, constituted by the class needs, power, laws, ideologies, cultures, and interests of the bourgeoisie. lenin maintained that even once a proletarian state is established representing the most complete form of democracy, its democratic state apparatuses, its class content, its function, must also be replaced (lenin 1964c) . the socialist task is, thus, to use the tools of democracy to push that totality to its limits (its "end"), to transform the power of the working class and other oppressed classes from resistance to creativity in new organized political and economic forms, and to subordinate democratic instruments (the state) to working-class power, and then ultimately see them vanish. after the first 1917 revolution and his return to russia, lenin experienced a profound disillusionment and frustration with the class nature of democracy. he thought (perhaps optimistically) that bourgeois democracy had been accomplished in russia under the liberal provisional government, but it refused (by the necessities of its existence and the logic of capitalist relations) to meet the needs of the people (lih 2011, 231) . the dire predicament of war, poverty, starvation, and disease demanded the working class take steps toward a new stage of revolutionary development. lenin posited that the post-tsarist democratic state denoted a capitalist class dictatorship. that is, the capitalist class manages and deploys state machinery through a governmentality of pluralist political parties and voting procedures to enforce its rule over the exploited and oppressed classes. the socialist-oriented majority, composed of the exploited working class in alliance with the oppressed and exploited peasantry, had to subordinate this machinery, dismantle it, and replace it with original, self-created forms of political organization. two agencies emerged in the struggle against tsarism, one with dictatorial power and one with "incipient" power (lenin 1964d, 38-39) . in contention for supremacy stood the reactionary bureaucratic power of the capitalist state (democracy) and the revolutionary institutions of the working class and the peasants. 12 social democratic theory, heretofore, conceded the terrain of this struggle to the capitalist class and its democratic state, urging compromise, quiescence, and submission on the working class and its allies in a truly revolutionary moment. as 1917 wore on, the famous slogan "all power to the soviets!" signaled the bolshevik demand for compulsory transfer of political power from the state to the working class, peasant, and military soviets. it represented the call for the beginning of a transition from democracy to a post-democratic, working-class hegemony of the political order. lenin recognized the tremendous political significance of the soviets in 1905 when he saw the strike committees press for deeper development of the revolutionary demands, and function as a site in which broad revolutionary working-class and peasant unity would crystalize (shandro 2007 ). shandro contends that through the soviets in 1905 had both "disrupted the hegemony of the liberal bourgeoisie and gained for itself some political experience" and "it had erected a new institutional form through which the diverse revolutionary-democratic forces could mesh together in a coalition of the masses, the worker-peasant alliance, and assume state power" (shandro 2007, 325) . with this historical experience in mind, lenin feared that if the working class failed to step forward immediately to claim revolutionary power, the state under the provisional government would never address the concrete needs of the mass of people. further, if the bolshevik party endorsed the existing regime, it would sacrifice hard-won revolutionary credentials by asking the worker-peasant alliance to suspend its forward momentum, relinquish its purchase on power, and starve and suffer. the historical motion toward working-class power drives revolutionary necessity. "it is impossible to stand still in history," he warned his opponents who insisted on adhering to the gains made under a revolutionary democracy (lenin 1964b, 324) . lenin argued that once the national democratic revolution had won power from the tsarist regime, the revolutionary forces should transition to a "commune" political project, a political formation that represents an advance over revolutionary democracy, as well as over the "dual power" of the subordinated soviets. lenin explored the role of the "commune" in relation to the specific conditions of the russian revolution in april 1917 in a short article called "the dual power," the terminology jameson referenced in his exploration of u.s. political dynamics in his 2016 essay. the first russian revolution of 1917 produced a unique situation whose specific character was "highly remarkable" and something "[n] obody previously thought." this uniqueness was the duality of power. it was the simultaneously contested power of the state--dominated by the capitalist class articulated by the police, parliament, laws, the army, schools, and media--and the soviets, the people's institutions that operated as "an entirely different kind of power" from the russian state. this second power, in this early stage, was "incipient" and erroneously inclined to compromise with the bourgeois state. it was, however, also characterized by its non-reference to existing law and its willingness to exercise power through armed force and extra-legal self-activity of the masses of the working class and the peasants. soviets deployed power to maintain public safety and order (which the state could no longer guarantee), replaced state bureaucracies "by the direct rule of the people themselves," and imposed direct forms of popular control over bureaucracies and political entities through mechanisms like the "recall" and the payment of working-class wages (lenin 1964d, 38-39) . this discourse needs careful attention. lenin regarded the soviets in the form developed after 1905 as "incipient," or early-stage forms of dual power. he also suggested they emerged under specific conditions, but called on the revolutionary class to operationalize them in ways that matched the people's needs and realities. jameson's discussion of the lack of "dual power" configurations in the u.s. misses this feature. lenin saw incipient dual power entities as endemic, if sublimated, to any capitalist formation, the specific forms in which the revolutionary class will create them depends precisely on the historical development of the revolutionary class, in combination with the needs, the history, and the cultures of the people from whom they emerge. theoretically, he elicited the dialectic between structure and agency, between systems and human action whose application is universal, if the specifics of place and time reshape the form and content of the institutionalized agency of the exploited and oppressed class. thus, jameson's judgments and selections about what could constitute dual power entities in the u.s. perforce discard the social unionism of the teachers' and nurses' unions as an incipient form, and completely miss the organizing and mobilizing that underline the #blacklivesmatter struggles. institutions or formations that comprise this incipient power do so when they assert a claim to power ordinarily claimed by the state. this incipient power threatens the dominance of capitalists in the economic and political spheres. according to lenin, when incipient power is made permanent it forms a basis of "dual power" and offers concrete alternatives to capitalist power. during the revolutionary democratic struggle, the revolutionary forces obtained "certain special methods of making history which are foreign to other periods of political life." these "methods" entailed, first, the "seizure by the people of political liberty" (lenin 1964a, 349-350) . they claimed rights, public space, actions, and creative means to redefine their relationship to the state and its institutions, one another, and to capitalism. this qualitatively new form of social action created "new organs of revolutionary authority," the soviets. the soviets achieved these two features because the people built them "irrespective of all laws and regulations," essentially defying the coercive power of the state. lenin described the soviets as "a product of native genius" that was a "manifestation of the independent activity of the people which has rid itself, or was ridding itself, of its old police fetters" (lenin 1964a, 350) . in lenin's view, this dual power served as a material and institutional foundation for the commune, the mode of political organization beyond democracy. lenin first outlined the commune, based on the paris commune, the ultimate, original occupy protest-cum-nascent workers' governing entity, as an institutional and permanent form of political power to contest the authority and legitimacy of the bourgeois parliament and state bureaucracy. in this creative space, lenin saw the soviets operating as mechanisms for workers and peasants (and other revolutionary forces and allies) to amplify demands, collectively cultivate approaches to administer enterprises, manage resources, build new social institutions, and protect their communities. in s&r, lenin developed this idea more explicitly. "the commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine 'only' by fuller democracy…. but as a matter of fact this 'only' signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type." the difference is so complete that it "a case of 'quantity' being transformed into 'quality'" (lenin 1964c, 419) . it was "accessible to the masses, sprang directly from the masses; and was a direct and immediate instrument of the popular masses, of their will" (lenin 1964a, 351) . the image lenin discloses of this alternative form of collective, socialist power reveals it to be utterly and inalterably other from democracy. this alternative form of governing power rests on the actions, participation, and movement of the majority of people who were formerly exploited, oppressed, and propertyless. the soviets had not finished their transformative work with the eventual assumption of sole governance (after the second revolution), however. the revolutionary process necessarily continued through the subordination of the capitalist-dominated state to a new form of institutionalized revolutionary self-government led by the worker-peasant majority. by necessity, this meant eliminating "the imperialist and military machinery," police and repressive forces, the dismantling of parliamentary forms of power consolidation, and the disintegration of bureaucratic administration tied to capitalist economic needs. in their place, socialist power would elevate the soviets as the source of administration, ownership, planning, and resource distribution, as well as control of coercive machinery such as police and other public safety instruments. this subordination of the capitalist state entailed "revolutionary democracy" or the production of "democracy in a new way" (lenin 1964c, 412, 416, 444) . lenin referred to this process as the establishment of revolutionary selfgovernment and considered it as a necessary precursor for the dissolution of capitalist power but not as the equivalent of socialism. the evolution of this new complex of power remains a preparatory ground for the radical transformation, which lenin identified as the "overcoming of democracy." in his thought, one detects a pause in the theorized momentum of the revolution to take stock of democratic theory. here, lenin posed an equivalence of democracy and the state. democracy is a form of state that operationalizes coercive force and ideological hegemony through its police, institutions, and bureaucratic apparatuses to suppress the majority, to form a bloc of power and institutionalization that depends not only on the individuals or capitalist class fractions that dominate it but also on the imaginary beliefs in and consent to the necessity of its perpetuation for the good of all. because the state becomes democracy becomes capitalism itself (lenin 1964c, 396) , the revolutionary goal is the "withering away of democracy," the "abolition of democracy." "no, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority" and, by reinforcing a permanent inequality, provides to the capitalist class, via its positioning vis-à-vis the social relations of production, the tools to mobilize coercive and consensual power to prevent this numerical disadvantage from allowing it to be subdued (lenin 1964c, 456) . in other words, democracy is the set of political conditions that enable an omnipotent minority to secure the consent of the far weaker, disorganized, less conscious majority for a system that requires the majority's exploitation to survive. this "commune" form, as a potential post-state, post-democratic socialist instrument of political power, theoretically functions more effectively within the socialist economic project of public ownership of enterprises, resources, institutions, and communities through the elimination of capitalist private property relations, commodity production, and the class process of the expropriation of surplus labor power. here, we discover how lenin rubbished the common belief that public ownership of the means of production through the socialized existing state machinery and institutions is the limit of socialist construction. unless the new entities are administered and planned by the spontaneously developed and coordinated forms of worker and community associations that make sense culturally and technically to u.s.-based working-class people, to make a cross-cultural comparison, they remain state capitalist, a project of imposition. in such a situation, the class struggle within a capitalist bourgeois democratic framework persists, demanding more advanced development of socialist institutions. while the specific institutional form of the soviet was unique within lenin's moment and place, some marxists continue to theorize its generalizable necessity for a socialist revolution. for example, scholar ranabir samaddar, who discusses the concept of "dual power" through the lens of anti-colonial struggles, explains further. dual power is not a "counter-power" concept or a reflection of the bourgeois state. rooted in the local and strategically oriented, it is not equivalent to the communist party, though the role of the communist party in initializing and organizing alternative institutions is indispensable from lenin's point of view. instead, it is a multisited, interlinked network of power struggles that expose the class nature of the bourgeois state, the illegitimacy of its rule, and the need for new institutional frameworks for displacing that power to liberate the working class and its oppressed allies. the ruling class is unable to rule in the usual manner; and the people no longer allow themselves to be ruled in that manner and make new forms of power. samaddar indexes this ideological and chronological break with capitalist rule. "[d]ual power means dual time," he writes. it defies linear conceptualizations of "transition" and the contemporaneity of historical time. indeed, it opens a new era within the space and time of the old era, requiring new political terminologies, philosophical stances, class relations of power, and international relations (samaddar 2018, 181) . this duality of time poses a complex problem. this complexity is best exemplified by what appears to be a contradiction over the struggle for democracy and a break with that struggle to establish the post-capitalist political and economic order. reconciliation of these two temporalized concepts is unnecessary. instead, a return to lenin on the question of the capitalism and the democratic state enable a move to theorize "the question of democracy, from the inside of the determined moment," to follow badiou (2007, 9) . this means the location of the fluid moments between the end of democracy and the beginning of revolution and to "[hold] open a gap" (dean 2016, 121 ) that appears to be blocked by neoliberal ideologies of the end of history or fascistic tendencies of the ultra-right. to return to lenin is to take seriously the necessity of the struggle for democracy, the development of the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class in that struggle, and its creation of historically and culturally relevant independent institutional forms of dual power in preparation for its post-capitalist and post-democratic supremacy. while democratic theory as an end has no future, revolutionary theory as a beginning has no history. state and revolution inscribes a commitment to socialist revolution against the atrocities of "the all-european filthy, bloody morass" of total global war, a general crisis of imperialist capitalism, and an openly racist and colonialist counterrevolution (lenin 1964c, 415) . more than a denunciation of capitalism and reaction, s&r theorizes and calls forth the technical-institutional tools, ideological apparatus, and value systems for the creative transcendence of the capitalistic and imperialist violence. it registers a new claim in its theoretical rupture with capitalism, with the totality of its political forms, its ideological and cultural hegemony, and its global economic processes. it should, thus, be read as both a specific critique of this balance of forces in russia and a theorization of the dialectics of the political development of capitalism. s&r's critique of democracy, may enable us to imagine new radical and socialist possibilities in the present conjunctural crises in the u.s. deepened by pandemic, economic collapse, an anti-racist uprising, and the threat of fascism. if the primary purpose of democracy in the u.s. political system is to produce reforms during a crisis that are meant not to empower the marginalized, oppressed, or exploited but rather to extend the legitimacy of capitalism and its rule by the capitalist class, then s&r, authorizes a transcendence of that political cul-de-sac. if the "liberal world order," as represented and led by the u.s. "does not (sufficiently) address issues of cultural identity, distributive justice, ecological integrity, moral decency, and solidarity," then lenin's political challenge is worth our return (scholte 2019, 68) . indeed, recent research shows that non-democratic systems that account for class and class struggle provide new models for what i term a post-democratic society. according to political science scholar zhongyuan wang, for example, the chinese system dispenses with western concepts such as multi-party systems, expensive election campaigns, and endless media demagoguery in a guise of democracy in favor of seeking actionable and accountable modes of representation, service, and mobilization that open more fundamental connections to the people's needs and interests (wang 2020) . by contrast, western imperialist desires to impose class-based and ethnically indoctrinated democratic political rituals on states and peoples who do not share dominant european historical roots has produced a massive catalogue of historical failure, violence, dictatorship, and recurring militaristic intervention (yang 2021) . thus, struggles in the u.s. outlined in this essay potentialize the dialectical attempt to articulate democracy (reform) with the attempts to overcome democracy (revolution). the experiences of "essential workers," the teachers' unions, the healthcare crisis, or of minneapolis and seattle do not yet approximate what lenin championed as "an incipient power" (lenin 1964d, 39) , the forerunner of the commune, a new, people-defined power that substitutes, subverts, and supplants the capitalist democratic state. they do, however, provide glimmers of hope. class struggle, the demand for justice combined with the practical activity of the oppressed and the embryonic political forms of dual power, transform the oppressed and exploited into a revolutionary subject. through this uprising, in its resistance to racist police brutality--the truncheon of the racist-capitalist class that dominates the u.s. state--the working class and its allies seek to extend democratic rights, secure power, build a bridge to an emancipated future, and reconstruct themselves as their own rulers. three 'returns' to marx: derrida, zizek one divides itself into two constructing deportable subjectivity: antiforeignness, antiradicalism, and antiblackness during the mccarthyist structure of feeling charisse. 2020. modern u.s. racial capitalism: some theoretical insights. monthly review. 1 july how some cities are starting to tackle reform. pbs news hour minneapolis: the rise of the 'trumpers'. nation how to talk about defunding the police we can't eradicate racism without eradicating racial capitalism democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: communicative capitalism and left politics the communist horizon dual power redux reflections on chinese governance teachers are wary of returning to class, and online instruction too new zealand has 'effectively eliminated' coronavirus. 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acknowledgements i offer special thanks to the anonymous reviewers, to yilin wendland-liu, and to joe sims, gerald horne, azfar hussain, and tony pecinovsky. code availability software application or custom code: not applicable. the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. the author is the sole contributor to this paper.funding not applicable. key: cord-0060927-9daojexn authors: davidsson, tobias title: tackling the contradictory nature of social work date: 2020-08-04 journal: narratives of social work practice and education in sweden doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-45874-4_10 sha: d80b1c41af59d1643f1254d8a8e9a325abe15ebc doc_id: 60927 cord_uid: 9daojexn this chapter highlights contradictions within social work and deals with the question of how research and teaching can address these. the point of departure is an account of the author’s feeling of unrest, stemming from clashes between professional social work experiences and ideas of how the social world functioned. applying critical theories of power, discipline and political economy helped the author to redirect the analytical gaze towards the historical and political nature of social work. in the chapter, two ways of researching contradictions within social work is accounted for: (1) the interconnectedness between social work and capitalism, exemplified by how contemporary workfare policies in swedish early twenty-first century draws on and refines arguments and assumptions that guided problematisations of swedish poor relief in the period 1847–1875, and (2) the concept of social exclusion, exemplified by a number of research studies where the political conceptualisation of exclusion is critically scrutinised and another study that proposes an alternative analytical framework, where social exclusion is conceptualised as dynamic actor-oriented processes, initiated and carried out by specific actors acting out of certain motives. the chapter ends with a reflection of how the paradoxes of social work can be communicated to students in order to help future social workers to incorporate these in order to work with them. identities, belief systems and political outlooks are always malleable to an extent. through our lives, we will encounter countless experiences that shape us in certain ways. one such experience is university studies. to devote several years in an academic setting has the potential to serve as a foundational rite of passage in forming one's views on how the fabric of the social world is weaved. however, it is important to recognise the fact that this sort of cultivation does not happen in a direct or pure linear manner. rather, a more complex and developed idea of how the world functions is often the result of what may be called a dialectical learning process in which certain theories, conceptions and ideas that one comes across during lectures and seminars clash or coincide with important personal experiences. out of this process, something new or transformed may see the light of day. in this chapter, i will repeatedly come back to reflect upon the dialectical learning process. dialectics is another word for thinking in contradictions. more precisely, a dialectical outlook helps us to focus on the process of contradictions clashing or interacting, something that could result in the emergence of new and sometimes unexpected phenomena. a thread through the chapter is the contradictions inherent in social work and how these have affected me, how i have tried to investigate them in my own research and how i try to communicate them to students. i will begin with an account of how i stumbled upon the contradictory nature of social work in my years as a social work student and as a social worker and how that shaped me and my way of perceiving the world. this is followed by a section in which i recount how i have examined contradictions in social work by studying the history of the practice and how the concept of social exclusion is used. before i conclude with some remarks concerning the potential future of social work, i describe how the contradictions of social work could be touched upon in teaching. my own years as a student on the bachelor's programme in social work are a good example of a learning process that was not exactly straightforward. at that time, the programme was quite focused on psychosocial interventions, and i can remember how this created quite strong dissonance and alienation in relation to what may be termed a 'political awakening' for me, coinciding with historical events such as the war in iraq and the continuous dismantling of the swedish welfare state. the experience of dissonance was further emphasised when i started to work as a professional social worker, mainly as a treatment assistant, assessing parental ability. although a truly meaningful experience in many ways, i often found myself thinking that i was 'merely' cleaning up the mess in a society deeply fraught by injustices and inequalities. virtually all families i met in my role as a treatment assistant were losers in the economic race and struggled to make ends meet. it became apparent to me that the opportunities to uphold the standard of family life demanded by swedish social legislation were not independent of class position. this was not a fact that our interventions as treatment assistants were expected to consider or strive to change. our job, and maybe rightly so, was to isolate the social problem at hand, namely, children who were exposed to danger or suffered from neglect. do not get me wrong, i do not intend to say that our interventions did not have a valuable impact on the children and families i met. i simply say that i sometimes felt that i was entering the stage too late, when the damage was already done. i started to feel weary and did not always agree with the narrow criteria that determined if a person was deemed to be a good enough parent. consequently, this was a moment when my professional experience clashed with the way i perceived the social world, and this led to my decision to return to university. i entered the master's programme in social work and was immediately introduced to a bundle of critical social theories that conceptualised many of my frustrations. these theories did not treat social work and its practices as self-evident or given. instead, the leap into critical theory made me recognise that social work was, and is, a historical practice. by historical, i refer to a socially produced practice bound up with economic, political and moral structures -a practice that is always subject to change. this was an extremely important insight for me, and i could suddenly start to put together my rather unsatisfying experiences from my professional career as a social worker with theories that seemed to illuminate and explain the forces at play. put another way, theory made me understand my own feelings of incapacitation and start to reason more critically about why society and social work are organised in certain ways. it also helped me to consider what social work could be instead. on the master's programme, i was introduced to the french philosopher michel foucault. if we strive to cultivate a critical gaze on social work practices deemed as 'empowering', 'liberating' or 'transformative', foucault's ideas of power as productive are seminal. foucault's historical examinations of social control and the normalisation by the state of its citizens into 'docile subjects' made me aware of new methods to analyse the relationship between society and individuals. his writings on discipline and biopolitics (foucault 1977 (foucault /1995 (foucault , 1990 (foucault , 2008 , in particular, helped me to examine hidden motives in seemingly benign social reforms. consequently, this made me realise that the aim of social work, and state interventions in general, is as much about controlling people as it is to help. complementing my then rather static marxist understanding, this was also a period when i started to gain a deeper understanding of the political economy in which social work is embedded. from my studies of the first volume of karl marx's capital (1867 /1976 ), i took a deep interest in the production of wage labourers. this allowed me to discover a whole field of literature that helped me to contextualise social work historically. from then on, i started to comprehend the contradictions in social work as, at least partly, stemming from contradictions within a dynamic economic system that on the one hand created goods, values and infrastructure of unprecedented value and on the other generated misery and deep inequality and treated people as commodities on the labour market. filled with academic enthusiasm, i wrote a master's thesis on how a discourse on 'welfare dependency' and 'outsidership' legitimised austerity measures in the swedish welfare apparatus (davidsson 2010) . this was my first attempt to map how political discourse interacts with the material base in order to produce 'docile subjects', moulded in a specific fashion in order to meet their prescribed role as wage labourers. the experiences gained from being a student on the bachelor's programme, working as a social worker and being introduced to critical theory on the master's programme contributed equally to shaping my basic understanding of social work as a fundamentally ambiguous practice. on the one hand, i regard social work as a truly important, if not necessary, remedy in a world where misery is continuously produced. on the other hand, i think this remedy acts as a saviour of the very economic system that produces misery in the first place, namely, capitalism. consequently, social work in a modern capitalist society is somewhat of a contradiction in itself. aside from this, social work is characterised by a continual political debate that brings numerous conflicting aspects to the fore. one such question is whether social interventions ought to be guided by reason or emotions, in turn leading to the question of whether social work is a calling or merely a job like any other. this conflict has been a part of the discussion on the nature of social work since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when modern bureaucratic systems of social support gradually began to replace the poor relief previously administered by the church. today, this debate is pushed to the agenda by the advent of technological advancements and the rise of evidence-based practice, manuals and evaluation devices that characterise what is sometimes called 'the audit society'. one such example can be found in the swedish municipality of trelleborg, where a robot has been used to assess applications for social assistance, prompting us to ask the question of whether certain aspects of social work could be algorithmised and totally automatised. another conflict pertaining to social work, and deeply tied to ideology, relates to the question of who the optimal mediator of social welfare is. if a person leans towards liberal policies, he or she may prefer the market to administer social welfare. a professed socialist is likely to favour the state, while a conservative may argue that the church, voluntary organisations or even the family constitute the ideal source of social support. just as political is the issue of whether social interventions ought to aim to reform societal structures or individual traits. when discussing this question, two american social work pioneers are often used to personify the conflicting positions. jane addams (1860-1935) was a settlement activist who advocated structural reforms to alleviate poverty and class conflicts, while mary richmond promoted the idea of case work methods to improve the situation for individuals in need. these two position have in turn spawned different traditions within social work. other interrelated conflicts, such as the question of whether social welfare ought to be regarded as a human right or something one must make oneself worthy of and if social work should mainly occupy itself with supporting or controlling people in need, are built into social work and have to be addressed continuously. to conclude, the aim of including this long but far from complete enumeration of different conflicts that are more or less inherent in social work has been to demonstrate what i call the historical nature of social work and to emphasise that the forms and content of social work are always contestable and therefore, to a certain extent, plastic. i will now tell you a little about how i have attended to the paradoxes of social work in my own research and teaching. in my research, i have dived into the contradictory nature of social work time and again. in this pursuit, i am not really looking to resolve the contradictions at hand. since i view the ambiguities as mere consequences of contradictions that capitalism cannot help to reproduce, they are after all imbued in the fabric of the modern world. nonetheless, i cannot just leave them be. one reason for returning so persistently to the contradictions may be connected to a personal frustration pertaining to people either idealising or dismissing social work. if we consider the contradictions seriously and in detail, we will acknowledge that social work always contains aspects worthy of both admiration and criticism. if we are to transform the forms and content of social work in a direction we desire, it does not help our cause to dismiss social work as a whole. likewise, it is not enough for us to invoke goodness or notions of justice and expect everyone to rally to our cause. these are, after all, contested concepts that signify different things to different people. rather, an investigation of the contradictions and their historical roots can help us show that social work, at least in this economic system, cannot be either totally good or completely bad. examining the contradictions then may help us to gain a deeper understanding of the processes bound up with certain aspects of social work. in other words, it can be a tool to contextualise certain practices and thereby illuminate the political economy of social work. ultimately, these kinds of investigations have the potential to serve as a foundation when we think about the shape of social work to come. mark twain is reputed to have said that history does not repeat itself but it often rhymes. thus, if we want to understand what is happening in our present time, it is often rewarding to go back in history. i would like to claim that this endeavour is especially important when investigating the contradictions of social work. when i entered the phd programme in social work in 2010, i wanted to understand how the practice we now know as social work came about and to investigate the interconnectedness between the emergent social work and nascent industrial capitalism. in my thesis, i examined a period in swedish history (1847-1875) in which sweden was becoming industrialised (davidsson 2015) . in the same period of time, a newly established public poor relief system was facing much criticism. a central point of departure in the thesis was the tension between the logic of two dominant distributive systems: on the one hand, 'work-based' distribution as in wage labour and on the other, 'need-based' distribution through the provision of public relief for those who are deemed as being 'worthy poor'. manoeuvring the tension between these two systems, by setting limits and boundaries, has been dubbed as 'the distributive dilemma' of principally every existing society in the history of mankind (stone 1984) . through my analysis, i found that public poor relief in a time of capitalist expansion and liberal reforms had to be designed in a manner that answered the needs of the work-based distribution. therefore, the function of poor relief was only rarely articulated as a means to materially relieving the situation of people in misery. notwithstanding the fact that sweden suffered from a crop failure and subsequent famine in the late 1860s, the alleviation of structurally inflicted despair was rejected as a component of the rationality of relief. however, the criticised relief apparatus was accused of causing scarcity and misery because it supported vulnerable individuals. the more the relief system expanded, the worse were the consequences. the dominating assumption regarding poor people was that they, more or less naturally, would have developed into industrious and frugal subjects, capable of abstaining pressing needs, if only they were not supported by poor relief. relief was said to paralyse 'the invisible driving forces' that led to 'forethought, industriousness and deprivation' when the poor were provided for, when the woe did not constantly remind them of their endangered existence, their bodies ran the risk of enervating. consequently, the main task was to create a new rationality for poor relief arranged in such a way as to promote industriousness. the most common assertion was that 'correct poor relief' could be designed if it could inculcate the link between labour and provision. a chief technique was identified: the demand for compensation in the shape of forced work as a condition of poor relief. this was assumed to have positive effects on the recipients, both morally and economically. so-called voluntary workhouses were established in swedish parishes, wherein a distinct logic of quid pro quo should furnish the relationship between relievers and relieved. the 'correct poor relief' was also marked with a logic of self-help that would teach the poor that they bore the sole responsibility to provide for themselves and their families. this could mean that the poor boards chose to give access to the ablebodied poor who then gave up some of their rights and entered the subordinate position as paupers. the poor board gained a legitimate role as a master, something that was intended to enable a process of nurturing the pauper into industriousness. the main result i took away from my dissertation was the close interconnectedness between capitalism and social work. harald swedner, the first swedish professor in social work, once wrote that social work is 'work of change at an individual, institutional and societal level with the aim to limit, transcend and prevent the ills and social problems that have prevailed in conjunction with industrialisation and urbanisation' (swedner 1996, p. 38, my translation) . to an extent, i agree with this assertion, but the definition is still only partial. social work is indeed occupied with the prevention of social problems, and there might have been times when it was aimed at transcending the social order, but in general, the organisation and scope of social work have always been confined by capital logic. in a capitalist society, the assurance of accumulation of value needs to be the superior aim, and even if social work constitutes an exemption to the laws of competition, it cannot threaten the order on a systemic level. at times, as i showed in the dissertation, social work has even been used to feed the economic system with 'employable' subjects. thus, if we are seriously determined to extend the values inherent in social work (i.e. equality, solidarity, emancipation, etc.), a prerequisite is to transcend the dominating economic system. another way for me to assess the contradictions of social work has been to investigate the concept of social exclusion, either as a sole writer or together with others. from my point of view, social exclusion as a concept captures the contradictory nature of social work in interesting ways. it can be deployed in what has been termed a 'weak version', focusing on the excluded position and concentrating on the flaws of excluded individuals. thereby, the weak version strengthens already established power relations and reinforces the current and dominant neoliberal ideology (veit-wilson 1998). a 'strong version', on the other hand, addresses the destructive elements inherent in the same ideology by directing the focus at the structural causes for exclusionary processes. a critical assessment of the political deployment of the weak version of social exclusion has been at the fore of my research on this subject. this body of work has been motivated by a personal political frustration with both the current state of affairs and the lack of meaningful and radical resistance. one of my desires has thus been to unpack the ideological superstructure of contemporary class composition and try to relate this to (the lack of) political resistance to neoliberal policies and rising social inequality. for example, i have studied how a certain political usage of the concept social exclusion has legitimised the establishment of a harsh workfare regime in sweden (davidsson 2010 (davidsson , 2016 and how the contemporary dominant weak conception of social exclusion discursively creates divisions, suspicion and separation within the working class and, as a consequence, undermines radical solidarity movements (allelin and davidsson 2017) , and a theoretical review of influential usages of the concept in social sciences (petersson and davidsson 2016) . in another study, my colleague and i explored how the concept of social exclusion has been deployed in swedish social work research, and we specifically analysed how the usage corresponded to the weak version (davidsson and petersson 2017a) . in the study, we found a frequent tendency within the retrieved studies to conflate exclusion with related concepts such as unemployment or marginalisation. much of the work that we reviewed demonstrated a clear preference for denoting exclusion as a precarious position. consequently, the proposed solutions often revolved around interventions at micro level aimed at transforming those supposedly 'socially excluded'. in opposition to this, we proposed an alternative analytical framework in which social exclusion is conceptualised as dynamic processes located in given times and spaces, initiated and carried out by specific actors acting out of certain motives by means of specific techniques. in the article, we suggest an actor-oriented research strategy involving a detailed analysis of the following four dimensions of exclusion: 1. identify who the involved actors are. is the excluding actor an individual, a group, an organisation or a government? who is being excluded? 2. investigate what an individual or a group is excluded from: supported housing, a city centre district or a nation state? what kind of resources are at stake -social, material, political and/or cultural? 3. examine how social exclusion is executed. which techniques can be discerned -material (such as reducing welfare benefit levels) and/or discursive (for instance, negative representations of welfare recipients as idle exploiters of the system)? 4. consider why exclusion occurs. what are the involved actors' explicit motives and accounts justifying and/or excusing exclusionary acts? how do these explanations relate to the specific setting and discursive environment? this framework may sound banal, but judging from the existing body of studies on social exclusion within swedish social work, it is necessary. applying the framework enables studies that investigate the dynamic processes involved in social exclusion on multiple analytical levels. who excludes? in what or whose interest is exclusion executed? which methods, strategies or techniques are used to achieve exclusion? by which categorisations or discursive practices are exclusions legitimised? answering these questions serves the purpose of shifting the analytical focus point from the supposedly 'excluded' to how, why and by whom borders are established and guarded. 1 in a sense, one may say that we are proposing a similar inversion of perspective as sociologists such as john kitsuse, and howard becker did with reference to deviation in the 1960s, i.e. instead of directing the focus on allegedly deviant individuals, they turned their attention to the normative conditions that make people deem others as abnormal. the research on the concept of social exclusion has helped me to further advance my understanding of social work as a contradictory practice and to problematise interventions expressed to aim for 'inclusion'. directing attention towards excluding actors and structures (rather than the excluded) is also a way of trying to imagine social work as something other, or rather more, than it is today. as i mentioned in the introductory paragraphs of the chapter, the bulk of the students i meet in my role as a university lecturer express that they wish to become social workers in order to help people in need. this is of course admirable, and it would certainly be a problem if they did not have the intention of offering support. however, as i have tried to demonstrate in this text, social work contains parts characterised by discipline and control, and the aim of interventions may not always coincide with what a social worker deems helpful to the clients. on the contrary, the person may feel that he or she acts as a gatekeeper or even a villain. in my role as a university lecturer, i firmly believe in the idea of communicating the contradictory aspects of social work to the students. in the best-case scenario, this could help future social workers to incorporate the contradictions in order to work with them. if not, one may be baffled and suffer from a sense of cognitive dissonance and depression when entering professional social work. as i have recounted in this text, i was quite unprepared for the alienation i came to experience as a social worker, and this probably led to my exit from the profession, pursuing instead a career within academia. however, escaping from the realities of social work is not the solution on a larger scale. i do much of my teaching in the first semester of the bachelor's programme, and in a lecture called 'the history of social work' (the very first lecture in the programme), i always tell a tale from a book by american sociologist stanley cohen. the story deals succinctly with the contradictory nature of social work: a man is walking by the riverside when he notices a body floating downstream. a fisherman leaps into the river, pulls the body ashore, gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, saving the man's life. a few minutes later the same thing happens, then again and again. eventually yet another body floats by. this time the fisherman completely ignores the drowning man and starts running upstream along the bank. the observer asks the fisherman what on earth he is doing? why is he not trying to rescue this drowning body? 'this time', replies the fisherman, 'i'm going upstream to find out who the hell is pushing these poor folks into the water'. (cohen 1985, p. 236) the story illuminates the limitations of individual casework in a striking manner. it also raises the importance of theory and asking questions about the nature of the originating causes of social problems. even if a social worker cannot be expected to always think hard about the structural causes of individual suffering when faced with an acute case that needs to be solved quickly, it is still important to be aware of how society operates in a greater sense. i also teach research methods and theory of science in the bachelor's as well as the master's programme. i see these courses as an opportunity to raise critical awareness of not only research but also in relation to what constitutes the social world in a more general sense. in the beginning of the courses at bachelor level, the students quite often express a sceptical attitude towards studying the 'theory of science'. they cannot really see the point of it; many of them just want to start working as social workers. 'why is it important for us to learn about how knowledge is produced? just give us the knowledge necessary for us to do our job!' this is a position i can sympathise with, but that does not mean that i can accept it. everything a social worker is expected to do in his or her line of work is based on certain assumptions, often grounded in science. being able to critically assess statements, causalities and scientific discourse is necessary in order to engage in the knowledge production that more or less determines the nature of certain practices. when teaching theory, i often think back to when i enrolled in the master's programme and was introduced to concepts that helped me to formulate and address my sense of alienation. in some sense, the process of absorbing theory reminds me of the movie the matrix, in which humanity is trapped inside a simulated reality and therefore unable to critically engage with the real threats, power mechanisms and structures of control. when the protagonist finally sees reality for what it is, he detects the code structuring humanity. this is of course fiction, but the process of really engaging with theory can produce similar sensations. suddenly, you start to see patterns in the social world that you had previously failed to recognise. a regular trip on the underground on a wednesday morning can turn into a social drama, and when you observe your surroundings doing everyday activities, you may start noticing greater social forces at play. following the demise of the socialist countries in the early 1990s, liberal commentators (most famously political scientist francis fukuyama) proclaimed that history had ended. this was, of course, not true at the time, and today no one would even think of making such a statement. we are living in turbulent times and the future is indeed uncertain. with the election of donald trump as president of the united states, great britain exiting the eu, the rise of far-right political movements, the lockdowns and the literal halt of the global economy following the covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing process of climate change and millions of people around the world fleeing tyrannical rule, it is clear that history is alive and kicking. the naïve idea of 'the end of history' has therefore come to an end in itself. however, if we truly are experiencing the end of the end of history, what are the implications for social work? first, we need to assess the nature of social problems in our present time and, most acutely, we need to address them as political. even if we never bought into the theoretical foundation in the statement of the end of history, we acted as if the stipulation was true enough. even if history did not take a rest, we did. at least in the western part of the world, politics has changed from being an arena where different ideologies and visions are disputed to a situation in which we as voters are expected to elect the most qualified, whose aims and goals everybody agreed upon, to carry out a mission. the focus has changed from inherently political questions of class, inequality and housing to the politicians themselves. who is most charismatic? which one is the most skilled rhetorically? who has the fanciest education? at the same time, material inequality flourishes and cities are becoming increasingly segregated. second, in order to combat these trends, we have to start acting as historical agents and shape the world to come. as i have stated repeatedly, social work is a social phenomenon, and as such it is shaped by us human beings. we need to start imagining a different kind of world, and we need to act in a way that brings us closer to that. if we think dialectically about the current situation, we may find seeds of hope in the contemporary order. neoliberal globalisation and the promotion of individualisation and competition have of course brought a plethora of social problems upon the world. at the same time, globalisation and technology have connected different geographical parts with each other in a way that is hard to reverse. the conditions for true global solidarity in which we see others as equals and dependent on each other may be closer than ever in human history. however, this is not an easy task; on the contrary, we are today witnessing how neoconservative forces try to pull us further apart. this is a situation that we have to analyse carefully, and most importantly we need to come together and be strong. for all of us, it is now imperative to intervene in the fabric of the social world, and as social workers, we do have a certain responsibility to stand up for justice and equality. om klassolidaritet och samtida gränsdragningar visions of social control: crime, punishment and classification utanförskapelsen: en diskursanalys av hur begreppet utanförskap artikulerades i den svenska riksdagsdebatten understödets rationalitet: en genealogisk studie av arbetslinjen under kapitalismen [the rationality of poor relief. a genealogy of the work strategy under capitalism är arbete inkluderande? ett kritiskt perspektiv på det tidiga 2000-talets arbetslinje social exkludering: perspektiv, process, problemkonstruktion towards an actor-oriented approach to social exclusion: a critical review of contemporary exclusion research in a swedish social work context göteborgs centralstation: en exklusiv mötesplats för vissa [gothenburg central station: an exclusive meeting place for certain people discipline and punish: the birth of the prison the history of sexuality the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collége de france 1867/1976). capital. volume 1: a critique of political economy definitioner och diskussion om social exkludering som begrepp och perspektiv the disabled state socialt välfärdsarbete, en tankeram setting adequacy standards: how governments define minimum incomes religious tourism in hungary – an integrative framework 175 hungarian geographical bulletin 62 (2) (2013) 175–196. religious tourism in hungary – an integrative framework anna irimiás1 and gábor michalkó2 abstract tourism to religious sites, shrines, temples, churches and religious festivities is signifi cantly growing worldwide. central and southeastern europe is historically a region where diff erent ethnic and religious groups live. in the last century, during the 40 years of communist rule over the social and political system in the carpathian basin, religion was banished and spiritual life could be practised mainly within the domestic environment. since 1990, former socialist countries like hungary (as also for example poland, slovakia, romania etc.) have turned to capitalism, but without being prepared for the social, economical and psychological changes, with which that process would aff ect individuals and families. faith and pilgrimages seem to have regained their roles in people's lives. this paper outlines an integrative framework on christian religious tourism and discusses its cultural aspects. the framework emphasises the identifi cation of geographical aspects of the phenomenon in terms of scale (local, regional, national and international) as well as in terms of the research theme (cultural, political and health-related aspects). in the fi rst part, the history of religious tourism and its integrative framework are presented based on relevant international literature. in the second part of the paper, the focus is on the development and interpretation of the via maria pilgrimage route (especially at its most important station, mátraverebély-szentkút), the fi rst established within the central and southeastern european area, and the primary results of our fi eld research are presented. keywords: tourism, spiritual experience, pilgrimage route, hungary introduction religious tourism has recently emerged as a signifi cant fi eld of study despite the fact that the phenomenon is contemporary to the birth of major world religions: buddhism, hinduism, islam, judaism and christianity (collinskreiner, n. 2010a). pilgrimage is one of the symbols of christian life deeply 1 kodolányi jános university of applied sciences, fürdő u. 1. h-8000 székesfehérvár, e-mail: irimias@kodolanyi.hu 2 geographical institute, research centre for astronomy and earth sciences, hungarian academy of sciences, budaörsi ut 45., h-1112 budapest, e-mail: michalko@iif.hu 176 rooted in the bible. the ecclesiastical view of a human being, of a christian as homo viator, is a person on journey, a pilgrim on earth on the way to the heavenly life. pilgrimage, moreover, refl ects a human desire for fulfi lment. throughout history, pilgrimage has been a religious phenomenon that set people on a physical journey yielding spiritual results (timothy, j.d. and olsen, h.d. 2006). in general, related academic works deal with the complicated economic, political, social, psychological, and emotional relationship between pilgrimage and tourism (nolan, m.l. and nolan, s. 1992). as collins-kreiner, n. (2010a) assumes in her article on pilgrimages, the key issues and the arguments related to that research fi eld also refl ect the boundary between tourism and pilgrimage. tourists and pilgrims visiting the same shrine might have diff erent motivations for travelling, but similar needs are satisfi ed on the spot. the research focused on the defi nitions of “religious tourism” as the individual’s quest for sacred places where the historical and cultural layer of meaning of the place might reinforce their spiritual experience (mazumdar, s. and mazumdar, s. 2004; nolan, m.l. and nolan, s. 1992). in addition, the search for something miraculous, bett er and purer, alleviating the perception of personal problems and off ering a diff erent perspective to the evaluation of life are key characteristics of modern secular pilgrimages (ward-thompson, c. 2011). in the canterbury tales by geoff rey chaucer, group cohesion among pilgrims on route is not only a question of security during the journey, but it is a means for elaboration of the pilgrimage experience. travelling with other fellows, the construction of groups and enhancing group cohesion are highly relevant aspects of religious tourism. going on a pilgrimage or participating in religiously motivated travels, however, might have several other reasons (olsen, h.d. 2010). in europe, believers att ribute healing eff ects to numerous shrines and the alleviation of physical suff ering is one of the motivations to visit pilgrimage centres (lourdes, for example). moreover, gesler, w. (1996) affi rmed that medical geographers were att empting to show how people infl uenced by their material circumstances give meaning to their experiences related to health in places and how places, in turn, change their perceptions and experiences regarding health. rátz, t. and michalkó, g. (2011) demonstrated that tourism has a benefi cial eff ect on individuals’ perception of well-being and contributes to the positive valuation of quality of life. the importance of the natural environment is highly relevant and landscape is considered to be therapeutic (gesler, w. 1996; pohner, t. et al. 2009). the environment close to sacred places might relieve depression or stress (foley, r. 2011) enhancing the wish to visit sacred and healing places. religiously motivated tourism, nowadays, is connected to cultural and heritage tourism as well. as it has been demonstrated, religious and secular pilgrims as well as cultural tourists oft en go on a journey for the same 177 reason: searching a spiritual experience (digance, j. 2003; murray, m. and graham, b. 1997; nolan, m.l. and nolan, s. 1992). in rome, the holy see represents the core of the 'eternal city' and it is embedded within the urban tissue of the city. it is worth noting that religious sites in rome are at the same time important cultural sites as well. the overlap of cultural tourism seeking christian traditions, heritage buildings, religious festivities and religious tourism represented by christian believers is highly pronounced in the vatican city. following pope benedict xvi’s resignation proclaimed on 11 february 2012, the vatican has experienced an increased number of tourists’ and pilgrims’ arrivals. the last mass celebration of pope ratzinger was followed by thousands of pious believers giving a new sense of pilgrimage to a pope who is still alive but despite that fact, celebrates his last mass. furthermore, religious tourism assumes the role of a niche tourism product in international tourism. pilgrimage involves not only a journey from one place to another, but it is a spiritual and cultural experience changing or signifi cantly infl uencing the pilgrims’ lives (pohner, t. et al. 2009). those journeys, usually completed with fellow pilgrims, hardly ever in solitude, are about self transformation, gaining knowledge and spiritual experience (collins-kreiner, n. 2010b; murray, m. and graham, b. 1997; nolan, m.l. and nolan, s. 1992). in the 21st century, questing for spiritual experience and relief includes not only traditional sacred sites worshiped by christians (the vatican, santiago de compostela etc.) but also contemporary pilgrimage sites (shackley, m. 2001). the geographical scale of religious sites is determined by a possible place development. current industry trends show that religious tourism has great economic potential and in some cases it contributes signifi cantly to regional and local development. however, internationally relevant pilgrimage centres constructed around hidden sacred fountains in a forest or in remote alpine villages have impact on the natural environment and they pose questions on sustainability (petrillo, c.s. 2003; rinschede, g. 1992). diffi cult-to-access monasteries and abbeys have recently become tourism att ractions, therefore infrastructural development as well as the construction of service facilities appear to be unavoidable. however, such development and commercialization of the places has strongly infl uenced the function, the work and the lives of monasteries involved. in this paper the aforementioned framework for religious tourism is discussed. pilgrimage is a common phenomenon to all major world religions, however, in this paper only tourism to european christian sites and religiously motivated catholic travels are analysed. in our approach aspects of authenticity, place identity and interpretation are highly relevant. we focus on the via maria pilgrimage route and present the results of the empirical research and fi eldwork conducted at szentkút. 178 theoretical framework for religious tourism thinking about historical pilgrimage routes, the holy land and jerusalem are the primary destinations coming to mind. the sacred city has been a holy place for jews and muslims, as well as for christians for a long time. (however, in 2012 israel hosted less than 4 million tourists (www1.cbs.gov. il). over the centuries, the places of birth, life events and the crucifi xion of jesus christ have become sites of pilgrimages for pious believers and secular tourists as well. in 2012, the birthplace of jesus with the church of the nativity and the pilgrimage route to bethlehem were included on the unesco world heritage site list. in 1453 the conquest of constantinople by the ott oman empire redrew the pilgrimage map of europe. the holy land with jerusalem was not accessible for christian pilgrims during the ott oman period and in its place numerous sacred sites appeared in europe to fulfi l the need of devotees for mercy through peregrination. rome became the main destination for pilgrims, however, in the 12th century santiago de compostela, with its patron saint james, became one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in medieval europe (rinschede, g. 1992). the bible is full of references to travel: leaving oneself behind, walking the walk and journeys of the soul. the destination might not be of such importance as the route itself while travelling away from familiar surroundings a pilgrim can meditate about his life. pilgrimage to a sacred site, especially to a historically relevant place puts the traveller in situations where they think and behave diff erently (andriotis, k. 2008). today pilgrims travel for many reasons (rinschede, g. 1992). one of the reasons for pilgrimages and religiously motivated travels is the personal need, the belief that being in a sacred location can bring healing, spiritual experiences or they just want to “give a try”. in postmodern and in stress-dominated societies where traditional values may seem to have vanished and more and more people are experiencing feelings of dislocation and rootlessness, religion and faith might be considered as islands of peace. participating in religiously motivated travel might have several reasons which can vary from the need for personal fulfi lment, through the wish to participate at religious rituals, to off er prayers and vows or request for divine intervention in one's life. furthermore, among the other motivations, we can fi nd the sense of obligation to visit a sacred place because it is a must for christians; nostalgic reasons or didactical purposes in terms of educating family members about religious beliefs (timothy, j.d. and olsen, h.d. 2006) and about national history which is oft en related to religious places as well. fátima, in portugal, has become a national meeting place for portuguese people who live in another country. they come to the shrine from all over the world. şumuleu ciuc (csíksomlyó), in transylvania, is an extremely important national shrine for hungarian pilgrims. 179 however, academic literature on religious tourism despite recent att ention dedicated to that fi eld is rather narrow. according to timothy, j.d. and olsen, h.d. (2006, p. 6), “most research and writing on the topic has centred on four distinct themes of inquiry: distinguishing the pilgrims from tourists; the characteristics and travel patt erns of religious tourists; the economics of religious tourism; and the negative impacts of tourism on religious sites and ceremonies”. the detachment from everyday life enables the pilgrims and tourists to intensify their understanding of spiritual life oft en in a place where the natural environment is considered to have healing eff ects. sharing the spiritual experiences with other fellow pilgrims makes people open to new experiences and relationships and reconsider some aspects of life. besides, studying the meaning of pilgrimage requires an application of transdisciplinary methods based on geography and sociology but also semiology and history, involving an interpretative approach to seeking hitherto neglected alternative meanings. cultural tourism at sacred sites cultural and heritage tourism today is connected to religious tourism since sacred sites, churches, monasteries and abbeys are not only places of religious rituals and prayers but they are monuments, ecclesiastical buildings and heritage sites as well. holy places and sacred sites are nowadays being seen as tourist att ractions and cultural resources. following a content analysis of the unesco world heritage list 2012, it has emerged that in europe, 92 religious buildings and sites are listed and considered to have outstanding universal cultural values. furthermore, ecclesiastical architecture and the listed religious buildings and sites refl ect european history as well (table 1). the number of ecclesiastical buildings listed by unesco (figure 1) show that these monuments are considered by the international organisation unique cultural att ractions. the cultural heritage sites and bett er-known pilgrimage sites of europe are capable of appealing to a wide range of visitors. according to smith, v.l. (1992), the continuum of visitors ranges from pious pilgrims and devout catholics to cultural tourists who consider themselves catholic but do not att end church ceremonies to and vacationers who visit the sites during their holiday (murray, m. and graham, b. 1997). el camino de santiago de compostela in northern spain, the emblem of pilgrimage routes, was the fi rst cultural itinerary in europe to be protected by unesco. every year el camino att racts thousands of pilgrims and tourists who aim to fulfi l their wish to walk along the medieval route. in 2012, a total of 192,488 pilgrims who obtained the compostelas (the offi cial certifi cate of having accomplished the pilgrimage) were registered (www.jacobeo.net). in europe, other pilgrimage centres have also been included in the unesco list clearly evidencing the importance and cultural value of religious sites (table 2.) 180 ta bl e 1. e cc le si as tic al a rc hi te ct ur e in e ur op e on th e u n e sc o w or ld h er ita ge l is t, 20 12 c ou nt ry n um be r of ty pe o f e cc le si as ti ca l a rc hi te ct ur e al l re lig io us w or ld h er it ag e si te s in th e co un tr y a rm en ia b el gi um b ul ga ri a c ro at ia c yp ru s c ze ch r ep ub lic d en m ar k fi nl an d fr an ce g eo rg ia g er m an y g re ec e h ol y se e h un ga r y it al y n or w ay po la nd po rt ug al r om an ia se rb ia sl ov ak ia sp ai n sw ed en sw it ze rl an d u kr ai ne u ni te d k in gd om 3 11 9 7 3 12 4 7 38 1 37 17 2 8 47 7 13 14 7 4 7 44 15 11 5 28 3 1 3 2 1 4 2 1 11 1 10 7 2 1 7 1 3 4 4 1 1 7 1 2 1 2 b yz an ti ne m on as te ri es , a rm en ia n ec cl es ia st ic al a rc hi te ct u r e c at he d ra l ( pr eg ot hi c st yl e) c hu rc he s an d a m on as te ry e pi sc op al c om pl ex , c at he d ra l pa in te d c hu rc he s c hu rc h, c at he d ra l, je w is h q ua rt er in t ře bí č, h ol y tr in it y c ol um n r os ki ld e c at he dr al (b ri ck -b ui lt g ot hi cst yl e ba si lic a) , j el lin g m ou nd s, r un ic s to ne s an d c hu rc h pe tä jä ve si o ld c hu rc h (l ut he ra n co un tr y ch ur ch ) a bb ey , c at he d ra ls , e pi sc op al c it y, p ilg ri m ag e ro ut e b ag ra ti c at he d ra l a nd g el at i m on as te ry c at he d ra ls , p ilg ri m ag e ch ur ch , a bb ey , l ut he r m em or ia ls , m on as ti c is la nd m et eo ra , m ou nt h a th os , t em pl e, s an ct ua ry , m on as te ri es v at ic an c it y b en ed ic ti ne a bb ey c hu rc h an d d om in ic an c on ve nt , r up es tr ia n ch ur ch es , c at he d ra ls , b as ili ca o f s an f ra nc es co u rn es s ta ve c hu rc h (t ra d it io na l s ca nd in av ia n w oo d en a rc hi te ct ur e) c hu rc he s, w oo d en c hu rc he s, p ilg ri m ag e ce nt re c on ve nt , m on as te ry c hu rc he s an d m on as te ri es , v ill ag es w it h fo rt ifi ed c hu rc he s m on as te ry w oo d en c hu rc he s c at he d ra ls , m on as te ri es , r ou te o f s an ti ag o c hu rc h v ill ag e of g am m el st ad c on ve nt s c at he d ra l a nd m on as ti c b ui ld in gs c at he d ra l, ab be y so ur ce : w hc .u ne sc o. or g/ en /li st , a ut ho rs ’ o w n el ab or at io n. 181 moreover, cultural heritage sites, since they represent universal cultural values, are visited by international tourists coming from diff erent parts of the world and having diff erent religious beliefs. the management of those sacred sites, religious heritage complexes, cathedrals, monasteries etc. must meet various requirements by pilgrims and tourists since visitors use the same places for diff erent reasons (hughes, k. et al. 2013; collins-kreiner, n. 2010b). some historical churches, cathedrals and monasteries heavily depend on tourist income and the economic benefits of cultural tourism have been widely recognised (leask, a. 2010). place interpretation and semiotics in religious tourism via maria is a recently established pilgrimage route connecting the most important shrines, sacred places and cultural heritage attractions related to the devotion of the virgin mary. since this route lacks a long tradition, its establishment requires promotion among pilgrims and tourists and the role of signs, symbols and interpretation are key factors in that process. in the literature review previous research on semiotics and tourism is briefl y reported (scheer, m. and willams, j. 2003). signs, symbols and their interpretation have always constituted a signifi cant role in place identifi cation and place att achment. it could be also affi rmed that the use of a complex system of signs is a distinguishing characteristic of humans (echtner, m.c. 1999). signs are identifi ed as anything that can be used to represent ta bl e 2. p ilg ri m ag e ro ut es a nd c en tr es in e ur op e on th e u n e sc o w or ld h er it ag e lis t, 20 12 n am e of th e si te w it h d at e c ou nt ry si gn ifi ca nc e p ilg ri m ag e c hu rc h of w ie s, 1 98 3 g er m an y t he p ilg ri m ag e ch ur ch is a p er fe ct m as te rp ie ce o f r oc oc o r ou te o f s an ti ag o d e c om po st el a, 1 99 3 sp ai n fi rs t e ur op ea n c ul tu ra l i ti ne ra ry p ilg ri m ag e c hu rc h of s t. jo hn o f n ep om uk a t z el en á h or a, 1 99 4 c ze ch r ep ub lic z el en a h or a pi lg ri m ag e co m pl ex s in ce 1 72 1 r ou te s of s an ti ag o d e c om po st el a in f ra nc e, 1 99 8 fr an ce t he r ou te p la ye d a k ey r ol e in r el ig io us a nd c ul tu ra l ex ch an ge d ur in g th e la te r m id d le a ge s k al w ar ia z eb rz yd ow sk a: th e m an ne ri st a rc hi te ct ur al an d p ar k l an d sc ap e c om pl ex a nd p ilg ri m ag e pa rk , 19 99 po la nd p ilg ri m ag e ce nt re ; o ut st an d in g ex am pl e of c al va ry , la rg esc al e la nd sc ap e d es ig n w hi ch in co rp or at es na ti on al b ea ut y w it h sp ir it ua l o bj ec ti ve s so ur ce : w hc .u ne sc o. or g/ en /l is t, au th or s’ e la bo ra ti on . 182 fig. 1. ecclesiastical architecture and religious sites listed by unesco as cultural att ractions, 2012 armenia: 1 = monasteries of haghpat and sanahin; 2 = cathedral and churches of echmiatsin and the archaeological site of zvartnots; 3 = monastery of geghard and the upper azat valley. belgium: 4 = notre-dame cathedral in tournai; bulgaria: 5 = boyana church; 6 = rock-hewn churches of ivanovo; 7 = rila monastery. croatia: 8 = episcopal complex of the euphrasian basilica in the historic centre of poreč; 9 = the cathedral of st james in šibenik. cyprus: 10 = painted churches in the troodos region. czech republic: 11 = pilgrimage church of st john of nepomuk at zelená hora; 12 = kutná hora: historical town centre with the church of st barbara and the cathedral of our lady at sedlec; 13 = jewish quarter and st procopius’ basilica in třebíč; 14 = holy trinity column in olomouc. denmark: 15 = jelling mounds, runic stones and church; 16 = roskilde cathedral. finland: 17 = petäjävesi old church. france: 18 = chartres cathedral; 19 = mont-saint-michel and its bay; 20 = vézelay, church and hill; 21 = amiens cathedral; 22 = cistercian abbey of fontenay; 23 = abbey church of saint-savin sur gartempe; 24 = cathedral of notre-dame, former abbey of saint-rémi and palace of tau, reims; 25 = bourges cathedral; 26 = historic centre of avignon: papal palace, episcopal ensemble and avignon bridge; 27 = routes of santiago de compostela in france; 28 = episcopal city of albi. georgia: 29 = bagrati 183 cathedral and gelati monastery. germany: 30 = aachen cathedral; 31 = speyer cathedral; 32 = pilgrimage church of wies; 33 = st mary’s cathedral and st michael’s church at hildesheim; 34 = abbey and altenmünster of lorsch; 35 = collegiate church, castle and old town of quedlinburg; 36 = cologne cathedral; 37 = luther memorials in eisleben and witt enberg; 38 = monastic island of reichenau; 39 = roman monuments, cathedral of st peter and church of our lady in trier. greece: 40 = temple of apollo epicurius at bassae; 41 = meteora; 42 = mount athos; 43 = sanctuary of asklepios at epidaurus; 44 = paleochristian and byzantine monuments of thessalonika; 45 = monasteries of daphni, hosios loukas and nea moni of chios. holy see: 46 = historic centre of rome, the properties of the holy see; 47 = vatican city. hungary: 48 = millenary benedictine abbey of pannonhalma and its natural environment. italy: 49 = church and dominican convent of santa italy maria delle grazie with “the last supper” by leonardo da vinci; 50 = the sassi and the park of the rupestrian churches of matera; 51 = cathedral, torre civica and piazza grande, modena; 52 = assisi, the basilica of san francesco and other franciscan sites; 53 = historic centre of rome, the properties of the holy see; 54 = piazza del duomo, pisa; 55 = early christian monuments of ravenna. norway: 56 = urnes stave church. poland: 57 = kalwaria zebrzydowska: the mannerist architectural and park landscape complex and pilgrimage park; 58 = churches of peace in jawor and świdnica; 59 = wooden churches of southern litt le poland. portugal: 60 = convent of christ in tomar; 61 = monastery of batalha; 62 = monastery of the hieronymites and tower of belém in lisbon; 63 = monastery of alcobaça. romania: 64 = churches of moldavia; 65 = monastery of horezu; 66 = villages with fortifi ed churches in transylvania; 67 = wooden churches of maramureş. russia: 68 = st basil’s basilica, moscow; 69 = cultural and historic ensemble of the solovetsky island; 70 = architectural ensemble of the trinity sergius lavra in sergiev posad; 71 = church of the ascension, kolomenskoye; 72 = ensemble of the ferrapontov monastery; 73 = ensemble of the novodevichy convent; 74 = wooden churches of kizhi pogost. serbia: 75 = studenica monastery. slovakia: 76 = wooden churches of the slovak part of the carpathian mountain area. spain: 77 = burgos cathedral; 78 = monastery and site of the escurial, madrid; 79 = cathedral, alcázar and archivo de indias in seville; 80 = poblet monastery; 81 = route of santiago de compostela; 82 = royal monastery of santa maría de guadalupe; 83 = catalan romanesque churches of the vall de boí. sweeden: 84 = church village of gammelstad, luleå. switzerland: 85 = benedictine convent of st john at müstair; 86 = convent of st gall. turkey; 87 = great mosque and hospital of divriği; 88 = selimiye mosque and its social complex. ukraine: 89 = kiev: saint-sophia cathedral and related monastic buildings, kiev-pechersk lavra. united kingdom: 90 = durham castle and cathedral; 91 = westminster palace, westminster abbey and saint margaret’s church; 92 = canterbury cathedral, st augustine’s abbey, and st martin’s church ← 184 something else, holding a second layer of meaning. semiotics recognised that there are usually several layers of meaning (barthes, r. 1995) within a sign system and they are bound in culture and context. semioticians set out that the meanings of sign structures are not inherent and universal, but they are arbitrary and established through particular social conventions. the swiss linguist, ferdinand de saussure (1978) coined the term ‘semiology’ in linguistic studies analysed the sign as created by the relationship between the signifi er (a word) and the signifi ed (the object or concept). however, the interpretation of signs could be dated back to the graecoroman period, represented by the etymology of the word itself, since ‘sign’ derives from gr. semeion. texts, representations, icons and places related to world religions, including christianity, are heavily interwoven with signs and symbols interpreted by christians. cohen, e. (2008) referring to research on jewish adolescents highlighted that symbols are important in representing ethnic and religious identities. as echtner, m.c. (1999) observes the applications of semiotics in tourism research are still focusing on the system of signs and the layers of meaning applied to tourism marketing. knudsen, d.c. and rickly-boyed, d.m. (2012) in their recently published research note on tourism sites debate on the conceptualisation of tourism as performance and the role of semiotics related to authenticity. their fi ndings are relevant to the examination of the complex system of signs applied for the promotion of a pilgrimage route evidencing place authenticity (belhassen, y. et al. 2008). belhassen, y. et al. argue that physical features of place and the socio-political context for its understanding, especially in the case of pilgrimage, are deeply infl uenced by the interconnections between human experience, perceptions and social meaning. geographical scale of religious sites throughout europe there are numerous pilgrimage sites which attract pious believers and secular tourists as well. the range of att raction of those sacred sites can be international, national, regional and local level. the term religious tourism according to the offi cials of the roman catholic church in europe is used to refer to all travels directed to destinations associated with roman catholic faith. that system encompasses a range of holy places, great cathedrals, monasteries, rural chapels as well as the service facilities associated with those sacred sites, religious rituals, ceremonies, choir performances etc. (nolan, m.l. and nolan, s. 1992; rinschede, g. 1992) the geographical characteristics of religious sites are extremely determinant for two reasons, on one hand, numerous sacred sites have become the economical resource for regional development (gatrell, j.d. and collins185 kreiner, n. 2006). highly evolved pilgrimage centres have an international catchment area and they usually represent the main economical engine for the villages and their surrounding areas. international airports operate to meet the tourism requirements of pilgrims, for example in lourdes located in southern france; in the small irish city of knock; in fátima in portugal and in santiago de compostela in northern spain. on the other hand, the use of space is infl uenced by heavy infrastructural development and constructions but the aim is still to conserve place identity and evidence the holiness of the site. ambrósio, v. (2003) elaborated diff erent categories of shrines and religious tourist att ractions according to their visitor numbers and religious functions. three major categories were identifi ed: 1. pilgrimage shrines both with low (fátima in portugal) or high (burgos in spain) value as tourist att ractions, shrines with pilgrimage events (st. torcato in portugal). 2. religious tourist attractions (ecclesiastical structures, famous cathedrals and monasteries). 3. sites of religious festivals (holy week and corpus christi processions). with the aim of providing religious services and tourism facilities, a signifi cant sum has been spent on the construction of local airports, on road networks, accommodation services such as hotels, apartments, transport and on health care for pilgrims and tourists alike. the level of commercial development located in the large surrounding area of a shrine exceeded in some cases the carrying capacity of the place. the overcommercialization of some sacred sites, as in the case of lourdes and santiago de compostela, might have a negative infl uence on pilgrims’ experiences once at the places in question. some pilgrimage sites have become extremely popular and they att ract hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and tourists from all over europe and in some cases even from outside of europe. large shrine complexes constructed in small communities generate a signifi cant place transformation and they also infl uence the socio-economical and natural environment. the small and remote village of međugorje in bosniaherzegovina has recently been discovered as a sacred place (vukonić, b. 1992) but the increased number of pilgrims and visitors has transformed the place. vukonić, b. (1992) noted that the parish offi ce estimated the arrival of 3,000–5,000 people in međugorje each day. according to recent statistics, a total of 47,500 holy communions were distributed in january 2013 (www.medjugorje.hr). the popularity of the site is in part due to the catholic press which spread 'news' of the virgin mary's appearance and of some miraculous healing cases said to have been experienced in međugorje. sites can be arranged in a hierarchy according to the size of their catchment areas. the small village in bosnia-herzegovina has defi nitely a global catchment area since pilgrims arrive not only from europe but also from the united states of america, argentina and japan. 186 invisible tourism and its aspects in religious tourism the conceptual framework of invisible tourism includes all those travels which could be positioned in the liminal zone of conventional tourism activities. short-term tourism distinguishes itself by spatially limited travels and short stays (brand, h. et al. 2008; glinos, i. et al. 2010). same-day visitors who stay less than 24 hours at a destination cannot be registered at public accommodation services and they are invisible to offi cial tourism data collection. tourism consumption of invisible tourists can be identifi ed despite the statistical gap. religious tourism in central and southeastern europe, and in particular in hungary, usually att racts only one-day visitors. the distance between the travelers' home and the religious site is relatively short. those one-day domestic travels elude the offi cial survey system and for that reason it is diffi cult to measure the importance and the range of religiously motivated travels. the organisational form of religious tourism highlights new aspects of invisible tourism. shinde, k. (2012) notes that the contemporary religious tourism industry evolved from traditional pilgrimages and religious actors continue to drive the industry by providing transportation and accommodation services along with religious services during the journey and at the destination. people travelling alone along a pilgrimage route or visiting a sacred shrine by themselves are extremely rare, they represent the minority. undertaking a journey to a sacred site and participating in a pilgrimage evokes interactions with other fellows. for this reason people on a religious trip generally prefer to belong to a large or a small group of organized pilgrims. the pilgrimage groups are mostly organized by offi cally credited travel agencies, however, tours for fellow believers are oft en organized by parishes, dioceses, youth groups, schools or senior clubs. in this case, commerical activities related to religious tourism remain invisible and hidden since they fail to meet the offi cal requirements of tour organization. tour organization for pilgrimage groups by parishes or dioceses has historical roots. in poland, for example, following the end of the second world war and during the decades of soviet state control, pilgrimages were secretly organized at national and local level. the communist authorities tried to weaken the infl uence of the church and they systematically refused to give permissions for group travels especially to pilgrimage sites (jackowski, a. and smith, v.l. 1992). in poland, the catholic church represents one of the strongest elements of polish nationalism and identity and one which could not be oppressed by communist rule. pilgrimages to kalwaria zebrzydowska and to częstochowa were organised illegally. furthermore, as nolan, m.l. and nolan, s. (1992) highlighted in their research on pilgrimages, invisible tourist activity is also present 187 on the supply side. religiously motivated travels like all tourist activities which last more than one day need tourism related services. in the case of pilgrimages organized by parishes or dioceses, sometimes private homes off er accommodation and food for religious tourists. at the pilgrimage site of san sebastian de garabandal, in northern spain and in san damiano, in northern italy, which are geographically small and hidden pilgrimage sites, service facilities are sponsored by nonprofi t groups. the geographical and historical context of hungarian religious tourism during the last century, in the historical turmoil, populations living in central and southeastern europe witnessed several political, social and economical changes having a great infl uence on people’s private lives as well. since the outbreak of the fi nancial and economic crisis in 2008, general living conditions have continued to worsen in these countries where social fragmentation and the dissolution of family ties due to the emigration of relatives and friends have had a great infl uence on the quality of life of individuals (egedy, t. 2012). the relationship between the state and the catholic church has faced several confl icts. the tragedies of the 20th century, the two world wars, the right and left wing dictatorships and the establishment of the communist political system signifi cantly aff ected the role of the catholic church in those countries (romsics, i. 2005). aft er the end of the first world war, the aim of the short-lived hungarian soviet republic in hungary was to mop-up the catholic church. under the terms of the peace-treaty imposed on hungary, the country lost a great part of its territories and population which made the devastation of the war even more tragic due to hungary’s new borders and her contested role within the region (kocsis, k. and váradi, m.m. 2011). during the period between the two world wars, the state and the church worked in symbiosis in order to reconstruct the country from its ashes. the position of the catholic parties in politics was highly signifi cant (irimiás, a. 2009) since the aim was to build a national and catholic country. the relationship between the state and the church changed drastically some years later. following the end of the second world war, hungary was “liberated” by the troops of the soviet union and the establishment of the communist political and social system began in 1947. the church became one of the main enemies of the system therefore it had to endure several punishments during the communist dictatorship (confi scation of properties, schools, institutions etc.). religion was banned and many (politically active) priests, friars and even the cardinal were persecuted (romsics, i. 2005). in 1989 following the fall of the berlin wall and with the change of the socio-political system in hungary, the church started to regain its power and infl uence. 188 the “rebirth” of the catholic church and faith and the rediscovery of the cultural and religious heritage related to maria, the patron saint of hungary, highlight the importance of this study. the via maria pilgrimage route is 1,400 km long and it connects the sacred and cultural heritage sites related to the virgin in the carpathian basin. the hungarian regions have several socio-economic and regional diff erences (kovács, z. 2004) which might infl uence the pilgrimage experiences along the route. one of the aims of the founders and managers of the route was to att ract not only devout pilgrims but tourists as well. since the route is set mainly in forests and in conservation areas far from urban centres, it presents some implications to develop sustainable tourism along the route. pilgrimage is strongly linked to sustainability since it promises not only physical but spiritual well-being too. in the case of the sacred site of mátraverebély-szentkút, the function of the holy well is embedded in the need of pilgrims to search for something material which is believed to have healing power because of its holiness. the cult of maria began in the 12th century and spread rapidly. it has had a great infl uence in hungary since maria is the patron saint of the country. originally, marian shrines included such relics as hair, bits of clothing and milk, however, later the relics were replaced by statues of the virgin as objects of devotion. the small maria statue of szentkút is considered to be special, so its clothing and hair are taken care of and the statue is adored for its power to cure infertility of women. the devotion to maria became localized in a number of specifi c places, and people accepted the plurality of virgins. mary’s gender, some think, plays an important role in her appeal. concepts perceived to be feminine such as motherhood, faith, tenderness, forgiveness and hope are represented by the virgin. the model to establish the via maria pilgrimage route was the camino towards santiago de compostela, however, the managers of the route underlined the specifi city of via maria, since it is a female pilgrimage route opposed to the masculinity of the camino. methodology the research on this recently established via maria pilgrimage route in hungary is concerned with applied implications of the phenomena of sustainable tourism and management of religious tourism sites. the geographical perspective highlights the importance of place and landscape since the route leads mainly through protected natural areas and is connected to already existing trekking paths. the relationship of sites, location and images of the sacred place of mátraverebély-szentkút were analysed applying, in part, the methodology used by semioticians to understand the diff erent layers of meaning to a place. data on the routes of movement, the catchment areas of pilgrims and the size 189 and scale of pilgrimage were obtained from secondary sources published by the managers of the route itself. in 2012, fi eld research was conducted at one of the major stations of the route, mátraverebély-szentkút, which is a holy well for christian devotees. the methodology of observation was applied documenting the pilgrims’ movements, clothing and the rituals during the mass celebration by taking photographs and notes. moreover, some pilgrims were interviewed informally on the spot. the shrine was visited several times during the summer of 2012 on sundays when the holy mass was celebrated for pilgrims. the calendar of the mass celebrations is published online by the friars on the site3. the dates of mass celebrations are linked to catholic festivities, however, the most important patronal festival is dedicated to saint anne on 28–29 july. at szentkút, several pilgrimages and patronal festivals are organised for diff erent target groups such as children, the elderly, young couples, single persons etc. special events, especially festive pilgrimages involving folkloric expressions, draw a highly mixed crowd of participants and visitors to the shrine. since pilgrims’ motivations can vary and the “thematic” patronal festivals address diff erent target groups, several site visits were needed during the research. findings (case study of szentkút) this section sets the mátraverebély-szentkút phenomenon within the historical context of journeys taking place over the last several centuries in hungary for the purpose of obtaining redemption from sin or cures for infertility. at that pilgrimage site, pilgrims pray to mary that she will intercede for them. the via maria route (figure 2) traverses northern hungary, an interior region of rural tourism. the need to mark and authenticate sites of importance to the catholic history of hungary connecting specifi c locations to the pilgrimage route like mátraverebély-szentkút was the basis for the establishment of the trail (photo 1). mátraverebély-szentkút is a shrine close to the hungarian-slovakian state border located in a hilly region. similarly to other places of worship managed historically by franciscans, szentkút has always been a common place to meet diff erent people. franciscan monasteries have always been multiethnic and the church services were delivered in the mother tongues of the people. this sacred site is a highly relevant place in hungarian history because of its legends related to ladislaus i of hungary, a chivalrous king in the 11th century. in 1091–1092, king saint ladislaus, according to the legend, was escaping from his enemies when he reached a precipice which forced him to stop and make his horse jump over the precipice. when his horse jumped, miraculously, a well 3 www.szentkut.hu 190 fig. 2. the via maria pilgrimage routes in central and southeastern europe, 2012 stations of the częstochowa–međugorje (north-south) route: poland: 1 = olsztyn; 2 = karlin; 3 = krzeszowice-kamien; 4 = kalwaria zebrzydowska; 5 = jordanów; 6 = orawka. slovakia: 7 = oravský podzámok (árvaváralja); 8 = ružomberok (rózsahegy); 9 = liptovská osada (oszada); 10 = staré hory (óhegy); 11 = banská bystrica (besztercebánya); 12 = zvolen (zólyom); 13 = banská štiavnica (selmecbánya); 14 = hontianske nemce (hontnémeti); 15 = plášťovce (palást). hungary: 16 = kemence; 17 = márianosztra; 18 = esztergom; 19 = dobogókő; 20 = márianosztra; 21 = budapest-máriaremete; 22 = szigetszentmiklós; 23 = ráckeve; 24 = dunavecse; 25 = solt-kalimajor; 26 = kalocsa; 27 = fajsz; 28 = szekszárd; 29 = ófalu; 30 = püspökszentlászló; 31 = pécs; 32 = máriagyűd. croatia: 33 = donji miholjac; 34 = beničanci; 35 = našice; 36 = čaglin; 37 = podcrkavlje. bosnia and herzegovina: 38 = kolibe gornje; 39 = derventa; 40 = kotorsko; 41 = doboj; 42 = maglaj; 43 = žepče; 44 = nemila; 45 = zenica; 46 = novi travnik; 47 = bugojno; 48 = kupres; 49 = šujica; 50 = donji brišnik; 191 photo 1. pilgrimage to szentkút, 2012 (photo by irimiás, a.) ← 51 = corići; 52 = široki brij eg. stations of the mariazell–șumuleu ciuc (csíksomlyó) (westeast) route: austria: 1 = terz; 2 = höllental; 3 = schott wien; 4 = unterberg; 5 = ratt ersdorf. hungary: 6 = kőszeg: 7 = csepreg; 8 = csénye; 9 = sárvár; 10 = celldömölk; 11 = mihályháza; 12 = att yapuszta (pápa); 13 = bakonybél; 14 = csatka-szentkút; 15 = bodajk; 16 = majkpuszta (oroszlány); 17 = nagyegyháza (felcsút); 18 = zsámbék; 19 = -máriaremete (budapest); 20 = szent anna-rét (budapest); 21 = rákosszentmihály (budapest); 22 = máriabesnyő (gödöllő); 23 = petőfi -forrás (bag); 24 = ecséd; 25 = kisnána-eger; 26 = kács; 27 = miskolcgörömböly; 28 = mád; 29 = tarcal; 30 = tokaj; 31 = rakamaz; 32 = nyíregyháza; 33 = napkor; 34 = máriapócs. romania: 35 = foieni (mezőfény); 36 = tiream (mezőterem); 37 = tășnad (tasnád); 38 = carastelec (kárásztelek); 39 = şimleu silvaniei (szilágysomlyó); 40 = zalău (zilah); 41 = hida (hidalmás); 42 = șărmașu (nagysármás); 43 = fânaţele mădărașului (hidegvölgy); 44 = târgu mureș (marosvásárhely); 45 = valea (jobbágyfalva); 46 = sărăţeni (sóvárad); 47 = praid (parajd); 48 = suseni (gyergyóújfalu); 49 = cârţa (karcfalva) 192 sprang up on the spot. this legend and the king’s great achievements provided the basis to elaborate a literary fi gure of him. an image, according to which ladislaus can be compared to moses emerged. it is believed that the hungarian king is the one who brought order to his people through his laws like moses did with the commandments to the hebrew people. springs of mysterious origin are common in catholic history. water has a high importance in religions throughout the world. water, as a literature topos as well, means cleanness, purity and regeneration. that interpretation is present in the case of szentkút, since it is refl ected in the location’s name itself, szentkút means a ‘holy well’. the well is thought to have healing forces. the first event of a miraculous recovery (from an illness) at szentkút was dated back to the 13th century when the holy mother with her son in her arms appeared to a mute shepherd. during her appearance, maria told him to dig (a hole) into the soil and drink the water of the spring he would fi nd there. the boy obeyed her and was cured miraculously, his ability to speak being given back to him. pilgrims started to construct a church in the village of mátraverebély around 1210 from where a procession was organised to the holy spring at szentkút (about 4 km away from the village inhabited mainly by a roma population). the church recognised the holiness of the place (crediting the miraculous events to it) and since 1400 has aff orded the shrine the highest benefi ts. in 1700, pope clement xi ordered the detailed analysis of some miraculous healing events at szentkút following which he declared that those were all authentic. deep in the surrounding forests there are some hermit’s abodes, still open to tourists, which were used by hermits until the second half of the 18th century. traditionally, the franciscans were the inhabitants of the monastery and the shrine was still fl ourishing in the period between the two world wars. however, its evolution was sharply stopped by the system of communist rule. in 1950, the friars were expelled by the communist dictatorship, the monastery was overtaken by the state and it was made to become a home for the elderly. the franciscans could only come back to szentkút in 1989 when the communist system collapsed and they had the opportunity to purchase their once owned properties which they started to develop and restore to their former glory. the tradition of pilgrimage on foot has become reinforced since the beginning of 1990’s. the shrine att racts devotees from a distance up to 150 km. in 2006, the shrine was declared to be the most signifi cant place of worship by the cardinal who entitled it as a national shrine. not only pilgrims but also cultural tourists visit the shrine and their visits frequently embrace a subconscious emotional dimension as well. various reasons have been put forward for the recent resurgence in pilgrimage to szentkút and other shrines. the phenomenon should be viewed not only on a personal level but taking in consideration the social, cultural, political and economic environment. 193 this place of worship unlike other signifi cant pilgrimage sites in europe devoted to mary could not be developed because of the forty years of communist rule in hungary and in central and southeastern europe in general. however, in 2012 more than 200,000 pilgrims visited the shire and the holy well to enjoy the wild beauty of nature and to feel the holy presence during the mass service and to fi nd alleviation through confession and during prayer. there is a long tradition of mixing the sacred and the secular at pilgrimage sites in western europe. it is similar in central and southeastern europe as well and visitors are impressed by the contrast between piety and commercialism, between serenity of religious worship and the chatt er of a festival. during the fi eld observations, that contrast was evidenced delineating a clear geographic aspect of space where two distinct areas could be distinguished. the profane space is nearby the main route with small shops selling souvenirs, toys, devotional objects and bott les of holy water along with street vendors of hamburger, sweets and, in small amounts, alcohol. while the sacred space is restricted to the area that surrounds the basilica minor, the confessionals (12 ones), the grott o (cave) and the holy well. tourism consumption, buying memorabilia, postcards and toys were practiced by pilgrims and many of them took home several bott les of holy water from the well. there are two types of pilgrims who come for mainly religious purposes: the ones who come with an organised group, usually organised by their own congregation or group of students organised by their school, and the individuals and families. today pilgrims come by bus, by private car or on foot. the pilgrimages are organised by dioceses or by local parishes. schools are the most important tour organisers of groups for the ceremonies dedicated to children and young students. in july, during the fi eldwork, labourers and rural, elderly people were strongly represented among pilgrims. the majority of them were women and two-thirds of them were over 60. although many, if not all visitors, consider themselves to be pilgrims, others would call themselves tourists (informal interviews on site). at szentkút, one of the most signifi cant moments of the pilgrimage is the confession. pilgrims oft en come from small communities, from villages where they know each other’s private lives. from the interviews with the friars, it turned out that many pilgrims wanted to confess their sins to someone other than the local parish priest. confession is also considered to have purifying eff ects. since medieval times, there has been a common belief that physical diseases might have spiritual causes (such as sin) and the specifi c goal of a religious pilgrimage, in the past and today as well, has been a cure for diseases. as emerged from the informal interviews with pilgrims, landscape and the peaceful natural surrounding have a relatively important role in the healing process. szentkút is enclosed in a spectacular natural beauty, it is relatively isolated, far from urban centres and human activities. pilgrims affi rmed 194 that the location of szentkút and its deep connection to nature enhances the pilgrimage experience, along with the perception of intimacy with the patron saint and the physicality of the holy water, to be a sacral one. drinking water from the holy well reinforces the spiritual experience and makes the pilgrims feel that they have done something to their health. conclusions the via maria pilgrimage route is an artifi cially constructed trail linking the sacral and the secular heritage sites related to the virgin in central and southeastern europe. the establishment of the pilgrimage route, based on the example of the unesco world heritage route el camino, was the fi rst initiative in the region to bring together pilgrims and tourists to visit the religious and cultural sites of the carpathian basin. the route has a particular resonance in itself during the communist period religion and religious activities were banished and they had to be practiced illegally. the properties of the church were confi scated and priests were persecuted. however, some shrines and sacral places linked to the devotion of maria managed to function also during the communist period. the rebirth of the catholic church can be dated back to 1990. sacred sites are socially constructed as sacred and they are accepted by believers to have a special power on individuals’ lives. the virgin mary is considered to be a holy fi gure who alleviates pain, off ers hope and cures infertility. however, the importance of szentkút also has national historical roots linked to one of the hungarian kings. pilgrims and tourists who visit sacred sites may experience intense personal, emotional experiences which are mediated by the visitors’ beliefs. since the pilgrimage route via maria has been recently established the management of the route has applied signs and symbols to delineate the path (the pictogram indicating the via maria depicts a male and a female pilgrim on their way) and the route in some places coincides with previously lined trekking routes. the aim of the managers and organisers of the pilgrimage route was to att ract believers, pilgrims and tourists as well. however, some implications (e.g. the conservation of natural protected areas) to sustainably manage the route has to be faced. sacred sites as szentkút, one of the most important shrines on the route, seem to have succeed in managing the massive arrivals of pilgrims. on sundays 4,000–5,000 pilgrims att end the mass services and participate the patronal festivals. the shrine and the holy well can only be reached on foot. all vehicles are banned from the site and must be parked near the basilica minor. sustainability is one of the key factors in the development of the pilgrimage route since the landscape and natural environment are key att ractions along the route. the conservational areas located in a beautiful natural 195 environment are tourist att ractions as well. moreover, it was outlined by the interviewed pilgrims that the beauty of landscape was perceived to have some healing eff ect on them and reinforce the spirituality of their experience. during the communist era religiousness was banned. faith could be practiced privately or illegally and this process had a great eff ect on individuals’ perception and their relationship with the church. during the fi eld research at szentkút it has been observed that the communication of the friars during the mass services were continuously referring to the past years dominated by 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(adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice key: cord-0060086-pyq8pd34 authors: ghodsee, kristen r. title: the enemy of my enemy is my friend: the curious tale of feminism and capitalism in eastern europe date: 2020-06-30 journal: gender and power in eastern europe doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-53130-0_2 sha: 91d31569e431a549815ce1cce1efe5e666c9e92f doc_id: 60086 cord_uid: pyq8pd34 across eastern europe today, populist leaders fan the flames of anti-feminism. poland has seen renewed attempts to restrict women’s reproductive rights and revert to traditional gender roles as catholic bishops rail against the pernicious influence of “gender ideology.” (kościańska 2014). in hungary, anti-gender policies have led to new rhetoric of “family mainstreaming,” and viktor orbán himself has said that women can only be promoted in his administration if they have three children (juhász 2016). fears about falling birth rates throughout the region have led to a resurgence of patriarchal, nationalist political movements, which reject supposedly foreign notions of gender equality. women have become the scapegoats for weak economies and demographic collapses. across eastern europe today, populist leaders fan the flames of anti-feminism. poland has seen renewed attempts to restrict women's reproductive rights and revert to traditional gender roles as catholic bishops rail against the pernicious influence of "gender ideology." (kościańska 2014) . in hungary, anti-gender policies have led to new rhetoric of "family mainstreaming," and viktor orbán himself has said that women can only be promoted in his administration if they have three children (juhász 2016) . fears about falling birth rates throughout the region have led to a resurgence of patriarchal, nationalist political movements, which reject supposedly foreign notions of gender equality. women have become the scapegoats for weak economies and demographic collapses. in this brief essay, i want to revisit my own early fieldwork in bulgaria in the late 1990s (ghodsee 2004 (ghodsee , 2005 and also think about nancy fraser's seminal article, "feminism, capitalism, and the cunning of history" (fraser 2009 ) in relation to the current gender backlash in eastern europe. fraser's article was intended as an indictment of the narrow domestic identity politics of american feminism, but it has a great critical value when we consider the ways that western liberal feminist theory and praxis were exported to eastern europe in the aftermath of the fall of the berlin wall. as fraser argues in the united states context, i propose that the triumphalist neoliberal capitalism of the 1990s co-opted and deployed liberal feminism and women's rights as a tool in the project of western economic domination in eastern europe. current tropes of hyper-masculinity and anti-gender diatribes in eastern europe at least in part arise from local perceptions that liberal feminism is an ideology of western cultural and economic imperialism, a perception that can and must be challenged by activist women in the region. by embracing the history of local women's activism, including that of state socialist women's organizations, feminists can once again represent a political project with the potential to challenge (rather than support and perpetuate) the ravages of unfettered free markets in the twenty-first century. this story could start back in the late nineteenth century with the debates between western women advocating for separatist suffrage movements in the united states and great britain and the socialist women in germany and russia who believed that working women needed to struggle together with working men for political as well as social and economic rights (zetkin 1896) . but for the sake of brevity, i begin this tale in 1975, in the middle of the cold war when the government of mexico hosted the first united nation's conference on women for international women's year. this historic gathering brought together delegations from the capitalist west, the state socialist east, and the developing countries of the south to deliberate on women's roles in society and culture under the three themes of "equality, development, and peace" (olcott 2017) . american feminists travelled to mexico city expecting to find a global sisterhood of women united in a common fight for equal rights with men. instead, jane jaquette, an american political scientist noticed the deep tensions that divided women from different political backgrounds: "i found north american feminists surprised to discover that not everyone shared their view that patriarchy was the major cause of women's oppression, and that third world women held views closer to marx than friedan" (jaquette 2004) . arvonne fraser, a member of the official united states delegation in 1975, later recalled that: "american women learned that they could be the target of public vilification, which shocked many of them deeply. . .the new u.s. women's movement had taught many american women to think of all women as friends, people united in a common cause. to find this not true, in their first international encounter, was, to some, an infuriating and very disappointing experience" (fraser 1987) . most relevant to the argument i hope to put forward in this essay, however, is the report from a journalist covering the 1975 conference for the american magazine, foreign affairs. she reported that some african women attending the conference considered western feminism a neo-colonialist plot to divide and conquer the men and women of newly independent countries in the global south (whitaker 1975) . in order to resist the economic and political imperialism of the capitalist countries, they argued, african men and women needed to work together. they believed that an independent women's movement would merely play into the hands of their former colonial masters. also, was this attitude really so unreasonable, given the long history of british imperial tactics to divide and rule african populations by promoting inter-ethnic hostility? indeed, throughout the united nations decade for women that followed the international women 's year (1976 's year ( -1985 , liberal feminists from the advanced capitalist countries tried to insist that the un conferences focus on narrowly defined "women's issues," whereas women from the eastern bloc countries and many women from the global south wanted to use the international women's congresses as an opportunity for women to speak about larger social, political, and economic issues (ghodsee 2012) . fast forward to 1998, when i began living in bulgaria to do my dissertation research on women's labor in the tourism industry. the immediate post-communist period was a time that witnessed a resurgence of traditional gender roles across eastern europe (gal and kligman 2000) . this was a moment when western aid was flooding into bulgaria through the european union's phare program, usaid's democracy network (demnet) program, and a variety of other bilateral donors to encourage the development of civil society through the establishment of local non-governmental organizations (ngos). many of these new ngos were created specifically to promote women's issues, to allow western liberal feminist ideas to be transferred to east european women who had been "emancipated from above" (drakulic 2015) . the anthropologist katherine verdery has argued that state socialism reduced women's economic dependence on men by making men and women equally dependent on the centralized state (verdery 1996) . with the collapse of that state and the rapid privatization (and outright theft) of state assets, men under capitalism would regain their supposedly "natural" roles as familial patriarchs and women could return to their "natural" roles as mothers and wives supported by their husbands (gal and kligman 2000) . across eastern europe, nationalists argued that capitalist competition would relieve women of the notorious double burden and restore familial and societal harmony by allowing men to reassert their masculine authority as breadwinners. for instance, the historian of sexuality, dagmar herzog, shared a conversation with several east german men in their late-forties in 2006. they told her that: it was really annoying that east german women had so much sexual self-confidence and economic independence. money was useless, they complained. the few extra eastern marks that a doctor could make in contrast with, say, someone who worked in the theater, did absolutely no good, they explained, in luring or retaining women the way a doctor's salary could and did in the west. 'you had to be interesting.' what pressure. and as one revealed: 'i have much more power now as a man in unified germany than i ever did in communist days' (herzog 2010, p. 113 ). in bulgaria, many women initially left the paid employment voluntarily, opting out of the labor market for a well-deserved break and believing that their families would be able to survive on one wage in the glorious democratic future to come. as enterprises began to be sold off or closed down, there was an early attempt to preserve jobs for male workers. as nanette funk observed: "reducing women's paid work is a major instrument of economic quasi-privatization and the integration of post-communist societies into a capitalist market system" (funk and mueller 1993). before 1989, women had enjoyed generous maternity leaves that guaranteed that a job would be available for them when they were ready to return to work, so women left formal employment with the expectation that they could go back anytime they wanted. however, as the economy imploded, the banks failed, hyperinflation ate up the nation's savings, and men found themselves increasingly made redundant, women realized too late that there would be no jobs for them to go back to (ghodsee 2005) . as early as 1992, the croatian journalist, slavenka drakulic, "worried about what would happen to all the good things that we did have under communism-the medical care, the year's paid maternity leave, free abortion" (benn 1992) . although men and women were both impacted by the sudden liberalization of labor markets, this historical moment coincided with a resurgence in traditional gender roles that rationalized women's return to the domestic sphere (saxonberg and sirovatka 2006) . at this moment of severe economic crisis and the growing impoverishment of the majority of bulgarian men and women, western-funded ngos supported projects that dealt directly with a narrowly defined set of women's issues that blamed the deficiencies of traditional bulgarian patriarchy for women's new ills. by prioritizing issues such as domestic violence in the home and sexual harassment in the workplace over the pressing social problems arising from unemployment and the dismantling of social safety nets, western-funded women's ngos targeted local patriarchies as the cause of women's disadvantages, constructing the image of the backward and uncivilized east european male who drinks too much, beats his wife, and is otherwise incapable of embodying the progressive, liberal habitus necessary for the citizens of modern democracy. moreover, discursively constructing women as a distinct category of bulgarians whose suffering required special remedy through foreign aid, these western-funded ngos created new gender-based fissures in bulgarian society where there would otherwise been class-based solidarity. like the socialist women of the early twentieth century and the african women at the 1975 un conference on women in mexico city, many east european women were suspicious of western liberal feminist discourses that valorized gender identities over class affiliations or national identity. non-governmental organizations funded by western donors attempted to create civil society by funneling dollars to support advocates for women's rights or ethnic minority rights. by creating democracy from the ground up, these ngos are also an important sort of "feminism-by-design," whereby western projects and programs were imposed willy-nilly on east european women interested in organizing to counteract the deleterious effects of the economic transition. the president of one organization in sofia believed that the biggest challenge facing bulgarian women was unemployment and economic displacement, but the western donor agencies preferred to fund projects about domestic violence, sexual harassment, or human trafficking. to receive funds, women's organizations in eastern europe framed their proposals using the language of western liberal feminism and adhered to strict pro-market projects, such as the promotion of social entrepreneurship or the encouragement of women-owned businesses. projects that challenged the logic of privatization or the marketization of previously state-funded social services often went unfunded. back in 2004, i asked if feminism and capitalism were "strange bedfellows" in eastern europe. i argued that: women's ngos may actually weaken grassroots opposition to neoliberalism and the dismantling of the social welfare state in bulgaria in two key ways. first, they place the blame for the drastic reduction in living standards for women squarely on the shoulders of traditional bulgarian patriarchy. they deflect attention away from the structural adjustment policies of the world bank and the stabilization programs of the imf, which are primarily responsible for the disappearance of the social safety net that once supported women and their families. second, ngos in bulgaria co-opt educated middle-class women who may otherwise have been able to organize a solid class-based opposition to secure women's rights in the post-1989 period (ghodsee 2004, p. 748 ). looking back after two decades, i understand that those early western "democracy promoters" were at least partially genuine in their hope to create a robust civil society sector by empowering different groups to advocate for their own rights within the new market economy. however, the suspicious way that western funding most often supported pro-western organizations reveals that these were not just projects about building local civil society actors and organizations. these western funds also determined which kinds of projects got funded, which voices were heard, which people were sent abroad for education and training, and which issues were supposed to matter to women or ethnic minorities or people with disabilities. in the case of many feminist organizations, if they wanted to survive in the competitive marketplace of ideas (and receive foreign grants) they learned to adhere to a narrow set of appropriate women's issues for which they could advocate, especially trafficking, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. i have a vivid memory of interviewing a senior mp from the bulgarian socialist party back in 2003. i wanted to talk about women's issues, and she told me that she did not deal with "your [american] kind of women's issues." she told me she dealt with policies dealing with pensions for widows, maternity leaves for mothers, and the education of young girls. "these are women's issues, too" she told me, defensively, and opined that ngos could not take interest in these more pressing problems because they required the intervention of the state. ngos could only deal on the level of the individual, but what was needed, in her opinion, was macro-adjustments to the economy that only a sovereign government could undertake. she wanted to focus on the structural foundations of inequality. this process was mirrored across eastern europe in the years leading up to european union accession. candidate members hoping to join the eu had to align their policies on gender equality with those envisioned in brussels, which increasingly focused on the economic value of achieving gender parity within the framework of free markets, a shift that has been seen as a move from "state feminism to market feminism" (kantola and squires 2012) . this market feminism was a stark contrast to the discourse of the international women's movement during the cold war when women's issues had been framed as basic human rights. however, after the collapse of the ussr in 1991, and the fourth world conference on women in beijing in 1995, a new discourse began to emerge, one that tied gender equality to explicitly economic outcomes; thus, linking a certain kind of liberal feminism with market-oriented reforms (stratigaki 2004; elomäki 2015) . this liberal feminism focused on improving the human capital of individual women to make them more competitive on emerging labor markets and did little to challenge the structural causes of gender disparities (spehar 2012; ghodsee and zaharijević 2015) . as in bulgaria, the specific brand of liberal feminism was strapped to the back of neoliberal capitalism as it spreads its tentacles out across the region. in addition to the ngo activism, countries wishing to accede to the european union in 2004 or 2007 implemented a variety of gender mainstreaming legislation designed to "protect" women from the worst ravages of the emerging free market system. just as east european men supposedly had their masculinity restored by the "natural" gender order guaranteed by capitalist competition, west european bureaucrats insisted that women needed special protections from unenlightened eastern masculinity. also, this is despite the fact that in countries such as hungary and bulgaria, male unemployment actually outpaced female unemployment in the 2000s (ghodsee 2005) . indeed, in russia and the former gdr, male life expectancy had suffered a precipitous plunge during the 1990s, primarily attributable to the premature deaths of middle-aged men economically displaced by the transition process. in an article in the premier british medical journal, the lancet, david stuckler, lawrence king, and martin mckee published an examination in the change in the mortality rates of working-age men between 1989 and 2002 in the countries of the former soviet union and eastern europe (stuckler et al. 2009 ). by examining the effects of mass privatization (which they defined as the transfer of 25% or more of previously state-owned assets to private hands within 24 months), and controlling for other factors to isolate the specific effects of the so-called "shock therapy," the authors found a statistically significant link between privatization, male unemployment, and premature death. russia provided the direst example, with male life expectancy falling by more than seven years between 1985 and 2002. while soviet men lived to an average of 67 years, their russian counterparts barely survived to 60. struckler and his co-authors argued that privatization in eastern europe could be blamed for millions of premature deaths. against the backdrop of this carnage, women's ngos and their western funders, as well as eu bureaucrats, continued to insist on special programs and laws to support/protect women's rights in eastern europe. i am not saying that problems like sexual harassment and domestic violence were not important, nor that these women's rights should not be protected, but merely want to point out that this insistence on importing a particular brand of western liberal feminism to eastern europe coincided with the imposition of neoliberal capitalism and that the former might have been part of a package of liberal discourses used to justify the latter. this importation of "feminism-by-design" from the west did two things. first, it attempted to erase the history of progressive state socialist policies for women in the region by claiming that it was illegitimate because ordinary women had not advocated for their own rights. this idea of "emancipation from above" (drakulic 2015) has been used to explain why east european women are supposedly so willing to let their rights evaporate after 1989. if rights were not hard won through grass roots activism, so the argument goes, women would not value them and they can easily be reversed. (of course, american women fought hard for their rights through an independent women's movement and they are still being reversed!) second, and more important, the importation of western liberal feminism to eastern europe discursively created a predetermined category of expected losers in the new capitalist economy. western liberal feminism emerged in conflict with capitalism, but also very much a part of capitalism. although there were many varieties of feminism in the west that challenged the hegemony of free markets along with patriarchy, the particular brand that got exported in the 1990s was the one that worked best with the free market economy, with a focus on the "politics of recognition" (i.e. identity politics) rather than on the "politics of redistribution" (fraser 2009 ). the "feminismby-design" model encouraged projects to protect women from market discrimination and thereby discursively legitimating that discrimination. in the american context, nancy fraser, susan faludi, and others have argued that western feminism has been co-opted by the economic project of neoliberalism, with its fetishization of unfettered free markets, emaciated states, and shredded social safety nets. in 2009, fraser published a stunning critique of contemporary liberal feminism's abandonment of social justice issues and its narrow focus on identity politics. the article systematically outlined how, "the dream of women's emancipation [was] harnessed to the engine of capitalist accumulation." rather than challenging the structures of inequality that oppressed women, liberal feminists (such as those who concentrated on supporting women's autonomy in a world of legally guaranteed sexual equality with men) unwittingly paved the way for the expansion of an economic system that ultimately increased the wealth and power of patriarchal, capitalist elites. although liberal feminists focusing narrowly on patriarchy eventually came to dominate the official american and eu feminisms, fraser argues that the early second-wave feminist movement was far more critical of capitalism: all told, second-wave feminism espoused a transformative political project, premised on an expanded understanding of injustice and a systematic critique of capitalist society. the movement's most advanced currents saw their struggles as multi-dimensional, and simultaneously against economic exploitation, status hierarchy and political subjugation. to them, moreover, feminism appeared as part of a broader emancipatory project, in which the struggles against gender injustices were necessarily linked to struggles against racism, imperialism, homophobia and class domination, all of which required transformation of the deep structures of capitalist society (fraser 2009, p. 107). in her article, fraser documents how the forces of neoliberal capitalism enlisted feminism as a tool to undermine the ideological hegemony of what she calls the "state-organized capitalism" of the post-war era. by challenging the four pillars of this state-organized capitalismeconomism, androcentrism, étatism, and westphalianismliberal feminism unwittingly helped to give birth to a world of globalized, unfettered free markets, and justified the ultimate dismantling of welfare states and the evisceration of class-based social movements. instead, second-wave feminism devolved into identity politics where rights and recognition took precedence over issues of redistribution and social justice. in 2013, susan faludi launched a scathing critique of facebook coo sheryl sandberg's book, lean in, as a way to investigate the strange affinities between capitalism and feminism in the united states during and after the ravages of the great recession. faludi noted how feminist discourses had been co-opted by the corporate elite and had lost touch with ordinary working women. she writes: sandberg's admirers would say that lean in is using free-market beliefs to advance the cause of women's equality. her detractors would say (and have) that her organization is using the desire for women's equality to advance the cause of the free market. and they would both be right. . . for the last two centuries, feminism, like evangelicalism, has been in a dance with capitalism (faludi 2013). this dance recognizes that, in the west, perhaps the most stalwart opponent of capitalism has often been patriarchy. whether advocating for a family wage for men or promoting special labor protections for women and child workers, patriarchy often strategically deployed traditional gender roles as a bulwark against exploitation. by keeping women out of the labor force and in the home, patriarchs benefitted from the reduced supply of workers, which often translated into higher wages for men. traditional patriarchal values also underpinned the creation of generous social safety nets to protect vulnerable women and children unable to fend for themselves. second-wave feminists in the west deplored the paternalism of the welfare state and insisted on equal treatment in the labor force, challenging the basis for gender specific labor protections or social entitlements. where feminists saw an opportunity to banish discrimination and unequal treatment, employers saw the opportunity to increase the supply of labor while doing away with unwieldy labor regulations and expensive welfare programs. by liberating themselves from patriarchal oppression, liberal feminists made themselves available for capitalist exploitation. both fraser and faludi argue that this was never feminism's goal, but once the wheel of history was set in motion there was no turning back. i believe that it was this particular version of liberal feminism that was imported into eastern europe during the 1990s, and in 2004, i catalogued the problems with building a "feminism-by-design" that was so closely linked to the imposition of neo-liberal capitalism. just as women's emancipation was conflated with communism and stridently rejected in the early 1990s, today that gender equality, reproductive rights, and anti-discrimination laws are too easily conflated with western economic imperialism, and this is what has led to the growing gender backlash throughout the region, as well as the rise of new tropes of nationalist hypermasculinity. for example, the countries of eastern europe rank the highest among those with the fastest shrinking populations in the world. a combination of out-migration and high mortality is exacerbated by below replacement fertility rates. since liberal feminists insist on reproductive freedoms for women, nationalists and social conservatives will inevitably assert that "feminism" and "gender" are part of a "western plot" to depopulate and weaken the east european nation-state. the ongoing hysteria about the impending demographic collapse of countries in eastern europe links patriotism with traditional gender roles as a protective mechanism against the perceived cultural and economic imperialism of the european union and the united states, and the liberal causes they seek to promote in eastern europe, including that of liberal feminism. i wrote this essay for the conference in berlin to provoke scholars of east european women's movements to rethink the history of the last three decades in the context of the resurgent nationalisms sweeping across the region. i want to make it very clear that i am in no way defending those politicians and citizens who hope to reinstate traditional gender roles and rob women of their bodily autonomy, but i believe it would be blind to ignore the fact that liberal feminism has been, and continues to be, deployed as a tool of neoliberal capitalism, both in the united states and around the world. indeed, sara farris (farris 2017 ) has recently coined the term "femonationalism" to denote the way that women's rights can be used to promote a right-wing, xenophobic agenda, showing that women's issues can never be divorced from their larger social, political, and economic contexts. across eastern europe today, at least some of the anti-feminist sentiment stems from a deeper anti-capitalist frustration, particularly in the wake of the global financial crisis, the subsequent great recession, and the devastating economic impacts of the novel coronavirus pandemic. for those of us interested in upholding women's rights, we must be cognizant to disentangle our demands from those that justify the extension of capitalist exploitation. feminism, or pro-women's activism-if we do not want to use the word "feminism"-does not have to be an exclusively female social movement that protects the interests of elite women, or to paraphrase susan faludi (2013) , which focuses on the glass ceiling while ignoring the floor. women have been the members of broad-based inclusive social movements that fight for the rights of all individuals while still challenging the patriarchy, nationalism, and xenophobia in all of its forms. if feminism and capitalism have been "strange bedfellows" in eastern europe, perhaps it is time for a divorce. the new governments just don't want any opposition'. melissa benn meets two croat writers who documented life during and after communism. the guardian how women survived post-communism (and didn't laugh the economic case for gender equality in european union: selling gender equality to decision-makers and neoliberalism to women's organizations facebook feminism: like it or not in the name of women's rights: the rise of femonationalism feminism, capitalism, and the cunning of history gender politics and post communism: reflections from eastern europe and former soviet union. routledge feminism by design: emerging capitalisms, cultural feminism and women's nongovernmental organizations in post-socialist eastern europe the red riviera: gender, tourism, and postsocialism on the black sea rethinking state socialist mass women's organizations: the committee of the bulgarian women's movement and the united nations decade for women, 1975-1985 fantasies of feminist history in eastern europe post coitum triste est? sexual politics and culture in postunification germany developing power: how women transformed international development hungary's poor economy is one reason women have become convenient scapegoats from state feminism to market feminism? who can be a true pole? on gender panic international women's year: the greatest consciousness raising event in history failing family policy in post-communist central europe this far, but no further? benefits and limitations of eu gender equality policymaking in the western balkans the cooptation of gender concepts in eu policies: the case of 'reconciliation of work and family mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis: a cross-national analysis what was communism and what comes next women of the world: report from mexico city only in conjunction with the proletarian woman will socialism be victorious key: cord-0060835-otdspo2i authors: larocca, david title: humanism’s necessary integration with capitalism: further remarks on brunello cucinelli’s philosophy of clothes date: 2021-02-16 journal: humanistic management in practice doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-51545-4_6 sha: f6f1f50b552fe70f864fdfa4f0cd32992714e914 doc_id: 60835 cord_uid: otdspo2i brunello cucinelli is the founder of an eponymous line of high-end, luxury fashion apparel and accessories. as surprising as it sounds at first blush (and perhaps surprisingly incongruous), cucinelli has a long-standing interest in and devotion to humanistic strains of thinking as they are found globally, but especially in the west, and more specifically emerging out of italy and the native regions familiar to his birthplace, umbria. thus, benedict of norcia and francis of assisi can be singled out both for their physical proximity to solomeo (the site of cucinelli’s headquarters and factory) and for their intellectual support of his cultivated application of their teaching to his type of humanistic management. in this chapter, i aim to provide an update on current trends and techniques in cucinelli’s business practice, one that emphasizes stewardship, philanthropy, and the dignity of labor—all practiced within the context of a lively, profit-driven capitalist enterprise. cultural historian, yuval noah harari, in works such as sapiens and homo deus, has provided a broad context in which to think our humanness-what makes us what we are, at once different from other species and like one another within a species. as harari shifts his scale of interest from ontogeny to phylogeny-and across vast swaths of time-he offers an especially useful heuristic for thinking about our appointed topic, humanistic management, since harari, in part, traces the abiding relationship between capitalism and humanism. i can briefly gloss one of his illuminating points on this perhaps unexpected intermingling by saying that where we have for centuries perceived capitalism's willingness to tolerate, support, and even at times celebrate humanism (e.g., with attention to factors such as improved working conditions; labor laws that prohibit children from service; retraining and re-education; supplying a living wage, health and social benefits, retirement and pension planning, and the like), harari announces, and perhaps also admonishes, that now "humanism with capitalism is a relic." 1 moreover, the distance between capitalism and humanism is widening with each passing season as the impact of post-human technologies-for example, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithmic-based systems-become the standard operating procedures for doing the business of capitalism (from banks to boardrooms, from pensions to personal financial decision-making). despite the increase of the human population on earth-and the attendant human impact on the climate, as framed, for example, in terms of the anthropocene-the uncanny fact remains that we are, concurrently, heading for an age of the post-human; this notion is most tersely and evocatively expressed as the separation of intelligence from consciousness. while humans may remain for some time the most conscious of animate creatures, our intelligence may, and likely will, fade from preeminence. if this is the case, and evidence suggests that we are already deeply immersed in this twofold transformation-viz., (1) capitalism's separation from humanism and (2) the separation of intelligence from consciousness-humanism needs not only new explicators and defenders, but also new models for study and reflection, and, when possible, emulation. in what follows here, i aim to articulate some of the ways in which a concrete illustration of humanistic management in business practice at brunello cucinelli may provide some indication of how humanism can retain its vital alignment with-and integration withincapitalism's onward development, and even account, in its own way, for the increasing nonhuman basis of intelligence. brunello cucinelli is the founder of an eponymous line of high-end, luxury fashion apparel and accessories. as surprising as it sounds at first blush (and perhaps surprisingly incongruous), cucinelli, who i will address by surname in what follows to help distinguish him from the name of his closely-held publically-traded corporate entity, has a longstanding interest in and devotion to humanistic strains of thinking as they are found globally, but especially in the west, and more specifically emerging out of italy and the native regions familiar to his birthplace, umbria. thus, benedict of norcia (c.480-547) and francis of assisi (c.1181-1226) can be singled out both for their physical proximity to solomeo (and cucinelli's hometown, castel rigone) and for their intellectual support of his cultivated application of their teaching to his type of humanistic management. the epicenter of the italian renaissance, florence, is fewer than a hundred miles away, while conceptually its contributions to global humanistic thought are immanent in cucinelli's small italian hill town and the international clothing empire he runs from its parapets. i will not rehearse here my earlier research on brunello cucinellimost perspicuously in two journal articles (one addressed to the essential role of literary and philosophical humanism in cucinelli's business practice and a second devoted to the company's philanthropic and stewardship activities-issues that lie beyond the appointed purview of the present volume) and also in a documentary film i directed, brunello cucinelli: a new philosophy of clothes (fine print film, 2013). 2 in these articles, in this film, and in interviews, i have articulated the rich and rigorous philosophical grounding of cucinelli's enterprise in the world of business. 3 in what follows, then, i want to supplement, extend, and update my existing research by doing two things: first, take up the mandate of the volume by focusing on the management practices of the company brunello cucinelli, which has been helmed since its inception forty years ago, in 1978, by the man who gave the company his name, brunello cucinelli. i will avoid, then, allusion to and engagement with cucinelli's philanthropic initiatives, which are at once inventive, generous, and pronounced (again, these projects are discussed in my prior work 4 ). as our editors usefully define it: "humanistic management is about how a business earns its money, not how it spends its money." the following notes will be attuned, then, to the way cucinelli's management style, principles, and practices enact humanism and illuminate humanistic traits-especially in relation to his employees, the running of his factories, engagement with suppliers, approach to retail operations and the products they purvey, and like enterprises devoted to improving the bottom line. in the case of brunello cucinelli, we glean a first lesson in his humanistic management style: the allocation of the company's profits to initiatives beneficial to his employees, their work environment, and the continual improvement of the production process and its products, is at the core of his sense of "how a business earns its money." a major, founding touchstone for thinking with cucinelli about how to run a business so that it can make money is the notion of the dignity of labor. there are many valences to this notion, among them that an employee feels respected by his employer; that she feels she is well-trained and capable of doing her assigned tasks with finesse and competence; that she feels sufficiently remunerated for her time, effort, and output; and lastly, that she feels part of a community of laborers and managers who respect her and one another. these four axes are elemental to cucinelli's vision for creating the conditions for a corporate environment in which even the prospects of profits can be imagined; for example, cucinelli's abiding concern with worker dignity would forestall any attempt, especially consciously, to put corporate profits ahead of it. if one doesn't have contented, motivated employees-people who feel genuinely valued by the company-there is no reason to undertake a capitalist initiative. managers are often charged with monitoring "quality control," a broad enough category to include the quality of the workforce (are they welltrained? are they efficient? are they making what they are supposed to make? and so on) and also, more familiarly, the quality of the products. for cucinelli, there is a through-line between quality of workers and quality of products; if you focus on the care of the worker as, say, a benedictine abbot might for his brothers at the abbey, then you can rest easy that the fruits of their labors will be the best they can be. 5 as we are building precepts-dignity, quality-we find time and again that cucinelli regards humanism as absolutely necessary to the evolution of capitalism. that is, humanism is neither a hindrance nor an irritant to the ambitions of a capitalist regime, but, instead, the guiding force for how capitalism should conduct itself. cucinelli's brand of humanismoften referred to, by him, as a neohumanism-makes itself known in and through these normative injunctions and ethical imperatives. that there is nothing capitalism should do besides maximize profits is anathema to cucinelli's vision of capitalism's still-deferred promise. indeed, under cucinelli's management, profits are the beginning and not the end of his humanistic preoccupations, since available equity can be used to promote, in his parlance, the human spirit. build a library, a theater, an elementary school, and a hospital; restore a church, a town square, or an ancient ruin; plant a grove of trees, harvest olives for oil and grapes for wine; and give workers a raise, time off, or some form of social supportthese are what profits are for. again, the quality of the end product, its viability on the open market, and the return of yet-more-profits will take care of themselves if these immanent, human needs and desires are first addressed. additional mantras of this sort can be adduced (and have been in my prior research 6 ), but their service, however briefly or loquaciously these are described, find humanism heeding close to the business of capitalism. the double entendre is intentional; it is meant to keep close at hand harari's notion that the very activity of business (at the heart of capitalism's workings) is increasingly being jobbed-out to computational algorithms. much of the global stock market-from moment to moment-is already running ahead of, or beyond, human control, even if we are simultaneously meant to believe that humans make ultimate and essential decisions now and again (e.g., setting interest rates and where to invest/divest). as neoliberal incarnations of capitalism continue to spread-with their heedless obsession with outcomes, ratings/rankings, and the pernicious recalibration (often diminishment) of human capital-management is increasingly, perhaps at a level never-before seen, in need of humanistic models. consider a glimpse into different realms of "business": where for generations, centuries in fact, capitalist business operated on market principles, the academy seemed part of an archaic world, a vestige of a lost age (among other ages, we might call it an age of humanistic inquiry-as in ancient greece and rome, later the renaissance, and more recently, various enlightenments and romanticisms). today, the academy has shifted almost entirely to control beneath a neoliberal order; the humanistic qualities, credentials, and occupations that defined the academy for most of its existence are extinct, or nearly so. 7 indeed, the very notion of "the humanities" appears increasingly evacuated, displaced, and replaced by those fields that show promising return on investment (roi). the cutting edge of the academic humanities, we are told, involves "data mining" (a fit trope for the logic capitalistic extraction). gone is the need, the allowance, for close reading. while academic bureaucrats are given substantial raises, tenured faculty are swapped out for temporary adjuncts; while new infrastructure populates the campus (a welcome center here, a sports stadium there), departments (indeed, whole programs, including academic presses) are underfunded and occasionally simply shuttered. if we are addressing broad trends, the academy is, by and large, no longer a location in which humanistic inquiry can flourish-mainly because the vested interests (a lovely sartorial pun if ever there was one, and ironical too) are hostile to humanism's claim for our time, attention, and value. in a lamentable coda to this crisis, it has been argued that the severe-perhaps irrecoverable-damage done to the humanities in the academy was largely self-inflicted. 8 it is all the more intriguing that-in an uncanny and unexpected reversal-we have discovered in cucinelli's company a redoubt in which capitalism has come to announce (indeed, preserve, protect, and develop) the virtues, even profitability!, of humanism. far from exploiting workers (as academic adjuncts are), reducing options for inquiry (as academic departments have), and generally laying waste to the potential for academic work in the humanities to bestow-and secure-the dignity of labor (as the ruling elites of corporatized academy are wont to do), cucinelli has with full, unironic commitment conceived and built a neohumanistic academy (equipped as it is with a so-called neohumanistic aurelian library, and across a piazza from a massive palladian theater constructed after cucinelli's design). it bears repeating-in part because it is rather rare and, in some measure, counterintuitive-that cucinelli does not see the creation of these humanistic institutions as how the company spends its money, but rather how the business earns its money. this last point needs some elaboration. theories of entrepreneurship, such as offered by j. p. kuehlwein, who has interviewed me for his ueber-brands podcast and during research for his coauthored book, rethinking prestige branding: secrets of the ueber-brands (with wolfgang shaefer 2015), might point out how cucinelli's management style (bracketing its humanism in principle or practice) is, in fact, in keeping with the corporatized, neoliberal approach to "building a brand." if that is the case, then we might wonder how we can "unbracket" the humanism to allow its enrichment of management practices; the onus of answering for what we would have to lose would be on those who entrench to avoid it, that is, who aim to keep humanism bracketed. some anonymous readers of my earlier work on cucinelli have leveled what we might call a cynical reading of his work, which, regrettably, may be the only way we have come to allow ourselves to think about corporate management ("humanistic" in name only, or by some other name that "virtue signals" but does not instantiate its practices and summon its hoped-for effects); such critics say, i might add, with kind of blithe confidence and untroubled dismissiveness, that cucinelli is using humanism as a marketing ploy (e.g., as one might accuse a company's bid for "environmental friendliness" as a scandal of "green washing"). the cynical reading is thus part and parcel of a skeptical one: cucinelli builds academies, schools, theaters, libraries, and, indeed, quotes from marcus aurelius and kant as part of an attempt to align his business with certain values that are commodified and thus monetized. the brand is, on this reading, a kind of cult one can "buy into" by buying off the rack. membership, like entreé into so many coveted guilds, can be had at a price. and yet, as a counterpoint to the cynical reading, we can see that the vast majority of cucinelli's adoption of humanistic principles for the management of his company never reach the website or catalog, the runway or the retail shop. there is no label on the clothes that admits, nay advertises, "humanism" as an ingredient of product or production. most of his customers, for better or worse, remain casually unaware of-and perhaps even actively indifferent to-the ethics that pervades the day-today operations of the factory and other managerial aspects of the company. in a world where social media can lead to a sudden and severe boycott of goods on account of the purported or presumed moral failing of their corporate owners (e.g., fossil fuel frackers, child labor exploiters, and fascist regime supporters-and far lesser infractions inveighed by "cancel culture"), it certainly would not likely hurt cucinelli's bottom line to have it broadcast that he aims at (and it would seem achieves) a high degree of loyalty from suppliers, worker dignity, customer satisfaction, and the like. but whether the humanistic programs cucinelli does in fact instantiate in his corporate hometown of solomeo reveal a positive correlation with profits remains at the level of speculation. one would need to interview each of his customers and ask: "was your purchase from brunello cucinelli motivated by anything besides your admiration and desire for the products you acquired?" as that question stands for the sort of social scientific motivation to track a causative relationship between brand and profit, i wish to point our attention to things we do know, and don't need to speculate about, namely that cucinelli's pronounced commitment to humanistic values is largely conducted away from the klieg lights and press kits. one indication of his sentiment-at once sincere and enacted-derives from him speaking about how most corporations have a twenty-or thirty-year plan for success. (we can pause to notice that that's about the length of an average career, another indication that selfish, proximate motives are involved in the mainstream discourse of corporate arcs.) cucinelli, contrariwise, speaks of a five hundred-year plan. clearly, for a man in his late-sixties, he doesn't presume to have much to do with the vast swath of that future. indeed, as revenue neared half-a-billion in 2015, and cucinelli's net worth is purported to be $1.4 billion in 2020, there seems little reason for him to make such far-reaching claims. can any reader mention another global entrepreneur who has spoken in such concrete, declarative terms about a vast, unknown future? some visionaries come mind: steve jobs, elon musk, jeff bezos. and yet are they pursuing such an expansive time horizon while simultaneously not giving short-shrift to imminent issues of worker dignity? moon shots and mars landings, electric cars and delivery drones, may derive from their concentrated wealth, but what of the lives of the laborers who make all that possible? are we enriched on the way to their extra-terrestrial obsessions? while the official, corporate website-www.shop.brunellocucinelli. com-might stick to the exhibition of attractive clothes (and thus as a portal for purchasing them), the online presence-at www.brunellocucinelli.com-also makes a practice of articulating and advocating humanistic principles, especially as they are in league and in line with the mandates of the market. in this respect, prospective customers may encounter an ideology of humanistic management according to cucinelli; whether this sways their purchase one way or another remains to be researched. since when he was a boy, he witnessed his father working in an unwelcoming environment and became a close observer of the world, thus developing his dream to promote a concept of work that ensured "being moral and economic dignity." this is a key element to understand his personality and the success of his business, which brunello considers not only as a wealth-generating entity, but also as a framework to develop and nurture his dream of a capitalism that enhances the human being. his knowledge of the great figures of the past has always fed his dreams and ideals, but he is always looking ahead towards the distant future, and each action and accomplishment of his is designed to last over the centuries. 9 the website describes how the "increasingly international market welcomed his made in italy products" and by these acquisitions-figured as a form of medieval patronage-"enabled him to implement his ideals." after decades of steady growth, the company went public on the italian stock exchange, borsa italiana (call letters bc), a decision, it is noted, that "was not driven by financial reasons alone, as brunello saw a wider participation in his business activity as an opportunity to spread his ideals of a new capitalism, a truly humanistic capitalism." indeed, when cucinelli was greeted on the day of his company's initial public offering, he remarked: "this listing shows that romanticism and enlightenment are compatible with a humanist form of capitalism," after which he presented the chief executive of borsa italiana with a sixteenth-century edition of aristotle's nicomachean ethics. 10 as part of his restoration of the umbrian hill town, solomeo, cucinelli hired local craftsmen to build what became known as teatro cucinelli. the structure has since hosted myriad talks, conferences, plays, operas, and other performances. (during the covid-19 pandemic, cucinelli used the stage-and the empty seats before him-as a venue for a solo twenty-minute speech, in which he drew from poets, parables, and parents, to encourage us to consider how the crisis can spur our thinking and growth, and in turn the betterment of humanity.) by an easy measure, the theater has become the heart of the cultural life of solomeo, and since so many employees work in the town or very near it, the theater and its offerings are part of their patrimony as well. the construction of the teatro and the adjacent forum of the arts by umbrian master craftsmen has led to the more recent founding of the solomeo school of arts and crafts. established in 2013 and inspired by the ideas and ideologies of essayist and aesthete, john ruskin, and famed arts & crafts innovator, william morris, the ssac is devoted to training current and future generations in craftsmanship. cucinelli regards craftsmanship itself-whether with stone and mortar, or needle and thread-as elemental to the humanistic enterprise. in any age that is speeding toward ai dominance in factories-where the productivity of computers and robots has already displaced millions and promises to displace millions more-cucinelli's turn toward craftsmanship, tradecraft, can seem at once naïve and antediluvian, if not also perilous, for any talk of a five hundredyear plan. and yet, despite the way cucinelli's projects challenge dominant corporatism and the dictates of neoliberal order, his business continues to expand (a new factory was constructed in 2017), his profits increase year after year. while he quotes kant from memory, and alludes to the sayings of roman emperors and greek poets, cucinelli presses on-founding the project for beauty in 2014. part of its first phase was the creation of three substantive parks in the valley below solomeo, land that has been reclaimed from abandoned factories. of his many attempts to have capitalism serve humanism, and in turn for humanism to make capitalism a milieu for the creation and maintenance of human dignity, the project for beauty is especially poignant. pushing aside the question about corporate business practice (e.g., in the boardroom), or the factory floor, the retail shop, or indeed even a concern with the products made by the company, cucinelli and his foundation, cofounded with his wife, federica, attend to the earth, plant trees and vineyards, and reflect on their roles as custodians. looking at these newlyplanted trees and vines, one gets an immediate sense of the tenability of his five hundred-year plan. while the first part of this chapter has shown that cucinelli and his eponymous company antagonize the prevailing ideological trends and philosophical tenets of corporate global capitalism (including its appointed pace and priorities), the second part will turn to what might be described as anthropological, even ethnographic, depictions of life in the company-something like a glimpse inside the day-to-day operations. though cucinelli has conflated, inverted, and otherwise confounded, the logic of this assignment-for example, by challenging the very notion that "humanistic management is about how a business earns its money, not how it spends its money," i will attempt, in the space remaining, to translate the prevailing humanistic management skills, techniques, and procedures at the company so they might be understood by communities outside of solomeo and the corporate culture of brunello cucinelli. to substantiate my claims, and enrich the dialogue between management inside the company and the models on offer outside it, i will relate details from a series of conversations conducted in the spring of 2018 with giorgiana magnolfi, senior public relations and marketing director at brunello cucinelli, and company employee for more than a decade. when i presented magnolfi with my mandate-to address humanistic management in so far as that activity is "about how a business earns its money, not how it spends its money," she offered me a knowing smile. "these are not separable, or opposed, for my boss," she explained. "mr. cucinelli sees his practice of humanistic management as a comprehensive project-ranging from the ethical treatment of the suppliers from whom he sources materials to the workers who cook for the banquets that celebrate a new season of clothes." when magnolfi engages the professional language of marketing and management practice, for example, when gesturing toward the company's stance on "sustainability," she pivots quite rapidly from some abstract discussion of "the earth," and related environmental concerns, such as global warming, to a highly proximate focus on the people who work for the company. "how are the humans doing?" she asks rhetorically. in an age that is preoccupied, perhaps to a fault, with politically correct corporate speech-for example, that would keep everything at abstract, depersonalized levels-magnolfi turns unapologetically to reflections on imminent concerns. she begins, "if you teach humans to be ethical," and she concludes with a sage's certainty, "they will sustain the earth." magnolfi has done her homework on sustainability as it is discussed in the contemporary corporate-and global-agenda. she confidently reports that "the company would qualify for several of the criteria in the united nations charter for sustainable corporations." she refers to the un's "global compact," launched in 2000, and described as "a call to companies everywhere to voluntarily align their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption, and to take action in support of un goals and issues. the un global compact is a leadership platform for the development, implementation and disclosure of responsible corporate policies and practices." 12 from the company's perspective, the environment always implies a hidden premise: "it is a humane environment." magnolfi is quick to reframe any corporate or marketing abstractions in anthropomorphic language, but even more boldly, anthropocentric terms. she speaks of brunello cucinelli as if it were a small village store, operating to serve its workers and local community, and as a natural effect of that care, satisfying its customers with products worthy of their appreciation. and in a genuine sense, aside from markers of scale, this is an accurate description of the company-in its embodied practices in solomeo and in its representative locations beyond it. magnolfi emphasizes that cucinelli doesn't tolerate hubris from his employees, much less harassment and other forms of degradation; rather, the goal is ever on "how you treat people"-with a focus on being an active, positive contributor to a community based on tolerance, shared interests, and also shared resources. this last point is not a nod to socialism, but rather to the vital social benefits of a capitalist corporation that holds tight to its humanistic priorities: the people first, and the rest will follow. with abundant profits, a corporate hegemon such as cucinelli has the power to "spread the wealth," and he chooses to do this by means of continual improvement of working conditions, but also by attending to the intellectual, social, and spiritual lives of his employees. perhaps this is too much interference for a standard laissez faire entrepreneur, and yet, as we see with elon musk, larry page, mark zuckerberg, and richard branson, corporations can shape the values of the people who work for them but also who buy from them-and perhaps, even more importantly, those who don't! as tristan harris has said, if you aren't buying a product, you are the product. consider, as a study in contrasts, how zuckerberg's abiding corporate credo has been "move fast and break things," while cucinelli's has been the fostering of a series of mutually-enriching, highlycomplementary, seemingly atemporal humanistic philosophies that seek the cultivation of and care for the human soul; indeed, given cucinelli's attention to physical as well as spiritual restoration, we might say his credo is precisely the opposite of facebook's founder: slow down and fix things. if we are eager to judge success by profits alone, then zuckerberg may be acclaimed more successful (at present, his net worth is one hundred times more than cucinelli); when we are thinking of the corporate management of human workers, such a de facto conclusion should give us pause. while locals in umbria, who are not the company's employees, will praise cucinelli's repair of earthquake damage to historic sites such as norcia (hometown of st. benedict and the monastery where he prayed) and perugia (not far from assisi, where st. francis began his practice of humble service to the poor), magnolfi finds these specific acts as representative of, as she says, "an overall desire-and hope-to create a work environment, as well as contribute to a broader community, where people are meant to respect one another, and when necessary, lift one another; instead of being individuals solely out for their own mark, each person operates as part of a greater whole, keeping in mind along the way the goals of the company and also the community. the two are truly one in this vision of things." with such a sentiment at hand, we glean how the corpus of the corporation requires individual and communal notions of "bodies" in the service of one another. moreover, seeing how closely the local medieval humanists (viz., benedict, assisi) are to cucinelli's vision, we can, without wincing at the pun, appreciate the difference between a profit motive and the motivation of prophets. what animates the dedicated behavior and developed talents of loyal workers?-not the boss's bottom line; rather, employees want to be sustained by a sense that their work has meaning in itself and also as part of a network of contributions by others. 13 by these means, individual human dignity emerges as a kind of epiphenomenon of corporate humanistic management. we, the audience of this company's approach to humanistic management-if not (also) prospective customers of the company's wares-may ask questions that radiate beyond the bespoke practices at brunello cucinelli: what incentivizes the behavior of those who would "work for" capitalists, entrepreneurs, and managers? thinking as an equity holder, looking out to a sea of employees, one could ask oneself: what if my motive for profit first addressed worker dignity-treating it, perhaps, as the very condition for envisioning corporate success? or, for that matter, what if the care of the customer became a priority alongside standards of product quality? 14 returning to the management methods in place for decades in solomeo, we see how, in reply to the first series of questions, cucinelli draws inspiration from a cadre of humanists-from socrates and aurelius to benedict and kant-and on the second front, from the likes of theodor levitt, a harvard business professor, who argued for the preeminence of the customer. (levitt was an early and decisive influence on cucinelli 15 ). cucinelli's regard for employees and customers is coupled with the standard (now expected) concern for quality control with respect to products, but his ratios of attention and his sense of priorities (viz., that employees and customers are priorities) remain distinctive when compared with the dominant forms of profit-centric, capitalistic management in the age of ai and data-driven algorithms. indeed, in the context of a luxury fashion brand, it's highly consequential that we are told "style is an algorithm; no one is original anymore, not even you." 16 decision-making by managers-and customers alike-has been disrupted by the rise of the machines and machine learning. incrementally, and at a conspicuous rate, the human factor is being driven out. a still further valence of "management"-in the sense that cucinelli's capacious humanism affords, and no doubt, demands-finds his corporate largesse extending to the students at the school of arts and crafts in solomeo: the company pays for student education in tailoring, patterning, as well as masonry and other "arts of craft." upon graduation, paid internships keep the talented graduates close to solomeo, encouraging them to contribute new ideas to the company that was so generous with them. the loyalty exhibited on both sides of the relationship-from corporate sponsor to striving artisan-adds another degree of social stability and interpersonal satisfaction; and, to be sure, in this context, there is still plenty of room for individual expressions of pride in accomplishment. some models of corporate capitalism would identify these educational initiatives as tax write-offs or loss leaders, and, as it happens, such may be technically the case for brunello cucinelli, though, as he would say, not spiritually. yet the point, given cucinelli's management priorities, is not to pursue only those things that either guarantee fiscal profit or otherwise enhance the brand (even if enhanced by virtue of financial losses). in this way, as a corporate head, cucinelli is decidedly uncynical. one need only read his recent collection of remarks-brunello cucinelli: the dream of solomeo; my life and the idea of humanistic capitalism (feltrinelli 2018)-to suss out his sincere demeanour and positive outlook. as befits such an approach, cucinelli, is a steady student of kant, and quotes from the german metaphysician and ethicist as if he were speaking his own sentiments: "two things fill me with wonder, the starry sky above and the moral law within." again, the motivation for profit derives from a motive discerned by a prophet: kant has illuminated for cucinelli the way in which one's intention is the limit situation for good works, not the common tack that mainly seeks utilitarian and financially advantageous outcomes. for brunello cucinelli-the company, its founder, and its current ceo-"humanistic management" is a phrase always in translation and action as a humanistic ethos. humanism, on this view, predates and thus precedes the capitalist venture-and yet, is absolutely vital to it, and must be retained. as in any anthropocentric weltanschauung worthy of the name, the people come first. (umbria's, and especially nearby florence's, medieval confluence of humanism and a market economy-no less in the textile trade-provides a rich scene for exploring their symbiosis, a hybridity that continues to inspire cucinelli in his twenty-first-century endeavors.) cucinelli's intense focus on the experiences of his immediate accomplices in business-his family, his coworkers at the top of the corporate structure, his employees at all levels (foreign and domestic, fulltime and part-time, consultant or associate), his suppliers and his retailers, craftsmen and students of craft, and so on and so forth-radicalizes his humanism so that it permeates the entire enterprise. his hallmark virtues-among them a focus on beauty, emphasis on the value of what is created, and dignity in and through labor-achieve their particular sheen in the light of his embodied practice of their emergence (e.g., in factories, farms, forests, schools, showrooms, theaters, libraries, and the like). the market analyst, the actuary, the business guru may find much to eschew and dismiss in cucinelli's special, even rarefied, approach to humanistic management. and yet, his results reveal his unintended defense: happy workers, esteemed products, and upward profits-"gracious growth," as he puts. 17 this specific quotation was gleaned from a conversation harari had with russell brand in the under the skin (podcast) a new philosophy of clothes: brunello cucinelli's neohumanistic business ethics building a brand on bricks and beliefs-brunello cucinelli on brunello cucinelli's new philosophy of clothes for more on the trope of the benedictine abbot, see larocca my remarks in this paragraph are informed by wendy brown, undoing the demos: neoliberalism's stealth revolution as a representative set of reflections on this topic, see eric bennett cucinelli's stellar debut seen boosting italy ipo appeal see data on these claims as represented in "the meaning of work on this line of inquiry, see larocca for more on levitt's influence on cucinelli, see larocca style is an algorithm a phrase drawn from conversations with giorgiana magnolfi dear humanities prof: we are the problem. the chronicle of higher education undoing the demos: neoliberalism's stealth revolution style is an algorithm building a brand on bricks and beliefs -brunello cucinelli brunello cucinelli: a new philosophy of clothes (david larocca, dir.). fine print film, color brunello cucinelli: a humanistic approach to luxury, philanthropy, and stewardship a new philosophy of clothes: brunello cucinelli's neohumanistic business ethics on brunello cucinelli's new philosophy of clothes. radio free acton, the acton institute cucinelli's stellar debut seen boosting italy ipo appeal anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 246 introduction nelson [rodriguez, the playwright] said to me, ‘tatiana, only assholes age. everyone else becomes wiser.’ this is very true. if you are super happy, have an active life, and a wrinkle bothers you, why not do something about it? that’s different than having plástica out of bitterness. aging is not cool. -tatiana, brazilian plastic surgery patient such a breezy acceptance of “plástica” has become common in brazil as the country experiences a boom in cosmetic surgery. tatiana’s comment that “aging is not cool” also points to new ideals of aging that have been popularized in industrialized societies since the 1980s. surgery-for-life: aging, sexual fitness and self-management in brazil the terms “successful aging,” “new age,” and “third age” reflect an optimistic view of aging as a process that can be managed to maintain not just physical health but also mental wellbeing, social engagement, and sexual fitness. this vision of aging has been described as an inspiring ideal that enables the elderly to counteract social isolation -but also as an ideology that masks structural changes in the life course in late capitalism, not all of which are positive. in this article i draw on ethnographic fieldwork on plastic surgery to explore tensions in ideals and norms of aging in brazil.  i situate this analysis theoretically in relation to a debate in gerontology about the “de-chronologization” of the life abstract this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork on plastic surgery to explore tensions in aging norms and ideals for women in brazil. i situate my analysis in relation to debates about a “de-chronologized life course.” some scholars argue that the life course in late capitalism has become less standardized. in this account, chronological age diminishes in importance as consumers are defined by life style choices available to all ages and the period of youth extends into middle age and beyond. in brazil consumers embrace plastic surgery as a means to “manage” aging, mental wellbeing, and reproductive and sexual health. this promise of a flexible and optimized aging trajectory seems to echo the notion of a de-chronologized life course. i argue, however, that medical discourse and patients’ accounts show ambivalence about aging and conflicts in the ideal of medically-managed sexual fitness for women. drawing on analysis of changes in family structure and women’s health regimes, i argue that passage through the life course, rather than becoming more flexible, is in some ways becoming more rigidly defined by biological processes. keywords: aging, plastic surgery, de-chronologized life course, sexual fitness, self-management, alexander edmonds professor of social and medical anthropology university of edinburgh aging, sex and well-being in brazil anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 247 alexander edmonds surgery for life  a rich literature in symbolic anthropology has explored how initiations, marriage ceremonies, funerals and other rites of passage “move” individuals and groups through life stages in ways that culturallly meaningful. in brazil and other industrialized countries there are of course many such rites and ceremonies, often with christian roots but distinctly secular expression: such as the 15th birthday party, weddings, baby showers, and increasingly since it was legalized in 1976, divorce. the experience of passage through the life cycle, however, i argue is becoming mediated by medical practices that are used to manage women’s reproductive and sexual health. i analyze how plastic surgery contributes to a biologized experience of aging that radically reduces the social persona to a sexual, reproductive and aging body defined in physiological terms.  this article explores the dialectic between the erasure of biological aging and its inscription on the body. i discuss how plástica addresses an “aging subject” made responsible for managing psychological health and well being through aesthetic and therapeutic techniques. but while this medical practice seems to promise an extension of youth into middle age and beyond, it also makes the “problem of aging” start early in life as younger patients plan “preventive surgeries.” while it inspires affects like hope and happiness, aging continues to provoke anxiety and disgust. plastic surgery is not just a means of selfmanagement, but a way to manage sexual relationships as family structures change. some women see themselves as competing in a market where youth is sexual capital that continually loses value. in this medical and social context passage through the life course, rather than becoming more flexible, is in some ways becoming more rigidly defined by biological processes. plástica, rejuvenation and the “mask of aging” brazil is the world’s second biggest cosmetic surgery market (after the us). mainstream news media, telenovelas, blogs, and entertainment magazines widely endorse plástica and present it as a routine consumer service. in the private sector cosmetic surgery became more available to a growing middle class after the stabilization of inflation in the 1990s. remarkably, plástica has also come within reach of patients from across the socioeconomic spectrum. credit course. scholars have argued that passage through the life course in late or post-fordist capitalism has become less standardized (debert 2011, macmillan 2005, moody 1993). the thesis of a “de-chronologized life course” builds on research analyzing historical changes in the life course in western societies (brückner and mayer 2005, kohli 2007, held 1986). in the transition from a pre-modern to modern period the life course became more standardized, or in the expression of kohli and meyer (1986), there was a “chronologization of life.” this was a multidimensional transformation in the structures and experiences of aging. mass education and an industrial labor market divided the life course into distinct phases: student, worker, pensioner. identity became less defined by family position than by rights and duties specified by the state.  the modern life course, some argue, has now been superseded by a “postmodern life course” in “which chronological age loses its relevance” (featherstone and hepworth 1991, debert 2011, 6). periods of work, leisure and education become intertwined as workers adjust to a dynamic labor market. the consumer is defined more by lifestyle choices available to all ages than by an ageddefined role in the productive order. sexual norms have become less linked to age with the rise of serial monogamy and divorced men and women who date in middle and old age (bruckner and mayer 2005). youth extends into middle age, middle age blurs into old age.  in this article i analyze the thesis of a “postmodern,” de-chronologized life course in light of the experiences of brazilian plastic surgery patients. consumers from a broad socioeconomic spectrum embrace plástica as a means to manage psychological and women’s health. some patients view it as a way to correct aesthetic damage attributed to childbirth, breastfeeding and menopause. other women say it enables them to “look as young as they feel,” manage sexual relationships, and maintain a youthful lifestyle throughout their lives. plastic surgery’s promise of a flexible and optimized aging trajectory seems to reflect the notion of a de-chronologized life course. one problem with the term “postmodern life course,” however, is that it mirrors the ideal of successful aging that is promoted by the anti-aging industry. while plástica generally has a “sex positive” discourse, a closer look at medical practices shows major tensions in new aging and sexual norms. anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 248 alexander edmonds surgery for life as rhinoplasty or some kinds of breast surgery). but even breast surgery -both enlargement and reduction procedures -often aims to project the breast and counter perceived effects of aging. the goals of aesthetic improvement and rejuvenation are also intertwined since women’s beauty norms strongly stress youthfulness.  surgeons and patients view the rejuvenating effects of plástica as a powerful means of improving psychological well being. a key term in medical discourse and patients’ testimonials is auto-estima (“self-esteem”). regardless of whether patients said they had “good” or “bad” autoestima, they saw plástica as a legimate means to boost it. one woman i met in a public hospital said simply: “it’s psychological. i think that for any woman who does plástica these days, it’s more psychological than anything.” while patients gave different reasons for “low selfesteem,” many said they felt their outer appearance did not match their sense of self. glaucia was as comfortable discussing plastic surgery as lacananian psychoanalysis. in her early 50s, she has two adult children and a namorado (boyfriend). she described the effects of her multiple operations: “the moment you see that you’re young again is really good, because in reality the spirit of a person does not age. what ages is the shell (caraça), nê? if you have a young spirit and have those aging problems, it’s terrible. i’m young, i’m a girl (garota).”  similarly, lídia, a middle-aged facelift patient, said: every time that i got up and looked at myself in the mirror i had this desire [for surgery] because i said, “it’s not possible. ah, to wake up with this face, i don’t want to wake up anymore, no.” [laughs] because when i put on make-up everything’s more . . . but it’s the moment when you wake up, nê?  for lídia a facelift did not reflect a desire to “be someone else,” but to “look like herself.”  in freud’s (2003) account, recognizing oneself in what at first seems to be a strange image in a mirror or photograph elicits an “uncanny” feeling. this uncanny double recalls lídia’s experience of not recognizing herself in the mirror, as if the aged face confronting her was both familiar and monstrously unfamiliar. for some patients their “naturally” aged appearance can seem more foreign to them than an “artificially” enhanced one. one critique of plastic surgery is that it distorts identity or causes selfalienation. but for many patients aging itself is a form of self-alienation, which plástica can correct. plans allow patients to make small monthly payments and some are marketed to “maids and secretaries” (the latter are often paid a very low, subsistence wage). some hospitals in the ailing public health system also offer free cosmetic operations.1 while the sus (public health care system) did not directly authorize comsetic surgeries (except for a few procedures), chief surgeons in some hospitals were able to successfully argue that residents-in-surgery need training in cosmetic techniques. some doctors also maintain that both reconstructive and cosmetic surgeries are a powerful means of psychological healing and thus should be offered to what they call the povão, the “common people.” surgeons from latin america, europe and elsewhere come to train in these residency programs where long lines of patients provide opportunities for intensive practice.2  i undertook ethnographic fieldwork in plastic surgery clinics, interviewed surgeons and patients from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, and researched sites that play a central role in the production and consumption of beauty, such as television studios and advertising agencies. this research was conducted primarily in rio de janeiro intermittently for approximately two years. i have given a fuller ethnographic account of this fieldwork and the lives of patients and surgeons (see edmonds 2009, 2010). here i explore what plastic surgery reveals about changing aging and sexual norms in brazil.  many operations are seen to “work” on the aging body. surgeons present facelifts and eyelid surgery as “rejuvenation” – even if a few doctors are critical of this promise. one senior surgeon became so exasperated by patients with “unrealistic demands” that he complained: “if i operate on a woman who is old and ugly, she is going to continue old and ugly, but with her skin stretched. ‘how many years am i going to rejuvenate, doctor?’ they ask me. and i say, ‘i’m not going to operate on your heart, operate on your liver, i’m not going to operate on anything, i’m going to stretch the skin of your face!’” operations performed on the body are also seen to counter aging effects. abdominoplasty, breast and buttocks lifts, liposuction, and genital surgeries “correct” changes blamed on childbirth, breast feeding or menopause, and thus “reverse the clock” – a frequent metaphor used to describe plástica’s effects. a few surgeries are motivated primarily by dissatisfaction with the size or shape of a body part, and are thus not directly linked to aging (such anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 249 alexander edmonds surgery for life focus on aesthetics. the psychological subject of anti-aging medicine brazil’s rise to “empire of the scalpel,” as a news magazine boasted, coincided with larger changes in social constructions of aging in brazil beginning in the 1980s. imported from abroad, the terms “third age” (terceira idade) and later “successful aging” refer to the ideal of a sociable, healthy, productive lifestyle for the elderly (leibing 2005, debert 2011). more generally, a youthful lifestyle is being defined as a norm for an expanding portion of the population. “successful” aging can refer not just to the avoidance of disease and infirmity but rather the active pursuit of health through a variety of therapeutic techniques.  as we’ve seen, plastic surgery is one such technique used to remedy low self-esteem and a disjuncture between appearance and the self. however, the psychological problems patients report can also be linked to a psychological subjectivity that has emerged as aging norms have changed in brazil. once a “young country,” over the past fifty years brazil experienced a rapid demographic transition. the percentage of elderly doubled as brazil’s fertility declined in the 1960s and 1970s and life spans were extended (leibing 2005, 17). while the population aged, the elderly were also made socially visible as a population in new ways. for example, pension funds began conducting market research that contributed to the notion of a “gray market” with political and consumer muscle (debert 2011).  annette leibing (2005) argues that beginning in the late 1970s aging has been removed from a christian moral framework that emphasized a simple, ascetic life as the key to longevity. seniors instead were constituted as a “national problem” as social workers and psychologists provided new interventions. new models of aging stress, though, that the elderly should not become wards of the state, but rather remain active in order to avoid biological decline and depression (leibing 2005). new aging ideals have sparked a social movement and reflect new social and politial aspirations of the elderly. however, the promise of liberation from (internalized) ageism is potentially undermined by new forms of self-monitoring.  for some women aging not only creates a gap between an ageless self and an aged body, but also pushes them into a new social role that they reject. tatiana said that already in her 50s she was being called “minha senhora,” a more formal form of address: there are men with white hair, for example, with the biggest charm, but women . . . they already become “minha senhora.” this is crazy. women they develop earlier. this is something genetic . . . women become sort of matronly, they get fatter, here [in brazil]. at 13 years old they’re already menstruating, with a woman’s body . . . because women are the generators of life, they have a hormonal factor, a different physical formation.  while she acknowledges a social double standard for men and women, her account of women’s aging stresses biological differences (genetics, menstruation, reproduction, hormones), which in turn require more medical management.  medical discourse sometimes stresses that historical changes have made aging a more problematic domain of psychosocial life. dr. barretto argues that medical progress expanded the life span from 35 years a century ago to between 80 and 90 today, which in turn has caused a “disequilibrium” between the mind and body. plástica can correct this historically “new” problem: “it’s more than normal to try to make the physical organism fit our interior youth, which is becoming more and more prolonged” (plástica & beleza, may/june 1999, 203). plástica is often presented as a new technology that enables women to negotiate the specific challenges presented by contemporary life.  this medical discourse recalls the representation of experiences of aging in “postmodern” societies made by some scholars. featherstone and hepworth (1991) describe a “mask of aging,” a kind of self-alienation where the inwardly young consumer ceases to identify with an outwardly aged appearance. similarly, katz and marshall (2003) discuss how new aging ideals address a “timeless” consumer who is trapped in an aging body (katz and marshall 2003). plastic surgery could be said to reflect aspirations for a more “plastic” sense of identity not defined or limited by processes of biological aging. in the next sections i explore tensions in this psychotherapeutic project. i first discuss the social forces that address an “aging subject” made responsible for maintaining a state of pyschological, reproductive and sexual health with a anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 250 alexander edmonds surgery for life “ruins” of psychoanalysis, and is often combined with, or else replaces, the older talking cure. in public hospitals the psychotherapeutic rationale for plastic surgery was also prevalent. sonia, who was waiting on line to have abdominal plástica, said, “i think my “i” is going to really improve, because the important thing is your interior. if your head is good, you’re going to look at yourself and feel good.” she also, though, added another reason: “we [a gente] want to be beautiful for the husband, nê?” like many women in public hospitals she often used the pronoun “a gente” (we) in place of the “eu” (i) more commonly used by middle class women. other patients were not fully conversant with the psychological idiom of plástica, or else doubted or mocked it. janaina had worked as a “mulata” (in her account a job description not a color term) in a samba show. when i asked her why she wanted liposuction, she said, “look, i’m going to do this surgery not because i’m bad in the head, but because i’m bad in the body . . . i looked at myself in the mirror and i saw that i was a pig [porcaria]. it doesn’t do to look at myself and say, ‘hum, i’m sexy [gostosa]’ if my eyes fight with my thoughts.” other women simply said that plástica was a “woman’s thing” or “women’s vanity.” some patients, like dona firmina, an illiterate woman in her 50s, showed up to consultations with a picture of an artista (celebrity). such patients could discomfit surgeons who worried that patients “did not have the culture to understand that plastic surgery is a medical procedure.”  thus, while psychological rationales for having cosmetic surgery were widespread, patients also had many other concerns that entered into their decision-making. some worried about getting fired because they were “old” or feared losing a partner. others were motivated by modest aspirations to break into the service economy and escape their mother’s fate of “working for a family” (a euphemism for employment as a maid). some psychologists employed by surgeons to screen candidates (to turn away those suspected of being too emotionally disturbed to be satisfied with results) were concerned that women were replacing psychotherapy with plastic surgery. yet plastic surgeons simply said that their techniques were more “effective” than the talking cure. and as one psychologist acknowledged, many working class patients – for whom talk therapy is not an option – simply “prefer surgery” (edmonds 2010).  positive aging, of course, presumes an opposite: negative aging. avoiding this fate – and the mental health problems that come in its wake – requires self-management. leibing points out that messages about “positive aging” involve “techniques of the self” and a “psychologization” of daily life (leibing 2011, 25). she argues that the notion of “selfesteem” (auto-estima) figures as a key term in pastoral programs aimed at seniors. keeping sociable as well as thinking positively are recommended as a means to age well. conversely, psychological problems are said to “accelerate aging” (leibing 2011, 24). plástica discourse reverses this formula: beauty work that slows aging becomes a means of avoiding psychological problems. the psychotherapeutic benefits of surgery are available throughout the life course, as a “miss third age” beauty contest made clear. the rationale of this event was to “augment the self-esteem” of the elderly. the 1996 winner was “judged by her plastic surgery, elegance, and empathy with the audience” (among the prizes was additional plastic surgery) (leibing 2005).  the rising popularity of plástica thus reflects the growth of a psychotherapeutic worldview and “psy-” institutions (cruikshank 1996, rose 1996). the notion of self-esteem can be seen as a “therapeutic technology” in that it morally authorizes the healing of healthy patients. elizabeth haiken (1997) points out that in the u.s. plastic surgeons in the early 20th century scorned “beauty” doctors in a bid to legitimate the specialty. the eventual acceptance of cosmetic surgery depended not just on improved surgical technique but also on psychological notions such as the “inferiority complex,” and later self-esteem. from a technical term used in psychological research (ward 1996) the term self-esteem entered into a range of everyday uses: self-help manuals, black social movements, mobilization around third age, and beauty industries (edmonds 2009). in brazil, for example, in the 1990s new magazines oriented towards “black” beauty practices and celebrities began to speak of “rescuing the self-esteem of the black brazilian” (filho dias 2006, 4; fry 2002).  in brazil the term auto-estima, like “third age” and “successful aging,” was originally imported. its foreign status does not mean it was inauthentic, but differences in class, education and religiosity have shaped the dissemination of a psychotherapeutic ethos (duarte 1986). among the middle class and elite plástica is thriving in the anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 251 alexander edmonds surgery for life  plástica is often given to teens as a birthday present, especially the festa de quinze anos. while a variety of operations aim to make patients look younger, ironically women are rarely considered “too young” to have plástica. carlos garcia, ex-president of the brazilian society of plastic surgery, argued that at the age of 16 the body is already “formed” and “nothing prevents adolescents from seeking a new appearance. it’s in the physiology text books” (“reino das formas perfeitas,” época, 6/19/00). another surgeon said that liposuctions “should only be performed four years after the first menstruation.”  the ideal of successful aging holds out the promise of extending a youthful lifestyle into middle age and beyond. yet, plastic surgery also pushes the “need” to manage the aging body into early adulthood. surgeons say that younger patients are “better patients.” younger skin means a smaller chance of complications and better aesthetic results. at a plastic surgery conerence in rio de janeiro, a surgeon told me that “the wrinkles of the future are not going to be the wrinkles of the present, that is, very deep wrinkles . . . plastic surgery is becoming more preventive.” the rise in “preventive surgery” and higher numbers of adolescents and women in their 20s having surgery have likely contributed to a drop in the average age of the patient. in 1980, the average age of the cosmetic surgery patient was 55 years. ten years later it had dropped to 40 and by 2000 it was only 35 (“os exageros da plástica,” veja, 3/6/02). there are also few upper age limits for plastic surgery. imagining a skeptical reader asking why an eighty year old would elect to have plástica, one surgeon asserted “to simply feel better, younger, a little over sixty perhaps.” rather than being presented as an “artificial” prolongation of youth, plástica is often seen as a “natural” means – provided it’s done well – to age in a modern world.  both facial and bodily surgeries are also linked to menopause. márcia had been waiting ten months to have a second facelift. she discussed her motivation to have the operation: “when i began menopause three years ago, everything fell, fell really fast. women age more quickly . . . menopause, hormones, breast feeding, giving birth, everything deforms the stomach, your body . . . and domestic life too is wear and tear, stress. and also men demand more of us.” while márcia mentions gendered social roles, she stresses that plástica is a means of  coached by surgeons, psychologists, or other patients, surgery candidates come to replace “bad” motives – such as the desire to look like an artista or secure a marriage – with “good” ones, such as “boosting self-esteem.” interactions in the clinic thus are didactic in that they train patients to describe “defects” in clinical terms. but they also teach a psychotherapeutic rationale for surgery and “open up” the body as a terrain of self-management. plastic surgery is thus not only a socially validated means to heal the suffering psyche, it also reflects a notion of appearance as a psychic domain requiring therapeutic management. yet while plástica promises to liberate the timeless consumer from what glaucia called the “shell” of the body, it can also reinforce awareness of aging as inexorable biological decline as it becomes embedded in the female life course. surgery-for-life: plástica and the female life course one of the most significant and problematic aspects of cosmetic surgery is that it is often a lifetime therapy for women. it was rare to encounter a patient who had had only one operation or was not already at the time of her first surgery planning additional ones. around 70 percent of patients are women, but plástica is also highly gendered in that surgeries are often timed to female lifecycle events.  a former president of the brazilian society of plastic surgery sketched out a “typical timetable” of surgeries that begins in adolescence: age 15 to 20: breast reduction surgery age 20 to 25: liposuction, even before marriage age 25 to 35: breast-lifting and liposuction, to correct the sags and bulges that can come with child-bearing age 35 to 43: she waits a while and goes back to the academia (gym) for exercise age 43 to 50: facial surgery, taking the opportunity to have some ‘freshening’ done on the body (“war on fat: rio cultists: good looks at the beach,” los angeles times, 8/15/87).  however, patients often discussed their operations not only in relation to a “need” defined by chronological age but in relation to significant age-related milestones: “becoming a woman” (in brazil often celebrated at the 15th birthday party); childbirth and breast feeding; decisions to end reproductive life (often by tubal ligation); divorce; and menopause. anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 252 alexander edmonds surgery for life wanted to combine the birth, which like the others would be a caesarean, with a tubal ligation and a correction of abdominal “flaccidity.” as with many other women, cecilia timed her surgeries to the end of her reproductive life (due to tubal ligation) in part because of a concern that becoming pregnant again would “ruin” the effects of surgery. after her gynecologist told her, however, that he couldn’t “fix her belly” during the birth since he was already “tying the tubes,” she decided to postpone the plástica. a few years later she had combined liposuction and abdominal surgery to “repair” the caesareans and reduce “localized fat” she had gained during her pregnancies.  cecilia was not considered “vain” by family or friends and in any event, vaidade (vanity) has a neutral or even positive connotation of “self-care” in brazilian portuguese. rather, her medical history reflects a more widespread, sometimes routine use of plastic surgery to manage reproduction and aging. ob-gyns refer patients to plastic surgeons after giving birth, reinforcing the idea that cosmetic operations are a “normal” aspect of women’s health. vaginal birth is said to cause sexual and aesthetic damage that can be avoided with caesarean sections, which comprise more than 70 percent of births in some private hospitals (rebelo et al. 2010, carranza 1994).3 plástica is also used to correct iatrogenic damage from c-section, but also to “compensate” for medical suffering since it is “good for the self.” women who are unable to acquire a c-section are often given episiotomy,4 an incision made in the perineal muscle during delivery, and later followed by the ponto de marido, the extra “husband’s stitch,” which aims to correct “vaginal trauma” (diniz and chacham 2004).5 other women giving birth in public hospitals who are “denied” c-sections are offered cosmetic vaginal plástica as a “proxy” c-section, emilia sanabria (2011) found. links between ob-gyn, plastic surgery -and sometimes endocrinology too -have helped to routinize an aesthetic approach to managing reproduction and aging within a highly interventionist medical culture (edmonds 2010, 2013a).  clinical practices themselves contribute to “producing” the age-related defect and a consciousness of aging as biological decline. the surgeon measures defects with surgical instruments or discusses them in technical language with the patient, which can lend them an compensating “damage” blamed on women’s “quicker” aging.  but the most important lifecycle events mentioned in relation to plástica are pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. breast surgery, abdominal surgery, and liposuction are said to correct flaccid skin or localized fat or else “lift” areas of the body described as acabado (finished), caído (fallen) or murcha (shriveled). this language reflects a clinical gaze – sometimes taken on by patients – that fragments the body. while the field of “aesthetic medicine” presents aging as a holistic biosocial process, clinical practices instead localize aging in body parts, some of which become pathologically or prematurely “aged.” plastic surgery, however, is often used not just once to correct a “defect,” but is integrated into a larger management regime for reproductive and sexual life.  now in her mid-40s, cecilia lives a comfortable life in a condo in the south zone of the city. she grew up, though, in one of the poorest rio suburbs, raised by a mother who gave birth to her at age 15, never learned to read, and converted from catholicism to an evangelical church. cecilia studied psychology in university and has tastes she considers “moderna,” which run from a love of french cinema to a simple and “relaxed” (in her mother’s words) sense of fashion. on her living room book shelf stand the entire collected works of freud, translated into portuguese. she is now separated from her husband, a self-made man with whom she had three children. talking about her multiple surgeries she often mentioned her reproductive and marital life.  while her mother blamed her for the end of her marriage -“you let yourself go” (se largou) – cecilia simply said, “we had grown apart.” it was at this time, when she was in her late thirties, that she decided to have abdominal surgery and liposuction on her thighs and abdomen (followed by an additional liposuction operation some years later). she explained how the operations were designed in part to “correct” the effects of her three caesarean births: i did it on my belly, which had a very flaccid part due to the cesáreas. . . . and the doctor made a cut a little bigger than the caesarean scars, and took out that piece of meat that was really flaccid, without life, and then he sewed it up, and did the liposuction.  she explained that when she was pregnant with her third child, she began to think about having surgery. she anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 253 alexander edmonds surgery for life menopausal playboys: sexual rights and duties in middle age new models of aging have, of course, not simply replaced older ones. positive images of the elderly are often presented with an underlying irony, leibing (2011, 22) points out. for example, activity is represented as a sign of successful ageing, but activity among the elderly is often seen as “empty bustling.” contradictions in new ideals of aging are particularly salient in the area of sexual health and sexual “fitness.”  the ideal of successful aging validates to some extent sexual activity among middle aged and older women as “healthy.” for example, the ministry of health announced that “86 percent of brazilians are sexually active between 41 and 55, a higher proportion than the 66 percent among youth from 16 to 25 (“sexo depois dos 40,” veja, 24/5/2000). an article in época claimed that over the last 30 years women have “succeeded in transforming their bodies into sources of pleasure” (“sem medo dos 40,” época, 9/27/99). celebrities too have played a role in defining a more “liberated” sexual norm for middle-aged women (goldenberg 2002, 19).  the new media interest in what one magazine article termed “sex after 40,” however, coincided with heavy promotion of medical or quasi-medical sex and beauty treatments. for example, a veja news article on the “arsenal of middle age” touted the benefits of a range of therapies for “him and her”: from viagra and antidepressants to aphrodisiacs that “combat frigidity” to cosmetic surgeries. such techniques enable the middle aged to have a “much more active sexual life” than their parents did. plástica is sometimes explicitly presented as erotic enhancement for middle-aged women. for example, actress ângela vieira – who like many celebrities has publicly discussed her surgeries -appeared nude in a magazine and was dubbed a “menopausal playboy” (“sem medo dos 40,” época, 9/27/99).6  flávia, a working class woman in her 20s, is one admirer of such images. she said that she “loved” to read magazines like playboy because she “loves to see the body,” i.e. the nude bodies of female models. plástica is sometimes positioned in this visual culture as way to achieve sexual fulfillment. flávia’s mother, bete, said men “flirted” more and that they had more tesão (desire) objective existence. in public hospitals discussion of defects is often a pedagogical exercise performed for a room filled with residents. a senior surgeon will (gently) pinch the nose, pull the skin on the forehead, pick up and drop the breast to test for skin elasticity. surgeons also use digital photography to measure the size of asymmetries or defects. in private clinics too surgeons frankly describe defects. lídia spoke of one consultation: “i went with my sister. i said to the doctor i’m thinking of a lift. he said, ‘you have to do it, you have to do it now.’ he took me into another room and with a pincer, showed me all i had to do. he said ‘our lady, you’re finished [acabada].’ the clinical description of defects though is often “softened” by gallant praise. when lídia said she had told him she was afraid of having a “stretched face,” he replied, “no, you’re a beautiful girl [moça], it will be good.”  i found it difficult to understand the effects of plástica on its ostensible therapeutic object: self-esteem. some patients used superlatives, describing how they felt “marvelous,” “super-happy,” “super-woman.” others spoke in a more restrained manner of a boost to self-esteem. but many patients came back for repeat surgeries, to correct complications, for retoques (touch-ups), or simply because their aesthetic expectations were not met. those who were satisfied often had additional surgeries later, either to counter new effects of aging or because they had perceived new defects. ironically, their interactions in the clinic could also create a heightened awareness of flaws. some surgeons said correcting one defect can accentuate another one, for example, a breast reduction can make the belly appear to protrude too much. in other cases the expert simply points out an asymmetry the patient had never perceived, but quickly learns to “see.”  patients and surgeons view plástica as a powerful means to overcome limits imposed by aging. yet the “operable body” is embedded in the female life course as patients time surgeries to biosocial events. thus, while plastic surgery reflects a view of the body as “plastic” – malleable, manageable, improvable – it can heighten awareness of aging as a biological trajectory. in the next sections i explore this tension further by analyzing the use of medical therapies to maintain or enhance sexual wellbeing throughout the life course. anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 254 alexander edmonds surgery for life approach to sexual fitness is also apparent in the marketing of cosmetic genital surgeries. medical discourse claims that these operations enhance women’s sexual pleasure (by correcting “vaginal widening” following normal birth) (cirurgia plástica íntima, 2006). this reasoning, in ways similar to discourses surrounding c-sections, promotes a view of childbirth as a process that puts women at sexual and aesthetic risk. marketing discourse also claims that “aesthetic aspects” of the genitals are “increasingly important for self-esteem.”7 sexual fitness is thus a complex ideal and norm. it aims not only to boost self-esteem and libido, but also entails a norm of medically-managed, “aesthetically pleasing genitalia” (mccallum 2005, 226). some patriarchal sexual norms -such as the ideal of premarital virginity -are in decline. on the other hand, these sexual norms resurface in an “aestheticized” form in revirginization genital surgery or in a management regime that views reproduction as a sexual and aesthetic threat.  to some extent anti-aging medicine seems to take seriously the sexual concerns of middle aged and elderly women, reflecting a shift from an older medical assumption that sexual decline was an inevitable and natural part of the life course (marshall 2009). in brazil it also, however, often normalizes beautification as a health aim throughout life course. teenagers have access to the same techniques of self-optimization as adults. women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s are “already” ageing and need preventive medicine. and all adults are potentially “falsely aged,” requiring therapy to look as young as they feel. the liberatory promise of anti-aging medicine thus coexists with a new “positive” morality that makes sexual fulfillment a right, but which also entails a duty to medically maintain attractiveness to preserve family relationships, self-esteem, and even health itself. “mom is a snapshot of me in the future”: aging in the family i have discussed tensions between the promise of a liberation from an aging body and a biologized experience of passage through the life course. i explore this point further by examining how women see themselves as being linked to female kin through a genetic inheritance that creates shared medical “needs.” plástica is often represented as a personal choice undertaken by the patient in private consultation with a physician. but during after she had several plastic surgery operations. these assertions of sexual agency, however, contrast with the disgust, contempt or even fear expressed by male peers, husbands, partners, and sons of female patients. one tv viewer said he felt repulsed when he noticed the contrast between a 40-year old face and an “old, wrinkled hand.” another man was outraged by a patient who said she had decided not to breast feed in order not to “ruin” her breasts. even positive depictions of sexuality in “older” women (where older is a category that encompasses ever younger women) often have an ironic tone. the term menopausal playboy is partly humorous, as is the separada malhada, a separated woman with toned muscles.  katz and marshall (2003) analyze how sexual fitness has become a “pivotal sex/age body-problematic” in the new ideal of successful aging. they argue that a more standardized life course has given way to a “postmodern life course” in which “timeless consumers” become responsible for transcending sexual decline. men have recourse to viagra and testosterone therapy while women have access to various hormonal therapies, and perhaps eventually, an arousal pharmaceutical. they conclude that “the discourses of positive aging have created the sexy ageless consumer as a personally and socially responsible citizen” (katz and marshall 2003, 12).  this ideal of the “sexy, ageless consumer,” however, involves very different therapeutic techniques for men and women. sexual fitness for men is often focused on “performance” and erectile function through diet, exercise and drugs; sexy means in this context, “feeling like having sex.” sexual fitness for women – perhaps especially in brazil – has a remarkable focus on beauty; sexy means here “sexually desirable.” as in other western countries, women’s magazines in brazil are filled with tips on erotic techniques. however, sexual fitness is often “aestheticized” in that it focuses on the technical management of attractiveness throughout the life course.  some patients see plástica as a means to explicitly enhance erotic allure. many operations that make relatively minor changes promise to project the breasts or “contour” the waist, hips and buttocks to create a more “gostosa” (sexy) figure. one female surgeon was distressed to see more clients in their 20s who “were already beautiful” and wanted to become “more perfect.” an aestheticized anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 255 alexander edmonds surgery for life  this mother and daughter pair stress the importance of “support” (força or apoio) they receive from each other.8 having plastic surgery can be seen as a kind of rite of womanhood, especially when it is linked to a key life event. other kinds of beauty work, such as wearing make-up or dressing up, can be seen as form of passing on the “arts” of femininity across generations and perhaps a form of bonding between kin. but plastic surgery also targets a notion of “beauty” that is defined biologically - in terms of anatomy, reproductive processes, hormones, and secondary sexual traits (edmonds 2013b). the mother “maps” the future because she provides the example of how to successfully manage aging, but also because, flávia said, their bodies age in similar ways.  patients spoke too of inheriting from kin combinations of ethnic traits that require surgical correction. for example, some women who identified as branca (white) or morena (“brown” or “brunette”) said they inherited the shape of their nose from an indian or black grandparent or great-grandparent. they sought rhinoplasty to narrow their nose and make it more in “harmony” with their face. their comments point to the “plasticity” of brazilian constructions of race and color, as well as color hierarchies that value white, or relatively white, brancina, facial features (edmonds 2010: part ii, goldstein 2003). they also show how generations are linked through genetic inheritance that creates particular medical “needs.”9  plástica also mediates the kin relation by making generational gaps less apparent, or even invisible. flávia and bete mentioned being mistaken for siblings. flávia hoped that when her five-year old was grown up, strangers too would assume they were sisters: “because my body will be so well-treated, so conserved, like my mom’s is now.” while the age gap separates mother and daughter into different family roles, aging also in a sense links them in a biological process that requires management.  patients spoke of plástica in terms that echoed the postmodern life course, and seemed to support the thesis of a “de-chronologized life course.” but one problem with this thesis – which some argue is a more general problem plaguing postmodern theories – is that it mirrors new ideologies about the social phenomena it depicts. successful aging is promoted by plastic surgeons. yet patients, not surprisingly, also had more ambivalent attitudes towards the psychosocial effects of aging and the fieldwork i was struck that plastic surgery was often a family matter. surgeons acknowledge that the most effective means of marketing is boca a boca, word of mouth, which is often from kin to kin. mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, daughters and cousins recommended surgeons to each other or accompanied each other during multiple visits to the hospital.  i met flávia and her mother, bete, at a private clinic. both women live in a working class neighborhood in the zona norte. now in her mid-20s flávia was having a breast lift and liposuction to “correct problems” she attributes to childbirth. she said she could never afford the clinic’s prices, but got a heavy discount through a personal connection. she spoke of the influence her mother had on her when she was a small child: my mother here already had four plásticas, and so since i was really little i lived with plástica in the family, nê? because she did her nose, she did her eyes, she did the same breast surgery and lipo i am doing now. and i was with my mom through all these procedures.  mothers can provide “inspiration” to have surgery, but they can also “map out” the daughter’s future aging. she said: “i usually say to men, look at your mother-in-law to see what you’re buying, taking home. mom is a snapshot of me in the future.”  like many unmarried women, flávia lived with her mother. both women were separated from the fathers of their children and in flávia’s words were “in the market” (of dating): in the past, a 40 year-old woman felt old and ugly. and she was traded for a younger one. but not these days. a 40 year-old is in the market competing with a 20 yearold because of the technology of plastic surgery. she can stretch [her skin], do a lift, put in silicone, do a lipo, and become as good as a 20 year old.  this description echoes the collapse of generational differences analyzed by gerontologists. plástica “allows” women of different ages to enjoy sexual freedom, making chronological age less relevant. figueira argues (1996) that in consumer capitalism family members become less identified with age-defined roles. for flávia, rather than being defined relationally through different rights and duties, mother and daughter become “equal” sexual beings, though situated in different moments of the aging process. this equality between the 40 year-old and 20 yearold though also puts them in a competitive relationship in a market, a point i return to below. anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 256 alexander edmonds surgery for life with the duty to maintain disposicão and diminish periods of sexual unavailability to partners. what appears to be a technique for sexual self-optimization can also be a means for managing sexual relationships.  tensions between reproductive and sexual rights (and duties) also surfaced in conversations with plastic surgery patients. tatiana saw plástica as a way to “have it both ways,” enabling her to enjoy breast feeding (without worrying about “damage”) while boosting libido. maria josé said that after becoming a mother, the “role of woman becomes secondary” – a problem again that can be solved with plastic surgery (her comment was taken from an interview in ribeiro and aboudib 1997). in these accounts plástica is a kind of modern technology that allows women to overcome the “split” between motherhood and sexuality, which sandra bartky (1990) argues characterizes patriarchal society. the highly interventionist approach to women’s health in brazil can also reinforce this split as it normalizes a view of reproduction and aging as biological processes threatening sexual and “asthetic” integrity.10 conclusion this article has approached plastic surgery as a window on tensions in aging and sexual norms. i began with a discussion of the thesis that the life course has been dechronologized in contemporary societies. to some extent plastic surgery patients live in social circumstances that support this thesis. women are postponing motherhood in brazil (as in other industrialized societies). across the socioeconomic spectrum they are less defined by domestic and reproductive work as brazil’s economy grows and gender norms shift (to give just one example, while the vast majority of older surgeons were male, young residents in surgery are about half female). in consumer culture youth is an ever-expanding category -a lifestyle more than a stage in the life course. and medical discourse portrays aging as a process that can be limited or transcended with the right psychological, health, and beauty work.  i have argued, however, that in some important respects the life course remains “chronological” as plastic surgery and other therapies are medically authorized as management techniques that accompany a woman through the life stages of adolescence, birth, breast feeding and menopause. patients embrace plástica as a means to bridge the gap between a youthful interior and aged exterior; yet possibility of managing them medically. flávia saw bete’s surgeries as an “inspiration,” yet her mother’s aging is also a sign of her own inevitable decline. she said in front of bete: “aging is horrible. i try not to even think of how i’ll be at 50.” mothers not only map the daughter’s aging body, but also possible futures of relationships. divorce and separation rates have been rising since divorce was legalized in 1976 in brazil. the number of men aged 40 to 59 marrying women in their 20s doubled from 1978 to 1996 (veja, 24/5/2000). plástica was also practiced by women in happy marriages, where it could provoke “jealousy” in the husband. but in intimate conversations women often expressed anxieties about current relationships or hinted at hopes that surgery would rekindle a marriage.  lídia said she had “done one plástica with each husband, this is now my third.” while flávia seemed reassured that plástica can make a 20 year-old woman as “good as” as a 20 year-old, valéria -who was divorced -joked about men who “trade one woman of 40 for two of 20.” luisamar spoke more despairingly about the breakdown of relationships: “in the past man didn’t separate. he had his lover, or lovers, but the family was sacred. this is changing . . . everyone separating. i think it’s absurd, a man living 40, 50 years with a woman, and then leaving her. it’s a kind of cruelty. 40 years of marriage, and they marry a 20 yearold.” other women viewed plástica as a “compensation” for the loss of love or inability to have more children due to the end of a relationship. the self-work in plástica is thus not just a “private” therapeutic technique for calibrating mind and body, but also transpires in a world of uncertain familial and sexual relationships.  plástica is not the only medical therapy used to manage sexual and “aesthetic” anxieties. in her ethnographic work in bahia, emilia sanabria (2010, 2011, 2012) found widespread experimental uses of sex hormones. compounding pharmacies offer hand-crafted implants that combine a variety of hormones, including testosterone. these are used for off-label indications: menstrual suppression, coping with work difficulties, and regulating mood, libido and sexual disposition, disposicão. dubbed “beauty chips” by the media, implants are also said to have “aesthetic” effects, such as diminishing cellulite, improving skin elasticity, and avoiding weight gain. these therapies are presented as a means to greater “freedom.” however, sanabria argues, this promise is subtly blurred anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 257 alexander edmonds surgery for life “elective” c-sections, compared to vaginal birth, protect sexual health or result in a speedier return to sexual activity (barrett et al. 2005). 4. demand for c-sections, as well as for plastic surgery, is partly fueled by class dynamics since both these therapies are considered in some contexts as “modern” medical goods that have been normalized in healthcare for middle class women (béhague et al. 2002, edmonds 2010). 5. medical studies dispute that the routine use of episiotomy has any health or sexual benefits (belizán and carroli 1998). 6. the news article held up the actress, a 47 year-old divorced mother, as an example of a generation of middle aged women who “give a new meaning to the phrase coroa enxuta” (literally “a crown in good shape,” that is, a well-preserved, middle aged person). 7. herbenick and reece (2010) claim to have developed a new psychological research tool, the “genital self-image scale.” 8. similarly, another working class patient, sonia, brought her teenage daughter, taís, with her to the hospital. sonia was waiting for abdominal surgery and at first i thought her daughter was there to give her moral support. discussing her decision to have the operation, she said that her husband “supports” her just as she supports her daughter’s decision. “it’s her 15th birthday present, the nose. she doesn’t want a party, she wants to make a “book” [in english, a fashion modeling portfolio] with a nose that makes her feel good.” 9. surgeons too reinforce a “racialized” aesthetics of aging. they argue that ‘pure whites’ have skin that ages more rapidly, while women with some african descent have a tendency to gain weight more easily. 10. tensions between maternal and sexual roles have historical roots in modernity, perhaps especially in latin societies that have been described as having a “madonna/whore complex” (yalom 1997). but this “complex” takes a specific form in brazilian medicine. when an ob-gyn says to a woman after she has her first child, “you don’t have to look like that,” sexual fitness is reinforced as an aesthetic norm attainable through proper management. references barrett, geraldine, janet peacock, christina r. victor, and isaac manyonda 2005 cesarean section and postnatal sexual health. birth. 32(4):306–311. bartky, sandra 1990 femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression. new york: routledge. also compete in markets of sexual relationships where youth is a form of capital. medical discourse valorizes “sex after 40” and women’s sexual pleasure; yet practices focus on a notion of sexual fitness that emphasizes the technical control of “aesthetic damage.” the timeless consumer can transcend some limits of the standardized life course, yet also have a heightened awareness of biological aging. some patients praise plástica as a way to manage conflicts between maternal and sexual roles; yet these conflicts also contribute to the pursuit of health practices which have health risks.  the goal of successful aging is thus often shadowed by the prospect of a failed rejuvenation. self-tinkering reinforced by medical authority has the potential to make patients even more conscious of aging as biological and aesthetic decline. it’s true that some patients experience therapeutic effects from both cosmetic and reconstructive surgery. medical treatments (e.g. cancer surgeries, gynecological surgeries, psychotropic drugs) often cause sexual and aesthetic damage, thus it is arguably more legitimate to correct such damage. however, the medical and psychological management of aging comes with considerable risks. perhaps the greatest is that plástica often becomes “surgery-for-life”: a therapeutic process that is entangled with life course events and necessary for healthy aging, healthy reproduction, and healthy sex. acknowledgements research was supported with grants from the social research council, princeton university, and a woodrow wilson postdoctoral fellowship. notes 1. one major plastic surgery center is located in santa casa de misericordia hospital, which is run with a mix of charity funds and state subsidies. unlike fully public hospitals where all medical services are free, it offers free reconstructive surgery, but charges a small fee to cosmetic surgery patients to cover costs of medical materials and anesthesia (surgeons receive no payment). both santa casa and public hospitals attend mostly working class patients. 2. price competition between surgeons in a crowded market – combined with an international reputation for quality – also attracts medical tourists (edmonds 2011). 3. a meta-study concludes that there is no evidence that anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 258 alexander edmonds surgery for life -2009 learning to love yourself: esthetics, health and therapeutics in brazilian plastic surgery. ethnos 74(4):465489. featherstone, mike and m hepworth 1991 the mask of aging and the postmodern life course. in the body, social process and cultural theory m. featherstone, m. hepworth and b.s. turner, eds. pp. 371-389. london: sage. freud, sigmund 2003 the uncanny. london: penguin classics. fry, peter 2002 “estética e política: relações entre ‘raça,’ publicidade e produção da beleza no brasil.” in nu & vestido: dez antropólogos revelam a cultura do corpo carioca, edited by mirian goldenberg. rio de janeiro: editora record. garcia, julio 2007 hormone administration in an aesthetic surgery practice: one surgeon’s experience. aesthetic surgery journal 27:212214. goldenberg, mirian 2002 “laços de família”: novas conjugalidades na novela das oito. web manuscript, accessed june 24, 2013. http:// miriangoldenberg.com.br/images/stories/pdf/lacosdefamilia.pdf goldstein, donna 2003 laughter out of place: race, class, violence, and sexuality in a rio shantytown. berkeley: university of california press. haiken, elizabeth 1997 venus envy: a history of cosmetic surgery. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. held, thomas 1986 instituionalization and deinstitutionalization of the life course. human development 29(3):157-162. herbenick, debra and michael reece 2010 development and validation of the female genital selfimage scale. the journal of sexual medicine. volume 7, issue 5, pages 1822–1830. katz, stanley and barbara marshall 2003 new sex for old: lifestyle, consumerism, and the ethics of aging well. journal of aging studies 17(1): 3–16. kohli, martin 2007 the institutionalization of the life course: looking back to look ahead. research in human development 4(3-4): 253271. béhague, d. et al. 2002 consumer demand for caesarean sections in brazil: informed decision making, patient choice, or social inequality? bmj 324 (7343):942-5. belizán, j. m., and g. carroli 1998 routine episiotomy should be abandoned. bmj 317 (7169):1389. brückner, hannay and karl ulrich mayer 2005 de-standardization of the life course: what might it mean? and if it means anything, whether it actually took place? in the structure of the life course: standardized? individualized? differentiated? advances in life course research, volume 9. pp. 27-53. amsterdam: elsevier. carranza, maria 1994 saúde reprodutiva da mulher brasileira. in mulher brasileira é assim, m. muñoz-vargas and s. heleieth, eds. rio de janeiro: rosa dos tempos. cirurgia íntima feminina 2006 webpages, www.vitalita.med.br, visited january 20, 2006. cruikshank, barbara 1996 “revolutions from within: self-government and selfesteem.” in foucault and political reason, eds. andrew barry, thomas osborne, and nikolas rose. london: university college london press debert, guita grin 2011 the dissolution of adult life and youth as a value. horiz. antropol. [online]. 2010, vol.5, no.se porto alegre. diniz, simone and alessandra chacham 2004 “the cut above” and “the cut below”: the abuse of caesareans and episiotomy in são paulo, brazil. reproductive health matters 12(23):100-110. duarte, luiz fernando 1986 da vida nervosa (nas classes trabalhadoras urbanas). rio de janeiro: jorge zahar editor/cnpq. edmonds, alexander. -2013a can medicine be aesthetic? disentangling beauty and health in elective surgeries. medical anthropology quarterly 27(2) (accepted). -2013b the biological subject of aesthetic medicine. feminist theory 14(1): 65-82. -2011 ‘almost invisible scars’: medical tourism to brazil. signs 36 (2):297-302. -2010 pretty modern: beauty, sex and plastic surgery in brazil. durham: duke university press. http://miriangoldenberg.com.br/images/stories/pdf/lacosdefamilia.pdf http://miriangoldenberg.com.br/images/stories/pdf/lacosdefamilia.pdf www.vitalita.med.br anthropology & aging quarterly 2014: 34 (4) 259 alexander edmonds surgery for life sbme 2011 sociedade brasileira de medicina estética. webpages visited may 20, 2011. www.sbme.org.br/portal ward, steven 1996 filling the world with self-esteem: a social history of truth-making. canadian journal of sociology 21(1). yalom, marilyn 1997 a history of the breast. new york: ballantine book kohli, martin and meyer, j. w. 1986 social structure and social construction of life stages. human development 29:145-149. leibing, annette 2005 the old lady from ipanema: changing notions of old age in brazil. journal of aging studies 19: 15–31. macmillan, ross 2005 the structure of the life course: standardized? individualized? differentiated? advances in life course research, volume 9. amsterdam: elsevier. marshall, barbara 2009 rejuvenation’s return: anti-aging and remasculinization in biomedical discourse on the ‘aging male.’ medicine studies 1(3): 249-265. mccallum, cecilia 2005 explaining caesarean section in salvador da bahia, brazil. sociology of health & illness. 27(2):215-242. moody, harry 1993 overview: what is critical gerontology and why is it important? in voices and visions of aging: toward a critical gerontology. r. cole et al., eds. pp. xv-xvi. new york: springer. rebelo, fernanda, et al. 2010 high cesarean prevalence in a national population-based study in brazil: the role of private practice. acta obstetricia et gynecologica scandinavica 2010, 89(7):903-908. rabinow, paul and rose nikolas 2006 biopower today. biosocieties 1:195–217. rose, nikolas 2007 the politics of life itself. princeton: princeton university press. 1996 inventing our selves, cambridge university press. sanabria, emilia 2010 from subto super-citizenship: sex hormones and the body politic in brazil. ethnos 75(4): 377-401. sanabria, emilia 2011 the body inside out. social analysis: the international journal of social and cultural practice 55(1): 94-112. sanabria, emilia 2012 le genre de la substance: pratiques hormonales et reconfigurations pharmaceutiques des identités sexuelles au brésil. clio histoire, femmes et societies 37. sulaiman & willett: islam, economic rationalism and accounting 63 dissemination of financial information? finally, if such is the case, what is to be done about it? these questions are addressed in the remaining sections of this paper. section 2 considers the nature and origins of western materialist philosophy and section 3 compares and contrasts the belief structures of islam and the west, in so far as these matters are relevant to the issue at hand. section 4 examines the historical context in which western values became adopted in muslim societies and section 5 discusses the policy issues that confront islamic standard setters. section 6 concludes. baydoun and willett’s theory as a prescription of what should be the qur’un categorically places emphasis on socio-economic justice (chapra, 1992; naqvi, 1994): and those in whose wealth is a recognised right. for the needy who asks and him who is prevented (for some reason from asking). (7024-25) sulaiman’s survey, while not finding support among muslims for a differential form of islamic financial reporting, does suggest that religious teachings impinge on how people believe they should ideally behave (e.g. the prohibition against consuming alcohol, riba, etc.). however, it also suggests (and this point will be explained below) that there are certain aspects of the commercial life of muslims that the islamic faith fails to inform. yet, most writers on the subject of islamic accounting have argued that islam does not recognise a distinction between the secular and the spiritual areas of life? is this principle, therefore, consciously ignored by muslims or is there another explanation for its being overlooked? hofstede’s analysis8 is relevant to this point. he suggested that issues such as these should be analyzed respectively at the level of the “desirable”, at the level of the “desired” and at the level of the “actual”. if baydoun and willett’s theory of islamic corporate reporting is relevant at the level of the desirable rather than at the level of the desired or the actual, then the validity of the theory is a question of reasoning from the foundations of islamic principles, not a question of correspondence with actual behaviour and belief. from sulaiman’s survey, it would seem that there are gaps and, perhaps, even tensions in both the way accounting is practised by muslims in malaysia and what is seen by them as 64 the american jomd of islamic social sciences 18.2 appropriate practice compared to the kind of accounting practice which is “desirable” in the sense of its being consistent with the tenets of islam. by accounting practice is meant, broadly speaking and given the terms of reference of baydoun and willett’s theory, accounting discl~sure.~ baydoun and willett’s analysis1o of the cultural relevance of accounting systems suggested that normative beliefs most likely affect aspects of accounting disclosure rather than basic accounting measurement procedures. thus, the issue addressed here will not be concerned primarily with measurement, strictly defined.” rather, it will focus on what kind of financial information should be communicated in an islamic society and in what way it should be coml?)unicated such that it is in harmony with the spirit of islam. the thrust of baydoun and willett’s theoryf2 of islamic corporate reports is that western accounting systems are inconsistent with the teachings of islam and the capitalist ethic upon which it is based. capital accumulation in the capitalist system gives pre-eminence to the profit and loss statement. on the other hand, the consistent and central focus of an islamic economy is that growth should lead to social justice and a more equitable distribution of power and wealth.13 more specifically, the concepts of ownership and private property in islam have different interpretations compared to those adopted in the west. for muslims, ownership of wealth is not absolute. individuals are only trustees; the ulti mate ownership of property belonging with god. consequently, the frame work within which islamic accounting systems should take place is that which is based on personal accountability to an all-seeing god. such a framework naturally tends to be broader than a western framework, more reliant on the application of sincere, individual, ethical conduct and is, therefore, very much more subjective. accountability in islam has a more ethical character than it does in the west, stressing obligation to society more than the rights of the individual. its focus is thus a wider social accountability compared to the western personal accountability focus on ~hareholders.~~ this emphasis on the social dimension of financial accounting information suggests that two essential objectives underlie the concept of accountability in islam: fuzz disclosure and social uccount~bility.~~ a financial statement that measures the performance of a finn’s activities by just a single dimension, that of the bottom-line profit, is not, from an ethical perspective, appropriate to islamic societies. the argument for the inclusion of the vas and the cvbs in islamic sulaiman & willett: ham, economic rationalism and accounting 65 corporate reporting is primarily derived from the need to discharge the objectives of full disclosure and social accountability. the vas is considered as being appropriate to the objective of social accountability and more in line with the concepts of justice and mutual cooperation that islam propagates than is the pl. in disclosing the share of the value added between different sections of society (employees, government, owners and creditors as well as shareholders), the vas concentrates more on the cooperative nature of the organization of the firm and more clearly emphasises the distribution of wealth created by the fm.16 in islam, emphasis is placed on the use of one’s possessions and merit lies in extending these intelligently and distributing them with generosity. l7 in contrast, the emphasis on the pl stresses the owners’ private interests above anythlng else: ethical support is derived from a materialist philoso phy (on which the secular capitalist mind-set is based) and economic theo ries such as “agency theory” which seek to justify its ethics on the basis of scientific rationality. islam does not deny that muslims will follow the road of self interest, but it teaches that true self-interest is a form of altruism which guides the individual to work for the good of the community.** baydoun and willett’s theory of islamic corporate reports argues that the need for greater awareness of the social impact of firm activities in islam, which supports the vas, also favours a cvbs. the cvbs is argued to be not only necessary for the specific purpose of computing shares in rnudarubul9 contracts and for the levying of zukat (i.e. full disclosure), it is also argued to contain information relevant to the community as a whole rather than just that which is relevant to the fim. the cvbs, it is suggested, could be regarded as extending the accountability focus of the f m further, primarily because the reporting of such information requires f m s to consider ‘economy wide’ information about transactions as the objective source from which current values may be calculated. given that one of the specific obligations laid down in the shari’ah is the payment of zakat, and since zakat is based on wealth, gambling and karim argued that current values would satisfy islam’s concept of justice more adequately than would historical costs?0 they reasoned that adhering to the concept of conservatism would lead to an understatement of the wealth that could be subjected to z ~ k u t . 2 ~ further, they contended that using one valuation method for zakat and another for reporting purposes would somehow imply that there exists a division between religious and business matters. clarke et a1 argued that the support for the use of current values 66 the american journal of islamic social sciences 18.2 in islam may be discerned from the common monetary denominator used in the prophet’s time to establish the nisub (the minimum threshold of wealth above which zukut is payable) for various assets that are subject to zakat.22 the notion of “value in exchange” (selling price) is said to have been implicit in the determination of zukut at that time. the basic thrust of these arguments is the need to attain socio-economic justice. baydoun and willett argued for the inclusion of the cvbs, but as additional information to the hcbs, not as a replacement, on the grounds referred to above (i.e. full disclosure and social accountability). according to their reasoning, the hcbs cannot be abandoned because it provides information which is central to all other accounting calculations. this was argued to be a middle road between traditionalism and radicalism. in the light of this claim to a reasonable middle road, it is useful to consider to what extent the inclusion of the vas and the cvbs in islamic corporate reports satisfies islam’s concept of justice. rodinson defined islamic justice as a ‘state directed in accordance with the principles revealed by god, treating all believers as equal before the divine law, practising within the muslim community an advanced form of mutual aid.23 it may be that the vas and the cvbs should indeed be desirable to muslims on these grounds. however, given the broad accountability focus in islam, the baydoun and willett model of desirable reports may still be regarded as fulfilling a bare minimum. if social accountability is really the basic objective of islamic corporate reporting, why stop at the current values of private costs? why not encompass social costs? perhaps a model similar to the corporate social responsibility framework of gray et a1 would be better designed to deal with accountability issues in islan1.2~ gray et a1 proposed a two-stage process in discharging the accountability of a firm. according to this view, each society must first determine a way to uniquely identify the responsibilities that organizations must meet. having done that, reports would then have to be prepared indicating the extent to which those responsibilities have been met. only by focusing on responsibility and accountability can one establish a generally acceptable basis for social reporting. accounting is, after all, the discharging of ac~ountability.2~ this radical approach contrasts markedly with the framework adopted by the financial accounting organisations for islamic banks and financial institutions (faoibf) when they suggested that the financial statements of islamic banks should include the historic cost statement of financial sulaiman & willett: islam, economic rationalism and accounting 67 position, a statement of income, a statement of cash flows, a statement of retained earnings, a statement of changes in restricted investments, a statement of sources and uses of zukut funds26 and a statement of sources and uses of qurd 27 funds (the last two being necessary in order to reflect the bank‘s role in the realm of social services). the foregoing statements are perceived to be adequate for discharging an islamic bank‘s accountabil ity under a principle referred to as “adequate” disclosure. this list includes neither a vas nor a cvbs. the possible usefulness of the vas does not seem to have been discussed in the literature in this context. this may be due to an innate conservatism on the part of the faoibf and also to the needs of the global market. whatever may be the reason for the shape and form of islamic corporate reports currently being considered by the faoibf, their conventional, western style format appears to be only minimally consistent with islamic principles, for the reasons cited above. baydoun and willett’s model goes further towards the goal of a more complete change, if the nature of financial statements and a more complete islamic corporate report should include still further information indicating the extent to which the social responsibilities of each firm have been met. full disclosure requires a report on human resource development and other social responsibility issues such as the import of the firm’s activities on the environment?* additionally, firms should be required to disclose information on activities that are specifically forbidden in islam such as involvement in usurious transactions, engaging in the importation of liqu09~, monopoly practices and the like. it is unlikely that such disclosures would happen voluntarily, but that fact is not an argument against disclosure per se. full disclosure should not, in any case, cause embarrassment to any party if transactions are undertaken to accord strictly with islamic principles. an islamic corporate report should not be concerned with matters of expediency. in the final analysis, an islamic corporate report should be about how firms (and thus the accountant on the f m ’ s behalf) discharge the tasks of social accountability and full disclosure before god. if the various forms which have been discussed as the basis for islamic corporate reports really have any validity, why is it that the results of the malaysian survey (if they support anythmg at all) favour the faoibfs framework rather than the more radical changes suggested by baydoun and willett? although data collected from the survey was from just one muslim country, one suspects, from one’s experience of attitudes expressed in 68 the american joumd of islamic social sciences 18.2 different persuasions in different parts of the world, the findings would not be much different to those found elsewhere. we are forced therefore to the conclusion that baydoun and willett’s theory of islamic corporate report must be understood as a normative theory at the level of the desirable if it is to have any validity, and that muslim users and preparers of financial statements have acquiesced in the division of the religious and the secular spheres of life and their perceptions of what is useful and what is acceptable to report. this is not in accord with islamic principles but is it, in some way, the inevitable consequence of modernism? gambling and karim argued that the same reasons which caused the decline of the influence of christian ethics in europe are also likely to be the cause of the failure to apply the shari’ah to business and economic affairs in muslim societies.30 wealth and the consumerism which accompanies it makes possible a degree of luxury that prompts a lax attitude towards morality and religion.31 the rational outlook that was both nurtured and encouraged by the development of scientific knowledge has, in the context of modem european history, evidently encouraged a materialist outlook and a separation of those spheres of life which may yield to logic (e.g. economics) from those which do not (e.g. equity and matters of ethics). it is thus of some interest to examine in a little more detail why and how such developments have occurred, how they impinge on muslim beliefs and in what ways these have affected muslim societies. the remainder of this paper examines these issues. economic rationalism the growth of large scale capitalism has been attributed to be the cause of the church’s failure to enforce religious discipline in trade and commerce and finally to its relinquishing business ethics to the secular economizing spirit.” weber attributed the spirit of capitalism to calvin’s extreme interpretation of luther’s concept of a “christian calling”. calvinism is essentially practical and regards the glorification of god as possible, not through prayer alone but more through actions. in the form that this belief is manifested in everyday life, the calvinist believes that thrift, industry and hard work are forms of moral virtue. the humblest type of work undertaken in such a spirit was, in the extreme case, more acceptable than a lifetime of spiritual activities. this formula, the basis for “enlightened self-interest”, helped create a climate favorable to commerce, and it was on this practical basis of urban industry and commerce that the sulaiman & willett: h a m , economic rationalism and accounting 69 calvinist social ethics were erected. although in the first instance commendable by islamic standards, the work ethic of enlightened self interest seems, with hindsight, to have led to a cynical materialistic outlook with followers extolling the pursuit of profits to the exclusion of everythmg else. such a single minded materialistic objective has come to be regarded as rational in the societies of the west.33 as the power and influence of the clergy diminished, so the dichotomy between the secular and the religious increased. weber contended that the root of this secularising trend was capitalism, reasoning that industry and frugality led to an increase in wealth and eventually to a focus on material possessions. thus, although the form of the christian religion may remain, its spirit has vanished.34 one could argue that these historical patterns have parallels in modern islamic society today. the term ‘capitalism’ has a variety of meanings.35 it may be regarded as a mode of production which is carried out by an enterprise. the owner of the enterprise pays a wage to his workers and the latter produce commodities, which the owner sells for his own profit. alternatively, it is possible to talk of a “capitalist sector” to indicate all the enterprises in which the capitalist mode of production is operative. finally, there is what rodinson termed the “socio-economic formation”. this refers to a particu lar economic system in which the capitalist sector occupies a predominant position, accompanied by an ideological and institutional superstructure through which it is ~ u p p o r t e d . ~ ~ the last is the most convenient characteri zation of capitalism for our purpose. capitalism per se is not un-islamic. however, the focus on the self in the absence of a religious discipline emphasizes on the maximization of profit and the accumulation of wealth; objectives which the income statements of western accounting systems are ultimately designed to serve. this is an example (and a particularly central one) of the tendency of modem capitalism towards the economic rationali zation of social actions.37 this attitude toward social action is embedded in the theories of neoclassical economics: humans are motivated by self interest, which is expressed primarily through the quest for financial gain; those actions that yield the greatest financial return to an individual are also those that are most beneficial to society (i.e. the benthamite tradition)?* competitive behavior is thus seen to be more “rational” for the individual than cooperative behaviour, signalling that societies should be built around the competitive motive. the consequence of economic rationalism is that human progress is perceived as being best measured by increases in the 70 the american journal of islamic social sciences 18.2 value of what the members of society are able to consume. higher levels of material output are assumed to advance the well-being of society. capitalism, propagating self-interest and private property, gives rise to materialistic tendencies in the individual, resulting in an “acquisitive” orientation. rationality is thus manifested in a growing calculability over all aspects of human life. weber likened a modem capitalist society to a machine: rational calculation is manifest at every stage .... the performance of each individual worker is mathematically measured, each man becomes a little cog in the machine and, aware of this, his one preoccupation is whether he can become a bigger rationality seems to offer the possibility of control over nature, liberating us from the anxieties of an unpredictable world and releasing us from the domination of external forces.40 the rationalist ethic, communicated through indoctrination in the technology of western accounting systems, now determines much of what we are able to do. as rodinson observed, among the merchants of genoa or venice in the middle ages, the shipowners and bankers of amsterdam during the renaissance, the pioneer industrialists of the industrial revolution in eighteenth century britain, the financial magnates of the imperialist era, and the american businessmen of today, we find the same feverish chase after profit, the same quasi-ascetic dedication of their lives to this pursuit.“l the profit motive is, of course, an indispensable part of the life of complex modern monetary economics of whatever type. it is the fixation upon maximizing profit to the detriment of everything else and upon its scientific and rational measurement as a final determinant of social choice action that presents problems for societies that have a wider brief than the material gratification of individual needs. accounting, as a device of economic rationalism, can therefore be seen as a potential threat to islamic principles because of the type of information it is capable of providing. the real problem, however, lies not with the possibilities of measurement (which are in a sense fixed) but with the possibilities for disclosure of that information and the way it focuses the mind of the user. the use of money and the structural conditions of accounting the engine of economic rationalism is enhanced by adopting money as a sulaiman & wilhtt: h a m , eeonomic rationalism and accounting 73 between measurement and disclosure is fundamental to the analysis of the relationship between accounting practices and societal values. on the one hand, accounting is seen to be objective and factual; not subjected to emotional or moral intent. on the other, accounting information is only useful if its supply is consistent with the values of specific social groups. calculations based upon fundamental measurements (e.g. accounting performance measures) may be wrongly construed as having a rational, absolute validity when, in fact, they are functional forms which serve some purposes well and others only poorly. hence, if the profit figure or the associated net asset values of western financial systems are incorrectly believed in islamic societies to possess a fundamental quality which they do not possess, they may give rise to an underlying tension between different groups representing different interpretations, interests or substan tive rationalities within a ~ociety.4~ given the multi-cultural nature of malaysian society and the global context in which the malaysian economy operates, consideration such as these may, in part, explain the results of sulaiman’s survey. certain calculations such as bottomline profit may be taken at face value as a convenient or politically correct numeral upon which to determine social choice. however, it is more likely that the apparent indifference to questions of ethics and culture in the sulaiman survey is due to tension between western, rationalist tendencies and islamic beliefs. the question therefore arises: does such a tension really exist and if so, what policy implications would arise from the provision of appropriately designed islamic corporate reports of the style described earlier? islam and economic rationalism baydoun and willett suggested that the economic rationalist worldview is contrary to the islamic world vie^.^^ the economic rationalist viewpoint has taken its fundamental assumptions from the most civilised and the most neurotic elements in the human condition: the desire to stand apart from others, to compete, to manipulate and to amass surpluses. this is inevitable considering the fact that any rational theory generally recognises the conscious elements in human intelligen~e.4~ islam’s viewpoint is (as is the case with other religions, perhaps) somewhat different. from an islamic perspective, a person establishes three simultaneow relationships in this world: with god, with his own self, and with society. those social concepts which are considered valid in both, 74 the american journal of islamic social sciences 18.2 viz. islam and capitalism, i.e. their promotion of the role of private initiative, individual freedom and private property rights, have to be understood in the context of the three relationships indicated earlier.% the fundamental difference between islam and modem capitalism arises from their respective ethical perceptions. while capitalism propagates the moral invulnerability of (exclusive) self interest, islam regards self-interest on the same plane as collective interest. self-interest in an islamic framework denotes a freedom which is coupled with responsibility. ownership of property in islam flows from an awareness that ultimately everything belongs to god. hence, the concept of private ownership in islam differs in concept from that of modem capitalism. ownership in islam is not absolute. while islam advocates the pursuit of wealth, it explicitly recognises that part of the wealth thus accumulated should be set aside for the benefit of the deprived and the needy. charitable deeds are consequently a requirement of a good muslim, not something that is left to the discretion of the individuals as in the capitalistic ideology. individual freedom does not translate to unlimited freedom in the use of one's private property. individuals, while preserving their own freedom, should not transgress on others. great emphasis is placed on responsibility to god and the community. an individual must be sensitive to the consequences of the exercise of his own rights51, so that when individual freedom is coupled with responsibility, self interest is kept in check.52 followers of islam do not consider such a moral code to involve the suppression of the individual's will; only the individual's freedom of action is controlled. unlike modem capitalism, where religion and business affairs officially stay in separate compartments, in islam, every material achievement is an outward expression designed to achieve a spiritual objective that eventually gives meaning to existence.53 rodinson described this attitude as follows, (the) koranic faith is also something more than intellectual conviction and assent to the truths revealed by the prophet. this conviction gives rise to an attitude that commits the whole man. faith brings peace to the soul, releases one from fear, ...g ives patience, endurance, resignation to the insults and ill-treatment suffered in gods cause, humility and the will to risk all for god and carry out good islam and capitalism, however, possess a basic similarity. both view the sulaiman & willett: islam, economic rationalism and accounting 75 pursuit of profits as important, for this is consistent with the natural human tendency to acquire wealth.55 however, in islam, profit is not regarded as something which is of benefit to society only indirectly, through the benefit it brings to individuals in the form of greater material satisfaction, but rather as a potential, direct means to the objective of socio-economic justice. consequently, the current form of typical accounting disclosure practices, which might be considered “substantively” rational from the western perspective, may not necessarily be so from the muslim users’ point of view, at least not at the level of the “desirable”. islam’s emphasis is on achieving a balance between the pursuit of profits and social resp~nsibility~~ and there is little evidence, financial or otherwise, to suggest that western accounting systems are likely to serve that objective. rodinson argued that islam is not against capitalism per se, for islam is not against the positive aspects of capitalism as in enterprise and initiati~e.5~ in fact, he argued that islam is more favorable than christianity to economic expansion, primarily because islam emphasises the good use of one’s possessions, the merits of expending them intelligently and distributing them generously. what is anathema in an islamic state, however, is the single-minded pursuit of profit and the accumulation of wealth as ends in themselves. islam requires the faithful to expand capital with a view to seeking the pleasure of allah. thus, islam injects a spiritual dimension to acquisitive activity. a similar focus on social responsibility has occasionally been advocated in the predominantly secular but christian west. as distinguished laureate, paul samuelson once said, a large corporation these days not only may engage in social responsibility, it had damn well better try to do such sentiments recur in the accounting and economics literature from time to time and possibly represent nascent christian values buried beneath the layers of capitalist indoctrination which western european society has erected in the minds of its people over the last several hundred years. given the greater differences of philosophical outlook which exist between modem capitalism and islam, one might have expected the results obtained from the sulaiman survey on disclosure practices to somehow mirror this. the fact that the evidence showed otherwise could be interpreted in at least two ways. it could mean that muslims have adopted the capitalist and secular values of the west, at least with respect to commercial 76 the american joumd of islamic social sciences 18.2 affairs.59 alternatively, it could also mean that the responses recorded in the survey did not capture the substantive values of muslims. the latter explanation is one that pertains to research methodology and can be left to other studies to decide. the former seems more likely and poses the question of why and to what extent such indoctrination has taken place and also what part current accounting disclosure practices have played in the process of indoctrination. the divergence between an apparently desirable form that financial statements should take under islamic principles, and the perceptions of appropriate practices which are seemingly diametrically opposed to these, is probably best understood in the historical context of the expansion of the capitalist world system and the effects of colonialism which the ‘core economies’ engendered in the economically undeveloped muslim societies in the “peripheral economies”.60 developing economies have imported the accounting practices of the west irrespective of whether they have been subject to explicit political colonialisation.61 in developing countries in general and muslim countries in particular, one observes an emerging commercial culture patterned after european bourgeois civilisation, manifested in a spirit of individualism, rationalism and materialism. this new attitude toward life is neither typically christian nor typically muslim, and the modem muslim seems to have projected this attitude onto his faith in a similar way to that which nineteenth century christians grafted it on the processes of world capitalism and globalization appear to have given rise to pressures towards the formation of a homogeneous culture where the spiritual and the emotive content of activities become secondary (von h u e , 1987).63 influence of western tationdistic thinking dependency theorists attribute the impact of materialist values on islamic societies to the actions of imperialists, colonialists, financiers and multinational corporations. historically, these theorists see a causal relationship between the rise of western imperialism and the decline of islamic values.@ it is worth looking more closely at this issue in the context of the capitalist world economy. the world economy the responses of muslims to the sulaiman survey are consistent with the viewpoint that capitalism gives rise to one common world economf5 sulaiman & willett: h a m , economic rationalism and accounting 77 and, by implication, to a materialist, secular philosophy of the type described above, wherein overt action and decision making in the commercial world are dominated by a self-interested rationality quite different from that advocated in islam. the capitalist world economy, originating in northwestern europe in the sixteenth century, expanded to include the whole world geographically in the nineteenth century, bringing people together regardless of their prior cultural dispositions, into a common harness, against their will, by a small minority called "the west" ---the peoples of western europe and their descendants in north america.66 according to the theory of world capitalism, the central dynamic economic force in the capitalist world system is the process of capital accumulation in the developed countries. the accumulation process comprised two stages: firstly, the creation of a wage labor force and secondly, the amassing of debt obligations to the developed western economies from the developing world. wage labour was primarily available through exploitation of the peasantry, and capital accumulation by the capitalists was possible through access to knowledge and control of (or at least influence over) the political processes and emerging legal structures and contractual arrangements (of which the peasanhy had, at best, only a nave understanding). the production of surplus value by capitalist owners and the conversion of a large part of that surplus value into additional capital was a cumulative process, always requiring new fields for investment, more labor and raw materials and larger markets for finished products. this was achieved initially through a combination of political and economic imperialism and later through exploitation of the political, legal and even philosophical basis established in the early stages of colonization. wallerstein distinguished the structure of the world economy as a single system which can be analysed in terms of the core, the semiperiphery and the periphery. in the nineteenth century, the core areas represented countries that had a complex variety of economic activities such as mass market industries. international and local commerce were in the hands of the bourgeoisie and there was an advanced and complex form of agriculture. splendor, wealth and high living standards were (and still are) found at the core of the world economy. the standard of living dropped in the semiperipheral countries. countries that represented the semiperiphery 78 the american journal of islamic social sciences 18.2 were those in the process of deindustrialising the neighbors, rivals and competitors of the core. here, one found relatively few industrial and financial organizations. those that did exist were often directed from out side. the peripheral areas constituted those countries that were monocul tural economies with cash crops being produced by coerced labor and where slavery still existed. these three groups made up the world economy in the nineteenth century and parallels to them exist t0day.6~ in a similar vein, sweezy argued that the world economy consisted of two rather than three sharply contrasting parts: the developed and the underdeveloped countries. the former consisted of a handful of dominant exploiting countries while the latter represented the much larger number of dominated and exploited countries. however, the two are indissolubly linked together, and nothing that happens in either part can be understood if it is considered in abstraction from the system as a thus, leaving aside the semiperiphery to concentrate on what will be referred to below as the “periphery” (i.e. countries where policies are or have been formulated to a large extent by foreign, western influences) the distinction between the core and the periphery in no way indicates that there exist two separate world economies. rather, it signifies different sectors performing different economic functions resulting in a world economy that is integrated and interdependent. this distinction is important to understanding the attitudes of people like the muslims in malaysia to technologies imported from the west, of which one of the most important is accounting. although a fuller discussion of the development of the capitalist world economy is beyond the scope of this paper, the brief description of its emergence just provided emphasises the interdependence that resulted from this phenomenon. the point being made now is that such interdependence has inculcated the secular materialist philosophy of the west into the minds of those in the periphery and, in particular, islamic societies such as malaysia. given the fact that the core-periphery relations are based on an unequal exchange, development of the latter is largely determined by decisions made in the former. therefore, it follows that the interdependence between the core and the periphery (or between the developed and developing nations) is generally built on universalized western te1ms.6~ von h u e described this as the world revolution of westernisation. sulaiman & willett: barn, economic rationalism and accounting 79 the rational capitalistic ideology which started in sixteenth century europe (and effected the separation between the state and religion) gradually made its mark in the muslim world in the nineteenth century.m by the beginning of the twentieth century, the entire world was dominated by political philosophies, technologies and the way of life of western europe and north america. about eighty five percent of the world's land surface had, by that time, been absorbed into western colonial empires and the remaining parts were also subject to western influences?l wherever the west intruded, it challenged and undermined traditional values?2 the process by which western values were embedded in muslim societies and how these values remained f m l y entrenched in the muslim mind is described next. the process of acculturation in malaysia, as in other former western colonies, a significant factor that helped shape the mental attitudes of muslims in the alignment with western imperialist values was the process of acculturation (instigated in this case by the british). colonial administrators did not underestimate islam's potential to disrupt this process ?3 they recognized that islam is a significant force in shaping the cultural belief systems of its followers, hence the teaching of islam was deliberately left out of the mainstream school curriculum. this produced a modem educated elite ignorant of islam and its values and a religious class untrained in the modem sciences who were unable to play an effective role in society. this had the effect of reinforcing the already inherent division in the colonizer's philosophy between the secular and spiritual spheres of life, and marked the beginning in malay-muslim society of the existence of this dichotomy. during the post independence period of malaysia, the secular malay elite, trained by the british, exercised great influence over the governance of the country. the indoctrination of western values by the british on malaysians in general, and muslims in particular, in matters pertaining to law, politics, economics and accounting is still firmly entrenched forty years after independence. in the case of the accounting profession, the british influence remains strong. this is reinforced by the fact that a large number of accountants were educated in britain, australia and new zealand. having been educated in the secular west, exposed to western political and economic ideology for varying periods of time, the educated professionals tended to bring back with them an imported culture and belief 80 the american journal of islamic social sciences 18.2 system which, once adopted, becomes firmly entrenched in their minds. this is evidenced by the following of the british legal, political, economic and accounting models. although islamic revivalism is in evidence in malaysia at the present time, it is still very much overshadowed by the one hundred years or so of colonial indoctrination which preceded it. a similar phenomenon occurred in indonesia. the ways of €bought and the feelings of the upper stratum of indonesian society were strongly influenced by european traits of individualism, rationalism and bourgeois morality, especially among the younger members of the elite. this acculturation process took place largely outside the boundaries of i ~ l a m . 7 ~ when indonesia gained its independence, it was the elite that were empowered to rule the country. in fact it was a deliberate move by the pre vious dutch colonizers, to help those who were more inclined to reject islam in its stricter form, to reach positions of political influence. thus, the secular systems (political, economic or administrative) put in place during colonization were reinforced after independence. the effects of the colonial infiltration of the western mind-set into the belief systems of muslims in southeast asia is clearly in evidence today. although islam can be regarded as a powerful political force in south east asia, most muslims in this region, in the opinion of some, have ceased to regard islam as a way of life, regarding islam more as a religion of rituals than of spiritual or moral substance?’ satha-hand and ariff have attributed this phenomenon to years of de-islamisation resulting from western influence and secularism, observing that some muslims in this region have exhibited complete disregard for islamic injunctions.’6 muslims in name only, they are conscious of their faith but not their responsibilities as muslims. others, in contrast, seemed to be obsessed with the rituals promulgated in the five pillars of islam without fully understanding the underlying islamic values and still others have tended to rationalise their actions as dharurat (which allows exceptions to matters that are normally disallowed). the last mentioned type probably represent a popular “escape” route for the otherwise conscientious muslims, especially in the case of southeast asian muslims who are not operating in an islamic economy. one school of thought subscribing to the shari’ah maxim that “necessity makes the unlawful permissable”, supports the prevalent conduct of muslims in southeast asia, especially those living in countries where muslims constitute a minority. in this regard, it was reported that al-zarqa sulaiman & willett: h a m , economic rationalism and accounting 81 contends that interest is permissable in such asituation and it is to be regarded as a temporary and exceptional circumstance until such time when the world economy is no longer under the domination of modern capitalism?’ a contrary viewpoint argues that islam allows no such rationalising except under extremely extenuating circumstances (such as the loss of life, perhaps)?8 ariff (1991) attributes such an “excuse” (i.e. dharurar) to ignorance, weakness in faith and expediency or pragmatism on the part of mu slim^?^ the results of the sulaiman questionnaire survey may thus be interpreted as showing that the spirit of capitalism still thrives no matter to what religious affiliation one subscribes. the materialist philosophy is, perhaps, so f d y embedded in the muslim mind that although islam may have an effect on how an individual behaves, the economic and social pressures originating from the capitalist world economy exercise a much greater influence over attitudes prevailing in commercial life.8o geertz’s distinction between being religious and being religious-minded may provide further illumination on this matter. according to geertz’s theory, being religious is not merely knowing the truth, but embodying and living it. being religious-minded, on the other hand, offers reasons for one’s beliefs. while both are believers, it is the religious that live their beliefs. hence, if one were to relate these two concepts to the results that have emerged from sulaiman’s survey of accounts users perceptions in malaysia, one might conclude that the muslim respondents surveyed illustrated a religious-minded disposition as opposed to a religious disposition. the facts about islamic values in southeast asia just discussed seem to support rodinson’s contention mentioned earlier. further evidence of the same phenomenon can be addressed to other areas of the developing world. in the middle east, industrial capitalism appeared as an imitation of western capitalism. the development of a modem banking system based on a european model requires devout muslims to conduct themselves in accordance with western values.81 in turkey in the early twentieth century, the secularization of the ottoman empire was basically an attempt to legitimate and justify the consequences of imported the economic collapse of the ottoman empire has, in part, been attributed to the success of ruling elites in granting extra-temtorial trade privileges to european merchants. fiscal mismanagement evidenced in the last stages of the ottoman empire (where foreign loans were contracted and banks and tax revenues were 82 the american journal of islamic social sciences 18.2 placed in the hands of foreign interests) resulted in direct european financial control of the turkish economy.83 this marked the beginning of an era of european supremacy in the muslim world. given the historical setting described above, it is not surprising that muslims often seem to behave (in business matters) in a manner which would be regarded as normal in the european capitalist world. what is happening in the muslim world today is consistent with the theory of social change and development implicit in wallerstein’s theory of world capitalism. it is also consistent with the “liberal” theory of social change and development, i.e. that all societies under the influence of modem science and technology will eventually become urban in their demographic distribution, industrial in their economies, democratic in their political structures and secular in their thoughts, values and culture.84 multinationals the latter-day manifestation of colonial influence lies in the existence of multinational organizations, themselves instruments of the capitalist world economy. the west, through these multinationals, paved the way for the further exploitation of human and natural resources in the periphery as well as ensuring that a market for manufactured goods was maintained. in the quest for enhanced gains, the typical production units5 in modem developed capitalism is both a conglomerates6 and a m~ltinational.~~ how does islam regard such a process of expansion? to the extent that the emergence of multinationals has given rise to a business environment that is conducive to cooperation and mutual aid, this form of organization is obviously not necessarily against islamic principles. however, where small players in the market are prevented (in the name of efficiency) from operating, the development of monopolies is not consistent with islamic beliefs, for such practices are exploitative in nature. exploitative or not, in the quest for greater material gains and in order to compete globally, governments may (and often do seem to) feel it necessary to re-culture their domestic arrangements accordingly. hence, the world capitalist system all too often relegates a nation’s domestic policies to being secondary to those which pertain to foreign matters. a similar phenomenon occurred during the early stages of the capitalist world system: the main difference being that while the social order then was to some extent forcibly transformed to accord with the value systems of the coloniser; today, the aligning of the social structure of the periphery sulaiman & willett: islam, economic rationalism and accounting 83 to the core arises out of the pure necessity for survival in order to perpetuate the world economy. the central task of the capitalist state, therefore, lies in creating conditions that are favorable to such a development.88 in the process, all western accomplishments such as science, technology, education, industrialism, and large scale organizations have been transformed into universal requirements. this process is further enhanced by powerful agencies of the united nations such as the international monetary fund and the world bank. through their guidelines, these organizations help maintain the universals of world capitalism among developing countries. global standardization of weights and measures, the interchangeability of money, communication, health and safety and the use of english as the preferred international language, all act to reinforce these universal^.^^ more importantly, given that most multinationals originate from countries which were once colonizers, the organisational culture and values that permeate such firms generally mirror those of the west. these values are, to a great extent, even more secular and individualistic. given such an environment, locals working in multinational companies have tended to assimilate these imported values u n c o n s c i ~ u s l y . ~ ~ with the ground rules of global interaction established by multinational f m s , big trading companies and banks impose their own universal practices, whether of management or industrial production or of accounting. in addition, commodities of a universal appeal such as automobiles, radios, computers, and soft drinks and directly or indirectly enforce new uniformities. all these have contributed effectively to building a true global community9*; a world that will perhaps ultimately become homogenized and made into a kind of mcdonald's of consumer sensibilities?2 in this regard, the fact that the bottomline profit has been universally accepted as a measure by which the success of a business should be gauged, reflects this uniformity. the need for material success is not necessarily contrary to islam for islam acknowledges that human virtue cannot exist when there is poverty and suffering. what islam forbids is the kind of materialism that transforms an individual into regarding wealth as an end in itself, the pursuit of which becomes the primary motivation of one's life, to the exclusion of everything else. like the expansion of the world economy, international trade and the search for markets were integral parts of the expansion of the islamic empire during the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. however, although islam is not against capitalism per se93, the 84 the american journd of islamic social sciences 18.2 shari'ah specifically provides for the types of trade that a muslim can engage in and the manner in which they should be conducted. above all, an individual's action should never violate social and economic justice. capitalist values can violate these principles and the onslaught of western imperialist values on the muslim mind has now so firmly entrenched them in the minds of muslims in commerce and related areas of human endeavor that islamic values tend to be overlooked or forgotten. the borrowing of western accounting models, in itself, is not necessarily contrary to islam, since the borrowing of ideas may be regarded as a mark of self-confidence. however, to take on board all that attaches to such models, particularly a purely secular materialist value system, is almost certainly not appropriate to the long term survival of an islamic community. policy issues this brings us to a final question. if, indeed, the results from the sulaiman survey are representative of what muslims in general perceive to be useful accounting information, should muslim countries continue to simply adopt western accounting models and abdicate any responsibility for considering the question of the consistency of such practices with islamic values? or should it more proactively and radically implement changes in accounting disclosure practices which are more likely to promote islamic values? this question is evidently one with policy implications of the highest and most profound kind for muslim societies. the findings of the sulaiman sur vey could be interpreted as evidence, not that there is no difference between islamic and non-islamic requirements for financial information, but that muslims have become corrupted by the adoption of the entirely secular ideals embodied in the typical profit and loss account (a tool or technology which might itself be said to represent the essential spirit of capitalism). if the latter is the case, it suggests that islam may have come to exercise a less powerful influence on the economic behaviour of its followers because of indoctrination, through importation, in a seemingly innocuous, technical procedure for disclosing financial information. consequently, muslims appear to behave in a manner similar to that which is regarded as normal in the european capitalist world.94 the policy issue is: is it right that this should be so? does islamic society want to do anything about it? if so, what needs to be done? su~aiman & willett: ham. economic rationalism and accounting 85 if muslims wish to conduct their business affairs more in line with the precepts of islam, the argument advanced here implies that some kind of change in financial reporting practices is a necessity. given the fact that theory can and may lead to its eventual practice, this is unlikely unless the theory is one “whose time has arri~ed”?~ as far as the prevailing environ ment of muslim countries is concerned, the future of some kind of islamic corporate reporting system as advocated by baydoun and willett (2000) seems to offer a kind of solution.% the growing religious commitment throughout the muslim world has resulted in an increasing number of muslim countries’ realigning their economic activities to accord with the tenets of i ~ l a m . ~ given this, one would envisage a specifically islamic accounting and financial reporting eventually evolving. voiuntary versus legislated disciosure with islamic economics still in the initial stages of development, the process of change in accounting practice, if it is to be pursued, should presumably be approached with caution. writing in the specific context of islamic economics, naqvi argued that, essentially, the process of transition should be one of compromise, searching for options that do not contradict the central purpose of islamic ideals?8 one should, however, not regard compromises as un-islamic simply because they do not exactly conform to ideal (textbook) situations. changes in financial reporting should be achieved through evolution.w there are two ways to achieve this end. on the one hand, the inclusion of a vas and a cvbs suggested by baydoun and willett may not need to be part of mandatory disclosure requirements. rather, companies could be encouraged to voluntarily include these statements as part of their reporting exercise. on the other hand, reliance on religious norms of righteousness and truthfulness may besimply inadequate to deal with the complexities of modem and econom ic rationa1ities.’oo in that case, legislation might be a better alternative. given the fact that the merits of the vas and the cvbs are acknowledged in western accounting systems (although their implementation has not been widespread), the implementation of such a reporting system may not necessarily be very radical. 86 the american journal of islamic social sciences 18.2 resistance to change satisfaction with the status quo, coupled with the fact that developed countries themselves have not seen fit to include current value information and the vas as a systematic part of their disclosure requirements, point to the fact that resistance to change (from both management and the accounting profession) may be envisaged regarding suggestions for islamic corporate reports to be of the type described in this paper. adopting a distinct islamic corporate reporting system may be regarded as being too radical a move. more specifically, management resistance to voluntarily disclosure events which will ultimately result in increased social costs (e.g. as in the reporting of environmental pollution, plant explosions, oil spills etc.) may be high. nevertheless, resistance to change may be overcome through education. students should be informed that the present style of financial statements represents practices which are currently acceptable by the profession. in addition, research results should be encouraged to reflect on the “desired” state of accounting practices.lol when the topic concerns islamic accounting, analysis at the level of the “desirable” (i.e. what muslims ought to want), the study of ethics and the ethical consequences of practice should also be part of the accounting curriculum. this may have the effect of gradually ensuring that users, accountants, directors and shareholders each better understand their respective responsibilities and can ultimately reach a consensus on what ought to be disclosed and how it should be disclosed in financial statements. the process of change the above suggestions for change may be regarded as the initial steps to be undertaken in developing a form of islamic corporate report. although these may not decrease by much the gap between a typical muslim society and those of the ideal islamic society, such a society would at least be recognizable as a distinct social entity inspired by islamic ideals.’02 however, of more importance is the reformation of the mindset, small though it might initially be, in being the individual with the right moral attitudes and ethical values that changing the form of presentation of financial information may impart.lo3 formal action is important in this respect. islam attempts to achieve conformity to basic values through the five pillars of islam: the shahadah, prayers, fasting, alms-giving and the pilgrimage. these rituals reinforce the faith and rational behavior of a muslim. sulaiman & willett: h a m , economic rationalism and accounting 87 the sanctioned rational behaviour of the muslim (and the rewards which it promises) is consequently entirely different to what constitutes the rational behavior of a non-muslim capitalist. making judgements on the basis of a vas, for example, is no less rational than making judgements on the basis of the income statement; it is just that the perspective of what should be done is different. conclusion this paper has explicated the likely reasons why the findings from a survey conducted on malaysian accounting information users revealed very few differences in the perceptions of usefulness between muslims and non-muslims. baydoun and willett’s normative theory of islamic corporate reporting, on the empirical validity of which the survey focused, was described. the differences between capitalism and the islamic belief system were compared with special emphasis on the impact on the latter of rational economic calculation. the development of the capitalist world economy was suggested as a reason why, despite obvious differences in the social philosophies of the two systems, very few differences between islamic and non-islamic preferences for financial information are evident. subsequently, the impact of the colonial indoctrination of western values as well as the role of multinationals were discussed in the context of the exploitation of the core on the periphery. finally, policy recommendations regarding the implementation of a reporting system which might be seen to be more in line with islam were suggested. notes 1. the authors would l i e to thank colleagues at the 1999 conference of the accounting association of australia and new zealand in cairns, australia for their helpful comments and suggestions. they are also particularly grateful to nabil baydoun, dubai polytechnic and sohail inayatullah, queensland university of technology for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2. t. gambling and r.a.a. karim, business and accounting ethics in islam. mansell, london, 1991; s. hamid, r. craig and f. clarke. “religion: a confounding cultural element in the international harmonisation of accounting?”, abacus, 1993,29(2), pp131-48; n. baydoun and r. willett. “islam and accounting: ethical issues in the presentation of financial infonnation“, accounting commerce & finance: the islamic perspective journal, june 1997, vol. no. 1, pp 1-25. 88 the american journal of islamic social sciences 18.2 3. 4. 5. 6. m. sulaiman, “testing a theory of islamic corporate reporting : the case of malaysia.” doctoral thesis, university of otago, new zealand, 1997 and ‘the usefulness of the current value balance sheet and the value added statement to muslims: some evidence from malaysia” accounting, commerce & finance: the islamic perspective journal, december, 1998, vol. 2, no. 2, pp.26-66. w t , one of the five pillars of islam, is a levy on muslims whose wealth reaches a certain specified minimum (nisab). itis not a charitable donation, for alluding to it as such would mean that &at is voluntary. the different levels of prescription in this analysis are an extension of a distinction made in hofstede (1980). where a need to distinguish between the “desired“ and the “desirable” in the analysis of culture is established. ”desired values are values that people actually desire and “desirable” values are those values they think ought to be desired. the analysis canied out in this paper mentions the third level of actual practice more for completeness than for any other reason, since there is very little difference in amunting m e a s m e n t between islamic and non-islamic societies at the present time. the distinction between the desired and the desirable is, however, crucial. rodinson, m., “islam and capitalism”, the chaucer press, suffolk, (translated by brian pearce), 1974; 0. mehmet, “islamic identity and development: studies of the islamic periphery”, forum, malaysia, 1990; m. ariff, “islam and the private sector: south east asian perspectives.” in m. ariff (ed.), ‘the muslim private sector in south east asia”, institute of south east asian studies, singapore, 1991. t. gambling and r.a.a. karim, business and accounting ethics in islam, mansell, london, 1991. g. hofstede, culture’s consequences: “international differences in work-related values”, sage publications, london, 1980. broadly defined to include the disclosure of current value information. 10..n. baydoun and r. willett, “cultural relevance of western accounting systems”, 11. that is, in accordance with the definition of what is a measurement theoretic issue (willett, 1987). 12. n. baydoun and r. willett, “islamic accounting theory”, working paper university of otago, new zealand, 1994 and islamic corporate reports, abacus, 2000, vol. 36. no. 1, p. 90. 13. m. a. mannan, “islamic economics:theory and practice”, hodder and stoughton, uk, 1986. 14. although this is slowly changing (gray et al, 1987). 15. n. baybun and r. willett, “islam and accounting: ethical issues in the presentation a ~ c u s , 1995,31(1), pp. 67-92. of fimancial information,” accounting commerce & finance: the islamic perspective journal, june 1997, vol. no. 1, pp. 1-25. 16.. m. renshall, r. allan and k. nicholson, added value in external financial reporting, the institute of chartered accountants of england and wales, london. 1979. sulaiman & willett: islam, economic rationalism and accounting 89 17. m. rodinson, “islam and capitalism”, the chaucer press, suffolk,1974 (translated by brian pearce); m. a. mannan, “islamic economics: theory t d practice”, hodder and stoughton, ukj986. 18. s. n. h. naqvi, “islam, economics and society.” kegan paul international, london and new york, 1994.. 19 a mudaraba is a form of business partnership where an investor (or a group of investors) provides capital to an agent-manager. 20 t. gambling and r.a.a. karim, business and accounting ethics in islam, mansell, london, 1991. 21. the qur’an specifically warns against miserliness as in the following verse, and ye love wealth, with inordinate love! (89:20). 22. f. clarke, r. craig and s. hamid, “physical asset valuation and zakat: insights and implications”, advances in international accounting, vol. 9, 1996, pp 195-208. 23. m. rodinson, islam and capitalism, the chaucer press, suffolk, (translated by brian pearce), 1974. 24. r. gray, d. owen and k. maunders, corporate social reporting: accounting and accountability. prentice-hall international, uk, 1987, p. 17. 25. ibid., 17. 26. this was only for banks which assume the responsibility for the collection and 27..these are l o a s extended without the element of profit imputed. such a fund is meant 28. some of these matters are proposed by the faoibf, “financial accounting distribution of zakat. to be a means of achieving social justice. standard no. 1”: general presentation and disclosure in financial statements of islamic h n k s and financial institutions, p. 13. generally do not disclose this fact if it is the subsidiary that engages in such an activity. such information is pertinent, for a devout muslim investor may not want to continue investing in such a company. london, 1991. publishers, london, 1927; m. rodinson, islam and capitalism, the chaucer press, suffolk,1974 (translated by brian pearce); m. weber, the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, unwin paperbacks, london, 1985. 32. r. h. tawney, religion and the rise of capitalism: a historical study, john murray publishers, london, 1927; a. b. sadr, islam and schools of economics. islamic seminary, pakistan, 1980 m. weber, the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, unwin paperbacks, london, 1985. london, 1985. 29. special mention of this is made here because large import/export holding companies 30 t. gambling and r.a.a. karim, business and accounting ethics in islam, mansell, 3 1. r. h. tawney, religion and the rise of capitalism: a historical study, john murray 33. m. weber, the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, unwin paperbacks, 34. ibid. 90 the american journal of islamic social sciences 18.2 35. m. rodinson, islam and capitalism, the chaucer press, suffolk,1974 (translated by 36. ibid. brian pearce). 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. m. weber, the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, unwin paperbacks, london, 1985. see bums and hart (1970). b. s. turner, weber and islam, routledge and kegan paul, london and boston, 1974, ibid. m. rodinson, islam and capitalism, the chaucer press, suffolk,1974 (translated by brian pearce). colignon, r. and m. covaleski, a weberian framework in the study of accounting, accounting, organizations and society, 1991, 16(2), pp.141-157. t. gambling and r.a.a. karim, business and accounting ethics in islam, mansell, london, 1991. r. colignon and m. covaleski, a weberian framework in the study of accounting, accounting, organizations and society, 1991. bid. ibid. bid. n. baydoun and r. willett. islam and accounting: ethical issues in rhe presentation of financial infonnation, accounting commerce 8c finance: the islamic perspective journal, june 1997, vol. no. 1, pp 1-25. t. gambling and r.a.a. karim. business and accounting ethics in islam. mansell, london, 1991. s. n. h. naqvi, islam, economics and society, kegan paul international, london and new york, 1994.. ibid. u. chapra, islam and the economic challenge, the islamic foundation, leicester, uk, 1992. a. h. a.sulayman, crisis in the muslim mind, international institute of islamic thought, hemdon, virginia, 1993 (translated by yusuf talal de lorenzo). m. rodinson. islam and capitalism, the chaucer press, suffolk,1974 (translated by brian pearce), p. 83. p ~ . 151-152. 55. s. a. maududi, the islamic way of life, k.ahmed and k.murad (eds), islamic foundation, london, 1986. 56. in the context of islamic administration, al-buraey (1990) is of the opinion that efficiency and effectiveness should be sacrificed if these conflict with humanism. 57. m. rodinson. islam and capitalism, the chaucer press, suffolk,1974 (translated by brian pearce). 58. p. a. samuelson, love that corporation, mountain bell magazine, spring, 1971, p. 24. sulaiman & wiltett: islam, economic rationalism and accounting 91 59. c. satha-anand, bangkok muslims and the tourist trade. in m. ariff (ed.), the muslim private sector in south east asia, institute of south east asian studies, sinagapore, 1991; m. ariff, islam and the private sector: south east asian perspectives. in m. ariff (ed.), the muslim private sector in south east asia. institute of south easf asian studies, singapore, 1991. 60. i. m. wallerstein, the capitalist world-economy, university press, cambridge, 1979. 61. g. m. scott, accounting and developing nations, university of washington graduate school of business administration, seattle, 1970; j. m. samuels and j.c. oliga, accounting standards in developing countries. international journal of accounting education and research, fall 1982, pp. 69-88. 62. w. f. wertheim, bourgeois currents in religion. in a. ibrahim. s. siddique and y. hussain (eds.), readings on islam in south east asia. institute of southeast asian studies, singapore, 1985. behaviour. forum, malaysia, 1990. 63. culture is defied by von h e (1987) simply as the tool of collective human 64. 0. mehmet., islamic identity and development: studies of the islamic periphery. 65. i . m. wallerstein, the capitalist world-economy, university press, cambridge, 1979. 66. t. h. von laue, the world revolution of westernization: the twentieth century in 67. i. m. wallerstein, the capitalist world-economy. university press, cambridge, 1979. 68. p. m. sweezy. modem capitalism and other essays, monthly review press, london, 69. t. h. von h u e , the world revolution of westernization: the twentieth century in 70. i . m. walierstein, the capitalist world-economy, university press, cambridge, 71. t. h. von laue, the world revolution of westernization: the twentieth century in 72. 0. haq, islamic resurgence: the challenge of change. in t. abdullah, and global perspective, oxford university press, new york, 1987, p. 3. 1972, p. 5. global perspective, oxford university press, new york, 1987. 1979. p. 66 global perspective, oxford university press, new york, 1987. s. siddique (eds.), islam and society in south east asia. chopmen publishers, singapore, 1986. 73. a. ibrahim, s. siddique and y, hussain. readings on islam in south east asia, institute of southeast asian studies, singapore, 1985. 74. w. f. wertheim, bourgeois currents in religion. in a. ibrahim, s. siddique, s. and y. hussain @ids.), readings on islam in south east asia, institute of southeast asian studies, singapore, 1985. 75. southeast asia has a large concentration of muslims. the region is represented by, amongst others, the philippines, thailand, singapore, malaysia, brunei and indonesia. the last three consist of predominantly muslims and the first three have significant minority muslim populations. 92 the american journd of islamic social sciences 18.2 76. this category of muslims were termed 'nominal'. 77. m. kamali, shari'ah and the challenge of modernity, k i m journal, 1994, 2(1) 78. again, 'extremely extenuating circumstances' is subject to individual interpretation. an example of this flexibility is in the case of eating non-halal (forbidden) meat. to some, this is allowed if one happens to reside in a place where halal meat is not available. to others, as long as there are other alternatives, one must not resort to dharurat. 79. satha-anand's (1991) study of thai muslims in the tourism industry provides evidence on the behavior of some muslims in such circumstances. restaurants belonging to muslims did not reflect their muslim identity, save for their owners' being muslims and a quranic verse hanging on the wall. liquor was served liberally in such restaurants. 80. m. rodinson, islam and capitalism, the chaucer press, suffolk,1974 (translated by brian pearce). 81. hid. 82. b. s. tumer, weber andislam, routledge and kegan paul, london and boston, 1974. 83. d. c. blaisdell, d.c., european financial control in the ottoman empire, a m s press inc., new york, 1966. 84. secularism refers to the eradication of religion as an institution in human society and erosion of man's faith in the divine and the transcendental (haq, 1986). 85. the development of machinery and other advanced technologies led to the need for larger amounts of capital. this, in turn, paved the way for the corporate form of organization. the quest for further material gains necessitated that fims expanded, possibly eliminating competition and increasing monopoly profits.thus, while competition was the hallmark of capitalism's initial development, monopoly practices are argued by some to be characteristic of its later stages of development. 86. a company operating in many industries. 87. a company that operates in many countries. 88. p. m. sweezy, modem capitalism and other essays, monthly review press, london, 1972. 89. t. h. von h u e , t.h., the world revolution of westernization: the twentieth century in global perspective, oxford university press, new york, 1987. 90. the differences in behavior (though slight) between malay-muslim employees of two companies operating in malaysia, called ' a and ' b respectively (due to confidentiality reasons, the names of the companies are not disclosed) provide some evidence of the impact of corporate culture on employees' behavior. while company a is an american multinational, company b is malaysian in origin. a visit by the researcher to the club shared by both companies' employees revealed particular differences in outward behavior between the groups. company a employees (malays) tended to act in accordance more with western values than company bs employees. they tended to converse in the english language to a greater extent than their b counterparts, dressed more in keeping with modem western standards, and at times, pp. 1-26. sulaiman & willett: islam, economic rationalism and accounting 93 were rather ‘loud‘ in their conversations (speech). the contrary was observed for company b s employees. muslim employees in a may be just as religious as their b counterparts but the external manifestations of the organizational influence in a seemed to align more with their western founders than local custom. 91. t. h. von laue, t.h., the world revolution of westernization: the twentieth century in global perspective. oxford university press, new york, 1987. 92. r. falk, perceptions of islam and globalization, new straits times (malaysia) friday, june 14, 1996, p. 7. 93 . m. rodinson,, islam and capitalism. the chaucer press, suffolkj974 (translated by brian pearce). 94. bid. 163. 95. gray, r., owen, d. and k. maunders. corporate social reporting: accounting and accountability. prentice-hall international, uk, 1987, p. 204. 96. baydoun, n. and r. willett islamic corporate reports. abacus, 2000, vol. 36. no. 1, 97. m. f. abdel magid, theory of islamic banking: accounting implications, the international journal of accounting, fall 1981, pp. 79-102. 98. s. n. h. naqvi, islam, economics and society. kegan paul intemational, london and new york, 1994.. 99. as reported in naqvi (1994), islam advocates evolutionary change as opposed to revolution. he cites the case of prophet muhammad and the abolition of slavery. the prophet did not abolish slavery outright but, instead, abolished slavery in stages. he taught the followers that freeing a slave is a form of piety. the prophet himself set the example. while providing a slave for his daughter fatima, the prophet persuaded her that the housework should be done on alternate days by fatima herself. gray et a1 (1987) writing on social responsibility accounting also advocated an evolutionary approach to reporting such practices. forum, malaysia, 1990. accountancy, september, 1973. london and new york, 1994. slamic thought, herndon, virginia, 1993 (translated by yusuf tala1 de lorenzo). pp 9. 100.0. mehmet, o., islamic identity and development: studies of the islamic periphery, 101. r. r. sterling, accounting research, education and practice, journal of 102. s. n. h. naqvi, s.n.h., islam, economics and society, kegan paul intemational, 103. a. h. a. sulayman, a.h.a,. crisis in the muslim mind, intemational institute of i key: cord-0059284-izskdmw6 authors: sprague, jeb title: the caribbean and global capitalism: five strategic traits date: 2020-05-15 journal: challenges of globalization and prospects for an inter-civilizational world order doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-44058-9_43 sha: 8278942b045510b1b6c447ee0dc5b537cd57bedc doc_id: 59284 cord_uid: izskdmw6 once the slave plantation outposts of european colonialism, then a domain of u.s. imperialism, over recent decades the caribbean has become engulfed in novel forms of accumulation and social relations. this paper focuses on the caribbean region’s contradictory integration into the globalization phase of world capitalism. as dominant groups facilitate new accumulation networks, workers have been compelled to incorporate their labor power into transnational value chains. markets once segmented by national economies are fragmenting and becoming functionally integrated across borders. in this paper, i outline five strategic traits unfolding across the region: (1) the rise of a transnational financial system into which caribbean society has become integrated, (2) the envelopment of the region by transnational production networks, (3) the marginalization, flexibilization and precarization of negatively racialized and gendered workers in relation to capitalist globalization, (4) the emergence of transnationally oriented state elites across the caribbean alongside the restructuring of u.s. domination, and (5) new subcontractor networks through which local business groups deepen their transnational integration. a tenuous political economic process entwined with upheavals from below, and socio-economic and environmental crises, it occurs alongside a revamping of consent formation and various coercive forms of domination. approach, represented by scholars such as hoogvelt (2001) , sklair (2002) , robinson (2004 ), and watson (2015 . this approach posits that over the last three to four decades, through the rise of transnational corporations (tncs) and globalized forms of accumulation, there have occurred fundamental changes to social relations. people across the planet have been compelled to integrate their labor power into transnational networks of accumulation (through banking, the goods they buy, their jobs, mortgages, and so on). while experiencing different histories than metropole societies, people in post-colonial nations have also become subsumed by global/transnational capitalism. this gcs approach in many ways updates and builds upon the world systems approach (wallerstein 1979; arrighi 1994) . world systems' scholars have provided a very useful paradigm for thinking critically about the unevenness of the interstate system over the centuries. world systems' scholars have helped us to understand how different core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral nation states have developed (or what they describe as having become underdeveloped). they have helped us to think about how different societal systems have been reproduced over the millennia (chase-dunn and lerro 2014), and how in modern history countries have become specialized in the production of particular types of goods. from this perspective, labor across the interstate system has become bunched within nations and geared toward particular industries and circuits of trade. while getting at important dynamics, in my view this proposition of world systems' scholars does not account for the deep integrative nature of transnational capitalism arising over recent decades. for transnational capitalists, the real economy is not a mass of independent national economies but rather an interconnected (global) space in which place and space form a heterogeneous unity, which approximates an open-ended totality that never reaches a simple whole. uneven and combined development remains integral to capitalism's spatial motion, with a "tendency for capital to concentrate in particular built environments" (robinson 2009, p. 74 ). yet capital accumulation (at the most general level), in my view, is often misrepresented as national economic development. far from being motivated to make the economic development of any single country its priority, the logic of capital is to enrich a handful of individuals and private institutions at the expense of nature and of the exploited, the marginalized, and gendered and negatively racialized working people. from a gcs approach the core and periphery can also denote social groups and classes through a transnational context. this helps us consider how social polarization rooted in the rising transnationalization of material relations impacts regions and nations. pools of the first world (such as high-consuming strata) now also exist in the third world, and vice versa large populations of migrants and marginalized workers live in the global north. these groups are linked in diverse ways to new transnational networks of production, finance, and consumption. even as transnational processes intensify (such as through finance, trade, entertainment, communications, and various institutions), these dynamics entwine with many local, regional and international particularities dynamics, impacting how capitalist development occurs. at historic crossroads, the caribbean has passed through different phases of capitalism-from mercantilism to national formation to international monopoly capitalism to today's transnational/global capitalism (sprague 2019a; regalado 2006; robinson 2003) . "transnational processes" differ from international processes in the sense that different components or agents jointly operate across borders, thus creating a diverse array of structural, institutional, and organizational phenomena that functionally link regions and nations globally. 1 many factors have contributed to this ongoing shift from international to transnational processes, key among them is the unprecedented technological revolution made possible by the development of the microprocessor, leading to leaps in coordinating and labor-eliminating computer technologies. this has allowed for new kinds of long distance instantaneous communications, remittance networks, global cultural and media flows, low-cost mass travel, new banking and financial activities, and so on. as an important factor, however i do not want to overemphasize technology and organizational advancements as the driving force of the changes that are occurring. first we need to look to the human role in constructing these changes. alongside the rise of transnational capitalism (or the "globalization era" of world capitalism), there have been periods of economic growth and stagnation and political tumult, the constant role of u.s. intervention, as well as a global crises like climate change and social polarization. top elites meanwhile face growing difficulties in reproducing their legitimacy and are seeking ways to offset this (alarmed by the potential political impact of social media and the rapid spread of information) (friedman 2018; blumenthal and sprague 2018; khandelwal 2018) . capitalist overaccumulation meanwhile intensifies, evidenced by risky investments in global cryptocurrencies and derivatives markets. the region also now enters a situation unprecedented in its modern history, with the region's healthcare infrastructure strained and the collapse of tourism occurring under the global coronavirus pandemic. over recent decades, with these deep changes coming about alongside rising levels of production and consumption, there has also emerged a scientific consensus on the rise of climate change with its increasingly devastating role on the planet's flora and fauna. more than half of the caribbean's coral reefs have been lost (aldred 2014) . as a tufts university report explains, "the two dozen island nations of the caribbean, and the 40 million people who live there, are in the front lines of vulnerability to climate change. hotter temperatures, sea-level rise and increased hurricane intensity threaten lives, property and livelihoods throughout the caribbean" (bueno et al. 2008) . the subsumption of the region into transnational capitalism, while allowing for improved access to goods and other advancements, exists through a form of production based on exploitation and is enmeshed in turbulent crises. what then are some of the fundamental changes taking place in the region that are representative of the rise of capitalist globalization? as the region's political economy is remolded, i argue that we see a number of strategic traits that hinge upon extreme inequality and a new kind of functional (transnational) integration across borders: (1) the emergence of a transnational financial system. (2) the formation of transnational production networks. (3) new subcontractor networks that function to integrate local and regional businesses into transnational chains. (4) a move away, by regional policymakers, from indicative development planning with an eye to national goals and to a transnational orientation and promotion of so-called "global competitiveness." this plays out in different ways, intersecting with different political authorities, yet as the u.s. remains the region's hegemon. (5) the flexibilization and precarization of labor, as the labor power of racialized and gendered workers is inserted into globalizing market relations. prior to looking at these traits in more depth and in relation to the caribbean, i want to first lay out a brief political economic history leading up to this point where there has arisen a new global historic bloc, which has at its core a new hegemonic class, the transnational capitalist class (tcc). the caribbean was the place of the first colonial expeditions and colonial institutions. it was at the center of the brutal slave plantation complex and where world capitalism's racialized class relations began in large part to take shape. but also, significantly it was also one of the first places of colonial independence and modern slave revolts. in reaction, it was the region in which the united states cuts its teeth as a nascent empire, in the shape of repeated military interventions. through the early to mid-twentieth century, in the wake of the completion of the panama canal and the rise of international monopolies, labor and independence movements were growing. in different manners, the u.s. and european colonial powers sought to manage or avert transitions to independence, and promote their interests in those parts of the region that had become independent (such as in haiti, the dominican republic, and cuba). eventually by the 1960s and 1970s much of the anglophone caribbean had achieved independence. meanwhile puerto rico and many of the french and dutch colonies (and some small remaining british outposts) came to exist in a liminal state, somewhere between self-rule and colonial holding. also over these decades, many state actors in the caribbean and latin america were attempting to develop national isi (import substitution industrialization) programs. these isi policies were meant to shield national industry from foreign competition and were envisioned as a way to manage portions of international capitalist investment, and often to secure a stake for the state in the major industries operating in the country. different such attempts were made in the 1960s and 1970s in jamaica, guyana, and in the dominican republic, just to name a few. leftist forces briefly achieved a counter-hegemonic moment in the region, from around 1979 to 1983, with socialist cuba remaining a radical beacon of revolutionary upheaval, and then joined by the left-wing sandinista and new jewel revolutions, in nicaragua and grenada. revolutionary forces in el salvador gained momentum and manley's social democratic government emerged in jamaica. this occurred at a time in which these countries could engage in trade and foreign relations with the soviet union and its allies, though by this time the u.s. and western powers had far surpassed their cold war foes in economic advancements and market penetration. in response to the renewed leftist projects in the western hemisphere, the u.s. intervened militarily, politically, and economically. u.s. forces invaded the island of grenada, engaged in a proxy death squad war in nicaragua, and facilitated paramilitary and army forces in guatemala that carried out ethnic cleansing in the country's indigenous highlands. at the same time, u.s. officials promoted the creation of new programs such as the caribbean basin initiative (cbi), which developed under the reagan administration, to help strengthen u.s. political influence as well as facilitate the growth of capitalist interests in the region. the reagan administration even promoted the exportation of christian pentecostal missionaries from the us bible belt into latin america and the caribbean as a form of counter-insurgency. rather than intervening only with force and money, the u.s. and its allies increasingly facilitated a wider variety of civil society strategies meant to build consent and construct an ideological base of support among parts of the local populations and within the region's business communities. new strategies were needed as top ruling elites sought to reconsolidate their power through institutions of the washington consensus (such as the imf and the world bank). during these closing decades of the twentieth century, there occurred a shift in the ideological terrain of many political scenes in the region. ideological differences between many of the major political parties became minimized, with u.s. policymakers and changing structural conditions playing an important role in facilitating this shift. the 1990s became a period of neoliberal expansion, with a deepening role of supranational forums and international financial institutions across the caribbean. u.s. officials and many leading local policymakers pushed for neoliberal macroeconomic adjustments such as the privatization of state enterprises, liberalization of trade and finance, and in general a shift in the balance of power away from labor and toward capital. alongside the evolving role of transnational capitalism and the various geoeconomic and geo-political tensions, always present has been corruption and opportunism, the hiding of assets in caribbean tax havens, or syphoning off of wealth from state agencies, and the corrupting influence of the narco trade. by the twenty-first century, new political challenges to the dominant order once again were inflamed. examining a number of countries in latin america, economist mark weisbrot (2001) points out how during the neoliberal period of the final decades of the twentieth century there developed a widening gap between rich and poor, as well as a decline in income for working people alongside major cuts in social spending. around the turn of the century and over the following decade, this helped a new generation of leftist and progressive forces, as weisbort observes, to gain power through elections in countries such as argentina, bolivia, brazil, ecuador, and venezuela. in the face of many difficulties, states within the alternative regional bloc known as alba (alianza bolivariana para los pueblos de nuestra america) attempted over recent years to pioneer an important anti-neoliberal developmental model, an alternative to that of the washington consensus. however, washington's brutal sanctions and hybrid warfare have greatly undermined bolivarian venezuelan (sprague 2019b) , heightening many internal problems, and weakening the alba project. while always integrated into capitalism and under intense pressure by the us empire, popular region-wide initiatives have existed. for example, the caricom campaign for colonial reparations has broad support. many officials in the region have walked a tight rope, attempting to maintain friendly relations with washington and transnational investors even as they have sought to cooperate with the leftist alba bloc (gaining valuable resources). many states in caricom, promoting the region as a zone of peace and international law, have clashes with efforts inside the organization of american states (oas) to isolate and undermine caracas (delgado 2017 ). venezuela's bolivarian revolution to be sure has suffered its own internal contradictions, alongside declining commodity prices, and under intensified u.s. and elite aggression (weisbrot 2017) . while leading to many important social investment projects, some of venezuela's foreign policy initiatives has faced pitfalls, especially as venezuelan officials-increasingly desperate-seek out any friendly partners available. the country has faced for nearly two decades a ramping up of a destabilization campaign launched by washington and its allies, making it increasingly isolated. in one of the most problematic scenarios, a large portion of the funds obtained by the government of haiti through a venezuelan petrocaribe initiative is believed to have gone into the pockets of local corrupt officials. by 2018-2019, a right-wing counteroffensive across the hemisphere was well underway. in this difficult and contradictory environment, statist fractions of transnational capital (from russia and china, for example) have proven to be one of the best options available to state actors (such as in venezuela and cuba) seeking an alternative to the washington consensus (harris 2016) . leftist political projects breaking from the washington consensus are made to feel the pain by the u.s. and its allies. by contrast most governments in the region, exhibiting only a "soft" form of sovereignty and on friendly terms with the u.s., remain deeply entrenched in their bourgeoisie political scenes in order to reproduce the status quo (beneficial especially to leading western sectors of the tcc) and to isolate as "despotic" for those political projects not going along with washington, we see emphasis on the construction of what is euphemistically advertised as "democracy" in nations around latin america and the caribbean. it should more appropriately be described as "polyarchy." polyarchy, as robinson explains, refers to …a system in which a small group actually rules, and mass participation and decisionmaking are confined to choosing leaders in elections that are carefully managed by competing elites. in the age of globalization, polyarchy is generally a more reliable political system for containing and defusing mass pressure for popular social change. but it is not just a superior mechanism of stable domination; it is also a more propitious system for managing intraelite conflict and competition, and for developing the political environment for globalized economic intercourse for which the old regimes were ill-suited. (robinson 2007) hence, in practice, "democracy" often becomes the activity of masses choosing between two or more competing elites in elections (who are oriented toward leading capitalistic interests). in many parts of the caribbean, we see that this polyarchy dynamic has been solidified over recent years (barrow-giles and joseph 2010). many of the region's major parties have come to differ little on core issues like economic development and migration (and depend on campaign contributions from local and diaspora elites). heavily funded "democracy promotion" programs conducted by agencies such as usaid, the washington d.c.-based national endowment for democracy (ned), as well as some european union and canadian institutions have been important for carrying out this agenda in the region as well (robinson 1996) . finding allies among leading wealthy families, business groups, and powerful western states, many post-colonial state policymakers now promote what harvey (1997) describes as neoliberal mechanisms for the reconsolidation of economic power in the hands of top dominant groups. this restructuring process, as gcs scholars argue, is occurring through a "progressive dismantling of autonomous or 'autocentric' national production systems and their reactivation as constituent elements of an integral world production system" (robinson 2003, p. 16) . as a heterogeneous process, this entails many different modalities from country to country. looking at the era of globalization, sociologists and political economists have studied the rise of new globally oriented ruling class groups, and what some describe as a transnational capitalist class (tcc) (sklair 2002; carroll 2010; liodakis 2010; harris 2016; murray and scott 2012; robinson and sprague 2018) . this tcc is not monolithic and is made up of different fractions such as those involved in global finance, agro-industry, tourism, and many other industries (robinson 2014; jessop and overbeek 2018) . some are more closely aligned with or entwined with particular state authorities than others. it is between some of these competing tcc fractions and their aligned states where we see some of the deepest geo-economic fissures boiling to the surface. for example, we can see ongoing disputes and competition between transnational capitalists closely aligned with the u.s. state with the more statistgeared tcc fractions in countries such as russia and china. yet, even as tension exists, and as some governing elites engage in nationalistic rhetoric or policies that are in apparent contradiction, global power elites engage in an array of joint investments and activities that require the maintenance of a "capitalist peace" (even if riven with crises). this is because to promote its hegemony over a crisis-prone global system, the tcc requires a new broad alliance of social forces, a globally oriented historic bloc (robinson 2014) . this new historic bloc (with the tcc as its hegemonic class) has been made up of major banks, transnational corporations (tncs), large global investors, transnationally oriented state managers, elite-oriented political strata, and a variety of technocrats and corporate media interests. as part of this formative process, over recent decades, contingents of many dominant national groups have peeled off, transitioning (or beginning to transition) toward a transnational orientation into this new global historic bloc. while many countervailing pressures and divisions remain, we are not going back to the late nineteenth century or to the economic world order of the second world war era, or even the early 1970s; however, many reversals and crises that might occur are part of the nodal line of history, a non-linear but forward historical motion. the role and emergence of a transnational capitalist class (harris 2016; phillips 2018; sklair 2002) , with its different fractions and allies, can be seen across the caribbean region. the cayman islands is now the chosen headquarters for over 40% of the companies listed on the hong kong stock exchange. richard branson, founder of the transnational virgin group, owns a 30-hectare island in the british virgin islands, where he hosted president obama shortly after he left office. in the bahamas, the walt disney corporation owns a private island, "castaway cay," which its cruise line uses. also in the bahamas, china's export-import bank recently provided a $2.5 billion loan to develop the baha mar resort. an iranian-born businessman, ali pascal mahvi, head of the switzerland-based m group corporation, helped develop sugar beach resort in st. lucia. in jamaica, and smaller islands such as st. maarten, hubs of chinese business people have formed, alongside major investments. meanwhile, in cuba, brazilian-based companies have largely financed a massive new cargo and manufacturing hub, managed by a singaporean firm (whitefield 2017) . numerous transnationally oriented u.s. capitalists use accounting strategies to "shift" profits to puerto rico to avoid mainland taxes. blockchain billionaires have been taking up residency in puerto rico seeking to remake the country into a "cryptocurrency utopia" (takahashi et al. 2018) . and, just shortly after the 2010 earthquake, haiti privatized the majority of its public telephone company, selling it to a vietnamese company. there is also a growing array of transnational capitalists who are citizens of caribbean nations. for example, trinidad and tobago is home to more than half a dozen billionaires, such as the sabga family, who originally migrated from syria in the early twentieth century. gustavo a. cisneros, a venezuelan-dominican national of cuban descent, of the florida-headquartered cisneros group, has a fortune estimated at over $1 billion (forbes 2018) . with financial holdings spanning the globe, he is a major shareholder in prominent spanish language media and entertainment outlets such as univision and venevisión. the wealthiest jamaican businessman, michael lee-chin, is an investor and philanthropist with dual jamaican and canadian citizenship, with an estimated worth of $1.2 billion. among numerous other holdings, he was the executive chairman of aic limited, a canadian mutual fund, and the chairman of the national commercial bank of jamaica since december 2014. haiti, often described as the poorest country in the western hemisphere-and the most unequal-is also home to a growing number of transnational capitalists. dumas siméus, originally from haiti but now living in the u.s., is a former ceo and founder of siméus foods international, and holds investments in many other companies and has powerful political connections, including within the republican party establishment in florida. global capitalist accumulation has meant immense gains for transnational capitalists and some benefits for consumerist middle strata. yet the majority of the region's population face exploitative or marginalized conditions. alongside improved access to healthcare and cheap goods, the majority of caribbean people face major crises. 6.3 million of haiti's 10 million people are unable to meet their basic needs, and 2.5 million cannot meet food needs, with just 2% of the population consuming the equivalent of $10 a day or more, according to data from the world bank (ibrd and the world bank 2014). meanwhile, a fifth of the population in jamaica lives in poverty, according to the world bank, yet, the structural reality is clearly much starker with so many people facing underemployment or very low wages alongside a lack of public infrastructure and rising costs of living. unemployment can reach higher than 40% in kingston's lowest-income neighborhoods like tivoli gardens. with the covid-19 pandemic of 2020 these are problems that have been greatly magnified, with employment plummeting. the backdrop to this extreme inequality has been the turbulent integration of a new global capitalism into the region, which has led to significant social and class transformations. (1) global finance and the remittance regime new cross-border financial flows constitute part of the process of globalization underway since the late twentieth century. we can trace parts of the history of this phenomenon to the creation of the society for worldwide interbank financial telecommunications network (swift), established in the 1970s, the interlinking of national stock markets that started in the 1980s, and the massive growth of foreign direct investment (fdi) and cross-border merger and acquisition deals over the last four decades. the caribbean has become home to some of the most successful tax havens in world history, and an important mechanism for tcc formation (van fossen 2012). in 2013, $92 billion flowed into the british virgin islands. this tiny territory pulled in more fdi than every nation in the world, except for china, russia, and the united states (miles 2014) . fdi to developing countries in the caribbean rose from $320 million in 1970 to over $6 billion in 2012, though it did face periods of stagnation. global finance not only immerses regional businesses into transnational capital flows, but also connects exploited working-class people to each other across borders via remittances and other financial networks. remittance businesses have profited tremendously by charging fees for cross-border money transfers. by controlling chains of the distribution through which income is sent, transnational companies have gained an additional means to extract value from lower-income people. western union, with its economy of scale, has come to control a significant share of the formal remittance market around the world. according to western union's tax records, the company has gone from revenues of just under $400 million in 1970 to nearly $5.5 billion in 2015 (sprague 2019a) . western union kiosks and agents are ubiquitous in the region. in jamaica, for example, western union first began operations in 1990 through a local agent, the gracekennedy group, a partnership that now accounts for approximately 50% of the island's entire remittance market. over time, other money transfer operators in jamaica followed suit. remittances help us to see the concrete manifestation of global capitalism across broad swaths of society. for instance, in the dominican republic in 1970, remittance inflow amounted to just $25 million, while, by 2013, it was valued at $4.5 billion. in jamaica and haiti over this same period, remittance inflows shot from insignificant amounts to $2.1 billion and $1.8 billion, respectively. in many rural communities and urban centers of the caribbean, it is only possible to buy the barest of essentials with the assistance of remittances sent from abroad. recent research suggests that as many as one in five households in haiti have received remittances, with each recipient family gathering an annual average of nearly $2,000. thus, these communities are often dependent on the diaspora. yet, as caribbean people become embedded within transnational remittance networks, new inequalities have emerged among community members. with these new dependencies come new contradictions. as some scholars have argued dependence on remittances can have a pacifying effect (garni and weyher 2013) ; where marginalized populations rather than organizing among themselves or putting pressure on local authorities can come to rely and wait upon small amounts of money sent from abroad. the same can be said of dependence on ngos and donor funding. pertinent here is what roy (2014) describes as the "ngo-ization of resistance," with its especially pernicious impact on resource starved movements from below. grantee, donor/aid, and ngo money holds such important sway upon so many in civil society (such as upon labor officials and business unionism that has become so dominant sprague 2008) . the role of ngos and remittances can also be said to have allowed politicians in the region to further justify withdrawing the state from its social responsibilities, claiming that remittances and aid from abroad provide sufficient cushions for lower-income populations. in haiti, where the state's role has largely receded, ngos have come to play a particularly central though exploitative role (schuller 2012) . key planks for so many people's survival thus are wrapped up-in contradictory ways-with the shifting global political economy. (2) global production and the new panoply of services throughout the late twentieth century, manufacturing and extractive industries became increasingly integrated into transnational production networks. this is shifting the very structural features of how capitalism functions in the caribbean. the establishment of a host of supranational agreements, such as the caribbean basin initiative (cbi), dominican republic-central american free trade agreement (dr-cafta), various european union and caribbean community (caricom) forums, as well as bilateral accords, has helped facilitate this process. a more conducive climate for big business in the region has been fostered through financial liberalization, the standardization of regulations, and creating new supply chain infrastructure such as with the advent of container shipping and in recent years the construction of new deep water ports. while the region has been entwined with international processes for centuries, so many linkages are now playing out through new and immediate transnational systems. deep changes in productive relations have occurred, such as in the mining industry. in the mid-twentieth century, british and u.s. companies launched modern industrial mining in guyana and jamaica, whose interests often closely aligned with the "national interests" of these nation states. in fact, the u.s. mutual security act (1951) and the point iv program (established in 1949) set the stage for decisions regarding the treatment of raw materials, such as bauxite, crude oil and their derivatives, to be seen as matters of "national security." u.s. government initiatives helped facilitate large-scale mining in the caribbean through its own companies in the 1950s and 1960s. in recent decades, however, we have seen a complete change in the makeup of both mining corporations and the industry's structural features (sprague 2015) . for instance, the transnational company uc rusal, now the world's largest aluminum producer, has begun to acquire jamaican mines in recent years. the company, with operations around the world, has headquarters in moscow, but was incorporated in the british channel islands, and is entwined with a host of transnational investors from across the world, like the u.s., china, and qatar. we can conceptualize such changes to the formation of capital as reflecting the globalization of ownership and mergers, with the rise of a tcc. changes to capitalist formation have developed in nearly all sectors of the regional economy, including telecommunications. digicel, which specializes in mobile telephone networks, has a heavy presence across the caribbean and other regions, such as oceania and central america. founded in 2001, digicel is headquartered in jamaica but is incorporated in the tax haven of bermuda. digicel's investors include a growing array of companies, ranging from private equity houses, corporations, and government firms. a number of caribbean-based investors have also provided launch costs for new digicel operations in the region, such as in barbados. in 2007, digicel sold $1.4 billion in high-yielding bonds (reuters 2007) . even the world bank has invested in digicel operations in haiti, whose majority owner is denis o'brien, an irish citizen residing in malta. after initially entering the telecom business during the early 1990s industry liberalization in ireland, his company now focuses on marketing mobile services in small countries worldwide. digicel has expanded rapidly through purchasing mobile licensing contracts from governments in the process of liberalizing their communications sectors. pre-globalization, political economists would have considered digicel's chief executives to be part of an irish or british capitalist class. but under the new regime of transnational capitalism, these businesspeople increasingly have no overriding incentive to develop their european home nations, nor interest in repatriating profits to them. in fact, they are increasingly oriented toward transnational accumulation. investors have sought to free themselves from national constraints, a goal shared by many political allies. while particular state policies may not benefit all transnational investors equally, many state policies have come to explicitly facilitate transnational capital at the expense of more locally or nationally oriented capital. policymakers from powerful state apparatuses are vitally important to this process, especially the u.s., which can intervene diplomatically, militarily, and so on. as grazia ietto-gillies explains, transnationally oriented capitalists with interests across various countries "use their economic position and clout to strengthen their ties and claims…[with] specific countr(ies) and exercise influence to secure special treatment" (sprague and ietto-gillies 2014) . a case in point is the transnational tourism corporations specializing in the caribbean, which enjoy privileged status from governments across the region and from the u.s. government. the owners and major investors of the cruise ship business are some of the wealthiest people in the world and are themselves a product of the transformations underway (sprague-silgado 2017) . the growth of social strata with disposable income for leisure activities has enriched this industry, with a significant part of the world's population having the resources to pursue entertainment and travel. the largest pools of consumerist strata exist of course in the global north, but so too there are growing middle strata groups in the post-colonial world. to serve growing tourist flows, massive walled-off resorts and an array of privatized beaches dot the region. transnational corporations (tncs) in the tourism and cruise ship business have become intertwined with the global financial system instead of with the more nationally rooted banking sectors of the past. for example, the cruise ship company carnival began to become publicly traded on the nyse in 1987, while royal caribbean went public in 1993. driving their competitors out of business or acquiring them, carnival and royal caribbean now form an oligopoly, operating around 70% of the world's cruise ships. carnival cruise lines' revenues of $1.3 billion in 1990 swelled to nearly $15.5 billion by 2013. carnival's former ceo, micky arison, in recent years was listed as one of forbes' 250 wealthiest people worldwide. importantly, while capital accumulation (and so-called development) is often misrepresented as a national economic project, over recent decades it has become increasingly clear that capital is not motivated by the aims of any single country. rather, it is focused on enriching a select handful of individuals and private institutions, regardless of nationality. seen in this light, we can understand how transnational processes allow capital to extract greater wealth from every corner of the globe, with ever less accountability to local populations. another important factor is the development of new subcontractor networks, where local capitalists become inseparable from global circuits of accumulation, integrating local and regional businesses into major tncs and globalizing financial interests. subcontracting for big construction projects and especially in post-hurricane clean ups has become a huge industry in the region, evident, for example, in the virgin islands, puerto rico, and other parts of the region following the irma and maria hurricanes of 2017. we can see so many concrete examples of how local business is linking into transnational chains through subcontracting. local owners of the banking sector in the caribbean, for example, have become part and parcel of the global financial system. across the region, local banks and remittance businesses operate as agents for transnational remittance companies. in the dominican republic, remesas vimenca operates as an agent for western union. smaller local agents exist as well, such as money corps (with offices in santo domingo), which works in collaboration with money gram, headquartered in the u.s. in haiti, sogebank, one of the country's largest banks-owned in part by a few local wealthy elites-operates its sogexpress chain as a local agent for western union. subcontractors have come to operate widely in many other sectors, such as in the cruise ship industry. for example, in many cases, they manage operations that are less profitable or require an expertise, like shops, casinos, photography, and spa services, and in turn pay sizable fees to the cruise ship companies in order to gain access to customers on the ships. tncs have become highly dependent on subcontractors, under extremely beneficial circumstances that effectively outsource much of the risk of lawsuits and consequences of direct management of employees. tncsubcontractor relations occur also within fenced-off privatized ports and markets built expressly for cruise ship tourism. whereas 30 years ago, in the incipient stage of the globalization era, tourists still shopped at local independent retailers, they now head to shore to shop at businesses contracted out by the cruise companies (sprague 2017) . in other industries as well, such as in the mining and textile industries, large tncs are employing a whole array of local, regional, and global subcontractors to carry out tasks previously done in-house. the logic of transnational capital increasingly seeps into every available crevice. locally based subcontractors have even come to advocate on behalf of these corporate interests. for instance, tour excursion providers and taxi operators have mobilized in support of the tncs to lobby local state officials (ibid.). in this way, many working people and middle strata people are drawn into the very structure of transnational capital, internalizing its logic as they are made dependent on it. (4) from indicative development to transnational engagement, and the role of the u.s. power over recent decades, caribbean policymakers of many stripes have shifted toward a transnational orientation. indeed, state elites have increasingly come to depend on transnational capital for their political survival and social reproduction. vital for this are new mechanisms to promote investor confidence, respond to crises that threaten market stability and security, and establish a level of macroeconomic policy uniformity across borders. this project unfolding under heterogenous conditions is open ended, incomplete, and crisis prone. these conditions can be seen in the history of how temporary and limited free trade agreements (such as the cbi and the lomé convention) were put in place during the 1980s, and into the twenty-first century as state officials developed increasingly all-inclusive trade agreements and supranational forums (that in fact expand beyond trade, such as in regard to copyright law) (cox 2008) . these new forums and agreements encouraging cross-border investment and transnational market penetration are not just lobbied for by capital, but are also promoted by government officials. the state itself is not disappearing, as some observers claim, but rather transforming in ways suited to this era of globalization (jayasuriya 2005) . caribbean politicians and state officials need access to capital, which is increasingly held in the hands of transnational businesspeople. at the same time, regional political actors must continue to placate domestic public opinion. this leads to a number of contradictions. political leaders are in a constant juggling act, attempting to maintain national political legitimacy, precisely while deepening practices congenial to transnational capital. even when these strategies are deleterious to the popular classes and to nature, state leaders often trumpet the creation of employment in the new sectors to bolster their legitimacy. as state officials engage in locally geared rhetoric and speak of national competition and rivalaries, at the same time many articulate interests that are tied less and less to territoriality or any local interests, but instead promote the interests of transnational capital. global industries have powerful lobbying and legal arms active in the region that seep into the state. for example, state officials, as well as national chambers of commerce and business associations seeking less cumbersome channels for production and trade, widely promote epzs. one official within jamaica's ministry of finance i interviewed explained that in addition to his government work, he was working with a group of entrepreneurs to launch an online remittance company that he hoped to pitch to silicon valley investors (sprague 2019a) . in an unhealthy pattern, the very government officials responsible for privatization of industries have regularly been rewarded with lucrative jobs in these sectors upon leaving office. yet it is not only personal enrichment and campaign donations that foster this relentless dynamic. officials have also sought to increase declining state revenues by tapping into new transnational capital flows, with mixed results. some countries, such as st. kitts and dominica, have resorted to selling citizenship, where wealthy individuals abroad, often from china or the middle east, can obtain passports allowing them to travel to more than a hundred countries (edmonds 2012; grell-brisk 2018) . state elites promoting global competitiveness have struggled with how to tap into the changing conditions, often seeking to lessen the burden on corporations while placing more of a burden on the popular classes and especially upon women workers and negatively racialized communities. many governments, for instance, have placed new fees and taxes on remittances sent by migrants home. such measures are highly unpopular, as so many depend on these remittances for their livelihoods. in a different instance, caribbean governments have largely failed to collect revenue from the tourists on cruise ships-as cruise ship tourists pay an average of just $15 to the countries where their boats land (klein 2009 ). caribbean policymakers attempted but failed to cooperate in agreeing on a common head tax in the 1990s and early 2000s, when cruise company lobbyists defeated the effort, playing the various island governments against each other. the apparent capture of the state by unaccountable interests has produced a concomitant crisis of legitimacy and deep cynicism toward party politics in the eyes of many in the region. caribbean-based ruling elites, as well as elites from other regions, are compelled to forge transnational alliances in order to have a fighting chance to reproduce themselves. while chinese state policymakers have expanded their role in the caribbean, this needs to be seen in light of the accumulation strategies and economic interests of chinese transnational capitalist fractions (harris 2016: 170-213) . while chinese capitalists expand their operations, china at the same time is vital for any multipolar developments in the region, with the economic lifeline it can provide to alternative political projects that are being undermined by washington (see for example: venezuelanalysis 2018a, b). that being said, the u.s. state is the world and regional power and is most vital for facilitating the interests of transnational capital. across the caribbean, u.s. military and security apparatuses have consistently intervened, from the post-second world war period in which there was a heightened internationalization of capital to the globalization era with the ongoing transnationalization of capitalism. in the wake of september 11, 2001, u.s. state authorities carried out a new "state of exception" with new security initiatives and a global surveillance state, and through new interventions and vast rounds of militarized accumulation (agamben 2005; robinson 2014 ). u.s. global strategy is not based on promoting peace and stability but is based on the idea that the united states is the indispensable nation, without which the world simply cannot hope to advance. in amplifying its aggression against venezuela throughout 2019-2020, the trump administration has been able to mobilize a bipartisan foreign policy consensus. this consensus is rooted in notions of full spectrum dominance and global supremacy. the us strategy is anathema to national sovereignty. in fact, the united states and its ruling strata promote capitalist globalization, consistent with the fact that capital accumulation is a global process. for instance, us policies do not just promote the interests of us capitalists, but rather benefit a variety of transnational capitalist fractions. even so, us officials feel compelled to try to "americanize". the same globalization they promote. this is largely unrealizable, for a variety of factors. us global military strategy feeds on the disorder that its officials help to produce and maintain. this is further designed to get us society to feel insecure at home and to believe that the world is naturally chaotic, needing the united states to hold things together. the strategy serves as a way to justify the pursuit of security abroad, as the necessary precondition to feel secure at home washington's bases now dot the basin-from the fourth fleet's home in florida to u.s. military deployments in colombia, to forces present in curaçao and aruba, to antigua and barbuda, to the installations in guantánamo bay in cuba, to andros island in the bahamas, and activities in panama, honduras, and el salvador (coha 2009; muñiz and vega rodríguez 2002) . in recent years, colombia, which has a large caribbean coast, has itself become a part of nato and serves as a base for rightwing plots against venezuela (feldman 2013) . whereas, some of the u.s. bases in the region are permanent larger sites, others serve as smaller flexible "lily pad" bases, where local authorities (such as in costa rica) have tried to deny their existence. most local security forces have become entwined with regional "security" efforts, especially those undertaken by washington. in the dominican republic, the country's military and border forces, financially supported by u.s. and e.u. agencies, are now mainly used as a mechanism for labor discipline and patrolling haitian migrant communities (miller 2014, pp. 177-208) . meanwhile, u.s. immigration agencies, the dea, and those forces engaged in the "war on drugs" have had an extensive role in the region over the closing decades of the twentieth century and into the twentyfirst century (paley 2014) . we must ask ourselves: what are the human costs of these policies? how else could these resources be utilized? globalization is profoundly impacting the lives of the caribbean's popular classes. the rise of tncs connects to new patterns of inter-regional migration, gendered and racialized workforce segmentation, and new strategies for disciplining labor. in the mining industry, jobs have declined alongside the use of new laboreliminating technologies. the thousands who do still work in mining in the region face new flexibilized and often precarious working conditions, in which companies utilize new monitoring technologies and quickly increase or decrease the number of employees and the hours of work, making employment less predictable and secure. we see racialized dynamics across industries, such as in mining, where managers are overwhelmingly mestizo or white, or come from nations in the global north (sprague 2015) . meanwhile, during the era of globalization many people in the region have been compelled to export their labor abroad as migrant workers in the global economy. remittance flows, the money sent from a migrant to her or his family or other relations abroad, now comprise vital revenue for the global poor; however, labor exportation and the increasing reliance on remittances also reflect the desperation and struggles to survive for lower-income people. tncs in the caribbean have also drawn upon strategies old and new to hinder labor organizing among the globalizing workforces. for instance, the cruise business relies on various means of social control and surveillance of workers-cruise lines typically hire workers from multiple countries, with different languages and backgrounds, undermining the possibility of collective action (oyogoa 2016) . even when workers overcome linguistic and cultural barriers to work together, the companies take advantage of their precarious legal and migratory status on the high seas. in one example, a cruise company solved a labor dispute by placing south korean, jamaican, and haitian room stewards (who were organizing together) onto buses at the port of miami, sending them immediately back to their countries of origin, according to research by klein (2001 klein ( /2002 . many have noted that companies operating in export-processing zones (epzs) often exploit workforces composed primarily of young women. these genderimposed hierarchies are reproduced and reconfigured to conform to the needs of transnational capitalism in these burgeoning sectors, such as among afro-caribbean women working in high-tech sweatshops in barbados (freeman 2000) . meanwhile, on cruise ships, not only are there few female ship captains, but unequal gender relations permeate the industry from top to bottom. female workers are usually responsible for "the 'frontline' work of interacting with passengers, or the 'backstage' work of cleaning cabins" (chin 2008 ). women's labor in turn is also segregated along national and racialized lines. according to christine chin (2008) , while it is common for eastern european female employees to greet and interact with passengers, lower-income and nonwhite female workers from the caribbean and elsewhere in the global south are usually tasked with the tedious, low-status duties that give the cruise ship an air of cleanliness and luxury. more broadly, gendered labor, in both productive and reproductive processes, has been at the core of devalued labor in capitalist society-seeping into ideology and so many cultural practices (bhattacharya 2017). in one example, some sex workers in the region have become part of a mobile fraction of today's globalizing proletariat, with the traveling or trafficking of women from parts of the region for sexual exploitation abroad (iom 1996) . a growing trend of regional mobility of sex work can be seen on display in costa rica, a country frequented by many well-off foreign tourists. these mobile caribbean sex workers though face a contradiction of barriers to care and rising risks of violence or contracting aids or hiv, yet alongside socio-economic opportunities not otherwise available (goldenberg, et al. 2014; maher, et al. 2014; johnson and kerrigan 2013) . industry shifts have occurred alongside a change in the kind of work being performed due to the explosive growth of subcontracting and the development of far-reaching business networks. alterations have occurred down to the very way that workers eat lunch, and in contradictory ways: decades ago in the dominican republic the mostly male workers at the pueblo viejo mine ate lunches they brought from home. instead, over recent years, the mega-subcontractor sodexo, which also caters many u.s. military bases, brings waged-almost entirely female-laborers on-site to make and distribute meals to all of the miners. a significant portion of the caribbean population faces structural marginalization and labor market exclusion. across the region, new policing strategies target these lower-income and negatively racialized people, crowded into neighborhoods such as the laventille slum in trinidad's port of spain, cité soleil in haiti, tivoli gardens in jamaica, or in dominican border towns (e.g., kerrigan 2015) . these populations are in turn compelled to seek out new means of survival. with shrinking options, if they seek employment that violates legal codes, the poor can expect the worst, suffering humiliation and repression. capital also benefits from these surplus populations as their desperate conditions pressure working people to accept low wages. powerful interests active in the region, especially u.s. policymakers, have long utilized a variety of methods to keep a lid on the restive energies of the structurally marginalized. chauvinism and conservative religious forces become a salve, where certain groups take the blame for many contradictions in society, without any clear critique of how the forces of capitalism shape those realities. in some cases, politicians facing legitimacy crises have taken advantage of these conditions by amplifying nationalist rhetoric, even promoting some "nationalist" policies in apparent contradiction with transnational capital. in other examples we see progressive and leftist forces vying for state power, recasting regional and international forms of solidarity. yet, as i have argued elsewhere, today's political economic restructuring is broadly consolidating power in the hands of a transnational bourgeoisie. many forms of domination are being revamped-from the courts of law, to militarized police, to the role of u.s. intervention and other coercive apparatuses (sprague 2018) . hegemony (the construction of consent) that functions to uphold the dominant order is being reproduced through a variety of mechanisms. these include ideology, cultural production, the role of media and information flows, and polyarchy within political scenes. the role of these mechanisms in renewing the dominant order relies on historical myths and on cultural and other established norms that have been constructed over the generations (such as the idea that it is acceptable for large swaths of humanity to live in poverty or without access to healthcare). transnational elites and their allies have become adept at exploiting the effects of major disasters, which have thrown societies and their political systems into disarray. this is nowhere more on display than in the wider caribbean. from new orleans to the small islands of the southern caribbean, we see how large investors have sought to buy up real estate in the wake of hurricanes, as naomi klein has so comprehensively demonstrated in her work (klein 2009 (klein , 2018 ; see also elie 2017). the u.s. government's indifferent and inhumane response to the devastation wrought by hurricane maria in puerto rico is sure to have profound social, economic, and political consequences for the island and perhaps the region as a whole. major components of the post-earthquake development strategy in haiti, meanwhile, have centered on drawing in global investors, as the u.s. and world bank facilitate export-processing ventures, new mining developments, and a host of undemocratically reengineered investment laws. what awaits the region in the post-corona era remains to be seen. according to major policymakers and investors, the solution to the emergencies that the region faces is to further deepen integration into the global capitalist economy. through its dialectical foundation, is this emerging global system laying the possibility for transcending the relations and processes that global capitalism has created? without the space here to consider the shifting conditions faced by subaltern, leftist, anti-imperialist, and social movement forces, it needs to be noted that these emancipatory and alternative countercurrents exist across the region. they face significant barriers toward interlinking their struggles and are under constant attack and demonization. even under difficult conditions, with the polyarchic political models that have taken hold in so many countries, there are renewed efforts to transcend and resist (watson 2015) . labor protests and ongoing grassroots and union organizing continue in the region, playing out, for instance, within epzs and mining communities. student movements and anti-corruption campaigns have gained steam, pushing back against persistent neoliberal and oligarchic political models. there have also been largescale protests against u.s. military presence, especially in puerto rico, where in recent decades, activists successfully pressured the military to shut down many of its activities, such as u.s. navy training and bombing activities in vieques (cruz soto 2018). in haiti, grassroots pressure is growing against the rebuilding of the country's brutal military apparatus and the rightist takeover of the country in the wake of the 2010 earthquake and 2004 coup d'é·tat. socialist cuba faces its own difficulties as it seeks to further integrate with the global economy, a peculiar case in the region, as novel social and political economic dynamics unleash contradictory transformations. in regards to venezuela, the global media has for nearly two decades demonized its elected government and left-wing bolivarian movement. western-based human rights groups and media outlets meanwhile say next to nothing of the harmful impact of sanctions and the strategy of economic strangulation that the u.s. and its allies have deployed against the country (emersberger 2018) . the reverberations of this desperate situation have been felt by venezuela's closest allies, such as in nicaragua, a country that has experienced growing polarization with violence breaking out between some government backers/police and some within the opposition (maté 2018) . the country's governing officials attempt to walk a contradictory line of pleasing transnational investors while maintaining a level of social spending and left rhetoric, and as they come under increasing pressure from neoconservatives in washington. while leftist, progressive, and popular political currents exist across the region, they face considerable challenges and contradictions. many have been worn down over time, been forced to make compromise after compromise, and have faced splits and opportunism. entrenched leading centers of power meanwhile have ways of reproducing themselves with seemingly endless resources, making the sustainability of any alternative project extremely difficult. the struggle of subaltern forces in a globalizing world remains the open-ended challenge of the century. as i have pointed out elsewhere (sprague 2019b) , the territorial division of the world in conjunction with growing transnational integration from above, strengthens the need to appreciate the importance for a 21st century popular front, among socialists and anti-imperialist progressive forces capable of building both international and transnational linkages. over recent decades not only have state and transnational capitalist forces recalibrated and facilitated new accumulation networks, the popular classes have been compelled to participate in these transnational value chains. we cannot separate the dynamics gripping the region from the broader transition from international to transnational capitalism. the new globalization era is novel in many ways, but it is also rooted in a practice that has been at least 500 years in the making. while the significance of the north-south divide continues in a major way, powerful transnational capitalist groups are involved in or have emerged throughout the "global south" whose interests lie in the transnational over national economies and beyond the older international models. since the closing decades of the twentieth century, the caribbean has served as a laboratory for the neoliberal "washington consensus." various mechanisms have been used to promulgate austerity policies alongside expanding tourism, non-traditional agricultural exports, export-processing zones (epzs), real estate, and other sectors that serve as platforms for integrating local productive relations with the global economy. financial activities across the region have become enmeshed with global banking interests, and business people across the region to have a fighting chance are compelled to link into global chains of accumulation. the emergence of globalizing transnational capitalism thus carries extraordinary consequences for regions around the world, including the caribbean basin. as people across the region are propelled into its clutches, they experience mounting inequality and climate change. working and marginalized communities seeking to organize and promote their own interests will need to seek out new and reworked strategies to confront these challenges. dr. jeb sprague is a research associate at the institute for research on world-systems (irows) at the university of california, riverside. he formerly taught at the university of virginia and at the university of california, santa barbara. he is the author of globalizing the caribbean: political economy, social change, and the transnational capitalist class (temple university press, 2019), paramilitarism and the assault on democracy in haiti (monthly review press, 2012), and is the editor of globalization and transnational capitalism in asia and oceania (routledge, 2016) . he is a co-founder of the network for critical studies of global capitalism. visit him at: https://sites.google.com/site/jebsprague/. notes 1. the term "transnational" has become quite popular in academic parlance and is sometimes, in my view, mistakenly used to describe processes occurring in earlier historical periods under which transnational processes were not yet present. the term is often used interchangeably with "international," ignoring how they describe fundamentally different dynamics. 2. one could argue that embryonic transnational processes occurred quantitatively in earlier times. the term "transnational" might be useful to describe some subjective dynamics occurring in earlier periods, for example, in the way that basch et al. (1993) deploy transnationalism to think about how migrants and others form subjective bonds across nations, developing a particular kind of consciousness. yet this subjective dynamics becomes all the more pronounced in recent decades as transnational objective processes begin to form. in my view, we do not see transnationalism qualitatively emerging (and continuing to heighten) until the shift in productive forces and social relations during, roughly, the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. state of exception caribbean coral reefs 'will be lost within 20 years' without protection. the guardian the long twentieth century general elections & voting in the english-speaking caribbean nations unbound: transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments and deterritorialized nation-state social reproduction theory: remapping class, recentering oppression facebook censorship of alternative media the caribbean and climate change: the costs of inaction the making of a transnational capitalist class: corporate power in the 21st century social change: globalization from the stone age to the present labor flexibilization at sea the u.s. military's presence in the greater caribbean basin: more a matter of trade strategy and ideology than drugs transnational capital, the us state and latin american trade agreements vieques rubio tells haiti, other nations to defend democracy in vote on venezuela sanctions selling citizenship in the caribbean it feels like dominica is finished': life amid the ruins left by hurricane maria. the guardian trump's economic sanctions have cost venezuela about $6bn since trouble brewing in south america: nato sets its sights on colombia #1999 gustavo cisneros & family high tech and high heels in the global economy: women, work, and pink-collar identities in the caribbean trust is collapsing in america dollars, 'free trade,' and migration: the combined forces of alienation in postwar el salvador complexities of short-term mobility for work and migration among sex workers: violence and sexual risks, barriers to care, and enhanced social and economic opportunities a brief history of neoliberalism global capitalism and the crisis of democracy globalization and the postcolonial world: the new political economy of development investing in people to fight poverty in haiti trafficking in women from the dominican republic for sexual exploitation reconstituting the global liberal order: legitimacy and regulation transnational capital and class fractions: the amsterdam school perspective reconsidered human trafficking and forced prostitution: a channel carrier of hiv transnational anti-black racism and state violence in trinidad china's latest crackdown on social media results in over 9800 accounts being blocked. the tech portal high seas, low pay: working on cruise ships. ourtimes: canada's independent labour magazine the shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism the battle for paradise: puerto rico takes on the disaster capitalists totalitarian capitalism and beyond sex work: labour, mobility, and sexual services debate: who is behind nicaragua's turmoil? the real news network top tax haven got more investment in 2013 than india and brazil: u.n. reuters border patrol nation: dispatches from the front lines of homeland security la ayuda militar como negocio: estados unidos y el caribe 1791-2001 2012. financial elites and transnational business: who rules the world? cruise ships: continuity and change in the world system drug war capitalism giants: the global power elite latin america at the crossroads: domination, crisis, popular movements, & political alternatives digicel cuts yield guidance on $1.4 bln debt-kdp. reuters promoting polyarchy: globalization, us intervention, and hegemony transnational conflicts: central america, social change, and globalization a theory of global capitalism: production, class, and state in a transnational world democracy or polyarchy? nacla beyond the theory of imperialism: global capitalism and the transnational state global capitalism and the crisis of humanity the transnational capitalist class the ngo-ization of resistance killing with kindness: haiti, international aid, and ngos globalization: capitalism and its alternatives labor, neoliberalism, and the from international to transnational mining: the industry's shifting political economy and the caribbean the caribbean cruise ship business and the emergence of a transnational capitalist class global capitalism, haiti, and the flexibilization of paramilitarism globalizing the caribbean: political economy, social change, and the transnational capitalist class washington's hybrid warfare on venezuela: multipronged intervention in an age of globalization. in futures held hostage: confronting us hybrid wars and sanctions in venezuela transnational corporations in twenty-first century capitalism: an interview with grazia ietto-gillies blockchain billionaire brock pierce on saving puerto rico, cryptocurrency games, and fighting controversy. venture beat the transnational capitalist class and tax havens. in financial elites and transnational business who rules the world? venezuela's maduro secures $5bn chinese loan & joins beijing's new silk road initiative us bars antigua visa-renewal waiver over pro-venezuela stance the capitalist world-economy 2015. globalization, sovereignty and citizenship in the caribbean imf "rescue" won't help latin america trump's sanctions make economic recovery in venezuela nearly impossible mariel is cuba's big industrial gamble. could u.s. companies be among investors? miami herald philippine mining capitalism: the changing terrains of struggle in the neoliberal mining regime alvin a. camba ► camba, a. a. (2016). philippine mining capitalism: the changing terrains of struggle in the neoliberal mining regime. aseas – austrian journal of south-east asian studies, 9(1), 69-86. this article analyzes how the mining sector and anti-mining groups compete for mining outcomes in the philippines. i argue that the transition to a neoliberal mineral regime has empowered the mining sector and weakened anti-mining groups by shifting the terrains of struggle onto the domains of state agencies and industry networks. since the neoliberal era, the mining sector has come up with two strategies. first, technologies of subjection elevate various public institutions to elect and select the processes aimed at making the mining sector accountable and sensitive to the demands of local communities. however, they often refuse or lack the capacity to intervene effectively. second, technologies of subjectivities allow a selective group of industry experts to single-handedly determine the environmental viability of mining projects. mining consultants, specialists, and scientists chosen by mining companies determine the potential environmental damage on water bodies, air pollution, and soil erosion. because of the mining capital’s access to economic and legal resources, anti-mining communities across the philippines have been forced to compete on an unequal terrain for a meaningful social dialogue and mining outcomes. keywords: mining; philippines; political economy of development; protest politics; resource conflicts  introduction the philippines, with natural resources valued at almost usd 1 trillion, ranks fifth in the world in terms of mineral resources: third in terms of gold reserves, fourth in copper, fifth in nickel, and sixth in chromite (philippine rural reconstruction movement, 2010). this article analyzes how mining sector and antimining groups compete for mining outcomes.1 even though the philippine mineral industry has occupied a central role in the economy since the beginning of the 20th century (camba, 2015), the nature of these contentions has changed during the neoliberal era. while previous works have focused on the developmental potential of the mining sector (rovillos, ramo, & corpuz, 2003; rovil1 mining outcomes pertain to many overlapping and possible scenarios but often encompass the following: whether or not communities in the mining areas – in local philippine towns called the barangay or indigenous peoples groups – are given a voice to allow mining operations, fair compensation for the destruction of livelihoods and environments, employment and services for the communities and protection from harassments and legal threats. the mining sector includes transnational and local mining companies, national government agencies, and at times local government actors. anti-mining groups consist of social movements, people’s organizations, and local communities in the mining area. aktuelle südostasienforschung  current research on southeast asia w w w .s ea s. at d o i 10 .1 47 64 /1 0. a se a s20 16 .1 -5 70 alvin a. camba  aseas 9(1) los   & tauli-corpuz, 2012; santos & zaratan, 1997), social movement mobilization against the mining sector (holden & jacobson, 2007a), state violence on anti-mining communities (holden, 2005; holden & jacobson, 2007b), the political economy of the mining sector (camba, 2015; gomez, 2012; hatcher, 2014; israel, 2010, 2011; orfenio, 2009), local mineral governance (holden, 2012; la vina, de leon, & bueta, 2012), and everyday forms of resistance against mining projects (nem singh & camba, 2016), there has been relatively little discussion on the shifting terrains of contention where disputes between the mining sector and anti-mining groups take place. i argue that the transition to a neoliberal mineral regime has empowered the mining sector and weakened the anti-mining groups by shifting the terrains of struggle from protest in the streets into the domains of state agencies and industry networks. during the colonial (1901 to 1941), national (1945 to 1964), and authoritarian (1965 to 1985) mineral regimes, anti-mining communities across the philippines resisted the state and mining capital’s imperative to incorporate mineral lands into the circuits of extraction.2 however, during the neoliberal era (1986-present), the mining sector devised two strategies to forward its economic interests. first, technologies of subjection elevate public institutions, such as the mining government bureau (mgb), the national commission for indigenous communities (ncip), and the department of environment and natural resources (denr) to elect and select the processes aimed at making mining accountable and sensitive to the demands of local communities. though some branches of these institutions want to intervene to help local communities, they often refuse or lack the capacity. second, technologies of subjectivities allow a selective group of industry experts to single-handedly determine the environmental viability of mining projects with no oversight. mining consultants, specialists, and scientists chosen by mining companies determine the potential environmental damage on water bodies, air pollution, and soil erosion. because of the mining capital’s access to economic and legal resources, anti-mining communities across the philippines have been forced to compete on an inherently unequal terrain for a meaningful social dialogue and mining outcomes. i use what aihwa ong (2006) calls “neoliberal exceptions” to refer to how states in the global south deviate from their usual practices of governing in order to become more attractive investment destinations and legitimate players in the global economy. postcolonial states transform their often inefficient and rent-seeking government agencies into capable and effective ones in order to implement neoliberal policies. these agencies become “exceptions” from conventional governing principles and administration standards across the country. as a result of these changes, protest tactics have not only been inhibited by capital-intensive mineral extraction but also hindered by institutional constraints, diminishing the effectiveness of their anti-mining mobilizations and campaign efforts. to effectively compete for mining outcomes, the opponents of mining projects need to contest the implementation of the neoliberal mining frameworks on institutional grounds: adopting the language of the state and institutions and leveraging their own capacity to conduct science. 2 i draw on selected cases of anti-mining communities and social movements from my fieldwork conducted in the philippines in 2009 and 2014. the two broad national movements include alyansa tigil mina (alliance to stop mining) and kalikasan (nature). 71philippine mining capitalism this study fosters a dialogue of political economy, political ecology, and the sociology of labor (agarwala, 2013; silver, 2003; zhang, 2015). specifically, it shows the shifts in the strategies of the mining sector and the subsequent adoption by antimining groups as they become integrated in global circuits of production and consumption (elias, 2010; nevins & peluso, 2008; ong, 2006). the neoliberal mining regime has not only invited capital to open up new lands for extraction (nevins & peluso, 2008; ong, 2006; peluso, 1992), but also generated enormous socio-ecological consequences for communities in the mining areas. as political ecology deals with the “chains of explanation to exploring marginalized communities” (peet & watts, 2004, p. 3) by situating the environmental problems in a broader context, a study of the shifting strategies of mining companies and the later adoption by anti-mining communities could further our understanding of the neoliberal restructuring of the extractive sector in the global south. i follow the tradition of global ethnography pioneered by micheal burawoy (1985, 2013) in order to understand how economic production, state strategies, and local histories constitute with, and form through, each other. numerous scholars have presented cutting edge ethnography works on labor in different parts of the world but the extractive sector has largely been overlooked (bickhmam-mendez, 2005; dreby, 2010; france, 2011; parrenas, 2015). though there are some ethnographies on mining and development (kirsch, 2014), i aim to extend an ethnographic approach towards the philippine mining industry to understand how the mining sector and anti-mining groups compete for mining outcomes since the neoliberal restructuring in 1986. a study of how new state strategies subdued resistance and how the subsequent adaptation of anti-mining communities to neoliberal restructuring has the potential to explore how people in precarious situations and informal labor conditions become more empowered social actors under particularly contentious conditions (peet & watts, 2004). i draw on selected cases of anti-mining communities and social movements from my fieldwork in 2014 conducted in the provinces of camarines norte, abra, mountain province, romblon, and bohol. through interviews with community leaders, representatives of social movements, national and local government officials, and spokespersons of transnational mining companies, i attempt to reconstruct the terrains of struggle between the mining sector and the anti-mining groups. first, i develop a theoretical framework that examines neoliberalism as an exception in the extractive sector in the global south. second, i briefly discuss the philippine mining sector prior to and during the neoliberal period. in the main section of the article, i analyze the two strategies that emerged after the shift towards a neoliberal mining regime in 1986: technologies of subjection in elevation of national state agencies and technologies of subjectivities through the power of industry experts. in both strategies, i briefly discuss how communities have adapted to the new terrain of contestation. 72 alvin a. camba  aseas 9(1) neoliberalism as an exception: subjection and subjectivities in the extractive industry david harvey (2005, 2010), one of the prominent marxist theorists in the 21st century, argues that neoliberalism was an elite-led project that successfully reversed capitalism’s profitability crisis of the 1970s. across western europe, states experienced tightening budgets, staggering economic productivity, and rising labor unrest. these conditions pushed political elites to restructure the economy around the principles of neoliberalism: privatization of state enterprises, deregulation of goods and services, and the liberalization of economic production. neoliberal elites dismantled state regulations and empowered transnational companies across the world. harvey (2006, 2010) also portrays neoliberalism as a knowledge paradigm that empowered dominant modes of governance employed by local and national governments, influencing civil society and non-state organizations, capitalizing on the ideological cleavages between labor and social movements, and most pivotally, subsuming economic and political elites into the rubrics of neoliberal ideology. however, the neoliberal restructuring of economies varies across places and economic sectors. the extractive industry, a vast, interconnected, and multi-trillion dollar heavy sector, occupies a central position in the global neoliberal restructuring of economic production. mining communities in africa, asia, and latin america have resisted mining companies (kirsch, 2014; nem singh & bourgouin, 2013; peet & watts, 2004), but the vast networks of corporations facilitate transactions between the extractive sector and commodity producers, making the mining companies relatively anonymous and invulnerable to consumer boycotts, inter-state regulatory efforts, and labor unrest (kirsch, 2014). state actors and representatives of the mining sector justified the expansion of the industry by emphasizing the need to revitalize the economy and provide employment. a more recent example of these efforts is the branding of the sector as a ‘promoter’ of sustainable development (recidoro, 2013). however, despite such investments, recent transformations in technology have weakened the employment capacity and environmental viability of the mining sector. because mining companies rely heavily on machine-heavy, capital-intensive open-pit extraction, which minimizes the use of labor (kirsch, 2014), they employ fewer permanent laborers and rely instead on contractual workers to construct infrastructure and protect them from protest politics. even though capital-intensive mining extracts more minerals, it also produces 50 times the waste and tailing vis-à-vis underground extraction (kirsch, 2014). alongside this shift towards capital-intensive mining, the world bank and the asian development bank promoted the liberalization of the formerly protected mineral sectors across the world (bridge, 2004; camba, 2015). states in the global south amended their mining codes, dismantled labor and environmental protection, and provided new institutions to expand mineral extraction (bridge, 2004). to understand the neoliberal restructuring at the local level, aihwa ong’s (1999a, 1999b, 2006) formulation of “neoliberal exceptions” has been a more useful concept than macroeconomic theories and institutional approaches. in agreement with harvey’s assessment that neoliberalism empowered the state to implement neoliberal reforms, ong examines the micro-level transformations of governance and govern73philippine mining capitalism ing fostered by the global shift towards neoliberal restructuring. specifically, ong’s framework traces and locates how neoliberalism reconfigures the relationship between the state and the people, sovereignty and territoriality, as well as power and knowledge. she argues that neoliberalism re-conceptualizes state governance as apolitical and technical, territories as commodities, and knowledge paradigms as universally applicable. ong suggests that states in the global south need to transform the exceptions in their governing practices to compete for foreign direct investments. the monopoly of violence, which is the primary repertoire of the state, may attract unwanted international scrutiny and embolden resistance movements. widespread use of state violence may also become ineffective due to the considerable costs on citizen morale, ideology, international reputation, and social order. in the philippine mining sector, these practices becomes exceptions because the mgb, ncip, and denr become efficient agencies to implement neoliberal frameworks. before restructuring, these institutions were inefficient by western standards and controlled by rent-seeking elites, but they were transformed to forward global mining interest. local, rent-seeking elites controlled mining production in the past. under neoliberal restructuring, however, they need to follow the rules of the national government and relinquish control of production to the transnational companies. in my reformulation of ong’s argument, neoliberal exceptions divert the terrains of struggle from protest in the street to state institutions and industry networks. neoliberal exceptions assemble and constitute the new state strategies of subjection and subjectivities. technologies of subjection regulate the behavior of the governed in particular matters of social and economic outcomes (ong, 2006). these technologies not only privileged the mgb, the ncip, and the denr to determine and implement the procedures aimed at making mining socially accountable, but also monopolized important decision-making on mining claims at critical junctures, bypassing and ignoring democratic procedures in favor of expediting mining permits for mining companies. furthermore, these institutions limit anti-mining groups within asymmetric decision making structures, preventing them from deploying other weapons in their repertoires. technologies of subjectivities empower industry experts chosen by mining companies to determine the environmental viability of mining projects: water pollution, energy usage, mercury pollution, and soil erosion. members of the networks – holders of particular credentials – police the boundaries of their own membership, hindering outsiders even with similarly competitive credentials from cross-checking their assessments. not only are these practices dangerous, but they also prevent accountability measures by remaining inaccessible and unintelligible to the outside. furthermore, these networks also monopolize the interpretation of particular modes of dominant knowledge paradigms to occlude other social groups with different sets of beliefs (ong, 1999b, 2006). environmental assessments neglect and do not take into account alternative forms of local and gendered knowledge (nevins & peluso, 2008; peet & watts, 2004), obscuring the concerns of indigenous communities, labor organizations, farmers, and environmental groups. technologies of subjection by state agencies minimize anti-mining resistance through the emergence of state-led consultations and official registration. technologies of subjectivities, in the form of industry networks, go hand-in-hand with the technologies of subjection, casting a cover of scientific legitimacy, accuracy, and neutrality onto the decision74 alvin a. camba  aseas 9(1) making structures of state institutions. both technologies of subjection and subjectivities enable and deny options for the mining sector and anti-mining groups. these technologies not only assume that all governed citizens are and should be liberal subjects that can decide freely, manage rationally, and survive independently, but also privilege the role of state institutions that exalts the currency of economic, social, and cultural capital. for actors to successfully impede state power and the scientific credential, movements must therefore acquire the necessary economic, social, and cultural capital. economic capital, in terms of access to law firms, information, and local officials, prefigures the outcomes of many legal cases across the world. access to social and cultural capital, such as educational attainment and scientific literacy, increases the credibility of the actors. indeed, cultural capital at many times becomes the ‘proxy’ for an empirically reflexive, careful scientific examination of processes. because of the nature of the structures and rules of these institutions and networks, local communities and resistance movements ultimately lose out as a result of the mismatch of their strategies and tactics. from the colonial to the neoliberal mining regime this section presents a critical historical overview of philippine mineral industry: late colonial (1901-1941), national developmental (1945-1964), and state authoritarianism (1965-1985). i present the historical development of philippine mining to show the key changes under the current neoliberal mineral regime (1986-present). in the colonial mineral regime, the us army ravaged the mountainous provinces of the nonhispanized philippine provinces. the northern mountain province and moro regions in mindanao were targeted because the previous colonizer, the spanish government, had never controlled them. by 1903, a colonial mineral law was passed and over five hundred foreign investors applied to explore and extract minerals and export them to the global market. in 1921, the philippines evolved as a major gold exporter, which shipped a total amount of usd 3,217,843 during that year (camba, 2015). after the great depression, the us economy needed nickel, chromium, iron, and zinc from the philippines to manufacture products and build infrastructure under the state-led new deal program. near the end of the 1930s, there were 19 large mineral infrastructures owned by major foreign mining companies and more than five hundred smaller companies that operated a thousand mines of various size. these mines directly employed approximately 75,000 laborers and hundreds of thousands of other people for supporting auxiliary work. in 1940, the philippines exported precious and gold metals worth usd 39,229,352 (camba, 2015). in the course of this expansion, hundreds of communities were dispossessed of their lands and waves of soil erosion and deforestation occurred, while philippine elites consolidated political and economic power (camba, 2015). as mining operations expanded across the country, approximately 50,000-75,000 filipinos were turned into laborers for the mining industry. this transformation expanded their power as they occupied a position at the point of production.3 protest and resistance could, at times, stop mineral-related 3 beverly silver’s (2003) forces of labor and lu zhang’s (2015) inside china’s automobile factories argue that labor’s position at the point of production empower them to resist exploitation and bargain for better conditions. 75philippine mining capitalism operations and induce conflict in these mines (camba, 2015). before world war ii, numerous rallies and strikes occurred in the major mining companies of benguet and lepanto, and at the marsman corporation, which increased the cost of labor for companies (american chamber of commerce, 1937, 1939a, 1939b; brimo, 1953, 1961). labor started to acquire more attention from the state, but the interruption of war delayed working hour regulations and other demands into the post-war period. though laborers and peasant organizations fought for different reasons, they both mobilized and campaigned against the colonial mineral regime (american chamber of commerce, 1937, 1939a, 1939b). after world war ii, during the national mining period (1945-1964), the capacity of workers to stop production by leaving their work and taking the fight to the streets had limited the mining industry’s ability to capitalize on cheap labor. the mineral industry maintained steady profits, but could not bring back the conditions of profitability from the 1930s. the philippine senate and congress mandated the industry to pay the minimum wage and threatened to impose taxes on mining licenses, corporate tax, and real estate, making the political and economic situation for mining companies more costly (sanders, 1963). as domestic business interests purchased most of the major mining companies during the 1950s, filipino-owned mining companies such as benguet, atlas, marcopper, lepanto, and philex began to export minerals mainly to japan (alyansa tigil mina, 2010; orfenio, 2009). but it was only under ferdinand marcos (1965-1986) that the state sought to extract state revenues from the mining industry and subsequently altered the rules of the game in favor of large-scale mining (lopez, 1992; orfenio, 2009). the state supported the capitalization of domestic firms and aggressively promoted mineral exploration in peripheral regions. from a passive, non-interventionist policy framework based on the colonial treaties arranged with the us, marcos shifted the mining regime towards an “active, state-led” development model in 1974. he enacted presidential decree 464, which favored established business interests that could mobilize financial resources to explore, develop, and exploit minerals. the active promotion of large-scale domestic capital, however, also meant restricting the rules of foreign ownership (e.g., a cap of 40% equity ownership in companies), thereby effectively preventing the entry of foreign mining companies (lopez, 1992). during the national and the marcos period, communities were able to strike a bargain with the state and domestic capital through the political conditions of that time. for example, the benguet mining corporation provided workers with a fair share of compensation in health benefits, education plans, and retirement packages in return for their labor and support (m. dempte baluda, geological society of the philippines, quezon city, 3 april 2010). provincial officials in benguet recognized marcos’ rule in exchange for some level of autonomy over economic production. protest politics and various strategies limited the capacity of the state and capital to expand mineral operations. the ikelahans in nueva vizcaya, for example, resisted marcos’ plans to transform the province into a giant tourist city (d. de vera, executive director, philippine association for intercultural development, quezon city, 6 june 2014). the key point is that the incorporation of workers into the developing mining economy simultaneously increased their power to protest and resist exploitation. despite the us colonial and marcos regimes’ monopoly over the use of force, the 76 alvin a. camba  aseas 9(1) need to maintain legitimacy and keep ties to the provincial elites limited the use of military violence. there were certainly human rights violations and the impunity of violence, but they were concentrated on the anti-marcos activist groups, islamic separatist movements, the new people’s army, and the oppositional political parties. the fall of marcos paved the way for neoliberal restructuring at the beginning of corazon aquino’s presidency (1986-1992). the post-marcos governments consolidated the neoliberal model in the context of political instability and economic indebtedness. in 1987, corazon aquino approved the national economic and development authority’s medium-term philippine development plan (1987-1992) that stressed the role of foreign companies in national recovery by dismantling state monopolies. furthermore, she adopted the executive order (eo) 266 – an investment omnibus code – and strengthened administrative reforms (bowie & unger, 1997). eo 266 awarded generous tax holidays, duty-free import, and tax exemption for the first five years for any foreign investment (orfenio, 2009). beyond shifting the principle of land ownership away from the traditional leasehold system, the new code regarded the state as the initial tender that would treat land as a commodity for mineral exploration and extraction. president fidel ramos (1992-1997) embraced sweeping liberal economic reforms as a way of catching up with the country’s neighboring asian tigers. in particular, he secured multilateral investment treaties and promoted privatization of public services. president gloria macapagal-arroyo (2001-2009), during her period as senator, was the principal author of the philippine mining act of 1995 (ra 7942), which became the state’s answer to foreign mining investors’ demands to reduce uncertainties in the extractive industries (orfenio, 2009; vivoda, 2008). at the same time, more progressive political reforms were implemented, for example, the recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights through the indigenous peoples rights act of 1997 and the decentralization of power towards local government units to strengthen regional autonomy especially in mineral-rich mindanao. the neoliberal restructuring transformed the power of the mining sector over anti-mining organizations through shifting the terrains of struggle from the streets to the domain of state institutions: the passive ncip, the pro-mining stance of the mgb, and the conflicting interest of the denr, as well as the power of industry experts in deciding a mining project’s environmental viability. this is discussed in the following section. technologies of subjection: elevation of state institutions to begin with, the 1995 mining act has been shown to have weak mechanisms for local communities (together with civil society organizations) to channel their grievances towards state institutions. the expansion of large-scale mining has delegated the safeguards for political consent and social acceptability to the ncip and the denr. the primary instruments of local accountability in the mining industry are the social acceptability clause for barangays aided by local governments and the process of free, prior and informed consent (fpic) for indigenous peoples groups facilitated by the ncip. more importantly, the social acceptability clause and fpic are susceptible to self-interested individuals in mining, leading to numerous allegations that both consultation processes are largely hollow (congressional staff, committee on national 77philippine mining capitalism communities, quezon city, 19 october 2013). some problems identified by critics include the arbitrary selection of barangay captains or new leaders in the indigenous communities who are supportive of large-scale mining, the numerous consultations with the communities until they acquiesce to mining, the treatment of minority support from few members of the community as majority vote or consent, and the lack of specific procedures for the fpic that subject the consent-building process to multiple and often competing interpretations (r. halip, asia indigenous peoples pact, bangkok, 12 june 2014). because of the numerous, repetitive, and arbitrary consultation procedures, multinational firms and local elites are given opportunity to exploit the social acceptability clause of the fpic process, pushing numerous communities to acquiesce to mineral industry demands. though ncip and local governments weaken the acts of protest in the streets and constitute the legitimacy of due process to determine mining outcomes, indigenous people face more inhumane kinds of historical and contemporary violence. to begin with, the mining act fails to delineate government land, ancestral domains, and protected areas, on the one hand, and appropriates land with mining potential for exploitation, on the other hand. using the absence of documentary evidence as an excuse, state agencies have weakened indigenous peoples’ claim to systematic ancestral domain, landownership, and property protection (congressional staff, committee on national communities, 19 october 2013). according to a policy paper from the samdhana institute (2011), the ncip funnelled the majority of its budget to education, health, and development projects for indigenous peoples. the main responsibilities of protecting ancestral land from outsiders, registering landownership, and systematizing ancestral land domains were ignored. around 60% of the budget went to the salaries of personnel and only 40% went to administrative expenses and programs for indigenous people. from 2006 to 2009, only 17% was channelled directly to indigenous peoples and intercultural communities, which paid for scholarships, trainings, health programs, livelihood, and legal services. instead of recognizing indigenous peoples’ legitimate right to their lands, the ncip became a container of poverty. furthermore, the mining companies pay for the fpic procedures themselves, which undermines the ncip’s capacity to facilitate fpic. if mining companies supplement the income of underpaid ncip officials to conduct the fpic process, the process becomes a conflict of interest that erodes the legitimacy of the ncip and the philippine government (samdhana institute, 2011). there is currently no single standard for financial transparency regarding the transfer of finances from the mining companies to the ncip, making it difficult for anti-mining groups to acquire information and documentary evidence regarding the unfair situation. the refusal of indigenous people to participate in the preparation of ncip’s budget exacerbates the situation, accentuating the institutional rigidities of state agencies and the marginalized political participation of those in the peripheries. while the budget was channelled mainly to salaries, the overall state budget allocation for the ncip was arguably inadequate. ncip officials bemoan their inability to do their duties properly because of the lack of financial support from the government. in 2004, ncip provincial officers were paid around usd 210 every month. for instance, attorney jake dumala, an ncip officer in the southern province of davao del norte, said that they end up using their own vehicles, salaries, and time while 78 alvin a. camba  aseas 9(1) their support for indigenous groups “is being hampered by their meagre budget” (alama, 2004). dumala appealed for a small increase “for travel allowances to better serve our lumad brothers, an ip group in the south, who are almost living in far-flung areas” (alama, 2004), but the philippine government did not give them any financial redress. in 2015, the results of the ncip’s failure to protect indigenous people in davao del norte became clear. the lumads, the major indigenous group in the province, started to evacuate their lands due to the fighting between leftist groups and the philippine military. the clashes were reportedly over potential mineral lands that mining companies wanted to open up. another research conducted by academics from the university of the philippines baguio (upb) complements the samdhana study. during the four-day gathering of indigenous peoples in 2011, the up baguio academics suggested that the ncip’s budget management and internal financial mechanisms have been faulty, inefficient, and wasteful (sinumlag, 2011). they showed that the ncip has received donations from international donors and direct funding from the department of budget and management, but has had “unliquidated cash advances worth p 36.6 million, as well as an additional p 9.5 million” since 1997 (sinumlag, 2011). the research also indicated that the ncip has been significantly quicker to grant fpic approval for mining companies than to issue certificates of ancestral domain titles (cadt) and ancestral domain sustainable development and protection plans (adsdpp). indigenous people need to have titles registered in ncip for the legal protection of their lands. since the formation of the ncip in 1997, it has only granted a total of 159 cadt and 89 adsdpp in contrast to 312 fpic approvals (sinumlag, 2011). indigenous people who failed to register their lands with the ncip (or where the ncip was too slow) were not given the right to participate in the fpic process, which led to expedited mineral applications, exploratory mineral testing, and numerous other operations (congressional staff, committee on national communities, 19 october 2013). my own fieldwork shows that the fpic process gives the leader or the council of the indigenous peoples the freedom to choose what kind of operation to allow and under which conditions (alyansa tigil mina, 2010; national commission on indigenous people [ncip], 2012; philippine congress, 2013). however, questions of leadership and location of ancestral domains remained vague. the law not only prefigures a liberal logic, reducing people to individual subjects with ‘free’ choices like consumers in markets, but also violently abstracts the historically tenuous experience of the autonomous indigenous peoples from the ‘sin’ of philippine nation state formation. however, the inadequacy of the ncip does not come as a surprise. from 1997 until 2011, the ncip was under the office of the department of environment and natural resources. what is striking is that the ministry in charge of protecting the environment is also the state agency responsible for signing and approving mining leases. in other words, the neoliberal policy framework brought together irreconcilable objectives within a weak state that created frictions within the bureaucracy. in 2011, the ncip was finally transferred to the office of the president and mandated to formulate new fpic guidelines (ncip, 2012). some state actors have said that in the first 10 years of the ncip, the state barely gave support to fund the fpic. for example, a local government official in cotabato city reported that the ncip only had a staff of four people and an annual budget of usd 3,000 for traveling to remote 79philippine mining capitalism areas, supporting indigenous peoples’ livelihoods, and conducting counter studies (congressional staff, committee on national communities, 19 october 2013). many supporters of the anti-mining groups know of the ncip’s historical inability to protect indigenous peoples. in a privilege speech given to the 15th philippine congress, representative teddy brawner baguilat (2011) said: the government’s obsession for ‘mining at all costs’ stems from the perpetuation of executive order no. 270-a, issued on january 2004, which provided for guiding principles for the revitalization of the mining industry. this eo has led government agencies to violate indigenous peoples’ right to free prior and informed consent recognized in the ipra [indigenous peoples rights act] but undermined by none other than the national commission on indigenous peoples (ncip) with their issuance and implementation of the 2006 ncip guidelines on fpic, which has been criticized by indigenous peoples’ leaders and their support groups, more favourable to mining corporations and violative of the right to self-determination of the indigenous peoples. . . . another observed cause of conflict is the flawed or defective implementation of the free prior and informed consent requirement for indigenous peoples. in many cases, regulating agencies either bypass this requirement or the implementing agency in connivance with companies manipulated the acquisition of consent of the affected communities. at the end of the speech, baguilat (2011) called on “president simeon benigno aquino iii to immediately issue an executive order calling for the moratorium while we are in the process of improving our mining policies”. in sum, technologies of subjection elevated the ncip and the denr to elect and select processes to protect barangays and indigenous people by (1) disengaging from social conflict; (2) abetting the mining sector over indigenous people and barangays; and (3) denying state support to effectively protect indigenous peoples from outside actors. technologies of subjectivities: the rise of industry experts technologies of subjectivities empower industry experts and constrain public participation in emerging scientific networks. to begin with, the 1995 mining act requires the denr to implement pre-extraction monitoring measures (environmental work program, environmental compliance certificate, environmental protection and enhancement program). mining companies also need to submit post-extraction measures (final rehabilitation and decommissioning plan). apart from these mining specific policies, several other laws (e.g., the national integrated protected areas act or the wildfire resource conservation act) reinforce environmental protection (rovillos et al., 2003). after the environmental impact assessment (eia), mining companies need to acquire an environmental compliance certificate from the denr. the environmental management bureau of the denr together with the mine environmental protection and enhancement office review proposals and create an environmental assessment review committee to conduct scheduled inspections, public hearings, and open house testing of environmental impacts. within 120 days, the 80 alvin a. camba  aseas 9(1) proponents of the project need to submit the eia to the environmental management bureau. unless explicitly rejected, the proposal is considered accepted. after submitting the eia, the provincial environmental board of local governments needs to verify the study through various standards. pro-mining local governments delegate their members to the provincial board, keeping anti-mining groups away from important positions of influence. membership in the board requires political connections, economic resources, and social capital in the provinces. in case indigenous peoples protest against the result of the eia, their grievances go through the ncip’s regional heading office instead of the indigenous peoples’ own socio-political systems. criticism on the procedures of the eia has been widely voiced. the requirements of public information have been narrowed, the processing timeframes reduced, and the decision-making concentrated to the environmental management bureau (rovillos et al., 2003). mining companies conduct the eia themselves by contracting industry experts. since the mining company pays for the eia, the contactor-payee relationship spawns doubt on the authenticity, sincerity, and neutrality of the study. industry experts rely on the mining companies to pay for their services, producing a perverse incentive to present a rosy picture of the mining project and erode the findings of the eia (congressional staff, committee on national communities, 19 october 2013). with civil society organizations and communities unable to participate in adjudicating and externally verifying the findings, the eia becomes an ineffective tool to protect barangays and indigenous peoples (m. diego, mangyan taga-bukid, atsmata indigenous group, quezon city, 6 june 2014). the dynamics amongst industry experts, juridical procedures, and the mining companies constrain the opposition of indigenous peoples and social movements. ncip’s regional offices and the provincial regional courts act as the institutional mechanisms for hearing indigenous peoples’ grievances. the regional offices work like a regular trial court and quickly facilitate cases and favor those who have political connections to the local governments (congressional staff, committee on national communities, 19 october 2013). in some cases, members of the local government bodies hunger for the potential foreign direct investments in the mining sector, believing in credentials of industry experts and deferring to their understanding of the soil, wind patterns, water bodies, and many others (former local government unit staff, bayombong, 26 june 2014). both courts subsequently dismissed alternative governing standards, such as respect for ancestral domains and indigenous peoples’ livelihoods, as backward, superstitious, and ‘anti-development’. they lack the capacity to conduct their own independent studies and externally check the findings of industry experts, constraining the effectiveness of the procedures (d. de vera, 6 june 2014). even when trials take place, they require year-long attendance in the courts of the provincial capital (d. de vera, 6 june 2014). while mining companies can access expensive law firms that have a firm grip on the legal system of the land and the patronage networks across the country, civil society organizations, local communities, and indigenous groups need to pool their financial and social resources together in order to attend the trials (d. de vera, 6 june 2014). since many of these people rely on cultivating their land for livelihood, they gruelingly need to adjust their schedule to accommodate the court trials (t. fernando daing, indigenous group leader, quezon city, 18 june 2014). it may be convenient for mining company officials to drive to 81philippine mining capitalism the courthouse from their hotels but it takes half a day for indigenous peoples’ leaders to walk from their lands to the provincial capital (d. de vera, 6 june 2014). time taken away from farming and put into court attendance disrupts livelihoods and the already limited material reproduction of indigenous peoples. the courts neglect the asymmetric economic and political conditions between indigenous peoples and mining companies, ostensibly treating them as equal before the law. in the province of nueva vizcaya, the regional branch of the mines and geosciences bureau approved a mineral exploration permit prior to the company’s fpic process. titan mining corporation, the mining applicant, at that time, bypassed the fpic process with the ikelahans, the main indigenous group in the province (former local government unit staff, 26 june 2014). the nueva vizcaya branch of the bureau ostensibly gave the final permit even if it did not have the power to do so because of the size of the potential mining area. instead of scrutinizing the application, the bureau’s main office in manila quickly approved the permit in less than 30 days (d. de vera, 6 june 2014). other concerns such as the ancestral domain, community beliefs, and livelihood concerns were deemed irrelevant to national development (m. diego, 6 june 2014). the ikelahans were unable to present a viable environmental study to the bureau to rebut the findings of titan mining corporation (d. de vera, 6 june 2014). the tampakan mining project in south cotabato – with usd 5.8 billion the biggest investment in the philippine mining sector – serves as another example. the project exists in a quad-boundary with three other provinces: agusan del sur, davao del sur, and sultan kudarat. according to local government unit staff, smi-xstrata, the mining applicant, submitted a tampered and incomplete eia, which lacked geographic simulation information of the river basins of the surrounding provinces. regardless of the incomplete and manipulated data of the report, the ‘expertise’ and credentials of the industry experts railroaded the mining application through the provincial environmental board, the mines and geosciences bureau, and the department of environment and natural resources (former local government unit staff, 26 june 2014). in a meeting facilitated by the state, smi-xstrata used the impeccable scientific studies and the projected monetary gain to justify the project. exclusive membership in the industry networks and the state support enabled the mining companies to manufacture studies on the environmental viability of their operations. technologies of subjectivities enabled them to bypass the ancestral knowledge of the indigenous groups that was framed as suppositious and premodern. though technologies of subjection and subjectivities weaken opposition, antimining groups began to adapt their strategies to limit the mining sector’s growing power (f. sevilla, policy and research officer, alyansa tigil mina, quezon city, 19 june 2014). groups started to build broad, multi-sectoral alliances amongst interested parties. the ikelahans not only protested in the streets in manila and contested the legality of the mining application in the court, but also contacted legislators and other social movements to pressure relevant state institutions.4 the ikelahans contacted the local parliamentary representatives and key allies in congress that led to 4 after their experience of protesting against the incursions of the marcos regime, descendants of the ikelahans moved to white-collar careers in law and medicine in the cities. some of their members acquired their own networks to contest the titan mining corporation (d. de vera, 6 june 2014). 82 alvin a. camba  aseas 9(1) several interventions from congressional representatives, which pressured the denr to retract the mining application due to shaky conditions. subsequently, and in a possible act of vengeance, titan mining corporation sued the ikelahan leaders for libel and economic sabotage that led to year-long and costly meetings for the indigenous peoples: legal harassments, court hearings, meetings in the cities, and arbitrations (former local government unit staff, 26 june 2014). furthermore, anti-mining groups started to expand their capacity to conduct studies to counter the industry experts of mining companies. despite political support from the former president gloria macapagal’s administration to the tampakan project, a provincial referendum was organized by the national government, local governments, and civil society members to vote on mineral extraction. social movements and peoples’ organizations believed that the mining firm and the national government deliberately presented an incomplete, manipulated, and biased scientific assessment. their suspicions were exacerbated by the government’s refusal to make the controversial eia available to anti-mining groups (d. de vera, 6 june 2014). through the support of local people’s organizations, various indigenous peoples and national organizations such as alyansa tigil mina (atm) and the philippine association for intercultural development (pafid), conducted a counter assessment of the project. pafid’s study, supported by cambridge-based geologists, challenged the study made by sdmi-tampakan and proved that sdmi-xtrata’s study did not take the implications on the river basins of the surrounding provinces into account. the results of the provincial referendum united initially undecided local government officials, local barangays and indigenous peoples in four provinces to take a firm anti-mining position (d. arias, campaign and advocacy officer, alyansa tigil mina, quezon city, 19 june 2014). hence, the antimining vote won through the referendum culminated in one of the most controversial moratorium in the country (p. macling malayao, spokesperson, kalipunan ng mga katutubong mamayan ng pilipinas, quezon city, 15 june 2014). australian investors of the tampakan mining project, industry experts from the denr and mgb, chamber of mines, and national government officials were disappointed but had to relent to the referendum’s decision. hence, anti-mining groups have started to use the language of science against industry experts of the mining companies. conclusion using ong’s concept of neoliberal exceptions, this article discussed the changing terrains of struggle in contemporary philippine mining. i argued that the transition to a neoliberal mineral regime has empowered the mining sector and weakened the anti-mining groups through two new governing strategies. first, technologies of subjection have elevated state mining institutions to choose and put into effect the processes aimed at addressing the demands of local communities. second, technologies of subjectivities have privileged a selected group of industry experts to narrowly arbitrate the environmental viability of mining projects with little external review. because of the mining capital’s access to economic and legal resources, anti-mining communities across the philippines have been forced to compete on an unequal terrain for a meaningful social dialogue and mining outcomes. with allies in state institutions and science at their behest, the subjection of the institutions and subjectivi83philippine mining capitalism ties of science become seemingly incontestable spaces for the opponents of mining. the mining sector has been able to marginalize community concerns such as ancestral domains, social justice, and community subjectivities through the monopoly of, and skewed access to, the power of state institutions and the credentials of industry experts. there are three concrete findings for the philippines. first, state policies should consider expanding civil society, social movement, and community participation in state mining institutions. communities faced abusive policy decisions from the mining sector and state institutions as a result of the lack of checks and safeguards. successful mining cases in chile, brazil, and indonesia were built on state-society compromises. specifically, civil society organizations occupied important roles in the mining sectors of these states. second, anti-mining communities should continue to invest in capacity to counter the mining sector in their terrain: state institutions and scientific assessments. the bigger danger to communities is the incomprehensible nature of the mining sector’s new weapons within the neoliberal era. movements across the world must continue to shift their strategies alongside the continuing transformation of global capitalism. and last, postcolonial development in the philippines must be inclusive and just for those who have been abandoned by the state for decades. indigenous peoples have been the most abused and neglected group from the spanish regime until today. it is not fair for the mining sector and the state to transform their governing strategies just for the sake of competitive advantage. a just and democratic mining sector has to consider alternative and historically rooted governing standards.  references agarwala, r. 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(2003). forces of labor: workers’ movements and globalization since 1870. cambridge: cambridge university press. sinumlag, a. (2011). reform the ncip, said indigenous people’s groups. bulatlat news. retrieved from http://bulatlat.com/main/2011/08/23/reform-the-ncip-said-indigenous-peoples-groups/ samdhana institute. (2011). tracking national commitments for the protection of indigenous peoples rights in the budget. a study of the national budget of the national commission on indigenous peoples (ncip). cagayan de oro city: the samdhana institute. vivoda, v. (2008). assessment of the governance performance of the regulatory regime governing foreign mining investment in the philippines. minerals & energy – raw materials report, 23(3), 127-143. zhang, l. (2015). inside china’s automobile factories. the politics of labor and workers’ resistance. cambridge: cambridge university press. about the author alvin a. camba is a doctoral student in sociology at johns hopkins university. combining detailed ethnographic fieldwork and macro-comparative methods, he focuses on analyzing historical mechanisms that embed states in and toward particular development pathways within the global circuits of capital. at the moment, he focuses on chinese investments in southeast asia to make sense of the region’s emerging development dynamics. ► contact: aacamba@gmail.com 86 alvin a. camba  aseas 9(1) acknowledgements fieldwork for this article was conducted prior to the matriculation at johns hopkins university. i thank shirley m. lung for her support and comments during the writing process. i also appreciate the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful critique and suggestions. for facilitating access to interviews with local organizations, community leaders, government officials, and anti-mining activists, i would like to thank members of alyansa tigil mina (atm) coalition, pafid (philippine association for intercultural development), and kalikasan (nature). any naiveties, gaps, or errors in the argument and the research are mine alone. key: cord-0059145-ycsyymr1 authors: marques, luiz title: the illusion of a sustainable capitalism date: 2020-04-29 journal: capitalism and environmental collapse doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-47527-7_13 sha: f73217142d85f875662c4d2f77b5d9982dc52ffe doc_id: 59145 cord_uid: ycsyymr1 capitalism’s environmental unsustainability is demonstrated not only through the arguments of kenneth boulding (the economics of the coming spaceship earth. in jarrett, h (ed.), environmental quality in a growing economy. johns hopkins university press, baltimore, 1966, pp. 3–14) and nicholas georgescu-roegen (the entropy law and the economic process. havard university press, 1971) but also by herman daly’s impossibility theorem (sustainable growth. an impossibility theorem in daly, he, townsend, k (eds.). valuing the earth: economics, ecology, ethics. mit press, cambridge, ma, 1993, pp. 267–285): an economy based on capital’s expanded reproduction in a limited environment occupies a position in economic theory that is the equivalent of the fundamental impossibilities of physics. this chapter examines the two impossibilities of implementing regulatory frameworks capable of containing the tendency toward collapse within the realm of globalized capitalism: (1) the self-regulation of economic agents induced by the presence of mechanisms emanating from the market itself and (2) regulation induced not only by market mechanisms but also by agreements negotiated between businesses, the state, and civil society. the idea of self-regulation does not apply to capitalism because markets are not ruled by the principle of homeostasis. moreover, capitalism cannot price its action on ecosystems because ecosystems are broader in space and time than the investment/profit cycle. no matter how corporate leaders want to improve their corporations’ ethical conduct, they cannot afford to subordinate their corporate goals to the environmental imperative. analysis of the second impossibility mentioned above (regulation induced by agreements negotiated between businesses, the state, and civil society) touches on the punctus dolens of all the problems discussed in this chapter and even in this book: the impossibility of this second route stems from the lack of parity between the parties, a necessary condition for an effective negotiation. anti-capitalist manifesto, but from the stern review. the economics of climate change authored by lord nicholas stern, former president of the british academy, former chief economist and senior vice-president of the world bank, second permanent secretary to her majesty treasury, and professor at the london school of economics and the collège de france. if there is someone who no longer has illusions about the compatibility between capitalism and any concept of environmental sustainability, it is yvo de boer, former executive secretary of the united nations framework convention on climate change (unfccc), who resigned after the failure of the 15th convention of the parties (cop15) in copenhagen in 2009. a diplomat well versed in the intricacies of international climate negotiations and professionally attached to the weight of words, he clarified his position in 2013 in an interview with bloomberg business: "the only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2° [c] goal is to shut down the whole global economy" (jung et al. 2015) . not too long ago, this statement could summarize the content of this chapter. today, meeting the 2 °c target no longer depends on a deal. it has become a socio-physical impossibility, as discussed in chap. 7. what is now on the agenda is to divert ourselves from our current trajectory which is leading us to an average global warming of over 2 °c in the second quarter of the century and over 3 °c probably in the third quarter of the century. we will repeat: any average global warming above 3 °c is considered "catastrophic" (xu and ramanathan 2017) , as it will lead to low latitudes becoming uninhabitable during the summer, the frequent flooding of urban infrastructure in coastal cities, and drastic decreases in agricultural productivity. it will also probably trigger even greater warming (>5 °c) which will have unfathomable impacts. to minimize the destruction to the earth system resulting from the predatory dynamics of global capitalism, regulatory frameworks have been implemented on a "deregulated" capitalism. the adjective is in quotation marks to underline its redundancy. in other words, would an economy operating within ecological frameworks still be capitalist? one might ask a more modest question: would an economy still be capitalist if it is capable of functioning under the ten key recommendations for a global action plan proposed in 2014 by lord nicholas stern and felipe calderón in their report, better growth better climate? the first part of this book presents ample evidence that capitalism is incompatible with the adoption of these ten proposals, each of which equates to an admission of capitalism's congenital environmental unsustainability: (1) "accelerate low-carbon transformation by integrating climate into core economic decision-making processes." in their investment decisions, corporations will not consider the impact of global warming whenever that impact conflicts with the raison d'être of the investment: the expectation of profitability in the shortest time possible. as long as the investment decision is an inalienable legal prerogative of those in charge of companies (private or state-controlled) and as long as this decision does not emanate from a democratic authority that is guided by science, this first recommendation will be ignored. this is a trivial observation based on overwhelming historical experience, and it is quite puzzling that it would still be necessary to mention it in the twenty-first century. agreement. all major economies of the planet failed to answer. the complete failure of the cop25 in madrid to cope with the climate emergency has once again shown that james hansen was right when he declared in 2015: "promises like paris don't mean much, it's wishful thinking. it's a hoax that governments have played on us since the 1990s." what still needs to be understood in order to conclude that the paris agreement is doomed to the same pathetic fate as the kyoto protocol? (3) "phase out subsidies for fossil fuels and agricultural inputs, and incentives for urban sprawl." in 2009, the g20 issued a solemn statement: "we pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies." in 2015, the g20 countries spent us$ 452 billion on direct subsidies to fossil fuels (bast et al. 2015) , and there was no mention of this in the paris agreement. an imf working paper (coady et al. 2019 ) provides estimates of direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies (defined as the gap between existing and efficient prices for 191 countries): "globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion (6.3% of global gdp) in 2015 and are projected at $5.2 trillion (6.5% of gdp) in 2017." the climate accountability institute keeps reporting on the responsibility of the big polluters. as already pointed out in the introduction, 63% of global emissions occurring between 1751 and 2010 originated from the activities of 90 corporations in the fossil fuel and cement industries. just 100 corporations have been responsible for 71% of global emissions since 1988, and just 20 of them are directly linked to more than 33% of all ghg emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution. these corporations are not paying the huge costs imposed on our societies by the burning of fossil fuels. we are. as stated by lord nicholas stern, the imf estimate "shatters the myth that fossil fuels are cheap" (carrington 2015) . in 2016, g7 leaders again urged all countries to phase out fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. three years later, no significant step has been taken in this direction. and this has not happened for the same reason as always, one that everyone is aware of: seven out of the top ten corporations in the world by revenue (according to the 2018 fortune global 500 list) are fossil fuel industries or are umbilically linked to them. together, the revenues of these seven corporations amount to almost two trillion dollars. not only do they control states, but the two largest of them-sinopec group and china national petroleum-are state-owned enterprises and are an essential part of the chinese state's power strategies. (4) "introduce strong, predictable carbon prices as part of good fiscal reform and good business practice." with their unwavering faith in the market, economists continue to believe in the carbon pricing myth, as if the energy transition-at the required scale and speed-could be induced through pricing mechanisms. actually, in 2019, more than 25 national or subnational carbon tax systems have already been implemented or are scheduled to be implemented around the world. so far, there has been no observed impact of these initiatives on fossil fuel consumption. and even as carbon tax systems become more widespread and more aggressive, the market will always be able to adapt to them without significantly reducing fossil fuel consumption, simply because these fuels are not commodities like any other. as seen in chap. 5 ( fig. 5.1 ), the huge variations in oil price between 1990 and 2019 had very little impact on the almost constant increase in oil consumption. (5) "substantially reduce capital costs for low-carbon infrastructure investments." these costs have been reduced without influencing the growth of fossil fuel consumption, as seen above. all projections indicate that there will be no significant reduction in gas, oil, and coal consumption in the discernible future. (6) "scale up innovation in key low-carbon and climate resilient technologies, tripling public investment in clean energy r&d and removing barriers to entrepreneurship and creativity." with the exception, perhaps, of china and india, there is no global expectation of tripling the allocation of resources for such research. instead, we see a slight reduction in these investments on a global scale between 2011 and 2017, as shown in fig. 13 .1. (7) "make connected and compact cities the preferred form of urban development, by encouraging better managed urban growth and prioritising investments in efficient and safe mass transit systems." as seen in chap. 9, urban sprawl and chaos increase with the proliferation of carmakers, fossil and cement industries, intensive agriculture, urban solid waste, and other unprocessed waste, particularly in so-called "developing" countries where gigantic conurbations tend to be concentrated. 2). deforestation of tropical forests will cease simply because by 2030, as seen in chap. 2, many of them will have been wiped out. (9) "restore at least 500 million hectares of lost or degraded forests and agricultural lands by 2030." reforestation has been limited to little more than planting a few-usually exotic-species, ones that are considered inputs for industries. in addition, soils continue to be degraded and will remain so, as long as we maintain the two paradigms on which agribusiness is based on: (a) a commodity agriculture that is toxic-intensive and strongly export-oriented, with food self-sufficiency decreasing in a growing number of countries, and (b) a diet based on carnivorism, which is evidently unsustainable. (10) "accelerate the shift away from polluting coal-fired power generation, phasing out new unabated coal plants in developed economies immediately and in middle-income countries by 2025." as seen in chap. 6, coal consumption rose again in 2017 after reaching a plateau and even a slight decrease over the previous 3 years. there are no signs of a significant, much less accelerated, decrease in the burning of coal for power generation on a global scale. moreover, if the opening of hundreds of thousands of hydraulic fracturing oil and gas wells in more than 20 us states since 2005 has led to a reduction in coal use, it has not resulted in lower atmospheric ghg emissions. in chap. 5, we refer to the work of jeff tollefson and colleagues ("methane leaks erode green credentials of natural gas") published in 2013 in nature. obviously, evoking historical evidence would not be enough to demonstrate the structural unsustainability of capitalism, since such a system could change, as lord nicholas stern and felipe calderón might argue, this being the very raison d'être of their document. it turns out, though, that globalized capitalism cannot change. more than a lesson from history, it is the logic of accumulation that can demonstrate the unfeasibility of the ten recommendations proposed in this document. the regulatory frameworks that the authors dream of are not within the aims of global capitalism and will never occupy a central position in its agenda. this chapter, thus, examines the two impossibilities of implementing regulatory frameworks capable of containing the tendency toward collapse within the realm of globalized capitalism: (1) the self-regulation of economic agents induced by the presence of mechanisms that emanate from the market itself (2) regulation induced not only by market mechanisms but by agreements negotiated between businesses, the state, and civil society the idea of self-regulation does not apply to capitalism. it is not ruled by the principle of homeostasis, pertaining to the dynamics of optimizing the internal stability of an organism or system. maurice brown (1988) notes that this idea goes back to adam smith's "faith in the homeostatic properties of a perfectly competitive market economy." even today, the belief that capitalism is self-regulating has the value of a maxim, being accepted by many scholars. an example of the use of this analogy comparing the mechanisms of the capitalist market to that of a living organism is found in eduardo giannetti (2013): [the market] "has a functioning logic equipped with surprising properties from the standpoint of productive and allocative efficiency. it is a homeostatic system governed by negative feedback. every time the system becomes disturbed, it seeks to return to equilibrium." the analogy between the market mechanism and that of a homeostatic system is a mistake. since claude bernard's idea of milieu intérieur or the internal environment (canguilhem 1968 (canguilhem /1983 2 and walter cannon's notion of homeostasis, we know that any influence disturbing the balance (deficits or excesses) of the vital functions in an organism or organic system triggers regulatory and compensatory activities that seek to neutralize this influence, resulting in the recovery of balance or, more precisely, in a new balance (allostasis). the maintenance of this efficient stability of the internal environment in its constant exchanges with the external environment is what guides the activity of every organism. even though it is dependent on the external environment, even though it is, therefore, an "open" system, all the energies of an organism are ultimately centripetal: they are directed toward the survival, security, and reinforcement of the organism's centrality and stability, in short, of its own identity. now, regarding the basic functioning of the capitalist market, not only does it not work by negative feedback, but it is even opposed to the mechanism of homeostasis. this is because the fundamental force that drives the market is not the law of supply and demand, which operates within the scope of commodity circulation, but the law of capital accumulation, which operates within the scope of commodity production and is, by definition, expansive. the market can even force a cyclical crisis and less production, but expansion is the basic rule of the return on capital, in other words, of the physiology of capitalism. this leads us to the second misconception of ascribing the attributes of homeostasis to the market: once it reaches its ideal size, every organism ceases to grow and goes onto the phase in which conservative adaptations prevail. this phenomenon does not occur in the capitalist market, which is driven by centrifugal forces (imposed by capital accumulation) toward unlimited growth. the ideal size of the capitalist market is, by definition, one that is infinite. unlike an organism, if the capitalist market stops growing, it becomes unbalanced. if the age of capitalist growth is coming to an end, this is not due to a homeostatic virtue of the market, but to something extraneous to it: the physical limits of the biosphere's resilience. since the 1970s, ivan illich (2003) being open, human equilibrium is liable to change due to flexible but finite parameters; if men can change, they do so within certain limits. on the contrary, the dynamic of the industrial system underlies its instability: it is organized toward indefinite growth and an unlimited creation of new needs that quickly become mandatory in the industrial framework. another argument of giannetti found in the same essay is, however, absolutely correct: "the pricing system, notwithstanding all of its surprising merits and properties, has one serious flaw: it does not give the right signs regarding the use of environmental resources." in this respect, andré lara resende (2013) is adamant: regarding the physical limits of the planet or the destruction of the environment caused by human action, relying on the market price system [...] makes no sense. any student in a basic microeconomics course should know this. the only pricing operated by the market is that of the relationship between economic costs and profit rate. capitalism cannot price its action on ecosystems because ecosystems are broader in space and time than the investment/profit cycle. in energy and economic myths (1975) , nicholas georgescu-roegen essentially states the same thing: "the phenomenal domain covered by ecology is broader than that covered by economics." in this way, he continues, "economics will have to merge into ecology." herman daly (1990) formulates this thesis equally elegantly: "in its physical dimensions the economy is an open subsystem of the earth ecosystem, which is finite, nongrowing, and materially closed." in capitalism, the world is upside down: the physical environment is conceived of as a raw material, that is, as an open subsystem of the economic system; there is a reversal of taxis which results in an equally inverted hierarchy of the world, one that is incompatible with its sustainability. therefore, the ability to subordinate economic goals to the environmental imperative is not within the sphere of capitalism. there is no moral judgment here. capitalism is unsustainable not because corporate leaders are bad or unscrupulous men. it would be absurd to suppose that corporate owners, shareholders, and ceos are people who lack a moral compass. nothing allows us to affirm that there is less moral sense in business circles than there is in any other civil society environment, for example, in trade unions and universities and in religious, artistic, or sports groups. the problem is that, no matter how much they want to improve the ethical conduct of their corporations, managers cannot afford to subordinate their corporate goals to the environmental imperative. to demonstrate this impossibility, we must start with a trivial example: money loses purchasing power due to inflation and has varying rates of purchasing power or profitability due to unequal market opportunities. to avoid depreciation or its use in disadvantageous conditions, every owner of a certain sum of money must choose the best exchange option in each moment. this applies to both the worker seeking to exchange his salary for as many goods as possible and the investor who chooses the most promising transactions or funds. in light of this elementary market reality, corporations must present the comparative advantages of one investment opportunity over others to their current or future investors and shareholders. if british petroleum, for example, forgoes a potentially profitable investment because of its environmental impact, investors will have two alternatives: they will replace that decision-maker if they have the power to do so; or, if not, they will redirect their investments to other corporations or even other sectors of the economy that are more likely to be profitable. both those who offer and those who raise funds in the market are subordinate to this relentless rationality. it explains why corporations cannot self-regulate around variables other than profit maximization. they have minimal leeway to adopt what seev hirsch (2011) calls "enlightened self-interest," as this most often entails sacrificing investment opportunities, raising costs, losing competitiveness, or limiting profits in the short term. both critics and supporters of capitalism agree on this. in 1876, friedrich engels wrote (as cited by magdoff 2011): friedman's answer is irrefutably logical. it defines a corporation's "moral responsibility" as the commitment of its governing bodies to its shareholders. this logic and conception of moral responsibility were defended by the new individualist review, on whose editorial board friedman served. 3 for the same reason, rex tillerson, chief executive officer of exxonmobil (2006 exxonmobil ( -2017 and the us secretary of state (from february 2017 to march 2018), was applauded in may 2015 at the exxon mobil corporation's annual meeting of shareholders in dallas by justifying his refusal to host climate change specialists and set greenhouse gas emission limits: "we choose not to lose money on purpose." incidentally, a proposal at this meeting to set ghg emission limits obtained less than 10% of the votes (koenig 2015) . this same moral responsibility toward shareholders is illustrated in another case analyzed by the economist in a 2012 report on rising global obesity levels: in 2010, a pepsico leader gave up making her products healthier, as shareholders started becoming outraged. and rightly so, friedman would say, since shareholders only put their resources and trust in pepsico because it promised them the best expected market return. frederic ghys and hanna hinkkanen (2013) showed why "socially responsible investments" (sri) are "just marketing," as they do not really differ from traditional portfolios. according to a financial investment expert, quoted in their report: "the bank would transgress its financial role as an asset manager when including environmental and social considerations in investment decisions for clients who had not directly requested it." we know that in order to maintain a reasonable chance of not exceeding a global average warming of 2 °c above the pre-industrial period, we have a carbon budget of approximately 600 gtco 2 (anderson 2015; figueres et al. 2017) . according to friedman's logic, for corporations to be a moral entity, in other words, to keep their stock prices high, thereby honoring their contracts and commitments to their shareholders, they must continue burning the coal, oil, and gas reserves controlled by them and by the state-owned corporations that live off the sale of these fuels. in an open letter to christiana figueres (unfccc executive secretary), written by cameron fenton (director of the canadian youth climate coalition) and signed by over 160 people and ngos (2012), we read: all together, the global oil, coal and gas industries are planning to burn over five times that amount, roughly 2,795 gigatonnes of carbon. indeed, their share prices depend on exploiting these reserves. (...) their business plan is incompatible with our survival. frighteningly, there are also states, parties to the convention [unfccc], with the same plan. the logic of the impossibility of a sustainable capitalism is concretely proven in numerous aspects of its modus operandi. let us isolate three aspects of this impossibility. but before that, it is best to start by giving voice not to pure and staunch liberals like milton friedman, but to those who believe that capitalism has nothing to fear from environmental regulation. many of them reject a defensive stance and put themselves on the offensive, claiming that environmental sustainability and increased profits are not only compatible but reciprocally strengthen each other in a virtuous circle. if i am not mistaken, the advocates of this thesis prefer the following argument: adopting innovative solutions to increase the efficiency of the input/product or product/waste ratio and improve environmental safety in the production process increases the company's competitiveness (as opposed to reducing it) because it is a valuegenerating process, be it in terms of risk management, brand image, and, finally, effective financial results. if this is true, then taking the lead and being at the forefront of economic processes with lower environmental impact and risk will ensure a better profitability than the average profit rate. i hope to not underestimate the literature on the business and sustainability binomial by saying that it limits itself to elaborating variations on this theme while offering several case studies on the direct relationship between sustainability and profitability. there are a growing number of economists and ngos committed to encouraging companies to embrace this belief. they naturally render a tremendous service to society and to the companies themselves through their work. however, their success is limited by the three aspects that render an environmentally sustainable capitalism impossible, as stated in the title of this section. (1) decoupling and circular economy decoupling is the hope that eco-efficient technologies and production processes in industrialized countries with mature economies will enable the miracle of increased production and consumption with less pressure (or at least no corresponding increase in pressure) on ecosystems (jöstrom and östblom 2010) . it is true that a greater efficiency in the production process may allow for relative decoupling, meaning that it enables a reduction in pressure per product or per unit of gdp. but it does not decrease this pressure in absolute terms, since the number of products does not cease to increase on a global scale. the mechanism known as the "jevons paradox" or rebound effect describes how increasing demand for energy or natural resources always tends to offset the eco-efficiency gain of technological innovation. thus, although energy efficiency per product has doubled or even tripled since 1950, this gain is offset by the expansion of production at a greater rate than the eco-efficiency gain. 13.3 three aspects of the impossibility of a sustainable capitalism the actions of institutions and business foundations that advocate for an ecoefficient and circular economy based on reverse engineering, recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing are certainly positive. we know, however, that there is no circular economy. no economy, let alone a global economy trapped in the paradigm of expansion, can evade the second law of thermodynamics, whose relationship with economics has been analyzed by nicholas georgescu-roegen since the 1970s (1971, 1975 and 1995) . here we must state the obvious: even though the surplus energy supplied by oil and other fossil fuels in relation to the energy invested to obtain them is declining (for this declining eroi, see chap. 5, sect. 5.5), low-carbon renewable energies are not yet, and may never be, as efficient as oil. this means that the energy transition, while urgent and imperative, will further distance us from a circular economy. according to calculations by dominique guyonnet, "to provide one kw/h of electricity through land-based wind energy requires about 10 times more reinforced concrete and steel and 20 times more copper and aluminum than a coal-fired thermal power plant" (madeline 2016) . the only way, therefore, to lessen the environmental impact of capitalism is to reduce, in absolute terms, the consumption of energy and goods by the richest 10% or 20% of the planet. this is incompatible with capitalism's basic mechanism of expansive functioning and with the worldview that it sells to society. (2) the law of resources pyramid the increasing scarcity of certain inputs and the need to secure their large-scale and low-cost supply nullify the potential benefits of various green initiatives taken on by companies. these cannot, in fact, evade the law of the resources pyramid, described by richard heinberg (2007): the capstone [of the pyramid] represents the easily and cheaply extracted portion of the resource; the next layer is the portion of the resource base that can be extracted with more difficulty and expense, and with worse environmental impacts; while the remaining bulk of the pyramid represents resources unlikely to be extracted under any realistic pricing scenario this law of the resources pyramid can be stated in an even simpler form: in capitalism, the logic of capital accumulation and surplus, together with the growing scarcity of finite natural resources, necessarily exacerbates the negative environmental impact of economic activity. (3) the impossibility of internalizing the environmental cost what makes it specifically impossible for corporations to submit themselves to the environmental imperative is the impossibility of "internalizing" the costs of increasing environmental damage that they bring about. methodologies to "price" nature are now multiplying. but whatever the methodology (always based on the assumption that the value of nature is reducible to a market price), the result is the same: it is impossible for corporations to internalize their environmental cost because the total value generated by their activity is often less than the monetary expression of the value of the natural heritage that was destroyed by that activity. 4 a report was prepared for the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity (teeb), titled natural capital at risk. the top 100 externalities of business (2013) show that: the estimated cost of land use, water consumption, ghg emissions, air pollution, land and water pollution and waste for the world's primary sectors amounts to almost us$7.3 trillion. the analysis takes account of impacts under standard operating practices, but excludes the cost of, and risk from, low-probability, high-impact catastrophic events. (…) this equates to 13% of global economic output in 2009. risk to business overall would be higher if all upstream sector impacts were included. let us now examine the second general impossibility of sustainable capitalism mentioned in the beginning of this chapter: sustainability achieved through regulatory frameworks negotiated between organized sectors of civil society, on the one hand, and states and corporations, or state-corporations, on the other. here we touch on the punctus dolens of all the problems discussed in this chapter and even in this book: the impossibility, at least up to now, of this second route stems from the lack of parity between the two parties, a necessary condition for an effective negotiation. there is still a huge gap between science and societies' perception of reality. the latter continue to consider the issue of climate change and the decline of biodiversity as non-priority issues in their list of concerns and expectations. but this is changing very quickly. increasingly aware of the bankrupt planet being bequeathed to them by the values and paradigms of globalized capitalism, society as a whole, led by youth, is beginning to mobilize around the idea of an alternative paradigm, characterized by the subordination of the economy to ecology. their movements have been gaining much more momentum and global reach than had been foreseen until recently by even the most optimistic. it is true that, up to now, their protests and claims have not slowed ghg emissions, nor the decline in biodiversity, nor the pollution of soils, water, and air. but history, it never hurts to repeat, is unpredictable, and a sudden paradigm shift in civilization, capable of overcoming the imperative of economic growth and anthropocentrism, may be closer than ever before. in any case, the possibility of mitigating the ongoing collapse is dependent on the strengthening of these socio-environmental movements, society's greater awareness of the extreme severity of the current situation, and the ability to impose on state-corporations' policies that are congruent with the current state of urgency. we must recognize that, on the other side of the battlefield, the constituted powers are increasingly united in defending themselves. we should not expect from the state initiatives that might lead corporations toward activities with low environmental impact. we saw in the introduction that there appears to be a true transformation toward a new type of state that is the partner, creditor, and debtor of corporations: the state-corporation. contrary to the 1929 crisis, which led to the new deal in the united states and to a new role of the state in the international stage, the financial crisis unleashed in 2008 displayed the impotence of the state and the loss of its identity. rather than regulating financial activity, governments embarked on the most comprehensive bailout operation of banks. since september 2008, the bulk of us and european financial resources has been used to bail out the banking system and "calm the markets." as a july 2011 document from the us government accountability office (gao) shows, from december 1, 2007, to july 21, 2010, the federal reserve bank (fed) had, through various emergency programs and other assistance provided directly to institutions facing liquidity strains, given out loans that amounted to us$ 1139 trillion. 5 the momentum of the crisis has led banks to, more than ever, take control of the state and raid their resources. according to a gao report on conflict of interest, requested by senator bernie sanders and published by him on june 12, 2012 6 : during the financial crisis, at least 18 former and current directors from federal reserve banks worked in banks and corporations that collectively received over us$4 trillion in low-interest loans from the federal reserve. according to information reported by bloomberg, as of march 2009, the federal reserve had pledged us$ 7.7 trillion in guarantees and credit limits to the north american financial system (ivry et al. 2011 ). as shown in table 8 of the gao report to congressional addressees cited above, between december 1, 2007, and july 21, 2010, funds from fed emergency programs were mobilized by 21 us and european banks in the form of not term-adjusted transactions, with an aggregate value of us$ 16.115 trillion. as george monbiot asked in 2011, "why is it so easy to save the banks, but so hard to save the biosphere?" the question has an unambiguous answer: because saving banks and other corporations have become a primary function of states. according to moody's bank ratings 2012, which assessed 7 banks in germany in june 2012 and an additional 17 in july 2012 (plus seven in 5 "report to congressional addressees. opportunities exist to strengthen policies and processes for managing emergency assistance", july 2011, gao-11-696. united states government accountability office. i thank dr. orice williams brown, director of gao's financial markets and community investment, for kindly sharing this document with me. http://www.gao.gov/products/ gao-11-696. 6 us senator bernard sanders (i-vt.), washington, d.c., 12/vi/2012, "jamie dimon is not alone". http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/061212dimonisnotalone.pdf the netherlands), even the richest banks in europe cannot manage their losses alone and cannot strategically survive without the state's safety net. there is no longer any place in the state for the classic figure of the statesman. voters complain about the increasing corruption of parties, the loss of values and principles, and politicians' venal attachment to state benefits. they also complain about managerial incompetence, disloyalty, or lack of leadership of heads of state who betray their ideological profiles and break the promises that galvanized their electoral victories. it has become common to compare yesterday's politicians with their successors in a way that is always disadvantageous to the latter: de gaulle with hollande or macron, churchill with cameron or boris johnson, franklin d. roosevelt with obama or trump, adenauer with merkel, de gasperi with berlusconi, renzi, or giuseppe conte, etc. but it would be absurd to suppose that societies have lost the ability to produce personalities equal to the great statesmen who led western democracies at critical moments in their history. what has been lost is the power of the state as the quintessential place of power and of political representation. the idea that political leaders are provisional bearers of a mandate granted to them by the governed, the idea, in short, of political representation, a cornerstone of the democratic tradition born in athens and expanded by universal suffrage in the contemporary age, obviously continues to be the only legitimate form of power that the state can exercise and must always be furthered. nevertheless, this legitimacy is critically endangered in our time. by deterritorializing power and shifting strategic decisions to the anonymous boards of corporations (whereby states and their resources are activated to finance and execute these decisions), the globalization of capitalism produces, along with the chronic indebtedness of national states, a progressive transformation in the historical meaning of state political power. with statesmen being unable to set the conduct for and impose boundaries on corporations, popular mandates are increasingly becoming the loci of spectacular ritualizations of power, and its dignitaries are increasingly masters in the art of gesticulation. the meaning of the term "representation" exercised by the representatives of popular votes is, thus, increasingly understood in its pantomimic sense. the international financial network controls states, mainly through their debts. total government debt reached us$ 59 trillion in 2016 and exceeded us$ 65 trillion in 2018, up from us$ 37 trillion just a decade ago (cox 2019). this debt has ballooned since the 2008 financial crisis, reaching levels never seen before in peacetime (stubbington 2019) . the dramatic leaps in public debt over the past decade, in both advanced and (so-called) emerging economies, are described in fig. 13 .2, according to data from the bank for international settlements (bis). based on data from 2016 to 2017, of the 153 nations listed by the imf or the cia world factbook, 102 now have public debts that exceed 50% of their gdp, 32 have public debts that exceed 80% of their gdp, and 16 countries, including the united states, japan, and italy, have debts that exceed 100% of their gdp: "the world's major economies have debts on average of more than 70% of gdp, the highest level of the past 150 years, except for a spike around the second world war" (stubbington 2019) . françois morin (2015) shows how 28 large banks, resulting from successive merges spurred by globalization and the deregulation of the reagan-thatcher era, have a total balance of us$ 50.3 trillion. these major banks have been labelled global systemically important banks (g-sibs) by the financial stability board (fsb), created in 2009 during the g20 summit in london. according to françois morin, they have fraudulently colluded into an oligopoly that he equates to a worldwide hydra (de filippis 2015): public debt plagues every major country. the private and toxic debts were massively transferred to states during the last financial crisis. this public over-indebtedness, linked exclusively to the crisis and to these banks, explains-while completely denying the causes of the crisis-the policies of rigor and austerity applied everywhere. [...] states are not only disciplined by markets but, above all, they are hostage to the world hydra. corporations manage european public debt through a vicious cycle: (1) prohibited by their regulations and by the lisbon treaty from buying government bonds directly from insolvent states, the european central bank (ecb) should buy them from banks in the secondary market, thus improving the balance sheet of these banks and avoiding the next systemic banking crisis. in addition, the ecb gives loans to banks at rates of 1% to 1.5%, obtaining "junk" bonds or high-risk government bonds as a guarantee. 7 (2) recapitalized, banks lend "new" money to defaulting states so that they (3) avoid default and repay their creditors. (4) in this way, banks can continue to finance states at higher interest rates, since the state is poorly rated by credit rating agencies. to be able to pay off their debts, states (5) sacrifice their investments and public services for the imperative of reducing the budget deficit and public debt. the so-called austerity measures (6) weaken the economy and lower revenue, which (7) pushes states into default, completing the vicious cycle and taking it to the next level. "those in insolvency have to sell everything they have to pay their creditors," said joseph schlarmann, one of the leaders of the cdu, the party that leads angela merkel's coalition in germany. this diktat led greece to sell the island of oxia in the ionian sea to shaykh hamad bin khalifa al-thani, the emir of qatar, who bought it for a paltry sum of five million euros. other greek islands (out of a total of six thousand), such as dolicha, were also put on sale. the natural, territorial, and cultural heritage of mediterranean europe is considered by creditors to be little more than a bankrupt estate. this type of negligence of mediterranean civilizational heritage gave rise to bitter assessments done by salvatore settis (2002) and silvia dell'orso (2002) , this time on the italian state's abandonment of its responsibilities toward the nation's extraordinary cultural memory. formerly, the state guaranteed citizens the enjoyment of their heritage and devotion to their monuments through museums and the educational system. having custody over and conserving this memory, the state was the nexus between the generations, and, through research, it also promoted the critical historical revision of this heritage. 8 today, even when it does not simply sell this natural, territorial, or cultural heritage, the state-corporation denatures it by conceiving it as an input for tourism to be managed according to the industry's profitability motives. 7 between may 2010 and march 2011, the ecb bought 66 billion euros from bankers and other investors. in august 2011 alone, the ecb bought a further 36 billion euros (always in the secondary market and at a much higher price than the one traded in that market) of government bonds from greece, ireland, portugal, spain, and italy. not satisfied with this rescue operation, banks took the opportunity to buy more junk bonds in the secondary market at a rate of 42.5% of their face value on august 8, 2011 (and even lower later on), and to resell them to the ecb at 80% of this value. eric toussaint, "la bce, fidèle serviteur des intérêts privés." interview granted to cadtm, 16/ix/2011 8 in "the use and abuse of history for life." (1874), nietzsche discusses the three meanings of history necessary for the man who lives in his own time: as a being that is active and has aspirations (monumental history), as a being that preserves and venerates (antiquarian history), and as a being that suffers and has a need for liberation (critical history). precisely between the years of nietzsche and the twentieth century, the social democratic state was the guarantor of these "uses" (nutzen) of history that nietzsche refers to. the impoverishment of states comes, above all, from tax evasion. in 2000, an article published in the newspaper libération estimated that approximately six trillion euros worth of resources were diverted to 65 tax havens, with an increase of 12% per year over the previous 3 years (1997) (1998) (1999) . according to a july 2012 report by economists from the tax justice network (tjn): at least $21 trillion of unreported private financial wealth was owned by wealthy individuals via tax havens at the end of 2010. this sum is equivalent to the size of the united states and japanese economies combined. there may be as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets held offshore by high net worth individuals (hnwis), according to our report the price of offshore revisited which is thought to be the most detailed and rigorous study ever made of financial assets held in offshore financial centres and secrecy structures. we consider these numbers to be conservative. this is only financial wealth and excludes a welter of real estate, yachts and other non-financial assets owned via offshore structures. (…) the number of the global super rich who have amassed a $21 trillion offshore fortune is fewer than 10 million people. of these, less than 100,000 people worldwide own $9.8 trillion of wealth held offshore. (…) this at a time when governments around the world are starved for resources. in 2008, edouard chambost, an expert on the subject, stated that "55% of international trade or 35% of financial flows pass through tax havens." 9 gabriel zucman (2014) of the london school of economics estimates that states lose us$ 190 billion every year to tax evasion. what the tax havens and financial opacity show is the impotence of the states and, at the same time, its complicity in relation to the power of corporations. according to thomas piketty (2016): unfortunately, in this area there is a huge gap between the triumphant declarations of governments and the reality of what they actually do. (…) the truth is that almost nothing has been done since the crisis in 2008. in some ways, things have even got worse. (…) thus, another vicious cycle, complementary to the one described above, is set up between corporations, investors, and big fortunes. these (1) divert a considerable portion of the taxes that are due to tax havens, and, through the banks that receive these funds, (2) they provide loans to states at high interest rates. such interest (3) further puts states at the mercy of creditors. from de jure creditors of corporations, states become their chronic debtors, which, finally, (4) fuels the ideology that social democracy is unfeasible because it generates leviathan states that are deficit-prone and wasteful. and, as if this vicious cycle was not enough, part of the state's revenue is directed to subsidize or finance-through the public treasury, public "development" banks, and tax exemptions-agribusiness, the auto industry, big mining and fossil fuel projects, the military-industrial complex, and other segments with a high concentration of corporate capital that have a deadly environmental impact. the current deterioration of states' financial health is comparable only to the situation at the end 9 quoted in la tribune, 16/x/2008, p. 38 of world war ii, when public finances had been destroyed. the difference, however, is that the destruction of the biosphere eliminates the prospect of a new cycle of economic growth, like the one that occurred in 1947-1973. in this context, what efforts can we still expect from states regarding the environmental regulation of corporate activity? can the brazilian state be expected-even before the election of jair bolsonaro-to implement an active energy transition policy and/or a policy to protect the country's forests? what to expect from the united states with its debt of us$ 16 trillion in december 2012 which then jumped to us$ 19 trillion in february 2016 and is expected to exceed us$ 23 trillion by 2020? in 2018, trump signed a us$ 1.2 trillion plan to revise the entire us nuclear arsenal and authorized a new nuclear warhead for the first time in 34 years (hennigan 2018) . to sustain the country's military-industrial corporate complex, one of the most polluting and environmentally unsustainable, its "defense" budget must be the third item in the national budget. dwight eisenhower had already warned about this in his famous farewell address to the nation in 1961: this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the american experience. the total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. we recognize the imperative need for this development. yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. what eisenhower called in 1961 the military-industrial complex has completely taken over the united states and is now best known as the military-industrial-congressional complex (micc). the civil and military arms industry lobby maintains control over congress, with the latter approving funds that are not even required by the military, such as financing the production of abrams battle tanks which the army says it does not want, since the current fleet of 2400 units is only about 3 years old (lardner 2013) . similarly, in france, although the centre international de recherche sur le cancer (circ) has been claiming since 1988 that diesel is carcinogenic, the french government, followed by germany, continues to subsidize some models of diesel engines, making france the country with the highest percentage (61%) of diesel-powered vehicles in the world. in conclusion, can we expect states to impose efficient environmental controls on the network of corporations that control them? notwithstanding timid advances, the answer is essentially a negative one. when comparing corporate vs. government revenues, it becomes very clear that corporate power is greater than that of states. according to the 2017 fortune global 500, revenues of the world's 500 largest corporations amounted to us$ 28 trillion, the equivalent of 37% of the world's gdp in 2015. as revealed by the ngo global justice now (2016), "69 of the world's top economic entities are corporations rather than countries in 2015," and 10 of top 28 economic entities are corporations. "when looking at the top 200 economic entities, the figures are even more extreme, with 153 being corporations." 10 nick dearden, director of global justice now, declared: "the vast wealth and power of corporations is at the heart of so many of the world's problems -like inequality and climate change. the drive for short-term profits today seems to trump basic human rights for millions of people on the planet." 11 even more important than the power of an isolated corporation is the obscure and highly concentrated power within the corporate network itself. this network is controlled by a caste that is barely visible and that is impervious to the pressures of governing parties and societies. their investment decisions define the destinies of the world economy and, therefore, of humanity. this is what research on the architecture of the international ownership network, conducted by stefania vitali, james b. glattfelder, and stefano battiston (2011) from the eidgenössische technische hochschule (eth) in zurich, has shown. based on a list of 43,060 transnational corporations (tncs), taken from a sample of about 30 million economic actors in 194 countries contained in the orbis 2007 database, the authors discovered that "nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of tncs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 tncs in the core, which has almost full control over itself." these 147 conglomerates occupy the center of a tentacular power structure, as these authors further elaborate: we find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. this core can be seen as an economic "super-entity" that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers. (…) about 3/4 of the ownership of firms in the core remains in the hands of firms of the core itself. in other words, this is a tightly-knit group of corporations that cumulatively hold the majority share of each other. the uhnwi the concentration of so much economic power in the hands of a numerically insignificant caste is unprecedented in human history. by combining data from the crédit suisse global wealth report pyramid (already presented in the introduction, see fig. 1.1) with the wealth-x and ubs world ultra wealth report 2014 and the two oxfam international reports (2014 and 2015) , we can examine this trend in more detail. as seen in the introduction, in 2017, at the top of the global wealth pyramid, 0.7% of adults, or 36 million individuals, owned 45.9% of the world's wealth (us$ 128.7 trillion). penetrating into the vertex of this global asset pyramid, we see that in this group of 36 million (with assets worth over us$ 1 million), there are 211,275 billionaires-the ultra-high net-worth individuals (uhnwi)-corresponding to 0.004% of adult humanity. their assets alone total us$ 29.7 trillion, assets that, moreover, increased by 7% in 2014 compared to the previous year (64% of uhnwi are in north america and europe, while 22% are in asia). now, with the aid of a magnifying lens provided by two listings (from forbes magazine and the bloomberg billionaires index), we will move up to examine the most exclusive stratum of this uhnwi club. in 2013, forbes magazine listed 1426 billionaires amassing us$ 5.4 trillion, which is equivalent to the gdp of japan (the world's third largest gdp). forbes magazine 2018 lists 2208 billionaires with us$ 9.1 trillion, an 18% increase in wealth compared to the previous annual survey. the bloomberg billionaires index contains an even more stratospheric list: the world's 300 richest individuals had a wealth of us$ 3.7 trillion in december 31, 2013. these 300 people became even richer throughout 2013, adding another us$ 524 billion to their net worth. from the top of this nanopyramid, situated at the extreme end of the crédit suisse pyramid, table 13 .1 allows us to contemplate the general picture of human inequality in the current phase of capitalism. more than 50 million dollars 33,900 more than 100 million dollars 3100 more than 500 million dollars 2208 more than 1 billion dollars 300 more than 12 billion dollars 85 more than 20 billion dollars 20 more than 60 billion dollars in 2014, oxfam showed that the 85 richest individuals on the planet had a combined wealth of more than us$ 1.7 trillion, which is equivalent to the wealth held by 3.5 billion people, the poorest half of humanity. the concentration of these assets continues to grow at a staggering rate, as shown in the table 13 .2 which shows the declining number of individuals whose combined wealth equals that of the bottom 3.6 billion people (the poorest half of humanity which is becoming increasingly poorer). according to the oxfam report, an economy for the 1% (2016), the wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 45% in the five years since 2010 -that's an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ($542bn), to $1.76 trillion. meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars in the same period -a drop of 38%. oxfam's 2015 report stated that in 2014, the richest 1% owned 48% of global wealth, leaving just 52% to be shared between the other 99% of adults on the planet: almost all of that 52% is owned by those included in the richest 20%, leaving just 5.5% for the remaining 80% of people in the world. if this trend continues of an increasing wealth share to the richest, the top 1% will have more wealth than the remaining 99% of people in just two years. this prognosis was confirmed in the following year. the 2016 report (an economy for the 1%) states that "the global inequality crisis is reaching new extremes. the richest 1% now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined." bill gates's fortune, estimated at us$ 78.5 billion (bloomberg), is greater than the gdp of 66% of the world's countries. in present-day russia, 110 people own 35% of the country's wealth. 12 another way to understand this extreme concentration of wealth is to look at the large financial holding companies. this emerging subspecies-the 0.004% of the human species known by the acronym uhnwi-owns the planet. their economic and political power is greater than that of those who have a popular mandate in national governments. their domination is also ideological, since economic policies are formulated-and evaluated by most opinion leaders-to benefit the business strategies of this caste. its power surpasses-in scale, reach, and depth and in a way that is transversal and tentaculareverything that the most powerful rulers in the history of pre-capitalist societies could ever have conceived of or had reason to desire. additionally, the power of these corporations is infinitely disproportionate to their social function of job creation. in 2009, the 100 largest among them employed 13.5 million people, that is, only 0.4% of the world's economically active population, estimated by the international labour organization at 3.210 billion potential workers. who in such circumstances can still uphold the historical validity of the so-called kuznets curve? as is well known, simon kuznets (1962) claimed, in the 1950s, that as an economy develops, market forces first increase and then decrease economic inequality. in reality, all the actions of this plutocratic super-entity are guided toward a single motto: defend and increase their wealth. their interests are, therefore, incompatible with the conservation of the biophysical parameters that still support life on our planet. since the 1960s, evidence of the incompatibility between capitalism and the biophysical parameters that enable life on earth has been recognized by experts from various disciplines. some marxist scholars (or those in close dialogue with marx) belonging to two generations, from murray bookchin (1921 -2006 ) and andré gorz (1923 -2007 to a range of post-1960s scholars, such as john bellamy foster, fred magdoff, brett clark, richard york, david harvey, michael löwy, and enrico leff, clearly understand that the current historical situation is essentially characterized by an opposition between capitalism and conservation of the biosphere. in the preface to a book that is emblematic of this position (the ecological rift. capitalism's war on the earth, 2010), john bellamy foster, brett clark, and richard york write 14 : "a deep chasm has opened up in the metabolic relation between human beings and nature-a metabolism that is the basis of life itself. the source of this unparalleled crisis is the capitalist society in which we live." but capitalism is perceived as an environmentally unsustainable socioeconomic system also by those for whom marx is not a central intellectual reference. pascal lamy and yvo de boer were already mentioned above. for them there is an unmistakable causal link between capitalism and the exacerbation of environmental crises. in fact, there are a number of non-marxist thinkers who subscribe to this evidence. two generations of pioneer thinkers, born between the beginning of the century and the interwar period, have laid the foundation for the understanding that capitalist accumulation is disrupting the climate system, depleting the planet's mineral, water, and biological resources, and provoking multiple disruptions in ecosystems and a collapse of biodiversity. we will point out the names of great economists, such as kenneth e. boulding, nicholas georgescu-roegen, and herman daly; geographers like rené dumont (1973) ; key philosophers on ecology, such as michel serres and arne naess; theistic philosophers, such as hans jonas and jacques ellul; biologists, such as rachel carson and paul and anne ehrlich (tobias 2013) ; or a christian-educated polymath and ecologist, ivan illich. inspired by the writings of these thinkers who shaped the critical ecological thinking of the second half of the twentieth century, studies on socio-environmental crises are growing today. these studies share an awareness that the imperative of economic growth is increasingly threatening the maintenance of an organized society. included here are authors of diverse ideological backgrounds and range of expertise, from claude lévi-strauss, edgar morin (2007) (2010), nafeez mosaddek ahmed hit the bull's eye: "global crises cannot be solved solely by such minor or even major policy reforms -but only by drastic reconfiguration of the system itself." more recently, hicham-stéphane afeissa (2007 afeissa ( , 2012 has been working extensively on an overview of deep ecological thinking in philosophy, especially in the twentieth century. the idea of managed degrowth, which implicitly or explicitly unites the names mentioned above, appears to be the most significant proposal today, perhaps the only one, that would be effective in creating a viable society. any decreased human impact on the earth system obviously requires abandoning the meat-based food system and the fossil fuel-based energy system. moreover, the idea of degrowth rests on three assumptions, which, if not properly understood, would make degrowth seem absurd. the first assumption is that economic downturn, far from being an option, is an inexorable trend. precisely because we are depleting the planet's biodiversity and destabilizing the environmental coordinates that have prevailed in the holocene, global economic growth rates are already declining when compared to the 1945-1973 average, as gail tverberg has shown (see introduction, sect. 1.7. the phoenix that turned into a chicken). according to the world bank, in the 2013-2017 period, the average growth of the global economy was 2.5%; this is a 0.9% decrease from the average a decade ago. 15 this tendency toward declining growth is inescapable. the current pandemic (sars-cov-2) will only accelerate this process of decline, as the economy will find it increasingly difficult to recover from its next crises. conscious that the developmental illusion is pushing the services rendered by the biosphere toward collapse, supporters of degrowth realize that a managed degrowth would be the only way to prevent economic and socio-environmental collapse, one that will be more brutal and deadly the longer it is denied or underestimated. the second assumption is that administered degrowth is essentially anticapitalist. the idea of degrowth within the framework of capitalism was rightly defined by john bellamy foster (2011) as an impossibility theorem. finally, the third assumption is that managed degrowth is not simply about a quantitative reduction in gdp. first of all, it means qualitatively redefining the objectives of the economic system which should be about adapting human societies to the limits of the biosphere and of natural resources. obviously, this adaptation implies investments in places and in countries that lack basic infrastructure and, in general, an economic growth that is crucial for the transition to energy and transport systems that have a lower environmental impact. but these are localized investments that are oriented toward reducing environmental impacts (sanitary infrastructure, abandoning the use of firewood, public transportation, etc.); it is never about growth for the sake of growth. serge latouche devoted almost all of his work to the question of degrowth (2004, 2006, 2007, 2012 and 2014) . he explains (2014) the link between degrowth and overcoming capitalism: "the degrowth movement is revolutionary and anti-capitalist (and even anti-utilitarian) and its program is fundamentally a political one." degrowth, as the same author insists, is the project of building an alternative to the current growth society: "this alternative has nothing to do with recession and crisis … there is nothing worse than a growth society without growth. [...] degrowth is not symmetrical to growth." the most poignant formulation on the incompatibility between capitalism and sustainability comes from the theories of two economists, developed before the emergence of the concepts of sustainability and decay: (1) the theory by nicholas georgescu-roegen in 1971 on the increasing generation of entropy from economic activity and, a fortiori, from an economy based on the paradigm of expansion and (2) the theory, developed in 1966 by kenneth e. boulding in the economics of the coming spaceship earth, on the need to overcome an open economy (cowboy economy) toward a closed economy (spaceman economy). 16 we will return to this last theory in the next chapter. for now, it suffices to cite a central passage from this text in which boulding shows that for the capitalist economy, production and consumption are seen as a commodity whereas in the economy toward which we should aspire-the closed economy or spaceman economy-what matters is minimizing throughput, namely, the rate of transformation (operated in the economic system) of raw materials into products and pollution. this means minimizing both production and consumption, which clearly conflicts with the capitalist view of the economic process: the difference between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the attitude towards consumption. in the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and the success of the economy is measured by the amount of the throughput from the "factors of production," a part of which, at any rate, is extracted from the reservoirs of raw materials and noneconomic objects, and another part of which is output into the reservoirs of pollution. if there are infinite reservoirs from which material can be obtained and into which effluvia can be deposited, then the throughput is at least a plausible measure of the success of the economy. (…) by contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized. the essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system. in the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. this idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with the income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts. the fundamental unsustainability of capitalism is demonstrated not only through the arguments of georgescu-roegen and boulding but also by herman daly's impossibility theorem (1990) . he claims that the impossibility-obvious, but not necessarily accepted in its consequences-of an economy based on the expanded reproduction of capital in a limited environment occupies a position in economic theory that is equivalent to the fundamental impossibilities of physics: impossibility statements are the very foundation of science. it is impossible to: travel faster than the speed of light; create or destroy matter-energy; build a perpetual motion machine, etc. by respecting impossibility theorems we avoid wasting resources on projects that are bound to fail. therefore economists should be very interested in impossibility theorems, especially the one to be demonstrated here, namely that it is impossible for the world economy to grow its way out of poverty and environmental degradation. in other words, sustainable growth is impossible. without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system." what delays a broader acceptance of this set of reflections are not arguments in favor of capitalism, but the mantra of the absence of alternatives to it. such is the hypnotic power of this mantra that even the scholars most aware of the links between environmental crisis and economic activity cling to the absurd idea of a "sustainable capitalism," an expression that herman daly aptly called "a bad oxymoron-selfcontradictory as prose, and unevocative as poetry." it turns out that it is possible, and more than ever necessary, to overcome the idea that the failure of socialism has left society with no other alternative but to surrender to capitalism. human thinking is not binary, and the unfeasibility of the socialist experience in the twentieth century does not ipso facto imply the viability of capitalism. the 2012 oecd report, looking to 2060: long-term global growth prospects, published by asa johansson and colleagues (2012), states that: "the long-term scenario provides a relatively benign long-term outlook for the global economy." but in order for this scenario to prove itself benign, the report mentions, at the end of the introduction, the factors that are being ignored in its forecast: "indeed, a number of other factors are also ignored, including the possibility of disorderly debt defaults, trade disruptions and possible bottlenecks to growth due to an unsustainable use of natural resources and services from the environment." oecd economists still live in an enchanted kingdom in which economic forecasts can afford to ignore "possible [environmental] bottlenecks." these bottlenecks must indeed be ignored because recognizing them, not as "possible" but as inevitable, would compel these economists to review the assumption-now frankly absurd-on which their knowledge is based, namely, that the environment is a relatively abundant and stable factor of production, a fact and not a problem, therefore, for economic forecasts. in short, capitalism is not an environmentally sustainable socioeconomic system if the establishment of regulatory frameworks capable of bringing it back to sustainability is left to the market. this is because the market is, at best, able to optimize the short-term cost-benefit relationship in the allocation of resources, but not the conservation of these resources. as kim stanley robinson's formula rightly sums up: adam smith's "invisible hand never picks up the check" (as cited by naomi oreskes, in conway, oreskes 2014, p. 93). capitalism could perhaps approach sustainability if its regulation was driven by a mixed mechanism in which the state and civil society were strong enough to offset the power of the global corporate network with its four strongest binding points: big oil, big mining, big food, and big bank. this is no longer the case because the state-corporations of our days have no interest in confronting the corporate network, and if they did, they would no longer have the means to do so. therefore, the immense task-of replacing the power of this global network with another model of society capable of combining local economy with an effective global and democratic political governance-lies on the shoulders of civil society, on its social, labor, and political organizations. whether we will be able to accomplish this task is still an open question. it presupposes, first of all, awakening from the illusion that capitalism can become sustainable and renouncing our fascination with consumerism and with the age-old psychological constant: more surplus = more safety, to be discussed in the next chapter. éthique de l'environment. nature, valeur, respect a user's guide to the crisis of civilization: and how to save it a structural view of u.s. bank holding companies". frbny economic policy review empty promises. g20 subsidies to oil, gas and coal production. oil change 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century of declines donald trump is playing a dangerous game of nuclear poker making globalization moral? secret fed loans gave banks $ 13 billion undisclosed to congress decoupling waste generation from economic growth -a cge analysis of the swedish case warming world: is capitalism destroying our planet capitalism killed our climate momentum, not 'human nature exxon shareholders to vote on climate change, fracking army says no to more tanks, but congress insists de la décolonisation de l'imaginaire économique à la construction d'une société alternative. paris, mille et une nuits ecological civilization what every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism losing earth" lost sight of some climate change villains, but not the scope of the problem vers l'abîme losing earth: the decade we almost stopped climate change fracking by the numbers. the damage to our water, land and climate from a decade of dirty drilling nicholas & calderón, felipe, better growth better climate. the new climate economy report. the synthesis report global debt surges to highest level in peacetime the ehrlich factor: a brief history of the fate of humanity the network of global corporate control well below 2°c: mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes taxing across borders: tracking personal wealth and corporate profits microsoft word brain_7_issue1_version1 111 romanian campaigns on corporate social responsibility – signs of glocalization monica pătruț lecturer, faculty of letters, vasile alecsandri university of bacău, bacău, romania monicapatrut@yahoo.com camelia cmeciu associate professor, faculty of journalism and communication studies, university of bucharest, bucharest, romania cmeciu75@yahoo.com abstract organizations play an important role in the development of the modern society since managers have become aware that financial profit highly depends on community involvement. the active participation of organizations in community life implies to adapt global strategies to local issues or to promote local issues at a global level. actually this is the essence of glocalization. the means by which organizations can achieve these glocal objectives is csr campaigns. csr represents an instrument used to solve diverse issues, such as: human rights, environment and climate change, education, support for vulnerable groups, sustainable development, or establishment of moral capitalism. within the context of the ever-rising internet access of all audiences, csr campaigns have become more visible and have capitalized on the advantages of collective intelligence, internet users’ participation and their user generated contents. the purpose of our study is to provide an insight into (1) the prominence of romanian organizations which are the most socially responsible, (2) the domains in which romanian organizations have invested; (3) the salience of csr 1.0 and csr 2.0 tools used in the promotion of csr campaigns in romania. keywords: glocalization, new media, social media, corporate social responsibility. 1. introduction organizations have gradually undergone a shift (grunig & white, 1992) from a pragmatic social role focused on financial benefits to a radical social role focused on contributing to social change in communities. this concern for the stakeholders’ benefits can be associated with the concept of corporate social responsibility (csr). since 1950, the concept of csr has developed at a theoretical and practical level. the researchers’ and managers’ interest in csr has mainly focused on the ways through which an organization can achieve its financial objectives by socially responsible means. as figure 1 shows, the public debate has contributed to highlighting other concepts: corporate social responsiveness, public social responsibility, corporate social performance, corporate citizenship, corporate sustainability (coman, 2009; de bakker et al., 2005; crişan, 2013). brain. broad research in artificial intelligence and neuroscience volume 7, issue 1, march 2016, issn 2067-3957 (online), issn 2068 0473 (print) 112 figure 1. developments in csr-related concepts (de bakker et al., 2005) although csr includes a large number of problems and themes, it focuses on three main aspects (fisher-buttinger & vallaster, 2011): environmental issues and concerns; workplace issues: the way in which employers treat employees, the health and safety of products, the impact of organizational activities on the community; companies’ ethical behavior. this variety of csr issues highlights two important aspects: 1. by planning csr activities and campaigns, organizations seem to take into account the twofold syntagms embedded in the concept of glocalization (“think globally, act locally” and “think locally, act globally”, wakefield, 2009). in terms of csr activities, “think globally, act locally” implies to adapt well-known csr strategies from developed countries to the national, regional, and local cultural and social life, whereas “think locally, act globally” implies to make known local csr strategies worldwide by means of new media and social media. 2. combining the csr internal dimensions (the relationship company employees) with the external dimension (the relationship company – all stakeholders), it is thought that profits, community members and environment may harmoniously coexist in a strategic organizational approach (borţun, 2012; ilieş, 2012; oprea, 2011). having as starting point the syntagm “doing well by doing good” (rawlins, 2005), csr should not be associated with a compulsory law, but with an organizational necessity, without any external pressure. on the long run, the benefits of a constant csr policy are: the company’s image improvement and reputation increase, a more efficient risk management and crisis situations, the brand revitalization, the motivation of valuable employees. moreover, within the relations between organizations and communities, csr is reciprocally advantageous because it generates profit for companies, it involves the support of the communities and of the socially disadvantaged groups and it contributes to the local development (middlemiss, 2010). placed between the economic profit obtained through the production of goods or services and the social profit resulted from the investment in society (cmeciu & cmeciu, 2011), the csr strategy should be embedded within the management objectives and the social investments should be measured in economic terms. table 1 shows the reasons for engaging in csr and the basic approach on this community-based insight into organizational activities (matten, 2006): m. pătruț, c. cmeciu romanian campaigns on corporate social responsibility – signs of glocalization 113 table 1. reasons for engaging into csr activities (matten, 2006) why csr ? motto nature of the drivers key ideas and concepts csr is enhancing the long-term profitability of the company “there is a clear-cut business case in csr” economic shareholder value maximisation socially responsible investment competitive advantage bottom of the pyramid strategies csr solves day-today management problems “csr enables us to manage our stakeholder relations!” managerial -stakeholder theory -corporate social performance csr is the morally right thnig to do “csr means doing the right thing” ethical -business ethics -sustainability csr is a way to be a legitimate and accepted member of society “csr makes us a good corporate citizen !” political -corporate citizenship -accountability transparency understanding that the sustainable financial success depends on the degree in which the business model includes the social responsibility and the proper administration, companies contribute to the shaping and consolidation of moral capitalism (young, 2009). within this new context of glocalization at an organizational level, companies generate five types of capital (reputational, social, human, financial and fixed) and the value of these capitals increases if the companies impose some clear ethical standards for the proper developments of activities. the socially responsible companies use their power wisely to obtain profits and with the help of the state, to provide civic order. taking advantage of the quality of corporate citizens, the companies’ responsible actions at the local level will also imply to honor the human rights and the democratic institutions, to support educational, cultural and environmental projects, to respect the local cultures, to promote peace, security, social diversity and inclusion, to involve employees in civic and community problems, to fights against corruption in the political environment, to avoid the waste of social capital (young, 2009). 2. csr activities in romania corporate social responsibility is closely related to the economic development of a country and to the types of relationships established between organizations and community members. communism and an up-down relationship had not been the proper contexts for the emergence of csr activities in romania. the slow economic development and the limited traction for communicating about the corporate responsibility efforts and achievements are the reasons for which romania is placed in “the starting behind” quadrant, according to the kpmg international survey5 of corporate responsibility reporting 2011. throughout the years, the csr activities have been gradually implemented in romania. the starting point was related to a local problem, namely abandoned children. after the revolution, the first csr activities had a humanitarian role (udrea & ionescu, 2007; dima et al., 2013), helping the disadvantaged categories (children, elder people, women). once big transnational companies (coca-cola, pepsi-cola, philp morris etc.) have invested in romania, the paradigm “think globally, act locally” seems to have been embedded in the romanian companies’ csr strategic management: community involvement, business behavior, brain. broad research in artificial intelligence and neuroscience volume 7, issue 1, march 2016, issn 2067-3957 (online), issn 2068 0473 (print) 114 relation with employees, workplace health, and relations with providers and clients. at the local level, the csr actions in romania, after 2000, have mainly focused on restructuring the technologies for improving environment, adopting social measures for employees, developing good relations with local authorities, and developing public-private partnership (source: csr and competitiveness european smes’ good practice – national report romania, 2007). another aspect of glocalization in the csr domain that has been implemented in romania is related to the transparency of csr campaigns. visibility has been attained through two online initiatives which support organizations and governmental institutions to promote their csr activities: csr romania http://www.csr-romania. ro/, a common initiative of the foundation forum for international communications and of the center for sustainability and excellence (cse); responsabilitate socială/ social responsibility http://www.responsabilitatesociala.ro – an initiative of jti romania). the visibility of companies’ csr activities is communicated in two ways: (1) monthly online newsletters; (2) csr case studies as good practices. the case studies encompass different fields into which romanian companies and global companies have invested: � http://www.csr-romania.ro/: education, entrepreneurship, disadvantaged social categories, environment, safety, health, community; � http://www.responsabilitatesociala.ro: education, culture, environment, social and human rights. 3. new media and social media – means of attaining visibility of csr activities at a local level transparency has become the prevailing concept related to csr since “csr communication has become an integral part of corporate reporting” and since “its impact on image building and stakeholder relationship management is widely accepted” (bittner & leimeister, 2011). the technological development from old media system → web 1.0 → web 2.0 has facilitated the implementation of the paradigm “think locally, act globally”. companies have wisely exploited the advantages of new media and social media (wilcox, 2009): widespread broadband; cheap/ free online publishing tools; new distribution channels; mobile devices; 24/7 news and information, and democratized media. but at the same time, the challenges of web 1.0 and web 2.0 have some drawbacks: fragmentation, information overload, polarization (dimitrova, 2007). the involvement of the community member is an important aspect that this technological development has brought. thus at a communication level, glocalization within csr activities has been achieved through the metamorphosis of every human being into a possible online publisher (pătruţ et al., 2013).while web 1.0 is known as “the read only web” and implies only communication via the email, the dial-up, high costs, websites which cannot be changed by other users, web 2.0 is known as “the read write web” (o’reilly, 2005), and it becomes a synonym of communication in real time, broadband internet (high speed, a better quality/ price measure), blogs, podcasts, social networks. 3.1. the shift from csr 1.0 to csr 2.0 starting from the differences between web 1.0 and web 2.0., wayne visser (2010) highlights the discrepancies between csr 1.0 and csr 2.0 (table 2). m. pătruț, c. cmeciu romanian campaigns on corporate social responsibility – signs of glocalization 115 table 2. discrepancies between csr 1.0 and csr 2.0 (visser, 2010) csr 1.0 csr 2.0 a vehicle for companies to establish relationships with communities, channel philanthropic contributions and manage their image. being defined by ‘global commons’, ‘innovative partnerships’ and ‘stakeholder involvement’. included many start-up pioneers like traidcraft, but has ultimately turned into a product for large multinationals like wal-mart. mechanisms include diverse stakeholder panels, real-time transparent reporting and new-wave social entrepreneurship. travelled down the road of “one size fits all” standardization, through codes, standards and guidelines to shape its offering. is recognizing a shift in power from centralized to decentralized, a change in scale from few and big to many and small; and a change in application from single and exclusive to multiple and shared. defined in terms of a journey and of the dna code (visser, 2010), csr 2.0 is considered to have an organic character for organizations in their effort to establish reciprocally beneficial relationships with community members: csr 2.0 = sustainablity (= destination) and responsibility (= journey). csr 2.0 or systemic csr implies a conjunction of responsibility which is “more about the journey – the solutions, responses, management and actions” (visser, 2010) and of sustainability “conceived as the destination – the challenges, vision, strategy and goals”. csr 2.0 = dna code. defining organizations as organisms, visser identifies four responsibility bases that should prevail in every csr 2.0-governed organization: value creation (capital investment, beneficial products, inclusive business), good governance (leadership, transparency, ethical practices), societal contribution (philanthropy, fair labour practices, supply chain integrity), environmental integrity (ecosystem protection, renewable resources, zero waste production). 3.2. reports on csr 2.0 initiatives at a global and glocal level the blending of firm-serving and public-serving motives (kim & lee, 2012) is meant to generate stronger activism among consumers, to help people and young scholars in need, to get involved in environmental, cultural, education issues (pătruţ et al., 2013). social media applications are the best means of making known these csr initiatives since they involve informing, mobilization, and involvement of community members. as the 2011 global social media and csr report on the ftse global 500 shows the ‘banks’ sector is the most productive (12%) in the use of social media in their csr activities, followed by the ‘oil and gas producers’ (11%), the ‘pharmaceutical and biotechnology’ (6%) and the ‘technology, hardware and equipment’ (5%). the advantages (‘collective intelligence’, ‘collaborative networks’, ‘user participation’, visser, 2010) that social media provide were exploited by 60% of the companies, the hierarchy of the forms of social activity being the following: rss posts (107 companies), embedded videos (102 companies), twitter (56 companies), facebook (44 companies), youtube (40 companies), blog (22 companies) and podcasts (7 companies). according to a zelist study (http://www.zelist.ro), in romania, in the last six months of the year 2011 there have been more online comments and posts on the banking services (11 romanian banks included in the study) than on the telecommunications or car industries. the most frequently used social media applications used were: twitter, blogs, and facebook. brain. broad research in artificial intelligence and neuroscience volume 7, issue 1, march 2016, issn 2067-3957 (online), issn 2068 0473 (print) 116 4. methodology and research questions in our study we will analyze the csr campaigns (200430.03.2015) that have been taking place in romania since 2004, the year when companies made the first csr reports public. these csr reports were available on the following websites: � http://www.csr-romania.ro, � http://www.responsabilitatesociala.ro, � http://www.csrmedia.ro, � http://www.praward.ro. we have identified 564 csr campaigns: 148 during 2004-2012 (pătruţ, 2013) and 416 csr campaigns during 2013-30.03.2015. the research questions of our study are the following: rq1: which are the main domains of the romanian organization which planned csr campaigns? rq2: which are the main social, cultural, and economic domains towards which csr campaigns are targeted in romania? rq3: which the distribution of romanian csr campaigns in time? rq4: what types of csr campaigns take place in romania? rq5: what type of promotion (online and/ or offline) did romanian companies choose for their csr campaigns? rq6: what was the prominence of csr 1.0 and csr 2.0 tools in csr campaigns in romania? the research method is content analysis of the csr public reports of romanian organizations, posted on the above-mentioned websites. a discrete research method (babbie, 2010), content analysis allows us to study this phenomenon without hindering its development. we started form the analysis framework provided by abbott & monsen (1979) and we adapted it taking into account the data provided by the romanian companies running csr campaigns. corporate social responsibility is perceived as an investment in the organizational future and as a means of helping the community/ society in which organizations run their activities. in romania, csr initiatives have been implemented by multinational companies since 2000 and they have been gradually incorporated into the strategy of national companies. figure 2 provides an insight into the hierarchy of the most socially responsible economic actors (rq1): banking sector (134 csr campaigns), telephone and telecommunications (112), pharmaceutical (73 csr campaigns), oil and gas (64), foundations and ngos (43). number of campaigns 134 73 112 64 44 43 20 11 31 12 13 7 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 b a n k p h a rm a c e u ti c a l t e le p h o n e & t e le c o m m u n ic a ti o n s o il & g a s f o o d & (n o n )a lc o h o li c f o u n d a ti o n s & a s s o c ia ti o n s b u il d in g m a te ri a ls a u to m o ti v e i n d u s tr y it c o s m e ti c t o b a c c o o th e rs figure 2. prominence of the romanian organizations – planners of csr campaigns m. pătruț, c. cmeciu romanian campaigns on corporate social responsibility – signs of glocalization 117 in order to provide an answer to rq2, we have started from the main domains in which organizations have invested at a global level: environment, equal opportunities, investment in employees, community involvement, and product safety and quality. as observed in table 3, the above-mentioned domains have been divided into subdomains in order to provide a more detailed image of the csr campaigns at a local level. we should mention that in many cases a csr campaign may focus on more subdomains because it has more objectives to be accomplished within a time interval. for example, the csr campaign „clujul are suflet”/ ”the city of cluj has soul” (transilvania bank, 2007) succeeded in opening a day care center for disadvantaged young people, a center which was meant to provide them not only with food, shelter and financial support, but also with psychological counseling, personal and professional development programs, support for social inclusion. as observed (table 3), the domain which triggered the economic actors’ attention more was the community involvement in problem solving (n=401), public health, social services, education and personal development, human rights, and non-governmental organizations’ development. on the second place, there are the csr campaigns (n=96) focused on environment issue: pollution control, recycling of waste materials, environment improvement and green areas maintenance. tabel 3. romanian csr campaigns – (sub)domains of interest domain subdomain number of campaigns percentage environment (96 csr campaigns) pollution control 25 4,43 % recycling of waste materials 23 4,07 % environment improvement 23 4,07% green areas maintenance 25 4,43 % equal opportunity (18 csr campaigns) minorities, women, disadvantaged groups on the labor market 18 3,19% investment in their employees (22 csr campaigns) health and safety of employees 10 1,77% advice & training 12 2,12% community involvement (401 csr campaigns) community-elected activities 13 2,30 % public health 69 12,23% assistance & social services 129 22,87% education & personal development 92 16,31% human rights 16 2,83% sports 22 3,90 % tourism 9 1,59% literature & arts 14 2,48% history and heritage 12 2,12% development ngos 25 4,43 % products (27 csr campaigns) product safety and quality 27 5,03% the temporal evolution of csr campaigns in romania shows (figure 3) that there was a timid start in 2004 (only 5 csr campaigns posted on the csr websites) but in time there was an increase by the end of 2010 (23 csr campaigns posted on the csr websites). the economic crisis has had an impact on the organizational budget for csr campaigns and this is obvious in the decrease of the csr campaigns posted on the csr websites in 2011 (7 csr campaigns) and 2012 (only 3 csr campaigns). then the number of csr campaigns has increased in 2013 and 2014. brain. broad research in artificial intelligence and neuroscience volume 7, issue 1, march 2016, issn 2067-3957 (online), issn 2068 0473 (print) 118 number of csr campaigns in romania 5 19 25 23 23 20 23 7 3 176 188 52 0 50 100 150 200 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 number of campaigns figure 3. the evolution of csr campaigns in romania (200430.03.2015) to find out the most frequent types of csr campaigns implemented in romania (rq4), we have started from kotler and lee’s typology (2005) of csr activities: promotion of a cause, philanthropic actions, community volunteering, cause-related marketing, social marketing and socially responsible business practices. taking into account the lack of information on the description of csr campaigns provided on the csr websites, we shaped our own typology of csr campaign types (figure 4) : monetary or goods donation, voluntary activities, cause-related marketing, sponsorships of special events, partnerships with public institutions, consultancy and training for internal and/ or external publics, information, education or awareness campaigns, philanthropic foundations within organizations. types of csr campaigns 8% 18% 20% 2%7% 13% 14% 18% philanthropic foundation monetary donation voluntary activities caus e-related marketing sponsors hip information/ education/ awareness campaigns cons ultancy and training partners hip with public authorities figure 4. types of csr campaigns in romania as figure 4 shows, the most frequently used types of csr campaigns in romania are: employees’ and community members’ volunteering (20%), monetary or goods donations (18%), local or national partnerships with public institutions (18%), consultancy and training programs (14%), and information/ education/ awareness campaigns (13%). for the promotion of csr campaigns (rq5), romanian companies used both the online and offline environment (figure 5). out of the 564 csr campaigns that were analyzed, 56% campaigns were promoted only offline, 30% were promoted in both environments and 2% were promoted only online. 12% csr campaigns were promoted neither online nor offline. this lack of promotion was either the investor’s desire to invest more money in helping the vulnerable groups or the immediacy of implementing urgent measures (the 2009 floods, for example). m. pătruț, c. cmeciu romanian campaigns on corporate social responsibility – signs of glocalization 119 promoting csr campaigns 30% 56% 2% 12% offline and online promotion only offline promotion only online promotion without promotion figure 5. offline and/ or online promotion of csr campaigns in romania the last research question (rq6) focused on the prominence of the csr 1.0 and csr 2.0 tools used in the csr campaigns promoted online (figure 6). all of the 45% (n=243) campaigns used the website, as a csr 1.0 tool, to promote their activities and used website title very similar to the csr campaign titles. as csr 2.0 tools, facebook was the most frequently used (n= 125), followed by blogs (n = 124) and youtube (n =56). most organizations, which promoted their csr campaigns online, chose both facebook and blogs to make their events or the information about the campaign visible. youtube was used to upload fragments from the events that took place in the csr campaigns. csr 1.0 and csr 2.0 tools in csr campaigns 45% 22% 23% 10% websites blogs facebook youtube figure 6. csr 1.0 and csr 2.0 tools in csr campaigns in romania as mentioned in 3.2., at a global level, the hierarchy of csr 2.0 tools used by the most profitable 500 companies in 2011 was the following: rss posts, embedded videos, twitter, facebook, youtube , blogs, and podcasts (source: 2011 global social media and csr report on the ftse global 500). as observed, at a local level, the hierarchy is different: facebook, blogs and youtube. the main reason lies in the increase of facebook and blogs in romania as means of self and organizational promotion. 5. conclusions after the revolution, romanian organizations have become aware that investing in local communities through csr campaigns will bring financial benefits. multinational companies investing in romania have provided the global strategies on csr activities, but romanian organizations have adapted these global strategies to the local context. the banking sector is the brain. broad research in artificial intelligence and neuroscience volume 7, issue 1, march 2016, issn 2067-3957 (online), issn 2068 0473 (print) 120 most socially responsible both at the global and at the glocal level (romania). the domains in which romanian organizations implemented their csr campaigns are: voluntary actions, donations and philanthropic foundations. throughout the years, the promotion has moved from the offline environment to the online environment where csr 1.0 tools, such as websites, and csr 2.0 tools, such as facebook, are the most frequently used. references : abbott, w.f. & monsen, r. j. 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(2009). capitalism moral. o reconciliere a interesului privat cu binele public, bucureşti: curtea veche. key: cord-0058088-f75n3lq1 authors: megarry, jessica title: female performers on a male stage date: 2020-11-28 journal: the limitations of social media feminism doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-60629-9_7 sha: aa5c25bf80ba96eb1524145867383e55b29d5a11 doc_id: 58088 cord_uid: f75n3lq1 in this concluding chapter, i argue that feminists should reject social media and return to older forms of revolutionary praxis. i examine how the contemporary conditions of advanced neoliberal capitalism have dovetailed with the ideology of the social media industry to produce new cultural and political challenges for feminist organising. in doing so, i establish social media as a space that men have created for their own patriarchal, commercial and militaristic purposes. the book ends with a call for the revival of face-to-face small group organising. have attempted to demonstrate that while wlm activists understood that bringing about a feminist revolution required autonomous organising and a complete break with male culture, women today are once again organising alongside men, in a male space, on a male stage. i have argued that social media and the politics of women's liberation are incompatible. relying on social media for organising produces an impoverished form of feminist politics that ultimately preserves the status quo. my argument is not only that social media is an impediment to reviving the wlm, but also that the use of male-controlled digital platforms for feminist organising is politically dangerous for women. to this end, i have not discussed alternative technological platforms that could be more women-friendly, or that might offer feminist activists more personal security in digital space. such a focus would constitute reformism by endeavouring to alter the technological landscape in specific ways, rather than recognising social media as a political institution upholding male dominance that feminists should reject. there is an inherent fallacy in the idea that a male-owned digital platform could provide an auspicious organising space for advancing women's liberation. as audre lorde ([1979] 2007, 112) famously stated, 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house'. in the much less frequently quoted sentences that follow the citation above, lorde goes on to say that: [the master's tools] may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. and this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support (emphasis added). lorde's claim is illuminating because it accurately captures the limitations of the celebratory zeitgeist that many feminist thinkers have been caught up in following the rise of social media. her argument also reinforces the claim that i have made throughout this book: it remains politically crucial for feminists to become women-identified and to move away from a reliance on male culture and male structures. without a feminist press and autonomous points of distribution, it is difficult to see how women can do much more today than write on male platforms whilst remaining visible and accessible to a male audience. many women depend on social media as 'their only source of support' in the contemporary neoliberal context, but i have argued that revolution is dependent upon women rejecting male structures and moving towards each other in physical space. the radical and lesbian feminist theoretical framework i adopt in this book is distinct from other recent critical investigations of social media and feminism. here, i foreground the existence of male supremacy, and i also explicitly theorise women's oppression. as several scholars have now identified, the alliance between social media and the values of neoliberal capitalism is certainly an uncomfortable one for feminism (banet-weiser 2018; jarrett 2016; yeatman 2014) . nonetheless, it is also crucial that scholars and activists remain committed to analysing how feminist success in digital space is dependent on male approval, and to take seriously how social media perpetuates patriarchy. i have demonstrated how male power intersects with social media and how an omnipotent male presence in digital space is limiting women's ability to revive the wlm. activists in the wlm had already embarked on the process of consciousness-raising before they engaged in printbased media production. in other words, there was an already existing groundswell of wlm activists who had come together to participate in consciousness-raising prior to movement women engaging with antifeminists or non-politicised women in the wider public sphere. via the small group process, many activists had also already developed strong relationships that transcended the boundaries of male-approved female bonding. the digitally mediated context that activists are working in today, however, is markedly different: instead of collectively creating media from a movement, women have been presented with men's digital communication tools, from which they are trying to grow a movement. what this means is that women who have never participated in a face-toface feminist group or bonded with other women in a political organising context are now trying to raise their consciousness, build feminist theory and engage in activism in digital spaces initially designed for young men to share and rate photos of their female classmates. in the pages that follow, i will provide a brief overview of the argument that has been advanced thus far, before offering some concluding remarks. chapter 3 drew attention to the significance of place and space to the political project of women's liberation. proceeding from the standpoint that space is relevant to the question of social and political change, i argued that the wlm was revolutionary because it materially shifted men's patterns of access to women. for wlm activists, occupying places for feminism and making them women-only spaces involved an element of saying no, of denying men access (frye [1977] 1988). this organising praxis was revolutionary because women moved; they created an infrastructure through which they could begin to move away from men and towards other women in their day-to-day lives. the face-to-face and print-based communication infrastructure of the wlm also facilitated women's ability to live their whole lives in the movement, and this promoted the development of both a visionary politics and an oppositional women's culture that presented a tangible challenge to male supremacy. wlm activists prefigured in their personal lives revolutionary ways of living. it was by separating from men that they set up the material conditions through which they could begin to explore-and also enact-their potential to be fully human outside of male control. in chap. 4, i argued that social media cannot provide a politically similar infrastructure for women because male omnipresence in digital space functions as a serious impediment to women's ability to think outside of male political frameworks. i also argued that feminists need to be alert to male surveillance of digital feminism as a form of political intervention. women bear witness to the abuse of other feminists online. this serves as a warning to all women about what ideas constitute acceptable feminist speech and it discourages them from pursuing revolutionary actions. so far, feminist social movement scholars have often uncritically accepted the architecture of social media as politically neutral, rather than a landscape created by, and for, male interests. such an approach is both naïve and politically dangerous. feminist geographers such as leslie kanes weisman (1992, 10) have done considerable work charting how male-dominated societies produce 'social, physical and metaphysical space[s]' that reflect and perpetuate 'male experience, male consciousness and male control'. in both platform policies and architectural design, social media companies advance a male worldview, are imbued with male values and, 'being the beneficiaries of the current political system' (hilla kerner dn, ca), are also thoroughly implicated in global systems of imperialist, capitalist and racist exploitation. significant scholarly attention has now been dedicated to investigating how women are organising online, but, as anne billows (dn, uk) pointed out in her interview, feminist academics and activists still know very little about mras and the strategies they use. robustly investigating the digital manifestations of male dominance is a pertinent avenue of research for feminist scholars. billows expressed this well when she said that women should 'stop leaving our whole souls and minds and bodies on the internet' and find answers to questions such as 'who are [mras] , what companies do they own, what concrete power do they have, and how does that play with the rest of patriarchal society?' in this book, i could only give a modest indication of the scope of men's digital organising against feminists, and the diverse tactics they use to perpetuate male control of women. there is much work still to do in this area. in chap. 4, i also demonstrated how digital activists try to survive men's hostility by adopting anonymous profiles, moderating content and retreating to closed and secret facebook groups. both retreating and attempting to render oneself anonymous or invisible are tactics that have long been used by women to try to circumvent male violence. according to weisman (1992, 70) , 'it stands to reason that if women perceive public space as unmanageable and threatening, they will avoid it and restrict their mobility within it'. a retreat to closed digital groups, however, is not ideologically aligned with the separatist tradition, and, as i have argued, it does not produce the same emancipatory political effects. the popularity of closed/private facebook groups amongst feminists is evidence of women attempting to carve out potentially safer enclaves within male institutions. separatism, conversely, is based not only on a rejection of, and a withdrawal from, male institutions; it is also a political process which attempts to create new social and political forms based upon feminist principles. i will expand on this point further below. like spatial autonomy, temporal autonomy is a feminist resource. scholars such as robert hassan (2012, 195) have argued that, in the contemporary context, 'the individual struggles to achieve any sort of temporal autonomy'. this is because our time 'is "owned" by [an] information network that continually makes demands on it and distracts it into countless different, yet increasingly homogenous commercial and commodified spaces'. in chap. 5, i contested the idea that social media has saved feminists time in politically meaningful ways. in doing so, i argued that the wlm 'feedback loop' (beins 2017) between consciousnessraising, theory-building and action should not be short-circuited. i demonstrated how the speed at which digital content is created fragments feminist ideas, obliterating a sense of the past and impeding women's ability to develop a structural analysis of male supremacy. as charlotte bunch (1978, 219) has argued, 'if the written word is important, then where, why and how we do it matters also'. social media is not a space conducive to strategic political organising; it keeps women's attention focussed on a perpetual present moment circumscribed by male concerns. platforms encourage personal expression, personal feelings trump political analysis and theory development is only permitted within tightly controlled parameters that are acceptable to men. in chap. 5, i also discussed how social media is underwritten by the ideology of therapism (raymond 1986) , where the goal is to make women feel temporarily better, rather than enabling them to challenge structural conditions. i suggested that connection in digital space does not encapsulate, and cannot transmit, the life of the revolution. while wlm newsletters were not responsible for sparking the creativity and passion which underwrote women's interactions in women-only physical space, they could, at that particular historical moment, provide a space for women to advertise events and spread feminist ideas without fear of surveillance or intervention. it is now becoming increasingly recognised that digital interactions are preformatted (van dijck and poell 2015, 2) , and that individuals have little control over how they construct their social media spaces. in chap. 6, i argued that social media has hampered, rather than facilitated, the development of a feminist ethic. activists are currently attempting to grow a feminist movement whilst firmly embedded within the dominant woman-hating culture, using a platform architecture that encourages combative, instead of feminist, forms of engagement. i critically analysed how social media logic has infiltrated contemporary feminist praxis, posing new barriers to women's ability to develop the skills of organising, envision alternative cultural forms and become gyn/affective (raymond 1986 ). women cannot create their own ways of communicating in digital space. because social media destroys the bridge between practice and theory that was so integral to the success of the wlm, there is also very little opportunity for women to develop gyn/affection. while activists might individually benefit from digital camaraderie and the sense of support they derive from social media interactions, digital participation is an individual coping mechanism for the present moment which does not facilitate collective resistance to male cultural norms in the same way that is possible in women-only physical space. women can discuss prefigurative forms online but they cannot put ideas into action until they physically come together. experimentation is also precluded, and, insidiously, conformity to the dominant culture is encouraged and rewarded via promotion in the network. in chap. 6, i suggested that women are picking up male tactics of political engagement based around the logic of surveillance, combative behaviour and hero worship. i also discussed how scholars often forget that attention remains a finite resource in digital space (lovink and rossiter 2018, 40; tufekci 2013) . it is still only a select number of users that are widely followed, shared and heard (dean 2019) . within the social media economy, people and ideas are rewarded with approval (likes, follows, shares), or are rejected by being ignored, which means that some women's contributions remain invisible to the network at large (baym and boyd 2012, 322) . social media architecture makes it very difficult for activists to determine whether they have read every contribution to a discussion: preferences algorithmically shape what activists are exposed to, content is evanescent and past contributions are difficult to retrieve. older interviewees highlighted how physical participation in the wlm, by contrast, gave them access to 'an ongoing ferment of ideas' and a diversity of perspectives which helped to ensure that feminist theory remained attuned to the diverse realities of women's lives: [ the ideas] were all happening at once, and they were all affecting each other […] we would have working class women say one thing, and maori women would say another thing, and lesbians would say another thing, […] and mothers would say another thing. and so, we heard a wide range of views about each particular issue, you know? it wasn't restricted to what you would get on the end of a blog about a particular shade of feminism. (jenny rankine wlm, nz) according to rankine, the 'ferment of ideas' that she experienced in the face-to-face context of the wlm is very difficult to achieve in social media spaces: 'i don't see it's possible to have it online'. linda bellos (wlm, uk) made a similar point in relation to the ethos of equality enacted in wlm consciousness-raising groups, where every woman present was given the opportunity to speak: digital self-publishing makes space for marginalised voices in the sense that it has removed traditional publishing gatekeepers, but nonetheless, there is little political use in every woman being able to speak if only certain women are listened to and promoted via sharing and liking functionalities. social media might enable women of colour to immediately call out and speak back to racism within feminist networks (daniels 2016, 54; okolosie 2014, 90) , but my interviewees drew attention to how a feminist praxis of anti-racism will not implicitly come to be because of the self-publishing properties of platforms. they also contested the idea that social media offers a more equal communicative space than faceto-face discussions or print-based media, because they traced getting rid of relations of dominance to the intentions of activists, rather than to technological architecture: 'people can say [social media] is horizontal, but our biases are always going to be there' (alicen grey dn, usa). from this vantage point, the claim that social media facilitates intersectionality, or that digital organising is more inclusive than earlier forms of feminism (hurwitz 2017) , denotes a form of technological determinism that pays insufficient attention to how 'getting rid of immanent hierarchies requires politics' (dean 2019, 329) . the point of view advanced in this book is a partial one, as there are undoubtedly many manifestations of both wlm and contemporary radical feminist organising that i have not been able to consider. what has been presented thus far is my analysis of the political efficacy of historical and digital radical feminist organising tactics. this analysis was informed by radical and lesbian feminist theory; the archival and digital data i collected; the perspectives, experiences and insights of my interviewees; and my own experiences of feminist organising and activism. i have argued that the idea that feminism is a broad umbrella movement containing diverse and competing political perspectives is politically dangerous because it creates space for anti-feminist viewpoints to masquerade as feminist and makes feminism vulnerable to attack from within (thompson 2001 ). this is not to suggest that the feminist movement is static and does not morph alongside the evolution of political ideas, but it is to suggest that feminism can be defined, and that its meaning should be debated (raymond [1993 (raymond [ ] 1995 . i hope that the ideas presented here can contribute to sparking both scholarly and activist debate about the most efficacious ways forward for radical feminists in the digitally oriented social and political context of the twenty-first century. in this book, i have attempted to systematically lay out how social media creates barriers to consciousness-raising, theory-building and the development of politically informed feminist praxis. i have suggested that social media does not provide the spatial or temporal conditions for theorising and activism to easily co-exist, and that the emancipatory potential of digital space has now been reduced to encouraging women to pursue a male ethic of engagement. today, it is becoming increasingly understood that social media corporations perpetuate misogyny and racism (daniels 2009; megarry 2018; noble 2018) , are responsible for large and distressing abuses of corporate power (cadwalladr 2017; zuboff 2019) , have enabled mass social surveillance (dubrofsky and magnet 2015; fuchs 2017) and are advancing a new kind of imperialism (greenfield 2018, 278; grossman 2015; lafrance 2016) . still, many radical feminists continue to use social media because they find it personally valuable. in their book changing our minds, celia kitzinger and rachel perkins (1993, 6) began their treatise on the dangers of psychology for lesbian feminism by stating that they have 'heard enough lesbians say it "saved my life" to feel almost guilty about challenging psychology'. throughout the years in which i have been working on this project, i, too, have commonly encountered the viewpoint that women both enjoy and would be lost without their international digital connections. like kitzinger and perkins, i have also at times been self-conscious about politically challenging an institution that has provided a lifeline to so many women. nonetheless, i remain convinced that feminists' use of social media should be challenged. all 26 women interviewed for this project, to varying degrees, advanced the view that social media is an impediment to the political project of women's liberation. of the two principal viewpoints that are discernible within the data set, the first is a complete rejection of the idea that social media facilitates feminist organising or feminist movement-building. for these women, social media communication is something else entirely. hilla kerner (dn, ca), for example, said that social media 'is very limited, it's just another way to get to women, it's not organising […] some women think more of it [but] i would not call [digital] conversation actual political organising'. sheila jeffreys (wlm, uk) also advanced this line of argument. she said: 'i'm not sure [social media] helps to create a movement because the groups don't exist, and the campaigns don't really exist either. […] i don't think social media facilitates organising'. the second commonly articulated perspective was that, while women held severe misgivings about the political efficacy of using social media as a tool for feminism, they also did not want to be completely negative about it. these interviewees pointed to communicative speed and the breaking down of geographical barriers between women as potentially beneficial to feminism: having access to a second by second, hour by hour reminder that you are not alone can be such an amazing thing that [women] wouldn't have had before the internet. women going through their day-to-day lives having their phone go "ding! ding! ding!" as a reminder that they are not alone. (tiger drummond dn, uk) the states are so big that a lot of american feminists think they are the only one in their town […] so for them, the ability to connect and talk with women online who are like-minded is really important to learn that they're not alone. (meghan murphy dn, ca) these quotes highlight how networked technologies enable women to feel better-what social movement scholars often term the affective benefits of digital participation (see mendes et al. 2019 )-or cope more easily with their daily reality in a hostile cultural and political climate. still, the potential advantages of communicative speed and international connections were not generally perceived by interviewees to make up for what feminism has lost in the shift away from face-to-face organising. for example, lierre keith (wlm, usa) said that 'there are women who have good experiences' and social media 'can provide an entry into radical feminism' but, ultimately, she felt that digital space provides an inhospireinstating lesbian feminism as a central pillar of the wlm was another important aim of this book. i have argued that moving away from men and choosing to live as lesbians offered women space to enact new social and political forms based upon feminist principles. while lesbians were crucial drivers of feminism during the wlm, several interviewees expressed concern that rejecting heterosexuality is not understood as a viable and positive choice for feminists today. some traced this directly to digital organising. tiger drummond (dn, uk), for example, said that because lesbianism remains intangible for women in digital space, the reality of women loving women cannot be rendered material; it remains an idea, rather than a reality. for drummond, interacting in women-only physical space is crucial if women are to reject heterosexuality. as she said, coming together physically 'deletes hours of [digital] arguments' because women can witness 'the reality' of women loving women for themselves. other interviewees pointed to the dominant cultural influence of queer politics to explain the decline in women choosing to live as lesbians today. queer politics creates problems for feminism, not least because it holds two oppositional perspectives in tandem: it claims that sexually is biologically innate instead of socially constructed, and it also positions normative sexuality as flexible and fluid, which suggests that women should be open to diverse sexual encounters ). both of these ideas perpetuate male dominance. suggesting that lesbianism is biologically innate is a politically conservative move that positions heterosexuality as natural and inevitable, thus foreclosing resistance (kitzinger 1989) . some interviewees, such as lynne harne (wlm, uk), reported that they were 'shocked to see the belief in biological determinism' in digital feminist spaces. harne felt that the notion that homosexual people are 'born this way' has a policing effect, and she explained how 'women get loads of abuse from people' online for suggesting that it is possible to leave heterosexuality and choose to live as a lesbian. the idea that women should be open to various sexual encounters also perpetuates male dominance because it buys into the patriarchal notion that all men should have access to women, even when they have declared themselves to be lesbians. interviewees were particularly concerned with the impact transgender ideology has had upon women's ability to delineate their own sexual boundaries. as i explained in chap. 2, transgender ideology obscures women's structural oppression because it understands cisgender women as having power over men who wish to perform femininity. in this way, transgenderism casts transgender-identified men as more oppressed than women and vilifies the idea of lesbianism on the basis that it is an exclusive sexuality which does not conform to compulsory queer fluidity . although they were cognisant that the leftist political climate of 'let's not exclude anybody' predates the rise of social media (jenny rankine wlm, nz), some interviewees felt that it is more difficult in the digital era for women to draw their own boundaries. in stark contrast to the ideology of the wlm, lesbianism is not commonly viewed as a revolutionary political choice for feminists today. queer culture positions lesbian identity as anachronistic, exclusionary and out of date (bendix 2019) , and, in line with this sensibility, many women now prefer the term 'queer' instead of 'lesbian' to describe themselves (jeffreys 2018; megarry et al. 2018; miller et al. 2016) . sheila jeffreys (2018, 189) has also recently written about anti-feminist developments within digital lesbian communities, highlighting how the boundaries of who can call themselves a lesbian are now being viciously policed by bloggers who insist that sexuality is biologically determined, and that women cannot choose to live as lesbians. according to this line of argument, a woman can only call herself a lesbian if she has only ever felt sexual desire for women and has never had sexual contact with men (jeffreys 2018, 189) . interviewees also flagged a rising anti-political lesbianism sentiment in digital feminist discussions. tiger drummond (dn, uk) and alicen grey (dn, usa) both traced its emergence to the blogging site tumblr. grey said: 'i'd say tumblr is heavily responsible. it sounds silly to blame tumblr, but really though!' drummond offered further expansion on this claim. she said that political lesbianism 'is a swear word on tumblr': 'i've had several friends who have left that site or have been sent abusive messages because they've entertained it as a possible thing […] it's just such a vicious environment'. 1 that lesbianism is being positioned as an elite club in digital spaces, one in which women who have never had sexual relationships with men and who have only ever felt sexual desire for women are worthy of joining, creates a significant problem for women's liberation. as jeffreys (2018, 189) has explained, this idea is 'harmful to the possibility of creating lesbian feminist community and politics, which cannot develop when the idea of essential lesbianism is wielded to prevent women imagining that they could choose to love women'. alongside the dominance of queer politics, the shift away from faceto-face organising and the feminist embrace of a social media ethic of antagonism may have also influenced the rise of anti-political lesbianism sentiment in social media spaces. jeffreys (2018, 189) has called the online boundary wars over lesbianism a type of 'jockeying for position, and for authenticity, for the status of "real ones"'. this kind of behaviour is congruent with social media logic, where feminists must fight for visibility and attention, and success is measured according to adherence to male cultural norms. social media spaces encourage lesbians to show off their wives and girlfriends and publicly display their relationships to receive cultural traction via likes and retweets. this strand of digital culture creates severe impediments to the revival of the wlm, because both the boundary wars over who is an authentic lesbian, as well as the behaviour of vying for visibility in alignment with the norms of celebrity culture, significantly impede the development of a feminist ethics of sexual practice. engaging solely in digital space and surrounded by male cultural norms, it is difficult to contest the celebration of inequality in interpersonal relationships, such as the manifestation of heterosexual power dynamics in lesbian couples. as i explained in chap. 5, personal experience is equated with truth in digital space, but there is no in-built mechanism that prompts a shift to critical analysis or collective theorising. tiger drummond (dn, uk) said that some activists feel they cannot critically 1 the revival of claims that sexuality is biologically innate is perhaps unsurprising as this view is congruent with the tumblr culture of playing 'the most enticing victim' (bell 2013, 36 ; see also nagle 2017) . according to this logic, lesbians on tumblr gain traction for their blogs by politically positioning themselves as authentic victims of their innate sexual desires. contest other women's ideas about lesbianism, which become 'untouchable online' when personal expression is privileged over critical analysis and debate: 'when [women] are told that these are the rules of radical feminism they go, "oh, okay". and they go, "let's not question that, or let's not offend, let's not be critical of the butch/femme dichotomy, or let's not be critical of lesbian relationships"'. it is important to acknowledge that feminists today are trying to organise in a more difficult cultural and political moment than that which was faced by early wlm activists. living under conditions of advanced neoliberal capitalism, in an era which is 'dedicated to the undoing of public collectivism as it centres on the authority of the state' (yeatman 2014, 90) , women are now bound by structural constraints that wlm activists did not have to contend with. for example, without access to state welfare, sustained participation in feminist organising is financially untenable for many women today. several wlm respondents explained how receiving benefits enabled them to dedicate their life to feminist activist work. jenny rankine (wlm, nz), for example, got a job in auckland's rape crisis centre because the organisation received state funding to cover one unemployed worker: 'i got paid the dole, basically, to work there on women's work, which i thought was wonderful'. interviewee accounts also reveal that the type of political action that activists engage in is related to the social context in which they are working. finn mackay (dn, uk) explained how 'the level of scrutiny that we live under today' means that political action is more constrained: that sort of direct action doesn't really happen now and i think a lot of the younger women are organising within the law, getting permission for protests, getting formal funding, getting formal sponsorship which comes with strings which means you can't do that kind of thing […] i totally understand why people organise the way that they do because of the parameters that are on activists nowadays. the beginnings of state surveillance in the 1980s also prompted some wlm activists to forgo participation in direct actions such as marches and vandalism and begin to work within legal channels to campaign for change. lynne harne (wlm, uk), for example, started working with the left-leaning greater london council in the 1980s to reform sex education in schools and also to raise awareness about lesbian women losing custody of their children after divorce. for harne, this type of campaigning is conceptually distinct from activism, because she understands activism to be an illegal activity. prior to the introduction of cctv, harne conceived of herself as a 'direct action' feminist: we used to do loads of spray painting and things [like] putting glue in the locks of sex shops, spray painting huge posters on motorways and trying to get cinemas closed down by putting concrete down the toilets […] we were actually trying to harm the pornographers, we were trying to harm their businesses. feminists today are even more bound by the constraints of competitive neoliberalism than women like harne were, and this shapes the type of organising they pursue. for example, a police record could now significantly impede a woman's future employment possibilities. as finn mackay (dn, uk) said, 'students are not as free as they used to be, if you are unemployed there are all these requirements and checks on you'. the structural conditions of the present moment also make it very difficult for women to find a place to meet. whereas 'most [wlm] meetings were held in someone's living room or in some other free meeting space' (hanisch 2010, n.p.) , many british women today can no longer afford to keep a lounge room in their private home, where political meetings could be hosted. 2 the introduction of the 'bedroom tax' in april 2013 imposed increasing conditionality on recipients of uk housing benefits by 'introduc[ing] financial penalties for anyone of working age living in rented social housing who was in receipt of housing benefit and deemed to be "over-occupying"' (dabrowski 2017, 163) . what this means is that individuals who receive housing benefits have their stipends reduced if they have a spare room. according to vicki dabrowski (2017, 164-165) , such a policy makes 'an enormous difference to some young women's standard of living' and has 'made already unstable positions worse'. this neoliberal climate of gendered austerity is not unique to britain; it is a reality across developed western liberal democracies (bray 2013, 93-116) . the process of gentrification that geert lovink and ned rossiter (2018, 28-29) have called the 'financialization of urban space' has profoundly affected women's ability to autonomously organise. across the usa, the uk, australia, canada and new zealand, it is largely no longer possible to 'hangout on the fringes of festivals, make happenings in the underground cafes, build art spaces and studios, maintain theatre and performance spaces [and] run off zines on your own printing press or server' (lovink and rossiter 2018, 28-29) . not only is it more difficult for women to access autonomous spaces today, but they also struggle to find the time to participate regularly in groups. increased flexibilisation and casualisation of labour (springer et al. 2016) means that feminist meetings must now be organised around women's ever-changing work rosters. women can be 'called into work erratically and unexpectedly', and this makes regular participation in a movement almost impossible (sitka 2017, 74) . organising consciousnessraising groups in the twenty-first century is no easy task: 'everyone is busier' and 'work and family demand much more of our time' (hanisch 2010, n.p.) . digital feminist praxis is perhaps fitting for a time in which revolutionary social change feels completely beyond reach. my interview data suggests that women's reliance on social media is related to changes in structural conditions. some interviewees wanted to meet other women more regularly face-to-face, but they felt constrained in their ability to do so: i'd love to meet more than we do […] every now and then there is an event, it's typically something like a radical feminist conference, and it's so good. things like that are really just kind of energising, because you have a weekend or whatever with your sisters, and you're talking, and you feel like "yeah, it's not just me", and social media provides a form of escapism for women; it is a place where they can try to transcend their material reality. the use of social media for feminism is also suited to the context of advanced neoliberal capitalism, where feminist participation, like the casualisation of labour, has become fragmented. women can get involved from anywhere, at any time, via smartphones, but this form of feminist engagement is questionable as a means for reviving the wlm: it contributes to fuelling, rather than challenging, the status quo. women's use of social media directly results in increased profits for globally dominant male-owned corporations (jarrett 2016) , and digital space is also totally surveilled. the internet cannot provide an effective space for women's political growth because it is not an autonomous space. rather, it is a commercial space that men have created to fulfil their own political agenda. if women are lacking in imagination today in comparison to wlm activists, then perhaps this is because they currently have very little free space in which they could dream. feminists today are also organising in a context that is more hostile to the pursuit of a genderless world. older interviewees explained how coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s meant that women were socialised into a culture dominated by a hippie aesthetic and the values of the countercultural left. according to lierre keith (wlm, usa), this framework lent itself more easily to a rejection of patriarchal beauty standards and normative femininity. she pointed to how socialist critiques of consumerist capitalism were quickly taken up by wlm activists and further subjected to feminist analysis: it was all about natural [and] that's not a bad value system because it's about saying we want to like our bodies [and] we are tired of these rules that say we are supposed to hate ourselves. women took [these values] and ran with [them] in particularly feminist ways. in contrast to the backdrop of leftist social movements which provided a culture conducive to the emergence of the wlm, keith suggested that it is more difficult for women to reject femininity and consumer culture today because they have been socialised into a hypersexual world: 'i know it's harder and harder for the young ones, i see that they are up against way more than i was ever up against. [the culture is] so increasingly pornified, so it's harder for women to get out'. as well as discussing how transgender ideology perpetuates gendered stereotypes, younger interviewees also highlighted porn culture (see dines 2010) as posing an additional barrier to women's ability to reject patriarchal social norms and formulate an oppositional feminist consciousness. tiger drummond (dn, uk), for example, said: 'the way that […] young girls [are] being exposed to pornography at such a young age [means that] things like [wanting to be sexually attractive to men] are really, really ingrained in women'. by encouraging women to utilise digital space and then celebrating them for their efforts, popular culture and mainstream political messaging function to implicitly discourage the building of face-to-face feminist connections. if women's liberation is dependent upon women and girls having time to explore their humanity away from male cultural norms, then the move to digital life is having profound consequences for a generation of young women whose every interaction is now being surveilled. chris sitka (wlm, au) expressed this idea in her interview: in order to be a small group of people standing up to the whole world around you, you have to build your own strength, and you do it by having your own culture, your own family, your own tribe. and this is why, when i see how young women now are all split off from each other, separated, not meeting, not even sharing houses together or whatever, i can't see how they can be strong enough to stand up against that pressure to conform to what we're told is correct. digital networking does not allow women to really see each other outside of male parameters, thus social media perpetuates their social and political atomisation. one recent british survey found 'a sharp decline in the happiness of young women and girls' (weale 2018) . explaining how girls' lives 'have contracted as their world moves online', the researchers reported that only 21% of girls 'met friends at each others' houses' in 2018, compared to 69% in 2009 (weale 2018 ; see also rogan and budgeon 2018, 9) . at the time of this book going to press, the covid-19 pandemic, its associated nation-wide lockdown policies, as well as the unprecedented push to digitally mediated engagement for all social, economic, political and educational activities will still be unfolding. of particular relevance to this book is the likelihood that the pandemic will enable further surveillance opportunities and extend the power and reach of social media companies. naomi klein has recently argued that we are currently 'observing the seamless integration of government with a handful of silicon valley giants' (klein 2020, n.p.) . klein (2020, n.p.) has called this a 'coherent pandemic shock doctrine', drawing attention to how 'the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent-and highly profitable-no-touch future'. it remains to be seen whether big tech scepticism and resistance will flourish post-pandemic, or whether public and academic opinion will be largely supportive of frenzied tech development as our only possible avenue out. while it is too early for me to comment at length here about the widespread implications of covid-19 for women's liberation, early developments are troubling. feminists know that in times of crisis the hard-won rights of women can be easily rolled back, or else forsaken entirely in the design of response measures (european network of migrant women 2020, 7). early reports indicate that both private and public spaces have become more dangerous for women, with rates of domestic violence, street harassment and indecent exposure spiking globally in the wake of 'stay at home' orders. in lockdown situations, women have few avenues to seek help from male violence, and digital space is far from a saviour. privacy issues with video conferencing platforms such as zoom have already been widely reported, with men hacking into meetings to share pornography alongside racist and misogynistic content. also concerning is that pornhub, 'the largest online depository of recorded sexual abuse of women', chose to respond to the crisis by offering men a free upgrade to its premium service (european network of migrant women 2020, 5). the consumption of online pornography has surged has a result, which equates to the increased dissemination of sexually violent content into private homes, where women and girls are currently trapped alongside their male abusers (quek and tyler 2020) . much work will need to be done by feminists to document and analyse various government responses to covid-19, associated technological development and the implications for women globally. we do need to resist [social media], reject it actually, not really resist but reject it. and build something [of our own]. (linda bellos wlm, uk) it has now been over ten years since the emergence of social media, and despite sustained efforts from feminist activists, evidence of tangible social and political outcomes for women remain unclear. amy richards (dn, usa)-the one activist i interviewed who did not describe herself as a radical feminist-evocatively characterised this situation: feminists have had a very robust presence on social media for 10 years. have the numbers of sexual assault gone down? no. have the number of women tenured professors gone up? no. has the pay disparity shrunk? no. in terms of social media being the turning point for change, i'm not so sure. some interviewees suggested that feminists are now developing more critical awareness around the limitations of social media and felt that a moment of change is afoot: i think that with experience, a lot of women are [now] seeing the limitations of 100% blogging and have [taken] to real life organising much more than they used to. they learnt the lesson basically. [social media] had its use, and now i think more and more women are learning to use the internet in more healthy ways. (anne billows dn, uk) refusing social media is not an easy task, especially when many scholars foreclose this as a practical possibility. laura portwood-stacer (2014, 299) , for example, has argued that feminist media scholars should challenge women's participation in media systems as 'an intrinsic good', but nonetheless she also posits that 'non-participation is largely untenablewe have little choice but to participate'. the internet is now so much a part of our daily lives that we can barely imagine a future which is not intrinsically bound to the digital. according to technology critic adam greenfield (2018, 8) , discursive foreclosures of alternatives impede our ability to collectively resist or 'think meaningfully about the future', because 'any conversation about the reality we want to live in [is now reframed] as a choice between varying shades of technical development'. this is similar to how feminist utopian imaginings have historically been shut down in the public sphere, presented as dangerous and impractical in order to preserve the status quo. heterosexuality, for example, was commonly understood as natural and inevitable before the wlm (miriam 1998, 13) . feminism threatens male institutions, and it is fear of feminist revolution that 'lurks behind the claim that radical feminism is utopian and therefore impossible' (miriam 1998, 13) . at this point of advanced neoliberal capitalism, resistance to social media can seem largely futile, especially considering that platforms are commercial enterprises 'whose size and concentrated technical competence now span much of the terrain of ordinary experience' (greenfield 2018, 275) . in the face of this onslaught, much feminist activism has understandably become oriented towards taking back the tech: getting women into positions in technology firms or trying to occupy space for feminism on digital platforms. this drive is only likely to increase in the post-covid-19 world. over the last few years, when i have presented some of the ideas contained in this book in activist and academic settings, many women have quickly accepted my argument that feminists should move away from social media giants. the focus of debate then usually turns to a consideration of the relative merits of alternative digital spaces for feminism, such as spinster, and how alternative platforms can best be kept secure from male surveillance and infiltrators. following twitter's decision to implement policies that effectively banned radical feminist speech in 2018, spinster was created in 2019 on the fediverse network to provide women with an alternative, women-centric space for digital discussion. 3 it was so popular when it launched that its servers initially failed. while there is clearly a strong appetite amongst women to move away from the digital giants, spinster is hardly free from their reach, or indeed from hostile men within the wider fediverse network. questions of safety persist for spinster users: some groups in the fediverse network blocked the site or have tried to shut it down, and google has also banned its android app, which significantly impedes usability for some women (fain 2019) . i remain unconvinced that any digital space, even those which women can more easily shape and control, are politically useful for feminist movement-building. the activist focus on creating digital platforms more suited to feminism continues to play into the idea that women's liberation can be achieved via digital transcendence. another common response to my argument that feminists should abandon social media is to suggest that women should technologically upskill themselves as hackers, forum designers and moderators. this suggestion is premised on the notion that if women were as technologically skilled as men, then they would be better equipped to control their digital domains. while it is crucially important that activists do develop the material skills of organising, if women continue down a digitally oriented path, then their activist energies will remain focussed on developing tech skills based around how to succeed on social media. many feminists now attend training days to learn 'the praxis of media-skills' including how to 'participate in tech cultures', and how to best avoid online sexual harassment (hurwitz 2017, 476) . such a trajectory binds women more closely to the digital world, and to a technological future. throughout this book, i have questioned whether such a future is suited to the political and ethical project of women's liberation. advocating that women become better hackers ignores that hacking evokes a male ethic of engagement based upon deception, sexual violence-that is, the penetration of targets-colonisation and surveillance (see tanczer 2015) . the battle for control of digital space can be seen as a type of modern warfare (lovink and rossiter 2018; pötzsch 2015) , and although academic debates often recast what i would see as a dangerous competition for manhood as boyish mischief (see cohn 2013, 138) that is, trolling-this does not diminish the danger for women. an embrace of social media for political organising makes feminism complicit in what anna yeatman (2014, 85) has called 'a distinctively modern fantasy of control' that promotes individualisation and fails to politically contend with the embodied experiences of everyday life. for this reason, yeatman (2014, 86) has called for feminists to 'interrogate [their] complicity with modern technology in a way that responds to the distinctive concerns of feminism'. recent scholarly suggestions for where to from here also fall radically short for women. disillusionment with social media and the decisionmaking mechanisms of unstructured crowds has prompted some academics to call for a return to the political party (dean 2016 (dean , 2019 . for feminists, however, new visions of the political party, complete with membership fees, are hardly suited to a political project that aims for nothing less than a complete overthrow of the patriarchal state system. another proposition is set out in geert lovink and ned rossiter's (2018) organisation after social media. in their book, lovink and rossiter (2018, 6) suggest that 'offline romanticism' is the 'nostalgia option' for activists because a rejection of digital space is unsuited to the present moment. they argue that what activists need is for organised digital networks to replace virtual communities (lovink and rossiter 2018, 35) . according to lovink and rossiter (2018, 13) , digital networks have become too big, and activists need to shift their focus away from the logic of watching and following to getting things done. their suggestion for where to now builds on an idea of small group organising that is coordinated through local, regional and national efforts. this is reminiscent of the wlm's organising structure, only transposed into the virtual realm. within lovink and rossiter's (2018, 5) framework, the autonomous, small, face-to-face group of the wlm is reimagined as a digital secret cell where communication is encrypted as a protection mechanism from outside dangers. lovink and rossiter (2018, 18) conceptualise their vision for the future of social movement organising as a praxis of 'organised networks', or 'orgnets'. they suggest that orgnets could draw on 'intelligent [male-designed] software' to remind people of when a network has lost focus and got too big, and assist them with 'dissolv[ing] connections, clos[ing] conversations, and delet[ing] groups once their task was over' (lovink and rossiter 2018, 2) . lovink and rossiter's treatise does not consider the needs of women to move towards each other, formulate a class consciousness and begin to recognise each other outside of male control. instead, their use of cuttingedge cyber metaphors reveals a masculine focus on hacking, encryption, transcendence and domination of the digital realm. reminiscent of donna haraway's cyberfeminist dreaming, it is very difficult to know what to actually do to 'rewire, recode and redefine' the core values of the network society to create 'contradictory platforms that break through the unconscious numbness of smooth surfaces', 'hack the attention economy' and 'smash the online self ' (lovink and rossiter 2018, 4, 163) . even lovink and rossiter's (2018, 134) tangible suggestions, such as the idea that movements should take inspiration from hate groups and paedophiles who create firewalls and use encryption technology to protect themselves against digital surveillance, also fall radically short for women. continually retreating into increasingly more tightly secured digital spaces does not solve the initial problem i have identified with closed/ private facebook groups: women's attention remains continually focussed on men and outside threat, rather than collective-based movementbuilding with other women. it is also difficult to understand how the tactics that have spurned the rise of politically conservative groups and paved the way for the expansion of male sexual violence in digital space can be in any way useful for prefiguring a feminist world. a feminist culture of social media refusal requires that women not only recognise the dangers of using the technology for feminist organising, but also that they begin to abandon it. for women isolated in their hometowns without access to other feminists locally, there are many reasons why this may be difficult. for younger women who have only ever participated in feminism in digital space, shifting focus and beginning to seek face-to-face connections might also be daunting. social media companies actively encourage users to spend more and more time on platforms, with the aim of making them feel indispensable to modern everyday life. lierre keith (wlm, usa) was one interviewee who explained how she had shut down her facebook account for a time, but having now reinstated it, finds that she keeps getting 'snowballed in'. refusal, however, is crucial. continuing down the current path will likely produce a generation of feminist activists who only know how to interact, debate and organise within the confines of platforms. the more feminists that step away from social media and begin to organise locally face-to-face, the easier it will become for others to find them and act to revive a collective-based movement. i am hesitant to suggest that it is politically efficacious for women to still use social media in conjunction with their face-to-face efforts. this is because, when i meet other activists in physical space, one of their first questions is often 'are you on facebook?' this question reveals the extent of our contemporary digital orientation: this woman does not need to begin the process of getting to know me, or to organise anything concrete here-and-now, because such work can be carried out later in digital space. while a staged shift from dependence on social media towards a face-to-face movement could potentially take place without the need to immediately abandon social media, this would need to be based upon women's concomitant pledge to creating face-toface organising structures. male-dominated societies continually deny women access to stable ground upon which they can base their activism, and developing strong female friendships is one way in which women can resist. according to janice raymond (1986, 152) , the development of gyn/affective friendship is fundamental to movement-building because it provides activists with an anchor from which they can launch political projects: the sharing of common views, attractions, and energies gives women a connection to the world so they do not lose their bearing. thus a sharing of personal life is at the same time a grounding for social and political existence. social media provides no such anchor for feminists today, and nor does it provide an infrastructure through which they can begin to move towards other women. instead, social media reproduces the values of male institutions within feminist organising structures. women need to separate from male systems to access the free space crucial to fostering revolutionary feminist ideas. this vision of separatism is aligned with the work of lesbian feminist scholars who have highlighted the creative possibilities that emerge when women withdraw from male-dominated institutions and male-dominated culture. it is not a vision of separatism as inaction, or a retreat to women licking their wounds in private. rather, it is a vision of separatism as a generative force (hoagland and penelope 1988) . for some women, giving up social media might feel like an enormous sacrifice. yet, if we understand separation from men and male institutions as a positive act that enables feminist creation (hoagland 1992, 197-198) , then we can begin to ascribe new feminist value to our choices. recently, there have been some signs of a return to face-to-face organising based around specific feminist campaigns. in the uk, for example, women managed to hold regular public meetings to protest the suggested changes to the gender recognition act that would allow men to change their legal status from men to women based only on the criteria that they self-identify as women (turner 2018) . new feminist hosting organisations such as woman's place uk, we need to talk and let a woman speak were formed to mobilise women across the country to fight the proposed reforms. several of the events hosted by the above-named organisations have been subjected to considerable protest and intimidation by transgender rights activists (hinsliff 2018) . despite this considerable pressure, women managed to hold a meeting in the house of commons on 14 march 2018 (maynard 2018) . the momentum sparked by these face-to-face gatherings has been tangible, but it is yet to be determined whether this revival of face-to-face campaigning will translate into grassroots mobilising around other issues, or a revival of consciousnessraising groups. academics and activists have also recently pointed to the continuing importance of consciousness-raising for the development of feminism, complete with calls for feminists to return to small group faceto-face organising (firth and robinson 2016; hanisch 2010; megarry 2018) , as well as providing educational workshops on how to do so. 4 revivals of face-to-face international radical feminist gatherings in europe provide another sign of hope. these events, however, also clearly expose how the lack of face-to-face organising in local communities today means that many women now travel enormous distances to access women-only space and intergenerational feminist community. at this point in history, it is important that feminists begin to conceptualise social media as the technological institutionalisation of male access to individual women, their political consciousness and the political project of women's liberation. i am arguing for a feminist paradigm shift away from the digital. social media provides an instant means of communication that transcends geographical boundaries, but digital space is not suited to the feminist political project. while both traditional print-based and digital media provide a mechanism for raising awareness of feminism and feminist issues amongst women, the existence of tangible and physically locatable feminist groups is crucial to women's political development and the growth of a revolutionary movement for social change. according to janice raymond (1986, 18) , 'men's ultimate fear is the threat posed by all dimensions, degrees and manifestations of women's personal and political movement towards and for each other'. a feminist movement grown entirely on social media would lose the basic components that made participating in the wlm life-changing and revolutionary. if feminism (and lesbianism) is to transform women's lives, then it needs to be a face-to-face activity. empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny socially mediated publicness: an introduction liberation in print: feminist periodicals and social movement identity trigger warnings: sex, lies and social justice utopia on tumblr how to make lesbians cool (and inclusive) again. nbc news north melbourne: spinifex press mark zuckerberg says change the world, yet he sets the rules. the guardian sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals the role of the state in shaping young women's experiences of austerity my brain database doesn't see skin colour": colourblind racism in the technology industry and theorizing the web crowds and party. london: verso pornland: how porn has hijacked our sexuality feminist surveillance studies global feminist perspective on the pandemic: what "normal" do we expect when the crisis is over? spinster is in its infancy, but it is already making waves in the fediverse. feminist current for a revival of feminist consciousness-raising: horizontal transformation of epistemologies and transgression of neoliberal timespace some reflections on separatism and power social media: a critical introduction radical technologies: the design of everyday life inside facebook's plan to wire the world: mark zuckerberg's crusade to put every single human being online women's liberation consciousness-raising: then and now. on the issues the age of distraction: reading, writing, and politics in a high-speed networked economy the gender recognition act is controversial-can a path to common ground be found? the guardian for lesbians only: a separatist anthology from ink to web and beyond: u.s. women's activism using traditional and new social media feminism, labour and digital media the lesbian revolution: lesbian feminism in the uk 1970-1990. london: routledge liberal humanism as an ideology of social control: the regulation of lesbian identities changing our minds: lesbian feminism and psychology how big tech plans to profit from the pandemic. the guardian facebook and the new colonialism. the atlantic the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house transgenderism and the war on women-house of commons 14/3/18. wordpress blog under the watchful eyes of men: theorising the implications of male surveillance practices for queer inclusion or lesbian exclusion: project update digital feminist activism: girls and women fight back against rape culture social movements and the construction of queer identity re-thinking radical feminism: opposition, utopianism and the moral imagination of feminist theory kill all normies: online culture wars from 4chan and tumblr to trump and the alt-right algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism beyond 'talking' and 'owning' intersectionality feminism and participation: a complicated relationship the emergence of iwar: changing practices and perceptions of military engagement in a digital era when staying home isn't safe: covid-19, pornography and the pandemic of violence against women a passion for friends: towards a philosophy of female affection. london: the women's press the personal is political: assessing feminist fundamental in the digital age female performers on a male stage: the first women's liberation movement and the authority of men, 1890-1930 being together the handbook of neoliberalism hacktivism and the male only stereotype radical feminism today not this one': social movements, the attention economy, and microcelebrity networked activism this gender battle is harder to solve than brexit. the guardian social media and the transformation of public space uk survey finds sharp decline in happiness of young women and girls. the guardian discrimination by design: a feminist critique of the man-made environment feminism and the technological age the age of surveillance capitalism capitalism's impending dangers for global humane development mahmoud dhaouadi the author suggests that development models influenced by the capitalist model of development overlooks nonmaterial dimensions of development and underdevelopment. as a consequence of this, social sciences, which are shaped by capitalist concerns also, do not examine the negative consequences of colonization on underdeveloped societies. the problem is not just ideological it is also epistemological. positive social science, according to the author an offshoot of capitalism, is also unable to comprehend the most important consequence of colonization other underdevelopment the underdevelopment of the cultural symbols, psychology, and language of the colonized societies. the author advances a model that will help include an analysis of culturalsymbolic underdevelopment in the study of development and underdevelopment of societies. development in the third world in the last three decades, most third world countries had unimpressive, disastrous, or even tragic development experiences. the burden of underdevelopment, in ali mazrui's terms, is probably most felt and experienced in black africa. 1 the human misery in countries like somalia, ethiopia, and sudan has become all too familiar to the whole world, especially through television news reports. droughts, internal conflicts, and the aids epidemic have certainly contributed to the deteriorated state of many african countries. these factors, however, are hardly adequate to account for the ugly state of affairs that prevails in several african countries in the last few years. their grim situation could have surely been otherwise had development achieved some measure of success. nation building has been anything mahmoud dhaouadi is a sociologist at the university of tunis in tunisia . 40 the american jow11al of islamic social sciences 17 .1 but a success story in these countries. nevertheless, the pessimistic image of development in somalia, ethiopia, and sudan represents the extreme case of failure in the development of the third world. on the other extreme, there are a few developing countries whose development performance has been impressive. geographically they are situated in southeast asia. south korea, taiwan, hong kong, indonesia, and thailand have embarked on serious economic and industrial growth. in fact, in the near future they are expected to become rivals to japan in the pacific. in general, however, the state of development in the third world is very bleak. those who have seriously studied developing countries believe that the experiences in those societies have been largely unsuccessful. the following quote is a good description of the situation: in the early 1990s, the community of scholars devoted to the study of third world development resembles in many respects its 1960s counterpart. the decade of the sixties began thirty years ago with a pervasive sense of optimism that in the new and modernizing nations of asia, africa and latin america, the processes of enlightenment and democratization will have their inevitable way, but it gave way increasingly to disillusionment and loss of theoretical direction. coups d'etat, once thought of as a latin american phenomenon, become regular occurrences in other parts of the world, particularly africa and the middle east. rates of economic growth in many countries were unimpressive despite foreign aid, and even in rapidly industrializing states such as brazil, south africa and iran, long-term prospects for social equality and political democracy appeared poor.2 with the state of third world development as briefly described, an intellectual crisis of development theorists of different social science orientations and schools has surfaced. modernization and dependency social science theorists, in particular, whose credibility has been challenged, have embarked on a fundamental reevaluation of their paradigms. 3 capitalism's leading posture in global development the collapse of socialism as an ideology and socioeconomic political system in its place of birth (the former soviet union and the socialist block of eastern europe) has opened the way for western capitalist domination throughout many societies, both as a superstructure and an infrastructure. dhaoudi: capitalism's impending dangers 41 the apparent victory of capitalism as a liberal socioeconomic and democratic political system has prompted francis fukuyama to describe this critical historical system shift as the "end of history."4 according to this american author, modern western industrial capitalist liberal and democratic societies have proven now, beyond any doubt, that their economic sociopolitical system is superior to the socialist system that was in practice in eastern europe and the former soviet union. history has ended in the sense there is no more room for large ideological battles. liberal democracy is not merely triumphant, it is simply what there is, and all there can be. literally, there is no more room for debate over fundamentals . the crystallization of the so-called new world order has put an end to the cold war between the two major superpowers, the united states and the former soviet union. these historical global transformations have favored capitalism as the economic sociopolitical system to become the model to be imitated and adopted, not only in the former socialist eastern european block, but also in many of today's developing societies. though in the last few years democracy has been gaining ground in many third world countries, the democratization process has not been smooth. democracy has known many setbacks here and there in the developing nations. for example, in january 1992, fearing a victory by le front islamique de salut (fis), the algerian government cancelled the second voting phase of the legislative election. this notoriously undemocratic event in algeria is just one among many that have occurred in the newly independent nations that have been experimenting with democracy. on the economic front, socialist-oriented or state-run economies of the third world have increasingly given way to the practices of market economy. this enhanced position held by capitalism since the collapse of socialism requires a reassessment of the relationship between capitalism and development. this relationship can be examined through the formulation of two questions: 1. is capitalism the ideal model that best promotes the development projects that societies really need? 2. can the capitalism of today's advanced western societies help the cause of development in less developed countries? jointly put, the two questions add up to this question: how promising, credible, and safe is the use of capitalism as a promoter of development on a more or less worldwide scale? 42 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17 .1 capitalism and development from within the term "capitalism" refers to the economic system that has been dominant in the west since the sixteenth century, following the breakup of feudalism in europe.5 with the numerous sociopolitical transformations that the west has known as a result of the french and american revolutions, as well as the industrial and scientific revolutions, capitalism has become strongly associated with democracy and social liberal policies. thus, we use here the term "capitalism" to refer specifically to the western liberal socioeconomic and democratic political system that has evolved in contemporary western advanced societies. more than four centuries of experience with capitalism as the dominant development model in the west constitutes an adequate period of time for the evaluation of the capitalist system. like any social system, capitalism is bound to have its positive and negative accomplishments. therefore, what matters in this assessment is how the pluses and the minuses balance out. because of space limitation, we intend to offer only a brief analysis of capitalism's development achievements within western frontiers. on the brighter side, capitalism has a great record of development achievements in the west in the few centuries of its existence. on the economic development front, the west has been seriously challenged only lately by japan's growing economic muscles. an argument can be made here that the japanese economic development has been more self-made than its western capitalist economic development counterpart. the latter has often been accused of exploiting other ·nations around the world. 6 in the domain of industrial and technological achievements, the capitalist west has indeed achieved some milestones. never before has man been able to manipulate, control, and transform his world as he is now able to do using the west's industrial and technological products. in this area, the japanese are either catching up or are overtaking their wes tern capitalist counterparts, particularly in the fields of electronics and information technology (e.g., computers and robots). it remains true, however, that the capitalist west is uncontestedly the pioneer in the development of modem technology in the broader sense of the term. in the development of knowledge and science, there is no doubt that the capitalist west stands alone in its unique role as catalyst of the scientific revolution and the formidable explosion of knowledge in modem times.7 these events have brought about a radical revolution in mankind's cognidhaoudi: capitalism's impending dangers 43 tion of himself and the world around him. with the new knowledge and science he has considerably strengthened his mastery both here on earth and in space. the entire planet could not have become, in mcluhan's words, a "small village," without the development of sophisticated information science and technology.8 parallel to these remarkable accomplishments, western capitalism has institutionalized the practice of political democracy and guaranteed the free expression of ideas and thought. in our view, this political-cultural development is the greatest achievement of capitalism. on this level, the western capitalist system is superior to any past or present socialist/communist system. what good are scientific/technological achievements if the system that has produced them suppresses what distinguishes mankind from other species? regardless of their scientific and technological importance, the development projects of totalitarian and tyrannical political regimes will always remain unimpressive, unappealing, and ultimately dehumanizing to the average human being. as pointed out earlier, the capitalist system has its own negative points and contradictions. 9 to begin with, at an accelerating pace over the past four centuries, capitalist development has done great harm to the ecological system of western advanced societies and of the world at large. pollution of the environment is a major concern today in many western and nonwestern cities. in most industrial and technologically advanced western societies, the rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans have been polluted beyond repair. health risks from toxic chemicals are hotly debated in those societies. deforestation, diminishing diversity of life, and global warming constitute great threats to the earth. the earth summit in rio in june 1992 bluntly warned of impending danger. the watchword in rio was "sustainable development." there are limits to the earth's resources and its capacity to absorb the waste products of industry; this must be taken into account in the process of economic development so that the legacy we leave our children is not a planet in a worse state of health than we inherited. 10 clearly, the earth is increasingly becoming uninhabitable. the major role played by western capitalism in the damage to the earth's natural resources and ecology is more than obvious. the picture of our present and future planet becomes grimmer and more desperate when we consider the ever increasing piles of destructive armament of all kinds (nuclear, biochemical) 44 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17. i in whose production and possession the capitalist west still leads. with this, the complete destruction of our planet and all living things has become a distinct possibility. the west's use of its military might constitutes an imminent threat to the very survival of mankind. in this century, two world wars were fought in which capitalist superpowers played central roles. japan was defeated by a capitalist superpower's monopolistic development and use of nuclear weapons against it. the building of a capitalist nuclear arsenal did not stop with the bombardment of hiroshima or nagasaki. rather, it has continued unabated. it has become the development model to be imitated since world war ii by big and small nations alike. it is certainly the most terrifying development model the capitalist west has set for itself and for others to imitate in modem times. on the social scene, capitalist societies have had their share of social problems. their rates of crime, divorce, suicide, alcohol/drug addiction, aids, and premarital pregnancy are considerably higher than the rest of the world's. within the fold of capitalism, individualism has run wild. in the nineteenth century, de tocqueville had already expressed observed the beginning of the weakening of collective social ties in america in favor of the individual's growing assertive freedom and independence. a more recent sociological study 11 on postmodern american society depicts a frightening portrait of its decaying "social ecology." the authors of the study argue that the harm done to nature's ecological system under rampant expanding and exploitive capitalism finds its equivalent in the damage inflicted on the web of social solidarity among americans. it is as urgent and important to save and repair social ecology as it is to save and repair environmental ecology. this worrying pattern of development under capitalist rule calls for serious reflection upon the principal forces that stand behind the capitalists' domination of the west and the rest of the world. three factors appear to be at work here: capitalism's obsession with economic/materialistic growth; the capitalist's passion for and fascination with the conquest of nature; and the capitalist's lack of a cosmic and religious frame of reference. this appears to be the result of the hostility of the expanding ethical power of materialism toward the church and the religious/spiritual conceptions/ideas it stands for. with these three forces orienting the behavior of western capitalists, it is easy to understand the state of development the west and the world at large have come to experience. for the capitalist, economic/material growth has become an end in itself even if this requires twisting/adapting sacred dhaoudi: capitalism's impending dangers 45 religious beliefs to fulfill this end. weber's protestant ethic is a good illustration of this in the rise of capitalism. 12 when economic/quantitative development becomes the target, then all efforts and all strategies have to be used to get it. that is, the ends justify the means. for capitalists, an exploitive worldwide colonization is not something to be ashamed of, nor is it considered shameful to pollute one's own environment and to overuse its natural resources, as long as the action is done for the sake of achieving economic/material growth. this unprecedented massive collective manipulation and exploitation of the earth's resources is sanctioned by the capitalists' relation with nature. they have been known for their strong passion and desire to subdue nature. since the enlightenment western man has conceived of himself as the only master here on earth. everything has to submit to his will, by force if necessary. nature's conquest is but the capitalists' fulfillment of this perception of themselves and the world around them. tension, hostility, and conflict are expected to prevail in relation to nature. the horrible consequences of the capitalists' interactions with nature on earth's well-being have just begun to be graphically and statistically told. the western renaissance, the enlightenment, and the scientific revolution shattered the capitalist's cosmic vision of things. the confrontation between the church and the men of the new science and knowledge ruptured the relations between science/knowledge and the spiritual dimension of human existence. contemporary capitalist science cares little, if at all, about the religious/spiritual/cosmic manifestations that earlier scientists, from eastern civilizations in particular, had given to this realm. heavily confined to the so-called objective and empirical research tools and methods, today's typical scientists care very little about the mysteries that lie beyond the reach of their narrow scientific outlook and their materialistic worldview. a comparison of the place of science and knowledge in muslim civilization and contemporary western civilization is in order. in islam, knowledge and science are the human means of salvation parexcellence. the ambition of the muslim scientist and scholar is not limited to the narrow discovery of nature's laws and their use here on earth. the access to more knowledge and science only makes the muslim scientist and scholar fear god more. the qur'an states plainly: "the erudite among his bondsmen fear god alone" (35:28). 46 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17. l while islamic knowledge and science draw the muslim scientists and scholars closer to the cosmos, contemporary western knowledge and science have almost done the opposite. they have done away with the spiritual connections that result from acting upon human knowledge and science. the practice of the latter is far from being a salvation for the great majority of contemporary western scientists and scholars. in other words, secularized western knowledge and science have inflicted a damaging blow to the role of knowledge and science as the most distinct and privileged means for humans to communicate with the larger cosmos. consequently, the horizons of contemporary western scientists and scholars have considerably shrunk to become confined to those phenomena they can see and measure with their five senses. from an islamic point of view, the interruption of communication between the first spring (god) of all knowledge/sciences and the individual scientists and scholars is an aberrant state that goes against the nature of things in the acquisition processes of knowledge and science. it is as unnatural as putting obstacles in space in order to prevent raindrops from returning to where they had evaporated from (rivers, lakes, oceans). based on these briefly described negative aspects of the contemporary capitalist system, one can hardly recommend it as the ideal model for worldwide development. the thesis of shumacher's small is beautiful is clearly anticapitalist. 13 capitalism is commendable only for lending itself to free political expression and democracy. on the economic and technological front, capitalism's development has proven very costlydepleting the earth's natural resources and harming its ecology. the development of all sorts of destructive weapons risks the survival of the entire planet. in terms of social justice and social ecology, the record of advanced capitalist societies is far from impressive. as mentioned above, contemporary western capitalist development of knowledge and science is cosmically underdeveloped. and last but not least, western capitalism can hardly claim innocence from the exploitation of other societies since its birth. its development can then be seen, at least partially, as the result of the underdevelopment of others. dhaoudi: capitalism's impending dangers capitalism and the underdevelopment of other societies 47 the picture of capitalism, as briefly outlined, permits one to adequately know in advance what to expect from its model of development when it has the opportunity to interact with other societies and civilizations. capitalism has had the opportunity of leaving its place of birth and making itself present on all five continents. it is now interacting with all societies as a dominant and powerful actor. with the west's unequal relation with the subdued other, the scene has been set to obtain greater benefits from this long and continuing encounter. the long period of contemporary western colonization of countries around the globe constitutes the peak of exploitation by the great western capitalist powers led by great britain and france. this is hardly difficult to imagine. on the one hand, we have a capitalist west that is strongly obsessed by the idea of achieving an ever-expanding economic/material growth. on the other, many of the countries that fell under capitalist colonization were quite rich in natural resources but helpless to defend themselves and protect their own wealth from a powerful enemy. within this historical juncture, according to dependency theorists, the development process of the underdevelopment of the colonized and dependent societies began. 14 arguments have been made by the opponents of the dependency theory that the underdevelopment of contemporary third world countries is due mainly to internal factors. the mainstream paradigm of western developmentalist social scientists asserts that the causes of third world underdevelopment have to be sought in the cultural value system and the social structures of those societies. 15 this kind of argument remains weak as long as it denies that colonization is a crucial variable that has to be taken into account in any genuine attempt to understand the dynamics of development/underdevelopment in contemporary societies. in the objective assessment of development and modernization carried out by contemporary western capitalism, the social scientist must seriously address the roles of both the spirit of capitalism and the industrial and scientific revolutions in that process of global change since the sixteenth century. obviously, scientific objectivity would not obtain if the role of the western colonization factor is dropped altogether from the analysis. empirically, it is utterly unacceptable to do away with the impact of something as concrete, as observable, and as widespread as contemporary western capitalist colonization. in denying or marginalizing the impact of west48 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17 .1 em capitalist colonization on third world underdevelopment, the social scientists put themselves in an unenviable situation. if they deny the potential impact of western colonization as an empirical social fact, they put the scientific ethics of neutrality/objectivity in real jeopardy. however, if they admit it while continuing to marginalize its role in the underdevelopment, then they can be accused of lacking the ability to comprehend (verstehen) and explain the wide range of damaging implications of contemporary western capitalist colonization on the state of development in the third world. three aspects of the former western capitalist colonization of developing societies can be outlined: the political, the economic, and the cultural colonizations . the act of contemporary western occupation of countries, especially in africa and asia, means in political terms the weakening of the capacity of the occupied people to fully run their affairs independently. the ruler of colonized territories is often either a colonial national appointee or a cooperating native designated by the colonizer. policies and decisions in the running of the affairs of people under occupation can hardly be done without the consensus and the approval of the colonizers. likewise, the administration is largely run and controlled by colonial staff who widely use the language and the administrative culture of the colonizer in dealing with the local people. in legal matters, the colonial authority appoints its own judges and magistrates and introduces its own law into the legal system. furthermore, the security forces put in place, like police, are usually nationals of the foreign occupier. the same is true also of the army. in social psychological terms, these aspects of western contemporary colonization mean the political deprivation of the occupied people from fully running their own affairs. modem research in socialization has shown the devastating effects of social deprivation on human behavior. 16 the colonization experience entails a collective deprivation of the diverse potentials of the colonized. the dominant/dominated relation that prevails between the colonizer and the colonized during occupation creates in the latter a sense of helplessness, dependency, and inferiority. 17 such a political experience can hardly claim to teach the dominated party self-respect. under colonization, political deprivation means ultimately a collective decapacitation that hinders people from growing toward full natural political development. in other words, the experience of political colonization imposes an extended period of political immaturity upon the occupied. the third world's widespread imitation of the west during and after occupadhaoudi : capitalism 's impending dangers 49 tion is to be accounted for , in part, by its continuing immaturity in the domain of conducting successful independent political governance and development projects. the stage of immaturity for both individuals and societies appears to be strongly correlated with a disproportionate tendency of imitation of those who have grown older, more mature , and more developed. capitalist western powers' contemporary occupation of foreign territories far from home was hardly an end in itself. in sociological terms , it had wider functions to accomplish for the interest of the colonizer. the british occupation of egypt, for instance, was very important for great britain as far as her maritime and military strategy for a worldwide effective expansion and domination. once political and strategic colonial domination is secured, the scene is set for the exploitation of the occupied party from within. economic exploitation of the colonized is bound to be high, if not the most important item, on the agenda of contemporary western capitalist colonizers . the dependency-based research program on development/underdevelopment has provided ample details of the various ways that capitalist economic exploitation was used to underdevelop the occupied territories.18 it is not the aim of this work to fully restate them. rather, it is sufficient to refer to some aspects of capitalist western economic exploitation of former colonies . cheap raw materials needed by the industrial revolution were shipped from the colonies to western industries. capitalist industrial development and production depended considerably on cheap material booty from abroad.19 growing agricultural crops in the colonies for consumption by the citizens of the colonial powers became a common practice. this exploitative practice, when widely and intensively implemented, endangered (underdeveloped) the colonies' autonomy in food production. in connection with this plausible food supply underdevelopment, one can hardly underestimate the crucial role of colonial farmers. often, the colonial authorities gave these farmers large tracts of fertile land to cultivate and export much of their crops home. andre gunder frank sees the underdevelopment of the third world as the outcome of what he calls the "metropolis-satellite structure" which "serves as an instrument to suck capital or economic surplus out of its own satellites and to channel part of this surplus to the world metropolis of which all are satellites."20 in other words, the satellite status of colonized countries during and after occupation becomes the key factor for understanding the continuing capitalist exploitation and the subsequent phenomenon of worldwide underdevelopment. in contrast, 50 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17. l societies which were not satellites of capitalism have developed very well. frank writes, "japan was not satellized either during the tokugawa or neyi period and therefore did not have its development structurally limited as did the countries that capitalists so satellized."21 contemporary capitalist western political domination and economic exploitation (specifically by great britain and france) of african and asian societies is inconceivable without a concomitant cultural domination. the concept of cultural domination means that once the capitalist western powers have occupied their targeted foreign territories, they carry out policies that spread their cultural symbols among the colonized. the cultural symbols refer here to such things like language, thought, religion, science/knowledge, and cultural norms and values. unlike in the economic domain, the capitalist western colonizer's exportation and diffusion of his cultural symbols does not in any way underdevelop his ongoing development. on the contrary, cultural symbols strengthen the exporter's grip on the colonized and often underdevelops the vitality and the functioning of its own cultural symbols. the role of language into this process of cultural underdevelopment in colonized societies is most crucial and decisive. usually, the occupying capitalist power introduces the use of its language in its colonies in many important sectors like education and administration. the extent of linguistic colonization can go from marginal to a total use of the occupier's language in those sectors. a clear consequence of this process is a minor to a major underdevelopment of the national local language(s). language is alive; either it grows and develops its potentials with intensive use, or it weakens and underdevelops its capacities with decreased use. / with the wide diffusion of the colonizer's language, the scene is set for an extensive spread of the rest of the cultural symbols among the occupied people. they are introduced to western ideas, science/knowledge, mores, and customs. through christian missions, they are also exposed to christian religious beliefs, which sometimes lead to their eventual conversion. in sociological terms, a collective process of acculturation of the colonized population is put in place once the foreign language has gained a stronghold. within the capitalist western colonial educational settings, students are taught western languages, history, geography, philosophy, and ideas. as a result, knowledge of their own language(s) and cultural heritage suffers and becomes distorted. while this imbalanced educational system favors the development of the colonial cultural symbols in the occupied terdhaoudi: capitalism's impending dangers 51 ritories and the promotion of a positive and a quasi-reverent perception of the dominant colonizer,22 it also leads to the underdevelopment of the cultural symbols of the colonized and the emergence of the phenomena of cultural conflicts and negative self-esteem. 23 cultural underdevelopment, as described above, often appears to be associated with self-degrading psychological manifestations24 among the larger population of the world who fell victim to capitalist western occupation. we have invented the concept "other underdevelopment"25 to describe this state of psychocultural underdevelopment that is widely experienced throughout the third world. the forgotten other underdevelopment from michael harrington's term the "other america,"26 i coined the term "other underdevelopment." harrington's "other america" refers to the blacks, hispanics, and other nonwhite americans forgotten by the larger white american population, while, "other underdevelopment," refers to the kind of underdevelopment, particularly widespread in the third world, that has been hardly studied by social scientists concerned with the issues of development and underdevelopment. western liberal capitalist and marxist social scientists and their followers in the third w arid have tended to confine themselves to the study of the socioeconomic aspects of underdevelopment, neglecting the study of other underdevelopment. that other underdevelopment has been ignored by mainstream modern social sciences in the study of development/underdevelopment constitutes in itself a phenomenon which has to be understood and explained. the absence of other underdevelopment in modern social science literature puts into question the credibility of the enormous quantity of social science articles, books, reports that have been written and published since world war ii on the issues of development and underdevelopment. by not paying attention to other underdevelopment, modern social scientists appear to have a rather narrow concept of underdevelopment. they don't seem to have seriously looked at development/underdevelopment as a complex social reality whose many components ultimately make up a social system. 52 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17. i an operational definition of other underdevelopment as mentioned earlier, other underdevelopment has two dimensions: the cultural and the psychological. other underdevelopment is, therefore, a psychocultural underdevelopment whose two dimensions interact with each other and produce ultimately a psychocultural system. cultural underdevelopment as conceived through our concept of other underdevelopment,27 cultural underdevelopment can be measured by three manifestations: l . linguistic underdevelopment: defined as the widespread use of one or more foreign languages in a given society and the underuse (the less than full use) of society's own native language (spoken/written or both). 2. knowledge/science underdevelopment: defined as the acute dependency of developing countries on western science and knowledge and the poor (underdeveloped) knowledge that third world intellectuals and scientists of western educational background have of their own civilization and culture's past contributions to the fields of science and knowledge. 3. the underdevelopment of the cultural value system: defined as the erosion and breakdown of the cultural value system of dominated third world countries as a result of their contact with the dominant west in the contemporary period. psychological underdevelopment psychological underdevelopment implies the deterioration of the basic foundations of the psychological well-being of the third world country's individual personality, which is mainly the outcome of western cultural domination. this psychological state can be measured by two major syndromes: 1. the inferiority complex : due to contemporary western domination of the third world , its citizens tend to manifest an inferiority complex toward the west. often the complex is associated with damaging attitudes and behavior to one's psychological well-being like the loss of faith in oneself, the strong desire to imitate the west, alienation, and stress. 2. the disorganized personality: the acute state of cultural conflict between the traditional cultural value system and its modem western counterpart is bound to have certain negative side effects on the personality structure of the third world acculturized (to western culture) individual. znaniecki and dhaoudi: capitalism 's impending dangers 53 thomas have referred to this type of personality as "disorganized personality."28 other underdevelopment as a psychocultural system having operationalized the other underdevelopment concept as cultural and psychological underdevelopment, we now need to show how they interact with each other and produce a system of their own. our study has shown that the two components of other underdevelopment do mutually interact in a reciprocal manner.29 we have demonstrated, on the one hand, that linguistic underdevelopment and knowledge/science underdevelopment are likely to lead to the development of an inferiority complex (psychological underdevelopment) in the personality of the western acculturized individual of the third world. on the other hand, psychological underdevelopment predisposes the third world individual personality to be eager to learn and use the language(s) and cultures of western dominant societies. furthermore, the inferiority complex becomes a compelling force causing the development of a negative perception of one's national language and culture. in this sense, a psychological inferiority complex (psychological underdevelopment) appears, thus , to harden the two dimensions of cultural underdevelopment and, consequently, contribute to the making of cultural alienation, a phenomenon which is widespread in underdeveloped countries, especially among groups with a western educational background. to complete the description of the dynamics of other underdevelopment as a psychocultural system, we need to look at the impact of the disorganized personality (psychological underdevelopment) on what we have called cultural underdevelopment or the cultural values system of the individual. the disorganized personality seems to contribute significantly to the breakdown of the cultural value system. in other words, conflicts of cultural values are likely to make the personality structure of the individual of the third world more vulnerable to further breakdowns and, thus, more receptive or less resistant to the adoption of western cultural values. ultimately, this leads to a deepening disintegration of the personality and, consequently, to confusion in one's cultural identity. table 1 illustrates the main components of the phenomenon of other underdevelopment and the nature of their interaction. 54 ' 0 -..c: c: u 0 ;>, s "' 0. 0. 0 .... -0 0 > "' 0 -0 c: ... 0 0 c: -0 8. c: s ::, 0 ti! u .s:! 0 bl) ..c: 0 ethe american journal of islamic social sciences 17. i table 1 the psychocultural nature of the phenomenon of _.-the other underdevelopment in the third world --.... i. third world inferiority i. linguistic underdevelopcomplex toward the dominant west 2. disorganization personality and abnormal behavioral and mental symptoms cultural values system disorganization social sciences' underdevelopment on cultural symbols ' 0 -..c: c: u 0 ;>, s "' 0. 0. 0 .... -0 0 > ~ .g c: ... 0 0 c: -0 8. c: s ::, 0 ti! u .s:! 0 bl) .c: 0 ethe long silence in modem capitalist and noncapitalist social science literanrre of development/underdevelopment on other underdevelopment in the third world has deprived this science of applicability and usefulness. to put this in perspective, we focus our analysis on the component of culnrral underdevelopment in other underdevelopment. as defined earlier, cultural underdevelopment encompasses language, knowledge/science, and culnrral values. all human cultural symbols in edward tylor's sense of culture, which he defined as that "complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom and other capacities and habits acquired by man as a member of society,''30 are to be referred to in this study as cultural symbols. the latter are fundamental to the human species; through them humans are most distinct from both artificial intelligence machines and other living creatures. there is a consensus among modem scholars of culture that the use of symbols is the most striking feature of culture. the symbolic abilities of humans are the yardstick by which leslie white defines the nature of humans. he writes, "we thus define man in terms of the abilities to symbol and the consequent ability to produce culture."31 white points out that language contains the most important cultural symbols: "but perhaps the best example of all is articulate speech or language; at any rate, we may well regard articulate speech as the most characteristic and the most important form of expression of the ability to symbol."32 dhaoudi: capitalism's impending dangers 55 the importance of cultural symbols for the shaping and the ultimate making of the human entity and identity enables one to strongly assert that the human species is decisively cultural-symbolic by nature. in our own words , cultural symbols constitute the cultural-symbolic soul of individuals. 33 thus, any credible scientific attempt to comprehend and explain human behavior, be it individual or collective, must give priority to the compelling weight of symbolic ability in the determination of the behavior in question. modem behavioral social science theories and paradigms that fail to seriously consider the crucial role of cultural symbols are doomed to discredit themselves in their assessment of the dynamics of social action. against this epistemological perspective on the nature of human cultural symbols, silence on the issue of other underdevelopment by both capitalist liberal and dependency social scientists of development/underdevelopment becomes unacceptable and can hardly be defended on genuine solid scientific grounds. social scientists' disinterest in dealing with the third world's widespread other underdevelopment is bound to be the outcome of narrow-minded and ideologically biased approaches to the study of development/underdevelopment in contemporary societies at large. wes tern capitalist liberal social scientists and their marxist colleagues have different reasons for their lack of concern for the study of other underdevelopment. the causes behind this fall into two categories; each is discussed below. causes inspired by western ethnocentrism among western capitalist liberal social scientists of development/modernization/underdevelopment there is an implicit or an explicit tendency to view the general cultural heritage (values, traditions, and religions) of third world societies as largely representing obstacles to the development/modernization process in those countries.34 this should explain why cultural underdevelopment has hardly any place in the massive quantity of academic studies that have been produced since 1945. western capitalist liberal social scientists in the field of development/modernization/underdevelopment have had the strong conviction that the capitalist west is the only real maker of contemporary history. thus, success in development/modernization projects by underdeveloped societies always needs a helping hand from the capitalist system. the wide diffusion of modem western languages (in particular, english and french) and wes tern cultural values into third world countries is expected to be 56 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17. 1 endorsed by modem capitalist liberal social scientists like lerner, inkeles, and smith.35 for them, it is quite obvious that the diffusion of western cultural symbols into underdeveloped societies is a process that helps the promotion of cultural development and is not a process leading to other underdevelopment, as we have defined it. as we have pointed, western capitalist liberal social scientists have hardly made any direct link between the phenomenon of third world underdevelopment and western capitalist colonialism. when that underdevelopment in all its forms (economic, social, and psychocultural) is not related somehow to imperial capitalist western classical or new colonialism in the last two centuries or so, then other underdevelopment, seen by us as resulting basically from capitalist western domination of the third world, is unlikely to be recognized and, subsequently, studied by those social scientists. it is only natural for western capitalist social scientists' conceptualization , understanding, paradigm, and theory building of development/underdevelopment to be west-oriented. the social scientists, whatever their nationality may be, are often inclined to rely heavily on the realities of their own social/civil milieu in analyzing societal phenomena and theorizing on them. thus, they are bound to be, at least in part, biased in their choice of what dimension (economic, social, or psychocultural) of third world underdevelopment to focus upon. in other words, contemporary advanced capitalist and socialist societies, to which the vast majority of modem social scientists belong, are not known to have seriously suffered, if at all, from the other underdevelopment syndrome as described by us here and elsewhere. 36 consequently, 6ther underdevelopment has remained an alien phenomenon that has failed to attract their scientific curiosity. causes of an epistemological nature on the whole, both western liberal capitalist and marxist social scientists have tended to externalize the development/underdevelopment phenomena in a materialist/quantitative way. if development/underdevelopment is conceived in terms of quantifiable economic , social , scientific, and technological indicators, then it is easy to understand why psychocultural underdevelopment ( other underdevelopment) has received practically no attention. it is well known, in this regard, that marxist social scientists have produced enormous analytical academic and scholarly works on third world economic exploitation by the capitalist west. but in contrast to this, dhaoudi: capitalism 's impending dangers 57 they have given no more than lip service to third world cultural exploitation by capitalist colonial powers. 37 by its nature, other underdevelopment appears to lie beyond the reach of mainstream traditional contemporary sociologists and economists. while traditional economists are interested in the analysis of the economic forces that work for or against development/underdevelopment, traditional sociologists are interested in social structures. thus, the study of the psychocultural dimensions of underdevelopment belongs rather to "radical" sociology.38 by neglecting, for epistemological or ethnocentric reasons , the study of other underdevelopment as a principal feature of third world development/underdevelopment dynamics, modern western capitalist and marxist sociologists and economists have seriously damaged the integrity and validity of their paradigms and theories about development/underdevelopment in the third world. cultural symbols research and the enrichment of the social science theoretical scope the marginalization or the total disinterest in the study of other underdevelopment has impoverished not only modem social science literature on the issues of development and underdevelopment, but it has also deprived their theoretical scope from being more credible in dealing with the comprehension and explanation of diverse societal phenomena. our own work in the last three years on cultural symbols, 39 which has a direct theoretical implication and concrete application on the cultural development component of other underdevelopment, has allowed us to revitalize the use of cultural symbols in modem social sciences. our ultimate goal has been to put forth a new theoretical framework on the nature of cultural symbols. as emphasized before, cultural symbols are central to the social actor's own identity and action. in other words, they constitute his/her cultural-symbolic soul.40 their impact on individual and collective behavior is long lasting and powerful. their imposing influence on social action seems to be triggered by quasi-supernatural forces . thus, i view cultural symbols as being impregnated with transcendental dimensions. two examples are sufficient to illustrate this new theoretical vision of cultural symbols. the two case studies are cultural dependency's danger 58 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17. 1 and longer life span and william ogbum's theory on the slow pace of cultural change ( cultural lag) in societies. cultural dependency is most dangerous the widely quoted saying "the cultural conquest of people is more dangerous than its miliary counterpart" is an assertion that is almost uncontested. one must, however, admit that there is a great deal of fuzziness and inaccuracy in the use of such terms like "cultural alienation," "cultural imperialism," and "cultural dependency" in the contemporary worldwide context of dominant/dominated societies. these various terms do little more than indicate the presence of imperial foreign cultural symbols in dominated countries. the scientific analysis of the potential dangers of cultural conquests cannot be adequately analyzed scientifically with the mere proliferation of such general labels. a mature scientific endeavor requires no less than the identification of the principal foundations of the phenomenon in question. our reference to the notion of cultural symbols in this study falls within our attempt to go beyond the philosophical and ideological levels of cultural imperialism and dependency to a more scientifically grounded analysis, which could ultimately help deal with cultural symbols' universe of the human species. accordingly, the ever-increasing complaints against so-called "american cultural imperialism," by both developed and developing societies,41 have to be understood through a credible scientific framework and not through a narrow demagogical/ideological perspective. the fear of those societies of the american cultural invasion can only be legitimate when viewed through the perspective of the thesis we have summarized in the second part of this article, which refers to cultural symbols. the propagation of foreign cultural symbols in societies means, as we have stressed, that the impact of those cultural symbols will be of lasting effect once the cultural symbols are deeply implanted into the culture of the dominated societies. thus, in the future, liberation from them will be difficult. past and present evidence shows that when a country spreads its language, cultural values, and religious beliefs into other societies and civilizations, it cleverly secures permanent relations with those countries. at this level, there is no doubt that the cultural strategy is far superior to military, geographic, political, and economic strategies. ultimately, it is the key to securing other societies' dependency on all fronts . dhaoudi: capitalism's impending dangers 59 contemporary researchers concur that french colonization has given more importance than its english counterpart to the cultural colonization of occupied peoples in africa and asia.42 consequently, it can be said that maghribi societies (algeria, tunisia, morocco, and mauritania) suffer more than their mashriqi (middle eastern) counterparts from colonial cultural dependency. 43 cultural dependency means the dependency of one's cultural-symbolic soul to the outsider, who may even be one's enemy. the dependency of one's cultural-symbolic soul constitutes a direct assault on the basic foundations of the cultural identity of the individual and society. accordingly, one should have no great difficulty in seeing the credibility of the statement: "the cultural conquest of people is more dangerous than its military countpart." based on this broad analysis, the third world countries' condemnation of modem western cultural imperialism be it american, english, or french is hardly unfounded. today's widespread official and unofficial use of english (american) and french in many african and asian societies has contributed to the impoverishment (underdevelopment) of those societies' native languages and dialects, and the struggle to win linguistic-cultural independence will not be easy. as stated before, when cultural dependency has been going on for a long time, it takes a longer time to get rid of it, even when all the appropriate conditions are present. cultural imperialism, whatever its origin, is considered negative when it triggers and amplifies the disintegration of the native culturalsymbolic systems of either developing or developed societies. third world countries that suffer from national ( or local) cultural alienation, disintegration, and loss of collective self-esteem are countries which are bound to experience profound adverse effects in the very foundations of their cultural collective identity.44 ogburn's cultural lag the concept of cultural lag, defined by american sociologist william ogburn, is another model that is enriched by applying our own theoretical framework of cultural symbols to it.45 ogbum's thesis contends that the pace of cultural elements change much slower than the material elements of society's social structure. the thesis underlined earlier in our study on the nature of cultural symbols helps explain the reason behind ogbum's cultural lag. he did not say a lot about it, however, and therefore his notion is rather a descriptive one. the explanation of cultural lag can be framed as 60 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17 .1 follows: the most profound and fundamental dimension of human beings is their cultural-symbolic identity. as pointed out earlier, cultural symbols often have transcendental dimensions. while cultural symbols appear to resist change because they occupy all that is most central and strategic in the entity of the social actors, the enormous resistance that the cultural symbols deploy in the face of change seems to draw its strong force from their transcendental aspects which are ultimately quasi-supernatural in nature. modem sociology and anthropology have just begun to identify the cause(s) behind the great difficulty that societies experience in changing their cultural-symbolic systems (see table 2). the centrality of cultural symbols and their transcendental input into the making of the identity of the social actors helps, in our opinion, explain why the pace of change of cultural components drag behind their structural-material counterpart (cultural lag). it is time to call upon researchers in the behavioral social sciences to seriously integrate the distinct nature of cultural symbols and their transcendental weight, not only into their analysis of cultural change but also into their general attempts to capture the underlying meanings of individual human behavior and the dynamics of human societies. table 2 explanations of the slowness of cultural change (cultural jag) : • the cultural symbols constitute all that is most profound and central in social actors ' identity. • the cultural symbols entail transcendental dimensions whose powerful force of resistance to change and their longevity are originated in a quasisupemational universe . the need for verstehen sociology of cultural symbols against this broad background of analysis one can come to grips with the difficulty that positivist social scientists have had in understanding the larger implications that cultural symbols place in the dynamics of human dhaoudi: capitalism's impending dangers 61 groups, communities, and societies. in general, the discipline of modem sociology has rejected the idea of an alliance with a subjective methodology that allows the sociologist to focus on the human dimension of the social actor and not on the social structure surrounding him. 1brough the use of our concept of the cultural-symbolic soul in the second half of this article, we have shown that it is time for sociology to fully reintegrate subjectivetranscendental components into every study with the aim of advancing the field's understanding of individual or collective behavior. the study of the cultural symbols by anthropologists and sociologists cannot be done adequately without comprehending and assessing them. the need is urgent indeed for the invention and establishment of some sort of verstehen sociology fit to deal with the complex maze that the human cultural symbols entail. figure 1 below summarizes some of the ideas, concepts, and theories that have been outlined and expands upon the implications of cultural symbols and ultimately other underdevelopment in societies today. 62 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17. l figure 1 "s;)!l;)ijos ls!felldllj uo ,(:,u;ipu;id;ip 1e1m1nj jo ;i1dwex;i j!ssep es, 1u;iwdopa;ip1;ipun 1;i1po s,p110m. pl!4j. s,,<epo.1 ·,(lllu;ip1 ;)a!lj;l1joj ;l!.jl pue 1enpla!l)u! ;ll.jl jo suo11epunoj {eidlloj al;),\ ;)l.jl )ll sj)(!j)s )! ;isne:,;iq 'sjiju;!pu;id;ip illl jo jju!u;)jll;)ll.jl lsow ;)l.jl s! lf :,(ju;ipu;id;)(j relnllo;) ·z "sll.jl loj )uoojjll piooj s1oqw,(s {elnl -joj uo suo!su;)wlp !llj!plo;)l.jl ;141 ui pjuoll -u;)w slopllj jo 1;iqwnu v ·jetnj1µed m ;ijjue4j fe!jos jo ,(jjoyopos ;141 u! umoii)( !pm si 1d;ijuoj iey-{eml -ynj s, ujnqjjq :;ijjuel.j;) jo ;)jlld mois s, 1oqw,<s 1e1n11n:j · 1 -~ <j> .., ..c: e.<j> 0 's ;,., r/l ol ... a -; u suo!sujw!q p;inddy ;il!.l 0 0 < .... :i ~ "' ~z ·>, ~ .0 -; i:: .... "' :i e ..... -; :i ::c: u the theoretical dimensions (") c 2 .., ~ vj '< 3 er 0 ;;;: -l :r 0 "' ;;; · i. the symbolic universe: language, thought, religious beliefs, knowledge, science, cultural values and norms, and myths 2. the cultural symbolic soul: it is distinctly human and is the basic foundation of both the individual and the collective identity. 3. cultural symbols' transcendence : (a) their longevity can become eternal, (b) cultural symbols can invest human social actors with great will and energy. their power can become irresistible like that of supernatural beings. dhaoudi: capitalism 's impending dangers 63 notes 1. canadian broadcasting corporation (cbc) ideas program, oct. 15 , 1992. 2. k. mano, "modernist discourse and the crisis of development theory," studies in comparative international development 26, no. 2 (summer 1991): 3-4. 3. ibid., 4. 4. f. fukuyama, the end of history and the last man (new york : free press, 1990) . 5. d. dillard , "capitalism," in charles wiber (ed.), the political economy of development and underdevelopment (new york: random house, 1979), 69. 6. h. madoff, imperialism: from the colonial age to the present (new york: monthly review press, 1978). 7. d. boorstin, the discoverers (new york: random house, 1983). 8. m. mcluhan and p. fiore, the medium is the message (new york: bantam, 1967). 9. d. bell, the cultural contradictions of capitalism (london: heinermann , 1976). 10. "preserving the earth: beyond ideology," the world and i (july 1992): 20. 11. r. bellah, et alia., habits of the heart (berkeley: university of california press, 1980). 12. m. weber, the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (glencoe: free press, 1980). 13. e.e. schumacher, small ls beautiful (new york: harper and row, 1976). 14. g. frank, capitalism and underdevelopment in latin america (new york : monthly review press, 1969). 15. d. lerner, the passing of traditional society (new york: monthly review press, 1964). 16. t. williams , socialization (englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall, 1983), 163-74. 17. a. memmi, portrait au colonise (paris: payot, 1960). 18. g. frank, "the sociology of development or underdevelopment of sociology," catalyst 3 (summer 1967): 20-73; and p. baran, the political economy of growth (new york: monthly review press, 1957). 19. while the modem wealth of some arab countries is usually linked to their oil resources, early arab imperial economic expansion after the spread of islam outside arabia's frontiers is explained by their military invasions of new territories. see our book review of the "arab political mind" by m. al-jabri in the coming issues of contemporary sociology. likewise, there is good reason to consider western capitalism's enormous contemporary economic growth as partially the result of worldwide colonization and its subsequent exploitation of the colonized. 20. charles wiber, the political economy of development and underdevelopment , 91. 21. ibid., 109. 22. m. dhaouadi, "an operational analysis of the phenomenon of the other underdevelopment in the arab world and the third world," international sociology 3, no. 3 (september 1988): 228. 23. ibid. , 229. 24. ibid., 230. 25 . ibid., 219-234. 26. m. harrington, the other america (baltimore: penguin books, 1963). 27 . dhaouadi, "an operational analysis of the phenomenon of the other underdevelopment in the arab world and the third world," 219-34. 28. f. znaniecki and w. thomas, the polish peasant in europe and america (new york: dover, 1958). 29. dhaouadi, "an operational analysis of the phenomenon of the other underdevelopment in the arab world and the third world," 229-30. 30. e.8. tylor, primitive culture (london: murray, 1871). 31. l. white, "the evolution of culture as cited in theories and paradigms," in s. denisoff et al. (eds.), contemporary sociology (illinois: f.e. peacock publishers, 1975), 224-25. 32. ibid., 220. 64 the american journal of islamic social sciences 17.1 33. m. dhaouadi, "the culturo-symbolic soul: an islamically inspired research concept for the behavioral and social sciences," the american journal of islamic social sciences 9, no. 2 (summer 1992): 153-72. 34. lerner, the passing of traditional society. 35. a. inkeles and d. smith, becoming modern (cambridge: harvard university press, 1975). 36. our first conceptualization of other underdevelopment was published in arabic in the journal of al mustaqbal al arabi 47 (january 1983): 20-41. see also our article (in arabic), "the other underdevelopment as a research notion both in the arab world and the rest of the third world," toward an arab sociology, 163-84. 37. writings on development/underdevelopment of marxist authors such as s. amin in le development lnegal (1973), p. baran in the political economy of growth (1960), and frank in capitalism and underdevelopment in latin america reflect their silence on the psychocultural underdevelopment as an integral component of the greater phenomenon of underdevelopment in the third world. 38. j.s. howard and j.l. wood, sociology: traditional and radical perspectives (new york: harper and row, 1989). 39. m. dhaouadi, "the other face of cultural symbols as reflected in a special sociological analysis" (in arabic), al-wahda 8, no. 92 (may 1992): 75-89. this study is expected to be published in english in coming issues of international sociology. see also note 34 above. 40. dhaouadi, "the culturo-symbolic soul." 41. the prestigious medical french journal, les anna/es, has adopted english as the language of its published scientific articles. this has raised a lot of protest in france . see interview with its editor in le monde, april 14, 1989, 12. see also "l'influence culturelle americaine en france," le monde: dossiers et documents, may 1981. 42 . l.j. calvet, linguistique et colonialisme (paris: payot, 1977), 84-85. see also y. eudes, la conquete des esprits (paris: maspero, 1982). 43. w.k. ruf, "dependence et alienation culturelle," in independence er interdependence au maghreb (paris: cnrs, 1974), 233-79. 44. g. kisber, the disorganized personality (london: mcgraw hill, 1982). 45 . w.f. ogburn , on cultural and social change (chicago: university of chicago press, 1964), 86-95. microsoft word 01_aziz_setting.doc malay pop: mass media.... (abdul aziz turhan kariko) 99 malay pop: mass media hegemony in indonesia popular music abdul aziz turhan kariko english department, faculty of language and culture, bina nusantara university, jln. kemanggisan ilir iii no. 45, kemanggisan/palmerah, jakarta barat 11480, azis_comi@yahoo.com abstract article discusses the domination of malay pop music through textual analysis of songs, observation of musical programs, and interviews with important figures. the research data were obtained by library research and analyzed through a critical theory approach to gain an understanding of the text and its effects. the article concludes that malay pop contains a strong uniformity which may be termed a phenomenon in the context of the culture industry, while also being dominant because of its legitimacy created by the media. the nature of malay pop is also very profitable for those participating in it, therefore the spirit of capitalism was also quite dominant in this context. there is also resistance from the indie music movement, and its attempts to fight regressive qualities of music that are legitimized in the mainstream mass media. keywords: malay pop, indie music, culture industry, hegemony, mass media abstrak artikel menjelaskan dominasi musik pop melayu melalui analisis teks lagu, observasi acara musik, dan interview dengan tokoh di bidang musik. data diperoleh dari studi pustaka dan dianalisis dengan pendekatan critical theory untuk memahami teks lagu dan dampaknya. artikel menyimpulkan bahwa lagu melayu pop mempunyai kesamaan atau ciri khas yang kuat sehingga dapat menjadi daya tarik di bidang industri budaya ( culture industry) dan mampu mendominasi lagu lain karena pengaruh media. muasal lagu pop melayu juga sangat menguntungkan mereka yang terlibat di dalamnya, dengan demikian semangat kapitalisme juga sangat dominan di dalam konteks ini. dijelaskan pula adanya resistensi dari gerakan musik indie dan usahanya untuk memperjuangkan kemunduran musik tersebut karena pengaruh multimedia. kata kunci: musik melayu, musik indie, industri budaya, hegemoni, media massa 100 jurnal lingua cultura vol.3 no.2 november 2009: 99-106 introduction background in 2008, the number of musicians in the mainstream indonesian music industry increased with the presence of a new group bands containing uniformity in a particular music genre, that is malay pop. this phenomenon began with the existence of kangen band, which gained popularity through the increasing piracy rate in sumatera, after which they signed a contract with warner music indonesia, a major recording company. then, many other bands with a strong uniformity emerged, such as st12, repvblik, matta, wali, salju, langit, pudja, vagetoz, merpati, and hijau daun. these music groups dominated the television shows that broadcasted music programs throughout 2008, such as inbox on sctv, dahsyat on rcti, klik on antv, and many more. the success of these music groups within the mainstream music industry was often criticized by fellow musicians or music observers. hafiedz (2008) wrote “the melancholic phenomenon of indonesia’s music groups is degrading our popular music” or the opinion of denny mr (an observer in the music industry) who wrote “these malay songs a tasty, as in food, but become sickening if there are too many of them”. there were also criticisms of the malay pop phenomenon in other magazines and newspapers. generally, these criticisms were directed or based on pop malay’s characteristics such as their banal lyrics, excessive melancholic sentiments within their songs, and dominant themes such as having an affair/cheating on a lover. take a look at a part from a lyric by st12 called p.u.s.p.a: jangan jangan kau tak terima cintaku/jangan jangan kau hiraukan pacarmu/putuskanlah saja pacarmu/lalu bilang i love you, padaku (don’t you reject my love/ignore your lover/just break up with your lover/and say i love you to me)… also take look at a song by kangen band, “selingkuh”: pacarku sayangilah aku/seperti ku menyayangimu/pacarku cintailah aku/seperti aku cinta kamu/(reff)tapi kamu kok selingkuh/tapi kamu kok selingkuh (my love, take care of me/just like how i’ve taken care of you/my love, love me/just like how i love you/but why are you cheating on me). the uniformity and the regression of musical quality were reaching the point of becoming a phenomenon in the indonesian popular music in 2008. major recording companies were on the edge of bankruptcy because of the growing rates of digital piracy that also caused sales of cds and cassette tapes to decline. major recording companies were then forced to take shortcuts by finding bands that were intriguing to society, and then making them as models so that the major labels could then reproduce the bands in the form of supposedly-new music groups. with complete disregard for their quality, the so-called market forecast had become a reference to avoid bankruptcy. the characteristics of contemporary malay pop music in indonesia are their vocal technique (malay-twisting/bending vocals) and the themes—mostly about love, especially in everyday life; having affairs with others; exaggerated worship toward one’s lover. the lyrics are very simple; indeed, sometimes they are so simple that they may be termed banal or non-poetic. modern malay pop songs are very easy to digest, which makes them very easily acceptable to listeners. but this approach to popular music production turned out to be considered to have produced a lowbrow musical genre. malay pop music groups were once criticized by a small part of society, and indisputably they were loved by a great many people. many music groups reached stardom by playing the malay pop genre most notably vagetoz, kangen band, wali, matta, repvblik, angkasa, pudja, and st12. even as this research was being written up, major recording companies were still launching malay pop bands in the music industry. based on the facts mentioned above, it can be concluded that the malay pop music genre can be considered as a phenomenon in the indonesian popular music industry especially in the context of the culture industry. (adorno, 1991) malay pop: mass media.... (abdul aziz turhan kariko) 101 in the end, the dominating mainstream music which also tends to follow the trends reaches saturation point in the ears of audiences, and this saturation point affected the emergence of a counterresistance against these musical industry trends. one example of this occurred in 1977, when pop music songs in indonesia were considered to be uniform and lacking any significant variation; after this, the prambors teen song writing competition (lomba cipta lagu remaja prambors) emerged, which then came to be regarded as freshly-composed counter products against the mainstream pop music songs. according to wendi putranto, an editor of rolling stone indonesia music magazine, nowadays the frontally launched counter product against dominating malay pop songs has been led by a band from an independent recording company (putranto, 2008). efek rumah kaca, from aksara records, frontally criticized the contemporary malay pop movement with their song cinta melulu. other than efek rumah kaca, music observer denny sakrie stated that the counter products against the movement also came from the independent recording companies such as fastforward records, sinjitos, and nubuzz with bands such as mocca, white shoes & the couples co., sore, the s.i.g.i.t, and zeke & the popo (sakrie, 2008). theoretical framework the background to the study above raises three questions that this article attempts to answer, which are; (1) can the musical uniformity within the malay pop songs by malay pop bands be identified as a ‘phenomenal’ product within context of culture industry in indonesian popular music? (2) how do malay pop music groups become a product of mass media hegemony within the context of popular music in indonesia? (3) how do independent recording companies/indie labels launch counter products and counter hegemony against the dominance of malay pop? this research framework uses the concept of hegemony and the culture industry (adorno, 1991). hegemony itself is the process of creating, maintaining, and reproducing a set of values and practices in the sense of power and authority. to antonio gramsci, hegemony denotes the situation where the ‘historic block’ from the ruling class that demonstrates their power and social leadership against subordinate classes. hegemony can work in a coercive way or alternatively be based on the consensual acceptance by the subordinate groups toward the ideas, values and leadership of the dominant groups. hegemony is not a fixed set of ideas so it has a constant function to change. it emerges from social and class struggles which it, in turn, shapes, transforms, and influences; and its control over dominated groups can never be totally guaranteed. hegemony operates through the institutions of civil society which characterize mature liberal-democratic, capitalist societies. these institutions include education, the family, the church, the mass media, and popular culture. this particular research project studied the connection between the roles of mass media, malay pop phenomenon, music industry, and the counter hegemony by independent recording companies since the beginning of 2008. other than becoming a product of mass media’s hegemony, the dominance of contemporary malay pop is also a cultural phenomenon within the context of the culture industry and popular music. the term ‘culture industry’ is a concept that was coined by theodore adorno and max horkheimer in their book the dialectic of enlightenment (1944). this work was written as their objection towards the presumption that art was independent and therefore had no connection with industries or commerce. adorno and horkheimer (2002) adapted the term ‘culture industry’ to argue that the means of production within cultural artifacts were reproduced in a similar way to other kinds of industry produced consumer goods in tremendous quantity. all goods were reproduced with the goal of gaining as much profit as possible through use of a standardized procedure, and this means of production helped to produce a passive and standardized consumerism. all such production is developed simply to gain profit. adorno and horkheimer (2002) used the metaphor of the ‘production line’ to emphasize the repetitive character of culture production. this 102 jurnal lingua cultura vol.3 no.2 november 2009: 99-106 theme then was extended by adding the two extra concepts of ‘standardization’ and ‘pseudo individuality.’ the argument about standardization here points toward the non-existence of elements of spontaneity in the production of culture, because this has become a routine operation using specific formulae. standardization means that popular songs are becoming more and more alike and their parts, verses and choruses more interchangeable. pseudo-individualization disguises this process by making the songs appear more varied and distinct from each other. in conclusion, adorno and horkheimer (2002) argued that if culture was to be organized structurally as a capitalist production industry, it would thereby become standardized, formulized, and a repetitive element of mass culture. hence, it would not have any aesthetical element and would lead to a specific type of consumerism; a passive and conformist type easily manipulated through the use of propaganda, advertising, and profit. methods in this research, the writer used three methods, these being textual analysis, observation, and interviews. a comparative study of 5 samples of contemporary malay pop songs and 5 samples of independent recording companies’ songs was conducted to analyze the topic textually. meanwhile, to analyze the domination of malay pop that is legitimized by the mass media and its counter-hegemony by the independent recording companies, the writer interviewed the producers in charge of music programs on private national television channels, as well as the local level television channels bandung tv. to analyze the resistance coming from the independent music movement, the writer interviewed local group efek rumah kaca. this interview focused on cholil mahmud as the mastermind behind the resisting ideology toward the malay pop phenomena/domination. result and discussions the theories of standardization and pseudo individuality are used here to analyze malay pop songs through a comparative study with ‘indie’ pop music songs. elements such as the music arrangements, theme, lyrics, and the video clip provided by both sides are compared. in this study, the writer uses 5 songs of malay pop and 5 songs of indie pop. table 1 below contains the list of the malay pop songs that are being used in this research. table 1 malay pop songs used in research malay pop music group song title rec. company (major st12 cari pacar lagi trinity optima production kangen band selingkuh sony bmg angkasa jangan pernah selingkuh warner indonesia merpati tak selamanya selingkuh indah nagaswara rec. matta band ketahuan pps malay pop: mass media.... (abdul aziz turhan kariko) 103 table 2 indie pop songs used in research indie pop music group song title rec. company (indie) sore pergi tanpa pesan aksara records sindetosca kepompong nubuzz records white shoes & couple co. senandung maaf aksara records agrikulture kompor meleduk future10 records efek rumah kaca cinta melulu aksara records based on the textual analysis, the elements of standardization and pseudo individuality on the malay pop songs above showed that this genre is clearly a strong product of the culture industry. this is evident through the various elements used within the songs, namely: the non-exploratory sense of musicality; repetitive love themes, especially those centered on exaggerated worship toward a lover which then creates a sub-ordinate/dominant relationship within; the dominant issue of cheating and affairs, here reproduced in such a way as to give a fresh impression within the songs; references to everyday life that include slang words and colloquialisms, non-poetic choice of words; and predigested/banal/denotative meanings within the songs. meanwhile, the characteristics of indie pop songs basically, counter all of the elements found in malay pop. there is a creative use of music arrangement; varieties of theme within the songs (they are not always about love); the use of poetic lyrics; and even the video clips show more signs of creativity. it can therefore be concluded that the content of indie pop songs emerged as a form of an alternative/counter product to a type of pop music in indonesia that is uniform, repetitive and standardized, as in the case with malay pop. the domination of malay pop in the indonesian music industry was legitimized by the mass media, especially by private national television stations through their music programs. prominent examples were dahsyat music program on rcti, klik on antv, kissvaganza on indosiar, and derings on transtv. but these examples were just followers. the first music program which then became the trend setter for other television stations, was inbox on sctv, first broadcasted in 2007 everyday morning. below is the schedule list of a typical morning music program on the private national televisions. table 3 schedule of morning music program in tv program television channel on-air schedule inbox sctv 7.30-9.30 everyday derings transtv 7.30-9.00 everyday kissvaganza indosiar 7.00-8.30 everyday dahsyat rcti 9.00-11.00 everyday the writer observed these morning music programs to examine the amount of television exposure of malay pop which then dominated the indonesian music industry. it became that the malay pop music genre was having a great deal of exposure through these live performances, video clips, and even simple interviews or gossip shows that were shown on the television morning music programs. society seemed to welcome the malay pop music groups because of the hegemony of the music program on television, which in turn gave birth to the mass reproduction of new malay music groups which were published by major recording companies. 104 jurnal lingua cultura vol.3 no.2 november 2009: 99-106 this process automatically made malay pop a dominant music genre and a product created by the hegemonic mass media because of such frequent exposure through televisions. the great number of music groups in the malay pop genre and their standardized musical arrangements allowed them to dominate the music industry, despite it being difficult to identify any individuality of the music groups because of their uniform elements within the genre. the malay pop genre was very profitable for those participating in it, such as the musicians, producers, recording companies, and even the mobile-phone content providers who sold song tracks through ring back tones (nada sambung pribadi). below is the list of malay pop music groups that made huge profits through ring back tones compared to non-malay pop music/singers. table 4 comparion of malay and non-malay music industries malay pop music groups music groups recording company income via rbt/nsp st12 trinity optima production 6 million download = rp 6 billion hijau daun sony bmg 6 million download = rp 6 billion wali nagaswara records 4 million download = rp 4 billion vagetoz sony bmg 5 million download = rp 5 billion kangen band sony bmg 4 million download = rp 4 billion matta band pps 3 million download = rp 3 billion non-malay pop artist/music groups artist/music groups recording company income via rbt/nsp d’massive musika 5 million download rossa = lagu ayat-ayat cinta trinity optima production 2 million download aura kasih universal musik indonesia 1 million download samson universal musik indonesia 1 million download kapanlagi.com, rileks.com, and lintasberita.com. these sites above were accessed on may 16th 2009 from the table above, it can be concluded that some malay pop music groups earned 3 5 billion rupiah from ring back tones alone (excluding those profit from live performance). this shows that the malay pop genre is very profitable compared to non-malay pop music groups, further reinforcing the mass reproduction of malay pop groups published by the recording companies, regardless of the strong similarities between them. implicitly, this phenomenon was countered by local media (television) that broadcasted independent music programs such as bandung tv with their program called reaksi; pjtv with lokal lebel; and stv with ziggy wiggy. the writer observed reaksi as an independent (indie) music program to examine the implicit counter-hegemonic movement toward the domination of malay pop. the writer examined the diversities as well as the non-commercial ideology of reaksi through an interview with its producer. based on the observation and the interview, the writer concludes that reaksi as well as other independent music programs displayed a great variety of musical genres (rock, metal, rap, hip hop, dangdut, pop, etc), in contrast to music programs such as derings and dahsyat that focusing primarily malay pop: mass media.... (abdul aziz turhan kariko) 105 on standardized and uniform pop music. the dominating music program by private national televisions focused on showing artists/music groups from major and professional recording companies, although the uniformity and standardized image of the music gave a questionable impression, regarding quality and creativity. reaksi did not broadcast any top 40 hits on their program, unlike the mainstream music programs which each had their own versions of top 40 charts within a period of time. reaksi focused on showing and discussing the essence of the music, unlike mainstream music programs that sometimes includes gossip and jokes to fill the duration of the show. therefore, it can be concluded that reaksi countered the hegemonic mass media of mainstream music programs with a non-standardized, non-uniform, and non-commercial music program. meanwhile, the explicit resistance toward the malay pop domination was led by indie music group called efek rumah kaca (glass house effect, erk), with their song “cinta melulu” (merely love). the song “cinta melulu” represented a feeling of boredom against the dominating mellow/love themes in songs that were shown in the mainstream media. according to erk, this condition should be fought against, in order to mend the regressive quality of indonesian’s popular music scene, and the resistance should serve different kinds of musical ideology against the malay pop ideology in order that their domination slowly be decreased. (interview was done on march 17th 2009). these different kinds of musical ideology should also be able to reach the lower classes in society, because the hegemony that the mass media creates together with the industry tends to be very much accepted by the lower classes. the various kinds of music should also be given to the society intensively, through local television or mainstream but rebellious televisions programs so that society would be able to learn and consume various kinds of music, not just the standardized ones served up by the mainstream media. although the resistance launched by the indie music movement was not of a huge scale, this act is arguably a vital counter-hegemony toward a cultural hegemony created by the mainstream mass media, the private national televisions. conclusion based on the above analysis, the three questions posed above can now be addressed directly. first, the malay pop phenomenon is identified as a product of the culture industry because of the strong similarities between the malay pop music groups themselves. these characteristics are the usage of love and affair themes, banalities and everyday life lyrics, simple musical arrangements, standardized malay vocal techniques, and also standardized video clips. these uniform music groups were always reproduced and modified in order to appear new and fresh, but the analysis demonstrates that actually they were not in any significant new. this can be related to adorno & horkheimer’s pseudo-individuality conception. this phenomenon represented a regression of quality within the indonesian popular music because of the imitative mentality. this musical genre, supported by major recording companies, stood to contradistinction to the music that published by the independent music movement: in other words, the indie music was not standardized or uniformed to anywhere the same degree. second, the contemporary malay pop music became dominant through media support (television) with their hegemonic music programs. society welcomed the malay pop and automatically led to the reproduction of the music groups by the industry and the media. their presence produced large profits for others that involved in the industry such as recording companies, cellular mobile phone provider, television stations (which increase ratings), and other musicians. this reproduction of malay pop music groups created a cultural domination within the context of popular music through their high profits. 106 jurnal lingua cultura vol.3 no.2 november 2009: 99-106 finally, counter hegemony through malay pop music by the indie music movement was represented through indie music programs on local television stations that emerged as an alternative to the hegemonic music programs. music programs such as reaksi, and ziggy wiggy supported the indie music movement by launching counter-hegemony through the promotion of alternative kinds of music against the dominant, commercial and highly-earned malay pop music. references adorno, t.(1991). the culture industry. london: routledge. adorno, t.& horkheimer, m. (2002). dialectic of enlightenment. california: stanford university press. hafiedz, r. ( januari-oktober 2008). loud music magazine. jakarta timur: pt jujur jaya. putranto, w. (2008). “musik indonesia hari ini”. rolling stone indonesia. resmadi, i.( 2008). music records indie label. bandung: mizan media utama sakrie, d.(des 2008). “fatamorgana musik pop indonesia”. koran tempo. microsoft word artikel karolus 2 e-journal of cultural studies feb 2020 vol. 13, number 1, page 9-14 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 9 the dynamic of caci multifunction in manggarai ethnic nowadays karolus budiman jama1, i wayan ardika2, i ketut ardhana3, i ketut setiawan4 1nusa cendana university,2,3,4cultural studies study program, faculty of arts, udayana university email: 1karolus1007@yahoo.com , 2ardikawayan52@gmail.com, 3phejepsdrlipi@yahoo.com, 4setiawan58@yahoo.com received date : 19-11-2019 accepted date : 03-01-2019 published date : 29-02-2020 abstract manggaraian ethnic has a special art named caci. the art holds and became an identity of the whole of manggaraian. the art was begun as the ritual of farmer’s land fertility. in its developing, the aesthetic has gone under the multifunction in it show time. the art is not only performing for the shake of the local people culture, but also perform for the political interest as well as the catholic church in mangggarai. this research used ethnographic method, data collected through the observation, interview, documentation, and triangulation. the research was done in manggaraian ethnic of flores. every caci performance has its own unique ideology. the ideology goes behind the cultural caci performance is the ideology of fertility. the ideology goes behind the government interest of caci performance is capitalism economy and political power. the church ideology is inclusivism through the inculturation languages. key word: dynamic, multifunction, caci, ideology, culture identity indtoduction manggaraian ethnic is one of numbers of ethnic spread out through flores island of east nusa tenggara province. the ethnic of manggarai known with is art called caci. the art of caci valued as the unifier in diversity of subculture of manggaraian ethnic. the art that was begun as the fertility ritual of the local farmers as well as performs for the other five important cultural rituals. now days, caci is not perform only for interest of cultural ritual, but also on some ceremonies, either it is government ceremonies, catholic church in manggarai or the other ceremonies such as thanks giving ceremony as well as the political achievement. the dynamic of multifunction of caci performance is not only related to cultural ceremonies, but also related to its esthetic value. the dynamic can be seen through the shapes and the style e-journal of cultural studies feb 2020 vol. 13, number 1, page 9-14 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 10 of the esthetic. the dynamic of multifunction implicates to the social life, religion, and the culture of manggarai ethnic. the implication and expansion of caci performance showing the interested point of the art. the government of manggarai and catholic church assume that the art that is unified the subcultural of manggarai ethnic is capable in managing local potentiality. the potential religiosity toward the catholic belief, political potential to get the people interest, and the economy in industry cultural. even, some individua caci perform for the shake of political achievement. for example, the chosen one in political competition. the aesthetic value of caci has power and interesting point in multifunction dynamic that goes to the deepest point of caci ideology in the practical of social, cultural, economy, and politic in manggarai. the expansion of dynamic multifunction of caci aesthetic comes up with new ideologies in aesthetic value of caci nowadays. research method the research method used in this research is ethnographic method. atkinson and hammersley (denzin &lincon, 2009: 325) stated that the characteristic of ethnographic is seems exist, ethnographic texts conventionality, representation of self and other in those text, the character of ethnographic as the genre textual, the characteristic of base argumentation of ethnographic, and rhetoric proven. the fours method of data collection used in this research were observation, interview, documentation, and triangulation or merging, ( sugyono, 2013). the location of the research was done in manggarai ethnic of flores. the informant selection was done by purposive and snowball, which was sourced from the speaker and the doer of caci. after data collected, the proceed to the analysis based on the culture paradigm study. data presentation is done verbally and through pictures illustration. result and discussion the caci aesthetic tradition was begun from the farmer’s land fertility. the ceremony is done for thank giving toward the creator through the worship of the ancestor and the worship to nature. the tradition is then brought along with other thank giving ceremony among the five cultural ceremonies and became a legitimation up on the cultural ceremonies. it is related to the draft of habit and domain according to bourdieu (takwindalam harker, 2009:xx) stated that the practical of aesthetic caci is related product from the habitual as the histories e-journal of cultural studies feb 2020 vol. 13, number 1, page 9-14 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 11 product of civilization of manggarai ethnic. caci aesthetic is product from the field of efforts in manggarai ethnic. the power of caci aesthetic tradition is on the holly ceremony before and after the caci performed. the caci player also doing the purifying ceremony individually before the caci performance. the purifying ceremony then implicate not to have sexual harassment as the prohibition during the purifying session as well as not to make other people get hurt. in this context caci aesthetic is domain of self purifying and life reflection domain. the process of purifying which is by langer (djelantik, 1999: 154) stated that art is the representation towards the value for life. langer’s view is same as schiller (sugiharto, 2013) that human being as a soul are able to see deeper his spirituality. the soul is able to control the power, sense of careless, desires, greedy desire, change them in to love solidarity, humble, and compassion became a noble. the special model of caci aesthetic tradition is relied on the power of ceremony’s soul that able to control the desires. the dimension of the aesthetic caci tradition is practice in ritual of ancestor feeding in the night time before departure, on the day of departure( in local language wuatwa’i), crossing the river between the two villages as the host of caci performance which called letangwae, welcoming ritual, the ritual of walking around the altar of scarification it called lilik, and ended with caci ritual called caca selek. the practical reality of caci performance in its developing, is not only perform by local people, but also by the government as well as the catholic church in manggarai. since the regency of manggarai formed legally and formally on 14 august 1958 or it is now called e-journal of cultural studies feb 2020 vol. 13, number 1, page 9-14 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 12 kabupatenmanggarai. government especially under the leadership of frans sales lega, caci seems like an interesting point all at once as the important identity that should be taking care and be defended. the government through the regency, subdistrict, village, are became hands to collect people to perform caci in order to commemorate the independent day of the republic of indonesia every august. the caci performance became a standard made by the government that is leading by new era government. maria erbin the book entitled “adat dan politik indonesia” stated that since the new order government of manggarai regency has done the caci performance and the cultural art competition. the activity that is mentioned above is done in order to find out the standard and become an identity of manggarai ethnic as national culture. in addition, the performance of cultural art for the shake of tourism as the contributor of national infrastructures (davidson, dkk. 2010: 275). for the shake of inculturation, the catholic church in manggarai also perform caci. jehandut (2012: 99) said that, firstly the church has to fertilize the wealth of religion from the nations. second, acknowledged the pluriform of liturgy as the creation of holly spirit. third, the church should become a pioneer and adapting the liturgy to the culture and tradition of nations. fourth, for the shake of authentic belief, the church has to do radical renewal based on the incarnation demands and based on unity principles as the shape of cultural. the catholic church believes that the local culture of caci as the unique wealth based on experiences religion-aesthetic manggarai ethnic. the church believes caci has religion values and unity. the value then taken as language and the spirit of the church in performing caci. the church performs caci during the purification of the priest, building up the church, and division or inauguration of parish. nowadays, the dynamic of aesthetic multifunction of caci, in the practical performance, caci either by the government or the church are implicated to the standard design and style. the standardize of practical are accordingly to the need and shake of caci performed. those design are mixing the position of the players who become a host and the invited players. there is no limit between the host players and the invited players as in the tradition of caci itself. there is no sacred and magical situation appeared during the caci performance undergoing by the government and the church as basic caci performance used to be. the ceremony doing by the government and the church seems like a simulation or a fake awareness about caci dance. in one hand, it is an awareness of doing the ritual, but on the other hand it is delegitimate the ritual. there are some circumstances dealing with e-journal of cultural studies feb 2020 vol. 13, number 1, page 9-14 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 13 delegitimate of the ritual, for example doing the ritual as if there is an altar of scarification, moreover in the practicalcaci is not performed as in its tradition. caci performed by the government and the church are made as their design either the location or the draft that supported the caci is being performed. for example, caci performed by the government, the ideology of caci being performed is a political power and economy issues. reading the dynamic of caci multifunction is strongly indicated as foucault said that there is a controlling power on the players and the local people by the government and the church in manggarai. as foucault writtendiscipline and punish and history of sexuality that is how he isolate and conceptualize the way where all bodies are become the most important component for the relationship of power and the modern society (santoso, dkk. 2015). he also stated that the years dominance rulersaffected by the political and intellectual authority that supported by the government as the ideology being run in the discourse (ratna, 2011). in the context of power and political ideology, caci is perform in the field which has a great stage. people who watch the performance of caci are looking directly forward to the great stage. these kind of design are made to watch the official who watch the caci performance. the blueprint of caci performance location as well as the set of caci players when they sing a folk song are directly overlooking to the stage that has been prepared. the kind of design are contradicted to the tradition caci itself. the most important of tradition of caci is that the sacrifice altar is not block by anyone in the performance. the place of nagagolo lying down and all souls who protect the village. it is made in order to avoid from great wound and disorder during the caci performance. dealing with the economic ideology, the government also doing it to support the tourism. it is supported by the attendance of foreigners who come to watch caci dance performance by becoming a honoring first hit and involving in dende. e-journal of cultural studies feb 2020 vol. 13, number 1, page 9-14 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 14 conclusion based on the dynamic multifunction of manggarainesscaci dance performance nowadays, it is found that the performance of characteristic design and ideology. it is different between the characteristic of tradition caci performance the caci dance perform by the government and the catholic church in manggarai. the difference is tradition caci is perform for ritual space and self-purifying. while, caci performance by the government and the catholic church is a caci profanity. the ideology of tradition caci is the ideology of fertility. while, the ideology of caci perform by the government is the ideology of political power and economy capitalism, and the catholic church ideology of caci is inclusivism through inculturation languages. references bonefasius jehandut. 2012. uskup wilhelmus van bekkum & dere serani mengintegrasikan unsur religiositas asli mansyarakat manggarai ke dalam liturgi. jakarta: nera pustaka. denzin & lincoln. 2009. hand book of qualitative research. yogyakarta: pustaka pelajar: djelantik, m. a.a. 1999. estetika. bandung: mspi. jamie. s. davidson, dkk. 2010. adat dalam politik indonesia. jakarta: yayasan pustaka obor indonesia. nyoman kuta ratna. 2011. teori, metode dan teknik penelitian sastra. yogyakarta: pustaka pelajar. richard, harker, dkk. 2009. pengantar paling komprehensif kepada pemikiran pierre bourdieu. yogyakarta: jalasutra sugiyono. 2013. metode penelitian kuantitatif, kualitatif dan r&d. bandung: alfabeta.cv. sugiharto, bambang. 2013. untuk apa seni. bandung: matahari. key: cord-0060300-eolj430w authors: therborn, göran title: two epochal turns of inequality, their significance, and their dynamics date: 2021-03-22 journal: j doi: 10.1186/s40711-021-00143-0 sha: 5fe6c7f40f7b3f72741c40911db942969b5768fe doc_id: 60300 cord_uid: eolj430w at the end of the twentieth century, two historical turns of economic inequality happened. among the developed countries of the global north, the secular trend of decreasing intra-national inequality turned into its opposite. at about the same time, the long period of global inequality began to bend down, among households as well as among nations, a turn less noticed but more significant than the reduction of extreme poverty in the south. the foundation of the former turn was the beginning of de-industrialization in the north, and the coming of a post-industrial society, very different from the one predicted. the paper analyzes the trigger of the turn and the central dynamics of the new inequality in the rich north, financialization, and the digital revolution. it then tries to answer two questions about the global turn: was the decline of global inequality causally connected to the increase of northern intra-national inequality? will there be a development of industrial societies in the south? the answer to both is no. what lies ahead is more likely a global convergence of intra-national unequalization, albeit with both different and similar dynamics, as the decline of extreme poverty in the south is leading to inequality increases comparable to those of the north. post-industrialism has no egalitarian dialectic like that of industrial capitalism, but the dynamics of the twenty-first century inequality are likely to be confronted not only with popular protest movements but also with an emergent scholarly and intellectual egalitarian enlightenment. the international inequality curve began to bend down. after 2000, global inequality among households also started the descent. the two other fundamental dimensions of inequality, vital inequality of health and life expectancy, and existential inequality of recognition/disregard, autonomy/heteronomy, and respect/humiliation, also moved in new directions in the last third of the past century, although less dramatically (undp 2019) . unequal life expectancy in the world diminished, but the unevenness, precarity, and reversibility of vital progress were highlighted by the havoc wrought by hiv/aids and by the restoration of capitalism in the former soviet union, which suddenly sank life expectancy by up to 10 years in south africa and for russian males by 7 years, respectively. in western europe and north america, a class gap of longevity opened up and started to widen. 1 these new inegalitarian life tendencies foreboded a century starting with the lethal opioid epidemic in the usa, ebola outbreaks in africa, and several virus epidemics up to the ongoing covid-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. with respect to existential inequality, on the other hand, landmarks of equalization were achieved, if far from full human equality. in the usa, african-americans finally got the right to vote, and the last explicitly racist state, apartheid south africa, imploded. patriarchal family legislation was abolished in most parts of the world (therborn 2004:chs. 2:3, and 3), and women got entry into public space and public office. current movements and struggles around racism and sexism are taking place on a field laid out by the abovementioned landmarks. this paper is concerned with understanding the two historical turns of economic inequality at the end of the twentieth century and their implications and prospects for the twenty-first century. it aims at historically situating and explaining the turn to increasing inequality in the global north from around 1980 and at identifying the major drives of the continuing process of unequalization. it will try to answer whether there is a connection between the turns to increasing intra-national inequality in the north and descending international global inequality. it aims at spelling out the sociohistorical significance of the rise of the global south. is it the beginning of the end of human poverty? will industrial society relocate to the south? or is it more significantly a beginning of convergence with the north in similar tendencies of intra-national inequality as well as in international standing? currently, the world, north and south, is moving towards ever more economic inequality. this is a socio-politically unstable process, even if there is no longer any powerful dialectic undermining it, as there was in industrial capitalism. the paper ends by indicating an emergent egalitarian enlightenment, which might add to the instability of ongoing inegalitarian tendencies. in 2008, the oecd (organization for economic co-operation and development), the economic cooperation organization of the most developed countries, took note of a new phenomenon, which had evolved over the past two decades, the rise of economic inequality. analysis and concern continued in a series of reports (oecd 2008 (oecd , 2011 (oecd , 2015 (oecd , 2018 (oecd , 2019 . what had happened constituted an epochal shift of income development, a turn away from a general post-world war ii tendency of economic equalization in the oecd world of the global north, indeed from the main distributive trend of the area since world war i (atkinson and piketty 2010:692-3) . it was a major surprise to mainstream economic wisdom, which held that after rising in the developmental phase of transition from agricultural to the industrial economy, inequality would decline with industrial development, the famous kuznets curve of an inverted u (kuznets 1955) . there is a vast literature on this turn and its continued dynamics, much of it referenced in the long oecd reports mentioned above. technological change favoring high skills, and "globalization," mainly of finance and labor markets after trade having been found of little or no systematic impact, have been the two favorite variables. this paper starts from finding two significant lacunae in the multivariate approaches. first, they pay no or scant attention to the large-scale turn of socio-economic history involved, to the egalitarian potentialities of industrial societies, to the significance therefore of northern de-industrialization and arrival of post-industrial societies, and to the importance for inequality of industrial prospects in the global south. second, they do not take into account the abruptness of a large-scale socio-economic change, which calls for politico-economic historical attention to triggers. while epochal, the turn to inequality in the developed north was uneven and unequal (oecd 2008:27) , with counterbalances of variable weight. from a historical perspective from 1900 to the second decade of the twenty-first century, the main patterns of change may be identified between two poles visualizable as a u and a reversed j. the usa, with the whole anglosphere and the nordic countries of sweden and others, has trajectories of a u-shape, while, e.g., france, germany, and japan more resemble a reversed j. 2 the political economy analysis of triggers of the turn in this paper will focus on the usa, the decisive pivot of the turn, and sweden, its unexpected continental european pioneer. the simultaneity and similarity of the turn of the two social poles of the oecd area, of forceful market liberalism and comprehensive social democracy, provide an edge to the analysis of the forces involved, while being unrepresentative of the self-constrained reversed j option. the inegalitarian u-turn of the global north around 1980 was a seismic social shift, which cannot be understood or explained by single variables. the major foundation of modern egalitarian policies and rights, developed industrialism, was suddenly trembling and breaking up. the end of the industrial mold of capitalism, and therewith of the conception of a developed society as an industrial society, is the most profound and fundamental cause of contemporary inequality in the rich north. industrial employment reached its peak in the developed countries in 1965-1973, a downward slope began in the usa and a few other countries in the late 1960s and then accelerated downwards with the mid-1970s oil crisis. de-industrialization has reshaped the social landscape (table 1) . successful, socially molding industrialization, capitalist as well as socialist, provided a basis for a broad, relatively egalitarian society, after usually horrific primitive industrial accumulation. it brought non-elite working people together, creating large workingclass communities that developed their own, largely egalitarian culture and organizations, thereby promoting social and political strength. under capitalism, this was the class dialectic marx indicated and predicted in the mid-nineteenth century. industrial capitalism would develop its adversary, the working-class whose livelihood was a cost to capital in size, cohesion, and strength. this led to political democracy, for which the labor movement was the main force (therborn 2020a) to trade union-based workers' rights and welfare state social rights. capital income shares fell, manual wages increased and narrowed their distance to the salaries of managers and white-collar employees (lindert and williamson 2016:200ff) . that is the story of the "great leveling" of the twentieth-century industrial world of 1945-1975. industrial technology had a particular pro-equality potential, which could be realized in socio-politically favorable contexts. its perhaps most typical twentieth-century component was the assembly line. it ensured the high productivity of unskilled workers, which in a positive context implied compatibility between profitability and high wages for masses of workers. the us auto industry with its well-paid and, after successful ferocious fights, unionized and socially insured workers summed up the pro-worker potential of industrial technology, from the 1949 landmark collective agreement referred to as the "detroit consensus." developed industrialism meant a norm of stable employment at living wages, workers' rights, and civic rights, doing away with casual labor. this led to the standardization and stabilization of sexual and family relations after the disruptions of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century industrial urbanization with plummeting marriage rates and soaring numbers of extra-marital children. the family of developed industrialism saw a peak of marriage in europe and north america, where the universal marriage was not a modern norm, unlike in asia and africa. 3 it was a male-dominated nuclear family, with a historical record proportion of female housewives. however, it provided a relatively equal launching-pad for social mobility, with supply routes opened by a broadening of the educational system and increasing demand for educated whitecollar labor from rapidly growing offices of business and public services. under post-industrialism, these conditions of developed industrial societies are all being reversed, with fracturing and inegalitarian consequences. post-industrial capital strives to distance and divest itself as much as possible from productive work, outsourcing, and subcontracting it instead. with digital platforms, in the so-called gig economy, it tries to profit from other people's work without employing them. fragmentation and dispersion of the class of workers are normal working conditions in the service sector. the low skill-high productivity jobs of the developed industry have decreased dramatically, and there is no equivalent service technology in sight. more than half of all new jobs in the oecd in 1995-2007 were "non-standard jobs,"-temporary, part-time, or own account-amounting to almost a third of total oecd employment in 2013 (oecd 2015:29). the classical work on the transition from industrial to post-industrial society is bell's the coming of postindustrial society (1973 /1976 /2003 , a bold and wide-ranging book. in relation to issues of (in)equality, it is disappointing and wrong, however. disappointing not only because it has virtually nothing to say about the issue, but mainly because from his lofty brahmin perspective, bell did not see the egalitarian working-class communities, the characteristic of historical industrial societies, and their beginning disintegration and destruction into a "rustbelt" with the coming of post-industrialism. bell was fatally wrong in his forecast of post-industrial capitalism, envisaging the coming society primarily as technocratic and science-based, in which capitalists would be increasingly marginalized. financial capital was a "strategic resource" of industrial society, and to be replaced by "human capital" (p. lxxxv), there would be an "enormous growth in the 'third sector,' the non-profit area outside of business and government" (p. 269). "and as ownership of companies becomes disbursed through mutual funds and pension plans, we approach the anomaly of a capitalist system without capitalists" (p. lxv). the "dominant figures" of power, succeeding businessmen, will be "scientists, research men" (p. 359). bell's basic ideas of a post-industrial society developed in the early 1960s (p. ciii) and have the imprint of the scientism and managerialism of that time, before the turbulence of the late 1960s and before the crises of the 1970s, indicating a conceivable evolutionary path to a post-industrial society if the later upheavals had never happened. post-industrialism did not come by scientists and research men, but by capitalists. their path was traced by two economists without elaborating its destination, barry bluestone and bennett harrison-the deindustrialization of america (bluestone and harrison 1982) and the great u-turn (harrison and bluestone 1988), little noticed by the mainstream literature. the post-industrial society of the global north arrived by the sharp fall of the rate of profit in the 1970s, particularly in the then central and leading manufacturing sector, and with the concerted efforts of capital and pro-capital governments, including the social democratic government of sweden from 1982, 4 to restore it. this was a cross-national phenomenon, although of varying severity. many factors contributed to the profit squeeze, including saturation of domestic markets for consumer durables, newcomers' export drives, by recovered germany and japan returning to the world market, and by emergent east asian economies, for example, south korea, and singapore, and cost increases from the oil price hike and trade union strength. the late 1960s to 1970s was the summit of working-class strength and ambition, in unionization, in successful strikes (e.g., bringing down the british conservative government in 1974), and in bold political projects (e.g., the socializing so-called meidner funds in sweden, and a "rupture" with capitalism program in france of the common front). in the usa, there were the war on poverty, the great society, the civil rights, finally bringing democracy to the us south, and the largest reduction of economic inequality in the post-war usa (kelly 2009:160) . fear of organized labor was one of the vehicles of northern post-industrialism. the solutions adopted had some underpinning in technological evolution. manufacturing employment had started to decline slightly before the crisis in some countries (e.g., usa and sweden), and swedish and other attempts at responding by statesupported reindustrializing policy failed. the parameters of international competition had changed, the increasing productivity of industrial technology needed less labor for producing goods in demand, and scientific developments opened up novel technical and economic applications. nevertheless, like the previous shift from agriculture to industry, the coming of post-industrialism should not be assumed to be a smooth advance of economic progress. it arrived through struggles for power and gain in contingencies of history. the international context of the 1970s to early 1980s was turbulent. the post-war system of currency stability had broken down, the oil cartel opec (organization of the petroleum exporting countries) had emerged as a new power player, the sudden flush of petrodollars meant a new investment landscape, and the keynesian economic policy consensus had blown up, in front of simultaneous inflation and mass unemployment. in this context of pressure and turmoil, the forces of capital, managerial, political, "scientific," and ideological mounted a large-scale counter-offensive, which turned out largely successful, particularly in the light of failed attempts at industrial revival. profitability was restored, while the decline of manufacturing employment accelerated in the usa, particularly in 2000-2010, when it lost a third of its total (acemoglu et al. 2014) . from a post-war low of 6.5% in 1982, the us net corporate profit rate went up to almost 9% in 1985, continuing to 11% in 1995, and through a bumpy ride to 13.3% in 2013. the share of corporate profits in national income jumped to a post-war record in 2016 (wolf 2017:27f) . between 1973 and 1986, the number of production and nonsupervisory workers in us manufacturing declined by 1.75 million while all other economic sectors hired more workers. hourly earnings fell for all workers except miners (harrison and bluestone 1988:297). the de-industrializing restoration of the profit rate in the usa meant another historical break, a decoupling of employee compensation from labor productivity. from 1947 to circa 1980, the two had run close to each other, but from then on, wages were increasingly lagging behind productivity (wolf 2017; 25) . falling labor shares of national income has been an international trend since the 1970s (oecd 2015) . the core of the counter-offensive of capital was an embrace of de-industrialization in the north in favor of importing from, and outsourcing and out locating to low-wage, non-unionized countries and regions (like the us south), foreign investment, and a turn to financial operations, even by major former industrial corporations, like general electric and general motors. the coming of post-industrial societies did not mean more power to science and scientists, but to capital and capitalists. they could increasingly keep trade unions out of workplaces-only a third of oecd workers are now working under collective agreements (oecd 2019:20) . they managed to make education, health care, and science sources of private capital accumulation, and they collected private riches beyond all comparison with other elite groups. from 1985 to 2010, the annual income of all employed americans increased by 7% in real terms, but for a professor at the university of chicago, the increase was 70%, and for a sample of big corporation ceos between 502 and 825% (hacker 2012:36) . at a lower level of inequality, a similar pattern has been found in sweden. since 1950, the swedish trade union congress (lo) has compared elite remunerations in sweden in comparison with the average annual wages of industrial workers (table 2 ). in terms of economic benefits and power, post-industrial societies have turned out business societies, above all. the skills permeated by the new economy are rather narrow. the first and the most direct force of the new inequality was financialization, "a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production" (krippner 2005: 174) , with "trade in securities on financial markets" (godechot 2016:496) as its core activity. it exploded with a remarkable simultaneity in the countries of the developed capitalist world in the 1980s, as manifested by one central aspect of it, stock market capitalization. between 1870 and 1985, the median ratio of the domestic stock market value and gdp in seventeen capitalist countries (including the usa, the uk, france, germany, and japan) was stable, around a third of the domestic product. after 1985, it suddenly rose fivefold, from a low of 1/5 of gdp to level with gdp in 2000, and stayed at the new level (kuvshinov and zimmermann 2018:6). the usa, whose stock market is "comparable" in size to the other 16 countries combined (kuvshinov and zimmermann 2018:12), was at the center of the surge (stein 2011; krippner 2012) . it spread rapidly, in the wake of the breakdown of the post-wwii international monetary system, fuelled by political deregulations of credit and capital markets, cuts of corporate and top income taxes, by innovative financial "products" (i.e., objects of trading and speculation), and cheered on by economic ideologies of deregulation and shareholder value. competition between firms has "shifted from product markets to stock markets" (erturk 2020:43 and ff) . from 1980 to 2002, the share of financial sector profits in total us profits trebled from its previously stable share to a peak of 45%, staying around that level. the share of financial income in the profits of the non-financial sector of the economy rose from 15 to 42% in 2001, then descending to a third (lin and tomaskovic-devey 2013:1284f) . in 1990, financial assets amounted to half of world gdp, in 2015 to more than 400% of it (lavinas 2018) . a large literature, both institutional (e.g., by oecd) and academic, has found that financialization has become a major driver of economic inequality (assa 2012; dünhaupt 2014; godechot 2016; de haan and sturm 2017, hermansen 2017) . calculations by the oecd have found that financialization, both in the form of increased stock market capitalization and increase of intermediated credit, has a polarizing effect on the income distribution, sinking disposable income growth for the bottom deciles and lifting it for the higher deciles, in particular the highest (denk and cournède 2015: 32 and 34) . among eu countries, operators in the financial sector make up a large proportion of the highest income earners, in the uk two thirds of the richest 0.1% (denk 2015: fig. a2 .18). sweden has experienced the largest increase of inequality in continental western europe under the new dynamic, which has included an extraordinary stock market capitalization expansion, from 9% of gdp in 1980 to 145% in 2017, proportionally the second largest in europe (after switzerland) (ceic.data.com). the new centrality of the stock market constitutes a new system of corporate governance in sweden, focused on "shareholder value," typical of the anglosphere, and different from that of france, germany, and japan. it is likely a major reason for atkinson's inclusion of sweden among the countries with a u-turn of inequality (cf. sjöberg 2009; roine and waldenström 2012). between 1991 and 2016, swedish household income from work increased by 64%, from entrepreneurship by 62%, and from capital (interest, dividends, and, most importantly, capital gains from selling assets) by 229%. income from capital is very unevenly distributed; 54% goes to the richest 1%, while the bottom 50% of the population receives 2% of it. in an econometric calculation, the swedish ministry of finance shows that the whole inequality increase (and more) for 1995-2016 is due to the rising weight and concentration of capital income (therborn 2020b) . the new inequality has been driven from the top by increasing income shares of the top 10%, top 1%, and top 0.1% in ascending order, virtually everywhere (alvaredo et al. 2018: ch. 2.3). a significant accelerator has been the growth of stock options in corporate executive remuneration systems, powerfully stimulating stock market entrepreneurship and providing a vehicle for delinking ceo pay from that of other corporate employees. in 1980, an executive of a british corporation on the top ftse (financial times/stock exchange share index) 100 list received a remuneration 18 times that of the median employee of the corporation; in 2018, it is 72 times (high pay centre 2016; . financialization has decelerated since its heydays in 1999-2000 and 2006-2007, but financial wealth and income remain at a level not seen in europe and north america since the depression of the 1930s. it is a very powerful source of inequality since it refers to a kind of assets beyond the reach of the majority of the population. in the usa in 2013, the richest 1%% owned about half of all outstanding stock, financial securities, trust, business equity, and one third of non-home real estate. the top 10% held 85-90 of all financial investment assets and two thirds of all non-home real estate. among middle-income households, their home accounts for three fourths of their assets, monetary savings for another 20%. between 1983 and 2013, median net wealth fell among the poorest 60% of the us population, and median financial assets were close to zero among the poorest 40%. between 1983 and 2013, the mean net worth of american households increased by 8369% for the richest 1%, by 634% for the next 19%, and by 6.6% for the middle 60% (wolf 2017: 655f , 681, and 187, respectively) . a significant aspect of financialization has been a post-1980 change of us pension (and other) systems, from "defined benefit" as a social right to "defined contribution" as an individual investor's risk. in the usa, this change alone has increased wealth inequality by four gini points (wolf 2017: 355f) . the inequality effects of financialization, or of "financial integration," variously measured, have been found consistently increasing across the global south as well. the research overview by zhang juzheng et al. (2014: 40f) covers from east asia to latin america. chile, under the military dictatorship, pioneered a replacement of its whole public pension system with one of the individual contributions to an array of private funds. in the second half of the 1990s, the world bank pushed this system as a means to develop financial markets in latin america and post-communist eastern europe, with initial but short-lived success (world bank 1994) . the remnants of the financial market pension system were the main target of the large egalitarian demonstrations in chile in late 2019, which have resulted in government promises of substantial reform. satellite tv, internet, smartphones, mobile apps, robotics, and other products of the digital technological revolution have, in several ways, changed the world for the better, much better connected, much easier to handle in many everyday tasks, creating much more entertainment. however, in a distributive perspective, the overwhelming effect has been to increase inequality. the democratic potential of interactive social media, in comparison with unidirectional mass communication, while operating in some special political moments, like the arab spring in 2011, has largely been overwhelmed by corporate marketing by expert hackers and professional information-fakers. the new digital technology has opened up a new field of capital accumulation, which in two to three decades has generated enormous wealth and monopolistic power for a few entrepreneurs and investors. capitalism has acquired a new dynamic through the technical revolution. the background of its very core, silicon valley in california, is a dizzying brew of massive military investments in technological innovation, an excellent, private entrepreneurial university (stanford), abundant private capital, and cultural openness to talents from everywhere, a venture driven by mixtures of military and civilian actors, academia and business, private and public capital, cosmopolitanism, and americanism. 5 remarkably, this dynamic has not spawned any accelerating economic growth, neither in the usa nor in the world economy. on the contrary, world economic growth has stayed well below the 1950-1970 global trend line (world bank data), and in the usa well below the 1948-1970 growth rate (gordon 2016:635) . at least in part, this slowdown might be due to financialization and its corporate orientation of substituting "distribute and downsize" for "retaining and reinvest" [earnings] (assa 2012) . the economic impact of the digital revolution, so far, is thus mainly distributive. the distributive impact of the digital revolution is most ostentatious in the fabulous personal wealth it has given its most prominent actors. among the world's ten richest persons, all men, as of august 24, 2020, according to bloomberg billionaire index, they are seven (the top four) front figures of the digital technological change: jeff bezos (amazon), bill gates (microsoft), mark zuckerberg (facebook), elon musk (spacex, tesla), steve ballmer (microsoft), larry page (alphabet, google), and sergey brin (alphabet, google). the individual rankings and exact fortune of these people are somewhat unstable, and bloomberg's billionaire index is a daily list, but the overall pattern is telling. of the world's twenty-five largest individual fortunes in august 2020, twelve have their origin in technologies that did not exist in 1980, only five were made in the pre-digital industry, four in retail trade, two in luxury goods provision, and two in private finance. a third of the largest fortunes (none of the top ten) are inherited or divorced. the personal wealth of the technological frontrunners is to a large extent due to the connection of the new high tech with venture capital and financialization, first of all, with running the stock market. the five big tech companies, apple, microsoft, amazon, alphabet, and facebook, account for 20% of all stock market capitalization in the usa. together with their chinese competitors like alibaba and tencent, they make up seven of the world's eight most highly valued corporations. their only rival is the saudi oil company aramco. 6 the abundance of private capital available for digital enterprising has created a new path to high wealth-out of expansive loss-making. ride-hailing uber and musicstreaming spotify, for example, are world-wide corporations which so far have made losses every year of their existence but which have already made their founders into billionaires-by selling their shares of continuously rising market value. 7 a major distributive effect of digital technology is its capacity to generate market power. digitalized communication has made fast global diffusion and virtual monopolization possible, including attraction and influence, entertainment stars, product brands, and logistics firms. it is also making it possible to set up and control global value chains from afar. global value chains control 80% of world trade, and a third is an intra-firm trade within multinational corporations (oecd 2016:60) . a telling illustration of the new market power is the cost structure of apple's iphones, analyzed by the business magazine forbes and others. the latest seen by this writer concerns the iphone10: in percent of the retail price, the cost structure of iphone10 is: components bought 37% manufacturing (wages of workers and profits of subcontractors) 2.5% profits for apple designers and shareholders 60%. 8 a profit margin of 60 to 70% seems to be general for smartphones, including samsung's (techwalls 2019). the outsourced, subcontracted industrialization of the south, constantly under heavy cost pressure from powerful northern customers, stymies the egalitarian potential of developed industrialization. finally, there is the asymmetrical power-enhancing effect of digital surveillance. the digital commandeering and monitoring of workers in amazon's warehouses, which so far have successfully fought off attempts at unionization and negotiated workers' rights, have become international notoriety (sanaito 2019; guendelsberger 2019) . workers are regarded as competing with robots and get treated as disposables. the us economist shoshana zuboff (2019) sees the emergence of a wider control system, "surveillance capitalism." coalescence of applied science and finance has brought a post-industrial business society. the resurrection of the south after centuries of subordination, in particular of china and india, has its world-historical significance primarily in geopolitics, as a historical shift of world power. however, it is also an epochal turning-point of global income patterns. international (population-weighted) inequality peaked around 1950 and started to decline in the second half of the 1980s, for the first time in two hundred years. at first, the bend of the curve was due exclusively to china (milanovic 2005:142) , but from 2000 international inequality is descending even excluding the ascent of china and india (milanovic 2014). by 1950, both china and india had a lower gdp per capita than in the 1900s. with decolonization, both began to grow (maddison 2001: 215, 265) . however, this did not directly mean a catch up with the rich world, as the latter was growing vigorously after the war, and with lower fertility rates. india's share of world gdp declined from 4.2% in 1950 to 3.1% in 1973, while china's increased very slightly, from 4.5 to 4.6% (maddison 2001:263) . only in the 1980s did china, india, and indonesia begin their long and still unfinished approach to western european gdp per capita, and since 2000, global inequality among households of the world is going down (milanovic 2019:212, and 7, respectively). in the predominant, world bank-orchestrated economic literature, the change of the south is mainly heralded as a historical reduction of human poverty. is this the most meaningful interpretation? there is no doubt that an important reduction of extreme poverty has taken place-as has also happened with child mortality. the drastic reduction of extreme poverty in the world in the last 30 years is a major step in human progress. at the lowest level of world bank-defined poverty, $1.90 a day in 2011 purchasing power parities, extreme poverty has decreased from 36% of the world population in 1990 to less than 9% in 2019 (world bank 2020a). china-the most recent wb (world bank) poverty rate, 0.5% in 2016 (world bank 2020b: table 1.2.)-has driven world change. between 1981 and 2005, the east asian population in dire poverty declined by 755 million, while in the rest of the world numbers increased by 229 million (excl., eastern europe, central asia, the middle east) (ravaillon and chen 2009: table 1 ). there may be debatable measurement issues in gauging transitions from subsistence to monetarized economies, but anyway, this is a great achievement. extreme poverty has become a regional problem of the south; in 2015, 56% of the poorest lived in sub-saharan africa and 33% in india (world bank 2018: 2, 4). however, poverty is a social concept, not a biological one, of survivability. it is intrinsically relational, referring to the disposal of resources lower than that of the median population. this state of lowliness may be defined at some more or less arbitrarily chosen level, as the original world bank option for $1 a day in 1990-an approximation of the official poverty line of a selection of the world's poorest countries, or in terms of the costs of a basket of basic consumer goods, as in the usa and latin america. alternatively, by the eu's definition and by the luxemburg income study, poverty may be defined as below a percentage of the median income of the population, 60% by the eu, 50% by the lis (luxemburg income study). while yielding different headcount numbers, both definitions are relational-defining poverty in relation to a given society and population, though the former is conventionally called "absolute" and the latter "relative." the key architect of the world bank's dollar-defined poverty, martin ravaillon, has later made a "weak" concession to relativity by including a coefficient of mean national consumption in his calculations. the effect is rather dramatic: in 1981-2005 "absolute poverty" declined in east asia and the pacific from 78 to 17%, in "weakly relative" terms from 79 to 38%; south asian "absolute" poverty headcount came down from 59 to 40% while increasing from 61.6 to 63.2% in relative terms; latin american poverty changed level, 13% in "absolute" terms, reduced to 8%, while 52.5% going down to 45% when some consideration of average consumption is included (ravaillon and chen 2009:tables 1-2). the problem is not the true percentage of poverty. the problem is that poverty, unlike survival, is always relative, and after leaving one level of poverty, you may enter another one. in a world of growing intra-national inequality, this is most likely to happen to a large proportion of the population. the progress of living conditions which has taken place in recent decades is socially very important. however, it does not make up a historical turning-point, like the increase of inequality in the global north and the decline of international and global household inequality. "poverty" has not been abolished in the usa or anywhere in europe, nor is relative poverty being abolished in china. living conditions in china have improved tremendously in the past decades, but the human goalposts are moving with socio-economic development. therefore, the most significant social change in the global south is not the reduction of some absolute poverty, but the shift of relative power and prosperity between the south and the north, and particularly between asia and nato-land, of europe and north america. explaining this shift is beyond the scope of this paper, but two aspects of the matrix of its dynamics may be noted. one is the rise in asia of political and economic leadership with the knowledge and the post-colonial autonomy and selfconfidence to make use of the opportunities opened up, by the new technologies, by the crisis of northern industrialism, and by the new wave of capitalist globalization. the other is the enormous demographic weight of the major asian countries once they start growing. the population of china is 4.3 times that of the usa, india's population 15.55 times that of germany, and indonesia's is 3.8 times the french population, pakistan's 2.9 times that of the uk. is there a connection between declining global inequality and increasing intra-national inequality in the north? the two inequality curves of western intra-national inequality and the world's international inequality changed direction at about the same time, in the second half of the 1980s. however, the triggers of the two were completely independent of each other. the rise of china, which, as we noticed above, first alone bent international inequality down, was due to a radical policy change in china's reform and opening-up. the new western inequality was western capital's response to the profit squeeze of the 1970s. the sharpening of international industrial competition, which played a major part in the fall of the profit rate in the usa and some european countries, like sweden, did not come from china, but, above all, from germany, japan, and south korea (harrison and bluestone 1988: ch. 2; therborn 2020b) . evolutionary tendencies of relatively diminishing manufacturing employment were discernible in both the usa and sweden before the 1970s crisis and had been part of britain's long post-war decline. for the oecd area as a whole, the most rapid acceleration of inequality occurred in 1985-1990 and 1995-2000 , before the great global economic impact of china, from its wto entry in 2001. indeed the chinese economic surge coincided with a deceleration of oecd intra-national inequality (oecd 2015: fig. 1.2) , and one might add, with a restoration of us net profit rates to the golden level of 1945 -1965 (wolf 2017 . china's stunning export success in the first two decades of this century has greatly impacted us de-industrialization (autor et al. 2016) , and to a lesser extent, the rest of the oecd (thevissen and van vliet 2018) but increasing northern inequality was fabricated in the global north, domestically and through regional interaction, of financialization especially. de-industrialization in the global north is coeval with industrialization in the south. what are the distributive prospects for the rise of southern national income, particularly in asia? is a new, relatively egalitarian industrial society coming? in the 2000s, china became "the factory of the world," a most impressive and unexpected achievement. however, neither china nor any country of the south is likely to become a fully industrial society. a decline of manufacturing employment, de-industrialization in latin america and korea began in the 1990s, in malaysia after 2000 (unctad 2016: table 3.2.). by the 2010s, manufacturing employment had stalled in china and india, while total industrial employment was being kept up by an increase in construction employment (ilo 2019) (table 3 ). this means that industrial employment in the global south will stop around the level of current japanese and german de-industrialization (table 1) . some further expansion of industrial employment in the south is not to be excluded, but it is very unlikely to reach even proximity to the peak of the most developed countries. post-industrialism is becoming a global characteristic, a common foundation of an unequalizing world. post-industrialism in the north means de-industrialization and de-standardization. in the south, it means stalled industrialization and persistent nonstandardization or "informality." the halt of industrialization in the south means that egalitarian strivings will likely have no tailwind from comprehensive developed industrialism. in the short and medium terms, there are two effects of this stalling which need to be underlined. one concerns the future of the large populations still in subsistence or otherwise small-scale agriculture. in sub-saharan africa, peasants constitute 55% of the working population, in south asia 43%, and in southeast and east asia, a third and a fourth, respectively (ilo 2019). for them, there will be no, or at most, a very narrow, industrial exit. many of them risk being trapped in post-extreme poverty, in either rural or urban slums. the other problem is "informal employment," basically work without contract and rights. it is a huge phenomenon. according to ilo (2018) , it comprises 61% of the world's working population. recent economic development has had a very limited effect on it, if any (table 4) . china is not included in the ilo (international labour organization) comparison, but informality is a significant, if minoritarian phenomenon on the chinese labor market, e.g., among rural migrant workers without urban social benefits or a formal work contract. developed industrialism signified a formalization of the economy. workers with an employment contract, and increasingly with a collective agreement, with workplace and social rights, replaced street vendors, family helpers, day laborers, and contractless workers in non-registered enterprises. public social benefits unbound to employment may, to some extent, compensate for informal work status. however, the dualization of the labor market between formal and informal is a deep inegalitarian divide. the halted industrialization is a heavyweight force for the persistence of this divide. china and the other rising big powers of asia will not become industrial societies in the historical euro-american sense. furthermore, there is no "end of poverty" in sight, given the social-relational dimension of poverty. the tendency towards less inequality between peoples and territories of the globe is likely to continue unless disrupted by a catastrophic outcome of the covid-19 pandemic. however, this global convergence includes another one, already visible, a development into similar inequality processes and patterns. exiting extreme poverty in asia is coming to mean entering a postfig. 2.1.1.e) . it should be noticed that the recent world bank interest in "shared prosperity," looking at the growth rate of the income or consumption of the poorest 40% of the population in relation to that of the total population, does not capture the inegalitarian and socially excluding effects of growing income gaps. for instance, because of the different starting levels of growth rates, the somewhat higher income growth of the bottom 40% of the chinese population in 2013-2015 did not prevent the gap between their income and that of the population as a whole from increasing by 12% (from $5.55 to $6.25 a day) (world bank 2018:63). the oecd (2018, 2019) has put out grim overviews of the outlook of inequality and for the middle class in the global north. it highlights the halt of upward mobility, the decline in the population share of income-earners between 75 and 200% of the median, the growing gap between the median income and the average of the top 10%, and more than one fifth of middle-income households spend more than they earn (table 5) . at present, it seems that the global south is heading in the same direction. the drives of southern inequality are beyond the scope of this paper, which no doubt include its own dynamic, e.g., related to rural-urban and agrarian-postagrarian transitions, but which already involve potent forces of financialization and digitalized capital accumulation. in the south, the period was seen as an escape from poverty, but in the north, it is lived as an ousting from the relative egalitarianism of developed industrialism. the latter kind of society is unlikely to be reached by the much touted "emergent middle classes" of the south (asian development bank 2011; therborn 2020c). the ongoing covid-19 pandemic is sharpening the common intra-national inegalitarian tendencies of the world. at the same time, rather, it seems so far, strengthening the international convergence of the last three decades, as the epicenter of the pandemic has been in western europe and usa, and as east asia has been the best managers of the challenge (hitherto). the most wealthy, the big tech corporations and their shareholders have been huge winners of the pandemic (oxfam 2020; new york times 21.8.2020), and the poorest have been the biggest losers, "informal" workers in the south and northern "temporary" workers, ethnic minorities. extreme poverty reduction is being reversed (oxfam 2020¸un 2020; world bank 2020b). post-industrial societies and financial capitalism have no tendentially pro-egalitarian class dialectic strengthening the poor and the exploited, unlike industrial capitalism. however, the inegalitarian denial of many people's possibilities of realizing their capabilities will sooner or later generate resistance and protest movements. increasing inequality is never a good recipe for social stability, though the time scales may be stretched. however, the future of inequality will be made by its inherent dynamics, probable protests, and the always unpredictable historical contingencies. the world also includes an egalitarian enlightenment, not without influence, actual as well as potential. it has three main components. most heavyweight is a plethora of organizations around the un (united nations), fao (food and agriculture organization), ilo, unesco (the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization), undp (united nations development programme), unicef (united nations international children emergency fund), who (world health organization), and others, which are all committed and institutionally empowered to a humane egalitarian agenda. they have made important contributions to poverty alleviation and the reduction of vital and existential inequality. their economic clout has always been limited, though. another component is an embryonic global civil society of organized concerned citizens. in the field of inequality concern, oxfam is perhaps the most important example. thirdly, and most recent, is a shift among economists, supported by other social scientists from more egalitarian traditions. promoted by the work of thomas piketty and his associates, and highlighted by crises and protests, from the crash of 2008 to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, inequality has become a hot topic. inequality studies are set up as centers, institutes, or programs in elite universities from paris and london to harvard, stanford, and berkeley and spreading across continents. the pioneer amartya sen and four recent nobel laureates of economics are involved, joseph stiglitz, angus deaton, abhijit banerjee, and esther duflo. the new managing director of the imf (international monetary fund), once the spearhead of anti-egalitarianism, is issuing a call to "reduce inequality to create opportunity" (georgieva 2020) . the founder and director of the world economic forum, advocating a "great reset" of a "better capitalism" (schwab and malleret 2020) , and the editors of the london financial times (april 3, 2020, www.ft.com) have also recently come out as egalitarians. while the bourgeoisie has intermittently harbored a few socially concerning exceptions, within the "dismal" discipline of economics, this phalanx of front-rank egalitarians seems to be yet another historical turn. the powerful twenty-first century dynamics of inequality, north and south, are not likely to unfold without critical questioning. the rise of china and the future of us manufacturing, voxeu.org/article alvaredo financialization and its consequences: the oecd experience the china shock: learning from labour market adjustment to large changes in trade /1976/1999/2002 the coming of post-industrial society new york, basic books blanchet the deindustrialization of america finance and income inequality: a review and new evidence who are the top 1% earners in europe? finance and income inequality in oecd countries an empirical assessment of the contribution of financialization and corporate governance to the rise in income inequality shareholder primacy and corporate financialization reduce inequality to create opportunity financialization is marketization! a study of the respective impacts of various dimensions of financialization on the increase in global inequality on the clock: what low-wage work did to me and how it drives america insane new york review of books harrison, b., and b. bluestone. 1988. the great u-turn the global income distribution for high-income countries executive pay in the ftse100 https://highpaycentre.org ilo 2018. women and men in the informal economy www.ilo.org ilo 2019. employment in industry the financialization of the american economy capitalizing on crisis: the political origins of the rise of finance economic growth and inequality the collateralization of social policy under financial capitalism, development and change, version online financialization and us income inequality trends in global income inequality and their political implications, graduate school city university of new york milanovic, b. 2019. capitalism alone how to promote social mobility under pressure: the squeezed middle class. paris, oecd. oxfam. 2020. pandemic profits exposed. oxfamamerica.org. accessed 22 sveriges nya miljardärer on the role of capital gains in swedish income inequality revealed: amazon touts higher wages while ignoring issues in its warehouses covid-19 -the great reset. geneva, world economic forum sjöberg pivotal decade: how the united states traded factories for finance between sex and power. family in the world dreams and nightmares of the world's middle classes chinese imports and domestic employment across 18 oecd countries averting the old age crisis new york what drives asia's rising inequality? the age of surveillance capitalism the author read and approved the final manuscript. publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. key: cord-0057866-4u3hxvo6 authors: shi, linda title: the new climate urbanism: old capitalism with climate characteristics date: 2020-11-19 journal: climate urbanism doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-53386-1_4 sha: 4897da24e2879dd1f7f4123f18a3640ef6465762 doc_id: 57866 cord_uid: 4u3hxvo6 this chapter argues that emerging urban responses to climate change are not necessarily new or urban, but instead recapitulate capitalist processes reproducing spatial, social, and ecological inequality. drawing on examples from us and asian metropolises, this chapter shows that climate resilience is becoming a new arena where cities compete for economic development and extract resources from rural or other less powerful jurisdictions in aid of their own security under climate change. climate urbanism’s competitive and extractive dynamics indicate not a transformative movement towards just and sustainable development, but a freudian death-drive capitalism with climate characteristics. the chapter concludes with reflections on issues of scale and sources of inspiration that can reshape the growing industry behind global climate urbanism. adaptation within and between metropolitan regions appear to recapitulate capitalist processes reproducing spatial, social, and ecological inequality. privileging cities as the primary or sole actors involved in urban climate action can overlook historic multi-scalar and multi-level contestations that drive changes at the city scale. naomi klein in this changes everything (2014: 459) writes: as the furthest-reaching crisis created by the extractivist worldview, and one that puts humanity on a firm and unyielding deadline, climate change can be the force-the grand push-that will bring together all of these still living [social, labor, and environmental] movements. however, this chapter shows that from inter-city competition over climate-resilient development in us cities to urban-rural competition over natural resource governance in asian cities, climate urbanism to date suggests not so much a transformative "grand push" but a freudian death-drive capitalism with climate characteristics. if this is not what most people think climate urbanism "should be," then it falls on all of us to ask what kinds of urbanism might be more fruitful. the chapter concludes with some reflections and the remainder of the book features contributions that identify seeds of this greater ambition. climate change tightens the screws of competitive urbanism. in an age of globalization, fiscal austerity, and decentralization, cities sustain themselves through entrepreneurial competition regionally, nationally, and internationally. climate change injects an unprecedented shock to this system by squeezing cities of available water resources and habitable land and increasing costs of development, service provision, and disaster recovery. market responses to climate risks-such as rising insurance premiums, realignment of mortgage markets and property valuation in coastal areas, and falling bond ratings for at-risk municipal or other government bonds-are already or will inject volatility into the bases of municipal fiscal function (taylor 2020) . evolving research not only identifies the overall potential for financial loss, but the implications for fiscal vulnerability at the city scale (miao et al. 2018; shi and varuzzo 2020; ucs 2018) . cities within and between metropolitan regions compete with one another both to survive the impacts of climate change and to use climate resilience as a narrative and marketing device (see chaps. 3, 8, and 9) . the experiences of metropolitan efforts to coordinate city-level adaptation to date is indicative of a competitive approach to climate urbanism. as growing numbers of cities began to adapt, many practitioners began to recognize the problems of urban climate adaptation planning (adams et al., 2016; shi 2019) . for many, barriers to digesting climate projections, undertaking vulnerability assessments, and adopting climate adaptation plans are too onerous (hamin et al. 2014; moser and ekstrom 2012; shi et al. 2015 ; see also chap. 10). others lament that cities cannot control decisions by utilities, highways, airports, state regulations, nor easily advance adaptation projects given multiple, inconsistent permitting standards (mukheibir et al. 2013; vedeld et al. 2016) . as some cities began to elevate seawalls or roads, practitioners foresaw a mess of uncoordinated infrastructure systems and the potential for spillover effects. in response, a growing number of metropolitan regions in europe, canada, and the united states have launched metropolitan-scale collaborations for climate adaptation (e.g. adams and french 2019; bauer and steurer 2014; vella et al. 2016) . these initiatives aim to catalyse adaptation across metropolitan regions to achieve systems-wide resilience. my research of five such collaboratives in the united states finds that they have helped to build awareness, equalize access to high-quality climate data and training, and lobby for resources (shi 2019) . recent design competitions-new york's rebuild by design (2013); the changing course design competition for the lower mississippi river delta (2014); san francisco rebuild by design (2018)-have also enlivened the public's ecological imagination as many nature-based proposals followed ecological rather than administrative boundaries. yet, despite efforts to advance collective, equitable, metropolitan-scale adaptation, local implementation remains highly uneven and unequal. cities that can attract investment have doubled down on waterfront development, often contradicting their own climate vulnerability assessments and regional frameworks (olazabal et al. 2019; berke et al. 2015; shi and varuzzo 2020; woodruff and stults 2016) . wealthier, high-risk municipalities have reconciled this contradiction by pushing for climate-resilient designs particularly in high-end developments, such as elevated buildings, wash-through first floors, wind shear resistance, and elevated hvac systems, as well as building elevated parks like hunter's point and the east river in new york city. the city of miami beach and miami-dade county are each raising $100 million or more (from water utility charges and bonds respectively) to fund road elevation and drainage upgrades. on the other hand, smaller suburban municipalities and those in "down markets" lack the funding for implementation, easily redevelopable sites from which to squeeze new revenues, and wealthy residents who can afford to pay more for services. an adaptation gap is emerging within and across metropolitan areas as those who can adapt invest in upgrades and armouring infrastructure, and those who cannot afford to adapt fear becoming climate slums (eubanks 2016) . competition is also emerging within and between metropolitan regions for status as the preferred "receiving destinations" for people migrating out of flood-prone areas. after hurricane katrina, roughly 100,000 people left new orleans for baton rouge, houston, dallas, atlanta, tampa, and other cities. studies expect future disaster events to continue to drive internal migration (hauer 2017) . in flood-prone "sending areas," markets are beginning to see depressed property value appreciation or actual value loss (bernstein et al. 2019; mcalpine and porter 2018) . by contrast, financial, insurance, and development industries are racing to model which areas are the best sites in which to invest in the future (keenan 2019) . real estate investors are beginning to incorporate climate impacts into their portfolios, although most still rely on insurance to mitigate risks and there is not yet a measurable change to their investment practices (uli and heitman 2018). in southeast florida, the ground zero of sea level rise in the united states, unincorporated parts of miami-dade county on higher land have seen land values grow faster than low-lying places like miami beach (keenan et al. 2018 ). lowincome communities of colour on higher ground like little haiti in the city of miami have seen rising demand for property in their neighbourhoods. taking a page from china's belt and road initiative, political scientists dolšak and prakash (2019) have proposed a "green rustbelt and road initiative" to revitalize post-industrial cities of the american northeast and midwest with new green industries and climate displaced persons. whether market shifts and individual choices bring investment to long-neglected geographies with underutilized infrastructure or add housing and transportation pressures to rapidly growing inland metropolises, marginalized communities who have for decades struggled to sustain a right to the city will be among the most impacted. these emerging dynamics of intra-and inter-metropolitan responses to climate change show that "new climate urbanism" can be speculative, competitive, and exclusionary, as described in several contributions across this book. speculative because individuals and corporations are eyeing future receiving cities, speculatively purchasing land, displacing residents, and anticipating new rounds of a spatial fix (harvey 2001; taylor 2020) . competitive because cities ultimately respond to their own residents, budgets, and regulatory requirements, and act in their own self-interest (see chap. 9). despite efforts to advance collective action, they necessarily plan and implement adaptation strategies individually and compete for government funding and private development, resulting in short-term decisions that may produce spillover effects to their neighbours. exclusionary because so much of the emphasis thus far has been on design and infrastructure fixes that are expensive to build and therefore tied to higher-end developments that justify the expense (see chap. 8). even where cities espouse nature-based solutions, such efforts can result in gentrification and exclusion (wachsmuth and angelo 2018; anguelovski et al. 2019; curran and hamilton 2017; dooling 2009 ). administrative fragmentation, long a factor in racial and class segregation, now produces new dynamics of spatial injustice (hodson and marvin 2009 securitizing cities under climate change also entails landscape-scale efforts to ensure that cities have enough water, electricity, and flood protection. cities are extractive and dependent on "rural hinterlands" for basic resources-water, energy, food, and natural resources that supply commodities (cronon 1992 ; duarte-abadía and boelens 2019; hidalgo-bastidas and boelens 2019; kaika and swyngedouw 2011; silver 2015) . the impacts of climate change on both rural and urban areas inject new volatility into what historian william cronon calls the "elaborate urbanrural hierarchy" (cronon 1992: 378) . this requires climate urbanism research to look at dynamics of appropriation, enclosure, and extraction within and beyond city boundaries. in a recent study, my students and i explore how climate change and efforts to adapt water management in four asian metropolitan regions affect surrounding rural communities (shi et al. under review) . we developed in-depth case studies of water supply management in the regions around mumbai (india) and khulna (bangladesh), and floodwater management around bangkok (thailand) and metro manila (the philippines). examining these cases together highlights how climate change impacts existing urban-rural dynamics across the spectrum of water management. efforts to ensure the resilience of these four metropolitan centres treat rural areas as sacrifice zones. mumbai and khulna are conscripting water from rural areas for urban domestic consumption rather than addressing problematic internal water allocations or inefficiencies. bangkok has built and continues to enlarge rings of levees that protect the capital from floods while flooding rural areas, even as the city ignores its own land use plans and permits development on floodplains reserved for floodwater retention. in metro manila, governments relocate urban informal settlers from along drainage ways to rural provinces to improve drainage in the capital, while ignoring the impacts to the floodplain by middle-and upper-class development and historic inadequate housing construction for the urban poor. the outcomes of urban adaptation actions often compound growing climate vulnerability in rural areas, themselves struggling with changing hydrological patterns, among other social and developmental changes. rural precarity then drives more urban migration. cities' greater political power and bureaucratic capacity, backed by subnational, national, and international development ambitions, tend to overwhelm rural resistance. in turn, unjust privileging of urban resilience contributes to intensifying urban-rural conflicts. in bangkok, residents of rural provinces broke 14 water gates following months of inundation, and both water projects in mumbai and khulna experienced years of lawsuits. the fragmentation of governance institutions and administrative entities across these large geographic scales challenges efforts to coordinate or rationalize development and water use. these institutional uncertainties further enable dominant political forces to grab resources at the expense of others. these dynamics suggest, firstly, that cities are not only unintentionally causing spillover effects in pursuit of their own well-being through climate responses, but also privileging their resilience over that of the "other." these actions go beyond the exclusionary to the actively extractive, as cities seek additional water or floodable land from other geographies. more empowered groups mount a resistance such that the most vulnerable groups-informal settlers without land tenure, indigenous tribes, and subsistence fishing and farming communities-that cannot legally or politically resist urban projects are ultimately the ones most impacted. their resilience and well-being under climate change are never part of assessments, revealing the double standard for whose resilience really counts. cities' growing prominence as climate actors and their search for investments to build climate-proof enclaves within their boundaries reinforces this incongruity (chap. 3). depriving rural areas of fundamental land and water resources denies their ability to survive and sustain the social, governance, and ecological relationships that historically stewarded natural landscapes. second, these cases demonstrate that urban responses to climate change implicate geographies far beyond their immediate borders. cities leading climate action are often represented as dots on a map, as if each dot captures the totality of that geography and all dots are equal and harmonious to others on the map. in reality, of course, these dots lie within metropolitan regions including dozens or hundreds of cities that exist as individual jurisdictions precisely because they value their autonomy. brenner and schmid argue the definition of "urban" is a chaotic concept and an artefact of statistics. instead, they call for "a new conceptualization of urbanization processes both within and beyond those settlement spaces that are demarcated as 'cities '" (2014: 749) . others critique academics for similarly committing "methodological cityism" (angelo and wachsmuth 2015) by focusing almost exclusively on the local as the relevant scale of climate adaptation (nalau et al. 2015; preston et al. 2013; chap. 5) . while cities do play a lead role in the united states, in the context of centralized asian countries, these projects are more often the result of decisions at higher levels of government than of local actors. the scale suggested by "new climate urbanism" belies the multiscalar dimensions of "the urban" (see also chap. 7). a focus on cities creates dichotomous geographies of urban and non-urban, while neglecting relationships that connect these geographies (roy 2005) . a focus on the urban can overlook the reality of administrative boundaries that divide a seemingly contiguous urban field into hundreds of fiefdoms with uneven capacity and authority. while the examples given above reference integrated landscapes like metropolitan regions or watersheds, the scale of urban climate securitization reflects the global reach of contemporary capitalism and urbanism (moser and hart 2015) . gulf countries, for example, have purchased large tracts of land in east africa to secure food production given their own lack of water and arable land (todman 2018) . rising nationalism and efforts to restrict immigration into europe and the united states in turn reflect national responses to secure nations from climate-displaced migrants. at a minimum, scholars and practitioners must be cognizant of these alternative geographies in assessing urban climate action. a critical task for scholars is to put forth workable alternatives to "cities" that facilitate assessment, planning, governance, and decision-making. it is likely that no such scalar metric exists universally, which itself frustrates efforts to scale up equitable adaptation. cities that have the political and economic clout are enacting a capitalist endgame that rehashes and intensifies existing dynamics of urban developmentalism, social and environmental exploitation, and deepening inequality (anguelovski et al. 2019; dooling 2009; long and rice 2019) . in coastal areas, cities are pragmatically, if cynically, maximizing coastal development to reap whatever revenues and profits they can before the music stops. other urban centres are wresting resources from rural hinterlands and disposing unwanted urban poor residents to rural peripheries, long-standing practices now buoyed by the added justification of climate change. if this is an era of new climate urbanism, these examples suggest that urban responses to climate threats are not necessarily new or even urban. many of the underlying drivers-fiscalization and monetization of land value; enclosure of the commons and eradication of people from land; boundary-setting to control who can access resources; capital mobility and hyper-competition among municipalities-are depressingly familiar. this is business-as-usual capitalism with climate characteristics. how can scholars, funders, activists, and practitioners challenge these tendencies? below, i highlight three potential shifts in adaptation practice that can help redirect the growing global industry around adaptation and resilience planning. expanding the geographic and temporal scale of resilience planning. there is an urgent need to reframe global resilience discourse to encompass alternative geographic and temporal scales. for one, dominant global networks raise up exemplary cities in ways that elide the complicated territorial infrastructure, ecological, and political systems in which cities sit. from a management perspective, ecosystem scales such as watersheds offer a logical scale at which to manage the hydrological impacts of climate change. the scale of metropolitan (even subnational) regions encompassing urban areas and rural hinterlands also enables more holistic approaches to study the impacts of climate change, the politics of land and resource governance institutions, and identify collective, transformative adaptation strategies. the lack of governance institutions in most countries to manage crises at the regional scale underscores the need to start conversations on territorial governance. the covid-19 pandemic is reviving interest in relocalization to mitigate vulnerabilities associated with global integration. this potentially awakens opportunities to consider socially and ecologically restorative approaches to regional food, natural resource, and development planning. for another, the future orientation of climate projections has produced adaptation plans that often forget and erase the historic unsustainable and unjust development processes that have resulted in present-day vulnerabilities. expanding the historic perspective of resilience initiatives forces adaptation planning to grapple with drivers of urbanization, past processes of resource extraction, pollution, and depletion, and these impacts on different identity groups. these are uncomfortable issues involving conflicts and trade-offs but which are necessary to confront to advance towards transformative change beyond incremental "win-win" solutions. looking to the margins rather than the global hubs of urbanization for inspiration. the inspiration for countering dominant, regressive strains of adaptation is unlikely to come from global cities and their governing elites because of their ability to securitize existing centres of wealth and power. as this chapter demonstrates, it is the most politically, economically, and culturally powerful cities that can exclude and extract in seeking resilience. from jakarta's great garuda to lagos' eko atlantis to rotterdam's room for the river to new york city's big u, these cities have incomparable ability to raise funds, attract investment, and launch large-scale infrastructure projects. in these cities, how are sacrificed and overlooked neighbourhoods organizing their own adaptation? how are secondary, tertiary, suburban, peri-urban, or semi-rural municipalities that lack capacity to plan or invest in infrastructure-based adaption responding? how are indigenous communities whose lifeways entail living with ecological flux dealing with these changes, given their reliance on ecosystems for livelihoods? these "views from off the map" (robinson 2002 ) are likely to reveal alternative adaptation strategies requiring collective action and non-infrastructural solutions by dint of necessity or alternative values. there is an opportunity to uplift alternative perspectives of "resilience" from those who have always been outside of or excluded from the benefits of capitalist urbanization. the planning field increasingly accounts for social vulnerability, equity, and justice in adaptation and resilience. while an improvement from mainstream resilience planning, this typically entails prioritizing vulnerable communities for emergency aid and disaster risk reduction. instead, social scientists can help synthesize case studies of indigenous knowledge, community-based adaptation, and small-medium city adaptation efforts and identify clear implications for policymakers. the earth systems governance project has worked to build a global community of scholars over the last decade and advance knowledge synthesis and harvesting (biermann et al. 2019 ). this and other efforts must work to ensure this knowledge gains the equivalent salience and recognition as c40 and 100 resilient cities. connecting and empowering local and transnational social movements. globally, social movements on the left and right are intensifying, from extinction rebellion to black lives matter to the rise of populism and nationalism worldwide. these movements are deeply divided by ideology, identity, and geography, yet share undercurrents of opposition to globalization, income and spatial inequality, and environmental decline. one critical need is for movement alignment that can build towards a bigger "we" to counteract dynamics of competitive and extractive urbanism under resource scarcity. an added challenge is bridging activism with communities of practice proposing and debating specific institutional reforms. property rights and land tenure regimes, fiscal policy, risk mitigation instruments like insurance, and mortgage-lending policies structure the politics around development decisions. community activism seeks remedies to immediate threats but rarely offers specific implementable reforms to broader institutions shaping urban development. instead, highly technical professional experts debate policy changes in these domains, bypassing the altogether separate sphere of activism. there is an opportunity to train both communities of practice to speak one another's language and enable more creative and productive dialogue, learning, and transformation. depression, grief, and a sense of helplessness are occupational hazards for natural and social scientists researching climate change. but i reject the notion that critical scholars exist to document the demise of society in an age of climate change. what is the value academia to broader society if not to give hope of better paths forward (see also chap. 2)? scholars play a key role in the above proposals. they can support alternative urbanisms by synthesizing knowledge, such as the innumerable case studies we conduct, to show clear alternative pathways. researchers can become, train, or work with boundary actors to bridge the worlds of activism and institutional governance. as keepers of disciplinary knowledge, we can inform and transform pedagogy and academic or professional institutions that define meaning and norms. scholars are excellent 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strategies but limited implementation guidance in us local adaptation plans urban diversity and the production of public space in budapest 209boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224.doi: 10.15201/hungeobull.65.3.1 hungarian geographical bulletin 65 2016 (3) 209–224. introduction due to the eff ects of globalisation and intensifying migration contemporary cities tend to become increasingly diverse in terms of ethnicity, culture, lifestyles, identities, values, ideologies and att itudes. the diff erent dimensions of diversity intersect in multiple ways within and between groups (tasan-kok, t. et al. 2014). these processes create complex and dynamic urban societies with changing dividing lines and interactions. because of their complexity the everyday realities of these diverse societies is diffi cult to analyse. neighbourhoods are often perceived and analysed as residential places with special att ention to segregation, social bonds and life chances. however, a growing body of literature suggests that neighbourhoods and place of residence should not be the only analytical units when researching social relations (van kempen, r. and wissink, b. 2014). there is strong empirical evidence that diverse neighbourhoods do not mean necessarily that there are diverse social networks among residents (atkinson, r. and kintrea, k. 2000; van beckhoven, e. and van kempen, r. 2003; lees, l. 2008; blokland, t. and van eijk, g. 2010; wissink, b. and hazelzet, a. 2012). other places, such as workplace, sites of consumption, schools, public spaces can be urban diversity and the production of public space in budapest lajos boros1, szabolcs fabula1, dániel horváth1 and zoltán kovács2 abstract public spaces are spaces for representation of individuals, social groups, ideologies, values, cultures. at the same time, public spaces are commodifi ed and “disneyfi ed” in capitalism, thus, the creation of a homogeneous, “desirable” spatial form and use of public space is often intended. therefore, their production is characterised by constant rivalries and struggles and causes social confl icts. in addition, the production of public spaces in post-socialism has distinct development paths which is often characterised by contradicting traditions and objectives regarding the spatial form and the everyday practices taking place there. these contradictions create confl icts between various individuals, social groups, actors of urban policies etc. the aim of the paper is to investigate how urban social diversity is (re)presented in the public spaces of the 8th district of budapest, józsefváros. which groups and values are more visible than others? how do local people use public spaces? the research is based on the content analysis of policy documents and interviews conducted with local residents of józsefváros – one of the most diverse districts of budapest. according to our results, the fragmented nature of the local society is refl ected in the use of public space: diversity is present between the public spaces and not within them. furthermore, some of the recent developments support the homogenisation of values and behaviours in public spaces. keywords: public space, social diversity, hyper-diversity, social cohesion, post-socialism, budapest, józsefváros 1 department of economic and social geography, faculty of science and informatics, university of szeged. h-6701 szeged, po. box 650. e-mail: borosl@geo.u-szeged.hu 2 geographical institute, research centre for astronomy and earth sciences, hungary academy of sciences, h-1112 budapest, budaörsi út 45; department of economic and social geography, faculty of science and informatics, university of szeged. h-6701 szeged, po. box 650. e-mail: zkovacs@iif.hu boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224.210 equally important for establishing contacts, because of proximity, similarity of interests, frequency of encounters etc. (peters, k and de haan, h. 2011; van kempen, r. and wissink, b. 2014). these places can be both located in and outside of the neighbourhood, shaping the spatial activities of local residents. therefore, social interactions, relations, bonds are signifi cantly infl uenced by the places (and the fl ows between them) where residents spend their time: spaces of work, family life and free time. these activities are not fi xed in space, instead they are characterised by mobility within uneven networks (sheller, m. and urry, j. 2006; urry, j. 2007). thus, to understand the relations in a diverse society we have to analyse the action spaces of people: where they work, live, spend their free time etc. public spaces are among the most important elements of activity spaces where multiple activities and encounters take place. the aim of this paper is to analyse the use of public spaces in a highly diverse neighbourhood of budapest, called józsefváros. our primary research questions are as follows: how diversity is (re)presented in those spaces? who use the public spaces in józsefváros and for what purposes? what kinds of confl icts emerge regarding the use of public space? research methodology this research was carried out in józsefváros which is one of the 23 independent district municipalities of budapest (figure 1). the district can be further subdivided into 11 quarters based on their history, built environment or social milieu (figure 2). among them the magdolna and orczy quarters are the most deprived areas. despite its relatively small territory (6.85 km2), the district is socially and culturally one of the most diverse areas of the city. the population of józsefváros is 76,250 (2011) among them the proportion of non-hungarian ethnic groups is 11.9 per cent – which is relatively high by hungarian comparison. the gypsy/roma is the largest ethnic minority group and in some parts of the district they comprise around 50 per cent of the local inhabitants. there are signifi cant south eastern asian and african communities in józsefváros as this is a popular destination for international migrants [1]. furthermore, józsefváros has a ‘springboard’ function within budapest: it off ers aff ordable housing for those who move to the city. thus, the local population is ever-changing due to the infl ux of new residents from both hungary and abroad. there is also a large number of homeless people and poor households in the fig. 1. location of the case study area within budapest. source: edited by the authors fig. 2. the quarters within józsefváros. source: edited by the authors 211boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224. area. the negative image of józsefváros is slowly changing as a result of ongoing urban regeneration programmes, gentrifi cation and ‘studentifi cation’. therefore, the area is very diverse with regards social status, ethnic and cultural identity, strength and forms of place att achment, lifestyles etc. the various aspects (social, architectural, cultural etc.) of diversity of the district is considered as an asset in the local development documents. this paper is mainly based on in-depth interviews conducted with residents of the district. altogether 50 interviews were held between september 2014 and march 2015 as the part of the divercities project, fi nanced by the 7th framework programme of the eu. the questions focused on the life of the respondents; their career, experiences, their social relations, everyday activities and their relation to józsefváros. the interview partners were chosen with a snowballing method with the help of key informants (e.g. locals living in the district for decades, representatives of homeowners’ associations or civil organisations) from the area. the participation in the research was voluntary. we intended to refl ect the diverse nature of the local society in the sample, and to include interviewees with diff erent age, residential, ethnic, cultural, occupational background. data on ethnic background are based on the selfidentifi cation of the respondents. according to these figures the sample is comprised predominantly by ethnic hungarians; approximately one-fourth of the interviewees (13) reported on at least one ethnicity other than hungarian. regarding their country of origin, 8 were foreign born; they are mainly from the neighbouring countries, namely slovakia and romania. in addition to the interviews, local and national policy documents were also analysed to identify the most important aims related to the development of public spaces. these documents were collected from the publicly available sources, mainly from the homepages of related institutions. no sampling was applied in this case – all available documents were analysed. diversity and public space several concepts have been used so far to grasp the complexity of urban societies: multiculturalism, inter-culturalism, diversity, super-diversity etc. one of the key concepts of this study is hyper-diversity (tasan-kok, t. et al. 2014) which refers to the increasing diversifi cation of population in various terms: ethnicity, socio-economic status, lifestyles, opportunities and activities. with this broad conceptualisation, hyper-diversity aims to move beyond the previous approaches which often tend to focus on ethnicity or nationality. traditional approaches assumed that a person’s position within the society is directly infl uenced by his/her ethnic or cultural background, and other socio-economic aspects att ached to it. but nowadays there is a growing status discrepancy, and diff erent members of the same family can have very diff erent status within the society. people belonging to the same social or ethnic group may have quite diff erent att itudes with respect to school, work, parents and towards other groups. they may have also very different daily and life routines, activity spaces. there are no clear and simple dividing lines: various interactions can emerge between the dimensions of diversity hyper-diversity is a result of the intensifying international migration, the diversifi cation of countries of origin (vertovec, s. 2007), increasing population mobility within countries and cities (syrett, s. and sepulveda, l. 2011), new political processes and structures, changing identities (castells, m. 2009; cantle, t. 2012), the neoliberal deregulation processes, the increased connectivity of global cities (dudás, g. and pernyész, p. 2011), the intensifying information fl ows between various groups and places and several other factors. the concept of hyper-diversity also emphasises the possibilities related to the diverse nature of society: it can contribute to social cohesion and social mobility through the acceptance of otherness and diff erent forms of mutual help and support. in addition, diversity can also enhance economic performance boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224.212 according to the concept because of the available social capital, the increased chances of networking, increased productivity and competitive advantages (nathan, m. 2006; eraydin, a. et al. 2010; syrett, s. and sepulveda, l. 2011; tasan-kok, t. et al. 2014). as it was mentioned above, activity spaces have a special signifi cance in the integration of hyper-diverse societies, thus, public spaces are essential to realise the potentials related to diverse urban societies. the defi nitions of public space often focus on ownership and accessibility, claiming that public spaces are commonly owned, accessible spaces (vedrédi, k. 2014). but due to the recent privatisation of public spaces there is no clear divide between publicly and privately owned spaces anymore. furthermore, probably no public space was accessible equally to everyone in the history – there were always formal and informal restrictions, rules regarding the use of streets, squares, parks etc. therefore, public space is an ideal type of space which has never been fully achieved (mitchell, d. 1995; harvey, d. 2005). other approaches focus on the functions and ownership of public spaces instead. however, focusing on ownership can also be misleading, since privately owned places can also function as public spaces – see the examples of malls, stadiums, beaches etc. therefore, the defi nition of public spaces should focus rather on their role in the society; hence they are places of social interaction, and spaces of and for representations. public spaces are ‘where the social and cultural rules governing public behaviour predominate’ (mitchell, d. and stahli, a. 2009, 511). these spaces include streets, squares, malls, parks, sidewalks, cafes, playgrounds etc. several studies (e.g. mitchell, d. 1995, 2003; sennett, r. 2002) connect public space with the idea of public sphere, developed by habermas, j. (1989). according to these approaches, public space is the place of free communication, gathering or interaction, therefore, it is a necessary prerequisite of democracy (calhoun, c. 1992; mitchell, d. 1995, 2003; nielsen, s. 2013). but according to sennett, r. (2002) public space is constantly eroded by private interests, thus, the democratic character of society is jeopardised. in addition to their political signifi cance, public spaces or places of consumption create the sense of belonging and comfort – even without direct social contact, through the casual encounters with familiar faces and environments (goffman, e. 1959; curley, a.m. 2010; blokland, t. and nast, j. 2014). encountering with foreigners can contribute to the growth of tolerance and acceptance in society. participation in these so called ‘third places’ (places outside home and work) provide vital elements of social existence through enabling and liberating experiences (oldenburg, r. and brissett, d. 1982, hickman, p. 2010). public spaces are the ones, where the diverse character of neighbourhoods becomes visible: people experience it and have to deal with it. the contacts in public spaces between people with diff erent backgrounds can range from the visual interaction to friendly conversation and communal activities. with these experiences, the social production of public spaces in diverse urban societies is an important element of social cohesion – they can generate awareness and acceptance of otherness and multiculturalism (forrest, r. and kearns, a. 2001; peters, k. and de haan, h. 2011; boschman, s. 2012; wiesemann, l. 2012). in this regard, the quality of public spaces is crucial: safe, comfortable, welcoming places with many facilities are more att ractive for diff erent groups of the residents (myerson, d.l. 2001; putnam, r. 2007; peters, k. and de haan, h. 2011). at the same time, encountering with diversity in public spaces can also have negative consequences on social cohesion. the diff erent kinds of activities in public spaces can be confl icting with each other, thus, creating divisive forms of identities and lead to intolerance, alienation and isolation (delanty, g. 2012; schmid, k. et al. 2014). public spaces are socially produced spaces and confl icted spaces where various values, ideologies and interests are constantly 213boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224. (re)negotiated according to the changing power relations in society. their functions, physical forms, shared meanings and uses can be very diferent (lefebvre, h. 1991; zukin, s. 1995; mitchell, d. 2003; erőss, á. et al. 2009; erőss, á. 2011; bodnár, j. 2015). furthermore, public spaces are increasingly commodifi ed and homogenised in modern capitalist societies (zukin, s. 1991, 1995, 1998). deviant behaviour and marginal groups (e.g. drug addicts, homeless people etc.) are often excluded through formal and informal restrictions (belina, b. 2007; udvarhelyi, é.t. 2014). these actions perceived as a threat to the public and democratic nature of public space (mitchell, d. and staehli, a. 2009). the recognition of hyper-diversity forces us to look diff erently at the possibilities of living together in a city or a neighbourhood. mixing groups within a neighbourhood – for example, in terms of income or ethnic descent – may lead to physical proximity of these groups, but because they have diff erent lifestyles, att itudes and activities, these people may actually never meet or never do anything together. therefore, to gain deeper knowledge on the extent and strength of social networks of the residents of józsefváros, it is important to analyse the types of activities and interactions of local people and the places where they are performed. public spaces in józsefváros józsefváros has a great variety of public spaces. green areas are located mainly in the outer parts of the area, while the inner part has a relatively dense street network with smaller squares and parks. the skeleton of the road system was laid down in the second half of the 19th century. markets have always been important for the local social and economic life and they were often associated with minorities: jews, roma people or more recently the chinese. the traditional market at teleki square was established at the end of 19th century and recently went through an extensive redevelopment to maintain and even expand its social and economic functions (focusing on middle-class consumption) (photo 1, 2). the four tigers market, functioning between 1993 and 2014 was the most important hub of chinese traders in budapest, and it had also a social function providing aff ordable goods for the less affl uent people. the market was recently closed because of the illegal trade and the tax evasion of the traders. józsefváros – as well as the whole innercity of budapest – suff ered from disinvestment in the decades of communism (kovács, z. 1998). this had an eff ect on public spaces as well: the conditions of local squares, parks and markets deteriorated. in the new millennium several urban regeneration programmes were initiated in central budapest by the local government and investors (szemző, h. and tosics, i. 2005; tosics, i. 2005, 2006; kovács, z. 2006, 2009; ladányi, j. 2014). these programmes aimed at improving the quality of life of the locals and to attract young professionals, tourists, students and also foreigners (czirfusz, m. et al. 2015). the transformation of old and creation of new public spaces played an important role in these programmes. in the case-study area the most important project was the so-called corvin promenade, a market-led largescale urban rehabilitation project with new apartment buildings, a shopping mall and new public spaces. this project was the latest modifi cation to the historically evolved street patt ern. social rehabilitation also took place in the district with the renewal of several parks and squares – the most prominent among them was the magdolna quarter, which is one of the most deprived parts of józsefváros. at the same time, the so-called downtown of europe programme aimed at upgrading the inner parts of the district in the palota quarter, in order to reposition the area in tourism [1, 2]. with the physical upgrading of public spaces new practices of spatial regulations were also introduced on national, city and district level. the aim was to keep public spaces secure and to protect the spaces of consumption. the consecutive versions of boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224.214 photo 1. the teleki square before renewal (photo by nyári, gy.) photo 2. the renewed market at teleki square (photo by nyári, gy.) 215boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224. the integrated urban development strategies (2008, 2012, 2015) of józsefváros all targeted to create safe and clean public spaces, to handle the problems related to begging and homelessness, to create quality places for leisure and to expand green areas [2, 3, 4]. but there were several anti-homeless and anti-beggar elements of the measurements taken as well – especially in the local legislation (udvarhelyi, é.t. 2014). in 2010 with the amendments of the act on built environment [5] and the act on spatial development and planning [6] it became a misdemeanour to use the streets and squares ‘improperly’ – i.e. begging or sleeping there. the amendment of the act on misdemeanours [7] in 2012 provided possibility for municipalities to introduce statutory provisions against homeless people and beggars. in 2012 the hungarian government made possible for local governments in the fourth amendment of fundamental law (the hungarian constitution) to forbid living in the streets, underpasses and other public spaces [8]. the aim of these regulations was to create safe, aesthetic urban spaces with the removal of disturbing behaviour. on the district level, new rules were also introduced to protect the renovated playgrounds and parks; these defi ned the time periods of use as well as the appropriate behaviour (e.g. no eating in playgrounds, no sleeping or alcohol consumption in parks etc.) in these places (photo 3). the renewed parks and playgrounds are often fenced to keep away the unwanted users. in some cases, security guards were also hired to enforce the regulations. the local government of józsefváros also banned eating the food waste from the trash cans in 2010 because ‘it is unhealthy and dangerous’ [9]. the local government also initiated a referendum in 2011 on begging and homelessness, trying to enforce the previously accepted anti-poor regulations. however, the referendum became unsuccessful, since the voter turnout did not reach the necessary threshold. photo 3. park regulations at the renewed teleki square (photo by boros, l.) boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224.216 as a bott om-up initiative, community gardening also appeared in the district, using the vacant plots in józsefváros – the most prominent example being the leonardo community garden. the general objective of leonardo is to establish and stimulate bott om-up initiatives through community building and to enhance social cohesion. the social background of tenants is very diverse; people with diff erent occupational backgrounds, age, educational level work in the garden. the diversity of participants can be noticed not only in socio-economic, cultural and ethnic terms but also regarding their lifestyle (e.g. residency, gardening experiences and civil leadership). however, the limited availability of plots, the bureaucratic decision-making system and inadequate regulation pose serious challenges to community gardens (bende, cs. and nagy, gy. 2015). due to the ongoing gentrifi cation processes, several quasi-public spaces (bars, restaurants etc.) also appeared in the area as the spaces of consumption, especially in palota quarter and corvin quarter (photo 4). to sum up, the social production of public spaces has changed signifi cantly in our casestudy area. both the market and the political forces fostered these changes in order to create more liveable and consumable public spaces. on the one hand, it resulted in the creation of aesthetic public spaces, while on the other, the struggle over the production of public space became also intensifi ed after 2000. the use of public spaces in józsefváros: empirical fi ndings in this section we present the results of the interviews. what kinds of activities are characteristic for local people, and what kinds of public spaces they use? what kinds of confl icts emerge regarding the use of public spaces and how they perceive the new dephoto 4. cafes in the palota quarter (photo by boros, l.) 217boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224. velopments and regulations? we also investigate the free time activities of the residents; what do they do, and with whom do they spend their free time? according to the respondents’ stage in the family life-cycle and their socio-cultural background, four major groups of residents could be identifi ed with distinct variations in daily routine and free-time activities: (1) young singles (below 35); (2) families with children; (3) middle-aged and older people (over 50); (4) migrants and minorities. within this latt er group, three subgroups could be defi ned: (a) ethnic hungarians born in the neighbouring states (i.e. slovakia, romania) who moved to hungary after 1990; (b) roma people being either residents of budapest already before 1990, or moving to the city after the political changes, (c) international migrants who moved to hungary/budapest after 1990 (e.g. arabs and chinese). among young singles new, fl exible forms of work are typical: they are often freelancers or employed in fl exible working hours, or telework. hence the actual place of work is either at home or at shifting locations in budapest or even beyond (businessmen, agents etc.). their daily routine is closely linked with other parts of the city, however, their local activity space within józsefváros is very narrow and it concentrates only to the house, and the surrounding blocks or streets. as the following quote shows, they mix with local people very rarely: “public spaces are occupied by drug addicts and homeless people, which do not make the neighbourhood att ractive for a stroll” (r30, male, 25 years, private entrepreneur: agent of fi nancial products, hungarian). the daily activity space of people living in families with children is determined by the triangle of home, workplace and institutions of children (kindergarten, school, sport-fi elds, music school etc.). their daily activity space is more related to józsefváros or even to the neighbourhood than in the previous case. families living in palotanegyed often take their children to kindergartens or schools in the neighbouring 5th district, where the number of children is much less, and roma residents are completely missing. the daily routine is most attached to józsefváros and the neighbourhood among older people. they use services (health, retail etc.) nearly exclusively in józsefváros, and typically in the close surroundings. they have also more church related activities, they spend more time with friends and visit cultural events also more regularly. the daily routine of people who belong to the group of migrants and minorities is also more strongly linked to certain parts of józsefváros, most typically the area near the place of residence. they are less skilled, more often unemployed (especially the roma) or employed by the district for temporary public works. their daily routine or free time activity is also diff erent from the other three groups because of cultural factors and traditions. for example, in the roma society women traditionally do not look for permanent job, they are expected to look after the children and the husband, therefore, they often stay at home. „how should i say? this is diff erent in each roma family. there are traditions and habits. some husbands let the wife going out with girl-friend to shop or have a chat. others say no, you must stay at home, you don’t meet others in the town. there are jealous husbands, unfortunately, you know what i mean?” (r44, female, 40 years, public worker, hungarian-roma). the daily routine of individuals is determined most signifi cantly by age, household structure and other socio-economic characteristics (e.g. education, occupation, income). the neighbourhood, its functional (e.g. location of shops, schools) and physical patt erns (e.g. green areas), or ethnic characteristics also play a role, though subordinated to the fi rst group of factors. the four major groups described above have substantial diff erences regarding their free time activities, too. older people living in józsefváros for a long time tend to spend their free time in a narrow geographical area, close to their home (e.g. senior club, market, church). they built up also the widest netboros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224.218 work of friends in the neighbourhood, and most of them maintain strong relations with their neighbours at the house/block level. the majority of young singles are newcomers in the district. they use public spaces, cultural or leisure institutions of józsefváros for free time activities relatively rarely. the reasons behind are basically twofold. firstly, this group has generally a lack of free time. secondly, as they arrived to józsefváros more recently, their family, friendly as well as working relations link them to neighbourhoods outside the district. their typical free time and leisure activity is visiting cafes and ‘ruin bars’ in the inner-city and most notable in neighbouring erzsébetváros (7th district). regarding leisure opportunities several respondents mentioned that józsefváros has changed a lot for the last decade, partly due to the ongoing regeneration activities. there are a lot more att ractive places (cafes, bars, clubs etc.) in the district that provide alternatives for young people than before. the growing diversity of free time opportunities was perceived positively by respondents. they also noted that tourists and foreigners living in budapest permanently are overrepresented in these fashionable places. the free time activities of people living in families with children are very much determined by the need of their children. parents adjust their free time schedule to the activities of their children let it be sport, entertainment or hobby. for free time activities, in addition to local parks and squares residents often use public spaces outside the district e.g. in neighbouring ferencváros (danube bank), in the 5th district or on the other side of the danube, gellért hill in 11th district. “we often go to károlyi garden, partly because everybody from the kindergarten of my kids go there. they live nearby, so for them it is easy. we go there because we always fi nd a mate from the kindergarten, or a couple of acquaintances whom we know, and it is easy to play together... we go to other playgrounds in the surrounding as well, and even to the 9th district, like… markusovszky square what we call ‘cat square’” (r18, female, 36 years, real estate agent, hungarian). on the basis of the interviews we can conclude that most of the residents seek free time opportunities also outside the district. the reasons are manifold, e.g. local public spaces often att ract people with antisocial behaviour (drug addicts, homeless etc.). the available public spaces and parks often lack conveniences and they are not very much attractive for families with children, or elderly. segregation plays also a role here, as public spaces in the centre of the district are used mostly by young roma people, who are noisy and gather in bigger groups, therefore, nonroma people living in the neighbourhood tend to go to other public spaces, sometimes outside the district limits. public spaces were often mentioned in the interviews because of recent local policies aimed at improving security and quality of public spaces. public spaces were also often mentioned among the positive (e.g. new developments, improving security) or negative (e.g. homeless people, drug users) aspects of the neighbourhood as well. one of the interviewees also highlighted the possible positive eff ects of renewals on social cohesion: “… the renovation of square has important role in the cohesion of community. it gives a good feeling to people, because it is important that our children can grow up in a nicer environment.” (r21, female, 63 years, old-age pensioner, hungarian) according to the interviews there is no particular focal point (i.e. a particularly important) of public spaces in the district, every neighbourhood has its most important place where people gather and interact. at the same time, some of the main roads were mentioned as borders of certain neighbourhoods or the district itself – for example the grand boulevard, which is one of the main traffi c lines in budapest. public spaces that were most often mentioned by respondents can be grouped into the following types: playgrounds, streets, squares, parks, and markets. shopping malls were mentioned actually fewer than expected – although one of the latest extensive shopping mall developments in budapest, the so-called corvin 219boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224. plaza (photo 5) is located in the central part of józsefváros. according to the interviews it is considered more of a place of consumption than a place of gathering, recreation and free time. on the other hand, the traditional market on teleki square was more often mentioned as a place with not just shopping opportunities but signifi cant social life as well. “the market on teleki square was renovated nicely very recently. before that i did not go there at all. instead i went to other markets further from my home because teleki square was a complete mess. now it is really a good place with a fantastic atmosphere. there are shops, coff ee houses and sometimes complete bands playing music while people are eating, chatt ing, shopping” (r48, female, 28 years, student/trainee lawyer, hungarian). based on the interviews playgrounds and parks (orczy garden being the most often cited example for the latt er) seem to be the most often used and most preferred public spaces in józsefváros. in many cases public space is used only for access to work from home. in these cases, they are sites of fl ows, and not intense interactions. if there are interactions in public spaces it is more probable that they develop between people at similar stages of life cycle (e.g. parents with children, pensioners) or with similar lifestyle (e.g. joggers, skaters, dog owners). “i would not say that i use them regularly. of course there were cases when i sat on one of the banks on rákóczi square, but i do not have a pet or something. but there are public spaces which are nice and it is a good feeling to go through them” (r3, female, 23 years, student, hungarian). the stage in life-cycle or the lifestyle of interviewees have direct infl uence on the use of public space, activities taking place there, and the level of satisfaction with available public spaces. for example, younger interviewees with children tend to be less satisfi ed with the quality and quantity of public spaces. “the most common problem is the lack of clean places and green areas. (…) there are not enough playgrounds: in palota quarter there is only one, in gutenberg square” photo 5. the corvin plaza, one of the largest shopping malls in józsefváros (photo by boros, l.) boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224.220 (r15, male, 37 years, joint representative of condominiums, hungarian). there are three types of confl icts related to public spaces: (1) the issue of who are entitled (or expected) to use them (exclusionary behaviours and policies); (2) confl icts between diff erent users and their activities; and (3) a gap between the needs and the quality and/ or ‘quantity’ of available public spaces. confl icts regarding the use of public spaces were most often mentioned in the case of renewed playgrounds, parks and squares and they were related to homeless people, or – rarely – people from other neighbourhoods. recently renewed playgrounds are often fenced and guarded to control access and in particular to keep homeless people away: “there are guards at the renewed playground at mátyás square and kálvária square as well. i think the reason for this is to keep away drug addicts, homeless people and to prevent vandalism over night” (r28, female, 37 years, community organiser at an ngo, hungarian-jewish-polish). the situation of public safety, especially drug abuse and the interventions against homeless people, were the most relevant topics for our interviewees. regardless political orientation respondents seemed to support unequivocally the eff orts of the district municipality to create ‘order’ in the district applying policy measures (e.g. cctv system controlling public areas, strict local regulation about anti-social behaviour in public spaces). at the same time, judgements on the recently installed cctv systems were rather contradictory. on the one hand, some people liked it, because they felt it strengthens security in the district: “well, the cameras are good things, since we all know that the population of the sistrict is mainly roma people and we all know the situation in józsefváros” (r33, male, 37 years, musician, hungarian-roma). on the other hand, some of the interviewees felt that the use of public space became too controlled, thus, they avoid certain places despite the renewal: “…there are these guarded super parks where i do not like to sit because it is not possible to have a beer or to do other kinds of stuff ” (r32, male, 34 years, museologist/ webpage designer, hungarian). the second type of confl icts often evolves related to dog walking and other uses of public spaces. diff erent lifestyle groups (e.g. joggers, dog owners, families with children etc.) would like to use the same space for diff erent – and often confl icting – activities. regulations are set where and when it is possible to walk dogs, but as some of the dog owners neglect the rules they disturb other users and cause problems: “… this köztársaság square, and when i moved here i tried to jogging around the square. i was able to do so about three times then i gave up when a pet dog att acked me and grabbed my pants. and its owner did not react at all” (r50, female, 35 years, researcher, hungarian). the gap between the needs of users and the quality of services manifested mostly in the lack of green spaces in the inner, very densely built part of józsefváros. “now, that köztársaság square is renewed we often sit there in the summer (…) a lot of youngsters visit this square and there is no public toilet. they renewed it spending more than a billion huf and there is no toilet” (r3, male, 23 years, student, hungarian). the cleanliness and safe use of public spaces seems to be particularly important for the interviewees and it was mentioned in almost every interview, regardless of the age, gender or social status of interviewees. it highlights the importance of clean and att ractive public spaces in creation of appropriate spaces for leisure and social interaction. it is important to highlight that the above mentioned confl icts usually do not result in a political action, the individuals concerned just expressed their dissatisfaction in the interviews. discussion and conclusions the hyper-diversity of józsefváros is manifested in the everyday activities of local residents since a lot of factors have an infl uence 221boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224. on what and where people do – however, ethnicity still has the most signifi cant role. prejudice towards roma infl uences the activities and the use of public space greatly since several interviewees indicated that they tried to avoid those places where roma people go. at the same time age, family status, lifestyle and place of residence are also important factors. for example, having children, owning dog or jogging increase the use of public space and the chance of interaction with other residents. as the interviews refl ected the most important and most frequently used public spaces in józsefváros are squares, markets, parks and playgrounds. although diversity of the district is manifested in the spatial form and use of public spaces, this diversity can be seen among diff erent places rather than within them. the manifestation of diversity can be limited within the public spaces due to local and national regulations which control the time of use and the acceptable behaviour. however, the interviewed residents usually do not oppose these measurements – in some cases they even support them. these measures often have homogenising eff ect on the public spaces and they exclude or discriminate certain social groups. security issues were mentioned in several interviews as motivations for using or not using certain public spaces. vicinity also has a key role in the use of public spaces: people usually use places which are close to their homes. this works against the mixing of different groups in public spaces. thus, public spaces of józsefváros do not function as ‘third places’ (oldenburg, r. and brissett, d. 1982) for some groups (especially for elderly people); they do not participate in activities outside their home or work. according to the interview partners, public spaces are the spaces for movement and places for leisure, recreation – these were the most emphasised functions. the democratic role of public space was not mentioned by our respondents, probably because the traditional spaces of political protests are located near to the national political institutions and national monuments which are situated outside of the district. no interview partner mentioned directly the renaming of some public spaces which has happened after the 2010 elections, but both the old and new names were used by the respondents. for example, the pope john paul ii square was sometimes mentioned with its previous name: republic (köztársaság) square. some interviewees used a shorter form of the name, calling it pope square (pápa tér) – but only for practical reasons, without any political connotation. a division between local users and tourists, visitors from other parts of budapest was clearly visible in the most fashionable spaces and also in shopping malls. local residents barely mentioned shopping malls when they described their daily activities and the use of public space. as our interviews showed, the fragmented nature of local society is refl ected in the use of public spaces as well. related to public space, diversity and multiculturalism have been mentioned mainly in relation to unusual (comparing to the norms of the ethnic hungarian majority), ‘strange’ behaviour of people from various social groups (e.g. the roma, immigrants). in order to exploit the possibilities of hyper-diversity, the chances of interaction within public spaces should be increased in the future. acknowledgements: this project has received funding from the european union’s seventh framework programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 319970 – divercities. the views expressed in this publication are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily refl ect the views of the european commission. the work of lajos boros was supported by the jános bolyai research scholarship of the hungarian academy of sciences. boros l. et al. hungarian geographical bulletin 65 (2016) (3) 209–224.222 r e f e r e n c e s atkinson, r. and kintrea, k. 2000. owner-occupation, social mix and neighbourhood impacts. policy and politics 28. 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice transmotion vol 5, no 2 (2019) 141 gerald horne. the apocalypse of settler colonialism: the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism in seventeenth-century north america and the caribbean. monthly review press, 2018. 256 pp. isbn: 9781583676639. https://monthlyreview.org/product/apocalypse_of_settler_colonialism/ in the apocalypse of settler colonialism, gerald horne once again earns his reputation as a nuanced transnational historian of race and class. in this, his thirtieth book, horne demonstrates that modernity arrived in the seventeenth century on the three horsemen of the apocalypse: slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism. through a focus on english colonial projects, horne proves these phenomena to be inseparable and interlocking, rather than, for instance, separate pillars of a single structure. horne’s deft archival work reveals rebellion to be a powerful and primary historical force, and clarifies whiteness as a category of convenience used to quell the vibrant cross-class and cross-racial revolutions which erupted throughout the seventeenth century—from england to jamaica, barbados to boston—rebellions that reverberated through the formation of the united states forward to this day. in horne’s adroit analysis, seventeenthcentury merchant class revolts against the monarchy, long thought to be paeans to democracy and liberalism, are shown to be inextricable from the violent enslavement of africans and native americans. for example, horne shows how the american revolution of 1776, often understood as a liberal democratic rebellion, was less laudable: a merchant class of capitalists used the “democratic” spread of white supremacy to wrest wealth from a divinely ordained monarchy’s monopoly on slavery. white supremacy, as horne’s historical research shows, is a tool of capital accumulation. whiteness was used to justify the opening up of slave markets, the accelerated brutality of colonial and settler colonial genocide and extraction economies, and the solidification of a categorical other underwriting the war logic that continues to define modernity. the apocalypse of settler colonialism makes essential interventions into existing scholarship on the history of racial formation, the emergence of liberal democracy, and the transnational dynamics of settler capitalism. in its attention to the conditions of crisis within seventeenth-century colonial projects, this book importantly backdates scholarship documenting the relationships between capital, class, and racial categories. horne’s text traces a transnational and early history that nell irvin painter takes up in the centuries that follow in her predominately american-focused the history of white people. horne reveals the seventeenth century as an era where the preconditions for what painter details are transnational. he establishes white supremacy (“often disguised in deceptive ‘nonracial’ words”) as an essential handmaiden to mercantile capitalism that crossed oceans, national boundaries, and political commitments (horne 135). merchants invoked white superiority to argue for their share of slave markets, making leaps from anti-monarchism to collaboration with royals with a flexibility that allowed an emergent capitalism to combine with elements of feudalism and slavery, a “blatant power and money grab by merchants [that] was then dressed in the finery of liberty and freedom” (horne 172). here, horne joins the likes of cedric robinson, whose “racial capitalism” challenges the marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. instead, horne and robinson agree that a historical continuum of exploitation dominated by the merchant class who allied with republicanism or monarchism as it suited their financial and social gains. in some cases, too, this continuum was embodied in a single figure, as “some aristocrats by lineage became merchants by currency” (horne 37). tracing these continuities, horne pays special attention to advancements in military https://monthlyreview.org/product/apocalypse_of_settler_colonialism/ april anson review of the apocalypse of settler colonialism 142 technologies, national and imperial political dynamics, and the force of venture capital as the material conditions which allow for this “new kind of aristocracy that is whiteness” (13). horne’s book offers an early transnational history for work on the paradoxes of liberal democracy. horne hones in on the glorious revolution of 1688––“not so glorious for africans and the indigenous”––as emblematic of the convenient use of liberal democracy to cover merchant capitalists in the dawning of the africa and native north america’s apocalypse (horne 164). horne catalogues the historical beginnings of what chandan reddy calls freedom with violence but argues “it would be an error to ascribe fiendish barbarity to western europeans alone, even settlers” (horne 59). he instead attributes the apocalypse to the systems of settler capitalism that recruited from across europe and britain and had impacts across the globe (horne 59). indeed, “the bloody process of human bondage” which included nearly 13 million africans and possibly as many as 5 million native americans, was “the driving and animating force” of the apocalypse that made both democracy possible and the executors of this apocalypse unbelievably wealthy (horne 9). horne’s text complements studies taking up more recent paradoxes of liberalism, adding transnational historical depth to studies of our contemporary moment. horne’s research fills out the colonial history informing work such as the economies of dispossession explored in a 2018 issue of social text, lisa lowe’s intimacies of four continents, wendy brown’s walled states, waning sovereignty, david theo goldberg’s sites of race, and grace kyungwon hong’s the ruptures of american capital. horne’s book also provides an essential antecedent to texts that take up these paradoxes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as timothy powell’s ruthless democracy, brenda bhandar’s the colonial lives of property, laura stohler’s race and the education of desire, and patrick wolfe’s traces of history. the apocalypse of settler colonialism is an essential colonial pre-history for aileen moreton-robinson’s the white possessive, roxanne dunbar ortiz’s an indigenous people’s history of the united states, and david stannard’s the american holocaust. moreover, horne documents the seventeenth century’s “racializing rationalization of inhumanity” in complement to jamaican social theorist sylvia wynter’s essential insights that categories of the “human” were crucial to the creation of racial others that accompanied conquest even before columbus with the landing of the portuguese on the shores of western africa (horne 8). horne’s focus on rebellions like king phillip’s war, which was enflamed by colonists selling indigenous peoples into slavery, connects indigenous and african political movements and details their power in the face of right-wing populist demagogues like francis bacon (horne 145). crucially, just as nick estes’ our history is the future reveals indigenous struggles to be a powerful historical agent, horne’s attention to the power of seventeenth-century political movements, especially african and native rebellions, makes clear that transnational solidarity is as old as colonialism and remains the greatest opponent of transnational settler colonialism and imperialism. horne’s text enhances recent work in indigenous, black, and ethnic studies that explores the “apocalypse,” rebellion, and settler colonialism as a set of apocalypse-inducing technologies aimed at dispossession that communities of color have been outlasting for centuries (la paperson 10). potawatomi environmental philosopher kyle whyte has shown the ways native transmotion vol 5, no 2 (2019) 143 communities in the united states and canada already live “what our ancestors would have likely characterized as a dystopian future” (horne 207). whyte’s words resonate with scholars across disciplines such as grace dillon (english), cutcha risling baldy (native american studies), zoe todd (anthropology), lawrence gross (race and ethnic studies), sidner larson (american indian studies), and other indigenous writers who emphasize that indigenous peoples are experienced survivors of the past and ongoing apocalypse of settler colonial capitalism. indigenous futurisms, a term coined by grace dillon, was inspired by afrofuturism which builds on mark sinker’s claim that the “apocalypse already happened: that (in public enemy’s phrase) armageddon been in effect” (sinker). horne’s study offers a vital historical archive for these recent anti-colonial futurisms. horne’s vibrant language and anticolonial methodology tracing seventeenth-century apocalypse adds urgency to his argument that revolution today is not just possible, but long overdue. for instance, his historical narrative relates the rebellions in 1640s barbados, antigua, virginia, maryland, and bermuda to our own delayed revolutionary moment, making clear that the apocalypse was not merely a game of the elites, but, rather, perpetrated by those who could rapidly class-climb by consenting to a solidarity based on racial capitalism that has yet to disappear. to make these connections across decades, centuries, and geographies, horne moves forward and backward in time in ways that can be dizzying for those more comfortable with linear chronology. however, horne’s deliberate interruption of progressive time may be a methodological aspect of his argument. the apocalypse of settler colonialism disrupts the forward movement of what mark rifkin calls “settler time” which normalizes colonial histories of modernity, and refuses the backward revisionism that claire colebrook reads in western apocalyptic narratives (rifkin). in this interruption, horne’s methodology closely aligns with nick estes’ explorations of the apocalyptic prophecies informing the standing rock movement. estes reminds readers that “indigenous resistance draws from a long history, projecting itself backward and forward in time” (estes 18). similarly, alexis pauline gumbs examines this forward-backward movement in terms of “black feminist time travel,” a time-space continuum where those seeking social justice today draw on the strength of people like harriet tubman, who, too, used her imagination of the freedom that many experience now as a source of strength to survive and free others. these indigenous and black studies scholars detail continuance through and beyond the apocalypse of settler colonialism, vital scholarship that builds decolonial futures into the historical recognition so assiduously archived in horne’s research. horne’s research and powerful conclusion gain even more force when understood in conversation with this growing body of research. the apocalypse of settler colonialism also draws attention to the ways apocalypse has been used to justify and reinvigorate these systems of exploitation, as scholars like betsy hartmann, joanna zylinska, andrew mcmurry, eddie yuen, larry lohman, and frederick buell show and the recent issue of asap/journal explores. though horne does not make these literary connections explicit, his brief mention of today’s alarming reprise of fascism offers scholars an opportunity to connect his work to literary, black, and indigenous studies scholarship regarding contemporary invocations of the apocalypse such as ecofascist responses to climate change. the apocalypse of settler colonialism provokes, but does not plot, the correlations between the rebellions and climate crisis of the 1600s and the ways that relates to our own contemporary climate chaos and social justice movements. horne does gesture to those connections, drawing april anson review of the apocalypse of settler colonialism 144 geoffrey parker’s work on seventeenth-century climate change into relation with the piratical character of capitalism, anti-blackness, indigenous genocide, and settler colonialism. horne gifts scholars the space to extend these exigent connections from his seventeenth century work even farther across time and space. the apocalypse of settler colonialism is essential reading for any scholar, student, or civic intellectual interested in transnational american studies, global economic systems, or the contemporary parallel rise of fascism and the apocalypses of climate change. april anson, university of pennsylvania works cited bhandar, brenda. the colonial lives of property: law, land, and racial regimes of ownership. duke university press, 2018. brown, wendy. walled states, waning sovereignty. zone books, 2010. buell, frederick. from apocalypse to way of life: environmental crisis in the american century. routledge, 2004. byrd, jodi a. et al. “economies of dispossession: indigeneity, race, capitalism.” social text 135. 36:2 (2018) pp. 1-18. colebrook, claire. “slavery and the trumpocene: it’s not the end of the world.” oxford literary review. 41:1 (2019) pp. 40-50. dillon, grace. walking the clouds: an anthology of indigenous science fiction. university of arizona press, 2012. dunbar-ortiz, roxanne. an indigenous people’s history of the united states. beacon press, 2015. estes, nick. our history is the future: standing rock versus the dakota access pipeline, and the long tradition of indigenous resistance. verso, 2019. goldberg, david theo. sites of race: conversations with susan searls giroux. polity, 2014. gumbs, alexis pauline. “like seeds or a guide to black feminist time travel.” everyday genius, 3 august 2012, http://www.everyday-genius.com/2012/07/alexis-pauline-gumbs.html. gross, lawrence. “the comic vision of anishinaabe culture and religion.” american indian quarterly. 26:3 (2003) pp. 436-59. hartmann, betsy. the america syndrome: apocalypse, war, and our call to greatness. seven stories press, 2017. http://www.everyday-genius.com/2012/07/alexis-pauline-gumbs.html transmotion vol 5, no 2 (2019) 145 hong, grace kyungwon. the ruptures of american capital: women of color feminisms and the culture of immigrant labor. university of minnesota press, 2006. hurley, jessica and dan sinykin. “apocalypse: introduction,” asap/journal. 3:3 (2018) pp. 451-66. la paperson. a third university is possible. university of minnesota press, 2017. larson, sidner. captured in the middle: tradition and experience in contemporary native american writing. university of washington press, 2001. lohman, larry. “fetishisms of the apocalypse.” the corner house, 20 september 2014, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/fetishisms-apocalypse. lowe, lisa intimacies of four continents. duke university press, 2015. mcmurry, andrew. “the slow apocalypse: a gradualistic theory of world’s demise.” postmodern culture. 6:3 (1996) pp. 1-23. moreton-robinson, aileen. the white possessive: power, property, and indigenous sovereignty. u. of minnesota p., 2015. painter, nell irvin. the history of white people. w.w. norton & company, 2010. parker, geoffrey. global crisis: war, climate change, and catastrophe in the seventeenth century. yale university press, 2014. powell, timothy. ruthless democracy: a multicultural interpretation of the american renaissance. princeton university press, 2000. reddy, chandran. freedom with violence: race, sexuality, and the us state. duke university press, 2011. risling-baldy, cutcha. “why i teach the walking dead in my native studies classes.” the nerds of color, 24 april 2014, https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2014/04/24/why-i-teach-thewalking-dead-in-my-native-studies-classes/. rifkin, mark. beyond settler time: temporal sovereignty and indigenous self-determination. duke university press, 2017. robinson, cedric. black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. university of north carolina press, 2005. sinker, mark. “loving the alien/in advance of the landing” the wire (february 1996). http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/fetishisms-apocalypse https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2014/04/24/why-i-teach-the-walking-dead-in-my-native-studies-classes/ https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2014/04/24/why-i-teach-the-walking-dead-in-my-native-studies-classes/ april anson review of the apocalypse of settler colonialism 146 stannard, david. the american holocaust: the conquest of the new world. oxford university press, 1993. stohler, ann laura. race and the education of desire: foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. duke university press, 1995. todd, zoe. “relationships.” in “lexicon for an anthropocene yet unseen.” cultural anthropology, 21 january 2016, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/relationships. whyte, kyle powys. “our ancestors’ dystopia now: indigenous conservation and the anthropocene,” in the routledge companion to the environmental humanities. ursula k. heise, jon christensen, and michelle niemann, eds. routledge, 2017, pp. 206-15. wolfe, patrick. traces of history: elementary structures of race. verso, 2016. wynter, sylvia. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument.” cr: the new centennial review 3:3 (2003) pp. 257-337. yuen, eddie. “the politics of failure have failed: the environmental movement and catastrophism.” in catastrophism: the apocalyptic politics of collapse and rebirth, sasha lilley, david mcnally, eddie yuen, james davis, and doug henwood, eds. pm press, 2012, pp. 15-43. zylinska, joanna. the end of man: a feminist counterapocalypse. university of minnesota press, 2018. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/relationships key: cord-0059237-ycxxhadg authors: sklair, leslie title: globalization and the challenge of the anthropocene date: 2020-05-15 journal: challenges of globalization and prospects for an inter-civilizational world order doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-44058-9_5 sha: f7dfed03c9591aac934ae062e5c01268b1cb59ae doc_id: 59237 cord_uid: ycxxhadg just as globalization was a leading idea in the social sciences from the 1990s to the first decade of the new millennium, the anthropocene is now a serious contender to be a leading idea in the social sciences and humanities. controversies around the origins and implications of the anthropocene mirror those around those of globalization—are they ancient or modern phenomena, are they sustainable or leading us into disaster? mobilizing ideas on the “silent qualifiers” of globalization (generic, capitalist, and alternative globalizations) i argue that it is fruitful to theorize generic, capitalist, and alternative anthropocenes. with the mantra of endless growth integral to the survival of both global capitalism and the state system, it seems obvious that these systems are incompatible with planetary survival in the long term, necessitating an engagement with the emerging degrowth movement. given the failure of governments and corporations to seriously engage with the risks of the anthropocene, smaller democratically organized communities at different geographic and socio-political scales offer prospects for simpler less ecologically destructive living. fortunately, the anthropocene is also a digital era, facilitating cooperative networking between such communities. the initial popularity of globalization as a motif for the social sciences and humanities was little short of astonishing. introduced in the print media around 1960, the term first started to be used systematically by scholars and journalists in the 1980s, and by the turn of the millennium it was to be found everywhere, applied to almost everything (ritzer 2012) . in the words of the economist in 2009, "the concept globalization was popularized by an american journalist, thomas friedman, in his book the world is flat (2005) ." it reached the top of several bestseller lists with its headline message that the world is now just "one big integrated market" (http://www.economist.com/node/14031230). the idea of the anthropocene was "officially" announced to the wider scientific community in a short communication in the journal nature 1 (probably the most influential science publication in the world) entitled "geology of mankind" (crutzen 2002 )-in retrospect, an unfortunate title. an article in the guardian (london) highlighted the male bias in science in general and in the group leading the anthropocene campaign in particular-this attracted hundreds of comments (raworth 2014) . critics of the ideas of globalization and of the anthropocene share many characteristics. for example, the literature on globalization is suffused with a good deal of fatalism, popularly known as tina (there is no alternative). even some progressive academics, popular writers, and political and cultural leaders seem to accept that there is no alternative to capitalist globalization and that all we can do is to try to work for a better world around it (giddens 2000) . and this is where the challenge of the anthropocene to existing conceptions of globalization starts to bite. in 2009, the historian of fossil capitalism andreas malm, declared: "forget the anthropocene, we should call it the capitalocene" (quoted in moore's edited book of 2016: xi). while sympathizing with the sentiment, i think that there are many reasons to claim that the anthropocene is an apt label for the human impact on the planet. it is inclusive of the human enterprise, and though different levels of responsibility can be apportioned, most people on earth (rich and poor) are understandably complicit through what i have labeled the culture ideology of consumerism (sklair 2001 (sklair , 2002 . rebranding anthropocene as capitalocene conveniently lets anti-capitalists off the hook to fly around the world critiquing capitalism and making our own ecologically destructive consumer choices. just as we are all living in a globalized world that world is also the anthropocene. and it is taking place within and being intensified through the system of capitalist globalization fortified by hierarchic states. what, then, does the idea of the anthropocene have to offer that the immense body of globalization research does not already offer? the first and most obvious answer to this question must focus on the efforts of earth system scientists to establish connections between the economic, social, and cultural spheres and the earth system itself. lorimer makes the distinction between the scientific agenda of the anthropocene for earth system science, and its rapid absorption into the intellectual zeitgeist. i would suggest, however, that the evidence permits another reading of the situation, namely, that many ess researchers (including some of the most influential) framed their concept of the anthropocene in a way that directly invited diverse publics into the fold, creating popular and transdisciplinary appeal. this, i would argue, can be clearly seen from what may be labeled the "official canon" of the anthropocene as a scientific reality. in their collective introduction to the topic in the authoritative philosophical transactions of the royal society, steffen et al. (2011) conclude that the anthropocene might be compared to the darwinian revolution. even more boldly (and alarmingly) these three leading earth scientists and one of the most influential world historians of our time state: "darwin's insights into our origins provoked outrage, anger and disbelief but did not threaten the material existence of society of the time. the ultimate drivers of the anthropocene, on the other hand, if they continue unabated through this century, may well threaten the viability of contemporary civilization and perhaps even the future existence of homo sapiens" (p. 862). unusually for an article announcing a new field of scientific inquiry in a most prestigious natural science publication, this suggests that the anthropocene is of direct relevance to planetary survival. further evidence of the enthusiasm of the promoters of the anthropocene concept to welcome the social sciences, humanities, and the arts into the broad tent of "anthropocene studies" comes from the anthropocene working group (awg). this was established in 2009 to prepare the scientific community and the general public for the theoretical and practical challenges that lay ahead. the chairman was jan zalasiewicz (professor of paleobiology at the university of leicester) who, through his writings, media outreach, and promotional skills, has done as much as anyone to disseminate the idea of the anthropocene in scientific and public spheres. in december 2009, in correspondence with davor vidas (an international law of the sea scholar), zalasiewicz wrote: "i would be glad to discuss the wider implications [of the anthropocene] to your field of study, because while we are aware of the general societal implications of this term, the possible practical implications for international law [of the sea] would be of considerable interest in our examination of this term." 2 the royal society of great britain accepted a proposal for a thematic set of papers on the anthropocene, to appear in their proceedings journal. the first theme was "historical perspectives and concept of the anthropocene," followed by eight geological and ecological topics. the last, "societal responses to the anthropocene," is of particular significance for my argument like the article by steffen et al., wide enough to encourage participation from practically anyone. in his annual awg report for 2014, zalasiewicz wrote: "this has been another eventful year in the rapidly growing field of what one might term 'anthropocene studies'." also highlighted were major anthropocene projects at berlin's haus der kulturen der welt (hkw), and the deutsches museum/rachel carson center anthropocene exhibition in munich, the incorporation of the anthropocene as a major theme in the smithsonian institution's "deep time" exhibition, three new anthropocene journals and general books and films on the topic in the pipeline-all examples of prestigious outreach and what research funding bodies term "impact." 3 the inaugural meeting of the awg was hosted and financially supported by hkw in berlin in october 2014. this meeting included discussion of various technical questions concerning the measurement of the holocene-anthropocene boundary, whether the anthropocene should be considered as "a unit of earth history or human history," and the issue of the "anthropocene as a time unit and a material unit to be visualized by geoscientists and other interested communities." a session on "human impacts and their consequences" ranged far and wide over critical assessment of science-political solution pathways, and a "research agenda beyond sustainability, linking scientific practice with societal relevance and local to global strategies of knowledge production." zalasiewicz summed up these "exchanges" as follows: "a set of dialogues between members of the anthropocene working group and social scientists, thinkers, and artists, a serial thread of conversations that draws from a vast range of expertise, disciplines, and practices. … engaging with research methods in the lab or field, at the desk or in the studio." this was followed in june 2015 by "the anthropocene project" at the tate modern, an exhibition at the barbican in london, and similar events in many other cities around the world. this suggests that in the case of the anthropocene the dire warnings of c.p. snow's "two cultures" thesis (chronicling the dangers of the separation of the sciences from the humanities and arts) were finally being taken to heart by all sides. 4 my view is that globalization as a sociological concept has always been too frail to sustain the theoretical and substantive burdens loaded on to it. the "global" has always seemed too big and often lacking the specificity necessary for any sort of scientific rigor and no doubt some think the same about the anthropocene. in order to address political and methodological problems, i originally distinguished three modes of globalization in theory and practice, what we may term the "silent qualifiers" of globalization, namely, generic, capitalist, and alternative globalizations (sklair 2009 ). now, after studying the anthropocene (and -scene), it appears to me that the same "silent qualifiers" can also be applied-generic, capitalist, and alternative anthropocenes (same names, different contents). 5 by generic anthropocene i mean the simple ideas that living creatures have always had a multitude of impacts on the earth system which itself is constantly changing in various ways, and that the evolution of humankind represented a quantitative transformation of these impacts (particularly with respect to city building, agriculture, and infrastructure). by capitalist anthropocene i mean that the industrialization made possible by fossil fuels, exploited via capitalist relations of production, set in motion qualitative transformations of these impacts on the earth system (malm 2016) . the difference between the generic and the capitalist anthropocenes and, by implication, between the quantitative and the qualitative impacts on the planet, is caught by the distinction that geologists have made between the holocene and the anthropocene. the holocene represents the previous 12,000 years of relative planetary stability, notably moderate temperature fluctuations and other functions favorable to life on the planet; the capitalist anthropocene represents an end of relative planetary stability and a far less predictable, possibly catastrophic future. in the opinion of many earth scientists and anthropocene popularizers, one possible outcome is the end of life as we know it on the planet. however, like capitalist globalization, in the capitalist anthropocene such alarming messages are rapidly dealt with by diluting them through a variety of what we might label "reassurance narratives." for example, the steffen et al. (2011) paper cited above concludes on an optimistic note reassuring us that human intelligence and ingenuity is prepared for the challenge of the anthropocene. the most influential statement of this view comes from the prestigious stockholm resilience centre research on planetary boundaries (pb). an authoritative report on the status of these boundaries, while highlighting the dangers (several boundaries already breached, others on the edge) concludes: "nevertheless, by identifying a safe operating space for humanity on earth, the pb framework can make a valuable contribution to decision-makers in charting desirable courses for societal development" (steffen et al. 2015: 475) . the ideas of "safe operating space" and the frequently quoted "welcome to the anthropocene" are only the most common of the anthropocene reassurance narratives which have come to be associated with the label "good anthropocene." the parallels with globalization as theory and practice are striking. equivalent reassurance narratives for the downsides of capitalist globalization are "the rising tide lifts all boats" blurring the evidence of global and local class polarization, and "ecological modernization" (also propagated by good anthropocene enthusiasts) blurring the evidence of global and local ecological unsustainabilities (see leichenko and o'brien 2008; sklair 2002: 48-58 )-the capitalist anthropocene avant la lettre! in the media, these reassurance narratives successfully morph from challenges to opportunities, successfully trumping (no pun intended) pessimism with optimism, pushing existential threats into the shadows. 6 engaging creatively with the science-politics of the anthropocene, stengers (2015) shows that as scientists went public on the anthropocene before all the geological results were established (waiting for more definitive markers could be catastrophic), the anthropogenic climate change deniers could keep the debate going, opening up the unenviable choice between merchants of fear or merchants of doubt. 7 latour keeps this conversation going. science and politics are both frail human endeavors, he argues. anthropocene politics "is not a rational debate … [it is] incredibly easy to make two sides emerge even when there is only one" (latour 2015: 147) . there is a large literature on climate change denial (boykoff and olson 2013), much less on anthropocene denial (but see the exemplary case study by casagrande et al. 2017 , where this is conceptualized as "ecomyopia"). unsurprisingly, comparisons have been made between climate change denial and holocaust denial: "climate change and the holocaust are not equivalent, but that does not mean there is no climate denial" (jacques 2012: 10) . while it would be quite wrong to identify the slogan "welcome to the anthropocene" with climate change or anthropocene denial, i would argue that even when used ironically it does create an atmosphere of skepticism about the severity of the situation, which can implicitly lead to denial. the slogan adorned a front-page story in the economist magazine in may 2011, the title of a 3-minute film introducing the un rio +20 summit in june 2012, and in 2014 "welcome to the anthropocene: the earth in our hands" opened in the deutsches museum, munich. a review of this exhibition concludes with a sharp critique of what i mean by the capitalist anthropocene reassurance narrative: "the anthropocene idea has prompted many scholars and activists to point out the radical environmental injustice of the epoch and to critique the capitalism that has led to it. we see neither in this exhibit. instead, it offers a relatively benign vision of a changing planet. the change is not pictured as threatening, in spite of being rapid. the exhibit says welcome to the anthropocene, not goodbye to the world you knew" (jørgensen and jørgensen 2016: 237) . 8 several books, articles, and mass media references to "welcome to the anthropocene" suggest that there is a middle way between the generic anthropocene and extreme capitalist anthropocene denial, and that the idea of the "good, welcoming anthropocene" provides it. we may, after all, be having to think about planetary survival sooner rather than later. 9 the debates around anthropo-scene ideologies take different forms from those around globalization (see sklair 2017) . capitalist ideologues generally adopted neoliberal forms of globalization, though by no means all (in and out of the transnational corporations and think tanks) took this position. my fourfold model of the transnational capitalist class (tcc) attempted to demonstrate alliances between corporate, political, professional, and consumerist fractions, but was sensitive to intra-tcc differences and sometimes open warfare between the fractions, though usually resolved in the interests of big business and the big state (sklair 2001) . in the case of capitalist globalization, it was always obvious that there were powerful globalizing forces at work-the consequences of the digital revolution in all spheres of life and social organization made this difficult to deny. the political problem was and is: can capitalist globalization work for everyone or does it have an inbuilt tendency toward class polarization, inequality, and ecological disaster? chinese president xi at davos in 2017 lectured the world with an impassioned defense of globalization and president trump in the white house in 2018 promised to make america great again by resisting globalization. the politics of the anthropocene do not rest on such obvious foundations. and, more to the point, i would argue that while globalization and especially climate change regularly appear in the mass media, albeit frequently in misleading and sensationalist terms (boykoff 2011) , the anthropocene is still relatively unknown outside some bubbles in the worlds of science, academe, culture critique, and creative arts. 10 adding to lorimer's remarks on science/climate fiction and the anthropocene (2017: 128-31), i can offer some comments on how the sciences are catching up with science fiction in a desperate attempt to prepare for the worst-case anthropocene scenario-namely, what do we do when planet earth becomes no longer able to support human life? 11 two issues appear to be paramount, first the practical possibility of physical escape from a doomed planet, and second, the identification of planets that hold out prospects of supporting human life. both are now being investigated by leading scientists and entrepreneurs with the financial backing of private benefactors and public money. planning for physical escape from a doomed planet does not receive much publicity, but it is clearly underway. in 2017, bbc2 screened a documentary, "the 21st century race for space." hosted by the genial professor brian cox, a leading science popularizer in the uk, it took viewers on a tour of cutting-edge research locations all around the world. cox explained: "surprisingly, some of the boldest efforts at putting humans into space are now those of private companies started by a handful of maverick billionaire businessmen." 12 these include richard branson (virgin galactic), jeff bezos (founder of amazon and blue origin) and elon musk (spaceport america and spacex) and their initiatives in privately financed space flight, space tourism, asteroid mining, and dreams of colonies on mars. but, says cox, "their true ambition is to ensure the survival of the human race by crossing our solar system and colonizing mars in the next decade." building space ships is one problem, the next is ensuring the voyagers survive the journey, and then to find somewhere eventually for them to land and make a home. this is the search for a new planet earth. the late stephen hawking had for some years been arguing that the human species will have to relocate to a new planet within 100 years. this documentary gave him one more platform to disseminate his views. the search for another planet earth or a planet that can be terra formed to serve as a new home for humans is also underway. 13 professor hawking and several other distinguished scientists worked with breakthrough initiatives, a program of scientific and technological exploration, probing the big questions of life in the universe. the website (https://breakthroughinitiatives.org) explains: "are we alone? are there habitable worlds in our galactic neighborhood? can we make the great leap to the stars? and can we think and act together-as one world in the cosmos? … breakthrough listen is a $100 million program of astronomical observations in search of evidence of intelligent life beyond earth. …a complete survey of the 1,000,000 nearest stars, the plane and center of our galaxy, and the 100 nearest galaxies. all data will be open to the public." this is serious money supporting serious efforts by serious scientists in what has been labeled exoplanet studies, namely, the study of planets outside our solar system that orbit a star. a recent publication on exoplanet astrobiology states: "the discovery of seven new exoplanets orbiting the relatively close star trappist-1 forces us to rethink life on earth. it opens the possibility to broaden our understanding of coupled system dynamics and lay the foundations to explore a path to long-term sustainability by entering into a cooperative ecological-evolutionary dynamic with the coupled planetary systems" (in kelley 2017) . 14 behind all this effort is the fear of the worst-case anthropocene scenario, a fear that seems to put all forms of globalization into a new, rather parochial, perspective. however, this would be a premature judgement. i have argued that the emerging discipline of anthropocene (and -scene) studies is poised to absorb globalization as the new meme for twenty-first-century thinking about our world as a whole and possible future. the anthropocene has the unique capacity to pose questions about planetary survival, and globalization has the unique capacity to explain local-global dynamics. the critical point will arrive if and when sufficient numbers of ordinary people all over the world begin to realize that geoengineering, new technologies, and artificial intelligence machines will not save us from the ravages of the anthropocene. stephen hawking, for example, campaigned vigorously against ai, warning that robots could destroy humanity-another sphere in which capitalist globalization confronts the anthropocene. 15 if it is not too late to secure planetary survival, alternative anthropocenes (i.e., intelligent reworkings of human impacts on the earth system and its constituent ecosystems) may start to replace the current dysfunctional capitalist and state systems that exacerbate existing problems. a necessary aspect of these reworkings would be innovative reformations of global-local relations. such initiatives are already under way in thousands of small communities all round the world, seeking routes to zero-carbon living, producing their own food, and detaching themselves from the growth obsession of capitalism and its variants. it is important to acknowledge that diluted versions of these strategies are also to be found in the rhetoric of the capitalist "good anthropocene," propounded by corporate interests, national governments, and international organizations in terms of getting to grips with climate change. climate change summits over the last 50 years have made some progress at local, national, and global levels, but the optimism of the negotiators and most of the mass media often seems pathetically naïve in comparison with the evidence-based pessimism of many earth system scientists. the key, in my view, is the issue of degrowth, now a rapidly expanding transnational intellectual and social movement (d'alisa et al. 2014) . with the mantra of endless growth integral to the survival of both global capitalism and the state system, it seems obvious that capitalism and the centralized hierarchical state are incompatible with planetary survival in the long term (perhaps even in the shorter term, if we are to take stephen hawking and others like him seriously). however, the proponents of degrowth, like everyone else, are yet to deal convincingly with the formidable problems of existing global inequalities and their root causes. studying more carefully small-scale self-reliant communities and their strategies of disengagement with the capitalist market and the state may "highlight the us and italy… not only because tarrant drew inspiration from both, but also because both have become important contemporary laboratories of dangerous ideologies." fortunately, the anthropocene is also a digital era, which raises the possibility for opportunities to create local democratically organized communities, networking on many different geographic and socio-political scales. this, in my view, is the best prospect for alternative globalizations and alternative anthropocenes. so, if the worst comes to the worst, even this remote possibility of long-term planetary survival might become a little less remote and the future for our descendants a little less desperate. 16 notes 13. usually, terraforming is defined as making other planets more like earth. however, i consider it more fruitful to expand the definition to include earth and bring terraforming into debates about nature, infrastructure, technology, and bio-and geoengineering. 14. kelley summarizes the paper-originally published in the journal anthropocene. i do not cite it because i do not entirely understand it; however, the conclusion in kelley, quoting one of the authors, seems to imply something like the relationship between earth and mars in robinson's trilogy. 15. in the long harvard business review (july 2017) cover story on ai, notable for their absence are the words citizen, democracy, ethics, morality, responsibility, and values. 16. for example, https://transitionnetwork.org/news-and-blog/activism-in-the-ant hropocene; see also sklair (2016) . as the coronavirus epidemic (frequently blamed on globalization) and the intensifying of the ecological crisis have demonstrated, the necessity for genuine system change is more pressing than ever. was a more technical article on the anthropocene in the newsletter of the international geosphere-biosphere programme the world ocean in globalisation," perhaps the first scholarly conference to link globalization and the anthropocene on these and other scholarly and creative art events, see robin and muir the major figure for the anthropocene in this context is the indian historian dipesh chakrabarty i deal with generic and capitalist anthropocenes in this section, for alternative anthropocenes see my conclusion the institutional support for these views could be labeled the "philanthropocene" (philanthropic institutions and foundations propagating "good" anthropocene narratives relevant here is the literature on consensus in science-the multidisciplinary survey of cook et al. (2015) has had more than 300 for a thorough discussion of debates around the "good anthropocene these comparisons might seem ridiculous (even offensive) now, but if the worst comes to the worst… 10. for an edited collection based on a research project to establish how the anthropocene is represented in the mass media in local languages all over the world tells the story of the colonization of mars. the richness and remarkable prescience of robinson's writing are ample rewards for the effort required to read all three volumes ethics, ecology, and the future: art and design face the anthropocene facing the anthropocene: fossil capitalism and the crisis of the earth system who speaks for the climate? wise contrarians': a keystone species in contemporary climate science ecomyopia in the anthropocene the climate of history: four theses anthropocene time consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming geology of mankind degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era framing the anthropocene: the good, the bad and the ugly anthropocene: a very short introduction getting the anthropocene so wrong the anthropocene and global environmental crisis: rethinking modernity in a new epoch a general theory of climate denial the anthropocene as a history of technology reading and revolution on the horizon of myth and history: kim stanley robinson's mars trilogy telling friends from foes in the time of the anthropocene environmental change and globalisation: double exposures the anthropo-scene: a guide for the perplexed fossil capitalism: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism merchants of doubt-how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming must the anthropocene be a manthropocene? the wiley-blackwell encyclopedia of globalisation, 5 vols the transnational capitalist class globalization: capitalism and its alternatives the emancipatory potential of generic globalization half-baked review article: sleepwalking through the anthropocene the anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives planetary boundaries: guiding human development for a changing planet accepting the reality of gaia: a fundamental shift less than one but more than many: anthropocene as science fiction and scholarship-in-the-making molecular red: theory for the anthropocene the role of islam in the abolition of slavery and in the development of british capitalism sultana afroz abstract west indian scholars have overlooked the role played by the muslim leadership in west africa in bringing an end to the transatlantic trade in africans. the jihād movements in west africa in the late eighteenth century gave political unity to west africa challenging the collaboration of european trade in africans with the pagan slave traders. west indian historiography, while emphasizing european abolitionist movements, ignores the islamic unity (tawhīd) of humankind, which brought together many ethnically heterogeneous enslaved african muslims to successfully challenge the west indian plantation system. the exploitation of the human resources and the immense wealth of the then moghul india and imperial china by british colonialism helped develop the british industrial capitalism, which controlled most of the world until the end of world war ii. the security of the british industrial capitalist complex could no longer depend on the small-scale west indian plantation economies but on the large-scale economies of asia protected by the british imperial forces under the british imperial flag. ________________________________________________________________________ sultana afroz is a lecturer in history at the university of the west indies, mona, jamaica. her current research is on the islamic paradigm in jamaica-west indian history and heritage. she is the author of islam: the eternal message, and the coauthor of the political economy of food and agriculture in the caribbean. her forthcoming book, titled invisible yet invincible: the islamic heritage of the maroons and the enslaved africans in jamaica, is due to be published by austin and macauley publishers in 2012. dr. afroz teaches courses on asian history ‒ namely, the history of the middle east, the history of modern japan, and the history of modern china. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tawheed the american journal of islamic social sciences 29:12 introduction scholarly debates over the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the final demise of the abominable slave institution in the british west indies in 1838 have been usually carried out in the context of the abolition movements in britain and in europe and in the context of an expanding industrialized british economy together with that of europe. traditional west indian scholarship has deliberated over the influence of humanitarianism and constitutionalism upon the champions of abolition (most of whom were either the initiators or the perpetrators of the pernicious slave system) as political or ecclesiastical leaders. meanwhile the growing power and role of islam in uniting a politically fragmented and ethnically heterogeneous west africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a united front against the enslavement of africans has been largely overlooked by traditional west indian historians. recent scholarship on west africa and the transatlantic trade reveal the different strategies adopted by the people of west central africa to protect and defend themselves and to effectively challenge the military invincibility of the european slave traders.1 however, the prejudice of these scholars in blaming islam and muslim leadership as the slaving agent is is quite clear. likewise, the wealth of moghul india and imperial china in terms of human and natural resources in sustaining and contributing to an ever growing capitalistic, industrialized british society has not been adequately studied. while analyses of the role of islam in west africa will debunk the established myth that muslims were the perpetrators and collaborators of the transatlantic trade in africans, research on the importance of the wealth of moghul india and imperial china to british industrialization will reveal the extent of the exploitation of the two asian empires by the british imperial power, which consequently held the world monopoly on colonialism and free trade from the nineteenth century to the end of world war ii. twentieth-century british imperial colonialism was maintained by the british imperial navy fueled by the natural gas and oil wealth of the middle east, then controlled by companies such as the anglo-iranian oil company. in this article, i attempt to establish the role played by the muslim leadership in west africa ‒ after the jihāds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‒ in bringing an end to the transatlantic trade in africans. i also underscore the importance of islam in uniting the ethnically heterogeneous enslaved african muslims to successfully challenge the west indian plantation system. i will also attempt to examine the importance of the wealth of moghul india in the development of british commercial industrial capitalism. afroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 3 jihād in west africa the jihāds of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in west africa ‒ with its centers in masina, futa jalon, futa toro and sokoto ‒ seem to have effectively challenged the european slave trade in west africa. until then, west africa represented a region of political fragmentation and violence caused by constant conflicts and wars among a multitude of chiefdoms and petty kingdoms. consequently, with a large-scale european demand for enslaved africans, the inhabitants of the communities without strong centralized states and in a state of lawlessness became an easy prey to the slave trade. such communities turned to local rural muslim leadership constituted of clerics for protection against the slave raiding carried out by the europeans with assistance from pagan warlords powered with foreign firearms. therefore, jihāds carried out by muslim clerical leadership were responses to local demand for protection against the slave raiders. with victories, local muslim leadership assumed the role of leading national coalitions in west africa.2 the direct consequence of the jihāds was the emergence of strong centralized states in west africa, backed by powerful military organizations. it was the political and military leadership of the west african muslims that played a historical role to bring an end to the slave trade from the continent of africa. as joseph e. inikori states: “for as long as their politicomilitary organizations remained strong and centralized authority remained firmly in control, the subjects were protected from capture and export.”3 these jihāds initially led by muslim scholars and teachers, itinerant preachers and their student followers, and the religious leaders of trading and agricultural communities, were aimed at ridding the societies of corrupt local rulers whether non-muslims or muslims. most of these jihāds had been achieved through a series of local non-muslim peasant uprisings against the tyranny of local political and military elites. the marabouts (muslim clerics) organized themselves against the tyranny of ceddo (a corps of warriors who assisted the slave traders). people victimized by various kinds of exactions and slave raids settled in the village refuges founded by the marabouts. initially, the jihāds began as social revolutions in dispersed places in the senegambia region to establish respect of islamic precepts and to face the increasing threat from the slave trade organized by the europeans.4 but gradually the jihāds influenced each other, and small colonies and communities of muslims were united, culminating in a region-wide struggle to establish muslim states. within these muslim states, many nonmuslim populations embraced islam and both the rulers and the ruled came under muslim law and collectively challenged the european slave trade. the american journal of islamic social sciences 29:14 the futa jallon jihād was the work of the settled muslim communities allied with fulani pastoralists. the jalonke landlords who constituted the political elites oppressed both muslim settlers and the pastoralists with heavy taxation on their growing trade in cattle and hide. as early as 1726 when ibrahim musa, known as karamoko alfa, proclaimed the holy war with the support of muslims and non-muslims ‒ islam became the banner of their solidarity and their resistance against the non-muslim ruling elites.5 the muslims finally prevailed when ibrahim sori (1776‒1793) became the leader (almami / imām). the new state of futa jallon instituted consensual leadership, whereby the ruler was elected by a council constituted of members from the different provinces. councils of elders led by local chiefs governed the families. islamic leadership at the center and the misidi (family hamlets) at the local level together protected the people from being enslaved either by a fellow african or a european slave trader. much of the pastoralist population found employment in the agricultural plantations. futa jallon with its tradition of muslim learning and islamic law and sedentary life style had no room for slavery or slave trade. in short, the islamic state apparatus became responsible for the security of its people and the islamic faith of the people ensured their freedom from enslavement. futa jallon finally succumbed to french military colonization in 1896. futa toro, in the senegal river valley, was the center of another jihād ‒ and with a senegambian and guinean network of muslim teachers in conjunction with local non-muslim peasants ‒ carried out by muslim religious leaders (sulayman bal and abd al-qadir kane) against the local military elites in protest at fiscal oppression and their collaboration with european slave traders. under the almami abd al-qadir kane, the islamic state of futa toro resorted to redemption, a strategy adopted mostly by the muslims to free the enslaved people from the european and local slave traders.6 this is in line with islamic tradition, which calls for the state to finance the freedom of the enslaved people. prophet muḥammad (ṣaas) set the procedure for the freedom of war captives through state funding and personal wealth.7 hazrat abu bakr as-siddiq (ra), a companion and father-in-law of the prophet muḥammad and, subsequently, the first caliph during the caliphate, exemplifies the redemption of enslaved people. in an effort to bring an end to the enslavement of africans, almami kane also closed the french and british trade passages through the territory of futa toro. al-hajj umar (1794‒1864), born in futo toro became a great nineteenth-century leader of west african jihāds. his jihād was not only against non-muslim locals but also against lapsed muslims and european intruders.8 his appeal in futa toro was enormous ‒ embodying people of mixed afroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 5 ethnic background, who found new social identity under the aegis of islam. western historians who have highlighted umar’s stress on the importance of strict obedience to muslim practice have also stated contradictory historical accounts of enslavement, warfare, and the accumulation of booty in the state of futa toro.9 such historical construction of the barbarity of the muslims in west africa has eased western historians’ justification of the european domination of the natives. this categorization of muslims as barbaric has armed western scholars with an ideological weapon to suppress the goodness of the islamic heritage in west africa. in 1893, umar’s state was absorbed into a growing french west african empire. uthman dan fodio (1754‒1817) of hausaland was the greatest of these west african muslim leaders, who denounced the corrupt and unislamic practices of west african muslim states. according to basil davidson “some of the origins of this fulani rising, and in hausaland, had lain in revolt against social inequalities”.10 dan fodio upheld the concepts of mujaddid (a person who appears at the turn of every century of the islamic calendar to revive islam), the hijra (the migration to a true muslim community), the role of the ʻulamā’(leaders of the islamic society) in teaching the true faith, and the role of reason and consensus in the derivation of muslim law. dan fodio’s appeal to justice and morality rallied fulani pastoral population, hausa peasants, itinerant preachers and others in the formation of a muslim state engulfing most of what is now northern nigeria and the northern cameroons. the caliphate of sokoto, established by dan fodio’s son, muhammad bello, after the jihād of 1804‒1812, was a combination of an islamic state and a modified hausa monarchy. the sokoto regime created an agricultural and industrial base ‒ producing cotton, indigo, grain, rice, tobacco, kola nuts, and other crops. the state promoted indigo and textile industries. the development of new industries such as peanut, oil and soap also favored the economic and political power of muslim peasants against the slave military elites who collaborated with the slave traders in the greater senegambia. the direct appeal made by dan fodio to the enslaved to join the jihād against the slave regimes guaranteed them state support against the forces of enslavement. samory rashid is of the opinion that dan fodio’s jihād “may have been the first movement of its kind to introduce islamic ideology to the phenomenon of slave resistance.”11 the fulani pastoralists were settled and converted to sheep and goat raising as part of an effort to bring them under the rule of muslim law. it has been argued that the jihād movement initiated by dan fodio found islam in central sudan “corrupt and persecuted” and left it “purified and supreme.”12 they found the fulani landless and insecure, and they left them a ruling arthe american journal of islamic social sciences 29:16 istocracy.13 in short, the sophisticated islamic tradition of religious reform of sokoto caliphate prompted a creative literary and religious effort, which united the heterogeneous people of varied ethnicity belonging to hausa, fulani, nupe, yorubaland, soninke, and wolof into one islamic state. the successful jihād of uthman dan fodio saw the spread of islam into new regions such as chad, southern nigeria, upper volta, the ivory coast, and guinea. throughout west africa, islam had come to be almost the system of political leadership and moral reform. the jihāds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in west africa created islamic states, which sought to include the whole population rather than a limited aristocracy, and to create a political people out of smaller diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistics backgrounds. the unity of islam changed the political map of west africa and posed a direct challenge to the transatlantic trade in africans. the formation of islamic states brought an end to the destructive wars of interstate rivalry. consequently, there was a sharp drop in the slave trade because of the lack of war captives. in addition, muslim rulers gained increasing local loyalties through their policy of the incorporation of former male captives into their armies rather than selling them as slaves.14 the army, which was constituted of freed war captives, became the essential state institution and the greatest impediment to the enslavement of africans by the european slave traders in west africa in the nineteenth century. consequently, muslim influence increased further owing to the suppression of the slave trade. islam began and remained as the “liberating force” and did not end up “rationalizing slaving military activity,” as opined by martin a. klein. the armies of the west african muslim states were composed of freed war captives who became the first defense of the states ‒ and then, to carry out raids into the dens of the slave traders to free the enslaved africans, whether muslims or non-muslims. the views held by western historians that the armies were composed of enslaved people and that muslim leadership rationalized the slaving military activity contradict the very nature of the jihāds, which were responses to free the enslaved and to provide security to the oppressed who sought refuge within muslim enclaves called “the village of free people,” “here we speak of peace,” or “place of abundance.”15 the creation of a massive sedentary society ‒ with the integration of pastoralists, peasants, and traders into a larger economy governed by islamic laws and protected by a conscripted state army ‒ made west africans less prone to kidnapping and enslavement by the european slave traders. with islam literacy spread among the local populace, there was also a wider understanding of the intricacies of the european slave traders and their collaboration with non-muslim african rulers. afroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 7 in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the civilizing impact of islam in west africa through the jihāds had been highlighted by the west indian missionaries sent to southern nigeria under the niger mission to carry on the evangelization of southern nigeria. reverend harry herbert simpson, a member of the niger mission succinctly stated that the hausa and nupe-speaking people became the “improved tribes” once they came in contact with the fulani (muslims), descendents of the semitic race and superior to them.”16 simpson further states that because of the british advent into southern nigeria, the igboand ijo-speaking people remained untouched by the influences of the fulani jihādists. in other words, it was the british advent into the region that “left the natives of the southern provinces a vastly inferior stamp of mankind to their advantaged brethren in the north.”17 ironically, black west indian missionaries were duped into propagating the myth that blackness symbolized inferiority and that it was the duty of the european colonizing missionaries or the ‘white man’s burden’ to civilize the uncivilized blacks. this became the justification for “imperialism of righteousness”. the process of civilizing the blacks became a two-fold program ‒ one on the plantations in the new world and the other in the continent of africa. edward blyden, the west indian missionary and historian, succinctly summed up the role of islam as a defensive force against slave traders: the introduction of islam into central and west africa has been the most important if not the sole preservative against the desolations of the slave-trade. mohammedanism [islam] furnished a protection to the tribes who embraced it by effectively binding them together in one strong religious fraternity, and enabling them by their united effort to battle the attempts of powerful ‘pagan’ slave hunters.18 such a summation from a christian missionary dismisses, firstly, the common western allegation of the spread of islam in central and west africa through coercion and force, and secondly, that the atlantic slave traders depended on muslim wholesalers. edward blyden’s statement authenticates that the africans who assisted the european slave traders were “pagans”and certainly not muslims. furthermore, the slave-trading houses were also along the pagan coastal belt of west africa, known asthe “slave coast.” goree island off the coast of senegal, captured by the european slave traders with military prowess, also was a storage center for the african captives from senegal and other parts of west africa before they were shipped to the new world. muslims from the senegamthe american journal of islamic social sciences 29:18 bia region became one of the worst victims in the atlantic trade in africans.19 although west indian historians have accused muslims of their involvement in the slave trade, their scholarship fails to adequately document the participation of the west african muslim leadership or the west african muslim trading house with the transatlantic trade in africans. scholars in west indian history have further failed to examine the role played by the west african muslim rulers in bringing an end to the slave trade. in short, the muslim states formed through jihād stood as a challenge to the marauding europeans until the end of the nineteenth century. subsequently, with unprecedented military power, all the muslim states of west africa were absorbed into european colonial empires and remained as european subjects until post-world war ii. islam and muslims gave west africa political and cultural unity. muslims in west africa, like the moors in andalusia and the moghuls in india, represent the bearers of civilization of cultural enlightenment and material progress ‒ in sharp contrast to a history of european plunder and pillage of africa. the qur’ānic command to wage jihād, or struggle against oppression, and reinforced by the traditions of prophet muḥammad was transplanted in the new world through the muslim maroons and the enslaved african muslims. jihāds took the practical form of marroonage, flight from bondage, leading to the establishment of maroon communities and the outbreak of innumerable slave rebellions throughout the americas. these islamic practices and principles appeared in the new world plantation, apparently with the enslaved africans many of whom may have received their experiences in the jihāds in west africa.20 jihād which became the religious and political ideology of the maroons and the enslaved africans in the plantations in jamaica forms the core of this presentation (also in my forthcoming book, invisible yet invincible: the islamic heritage of the maroons and the enslaved africans in jamaica, austin and macauley publishers, 2012).21 the inner jihād ‒ that is, the personal struggle to be in the righteous path, regarded to be the greater jihād ‒ finally gave way to the lesser jihād ‒that is, the rebellion against the enslavement system in defense of human dignity. the mythical role of the european abolitionists west indian historians have emphasized that the false goodness and the mythical humanitarian role of the european abolitionists to bring an end to the slave trade, was ironically carried out by their own european brethren. almost all sectors of the british society ‒ royalty, ecclesiastical leaders, high government officials, both military and civil, and leading middleclass humanitarians ‒ shared the wealth of the transatlantic trade in africans with merchants, shippers. and planters. the economic motivations afroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 9 of these so-called abolitionists ‒ many of whom, such as william wilberforce, were members of the british parliament ‒ culminated in the ruination of the once prosperous moghul india, and the destruction of the middle kingdom the imperial china. the continent of africa was not spared of the exploitation of its human and material wealth by the european abolitionists. they initiated the notorious “european scramble for africa” in the 1880s and 1890s ‒ likened to “the slicing of the chinese melon” by the european powers in the late nineteenth century and the dismemberment of the ottoman empire, beginning in the early twentieth century.22 economic inefficiency, international exigencies, and political necessities rather than humanitarianism or a sense of the immorality of slavery had led british prime minister william pitt to urge his friend william wilberforce to launch the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade in 1787. with the independence of the thirteen british north american colonies in 1783, the economic importance and security of the west indian plantation system to the expanding british industrialized economy further declined. the british west indies were restricted from having unlimited trade with the newly independent united states. by the order-in-council of july 2, 1783, the united states was excluded from colonial markets under the principles of navigation acts. the west indian islands could not import the necessary foodstuffs such as salted beef, pork, fish, and dairy products and the lumber necessary for making hogsheads and barrels to ship their sugar and rum.23 west indian rum makers lost their main american consumers. the rum trade usually paid for all the local expenses of the west indian plantations, including the purchase of slaves. trade restrictions with the united states and the discriminatory duties imposed on west indian products by some states of the united states reduced the profitability of the west indian sugar economy.24 in order to reduce dependence on food imports, diversification of food crops had been undertaken in the islands. the planters were forced to grow more provisions, but jamaica and the other british west indian islands were repeatedly faced with severe shortages of food. under the new atlantic commercial system, what the plantation system in the west indies was producing for export increasingly proved to be of small-scale economies “geared to subsistence production.”25 different views have emerged regarding the impact of the american revolution on the british mercantilist system. andrew j. o’shaughnessy is of the view that eric williams exaggerated the importance of american trade and that the american revolution brought about crucial changes in the british imperial economy.26 the restrictions on amerithe american journal of islamic social sciences 29:110 can trade imposed by the navigation acts had limited effect in preventing the trade between the newly independent united states and the west indies. the american revolution coincided with the rise of “free trade ideas and the beginnings of industrial capitalism”.27 traditional west indian historians have stressed the role of abolitionists such as james ramsay, thomas clarkson, william fox, and william wilberforce for the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 leading to the final emancipation of the enslaved in the british west indies in 1838. the role of james ramsay as a genuine abolitionist is questionable. james ramsay had served the anglican church in the west indies for twenty years, carrying out the injunctions of the church of england to christianize the enslaved population. christianization is seen by many as nothing less than spiritual genocide of the enslaved population. even, thomas clarkson, regarded to be a leading antislavery historian for his statement on the slave trade as “the most monstrous of evils,” cannot be considered a compassionate friend of the enslaved africans. his writings on the enslaved people as “the wretched africans . . . torn from their country in a state of nature . . ,” reflects his true belief of the enslaved africans as the miserable, squalid africans living in a primitive state. with such a portrayal of the enslaved africans, clarkson perhaps was trying to gain the sympathy and support of the british for the abolition of the slave trade and thereby earn a position for himself in the abolitionist movement. yet, that uncertain sentiment sends mixed messages about his true intentions. wilberforce, for his part, represented the british industrial interests and therefore, understandably, could not have been a supporter of the west indian interest upon which the enslaved system depended. a natural corollary to the destruction of the power of the west indian interest by the british parliamentary members, who protected the industrial interest group, was the abolition of slavery. to the enslaved african muslims, wilberforce was simply another bucra massa, (the white master) with a fossilized soul who lacked human values and qualities.28 british colonial history is rich in telling the victories and glories of their soldiers and statesmen. but upon closer scrutiny, many of the stories of heroism appear to be mere myth and legends or victories achieved through deceit, treachery, and the “divide and rule” of the colonized. while at the same time, the extraordinary feats of the colonized people, described as the “uncivilized brutes,” are labeled as works of obeah such as the heroism of grandee nanny – sarah against the british red coats in jamaica. to represent wilberforce as a friend of the enslaved africans and a great abolitionist is as fictitious as the role played by t. e. lawrence, popularly afroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 11 known as lawrence of arabia in liberating the arabs from the ottoman rule in 1916 during world war i. t. e. lawrence, welsh by birth was no arab and his reputation was only an offshoot of the arab revolt, which defeated the ottomans during the capture of aqaba. he had no military role in the arab revolt. he was a cartographer and the role he played can be described in the twenty-first century as a “terrorist,” dynamiting the railroads in the arabian peninsula to paralyze the communication links of the ottomans. once again, the claim made by the british of lawrence as the military leader in the capture of aqaba, which paved the way for the subsequent british and french conquest of the middle east has no historical authenticity. during world war i, the alliance between the ottomans and germany made it imperative to secure the suez canal, the lifeline to the british indian empire. prior to the arab revolt in 1916 led by the sons of emir hussein of makkah ‒ faisal, abdullah, sherif ali, and sherif nasir ‒ and auda abu tayeh, the head of the tawayha section of the huwaitat confederation, two british expeditions undertaken by sir archibald murray from egypt to capture aqaba had met with disastrous defeats.29 the british duped the arabs with false promises of independence and military assistance to raise an arab revolt against the ottomans. sir edmund allenby, who replaced sir murray, arrived in cairo towards the end of june 1916. the news of the fall of aqaba on the sixth of july was the first news of military significance that had greeted the new commander-in-chief on his arrival. however, the arabs had been robbed of their victory against the ottoman forces by sir allenby, whose forces quickly took over palestine while the arab leader, emir faisal was engrossed in military and political preparation. the capture of aqaba paved the way for the anglo-french domination in the middle east in post-world war i, through the league of nations mandate system based on the secret sykes-picot agreement of 1916. the agreement, which carved out the asian-arab portion of the ottoman empire between britain and france, conflicted with the pledges made in 1915 by sir henry mcmahon, the british high commissioner in cairo to the arabs. the sykes-picot agreement has been described as “not only the product of greed at its worst . . . : it also stands out as a startling piece of double-dealing.”30 the role played by t .e. lawrence in the arab revolt in 1916, is nothing short of a myth. it is the arabs who took arms to defend their own land, and lawrence was peripheral to the arab revolt. writing on british deceitful and devious promises, lawrence in his autobiography, seven pillars of wisdom writes: it was evident from the beginning that if we won the war, these promises to the arab would be dead paper and had i been an honest adviser of the american journal of islamic social sciences 29:112 the arabs i would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff. . . . i risked the fraud on my conviction, that arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the east, and that better we win and break our word than lose.31 no british forces took any part in the arab revolt, yet british treachery and military prowess enabled them to occupy the middle east. when the league of nations awarded the united kingdom the palestine mandate in 1922, it specifically charged britain to implement the infamous balfour declaration ‒ leading to the systematic destruction of palestine and the creation of israel, a western colonial entity. similarly, the projection of wilberforce as the leading abolitionist in the antislavery movement is a denial of the sacrifices made by the enslaved africans to establish the dignity of the soul. wilberforce’s association with the abolitionist movement was closely allied to the interests of the industrial magnates who subsequently scourged the world. his support for the industrial magnates of britain required him to destroy the west indian plantation monopoly with its dependent institution of slavery. the abolition of slavery was by default rather than intentional or the objective of the british imperial authorities on moral grounds. in short, wilberforce’s role can be seen as destroying an evil institution out of necessity only to be replaced by another, whose tentacles reached almost every civilization to serve the ever growing greed of an industrialized britain. resistance (jihād) by the enslaved african muslims the end of the british atlantic trade in africans did not bring an end to the untold miseries and sufferings of the enslaved africans in the british west indies. the cruel slave system continued with more repression and oppression to tame the existing enslaved africans who would now be hard to be replaced. the enslaved africans, led by their muslim marabouts (clerics) and imāms (prayer leaders), continued their struggle in different forms from open rebellion to covert acts of resistance such as burning cane-fields, damaging plantation machineries or other symbols of slavery, and running away ‒ until the evil system was crippled from within in the 1830s. the sacrifices made by the enslaved african muslims to establish the dignity of the soul are incalculable. ironically, the increasing effort toward the christianization of the enslaved population with the intended aim to bring western civilizing effects upon them only strengthened the resolve of the enslaved african muslims to maintain their faith and their value system even at the cost of their lives. between the ending of the napoafroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 13 leonic wars in 1815 and 1832, a crescendo of slave rebellions occurred throughout the british west indies. although the creole (island-born) population constituted 80 per cent of the enslaved population, the rebellions were led by the slave elite ‒ who were born in africa and enjoyed respect from the others because of their positions on the estates based on their skills. among the insurrections of the enslaved, the most important ones were: in barbados in 1816; demerara, in guyana in 1823 and with its climax in jamaica in 1831‒1832. although commonly known as a baptist rebellion, it was a jihād in response to a call made through a wathiqa, a pastoral letter urging the ummay-i-islamiyah (the followers of islam) to rise against the oppressive slave system.32 although the revolt lacked a centralized leadership, it assumed the dimension of an islandwide uprising and spread over an area of 750 square miles, involving about sixty thousand enslaved people from more than three hundred estates. though brutally repressed, the rebellion convinced the british parliament that it would be prudent to bring an end to the system that was no longer viable in an industrial capitalistic era, which required sustained loyal workers who enjoyed a degree of consuming power. the aim of the jihād of 1831‒1832 was to free the enslaved from bondage and make them wage earners. while freedom from bondage established the dignity of the soul of the enslaved african muslims, the abolition of the slave system created a consuming population for the industrialized magnates in britain who controlled the british parliament. however, abolition of the slave system in the british west indies and industrialization in england did not lead to the economic upliftment of the newly freed africans but put them in perpetual economic poverty. freedom from bondage required them to maintain themselves. with no land ownership, the long standing agricultural skills of the freed africans went underused and wasted with a consequential plummeting of agriculture and food production. neither did the former enslaved population have access to educational institutions nor vocational training to better their lives. once again, the victims of the abominable slave system became easy prey to the evils of a capitalistic industrial system. michael craton succinctly concludes that the slave rebellions throughout the british west indies were a “heroic, but heroic failure.”33 he further adds: “formal emancipation was little more than a hegemonic trick. new forms of slavery were instituted by importing asiatic coolies or simply wage slavery.”34 the west indian plantocracy reformed, it joined ranks with the power of industrial capital, which replaced the landed aristocracy in the new british parliament, so that they continued to rule for at least a hundred years after 1838. the american journal of islamic social sciences 29:114 the moghul islamic wealth although eric williams states that “the rise and fall of mercantilism is the rise and fall of slavery,” british mercantilism and commercial imperialism expanded in asia with the abolition of the slave institution in the west indies. british west indian plantation monopoly and british east india company’s monopoly of the china trade came to an end in the 1830s. the nature of colonialism, capitalism, and mercantilism changed with the abolition of slavery. british monopoly of world commerce, mercantilism, capitalism, and colonialism assumed a grandiose scale. the age of laissez faire also saw the direct involvement of the british imperial government in upholding its national honor by protecting the interests of the british citizens in their quests for commercial mercantilism, capitalism, and acquisition of raw materials for british industries and markets for british manufactured goods. in short, with the abolition of monopoly charters to private british companies, the british imperial government replaced the companys’ role to maintain commercial and trade relations with foreign countries, often leading to the forceful opening of the latter to british establishment of political and diplomatic relations. colonies of small-scale economies of the british west indies were replaced by colonial economies of outstanding prosperity such as moghul india and imperial china as they were essential to the development and survival of the british imperial-industrial complex. while india and the chinese island of hong kong became british colonies, the entire yangtze valley, with the port of shanghai, in imperial china became a british sphere of interest containing some of the most exploitative institutions. aas eric williams claims, british mercantilism in the post-slavery period was neither dead nor damned.35 the period following the abolition of slavery, saw the accumulation of bullion by the british treasury for a sound economy, a favorable balance of trade worldwide, and the development of agricultural and industrial manufactures. these essentials of mercantilism were better secured directly by the british government, and its continuance required direct political and military control over geographic territories worldwide rather than being maintained by monopoly company holders who often lacked the military power to protect british citizens and their interests or who lacked diplomatic recognition. subsequent to the loss of the thirteen british north american colonies in 1783, following the american revolution, it became important to locate exploitable treasures to keep the wheels of british industrialization in motion. the riches of moghul india were opened to the britafroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 15 ish treasury in 1757, when through the east india company, britain gained a foothold in the subcontinent unseating the legal nawab of bengal, sirajuddaullah,36 through treacherous and devious policies. britain turned to india aiming to turn the indian economy into the classical colonial mould. the british exchequer was aware of the immense wealth of the east as the oriental trade in silk, muslin, cotton, and piece-goods, dominated by the east india company, which had brought in extraordinary gains to the nation as early as the late seventeenth century. india, a predominantly hindu nation, had come under muslim rule from the early thirteenth century. islam had made its first appearance in the subcontinent in 712 ac. unlike the british raj, the great moghuls of india, beginning with babur in 1526, enriched the country and have left their mark in the history of medieval india not only as conquerors but as builders of a great empire ‒ of which present day india boasts of its proud heritage. the rule of the six great moghul emperors ended in 1706 and gave way to the nominal reign of the weaker moghuls, wo were exploited by the east india company when it became a territorial power in 1757. by 1760, britain became the dominant power in india, though direct crown rule was not imposed until 1858 following the indian sepoy mutiny and the deposition of the last moghul ruler, bahadur shah ii. india, under the moghuls, was the home of cloth manufacture and the greatest and almost the sole supplier of the hundred varieties of her well-known cotton goods, precious stones, drugs, and other valuable products.37 it was said “all the gold and silver of the universe found a thousand and one channels for entering into india, but there was not a single outlet for the precious metals to go out of the country.”38 evidently, the coins of the moghul rulers of india were minted from new world silver.39 european demands for goods from india saw the immense and constant inflow of gold and silver into the indian empire, which made the masses live in ease and comfort under the great rule of the moghuls. moghul india, best known for the taj mahal, one of the seven wonders of the world, had accomplished a high level of cultural achievement in the arts, literature, history, philosophy, poetry, science, and architecture. the exploitation of india, initiated by the east india company with the tacit approval of the british imperial government soon after the battle of plassey in 1757, set in motion the industrial revolution in england with a rapidity of changes that “probably nothing has ever equaled.”40 evidence further suggests that “probably between plassey and waterloo a sum of ₤1,000 million was transferred from indian hoards to english banks.”41 in short, an average of ₤17.2 million per annum flowed into the british economy from the american journal of islamic social sciences 29:116 india. while the muslim rulers of bengal had collected ₤818,000 in land revenues between 1764 and 1765, the british authorities in india enjoyed land revenue of ₤3,235,259 in 1794 and1795.42 in india, the scale of british exploitation is horrendous. since bengal was the richest province in moghul india, it probably paid an unparalleled price: “in bengal alone, up to 20 million people were slaughtered at the end of the 18th century.”43 in short, within a span of forty years, the british raj had eliminated twenty million people by the use of brute force. the tragedy of india in terms of human loss and material wealth was, therefore, no different than that of west africa. the ruby that adorns the crown of great britain best exemplifies the british exploitation of the wealth of moghul india. the british acquisition of the riches of moghul india, known as the “jewel” within the british empire, helped augment the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and finally the abolition of the enslaved system in 1838. with the acquisition of territorial power in india, the east india company, with no investment cost, took control and directed the cultivation of sugar in 1787, in a bid to maintain its supremacy in the british sugar trade. in the same year, wilberforce was encouraged by prime minister pitt to sponsor the proposal for the abolition of the slave trade, on which the west indian sugar monopoly was maintained. the first shipment of indian sugar of 202 tons valued at ₤22,345 reached england in 1791.44 imports of indian sugar increased to 11,041 tons, valued at ₤545, 937, in 1800. british sugar consumers paid less for indian sugar than for west indian sugar. hence, the demand for the abolition of slave trade, on which the west indian sugar plantations depended, was a compassion for the british consumers rather than for the caribbean slaves. wilberforce had at his heart the interest of the british people he represented as a member of the british parliament. he regarded the enslaved africans as “uncivilized” who “were particularly prone to rebel.”45 he stressed the civilizing of the slaves for the preservation of the prosperity and tranquility of the british west indian colonies. although wilberforce urged the british parliament to provide for the moral and religious instruction of the negroes, his primary concern was the security and well-being of the british planter class and the promotion of the british industrial interest and not the upliftment of the enslaved africans or the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the enslaved. at the core of the declining slave economy was the moral bankruptcy of the plantation masters rather than of the enslaved people who for the most part came from scholarly lineage that they displayed in their demeanor. craton writes: “absenteeism had become the rule for west indian estates by the middle of the eighteenth century.”46 the most successful planters such as the beckfords, the hibberts, the longs, the gladstones, the codringtons, afroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 17 the warners, the pinneys, and the marryats, returned to england once they collected their fortunes. “thereafter.” craton suggests, “the plantations were in the hands of overseers and attorneys, the most mediocre members of the imperial middle class.”47 referring to the few planters who remained in towns or in “great houses,” craton says, “at best, the politest society in the west indies was a pale and philistine imitation of life in the metropolis.”48 by the early nineteenth century, british west indian monopoly in sugar was “unsound in theory” and “unprofitable in practice” in the face of sufficient and cheap supply of sugar produced by free labor in india.49 sugar cost the british people annually more than one and a half million pounds sterling in the late 1820s.50 two-fifths of the price of every pound of sugar consumed in england represented the cost of production, two-fifths went in revenue to the government, and the west indian planter received one-fifth in tribute.51 evidently, the commercial plantation economy throughout the west indies was mortally ill. the high rate of capital depreciation caused by maroon wars, repeated slave rebellions on the estates accompanied by destruction of plantation infrastructure, and the maintenance cost of the enslaved population, imposed an unbearable burden on the gross revenue of the plantations in the west indies. jamaica, the largest of the british west indies islands, had a frightful situation where debt, disease, and death were the only three topics of conversation. according to eric williams, “65 plantations had been abandoned, 32 were sold under decrees of the court of chancery to meet claims against them” between 1799 and 1807.”52 in addition, in 1807, suits were pending against 115 others. the price of west indian sugar was less than the cost of production in 1806, and the planter made no profit in 1807. the decline in the economic value of the west indies to the british economy, initiated by the independence of the united states of america, was furthered by haitian independence on january 1, 1804 from france. the independence of haiti brought an end to british attempts to acquire this large sugar-plantation economy based on slavery. the success of the enslaved africans in haiti to create the first black nation in the western hemisphere caused trepidation and alarm throughout the plantation economy in the americas of similar massive slave insurrections. in addition, the british west indian slave economy showed signs of economic bankruptcy not only because sugar lost its importance with the competing indian sugar and the introduction of beet sugar but also because of the expanding textile industries of manchester and lancashire. the wealth of moghul india also increasingly became important during the commercial warfare between britain and france in the early ninethe american journal of islamic social sciences 29:118 teenth century, which seriously challenged not only the transatlantic trade in africans but also the viability of the west indian plantation system. britain through orders in council was able to establish a naval blockade of north european ports to all trade and the closure of all coastal trade between european ports under french control. napoleon, in retaliation, proclaimed the continental system, whereby he declared a blockade of the british isles and closed the european ports under his control to english goods. british slave ships sailing from west africa to the caribbean and to liverpool were at high risks. the commercial warfare extended into the caribbean, and american commercial interests, which initially flourished because of its neutral position, gradually got caught in a vise. scores of american merchant vessels were captured by the british navy on grounds that they were trading illegally between enemy ports in the caribbean normally closed to foreign trade.53 britain had established a virtual blockade of the key ports on the atlantic coast and in the gulf of mexico. the british navy patrolled the coast of the united states to capture goods from american vessels and to reship them to european ports. the british further infuriated americans by their practice of impressment. many british sailors attracted by the comparatively higher wages deserted their own vessels to join american crews. as a result, british ships were hard pressed for experienced sailors. under british law the navy had the authority to stop any neutral vessel, take off all english subjects and impress them into service. consequently, many american ships were stopped and searched for potential recruits. between 1793 and 1811, the british captured about ten thousand native-born americans ‒ along with english, swedes, danes, and portuguese sailors.54 the practice of impressment indicated the dire need of adequate and experienced sailors for british ships at a time when napoleon renewed hostilities with england, which lasted until 1815. moreover, the slave trade “was in reality the grave of the sailors employed in it.”55 according to thomas clarkson, the slave trade exacted an annual toll of two thousand british sailors. he said, “if, therefore, we have any regard to the lives of seamen, we ought to abandon a branch of trade which dissipates the men in so unprofitable a manner.”56 under such circumstances, it would seem that the abolition of the slave trade was more prudent to meet the wartime exigencies of the british navy in terms of experienced naval personnel upon which depended the security of the british isle and the british empire from napoleonic hegemony. the abolition of the slave trade by great britain in 1807 also came at a time when the united states, in an effort to counter the british blockade of its seaboard, put an embargo on the export of american goods by sea or by land.57 the stoppage of american foodstuffs and supplies caused afroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 19 real distress in the west indies.58 the hard lessons from the american revolution alerted the british imperial authorities of the implications of another war with america and its consequential impact on the enslaved population. between 1780 and 1787, fifteen thousand slaves died of famine in jamaica.59 when the british parliament took the decisive step to abolish the atlantic slave trade in 1807, wilberforce and his supporters voted in favor of the abolition of the transatlantic trade in africans to ease the economic distress and insecurity of the british planter class. wilberforce’s role in parliament over the abolition of the slave trade issue, leading to the final demise of the slave institution ,has earned him the position as the indisputable abolitionist leader in west indian historiography ‒ leaving no room for the sacrifices made by the enslaved africans on the plantations and the unquestionable part played by the african muslims in west africa to bring an end to the crime against humanity. on the other hand, the abolition of the slave trade has elevated the image of the british government to higher moral grounds. the atrocities committed upon the enslaved africans remain submerged under the pretentious “goodness” of those who created and perpetuated the brutal system. on the occasion of the bicentenary celebration of the demise of the pernicious trade, the achievements of wilberforce as the leading abolitionist of the slave trade and slavery were celebrated with applause in the political and ecclesiastical halls in great britain, even after two hundred years of the abolition of the transatlantic trade in africans. the image of the victims remains as the uncivilized, violent, idolatrous africans influenced by evil spirits and devoid of the basic intellectual faculties to question the injustices and oppression inflicted upon them. the lack of written evidence on the part of the enslaved to authenticate their role in the emancipation of themselves has blinded the revelation of the truth in historical writing. ironically, traditional west indian history based on recorded documents of the planters, the colonial officials, and the ecclesiastical circles, echo the accolade of the british masters. moghul indian capital and british industrialization admittedly, the labor of the enslaved africans was the key to the development of the americas and the wealth created initially by business in enslaved africans and subsequently by african labor power was integrated into the manufacturing and industrial capitalism, leading to the emergence of an extra-european world market.60 the capital accumulated within the world market was reinvested for the further development of industrial production. but the plantation economy based on the enslaved the american journal of islamic social sciences 29:120 population in the british west indies was no longer expansive but restrictive and limited in nature to the expanding demands of an industrialized consumer economy of great britain by the late-eighteenth century. plantation system had outgrown itself and was no longer viable in the machine age. large-scale resources, capital, and market were essential for sustaining the continued growth of the british industrial capitalism and its world market. india with its accumulated capital and its wealth in terms of human and natural resources became the easy source of exploitation for the growth of the english imperial capitalistic economy. scholars have suggested that “possibly since the world began, no investment has ever yielded the profit reaped from the indian plunder, because for nearly fifty years great britain stood without a competitor.”61 with the consolidation of the east india company rule, the flight of capital from india increased to a horrendous scale at the expense of the development of the native resources of india. this is illustrated by a declaration made by john sullivan, a company’s servant for twenty-nine years and president of the madras board of revenue before a parliamentary committee set up in 1848, to investigate the conditions of india, which was then fast deteriorating: our system acts very like a sponge; drawing up all the good things from the banks of the ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the thames. . . . the demands . . . (on the people) are incessant and facilities for meeting these demands are in a great measure denied to them.62 evidently, the exploitation of indian wealth had a dramatic rise following the abolition of slavery in the british west indies. after wars, pensions, and 10.5 percent dividends had been paid, the parliamentary committee found that with revenues of £20,000,000 a year ‒ or £300,000,000 between 1833 and 1847 ‒ plus £16,000,000 in loans, the east company in india had spent only a little over £100,000 annually, or a total of a million and a half sterling for desperately needed public works in all its territories.63 evidence further suggests that the indian taxpayer met all administrative expenses incurred within britain as well as india.64 india’s very large export surplus on a merchandise balance of trade between 1814 and 1858 was also unilaterally transferred to britain to settle overseas debt and administrative expenses incurred within britain.65 britain’s foreign debts in the 1780s amounted to about £31million. under such dire british financial conditions, it is quite plausible that moghul india’s wealth also went toward the payment in compensation for the emancipation of the enslaved to some of britain’s most influential citizens and institutions. among them were william gladstone’s family, which had received £85, afroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 21 600 in 1837 in compensation for 2,183 slaves, the hibberts (of hibbert journal of theology, religion and philosophy) got £31,120 for 1,618 slaves, and joseph marryat of lloyd’s was awarded £15,000 compensation for 391 slaves in trinidad and jamaica.66 historians maintain the argument that sugar did not have sufficiently large total output to be a major contributor to the savings that funded the industrial revolution.67 the role of indian cotton in impelling the whole british economy forward into rapid industrial growth is immeasurable. the manufacturing and commercial interests in england, particularly the manchester chamber and the lancashire cotton industries, made india a potential supplier of raw materials and an importer of cheap machine-produced textiles from britain68 ‒ thus ruining indian industries, particularly the cotton industry of bengal.69 great britain’s cotton needs were wellsecured with the acquisition of indian territories having the finest cotton tracts by lord dalhousie through the application of the doctrine of lapse in the 1840s and 1850s. although american cotton was cheaper and formed an important source for lancashire industries, its supply was often hindered due to short crops in the 1830s and 1840s.70 india, thus, became not only the most important source of cotton, but also a market for british-manufactured cotton goods for about two million people. manchester’s dependence on india became more vital with the outbreak of the civil war in the united states. besides cotton, other important export items from india between 1814 and 1857 were sugar, indigo, piece-goods, raw silk, opium, spices, oilseeds, jute, and various other miscellaneous goods.71 while the west indies sugar plantation economy based on the capital-intensive slave system became unprofitable and burdensome to the imperial government, india, with the vastness of the country and its riches, drew the attention of the political leaders, traders, capitalists, and manufacturers of britain. robert p. thomas views the west indies plantation colonies as retarding british economic growth because the capital invested in the west indies could have earned higher returns if invested elsewhere.72 while the wealth of jamaica was £28,040,217, the total wealth of the british possessions in the caribbean at the time of the american revolution was £51, 926,327.73 as stated earlier, in sharp contrast, with no british investment, £1,000 million was transferred from india to british banks between 1757 and 1815. bengal sugar also showed a phenomenal increase from 1836 to 1837 and onwards as a result of the equalization of duties on the east india products with those from the west indies.74 ironically, some of the leading abolitionists of the west indian monopoly had interests in the east india the american journal of islamic social sciences 29:122 company which enjoyed monopoly in the india and china trade. members of the clapham sect who advocated the abolition of slavery had east indian interests. they expressed disappointment at the “unfair discrimination of the sugar duties in favour of the west indies and against the growing sugar plantations of india.”75 zachary macaulay, regarded as an abolitionist, had shares in the east india company. his stance was more against west indians’ right to claim the continuance of a protecting duty on sugar, which was harmful to the interests of india ‒ that is, the east india company and to great britain ‒ rather than the abolition of slavery.76 james cropper, the greatest importer of east india sugar into liverpool also advocated the abolition of the west indian monopoly. his trade of a thousand pounds of sugar a day from india and imported slave-grown cotton from the united states speak of his own interests rather than of the immorality of the institution of slavery. the interests of the entire british empire, and more particularly of the manufacturing districts, were bound up intricately with those of the indian position among her majesty’s dominions. british india and the anglo-chinese trade india was also central to the british trade with china. there was a steady demand for indian cotton as a basic ingredient of india’s trade with china. together with opium, it was used to pay for the tea and silk brought to meet the demands of the british consumers.77 by 1773, the east india company established a monopoly on the opium cultivation under the bengal government which was under company rule since 1757. the rich paddy fields of india became the cultivable lands for the production of opium. repeated famines occurred in india between 1770 and 1878 because of shortages of crops due to the planting of poppies instead of rice or other grain by the peasants under undue pressure and order from the company. the canton trade in the eighteenth century was heavily one-sided in china’s favor.78 foreign traders bought tea, silk, rhubarb and other articles with gold and silver, while the middle kingdom imperial china ‒ had no need for the western products. very often 90 percent and sometimes as high as 98 percent ‒ of the east india company’s shipment to china was gold, and only 10 percent commodities.79 reversal in the balance of trade became the dictated policy of the british in the pursuit of its larger interest to open markets and to acquire the rich supplies of raw materials from china, which had made the middle kingdom a self-sufficient nation for centuries. the balance in china’s favor slipped the other way from the early 1830s with the dramatic rise in british export of opium to china from india. opium, which was a banned item of trade by the chinese govafroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 23 ernment, fetched extraordinary profit in the company’s trade with china. moreover, opium provided over 9 percent of the company’s revenue in india in 1828 and 1829 and had risen to 12 percent in the 1850s. following the abolition of the company’s monopoly of the china trade in 1834, the british sold $18 million worth of bengal opium in china against the $17 million worth of chinese tea and silk, which they bought in 1836.80 without the opium trade, the british would have suffered a severe trade deficit. opium had become the economic panacea for the british trade doldrums. consequent to the abolition of the institution of slavery in the british west indies, the enslavement of the chinese began with the opium war in 1840. regarded by chinese marxist historians “as the epitome of evils of capitalism and imperialism,” the resulting events of the opium war plunged the self-sufficient affluent chinese empire into the abyss of european colonialism for a century.81 imperial china like india had the natural resources and the consuming market for the british industrial manufacturers. it also had human resources required by the plantations in the british west indies. the ruining of the two great empires went handin-hand for the success of an ever expanding british industrialization. while the former moghul india empire became part of the british imperial colonialism, china was reduced to the status of semi-colonialism, characterized by an inefficient, powerless imperial chinese government manipulated by the european powers for profit and plunder and a slice of the chinese melon. the opium war was a confrontation between two divergent societies ‒ a self-sufficient, agrarian china based on confucian philosophy, at the core of which were the values of humaneness, loyalty and filial piety; and an expansive, industrial britain, interested in the profits of trade. while the chinese concept of their superiority was culturally derived from the confucian emphasis on the power of example, to the british it was national honor established on the premise of military prowess. in the aftermath of the opium war, imperial china with approximately 430 million people became britain’s largest consuming market. foreign cotton textiles and other consumer goods poured into china after 1842. the total value of the merchandise imported from britain in 1842 was about ₤1 million, and by 1845 it was ₤2.4 million. by the mid-1840s, the prosperous centers of native textiles in kiangsu province lost half of their volume of trade to the influx of cheap manufactured textiles from britain. the textile factories of birmingham and manchester eventually destroyed the indian textile trade and the chinese household cotton industries.82 highlighting the importance of british textile to its economy, f. the american journal of islamic social sciences 29:124 m. eden wrote: “the exportation of a piece of british broadcloth is more beneficial to us than the re-exportation of a quantity of bengal muslin or of west india coffee of equal value.”83 similarly, woolens were exported to china even when the market was not good but “it was considered a moral obligation.”84 as a result of the destruction of the indigenous industries in india and china, there was no local demand for the raw material ‒ that is, cotton and, hence, raw cotton found its way to english textile industries. the human resources of both india and china had concerns about the acute labor shortages on the plantations following emancipation of the enslaved in 1838. after efforts to recruit indentured laborers from africa and europe had failed, planters demanded other labor sources such as china and india. between 1838 and 1917, approximately half a million east indians came to the caribbean. most of these indian immigrants were imported to serve in the sugar estates of guyana and trinidad. almost 16 percent, or about 80,000, of them were muslims. one-third of the east indian population was female. although the exact number of immigrants who came to jamaica between 1845 and 1917 is unclear, evidence suggests that about thirty-seven thousand landed in jamaica, representing only 8.5 percent of the total indentured east indians imported into the british west indies.85 with the end of the opium war, the port of amoy in china was the first to witness the participation of foreign nationals in coolie traffic, which caused friction between the chinese officials and the foreign traders. the coolie trade, spread to other ports that were opened to foreign traders under the treaty of nanking in 1842. prior to the opium trade, macao was the home for the barbarian western traders, and canton, the traditional trading port of imperial china, and hong kong, which became a british colony, saw the migration of the chinese. approximately eighteen thousand chinese were brought to the british west indies as immigrant laborers between 1838 and 1918. while the majority of the chinese immigrant laborers, constituting 76 percent of the total, entered trinidad, while jamaica received 6.4 percent of the chinese.86 conclusion the abolition of the institution of slavery was substituted with the institution of indentureship in jamaica and in the wider british west indies. since economic interest lay at the root of indentureship, the asian immigrant workers experienced the horrors of plantation life under deceitful contracts. the wealth of moghul india and of imperial china was incomprehensible, incalculable, and direct control over the two counafroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 25 tries assured british industrial supremacy and colonial hegemony over the world for centuries to come. from the mid-1850s, the outbreak of almost every rebellion either in india or imperial china had a direct repercussion in the west indies or in the americas at large, for the rebellions were reactions to the british imperial policies in china or india. with the indentured laborers from india and china in the west indies, imperial britain continued the exploitation of human labor while it further enhanced its commercial industrial capitalism throughout asia and africa. endnotes 1. see sylviane a. diouf, ed., fighting the slave trade: west african strategies, athens, oh: ohio university press and oxford: james currey, 2003. 2. martin a. klein, “defensive strategies: wasulu, masina, and the slave trade,” in fighting the slave trade, ed., sylviane a. diouf (athens, oh: ohio university press and oxford: james currey, 2003), 71. 3. joseph e. inikori, “the struggle against the transatlantic slave trade: the role of the state,” in fighting the slave trade, ed., sylviane a. diouf (athens, oh: ohio university press and oxford: james currey, 2003), 192. 4. adama gueya, “impact of the slave trade on cayor and baol: mutations in habitat and land occupancy,” in fighting the slave trade, ed., sylviane a. diouf (athens, oh: ohio university press and oxford: james currey, 2003), 50‒55. 5. kevin shillington, history of africa (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2005) 224 and ira m. lapidus, a history of islamic societies (cambridge,uk: cambridge university press, 1994, p. 511. 6. sylviane a. diouf, “the last resort: redeeming family and friends,” in fighting the slave trade, ed., sylviane a. diouf (athens, oh: ohio university press and oxford: james currey, 2003) , 91. 7. see appendix, “islam and the discountenance of slavery”, in sultana afroz, invisible yet invincible: the muslim heritage of the maroons and the enslaved africans in jamaica (london: austin & macauley, forthcoming). 8. lapidus, a history of islamic societies, 518. 9. ibid., 519. 10. basil davidson, the africa slave trade, new york (little, brown, 1980), 33. 11. samory rashid, “islamic influences in america: struggle, flight, community,” journal of muslim minority affairs 19, no.1 (1999), 12. the american journal of islamic social sciences 29:126 12. hugh a. s. johnson, the fulani empire of sokoto (london: oxford university press, 1967), 111. 13. ibid. 14. ibid, 230. 15. gueye, “impact of the slave trade on cayor and baol: mutations in habitat and land occupancy,” 55. 16. waibinte e. wariboka, ruined by “race”: afro-caribbean missionaries and the evangelization of southern nigeria, 18951925, trenton, ny: africa world press, 2007, 201‒203. 17. ibid., 201. 18. edward blyden, “mohammedanism in western africa”, in henry schieffelin, ed., the people of africa: a series of papers on their character, condition, and future prospects (new york: a. d. f. randolph, 1871), 76. 19. see gwendolyn mildo hall, slavery and african ethnicities in the americas: restoring the links (kingston, jamaica and miami, fl: ian randle publishers, 2006). 20. rashid, “islamic influences in america,” 13. 21. see sultana afroz, “from moors to marronage: the islamic heritage of the maroons in jamaica,” journal of muslim minority affairs 19, no. 2 (1999): 161‒79 and sultana afroz, “the jihād of 1831‒32: the misunderstood baptist rebellion in jamaica,” journal of muslim minority affairs 21, no.2 (2001): 227‒43. 22. see walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa (london: bogle l’ouverture publications ltd., 1988). 23. selwyn h. h. carrington, “the united states and the british west indian trade, 1783-1807,” in verene shepherd and hilary mcd. beckles, eds., caribbean slavery in the atlantic world (kingston, jamaica: ian randle publishers, 2000, 343. 24. ibid., p. 352. 25. eric williams, from columbus to castro: the history of the caribbean, 1492-1969 (london: andre deutsch, 1983), 284. 26. andrew j. o’shauhnessy, “eric williams as economic historian,” in heather cateau and s. h. h. carrington, eds., capitalism and slavery fifty years later: eric eustace williams—a reassessment of the man and his work (new york:peter lang publishing, inc., 2000), 102. 27. ibid., 107. 28. see the surat baqarah in the holy qur’ān. afroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 27 29. george antonius, the arab awakening: the story of the arab national movement (new york: paragon books, 1979, original edition, ‒ new york, g. p. putnam’s sons, 1946), 223. 30. ibid., 249. 31. t. e. lawrence, seven pillars of wisdom (middlesex, uk: penguin books, 1962), 24. 32. philip d. curtin, ed., africa remembered; narratives by west africans from the era of the slave trade (madison, wi: university of wisconsin press, 1968), 164; sultana afroz, “the jihād of 18311832: the misunderstood baptist rebellion in jamaica,” journal of muslim minority affairs 21, no. 2 (2001): 227‒43. 33. craton, “the passion to exist: slave rebellion in the british west indies 1650-1832,” journal of caribbean history 13 (1980): 19. 34. ibid. 35. brijen kishore gupta, sirajuddaullah and the east india company, 1756–1757, background to the foundation of british power in india (leiden, the netherlands,1962). 36. eric williams (with a new introduction by colin palmer), capitalism and slavery (kingston, jamaica: ian randle publishers, 2005), 140. 37. bal krishna, commercial relations between india and england, 1601‒-1757 (london: george routledge, 1924), 273‒74. 38. ibid., 274. 39. paul lunde, “monsoons, mude and gold,” saudi aramco world, july/august, 2005, 8. 40. tara chand, history of the freedom movement in india, vol. 1 (calcutta, india: publications division, ministry of information and broadcasting, 1961), 369 and 389. 41. ibid., 387. 42. romesh dutt, the economic history of india under early british rule, vol. i (new delhi, india: government of india, 1970), . 85 and 450. 43. quoted in john rose, the myths of zionism (london: pluto press, 2004), 140. 45. michael craton, empire, enslavement and freedom in the caribbean (kingston, jamaica: ian randle publishers, 1997 oxford: james currey publishers, 1997, and princeton, nj: markus weiner publishers, 1997) 309. 46. michael craton, sinews of empire (garden city, nj: anchor, 1974), 201. 47. ibid., 201‒202. 48. ibid., 201. 49. williams, from columbus to castro, 138. the american journal of islamic social sciences 29:128 50. cited by williams, capitalism and slavery, 138, from w. naish, reasons for using east india sugar (london, 1828) 12. 51. williams, capitalism and slavery, 139. 52. williams, from columbus to castro, 281‒82. 53. rebecca brooks gruver, an american history, vol. 1 (reading, ma: addison-wesley publishing company, 1978) 136. 54. ibid., 137. 55. williams, from columbus to castro, 258. 56. quoted in ibid. 57. thomas a. bailey, a diplomatic history of the american people (englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall, inc., 1980), 129. 58. ibid., 128. 59. bryan edwards, the history, civil and commercial, of the british colonies in the west indies, vol. 2 (dublin, uk: luke white, 1793), 515. 60. cedric j. robinson, black marxism, the making of the black radical tradition (chapel hill, nc and london: the university of north carolina press, 1983), 113. 61. chand, history of the freedom movement in india, 369 and 389. 62. arthur w. silver, manchester men and indian cotton, 1847‒1872 (manchester, uk: manchester university press, 1966), 50. 63. ibid., 46. 64. neil charlesworth, british rule and the indian economy, 1800‒1914 (london: macmillan, 1982), 53. 65. k. n. chaudhuri, the economic development of india under the east india company, 1814‒1858 (cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, 1971), 36; also charlesworth, british rule and the indian economy, 52‒53. 66. williams, capitalism and slavery, 104‒105. 67. s.l. engerman, “british imperialism in a mercantilist age, 1492‒1849: conceptual issues and empirical problems,” revista de historia economica 16: 195‒231. 68. silver, manchester men and indian cotton, 1847‒1872, 58‒69. 69. ibid., 26; chand, history of the freedom movement, 369. 70. silver, manchester men and indian cotton, 58‒59 and 137. 71. chaudhuri, the economic development of india, 26. 72. r. p. thomas, “the sugar colonies of the old empire: profit or loss for great britain?,” economic history review 21 (1968): 30‒45. afroz: the role of islam in the abolition of slavery 29 73. quoted by kenneth morgan in slavery, atlantic trade and the british economy, 1660‒1800 (cambridge uk: cambridge university press, 2000), 57. 74. chaudhuri, the economic development of india, 34. 75. quoted in williams, capitalism and slavery, 186, from “introduction,” in k. bell and w. p. morrell, select documents on british colonial policy, 1830-1860 (oxford: oxford university press, 1928), xxx. 76. ibid. 77. silver, manchester men and indian cotton, 31. 78. harold m. vinacke, a history of the far east in modern times (london: george allen & unwin ltd., 1964), 34. 79. immanuel c. y. hsu, the rise of modern china (oxford: oxford university press, 1990), 168. 80. ibid., 173. 81. ibid., 4. 82. paul lunde, “the coming of the portuguese” saudi aramco, july/ august, 2005, 60. 83. f. m. eden, eight letters on the peace; and on the commerce and manufactures of great britain (london: j. wright, 1802), 129, cited by williams, capitalism and slavery, 134. 84. p. j. marshall, cambridge history of the british empire, vol. 2, cambridge, uk: cambridge university, 1929, 239. 85. walton look lai states that 36,412 east indian immigrants were imported into jamaica in indentured labor, caribbean sugar: chinese and indian migrants to the british west indies, 1838‒1918 (baltimore, md and london: john hopkins university press, 1993), 19. 86. walton look lai, the chinese in the west indies, 1806‒1995 (kingston, jamaica: the press university of the west indies, 1998), 6; between 1838 and the 1880s, approximately 600,000 chinese came to the americas. latin america and the caribbean received 45 percent of the chinese immigrants. cuba received the majority of about 142,000 immigrants. rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination of the future – commentary to ansell and colleagues urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa102004 doi: 10.11143/fennia.102004 reflections rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination of the future – commentary to ansell and colleagues tatek abebe and tanu biswas abebe, t. & biswas, t. (2021) rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination of the future – commentary to ansell and colleagues. fennia 199(1) 118–128. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.102004 in this piece, we reflect upon a recent article published in fennia by ansell and colleagues. we identify and discuss aspects of learning that educational research, policies and institutions can consider, addressing the needs and subjectivities of learners and activating a politics around rights in education. rights in education foreground the intrinsic value of learning, inviting us to realign the purpose of education with the overall purpose of life on this planet. it pursues a ‘bottom-up’ strategy for rethinking education as community formation to incorporate complex sources of knowledge and modes of knowing and becoming for children. in order to think about rights in education, we uphold an analytical distinction between schooling and education. the distinction enables us to raise some questions, reflect on them and suggest preliminary ideas for decolonial, childist strategies to envisage education, highlighting how education and the ‘future’ are intimately woven and exploring what they mean for each other and for childhood. we do so particularly by critiquing ‘western schooling’ as a mode of learning which is a conspirator of capitalism deeply rooted in philosophical racism and contributing to a global epistemological loss. finally, we outline four strategies of moving forward with a decolonial, childist lens of reimagining education as community formation and welcome further discussions on rights in education. keywords: rights in education, childhood, future, decoloniality, childism, community formation tatek abebe (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3811-0486), department of education and lifelong learning, norwegian university of science and technology, paviljong a, dragvoll loholt alle 7049 trondheim, norway. e-mail: tatek.abebe@ntnu.no tanu biswas (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4498-8703), department of philosophy, university of bayreuth, universitätsstr. 30, 95447 bayreuth, germany. e-mail: biswas.tanushree@gmail.com © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 119tatek abebe & tanu biswasfennia 199(1) (2021) introduction the article by ansell and colleagues (2020), on which this commentary is based, demonstrates how schooling in rural peripheries of the global south perversely engages ‘aspiration’ only to generate paradoxical outcomes for children and young people. one of these paradoxes is that whereas schooling is a privileged practice through which new social possibilities and futures can be imagined, it works as a hegemonic institution that shapes and often stifles creativity and ethical-moral alternatives. a second paradox is that although education is considered a basic human right, it is realized by making schooling an obligation that children cannot easily refuse. nor is what children learn in schools something that is co-developed in ways that attends to their needs and subjectivities. another paradox is that the task of educating future citizens in a common institutional framework is understood as means to equalize social and economic differences. yet, ongoing processes of privatizing and commodifying education contributes to a reality in which schooling increases social and economic inequalities not only of the present generation but also for the future. a further paradox is the discrepancy between the (opportunity) cost of educating children in schools, especially for low-income families and communities such as those in laos, india and lesotho; and the insecurity and uncertainties — and sometimes ‘disjuncture’— about children's educational outcomes and successes. ansell and colleagues (2020) ask the important questions as to why, despite these paradoxes, schooling is invested upon and remains overloaded with economic, moral and economic expectations and hopes. which processes sustain schooling as a social investment and as a privileged model of education for children in the rural peripheries of the global south? how and why the conditions of exclusion from the global economy and production of surplus populations continue to be facilitated by the project of schooling? the articles’ theorization on how schooling produces subjects who are alienated from their communities’ ways of life and livelihoods draws attention to what other, possibly relevant, knowledge systems are ‘out there’ that are not part of schooling, and consequently remain unacknowledged as education. global agendas on education for all (efa) and united nations development goals like millennium development goals (mdgs) and sustainable development goals (sdgs) that have re-scripted the purpose of education globally, pressure nations and their citizens to align themselves with a template of western schooling that is presumed to work everywhere. schooling is a mode of learning deeply rooted in and historically resonating with western colonial culture and practices of knowledge transmission, contributing to the ‘exclusion’ of a vast range of knowledge systems and traditions. the point with this critique is that the tendency to formalize or standardize that which is otherwise informal, or ‘the everyday,’ has failed children and young people in many social and cultural contexts of the global south. at the same time, as some of the most privileged school-children in the world are now going on school strikes for climate justice – asking whether the time they spend in school is pointless in the face of the planetary crisis – we begin to question whether this model serves children in the global north too. in this reflection piece, we build on these concerns of appropriate, relevant, and contextual learning for the future. we uphold the significance of activating debates around rights in education and facilitating a re-engagement with complex knowledge systems that are otherwise marginal or are excluded from mainstream knowledge economy. we do so by embracing powerful impulses from decolonial proponents and engaging with the education as community formation using the childist lens. our reflection begins by considering schooling through a critical decolonial lens which is not limited to the global south and concerns a north-south continuum. we then discuss the potential of the rights in education framework in challenging global knowledge orders that privilege schooling as a singular form of ‘education’ based on the supremacy of ‘white scientific knowledge’. that takes us to making a case for broadening pathways to rely on pluralist indigenous philo sophies to re-imagine education, childhood and future. finally, we discuss education as community formation in recognizing that in pursuing pluralist indigenous philosophies we risk embracing a regressive ideal of education that reinforces adult-child hierarchies. in conclusion, we propose four preliminary strategies and welcome engagement from stakeholders within the promising framework of rights in education. 120 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections schooling through the decolonial lens of global epistemic (in-)justice the valorization of schooling as an educational practice superior to other ways of knowing and learning reflects the unequal power relations that engender the paradoxes of schooling. in recent years, the notion of cultural imperialism has been invoked as a warning that knowledge and practices of international development (including global development goals and efa initiatives) are, in fact, historically specific to the western world and do not necessarily reflect the realities of children elsewhere. postcolonial scholars have proposed the term ‘epistemological violence’ to highlight hegemonic cultural interpretations of scientific knowledge that construct the ‘other’ as problematic or inferior, with implicit or explicit negative consequences for the ‘other’ (teo 2008; mbembe 2016). as serpell (2018) argues, the institutionalized public systems of schooling that draw on competitive, capitalist values not only promote an extractive definition of success but also inflict violence by stigmatizing unschooled children as ‘incomplete’ and ‘incompetent’. schoolchildren who are intellectually competent by indigenous cultural criteria but did not meet the official criteria for progression to the next grade often attribute their educational ‘failure’ to personal shortcomings (ibid.). santos (2014) argues further that the struggle for social justice today needs to move beyond addressing political and economic inequalities to also attend to ‘cognitive justice’ or ‘epistemic justice’. he notes that much of the knowledge produced in colonized and post-colonized societies has been incorporated into the mainstream school knowledge economy only marginally. contemporary schooling renders certain types of knowledge invisible, unlearned, silenced, ignored, or made irrelevant. this failure to include the knowledge systems of certain communities and societies or perceiving their knowledge as “pagan, mystic, non-scientific” – “epistemicide” (santos 2014, 30)— is a pervasive problem that represents the depoliticisation of knowledge and learning itself. schooling propels childhood to an imagined future, viewing children as ‘embodiments of the future’ and a site of social investment (kjørholt 2013). yet, the significance of schooling and what it teaches children is also nested in the culture and history of society. arguably, western schooling produces future workers who are servants of capitalism regardless of where in the world they are schooled. as ansell and colleagues (2020) systematically show with comparative examples from laos, lesotho and india, schooling in the global south particularly produces subjects who are in many ways a “surplus population” that is not necessary for the global capitalist economy or as katz (2011, 58) puts it – subjects who are rendered a “waste”. the future-working-child is meant to be schooled, but not educated so that she can be deployed into labor whenever needed. however, she is often dismissed and replaced or sits idle, hoping for fitting opportunities to arise that match her ever-increasing aspirations. this reality has crystalized in the world-wide problem of schooled unemployed youth who scramble for precarious jobs (jeffery 2005; jeffrey et al. 2010; clemens & biswas 2019). research also shows how schooling alienates children from rural futures and the physical environment, contributing to a decline in their skills for resource conservation and environmental management (abebe 2020; biswas & sharma forthcoming). this is not only because children have limited access to land as they come of age, but they are also learning about land in a socio-historical context that is characterized by rapid population growth, land-grabbing, deforestation, and environmental degradation. the destruction of the physical environment heightens young people's sense of displacement from the future. katz (2004) argues that this displacement is a consequence of rural communities’ insertion into the capitalist system that erodes existing patterns of social reproduction. thus, children learn farming or herding, but they have no land on which to do it, or they attend school long enough to learn skills that are inappropriate for non-agricultural employment (ibid). yet, as ansell and colleagues (2020) show, schooling also stimulates unattainable aspirations and what durham (2017) calls “elusive adulthoods”. the problem of schooled unemployment and elusive adulthoods whereby young people struggle to achieve their socio-economic aspirations are interlinked with the ‘academization of education’. schooling represents the academicization of education – a reductive practice that contributes to the ‘narrowing’ of knowledge (also see biesta 2015; fitzsimons 2002). in other words, we find that schooling abstracts societal knowledge in ways that disconnects learners from local realities. this abstraction of knowledge, in turn, contributes to the narrowing of complex knowledge systems that cannot be ‘scholarized’. 121tatek abebe & tanu biswasfennia 199(1) (2021) we argue that schooling is inherently a western epistemological project in which eurocentric systems of thought are imposed upon and expected to presumably alter, ‘tame’ or ‘civilize’ the subaltern and her ways of existing. we are particularly agitated by the pluralistic modes of knowing, doing, and becoming that have been erased and continue to be erased by the universal promotion of mass schooling under the pretext of fulfilling a ‘right to education’ which, in fact, concerns only the ‘right to schooling’. we mourn the alternative futures of childhoods that have been irrecoverably displaced due to the ‘ideal white pupil’ model and, as a result, the various meaningful versions of childhoods that have not been envisioned in both the global south and the global north. drawing upon critical comparative insights provided by ansell and colleagues (2020) and our respective scholarships on education and childhood over the past years, we find that schooling has contributed to taking children out of community forming economies globally. this involves not only spatiotemporal standardization of community life but also of childhood and children’s time so that their task is re-scripted to become only participation in institutionalized public schooling. yet, the incompatibility of the school calendar with communal agricultural work cycles engenders the ways compulsory schooling, for example, renders children – who must be absent from classes for sustaining the local economy of coffee production in ethiopia – as being problematic, ‘delinquents’ and ‘truants’ (abebe 2011, 2015). nieuwenhuys (1994) similarly argues that formal education led indian children’s life to be more burdensome as it did not relieve them from contributing to familial livelihoods but instead was added on top of those activities. these paradoxes imply the economic and cultural significance of childhood to society and reimagination of what meaningful education for children could be, invoking ideas of rights in education. rights in education we are interested in how communities strategize and push back against the supremacy of ‘white scientific knowledge’ and the privileging of schooling as a singular form of ‘education’. that is to say, the ways young people and their communities fight for rights ‘in’ education and not just right ‘for’ education. rights in education evokes questions that not only challenge the global knowledge order but also inscriptions of new practices through the mediums of resistance/revolution/activism so as to re-politicize knowledge and re-introduce it in the debates around epistemic justice. the ruptures in social reproduction require solutions in the projects of development and schooling by reorienting educational institutions as sites for reimagining learning. given that promises of education for a better future are not met, it is time to rethink education outside the neoliberal paradigm and delink schooling from market-driven requirements of the capitalist economy (ansell et al. 2020). a similar impulse comes from young climate activists from some of the most privileged welfare states in the world; young activists for whom neither the right to schooling, nor future income appears to be under threat. despite their materially privileged positions they choose to go on school strike and question the hours demanded of them in school, because the current fossil-fueled neoliberal economy puts the future right to life for them and future generations into threat. their indirect challenge to economic priorities of their governments, too, persuades us to move away from the discourse of rights ‘to’ education to instead inscribing rights ‘in’ education. rights in education activates an onto-epistemological politics that attaches intrinsic value to life and realigns the purpose of education with the overall purpose of sustaining life on the planet. unlike the right to education, which is about access, rights in education attend to the basic social, economic, cultural and gendered needs and subjectivities of learners as part of community formation processes. it draws attention to alternative strategies of intergenerational sharing of knowledge which seem to be neglected in the age-segregated context of schooling. rights in education proposes to define schooling curricula upward by including educational goals such as social justice, citizenship, diversity, values, learning in a global context, and sustainable development (wu & geo-jaja 2016). this ‘bottom-up’ approach to create the content of curriculum is indispensable because it opens a space to contest what constitutes knowledge and addresses the enduring legacy of colonialism that haunts schooling in the global south. it also helps to locate learning at the heart of a decolonial approach to reach the possibility of non-eurocentric modes of education. yet, given that the overheated planetary crisis that will continue 122 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections to confront the lifespans of the authors and readers of this text, and those lifespans that go beyond ours, there are additional touchstones of how a childist, decolonial analysis of rights in education should unfold in our view. the unprecedented case (earth justice 2019) filed by a transnational collective of 16 young climate activists including greta thunberg under the united nations convention on the rights of the child (uncrc), asserts that the climate crisis is a children’s rights crisis in so far as high carbon-emitting economic policies are violating the rights guaranteed to children by the uncrc, for example the right to life, health and prioritizing the best interest principle. complementary to this (and similar climate litigation cases filed by legal minors across the world) are courageous acts of non-violent civil disobedience, organised globally under the umbrella of the fridays for future movement, which appeal to profound pedagogical concerns that are directly linked to the rights of the future generation, environmental sustainability and post-colonial global inequity, for example by asking, “why study for a future if there is no future?” (biswas & mattheis 2021). their question not only evokes the crisis of existentialism heightened by a capitalist system that is under the verge of collapse, but also the childist dimension of deep interdependence (e.g. joseffson & wall 2020) and communities of care. nobel peace prize winner malala yousafzai’s advocacy for education that resonates with girls’ aspirations is another example of how young people are performing an educational task for their communities that ‘adultist’ educational structures of instrumental schooling fail to do. given these and other struggles for climate justice and educational justice (e.g. elaw 2017; eauc 2020; climate case chart 2020); it is time to recognize the inseparable question of childhood and education, acknowledging children as future-makers seriously (spyrou 2020) and considering how to enable their role in education for community formation. moving with the ‘relational ontological turn’ in critical childhood studies (spyrou 2018; spyrou et al. 2019) we understand ‘education’ as essentially an intergenerational relationship (see also hoveid & hoveid 2019). while education involves an intergenerational transfer of knowledge, values, and skills, we find that it also needs to be a reciprocal and co-generational process in order to enable younger generations to be active parts of community formation. by co-generational, we refer to a childist understanding of educational relationality that moves away from the hierarchy of adults as teachers and children as learners to instead fostering horizontal educational practices, with children and adults as co-learners. for example, by opening up to the philosophical richness that awaits adults if they participate in children’s playfully constructed worlds as guests (biswas 2020) or the courageous ways of socio-political civic engagement that adult citizens can learn from young activists who choose to go on school strike to fight for intergenerational climate justice, despite the harsh adultist reactions they must face (biswas & mattheis forthcoming) or in a broader socio-political sense involving questions of right to stay put (aitken 2018) and how city governance could be directly realized with children’s participation and perspectives (sundhall 2017). there is also a need for a shift from looking at intergenerational learning within families to harness the potential for extrafamilial places of intergenerational encounters as sites of learning (mannion 2018). a relational view on rights in education focuses on intergenerational dimensions of learning in interrelated contexts and spheres of life. it includes learning that takes place, yes, in schools and playgrounds, lecture theaters, and within school buildings but also with peers or siblings ‘at home’, on-line (in virtual spaces) and, most intriguingly, through embodied mobilities (in cars, on trains, and while walking, climbing, and playing) (abebe & waters 2017). yet, there is a sense that learning, in part, depends upon involvement in various activities: while herding, farming the fields, trading in the marketplace, or at weddings and festivities and funerals. rights in education also entails problemsolving and transformative education which are predicated on designing programs nested in progressive ideas of learning for the future. it foregrounds intergenerational dimensions of sociomaterial practice and learning, including in issues such as children’s rights and participation, and in wider society as it faces ecological and other challenges (mannion 2018, 314). while such a view of the intertwined question of education and childhood strongly resonates with the relational ontological turn in critical childhood studies, the childist lens particularly demands that the adult-as-teacher and child-as-learner hierarchy does not reproduce itself while ‘putting the child back’ into processes of community formation. 123tatek abebe & tanu biswasfennia 199(1) (2021) making a case for pluralist indigenous philosophies of childhood and education rights in education engenders the revitalization of indigenous knowledge and educational features that were rendered meaningless by colonial and neoliberal conditions. it calls forth the imagining of an inclusive education that is responsive to the subjectivities, contexts, and needs of multiple generations, addressing such questions as what education as community formation implies. our engagement with questions of rights in education not only bring to light issues of resistance to an unproblematized acceptance of school curriculum but also the need re-politicize knowledge, schooling, and learning in order to reintroduce them in the debates on educational justice as part of a larger global concern with epistemic (in)justice. on a pragmatic level this includes acknowledging the pedagogical significance and reactivating practices such as multilingualism, musical performance, and ways of transmitting collective memories like rituals, oral history, folklore, dance, art, handicrafts, proverbs, poetry, drama as well as architectures and technology that reflect the histories, cultures, and identities of pre-colonial societies (tedla 1995). on a philosophical level, this includes confronting the history of philosophical racism that has also seeped into philosophical commitments that underlie what constitutes ‘being educated’ and ‘being knowledgeable’ across the globe today. in our view, a way of confronting this history is by broadening scholarly and social pathways to rely on pluralist indigenous philosophies to re-imagine education, childhood and future. an example of a pluralist indigenous philosophy that embeds interdependent existence and can be helpful to understand how rights in education, childhood and the future are intertwined is ubuntu. ubuntu represents the worldviews of indigenous black populations of sub-saharan africa, transmitted from generation to generation through observation, experience, language, and art. the widely acknowledged maxim ‘i am who i am because of who we all are’ indicates that a pluralistic relationality is at the core of what it means to be a human being. the worldview of ubuntu reveals that “what happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual” (mbiti 1969, 106). ubuntu is about socialization, that is, how one would not know how to think, walk, speak, or behave unless s/he has learned it from others. at the same time, it is also about the spiritual dimensions of how a person needs other human beings to be human (tutu 2004, 25). ubuntu relationality is pluralistic as it is not about ‘i am ...because you are’ but rather ‘i am ...because we are’. ubuntu suggests that – like every member of the family and community – children develop personhood through social interactions, which means that they must “prize communal and harmonious relationships with others” (metz 2016, 324). this emphasis on the community over the individual does not reject the individual but acknowledges that the two are co-creators, interdependent, and mutually sustaining (see chilisa 2020). this implies that adults also realize their personhood through relationships with children, making room for a co-generational understanding of education for sustainable futures. the philosophy of ubuntu is consistent with the ideals of education for sustainable futures in so far as it emphasizes values of interconnectedness, including interpersonal values (regards for others); intrapersonal value (regard for self) and environmental values (regard for the environment) (maphala 2017). we find that it serves a pertinent role to help us grasp pluralistic relationalities, human-nature interaction and sustainable co-generational futures. serpell and adamson-holley (2017) further invite us to think about how the african traditional practice of assigning social responsibility to children from an early age is highly compatible with contemporary goals (if not practices) of education elsewhere. their argument is that african societies prime children to learn about sustainability and interdependence: knowledge about agriculture, environment, nutrition, sibling care and so on are not only part of learning and socialization that school curricula overlook but also necessary for cultivating social responsibility and peaceful coexistence. in calling for educational reforms, one ‘bottom-up’, ‘active learning’ educational strategy they found to be productive is what they call the ‘child-to-child approach’ (serpell & adamson-holley 2017). these forms of knowledge and strategies of learning push us into a space outside the binding strictures of the classroom as well as adults as educators. yet, in arguing for education that reflects local and indigenous knowledge systems one needs to be careful in how one advocates instilling pride in ‘local’ traditions, which can very quickly escalate to large scale nationalisms. sometimes such traditions need to be challenged in order to promote progressive social change, to redress the intersectional, hierarchical relations between classes, 124 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections genders and generations, exclusive injustices towards ethnic minorities, the differently casted and abled, and to resolve conflict between ethnic and religious groups. in other words, we recognize the philosophical value of ubuntu for a decolonial, childist approach to global education, but we exercise caution in so far as we do not automatically favor ‘local pride’. this is not the least because all forms of knowledge are in some ways ‘local’ but shared across space and over time. another example of an extra-familial site of decolonial learning is education in spiritual contexts. by spiritual learning, we imply the connection of humans with nature as well as a metaphysical appreciation of the significance of traditions and affirmation of all life as a powerful, culturally motivating force. what it means to be an educated person or a critical learning subject in spiritual settings differs from how the dominant western model of schooling views the child as a ‘tabula-rasa’ learner. across sub-saharan africa (as in most parts of the world), for example, western style schooling replaced diverse forms of education that emphasize spirituality – and religious education as well. schooling in sub-saharan africa is practiced as an antipode to, not alongside with, religious learning such as qur’anic education, which traditionally were the main sources of knowledge, literacy skills, and ethos of life for children as community members. such forms of education are based on different understanding of the purpose and goals of life, which include education, how to be critical learner as well as the meaning of children and childhood. islamic educational practices view children as a divine gift to be honored as part of the spiritual practices of adults too. in the age-old educational practices of the ethiopian orthodox church, the child is viewed as spiritually endowed and as possessing capacities that in certain ways exceed those of adults. the ‘rinponche children’ of the tibetan buddhist traditions (e.g., the dalai lama as a child) are similarly viewed as having onto-epistemological capacities that exceed those of most adults. in addition to how children may be viewed, another defining dimension of spiritual contexts is the relationship between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’. while ‘western schooling’ limits the value of inanimate objects to their usefulness for human beings, indigenous worldviews understand life and resulting human-nature relationality in a wider sense. such views are not limited to the african or asian continent but are also found, for example, in the indigenous sami spirituality of northern scandinavia too (bunikowski 2015). yet, doing away with spirituality as part of the ‘western’ secularization project instigates educational structures that chronically compromise on spiritual sensibilities that allow children to navigate the social, moral and emotional landscapes of their societies throughout their lifespans. we view this as a ‘global epistemological loss’ which is not restricted to societies in the global south like those that ansell and colleagues (2020) have studied. this is an important and often overlooked point; because spiritual learning is not just integral to children’s wellbeing and well becoming but it also enables them to develop meaningful and satisfying lives and fit constructively into their societies. article 27 of the uncrc is particularly relevant here as it explicitly recognizes the role of spiritual development not only in the realization of children’s ‘full potential’ and to flourish as human beings but also as integral to an ‘adequate standard of living’. we often witness child rights advocates (who seem to rely on the ‘ideal white pupil’ imagination) drawing attention to the cultural reasons why children’s rights to education are not fulfilled or the political economic and material deprivation that hinders effective learning in schools. however, what is neglected is how children realize rights in education and develop reciprocal and meaningful lives, as well as find happiness within a supportive community of educators outside formal schools, including in spiritual contexts (bourdillon 2014). with the above examples we demonstrate that it is necessary to make in-roads into pluralist indigenous philosophies of childhood and education by tapping into non-colonial histories and use historical knowledges as inertia to move forward progressively. the examples reveal the significance of the past in the present, invoking the notion of sankofa – a west african (akan) concept that means ‘to go back and fetch’ – lending interpretation for why history matters and its contemporaneity in the present-day lives and experiences of childhoods (tedla 1995). having said that, the challenge for a childist decolonial engagement remains that, in pursuing pluralist indigenous philosophies and revitalization of the ‘global epistemological loss’ which is a direct consequence of colonialism; one does not succumb to a regressive, adult-centric intergenerational ideal of education. what then could be some progressive decolonial childist strategies to re-imagine education as community formation that takes children as future-makers seriously? 125tatek abebe & tanu biswasfennia 199(1) (2021) reimagining education as community formation ansell and colleagues’ (2020) critique of schooling and the manipulation of aspiration that disappoint today’s generation of children and the wider society has ushered us to reflect upon the issue of ‘what beyond’ school systems globally. their comparative empirical insights presented have been impulses for us to connect ideas about educational philosophies, childhood, and the future as well as reimagine education that attends to the question of generational segregation. we think that the unjust crisis highlighted should not be tackled as solely a ‘global south’ issue but must be considered as part of a north-south continuum. the critique of schooling that is implicit in the climate protests of privileged children in the global north in conjunction with the dysfunctional implementations of the ‘right to education’ in the global south led us to discuss ‘schooling’ through the decolonial lens of epistemic injustice. the resulting global epistemological loss of various pluralistic indigenous philosophies that could have guided educational practices is related to the upkeep of ‘an ideal white school child’ whose present time is systematically claimed in the name of an education for a future that deters her from negotiating that future. rights in education, seems to be a promising framework for further engagement for decolonial responses. however, we remain alert that proceeding on a decolonial note that simultaneously minimises adult-child power hierarchies is a key hurdle in reimagining education as community formation. in this concluding section, we lay out four preliminary strategies of moving forward with a decolonial, childist lens of reimagining education as community formation. the first strategy is restructuring and reclaiming the spatio-temporality of global childhoods. since schooling and its conspirator – capitalism – ejected children out of community forming economies by separating social reproduction from that of economic production (e.g. katz 2004), there is a need to reclaim the space and time of childhood to develop children’s situated learning by facilitating their participation in familial and community livelihoods. this appears to be too obvious a point to make but it is an indispensable one. for example, learning through laboring-with-others is an integral part of children’s identity and gives value to what it means to be a child in diverse socio-cultural contexts of the global south. it increases children’s learning experiences through observation, the contribution of material value so vital to the sustenance of life as well as the transference of complexly valued and valuable skills that are rendered useless through schooling. this realization further persuades us to consciously partake in the decolonial project by imagining education that does not take children out of community forming economies. however, such practices need to be situated not only in the project of relevant and useful education but also in the re-conceptualization of intergenerational education as a co-generational exercise. the second strategy is altering the global economic and political structures, including moving away from capitalism as the modus operandi for which schooling is in service. as ansell and colleagues (2020) highlight, without schooling the capitalist system that creams off profit from the precarious labor market would not exist. this implies that the strategies of education for the future cannot be separated from delinking schooling from capitalism as well as the wider political and economic structures of neoliberalism. this strategy also requires models of education that disengage from western ideologies of international development that equate schooling with education. among other possibilities, such model should be realized with pluralist indigenous philosophies of childhood and education because they offer very rich spiritual understandings of the meaning of life as well as human-nature relationships. we also call for reimagination of education and learning beyond its curriculum to incorporate a temporal dimension knowledge sharing/transmission in which, for example, ancestral knowledge and philosophies such as ubuntu are linked with the knowledge and philosophies of the ancestors that the present generation will become. in other words, a reimagination of children’s education and futures to unfold not in a linear sequence but rather as an interlocking of pasts, presents, and futures or in which past and future resonate in the present. the third strategy is to make existing institutions and educational systems work. this can be achieved, for example, through cultivating educational practices for multiple generations and fostering intergenerational learning encounters in familial and community settings. in the global south, this might entail connecting more fully with aspects of learning that are situated in everyday livelihoods in which multiple generations take part. apprentice education can be one platform for intergenerational 126 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections relating and learning. however, it requires systematic planning and adequate political will and economic investment to facilitate its efficacy in transferring skills and knowledge across generations. in the global north, the existing institutional settings of kindergartens and old homes can be used as intergenerational learning sites where education and care for children and aging populations are combined. such intergenerational learning centers can potentially facilitate reciprocal learning and co-generational care for early childhood and old age, enhancing the reality of generational interdependence. finally, whereas there are aspects of education that can be adapted to local realities; we need to rethink the inseparable imaginations of childhood and education afresh, and address questions that engender rights in education for the future, in both the global south and the global north. promoting rights in education for community formation is entwined with questions of educational policies and practice. in tandem with fostering co-generational learning, there can be, for example, development of policies for non-formal education where children actively acquire skills alongside other generations outside schools. national educational policies could support shared community conceptions of a good life that are culturally enriching and morally and ethically justifiable. they could also promote diverse forms of education devised with children so that their learning is geared towards and is responsive to the wider cultural, socio-economic and political changes within their societies and beyond. the important role of language in schools and other contexts of education and in preparing children and young people to deal with transient livelihoods cannot be overemphasized. we propose these outlines to invite future discussions and debates on rights in 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(eds.) effects of globalization on education systems and development, 3–21. sensepublishers, rotterdam. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-729-0_1 key: cord-0058110-a65g316j authors: mukherjee, subham; kar, surajit; pal, sukdeb title: environmental disaster management and risk reduction date: 2021-03-18 journal: environmental management: issues and concerns in developing countries doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-62529-0_11 sha: 2bce6dc544e6f8453cd534db1ab88aa525ca3aa3 doc_id: 58110 cord_uid: a65g316j the environment can be well-defined as all forms that surround both living elements (such as humans or animals, fishes and birds) as well as non-living elements, itself classified as both moving (such as air and water) and non-moving (such as mountains and forests). human activities do interact with the bio-physical environment in a multifaceted manner connecting different geographical levels. the existence of all living forms on this planet gradually evolved to build a healthy and well-balanced environment throughout the space and time. the new economic demand should operate in a way that shields the biophysical environment to maintain the balanced and sustainable growth both at the present and in the future. we must not merely consider the natural resources, such as forests, as carbon sinks. rather, it is the time to reconsider them as vital resources that provide vital elements such as fresh air for our crucial survival. human beings inhale oxygen from the environment and release carbon dioxide back while plants simultaneously absorb carbon dioxide and give out oxygen, thus maintaining a balance between the two. another significant contributor to the ghgs is the livestock emission (mostly methane) which many of us often ignore. radical changes in either of the consumption-release patterns can lead to an unmanageable environmental balance. presently the world is facing enormous population growth and pressure. capitalism has fuelled it by exploiting natural resources at a faster pace than ever. formerly, nature itself used to check ecological balance through extreme events such as natural disasters as well as hazardous epidemics. the arrival of modern health care systems and advancements in the field of science and technology can control epidemics and diminish the effects of natural disasters today. at the same time, we are becoming increasingly susceptible to diseases and the rate is rapidly increasing. the complexity of the man-nature relationship has significantly altered in today’s world. in the past, nature was seen as necessary and beneficial on which amplification of human need in today’s world has left its footprint. therefore, a minor environmental change nowadays puts significant impacts on human life. however, the perception of what constitutes a ‘hazard’ and ‘disaster’ changes over time (paton and johnston, 2001; furedi, 2007). a hazard is a dangerous incident that brings a menace to humans, while a disaster is a stern disturbance striking over a shorter or longer duration that grounds extensive material and/or, or ecological loss for the both human and natural enevironments that surpasses the capacity of the impacted community to survive back using its immediate own resources again (hankins, 2015). hazards will be considered disasters once they affect humans, but if they occur in an unpopulated area, they will remain hazardous. since the man-nature relationship is not identical over different periods of time and at different places, the intensity of disasters or natural outbreaks are different accordingly (zhao et al., 2006). developing countries pay the most once a disaster hits. these fatalities in developing countries due to natural hazards are over 20 times bigger in terms of gdp than the industrialised countries (peduzzi et al., 2002). either of the consumption-release patterns can lead to an unmanageable environmental balance. presently the world is facing enormous population growth and pressure. capitalism has fuelled it by exploiting natural resources at a faster pace than ever. formerly, nature itself used to check ecological balance through extreme events such as natural disasters as well as hazardous epidemics. the arrival of modern health care systems and advancements in the field of science and technology can control epidemics and diminish the effects of natural disasters today. at the same time, we are becoming increasingly susceptible to diseases and the rate is rapidly increasing. the complexity of the man-nature relationship has significantly altered in today's world. in the past, nature was seen as necessary and beneficial on which amplification of human need in today's world has left its footprint. therefore, a minor environmental change nowadays puts significant impacts on human life. however, the perception of what constitutes a 'hazard' and 'disaster' changes over time (paton and johnston, 2001; furedi, 2007) . a hazard is a dangerous incident that brings a menace to humans, while a disaster is a stern disturbance striking over a shorter or longer duration that grounds extensive material and/or ecological loss for both human and natural enevironments that surpasses the capacity of the impacted community to survive back using its immediate own resources again. hazards will be considered disasters once they affect humans, but if they occur in an unpopulated area, they will remain hazardous. since the man-nature relationship is not identical over different periods of time and at different places, the intensity of disasters or natural outbreaks are different accordingly (zhao et al., 2006) . developing countries pay the most once a disaster hits. these fatalities in developing countries due to natural hazards are over 20 times bigger in terms of gdp than the industrialised countries (peduzzi et al., 2002) . therefore, the question remains whether development and environmental protection can be achieved together or whether there is a kind of dichotomy between the two. this is, however, not a simple question to answer. for example, urban areas are highly modified to suit human needs which results in the destruction of green spaces and formation of urban heat islands (doick et al., 2014) . however, in rural areas, although the natural environment is quite intact, unskilled agriculture and pressure on farmland causes serious land degradation, thereby leading to ecological and economic stress (sudhishrf and dass, 2012) . a disaster or any natural outbreak has a cause and effect inter-relationship between nature and human societies. a disaster can be defined as a serious disturbance of the functioning of both biophysical and human societies, causing extensive environmental, human and material losses which surpass the ability of the affected communities to deal with using only its own resources (asian disaster reduction center, 2003) . the impact of anthropogenic impact on the natural environment is directly co-related to population growth (donner and rodríguez, 2008) , particularly in urban areas with a population density of around 30%, which may reach up to 60% by 2050 (patel and burke, 2009 ). related factors include consumption patterns of populations as well as their innovative technology-intensive lifestyles. humans consume resources from the healthy ecosystem, but in return they transform it into an unhealthy form of ecosystem. from the prehistoric to the modern age, the idea of disaster has been influenced by such diverse factors as religious belief and scientific considerations. disasters were often characterised as 'acts of god,' thereby implying that 'nothing could be done about their occurrence' (quarantelli, 2000) . nevertheless, with the advent of enlightenment thinking and the augmentation of scientific knowledge, the idea was shifted from 'acts of god' to 'acts of nature' and consequently to 'acts of men and women' (quarantelli, 2000) . post-1980 , the perception of disaster has been considered through a sociological and ecological lens. instead of focusing on natural phenomena such as tornadoes and tsunamis, research focus has now shifted towards the new acts of man-made toxic and technical disaster (shaluf, 2007) . with this anthropological turn in scientific research, such events have come to be related to human activities and their causes have accordingly been perceived as the consequences of human irresponsibility or malevolence (park, 2016) . the concept of 'vulnerability' emerged after the environmental movement of the 1970s (kroll-smith et al., 1997) which brought the central ecological perspective of disaster to the forefront (trickett, 1995) . the intensity of damage brought about by any disaster indicates to what extent the communities are vulnerable (kelman et al., 2016) and what preventive measures should be taken to tackle future risks (kunz et al., 2014) . besides the practical nature of vulnerability, heijmans, noted that the concept of vulnerability is also a matter of perception (heijmans and victoria, 2001) . one of the principal claims of this study is that the number of occurrences of disasters are dramatically increasing and thus communities are becoming gradually more exposed to their impact. vulnerability or exposure to the disaster is here conceptualised as the natural state of being (ewald, 2002) . the terms 'vulnerability' and 'risk' are often interchangeably used where 'risk' denotes anticipated losses from a particular hazard to certain element(s) at a particular point of time in the future (cardona, 2005) . increase in population is generally regarded as the core of the problem which increases vulnerability, and potential damage of biophysical environmental stability encompasses exponential growth in numbers. the rising intensity of financial activities, exclusively its meditation in sporadic urban agglomerations, adds to this above mentioned issue. however, it is uncertain whether the correlation between the loss in ecosystem and growth in financial sectors is simple or direct. for instance, studies revealed that only 11% of the people vulnerable to natural hazards living in low human development countries comprise more than 53% of recorded losses. this implies that development rank and risks associated with disasters are meticulously linked (undp, 2004) . further, the intensity of any catastrophe may not be the same in different places, even catastrophic events usually differ from place to place, though the same event will inflict different degrees of damage in different places (hewitt, 2007) . these findings seem to indicate that historical, socio-cultural, and recent eco-political developments set some groups of people at greater risk compared to others (enarson and morrow, 1998) . while, the specific contexts are examined, the largest losses not only tend to accrue to relatively disadvantaged and powerless communities, but also reveal certain growths in human settlement, most visibly those in and around the rapidly increasing urban centres (maskrey, 1989; fernandez, 1999; pelling, 2003a; pelling 2003b ). however, it should be pointed out that the incident of losses may not be an accurate assessment of how far communities are vulnerable to disaster, for such vulnerability is also affected by such factors as proper site selection for residential areas, carrying capacity, and, most importantly, level of modern safety standards (world bank, 2001; ozerdem and jacoby, 2006) . water has been the lifeline for all the civilisations existing on earth and today water pollution is one of the major sources of vulnerability. for example, aquifer contamination is the artificially induced deterioration of natural groundwater quality. it is mainly caused by anthropogenic (mainly, industrial and/or agricultural) activities. these potential sources of contamination (pollutants) are responsible for the degradation of groundwater quality, consequently increasing vulnerability. the aquifer vulnerability is demarcated as the relative incident when a pollutant injected on or near the land-surface can migrate to the aquifer due to the certain land use management practices, the characteristics of the pollutants and conditions of the aquifer sensitivity (aller et al., 1987) . details of total fatalities accentuate the exposure of not only certain communities, sectors, and/or areas, but also of confusing and undesirable incidents. the special apprehension is looming for proficient responses such as official reports of modern safety standards that are sometimes, if not mostly, either ignored or unenforced. for instance, although there is fairly convincing evidence that the 2012 kedarnath disaster in northern india was the consequence of flash flooding and cloud blast (dobhal et al., 2013) , the intensity of damage was mainly due to improper site selection for build-up area (ray et al., 2016) . the disaster could have been explained as a natural phenomenon only if the mountain valley was to be free from human residency (rao et al., 2014) . therefore, it is evident that in both wealthy and developing countries disregard, catastrophes and public trusts are extensively stated in official regulatory systems (mcclean and johnes, 2000; oliver-smith and hoffman 2001) . disasters constitute one of the major reasons of inequitable and unsustainable growth in today's world. disasters can primarily be broadly classified into three specific categories, i.e., natural, anthropogenic, and mixed or hybrid. the natural disasters are those which are beyond anthropogenic control and therefore, necessitate our adaptation to them. anthropogenic disasters, mainly, are caused by human themselves and are primarily the result of human greed, inefficient governance, and the poor civic sense among the different classes of society. the question of how society makes sense of the associative link between an unexpected calamity and the resultant impact is related to disaster vulnerability (fischer, 2002) . following the attacks on the world trade centre on 9/11 incident in the usa, there has been a new or emerging awareness and appreciation in the field of research on the impact of disasters on human societies. disaster categories and definitions have been discussed in details by turner and pedgeon (1997) , richardson (1994) , the world health organization (2003), the federal emergency management agency (2003a, b) , and the mid-florida area agency on aging (2003). natural disasters are hazards that are triggered by natural reasons and may be of hydrometeorological, atmospheric, geological, or even biological causes (world health organization, 2006) . common examples of these natural hazards include cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions which are exclusively of natural origin. together with climate change, natural disasters present considerable challenges to socio-economic attainment and sustainable development as they disturb a wide array of both social and ecological systems (ipcc, 2001) . even today, many societies are ill-prepared to cope with extreme events and climate change threatens to undermine many decades of effort in the spheres of development assistance, poverty reduction, and disaster risk management (thomalla et al., 2006) . the observations of the international federation of the red cross and red crescent societies in the world disasters report (ifrc, 2002 (ifrc, , 2003 (ifrc, , 2004a reveal that the number of people killed by natural disasters continues to be elevated, as well as that the number of people or communities altogether affected and, most certainly, associated financial losses have augmented significantly since the 1970s (ipcc, 2001). anthropogenic disasters are hazards which can be caused due to direct human negligence or faults. these man-made disasters are linked with industries, agriculture or energy generation facilities and include pollution, leakage of toxic waste, bigger impacts such as dam failure and explosions, wars or civil unrest to name a few (pidgeon and o'leary, 2000) . man-made disasters are also labelled as sociotechnical disasters (richardson, 1994) that are caused by failures in different organisational sectors like transport, industrial as well as public places or fora. although access to safe and enough water and air are indispensable for both health and overall development of human beings, which are currently at risk if we continue to deteriorate both of them. the food and health care industries are extinguishing natural bio-physical elements and destroying the environments for both human and other living beings across the world. sporadic urbanisation, population explosion, improper agricultural practices and unrestrained sewage discharge into rivers and wetlands are the main reasons behind the heavy increase in surface water pollution. although groundwater is being used extensively, recent research which explores the fundamental structures that reveals current forms of human exposure to rapid and anthropogenic environmental transformation is not being considered (kasperson and kasperson, 2001; turner et al., 2003; pelling, 2003b) . studies also have improved our perception of how human influences and social constructions interact with physical environmental systems in creating hazardous conditions. heavy industries, mining activities, and transport systems based on fossil fuels have been the major contributors to groundwater pollution. across the globe, human civilisation developed on the banks of the rivers since water is necessary to sustain life. however, since the industrial revolution, with industrialisation concentrated mostly around urban centres, a major chunk of population from the rural-agricultural setup began to migrate to urban centres in search of better opportunities. this rise in migration together with improper agricultural practices contributed to the growth of pollution, thereby affecting not only the environment but also all existing living creatures on earth. both, younger groups of people today convey a certain amount of more than 100 chemical residues that were absent in the bodies of their older generations. these harmful chemical substances accumulate slowly in their systems and are being transmitted to the next generation in very high concentrations. waterborne diseases caused by the intake of chemicals and contaminated water affect around 3.4 million people globally. environment institute (sei) and clark university in the us have illustrated both the complexity of, and interactions involved in, vulnerability analysis, drawing attention to how multiple socio-political and physical processes operating at different spatial and temporal scales produce vulnerability within the coupled humanenvironment system (turner et al., 2003) . industrial pollution can either be sourced from point sources or non-point sources of pollutants. industrial pollution can be controlled either by legislative measures (such as the water act of 1974, the air act of 1981, the environmental act of 1986, the eia notification of 2006, and so on) or by the establishment of pollution control boards. however, there are systemic weaknesses which complicate matters. the bhopal gas tragedy serves as the perfect example to illustrate this point. the disaster could have been deterred if governmental departments had followed the specified norms as an alternative. however, residential or non-commercial houses were allowed everywhere in the factory, thereby resulting in the magnitude of the disaster. further, urban water pollution has considerably reduced the availability of drinking water. agricultural pollution is mainly a non-point source of pollution and hence there are no fixed and universally accepted rules and regulations to control it. the only possible remedy can be inviting a change of technological methods applied or innovated. although some farmers have made some effective attempts in this direction, most government authorities have not shown much interest. the gulf of mexico, for instance, has turned into a dead zone spreading over a considerably huge area with runoffs that contain residues of highly toxic (for marine aquatic organisms) chemical fertilisers and sprays from agricultural farms carried through the waters of the mississippi river in the usa. since the relationship between human beings and nature is dynamic and complex, a new subset of anthropocentric disasters has been defined on the basis of the role played by both elements. this is called 'hybrid disaster' (song and park, 2017) and is based on the premise that both human error and natural forces collude to cause disaster. one of the examples of this type of disasters was latur earthquake which happened on september 30, 1993. this early morning earthquake incident was one of the deadliest earthquakes the state of maharashtra (india) has seen till date. in this intraplate-earthquake, about 52 villages were devastated and over 30,000 people were injured whereas nearly 10,000 people were dead. the earthquake left a massive hollow in killari village, the epicentre of the earthquake, remains the same till date. the earthquake's focus was around 12 km deep -relatively shallow causing shock waves to cause more damage. the inexplicable failure of india's seismological network system, the untimely responses from the scientists fail to give necessary warning as well as the traditional building construction practices in the area led to unimaginable death rates and destruction of properties of poor people (sinha and goyal, 1994; ravi, 1994) . if we overlook meteorologic issues it would be difficult to determine the increasing disaster risk. even for meteorological hazards, the geophysical aspects of the worst cases of events in recent years had already been equalled or surpassed in the last centuries. with scientific agreement, considering anthropogenic activities as the main drivers of the current rapid climate change issues, the only way to effectively inverse the trend similarly depends upon gradual social transformations. at large, social assessments confirm the potential dangers that come mainly from more human exposure to the threats and, certainly, the lack of safety measures taken into serious account. in the meantime, for the last several decades and in almost everywhere in this world, the production of assests per capita and the obtainability of modern commodities have far surpassed even the growth of population. accessibility and transformation of wealth could have had better and positive effects on safety measures, although wealthier countries often experience horrific disasters in recent times, such as the fukushima disaster in japan, which could have been controlled or even prevented more profoundly (hewitt, 2013) . according to mcclean and johnes (2000) , the negligence in responsibility and preventive measures can act as a trigger to the greater exposure of risk, and damage to many selective groups of people or communities that are already standing on the verge of vulnerability due to the absence of a proper regulatory framework of risk reduction or lack of equitable responbilities. thus, presence of marginalities and internal power relations within the society(s) affect the vulnerability more selectively. the fatalities and impacts of any disaster are being seen in an inequitable way, more for some particular groups or parts of the population on the basis of their sex, gender or any other intersectional attributes. it is evident in cases of different disasters, such as tsunami of 2004. the countries along the indian ocean suffered the most and there was a high number of women fatalities among the deaths. it was also the similar case of the earthquake in kobe during 1995, where the death toll was major among women residents of the area. according to enarson and morrow (1998) , these unequal losses can be explained by the cultural history of social practices as it divided the society into groups and put some in greater exposure of danger. therefore, it is evident that due to the existing social divisions and selectiveness, differences in power and hegemonic roles, some groups are already in danger, whereas disasters or physical conditions do not discriminate between people, communities and societal practices (hewitt, 2013) . so-called wealthier nations do not avoid such situations, although not too substantial most of the times, but the losses found to be directly associated with inequitable and discriminatory social conditions for certain groups or communities. it can be linked with absence of serious institutional and technical preparedness for all. detailed scrutiny of the specific concerns of threats could reduce the risk of disasters. comprehensive reconstruction efforts show that many victims had been living in areas and buildings which violated basic safety rules and regulations. pre-disaster investigations or surveys reveal the same. a majority of the victims were also reported to have already been suffering from a range of acute stresses and lack of basic support system, even before the disasters occurred. preparedness is a shielding procedure that incorporates measures to enable governments, groups or communities, and individuals to respond fast to disaster conditions to deal with them as effectively as possible. it thus embraces the formulation of feasible plans for emergency supplies, the advancement of practical warning systems, the careful preservation of inventories, and the last but not the least, personnel training to cope. further, it includes necessary investigation and rescue actions and evacuation plans, wherever necessary, to avoid the threat and impact from another surge of the disaster. preparedness thus involves these important steps well in advance of any possible disaster event to minimise the projected fatalities, trouble in critical services supply and the direct structural damage. forecasting natural disasters is a budding area of research in recent years. however, the measure of human anguish in post-disaster situations is rarely considered prior to the occurrence of any disaster. generally, this puts an instantaneous burden on the already damaged environmental services for the provision of emergency supplies of shelter, water, or waste management services. nearly all disasters cause certain environmental impacts, which lay extra adverse effects to the already impacted communities. considering the degrees of dangers in a disaster and its impacts on both the environment and the society, the immediate requirements of the communities, and the consequences for the early recovery preventive plans is therefore an essential need. simultaneously, there are a number of philanthropic and relief-based activities which are generally undertaken at the initial preventive stage that may themselves have a serious impact on the state of the situation. till date, post-disaster preventive measures entail assessments that are being carried out primarily to identify the instant life-saving requirements. from the perspective of humanitarian reforms, attention should be given to the immediate needs of the affected communities after the end of the emergency phase and before full-scale development starts to fill the gap. this initial recovery stage of disaster management should be allocated and provided according to the need of the people. efforts and measures taken at the early recovery phase by governments and other intergovernmental actors in case of a larger disaster event ever so often suffer from a combination of isolated initiatives and sporadic strategic leadership. this ultimately takes the whole situation to the deficiency of a holistic strategy and framework, resulting in a replication of efforts, a wastage of resources and, of course, lives as well as a catastrophe to factor in risk reduction deliberations. this condition makes the whole recovery in peril from the sustainable point of view. therefore, renewed effort is now being considered for supporting the necessary early recovery phase of any post-disaster conditions by addressing the immediate needs and chances across the board, taking an intersectoral consideration, and institutional and community requirements into account, and consolidating necessary data into a common understandable format which can be instantly introduced into the available measures for both immediate and future financial support. monitoring and evaluation (m&e) are important as they: a) make operational activities more liable to the affected and the supportive groups, b) validate the risk reduction activities to the responsible authorities to demonstrate the efforts engaged and c) improve the perception of the disaster risk reduction (drr) procedures in practice by identifying the issues responsible for larger impacts. the variations of m&e methods and frameworks for relief as well as further recovery have been developed significantly over the past decades. this can partially be determined by wide disparagement and pressure from the responsible donors but also because of the ongoing demand to demonstrate and aggravate the success and improved performance during and after disaster(s). thus, a growing body of work is delivering governmental and non-governmental agencies the better-informed direction on m&e approaches for further development in disaster risk reduction, and emergency services. this is also supported by different humanitarian initiatives active throughout the world. assessment of a m&e project should emphasise on the following features: • inputs which include the financial, technical and human resources arranged. their critical effectiveness, profitability, and feasibility can also be assessed simultaneously. • activities include the performance of measures and their responsible factors. • outputs are the immediate outcomes or deliverables achieved by the project. • impact refers to significant deviations caused by the action(s) taken. monitoring discourses on the above mentioned inputs, activities, and outputs need to meet the timely data requirement of the associated project authorities and supply information related to developmental progress to the donors. thus, these monitoring discourses must maintain a regularity and commence throughout the duration of the disaster management project. whereas, evaluations generally focus on outputs, their impact, and degree of involvement of wider stakeholders even beyond the organisational setup. it is more infrequent and implied at any stage of the entire project cycle or, even beyond. thus, monitoring is having an eloquent nature and evaluation is more investigative. reviews are supplements for regular monitoring processes, in a less frequent manner and provide opportunities to identify key issues required in the project. they thus form a significant part of an internal managerial procedure, eventually engaging external stakeholders. audits are important for assessing the project and to follow the compliance of the programme with already considered and existing agreed regulations, and mandates. the evaluation procedure should be initiated at the design phase of the project where aims and objectives are being established and outcomes-based project frameworks are being developed. an array of evaluations should be there during and after the project ends to allow more profound assessment, although this practice is unlikely in reality. evaluations should be programmed at those critical points within the project cycle whenever they are needed at the most, especially for the decisionmaking stages. quantitative evaluation indicators are generally target oriented like the number of disaster-resistant structures built or disaster preparedness committees involving the community(s) established, sometimes using proxy indicators for this. whereas, qualitative measurement indicators are more often necessary for the risk assessment, using inputs from the stakeholders through various workshops, interviews, engaging focus groups and semi-structured consultation based interviews. these qualitative measurement indicators can be crucial to provide proper measures of development and outcomes, therefore untangling insights into the processes undertaken. participatory approaches have been proven to be delivering a decent qualitative information. mitigation holds measures to decrease both the direct impact of the hazard and the after math situations in order to reduce the degree of a future disaster. mitigation measures can therefore focus on the hazard directly or on the exposure to the future threat. for example, water management can be a hazard specific mitigation measure applicable for drought-prone areas to relocate people from the affected areas, and reinforcement of infrastructures to mitigate damage once a hazard occurs. apart from these physical mitigation measures, reducing the economic and social threats of the disasters in the future should also be another aim for mitigation. unfortunately, due to the lack of proper governance system and awareness measures among the societies, socio-economic mitigation measures, generally, cannot show its full potentiality in most of the cases, such as disasters related to flood in most of the developing countries almost every year. in the aftermath of a disaster, the pressure to rapidly restart the essential services increase the mitigation and rebuilding. in many communities, powerful right-wing alliances mainly, consisting of landowners, industry lobbies, and some governmental sectors attempt to maintain the previous capitalistic practices that results profit for this smaller group of higher powerholders, regardless of the impact on the less powerful groups and interests (logan and molotch, 1987) . on the contrary, research as well as experiences recommend that proper planning and the use of public sector dispute resolution techniques can play a role in addressing the power imbalance and relations, and enduring requirements and concerns of the communities (forester, 1987 (forester, , 1989 godschalk, 1992; susskind and cruikshank, 1987) . the process of equitable disaster mitigation recovery is not always the best and possible approach. disaster mitigation and recovery should consider the significant but limited scope of prospect to restructure the damaged services even stronger than their previous condition (before the event) by adjusting landuse pratices and its patterns, and reform the existing social sphere. many studies have revealed that disasters incline to variably impact individual persons and groups depending on their pre-disaster levels of existing social vulnerability (blaikie et al., 1994; bolin and bolton, 1986; bolin and stanford, 1999; peacock, morrow, and gladwin, 1997) . linking the status quo and captivating benefit of post-disaster prospects towards the positive change, inclusive actions taken in favour of less-powerful groups, it is obligatory for planners and other authoritative agencies to involve all stakeholders and pursue consensual approaches which elicit mutual benefits across the potentially disagreeing groups. previous researches have also revealed that disaster mitigation and recovery policy are less prominent to local officials and authorities who tend to face disasters less frequently than the state itself and higher personnel, whereas the resistance to change may be overcome through a rapidly developed inclusive recovery measures (wright and rossi, 1981; geipel, 1982) . while researching on earthquake recovery strategies in peru, oliver-smith (1990) found that sustainable recovery goals (e.g., tackling issues of existing inequality in the society and the adoption of best practices mitigating hazard) were reached when planning strategies met local needs. in this case, local capabilities were taken into consideration by those responsible for the supply of external aid, and the community, on the other hand, understood the organisational requirements. some recent studies suggest that individuals and organisations are both, perhaps, more considerable to changes in the status quo following the occurrence of disasters (birkland, 1997) , that include sustainable disaster recovery planning and reconstruction measures taken as an approval of leaders from various levels who advocate for this approach (smith, 2004) . the efficiency of pre-disaster response planning for post-disaster emergency response not necessarily always complies with the impactful management of disaster response actions (quarantelli, 1993) . similarly, some groups appeared to react more efficiently to a disaster once they failed to plan or ignored existing planning measures altogether (clarke, 1999) . equitable recovery planning can be accomplished through an adaptive and methodical approach (smith, 2004) . mileti (1999) mentioned the following features underlying effective recovery plans at the local level: i. impacted stakeholders (by post-disaster measures) should be taken into consideration for input generation and accordingly policy-makers should attain buyins from them as a preventive measure. this will not only reduce conflict but also help to aid in the developmental process of a rapid recovery plan reflecting the local needs. ii. the usefulness of a plan is also driven by the data and information used for making the policy and immediate action. specific data and information crucial to develop an effective recovery plan incorporates hazard characteristics too (for example, high wind or storm surge) and potentially vulnerable areas, population size, and its composition, and spatial distribution, local economic factors etc. technology such as geographic information system (gis) can be used to provide a meaningful investigative platform to graphically display and analyse collected data and, thus, is being, even more, used by local governmental agencies and emergency planners and managers in the decision making process to mitigate and recover the impacts of hazards and disasters. iii. a recovery management strategy should identify the potentially relevant groups and organisations that can offer specific types of support. a recovery group can therefore lead post-disaster management efforts and regularly organise to engage in preventive planning and policy-making decisions. this organisational structure must involve governmental agencies as well as non-profits and emergent organisations which can be the most effective while trying to aid the marginalised and/or those remain heavily excluded following disasters. iv. recovery and mitigation plans should be pragmatic and applicable. in the postdisaster conditions, existing policy-making measures must be adapted to account for the requirement to make fast decisions. thus, measures should include hazard mitigation for the recovery of damaged infrastructural facilities and the future development plans according to the acknowledged hazard-prone areas to be put on the exclusion list. v. the recovery strategy should also clearly articulate the effective functioning tasks in regard to the mobilisation, distribution, and coordination within the operational groups to conduct impact assessments. the information should be collected in such a manner that it can be quickly integrated and used to weigh local needs and support in the execution of pre and post-disaster reformation planning and policies. vi. generally, major disasters can affect in financial loss significantly exceeding local governmental budgets. the ability to bridge the identified needs collected as parts of the impact assessment as mentioned above to existing financial resources and funding sources and properly planned policies is central to the successful execution of identified goals and objectives, where, even if, local needs may not be enough to match the certain eligibility criteria but the presence of alternative implementation strategies in the planning procedure. it helps to plan for the effective contingency budget as a part of the preventive measures. geospatial sciences which complies geographic information systems (gis), remote sensing (rs), and global positioning systems (gps) together have gained much attention in recent years for the practical and on-time applications in disaster mitigation and management planning and are progressively being employed throughout the total cycle of disaster management system as a tool to support decision-making. giss, are in many cases, recognised as a standard key tool for supporting decision making in disaster management (mileti, 1999) . policy-makers, disaster managers, and the mass are gradually taking these geospatial sciences seriously for their visualisation capabilities. disaster management entails complex coordination within existing resources, necessary and available equipments, required skills, and possible human resources from different agencies. this multidimensional process therefore requires robust decision support systems for fostering cooperation and help disaster loss reduction (assilzadeh and mansor, 2004; pourvakhshouri and mansor, 2003) . while spatial queries have long been of core of concern for both the disaster researcher groups and practitioners in the field of policy and decision making similarly, the inclusion of gis has essentially augmented the capacity of the disaster-research-community for incorporating geographic approaches. the locational knowledge regarding the hazard zones and understanding existing inter-relationship with the distribution of various groups and sub groups of the people is crucial to develop planning and policies for mitigation and strengthen preparedness with proper strategies. real-time locational information can effectively improve the distribution of essential resources as a part of the mitigation response. despite the complexity regarding the, geographic approaches and technology oriented functional ability in geospatial sciences, these modern technology is rapidly and effectively being used in recovery strategies for mitigating disaster risks and hazard management. the spatial decision support system for disaster management (sdss) incorporates technical dimensions in organisational issues. a decision support system, thus, meets the requirements of the practitioner simultaneously integrating existing physical and social factors. sdss supports the inter-operability of emergency services essential during response and relief stages (zlatanova, van oosterom, and verbree, 2004) . the sdss thus has a crucial role in mitigation and recovery planning phases of disaster management strategies. advanced sdss must be able to perform sophisticated tasks wherever and whenever needed, which involve right from the defining the problem and selection, identification and evaluation of the potential alternative solutions (de silva, 2001) . at the same time, gis must be taken into the decision making process in accordance with decision-makers, disaster managers and policymakers as well as the public to create a robust system altogether. the assessment of aquifer vulnerability (pollution potential of an aquifer) is a study pertaining to a combination of hydrogeologic factors, anthropogenic impacts or influences, and contamination sources in a given area. mapping of aquifer vulnerability is based primarily on the percolation factors and diffusion of contaminants factors. the contaminants present in the aquifer system may be linked to the naturally absorbed components of the host rock or brought by the human activities during infiltration or percolation process of water from the surface of the ground above. considering the accuracy, frequency of availability and accessibility of the data, aquifer vulnerability assessment method can be regarded as advantageous or with limited merits while application. aquifer vulnerability assessment methods can be, therefore, categorised into the following: • statistical analysis methods measure groundwater quality and its pollution level through the study of statistical correlations and associations between the observed pollution data, circumstantial environmental conditions and land use -land cover patterns on the ground above. • computer simulation method requires more complexity and prerequisites of the details pertaining to the vulnerability assessment. thus, the computer simulation method examines both physical and chemical properties and processes with greater distinction. • descriptive ranking methods classify or categorise the vulnerability or the intrinsic susceptibility of the groundwater table into different low, medium and high categories of vulnerability to help the managerial decisions. among these models, the most comprehensive and commonly used model for assessing groundwater vulnerability is the drastic model (aller et al., 1987) . drastic methodology was originally developed by the united sates environmental protection agency (usepa) and is one of the worldwide used standardised systems for evaluation of groundwater vulnerability (merchant, 1994; lobo-ferreira and oliveira, 1997; babiker et al., 2005) . drastic model is comprehensive in nature, and has the worldwide acceptance and application for assessing aquifer vulnerability. strategic geographical planning has always been set and executed under uncertainties. planners used to deal with the uncertainties by overlooking the complexity. the strategic spatial planning can be regarded as a study of possible potentialities (balducci, 2008; hillier, 2005) . this spatial planning also involves "encouraging the emergence of particular development trajectories" (healey, 2008) . the emergent trajectory proposes a shift from previously set targets to a flexible method which seeks to substitute beneficial change. many suggest involving people in a debate on alternative futures must be important "through the creation of arenas for transparent, inclusive, democratic debate of foresighted potentialities" (hillier, 2007) . postdisaster recovery planning has to deal with the complexity that arises over the time. maximum strategic decisions need not to be presented in convenient ways. at the same time, problems and potential opportunities must be identified from "streams of ambiguous, often conflicting subjective opinion" (mintzberg et al., 1976) . the decision-making procedures of identification, prototypes, and negotiating adaptation strategies for disaster managers are still not very clear and universally accepted. little attention has been paid to the initial diagnosis step which is a prerequisite for necessary actions to be taken. quarantelli (1969) observed that recovery suggests an attempt to take the postdisaster condition to some stages of acceptance which can be similar to the preimpact stage. recovery may decipher a form of stability rather than a return to any recognisable pre-event order (hills, 1998) . right after wwii, planning became progressively rational, following a recognised pattern of consideration of all possible alternatives by decision-makers, the identification and assessment of the costs of each course of action, and the subsequent selection of the one which was the most desirable. one characteristic of this rational model of planning was the incorporation of the evaluation stage into the existing planning process. recently, this model had been defied. now, planning can be regarded as a frame of reference and an instrumental strategy for decision-making and at the same time, integration of uncertainty in the system, thus making planning process more flexible (faludi, 1987) . decision-making, on the other hand, can be viewed as a problem-solving action concluded by a solution deemed to be satisfactory (schacter et al., 2011) . thus the decision-making appears as a process of selection which can be rational or irrational and based on explicit assumptions. rational choice theory represents the notion to maximise benefits while minimising costs. nevertheless, it should also consider that some, if not the most, decisions are made unconsciously, without thinking much about the decision process (nightingale, 2008) . rational theories of reasoning reveals how the reasoning should help to make proper judgments, and take decisions accordingly. these theories such as probability theory or decision theory suggest guidelines to follow. all rational choice models agree with preferences, for example, motivations, affect, desires, values, tastes, and beliefs such as cognition, ideas, knowledge, information, as the systematic driving forces behind the actions taken (sun-ki chai, 1997) . kinicki (2008) suggests that rational decision-making denotes a structured and stepwise approach to decision-making which follows a rational four-steps order: 1. identification of the problem 2. generation of alternatives 3. solution selection 4. implementation and evaluation of the outcome. the main benefit of this rational choice approach lies in its ability to support in the prediction of the act, either at the individual or the collective level. however, there are crucial limitations associated with this model for disaster decision-making, like unacceptable delays in the pursuit of an ideal solution, inadequate information, and the swiftly-changing nature of the issues. in contrast, the 'irrational' model proposes that decision-making is considered by inadequate information and its processing capacity, using critical heuristics and shortcuts to simplify decision-making, and by picking solutions meeting the minimum requirements to be good enough. disaster mitigation planners and managers are needed to take a range of reactive decisions to respond to the crisis events. many of these operational decisions, in case of well prepared nations, would have been practised in advance and there would be well-established strategic protocols in place for most contingencies. time is limited after a disaster and there is an imperative need to transport relief and to return to normalcy starting from clearing up the debris, repairing the damage happened, rebuilding livelihoods. hence we must consider the fact that decision-making process needs to be prompt and under severe pressure than normal. capacity refers to the total strengths, attributes, and available resources that a society, community or organisation possess in order to cope and decrease the risk from disaster and increase resilience (unisdr, 2017) . it emphasises capacity of the individual more to predict, manage, resist, and improve the loss, impacted from disasters, despite of focusing on the limiting vulnerability. capacity also depends on other performing assets that economy, political stability or instability, presence of good governance, psychological conditions and, certainly the bio-physical environment offer (dfid, 2004) . capacity can also be designated as the opposite of vulnerability, nevertheless, even vulnerable people have some degrees of capacities too (wisner et al., 2012; shepard et al., 2013) . undeniably, the initial stage of capacity development is the composite of traditional or indigenous knowledge, powers, qualities, and other material assets that individuals, organisations, and/or societies altogether already have. capacity may also incorporate collective infrastructural, institutional, knowledge and skill oriented qualities like social cohesion, leadership, and management capabilities (unisdr, 2017) . thus, developing capacity can be defined as a concept that extends the ambit of building strength to encompass all the aspects of creating and sustaining growth over time involving learning and training opportunities in order to develop institutional, political, financial and technological awareness and resources as a comprehensive system for enabling environment widely (unisdr, 2017). disaster risk reduction requires empowerment as well as comprehensive, accessible, and equitable participation (un report, 2015) . capacities are generally endogenous to communities at the household level, implying that people are more regulatory than communities (wisner et al., 2012) . instead of making an effort to lessen vulnerability, strengthening capacity may be an easier strategy for the people themselves as most drivers of vulnerability remain unchanged at the household level, although economical, and political conditions can alter them (wisner 2007) . most of the countries in the global south, the disasters' impact with wide-ranging risks are commonly absorbed by the low-income groups at the household level, sustaining and increasing poverty intensities and weakening developmental consequences. augmenting capacity may offer those vulnerable communities the prospect to diminish their risk from the disaster as well as develop and adapt to ongoing threats from the rapidly changing climate. an integrated capacity development always transforms the mindsets and, as a result, attitudes more than simply performing duties or tasks given. nevertheless, measuring these transformations and consequential effects are no less than a major challenge (undp, 2009 ). an aiding environment, that is, robust political will and commitment at the maximum levels of authority, all-embracing participation, and transparent public accountability is crucial for deciphering capacity at the performance level. for disaster risk reduction, capacity building offers the foundation of a pragmatic strategy that begins with the development of awareness, evaluation, reduction as well as prevention of potential risk and possible adaptation of mitigation measures (unisdr, 2008) . organisations offer the comprehensive platform for individuals for working together towards a common set of goals with a shared vision (undp, 2008) . organisational capacity may thus be improved and evaluated from the management aspects of financial, administrational, governmental and human resources (usaid, 2012) . capacities need to be developed through the process of formal education and practical training rather than just depending on the reflexion and performance at the individual level (undp, 2009 ). in addition, networking, leadership development and multi-stakeholder platforms also augment these capacity development processes (datta et al., 2012) . capacity building should also be established on the essential traditional knowledge of local indigenous communities, which they possess through generations of experiences to deal with the disasters. capacitydevelopment strategies, hence, at the local level should include: • anticipate through raising the awareness, education, participation and implementation of risk assessments; • manage by providing essential first aid-training, learning to swim, and so on; • resist through preventive measures such as early warning systems, evacuation strategies, storing emergency equipment; and • mitigation through providing alternative means of income and social protection etc (hagelsteen and becker, 2014) . capacity building is not just the development of technical measurements but need to be associated with specialised disciplines and precise sectoral requirements and, therefore, required to collectively promote the leadership and other managerial capabilities (undp, 2009 ). these incorporate the capacity to: • involve stakeholders • evaluate a situation • set a goal • design policies and related strategies • budget, manage and implement • assess impact cases of applying capacity development process for disaster risk reduction could present various unknown challenges. as of now, there is a considerable degree of uncertainty in the formal terminology used related to disaster risk reduction, capacity building and ownership in both literature and practice. notions are also different while considering the local context, capacity assessment together with the distinction of roles and responsibilities at different levels of application (hagelsteen and becker, 2014) . a culture of resilience could develop if we can enhance the disaster risk reduction capacity of individuals as well as organisations. land is a finite resource which is transformed over time with human intervention through production, settlement, and other associated socio-economic activities. among these economic activities, industry and mining are primarily associated with the depletion of land resources. the term 'brownfield' refers to the industrial wasteland within an indian perspective, but this term is also used in parts of europe, the united kingdom, and the united states (bambra et al., 2014) . the us environmental protection agency (epa) defines brownfield as abandoned, idle, or under-used industrial and commercial facilities where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination. the terms 'brownfield,' 'greyfield,' and 'derelict sites' are all related to each other (maantay, 2013; litt and burke, 2002; shortt et al., 2011) and they are interchangeably used in literature. the primary similarity between these lands is that they are vacant contaminated sites in urban or suburban areas (bambra et al. 2014 ) which have the potential to become a health hazard (catney et al., 2007) and are located within a 5-25 km radius from the centre of each capital city (newton, 2010) . the environment agency estimates that approximately 300,000 ha of land in england is regarded as land affected by chemical and radiological contamination. scotland as a whole accounts for a large number of (hanlon et al., 2005; mitchell et al., 2005; taulbut et al., 2009; walsh et al., 2010) brownfield and derelict sites that serve as triggers for the inequalities of health (based on the degree of deprivation) as compared to other parts of the uk and europe, but even within scotland, glasgow leads with the highest number of derelict and brownfield sites, worst overall health, and higher inequalities (gray, 2008) . nonetheless, it is questionable why glaswegians tend to have lower health outcomes even when compared with a few developing world cities (hanlon et al., 2005; mitchell et al., 2005; taulbut et al., 2009; walsh et al., 2010) . even after making allowances for a similar industrial and cultural history, people in glasgow have poorer health and higher deprivation compared to other cities in the uk (gray, 2008) . in this regard, fairburn et al. (2004) noted that given the contingencies of industrial pollution and land contamination as well as deteriorating air quality and water quality in rivers, there is a strong interrelationship between environmental degradation and high deprivation in glasgow as people living in the most-deprived areas are far more likely to be living near the sources of potentially hazardous environment. with the help of a comprehensive literature review by brender et al. (2011) , it is evident that there is a correlation between environmental pollution and its threat to human health and the disproportionately large magnitude of its effect on poor and minority populations. the concept of environmental justice (ej) refers to the distribution of equal environmental benefits among all population groups (bullard et al., 2005) . however, it should be noted that distribution patterns may be unequal as a consequence of the patterns of human settlement, income levels, racial traits, and cultural differences (craig, 2010) . although it is evident that lower income groups and immigrant communities suffer significantly as a consequence of problems brought about by environmental pollution (smyth, 2000) , this connection is highly standardised with respect to racial traits, ethnicity, and poor environmental components in the united states (maantay, 2001; maantay, 2002) . in glasgow, there are approximately 927 individual sites of brownfield land which account for about 4% of total land area in the city and 12% of the entirety of scotland's brownfield land (scottish government, 2012) . more importantly, about 60% of glasgow's city population resides within a 500 metre radius and over 92% live within a 1,000 metre radius (chakraborty and armstrong, 1997; neumann et al., 1998; sheppard et al., 1999) . with the assistance of the base map (scottish government, 2012) of glasgow city, maantay (2013) noted that zones separated by radii of 100 metres from the contaminated sites are regarded as 'sacrifice zones' where even city planners are not interested in investing money because these zones have already crossed the threshold of re-development. these contaminated sites (mainly coal tar/creosote, phenols, cyanide and sulphur, heavy metals such as cadmium, lead, barium, and chromium, phytotoxic metals, and so on) have high incidences of foetal death, heart disease, various cancers, low birth weight of infants and, more importantly, respiratory disease (malik et al., 2004; ding, 2006; kuehn et al., 2007; wang, 2011) . about 69% of the population in glasgow is regarded as 'highly deprived' and does not have access to proper hygiene facilities such as drinking water, air, and food (greenberg et al., 1998) . glasgow's environmental degradation is not, however, only due to the presence of brownfield sites but is rather a consequence of a larger complex of associated issues which are responsible for poor health and deprivation in the city. for example, individual behavioural issues such as excessive smoking, drug abuse, alcohol consumption, and poor diet (craig, 2010) are also responsible for poor health and depression among communities. moreover, the issues regarding ej have only recently come under the attention in parts of the uk. although ej in scotland has been discussed in scholarship, inequalities of health among different communities or within a particular community in the city has not hitherto been the major focus (dunion, 2003; scandrett, 2010) . therefore, it is imperative to tackle these healthrelated inequalities and deprivation through proper policy-making. although planning has usually failed to effect significant change in the face of a continuing downward spiral, this is not so much the result of negligence on their part but rather due to realistic and pragmatic considerations about the limits of available resources. improper management of waste, particularly industrial waste, may contaminate environmental components such as soil, surface water, groundwater, and air. both natural as well as anthropogenic factors influence the physico-chemical properties of soil depending on natural and anthropogenic factors, and acting together across different spatial and temporal scales. heavy metal content in many soil types is often significantly influenced by the parent material, and sometimes significantly influences the heavy metal content in many soil types, with concentration levels sometimes exceeding the critical values (palumbo et al., 2000; salonen and korkka-niemi, 2007) . some rock types of volcanic and metamorphic origin contain several heavy metals such as ni, cr and mn. these are trace elements in some rock types of volcanic and metamorphic origin (alloway, 1995) . during the weathering processes of rocks the primary crystalline structure breaks down and consequently the relevant chemical elements are released from the rocks. furthermore, these either get absorbed into the topsoil or move towards surface water or groundwater. prolonged excessive use of pesticides in agricultural land results in the concentration of heavy metals such as copper, nickel, zinc, and cadmium accumulating in the topsoil (nicholson et al., 2003) . in such cases, the presence of different sources of contamination and the widely divergent patterns of distribution of products make soil pollution assessment overly complex in the presence of different sources of contamination and the widely divergent patterns of distribution of products (parth et al., 2011) . disposal sites of hazardous waste (hw) are one of the major prime sources of elevated levels of metals in the soil environment (bozkurt et al., 2002) . hazardous waste is typically defined as a solid, semi-solid, or non-aqueous liquid waste which, because of its chemical composition and characteristics, may pose a substantial human health hazard or environmental hazard if not managed properly or released accidentally. a piece of hazardous waste can be defined by one or more of the following properties: • ignitability: waste is considered ignitable if its flashpoint is < 60° c, is an oxidiser, and is capable of causing fire through friction, absorption of moisture, or spontaneous chemical changes under normal conditions of temperature and pressure. examples include waste oils, organic solvents, paint wastes, epoxy adhesives and resins, spent inks, degreasing agents, white phosphorous, and so on. • corrosivity: although not every waste material is corrosive in nature, if it has a ph < 2 or >12.5 then it can be corrosive. for example, spent acids, alkalis, and solids that can form strongly acidic or basic solutions when mixed with water (ferric chloride, sodium hydroxide, etc), solutions that are strongly acidic or basic (ferric chloride, sodium hydroxide, etc). • reactivity: waste may be considered as reactive if it is unstable or undergoes rapid or violent chemical reaction when exposed to air, water, or other materials at normal conditions and generates toxic gases or vapours when mixed with water or when exposed to ph conditions between 2 and 12.5 (as is the case with cyanide or sulphide-containing materials). examples include wastes containing white phosphorous, acetyl chloride, chromic acid, cyanides, hypo-chlorides, organic peroxides, perchlorates, permanganates, sulphides, some plating materials, and bleaches. currently, india generates about 6.23 million metric tonnes per annum (mmtpa) of hazardous waste. significantly, most of such hw is produced by the industrialised states, of which gujarat (28.76%), maharashtra (25.16%), and telangana (8.93%) constitute the top three. at the same time, environmental components are highly contaminated in a few states, such as in gujarat where the air quality is severely degraded and is a direct contributor to serious airborne diseases (basha et al., 2010) . more specifically, the coastal marine atmosphere surrounding large industrial centres can be highly affected by pollution emissions, resulting in the high concentration built-up of pollutants in the ambient air (chester et al., 1994; ondov et al., 1997; scudlark et al., 2002) . levels of trace metals in ambient air were also found to be higher than those in industrial areas of titao scalo and ispra in italy and daejon in korea (rizzio et al., 1999; ragosta et al., 2006; kim et al., 2002) . the heavy usage of chemicals in agricultural land in punjab has been found to contaminate groundwater. levels of f, no 3 , so 4 , ca, na, and mg higher than permissible have been reportedly found in the groundwater in certain villages of the bhatinda district (kochhar 2000 ). there appears to be a correlation between these high values in groundwater and high uranium and radon activity (kochhar and dadwal, 2004) . to assess the role of certain elements in causing cancer in the jajjal and gyana villages of bhatinda district, the groundwater characteristics and radon activity including levels of f, no 3 , so 4 , u, pb, cr, and ni were monitored in certain parts of southwest punjab (kochhar et al., 2007) . the world is currently facing an unprecedented threat from the coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) , a respiratory illness, pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (sars-cov-2), infection, a novel (new) coronavirus first identified in wuhan, china in december 2019. covid-19 is a respiratory illness caused by sars-cov-2 infection. the looming crisis in the developed as well as developing countries threatens to devastate economies and further ramps up inequality. according to the latest report and guidelines published by who/ unicef (2020), 'the provision of safe water, sanitation, and hygienic conditions is essential to protect human health during all infectious disease outbreaks, including the covid-19 outbreak. ensuring good and consistently applied wash and waste management practices in communities, homes, schools, marketplaces, and health care facilities will help prevent human-to-human transmission of the covid-19 virus'. covid-19 has crucially induced the deployment of identification and confinement measures, the drawing of boundaries, and exclusionary strategies which have unsurprisingly re-ignited the contested question of intersectionality and social exclusion in terms of water, food, and energy nexus securities. the provision of safe water, sanitation, and hygienic conditions is absolutely necessary to protect human health during any infectious disease outbreaks, including corona virus pandemic (who/unicef, 2020). according to the un report (2020), in least-developed countries up to 75% of people lack access to soap and water. the recently published un water report (2020) mentions that about 4 billion people live in severe conditions of physical water scarcity for at least one month per year. around 1.6 billion people-almost one fourth of the world's population-face economic water shortage, which means that they lack the necessary infrastructure to access water. according to the fao (2020), a pandemic has significant impacts on both food supply and demand, and thus, pose a risk of an impending food crisis. currently, about 820 million people around the world are experiencing chronic hunger, that is, not consuming enough caloric energy to live a normal life. of these, 113 million are coping with acute and severe insecurities-hunger so severe that it poses an immediate threat to their lives or livelihoods and renders them reliant on external assistance to survive. these people can hardly afford to have any further potential disruptions to their livelihoods or access to food that covid-19 might bring. if covid-19 cases-already present in most regions of the world-proliferate in the 44 countries that need external food assistance or in the 53 countries home to 113 million people experiencing acute and severe food insecurities, many of whose public health and social protection systems face capacity constraints, the consequences could be drastic and catastrophic. the energy sector has already felt the impact of covid-19. the outbreak has contributed to a sharply reduced demand for oil, resulting in plummeting prices and declining production, especially in the wake of the russia-opec price war. according to the iea oil market report (2020), global oil demand is expected to fall by a record 9.3 mb/d year-on-year in 2020. demand in april is estimated to be 29 mb/d lower than what it was a year ago, down to a level last seen in 1995. covid-19 has also accelerated the sustained drop in gas prices. a similar trend of falling demand and price reduction can be observed in the electricity sector. at this moment, it is difficult to predict the consequences of these changes in the water, food, and energy sectors. although these changes depend upon the ultimate trajectory of the virus outbreak itself which cannot be mapped with certainty having the distinct indications that scenarios will worsen much more for poorer nations (unctad, 2020). in addition, according to the recent un report (2020), income losses are expected to exceed $220 billion in developing countries. with an estimated 55% of the global population having no access to social protection, these losses will reverberate across societies, impacting education, human rights and, in the most severe cases, basic food securities and nutrition within (intra-urban) and/or on the fringes (peri-urban) of a city or metropolis in the global south where the density of population is currently the highest in the world. since the discovery of sars-cov-2 in december 2019, its geographic distribution continues to evolve (world health organization, 2020). unicef's water, sanitation and hygiene (wash) interventions have contributed to the formulation of government strategies designed to control and terminate the transmission of the disease. the who has formulated a standard strategic preparedness and response plan (sprp) to be used at country level. the sprp outlines the public health measures that need to be taken in order to support countries to prepare for and respond to covid-19. the eight pillars of the covid-19 strategic plan (who/unicef, 2020): 1. country-level coordination, planning, and monitoring 2. risk communication and community engagement 3. surveillance, rapid response teams, and case investigation 4. point of entry 5. national laboratories 6. infection prevention and control 7. case management 8. operational support and logistics over the past few days, a series of stimulus packages, unique in both scale and scope, have been declared by china and the major developed countries to combat the escalating economic damages and the deteriorating crisis at the health sectors. even though many developing countries had already registered slow economic growth in the last quarter of previous year with several inflowing recessions, the rapidity at which the pandemic has dealt an economic shock to even the most advanced economies is comparable to the global financial crisis of 2008. the economic effect of the covid-19 pandemic is ongoing and gradually becoming difficult to predict, although there are straightforward indications that things will deteriorate considerably for developing economies even before any further preventive step is taken. nonetheless, the full impact of the current health crisis has not yet been felt in many poor and middle income countries, and the 'end of the beginning' of the economic crisis has not yet been reached in advanced economies. the strong recovery in trade between developing countries that happened in 2010 appears less likely to be repeated this time around. even if the impairment to global supply chains is retrievable, the entire global business model will have a permanent trait of change from top to bottom in order to recover the predicted damage. moreover, china has gradually reduced its dependence on exports in its supplychains increasing its domestic production of intermediate goods. apart from the economic downfall and predicted global health crisis, the socio-cultural status and morphology in the developing world, especially in a country such as india, can be a vital input for further disaster. although 'social distancing' is the key strategy for preventing further spread of covid-19, it is questionable how far such a strategy would be possible in countries such as india, indonesia, pakistan, and china. in the case of india, for instance, marginalised communities are entirely dependent on daily wages to sustain their livelihood. given this financial contingency, how would it be possible for them to follow the 'stay-at-home' protocol? further, factors such as illiteracy, high population density (414 people per square kilometre), together with moderate-to-poor medical infrastructure will further compound the severity of this pandemic. apart from the natural hydrometeorological hazards, environmental disasters are very likely during the current century as a result of years of exploitation of environmental resources as well as the absence of social securities for vulnerable groups of people especially in the lower and middle income countries. a range of solutions is, therefore, needed, including access to technologies, early warning systems for disaster management, as well as increased stakeholder capacities at every level. the interlinked nature of the risks posed by natural disasters and climate change is well documented. the urgent need to reduce the disaster risks has been recognised and reaffirmed in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. it was emphasised that thinking and action must be through managing systems to mitigate disaster risks and build resilience. the most effective means of reducing disaster risks include strong actions on climate change mitigation and adaptation. otherwise, the frequency and intensity of, and the vulnerability to, disasters will only escalate in the future. last but not the least, the role of good governance and imbibition of lessons learned from traditional knowledge are also necessary. drastic: a standardized system for evaluating ground water pollution potential using hydrogeologic settings, epa/600/2--r heavy metals in soils glossary on natural disasters natural disaster data and information management systems: geo imagery bridging continents, xx th isprs congress a gis-based drastic model for assessing aquifer vulnerability in 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management: geo-dbms and positioning acknowledgements we thank the german academic exchange service (daad) who provides a fellowship to conduct this study. we would also like to thank mr. jaydeep sinha, india for his kind assistance in proof reading and checking the language. the article is checked for plagiarism using the ithenticate software and recorded in the knowledge resource center, csir-neeri, nagpur for anti-plagiarism (krc no.: csir-neeri/krc/2020/may/wwt/1). key: cord-0057868-pmyg0ogv authors: cremona, elisabeth; ioris, antonio augusto rossotto title: ‘the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men’: transformative agency towards ecosocialism date: 2020-08-27 journal: environment and development doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-55416-3_9 sha: 9992b796ca4c39ecab13504b494acec2dbf65a71 doc_id: 57868 cord_uid: pmyg0ogv within ecosocialist literature, there exists a significant lacuna on the subject of transformative agency, exactly those actors with the capacity and power to realise the ecosocialist vision. our research explores this topic through (1) an analysis of three documents (the belém declaration; the réseau ecosocialist manifesto; and ecuador’s national development plan), which mirror ecosocialist goals and are actively followed by a group of people, and (2) a stakeholder power analysis of the actors involved in the controversial belo monte dam project in brazil. five agents feature prominently in the discussion, two of which contrast with traditional red-green thought: social movements, indigenous groups, the affluent capitalist class, left-wing political parties and the state. their specific capabilities and power resources determine the different roles they could assume in a transition from a capitalist to an ecosocialist situation. we also argue that the particular opportunity context within which their activities are taking place constitutes a key consideration in transformative agency. foundation of these civilisations. for instance, eric hobsbawm observed that the crisis of the seventeenth century constituted the final break from the feudal system, which had been in place for centuries, to a new capitalist economy (hobsbawm 1965) . likewise, mounting tensions created by nationalist and imperialist disputes since the middle of the nineteenth century led to two world wars and the dramatic reconfiguration of global economy and society after 1945. as the twenty-first century unfolds, an interested bystander may become increasingly concerned when faced with acute environmental pressures (climate change, biodiversity loss, etc.), financial crises (such as the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, still largely unresolved and re-emerged in 2020, following the coronavirus pandemic), worrying trends of widening local and global inequalities, rapidly diminishing trust in politicians and institutions (e.g. brexit and the 2016 results of the us electoral system) and the list goes on. will the situation be eventually stabilised or are we witnessing the development of the general crisis of the twenty-first century, which will impact and transform today's global civilisation? mainstream responses to these problems and to the environmental contradictions of mainstream development are typically devoted to their amelioration in an atomistic isolation from other issues, normally informed by discourses and the rationalisation of socio-economic and ecological problems as circumstantial failures of the existing politicoeconomic order (e.g. the concept of sustainable development as an attempt to build consensus around technological and managerial adjustments). however, a rejection of these responses appears to have taken hold in a number of countries and is spreading, most conspicuously on the political level. this is evident, for instance, in the rise of (apparent) anti-establishment (e.g. donald trump's victory in the us 2016 presidential election) and right-wing extremist political parties in europe (e.g. alternative für deutschland, the third largest party in the bundestag after the 2017 election in germany), their popular support fuelled by uncertainty in the world economy and the people's declining confidence in the power of current political parties to adequately tackle socio-economic and environmental problems. in addition, there is a growing awareness among academics and social movements that current mainstream approaches to resolve the ongoing economic and environmental crises (typically along the lines of ecological modernisation and market-based environmental conservation) can only provide superficial and short-term solutions as they fail to address the wider historical, political and socioeconomic roots of the problems (such as those related to patters of production and consumption, property regimes, widespread alienation and multi-scale power disputes). as a result, there has been a call from critical circles for radical transformation of the prevailing capitalist development system and the overcoming of its perverse repercussions at the global, national, local and personal level, and a shift towards a more radical critique may even be welcomed in the current political climate (arnold 1990; escobar 2007; pepper 1993; sachs 2010; schweickart 2009 schweickart , 2010 . the fall of the soviet empire led many to proclaim that this demonstrated the undeniable superiority of capitalism and the unfeasibility of other alternatives. however, at the same time, the remaining uneasiness about pending socio-ecological and existential problems have recently begun to chip away at the western world's shattered confidence in this totalising narrative, triggering a resurgence of radical critiques and keeping the debate about the future wide open (ingham 2008; kaletsky 2011; prisecaru 2012) . while many maintain that the current crises are simply manageable instabilities and not terminal contradictions (kaletsky 2011) , there are a number of scholars and activists who argue that the capitalist system is primed for a radical shift, somehow analogous to the transition from feudalist to capitalist europe in the sixteenth century (bellamy foster 2013; chase-dunn 2014; moore 2014a, b) . however, in 'a world gone cosmopolitan by default', it is difficult to locate or prefigure the 'exit' to capitalism (harvey 2014: ix) in concrete political, economic and social practices. our departing point in this chapter is to claim that it is not only important but necessary to explore the meaning and routes to a postcapitalist development pathway, one which may emerge should the general crisis of the twenty-first century truly become a reality. an anticipatory or visionary approach is also relevant to help to understand the shortcomings of present-day society. for these reasons, it has become pertinent to draw our attention to those radical scholars and social movements, which challenge capitalist relations of production and reproduction, and advocate a substantive and meaningful reconfiguration of the world system and a different interface between environment and development. the consideration of an ecosocialist alternative is an important element of those debates. the ultimate aim of this chapter is to contribute to the discussion on transformative agency in ecosocialism, and thus, to ecosocialism's philosophy of praxis (daldal 2014). should the crisis materialise, to whom should our global society look if it wishes to see the materialisation of an ecosocialist system? ecosocialism constitutes one such radical critique of capitalism. founded on a synthesis of red and green theories, it asserts that the current economic and environmental crises constitute one unified, not separate, 'epochal crisis' (bellamy foster 2013), which has emerged as a result of the capitalist mechanisms of production and reproduction. ecosocialist authors indict capitalism's 'grow or die' regime of accelerating accumulation for ecological destruction, the creation of exploitative working conditions, poverty and a highly individualistic society, which is addicted to commodity consumption (ioris 2018; kovel 2008b; löwy 2015) . it has recently been gaining prominence within development discourses, and social movements embodying some of the principles of ecosocialism are beginning to emerge worldwide (e.g. la vía campesina) and, despite the 'demise' of the left in the west, many latin american countries have had experiences with left or centre-left governments, some of which have incorporated ecosocialist goals into their national constitutions (e.g. sumak kawsay in ecuador) with varying levels of success and political acceptability (adams 2009; betto and löwy 2010; burkett 2006; huan 2010; löwy 2015; löwy 2014; radcliffe 2012) . however, while it can be considered a persuasive political discourse for transformation, ecosocialism still faces significant epistemological, analytical and operative challenges (huan 2010) , which reflect the wider questions about the meaning and the contribution of radical political thinking in the contemporary world. one particular gap in the work of many ecosocialist writers is the limited attention given to social actors, exactly those agents with the transformative capacity to realise the ecosocialist vision. this lacuna in the ecosocialist literature was rightly observed by aşıcı (2012) and aşıcı and bünül (2011) in their review of the available literature and confirmed by the authors' own research. this oversight is disappointing given that an analysis of transformative actors constitutes an undeniably vital component of a successful radical social critique, from both a theoretical and practical standpoint (arnold 1990; castree 2009 ). this is highlighted, for instance, in the definition of transformability of socio-ecological systems (ses) provided by walker et al. (2004) as the capacity of social actors to 'create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social (including political) conditions make the existing system untenable' (ibid.: 7). such thinking arguably mirrors the conditions created by capitalism at this current juncture and emphasises that understanding agency is crucial to understanding large-scale transformation (westley et al. 2013) . the ecosocialist writers white et al. (2017) also hinted at the need to explore the transformative capacities of different actors, believing that the 'second stage' of ecosocialism constitutes an attempt to move beyond a critique of the status quo and towards an analysis of the conditions that will enable such a transition, including the empowerment of diverse agents. in light of this, our research seeks to specifically contribute to the neglected topic of transformative agents in ecosocialism, from both a theoretical and empirically based standpoint. this chapter shall examine the transformative potential of key actors that are somehow associated with the ecosocialist vision, based on their outlined practices, their ability and commitment to form part of the transition to a new world order, and their capacity (power) to successfully bring about such changes. this was investigated through (1) an analysis of ecosocialist literature, including two emblematic ecosocialist manifestos (the belém declaration and the réseau ecosocialist manifesto) and ecuador's national development plan, selected as documents which mirror ecosocialist goals and are actively employed and followed by a group of people, and (2) a power analysis of the controversial belo monte dam project in brazil, to investigate the power of the identified transformative agents within a practical and 'real-world' context. the latter was selected as a case study based on kovel's (2014) assertion that 'agents of transformation [will] emerge interstitially' in 'zones of emergence that appear as contradictions mature ' (ibid.: 14) , and the prevailing view that southern communities will be those most immediately and effectively impacted by environmental issues, and thus see the creation of such zones (white et al. 2017 ). within the limited ecosocialist literature on the crucial subject of the identity, practices and imaginaries of social actors, there appears to be two prevailing perspectives as to the agents of transformation who could move society into a post-capitalist, ecosocialist future reality. one view prioritises the controversies in more affluent nations and social contexts, particularly those in the global north, while the other attributes the responsibility for the envisioned transformation to those people less estranged from nature, typically rural and indigenous groups, predominantly those in the global south. in order to more closely examine the issue of actors within ecosocialism, the conceptualisation of transformative agency and its function within ses from westley et al. (2013) is adopted. this approach is considered to be complementary both to the objective of this study and to the theories of ecosocialism, given that it focuses on the role of social innovation in transforming problem domains in complex systems with a view to system change (olsson 2017) . agency is thus examined on a broad system scale in what westley et al. (2013) term the 'problem domain', constituted of actors, organisations and institutions concerned with or affected by a complex problem; within the problem domain, strategic action or agency is required to move the process of transformation of the ses forward. due to the complexity of the problem domain, agency is associated with the action of a myriad of actors, classes and class segments that push the system through different stages of transformation, an effort termed 'institutional entrepreneurship'. this conceptualisation of agency is reflected in the writing of ecosocialist writers, such as kovel (2013) who asserts that 'there is no privileged agent of ecosocialist transforming' (ibid.: 14), but the postcapitalist transformation will be realised through an abundance of individual paths, which will eventually converge, having taken place where the contradictions of capitalism manifest themselves as opportunities (holloway 2010; kovel 2008a, b) . the theory of institutional entrepreneurs in ses allows for such a pluralistic view of transformative agents, who are facing complex problems in ses, and an understanding of their different and disaggregated activities according to their temporally and spatially specific opportunities. our examination employs the theory of transformative agency of institutional entrepreneurs, adopting the heuristic framework employed by westley et al. (2013) , in order to shed light on the identity of the political subjects of the ecosocialist transformation. the approach is based on a combination of holling's 1986 adaptive cycle and dorado's 2005 model of opportunity context, which presents the context of ses as dynamic, with different opportunities for transformative agents emerging at different intervals ( fig. 9 .1). here, opportunity context indicates whether the current situation will permit actors to identify, introduce and institutionalise new ideas and reforms. this heuristic model, combined with the theory of the institutional entrepreneur, describes how actors emerge from within certain institutions to challenge and transform the status quo, and charts the wide diversity of skills and strategies required by these agents for a successful introduction and subsequent institutionalisation of a new or modified system (in this case, ecosocialist reforms). the three different opportunity contexts (opaque, hazy and transparent) are characterised by different configurations of two essential elements: (1) the diversity of organisations forms and (2) the degree of institutionalisation. the entrepreneurs, their agency and their roles are different according to the stages of the cycle and the specificities of the opportunity context therein. olsson (2017) asserts that this is important where large-scale transformation within complex systems is required, and thus change must occur at multiple levels, scale and sectors. indeed, it is highly likely that any post-capitalist transformation will necessarily take a non-linear form, where the cyclical movement through opportunity contexts occurs at different spatial and temporal scales. in brief, the 'back loop' of the heuristic model constitutes the turbulent change portion of the cycle in which there exist multiple organisations and institutionalisation is low, thus allowing for novel ideas to emerge and trigger transformation of the institutional system. the new systemic configuration thus becomes increasingly stabilised, and is institutionalised as the new system of the 'front loop'; here, the degree of institutionalisation is high, and few organisations are dominant. although kovel believes that no specific blueprint of a transition to an ecosocialist world can be laid out in advance (kovel 2008a; kovel 2013) , this heuristic framework adopted from the study by westley et al. (2013) can be employed to better visualise and discuss the diversity of actors who are required to successfully bring about changes in ses and the various skills, alliances and strategies needed according to different opportunity contexts, the latter being spatially and temporally specific. we are interested westley et al. 2013) in the agency that enables movement from the 'front loop'-the current problem domain-to the 'back loop' where multiple agents are mobilised, new ideas emerge and are eventually institutionalised into the new 'front loop', a reformed (ecosocialist) system. given that the transition process to ecosocialism is theorised to take place gradually through the action of a vast array of actors, a discussion on the spectrum of transformative agents, their different capabilities and resources, is important in order to successfully take advantage of opportunities as they emerge, borne out of the multiple crises of capitalism. the agents and their actions outlined in the three ecosocialist documents listed in the previous section are examined using this heuristic framework, allowing for a discussion on whether the agents and their actions stipulated cover the full transition from the current capitalist 'front loop' to an ecosocialist future 'front loop'. taking the 'opaque' context as a starting point, this context is characterised by a few dominant organisations, and institutions and beliefs are well established. in order to challenge the status quo (which is identified as the ultimate cause of the complex problems society is facing), the primary strategies employed at this stage are those that introduce disturbances into the well-established system. indigenous people and social groups, particularly those in south american countries where their power is more intact, are attributed the highest attention in ecosocialist literature and in the two ecosocialist manifestos examined, with their role primarily concerning introducing disturbances into the system. this performs the dual function of challenging established institutions and raising human consciousness. the belém declaration, adopted by the ecosocialist international network in 2009, was the result of a global mobilisation and focuses almost solely on such activities and those agents who are assigned the task of creating disturbances, largely through social activism and protests. this is an undeniably important part of the transformation process, but the document appears to operate at a high level of political activism and gives much less consideration for other strategies and other agents that will be required past the point of creating disturbances; this, therefore, raises questions as to how the ambitious goals outlined in the belém declaration will be met in the complex political landscape and with the high level of political demobilisation in the world today. this is a trend that tends to pervade ecosocialist literature-a gap between the agent and their actions and the theorised ecosocialist reforms that will take place. our call for greater attention to the complexity of social protagonism seems to be greatly justified by the need to connect local and sectoral problems with global and generalised tensions. coordinated political disturbances, combined with internal system shocks, such as crisis internal or external to the system, may subsequently cause the opportunity context to move from an 'opaque' to 'hazy'; a change that is required, in this case, to allow for the system of capitalism to be directly and progressively challenged. in a 'hazy' context, old organisations have lost their dominance, causing institutions and beliefs to become open to interpretation and change. recent economic and political crises across the globe combined with the growing environmental crisis have sent shockwaves through the system, but has this amounted to the creation of an 'epochal' crisis, as some have argued (bellamy foster 2013; moore 2014a)? have these shocks caused people to question the system of capitalism to the extent that its very foundations are being challenged? it can be argued that, previously, the capitalist system did not generate contradictions powerful enough to motivate the revolution predicted by marxist scholars, but that the incorporation of the earth's ecological limits will create a demand for immediate and more radical action (whiteside 1997) . kovel (2008a: 242) , while echoing this sentiment, believes that 'none of these conditions is close to being met at present'. indeed, an awareness of the urgency of environmental problems has existed for a number of decades, but meaningful and sustained radical action has yet to be observed; it is because of this that social actors need to be more carefully understood. the continuing and self-reinforcing hegemony of the modern global capitalist system continues to consistently inhibit the prospects of a transition from an 'opaque' to a 'hazy' context, as it subdues challenges and threats to the system, thus restricting any movement towards a postcapitalist future. indeed, mankoff (1970) argues that the conditions for triggering radical social change are likely to be constantly present under capitalism, but the existing economic order is maintained due to the nonelites' acceptance of capitalism's legitimacy. other authors also point to this false consciousness that pervades today's society, which prevents it from challenging capitalism's ideological hegemony (kovel 2013; pepper 1993 ). this evokes a more classical gramscian view of ideological hegemony exercised not by states specifically, but through social groups and certain dominating classes operating through the state (robinson 2005) . perhaps for this reason, dordoy and mellor (2000) and johns et al. (2003) argue that capitalism can only be overcome once the crisis truly affects those affluent groups that benefit from the exploitation of people and the planet, implying that the transnational capitalist bourgeois is a pivotal change agent in the ecosocialist transition. it is thus possible that the crucial movement to a 'hazy' context, in which the foundations of capitalism can be challenged and new ideas allowed to emerge, requires action from the affluent, capitalist classes as well as social groups and indigenous communities. in any case, anti-capitalist sentiments and thinking appear to be gaining ground in different countries to significantly different degrees, and in academia and social movements, particularly those in latin america; therefore, it is possible that we find ourselves now in a system which is beginning to move into the 'back loop' (schumpeter 2015) . at this point, an essential strategy in the 'hazy' and subsequent 'transparent' context, in which institutionalised systems and beliefs are openly being challenged, is allowing new ideas and understandings to emerge (westley et al. 2013 ). here, indigenous groups and grassroots social movements are implied to play another key role, that of shaping the design of the post-capitalist future system (löwy 2015; kovel 2008b) . these peoples' connectedness to nature assumedly forms values that reflect respect for the environment and the maintenance of sustainable practices; thus, they become a source of creativity and experimentation for the new system being designed. this notion recalls the work by max-neef (1992) on barefoot economics, which proposes to engage with those people who are on the periphery of, or excluded from, the capitalist economic system, in order to construct a more humble economic system that builds on their ecocentric values (imas et al. 2012) . therefore, indigenous groups and social movements, in various associations with urban and rural working classes and other critical activisms, constitute essential transformative agents which bridge the gap between local action, wider engagement and actualised social reform, as this requires making the step from critique to construction, and from opposition to proposition (pieterse 1997 ). supporting such activities by social groups and indigenous peoples, the réseau ecosocialist manifesto, adopted by a quebec-based ecosocialist movement, also identifies left-wing political parties as key agents, particularly throughout the 'hazy' and 'transparent' contexts, as their outlined activities include creating spaces for involvement, and accumulating resources and ideas. these initiatives are vital to the convergence and sense-making activities, which need to occur through the 'hazytransparent', context to allow a transition to the 'front loop'. while this could possibly be achieved by indigenous groups, social movements and others acting together, it is arguably more likely to be successful when there is a designated party or organisation to lead these activities, particularly those which already have the relevant resources and experience at their disposal, such as political parties. however, caution is required here. in the so-called western world, there has been a notable decrease in the popular support for left-wing political parties, with some political scientists using the term 'pasokification' to describe this continent-wide shift in europe; the term was coined following the crashing support for the greek left-wing political party pasok from a steady 45% to 4% in 2015 (the economist 2016). 1 additionally, the political left in many western countries appears to have lost much of its identity, discourse and legitimacy, and is therefore less likely to join those groups that are directly challenging the institution of capitalism. indeed, corporatist theory postulates a social domination model where those organisations opposed to capitalism, like left political parties and unions, are progressively integrated into an institutional structure of social control, ultimately leading to class collaboration as opposed to the more conventional class struggle predicted by marxists (lichten 1984; stephens 1986 ). in light of this, it is perhaps unlikely that the ecosocialist transition will begin in the global north. the situation is different in latin america, where social programmes introduced by left-wing political parties retain popular support, although in more recent times these parties appear to be in state of flux due to the mounting contradictions of formal democracy and conventional policymaking (bremmer 2017; the conversation 2017; ioris 2017 ioris , 2019 kozloff 2016) . while the réseau ecosocialist manifesto identified left-wing political parties as important transformative agents, particularly due to their available resources and leading capabilities, it rejects the potential of states and corporations to act as agents in the ecosocialist movement. in contrast to this, ecuador's national plan for good living (2013-2017) provides an interesting contribution to ecosocialist literature, as it identifies the state as the main transformative agent; although this is unsurprising, given that it is a plan issued by the ecuadorian government (likely to be significantly amended since the recent presidential election). it is also the first ecosocialist document encountered by the authors that gives significant consideration to the important step of institutionalisation of a new systemic design-that of an ecosocialist system; this process is essential in the 'transparent' context, in order for the ses to transition to an 'opaque' context in which the new post-capitalist model has become well established. ecuador's national plan stipulates that the state is primarily responsible for institutionalising the changes set out in its plan, many of which are based on the principles of sumak kawsay, the concept of a society where people live in harmony with each other and with their environment, and one which heavily mirrors the goals of ecosocialism. indeed, wall (2010: 138) , one of the few ecosocialist scholars who acknowledges the importance of the state as a transformative agent, emphasises that, although 'an obvious starting-point is to stress the vital importance of working-class and indigenous agency', state-level power is ultimately imperative 'in order to transform the structure -legal, social, economic and even physical -necessary for the transition to an ecosocialist society' (ibid.: 143). in addition to this, through the implementation of ecuador's national plan, the state aims to create an active citizenry which is critical and conscious, characteristics of key transformative agents; thus, the state is said to be carrying out its 'educative' function described by gramsci (daldal 2014), despite all the intrinsic difficulties associated with the political pressures that involve and pervade the state apparatus (ioris 2014 ). in the ecuadorian plan, priority is being given to investing in generating capacities and also providing platforms through which citizens can participate in and influence decision-making. in this manner, the state is not only a transformative agent but also acts in an intermediary manner as 'the main agent for collective action', that is, conducting convening and sense-making activities, crucial in the transition from a 'hazy' to a 'transparent' context (senplades 2013: 47) . furthermore, the aim to create an active and critical society enshrined in the plan implies that the states seeks to facilitate an almost cyclical or iterative process, whereby social actors are made capable of challenging, as well as transforming, the established institution. a society with such capabilities is indisputably important, particularly given the fact that an 'ideal' system can never truly be achieved, and socio-economic institutions will always require refinement and adjustments. despite the potential transformative ability of the state, it tends to be heavily neglected or even rejected in ecosocialist writings, likely a result of the influence of the red-green theory foundation of ecosocialism, which views the state as primarily upholding capitalist interests (burkett 2006; pepper 1993) . in contrast, wall (2010: 141) emphasises that 'to get to this ecosocialist society, the state must be transformed; it cannot simply be ignored'. indeed, the significance of this statement is enhanced when recalling that the hegemony of capitalism is maintained by the dialectical interplay of coercion and consent, and that the power of legitimate coercion is a unique attribute possessed by the state (upchurch and mathers 2012) . and, if we apply the orthodox marxist view of the state acting as a tool of the capitalist bourgeois to maintain capitalism's hegemony, the transformation of the state into one with an ecosocialist ontology would theoretically undermine this relationship between the former and the state. indeed, to disregard the state would be to overlook the distinct opportunities it presents for the ecosocialist movement. the contemporary state, informed by the hegelian political theories, adopted a 'greener' appearance, but at the cost of avoiding any fundamental change of core state commitments; it means that calls for governance and democracy that avoid tackling the distortions and ideological biases that underpin current-day environmental responses tend to reinforce and, consequently, perpetuate socio-ecological contradictions and environmental injustices (ioris 2014) . indigenous groups and social movements are undeniably key transformative agents, most prominently in the prefiguration stage of ecosocialism; however, consideration of transformative agency beyond this stage, to that in which the radical changes demanded by ecosocialism are refined and institutionalised, is essential. in light of this, the state should perhaps be considered as another potential key actor in ecosocialism, one which plays a dual role in any largescale transitional process, both enabling and encouraging social reform, and also institutionalising it. it is also possible that transformation of the state's ontology would significantly impinge on the ideological hegemony of capitalism. the fundamental antinomies of flexibility and legitimacy of contemporary environmental policies need to be situated in this wider politico-ecological debate about the substantial transformation of the actually existing state apparatus. the key ontological and political question is less how the state deals with the environmental policies and strategies per se, but what its ultimate commitments are and how it works to reinforce or eliminate processes of exclusion and exploitation (ioris 2015) . in sum, the framework set out in the study by westley et al. (2013) provides a solid basis for visualising the lengthy process of ecosocialist design, reform and institutionalisation of a post-capitalist system and the myriad of agents creating such a transformation. it allowed for gaps in certain ecosocialist documents to be identified in terms of the range of actions that will be required to bring about lasting ecosocialist reform and the transformative agents who will carry out such initiatives. for instance, the belém declaration only focused on activities that need to take place in an opaque context and neither the agents outlined nor their actions seek to fulfil different parts of the cycle. moreover, there was often a notable gap between the designated actors and their actions, and the outlined ecosocialist design. the belém declaration focuses solely on indigenous and social groups that are charged with creating disturbances, while its proposed goals include changes such as the 'provision of an extensive free public transportation system' or 'drastic and enforceable reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases' (angus et al. 2009: 3) . not only is it questionable how such goals can be achieved by the designated actors, but there is no consideration for the various activities that are required in order to realise these goals. in contrast, the agents outlined in the réseau ecosocialist manifesto account more fully for the different activities, which need to take place throughout the cycle from the current 'front-loop' through to a new one, pertaining to those activities carried out by social and indigenous groups as well as left-wing political parties. the state, however, is viewed with mistrust and is rejected as an agent. on the other hand, the national development plan of ecuador places the responsibility of instituting change on the state, in terms of both its education function and institutionalising the principles of sumak kawsay (as mentioned in other chapters of this book, please note equivalent concepts informing the political agency of indigenous groups in south america, as küme mongen for the mapuche or teko porã and teko joja for the guarani). additionally, through the discussion, the possibility emerged of the transnational capitalist class, constituting a vital agent in the ecosocialist transition, particularly in the transition from an opaque to a hazy context, that is, overcoming the ideological hegemony that pervades much of society; however, it is likely that the international affluent classes will have to be significantly affected by the problems created by capitalism before they assume any transformative role in an ecosocialist transition. it is worth noting the five transformative agents featured in this discussion based on an analysis of two ecosocialist manifestos and ecuador's national plan for good living (2013-2017): social movements, indigenous groups, the affluent capitalist class, left-wing political parties and the state. the transformation and transition to an ecosocialist system will require a wide range of actions, and thus, a full spectrum of actors to perform such actions. in addition to those mentioned here, consideration of the potential transformative agency of the working class, trade unions, non-governmental organisations (ngos), activists and other such actors would increase the depth of discussion. thus, there is a need for ecosocialist authors to consider a wider spectrum of transformative agents in connection with the multi-layer and multi-sectoral actions, which are required in order to bring about lasting and large-scale solutions (carvalho 2006; wall 2010) . thus, there is also a need for a more enhanced discussion on the arc of actions, which will be required for a successful transition beyond the mere beginning of challenging the established institution of capitalism. based on the available ecosocialist literature, determination of which agents of change are to play a key transformative role in ecosocialism appears to have been heavily shaped by consideration of their perceived social power. power clearly plays a predictive role in the evolution of human societies, and there is an obvious relationship between transformative agency and social power (dowding 2012; hearn 2014) . in order to examine this relationship further, particularly in the context of transformative agents in ecosocialism, a stakeholder power analysis was conducted on the case of the belo monte dam (bmd), based on the method developed by mayers (2005) and adapting the power resources framework created by korpi (1985) . this particular case study was selected because the social actors involved included the majority of those referenced in ecosocialist texts and identified in this research. it therefore provided a practical example through which to analyse the different degrees of their transformative agency based on events which spanned decades. during this time, the country of brazil underwent two important transitions which had significant implications for the bmd project and the agents involved: a political transition from a military regime to a democracy and an economic transition from import-substituting industrialisation to the model of neoliberalisation (saad filho 2014). the bmd on brazil's xingu river was initially proposed in 1975 under brazil's military dictatorship. a region that makes up 54.4% of brazilian territory and encloses 78% of the reserve of national freshwater was considered by the dictatorial government guilty by its geography and 'condemned' to go through a process of water development (a risky endeavour, taking into account the region's particularities, especially the extensive plains and complex socio-ecology). note that the amazon, despite the incredible amount of surface water (around a fifth of the planet's freshwater), is quite ill suited for dams, and swaths of land and forest have been flooded in exchange for relatively little electricity. the largest scheme built during this first phase was tucuruí (inaugurated in 1984), which generates electricity especially for aluminium smelting. the project received very limited environmental consideration, as it was common for all projects advanced by the military government (although it has changed only superficially after the introduction of more comprehensive environmental regulation in the 1990s). during the filling of the tucuruí reservoir, a large quantity of trees was left in the area and then inevitably died, leading to a massive release of methane from their decomposition. with the construction of the tucuruí dam, 2430 square kilometres of forest were flooded and more than 33,000 people (besides the indigenous population) had to be resettled. the scheme also inundated part of three indigenous areas (parakanã, pucuruí and montanha), the effect of which was added to the impact of the transmission lines on their land; in addition, the artificial tucuruí lake led to the extinction of various biological species and to the proliferation of water-borne illnesses. many of these problems remain unsolved and were again present in the next phase of dam construction. a second phase of dam engineering was more focused on politicoeconomic adjustments and that coincided with the neoliberal reform of the brazilian state in the 1990s. the contradictions of the state-led model of development-implemented in brazil along most of the twentieth century and intensified by the military governments, making use of foreign savings through loans from multilateral banks-had resulted in growing economic inefficiencies and reliance on the continuous injection of capital by the state. along the lines of the liberalising institutional changes introduced by the real plan, both generation and commercialisation of energy became then available to private national entrepreneurs, increasingly associated with international investors or energy companies. because of the changing role of the state apparatus, increasingly focused on pro-private sector incentives, instead of direct construction and operation (which, nonetheless, continued to occur, despite the neoliberal discourse), very few hydropower schemes were built during the second period. coordination and decision-making became significantly diffused across many agencies, without the presence of a centralised, well-equipped agency as during the military dictatorship. more recently, since 2003, the amazon hydropower sector has provided an emblematic demonstration of the choreography of continuities and adjustments. in the madeira basin, after a lengthy political dispute, the jirau and santo antônio plants were licensed in july 2007, allowing the overflow of up to 529 square kilometres. the two schemes have affected several indigenous groups, such as the karitiana, karipuna, urueu-wau-wau, katawixi and also other isolated, unnamed tribes (some living only six miles from the jirau dam) who were forced to migrate to new lands, where they clash with garimpeiros (wildcat miners) logging companies, and are exposed to diseases to which they had no immunity. the more contentious project was belo monte-the largest hydropower scheme entirely within the brazilian territory-which has attracted great publicity in the international media (e.g. 29 articles posted by bbc news alone between 2010 and 2017). belo monte, still under construction, demonstrates that the neoliberalising platform was being cleverly adjusted to fulfil neo-developmentalist goals. it also epitomised the revival of the construction of large hydroelectric power plants in the amazon and the encroachment of brazilian energy demands upon neighbouring nations (because some schemes have flooded bolivian land, and brazilian construction companies are deeply involved in projects in peru, venezuela and other countries). the project was partly inaugurated in 2016, with 11,233 megawatts of installed capacity and a cost of more than us$13 billion. after its completion, belo monte will be the third biggest hydropower plant on the planet, just behind itaipu (inaugurated in 1984 on the border between brazil and paraguay) and the three gorges dam in china. the belo monte project, with another name (cararaô), was originally conceived by the military in 1975, but could not go ahead due to the collapse of the regime and its growing financial and political problems. the residents of altamira (near the site of the dam) and the indigenous people keep up a resistance that is organised and quite influenced by the traumatic experience with tucuruí. there was a large gathering in 1989 with more than 1000 participants, including more than 600 indigenous people, which managed to attract international attention to the dispute and led to the cancellation of a world bank loan under negotiation (carvalho 2006) . the proposal was revisited by the neoliberal administration of president cardoso, but it was only really implemented by the government of presidents lula and dilma. a consortium of state-owned companies (called norte energia [more details at http://norteenergiasa. com.br]) won the contract to build belo monte and manage it for 35 years. it is actually bewildering that the lula government included many energy and environmental authorities who for a long time fiercely opposed this and other similar projects in the past. the government had to respond to the criticism raised by environmental groups and local communities (including important indian groups) that managed to form an international coalition against belo monte (that included hollywood stars and famous artists). capacity and transmission lines were reduced, and the new design removed the sizeable reservoir, in order to minimise the negative impacts. moreover, the controversial features of belo monte continue to stir protest and serious resistance (ioris 2020) . the project was the object of a lengthy battle in the courts, which led to repeated interruptions of the construction and operation (the last interruption ordered by a judge occurred in 2017, but local groups also regularly occupy the site of the dam to protest against the unresolved problems associated with the project). the most controversial issue is related to actual viability of the project without other supporting dams upstream. due to the long dry season and the resulting long period of low flows in the xingu river basin (a common feature of eastern amazon rivers), belo monte has a low operation and economic performance if operating as a single dam. it means that a cascade of dams is necessary, but this would magnify the impacts on indigenous land, natural parks and farms. the national government has guaranteed, on many occasions, that belo monte is the only large-scale dam of the xingu river, but the wider problem for the brazilian society is the low legitimacy and eroded trust in public authorities. this is a global phenomenon that seriously impacts on the quality of the formal democracy of many countries, brazil included. similar reassurances were given in relation to the construction of other schemes in the amazon, such as the 43 large dams to be implemented along the (even more vulnerable and controversial) tapajós river by 2022 (fearnside 2015) . those dams are directly benefiting from the friendly interpretation of the legislation and lax enforcement of water and environmental regulation, which means that several indigenous reserves and conservation areas will be flooded and degraded. it is evident that the interests of the construction and business sectors for new infrastructure projects in the amazon contrast with the persistent disregard for public participation and social demands, which reveals the contradictory and asymmetric priorities of the state. the granting of environmental and water licences, as much as public consultation required for the approval of the project, was notoriously undemocratic and strongly pushed forward by the federal government under the justification that economic growth needed additional sources of energy. it is estimated that belo monte displaced between 20,000 and 50,000 people (including many families left behind after the collapse of rubber production in the early 1900s), while only one-third of the compensation promised by the authorities was ever paid (anderson 2017) . for many activists and local communities, there is a distinctive feeling of betrayal and deception associated with belo monte, especially because of the strange new alliances formed between left-wing politicians and conservative economic and political groups (melo 2016) . the election of lula, an important union leader, had raised great expectations, but once in office, his government (2003) (2004) (2005) (2006) (2007) (2008) (2009) (2010) was allied with the most archaic and corrupted politicians and construction companies in the country. it was not coincidence that the approval of belo monte involved systematic diversionary operations employed to divide the opposition and, at the same time, to legitimise the controversial project. during the dilma government (2010) (2011) (2012) (2013) (2014) (2015) (2016) , which succeeded lula's, the secret service was even asked to spy indigenous leaders, anthropologists and social movements that opposed the construction of belo monte (valente and bragon 2017) . due to the associated environmental and social consequences, the bmd project has been the focus of intense controversy since its inception, sparking substantial opposition from affected groups, extending to and including citizens, groups and ngos at the national and international level. for the purposes of this research, the social actors involved were divided into two groups based on their response to the project: the pro-dam and anti-dam groups. both are constituted of a wide variety of actors, ranging from local to national and international agents, but supported by contrasting types and different degrees of power resources. these are summarised in table 9 .1. the power of the anti-dam actors stemmed primarily from their shared ideology, the belief that the environmental and social impacts of the bmd outweighed any benefits from the project. ideological power, as a power resource, is characterised by a large domain (the number of actors who are receptive to it) but a narrow scope (the range of activities of other actors that can be punished or rewarded via the resource) (korpi 1985) . indeed, it is traditionally considered to be less powerful in the face of financial resources, physical capital and means of violence, power resources which have both a large domain and wide scope. these latter resources were embodied by the national state, norte energia and the world bank, the main actors in the pro-dam camp. however, when the project was first proposed, the opposition from indigenous and local people, ngos and the international community proved to be successful in its lobbying of the world bank, leading to cancellation of its loan to the federal government, causing the project to be shelved (xing 2013) . while this could demonstrate the potential power of ideology when large groups of people are mobilised, carvalho (2006) attributes the success of the anti-dam campaign not to the opposition movement itself but to the timing. the late 1980s constituted a crucial moment for the world bank, as it was under much scrutiny for its poor environmental performance, and following the cancellation of the loan, the brazilian government was not in a position to finance the project itself. this highlights the importance of context when considering the transformative potential of agents. following this, the design of the bmd project was amended to decrease flooding and increase capacity, and proposed again in the early 2000s. despite the previous success of the anti-dam movement, different circumstances resulted in the eventual full licensing of the bmd (the scheme is expected to be completed by 2019). the government announced that the brazilian national development bank (the main development bank, owned by the federal government) would finance 80% of the project, demonstrating the significant increase in the state's financial resources and thus its autonomy from multilateral agencies, such as the world bank (xing 2013) . the plans for the bmd were again met with strong opposition from the anti-dam coalition, their power still primarily based on ideology, with the aim to stop construction. however, the new financial strength of the state and norte energia created a more pronounced power asymmetry between the two sides, allowing the state to resist the protests at all levels, including the international level, where it bypassed the temporary injunctions, resulting from the anti-dam's coalition to the united nations (un) human rights council and the international labour organisation (cato 2013 ; d'elia 2012). on 7 november 2018, a delegation of the inter-american commission on human rights visited the region and, at the end, urged the brazilian government to immediately resolve the grave violation of the basic human rights of indigenous peoples and riparian communities living close to the bmd. unfortunately, the new brazilian government, in power since january 2019, was elected with a strong anti-indigenous and anti-minorities manifesto, which has included the cancellation of any new recognition of indigenous lands, and also a clear policy of utility privatisation and minimum environmental regulation. this may be demonstrative of the supremacy of financial capital as a power resource over ideology, particularly in today's capitalist economies in which accelerated economic growth is the main concern. financial resources and physical capital certainly presented advantages over ideology as power resources in the case of the bmd. the latter has a low mobilisation and storage potential, implying that over long periods of time-the protests spanned three decades-the ability of ideology to provide significant power is reduced, particularly when engaged in an ad hoc fashion (korpi 1985) . as a result, the second wave of protests constituted a more diffuse coalition and less visible action than in 1989 (carvalho 2006) . others also noted division among indigenous and local groups, some of which were materially enticed by the state to neutralise key activists, indicating that ideology may be compromised by other more material resources (barrionuevo 2010; bratman 2015; d'elia 2012; watts 2014) . should ecosocialism rely exclusively on similar groups of agents, that is social movements and indigenous people (as is the prevailing view in ecosocialist literature), to further the movement's goals and eventual transition to a post-capitalist society, their power resources would have to include more than a shared ideology, in order for them to succeed, for this has shown to decrease in momentum and power over time. and ecosocialists, in contrast with orthodox marxist scholars, favour a more gradual transition process, implying that transformative agents will require power resources with a high storage potential, these being physical and financial capital and regulatory power (kovel 2008a, b; holloway 2010) . in light of the dependency of agents' transformative potential on their respective power resources, the role of the state as a transformative agent becomes interesting due to its dual characteristic; it is both an agent that effects change and is also an agent that can enable or restrict other agents due to its regulatory power, that is, its role as a major distribution of power resources, and its power of legitimate coercion. the state creates and upholds the structures of society, which determine the power of agents, as they constitute the organisationally defined social means to power resources. through defining property rights and controlling market regulations, the state can theoretically even exert influence on the economic behaviour of organisations and corporations, thereby extending its power to the economic elite, those agents that, in a capitalist society, are characterised by a high concentration of power resources (nasra and dacin 2010; scott 2013) . moreover, the internationally prevailing neoliberal paradigm appears to have institutionalised a modus operandi, which restricts the state's power and thus further reduces the possibility that the state would take actions that run contrary to capitalist interests (teeple 2000) . indeed, it could be argued that the brazilian state's support of the bmd project through its national development bank demonstrates its adherence to the neoliberal paradigm and to capitalist interests (emphasis on the growth of the national economy creates an ever-increasing demand for energy to support it). the emergence of the left-wing movement in brazil in the 1980s led to the dismantling of the elitist party system that dominated national politics and began the substantial process of democratisation of decision-making and the creation of opportunities for public participation; guedes de oliveira (2010) terms this brazil's 'counter-hegemony'. despite this, however, the state's adherence to the neoliberal paradigm significantly reduced the agency of social groups through the 'restoration of class power', particularly as a result of strict property rights and the progressive neutralisation of labour unions (harvey 2005 (harvey , 2006 . this has led to the concentration of financial resources and physical capital in the hands of the economic elite, the characteristic distribution of power resources in capitalist societies, as these are the agents that own and control the means of production. therefore, while democracy may have been established at the political level in brazil, the capacity of agents to effect the change they desired in the case of the bmd was still restrained due to the state's adherence to the neoliberal paradigm and its subsequent distribution of power resources, which allowed one group (the economic elite) to maintain its hegemony, thus undermining brazil's 'counter-hegemony' (saad filho 2014; vanhanen and kimber 1994) . this contradiction in political and economic structures recalls the arguments outlined in support for 'economic democracy', in which the structure of the economy is redesigned to engender democratisation, a condition which would be fundamental to ecosocialism (dolack 2012; pepper 1998) . in sum, the bmd project provided an interesting, and intriguing, case through which to examine a significant attribute of transformative agency: the power of different actors and how this pertains to their potential contribution in the ecosocialist transition. empirically based observations drew attention to the varying levels of impact these groups can have, impacts which are dependent on the context and the power resources of the agents. ideology, employed by social movements and indigenous people, was proven to be a persuasive force, particularly when the opposing actors faced uncertain financial resources. however, the former cannot be considered a sustainable resource and was unable to sustain its force over the four decades of the project; thus, ideology alone cannot be expected to sustain the momentum of an ecosocialist transition. the financial power of the norte energia and the federal state (brazilian national development bank-bndes) was seen to be a significant power resource and one which ultimately decided the fate of the bmd project. this strengthens the argument that the state should be considered a key factor in ecosocialism, one which must be transformed as opposed to ignored. this study sought to contribute, from the perspective of the nexus between environment and development, to a current lacuna in ecosocialist literature on transformative agency, that is, the actors who will bring about the theorised transition to a post-capitalist regime and their transformative potential as a function of their power resources. the former was explored against the framework created by westley et al. (2013) of transformative agency within ses; this brought to attention the wide range of actions that must be executed in the transition from one ses to another, thus implying an equally diverse range of agents. the discussion focused on five transformative actors and their particular roles in an ecosocialist transition according to different contexts: indigenous groups, social movements, left-wing political parties, the state and the transnational bourgeois classes. the latter two are often disregarded in the limited ecosocialist literature that references the subject of transformative agents. however, given that they possess significant and effective power resources, and thus have a high transformative potential, the role of the state and affluent classes in the ecosocialist transition requires further research. indeed, both context and power resources were demonstrated to play a significant role in the transformative potential of different agents. different contexts require different actors to take the leading role, depending on the action required at the time (e.g. political parties would take a leading role in the sense-making activities required during hazy and transparent contexts). in this regard, there is a need to further understand the complexity and political subjectivities of social actors in different socio-spatial circumstances. in addition, the effectiveness of certain power resources may also be dependent on contexts (e.g. the initial triumph of the anti-dam coalition on the basis of ideological power). on a final point, the authors, here, would like to emphasise that, based on the earlier discussion, it would be pertinent for future research in this area to examine the transformative potential of agents in a globalised context, one which presents a number of challenges to social actions, even at the micro-and meso-scale, and has significant repercussions on the distribution of power resources. the transition which has occurred from national to global 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critical perspectives issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4493 ©2021 (valentin dander; theo hug; ina sander; rachel shanks). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. editorial digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives guest editors valentin dander fh clara hoffbauer potsdam, university of applied sciences theo hug university of innsbruck ina sander cardiff university; helmut-schmidt-university, hamburg rachel shanks university of aberdeen introduction one famous narrative of the internet is that it is a free and liberating space that has been invaded by big business. this narrative is as well-known as it is criticized for its oversimplification. nonetheless, we can observe certain shifts within the infrastructure of the internet and other digital technologies: from open, interoperable protocols and formats to ‘walled gardens’ of social media platforms; from non-commercial sharing economies to profit-driven services; and from the web as a transnational structure to nationalized internets with location-specific services, restrictions and regulations. as digitization and datafication continue to extend into all areas of society, digital capitalism becomes equally ubiquitous and universal. the aforementioned examples illustrate how economic and political interests are at work. these examples highlight some of the difficulties in the conceptualizations and practices of digitization. digital capitalism, https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4493 digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 and related phenomena such as data, surveillance or platform capitalism, operate on the basis of a comprehensive expropriation and exploitation of personal data profiles. it functionalizes life worlds and places of education to an unprecedented extent. while we are facing new ways of dealing with quantitative dimensions of education, nonmeasurable dimensions of education as well as media critical perspectives are often neglected. moreover, the limitations of mathematical languages and algorithmic rationality very often remain unnoticed as well. education, in this context, obviously plays a ‘critical’ role in an ambivalent sense. on the one hand, (media) education can be seen as an important countermeasure in raising people’s awareness, as well as their levels of criticality and reflexivity. in this sense, educational work within media education corresponds with the critical analysis of digital capitalism and datafication, informing knowledge about contextual dimensions of big data as well as promoting facilitation of critical literacies, self-determination, enlightenment regarding the distribution of responsibility, solidarity with underprivileged groups and personal agency. on the other hand, education in many cases extends digital capitalist ideologies (cf. technical solutionism), tech services and practices to the development and utilization of human capital. examples include large tech companies lobbying for their equipment, cloud-based services, datafied learning and automated learning systems in schools or he, especially in the context of the emerging global education industry (gei). political and educational actors largely embrace these metrics-based solutions, as they promise an effective way of reducing complexity in formal education settings, but they may not always be aware of the implications of these systems. what position/s can media education in research and application take to respond to these developments? which theories, concepts and methods help to formulate adequate analytical, critical and transformative answers? overview this special issue opens with horst niesyto’s theoretical essay on “digital capitalism and critical media education”. the author takes two of his previous writings about challenges for media education in light of developments in digital capitalism as a starting point. he points out affinities between capitalist and digital structural principles as well as related problems regarding structures of social inequality, power relations, processes that promote and endanger democracy, and influences of it industries on education. in his conclusion, niesyto argues for strengthening critical media education and promoting alternative pathways to the commercial offers that large it corporations provide. in the paper “refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education” jeremy knox examines how division can be understood through the distinction between learning in and learning from educational platforms. knox uses zuboff’s work (2019) the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power and digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 the term ‘division of learning’ to consider educational platform software. there is the distinction or division between those who use technologies and learn in educational platforms and those that own the platform software. knox explains how zuboff uses the term ‘shadow text’ to denote the body of data that is gathered from users, below the surface, unseen by the users but seen by the knowledge elite who derive insights into human behaviour. in the second part of his paper, knox suggests that researchers and others need to engage in a purposive, political and emancipatory form of data science rather than calling for people to become experts in data science, which zuboff appears to be doing. in her paper “critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy”, fieke jansen takes a socio-political perspective towards critical data literacy. the author provides a thorough overview of recent approaches to (critical) data literacy and unpacks the assumptions that underly these redefinitions. reflecting on years of experience in creating data literacy resources in the third sector, the author advances the argument that data literacy needs to be (re)politicized: both in terms of the competencies learners need to influence political processes and challenge existing power structures in datafied societies, and in terms of the assumed ‘neutrality’ of the data literacy concept itself. throughout the article, jansen underpins this argument by engaging with recent scholarly debates as well as reflecting on her own practical experience in the field, highlighting “blind spots” in recent data literacy concepts and suggesting concrete approaches for politicizing the practice of critical data literacy. with the digitization and datafication of our societies, the term ‘consent’ has developed a new meaning, describing the click of an ‘ok’ or ‘i agree’ button, and constituting the legal necessity for using the digital ecosystem. in “a feminist critique to digital consent”, elinor carmi analyses this new understanding of consent in the digital age and asks: “who benefits from digital consent?”. in search of an answer, the author analyses feminist understandings of consent, presenting a feminist critique of digital consent mechanisms and uncovering the power asymmetries that digital consent enables. the article identifies the current digital consent system as flawed and argues that cosmetic changes toward a more ‘ethical’ consent mechanism only strengthen this broken system. finally, the article highlights the broader educational effects of digital consent, as it nudges people towards behaving with narrow agency and in ways that preserve asymmetric power relations. while the research field critical data studies has grown significantly in recent years, most studies in the field focus on social, cultural, political, and economic factors rather than technical dimensions of data systems. the article “towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures. a technogenetic analysis of the experience api” by christoph richter, lars raffel and heidrun allert aims to broaden the analytic scope of critical data studies in education by examining the technical dimension of emerging educational data infrastructures. as a case study, the authors examine the ‘experience application programming interface’, or xapi, which has been developed to digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 support the recording, exchange, and retrieval of learning processes across digital educational platforms. based on first-hand experience in implementing the xapi, the authors unravel the social, historical and cultural assumptions and perspectives underlying educational technology standards like the xapi and demonstrate the rather restricted idea of learning and education that such systems support. dan verständig’s paper on “critical data studies and data science in higher education” gives a very useful introduction to the thematic field around data and algorithms: including various contexts; differentiated power relations; and inequalities within or through data practices. the author, then, presents and reflects upon a course project for masters students in higher education. the course mainly addressed students from computer science and education and was based on problem-/project-based learning and a wider understanding of transformative learning. students in the course acquired insights into a range of concepts from critical data studies and data science, as well as skills in programming and the use of data retrieval and analytics tools. in the core of the course, a joint group project was conducted, accompanied by a steady process of discussion and reflection upon ethical aspects, power relations or team processes. while the paper is mostly based on personal considerations by the author, it provides valuable insights into a pedagogic approach to critical data literacy at the intersection of data science and media education in an interdisciplinary setting. xavier giró gràcia and juana m. sancho-gil’s paper “artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism” provides a useful overview of the issues facing educators, policy makers and educational researchers in this field. they first introduce the concepts of big data, artificial intelligence, learning analytics and machine learning algorithms and then explain how they are deployed as ‘black boxes’. they consider the possible impact on education that these developments can have. the paper then focuses on the underlying educational discourses that present information and communication technologies as a panacea for solving educational problems and suggest these are reductionist solutions to wicked problems. the authors point out the need to analyse not only the advantages of these technologies but also their possible negative effects. the paper concludes with a call for education on algorithms and the impact they can have on our lives. in their paper on the “global education industry”, theo hug and reinhold madritsch explore the “state of affairs in austria”. departing from general remarks on processes of economization and digitization in education, especially under pandemic conditions, the authors draw on anthony picciano’s notion of the “educational-industrial complex” (eic) as an analytical heuristic to investigate the development and status quo of digitization within the education system and educational politics. the concepts offer three dimensions – ideology, profit and technology – with which the authors shape their analysis. their national case study encompasses material such as websites from public authorities, learning portals, business networks and marketing materials from commercial providers digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 for learning technology and content. the paper depicts and disentangles the interdependencies of public and commercial actors. the authors suggest that to counter the previously analysed networks within the eic it is necessary to strengthen public responsibilities for partly outsourced sectors as well as the “ethics of the commons” (e.g. in using free software) and “digital sovereignty”. in the first part of the final paper by geir haugsbakk, he examines international debates on the influence of technology giants on educational policy. he provides a synopsis of contemporary research about edtech industries and the kinds of relations and networks that have been established since the early 1990s. in the second part of his paper, the author focuses on networks and channels of influence in a norwegian context. the author comes to the conclusion that there are some similarities in terms of edtech dynamics in different countries, especially regarding a general level of how digital technologies are valued as a way of improving teaching and learning. however, the author also found aspects specific to the norwegian context, for example well-funded public schools that leave less leeway for privatization and commercialization. the paper concludes with a demand for more systematic approaches in dealing with a whole range of complex questions related to the technology giants and their influence on education policy. the editors of this special issue hope that you enjoy the contributions and that they help to further your understanding of the issues raised and maybe prompt you into considering your own data traces and entanglements with digital capitalism. editorial digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives guest editors introduction overview microsoft word ahkmad marhadi 4 e-journal of cultural studies august 2018 vol. 11, number 3, page 23-32 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 23 power relation of punggawa-sawi on fishermen of bajo ethnics at tiworo archipelago, north tiworo district, west muna regency, south east sulawesi akhmad marhadi1, i ketut ardhana2, i nyoman darma putra3, ni luh arjani4 1faculty of art halu oleo university, 2 3 4 cultural studies program faculty of art udayana university email: 1ajie_np@yahoo.com, 2phejepsdrlipi@yahoo.com, 3idarmaputra@yahoo.com 4arjani_psw@yahoo.com abstract after the coming of globalization flow and ideology of capitalism in ner order around 1970s and 1980s until reformation era in 1998 up to now, power relation of punggawa-sawi resulted in hegemony on the group of sawi that had the impact on economic imbalance in the life of bajo ethnics. this research is a qualitative method. next, this research used a qualitative method with technique of snowball according to the purpose and objective of research. result of this research showed that in forming power relation and hegemony of the group of punggawa is done not only directly in recruiting sawi as the worker to collect sea product, but also do the power and hegemony through another punggawa, through capital restriction and restrain of trade. in addition, manipulating regulation of government, power relation and hegemony through trader outside and through security apparatus are also done in recruiting sawi with the purpose of pursuing economic profit. ideology of capitalism and religiousity is the supporting factor of hegemony towards sawi to happen. in this case, power relation between punggawa and sawi has the implication on ideological aspect that also influences system of knowledge of bajo ethnics. besides, this thing also has the implication on economic aspect, namely inegality of incoming between punggawa with sawi, political aspect, namely the involvement of the group of punggawa in practical politic, and has the implication in practical poliytics and has the implicatin on the condition of social stratification in which the change on the system of socil stratification happens on the society of bajo ethnics. keywords: power relation, punggawa-sawi, bajo ethnics, ideology, and capitalist. introduction in the light of economic aspect, societal life of bajo ethnics at tiworo archipelago, north tiworo district, west muna regency constitutes the relation of patron-client between the capital owner and worker that is usually called with the term of “punggawa-sawi”. in analyzing the power relation between punggawa and sawi during new order in 1970s and 1980s and the coming of reformation era in 1998 up to now with globalization flow and capitalism that is increasingly strong did not make the change totally on the life of bajo ethnics. one of which that is still inherent in economic life as their cultural heritage is the e-journal of cultural studies august 2018 vol. 11, number 3, page 23-32 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 24 relationship of patron-client between capital owner/production leader and worker that is usually called by bajo ethnics in south and southeast sulawesi with the term of punggawasawi. the word of punggawa is similirized with leader or boss. this term is used to describe the relationship in the broad scope between superior and subordinate that is accompanied with personal bonds. the term of sawi is the complement of punggawa that can be interpreted as the subordinate or the person having personal relationship with the superior. the relation between pungawa-sawi on fishermen community of bajo ethnics at north tiworo forms the bonds of patron-client. initially, the relationship of punggawa and sawi in doing fish-catching and catching-product division ran in a balanced and fair manner between punggawa and sawi. but, the advent of capitalism flow causes the group of punggawa increasingly intensively builds the relations with other parties in doing management of sea product that, without being realized, arouse the power and hegemony to the group of sawi. this has the implication on economic condition of society of bajo ethnics. the main question in this research how the forms of power relation of punggawasawi in the activity of fishermen of bajo ethnics at tiworo archipelago, north tiworo district, west muna regency are. this research aims at answering the general problems that happen on fishermen of bajo ethnics at tiworo archipelago, north tiworo district west muna regency related to the power relation of the group of punggawa and group of sawi. whereas, the specific purpose of this research is to respond the problems in the problem formulation. this research uses a power relation theory of foucault to study the forms of power relation between the interest supporter namely punggawa (rural government and entrepreneur of sea product collector) and society of fishermen of sawi and influence of modernization towards ideology of group of punggawa and sawi. this research also employed a theory of capital of bourdieu. this theory is used not only to see the form of power relation, but also to study the implication that happens in power relation of punggawa-sawi on fishermen of bajo ethnics at north tiworo district, west muna regency. result and discussion the forms of the power relation of fishermen’s activities mentioned above are as follows. the form of working-relation also happens between small punggawa with his sawi. small punggawa is the punggawa given capital by big punggawa to be managed with the purpose of enlarging his working-area. the task of small punggawa is recruiting the group of e-journal of cultural studies august 2018 vol. 11, number 3, page 23-32 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 25 sawi or traditional small fishermen to work to punggawa. the direct recruitement of sawi that is done by small punggawa is the strategy done to create their own fishermen in their own region in collecting sea products like tasipi village, bero village, tiga village, and all villages at north tiworo district. this is carried out not only to expand working-relation, but also to fulfill their production necessity including how the small punggawa as the mediator of big punggawa can become the relation and hegemonize the distribution areas of fishermen of sawi to be made the worker in collecting sea products. the target of small punggawa in doing the recruitement of sawi to do the activity of fish-catching is the group of small fishermen that works individually either they who use traditional boat by using sticking-machine or traditional boat by using oar or they who do not have catching-tools. the way done by small punggawa is by giving additional capital loan for the fishermen of sawi who have had the business of catching previously according to their needs. whereas, for sawi who begins their business for the first time is given capital loan in the form of tools and equipment of catching-tool and is given money loan to fulfill their daily life needs. the strategy of direct recruitement of sawi by giving capital and loan for daily life needs aims to be easier to monitor and control their performance so that it makes the power and hegemony of punggawa towards sawi to be increasingly strong. it is due to the life pattern of sawi himself that tends to be pragmatical and irregular in the management of finance because of their mindset that regards that sea has provided their life needs. the relation formed by big punggawa to expand his business network is by forming small punggawa as the mediator of big punggawa in building power relation and hegemony towards sawi. one of the criteria in lifting small punggawa is done by being chosen a sawi that has worked for a long time and has obtained the trust, loyality and still owns kinship bonds with big punggawa. it is through the small punggawa that in turn recruites sawi to work to collect sea products either by using traditional boat or by using sticking-machine in all areas of north tiworo district to fulfill the necessity of market. the way of big punggawa builds the connections in enlarging his business expansion by creating small punggawa as the mediator of big punggawa. the group of small punggawa spreads in every island that also constitutes the villages at north tiworo district to facilitate the access of small punggawa and collect sea products from the fishermen (sawi). through the small punggawa that has been created by big punggawa aims at strengthening the power and hegemony of punggawa towards sawi. e-journal of cultural studies august 2018 vol. 11, number 3, page 23-32 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 26 working-relation that happens between punggawa and sawi is carried out by giving the trust to manage capital with the purpose of binding the group of sawi in order to keep working and obeying towards the command of punggawa that is helped by small punggawa. the group of big punggawa expands their working-relation and develops business with the purpose of dominating sea products so that they can fulfill their production needs. in actuating this strategy, big punggawa depends on the capability of the small punggawa as their mediator in every village that spreads at north tiworo district. in choosing the person that is made as their working-partner, the group of big punggawa has their own requirement. this requirement is done to give the guarantee in order that the distributing of capital and loan to sawi can run well and make sure that the collecting of sea product can be dominated by big punggawa. this strategy is carried out in order that the cost is still in the control of big punggawa. the submission of authority in capital management and purchase cost determining towards catching-product of the fishermen of sawi is made use of by the group of small punggawa to do the purchase according to the cost established partially by the group of small punggawa, eventhough the cost does not exceed the standard of cost established by the group of big punggawa. this case becomes the space of the group of small punggawa to do the power and hegemony towards the group of sawi by means of giving capital according to the needs of sawi and on the aspect of product division and purchase are not greatly imbalanced and tend to lose the group of sawi. social bond between punggawa and sawi not only obtains the profit economically, but this relation in turn develops and is directed to reach a bigger political interest. its purpose is to strengthen the existence of punggawa in the middle of bajo ethnics by making use of social bond between punggawa and sawi for political interests with the hope of being capable of arranging and of actuating the aids given by both central government and local government to the group of fishermen of bajo ethnics. economic dependence of fishermen of sawi towards punggawa becomes moral bond with the obligations that must follow the will of punggawa in giving his political decision. the capability of punggawa in controlling his member becomes special attention both executive and legislative government. punggawa is in turn made as the connection of building communication with groups of fishermen that are controlled by the group of big punggawa. this condition opens the space in which power relation and hegemony paly in the midst of society of bajo fishermen. e-journal of cultural studies august 2018 vol. 11, number 3, page 23-32 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 27 along with the socio-political development in the region, the group of punggawa in turn changes into the agent that guards governmental policy even becomes political connection in the midst of society of fishermen of bajo ethnics at north tiworo district. the group of punggawa plays a role not only as the capital owner in domination of economical assets, but begins entering in political fields. in addition to strengthening their existence in the society, the group of punggawa also protects and adds their economic assets through governmental policy both executive and legislative government. this progressively strengthens the power and hegemony of punggawa towards sawi by doing manipulation of governmental policy regulation both executive and legislative government. the group of punggawa to optimalize performance of sawi in collecting sea products in order to be able to get big profit by means of interlacing relation and collaboration with traders outside whether they who are in makassar, bali, surabaya, or jakarta. the relation that is built through the traders outside of north tiworo district is done in order that they obtain capital loan and make sure that the route of marketing of sea products can be overcome and can get bigger profit. the traders outside are also not reluctant to give the trust in the aid of capital for the group of punggawa to make them easier to obtain the supply of sea products. the relationship of power relation between big punggawa with trader of sea product collector from outside has had their each own route. the abovementioned trading-route may not be broken and if they break the rule that has been established will get sanction from the collectors of sea products from four cities in indonesia. in addition, they as the capital supplier, it signifies that it has happened the power and hegemony of traders outside towards the role of big punggawa. therefore, they cannot help but obliging to guard the relationship of fellow punggawa and do the power and hegemony towards sawi to work as well as possible for the survival and trust of their business from the sanction that they obtain whenever from traders outside. punggawa as the doer of business in the midst of society certainly always expects to conduct their safe and comfortable business and without any disturbance. principally, punggawa requires the security guarantee in doing their business according to what is expected without any disturbance from another person or from certain societal groups as the consequence of business competition. for that reason, the group of punggawa entrusts safety and protection of their business through security apparatus. in this case, institution of police matter is the best institution in ascertaining the safety of their business. e-journal of cultural studies august 2018 vol. 11, number 3, page 23-32 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 28 there is mutualistic relation in which punggawa gets the sense of safety in one hand, on the other hand, the group of punggawa can also give the fear towards sawi that tries to do the bad things or opposition towards punggawa. based on this case, punggawa makes the security side as the tool to give the fear towards the group of sawi in order to guard and guarantee their obedience towards punggawa. the relationship of power relation and hegemony through security side also aims at guaranteeing the survival of fish-catching business and preventing conflict of inter fellow fishermen that depend his life form sea products. besides, power and hegemony through security apparatus also aims at avoiding and acting on emphatically the fishermen from out of north tiworo to conduct sea product catching in their area. closing the implication of power relation of punggawa-sawi on the fishermen of bajo ethnics at tiworo archipelago, north tiworo district, west muna regency is as follows. loyality and obedience of bajo ethnics are keeping ritual and pamali in the form of prohibition and forbidding and are keeping the belief to the existence of magical creature of sea guardian. the prohibition that must be obeyed both sawi and his family member when the husband is going in the sea may not break pamali. pamali is in the form of prohibition and forbidding that have been institutionalized in the self of every fishermen of bajo ethnics so that it forms the action and paradigm of bajo ethnics about surroundings. this implies on the action of balancing between human beings and papu (the god), between human and human, and between human and nature. pamali that is in the form of prohibition and forbidding is made use of by punggawa to influence sawi in doing his activity during going in the sea. the belief towards the sea guardian is considered as a truth. as a result, it arouses the high faith, loyality, and obedience from sawi towards punggawa. it is through this ideology that in turn punggawa instills and strengthens the power of his hegemony to obtain legitimation from society of bajo ethnics to persue his economic interest towards sawi. the portrait of life of fishermen of bajo ethnics at north tiworo district initially was still simple. they have not used modern catching-tools yet. the boat that they use was still driven by human’s energy (manual) by using oar (busae), catching-tool used is also the work of fishermen themselves. along with the time goes, the life of bajo ethnics at north tiworo e-journal of cultural studies august 2018 vol. 11, number 3, page 23-32 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 29 district begins being influenced by modernization, the coming of modernization results in the change of paradigm and knowledge of bajo ethnics. the change of life pattern in the society of fishermen of bajo ethnics appears on the using of means and traditional catching-tools that in turn becomes the using of means and modern catching-tools in the form of technological application of mini ship of pursein 5-10 gt with catching-tool of ring dragnet that is usually called with gae. the using of modern technology in fish-catching has the implication on plentiness and unplentiness of their catching-product. this condition is not only resulted in by the capacity of exploring-power means and modern catching-tools employed, but is also caused by the shift from human’s energy (manual) to machine. in addition, it is also due to specific skill from sawi in operating the abovementioned means and catching-tools. another implication is the change of social structure of fishermen. the fishermen of capital owner (money and production means) are categorized as punggawa, while the fishermen having capital of energy and skill of catching fish are called as worker or sawi. besides, the change of relational pattern that happens becomes hierarchical but does not direct to exploitative thing in which with his skill of catching fish, a sawi is employed by punggawa. the using of means and modern catching-tools that are given by punggawa to sawi is managed as maximal as possible by punggawa as the media to dominate and hegemonize for the sake of obtaining profit as much as possible. punggawa owns the strength of money and catching-tools. having capital strength and fish-catching-tools make punggawa to have many loyal followers in this case the group of sawi. it is the reality that makes the candidates in the election both in the level of village like the election of village head and general election such as: legislative election, regent election, governor election, and president election are more interested in approaching punggawa than sawi. punggawa can employ his influence (power) to organize and can make his sawi to be present to the place of vote-taking for electing one of the candidates required by the punggawa. the existence of punggawa is considered by the fishermen of sawi as the person having the right in deciding the direction of political support for the fishermen of bajo ethnics particularly for the group of sawi. the decision mentioned above has consequence if it is not followed. the real consequence on the denial of the abovementioned decision from punggawa is felt directly by sawi. some of the punggawa get involved in political spaces as the effort of strengthening the power by becoming the part of political party organizer or e-journal of cultural studies august 2018 vol. 11, number 3, page 23-32 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 30 success team. even, there are also some of them that have become the member of legislative by making use of his power towards their sawi. after the coming of economical interest of the traders outside of north tiworo district, it has the implication on the change of social stratification of society of bajo ethnics. initially, bajo ethnics knew three layers in social stratification, namely lolo bajo, sandro, and sesehe, but currently becomes four social layers of society. the position of punggawa as the capital owner becomes the top position or first layer, the second layer is lolo bajo (the noblemen), the third layer is sandro (the shaman), and the fourth layer is sesehe that changes into sawi (the worker) occupies the last layer. bibliography abdul hafid. 2012. kearifan lokal nelayan bajo. makassar. pustaka rekfleksi ---------2014. pengetahuan lokal nelayan bajo. pustaka refleksi. makassar. alias, 2012. kearifan lokal orang bajo dalam pengelolaan sumber daya laut. tesis. badan pusat statistik. 2015. kabupaten muna dalam angka 2015. badan pusat statistik kabupaten muna barat. ---------2015. kecamatan tiworo utara dalam angka tahun 2015. muna barat : badan pusat statistik kabupaten muna barat. baskara. 2016. islam bajo agama orang laut (banten: javanica). bourdieu, pierre. 2005. the social structures of the 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(ed.), handbook of theory of research for the sociology of education, new york: greenword press, hlm. 46-58. foucault, michel. 1983. structuralism and post-structuralism. in the essential foucault. the new press. new york. ---------, 2002. power/knowledge wacana kuasa/pengetahuan. (terjemahan yudi santoso).yogyakarta : bentang budaya. garna, judistira k. 1999. metode penelitian pendekatan kualitatif. bandung: cv primaco academia. gramsci, antonio. 1976. selections from prison notebooks. newyork: international publisher. e-journal of cultural studies august 2018 vol. 11, number 3, page 23-32 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 31 hamzah, awaluddin. 2015. “fishing technology conversion, differentiation, and social mobility of fisherman in lagasa village of muna regency”, jurnal international journal of sustainable tropical agricultural sciences. hanafi. hussin, 2008. diaspora bajau laut dan pengekalan serta penerusan amalan tradisi di sabah”. borneo research journal, no. 2. harris, z. 1991. “bajo, suku yang tinggal terapung di perairan timur kendari”, kendari. sinar harapan. kumbara, dkk. 2016. pergeseran hubungan siwa-sisya (patron klien) dalam keberagaman umat hindu di kota denpasar. denpasar laporan hiba grup 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terhadap kearifan lokal masyarakat pantai, melestarikan budaya bahari dalam pembangunan kebudayaan dan pariwisata. jakarta: kementerian kebudayaan dan pariwisata. -------2013. “kebangkitan identitas orang bajo di kepulauan wakatobi”. jakarta. antropologi indonesia vol. 34 no. 1. wianti nur isiyana. 2011. kapitalisme lokal suku bajo (studi kasus nelayan bajo mola dan mantigola, kabupaten wakatobi, provinsi sulawesi tenggara tesis magister, sekolah pascasarjana institut pertanian bogor. wilson m.a. therik. 2008. nelayan dalam bayang juragan: potret kehidupan nelayan tradisional bajo di tanjung pasir, pulau rote, nusa tenggara timur. salatiga, pusat studi kawasan timur indonesia (pskti) universitas kristen satya wacana (uksw). e-journal of cultural studies august 2018 vol. 11, number 3, page 23-32 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 32 zada ua, marsianus. 1996. nelayan bajo lewoleba di lembata kab. flores timur nusa tenggara timur (suatu tinjauan antropologi maritim). yogyakarta:, jurusan antropologi, fakultas sastra, universitas gadjah mada. microsoft word ivanrbkaunang_e-journal comodification of maengket dance in minahasa, north sulawesi in the globalization era ivan robert bernadus kaunang1, i nyoman kutha ratna2, aron meko mbete2, i gde semadi astra2 1postgraduate program, udayana university 2faculty of letters, udayana university email: ivanzkaunang@yahoo.co.id abstract this research explores comodification of maengket dance in minahasa (tari maengket hereon abbreviated to tm) in the globalization era. it reveals the empirical field reality related to comodification. the influence of global culture in minahasa has been responsible for the cultural practices of capitalism such as the emergence of cultural industry which refers to the comodification of cultural forms as amusement industry, mass culture, popular culture and culture of consumerism. the tm has been comodified, commercialized, touristified in such a way that new meanings and forms are created. this research is focused on (1) form of the comodification of the tm in minahasa, north sulawesi in the globalization area; (2) the factors which have been responsible for the comodification of the tm minahasa, north sulawesi, and (3) the effects and meanings of the comodification of the tm in minahasa, north sulawesi in the globalization era. the related data were collected through interview, observation and documentation and they were descriptively, qualitatively and interpretatively analyzed. the data sources are some key informants and some other ordinary ones. the purposive method was employed to interview them. the theories used are the theory of comodification (fairlough), the theory of popular culture (williams and agger), the theory of deconstruction (derrida) and the theory of representation (hall). the research findings show that comodifation has tended to the shift of the tm values following the pattern of arts organized by the ruler and entrepreneur, the pattern of distribution carried out through the inter group or institutional power relationship, and that the form of comodification has taken place from the process of production to the community of consumers which have been conditioned. it has also been found out that the factors of the supporting community, the creativity of the artists, christianization, industry of culture, mass media and tourism have been responsible for the comodification of the tm in minahasa. the effects of the comodification are that the orientation of the magic-religious values has shifted to christianity, the creativity of the artists has been shackled, and the minahasanese political identity has become crystallized. and then, the meanings of the comodification are competitiveness, contestation, image, well-being, and representation of minahasanese identity. key words: commodification, maengket dance, minahasa, north sulawesi, globalization background the influence of global culture in minahasa has been responsible for the cultural practices of capitalism such as the appearance of cultural industry which refers to the comodification of cultural forms as amusement industry, mass culture, popular culture and culture of consumerism. the fact that tm has been comodified, commercialized, touristified is reflected by the current form of the maengket dance (tari maengket hereon abbreviated to tm). the tm in minahasa used to be performed as a sacred dance and to have highly religious meanings. it used to be performed at particular events such as the event when it was time to harvest rice. the expressions sung were directed to empung walian wangko, god, the almighty. before the twentieth century, the tm did not undergo any change with regard to its forms of representation, its context and setting. the tm was performed as a ceremonial ritual activity in various aspects of traditional life of minahasa community. now it has been performed for three aspects of tradition such as harvesting rice (maowey kamberu), dedicating new houses (rumamba) and youth social intercourse (lalayaan). the interaction of interests in the process of the comodification of the tm involves the production agetnt, the distribution agents, and the consumers. the process of comodification acted by the entrepreneur and the government in producing and distributing the tm including the culture of its supporting community is interesting and relevant to explore in the perspective of cultural studies. discussion the form of comodification of the tm in minahasa in the globalization era has followed the patterns of arts organized by the entrepreneur (the capital owner) and the ruler (the government). they have produced the tm and have distributed it as an attempt to fulfill the demand of the market and consumers. the comodification of the tm has taken place from the process of production and distribution. it has taken place in various forms of consumption. as a whole it has been comodified and its elements have been comodified as well. as far as its current form is concerned, the dancers performing it, its movements and formation , the accompanying instruments , the uniform and make up worn by the dancers, the property, the place where it is performed have all been comodified in such a way that it may satisfy the consumers (the market). the factors which have been responsible for the comodification of the tm are its supporting community, the artists with their creativity and innovation, and the construction of the minahasanese identity as a response to the pressure of the global culture. apart from those factors, the factors such as christianization, the mixture of the global culture and local culture, the cultural industry, the mass media as the popular cultural agent, and tourism have also led to the comodification. the effects of the comodification of the tm in minahasa in the globalization era are that the orientation of the religious magical values has shifted resulting from the conversion from the traditional religion into christianity, the creativity of the artists which has been shackled as a consequence of the structural domination, the tm products which have been claimed by several organizations known as the comodifying groups as there is a power relationship between them and the ruler (the government). in addition, the comodiying groups also have capital of power and knowledge. there are still some other factors which have also led to the shift of orientation of the religious magical values. those factors are the artists and the cultural observers who belong to the same politics of arts get united, the socio capital which binds the minahasa leaders coming from different background of influences, and the comodifying groups have power to create the community of consumers (accessibility of capital). structural domination, cultural claim, and the conditioned eliticism of groups of arts have made the creativity of the artists and cultural observers who belong to the same politics of arts and those who are marginalized, being not included in the those elite groups, shackled. then, the next effect is that there is a political crystallization of identity on the identity of the ethnic group of minahasa and on the identity which unifies the other plural and multicultural ethnic group communities in minahasa. the meanings of the tm in minahasa in the globalization era are competitiveness, contestation, imagology, and well-being which refer to the economic benefit and exchange values in the forms of status, image and group identity. then the meaning of the representation of minahasaness identity is expressed in many ways and is reflected by the dancing uniform, the dancing formation, the sounds and the lyrics. novelties the novelties of this study are as follows. 1. the finding which enriches the concept and theory of comodification is called the layer or stacked comodification. 2. the finding that there have been claims made by several studios of arts such as association of waranei wulan minahasa (persatuan waranei wulan minahasa hereon abbreviated to iwmm), association of maengket massamper (persatuan maengket massamper hereon abbreviated to pmm) of north sulawesi, institute of arts and culture of north sulawesi, and the teams of arts of the tm from all the regencies in minahasa for the final products of the tm. 3. the finding in the form of the concept and redefinition of the tm. nowadays, the tm is referred to as a popular dance which can be performed in various places, any time and in various programs and activities. the dancers may wear colorful uniforms and may be adjusted to the context of the programs in which it is performed. it may be performed by at least eight pairs of dancers, or at most twelve pairs of both female and male dancers, or may also be colossally performed by hundreds and thousands of dancers. the leader of the dance is called kapel and the musical instruments used are tambur, iron kolintang (momongan), gong, and tetengkoren (tuked). the tm has not been performed in three stages any longer but now it has been performed as a formation of three themes such as the themes of maengket maowey kamberu, marimba, and lalayaan. these three themes may be performed as a package or separately, depending on the context and the objective of the program for which it is performed. conclusions the first conclusion is that the comodification of the tm takes place when it is produced, distributed and consumed. the process of comodification takes place in the form of a package performed to welcome guests ceremonially, to dedicate a program activity and to celebrate the anniversary of any regency, any town and the province. it is also performed for evening of cultural entertainment, any festivals, any bestowal, any parade and any cultural carnival, any personal activity such as weeding parties and tourist attractions performed for domestic and foreign visitors. the production and distribution of the form of the comodification of the tm in minahasa has been done by the association of maengket massamper (perhimpunan maengket massamper, hereon abbreviated to pmm) of north sulawesi, the association of waraney wulan minahasa (ikatan waraney wulan minahasa , hereon abbreviated to iwwm), the institute of arts and culture of north sulawesi. the dancers, the choreographers, the movements and the formation, the lyrics, the accompanying instruments, the uniform, the property, and the place where the tm is performed to satisfy the consumers (the market) have also been comodified. the pattern of distribution has been made through the power relationship among the institutions, the studios of arts and the community of the consumers of the tm which is conditioned. the second conclusion is that the supporting community, the creativity of the artists, the construction of minahasanese identity, christianization, the mixture of the global culture and the local culture, the rapid development of cultural industry, the mass media of industry as the agent of popular culture, and tourism industry have been responsible for the comodification of the tm in minahasa. the third conclusion is that the effect and meaning of the comodification of the tm in minahasa in the era globalization are that the magical religious values have shifted resulting from the conversion of foso traditional religion into christianity, the shackled creativity of the artists, crystallization of the politics of identity and the meaning of wellbeing. as far as the meanings of the comodification of tm is concerned, the meaning of competition, the meaning of contestation, the meaning of image, the meaning of image and the meaning of the minahasanese identity representation are reflected through the products of dancing uniform, the formation of the dance, the sounds and the lyrics. microsoft word artikel wahyuni 5 e-journal of cultural studies august 2019 vol. 12, number 3, page 24-33 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 24 gocekan as a power relations in batuan village, gianyar, bali ni made dewi wahyuni1, industri ginting suka2,ni luh nyoman kebayantini3 1senior high school 3 denpasar,2,3cultural studies program, faculty of arts, udayana university email: 1dewipingpong@gmail.com,2,3s2kjbdyunud@yahoo.com received date : 28-05-2019 accepted date : 10-07-2019 published date : 31-08-2019 abstract gocekan is a series of percussion rituals with brawls that are carried out routinely every year starting on the kajeng kliwon enyitan sasih kalima (mid-november) to ngembak geni, the end of the sasih kesanga (mid-march) in the puseh temple area in batuan village, gianyar, bali. in its development shocks have been influenced by various interests due to the power relations that occur in the implementation process. this study aims to address the main problems, namely regarding the forms of power relations, the driving factors for power relations, and the meaning and impact of power relations in shocks. based on research there are several forms of power relations in shocks, namely the relations of hegemonic ideological power, symbolic power relations, and the power relations of domination practice. the factors that encourage power relations in shocks can be divided into two, namely internal factors consisting of beliefs (religious), cultural sacralization, openness of traditional villages, and lack of understanding of religious and legal norms. external factors consisting of capitalism, tourism and the economy. in this regard, the meaning due to the power relations in shocks is the symbolism of religious ritual and impunity. as a result it will have an impact on the deviation of the implementation of hinduism, deviations of morality and power, and metajen habits as a subculture of the balinese. keywords: shock, clubbing, power relations, interests introduction gocekan as part of ritual percussion in hinduism in bali by using chicken as a sacrifice which is routinely carried out every year, starting on kajeng kliwon enyitan sasih kalima (midnovember) to ngembak geni, ending sasih kesanga (mid-march) in the area puseh temple, batuan village. scuff as a form of religious ritual in its development has been influenced by a variety of interests due to the power relations that occur in the implementation process. the development of shocks that seem lost control causes it to indirectly injure hindu values. this research on "gocekans as the power of relation practices in batuan village, gianyar, bali" e-journal of cultural studies august 2019 vol. 12, number 3, page 24-33 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 25 aims to analyze three problem formulations, namely: (1) the form of power relations in shocks, the factors driving power relations in shocks, as well as the meaning and impact of power relations that occur in shocks in the village of batuan, gianyar, bali. research methods this research, located in batuan village, was designed as a qualitative study with a cultural study paradigm. in line with this paradigm, data collection is done by observation, interview, and literature study. after primary and secondary data are collected, then analyzed using critical concepts and theories such as hegemony theory, the power of knowledge theory, and practice theory. all data were narrated and the results of the study were presented in analytic descriptive. discussion modernization and globalization that occur throughout the world has led to dynamics and changes in all aspects of life including hindu religious activities in bali, in relation to the megocekan tradition. after the problems formulated, this study found that there were some developments in the implementation of shocks which were ritual percussion in the village of batuan, which was caused by the various forms of power relations practices carried out by the agents involved in the implementation of shocks. the forms of power relations that occur in shocks are in the form of hegemonic ideological power relations, symbolic power relations, and dominating power relations practices. the hegemonic ideological power relation is a place for power holders in shocks, namely religious leaders (temple stakeholders) and the organizing committee organization assigned by the customary village by perpetuating the role of myths for the sustainability of megocekan. according to althusser (2010: 39), ideology is a representation of the relationships of imaginary individuals under the real conditions of their existence. systematically hegemony ideology force individuals and society with certain thoughts, certain biases, certain preference systems, where power tends to do hegemony of meaning to social reality. individuals and communities are accommodated by their values and ideas with a perspective that has been patterned, structured in terms of the meaning created and desired by power. various myths about the implementation of shocks in batuan village were deliberately used as a basis and shield in their implementation. another form of power relation is symbolic power relation, which is a relational game that is carried out by a group of shocks to the supporting aspects e-journal of cultural studies august 2019 vol. 12, number 3, page 24-33 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 26 of shredding (for example bebotoh and material aspects related to the implementation of shocks as a religious ritual). the form is in the form of the use of symbols to direct the view to interpret shocks as part of the rite. the material used in shredding seeks to be interpreted religiously and is related to religious rituals. furthermore, the form of power relations in the form of the practice of domination, in general social relations the rules that already exist and are made by 'a dominant group' will become a habit that has unwittingly become a symbolic capital for the continuation of power. the practice of dominance in shredding is particularly evident in the formation of a committee which is hereinafter referred to as sekaa shaking by customary village of batuan as the organizing committee for the whole series of shredding activities. the central role as a regulator of the implementation of shocks lies with sekaagekan which is an extension of the customary village government. the customary village as the protector of the execution of puts the chosen people in charge of organizing the shock every year. everything related to the execution of shocks is prepared and carried out by this organization. the dominance of the chosen people also influences the procedure for its implementation, in that it does not deny that the agent can include ideas or special interests in the process of implementing the shock. source: dok: dewi, 2017. second, developments that occur in shocks are influenced by several factors that accompany the implementation process so that the practice of power relations is encouraged. the factors that drive power relations in shocks consist of internal and external factors as follows. a. internal factors 1. belief (religion) e-journal of cultural studies august 2019 vol. 12, number 3, page 24-33 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 27 humans are homo religious, namely religious beings. characteristics of religious people include belief in supernatural creatures such as gods or demons (haryanto, 2015: 12). both are often positioned in opposing characters namely gods with good character, while demons have bad character. in anthropomorphism both are often manifested in the form of creatures that resemble humans while the other resembles a giant (weber, 2002 in atmadja, 2015: 128-134). the linkage between shredding with homo religious is seen in the way of love, the bhuta yadnya ritual which is based on the calculation of the moon. according to the balinese calendar. related to the implementation of shocks in batuan village according to mythology, it is an effort to avoid the danger caused by i gede mecaling. the implementation of tawur at puseh village in batuan temple is also a ceremony related to the distribution of sasih as shown in the table above. bhuta, according to the people of batuan village, is analogous to the figure of i gede mecaling who is both a negative force causing distress. the presence of percussion in every tawur/caru is an ideological conception that underlies the organization of the shock in batuan village. ritual activities that are one unit with a belief system (religious) are very difficult to be removed from the mindset of the community. so that whatever developments occur in the practice of the ritual, as long as it is still carried out it is likely that it will still be accepted by the community. moreover, it is equipped with relational practices in it which perfects power games in shocks. if it is allowed to develop, according to arifin (2005: 3), it indicates that religion (religion) will increasingly no longer be able to carry out its main function (functional imperative), because it’s main function is sacrificed for the benefit of other social institutions that have very different main functions. in such a trap, religion (religion) is no longer an institutionalizing force which is then systematically and systemically interpreted with human reason (arifin, 2005: 3, in arsana, 2011: 278-279). sakralisasi budaya culture is a fairly complicated and often debated word because this concept does not represent an entity that stands apart from the world of objects. culture should be understood as a flexible marker that enables a variety of ways to discuss clusters of human activity with various purposes. in other words, the concept of culture is an instrument or tool that is more or less useful as a frame of life (life form). the use of this concept and the meanings embedded in it are constantly changing because thinkers relentlessly seek to do a number of things with this concept (barker, 2014: 64). e-journal of cultural studies august 2019 vol. 12, number 3, page 24-33 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 28 based on the explanation above, shock is one of the culture which is sacred through various practices that have been carried out and inadvertently in the next development, it is trapped into a culture of subculture. this idea is based on the consideration that the balinese people in general and batuan in particular have balinese culture as a large culture that is dominant to the balinese. balinese culture includes the whole way of life and includes the mapping of meanings or meanings that affect how the world is lived or understood by balinese as reflected in their social actions in social life. in the midst of the dominant balinese culture, shocks can be positioned as a subculture. starting from its position as a subculture, shock tried to occupy a dominant position in society. one of the things done is trying to build confidence and legitimacy over the implementation of shocks through sacralization. profane sacralization is the theft of sacred values and sacred rituals into the identity of non-spiritual products to be interpreted by consumers as religious faiths (meinhold, 2005). in the current era of globalization, a culture that exists is a culture that can be emotionally attached to the equivalent of religion. 1. openness of indigenous village regarding the shock in batuan village, it shows the open attitude of the customary village to the developments that occurred in the shock. this open minded acceptance is the first step in an effort to accept the effects of modernization and globalization. an open attitude will make us more dynamic, not be shackled by old things that are old-fashioned, and will be more receptive to the changes and advances of the times. however, the lack of social control originating from indigenous villages can also lead to the development of shocks that were originally only in the form of ritual activities so as to lead to negative things. customary villages have awig-awig as a filtering of external influences that enter the village order. awig-awig have a very strong social control because it has been determined what rights and obligations should be exercised by indigenous people. after being able to open up from new things, the next step is to have sensitivity (anticipative) in assessing the things that will or are happening to the effects of modernization and globalization. anticipatory attitudes can show the effects arising from the current of globalization and modernization that lead to the ability to choose (selective). customary villages as a place for growth and development of a culture must be able to be a shield in preserving a culture from the effects of modernization and globalization. 1. lack of understanding of religious and legal norms norms are behavioral guidelines that must be done and should not be done in daily life, based on a certain reason (motivation) accompanied by sanctions. religious norms are rules of life e-journal of cultural studies august 2019 vol. 12, number 3, page 24-33 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 29 in the form of commands and prohibitions, which are believed by its adherents to come from god, the almighty. these rules not only regulate the vertical relationship, between humans and god (religious), but also horizontal relationships, between humans and fellow humans (widjaja, 1985: 168). scriptures rgweda x. 34. 13, rgweda x. 34. 10, rgweda x. 34. 3, expressly forbid hindus from gambling. gambling can make a family miserable. work on the fields and make ends meet and satisfy it, according to the contents of the vedic mantra. manavadharmaśāstrayang is a compilation of hindu law sloka ix. 221 to sloka ix. 227 also states about the prohibition of gambling (pudja and sudharta, 1996: 587-588). in essence gambling is also an act that is contrary to legal norms. the criminal code (kuhp) regulates gambling in article 303, based on the modern criminal law sanctions or reactions are given not only in the form of criminal, but also actions aimed at protecting the public from harmful acts (hidayat, 2011: 87 -88). based on the provisions above, basically both in terms of religious norms and legal norms both do not justify an activity that is a gamble or gambling. an understanding of religious and legal norms is absolutely necessary to guide one's person so as not to commit acts outside of these social norms. in connection with the development of shocks in batuan village that lead to gambling practices, the most basic thing that must be introspected is the understanding of religious norms and legal norms of the perpetrators of these activities. accepting the influence of modernism and globalization is okay, but consideration regarding the aspects of religion and law is needed in the preservation of a culture. a. external factors 1. capitalism regarding the shock in batuan village, the dominant capitalist practice is seen in its implementation. capitalists in relation to shocks are agents who have capital in them, both economic capital and social capital in the form of power. in terms of economic capital, which includes the bebotoh. bebotoh is a gambler. bebotoh certainly needs an arena to channel his gambling desires. seeing the existence of a gap as an arena, many bebotoh involved in shocks. whether or not there is a botoh affects the village's income. the number of bets that are in the flock depends on the number of bebotoh involved. if each fighting chicken is pegged at rp. 1,000,000, if the number of chickens has not yet been obtained, the chicken complaint will be postponed or canceled until it gets the specified amount anyway. every 5% of the amount after each complaint will be deducted as excise tax (abbreviated as cuk). thus, the e-journal of cultural studies august 2019 vol. 12, number 3, page 24-33 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 30 role of bebotoh in shocks is very important, namely as a contributor to income for traditional villages. in terms of social capital in this case in the form of power, traditional village leaders and their predecessors are the dominant shareholders. the power to regulate the course of the shock makes all the shock can receive input or entrust the interests of a party. based on a cultural perspective, power is an energy or strength that is able to maintain, preserve, transform culture in society. as an illustration, a person who has the capability as a ruler can instill the values in the body of the community. in connection with shocks, the power of traditional village leaders and their role plays a role in maintaining the existence of the implementation of shocks by hegemonying the community with built ideologies. the implementation of shocks that have evolved to become biased is protected by ideologies that are sparked for the sake of continuing shocks like today. 1. tourism bali is one of the famous tourist destinations with cultural tourism. the tourism industry is the biological child of globalization that produces cultural objects to be traded for financial gain. one form of cultural objects that has been commodified in the era of globalization is ritual (irianto, 2016: 213). increasingly expanding the promotion of bali cultural tourism packages through online media makes agents more creative to create new ideas to sell in the market. on several websites of online tourism agents found balinese cockfighting travel package promotions. this shows that there are efforts to include this activity as part of a cultural tourism package. (source: http://bayubalitours.com/article/bali-cockfighting/) e-journal of cultural studies august 2019 vol. 12, number 3, page 24-33 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 31 meanwhile in batuan village, the way to promote balinese cockfighting is done by direct communication with tourists. the management officers who took tourists around the temple also explained about the existence of shredding and staging the sutjang dance. 1. economy the implementation of shocks is closely related to providing employment for the community. work done by humans as a reflection that humans as homo faber means humans who create, namely making tools to increase work productivity (haryatmoko, 2014: 56-57). this linkage can be direct, in the sense that they are certain people who are directly and physically present in the arena to get a fortune, both as primary and additional income. they can be divided into two, namely first, the breadwinner outside the arena of shreds. they are traders around the arena who occupy a relatively fixed space which is good from the context of their work. most of the traders in the arena are food traders. second, the breadwinner is directly in the arena of shocks. they consist of spur owners and fighting chicken traders. those who are involved in shredding are never bored, but there are some people who specifically do certain activities to get a wage, so they come to the shocks as laborers. there are also earners who are not directly in the arena of shocks, however what they do is related to shocks. people included in this group are makers and traders of guwungan or confinement of chickens, makers and sharpeners of spurs, laborers who are paid specifically to raise chickens, and traders of chicken food and medicines. the role of traders in the arena is very important, namely as a supporter of excitement and enhancing the pleasure of people who come to the arena. traders indirectly take advantage of the "arrogance" of bebotoh, considering that if bebotoh wins, they do not take into account the value of money so that whatever the price of food, it must be bought. this fact raises the perception that money in the gambling arena (tajen in general) is money with no eyes or blind money. this symbolic statement is used to show the nature of bebotoh when using his money, it seems like it does not take into account its value. this condition causes the price of food or perhaps goods sold in the gambling arena to be relatively more expensive than the market price. e-journal of cultural studies august 2019 vol. 12, number 3, page 24-33 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 32 source: dok, dewi, 2017 third, the developments that occur in the implementation of shocks generate new meaning which also impacts the shocks themselves. meaning that arises as a result of the power relations in the implementation of shocks causes this ritual cannot be interpreted absolutely as a rite, but rather a symbolism of a religious ritual. other meanings arising from developments in shocks cause it to appear to be immune to the law, due to the fact that shocks have in fact been contaminated with gambling can continue to be carried out for quite a long period of time without firm action based on applicable law. as a result it will have an impact on the deviation of the implementation of hinduism, deviations of morality and power, and balinese culture (in this case the balinese metajen culture) as a subculture. conclusions and suggestions finally, by paying attention to all of the explanations above, it can be proven that there has been a power relationship in the shuffle in batuan village, gianyar, bali. this is most evident in the presence of anyway with the assistance of rupiah money not with uang kepeng. the game of power relations in this study can be seen in a series of discussions about the form, driving factors, meaning and impact of power relations that occur in shocks. the occurrence of power relations on shocks indirectly also disturb hindu religious values. the suggestion of this research is that the existence of a culture especially religious rituals must indeed be maintained and preserved. but if there is a deviation in its implementation let alone violating the law it should be dealt with firmly. in connection with the phenomenon that occurs in shocks, mediation should be carried out by law enforcement e-journal of cultural studies august 2019 vol. 12, number 3, page 24-33 doaj indexed (since 14 sep 2015) issn 2338-2449 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/ecs/ 33 agencies and customary village government in order to revitalize the implementation of shocks. acknowledgement the author would like to thank the supervisors, all teaching lecturers in cultural studies, and research informants who have contributed to this research, so that this paper can be realized. references althusser, louis. 2010. tentang ideologi. marxisme strukturalis, psikoanalisis, cultural studies. yogyakarta: jalasutra. atmadja, nengah bawa. 2010. tajen di bali perspektif homo complexus. singaraja: pustaka larasan dan ibbik undiksha. haryanto, sindung. 2015. sosiologi agama: dari klasik hingga posmodern. yogyakarta: arruzz media. arsana, i gusti ketut gde. 2011. sabung ayam (tajen) di bali: di antara ranah budaya dan hukum. jnana budaya. bali: balai pelestarian sejarah dan nilai tradisional bali. hal. 271-284. barker, chris. 2014. kamus kajian budaya. yogyakarta: kanisius. haryatmoko. 2014. etika politik dan kekuasaan. jakarta: pt. kompas media nusantara. irianto, agus maladi. 2016. “komodifikasi budaya di era ekonomi global terhadap kearifan lokal: studi kasus eksistensi industri pariwisata dankesenian tradisional di jawa tengah”. jurnal theologia volume 27, nomor 1, juni 2016. semarang: fakultas ushuluddin dan humaniora universitas islam negeri walisongo. meinhold, roman. 2005. pop culture and consumerism. konigshausen &neumann, jerman dalam http://jurnal-s1. fsrd. itb. ac. id/index. php/product/article/download/85/76 diakses pada 7 maret 2017 pukul 15. 22 wita. return to the road of capitalism: recapitulating the post-socialist urban transition 319 hungarian geographical bulletin 63 (3) (2014) 319–334. doi: 10.15201/hungeobull.63.3.6 return to the road of capitalism: recapitulating the post-socialist urban transition márton berki1 abstract over the course of history, relatively slow and gradual processes of urbanisation are occasionally interrupted by periods of turbulent restructuring. the post-socialist transition is defi nitely one of the most outstanding examples of these changes, directly aff ecting the lives of over 300 million people. within the confi nes of this succinct theoretical recapitulation, fi rstly, the relationship between capitalist and socialist urbanisation – as a broader conceptual frame – is presented, followed by the brief summary of the post-socialist transition’s general characteristics. subsequently, the specifi cities of the urban structure of socialist and post-socialist cities are subsumed, and fi nally, diff erent scenarios and development perspectives for post-socialist cities are outlined. keywords: post-socialist cities, urban transition, urban theory, urban structure introduction over the course of history, relatively slow and gradual processes of urbanisation are occasionally interrupted by periods of turbulent restructuring, such as in the time of colonial endeavours, large conquests and wars, or in the case of transition to diff erent political systems. concerning the latt er, the post-socialist transition is defi nitely one of the most outstanding examples from the recent past, directly aff ecting the lives of over 300 million people. moreover, aft er the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the european union, the fate of post-socialist countries undoubtedly became a pan-european issue and responsibility. on the one hand, there has been an increasing interest towards the political, economic and cultural restructuring of post-socialist cities from the side of the western social sciences during the last two decades, particularly 1 department of social and economic geography, eötvös loránd university, h-1117 budapest, pázmány péter sétány 1/c; institute for sociology, centre for social sciences, hungarian academy of sciences, h-1014 budapest, országház u. 30. e-mail: berkimarton@yahoo.com 320 due to the scholarly work of authors originating from (and later partly returning to) former socialist states, such as in the case of andrusz, g. et al. (1996), bodnár, j. (2001), herrschel, t. (2007), stanilov, k. (2007), czepczyński, m. (2008), or hirt, s. (2012). nevertheless, post-socialist urban theory still has a great number of question marks and dilemmas to be discussed. within the confi nes of this succinct theoretical recapitulation, in this paper fi rstly the relationship between capitalist and socialist urbanisation – as a broader conceptual frame – is presented, followed by a brief summary of the post-socialist transition. subsequently, the specifi cities of the urban structure of socialist and post-socialist cities are subsumed, and fi nally, diff erent scenarios and future development perspectives for post-socialist cities are outlined. the relationship between capitalist and socialist urbanisation in order to highlight the intricate relationship of capitalist and socialist urbanisation we turn back to szelényi’s oft -cited question of ‘how much diff erence did socialism make to urban development?’ (szelényi, i. 1996). in response, he outlined two major intellectual strands. according to the ‘ecological model’ (adopted by e.g. van den berg, l. et al. 1982; wilson, f.d. 1983; enyedi, gy. 1988), the 20th century urbanisation was primarily fuelled by rapid modernisation and industrialisation, and since socialist and contemporary capitalist states were both infl uenced by these processes, the similarities between capitalist and socialist cities overweighed their diff erences. in this view, these two types of cities represented nothing more than diff erent variants of the general model of industry-led 20th century urbanisation, and consequently, socialist cities were supposed to be characterised by the same urban development stages as the ones in capitalist sett ings, although with a temporal lag. therefore, socialist cities should have also undergone the well-known path of urbanisation, suburbanisation, deurbanisation and reurbanisation, the only diff erence would be that the prevailing ideology of socialist states might have been able to fi lter some of the global impacts, possibly leading to the temporal prolongation of the stages. as opposed to this reasoning, proponents of the so-called ‘historical school’ harshly criticised the social-darwinist underpinnings of the process of urbanisation. in contrast to the above-mentioned presuppositions, they rather focused on the marked diff erences in the dominant mode of production on the one hand (neo-marxist approach, see harvey, d. 1973; castells, m. 1977), and in sociopolitical organisation on the other hand (neo-weberian approach, see pahl, r. 1970; szelényi, i. 1996). according to this stance, their fundamental dissimilarity resulted in two distinct – capitalist and socialist – urbanisation models, as well as in the form of strikingly diff erent socialist and capitalist cities. the most essential conceptual distinction between the two approaches is presented in figure 1. 321 since the socialist regimes established aft er world war ii were slightly diff erent from country to country, the changes in the scope of urbanisation – contrary to the common direction – were also manifested in diverse ways and at various paces. as a consequence, countries of the eastern bloc were characterised by highly diff erent degrees of urbanisation throughout the decades of socialism; some of them (such as romania, bulgaria and especially the soviet union) were rapidly and heavily urbanising, others (for example east germany and hungary) to a lesser extent, whereas countries of the balkan (e.g. albania) preserved their predominantly rural character. recognising these remarkable diff erences, musil, j. (1980, p. 148) proposed a three-component analytical frame for the investigation of the socialistera urbanisation processes; in this model, he att empted to distinguish the ‘permanent, common features’ of socialist urbanisation (stemming from systemic determinations), the ‘specifi c features’ of urbanisation caused by the inherited diff erences in sett lement structure and demographic situation, and fi nally, the diff erences resulting from the ‘diff erent phases of industrialisation and urbanisation’. correspondingly, szelényi (1993) also raised a similar question: how much of the distinct nature of socialist urbanisation was determined solely by the socialist system, and to what extent was it the consequence of the central and eastern european region’s semi-peripheral capitalist past? according to bodnár, j. (2001, p. 23), western theorists mostly tend to ignore the latt er historical legacy of the macro-region and perfunctorily subsume all specifi cities (always being understood as divergence from western european and north american patt erns) under the all-encompassing label of socialism. taking all these important diff erences into consideration, another remarkable (macro-scale) analytical frame emerged, that of the world-systems analysis, placing the central and eastern european region within the global fig. 1. ecological and historical explanations of the process of urbanisation. source: aft er szelényi, i. 1996, modifi ed by the author 322 power hierarchy of core countries, semi-peripheries and peripheries. an early example of this perspective can be traced in the comprehensive volume of berend, t.i. and ránki, gy. (1976) but later, a more explicitly wallersteinian reasoning is featured in the investigation of kennedy and smith (1989), or as recently as in the analyses of melegh, a. (2006) or bohle, d. and greskovits, b. (2012). besides this specifi c research tradition, the regulation school’s work on fordist and post-fordist capital accumulation regimes has also been applied in the case of the socialist (and later, post-socialist) context, and therefore, can be directly linked to the debate on the distinct or similar nature of socialist and capitalist urbanisation (see for example altvater, e. 1993; smith, a. and swain, a. 1998; chavance, b. 1994, 2002). as an important aspect of the topic, most of these analyses demonstrated that the rigid socialist half-fordist accumulation regime was in many respects diff erent from western fordist accumulation regimes characterised by more sophisticated and fl exible modes of social regulation. finally, a growing number of authors aim to establish theoretical links between modern (capitalist/socialist) and postmodern (and its specifi c variant, post-socialist) societies and urban development (e.g. kharkhordin, o. 1997; wu, f. 2003; hirt, s. 2012). one of the recent contributions to the debate is provided in the theoretical framework elaborated by gentile, m. et al. (2012). on the one hand, their approach also shift s away from the dialectical straightjacket of the capitalism–socialism binary, yet they still explain urbanisation processes in a dichotomic manner. in their model, two idealised city types – the homopolis and the heteropolis – are introduced, along with the complex processes these urban forms are created (and shaped) by, labelled as homopolitanisation and heteropolitanisation. while the distinction of socialist and capitalist cities is of an ideological, political and economic nature, the homopolis-heteropolis theoretical construct is based on their diff erent social and spatial structures (irrespective of the underlying political and economic systems). during state socialism, cities (as centres) played a key role in the formation of the new society; as part of this endeavour, eliminating diff erences was of paramount importance, which eventually led to social, economic and spatial homogenisation, and thus, to homopolitanisation. nonetheless, it is important to note that homopolises could be found out of the eastern bloc as well (such as the coal-mining town of gelsenkirchen, detroit and flint, both being based on motor industry, or post-war charleroi and liège). in addition, several principles of socialist urban planning – including architectural modernism or the idea of neighbourhood units – were also inherently western (before having been purifi ed by the ideological fi lter of socialist central authorities). since these global infl uences were no more restricted aft er 1990, an extremely rapid heteropolitanisation began in central and eastern european cities. the result of these transformation processes is the formation of the 323 heteropolis, the socially and spatially complex and heterogeneous city, characterised by a high level of diversity and fl exibility, as well as by a decentralized (or even fully laissez-faire) regulatory environment. to sum up, in the light of the diverse conceptualisations and disputes outlined in this section, it is evident that the intriguing intellectual debate on the nature of capitalist and/or socialist urbanisation spanning from the 1970s is still far from being closed. general characteristics of the post-socialist transition according to the apt phrasing of sýkora, l. (2009, p. 387.), the post-socialist transition is ‘[a] broad, complex, and lengthy process of societal change starting with the refusal of communist regimes and central planning, leading to democratic political regimes and a market economy’. in terms of urbanism, this epoch might also be understood as a period of restructuring through which cities gradually lose their former socialist specifi cities and turn – or, more pertinently – return to the road of capitalist urban development. hence, post-socialist cities refl ect temporary conditions, the dynamically evolving adaptation of the inherited socialist urban environment to the capitalist rules of the game, i.e. to the new political and economic circumstances. the transition consists of a set of transformation processes, either initiated by the central governments (such as in the case of the initial political and economic reorientation), or spontaneously emerged due to the altered conditions (for instance in the case of the citizens’ changing savings strategies or cultural habits). nevertheless, it is important to underline that the process of the transition and the (re-)building of capitalism took place in a highly uneven manner in the former eastern bloc, both spatially and temporally. just as capitalism is not a uniform construct (see in the works of, among others, esping-andersen, g. 1990; hall, p.a. and soskice, d. 2001), so too was not its dialectical counterpoint, socialism, and certainly its successor, post-socialism either (see e.g. fassmann, h. 1997; greskovits, b. 2004). applying a foucauldian perspective for historical enquiry, it is always more challenging to focus on breaking points instead of continuity and linearity (foucault, m. 2002). in this regard, one of the most essential questions raised in the extensive literature dealing with the relationship of socialism and postsocialism (such as in andrusz, g. et al. 1996; verdery, k. 1996; fraser, n. 1997; burawoy, m. and verdery, k. 1999) is whether there was a sudden and sharp break between the two epochs (i.e. an immediate and complete reckoning with the communist past), or rather a smooth and more gradual process of transition? since these systemic changes can never be uniformly conceptualised (either as a breaking point or as an organic process), the answer usually varies depending on 324 which aspects – i.e. the political, economic, cultural, demographic etc. dimensions – of the transition are being scrutinised. (concerning the issue of temporal continuities and/or discontinuities, see the recent work of grubbauer, m. 2012.) therefore, the most important aspect for the understanding of postsocialist urban change undoubtedly lies in its temporally multi-layered nature. according to sýkora (2009), fi rstly a short-term period can be outlined when the fundamental principles of political and economic organisation are reshaped (i.e. political parties and local municipalities are established, democratic elections are held, the legal frames of market economy are implemented etc.). these changes might be realised even within a few months, usually in a topdown manner. in contrast, the mid-term period might last much longer, during which peoples’ habits and norms are adapted to new political, economic and cultural environment: while socialism was organised along collective values these former(ly conditioned) norms slowly started to changed aft er 1990, depending on the intensity of global infl uences. the length of this transition might last up to 10–15 years in the case of certain social groups, however, in the end, the majority of post-socialist societies are also characterised by individualism, hedonism, the need of self-expression, and hybrid consumption. finally, right from 1990, a long-term period also begins in which the stable patt erns of urban morphology and land use are being reshaped. (these fundamental changes may take several decades.) still concerning the theorisation of the post-socialist transition, further complications are caused by its two-level nature. on the one hand, there is a local, post-socialist transition (from state socialism to market economy) but, parallel to this, there are also several global political, economic and cultural shift s that infl uence local contexts (such as the restructuring of the fordist, keynesian welfare state to a post-fordist, post-keynesian neoliberal state). importantly, these two levels of transition are mutually interrelated and interdependent, both strengthening and weakening each other (sýkora, l. 2009). therefore, albeit post-1990 changes might seem internal, they are in fact deeply embedded in contemporary global processes. consequently, when investigating the urban development trends of central and eastern europe, it cannot be unequivocally assessed whether a given phenomena is the result of the post-socialist transition or that of the global restructuring (or, possibly, the particular hybridisation of the two). regarding global post-fordist and post-keynesian transformations, it is important to emphasise that western european and north american societies have also undergone these processes, however, much earlier (during the 1960s and 1970s) and in a more gradual way. therefore, western policy-makers had more time to ‘test’ diff erent development concepts and, if necessary, to mitigate their negative impacts. in contrast to the western context, central and eastern european transition countries quickly adopted the laissez-faire model of social (and also urban) development, partly as an antidote to their totalitarian past 325 (stanilov, k. 2007). during the post-socialist transition, national and urban governance is increasingly infl uenced by the neoliberal doctrine, which was initially – as a specifi c socialist legacy – blended with the institutions of the welfare state (sýkora, l. 2009). over the past years, however, this specifi city has also been changed, since state planning (and, as its part, urban and regional planning) is widely considered as being opposed to the needs of the market. as a result, the privileged group of socialist-era urban planners are replaced by investors, playing a key role in infl uencing the political sphere as well. due to the overall decline in planning, uncoordinated development concepts and ad hoc decisions are becoming more and more frequent. moreover, aft er the 2004 enlargement of the european union, the (mostly uncritical) mimicry of western practices also becomes widespread in the region. since the access to foreign direct investment (fdi) turned out to be one of the main diff erentiating factors of economic prosperity aft er 1990, the appearance of multinational companies and the growing importance of international institutions signifi cantly reshaped local economies. as a result of the ex-socialist countries’ entry into the global competition, several new actors gained the power to infl uence the cityscape, leading to a high-level urban fragmentation (gentile, m. et al. 2012). besides that, the process of rapid and incautious privatisation – considered as the leitmotif of the post-socialist period by bodnár (2001) – also greatly contributed to the fragmentation of urban space (see also in grime, k. 1999). the extraordinary scope and impact of privatisation is refl ected in the private homeownership rates of several central and eastern european countries being around 90 percent, especially when compared to the mere 67 percent of the united states, the so-called ‘nation of homeowners’ (hirt, s. 2012, p. 44). finally, even though it might be less evident but the transition had indirect demographic consequences as well. the main political aim of the socialist leadership, at least at the level of offi cial propaganda, was the creation of a (more) just society, which was to be achieved – besides collectivisation – by the state-controlled allocation of housing (sýkora, l. 2009). as a result, the offi cial marriages and the compulsory childbearing required for these subsidies both contributed to the survival of the tradition family model, and also ‘protected’ socialist countries against the alarming demographic trends of western societies. although these need-based housing policy principles would have triggered social homogeneity, however, in practice, the (re-)allocation of housing rather depended on political merits, party membership etc. to conclude, the spatial stratifi cation and segregation patt erns of socialist cities were not only aff ected by macro-structures but also by the decisions of individual agents connected to childbearing, party membership, political engagement and so forth (gentile, m. et al. 2012). 326 based on the above-discussed considerations, the post-socialist transition defi nitely caused elementary changes in the aff ected societies. from the perspective of over two decades, we might assert that the fi rst years of the transformation fulfi lled the grim prediction of john maynard keynes from 1933, according to whom ‘a transition will involve so much pure destruction of wealth that the new state of aff airs will be, at fi rst, far worse than the old’ (cited in hirt, s. 2012, p. 40). correspondingly, countries of the former eastern bloc were characterised by a sudden decrease of gdp, peaking unemployment, unleashed infl ation, and re-emerged ethnic confl icts in the fi rst half of the 1990s. the level of social polarisation rapidly increased, both between and within countries, as well as between and within cities. although later, around the turn of the millennia, the fi rst signs of economic recovery already appeared but the acute social problems still remained, and the economic growth of central and eastern european countries was disrupted by the recession of the past years. the specifi cities of the urban structure of socialist and post-socialist cities when taking stock of the literature dealing with the period of socialism and post-socialism, stanilov, k. (2007) highlights that the majority of works primarily focused on the economic and political aspects of the transition, while relatively litt le att ention has been paid to urban structure analyses to date. the rare exceptions include the general model of sýkora (2009) as well as a number of post-1990 case studies (e.g. csanádi, g. and ladányi, j. 1992; or dingsdale, a. 1999, for budapest; sýkora, l. 1999, for prague). the main conclusion of these investigations was that state socialism (lasting for over four decades) created several common characteristics in central and eastern european cities which markedly – both morphologically and aesthetically – distinguished them from the capitalist cities of the same era. generally speaking, socialist cities were scrupulously planned, characterised by uniformity and the lack of spontaneity (hamilton, f.e.i. 1979). however, as the most important morphological diff erence between the two types, they were signifi cantly denser and more compact, especially when compared to the sprawling north american metropolises. this diff erence can be traced back to the preceding capitalist – and in some places even medieval – built environment of the cities. since these legacies could not be easily removed or eliminated, the socialist power concentrated on new constructions (mostly multi-storey prefabricated buildings) at the edge of the cities on the one hand, and on infi ll developments on the other hand (sýkora, l. 2009). furthermore, as another signifi cant dissimilarity, their inner city neighbourhoods were surrounded by vast housing estates. hence, in contrast to the north american metropolis, the verticality of the socialist city was growing 327 from the centre to its edges (using the terminology of gentile, m. et al. 2012, 293., ‘hollow’ cities were created). nevertheless, contrary to their otherwise compact form, in other regards, socialist planning was indeed generous with urban space: throughout the entire eastern bloc, enormous parade squares and monumental representative buildings have been erected in the reshaped historical inner city areas (such as the procession square in budapest or the palace of parliament in bucharest). with the transition, completely opposite processes began, since contemporary post-socialist cities are rather characterised by shrinking public spaces and expanding private ones (hirt, s. 2012). along with the subordinated role of services, the economy of the socialist city was dominated by industry (both in terms of employment and land use). one of the underlying ideological reasons of this one-sided economic structure was to keep manual workers (as a revolutionary force) in major cities (sýkora, l. 2009). this strong industrial character was, however, coupled with a generally weak retail supply even during the last years of state socialism: according to tosics, i. (2005), in the early 1990s retail space per person was three times lower in moscow than in berlin. urban services, such as hospitals, schools and cultural institutions were planned in a hierarchical manner, based on the economies of scale. for a bett er accessibility of public services, socialist cities heavily relied on mass transportation: whereas 80-90 percent of urban trips were carried out by mass transit in the late 1980s, this proportion decreased to only 50 percent by now, while private car ownership nearly tripled in the region (hirt, s. 2012, p. 44). socialist cities were not only diff erent from their western counterparts in terms of their spatial patt erns and morphology but also regarding their social character: they were characterised by lower levels of diversity, segregation, marginality and informality, and in general – due to the permanent surveillance by the authorities – they were ‘safer’ as well (hirt, s. 2012). remarkably, most of the pre-socialist patt erns of residential diff erentiation re-emerged during the transition, while new enclaves also appeared in these cities. aft er 1990, however, not only the level of socio-spatial disparities and the stratifi cation of societies increased but the social groups’ mobility as well, even though the main directions of migration dynamically changed. in the fi rst period, during the 1990s, the least prosperous urban areas (primarily run-down inner city neighbourhoods and large housing estates) were aff ected by a selective out-migration of younger and higher qualifi ed inhabitants (usually moving to the suburbs). this was, in the majority of ex-socialist countries, followed by the re-appreciation of inner city areas from the 2000s, through contradictory gentrifi cation processes leading to the exclusion of less affl uent social groups. finally, and most recently, another kind of migration is fuelled by the economic crisis of the past years in central and eastern europe: besides the younger generations’ fl ow to western europe (and partly to north america), 328 more and more low income urban residents tend to move to countryside areas as part of their daily survival strategies. beyond the general characteristics of the morphological, functional and social transformation of socialist cities, it might also be benefi cial to review the changing preand post-1990 roles and power positions of diff erent urban zones. hereinaft er, a concise overview of these changes will be provided, based on the extension of the comparative model of sýkora (2009) (figure 2). the city centre and the inner city in the socialist period, besides residential properties, the cities’ central cores and inner areas were characterised by representative governmental and municipal buildings, as well as by public institutions responsible for the residents’ ideological education (such as cultural centres or libraries), as a sharp contrast to business-driven western architecture. at the same time, however, inner cities were also treated as the hideout of the bourgeoisie, stigmatised as reactionists and considered as the enemies of the state. as a consequence, in some inner city areas even damages from world war ii remained untouched for decades. due to their gradual deterioration, radical inner city reformulations were carried out from the 1970s. (thus, from today’s perspective, areas which remained intact and neglected owing to the indiff erence of state authority might be regarded as much more fortunate ones.) urban regeneration endeavours aimed at the refurbishment of central residential neighbourhoods were only initiated as late as in the 1980s, primarily in the form of cautious att empts and smaller-scale experiments (sýkora, l. 2009). aft er 1990, the fate of city centres and inner residential areas was rather diverse. in some of the post-socialist metropolises, american and eastern asianstyle central business districts emerged with high-rise architecture (e.g. in moscow, warsaw or belgrade), whereas in other cities, the main emphasis was instead placed on the conservation and/or rehabilitation of historical urban areas (such as fig. 2. changing political and economic interests in socialist and post-socialist cities. source: aft er sýkora, l. 2009, modifi ed by the author 329 in prague or budapest), although with a particular att ention to the needs of mass tourism (stanilov, k. 2007). in addition, large-scale urban revitalisation investments were in many cases not fully controlled or steered by local municipalities but by international capital; therefore, such ventures were rarely tailored to the requirements of local residents. as a result of the so-called ‘spotlight renovation’ practices (aff ecting only relatively small areas), post-socialist city centres and inner city districts are still janus-faced; youthful and rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods create striking contrasts with the ageing, blighted urban quarters. the former industrial areas industrial areas – originally established and developed on the edge of cities in the late 19th century – were of paramount importance for the newly sett led socialist leadership; thus, due to the commonly believed primacy of industrial production, these areas immediately fell in the hands of the state through nationalisation. along with the massive ring of new housing estates, monofunctional industrial districts became the central authorities’ most favoured and supported urban zones. however, while the process of deindustrialisation set into motion in the advanced capitalist countries already in the 1960s and 1970s, the cities of the eastern bloc – owing to the secure hinterland of the comecon-market and the soviet union – were not aff ected by these changes. under the aegis of the infl exible central planning, the vast majority of the large state-owned industrial enterprises were artifi cially maintained for political and legitimating reasons until as late as 1990; as a result, cities of state-socialism did not undergo the far-reaching post-fordist transformation processes typical for the western capitalist economies. central and eastern european cities, however, paid a high price for these state interventions, as the extremely rapid deindustrialisation processes starting right aft er 1990 had more serious consequences in the region compared to the west. due to robust restructuring the economy of post-socialist cities rapidly shift ed from manufacturing to the tertiary sector in the early 1990s. as a result, similarly to the inner city neighbourhoods, the contemporary character of the former industrial areas is also highly ambiguous; in this case, a relatively low number of successful brownfi eld regeneration projects can be found against vast areas of derelict industrial land still incapable for renewal. the socialist housing estates besides the damage wrought by world war ii, the most radical intervention in the urban tissue of central and eastern european cities during the entire 20th 330 century was undoubtedly caused by the mass-scale construction of socialist housing estates. the devastation of the war and the subsequent baby boom together resulted in an acute housing shortage which also closely coincided with the ideological and urban development endeavours of the newly established socialist regime aiming at creating a new society with an entirely new (socialist) way of life. the construction of housing estates began on the extensive empty (in today’s terminology, ‘greenfi eld’) areas then abundantly available around the cities’ industrial districts, and indeed, this form of (mass-)housing initially provided decent living conditions for the newcomers, especially for low-skilled industrial workers. aft er 1990, housing estates became the biggest losers of post-socialist transition, partly due to their outdated technological solutions, and partly as a consequence of the rapid ageing processes caused by selective outmigration. as a consequence, a signifi cant number of socialist-era housing estates are still facing complex societal challenges (see csizmady, a. 2003). therefore, while socialist regimes concentrated on the empty areas located on the urban fringe in order to establish mass-scale housing and large industrial conglomerates, post-socialist urban development – mainly due to the newly emerging suburbanisation processes – stretches far beyond the administrative borders of the former socialist city. according to stanilov (2007), the post-1990 urban growth simply ‘leaped’ over the immovable ring of housing estates, once representing the quintessence of socialist urban planning. nevertheless, despite the massive outmigration from these areas, a signifi cant share of the population in post-socialist cities still resides in large housing estates (e.g. 82% of the total population in bucharest, 77% in bratislava, 60% in sofi a, 56% in warsaw, and 55% in tallinn) (hirt, s. 2012, p. 35). the former periphery – the contemporary suburbia socialist cities preserved their compact character, they were not girdled with a vast, sprawling suburban zone. large neighbourhoods of detached houses were not desirable for the socialist regime, since this form of housing would have provided residents with too much private space, possibly contributing to a capitalist-type of residential segregation (according to these opinions, as cited by hirt, s. 2012, p. 40, ‘it is the yard that makes the bourgeois’). consequently, in contrast to the extensive american suburbia, socialist cities were mainly surrounded by agricultural land, occasionally dott ed with industrial new towns (szirmai, v. 1988) established aft er world war ii. during this period, large cities (as central places) represented the apex of the redistributive system, whereas the adjacent areas were primarily considered as their periphery, in many cases having been suppressed via administrative tools as well. 331 hence, the massive outfl ow of urban population and the rise of suburban areas began only aft er 1990. this process was further accelerated by the liberalisation of the real estate market and a booming private car ownership. in spite of the negative environmental impacts of urban sprawl, residential fl ows were soon followed by the suburbanisation of the industry and – to a lesser extent – the services sector as well. as a result, along with city centres, the formerly neglected and peripheral suburban areas became undoubtedly the most dynamically developing areas of contemporary post-socialist agglomerations. as shown by figure 3, the overall status of the diff erent urban zones, as well as the political and economic interests related to these areas have both undergone a signifi cant realignment in post-socialist cities aft er 1990, mainly heading towards a completely opposite direction compared to pre-transition processes and power relations (sýkora, l. 2009). areas previously preferred by the communist regimes immediately lost their privileged positions, whereas the ones that were less supported – for ideological reasons – became the most prosperous areas of recent years. to conclude, this intra-urban equilibration process might be referred to as ‘the paradox of post-socialist transition’. future perspectives of post-socialist cities the dissolution of the soviet union and the collapse of state-socialism caused overwhelming changes in east central europe. stanilov (2007) identifi es it as a global-scale pruitt -igoe, the most remarkable moment of the dawn of modernity. concerning epochal demarcations, hirt (2012) draws similar parallels when comparing the era of socialism and post-socialism with the binary of modernity and post-modernity, highlighting the apparent similarities between post-modern and post-socialist urbanism. concerning the future perspectives of post-socialist cities, the most comprehensive overview is provided by kiril stanilov (2007), who outlines four possible development scenarios based on macro-regional urbanisation trends. (1) in the long term, he sees the possibility of a west european-type development, characterised by controlled rates of suburbanisation, vibrant central and inner city areas, high quality public services, and noticeable (although not excessive) patt erns of social stratifi cation. fig. 3. the changing political and economic status of socialist urban areas during the post-socialist transition. source: aft er sýkora, l. 2009, modifi ed by the author 332 (2) in contrast, the north american model is rather dominated by higher levels of privatisation and spatial deconcentration, as well as a stronger segregation by income and ethnicity. (3) thirdly, an east asian-type of urban development path might be characterised by the coexistence of an exceptionally rapid economic growth and strong local cultural traditions. (4) finally, he also warns about the possible emergence of a fourth kind of (over-, or dependent) urbanisation typical of third world countries. this model is characterised by an uncontrollable rate of population growth exceeding the ability of the economy and the government to provide jobs and an appropriate urban infrastructure, consequently leading to increasing urban informality. thus far, according to stanilov, post-socialist urban development exhibits select features of these models. over the past 10–15 years, the vitality of inner city neighbourhoods has undoubtedly grown (in correspondence with the western european model), while the unleashed suburbanisation, the growing fascination with (mass-)consumer culture, and the all-encompassing privatisation processes rather resemble the north american development path. until the recession of 2008, several central and eastern european regions and cities were characterised by east asian-type ‘booming’ economies, however, as an alarming signal of the fourth model, the rapid erosion of public service provision can also be observed in post-socialist cities. beyond all these urban development processes, the increasing level of socio-economic polarisation is defi nitely one of the most enduring aspects of the so-called ‘bifurcated transition’ (hirt, s. 2012), i.e. the simultaneous appearance and coexistence of first world-style and third world-style capitalisms. in whichever direction the urbanisation processes of transition countries may eventually turn, it is obvious that the inhabitants of post-socialist cities still have to face several local and global challenges. within the ex-socialist countries joining the european union in 2004 and 2007, according to the statement of a 2008 world bank report, even though “the transition is over, but the schumpeterian process of creative destruction is not” (alam, a. et al., 2008, p. 29). references alam, a., casero, p.a., khan, f. and udomsaph, c. 2008. unleashing prosperity. productivity growth in eastern europe and the former soviet union. washington d.c., world bank, 274 p. altvater, e. 1993. the future of the market. an essay on the regulation of money and nature aft er the collapse of “actually existing socialism”. london, verso, 272 p. andrusz, g., harloe, m. and szelényi, i. eds. 1996. cities aft er socialism. urban and regional change and confl ict in post-socialist societies. oxford, blackwell, 356 p. 333 berend. t.i. and ránki, gy. 1976. közép-kelet-európa gazdasági fejlődése a 19–20. században (the economic development of central and eastern europe during the 19th and 20th century). budapest, közgazdasági és jogi könyvkiadó, 723 p. bodnár, j. 2001. fin de millénaire budapest. metamorphoses of urban life. minneapolis, university of minnesota press, 222 p. bohle, d. and greskovits, b. 2012. capitalist diversity in europe’s periphery. new york, cornell university press, 304 p. burawoy, m. and verdery, k. eds. 1999. uncertain transition. ethnographies of change in the postsocialist world. lanham md, rowman & litt lefi eld, 322 p. castells, m. 1977. the urban question. london, edward arnold, 502 p. chavance, b. 1994. the transformation of communist systems. economic reform since the 1950s. boulder, westview, 225 p. chavance, b. 2002. institutions, régulation and crisis in socialist economies. in régulation theory. eds. boyer, r. and saillard, y., paris, la découverte, 267–273. csanádi, g. and ladányi, j. 1992. budapest térbeni-társadalmi szerkezetének változásai (changes in the socio-spatial structure of budapest). budapest, akadémiai kiadó, 159 p. csizmady, a. 2003. a lakótelep (the housing estate). budapest, gondolat kiadó, 320 p. czepczyński, m. 2008. cultural landscapes of post-socialist cities. representation of powers and needs. aldershot, ashgate, 209 p. dingsdale, a. 1999. budapest’s built environment in transition. geojournal 49. 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /ita 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(adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice black entrepreneurship: contradictions, class, and capitalism‡ alisha r. winn abstract this article examines philosophical contradictions faced by black business owners who benefited from racial segregation, yet were often active participants in the civil rights movement. the research provides a critical analysis of the atlanta life insurance company, examining and revealing conflicting ideas of class and color during jim crow, as well as the contradictions of gender, the company’s program to “uplift” the community, and hierarchies within the company. this case provides a unique perspective for examining black entrepreneurship, its history, and complexity in the african american community. keywords african americans, entrepreneurship, community, contradictions, civil rights, segregation, black elite ‡ i would like to thank jba’s anonymous reviews and the editors, brian moeran, elizabeth briody, and christina garsten, for their assistance and support. i would also like to thank mychele conway for her insight and taking the time to review this article. page 1 of 30 jba 3(1): 79-108 spring 2014 © the author(s) 2014 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 80 this article examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century history of the atlanta life insurance company, a blackowned insurance company that serviced exclusively the needs of african-americans, first in atlanta, and later in the southeastern region of the united states.1 its particular concern is with the philosophical contradictions faced by black business owners during the jim crow period of racial segregation (1876-1965).2 atlanta is a city known for its established african american community and elite. by 1940, it had by far the most extensive and accomplished black community leadership in georgia (tuck 2001: 56); and by 1970, african americans constituted a majority of atlanta’s population for the first time in history (rutheiser 1996:62). however, atlanta’s history is also one of tragedy: of racism, as well as civil rights, achievement, success, and change. simultaneously described as “the cradle of the modern human rights movement,” and “one of the poorest and most racially segregated central cities in the united states” (ruthheiser 1996:3), atlanta is a city of complexity and imagination. in the 1880s, the black population was approximately 9,000, rising to 35,000 by 1900. this population growth increased job competition among black and white workers and heightened class distinctions. as a result, the city's white leadership, which feared the social intermingling of the races (mixon and kuhn 2005), initiated restrictions to control the daily behavior of the working class. racial tensions in the city were further exacerbated by the emergence of a black elite. during reconstruction, from 1867-76, black men were given the right to vote. they became more involved in the political realm, establishing businesses, creating social networks, and building communities. many whites were uncomfortable with the advances of this black elite (mixon and kuhn 2005), which some believe led to the 1906 atlanta race riots.3 after these riots, race-based zoning 1 this article expands upon the extensive work of alexa benson henderson (1990), which provides a detailed and thorough history of the development and progress of the atlanta life business, and of carole merritt (2001), which is an excellent biography of alonzo herndon and his family, and includes a short chapter on the establishment of herndon’s insurance company. these two historical studies provide a backdrop for this further analysis of the insurance company. 2 jim crow was a 19th century dance ridiculing black people, transformed by the start of the 20th century into a term meaning racial discrimination and segregation (hine, hine and harold, 2004). jim crow laws were implemented after the u. s. civil war to legally enforce segregation, particularly in the south, after the end of slavery (guest, 2014). these segregation laws throughout the south legally enforced the boundaries between blacks and whites in housing, education, voting rights, property ownership, and access to public services such as transportation, bathrooms, and water foundations (guest, 2014:216). all african americans, regardless of their wealth or social standing, had to adhere to these laws (hine, hine, and harold, 2004). 3 by the end of the riots, although disputed by its low number, 25 blacks and one winn / black entrepreneurship 81 and other more informal means were used to enforce residential and commercial segregation, as well as seating areas for public transportation.4 successful black entrepreneurs concentrated themselves in a segregated business district east of downtown on auburn avenue5 ‒ referred to as “sweet auburn,” and known as the richest “negro street in the world” (rutheiser 1996:33). the atlanta life insurance company (founded 1905) was an institution of triumph, resilience, community uplift, prosperity, and success ‒ characteristics that mirror the life of its founder, alonzo f. herndon. 6 atlanta life originated from the atlanta benevolent and protective association. founded and led by peter james bryant, pastor of the wheat street baptist church, atlanta benevolent provided insurance for small organizations which pooled their money, as each member paid five to 25 cents a week in dues to cover sickness or death (merritt 2002). the association was one of the numerous small self-help groups that sprang up in african american church communities during the latter half of the nineteenth century (merritt 2002:76). in 1904, georgia passed a law requiring mutual associations to deposit $5,000 with the state to protect policyholders. bryant and his assistant, james arthur hopkins, were unable to raise the money, so herndon paid the deposit and purchased the atlanta benevolent and protective association from them for $140 (merritt 2002:78). this sale prevented whites from taking over the firm, for both ministers were determined that it remain in african-american hands (ingham and feldman 1994:325). after acquiring two other companies, the royal white person died. however, there were many blacks and whites injured (merritt 2002). 4 race is a social construction, with great consequences. from at least the seventeenth century on, blackness was conceptualized as the opposite of whiteness and european-ness (feagan 2001:210) and so functions as the prime racial signifier. “white and “black” are socially constructed categories riveted to a white-dominated structure of oppression, and it is those with the greatest power ‒ white americans ‒ who have controlled who gets placed where in the continuum’s categories (ibid.). 5 auburn avenue was the headquarters for black-own banks, insurance companies and, in 1932, the nation’s only black daily newspaper, the atlanta daily world (rutheiser 1996:33). the concentration of black capital in sweet auburn helped to define the entrepreneurial black elite (rutheiser 1996). it was considered “sweet” because money was sweet, and by 1945 the black-owned businesses of atlanta had a combined worth nearing $30 million (kruse 2005:28). 6 herndon was born a slave in social circle, georgia on june 26, 1858, on a slave plantation in walton county, 40 miles south of atlanta, run by his white father, slave-owner, frank herndon. after emancipation, alonzo worked as a sharecropper and remained in social circle, georgia until the age of twenty when, with just one year of formal education, he left the small town with $11 in his pocket and settled in jonesboro, georgia, where he learned the barbering trade (ingham and feldman 1994; merritt 2002). in 1882, he moved to atlanta, continuing his barbering business, and eventually owning three barbershops (walker 1998). journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 82 mutual insurance company and the national laborers' protective union, herndon reorganized all three companies in 1905 to form the atlanta mutual (henderson 1990). figure 1: alonzo f. herndon, 1858-1927, founder of atlanta life in 1905. herndon owned several properties, including three barbershops, and became atlanta’s first african american millionaire. by 1915, atlanta mutual had become the largest black industrial insurance company in the south and, in 1922, amended its charter, increasing its capital stock to $100,000. in this way, it became georgia's second black legal reserve company, able to sell all classes of insurance, and renamed itself atlanta life insurance company (merritt 2002). atlanta life stemmed from the “traditions of self-help and mutual aid that sustained african americans” (henderson 1990:3). like other mutual aid society-like businesses operating at this time, the company was characterized by socially-responsible investment. it represented the most effective form of social and economic cooperation among africanamericans, and helped to promote community interests and racial solidarity. alonzo herndon’s entrepreneurial insurance venture enhanced the course of his life and impacted african americans in the business world, as well as black communities throughout the southeastern region of the united states. the development of black insurance companies and banks began toward the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century (lincoln and mamiya 1990), when african americans faced severe discrimination in the mainstream insurance industry. blackowned insurance companies exclusively provided african americans with a needed service during jim crow, and black insurance companies winn / black entrepreneurship 83 emerged as the most successful example of black economic development (weems 1996). their financial base came from benevolent and burial associations, as many poor people bought burial plans ‒ paying five to ten cents a week for burial insurance that assured them of a decent burial. the practice of segregated cemeteries in the north and the south, together with the difficulties of obtaining loans from white lending agencies, also led to the establishment of black cemetery associations, out of which many black funeral parlors and mortuaries grew. in addition to the provision of sick and burial benefits, many insurance companies also became building and loan associations (lincoln and mamiya 1990) as they invested in real estate. by providing mortgage loans and venture capital for african americans during the first half of the 20th century (weems 1997:210), they helped bridge a critical gap in african americans’ access to housing and home ownership (butler 1991). in this respect, atlanta life helped redefine the characteristics of an insurance company, by not only providing loans for the establishment of african american businesses, churches, and homes, but also by contributing to colleges to support and maintain local historically-black educational institutions, so that it can be said to have been partially responsible for the success of many african americans and colleges in atlanta.7 moreover, in the mid-20th century, atlanta life assisted black neighborhoods in atlanta and other southern cities by supporting the civil rights movement, and other areas of community development (henderson 1990; merritt 2001). renamed the atlanta life financial group (alfg) in 2001, the company has consisted of two operating units since august 2012 ‒ atlanta life insurance company and herndon capital management ‒ which together provide financial solutions for customers in how to manage their insurance and investments.8 in terms of both number of employees and business reach, however, the alfg has curtailed its operations significantly.9 while, in 1980, there were 520,000 7 alonzo and his son contributed thousands of dollars to support and maintain local historically-black educational institutions such as spelman, morehouse, clark atlanta, and morris brown college. 8 atlanta life insurance company is the former name of the entire company, from 1922-2001. for the purposes of this article, i will refer to the company as atlanta life in my focus on historical events, practices, and perspectives of the former atlanta life insurance company. until fall 2012, jackson securities constituted the third company under alfg. although due to merge with m.r. beal & co ‒ another, minority-owned firm based in new york ‒ the company called off the proposed merger in march 2013. see alfg website: www.atlantalife.com. 9 weems’ (1990) analysis of the decrease in assets, and african american firms’ staff reduction between the years 1982-1992, relates to atlanta life experiences of these reductions from downsizing in the early to mid-1990s. during this time, many pioneers and long-term atlanta life employees retired. due to a decline in business, the first downsizing in the early 1990s meant the closure of many branch offices between 1995 and 1997, and resulted in the sole operation of the home office in atlanta. http://www.atlantalife.com/ journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 84 policyholders and $108.7 million in assets (henderson 1990), and (in the early 1990s) close to 300 employees in the home office, and approximately 500 more working in the district offices (which, by 1968, numbered 65, and were to be found as far afield as the midwestern states of illinois, michigan, and ohio), operations are currently confined to the home office, although the business is licensed in seventeen states. telling the atlanta life story the atlanta life insurance company’s legacy and place in history was unknown to me when, in 2000, i applied to work for the herndon home museum.10 i had no inkling of the fascinating story behind this beautiful mansion and its owner. in this respect, my knowledge of the history of african american entrepreneurship was, like that of people in general, severely limited, in spite of numerous writings on the history of black business and insurance (henderson, 1991; butler 1991; gerena 2004; green and pryde 1990; harris, 1936; walker 1998; weare 1993). weems (1997:200) suggests three reasons why black businesses and business people have been under-represented in african american historiography: there has existed a pervasive belief that black business, historically, represented an unprogressive element of black community life… second, even when black businesses were considered, their activities were analyzed in a noncomparative vacuum which unduly diminished their significance. finally, the “racial integration” and “civil rights” paradigms of the 1950s and 60s, which focused upon black movement into the american “mainstream,” further marginalized community-based black business enterprise. i soon discovered that the success of the atlanta-based insurance company dispels the myth of african american business weakness and restores its presence in the african american community. african americans who lived during the jim crow era talk about black businesses and their owners as service providers in their communities, enabling them to thrive despite discrimination and racism. through ethnographic and archival methods, the research presented here provides a critical analysis of the company, as it examines conflicting ideas of race, class, and gender during the jim crow period.11 10 the herndon home museum is the former residence of atlanta life founder of alonzo f. herndon. it was designed by his first wife adrienne herndon, without any blueprints, and built by black craftsmen in 1910. in 1973, the herndon’s only child, norris herndon, transformed the home into a museum as a memorial to his mother. it is a national historic landmark. 11 during jim crow-america, leaders of atlanta life faced the challenges of segregation and discrimination in a larger society that affected all african americans regardless of class. an ethnography of the african american upper class and entrepreneurship is an example of what laura nader (1972) has winn / black entrepreneurship 85 as i said earlier, my concern is with the philosophical contradictions facing black business owners during jim crow: with how they benefited commercially from racial segregation, on the one hand, and yet were often active participants in the civil rights movement, on the other. their success threatened their ethnic-based monopolies, which were good for black business, as they provided the majority of services in the black community. however, discrimination against black businesses in the larger market place prevented the expansion of their successful business activities beyond the black community. at the same time, internal divisions in black atlanta aligned with color and family status ‒ divisions replicated within the company, in terms of corporate hierarchies, gender roles, and the company’s “uplift” of the african american community. this itself reflected the jim crow dichotomy, as black elite organizations and activities ‒ as well as wellknown wealthy families ‒ operated as a network closed off from the rest of the black community. in addition, although women played vital roles in the company, they faced challenges that limited their mobility and roles in the company. atlanta life, like many other black businesses during the jim crow period, found itself between two worlds: a segregated america operating within a larger capitalistic society, and a segregated black community. figure 2: 1922 atlanta life staff, atlanta, georgia. formerly called atlanta mutual, the company had several branch offices throughout the southeastern region of the united states during the 20th century. (courtesy of herndon museum) termed “studying up.” although i am not studying the “colonizers,” i am nevertheless analyzing “the culture of power rather than the powerless, the culture of affluence, rather than the culture of poverty” (1972: 289). therefore, it is important to address the conflicts faced by a company at the forefront of the civil rights movement in atlanta ‒ a company that clearly benefited from segregation. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 86 this article takes a critical look at how atlanta life built and maintained a successful business in the u.s. south, and at the issues that confronted black business people compared to similar businesses in other ethnic communities. it asks three questions. what were the costs and benefits to business owners, and to members of the community served by them, on the basis of race in the u.s.? what did it mean for business owners to confront race, class and gender issues while accumulating wealth? and how did atlanta life business owners and leaders contend with poverty and inequality within the african american community? methodology as indicated above, my initial involvement with the research presented here developed through my employment at the herndon home museum as an archivist, when i was hired to create the atlanta life photographic collection.12 as part of the national endowment for the humanities grant, “preserving a business legacy,” i preserved, arranged, and categorized 6,000 atlanta life insurance company’s historic photographic prints and negatives dating from 1918-1993 (the bulk of them from 1950-1970).13 i created a finding aid, a detailed record of the content and location of the categorized photographic collection, while other museum staff processed the atlanta life documents. all were to be mounted on the world wide web to be available to researchers interested in the history of the insurance company. through the categorization process, i found thousands of photo prints and negatives of atlanta life events and social groups, as i spent a year putting together the collection. it was at my discretion to create titles of series and folders for the photos, and i grouped images based on such classificatory categories as buildings, employees, groups, and events. as i sat processing and preserving, i meticulously took my own notes, and discovered evolving patterns during this process. clearly, not only did the company provide insurance; it was also involved in a social and economic context beyond anything i had imagined. these images led me eventually to dissertation research on the social and cultural dynamics of the company, and to further exploration of class and the contradictions of entrepreneurship. for this latter research, i designed a multi-method investigation 12 register of the atlanta life insurance company photographic print collection 2004 digital library of georgia. http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/herndon/atlantalifephotos.html. processed by sanford, l. w. chenault, and author. websites for the atlanta life negative collection and herndon family papers are also available: register of the atlanta life insurance company records and herndon family papers. digital library of georgia, online. auburn avenue research library, atlanta-fulton county library system. atlanta, georgia. 13 this grant supported the preservation of the history and culture of atlanta life through photography and primary documents. http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/herndon/atlantalifephotos.html winn / black entrepreneurship 87 using archival data, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with former and current employees, as well as with non-employees affiliated with the company.14 the herndon home museum and the auburn avenue research library in atlanta provided the archival data. the herndon home museum’s collection of the atlanta life photographic collection, transcripts of previous interviews of former employees, the collection series of atlanta life employees and events, historical records of the atlanta life, and museum newsletters, provided a scope for knowledge about the social and cultural importance of the company that was beyond its business aspects. using the auburn avenue research library on african-american culture and history’s collections of atlanta life records and its finding aid, i chose and reviewed relevant documents and photographs from the collection, focusing on those related to the civil rights movement, employee information, and atlanta life events. in addition, i focused mainly on interviewees who had experienced life and employment during the jim crow era, and individuals connected to the company during the transition to the desegregation, and postdesegregation periods. i interviewed fifteen atlanta life employees (current and former), ten of whom were women, as well as former employees over the age of 60, nearly all of whom had worked for the company for at least 30 years.15 most of the current employees for the atlanta life financial group, aged 45-65, had worked for the company for 30 years as well. i also interviewed individuals associated with atlanta life through the company’s financial and professional support of the civil rights movement, because i wanted to understand atlanta life’s impact and influence on the civil rights movement through the eyes of those who had experienced these events. from these interviews, i attempted to align the study participants’ data with archival and visual data to validate the research. for atlanta life employees, i analyzed and compared the formal processes of the company’s operations, of how it prepared its employees for business, employees’ individual journeys through atlanta life, their identity within it, and the meanings they attributed to working for such a prestigious and renowned company. 14 occasional participant observation at contemporary atlanta life financial group events revealed that the company still provided a space for shared identity and economic cooperation, and that it still played a significant role in strengthening the community. 15 employee interviews took place between 2007 and 2009. some worked in atlanta life branches throughout the country, while others spent their entire atlanta life careers at the home office in atlanta. many were retired at the time of the interviews. for the purposes of this article, i focus on the experiences of former employees who worked for the company before the 1970s, and atlanta life affiliates who witnessed the company’s involvement during the civil rights movement. all interviews were audio-taped, transcribed, and edited. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 88 defining the black elite historically, education, occupation, and income defined the black upper and middle classes. in addition to those in the professions and in government positions, the black upper class included families identified with such service trades as catering, barbering, and tailoring, which brought them into regular contact with upper-class whites (gatewood 1993: 27). still, the lines are unclear when constituting classes for african americans. as sigelman and welch (1994:17) put it: “the difficulties of defining class in the black community stem from several social and economic realities of black life: education traditionally has not produced the same income gain for blacks as it has for other racial and ethnic group.” so, factors other than purely economic reward are clearly affect the attribution of class ‒ in this instance, varying interpretations of respectability and level of community involvement come into play (green and pryde 1990:58). gatewood’s (2000) description of the black elite identifies its claim to privileged status on the basis of past record of achievements, as well as being antebellum free people of color, culture, education, and, to a lesser degree, wealth. in addition, upper class children in schools reinforced an emphasis on “respectability” and values. gatewood argued that the educational experience of the black upper class conspired to mold itself into a replica of middle-and upper class white americans. the “black aristocracy,” the “respectables of the race,” consisted of those who possessed a certain moral character and virtue (2000:113). within the african american community, leaders of these institutions, including black entrepreneurs and businessmen, represented upper/middle-class blacks who were highly respected. the description by kevin yelvington (1995) of supervisors or managers in a trinidadian factory parallels this of atlanta life power, leadership, and black elite. power is definitional because it affects who can take up certain positions, and who gets to establish what kind of rules and procedures in a setting such as a factory. yelvington also sees power as something practiced or exercised, as well as produced, through an economic process. it is achieved by means of resources that are hierarchically distributed (1995:12, 15), so that dimensions of power are relational, structural, definitional, historical, and cultural. such relational power derives from scarce resources (time, money, commodities), where control over resources by a social entity (an individual, a group, a class) is based on relations between that entity and the resources (1995:17). atlanta life’s hierarchical structure ‒ revealed in images of its board members, officers, and middle and senior managers, directors, and sales agents attending conferences and events throughout the country, as well as in visits to the company by prominent black international figures ‒ reflects how resources were controlled. winn / black entrepreneurship 89 figure 3: president of liberia, william tubman, visits atlanta life, 1954. (courtesy of atlanta life photographic collection, herndon museum) figure 4: heavyweight boxing champion, muhammad ali, visits atlanta life, n. d. (courtesy of atlanta life photographic collection, herndon museum) class is used to confound racism, which can also involve, for example, personal conduct and manners (yelvington 1995). here we see the involvement of social and cultural capital as issues of class and gender arise. there is a “kind of people,” and a “kind of labor” (1995:38), established historically and contemporarily, that correlate with how owners impose their own definitions of social identities on groups (yelvington 1995:39) ‒ definitions which reinforce conflicts and separations between who are perceived as “acceptable,” and those who are not, in society. for leaders, wealthy owners, and officers of the company, class income differences lay hidden beneath their blackness, concealed by their commonalities: a shared space, identity, and struggle with the lowerjournal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 90 income members of the african american community. however, many low-income african americans remained impoverished despite the presence, role, and impact of atlanta life within the community. there is a relationship between the formation of collective identities and structural arrangements of power (gregory 1998), consisting of larger structures of a capitalistic system, which exclude, and alternately include, the african american community and leaders of the institutions: the black elite. class: attitudes and prestige the majority of employees of atlanta life company were graduates of atlanta university and many attended first congregational church (tuck 2001:57). the five former women employees i interviewed, who worked for the company from the 1940s to the 1990s, attended historically-black, popular, and prestigious colleges: spelman, morris brown, and clark college. during one interview, a woman compared and contrasted atlanta life’s working environment with her current living environment. her work had indirectly defined her higher-class and educational status, compared to that of other individuals living in her building. “i say being in a building like this, all these different people from all walks of life… but i don’t deal with them because we don’t have anything in common, you know. so many different types of people in a place like this. so i say, and i tell people, i say i can’t compare that when i was at the atlanta life all those women, 150 women or so, because we were more or less kind of on the same level, had something in common.” when i asked what she meant by “same level,” she replied: “education and character.” she recalled how she and other women workers went to the same type of colleges, adding: “there at atlanta life, people were on the same level… kind of compare this (her residence)…kind of getting to me like the projects what the projects feels like, people from everywhere. just because i live in the building with them, you know you gonna’ speak, but i’m not going to associate with them, cause we don’t have anything in common, like we did at the atlanta life.” this interviewee equated her current living environment to living in the housing projects. she felt that she did not belong, and appeared to yearn for those times in her past when she was surrounded by atlanta life employees. although women did not earn much income, their employment at atlanta life and their education enabled them to move upward in class and separate themselves from lower-income individuals. winn / black entrepreneurship 91 not all current female employees were educated through the au center.16 however, they had some form of educational training in business and/or insurance. attitudes like this towards non-atlanta life employees, as well as towards those with lower-class status, are reflected in the literature on perceptions of the black poor by upper class blacks, with many writers portraying members of the upper class as wanting to separate themselves from the masses (drake and cayton 1954). class in black america has never been viewed in strictly literal economic terms: the black definition of class embraces style and behavior as well. hence, it is not uncommon to hear ‘that’s so ghetto’ used to describe behavior associated with poor folk, whether one picks garbage or sets a pick-androll on the basketball court for a living. (dyson 2006:xv) in black metropolis, drake and cayton (1945:559) present upper-class blacks’ description of lower-class blacks in bronzeville, chicago, in the 1940s: upper-class are very definite in their conception of what constitutes lower-class behavior. it is not poverty that outrages their sensibilities, but lack of decorum ‒ what they call “ignorance,” “boisterousness,” “uncouthness,” “lowbehavior.” they add (p. 584): “whenever a low-class negro confronts a negro of higher status, the atmosphere is sub charged with latent class antagonism.” upper class attitudes toward lower-class behavior reveal that “lower class people are those who give free rein to their emotions, whether worshipping or fighting, who ‘don’t know how to act,’ or dress correctly, or spend money wisely” (ibid. p. 562). class: distinction and exclusion the black elite leadership, which automatically stratified the black community, in turn perpetuated a space for forms of exclusion. gatewood’s (1990) study of the black aristocracy after reconstruction reveals how “old families” viewed themselves as the products of a process of natural selection and superior to other blacks in terms of culture, sophistication, and achievement. these beliefs revolved around a “sense of longevity and exclusiveness” (bowser 2007:143). 16 the black business elite of atlanta connect to the city’s historically-black colleges known today as the atlanta university (or au) center, which consists of clark atlanta university, morris brown college, interdenominational theological seminary, spelman college, and morehouse college. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 92 the lives of the atlanta life officers reveal this exclusivity of the black elite. parties and social interaction with wealthy whites and famous blacks defined an upper class lifestyle led by norris herndon and those in his circle, including many of atlanta life’s management. this prestige also resulted from their helping to “uplift” the african american community, together with the power that was associated with this uplift, while giving to charities, sponsorship, and advertising. such actions brought more attention and money to the company from black consumers, and contributes to an idea of class as “an identity based on a cultural understanding of one’s capital resources and the mode of closure one habitually employs within the objective structure provided by capitalism as totalizing cultural system” (yelvington 1995: 32). the processes by which atlanta life’s senior officers sought to maximize rewards by restricting access to resources and opportunities to a limited scale of individuals epitomizes yelvington’s (1995:29) notion of “closure.” for example, the company used to invite district managers in the top selling districts to atlanta life’s annual christmas gala in atlanta. a former district manager of miami, florida recalls how the company rented a greyhound bus in miami in the mid-1960s, before driving through lakeland, florida, and picking up managers to take them to atlanta for the christmas gala at the royal peacock ‒ a local nightclub located on auburn avenue, once the hub of african american businesses. the company put the managers up in paschal’s, an african american owned hotel at the time. not that rewarding employees was anything new. in 1924, the company initiated special incentive campaigns for those who produced the largest debit during a particular time frame (henderson 1990:93). in 1954, some employee recipients of the norris b. herndon caravan won a free trip to the world series between the cleveland indians and the new york giants. the image of the winners in front of progressive field in ohio, holding a banner displaying their success, reveals a separating out of certain employees and their families from within the larger african american community. most female employees, employees in lower level positions, and those who did not produce high enough sales, did not qualify to win all-expenses-paid trips (see figure 5). whether intentional or not, this created an exclusion of certain groups ‒ an exclusion that resonated with issues surrounding gender and class, and/or employee level or position, within the context of an african american business. winn / black entrepreneurship 93 figure 5: employees in front of progressive field, 1954 (courtesy of atlanta life photographic collection, herndon museum) most female employees did not attend atlanta life and national insurance association conferences either.17 according to one former employee (employed 1959-1991), beneficiaries of the trips included agents, supervisors, area directors, and managers with a high level of sales and productions. most agents were men who were permitted to bring their wives and families on these trips. this same interviewee added: “atlanta life had these national insurance conventions that gave us an opportunity to be exposed to a lot of stuff. my children look[ed] forward to that because we went to various cities. see, those are things that benefit us…i’ve driven to california…we went to las vegas… these are national conventions, you earned these trips.” in short, the company provided a secure space for employees to expand their education and develop their careers, providing opportunities for upward mobility, skill development, status and prestige. the positions offered higher-ranking employees, particularly men, opportunities for travel and leisure that characterized a middle and upper class lifestyle. 17 the national insurance association, originally known at the national negro insurance association, was founded in 1921 and consisted of the major black insurance companies in the nation. the association had a school called the nia institute. officers served as the principal instructors. atlanta life sponsored the trips to the nia conventions. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 94 figure 6: atlanta life auditing school, late 1920s. (courtesy of atlanta life photographic collection, herndon museum) women in his description of racial stratification of urban labor markets, glenn (2002:106), describes the racial and gender differences of black employment between 1865 and 1890: black women were even more constrained. only about 3-4 percent of those in the labor force were employed as skilled craftswomen and professionals. most of the craftswomen were seamstresses, while the largest group of professional women were teachers. the overwhelming 80-92 percent of black women workers in southern cities were employed as laundresses or in domestic service as maids, cooks, and child nurses. therefore, for women, employment with atlanta life provided rare opportunities for social and economic mobility during the jim crow era. an atlanta life affiliate described opportunities for women in the following way: “you have to remember this was a time when there weren’t a whole lot of black folk with good jobs… most women who were working were either teaching school or they were maids… women were going to catch that bus in their white uniforms, going to take care of white folks’ homes and their kids. and so, to come by a place (atlanta life) like this where you have white collar looking people, you know dressed up, come in here working in an office kind of environment… that was impressive and it was an inspirational thing for the broader community.” winn / black entrepreneurship 95 employment by a company like atlanta life, then, was prestigious for women. “it was a job that was not a menial job,” said one former employee, before continuing: “you weren’t doing any housework, kitchen, cooking… good jobs, sit down jobs; typewriters and adding machines, bookkeeping. it wasn’t the type of jobs that was usually given to young black women at that time. the best job you could get was working at a store somewhere as a sales clerk...” the majority of the employees who worked for atlanta life during world war ii were women. as in many other companies, “women were hired in great numbers, taking over the job of making weekly collections from drafted men” (henderson 1990:142). they proved extremely capable and made a significant contribution to atlanta life during the war era (henderson 1990:143), although most were clerks, not agents, and were only promoted to the role of supervisor, whereas men became officers and managers. figure 7: atlanta life female employees, 1940s. atlanta life provided women with better employment opportunities. (courtesy of atlanta life photographic collection, herndon home museum) female employees played multiple roles pursuing education, supporting agents and supervisors, providing accurate work, and maintaining family roles at home. according to one of the interviewees, half of the women working from 1950 to 1990s were married, so that many of them had to balance work and family responsibilities throughout the decades. nevertheless, there were very few rights for women, even in the “white collar” world. historically women employees did not make a lot of money, nor did they have many rights. according to one retired employee, journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 96 who began working for the company in the 1950s, atlanta life leaders asked women applicants if they planned to have children. having too many children posed a problem, and was grounds for possible termination, although it was never made clear just what number of children constituted “too many.” if a woman wanted to come back, she had to write out a statement to that effect: “once i finish my leave of absence, i would like to come back.” as one interviewee acknowledged: “it was a man’s world back in the day. women didn’t have too much authority… the men got the jobs first.” one former manager commented that, when he reviewed applications for employment during the 1950s, a woman was required to have her husband’s approval to work. another employee recalled how, as late as 1998, her husband had to agree to the type of retirement settlement that she would get: a lump sum or increments. the employee wanted to get a lump sum, but her husband preferred to get checks. “i thought it was horrible,” she said. at a time when many african americans, particularly women, could in general only find menial jobs and domestic work, the company offered opportunities, since office or desk jobs were a prestigious form of employment. the company was thus a space, not only for the production of cultural identities, but also of employee power and status, independent of their income level. nostalgia and contradictions in spite of these clear lines of race, class and gender within atlanta life, employees whom i interviewed, and who had worked for the company for at least twenty years, frequently resorted to a nostalgia for the “good old days.” in this respect, they occupied a “disclosive space” ‒ meaning “any organized set of practices for dealing with oneself, other people, and things that produces a relatively self-contained web of meanings” (spinosa, flores, and dreyfus 1997:17). time and time again, i heard comments like, “it was the life,” “it was like family,” “now things have changed,” and “we used to be…” as interviewees expressed a nostalgia and longing for the past that neatly encapsulate present day ideas about segregation ‒ something a sizeable proportion of the african american community now looks upon favorably. as one long-time male employee said of the board of directors and senior managers: “it was like a family affair, you didn’t have to worry about, ‘oh lord here come so and so i can’t speak to them’… it wasn’t like that. you could speak to any of them… their problems were your problems…” one female employee, who began working for the company in 1947, went on maternity leave, pursued another job, and returned to atlanta life seven years later. she re-applied and was re-hired, without any problems. winn / black entrepreneurship 97 her name was still in the records, and she was put back into the same department. “at that time i didn’t think anything about it. that was the first job i ever had. so to come back to it, it just seem like i was coming back home… i enjoyed it thoroughly, working for atlanta life; it was like a family…each department depended on the other department for part of their work.” employees’ nostalgia and romanticizing memories of the company present a view of the firm as everyone “getting along” in a “family-like” atmosphere without many problems. they shared much in common, and fully supported one another. yet my interviews also revealed several contradictions. some women could obtain better or higher positions in the company from dating officers. they were also discriminated against when it came to pay, and were hired on the basis of skin color, where lighter skinned, or “high yellow,” 18 women were likely to be hired, even though they had failed the application test. the same was true of women who had connections to the atlanta life leadership. as one interviewee put it: “you could be a dumb black girl and be fair, you could get a job.” this is not to infer, however, that skin color was the only criterion used to hire female employees, and unequal practices like this did not deter women from pursuing employment under challenging circumstances. so far as they were concerned, working for the company was better than doing menial work, where they faced both racist and sexist attitudes and practices. black business and segregation as mentioned earlier, before the civil rights movement and equal opportunity, members of the traditional black elite were confined to segregated environments. “they lived and attended schools in primarily segregated communities. they were generally employed or self-employed in institutions serving the black community” (benjamin 2005:44). the racism that the traditional black elite experienced was overt, and it was supported and sanctioned by the folkways, mores, and laws of the larger society (ibid.), which limited african americans’ social mobility among whites, while enabling it within the black community. forced to attend historically-black colleges, african americans received “an automatic ticket into the black middle class” upon graduation (bowser 2007:56). many black businesses, like atlanta life, operated initially in a segregated space. within this segregated space, service was open to 18 "high-yellow" has been used to describe an african american of light or fairskinned complexion. it can also be associated with "mulatto” (having one black parent and one white parent). this term could be interpreted as derogatory based on its usage and circumstance (gayle 2012). journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 98 blacks to provide the services needed in the black community. these included dental and medical services, grocery stores, and schools (bowser 2007), and there was a small percentage of black professionals serving the black population: primarily small businessmen, ministers, teachers, and undertakers, but also doctors, lawyers, and pharmacists. african americans found few white-collar opportunities in either the public or private sectors (harris 1999:1). historically, then, segregation shaped african american business. “in the south, ten years after the civil war, afro-american businesses did not serve only black clientele. but, the passage of jim crow laws in the 1890s changed this pattern and forced all afro-american businesses into one section of the business world” (butler 1991:144). either they had to develop their own institutions, or they had to exist without them (walker 1991). this “man-made barrier” (butler 1991:77), prevented african americans, by law, from operating their business enterprises in an open market (butler 1991:77). slavery, racism, and legal segregation afflicted african americans in a unique manner unique, which is often characterized as having stunted the development of african american communities and impeded their economic and social integration in larger society (greenbaum 1991:95). however, while segregation both stifled and encouraged the development of companies (greenbaum 1991:104; jackson 2004, 2006), it also enabled the economic development of black entrepreneurial businesses, which in turn provided services for the african american community. it was not until after emancipation that modern business enterprise took root among the black elite, thanks to the establishment of the freedman’s bureau (frazier 1957).19 in this kind of environment, wealthy owners and leaders could themselves relate to the rest of the black community, to some extent at least. they shared a common goal of eliminating discrimination, since wealthy owners did not have full access to the larger capitalist society, nor did they have fully equal rights. many still had to live in black neighborhoods, and faced discrimination outside the black community. so they were bounded by physical space due to segregation laws, and by economic space globally. both helped diminish the differences between wealthy owners and the rest of the community (middle, working or lower income), although some employees experienced some aspects of the privileges that came with working for a company like atlanta life (that is, there was no competition with whites, an opportunity to grow and 19 established march 3, 1865, the freedman’s savings and trust company was a mutual savings bank established for the benefit of black people. it was a nonprofit concern which had no stockholders (walker 1998). all assets of the bank were owned by depositors, in proportion to the deposits of each (osthaus 1976:5). winn / black entrepreneurship 99 develop skills, a safe work environment, and family-like solidarity). in addition, atlanta life’s attraction and popularity related to the fact that all members of the african american community could acquire simple nickel and dime policies. atlanta life provided insurance for everyone, whether poor, working class, or black elite. civil rights and black business in this shared reality between the black elite and the rest of the african american community, the wealthy owners of atlanta life took on the role of fighters for equal rights, and provided assistance in the community. black businesses in general played a major role in the civil rights movement and in the fight for equality. in addition to providing financial services, for example, african american banks gave members of the african american community a sense of security and confidence in their ability to gain a foothold in mainstream america (ammons 1996:471). the 1960s were a time when black leadership called for blacks to secure equal access to public accommodation, and to full civil and voting rights. these were crucially important for the development of african american business and investment activities, as well as for overall economic development (walker 1998:263). between 1957 and 1968, black organizations directed the efforts of tens of thousands of people, mostly blacks, in a national civil rights protest movement, the principal features of which are now familiar: raising money, collecting and distributing food, and carefully orchestrating boycotts, sit-ins, and marches (carson 1993:36). the fight for equality and economic development were the common goals of african americans and institutions led the community in this movement to change segregation laws. atlanta life assisted in voter registration, bailed protesters out of jail, and financed marches/protests. all such activities represented a continuous link with the broad social activism of alonzo herndon, and reflected the social consciousness of both the enterprise and his leadership (henderson 1990). atlanta life’s involvement began when morehouse college students,,, lonnie king and charles black, and other students from the atlanta university center, protested against rich’s department store and ten other businesses that discriminated against blacks. on march 9, 1960, the students drafted a document, an appeal for human rights, which appeared in most of atlanta newspapers, both white and black, and as a paid advertisement in the atlanta journal constitution. in it, students demanded equal rights and justice in education, housing, employment, voting, hospitals, restaurants, entertainment, and concerts. this was followed a week later by student protests in eleven different places simultaneously throughout the city. the atlanta life photographic collection contains hundreds of journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 100 photos and negatives of the civil rights protests in downtown atlanta. as business people and influential citizens, leaders of atlanta life could not watch quietly from the sidelines, as blacks waged a desperate struggle for freedom and equality in america. instead, these individuals frequently attempted to use their positions in business, and in their communities, to inspire economic, political, and cultural development among africanamericans (henderson 1990:168). in the 1950s and 60s, atlanta life president norris herndon and other atlanta life executives had bailed protestors out of jail on many occasions. now their employees were participating in civil rights protests. one former employee, who worked for atlanta life from 1947 to the 1990s, described her experience picketing in downtown atlanta in front of rich’s department store: “i went a whole month there. i was kind of nervous, you know. i said to myself, i hope these white people don’t bother me.” figure 8: 1960s civil rights protestors. (courtesy of atlanta life photographic collection). atlanta life also promoted professionalism in the civil rights movement, giving it a business-like appearance, and even helped create picket signs for protestors. organizer and leader of the 1960 atlanta student movement, lonnie king, recalled how atlanta life vice president, eugene martin, spoke with him after seeing one early protest on television. king described herndon’s message as follows: “pushing this move, we need to look good, it’s public relations. the world’s going to be looking. they should not see the atlanta university center students with rag tag signs… we had the most professional looking signs… martin winn / black entrepreneurship 101 made it very clear to me when he called me that day about those signs. he was speaking for mr. herndon. ’cause mr. herndon had seen our picket signs and he didn’t like the way they looked, and felt that if we were going to do this thing and it was right, (whispering), they needed to look good.” on herndon’s order, martin brought in atlanta life artist, maurice pennington, to improve the appearance of protestors’ picket signs ‒ something that reflected past concerns about proper presentation in public, particularly a positive and professional presentation amongst african americans. respectability and proper presentation were seen to be extremely important in the rebellion against the “jim crow system.” after all, respectability is an attribute defined by those in power as part of the ideological “rationale” for their own superior possessions and authority (greenbaum 2002:22). charles black, another leader in the 1960 student movement, had this to say about the picket signs: “nice block letters printed on poster board… we probably had the best-looking signs in all the movement, in the whole country… support we got from atlanta life. they had the independence, of course, to be able to do that. their clientele was black, you know, so it was not possible or easy for them to be reprised against by the established community, ’cause they were a power unto themselves. so they were able to provide that kind of support.” business for community, business for profit it is clear that atlanta life used its notoriety, wealth, and status to their social advantage, by participating in the civil rights movement through protests and voter registration. at the same time, however, while supporting the african american community, its management continued to accumulate wealth ‒ something that was common to black businesses in general, particularly during the civil rights movement. the company’s involvement, therefore, put it in the forefront of the movement, both socially and economically, as the company used its resources (including advertising, public relations, connections, power, success, and wealth) to confront injustices head on. 20 atlanta life had two missions: one was to “uplift” the african american community; the other, to serve the public as a business. like any other company, atlanta life functioned according to the rules of capitalism and was part of the american economic system. as herndon himself is reputed to have said in an interview: “america is a capitalistic country, and i am a capitalist” (kimbro and hill 1992:61). this comes across in two of his business activities. first, herndon father and son 20 it is also possible that this publicity encouraged or influenced members of the african american community to take out insurance policies from atlanta life. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 102 owned and ran prestigious barbershops whose all black barbers served “whites only” in atlanta (until protests following the civil rights bill enforced a change). 21 this was in accordance with jim crow laws, and shows how alonzo herndon used the segregated market to his advantage: “he would engage two worlds of business, two separate markets, turning the deep and constant racial divide to his own advantage” (merritt 2002:69). as one former atlanta life employee put it: “mr. herndon made his money in segregation; opened a barbershop on peachtree street. that’s where he made his money; the money that enabled him to open up the atlanta life insurance company to start it…cause when they started, think how the black companies grew so mr. herndon started atlanta life from barbershop money from white people; he made a whole lot of money.” the question is: was he motivated by money? or was he trying to help black barbers protect their image and preserve their tradition of “best service,” and in so doing support the black community? after all, he ‒ and his son norris ‒ were stuck in a quandary. thanks to segregation, “white” money had enabled the herndons to set up and run an insurance company in the first place, and attract black customers. this was the reality that faced the leaders of many african american businesses during jim crow. second, atlanta life provided the wherewithal, promoted, and exhibited a motion picture, the parade of negro progress, which highlighted and celebrated different aspects of “negro life.” in spite of this cultural façade, however, it appears that for senior management “the primary object of the film was to make money, but in a clean and honest way… to build friendships, and to show others” what the company was doing (tidwell and sanders 2007:171). this idea of making corporate profit behind the veil of community “uplift” mirrors weems’ (2002:405) “black businessman as villain” thesis, which, building on earlier critique (harris 1936), argued that blackowned businesses exploited lower income black consumers (weems 2002:406). like other black middle class business owners, herndon and his senior management promoted racial pride and unity as a cover-up to gain black support for middle class controlled businesses (harris 1936:50). this raises a series of questions. were atlanta life leaders’ seemingly altruistic actions a genuine strategy to strengthen the black community? or were they designed to increase wealth and power for 21 in november 1965, members of the southern christian leadership conference (sclc) protested at the herndon barber shop for only serving whites, refusing to serve black customers. the civil rights act of 1964 excluded barbershops not located in hotels or other places of public accommodation. a few days after the incident, blacks were able obtain haircuts at the barbershop, with the stipulation that not too many blacks come at one time (britton, 1965). winn / black entrepreneurship 103 themselves? did these acts of kindness towards the community serve as a cushion, or back-up, if management was accused of conducting business “only for profit”? did atlanta life’s leaders perpetuate the “black villain theory” (weems 2002)? as we have seen, the company’s function within the capitalistic system was twofold: the company took care of the community, and the community took care of the company. this reciprocal system of cooperation worked successfully. in atlanta capitalist society, black businesses made money, even though they operated in an environment of racism and predation, created and sustained by the larger capital market and legally enforced rules. at the same time, the fact that atlanta life employees protested against discriminatory businesses dispels this black villain theory. although they did not have to worry about losing their jobs, and knew that the company would bail them out of jail if necessary, their protests were made not without risk. they could be arrested, spend time away from their families, or be beaten or killed. while having the protection of their employers, therefore, employees sacrificed themselves to some degree. it is difficult now to determine how much tension atlanta life’s leaders and officers had to contend with at the time. indeed, so far as they were concerned then, economic growth and uplift of the african american community may not have been a contradiction at all. they may not have needed to engage in “uplift” as a means to establish wealth and power, because african american businesses owed their origins to a more communal form of organization, and only later developed more obviously “capitalist” characteristics. in greenbaum’s words (1991:104): “black mutual benefit societies by the turn of the century were becoming increasingly entrepreneurial, with a declining emphasis on fraternalism and ritual.” in other words, atlanta life’s insurance business, which originated as a mutual aid society, “played a vital role in capitalizing the development of businesses and homeownership in black communities,” so that its own expansion and economic growth could have contributed to the direction then taken by the company, as traditional overlaps between “family, residential, and occupational ties” were changed. in this, it adhered to developments in business more generally, where “increasing size inevitably attenuated intimacy and growth in scale conditioned hierarchical structures” (greenbaum 1991:99). conclusion african americans faced a unique dilemma: how could, and should, black business contend with jim crow laws? economic segregation ‒ described by john sibley butler as an “economic detour” (1991:144; stuart 1970) ‒ makes the african american experience unique, in that it posted many negative aspects. first, it prevented blacks, particularly businessmen and women, from competing in a larger market (oliver and shapiro journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 104 2007:103), and restricted them to their own group or servicing whites only, thereby limiting economic success on a larger scale. second, it limited black consumer choices when purchasing goods and acquiring insurance in the larger market. in spite of these constraints, african americans developed businesses by numerous means. atlanta life thrived on the crest of segregation (merritt 2002:84), strengthening the relationships between the company and the community, and while pursuing economic development. segregation also enabled black entrepreneurs to accumulate more wealth from the black community, resulting in greater class differences, which created larger divisions in the black community as blacks carved out social spaces within which their alternative visions of society and community could thrive (glenn 2002: 127). in these spaces, blacks built an oppositional culture, one that emphasized collectivist values, mutuality, and fellowship (glenn 2002:127). it placed company leaders in a position to uplift the community, while black business owners could simultaneously increase their wealth. most former and current employees viewed the company as a family. these unique aspects of african american business in a shared experience of a “family” represented a fascinating combination of security, support, protection, solidarity, class, gender, exclusion, and inclusion ‒ all affected by segregation and desegregation. the recurring theme, “like a family,” illustrates both the functions and dysfunctions of any family, together with its contradictions. from interviews, archival data, and literature, i have shown how such contradictions counteracted the romanticism of a “family-like” organizational culture: stories about low pay, poor leadership, betrayal, disconnections between community and customers, discriminatory hiring practices, and discrimination of female employees. despite these issues, the company continued on its successful path. atlanta life was a symbol that affirmed black success, providing a space for upward social and financial mobility for its employees. a segregated space provided opportunities: the right to succeed economically, to obtain an education and a decent job, and to participate in social activities. but segregation also had consequences outside the african american community: blacks experienced discrimination, racism, violence, inequality, and humiliation. the african american community provided a market for black businesses during jim crow ‒ businesses that became a paradox of community solidarity, as they created an opportunity for african americans to act and demand equal rights. many former employees referred to the company as “the atlanta life,” as if the firm were an “economic entity” (ingham and feldman 1994:325) ‒ monumental, with a sense of honor and sacredness. former atlanta life employees romanticized the company and showed their loyalty to it as they described its business. employment in the company winn / black entrepreneurship 105 appears to have outweighed the many challenges, issues, and contradictions faced by employees, officers, and leaders. a common refrain in the interviews i conducted was: “atlanta life was such a great place to work for, and to be a part of.” most employees, former or current, had a sense of pride to work for the company. entrepreneurship changed the meaning of work for african americans in that it gave them autonomy for their own way of life, setting their own standards of business, wealth, and success. this research has revealed the longstanding patterns of corporate social responsibility in african american firms, and how the shared struggle for equal rights and fair treatment transformed business enterprises. it has examined past and present relationships between the community and atlanta life, and the peculiar role that segregation played in reinforcing the solidarity between the insurance company and the wider african american community. as one of the largest and most successful african-american financial institutions in the country during the 20th century, atlanta life’s resilience throughout the years confirms its legacy, perseverance, and determination. at the same time, this research has brought to light some of the complexities and paradoxes found in the african american community, as atlanta life played multiple roles to assist and impact it. in these respects, this research challenges how we 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(accessed january 2009). nader, l. 1972. ‘up the anthropologist: perspectives gained from studying up.’ in dell hymes (ed.) reinventing anthropology.pp.284-311. n.y.: pantheon books. oliver, m. l. and t.m. shapiro. 2007. ‘wealth and racial equality.’ in michael t. martin and marilyn yaquinto (eds.) redress for historical injustices in the united states: on reparations for slavery, jim crow, and their legacies. durham and london: duke university press. osthaus, c. r. 1976. freedmen, philanthropy, and fraud: a history of the freedman’s savings bank. chicago: university of illinois press. rutheiser, c. 1996. imagineering atlanta: the politics of place in the city of dreams. london: verso. sigelman, l. and s. welch. 1994. black americans’ views of racial equality: the dream deferred. cambridge university press: new york, ny. spinosa, c., f. flores, and h. dreyfus. 1997. disclosing new worlds: entrepreneurship, democratic action, and the cultivation of solidarity. cambridge and london: mit press. stuart, m. s. 1970. an economic detour: a history of insurance in the lives of american negroes. new york: wendell malliet and company. tidwell, j. e. and m. a. sanders (eds.). 2007. sterling a. brown’s: a negro looks at the south. new york: oxford university press. tuck, s.g. n. 2001. beyond atlanta: the struggle for racial equality in georgia, 1940-1980. athens, georgia: university georgia press. walker, j.e.k. 1998. the history of black business in america: race capitalism, race, entrepreneurship. new york: macmillan library reference. weare, w. 1993. black business in the new south: a social history of the north carolina mutual life insurance company. durham: duke university http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/article.jsp?id=h-3033 journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 108 press. weems, r.e. 1996. black business in the black metropolis: the chicago metropolitan assurance company, 1925-1985. bloomington: indiana university press. weems, r.e. 1997. ‘out of the shadows: business enterprise and african american historiography.’ business and economic history (26)1: 200-212. weems, r.e. 2002. ‘where did all our consumers go? historic blackowned businesses and the african american consumer market.’ in jalloh, alusine and toyin falola, (eds.) black business and economic power. pp. 405-423. new york: university of rochester press. yelvington, k. 1995. producing power: ethnicity, gender, and class in a caribbean workplace. philadelphia: temple university press. alisha r. winn is an applied cultural anthropologist whose research has focused on heritage preservation in african american communities, museums, educational disparities, employment, and identity. her present research focuses on the preservation of the local history of a historic african american community in west palm beach, florida, and an exploration of college students’ cultural and religious beliefs, affecting classroom participation and academic success. she is currently assistant professor in anthropology in the department of sociology at fayetteville state university. she may be reached at awinn1@uncfsu.edu jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 391 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils book review controversial ideas about the state and revolution, a book review “the state and revolution” vladimir ilyich lenin, haymarket books chicago, 2014, 210 pages, isbn: 978-1-60846-498-2 nur rohim yunus gosudarstvennyy universitet upravleniya (guu) moscow, russia  nurrohimyunus@yandex.ru submitted: feb 18, 2022 revised: april 11, 2022 accepted: may 30, 2022 abstract the state and revolution is a book that was born from lenin's life experience as the father of russian revolutionaries. the movement that gave birth to major changes in the future of russia and the formation of a soviet state with marxism-leninism. in his book, a discourse of justice and legal protection in domestic and global perspective published by faculty of law, universitas negeri semarang, indonesia volume 7 issue 1, june 2022 issn (print) 2548-1584 issn (online) 2548-1592 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2782-1266 392 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils vladimir lenin divides the discussion into six chapters, each of which is divided into several sub-chapters. the method of writing the book uses a descriptive analysis pattern with a contextual approach. in fact, this book has a positive contribution to anti-bourgeois supporters, because of its ideas against bourgeoisie and western capitalism. but this book is a negative ghost, for lovers of freedom and democracy. because the true teachings of leninism require authoritarianism and the absence of freedom for its citizens. keywords: state, revolutions, marxism-leninism copyright © 2022 by author(s) this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-sharealike 4.0 international license. all writings published in this journal are personal views of the authors and do not represent the views of this journal and the author's affiliated institutions. how to cite: yunus, nur rohim. “controversial ideas about the state and revolution, a book review “the state and revolution” vladimir ilyich lenin, haymarket books chicago, 2014, 210 pages, isbn: 9781-60846-498-2". journal of indonesian legal studies 7, no. 1 (2022): 391408. https://doi.org/10.15294/jils.v7i1.57385 short note this book was written by lenin in august–september 1917, with the original russian title “государство революция (gosudarstvo i revolyutsiya)”, which was later translated into english as “the state http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 393 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils and revolution.” the book that gives a definitive presentation on the marxist theory of the state. it is written in the clear and sharp lenin style, and is the cornerstone of revolutionary marxism.1 the author's real name was vladimir ilyich ulyanov (10 april 1870 – 21 january 1924) who was later nicknamed "lenin" after the lena river in siberia.2 he served as head of government of the russian soviet federative socialist republic (rsfs russia) from 1917 until his death, and also as head of government of the soviet union from 1922 until his death.3 lenin was politically marxist and had contributed to his political ideas in marxist thought known as leninism. this idea when combined with marx's economic theory is known as marxismleninism.4 as the head of the bolshevik branch of the russian social democratic labor party, he was instrumental in the beginning of the october revolution of 1917, which resulted in the overthrow of russia's provisional government and the establishment of the russian socialist federative socialists. not long after that, lenin began enacting socialist reforms, one of which was the transfer of property rights to the soviets, including those pertaining to land and buildings (labor councils).5 lenin was pressured into signing a peace 1 a riley, lenin and his revolution: the first totalitarian. soc 56, 503–511 (2019); ziva galili, “women and the russian revolution.” dialectical anthropology 15 (1990): 119-127. 2 jane burbank, “lenin and the law in revolutionary russia.” slavic review 54, no. 1 (1995): 23–44. 3 richard gregor, “lenin, revolution, and foreign policy.” international journal 22, no. 4 (1967): 563–75. 4 k marx, critique of the gotha programme in mecw, v 24. moscow: progress publishers. first written in 1875, (1989); k marx, and engels, f. manifesto of the communist party in mecw v 6. moscow, (1984). h draper, karl marx’s theory of revolution. v 1. new york: monthly review press (1977). 5 gizachew tiruneh, “social revolutions: their causes, patterns, and phases.” sage open, (july 2014). http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils 394 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils treaty that brought an end to russia's participation in world war i by threats from the german empire. in 1921, he launched what came to be known as the new economic policy, which was a form of statesanctioned capitalism that kicked off the process of industrialization and post-civil war reconstruction in russia. a year later, the russian socialist federative soviet amalgamated with other areas that had previously been a part of the russian empire to form what would later be known as the soviet union. lenin served as the leader of this new government. vladimir lenin made a significant contribution to the development of the revolutionary program and strategy for the working class throughout the time of imperialism. at the same time, lenin was simultaneously working to create and implement the organizational practices of bolshevism. lenin had the foresight to realize that a mistake in theory would eventually translate into a mistake in practice, and that it was a matter of life and death to arrive at an accurate evaluation of the state and the working class's relationship to it. in his consideration of the issue, lenin approached this matter with a great deal of caution. the book the state and the revolution was written in the heat of the russian revolution in the late summer of 1917. lenin aimed his fire at the reformers for the slave adaptation of the socialist leaders to the interests of the bourgeoisie. these words retained their full force that day, when the self-proclaimed socialists gave themselves cover for the anti-worker's actions of the bourgeoisie. lenin was confronted with the skepticism many anarchists had regarding the state. he did not merely advocate for the elimination of all forms of state power or a complete rejection of it. lenin elaborated on marx and engels' theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and he advocated for the overthrow of the capitalist state and its replacement with a workers' state that aimed at the expropriation and http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 395 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils oppression of capitalists. lenin's ideas were influenced by marx and engels. book review chapter 1 class society and the state6 lenin created the stage for his side of the debate in the first chapter by allowing marx and especially engels to speak for themselves about the genesis and role of the state in society. engels was particularly influential in lenin's thinking. in contrast to the distortions of opportunists like karl kautsky, he draws on the fundamental tenants of the marxist viewpoint on the state by offering a number of crucial excerpts from the origin of the family, private property and the state and engels' anti-dühring.7 then lenin divides the chapter into four parts, lenin outlines the basic conclusion that the state arises from the division of society into classes; that it exists to ensure the domination of the rulers, to possess the upper classes of the exploited masses and not to reconcile the competing classes in society; that it relies on a specialized agency of armed men and physical strength to carry out this function; that in seizing power the proletariat abolishes this state and replaces it with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in turn will disappear when class antagonisms are removed; and that this is not possible without violent revolution. 6 vladimir ilyich lenin, the state and revolution, chicago: haymarket books (2014). 7 f engels, [preface to the fourth german edition (1890) of the manifesto of the communist party] in karl marx frederick engels collected works (hereafter mecw), v 27. moscow: progress publishers. first written in 1890, (1990). http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils 396 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils lenin then evaluated the historical experiences of the numerous revolutions and expanded his position inside the state on the basis of these main concepts. in essence, however, it was precisely these concepts that distinguished revolutionary marxism from reformism. chapter 2: the experience of 1848–18518 lenin takes a more in-depth look at the evolution of marx's thinking on the question of the state following the french revolution of 1848 and the seizure of power by louis bonaparte in december 1851 in this chapter of his book. lenin's focus is on the period after the french revolution. lenin demonstrates, through the use of marx's prerevolutionary writings as well as louis bonaparte's eighteenth brumaire, that the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat runs consistently throughout marx's work. this is in contrast to the fact that revolutionists and opportunists claim that marx supported the dictatorship of the proletariat. lenin demonstrates that marx did not support the dictatorship of the proletariat. lenin was quoted as saying that the notion that the state is capable of overcoming the class struggle and convincing the minority to meekly surrender to the majority is a petty-bourgeois version of the utopian ideal. according to marx, every previous revolution has been merely an improvement on the existing state apparatus, in the form of an ever-growing bureaucracy and army. the task of the proletarian revolution is not to inherit this state but to destroy and replace it with a proletariat organized as the ruling class. 8 vladimir ilyich lenin, the state and revolution, chicago: haymarket books (2014). http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 397 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils chapter 3 the experience of the paris commune of 1871−marx’s analysis9 having proven, in a general sense, that the working class is unable to simply seize control of an already-built state machine and employ it for its own purposes, the working class must instead strive toward the destruction of the pre-existing bureaucratic apparatus. in addition to this, it is essential to provide a detailed explanation of the specific pieces of machinery that need to be swapped out for other machinery. this comprehension can only come about as a result of the working class's fight for its very existence, and the paris commune provides the outside world with a sight of the dictatorship of the proletariat in action. lenin then defines the fundamental aspects of the workers' state at the beginning of an armed people rather than a standing army, which is a summary of marx's interpretation of his experience. in addition to this, the election of all officials with the right of recall, the limitation of the salaries of officials to labor wages, and the abolition of parliamentarism in favor of workers' councils made up of elected delegates with legislative and executive functions are all things that need to happen. it laid the groundwork for the workers' democracy that exists even to this day. chapter 4 continuation: supplementary explanations by engels10 lenin opens this chapter by drawing a clear distinction between marxist analysis and the anarchist notion that the state can be abolished overnight. the anarchist position holds that the state can be 9 vladimir ilyich lenin, the state and revolution, chicago: haymarket books (2014). 10 vladimir ilyich lenin, the state and revolution, chicago: haymarket books (2014). http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils 398 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils abolished overnight. he emphasized that in order for the proletariat to triumph over the inevitable opposition of the bourgeoisie, they had to make use of the state as a temporary instrument. anarchists are going to deprive the working class a tangible and necessary method of protecting the revolution in the sake of some abstract concept that they believe is more important. lenin emphasized the fact that the true workers' state was distinct from all other states in this regard, and he compared it to other states throughout history. instead of serving a specific power that is placed above society to ensure the control of a small minority, we should do our best to serve society as a whole. the vast majority of people use the state as a tool to subjugate the smaller population groups. lenin then continued to explain why marxists should not be considered neutral on the subject of how the bourgeois state ought to be structured. for instance, democratic republics are superior to autocratic monarchies insofar as these conditions make it simpler for working people to organize social revolutions. this makes democratic republics preferable to autocratic monarchies. on the other hand, this in no way suggests that there is any sympathy for the bourgeoisie.11 lenin also clarified that privileged officials should not be trusted with the administration of the workers' state after he stated that this responsibility should not be delegated to them. instead, everyone needs to learn how to take turns carrying out different state functions. when the majority of people have acquired the skills necessary to self-manage and genuinely take charge of social production, the groundwork that is necessary for the complete dismantling of the state will have been laid. 11 gizachew tiruneh, “social revolutions: their causes, patterns, and phases.” sage open, (july 2014). http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 399 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils chapter 5 the economic basis of the withering away of the state12 lenin addresses the period of time spanning the transition from capitalism to socialism to communism without a state or monetary system in this chapter of his work. lenin was also critical of the fact that many capitalist nations in the west are referred to as democracies, despite the fact that the vast mass of the population is unable to participate in actual politics other than casting a vote once every few years. instead, capitalists make use of their wealth and position to exert direct and indirect influence over state institutions in order to better protect the basic interests that underpin their businesses. the socialist revolution will ultimately result in a democracy that is more inclusive and, more specifically, a democracy that serves the majority rather than the minority. however, as time passes, the conflicts between social classes that were the impetus for the establishment of the state in the first place will become less relevant, and the state, in whatever shape it takes, will become less necessary. people will develop the habit, rather than being compelled to work and obey the law through the use of economic coercion or physical force, of earning for the common good and adhering to the rules of social life. this will eliminate the need for such methods. in reference to marx's critique of the gotha programme, he differentiates the earlier stage of communist society, which he refers to as socialism, from the later, more advanced stage. the lowest transitional stage has not completely shed the imprint of its previous existence as a capitalist society. the distribution of social wealth in general is still controlled by the amount of labor done, which means 12 vladimir ilyich lenin, the state and revolution, chicago: haymarket books (2014). http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils 400 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils that equality of living has not yet been achieved to its full potential, despite the fact that class exploitation has been formally eliminated. however, once capitalism has been expropriated and the profit motive has been abolished, it will be possible to massively accelerate the development of the productive forces, which will lead to a relatively rapid transition to full-fledged communism. this is because the development of the productive forces is directly proportional to the level of economic activity. the idea that each person should be treated according to his or her ability and given what they require should not be completely realized until that time. chapter 6 the vulgarization of marxism by the opportunists13 lenin makes an effort in the final chapter to argue against those adherents of marxism who want reform rather than revolution by defending the revolutionary marxist heritage. he did not come back with the idea that the proletariat could either take control of the already bourgeois state or refuse to exercise any form of state authority. it is contingent on its own conditions and can only be conquered by the use of force. lenin emphasized that in order for society to function properly under capitalism, bureaucracy is required. this is due to the fact that the working masses are forbidden from engaging in political activity. one of the ways that capitalists keep control of the state is through the use of a loyal bureaucracy. one of the tasks that must be accomplished during the proletarian revolution is the dismantling of the bureaucracy that is associated with the bourgeois state. all functionaries must be replaced with workers who have been elected to the positions, and these workers must be paid the same wages as 13 vladimir ilyich lenin, the state and revolution, chicago: haymarket books (2014). http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 401 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils the average worker. when everyone is a bureaucrat for a certain amount of time, then no one else can become a bureaucrat after that. lenin, in his critique of karl kautsky's revisionist distortions, pointed out that the proletariat's takeover of state power cannot be accomplished only by securing a majority in parliament. this was one of lenin's main points in his argument. this is only possible if the bourgeoisie are displaced as the dominant social class in the state by the working class, the proletariat, who would then organize themselves as the governing class. this can only be accomplished by violent social upheaval. due to the fact that he was preoccupied with the october revolution, lenin was unable to successfully complete the book. on the other hand, he mentions in a footnote that experiencing the revolution first-hand was much more pleasurable and gratifying than writing about it afterwards. book criticism 1. lenin's concept of the state as the proverb states "the experience is the best teacher," the theory of revolution in the ideas of karl marx which was conveyed by vladimir lenin in his book the state and revolution has indeed produced results with his success in achieving the ideals of total state change. however, there are some things that don't necessarily become real ideas in real life. when analyzed from lenin's writings from his book, it will be found several things that have drawn criticism. but this is basically a different perspective from lenin's understanding. among these are the concepts of the state, freedom, and the state system. http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils 402 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils lenin started with a quick assumption and established that the state is a body that arises from irreconcilable class antagonisms. whereas the state is a set of institutions that monitor, control, and enforce the rules of one class over another, so as to ensure a better order to continue exploiting its citizens. lenin finally showed that the state is about soldiers, police, prisons and courts. not too much freedom of argument that can be conveyed by citizens. except for the rules and restraints in the name of revolution.14 lenin's argument, which followed marx's in the communist manifesto, was that the state was nothing more than a committee tasked with resolving the problems faced by the whole ruling class. the word "whole" best describes this situation. lenin brought out the nuances in marx's theory by pointing out that the disintegrating elite in society is rarely headed in the same direction to go. this was one of the ways that lenin drew out the nuances. the current discussion regarding europe serves as a good example of how the ruling class will continue to be divided. conflicts between persons in positions of authority can quickly become contentious. therefore, states must try and hold, sometimes warring factions and groups together. failure to do so would be disastrous for those in power as their bickering went too far due to their often diverging economic and political interests. class divisions often open room for rebellion from below. this was something the state wanted to avoid and therefore required efforts to mediate between the factions within the ruling class. so the state according to him is like a big house with different rooms with different interests. the crucial room, or basement, is where the special agencies, both armed men and women are placed. 14 sarah washbrook; the ambivalent revolution: forging state and nation in chiapas, 1910–1945. by stephen e. lewis (albuquerque, university of new mexico press, 2005) 283 http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 403 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils in this regard, the function of the state according to lenin is clearly very repressive. 2. controversy of leninist ideas in the modern era lenin's ideas contained in his book later developed into a new understanding and theory called the theory of leninism. several countries were fascinated by this notion and adopted it in their national life, such as north korea, cuba, vietnam, cambodia, and the people's republic of china. however, some countries even reject it and claim that it is not in accordance with the freedom of human life, even considering it as anti-religious and tends to lead to atheism, such as democracies in the west and also indonesia after the g30s/pki.15 in theory, lenin shifted marx's analysis of capitalism from advanced capitalist economies to dependent colonial countries. he combined political economy, geopolitics, political organization and the sociology of social structure to form an innovative revolutionary praxis. the expansion of western capitalism shifted social and political contradictions to countries moving from feudalism to capitalism. lenin was right in his assessment of the social forces supporting the bourgeois revolution. but he gives an overly optimistic prediction for the disintegration of monopoly capitalism and only a partial analysis of the working class in the developed capitalist countries.16 lenin's political approach required a redefinition of the balancing forces and class alliances and a shift in focus from the semi 15 am aji, nr yunus, gra putra, communism and its influence on the emergence of atheism. palarch's journal of archaeology of egypt/egyptology. 17 (9) 2020, 411424. 16 xueguang zhou and liren hou. “children of the cultural revolution: the state and the life course in the people’s republic of china.” american sociological review 64, no. 1 (1999): 12–36. http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils 404 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils periphery to the 'strongest link' in the capitalist chain. a 'return to lenin' is not to adopt his policies but an impetus to rediscover the socialist sociological vision that stems from the hopes of the enlightenment and marx's analysis of capitalism.17 in his book, lenin shows his hatred for capitalism. according to him capitalism is a system of geo-political competition, and armed forces can be used to defend, expand or destroy the territory they live in. the arrogance of capitalism to control the natural wealth in the country, even in other areas. this is what causes conflicts between nations in the form of endless wars. however, the anti-capitalism movement and the campaign for socialism cannot necessarily be fully justified. because in reality socialism does not always guarantee complete welfare for all citizens, even citizens are only used as a tool to fulfill the political ambitions of the political elite.18 this book is controversial in global political discourse. however, this controversial idea then gave rise to new ideas as a form of truth as a result of the rebellion of thought. this can be seen from the existence of questions and discussions about the relationship between the proletariat and the state as an important question posed by class revolutionary action. this question was very important that day because of the state of the world in war and the existence of a state revolution. however, the fact that the problem of national defense then became a natural matter of the defense of the bourgeois state, and the national problems of a country depended on the support of other countries. 17 david lane, v.i. lenin’s theory of socialist revolution. critical sociology. 2021, vol. 47(3) 455–473. ps://doi.org/10.1177/0896920520958451 18 revolutionary perspectives. bukharin’s review of lenin’s ‘the state and revolution”. magazine of the communist workers’ organisation affiliate of the internationalist communist tendency. series 4, no 11, winter 2018 http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 405 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils after his death, marxism–leninism developed into several new branches of thought such as stalinism, trotskyism, and maoism. lenin is still a controversial world figure. his detractors gave him the label of dictator because he was considered to have violated many human rights during his tenure, while his supporters opposed this opinion by arguing that lenin's powers were limited and giving him the title of defender of the workers. however, lenin had a major role in the international communist movement and became one of the most influential figures in the world in the 20th century. conclusion the delivery of the contents of the book written by vladimir lenin is seen in his doctrinal and campaign style, to raise public awareness and follow his ideas and thoughts. this book, which was written in the era of revolution, conflict and violence, provides a heat of assertiveness and dominant power. but finally, the readers can be wise with their belief to think creatively in order to achieve freedom and modernity. this book by lenin boldly demonstrates this distinction. the reader in this condition cannot blame the author for citing extensively the works of marx and engels. because basically these two figures made the new school of leninism grow and develop. this work at least provides input and evaluation to western capitalism. this is where the war of discourse between capitalist understanding, and social groups looks real. references aji, a. m., yunus, n. r., and putra, g. r. a. communism and its influence on the emergence of atheism. palarch's journal of http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils 406 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils archaeology of egypt/egyptology. 17 (9) 2020, 411-424. https://archives.palarch.nl/index.php/jae/article/view/3469/3457 burbank, jane. “lenin and the law in revolutionary russia.” slavic review 54, no. 1 (1995): 23–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/2501118. draper, h. karl marx’s theory of revolution. v 1. new york: monthly review press (1977). engels, f. [preface to the fourth german edition (1890) of the manifesto of the communist party] in karl marx frederick engels collected works (hereafter mecw), v 27. moscow: progress publishers. first written in 1890, (1990). galili, ziva. “women and the russian revolution.” dialectical anthropology 15 (1990): 119-127. gregor, richard. “lenin, revolution, and foreign policy.” international journal 22, no. 4 (1967): 563–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/40200198. lane, david. v.i. lenin’s theory of socialist revolution. critical sociology. 2021, vol. 47(3) 455–473. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920520958451 lenin, vladimir ilyich. the state and revolution, chicago: haymarket books (2014). marx, k. and engels, f. manifesto of the communist party in mecw v 6. moscow, (1984). marx, k. critique of the gotha programme in mecw, v 24. moscow: progress publishers. first written in 1875, (1989). revolutionary perspectives. bukharin’s review of lenin’s ‘the state and revolution. magazine of the communist workers’ organisation affiliate of the internationalist communist tendency. series 4, no 11, winter 2018. riley, a. lenin and his revolution: the first totalitarian. soc 56, 503– 511 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-019-00405-1 tiruneh, gizachew. “social revolutions: their causes, patterns, and phases.” sage open, (july 2014). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244014548845. washbrook, sarah. the ambivalent revolution: forging state and nation in chiapas, 1910–1945. by stephen e. lewis (albuquerque, university of new mexico press, 2005) 283 pp. $24.95. the http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils https://archives.palarch.nl/index.php/jae/article/view/3469/3457 https://doi.org/10.2307/2501118 https://doi.org/10.2307/40200198 https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920520958451 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-019-00405-1 https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244014548845 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 407 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils journal of interdisciplinary history 2007; 37 (4): 664–666. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2007.37.4.664 zhou, xueguang, and liren hou. “children of the cultural revolution: the state and the life course in the people’s republic of china.” american sociological review 64, no. 1 (1999): 12–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/2657275. http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2007.37.4.664 https://doi.org/10.2307/2657275 408 jils (journal of indonesian legal studies) volume 7(1) 2022 available online at http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils while the state exists, there can be no freedom. when there is freedom there will be no state. vladimir lenin estado y revolución about authors nur rohim yunus is ph.d. student in constitutional law at guu (gosudarstvennyy universitet upravleniya) moscow russia. he is also lecturer at state islamic university syarif hidayatullah jakarta. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2782-1266, scopus id: 57216167775. researcherid/wos id: f-3477-2017. http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jils https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/41787427 key: cord-0057867-gbvw87ch authors: leoni, zeno title: a marxist theory of international relations date: 2021-03-02 journal: american grand strategy from obama to trump doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-54742-4_2 sha: 2c7c06a3c794c19f6c4002ba31b131283ac9444f doc_id: 57867 cord_uid: gbvw87ch the lack of a rigorous marxian theory of the state and the international has caused much discussion about what a marxist theory of imperialism and international relations would look like. the aim of this chapter is threefold. firstly, it makes the reader familiar with theories of and debates on imperialism in the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. secondly, it reviews theories of imperialism seeking to highlight strengths and weaknesses. thirdly, it provides the theoretical framework for the empirical chapters of the book. ultimately, this chapter maintains that because capitalism develops unevenly at the spatial, institutional, and ideological level, a marxist theory of the international can incorporate political concepts from mainstream theories of ir. it is suggested that such theory should develop an ‘operational code’ of political elites’ ideologies that accounts for their views of the geopolitical world order, capitalism and the ruling class, and power. 'end of history,' and the 'end of the geography' appear distant from the contemporary world, both in time and from an empirical viewpoint. nationalist identities and economic and military multipolarity have increasingly become defining features of ir since the great recession in 2008. what stands out is a tangible techno-and geopolitical competition for regional if not global hegemony between the united states and china. the bottom line is that if the world order appears less homogeneous and more fragmented, a marxist theory of imperialism would benefit from sharpening further its theoretical tools. the aim is to overcome a marxist tendency to generalize-a mistake that different strands of the theory of imperialism have in common, from lenin and bukharin to hardt and negri-and to over-rely on economic as opposed to political analyses. in this regard, marxism has remained for too long a 'lame duck' vis-à-vis mainstream ir theories. the lack of a systematic marxist theory of the state has not only resulted in a proliferation of marxist accounts of the state and of imperialism-this in itself is actually a very positive development, but it has also meant a neglect-until recently-of the role that human agency performs within the foreign policymaking process. to avoid the temptation of echoing realism in order to explain conflict in the international, this chapter cuts out a space for marxism in ir and offers a new perspective building on previous scholarly contributions. this aim is achieved by developing an interdisciplinary framework situated between marxist international political economy (ipe), ir theory, and foreign policy analysis (fpa). in particular, the chapter aims to demonstrate that a materialist theory of imperialism can incorporate elements from other theories of the international and that some commonly used ir concepts should not be the exclusive prerogative of mainstream theories. the chapter is organized in the following sections: sect. 2.1 provides an overview of the context from which the classical marxist theory of imperialism emerged. it highlights that this was a very diverse but not a particularly rigorous intellectual experience, considering the differences between the protagonists of that first wave of discussions. section 2.2 unpacks these theories further along the fault line of capitalism and imperialism as a catalyst for peace or war. section 2.3 engages with kenneth waltz's and robert gilpin's critique of the theory of imperialism. although the chapter disagrees with some of the issues raised by waltz, it finds that he touched upon important questions-especially on the validity of the theory with regard to a usled, post-wwii order. while accepting some of the limits of the theory of imperialism, it is noted that this is a flexible theory. it offers a comprehensive framework for analysis that brings together economic and geopolitical levers of power and it is open to further refinement. section 2.4 of this chapter engages with contributions from the third wave of debates. it endorses the thesis of those marxists who have defined imperialism as an intersection of economic and political interests and who have launched proposals for further research in this area. in particular, the chapter praises david harvey's thesis but it also acknowledges that he did not stretch the theory of imperialism far enough into the realm of agency. section 2.5 puts forward a proposal for facilitating the interaction between a materialist theory of imperialism and foreign policymaking. drawing on james n. rosenau's blueprint for a 'pre-theory' of foreign policy based on multiple levels of analysis, the chapter looks at the relationship between structure and agency through the lenses of space (the systemic or external environment level), state-capital relations (the societal-governmental level), and political elites' strategic worldviews (the idiosyncratic or individual level). the relationship between politics and economics is then deconstructed along these three levels of analysis and through the fault line of capitalist unevenness. the subsection on space and the systemic level retrieves an overlooked aspect of henri lefebvre's writings that invites the merging of the geoeconomic understanding of space, common in marxist geography, with the political spatiality of states. here, it is maintained that capitalist production of space compels the state to intervene in economic matters in order to manage the consequences of the uneven development of capitalism. although the state operates within the boundaries of capitalism, it does so by maximizing its geopolitical leverage and through its (geo)political means. the subsection on statecapital relations draws on the miliband-poulantzas debate but it seeks to move away from the discord on state autonomy, arguing that by virtue of the functions it performs the state retains legitimacy and control of foreign policy decisions. a successful capitalist economy requires a diplomatically and geopolitically assertive state and in general capitalist interests will benefit from this. however, short-term political and strategic decisions may not be the ones favored by the ruling class and could have collateral effects across the geoeconomic space. the subsection on the ideological space suggests that the unevenness of capitalism does not only affect geoeconomic and institutional processes, but also ideological ones. drawing on the german ideology (1974) and sebastiano timpanaro's work, the subsection endorses lefebvre's argument that space is social, but also physical, and above all, mental. it points out that in addition to economic and institutional unevenness one should also consider ideological unevenness. at the ideological level policymakers will seek strategic synthesis accordingly to their worldviews, therefore it would be useful for a theory of imperialism to develop an operational code of political elites. this, it is argued, opens a space for dialogue with theories such as strategic culture, among others. theories of imperialism? it is widely believed that marx 'did not use' the word 'imperialism' (brewer 1990, 25) . this is only partially true. he did mentioned the 'i' word at least once in a letter addressed to friedrich engels (mecw volume 40, 72). however, marx never integrated this concept into his work, neither did he engage with 'a generic term to describe the rule of a more advanced nation state over a more backward area' (brewer 1990, 25) . 1 as marx never produced a theory of imperialism the early twentieth century was the ground for several contributions in this regard. these theories did not arise out of the work of a coordinated research network. lenin and others were not academics and did not feel the need to build a rigorous theory (callinicos 2009, 25-6) . 2 the classical marxist theory of imperialism is a multitude of different works and experiences which developed in the run up to, during and after wwi. its authors came from a variety of professional and ideological backgrounds. ironically, with marx dying too early to put together the puzzle of his many intuitions, great credit for putting forward the vital elements of the classical marxist theory of imperialism does not go to a marxist but to a liberal dissatisfied with the socio-economic conditions of his time, john atkinson hobson. another major contributor was rudolf hilferding-an austro-marxist-who later became the intellectual leader of eurocommunism and the new left, and the austrian experience inspired the policies of governments of the uk labour party and scandinavian social-democrats. 3 a further and decisive development occurred with what alex callinicos called the 'lenin-bukharin' synthesis. differences also existed between the two comrades, particularly because nicolay bukharin's work is more comprehensive and accurate than vladimir lenin's. for the latter, imperialism (1939) was an opportunity to publish in the legal press. the pamphlet resulted from a commission by the 'legal russian "parus" (sail) publishers in petrograd.' the official purpose was to write a booklet for the popular 'pre-and post-war europe' series, giving a general characterization of the new epoch. to write 'a popular outline' meant using a certain style of communication, and to write something 'with an eye to the tsarist censorship' required, in lenin's words, the use of 'slavish tongue' (lenin 1939, 7-9) . thus, writing a theory of imperialism was also functional to lenin's political aspirations and his proselytising action, before anything else (arrighi 1978, 19-21) . furthermore, the pamphlet fulfilled the purpose of writing something 'scathing' about 'marxists like kautsky' whose analyses in lenin's view were too kind to capitalism (kiely 2010, 59) . these writers were intellectuals and militants, but they came from different experiences-hilferding was a pediatrician turned minister, hobson an economist and journalist, lenin a revolutionary leader and bukharin a journalist and communist intellectual. their views ranged from (what later became) keynesianism and different forms of marxism. their ideas for action were different. hobson, hilferding, and kautsky had a reformist approach in contrast to the unequivocally revolutionary character of the other three: rosa luxemburg, bukharin, and lenin. they had different national origins and even though they had the shared context of wwi in common, their political experiences which shaped their intellectual outlook were different. with such a multifaceted picture, why should one use the label of 'classical marxist theory of imperialism'? in spite of the above-mentioned differences, some extensive commonality existed. these thinkers lived roughly at the same time and all of them noted a change in capitalism. between 1870 and 1900, world gdp rose exponentially. despite the long depression of the 1870s, heavy industry overtook light industry, becoming a central feature of industrial production, while the revolution in the technical base of production also brought a rapid increase in the size of enterprises. hilferding, bukharin, and lenin wrote around the time of the start of wwi and all of them acknowledged two aspects. on the one hand, they noted 'the formation of monopolies on a national basis and the intensification of competition on a world scale between national groupings of capital'; on the other hand, 'they predicted an acceleration of capitalist development in backward areas of the world' (brewer 1990, 20) . 4 as eric hobsbawm put it, industrialization and depression were slowing the rate of profit and turning national economies into rivals, as 'the gains of one [country] seemed to threaten the position of others ' (1987, 42) . contrary to previous forms of imperialism, interstate rivalry was increasingly the product of capitalist economy (hobsbawm 1987, 60; wood 2003) . hilferding, bukharin, and lenin all noted that state institutions and big capital mergers were tied together in a symbiotic relationship. although the growing transnationalization of economics was an important feature in the decades leading up to wwi, even multinational corporations needed to 'attach themselves to a suitably important national economy' (hobsbawm 1987, 42, 54) . these thinkers provided an instrumentalist perspective in that their theories highlighted the primacy of economic over political interests. like many who came after them, they never engaged in a study of distinctive national peculiarities or of political elites. the classical marxist theory of imperialism was flawed by its attempt at extrapolating a universal theory from the particular (callinicos 2009 , 10). although marx never described himself as a space theorist, he portrayed a world where capitalism was transforming the global space. he lived in the mid-nineteenth century when the world economy was being made and remade at such a fast pace, a time that historian eric hobsbawm called the age of capital (1975) and jules verne daydreamed about traveling around the world in eighty days (2008) . technologies of transport led the change and marx spoke of 'annihilation of space through time' (1973, . this view dramatically informed marx and engels' the communist manifesto (1967) , in which they illustrated the inexorable rise of a world bourgeoisie. the 'age of capital' was revolutionary by definition, according to the two comrades, as it swept away older modes of production and levelled economic conditions across (some) nations, changing the way millions of people lived: 'the bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of productivity, by the immensely facilitated means of communications, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization' (marx and engels 1967, 8) . anticipating narratives of globalization by at least one century, the manifesto portrayed the fragmentation of sociopolitical barriers to trade with adjectives such as 'world-market' formation, 'technology' diffusion, 'connections,' 'globe,' 'cosmopolitan,' 'new industries,' and the 'interdependence of nations.' 5 neil smith described this trend as a 'drive toward spacelessness,' that is 'an equalization of conditions and levels of production ' (1990, 94) . 6 this understanding of capitalist spatiality was central to one of the two main strands in the early twentieth-century debate on imperialism. some authors saw in the globalizing tendency of capitalism a systemic thrust toward interstate peace and economic integration. for eduard bernstein '[t]he most industrially developed countries are simultaneously competitors and customers of one another; … the era in which peoples attempted to subjugate one another is finished in europe' (howard and king 1989, 92) . heinrich cunow stated that because 'imperialism is present-day capitalism; the development of capitalism is inevitable and progressive; therefore imperialism is progressive; we should grovel before it and glorify it!' (kumbamu 2010, 135) . karl kautsky noted that wwi was leading to 'a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race. … a phase of ultra-imperialism, … of … world peace' (kautsky 1970, 46) . 7 for kautsky, concluded lenin, imperialism amounted to no more than a 'striving for annexations.' to lenin this sounded 'very incomplete ' (1939, 90) . like others in the german debate, rosa luxemburg believed that capitalism was 'destined' to reach globally. eventually, it would have to implode after running out of non-capitalist space, so important to its expanded reproduction. this was a theory of inevitable capitalist overstretch: 'capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves towards a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply be impossible' (luxemburg 2003, 24) . luxemburg however, was not a kautskyite. although she envisioned a global capitalist order she insisted that capitalism is a 'spasmodic expansion' that violently attacks people, nature, and previous modes of production (luxemburg 2003, 352) . 8 as far as this book is concerned, these ideas implied a less proactive role of states in the international arena. this was not the case on the other side of the spectrum of the theory of imperialism. hobson found that the 'taproots of imperialism' lie in the overproduction that 'forced great britain, germany, holland, france to place larger and larger portions of their economic resources outside the area, … and … to take in the new area' (1902, . this statement puts hobson in line with more radical thinkers such as lenin and bukharin. nonetheless, because of his liberal views he remained an ambiguous figure. he sounded more schumpeterian when he blamed imperialism on the corrupt modus operandi of rich elites such as 'messrs, rockefeller, pierpont morgan, and their associates' (hobson 1902, 82-3, 100) . finance was the villain and imperialism the violent arm of a restricted plutocracy (hobson 1902, 60, 66-7) . 9 rudolf hilferding brought some clarity to this ambiguity, stating that 'capital can pursue no other policy than that of imperialism ' (1981, 366) . 10 the rise of finance capital (finanzkapital ) had led to a shift in the ownership of wealth and the 'dependence of industry on the banks' (hilferding 1981, 225) . here lies hilferding's originality. 11 however, he did not develop this insight into a theory of interstate competition, even though he acknowledged that capitalism pushes for a maximization of territory (hilferding 1981, 326) . nonetheless, hobson's novelty laid in his focus on the rivalry-prone tendency among capitalist states. reporting on the second boer war (1899-1902) hobson described two political-industrial blocs fighting to grab south african mines, one sponsored by britain and the other by germany. 12 lenin-who acknowledged the influence of hobson's work in his theory of interstate rivalry (1939, 7)-argued that 'a monopoly, once it is formed and controls thousands of millions, inevitably penetrates into every sphere of public life, regardless of the form of government' (1939, 58) . but lenin went beyond this observation and reflected on the implications that capitalism might have on the international balance of power: as long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilized … for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries. in these backward countries profits are usually high, for capital is scarce, the price of land is relatively low, wages are low, raw materials are cheap. (1939, 63) the implications of this viewpoint are that capitalism, by its very nature, does not lead to an equalization of economic conditions and geopolitical harmony. rather, it produces unevenness across the international space. attacking kautsky's idea of 'ultra-imperialism,' lenin explained the geopolitical consequences of the uneven development of capitalism in the following passage … the only conceivable basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, interests, colonies, etc., is a calculation of the strength of those participating, their general economic, financial, military strength, etc. and the strength of these participants in the division does not change to an equal degree, for the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or countries is impossible under capitalism. half a century ago germany was a miserable, insignificant country, if her capitalist strength is compared with that of britain of that time; japan compared with russia in the same way. is it "conceivable" that in ten or twenty years' time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? it is out of the question. (1939, 118-9) 13 ultra-imperialism, lenin argued, cannot be durable and the rise of germany and japan proves it. with this argument lenin anticipated the concept of 'balance of power' and the idea of 'the rise and fall of great powers' that are central to contemporary realist theory. bukharin's perspective was more articulated than lenin's. drawing on hilferding he noted a degree of 'transfusion of capital from one "national" sphere into the other,' a process of 'internationalisation' (bukharin 1972, 28, 35, 39, 40, 41) . for bukharin, this internationalization rather than leading to ultra-imperialism increased competition between cartels which turned to their states for (geo)political support (1972, 40-52, ch. 2, 3) . because of such competition, bukharin argued, capitalists seek state help and this leads to a 'tendency to "nationalize" capitalist interests, to form narrow "national" groups armed to the teeth and ready to hurl themselves at one another any moment ' (1972, 107) . this, substantially, is an 'economic policy of the cartels as formulated by the state' where 'at some point the trust cedes power to state ' (1972, 75, 125) . unequivocally, bukharin stated that the bourgeoisie as a whole is more tolerant regarding monopolistic interference by the state power. … the interests of the state and the interests of finance capital coincide more and more. on the other hand, a maximum of centralisation and a maximum of state power are required by the fierce competitive struggle on the world market. (1972, 155) ultimately, hobson, hilferding, lenin, and bukharin made a crucial point for later debates on imperialism. internationalization and the consequences of uneven development of capitalism tie states and the capitalist ruling class to a shared destiny of fortunes and misfortunes. powerful and organized political leadership is necessary for monopolies to achieve economic objectives, although the political solutions devised by governments could lead to short-term contradictions and intra-elites tensions. 14 2.4 waltz's and gilpin's critique of the theory kenneth waltz provided a useful critique of the theory of imperialism but some areas he touched upon require clarification. 15 the theory of imperialism is certainly not a flawless theory. yet, one should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. indeed, the theory with all its imperfections provides a flexible framework that can be improved and adapted to current times. toward this end it is useful to provide some clarification. waltz, like many others, associated lenin's theory to world system and dependency theories. these were described as an 'effort to save lenin's thesis' (waltz 1979, 34) . more to the point, he posited that the focus of the theory is 'the baleful influence of the strong over the weak' (waltz 1959, 36) . however, as it was evident from the previous section of this chapter, imperialism in the classical marxist theory means 'primarily, rivalry between major capitalist countries' (brewer 1990, 88-9) . in addition, waltz argued that the theory is at odds with a post-colonial world where great powers tend not to engage in territorial conquest. he asked 'how' could one 'salvage' lenin's theory given the lack of 'colonial policies' and pointed out that 'empires without colonies … were unimaginable to lenin' (1979, 28) . this is a fair point which, as chapter 3 demonstrates, remains central to the debate on whether the united states is an empire or a hegemony and continues to divide marxist students of imperialism. both lenin and bukharin considered this possibility even though they were too ideologically averse to capitalism to really believe in this scenario. they predicted the rise of a 'kautskyian moment' characterized by economic integration and political peace under the dominance of a powerful cartel. in his introduction to bukharin's book, lenin acknowledged that the 'development is going in the direction of a single world trust that will swallow up all enterprises and all states without exception' (bukharin 1972, 14) . however, he also believed that 'before a single world trust will be reached, … imperialism will inevitably explode' (bukharin 1972, 14) . bukharin instead, by focusing on the internationalization of capital, came very close to predicting the kind of world order the united states and its western allies were able to set up after wwii, and even more so after 1989. he imagined that the capitalist ruling class could find an international 'solidarity of interests' in 'the common ownership of securities' and 'collective property' that could bring to 'the formation of a golden international' or 'an all-embracing power which had conquered all the others' (1972, 62, 142) . but much like lenin, bukharin believed that this tendency could be 'counteracted by a still stronger tendency of capital towards nationalization' and 'the forces that are hostile to imperialism' (bukharin 1972, 138, 142) . the most stimulating point raised by waltz-from the viewpoint of this book-is that lenin's theory of imperialism is not political enoughif at all. he stated that 'the assumptions of the hobson-lenin theory will be economic, not political' and this makes it a 'reductionist' theory, 'inadequate for the construction of international-political theory' (1979, 20, 36) . he added that for marxists 'there are no good internationalpolitical reasons for the conflict and the warring of states' (waltz 1979, 36) . in fairness, waltz was not rejecting the idea that capitalism can lead to aggressive state behavior. rather, he was pointing out that a theory that only focuses on the domestic sphere is flawed (waltz 1979, 26) . although considering capitalism a domestic factor is equal to putting a straightjacket on the concept itself, waltz's critique hit a vulnerable spot in the marxist theory of imperialism. the latter tends to neglect factors that can explain national specificities. waltz suggested that '[e]xternal conditions must be part of the explanation since the variety of conditions internal to states is not matched by the variety of their external behaviours' (waltz 1979, 26) . meeting this challenge is central to the intellectual effort of this book, that is, stretching the classical marxist theory of imperialism. nonetheless, this author takes issue with waltz's accusation of 'reductionism.' if the theory of imperialism is focused on capitalism, it still entails a tangible interest in geopolitics. waltz stressed that lenin's theory was disproved because imperial powers 'exported little capital to their own colonies' (waltz 1979, 24) . 16 similarly, fieldhouse maintained that hobson 'had in no sense proved' the relation between foreign investments and expansionism (2006, 128) . but hobson himself admitted that recent annexations of tropical countries procured at great expense, have furnished poor and precarious markets, that our aggregate trade with our colonial possessions is virtually stationary, and that our most profitable and progressive trade is with rival industrial nations. (1902, 76) hobson's words offer a very geopolitical picture. while economic calculations remained central to imperial political elites, territorial expansionlike diplomacy and trade policy-was a solution for states that wanted to acquire geopolitical leverage against rival states. eric hobsbawm maintained that disputes over seemingly worthless territories such as the 'congo basin' or a 'pacific atoll' could provide a country's economy and its monopolies access to natural resources, potential markets, or economic deals (1987, 66) . hobson and lenin did not consider colonies as the 'eldorado' (hobsbawm 1987, 67) . rather, these (may have) served as bargaining pawns, assets for negotiating with rivals or blackmailing them. in this regard, lenin wrote that an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony. (emphasis added, 1939, 91-2) andrew linklater has endorsed this argument, maintaining that if 'capitalist development was the dominant logic' in the theory of imperialism, few observers noticed that the theory of imperialism allows for 'interplay' between different 'domains' of power (linklater 1990, 87) . indeed, 'the traditional reading of lenin's essay has often replaced lenin's imputed economism with a similarly "one logic" explanation of the colonial epoch' (linklater 1990, 88) . linklater took this even further than many marxists did, arguing that the economic logic of the marxist theory served as a foil for realists … [who] overlooked the main contribution of lenin's analysis of international relations … its attempt to understand the relationship between the process of capitalist development … and the increased propensity for violence between nation states. (linklater 1990, 83) in this regard, robert gilpin appeared more generous to lenin than waltz was. he acknowledged lenin's insight into the geopolitical implications of the uneven development of capitalism and sympathized with the idea that marxism could theorize the 'international balance of power,' although he remained skeptic about the possibility of 'predict[ing] political outcomes ' (1981, 48, 76-7) . for gilpin 'the struggle for power and the desire for economic gain are ultimately and inextricably joined' (1981, 67) . his viewpoint is informed by the belief that 'economic factors and motives are universal elements in the behavior of states ' (1981, 67) . this has to be welcomed in a theory of imperialism, as is the statement that 'groups and states seek to control and organize economic relations and activities in ways that will increase their own relative shares of this surplus,' even though gilpin drew this conclusion from a rational choice model (1981, . 17 on the other hand, for gilpin international politics is determined by 'universal elements ' (1981, 68) . from this viewpoint he echoes waltz's argument about the existence of imperialism before capitalism (1979, 25) . marxists do not question the fact that imperialism predated capitalism (wood 2002, 147-52) . however, 'capitalism did not put an end to old imperial practices … it created new reasons, new needs, for pursuing some of them with even greater gusto … new forms of appropriation and exploitation' (wood 2002, 151-2) . to an extent gilpin shared this view when acknowledging that 'economic interests … are of greater consequence in the modern era' compared to 'religious and political passions' and that 'no two hegemonic conflicts are alike' (gilpin 1981, 49, 67-8; waltz 1979, 25 ). yet, to him the state remains the ultimate source of power: the economy and economic activities are subordinate to the perceived security and economic interests of the state and the ruling elite. a major function of economic exchange is to enhance the war-making capability of the state. (gilpin 1981, 112) while some of gilpin's observations are inspiring for a review of the theory of imperialism, by its very nature marxism cannot accept gilpin's idea that economic power is subordinate to 'war-making.' marxism rejects the claim that history is a product of 'power drives … and the outstanding personalities' and that technological and economic forces are 'geared to imperialist drives, contrary to their inherent tendencies, by statesmen' (kemp 1972, 17 ). interest in neocolonialism, dependency, and world-system theory has been a constant since the crisis of empires and the end of wwii (arrighi 1978; palma 1978; wallerstein 1979 wallerstein , 2007 wallerstein , 2011 warren 1973) . however, the debate on the classical theory of imperialism and interstate rivalries stalled. 18 yet, the end of the cold war and the apparent triumph of globalization inspired (new?) ideas on the relationship between capitalism, imperialism, peace, and rivalry. the debate was reopened by two highly provocative contributions. william i. robinson noted that if the national state was once controlled by the bourgeoisie, nowadays the transnational state (tns) performs similar functions but in the interest of a transnational elite. to him, 'a transnational institutional structure has played an increasingly salient role in coordinating global capitalism and imposing capitalist domination beyond national borders' (2007, 17) . from a spatial viewpoint, the tns is not structured in a hierarchical fashion, but on a horizontal set of 'multi-layered' and 'multifunctional' institutions which are networked with each other (2002, 213) . although this sounds to this book's author a rather kautskyian approach, robinson rejected the accusation. he responded that his theory 'emphasizes that conflict among capitals is endemic to the system but that such competition takes on new forms in the age of globalization not necessarily expressed as national rivalry' (robinson 2007, 10) . through this lens, conflict in the international has to be seen as 'less a campaign for us hegemony than a contradictory political response to the crisis of global capitalism ' (2007, 21) . hardt and negri, meanwhile, maintained that state power has surrendered to a 'new logic and structure of rule' centred on commoditization of life and by doing so they endorsed o'brien's narrative on the 'end of geography ' (1992) . in their view, 'capital seems to be faced with a smooth world order' which arose with the 'passage from industrial to informational economy,' or, from fordism to toyotism (hardt and negri 2000, xiii, 294; colás 2007, 174) . with the end of the nation-state, world regions 'infuse one another, distributing inequalities and barriers along multiple and fractured lines' (hardt and negri 2000, 335) . from this, they inferred that 'the history of imperialist, inter-imperialist, and antiimperialist wars is over ' (2000, 189) . to hardt and negri, the 'state does not, and indeed no-nation-state can today, form the centre of an imperialist project,' while conflict appears more as 'police action' exerted by the united states rather than as nineteenth-century conflicts (2000, xiv, 10, 12) . hardt and negri's thesis has been widely debated and criticized. yet, as far as this book is concerned, the current historical conjuncture-and the new cold war between beijing and washington in primis -does not resemble a world order where interstate rivalries have disappeared. if anything, it seems to be the contrary. this is one of the reasons why their provocative arguments together with bush's war on terror stemmed into the third-wave theory of imperialism, echoing some of the contrapositions of the first wave of imperialism debates. on the opposite side of the spectrum compared to hardt and negri sits david harvey, who intervened in the debate on the new imperialism by seeking 'a connection between processes of capital and expansionist political-military projects -such as the project of the new american century that has inspired the us war on terrorism and the invasion of iraq' (arrighi 2006, 201) . but for harvey these 'two logics' that form the engine of imperialism are in 'a contradictory fusion ' (2003, 26) . to him, this contradiction rests on the difference between the 'two logics,' since the 'logic of territory' is driven by statesmen's interests to 'sustain or augment the power of their own state vis-a-vis other states' while the 'logic of capital' chases opportunities 'wherever profits can be had ' (2003, 27) . 19 more importantly, harvey specified that the statesman, contrarily to the capitalist, pursues a collective advantage and is constrained by the political and military situation of the state and is in some sense or other responsible to a citizenry or, more often, to an elite group, a class, a kinship structure, or some other social group. (2003, 27) this is a key-though undeveloped-point that suggests where research into the relative autonomy of policymakers should be pursued, as this chapter does in its final section. harvey's contribution sparked a decennial discussion, as mentioned at the start of this book, that includes widespread critiques. in this author's view, there are two interrelated problems with harvey's theory of imperialism and both concern the way harvey thinks about the relationship between capital and state. from a presentational point of view, harvey's work ended up in an impasse similar to that of lenin, who argued that states' imperialist expansion leads to attempts to 'weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony,' without developing this important point any further (1939, 92) . similar to lenin, harvey did not scrutinize the (geo)political sphere as much as he did with capitalist development. for harvey, the 'two logics' are 'distinct from each other ' (2003, 29) . this is highly problematic for marxism-as discussed in the following point. yet, it is even more confusing if for harvey 'it is also undeniable that the two logics intertwine in complex and sometimes contradictory ways ' (2003, 29) . indeed, he refers to the 'relation between these two logics … as problematic and often contradictory (that is, dialectical) rather than as functional or onesided' but it takes the reader no further (2003, 30) . so, the reader is left alone to make sense of a relation between two forces that are 'distinctive but intertwined' while harvey himself admits-correctly-that there is a 'difficulty' in 'keep [ing] the two sides of this dialectic simultaneously in motion and not to lapse into either a solely political or a predominantly economic mode of argumentation ' (2003, 30) . this, from this author's viewpoint, justifies ellen meiksin wood and robert brenner when they maintained, respectively, that 'it is not clear precisely which distinction … he [harvey] really has in mind' when he illustrates his point about the 'two logics,' and that the theory 'is not all that clear' (wood 2006, 11; brenner 2006, 80) . this author's interpretation of such criticisms is that the theory, with regard to the political sphere, is not articulated enough compared, for instance, to other contributions below. nonetheless, this part of harvey's book remains a work in progress which has paved the way to much intellectual discussion. from a conceptual viewpoint, even if harvey's theory has nothing to do with realism-those who made that accusation fired a cheap shot-the most obvious flaw of his theory is that the 'logic of territory' is presented as external to capitalism; this is unacceptable to marxism because 'to counterpose a "territorial" to a "capitalist" logic implies that the former is noncapitalist,' but 'given the inevitably capitalist nature of the state in capitalist society' this is highly unlikely (anderson 2005, 11) . 20 how exactly harvey sees the 'logic of territory' autonomously dealing with the 'logic of capital' is not spelt out in detail. simply put, in the the new imperialism (2003) the problems debated in long-standing discussions about the capitalist state within the marxist tradition appear-unwarrantedly-to be beyond harvey's focus. from this viewpoint, while the logic of territory in harvey's account does not necessarily lack its 'raison d'etre,' brenner is not unfair when arguing that it is 'drop[ed] like a hot potato ' (2006, 81, 83) . this book's author seeks to address this flaw in the next section of this chapter by claiming that it is the unevenness of capitalist development conceived at every level of social and human life that opens a space for conceptualizing the actions of agencies which are unquestionably socialized within capitalism but which are not-for professional and intellectual reasons-fully subsumed by capitalism. nonetheless, this author believes that the flaws of harvey's theory do not necessarily invalidate his assumptions, which are, in wood's words, that an 'ever-expanding capital accumulation must be accompanied by an ever-expanding political power and command over territory ' (2006, 13) . indeed, wood's argument that 'the specificity of capitalist imperialism lies in the unique capacity of capital to impose its hegemony without expanding its territorial political power' probably relies on an overly narrow or old-fashioned definition of geopolitical power and territorial control (2006, 13) . this is confirmed by wood's misconception about the us empire, described as 'the first truly capitalist empire precisely because it is the first imperial hegemon to possess the kind of economic power needed to dispense with territorial ambitions ' (2006, 13) . this is a misconception to the extent that the lack of us colonies-a historically problematic point anyway-is not synonymous with the lack of nationally informed coercion and control of territory. similarly, brenner's point that harvey 'never tells us why he expects the territorial logic of power and the capitalist logic of power to come into conflict' is unfair since harvey has in mind, among other examples, the economy-security conundrum of us policymakers who deal with china (2006, 81) . if harvey's intervention was exciting enough to stir an international academic discussion, the lack of refinement to some aspects of his theory also deserves some credit for keeping the discussion on imperialism alive. there are several competing approaches that have challenged harvey's theory on the relationship between the 'two logics' but this book does not provide an exhaustive account of them. leo panitch and sam gindin situated themselves somewhere between hardt and negri, on the one hand, and harvey, on the other hand. indeed, they did not argue that the state has withered, rather they argue that it remains 'at the center of the search for an explanation of the making of global capitalism'-because it contributes by 'maintaining property rights, overseeing contracts, stabilizing currencies, reproducing class relations, and containing crises ' (2012, 1, 4) . yet, they drew on nicos poulantzas' concept of 'relative autonomy ' (2012, 4) . from the viewpoint of this book's author, such a choice defines the strengths and weaknesses of their approach. the 'relative autonomy' solution is a highly astute escamotage in that it moves away from the conception of the state as a puppet of the bourgeoisie and shifts its attention to the long-term stability of capitalism. in other words, poulantzas abandoned the economy of the ruling class-the realization of direct interests-and analyzed the politics of capitalism and the planning of long-term solutions to the structural limits of profitability. the state is portrayed as a referee which maintains social order-even if this means going against individual, short-term bourgeois interests-but whose policies in the long term help prevent social and economic crises-the modus operandi of the federal reserve's interest rates policy is a good example of this. indeed, in poulantzas' account the state 'sets the limits' to curb capitalism's greedy, self-destructive nature (1973, 187) . the state's purpose is to 'disorganize the dominated classes politically, and at the same time to organize the dominant classes politically ' (1973, 189) . for poulantzas, the state's autonomy is 'relative' to the extent a government 'does not directly represent the dominant classes' economic interests' but is the 'organizing agent of their political struggle ' (1973, 190) . the concept of 'relative autonomy' however remains problematic. although this may sound like a semantic matter, poulantzas managed to go beyond what he called 'economism' in the sense that the state is not directly controlled by individual capitalists. but 'instrumentalism' remains because the state is still a machine which serves the ruling class. poulantzas' rejection of this accusation sounds too tautological: it is true that the political and economic struggles of the dominated classes impose this on the capitalist state. however, this simply shows that the state is not a class instrument, but rather the state of a society divided into classes. (1973, 191) in addition, the concept 'relative autonomy' leaves open the question on why the state works toward the interests of capital if the state and the bourgeoisie are not tied into the kind of relationship described by miliband, for instance. ultimately, it appears unfair to limit us power to the 'managing and superintending [of] capitalism on a worldwide plane' (panitch and gindin 2012, 1) . scholars drawing on theories of uneven & combined development (u&cd) contribute to a major agenda that goes way beyond harvey, the debate on the new imperialism, and even marxism-indeed, the relation between studies in u&cd and marxism is also debated. 21 nonetheless, this family of writings has offered several intriguing contributions. although there is a vast literature on u&cd, it seems fair to maintain that this approach studies society and geopolitics from a longue durée perspective, taking into account the influence of earlier 'forms of social existence' on the present and focusing principally on history (rosenberg 2010, 186) . 22 u&cd has produced fascinating studies but this book's author finds that it remains 'limited'-so to speak-by its broad and overly comprehensive focus, at least concerning the subject of discussion in this book. indeed, individual authors have their own personal agendas and focus on different areas but if taken as a whole u&cd presents itself as a social theory of history, to such an extent that ernest mandel calls it 'a universal law of human history' (mandel 1962, 91) . 23 while this is an extremely ambitious endeavor, it is neither the objective of this book nor was it the objective of classical marxist theories of imperialism, in this author's view. if anything, this book's author sees the true challenge of the debate on imperialism as narrowing the scope of analysis in order to theorize the behavior of agencies. indeed, while anievas, for instance, is on the lookout for a theory of international history that does 'capture the distinctive but in no way autonomous dimensions of social development in terms of their mutual entailment,' this book is interested in the way the domestic level processes both internal and international factors (2014, 34). developing a law of history seems a gargantuan task. adding on the top of this an enquiry into individual agencies and foreign policymaking may lead to a theoretical overstretch. the 'problem' above-mentioned can be seen in a work by alexander anievas and richard saull (2020) that, compared to other u&cd writings appears much closer in focus to this book. although they argue that 'hegemony is a highly dynamic state of affairs, always provisional and frequently unstable' which necessitates 'the active (and continuous) agency of the ruling classes and state to reproduce the conditions of its existence through mobilizing subaltern (and dissenting) layers,' they do not unpack the working mechanisms of what they call 'provisional' and 'unstable' (anievas and saull 2020, 376) . in a conclusive passage, indeed, they cite gramsci and refer to the complexity that characterizes the amalgam of hegemonic blocs, arguing that '[m]ultiple ideological tendencies and different iterations of hegemonic projects can exist within a single bloc' (391). this, however, sounds too much like harvey. more specifically, it suggests that u&cd may not be a theory for foreign policy agencies as other theories are, as teschke (2008) argued. surely anievas is right in his defence that u&cd offers 'an explanation of the sociologically differentiated forms that agency takes ' (2014, 48 ). yet, the purpose of this book is to go beyond sociology. two additional approaches dissected the relationship between material structures and agencies and did so through the prism of dialectic. (2018) sought to explain through a materialist lens the 'upheavals of developmental "catch up" and interstate rivalry shaped by global capitalism as well as the causes and consequences of global war' in the twenty-first century (2018, 4) . alongside other contributors to this debate they wanted to correct ir scholarships' tendency to treat 'material content and ideational form, agency and structure … ontologically as dualisms, often as discrete or at best as interacting separate elements ' (2018, 7) . indeed, the way to unpack 'inner connections of global capitalism, global war, global crisis' is by theorizing the international through a philosophy of internal relations that 'makes explicit a conception of capital through which connections are maintained and contained as aspects of a self-forming whole ' (2018, 7, 9) . in particular, what is of major interest to the argument made in this book is how bieler and morton attempt to explain 'the way ideas are internally related to material structures through the "material structure of ideology" ' (2018, 17) . to them this happens in four steps. yet, for bieler and morton, the hegemony of capitalist class relations is still the catalyst to ideology, which means that the political remains a manifestation of the economic, even if the authors cleverly draw a distinction between 'differentiation' and 'separation ' (2018, 17) . in fact, bieler and morton treat ideas as 'material social processes' and describe hegemonic ideas as those gaining status of 'common sense' (2018, 53, 72) . this book's argument instead is less focused on ideas as the dominant ideas and more on how individual worldviews help elites to filter and process information and to develop strategies. the approach that has possibly most challenged harvey but, at the same time, has taken seriously his invitation to open up the sphere of policymaking is political marxism. benno teschke and hanne lacher questioned harvey's idea of economic-political inter-imperialist blocs: [w]hy was/is the capitalist state a national state? why did capitalist class relations and accumulation strategies find expression in a territorial political framework to begin with? (teschke and lacher 2007, 567) 24 noting that capitalism arose after the nation-state-not the other way around-they absolved the former from responsibility for interstate rivalries (2007, 574) . that is, the genesis of geopolitical competition was already matured prior to the making of capitalism. to this, wood's discourse added that national rivalries are 'self-defeating' from an economic viewpoint (wood 2003, 156-7) . this point was countered by alex callinicos, who drawing on marx's work argued that because pre-capitalist and capitalist economic forms coexist, '[w]hy shouldn't the state system be conceived analogously, as a social form that develops prior to the dominance of capitalism but that is incorporated into and adapted to the capitalist mode? ' (2009, 80) . also to this book's author political marxism raised an intelligent argument. indeed, one should not forget that while competing, the united states and china are also cooperating thanks to the economic interdependence that characterizes this relationship. yet, while several individual businesses will find interstate tension detrimental to their interests, being tied to a geopolitically influential state has its benefits in the long run. moreover, there are some questions that could be further explored in relation to teschke and lacher's work. 25 on the one hand, twentiethand twenty-first-century globalization has failed to transform the international order into a truly transnationalized entity. the rise of nationalism, the persistence of mercantilist foreign economic policies, the return to military multipolarity, and the (lack of) a transnational crisis management system on migration, financial crises, and coronavirus show a fairly uneven picture. on the other hand, one should look beyond europe. giovanni arrighi showed that the asia-pacific region enjoyed a 'five hundred years peace,' interrupted by sporadic clashes, hosting a geopolitical order which did not come to know systemic conflict as in the old continent. the rise of territorial tensions in the south china sea since capitalism spread across the region deserves more attention in this regard. regardless, teschke and cemgil (2014) have rightly focused on how to integrate fpa into a materialist framework. the raison d'etre of their approach is a rejection of other marxist approaches guilty of reducing foreign policy to the 'epiphenomenal,' that is 'to capitalist imperatives or other overriding sociopolitical determinations in structural-functionalist terms ' (2014, 607) . indeed, in this critique they included classical marxist theories of imperialism and those of neo-leninists, neo-kautskyians, neo-gramscians, post-leninists, and neo-trotskyists-approaches covered in this chapter. to them, they all failed to treat foreign policy as an 'object of analysis in its own right-the active drawing together and purposive re-articulation of multiple influences from the domestic and the foreign.' indeed, in each of these approaches foreign policy remains a 'derivative phenomenon, deduced from deeper social forces, if it is not declared aprioristically as un-theorisable.' simply put, for teschke and cemgil there is no ir in their marxist theories of international relations (2014, 608). teschke and cemgil's contribution to this debate is as cleverly argued as others, offering a 'particular understanding' of dialectics, according to which 'all social categories, including capitalism, the state, and foreign policies, remain historically open and subject to change, rather than theoretically closed and fixed ' (2014, 608) . consistent with the assumptions of political marxism, their argument is based on the belief that capitalism originates from 'inter-subjective conflicts' and in 'relation to other macro-phenomena (state, inter-state system, foreign policy) as an ongoing social construction-and not as a self-reproducing totality or system ' (2014, 615) . more to the point, they use dialectics as 'an epistemological procedure that re-converts social phenomena as abstractions into their inter-subjectively constructed concretions ' (2014, 615) . for teschke and cemgil, applying a truly dialectic approach to fpa means 'identifying how contradictory relations between social agents are resolved, reconciled, or set aside ' (2014, 620) . that is equal to saying that 'there cannot be a singular concept of capitalist international relations' because in an international system of states foreign policy is the product of the 'sui generis character of successive inter-subjectively constructed foreign policy encounters, contextualised but not purely derivable from or reducible to contexts, which should move centre-stage ' (2014, 621) . this is what they call the 'unintended quality' of interstate relations (2014, 621). teschke and cemgil's approach offers the benefit of applying a materialist methodology to a realm that has remained unexplored in other accounts, that of foreign policy. furthermore, it incorporates geopolitical competition to the extent it shows that a state's foreign policy is also the consequence of other states' strategies. although the authors do not say it, de facto they have developed a sort of two-level game, where domestic interests are shaped by the diplomatic will of external actors. from this viewpoint, teschke and cemgil's approach is not different from the one made in this chapter; this book's author seeks to incorporate into a marxist theory of ir agential behaviors that are shaped by capitalist structures but, at the same time, cannot be exclusively explained with a systemic approach. rather, they are the product of how different policymakers in a capitalist society seek to resolve the complex puzzle of geopolitical competition. while the mindset remains capitalist, capitalist structures do not provide politicians with prêt-à-porter solutions to the rubik's cube of geopolitics. these have to be made up with an increasing need for creativity. so far this chapter has showed that the marxist theory of imperialism from the first to the third wave contains several imperfections. most importantly, the theory can benefit from accounting for national differences and human agency with more accuracy. however, the chapter has also argued that it still offers a malleable framework that could satisfy waltz's demand for a 'useful nonreductionist, … theory' and incorporate a 'variety of conditions' stretching the analytical reach of the theory (waltz 1979, 26, 37) . as andrew linklater put it, the problem for the theory of imperialism 'may not be whether strategic factors were more important than economic factors, or vice versa, but how these phenomena interacted so as to produce the international conflict which lenin attempted to describe' (linklater 1990, 84) . therefore, going back to callinicos' statement about the intersection of geopolitical and economic competition, one should ask what laws operate the strategic synthesis between these two forms of competition. answering this question will allow us to overcome what has been accurately described as the marxist theory of imperialism's tendency to 'unit homogenization' (anievas 2014, 32) . 26 as a solution to this problem this author proposes to build on recommendations that emerged from three contributions. david harvey suggested that '[s]trategic decisions of sometimes immense import (and not a few sometimes startling unintended consequences) are arrived at and implemented in the rough and tumble of the political process where variegated interests and opinions clash ' (2003, 28) . alex callinicos pointed out that a marxist theory of ir 'requires a critical engagement with the main theoretical ideologies of the international … and … incorporation of valid elements of these ideologies' such as liberalism and constructivism, in addition to realism (2009, . gonzalo pozo-martin's contribution called for marxist scholarship to familiarize itself with the ideologies of imperialism by understanding what the views are of each section of capital (2007, 561) . 27 these recommendations lead toward further enquiry into how political elites, informed by their worldviews, seek to translate the economic pressures of capitalist economy in a coherent foreign policy that goes beyond the direct, individual interests of the capitalist ruling class. can marxism venture into this unfamiliar territory without drifting off into weberian or realist accounts of state power? the way forward suggested in the rest of this chapter requires the reader to view imperialism as the product of hierarchically ordered, self-reinforcing but at times contradictory, interconnected determinations of power. this description of imperialism opens up to the study of imperialism as the intersection of different levels of analysis across the structure-agency spectrum. to do so, this chapter draws on james rosenau's blueprint for a multidimensional model of fpa. this approach was originally aimed at a 'general theory' that could scrutinize foreign policies not in isolation but through the intersection of 'idiosyncratic, role, governmental, societal, and systemic variables' (1966, 32) . because rosenau did not say 'which set of variables contributes most to external behaviour' or 'how to treat each set of variables relative to the others,' this book seeks to infer that using a materialist lens (1966, . therefore, from the perspective of this work the 'systemic' is observed through the lens of the geopolitical world order and the uneven development of capitalism; the 'societal' and the 'governmental' relate to the state-capital nexus and to how the ruling class influences-but also demands help from-the state's strategy makers; what rosenau calls the 'idiosyncratic' is intended here as state managers' worldviews. drawing on the concept of uneven development, the argument raised here is that the relationship between socio-economic base and political superstructure is dominated by capitalism only unevenly, and that unevenness remains an important feature at the level of space, statecapital relations, and ideology. the concept of uneven development is derived from marx's description of it in grundisse (1973), while in the final part, this chapter also considers two passages within the german ideology (1974) which more explicitly link uneven development to the ideological sphere. in grundisse, marx refers to 'uneven development of material production relative to e.g. artistic development,' which for him entailed dissecting 'how relations of productions develop unevenly as legal relations ' (1973, 109) . in fairness, this is the only time he calls it uneven development of capitalism and this is found in the introduction. nonetheless, he returns to this concept on at least two occasions. firstly, when he explains that 'the new forces of production and relations of production do not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky, nor from the womb of the self-positing idea; but from within and in antithesis to the existing development of production and the inherited, traditional relations of property' (marx 1973, 278) . then, he goes back to this when talking about 'dissolution' (marx 1973, 497-8) . this section therefore deconstructs the relationship between political and economic power along these three levels of analysis. the marxist tradition has treated space and its transformation as 'sociotechnical practices' seeking to step away from the 'realist trap' and a definition of territory as 'spatio-political first cause' (painter 2010 (painter , 1093 (painter , 1096 . contrary to mainstream ir, in marxist geography space is a dynamic entity that is constantly produced and reshaped by the way 'value' is defined in capitalist society. lefebvre asked 'if space embodies social relationships, how and why does it do so? and what relationships are they? ' (1991, 27) . he answered that value is generated by 'the flow of energy, the flow of raw materials, the flow of labour, the flow of information, and so forth' and through 'networks of banks, businesses, and great centres of production … highways, airports, and information networks' and the 'city' (lefebvre 2009, 186-7) . ultimately, space is both a source as much as an infrastructure 'to produce surplus value' (lefebvre 2009, 186-8) . geoeconomic flows, however, are dictated by excessive volatility and at times irrationality by which capitalism spreads economic, social and environmental fortunes and misfortunes across the global space. as noted in lenin's theory of imperialism, this unevenness on an international scale leads to a shifting balance of economic and geopolitical power. for instance, of the global decline in fdi inflows of us$300 billion, from us$1.6 trillion in 2011 to an estimated us$1.3 trillion in 2012, almost 90% is accounted for by developed countries. fdi declined sharply in both europe and the united states, while belgium and germany saw large declines in fdi inflows. (spe) (unctad 2013, 4) this trend has been paralleled by a steep increase in the flow of foreign direct investment (fdi) toward developing countries, which 'accounted for more than half of global fdi again in 2013, as their inflows reached a new high, at an estimated us$759 billion,' while the growth of asia-pacific economic cooperation members and brics countries was remarkable, as their share of global fdi has risen to 'twice that of their pre-crisis level' (unctad 2013, 5, 7-8) . such geoeconomic unevenness is a sword of damocles on state managers. the competitive struggle between 'mobile' and borderless capitals out to grab the constantly changing opportunities of spatial openness inevitably calls into question the role of states both as advocates of capital and as keepers of 'fixed' sovereign borders and public wealth, with consequences at the level of interstate relations. in other words, as state institutions are harnessed to regulate the uneven geographies of political-economic life, they engage continuously in the production and transformation of places, regions, territories and scalar hierarchies. (brenner 2004, 111) while capitalist production exerts pressure on states to regulate flows across space, it can only determine the modus operandi of political institutions to an extent. states act under capitalist pressure but do so through a political logic. while corporate interests and pressures on politicians may appear as quite obvious, it is not necessarily obvious how those demands are met, or what political solutions to the limits of capital are found. as one author noted with reference to wwi, in the cabinet room, as well as in the field, decisions had finally to be made by politicians, proconsuls and military chiefs who had no direct contact or necessary sympathy with the monopoly capitalists, the magnates of heavy industry and the bankers and stock-jobbers who personified the new forces of capitalism. (kemp 1972, 24) although largely overlooked, such dynamics were considered by lefebvre when he offered 'more political' observations about space. for him 'state and territory interact in such a way that they can be said to be mutually constitutive. … state officials … seem to administer, to manage, and to organize a natural space' (lefebvre 2009, 228) . paraphrasing a classic weberian definition of the state, lefebvre admitted that without space there is no state: 'born in and with a space, the state may also perish with it' (lefebvre 2009, 224) . space for lefebvre conflates three subdimensions such as 'social space,' 'natural territory,' and 'mental space' (italics in original; lefebvre 2009, 224-5) . these spatialities inform the way in which the state 'serves as a tool of thought and of action … a means of control, and hence of domination, of power' (lefebvre 1991, 26) . the state level in lefebvre's view is 'the level at which strategic thoughts are located' and these are applied 'consciously or unconsciously, well or badly' and at times with a great deal of contingency (lefebvre 1973, 79) . while these scattered insights on state and space do not amount to a systematic theory, they highlight that lefebvre advocated for a multidimensional understanding of space. 28 more to the point, what these words suggest is that rather than focusing on state autonomy, one should reflect on the fact that states operate a strategic synthesis that through processing and contingency adds a degree of complexity to mere economic interests. such strategic synthesis may happen within a state that is not autonomous of capitalist interests. yet, the very process of strategic synthesis and of dealing with geopolitical challenges by default grants (capitalist) policymakers room for autonomy. lefebvre's insights are inspiring for those who see the state as more than a 'committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie' (marx and engels 1967, 5) . marx's masterpiece contained similar flaws that appear in miliband's work on the state and recent research on elites' networks (miliband 1969; domhoff 2006, 217-24; van apeldoorn and de graaff (2015) . while these perspectives provide a rock-solid picture of the context within which policymakers operate, they are limited by correlation-causation deductions. looking at the state through the lenses of cum hoc ergo propter hoc and post hoc ergo propter hoc does tell us that big corporations have formal and informal channels for influencing political leaders and bureaucrats. such an approach is extremely insightful when it comes to, for instance, understanding the relationship between capitalist interests and american grand strategy. however, this does not help to resolve the problem of 'unit homogenization'-if anything, it only makes it worse. nor does it contribute to 'explaining why state x made a certain move last tuesday,' that is, differentiating between long-term strategies and tactical choices (wivel 2005) . while economic interests remain central to imperialism, politico-ideological logics determine the modalities that policymakers adopt to achieve these goals. any attempt by state managers to maximize their or their state's power could only be framed within the boundaries of capitalism. this is because there is a 'tacit equation of unlimited economic growth and political power' which in a capitalist world order becomes a matter of survival (1987, 318) . if state managers want to acquire the capabilities to defend their enterprises, they can only do so by increasing their state's political leverage which in turn is tied to corporate success. in contrast to realism, the politician's interest in consolidating the power and success of his or her state remains entangled in the 'expand-or-perish' logic of capitalism. this is the sense of a 'capitalist geopolitical logic' (pozo-martin 2006, 556) . the most efficient and viable way for state managers to develop a strategy that maximizes their state power can only be obtained by pursuing policies that increase the state gdp. furthermore, state managers perform a different job from that of corporate managers as they have long-term and structural concerns (harvey 2003) . this leads to a vicious circle: a strong state can better support its capital; the latter is more successful visà-vis its market competitors; this guarantees the state's solid economic growth and resources essential for projecting geopolitical influence and defending capitalist interests. there is in other words a 'structural interdependence' where state and capital cooperate (harman 1991; mazzucato 2013) . 29 within this relationship, the state gains leverage as the inability of economic constituencies to overcome political obstacles in the international arena increases the degree of power; respect also increases for national political elites who not only need legitimacy but are also compelled to devise solutions for their national economic stakeholders. at the same time, this 'structural interdependence' is imperfect as it can turn into a forced cohabitation or problematic interlocking. given the high degree of complexity in the international arena, the strategic synthesis devised by state managers may not remain confined to capitalist 'normality,' that is, to actions that directly reflect the interests of the ruling class. rather, geopolitical calculations can be prioritized over economic interests. 30 the relationship between 'logic of capital' and the 'logic of territory' is 'a problematic and often contradictory (that is, dialectical)' one and should not be conceived as 'functional or one-sided' (harvey 2003, 30) . political power-and above all military power-can become a barrier to economic interests, particularly because it will have to be deployed in suboptimal conditions given the constraints imposed by rival states. 31 as joel wainwright put it when commenting on marx's concept of uneven development and dissolution, '[i]t takes time for everything [precapitalist social relations] to dissolve, so to speak ' (2008, 884) . this captured well marx's stance on uneven development contained in the german ideology. here, marx further confirmed that the superstructure is a reflection of the base only to an extent. furthermore, he portrayed this concept with an eye on human consciousness confirming once again that capitalism does not only develop unevenly at the spatial and institutional level, but also at the ideological level. that is, ideas are manifestations of capitalism and capitalist interests only in so far capitalism has overcome pre-or non-capitalist formations. in this regard, marx noted that the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. … the writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men. (1974, 42) this could be interpreted either as a eulogium to path dependency, therefore to the persistence of pre-capitalist or non-capitalist elementswhether political or cognitive-of human and social life, or as a eulogium to nature itself, that is, awareness of the influence that natural elements like (control of) territory and resources exert on policymakers. consistent with this, marx added that consciousness is at first, of course, … consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men's relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature (natural religion) just because nature is as yet hardly modified historically. (1974, 51) although these insights do not amount to a theory of agency, they serve two purposes for this book. firstly, they support the argument that capitalist unevenness has to be envisioned at every level across the structure-agency spectrum. secondly, such ideological unevenness is hardly overcome. timpanaro has added to this by pointing out two crucial issues: that materialism could be defined broadly and that the past continues to have an effect on the present: the priority of nature over 'mind', … of the biological level over the socioeconomic and cultural level; both in the sense of chronological priority … and in the sense of the conditioning which nature still exercises on man and will continue to exercise at least for the foreseeable future. (timpanaro 1975, 34, 40-3) 32 this abstract discussion allows us to better appreciate that in every strategic synthesis operated by state managers there is a higher degree of complexity than the one acknowledged by economic accounts of imperialism. logics of individual profit and economic calculations do not influence the full-spectrum of human beings' worldviews. as a neurologist pointed out in his study on the biology of nationalism, 'humankind's best and worst moments arise from a system that incorporates everything from the previous second's neuronal activity to the last million years of evolution (along with a complex set of social factors)' (sapolsky 2019, 42) . economic interests therefore have to 'compete' with the influence of history and geography, in addition to the cognitive world, before taking full control of individual political agendas. the chaotic combination of these factors-compounded by challenges stemming from the international arena-take an ideological shape as ideology is 'an indispensable guide to an infinitely complex and otherwise bewildering present' (hunt 2009, 12) . ideology is necessarily a coherent tool, which is used to provide order. conceptualizing the possibility of relating state managers' ideologies to a marxist theory of imperialism in this way, it provides a platform for dialogue with mainstream theories of the international. there may be several interlocutors here. one could be spykman's realist strategic studies, a tradition that 'depended on the influence of the natural environment that can be changed by human land use and technology' (ashworth 2011, 294) . another arena for cooperation appears to be possible with constructivism, from which the theory of imperialism could adopt the concept of worldviews and strategic cultures. despite world politics seeming increasingly shaped by the aterritorial and economic logic of neoliberalism, national 'elites socialized in different strategic cultures [and faced by different challenges] will make different choices when placed in similar situations' (johnston 1995, 35) . caught between competing pressures, these elites will attempt to produce strategic syntheses between political and interests/constraints in their foreign policies, relying, among other things, on a shared 'perception of the national historical experience' (gray 1981, 22) . indeed, as this book's case study will demonstrate, state managers 'approach international politics with an already quite comprehensive and elaborate appreciation of the world, of the international system and of the place of their state within it' (weldes 1996, 280) . in particular, understanding the worldviews of state managers would allow the theory of imperialism to account for differences between elites in the same country and for tactical discontinuities between different administrations. this could be further refined as an 'operational code.' the advantage of drawing on this concept is twofold (george 1969) . firstly, it provides more accuracy compared to that of strategic culture. secondly, it allows a marxist theory of imperialism to create its own tailored lens, its own code. when looking at the operational code of state managers, the theory of imperialism should consider a different set of questions related to its own levels of analysis. this chapter had two objectives. firstly, it introduced the reader to important debates in the making of theories of imperialism that took place in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. both discussions were triggered by international events and in particular by interstate competition and wars. on both occasions, similar tensions and viewpoints emerged but each time the root cause of discussion and disagreement was the fact that marx had not produced a rigorous theory of the international. secondly, when presenting these debates to the reader, the chapter also sought to make sense of the diversity within the classical marxist theory of imperialism, its strengths and flaws, and critiques. indeed, the chapter suggested a new possibility for a marxist theory of imperialism to engage with mainstream theories of ir. this is very important for two reasons. on the one hand, it makes the theory of imperialism better equipped to understand foreign policy and interstate rivalries. on the other hand, it increases the space of dialogue between marxism and mainstream theories of ir. ir theories tend not to respect marxism as a theory of the international, while marxists see mainstream ir as a superficial lens on the world. from this viewpoint, this chapter's proposal sought to open a space for a productive dialogue between two distant worlds in the hope that future theoretical discussions will continue to seek synergies as opposed to divergences and sectarianism. in order to achieve these two goals, the chapter touched upon different aspects of the theory of imperialism. the first section sought to draw attention to the multifaceted and unrigorous theorization of the theory of imperialism. the second section instead unpacked first-wave debates by comparing thinkers who saw in capitalism the roots of inter-imperial rivalries and thinkers who predicted the rise of an ultra-imperial world order. in the third section, the chapter engaged with waltz's and gilpin's critique of the theory of imperialism-especially, lenin's version. here, it was argued that waltz's critique provides a chance to further reflect on how to improve the classical theory of imperialism. furthermore, it was noted that gilpin's interpretation of the theory appeared to be more sympathetic and constructive. ultimately, it emerged that while the classical marxist theory of imperialism has several limits, it still provides a framework that can be shaped and improved. the fourth section of the chapter scrutinized the third wave of debates on capitalist imperialism which developed during the first decade of this century, showing that some of the issues dividing scholars are not so different from those of the first wave of debates one century ago. from this section it emerged that the chief objective of any marxist theory of international relations should be to integrate national specificities and an understanding of political agencies. carrying out this task by focusing on the potential of policymaking and ideology appeared to be a viable solution to these authors. therefore, this chapter met the challenge and sought to expand on those recommendations. drawing on james n. rosenau's approach to foreign policy this part of the book developed a framework based on three analytical levels that touch upon the systemic geopolitical context of a foreign policy, the relationship between state-political elites-and capitalist ruling classes-and foreign policymakers worldviews. it was argued that in order for a marxist theory of imperialism to integrate political elements within its framework without betraying its historical materialist essence it needs to conceive of capitalist development as uneven at every level of analysis-geopolitical, societal-governmental, and ideological. this opens up a space for marxism to interact with branches of realism and constructivism, among other theories. more to the point, the chapter argued that a marxist theory of imperialism would benefit from developing an ideological operational code of political elites that deconstructs how these elites interpret the geopolitical context they face, capitalism and the ruling class, power, the role of their state in the international arena, and the style of their foreign policy. this way, the theory of imperialism maintains its economic roots while not necessarily becoming a theory based on economic determinism. as far as the case study is concerned, this framework allows the book to consider us foreign policy from obama to trump by looking at three areas. firstly, chapter 4 considers how the uneven development of capitalism has led to a transition of the geopolitical world order and how this transition has required the united states to adjust its financial priorities and geostrategic focus based on a changing environment. secondly, chapters 5 and 6 provide a picture of obama's and trump's views of capitalism, relations with the capitalist ruling class, and operational code. then it analyzes obama's and trump's policies toward the middle east, europe, russia, and asia and it demonstrates that between the two presidents there was a great deal of strategic continuity and tactical changes. earlier, [had] described as inter-imperialism. except for coining a new and clever catchword, replacing one latin prefix by another, the only progress [that] kautsky has made, in the sphere of "scientific" thought, is that he gave out, as marxism, what hobson, in effect, [had] described as the cant of english parsons' (lenin 1939, 117) . 8. for luxemburg, 'militarism in all its forms … can only be overcome with the destruction of capitalism ' (1911, 447) . 9. hobson's disappointment toward high finance might have stemmed from his anti-semitism. he wrote that 'johannesburg is the new jerusalem' and 'the gold-mines of the rand, are almost entirely in their [jewish community] hands ' (1900, 190-1) . 10. see also hilferding (1981, 315) . hilferding saw in this phase a political opportunity when he stated that '[t]he socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the task of overcoming capitalism' (1981, 367; sassoon 2010, 51) . 11. lapavitsas (2013, 67-8) has questioned hilferding's argument about the fusion between banking and the industrial sector. see also harvey on the fusion between managers and shareholders and the consequent interest in boosting stock asset value as a way of financing (2005, 32) . nowell has argued that retail companies have their own financing, undermining hilferding's claim (2009, 324) . 12. 'a few of the financial pioneers in south africa have been englishmen, like messrs, rhodes and rudd; but recent developments of transvaal goldmining have thrown the economic resources of the country more and more into the hands of a small group of international financers, chiefly german in origin and jewish in race. by superior ability, enterprise, and organization these men, out-competing the slower-witted briton, have attained a practical supremacy which no one who has visited johannesburg is likely to question' (hobson 1900, 189) . 13. this quote undermines spyros sakellaropoulos and panagiotis sotiris' argument that lenin's theory is based on uneven & combined development (2015, 89-90). lenin added that once the world economy had been divided, the only way to overtake these politically determined limits was to redivide the world, especially 'if the relation of forces changes as a result of uneven development, war, bankruptcy, etc.' (lenin 1939, 70) . 14. this was followed by a great expansion of the state's military power (bukharin 1982, 16, 22) . bukharin refers to prime minister lloyd george and the legislation ceding full power to the government (1972, 151) . 15. ronald robinson and john gallagher argued that british imperialism in africa was driven by strategic stakes (robinson and gallagher 1961, 2, 465) . arthur eckstein criticized lenin's theory for its 'chronology; locale; causation ' (1991, 299) . 16. waltz here is drawing on michael barratt brown. for barratt brown 'monopoly and finance capital were not the chief cause of the outward pressure into empire, at least for britain, … and that the imperial tribute never played so important a role in britain's life ' (1970, 13) . however, he admitted that lenin was right about germany before the great war and 'the whole capitalist world in the 1930s and 1950s ' (1970, 453) . others have highlighted the importance of india for the british empire (callinicos 1994, 24; arrighi 2005, 64-5) . 17. for a critique see teschke (2003, 16-27) . 18. an exception was marxism and the new imperialism (callinicos et al. 1994 ). 19. similarly, callinicos argued that 'there is, necessarily, a realist moment in any marxist analysis of international relations' (callinicos 2007, 542) . he articulated this further explaining that rather than two separate logics one should see capitalist imperialism as 'the intersection of economic and geopolitical competition ' (2009, 72) . 20. for accusations against harvey for having turned to realism, see paul (2007, 52) . 21. justin rosenberg, who relaunched the theory in the late '90s made three points that describe well such a theory. firstly, it entails transhistorical relations of interdependence between societies. secondly, throughout history it has resulted in the interdependence of the social, material, and cultural realms of these societies. thirdly, it is as trotsky intended-as a process of hybridization of different modes of production (rosenberg 2006, 324-5) . for rosenberg, international relations do not exist-particularly, in the way realists think of them. he advocates for a 'sociological definition of the international' (2006, 324) . 22. this approach, however, is better suited for explaining european and asian history. kamran matin has provided a highly theoretical illustration of u&cd (2007, 427) . for u&cd applied to the causes of wwi see anievas (2013) . 23. for a critique, see smith (2006) and rioux (2015) . 24. see also callinicos (2009, 70) . for a critique of political marxism, see callinicos (1990) , and anievas and nisancioglu (2014) . 25. regardless, teschke's and lacher's analysis rests on a fascinating scholarly exercise that cannot be dealt with here (teschke 2003) . 26. linklater suggested that this could be done by incorporating realism and marxism 'within a historical sociology of international relations' (linklater 1990, 95) . 27. see also pozo-martin (2006, 239) . 28. lefebvre polemicized against 'certain sociologists' who portrayed the state 'as subject, as superior consciousness able to maintain and support its own conditions ' (1973, 9) . indeed, this book is not advocating for that fetishization of territory typical of classical geopolitics and which bukharin called 'childish prattle' (bukharin 1936, 564) . 29. capitalists 'have influenced and been influenced by the state structures in which they have found themselves … the state and the individual capitals are intertwined, with each feeding off the other' (harman 1991) . 30. trump's tariff war against china is a case in point. 31. this passage provides an excellent picture of the kind of tension between donald trump and sections of the american ruling class triggered by the issuing of trade tariffs against china. 32. crucially, timpanaro asked '[h]as this second nature, this "artificial terrain" (as labriola called it), entirely absorbed within itself the first nature? ' (1975, 16, 45, 48-9) . marx did not link imperialism with a tendency toward monopoly capitalism that he noticed in the development of limited liability corporations (llc) and discussed in chapter lucia pradella argued that marx had already drawn a 'relationship between his crisis theory and the phenomenon of modern imperialism see donald sassoon's definition of austro-marxism in his voluminous work on twentieth century western marxism (2010, 70). for a more comprehensive work on austro-marxism, see bottomore hobsbawm noted that although there was a 'tendency towards monopoly or oligopoly … in the heavy industries,' it is 'too simplistic' to use the word monopoly (1987, 44) this is still a must-read for understanding late twentieth-century globalization, according to david harvey in the more fashionable language of neoclassical economics this means a condition where 'interest rates, profit rates, wages, and incomes in general would be converging as would rates of growth and productivity' (berger and dore 1996, 8). marx pointed out that before kautsky, hobson had already expressed a similar concept when stating that a division of the world in empires potentially 'would offer the best hope of permanent peace on an assured basis of inter-imperialism' (1902, 351) borders, fixes and empires: territoriality in the new imperialism (centre for international borders research (cibr), electronic working paper series 15) marxism and world politics 1914 in world historical perspective: the 'uneven' and 'combined' origins of the first world war capital, the state and war: class conflict and geopolitics in the thirty years' crisis, 1914-1945 the poverty of political marxism. international socialist review reassessing the cold war and the far-right: fascist legacies and the making of the liberal international order after 1945 the geometry of imperialism hegemony unravelling-1 spatial and other 'fixes' of historical capitalism 100 years of permanent revolution: results and prospects realism and the spirit of 1919: halford mackinder, geopolitics and the reality of the league of nations karl marx on colonialism & modernization after imperialism (rev national diversity and global capitalism global capitalism, global war, global crisis new state spaces: urban governance and the rescaling of statehood what is, and what is not, imperialism? historical materialism marxist theories of imperialism: a critical survey austro-marxism imperialism and communism imperialism and world economy selected writings on the state and the transition to socialism the limits of 'political marxism imperialism today does capitalism need the state system? imperialism and global political economy open doors and closed frontiers: the limits of american empire the value of territory: towards a marxist geopolitics who rules america? power, politics and social change is there a 'hobson-lenin thesis' on late nineteenthcentury colonial expansion? the economic history review imperialism: an historiographical revision the endless crisis: how monopolyfinance capital produces stagnation and upheaval from the usa to china the 'operational code': an approach to the study of political leaders and decision-making war and change in world politics national style in strategy: the american example the state and capitalism today the new imperialism spaces of neoliberalization: towards a theory of uneven geographical development (hettner-lecture) a companion to marx's capital finance capital: a study of the latest phase of capitalist development the age of capital the age of empire the war in south africa imperialism: a study a history of marxian economics ideology and us foreign policy thinking about strategic culture ultra-imperialism the marxist theory of imperialism rethinking imperialism farewell to imperialism? a critical sociological study of empire financialization and capitalist accumulation: a structural account of the crisis 2007-09 imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism the survival of capitalism: reproduction of the relations of production the production of space state, space, world: selected essays beyond realism and marxism: critical theory and international relations the accumulation of capital. london: routledge classics discovering imperialism: social democracy to world war i marxist economic theory the marxist theory of imperialism and its critics grundrisse (m. nicolaus, trans.) the german ideology the communist manifesto uneven and combined development in world history: the international relations of state-formation in premodern iran the enterpreneurial state the state in capitalist society hilferding's finance capital versus wal-mart world: disaggregating the dollar's hegemony global financial integration: the end of geography dependency: a formal theory of underdevelopment or a methodology for the analysis of concrete situations of underdevelopment? rethinking territory the making of global capitalism: the political economy of american empire the siren song of geopolitics: towards a gramscian account of the iraq war a tougher gordian knot: globalisation, imperialism and the problem of the state autonomous or materialist geopolitics? imperialism and capitalist development in marx's capital. historical materialism mind the (theoretical) gap: on the poverty of international relations theorising of uneven and combined development capitalist globalization and the transnationalization of the state beyond the theory of imperialism: global capitalism and the transnational state africa and the victorians: the official mind of imperialism pre-theories and theories of foreign policy why is there no international historical sociology? basic problems in the theory of uneven and combined development. part ii: unevenness and political multiplicity from territorial to nonterritorial capitalist imperialism: lenin and the possibility of a marxist theory of imperialism this is your brain on nationalism: the biology of us and them uneven development: nature, capital and the production of space 100 years of permanent revolution: results and prospects international handbook of development economics: volume one the myth of 1648: class, geopolitics, and the making of modern international relations the oxford handbook of international relations the changing 'logics' of capitalist competition the dialectic of the concrete: reconsidering dialectic for ir and foreign policy analysis on materialism global investment trends monitor american grand strategy and corporate elite networks: the open door since the end of the cold war around the world in eighty days uneven developments: from the grundisse to capital theory of international politics the capitalist world-economy precipitate decline: the advent of multipolarity the modern world-system i man, the state, and war imperialism and capitalist industrialization constructing national interests explaining why state x made a certain move last tuesday: the promise and limitations of realist foreign policy analysis the origin of capitalism: a longer view logics of power: a conversation with david harvey key: cord-0060155-zzd4mc9m authors: bhattacharyya, sambit title: a unified theory of rent, elite feud, and imperial expansion date: 2020-09-17 journal: a history of global capitalism doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-58736-9_2 sha: f8c98d7312c4cedfddb009445e10ba55b67c40d7 doc_id: 60155 cord_uid: zzd4mc9m this chapter presents the theoretical framework. the framework addresses two fundamental questions in economic sciences. what factors explain the divergence in living standards across countries and what ensures internal and external stability of the capitalist economic system? the framework adopts a non-technical and unified approach. using the neoclassical growth model, it shows that economic growth is dependent on access to raw materials, labour, capital, technology, and perhaps most importantly ‘economies of scale’. then it modifies the neoclassical growth model by introducing power relations (both internal and external to a nation), which ensures scale economies through guaranteed access to markets and raw materials. thus, imperial expansion is a natural consequence of the capitalist economic system. the stability of the system depends on growth and distribution and it is not possible to have one without the other. however, the quest for growth and imperial expansion implies one empire invariably enters into conflict with another empire. such inherent tension in the capitalist system can be best managed by acknowledging great power spheres of influence. in this chapter, i describe the theoretical foundations of this book: how economic factors motivate expansionism, elite rivalry, and conflict which in turn shapes history. we consider a model that demonstrates resources, technology, and power as the three pillars of the capitalist system that evolved over the last 500 years. in particular, the production process is characterised by the following relationship: where the output y is produced using a combination of the inputs natural resources r, labour l, and capital k. for tractability, we consider all firms in the economy to be identical. therefore, the macro output of the economy is the product of the micro output of the representative firm and the number of firms in the entire economy. note that we do not distinguish between land and natural resources here to keep the structure parsimonious and tractable. land could be considered as a natural resource, which hosts factories, farmlands, offices, mines, and oil rigs (in case of subsoil wealth), and forests. the inputs of production (natural resources, labour, and capital) receive compensation through wages or rental payments equal to their contribution to production at the margin. 1 the compensation schemes could be different between the market and planned variants of capitalism. we will elaborate later in the chapter that the production process is similar across the two systems with the main difference emerging out of redistribution. technology and power 2 relations across inputs determine the most suitable combination of inputs. to illustrate the role of technology, let us consider the following cobb-douglas production function y ¼ r α l β k 1 à α à β . if all inputs are increased by a fraction θ then the output also increases by a fraction θ. hence, the production function exhibits constant returns to scale technology. for the sake of minimising complexity, we consider the combination of inputs used here as knowledge or production technology. alternatively, one could define the production function as y ¼ ar α l β k 1 à α à β , where a represents technology. in that event, a ¼ 1 would represent constant returns to scale technology while a > 1 would represent increasing returns to scale technology. power relations between the different owners of inputs (or factors of production) are enforced through rules such as factory discipline, law and order etc. in the power hierarchy, the state typically enjoys 'monopoly of violence'. it can also exert 'threat of violence'. thus, it acts as the main enforcer of power relations. the production process converts inputs into outputs for mass consumption. even though technology plays a critical role in the production process, power relations also matter at the margin. for instance, given a certain level of technology, inputs can gain at each other's expense if the existing set of rules or institutions are biased in their favour thereby assigning more power. the owner of capital can extract payment greater than their marginal product using the power hierarchy while depressing wages of workers using violent repression. 3 as technology is upgraded, the combination of inputs required for production changes thus altering power relations over time. moreover, with technology upgrade the need for skilled labour increases relative to unskilled or low skilled labour thereby introducing hierarchy within labour. under this system of production, within country inequality and poverty stems from the relative payments received by the inputs of production, skills, and power relations. power relations act both at the micro and macro levels and can be either progressive or regressive. for instance, if a particular technology is biased in favour of skills and capital then a progressive power relations system practiced either by the state or an enterprise can correct for the resultant inequality through redistribution or reskilling of workers. in contrast, a regressive power relations system if practiced can perpetuate inequality and cause extreme poverty. plantation economies in the americas and other former colonies in africa and asia are good examples of such systems. similarly, across country inequality and poverty could stem from skill and technology gap, and a political system perpetuating regressive power relations. as described above, a fraction of the output produced in a capitalist economy using the production function (2.1) is used for factor payments. a fraction of the output is also used for investments, consumption, government expenditure, maintenance of the existing stock of machines (or capital), and endow children of the owners of capital with capital. 4 government expenditure includes spending on military, police, law enforcement, public sector employees, and welfare. at least in theory, under perfectly competitive market structure there will be free entry and exit of firms. therefore, there will be no surplus value (or rent) generated by the firms. in practice, all market economies exhibit oligarchic or monopolistically competitive market structure. for interested readers, i would refer to the literature on schumpeterian growth. this literature demonstrates the prevalence of non-competitive market structures in market economies. under conditions of oligarchy or monopolistic competition with at best partial free entry, all firms and by extension the entire economy generates positive rent. in socialist economies, the entire rent is appropriated by the state. a part of it is redistributed to the population and a part of it is saved in the form of precious metals or other liquid or illiquid financial assets. the per capita redistributed rent for the elite is greater than the same for the non-elite population. for a complete account of growth and distribution in socialist economies, see kalecki (1990 kalecki ( , 1992 kalecki ( , 1993 . we discuss more on this in chaps. 8 and 9. in contrast, in market economies, the state uses tax as the main instrument to appropriate a proportion of the surplus or rent from the private actors (mainly owners of capital). labour can also generate a surplus in the form of savings but this is small relative to the surplus generated by firms. therefore, marketoriented states typically do not tax small savings. the economy illustrated above attains steady state when per capita capital stock and per capita output stops growing over time. note that we are assuming exogenous population growth at a constant rate. the steady-state level of per capita capital stock and output is dependent on the factors of production including natural resources and capital. long-run growth in per capita income is possible with steady technological progress, which continually shifts the production frontier given production inputs (or factors of production). an increase in the access to natural resources or capital also increases the steady-state level of income and the economy shifts from a lower level steady state to a higher level steady state. this expansionary shift is described as the 'transitional dynamics'. note that the steady-state result appears due to the theoretical assumptions of constant returns to scale (crs) and diminishing returns to the factors of production. it is also possible for economies to make efficiency gains by using the inputs better if they are not producing on the production possibility frontier. let us now examine the factors that can trigger expansion in the abovementioned model. under the strict contours of the model, an expansion in the resource base r leads the economy to a higher steady state. therefore, access to new natural resources is expansionary. the effect of the expansion of the labour force on the economy is manyfold. a larger labour force would imply a greater share of the output is used to equip more new workers with capital. this would leave less output for the purpose of investments, which would be contractionary. however, a larger labour force can also reduce cost of production and increase rent for the firms if the institutional structures allow them to discriminate across different groups of the labour force. this can effectively create a constant pool of surplus labour for the owners of capital. overall, it is expected that the latter effect would dominate over the former and therefore would be expansionary. the model illustrated above is a supply-side model, as it does not deal explicitly with the demand side. it implicitly assumes that in the long run, supply creates its own demand. expansion of the size of market would present a positive demand shock to the economy and therefore undoubtedly would be expansionary. it would provide new incentives for firms and the economy to expand output supply. access to a bigger market would open up additional opportunities for firms to exploit scale economies and maximise rent. finally, exogenous technological progress in the form of a as noted above would also be expansionary. the dynamic here is identical to a textbook solow model. even if we introduce the flexibility of endogenous technological progress as in schumpeterian growth models, the effect of a positive technology shock is always expansionary. the model as described above does not take into account the distributional consequences of economic expansion. it implicitly assumes that there are no distributional consequences as all the factors of production receive payments equal to their marginal product. in reality, factor markets in a capitalist system are segmented not just by skill levels but also by social status. therefore, economic expansion as illustrated above inevitably delivers skewed distributional outcome, which unleashes antagonistic political forces. the balance of power between these antagonistic political forces constitutes the political equilibrium or steady state, which is not explicitly discussed in the model so far. for example, a somewhat simplistic description of the political economy equilibrium would be that the production process is capital and skill intensive and therefore the distributional outcome inevitably favours the owners of capital and skills relative to the owners of other factors of production, especially unskilled or semi-skilled labour. in reality, the political economy dynamics is far more complex which i aim to describe next. the above model is capable of delivering a stable steady state without the need for continual expansion. therefore, a valid question would be why the system needs to be expansionary. the answer stems from the stability of the political equilibrium that emerges from the distributional consequences of the economic steady-state equilibrium. the political equilibrium shapes the rules of the economic equilibrium. therefore, political instability leads to economic instability. the political equilibrium remains stable as long as the majority population perceives the distributional outcome fair. overall, the majority care about their absolute income as opposed to their relative income. therefore, the majority are willing to tolerate inequality as long as their absolute income is going up over time. in other words, the unskilled and semi-skilled labour force would perceive the distributional outcome fair as long as their absolute income is increasing over time but albeit at a slower pace relative to the owners of capital and skills. the only way to deliver such an outcome is through continual expansion or economic growth. if this is not the case then the legitimacy of political equilibrium is called into question. questionable legitimacy destabilises the political equilibrium and in turn the economic equilibrium or the steady state. furthermore, expansion generates economic rent and the incumbent elite protects their rent by creating entry barriers for new entrants often by using brute force. we will describe the role of brute force later in the book. in the event of a growth slowdown, the sharp distributional contradictions inherent to the system are unleashed and consequently, the system enters a phase of crisis and stress. a politico-economic system in crisis and stress gives rise to elite competition, rivalry, and feuds. in turn, the incumbent elites also use feuds and military conflict as tools to achieve expansion of their resource base in order to sustain growth and maintain stability. in what follows, i argue that this dynamic of expansion, crisis, feuds, and further expansion is the toolbox that could be used to explain the history of global capitalism. i elaborate on the mechanism described above a bit further in the following paragraphs. in order to describe the political economy dynamics, let us stratify the society into elites and non-elites. elites are a minority. however, they exert substantial influence on the political equilibrium and shape the rules that govern economic and political life. elites are typically the owners of natural resources and capital. the non-elites could be divided into broadly two groups-skill endowed and unskilled. the skilled endowed non-elites are typically upwardly mobile. since returns to skills are substantial, therefore they are presented with the opportunity to save, invest, and own capital. examples of such groups of non-elites are the merchants in the early modern era with their entrepreneurial and military skills and the urban university-educated middle class in the contemporary world with their engineering or information technology skills. let us also impose a taxonomy of elites. elites can be classified as three typesnational security elite, financial and corporate elite, and media elite. all of these elites have vested interest in expansion which i will call imperial expansion. as i will demonstrate later in the book that expansion beyond a point becomes well outside the territorial and cultural boundaries of the core and hence imperial in nature. as the empire expands, the size of the rent that these elite groups could extract also expands. the empire could expand directly by setting up colonies and absorbing more and more territory through military conflicts. it could also expand through proxies and via controlling the economic and political means of others. the former is observed leading up to the second world war whereas the latter is a method of choice for imperial expansion in post-colonial societies after the second world war. large corporations set up production within strategically important sectors. they provide the benefit of scale economies, monopoly power, and rent maximisation to the sections of elite who own natural resources and capital. rent is extracted via restricting entry and increasing the size of the market through imperial expansion. note that both of these shocks would result in a positive shift in the economic steady state. this takes place irrespective of ideologies and political preferences of the elite. for example, both liberal and socialist philosophies are internationalist in nature as they both rely on the capitalist mode of production. again, it is important to emphasize that the motivation behind expansion here is twofold. first, the profit and power motives of the incumbent elite. expansion increases the size of the rent and hence increases the economic and political power of the incumbent elite. we assume that political power is derived from economic power. greater political power allows the incumbent elite to tilt the rules in their favour that in turn ensures favourable distributional outcome and greater rent in the subsequent periods. second, the stability of the entire system. expansion creates enough surplus for redistribution. redistribution in turn helps the incumbent elite to dampen sharp contradictions within the society emerging from the skewed distributional outcome of the capitalist system. therefore, globalisation of the mode of production and imperial expansion is central to the capitalist system and its survival. globalisation of the mode of production implies creating a global network of raw materials, labour, production, and markets to sell goods and services. militarism is an integral part of this system, as one would need muscle power to secure the networks. competing empires would like to expand and secure their respective global networks. given that resources and markets are finite, confrontation, or what i call 'elite feuds' emerge as an inevitable consequence of such imperial rivalry. it is of course in the mutual interest of these competing empires to manage such conflict. management can take place through a global security architecture or global institutions. alternatively, it can also take place through some form of unwritten rules, bilateral or multilateral treaties, and sheer luck. however, all of these mechanisms are subject to commitment problems. in other words, there is no effective enforcement mechanism at the global level. if one empire perceives itself to be too strong or too weak they might deem the perceived cost of a direct violent confrontation to be acceptable and thereby violate the existing agreements. we will return to this discussion again later. the national security elite within the society looks after security and defence of the production and raw materials networks. therefore, they look after the industries related to national defence. it is relatively more nationalistic to start with as the defence industries typically have a home bias. this however changes over time and with the size of the empire. larger empires also internationalise their defence production networks in order to reduce costs and exploit economies of scale. therefore, they tend to become more internationalist over time. the financial elite derives their wealth and power from controlling the supply of money. money is the mode of transaction in capitalist societies. as i have described earlier, large corporations and skilled non-elites generate surplus from exploiting economies of scale or partaking in skill-intensive production. generating these surpluses and day-to-day economic exchanges involve potentially infinite number of transactions. to reduce transaction costs requires a mode of transaction and hence the role of money. the surpluses also need to be saved for the purpose of investments or future consumption. therefore, they need a store of value. money and other forms of liquid and illiquid assets act as a store of value (or instruments of saving). the conversion of savings into investments, the management of assets, and pooling of risk associated with saving and investing require intermediation. financial institutions provide this service of intermediation and the financial elite controls these institutions. the power of the financial elite evolves over time. as the size of the empire grows, so is the power of the financial elite. outward orientation is natural to the financial elite as it collectively increases their power and wealth. in particular, when the size of the imperial state is relatively small, the financial elite derives their wealth from issuing currency on behalf of the state and buying state securities and debt. the imperial state pays interest to the financial elite in return for holding their debt. the currency issuance (or the ious) by the financial elite 5 is typically backed by precious metals such as gold and silver. the stock of the precious metal dictates how much currency the financial elites can issue and therefore acts as a constraint from the supply side. in addition, the total volume of economic activity acts as a constraint from the demand side. for example, if there is an economic expansion (or output growth) then it is expected that the number of transactions in the economy would grow thereby increasing demand for money. the supply of money (or currency in circulation) would need to be increased accordingly. if there is imbalance in the form of excess supply of money then it would trigger inflation. in contrast, if there is excess demand for money (or not enough currency in circulation) then that would trigger a collapse in bond prices and an increase in interest rate. bond prices would fall as wealthy citizens would try to sell bonds and other financial assets in order to satisfy their demand for liquidity. borrowers and bond issuers such as the imperial state would have to pay more to borrow thereby increasing bond yield. subsequently, economic contraction would ensue. as the empire expands, so is its access to raw materials and markets. large corporations typically lead this process on behalf of the empire. under a globalised system of trade and commerce, at least within the imperial boundary, expanding commerce demands expansion in the financial system as well. this implies expansion in currency issuance by the financial elite. the colonies are encouraged (or forced) to use the imperial currency as their mode of transaction. at the very best, the colonies set up currency boards by pegging their local currency to the currency of the imperial core thereby giving up their monetary policy independence. colonial governments are also forced to hold sovereign debt of the imperial core. this creates additional demand for the imperial currency in terms of both transactions and assets outside of the imperial core. furthermore, an expanding empire brings in new security challenges in terms of protecting trade routes. maintaining military presence in strategically important locations gain increasing importance. a network of overseas military bases become essential for the management of the empire. needless to say that this imposes a significant burden on the imperial state budget. therefore, imperial states have to engage in deficit financing to satisfy the financing needs. in other words, the budgetary challenges are addressed intertemporally by imperial states through borrowing from the future. imperial states issue bonds which are then bought, sold, and managed by the financial elite. this also creates a symbiotic relationship between the financial and national security elites. the national security elites do not mind military conflicts as long as it is below their threshold level of cost in terms of personnel and equipment loss. personnel loss acts as a constraint in any armed conflict for the national security elite. all of the above taken together contributes to the wealth and power of the financial elite. note that the sole instrument to power for the financial elite is currency issuance. the constraints on currency issuance are primarily twofold. first constraint is the transactions demand for currency. imperial expansion is an obvious response to increase transaction demand. second constraint is the reserve requirement. having precious metals of equal value (or a fraction of the value) in reserve against currency issuance is the key to the stability of any fractional reserve financial system. this allows the financial elite to hedge against the risk of herd behaviour and bank runs. obviously, the financial elite also strives to minimise this constraint but there is a trade-off. strengthening regulatory environment, property rights, contracting institutions could encourage peripheral players to invest in imperial core currency denominated assets. this could increase transaction demand. furthermore, the currency could be used in the international trade of strategic commodities such as energy. money supply could be increased accordingly without expanding the reserve requirements (i.e. the need to hold precious metals). however, there is always a limit to this expansion as it depends on third parties choosing to use the imperial currency. military threats could be used to compel third parties into trading using the imperial currency but there is a cost in terms of personnel and other losses. in the end, controlling human behaviour and currency preferences is not costless. the three elite groups within the political system wield enormous political and economic power. this is irrespective of the political system that is in place. political systems (democracy, theocracy, autocracy etc.) are largely instruments of legitimacy of the elite rule. they help address the political succession problems inherent in any political system. democracies choose their elite from a wider pool using plebiscites, theocracies use religious and moral authority, whereas autocracies rely on heredity or the selectorate. 6 note that political systems are generally not universal and appear to be correlated with local traditions, culture, and religion. imposition (often violently) of one type of political system (preferred by the imperial elite) over another is also common and correlated with the forces of expansionism and globalisation. sometimes moral arguments are used to justify violent expansionism but they are never credible when judged through the lens of imperial interest. relationship between the imperial elite (elite in the core) and the colonial elite (elite in the periphery) is also very important. the core imperial elite tolerates some degree of autonomy of the peripheral elite depending on the level of trust between them. the core-periphery relationship appears to be heterogeneous. trust plays a very important role along with the distribution of rent and patronage. the role of the peripheral elite is primarily to collect rent on behalf of the core. it facilitates extraction of raw materials, manages physical and human resources, and maintains military presence in the event of any security threat. it also maintains local infrastructure facilitating primarily resource extraction and other economic activities. an example of the heterogeneous nature of core-periphery trust, we could look at colonies populated by european settlers as opposed to non-settler colonies. european imperial elite trusts the european colonial elite more than they trust the natives. this could be due to cultural ties. this could also be due to sociocultural constraints faced by the european imperial elite located at the imperial core in terms of exercising unmitigated violence or coercion towards the european colonial elite at the periphery. for instance, any atrocities or acts of coercion committed against the native population in the colonies would not affect public opinion much in the imperial core. 7 therefore, it is unlikely to threaten legitimacy of the imperial elite's rule in the imperial core. in contrast, a conflict with the colonial elite of european descent could endanger the legitimacy of the imperial elite's rule at the imperial core due to deep cultural ties. overall, a patron-client relationship typically evolves. technological progress facilitates growth thereby increasing rent. this, in turn, supports expansionism and thereby makes the system durable. it also aids legitimacy of the elite rule if it improves average living standards. however, the spasmodic nature of technological progress makes expansion through this channel uncertain. typically, diminishing returns to the factors of production given a certain level of technology sets in. this triggers elite competition and feuds over the existing resources. when is the elite likely to use coercion and violence (both internally and externally)? when all else fails and the elite becomes desperate and fearful about their existence. in other words, when there is a credible threat to their authority and power they resort to violence. therefore, empires in their declining phases are often the most dangerous because of their increased propensity to resort to violence. elites (especially large corporations) use their economic power to control media (the information space) and hence manipulate public opinion. this is a critical instrument for the elite in order to manufacture consent and seek legitimacy. note that the incumbent elite cannot rule the masses without legitimacy. therefore, in any political system, the incumbent elite would require a critical minimum support from the masses in order to be legitimate. the media elite colludes with the incumbent in order to manufacture consent and seek legitimacy on behalf of the incumbent. in return, the media elite receives a share of the rent. note that, the media elite faces competition in the information space. therefore, the appearance of neutrality is important for the colluding media elite in order to remain a credible source of information. hence, they devote significant resources to appear impartial while defending the legitimacy and imperial interests of the incumbent elite at both home (imperial core) and abroad (periphery). in addition to the information control, the imperial core also uses international assistance and non-governmental assistance to buy influence and promote hegemonic interest in the periphery. we have not discussed the media arm of the elite in detail thus far. this is more modern than all the other elites. we will talk more about it in due course. politicians/leaders in the imperial core do not act independently. they are only one component of the elite and is often chosen by the underlying powerful group and then legitimised by a popular vote or other forms of institutions. their actions nonetheless are often heavily constrained by the national security and the economic/financial (large corporations) elites. this system of social contract works fine as long as there is economic expansion and tolerable inequality. in other words, some improvement in living standards for everyone in the society albeit at an unequal pace. the system gets challenged when growth slows down or stops (diminishing returns), inequality increases, and growth becomes skewed (i.e. only the very top benefits from growth). this inevitably leads to expansionist pressures with the aim of expanding access to resources (material and human) and markets. this lies at the heart of elite feuds, wars, and violent conflicts. in what follows, i present a rapid-fire illustration of the theory in action to explain the economic histories of the global north and south. i will of course enter into much more detailed discussion in parts ii and iii of the book. the global north and especially britain was one of the early movers towards an energy and technology-intensive production process commonly known as the industrial revolution. many other countries had the initial conditions to undergo such transition in the production process but britain was the first among equals. in bhattacharyya (2016) , i discuss the process and geographic preconditions that led to the industrial revolution therefore will not repeat it here. however, the key point to note is the desire to expand output. expansion can take place via new technology, access to abundant raw materials (including energy), and access to new markets. all of this taken together offers economies of scale, which further reduces the unit cost of production and facilitates expansion. the desire to expand not only stems from greed and scale economies but also from maintaining legitimacy of the ruling elite. without growth in output, the redistributive demands by the disadvantaged input (labour) could increase making it increasingly expensive for the owners of the winning inputs (capital and skills) to preserve the prevailing power relations. we can call the owners of the winning inputs the elite who typically gets to set the rules both at the micro and macro levels. in the global north, the spanish and the portuguese were the first to embark on this expansion drive once they organized themselves as imperial nation-states. under an early modern pre-industrial production relation, nation-states offered the desired optimal scale economies and therefore we notice the mass extinction of feudal states in western europe. in bhattacharyya (2011a bhattacharyya ( , 2016 , i discuss what transpired such transition and to what extent geography contributed to it. the iberians had ocean navigable ships but did not have the gift of steam power. britain managed to make that significant technological leap first. moreover, even prior to the technological leap england shattered the expansion prospects of the spanish in the north atlantic by defeating their armada. the industrial revolution put britain in a dominant position as an industrial power. the initial access to abundant coal in england and wales facilitated the transition towards a coal-fired energy-intensive and steam-dependent production process. military success contributed towards access to new markets and new resources, which offered scale. in case of britain, the initial expansion occurred in north america and the indian sub-continent. the energy-intensive production process and technology gradually diffused to other parts of continental europe. what followed is intense competition for market access and natural resources between different european imperial states. a complicated system of alliances, betrayals, and treaties between european empires signify this epoch with the french, and the dutch and the british dominating the global map of trade and commerce at different points in time. this intense competition gave rise to three major conflictsthe napoleonic wars, world war i and world war ii. following world war ii the european colonial world order collapsed. the global south during this time was colonised. it collectively did not manage to make the transition towards an energy-intensive steam-based production system and as a result lagged behind. some societies in the south did have the initial conditions to make such a transition but failed to do so in time (bhattacharyya 2011b) . moreover, the south systematically succumbed to the military and technological prowess of the north losing key battles and conflicts and thereby giving way in terms of access to markets, raw materials, and strategic control over logistics. as a result, the elite in global south and its population ceded control of the production process and power relations within their society. power relation was dominated by the colonizers who could set the rules regarding access to raw materials, technology, capital, and distribution. this triggered deindustrialization and deskilling of the local population, which perpetuated inequality and extreme poverty. after the second world war, many of these former colonies became independent and embarked on nation-building. nation-building during this epoch was driven by self-reliance in order to protect the hard-earned sovereignty and independence. this strategy led to some improvements in the living standards of the masses but largely failed to deliver on the promise of growth and mass eradication of poverty. the strategy was over reliant on the internal market, which hardly offered economies of scale. as a result, it failed to deliver the growth and distribution needed to transform these societies. following the conclusion of the cold war in 1991 new opportunities emerged for the global south from a reinvigorated model of globalization. globalization and international trade offered the scale economies and access to technology required to generate growth and reduce poverty. sovereign, independent and accountable governments in the south also helped in improving power relations, which helped reducing poverty. southeast asia, china, and india are useful examples of such success stories. therefore, one could argue that the lessons from history going forward is that the most effective poverty reduction strategy is to engage in international trade and commerce in a competitive global economy where the rules of engagement are fair and respect the sovereignty of every nation-state. the theoretical framework introduced above is directly related to a large literature on long-run economic growth and development. i have discussed them elsewhere (see bhattacharyya 2011a) and in various journal publications. therefore, i will not include them here. however, chap. 13 offers a fairly comprehensive review of this literature for interested readers. the framework is partially related to the politics, sociology, and international relations literature. wallerstein (1983) describes capitalism as a historical social system with an imperial core and colonial periphery. political scientists hardt and negri (2000) describe the transition from a nation-state imperialism to a postmodern empire. brewer (1991) and meiksins wood (2003) offer theoretical explanations of imperialism. in particular, how the political power of capital evolves with capitalism. another related literature is the work that followed carr (1937) and morgenthau (1948) commonly referred to as the realist traditions of international relations theory. note that, the primary subject matter of this book is the economic history of capitalism. therefore, any relationship to the social and political theories are at best partial and somewhat remote. furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, none of these studies in sociology and politics discuss the role of economies of scale in economic expansion and empire, a key subject matter here. the contributions in sociology and politics also do not offer a holistic and long view of economic and political history as is offered here. a more relevant framework however is north et al.'s (2009) 'natural state' thesis. the key idea is the following. elites within a state are able to form coalitions. they do so in order to restrict entry and protect their rent from potential challengers. however, the forces of free market, trade, economic growth, and liberal democracy challenge these restrictions. the forces unleashed by the process of economic growth and liberal democracy challenge incumbent elite power in illiberal polities and therefore the elites suppress economic growth and democratization in order to hold on to power. in contrast, states that are able to transition towards free market and liberal democracy are competitive, durable, and prosperous. north et al.'s (2009) 'natural state' thesis explain the development process of countries in the north atlantic. in particular, it explains anglo-american engagement in atlantic trade and subsequent economic and political changes. however, it ignores the role of the atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and institutionalised racial discrimination in shaping the economic fortunes of the atlantic economies (williams 1944; findlay 1990; inikori 2002) . 8 more importantly, the 'natural state' thesis fails to explain the decline in economic and political powers of post-imperial societies possessing the twin institutions of free market and liberal democracy. the relative decline of british economic and political power post-second world war is a case in point. furthermore, the relative decline of the continental european economies of the atlantic alliance since 2008 global financial crisis also cannot be explained by the 'natural state' thesis. this trend is only likely to accelerate in a post-covid-19 pandemic world. north et al.'s (2009) 'natural state' thesis does not explain institutional capture in western liberal democracies. the thesis assumes that the twin institutions of free market and liberal democracy is sufficient to guarantee perpetual economic expansion and fair distributive outcome. yet lobbying and institutional capture erode institutional capacity in free market liberal democracies delivering weak growth and skewed distributive outcome. rising income and wealth inequality in the united states since 2008 is a case in point (saez and zucman 2019) . indeed, a fraction of it could be explained by technological progress. nevertheless, institutional capture and tax evasion by the elite remains a potent factor. the 'natural state' thesis also fails to explain the rise of china, a country that did not embrace anglo-american liberal political institutions. china's expansion strategy is not dissimilar to the european imperial powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. the european monarchies created monopolies using the institutional mechanism of the royal charter granting the bourgeoisie monopoly rights over trade in certain commodities. several east india companies emerged out of this process. the intention was to exploit scale economies and eliminate competition. similarly, modern china's expansion strategy relies on trade, foreign direct investment, and state monopoly in strategic sectors. trade increases the size of the market thereby offering scale economy. foreign direct investment works symbiotically with the state monopolies offering scale. privately owned small and mediumsize businesses evolve as part of the supply chain of the monopolies. in contrast, my theoretical framework as described above is able to adequately explain the relative decline of british and continental european economic and political power. the loss of empire limits accesses to markets, raw materials, and human resources. at the very least, it makes the inputs of production relatively more expensive thereby reducing economic rent. loss of markets also limits the ability to my framework is also able to explain institutional capture within the atlantic alliance and the rise of china and the brics growth miracles and growth debacles: exploring root causes five centuries of economic growth in india: the institutions perspective the historical origins of poverty in developing countries marxist theories of imperialism: a critical survey international relations since the peace treaties the triangular trade and the atlantic economy of the eighteenth century: a simple general-equilibrium model (essays in international finance slavery, the british atlantic economy and the industrial revolution. discussion papers in economics and social history number 113 africans and the industrial revolution in england: a study in international trade and economic development political aspects of full employment central price determination introduction to the theory of growth in a socialist economy empire of capital politics among nations: the struggle for power and peace violence and social order the triumph of injustice: how the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay historical capitalism with capitalist civilization capitalism and slavery key: cord-0057550-7vaydzk3 authors: lykidis, alex title: afterword date: 2020-11-27 journal: art cinema and neoliberalism doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-61006-7_7 sha: 1ef413368cfb5402ecc915fcc0c992e77f10e40b doc_id: 57550 cord_uid: 7vaydzk3 this short chapter begins with an overview of the irrational and punitive characteristics of neoliberalism and the radicalization of youth in the post-2008 period. the rest of the chapter considers the way art cinema can remain politically relevant by engaging with popular culture, addressing the systemic cruelty of contemporary capitalism and providing ethical and social alternatives to the current order. the chapter concludes with an analysis of the ending of yorgos lanthimos’s the favourite (2018), which provides an example of how to balance social criticism with symbolic transcendence of neoliberal capitalism. we are living through an irrational phase of neoliberalism, defined by fictitious growth, incompetent leadership and an imperviousness to critique. the political response to the 2008 financial crisis was to use taxpayer money to bail out the banks and pump trillions into the financial sector through quantitative easing. this has resulted in zombie banks that are overleveraged and would not be viable were they not propped up in this way. because the underlying economy is not sound, banks have not favored investments in the productive sector, instead channeling their excess liquidity to risky financial instruments in the shadow banking system. speculation and stock buybacks have fueled asset bubbles that destabilize the global economy and decouple executive pay, bank profits and stock market gains from the living standards of workers (harman 2009, 282-289, 303; van zon 2016, 11-24, 42-48, 149-155) . the zombification of the banking sector has merely kicked the can down the road rather than resolving the problems that caused the 2008 crisis, rebuffing any attempts to restructure financial capitalism or to reassess the tenets of free market ideology (davies 2016, 133; milburn 2019, 35) . the current irrationality of neoliberalism is most evident in the insistence on austerity as the appropriate response to the 2008 financial meltdown, which has magnified the catastrophic social consequences of the crisis and widened popular discontent with neoliberal governments. during the past decade, the zombification of the world economy has been facilitated by the zombification of political governance, as keir milburn explains: the key characteristic of zombies is brain death … the zombie is a body stripped of its ability to alter course and decide on a different future … similarly, the distinguishing characteristic of post-crisis neoliberalism is its inability to reform itself, despite a decade-long stagnation. neoliberalism has stopped making sense, even on its own terms, yet the project hasn't stopped. neoliberal ideology has lost its coherence, yet its policies roll out unabated. (milburn 2019, 50-51) william davies describes this as a state of exception that suspends the critical judgment needed to address the underlying causes of crises (davies 2014, 177) . the leadership vacuum created by the intransigence of neoliberal politicians has been exacerbated by the recent electoral victories of right-wing demagogues whose continued adherence to neoliberal policies, coupled with their corruption and negligence, have further eroded the effectiveness of policy responses to the 2008 crisis and its aftermath. as wolfgang streeck aptly summarizes, "[t]he utter destruction of national institutions capable of economic redistribution and the resultant overreliance on monetary and central bank policy as the economic policy of last resort have made capitalism ungovernable, whether by 'populist' or technocratic methods" (streeck 2017, 168) . the other defining feature of the current phase of neoliberalism is its punitiveness. the imposition of austerity on people who lost their homes and savings in 2008 seemed to serve no macroeconomic purpose since it deepened the recessionary effects of the crisis. according to william davies, austerity's assault on the impoverished masses after 2008 was an act of vengeance: "those crippled by poverty, debt and collapsing socialsafety nets … have already been largely destroyed as an autonomous political force. yet somehow this increases the urge to punish them further" (davies 2016, 132) . the punitiveness of contemporary politics is enabled by the increasing authoritarianism of neoliberal governance, which takes three primary forms. first, there is "constitutional authoritarianism" in which neoliberal policies are forced on resistant populations through international treaties, currency agreements and debt repayment schemes (ayers and saad-filho 2015, 606) . second, there is an expansion of executive power, especially in the aftermath of crises when emergency conditions are used to impose unpopular measures on other branches of government (davies 2014, 27) . third, popular discontent with the neoliberal order and the suppression of left-wing alternatives have enabled the resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism: "without a left … the maelstrom of capitalist 'development' can only generate liberal forces and authoritarian counterforces, bound together in a perverse symbiosis" (fraser 2017, 47) . the punitive phase of neoliberalism has pronounced racial characteristics, not only due to the neocolonial dynamics of contemporary capitalism but also because people of color comprise a significant portion of the working class in many countries that have been devastated by austerity and right-wing populists blame immigrants for the economic failures of neoliberalism (hong 2015, 57-62) . the demand during the covid-19 pandemic for workers to prematurely return to farms, factories and schools despite the obvious health risks reveals the increasingly necropolitical dimensions of neoliberalism. the punitiveness of neoliberal governance lends a renewed relevance to the aesthetic principles of antonin artaud's theater of cruelty. according to angelos koutsourakis, artaudian techniques can reveal the systemic cruelty of the existing social order by favoring physicality over psychology, making the body a locus of social conflict, situating violence in the mundane, making the audience viscerally experience the suffering of characters and using theatricality and uncommunicative language to denaturalize representation (koutsourakis 2018, 190-216) . we already see artaud's impact on the films of ulrich seidl, yorgos lanthimos and lars von trier and we can expect his influence on art cinema to grow given the punitiveness of the current phase of neoliberalism. the apparent inescapability of contemporary capitalism produces what lauren berlant calls cruel optimism, an attachment to fantasies of the good life that allow us to endure the harsh conditions of existence under neoliberalism but also suture us further into a destructive social order that no longer provides us with mobility, security or equality (berlant 2011) . the impossibility of escaping the current system is captured in the situation tragedy, which berlant describes as a "marriage between tragedy and situation comedy where people are fated to express their flaws episodically, over and over, without learning, changing, being relieved, becoming better, or dying" (berlant 2011, 176) . the increasing irrationality and illegitimacy of neoliberal governance may allow art cinema to move past the cruel optimism theorized by berlant to a more radical break with the current order. we can expect future art films to oscillate between bewilderment and contempt, irreverence and indignation at the incongruities and injustices of contemporary capitalism, with filmmakers adapting art cinema style to the demands of this new phase of neoliberalism. while right-wing populism has been the main beneficiary of capitalism's post-2008 legitimacy crisis, there have also been important left-wing challenges to the neoliberal consensus during this period, first in the form of anti-austerity, anti-racism and pro-democracy street protests and occupations in 2010-2013 and then via the electoral gains made by socialists or social democrats like podemos, syriza, bernie sanders and jeremy corbyn. young people have been a driving force of these extraparliamentary and electoral contestations of the neoliberal order, with electoral results in many countries showing an unprecedented polarization of voting preferences by age (milburn 2019, 1-6, 57-103) . older generations that accumulated wealth before or in the early days of neoliberalism have been largely insulated from its worst effects: indebtedness, unemployment and precarity. these generational differences have been accentuated by the neoliberal response to the 2008 crisis, which created asset bubbles that favor older people who own more stocks and property (milburn 2019, 37) . this is an era of lost youth, in which most young people "are trapped working long hours at badly paid jobs just to make enough money to pay the rent," their living standards and prospects squeezed by the rentierism of financialized capitalism that extracts value parasitically from their contingent labor, student debt and online interactions (milburn 2019, 114) . youth has been associated with art cinema since successive new waves of the 1960s posed generational challenges to their respective national film industries (in france, most famously, against le cinéma du papa). many new wave films featured young protagonists, thematized youthful rebellion and were directed by young filmmakers. james tweedie has shown, for instance, that french, taiwanese and chinese new wave films captured the social upheavals visited upon youth culture by the twin processes of globalization and urbanization in the 1960s, 1980s and 1990s (tweedie 2013) . we can similarly expect the recent divergence of life prospects and political beliefs along generational lines to exert pressure on the aesthetic conventions of art cinema. a mode of filmmaking that continues to be associated with bourgeois audiences and to cultivate an air of distinction is unlikely to resonate with the political sensibilities of today's beleaguered youth. the paradox that this generational realignment creates is that it situates radical politics in an age group immersed in the commercial forms of popular culture. it is likely then that genre revision will become more prevalent in art cinema, combining popular forms familiar to young audiences with anti-establishment messages and a confrontational style. art cinema techniques such as nonlinearity, subjective narration and ambiguity have been selectively appropriated by hollywood for many years now (such as in the films of david fincher and christopher nolan), and conversely, popular genres and styles have influenced the work of contemporary art cinema directors like jacques audiard, park chan-wook and wong kar-wai (andrews 2013, 87-89, 148; kiss and willemsen 2017, 144; kovács 2007, 60; ndalianis 2007, 87; taylor 2017, 4 ; for a discussion of art cinema's engagement with popular culture in earlier periods, see corrigan 1983, 3-12, 25-41; elsaesser 2005; lev 1993 ). however, while this cross-pollination has blurred the stylistic distinctions between hollywood and art cinema, it has not eliminated their ideological differences because hollywood films rarely reproduce the critical perspectives found in art cinema. even though the mixture of high and low cultural forms is usually associated with the ahistorical depthlessness of postmodernism, the tradition of popular modernism from sergei eisenstein to abraham polonsky to spike lee demonstrates that "popular forms" can be used to "make the dialectical portrayal of social contradictions pleasurable" (koutsourakis 2018, 82 ; see also aitken 2001, 155-157) . 1 new varieties of popular modernism are needed to expand the reach and extend the relevance of art cinema by engaging with the political radicalization of today's youth. as james harvey has said: "politically fertile art films … address an us, a we, a people … not with the intention of exclusively reinforcing the us that already exists, but of insisting upon its expansion" (harvey 2018, 19) . in order to "address an us, a we, a people," art cinema will need to challenge the individualism that lies at the heart of neoliberal ideology. the promotion of the entrepreneurial self has been used to absolve the neoliberal state of the need to ensure the welfare of its citizens. personal responsibilization naturalizes social inequality, moralizes indebtedness and heightens economic insecurity (bloom 2017, 6-17, 30-35; bonanno 2017, 190; masquelier 2017, 47-52; mcguigan 2016, 129-133) . milburn argues that in order to counteract the atomization of life under neoliberalism, youth-led political movements should reinvigorate the tradition of the commons: this will involve incentivizing forms of collaborative production, disincentivizing business models based on rent, and socializing the benefits of automation, data creation and the positive externalities of network effects … governing the commons is the diametric opposite of neoliberal managerialism. it constitutes a training in democracy. instead of isolated, competitive and hierarchized individuals it produces more connected, collaborative and powerful collectivities. (milburn 2019, 117-118) communal alternatives to the current order have not been fully explored in contemporary cinema, with many films about neoliberalism "strong in making criticisms, [but] much weaker in offering solutions" (mazierska 2018, 18) . koutsourakis notes that "what connects" filmmakers "who address questions of social inequality in contemporary neoliberal societies … is precisely their mourning for the lack of a collective spirit that can enable us to envisage alternatives" (koutsourakis 2020, 63) . given the increasing illegitimacy of neoliberal governance and the radicalization of young people in many parts of the world, we can expect future art cinema to engage more extensively with communal alternatives to neoliberal individualism. but such engagements carry their own risks, since in the absence of real-life corollaries they may merely produce a phantasmatic transcendence of existing social conditions. as berlant states, while there is an "affective sense of solidarity that might come through a collective detachment from the normative world," "[n]eoliberal interests are well served by the displacement of so many historical forms of social reciprocity onto emotional registers, especially when they dramatize experiences of freedom to come that have no social world for them yet" (berlant 2011, 222) . a system as profoundly antisocial as neoliberalism relies on real or imagined acts of communal solidarity to mitigate the consequences of its own neglect. 2 martin o'shaughnessy points out, in reference to the gift economies thematized in the films of the dardenne brothers, that we should be weary of any mode of solidarity that is "dependent on that which it opposes;" that "needs neoliberalism's murderous logic to found its own commitment to the other and offers no meaningful way to move beyond this opposition" (o'shaughnessy 2020). it will be important for future art cinema to conceive of forms of communality that do not reinforce the dominance of neoliberalism. some, if not all, of the prospective elements of a politicized art cinema discussed in this chapter: a young director, young protagonists, engagement with popular culture or mainstream genres, criticism of the systemic cruelty of contemporary capitalism and the exploration of affective dispositions and social relationships that challenge the antisociality of neoliberalism. the fact that these films have been met with acclaim in film festivals as well as more popular venues demonstrates how critiques of neoliberalism are being integrated into mainstream production, distribution and reception circuits in ways that complicate any attempt to assess contemporary art cinema's oppositionality. the broad appeal of these films is based on their ability to unsettle familiar modes of spectatorship by embedding critical messages within recognizable genres and popular forms: the favourite, for instance, repurposes the middlebrow entertainments of the monarchy genre toward an unvarnished critique of undemocratic systems of governance. despite its historical subject matter, the film's stylistic continuities with lanthimos's earlier work (see chap. 3) give credence to an interpretation of the favourite as an allegory of the disenfranchisements of the neoliberal era. the endemic cruelty of social relations in queen anne's court and the incompetent leadership of the capricious monarch at the center of the narrative allow us to better understand the irrationality and punitiveness of neoliberal governance. the film's ending provides an example of how to combine criticism of contemporary capitalism with a symbolic expression, however tentative, of a communal alternative to neoliberal individualism. the final scene of the favourite shows abigail hill performing a degrading act of servitude on queen anne: kneeling down in front of anne and rubbing her gout-ridden legs while anne roughly grabs abigail's hair. this scene is unsettling for many reasons. the film has followed abigail's climb to a position of high status in the royal court so this moment of abjection serves as a harsh reminder of abigail's continued subordination within the court's rigid social hierarchy. anne was previously portrayed as a pathetic victim of others' manipulations, which makes her sadistic humiliation of abigail shocking for the audience. a manichean interpretation of this incident is complicated by preceding scenes that show abigail neglect and deceive anne in various ways. this depersonalizes the film's critique of hierarchical social arrangements by implicating both anne and abigail in the depravity of the royal court, whose diseased body, we come to realize, cannot be healed from within. the visceral discomfort that we feel as we watch this scene is based in part on how it is shot: its excruciating duration, the low angle that places us in a subjugated position and the placement of anne's legs offscreen which forces us to imagine, or to try not to imagine, the actions taking place out of frame. the unpleasantness of what we are watching (or imagining) shatters the thrill that monarchy films usually provide by allowing us to identify with powerful court figures. the favourite concludes with a superimposition of several shots: respective close-ups of anne and abigail in the midst of the act of servitude and one or more shots of the queen's rabbits, which we can interpret as a symbolic representation of the british peasantry: relatively powerless, perceived paternalistically and subject to the whims of those in charge (fig. 7.1) . the appearance of the rabbits reminds us of the masses whose lives are affected by the machinations of the royal court that have been the focus of the film's narrative. we eventually no longer see the two women so that the rabbits now fill the frame, the superimposition of multiple shots giving the impression that they are proliferating and that in time this will place sufficient pressure on the system that keeps them in cages. this closing sequence allows us to pay attention to two things at once: the film's indictment of an inequitable and exclusionary system and the symbolic portrayal of its demotic replacement. striking such a balance between an fig. 7 .1 superimposition is used to divide our attention between a critique of the political system and its symbolic transcendence in the favourite (film4 productions and waypoint entertainment, 2018) unequivocal critique of neoliberalism and the exploration of communal alternatives will be the great political and representational challenge of the coming years in art cinema and beyond. 1. there are, of course, plenty of contemporary auteurs who produce work that is radically different from mainstream cinema, many of them part of the slow cinema movement. directors such as apichatpong weerasethakul, jia zhangke, pedro costa, lee chang-dong and cristi puiu make films that deviate from conventional narrative causality and continuity editing, defy generic categorization and encourage active spectatorship. 2. according to peter bloom, "alternative values can serve to strengthen a status quo, even when they are ostensibly seeking to resist it" because "values of reciprocity, care and social responsibility are prioritized as a means of adequately coping with and to some degree 'fixing' the subjective and material problems caused by neoliberalism" (bloom 2017, 30, 38) . european film theory: a critical introduction theorizing art cinemas: foreign, cult, avant-garde, and beyond democracy against neoliberalism: paradoxes, limitations, transcendence cruel optimism the ethics of neoliberalism: the business of making capitalism moral the legitimation crisis of neoliberalism: the state, will-formation, and resistance. houndmills new german film: the displaced image the limits of neoliberalism: authority, sovereignty and the logic of competition european cinema: face to face with hollywood progressive neoliberalism versus reactionary populism: a hobson's choice zombie capitalism: global crisis and the relevance of marx jacques rancière and the politics of art cinema impossible puzzle films: a cognitive approach to contemporary complex cinema the resurgence of modernism and its critique of liberalism in the cinema of crisis screening modernism: european art cinema the euro-american cinema critique and resistance in a neoliberal age: towards a narrative of emancipation contemporary cinema and neoliberal ideology neoliberal culture. houndmills: palgrave macmillan generation left art cinema beyond neoliberalism? gift economies in the films of the dardenne brothers the return of the repressed as the beginning of the end of neoliberal capitalism troubled everyday: the aesthetics of violence and the everyday in european art cinema the age of new waves: art cinema and the staging of globalization globalized finance and varieties of capitalism. houndmills key: cord-0059394-c41feqvg authors: scribano, adrián; camarena luhrs, margarita; cervio, ana lucía title: cities, covid-19 and sensibilities: a kaleidoscope of experiences date: 2020-09-14 journal: cities, capitalism and the politics of sensibilities doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-58035-3_13 sha: 5703877964485bd50f47970a551147f0777a6275 doc_id: 59394 cord_uid: c41feqvg this final chapter is a three-part device that seeks to allow the reader to capture some fragments of the sensibilities of cities in the covid-19 pandemic. it is an irregular look, diverse across each of the three elements, which reflects the feelings of those who have looked through these three mirrors, constituting them. it is a playful ending: the reader can start and end with any of its parts and also borrow its metaphorical force from the kaleidoscope to reach unknown terrain by known means. they are reflections open to dialogue and multiple endings, to multiple images, to multiple observations. it is a chapter where beauty will be a matter for the reader, since it will be his or her eye that validates, denies or rewrites the policies of the sensibilities of the cities today. the chapter has three sections that operate as three “chapters”. we have decided to claim authorship of each section separately, for having had the experience in different cities, for being impacted by dissimilar practices of being in the city, and for valuing how the collective does not eliminate the personal, hence the selection of the title of the chapter as a whole. in this context, this final chapter is a three-part device that seeks to allow the reader to capture some fragments of the sensibilities of cities in the pandemic. it is an irregular look, diverse across each of the three elements, which reflects the feelings of those who have looked through these three mirrors, constituting them. it is a playful ending: the reader can start and end with any of its parts and also borrow its metaphorical force from the kaleidoscope to reach unknown terrain by known means. they are reflections open to dialogue and multiple endings, to multiple images, to multiple observations. it is a chapter where beauty will be a matter for the reader, since it will be his or her eye that validates, denies or rewrites the policies of the sensibilities of the cities today. in this framework, the chapter has three sections that operate as three "chapters". the first, written by margarita camarena luhrs, is "in the face of the covid-19 pandemic, emerging mutual aid practices inspired by values of protection and care for life". the second, "cities in silence. a global response to fear of the other", is offered by ana lucía cervio. and, finally, "the pandemic city: between lack and possibility", is authored by adrián scribano. we have decided to claim authorship of each section separately, for having had the experience in different cities, for being impacted by dissimilar practices of being in the city, and for valuing how the collective does not eliminate the personal, hence the selection of the title of the chapter as a whole. in the face of the covid-19 pandemic: emerging mutual aid practices inspired by values of protection and care for life as it is currently unknown how and when the covid-19 pandemic will end, everyone experiences a different degree of risk, threat, even danger of death. even so, the uncertainty that this causes is an unprecedented social force that moves us equally. under these conditions, different valuations of life itself emerge. these can be seen from responses that range from indifferent indolence on the part of some authorities, to the most practical, massive and compassionate forms of mutual aid. inseparable practices of values emerge that exceed the economic priorities of the market: reciprocity and trust, bravery and courage, generosity. above all, it is essential to protect life, to take care of oneself, which suddenly turns out to be everyone else. for this "i" that could no longer be known multiple, from the status quo the collective individualism that we felt as something so crystallized, immovable and safe, something suddenly happens: the pandemic and, once again, the feeling that we are lost. doubt, hesitation and indecision are seen everywhere. something lurks behind immediate contact. the possibility of being infected dilates the encounter, it affects us passively. there is, again, that old known presence of fear; a catalyst that we had tried to forget. with the covid-19 pandemic other emotions come into play, another state that mixes the imperative to "stop feeling" with "regain feeling (yourself) in others". the normalized amalgam of conflict networks before the pandemic cannot be rescued. it seems that it will no longer be possible to return to the former. what will change? it is not foreseeable, beyond the fact that they will try to endure the experience in the best possible way, with a grace that empowers women with much love for all people. for this reason, the situation that threatens world health opens up unprecedented opportunities that may shake capitalist structures through possible adaptations. it is clear that previous needs emerge in full force, that there are newly affected in addition to those that already existed within the prevailing social order. controversial dilemmas appear, and not all decisions in the face of events manage to leave behind well-known authoritarian and unsustainable ways. this crisis of certainties has been prolonged more and more. it seems that the world will face a "new normal" in response to covid-19, as evidence shows that the majority of the population remains susceptible to the virus. as the situation stabilizes in europe, the numbers begin to rise in latin america where, according to experts, there is still time to avoid massive outbreaks (un 2020, 1). have there been in history or today more conflict networks materially and emotionally virulent than those now experienced with the spread of the coronavirus? if they may have been longer in duration due to the outbreak of contagion, even with the tremendous hope (lessness) and fear shared today with other devastating historical episodes, there are emerging practices inspired by (re) appropriated values of unedited ways. so it can be alluded to that this pandemic is as virulent as the best known of antiquity. it can be seen this way not only because it exposes structural historical conflicts that seemed immutable, but because it complicates them by adding to these conflicts multiplied by expressive networks of pain and suffering, of death that has no reparation, that is pure destruction. while what we are currently experiencing is a cathartic conjuncture of unprecedented consequences and difficult to measure, even so, we witness the over-institutionalized violence, too many attempts to maintain control of what had managed to be normalized in all areas of social life; trying, probably fruitless, to successfully instal a "new normal" everywhere. along this spectrum, other possibilities for structuring social reality are suggested. although it would be too soon to confirm it, if the emergence of other practices related to the protection of life is not observed, other responses that go beyond the previous lines of possibility are beginning to be evident: the care of victims in different ways and in different measures; on this occasion we all live in anguish, in isolation, feeling helpless, unprotected, afraid, in the midst of a helplessness that even silence and weather cannot break. memories of fatal epidemics that transformed societies and states remain from the depths of history. ravages of its consequences are still expressed in the bodies/emotions of people everywhere. alive, perhaps less fatal, are the traces of high-risk contagious diseases such as smallpox, measles, polio, malaria, tuberculosis, amoebiasis, cholera, dengue, viral hepatitis, typhoid, dysentery and other food poisoning infections. these and other diseases are present throughout the history of despair that has plagued the world with health crises at different times, as seen in the following table 13 .1. this comparison between covid-19 and other major historical health crises caused by previous pandemics helps us to remember how much they altered world history and, above all, to state that there may now be a possible lesser degree of devastation because it will end, to a great extent, source: own elaboration based on carrión (2020), garrido (2020) , and opazo sáez (2020). thanks to the fact "that modern science and medicine can be rationally used to stop it" (opazo sáez 2020, 4). still, the events of death remain part of the common denominators of all these epidemics. like famines or wars, the covid-19 pandemic makes evident correct measures or great failures experienced in each place and on each of the occasions mentioned. the truth is that measures implemented have not yet been sufficient to completely contain it. in fact, it is difficult to have sustainable public health programmes when priorities change according to what happens at any given time. one difference with what happens with the covid-19 outbreaks now is that public health measures are beginning to be effective in some way to control the "spikes" of maximum incidence, delay the spread of germs and thus reduce the level of deaths worldwide. current epidemiological surveillance is an important historical difference in knowing who is affected and who is not. knowledge about the spread of germs is decisive. however, it is massive physical distancing and voluntary quarantine measures that work the most. the need is known and felt to protect goods and services essential for social life (e.g. health, food, water, energy, work, housing, transportation, communication, education, etc.) as well as access to all this in economic conditions that, although not completely paralyzed, are necessarily restricted by sanitary measures that seek to selectively contain the contagion nuclei. if income and payments should be equal for everyone simply by being alive, the reality is that they are not the same. asymmetries in income, or depending on what is done in different jobs, generate very different profits and wages, and salaries do not correspond to profit margins. these differences in spending capacity, combined with the informality of 56% of the economy and unemployment, force jobs to be carried out in extremely unequal ways. so the information and protection resources to face the pandemic are also very different. this is evident when we see that, for example, 17% of parisians (greater paris) have left the city to take refuge in their temporary residences in the countryside. that is something that the poor cannot afford. the covid-19 drama in new york, a city with crowded morgues and field hospitals (paredes 2020, 2) . thus, we know that huge sectors of supermarket and warehouse employees, those who distribute basic products, cannot be quarantined, nor are those in charge of their transport, drivers and storekeepers, or hospital staff. as criticism of government actions around the world shows, very different perceptions emerge about what care and protection measures need to be put into practice. "people die because circumstances compel them to continue working. this generates fear and anger at the same time, because many feel abandoned. it is as if the life of the poor had no value" (paredes 2020, 4) . thus, different perceptions also arise about what is considered urgent. we are experiencing a cultural change that is not only worldwide, which, if it forces isolation, not only has with it very harsh introspective effects of an overwhelming silence. the normality that with all the difficulties and tensions of the day-to-day was already lived with difficulty until before november or december 2019, was left behind. when we felt more or less safe, this happens with covid-19. and the feeling grows that we are lost again. now, something else haunts us everywhere. we are reaching this future very quickly, because in order to care for and protect life, the forces of society are mobilized and those of the state are questioned. 1 "we have governments that do not know how to handle the crisis and who constantly change their minds. these actions have taken human lives" (paredes 2020, 3) . the causes are many: that if one acts well and for good or, on the contrary, that the action put in place corresponds to authoritarian and petty interests, that hospital medical capacities are not enough, that small groups cannot mobilize everything necessary, etc. among the facts, opinions, and recommendations reported by serious mass media and authorized global health institutions, the need to protect life itself constantly emerges. at the same time, in order to achieve this, mutual aid is constantly breaking through. with this common value, support is organized within housing units, some prevention of contagion is being achieved, and there emerge even broader and more effective responses with support networks to stop the spread of the disease. realizing with covid-19 that life itself is valuable is leading to the recognition of many other substantive values of social coexistence. what matters is the emerging solidarity practices of generosity and piety. above all, practices that reintegrate doing with what has been done, saying consistent with acting. practices that are showing that, with the emergence of the value of mutual aid, trust is also emerging as a common good. between fear and these hopes, perhaps a better society will flourish. to cope with the pandemic, errors or failures of state responses can be pointed out. it can also be seen that people are giving themselves a practical, compassionate response to the current crisis of world development. as the social values put into practice to take care of one's life grow, because it depends on everyone's life, another value is achieved that is quite far from the market. inside and with the other, something comes up that reconnects us. a particular connection emerges so as to be able to keep in touch in these abnormal conditions. perhaps this is a peculiar experience of forced isolation to avoid infection. the fact is that it resizes the essential, makes it evident, leads to the choice, forces us to decide between different paths to take. if we never go back to the exact same place, these decisive practices taken at each moment of the pandemic, in each place and city, raise different meanings. the slightest choice made by and with others reverberates immediately across the entire planet. the cultural change we are experiencing right now comes from many different experiences, places and influences that reiterate the need to reconnect with the earth. the pandemic declares a period of change not without violence and death in which unmentioned proposals emerge. it is possible that what we are experiencing heralds radically changing timesof transition towards another order that is not patriarchal but, fundamentally egalitarian and free. realizing this multiple revaluation that we are implementing in favour of life and mutual aid is key for all of us because it comes from another ethic "that values care, life and democracy. the central political task at this time of crisis is to live and organize around those values" (mair 2020, 12) . therefore, in the face of the covid-19 pandemic, it will seek to encourage inseparable emerging practices of values inspired by the care of life. response to fear of the other saint peter's square without faithful or pilgrims on easter sunday; the roman colosseum without tourists; tiananmen square in beijing empty; the plaza de la revolución deserted and without the traditional parade for workers' day in havana. a similar picture, of silence and stillness, is observed in the obelisk in buenos aires, in the paseo de la reforma in mexico, on the copacabana beaches, in the centre of beirut or on a panamanian highway. these and other images of a world "without people" resignify to "silence" as part of the urban cartographies inaugurated by the global pandemic of 2020. in the framework of hyperdigitalized societies, in which information and interconnection through technological innovations make up a good part of the macro and micro-social dynamics, silence is undervalued. it is hardly supported in a face-to-face interaction and is usually uncomfortable in a video call or in a conversation on whatsapp. it is only admitted as a prayer and protest against death. at most, silence is considered as what "remains" after the passage of sound, or as a mere backdrop for noise. le breton (2001) argues that observing the social situations in which silence appears constitutes a privileged analytical way to examine the social order. with this, the author defines the "transgressive" character that silence has in today's societies. from our perspective, far from being a discursive abyss or a void between noise and noise, silence is an activity crossed by a body/emotion. as such, it constitutes an opportunity to initiate the active listening that is necessary for collective action. understood as the starting point of any form of social interaction, silence opens worlds. hence, in the connections between "knowing how to listen" and "making silence", all possibilities of dialogue with the context and with others begin (scribano 2019) . silence. it is what prevails in the avenues, neighbourhoods, factories, schools, shopping centres, stadiums and monuments of most cities on the planet. silence. this condition that seemed to be in danger of extinction in large cities is one of the great "miracles" that the covid-19 pandemic has unexpectedly offered to billions of the world's inhabitants. in the framework of the current confinement of populations, silence is not only a state that denotes an absence (of sound). fundamentally, it points to the presence of new (and not so new) social relations drawn up to respond to the demands of capital that the virus brought with it. the home office, e-learning, e-commerce and even sexting are some of the trends that have spread massively with isolation, causing the world's homes to becomeovernight-exclusive areas for working, learning, consuming, loving and enjoying in times of coronavirus. out of fear, starting in march 2020, the entire world had to slow down. for physics, deceleration is the negative variation of speed, that is, it expresses the passage of a body in motion from one speed x to another lower, always following the same path. in the current context, the irruption of this social, economic and affective "pause" that seeks to contain the spread of the virus means, as a derived effect, the establishment of a novel urban silence. in addition to the decrease in noise pollution that several cities have verified in recent months (zambrano-monserrate et al. 2020), which has favoured, among other aspects, the reappearance of sensations such as hearing the trill of the birds or that the people manage to improve their quality in rest, remembering melucci (1996) we can affirm that this "new" silence is a "message" of structural social processes. as such, the silence that accompanies the compulsory and/or voluntary confinement of populations as a result of covid-19 testifies to the forms taken by the social relations of production-especially between capital and labor-and the functions that states assume in their articulations, with the global agendas and actors and, in particular, the pre-existing social inequalities that the pandemic illuminated and deepened in a virulent way. indeed, there are millions of human beings who do not have adequate housing to "comply" with isolation; urban agglomerations that do not have sanitation services and lack basic facilities for hand washing; thousands of hospitals in the world without resources or basic supplies to care for those infected with covid-19 (and other conditions); precarious health professionals with pictures of stress and emotional exhaustion linked to their working and salary conditions. these and other snapshots are part of the silent urban postcard that materially and symbolically unfolds "outside" the interiors of our houses and that the passing of this health and economic crisis does nothing but aggravate. in the framework of the race initiated by the health and executive authorities of the countries to "beat" the virus, seeking to "flatten" the curve of infections and deaths, a social experiment of unprecedented mass seclusion of people has been carried out, that not even the most visionary mind could ever have imagined. taking care of yourself and confining yourself at "home" has been approved worldwide as the best "vaccine" to prevent the spread of the virus. in practice, this implies making the private, domestic and intimate environment a kind of "trench" to contribute to one's own and the community's health. in this scenario, the idea of the common has been resignified as a compulsive virtuality, with no escape: we are and, therefore, we contribute to the community by staying "inside". meanwhile "outside", on the outside, the other (the unknown, but also the neighbor, friend or relative) is installed as a threat (korstanje 2019) . that is, as a suspected virus carrier and potential contagion agent, capable of breaking with the possibilities of a healthy future, outdoors and in freedom. it is precisely this fear of the other that has established silence as one of the most extraordinary consequences that cities exhibit today. in this compulsion for life and health "entrenched" at home, the street has become-more than ever-a mere place of transit, moderate, limited and monitored by the security forces, and also by security practices assumed by the citizenship from their windows, balconies or terraces. all in all, social isolation has reinforced the erosion of the political and creative possibilities that the street houses as a place of information, social exchanges, entertainment and stimulation. in urban terms, the pandemic has further radicalized the "colonization" of public space historically undertaken by capital in its expansionist drive. in the streets, the place par excellence of the public, change and exchange value dominate over use and use value, limiting themselves to being reticules organized by and for consumption (lefebvre 1991) . for example, with the mandatory isolation imposed in several countries of the world to contain the spread of covid-19, city streets have become solid passages that allow people to move around (on foot, or with the aid of the car or transportation) in public to local shops or hospitals and then return, rigorously, to "home". this cadence makes public space not a collective product but rather the effect derived from the sum of individual body movements delimited and monitored according to the guidelines that govern the extension of displacement and the length of stay abroad imposed by the authorities to control the contagion. the abrupt change between density and emptiness, between noise and silence, has established a new social order that forces social sciences to reformulate the traditional approaches to the city and its dynamics. with the advance of the pandemic, the noises, sounds, music and voices begin to resignify in the great urban void. this supposes an evident alteration of routines and daily lives, as well as a drastic reformulation of the spacetimes of the interactions that originate new ways of conceiving the hours, the days, customs, public life and the spaces of intimacy. in particular, the generalized silence imposed by the pandemic has broken with the "previous urban normality" and has become a sign of suspicion and mistrust in the face of all things, people and relationships that are "outside" the personal area of confinement. in this scenario, the virus is foreign. its "invisible" presence involves risks, uncertainties and mistrust that are projected onto others, configuring them as latent threats. in this table, mass seclusion in the private sphere appears as the fastest and cheapest way for individual defence and protection. so, in the face of fear of the other, the answer is confinement and an expectant silence. something like the scene that is repeated in any thriller where the hidden victim, in the dark and in silence, awaits the (inevitable?) stalking of his victimizer. but just as silence is a necessary condition for interactions, urban mutism caused by the massive confinement of populations reveals the nullification of all possibility of listening to the other, of looking into their eyes and of opening other worlds. when the noise, the sounds and the voices are confined in the private space and the cities are silent, everything that happens outside the walls bears the exclusive mark of suspicion and threat. thus, in the face of the individuation, differentiation and social fragmentation that accompany, as features, the current phase of capitalism-and that the fear of covid-19 has deepened to the extreme-distrust is a feeling that permeates much of the experiences of the life, consuming, sharing and enjoyment that take place in cities day by day (scribano and cervio 2018) . immersed in a sanitary rhetoric that defines interpersonal distance and self-care as social responsibilities necessary to face the emergency, the aforementioned structural conditions are deepened still further, drawing limits and manufacturing (socio-sensible) borders that regulate the contacts that are "allowed" and the "adequate" distances between bodies that are recognized as strange, dangerous, threatening. in short, we are facing an uncertain social scenario, full of paradoxes and contradictions, haunted by the pain caused by deaths and infections, cornered by the collapse of health systems and by the collapse of world economies. in this context, mistrust expands as a bastion of urban social interactions. to distrust is instituted, then, in a sensation and form of socialization to which the subjects resort to continue acting in the world (in their world), hoping to find "there", in the stubborn and routine construction of inter-individual borders, some opportunity to reduce the risks and uncertainty that inexorably accompany the spread of the pandemic. the covid-19 pandemic has produced an amplification effect on several of the most complex and negative edges of cities and, at the same time, has brought forth diverse potentialities. here we want to refer to the city as a lack, trying to highlight the limits and deficiencies that quarantines and isolation have "emphasized", and also as a possibility, pointing out the practices and sensibilities that appear increased under pandemic conditions. i have named the set of spatial/temporal features of the cities affected by the spread of the virus and subjected to public policies to mitigate its effects as a "pandemic city". this is not a different city, which brings with it the inheritance of what was discussed in chapter 1, but it is a different time/space that is expressed in a feeling of "being suspended in the air", "being in parentheses", in a timeless way of being. as faults that are increased and reproduced, we systematize the following: hunger, "roof", education and distraction. as possibilities, we present the redefinition of the indispensable and the look on the next paragraph one of the aspects that the pandemic city reveals is that not all citizens, the neighbours, have enough to eat. one of the first sources of tension is in this new way of organizing the city around food procurement, not only because shops are closed, not only because shops are concentrated (they are concentrated in the sense that they are the big chains), and those that are benefited, but also by the attention/tension that emerges with the "senses" of local businesses. this relationship is redefined between waiting in line, "keeping distance" in the supermarket and buying in the store (where the stores are) in the chinese supermarket, in the smaller local supermarkets. a tension is redefined between waiting and patience, such as civic virtues, and food. in the neighbourhood there is a tension of what it means "not having to buy", "not being able to buy" and "not being able to produce an activity to buy". the pandemic city is a city of lack. when productivity stops, when trade ceases, when transfers freeze, what appears is what is missing and the first thing that is missed is the possibility of constituting that triangle so difficult to capture between food, meal and satisfaction. the pandemic city demands that we keep in mind the regular satiety indices; the purchase is made between what it takes to feed, between food to fill up with, and the possibility of doing it. the pandemic city shows very clearly that capitalism has constituted a social fantasy of what it means to be satisfied, what it means to be satiated, what it means to "be eaten". this city of lack reveals that in front of the veneer of normality there is a large mirror that reflects that there were many human beings without food, hidden in a bazaar of frivolity of consumption, in the corners, on the margins, on the edges. paradoxically, the city that provided everything was reduced to having the possibility and the disposition to acquire it; and it becomes more radical when those possibilities/provisions refer to food. that is why the structure of that dialectic, of that triangle between food, meal and satisfaction, is revealed, it is seen pornographically when the city empties, when silence occurs, when lack constitutes the structure of what was always bustlingly complete. it is very clear who eats every day in this city where food begins to be a central problem of the day-to-day for most of those who have to stay at home: it is already more clearly seen that it was not a city of all, that it was not a city for everyone, that everyone did not eat. another of the features of this city of lack, of the pandemic city, is to make present, to put under the magnifying glass, a problem that is structural for the capitalist city and which is precisely the lack of a house. when you look at a city what you see are houses, buildings, shopping malls and, for that same reason, you cannot clearly perceive that there are thousands of people who are not included in the social fantasy of the house. they do not have a room to stay in, they do not have a house in which to isolate themselves because the roof is an object of dispute, not a given natural condition. there is no fantasized homogeneity of the public/private structure of a "type" of house in the spaces of these cities, understood as a room for a certain number of people, a place to eat for a set number of people, places for sanitizing for a specific number of people: the fantasy of "having a house" is collapsed in the pandemic city by the ghost of "not being able to stay at home", due to the impossibility of being in a house. this is not only experienced by those who are on the streets, this is not only experienced by those who wander in the parks, but those thousands of people who literally live "outside the house", who go to sleep in a small place that is constituted simply in a "place to arrive", but they do not have the class conditions implied by the fantasy of being able to stay at home, they do not have the water to wash their hands, they do not have the conditions to have social distancing. if we add to this the sanitary measure called a "face cap" it is very interesting to observe its ineffectiveness because its effectiveness is related to the fact of "having" distance, proximity, the logic of being close together, implies the impossibility of defending against the pandemic. but also, there is no mask because there is no cash, because there is no money, because there is no work, because they have lived in informality for decades. so there is no way to mediate an instrument between the subject and the other subject. the device, the thing called a "face cap", is the result of the uneven distribution of the possibilities of self-administering that device. in short, the pandemic city clearly states that not all of us have a place to stay, not all of us have shelter, not all of us have that "natural border" against the virus: house/roof. a third element that the pandemic city brings to the table is the unequal distribution of access to educational opportunities. if people are to stay at home and education is going to be virtual, they need, on the spot, at home, the internet connection and the device to connect with it. beyond all the logic of the structuring that has resulted in the digitization of the world, beyond this continuum between digital/mobile/virtual that has occurred globally, the pandemic city puts inequality under the lens, the lack of that which you really should have access to: the plan to manage gigabytes, to connect. whether through whatsapp or any other platform, connecting with the other involves spending money and there are multiple varieties of access. the pandemic city revealed that neither the material conditions of existence, nor the organizational forms of information distribution, nor the material structure of connectivity, are distributed more or less equally. the necessary consequence was then that educational inequality was reinforced by amplifying another lack of the city. to be able to watch a video on whatsapp or facebook, the person needs money and what stands out as a possibility of equality ends up being a new inequality. i cannot stay at home and i do not have internet access and, in that sense, i am condemned to not having an education precisely because the pandemic city reinforces the pre-existing faults. one of the most radically suggestive aspects of this absence of possibility and condition is that it is also experienced by teachers, those who have to teach, not only the children, young people and/or adults who receive these classes; which shows very clearly that this exposed lack, this exposed breakdown of education in the pandemic city, is the product of a structural movement prior to the pandemic itself. this is an exposed breakdown generated by the structural inequality of both students, teachers and those who have to receive education. finally, the pandemic city highlights the close link between the social fantasy of a city for all and the enjoyment of the means of entertainment and distraction that keeps people happy. the means of containment involve a contained citizen, that is, one who is not ready for conflict, who is prepared for collaboration with the city and its system. that is, precisely, a distracted citizen, that is, entertained. it is a distraction from that radically important thing that was hunger, which was the roof and education, and that is why the first three offences increase, grow, in pandemic conditions. now these faults are seen because there is no longer organized enjoyment, because there is no longer organized distraction. the social magic stops, that is, producing an event with one hand while the other hand is the one that distracts the attention of the public. magic involves the fact that people "relapse and repeat" what is seductive in fantasy: disconnection from the real world. at the end of football, at the end of the cinema, at the end of the walks, at the end of the bars, at the end of the theatres, at the end of everything that is ready to distract and provide enjoyment in the city, he asks himself once again what is essential: that also brings with it the fact that there is another city, that there are other features of the pandemic city. opening interstices between the structural flaws that the pandemic city makes visible and puts under the magnifying glass, we find other consequences that deny the value of totality that the regime of truth pretends to have: the indispensable and what is next. the pandemic city lets us see the other side of social organization because it challenges us, and once we have found ourselves facing hunger, homelessness and lack of options, in a context of non-distraction we begin to think the indispensable. we begin to reflect on what we really cannot stop doing; we begin to think about what it would be impossible to continue living without, and in this context, the pandemic city confronts us with the decision to continue immediate enjoyment through consumption slowed by the closure and emptiness of the pandemic city. as a consequence of the measures of confinement, of the same measures of defense against the virus, conditions are structured to decide "another way", and not just to continue wildly in consumption. the pandemic city confronts us with the possibility of selecting those things that seem important to us, that are indispensable, that without which we could not produce the coordination of action, the reproduction of life and the elaboration of the fabric of the social. the pandemic city puts us in the predicament of having to re-decide just what indispensable means. for the coordination of the action what is indispensable is that which has no aggregate, that does not depend on any fiction, that which is not only set for the other to see me, that which is above the purely instrumental. in this sense, what is indispensable is not an "as if": it is that for which the coordination of the action is not possible. that is why the pandemic city, has written on its frontispieces: it leaves out everything that is a weight, that is a ballast, that will not serve to meet the other, to relate to others. the pandemic city opens the door to concentrate on that without which action is impossible. but what is essential is also what allows us to reproduce: to sleep, eat, breathe, walk, "be in the world", last, relate the present with the future, take advantage of what we learned in the past. all these things are indispensable, that is, they cannot be absent, we cannot stop doing them, because they have to do directly with our own reproduction. in the pandemic city, the urban fabric is rewoven, the set of threads that weave the urban structure, new networks, new paths, are knotted again: because those indispensable paths appear. this pandemic city leads us, once again, to think about what otherness means and with this gives us another possibility for that which is shared. who is the other? who is my neighbour? who am i with? these are all questions that in the context of uncertainty, fear and the slowdown in life, the pandemic city allows us to ask. it allows us to configure these dimensions as radical questions. the pandemic city allows us to think about proximity, the distance that differentiates us from each other, what separates, what connects, what is at a time-space that allows to be easily found others persons and that allows to be identified as similar person.. the pandemic city gives us the possibility to stop thinking about the abject, to stop thinking about the discriminating, to stop thinking about domination in the face of the different, because the other, the proximity and the distance are redefined according to silence and emptiness of these threatened cities rebuilt and rearmed by the violence of a humanity that crossed all limits with other species, with itself and with the entire planet. the pandemic city allows us to think the other and the other with a capital letter, allows us to think again that taking care of myself i take care of the other, that taking care of the others i take care of myself. the self is not defined by its capacity for isolation but for its ability to care for the other, to meet another at a distance, to allow that which redefines who i am isolated constitutes the starting point of the common, of the communal. the spatial temporal unpinning that allows a city to be lived at a distance leaves the doors open to radically think of the other as someone who is necessary and indispensable to me in order to narrate myself in an individual and community history. the one next to it becomes this one that allows me, when taking a distance, to take it into account; the crowding is radically transformed into the possibility of seeing the other. those two metres allow us to identify faces, not in the mass that walks disoriented in search of a consumption that allows self-centred enjoyment. the next one at a distance recovers the possibilities of redefining what is next, who is my neighbour, who are our next ones. thus, if we connect the indispensable with the next, we can draw a new geometry of the bodies; we can rethink the new normality that does not throw us into the emptiness of being mere objects of enjoyment for others. in the pandemic city, others are indispensable, neither luxuries, nor fantasies, nor phantoms. what is indispensable is the common that can only be produced by and with others. by the reader. coronavirus: cómo el miedo a la enfermedad covid-19 está cambiando nuestra psicología infografía. las pandemias de la historia. el ágora, diario del agua el caleidoscopio en la literatura española. káñina precedentes al coronavirus. de la peste al sida: el impacto social de otras pandemias históricas disasters in the society of fear el silencio. madrid: sequitur the production of space how will coronavirus change the world? bbc future challenging codes. collective action in the information age la pandemia de coronavirus va para largo, los contagios a la baja pueden volver a dispararse enfermedades. comparación entre covid-19 y otras pandemias históricas. nación farma coronavirus. el confinamiento es un concepto burgués: cómo el aislamiento afecta a las distintas clases sociales. bbc news mundo el silencio como punto de partida distrust and proximity. the paradoxes of violence in argentina indirect effects of covid-19 on the environment key: cord-0070605-60df7qdr authors: duile, timo title: paradoxes of indigeneity: identity, the state, and the economy in indonesia date: 2021-11-30 journal: dialect anthropol doi: 10.1007/s10624-021-09640-7 sha: 2473813d9408da9773f6ca31f9bc8e85094e7962 doc_id: 70605 cord_uid: 60df7qdr contributing to recent debates on indigeneity, this article investigates contradictions of indigeneity, especially the “indigenous paradox,” that is, the formation of indigeneity through claiming sovereignty and autonomy from the state by acknowledging the very state and its laws as the framework for those claims, in the context of indonesia. after analyzing how indigeneity came into existence in the indonesian context, this article sheds light on the process of indigenous recognition in the duri highlands, south sulawesi. it is argued that the contradictions of indigeneity concern not only indigenous—state relations, but also narratives on tradition and history, and most of all, economic contradictions. it is the recognition of the overall framework of capitalism and the state which makes possible the emergence of alternative local economies based upon solidarity. drawing on louis althusser’s concept of overdetermination, this article suggests that indigeneity shapes the way how economic contradictions are expressed, and while it provides local spaces for alternative economies, indigeneity is also prone to being incorporated into the logics of capitalism. the phenomenon of indigeneity has often been described as a relational identity which appears as a given but actually emerges in relation to other, mostly oppressive, forces such as the state or settler societies. recently, jonas bens (2020) argued that native communities become indigenous when they occupy a paradoxical legal position. referring to cases in the americas, bens explains that on the one hand, indigenous peoples reject the state and view the regulation of their affairs by the state as a violation of their sovereignty and autonomy. this rejection is not a this article is based on findings from field work during the author's stay as a guest researcher at hasanuddin university in makassar between january and december 2019, during which research on the indigenous movement in jakarta, makassar, and enrekang was carried out. this was complemented by online conversations with interlocutors during the coronavirus pandemic. it outlines overall trends on the national scale and analyzes how they shape concrete processes of becoming indigenous at the grassroots level. as this article aims to contribute to ongoing debates on indigeneity, it departs from some current analysis of indigenous identity. in order to come into existence as a political force, indigenous activists often understand indigeneity as simply a matter of descent and kinship, and this descent establishes a relation to the land they claim (cf. bens 2020: 4) . in these views, indigeneity is a matter of identity as fixed and given entities. in contrast, some scholars have stressed that indigeneity comes into existence through and in relation to autochthon communities and settler societies or postcolonial states, and some indigenous scholars have adopted such approaches as well (for instance mikdasih 2013; simpson 2017; corntassel 2018) . in these accounts, indigeneity emerges as what merlan (2007) has labeled a relational identity. indigeneity always needs its other (the state, the setter colony, or mainstream society). in all these cases, an oppressive relationship had been established which marginalized people and communities economically, politically, and culturally, and indigeneity is the result of these processes. however, scholars critical of indigenous movements have stressed that indigeneity is not an identity in and of itself. in these analyses, indigeneity emerges as a form of ethnonationalism against other parts of the population (most prominently : kuper 2003a : kuper , 2003b . while this is not necessarily or always the case (and the example of aman in indonesia proves that indigeneity does not necessarily rely on ethnonationalism), indigeneity, when conceptualized as an ethnic identity with a notion of being original to a place, holds the potential to draw boundaries of identity similar to those of european ethnonationalism where language, origin, or ethnicity are essentialized. taking these approaches into account, jonas bens has analyzed what he calls the "indigenous paradox." in his work on indigenous court cases in the americas, he concludes that indigeneity inevitably presents itself as a paradox. in order to emerge as indigenous, a community usually has to claim independence from (or sovereignty against) the state in the sense of being distinct in cultural terms and/or has to apply the extralegal fiction of cultural difference (bens 2020: 190-191) . in bens' account, the paradoxical formation of indigeneity emerges as a matter of law: indigenous communities claim sovereignty from the law of the nation states they find themselves in and apply this very law in order to make their claims. the relational character of indigeneity is, in this regard, a matter of rights and sovereignty. as such, it is a juridical paradox. the indigenous paradox is based upon a contradiction between being part of the state and law and claiming a position outside it. indigeneity and its paradoxes can be interpreted either in a poststructuralist or in a dialectical way. what i call the post-structuralist way here are those approaches that are concerned with pure difference and this difference usually emerges through relations (which can be oppositions but also, for instance, chains of equivalences that are related to oppositional chains of equivalences). the main idea in these approaches is that there is nothing but difference and relations, and thus meaning and identity are only possible through this difference. this is an approach of radical difference. dialectics works differently: in a dialectical approach, identities are also not self-identical, but in contrast to relational approaches, a dialectical approach stresses that difference is always part of what it opposes. it is an approach of relative difference. in other words, identities include self-difference. much of the recent work i have mentioned above stresses the relational character of indigeneity and as such it is (explicitly or implicitly) influenced by poststructuralist approaches. indigeneity is difference and the difference of indigeneity as a signifier exists through its relation to other signifiers, such as "the nation," "sovereignty," "progress," "colony," "the west," and "civilization." i suggest here a dialectical notion in which indigeneity appears as an antithesis but, as such, it is always already a part of what it opposes. we can find out what indigeneity is not only by analyzing its relations to its others, but also by thinking of how indigeneity is contained in and comes into existence in and through its other-and vice versa. through dialectical processes, i argue, indigeneity develops within the frame of the political economy. moreover, indigeneity itself is dialectical in its relation to the political-economic frame: it contains, i argue in the last part, the contradictions of affirming and opposing the capitalist framework. drawing on an approach of political economy, one might ask if "paradox" is the right term here and whether the notion of "contradiction" would not better grasp the dialectical movements i am about to analyze. it is true that the idea of indigenous contradictions is what i want to outline in the following. however, "paradox" can be understood as a special case of contradictions, namely as a contradiction that is a necessary condition for something to come into existence, in this case indigeneity. that means that indigeneity is not only contradictive but that the contradictions of indigeneity are necessary features of it. for this reason, i use the notion of indigenous paradoxes. the insight that indigeneity consists of contradictions (and by extension, that it is paradoxical in nature) is not new. scholars such as ronald niezen (2003) have noticed the contradictive nature of indigeneity, but in academic practice, the fact that indigeneity consists of contradictions has often been downplayed in order to avoid harming indigenous movements. however, as luisa steur (2005) has outlined, it is important to criticize the liberal culturalism that is well aware of these contradictions but does not openly address them. in order to widen the possibilities for solidarity and resistance, it is necessary to focus on "contradictions of indigenism and making them the starting point of critical analysis" (steur 2005: 175) . indigeneity is, as with other identities, always a matter of becoming and being but is never simply invented. tania li (2000: 151-153) has outlined in regard to stuart hall that indigeneity is a form of positioning. it is not something natural or inevitable, nor something invented or adopted in the sense that people are aware of its artificial character. as positioning, indigeneity "draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes, and repertoires of meaning, and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle" (li 2000: 151) . i agree with this account and develop it further by arguing in this article that this positioning develops dialectically: the meaning of indigeneity is indeed historically sedimented, but it is more than a mere accumulation of meaning through history. rather, i suggest that the notion of indigeneity developed as historical practices and meanings fostered and articulated contradictions, and sublated older meanings. additionally, indigeneity came into existence as a category of struggle against and in engagement with the state, and it depends on both. this contribution outlines this for the context of indonesia, a country which was not a settler colony but nonetheless accommodates the indigenous paradox to some extent. however, i argue that there are more dimensions beyond the juridical and political process of the indigenous paradox, and i am going to outline two of them here. one is the narrative dimension of indigenous communities and activists through which indigeneity is made meaningful for local communities. however, the most important dimension of the indigenous paradox is its economic dimension, in which the paradox of being in and outside of capitalist relations emerges. in order to relate the different dimensions of the indigenous paradox to each other, it is useful to draw on louis althusser's notion of overdetermination (althusser 2005: 87-128) , a concept he borrowed from freudian psychoanalysis. the basic idea of overdetermination is that a single event or observed effect is determined not only by a single cause but by multiple causes. althusser argued that the superstructure has a relative autonomy from the base of economic contradictions. in contrast to orthodox marxist accounts, althusser argued that it is not possible to explain a historic event merely in regard to the base, that is, the economic contradictions. rather, "the economy is the determinant, but in the last instance (…). from the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the last instance never comes" (althusser 2005: 112-113) . this is also true for the case of indigeneity in the indonesian context (and elsewhere): the superstructure, which also includes some dimensions of the indigenous paradox, namely the narrative, political, juridical, and (as we will see in the example of the duri communities) the religious, for instance, is relatively autonomous from economic contradictions. but at the end of the day, the indigenous struggle is an economic struggle as it is concerned with land rights, that is, with the means of production, although indigeneity as an ideology does not portray itself as concerned with economic issues in the first place, but rather with cultural issues. for althusser, contradictions are overdetermined as well. he argues with regard to marx that economic contradictions never occur in their pure form but are shaped by history and current social, political and cultural circumstances, which give them their distinctive features. this means that indigeneity expresses this overdetermination of economic contradictions as it is not simply an effect of the last determining instance, namely the economy. rather, it translates economic contradictions into a language of culture and sovereignty claims. in other words, indigeneity is not class identity, nor is it independent from class identity. the relation between indigeneity and class has been the subject of debates in anthropology, for instance between mahmood mamdani (2000) and bridget o'laughlin (2000) . mamdani (2000: 44) has argued that in order to understand the dynamics of the colonial world and the production of the category of the native (and thus the indigenous), neither the political can be deduced from the economic nor the economic from the political. it is crucial to grasp the contradiction between the economic and the political. i rely on this approach for further analysis. however, i argue that this is only thinkable in a marxist analysis if one assumes the relative autonomy of the superstructure (the political) from the base (the economic). indeed, indigeneity is not a class identity as it cannot express economic contradictions in their pure form (if they ever appear in such a form). the relations of production are nonetheless addressed, as i will argue. the overdetermination of the indigenous paradox is rooted, as i will argue, in the overdetermination of indigeneity as an identity through which economic contradictions assert themselves in other (usually cultural) forms. this line of thought provides a material-dialectical foundation for the indigenous paradox and, as i will outline, this holds true not only in settings where indigenous communities engage in violent conflicts over their land and rights. drawing on the case of duri communities in the uplands of south sulawesi, i shed light on a case in which recognition of indigenous rights went relatively smoothly, at least when considering the local dimension of this process. however, here as well, the economy is the driving force, but other dimensions of the indigenous paradox are also crucial when explaining the emergence of indigeneity in the duri highlands. by taking political economy into account as the last determining instance, i aim to contribute to a critical investigation of indigeneity as a hyper-politics machine that offers symbolic-political solutions to political-economic problems (goodale 2016: 442) . while i agree with mark goodale's critique here, investigating indigeneity and indigenous paradoxes as overdetermined in the althusserian sense also allows for the progressive potential of indigeneity to be recognized, as economic contradictions and class struggles can be accommodated within indigeneity. in the dimensions of the indigenous paradox i am about to outline in this article, the overdetermination of the economic contradictions emerges. althusser argues that the basic "contradiction is never simple, but always specified by historically concrete forms and circumstances in which it is exercised. it is specified by the forms of the superstructure (the state, the dominant ideology, religion, politically organized movements, and so on (…)" (althusser 2005: 106) . in other words, the indigenous paradox sheds light on the overdetermined contradiction between labor and capital, and in the case of indigenous movements, this especially addresses the question of land as a means of production, although indigenous discourses usually apply specific cultural attributes to the land, which are also important when one assumes that the superstructure is largely specific and relatively autonomous (cf. althusser 2005: 113) . in other words, indigenous ideologies and indigenous struggles are not reducible to mere phenomena of economic contradiction, but economic contradictions cause them in the last instance. as nancy fraser (1995) has argued, justice requires both recognition and redistribution. the indigenous struggle is about both, but by denying the economy as the last instance, it favors the first over the latter. a critique of indigeneity and indigenous movements from a dialectical-materialist perspective should shed light on this point but should also acknowledge the relative autonomy of indigeneity as a part of the superstructure. indigeneity developed into a political force in indonesia in the 1990s when activists concerned with environmental issues and the dispossession of rural communities adopted the concept of indigeneity from transnational discourses. it drew, however, on local contexts and histories. before shedding light on the case of duri communities in south sulawesi, i outline some developments and features of indigeneity in indonesia and explain how they developed in history and the changing political economy of rural indonesia. in indonesia, activists in the 1990s decided to translate the term "indigenous peoples" and "indigenous communities" into masyarakat adat, literally meaning "society of custom." custom here signifies systems of values, economy, culture, land management, and so on. adat, in the widest sense of the term, means a cosmological order which gives sense to all everyday practices and institutions (acciaioli 1985: 182; moniaga 2007: 291-282) . however, the conceptualization of adat has its roots in the late colonial order when dutch scholars conceptualized adat as law (burns 2004 (burns , 2007 . adat as a category of autochthon law in the netherlands east indies came into existence when cornelis van vollenhoven and scholars of the leiden school collected data from missionaries and colonial officials, arguing that the colony was a space of distinct law with some crucial features. most importantly, he argued that adat communities all over the archipelago had concepts of hak ulayat (right of avail). the hak ulayat is the right to communal property over which, in van vollenhoven's account, the adat law community should maintain and exercise its original social and political control (von benda-beckmann 2019: 404-405). on the other hand, scholars from the utrecht school argued for an integration of autochthon communities into the market and rejected the idea of legal pluralism in the colony and the recognition of adat. as tania li (2010: 393-394) has summarized, the debate between the conservative leiden school and the liberal utrecht school was about the (economic) question of whether natives should become market subjects of colonial capitalism or not. the seemingly cultural arguments of the leiden school therefore had economic implications. they feared that natives would be dispossessed of their land (as they might sell it), and thus, social unrest and upheaval would occur which might destabilize the colonial order. we can see here how indigeneity was not just the opposition or the other of the colonial state but also an integral part of it. it was conceptualized in regard to economic contradictions as van vollenhoven saw that an incorporation of adat communities into the liberal market would lead to economic marginalization and potentially to social unrest. in 1870, all land not under ownership under the civil code became the domain of the state. that meant that hak ulayat and other adat rights were largely ignored. only if adat land were in "constant use" (gedurig gebruik), it would be regarded as non-free state land. this land was usually not sold or rented to others by the state, but indigenous ownership was also not recognized (fitzpatrick 2007: 133-134) . however, the colonial state recognized adat legal systems for inlanders and in directly ruled areas. some indonesian students and later members of the national movement such as supomo, maramis, and subardjo were influenced by the conservative and integralist ideology of the leiden school. they assumed that there was a single, basic "ur-adat" that constituted a legal realm in the netherlands east indies fundamentally different to western individualist and capitalist societies and their laws. this concept was crucial for the independence movement, but not all relied on reactionary concepts in which adat meant a local village system where people know their place in the social hierarchy and obey, and wherein the state should be based upon a similar concept. sukarno, for instance, used the notion of adat and village life as well, but rather emphasized mutual cooperation, solidarity, and social equality (bourchier 2007: 114-117) . in other words, there was a conservative and a populist indigenism among those who struggled for indonesian independence, and both deployed the notion of adat for their purposes (bourchier 1998: 204-205, 209) . in independent indonesia, the government sought an "indonesian" foundation of land laws. adat became the basis of the basic agrarian law of 1960, but two important restrictions were made: the continued existence of hak ulayat had to be proven and state interests could always nullify adat claims. this development was due in part to leftist forces, especially from the communist party, which aimed at a general redistribution of land in indonesia but paid little attention to adat communities as they prioritized the peasantry as a political force (bedner and arizona 2019: 419). when suharto and right-wing fractions of the armed forces seized power, the political economy of indonesia changed radically. an authoritarian developmentalist state was established and leftist organizations were outlawed. the new suharto government sought to attract foreign capital for its developmentalist agenda. in order to do so, a basic forestry law was issued in 1967. the law ensured the state's control over all forests that were not privately owned and it even lacked the symbolic language of recognition of adat as found in the 1960 basic agrarian law. adat rights could not be converted into property rights. the state had the power to define land as forests and as the domain of the state, and this concerned about 70% of indonesia's land territory (bedner and van huis 2008: 181-183) . from the 1980s in particular, the suharto regime dispossessed numerous autochthon communities by declaring their land state forest and renting it out to companies. this process was said to be conducted in the interest of the nation and development. the communities in question were often labeled as "estranged" and "isolated" communities (masyarakat terpencil) both by the government in its development programs and in public discourse. state institutions defined "isolated communities" as nomadic, having poor housing and transportation facilities, engaging in swidden agriculture and other "unsustainable" resource use, with a lack of education and strong commitment to traditional beliefs (li 2000: 154) . it was the political economy of original accumulation-a process in which the producers, namely the rural communities, had been separated from their means of production (land)-and, simultaneously, the discursive delegitimation of traditional ways of life that provided the grounds for resistance under the banner of indigeneity from the 1980s onwards. all over the archipelago, rural communities and activists organized under indigenous identities, as orang asli ("original people"), tribes, masyarakat adat, or as ethnic groups which had the stigma of being backwards and primitive (for instance : robinson 1986; robinson 2019: 473-475; li 2000: 163-169; moniaga 2007: 281-282; maunati 2012; tanasaldy 2012: 283-284) . the reform era (reformasi), which began in 1998, saw a revival of tradition in indonesian politics (davidson and henley 2007) . on the one hand, local elites used adat and tradition to improve or maintain their political influence in local politics (i.e. klinken 2007; tyson 2010: 81-100; thufail 2013; klenke 2013) . on the other hand, indigeneity became the foundation of a movement of the grassroots. as leftist approaches based on communism and socialism were de facto impossible since anticommunism had become a raison d'état since 1965 and marxism was still outlawed in post-suharto indonesia, indigeneity became a promising alternative, also because it was well established in international discourses. in 1999, indigenous activists from all over the archipelago gathered in jakarta for the first congress of the indigenous alliance of the archipelago (aliansi masyarakat adat nusantara, aman). at that founding congress, the activists announced their famous slogan: if the state will not recognize us, we will not recognize the state (jika negara tidak mengakui kami, maka kamipun tidak akan mengakui negara) (aman: undated). at first sight, this indicates an oppositional strategy, a strategy of indigeneity against the state. however, from the very beginning of the indigenous movement, the relationship between the state and indigenous peoples was more complex. in the provocative statement announced by the activists in 1999, a dialectical relationship between indigenous peoples and the state was already outlined in a nutshell. as the statement was formulated negatively, masyarakat adat came into existence though the possibility of a negation of the state. through such an identity, the "we" (kami) became a subject as it declared its ability to withhold recognition of the state. consequently, the state appeared in aman's view as a condition of the very existence of masyarakat adat, and the two entities of masyarakat adat and the state (negara) emerged as simultaneously constitutive to each other and as their respective negations (tamma and duile 2020: 276-277) . it is no surprise therefore that indigenous activists engaged with the state in order to achieve indigenous recognition. pengakuan (recognition) of their autonomy and rights became the leitmotif of the movement. it became clear within the first years of the movement that indigenous communities in indonesia did not seek sovereignty against the nation-state but rather autonomy (otonomi) within the state, which would allow the communities to organize on internal issues such as indigenous local economies. however, their notion of otonomi is partly contradictive as they recognize the state and its monopoly of violence but also demand the right to reject economic penetration from the outside and require the recognition of adat law and initiations for their internal issues, which would come at the expense of state laws and institutions (acciaioli 2007: 295-307) . indigenous activists engaged with the state in order to achieve recognition. most importantly, aman issued a lawsuit at the indonesian constitutional court in order to review the status of adat forests, which fell within the state's domain. in 2013, the court ruled in favor of aman and decided that adat forest is not state forest. the state had to recognize adat land ownership, and this is also the case with land not in permanent cultivation on which adat communities claim their hak ulayat (bedner and arizona 2019: 423-424; tamma and duile 2020: 279) . it is not surprising that indigenous activists intensified their relations with the state and its institutions. during the 2014 election campaign, aman supported joko widodo (jokowi), who was then elected as the new president. jokowi promised to support indigenous communities in their struggle for land rights. indigenous activists had therefore intensified their relations with state institutions as they saw the jokowi presidency as a new opportunity for their struggle. not only did indigenous activists engage in the jokowi election campaign, they also developed strategic interactions with state officials (see on this issue more in detail: affif and rachman 2019: 461-466) . in some cases, state officials were quite supportive. siti nurbaya bakar, who became the minister for environment and forestry, for instance, cooperated with aman activists. her ministry is important in the process of recognition because it is responsible for designating forest as adat forest. another important ministry is the ministry for agrarian affairs and spatial planning. however, relations with sofyan djalil, the minister of agrarian affairs and spatial planning and aman were difficult. djalil stuck to the old paradigm that development in rural areas is most efficiently realized by large corporations and individual land ownership. he put an emphasis on the productiveness of land and declared that land held by the people but not used efficiently should be taken by the state. in his view, corporations with access to capital and knowledge are the better partners for the government (maulana 2019) . meanwhile, siti nurbaya bakar and president jokowi emphasized the potential of local communities as entrepreneurs who could boost local economies. this image was also applied by aman, for instance by the former aman chair abdon nababan who argued for people's agroforest areas (nababan 2015) . however, land redistribution happened slowly and many indigenous activists became disappointed with the jokowi administration. on 30 december 2016, 13,000 hectares were handed to nine indigenous communities in a ceremony in the state palace (affif and rachman 2019: 454) . some more communities followed in 2018, but jokowi's promise in the 2014 election campaign that by 2019 12.7 million hectares would be redistributed to indigenous communities was not fulfilled by no means at all (tamma and duile 2020: 280) . indigenous activists had to deal not only with the slow process of land allocation but also with a task that shifted their struggle to the level of the regencies (kabupaten). in 2016, in order to gain land titles from a natural reserve, aman activists agreed with a proposal from the ministry of the environment and forestry that indigenous communities needed to be recognized first by their respective regencies (affif and rachman 2019: 463) . the current mechanism of recognition emphasizes the local level as there is no recognition of land titles before the communities in question are recognized by their respective regencies. in order to push local recognition, indigenous activists lobby on the provincial scale, hoping that provincial legislation or guidelines will accelerate legislation and recognition processes on the regency level. this emphasis on the local level is common in indonesia's decentralized political system, which started to emerge in 1999 after the downfall of the suharto government and which especially stresses the importance of the regency level (holzappel 2009 ). decentralization has had tremendous impacts on indigeneity, both in terms of a revivalism of traditional elites and progressive indigenous struggles (for instance, de jong 2009; prabowo 2009 ). the forest sector was decentralized as well, with mixed results, and was eventually recentralized (bullinger and haug 2012) . therefore, indigenous activists now have to maneuver between different scales in order to achieve the recognition of their customary forests. to summarize the history of adat and indigeneity in indonesia, we can conclude that indigeneity as adat emerged as a concept in the colonial context when economic issues were addressed with cultural approaches. in independent indonesia, adat became a foundation of genuine indonesian identity, but was subordinated under the state and even completely ignored in the so-called new order era. the new order state dispossessed rural communities not only through original accumulation, when it took their land and rented it out to companies, but also in terms of ideology since political organizations under the banner of communism or socialism were outlawed. indigeneity as a new emerging political identity became a means to express economic contradictions and to fight dispossession. however, it did and does so in terms of culture. the indigenous movement in indonesia first adopted an oppositional stance towards the state, as it declared that it would not recognize the state if the state did not recognize indigenous communities. this recognition, however, also meant the acknowledgement of land titles-for many people the foremost issue. therefore, indigenous communities and activists had to engage with the very state that they had threatened to refuse to recognize. the indigenous paradox also unfolds in the indonesian context, but in comparison to settler colonies, indigenous activists could always claim to be an integral part of the nation. their constitutive outside is rather the new order state and its remnants in post-authoritarian indonesia. this paradoxical notion of being, on the one hand, part of the nation and engaging with state institutions while on the other hand simultaneously denying the legitimacy of the state when it declares indigenous land as state forest is not only a matter of law and politics but, most of all, of the economy. at stake here is land as the most important means of production for rural economies. land ownership is thus claimed against the state as the state's claims of adat territory are denied, but also with the state as indigenous activists enter the state and seek to appear in its law. in terms of economic concepts, a notion of indigenous entrepreneurship represents an ideological conjuncture between parts of the political elite and activists, and it is through this conjuncture that institutional engagement becomes possible. as this contribution has now shed some light on the national context of indigeneity in indonesia, in the following, it aims to investigate the case of indigenous duri communities. many contributions have investigated how indigeneity and notions of "being traditional" have been deployed in conflicts over land and resources in indonesia (e.g. li 2000; steinebach 2013; bräuchler 2018; robinson 2019; fisher and van der muur 2019). certainly, these contributions have helped greatly to explain the phenomenon of indigeneity in indonesia. however, many communities that now self-identify as indigenous do not find themselves in such highly conflictual settings. indigeneity emerges through conflicts with the state and companies making land claims, but also through cooperation with these outside forces. in the case of the recognition of duri communities as indigenous, conflicts are less prominent, but i argue that these cases can also help us to understand how indigeneity comes into existence and how the paradoxical dimension of indigeneity unfolds. south sulawesi was one of the birthplaces of indonesia's indigenous movement. in 1993, environmental activists and indigenous peoples met in toraja and founded the indigenous peoples rights and advocacy network, from which aman later emerged (moniaga 2007: 281) . the toraja, with their iconic tongkonan and indigenous rituals, are one of the main ethnic groups in south sulawesi. they live in the uplands and are mostly of christian faith. the other dominant groups are bugis and makassarese, both muslim groups from the lowland. while there are numerous ethnographic accounts focused on these major groups (e.g. nooy-palm 1986; rössler 1990; hollan and wellenkamp 1996; pelras 1996) , smaller groups are far less frequently considered in ethnographic research on south sulawesi. some of these lesser groups live between the major groups, between the lowland and upland, for instance in the regency of enrekang. in local languages, this area is often referred to as massenrempulu which was also the name of a federation of petty kingdoms and translates literally as "at the edges of the mountain." besides the enrekang ethnic groups in the central part of the regency, there are two more groups, namely the maiwa in the southern, lowland part, and the duri which dwell the northern upland up to the borders of toraja. all groups are of muslim faith which distinguishes them from the toraja, but in terms of language especially the duri share similarities with the toraja (batong 2007; hadrayani and karim 2019; tamma and duile 2020: 281) . enrekang was among the first regencies to pass a local regulation (peraturan daerah, perda) for the recognition of indigenous communities. the perda was issued in early 2016. a number of things made this legislation possible. in enrekang, indigeneity had not previously been appropriated by traditional elites (like, for instance, in nearby toraja) who might compete with aman on the issue of indigeneity. moreover, indigenous activists had good ties with local politicians. also, there were no latent conflicts between the state and companies on the one hand and indigenous communities on the other, despite the fact that local communities frequently violated laws and entered state forests. finally, the common goal of economic extraction and growth provided an ideological consensus between the activists, local communities and the local state apparatus. in the following, the article sheds light on the political process of recognition and how indigeneity emerged in the duri highlands. thus, other dimensions of the indigenous paradox are outlined, especially the economical stance of being part of the capitalist economy and seeking autonomy for an alternative indigenous economy. in indonesia, indigeneity is sometimes at odds with islam as some activists perceive islam as a modernizing force that destroys traditional worldviews. this is in accordance with some western views that emphasize that indigenous peoples are only fully indigenous when they maintain their traditional worldviews against modern religions. while generally careful when it comes to the sensitive topic of religion, some indigenous activists expressed their support when kepercayaan (an umbrella term for traditional beliefs) was recognized as an official belief in indonesia in 2017. occasionally, indigenous activists complained about aggressive efforts to convert animists into muslims, for instance among the badui in west java. however, many indigenous communities in indonesia are of muslim faith and often islam has even shaped their indigeneity in a profound way, as i will outline in regard to the duri communities: islam was indeed a modernizing force with a tremendous impact in the duri highlands. political and juridical contradictions in the process of recognition are often linked to the issue of islam, and on the one hand, indigenous activists have found ways to incorporate islam into their agenda, while on the other hand, islam has profoundly shaped what is now called indigeneity among the duri. as elsewhere in indonesia, it is not ethnic groups who are recognized as indigenous but communities. these communities consist of one or a few villages and are usually much smaller that ethnic groups. these communities can, after they gain acknowledgement from their regency's government, apply for adat forest land titles at the ministry of agrarian affairs and spatial planning. the large network of politicians and religious authorities that indigenous activists in enrekang are embedded into is probably a main factor in why enrekang was among the first regencies to adopt a local regulation (peraturan daerah or perda) on the acknowledgement of indigenous communities. in particular, pak budi, the head of aman enrekang, is crucial in this regard. being a member of pan (partai amanat nasional, national mandate party), a political party affiliated with modernist islam, he has strong ties to both politicians and islamic clergy. this was particularly important in 2015 when conservative muslims in enrekang feared that the acknowledgement of indigenous communities would come at the expense of "proper" islam, as indigenous communities would revitalize traditional beliefs (known as aluk tojolo in the duri upland). countering these accusations, indigenous activists always stressed their islamic beliefs. in one conversation with pak budi, he stressed the importance of islam against everything that is irrational and emphasized what he acknowledged as the foundations of aman and the indigenous struggle: islam, the indonesian constitution (undang-undang dasar), and the national ideology of pancasila. also, adat heads in several duri villages stressed in our conversations that traditional rituals are always embedded into islamic contexts: it is always allah who is addressed in the indigenous rituals and often adat experts and islamic clergy perform rituals together. pak budi explained that during the darul islam rebellion in the 1950s and 1960s, traditional beliefs were outlawed and any ritual relation with spirits was subject to punishment. however, for indigeneity as pak budi understands it, traditional beliefs are unimportant. indigenous activists in enrekang in general are eager to portray indigenous communities as a part of the local community and the indonesian nation, and this is also made clear in the peraturan daerah. at the beginning of the document, indigenous communities (in the document as "customary law societies", masyarakat hukum adat) are said to be indonesian citizens with "special characteristics," probably in cultural terms. a further criterion is that they live in "harmony according to their customs" and have "strong relations to the land and environment." here it is already clear that the peraturan daerah refers to transnational discourses on indigeneity in which indigenous peoples' relationship to the land and their cultural distinctiveness is stressed, and to indonesian nationalism and the indonesian nation as the very framework of their identity. indigenous identity in enrekang is evoked in accordance with the nation and thus points toward spaces of indigenous distinctiveness within (and not against) the nation. this fits well into the concept of the citizenry of a plural state (negara majemuk) that indigenous activists have stressed from the very beginning (acciaioli 2007: 305) . also, indigenous rights to natural resources as communal or individual rights which "originate from their origin" and stem from their "distinctive social systems and cultures" are mentioned in the peraturan daerah. in order to gain acknowledgement, the peraturan daerah outlines a process for communities in which they are identified by a committee investigating whether the community in question has a history of being an indigenous community with customary territory, customary law, "treasures" or cultural artifacts, and indigenous institutions. according to the documents of the recognition of the marena and orong, two duri communities who gained acknowledgement in 2018, and the data collected by indigenous activists for the committee, indigenous history is narrated as a genealogy of the adat heads, but is also embedded in hegemonic narratives of the nation. it is, for instance, written that adat heads of the orong had engaged in the war against the dutch, even suggesting that they were close to the (indonesian) government. also, when the data mentions indigenous rituals, these rituals are not only embedded in islamic contexts but are also portrayed as a sign of being grateful to the "almighty god," using the phrase tuhan yang maha esa which refers to the national ideology of pancasila which itself uses the phrase ketuhanan yang maha esa as a concept of a divine entity. all this demonstrates that indigenous sovereignty is only thinkable within the sovereignty of the indonesian nation and its narratives. the local regulation as well as documents from the committee and indigenous activists who gathered data for the committee suggests that indigenous communities are integral parts of the nation, but it is just this constellation that enables them to gain control over their land. with this strategy (and it is not merely a strategy as the aman activists in enrekang genuinely believe in it), it was not only possible to gain support for the peraturan dearah from all factions within the regency's legislature and to appease pious muslims, but also to get the recognition of six indigenous communities in 2018 and three more in 2019. in total, 20 communities in enrekang have become aman members. aman is heavily engaged in the procedure of recognition. as aman activists provide the data on the communities seeking recognition, being an aman member is a necessary part of seeking recognition from the regency. aman has its own definition of indigenous communities, and in the context of south sulawesi, indigeneity is a contested concept. as traditional elites engaging in local politics are eager to deploy the concept of indigeneity, aman activists distinguish between indigenous communities on the one hand and sultanates and kingdoms on the other hand. as rukka sombolinggi, the current head of aman, declared at the aman council of south sulawesi in 2019, for instance, sultanates and kingdoms are not masyarakat adat as they have cooperated with colonizers and have also exploited indigenous communities. indigenous communities are those who have always been marginalized, those "who have always lost in history", from colonialism to the new order, and are now about to struggle for their rights. in the duri uplands, there had also been some petty kingdoms with local hegemony prior to the darul islam rebellion. though some of the successors of the petty sultanates tried to register as aman members, their memberships were denied because of their history as kingdoms. aman promotes the image of rather egalitarian, marginal communities, but when duri communities fit into this image, their current state is, contrary to the indigenous claim, not an authentic, constant feature. it is rather the result of the troubled history of the duri highlands. it is difficult to draw a clear line between kingdoms and indigenous communities, and social stratification was a crucial feature of all of these groups. it was not before 1906 that the dutch established control in the duri area and they kept most of the traditional hierarchy intact and cooperated with adat heads, outlawing debt bondage and other forms of slavery. the dutch introduced a clear distinction in south sulawesi between nobles and all others (pelras 1996: 276) . however, probably the most radical change in duri societies came in the 1950s and early 1960s during the darul islam rebellion. this rebellion, which is often depicted as a serious threat to the indonesian nation in state narratives, had a stronghold in the duri area: the rugged terrain was ideal for guerilla warfare and the troops received much support from the duri. the darul islam movement aimed for an islamic socialism including moderate land reform. social inequality was rejected and nobles lost their adat positions (pelras 1996: 284) . debt bondage and slavery were abolished among muslims. the abolishment of all hierarchies accompanied the war, and the duri often found themselves the victims. as many ordinary duri peasants supported darul islam because of their egalitarian approach, the indonesian army set villages on fire when the inhabitants cooperated with darul islam. in south sulawesi, the indonesian army was depicted as an alien, javanese force which only had the support of aristocrats and nobles (van dijk 1981: 155) . contrary to official indonesian narratives, many interlocutors (both indigenous activists and ordinary villagers) still had good opinions of the darul islam rebellion, stressing its egalitarianism. indigenous activists never denounced the darul islam movement. after the defeat of darul islam, local nobles tried to re-establish their positions. however, as modernist islam became influential, this time through muhammadiyah, traditional adat hierarchies were still in a difficult position. the outcome was rather egalitarian communities (especially when compared with the socially stratified communities in nearby toraja), except for hierarchies between male and female. on the downside, some adat institutions disappeared and some communities could therefore not apply for indigenous community status. however, in those communities with intact adat institutions, those institutions had lost some of their power and as a result they fit much better into aman's image of egalitarian indigenous communities: ironically, it was the modernizing, anti-traditional darul islam who shaped duri societies in this way. this helps us to outline some dimensions of the indigenous paradox in enrekang and the duri uplands. in political terms, the process of recognizing indigeneity acknowledges the state and the nation in the first place. contrary to aman's famous statement that they would not acknowledge the state if the state did not acknowledge indigenous peoples, aman activists in enrekang engaged in the political framework of local state institutions as the given and acknowledged framework, lobbying for the peraturan daerah and thus for the recognition of its member communities. in the perda and the documents of the recognition process, indigenous communities emerge as a constant part of the nation, but as distinct in cultural manners. these cultural features constitute rights, and this is where the sovereignty of indigenous communities comes in. this sovereignty means, above all, land rights, as adat forest, should be in the hands of indigenous communities. the whole process of recognition revolves around the issue of the land rights of the communities in question. here, the indigenous paradox unfolds as follows: only through the prior recognition of the state and the nation is it possible to gain land from the state and thus establish indigenous autonomy. in terms of history, another paradoxical dimension comes into focus: indigeneity is narrated as an identity of a marginal and egalitarian social group which distinguishes itself from hegemonic parts of society. in enrekang, indigenous communities also have to be similar to other parts of the population, most of all in terms of religion. being islamic is crucial for their recognition, whereas difference is evoked through other cultural characteristics such as adat institutions and material culture. only when similar in terms of religion can the communities occupy a space of legitimate and acceptable difference. also, the idea of egalitarianism is contradictory to the claim of being traditional, as egalitarianism is a rather new development (which took the duri societies from a society with slaves to an egalitarian islamic socialist society in only five decades). however, indigenous activists and people in the recognized villages subscribe to narratives which do not oppose indigeneity and darul islam rebellion (as they do not oppose islam in general). aman activists act on behalf of both tradition and egalitarianism, and this is clearly a paradox, but just as with the paradoxical formation of their relation to state and sovereignty, this paradox is crucial for their agency. and it is the affirmation of egalitarianism which makes their version of indigenous traditionalism possible. in the first part of this article, i argued with regard to mark goodale (2016) that indigeneity offers symbolic (cultural) solutions to political-economic problems. i now return to this issue and explain how this happened in the duri highlands. it is indeed the case that indigeneity obscures economic processes, but on the other hand, it is this obscuring through the language of indigeneity that makes new forms of economic organization possible. indigenous economies, as they are about to emerge in the new indigenous communities, point towards contradictions but also offer a means for a more egalitarian organization of local economic processes. in the duri highlands, manifest and violent conflicts over land and other resources are largely absent and have been so over recent decades. the peraturan daerah and the process of indigenous recognition were not carried out in order to settle a conflict between indigenous communities and companies as was the case in bulukumba, for instance (tyson 2010: 129-153; fisher and van der muur 2019) . rather, the conflict between local populations and the state was low key, as people were aware that the state had claimed control of their customary forests, but they nonetheless entered the forbidden areas in order to collect forest products. in some villages such as uru or marena, for instance, people planted fruit trees and even coffee in state forests, maintaining and harvesting their products with some caution. occasionally, the forestry department would catch farmers in state forests, but overall, the state was largely absent. in conversations, indigenous activists portrayed the state much more as a threatening force than local people did, as the activists stressed their opposition especially to the new order state as a constitutive other for their indigeneity. some areas were dedicated to timber production, but the forests utilized by local communities were neglected areas. underneath the process of indigenous recognition, an ideological conjuncture arose between local state institutions, indigenous activists, and people in the respective villages. their common goal was what tania li (2007) called "the will to improve," and it will be outlined in the following. just as pak budi was a major actor mediating between the local aman branch, his political party and thus other parties in the legislature, pak azis, an assistant to the regency head (bupati) was such a mediator from the other side. when talking about the process of recognition, he speaks of "stakeholders": the regency government, village governments, activists, ngos, and potential investors shared the goal of economic development. in his words, the customary forest should be managed in order to "push" the economic development of the indigenous community without destroying the environment and the forest. he said that the customary forests could become tourism sites. also, the government supported the communities by buying 1,000 seeds each of durian and nutmeg trees to plant in the adat forests. pak azis wants the forest to be "really productive," and the indigenous management reconciles production and protection for him. in his view, the whole process of recognition should "lead to a boost for the indigenous economy." a similar motivation also prevailed in the recognized indigenous villages. the indigenous community of orong, for instance, became an aman member in 2012. activists back then referred to aman's goals, especially their overall goals of becoming economically independent (mandiri secara ekonomi), sovereign in political matters (berdaulat secara politik), and culturally dignified (bermartabat secara budaya). what persuaded the villagers most was, according to the orong's adat head, aman's slogan of becoming mandiri secara economi, and especially the idea of gaining recognized control over the adat forest. during the author's stays in late 2019, people in orong discussed planting coffee trees in their adat forests and establishing a tourism site. however, first they had to establish a road to the forest. what is at stake here is hutan adat, that is, forest, but from the concepts delineated by activists and villagers, there is no clear-cut distinction between forest and agricultural land. it is true that the recognized adat forests should be maintained as forests, but this does not rule out the use of forests as agricultural forests where fruit trees or coffee trees are integrated into the forest to a quite large extent, or the use of a forest as a tourism site. in fact, indigenous forest management might serve as an excuse for agricultural activities in forest areas that previously have not been designated for agricultural production. indigenous activists have organized workshops with recognized communities from enrekang and toraja as well as with foreign ngos in order to establish criteria for indigenous coffee labels. they hope that certified indigenous production with traditional organic fertilizers can add value to their coffee they want to sell to big cities and maybe even overseas. after the orong forest was, as pak denny, the village head put it, "liberated" (dibebaskan) in 2018, not much changed in terms of forest use. it was common before the "liberation" to cultivate cloves, mangoes, and even pepper and dragon fruits in the forest, and people continued to do so as it was now legal. this raised some concerns about conservation, but as long as there was no road for cars to get to the forest (which is about a 40-min motorbike ride from the main village), exploitation remained limited. development of infrastructure had been outlined as a necessary condition for successful exploitation of the forest. the orong community also now benefits from a contract with a resin-extracting company which operates in parts of the adat forest where pine trees grow, but adat heads emphasized that the company now has to comply with adat rules, which forbids resin extraction from young trees. however, despite all the plans and initial cooperation between the government, the company, and the communities, the idea of an indigenous economy often remains vague, encompassing different hopes and possibilities. aman has established indigenous economic groups (kelompok ekonomi masyarakat adat) in several duri villages, which are meant to be in charge of the customary forest, its exploitation, and protection. these groups were established in 2019 and called pammesatan, which means "unity" in duri. by 2021, 40 families had joined the kelompok ekonomi in orong and 32 in marena. the aims of these groups were often a topic of conversation, and people referred to notions such as mengingkat kapasitas (capacity building), hidup kesejahteraan (living in wellbeing), and pengembangan diri (self-development). in other words, they adopted the language of entrepreneurship, and this language and these concepts express the ideological conjuncture with the local state apparatus. the kelompok ekonomi is equally open to all members of the komunitas masyarakat adat who wish to participate. this follows a narrative that all members have equal hak ulayat as long as they are members of the community. therefore, mutual assistance (gotong royong) is, within the structure of the kelompok ekonomi, not a means of labor mobilization on the basis of political status, as has often been the case in indonesian history (see on that issue : bowen 1986: 548-549) . when asked why people joined the kelompok ekonomi, both activists and villagers said that they like the group's foundations of gotong royong and kebersamaan (togetherness). it is important here to contextualize the notion of gotong royong. during the new order, gotong royong served as a national construct to legitimize state interference into village life and the mobilization of rural labor (bowen 1986: 555) . this state interference was, however, quite weak in the duri highlands. the term gotong royong was nonetheless known among the duri. it was popularized again by aman activists as a means to describe indigenous features and village autonomy. in this regard, it is reminiscent of mohammed hatta's notion of gotong royong, where mutual assistance is depicted as an original feature of village democracy against feudalism (bowen 1986: 549-550) . to people in the duri villages and indigenous activists, gotong royong and kebersamaan are indigenous values which are already strong in the community. however, if these values are already strong, the question of why they need the kelompok ekonomi arises. the culture of gotong royong is usually put into practice when a household needs help, but gotong royong did not have a permanent, organized form. in this regard, the kelompok ekonomi represented something new for the people in orong and marena. the institutionalization of gotong royong in the kelompok ekonomi came with the control of the adat forest as a crucial means of production that is owned and administered together. in practice, decisions over forest exploitation need the approval of the adat elders, but they usually approve what the group decides. the adat elders' status is thus rather symbolic and does not allow for personal accumulation. also, the groups had plans to buy other means of production, namely coffee roasting machines, facilities for drying the beans and harvesting from the trees. this is remarkable insofar as collective ownership of movable property beyond families and kinship groups is historically uncommon in indonesia (henley 2007: 101) and is also something new in duri communities. it just appears as a part of adat because it is framed as a part of mutual help and assistance. also, indigenous labeling as a means to add value to the products is in collective ownership. in other words, the kelompok ekonomi, even though their members adhere to and express entrepreneurial aims, offers the possibility of a new solidarity economy. this would be, however, embedded in wider capitalist networks, and the overall foundation of state capitalism has to be acknowledged first in order to gain room for indigenous alternative economies. this is where the economic dimension of the indigenous paradox becomes visible: the possibility of an indigenous solidarity economy in the duri highlands can only emerge when recognizing the hegemonic capitalist and entrepreneurial approach of the state and its institutions. the indigenous economy cannot be outside capitalism as their goods are distributed through the markets, but they make possible new forms of local appropriation of nature. this article suggests that islam (in the form of religious party politics, historical forces, and islamic ways of life in the indigenous villages), ngos, regional autonomy and national discourses, and the concept gotong royong have all become sites of articulation of indigeneity and its contradictions. moreover, indigeneity as it now appears in the duri highlands inevitably consists of contradictions in itself; its contradictions are a condition for its existence. therefore, i have called these contradictions "paradoxes." i have argued that paradoxes of indigeneity are a form of a dialectical process (rather than an issue of relation and difference). indigeneity always appears as antithesis: first as adat as the cultural other within what it opposes (dutch colonialism). this does not mean that adat is simply the opposite of colonialism. in fact, it was an integral part of the colonial endeavor as recognition of adat could serve to stabilize the colonial order. however, indigeneity was the negation of the colonial state insofar as adat was developed with regard to specific economic concerns that expressed economic contradictions within the colonial state (li 2010) . eventually, indigeneity was sublated in indonesian nationalism as the indonesian nation was a synthesis of the western concept of the nation and indigenism as its inner form, only to emerge again as a new antithesis (as masyarakat adat, "indigenous peoples") to the state and its economic-political practices during the late new order. in its engagement with the (post-) reformasi state apparatus, it sublated the notion of indigeneity as antithetical to the state since indigenous people now sought sovereignty within the state and became a part of the political economy that the state supports. in other words, indigeneity is a form of positioning depending on historically developed practices and meanings (li 2000) , but this evolved in a dialectical pattern. as i have demonstrated in the part on indigeneity in the duri highlands, indigeneity now reconciles with the state and its apparatus, but points toward new contradictions between affirming entrepreneurialism (which could fit into a neoliberal framework but does not necessarily have to) and the emergence of a local economy of solidarity. the co-production of entrepreneurial capitalism, the ideology of economic growth, and indigeneity in the duri highlands have resulted in an economic indigenous paradox. as indigenous activists and people in the now indigenous villages begin to outline "indigenous" economies of solidarity (which are, contrary to their claims, not simply traditional ways of working together but are shaped by history and current political conditions), they can do so only by embracing the fundamental capitalist paradigms of the state apparatus. it is only through their common aims of market-oriented indigenous extractivism and capitalization of nature that the alternative spaces of local economies become possible because the common ideas and aims of boosting the rural economy laid the foundation of indigenous recognition. it is crucial, therefore, not only to understand that indigeneity is a political identity (rather than an economic one) but to grasp the contradiction between the economic and the political, or, to be more precise, between class identity on the one hand and native or indigenous identity on the other (see mamdani 2000) . indigeneity is embedded into economic contradictions, and while not simply an economic identity, it is a product of it, and it relates to the political economy in contradictive ways. if indigeneity has a relative autonomy from the economic base, one can argue that it developed through economic processes but maintains and expresses contradictions. the relations between the political (or, to be mere precise, the culturalpolitical) identity of indigeneity and the economic-political identity of the peasantry is, i conclude, not just contradictory, it is also dialectical: indigeneity sublates peasantry in a certain sense; it abolishes it in the sense that indigeneity is an alternative political identity; and it maintains it in the sense that it provides a tool for economic struggles. the same holds true for indigeneity in the local setting in enrekang. indigeneity sublates, for instance, the darul islam movement. it opposes and rejects it because indigeneity rejects the aim of an islamic state and supports the nation state, but it preserves the egalitarian notion of the islamic movement. however, new contradictions can emerge within indigeneity. what political-economic realities are thus obscured (but in some way also made tangible for ordinary people) in institutions of indigeneity? first, aman provides a narrative for local people's separation from the means of production (land). the new order declared land to be state forest in an act of heteronomy. the reason why local people should have direct control over the forest is, in the narratives of indigeneity, because they are indigenous, the original inhabitants, who had been there long before indonesia's establishment. in their view, indigenous communities constitute the state in its diversity, and therefore, the new order violated the state's obligation to indigenous communities. this narrative makes the original accumulation through the state apparatus tangible to people in the duri villages, but it also obscures this economic process by rendering it a cultural-political rather than an economic-political issue. secondly, there are now grassroots indigenous institutions such as the kelompok ekonomi. this institution clearly coordinates economic relations and, as i have argued above, set the condition for a rather egalitarian organization of economic relations. on the one hand, indigeneity obscures this economic process. instead of consciously creating new economic forms of organization, people think that they are only "going back" to an original form of economy that existed before the state separated them from the adat forest. however, as i have argued with regard to tania li (2000) , indigeneity is a positioning, drawing on the historical processes in the duri highlands, and is, in its current form, actually a new identity. collective ownership of the means of production is made tangible and desirable through the concept of indigeneity. in this sense, the symbolic solution for a political-economic problem is in itself already political-economic, albeit that it does not appear through a political-economic identity. this leads to economic contradictions that are a necessary condition for indigeneity. indigeneity means equality, but it also means tradition. it means criticizing the state and its original accumulation, but it also means seeking recognition from the state and expressing itself in the language of the state, that is, economic growth and commodification of natural resources. the paradoxical economic situation also emerges on the national scale. on the one hand, activists argue in terms of economic growth and stress their aim of rural development, which appears as compatible with the government's notion of economic development (nababan 2015) . on the other hand, aman occasionally criticizes the political economy, for instance when advocating for land reform and engaging with other marginalized groups (aman 2020). this economic paradox is embedded in the political paradox of simultaneously acknowledging the state and claiming indigenous autonomy. in the indonesian context, indigeneity is no longer constructed against the state, as indigenous activists have engaged with state institutions and acknowledgement from those state institutions has begun a process of recognition. this article has contributed to research in the indigenous paradox (bens 2020) and expanded the paradox beyond law, especially to the economy. the paradoxical situation of being part of, supporting and simultaneously claiming to be outside the capitalist realm, is an expression of economic contradictions translated into the language of indigeneity. it is this very language that provides the possibility for alternatives, and time will tell if these alternatives of indigenous economy will come into existence or if indigeneity will become just a tool for neoliberal entrepreneurship in which certain individuals might benefit from indigenous land and enterprises but no fundamental alternative emerges. the indigenous paradox points towards its own overdetermination. as a contradictory constellation, it speaks of culture while addressing economic questions and expresses itself in and through economic contradictions. in the duri highland, this economic contradiction consists of the state's grasp on land as state forest, while the prevailing ideology suggests the need to appropriate nature efficiently. as the state has failed to do so, indigenous entrepreneurship and vague ideas of a solidarity economy emerge as "indigenous" answers to the contradiction of state claims and the state's economic agenda of economic growth. by introducing new ways of organizing the local economy, it points towards the basic contradiction between ownership and productive forces, and suggests sublating this contradiction by introducing a solidarity economy. however, this approach will only become truly emancipatory if the kelompok ekonomi as a form of solidarity economy will develop into a universal category for organizing the economy beyond the particular struggle of indigenous peoples. what do the constituting contradictions of indigeneity mean for grassroots activism? indigeneity as a political force can benefit from taking its own contradictions into account. only when recognizing its paradoxical character can it convincingly denounce those who speak on behalf of indigeneity and simultaneously in the name of the (local) state, because the contradictive character of indigeneity can show how these traditional elites in the local state apparatus veil the constituting contradictions of indigeneity and rather act on behalf of their economic interests. the notion of indigeneity as social equality must acknowledge the contradictive history of indigenous communities, as indigeneity otherwise often means going back to (imagined) traditional hierarchies. taking its own contradictions into account, recognizing and embracing them might be a helpful strategy for indigenous grassroots activism against essentialization and is a powerful tool against cooptation by traditional elites. focusing on the contradictions of indigeneity can, as steur (2005) has outlined, also widen the possibilities of solidarity and resistance: the indigenous movement, once aware of its own contradictions, might easier find some common ground with other rural movements and become more resistant to the threats of ethnic exclusivism. funding open access funding enabled and organized by projekt deal. the research was founded by the german research foundation dfg (du 1774/2-1). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/. culture as art: from practice to spectacle in indonesia reconceptualizing masyarakat adat in contemporary indonesia institutional activism: seeking customary forest rights from within the indonesian state for marx komite nasional pembaruan agraria (knpa) keluarkan manifesto politik agraria the return of the native in indonesian law indigenous communities in indonesian legislation adat in indonesian land law: a promise for the future or a dead end? the indigenous paradox. 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indigeneity and the state in indonesia: the local turn in the dialectic of recognition regime change and ethnic politics in indonesia. dayak politics of west kalimantan becoming aristocrats: keraton in the politics of adat decentralization and adat revivalism in indonesia. the politics of becoming indigenous rebellion under the banner of islam. the darul islam in indonesia. the hague: martinus nijhoff return of the sultans: the communitarian turn in local politics anachronism, agency, and the contextualisation of adat: van vollenhoven's analysis in light of struggles over resources key: cord-0059427-yzgqpikq authors: jasso lópez, lucía carmina title: (in)sensibilities to the vigilance of others in the city date: 2020-09-14 journal: cities, capitalism and the politics of sensibilities doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-58035-3_7 sha: 84961f228155c3d6ac89a26ff22421f87c6a4a07 doc_id: 59427 cord_uid: yzgqpikq the (in)sensibilities to the vigilance of others in contemporary cities are studied. in particular, the analysis focuses on the surveillance technologies that permeate the urban structure on a global scale as a way of observing those who live and transit more systematically. starting off of the premise that these technologies are deployed territorially in order to make them perceptible to society, generating sensibilities to regulate and control their behaviour. however, the effects of surveillance on society are not homogeneous, and while some are permanently violated because they are sensible to the possible observation of others, there are those who manage to normalize this surveillance and even be insensible to its presence. the research is mainly circumscribed in mexico city where, as part of the broader research project, the phenomenon was studied and semi-structured interviews were carried out regarding the perceptions and sensibilities of the inhabitants. but also, relevant international social practices are taken into account. in most contemporary cities, public and private surveillance technologies 1 have been deployed to watch what others do or do not do. it is a phenomenon of the city on a global scale (ramírez and valenzuela 2017) , one which has become "a key dimension in the modern world" (bauman and lyon 2013, 4) . behind this urban unfolding, there is a public discourse that refers to these technologies being emplaced in order to reduce crime, and what is expected is that they are perceptible to the populations who transit public space with the purpose of dissuading them from any incivility or criminal activity, attributing to these devices a symbolic power. however, over time the presence of these surveillance technologies to which society has become accustomed and even desensibilized has been normalized. 1 video surveillance cameras and drones are mainly considered. this article aims to analyse the (in)sensibility to surveillance of others in the city. in principle, it focuses on the study of the social effects of surveillance technologies in contemporary societies and cities, and the implications of watching others as the potential violation of fundamental prerogatives such as the right to privacy, to mobility, to the protection of personal data and to not be discriminated against. the research is located in mexico city where i have carried out fieldwork to study the planning and organization of surveillance technologies that converge in public space, and i have also conducted interviews with inhabitants of this city regarding their perceptions and sensibilities. however, in addition to studying the phenomenon at the local level, these social practices are also taken up on a global scale. the analysis is circumscribed within the framework of a politics of sensibilities 2 to study the social practices that normalize the presence of surveillance technologies in the city, as well as those that perceive and assume them as a latent threat in their daily lives and in response to which they have generated new horizons for action. surveillance technologies with different social purposes and different technological scopes have been installed and are operating in practically all cities. the diversity of possibilities of these technologies is so wide that it is complex, at least to outline it in a few pages, in addition to permanently contributing to new forms and characteristics through technological innovation. however, in general, they all have the same objective: to watch the others. watching is associated with observing, and with the sight which is one of the five human senses. sight is the motor of surveillance and is central to social life because, as barreto durán points out: "the eyes are my main connection with the world, with them i am constantly evaluating and questioning my surroundings" (2009, 7) . through the sense of sight, it is possible to look at objects, examine behaviours, understand the world, among many other possibilities that, connected with the other senses, enhance our existence through sensibilities. however, we do not observe objectively or neutrally, our glances are charged with subjectivities because there is an established order in which "shared symbols and accepted conventions give order to our lives, a refuge where we can rest easy, knowing what is right, how our environment has been determined and what we must see as real" (barreto durán 2009, 8) ; so, the possibilities of looking are multiple, and in a broad sense: we never look at just one thing; we always look at the relationship between things and ourselves. our vision is in continuous activity, in continuous movement, continuously learning the things that are in a circle whose centre is itself, constituting what is present for us as we are. (berger 1972, 1) the glance is dynamic and changes over time and in the face of various circumstances and contexts, but it is always related to our existence as individuals who are part of a society, accompanied by wisdom, knowledge, prejudices and social symbols. thus, "there are a number of ways to see the world, to explore and understand it" (barreto durán 2009, 8) . in summary, we could say that there is a force that homogenizes, but at the same time it coexists with another that advances in the opposite direction towards diversity, free will and discordance. in our daily life in the city, "heterogeneous ways of seeing, saying, feeling and doing are promoted", but also other ways that "condition them, showing the structural mechanisms that make it a particular sociospatial and classist geometry" (cervio 2015, 21) . urban design, the showcases and spectacular advertisements that present us with products, the lights and all that visual arsenal that nourishes the cities, are there influencing the views of society, potentially unifying sensations and, at the same time, providing information that can be discerned by each individual. in this context, surveillance carried out through the sense of sight is impregnated with all this social baggage. those who watch with the support of surveillance technologies are people who watch with prior prejudice, knowledge and beliefs. this includes those who watch from home, companies or businesses with a few cameras, and government institutions or police corporations that have hundreds or thousands of cameras in the city. in all cases, the people behind the surveillance technologies, receive and process these images according to their own prior knowledge and prejudice. even the images that are selected and analysed by artificial intelligence will eventually become part of the human glance and judgement for their interpretation. thus, even those who have received training and are trained to watch and find certain patterns of behaviour, cannot avoid their own subjectivities because "what we know or what we believe affects the way we see things" (berger 1972, 1) . when watching, and especially in the effort to do it "efficiently", we will bet on the observation of certain types of people that according to their physical and social characteristics correspond to a certain ethnic, age, religious, ideological group, etc., "potentially" characterized-previously-as risky. this could be considered, to a large extent, as discriminatory by directing surveillance more intensely towards certain types of people than others. in public video surveillance, watchers play a fundamental role, because they are the ones who, permanently-as humanly possible-are observing the images of the surveillance technologies deployed in the city and interpreting whether or not there is any abnormality, some data or image that corresponds to any incivility or crime. to enter that job, each of them participated in a training course in which they explained what they should observe, and what they should report as an emergency or incident, but of course their prejudices and socially shared symbols are added to their training allowing them to discern between one image and another. it is evident that the watchers, when observing, do so with the received indications and with the social baggage and previous knowledge. but it is also clear that "our perception or appreciation of an image also depends on our own way of seeing" (berger 1972, 2) , and even when there are indications about what to look at, each one will see what they choose to see, even in the same image there will be those who appreciate a normal situation and where someone else perceives an unusual or suspicious situation. thus, the sensations that "arise as a result and as an antecedent of the perceptions that give rise to the emotions" (scribano et al. 2012, 8) , are there permanently influencing what we see and how we see it, and this is enhanced through surveillance technologies that magnify the quantity and quality of the images that reach human eyes. in contemporary cities, cameras and drones are watching what is happening, collecting images from different places in the territory, and have the ability to track events in real-time or remotely. the cameras "can reach a wide spectrum by making possible the recording (and reproduction) of the activities of any person who is in the observed place" (cordero 2015, 361) . and even when surveillance is directed at a specific property or person or group, it will also record the activities of those who pass through it, violating their right to privacy. but, "drones are changing the possibilities of our way of seeing, looking and observing" (scribano 2017, 65) . they are able to move quickly from one side to the other and obtain images of precise situations, they introduce a "vertical glance" (arteaga 2016) to watch certain spaces such as borders, airports, roads or social manifestations, marches, confrontations or protests, at the moment in which these occur. all this serves to reduce the risk to those who monitor, and increases surveillance capabilities. at the time of covid-19, these technologies showed the potential of surveillance, especially in asian cities, but also-keeping the proportions-in latin american cities where even when surveillance technologies do not have the scope-both numerical and in capacity-as in asian cities, have increasingly shown more possibilities. in the media, we have witnessed how the health contingency has "accelerated the use of artificial intelligence (ai) systems and surveillance technologies in china" (vega 2020) . it is largely a process that has been brewing for years in the cities of this country whose "artificial intelligence technologies and has set up the world's most sophisticated surveillance state […] tracking citizens' daily movements" (feldstein 2019) . starting from the contingency, there are cameras with computerized vision and infrared sensors capable of detecting the temperatures of people in public spaces, as well as having the ability to identify if people are using their masks properly (vega 2020) . it is no secret to anyone that in china there has been a huge deployment of surveillance technologies for years, and that various activities of daily life are observed through different technologies with facial recognition, artificial intelligence, among other means that generate huge databases and the possibility of conceiving intelligence from its analysis. it is no secret either that chinese governments and companies have exported these technologies to various parts of the world. in latin america, there is evidence that governments-from different ordershave received advice for the implementation of their surveillance systems and have even accepted donations from chinese companies and governments (jasso 2020). thus, it is known that there are cameras and drones capable of carrying out "dystopian uses" orienting surveillance to social control in cities. in this regard, chokshi presents some of these uses: in one, a politician requests footage of his enemies kissing in public, along with the identities of all involved. in another, a life insurance company offers rates based on how fast people run while exercising. and in another, a sheriff receives a daily list of people who appeared to be intoxicated in public, based on changes to their gait, speech or other patterns. (chokshi 2019, 1) to these amazing every day uses of surveillance is added the fact that through drones and cameras more and more can be known about us. for example, the technology that, with the support of the cameras in the electronic advertisements on the streets, "recognizes our reactions and adapts to them" in order to have "a greater impact" on people's preferences. these technologies have been used in tokyo, japan, allowing people to be discriminated according to their preferences and manipulated to consume, but for governments-particularly authoritarian ones-they can serve to "regulate social behaviour without anyone being able to protest" (medina 2017) . any place can be conducive to watching and observing. facial recognition cameras have been placed in the public toilets in beijing, china, 3 the purpose of which is to deliver toilet paper to people who have not previously been in a certain period of time, and thus avoid wasting paper and using it responsibly. however, in terms of human rights, it is a latent violation of privacy, in addition to the right to the protection of personal data when compiling information from millions of faces. in latin america there is also evidence of these dystopian uses. in mexico, in some gated communities in the metropolitan area of monterrey, nuevo león, 4 surveillance cameras have been equipped with artificial intelligence that allows them to detect certain types of clothing or behaviour associated with youth groups. 5 as guzik (2016, 3) notes, there are a "large amount of surveillance capabilities", and with these dystopian uses surveillance technologies have unveiled the control capabilities they have over society, as well intervention to generate data and intelligence in crisis situations and the management of cities. this is relevant, because the analysis of databases implies the "material surveillance of massive amounts of information about people and societies" (scribano 2017, 65) . but these surveillance technologies, like all affordable technologies, are not neutral and there is the possibility of making different uses of them. thus, it is important to emphasize that "technology in itself does not have to lead us to create dystopian cities, it is only a tool. it is how it is used and for what purposes what constitutes the difference" (medina 2017 ). in foucault's (1975) terms, vigilance is power. the fact that someone can be observed and cannot know who is observing them, generates "power mechanisms". above all, when there is no possibility of reciprocity and you cannot see who is watching, and-in the best of scenarios-you can only see the device that is located somewhere. according to berger (1972) , there is a "reciprocal nature of vision" in which we can see something or someone, reciprocally they could also see us. however, in surveillance technologies, this reciprocity is broken because the glance is done remotely, and with difficulty, someone watched by the camera or drone will not be able to see who is watching him, at the most he will be able to see the device, but not who is really watching. in cities, most surveillance technologies are visible to passers-by on public roads (bauman and lyon 2013) , precisely because they have a symbolic function in which they discourage certain social conducts or behaviours. in this sense, the "vigilant architecture" is displayed as "the technology of power in order to repress individuals, manufacture subjected and exercised bodies and impose silence" (cortés 2010, 17) . the goal of these surveillance technologies is that their presence inhibits or dissuades social control. they are placed and managed hoping that populations are sensible to their presence and thus behave according to the established rules because they have the feeling that they are being observed. this agrees with human nature and the sense of sight, because "soon after being able to see, we are aware that we can also be seen" (berger 1972, 1) . in short, it is surveillance that constantly coerces by being permanently present in the cities, manifesting itself as foucault refers, in the form of "the physics of power" in which: control over the body is carried out in accordance with the laws of optics and mechanics, in accordance with a whole set of spaces, lines, screens, beams, degrees, and without resorting, in principle at least, to excess, to force, to violence. a power that is apparently so much less bodily as it is more wisely physical. (foucault 1975, 108) surveillance technologies in cities, especially public ones, are placed in the urban area in a way that they are visible to everyone who transits through there. these are everywhere and it is about "privatized public spaces kept under constant surveillance" (harvey 2008, 32) . in some cases, even advertisements referring to the presence of these devices are placed, either as a way to warn about the vulnerability of the right to privacy or to increase the symbolic, bodily and emotional effects on society. but whatever the case, they are made visible to maximize people's perception and sensibility. the visibility of surveillance can go beyond the symbolic and go to unsuspected extremes. in medellín, colombia, through the loudspeakers on the posts with surveillance cameras, citizens are warned that they are discovered or are about to commit an offence. 6 that is, they show that people are being observed and that could be evidenced and subject to a sanction. in china, giant screens are displayed on the main streets of xian, projecting images captured by cameras in the city. therefore, watchers ensure that everyone who is there is aware of and is sensible to the presence of the surveillance devices and the possibility of disclosure of their image. in this logic, the state "has the possibility and uses image and sound capture means, it is not illogical to think that this will have an impact on the behaviour of the individual in spaces open to the public" (cordero 2015, 370) . at least, this impact is what is expected to control society. in the particular case of drones, it is noted that: "the propensity of the modern state to place, on one side, its ability to observe from a certain height, as well as to place itself symbolically above society" (arteaga 2016, 269) . they exercise hierarchical vigilance, not only because of their physical position above us, but also symbolic, as they can disappear from one moment to the next. thus, surveillance "affects the direct exercise of citizens' rights that are exercised in public places. the fact of knowing that you are permanently observed and registered represses and restricts your full exercise" (cordero 2015, 370) of the right to free transit, to privacy, to the protection of personal data and not to be discriminated against. to this sense of surveillance in cities, we must add the unavoidable fact that the trend of surveillance technologies is incremental. even though there are more and more voices criticizing the effectiveness of cameras and drones, and questioning the potential violation of fundamental prerogatives, the numbers of cameras in the urban structure are actually increasing. 7 it seems that society has begun to internalize the presence of surveillance technologies and "one look is enough. a look that watches, and that each one, feeling it weighing on himself, ends up internalizing it to the point of watching himself; each one will exercise this vigilance on and 7 in mexico city, 8088 public surveillance cameras were installed in 2008. in the first months of 2020, they totaled just over 15,000, but in august 2019, the head of government announced that the installation of 58,000 cameras inside the neighbourhoods with high crime rates would start (la razón 2019). to these are added the tens of thousands of cameras that the victimization surveys identify as having been installed in homes and businesses in the city. against himself" (foucault 1980, 18) . it is largely a new social contract in which we give up part of our rights in exchange for vigilance that watches over me and others and maintains social order. in the interviews conducted in mexico city, 8 there is evidence that society is sensible to the presence of surveillance devices and the permanent glance that is exercised. an interviewee reported that, while we are being sensible to this surveillance, it has a regulatory function in society and serves "so that we are better people". as a specific case, she pointed out that images are shown in the media and on social networks in which people are seen abandoning pets, but these videos manage to sensibilize society, because "knowing that they are being observed by the cameras, they no longer abandon dogs on the street". this occurs either because they are sensibilized to images of abandonment and internalize the consequences, or because they are afraid of social sanction, but from the point of view of the interviewee, society is sensible to surveillance and also modifies its behaviour. in several interviews, men and women reported behaviour modification in the presence of surveillance technologies, in such a way that when they know that they are being recorded-even when they get used to itthey behave differently because they have knowledge that they are being observed. in this regard, an interviewee shares: in the cameras of the shopping centres you start to behave differently if you notice that there is a camera right in front of you. because of course, you know that someone is going to see that recording, for me it is that someone is going to have my image, for some reason we have the instinct to behave under normal standards and [you have to] demonstrate that you are a normal person, even if you don't have the intention to carry out criminal activity, but it is like an instinct to demonstrate that you are an ordinary person who will not draw attention. but what happens with the thousands of public cameras that are permanently monitoring in mexico city? 9 the probability that our daily activities are monitored is high and in this sense, "it can inhibit your normal activities" or "if you know that there is some kind of observation in you, you may change some behaviours" as two interviewees pointed out. and although we are aware of the location of the cameras either by the signs that point to them or by the diffusion of the places where they are placed, 10 it is difficult for us to be fully aware of when and when we are not under the glance of surveillance technologies. furthermore, considering that, in the colonies, both households and companies and businesses have added hundreds of thousands of cameras (jasso 2020), how can we assess whether they are effectively watching us or not? under what circumstances are we sensible to this surveillance that is everywhere? in response to this question, an interviewee stated that "unconsciously, you feel watched", and there are those who even express the social panic of being watched and persecuted permanently. but they warn that this effect increases when there is the certainty of a sanction for inappropriate behaviour, in such a way that: "your attitudes change when there is a sanction involved. the fact that there are cameras must have a follow-up, a result, a consequence or something […] it is more the fear of sanction". in summary, i agree with bauman and lyon (2013, 4) who affirm that "in many countries, people are very aware of the way in which surveillance affects their lives". this holds even in circumstances where there is an absence of certainty about in which place or moment they are being observed. i particularly agree that surveillance is "a unidirectional process in which the glance of the watchers prevails over the watched" (arteaga 2018, 9) , thus the watched are not necessarily certain of when they are observed, and precisely in this uncertainty lies the power of surveillance because although the dream of the panopticon, which allows one to 9 "c5 operates and monitors more than 15 thousand surveillance cameras that exist in mexico city (closed circuit television, cctv), in order to prevent and immediately alert the authorities of security and capital emergencies about any situation of risk". see: https://www.c5.cdmx.gob.mx/dependencia/acerca-de/video-monitore. 10 in mexico city a database was published in which "the locations of the posts of the command, control, computing, communications and citizen contact center (c5) of mexico city with security cameras, panic buttons, speaker, pole type and georeferencing can be consulted". see: https://datos.cdmx.gob.mx/explore/dataset/ubicacionacceso-gratuito-internet-wifi-c5/table/. "see with a glance everything that is done in it" (bentham 1971, 37) is impossible, the sensation of surveillance permanently affects society. in the architectural design of cities "the problem of the total visibility of bodies, individuals, things, under a centralized view, had been one of the most constant basic principles" (foucault 1980, 10) . to a large extent, it became an aspiration to be able to observe others and a necessity to maintain order, thereby avoiding crimes and incivilities. with surveillance technologies, the ability to observe was magnified. these devices have the ability to systematically watch for long periods of time, as well as to record enormous amounts of information in images. they can perform much more "effective" surveillance than is possible with human eyes. thus, the trend towards hierarchically structured cities, with the distribution of bodies in space and densely watched, is aspirationally one of the objectives of contemporary societies, and in the effort to achieve them permanent vigilance is accepted and assimilated (jasso 2021) . faced with this technological deployment, a kind of new social contract was generated in which society gives up 11 all or part of its liberties and rights, such as privacy, free transit, not being discriminated against, in exchange for surveillance of itself and the others that, in turn, allows us to live in an orderly and controlled environment. in this context, drones and "surveillance cameras have become omnipresent and their presence is already understood as something normal "normal" that few of us come to question" (cortés 2010, 33) . much of society tends to the normalization of surveillance technologies, and "citizens dedicate themselves to their affairs almost without noticing the surveillance cameras that point from the top to the streets of all major cities" (garland 2001, 31) . in consequence we arrive at a situation in which "what scares is not the arrival of a surveillance society, but rather that we live in it without it worrying us" (bauman cited by ramonet 2016) . although a society in the midst of a social panic about surveillance is not convenient, neither is one that normalizes and does not question the implications of surveillance. why does the normalization of surveillance technologies occur in contemporary societies? there are several answers, but in order to contribute to the debate in these studies, i will briefly state some of them. one answer is associated with the "imperceptibility of surveillance"; even though most cameras and drones are exposed to the eyes of passersby just to make them sensible, there are also other schemes where "architecture and technology come together to achieve social control through the imperceptibility of surveillance" (cortés 2010, 47) . especially when the aim is to surprise potential attackers, the devices are hidden as a strategy from homes or businesses, and even more so when it comes to national security intelligence operations. on the other hand, the watchers are anonymous and the watched face the uncertainty of not knowing how, when and where they are being observed (jasso 2021). it is not even possible to know if all the devices are working, 12 and if they are also being observed at that precise moment by someone. thus, it is known that there is a possibility of not being seen. in this context, it is clear that surveillance is not, nor can it be, absolute. even with the most powerful technologies, it is not possible to watch everything, much less in cities that are in constant movement and territorial expansion. there will always be something that escapes the glance of these surveillance technologies-both public and private-there will always be some object that in the structure or design of the city prevents the partial or total view of something that wants to be observed, from a tree, a pole, a building or a billboard. furthermore, from a different angle, the images about the same event could be so different that they manage to generate debates among those who observe them. leaving a key person or perhaps a vehicle out of sight can make a real difference in investigating a crime. at the same time, it shows the impossibility of total surveillance and the implications for decision-making. in addition, the possibilities for change and movement in the city are of such magnitude that it is not surprising that people assume that they are not necessarily watched in their daily activities. furthermore, when it is known that although cameras and drones can record a large number of images, they are useless if there is no one behind them to analyse what is happening (jasso 2021) . humanly speaking, it is impossible that the thousands of cameras installed in cities are being permanently watched, and even assuming that a person was hired to observe each of the thousands of cameras that are in the city, there would be moments of fatigue or distraction that would impede observation entirely. 13 finally, i dare to propose that the normalization of surveillance technologies, and the insensibility to their presence, occurs because they are considered necessary to maintain order, and society prefers it to avoiding chaos in cities. in contemporary cities, there is a strong demand for surveillance technologies and consequently, as whitaker (quoted in cordero 2015, 360) argues "the contemporary panopticon is surprisingly different […] the prisoners of bentham dreamed of escaping; the orwell dissidents in 1984 ardently wanted to flee to a better place, but they could not, for there simply was no such place. on the contrary, our panopticon is accepted, and above all demanded". that is a new reality. also, it should be considered that in this process of normalization it could happen that people "get used to despising the public eye and become insensible to shame" (bentham 1971, 42) . in this way, it is not surprising that people even look at the cameras and smile and act as if no one were watching them, 14 but it should be noted that what is risky is normalization to such a degree that it reflects insensibility as a society. before the occurrence of high impact events, such as a crime, an interviewee in mexico city reported: […] i watched a video on where a guy comes out of the trunk and it is believed that it was because he was being kidnapped. he falls to the ground, and want to remove the bandages. the incredible thing is that a car recorded all this, but nobody stopped it […] many people have watched the video, it was on the news, but when talking to the authorities there was no lawsuit, no investigation folder, not even culprits, it is not known who is the person that flew out of the trunk. in another interview, we reviewed the case in which "the murderer records everything that is happening and then publishes it on social networks. as if he had made sense of his crime and spreading it was part of his goal". with these types of events, the level of insensibility to images is revealed where "in society, the fact of recording is more for morbid curiosity than for doing justice". with these type of cases, the underlying reflection is that, although the witnessing and recording of an event through a cell phone manipulated by a person can become insensible, the more the glance through the video surveillance systems that operate en masse in the city, not only because they could escape the eyes of the watchers or the scrutiny of artificial intelligence and facial recognition, but because behind the decisions of which cases to attend, there are also social actors who prioritize what is priority, as well as what is possible and suitable for them to do. it would be considered that "the fact that criminals smile at the cameras is an unusual attitude", however, it is also a consequence of the fact that there is no effect on criminal behaviour. thus, it happens that the cameras "inhibit us because we do not commit criminal acts, but when you are already doing something that you know has no consequences, that they are not going to punish you, then you take it as a joke". the existence of a sanction when a crime is committed is not always the rule, not even when the cameras are present, and this is the reason why those who commit crimes act with total unconcern even in front of the cameras. the case recalled in an interview stands out: you can see in the assaults on the foreign trucks that all have cameras and the assailants get on, take off their headscarves and smile, they literally smile, they say: "look at what i do with your video" because there is no fear of the consequence, then there is no use in recording. it is clear that in society the standardization of surveillance technologies has permeated to such a degree that they become insensible to its presence. in some cases, even extreme situations are recorded in which crimes or incivilities are committed in the presence of the camera. studies on surveillance technologies in cities are relevant because they represent a wide range of possibilities for urban coexistence and also have diverse social effects. but above all they are fundamental, because in most cities, particularly latin american ones, they are constantly expanding, even more so after the context of covid-19 that has revealed the potential of these technologies. it is important to study which effects surveillance has on individuals and society, what does it represent socially that someone else can observe us without us being able to look in reciprocity and without us knowing what happens to the images that are compiled from us every day. in short, how it affects our sensibilities. thereon, one of the main conclusions is that the effects of surveillance in society are not homogeneous. while some are permanently violated because they are sensible to the possible observation by others, there are those who manage to normalize this surveillance and even be insensible to its presence. on the one hand, it is unavoidable that surveillance technologies potentially violate people's rights by violating their privacy, the protection of personal data and the right to mobility. these devices are capable of making people feel persecuted and observed, particularly when urban design insists on manifesting the presence of surveillance devices and generates sensibilities in people that consequently force them to modify their behaviour. however, there are those who normalize the presence of cameras and drones. it is a form of "normalized sensibilities" (scribano and de sena 2019) that is partly due to a process of rationality in which the impossibility of total surveillance is known, as well as the absence of information and the latent "imperceptibility of surveillance" (cortés 2010) , which is further accentuated when the devices are hidden for national security reasons, or for some other reason that warrants it. but the process of normalization and insensibility also occurs because people accept this surveillance in a new kind of social contract, in which prerogatives are given in exchange for control in the city and more security. in this way, it is observed that as they demand more vigilance, and even in some cases finance it with their own resources, the criticism and questioning of the vigilance of others diminishes. at the extreme are those who are totally insensible to the surveillance of others and to the images of crimes and violence recorded by these technologies. the fascination with the image is lost and even when scenes that should be important and shocking to our senses are shown, we normalize them and even make them invisible. surveillance in cities is a fact, and it is likely that it will increase in time both numerically and in its capacities. in this sense, what is socially pertinent is that the surveillance exercised by others be limited and controlled in order to avoid dystopian uses that further violate the social rights and sensibilities of those who inhabit the cities. tecnología de reconocimiento facial en los baños públicos de china contra los ladrones de papel higiénico política de la verticalidad: drones, territorio y población en américa latina. región y sociedad videovigilancia en méxico. protesta política, conflicto y orden social cómo veo lo que veo vigilancia líquida el panóptico. madrid: las ediciones de la piqueta modos de ver. london: british broadcasting corporation (bbc) and penguin books experiencias en la ciudad desde las tramas de los sentidos how surveillance cameras could be weaponized with a.i. the new york times graban asaltos a casas y negocios de la condesa; los ladrones ni se inmutan videovigilancia e intervención administrativa: las cuestiones de legitimidad la ciudad cautiva: orden y vigilancia en el espacio urbano how artificial intelligence systems could threaten democracy. the conversation advertising billboards use facial recognition to target shoppers. the guardian vigilar y castigar. nacimiento de la prisión el ojo del poder la cultura del control making things stick: surveillance technologies and méxico's war in crime el derecho a la ciudad seguridad ciudadana y tecnología: uso, planeación y regulación de la videovigilancia en américa latina. díkê. revista de investigación en derecho la ciudad videovigilada. entre la prevención del crimen y el control social cámaras vecinales enlazadas al c5 llegan a zonas peligrosas la distopía de las ciudades inteligentes. nexos, la brújula. el blog de la metrópoli videovigilancia en el espacio público: el monitoreo de la ciudad como dispositivo de control poblacional. memoria para optar por el grado de licenciado en ciencias jurídicas y sociales may 6). ¿cámaras con altavoces para sancionar gente en medellín? el colombiano drones: una manera de ver políticas de los cuerpos y emociones en los sujetos involucrados en acciones colectivas en la ciudad de villa maría los programas sociales como mecanismos de "represión desapercibida" en argentina covid-19: ¿un caballo de troya? reforma key: cord-0060277-5ko4eoga authors: berglund, oscar; schmidt, daniel title: reimagining democracy date: 2020-09-10 journal: extinction rebellion and climate change activism doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-48359-3_5 sha: b18e51b56de78b538a1f2ceea3680751b49de8d2 doc_id: 60277 cord_uid: 5ko4eoga this chapter explores xr’s demand for a citizens’ assembly and how it draws on critiques of representative democracy that have been growing in social movements to provide a more democratic model. we argue that the citizens’ assembly demand as sketched by xr comes from an established critique of representative democracy but that it then becomes a way of avoiding answering the big question of what needs to be done to address the climate emergency. the demand for a citizens’ assembly on the climate emergency highlights the tensions in xr and beyond around solution agnosticism and the ignoring of the power relations and structures that drive climate change in contemporary capitalism. as sketched by xr comes from an established critique of representative democracy but that it then becomes a way of avoiding answering the big question of what needs to be done to address the climate emergency. the demand for a citizens' assembly on the climate emergency highlights the tensions in xr and beyond around solution agnosticism and the ignoring of the political economy. in the first section we argue that xr's critique of representative democracy draws on political discourses of anti-capitalism, so-called left populism and an institutional critique of the short-termism in representative democracy. we then proceed to study the demand of a citizens' assembly and how such assemblies have emerged from the scholarship on how deliberative democracy can address some of the shortcomings of representative democracy. in the third and fourth section we explore what the citizens' assembly demand does for xr as a movement. we argue that the demand lies at the centre of the tensions around solution agnosticism, reform or revolution and the non-engagement with the political economy that we set out in the introduction. it allows xr to defer solutions to the climate crisis to a future citizens' assembly and thereby avoid detailing critique and demands. xr's assembly demand is designed to create radical climate policies and not to lastingly transform the way we do politics. the prospective climate assembly, as envisioned by xr, represents a single exception to politics as usual which can exert pressure on politicians to act in the public interest and enact the climate policies that we need. we argue that a citizens' assembly is unlikely to solve the climate emergency but rather becomes a tool in the much broader struggle to do so. this is because a citizens' assembly does not fundamentally alter the power relations in society and the economy that drives the climate emergency. xr's critique of representative democracy comes at a time when representative democracy has lost significant legitimacy across society and society has become increasingly polarised. as such, we distinguish three types of political discourse that xr echo or draw upon in their critique of representative democracy; anti-capitalism; so-called left populism; and an institutional critique of the short-termism of representative democracy. in their declaration of rebellion, xr announce that we, in alignment with our consciences and our reasoning, declare ourselves in rebellion against our government and the corrupted, inept institutions that threaten our future. the wilful complicity displayed by our government has shattered meaningful democracy and cast aside the common interest in favour of short-term gains and private profit. (xr 2019d, p. 2) this declaration gives expression to the movement's conviction that the political process is broken. representative democracy has here proven incapable of acting in the public interest and tackling problems such as inequality and climate change. the movement holds that the present political system serves the needs of short-term financial interests of elites; has been co-opted by these elites; and is structurally inept to deal with climate change. xr's discursive treatment of capitalism is muddled and purposely so. many xr spokespeople and members are anti-capitalists and publicly state their political convictions. the movement's official line, in contrast, is to stay away from what xr call 'lefty language'. but even in this official line, there are references to the domination of capital to explain past governments' failure to address the climate crisis. here, 'democratic representatives are lobbied by powerful corporations' (xr 2019c), which makes them more beholden to the interests of businesses than the public. this is seen as particularly catastrophic for climate change policy since the current fossil-fuel-run capitalist economy has significant interests in maintaining the status quo. there is in other words an implicit, if not explicit, critique of what badiou calls (2010, pp. 98-99) 'capitalo-parliamentarialism'. implicit or soft anti-capitalist discourse often appear as what has been termed left populism, where the people are pitted against the elite (stanley 2008; mudde 2017) . according to roger hallam (2019a) , 'elites in business, government and the media' (p. 9) and 'the various supporting pillars and groups who follow their orders: courts, police, security people etc.,' (p. 17) are unwilling to 'respond even minimally to demands for structural change' (p. 23). this reluctance makes them the 'opponents' in xr's struggle. here the problem is seen to be 'post-democracy' (crouch 2005) , a system in which the private interests of a small elite predominate democratic institutions. there are in other words strong similarities between particularly hallam's anti-elitist language and that of the movement of the squares (flesher fominaya 2015; fernández-savater et al. 2017) , as well as the anti-austerity parties that grew out of that movement (della porta et al. 2017) . lastly, xr critique the institutional limitations inherent to representative democracies. the movement argues that the 'five-year electoral cycle discourages governments from attending to long-term issues like climate breakdown' (xr 2019c, p. 16) . they argue that since 'political power in the uk is in the hands of a few elected politicians' who 'simply can't see past the next election', the political system has failed to make 'the long-term decisions needed to deal with the climate and ecological emergency' (xr 2020a). policies whose positive impact will only become evident in decades to come do not help politicians win the next election. hence, representative democracies exhibit a strong tendency towards 'short-termism', a bias that partially accounts for the electoral system's failure to adequately tackle climate change (see hanusch 2018 ). an aggravating factor, according to xr, is politicians' reliance on opinion polls, or 'partially informed knee-jerk reactions', to 'inform themselves on what their constituents might want' (xr 2019e). this, they argue presents a form of 'will of the people' that is devoid of any reflection or learning. there are in other words echoes of various strands of scholarly and popular critique of representative liberal democracy in xr's discourse. the difficulty of representative democracy to tackle a long-term issue like climate change has led to demands of both authoritarian and more democratic forms of governance. many concur with xr's diagnosis but infer an argument in favour of technocratic authoritarianism (stehr 2016; fiorino 2018) . by their account, climate action requires 'governance by experts' and a political process which is less publicly accountable (shearman and smith 2007) . xr and many other social movements go in the other direction and advocate for deeper forms of democracy. the climate emergency requires, according to xr, 'radical system change on a scale never seen before' (knights 2019, p. 11 ). the movement is however diffused on what such radical system change may entail in political economic terms but is clearer on how they will take place in terms of institutional democratic reform. the 'only way by which we can take back control from the corporate captured system currently failing us', according to xr, are 'radical new forms of democracy that put decisionmaking back in the hands of the people' (xr 2019b, p. 3) . to this end, xr propose the establishment of citizens' assemblies. if these are the political discourses that xr draw upon in demanding a citizen's assembly, there is also a wealth of theoretical and empirical scholarly research into forms of deliberative democracy that bolster this demand. the demand of a citizens' assembly draws on a long tradition of critique of representative democracy and for deliberative democracy to play a greater role in governance. the demand states that the 'government must create and be led by the decisions of a citizens' assembly on climate and ecological justice' (xr 2019a). the citizens' assembly is to be tasked with finding solutions to the climate and ecological crisis, providing the public 'with a way to decide what is best for our future, even if that requires radical changes in the present' (xr 2020a). assembly members are to be chosen through the selection mechanism known as sortition, or selection by lot. as for jury service, every eligible citizen has an equal probability of being selected to participate (smith 2009, p. 167) . xr propose stratified random sampling where 'the public is divided into subpopulations based on, for example, gender, age, ethnicity, education level and geography' and the makeup of the assembly is proportionally representative of the population as a whole according to these subcategories (xr 2019c, p. 15 ). this process ensures that the chosen members are broadly representative of the demographics of the general public (manin 1997) . unlike jury service, however, citizens who receive an invitation to become an assembly member will not be obliged to take part (xr 2019c). by making participation voluntary, assembly members are more likely to be interested and motivated in the proceedings. but even with stratified random sampling, voluntary participation decreases representativeness by allowing for some self-selection, perhaps towards more politically engaged citizens (leib 2004, pp. 103-114; fishkin and farrar 2005, p. 74) . the purpose of sortition is to do away with current inequalities in terms of representation. for xr (2020a), current representative democracy enhances pre-existing power relations and disproportionately advantages older, male, white and wealthy populations and interests. because future assembly members would not be exposed to lobbying and electoral pressures, they would speak more freely about what was on their mind and decide on what they truly believed was in the public interest. yet, the selection process can put pressures of a different sort on participants. while meant to encourage assembly members to draw from their diverse experiences and backgrounds in joint pursuit of the public good, sortition can also encourage participants to think of themselves as representing 'people like them' (smith 2009, pp. 82-83) . it may be expedient to temper strong claims to representativeness so that participants do not think of themselves 'as irreconcilably divided by race, selected only to fill a particular racial or gender slot' (abramson 1994, p. 11) . a common critique against citizens' assemblies that xr has to counter is the average citizens' alleged ignorance or incompetence. it is often posited that randomly chosen citizens are not qualified to make policy decisions since they lack the required expertise, experience, skills or, in harsher formulations, cognitive capabilities (van reybrouck 2016). weighting different responses to climate change requires a deep understanding of the science of climate change, technical expertise of relevant technologies and policy knowledge. this supposedly makes climate assemblies a more precarious endeavour than prior citizens' assemblies on abortion, euthanasia or same-sex marriage. xr would however be right to retort that the purported technical expertise of politicians and other policymakers has so far not led them to implement compelling climate policies. moreover, assembly members have plenty of opportunities to listen to and cross-examine experts in order to gain relevant knowledge. citizens' assemblies are a form of participatory democracy. in contrast to a representative system with elected officials, citizens' assemblies put power in the hands of people who are not professional politicians. by involving citizens in policymaking, citizens' assemblies are designed to be participatory in regard to political outcomes. the idea is that the decisions of a citizens' assembly can be accepted as representative of what the general public had decided if all citizens had taken the time to properly inform themselves on an issue: people are supposed to think: 'if i were selected, if i had time to learn and to deliberate with my peers, perhaps i would come to a similar conclusion as the assembly did'. (xr 2019e) however, the model falls short of realising two elements of a participatory democracy, mass participation and civic education (pateman 1970; fishkin 2009, chapter 3) . in fact, only a minuscule percentage of the general population takes part in a citizens' assembly. if some 100 people participate out of tens of millions of eligible citizens, this hardly constitutes a wider democratisation of society (pateman 2012; lafont 2015) . consequently, the educative effects attributed to participatory practices are also restricted to the very few participating individuals. if the large majority of people does not personally experience the assembly process, they will not be able to benefit from the experience and grow into better people or citizens in a way that participatory democracy is intended to (pateman 1970) . for a polity to be truly participatory, not only should everyone be given an equal chance to participate; a broad segment of the population actually has to be involved. as well as participatory, citizens' assemblies are also designed to be deliberative. citizens' assemblies are deliberative in that they enable lay citizens to make good policy decisions by bringing people together and facilitating face-to-face discussions (goodin and dryzek 2006; warren 2008) . they aspire to the ideal of a deliberative democracy which attributes a central significance to deliberation and the concomitant requirement to give reasons for one's opinions (rawls 1997; smith and wales 2000; gutmann and thompson 2004; fishkin 2009; lafont 2020) . deliberation consists of 'mutual communication that involves weighing and reflecting on preferences, values, and interests regarding matters of common concern' (bächtiger et al. 2018, p. 2) . deliberative democracy is conceptually contrasted with aggregative models of democracy that are based on the counting of votes. the former considers the reasons people give for their expressed views and asks for justifications. the latter model takes people's preferences as given and only seeks to combine them in a fair way (dryzek 2000, p. 3; gutmann and thompson 2004, pp. 13-21; chambers 2009 ). ideal deliberation aims to arrive at a rationally motivated consensus. but in practice, deliberation and aggregation, talking and voting, are often combined (cohen 1989; bächtiger et al. 2018 ). citizens' assemblies generally have a voting mechanism in place to decide on the final policy recommendations. after all, it is very improbable that all assembly members will arrive at a complete consensus for any one policy, let alone a significant number of measures. a key area of inquiry in deliberative democratic theory pertains to the conditions that constitute authentic deliberation. even within xr, while citizens' assemblies are accepted as a good idea in principle, there are prevalent concerns regarding their practical implementation. one xr activist aired concerns 'about how we choose the experts that provide the evidence to give to people' and how to put the 'knowledge of a very technical, complex subject into the hands of ordinary people' so that they have a good enough understanding 'to make well-informed, sensible decisions'. this goes to show that, in order to be perceived as legitimate, citizens' assemblies need to have a thought-out process in place to guide participants step-by-step to the eventual drafting of policies (fung 2003; gerwin 2018; patriquin 2019, chapter 2) . xr advance an assembly process that is divided into four phases: learning, consultation, deliberation and decision-making (xr 2019c, p. 12; 2019e) . during the learning phase, experts and stakeholders present information on the issue at hand to the assembly members, who also have an opportunity to invite and question additional experts. all the assembly members are to learn climate science and social justice issues. xr advocate that participants subsequently disperse into multiple citizens' panels on specific issues, such as transport, agriculture, housing or power, with a size of between 50 and 100 members each. next, in the consultation phase, individuals and groups from society can make written submissions which are summarised and presented in the assembly. during the deliberation phase, in plenary sessions and facilitated group discussions, assembly members reflect on and discuss the evidence and opinions they have heard. finally, based on these deliberations, they draft and vote on policies and deliver a report outlining their decisions. to guarantee a fair process and legitimate deliberations, four distinct groups are to run and monitor the citizens' assembly (xr 2019c, pp. 8-9 ). an impartial coordinating group conducts the random selection of citizens and invites experts, stakeholders and facilitators. an advisory board, composed of academics and practitioners, develops the selection criteria for the expert/stakeholder panel and ensures balance of the background material and evidence presented to the assembly. a team of experienced facilitators sits with assembly members and makes sure that the deliberation is not dominated by a vocal few. lastly, an oversight panel is tasked with monitoring the entire process. deliberative democratic practices, and by extension citizens' assemblies, have encountered a number of criticisms. for one, deliberation is held to be susceptible to manipulation. contrary to the 'ideal speech situations' posited by discursive theorists such as habermas (1984) , in real-world discussions the force of the better argument may rarely be decisive. humans are not purely rational beings and vulnerable to sophistry and manipulation. there is plenty of opportunity for the most educated and those most skilled in rhetoric to sway the decisions in their favour (elster 1998, pp. 1-2) . moreover, deliberation does not necessarily result in consensus. even deliberations that take place under favourable conditions are not always conducive to a convergence of opinions or a deeper understanding. they 'can get nowhere and peter out, they can cause people to become even more confused than they were at the outset', 'foster polemics, and generate further bitterness, rancor and division' (geuss 2019) . empirical findings attest to the phenomenon of group polarisation, where discussion is likely to shift judgements towards more extreme positions than the initial inclination of members (sunstein 2000) . and especially in divided and polarised societies, discussions between citizens often exacerbate differences rather than resolve them (mouffe 1999; dryzek 2005) . lastly, and especially troubling for climate assemblies, decision-making in deliberative bodies is slow and it has historically taken a long time for assemblies' recommendations to become law (fenton 2019) . a long-winded process is incongruous if quick action is needed. these critiques notwithstanding, xr's demand of a citizen's assembly is grounded on decades of scholarship on the shortcomings of representative democracy and potential for deliberative democracy. the citizens' assembly demand serves to make a strategy that is based on how to achieve revolutions become democratic and reformist. it thus lies at the centre of the tension between revolutionary and reformist tendencies in xr's discourse. the movement's strategy, or 'theory of change', is based on the tactic of mass arrest. xr aim to mobilise a small minority of the general population to publicly and visibly break the law in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. roads are blocked and transport systems obstructed until the inflicted economic costs and logistical difficulties caused by mass-arresting peaceful protesters force the government to accede to the movement's demands (hallam 2019b) . xr recognise that this seemingly revolutionary strategy can be problematic for a democratic movement. after all, a majority of the population may disagree with xr's aims and demands. xr attempt to circumvent this problem by means of the citizens' assembly demand. that is, xr do not impose solutions of its own on the majority but rather demand to let the people decide. thereby, according to a local xr coordinator, the movement turns a strategy that is 'profoundly anti-democratic into something that is supremely democratic'. through the assembly demand, the movement's strategy becomes compatible with its democratic self-appraisal. this makes the citizens' assembly demand an indispensable corollary to xr's theory of change as it balances the revolutionary with the reformist. this analysis, however, is in tension with xr's demand to achieve carbon neutrality by 2025. xr stipulate that the national citizens' assembly is to determine how to achieve net-zero emissions in the uk by 2025 (xr 2019a). the 2025 target is widely regarded as highly ambitious and its realisation would require, according to xr, a mobilisation 'of the scale of a world war' (xr 2020e). crucially, this implies that the timeline for the yet-to-be-determined policies is set by xr and not itself up for democratic scrutiny and debate. assembly members are only to decide on the policies that will achieve carbon neutrality by 2025, not to question the target itself. this indicates a tension in xr's solution agnosticism as it limits the remit of a future citizens' assembly. it expresses an uncertainty about a citizens' assembly deciding that carbon emissions should only be level as late as, for instance, 2040. alternatively, it addresses the risk that the future assembly will not be able to agree on a target. the citizens' assembly demand has limited the movement in talking about solutions to the climate emergency. xr have been reticent when it comes to lobbying for particular climate and environmental policies and projects. a number of local working groups are discussing action plans with city councils, for example, regarding airport expansions. nevertheless, there is little broader debate within xr about what kind of society we need and what kinds of lives we would have to live in order to address the impending climate crisis. discussions between xr members circle around topics such as actions, movement strategy, media messaging and wellbeing. there is surprisingly little discussion about both climate change and what kind of systemic changes would be needed to address it. this void speaks to the tensions of solution agnosticism and how xr relate to capitalism in their clamour for system change. the void is justified on the basis that xr are a self-selective movement that has neither the legitimacy nor the ability to implement political responses. for xr, only the national government 'has the power to enact the scale and scope of necessary action' (xr 2019e). hence, the movement is best served by influencing the public debate and forcing the government to create a citizens' assembly in the first place. essentially, xr is to concentrate on forcing the government to agree to its three demands. this reluctance to talk about political solutions has not gone unchallenged. a number of xr activists hold that the citizens' assembly demand indulges the illusion of a straightforward path towards victory. in one coordinator's view, xr does not talk about solutions, what we are gonna do. we barely even have policy demands. we just say 'let's build a citizens' assembly' and the citizens' assembly will work out the policy positions. from this perspective, xr's theory of change gives people a false sense of security. some activists thus believe that xr need to take a more active part in bringing about the transformations in our ways of life and the structures that sustain them. to do this, xr should broaden its strategic outlook from solely pressuring the state to making changes in the very make up of (capitalist) society. this view seems to have held some sway in the movement. in the strategy paper for 2020, xr delineates a year where rebellion will go beyond the streets and into the fabric of everything we do…we won't wait for our demands to be met, we will begin to enact them, piloting new participatory systems in democracy, media and economics. (xr 2020c) part of this project are local citizens' assemblies which will enable communities to develop their own, smaller-scale initiatives. xr are also planning to increase their contestation of non-state actors, be it the 'corporate media' or the 'economic systems that destroy life on earth', by 'offering alternatives which disrupt the business-as-usual hold on power' (xr 2020c) . this reorientation is more in the spirit of a 'revolution of the everyday' which urges individuals and communities to create democratic and egalitarian spaces in the fissures of power without initially aiming for large-scale transformations (davies 2014) . it is in other words a whole lot more prefigurative than what xr have been doing up until this point. how this new prefigurative agenda will play out in practice is as of yet uncertain but it does point to tensions in and a possible break from the solution agnosticism that has dominated until now. this brings us to the tangled relationship between the prospective climate assembly and the current political system. as we argued above, xr introduces the citizens' assembly as a response to the failures of representative democracy. like many other movements, xr see the political sphere as negligent and corrupt and look for different means of redress. the citizens' assembly demand promises to go 'beyond politics' (xr 2019a), heralding a new kind of collective decision-making. however, xr's proposal is less transformative of the current political system than may be inferred by the movement's rhetoric. for one, the citizens' assembly is to be an addition to the representative system, not a substitution. the assembly's decisions 'will provide political cover and public pressure for politicians to set aside the usual politicking and do the right thing' (xr 2020a). it will thereby 'enable politicians to address the emergency before it's too late' (xr 2019c, p. 5). policymakers remain central to xr's vision and parliament as well as all other representative bodies will continue to exist and do what they have always done. additionally, the citizens' assembly is only to discuss how to tackle the climate and ecological emergency. once the assembly submits its recommendations, it will disband again. the climate assembly's scope and duration is in this discourse not intended to lead to lasting disturbance of the liberal democratic consensus. an add-on, single-issue, once-only citizens' assembly would not fundamentally alter the political system. in this sense, the national coordinator for xr uk's citizens' assembly working group is right to claim that 'a citizens' assembly, to me at least, is not that radical at all' (all hands on 2019). here, 'beyond politics' does not signify a transformation of the political sphere but an exception to politics as usual subsequent to which things can continue as before. the tension between reformist and revolutionary undertones in xr's discourse becomes visible here. the talk of system change and the deeper theory of change based on transforming the state as we know it and its concomitant unequal power relations gives way to a reformist discourse where a citizens' assembly is an add-on to existing structures. the primary use of the prospective citizens' assembly is not to alter politics but to get better climate policy. xr hope that the climate assembly will endorse a more radical and socially just environmental action plan than anything that parliament can come up with. such deliberative mini-publics have indeed been found to 'be relatively sensitive to the perspectives of environmentalists' (smith 2003, p. 101) . while they do not always provide the results environmentalists look for, green positions seem to be favoured compared to decision-making in representative bodies (dryzek 2013; bryant and willis 2019) . nonetheless, the outcomes of the assembly process will depend on the assembly's design. these design elements are contested, as is perfectly exemplified by the differences between xr's demanded citizens' assembly and the existing climate assembly uk, which is taking place at the time of writing (climate assembly uk 2020). the latter was established by six house of commons select committees and convened over four weekends in the spring of 2020. for a start, contrary to xr' s demands, the climate assembly uk discussed how to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. by postponing the underlying target by 25 years, the ensuing policy proposals were ensured to be less far-reaching and impactful. additionally, as xr (2020d) point out, 'the net-zero target climate assembly uk will work towards does not account for emissions from aviation or trade' or for the 'uk's international emissions, so we can continue to outsource a significant proportion of our emissions to other countries'. another limitation of the assembly is what xr criticise as an overall focus on 'changes on the individual level' that 'will not adequately address top-level policies, such as regulations for industry, infrastructure and international supply chains' (xr 2020d). people debated 'how we travel', 'what we buy' and learned about heat and energy use in the home, consumption, waste, dietary choices and land use (climate assembly uk 2020). yet structural issues relating to the global economy were effectively omitted. we can then see how what appears to be a radical political demand in the form of a citizens' assembly can be watered down and thus result in something that falls well short of necessary action. the climate assembly uk, lastly, has only an advisory status. it was not commissioned by the current government but by the previous parliament and is consequently restricted to making advisory recommendations (fenton 2019) . according to xr, non-binding recommendations are insufficient since they are open to challenge by the current political system, and hence interest groups and corporations. xr suggest that assembly proposals with over 80% support should be binding. as for recommendations with between 50 and 80% support, the government is to address them and provide a rationale for why they were either rejected, modified or accepted (xr 2019e). while this would be ideal, there is an understanding within xr that getting the government to agree to legally binding decisions is unlikely. the more realistic option is to exert pressure on politicians so that they do not dare to reject the assembly's proposals (xr 2020b) . in this case, the likelihood of success will also depend on the perceived legitimacy of the citizens' assembly amongst the broader public. in this chapter, we have argued that xr's citizens' assembly demand draws on influential critiques of representative democracy and delineates a seemingly straightforward solution to the climate crisis. while we agree with xr that a randomly selected, deliberative political body has a number of desirable attributes we nonetheless allege that xr's proposal relies on several leaps of faith. to start, the citizens' assembly's ability to deliver a more participatory and deliberative democracy is severely restricted. xr's claim to go beyond politics does not signify a lasting transformation, but a short-lived exception, to politics as usual. the assembly demand's actual role is to create a one-time chance for implementing radical policies specifically relating to climate change. xr may, however, be overly optimistic in their expectations of the assembly results. guided deliberation does not necessarily lead to superior policymaking and assembly members may not arrive at a consensus or clear majority decisions. citizens' assemblies have indeed been shown to favour environmentalist positions, but the prospective climate assembly's design will be crucial for determining the eventual recommendations. these design elements are highly contested and amenable to the vested interests that currently impede effective climate action. lastly, in order for radical proposals to be implemented, the climate assembly will either have to sit above existing representative bodies and make legally binding recommendations or there has to be strong political and public support for the assembly. in the current political climate, the former option seems unlikely and the latter is highly dependent on xr's success at 'truth-telling' and convincing the public of the urgent need for action. citizens' assemblies and the demand for them can be a useful political tool in the fight for climate action and climate justice, but they are unlikely to be a silver-bullet solution. deferring solutions to a climate assembly gives xr democratic legitimacy but it also ignores the power structures that are in fact preventing effective action on climate change. part of xr's discourse is that representative democracy has been co-opted by economic elites and the fossil fuel industry has played a particular role in delaying addressing the climate emergency. there is also a recognition that the media plays an important role in maintaining what xr call the status quo on climate change. a citizens' assembly that operates in a political system and society that is still dominated by these power relations would not have the power to overcome them. a hostile media could have undue influence on part of the assembly. it could also severely undermine the legitimacy of the assembly in the eyes of much of the public in the currently polarised society. shielding participants in the assembly from undue influence from the fossil fuel industry would also be crucial but challenging. not least, a citizens' assembly on climate change would have to be so overarching in its remit that it would have to sit above the rest of the state in many ways. this is because addressing climate change will involve huge changes to how we make, sell, buy, trade, transport and invest in goods and people globally. in other words, it involves transforming global capitalism. the initial response to covid-19 taking place at the time of writing gives some indication to how dramatic such changes are likely to be. that is a rather larger task than deciding on individual policy issues, such as when abortions should be legal. we do not dispute that a citizens' assembly would be as qualified as elected representatives to make important decisions. we do however dispute citizens' assemblies as solutions in and of themselves. that is, if we in a hypothetical future would find ourselves in a situation where a citizens' assembly is unaffected by the currently existing power relations in global capitalism, we would have to overcome those power relations first or the effects of the citizens' assembly would be too limited to achieve the necessary reforms. the citizens' assembly would not do that for us. in short then, if demanding a citizens' assembly can give legitimacy to xr and climate change activists; suggestions from a citizens' assembly set up under current circumstances would have a high level of legitimacy, making the assembly a useful tool in the fight for climate action; but the assembly would not be able to solve the climate crisis without wider changes in the power relations that have created the climate crisis. new york: basic books deliberative democracy: an introduction the communist hypothesis beyond the ballot: how citizens can lead the climate change conversation, shared future rhetoric and the public sphere: has deliberative democracy abandoned mass democracy? climate assembly uk deliberation and democratic legitimacy post-democracy just do it differently? everyday making, marxism and the struggle against neoliberalism movement parties against austerity deliberative democracy and beyond: liberals, critics, contestations deliberative democracy in divided societies: alternatives to agonism and analgesia deliberative democracy and climate change, center for humans and nature. center for humans and nature deliberative democracy are citizens' assemblies really the answer 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extinction rebellion handbook deliberation, participation, and democratic legitimacy: should deliberative mini-publics shape public policy democracy without shortcuts: a participatory conception of deliberative democracy deliberative democracy in america: a proposal for a popular branch of government the principles of representative government deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism? populism: an ideational approach participation and democratic theory permanent citizens' assemblies: a new model for public deliberation the idea of public reason: postscript the climate change challenge and the failure of democracy deliberative democracy and the environment democratic innovations: designing institutions for citizen participation citizens' juries and deliberative democracy the thin ideology of populism exceptional circumstances: does climate change trump democracy? deliberative trouble? why groups go to extremes why elections are bad for democracy. the guardian designing deliberative democracy: the british columbia citizens' assembly our demands. rebellion.earth people's assemblies manual the-extinction-rebellion-guide-to-citizens-assemblies-version this is not a drill: an extinction rebellion handbook why xr demands a citizens' assembly on climate and ecological justice citizens' assembly-extinction rebellion. rebellion citizens assembly workshop. zoom.us. available at: https:// zoom.us/recording/play/frsdfbjk65k8kp4l-butechwye5gzjyorznqpu eoo5ojaahigyna1ufx-2mx7yap?continuemode=true extinction rebellion uk 2020: power together. rebellion extinction rebellion welcomes climate assembly uk, but mourns its lack of urgency and agency. rebellion the emergency. rebellion.global tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 the teaching excellence framework: perpetual pedagogical control in postwelfare capitalism conor heaney, hollie mackenzie abstract in this paper, we argue that success as a knowledge economy and the teaching excellence framework will constitute a set of mechanisms of perpetual pedagogical control in which the market will become a regulator of pedagogical possibilities. rather than supporting pedagogical exploration or creating conditions for the empowerment of students and teachers, such policies support the precarisation and casualisation of both. we develop these claims through a reading of these policies alongside gilles deleuze’s postscript on the societies of control, and situating it in the context of what gary hall has termed postwelfare capitalism. we conclude by reaching out to others in the tertiary education sector and beyond to ask if this really is the direction we wish to take this sector in the uk. keywords: tef, deleuze, postwelfare capitalism, pedagogy, critical education policy studies introduction the teaching excellence framework (tef) and the accompanying uk government white paper, success as a knowledge economy: teaching excellence, social mobility, and student choice (department for business innovation and skills bis 2016b), pose a number of challenges to those working in the contemporary university. in this paper, we articulate some of these challenges through a reading of gilles deleuze’s postscript on the societies of control (1992) alongside this white paper. more specifically, our first claim, made through deleuze, is that the tef’s implementation and enforcement – as well as many of the other measures outlined in the white paper will constitute a set of mechanisms of perpetual pedagogical control through which the concrete everyday relations of university life will be further subjected to processes of neoliberalisation, management, control, supervision, metricisation, marketisation, casualisation and precarisation (to name only some potential effects). by ‘further’, we here situate this research alongside the work of others who have developed research, tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 criticism and resistance to the continuing neoliberalisation of the university in the uk and beyond (brunskell-evans, 2009, 2012; harney and morton, 2013; heaney, 2015, 2016; neary, 2015). the tef is itself ‘marketed’ as a necessary corollary to the research excellence framework (ref) and as a policy mechanism which will ‘drive up the standard of teaching’, providing students (in esse and in posse), employers and other education providers with ‘powerful signals’ about how ‘excellent’ teaching is being produced across the higher education sector (2016b: 13). against this, the second argument of this paper is that these incoming reforms of the uk’s tertiary education sector have little to do with improving teaching quality or enhancing student empowerment, but instead are indicative of the uk’s gradual move towards what gary hall (2016) has aptly termed postwelfare capitalism; these reforms, in other words, we situate as reforms which help enable a transition to a tertiary education sector befitting a postwelfare neoliberal state.1 success as a knowledge economy before making these arguments, however, we shall first devote our attention to the key claims we wish to focus on within the white paper (the provisions from which are to be found in the higher education and research bill, which, at the time of writing, has gone through its second reading in the house of lords and is awaiting its committee stage examination). the key claims on which we shall focus relate to (1) the white paper’s extensive policy of marketising the tertiary education sector further, a policy which, it is argued, requires (2) so-called regulatory ‘simplification’, and (3) extensive ‘information provision’ for the apparent aim of ‘empowering student choice’ (bis, 2016b: 10), to which the tef is, in part, a response. we shall explore each of these points in turn. i. (neoliberal) marketisation the first point we wish to highlight is the extent to which the white paper reifies, glorifies, and fetishises competition and marketisation. this, of course, is not in itself unique or surprising – the browne report (bis, 2010) explicitly did this too however, success as a knowledge economy’s ambitions on this are extensive and explicitly claim to ‘go further’ than previous moves towards the marketisation of the tertiary education sector. consider the following: 1 we would like to thank both anonymous peer reviewers and the copy-editor for both enriching and improving the clarity of this paper through their feedback. tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 competition between providers in any market incentivises them to raise their game, offering consumers a greater choice of more innovative and better quality products and services at a lower cost. higher education is no exception […] but we have not made a decisive enough move to open the higher education market (bis, 2016b: 8-9, our emphasis). the ‘decisive move’ the report envisages is one in which ‘market entry and exit’ – that is, the ability for new degree or ‘service’ providers to enter the higher education ‘market’ and acquire ‘degree awarding powers’ (bis, 2016b: 10), and the potential ‘exit’ of these providers from the market if business proves unprofitable or slow is simplified through the reduction of ‘barriers to entry’ for new potential service providers. this ‘decisive move,’ the white paper claims, will combat the market privilege enjoyed by long-standing institutions (or ‘incumbents’) whose privilege acts as a blockage to the competition the report glorifies. indeed, easing ‘market entry and exit’ is envisaged almost as a silver bullet, as a mechanism which can simultaneously drive up teaching standards, economic growth and social mobility (bis, 2016b: 9). opening the future of the tertiary education sector to further marketisation through the reduction of barriers to entry and exit, it must be noted, in effect means that the ‘failure’ and therefore ‘market exit’ of education providers is envisaged as a ‘natural part of a healthy, competitive, well-functioning, market’ which ‘the government will not, as a matter of policy, seek to prevent […] from happening’ (bis, 2016b: 10). such an implicit and explicit affirmation of a neoliberal market allows the white paper to present the proposed reforms as inclusive of the notion that future ‘market exits’ indicate overall ‘market health.’ although an extensive discussion of this point is not possible within the confines of this paper, it is worth noting how recent, contingent and contestable the dominance of this neoliberal market-oriented language is in the context of tertiary education (barry, 2011; canaan, 2013; heaney, 2015). ii. regulation, control returning to the logic of success as a knowledge economy more closely, we move on to the second point from this document that we wish to highlight. in order to create the sort of competitive market environment envisaged, what is demanded, according to the white paper, is regulatory ‘simplification’ or an ‘updating of the regulatory architecture.’ that is, in order for there to be a ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’ market, what is required is a large amount of regulatory intervention. [the capitalist coupling of deregulatory rhetoric with actual interventionism a far cry from any putative claims of laissez-faire has already been conceptually developed and tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 empirically examined by, of course, karl polanyi (2001: 141-145) and michel foucault (2010: 145), amongst others.] through such intervention, the hope the white paper articulates is that more private firms will be able to enter the ‘higher education provision market’ more easily, offering ‘niche’ education provision to help plug ‘skills shortages’ (bis, 2016b: 8). the creation of a single market regulator, the office for students (ofs), is central to this, a regulator that will be designed to be ‘explicitly pro-competition and pro-student choice’ (bis, 2016b: 15), in part through adopting a ‘risk-based approach to regulation’ (bis, 2016b: 21). as bridget hutter notes (2005: 2-3), the history of risk-based regulation in the uk is closely associated with the emergence of deregulatory rhetoric and policy in the 1980s and 1990s and the attendant growing prominence of private-sector styles of management. hutter interestingly connects riskbased regulation with (1) reagan-era us ‘regulatory relief’ (which was one of the four cornerstones of reagan’s economic programme) (2005: 2; also, see mcgarity, 1986: 261) and (2) so-called ‘new public management’, a trend in public sector management focusing explicitly on performance indicators, hands-on management, continuous processes of ‘modernisation’ and ‘rationalisation’, amongst other things (hood, 1991: 4-5). the regulatory move towards ‘risk-based approaches’ entails, this is to say, a doublemovement: a decentring of the state away from provision and ownership (first movement) towards oversight and management (second movement); or, what hutter describes as ‘a move from public ownership and centralised control to privatised institutions and new forms of state regulation’ (2005: 3). this is a decentring in so far as the state moves away from its previous role as a (depending on the context) owner, provider or main funder of a service, towards an overseer, supervisor, or manager of the industry in question. in the white paper’s vision of the future uk tertiary education sector, the level and intensity of supervision and management proffered is connected to an institution’s performance in regular data monitoring mechanisms (as is already in place in, for example, the ref). for example, and to return briefly to the question of ‘market exit’ which we noted above, whilst the white paper does emphasise the need for ‘student protection’ in the event of ‘market exit’ (bis, 2016b: 22) and does claim that any ‘choice’ to close a particular institution will be in the hands of the institution itself (bis, 2016b: 38), it nonetheless does not explicitly exclude the possibility of the sector regulator’s pushing particular institutions towards ‘market exit.’ 2 instead of this, the white paper affirms that the regulator will attempt to ensure the efficiency and swiftness of any institution-closure process (bis, 2016b: 39) and, further, that institutions which give the regulator a ‘cause for 2 we thank one of the anonymous peer reviews for this astute point. tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 concern’ (bis, 2016b: 34), for example, will be subject to more regular and intensive reviews, whereas ‘the highest quality providers will no longer be subject to controls’ (bis, 2016b: 27) although all institutions are subject to data monitoring, of course. as part of this, the white paper even envisages the creation of what is termed an ‘enter and inspect’ (bis: 2016b: 35) piece of legislation which would enable, under certain conditions, either the sector regulator or secretary of state to ‘enter and inspect’ a higher education provider. in short, the level and intensity of regulatory control of the sector will be explicitly connected to certain ‘key indicators’ (bis: 2016b: 33) – for example, national student survey (nss) scores, tef rankings, graduate employment – indicators which function as epistemological tools which justify and enable high levels of individual intervention into particular institutions whose ‘performance’ does not meet, or is not compliant with, market demand. we shall now focus a little more closely on these epistemological tools and on the question of the ‘information provision’ of these ‘key indicators’ which the white paper lauds for its potential for ‘empowering student choice’ (bis, 2016b: 10). our explicit focus here will be the tef. iii. information provision the logic of the claims of success as a knowledge economy, on the reading we are developing, is this: the tertiary education sector requires competition to flourish and grow; competition requires marketisation; marketisation requires reducing barriers to entry and a move to a risk-based regulatory framework; a move to risk-based regulatory framework requires oversight and management (i.e., further processes of intervention). oversight and management, then, become the problems to be solved and these are immediately problems of control and supervision. indeed, as céline baud and eve chiapello (2016) note, drawing on michel foucault (2010), and, as we have already suggested, the (decidedly neoliberal) move towards risk-based regulatory frameworks does not require ‘less’ intervention, but rather demands a multiplicity of new tactics of intervention, disciplinarisation and control, such as the building of new institutional incentive structures through epistemological and calculative technologies, bureaucratic expansion and so on. control and supervision are positioned as the explicit centre-point of both the ref and tef. the tef will provide information and ‘inform the competitive market’ (bis, 2016b: 13) about which institutions have been most compliant with the incentive structures the tef promotes (i.e., ‘teaching excellence’). the white paper notes that ofs ‘will be able to provide real-time analysis and information to the secretary of state’ (bis, 2016b: 66) of the higher education sector and individual institutions; tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 furthermore, bis’s ‘factsheet’ on the higher education and research bill even speaks of this as an ‘information revolution’ (2016a). more information provision, of course, means more intervention, supervision and control. the clearest mechanism of control and supervision, as well as one of the largest signals to the market and students, will be the establishment of tef league tables which will grade and rank institutions. noteworthy is the decidedly extensive nature of these mechanisms of measurement, justified by the, to say the least, difficult epistemological task of reducing a practice as broad as teaching to a single metric: measuring teaching quality is difficult. but it is not impossible. we define teaching broadly including the teaching itself, the learning environments in which it takes place, and the outcomes it delivers. such things can be measured: students assess their satisfaction with their courses, retention rates are a good proxy for student engagement, contact hours can be measured, employers choose to sponsor some courses, or work with some institutions, because of the industry-relevance of their offerings, and employment rates can be measured. some of these metrics are of course proxies – but they directly measure some of the most important outcomes that students and taxpayers expect excellent teaching to deliver. and we recognise that metrics alone cannot tell the whole story; they must be benchmarked and contextualised, and considered alongside the additional narrative that can establish a provider’s case for excellence. taken together, we can build a rounded picture of the teaching experience that we expect higher education to deliver to its stakeholders. (bis, 2016b: 46) the more extensive the epistemological task, the white paper argues, the more that aspects of the teacher-student relationship need to be measured, supervised and thereby controlled. once teaching practices are metricised and ranked, higher rankings will enable institutions to charge higher tuition fees which, along with the ref (and the many other prominent league tables), will further reproduce and centralise a competitive and hierarchical reputational economy between universities built around a putative commitment to ‘student choice’. this is an effect the white paper explicitly lauds (bis: 2016b: 46); indeed, the continual establishment of hierarchies and short-term reputational competition between institutions, students and teachers is one of the explicit purposes of the tef, rather than the sort of fundamental challenge to the privileged enjoyed by long-standing ‘incumbent’ institutions which we mentioned above. competitive reputational economies, and hierarchies between institutions, students, and teachers, this is to say, constitute one of the key aims of information provision, and thus of the tef. tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 having outlined the components of the white paper pertinent to our arguments in this paper, we shall now pivot to these two arguments themselves. the tef as a mechanism of control deleuze’s arguments in his postscript on the societies of control will guide this section. what deleuze called societies of control, which he claimed were emerging at the time of the paper’s publication, are distinguishable by their gradual move away from tactics of normalisation and discipline in ‘enclosed’ institutions such as the school, hospital, prison, and so forth (the institutions so central to foucault’s disciplinary societies), and towards new modes of normalisation or modulation in ‘open’ environments. of course, for deleuze, enclosed institutions are not totally erased, and disciplinary power is not totally replaced, by the emergence of control societies. further, as bernard stiegler notes, control societies cannot be disassociated from the emergence of contemporary digital technologies (2015: 49). deleuze identifies some institutional shifts: from the hospital to more decentralised mechanisms of care (e.g. hospices and day care); from the factory (a key site of discipline) to the corporation (a key site of control). the factory/corporation distinction, here, is worth focusing on, as it is the emergence of the contemporary corporation which is vital in the emergence of new forms of educational institutions. the corporation operates in part, for deleuze, through practices of modulation (as, for example, in differential salary structures), which affect each actor in the institution and which ensure perpetual competition between them: if the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision […] the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within (deleuze, 1992: 4-5, our emphasis). crucial for our purposes are deleuze’s reflections on educational institutions, the future of which he sees as a general merging with the corporation. indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation. (ibid, 5) whilst one ‘exits’ disciplinary institutions (usually to move on to another site of enclosure) – such as the exit of the ‘reformed criminal’ from prisons into factories – one, in effect, never exits tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 control. control is, for deleuze, perpetual, limitlessly postponed from completion (ibid, 5), inciting continuous short-term competition for short-term accumulation and turnover, but whose general operation is in principle ‘continuous and without limit’ (ibid, 6). a further aspect of control which is pertinent to this paper is that of how control demands supervision and oversight. continuous and constant supervision and oversight allows for incentive structures to be continuously changeable, for rewards and punishments to be always possible. this is the crux of deleuze’s claim that ‘controls are a modulation’ (ibid, 4): continuous and constant supervision – rendered possible by contemporary digital technologies – allows for the continuous differentiation or modulation of the incentive structures that individuals face, how they are rewarded, punished, and so forth. to sum the points we wish to extract from deleuze: the move towards societies of control as a move towards new modes of normalisation and modulation in ‘open’ environments is constituted through (1) modulation and incessant competition; which is in principle (2) open, continuous, constant, and without pre-defined limits; which, in order to operate, requires (3) continuous and constant supervision and oversight. we do not presuppose any priority to these three components, nor do these three points exhaust deleuze’s claims, but they will suffice for our purposes. returning to success as a knowledge economy and the tef, let us revisit the rationale for further marketisation in the tertiary education sector. the white paper, as we have already noted, reifies, glorifies, and fetishises competition and marketisation. the key condition for creating the institutional incentives for such behaviour (incessant competition and marketisation) is a vast set of epistemological mechanisms of supervision and control, mechanisms which perpetually modulate the behaviour of each individual actor insofar as the application of these epistemological mechanisms are, in principle, perpetual and unlimited and can be applied differentially; institutions which do not compliantly adapt to these incentive structures will face harsher and more radical interventions and, if necessary, the government will ‘assist’ their market exit. the open-ended reputational economy which the tef is presented as, for example, is an open mechanism of perpetual competition which is never completed. teachers under the tef, in this sense, will always be preparing for the next tef and the next process of monitoring and are incentivised to adjust their behaviour according to these mechanisms of control. institutions which do not compliantly adapt the behaviour incentivised by these incentives will not, the white paper hopes, last long, evidenced especially in the white paper’s emphasis on tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 and, indeed, support of, ‘market exit’ as an apparent sign of a healthy, competitive market (bis, 2016b: 43; 49; 53). transforming the regulatory and incentive structure of the tertiary education sector through lowering barriers to market entry and exit and the generation of hierarchical and reputational economies with financial ‘prizes’ attached (such as the potential ability to raise tuition fees when an institution achieves high tef rankings) is the white paper’s approach of industry modulation, that is, its method of creating a more thoroughly marketised sector and generating incessant competition. the tef is envisaged as an industry modulator, a regulatory tool comprising informational flows and signals through which to control the sector. in addition, it is important to note that, since ‘competition’ and ‘growth’ are the explicit goals of all the policies suggested in success as a knowledge economy, these goals are, of course, never achieved ‘once and for all’. they are, in principle, perpetual, as jo johnson notes in the white paper’s foreword: ‘if we are to continue to succeed as a knowledge economy, however, we cannot stand still, nor take for granted our universities’ enviable global reputation’ (bis, 2016: 5). the risk-based approach to regulation is perpetual, continuous, and without limit. the state’s role becomes, therefore, that of enabling informational flow and the manipulation of incentive structures through epistemological, calculative, and financial technologies; or, in other words, the state’s role becomes that of continuous and constant supervision of individual and institutional ‘performance’ and of the relations between students and teachers as such. insofar as such supervision and oversight, as far as the tef is concerned, is focused on teaching practices, but in a broad sense which encompasses teaching ‘environment’ and therefore the teacher/student relationship as such, our claim here is that the tef is explicitly a mechanism of perpetual pedagogical control. the university in postwelfare capitalism in the uberfication of the university, gary hall uses the term postwelfare capitalism as a broad indicator to denote the coalescence of two main socio-economic trends of recent years (here we are focusing specifically on the uk): (1) privatisation, deregulation, and austerity and (2) the growth of (profit-driven) so-called ‘sharing economies’, which rely on contemporary digital technologies and which are part of the growth of ‘platform capitalism’ (srnicek, 2017). by way of concluding this paper, this section will offer a reading on this context of postwelfare capitalism by intersecting our reading of success as a knowledge economy, alongside deleuze, with the political-libidinal economy of the present. tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 uberfication, broadly speaking, denotes the recent growth of these so-called ‘sharing economies’, which commodify human-human relations through digital sharing platforms built upon maximising the sense of consumer choice and convenience, usually through extensive rating systems for ‘service providers’ and rapid, digitally-enabled, service. firms like (of course) uber and airbnb are treated as exemplars of this trend. an early point worth mentioning is that the majority of those who labour (and generate profit) for airbnb, for example, are not airbnb employees and thus do not have access to labour rights (hall, 2016: 8-9). (it remains to be seen what effects the employment tribunal’s decision, in october 2016, on uber’s losing the right to classify its drivers as self-employed in the uk will have). nick srnicek notes that such firms adopt a ‘hyper-outsourced model’ (2017: 76) and are thereby able to side-step the provision of any economic security to their workers. this is indicative of the type of casualisation of labour – or precarisation of labour (standing, 2011) prominent in the ‘sharing’ or ‘‘gig economy (but which, of course, is not reducible to it), especially insofar as digital platforms allow ‘gigs’ to be arranged on an ad-hoc basis for the consumer (and therefore on an insecure basis for the service provider). casualisation also denotes flexibilisation. in flexible markets, as hall notes, ‘employers want to be able to draw from a pool of part-time, hourly-paid, zero-hours and nocontract workers who are available ‘on tap’, often at extremely short notice’ (2016: 18). in their hiring practices, employers want to ensure further, we should add, that only the ‘most competitive’ employees are hired to satisfy ‘consumer demand’. access to the relevant information, coupled with a reputational economy, helps employers and regulatory agencies generate such flexibilised labour conditions and produce certain incentive structures. the example of uber is instructive here: both consumers and service-providers are subject to a ratings-based reputational economy. microsoft-owned linkedin, too, performs a similar function in providing employers and potential employees with instant access to a large database of ‘trusted’ (through their gated-access approach) potential ‘networking’ and employment opportunities. hall does not explicitly discuss the white paper, nor the teaching excellence framework. nonetheless, as he does note, levels of casualisation in the tertiary education sector are already considerable, noting university and college union (ucu) research which found that, when ‘the use of atypical academic staff is factored in, 54% of all academic staff and 49% of all academic teaching staff are on insecure contracts’, concentrated on those who have the largest teaching loads (ucu, 2016). the white paper’s measures of marketisation, including the function the tef could feasibly play in such new conditions, we here argue must be considered alongside tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 these tendencies towards precarisation in the tertiary education sector and, as such, within the uk economy more generally (srnicek, 2017: 79). these measures of marketisation look set to open this sector to accelerated further processes of casualisation and precarisation. under such increasingly precarious labour conditions, the reputational economy which the tef seeks to become (bis, 2016b: 49), the white paper hopes, will acquire central importance in enabling ‘service-providers’ (teachers) teaching ‘gigs’ in a new education market a shift which would be a continuation of processes of what charmaine brown (2013) has termed the ‘professionalisation agenda’ and which she has associated with a generalised deterioriation of working conditions. the tef’s reputational economy is argued for in terms of student choice and satisfaction wherein satisfaction is instrumentally connected with ‘good outcomes’ or ‘employment outcomes’ (bis, 2016b: 43) but also in terms of flexibility and a commitment to part-time study (ibid, 52). in effect, the labour market that the white paper envisages is explicitly precarious and insecure, which, the white paper conjectures, is a condition for ‘teaching excellence’: [w]e want a higher education system which is flexible enough to cope with change […] a competitive and dynamic higher education sector needs students who actively and regularly challenge universities to provide teaching excellence and value for money. it needs institutions with the right incentives to deliver for students, to innovate, and to grow. (ibid, 53, our emphasis) flexible labour markets, of course, require flexible and precarious workers, or quite simply, disposable workers. hall, in a related market (in his projection for the soon-to-be uberfied university sector), notes the following: increasing numbers of university workers […] will have little choice but to sell their cheap and easy-to-access courses to whoever is prepared to pay for them in the ‘alternative’ sharing economy education market created by platform capitalism […] and as such, they will experience all the problems of deprofessionalization, precarity (in the sense of being unable to control or even anticipate their own future), and continuous performance monitoring by networked surveillance technologies that such an economy brings. (hall, 2016: 21-22, our emphasis) in place of continuous, hall could, of course, have also used the term perpetual. recall the points we subtracted from deleuze in the previous section: the move towards societies of control was positioned as a move constituted through (1) modulation and incessant competition; tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 which is in principle (2) open, continuous, constant and without pre-defined limits; and which, in order to operate, requires (3) continuous and constant supervision and oversight. we treat deleuze’s claims here as instructive when considered in the light of our contemporary postwelfare capitalism and the proposed policies of the white paper. we do so for two main reasons, which we shall now outline before concluding this paper. first, it is of note how modulation and incessant competition is incentivised among individuals working in and between academic institutions through the pervasive rhetoric of excellence and the hierarchical and reputational economies generated through mechanisms of surveillance such as the ref (and soon, the tef). such incessant competition must be perpetual and openended, insofar as such open-endedness maintains an incentive structure by which academic staff ‘are motivated to continuously try to do better’ (hall, 2016: 27). achieving ‘better’ and producing ‘excellence’, in other words, become, in effect, about being controlled by short-term reputational metrics and targets ‘control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit’ (deleuze, 1992: 6). similarly, as srnicek notes, the reputation systems of firms such as uber and airbnb tend to transmit and exacerbate gendered and racialised biases (2017: 77): metrics of control are, in this sense, metrics of exclusion. in the context of postwelfare capitalism, the intensification of precarisation and reputationalism which the white paper and the tef seek to produce – that is, its aim of perpetual pedagogical control – looks set to transform teaching into a ‘gig’ to be competed for in the university-to-come. such a transformation of the labour conditions in the tertiary education sector, coupled with a framework of control based upon a notion of ‘excellence’, is well suited to weakening the possibilities of solidarity, of collective organisation and therefore of key potential avenues through which such trends could be resisted and/or confronted in creative and dynamic ways. such solidaristic possibilities are attacked through incentive structures of incessant competition, the potential exacerbation of gendered and racialised privilege and accelerating processes of precarisation. the second point we wish to make on this context of postwelfare capitalism relates to the putative commitments to ‘student choice’, ‘student satisfaction’ and ‘teaching excellence’, through which success as a knowledge economy makes its claims. the white paper envisages an education market which is hyper-responsive to ‘student and employer demand’ and which (they conjecture) is ‘more satisfying’ or ‘more excellent’ the smoother the transition from tertiary education to employment is for students (bis, 2016b: 5, 8, 9, 13, 19, 46, 58). [it is also of note that tef review boards will include ‘employers’, though this is not commented on in tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 any detail (bis, 2016b: 19, 40).] under perpetual pedagogical control, pedagogical exploration becomes totally subordinated to the production of satisfied and employable customers, as well as the transmission of hollow and dogmatic pedagogies (mackenzie and mackenzie, 2014). as hall notes: faced by such a situation [where metrics dominate and govern] […] academics are likely to prefer to run courses in subjects that are perceived by student debtors-as-consumers as having the potential to help them gain a ‘good’ job with a decent salary. they will thus be involved mainly in producing the type of unthreatening, lower-level, vocational ‘workers’ that are needed by postwelfare capitalism (and which the current push on the part of many governments towards an ‘employability agenda’ for much of higher education seems determined to generate) rather than the kind of educated public citizens or creative critical thinkers who are capable of maintaining some control over their own work and futures (hall, 2016: 31-32). teachers (and, of course, potential students) who do not adapt to these conditions face, in other words, even further economic insecurity in a context of precarisation. following the white paper’s logic, we ought not to teach those subjects which do not satisfy consumer demand (which do not produce satisfaction and employability); nor ought, it follows, education providers (temporarily) employ those individual teachers who do not produce satisfied and employable graduates. the effects such incentive structures and mechanisms of control will have on what is pedagogically possible in the university-to-come cannot be fully predicted, of course. however, as daniel saunders notes, speaking here of the similar pervasiveness of ‘excellence’, competition and precarious labour conditions in the united states tertiary education sector, excellence frameworks (such as the tef and of course, the ref, which has been subject to similar criticism (cabral and huet, 2015)) are grounded on the reducibility, metrifiability and ranking of teaching practices and, as such: not only does this quantification necessarily challenge emancipatory educational practices that are built upon the recognition of students and faculty as nuanced, multidimensional people who are irreducible with one another (freire, 2000; illich, 1971), but it limits the potential for new, non-quantitatively based pedagogical practices and educational priorities. such measurement and its corresponding closing off of alternative approaches is a foundation of the neoliberalization of postsecondary education, as everything within a neoliberal world is commensurable with one another and subject to tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 quantitative measures (brown, 2015). as such, to embrace the commitment to excellence is to naturalize and universalize the quantification of postsecondary education […] once excellence is accepted as a primary educational goal, institutions must ensure that the goal is met. to do so requires building upon the quantification of all educationrelated activities and placing them within assessment regimes (saunders, 2015: 403). one of the threats which saunders gestures towards in his own context, and which we wish to emphasise by way of conclusion, is that the language of student choice and excellence functions in fact as a commitment to the ‘competitive market’ as the arbiter of excellence and, as such, the arbiter of what is not excellent, what is legitimate (profitable) to teach and what is not so. or, in short, a (dogmatic and uncritical) commitment to the ‘competitive market’ becoming the regulator of pedagogical possibilities, to the normalisation of incessant and perpetual pedagogical supervision and control, and to intensifying processes of casualisation and precarisation. it is, to say the least, difficult to identify processes – which others have with some optimism in recent years (birch, 2012) which support student empowerment, explorative and deep pedagogies through which students and teachers might be able to co-create empowering environments together, or the long-term economic security of either students or teachers. success as a knowledge economy and the tef, we claim, have little to do with improving teaching quality or enhancing student empowerment, but instead are significant steps towards a more thoroughly marketised tertiary education system: a tertiary education sector befitting a postwelfare neoliberal state. conclusion in this paper, we have argued that success as a knowledge economy and the teaching excellence framework will constitute a set of mechanisms of perpetual pedagogical control in which the market will become a regulator of pedagogical possibilities. rather than supporting pedagogical exploration and empowering students, such policies support precarisation and casualisation, and the subordination of pedagogy to market principles and truths. we here have not suggested a particular course of action to take, in part owing to the fact that we do not wish perpetuate mechanisms of control over the myriad of as-yet unexplored possibilities of creative confrontation. such a move would pre-emptively narrow what we cannot foresee. we understand that such confrontations could be actualised in a number of different ways and hope that the critique outlined in this paper will encourage or invite readers to carve out their own possible confrontations. our own response, however, has already started to tef special edition compass: journal of learning and teaching, vol 10, no 2, 2017 manifest itself in creative and experimental pedagogy: an avenue that we have been exploring through workplayshops (these explorations will be the subject of our following paper on these themes). creatively confronting the conditions we face becomes, we suggest, a pedagogical task to be participated in and explored for those interested in transforming them. this paper ends with an open narrative rather than a closed one and with more questions than answers. do we support conditions such as these in the tertiary sector? is it not our task to confront them? how may we mutually empower each other and support inclusive and open educational practices rather than submitting to the exclusionary logic of the market? reference list barry, j. 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(2011). the precariat: the new dangerous class. new york: bloomsbury academic. stiegler, b. (2015) symbolic misery volume 2: the katastrophē of the sensible, translated norman, b. cambridge: polity press. university and college union (2016) precarious work in higher education: a snapshot of insecure contracts and institutional attitudes. available at: https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/7995/precarious-work-in-higher-education-a-snapshot-ofinsecure-contracts-and-institutional-attitudes-apr 16/pdf/ucu_precariouscontract_hereport_apr16.pdf (accessed: 6 december 2016). the ideology of self-making and the white working class in rebecca harding davis’ life in the iron mills sofía martinicorena universidad complutense de madrid reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 the ideology of self-making and the white working class in rebecca harding davis’ life in the iron mills sofía martinicorena universidad complutense de madrid r 60 ab st ra ct sofía martinicorena is a research fellow (fpu-2019) at the department of english studies of the universidad complutense de madrid. after obtaining a master’s degree in united states literature at the university of edinburgh (2017-2018), she is currently writing her phd thesis on the national spatial imaginary in contemporary united states fiction. she has participated in conferences and seminaries relating to the field and has published articles on varied topics, including united states space and place, edgar allan poe or film studies. martinicorena, sofía. “the ideology of self-making and the white working class in rebecca harding davis’ life in the iron mills”. reden, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 59-68. recibido: 11 de diciembre de 2019; 2ª versión: 04 de junio de 2020. ebecca harding davis’ novella life in the iron mills, published in 1861 in the atlantic monthly, is now considered a landmark of early american realism. this paper analyses the text’s depiction of the white working class and the ideological consequences of the myth of upward mobility and self-making, which are presented as an impossibility to hugh wolfe, the story’s main character. i will argue that davis’ choice to offer a representation of the precarious lives of the workers of northern industrial capitalism implies a criticism of the quintessentially american narrative of upward mobility, and a subsequent reflection on how foundational narratives operate in a society that is not homogeneous in terms of race or class. more specifically, i will maintain that life in the iron mills operates as a contestation to the myth of the selfmade man, evinced by the comparison between hugh wolfe’s situation and that of the mill owners, who encourage his aspirations from an oblivious position of privilege. lastly, hugh’s tragic death will be taken as proof that the myth of self-making mystifies the actual social and economic dynamics of industrial capitalism. key words: realism; harding davis; self-made man; capitalism; ideology. 1 see schocket, tharp and grauke for an analysis on the relevance and implications of the atlantic monthly’s editorial political positioning of the time and its reading audience’s assumptions. 2 although it is hardly arguable that davis’ writings qualify as, indeed, realist and reformist literature, critics have challenged these labels claiming for a more complex understanding of her oeuvre (hughes 114). 3 the social advancement and “rags to riches” trope has been often taken to epitomise the so-called “american dream”, a ubiquitous expression whose “definition is virtually taken for granted” (cullen 5) and which as a result becomes problematic when used casually. because of its complex implications, this essay avoids such phrase, opting instead for the more precise “upward mobility.” see jim cullen’s the american dream. a short history of an idea that shaped a nation (2003) for a concise survey of all the myths and narratives that make up the american dream ideology, among which we can find the upward mobility trope. 4 hence the “tropes of blackness” and “orthographically denoted dialect” applied to white workers that we find in iron mills (schocket 46). see schocket’s vanishing moments for an appraisal of the intermingling of images of race and class oppression in davis’ text. 61 rebecca harding davis’ novella life in the iron mills is one of the first instances of nineteenthcentury american fiction that explicitly focuses on the white working class. a largely forgotten text until it was republished by the feminist press in 1971, iron mills was published in 1861 in the atlantic monthly, a magazine “committed to the ideals of american democracy.” (tharp 3)1 against the backdrop of a nation on the verge of disaster and a society that was experimenting deep economic and political change, davis decided to write about the deprived lives of the workers of industrial capitalism, managing to establish herself as one of the leading voices of reformist literature and american realism (long).2 the aim of this paper is to explore how her writing analyses the consequences of the myth of upward mobility for the working class. i will argue that iron mills is construed as a contestation to the pervasive—and quintessentially american—myth of the self-made man,3 which by promoting an ideology of effort and hard work as the means towards personal self-realisation, overlooks class differences and socioeconomic realities. an analysis of the tragic unfolding of hugh wolfe’s life will evince how this myth functions in an ideological way, obscuring the real social dynamics that operate under industrial capitalism. the liminal position of davis as a writer in a border state like virginia might have been useful in the exploration of conflicts in a way that was relevant both to the north and the south of the united states. as canada argues, people living in border states had a privileged position as they perceived the complexity of the conflict in a way that was uncommon. iron mills provides a glimpse of the worst of both worlds: slavery and exploitative industrial capitalism.4 the novella begins with an anonymous, ungendered and presumably middle-class narrator describing the industrial town where the story takes place—a town governed by thick, polluted grey smoke. the introduction rapidly situates the reader in a suffocating environment that mirrors the equally grey, unhealthy lives of the people that inhabit it. the wealth of adjectives can only help to immerse the reader in the stifling atmosphere of the story, as the narrator invites us into “the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia.” (13) the deliberate association between an industrial setting and thick pollution must be read as a political critique on davis part, since as gatlin explains, “smoke symbolized manufacturing might and economic triumph” for industrial advocates (202). what davis sees as filth and unwholesomeness, industrial capitalists regarded as a means towards success. in a nation that was increasingly polarised, the northern capitalist economy was seen as modern and in tune with the fight for freedom, as compared to the southern plantation-based economy. the idealisation of the reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 the ideology of self-making and the white working class... sofía martinicorena 62 iron mills is construed as a contestation to the pervasive–and quintessentially american–myth of the self-made man, which by promoting an ideology of effort and hard work as the means towards personal self-realisation, overlooks class differences and socioeconomic realities. revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 63 reden north often had ideological consequences, as foner rightly puts: “glorifying northern society and […] isolating slavery as an unacceptable form of labor exploitation served to justify the emerging capitalist order of the north.” (qtd. in schocket 37) by associating successful capitalism with a lethal environment, davis begins to destabilise common assumptions about success and what they may entail for working-class individuals in a way that will resonate throughout the story. the workers of the iron furnaces are presented as a homogeneous mass of people with no names. their lives are uneventful and highly routinised, consisting of activities that contribute to the destruction of their bodies: “their lives were like those of their class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking…” (iron mills 15) davis provides a careful description of the physical squalor that impregnates every movement of the workers’ existence. the destructive nature of their daily routine is tragically ironic if we consider that the workers’ only worth is as physical capital. the fact that workers are metonymically conceptualised as hands signals the commodification they are subjected to: they are valuable insofar as their impaired bodies can produce. for kirby, one of the mill owners, workers are no more than machines: “if i had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world’s work should be machines,—nothing more,—hands.” (34) their physicality is their only value, but it is a physicality that is not only flawed but also alien to themselves. the “vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed” (19) as presented in iron mills is a paradigmatic example of a dehumanising force that alienates the workers in a marxian sense, as labour is not an end in itself but a means for mere survival and “therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor”. (marx 655) because labour under the capitalist mode of production, is a matter “of self-sacrifice, of mortification,” (655) working means the ultimate dispossession. the worker’s labour, then, “belongs to another” and therefore “it is the loss of his self.” (655) davis’ effort in portraying the lives of the white working class suggests that her story is not merely an account of the life of an individual. although hugh wolfe is the main character in the novella, it seems that he is only an arbitrary example chosen from the many lives of the many white working-class industrial workers. the narrator confesses: “i cannot tell why i choose the half-forgotten story of this wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands.” (14) the story about hugh’s wasted potential, read as a contingent example of what it is like to live as white labour, talks about the wasted potential of a whole class. hugh’s artistic endowment could defy this claim if we took it as evidence of his being a special case among his working peers. however, davis’ emphasis on the interchangeability of the workers’ lives points to the idea that if this potential the fact that workers are metonymically conceptualised as hands signals the commodification they are subjected to: they are valuable insofar as their impaired bodies can produce. does not show in other workers, it is because they are just too alienated to have any ambition beyond mere survival. furthermore, the very title of the story accentuates the non-individuality of characters. hugh’s is “only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives.” (13) in other words, what is at stake in davis’ novel is not the tragic story of a man, but rather the tragedy of a class. the working class presented in iron mills is defined in contrast to the mill owners. by introducing them into the story, davis elucidates the privilege differences between the workers and the capitalist owners. with bitter irony, the narrator tells us how the visitors to the mills stop by hugh’s furnace as they are tired from walking around the foundries. as soon as hugh sees them, he is invaded by curiosity: they represent the “mysterious class that shone down on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being.” (27) hugh is painfully aware that he and the visitors belong to different worlds, and he cannot help but wonder: “what made the difference between them? that was the mystery of his life.” (27) the class abyss between them is an undecipherable secret for hugh. the problem is aggravated when the immutability of class hierarchy is combined with disembodied identity ideals that efface any reference to class, as those represented by mitchell. hugh begins to compare himself to him, whom he sees as the epitome of western civilization and refinement: “wolfe listened more and more like a dumb, hopeless animal, with a duller, more stolid look creeping over his face, glancing now and then at mitchell, marking acutely every smallest sign of refinement, then back to himself, seeing as in a mirror his filthy body, his more stained soul.” (30) mitchell’s nonchalant knowledge of science and philosophy, of kant, novalis and humboldt, and most importantly, his white hand symbolise for hugh the “the impossibility of an identity.” (dow 53) tellingly portrayed as an animal in this scene, hugh is projecting onto mitchell the ideals of class and manhood that he knows he will never attain: “he knew now, in all the sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great gulf never to be passed. never!” (30) mitchell embodies the aspirational dream of whiteness constituted as “a signifying agent of class mobility” (schocket 60) that makes one of the pillars of american nationhood. according to miles, the nineteenth-century united states promoted an identity ideal of white disembodied masculinity that consolidated itself as the legitimate subject of american citizenship. such ideal was based on an exclusionary subject that did not include the white male worker, among others. because the dominance of the hegemonic white male subject in nineteenth64 the ideology of self-making and the white working class... sofía martinicorena tellingly portrayed as an animal in this scene, hugh is projecting onto mitchell the ideals of class and manhood that he knows he will never attain: “he knew now, in all the sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great gulf never to be passed. never!” 65 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 century america was more tacitly enacted than explicitly agreed upon, hugh cannot find a rational motive to think himself unfit for the same chances of middle-class success that mitchell embodies. the frustration that hugh feels on realising that he does not have access to those possibilities of self-realisation is especially acute in a land where it is a supposedly self-evident fact that “all men were created equal.” the declaration of independence, which marked the character of america as a self-made nation itself, offered the promise of a land of opportunities where all men who so desired could freely pursue a happy life. as berlant suggests, the foundational documents of america “implicitly defined a ‘natural’ legitimate subject” that was white and male (qtd. in miles 91). while america thought of itself as a welcoming nation where anyone could fulfil their dreams of upward mobility through individual effort, “americans simultaneously founded the nation and consolidated a powerful disquisition of disembodied white manhood that would equate nationhood with all white men.” (miles 91) the myth of upward mobility, then, albeit publicised as an opportunity for anyone who desired it, was in reality restricted to a very specific demographic, consisting of subjects that had a relevant degree of agency over their lives. the ideology of self-making relies on a modern conception of individuals as people endowed with freedom, who own themselves and who are able to accomplish their potential. considering the alienated lives of the workers in iron mills, it is highly problematic to accept that these people have any sort of control over their own existence. life does not seem to have much to offer to hugh besides work and the filth that will accompany him to the grave, where he will have “not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.” (13) the canary chirping in the first pages of the novella evokes a pastoral america that is just as desolate as the bird’s singing: “its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, i think.” (12) the promise of a fertile land brimming with opportunities for all those who may want to take them is revealed by davis as a tantalic dream that has been cruelly offered to hugh, who will discover that, in reality, it had been denied to him all along. ironically, the path towards such dream of self-making is hard work and diligence, an idea resonant with a protestant work ethic and most famously embodied by benjamin franklin’s autobiography. the fact that work is the main engine of self-making is painfully ironic since the only thing that hugh and his working-class fellows do is, indeed, work. this is why doctor may’s unwillingly perverse advice to hugh that he may become what he chooses becomes the catalyst of the frustration that hugh feels on realising that he does not have access to those possibilities of self-realisation is especially acute in a land where it is a supposedly self-evident fact that “all men were created equal.” the canary chirping in the first pages of the novella evokes a pastoral america that is just as desolate as the bird’s singing: “its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, i think.” (12) the promise of a fertile land brimming with opportunities for all those who may want to take them is revealed by davis as a tantalic dream that has been cruelly offered to hugh, who will discover that, in reality, it had been denied to him all along. 66 the ideology of self-making and the white working class... sofía martinicorena the tragedy in the story, as it represents the absolute clash between what culture is interpellating hugh to believe and his real, material possibilities as conditioned by an exploitative system: “do you know, boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor, a great man? do you understand?” […] a man may make himself anything he chooses (37). even if he might be trying to be sympathetic towards hugh, the truth is that his words have the most devastating effect upon him, since on making hugh believe that he has power over his own life, doctor may hampers hugh’s understanding of the mechanisms of capitalist society in a way that will prove fatal: “’it’s all wrong, […] all wrong! i dunnot understan.’” (41) when the idea that he can “make himself anything he chooses” is injected in his debilitated mind, hugh begins to assimilate the ideology behind the mill owners’ words and acquires a “false consciousness,” which terry eagleton defines as a set of ideas “functional for the maintenance of an oppressive power” while “those who hold them are ignorant of this fact” (24). similarly, adorno and horkheimer claim that “the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them” (134). hugh’s unaware participation in this ideology leads him to desperation for not really understanding the ways of the world he lives in. anxiously not knowing who is to blame for his desolation, hugh begins to blame himself, wondering whether it is his own fault that his life is so miserable: “what am i worth, deb? is it my fault that i am no better? my fault?” (41) because the ideology of self-making is essentially individualist, it makes all the weight of responsibility fall on the shoulders of individuals, thus obscuring the real reasons why hugh cannot, indeed, make himself what he chooses. the reasons are no other than the fact that hugh’s only function in the system he is inserted in is to be a hand; a system where the privilege of upward mobility is reserved for the aforementioned legitimate subject of rights. since capitalism “educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest,” (weber 20) hugh is simply destined to accept his place in that system and perish as one of the weakest. this extreme individualism is accompanied by a negation of any type of collective responsibility, which allows privileged agents not to admit they have a share in other people’s misery. as kirby tells doctor may, “ce n’est pas mon affaire. i have no fancy for nursing infant geniuses.” (34) in an ideology in which everything depends on the alleged free agency of individuals, those who are “unsuccessful” are to blame for their own situation. hugh’s incomprehension of the logics of this “world-cancer,” (49) as he calls it, is so unbearable that the only way out for him is suicide. several critics have read hugh’s suicide as his final proclamation of self-making, as a way of “assert[ing] ownership over his body by erasing it.” (miles 99) likewise, schocket has argued that “davis assures us symbolically that hugh finds whiteness in his death,” a death which works as a parody of “the mill visitor’s desires for self-made men” and as “salvation by way of spiritual transfusion.” (61) while i agree that that hugh’s final suicide is an example of accomplished agency, i think it is a highly problematic instance of it since the transformational possibilities that his death offers are virtually non-existent. the ending of the novella renders an ironic presentation of art and religion by tacitly suggesting that they lack the redemptive potential that they are often presumed to have. the narrator’s final reverie about reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 67 68 the ideology of self-making and the white working class... sofía martinicorena “homely fragments, in which lie the secrets of all eternal truth and beauty,” (65, emphasis mine) situated in a middle-class environment, acts like a mockery of the tragedy we have just witnessed. in conclusion, davis’ novella can be read as a case study of the harmful consequences that a particularly pervasive ideology as that of self-making had upon a given sector of the population that had not received much attention in american literature heretofore. by addressing a target audience that consisted mainly of well-to-do bostonians, davis managed to introduce complex debates in the core of american middle class, critically reflecting upon how certain national foundational narratives operate in a society that is not homogeneous in terms of race or class. hugh’s tragic ending can only help to evince how subaltern identities that did not fit into national narratives deserved a recognition that took into consideration their equally american realities. adorno, theodor & max horkheimer. dialectic of enlightenment. verso, 2016. canada, mark. “rebecca harding davis’s human stories of the civil war.” southern cultures, vol. 19, no. 3, 2013, pp. 57-71. cullen, jim. the american dream. a short story of an idea that shaped a nation. oxford up, 2003. davis, rebecca harding. life in the iron mills and other stories. feminist press, 1985. dow, william. narrating class in american fiction. palgrave macmillan, 2009. eagleton, terry. ideology: an introduction. verso, 1991. gatlin, jill. “disturbing aesthetics: industrial pollution, moral discourse, and narrative form in rebecca harding davis’s ‘life in the iron mills.” nineteenth-century literature, vol. 68, no. 2, 2013, pp. 201–233. grauke, kevin. “suicide, social reform, and the elision of working-class resistance in rebecca harding davis’s life in the iron mills.” prospects, vol. 27, 2002, pp. 137-175. hughes, sheila hassell. “between bodies of knowledge there is a great gulf fixed: a liberationist reading of class and gender in life in the iron mills.” american quarterly, vol. 49, no. 1, 1997, pp. 113-137. long, lisa a. “the postbellum reform writings of rebecca harding davis and elizabeth stuart phelps.” the cambridge companion to nineteenth century american women’s writing, edited by dale m. bauer & philip gould. cambridge up, 2001, pp. 262-283. marx, karl. “from economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844.” the norton anthology of theory and criticism, edited by vincent b. leitch. w.w. norton & company, 2010, pp. 651-655. miles, caroline s. “representing and self-mutilating the laboring male body: re-examining rebecca harding davis’s life in the iron mills.” the american transcendental quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2, 2004, pp. 89-194. schocket, eric. vanishing moments. class and american literature. the university of michigan press, 2009. tharp, allison. “‘there is a secret down here’: physical containment and social instruction in rebecca harding davis’s life in the iron mills.” journal of narrative theory, vol. 47, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–25. weber, max. the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. routledge, 2005. references key: cord-0059585-v93c7pdx authors: basu, dipak; miroshnik, victoria title: contemporary capitalism and imperialism date: 2020-08-18 journal: imperialism and capitalism, volume ii doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-54891-9_6 sha: 2706f88a9aeba39e6ac8e16f9336553436b684c7 doc_id: 59585 cord_uid: v93c7pdx this chapter analysed the development of imperialism since 1945 and its relationship with capitalism. today we have two empires, american empire and the chinese empire. american empires were designed to promote the western multinational companies. it followed the theory of lenin, but the chinese empire followed the theory of schumpeter, that for national prestige empire is needed, as there are no chinese multinational companies. while american empire was having indirect control or neo-colonialism of lenin through the western financial organizations, chinese empire is following classical imperial control. this chapter has analysed the development of these two empires and their devastating consequences on iran in 1953, guatemala in 1957, vietnam in 1955, iraq, libya, nicaragua, syria and most recently in venezuela by the american empire and on tibet, mongolia, east turkestan, manchuria by chinese empire. financed by profits of its multinational companies. wars were fought in korea, vietnam, laos, cambodia, angola, the sinai peninsula and elsewhere. profits from contracts for the development and deployment of weaponry became profitable on an epic scale. the military/industrial complex came to own whole swaths of the american political spectrum on both sides of the aisle and attached itself as umbilical chord to the petroleum industry as a matter of basic expediency as one cannot fight wars without an abundance of oil and gasoline. now, permanent war and rule by fear are accepted without question; the dominance of the military/industrial/petroleum combine is unquestioned (hopkins 2018; immerwahr 2019; weiner 2007) . in recent years, the usa has used similar strategies against venezuela, another oil-producing country. the trump administration was determined to depose venezuela's elected president nicolás maduro. the usa placed sanctions on venezuela's oil exports, which provide 90% of the nation's revenue, confiscated oil assets of venezuela and asked britain to do the same, while also insisting venezuela should allow it to deliver humanitarian aid to the country. in venezuela, we can see a replay of the us invasion of mexico in 1846. a key pillar of us post-second world war hegemony was the domination by us companies of the 'world' oil resources concentrated in the middle east. oil is a strategic commodity that everybody needs and is crucial to military power. the reconstruction of western europe, crucial to the expansion and sustaining of capitalism, depended on cheap middle east oil supplies. oil is also essential to the us version of energy-intensive capitalism: the spread of the motorcar, suburbs, chemical-intensive agriculture and cheap food were all dependent on cheap oil. general wesley clark, the nato commander in charge of the destruction of yugoslavia, said in march 2007 that the usa had the plan to invade seven countries in five years and it is because of oil. if there is no oil the middle east will be like africa, nobody would bother (kinzer 2006; wilford 2013) . containing any threats from either the soviet union or local nationalism to the cheap energy needed by the capitalist world economy, which middle east oil provided was one of the functions of hegemony. that made us military power indispensable. moreover, the alliance of us oil companies and the us government with saudi arabia was pivotal to the oil price stability and global economic prosperity. however, the particular way the usa has exercised its 'oil protectorate' over the middle east regularly has stimulated backlashes and periodic regional conflicts that actually put global energy security at risk. these challenges have been invariably stimulated either by a coercive intervention to sustain western control of oil or by a linkage between oil and western backing of israel. nationalist challenges to western control of middle east oil began with muhammed mussadeq's nationalization of the iranian oil industry; indigenous reaction to the subsequent ciasponsored coup to overthrow him would take decades to mature but it ultimately stimulated the islamic revolution. other major challenges to western control of the oil market would come from the arab world, where arab nationalism saw a combination of western imperialism and zionism as the main threat and arab nationalist control of arab oil as the main key to challenging these forces (rearden 2012; heiss 1997) . the usa managed, however, to turn the oil crisis to its advantage by striking a close alliance with saudi arabia by which it provided security in return for the saudis' use of they're position as 'swing producer' to moderate oil prices. given the privileged position of the dollar as the international reserve currency in which oil is sold, the new wealth of the oil producers was disproportionately 'recycled' through us banks and via arms purchases and investments in the usa. us hegemony is based on the dollar as much as its military and, since the 1970s, oil hegemony reinforced us dollar hegemony, because all countries needed dollars to buy oil and needed access to the american market to get them. that dollar allowed the usa to levy a tax on the world's economy to finance massive us military spending and imperial overreach and to impose economic measures that hurt its competitors (dreyfuss 2005; weiner 2007) . after the oil price boom, the competitive position of europe and japan declined as the price of energy increased, ushering in the stagflation of the 1970s. this was followed by british prime minister margaret thatcher's attack on the european welfare state. the more limited damage of the boom to the usa was very disproportionately distributed-there the consumers suffered, texas oil barons got higher oil prices, and power shifted to the military/oil industries concentrated. in 1974, the usa paid out $1.7 billion for saudi oil but $8.5 billion were recycled from saudi arabia back to the usa. in the longer term, the us-saudi alliance by the early 1980s had secured the stabilization of oil prices followed by a precipitous price decline that kept energy-intensive us capitalism competitive. however, that has created the conflict between iraq and kuwait, and iraq invaded kuwait and saudi arabia to teach a lesson for being a pro-american (hopkins 2018) . the subsequent us war on iraq was intended to avoid a potent challenge to us oil hegemony. if iraq had retained kuwaiti oil fields and remained in a position to intimidate saudi arabia, thereby acquiring 'control' of over 40% of world oil reserves, it might have had the power to shape the oil market in ways inimical to us interests. while the conservative gulf rulers, by virtue of their security dependence on the usa and their western investments, had a shared interest with the west in ensuring stable access to oil at moderate prices, iraq had no such stake. iraq was, of course, in dire need of revenues and had to sell its oil at prices consumers would pay. saddam's threat to make the terms of oil sales conditional on a favourable western policy in the arab-israeli conflict caught us politicians between two powerful contradictory domestic demands-for cheap gasoline and the advancement of israel's interests (gendzier 1999) . in the end, the war actually enabled washington to reinforce its hegemony on the oil market. the usa used the war to demonstrate its continuing indispensability to protecting the world capitalist control of oil against challenges while, in making it's gulf clients, above all saudi arabia, more dependent on the usa for their security. the war boosted america's relative economic standing for, while japanese and european capitalism had become more energy efficient. us capitalism, protected by the special benefits of hegemony, had built american competitiveness on low oil prices. the war ensured prices would stay low and that gulf petrodollars would be disproportionately recycled through us-not european or japanese-banks and arms manufacturers. in addition, the usa actually managed to make its imperial policing profitable by inducing its economic competitors (germany, japan) and clients (saudi arabia, kuwait) to pay for the war (elwell-sutton 1955) . prior to the intervention of nato, there were no sectarian murders of christians in libya and islamist militias tied to al-qaeda were small groups with no broader influence. these forces were armed and promoted when, in 2011, the obama administration and its allies in europe led by french president nicolas sarkozy and british prime minister tony blair invaded libya (basu and miroshnik 2012; hopkins 2018; immerwahr 2019) . the imperialist powers funnelled massive amounts of money and weaponry to islamist militias and al-qaeda operatives, providing them with air support through a mass bombing campaign that killed tens of thousands of libyans. the declared purpose was to establish democracy but the result was a chaos and disintegration of libya. a syndicate of western imperialist powers got hold of libya's oil wealth and turn its territory into a neo-colonial base of operations for farther interventions throughout the middle east and north africa. syria became the major victim. libya after the murder of gaddafi became a training ground for cia-backed islamist forces preparing to fight the syrian government of president bashar al-assad. western media described the conflict that led to gaddafi's ouster simply as a "civil war", without even mentioning nato's six-month bombing of libya in 2011 (immerwahr 2019). gaddafi ruled for 42 years, leading libya to a significant advance in social, political and economic matters with standard of living comparable to that of saudi arabia. after the second world war, libya was ceded to france and the uk, and both countries linked it administratively to their colonies in algeria and tunisia. in 1951, it became a nominally independent country but it was in backwardness in education, health, housing, social security, among others. in 1969, colonel muammar al-gaddafi removed the king with the aim to share the benefits and wealth to all libyans. ambitious social programmes in education, health, housing, public works and subsidies for electricity and basic foodstuffs led to a substantial improvement in the living conditions of libyans, from being one of the poorest countries in africa in 1969 to being the continent's leader in it's the u.n. human development index in 2011. libya had a literacy rate of 88.4%, a life expectancy of 74.5 years, gender equality, free housing and free medical service among several other positive entitlements for the citizens. it used to provide jobs for 40,000 other africans. in 2011, libya had the highest gdp per capita and life expectancy on the african continent. fewer people lived there in libya below the poverty line then than in holland. hugo chavez and maduro of venezuela tried to emulate gaddafi to uplift his people in venezuela but could not because of american hostility (kinzer 2006; wilford 2013) . the uprisings in benghazi by the islamic terrorists sent there by france were enough for the u.n. security council and nato to intervene on behalf of the 'responsibility to protect' (resolution 1973) and launched a bombing campaign between march and october 2011 which had the result of the assassination of gaddafi and the destruction of libya. the western-backed counter-revolution of 2011 has resulted in libya becoming a failed state and its economy is in shambles. in 2011, the west's objective was clearly gain control of libya's natural resources, mainly oil. libya sits on a resource more valuable than oil, the nubian sandstone aquifer, which is the world's largest underground source of freshwater (hopkins 2018; immerwahr 2019) . france's global mega-water corporations, like suez, ondeo and saur, control more than 45% of the planet's water market, which is already a $400 billion global industry. for france, the 2011 revolution in libya was about gaining control of and privatizing libya's astounding water resources. the regime change revolution in libya was a major instance of imperialist hydrological warfare. now that libya's water profits are flowing to the west, unsurprisingly, western parts of libya are running out of drinkable water. due to corporate greed and neglect, two-thirds of the nation's key water conduits are no longer functioning. from oil to water, and from arms to natural gas, the 2011 revolution in libya has given billions of dollars for the west and only wrought misery and endless civil war for libyans (toh 2017; wilford 2013) . for eisenhower and the dulles brothers in the 1950s, vietnam was just another small and impoverished country that could do nothing to against the usa. after the second world war, all imperialist countries came back to asia to reclaim their empires while japanese gave them limited independence. french came back to vietnam, dutch came back to indonesia, the british came back to india, burma and malaysia. war has never ended in asia. french were defeated in the hands of the vietnamese in 1954. un came in and about to organize an election to be supervised by india, canada and poland on behalf of the un. however, just the day before the election in 1955 the usa organized a coup and ngo ding deim, a catholic became the dictator in a buddhist country. kennedy organized another coup in 1963. by august that year the president of the usa, lyndon b. johnson, ordered the first bombing of north vietnam. more bombs were dropped over vietnam in this campaign alone than the total dropped during the entire second world war. two million vietnamese and more than 50,000 american soldiers would die in this war. chemical weapons would defoliate 10% of the country's surface. all these for just to stop the soviet union to expand its influence in south east asia, as vietnam had practically no natural resources (hopkins 2018; immerwahr 2019; toh 2017) . usa and british intelligence agencies organized a coup to oust iran's democratically elected prime minister, mohammad mossadeq in 1953 when iran had sought to nationalize iran's oil industry, which was under the anglo-iranian oil company (aioc), a british corporation (now part of bp). fearing a communist takeover in iran, uk prime minister winston churchill and the eisenhower administration decided to overthrow iran's government and to put prince reza pahlavi in power. in 1908, oil was struck in iran, but the ownership was to the british-owned burmah oil company, renamed as the anglo-persian oil company (apoc), whereby persia received 16% of "net profits". in 1921, a coup organized by the british brought a general, reza khan, into the government, first as the prime minister, and then by 1925 reza khan was crowned reza shah pahlavi. in 1941, after the nazi invasion of the ussr, the british and commonwealth of nations forces and the red army invaded iran. the reason was to secure iran's oil fields. reza shah's son, mohammad reza pahlavi, became the shah of iran (gasiorowski 1987 (gasiorowski , 1991 . in late 1951, iran's parliament approved the oil nationalization agreement. many iranians felt that for the first time in centuries, they were taking control of the affairs of their country. iranian parliament and people demanded more favourable concessionary arrangements, which britain vigorously opposed. by september 1951, the british had virtually ceased abadan oil field production, forbidden british export to iran of key british commodities (including sugar and steel), and had frozen iran's hard currency accounts in british banks. just before the coup, by 1953, economic tensions caused by the british embargo and political turmoil began to take a major toll on mosaddegh's popularity and political power. the people were increasingly blaming him for the economic and political crisis. political violence was becoming widespread in the form of street clashes between rival political groups. the usa did the same for venezuela in recent years. after the coup, five american petroleum companies, royal dutch shell, and the compagnie française des pétroles, were to draw iran's petroleum. the overthrow of iran's elected government in 1953 ensured western control of iran's petroleum resources and prevented the soviet union from competing for iranian oil (abrahamian 1982; heiss 1997; kinzer 2003) . syria was invaded by the arabic-speaking french foreign legion in 2011 in the pretext of arab spring, the popular mass-movement starting in tunisia. from libya, where these french foreign legion members were went to syria with turkey providing base to them. initially, they were added by al-qaeda, al-nusra and isis to occupy both syria and iraq. us army came in with the excuse to protect the kurds who were then fighting against those turkish backed invaders. the real purpose was to occupy the oil fields of syria. another purpose of the us involvement was to construct a pipeline through syria and turkey to supply oil and gas from saudi arabia and the gulf arab states to europe. that could destroy russian export of energy to europe (basu and miroshnik 2012; wilford 2013; toh 2017) . the invasion of syria started in 2011, after the destruction of libya, when syria was a prosperous stable country with no apparent economic problems. just like in the ukraine and georgia, and also in egypt and tunisia, some very violent crowds were hired by some strange shadowy agency, financed by a group of countries in the arabian gulf and turkey. the purpose was to change the regime first by creating mass demonstrations and then concerted international denouncements by mainly the western media, followed by some violence and ultimately a change of the regime by force. the same pattern was used in country after country with two major exceptions, libya and syria. in both cases, initial mass demonstrations were followed by armed insurrections supported by foreign powers. in libya, the foreign powers were france, the usa, the uk and nato, with some involvement from saudi arabia, qatar, uae and turkey. however, in syria the armed groups came directly from saudi arabia, qatar, uae, libya, turkey and france to change the regime. the libyan regime collapsed quickly because of the direct attacks from nato. in syria, nato was not able to take part because of the opposition raised by russia and china in the un security council. in the meantime, the invading forces were not doing very well and were under serious attack by the government forces. the invading forces were crying out for western military support. thus, they had to find an excuse, which was created by a chemical attack on 21 august 2013 on the civilians in the suburb of damascus blamed on the syrian government. the fact is that whether or not there were any chemical weapons in syria, the usa, france, saudi arabia, qatar and uae would have invaded syria anyway (www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/…/syri-a22.htm; elitedaily.com/…/the-real-reason; www.theguardian.com/…/ islamic state(isis)). economics is the real issue. syria has an estimated reserve of petroleum worth about 2.5 billion barrels. this is higher than the reserves of all other arab countries except iraq. syria is also fortunate to have a very large reserve of natural gas. thus, it has every potential to have large-scale chemical industries. since 1964 syrian oil and natural gas fields have been in the public sector of syria. foreign companies, except the russians, are not allowed to enter that sector. until the disturbances started, syria used to earn at least $4 billion every year from its export of petroleum (www.eia.gov/country/ cab.cfm?fips=sy). in iraq, most important petroleum fields have already been taken over by the us-french-uk oil companies. iraq has lost control of its oil resources. the same is planned for the syrian oil fields. that was the reason foreign invaders have targeted these oil fields to deprive syria of its export earnings. in future when the occupation of syria is complete, western oil companies will take over these oil fields after getting rid of the russians, who discovered and developed these fields for syria. there is more to it. the foreign forces are guided by turkey, saudi arabia and qatar because of their plan to set up a long pipeline, controlled by usa and other western oil companies, to export natural gas to europe. syria is an impediment to that plan. thus, the syrian war is the war of the natural gas pipeline. during the invasion of iraq in 2003, the pipeline of kirkuk-banias connecting iraq to syria was destroyed by the us forces. however, recently an alternative pipeline between ain zalah and suweidiva was opened to connect iraq to syria. plans are there to set up more pipelines for both petroleum and natural gas. the purpose of these proposed pipelines is to export both petroleum and natural gas from iraq directly to the european market. however, another development is possibly more important (www.oxf ordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/…/ng-78.pdf). in 2011, syria, iraq and iran had made an arrangement to construct a pipeline to export iranian natural gas to europe via iraq and syria first and then to lebanon and ultimately to greece through a submarine pipeline. this proposed pipeline would be 6000 miles long, with a capacity of 100-120 million cubic feet of natural gas every day. the estimated cost would be at least $10 billion. in 2013, syria, iran and iraq had finalized the agreement to share the cost. western oil companies are against this plan (www.al-mon itor.com). they will surely destroy the proposed pipeline, if the foreign forces can occupy syria. this is the reason for the war. the first target of the foreign invaders was the city of homs in syria, near the turkish border. homs is the place where the existing gas pipeline from egypt ends. this pipeline was established by the western oil companies to export natural gas from egypt, saudi arabia, qatar and uae. the plan was to extend the pipeline from homs to turkey to export natural gas from the arab countries in the persian gulf area to europe (www.glo balresearch.ca/iran-white…agreement/5359718). as a result, syria has invited the wrath of the arab states of the gulf. these countries have sent terrorists trained by the taliban in pakistan and the arab-speaking soldiers of the french foreign legion, a lot of them from libya, to destroy syria and the planned pipeline from iran to lebanon. al-qaeda and the taliban also have joined in. this is the reason us secretary of states john kerry and now president trump wants to hand over afghanistan to the taliban as the price (www.dawn.com/ news/1050763). afghanistan was destroyed by the us-supported pakistani mujahideen in 1992 for the same reason (http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski. html). the plan was to build a gas pipeline from turkmenistan to pakistan via afghanistan to avoid the existing route via russia. the socialist government of afghanistan would not have allowed it given its close relationship with the soviet union. thus, it had to go in 1992. however, there was a dispute in 1995 between the mujahideen government of afghanistan and unical, the us energy company constructing the pipeline. thus, the taliban was formed out of the ranks of the pakistani army, who took over afghanistan replacing the mujahideen. however, iran and russia created a new armed group called the northern alliance to fight the taliban. as a result, the proposed pipeline was never finished. the reason why the usa and its western allies are so interested in the oil and gas resources of the middle east lies in the economics of us dollar. since 1972 the us dollar has not been backed by gold but instead it is just a paper currency, which the usa can print at will. the us government can exchange the dollar for any commodities or services anywhere in the world using that paper currency. no other country has that facility to print its own money to pay for imports. the value of the dollar depends on its control over the international trade of the world. petroleum and natural gas dominate world trade considering its share of the value of the total world trade. petroleum and natural gas are traded, except for a few countries, in terms of the us dollar only. this system provides and protects the value of the us dollar; otherwise, it will have no value at all. thus, it is extremely important for the federal reserve board (frb) to protect the us dollar by controlling the oil and gas resources of the world in advance. the question is which private companies control the frb, if not the us government. the interests of the frb and the western oil companies thus coincide. those, who own frb, are the same people who own the western oil and gas companies. frb, a private company, has the exclusive right to print us dollar, which they lend, since 1913, to the us government and earns huge amount of money doing nothing. oil is not just by far the most important commodity traded internationally; it is the lifeblood of all modern industrialized economies. until recently, all opec countries agreed to sell their oil for dollars only. so long as this remains the case, the euro was unlikely to become the major reserve currency. the countries, that have refused to accept the us dollar for payments for their exports of oil and natural gas, were saddam hussein's iraq, colonel gaddafi's libya, venezuela, syria, iran, the old soviet union and now putin's russia. iraq and libya were invaded and the western oil companies have taken over their oil fields. there is an economic sabotage against venezuela to kill the economy. syria is on the verge of total destruction. iran is the next target. western countries are using the so-called islamic terrorists to destabilize these rebel oilproducing countries with the ultimate aim of destabilizing russia, which the usa still considers its prime enemy. this is the very reason russia is supporting syria when invasion of syria was planned long in advance. from 2015 onwards, russia came to support syria. as a result, isis and other islamic groups retreated. then usa allowed turkey to occupy a whole province of syria and areas in kurdistan. the kurds now are with the syrian government. usa still is occupying the oil fields of syria. the country of syria is now destroyed. at least 12 million out of 22 million people became refugees, with at least 570,000 were killed. in 1963 the arab socialist baath party came to power and implemented socialist policies. per capita income of syria before the war in 2010 was us$4058, a middle-income country. however, economic sanction instigated by the western countries devastated the economy even before the actual war stated in 2011 (wilford 2013; hopkins 2018) . iraq, libya, syria and venezuela are the examples how successful and stable countries can be destroyed because of the american and western aim to control the oil market. who is the next? algeria perhaps. the cold war had key consequences in latin america, considered by the usa to be the leader of the western bloc. fighting communism became the argument justifying the aggressive us presence in latin america. in april 1948, the organization of american states was established. member states pledged to fight communism on the american continent. throughout the 1960s and '70s, the usa supported a number of coups against democratically elected leaders. by 1976, south america was covered by military dictatorships called juntas (hopkins 2018) . operation, which overthrew the democratically elected president of guatemala, jacobo árbenz guzmán, in 1954, was to be one of the first in a long series of us interventions in latin america during the cold war. in the same period, the usa suspended economic relations and/or . this is driven both by the desire of us transnationals to lay claim on latin america's resources and markets-not least bolivia's vast energy and mineral reserves, including 70% of the world's lithium-and by the strategic confrontation between us imperialism and china, whose trade with the region rose to $306 billion last year. morales's government came to power with huge popularity in 2006 like hugo chavez in 1998 in venezuela. like chavez, morales declared himself an adherent of the "bolivarian revolution" and socialism. the leader of the coca growers' union and the first bolivian president from the country's long-oppressed indigenous population, morales won broad popular support. in the end, the bourgeois army, which morales never disbanded, proved loyal to its roots in the fascist-military dictatorships of generals hugo banzer and luis garcía meza and the national security state doctrine of the pentagon's school of the americas (hopkins 2018; immerwahr 2019) . morales went in with a mandate to shatter the neoliberal policies of austerity and privatization that had shaped bolivian society for the past two decades. from 1985 until morales's election in 2005, bolivia was under the yoke of one version or another of the washington consensus. morales passed a law seizing tens of thousands of square miles of land deemed unproductive or illegally held and redistributed it to landless peasants. he placed the natural gas, oil, telecommunications and electricity industries under state control. he continually raised the minimum wage, which has tripled since he entered office. morales also dramatically increased social spending. he invested in building roads, schools and hospitals, an expansion of infrastructure that was particularly transformative in the countryside. he established modest but deeply popular cash transfer programs: a universal noncontributory pension system for bolivians over the age of 60; assistance to households with elementary school-aged children who can demonstrate their children are attending school; and funds for pregnant women or mothers with children under the age of two without health insurance. during the morales era, bolivia has seen per capita income increase threefold and has rapidly transitioned from a low-income country to a lower-middle-income country. inflation and the exchange rate have remained exceptionally stable. at the same time, bolivia levels of inequality went from well above the latin american average to well below it. bolivia's movement toward socialism has defied right-wing predictions of food shortages, labour camps, and the collapse of private life. instead, it has stepped in the direction of european social democracy and illustrated how a developing economy can modernize and grow swiftly without subjecting itself to austerity. in venezuela the regime is presiding over one of the greatest economic catastrophes the western hemisphere has seen in recent history. bolivia, though, has endured because of three distinguishing qualities. venezuela's economy has relied entirely on one resource oil and the usa put an embargo and sanctions that no country could dare to buy oil from it. in addition both the usa and the uk confiscated all assets of venezuela in american and british banks. with the collapse of the oil price since 2014 venezuela is in serious crisis. morales, by contrast, has been more focused on the long term. bolivia's main money makers are natural gas and mineral exports like zinc, but morales has shown an interest in diversifying the economy by investing in agriculture and industrialization. he's invested in health, education and aid for the poor, but began with a fairly minimalist welfare state to ensure sustainability. bolivia's gradualist economic outlook was presided over by morales's long-standing finance minister, luis arce. another quality that's helped bolivian socialism was morales's emphasis on racial inclusiveness-a feature that has both widened participation in the economy and also inspired more buy-in from bolivia's majority-indigenous population. morales has wielded symbolic power as bolivia's first indigenous president, but also used the letter of the law to create a society that embraces and defends its multicultural diversity. the constitution he passed in 2009, which changed the country's official title from "the republic of bolivia" to "the plurinational state of bolivia", officially recognized 36 indigenous languages. laws have been passed banning racial discrimination and requiring children to learn local indigenous languages. there was a rise in the number of lawmakers who identify as indigenous. the end of the commodity boom affected bolivia's economically and undermined the basis for evo morales' class conciliations policy. since 2006, bolivia's government has reaped the benefits of natural gas exports. after the neoliberal regime collapsed in 2003, evo's election in 2005 led to what evo's government called the "nationalization" of gas. more accurately, the government renegotiated contracts with foreign gas companies, yielding a much higher percentage of royalty payments, or rents, to the government. by 2017, bolivia was 42% richer than when morales took office. for the average bolivian, the results were even better-the country's gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, fell by more than 19% since morales took office. poverty has declined by 25% since he was elected. although morales has shown some disturbingly authoritarian tendencies, including doing away with presidential term limits, economically he had turned his country around. he has to pay the price for that as the usa does not like a country trying to uplift her people, sooner or later it would be destroyed like libya and syria and iraq (krauss and daniel 2019). the winner of the new international business order is china, which has dominated the markets of most of the developed countries. the result of that victory also has promoted chinese imperialism in asia. this chapter analyses the history of some of the victims of china. china's geopolitical strategy is to use their competitive advantage of soft power to out-manoeuvre the usa, and other countries such as india, japan, vietnam or the philippines, in acquiring natural resources and to allow for continued growth of their economy while gaining political influence in various countries and regions throughout the world. china's application of unrestricted warfare is apparent when the security and military aspects of china's involvement in afghanistan are examined. china enjoys protection of its projects in afghanistan because of its close relationship with pakistan. this implies that pakistan's national intelligence agency, inter-services intelligence directorate, or isi, exerts its influence over the taliban to allow the chinese projects to continue unimpeded. while chinese workers in afghanistan have been attacked, the level of violence is very low when compared to attacks on the usa, india and un personnel and facilities. it is unlikely that there will be peaceful development of china overall, as there appears to be no desire for peace and stability, but rather a development of good, old-fashioned militarism and imperialism. in the first place, the economic 'miracle' of the chinese economy is based on the fierce exploitation of its working class and farmers, and on an export drive to destroy the manufacturing capacity of most of the countries of the world by offering cheap debt facility and cheaper manufactured products. the economic colonization accompanied by a strong geopolitical strategy to project chinese power, both military and financial, is the building blocks for the new chinese empire, in which the new international business order is facilitating the chinese expansion. since china resumed its threats against taiwan, india, vietnam and the philippines, and increasingly threatened japan, both france and germany have been trying to overturn the arms embargo on the people's liberation army for purely commercial reasons. that demonstrates the influence of chinese finances and the lure of the chinese markets for the european powers. to the south of china, the country is largely underwriting the construction and development of a 1850 kilometre network of roads, rivers and ports in vietnam and laos, circumventing the natural defensive barriers of the foothills of the himalayas in india, which will directly connect chinese kunming to thailand. that facilitates the movement of the chinese military to the south east asia region whenever it needs and provides markets and natural resources for the chinese economy. around india and pakistan to the west of china, within the framework of chinese imperialism major development is also occurring. as the usa and india enjoy an increasingly warmer relationship, pakistan will probably look closer to china for technical and military assistance. china already supplies pakistan with nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons. according to the asian studies department at the brooking institute, the nuclear programme in pakistan is essentially the result of sino-pakistani relations. some news agency reports suggest that chinese security agencies knew of the transfer of nuclear technology from pakistan to iran. worldanalysis.net shows that one of the most significant recent projects is the construction of a major port complex at the naval base of gwadar on the arabian sea, giving china strategic access to the persian gulf and a naval outpost on the indian ocean. relations between china and india deteriorated after india gave refuge to the dalai lama in 1959, followed by india's humiliating defeat in the 1962 war over a disputed border, and chinese aid to pakistan. india still claims that china occupies 38,000 square kilometres of its territories and, for its part, beijing still lays claim to the north-eastern indian province of arunachal pradesh. china's recent demand that arunachal pradesh of india is a part of china has provoked a very adverse reaction from the government of india and the indian media in general. once again, india has failed to turn the tables against china. india should have said, china has no border with india at all, but tibet has. by not recognizing the fact that china is occupying tibet illegally india has once again, in practice, accepted the chinese occupation of tibet, manchuria and eastern turkistan or the pakistani occupations of baluchistan and north-west frontier province (nwfp) (basu and miroshnik 2012) . there is no evidence that tibet was a part of china before china colonized it in 1949. the same is true of taiwan and eastern turkistan. if the manchus are not chinese, as sun yat sen declared in 1911, manchuria, which china received as a gift from stalin in 1950, was never a part of china either (basu and miroshnik 2012) . however, the world has ignored this chinese imperialism and even gives recognition to china as being one of the five controlling powers of the world affairs as a permanent member of the un security council. china has no continuous history as a nation state. before 1279, only the central part of what is china today, was pure chinese-that is, inhabited by the han chinese tribe. during 1279-1368, china was a part of the mongol empire and it ceased to exist as a sovereign state. from 1368 to 1644, china had the ming dynasty of the han chinese tribe, but was occupied by the manchus in 1644 until 1911. tibet has a history of at least 1300 years of independence. the first recorded contacts between tibetans and chinese date back to the seventh century, following the unification of tibet under king songtsen gampo and the marriage of a chinese princess to songtsen gampo in 641. this marriage alliance was sought after tibetan armies had captured towns in sichuan province. in 821, a treaty recognizing them as two independent nations ended almost 200 years of war between china and tibet (basu and miroshnik 2012) . during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, both china and tibet came under the influence of the mongol empire. the mongol's militarily conquered china while the tibetans and the mongols established the historically unique 'priest patron' relationship, also known as cho-yon. the mongol aristocracy had converted to buddhism and they sought spiritual guidance and moral legitimacy for the rule of their vast empire from the tibetan theocracy. as the patrons of tibet, the mongols promised to protect tibet against foreign invasion. the mongol empire came to an end in the mid-fourteenth century. today parts of mongolia, which is not occupied by china, is an independent country, not a part of china and mongols are not chinese. by the fifteenth century, political authority in tibet had passed into the hands of contending religious hegemonies that were eventually replaced by a system of rule under the dalai lamas. in china, the native ming dynasty overthrew the mongols. during the ming dynasty both tibet and china existed as separate and fully sovereign states (basu and miroshnik 2012) . in 1639, the fifth dalai lama established another cho-yon relationship with the manchu emperor, who, driven out of manchuria by the russians, occupied china and established the manchu dynasty in 1644. manchu officials or ann bans were stationed in tibet from 1728 until the fall of the dynasty in 1911. ann bans were instructed not to interfere in the internal policies of tibet and to refrain from exploitation. in 1911, sun yat sen declared manchus to be foreigners, deposed the manchu emperor of china pei wei and proclaimed china to be a republic (basu and miroshnik 2012) . manchuria had been a russian territory since the sixteenth century. russia had developed industrial cities like harbin in manchuria and port arthur in korea. the settlement of han chinese in manchuria was prohibited until late into the nineteenth century. in 1905, japan according to the portsmouth treaty took over manchuria from russia but allowed some pro-japanese warlords of china to rule over it from 1918. in 1931, japan took complete control over manchuria, renamed it manchukuo, re-established pei wei as the sovereign emperor of china and in his name they tried to occupy the rest of china. the soviet union took over manchuria in 1945 after the surrender of japan to the usa, but gave it away to china in 1950 without any consideration for the wishes of the people in manchuria (rearden 2012) . despite claims of chinese propaganda, millions of non-chinese people living in areas presently under the people's republic of china suffer all kinds of discrimination. the most disturbing effect of chinese policy towards people in these areas is the demographic transformation that has been imposed upon them. in virtually every area, new chinese immigrants have become the majority community. manchuria has been completely absorbed and the distinct manchu culture that was vibrant until 1949 does not exist at all anymore. the british, after 1911, convened a tripartite conference to discuss tibet's border with the british india in simla in 1914 (atchison 1929) . the tibetans arrived at the conference with written proof of tibet's historical independence. the chinese delegation-present only to witness the treaty between britain and tibet-argued that tibet's subjugation by the mongols and the manchus became an integral part of china, and should therefore be ruled as part of the new republic of china of sun yat sen from peking. that was also the beginning of the border dispute between china and india. however, although tibet was not really subjugated by the mongols and manchus, it was certainly influenced by them. neither mongols nor manchus were chinese. in fact, china itself had been occupied for a long time by both the mongols and the manchus (van walt van praag 1987). the fact that both tibet and china came under mongol political influence does not indicate unification of the two countries, as china claims. iraq, turkey, most parts of russia and eastern europe, the indian subcontinent, northern burma, north vietnam and korea were all part of the vast mongol empire. would that mean these areas belong to china? british india included burma until very recently. the british empire also used to control sri lanka, malaysia, iraq and burma. does that mean india should now legitimately claim sri lanka, iraq, malaysia and burma as its integral parts? such is the absurdity of the chinese claim (basu and miroshnik 2012) . the most important point is that manchus, like mongols, are not ethnic chinese and suggestions that tibet became an integral part of a 'chinese' empire during the manchu empire are just absurd. tibet continued to conduct itself as a fully sovereign nation, recognized by the british empire until its occupation by communist china in 1949 (van walt van praag 1987 . today, however, china disputes the legal status of the simla convention and the resultant mcmahon line-the border between india and tibet accepted by the british, the true significance of which lies in its recognition of tibet as an independent nation with which binding agreements such as the lhasa treaty of 1904 could be negotiated. throughout the nationalist (kuomintang) period from 1912 to 1949, no chinese government was able to exert any influence over tibet. during the second world war, tibet remained neutral, despite strong pressure from the usa, britain and china to allow the passage of raw materials through the country. when nepal applied for membership of the un in 1949, it cited its treaty and diplomatic relations with tibet to demonstrate its full international personality (van walt van praag 1987). the invasion of tibet by troops from the people's liberation army in 1949-1950 is described in official chinese histories as a 'peaceful liberation'. the seventeen-point plan for the peaceful liberation of tibet (1951) was signed between the communist government and tibetan officials in may 1951, which apparently 'enjoyed the approval and support of the people from every ethnic group in tibet' as in the information office of the state council of the people's republic of china 1992. if tibet was part of china, then there was no need for the agreement, which was forced upon the tibetan delegation in china for signature, and then china announced to the world that tibet was liberated. in fact, discrimination and the suppression of traditional practices in eastern tibet drove hundreds of tibetans up into the mountains to conduct guerrilla warfare, while thousands more fled west to lhasa to escape chinese persecution. in march 1959, growing tibetan resistance exploded in an uprising against the chinese occupation. the 14 th dalai lama fled into exile in northern india, and the subsequent chinese crackdown in tibet was brutal.… tibetan sources suggest as many as 430,000 were killed in the uprising and subsequent years of guerrilla warfare as described by the tibet support group in 1994 (terril 2003) from 1951 to 1959 china broke every promise that it made towards tibet, resulting in the tibetan uprising against china in march 1959. the dalai lama and 100,000 tibetans escaped into exile. from that day onwards, tibet effectively became an occupied country. despite promising not to get involved with the existing system of government and society in tibet by signing the seventeen-point plan for the peaceful liberation of tibet, china did interfere in eastern tibetreneging on the treaty altogether in 1959. china has renamed two of tibet's three provinces as parts of the chinese provinces of qinghai, gansu, sichuan and yunnan, and has renamed the remaining province of u' tsang as tibet autonomous region (tar) (basu and miroshnik 2012) . on 28 october 1991, us congress under a foreign authorization act passed the resolution wherein they recognized 'tibet, including those areas incorporated into the chinese provinces of sichuan, yunnan, gansu and qinghai, an occupied country under the established principal of international law'. the resolution further stated that tibet's true representatives are the dalai lama and the tibetan government in exile as recognized by the tibetan people as described by the us state department authorization act 1991 (terril 2003) . some 1.2 million tibetans are estimated to have been killed by the chinese since 1950. reprisals for the 1959 national uprising alone involved the elimination of 87,000 tibetans by the chinese count, according to a radio lhasa broadcast of 1 october 1960. tibetan exiles claim that 430,000 died during the uprising and the subsequent 15 years of guerrilla warfare. in its 1959 and 1960 reports, the international commission of jurists concluded that 'there was a prima facie case of genocide committed by the chinese upon the tibetan nation'. these reports consider events before the cultural revolution of mao-tse-tung, during which much of tibet's own cultural assets were destroyed and thousands of tibetans killed (tibet support group 1994; basu and miroshnik 2012) . up to 260,000 people died in prisons and labour camps between 1950 and 1984. since september 1987, approximately 3000 people are believed to have been imprisoned for political offences such as giving out leaflets, writing letters or talking to foreigners about the tibetans' right to independence. from march 1989 to may 1990, the chinese administered a campaign of torture against tibetan dissidents in prison. during 1994-1995, three nuns died shortly after release from custody as a result of ill treatment and torture in detention. beatings and torture are still regularly used against political prisoners today. detainees are held in sub-standard conditions, malnourished, forbidden to talk, denied medical treatment and often held in solitary confinement. according to the tibet support group (1994) , 'the chinese have refused to allow independent observers to attend so-called public trials. prison sentences are regularly decided before the trial. less than 2% of cases in china are won by the defense' (basu and miroshnik 2012) . tibetan was replaced by chinese as the official language and despite official pronouncements there was no practical change in this policy. it is difficult for tibetans to gain employment in the state sector without proficiency in chinese. secondary school children are taught all classes in chinese. religious practice was forcibly suppressed until 1979, and up to 6000 monasteries and shrines were destroyed. in 1995 the chinese authorities rejected the child recognized by the dalai lama as the rebirth of the panchen lama and installed their own candidate (basu and miroshnik 2012) . there are an estimated 300,000 troops stationed on tibetan territory and three nuclear missile sites. near lake kokonor, the largest lake on the tibetan plateau, there is a 20-square kilometre dump for radioactive pollutants and china has admitted depositing nuclear waste as described by the tibet support group 1994 (terril 2003; basu and miroshnik 2012) . china is filling up tibet with ethnic chinese in an attempt to destroy the ethnicity of the tibetans. this policy has much more potential to destroy tibet as a nation than the millions who have died from chinese policies, the destruction of more than 6000 buddhist monasteries, the arrest and torture of tibetan monks, the destruction of tibetan forests and the stationing of nuclear weapons and waste dumps in tibet. samdhong rinpoche, the prime minister of the tibetan governmentin-exile, estimates that seven million ethnic chinese now live in tibet, where there are only 2.3 million tibetans. in towns like lhasa and chengdu, 75% of the people are ethnic chinese. according to the tibet support group (1994) , it was this influx of chinese nationals that destabilized the economy. forced agricultural modernizations in tibet were the cause of extensive crop failures and the country's first recorded famine (1960) (1961) (1962) , in which 340,000 tibetans died. tibetan farms and grazing lands have been confiscated and incorporated into collectivized and communal farms. the resettlement of chinese migrants has led to tibetans becoming the minority in many areas, including lhasa. this in turn has created high unemployment among tibetans. official figures put the number of non-tibetans in the tar at 79,000. independent research puts the figure at 250,000-300,000, and for the whole of tibet 5-5.5 million chinese to 4.5 million tibetans. in kham and amdo the chinese outnumber tibetans many times over (basu and miroshnik 2012) . as with previous railways built by china in mongolia and east turkistan, the more recently built tibet railway would greatly speed colonization of the area. the railway will improve china's military manoeuvrability, enable rapid troop deployments and facilitate the expansion of people's liberation army bases and increases in nuclear weapons stockpiles and missile deployments on the tibetan plateau (basu and miroshnik 2012; terril 2003) . east turkistan, another colony of china, is bordered by kazakhstan to the north, tibet and india to the south, and afghanistan and pakistan to the west. it is china's largest province of 640,000 square kilometres-onesixth of the present chinese territory. however, it was not a part of china until 1949 and the people of that land are not chinese either. about 96% of its population are turkic peoples of tajik, kyrghyz, uzbek or kazakh, similar to their relatives in the former soviet union, commonly known as uyghurs. the invasion of east turkistan by the han chinese started in 104 b.c., and the country was occupied several times by chinese soldiers, but none of these occupations lasted for long. there were six invasions from 104 b.c. to 751 a.d., but during that period the chinese invaders sustained their control for only 157 years. arab, turkic and tibetan forces repulsed the chinese occupiers in 751 a.d. east turkistan later became a part of the mongol empire briefly. in 1876, the manchu empire occupied east turkistan. the people in the southern part of east turkistan established an eastern turkistan islamic republic in 1933 and then, in 1944, established the second eastern turkistan republic (castets 2003; yu 2018) . east turkistan was occupied by china in 1949 and its name was changed to xing kiang in 1955. communist china has been exercising a colonial rule over the land since then. the people there, just like the people in two other colonies of china in tibet and manchuria, have to undergo unimaginable suffering and have been subjugated to inhuman conditions under the repressive alien rule. the year 1999 saw mass arrests and murders of the people of east turkistan become most widespread. this policy was especially sinister in the regions of hotan, kashgar, aksu and ili. as recently as 1999, some 2500 were killed. according to amnesty international, currently at least 250,000 people are in prison. in 1949, kuomintang forces of chiang-kei-seik defeated by mao-tse-tung invaded formosa. they massacred the local population, who are not ethnic chinese but a mixed population of japanese, chinese, portuguese and the indigenous proto-malays (ushimura 2003) . however, now china claims that formosa, renamed as taiwan, is an inalienable part of china and china wants to reclaim it as soon as possible. history cannot support that chinese claim. from 1368 to 1644, china had the ming dynasty of the chin or han chinese tribe. at that time, formosa was occupied first by the dutch and then by the portuguese. for a brief period from 1645 to 1662, a half-japanese general of the ming dynasty, tei seiko, after being driven from china by the invading manchus from the north, occupied that island. however, the portuguese soon regained control of the island, which they had renamed as formosa, or the beautiful island. the machu empire only ruled formosa for eight years between 1887 and 1895, but manchus were not chinese either. the manchu empire of china managed formosa for just that brief period of time and, in 1895, gladly ceded it to japan. after that, china had forfeited its rights to the island permanently or until the signing of another international treaty. the present-day beijing government claims that the 1943 cairo declaration and the 1945 potsdam declaration recognized china's sovereignty over formosa. that is not factually correct. the cairo declaration had nothing new on the question of chinese territorial sovereignty over formosa. furthermore, both the cairo and potsdam declarations were not valid international treaties but, to quote justice radha binod pal, a 'victor's justice' (ushimura 2003) , where japan never took any part. the people's republic of china, which came into being in 1949, was at war with the un in 1951 over korea and wasn't invited to sign the san francisco treaty in which japan formally renounced 'all right, title and claim to formosa'. the republic of china or kuomintang was unable to represent china in that treaty. accordingly, to follow the un principle of self-determination, formosa belongs only to formosans, not to china. the history of tibet, manchuria, east turkistan and formosa, dating back more than two thousand years, has been one of independence from china. at no time, since the founding of the nation in 127 b.c., have the tibetans conceded their sovereignty to a foreign power. east turkistan was occupied from time to time, but those periods of occupation were brief. manchuria was not occupied by china until 1950. formosa, except for seven years, was never a part of china. china has no limit to its demands on lands, islands, rocks and reefs in the south china sea, disregarding any international laws and conventions. china only recognizes might, not logic. legitimate claims by other nations of east asia have no meaning in the dictionary of china. china has claimed sovereignty across most of the south china sea. it grants itself rights that cannot apply to an international shipping route. in fact, china imposes its demands by building military structures on uninhabited archipelagos, islets, rocks and reefs that are already possessed by other countries in the region, including japan, vietnam, the philippines, malaysia and indonesia. chinese citizens are encouraged to fish everywhere under the protection of china's coastguards and to engage in prospecting for oil, with the installation of a drilling platform off the coast of vietnam. in a direct head to head with vietnam, malaysia, brunei and the philippines, taiwan and japan, beijing claims possession of the paracel and spratly islands, the scarborough shoal and the senkaku islands. it also appears to be extending its own territorial waters so much that there is practically nothing left for the rest of southeast asia (o'neill 2018). in april 2012, there was a clash between china and the philippines over scarborough shoal, one of the spratly islands in the south china sea. the confrontation between the naval vessels of the two countries continued for almost two months and in the middle of this the usa and the philippines carried out a joint military drill in the vicinity. japan, australia and south korea all sent their personnel to participate in this drill. china deployed an armada of 80 military and civilian ships, along with support aircraft, to install a billion dollar oil rig on vietnam's continental shelf well within its 200 mile exclusive economic zone (eez). according to rodis (2012) : when vietnam responded by dispatching 30 of its ships to defend its sovereign territory, china used high-powered water cannons to disperse them and even rammed its vessels straight into vietnamese ships causing damage to the vietnamese ships and injury to those on board. vietnam may have the will to fight but clearly lacks the 'suitable' might to defend itself against china. vietnam is mindful about what happened on march 14, 1988 when four ships of the chinese people's liberation army navy [plan] landed on vietnam's johnson south reef and faced vietnamese defenders on the reef who refused to leave. the chinese ships fired at will at the sailors and pounded the reef with heavy shells. when the dust settled, several vietnamese ships were destroyed and 64 vietnamese sailors lay dead. the johnson south reef massacre was recorded by the chinese navy and shown all over china as an example of china's might. china's recent attack against the philippines was initiated when china moved a giant oil rig to the recto bank-just 85 nautical miles from palawan. the us energy information administration (useia) has estimated that there could be approximately 11 billion barrels (bbl) of oil reserves and 190 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas reserves in the west philippine sea. ayungin is the gateway to the recto bank and china intends to occupy ayungin shoal (rodis 2014 ). china's occupation of the philippine mining industry is another issue. one of china's mining companies is operating in the philippines 'located near the scarborough shoal in the coastal town of masinloc where china's wei-wei group has set up a us$100 million nickel processing plant. in nearby botolan, zambales, china's jiangxi rare earth and rare metals tungsten group company limited operates a us$150 million nickel exploration and cobalt processing project' (rodis 2012) . there is an estimated us$1 trillion in untapped mineral resources in the philippines. chinese mining companies, many of them operating illegally, have been exporting precious minerals such as gold and nickel out through the island country's porous coastal ports, where there are no customs officials. if china can occupy the scarborough shoal, smuggling precious metals from the philippines to a chinese base will be easy. in 1996, china occupied the mischief reef-75 miles from palawan. vietnam, malaysia and the philippines have separately protested against chinese land reclamation at numerous reefs in the spratly islands. the fear is that they could be used for air, naval or logistic bases to strengthen china's territorial claims a long way from its mainland (o'neill 2018). china's aim to make asia's seas its exclusive property, keeping japan at bay and excluding us military presence, is just one part of a greater mission. china intends to extend its military power through burma, africa and pakistan up to the arabian sea, on to the persian gulf and into the middle east and africa. china's defence budget is second only to that of the usa, giving it great purchasing power and increasing military capabilities (green and hicks 2017) . recent outbreak of coronavirus and resultant thousands of death all over the world is blamed on china that either china has developed this virus in its laboratory in wuhan or it suppressed the information so that other countries could not take action beforehand. the result is worldwide shutdown and mass unemployment and bankruptcy. most companies are having the problem of very low demand and falling share price. china is taking advantage of that. it is buying up companies after companies everywhere particularly in the developing countries. every nation in the world talks of peace. throughout the twentieth century, countries have enthusiastically praised the virtues of 'stability', 'peace' and 'good relations', yet they have all been caught up in the irrationality of actively prepared for and fomented war. among growing economic chaos, there is unlikely to be a 'peaceful rise' to chinese imperialism-just preparations for war to expand china's economic interest through its militarism. big corporations in the western world control the mass media. for example, walmart, the biggest retail chain stores in the usa, which receives most of its supplies from china, is owned by rupert murdoch, who also owns some of the most important newspapers and television channels in the usa, uk, australia, india and east asia. the result is a continuous pro-chinese propaganda in the media, which is blaming the democratically elected taiwanese leaders for provoking china by not accepting the chinese colonialism. when the interests and ambitions of the kuomintang chinese and china have now merged, it will not take long for the usa to discard taiwan to its fate in order to please china and to protect the commercial interests of the american companies in china. china recently created a new type of imperialism. in the name of belt and road initiative, it is giving huge loans to a number of countries for infrastructure projects at very high interest rates. all materials for these projects including labour force would come from china, although the recipient countries could supply most of these particularly the labour forces to reduce the borrowings. when the country will be unable to pay back these loans, china will take very long-term lease of important ports, airports, mines or islands. recently sri lanka when unable to repay its loan to china gave lease of an airport, hambantota, for 100 years to china. maldive has taken from china a loan of $250 million, which is the same as its gdp. kenya gave up mombasa port to china, after failing to repay its debt to china. in africa, similarly, a number of countries leased out their mines. china has a plan to invest $60 billion in africa, 75% of that in oil-related industries. sudan has taken $6.4 billion, kenya has taken $8 billion, republic of congo has taken $7.3 billion, ethiopia has $13.5 billion loan from china, and angola has taken $25 billion from china. these are nothing when we consider pakistan, which has taken $40 billion loan from china with a guaranteed rate of return of 30%, which it cannot repay. therefore, pakistan has given away gwadar port in balochistan for a joint military base with china. this is imperialism in another name (toh 2017; kesling and emont 2019; terril 2003) . both china and the usa thus correspond to the classical pattern of colonialism. they both want to capture territories to promote their business interests. in the case of american empire the desire is to protect its overseas investments and particularly the oil industry worldwide. it can correspond somehow to the theory of lenin. chinese empire does not correspond to the theory of lenin at all. china wants to capture resources of the world to promote its industry in future as a matter of national honour and prestige to wipe out 'the century of humiliation'. it corresponds to the theory of schumpeter not lenin. iran between two revolutions a collection of treaties, engagements and sanads relating to india and neighbouring countries structural revolution in international business the savage wars of peace: small wars and the rise of american power the uyghurs in xinjiang-the malaise grows. china perspectives devil's game: how the united states helped unleash fundamentalist islam persian oil: a study in power politics the 1953 coup d'état in iran u.s. foreign policy and the shah: building a client state in iran notes from the minefield: united states intervention in lebanon and the middle east countering coercion in maritime asia empire and nationhood: the united states, great britain, and iranian oil american empire: a global history how to hide an empire: a history of the greater united states how the u.s is countering china's empire building plan all the shah's men: an american coup and the roots of middle east terror overthrow: america's century of regime change from hawaii to iraq evo morales urges resistance to new bolivian government dividing asean and conquering the south china sea council of war: a history of the joint chiefs of staffs war on iraq china's mining occupation of the philippines what did estrada and arroyo promise china the new chinese empire is china an empire beyond the judgement of civilization: the intellectual legacy of the japanese war crimes trials the status of tibet, history, rights, and prospect in international law legacy of ashes: the history of the cia america's great game: the cia's secret arabizes and the making of the modern middle east china's final solution in xinjiang. the caravan, issue 1819 key: cord-0062086-hxisczs9 authors: bandinelli, carolina; bandinelli, arturo title: what does the app want? a psychoanalytic interpretation of dating apps’ libidinal economy date: 2021-04-19 journal: psychoanal cult soc doi: 10.1057/s41282-021-00217-5 sha: 11c5768b46673fd505a58337c81ee5f6a2c41e79 doc_id: 62086 cord_uid: hxisczs9 in this article, we take dating apps as a case study to tackle the question of desire and enjoyment in contemporary society. moving away from an instrumental conception of digital media, we focus on their (mis)functions and the related (dis)satisfactions. we argue that dating apps’ key function and significance is not that of offering a means through which to find a potential partner, but rather of engaging the subject’s desire without the need for an actual relationship with another person. applying lacanian theory to the analysis of empirical data, we dwell on the microphysics of enjoyment of dating apps to analyse the ways in which they activate, exploit and turn the subject’s desire. we maintain that dating apps entail a libidinal economy that operates independently of the app’s obvious function of connecting individuals: they act seductively, engaging the subject’s desire in a pulsating dynamic of loss and gain, promise and frustration, thus becoming an affective object in their own right and offering a way for the subject to cope with the demand to enjoy typical of late capitalism. in a cultural atmosphere in which having a vibrant dating life becomes an imperative, thus foreclosing the space for desire to emerge, dating apps can be a way to respond to such injunctions without confronting the anxiety of an embodied encounter. digital societies are particularly distinguished by the emergence of new technologies of romance and sexuality; namely, dating apps. these have arguably contributed to a resignification of the rituals, grammar and values of romance, and constitute an object people relate to and rely on to an ever more significant degree. previously socially stigmatised, online dating has now become not only largely acceptable but increasingly popular amongst urban youth in big cities. recent statistics report that about 196 million adults use them, with people aged 18 to 29 being the largest population segment (statista, 2020) . while it would be naïve to claim that dating apps have revolutionised our understanding of love and sexuality, we are witnessing a digital remediation of these domains, which is producing new codes to (re)negotiate romance. dating apps' affordances and narratives remediate specific rituals of courtship, producing new practices, such as swiping, liking, matching and texting, and a related etiquette, or grammar, with specific questions attached to it: e.g. what kind of profile picture and bio is the right one? what kind of opening message? this is an evolving field which sees users trying to figure out how to deal with the techno-social milieu produced by the app itself (ansari and klinenberg, 2015; ellison et al., 2011; heino et al., 2010; ranzini and lutz, 2017) . in what follows, we draw on the lacanian understanding of desire and enjoyment to explore the subject's engagement with dating apps. this perspective allows light to be shed on the psychic and affective investment that is at stake in the ways in which we relate to digital technologies. it implies an understanding of dating apps and digital media in general -not as a means to achieve certain ends -but rather as libidinal objects in their own right, i.e. objects capable of interacting with one's desire and enjoyment to turn, activate, hijack and support them. instead of privileging a perspective that looks at what users do with the app, we shift our attention to what the app does to and for its users. what we are interested in is neither a conception of dating apps as mediators that can incentivise or discourage romantic and sexual encounters, nor an empirical analysis of users' behaviours and motivations. rather, we look at the microphysics of enjoyment as produced within the relationship between the subject and the app. to do so, we look at what happens when their most explicit use, i.e. meeting potential partners, is not at stake. we ask: how do dating apps work when they do not work? tackling this question, we analyse dating apps' libidinal economy, i.e. the ways in which they participate in the (ideological/fantasmatic) regulation of the open and contingent relationship between desire and enjoyment, lack and excess, in a given social order. this resonates with enquiries on the affective, social and ethical stance of the networked self and sociality, marked by the ambivalence between a narcissistic movement towards extreme individualisation and the political potential of multiplied opportunities for social connections (e.g. flisfeder et al., 2016; papacharissi, 2011; davies et al., 2014; turkle, 2011) . this strand of research has mapped the multiple ways in which digital media can be used and misused to build or alienate social relations and identities (for two complementary perspectives on this matter, see for instance, boyd, 2014; turkle, 2011) . what remains partially underexplored, however, is the nature of our involvement with digital media not as remediators of social relationships but as objects that trigger a particular kind of affective and libidinal investment (there are exceptions; e.g. bown, 2015; johanssen, 2019; deuze, 2011) . these can be found beyond the explicit function of the medium, in between the big events of failure and achievement of a supposedly rational purpose. by means of a lacanian analysis of empirical data that frames them in relation to the demands of the 'society of enjoyment ' (mcgowan, 2004) , we highlight three key characteristics of dating apps' libidinal economy: (a) dating apps allow the subject to cope with the anxiety deriving from injunctions to enjoy a 'dating life' whilst disseminating the very same injunctions; (b) through the match, dating apps offer a quantifiable and crystallised sign of the possibility of a (romantic and sexual) event by engaging the subject in a dynamic of loss and gain that produces a particular kind of (dis)satisfaction; and (c) in so doing, dating apps may end up occupying the position of an affective object in their own right, standing in for the sexual or romantic partner they are meant to procure us. this article is structured as follows. firstly, we contextualise our research within academic debates on subjective enjoyment and social demands. secondly, we introduce our object of study, i.e. dating apps, drawing on recent literature on the topic in the fields of media, sociology and cultural studies. then, we offer a brief methodological note. in the empirical sections, we give voice to the research participants exploring the microphysics of enjoyment in a way that distinguishes dating apps beyond their obvious function of organising a date. modern popular culture has typically associated romantic love and sexuality with the space of exceptionality and transgression, at least until the second half of the 20 th century. western literature, from shakespeare to goethe, placed them outside of the boundaries of social and economic constraints (de rougemeont, 1983) . romantic love, characterised by the co-presence of love and sexuality, was represented as radically uncompromising and thus a potential threat to the social order. but after the sexual revolution of the 70s -as sociologists and cultural scholars have shown (beck and beck-gernshein, 1990; illouz, 2011; giddens, 1992 ) -romantic love became embedded in the social order, yet without losing its absolute character. as a result, in late capitalism, the social demand has turned into one of combining true love with the most satisfying sexual life in a 'healthy' relationship. this, as illouz (2011) pinpoints, puts the person in front of an unsolvable dilemma: that of holding together pure love, wild passion, and the shared duties and responsibilities that characterise a long-lasting relationship. such a conception of love gets intertwined with the discourse of neoliberalism, which offers 'freedom of choice' as the pivotal device for navigating the stormy water of romance (bauman, 2003) . the individual is free to choose, and obliged to choose freely, and, if they are good enough at choosing, they may respond adequately to the social demand to optimise their life to its maximum (salecl, 2010) . there is no more social order to blame if complete emotional and sexual fulfillment is unattainable, but rather an insufficiency in the ways in which we relate to ourselves and others (frith, 2015; illouz, 2011) . the sociologist lisa wade (2017) offers an illustration of how demands to enjoy one's sexuality are experienced by young people in the us. in an empirical study on college students, she shows how hook-ups can be perceived less as a liberation than an injunction. what we seem to be confronted with is a society in which love and sex are no longer a dimension where social imperatives may be transgressed but rather one that requires conforming to them. how should we interpret this shift? psychoanalysis offers a way to conceptualise the relationship between social demands and subjective enjoyment which yet again moves beyond a simple dichotomy. already with early freud (1908 freud ( /1959 , we have a detailed interplay between the internalisation of civilisation's commands and the subject's sexual impulses. in particular, as freud (1930 freud ( /1961 develops his concept of the superego, he highlights that the latter does not simply signal the internalisation of a social imperative but is also traversed by sadistic drives. for the super-ego, no renunciation is ever enough. as mcgowan (2016) points out as he traces this genealogy, certain freudo-marxist authors (e.g. marcuse, 1998; reich, 1974) have somewhat simplified freud's argument, reducing it to a battle between sexual instincts and social repression. what follows is the idea that sexual desire could finally be liberated (and capitalism overthrown) by lifting prohibitions. from a lacanian perspective, a limitation of this approach is that, whilst producing a critique of capitalist ideology, it focuses on its dissatisfactions rather than on how capitalism exploits and obfuscates the subject's desire: 'the problem [. . .] is not that capitalism fails to satisfy but that it doesn't enable its subjects to recognize where their own satisfaction lies' (mcgowan, 2016, p. 11) . because for lacan the subject is ontologically lacking (i.e. lack is constitutive of subjectivity), the ultimate aim of desire is not the filling of one's lack by means of an object (this would ultimately imply the subject's annihilation) but rather its own (i.e. desire's) perpetual continuation. in this strict sense, desire is constitutionally dissatisfied, but, notwithstanding this structural condition -or because of if -the subject is able to 'enjoy' in the gaps and cracks brought about by the repetitive failures to actually attain its 'proper' object: the lacanian object a. importantly, the object of fantasy, object a, should not be understood as a positive entity capable of filling one's lack. from the point of view of the symbolic, it is the logical operator of lack; from the point of view of the real, it is the entropic waste produced by discursive operations (lacan, 2007) . however, capitalism obfuscates the negative dialectic of the subject's relation to its object -i.e. it papers over object a's constitutive negativity by endlessly promising to fill the subject's lack (and grant total satisfaction) by means of commodity objects. as vighi (2015) explains, 'the pervasive commodification of objet a turns the latter into a master-signifier, securing the ideological closure of the capitalist structure' (p. 10); this 'masterisation' of object a effectively renders it 'a cruel master demanding more and more obedience to ''flat'', repetitive and utterly anodyne forms of enjoyment' (p. 10). lacan conceives of enjoyment -what he calls jouissance, which is different from pleasure for the way it refers to a sexually charged, excessive bodily experience deeply intertwined with a degree of failure -as an inherently problematic domain, distinguished by a complex (and failed) relation between subject and the other. rather than understanding the super-ego simply as an agency urging the renunciation of one's impulses, lacan (1999) claims it always also commands a certain modality of enjoyment. as such, it follows a perverse sadistic logic: 'nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the super-ego. the superego is the imperative of jouissance -enjoy!' (p. 3). far from liberating our desires, late capitalism has thus turned enjoyment into a social injunction (mcgowan, 2004; ž ižek, 1997) . in this sense, ž ižek (2005) is right when he writes that 'the superego is the revenge that capitalises upon our guilt' (p. 69), for it does cash in on our failed attempts to be the happy, healthy and sexually active individuals we are supposed to be. this offers a useful framework to understand the key elements that characterise late capitalism's libidinal economy and how it plays with our desire. it is against this backdrop that we look at dating apps and try to establish a dialogue between lacanian theories and current media and cultural studies on love and sexuality in digital societies. dating apps' reflexive narratives claim to provide an efficient solution to tackle the problem of freedom and abundance in the consumerist scene of romance, offering a set of tools to source and rank potential partners. overall, this narrative is procedural in kind, revolving around a form of solutionism (morozov, 2013) that promises a maximisation of the possibilities to enjoy the realm of intimacy. tinder's tagline 'match chat date' suggests a simplification of the socio-cultural practice of dating, here turned into a 3-step procedure. in its very name, pof -plenty of fish -plays on the exponential augmentation of romantic possibilities. e-harmony, with its successful slogan 'the brain behind the butterflies', focuses on the utter rationalisation of an otherwise mysterious domain. within this narrative, dating apps should enable a kind of optimisation of the dating process, making it 'easier' to navigate for users and enhancing their opportunities to meet 'suitable' partners. however, scholarship in the field of media and communication has demonstrated that people use dating apps to fulfil needs that exceed the domain of emotional and physical intimacy. one piece of us-based research argues that 'although such apps are ostensibly to encourage people to meet, many people may be using them without such intentions' (carpenter and mcewan, 2016, n.p.) . these conclusions echo those of another study carried out in the netherlands which shows that people use tinder for a range of reasons, from 'entertainment to ego-boost, to relationship seeking' (ward, 2016, p. 1 ). sumter and vandenbosch (2019) offer a classification of the motivations of dating apps' users in three broad categories, namely relational goals; entertainment goals; and intrapersonal goals. the last of these refers mostly to self-confidence and points to the ways in which dating apps' affordances allow users to act on themselves and receive feedback on these actions. from this viewpoint, dating apps act as a technosocial environment for the performance of the self, which impacts on the ways in which individuals perform their digital identities gibbs et al., 2011) . dating apps may leading to a specific perception of the self as a commodity (heino et al., 2010) and of other users as potential deceivers (sharabi and caughlin, 2018) . this assumes and produces a user who is to become very skilled at identifying deceptions (sharabi and caughlin, 2018; mcgloin and denes, 2016) , handling rejections (de wiele and campbell, 2019) and managing aspirations . at the same time, dating apps' affordances increasingly incentivise the entertainment component of swiping profiles, accentuating a marketised and gamified conception of dating (zichermann and cunningham, 2011; heino et al., 2010; hobbs et al., 2008) . this body of literature challenges a solutionistic and commonsensical understanding of dating apps as 'internet-based mobile applications [...] that people use for arranging intimate interactions with potential partners' (comunello and parisi, 2020) and suggests a more nuanced picture that encourages one to look at dating apps not only as mediating the relationship between people but also as an object with which we establish an affective relationship. importantly, this comes before (logically and chronologically) the potential relationship between users themselves. as a matter of fact, first of all we relate to the apps' affordances, and these act on us in establishing what can and cannot be done. this questions the understanding of dating apps as mediators of romantic encounters; but it is consistent with the underlying logic of digital applications whose objective is that of retaining users. dating apps, and apps in general, are 'sticky' (kim et al., 2016) , and this is to be found (also) beyond their most apparent function. in this article, we offer an analysis of the empirical data that one of us (carolina) collected over a period of 18 months from january 2018 to june 2019 as part of a piece of explorative qualitative research on the digital culture of love. this comprised ten in-depth interviews, five focus groups and a number of informal conversations. additional data came from a two-month period of reflexive ethnography also conducted by carolina. the participants were millennials living in italy and the uk, the vast majority of whom were white, middle-class, well-educated, heterosexual, cis-gender individuals. while this is certainly a limitation of this research, it also allowed us to focus on the mainstream heteronormative use of dating apps. this is not a piece of comparative research: instead of being interested in contrasting and comparing how different contextual factors impact on the use of dating apps, we looked at the similarities between participants' experience (beck and beck-gernsheim, 2008) . the reader will notice that the main focus has been on tinder. this reflects the popularity of this app amongst participants and its leading role in the market (belton, 2018) . in what follows, we proceed by analysing empirical vignettes for how they shed light on the position of the subject vìs-à -vis the social order. we do not use psychoanalysis to infer something about the unconscious of participants as singular individuals, nor did we use psychoanalytic methods to make them freely associate in interviews, as experimentally investigated, for instance, by hollway and jefferson (1997) and johanssen (2019) . rather, we use psychoanalytical concepts as heuristic categories to interpret qualitative data. more specifically, lacanian psychoanalysis provides us with a theory of subjectivity whereby the notions of desire and enjoyment can be mobilised to build a bridge between the dimension of individual experience and the discursive and libidinal functioning of social and political apparatuses (hook, 2008; parker, 2010) . in this respect, this article contributes to the emerging field of psychosocial studies in that it regards social and psychic life as co-constitutive and inherently entangled (e.g. frosh, 2010; parker, 2010; roseneil, 2006) . most of the research participants -despite being habitual users of dating appswere not meeting many people. many lamented what they seemed to consider an allegedly faulty aspect of dating apps: 'it doesn't work' they would typically say, referring to dating apps' algorithms. others would blame themselves and their lack of self-branding skills. in some cases, perhaps more interestingly, participants were just not that interested in going out on a date, displaying what may at first seem a rather eccentric take on the matter. overall, these observations reveal a picture in which getting a date is often perceived as difficult and not always desirable. sam, a british man in his late twenties living in london, had been on tinder for a while, but had only very few dates -just two in the last year -neither of which resulted in a sexual or romantic involvement. quite a few times, the dates he had arranged were bluntly cancelled. once this had happened when, on his way to a date, he got an sms asking, 'are you tall?' to which he replied, with admirable honesty, 'not particularly'. elisa, an italian woman based in london and the same age as sam, recounted the same experience but with inverted roles, in which she cancelled a date having obtained more precise information about the height of her potential partner. brad, a young man studying in the uk, confirmed that 'it's very hard to go out with someone you met on tinder'. jessica, a 35-year-old italian woman living in london, has been using dating apps for over three years and disappointedly confirms that 'you don't find much there ... it's very difficult!'. it comes as no surprise that users are often utterly frustrated with the app. 'it doesn't work!' claims luca, an italian man in his mid-twenties. everyone who took part in this study at some point expressed the same view. sam was puzzled. after a long open-ended interview, he wondered: 'why are people on tinder if they don't wanna meet?' sam also turned the question on himself, noting that 'most of the time i use tinder, when i am on the loo ... it is a way of just killing time, like doing something mindlessly, but also i feel i am doing something useful, i am being productive, in a sense.' the productivity of tinder is related to its social function. as he put it: 'you feel like you are doing something you must be doing, looking for a partner, having a love life, being on the dating scene.' the very simple act of installing tinder on one's phone, setting up a profile and swiping allows individuals to signal their status on the dating scene. in psychoanalytic terms, using tinder offers subjects a point of identification as desiring and desirable, hence opening up a space of enquiry into one's and the other's desire. indeed, using dating apps, one can gossip, interpret, judge, imagine, wonder, fantasise. one can talk about one's achievements, interpret the messages, envisage possible scenarios, provide reassurances and unsolicited ó 2021 springer nature limited. 1088-0763 psychoanalysis, culture & society advice, even try to manipulate the other's feelings. johanna, an undergraduate student, reports that her housemates talk about it 'all the time'. elisa and her housemate lawrence, an italian man in his mid-thirties, would often organise a 'tinder salad' in their flat in london. together with other friends, they would discuss how to improve their profiles, swipe together and even chat on behalf of one another. these findings challenge any straightforward solutionistic understanding of dating apps, corroborating the findings of recent media studies on how dating apps' users' motivations exceed sexual and romantic intimacy (e.g. ward, 2016; sumter and vandenbosch, 2019 ). yet, we push this forward, arguing that the specific forms of leisure offered by the app in itself have a precise ideological connotation: allowing one to respond to the imperative of having a dating life by enabling a social -or, to put it psychoanalytically, fantasmaticperformance of it. on the one hand, dating apps seem to offer a way to respond to the social demands of having a vibrant 'dating life'; on the other, they may be seen as a device implementing those same demands, leaving the subject with no excuse to disattend them. the user is caught up into a kind of feedback loop, a short-circuit, whereby cause and solution endlessly feed into each other. even without meeting anybody, dating apps can offer their users a specific form of enjoyment. this can be found in what is arguably the most important thing that tinder does without any direct contact with another human being: produce 'matches'. on tinder, a match happens when two people reciprocally swipe right to signal that they fancy each other. typically, the mobile phones of tinder's users are full of matches; however, only a very small minority of them translate into a date or even a chat. this leads us to consider the match as not always or primarily instrumental to getting a date but rather as producing a form of satisfaction in its own right. indeed, every participant mentions that getting matches makes them feel attractive, even if just for a few seconds. amy, a young british woman based in london, recounts that she would use dating apps 'when feeling alone' just to get that 'confidence boost'. allison, a young british woman, put it clearly: 'i love to match and chat with strangers, but i would never meet a stranger!' corrado, a 30-year-old italian man living in naples, has an analogous take: 'i like to test my attractiveness, getting as many matches as possible, but i would never go on an actual date with someone i met on tinder!' in her reflexive journal, sarah, a 20-year-old british woman, confessed that she uses the geo-localisation feature of tinder to make sure that she matches with people who are far enough away to minimise ó 2021 springer nature limited. 1088-0763 psychoanalysis, culture & society the risk of 'meeting them', as 'how embarrassing would it be to meet someone you matched with?' a match feels like a confidence-boost; it is a sign that the other sees you and likes you, offering a form of recognition: i am or have something for the other. admittedly, it is ephemeral, but it is also replicable, so the sense of void that follows the fleeting sense of satisfaction is rapidly filled up again, however temporarily, with another match. sandra, a 20-year-old british woman, puts it clearly: 'when you get a match you feel thrilled, and then the minute after you are empty again, but then another match comes… so it kind of works… .' sandra's statement well describes the specific affective dynamic of matches: they are part of a sliding chain which pulsates between negativity (the absence of the match) and positivity (the match). matches 'work' by themselves as replicable signs of likeability and indications of the possibility of a romantic encounter. through this process, dating apps autonomously provide a form of a satisfaction deeply intertwined with a degree of failure and with the experience of the impossibility of completeness. importantly, matches can be produced ab limitum, the underlying utopia being that of providing potentially infinite opportunities: a desire that gets constantly re-ignited, regardless of its object, and at the same time negated, as the next profile picture appears on the screen. the match frames an unknown other -as well as ourselves -as a potential source of love, intimacy and sexuality. matches are kept in the user's phone: crystallised, storable, countable. by means of the match, the app becomes the bearer of the horizon of possibilities that defines the evenemential encounter in its initial stages. the match is thus the technologically produced fixation of the possibility of an event, a techno-social object that refers to a specific temporality. with its repetitive and theoretically limitless offer, the app subsumes and re-mediates the infinite possible 'futures' that cause the subject's desire. this replicates the logic of accumulation typical of late capitalism whereby, against the promise of a more fulfilling future, what gets played out is a game of loss and gain, presence and absence, which produces a quota of enjoyment in the present (mcgowan, 2016) . in reviewing the relevance of enjoyment as a political factor, derek hook (2017) notes that it would be incorrect to claim that enjoyment is unconscious, for it always includes an affective and bodily dimension. both for freud and lacan, affects are not repressed but rather displaced; what is broken in fact is the link with their ideational representative or signifying function (soler, 2016) . what remains unconscious is not the enjoyment itself but the (ideological) function it plays. in the case of dating apps, the primary function is not that of enabling an embodied encounter but of producing a libidinal attachment to the process of looking for one. the enjoyment generated by the match is thus a trait of the relationship that the subject has with the app itself by means of potential others, and not with potential others by means of the app. from this viewpoint, dating apps (and arguably apps in general) emerge as objects producing forms of affective attachment in and for themselves. the words of most research participants betray an affective relationship with the app, made of interruptions and new beginnings, hope and frustration. they recall having gotten 'angry at tinder' because it was 'not working' or because it was 'fake' or 'addictive'. they would then delete it only to reinstall it eventually, often as a result of a form of jealousy: the desire for the app being reactivated by the image of it with 'someone else', in a triangulation that constitutes a typical symbolic structure of desire (fink, 2017) . saul, an actor in his mid-twenties who studies in bristol, summarises his relationship with tinder as follows: i downloaded it because i saw everybody had it, so i thought why not? i had kind of great expectations… but i don't know why it was never happening… i tried to change my profile, my bio, to make things work, but it didn't. i grew frustrated, and i deleted it. … then i went on tour and the director of the show was using tinder all the time, getting a lot of dates… i thought ok it gotta work for me too, so i tried again… saul's desire to activate tinder was triggered by the desire of others who were using it and supposedly getting what they wanted from it. he describes a difficult relationship in which things won't work and in which he had to change himself (the picture, the bio) in the aim of getting things right. but that was impossible, and he gave up: a radical break-up. when saul saw tinder with someone else ('somebody new'?), his desire for the app was re-ignited. most users appear to have gone through a similar process in what some of them describe as an 'on and off relationship' with dating apps. if we look at the ways in which tinder is designed, we notice that it constantly speaks to us, demands, invites, incites. tinder is relentlessly friendly and always available. if you don't open it for a while, it teases with its messages, reminding you that others are enjoying the swiping: 'who are all these new people swiping in your area? swipe to find out', or 'you have 313 new likes! swipe to see if you like them back'. if you are ignoring it, the app reacts, trying to be flattering, ultimately to win you back, to have you touching it, enjoying it. it wants us. it wants us to be there, to do things. and, when a match occurs, tinder is there to encourage and reassure ('you know they already want to talk to you, right?'); to play on a sense of urgency ('send a message before your battery dies'); or shamelessly remind you how likeable it is ('someone should create an app to meet cool people. oh wait'). tinder seduces -in its latin meaning of 'leading' someone 'away' from themselves and towards the seducer -insofar as it constantly tries to hook and keep its users. this permissive and amicable way of addressing the subject disguises a super-egoic demand for active engagement which plays on our sense of guilt and inadequacy. what is at stake is a seductive dynamic in which the app itself commands a form of enjoyment, articulating its own demand of being used and touched. the app functions both as a void that attracts an array of emotions, feelings and projections, and an object that ceaselessly syphons off our enjoyment; its existence depends less on its ability to 'deliver' a date than to keep us engaged in its ever-promising yet failure-ridden enjoyment circuits. as a matter of fact, in order to 'survive', the app needs to keep us desirous (i.e. dissatisfied) and, at the same time, libidinally attached to it (i.e. dependent on its enjoyment-boosts). incidentally, this also holds as true from an industry viewpoint, for dating apps' business model needs users to be (constantly) in search of something in the app and not to find that something for good (love, sex or whatever else) outside of it. as our research findings suggest, dating apps entail a libidinal economy that operates independently of the app's obvious function of connecting individuals. what may seem eccentric uses of tinder and dating apps in general are central to their success. what makes them 'effective' is the process in which they engage users, rather than the outcomes they produce. in a cultural atmosphere where having a dating life, and a desire oriented towards sex and love, becomes an imperative, the space for this desire to emerge is compromised. bombarded with invitations and injunctions to live the 'swipe life' -to have more and better sex, more and healthier relationships, to experiment, to dare, to 'take it all' -we may face the question of how to confront the anxiety resulting from our failures to embody the happy individuals we are supposed to be. dating apps may be used to tackle this issue, for they offer ways to engage with one's and the other's desire without the necessity of an embodied encounter. the app acts as what teases and triggers, alludes and deludes, becoming a partner in its own right. and, crucially, this process generates a paradoxical (dis)satisfaction precisely because it plays out the impossibility of putting a stop to the endless metonymy of desire. in these regards, it is revealing to see how dating apps accommodate the interchangeability and ineludible ephemerality of the object (cause) of desire whilst obfuscating the constitutional negativity that is linked to it. it is precisely in this dynamic that the reasons for the pervasiveness of dating apps may be found. the repetitive dynamic of swiping and matching replicates capitalism's logic of accumulation and its ever-renewed promise of total satisfaction through commodity consumption. it is when the promised object is relentlessly framed and lost, swiped and accumulated, that a quota of surplus enjoyment is produced, since every time one misses the object, one is granted the possibility of a new boost as the encounter is re-staged at the level of fantasy. it is important to stress that surplus enjoyment is not produced within the freudian pleasure principle but should be situated in its 'beyond', that is, in the realm of sex and the drives (zupančič, 2017) . indeed, sexual enjoyment implies a de-regulation of the pleasure principle, a disturbance of its homeostatic logic, which might cause tension or pain but also grants a surplus. as zupančič (2008) argues, it is precisely when the organised system of pleasure (automaton) fails to work as it encounters a point of negativity in the other, that a contingent surplus enjoyment (tyche) is produced. put simply, we enjoy where something does not work. whilst often going unnoticed, this partial satisfaction is key in articulating users' engagement with the dating app. it is insofar as they hold the potential to endlessly (re)stage and disattend their promises that dating apps operate so effectively. their effectiveness should therefore be praised not insofar as they may procure us the date they promised us but because they may become 'precious' libidinal objects despite failing to do so. we use dating apps to get access to a way of desiring another human being, and they allow us to do so by framing anonymous individuals, as well as our own selves, as desirable. but we may well end up involved in a fantasy scenario whereby the app itself functions as a 'stand in' for our potential partners, because, after all, what we relate to is the app. we act on it. we are acted upon by it. a seemingly paradoxical overturn: rather than relating to other persons by means of the app, we relate to the app my means of other persons. in this article, we have taken dating apps as a case study to tackle the question of desire in digital societies. combining ethnographic methods with lacanian theories, we have offered an analysis of the psychic investment that characterises the relationship between dating apps and their users. focusing on the microphysics of subjective enjoyment, we have shown that the success of dating apps cannot be reduced to their manifest purpose of organising dates. rather, we argue that the primary function of dating apps is to support, hook and turn the subject's desire vis-à -vis the imperative to enjoy that characterises late capitalism. certainly, an embodied encounter can happen, but this may be considered as a by-product of dating apps' operations rather than their core activity. from a media and cultural studies perspective, this may be understood as a psychoanalytic description of the app's 'stickiness' that contributes to identifying the ways in which dating apps participate in the late capitalist ó 2021 springer nature limited. 1088-0763 psychoanalysis, culture & society cooptation of desire, remediating values and practices associated with the realms of love and sex in datafied digital economies. recents observations on the use of dating apps during the covid-19 lockdowns seem to offer further evidence in support of this argument. from the conception of dating apps as tools to source an embodied meeting with another person, it should follow that, once the latter is made impossible, dating apps become substantially useless. therefore, during the weeks of lockdown in spring 2020, one would expect a drop in dating apps' engagement. in fact, the opposite happened. in an article published on 9 may 2020, the economist (2020) reported that, under lockdown conditions, users' engagement with dating apps has increased globally: 'during the worst week of china's epidemic, in late february, the average user of tantan, a chinese app, spent 30% longer on the app than normal [. . .] [in the us] between late february and late march, the average length of a conversation on tinder [. . .] surged by 25%.' these data can be explained by a range of factors that go well beyond the scope of our analysis, yet they further demonstrate that what hooks us to dating apps is not only the perspective of an embodied date. this may open up speculations about the significance of embodiment and its emotional burden. is it that, once the body is out of the way, dating apps' users find a renewed ease in connecting to others? this depicts a culture that, rather than eagerly seeking sexual encounters, is more interested in avoiding them and finding alternative practices. an article published in vogue provocatively suggests that, during lockdown, we might have discovered that 'sexting is better than the real thing' (lord, 2020) . further research on this phenomenon may be crucial to tackle the politics of desire in digital societies. carolina bandinelli is assistant professor in media and creative industries at the university of warwick. her research focuses on emerging forms of subjectivity and sociality in digital media and creative industries, which she explores combining ethnographic methods with the analysis of symbolic and affective experiences. arturo bandinelli is an independent researcher, filmmaker and training lacanian psychoanalyst at the centre for freudian analysis and research in london. he has recently completed an ma in psychosocial studies at birkbeck university, where he is due to start his phd on posthuman sexuality in september 2021. in his intellectual and creative practices, he explores the relationship between subjectivity and otherness, gaze and identity, and sexual politics and bodies. notes 1. for an exploration of enjoyment in lacan's teaching, see miller (2019) ; for discussions on enjoyment as a socio-cultural and political factor, see ž ižek (1993) and hook (2017). 2. we recognise a resonance between this part of our argument and the ways in which the concept of lathouse has been discussed in recent years (see, for instance, voruz, 2010; millar, 2018) . modern romance liquid love: on the frailty of human bonds the normal chaos of love global generations and the trap of methodological nationalism for a cosmopolitan turn in the sociology of youth and generation love and dating after the tinder revolution it's complicated: the social lives of networked teens the players of micro-dating: individual and gender differences in goal orientations toward micro-dating apps dating apps digital technologies in the lives of young people love in the western world media life. media from swiping to ghosting: conceptualising rejection in mobile dating fewer when you hold me tight. casual sex is out, companionship is in. lockdowns are forcing singletons to embrace emotional intimacy profile as promise: a framework for conceptualizing veracity in online dating self-presentations lacan on love: an exploration of lacan's seminar viii ) ž ižek and media studies: a reader /1959) 'civilized' sexual morality and modern nervous illness /1961) civilization and its discontents orgasmic bodies: the orgasm in contemporary western culture psychoanalysis outside the clinic: interventions in psychosocial studies first comes love, then comes google: an investigation of uncertainty reduction strategies and self-disclosure in online dating the transformation of intimacy: sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies relationshopping: investigating the market metaphor in online dating liquid love? dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy eliciting narrative through the in-depth interview articulating psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies: limitations and possibilities. psychoanalysis what is ''enjoyment as a political factor why love hurts: a sociological explanation psychoanalysis and digital culture: audiences, social media, and big data factors affecting stickiness and word of mouth in mobile applications the seminar of jacques lacan. book xx, on feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge the seminar of jacques lacan. book xvii, the other side of psychoanalysis will lockdown easing prove that sexting is better than the real thing? eros and civilization: a philosophical inquiry into freud too hot to trust: examining the relationship between attractiveness, trustworthiness, and desire to date in online dating the end of dissatisfaction? jacques lacan and the emerging society of enjoyment capitalism and desire: the psychic cost of free markets ex-machina: sex, knowledge and artificial intelligence six paradigms of jouissance to save everything, click here: the folly of technological solutionism a networked self: identity, community and culture on social network sites psychosocial studies: lacanian discourse analysis negotiating interview text. psychoanalysis love at first swipe? explaining tinder self-presentation and motives the sexual revolution the ambivalences of angel's ''arrangement'': a psychosocial lens on the contemporary condition of personal life the tyranny of choice deception in online dating: significance and implications for the first offline date lacanian affects: the function of affect in lacan's work. london online dating -worldwide | statista market forecast dating gone mobile: demographic and personality-based correlates of using smartphone-based dating applications among emerging adults alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other ontology of crisis and lacan's discourse of the capitalist. psychoanalysis psychoanalysis at the time of the posthuman: insisting on the outsidesense american hookup: the new culture of sex on campus swiping, matching, chatting: self-presentation and self-disclosure on mobile dating apps gamification by design: implementing game mechanics in web and mobile apps for they know not what they do: enjoyment as a political factor the metastases of enjoyment: six essays on women and causality the odd one in: on comedy publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations key: cord-0060853-g9prdjaz authors: sobande, francesca title: why the digital lives of black women in britain? date: 2020-08-12 journal: the digital lives of black women in britain doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-46679-4_1 sha: d01fda8e948f4e8d89ba38d1ba0d8afdb168ce4f doc_id: 60853 cord_uid: g9prdjaz this chapter outlines questions that buttress this work, such as: how is digital media implicated in the lives of black women in britain? in what ways do such digital experiences involve forms of creativity and cultural production? how are the intersections of anti-black racism, sexism, and capitalism connected to this? what is the ‘digital’ in the lives of black women in britain, and how can it be both a source of joy and pain? how and why are black women often identified as digital ‘trendsetters’, while being both erased and hyper-visible as creators, knowledge-producers, and social movement builders? this chapter provides an overview of key themes in this book, including digital diasporic dynamics and transnational, national, and regional relations. digital 'trendsetters', while being both erased and hyper-visible as creators, knowledge-producers, and social movement builders? these questions buttress the digital lives of black women in britain-a book which focuses on issues, experiences, and perspectives that are seldom addressed in media, cultural, and digital studies. this work is predominantly based on my research which commenced in 2015, but its roots developed prior to the rise of content-sharing sites and social media such as facebook, instagram, twitter, tiktok and youtube. since childhood, my mind has homed a patchwork of thoughts on black people's depiction on-screen and their involvement in the creation of media. i have memories of north american media imports and television shows from bump 'n' grind, kerching!, harry and cosh, moesha, desmond's, my wife and kids, eastenders, one on one, cutting it, hollyoaks, waterloo road, the crust, hang time, girlfriends, the story of tracy beaker, sister, sister…the list goes on. i watched a lot of tv-i still do, but now mostly online. often glibly dubbed 'urban tv', the channel trouble was a staple part of my childhood television diet because it offered a broader range of depictions of black lives than those (un)available through most mainstream media outlets in britain. as i got older, my pre-teen television musings morphed into meaning-making sparked by different expressions and experiences of black digital diasporic culture (everett 2009 ), as well as my understanding of how black women in britain have come together throughout history 'to record our version of events' (bryan et al. 2018, p. 1) . just as the development of television 'altered our world' (williams 2003, p. 3), so too did the rise of the internet and wi-fi connections from the 1990s onwards (mcilwain 2020; roberts 2019), paired with the popularity of mobile devices which enabled some people to create and communicate online and while on the move. simple and sturdy mobile phones that were likened to indestructible bricks were gradually crowded out by slicker models with online functions and aesthetic appeal. screen time was no longer just about the prospect of being at the cinema, in front of a television, or a desktop computer. instead, it now included the possibility of time spent with friends crowded around one person's mobile screen and connecting to the internet-possibly at an exorbitant cost-without needing to physically plug in a device. i passed time on websites such as dressupgames, piczo, and dollz-mania. i created amusingly bad polyphonic ringtones, marveled at the magnetism of comic sans, and made my way through nintendo 64, game boy advance, and playstation games-including gems from the crash bandicoot, pokémon, sims, and tony hawk series. eventually, i moved on to mining xanga for the latest 'noughties' emo and posthardcore music demos, in-between wistfully browsing fueled by ramen band merchandise when fall out boy had just started to grace the cover of kerrang! magazine. during my childhood, the nuances of the different digital experiences of black girls and black women in britain were far from being at the forefront of my mind. this is not to suggest that i was ever oblivious to the particularities of my identity as a black (and 'mixed-race' 1 ) girl in a predominantly white society. rather, as a child exploring the internet, i was not preoccupied with considering connections between people's digital experiences and their racial and gender identities. later in life, this shifted. since embarking on my research project, the motivation behind writing this book has not changed, including frustration at how black women's media experiences and creative and cultural contributions are often structurally dismissed and obstructed. i seek to reflect on the contemporary media experiences of black women in britain, especially those connected to internet activity-from enjoyable and enriching online encounters, to participating in digital forms of cultural production and contending with online harassment and abuse. if it is true that '[n]othing seems to escape capital's control, whether affects, emotions and feelings, linguistic skills, or manifestations of desire, dreams or thought' (mbembe 2019, p. 43) , then efforts to understand the digital experiences of black women in britain must reckon with how capitalist frameworks impact them. consequently, i write these words with the aim of contributing to dialogue about the relationship between anti-black racism, sexism, capitalism, media, the internet, and the lives of black women of african descent 2 in britain. despite the relatively unchanging nature of the reasons for me doing this work, over the last decade media depictions and the digital experiences of black women in britain have changed, at least, to some extent (adewunmi 2012; amoah 2019; gabriel 2016; sobande 2017; sobande et al. 2019; wilson-ojo 2017 ). yet, the digital experiences of black women in britain are scarcely considered in scholarship (t)here, including media, cultural, and digital studies. black people are often excludedboth literally and conceptually-from academia in britain, in addition to many different institutional and educational environments (johnson et al. 2018; johnson 2019) . thus, the digital lives of black women in britain was written against a societal backdrop punctuated by the structural omission and oppression of black people (t)here, and impacted by the interlocking nature of anti-black racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of discrimination (bryan et al. 2018; crenshaw 1989 crenshaw , 2017 hill collins 2000; lewis 1993) . this book considers how media is implicated in black women's lives in britain-ranging from accounts of twentieth-century activism and television representations, to experiences of youtube, twitter, and the internet. drawing on black feminist approaches, i synthesise critical understandings of digital culture, gender, race, blackness, and britain, to offer a text that dances between disciplinary boundaries and focuses on the lives of black women. in doing so, this work critically contributes to media, cultural, and digital studies, particularly in britain. perhaps, it generatively disrupts these research fields and how matters to do with black lives, anti-blackness, and, specifically, black women in britain, are rarely addressed. while the focus of my book is the digital lives of black women in britain, when addressing associated issues i affirm that digital encounters, embodied experiences, and material conditions are inherently entwined. can lives ever be 'digital'? what does, or can, the concept of 'digital lives' even mean, resemble and feel like? any professed clean-cut distinction between online and offline 'worlds' and 'lives' is always a blurred and illusionary one, at best emejulu and mcgregor 2016; kolko et al. 2000; nakamura 2008) . for this reason, my book does not merely focus on the online experiences of black women in britain. more precisely, it accounts for how digital content creation, humorous exchanges, marketplace interactions, meaning-making, and collectivity, takes shape in relation to different types of technology and digital space-in addition to so-called 'in real life' (irl) contexts and cultures. digital diasporic dynamics: transnational, national, and regional relations significant scholarship in the early twenty-first century on african-american experiences in cyberspace illuminates that-at that timealthough 'the virtual black community' (alkalimat 2004, p. 4 bruce (forthcoming, 2022) examines 'the creation, circulation, and engagement with black women's digital visual culture'. her work demonstrates how 'digital diasporic identity and community is created and performed on social media through processes of visuality and affect' (bruce, forthcoming, 2022) . relatedly, walcott's research (forthcoming, 2021) examines 'how language is disseminated between geographically and culturally disparate people who self-identify as black, and how linguistic acts of performative identity that black british women use contribute to the articulation of a group black identity through shared language and experience'. in november 2018, keisha bruce (@keishastweets) used twitter to call for expressions of interest in putting together a panel on digital blackness for the american studies association (asa) 2019 annual meeting which took place in honolulu, hawai' i. rianna walcott (@rianna_walcott) and i (@chess_ess) responded. this led to the three of us corresponding for months at a distance online to create our panel-'navigating transnational digital blackness: networked publics and decolonized ethnographic approaches'-chaired by african american studies and english scholar cynthia a. young. we drew on paramount work on media, culture, digital and communication studies, and black people's online experiences in the us (benjamin 2019; brock 2018 brock , 2020 clark 2014; everett 2009; gray 2015; jackson 2016; mcmillan cottom 2017; noble 2018; noble and tynes 2016; steele 2016a steele , 2016b steele , 2017 , while focusing on the specifics of black lives in britain. our asa session continued conversations that walcott and i took part in at a panel in 2018 on 'bridges and boundaries: black (british) digital discourses'-chaired by communication studies scholar jessica h. lu. walcott and i co-organised the panel to participate in intentionally digital, intentionally black-the first national conference of the african american history, culture, and digital humanities (aadhum) initiative at the university of maryland. we did this together with laylaroxanne hill who is a curator, artist, and organiser who advocates for non-commodifiable collective liberation, and melz owusu who is a nonbinary, decolonial and black feminist thinker, a community activist, and is undertaking a phd at the university of cambridge-exploring the relationship between epistemic and social justice. in sum, the scholarship of walcott and bruce is critically contributing to the development and direction of black digital studies in britain. in addition, the work of both owusu and hill significantly shapes various movements for radical liberation on multiple fronts. individually, we each explore different landscapes, experiences, understandings, and expressions of black life across a range of digital spaces and offline places. collectively, we work towards making a critical intervention concerning the erasure and articulation of black diasporic experiences, knowledge, and cultural production-particularly in relation to the specifics of being black in britain, in various regions. as is suggested by film and media studies scholar anna everett's (2009) innovative research on race and cyberspace, the term 'digital diaspora' can be a useful one to refer to the myriad examples of how black people around the world have connected, communicated, and created space(s) by using different digital technologies, platforms, and prowess. black digital diasporic dialogue, including social media discussions between black people, can facilitate the feeling that such online communication overcomes and erodes geographical borders-despite persistent barriers to the free movement of black people within and beyond countries and digital enclaves. put briefly, digital spaces can enable black people in different places to communicate with each other and come together, even momentarily, and as part of 'the online black public sphere' (steele 2016a, p. 2) which among many other experiences can involve collectivity, creativity, relationality, joy and resistance (clark 2014; gabriel 2016; lu and steele 2019; sobande et al. 2019; steele 2016a steele , 2016b steele , 2017 . still, social constructions of the nation-state, citizenship, ethnicity, racial identity and borders (hill 2018; omonira-oyekanmi 2010; otele 2017)-which can be 'those places where, for many of our contemporaries, the world comes undone and globalization comes up against its limits' (mbembe 2019, p. 22)-impact digital experiences irrespective of feelings of borderlessness. also, '[i]dentity formation, the sense of being an embodied, located individual, does not occur in isolation from within a mono-logic of cultural development and formation' (young 2000, p. 45 ). therefore, focusing on the digital lives of black women in britain involves thinking about how such lives are connected to and disconnected from those of black women in other countries. my work considers how issues related to regionality factor into the lives of black women in britain (hill and sobande 2018; sulter 1986), both online and offline. i remain skeptical of the adequacy and specificity of describing someone or something as being located 'in britain'-because, where exactly? my perspective relates to an awareness of how claims of britain's unified nature are often effectively and ardently contested, and how stark differences between life in nations within britain-england, northern ireland, scotland, and wales-are often ignored as part of sweeping statements about life (t)here. in turn, and given 'the value of cultural specificity in understanding emerging media' (florini 2019, p. 5) , throughout my book i consider how different regions where black women are based affect their media experiences and lives in certain ways (kay 2010; palma 2017 ; the afro-caribbean women's association 1990). even so, i do refer to the lives of black women as being 'in britain'-while clarifying different regional experiences-but without specific reference to being 'british'. my avoidance of the term 'british', unless used when referring to the chosen words of others, is partly based on recognition of 'widespread ambivalence among some black people about identifying themselves as british, in any unadorned, unembellished or unhyphenated sense' (chambers 2017, p. xvii) . my position is shaped by jacqueline nassy brown's (1998) anthropological research related to 'why and how black identity is constituted as the mutual opposite of english and british identities' (p. 291). additionally, given that the concept of britishness is often equated with experiences in england, with little to no connection to those in northern ireland, scotland, and wales, i choose to observe differences between the notion of being british and being in britain. my decision to avoid a focus on the term 'british' is not intended to be dismissive of the identities and experiences of individuals who refer to themselves as such or are identified this way by others. instead, this decision is aligned with my intention to avoid the exclusionary nationalistic sentiments that can be associated with britishness. what's more, i aim to eschew undermining the different national and regional-specific ways that black women in britain may identify or be identified as-including english, scottish, welsh, and northern irish (british social attitudes 2013; northern ireland statistics and research agency 2013a). i also intend to avoid negating the experiences of black women in britain who primarily identify with a sense of nationhood located outside of britain, as well as the experiences of those who do not identify with any notion of nationhood or citizenship-including a 'transactional model of citizenship' (benjamin 2019, p. 19) which 'presumes that people's primary value hinges on the ability to spend money and, in the digital age, expend attention … browsing, clicking, buying' (ibid.). to be black in britain can distinctly differ to being black elsewhere. further still, to be black in a capital city may be to experience life in a way that contrasts with the realities of black people living in rural settings. still, there can be commonalities between black diasporic experiences (emejulu and sobande 2019; figueroa-vásquez 2020; florvil and plumly 2018; palmer 2011 palmer , 2016 perlow et al. 2018; sims and njaka 2019; twine 2004 twine , 2010 . in my work, the term 'diaspora' encompasses felt, yet, intangible and sometimes fragile connections and forms of consciousness-which along with being associated with a racialised embodied identity, ancestry, and perceived country of 'origin', are linked to (re)imagined and (re)presented notions of home and belonging. then again, i use the term 'diaspora' with a critical perspective of its potential to flatten distinctly different experiences (e.g. of migration, asylum-seeking, class, colourism, sexuality, gender, and religion) between black people who are sometimes mistakenly thought to share a somewhat fixed and completely collective experience. in the words of sociologist frederick f. wherry (2012, p. 7): just as people are born into a culture with a language and a structure of language that existed before they were born, so too do individuals find themselves by birth or by migration to inhabit a shared sense about how the world is ordered (or at least about how things ought to be ordered and done). an example of shared struggle is navigation of the pervasive global force of white supremacy and systemic oppression faced by black people (gilroy 1987; taylor 2016; wekker 2016; yancy 2018) . nevertheless, existence of any type of such shared struggle does not disprove differences between black people and does not solely define what it means to be black. due to systemic factors such as colourism which involves the structural favouring of light-skinned people and the contrastingly severe oppression and dehumanisation of people who are darker-skinned (adegoke 2019; amoah 2019; gabriel 2007; tate 2009 tate , 2017a tate , 2017b )-including within black communities-not all black people are equally subjected to forms of anti-blackness. given the rifeness of white supremacy, coupled with their perceived embodied proximity to whiteness, lightskinned black people-including those also identified as 'mixed-race'can contribute to, and, be complicit in, anti-blackness and colourism. accordingly, when reflecting on the digital lives of black women in britain it is necessary to tarry with how black women's many experiences are sculpted by different types of interlocking structural oppression (crenshaw 1989 (crenshaw , 2017 hill collins 2000) , such as anti-blackness, sexism, and 'the impact of colorism (also referred to as shadeism)' (amoah 2019, p. 1). i consider how digital spaces shape the identities, self-expression, and lives of black women in britain, and how black women in britain shape digital spaces, and environments beyond, but, connected to them. in agreement with the perspective of curator and writer erika dalya muhammad (2001) , throughout my book '"digital space" is used as a deliberately elastic term to define both old-school and new-school media practices that respond to continual technological innovation' (p. 92). one black woman's digital source of joy and refuge may be another's source of stress and struggle. my book wrestles with tensions between black women's creation of online content sometimes being a labour of love, a form of (un)credited labour or, simply, an entertaining and enjoyable pastime. in this context, what does 'labour' mean? when is it present or absent? how is it claimed and (un)compensated? when considering these questions in the chapters that follow there is acknowledgement of the intricacies of online commentaries which can circulate in an arguably transnational black digital diaspora (everett 2009; sobande et al. 2019 ). as part of such discussion there is also recognition of how black digital diasporic spaces can be ones where a sense of community and kinship may feel as though it exists, alongside hierarchical relations and hegemonic discourse influenced by the domination of the english language (emejulu and sobande 2019) . research and writing about perceived 'minoritarian users and makers of digital culture' (de kosnik and feldman 2019, p. 2) points to how people's identities and social relations are continually (re)produced as part of their engagement with on-screen images and media practices at different stages of their lives. my book involves contemplation concerning some of the experiences of black girls-including constant oppressive scrutiny that they face (dawes 2012 ; halliday 2019; okanlawon 2019)and how media depictions they encounter as children can influence them, even in later life. i discuss how some 'parents construct black children's engagement with media as being a counter-cultural coping mechanism, to temper the potential racial and diasporic discordance of their children's identities' (sobande 2018, p. 37) in predominantly white societies. such parental management of children's media is by no means exclusive to the twenty-first century, but the development of digital media and technology has affected how parents may attempt to manage and mediate the consumer culture experiences of their black children, and by extension, their self-perceptions. informed by extant studies, i use the words 'consumer culture' in reference to 'the intensification of consumerism along with increasing prominence of consumption as social, cultural and economic activity that has come about with free-market capitalism and that is characteristic of late modernity, or what many refer to as postmodernity' (kravets et al. 2018, p. 1) . influenced by critical studies of consumer culture, this book responds to recent calls for more research on the racial and racist dynamics of media and marketplace activity to further develop understandings of how racialised subjectivities and racist interactions are experienced online and around the world lindridge et al. 2015) . social media and online content-sharing platforms are key sites of consumer culture, as well as sites of contemporary meaning-making, including as part of recent 'conversations about race and racial inequality' (anderson and hitlin 2016, p. 2)-especially those led by black people (clark 2014) , who have made use of networked forms of communication in ingenious ways for centuries (brock 2020) . since the 1990s, 'black connectivity online seems to have achieved a critical mass' (everett 2009, p. 10 ) and contributed to the formation of national and global solidarities and social movements (mcilwain 2020; taylor 2016) . despite this, there is a relative dearth of in-depth empirical research which focuses on how the production and spectatorship of digital media and content is intertwined with issues concerning race, ethnicity, gender and, specifically, black life in britain. be that as it may, the distinct paucity of academic journal articles and books on the digital experiences of black women in britain should not be mistaken for an absence of black women in britain recording, working on, writing about and ruminating on related issues-including online. the rise of social media and content-sharing platforms 'which contribute to many people's daily routines, has significantly affected contemporary british politics and public life' (sobande 2019a, p. 152) in ways that black women are highly attuned to. ergo, as i processed the (un)expected results of the general election in britain in december 2019, typically, it was the critical analysis of other black women online that i turned to for incisive accounts of the history and trajectory of britain's political and social life. moreover, as people and places around the world responded to the (un)anticipated covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic in 2020, which resulted in forms of government-directed 'lockdown' and physical distancing between people, i often attempted to make sense of what was-and was not-happening, through online conversations with black women across a range of platforms and devices. black women in britain are using digital media and spaces creatively, enabling the co-production, sharing, and documentation of knowledge in ways hardly ever afforded to them in many formal and institutional educational and academic settings. decades have passed since leading black feminist activist, psychosocial studies scholar, and psychotherapist gail lewis (cited in the brixton black women's group and the organisation for women of african and asian descent 2017) poignantly wrote about 'a time when we, as black people, were particularly vocal, both in britain and in the us, in expressing the need for the learning and writing of our own history, literature being central, particularly resistance literature' (pp. 2-3). yet, many black women today continue to strive in the same ways and for some of the same reasons, including pursuit of 'decolonisation of the mind' (ibid.)-and sometimes-with the use of digital tools. the 2018 republication of the heart of the race: black women's lives in britain by writers, educators, activists, and scholars beverley bryan et al. (1985) marked a key moment in black women's herstoricising and sustained archiving of their experiences (akpan 2019). in the words of artist, photographer, writer, and curator maud sulter (1986) , who penned thoughts about the book the first time it was published, the heart of the race: black women's lives in britain offered 'us the opportunity to take up the pen and document our histories for ourselves ' (p. 29) . writing about black women's lives in britain today is built upon the work and knowledge of black women in previous decades; including observation of how black women's agency is often overlooked, as 'we are usually portrayed as the passive victims of an historical necessity which began on the "dark continent" with the slave trade and eventually brought us to the inner-cities of the "mother country"' (bryan et al. 2018, p. 2) . the creativity, activism, and scholarship of those such as bryan et al. (1985) , among others, undoubtedly paved the way for current and future writing on the lives of black women in britain. black women around the world are addressing issues related to digital media and technology which are pertinent to black people and society-elucidating the digital dynamics of democracy and politics in kenya (nyabola 2018) , reflecting on online activism that foregrounds marginalised voices in ghana (mohammed 2019) in some ways, my book is influenced by me being born and having grown up in scotland, residing in england when starting this book, and now living in wales. i do not disclose these details to caveat anything included in this book or to fetishise the self-disclosure and personal essay writing of black women. instead, i reflect on the place(s) from where i view, write about, and experience some of the issues covered in subsequent chapters as part of my efforts to articulate elements of the different lives of black women in britain. i recognise potential benefits and limitations of work such as mine. it may broaden understandings of the digital experiences and lives of black women in britain but can never convey the richness and varied nature of all of them. i reject the idea that any one person or perspective can encompass what it means to be a black woman in britain today. in writing this book i do not claim to write on behalf of all black women in britain or to produce an exhaustive list of black women's digital, creative, and cultural contributions. however, 'the burden of representation' (mercer 1990, p. 61) can loom large for a black person in britain, where the population of black people is less than 5% of the total population of england and wales (gov.uk 2018) , is approximately 1% of the total population of scotland (national records of scotland 2018), and is approximately 0.2% of the total population of northern ireland (northern ireland statistics and research agency 2013b). my book draws upon black feminist and women's studies scholar jacqueline bobo's (2001, p. xv) vital writing on how 'black women have confronted institutional and societal barriers in their daily lives and in their creative spaces'. work that considerably influences mine also includes the leading research of communication, gender, and women's studies scholar kishonna l. gray (2015) on black cyberfeminism-which 'as an extension of virtual feminisms and black feminist thought, incorporates the tenets of interconnected identities, interconnected social forces, and distinct circumstances to better theorize women operating within internet technologies and to capture the uniqueness of marginalized women' (p. 176). gray's (2015) black cyberfeminist framework accounts for both the liberatory and limiting potentials of digital technology, especially as experienced, understood, and developed by black women. as is outlined in the crucial work of sociologist and writer tressie mcmillan cottom (2017), black cyberfeminism can 'interrogate how social relations of dominance are translated through digitally mediated relationships with technology, the interests that produce it, and the processes that resist them' (p. 217). for these reasons and more, black cyberfeminism (gray 2015; mcmillan cottom 2017) orients much of my work. at the crux of my research is an interest in the inseparability of many digital, material, and embodied experiences, along with an awareness of how hierarchical power relations are homed in digital spaces and made manifest in the development and use of digital technologies (emejulu and mcgregor 2016; gregory 2017) . overall, my work is inspired by contributions from a range of what tend to be referred to as disciplines, fields, and subject areas. these include, but are not limited to, sociology, media and cultural studies, black feminist studies, communication and information studies, visual studies, digital studies, and critical marketing and advertising studies which recognise that '[t]he marketplace is not simply a place where money is made; it is a site of service, a place where crusades and social movements attempt to overturn "bad'" practices' (wherry 2012, p. 9) . my work is also moulded by my participation in ongoing collective-oriented activities which foster critical discussion and actions in response to matters concerning black lives, digital media, and marketplace settings . as well as being the outcome of over five years of research, the digital lives of black women in britain is born of a kaleidoscope of conversations with friends, family, and loved ones. although my book does not specifically focus on black feminism and black activism, it is nurtured by the writing and work of black feminists and activists, such as olive gallimore, gail lewis, melba wilson, and individuals involved in the brixton black women's group which was founded in 1973 and created space 'to look at the questions of colonialism and the nature of capitalist society, african history and these sort of things' (lewis cited in the brixton black women's group and the organisation for women of african and asian descent 2017, p. 1). while my book outlines some of the ways that the digital experiences of black women in britain are mobilised by consciousness-raising and political intentions, it also addresses the fact that this is not the case for all. regardless of differences between what black women in britain write, post about, enjoy and do online, one common component of such digital experiences is dealing with harassment (akiwowo 2018; allman 2019). such harassment is often underpinned by co-dependent anti-black racism and misogyny-namely, misogynoir, which is a term introduced in 2008 by moya bailey who is the digital alchemist for the octavia e. butler legacy network, and whose work focuses on how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. bailey, who curates the #transformdh tumblr initiative in digital humanities, and whose scholarship and work has played a pivotal role in critical digital humanities developments, has written about misogynoir online since 2010 (bailey 2010) . since then, the term 'misogynoir' has been developed and discussed in detail by bailey, as well as trudy who is an artist who works as an indie creator, author, writer, photographer, curator and social critic, and is the creator of gradient lair-a digital space about black women, art, media, social media, sociopolitics, and culture (bailey and trudy 2018, pp. 767-768) . taking heed of such work and how misogynoir and intersecting oppressions impact the lives of black women, one of several key topics of discussion in my book is how black women in britain try to navigate negative aspects of their digital experiences, such as the reality of online abuse and constant exposure to traumatic content and malicious messages that are directed at them. the themes at the centre of my book originate from 26 in-depth interviews with black women in britain (aged 19-47 years old), as well as interpretive analysis of resources accessed at the black cultural archives (bca) in brixton in london, at the british library, and at glasgow women's library (gwl). some of the interviews occurred at cafés, over the phone or via a video call, and in other cases, they took place at the person's home. although the chapters that follow do not include excerpts from all 26 interviews, many of the excerpts that feature encompass and echo perspectives that were expressed across most of them. aligned with black feminist principles which inform my work, the methodological approach that underpins it foregrounds the experiences and knowledge of black women in britain, as expressed in their own words-including in interviews with me and in pre-existing written texts. some people may think it is counterintuitive to not prioritise digital methods when researching digital encounters and activity. but, to return to previous words of mine in this chapter, i affirm that digital encounters, embodied experiences, and material conditions are inherently entwined. i recognise researchers' 'dual charge to experiment with and work through new digital tools, but not take the tools so seriously that we lose sight of the very social conditions that have given rise to them' (gregory 2017, p. 4) . in view of that, when approaching the research that led to my book, i sought to focus on the individual lives of black women in britain and the material and social conditions that impact them, as a prelude to understanding their experiences of digital space, media, and technology. i did not solely want to learn about how other black women in britain are creating and making use of digital media. instead, i wanted to do work that involves acknowledging, understanding, and responding to black women's thoughts and feelings concerning such experiences, the contexts they occur within, and the lives that they are a part of-discussed with them in a setting of their choice. in other words, i principally based my book on what arose during in-depth interviews with black women which relate to how their individual biographies (dis)connect to and from their digital experiences, as well as their shared and different herstories. as most of the women (19) who were interviewed were in their twenties or younger, my book mainly focuses on the experiences of black women who are part of a generation of people who are typically assumed to be very familiar with digital technology and online communication processes. all interview excerpts are attributed to pseudonyms that those who i spoke to selected for themselves. despite my work foregrounding the thoughts and encounters of individuals who do not identify as online influencers or internet famous, there is acknowledgement of how differing levels of visibility can impact the digital experiences of black women in britain. after all, there are numerous examples of black women in britain using their digital presence and influence in creative, educational, community-oriented, and resistant ways, as well as those who focus on commercial, branding, and business opportunities (wilson-ojo 2017) . throughout these pages i use the terms 'mainstream media' and 'massmedia' to refer to high-profile and longstanding corporate media organisations, outlets, and the content that they distribute (sobande 2019b) . i also understand the contestable qualities of these concepts 'given that online content produced by non-media and non-marketing professionals is continually incorporated into prominent media and marketing endeavours' (sobande et al. 2019, p. 3) . my use of the word 'spectator' is based on an understanding of the spectacular(ised) attributes of much media, as well as the active approach to watching, engaging with, and responding to it, which can be part of some people's media viewing experiences. the connected concept of the 'gaze' can bring up various connotations (berger 2008) such as the lingering eyes of onlookers, who watch admiringly or with intent, and can be associated with a sense of scrutiny and surveillance that black people are structurally subjected to (browne 2015) . my perspective of a gaze affirms the notion that such a form of looking is purposeful and involves people situating themselves in relation to who or what they gaze upon. the sustained intentionality at the root of someone casting their gaze upon something or letting it linger is markedly different to the ambivalence that may be associated with a cursory glance or glimpse. my use of the word 'practices' in relation to digital and media activities encompasses experiences which involve a habitual element and are influenced by socio-cultural norms and the broader geo-cultural locations that people find themselves in. the phrase 'digital media practices' is used in reference to commonplace digital activities, including those which are particular to the lives of some black women in britain. in the context of this work the term 'practices' also implies that such experiences are connected to collective sentiments and cultural conventions that are reinforced via certain institutional and social processes. related discussion of digital remix culture concerns 'how people (re)use and (re)create digital content and commentary' (sobande 2019a, p. 153) , including as part of digital processes and practices that 'can involve editing or adding to existing visual, audio and textual content to (re)produce something new, which is tailored to capturing specific socio-cultural views and events' (ibid.). lastly, my perspective of the term race is based on the position that 'the socially constructed nature of race doesn't mean that our understanding of race and racial categories isn't somehow real or that it doesn't have real effects: quite the contrary, those categories do exist and they have tangible (and all too often deadly) effects on the ways that people are able to live their lives' (kolko et al. 2000, p. 2) . my understanding of how race functions also echoes the explanation offered by erika dalya muhammad (2001) , who curated the race in digital space exhibition for the mit list visual arts center in cambridge, massachusetts, from 27 april to 1 july 2001, '[t]he word "race", at once positional and relational, reflects a variety of cultural realities' (p. 92). the exhibition-race in digital space-curated by dalya muhammad (2001) sought to 'contextualize race as a dynamic power system that is further manipulated and complicated by hi-tech devices and evolving historical paradigms' (p. 92), while also accounting for some of 'the effects of new media on the dynamics of cultural hegemony' and 'cultural interchange' (ibid.). in a similar vein, my book is intended to contextualise how power relations, digital technologies, and space impact experiences, expressions, and understandings of black women's lives in britain. when closely observing media and 'consumption and market activities, the tangibility, reality and brutality of racial dynamics are almost impossible to miss' (grier et al. 2019, p. 91) . despite perceptions of the democratised nature of digital media production processes, social media and content-sharing platforms such as youtube and twitter still reflect and perpetuate intersecting inequalities (noble and tynes 2016)including those connected to how 'power relations of racism and sexism gain meaning in relation to one another' (hill collins and bilge 2016, p. 27) . social media contexts have been identified as digital spaces that can be used to harvest and propagate far right and white supremacist politics (daniels 2009 (daniels , 2012 (daniels , 2017 lewis 2018) . therefore, while my work includes acknowledgement of the potential for digital environments to contribute to the lives and wellbeing of black women in britain in ways that are helpful to them, i also recognise that many risks and types of abuse and harm are frequently a part of black women's digital experiences. extending upon this opening chapter, chapter two considers aspects of black women's media encounters and lives in britain over the last several decades. chapter 2 outlines media developments and key matters concerning the on-screen depiction of black women in britain. there is discussion of self-representing and organising in relation to black women and the media, the politics of representation in connection with forms of superficiality, conceptualising black women's media experiences, representations of black women on television, and how issues regarding regionality and rurality are embroiled in this. chapter 2 predominantly draws on archival material and pre-existing written accounts, before chapter three's stronger emphasis on the contemporary experiences of black women. chapter 3 focuses on black women's present-day digital, creative, and cultural industry experiences. there is a reflection on the overlap between tacit issues concerning racial, gender, and cultural identity in online spaces, and tensions between the emancipatory, enterprising, enjoyable and extractive dimensions of the digital experiences of black women in britain-which are inevitably impacted by capitalist infrastructures and commercial entities. chapter 4 highlights issues to do with black digital diasporic content and communication, as part of discussion of how black women's digital activity can be a coping mechanism which enables them to deal with experiences of oppression that are specific to their lives and in communal ways. there is a consideration of the resistant credentials of some of the digital experiences of black women in britain, while reckoning with potentially conflicting aspects of counter-cultural practices which exist in the context of digital consumerism. this chapter includes analysis of how black american popular and digital culture contributes to some of the digital encounters and lives of black women in britain. there is also a focus on black women's experiences of natural hair video blogs (vlogs) on youtube, and knowledge-sharing online. chapter 5, which reflects on the impact of the covid-19 (coronavirus) global pandemic in 2020, includes discussion of the (un)definable nature of the digital experiences of black women in britain, and similarities and differences between such experiences. this chapter is a closing consideration of how and why digital terrains continue to be a source of pleasure, creativity, and knowledge-sharing, as well as distress and danger for black women in britain. my writing may have some form of an introduction and conclusion but the story that it is both part and a result of is a complex openended one which black women continue to chronicle-online and offline. digital (self)representations, discussion, and depiction of the lives of black women in britain will continue to far exceed the pages of my book. it is my hope that the digital lives of black women in britain sheds light on the experiences of such individuals and the structural issues that affect them. 1. the term 'mixed-race' is commonly used in britain in reference to a person who is biologically related to parents from different racial backgroundsbroadly defined-including a person with one black parent of african descent. 'mixed-race' is one of many terms that has been used as part of essentialising, homogenising, racist, and purist white supremacist pseudoscience discourse regarding race and eugenics. the term 'mixed-race' has also been used as part of some people's self-identifying efforts to distance themselves from their blackness, in ways that may ultimately be rooted in anti-black positions and a rejection of black identity. i use the words 'mixed-race' with caution and an unwaveringly critical perspective of this term, including due to how it can obscure particularities of the experiences of racialised people and can function as part of rhetoric and research which upholds oppressive and racist notions of 'racial purity'. however, i use the words 'mixed-race' in my book to acknowledge how my black identity-as a child of a black parent and a white parent-is often perceived, described, and categorised by others in the context of britain's history and contemporary notions of racial identity and blackness. 2. 'black women of african descent' includes black women with african ancestry who identify as african and those with african ancestry who identify as caribbean. dark skinned women are now being celebrated, but don't blame us for scepticism why black british drama is going online, not on tv amnesty's latest research into online abuse finally confirms what black women have known for over a decade how the stories of black women in the uk are being reclaimed the african american experience in cyberspace: a resource guide to the best web sites on black culture and history people/ the-dark-side-of-social-media-for-black-women?listids=5d93b25a88157fff35 0b6d2e #noshade: a critical analysis of digital influencer activism against shadeism in the beauty industry social media conversations about race: how social media users see, share and discuss race and the rise of hashtags like #blacklivesmatter they aren't talking about me …' crunk feminist collective on misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. cambridge and medford london: penguin black feminist cultural criticism devolution: trends in national identity critical technocultural discourse analysis distributed blackness: african american cybercultures dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness forthcoming, 2022). 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cyberspace decolonizing diasporas: radical mappings of afro-atlantic literature beyond hashtags: racial politics and black digital networks rethinking black german studies: approaches, interventions and histories layers of blackness: colourism in the african diaspora blogging while black, british and female: a critical study on discursive activism there ain't no black in the union jack': the cultural politics of race and nation population of england and wales race, gender, and virtual inequality: exploring the liberatory potential of black cyberfeminist theory structure and agency in a digital world reimagining the marketplace: addressing race in academic marketing research the black girlhood studies collection an other world in our own words: organising and experiencing exhibitions as black women and women of colour in scotland black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment re)imagining intersectional democracy from black feminism to hashtag activism throwing our bodies against the white background of academia the fire now: anti-racist scholarship in times of explicit racial violence race in the marketplace: crossing critical boundaries red dust road race in cyberspace the sage handbook of consumer culture in inside babylon: the caribbean diaspora in britain cited in black women organising, written by the brixton black women's group and the organisation for women of african and asian descent alternative influence: broadcasting the reactionary right on youtube virtual) ethnicity, the internet, and well-being joy is resistance": crossplatform resilience and (re)invention of black oral culture online notes from the frontier black software: the internet and racial justice, from the afronet to black lives matter black cyberfeminism: ways forward for intersectionality and digital sociology black art and the burden of representation online activism: centering marginalized voices in activist work race in digital space: conceptualizing the media project those who fight for us without us are against us: afrofeminist activism in france digitizing race: visual cultures of the internet black liverpool, black america, and the gendering of diasporic space algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism the intersectional internet: race, sex, class, and culture online census 2011: detailed characteristics for northern ireland on health, religion and national identity census 2011-detailed characteristics for northern ireland on ethnicity, country of birth and language digital democracy, analogue politics: how the internet era is transforming politics in kenya this is us: black british women and girls the injustice of indefinite detention fashioning my garden of solace: a black feminist autoethnography history of slavery, sites of memory, and identity politics in contemporary britain for the love of a mother: the black children of ulster the politics of loving blackness in the uk introduction.' in blackness in britain black women's liberatory pedagogies: resistance, transformation, and healing within and beyond the academy behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media mixed-race in the us and uk: comparing the past, present, and future watching me watching you: black women in britain on youtube managing media as parental race-work: (re)mediating children's black identities memes, digital remix culture and (re)mediating british politics and public life woke-washing: 'intersectional' femvertising and branding 'woke' bravery resisting media marginalisation: black women's digital content and collectivity an african city: black women's creativity, pleasure, diasporic (dis)connections and resistance through aesthetic and media practices and scholarship african americans and the media the digital barbershop: blogs and online oral culture within the african american community signifyin', bitching, and blogging: black women and resistance discourse online black bloggers and their varied publics: the everyday politics of black discourse online surveying the scene: writings by women of african and asian descent black beauty: aesthetics, stylization, politics the governmentality of black beauty shame: discourse, iconicity and resistance skin: post-feminist bleaching culture and the political vulnerability of blackness from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation our day of awakening the brixton black women's group and the organisation for women of african and asian descent a white side of black britain: the concept of racial literacy a white side of black britain: interracial intimacy and racial literacy forthcoming, 2021). 'a tweet at the table: black british women's identity expression on social media white innocence: paradoxes of colonialism and race the culture of markets television: technology and cultural form social media has done for black british women in one decade what tv couldn't in thirty years backlash: what happens when we talk honestly about racism in america what is black british feminism? key: cord-0073300-gplb9bjd authors: dubinsky, yoav title: country image, cultural diplomacy, and sports during the covid19 pandemic: brand america and super bowl lv date: 2022-01-10 journal: place brand public dipl doi: 10.1057/s41254-021-00257-9 sha: a416cd7df545c977e422e5a691e3f858c3474777 doc_id: 73300 cord_uid: gplb9bjd although the super bowl became a national celebration of american culture, capitalism, and lifestyle, super bowl lv held in 2021 had a different tone, being held a few weeks after the attacks on the us capitol, and during the covid19 pandemic that by then cost the lives of over 400,000 in the united states. this study aims to answer the research question: how is the image of the united states projected through the coverage of super bowl lv in international media? after analyzing 114 media articles published by 19 national news outlets from 13 different english-speaking countries, five themes emerged from the data: (a) shared culture and values, (b) sociopolitical climate, (c) the pandemic, (d) the event, and (e) positionality. using buhmann and ingenhoff’s four-dimensional country image model for analysis, findings of the study suggest that while american culture is being celebrated, american norms, ethics, and values are criticized, leading to a mixed international image. the study is significant as it contributes to the literature on country image, public diplomacy, and the sociocultural role of sports in brand america and suggests a conceptual model for using sports for nation branding during the pandemic. the purpose of the study is to explore and analyze the role of sports in nation branding and public diplomacy during the pandemic by analyzing the projected image of the united states (usa) through international media covering super bowl lv (sblv), held in tampa, florida, on february 7, 2021. the super bowl (sb) is not only one of the usa's most significant annual domestic traditions (real 1975; dyreson 2017 ), but it also plays a role in the diffusion of american culture and american ideology abroad (dzikus 2017) . sblv included some of the previous sb traditions such as a halftime performance and expensive creative commercials but was also different in several ways. sblv is the first sb held during the presidency of joe biden. during donald trump's administration, the former president called to fire nfl players protesting during the national anthem (boykoff and carrington 2020) . furthermore, some players and teams refused to visit the white house after winning the championship (dubinsky 2021; espn 2018) , and even the sb itself became a stage for protest by the athletes and by halftime performers. sblv is also the first sb taking place during the deadly covid19 pandemic. the 2021 sb game took place one year and one day after the first covid19 identified death in the usa. since the outbreak of the pandemic and as of february 2021, over 400,000 people in the usa have died from the coronavirus. the pandemic also changed the world of sports and the nfl, canceling and postponing games, and having a variety of safety protocols including teams holding games in empty stadiums or with a limited number of fans. super bowl weekend usually creates an economic impact of hundreds of millions of dollars (o'reilly et al. 2008 ) not only through out-of-city fans attending the game but through parties and other related events. with the pandemic and the health restrictions, fewer fans attended the game and much of the events were held virtually. also, sblv was the first sb after the insurrection of january 6, 2021, and the attacks on the us capitol. this article analyzes the projected image of the usa through the coverage of sblv in international media through different nation branding perspectives (fan 2010), and uses buhmann and ingenhoff's (2015) four-dimensional country image model. based on the findings, the study suggests a revised model for using sports for nation branding purposes during the pandemic. the role of the sb in american culture, in american identity, the different economic impacts, and even the use of american football as part of spreading american values has been studied through multiple scholars for decades (butterworth 2008; dzikus 2017; hopsicker and dyreson 2017; real 1975 ), yet there is a gap in the literature about the way international audiences frame america through the sb. by focusing on international coverage of the game, this article fills some of that gap. this study aims to explore and analyze the portrayed image of the usa and brand america by international media outlets. thus, the theoretical framework of this study focuses on theories and lenses analyzing the role of sports in country image and nation branding. countries, cities, and communities have been using sports to improve their images and achieve social, political, and economic goals for hundreds and even thousands of years (dubinsky 2019) . countries' images are studies through lenses and theories from political science, business management, communication, and sociopsychology (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) . buhmann and ingenhoff (2015) suggest a four-dimensional model evaluate a country's image. the functional dimension pertains to the competencies and competitiveness of a country including the political and economic performance, the normative dimension pertains to beliefs regarding the norms and values of a country, and the esthetic dimension pertains to the attractiveness of the culture, history, and scenery of a country. an attitude consists of three components: (a) a cognitive component that pertains to knowledge, (b) an affective component the is involved with feelings and emotions, and (c) a behavioral component that pertained to undertaken action based on knowledge and feelings (grewell and levy 2021). while the first three dimensions of a country's image are cognitive components, the fourth dimension, the sympathetic dimension, is an affective component that pertains to feelings and fascination for a country (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) . the functional, normative, and esthetic dimensions impact the sympathetic dimension. country image is one of the outcomes of the process of nation branding (fan 2010). according to fan (2010), nation branding is composed of export branding, place branding, political branding, and cultural branding. from political science and international lenses, a countries image is impacted through soft power, foreign policy, and public diplomacy (cull 2008; nye 2008) . the term soft power refers to the use of attraction to achieve a more favorable image of a country, rather than military power or economic sanctions (nye 2008) . the three main resources of soft power are political values, foreign policy, and culture. the traditional definition of public diplomacy refers to the use of communication with foreign publics to achieve foreign policy goals (cull 2008) . more contemporary definitions also analyze the role of the private industry through corporate diplomacy and private citizens through peopleto-people diplomacy (dubinsky 2019) . fan (2010) refers to political science as political branding. during the cold war, the usa has been using smart power, a combination of both hard power and soft power, to achieve its dominant status as a superpower. in the context of sports, manifestations include forming relationships with china following table-tennis games (pigman 2014) and boycotting the 1980 olympic games in moscow as a retaliation for the soviet union invading afghanistan (murray 2019) . from business management perspectives, countries' images have been analyzed through two main approaches on nation branding (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015; fan 2010) : tourism-based approach in which a place is analyzed through its attraction as a tourism destination (anholt 2010) , and product-based (jaffe and nebenzahl 1993) in which the country-of-origin is analyzed through its business industry, its workforce, and associated products. in the context of country image and nation branding, fan (2010) refers to product-based branding as export branding and to destination-based approaches as place branding. heslop et al. (2010) analyzed the impact of the 2008 beijing olympic games on the image of china in the eyes of americans and canadians, evaluating the images of china as a vacation destination, using the following criteria: quality of service, amount of wilderness, sports facilities, ease of getting around, ease of finding place of interest, accommodation, restaurants, climate, peaceful, for the whole family, safety, your knowledge of china, attractiveness of scenery, variety of services, originality of experience, culturally interesting, entertainment, shopping facilities, memorability of experience, proud to visit, willingness to travel to, willingness to recommend, overall ratings, overall ratings compared to other countries, and tourism attractiveness. from a productbased approach, factors such as the "made-in label" and the country-of-origin are analyzed. martin (2007) analyzed "brand america" arguing that some of the characteristics associated with the usa and with americans include capitalism, freedom, along with insensitivity, ignorance, arrogance, and self-absorption. he argues that the sports company nike embodies characteristics that pertain to the american experience and that the "nike swoosh is a badge that identifies the wearer as someone who's energetic and a bit of the rebel, whether roller-blading or lying in a hammock" (martin 2007, p. 99) . from communication lenses, countries' images have mostly been analyzed through mass media. two central theories for mass media analysis are agenda-setting and framing (entman 1993; mccombs and shaw 1972) . according to agenda-setting theory, the media does not tell its audience what to think but what to think about (mccombs and shaw 1972) . framing theories, on the other hand, analyze how and why a story was presented in a certain way (entman 1993) . according to buhmann and ingenhoff (2015) , the "central role of mass media in the formation of country images has stimulated numerous content analyses evaluating images of certain countries as portrayed in foreign media" (p. 108). for example, oh et al. (2020) analyzed the media framing of the unified korean olympic women's ice hockey team consisting of players from both south korean and north korea through newspapers and social media during the 2018 winter olympic games in pyeongchang. they (oh et al 2020) found that from an agenda-setting perspective, progressive outlets framed the team more positively, while conservative papers either covered the team less or framed it negatively. from socio-psychology perspectives, a country's image is analyzed through collective identity and national identity including stereotypes and distinctions between in-group and out-group (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) . national identity includes shared ideology, identity, values, history, culture, common myths and memories, beliefs, and other socially constructed characteristics (david and bar-tal 2009) . fan (2010) refers to national identity as cultural branding. hobsbawm (1992) coined the term imagined communities, arguing that sports play a role as an expression "an expression of national struggle, and sportsmen representing their nation or state, primary expression of their imagined communities" (hobsbawm 1992, p. 143) . such struggle could be seen in the 1968 olympic games when tommie smith and john carlos protested when the american anthem was played during the medal ceremony against racial injustice in the usa (murray 2019) and was kicked off the team. more recently, when nfl player colin kaepernick and the united states women's soccer team (uswnt) star megan rapinoe knelt during in protests of racial injustice in the fall of 2016, they were portrayed as labeled "anti-american, anti-military, and anti-nationalist" (schmidt et al 2018, p. 654) . shared values change over time, as in 2019, the united states olympic and paralympic committee (usopc) admitted smith and carlos into its hall of fame (shinn 2019) , and in 2020, after the demonstrations following the murder of george floyd by a policeman in minnesota, the nfl apologized for not listening to players protesting racism (espn 2020) and us soccer repelled the rule of banning protests during the american national anthem (associated press 2020). trump was a populist and a separatist president (dubinsky 2021) , who withdrew from international initiatives such as the paris climate agreement use rhetoric of putting america first. when analyzing the role of sports in brand america and in us public diplomacy during donald trump's presidency, dubinsky (2021) identified several trends: (a) domestic power struggles shape international relations, (b) the usa uses gender for diplomacy, (c) brand america has questionable values, (d) sports diplomacy manifests in different forms, and (e) chaos creates energy, but exposes the vulnerabilities of a country. this article further adds to the discussion on the intersection of country image, nation branding, and sports by analyzing the first largest sports event america hosted in the post-trump era. to address the research question on the projected image of america through sblv, the study sets the conceptual framework around the role of american football and of the sb in american society, american history, and globalization. association football, known in the usa as soccer, and rugby, inspired the development of american football in the second half of the nineteenth century (krechmar et al 2017) . the first american football game between rutgers and princeton in 1869 was inspired by soccer codes, and the sport developed in the 1870s from revisions of the british rugby reflecting "patterns and practices of american nationalism" (krechmar et al. 2017, p.309) . the role of football in american national culture increased with technological development such as live television coverage and the first sb in 1967 which in the next half a century became "a beacon of american nationalism " (dyreson 2017, p. 151) . literature on the role of the sb as "the most lucrative spectacle in american mass culture" (real 1975, p.31) , goes back to the 1970s and since then dozens of scholars have analyzed some of its national and international impacts and manifestations. some of the manifestations of nationalism in previous sb pre-games include collaborations with armed forces, such as us air force flyovers, air force academy choir and the us marine corps marching band, and patriotic gestures and images through the pledge of allegiance by the apollo 8, apollo 11, and apollo 17 (hopsicker 2017) . the national anthem became one of the most iconic patriotic traditions, most notably in 1991, with whitney houston's memorable performance during the first persian gulf war (hopsicker 2017) . the terror attacks of 9/11 were also followed by patriotic gestures, in the following sb and when new york held the game for the first time since the attacks (butterworth 2008) , indicating the role of sports in democratic citizenship and the war against terror. according to hopsicker (2017) , while the gulf war, the 9/11 attacks, and the wars in afghanistan and iraq provoked attention to nationalism associated with the sb, "overwhelming evidence suggests that the nfl has continuously engaged since the earliest staging of the game in connecting 'americanness' to the super bowl" (p. 37). beyond nationalism and affiliations with armed forces and patriotism, the sb also serves as a manifestation of american exceptionalism (dyreson 2017) , and since the 1980s became attached to politics, capitalism, and the white house (hopsicker 2017) , with presidents making congratulating phone calls or even hosting the champions. the connections between the sb, american lifestyle, and capitalism, led to the development of traditions around the game. according to hopsicker and dyreson (2017) , "super bowl sunday stands as the day when americans celebrate conspicuous consumption-a public demonstration of the american ability to buy things" (p. 3). companies invest millions of dollars for 30 min commercial ads known as 'ad bowl,' and "celebrities of all genera vie to sing the national anthem or headline the halftime extravaganza on a stage viewed by over two-thirds of americans" (hopsicker and dyreson 2017, p. 2) . in the twenty-first century, football games dominate the rating charts and the annual mostwatched telecast in the usa is the sb, drawing between 98 million and 114.4 million viewers between 2010 and 2020, with eight of them being the eight most-watched telecasts in american history (smw, n.d.) . the sb advertisements not only represent american commercialism, but companies also capitalize on the large audience through inclusive messages such as gender equity, racial harmony, diversity, and even a multi-ethnic cast singing "america the beautiful" (hopsicker and dyreson 2017) . furthermore, the popularity of the sb provides opportunities for other countries to brand themselves as attractive tourism destinations with commercials promoting travel to ecuador and australia, by exposing their scenery, culture, wildlife, or celebrities to american and global audiences (marcus 2018) . several companies used the sb to promote their product, which also exposed their country-of-origin (fan 2010), such as turkish airlines or avocados from mexico (dua 2020) . beyond the revenues generated via television rights and commercials, the sb creates an economic impact of hundreds of millions of dollars through non-residences coming not only to the game but also to experience the surrounding parties and related events in the host city (o'reilly et al. 2008) . such commercially related traditions and impacts, all contribute to a shared american experience and give super bowl sunday a statue of a national holiday and a civic religion (butterworth 2008) . although football and the sb are a significant component of american culture, that is not the case outside the usa. according to woods and butler (2021) , american football is not even one of the top ten most popular sports worldwide in terms of watching and participating. at least ten games from the 2018 fifa world cup exceeded in ratings the mostwatched sb games fifa world cup russia 2018 smw, n.d.) . even annually, the uefa champions league final enjoys higher global viewership than the sb (vertelney 2018) . there are several explanations or speculations about the different impacts, including the violent nature of american football (dyreson 2017) . the game of football receives much criticism regarding on-field and off-field violence, with concussions leading to short-term and long-term brain damage, and can manifest in aggressive behavior including murder, domestic violence, sexual violence, and suicide (woods and butler 2021) . furthermore, there is also much criticism on the exploitation of college football players who generate billions for the universities and other stakeholders and are not allowed to get paid although being worth hundreds of thousands in an open market (borghesi 2017). yet, although the american sports system was not adapted globally, to argue that american football and the sb do not have an impact on the perception of the usa will also be inaccurate. american football has been covered internationally since the late nineteenth century by british newspapers (dzikus and dubinsky 2018) . after world war ii and during the cold war, american soldiers deployed in berlin used american football to stay in touch with home and that contributed to the globalization of the game (dzikus 2017) . according to dzikus (2017) , the sb played an important role in the diffusion of american football in germany and with that also shaped the cultural image of the usa. although dzikus (2017) uses lenses of globalization to analyze the diffusion of football in germany, such an argument exemplifies a way of how the usa used football as part of smart power (nye 2008) strategies to achieve more favorable images abroad and eventually win the cold war. as a world hegemon, the image of the usa deteriorated over the years, especially after the invasion of iraq (martin 2007; nye 2008) , neglecting its soft power and focusing mostly on hard power. the connections between football and the sb with armed forces might reinforce that image. since 2016, the connection between football and american nationalism has changed especially with the rising of evidence of police brutality and racial discrimination against african americans, a demographic that is overrepresented in the sport (woods and butler 2021). beyoncé's performance in the 2016 halftime show was deemed "anti-police and anti-american" (gammage 2017) by policy unions and the public. later that year, populist presidential candidate donald trump criticized colin kaepernick and other nfl players for protesting during the national anthem and disrespecting the flag (cooper 2019). as a polarizing populist president, trump even called owners to sanction protesting athletes, saying: "wouldn't you love to see one of these nfl owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'get that son of a bitch off the field right now. out! he's fired. he's fired!'" (boykoff and carrington 2020) . according to nye (2019) , "america's place in that world may be threatened more by the rise of populist politics at home than the rise of other powers abroad" (p. 80). during trump's chaotic presidency, the image of the usa has tarnished abroad, with american media reporting that other countries "pity" the usa for mishandling the coronavirus pandemic and portraying america as anarchy after white supremacist trump supporters took over the capitol as the congress and the senate were confirming the election of joe biden as the next president, questioning the authenticity of the democratic image of the usa (ellyatt 2021; pop and dube 2021). also, while trump encouraged universities to hold a college football season during a pandemic (vazquez and carvajal 2020) , american scholars criticized the us system through international media portraying it as exploitative (borghesi 2017; silva et al. 2020) . as a result of trump's divisive rhetoric and policies, the connection between football and the white house changed as the 2018 sb champions philadelphia eagles declined the traditional visit to the white house (dubinsky 2021; espn 2018) and after the killing of george floyd, the nfl officially supported athletes protesting during the national anthem. thus, an act seen as "anti-american" when kaepernick was protesting in 2016 (schmidt et al. 2018) was embraced by the establishment, shedding new light on the images of football and america. this study explores and analyzes the projected image of the usa to international audiences during the first mega event held in america, through a sport that captures american civic religion (butterworth 2008) , weeks after the end of a chaotic presidency of a separatist president (dubinsky 2021) , during an unprecedented and deadly global pandemic. this study aims to explore and analyze the role of sports in nation branding during the covid19 pandemic, by focusing on sblv and the image of the usa. the study tries to answer the research question: how is the image of the united states projected through the coverage of super bowl lv in international media? to answer the questions, the study uses content analysis (flick 2014; krippendorff 2004) of online national news outlets in countries in which english is an official spoken language, followed by a conceptual and theoretical analysis through country image (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) and nation branding (fan 2010) lenses. for the data collection, the study used purposeful sampling of online international news outlets from 13 countries in which english is at least one of the official spoken languages: australia, new zealand, south africa, nigeria, india, singapore, england, ireland, canada, barbados, jamaica, guyana, and belize. several other countries were looked at but were not analyzed in the study if no coverage of the sb was identified or if the only published articles were from syndicated organizations. the countries and the articles were identified through bbc's country profiles index (bbc, n.d.) during february 2021. due to different time zone differences, deadlines, potential holidays, or other miscellaneous circumstances between the different countries, to capture articles previewing sblv and that covered the game itself, the study analyzed articles published between february 5 and february 9, 2021, giving each media outlet a five-day window to address the event. to maintain consistency, articles published before that timeframe or after it were not analyzed in this study. according to krippendorff (2004) qualitative researchers use multiple and diverse sources when conducting content analysis, to capture multiple interpretations. thus, for triangulation and reliability purposes (flick 2014), and to increase diversity (krippendorff 2004) , the study focused on private and public media outlets from all five continents. overall, this study analyzed 114 articles, published in 19 media outlets from 13 different countries. 73 of the analyzed articles were published by privately owned news outlets, and 41 by state-owned media outlets. as the objective of the study is to analyze international coverage, articles from syndicated press agencies such as reuters, the associated press (ap), or agence france-presse (afp) were not analyzed in the study unless the local news outlet contributed to the article as well. in an attempt not to over-emphasize the coverage in one country, no more than two news outlets were chosen per country, and coverage from countries from all five continents is analyzed in the study. table 1 summarizes the data collection. for the data analysis, the study used four rounds of manual coding according to saldaña's (2016) manual coding for qualitative researchers. in the first round, all 114 articles were read, and each sentence, paragraph, segment, or article received an in vivo code, also known as literal coding or verbatim coding (saldaña 2016) , capturing the exact words of the text. in the second round, the identified codes were grouped into 51 categories using topical coding. when in vivo coding was not applicable, topical coding was used to capture the shared topic of the codes in the category. in vivo coding and topical coding methods are popular and applicable to almost every qualitative research, but they also have a purposeful use for initial rounds of descriptive coding (saldaña 2016) . in the third and fourth rounds, the study used focused coding, grouping the 51 categories into 14 subthemes, and ultimately coming up with five different umbrella over-arching themes: (a) shared culture and values, (b) sociopolitical climate, (c) the pandemic, (d) the event, and (e) positionality. following the thematic analysis, the study used buhmann and ingenhoff's (2015) four-dimensional country image model and the different nation branding lenses fan (2010) categorizes, to suggest an integrated and revised model for using sports for nation branding purposes during the pandemic. the findings of the study answer the research question: how is the image of the united states projected through the coverage of super bowl lv in international media? although sblv received the lowest tv ratings for a super bowl game in over a decade with 96.4 million viewers (young 2021), the sb is still the most-watched televised event in the usa. after analyzing the 114 relevant published articles, five themes emerged from the data: (a) shared culture and values, (b) sociopolitical climate, (c) the pandemic, (d) the event, and (e) positionality. table 2 summarizes the coding and categorizing process. one of the primary issues international media focused on when covering the sb was the cultivation of values and cultures in american life. the theme captures the variety of events associated with the sb and with the usa through five subthemes: (a) culture and capitalism, (b) shared experience, (c) fashion and lifestyle, (d) national pride, and (e) state of the country. almost every news outlet extensively covered the variety of culturally associated activities, including musical performances and even poetry (cna sport 2021; lee and horton 2021). yet, beyond the artistic displays, much of the coverage emphasized the connection between american culture and consumption and capitalism, especially through the 5.5 millionper 30 s super bowl ads that included a-list celebrities, promoted movies and tv shows, and paraphrased famous songs by shaggy and dolly parton (coetzee 2021; hurley 2021; lee and horton 2021; sng 2021) . tiktok sponsoring the pre-game tailgate party in which miley cyrus performed and the sb pepsi halftime show headlined by the weeknd are also examples of such intersection between culture and capitalism in america. a uniquely american phenomenon that hopsicker and dyreson (2017) define as a celebration of "conspicuous consumption." the second subtheme "american collectivism" focused on the shared experiences around the sb, in a country that is associated with freedom and individualism (martin 2007) . for example, the ratings the sb will receive in the usa, the gathering around food and especially chicken wings, consumption of alcohol, and sharing a collective experience through parties or even through social media reactions and viral memes (lee and horton 2021; trends desk 2021). the third theme captures the perception of the american lifestyle, especially with glamorous descriptions of tom brady's life outside football, or through references to fashion. in past sb games there was much focus on armed forces (hopsicker 2017) , in sblv, health workers were honored as national heroes, including by having thousands of vaccinated health workers attending the sb. president joe biden thanked them in a message before the game, and african american female poet amanda gorman read the poem she wrote: "chorus of the captains," saying: "for while we honour them today, it is they who every day honour us" (cna sport 2021). in the fifth and last subtheme, state of the country, the current situation of america is discussed in international media, including the attack on the capitol and the overall gloomy situation after a tough year full of death and social unrest. a jeep commercial starring bruce springsteen reflected on the divisive state of the country trying to find the middle (lee and horton 2021). the bbc (2021) framed the decision to have country singer eric church sing the national anthem together with r&b singer jazmine sullivan as "a genre cross that serves as yet another nfl message of american unity." the coverage of the ads reflected the current state of america, for not focusing on the present but going either to nostalgia to the 1990s bringing back wayne's world and edward scissorhands (sng 2021) or contrary to that, fast-forwarding to the future and winning trip to space from spacex (bbc, 2021) . the combination between darkness, the past, and the future (moran 2021; courtney 2021) manifested through the coverage of the halftime show. moran (2021) wrote about the weeknd's show in the sydney morning herald: "if his intent was to evoke america's ongoing end-times scenario, he succeeded." the cultivation of american values and american culture discussed in theme 1 could not be fully understood in vacuum, without the context of sociopolitical climate in which they manifest. throughout the coverage of sblv, international media focused on issues related to social, political, and economic issues, through two subthemes: (a) diversity and inclusion, and (b) activism and social justice. most international media organizations reported about diversityrelated issues mostly in the contexts of gender and race. example including celebrating the first two female coaches winning the sb as the first female referee in the sb breaking gender barriers, or focusing on african american amanda gorman reading poetry, mentioning kamala harris elected as vice president and all-black coordinators in tampa bay's coaching staff (collins 2021; singer 2021) . perhaps the most inclusive angle was the focus on toyota's commercial and the real-life story of double-amputee swimmer jessica long who was adopted from a siberian orphanage (lee and horton 2021) , and through grit and resilience became one of america's greatest paralympic champions winning 13 gold medals. such a story portrayed the usa as diverse in terms of gender, ableism, and place of birth. yet, while such coverage presented the usa in a positive light, other articles also focused on racism and discrimination, such as focusing on the name kansas city chiefs being "hurtful and inappropriate to indigenous peoples" (ram 2021). international media also covered the lack of diversity in black nfl coaches (felt and lutz 2021) . the mixed coverage of diversity might enhance the reputation of brand america (martin 2007 ) as a land of opportunities, but also the image of americans as insensitive. the social climate in america, including the kneeling of colin kaepernick and the change of heart by the nfl following the black lives matters protests after the death of george floyd, led to several critical articles and columns about activism and social injustice (abdul-jabbar 2021; campbell 2021). former nba legend and social activist kareem abdul-jabbar (2021) wrote an article in the guardian in which he discussed the role of an athlete as a social activist, including posing the question regarding the legacy of tom brady, who sidestepped the issue of activism in 2014 but was more outspoken after the events of the summer of 2020. when covering brady's achievements, the irish times published an article written by the new york times (shpigel 2021) about brady's legacy, also mentioning the quarterback had a make america great again hat in his locker room in 2015 when playing in new england and saying his relationship with donald trump became "uncomfortable." morgan campbell (2021) from the canadian broadcasting corporation (cbc) criticized the nfl for framing the story of african american kenny washington who played in the league in 1946 as "reckoning with race." he wrote that the nfl was concerned about "rehabbing the league's image," while not diving into "confronting the ugly history" (campbell, 2021) . campbell argues that while the league tried to project a progressive image, through his short career washington faced racism. "washington's experience contradicts the myth that racism recedes with time," he writes (campbell, 2021) . furthermore, campbell (2021) goes further pointing out a glass ceiling for african americans seeking the head coaching position, and especially questions ethical practices in the nfl in relation to concussions which leads to cognitive decline and head trauma. that was not the only time international coverage questioned the ethics of the sport. when reviewing the tradition of pre-super bowl presidential interviews, the indian express wrote "donald trump confessed he would have a 'hard time' letting son barron play american football, alluding to the "dangerous sport's" link to brain trauma" (bhatt 2021 ). yet, campbell (2021) focuses on the impact on african americans, using the term "race norming" while citing a story covered by abc news: abc news reported that several doctors in charge of assessing players for the cognitive decline that could qualify them for settlement money had grown frustrated with nfl guidelines they say made them factor a patient's race into test scores. the practice, known as "race norming," was invented as a way to avoid over-diagnosing black students as learning-disabled, correcting for the segregated, under-resourced schools they might have attended. but doctors mentioned in the abc report complain that the practice handicaps black patients' test scores. it's tougher to argue nflrelated head trauma caused low scores when race norming suggest black people are prone to score poorly anyway, and the uncertainty can limit black players' access to settlement cash. (campbell, 2021) theme 3: the pandemic international media did not only focus on the sociopolitical climate in the usa, but also on the impact of the global pandemic that cost the lives of millions around the world and hundreds of thousands in the usa and forced countries to cancel or postpone sports events. sblv was one of the most-watched sports events organized during the covid19 and the pandemic was in the front-end or the background of the coverage of almost every aspect of the event. the coverage of the coronavirus pandemic in relation to sblv was coded into two main subthemes: (a) different impacts of the pandemic and (b) criticism over the pandemic. international media covered extensively how the usa managed to organize the sb, having an attendance of 25,000 fans in the stadium including 7,500 health workers who received free tickets, and filling 30,000 seats with 25,000 cutout fans (collins 2021) . the pre-game tailgate party headlined by miley cyrus in front of vaccinated healthcare workers, and the singer herself became emotional while singing her hit "wrecking ball" (rte 2021). covid restrictions were also mentioned around the players' bubble, precautions taken after players were exposed to a positive-tested barber (collins 2021) , and that the weeknd was the only artist in the halftime show without fans on the field (trends desk 2021). furthermore, some international media outlets that used to cover the sb from the press-box in the stadium did not travel to tampa, a significantly lower number of outof-state visitors attended the game or the hosting city, with fewer surrounding events taking place or being replaced by virtual experiences (collins 2021) . when covering the commercials, international media reported that companies are spending less, not at all, or focusing on vaccine awareness (cbc 2021a, b). one ad that used the pandemic to promote its products was seltzer lemonade with a "not-sosubtle nod to the plans that were derailed during 2020 and the axiom 'when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.'" (loop entertainment 2021). yet, international media also focused on the death toll of over 400,000 people killed by the coronavirus in the usa (lee and horton 2021) and on people in tampa celebrating together not wearing masks or social distancing fearing the sb will become a coronavirus super spreader event (cbc news 2021a, b). unlike the first three themes that focused on social, political, and economic issues around the sb, the fourth theme captured how international media portrayed the event as the championship game of a sports competition. the first subtheme focused on the coverage of the athletic competition between two competitive teams including previews, playby-play descriptions, pre-game and post-game interviews, statistical analysis, and so on. the second subtheme focused on applicable narratives that sports fans can relate to, regardless of the athletic discipline. the repeated storyline around sblv was old vs new and the battle of generations between two quarterbacks, the 43 years old tom brady and 25 years old patrick mahomes (smale 2021a) . such a narrative was relatable, as in any sport and in any culture, there are generational transitions. the second repeating narrative was the references to tom brady as the goat-the greatest of all time-through constant comparisons not just to american football players, but also to dominant athletes in other sports such as michael jordan in basketball, serena williams in tennis, or comparisons to top veteran soccer players such as leo messi and christiano ronaldo (higham 2021; lutton 2021) . such comparisons also provide sports fans a relatable debate, increasing the drama and interest around the storyline of the competition. other supportive narratives included rob gronkowski coming back from retirement to join brady and win a sb, tampa bay playing the championship match on their home field, and the assistant coach and son of the head coach of kansas city missing the game due to a car accident (connolly et al 2021) . while the first four themes identified in the study analyzed how international media sees america, the fifth theme captured how other countries are positioned in comparison with america, also giving an introspection of how international media sees their country in relation to america and how international media portrayed the way america and americans see others. the fifth theme captured how other countries are positioned in relation to the sb through three identified subthemes: (a) us and the event, (b) others' social identity, and (c) place branding. in the first subtheme, us and the event, international media focused on how to experience the sb abroad, where and when to watch around the world in nigeria (chukwu 2021) , south africa (richardson 2021), new zealand (nz herald 2021), australia (smale 2021b), or great britain (higham 2021) , how to "go all-american" (rte lifestyle 2021) and hold virtual sb parties in ireland, instructions on household gatherings and limitations of outdoor watching of the game in canada (djuric 2021) , and competing sport-events occurring during that weekend such as england competing in cricket games (felt and lutz 2021) or the australian open tennis tournament in melbourne. furthermore, as american football was developed out of soccer and rugby, and several english-speaking countries are former british colonies that are influenced by british sports or british colonialism (krechmar et al 2017; woods and butler 2021) , international media also made comparisons to local sports and culture. for example, comparing the nfl to the national rugby league (nrl) in australia (masters 2021) , local american football variations such as flag football in new zealand (egan 2021) or being described as "similar to soccer but played differently" (kaieteur news 2021a, b) in guyana-the only english-speaking country in south america. campbell (2021) compares the lack of racial diversity in american football to similar history in canadian hockey. yet, perhaps the most comprehensive article of analyzing a country in relation to american football was written by connor neville (2021) about ireland, including the history of covering the sb, in relation to local sports such as gaelic football, the history of violence in soccer, and even playing the american version of the game and holding an "inaugural shamrock bowl." the second subtheme pertained to social identity and the spotlight international media put on their citizens playing a role in the sb. canadian national pride was manifested several times through the framing (mccombs and shaw 1972) of the weeknd being the first canadian solo artist to headline the sb halftime show. according to the cbc, toronto mayor even declared february 7 being declared the weeknd day, saying: "toronto is proud that one of its own, the weeknd, has achieved such enormous popularity both here at home and on the world stage" (lau 2021) . canadian media also emphasized local pride by reporting canadian kansas city chiefs player opting out of the season to work on the covid19 crisis in quebec and on quebec-born antony auclair from tampa bay being the 17th canadian to appear in the sb (steuter-martin 2021) . similarly, media outlets in belize focused on rakeem nunez roches becoming the first garifuna belizean american to win a super bowl (ramos 2021) . in a demonstration of a shared collective identity (david and bar-tal 2009) , ramos (2021) writes "we should all be happy for him." yet, collective identity and national pride in the sb manifested also off the field of play, including through commercials. in the most political manifestation of collective identity and global affairs, indian americans used a crowdfunding campaign to broadcast a super bowl ad in california to raise awareness of the farmers' protest in india (pti 2021). the ad, which also includes a quote from martin luther king jr. and the mayor of the city of fresno, focuses on farmers camping at several delhi border points "demanding the government to repeal the three farm laws" (pti 2021). the lighter cheetos commercial featured reallife celebrity couple ashton kutcher and mila kunis along with jamaican artist shaggy, paraphrasing his iconic song "it wasn't me" (hurley 2021 ; the gleaner 2021), was a source of pride in both new zealand and jamaica. while media outlets in new zealand celebrated the creativity of "the kiwis who wrote the cheetos super bowl ad" (hurley 2021) , the jamaican media celebrated "the boombastic singer" (the gleaner 2021) being a global superstar. the third subtheme of positionality pertains to place branding. one form of place branding through the commercial ads was through general motors (gm) cars and comedian will ferrell portraying norway as the leading country in the world in electric cars per capita (lee and horton 2021) . the san pedro sun (2021) reported that after belizean american player rakeem nunez roches won the sb, belize tourism board (tbt) tweeted "'the minister of tourism and diaspora relations look forward to welcoming you to belize,' tagging rakeem and brady" (the san pedro sun 2021), referencing reports that the offered vacation would be on the expense of btb. these are all examples of how countries use the sb and its related activities and events to leverage their brands as a tourism destination or how companies are using the country images of different countries to enhance their brands. the study aims to explore and analyze the projected image of the united states through international media coverage of sblv, and based on the thematic analysis, the findings suggest a complex projected image. from agenda-setting perspectives (entman 1993 ) by emphasizing the cultural significance of the sb, including the musical performances and creative commercials, international media told its audience these aspects of america were worth focusing on. from framing lenses mccombs and shaw 1972) through international media projected a variety of power struggles resulting in mixed messages about diversity, racism, and handling the pandemic. to analyze the significance of the findings on country image, nation branding, sports, and the usa, the study uses theories suggested through buhmann and ingenhoff's (2015) 4d country image model, followed by the analysis of the different uses of the sb through nation branding lenses (fan 2010). to answer the research question about the projected image of the usa through international coverage of sblv, the study uses buhmann and ingenhoff (2015) model that analyzes a country's image through functional, esthetic, normative, and sympathetic dimensions. table 3 summarizes the projected image of the united states through buhmann and ingenhoff's (2015) 4d country image model. the functional dimension of a country analyzes the abilities, competencies, and success of a country (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) . on one hand, the functional dimension of the usa received positive coverage for being able to hold a mega event during the pandemic. however, there was also much international criticism, focusing on over 400,000 deaths in the usa, and on fear the sb will become a super spreader. such critics enhance the reputation of americans being selfish (martin 2007) . the functional dimension also refers to the economic attributes of the country and its political organization (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) . on one hand, the american high-technological industry receives international exposure including the initiatives of spacex (courtney 2021), yet on the other hand, the implications of the storm of the capitol cast a shadow on america's functional dimension. the ample articles and mentioning of the commercials reinforce the role of capitalism in brand america (martin 2007 ) framing the american economy as strong and functioning. mentioning the speeches by president joe biden, the inauguration, and the democratic institutions of the american system also help to portray the country as functioning. the most positive framing of america occurred focused on the esthetic dimension of the country "that is its beauty and attractiveness as a cultural and scenic place" (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015, p. 114). through the coverage, table 3 the projected image of the usa during the coverage of sblv through the 4d county image model (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) country image dimension projected image of the usa high developed technology and industry; ability to complete an nfl season and to host the sb during the pandemic; limited ability to protect society from covid esthetic rich culture including music, sports, art, television and films, and celebrities; creative; having collective traditions; attractive scenery; active nightlife normative diversity in sports; issues of racism in society; prioritizing individualism and commercialism over people's health and even human lives; unauthentic messages; care for health workers; divided country sympathetic fascination with american culture and sports; imitating american parties and traditions; criticism on american priorities international media celebrated american culture by mentioning dozens of celebrities, discussing in-depth the creative ads, analyzing the traditional halftime show while also recalling previous performances, and even pointing out the uniqueness of having poetry in the sb. perhaps the most significant demonstration of the intersection between sports and culture for nation branding and public diplomatic purposes occurs during the opening ceremonies of the olympic games (arning 2013) . nye (2008) identifies culture as a critical component for effective soft power and the extensive international coverage of the cultural events and traditions around the sb and emphasizes the appeal of american cultural diplomacy, enhancing the esthetic component in the usa's country image (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) . according to david and bar-tal (2009) , national identity includes shared history and culture among other characteristics. according to hopsicker (2017) , the sb plays a role in creating american nationalism. the subtheme nation pride pertains to different manifestations of american patriotism including different traditions such as presidential speeches and interviews, the playing of the national anthem and "america the beautiful," and other american symbols and institutions associated with the coverage of the sb. when covering sblv, along covering the repeating traditions, international also emphasized the diverse musical genres of r&b and country when playing the national anthem and the consumption of food and good, adding to hopsicker and dyreson (2017) definition of the sb being a celebration of "conspicuous consumption." the competition itself also has cultural value. with sports being a subset of culture (dubinsky 2019), having competitive interesting leagues increases the esthetic dimension (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) of a country. furthermore, the focus on applicable narratives such as new vs old or who is the goat makes the sb a relatable drama that adds value to the esthetic dimension of the hosting country. while america's esthetic dimension (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) is being portrayed as rich and diverse and added to the association of brand america with capitalism (martin 2007) , the country's normative dimension was much more scrutinized. the normative dimension covers beliefs regarding the integrity of a country, its values, and norms (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) . the mentioning of the attack on the us capitol, the analysis of racial injustice in american, the reporting on ignoring health guidelines, and the focus on unethical practices in the sports of football all pose a question mark regarding the ethics and values of america especially with the lack of care for people's safety and human lives. such framing supports dubinsky's (2021) analysis of the role of sports during the trump presidency that brand america has questionable values. by focusing on racism and on questioning the ethics and norms of the most popular sport in america, emphasizing that even a republican president would feel uncomfortable having his son playing, and casting doubt on the authenticity of the league's communication, the normative dimension (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) of usa's image is portrayed mostly negatively by international media. the usa was also framed as a country mishandling the global pandemic and not learning from its mistakes after hundreds of thousands of deaths. such priorities also project on the normative dimension (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) of the country. with that said, the criticism was also moderate. international media did not focus on the exploitation of african american college athletes who generate billions without being able to get compensated (silva et al. 2020) . although questioning the authenticity of the nfl's messages for "rehabbing the league's image" (campbell 2021 ) international media did not use the term "sports washing" which is used for describing mostly non-democratic countries for using sports to launder their images from being associated with human rights violations (cnn 2020). furthermore, there was also some positive coverage of american norms, by focusing on the inclusion of women in coaching positions and refereeing the sb, by tampa bay having black coordinators, and by honoring health workers as heroes. the international coverage of sblv reflected a unique perspective of what america defines as heroism in 2021, different from the patriotic manifestations of after 9/11 or during the first gulf war (butterworth 2008; hopsicker 2017) and perhaps shifting the militant image of america (martin 2007; nye 2019) to a more humanitarian one. with that said, international media also attacked the credibility of the sent messages sent around the sb. thus, while honoring health workers with free tickets, concerts, and speeches, and a few hours later, people celebrating in the streets and bars without masks while hundreds of thousands of americans died from the coronavirus, also shed doubt on the credibility of america and negatively portrays the us normative image. while the functional, esthetic, and normative dimension constitutes the cognitive component of an attitude and the knowledge associated with a country's image, the sympathetic dimension contains the affective component of an attitude and the feelings and fascination toward a country's image (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) . the five themes identified in the study indicate what international media was fascinated about when covering the sb including the (a) shared culture and values as manifested through the ample coverage of the musical performances, the creative ads, and the traditions around the game, (b) the sociopolitical climate including the coverage of racial issues america including in the context of football, (c) the pandemic including the impact on the organization, honoring health workers, but also mishandling the response and the enormous death toll, (d) the event and the storylines around the competition, and (e) positionality of the different countries in relation to the sb, to america, or of america in relation to others. the projected image of america portrayed a divided society and a struggling country, clinging to nostalgia or imagining the future. nye (2008) suggests the usa should re-invest in america's smart power trying to attract foreign audiences through culture. the coverage of sblv demonstrates that despite donald trump's separatists and populist views and policies (nye 2019) , international media is still attracted to american culture. whether the complex projected image will result in increased travel to the usa, purchasing american products, fascination with american culture, supporting a party aligning with america, or rejecting american values pertains to the behavioral components (grewell and levy 2021) of international audiences toward the image of america. the second part of the analysis uses nation branding lenses to answer the research question on the projected image of the usa through international coverage of sblv. while the first four themes focused on the image of the usa, the fifth theme, positionality, focuses on the coverage of how other countries see themselves in relation to the usa or the sb, or how the usa sees itself in relation to other countries. fan (2010) argues that nation branding is analyzed through different perspectives: (a) export branding which in this study is also referred to as product-based branding, (b) place branding which in this study is also referred to as destination-based branding, (c) political branding in the form public diplomacy, and (d) cultural branding in the form of national identity. table 4 exemplifies the use of sblv for nation branding through the different lenses of productbased branding, destination-based branding, public diplomacy, and national identity. hosting mega sports events embody significant opportunities and risks through international media and tourists (dubinsky 2019) . the sb has an impact of hundreds of millions of dollars on the hosting city, mostly through out-ofcity visitors (o'reilly et al. 2008 ). due to the pandemic, much fewer international media came to cover the game, less than half of the stadiums were full, and fewer tourists came to the city, leading to a much different impact on the hosting city, including on its international exposure. furthermore, the pandemic also had negative impact on travel, tourism, or airline ads. if in previous years tourism australia or travel ecuador (marcus 2018) saw the sb as an attractive platform for destination branding that was not the case in 2021. furthermore, even products associated with countries-of-origin such as turkish airlines or avocados from mexico (dua 2020) did not have ads during sblv. so, the manifestation of destination-based branding and product-based branding was different. in one example of destination-based branding, belize tourism board tagging rakeem nunez roches and tom brady while tweeting the minister welcomes them to belize (the san pedro sun 2021). the ad by gm that portrayed norway as a leader in electric cars (lee and horton 2021) applied both to products associated with the country and showed the country and other scandinavian countries as attractive tourism destinations. through the ad, not only the normative dimension of norway is enhanced, but also the scenery of scandinavian countries, adding to their esthetic components and to their value as a tourism destination. traditional definitions of public diplomacy refer mostly to communications with foreign publics (cull 2008) linked to foreign policy goals. with the sb being a national competition, mostly watched by americans (vertelney 2018) and including different american traditions (hopsicker and dyreson 2017) , most of the target audiences are americans. with that said, there are also different diplomatic uses of the event, including an interview with us president joe biden and messages from the biden and the first lady about fighting a global pandemic. furthermore, as mentioned previously, the ample interest in the musical performances, the celebrities, and the creative commercials play a role in american cultural diplomacy and soft power (nye 2008) , that resembles performances in olympic games' ceremonies (arning 2013) . another form of diplomacy during sblv manifested through indian americans in california crowdfunding a commercial to raise awareness about social issues, people-to-people diplomacy through raising awareness to farmers protest in india national identity using the anthem, presidential interviews, and salute to heroes to promote a collective identity canada celebrating the weeknd headlining the halftime show, and athletes playing in the sb or opting out to join healthcare workers and the social struggles of the farmers. that can also be seen as people-to-people diplomacy (dubinsky 2019) , adding both to the functional and normative dimensions (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) of both india and the usa. unlike the traditional definition of public diplomacy that analyzes communications with foreign publics (cull 2008) , national identity also focuses on domestic public, creating different collective traditions, myths, and values (david and bar-tal 2009) . the thematic analysis discussed in-depth the roles of the sb in american society, creating a collective image, adding to what dyreson (2017) defines as "a beacon of american nationalism" (dyreson 2017) . however, the findings also demonstrate how the sb plays a role in other countries' national identities. examples include canadian media celebrating the weeknd being the first canadian solo artists in the halftime show which adds to the esthetic dimension of the country or emphasizing a canadian player opted-out of the season, prioritizing empathy and care, or competing for titles or receiving a large paycheck adding to the normative dimension of canada in the eyes of canadians and foreigners. regarding national pride and sports, canadian and belizean media focusing on their players winning the sb demonstrate the importance of what hobsbawm (1992) defines as "imagined communities," with athletes representing the culture and values of entire nations. figure 1 illustrates a model for nation branding and sports during a pandemic, based on the findings and discussion of the study. based on the themes that emerged from the data as portrayed in table 2 , and in relation to the different nation branding lenses as discussed by fan (2010) and other authors as seen in table 4 , and correlation with buhmann and ingenhoff's (2015) 4d country image model expressed in table 3 , the study suggests the model above as a blueprint to analyze the use of sports for nation branding purposes during the covid19 pandemic. the model suggests that each lens of nation branding (product-based branding, destination-based branding, public diplomacy, and national identity) needs to be evaluated through the different themes that emerged from the study (the pandemic, sociopolitical climate, shared culture and values, the event, and positionality) and the outcome on the perceived image of the country should be evaluated through one or all the four dimensions (functional, esthetic, normative, and sympathetic). countries, cities, communities, and other stakeholders who strive to improve their images should consider this model when using sports for nation branding during the covid19 pandemic. this study analyzed the projected image of the usa through international coverage of sblv. based on the thematic analysis of the finding, the study suggests that international audiences are fascinated by american culture as portrayed in the esthetic dimension (buhmann and ingenhoff 2015) , but are critical about the ethical norms of the country relating to race and human lives and with the functionality of the country mishandling the pandemic. the five themes identified in this study (the pandemic, sociopolitical climate, shared culture and values, the event, and positionality) all add to the three cognitive dimensions and to the affective sympathetic dimension of the complex image of america. the study used different lenses of nation branding (fan 2010) in the context of the usa and other countries and the sb including product-based branding, destination-based branding, public diplomacy, and national identity. based on the findings and the theoretical and conceptual analysis, the study suggests a model for countries seeking to use sports for nation branding during the covid19 pandemic. the study has several limitations and delimitations. due to language barriers, the study followed the coverage of the sb only in countries where english is an official spoken language and only though online national media outlets between february 5 and february 9. coverage in non-english-speaking countries and especially non-western countries which have not been impacted by british culture or british colonialism (krechmar et al 2017) might portray a different image of america. furthermore, coverage in sports-designated websites, in non-digital mediums or media outlets, or beyond the five-day window of this study, might have also been different than in the articles analyzed. the novelty of the study is that it focuses on international media, yet as a result it does not claim to suggest what is the projected image of the usa through domestic american media, nor does it analyze attitudes of readers toward america. these would require different research designs. furthermore, although the sb draws some international attention, it is still mostly an american-oriented event (vertelney 2018; woods and butler 2021) . by focusing on more global and international events such as the olympic games, studies might identify more or different manifestations of nation branding during the pandemic. the study is significant for both theorists and practitioners. as previously mentioned, the study enriches existing literature on sports and the image of brand america (martin 2007 ) by focusing on the projection of america through international media which fills a gap in existing literature. furthermore, the study analyzes one of the first mega-events during joe biden's administration, shortly after the attack on the capitol and amid covid19, which makes the case of sblv unprecedented and unique. the study also suggests a model future hosts and nonhosting countries should consider as using sports for nation branding during the pandemic. future research should continue to fill some of the gaps identified and discussed in this study, by analyzing the image of america in more countries, through more news outlets, over a longer period, and measuring attitudes to get a more holistic international image. future studies should also analyze future sb games and 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antony auclair could taste super bowl glory tonight count ry-cheet os-and-clean-bandit-shaggy-unlea shes-bevy-colla bs the san pedro sun. 2021. belizean super bowl champion rakeem roches has ties with san pedro: btb offers belizean vacation. the san pedro sun. belizean super bowl champion rakeem roches has ties with san pedro; btb offers belizean vacation -the san pedro sun trends desk. 2021. the weeknd's super bowl performance sparks memes fest online. the indian express trump calls on college football games to resume amid coronavirus pandemic media microscope: super bowl owns american tv, but soccer conquers the globe social issues in sport country image, cultural diplomacy, and sports during the covid19 pandemic: brand america and… young, j. 2021 armenian folia anglistika, vol. 18, issue 2 (26), 2022 culture studies 122 doi: https://doi.org/10.46991/afa/2022.18.2.122 “new normal” of post-covid and post-modern world in the mirror of language narine harutyunyan yerevan state university today humanity is going through a period of radical transformation of the world, the principles of the existence of society, economy, education, traditional values. we are witnessing giant shifts in the world politics, epic battles between good and evil. it can be assumed that the modern society of the post-covid era is moving in the direction of "new postmodernism" and "post-capitalism". the world elite is trying to “recode” sociocultural reality, human existence and linguistic consciousness. with the help of new cultural concepts and linguistic signs the “new reality” and the “neology” of this reality is created and described. this article is a study of the actual problem of neologization, carried out in the context of the above-mentioned dynamic processes occurring in the post-covid world. it is aimed at identifying and describing the linguistic means that reflect the current trends of the world elite in establishing a "new world order". to implement a "radical transformation" and to impose a "new world order" with new values and traditions, the "newspeak" of the post-pandemic era is used. the object of our research is the new terms and concepts of the actual spheres of social life, which is considered as an important fragment of a new conceptual and linguistic picture of the world. keywords: “social puppet”, neologization, new world order, great reset, gender-neutral language, metamodernism. introduction language continuously reflects every change in human society. the lexical composition is expanding. along with new phenomena and concepts, new lexical units appear, and the old ones change or lose their meanings. according to the global language monitor, the english language is updated with new words every 98 minutes, and is rightfully considered one of the most dynamic  narineharutyunyan@ysu.am this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. rceived: 13.06.2022 revised: 08.07.2022 accepted: 19.07.2022 © the author(s) 2021 mailto:narineharutyunyan@ysu.am https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ culture studies armenian folia anglistika, vol. 18, issue 2 (26), 2022 123 languages in the world. the appearance of new words almost always falls at the peak of the development of modern technologies, as well as a period of acute political situations, natural phenomena, the emergence of new diseases, and the development of social networks. global events always leave their mark on the language and culture of any society. in the second decade of the 21st century, these events include globalization, migration processes and, of course, coronavirus (covid-19). over the past two years, the world has undergone such radical changes in its consequences that some experts refer to the eras “before the coronavirus” (b.c. covid-19) and “after the coronavirus” (a.c. covid-19). no doubt, we will continue to be amazed at both the transience and the unexpectedness of these changes as they influence each other, they will provoke second, third, fourth order consequences, thereby cascading effects and unintended results. “great reset” according to the founder and executive chairman of the world economic forum in davos, klaus schwab, the world needs a “radical transformation” after the coronavirus pandemic, “the only acceptable response to such a crisis is to pursue a “great reset” of our economies, politics, and societies” (klaus schwab, 2020). schwab, in his book “covid-19: the great reset”, has made it clear that the coronavirus is less of a crisis than a chance to hasten the birth of a “new world order”, which he calls the “fourth industrial revolution”. for the transition to the "new world order”, the world elite decided to apply the so-called "transforming event". an "anthropological transition" was applied, namely the formation of a society consisting of two sociobiological caste layers such as eloi and morlocks from herbert wells' novel “time machine”. on the one hand, “superhumans” living in their enclaves up to 120– 140 years old, on the other hand, “service people” with completely different mental and physical abilities and a lower life expectancy. in essence, this means the transformation-modification of a person, the nullification of old values and the imposition of those that can turn a person into a “social puppet” whom the owners of the new system can easily manage. the emphasis of the tops of the elite on stimulating human diversity, as well as on the rights of various sexual minorities and racial, ethnic, national, cultural, religious, historical identity, family norms, the introduction of "fluid gender", tolerance all this is the means of establishing a new system, a new type of production relations, where a person is alienated in his integrity. armenian folia anglistika, vol. 18, issue 2 (26), 2022 culture studies 124 in modern conditions, the cultural picture of the world acquires new features. an example of this is the picture of the world of social networks, media space, which represents a special reality, with its spatio-temporal dimension, often transforming the real image of the reality. new world order and since the main means of social construction of reality is language, the “newspeak” of the post-pandemic era is used to impose a "new world order" values and traditions, to implement the “radical transformation”. this very “new reality” is programmed by using a rich choice of lexical means. with the help of the media, the elites influence the mass consciousness of people, since, as you know, one of the most important functions of the language is the ability to influence the formation of public opinion. a new thesaurus is being created to implement the “new world order” project and construct a new social reality. this is expressed in neologization, — the creation of new socioeconomic realias, terms and concepts, new meanings, which will be used in the formation of conceptual and figurative ideas about the surrounding reality of the new world. therefore, it is necessary to follow the language, new concepts and words, which, like the “trojan horse”, carry a hidden danger. in our opinion, we are witnessing the “recoding” of the socio-cultural reality, human existence, linguistic consciousness, the formation of the “neology of a new reality”, when this new reality is created and described with the help of new cultural concepts and linguistic signs. the works of klaus schwab, jacques attali, branko milanovic and others are an important source for the formation of the “new reality” and its language. the language of “new normal” as klaus schwab states in his book “the fourth industrial revolution”: “the fourth industrial revolution, finally, will change not only what we do but also who we are. it will affect our identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships. …the fourth industrial revolution is reshaping every sphere of human life — from government to culture studies armenian folia anglistika, vol. 18, issue 2 (26), 2022 125 commerce; from education to healthcare. it is even impacting human values, opportunities, relationships and identities by modifying virtual as well as physical worlds of human beings (klaus schwab, 2017, p. 7). the industrial revolution had an effect on the development of the language “as new words had to be invented or existing ones modified to cope with the rapid changes in technology” (the industrial revolution — impact on english language, 2014). so, the merriam-webster american dictionary recorded more than 500 new words in 2021. the most interesting of them are not just words, but real social phenomena or new sociocultural concepts: digital immigrant, accessism, green-revolution; technocratic discourse, “happytalism” and many other new data. today, many of us are aware that we speak a new language the language of the "new reality": "green economy", "technological order", "information society", "new normal", “great reset”; “post-normal science” ; “boiling frog”; social change; diversity manager, “build back better”; biodiversity; climate-neutrality; augmented reality; new “year zero”; infodemic; resilient post-covid future; turning point of humankind; human augmentation; neurotechnological brain enhancements; genetic editing; new value creation; digital economy; eco-carbon ways; net-zero technologies; technological singularity, etc. it is worth noting that so many changes have recently taken place, and so many new trends have emerged in the world economy and the economy of individual countries that this area has become one of the main sources of neologisms that deserve attention: "inclusive capitalism", inclusive economic growth; “surveillance capitalism”; stakeholder capitalism; digital economy; "sustainable development", high-tech economy, zero emissions economy, etc. i would like to focus on the peculiarities of english neologisms of the conceptual and thematic field of the “new world order” or so called “new normal”. according to schwab’s works, the new world order is constructed as follows: a) the fight against climate change, b) a green economy, c) the struggle for gender equality, e) ensuring the dominance of sexual minorities. for example, a significant number of new units have appeared due to the problem of climate change. in 2019, the oxford dictionary awarded the title of "word of the year" to climate emergency "a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it " (“climate emergency” is the oxford armenian folia anglistika, vol. 18, issue 2 (26), 2022 culture studies 126 english dictionary’s word of the year, 2019), and in 2020 the oxford dictionary published new words in the list of which included net zero zero greenhouse gas emissions (only 2020 could bring us words like these, 2020). the shortlist of the oxford english corpus (oxford english corpus, 2022) included the following data: climate action — stepped-up efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-induced impacts, including: climate-related hazards in all countries; integrating climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning etc.; eco-anxiety — the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one's future and that of next generations; ecocide the destruction of the environment as a result of human activity; firenado a phenomenon created when turbulent air rapidly rising from the site of burning, as a forest fire, sucks flaming gases, embers, and other fiery debris up into a twisting column, sometimes hundreds of feet in height; megafire – according to the united states department of agriculture, a megafire is a wildfire that burns over 100,000 acres. the state of california, in particular, has suffered from many megafires over the past several years with a 2020 wildfire burning over 1 million acres for the first time in state history; savannafication climate change coupled with fires set ablaze to clear land for cattle and crops are transforming the world's largest tropical forest into arid expanses of grasslands, etc.; cli-fi — (short for “climate fiction.”) all of the recent books and films related to worlddestroying disasters brought about by climate change. notable examples include “the day after tomorrow”, “2012” and “interstellar”; solastalgia — psychological distress caused by climate change; morbique — the morbid desire to travel to places to experience them before they are irreparably damaged by climate change or other manmade changes. through the efforts of activist greta thunberg, more and more people are ready to lead an “environmental lifestyle”. a lot of neologisms have appeared in some other european languages as well. for example, in swedish: flygskam — shame for flying on an airplane”; tågskryt — boasting that you ride a train”; smygflyga — keep flying on an airplane, but be ashamed of it and hide it; greta-effekt — this term describes the change in consumption, voting participation and travel habits of people who have been influenced by the swedish climate activist greta thunberg and the fridays-for-future demonstrations (see: kak yazyk reagiruet na izmenenie klimata, 2021); in dutch: vliegschaamte the shame of flying on an airplane (similar to the culture studies armenian folia anglistika, vol. 18, issue 2 (26), 2022 127 swedish flygskam); treintrots literally “train pride,” this concept is related to vliegschaamte, or fly-shaming. treintrots has to do with taking pride in taking the train instead of a plane; laadpaalklever someone who leaves his electric car parked a bit too long in the recharging spot for electric cars, thereby using it as a free parking spot (indirectly linked to climate change.). in italian: gretini — the thousands of teenagers who have taken part in demonstrations for climate change recently. the suffix -ino is used for the diminutive form in italian, and the word can be translated as “greta’s followers.” however, due to the similarity and assonance with the word cretini (meaning “the idiots; the stupid people”), the word has been used (especially by deniers of climate change in the press and in politics) to condescend to protesters (steph koyfman, 2019). as for the point b), referring to “green economy” sphere, the language was replenished with such vocabulary units as: freegan — a person who rejects consumerism and seeks to help the environment by reducing waste, especially by retrieving and using discarded food and other goods; eco-conscious — the mentality to focus on reducing harm to the environment wherever possible; green collar job — a job connected to eco-friendly products and services; ecoterrorism — sabotage intended to hinder activities that are considered damaging to the environment; soy or vegetable-based ink — ink made from soybeans and other vegetable oils instead of petroleum; naked packaging — products that are sold without packaging; green meeting — an event that incorporates eco-friendly practices in order to reduce its impact on the environment (group multi-occupant spaces conference rooms, classrooms and other indoor spaces used as place of congregation for presentations, training sessions, etc.), (glossary of green terms and definitions, 2009; ecofriendly terminology, 2021); köpskam — the shame associated with shopping or consuming (ortega, & moynihan, 2019). the next point in the project of a “new normal” is the elimination or neutralization of gender differences in the words used by modern society. in this regard, the idea of a language that will be neutral in terms of the gender of a person is gaining wide popularity. a new language (newspeak), which involves addressing people without specifying their gender, calling them a neutral word. in linguistics, such a language is called an inclusive language. the university of manchester has released a guide that encourages employees to use gender-neutral terms instead of gender-specific words. armenian folia anglistika, vol. 18, issue 2 (26), 2022 culture studies 128 there are 26 gender-neutral titles that non-binary parents could go by: baba, dama, mada, maddy, mapa, moddy, pama, pom-pom (gender neutral/non-binary parent titles, 2019). in everyday life, when you are unsure of a person’s gender, you should use “they”. “they” is essentially a replacement for the usual pronouns "she" and "he". that is, in this way they mark people who define themselves differently than “man” or “woman”, or in cases where you are not sure about the gender of this or that individual. for example, we have a new teacher. they will come tomorrow. the canadian senate has approved a bill that would replace the words of the national anthem "true patriot love in all your sons command". with "gender-neutral" ones and now this line sounds: “true patriot love in all of us command”, because the activists were terribly indignant at the fact that only sons are driven by love for the country (canadian national anthem revised with gender-neutral language, 2018). special dictionaries and reference books have already been published, the authors of which recommend avoiding words and expressions in your speech that indicate the gender of a person. the use of inclusive language in the nominations of words such as same-sex marriage, homosexuals, heterosexuals, etc. hides the meaning behind the inclusive name. today, there are 76 other genders besides male and female, such as: gender non-conforming, genderqueer, cisgender, bigender, nonbinary, gender fluid, pangender, gendervoid, graygender, agender, cisnormative, cisprivilege, etc. inclusive language can be considered not only as a way of linguistic expression that involves naming a person regardless of gender, but also as a language norm that does not allow discrimination based on race, health status, appearance, age, marriage and family relationships. in this case, we are talking about communication in a society where one can often hear words and expressions that are unacceptable for the language, which easily offend the interlocutor, there is an infringement of his rights by linguistic tactlessness or straightforwardness of one of the communicants. based on the foregoing, we can state the fact that today humanity is going through a period of cardinal transformation of the world, the principles of the existence of society, the economy, education, and values. we are witnessing gigantic shifts in world politics, epic battles between good and evil. it can be culture studies armenian folia anglistika, vol. 18, issue 2 (26), 2022 129 assumed that the modern society of the post-covid era is moving towards the “new postmodernism” and post-capitalism. the era of “metamodernism” in the last decade, culturologists, sociologists, philosophers, economists and other specialists offer their own options for describing the era of the fourth industrial revolution: “the era of new sincerity” (eshelman, r.), “capitalist realism” (fisher, m.), “metamodernism” (timotheus, vermeulen, & robin, van den akker), "digimodernism" (kirby, a.), "cosmomodernism" (moraru, s.), "automodernism" (samuels, r.), "post-postmodernism" (nealon, j.) and a number of others (cited in khrushcheva, 2020). the term “metamodernism” seems to be the most successful of the above mentioned variants for us. why? firstly, the prefix meta — means “following something, transition to something else, change of state, transformation”. thus, “metamodernism” is a world with different views on life, the world of opensource, open science, open data and open innovation, etc. “metamodernism” is a global mental paradigm that has replaced postmodernism." the era of the fourth industrial revolution can be considered the external cause of the emergence of metamodern, while the crisis is internal postmodernism. “the internal cause of metamodernism is connected with fatigue from the total irony of postmodernism, from its continuous quoting……. if postmodernism reflects an unprecedented amount of information, then metamodern reflects the unprecedented speed of its distribution: metamodern arises not just in the era of the internet, but in the era of the fast internet, available everywhere (ibid). the era of "metamodernism" or the 4th industrial revolution is the era of the introduction of artificial intelligence, automation, editing of human genes, the narrowing of private space, control by the state and corporations of all aspects of human life through internal and external digitization. conclusion involving militant representatives of racial, ethnic and religious exclusivity in the modern “armageddon”, in order to maintain its “status quo” on the planet, the global ruling class uses the technologies of “controlled chaos”, gender psychosis, coronavirus and vaccine madness, the destruction of traditional cultures and states as such, the deformation of education systems, health care, armenian folia anglistika, vol. 18, issue 2 (26), 2022 culture studies 130 total digitalization, transition from a technocratic model of science to a “postnormal science”, allowing this "chosen minority" to take control of the rest of the world. artificially created newspeak drags society into the funnel of the “new world order”, imposing gender, climate and other agendas and ideologies on us, giving rise to gender throwing, environmental concerns, covidophobia, fear of man-made and natural disasters and other types of phobias. the study of the extralinguistic causes of 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(2022). sketch engine. retrieved march 12, 2022. հետկովիդային հետմոդեռնիզմի «նոր նորմալը» լեզվի տիրույթում նարինե հարությունյան այսօր մարդկությունը վերապրում է հասարակության գոյության սկզբունքների, տնտեսության, կրթության, ավանդական արժեքների արմատական վերափոխման շրջան։ մենք համաշխարհային քաղաքականության հսկայական տեղաշարժերի, բարու և չարի միջև տեղի ունեցող էպիկական մարտերի ականատես ենք: կարելի է ենթադրել, որ հետկովիդային դարաշրջանի ժամանակակից հասարակությունը շարժվում է «նոր հետմոդեռնիզմի» և «հետկապիտալիզմի» ուղղությամբ։ համաշխարհային վերնախավը փորձում է «վերակոդավորել» հանրամշակութային իրականությունը, մարդկային գոյությունը, լեզվական գիտակցությունը։ մշակութային նոր հասկացույթների և լեզվական նշանների օգնությամբ՝ ստեղծվում և նկարագրվում է ոչ միայն «նոր իրականություն»ը, այլև այդ իրականության «նեոլոգիան»։ սույն հոդվածը ուսումնասիրում է նորաբանությունների արդիական խնդիրը՝ հետկովիդյան աշխարհում տեղի ունեցող դինամիկ գործընթացների համատեքստում: քննության են առնվում համաշխարհային վերնախավի կողմից «նոր համաշխարհային կարգ» հաստատելու ներկայիս միտումներն արտացոլող լեզվական միջոցները: սույն հետազոտության առարկան հասարակական կյանքի արդիական ոլորտների նոր տերմիններն ու հասկացություններն են՝ որպես աշխարհի նոր հայեցակարգային և լեզվական աշխարհապատկերի կարևոր մաս։ բանալի բառեր՝ «սոցիալական խամաճիկ», «նեոլոգիա», նոր աշխարհակարգ, մեծ վերագործարկ, գենդերային չեզոք լեզու, մետամոդեռնիզմ: https://plus-one.rbc.ru/society/kak-yazyk-reagiruet-na-izmenenie-klimata. https://plus-one.rbc.ru/society/kak-yazyk-reagiruet-na-izmenenie-klimata. https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/climate-change-vocabulary/ https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/climate-change-vocabulary/ https://grist.org/climate/2020-climate-words-of-the-year-doomer-net-zero-anthropause/ https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/2822326 https://www.sketchengine.eu/oxford-english-corpus/ key: cord-0076071-1p9yuc3z authors: theodoropoulou, sotiria title: recovery, resilience and growth regimes under overlapping eu conditionalities: the case of greece date: 2022-03-25 journal: comp eur polit doi: 10.1057/s41295-022-00280-x sha: 67afe612ad3a64b295056c98f98e34675b305497 doc_id: 76071 cord_uid: 1p9yuc3z this paper attempts to weigh into the debate on whether and if so, to what extent the policy response to the pandemic of the eu, most notably among others, the recovery and resilience fund of the next generation eu, its conditionality, and the response of the ecb, marks a qualitative change rather than echoing the legacies of the previous crisis by looking into the case of greece. according to the third-generation comparative capitalism literature, eu economic integration has been favouring export-led growth models over domestic-demand led ones through several channels, which included fiscal rules, financial support conditionality and monetary policy. during the pandemic, there have been apparent shifts in some of these channels. greece has entered the pandemic with vulnerabilities from previous economic adjustment programmes it had to follow, large enough to warrant ‘enhanced surveillance’ by the european commission, as well as challenging fiscal conditionality to secure some preferential treatment by its eurozone partners/lenders of its public debt, to improve its fragile sustainability. this article assesses the risks that the greek recovery and resilience plan may face, given the economic, social and political legacies of and the lingering conditionality from the previous crisis. it thus illustrates how the implementation of the eu response to the pandemic in greece is constrained by the legacy of the previous crisis despite shifts in policy channels through which the eu economic integration has been shaping national capitalisms. the covid-19 pandemic plunged europe into the greatest recession since world war ii, the second in the space of 12 years. the eu economic policy response was different this time, from the prompt launch of the ecb's pandemic emergency purchase programme (pepp), and the activation of the general escape clause of the stability and growth pact (sgp), to the launch of the support to mitigate unemployment risks in an emergency (sure) and the next generation eu (ngeu) programme with its recovery and resilience facility (rrf). the introduction of these policy responses was accompanied by a marked shift in the framing of the challenge facing eu member states: instead of attributing the varying capacity of member states to deal with the pandemic to past more vs. less prudent policies, it was acknowledged that all countries were facing symmetric external threats (the pandemic but also climate change) (schelkle 2021) . the european commission has been presenting the ngeu as 'a once in a lifetime chance to emerge stronger from the pandemic, transform our economies'. policy analysts have, thus, been posing the question of whether europe experienced its 'hamiltonian moment' (cf. kaletsky 2020) , others have written about a critical juncture (ladi and tsarouhas 2020) and, while many agreed that europe seems to have learnt some lessons from the handling of the sovereign debt-cumbalance of payments crisis in the 2010s (buti and papaconstantinou 2021) , some have argued that the economic policy response of the eu, especially the ngeu, has been path-dependent, shaped by the lingering legacies of the previous crisis, thus reflecting 'voices from the past' (armingeon et al. this volume) . this paper attempts to weigh into this debate on whether and if so, to what extent the policy response to the pandemic of the eu marks a qualitative change rather than echoing the legacies of the previous crisis by looking into the case of greece, through the lens of the third-generation comparative capitalism literature. having received by far the largest financial support between 2010 and 2018, gone through the most intrusive economic adjustment conditionality programs (theodoropoulou 2015) but also having arguably graduated from these programs with the greatest economic, financial and social vulnerabilities in europe, greece has been economically among the most affected from the pandemic and is also expected to be among the largest beneficiaries of the multiannual financial framework (mff)-ngeu package. despite having rebalanced the imbalances that embroiled it into the balance of payments/sovereign debt crisis in 2010, greece is still in search of a more sustainable growth model, the search for which the mff-ngeu funds would be ideally placed to support. however, greece is still under 'enhanced surveillance' and demanding fiscal conditionality by its eurozone partners in exchange for measures that will lighten the burden of servicing its public debt until 2060. beyond demands for very demanding budget surpluses over decades, this conditionality also dictates that greece continues structural reforms in the spirit of the previous economic adjustment programs. this article assesses the risks that the greek recovery and resilience plan may face, given the economic, social and political legacies of and the lingering conditionality from the previous crisis. it thus illustrates how the implementation of the eu response to the pandemic in greece is constrained by the legacy of the previous crisis. the rest of the article is structured as follows. the next section uses concepts from the third generation comparative capitalism literature to frame the perspective under which the greek quest for a sustainable growth model can be assessed. section 3 focuses on the case of greece, the legacies of the previous crisis, the lingering conditionality from the bailouts it received in the 2010s, the basic tenets of its recovery and resilience plan (henceforth rrp) and an assessment of the opportunities and risks therein from the perspective of promoting a different growth regime. the final section concludes. the balance of payments/banking/sovereign debt crisis of the late 2000s and early 2010s raised the questions of why some e(m)u member states were more affected than others (noelke 2016 ) and why the eu economic policy framework and response to the crisis, in particular the economic adjustment programs imposed on bailed-out eurozone member states, created more problems than they sought to solve (armingeon and baccaro 2012; myant et al. 2016; lehndorff 2012; flassbeck and lapavitsas 2015) . to answer these questions, some of the so-called third generation scholarship in the field of study of comparative capitalism, with its focus on demand-side developments and growth models (baccaro and pontusson 2016) , explored the compatibility between the framework of eu economic integration and of e(m)u economic governance with different national regimes of capitalism (see johnston and regan 2018 as well as the entire special issue introduced by this article, and johnston and regan 2015; johnston et al. 2014; hall 2014) . some of the channels through which it was shown that the eu could impact national growth models were the establishment of strict and austere fiscal policy guidelines by means of the stability and growth pact and related legislation ('six pack', 'two pack' regulations, and the treaty on stability, coordination and governance in the economic and monetary union ) and the economic adjustment programmes conditioning the receipt of financial support by the european stability mechanism (esm) and its predecessors (cf. perez and matsaganis 2018) ; the creation of the single currency, managed by the european central bank whose primary mandate of maintaining price stability had been operationalised as maintaining inflation in the euro area close to but below 2% (johnston and regan 2015) ; and the facilitation of cross-border financial and capital flows (fuller 2018 ). an insight that emerged from this third-generation comparative capitalism scholarship was that from the launch of the euro and until 2008, the accelerating crossborder financial and capital flows that followed from the new single currency created a benign complementarity among the export-and domestic demand-led growth models within the eurozone: in addition to benefiting from the single currency and large eu internal market to develop further their exporting sectors, member states with the former growth regime could also export their excess savings to those with the latter, thus fuelling domestic-demand growth (fuller 2018) . once, however, the global financial crisis led to a 'sudden stop' of these financial flows (cf. merler and pisani-ferry 2012) across countries with different growth regimes, the benign complementarity unwound, leaving large current account exposures in the member states with domestic-demand-led growth regimes which had been receiving the financial flows. the pressures of current account adjustment were fiercer and the ensuing adjustment more painful than they needed have been due to a host of reasons: the absence of a common fiscal capacity at the eu/eurozone level, the initial absence of a lender of last resort to eurozone governments, which resulted in too high spreads for troubled governments' bonds in the sovereign debt markets, dogmatism over economic policies in powerful member states, and the lack of political willingness to share the responsibility for the rebalancing of imbalances and of support for a smoother divestment of the savings' exporting member states from their counterparts. as the development of quality aspects of export competitiveness typically takes time, current account adjustment strategies in the troubled member states focused on fiscal austerity to reduce domestic demand and government budget deficits, and sharp labour cost adjustments (internal devaluation). the latter was pursued by means of direct wage cuts and labour market reforms to stimulate external demand and possibly investment. hence, this literature concluded that eu economic integration favoured member states with export-led growth models more than those without (johnston and regan 2018; scharpf 2021) . the same strand of the literature illustrated the conditions that favoured different varieties of export-led growth models. four different varieties have been identified: the german model, based on high-quality manufacturing exports, strong coordination mechanisms between employers and trade unions and wage/domestic demand repression; the swedish model, based on the exports of high end services whose demand is less price elastic (baccaro and pontusson 2016) ; and two varieties of fdi-export-led models encountered in ireland and the visegrad countries. the irish model has been enabled by strong 'enteprise policy' of low corporate taxation and has been resulting in duality between those working for american multinationationals and the domestic sector (regan and brazys 2018) ; and the visegrad model, where the manufacturing sector, based on pre-transition manufacturing capacity has been successfully integrated into the german value chains (bohle 2018). the high economic and social costs of economic adjustment programs tied to bailouts of countries with domestic-demand led growth regimes but also the long drawn-out recovery in the eu, with relatively weak real gdp growth, weak wage growth and inflation well below its target rate in the rest of the eu/eurozone did not go unnoticed in brussels and other european capitals, raising questions about the fitness for purpose of eu socio-economic governance. these developments and evidence that trust in the eu among its citizens declined sparked several policy debates and responses, which, prima facie, suggest shifts in the channels through which the comparative capitalism literature cited above posits that eu economic integration shapes national growth regimes. a series of reports and communications was published on how the eurozone could be reformed to improve its function, all of which envisaged the establishment of some sort of fiscal capacity at the eurozone/eu level (juncker et al. 2015; european commission 2017 , 2016 european council 2012) . in 2017, the european pillar of social rights (epsr) was inter-institutionally proclaimed to provide a compass for upwards social convergence. shortly before the pandemic gripped europe, the new european commission introduced the eu's new growth strategy, the european green deal (egd) promoting a 'just transition' to a sustainable economy, while in early 2020 it launched a review process for eu's economic governance arrangements. the introductory communication for the review acknowledged several of the shortcomings, especially with regards to the fiscal rules, that critics had been voicing over the previous decades on the limitations that these rules placed on national fiscal policies and the growth models but also on their failure to secure an appropriate aggregate fiscal stance for the euro area (european commission 2020). this process had to be put on hold at the beginning of the pandemic but has been recently relaunched with a new european commission communication which reiterated earlier messages, taking also into account lessons from the response to the pandemic (european commission 2021). the eu response to the pandemic also provided some innovations, from the activation of the general escape clause of the sgp, to promoting job retention rather than flexibility for job separations through sure, to effectively establishing a temporary but sizeable eu fiscal capacity through the ngeu/rrf. echoing painful memories from the 2010s, the conditionality for financial support under the latter departed from the form of conditionality seen in the bailouts of the late 2000s and early 2010s (cf. armingeon et al. in the current volume). characteristically, the german secretary of foreign affairs stated in april 2020 that europe needed 'rapid help without 'torture tools' such as a troika' (der spiegel (international edition) 2020), whereas the greek prime minister stated in an interview with the financial times that 'greece will not bow to eu conditions on covid-19 aid' (financial times 2020). prior to the official submission of the national rrps from late april 2021 onwards, extensive informal consultations over earlier drafts were made between national government and european commission officials to make sure that the official submission would be likely to receive positive assessments. otherwise, however, member states were in principle free to structure their programs in line with the assessment of their needs and in compliance with the broadly defined priorities in the regulation establishing the rrf. the ecb from its part gradually embraced more unconventional tools of monetary policy as the environment it had to operate in had changed dramatically since its establishment: policy interest rates in the advanced world had dropped at or below zero, the eurozone inflation rate had been undershooting its target for years, the absence of a lender-of-last-resort to eurozone governments had pushed the eurozone to the brink of disintegration, while new pressing eu policy priorities, such as the timely transition to a net zero carbon economy and society, had also emerged. when the pandemic hit, the ecb was thus prepared to once more do whatever it would take to support the eurozone, most notably with its pepp which for the first time included greece but also with its targeted long-term refinancing operations (tltros) which provided liquidity to eurozone banks. moreover, in summer 2021, following a review of its monetary policy strategy, the ecb decided to re-operationalise its definition of 'price stability', henceforth 'aiming for a 2% inflation over the medium-term', thus adopting a less asymmetric approach between its primary goal of price stability and that of output stabilisation. in the context of the same review, the ecb announced a climate action plan in the context of which it will start reviewing and reassessing its collateral and asset purchasing policies to see whether they contribute to the eu policy objective of achieving carbon neutrality in the eu by 2050. this could have immense consequences for government spending in the future. the above overview suggests some of the channels through which the literature from the 'third-generation' scholarship of comparative capitalism concluded that the eu integration and in particular the emu favoured export-led growth regimes over consumption/domestic-demand-led ones in the euro area have been shifting: more fiscal capacity has been made available to member states through the suspension of fiscal rules and through the rrf, pending also a reform of the eu economic governance; while the rrf regulation establishes some broad policy objectives as conditionality for the use of the facility's funds, member states have been allowed to set their paths of recovery, green transition and digital transformation, instead of having recipes imposed to them in a top-down fashion by some institutions, fully in line with dogmatic approaches to economic policies of certain influential member states; the ecb is now more mindful of output fluctuations while pursuing price stability and has been actively keeping government bond spreads low while considering the impact of its policies on decarbonisation. of course, the above changes are in some cases temporary and in others still inconclusive. despite communications which suggest a shift in ideas, political decisions by the member states will still have to be made on their final shape, whereas it is not always clear how far new ideas are informing commissioners or the european commission services responsible for managing relevant policies. in principle, however, these shifts could favour more balanced growth regimes/models. the legacy of the bailouts greece has been one of the countries which illustrated the insights of the comparative capitalism literature on the relationship between eu economic integration and national growth regimes most vividly. an economy chronically lacking a strong export orientation beyond tourism and shipping services and low-to-medium technology goods, greece, like other member states in the eurozone's southern periphery has been a domestic-demand-led economy. foreign direct investment flows have been weak as has been the country's integration into international supply chains. with a current account deficit of 15.8% of gdp in 2008, mirroring the large financial inflows from the eurozone and beyond into a fast growing economy, and a budget deficit of 15.1% of gdp and given the institutional architecture shortcomings of the eurozone, greece experienced major turbulence in the sovereign debt markets after the global financial crisis which resulted in bailouts. although the country managed to eliminate the imbalances that triggered its financial crisis (by 2018, greece had a surplus of 0.9% of gdp in 2018 and a current account deficit of only 3.5% of gdp), it graduated from its economic adjustment programmes with deep economic and social scars, as output, investment and hourly labour productivity plunged while public debt, unemployment and poverty soared (see table 1 ). starting in 2010, real net fixed capital formation was negative in greece, implying that there was no sufficient investment even to replace depreciating capital stock, let alone deepen it to spur output growth. with hindsight, fiscal adjustment turned out to be too steep for growth (cf. blanchard and leigh 2013) while the structural reforms aiming at engineering an internal devaluation failed to produce a sufficiently counterbalancing increase in external demand (cf. perez and matsaganis 2019). although structural reforms were also marketed by the troika (or 'the institutions' after 2015) on the promise that they would tackle the chronic structural problems of the greek economy which had led to the build-up of imbalances over decades, they were often illtimed and ill-sequenced both among them and with regards to the fiscal adjustment, while in some cases it also seemed that the troika insisted more on fiscal table 1 the impact and legacies of the 2010s crisis in greece note: a: 2007 note: a: , b: 2008 note: a: , c:2009 note: a: , d: 2010 note: a: , e: 2012 note: a: , f: 2013 note: a: , g: 2014 note: a: , h: 2015 note: a: , i: 2016 note: a: , j: 2018 adjustment than on a sensible implementation of reforms (vayanos et al. 2017) . they thus led to greater damage than would have been necessary given the size of the adjustment that greece needed to undertake. consequently, public debt as a share of gdp reached 186.7% of gdp in 2018 and that despite a large debt restructuring program in 2012. while real gdp growth had resumed since 2017, it ranged between 1.1 and 1.8%, low rates given the income losses endured during the previous crisis. in 2018 and 2019 investment flows were declining again (after being negative between 2008 and 2014), with gross fixed capital formation standing at 10.6% of gdp in 2019 (21.5% in the eu) (ameco data). the same was true for net public investment (and public capital, e.g. public infrastructure) since 2011, with the exception of 2015 and 2017. the employment rate in 2019 was 56.5% of those aged 15-64, the lowest in the eu, an 8p.p. increase from its trough in 2013 but still lower by 12 p.p. than the eu average. similarly, in 2019 the unemployment rate had dropped to 17.3% of the active labour force while labour market slack (i.e. those unemployed, those underemployed and those marginally attached to the labour market) stood at 24.5% of the extended labour force (eurostat lfs data). the share of persons at risk of poverty (anchored at 2008) stood at 42% (48.6% for those under 18). in 2018, expenditure (euros per inhabitant) on healthcare and sickness was 38.7% lower than in 2010 (eurostat esspros data) and in 2019, 8.1% of persons aged over 16, most than any other member-state, had selfreported unmet needs for medical examination because it was too expensive, too far to travel to or the waiting list was too long (eurostat hlth_unm data). in 2019, exports accounted for 40% of gdp in greece compared to 43.5% in portugal, 47% in sweden, 55% in austria, 74% in czechia and 82% in belgium, all countries of similar population size. the economic adjustment programs decimated the capacity of the state to spend and effectively emasculated an important pillar of the greek growth regime, without, however, any visible emergence of an alternative. imports weighed heavily on the current account balance adjustment. (theodoropoulou 2016) . finally, the hitherto stable political party system in greece underwent major turmoil, resulting in fragmented parliaments, unstable coalition governments and the rise in popularity of anti-systemic parties both on the far right and the left (pappas 2015) . between 2010 and 2018, there were six different prime ministers in greece, two of which presided over caretaker governments. the country's socialist party (pasok), one of the two parties alternating in office since 1974, when democracy was restored, saw its share of votes collapse from 44% in 2009 to 4.7% in january 2015. despite the political turmoil and extreme economic adjustment, the elections of 2019 marked some return to calmer waters: new democracy, the centre-right party which had been alternating into power with pasok between 1974 and 2009 won the elections and formed a majority government. syriza became the government opposition capturing the space that former pasok used to occupy, while other, anti-systemic parties in the far right, such as the golden dawn and anel did not manage to win any seats in the parliament. in summer 2018, following the completion of its third and final programme of economic adjustment and in compliance with one of the 'two-pack' regulations, greece was placed under 'enhanced surveillance'. greece's imbalances and vulnerabilities, most notably its high public debt as a share of gdp, negative net international investment position and very high unemployment and youth unemployment, were considered risks to greece's financial stability, which could spill over to other eurozone memberstates (european commission 2018). a little earlier and given the concerns about the sustainability of greece's public debt, an agreement was struck in the eurogroup meeting of june 2018 between greece and its eurozone lenders: the lenders endorsed debt reprofiling measures and committed to keep open the possibility of negotiating further measures in that direction towards 2032 to keep greece's debt servicing burden below 15% of gdp in the medium-term and below 20% of gdp in the longer-term. in exchange, greek governments would continue implementing key reforms undertaken under the third, esm bail-out, ensure that the objectives of the reforms of previous economic adjustment programs (e.g. in collective bargaining, minimum wage-setting the reform of the pensions system) were safeguarded, and implement further measures in the areas of fiscal and fiscal-structural policies, social welfare, labour and product markets, financial stability, privatization and public administration (ibid. and eurogroup 2018). chief among the conditions was that greek governments would have to maintain primary general government surpluses of 3.5% of gdp until 2022 and of 2.2% of gdp until 2060 (eurogroup 2018) . the imf warned, after having reviewed the experience of 90 countries in the postwar period , that the prescribed budget surpluses for that length of time for greece were unrealistically high. the economic, structural and policy conditions that could shape the likelihood of sustaining them, from expected output growth and unemployment rate to demographic change, low healthcare spending and the lack of nominal exchange rate and monetary policy tools were simply too unfavourable in the case of greece (imf 2018). thus, in the face of a public debt whose longer-term sustainability is questionable, greek governments could pursue unrealistically high budget surpluses and structural reforms, the logic of which had not always gone beyond mere (fiscal) cost cutting as a growth strategy, likely to create economic, social and political turmoil, hoping that they would get further debt relief from their eurozone partners. if debt relief was not forthcoming, then public debt sustainability risks would likely materialise, plunging greece into further debt crises and the need to negotiate further bailouts and economic conditionality programs. given the scars of the previous crisis (inequality, unemployment, severely under-funded healthcare system) and the transitions facing greece, this is an important constraint on its current and future governments. covid-19 arrived in greece in 2020 somewhat later than in other parts of europe and until the autumn 2021, the country had experienced three relatively mild waves of the disease. nevertheless, according to our world in data evidence, since autumn 2020 the number of deaths associated to covid-19 cases has been one of the highest in the eu. the pandemic has been straining the healthcare system, which was one of the main targets of public spending cuts under the economic adjustment programs of the 2010s and has brought in even more stark relief its problems. despite the relatively lower incidence of the disease, the greek economy was one of the most affected in the eu in 2020, second only to spain, as real gdp declined by 9% compared to 2019. the large weight that the tourism sector bears in overall economic performance has been a contributing factor to the relatively large economic impact of the pandemic in greece: according to data from the world travel and tourism council's 2020 economic impact report, in 2019, travel and tourism accounted for 21% of the greek gdp and supported over a fifth (21.7%) of total jobs in the economy, both figures considering the creation of demand and employment indirectly in other sectors as well. following a strong rebound in demand for tourism services in 2021, real gdp is expected to increase by 7.1% (european commission 2021), while real gdp is expected to have returned to 2019 levels only in the course of 2022. the greek government, taking advantage initially of the financial buffer that had been provided by the esm upon its exit from the last financial support program and of financing opportunities created at the eu level, responded with support measures for the sectors, companies and workers which were affected by the pandemic but also the healthcare system, whose fiscal cost rose to c.9.65% of gdp in 2020, among the highest in the eu, and is expected to rise to 7.9% of gdp in 2021. as a result of these measures and the recession, the greek primary budget deficit reached 10.1% in 2020 and is expected to be at 9.9% in 2021, while the public debt is expected to climb to 202.9% of gdp (european commission 2021). later in 2020 and in 2021, the greek government took the opportunity afforded by the ecb's pepp to borrow at very advantageous terms and replenish its esm buffer. thus, the importance of both the rrf and the pepp for supporting greece to avoid/mitigate future difficulties in the financial markets cannot be overstated. the greek government moved swiftly to prepare its application for funding from the rrf. it engaged a high-level expert committee steered by economics nobel laureate pissarides to come up with a development plan for the greek economy, which became known as the 'pissarides report'. this development plan was presented in november 2020 and has been the blueprint for most actions proposed in the greek recovery and resilience plan (rrp), entitled 'greece 2.0'. the development plan and the greek rrp set as chief objectives for greece the convergence of per capita real income to the eu average, in addition to the increase in social cohesion and better environmental performance. per capita income convergence will require substantially higher employment, especially of hitherto underemployed groups such as women and younger persons and higher productivity, which, the plan assumes will lead that will ultimately improve the well-being of households. as means for reaching higher productivity, the plan proposes several goals, such as the increase in fixed capital formation (investment) to converge to the eu average; the increase in public and private r&d expenditure and the better connection between research and production; the increase in the share of exports to levels closer to those of other small open economies in europe; the increase in the numbers of middle and big-size firms as a precondition for increasing productivity and exports, and their integration into global supply chains; the evolution of the greek economy into a regional hub (pissarides et al. 2020) . to achieve these objectives and goals, the report focused its proposed policy priorities in measures concerning production and investment, human capital, and the public sector and administration. several of these measures concerned the reduction in tax, social security costs and overtime costs of labour for businesses, tax incentives for investment in machinery equipment and innovation, the reduction in administrative and energy costs for manufacturing companies, improving infrastructure and emphasizing the acquisition of skills. the structure, total cost of and distribution of solicited rrf funds for the greek rrp are shown in table 2 (european commission 2021, 26-27) . the greek government has also applied for the full amount of loans it could receive from the rrf (€12.7bn) which it plans to use to support further private investment and reforms. the areas of green transition and private investment and transformation of the economy were those in which the eu financing was projected to stimulate the highest private investment flows among the four, with green transition expected to mobilise a total of €10.4bn and private investment and transformation of the economy expected to mobilise a total of €7.8bn in investment funds over the duration of the rrf (greek government 2021). overall, the rrf grant funding to greece alone could contribute to increasing real gdp by 2.1-3.3% of gdp by 2026 (european commission 2021), while the plan forecasts the creation of 180-200 k new jobs over its duration. after more than 100 consultation meetings between government and european commission officials to discuss drafts thereof, the finally submitted greek rrp received a positive formal assessment as well as informal plaudits by the european commission services (european commission 2021; financial times 2021). however, given greece's past record of absorbing eu funds and implementing reforms, concerns remain about the extent to which the rrp will be implemented (see for example imf 2021) but also regarding the means it proposes to reach its aims. for the mff 2014-2020, data going until the end of september 2021, suggested that greece had only managed to spend 59% of the planned funds. the current greek government has taken steps to improve its public investment implementation framework, which should technically work in favour of implementation. regarding the ownership of the plan, the government broadly fulfilled the public consultation requirement of the rrf regulation and more engagement of key stakeholders is foreseen in the implementation phase. more crucially, however, ownership will be gained, especially towards reforms, if the plan delivers on its promises of higher and more equitably distributed per capita income and prosperity, also in a context of engineering greece's transition to a carbon-neutral economy and society and if the plan provides sufficiently attractive prospects to potential losers from its reforms and from the transition to a different economic model that it aims for. for a successful transition to a new growth regime, crucial among the proposed policy interventions are those pertaining to labour market and education and training policies. this is because the transition would imply that a significant proportion of the current and future labour force would need to change jobs and possibly sectors and will thus need both passive (income) and active support for navigating the these changes and not be left behind. as is seen from table 2 , the financial emphasis in the greek rrp is on active labour market policies. more specifically, the rrp provides for a redesign of the portfolio of almps, for programmes of subsidised temporary employment in the private sector for the unemployed and for targeted employment schemes in regions affected by decarbonisation, de-industrialisation and high shares of seasonal employment. moreover, jointly funded by the rrf and the esf + investment is planned on improving the focus of local services of the greek public employment service (oaed) so that they improve the matching of unemployed workers to vacancies (table 2) . complementary to the above labour market policies, the rrp also provides for several actions aiming at improving the systems of vocational and lifelong training and education and skills, dedicating to them one of the largest envelopes of the requested rrf grants (€2.3 bn out of €5.2bn of the 'social pillar' of the national rrp). the objectives of the planned actions are to increase long-term productivity, employability/employment and ultimately growth. the plans will see the incorporation of new (green, digital and soft) skills into the curricula of vocational education, an improved alignment of the programmes to the labour market needs, as well as attempts at improving the governance and assessment of training programme providers, most notably by linking their compensation to the salaries of those trained and by engaging social partners and employers in the redesign of apprenticeships curricula. the digital transformation of education is also on the cards. an important part of that budget will be dedicated to improving the quality of universities and their linkages with the private sector and its needs for research. the rrp also provides for investment in passive labour market policies. more specifically, two pilot programmes will be launched to test the implications for the labour market from an increase in the level and coverage of the long-term unemployment benefit and from an adjustment of the benefit level to the unemployed worker's last net salary. a unification and rationalisation of the different benefits is also planned to improve the efficiency of public spending but also to eliminate any counterincentives for those recipients who concurrently participate in training programmes (kathimerini 2021) . the reform is due to be completed by the end of 2024. the proposals seem to suggest that the main considerations of these actions are the minimisation of any work and/or training disincentives and the efficiency of public spending. this prioritisation seems rather oblivious of the dismal reality that in 2019, less than one out of five unemployed workers received regular unemployment benefits in greece (18.2% of recipients over unemployed, data from matsaganis 2021). the package of proposed policy actions for the labour markets in the rrp also includes the introduction of legislation reforming several aspects of employment. the law 4808/2021 was already passed in june 2021 and included articles aiming at validating an ilo convention on combatting harassment and violence at work, transposing the eu directive on work-life balance of parents and carers, introducing some changes in employment protection and more specifically, in working time and over-time arrangements, the regulation of teleworking and platform work, the introduction of an e-employment card aiming at combatting undeclared work, as well as changes in collective labour law, concerning the establishment of a labour inspectorate and aspects of trade union organisation. of particular interest in this law are the articles concerning the status and rights of those employed by platforms. while the law granted platform workers rights of forming a works' council (but not a union), of collectively bargaining pay agreements and of strike, it also adopted rather restrictive conditions for someone to be automatically considered as an independent collaborator of a platform, namely that the platform worker does not ever refuse 'gigs' and does not choose her hours of work, both of which are usually promoted as the advantages of platform work. these requirements are striking also given that the same law provides for more negotiated flexibility on working time arrangements for employees. to sum up, the policy interventions linked to employment and the labour market proposed in the rrp seem to emphasise activation over extension of income support for the unemployed, education, training and skills, and light-touch labour market regulation aiming mostly at tackling questions of occupational health and safety, discrimination, especially against women and protection (cf. lyberaki, meghir and nicolitsa 2017). in a similar vein, the emphasis on the bundle of measures on social policy is on social investment (protection of children through, inter alia, investment in early childhood care and creation of childcare facilities at the workplace), anti-discrimination, the targeting of spending to the most vulnerable groups (disabled, roma, asylum seekers and refugees). comparably to other policy areas, funding is dedicated to the digitalisation of the system of access to social services, which promises to provide efficiency and administrative cost savings and improved management. the emphasis on social investment policies and activation is in the right direction for a country with high unemployment, in transition to major transformations (green, digital, higher-value-added exports) and a demonstrably severe problem of mismatch between the skills of the labour force and those sought in the labour market (cf. matsaganis 2021) . moreover, in a country as fiscally constrained as greece is likely to be for at least the coming decade, prioritising spending on policies which may improve income 'pre-distribution', in this case how well workers may do in the labour market may indeed be the better plan, albeit not an unproblematic one. still, past experience in greece and elsewhere leave questions open. concerning the implementation of large scale economic adjustment programs, greece has not had the best record in terms of coherence (see matsaganis 2018 for an example on the extension of eligibility of unemployment benefits). the present circumstances are not an exception. despite the consensus that greece needs to move away from the large prevalence of self-employment and very small firms, by providing them with incentives to grow, recent legislation on social security provided for choice among the self-employed on how much they would pay for social security contributions putting those on dependent employment and their employers at a cost disadvantage (matsaganis 2019) . the rather restrictive legislation on who is considered as an independent collaborator for platforms pushes in a similar direction. beyond the rrp and given the fiscal constraints, a comparison of the share of social expenditure dedicated on unemployment and old age/survivors questions where priorities lie: between 2010 and 2019 the share of social expenditure dedicated to unemployment fell from 6.1 to 3.9%, whereas the share of social expenditure dedicated to old age and survivors increased from 55.3 to 63.3% of total social expenditure, despite the massive increase in unemployment in the 2010 and the fact that the retired did not suffer as high reductions in their incomes as the unemployed (ibid.). beyond implementation issues, there are also open questions on some fundamental assumptions underlying the rrp. social investment policies by increasing the skills and participation of underemployed labour force groups can create some dynamic for job creation and for attracting fdi and the fact that greater involvement of the social partners and employers is planned in the field of apprenticeships is promising that at least some of the skills acquired will be the ones that some employers need. this would be but one element echoing the vocational training policies underpinning germany's successful export sector. whether in practice, however, they will prove sufficient for creating good (i.e. secure and well-paying) jobs at a large enough scale to lift people's incomes and reduce inequality, together with other 'horizontal' measures aiming at 'improving the business environment', is more doubtful, unless potential investors and employers are more actively engaged and motivated in that direction. light employment regulation and low-wages have been shown to not work in the direction of motivating firms to invest in the training and development of their employees (estevez-abe et al. 2001 ) to support appropriate export strategies. similarly, the measures aiming at promoting innovation as means of stimulating growth provide no guarantee that innovation will support rather than undermine local job creation. calls for more targeted government policies for steering technological change and innovation towards directions that complement rather than substitute for employment have been emerging as an antidote to high inequality due to the labour market polarization seen in many advanced economies (rodrik and stantcheva 2021; atkinson 2015) . at the eu level, new industrial policy takes a different approach to governance by establishing 'alliances' where various stakeholders are actively involved. the same applies to the explicit assumption of both plans that increases in productivity growth will translate into higher labour incomes and lower inequalities. while labour productivity growth is a necessary condition for sustainable wage increases, it is by no means a sufficient one, as the decoupling between productivity and wage growth in many countries has shown (cf. summers and stansbury 2017; theodoropoulou 2019). this decoupling has been associated with reduced bargaining power of labour to which labour market deregulation policies have contributed in the past decades (ciminelli, duval and furceri 2018) . this article has sought to put into perspective whether the eu response to the pandemic mark a qualitative change or rather than echoing legacies and vulnerabilities from the previous crisis by looking into greece. greece has entered the pandemic with vulnerabilities from previous economic adjustment programmes it had to follow, large enough to warrant 'enhanced surveillance' by the european commission, as well as challenging fiscal conditionality to secure some preferential treatment by its eurozone partners/lenders of its public debt, to improve its fragile sustainability. the question asked was whether in view of the recent response and policy shifts at the eu level, greece has been aiming for a more balanced export-regime than the one that was unsuccessfully promoted to it in the 2010s. the analysis of the greek development plan and its rrp suggests that greece has continued, at least at the programmatic level, to seek to strengthen the investment, competitiveness and export dimension of its economy as a means of restoring long-term growth. given the painful current account and fiscal adjustments experience of the 2010s but also the very weak performance of greece in these dimensions compared to other similarly sized economies in the euro area, these goals are hard to contest and should therefore not be surprising. the notion, however, that market liberalisation and light touch regulation and state intervention will ensure productivity, external competitiveness, growth and ultimately jobs is still underlying the greek programme as it did in the 2010s is the starker indication that the various policy shifts at the eu level are not associated with a change in greece's strategy of adjustment to the problems it has been facing since 2010. an apparent explanation for this is that the lingering debt conditionality trumps the one of the rrf, if anything because failing in the former can arguably have more dramatic and far-reaching consequences than failing the latter. in fact, as the conditionality related to the enhanced surveillance and the debt reprofiling measures had been characterised as a memorandum of understanding but without the funding, it could be argued that the ngeu/mff but also the rest of the eu financial support provided just the necessary cushion so that greece could have a chance of fulfilling the fiscal conditionality attached to its debt, once normality is restored. the fact that the european commission and ultimately the council, the members of which sit at the eurogroup and the esm governing council, monitor and assess the implementation of the greek rrp further underlines the fact that rather than 'an once in a lifetime chance to emerge stronger from the pandemic, transform our economies', the rrf is a bridge for avoiding yet another financial and political meltdown. as the previous section has highlighted, however, in the case of greece, this approach is likely to prove problematic: if the rrp policies do not deliver on their promises of growth and do not manage to buy-in the potential losers of the transitions, the implementation of the rrp is likely to stall, possibly depriving greece of some funding lifeline but also jeopardising any possibility of creating permanent eu fiscal capacity in the future.. as far as the question of how eu economic integration impacts on national capitalism models is concerned, the case-study of greece suggests that recent policy shifts at the eu level are possibly still too superficial and their durability uncertain to expect a shift support for growth regimes other than export-led ones. this renders ongoing current ongoing policy review processes interesting to watch to see whether they will evolve in a way that marks a genuine shift, beyond dealing with potential fallouts from legacies to supporting more balanced growth regimes in the eu. as the analysis of this paper suggests, however, the current buoyancy about the ngeu also runs the risk of masking the gravity of the situation in countries like greece. political economy of the sovereign debt crisis: the limits of internal devaluation voices from the past: economic and political vulnerabilities in the making of the 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capitalism comparative institutional advantage in the european sovereign debt crisis completing europe's economic and monetary union europe's hamiltonian moment the new labour market reforms-what will be run through the recovery fund (in greek: 'οι νέες μεταρρυθμίσεις στην αγορά εργασίας-τί θα τρέξει μέσω του ταμείου ανάκαμψης') eu governance and covid-19: policy learning and windows of opportunity the triumph of failed ideas institutional framework and labour market reform (in greek: 'το θεσμικό πλαίσιο και η μεταρρύθμιση της αγοράς εργασίας') income support policies and labour market reforms under austerity in greece: a european perspective social policy at hard times: economic crisis, fiscal austerity and social protection (in greek: η κοινωνική πολιτική σε δύσκολους καιρούς: οικονομική κρίση, δημοσιονομική λιτότητα και κοινωνική προστασία) the welfare state as an accelerator of sustainable development (in greek: 'το κοινωνικό κράτος επιταχυντής της βιώσιμης ανάπτυξης') sudden stops in the euro area unemployment, internal devaluation and labour market deregulation in europe economic causes of the eurozone crisis: the analytical contribution of comparative capitalism λαϊκισμός και κρίση στην ελλάδα" in greek) export or perish: can internal devaluation create good enough jobs in southern europe? the political economy of austerity in southern europe growth plan for the greek economy (in greek 'σχέδιο ανάπτυξης για την ελληνική οικονομία) celtic phoenix or leprechaun economics? the politics of an fdi-led growth model in europe fixing capitalism's good jobs problem recovery, resilience and growth regimes under overlapping… conditionality by other means: eu involvement in italy's structural reforms in the sovereign debt crisis europe's orphan. 2nd forced structural convergence in the eurozone fiscal integration in an experimental union: how path-breaking was the eu's response to the covid-19 pandemic? convergence to fair wage growth? evidence from european countries on the link between productivity and real compensation growth national social and labour market policy reforms in the shadow of eu bailout conditionality: the cases of greece and portugal the greek economy before and during the crisis: economic policies for the future acknowledgements earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the 2021 ces conference and two special issue webinars. for comments which helped improve this paper, i am grateful to the participants in these meetings and especially elke heins and caroline de la porte, as well as to an anonymous referee. this article would have not been completed without the support of nicόlas, zoé and kristian krieger to whom i am most thankful. publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. sotiria theodoropoulou is senior researcher and head of unit european economic, employment and social policiesat the european trade union institute. her research work has been focusing on the interplay between the eusocio-economic governance and national labour market and social policies key: cord-0059193-jmqfdv2q authors: windsor, duane title: political and ethical challenges of 2025: utopian and dystopian views date: 2020-05-05 journal: the palgrave handbook of corporate sustainability in the digital era doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-42412-1_12 sha: adeb97cb97ed31830868edbcba97ed3554a315ff doc_id: 59193 cord_uid: jmqfdv2q a perfect storm of political and ethical challenges may be brewing up through 2025. first, the chapter constructs two opposed scenarios. the utopian or optimistic scenario is progressive and globalizing in orientation and expects the future to transform corporate sustainability radically to social advantage. the dystopian or pessimistic scenario is conservative and even nationalistic and populist in orientation and expects the future to be chaotic for corporate sustainability to social disadvantage. these designed extremes frame a dialogue. second, each citizen chooses a political and ethical stance in light of expectations about the future and capacity to influence that future. the analysis details three stances at individual citizens and aggregating political party levels. the greater social division increases the importance of a neutral median voter perspective but increases the likelihood of a centrist party disappearing. a business manager assesses how corporate social responsibility (csr) views and political criticism of capitalism and wealth affect corporate sustainability. this chapter designs contrasting utopian and dystopian scenarios about the future (windsor 2018b ) and a median voter perspective to examine political and ethical challenges of 2025 affecting corporate sustainability. each citizen chooses a political and ethical stance in light of their expectations about the future and capacity to influence that future. the situation has strong implications for business managers assessing the corporate social responsibility (csr) of businesses and political criticism of capitalism and wealth as aspects of corporate sustainability. citizens are stakeholders of specific businesses. business managers are citizens facing the same challenges in private life as well as in their management responsibilities. the utopian or optimistic view is designed to be progressive and globalizing in orientation. governments and global markets both function effectively, and global economic growth continues. this view presumes that sustainable development is feasible politically and economically and that technological advances will ameliorate and reverse climate change damages. the view rests on an implicit assumption of aggregate positive-sum changes. the dystopian or pessimistic view is conservative and increasingly nationalistic and populist in orientation. this view presumes that coming changes are adverse to national and popular interests. governments and global markets begin to function less effectively toward 2025. there could be persistent trade wars between key economic actors, such as the us and china or the european union (eu). the view rests on an implicit assumption of zero-sum changes: what one country or interest gains, another country or interest loses. zero-sum invokes a lifeboat ethics condition concerning other countries and refugees (hardin 1974) . this chapter relates to the overall project of business 2025 corporate sustainability in the digital age as follows. the project call for papers identifies 2025 (see center for long-term cybersecurity 2019; lipman and petrov 2013; gerhold and steinmüller 2018) as possibly a "point of no return" for various problems. the dystopian scenario corresponds to this concern. the implication is that there must be changes in individual and business behaviors as well as in public policy. the utopian scenario corresponds to positive effects of desirable changes, but must function effectively now to avoid a possible "point of no return." contrasting narratives for utopian and dystopian scenarios examine what happens if on the one hand viable solutions are quickly found and behavioral and public policy changes do occur quickly enough, or if on the other hand such solutions are not quickly found and behavioral and public policy changes do not occur quickly enough. businesses cannot decide what actions to take without considering the political chaos that seems to be unfolding in the us and the eu, in the eu due to brexit and increasing immigration, and the combined political and ethical challenges facing the citizens of democratic societies. the emphasis in this chapter is on the implications of the call's "social, demographic, technological, and managerial trends by 2025" as viewed by the median voter citizen and the business manager. these trends constitute the business environment shaping corporate sustainability. the importance of the topic coverage is that this chapter addresses the difficulty of understanding the dynamics of political and ethical choices. if 2025 in reality proves to be a "point of no return," then individuals, organizations, and institutions have amazingly little time to identify key problems and decide how to proceed. a utopian narrative anticipates success. a dystopian narrative anticipates failure. each narrative in effect advises differently on what may happen and how to decide what to do in each year from 2020 through 2025. the chapter structures specific objectives as follows. the second section explains the context and background for the scenario approach in terms of a perfect storm for corporate sustainability. the section identifies a first list of the most important political and ethical challenges expected in 2025. the year 2025 suggests a relatively short time horizon over which to identify potential solutions and make choices. the ethical problem for citizens and managers takes the form in a perfect storm of hardin's (1974) lifeboat ethics. the third section explains the constructed utopian and dystopian scenarios. the section sharpens differences between utopian and dystopian narratives to emphasize political and ethical choices facing citizens and business executives and directors. the scenarios constitute a dialogue. the fourth section links these scenarios to a median voter perspective in which the median voter is politically neutral but ethically concerned without embracing hardin's lifeboat ethics. the chapter links the proposed scenarios to the median voter perspective and then to business sustainability issues of csr and political criticism of capitalism and wealth. because 2025 is coming up quickly, references must emphasize current topics, used simply to illustrate arguments. the chapter also seeks to link these topical references to an academic literature. the left extreme emphasizes the utopian scenario. the right extreme emphasizes the dystopian scenario. the political center party of median voters may disappear toward the left and right extremes. the fifth section addresses two key corporate sustainability issues within the framework generated by the scenarios and the median voter perspective. these two issues are corporate social responsibility (csr) and political criticism of capitalism and wealth. 1. rising nationalism and populism negatively affect international trade, investment, and cooperation (windsor 2019b has cautioned that climate change effects might result in "the disruption of the whole political order of the world" and that effective action in washington, dc will depend on "wins for both parties" rather than "a victory for one party" (osborne 2019). 4. there is a potential ideological shift away from capitalism and toward socialism (economic report 2019; newport 2018): this shift involves concerns over inequality (semuels 2019; telford 2019; tomlinson 2019) and health care access (schatzker 2019) . these concerns lead to demands for higher taxes, universal basic income, and universal medicare access promoted by progressives-whose financing scheme is higher taxes beginning with the wealthiest and working downwards. senators bernie sanders (democrat, vermont) and elizabeth warren (democrat, massachusetts) have advanced various proposals (rappeport and kaplan 2019; sanders n.d.; stein 2019; windsor 2019a). senator sanders has stated: "there should be no billionaires. we are going to tax their extreme wealth and invest in working people" (cillizza 2019). 5. there is risk of permanent winning coalitions driven by identity politics (boettke and thompson 2019) or some other kind of anti-compromise politics that can destroy democratic governance by establishing oneparty states that are unavoidably dictatorial (although majoritarian) rather than constitutional (featuring checks and balances and electoral competition) (mainwaring 2001; traub 2013 ). 6. china, russia, iran, and north korea are aggressive regional military powers that seek to gain regional hegemony and threaten neighbors (sciutto 2019) . iran and north korea have nuclear weapons development programs. regional aggression may force arms race and regional conflicts (arnon and guzansky 2018) . iran and saudi arabia are engaged (or arguably not) in an undeclared war in yemen (bednarz et al. 2015) . 7. pervasive corruption is widespread in many countries, including brazil and india as well as china, russia, iran, and north korea. advanced economies with democratic regimes are not immune to corruption (hall et al. 2020) . corruption undermines public confidence in institutions (clausen et al. 2011) . multinational enterprises may play a crucial role in providing bribes to public officials (windsor 2019c) . a variant of corruption involves the multiple business scandals that undermine public confidence in capitalism (lombardi et al. 2019 ). hardin's (1974) lifeboat ethics model illustrates ethical challenges for citizens and managers in a perfect storm. climate change may increase both internation and intra-nation inequality effects (diffenbaugh and burke 2019) . in a proposed model of lifeboat ethics, hardin makes an argument for not helping the poor of the world. an interpretation of the argument is as follows. the advanced economies possess a lifeboat capable of holding their own population. the developing countries-holding most of the world's growing population-do not have such lifeboats. the advanced economies cannot save the rest of the world without being swamped. this argument generates present debates concerning refugee policies and sanctuary zones in the us and the eu. the policy of the eu has been that if a refugee can touch some part of the eu, then the refugee is automatically admitted. a "progressive" position favors admission; a "conservative" position favors exclusion. the lifeboat model raises a profound question about personal ethics for citizens and business managers. in the setting of using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (crispr) for genetic modification of humans, george church (professor of genetics, harvard medical school) argues: "i believe we have an ethical obligation to maximize benefits and minimize harm" (hall 2019: 15) . dov seidman, ceo of the ethics and compliance consulting business lrn, states: "moral leadership means truly putting people first and making whatever sacrifices that entails" (friedman 2018 ). a scenario is simply a description of a possible future. contrasting scenarios may thus be an informative dialogue. a scenario may be qualitative (i.e., a narrative) or quantitative (i.e., a mathematical model). narratives are the most common approach. scenarios may prove useful for dialogue (gerhold and steinmüller 2018) and addressing "wicked problems" (wright et al. 2019) . this chapter does not undertake to make specific predictions. scenarios have equal likelihood. for instance, the center for long-term cybersecurity (2019) looks at four scenarios for 2025. an optimistic (or utopian) scenario 1 "quantum leap" expects quantum computing to be successful and important. a pessimistic (or dystopian) scenario 2 "the new wiggle room" is a "poisoned chalice" in which there is too much information and knowledge. scenario 3 "barlow's revenge" shifts cybersecurity to government or by delegation to big business (barlow 1996) and scenario 4 "trust us" shifts cybersecurity to an artificial intelligence (ai) "safetynet" trusted to function correctly. the center for long-term cybersecurity (2019: 6) characterizes the scenario approach as follows: the cybersecurity futures 2025 scenarios (like all scenarios) are not predictions. they are logical narratives that tell stories about how forces of change from a variety of sources … may overlap and combine to create a set of cybersecurity problems in 2025 that are different from those encountered today. figure 12 .1 depicts two contrasting scenarios for the future, adapted from windsor (2018a). one scenario is utopian or positive. the contrasting scenario is dystopian or negative. these two scenarios are extreme and opposing narratives about the possible future. sustainable development (a "brave new world" invoking huxley 1932) and environmental catastrophe ("1984 (" " invoking orwell 1949 here describe positive and negative outcomes in perhaps the year 2100. an essential difference across time horizons is that "while a near future is represented in practical terms and concerned with forming expectations and goals under conditions of uncertainty, a distant future is represented in stylized terms and concerned with imagining possibilities under conditions of ambiguity" (augustine et al. 2019 (augustine et al. : 1930 . because scenarios are not predictions but narratives about possibilities, it is important not to treat a scenario as in any sense a reality. individuals may tend to believe scenarios. augustine et al. (2019 augustine et al. ( : 1930 in a study of proposed geoengineering planetary-scale technologies for addressing climate change caution: geoengineering has increasingly been treated as if it were a reality, despite continued controversy and in the absence of any implementation. we find that societal-level imaginaries that were built on deeply-held moral bases and cosmologies underpinned the conception of geoengineering, and that a dialectic process of discursive attempts to reconcile oppositional imaginaries increased the concreteness and credibility of geoengineering so that it increasingly has been treated as an 'as-if' reality. author's creation adopted in part from windsor 2018a) table 12 .1 provides a comparison of proposed utopian and dystopian scenarios on key dimensions. these scenarios are constructed narratives and not specific forecasts. the constructed narratives may include some apparent inconsistencies or elements that arguably might serve better in the opposed narrative. the scenario labels are metaphors. the essential feature of future utopia is that society solves all key problems to everyone's benefit: the scenario is optimistic. the essence of future dystopia is that key problems overwhelm society's ability to handle: the scenario is pessimistic. these two narratives are intentionally extreme opposites. reality to 2025 and beyond may well prove to be some mix of positive and negative dimensions. while the two scenarios do strongly emphasis sustainable development versus environmental catastrophe, the scenarios are not restricted to environmental matters: political, ethical, and value orientations, political outcomes, and ai outcomes are also included. the scenarios present the median voter and business managers with conflicting narratives about the future. a progressive party may threaten that environmental catastrophe must result from a conservative party and promise that utopia will follow from socialism. a conservative party may threaten that socialism will result in dystopia and promise that capitalism is the path to wealth. but in (huxley, 1932) : the future will be positive through replacement of capitalism by socialism "1984" (orwell, 1949) : the future will be negative due to replacement of capitalism by socialism political orientation progressive conservative ethical orientation social welfare lifeboat ethics (hardin, 1974 huxley (1932) , orwell (1949) , and hardin (1974) general terms, utopian reasoning tends to be progressive (huxley's "brave new world" is coming) and dystopian reasoning tends to be conservative (orwell's "1984" is coming) . a particular reader may view "brave new world" as dystopian (huxley's intention) and "1984" as utopian. but the chapter's author designs these two extreme scenarios as forming a dialogue for the median voter and then the business manager about corporate sustainability. "brave new world" is an ironic twist on huxley's (1932) dystopian view of the technological future. huxley envisioned that technology would enslave mankind-here as a twist technological solution to climate change free mankind. the intended sense of the scenario is that the future will be good, and especially under the guidance of a progressive political party moving toward socialism. four major improvements occur. one improvement is that technological solutions for climate change problems do appear. that is, independently of political and institutional developments, technological innovation will begin to reverse environmental damages. it may be 2050 before such technologies must be operating, but there must be convincing evidence of practicality by 2025 to provide citizen confidence. a second improvement is that there will be institutional arrangements for addressing climate change problems. in particular, something like the paris accord will function effectively. a step in this direction by 2025 might be that the us rejoins and implements the paris accord. a third improvement is that social institutions at various levels will prove more resilient and innovative than predicted (windsor 2018b) . a fourth improvement is that the leading democracies-especially the us concerning attempted one-party impeachment of president donald j. trump and the uk decision concerning brexit-resolve amicably and satisfactorily present internal political dissensions. in this utopian scenario, ai and humans can be complementary and ai investment increases human employment (windsor in press). some scenarios in the literature are positive concerning the future (whittington 2019; xing et al. 2019 ). schanes, jäger, and drummond (2019) feature three possible scenarios for reaching a more resource-efficient economy in europe. each of the three scenarios-labeled as-global cooperation, europe goes ahead, and civil society leads-while quite different leads to greater resource efficiency. global cooperation relies on top-down agreements. europe goes ahead emphasizes market mechanisms that drive technological solutions. civil society leads relies on bottom-up changes in behavior through community-based initiatives. the best path forward is then a combination of the three scenarios or approaches. a study by yu, zheng, li, and li (2018) explains alternatives for peaking carbon dioxide emissions in china before 2025. the comparison approach of adjusting the present energy-intensive heavy and chemical industrial structure cannot meet the 2030 target date (see also zhang et al. 2019) . "1984" takes its label from orwell (1949) (zuboff 2019) , in which totalitarian systems of competing ideologies have control of key societies. the intended sense is that the future is dim, and especially if capitalism is abandoned in favor of big government socialism. a dystopian scenario is the opposite of a utopian scenario on each of the key dimensions. first, technological solutions either do not exist or will be substantially delayed in effective operational implementation. in either case, citizen confidence will be undermined in the period between 2019 and 2025 as climate conditions deteriorate and perhaps accelerate in speed of deterioration. alternatively, a problem is that as environmental activists (scientists or otherwise) emphasize accelerating speed of climate deterioration in order to marshal support and resources for action and thus keep moving the timing of disaster to the present, it is possible that citizens will lose confidence in the predictions. alarmism may undermine credibility. second, the paris accord proves hopelessly inadequate collectively to handle climate deterioration in the absence of technological solutions. third, social institutions at various levels do prove inadequate to handle climate change effects. fourth, between 2019 and 2025, internal political dissensions result in considerable social damage in the us and the uk. in this dystopian scenario, ai and humans are substitutes and ai investment decreases human employment (windsor in press) . substitution possibly could place increasing stress on government action to handle the effects of mass or increasing unemployment. identity politics may tend to undermine democratic governance through promotion of tribal violence: the problem embedded in identity politics is that there will be "permanent winning coalitions" preventing compromise across policy issues (boettke and thompson 2019: 1). it is possible that identity politics may be offset by existence of multiple value configurations. a study (midgley et al. 2019 ) reclassifies 83,526 respondents from 60 countries (in wave six of the world values survey) into five global archetypes of different value configurations. countries vary, perhaps markedly, by proportions of populations falling into each archetype. the median voter chooses between political party proposals. the progressive stance is that environmental catastrophe must be tackled by government and that socialism will create utopia. the conservative stance is that socialism is even worse and that capitalism is the path to utopia and avoidance of environmental catastrophe. citizens are stakeholders of businesses and business managers are voting citizens. the fundamental political consideration is whether in democratic societies the party system maintains the center or deteriorates toward the more extreme postures of progressive and conservative parties. in this chapter's utopian scenario, the median voter model is working and political choices gravitate to the center. in this chapter's dystopian scenario, the median voter model is not working and there is a deep division between deeply different and increasingly ideological positions (progressive versus conservative). a median voter perspective appears more significant now for the us and the uk than in the previous decades since 1945. the reason is accelerating movement of the parties toward their extremes and increased pressure on centrists to go one way or the other. the concern is not strictly new (binder 1996; schofield and sened 2005) , but relevant to 2025 and may be intensifying recently. senator sanders to the left and president trump to the right arguably illustrate the trend (olmstead 2018) . a split may be temporary. the brexit referendum on june 23, 2016 was not a strong majority outcome (bbc 2016). the overall vote in the uk was 51.9% leave and 48.1% remain. the difference was about one million votes. the country was closely divided, with key regional differences. after more than three years of failed negotiations over brexit terms and calls for a second referendum, prime minister boris johnson's conservative party obtained an absolute majority in late 2019. in january 2020, the house of commons voted brexit legislation (330 for and 231 against). or the split may be longer lasting: socialism seems to be gaining favor in the us, and the us house of representatives has adopted partisan (not bipartisan) articles of impeachment of president trump. unless a compelling impeachment case is developed, sufficient to pass the us senate by two-thirds majority, a predictable outcome is a roughly 50-50 split in the us electorate (polls 2019). for studying political and ethical challenges to corporate sustainability, a median voter perspective is quite useful and particularly so from 2020 toward 2025. a permanent split encourages the dystopian scenario and orwell's 1984 may unfold. the median voter assesses the dialogue created by the two competing narratives. the essential feature of a median voter model as a predictive theorem is that "a majority rule voting system will select the outcome most preferred by the median voter" (holcombe 2006: 155) . in effect, outcomes move toward the centrist position on any policy question. consider a simple version of the median voter model, in which there are three voters on any decision and the two-voter majority wins with the peaceful acceptance of the third voter. twothirds of the electorate is a strong majority. the voters agree to the voting rule in advance. one voter wants to spend $x, another voter wants to spend $2x, and the median voter wants to spend $x+2. the voting outcome will be $x+2. the idea, however, is that the winning coalitions vary across issues. the median voter model may be applicable to both electorates (voting in referenda or for representatives) and elected representatives (voting in legislatures). there are two potential defects in the median voter model. one defect is that there is no centrist position, but simply two competing positions. it is easier to see this defect with four voters. two voters prefer x and two voters prefer not-x: there is no solution. the two voters concur and a third voter accepts the outcome serves to conceal this defect. in practice, the majority in favor of a policy may be very thin and not reflect a centrist position. it is also possible that a center is quite thin, meaning that policy choices rest on a relatively small proportion of centrists in a deeply divided electorate. the other defect is that relative to either thin center or two competing positions in deadlock, the more radical wings draw the political parties (in control of nominations to elected representative positions) away from the center and toward more radical postures, whether progressive or conservative (pitts 2019) . there are awkward decision problems of the following form. one voter wants x; another voter wants not-x (the exact opposite policy). the median voter, in between, decides the outcome as x or not-x. for instance, x is proabortion and not-x is anti-abortion: the positions are irreconcilable. the median voter must choose (or find a compromise solution satisfactory to the x and not-x voters). but the vote, in a large electorate, may be very close. the median voter model may or may not be too simple for political complexity. the favorable case is that simple models are "engines of analysis that allow a variety of hypotheses about more complex phenomena to be developed" and that "simple models that extract the essential from the observed will serve us well" (congleton 2004: 707) . on the other hand, a different study reports that legislators are most constrained by median voter preferences in homogeneous districts: heterogeneity frees the legislator (gerber and lewis 2004) . the median voter may proceed on any of three bases. first, the median voter simply prefers x or not-x. that is, there are only two positions (or political parties) and the median voter adheres to one of them at the outset of voting. this basis is the simplest version of the median voter model. second, the median voter has no policy preference but acts on self-interest only. that is, the median voter calculates what is in her or his interest regardless of effects on others (downs 1965) . third, the median voter is neutral and weighs the merits and consequences of x or not-x in order to decide what to do. each one of these bases is a different political decision-making process. in a civil discourse setting, the median voter listens to x and to not-x before deciding which alternative to select based on the merits of the positions. the median voter must consider the ethics of best policy concerning social welfare (or the public interest). social division over immigration is a good illustration. the progressive view encourages immigration as part of the path to huxley's brave new world; the conservative view discourages immigration as part of the path to orwell's 1984. immigration is a decision problem involving two dimensions (epstein and herz 2019). one dimension is the aging of the population in developed countries. the native population needs, or wants, tax base linked (in the absence of increased automation investment) to imported labor. increased immigration addresses this need or want. the other dimension is that the immigrants may be different in "social norms and culture" that alters the country in ways that the natives do not approve. this second dimension may serve as a constraint on the first dimension. the conflict in dimensions may be exacerbated by the acquisition of voting rights by the immigrants or their descendants. suppose, for instance, that immigrant voters prefer to reduce their taxes and thus pension payments to native retirees. evidence from switzerland suggests that direct democracy tends to oppose naturalization of immigrants (hainmueller and hangartner 2019) . previously in switzerland, naturalization requests were subject typically to municipal referendums. federal court rulings then forced municipalities to transfer naturalization decisions to elected municipality councils. over the period 1991-2009 for about 1400 municipalities, hainmueller and hangartner found that naturalization rates increased by 60% when handled by progressive representative democracy rather than conservative direct democracy. the municipal councils had to justify rejection decisions formally and potentially subject to judicial review. while it is true that citizens may be more xenophobic and less impressed with judicial review than are elected representatives, this interpretation unavoidably sidesteps the question of whether naturalization of immigrants is socially desirable or not. the citizens express different preferences than do representatives constrained by the federal court rulings. analysis can scale from the median voter model at the individual citizen or manager level to aggregating political parties by imagining an abstractly defined three-party democracy. each political party attracts individual voters through a set of policy positions on key issues of rights, entitlements, taxation, immigration, and social norms. there are left, center, and right parties. in this imaginary three-party democracy, the left party is "progressive" on key issues. the right party is "conservative" on key issues. the left and right positions are essentially ideological: for socialism versus capitalism, with expectations about whether there are likely to be technological solutions preventing environmental catastrophe. the left party ideology views lifeboat ethics as inhumane and immoral. the right party ideology views lifeboat ethics as moral necessity in a perfect storm. the "centrist" party lies in between the progressive and conservative parties and attracts any ideologically "independent" voters who are neither progressive nor conservative systematically. this centrist party independently must decide what it thinks on each key issue. in the imagined three-party democracy, a progressive party increases individual rights (including abortion) and entitlements (including transfers to poorer citizens). the transfer component leads to higher taxes for redistribution. this party can be more global in value orientation and thus otherregarding concerning other countries and cultures, which are to be treated with respect accorded to the country's own citizens. a progressive party expands the government sector through higher taxes on wealth and is welcoming to immigrants. a progressive party may tend to be anti-capitalism and progovernment expansion. a progressive party tends to emphasize that policies will create a utopian future for citizens. a "conservative" party emphasizes individual responsibilities. a conservative party seeks to reduce taxes and is less welcoming to immigrants, especially those who are likely to draw on public welfare benefits and to vote for the progressive party. this party may be more nationalistic in value orientation and thus self-regarding concerning other countries and cultures, so that the test of international policy is at least no cost and preferably increased benefits to the country's own citizens. a conservative party tends to be pro-capitalism and anti-government expansion. a conservative party tends to emphasize dangers of a dystopian future arising from undesirable government expansion. the centrist party becomes critically important when progressives and conservatives are roughly balanced in voting power (whether in the electorate or in the legislature). assume, for instance, that there are 100 progressives, 100 conservatives, and 10 centrists. these numbers can be scaled up and down. the 10 centrists determine policy outcomes in a pure referendum context. the centrist party thus corresponds to the median voter. alternatively, in a us-style two-party system, centrists can comprise both independents and centeroriented members of progressive and conservative parties. in either interpretation, there are three positions. this three-party political system, in either configuration, faces a set of real policy challenges. political crisis may result from the center disappearing and the progressive and conservative parties moving their policy positions to the extreme opposites. abstraction means that the imaginary democracy does not correspond in detail to any specific national political system. much more detail is necessary to match to a particular system such as the us or the uk. the actual content of "progressivism" and "conservatism" may take different forms in various countries. american variants may be quite different from european variants. the party definitions are therefore as abstract as possible to the analysis purpose, but some detail is necessary to the party definitions. the author thinks the party descriptions reasonably match the us 2020 presidential nominations process and the prolonged brexit crisis in the uk resulting in a late 2019 strong conservative party majority for prime minister johnson, committed to brexit. within conditions captured by the two scenarios confronting a median voter as a progressive-conservative dialogue, business managers must make judgments about key business issues in a perfect storm. for illustration, this chapter focuses on csr and political criticism of capitalism and wealth as relevant to corporate sustainability. csr is a conception of the relationship between business and society (aguinis and glavas 2012) . matten and moon (in press) theorizes practical need to establish legitimacy with core stakeholders, societies, and regulators. those authors place this practical need within the configuration of such influences. the utopian scenario increases the role of the regulators. the dystopian scenario throws businesses into more chaotic conditions. the present author's conception is different (windsor 2013) : each business should undertake feasible actions to improve society independently of the purely economic performance of that business. this conception can separate into three kinds of actions: (1) voluntarily obey laws and governmental policies, (2) do not cause any harm to stakeholders through unethical conduct not fully regulated by government, and (3) do try to generate some good for stakeholders through corporate citizenship conduct. in this conception, society has the meaning of any stakeholders of a business who receive harms or benefits. such actions arguably meet the practical need stated by matten and moon. however, a business might improve its profitability through intentional evasion of laws and policies, which require effective government enforcement. the german company siemens operated a top-down global bribery scheme until caught in 2006 by us and german authorities (berghoff 2018) . a business might improve its profitability through unethical conduct not fully regulated by the government (ingram n.d.) . ingram cites labor practices, environmental concerns, marketing practices, and business impacts on society. a business might improve its profitability by not engaging in corporate citizenship conduct and especially philanthropy or alternatively might find that donations help contribute to shareholder value (liang and renneboog 2016) . csr is sometimes conceptualized in terms of triple bottom-line performance defined as economic, environmental, and social effects (slaper and hall 2011) . the literature on csr divides into two general approaches. an approach based on market economics theory (kitzmueller and shimshack 2012) restricts csr to a combination of (1) legal compliance and (2) ethical compliance only, to the exclusion of citizenship activities. in this restricted approach, there is a tendency also to minimize the content of laws and ethics to a set supportive of business economic performance. an economics-based approach emphasizes profit seeking in a capitalist market economy as the best path to improving social welfare. there is an effort to identify win-win solutions in which the business does social good and financially well (aguinis 2011 ). an approach based on ethics broadens csr to encourage citizenship activities and also to expand the content of laws and ethics (carroll 2000) . an ethics-based approach tends to constrain profit seeking through increased duties (negative and positive) to a broad set of stakeholders. political csr (scherer and palazzo 2011) encourages businesses to foster democracy and to provide public goods in instances of governmental incapacity: the utopian scenario encourages such a transformation in corporate conduct. as with the utopian and dystopian scenarios, economic csr and ethical csr are opposed approaches. an intermediate position between economics and ethics is that there can be a good business (or strategic) case for csr (carroll and shabana 2010) . the business case for addressing multiple social issues is subject to criticism (kaplan in press) . the utopian scenario, as associated with the progressive left in this chapter, envisions government increasing csr through laws and policies in place of voluntarism. the scenario, as formulated in this chapter, is highly critical of capitalism and wealth. business can anticipate increasing government substitution for csr activities. the dystopian scenario, as associated with the conservative right in this chapter, envisions leaving csr other than strictly limited legal compliance to business as a voluntary decision. business can anticipate increasingly difficult conditions for profitability. the political and ethical uncertainty of the business environment through 2025 reflects in the most recent shell scenarios concerning energy futures. royal dutch shell has long developed scenarios of energy futures. these scenarios are "what if?" questions for shell executives. the most recent effort provides three scenarios in which the process of economic globalization may unfold on three very different pathways to 2025. each scenario also has different international relations and international cooperation concerning "peace, international security, and economic development." the three scenarios are labeled "low trust globalisation" and "open doors" and "flags" to identify "different combinations of market, geopolitical and social forces" (shell scenarios n.d.). the scenario labels are reasonably clear: low trust prevails, open borders facilitate globalization, and national interests impede globalization. open borders match a utopian scenario; low trust and national interests match a dystopian scenario. the conventional view of corporations is that agent-managers of publicly traded enterprises do and should seek to obtain as much profit as possible for shareowners. privately owned businesses may act more altruistically as a matter of choice. the business roundtable (2019) in a statement signed by 181 ceos (of 193 members) in august 2019 adopted a different stance. the statement recommends five objectives defined in terms of primary stakeholders: value delivery for customers, investment in employees, fair and ethical dealing with suppliers, support for communities in which operating, and long-term value creation for shareholders. the last one is both fifth in the sequence and the only one explicitly regarded as oriented toward long-term value. the majority voting approach (rice 1985) may arguably lead to expansion of the government sector (husted and kenny 1997) . the median voter can tax wealthier citizens and transfer wealth to both poorer citizens and herself or himself. an empirical analysis of 79 household budget surveys from 24 democracies concludes that greater inequality of factor income redistributes more wealth to the poor (milanovic 2000) . there is rising criticism of capitalism and excess wealth concentration (dorning 2019; schatzker 2019) . there are proposals to break up the big technology corporations as too powerful and too wealthy (timberg 2019) . historically, there have been real experiments with laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. the nineteenth century was arguably the high point of unregulated or laissez-faire capitalism. the twentieth century was arguably the high point of socialism (essentially marxism). the historical record is that both approaches proved highly defective (thomas 2019) . that is, critiques of both unregulated capitalism and full-blown socialism have merit, even separating democratic socialism away from totalitarian communism to look at economic performance isolated from political regime. the argument thus always becomes that next time the experiment will work better because the advocate says so. margaret thatcher, subsequently uk prime minister, stated the essence of the decision problem for the median voter: "socialism started by saying it was going to tax the rich, very rapidly it was taxing the middle income groups. now, it's taxing people quite highly with incomes way below average and pensioners with incomes way below average" (thatcher 1976 ). the question for the median voter is whether to trust a pledge to tax the extremely wealthy only. the pledge might be sincere or a ploy to gain office. the us presidential nomination process for 2020 appears to have the effect of leading prominent democratic party candidates toward socialism defined practically rather than ideologically as the marked expansion of government. the question for the median voter is whether a pledge to be a democratic socialist and not a socialist (much less a communist) is valid, leaving aside the issue of whether there can be a substantive difference in practice between socialism and democratic socialism (or social democracy), arguably as practiced for instance in scandinavia. senator sanders has proposed increased taxation of the very wealthy and corporate taxation based on the difference in pay between ceos and employees. the corporate taxation proposal is that taxes would increase on a corporation in which the highest paid employee (typically the ceo) received more than 50 times the pay of the average employee. this proposal is restricted to corporations of more than $100 million annual revenue (stein 2019) . senator sanders' wealth taxation proposal is to increase taxes on the top 0.1%, estimated at about 180,000 households (sanders n.d.) . "the revenue raised under this plan would be used to fund bernie's affordable housing plan, universal childcare and would help fund medicare for all" (sanders n.d.) . cillizza (2019) points out that the details of the proposed taxation do not amount to elimination of billionaires but rather cutting the wealth of present billionaires in half over 15 years. there would be a 1% tax on net worth over $32 million (married couples), rising with net worth in percent steps (2%, 3%, and so forth) to 8% on net worth over $10 billion (married couples). all brackets would be halved for single-person households (so $16 billion to $5 billion) (cillizza 2019; sanders n.d.) . senator warren's similar proposal is restricted to a smaller set of households and begins at $50 million net worth with a 2% tax that rises to 3% tax above $1 billion (rappeport and kaplan 2019). such a wealth transfer may be appealing to poorer households, who would benefit at no cost. the median voter, who presumably falls below the top 0.1% of the wealth distribution, should have no objection as the transfer is from the wealthier to the poorer. the median voter might be attracted by some of the specific benefits (such as medicare for all) promised at no cost. however, the median voter must weigh the prospect that this excess wealth tax is (whether intentionally or by foreseeable evolution) simply the first step in increased taxation down to the median voter in order to fund all kinds of government projects such as the "new green deal" on climate change. the citizen and the business manager face a set of political and ethical choices about difficult problems. this set of problems has important implications for corporate sustainability through and beyond 2025. a first list of these problems includes rising nationalism and populism, population movements across borders, climate change, ideological conflict between capitalism and socialism, possible collapse of traditional democratic governance, aggressive authoritarian regimes possessing or seeking nuclear weapons, and pervasive corruption. the lifeboat model raises profound ethical issues for citizens and business managers. the chapter explains two contrasting scenarios, utopian (or optimistic) versus dystopian (or pessimistic), concerning how these problems unfold through 2025. the scenarios provide a dialogue in narrative form: huxley's brave new world versus orwell's 1984. the chapter links these scenarios to judgments required of the median voter and the business manager. for academia and policy makers, the recommendations include careful examination of these issues and their implications for corporate sustainability and citizens. for academia and educational institutions, the vital issue is whether research and teaching are addressing the constellation of problems and effects in ways that are useful for citizens and business managers. for policy makers, the vital issue is whether they understand both the big picture and the details of what may be unfolding to 2025. both the us and the uk exhibit signs of policy deadlock that may undermine confidence in democracy and capitalism. there are increasing signals of policy stress in other countries such as finland. a fundamental concern going forward to 2025 is whether "democracy" is increasingly perceived to be beginning to fail and fracture in the us and the uk. policy deadlock on brexit in the uk and gun control in the us can be interpreted as signaling the political systems are no longer working effectively (dionne 2019) . "the united states retreated from its traditional role as both a champion and an exemplar of democracy amid an accelerating decline in american political rights and civil liberties" (freedom house 2019). such opinions (or judgments) might be viewed as an "early warning indicator" (goldberg 2019) . a development is the arguably increasing tendency to subject political and policy disagreements to criminal investigation or to civil litigation as a feature of orwell's 1984. many policy initiatives of the trump administration have been subjected to civil litigation in the courts. one feature of the 2017 us tax law change was a $10,000 cap (salt) on federal deductibility of state and local taxes. four of the high tax states-connecticut, maryland, new jersey, and new york-sued in federal court on the ground that the cap unconstitutionally infringed on state sovereignty to adopt progressive taxation and effectively raise public service cost per household in their states. on september 30, 2019, a us district court (manhattan, new york) ruled against the plaintiffs, holding that the us congress has broad power to levy taxes (casselman 2019) . the matter must properly be resolved at the federal election ballot box and not in the federal courts. the median voter is the key to the election process. either the center determines election outcomes, or the center disappears as the progressive and conservative extremes dominate the election process. a progressive domination promises huxley's brave new world; a conservative domination cautions against orwell's 1984. references immigration worries drove the brexit vote organizational responsibility: doing good and doing well what we know and don't know about corporate social responsibility: a review and research agenda a conventional arms race. institute for national security studies (inss) insight no. 1074 constructing a distant future: imaginaries in geoengineering a declaration of the independence in cyberspace proxy war in yemen: 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analysis china can peak its energy-related carbon emissions before 2025: evidence from industry restructuring decomposition analysis of china's co2 emissions (2000-2016) and scenario analysis of its carbon intensity targets in 2020 and 2030 the threat of big other key: cord-0065563-ywz4qtzq authors: de jong, martin title: inclusive capitalism: the emergence of a new purpose paradigm in economics and business administration and its implications for public policy date: 2021-07-07 journal: gppg doi: 10.1007/s43508-021-00020-z sha: 98f2dd3ad9aa470fcbd9f48bffce6689caa5db53 doc_id: 65563 cord_uid: ywz4qtzq with the societal cracks resulting from decade-long neoliberal policies becoming increasingly visible in many countries, capitalism as the most suitable institutional system to produce material wealth, environmental sustainability and social stability has come under growing attack. this contribution examines what the growing army of recent heterodox scholars in economics and business have to say on what one could call ‘inclusive capitalism’. this concerns both the flaws in current capitalist systems and the behavioral assumptions that underpin it, as well as the possible institutional fixes they propose. i first sketch the background of the crisis surrounding capitalism, delve into its conceptual foundations and offer a working definition. i subsequently examine what social and environmental inclusion refer to and use kate raworth’s conceptualization of the doughnut economy as a point of departure to explore what ‘inclusive capitalism’ may imply. i also identify requirements for its implementation in institutional practices. it appears that ‘purpose’ rather than utility maximization or profit maximization is what novel economists and business scholars perceive as the key driver in ‘stakeholder-oriented capitalism’ or the ‘economics of mutuality’. their claim is that at the end of the day this is not only a moral imperative for companies but also more beneficial for them in terms of long-term profitability. moreover, they see a far more important role for government in shaping markets and leading the way into a more inclusive future than it is currently fulfilling. i argue that it is time for scholars in the field of public policy to take heed of these new theoretical developments in neighboring disciplines and respond to them. while most scholars in the field of public policy are happily engaged in working out further details of normal theory in new public management and new public governance, in several other social science disciplines, a paradigm shift seems to be under preparation. not only in sociology or geography, but also increasingly in economics or business administration, neoliberalism has become a swearword and modern-day capitalism is either rejected or at least deemed in urgent need of repair (steger & roy, 2021) . milton friedman and his ideas on policies to control the flow of money, his moral yardstick for companies only to maximize shareholder value and his methodological treatise about economics being a science of prediction rather than description and explanation, not unlike handling billiard balls that simply have to run their course to win a game, have been fashionable for decades. economists leaned on his maxims for modeling and forecasting. business scholars and organization theorists mimicked his idea that 'the only business of business is business' and corporations were in the end mere money-making machines. political and policy scholars joined the fashion and proposed to shrink government and limit the damage it did to society, while the remainder of social science mapped societal problems maintaining a firm belief that these were only minor ripples in the river; and that overall humanity was on a speed-boat to inevitable progress. left-leaning geographers and sociologists who offered systematic criticism could easily be pushed aside as 'radicals' or 'marxists'. but the tide is turning. the past decade has seen a growing number of influential scholars from leading universities disavowing the mainstream assumptions underlying the academic disciplines they grew up in. kate raworth (2017) and mariana mazzucato (2018) laid bare the serious limitations of modeling exercises based on erroneous assumptions and demonstrated how ceteris paribus clauses were abused to favor hobby horses over societal relevance. paul collier (2018) and jonathan aldred (2019) showed how these assumptions were not just erroneous and based on an overly negative conception of human nature, but also how they lead to policies rewarding selfishness as dominant patterns of behavior and systematically corrupt our morality. colin mayer (2018) and rebecca henderson (2020) have spotted how maximizing shareholder value has led companies to sacrifice long-term investment and employee income for the benefit of self-enriching owners and top managers, while mostly neglecting the primary societal goals these companies were aimed to fulfill at the outset. joel bakan (2004 bakan ( , 2020 and william lazonick and jang-sup shin (2020) essentially characterize the modern corporation as a predator with the greediest and most temporary shareholders killing 'their' corporations the quickest by pulling out massive financial and other resources and lobbying government with enormous funds to further financialize the economy and deregulate any control the public sector might have over their discretionary operations. meanwhile, the major environmental challenges and issues in decreasing social stability are left for a deeply battered and torn government to resolve. however, if the washington consensus is dead even in washington itself and neoliberalism is not even defended anymore by the political right, what will come in its place? since acquiring and accumulating capital is still the guiding behavior, and an essential basis of existence for many of us, we must assume that capitalism is so deeply ingrained in our organized systems of production and consumption that it will not disappear any time soon. but then, how can or should it be reformed? thus far, a variety of the abovementioned academic disciplines have produced intriguing first building blocks to scaffold such a reform and displace old mainstream elites in their profession from their positions of power. the political and policy sciences, however, have been remarkably absent and appear to be latecomers in the debate on reforming capitalism. although it is understandable that policy scientists shun impactful and potentially explosive ideological terminology and to some extent reflect the grayness of the public bureaucracies they study, there is no way around it this time. if socio-economic and environmental inclusion are to take shape in 'new green deals', if weakened public organizations should no longer be meekly following and pleasing emboldened private firms, but check on them, lead them and guide them towards a more equal and sustainable society, they should be readied for that new position. it falls partly on scholars in politics and policy to offer them conceptual ammunition for this transformation, invigorate their own discipline to perform this task and converse with economists and business scholars on equal terms. in this contribution, i will attempt to take a first step in this direction and synthesize the lines of thought as they have been developed in the new 'purpose paradigm' as it is emerging in economics and business administration. i will focus primarily on these two disciplines with occasional sidesteps to economic sociology and economic methodology, but not touch on other areas. neither will i claim completeness in my presentation of these influential fields or assume that all authors i mention agree with each other on all aspects of their take on capitalism and the direction of its reform. what i do intend to do is present a stylized version of what 'capitalism' currently is, what crucial weaknesses it has and in which direction the new 'purpose paradigm' claims the institutions undergirding it should be transformed to make it more 'inclusive'. the remainder of this article will proceed as follows. section 2 will examine what can be considered the key features of 'capitalism', which of them can be seen as pernicious for generating an inclusive society, which appear unalterable given the path-dependency of socio-economic evolution and which institutions can and should be reformed. in sect. 3, the concept of inclusion will be central. i will investigate its elusiveness, which main environmental and social dimensions it covers and how different dimensions of inclusion may go against each other and necessitate trade-offs. section 4 will then be introducing 'purpose' rather than 'utility maximization' or 'profit maximization' as the main driver underlying human and corporate behavior and require a stakeholder orientation rather than a shareholder orientation within firms to realize inclusive capitalism. in sect. 5, institutional differences across 'varieties of capitalism' around the world will be central, along with the question of how they affect the inclusiveness of their system. explicit recognition of the value of other types of capital beyond finance alone can take them a long way on their transformation to higher levels of environmental and social inclusion. finally, in sect. 6 i will present the main conclusions of my inventory of this new 'purpose paradigm' and the implications this body of literature for the future development of public policy as a discipline. it is not unusual for analysts to use the term capitalism and give it obvious positive or negative connotations. neo-institutional economists such as oliver williamson or liberal sociologists like daniel bell may speak of the 'economic institutions of capitalism' and certain limitations these might have, but they would not for the world want to give them up for fear of opening the floor to non-democratic alternatives (bell 1976; williamson 1990) . neither would business analysts bruno roche and jay jakub (2017) when they explain how corporations can improve their supply chain and enhance their profitability by redirecting their production processes in ways that enhance rather than degrade the human and physical capital of the partners they work with: they call that 'perfecting capitalism'. and as optimistic believers in a bright future beyond capitalism are hard to find, it takes pessimists such conservative urban scholar joel kotkin (2014 kotkin ( , 2020 or neo-marxist sociologist wolfgang streeck (2016) to predict the coming of a neo-feudal society emerging from the ashes of dramatically grown policy quandaries to which governments are no longer able to face up and dramatically grown socio-economic inequalities which can easily be called a societal structure based on new class distinctions. if the optimism of a new communist hosannah is understandably shared by very few, it appears that post-capitalism is rather a synonym for an undefined, grim and inequitable complex of human institutions and constellations that is to be feared but cannot be avoided. and yet, before jumping to conclusions, it is important to make an attempt at impartiality when characterizing the socio-economic institutions that define capitalism. thomas piketty (2017) and katharina pistor (2019) lead the way here by harking back at the essential component of capitalism: capital. once humans invented and deployed currency, this allowed for the use of metal coins not only as a unity convenient exchange and calculation, but also as one of storage. this latter proved especially consequential because it lies at the origin of the drive to collect, invest and collect sometimes unfathomable amounts of money. once early technological development made the production of agricultural surpluses possible, trade grew and accumulation of capital among merchants became possible, the relative importance of business ventures with invested sums started on a steep incline. where and when 'capitalism' officially originated remains a matter of dispute, but there is little disagreement that international explorations and exploitations triggered technological progress and societal upheaval with the accumulation of capital evolving into a key driver underlying the behavior of at least the financially successful segments of humanity. this socio-economic transformation led to modes of production and consumption where the relative positions of the various production factors changed position vis-à-vis each other. feudal societies in which agriculture, the primary economic sector, was the dominant economic function consisted largely of an interplay between land (nature) and labor, with the landlords as owners of the land controlling and squeezing resources from the owners of labor. the activation of capital as a meaningful additional production factor evolved into a tipping point for societal change: while self-sufficient supply of agricultural produce allowed cities and factories to grow, the relative importance of land decreased and it was the relationship between the owners of capital and those of labor that defined production and consumption processes in society: while the relations between landlords and serfs constituted the main axis of interaction in feudal society, the interaction between capitalists and laborers is key in capitalism. capitalism, however, is not a stable or stagnant mode of production. it has gone through various stages: global expansion has deeply affected it and the mediating role of governments has changed over time under the influence of power struggles waged by the main political players (fulcher, 2015) . equally importantly, in recent decades the scarcity of land (nature) has grown under the influence of intensive use of natural resources, the abundance of labor has risen due to dramatic population growth, the availability of financial capital has become less problematic than it was before and the impact of a fourth production factor, knowledge and data, on the other three and its comparative value has grown enormously, leading many to believe we have entered the era of a knowledge economy. farms and factories continue to produce, but they can now be found side by side with offices and laboratories in which the processing of data is the main activity. in other words, the labor input and contribution to gross domestic product of the primary sector (agriculture) has dwindled but it is not negligible, that of the secondary economic sector (manufacturing and mining) was at its zenith a few decades ago, but is now falling rapidly in most parts of the world, while that of the tertiary sector (services) has been augmented accordingly. this transformation of the industrial structures over time has also altered the strata or class-divisions in society. although there are still remains of the landlords, yeomen and day laborers in what is left of the primary sector and capital owners, small manufacturing firms and workers still exist, they have been supplemented by what richard florida (2003 florida ( , 2018 ) calls a creative class of professionals and artists and a service class of lowly skilled, lowly paid and temporary employees with high levels of vulnerability at the labor market. in sum, class structures in twenty-first century capitalism differ markedly from those in the nineteenth century, but they have anything but vanished. joel kotkin's (2020) idea that modern neo-feudal society now consists of an oligarchy (similar to the feudal nobility), a clerisy (analogous to the feudal clergy), yeomen (independent owners of small and medium enterprises) and serfs (members of the working and service classes) may be oversimplified, but ultimately not so farfetched. however much capitalism may have changed over the decades and centuries, according to leading theorists it does have a number of features that really define it as such. it is economic methodologist geoffrey hodgson (2015) that has made a comprehensive historical and conceptual study of its essential and indispensable features. in his summary definition, which i fully embrace here, capitalism has six main characteristics (hodgson, 2015: 259) : (1) a legal system supporting widespread individual rights and liberties to own, buy and sell private property, (2) widespread commodity exchange and markets involving money, (3) widespread private ownership of the means of production by firms producing goods or services for sale in the pursuit of profit, (4) much of production organized separately and apart from the home and family, (5) widespread labor and employment contracts, (6) a developed financial system with banking institutions, the widespread use of credit with property as collateral, and the selling of debt. in my view, none of these features are likely to disappear any time soon, leading to the conclusion that any form of environmentally and socially inclusive economic system will have institutions that change political, legal, organizational or cultural patterns without touching on these six aspects. individual political and legal liberties, markets, private ownership, labor done for organizations based on employment contracts and capital transactions through financial institutions are unlikely to be disbanded, so what is left? arguments that it is vital to realize inclusion and inclusiveness in society have grown considerably more powerful and prominent in recent years. however, as with many popular container concepts, this obviously means different things to different people. given the vastness of the literature on the topic and its dissemination far beyond the realm of economic systems, i will restrict myself to the literature on the institutional aspects relevant to managing capitalism. it is easiest to delineate the inner and outer reaches of inclusion with the help of kate raworth's (2017) conception of the doughnut economy. she defines an outer boundary beyond which economic production, distribution and consumption cannot go: the ecological carrying capacity of planet earth. this implies delving and digging natural resources only to the extent that these can be replenished, emission of harmful substances in air, water and land to levels that keep eco systems intact and eventually the complete closure of reducereuse-recycle flows to prevent water, energy and materials from becoming irreparable waste. one could call maintaining this ecological outer boundary or upper level realizing 'environmental inclusion'. in many ways, implementing environmental inclusion coincides with what is known as the environmental part of the global sustainability agenda and what still others have called the circular economy. the academic sub-disciplines environmental economics (for weak sustainability) and ecological economics (for strong sustainability) have been established for academically rigorous thought on and policy measures promoting environmental inclusion when looking at them from an economic angle. there is a difficulty, however. the former converts any type of natural good or bad into utility or monetary terms and therefore simply reduces nature and its various elements to just their monetary and/or utilitarian value and does so with the help of primarily financial instruments. in contrast, the latter line of thought does honor the multi-dimensionality of various aspects of environmental degradation, but it can rarely present conclusive approaches to policy practice in which human and non-human interests are combined into convincing policy packages. replacing coal with nuclear energy is good for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and preserving precious landscapes, but it otherwise generates intractable and dangerous waste streams and an infinitely small likelihood of an infinitely large explosion disaster. building compact cities with a great many high rise buildings is good for controlling energy consumption and making public transport affordable, but it is a potential threat to local air quality, beneficial direct human access to greenery and it increases the impact of the heat island effect typical of built environments. it is key to understand nuance in these possible interventions to secure environmental inclusion, but the required trade-offs are political rather than economic. environmental inclusion eventually boils down to making important but arbitrary trade-offs among various dimensions inherent in natural resources and the impact of their use on human prosperity. this same multi-dimensionality exists in the socio-economic inner boundary distinguished by raworth. in her view, there exist certain minimum levels for enjoying acceptable quality of life, for humans to spend decent and meaningful lives in their respective societies: so-called socio-economic inclusion. these conditions certainly include material living conditions, but they are also far more comprehensive than wealth and income alone. health, housing and absence of discrimination are for instance also part of the equation here. as inclusionary claims these various facets of sufficient quality of life for all do not universally point in the same direction. nilson ariel espino (2015) uses anthropological argumentation to clarify why groups and individuals in society are often eager to accentuate their distinctiveness from 'lower' others and undertake action and deploy rules to restrict rather than promote inclusion. robin hambleton (2014) makes an impactful plea for maximum levels of social, political and economic inclusion on all counts to generate societal fairness but has to acknowledge that realizing inclusive inclusion is in the end a truly tough game. the former emphasizes limited cultural acceptance of full inclusion, because the privileged see it as going against their interest to accept equality in many aspects of life: they prefer to dress differently or live in separate neighborhoods. the latter presupposes a moral imperative (and in its wake a political desirability) of maximum broad and deep societal inclusion to realize a democratically just society. taking a pragmatic rather than skeptical or idealistic stance, anttiroiko and de jong (2020) formulate the creation of shared prosperity as their key objective in realizing social inclusion and have introduced a list of so-called exclusion grounds: age, mental & physical disability, religion & ideology, race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, income & wealth and location. inclusion is obviously, here as well, a monster with multiple heads. exclusion from (or inclusion in) benefits of any form of capital (human, social, financial, physical or natural) can be based (and often does occur) on any of these grounds. being a minor can be a reason not to be admitted to public buildings, not having sufficient salary or owning real estate as collateral can deprive people from access to financial loans and being homosexual may in some societies preclude people from adopting children. such exclusion can clearly be enforced by legal means, but even without the existence of legal restrictions, de facto exclusion through intentional or unintentional discriminatory practices is also very common. although in political and social debate, it is normally explicitly or implicitly assumed that for all individuals and groups to be included in as many facets of life as possible is a conditio sine qua non for an ethically responsible society and should be considered a political and legal entitlement, in practice it appears that it is frequently impossible if not even sometimes unwished to include all individuals or all groups in all types of events or benefits. voting may not be wise at any age or at any level of mental ability, access to the swimming pool may not be granted to any age and gender at any time, nor can or should all organizational positions be open to any level of educational qualification and nor are all religious facilities comfortable with allowing all individuals of any faith to all of its spiritual services. different nations, cities and organizations structure access to their respective types of capital in sometimes very different ways, but in none of them is access totally open for all to every benefit and neither is it easy to pinpoint which type of inclusionary priority setting is clearly superior to any other. in short, both for ethical and practical reasons inclusion based on trade-offs across various interests but aimed at economic value creation rather than the imposition of inalienable rights and entitlements, generates higher levels of shared prosperity in any given society. if this balancing out among different exclusion grounds and access to benefits is based on a vision adopted and promoted by relevant authorities and/or leadership, but based on broad stakeholder involvement, it is likely to lead to higher levels of active participation of various societal groups in economic value creation. this occurs by recognizing well-known and lesser known talents these groups have and the constructive development and use of which generates higher levels of inclusive prosperity. the behavioral assumptions underlying 'homo economicus' have long been lambasted by many heterodox economists and scholars in other social science disciplines alike. in their latest work 'greed is dead', paul collier and john kay (2020) state the following about him/it: the practical workhorse of market fundamentalism was economic man, an unappealing mammal who responded only to financial incentives. greedy, selfish and potentially lazy, he exemplified possessive individualism. and smart: he knew all that was knowable. in the key phrase used by some economists, he 'knew the model' that described how the world worked. and the model showed that individual greed could be harnessed through the miracle of the market to maximize the potential of the economy. (collier & kay, 2020: 14) . countless numbers of publications had preceded this one roughly offering the same message: utility is an empirically hollow and tautological concept, maximizing is not really how humans behave in daily practice, information is incomplete, precious, biased and potentially false, markets are always imperfect if not perversely organized into collusive monopolies or oligopolies, both production functions and innovation are ill-understood and treated like a black box and while description and explanation are disparaged as analytically inferior scientific activities, predictions are glorified but when produced by orthodox economists prove invariably deeply flawed if not downright harmful. for decades, the well-organized orthodox economists were able to withstand the pressure from more empirically inclined academics by presenting their exempting ceteris paribus clauses, by pointing at the beauty of conceptual parsimony and by vaunting the clarity of the numbers their calculations churned out to policymakers with eyes wide open and arms stretched out to receive them. but the 2008 financial crisis which once again struck the community of confident group-thinking economists like thunder in a clear sky, may well prove to have been a decisive turning point for their credibility. since then, a distinct sense of purpose has emerged among a new generation of critical economists and business scholars. although profit maximization as a behavioral driver among corporations is not completely washed away yet, its existence as the sole motive that makes shareholders tick and, directly responding to their demands, top managers as well, is jettisoned by a growing number of academics and practitioners. instead business scholars such as colin mayer (2018) and rebecca henderson (2020) define the purpose of an organization as the key reason for its existence: what societal problem is it aimed at solving? bicycle repair shops fix bicycles and perform well if their customers are happy with their service delivery, real estate agents do their job well when new owners of a dwelling have made the right choice and accountants may be satisfied with their work efforts if they have dug up most relevant information about another firm's financial operations and fully applied their professional ethic to their report and final judgment, in their case even if the customer is less satisfied. in the end for organizations to fulfill this sense of purpose should prevail over making substantial levels of profit, even if the black figures are also in fine shape. this message is obviously attractive from a moral point of view and to some extent it is also true that many workers and employees are indeed driven by the content of their activities and quality of their efforts at least as much as by the financial gain they can provide to their superiors or shareholders. heterodox economist mariana mazzucato (2021) frames it in a largely similar way: she sees as it the mission that an organization has formulated for itself aimed at creating broad societal value rather than narrowly circumscribed market value. this broader public value should then be brought in line exactly with kate raworth's requirements for a doughnut economy. the difficulty with this approach is at least twofold. the first complication is that organizational purpose cannot always be so unambiguously defined and is subject to change over time. the second is that many institutional and organizational incentives stimulate the maximization of profit and guide corporates towards behavior in which shareholder revenue is the highest good. as a result, corporate executives feel obliged to behave accordingly, squeeze as many funds out of their companies they lead as they possibly can and severely restrict the size of investment programs and the benefits for employees, suppliers and customers. they are also famous for rarely forgetting to look after their own interests. the question then becomes how profit-driven organizations can be turned into purpose-driven ones if profit is much more conveniently established than adherence to purpose and moreover strongly enforced by institutional and organizational rules in place. practitioners and people with hands-on experience in business may easily discard this new purpose-oriented idealism as 'naïve'. but not all is lost. roche and jakub (2017) in their 'completing capitalism' argue that those companies that set up their supply chain in ways that maintain or even enhance human capital and natural capital among the participants in the supply chain are also the ones showing the best financial performance. in other words, environmentally and socially responsible behavior pays off handsomely in profit figures too, and they show this with a number of case studies. the good guys can never lose. in addition, proponents of new institutional winds such as mazzucato (2015 mazzucato ( , 2021 also observe a lasting diminution and underestimation of the value of government and its importance in the creation (as opposed to the capturing) of public value. she proposes to make its position far more prominent again, both in terms of regulation and taxation imposed on corporations and to encourage them to turn their currently narrow focus on market value and shareholder value into one of broad public or societal value and stakeholder value. government should not only regulate and tax the corporate sector, and especially the financial sector, far more strictly than it currently does to prevent it from undertaking operations that go against environmental and social inclusion. it should also take the lead in social and technological innovation again as it used to do before the chicago school took control of economics and its political followers: government should trigger large complex projects again, undertake them in collaboration with corporate and civil society players and pay attention to receive the credits it deserves for its work in being at the origin of many pathbreaking technological innovations. in short, government should once again be a bold market-shaper rather than a timid market-fixer. it should retort accusations of government failure by pointing out that it is because of daring public funds rather than risk-avoiding private finance that society now has the disposal of high-quality health services, global internet and breath-taking imageries of spatial bodies lightyears away from planet earth. furthermore, where would the energy transition and other adjustments to limit climate change be without a steering role of public authorities alongside purpose-driven private companies? what would happen with the necessary education levels of large segments of the population if the private sector was in the driving seat? new-fangled economists and business scholars still see a role for public-private partnerships, but rather than the private sector being the assertive side that is deemed efficient, successful and powerful with authorities merely picking the wining private bidders, it should be public players that take the lead: the days of public sector value creation and private sector value capturing are over; it is now time to curb the hoarding of the rentiers and give wider public values the boost they need to maintain social stability and ecological preservation. but are government and the corporate sector ready for this major switch? virtually all scholars in economics and business administration favoring the new 'purpose paradigm' evidence a strong preference for extensive (or at least enhanced) use of cooperatives in which means of production and finance are shared among the many, and for so-named stakeholder-oriented corporate structures. the latter refers to a style and structure of corporate management in which the various forces adducing resources to the company balance each other's power out and each extract a substantial amount of benefit from it. suppliers earlier in the value chain obtain higher, fair prices for what they deliver, environmental consequences of business operations are explicitly and/or compensated for, priced workers and employees at various level of hierarchy within the company enjoy rising salaries over time if increased revenues allow for it, sufficient funds are reserved for research & development and capacity growth, bank reserves are stuffed, customers enjoy discounts if the situation calls for it and are not systematically bombarded with sophisticated marketing campaigns to secure their mental dependency on products and services they do not truly need for their happiness, and shareholders still receive dividends but they no longer represent the main or only constituency with the primary right to financial and other benefits from the firm. elsewhere this approach to corporate organization and management eventually finds its macro-societal counterpart in a stakeholder-oriented approach to broader socio-economic policies and institutions, as the rhineland model (albert, 1993) , the economics of mutuality (mayer & roche, 2021) or the coordinated market economy (cme) (hall & soskice, 2001) . this stakeholder-oriented approach where various players in and around the organization negotiate over allocation and distribution of resources is normally contrasted with the shareholder-oriented approach, also known as the anglo-saxon model, the economics of extraction or the liberal market economy (lme) in which financial capital clearly dominates all other types of capital. hall and soskice indicate that the economic performance of cmes such as germany and japan, albeit both being of a very different kind, by and large are equal to those of lmes such as the united states and the united kingdom, but their levels of socio-economic inequality (gini-index) are distinctly lower (hall & soskice, 2001) . other scholars, such as lazonick and shin (2020), mazzucato (2018) and streeck (2016) are more of the opinion that neither cmes nor lmes are sufficiently equipped to withstand the turbulent waves of ecological distress and socio-political instability humanity is faced with, but cmes still tend to generate policy choices that are environmentally and socially more inclusive and therefore still come closer to the ideal of an inclusive capitalist system. in reality, there are obviously as many varieties of capitalism as there are nations in the world and it is the total constellation of how each of them establishes and changes the formal and informal institutions for the various key elements in its production and consumption processes: labor market, education system, r&d, welfare system, health system, corporate and investment legislation, intergovernmental relations, environmental regulation, taxation and many others, as well as the ways in which these components dynamically interconnect. there are theoretically as many possible varieties of capitalism as there combinations of all these features, all with somewhat different impact on environmental and social inclusion, all evolving in their own pathdependent ways addressing specific problems they face, how their public and private stakeholders address them in their own context and drawing selective lessons from other varieties of capitalism. even though non-western or unconventional economic systems such as brazil, russia, india and china are normally not included in the typology, their having in place or adoption of crucial principles for capitalism (see sect. 2) also makes them specific varieties of capitalism, regardless of the their political system, nominal public ownership of land or divergent corporate management structures or styles (see also lazonick, 1991; hancke, 2009; musacchio & lazzarini, 2014; clark, 2015) . it would certainly go beyond the scope of this article to delve more deeply into a possible world classification of varieties (if such a typology could be convincingly produced at all), but a promising entry to examine how capitalism can be made more inclusive is by identifying various types of capital and how they are controlled and managed. hodgson (2015) points out that depending on one's theoretical perspective, capital can either be very broadly defined as 'a relatively durable thing or attribute that leads to the satisfaction of wants' or more narrowly as 'the money value of tangible and intangible assets owned by the person or firm, which in principle can be used as collateral and serve to buy or hire resources to produce good or services for commodity exchange ' (2015: 184) . he makes a choice for the latter and indicates that money capital and (physical) goods and services that can conveniently be converted into money may count as 'real' capital in the narrow sense of the word, while human, social and natural capital which cannot be normally be owned, bought and sold at market prices or measured in the aggregate, can only count as capital in the broader sense of the term. however, to fulfill the task of boosting environmental and social inclusion in a capitalist system, it is inevitable also to value the capital contained in human knowledge, social networks and trust, and natural assets and let these be included in the calculation of human prosperity, even if they cannot be considered 'real' capital: they should somehow be conceptualized, measured and institutionalized as being of value too to be taken seriously in a capitalist society. in short, the whole approach to create and secure value and capture it in sustainable and equitable ways requires the incorporation of all types of capital in the prosperity equation: a complex yet urgent assignment. setting an important step in that direction, mayer (2018) , roche and jakub (2017) and mayer and roche (2021) in their various books on prosperity, capitalism and mutuality systematically offer the same message: better business implies following 'purpose' as a yardstick for organizational behavior rather than profit. this implies mapping the full value chain of any product or service, establishing where environmental or social leakage takes place and insuring that at each node not only financial and physical, but also human, social and natural capital are at least kept at the same level and preferably enhanced. they do not only provide the concepts that make their perspective accessible to the broader government and business community, but also offer methods to operationalize their concepts, methods and metrics that allow users to measure their current performance and see where possible improvements lie. they have even developed an oxford certification procedure that enables companies to have themselves inspected and advised in line with the 'economics of mutuality' procedures. their vision is that corporations that do well on all relevant types of capital along the value chain are not only ethically better businesses, but that eventually this also pays off for them in handsome profits and satisfaction among all stakeholders. one may or may not follow the empirical implications of this logic, but skeptics can easily point out that this may be valid in certain niches of the markets or among specific firms, but that less willing corporations make superficial use of these metrics to greenwash their operations and that the laggards, the reluctant and the saboteurs will simply not undertake any action unless active public sector involvement forces them to do so and evasion of corporate responsibility is really no longer an option. the need for regulation, taxation, inspection and public campaigns automatically leads us to the role of government. rebecca henderson (2020) , in spite of devoting most of her book to the need for corporate change, eventually clearly mentions how vital the role of government is in urging the private sector to undergo a profound transformation after which purpose will systematically have replaced profit as the main driver of organizational behavior. in sum, to realize inclusive capitalism leading authors in business administration must demand strong government both to play a leading role in making investments in a sustainable future and to undertake determined political and legal intervention among corporations that refuse to be a part of far-reaching changes required to keep the planet inhabitable for humans and to secure sufficient equality, solidarity and stability in our countries, cities and organizations. but are scholars in the field of politics and government preparing their students for this newly invigorated attitude? the past 15 years or so have been particularly turbulent. the global financial crisis in 2008 and the covid-19 pandemic have called into question many certitudes governments and industry thought they had about the nature of capitalism, democracy and rule of law. the operations of financial institutions and the public authorities supposed to monitor them have blatantly failed to serve the wider society they were believed to serve. the fragility of healthcare systems and political parties in dealing with crisis situations has become more apparent than many of us believed to be possible. both crises could theoretically have been assumed to be blessings in disguise helping government, industry and civil society in most countries realize that a quantum leap in their policies vis-à-vis environmental and social inclusion in their capitalist systems was long overdue. but no such policy overhaul occurred: in spite of incidental pleas made here and there for societal transformation, public and private organizations as well as their citizens have been nearly universally eager to return to the original state before the outbreak of the financial crisis and corona epidemic as quickly as possible and avoid the complications of economic system change. financial institutions were bailed out with funds provided by the tax-paying middle classes and returned to remunerating their shareholders and directors profusely as soon as normality had returned. rather than ensuring that measures were taken to fundamentally alter modes of transport and bring the regulatory and taxation incentives for them more in line with the externalities they inflict on the natural environment, governments offered enormous financial support for their national airlines and endorsed mobility-hungry customers when they rushed to book cheap flights to their favorite holiday destinations as soon as travel restrictions had been lifted. on the face of it, then, it appears that the pessimists have it: it is only a matter of time until kotkin's (2020) era of inegalitarian neo-feudalism becomes a reality and streeck's (2016) prediction that post-capitalism will not be communism but a nondescript dark age clearly does not seem far off the mark. but this does not have to be the end of the story. a host of forward-looking economists and business administration theorists have recently woken up to the new challenge and jettisoned many assumptions about their discipline which they had been taught and taken for granted for many years. they have begun to analyze the functioning of capitalism at the macro, meso and micro levels and infused it with a hue of empirical curiosity rather than self-confident model-making and enriched the world with the beginnings of what may well turn out to be the new purpose paradigm: corporate organizations do not and should not engage in profit maximization as the highest objective but return to the mission that brought them into being in the first place, which is good customer service through the delivery of quality goods and services that take the impact their creation has on the human and natural environment fully into account. many leading theorists have made their coming out and engaged in both debunking old myths and proposing new metrics for making purpose the cornerstone of new forms of accounting and behavioral standards in the corporate world. this is a significant theoretical development of which the both the empirical merits and practical impact remains to be seen, but it definitely carries the stamp of a moral awakening that a more inclusive subspecies of capitalism sorely needs. what these theorists also do is clamor for a far more pro-active and daring government than they currently observe. if the coalition of the willing in the corporate world is to be effective in turning around the current shape of capitalism and bring it in line with that of a sustainable and egalitarian society, it requires pro-active, investing and market-shaping interventions from public organizations that level the playing field in view of these new conditions. government as it functions now is simply too weak, too insecure and too permeated with neoliberal policy assumptions. adherents of the purpose paradigm in economics and business know something urgently needs to change in politics, public policy, political theory and public policy theory. however, they are insufficiently aware of the internal operations within the public sector to tell what needs to change and how this can be changed. public policy as an academic discipline is painfully lagging behind in its recognition that inclusive capitalism is more than managing policy networks, preparing packages of policy instruments, organizing open tenders for efficient services and analyzing discourses alone. capitalism has always been a matter of money and installing power to collect and hoard it. an inclusive future needs more profound interventions of the public sector into the private sector to allow the good half of the latter to defeat the bad half of the latter. without such regulatory and financial interventions based on solid legal and organizational foundations, it remains very probably that the bad corporate half will win. capitalism is not a state, but a process and one in which public policy can and should play a role. this contribution has consisted of an overview of recent heterodox developments in economic and business administration. it has identified the characteristics of a new purpose paradigm and sketched its challenges. it has presented the crucial elements of capitalism and inclusion and indicated that bringing these two concepts together is the only way to make our physical and social environments truly sustainable, but acknowledged that approaching this ideal requires value trade-offs that may look different around the world. in that sense, there are not one but many varieties of inclusive capitalism around the world. finding an appropriate balance between pro-active public sector intervention to correct harmful private sector practices and corporate protection from arbitrary government infringement is not the same everywhere depends on specific institutional path-dependencies. but it is obvious that scholars in public policy should take heed of the abovementioned new theoretical developments in economics and business administration, come to a deeper and more critical understanding of capitalism and its institutions, their impact on processes of environmental and social exclusion and especially the role of government organizations in creating and recreating them. charles lindblom, undeniably an early protagonist in public policy, was known for (1) his awareness that policymaking is essentially a gradual and messy process of muddling through incomplete and ambiguous information and divergent interests through mutual adjustment (lindblom & woodhouse, 1992) and (2) his accurate and painful analysis of how pluralism in interest representation among various stakeholders was seriously impaired by the overwhelmingly influential lobby and impact of the corporate world on politicians and civil servants leading to systematic bias in the making of important political choices (lindblom, 1990) . lindblom was an incrementalist when it came to how information is processed and an elitist in the way he looked at the distribution of power in political economies. he has often been vilified for producing two contradictory perspectives of politics and policy, but there is no real contradiction here. the world is indubitably complex and dynamic, but this does not exonerate policymakers and policy analysts from the duty always to bear the needs of the duped, underprivileged and the children in mind. let lindblom's brilliant paradoxality be the guiding light for a thorough revision of public policy theory and practice. capitalism can survive without it, but it is questionable whether an inclusive variety of it can. capitalism against capitalism licence to be bad: how economics corrupted us the inclusive city: the theory and practice of creating shared prosperity the corporation: the pathological pursuit of profit and power the new corporation: how 'good' corporations are bad for democracy. vintage books. bell, d. (1976). the cultural contradictions of capitalism the evolution of economic system: varieties of capitalism in the global economy the future of capitalism greed is dead: politics after individualism building the inclusive city: theory and practice for confronting urban segregation the rise of the creative class: and how it is transforming work, leisure, community and every-day life the new urban crisis: gentrification, housing bubbles, growing inequality and what we can do about it capitalism: a very short introduction varieties of capitalism: the institutional foundations of comparative advantage leading the inclusive city: place-based innovation for a bounded planet debating varieties of capitalism: a reader reimagining capitalism in a world on fire conceptualizing capitalism: institutions, evolution, future the new class conflict the coming of neo-feudalism: a warning to the global middle class business organization and the myth of the market economy predatory value extraction: how the looting of the business corporation became the us norm and how sustainable prosperity can be restored inquiry and change: the troubled attempt to understand and shape society the policy-making process prosperity: better business makes the greater good putting purpose into practice: the economics of mutuality the entrepreneurial state: debunking public versus private sector myths the value of everything: making and taking in the global economy reinventing state capitalism: leviathan in business, brazil and beyond capital in the 21st century the code of capital: how the law creates wealth and inequality doughnut economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist completing capitalism: heal business to heal the world how will capitalism end?: essays on a failing system the economic institutions of capitalism the author is indebted to the erasmus initiative for the dynamics of inclusive prosperity (doip) for offering time and funds to undertake this study and his academic peers and colleagues in and around erasmus university rotterdam in general and doip in particular for their inspiration. key: cord-0054072-ulffohh2 authors: jandrić, petar; ford, derek r. title: postdigital ecopedagogies: genealogies, contradictions, and possible futures date: 2020-12-19 journal: postdigit sci educ doi: 10.1007/s42438-020-00207-3 sha: 390bd77fea3fc4de28197b83624d0c843ea4a3d7 doc_id: 54072 cord_uid: ulffohh2 this paper charts some genealogies, challenges, and directions for experimenting with the utopic postdigital ecopedagogies demanded by our present (post)pandemic reality. these are messianic—rather than prophetic—utopias that exist not as proclamations or programmes for a distant future but as potentialities immanent in the irreducible excess of the present. while their roots most clearly emanate from the freirean-inspired ecopedagogy movement, we conceptualize ecopedagogies instead as educational forms that emerge from, negotiate, debate, produce, resist, and/or overcome the shifting and expansive postdigital ecosystems from and to which we write and think. these are expansive ecosystems of humans, postdigital machines, nonhuman animals, minerals, objects, and more; ecosystems that are overdetermined by new forms of ontological hierarchies and capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. by charting some of the potential lineages, directions, contradictions, and challenges—and by proposing potential lines of educational praxis—we lay a basis for reinvigorated fields of inquiry that moves beyond the existing postdigital literature on the current pandemic. as we write these words in november 2020, the covid-19 pandemic approaches its first anniversary. reflecting on our early responses to the pandemic, 1 we cannot but notice significant changes in our thinking and feeling over the past months. during our first lockdowns in spring, the pandemic seemed like a terrible event that we needed to get over with. yet our bad feelings had been strongly alleviated by a tremendous sense of local and global solidarity, and the crisis felt like a unique historical opportunity for desperately needed changes in global capitalism (jandrić 2020a (jandrić , 2020b mañero 2020) . as we approach the end of the year, many of these solidarity projects continue-and have been intensified in the usa in light of the uprisings against racism and police terror-yet many people are just exhausted. beginning with our ambiguous and precarious situation, what we need to run to now is the development of more sustainable and just ways of being. this is a global cognitive and affective project, which stretches beyond environment and indeed education. we need critique and criticism as well as courage, creativity, imagination, hope, and organization. we need new goals and new practical measures towards reaching these goals. we need new utopias, new pedagogical and political programs, designs, and experiments that fit our pandemic age of the (post-)anthropocene. prior to the covid-19 outbreak, there was no shortage of crises facing our world and way of being; crises which social movements and researchers were analysing and trying to move beyond. indeed, revolutionary praxis has always emerged in response to and in anticipation of crises. in our age of the anthropocene, crises have multiple planetary impacts; politics and economy cannot be thought of without the environment. now more than ever, we need to think seriously and creatively about the postdigital pedagogies that can articulate, embody, advance, and debate new presents and futures. according to tyson lewis (2010: 234) , the freirean critical utopia serves 'both a cognitive (critique of the present through imaginative reconstruction of the future) and affective (opening up the possibility for hope, for desiring differently) function'. speaking of the cognitive function, we urgently need to develop a better understanding of living systems and their interactions with technology at all scales-from viruses, through human beings, to earth's ecosystem. focusing on the affective function, we need to align our hopes and desires with our (post-)anthropogenic reality, acknowledging and negating our affectivity-our capacity to affect and to be affected by others known and unknown, human and machine, animal and mineral, subjective and objective, cognitive and affective. crucially, this utopia is messianic as opposed to prophetic because the latter is located in the future and takes place according to chronological time, while the former is located in the now. more specifically, critical freirean utopia 'is a creative time that exceeds chronological time by introducing future eternity as an internal surplus to the everyday' (lewis 2010: 238) . situated between being and becoming but without disparaging the past or adhering to linear models of development or time, utopian pedagogies have an urgent and important role in intervening in our (post)-pandemic reality. given this, it seems useful to outline some of the lineages from which we might draw, extend, sublate, subvert, or otherwise tinker with as we think and act out new ecopedagogies, lineages that often-but not always-crosspollinate and merge. our use of the term ecopedagogies, while unavoidably linked with the first group of literature we broach, are educational praxes that are not strictly about or for the physical environment. instead, it names a set of pedagogies that emerge from, negotiate, debate, and produce the shifting and expansive postdigital ecologies within which we write, think, and act. we use ecopedagogies in the plural to keep the field open to various understandings and interpretations. in what follows, we will outline some themes and fields of inquiry that need to be taken into account en route to develop new postdigital ecopedagogies fit for our (post-)anthropogenic and pandemic moment in a liberatory manner. as a group of diverse scholars who met in 2018 to push the concept of the postdigital into the humanities and social sciences wrote: 'the postdigital is hard to define; messy; unpredictable; digital and analog; technological and non-technological; biological and informational. the postdigital is both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation.' (jandrić et al. 2018: 895) . thinking the postdigital as an ecosystem means that they-like all ecosystems-are not stagnant or fixed but living, breathing, expanding, and fluid. they are both conditions and questions of our nonchronological present. postdigital ecopedagogies are connected to but not determined by the ecopedagogy movement that extends critical pedagogy to environmental issues. while we soon broaden some of the contours of postdigital ecopedagogies, we find it helpful to begin with this connection. officially founded at the second earth summit held in rio de janeiro in 1992, the ecopedagogy movement's underlying ideas and principles can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s. as it often happens, two key approaches to ecopedagogy can be illustrated using the works of critical pedagogy's key figures from that period: ivan illich and paulo freire. in deschooling society, illich starts from a deep critique of institutionalization of society. 'medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work' (illich 1971: 3 ). an institutionalized society, inevitably, has institutionalized education. 'the pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.' (illich 1973: 3) institutionalized education reduces human beings to producers and consumers, which makes it dehumanized. furthermore, institutionalized society is firmly based on economic growth, which inevitably leads to ecological destruction. in response, illich makes the radical proposal of replacing institutionalized education with non-institutional largescale educational infrastructure which strongly resembles today's internet [for a detailed discussion of this argument, see jandrić (2014) ]. in tools for conviviality illich expands this critique to human relationships with our tools. his analysis begins with a typification of six main hazards associated with technologies of his times: biological degradation, radical monopoly, overprogramming, polarization, obsolescence, and frustration (illich 1973) . based on the analyses of these hazards, illich proposed the concept of conviviality. ' [o] nly within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom.' (illich 1973: 12) acknowledging these limits, illich proposed a 'triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity'. a society based on this triadic relationship would mean that technologies are subservient to the new political collectivity. illich used the concept of conviviality as 'a technical term to designate a modern society of responsibly limited tools' (illich 1973: 12) (emphasis from the original). convivial tools cannot be produced within capitalism-therefore, illich develops a deeper concept of convivial reconstruction. it is worthwhile to note that the term '"convivial" is used by illich with a special meaning', which does not correspond to typical dictionary definitions, and is associated 'with tools for joint inquiry and action' (goodyear 2020). freire's work is much more focused to development needs and to the practical role of technology. freire often used the latest technologies such as slide projectors in his projects, and during the early 1990s, he established the central laboratory for educational informatics in sao paolo which heavily invested in digital equipment (kahn and kellner 2007: 437; freire 1993: 152) . however, freire never developed a full theory of technologies. his sporadic comments on technology in early writings such as pedagogy of the oppressed indicate a strong instrumentalist position 2 : '[i]t is not the media themselves which i criticize, but the way they are used' (freire 1972: 136) . in pedagogy of the heart, freire (1997: 56) sees technology as a capitalist enterprise: '[t]oday's permanent and increasingly accelerated revolution of technology, the main bastion of capitalism against socialism, alters socioeconomic reality and requires a new comprehension of the facts upon which new political action must be founded'. to a point, freire echoes some broader concerns explored by illich: for example, that technologies can 'create a cult of worship' (freire 2000: 62) . yet unlike illich, freire never explicitly connected digital technology with planetary ecological concerns. it is fair to say that freire's promethean view of technology as something that needs to be utilized for a good purpose, demystified, or even conquered is starkly opposed to illich's epimethean approach which seeks broad planetary balance. 3 in spite of these theoretical issues, freire's work was much more practical and applicable than illich's utopian ideas, and it is hardly a surprise that his views were built into then-emerging fields such as critical media literacy (kellner and share 2007) and ecopedagogy (kahn 2010; misiaszek 2020; misiaszek and torres 2019) . in critical pedagogy, ecoliteracy, and planetary crisis: the ecopedagogy movement, richard kahn outlines the program for ecopedagogy which focuses on (1) 'ecoliteracy programs both within schools and society'; (2) creating scholar-activist coalitions to promote ecopedagogies; and (3) promoting 'critical dialogue and self-reflexive solidarity across the multitude of groups that make up the educational left' (kahn 2010: 27-28 ). kahn's book was a key contribution to today's development of the ecopedagogy movement based on freire's ideas. according to misiaszek (2020: 748) , '[e]copedagogy emerged from freirean, popular education models of latin america (misiaszek 2011 (misiaszek , 2018 gadotti 2008c; gadotti & torres 2009; gutierrez & prado 2008; kahn 2010) , that center environmental teaching on critically understanding the connections between social and environmental violence'. therefore, today's ecopedagogies are 'reinventions of paulo freire's work and the topic of an unfinished book due to his untimely death' (misiaszek 2020: 748) . this fascination with freire's work runs so deeply, that greg misiaszek and carlos alberto torres even wrote a missing 'fifth chapter' of freire's pedagogy of the oppressed focused to ecopedagogy (misiaszek and torres 2019) . already in 2010, kahn (2010: 27) warned about 'a possible historical over-reliance upon freirean positions within the field of critical pedagogy'. kahn does not imply that freire's works have lost their relevance; he simply (and rightfully) points out that we now live in a very different world. for others, critical pedagogy remains too tethered to (a particular interpretation of) freire, too muddled and liberalized, too focused on critique, too anti-communist, and too divorced from revolutionary praxis to continue providing an adequate basis for political pedagogy (e.g. ford 2017; malott 2016). we use political pedagogy here to designate all forms of explicitly political educational praxis. whether or not one chooses to endorse, develop, or leave this kind of freirean thought, it is evident that changes within the relationship between and within the human-nature-machinic require a serious reconsideration. while we are currently strongly focused to the covid-19 pandemic, the argument equally applies to a wide array of environmental questions (jandrić 2020b) . today, the world's strong reliance on various digital and biotechnologies requires a deep reinvention of ecopedagogies in the light of recent socio-technological developments which embody emancipatory and oppressive tendencies. ecopedagogies, in fact, might be thought better as exopedagogies, which envision and enact education as a project of exodus (ford 2019; lewis 2012; lewis and kahn 2010) . exodus is neither an escape or withdrawal from our common ecologies, nor a form of opposition or negation-which can end up affirming that which they oppose. instead, exodus is a reconfiguration of proposed alternatives, thus shifting the very terrain on which we operate. in this way, exopedagogies dwell in the endless indeterminacies of the postdigital age, the crossing and hybridization of borders between the human and nonhuman, the analog and digital, the subject and object (ford 2020a (ford , 2020b . as lewis and kahn (2010: 11) put it, 'the prefix "exo" designates the beyond, an education out of bounds, whose location resides at the very limits of the recognizable-where we learn to study the zone of uninhabitability that indicates the untimely arrival of a swarm of monsters and strangers'. to put this in the postdigital era, we could turn to dominic pettman (2016: 3) who writes that today we are 'suspended between bot and not, between anonymous and tagged, generic and specific'. we cannot divorce ourselves from the earth, animate and inanimate beings and objects, algorithms and postdigital platforms, and the political and social restrictions and possibilities therein. moreover, we cannot treat these as distinct entities and must instead engage them as indeterminate ecosystems that require ecopedagogies. during the past few decades, much of political pedagogy has either ignored emerging techno-social challenges or has approached them using one or another determinist and/ or instrumentalist position. in the meantime, philosophers such as andrew feenberg, christian fuchs, and many others have built on a body of work from karl marx to frankfurt school of social science and developed nuanced approaches to human relationships with (today's) technology. in a recent article, feenberg explains the relevance of this philosophy to political pedagogy: the study of technology in philosophy and the social sciences is politically relevant today as never before. much discussion in these fields turns on refuting cognitive errors such as the notion that nature can be 'conquered,' or that a 'great divide' isolates human beings from nature. while it is useful to refute erroneous views, a focus on beliefs tends to put the onus on the human species. cognitive errors do not explain the power structures that are actually responsible for the civilizational crisis we are living today. (feenberg 2020) in the context of scientific research, critical philosophy of technology gave birth to the field of inquiry called science and technology studies or science, technology, and society studies (sts). sts explores complex relationships between culture, politics, technological innovation, and society. it claims that all knowledge and technology is socially constructed and reaches all the way into questions pertaining to collective decision-making including but not limited to democracy. a prominent theoretical and methodological approach in sts is actor-network theory (ant), which focuses to networks and relationships. building on various posthumanist theories, ant gives equal agency to human and nonhuman actors (latour 2005) ; in more traditional disciplines such as sociology, this causes some controversy. another theme in sts is garrett hardin's (1968) concept of 'tragedy of the commons' and its application to emerging commons such as the internet. recent developments in sts look into transformations such as commodification and assetization of various public goods (birch and muniesa 2020). sts research reaches all the way to the nature of human beings and often ending up in various posthumanist (fuller 2011 ) and transhumanist (fuller and lipinska 2014) approaches. insights from critical philosophy of technology and science and technology studies are important for adequately understanding power structures and techno-social relationships that shape today's society, critical epistemologies, struggle against various forms of epistemicide, self-reflective solidarity, etc. in our age of the (post-)anthropocene, these traditional concerns of political pedagogy are especially relevant for development of new postdigital ecopedagogies. during our constant interactions with various digital systems, we produce huge streams of data. these large streams, often called the big data, feed algorithmic artificial intelligence (ai) systems, which 'are provided [by human programmers] with some initial rules of behaviour, and then they are 'taught' by large datasets. then, a computer independently establishes various connections between input data and produces "intelligent" solutions to new problems in non-predetermined ways' (jandrić 2019: 32) . this interplay between big data and algorithms is used to sell us products, calculate our taxes and eligibility for social and other services, monitor our health, assess our students, and so on. algorithmic processes are far from neutral, as 'the complex systems of data production and representation co-constitute the very systems they purport to describe, and in this process, they often embed, replicate or reinforce pre-existing attitudes and prejudices' (jones 2018: 49) . furthermore, digital technologies are very carbon intensive; according to a recent report, computers now cause more carbon emissions than global aviation industry (the shift project 2020). depending on their focus, authors describe these changes using various names including data capitalism (fuchs 2019) , algorithmic capitalism (peters and jandrić 2018: 32) , communicative capitalism (dean 2009; ford 2018) , surveillance capitalism (zuboff 2019), technoscientific capitalism (birch and muniesa 2020), high-tech and low-pay capitalism (marcy 2009 ), and more. yet a common thread concerns the changing relationship of knowledge within capitalism and the ways that knowledge-even oppositional and critical knowledge-can be captured within the circuits of surplus production (ford 2021) . critiques of capitalism have always been at the heart of many political pedagogical projects, and engaging them as postdigital ecopedagogies can mitigate against the risk of absorption within the surplus of capital rather than the excessive surplus of utopia. artificial intelligence, moreover, directly pierces the heart of so much educational thought, organized as it is around knowledge and intelligence, whether it be liberal, conservative, critical, radical, and so on. in inhuman power, nick dyer-witheford, atle mikkola kjøsen, and james steinhoff question and explore not only what artificial intelligence is but, more interestingly, what intelligence itself is. they note, for example, what they call the 'ai effect', whereby 'as soon as ai can do something, it is no longer considered to require intelligence' (2019: 9). in other words, the ai effect is a constant destabilization of what we think of what we think, and therefore of who it is that we think can think. intelligence and knowledge, under capitalism, are defined and valued according to their ability to contribute to the production and circulation of capital, and are therefore equated with speed, efficiency, and development. ecopedagogies have to wrestle with the implications of such definitions and their destabilizations, the extent to which we should embrace or reject the very idea that intelligence could be 'artificial' or 'organic', embodied in humans, machines, and other objects (or in the relations between and within them). we need to seriously consider the material side of digital technologies, including their carbon footprint, and, of course, decide upon further course of action with existing ai technologies and platforms. during the second half of the twentieth century, we slowly but surely digitized every kind of traditional information source-books, music, films, and even human genome. these days, the focus of digitization has taken a turn towards the biological. in 2008, craig venter declared that we are in a new era defined by a shift from decades of 'digitizing biology' to 'trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology, with designing and synthesizing life', and asking if it's possible to 'regenerate life' or 'create new life, out of this digital universe' (venter 2008) . in his 2012 presentation, 'what is life? a 21st century perspective', venter responds to his own question: 'we can digitize life, and we generate life from the digital world. … scientists send digital code to each other instead of sending genes or proteins. … it's faster and cheaper to synthesize a gene than it is to clone it, or even get it by federal express.' (venter 2012) these scientific developments are inextricably linked with political economy. we now live in the age of bio-informational capitalism 'based on a self-organizing and selfreplicating code that harnesses both the results of the information and new biology revolutions and brings them together in a powerful alliance that enhances and strengthens or reinforces each other' (peters 2012: 105) . in our pandemic times, the idea that various techno-social systems such as 'codes and ecosystems in information, publishing, education and emerging knowledge (journal) systems' (peters and besley 2020; peters, jandrić, and mclaren 2020) can be described using our insights into viral behaviour, now also attracts a lot of attention. for instance, 'the covid-19 pandemic has sparked a viral research response' (jandrić 2020c: 534) , thus exemplifying the wider 'dialectic between biological viruses and information viruses, or more generally between inanimate matter and life' . bioinformation, its emerging political economy, and viral behaviour of many social phenomena, are crucial for development of new ecopedagogies. as tony sampson (2012: 4) insists, the biomedical concepts of virality are not mere metaphors for describing human behaviour. instead, virality 'is all about the forces of relational encounter in the social field', and is 'located in an epidemiological space in which a world of things mixes with emotions, sensations, affects, and moods'. this, again, points us to our postdigital age in which the boundaries between the human and nonhuman are as porous and up for debate as ever. digital viruses, for example, initiate a ceaseless creation, probing, breaching, and reconstruction of knowledges, subjects, and systems. the unknown becomes the organizing principle of immunology, such that 'the binary filtering of immunological self and nonself exceeds abstract diagrammatic forces" and emerges as 'part of the concrete relations established between end users and the software they encounter' (134). this, again, speaks to the cognitive and affective project of contemporary ecopedagogies, in that these flows are prior to and outside of any mind that might make sense of them, let alone capture, control, or direct them. such ecopedagogies might acknowledge that viruses as teaching forces themselves are at times more agential than any authoritarian teaching might be. while critical pedagogy projects have generally engaged with critiques of capitalism, others have insisted on the international, global, or transnational nature of capitalism and its intrinsic relationship to colonialism and imperialism (e.g. erevelles 2011; ford 2017; grande 2004; malott 2016) . sandy grande, for example, builds on revolutionary critical pedagogy-particularly that of mclaren-while attending to how its concepts of development and progress, which are based on linear chronology, can exclude and dismiss 'indigenous cultures as "primitive" or precapitalist entities' (grande 2004: 88) . indeed, such a caution and critique could be waged against many strands of postdigital scholarship if they do not acknowledge the uneven development and impact of digital technologies, including their production, distribution, use, and impacts. in his critique of the anti-communism of critical pedagogy, curry malott (2016) importantly shows that anti-imperialism is also a theory and movement against colonialism and settlercolonialism and that the struggle for socialism entails-at its very core-the struggle for the self-determination of oppressed nations, including those within the usa. these struggles must not be ignored or condemned but rather looked to as inspiration for our own struggles. it is interesting to note that freire himself too has taken this perspective, not only by calling on v. i. lenin, fidel castro, and che geuvara in pedagogy of the oppressed (freire 1972) , but also in his pedagogy in process: letters to guinea-bissau, where he looked to the pedagogy of amílcar cabral (freire 2016) . in a globally networked postdigital age, which has transformed global structures of imperialism, settler-colonialism, and colonialism without changing their core features, issues of digital sovereignty come into play. these issues concern 'the relation between sited territories of local communities and the network systems that link us to global communications' as 'deeply shaped by geopolitical projects, corporate mechanisms, and governmental agencies' (labelle 2018: 82). this is why, for example, the bolivian government under evo morales began constructing sovereign-that is, independent from western political and corporate control-digital infrastructure. this also explains the recent us-led opposition to china's peaceful rise on the world stage insofar as it could provide an alternative route that would free them from the domination of western imperialism. today's ecopedagogies cannot be thought of without considering these recent transformations, without theorizing and experimenting adequate responses and resistances to them, without taking all forms of exploitation and all systems of oppression into account, and without grasping the cognitive and affective consequences they have on our lives and being. feminism is a broad concept which includes a wide range of theories, social movements, and practices aimed at combatting gender-based oppression. while feminism has always questioned and challenged what gender is and the reasons why it still dominantly remains a fundamental grid through which to view the human and the social, it has increasingly taken up questions of technology and intersectionality. some strands of feminist theory have for decades now been at the vanguard of postdigital thinking. the best example is undoubtedly donna haraway's 1985 article, 'a cyborg manifesto', originally published in socialist review, in which she famously declared that, 'in short, we are cyborgs', that cyborgs are 'our ontology' and the basis of 'our politics' (haraway 2006: 118) . the cyborg is not, in other words, a metaphor. by abandoning the dualisms of essence/construction, public/private, mind/body, nature/ culture, and human/technology that constrain thought and politics, the cyborg signals the postdigital ecologies through which subjects and identities are produced, oppressed, and potentially liberated. more recently, others have considered the contemporary digitally networked ecologies of feminism. one example is what some call the 'fourth wave' of feminism. these focus on 'technological innovations such as social media', which enable feminism to consider micro and macro politics by 'situating their individual lived experiences within broader global discourses' (parry, johnson, and wagler 2019: 1). this is evident in 'the number of collective movements based on social, economic, and political agendas'. probably the best example of the 'resistance and challenges to sexism, patriarchy and other forms of oppression via feminist uptake of digital communication' is the #metoo movement (mendes, ringrose, and keller 2018: 236-237) , which has significantly expanded the traditional limits of feminist activism. none of this can escape the contradictions of bioinformational capitalism, whether they be the network effect (dean, medak, and jandrić 2019: 223-224) , which creates a celebrity culture based on principles of viral modernity, or the way in which feminism could become just one of many possible and commodifiable identities. in its mainstream instances, the fourth wave of feminism has thus become co-constitutive with new capitalisms. on the other hand, harriet kimble wrye (2009: 187) shows that fourth wave feminism also reaches beyond mere expansion of traditional feminist struggle into new media and addresses 'the limits of materialism; the need to turn from concerns about "me" to concern for the planet and all its beings; and the sense that, for us in the fourth wave, what is most important is to put ourselves in the service of the world'. the fourth wave of feminism directly speaks to the bioinformational challenge of new capitalisms, viral modernity, (critical) posthumanism and transhumanism, and other postdigital and ecopedagogical challenges. by moving from dualities to networks, postdigital feminisms also name the ecologies through which postdigital ecopedagogies might intervene. intermixing significantly with the trajectories in the former sections, black and antiracist scholarship has insisted on the centrality of racial categories within knowledge, research, and pedagogy, although it has predominantly centred on us and western education. from critical race theories (see delgado and stefancic 2001 for an overview) to critical whiteness studies and abolitionist pedagogy, racism and white supremacy can no longer be viewed as individualist attitudes. at the same time, the proliferation (and transformation) of intersectionality theory has productively disrupted and reconfigured this scholarship. in 'mapping the margins', kimberle crenshaw (1991 crenshaw ( : 1296 presented intersectionality 'as a way of framing the various interactions of race and gender in the context of violence against women of color', while noting that it 'might be more broadly useful as a way of mediating the tension between assertions of multiple identity and the ongoing necessity of group politics'. intersectionality is a way of understanding and thinking through the matrixes through which identities are constructed to advance the 'necessity' of political coalitions across identities-and not to further fracture political movements. crenshaw was building on identity politics, a concept attributed to the combahee river collective, a group of socialist black feminists organizing and researching together in the 1970s. in the 'combahee river collective statement', they state that their identity politics were rooted in collectivity and solidarity and an extension of marxism (combahee river collective 1977) . advocating neither factionalization nor uncritical unity, identity politics as initially formulated was precisely about building alliances and solidarity-ecologies of resistance-insisting that this cannot be done without considering these complexities and contradictions (see taylor 2017) . the extent to which research in this trajectory has accurately or inaccurately interpreted identity politics and intersectionality is up for debate, and it runs the same risks identified in the previous section: the network effect and absorption within bioinformational capitalism. a revolutionary project of this will be fraught with tensions but will undoubtedly entail building the kinds of alliances that crenshaw and the combahee river collective proposed. in addition, it will entail debating and understanding the historical origins and transformations of these structures and systems (see alexander 2010 and puryear 2013 for contrasting political histories and trajectories). wherever one stands in these debates, the shape and components of ecosystems based on national and identity oppression inescapable and urgent problems for ecopedagogies to consider and address. posthumanism is a common name for a wide array of theories which reject human dominance, and often human uniqueness, in nature. it responds to the crisis in historicity, rejects generality of human knowledge (intersecting with sts), and is strongly interested in the boundaries of our understanding of the human (see savin-baden's [forthcoming 2021] work on postdigital humans). transhumanism accepts many features of posthumanism yet retains human exceptionalism: 'transhumanism is an extension of the humanist project, whereas posthumanism is critical of humanism' (bayne in jandrić 2017: 197) . critical posthumanism focuses to the intersections between human and nonhuman agency, and 'conceptualises knowledge and capacities as being emergent from the webs of interconnections between heterogeneous entities, both human and nonhuman' (jones 2018: 47) . in ant, this leads to radical equality between human and nonhuman actors (latour 2005) . for rosi braidotti, what makes posthuman studies critical has to do with its relationship to the developments in capitalism outlined above. while her position is unclear in that at times she embraces posthumanism's alliance with cognitive capitalism while at other times she insists it keep its distance, her ultimate wager is that posthuman knowledge and thought pose too great a challenge. when the human and nonhuman become collective thinking subjects, they create 'forms and subjects of knowledge that cannot fully be captured by the schizoid speeds and acceleration of capital' (braidotti 2019: 103) . while projects critical of humanism have a long history in educational theory and practice, over the last few decades, they have gained increasing prominence in a range of subdisciplines. it's not just the decentering of the student-teacher relationship or the inclusion of nonhuman actors as pedagogical agents that's pursued, but a complete reconceptualization and reorganization of the educational process overall. indeed, during and after the covid-19 lockdowns, where digital communication is at a historical peak, these new contours are crucial for the development of ecopedagogies. one of the most important insurgencies in educational theory and practice has undoubtedly been the emergence of critical disability studies. emerging with the distinction between the medical model of disability-which locates disability as a problem within the individual-and the social model of disability, which locates disability as the organization of society that turns an impairment into a disability, the field has since moved beyond this binary, rejecting the idea strict biology/sociology distinction. moreover, erevelles (2011) considers disability not as another identity but as the matrix through which identity-based oppression occurs: by placing certain groups closer to or further from 'the human'. as we have witnessed militarized responses to the spread of the pandemic, critical disability studies push us to acknowledge the fiction of immunity in the first place. viruses circulate in and between beings, which means that 'bodies are not closed systems-as bodies, we take in the other in all manner of ways-exchanges of breath, blood, saliva, and more' (ferri 2018: 7) . ferri writes based on her own embodied state of autoimmunity about the ways that one's own body is not one's own body, can be pitted against itself, both defendant and victim. autoimmunity here is not a disease to be cured but an opportunity to grasp the ecologies through which we 'are mutually dependent and often indistinguishable from one another'(14). the war to which mcguire (2016), ferri (2018), sampson (2012) , and others (e.g., wagener 2020) refer is also not just a metaphor. indeed, the ongoing history of the oppression of the disabled is one of repression, violence, and murder; one tied up in the quantifying and bioinformational logics of capitalism. for instance, stephanie wheeler locates the quantification of the subject in the 1800s as a primary motor in the eugenics movement. 'during this time', wheeler writes, 'anthropometrics became the tool that determined the need for this editing' necessary to distinguish, segregate, and eliminate non-normative ways of being (wheeler 2017: 380) . anthropometric technologiesnow fully postdigital-continue to produce ontological hierarchies of being, orders of exclusion and (differential) inclusion that also produce surplus value for bioinformational capitalism. after all, as nirmala erevelles (2000) shows, the demonstration of capacity, citizenship, and so on are motivated capitalist demands for efficiency, productivity, and exchange value. as such, ecopedagogies should not be organized as development processes of acquiring knowledge but rather entail errant and wandering movements that, as the 'ai effect' does, challenge and explode our conceptions of knowledge-perhaps even queer them. while 'queer' has been taken up-reclaimed some might say-as an identity, an expansive body of literature foregrounds queerness as that which, as lee edelman puts it, can never be an identity but 'can only ever disturb one' (edelman 2004: 17) . while there are plenty of detractors from edelman's general arguments, the virality of queerness continues to infect queer theory. queerness is an unstable and opaque relation, what sara ahmed examines as a phenomenology. here, queerness is not in the body but a capacity of the body as it moves throughout the world in errant yet not entirely free ways. repetition makes bodies and spaces 'straight, which allow[s] straight bodies to extend into them, such that the vertical axis appears in line with the axis of the body' (ahmed 2006: 92) . queer bodies disrupt such repetitions and expose the developmental lines through their deviance. mel chen offers an opening to such a pedagogy while discussing their own daily embodied movements, which are guided not by efficiency but instead 'follow the moment-to-moment changes in quality of air to inhale something that won't hurt me, turning toward a thing or away from it correspondingly' (chen 2012: 202) . this might be an ecopedagogy of exodus that resists chronological and linear development that 'requires healthy doses of forgetting and disavowal and proceeds by way of substitutions,' which can allow us to 'access other modes of relating, belonging, and caring (halberstam 2011: 72-73) . queering is an irreducible eruption of a glitch, which asks us to solve or dwell in it, including the queer glitches of digitally-mediated urban areas. sara elwood, for example, examines the queer glitches of such spaces to argue that 'apprehending a wider range of possibilities for life and liberation in "smart" cities starts from mapping theorizations such as glitch politics from black and queer code studies to the sociospatial relations of digitally mediated urbanism' (elwood 2020: 6 ). elwood's analysis emerges within the ecosystem of postdigital urbanism, identifying and pursuing lines of closure and exposure, intelligibility and opacity, which are not prophetic but properly messianic (e.g., muñoz 2009 ). it is noteworthy that the first documented use of the term postdigital originated in aesthetic theory and in particular sound theory. in 'the aesthetics of failure: "postdigital" tendencies in contemporary computer music', kim cascone coins the term as a result of the fact that 'the revolutionary period of the digital information age has surely passed ' (2000: 12) and digital technologies no longer significantly disrupt life. at the same time, the implications of postdigital sound at the time had not been fully fleshed out relative to the new internet-based music scene in which digital technologies are both tools for and means of distribution of computer music. cascone is particularly interested in the failures of digital technologies like glitches and bugs-we might add viruses-that become agential forces that act upon what was previously considered the raw material of sound. postdigital aesthetics take up the ways in which the postdigital era transforms the production, distribution, and reception of artistic works and practices. do we today, as michael hardt and antonio negri put it in empire (2000: 291) , 'increasingly think like computers')? or, because we create computers, do computers think like 'we' do? for david golumbia, this binary is itself dangerous, as there's a lack of consideration of the wording involved: thinking-and sensing, creating, and so on-like computers is different from thinking computorily. responding to 'the new aesthetic: thinking like digital devices', a panel at the 2012 south by southwest event, golumbia (2015: 123) maintains that sight itself is digital, but that digital technologies do not see like humans 'or even animals do'. they might see the same data, and information, but seeing is something embodied. machines see qualitatively and quantitatively differently, and they see other machines in ways that the human cannot. yet to return to braidoitti's (2019) challenge, what remains unthought here is the subject of the sight and the separation of the machine from the human or animal, let alone the relationships between the two. pedagogy and educational processes more generally are always aesthetic processes in that they concern what we can sense and not sense, as well as the organization of sensibility, orders of intelligibility, or 'distribution of the sensible' of which jacques rancière writes (e.g., rancière 2006) . here, the possibilities of ecopedagogies to embrace the aesthetic open up a variety of important pursuits with pedagogical and political consequences. pursuing this line of aesthetics more broadly as a zone of indeterminacy and uncertainty of our age, postdigital ecopedagogies can help attune education, politics, and research to the vast and complex ecologies that act on, inform, and transform our senses and perceptions. this is true not only for other-than-human voices, but for those human voices deprived for recognition and those forms of discourse and matter that appear beyond the sensible (see ford 2020b). science fiction has anticipated many inventions such as submarines, space travel, and the internet. according to paul levinson, 'if you look at the history of science, you will find science fiction as its profound backdrop. this relationship is two-directional, because science fiction inspires science and also has to be based on sciencethe interplay between science and science fiction is a trajectory of progress' (levinson in jandrić 2017: 286). refining this thought, mckenzie wark says that science fiction provides an exchange between specialized work 'trapped in worldviews and metaphors derived from that specialization'. because science fiction is about the future and the present-or the messianic utopia-it 'is one of the things that enables you to think through relationships between different kinds of knowledge' (wark in jandrić 2017: 132). this argument extends beyond the narrow genre of science fiction and encompasses various other forms of fictional thinking. a more systematic approach can be found in the area of future studies. seminal books in the area, such as future shock (toffler and toffler 1970) and the singularity is near: when humans transcend biology (kurzweil 2005) , reach beyond the theoretical appeal of literature and have a wide range of applications (bell 2003 (bell , 2004 . sohail inayatullah (1990: 115) defines 3 perspectives 'on how the future is planned for: namely, the predictive-empirical, the cultural-interpretative, and the critical-post-structural'. in the case of covid-19, the predictive-empirical perspective would consist of predicting future pandemics and developing appropriate responses; the culturalinterpretative perspective would consist of culturally sensitive interpretations of future pandemics and their responses; the critical-post-structural perspective would focus to pandemic power relationships and politics. in the latter perspective, '[i]nstead of the search for the objective or the grand design of things (transcendental truths that cause events and trends), the real is made political, it is historicized and made peculiar; it is no longer seen as being itself, as an eternal verité' (lnayatullah 1990: 128) . responding to the inherent messiness and non-predictability of our postdigital existence, (science) fiction and future studies offer inspiration and years of methodological experience in grappling with the future. in our current pandemic moment, which require urgent development of new (approaches to) present and future, this inspiration and experience is crucial for the development of new ecopedagogies. humans are not just beings of logic-we are also beings of myth and faith (mclaren 2020: 255) . critical pedagogy has recognized this a long time ago, especially (but far from exclusively) through strong connections with the latin american tradition of liberation pedagogy. according to peter mclaren, '[t]he realm of religion is the realm of myth, symbol, art, mystery, legend, theater, and poetry-realms where we can delve deeply into the meaning of life' (in mclaren 2020: 143). as '[w]e need to understand the world in order to change it', claims mclaren, 'liberation theology needs social science as much as social science needs theology ' (in mclaren 2020: 99) . setting aside the debates on religion within marxism, liberation theology has clearly made positive contributions to the anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and de-colonial movements outlined above. various forms of spirituality are influential in our postdigital reality in both reactionary and liberatory forms. one does not need to belong to an organized religion to succumb to placing our own customs and beliefs before (sometimes very evident) truth. a typical case in point is the question of post-truth and fake news, which stems from our postdigital 'environment which can seduce people into having or maintaining false beliefs with such swift stealth that the power to deceive goes unchecked' (mckenzie, rose, and bhatt 2020). it is a long way from genuine belief in god to being deceived into believing that a deepfake viral video is real and/or believing into a developed conspiracy theory. however, these three types of belief, and numerous shades of grey in between, are closely linked to virtue epistemology, which 'is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the intellectual and character qualities a person requires in order to inquire about the state of knowledge' (mackenzie and bhatt 2020: 1). looking at history and philosophy of science, steve fuller reaches all the way to the very basics of western civilization and argues that 'we wouldn't have gone down the path of modern scientific inquiry at all without the predominance of the world-view associated with the abrahamic faiths' (fuller and jandrić 2019: 203) . from inquiring into deep philosophical questions about one's own purposes and methods, to reaching out to religious believers, to addressing obvious threats arriving from climate change deniers, anti-vaccinationists, and believers in other conspiracy theories, today's ecopedagogies cannot will away the ongoing centrality of myth, religion, and belief in our postdigital ecologies. these days, freire's messianic utopia with its hopeful and courageous view of the future and to the futurity that is here now as a surplus is more needed than ever. political pedagogies offer decades of experience in the trenches of formal and informal education, finding ways through the direst of crises, reinventing themselves across contexts, and even contributing to revolutionary movements. while the ecopedagogy movement is undoubtedly relevant to our pandemic moment, it is still too deeply connected to the freirean understanding of human relationships with technology and is therefore ripe for a deep reinvention and reconsideration in and for our postdigital, bioinformational reality. postdigital ecopedagogies need not approach the freire or illich as the fathers from which they cannot depart. in fact, it may be that the postdigital era-in which our notions of intelligence and knowledge, subjectivity and machinery, sovereignty and dependency are being contested, reified, and reconfigured constantly-ecopedagogies can benefit just as much from a rupture with that legacy. the contestations, lineages, debates, and directions charted in this article address some of the contemporary coordinates of our postdigital ecologies. some of these perspectives are not fully commensurable, while others significantly overlap and use different paths to arrive to similar conclusions. we are at the very brink of the postdigital age; at this stage, this messy and sometimes paradoxical nature of our knowledge is just a part of the game. if communicative and bioinformational capitalisms continue, then one day, probably, our postdigital condition will be condensed in concise encyclopaedia entries and routinely explained by undergraduates. one task is to ensure this does not happen, and that the postdigital remains-for as a long as it is productive-a concept that constantly resists any final definition. at this moment in history, however, we cannot be sure which of the listed (and indeed non-listed) perspectives and/or combinations thereof will be more relevant than the next one. this will depend on the cognitive and affective dimensions of our utopic pedagogic imaginings. yet we do know, and without hesitation, that the questions and dilemmas of our postdigital age need to be addressed in educational theory, policy, politics, and practice, and that ecopedagogies are a particularly ripe place for their growth. we may not know where we are going, and we may have even less idea about how we might get there, yet we cannot remain idle as the new ecologies of capitalism and imperialism, with their ontological hierarchies and divisions, tailor our destiny. ecopedagogies have to, then, consider the nexuses identified above (and more!), while disavowing fantasies of political, bodily, and digital immunity and embracing the opacity, contingency, uncertainty, and interdependent vulnerability of all things to transform the animacy hierarchy into a horizontal configuration of human/nonhuman/ object. we need to invent new postdigital ecopedagogies that are critical and creative, certain and indeterminate, transparent and opaque, and that accept and negotiate the contamination of the constantly shifting borders between humans, machines, nature, nonhuman animals, and objects. in our pandemic moment, the lines of inquiry identified in this article-while far from exhaustive-offer some signposts and references we might use to develop such ecopedagogies. but we ourselves remain open to, curious about, and excited for the ecopedagogies that can emerge from the excessive future that is here already. queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others the new jim crow: mass 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unruly bodies: critical pedagogy, disability studies, and the politics of schooling difference and disability in global contexts: enabling a transformative body politic critical constructivism: an exposition and defense. logos: a journal of modern society & culture metaphors of contagion and the autoimmune body. feminist formations education and the production of space: political pedagogy, geography, and urban revolution queer communist study: the sinthomostudier against the capital-debt-learning regime pedagogy of the "not:" negation, exodus, and postdigital temporal regimes the aesthetics of exodus: virno and lyotard on art, timbre, and the general intellect the sonic aesthetes of writing: pedagogy, timbre, and thought. pedagogy inhuman educations: jean-françois lyotard, pedagogy, thought pedagogy of the oppressed pedagogy of the city pedagogy of the heart cultural action for freedom pedagogy in process: letters to guinea-bissau karl marx in the age of big data capitalism humanity 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movement paulo freire and ivan illich: technology, politics and the reconstruction of education critical media literacy is not an option the singularity is near: when humans transcend biology sonic agency: sound and emergent forms of resistance reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory messianic pedagogy exopedagogy: on pirates, shorelines, and the educational commonwealth education out of bounds: reimagining cultural studies for a posthuman age lies, bullshit and fake news dupery by design: the epistemology of deceit in a postdigital era history and education: engaging the global class war postdigital brave new world and its educational implications high tech, low pay: a marxist analysis of the changing character of the working class war on autism: on the cultural logic of normative violence postdigital science and education networked religion: metaphysical redemption or eternal regret? postdigital science and education #metoo and the promise and pitfalls of challenging rape culture through digital feminist activism countering post-truths through ecopedagogical literacies: teaching to critically read 'development' and 'sustainable development'. educational philosophy and theory ecopedagogy: the missing chapter of pedagogy of the oppressed cruising utopia: the then and now of queer futurity viral modernity? epidemics, infodemics, and the 'bioinformational' paradigm. educational philosophy and theory pandemic education and viral politics infinite distraction: paying attention to social media shackled and chained: mass incarceration in capitalist america the politics of aesthetics, trans virality: contagion theory in the age of networks postdigital humans: transitions, transformations and transcendence how we get free: black feminism and the combahee river collective lean ict towards digital sobriety future shock on the verge of creating synthetic life on the 70th anniversary of schroedinger's lecture at trinity college crushed by the wheels of industry: war, heroes, and domestic recolonization in the time of covid-19 the construction of access: the eugenic precedent of the americans with disability act the fourth wave of feminism: psychoanalytic perspectives introductory remarks the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power convivial technologies and networked learning fourth wave feminism: theoretical underpinnings and future directions for leisure research acknowledgements we extend our thanks to sarah hayes, tim fawns, and mark carrigan, for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. nobel: journal of literature and language teaching volume 10, number 01, april 2019, 01-14 demystification of the myth of freedom in the characterization of christopher mccandless in krakauer’s into the wild ni komang arie suwastini1, gusti ayu putu suprianti2, nyoman trijaya suparyanta3 ganesha university of education, jalan raya sesetan no.196, denpasar, bali 80223 arie.suwastini80@gmail.com1, gap.suprianti@undiksha.ac.id2, nyoman603@gmail.com3 abstract: while krakauer’s into the wild depicts mccandless’ flee from society to live in the wild, many reviews argue that mccandless was not really a kind of person who finds freedom in nature. the present study will investigate further the surface characterizations of mccandless as freedom chaser with the plot development to fill the gap between mccandless’ characterizations and the myth of freedom that he chases. by applying barthes’ mythology, the study reveals that mccandless was described as an adventurer, immaterialist, and loner. however, the plot development reveals that as a person who sought an adventure in nature, mccandless would deal with water, but knowing that he had fear of water, it is contradictive with his characterization as an adventurer. as a person who rejected capitalism and materialist society, he was found working at mcdonald's for having money in which both mcdonalds and money are symbols of capitalism and materialistic society. as a person who spent his time mostly alone and intended to be alone in alaska, he was a lonely person after all. thus these contradictions demystify the myth of freedom that mccandless chases. key words: into the wild, freedom, myth, characterizations, demystification doi: 10.15642/nobel.2019.10.1.01-14 the death of chris mccandless in a bus became viral. this also becomes one of the reasons of krakauer creates into the wild. the essay that krakauer wrote about mccandless had resulted in the positive comments from the reader which led to the making of the book. into the wild tells about a young man, namely, christopher johnson mccandless who flees from his society to live alone in alaska wilderness. from the beginning of the story, mccandless showed any signs of disliking his old society which was full of materialistic people. he rejected the new car that his parents gave him, telling them that he already had the best car. he even gave jim gallien all of his money and watch and told him that he did not need that. after donating all of the money he had for his study to a charity, he decided to leave home adopting a new name: alexander super-tramp. chris mccandless was depicted as an adventurer, immaterialistic person, and a loner. he had done several adventures during his journey to alaska, like camping in a tent and getting a free lift by hitchhiking in order to achieve his destination. he was not a materialistic person since he had rejected the car and left his upper-middle-class society to live his new life ni komang arie suwastini, gusti ayu putu suprianti and nyoman trijaya suparyanta 2 as a vagabond. mostly, he spent his time alone and stayed out of people for a long time. when he met franz and refused franz’ offer to be his grandson, mccandless felt relieved that he could evade the emotional feeling resulted in a long-term relationship. this signifies that he wanted to live alone without society. connecting these surface characterizations with how mccandless left his society, these connote chris mccandless as a free spirit person and a freedom chaser. chris mccandless was depicted as an adventurer, immaterialistic person, and a loner. he had done several adventures during his journey to alaska, like camping in a tent and getting a free lift by hitchhiking in order to achieve his destination. he was not a materialistic person since he had rejected the car and left his upper-middle-class society to live his new life as a vagabond. mostly, he spent his time alone and stayed out of people for a long time. when he met franz and refused franz’ offer to be his grandson, mccandless felt relieved that he could evade the emotional feeling resulted in a long-term relationship. this signifies that he wanted to live alone without society. connecting these surface characterizations with how mccandless left his society, these connote mccandless as a free spirit person and a freedom chaser. while the myth of freedom is constructed from the surface characterizations of mccandless, the plot development of into the wild reveals that in the end, mccandless felt lonely and even wanted to go back to civilization. this creates questions: was freedom what mccandless intended to find? were there any reasons mccandless hated his society and decided to leave home? thus, the surface characterizations and the characterizations revealed in the plot development of mccandless’ story create a gap between mccandless who was a freedom chaser and mccandless as a lonely man. the present study will investigate how these characterizations deny the signifiers of freedom and demystify the myth of freedom that mccandless chases. the research design used in this study was a qualitative study in the form of interpreting the qualitative design. according to prior (2008), interpreting qualitative method is a method in which the researcher construes meaning from research findings and use the researcher’s assumption/interpretation to provide a context to help the readers understand the result of the study. this research used textual analysis as the research method. according to lockyer (2008) in given (2008), textual analysis is a method to examine both the content and meaning of texts or their structure and discourse as accurate as possible. the data of this research were the signifiers which show the characterizations which signify the myth of freedom and the characterizations which demystify the myth of freedom from those demystification of the myth of freedom nobel: journal of literature and language teaching volume 10, number 01, april 2019 3 signifiers. after the data were gathered, they were analyzed by using semiotics theory from roland barthes. discussions of main themes myth of freedom the surface characterizations of mccandless signify the myth of freedom. those characterizations are an adventurer, immaterialist, and a loner. stated below are the characterizations of mccandless which signify the myth of freedom, alongside with the analysis. adventurer the first characterization which signifies the myth of freedom is an adventurer. this characterization is shown in sequences: 1a, 3a, 4d, 5d, 6a, 7a, 8a, 8b, 8d, 11a, and 12d. sequence 1a tells about the meeting with jim gallien, a truck driver who gave mccandless a ride just before he disappeared into the wild. mccandless met gallien when he was hitchhiking in fairbanks, alaska. sequence 3a tells about the meeting with wayne westerberg. westerberg took mccandless to his place in chartage, giving him a place to stay and a job. sequence 4d tells about the disappearance of mccandless from his family’s sight. this sequence tells about mccandless’ past just before he left his home and changed his name into alexandre super-tramp. sequence 5d tells about the journey in lake mead, where mccandless got a ride from the passing boaters. sequence 6a tells about meeting with jan burres and bob. mccandless met this couple when he was picking the berries. mccandless had stayed with them until orick beach, where he decided to continue his journey. sequence 7a tells about the ticketing activity from mccandless. mccandless tried to have an adventure in willow creek, where he was caught because of ticketing. sequence 8a tells about mccandless’ journey to mexico through colorado river. following the colorado river, mccandless had paddled his canoe until he reached mexico. sequence 8b tells about the help from duck hunter whom he met when he was in mexico. sequence 8d tells about immigration office (no id). this sequence tells about mccandless who was caught by the immigration office when he entered the usa because he did not bring any id. sequence 11a tells about the meeting with ronald franz. this sequence tells about mccandless’ journey in anza borrego and met ronald franz who gave him a place to stay. sequence 12d tells about the departure to alaska. this sequence tells about mccandless departure to alaska after he said goodbye to westerberg. ni komang arie suwastini, gusti ayu putu suprianti and nyoman trijaya suparyanta 4 as mccandless decided to leave his home to have an adventure to alaska, he can be characterized as an adventurer. during his trip to alaska, mccandless had done several adventures. the evidence of his adventures is his appearances in those places. he even was depicted as an adventurer from the opening of the story which is in sequence 1a. from the opening of the story, mccandless had appeared in front of the truck driver name gallien. mccandless got a free ride from gallien, and he told gallien about his intention to live off the land for a few months, “he explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge of denali national park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and “live off the land for a few months.” (krakauer, 1995: 5). from the part of the story above, what denoted here is mccandless’ intention to have a ride as far as the edge of denali national park to live off the land for a few months. the line “he explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge of denali national park” signifies that mccandless sought for adventure. mccandless wanted to have an adventure in denali national park. seeking for adventure signifies the adventurer characterization. relating to his goal, mccandless wanted to live alone in alaska and he could achieve that by doing an adventure. having an odyssey to alaska in order to live alone there and be free from his society becomes the signifier of the myth of freedom. this myth is also supported by the setting where mccandless and gallien met, which is fairbanks, alaska. mccandless decided to have an odyssey to alaska in order to find freedom from society. he decided to live there with nature. the odyssey becomes the signifier of finding freedom. thus, the setting of this passage signifies the myth of freedom. immaterialist the second characterization which signifies the myth of freedom is immaterialist. immaterialist means not materialistic. the word “materialistic” means excessively concerned with material possessions or money-oriented. this characterization is shown in the sequence 1c and 4c. sequence 1c tells about the disappearance of mccandless into the wild. in sequence 1c, mccandless insisted to give gallien his money, which was 85 cents; his comb; and his watch, but gallien insisted not to take them. mccandless then told gallien that if gallien did not take them, he would throw them away. the way mccandless gave gallien his money, watch and comb signify the non-materialistic characterization. sequence 4c tells about the family meeting. in sequence 4c, mccandless had rejected the offer from his family about the new car. he told them that he already had the best car. this signifies mccandless who was not materialistic. demystification of the myth of freedom nobel: journal of literature and language teaching volume 10, number 01, april 2019 5 the intention to live alone in alaska was caused by mccandless’ disliking towards his old world which was full of materialistic people. the part of the story in sequence 4c tells that mccandless had rejected the offer from his family about the new car. he told them that he already had the best car. this can be seen from the passage: “indeed, mccandless had only recently upbraided walt and billie for expressing their desire to buy him a new car as a graduation present and offering to pay for law school if there wasn’t enough money left in his college fund to cover it. (krakauer, 1995: 16) the part of the story above gives the information that he rejected the offer of a new car from his family. the word “upbraided” signifies the rejection towards the new car. he rejected the new car from his family because he already had a car. mccandless had upbraided his parents because they offer him a new car as a present for his graduation. he already had a car so that was why he rejected the offer. this shows any disliking towards the way his parents thought about money. the word upbraided connotes the rejection towards materialistic society. another evidence of immaterialist characterization happens when mccandless met gallien. in the story, mccandless insisted to give gallien his money, which was 85 cents, his comb, and his watch, but gallien insisted not to take them. mccandless then told gallien that if gallien did not take them, he would throw them away, “alex insisted on giving gallien his watch, his comb, and what he said was all his money: eighty-five cents in loose change……[sic] “if you don’t take it, i’m going to throw it away,” alex cheerfully retorted. (krakauer, 1995:7). the line “if you don’t take it, i’m going to throw it away,” signifies that mccandless was immaterialist. the way mccandless gave gallien his money, watch and comb signify the immaterialist characterization. mccandless did not want to concern with the material or money that he had. he even told gallien that he would throw his money, comb and watch away if gallien did not take them. the way mccandless thought about his old society, which was materialistic, signifies the reason mccandless did his journey to alaska. mccandless wanted to be free from the society which was materialistic. the way mccandless wanted to be free from the materialistic society signifies the myth of freedom loner during his adventure to alaska, mccandless met several people, although he mostly spent his time alone. this signifies the characterization of a loner. this characterization is shown in sequences 11c, 12b, 13a, 14c, and 16c. sequence 11c tells about franz’s thoughts on mccandless. franz thought that mccandless was an interesting man that made him wanted to ni komang arie suwastini, gusti ayu putu suprianti and nyoman trijaya suparyanta 6 adopt him as his grandson. the sequence 12b tells about the meeting with borah. borah stated that mccandless was a little bit shy and seemed hard to be around people at first meeting. she thought that it might be because mccandless spent so much time by himself. sequence 13a tells about carine’s thought on mccandless. carine stated that when mccandless was young, he was very occupied to himself. he did not seem to need a toy or friends. he could be alone without being lonely. sequence 14c tells about the drive to fairbanks. there is a part of the story in this sequence where mccandless told stuckey that he did not want to see a single person, airplanes, or any signs of civilization. he wanted to prove himself that he could make it on his own. sequence 16c tells about mccandless’ declaration of independence. he wrote that he walked for two years on the road with no phone no pool, and no cigarettes. he was no longer poisoned by civilization. he walks alone upon the land to become lost into the wild. thus, this characterization is mainly about mccandless who wanted to live alone in alaska with no sign of civilization. when mccandless met ronald franz in sequence 11c, he had stayed with franz for several days and then franz asked mccandless whether he wanted to be his grandson, but mccandless refused franz’ request. mccandless felt relieved because he could evade the emotional baggage made in every relationship with the people he met, “so i asked alex if i could adopt him, if he would be my grandson.” mccandless, uncomfortable with the request, dodged the question…[sic} he was relieved as well—relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it.” (krakauer, 1995:37). the quote above tells about mccandless’ rejection of franz’ offer. the line “mccandless, uncomfortable with the request” signifies that he did not want to make a further relationship with franz. he refused the offer to be franz’s grandson. based on the passage above, mccandless also felt relieved that he could evade the intimacy and the emotional baggage resulted from it. the word “relieved” signifies that mccandless could be alone. if he made a further relationship with people, he could not live alone in alaska. his decision was to live alone in the alaska wilderness. he could not achieve that if he made a further relationship with people. this situation signifies loner characterization. the loner characterization signifies independent life. by living alone without any society, mccandless would have his independent life because he did not rely much on society. mccandless decided to have a journey to alaska in order to achieve freedom from society. having a loner characterization builds a connotation of independent. the odyssey to alaska signifies freedom from society. the odyssey to alaska and the independent life which demystification of the myth of freedom nobel: journal of literature and language teaching volume 10, number 01, april 2019 7 mccandless build connote the freedom from society. in conclusion, loner characterization signifies the myth of freedom. demystification of the myth of freedom the main objective of this research is to demystify the myth of freedom from chris mccandless’ character. from the plot development chris mccandless’ story in into the wild, there are three characterizations which are against the myth of freedom, they are fear of water, persistent fear to depart from capitalist consumption and endless suffering from loneliness. fear of water water is an integral part of nature. as a person who wanted to live in nature, mccandless will deal with water. thus, mccandless should not have any fear of water. the first characterization which denies the myth of freedom is fear of water. this characterization is shown in sequence 1b and 18c. the signifier of afraid of water in sequence 1c is when mccandless looked down at nenana river and he realized that he was afraid of water. the signifier of afraid of water in sequence 18c is mccandless could not swim to teklanika river because he was afraid of water. from the plot development, at first, mccandless did not show any fear of water until he reached mexico where he faced a storm which almost killed him. facing a storm in mexico becomes the beginning of his fear of water. in sequence 1b, mccandless met jim gallien, a truck driver who gave him a ride. to the truck driver, mccandless had claimed that he was afraid of water, “as the truck lurched over a bridge across the nenana river, alex looked down at the swift current and remarked that he was afraid of the water. “a year ago down in mexico,” he told gallien, “i was out on the ocean in a canoe, and i almost drowned when a storm came up.” (krakauer, 1995:6)” from the part of the story above, what is denoted here is the fear of water characterization. from the first line of the part of the story above, it is known that, by looking down at nenana river, mccandless shows any gesture that he wanted to make sure about the condition of the water. by knowing that the water of nenana river moved fast, he mentioned to gallien that he was afraid of water. mccandless also mentioned that a year ago in mexico while canoeing, he faced a storm that almost drowned him. this bad experience made him afraid of water. from the part of the story above, the location of mccandless should be near nenana river, because he easily looked down at the river. this river is located in alaska. by ni komang arie suwastini, gusti ayu putu suprianti and nyoman trijaya suparyanta 8 knowing that mccandless’ intention was to live alone in alaska, there should be some big rivers in alaska, for example, teklanika river. due to his fear of the water, mccandless could not move further if he faced the big rivers to continue his adventure. this becomes contradictory that as a person who sought an adventure in nature, mccandless was afraid of water which is part of nature. thus, this contradiction denies the idea of an adventurer. mccandless’ fear of water connotes that he could not survive his life alone in the alaska wilderness. while he was in alaska, he should face a lot of big rivers. he will put his life in danger if he is trapped in a situation where he could not cross the river. further investigation results that the part of the story below denotes the condition where mccandless could not move further because he could not cross the river, “mccandless was a weak swimmer and had confessed to several people that he was, in fact, afraid of the water. attempting to swim the numbingly cold torrent or even to paddle some sort of improvised raft across seemed too risky to consider.” (krakauer, 1995:117). the information that is denoted from the part of the story above is the fear of water characterization and a weak swimmer. this can be seen from the first line of the quote. swimming ability is essential especially for those who deal a lot with nature. being signified as a weak swimmer reveals that mccandless was lack of surviving ability. as an adventurer, having a lack of swimming ability will put mccandless’ life in danger and limit mccandless field of adventure. he could not continue his trip if he faces the big rivers which require him to swim across. this lack of swimming ability is also supported with the fear towards the water, makes it harder for him to continue his adventurer, thus becomes a contradiction with his characterization as an adventurer. thus, based on the investigation above, being afraid of water connotes mccandless’ unavailability to live in alaska considering that alaska has lots of big rivers. for a person who sought adventure in nature, mccandless must deal with water a lot, since water is an integral part of nature. not only having fear of water, but he also had a lack of swimming ability which is necessary for him to survive his life. the fear of water becomes a contradiction towards an adventure characterization as the signifier of the myth of freedom. fear to depart from capitalist consumption chris mccandless has tried to leave the materialist society he once lived in by having a trip to alaska, where he could stay alone. he is signified as an immaterialist by donating all his money to charity and rejecting the new car that his family offered because money cannot buy his respect (krakauer, 1995). he is also signified as a person who rejected the rules and all systems in it. this can be seen from the sequence when he did not follow the flash flood demystification of the myth of freedom nobel: journal of literature and language teaching volume 10, number 01, april 2019 9 sign, burned the money, did not carry any id, did not have a hunting license, and even he swore to government that “how i feed myself is none of governments business. fuck their stupid rules” (krakauer, 1995). he is also signified as a hater of his old society because he did not use his real name anymore when introducing himself. by considering these signifiers, his actions connote the rejection towards materialistic society and capitalism. while mccandless’ actions connote the rejection towards materialistic society and capitalism, it is found in the plot development that he had a persistent fear to depart from capitalist consumption such as he had worked in mcdonald's by using his real name and he showed any lack of surviving skills. the sequences, which show that mccandless worked in mcdonald's, are sequences 9a and 9b and the sequences which show that mccandless was lack of experience are sequences 16b and 17c. sequence 9a tells about mccandless’ job in mcdonald's. mccandless applied for a job in mcdonald's in bullhead city. sequence 16b tells about mccandless’ problem concerning teklanika river. in this sequence, mccandless had a really big problem in crossing the teklanika river. the water was so deep and flew fast, while he was a weak swimmer and fear of water. this was the result of mccandless’ inexperience especially in living inside the jungle. sequence 17c is about the declaration after failing to process the carcass. in the sequence 17c, mccandless got a dead moose, but he seemed to find any difficulty in handling the meat. the first evidence which reveals that mccandless has a persistent fear to depart from capitalist consumption is the fact that he had worked in mcdonald's. this happens in sequence 9b which is about mcdonalds’ employee’s thought on mccandless. curiously, when mccandless applied for the mcdonald’s job, he presented himself as chris mccandless, not as alex, and gave his employers his real social security number. it was an uncharacteristic break from his cover that might easily have alerted his parents to his whereabouts. (krakauer, 1995:29). the first line of the quote mentioned that mccandless had worked in mcdonald's. knowing that he had worked in mcdonald's denies the idea of rejecting capitalism and materialism since mcdonald's is considered as a symbol of capitalism. the fact that mccandless had worked in the restaurant proves that mccandless could not escape from capitalism. working in a company means mccandless should follow the rule, including telling his true name. by following the rule seems contradictory with mccandless who rejected the rules and the systems in the society. the first line of the quote above also mentions that he introduces himself as mccandless, not alex. working in the big company might require the true identity of the worker, so mccandless might give his id card when he applied for the job. when he used ni komang arie suwastini, gusti ayu putu suprianti and nyoman trijaya suparyanta 10 alex name, mccandless had thrown away his old life as christopher johnson mccandless. however, the fact that he used his true identity in applying for the job in mcdonald's reveals that he could not be free from his old society. this contradiction shows any inconsistency towards mccandless’ actions. his action might alert his parents about his location as mentioned in the quote above, but referring that he continued his trip afterward, he might just need the money that he got by working in mcdonald's. thus, in this state, mccandless realized that he could not survive his life and reach his destination just to rely on what he had found on the road. he still needed money before he reached alaska to buy the tools to survive. knowing that he still needed money signifies that he could not escape from capitalism because money is also a symbol of capitalism. this is how mccandless still had a fear to depart from capitalist consumption. the second evidence is having a lack of experience to live in wildlife. the fact that mccandless had been raised in the upper-middle-class family cannot be hidden. thus, he did not experience how to live in nature before he left his home. while he was in his journey, mccandless had learned from the local hunters about surviving skills and also from the book that he had in the university of alaska about the edible plants. however, from the further investigations towards the plot development, mccandless had struggled in dealing with the moose meat. in processing the moose meat, mccandless had found any difficulty as shown in the part of the story below which happened in sequence 17c. alaskan hunters know that the easiest way to preserve meat in the bush is to slice it into thin strips and then air-dry it on a makeshift rack. but mccandless, in his naivete, relied on the advice of hunters he’d consulted in south dakota, who advised him to smoke his meat, not an easy task under the circumstances. “butchering extremely difficult,” (krakauer, 1995:114) the first line denotes the easiest way to preserve meat; instead, mccandless used the smoking method. mccandless did not know the easiest way to preserve the meat, so he followed the advice from south dakota hunter. knowing the conditions where he was in south dakota and alaska was totally different, the method of preserving the meat is also different. thus, this condition makes mccandless failed in the end to process the moose meat when the maggots started to appear. this also reveals that mccandless had no experience before in dealing with the big game because before he left his society, he used to eat the food he could find in his society, which was a capitalist society. thus, this condition connotes that mccandless had any fear to depart from capitalist consumption. demystification of the myth of freedom nobel: journal of literature and language teaching volume 10, number 01, april 2019 11 endless suffering from loneliness chris mccandless has spent lots of his time alone. not only when he left but also when was at home. his sister, carine, also stated that he spent his time mostly alone in his family. in his trip to alaska, he had met several people who were interested in him, but he decided not to stay for too long with them. in anza borrego, mccandless had met ronald franz who wanted to adopt him, but mccandless rejected his offer and then he claimed that he felt relieved to evade the emotional baggage resulted from the further relationship. when he met stuckey in alaska, mccandless claimed he wanted to spend his time alone in alaska without any single person and any sign of civilization. he also declared his independence when he was in alaska by mentioning about no longer to be poisoned by civilization (krakauer,1995). thus, this evidence signifies mccandless as a loner. while he was depicted as a loner from the evidence above, further investigation found that there are several pieces of evidence which reject the idea of mccandless as a loner. instead, this evidence signifies mccandless was suffering from endless loneliness. that evidence is reflected in sequence 13b where mccandless saw the clash of his parents so often; in sequences: 3b, 6b, 10b, and 12b which show that mccandless was staying in touch with the people he met on his journey; and in the sequences 18a, 18b, and 19a which show that mccandless was lonely. . in the sequence 13d, carine said that their parents are only concerned about money. they rarely saw their parents at home because they were too busy working in the office. this was the reason mccandless left home. in the sequence 18a, mccandless decided to go back to civilization. he wanted to share his experience with the world. he intended to walk out. in sequence 18b, mccandless had finished reading about family happiness. in the sequence, 3b mccandless stayed in touch with westerberg by giving him one of tolstoy’s books and sending him a postcard every one month or two. in the sequence 6b, mccandless was with jan burres and bob. he camped with them for a week on orick beach. when he left them, he left the impression that he was a good person. mccandless always kept in touch with jan burres and bob. in the sequence 10b, mccandless visited burres and bob at the slab where lots of trampers and vagabonds gathered there. he had a good time with people and talked a lot to them. lots of people were attached to him. in the sequence 12b, westerberg introduced mccandless to his mother, mary westerberg. the result is, mary got pretty attached to mccandless and talked for hours with him. all these sequences show that mccandless was really sociable that he could talk with new people he met and get in touch with them. in ni komang arie suwastini, gusti ayu putu suprianti and nyoman trijaya suparyanta 12 sequence 19a, mccandless had torn a paper from louis l’amour’s memoir and wrote a goodbye message. one of the evidence which signifies loneliness characterization happens in sequence 13b. in sequence 13b, carine mccandless mentioned that they rarely saw their parents home because they worked all the time (krakauer, 1995). they often saw the clash between their parents that they often used verbal sparring and sometimes threatened divorce (krakauer, 1995). his conditions back then were in a family who were so busy making money and were often in a clash. having a family with lots of clashes causes mccandless feels a lack of happiness. there was no interaction between family members because the parents are only concerned about money. by knowing the fact that mccandless did not have lots of interaction with his parents and often to see the clash between his parents reveal that he was in a state of loneliness. perlman & peplau (1981) mention the parents who were less trustworthy, disagreeable, and divorced cause great loneliness towards the children. mccandless had experienced that his parents were disagreeable, have lots of clashes, and almost got divorced. there was a different way of thinking between mccandless with his parents which cause disagreement. there were a lot of clashes happened between walt and billie which causes them almost got divorced. these facts cause great loneliness feeling inside his heart. he felt that his society was not warm anymore. then, as a result, he decided to leave the society with the reason to find freedom. the sequence 3b, 6b, 10b, and 12b tell the moments when he met westerberg in carthage; burres and bob while he was picking berries and stayed with them for a week; and ronald franz in anza borrego. all these people mentioned that mccandless always got in touch to them and that the people around him are pretty attached to him. westerberg mentioned that mccandless used to tell the people about amazing stories and lots of people in carthage were attached to mccandless. when mccandless was with burres at the slab, burres mentioned that mccandless had a really good time with people and he did a lot of socializing. when he was with franz, franz was so attached to mccandless that made him wanted to adopt mccandless as his grandson. this evidence signifies mccandless as a sociable person. the fact that mccandless loved to socialize with the people he met in his journey denies the idea of mccandless as a loner. this evidence proves that mccandless loved to socialize with people. he still loved to get along with people. this is in contrasts with his goal to live alone in alaska. the strong evidence of suffering from loneliness is when mccandless realized true happiness. the phrase “happiness only real when share” (krakauer, 1995: 129) demystification of the myth of freedom nobel: journal of literature and language teaching volume 10, number 01, april 2019 13 shows that mccandless realized that true happiness is with people around him. this shows his regret because he threw away everything he got just to fulfill his ambition to get freedom from society. this also highlights that what mccandless wanted the most is happiness, not freedom. that is why he felt unhappy at the end of the story. mccandless was unhappy because he was in the state of loneliness. perlman & peplau (1981) stated that in order to minimalize the feeling of loneliness, people can try to reduce their loneliness’ feeling by gratifying their needs in alternative ways. referring to the above statement, mccandless was lonely. what mccandless needs the most was happiness. in order to find happiness, he used the journey to alaska as the escape route to reduce his loneliness. as a sociable human being, his character shows that he was easy to get attached to people whom he met. he could impress those people and showed his respect towards them. living alone would not bring him what he wanted from the bottom of his heart. he did not get experiences, he did not get warm feelings from the other people, he could not share his experience, he could not talk about philosophy, and more importantly, he did not find any happiness which he realized when he lived for months inside the magic bus 142 in alaska. he did not find any happiness in his old society which only concerned about money because he thought that money could not buy his respect. if it is referred to what pearlman and peplau have stated, mccandless was lonely after all. in order to reduce his loneliness, he is gratifying what he wanted the most, which was happiness, by having a trip to alaska. conclusion based on the result, the depiction of chris mccandless as a freedom chaser is denied through the evidence found during further investigation towards the plot development of into the wild. as a person who sought an adventure in nature, mccandless would deal with water, but knowing that he had fear of water, it is contradictive with his characterization as an adventurer. as a person who rejected capitalism and materialist society, he was found working at mcdonald's to earn some money in which both mcdonalds and money are symbols of capitalism and materialistic society. as a person who spent his time mostly alone and intended to be alone in alaska, he was a lonely person after all. thus these contradictions demystify the myth of freedom that mccandless chases. after meeting with warm people during his journey, mccandless seems realized that what he intended to find is not freedom, but happiness from the people around him. he did not get that happy when he was in his old society in which his parents only concerned with ni komang arie suwastini, gusti ayu putu suprianti and nyoman trijaya suparyanta 14 money and often had a clash. he was lonely from the beginning. after he met the warm people in his journey, and he left them to stay alone in the jungle, he seems realized that he was lonely in the end. this endless suffering from loneliness covers mccandless from the beginning and at the end of his life. the society that he missed was the kind of society that he met during his journey and the society that he hated was the society that he was once before his journey to alaska. therefore, he left that society to chase what he believed as freedom, which is just a myth. reference barthes, r., & lavers, a. (1972). mythologies. london. hill and wang. bouzida, f. (2014). the semiology analysis in media studies roland barthes approach. socioint14: international conference on social sciences and humanities, (september), 1000–1006. cobley, p., & jansz, l. (n.d.). introducing semiotics. mcpherson's printing group victoria given, l. m. (2008). the sage encyclopedia of qualitative research methods. sage publications. hayek, f. a. von (friedrich a. (2006). constitution of liberty. routledge. krakauer, j. (1995). into the wild. macmillan. perlman, d., & peplau, l. (1981). toward a social psychology of loneliness. personal relationships, (6), 31–55. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x.41.2.229 prior, l. (2008). document analysis. the sage encyclopedia of qualitative research methods. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412963909 sebeok, t. a. (thomas a. (1994). signs : an introduction to semiotics. university of toronto press. stanford university., & center for the study of language and information (u.s.). (1997). stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. stanford university. retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/ key: cord-0059213-b13o5fkg authors: avis, james title: post-work, post-capitalism and the fourth industrial revolution date: 2021-01-05 journal: vocational education in the fourth industrial revolution doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-52032-8_4 sha: 61fed6c753b08b2ca76c841ff0c03a818842df20 doc_id: 59213 cord_uid: b13o5fkg the chapter addresses arguments about italian workerism, post-capitalism, post-work, universal basic income and the politics of abundance. it moves beyond current conceptualisations of the fourth industrial revolution (4th ir) to develop a politically informed analysis that can inform a critical, if not transformative praxis. labour market analysts refuse the suggestion that labour is being expelled from paid employment. there is a tension between those who experience and bemoan precariousness, intermittent and under-employment and those for whom all of life is centred around work. for some this had led to their expulsion from waged labour, whilst for others it has led to its intensification. the 4th ir is presented as inevitable, silencing the manner in which it relates to the development of capitalism and its articulation with class struggle. the chapter calls for an expansive understanding of both class and vocational education and training. this chapter draws on arguments raised in previous chapters that address the future of work and skill, setting this alongside more radical analyses. much of the work that addresses the labour market refuses the suggestion that labour is being expelled from paid employment and stands in direct opposition to some of the analyses considered earlier in the book. there is a tension between the experiences of those who bemoan precariousness, intermittent and under-employment and those for whom the whole of life seems to be centred around work. paradoxically, for some this had led to the expulsion from waged labour, whilst for others it has led to its intensification. in its ideological manifestation the fourth industrial revolution (4th ir) is presented as an inevitable development flowing from the first to the current ir. however, what is silenced in these constructions is the manner in which the 4th ir connects to the development of capitalism and its articulation with class struggle. these processes alert us to the way in which technology is entwined with social relations. consequently, this chapter addresses arguments that engage with italian workerism, post-capitalism, post-work, universal basic income (ubi) and, paradoxically, the politics of abundance. it seeks to develop a politically informed analysis that moves beyond current conceptualisations of the 4th ir that are lodged within productivism, which in turn can inform a critical, if not transformative praxis (anderson 2009; mcgrath and powell 2016; powell 2012) . frey (2019) argues that technology can impact upon the labour market and waged labour in two ways. it can lead to the displacement of labour, technological unemployment or alternatively can augment the labour process resulting in increased productivity and opportunities for employment. in addition, on the basis of an engagement with a wide-ranging literature, frey argues that there are similarities between the disruptions that ensued following the 1st ir and current conditions which have been described as the 4th ir (see fig. 1 .1, chap. 1). in the early years of the 1st ir following mechanisation, workers were displaced from employment leading to a fall in the wages of formerly skilled workers, as did the ranks of those they joined, semi-and unskilled workers. 'during the first four decades of the nineteenth century, the profit share of national income doubled, as both the share of land and labor declined' (frey 2019: 132) . drawing upon allen (2009) , frey describes this period as 'engels' pause'. marx and engels analysis was set within this particular moment of capitalist development with the marxist critique emphasising the immiseration of the proletariat. for both allen and frey this period was followed by the second ir which was characterised by the introduction of technology which served to augment labour power and consequently resulted in increased wages for the working class-that is to say those who laboured in semi-and unskilled work. in an echo of the embourgeoisement thesis these workers were able to attain the life style and material well-being of the middle class. there are at least two points to note. it took something like 40 years for the disruption following the 1st ir to be resolved in favour of the working class with an expansion of the need for semi-and unskilled labour. during this period technology augmented labour enabling workers to be more productive and therefore empowered to enhance not only their wages but also material and social well-being. whilst frey is rightly cautious about speculating on the future of work, his argument suggests that we are currently in a conjuncture in which technology is displacing the labour of semi-and unskilled workers in much the same way as occurred during 'engels' pause'. at the same time technology has spawned the need for high skilled, highly educated labour, resulting in an increasing divide between the university and highly educated middle class and the working class. yet the logic of the argument would seem to suggest that if parallels can be drawn between the 1st and 4th ir, with the 2nd resolving the dislocation caused by the 1st, it would seem likely that after a period of disruption there would be a renewed need for semi-and unskilled labour (and see autor 2015) . that is to say, that in the same way as the 2nd ir sought to augment the labour power of semi-and unskilled workers the future may hold not dissimilar possibilities for those workers who are currently displaced. if this argument is accepted the keynesian and social democratic settlement that occurred in the twentieth century should not be considered as exceptional but rather as an aspect of capitalist development. frey would argue that such a future is far from certain. however, what he would unequivocally claim is that the current moment is one in which technology is replacing the labour of the semi-and unskilled working class with all the negative consequences that flow from that. whatever the future holds for waged labour, it will in part be shaped by political and social processes that coalesce around an expansive notion of class struggle as well as by the affordances offered by technology, be it enabling or displacing workers. it is also important that we acknowledge that technology comes from somewhere and is never innocent or neutral. it derives from particular socio-economic circumstances and the balance of power between labour and capital, seeking to address particular problems and issues. an expansive notion of class struggle will incorporate intersectionality not only of the workless and unwaged but also members of the middle class (avis 2019). it also calls for a re-imagining of what constitutes vocational education and training (vet) in conditions of worklessness, the salience of unwaged labour and the significance of the informal economy, particularly in the social formations of the global south (mcgrath and powell 2016; powell 2012) . whilst the spectre of technological unemployment may appear to be exaggerated, it is vital to consider the type of employment that is available to displaced workers, in terms of skill, duration and remuneration. i am somewhat uneasy with the use of the terms semi-and unskilled work. whilst it is the undoubtedly the case that the formerly well-paid factory workers of the keynesian era have been displaced, and more often than not find themselves in what are considered low-skilled and low-waged routine jobs as janitors, care and service workers and so on, nevertheless we need to interrogate the way skill is understood in these contexts. one way to do this is to think about the skills of the professional middle class and what we might describe as really useful labour, or indeed that which is productive, that is to say, embodying use value. this raises a range of questions about the way in which we understand these terms which i address below. earlier in this book, i examined the relationship between skill, expertise and by default connoisseurship. i argued that skill is not so much a feature of the individual but rather a collective accomplishment and it is for this reason that expertise would be a better term as it embodies a developmental and dynamic trajectory. not only is expertise continuously developed it is also situational, contingent and will involve the exercise of judgement and connoisseurship that develops over time whereby the practitioner gains a deep and almost intuitive understanding of the field of practice. however, the enactment of expertise will nevertheless be constrained not only by the immediate but also by the broader socioeconomic context in which it is placed. in recent years much has been made of the skills required by the 'knowledge' or digital economy. the world economic forum (wef 2018) in its report the future of jobs surveyed senior executives to ascertain the top ten key skills currently required and those they anticipated would be in demand in 2022. the main point to be made is that alongside the proficiency in new technologies it was anticipated that there would be a significant demand for soft, human and cognitive skills. analytical thinking and innovation analytical thinking and innovation complex problem-solving active learning and learning strategies critical thinking and analysis creativity, originality and initiative active learning and learning strategies technology design and programming creativity, originality and initiative critical thinking and analysis attention to detail, trustworthiness complex problem-solving emotional intelligence leadership and social influence reasoning, problem-solving and ideation leadership and social influence reasoning, problem-solving and ideation co-ordination and time management systems analysis and evaluation (derived from wef 2018: 12) interestingly and perhaps unsurprisingly these key skills articulate with those which are putatively associated with the professional middle class. amongst these skills are those that involve a commitment to lifelong learning, analytic thinking, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, the use of emotional intelligence and leadership skills that can be used to secure influence. there is a clear echo not only with reich's (1992) 'symbolic analyst' but also with the flexible, adaptive, enterprising subject of neo-liberalism who constantly refreshes their skills-the high flying graduate employee. these highly skilled individuals will constitute the type of knowledge workers that brown et al. (2011: 81) describe as developers, top performers who are given 'permission to think'. importantly these knowledge workers are placed alongside others, who brown et al. (2011: 81) describe as demonstrators and drones, terms which themselves reflect the de-skilling and routinisation of knowledge work. this labour lends itself to the mobilisation of artificial intelligence (ai) which results in the hollowing out of middle-level knowledge work. there are several additional arguments to be addressed not least amongst which is the way in which those with social and economic power use this influence to attribute to themselves rare and remarkable skills which sets them apart from the rest of us (see e.g. davis and moore 1945) . both historically and contemporaneously this over-valuation of particular forms of labour and skill has rested alongside the devaluation of other types of service work. this devaluation has frequently been applied to the 'care' work carried out by women as well as other marginalised groups, ethnic minorities, immigrants and so on in wider society. care work because of its complexity and demand for emotional intelligence is difficult to automate and requires a number of the key skills that the world economic forum suggests are not only essential in 2018 but likely to be needed in 2022. many business leaders consider these skills are expected to emerge in the near future and, in the wef's terms, are 'trending'. we could think about analytic and critical thinking, active learning, creativity, problem-solving, emotional intelligence and reasoning-all of these skills could be mobilised by a care worker attempting to administer to the complex and demanding needs of an elderly person suffering from dementia. we could think of this as 'really useful labour' as it contributes to the well-being of those it caters for and therefore has 'real' use value. the importance of the nursing and social care workforce has been strongly evidenced during the covid-19 pandemic. however, it should not be overlooked that care work has been commodified and is subject to the disciplines of the capitalist labour process whereby its aim is to generate surplus value rather than to meet the needs of those it serves. in this way care work could be thought of as productive labour in the sense that it serves to generate profit. to the extent that care work contributes to well-being this is frequently in spite of the capitalist relations in which it is set and is undertaken at some cost, both emotionally and economically, to the care worker. thus in contradiction to the previous point this labour nevertheless could be considered productive in the sense that it develops use value and well-being. the evaluation of work is in part dependent on who labours and the social location in which this arises which in turn constitutes a value judgement. jeremy corbyn, the then leader of the labour party, in his speech launching the 2019 election campaign stated: and the big question of this election is: whose side are you on? are you on the side of the tax dodgers … the dodgy landlords … the bad bosses … the big polluters … the greedy bankers … the billionaire media barons …, whose empire pumps out propaganda to support a rigged system. you know whose side labour's on-a labour government will be on your side. together, we can pull down a corrupt system and build a fairer country that cares for all. interestingly corbyn's invective was directed at the corruptions of the capitalist system. this is a theme that is present in much of the writing of those who support capitalism but who bemoan its excesses (rajan 2019; stiglitz 2019) and who anticipate the development of a fairer and more caring form of capitalism. there is an echo here of social democracy and nordic egalitarian capitalism (kenworth 2004) . however, the logic of capitalism is that it will endlessly seek to accumulate capital and develop new markets, as can be seen in the privatisation of parts of the welfare state (harvey 2014: 23-24) . at times when labour is in ascendance and wields greater power the excesses of capitalism will be constrained through class struggle. however, at other times such as in recent decades in which neo-liberalism has gained ascendancy capital will pursue its goals aggressively. in the current conjuncture a number of the key skills that the wef cites will be mobilised by members of the professional middle class in the service of capital and could thereby be seen as a form of productive labour, in that it serves to facilitate the accumulation of capital. yet at the same time as graeber (2018) argues it is broadly within this professional constituency that we encounter what he describes as 'bullshit jobs', ultimately meaningless and in any definition of work, unproductive labour. aspects of the academic labour process would be a case in point reflected in the time spent in committee meetings, dealing with emails and so on (fleming 2017: 137; zukas and malcolm 2015: 7-11) . graeber (2018: 217) writes, some academic environments are more anti-intellectual than others. but everywhere, at the very least, there is a sense that the pleasurable aspect of one's calling, such as thinking, were not really what one is being paid for; they were better seen as occasional indulgencies one is granted in recognition of one's real work which is largely about filling in forms. graeber is criticised for drawing on personalised accounts that do not go beyond the subjective and thereby fails to consider their relationship to capitalist and neo-liberal processes. he does nevertheless draw our attention to the messiness of these processes and the manner in which they articulate to the interests of the powerful. for example, the preoccupation of many organisations with performativity and the measurement of outcomes aligns with low trust relations whereby professionals are deemed untrustworthy and therefore need to be constantly monitored. in addition, meaningless labour may be used to buttress the power and prestige of organisations and senior management teams. in these instances, graeber (2018: 13) cites the work of receptionists, front of house workers in office blocks who have little to do, but whose presence reaffirms the power and prestige of the organisation. relatedly anderson (2017) refers to the dictatorship of 'private governance' whereby employees are subject to the unaccountable whims of senior management. there are at least two points to be made. first, the arbitrary rule of management cadres is subject to the disciplines of capitalism this can be softened by monopolistic and oligarchic tendencies which serve to concentrate power and facilitate its abuse. second, the increasing significance of 'financialisation' has interrupted the 'traditional' way in which surplus value is appropriate, that is money being used to generate more money (m-m), thereby circumventing the role of productive labour. this process has rather more in common with primitive accumulation and rent seeking than with the real subsumption of labour to capital. notably, the current conjuncture is one which features the decoupling of employment and wages from productivity and growth. this can be seen in the arbitrariness of the relationship between wages and productivity; we need only to reflect on the excessive incomes awarded to senior management whose companies fail, setting this against the derisory wages of productive workers. at times this can be reflected in the irrationality and incoherence surrounding the distribution of income and wealth. this distribution is of course shaped by the balance of class power which currently favours senior management and the interests of capital. waged labour is central to the current doxa and is construed as being pivotal to social and economic well-being with its absence seen as the obverse. the lack of waged labour carries with it a range of social harms that can lead to a sense of worthlessness resulting in both physical and mental health issues. work is construed as being central to who and what we are (wilkinson and pickett 2010, 2018) . this raises several issues. the significance of waged labour is that it can enable full participation in wider society. however, this is predicated on having a sufficient incomenotably in-work poverty is increasingly a feature of capitalist economies (anderson 2017: 134-135; bloodworth 2018; ehrenreich 2010) . in-work poverty is also reflected in highly alienating and unpleasant work in both the global north and south (the guardian 2015; parker and vonow 2017; war on want 2019a, b). whilst what constitutes alienating and unpleasant work is not only a subjective but also a value judgement, we should nevertheless reflect on the type of work available to the working-class communities that shildrick et al. (2012) studied. in these communities many people churned between low-waged, low-skilled work interspersed with periods of unemployment, but nevertheless the search for and commitment to waged labour is a feature of these communities. for a number of writers this commitment is used to challenge 'pathological' notions which construe such communities as not only refusing to work but as also living off state benefits and petty crime (shildrick et al. 2012; simmons and thompson 2011) . in this instance, the commitment to and search for decent work is seen as a social justice question. however, there is an irony. on one level this argument reflects a realistic political strategy that seeks to provide decent work for those who have been excluded. in some respects the debate concerned with ubi addresses these social justice questions. it is suggested that ubi would enable people to avoid highly exploitative and oppressive waged labour. it might lead employers to invest in capital machinery so as to remove the drudgery from waged labour whilst simultaneously encouraging improvements in the quality of work. at best ubi could be seen as an aspect of revolutionary reformism-a stage along the route to a qualitatively transformed social and economic system. yet on another level through the centrality accorded to waged labour ubi may serve to lock people into capitalist work relations, becoming a form of entrapment (holloway 2019: 230) . for cleaver (2017: 13) the struggle against waged labour, or in workerist terms its refusal, places 'the struggle against work [as] the most fundamental threat to the [capitalist] machine'. it is important to acknowledge the damage waged labour inflicts upon those who encounter in-work poverty. at the same time we also need to recognise the harm that results from the intensification of labour and the surrounding insecurities that arise when all of life revolves around work (beckett 2018, online; cederström and fleming 2012; frayne 2019; marazzi 2011: 113) . sage (2019) points out that it is not so much the lack of the experience of work that matters but rather the failure to adhere to a powerful social norm that calls for involvement in waged labour. he claims that those who are weakly attached to this social norm suffer far less from the absence of waged labour than those who are strongly attached (frayne 2015) . for example, sage (2019: 210) cites hetschko et al. (2014: 150) who found that the well-being of those who transition from long-term unemployment to retirement increased significantly suggesting this was because they are no longer subject to the 'work ethic' and the opprobrium of not having waged employment (and see ponomarenko et al. 2019) . before considering the debates that surround the ubi, i would like to revisit conceptualisations of work. much of the previous discussion prioritises waged labour and presupposes the patterns of employment that characterised industrial capitalism. it bemoans the transitions that have occurred in recent years that have led to exclusion from waged employment and increased precariousness. malloch et al. (2021) argue that historically we have tended to define ourselves in terms of waged employment (see wilkinson and pickett 2010, 2018) . consequently, lifelong learning has been justified through its instrumental connection with waged work, this being particularly the case with vet. in this instance, sage's (2019) argument is particularly salient, pointing as it does to those who have transitioned from waged employment to retirement. this argument serves to alert us to the potential contribution that a re-imagined vet could make to lifelong learning for those at different stages in their 'lifespace' and 'lifespan' and who are differently positioned to waged work (malloch et al. 2021) . such a stance would call for the re-imagining of vet that moves beyond a narrow instrumentalism tied to waged employment. there are a range of conflicting arguments derived from both the left and right that revolve around ubi and its cognates (see martinelli 2017 , for a measured account of the issues as they apply to the uk). much of this debate concerns questions of affordability and is located within a policy science framework that addresses the application of ubi in the current socio-economic context. this takes for granted existing capitalist relations and seeks to insert ubi into the current welfare system, one increasingly seen as out of kilter with the nature of waged labour and family life in the twenty-first century. that is to say, one in which fordist models of employment have been superseded by more flexible and less secure work, with the two income family becoming normalised. demographic changes in global north have led to increasing number of elderly people living in single occupancy households who require support by carers or family members. it is important to recognise that the manner in which ubi could be implemented varies with the specific version that is adopted. yet at the same time within this policy science framework the lineaments of the argument remain the same being split between two diametrically opposed positions. martinelli (2017: 2) suggests that 'rather than claiming ubi is unaffordable per se, a more apt characterisation of opposition is that an affordable ubi would be inadequate, and an adequate ubi would be unaffordable'. in addition, there are claims that ubi would not necessarily benefit the poorest members of society, that is, if ubi served to replace both the bureaucracy and range of benefits provided by the welfare state. the suggestion is that if ubi is to be affordable it would need to be set at such a low level that it would fail to address the poverty of the poorest and that if it was set at a sufficiently high level it would be unaffordable (hoynes and rothstein 2019) . it is also suggested that ubi by definition would be a universal benefit offered to all and therefore its distribution would sit alongside existing patterns of inequality unless elements of conditionality were applied which would mean it would be bought into alignment with other welfare benefits, with all the costs that this would incur. paradoxically, its effectiveness as a counter to poverty would be undermined by its universality which would mirror existing patterns of inequality (goulden 2018) . for those who argue in favour of ubi from a policy science or technicist framework, it is thought that a basic income will address the inequalities that derive from precarious work as well as those forms of employment that lead to in-work poverty. a basic income would guarantee a minimum standard of living that would compensate for periods of unemployment as well as for inadequate wages (skidelsky 2016 ). in addition, by reducing levels of poverty ubi would also bring with it improved physical and mental health (haagh and rohregger 2019) (world health organisation 2019). it is suggested a basic income would reduce welfare bureaucracy by shrinking the number of means tested benefits. in its pure form it would result in a universal payment to all members of society, placing on recipients the responsibility for how it was spent and the purposes to which it was put. in this way it would reduce the cost of the welfare state by eradicating all other benefits. however, many of the proposed versions that seek to implement ubi are based on some sort of conditionality. for example, the royal society of arts' (rsa's) version reduces ubi once incomes are in excess of £75,000 pa and tapers it away to nothing for those who earn above £150,000 pa (painter and thoung 2015: 23) . in the following i want to move away from policy science, or what i have described as technicist approaches to ubi. such approaches are concerned with technical questions surrounding the implementation of ubi, its feasibility, as well as its costs and benefits. these technicist approaches would interrogate whether it is the best way to address poverty and inequality in the current socio-economic context. the starting point for this discussion is with the moral and ethical arguments that ubi could prefigure the development of a future society that moves beyond both waged labour and capitalist relations-a post-work, post-capitalist social formation. weeks (2011: 12) reminds us that there are other ways in which work, or more precisely productive labour, could be organised than those found in capitalist economies. in the preceding discussion it could be argued i have used the term productive labour somewhat promiscuously. the term itself is janus-like in that it can point to the production of surplus value and its appropriation by capital but also to the production of use value that may lie outside the remit of capital, the domestic labour of women involved in social reproduction would be a case in point (hester and srnicek 2019) . rustin (2013: 13) reminds us that 'there is no conceivable material or technological excuse for unemployment, when there is abundant work which could and should be done, in nurturing, developing and expressing human capabilities'. whilst this passage is rooted in productivism it nevertheless alerts us to the possibilities of 'really useful labour' lying outside of capitalist wage relations, in which we could express our species being. this would call for a form of vet predicated on the right to education which broke from its connection with productivism (anderson 2009 ). such a model would seek to enable participants to engage with really useful labour and would facilitate a re-•imagining of social and political relations, thereby allowing vet to be directly engaged with our species being. hunnicutt's (2013) discussion of the forgotten american dream is both salutary and pertinent. at the onset of industrial capitalism there was a concerted attempt to discipline workers so that they became habituated to the rhythms of the factory-immiseration was one such tactic. hunnicutt draws our attention to the struggles of american workers in the 19th and the early years of the twentieth century for the reduction of working hours and their call for the exponential expansion of free timethe "progressive shortening of the hours of labor" (hunnicutt 2013: xi) . such concerns were apparent until the middle years of the last century when they were eclipsed by the pursuit of an ever-increasing standard of living. free time was a space in which workers could exercise their species being and engage effectively in un-alienated labour, thereby escaping the 'tyranny of the job' and reasserting the dignity of labour external to capitalist wage relations (hunnicutt 2013: 7) . although the struggle against the discipline of the factory was evident in britain during the early stages of industrialisation concerns with the extension of free time was less pronounced than in america. it was nevertheless a feature of trade union campaigns. however, this struggle was of a reformist kind, contributing towards the social reproduction of labour. it provided a space where workers could escape from the meaninglessness of waged labour. engagement with free time enabled some workers to give meaning to their lives and facilitated their subsequent reengagement with paid employment. current concerns with work-life balance resurrect such concerns. at the same time the call for the extension of free time could be reinvigorated to articulate with moves towards ubi as part of a revolutionary reformism. as pitts and dinerstein (2017a: 428) quizzically comment on this position 'basic income is perceived as the means by which the link between money and subsistence can be maintained in a world where the relationship with the wage weakens'. yet, ubi may also place the capitalist state in a position of power over those whose income fails to meet their subsistence needs. at the same time ubi because of its focus on individualisation serves to undermine the collective power of labour and trade unions. for writers, influenced by italian workerism, such as fumagalli (2011), the relationship of labour and the measurement of surplus value has been interrupted in the current economic context. he suggests that 'with the advent of cognitive [knowledge, immaterial, info-] capitalism, valorization tends to graft itself onto different forms of labor, which go beyond the official work-time and coincide more and more with the whole lifetime' (2011: 10, and see vercellone 2009 ). these arguments are buttressed by a particular analysis of the 'general intellect' and a passage in the grundrisse referred to as 'fragments on machines' (marx 1973 (marx [1857 (marx -1858 704-706, 2014 [1858] ). cognitive capitalism emphasises the role of 'common' collectively formed knowledge developed outside the labour process which is subsequently appropriated by capital in the pursuit of surplus value. gorz (2010: 52) points out that cognitive capitalism operates in a different manner to industrial capitalism in that its main productive force, knowledge, is a product that is in large part the outcome of unpaid collective activity. in addition, the manner in which production is described in the 'fragments' is deemed to illustrate the logic of capitalist development. marx (1973: 705) writes, 'labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself '. the thrust of these arguments is to underpin those that celebrate the possibility of a post-capitalist, post-work society, one which is marked by abundance. this is allied with, what may be described as, following adler (2007) , paleo marxism, whereby the full development of the forces of production are held in check by the relations of production. in these instances, knowledge itself is deemed to be an important means of production whose transfer and distribution incurs minimal costs leading to what rifkin (2014) describes as 'the zero marginal cost society'. the full development of the forces of production heralds the possibility of a society marked by abundance in which traditional notions of waged labour are transcended. this 'accelerationist' stance is a feature of the work of hester and srnicek (2019) , mason (2015) and srnicek and williams (2015) , amongst others. the political logic here is to push capitalism as far and as fast as possible, thereby exacerbating the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, speedingup the move towards a post-work and post-capitalist social formation (mackay and avanessian 2014) . mason (2015: 144) writes, technologically, we are headed for zero-priced goods, unmeasurable work, an exponential take off in productivity and the extensive automation of physical processes. socially we are trapped in a world of monopolies, inefficiency, the ruins of a finance-dominated free market and a proliferation of 'bullshit jobs'. for mason this is reflected in the contradiction between 'the possibility of free abundant socially produced goods' and 'monopolies, banks and governments seeking to maintain control ' (2015: 144) . it is almost as if capitalism will bring about its own demise and that all we need to do is to work with the grain of the development of the forces of production to transform society. whilst the move beyond waged labour is thought to be progressive and predicated on the development of the forces of production, this relationship is not straightforward. this issue is addressed in critiques of workerism, post-work and post-capitalism which raise several questions concerned with: the analysis of general intellect, productive labour, forces of production as well as the measurement of value. writers such as pitts and dyer-witheford, amongst others, draw our attention to the difficulties and tensions in workerist, post-capitalist and post-work thinking (dyer-witheford et al. 2019; pitts and dinerstein 2017b). pitts, for example, emphasises that the focus on waged labour fails to move beyond capitalist relations for two reasons: first, the provision of ubi replaces the employer with the capitalist state and, second, and more importantly for this discussion, analyses of post-work fail to transcend the social relations of production. lombardozzi and pitts (2019: 9) argue, what appears simply as a crisis of work, wage and social democracy in fact reflects a deeper and more pervasive crisis of social reproduction. these three are the social forms that mediate the antagonistic and contradictory struggle to survive in capitalist society. combined with such a 'social form' perspective, social reproduction theory expands the theoretical understanding of the under-investigated intertwined relationship between productive and reproductive work which reproduces social inequality and hampers wellbeing. importantly for pitts (2018: 3) the key insight of social form analysis is that value does not derive from concrete but rather from abstract labour which is 'a category of social mediation expressed in money', a social form undergirded by antagonistic social relations. it is here that the crisis of measurement can be resolved. this resolution is based on 'socially necessary labour-time, a retrospective abstract social relation between all labours mediated by commodity exchange' (pitts 2018: 24) . hester and srnicek (2019) in a similar manner to lombardozzi and pitts (2019) draw our attention to the crisis of social reproduction, albeit from a stance rooted in a post-work framework. they point out that many analyses of post-work have been in danger of side stepping questions of social reproduction and productive labour, or to put it differently, the 'really useful labour' that would be required in such a context. hester and srnicek (2019) are fearful that this neglect could serve to exacerbate and may even naturalise gender inequalities concerned with care and the nurturing of children. within a post-work society, despite the rhetoric attached to artificial intelligence, robotisation and the like, there will be a range of tasks that will continue to need to be performed by people. these tasks could range from elder care through to dealing with human detritus and so on. as discussed earlier the thrust of postcapitalist analysis of the forces of production suggests that its development will result in a society of abundance. this is a top down process whereby the development of the forces of production herald the end of capitalism leading to its demise and is reminiscent of marx and engels's (1967: 94) description of capital being its own gravedigger. this is a process that follows a logic that is independent of human agency. however, the forces of production are wedded to capitalist relations as is the technology that is mobilised. the point here is that to presume that the development of the forces of production of themselves can herald a post-capitalist society is overly optimistic. this lacuna can be addressed if we reintroduce an analysis of class struggle into conceptualisations of the forces of production. such an analysis would recognise that there is a class struggle over the application of technology to production which is marked by an antagonistic relationship between labour and capital. this antagonistic relationship is mediated by regional, national and localised contexts as well as by intersectional relations, that is to say, the way in which class, race, gender and so on are interrelated. for workerist and post-capitalist analyses marx's discussion of the general intellect in the 'fragments on machines' is of pivotal importance. to reprise the earlier discussion the 'fragments' have been used to analyse the current conjuncture and sits alongside discussions of cognitive or information capitalism etc. gorz touches on these arguments when he suggests the current conjuncture is qualitatively different from that of industrial capitalism in which the main productive force, knowledge, is a product that is in large part, the outcome of an unpaid collective activity, of a 'self production' or 'production of subjectivity'. it is to a large extent, 'general intelligence', shared culture, living and lived practical knowledge'. (gorz 2010: 52) in a not dissimilar manner vercellone (2009) suggests that within cognitive capitalism we need to explore the production of surplus value that arises externally to the capitalist enterprise. [following the gratuitous appropriation of the surplus generated by the social cooperation of labour] it becomes important to rethink the concepts of wage, productive labour and exploitation in a framework where this cooperation is no longer confined within the factory but extended to the whole of society, as it organises itself more autonomously from capital. (vercellone 2008, unnumbered) the significance of the above is that it prioritises the development of knowledge, and views this as a collective and implicitly democratic accomplishment occurring outside the direct control of capital. such arguments are tied to an anthropised analysis of the general intellect and for writers, such as dyer-witheford and pitts, this anthropisation represents a misreading of marx. pitts and dinerstein (2017b: 2) comment, capitalism's specificity pertains not to work but to the forms taken by its results: abstract labour, value, money. combined, these approaches suggest that the escape from 'work' is no escape route from capitalism. for dyer-witheford et al. the general intellect is represented by its embodiment in capital, whilst for pitts a better understanding of the current conjuncture can be provided by form analysis allied with social reproduction theory. the point is that these writers refuse a straightforwardly optimistic view of the general intellect and the thrust of capitalist development towards a post-capitalist future. these writers accept that such developments may lead to the absence of waged labour but this does not necessarily represent the transcendence of capitalism. rather blacker's description of worklessness may be more appropriate for these writers and to this particular context. the current neoliberal mutation of capitalism has evolved beyond the days when the wholesale exploitation of labor under-wrote the world system's expansion. while "normal" business profits plummet and theft-by-financerises, capitalism now shifts into a mode of elimination that targets most of us-along with our environment-as waste products awaiting managed disposal. (blacker 2013: 1) dyer-witheford et al.'s (2019) rather bleak discussion of ai and its potential development echoes blacker's analysis. although their analysis is speculative focusing on artificial general intelligence (agi) they suggest that currently ai cannot match human capabilities. currently, variable labour power is seen as a particular feature of human labour which is characterised by general intelligence, that is to say, 'the ability to reason with general knowledge, to perform many different tasks, and to operate in new and completely different domains and environments …' (dyer-witheford et al. 2019: 126) . nevertheless, dyer-witheford et al. speculate that in time agi will become a possibility thereby rendering human labour redundant and no longer required by capital. the point is that these more pessimistic accounts point to the importance of struggle in shaping societal development and in this way avoid the over optimism surrounding some readings of post-capitalism and accelerationism. they suggest a variety of sites of struggle that could be engaged in the pursuit of a post-capitalist social formation which i discuss below. chatterton and pickerill (2010) in their discussion of anti-capitalist activists not only discuss the range of practices deployed but also point to the fluidity of the strategies mobilised to access a wider constituency. a similar argument could be made in relation to the strategies that could be used in the struggle towards a post-work/post-capitalist society. there are any number of starting points for such a politics, all of which carry with them limitations and omissions. despite the critique of accelerationism, it does provide a starting point that builds on the development of the forces of production and pushes these to their limit. the omission is that this stance plays down the manner in which technology is enmeshed within capitalist relations. consequently, it is involved in a twofold struggle. first is to re-appropriate technology for the collective good thereby undermining the way it is shaped to serve capitalist interests and in this way technological advances could be bent to serve all members of society. second, in its current configuration technology has facilitated processes that have led to deskilling, casualization and precarious labour. this becomes another site of struggle concerned with the availability of decent work. those capitalist processes that lead to de-skilling, casualization and precarious labour could be both challenged and re-engineered to serve collective ends. currently, there is a 'schizophrenic' orientation to waged labour, for some, work consumes all of life whereas for others its absence compounds the disadvantages they face. shortening the working week and increasing the amount of free time available to workers could address this issue and presage alternative conceptualisations of waged labour. if the logic of capitalism is to render increasing numbers of people surplus to its requirements this could presage the possibility of a post-work future, opening-up a politics that moves beyond the preoccupation with waged labour (harvey 2014) . the use of ubi in part addresses this issue, yet may lead to the capitalist state taking on the mantle of the employer with all the negativity that surrounds that. there is a struggle here that needs to move beyond the individualisation that surrounds ubi which needs to connect with collective strategies for social change. such strategies would engage in discussions of the alternatives to waged labour in post-work/post-capitalist society which need to address the transformation of the social relations of production. i would like to close this section by referring to chatterton and pickerill's (2010) activists whose practices may serve to validate and give social recognition to forms of 'productive' labour that are external to the wage nexus. this of course is another site of struggle that could lead to the development of collective strategies for change that would at the same time address the manner in which socially necessary labour is distributed without compounding existing inequalities. these examples are drawn from what could be described as localised practices. however, such practices need to engage with broader social movements that are concerned with struggles towards change, not only at a local level but also regionally, nationally and globally. the point here is to join with broader struggles that seek to transform and develop socially just societies. lombardozzi and pitts (2019) remind us that discussions of waged labour, work and ubi, by failing to move beyond the capitalist social forms in which these are located, are unable to develop a politics that addresses the antagonistic social relations that generate the crisis of social reproduction. these antagonisms derive from the totality of social relations that lie beyond the immediacy of waged and 'free' labour. an adequate politics needs to address the totality of these social relations, failure to do so means critique is lodged within the sphere of social forms that are entwined with capitalist relations. pitts (2018) argues postoperaist, or what i have referred to as workerist, accounts of contemporary work can 'easily dovetail with mainstream accounts of changing capitalism'. we need only reflect on the work and analyses of the wef and similar institutions. in many of the societies of the global north and south, vet is deemed to be of lesser value than that provided by universities (see cedefop. 2017: 4; wang and guo 2019: 551, 553 ; but see cedefop. 2017: 24) . in the recent past and especially in the uk, vet has been described as being for 'other peoples' children' (bathmaker 2014a, b) . even when vet is offered in higher education institutions it is frequently devalued, being compared unfavourably with medicine, engineering and so on (bathmaker 2014a, b) . there is a degree of ambiguity in this type of argument that serves to devalue vet, though they do indicate the presence of classed based processes. at the same time universities are increasingly being called upon to be business facing and to prepare their graduates for the world of paid employment. the irony is that elite higher education institutions have historically been pivotal in the reproduction of social relation in terms of class as well as ethnicity. importantly, attitudes towards vet are mediated by the socio-economic, temporal, spatial and geographic context in which they are placed. in a review gessler and siemer (2020: 92) suggest, since the financial crisis of 2007/2008, at the latest, vocational education and training (vet) has gained a high degree of attention, as it is often perceived as a solution to socioeconomic problems following financial crises, particularly the rise of youth unemployment. vet is also viewed as an instrument for increasing an economy's productivity, capacity for innovation and competitiveness. there are a number of issues that flow from this discussion particularly in an analysis that argues for an expansive construction of vet. importantly, esmond points towards the further development of vet and workplace learning in the formation of what he describes as 'technical elites' (atkins et al. 2019) . there is an echo here with discussions of the 4th ir which suggests there is a hollowing out of the occupational structure. those workers who are described as 'technical elites' able to understand and problem solve creatively when things go wrong will need a holistic understanding of productive processes. in this respect, these elite workers will be required to combine and draw on both 'disciplinary' and practice-based knowledge that underpins production. access to disciplinary knowledge in this context is not only a feature of distributive justice but also an embedded feature of their labour. it would be risible to ignore the relationship of vet to waged labour and the manner in which for all worker disciplinary knowledge relates to practice and should be thought of dialectically rather than as a static relation. such a conceptualisation can be related to the significance of occupational and professional responsibilities to wider society, that is their civic responsibilities and social obligations. alongside the discussion that addresses the significance of vet for occupational and professional practice there is another debate that has often been marginalised. this debate considers those who lie outside the waged relation and formal economy-the unwaged and workless. it articulates with the social and civic obligations that we owe to one another and is concerned with the development of use values that can contribute towards the well-being of ourselves, the communities within which we live, as well as beyond. it is easy enough to relate this type of vet, particular at this moment of time, with caring forms of labour. however, it extends further than this to encompass a range of self-defined concerns. in the global south these could encompass responses to, as well as the cultural, social and material resources that could be drawn upon to survive poverty and build a 'good' life. in addition vet will be mediated by temporality and our location within our lifespace and lifespan. this would be a rights-based vet that would break free of its erstwhile association with capitalism and a narrow instrumental interest in addressing the needs of industry. in this instance, vet would conjoin with a rightsbased education concerned with the furtherance of a socially just society. conceptualisations of the 4th ir are intertwined with capitalist relations and constitute a deeply ideological notion which carries with it a number of implications for the future of work, social relations, education in general and vet in particular. the term itself could be re-appropriated by a post-capitalist and post-work project. however, such a politics would face a number of obstacles, but no more than any other radical project in the current conjuncture in which the forces of popularism and post-neoliberalism hold sway. such an engagement would interrogate the 4th ir for the affordances it offers in the development of emancipatory practices. as against those who advocate the distinctiveness of 4th ir who position it as qualitatively different to those of the past, it is important to note that it is nevertheless necessary to hold onto the manner in which industrial revolutions (from the first to the fourth) articulate with capitalism and its accumulation strategies. this engagement, by centring capital, would qualify claims to the 4th ir's distinctiveness. such a stance would acknowledge that to re-appropriate the 4th ir for an emancipatory project would necessitate a break with its logic which is rooted in capitalist relations. this chapter addresses arguments that engage with italian workerism, post-capitalism, post-work, ubi and paradoxically, the politics of abundance. it seeks to develop a politically informed analysis that moves beyond current conceptualisations of the 4th ir that in turn inform a critical, if not transformative praxis. it serves to remind us that technology is never innocent and that in its current form is conjoined with capitalist interests. consequently, social and political processes are of central importance in the struggle for change. the affordances provided by the technology surrounding the 4th ir need to be re-appropriated to serve collective interests. this is no easy task, the 4th ir is an ideological construct that can be bent in a number of different directions and can be given a progressive veneer by the apologist of capital. it is for this reason that class struggle is of central importance, but this struggle must be aligned with an expansive understanding of class. such an understanding would include sections of the middle class as well as those who are involved not only in waged labour but in other forms of 'really useful productive' labour. care work would be a case in point as would that which contributes towards social reproduction-in this instance the domestic labour of women is pivotal. an expansive understanding of class would also incorporate the workless, those surplus to the requirements of capital who have been excluded from the wage nexus and would similarly necessitate a broader conceptualisation of vet. the struggle for change needs to be informed by a political strategy that operates on a number of fronts, from the local through to the national and global. whilst such a politics would be located within a revolutionary reformism, it needs to refuse the limitations of such a stance and the danger of its co-optation by a progressive capitalism that seeks to resolve and move beyond the limitation of a post-neo-liberalism. the future of critical management studies: a paleo-marxist critique of labour process theory engels' pause: technical 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approaches to a healthy, prosperous life for all learning to be a social scientist acknowledgement this chapter draws in part on my 'socio-technical imaginary of the fourth industrial revolution and its implications for vocational education and training: a literature review', published in the journal of vocational education & training, 2018. 70:3, 337-63, https://doi.org/10.1080/1363682 0.2018 e-journal of linguistics doaj indexed (since 15 sep 2015) july 2019 vol. 13. no. 2 p: 281—289 https://doi.org/10.24843/e-jl.2019.v13.i02.p07 e-issn: 2442-7586 p-issn: 2541-5514 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eol/ 281 lingual investigation of president soekarno speech: a report 1 david samuel latupeirissa, stiba kupang, nttindonesia 2 i ketut darma laksana, darmalaksana27@yahoo.com udayana university, bali-indonesia 3 ketut artawa, artawa56@yahoo.com, udayana university, bali-indonesia 4 i. g. ag. sosiowati, sosiowati@yahoo.com, udayana university, bali-indonesia *corresponding author: latupeirissadavid1@gmail.com received date: 10-01-2019 accepted date: 28-02-2019 published date: 31-07-2019 abstract—the current research aims at investigating the most important speech of soekarno and the ideologies behind the speech. since soekarno was the proclaimer of indonesian independence as well as the first president of indonesia, we would claim that his speeches were important to be investigated. among the speeches, we tried to reveal the most important one through a lingual investigation. this investigation was based on grounded theory and hermeneutic theory. it was focused on the text as a part of the language. the results have shown that the most important speech of soekarno is the speech entitled, ‘tahun berdikari’. it is viewed as a high novelty finding because there is no researcher who has ever claimed ‘tahun berdikari’ as the most important speech in the history of indonesia. the speech contained three main ideologies, namely (1) unity as the most important thing for indonesians, (2) revolution must be in the indonesian soul, and (3) imperialism and capitalism as indonesia’s main enemy. keywords: soekarno’s speech, discourse, grounded theory, hermeneutics 1. introduction political speech is a genre of political discourse and is part of public discourse. it is characterized by formal lexis and monolog form and it is usually carefully crafted by professional speechwriters, which leaves no room for improvisations on the part of the speaker (matić, 2012). the study of political discourse itself, that focus on political speech, has become a very crucial study especially in the area of the ideology behind a political language. in line with the above statement, thomans & wareing (1999) states that political speech, through indirect manipulation of language, impulses people to do or not to do something. skillful speakers of the political language are able to influence the preconceptions, views, ambitions, and fears of the public (norman, 1989; david, 2014). they can persuade people to accept false mailto:darmalaksana27@ mailto:artawa56@yahoo.com mailto:sosiowati@yahoo.com mailto:latupeirissadavid1@gmail.com e-journal of linguistics doaj indexed (since 15 sep 2015) july 2019 vol. 13. no. 2 p: 281—289 https://doi.org/10.24843/e-jl.2019.v13.i02.p07 e-issn: 2442-7586 p-issn: 2541-5514 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eol/ 282 statements as true postulates, or even support policies conflicting with their interests. preconception, views, postulates, belief, etc, are parts of ideology that contain in political language (cf. mclellan, 1986; erikson & tedin, 2003). counting such ideas, it is stated that any political speech is important to be investigated, especially in the area of its ideology. this paper was written to investigate the most important speech of soekarno. soekarno was the proclaimer of indonesian independence, as well as the first president of indonesia. his speeches, theoretically, are believed as the basics formation of indonesian social construction (cf. fairclough, 2006). we believe that the result of the current investigation will contribute to the field of political discourse, critical discourse analysis, as well as the history of indonesia. the finding of the most important speech, especially the one which is related to ideology that constructed social phenomena of indonesia, will direct any future researchers of political discourse, or critical discourse analysis, and historians, etc., to explore the speech for humanity and scientific purposes. 2. research methods we applied qualitative research that was based on grounded theory and hermeneutics. the grounded theory is a logically consistent set of data collection and analytic procedures aimed to develop a theory (charmaz, 2014). it is a kind of inductive strategy for analyzing data. a major contribution of the grounded theory method is that it provides rigorous procedures for researchers to check, refine and develop their ideas and intuitions about the data (bryant et al, 2007). charmaz (2014), furthermore, stated that the term grounded theory denotes dual referents; (a) a method consisting of flexible methodological strategies and (b) the products of this type of inquiry. in the current research, rigorous procedures were set to investigate soekarno’s speeches. the methodology was rather flexible. firstly, we went to the indonesian republic national archives (irna) in south jakartaindonesia, and national library of indonesia republic in central jakartaindonesia. secondly, we investigated the archive of soekarno’s speech by reading and comparing them. thirdly, we decided the smaller corpora. the last, from the corpora we applied hermeneutics principles to decide the most important speech. the research was conducted for two years, that is, from 2016 to 2018. e-journal of linguistics doaj indexed (since 15 sep 2015) july 2019 vol. 13. no. 2 p: 281—289 https://doi.org/10.24843/e-jl.2019.v13.i02.p07 e-issn: 2442-7586 p-issn: 2541-5514 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eol/ 283 3. result and discussion our research, as has been stated above, was firstly conducted by visiting indonesian republic national archives (irna) and national library of indonesia republic. irna was located in ampera raya street no. 7 south jakarta, while the national library of indonesia republic was located in the 27 salemba street, central jakarta. both of them were the places where original state documents were kept. irna was the office storage of soekarno’s speeches that retrieved directly from the office of the indonesia state secretariat while the national library of indonesia saved the original documents of soekarno’s speech that have already published. the places mentioned above were chosen for the sake of getting genuine documents. in irna, there were 919 documents of soekarno speeches and memos/ notes of soekarno. after reading all the documents, we have found that soekarno put more attention on speeches that delivered on august 17 th s. soekarno himself stated that particular august 17 th speeches were important (siswo, 2014). the statement is displayed in the following data. data 1. tahun jang lalu, saja menamakan hari ulang tahun proklamasi satu hari jang unik. satu hari jang istimewa, satu hari jang menondjol, satu hari jang luar biasa… in the last year, i called proclamation anniversary day as a unique day, a special day, a prominent day, an extra ordinary day…. data 2. sebetulnja tiap hari 17 agustus adalah hari istimewa… every august 17 th s is an exceptional day… data 1 and 2 above were taken from soekarno’s speech entitled “laksana malaikat yang menyerbu dari langit”, that was delivered in august, 17 th 1960. the data are examples of many others which show that soekarno, himself, very admired the days of august 17 th s. another example was taken from the speech entitled “jangan sekalisekali melupakan sejarah”. the speech was delivered on august 17 th, 1966. one of soekarno’s statement is shown in the data 3. data 3. memang pada tiaptiap 17 agustus seluruh dunia dan seluruh umat manusia mengarahkan perhatiannya kepada djakarta, karena mereka ingin mengetahui… in every august 17 th s, indeed, the world, as well as all human beings, give their attention to djakarta (the capital city of indonesia), because they want to know… e-journal of linguistics doaj indexed (since 15 sep 2015) july 2019 vol. 13. no. 2 p: 281—289 https://doi.org/10.24843/e-jl.2019.v13.i02.p07 e-issn: 2442-7586 p-issn: 2541-5514 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eol/ 284 it is known from data 3 that soekarno had the perception that all the people in the world focused and gave their special attention to indonesia. based on this perception, we would say that soekarno prepared his best in delivering august 17 th s’ speeches. having known the phenomena, we focused on the speeches that delivered by soekarno in august 17 th s. there were 21 speeches of soekarno that categorized as important speeches. the speeches were delivered on august 17 th , started from the year 1945 to the year 1966. on this stage, we examined all the speeches by applying the technique of “critical discourse reading”. as a result of applying the technique, we have had a speech that categorized as the most important speech of soekarno. taking those thoughts into account, this research has found that the most important speech of soekarno’s political speech (sps), based in our lingual investigation, is the speech under the title of ‘tahun berdikari’. it was delivered by soekarno on august 17 th, 1965. following is the explanation of our research’s result of applying “critical discourse reading” (see. fairclough, 1995). the sps ‘tahun berdikari’ was selected for several reasons. the first reason, soekarno himself, as has been stated previously, stated that the speeches of august 17 th were very important (siswo, 2014). among the speeches, ‘tahun berdikari’ was the most important speech since it was the only speech that contains a summary of all the august speeches, that soekarno delivered from august, 17 th 1945 august, 17 th 1959. in other words, it incorporates the complete ideology of spl. the following diagram describes how this speech contained the complete ideology of soekarno. e-journal of linguistics doaj indexed (since 15 sep 2015) july 2019 vol. 13. no. 2 p: 281—289 https://doi.org/10.24843/e-jl.2019.v13.i02.p07 e-issn: 2442-7586 p-issn: 2541-5514 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eol/ 285 diagram 1 the existence of “tahun berdikari” speech” note: = the speech which contains the most ideology concepts of soekarno = the main ideology of a speech was restated in “tahun berdikari” speech. pidato = speech the second reason is described as follows. in 1965, indonesia faced critical times as the communist party maneuvered to kill a number of indonesian generals. this was followed by the tragedy of large-scale killings and civil unrest which occurred over several months, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic chinese and alleged leftists, often at the instigation of the armed forces and government (melvin, 2017). hermeneutically, as the president, with evidence of foresight, soekarno appeared to feel and sense the crisis before the tragedy happened. for sure, he constructed and delivered his best political speech in that year. that is why the speech of ‘tahun berdikari’ was selected to be the most important speech. on the further investigation of the speech, we have found some important clues that will lead them to the revelation of ideology. first, there were 145 segments in sps. second, on the segments, there were more than 14 main ideas/ issues discussed by soekarno. the topics were 1) unity, 2) revolution, 3) imperialism/ capitalism, 4) history of the indonesian nation, 5) thanksgiving for many positive aspects that have been given to indonesian people, 6) the spirit of struggling in gaining freedom, 7) the meaning of freedom, 8) do not give up in facing difficulties, 9) nationalism, 10) the spirit of independence, 11) real leadership, 12) culture, 13) e-journal of linguistics doaj indexed (since 15 sep 2015) july 2019 vol. 13. no. 2 p: 281—289 https://doi.org/10.24843/e-jl.2019.v13.i02.p07 e-issn: 2442-7586 p-issn: 2541-5514 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eol/ 286 spiritual braveness, and 14) the ideology of marhaenism. third, the dominant issues were unity, revolution, and imperialism. soekarno discussed ‘unity for indonesian’. the theme of unity dominates 30% of the whole text. semantically, there are 119 lexicons that related to the topic of unity as the most important thing for indonesians. the lexicons were used to persuade people to be united. on the analysis of context, it would be explained the whyness of this persuasion. the second dominant topic that has been identified, was about revolution. the researchers have found that soekarno constructed 39 segments speaking to speak about revolution. it features in 27% of the whole text. the general meaning of these segments is that ‘revolution itself that must be sustained and continually lived out by all indonesian people’. both the first and second topics are repeatedly expressed in sps. overall, there are 204 lexicons that are semantically related to the topic of revolution. there are 164 lexicons of the word ‘revolution’, and 40 lexicons of the word ‘revolutionary’. the third dominant topic that has been identified, was imperialism and capitalism. the total construction of segments that speak about it was 31. it features in 22% of the text as a whole. semantically, there are 76 lexicons that relate to this third topic. using the lexicons, soekarno constructed the ideology into indonesian people. following is the chart of sps’ topics/ issues. e-journal of linguistics doaj indexed (since 15 sep 2015) july 2019 vol. 13. no. 2 p: 281—289 https://doi.org/10.24843/e-jl.2019.v13.i02.p07 e-issn: 2442-7586 p-issn: 2541-5514 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eol/ 287 30% 22% 21% sps' main topics unity revolution imperialism and capitalism other topics figure 1 the dominant issues of sps other topics, collectively comprising 21%, talk about: (1) history of the indonesian nation, (2) thanksgiving for many positive aspects that have been given to indonesian people, (3) the spirit of struggling in gaining freedom, (4) the meaning of freedom, (5) do not give up in facing difficulties, (6) nationalism, (7) the spirit of independence, (8) real leadership, (9) culture, (10) spiritual braveness, and (11) the ideology of marhaenism. the eleven ideas above, overall, are only 1.9 % of the spl. in other words, they are not dominant in the text. the dominant ideas, or the main topics, are ‘unity’, ‘revolution soul’, and ‘imperialism and capitalism’. having conducted the analysis, the researchers believe that the findings of the main topics or dominant issues of sps have led them closer to the revelation of the ideology behind sps. 4. novelties having done the analysis, there are some novelties of this study which are presented as follows. first, in the history of indonesia, there is no one who has ever stated that the most important sps is ‘tahun berdikari’. based on our examination, we have found that ‘tahun berdikari’ is the most important sps. second, there is a belief among indonesian people that marhaenism and nasakom were the main ideology of soekarno (wibowo, 2005; kuswono, 2016; winata, 2017). based on the current research’s finding, we have found that the belief was e-journal of linguistics doaj indexed (since 15 sep 2015) july 2019 vol. 13. no. 2 p: 281—289 https://doi.org/10.24843/e-jl.2019.v13.i02.p07 e-issn: 2442-7586 p-issn: 2541-5514 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eol/ 288 not correct. the marhaenism and nasakom were only ‘branch’ of three main ideologies, that is, ‘unity as the most important thing for indonesians’, ‘revolution must be in the indonesian soul’, and ‘imperialism and capitalism as indonesia’s main enemy’. 5. conclusion based on our investigation, we concluded that the important speeches of soekarno were the speeches of august 17 th s. among them, the “tahun berdikari” speech is the most important one. related to the finding, we conducted a further investigation about the ideologies of the speech. we have found that the three main ideologies of the speech were ‘unity as the most important thing for indonesians’, ‘revolution must be in the indonesian soul’, and ‘imperialism and capitalism as indonesia’s main enemy’. references bryant, antony, and charmaz, kathy. (2007). 'grounded theory in historical perspective: an epistemological account', in bryant, a., and charmaz, k. (eds.), the sage handbook of grounded theory. los angeles: sage. pp. 31–57. charmaz, k. (2014). constructing grounded theory. sage. david, m. k. (2014). language, power, and manipulation: the use of rhetoric in maintaining political influence. frontiers of language and teaching, 5(1), 164-170. erikson r.s, tedin k.l. (2003). american public opinion. new york: longman. 6th ed. fairclough, n. (2006). discourse and social change. cambridge: polity press. kuswono, k. (2016). marhaenism: social ideology create by sukarno. historia jurnal program studi pendidikan sejarah, 4(2), 119-130. matić, d. (2012). ideological discourse structures in political speeches. komunikacija i kultura online, 3(3), 54. mclellan d. (1986). ideology. minneapolis: univ. minn. press norman, f. (1989). language and power. london and new york: longman. siswo, i. (2014). panca azimat revolusi: tulisan, risalah, pembelaan, & pidato sukarno 1926 1966. jakarta: kpg thomans, l., & wareing, s. (1999). language, society, and power. london: routledge e-journal of linguistics doaj indexed (since 15 sep 2015) july 2019 vol. 13. no. 2 p: 281—289 https://doi.org/10.24843/e-jl.2019.v13.i02.p07 e-issn: 2442-7586 p-issn: 2541-5514 https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eol/ 289 fairclough, n. (1995). critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. london: longman melvin, j. (2017). "mechanics of mass murder: a case for understanding the indonesian killings as genocide". journal of genocide research. 19 (4): 487–511. https://doi:10.1080/14623528.2017.1393942. wibowo, y. s. (2005). marhaenisme: ideologi perjuangan soekarno. buana pustaka. winata, l. (2017). nasakom sebagai ideologi negara tahun 1959-1965. avatara, 5(3). 7. acknowledgments i would like to express my deep appreciation and thanks to those who have given me hight motivation to finish this work; my nuclear family, parents, and sisters. https://doi:10.1080/14623528.2017.1393942 e-journal social criticism in the poems and dramas created by w.s. rendra from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties i ketut sudewa indonesian deparment, faculty of letters, udayana university jl. nias 13 denpasar, telephone (0361)224121 e-mail: sudewa.ketut@yahoo.co.id i nyoman darma putra indonesian department, faculty of letters, udayana university jl. nias 13 denpasar, telephone (0361)224121 e-mail: idarmaputra@yahoo.com i nyoman kuthra ratna indonesian department, faculty of letters, udayana university jl. nias 13 denpasar, telephone (0361) 224121 i nyoman weda kusuma indonesian department, faculty of letters, udayana university jl. nias 13 denpasar, telephone (0361) 224121 abstract social criticism in the poems and dramas created by w.s. rendra from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties this study analyzed the poems and dramas created by w.s. rendra which were published from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties. such an era was a period of time during which rendra creatively created his literary works. politically, the decade from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties was an era during which the authoritative new order held the power and did not hesitate to take action against those, including artists, who bravely expressed their criticisms. it was in that repressive period of time that rendra appeared as a poet who so bravely used the poems and dramas he created to articularize his social criticisms. this study aims at revealing the themes and consistency of the social criticisms expressed by rendra in the poems and dramas he created. this study was importantly conducted as the social criticisms the literary works rendra created were not only strong but are still currently factual as well. many researchers have analyzed the social criticisms the poems and dramas created by rendra contained but none had analyzed such a topic comprehensively and consistently. this present study attempted to complete the studies previously conducted so that the ideas, thoughts and concepts expressed by him through his literary works can be more comprehensively understood and exceed the era when they were created. the theory of sociology of literature and the theory of semiotics were used to analyze the social criticisms expressed by rendra through his literary works. the theory of literature was used to analyze the social criticisms by contextualizing the themes and era when he created his poems and dramas, and the theory of semiotics was used to analyze the meanings of the sign systems the two genres contained. these two theories were used at the same time and were supported by the other relevant theories such as the theory of politics, the theory of capitalism, and the theory of feminism. his dramas were analyzed before his poems so that the consistency of the social criticisms he expressed in the two genres could be described. the result showed that the social criticisms expressed by rendra in his poems included four great themes; they were values of feminism, education, capitalism and poverty, politics and law. his dramas also contained such social criticisms, as exemplified by the poems “sajak sebotol bir” and “sajak pulau bali” and the drama “kisah perjuangan naga”, which contained the theme of how vicious capitalism was. the language styles used to articulate his social criticisms were also identical, indicated by the use of metaphors, repetitions, paradoxes, rhetorical questions, ironies, and cynicisms. his consistency in expressing social criticisms through his poems and dramas made him successful in becoming the most talkative man of letters during the indonesia’s history of literature. keywords: social criticism, poem, drama, consistency 1. introduction this study explores the poems and dramas written by rendra which were published from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties. such a period of time was the golden era of the new order regime. his poems and dramas published from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties contained social criticisms of various social problems in indonesia such as feminism, poverty, the power the capitalist had, education, politics, law and human rights. the social criticisms the poems and dramas written by rendra from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties contained were worth exploring for the following reasons. first, they revealed various social problems in indonesia with their themes starting from feminism, education, capitalism and poverty to politics and law. rendra’s awareness of and attention to social life in indonesia caused such themes to appear. such a period of time was the golden era of the new order government which was authoritative in all aspects of state life. the government executed was not based on the awareness of and attention to what people needed but on the power for maintaining national stability. second, the period of time from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties was the period of time during which rendra was highly productive. therefore, it was an important period of time of his authorship. before and after that period of time, he was not so productive. prior to that period, he paid less attention to the social life in indonesia. after that period of time, his productivity as a poet and stage of actor was decreasing. third, rendra was a great poet, stage actor and cultural observer. he was not only popular in indonesia but also in other countries; therefore, his works were worth exploring. it was believed that his works contained great ideas, insights and concepts which needed revealing. apart from that, as a poet and stage actor, he was different from the other poets and actors in his era. the problems which were explored in this study were (1) what social condition in indonesia was reflected in the poems and dramas written by rendra which were published from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties? (2) what social criticisms could be revealed from the poems and dramas written by rendra which were published from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties? (3) how the social criticisms revealed from the poems and drama written by rendra which were published from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties related? 2. theoretical framework the theory of sociology of literature and the theory of semiotics were used as the main theories in this study, and the theory of capitalism, the theory of feminism, and the theory of politics were used as the supporting theories. the reason why many theories were used was that in the study of literary works, no theory was independent; in other words, supporting theories are always needed. in this study, the theory of sociology of literature proposed by diana laurenson and alan swingewood (1972) was used. according to them (1972:16-22), the analysis of sociology of literature includes three perspectives: (1) the sociology of literature is not only supposed to find out the social history and reflection any literary work has, but is also supposed to be able to find out the facts it contains; (2) the sociology of literature considers any literary work a production, especially the production of the writer’s social situation; (3) the sociology of literature attempts to find the events in any literary work which can be accepted as social facts, especially historical events. this theory accommodates all the concepts related to the theory of sociology of literature. it was expected that the theory of sociology of literature could reveal optimally the social criticisms the poems written by rendra contained. the theory of semiotics used is the one proposed by ferdinand de saussure (in zaminar, 2008; widana, 2009). he discovered the theory of signs. he formulated his theory by stating that signs in language involved three things; they were (a) sign, (b) signifier, and (c) signified. ever y sign in a language had two sides; the signifier and the signified. it is through these two sides, the meaning of the signs the poems and dramas written by rendra contained could be revealed. 3. research method the method used in this study was library research. the other methods which were relevant to the analysis of sociology of literature and semiotics such as qualitative and hermeneutic methods were also used. the research was initiated by reading the poems and dramas written by rendra which were published from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties thoroughly and intensively. as far as the poems were concerned, they were read deeply, identified and classified. finally, the poems which contained social criticisms were found. in addition, the poems which contained social criticisms were further identified and classified based on the themes. it was the poems which had been identified and classified based on the themes were used as the sample of the study. the dramas written by rendra which were published during the same period totaled four. they were intensively read and the themes they contained were identified. the analysis was made based on the themes. finally, the relationship between the social criticisms his poems contained to the social criticisms his dramas contained could be found. in the process of analysis, every poem and drama written by rendra which had already been classified based on the theme, were analyzed using the operating method taken from the theory of sociology of literature and the theory of semiotics. the relationship of the poems and dramas written by rendra to the social situation during the period they were written and various signs they contained were identified. during the analysis, the poems and dramas used as the sample were interpreted using the hermeneutic method, the theory of sociology of literature and the theory of semiotics. when analyzing the poems, they were read heuristically and hermeneutically or retroactively. heuristic reading means the reading which is done based on the structure and convention of the language used in the poems. and hermeneutic or retroactive reading means the reading which is done based on the literary convention. by such readings, the social criticisms the poems written by rendra contained and how they were related to those his dramas contained could be found. 4. discussion and results rendra’s literary works revealed many actual social problems in indonesia. it turned out that the social problems revealed in his poems and dramas which were inspired by the condition in indonesian during the new order era were still currently factual. in addition, the language used was simple, factual and contextual. therefore, his works were welcome by society in general and the lovers of literary works in particular. from the analysis of the sociology of literature, it was found out that the poems and dramas written by rendra which were published from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties reflected the social condition in indonesia during the new order era. what was revealed in his literary works included poverty, capitalistic behavior, education, socio-political condition, law and human rights. through four great themes, rendra expressed his responses to and attitudes toward the social situation in indonesia. he criticized how the authoritative new order government behaved toward its people. the functions and meanings of the four themes were to fight for what people should have received in regard to economy, politics, education, law, and human rights. in his poems, he expressed his social criticisms using metaphor, repetition, paradox, rhetorical question, irony, satire, and the image of sight and hearing. in his dramas, he expressed his social criticism through satire and irony. the results of the study showed that his dramas had four themes and used satire and irony, which were continued in his poems, meaning that the quality and consistency of his social criticisms expressed in his poems were well maintained. as a poet, stage actor and cultural observer, he was consistent with his attitudes toward the social situation in indonesia; he socially criticized the new order government, which he should be responsible for. this also means that rendra was consistent with his global view that the ‘ability to survive’ should be maintained in his literary works. his attention to the social life in indonesia was so great that he could be stated a sociologist as well as a poet, stage actor, and cultural observer as umar khayam and mangun wijaya. 5. conclusions and suggestions 5.1 conclusions rendra’s poems and dramas which were published from nineteen seventies to nineteen nineties reflected the social situation in indonesia during the new order era. through his poems and dramas, he criticized many social problems such as feminism, education, capitalism and poverty, politics and law. the language styles used in his poems and dramas were metaphor, repetition, paradox, rhetorical questions, irony, satire and the image of sight and hearing. by using such language styles and image, the social criticism he expressed became strong and simple. the social criticism expressed by rendra in his poems was similar to that expressed in his dramas. similarly, the language styles used to express his social criticism in his poems were similar to those used in his dramas; the dominant ones were irony and satire. he expressed the same problems using the same language styles. from the two genres, it seemed that the social criticisms revealed by rendra in his poems were still maintained in his drama, meaning that the quality and consistency were maintained. 6.2 suggestions many literary works created by rendra have not been comprehensively investigated yet. exploring his literary works means indirectly introducing rendra and his thoughts to the public. this study is a small attempt which may lead to it. it is recognized that his ideas and insights expressed in his literary works are sociologic in nature; therefore, they need to be comprehended and mused about by the readers. it is suggested that literary works need exploring perpetually. in this way, his thoughts and ideas could be understood and the social situation expressed could be understood as well. it is recognized that this study has not been complete and perfect; many other things need exploring using psychology of literature, intertext and reception of rendra’s literary works. in addition, the social criticism expressed by the other poets both coming from his era and other eras also need exploring. therefore, it is suggested that his other literary works and the literary works written by other poets should be explored as well to enrich the treasure of research in literary works in general and the literary works written by rendra in particular. this attempt is intended to make the world of literature close to the public. literary works will become animate objects instead of inanimate ones in the middle of community. 6. acknowledgements this dissertation could not have been completed without supervision, input, suggestions and assistance provided by many parties. therefore, in this opportunity, the writer would like to thank prof. dr. i nyonan darma putra, m.litt., as the main supervisor, prof. dr. i nyoman kutha ratna, s.u., as co-supervisor i, and prof. dr. i nyoman weda kusuma,m.s., as cosupervisor ii for their motivation, supervision and input. thanks are also expressed to the board of examiners such as prof. dr. i wayan cika, m.s., prof. dr. i made suastika, s.u., prof. dr. i.b. putrayadnya,m.a., prof. dr. i nyoman suarka, m.hum., and dr, i. b. putra manuaba, m.hum. for the input and suggestions provided. finally, a word of appreciation should also go to all the parties that cannot be mentioned one by one for their encouragement, suggestions and input during the completion of this study. microsoft word 4.1_galleys.docx tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 59 redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice tana-julie drewitz university of duisburg-essen abstract science fiction enables us to explore alternative notions of gender, identity, and biotechnological advancements. a potential new futuristic universe may depict societies that might have different social norms. anthropocentrism limits our imagination in that humanity becomes the vantage point from which we judge other forms of existence. the notion of posthumanism challenges human exceptionalism, thus constructing a narrative based on post-anthropocentrism. this article addresses the issue of displaced discriminatory power structures with special attention to reconfigurations of humanity that challenge the self/other dichotomy. the cyborg as a hybrid identity disrupts the traditional dualisms of embodiment (mind/body) and identity (organism/machine). it examines octavia butler’s dawn (1987) and ann leckie’s ancillary justice (2013) in order to show how the protagonists deal with power struggles that are quite different from conventional narratives of power in western scholarship such as white patriarchal capitalism. the protagonists of both novels become posthuman cyborgs by moving beyond the normative human condition, with gender as a key aspect. butler’s lilith biologically transcends her human self by fusing with an alien other, thus representing biological posthumanism. leckie’s breq merges an enhanced human body with an ai consciousness and becomes an exponent of technological posthumanism. i argue that the anthropocentric issues of racism and sexism are not supplanted by post-anthropocentrism, the protagonists rather subvert anthropocentrism in different contexts of posthumanism. this project sheds new light on science fiction narratives written by female authors—with a focus on afrofuturism, in the case of butler—and explores how the protagonists are exponents of unique non-binary gender configurations. keywords: posthumanism, science fiction, collective will, hybridity, cyborg, transformation. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 60 i. introduction: advantages of science fiction the age-old question of what it means to be human is prevalent in almost every field of study. whether it is the evolution of the modern homo sapiens in biology, pivotal events in human history, or sociocultural aspects of spirituality in theology: despite ongoing debates in the course of philosophy, the mysteries of humankind have yet to be unraveled. speculative fiction in literature becomes a tool for writers who seek to explore the privilege of calling oneself a human being. science fiction (sf) in particular is a genre in which a plethora of possible futures can exist, presenting readers with interesting alternatives to the present real world. mary shelley’s frankenstein or the modern prometheus (1818), an exponent of gothic fiction, is also regarded by some scholars as the first real sf narrative because it includes scientific and ethical issues in a story about a mad genius creating a being that wreaks havoc upon society: an unholy monster that confronts its maker with the harsh reality of its (in)human nature. humanity as a concept can be understood in two different contexts. on the one hand, it is the whole of humankind on earth as in a bipedal, intelligent mammal that has populated the planet. its biological constitution (humanness) includes a developed consciousness, advanced intelligence and an s-shaped spinal cord. on the other hand, humanity represents the virtue of acting on kindness, compassion, and benevolence. the concept of becoming “more than human”—moving away and beyond humanity—is represented by the notion of posthumanism. the two primary texts analyzed here, as it is shown through close reading, deal with the transcendence of humankind in two different ways. in octavia butler’s dawn (1987) humanity comes in direct contact with an otherworldly intelligence called the oankali. protagonist lilith iyapo wakes up on an unknown spaceship which turns out to belong to the aliens who kept her and other humans asleep for 250 years in suspended animation after a nuclear war rendered planet earth uninhabitable. having been rescued from a gruesome death, lilith and the other survivors are to become part of a plan to re-colonize earth. lilith is chosen to teach a group of forty humans how to survive on their former planet as well as to mentally prepare them to meet their alien saviors. with genetic engineering and biological modification as key themes, this novel is a great example of how popular culture representations of stem and gender operate within different ideologies and in terms of power struggle. ann leckie’s ancillary justice (2013) tells the story of a rogue soldier by the name of breq who seeks revenge on the leader of the radch empire. nineteen years before, she had been in the service of the radchaai as an artificial intelligence (ai) in the warship justice of toren. after an act of betrayal which leads to a traumatic incident resulting in her new posthuman existence, she now seeks revenge, traversing the empire in search of her enemy. this narrative revolves around augmented cyber bodies, militarized ai, and a far-reaching conflict while featuring a prominent female protagonist. thus, it fittingly portrays the interrelationship between stem, gender, and popular culture. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 61 i argue that the two novels feature characters that transcend human standards in favor of enhanced bodies. in that sense, both narratives convey the notion of posthumanism in terms of biology (in butler’s case) and technology (in leckie’s). the two novels are both the first installments of a trilogy and can offer new ways of evaluating two different decades of american sf writing. hence, a comparative reading of both narratives is useful in revealing similarities or even crass differences in depictions of leading female characters. in order to examine the extent of posthumanism and its realization in american sf, it is necessary to define the concept more clearly and develop three main aspects significant for its further analysis: the existence of a collective will, the transformative process of becoming posthuman, and finally, the state of being more than human. prominent scholars such as donna haraway and katherine hayles have analyzed different conceptualizations on decidedly the most well-known figuration of posthumanism, namely, the cyborg. this article utilizes their theoretical frameworks along with critical perspectives from other academic writers (such as ivan callus and stefan herbrechter; francesca ferrando; and cary wolfe). the following analysis is founded on three aspects concerning posthumanism in american science fiction: a collective will, transforming into a posthuman subject, and the consequences of hybridity. in terms of a collective will, both novels feature a type of overarching authority that seeks to unite humans under a collective mentality. this is either a benevolent alien civilization, or an expanding military power. arguments concerning the construction of a collective will center on the idea that an individual can only thrive if they find their place in a collective culture. as a second aspect of posthumanism, becoming posthuman involves abandoning one’s humanity in order to become a posthuman subject. technological fragmentation represents one way of transforming, while biological and social assimilation in the form of alien kinship represents the other. finally, the third aspect entails the consequences of existing as a posthuman cyborg. hybridity means either worrying about cyborg anxiety or having a new sense of identity by dismantling dualisms and embracing non-binary modes of existing. essentially, it is crucial to question whether a supposed non-hierarchical society truly liberates individuals who are disadvantaged by prejudice and discrimination, or if it constrains them even more so. ii. defining posthumanism posthumanism refers to the notion of going beyond the normative definition of being human: a different body, species, or perception. generally known as critique of the liberal humanist subject from the age of enlightenment, this interdisciplinary field has scholars drawing connections to known critical theory terms such as postmodernism or poststructuralism. for cary wolfe, posthumanism “comes both before and after humanism: before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world” (xvi-xvii). ivan callus and stefan herbrechter define tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 62 posthumanism as “the cultural condition occasioned by twenty-first-century biopolitics, technoculture, lifescapes and all the desires and anxieties arising therein, as well as the discourse that studies all that” (145). there are two consequences to moving beyond the human condition. on the one hand, posthumanism poses a threat to humanness—human nature, in an anthropocentric sense—, which might lead to its rejection. on the other hand, however, the idea can be embraced based on the positive implications of a posthuman condition that encompass a better future for all life on earth. a closer look at different contemporary critical, philosophical, and cultural approaches to the concept contributes to clarifying what this key term means for the present literary analysis. human exceptionalism establishes a primacy of human over non-human animals, while also creating social hierarchies within the human realm. posthumanism as a concept dismantles human power structures entirely and alternatively creates a non-hierarchical environment. thus, it challenges human exceptionalism and reimagines “particular modes of inquiry from perspectives that do not privilege human needs, human ideas, and the general bias toward human centrality“ (pilsch 312). in this sense, humans are not put above animals but are rather regarded as equals to them. postanthropocentrism replaces anthropocentrism in that human social issues such as racism, sexism, and homophobia are supplanted by speciesism, which then becomes a new form of distinction, or worse, prejudice and discrimination (callus and herbrechter 150). new differences emerge as the humans become obsolete: exotic others such as the robot, the extraterrestrial, and the cyborg challenge the dualistic nature of the human condition (ferrando 30). yet, the question remains if a non-hierarchical society can truly exist without a new authority rising to take control. the extent of postanthropocentrism in the novels must be further examined in the context of a collective will. posthumanism breaks down boundaries and the barriers of traditional binaries. one figure that embodies the blurring of strict separating lines is the aforementioned cyborg. commonly known as a cybernetic organism, this figure can also act as a link between polarizing concepts. two leading scholars in this field, donna haraway and katherine hayles, have published works concerning this iconic paradigm. both see its significance for the posthumanist discourse, albeit in slightly different contexts. in haraway’s “a cyborg manifesto” (1985), the cyborg is a political myth which explores boundaries that “have resulted from post-world war ii technoscience: those between human and animal, organism and machine, and the physical and non-physical” (leitch, “donna haraway” 2188). within the framework of feminism, an oppressed individual (e.g. women) becomes a liberated posthuman subject, freed from constraints of the conventional narratives of power like western white capitalist patriarchal society (csicsiery-ronay jr. 396). in reference to ferrando’s non-hierarchical future, haraway’s cyborg transgresses certain dualisms such as self/other, mind/body, and even male/female (leitch, “donna haraway” 2217). posthumanism offers a future society that abolishes distinctions based on binary systems, tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 63 creating a world in which we, as posthumans, are all hybrid identities, either cyborgs (human/machine) or maybe chimeras (human/animal) (2191). hybridity in both novels is depicted differently, with one narrative focusing on various blurred concepts and the other highlighting the anxiety arising from the merging of the self/other. hayles’s approach to the posthuman incorporates aspects of information theory and cybernetics. in her groundbreaking theoretical framework how we became posthuman (1999), hayles touches upon several terms that describe the steadily increasing virtual quality of human life and social interactions. for her, the emergence of the posthuman is due to the scientific developments since the second world war that transformed the liberal humanist individual (leitch, “n. katherine hayles” 2161). this shift in favor of virtual existence privileges a disembodied state of existence over a materially embodied one: “in the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism” (hayles 3). these material-informational beings do not possess a will of their own as there is “no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will” (4). this leads to the construction of a collective will. iii. collective will: alien saviors and imperialistic radch in the fictional worlds of both novels, a new authority seeks to unite humans under a certain mentality. it can either be the benevolent exotic other, as is the case in butler’s alien oankali, or it can appear in the form of leckie’s militaristic radch empire. both factions are characterized by a specific drive to ameliorate humanity in terms of existence and culture. in this sense, the new authorities dismantle individual autonomy and become all-embracing omnipresent systems (callus and herbrechter 145). in other words, human self-will fuses with the authorities’ other-will resulting in a collective will (hayles 4). the following sections deal with two different conceptualizations, one where individuality is negotiated and one where it is unwillingly suppressed. the premise for dawn deals with a planet earth that has been devoid of human civilization for nearly three centuries after a human-induced nuclear war rendered it uninhabitable. the only humans who are left in this postathropocentric scenario are on a space vessel floating just in proximity to the planet. protagonist lilith wakes up in a strange room in which she feels like a prisoner. after some time one member of the alien species keeping her there eventually reveals himself to her. this is the first time lilith comes in contact with the new other. the male humanoid being with an androgynous voice and strange worm-like tentacles all over his body triggers xenophobia, or rather speciesism, in the protagonist due to the “pervasive need to alienate from oneself those who appear to be different—i.e., to create others” (zaki 241). tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 64 in the conversation with the oankali male, lilith learns more about the aliens. they have three sexes: male, female, and ooloi, with the latter being gender neutral and playing a crucial role in oankali reproduction (butler 22). the ooloi are genetic engineers, their bodies being living science laboratories where they mix their species’ male and female genes to create offspring. physiologically, they differ from the other sexes with their four arms and two elephant-like trunks. as a people, the oankali regard themselves as gene traders whose existential purpose involves collecting genetic material from various sentient and intelligent species in order to create new forms of life: “we trade the essence of ourselves. our genetic material for yours … it renews us, enables us to survive as an evolving species” (40). this practice of genetic engineering from an alien other exemplifies biological posthumanism. in their opinion, humans are erroneous beings who need guidance. the destructive nature of humanity apparently stems from the combination of a high level of intelligence and the tendency to fall into hierarchies (ferrando 28; butler 38). to avoid a nuclear war from ever happening again, the oankali seek to correct the human flaw in order to establish a peaceful togetherness. in exchange for the humans’ willingness to mate and produce hybrid offspring, they will be offered the chance to return to earth to restart a posthuman civilization: “that’s part of the trade … to the rebirth of your people and mine” (butler 42-43). already, the collective will set for lilith and the other survivors seems like a good alternative to letting the human species go extinct. this human-alien partnership “suggests the birth of something new through the fusion of two previously separate entities” (bollinger 37). both sides would mutually benefit from each other by surrendering an aspect of their self (self-will) in return for a part of the other (other-will). however, not all humans on board agree to this collective will. social hierarchies based on discrimination and difference reappear, hence confirming humans’ need to constantly create others in order to reassert one’s own true human self (zaki 241-2). this can be observed later in the novel when lilith starts mentally preparing the other humans to meet the oankali. after a couple of days, the group is divided into two factions: those who trust lilith and those who outright reject her leadership while accusing her of conspiring with the enemy (butler 159). the oankali represent the new exotic other that seeks to create a postanthropocentric future without hierarchies that would lead to conflicts and violence. the collective will is therefore established on a positive note: the aliens are a helpful authority wishing to help humanity in order to ultimately help themselves. however, the universe of ancillary justice paints a different picture. this plot takes place in a far-away future in which humanity has moved on from earth into the outer reaches of space. militaristic conquest of the imperialistic radch empire has thus shaped the galactic community in this narrative. for nearly 3000 years, this empire has been tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 65 led by the entity known as lord of the radch, anaander mianaai.1 unlike butler’s alien narrative, this collective will is mainly based on obedience rather than benevolent guidance and can be observed in two ways. the first involves the radchaai society, while the second refers to the construction of military warships with their artificial intelligence systems. the latter specifically constitutes technological posthumanism. using violent annexations to expand its space territory, the radchaai seek to bring civilization to planets and assimilate the respective cultures into the prevalent radchaai society. in their language, radchaai means to be civilized and any member of the radch is addressed as citizen (leckie 62). here, then, the binary labels citizen/noncitizen replace binaries known to us such as male/female, abled/disabled, or heterosexual/homosexual. people are either radchaai or non-radchaai, civilized or not civilized. although this new authority seeks to unite humanity into one great collective through space conquest, the radchaai society is not inherently egalitarian. a class system divides radchaai citizens into privileged and less privileged houses. therefore, the radch does not represent an ideally non-hierarchical society (ferrando 30). the large military arsenal includes various spaceships called swords, mercies, and justices which are used for annexations. the justices function as troop carriers and the built-in computer system of the ship is completely automated; ais control every part of the ship, which includes up to twenty technologically modified humans that act as extensions for the military unit. this clearly represents technological posthumanism, as the cyborg segments are hooked onto a collective unit in which they are completely under the other-will. the self in this case is the ai program in the ship, a sort of technological nervous system that controls various connected bodies. these ancillary segments are a part of a powerful operating system (clark 133) and have no will of their own due to ai-controlled brain implants. the fusion of self-will and other-will results in a perfectly cohesive collective will, like a virtual puppeteer who controls the former human cyborg segments with invisible cybernetic strings. prior to becoming breq, the protagonist used to be the ai of the ship justice of toren one esk. both names refer to one subjectivity,2 it is only the form of existence that has changed. flashback chapters date back nearly two decades, recounting the events that led up to the birth of breq including the ai self and its service under lieutenant awn. with the ai being everywhere, the ship as an entity floats above the planetary orbit while also being 1 the nature of this being is not defined more closely. it would be plausible to assume that this character might also be an artificial intelligence or a powerful human who has managed to create a large empire: “when most people spoke of the radch they meant all of radchaai territory, but in truth the radch was a single location, a dyson sphere, enclosed, self-contained” (leckie 235). 2 given the first-person narrator in the novel, breq and one esk (the ai as well as the actual space ship justice of toren) essentially represent the same identity with the same subjectivity. the only difference is the 19/20 year time jump and the material manifestation. during the analysis, i refer to one as the other but in different contexts. i will refer to the ai as “it” and use the pronouns she/her for breq. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 66 omnipresent on the ground with its many ancillary bodies “i stood at the entrance … i also stood some forty meters away … i saw all of this, standing as i did at various points surrounding the temple” (leckie 13-15). with its distributed cognition and multiple points of perspective, the ai is comparable to a surveillance camera. it is in a constant state of simultaneous embodiment and disembodiment best described as a “new posthuman ontology of simultaneous corporeal substance and cybernetic disembodiment” (leitch, “n. katherine hayles” 2162). the ship, its brain (ai), and the external connectives constitute one being that corresponds to hayles’s concept of the posthuman subject. she defines the latter as a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo a process of continuous construction and reconstruction (hayles 3). when a new segment is attached the configurations change, a new body must adapt to the collective will. as one esk recounts: “things were always a bit clumsy while i got used to a new segment. sometimes [it] simply would not function properly, and then it would have to be removed and replaced” (leckie 172). like a computer that needs fixing, the construction of ais and ancillaries combines cybernetic elements with biological components. the enslaved victims of the radchaai imperial conquest are used as military equipment, acting as parts in a machine that operates under a collective consciousness. in this sense, the whole system is comparable to the borg, a recurring antagonist from the popular television series star trek.3 what callus and herbrechter refer to as an omniscient “all-embracing system” (145) is represented on the one hand by sympathetic alien oankali, who do not mean any harm to the human survivors. on the other hand, ancillary justice only depicts technological posthumanism to some extent, including the dehumanizing aspect of slavery. compared to the aliens’ plan to eliminate humanity’s proclivity towards hierarchies, the radch empire still adheres to social ones in the form classism. iv. transformation: becoming posthuman, assimilation, and fragmentation the process of becoming more than human entails a transformation from the normative human condition into a posthuman one. on the one hand, seeing as “technology frequently operates in science fiction to dissect or disassemble the body for purposes of reconstruction and modification” (seed 64), a change in terms of technological posthumanism appears in the form of a computer malfunction or a disrupted flow of information codes. biology, on the other hand, works with modification, where the subject adapts to a new way of life through posthuman kinship, intimacy, and physical enhancements. 3 the borg travel through space (and occasionally time) enslaving species they might find useful for their ever evolving collective. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 67 in the alien narrative dawn, the humans on board of the ship become posthuman through assimilation into oankali culture. this happens through interdependency and scenarios of strange intimacy between the species. the following sections deal with the protagonist’s journey into a posthuman existence which consists of her familiarization with members of the alien species and the attainment of certain capabilities. the plot takes a turning point when the ooloi reveal themselves to the awakened4 humans, a pivotal moment that marks a point of no return from humanity. lilith starts becoming posthuman when she starts bonding with the family of the oankali male that she had first met upon waking. slowly but surely, she starts to feel more comfortable among them by living with them and learning about their culture. her relationship with the gender neutral ooloi nikanj grows stronger, which ends in them becoming mates in the course of the novel. the ooloi develops external sexual organs—sensory arms that encase a starfish-like sensory hand—in an apparent oankali puberty during which lilith stays close to it providing food and emotional support. this level of intimacy reaches a climax when a human male is brought into the relationship. when the male and female oankali mates arrive to bring their gender neutral ooloi partner into their home, lilith joins them (butler 82). being in this polygamous alien-human relationship signifies lilith’s transition into a posthuman existence. not only does ooloi nikanj facilitate the protagonist’s social posthuman condition, it also enhances her physical capabilities: ooloi drug-induced brain chemistry change allows lilith to speak and understand the oankali language (butler 79-81), a heightened perception had her efficiently navigate of the ship’s plant-like walls (102), rapid healing prevents injuries. biologically speaking, lilith is human no more. yet, there is also a rather negative aspect attached to that. after spending more time with their designated alien, the humans start to rely on them and, as a result, cannot “tolerate the nearness of anyone except their human mate and the ooloi who had drugged them” (193). the scenario evokes a comparison to drug withdrawal. in this case, the ooloi let the humans become addicted to their biochemical and olfactory signals. by adapting to the otherworldly culture with their bodies (sex) and minds, the post-earth humans acquire a posthuman sense of self: “the choice to embrace the society of the other (the alien) means that the individual, of necessity, rejects his or her own centre (earth)” (kerslake 15). despite the oankali’s apparent dominance, posthuman intimacy also works the other way around. the ooloi themselves are also dependent on their oankali male and female mates as well as their human ones: “ooloi did not endure well when bereft of all those who carried their particular scent, their particular marker … metabolisms slowed, they retreated deep 4 both the adjective “awakened” as well as the verb “awaken” in its other tenses are deliberately spelled with a capital letter throughout the novel. it signifies a specific group of people who have been kept in suspended animation and are now waking up to a new future. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 68 within themselves” (butler 206). the relationship between the species is thus interdependent. with each moment both species spend together, the lines between self/other dissolve. from the humans’ perspective, they move beyond the normative category of “humankind.” thus, they become posthuman by becoming an other. the protagonist of ancillary justice is not human and never has been, which is why her transformation involves moving from an imitation of the human condition to a posthuman existence. one esk’s connection to the ancillaries dissolves and the ai manifests in one single cyborg body, namely breq, a process i will refer to as fragmentation. in order to determine her posthuman condition, it is vital to ask whether an artificial human condition in terms of cognition (psychology, emotion) is a necessary prerequisite for becoming posthuman. this is done by finding evidence for (near) human qualities exemplified by the ai and its relationship to lieutenant awn. a partial transformation of the ai one esk occurs in a scene set in the temple of ikkt. the lord of the radch pays a visit to the city ors, currently under control of lieutenant awn. a false accusation involving conspiracy theories among two citizen groups results in the brutal execution of innocent civilians. unfortunately, the lord of the radch does not tolerate accusations lacking evidence and orders the citizens’ execution by the ancillaries of one esk. a mysterious signal interference renders the ai temporarily powerless as it becomes partially disconnected from its segments: four hours before dawn, things went to pieces. or, more accurately, i went to pieces. each segment could see only from a single pair of eyes, hear only through a single pair of ears, move only that single body … from that moment i was twenty different people, with twenty different sets of observations and memories. (leckie 112) although the segments are not entirely detached from the collective will of the ai, the collective subjectivity still suffers from a form of disembodiment. the cessation of the information flow results in a fragmented subjectivity (leitch, “n. katherine hayles” 2162). yet, the former human victims do not truly reclaim a sense of their selves; the incident merely resembles a technical malfunction. the final fragmentation of one esk’s subjectivity leads to the creation of single cyborg breq. after the debacle in the temple, the lord of the radch confronts the lieutenant about the incident. in a turn of shocking events, it is revealed that lieutenant awn had served her purpose as a pawn of the lord’s inner conflict. for some time now, the alien presger have been corrupting a part of anaander mianaai’s identity, which resulted in the lord’s split personality: “i am at war with myself … i have been for nearly a thousand years … at war over the future of the radch” (leckie 245). this puts ancillaries like one esk in a predicament, as it cannot disobey the lord. but obeying one part means automatically disobeying the other. lieutenant awn is caught in that crossfire, and having done nothing wrong, she is still betrayed by one anaander mianaai. the lord orders ship ai one esk to execute its own tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 69 superior. yet, due to the ship’s loyalty to awn, its segment one var immediately attacks one of the lord’s bodies in an act of retribution. this ultimately leads to the fragmentation of the ship ai: “i formed intentions, transmitted orders to constituent parts … and then i fell to pieces” (248-49). segment one esk’s decision to rebel is an expression of free will that turns into a “mutation within a paradigm of pattern/randomness” (leitch, “n. katherine hayles” 2162). it is this segment that would then become breq. in this case, the fragmentation is a technological malfunction, a disruption caused by the informational overdrive of the ship ai. its bond to lieutenant awn is so strong that the guilt of executing her caused the sudden detachment of one ancillary body from the collective. here, breq defies hayles’ concept of the posthuman cyborg because from that moment on, the protagonist develops a self-will that is distinguishable from an other-will (4). what hayles refers to as the “displacement of organic presence by information pattern” (leitch, “n. katherine hayles” 2163) cannot be applied to the transformation that creates breq. in her case, the shift is reversed as the information that used to flow from ai to the different bodies is permanently disrupted; pattern/code (information flow in ship) is replaced by an organic/mechanical presence (ancillary cyborg body). after the single segment escapes, the ship explodes, on board the corrupted part of the lord and the other radchaai soldiers. the collective consciousness of justice of toren is destroyed, or deconstructed, but not entirely lost due to the fragment that becomes breq. moving from the artificial human condition, she is now reconstructed in a posthuman condition. following haraway’s principle of the cyborg subject, “[a]ny objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly” (leitch, “donna haraway” 2204). the destruction disassembles the ship as an entity, but the posthuman emerges as the fragment of one segment detaches just in time. likewise, hayles’ concept of construction and reconstruction (3) is also exemplified in this scenario: the ship is deconstructed and put together again in a different manner. this complex process of fragmentation in ancillary justice aptly represents technological posthumanism. in spite of her insistence that she is not human, breq/one esk does show feelings of love and devotion, even if they are just an imitation of human emotions. these sentiments persist after the fragmentation, which is the sole reason for breq’s quest for revenge. having the courage to face the all-powerful lord to avenge lieutenant awn. a temporary lover of awn, lieutenant skaaiat, points out the strong bond: “you’re the ancillary, the non-person, the piece of equipment, but to compare our actions, you loved her more than i ever did” (leckie 370). love out of loyalty is equally as valid as romantic love in human relationships. compared to the “true” human lilith who biologically transitions into a new being, the protagonist of ancillary justice moves from an imitation of the human condition to a true posthuman one. whether it is posthuman intimacy or fragmentation, lilith and breq must come to terms with their new situation. to further analyze how each form of posthumanism tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 70 is conveyed in both novels, it is imperative to examine the state of being more (or less) than human. v. hybridity: being posthuman, cyborg anxiety, and blurred concepts hybridization in posthumanism is “both a notion of human-machine merging and the rather specific nature of the merging envisaged” (clark 131). haraway’s cyborg is either a being that blurs dichotomies such as human/machine or human/alien, and transgresses binaries which have, in the western world, resulted in categories like male/female or masculinity/femininity. while dismantling these dualisms might liberate an individual, it can also lead to negative reactions when blurring distinct entities means abandoning a part of one’s identity, an aspect represented by the self/other paradigm (mack 194). the protagonist of butler’s dawn exemplifies a blending of the human self and the alien other, hence, she is a posthuman cyborg. while this hybridization liberates lilith in multiple ways, it also has the negative consequence of alienating her from fellow humans. during her time teaching the group survival skills, lilith is met with open hostility because of her alien advantage. in the final battle scene, she must choose a side in the conflict between humans and nonhumans. lilith must defend her leadership along with her posthuman identity when specific members of the group revert to old patriarchal modes of dominance and prejudice like racism, homophobia, and misogyny (butler 159). retaining one’s humanity becomes a battle cry for the resisting humans. binary dichotomies reappear as a reaction to cyborg anxiety, which is simply the fear of humanity becoming impure through means of an other influence: “[i]n times of genetic breeding, the boundaries between human, animal and machine are being eroded, questioning traditional ‘purities’ and provoking new visions of hybridity and anxieties about purity as a result” (callus and herbrechter 150). in the context of butler’s dawn, the term cyborg anxiety describes the fear of anyone who is not truly human attempting to contaminate human purity. contamination connotes illness, toxicity, and even poison (mack 191), therefore it is not beneficial for the human self. three men from the group challenge lilith’s leadership and by doing so they reject the merging of self/other. curt, peter, and gabriel openly antagonize her by accusing her of not being human enough, even insinuating that she might just be enjoying her sick privilege with the oankali. in contrast to a non-hierarchical posthuman society, these three male characters symbolize toxic patriarchal masculinity. in terms of gender dynamics and performativity, protagonist lilith transgresses traditional behavioral concepts of gender roles only to a certain degree. she questions her leadership skills as a woman and thus contemplates her own femininity. she feels like she is too vulnerable and not mentally prepared to be responsible for parenting a group of forty humans. she imagines if a man were to be chosen as leader: “he tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 71 could undermine what little civilization might be left in the minds of those he awoke5. he could make them a gang. or a herd. what would she make them?” (butler 118). lilith is selfconscious of her womanhood and slightly frightened by the prospect of dealing with violent men who openly challenge her authority. in one scene lilith exemplifies typically masculine traits when she uses violence to end violence within the group. lilith quickly intervenes to stop a sexual assault by fighting the aggressors with her enhanced strength. while the men use violence to assert patriarchal superiority, lilith uses it to reinforce human decency by protecting her fellow woman: “nobody here is property … there’ll be no back-to-the-stone-age, caveman bullshit! … we stay human. we treat each other like people, and we get through this like people” (butler 178). lilith urges everyone to remember the virtue of humanity—compassion and respect for one another—an aspect that might also be interpreted as a call for a posthuman way of going beyond binary distinctions. one could go ahead and call her androgynous as she exemplifies both feminine as well as masculine characteristics (zaki 246). yet seeing as she no longer fits into the normative definition of human, she need not adhere to any of the aforementioned categories. a compromise might be achieved by employing the neutral dichotomy of assertive/reserved. it would be even more fitting to say that as a posthuman lilith is non-binary due to the influence of the alien oankali. the conflict between benevolent aliens and human aggressors reaches a climax in the final parts of the novel. human extremist curt radically labels those who willingly choose the oankali’s protection and anyone who displays posthuman capabilities as traitors. he is responsible for the tragic death of the protagonist’s mate joseph, after seeing the ooloi nikanj heal him (butler 220-23). joseph’s posthuman condition is seen as a threat, genetic modification represents alien corruption: “this conflict is expressed in xenophobia on part of the humans, and the idea of the posthuman, the blurring of boundaries between the human, the animal, the machine, the male, and the female … poses a threat, a dystopia, to the human character” (georgi 263). in the face of an increasing hostility from the humans, the people in the group start accusing each other of cooperating with the oankali and thus betraying the human species. it is here where lilith boldly solidifies her posthuman identity by accepting her self/other union during the final battle: “lilith found herself standing with the aliens, facing hostile, dangerous humans” (butler 227). her conscious decision confirms her cyborg identity: she possesses human and alien elements by supporting the other. even though lilith the cyborg transcends the human/alien dichotomy, this affirmative hybridization is only temporary. lilith herself feels cyborg anxiety and feelings of abjection when she learns of how the ooloi nikanj had inseminated her through its genetic engineering 5 spelling in novel, see footnote 4. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 72 skills. the protagonist realizes how she truly feels about the collective plan to create a hybrid species and calls her unborn child a monster. her attitude reflects some of the other humans’ stance when she wishes for the human condition to end with dignity and not to become a messy posthuman condition (butler 246). consequently, the “question of hybridization versus purity becomes a matter of species survival, asking whether any process of genetic manipulation, no matter how well intended, should be permitted to triumph at the exposure of another species’ extinction?” (roof 129). this pregnancy is not entirely consensual: for the sake of a collective will, lilith was gently pushed into a risky leadership but is met with hostility and rejection due to cyborg anxiety. with this “monster” growing inside of her she rather unwillingly abandons her human condition. moreover, by challenging her leadership the awakened survivors challenge her humanity. breq as a cyborg embodies the traditional merging of human/machine, albeit in a different manner: she is not a human subjectivity inside a machine (hayles 238) but rather an artificial subjectivity in an enhanced female body. ancillary justice is exemplary for “texts that have served to disrupt or challenge normative cultural understandings” (merrick 241) by creating a gender-neutral society and featuring a protagonist who challenges the dichotomies of sex (male/female) and gender expression (masculinity/femininity). radchaai society does not adhere to the strict gender binary, every aspect is quite ambiguously gendered. this is reflected by the language: “radchaai don’t care much about gender, and the language they speak … doesn’t mark gender in any way” (leckie 3). breq has some difficulty when she meets people from cultures that have linguistic markers for gendered identities. in one instance she tries to assume a non-radchaai perspective when she observes a crowd of people: i saw all the features that would mark gender for non-radchaai – never, to my annoyance and inconvenience, the same way in each place … thick-bodied or thin-, faces delicatefeatured or coarse-, with cosmetics or none. a profusion of colors that would have been gender-marked in other places. all of this matched randomly with bodies curving at breast and hip or not, bodies that one moment moved in ways various non-radchaai would call feminine, the next moment masculine. (283) radchaai gender norms go beyond the set dichotomy of femininity/masculinity. there is not opposition or distinction between the two, blurring or even escaping the categories is normalized. as a result, it would be fitting to consider the radch empire a cyborg society not only in terms of their military technology (ai and segments), but also in reference to their cultural gender ambiguity. technology then becomes “a site of cultural anxieties about gender” (merrick 246) by adding inorganic elements to organic bodies and having former humans transcend gender. it cannot be ignored that this is quite negative seeing as the ancillaries are crudely objectified. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 73 the cyborgs lilith and breq both transgress gender and identity dualisms. the pivotal scenes mentioned above solidify their posthuman condition. hybridity in technological posthumanism works with the oscillating flow of information and the constant change of perspective, whereas the biological posthumanism in butler’s alien narrative revolves around the anxiety of becoming other and abandoning one’s (human) self. vi. conclusions butler’s dawn (1987) and leckie’s ancillary justice (2013) depict two future scenarios in which humankind exceeds its normative condition. with the help of posthumanism we can question humanity’s centrality in the universe as well as become aware of the possible consequences of a post-anthropocentric world through literary narratives. it might be non-hierarchical under the guidance of an alien species and therefore a positive prospective. another possibility entails the emergence of a new military power with the need to civilize space. this may include uniting different places on many planets under a negative collective will, annexations, and technological slavery. the protagonists of both novels become more than what they once were, acquiring skills but also losing some they might have had before. their transformation gives them enhanced capabilities which solidifies their hybrid identity and existence. in sum, the narratives of butler and leckie exemplify biological and technological posthumanism concerning the aforementioned aspects of an omniscient authority, a change of physical constitution, and the transgression of boundaries resulting in a liberation from certain social hierarchies. as such, the core arguments of this essay develop haraway’s and hayles’ work on the posthuman cyborg further in that hybridity can also be regarded in a biological context. regarding other genres of speculative fiction, this new approach to science fiction, horror, or even fantasy narratives opens up new methods of interpreting characters who have hybrid identities that go beyond the typical human/machine cyborg. posthumanism offers a path to redefine humanity in ways that liberate some people in terms of physical and social dualisms, whereas it may evoke anxiety in others at the mere mention of nonhuman entities. it is effective because it challenges our understanding of what it means to be human. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 74 works cited bollinger, laurel. “symbiogenesis, selfhood, and science fiction.” science fiction studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 34–53. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/40649584. butler, octavia e. lilith’s brood. new york, grand central publishing, 2007. callus, ivan, and stefan herbrechter. “posthumanism.” the routledge companion to critical and cultural theory, 2nd ed., edited by simon malpas and paul wake, routledge, 2013, pp. 144–53. clark, andy. “cyborgs unplugged.” science fiction and 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d’octavia butler).” science fiction by women, special issue of science fiction studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 1990, pp. 239–51. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/4239994. key: cord-0060854-hwglby22 authors: poyner, jane title: joining the dots: environment, disease and enterprise in the “new” south african novel date: 2020-08-21 journal: the worlding of the south african novel doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-41937-0_7 sha: ec8abcec92bc45d76f91591eab3b1f45cf0a79b1 doc_id: 60854 cord_uid: hwglby22 the chapter discusses how get a life and high low in-between narrativise a failure to imagine the connections and its corrective of joining the dots between global capitalism, the environment and human health. this corrective is revealed through a process of telescoping divergent scales of existence, from the microscopic to the cosmic, that has been deployed by environmentalists and ecocritics to understand the relationship between human and planetary agency. joining the dots prompts readings of human disease such as hiv/aids, in part at least, as an issue of environmental injustice. this thesis risks apparently endorsing thabo mbeki’s eccentric response to the aids crisis, whereby mbeki argued with catastrophic effect that poverty causes aids. yet notions of environmental justice provide a meaningful, materialist intervention in our understanding of human health. […] hostel dwellers are particularly hard hit by the combined effects of poor environments and the instability of their life circumstances" (bed 39). in this chapter i explore how two novels, gordimer's get a life and imraan coovadia's high low in-between (2009) (hereafter, high low) , extend the thematic and discursive repertoire of south african fiction to the impact of the environment, and its management by institutions like national governments, upon the well-being of south africa's poor. environmental justice takes account of the missing link between human and planetary well-being: namely, the capitalist world economy. the capitalist world-system has not only impacted directly upon the natural environment, especially in the third world, which from colonial times to the present day has been harnessed by the first world as a natural resource. built upon the "development of underdevelopment" and "dependent development" (wrec 13), global capitalism immiserates these societies, so leaving them more vulnerable to the degraded environments they inhabit, which are produced by the capitalist world system in the first place (notice the pervasive circularity here). such justice ameliorates its correlate, environmental injustice, whereby communities marginalised by a nexus of race and class bear the brunt of environmental crisis because, as rob nixon defines environmental racism, they are viewed as "more expendable than others" (nixon, slow violence 59) . (i prefer to use "environmental injustice" since "environmental racism" problematically elides the issue of class so central to south african concerns today.) commentators are increasingly thinking through the gendered nature of environmental injustice too (cf. harvey, fiona) . it is therefore not surprising that environmental justice movements have proliferated in former colonies like south africa. in this chapter i explore how get a life and high low narrativise a failure to imagine the connections and its corrective of joining the dots between global capitalism, human health and the environment. as nafisa, the wife of murder victim arif, elucidates, "it came to me this afternoon, govin. everything was connected to the court case. i should have connected the dots a long time ago. the first illegal kidney you transplanted was for arif. you must have paid out of your own pocket" (coovadia 240) . this corrective, i argue, is revealed textually through a process of telescoping divergent scales of existence, from the microscopic to the cosmic, that has been deployed by environmentalists and ecocritics to understand the relationship between human and planetary agency (cf. chakrabarty, clark, . central to environmentalist thinking, for instance, are the twinned concepts of the great acceleration and the anthropocene. the new geological age we have entered, the anthropocene is marked by the onset of industrialisation and industrial capitalism when humans for the first time became agents in the planet's well-being. the great acceleration describes the period during this age as global warming speeds up as a result of an increased use of fossil fuel and the boom in manufacturing after world war ii (cf. clark, ecocriticism 16; chakrabarty, "climate of history" 209) and as the world enters a phase of multinational capitalism. 1 the much needed work of joined up, interdisciplinary thinking is summarised by dipesh chakrabarty when he writes, "if, indeed, globalization and global warming are born of overlapping processes, the question is, how do we bring them together in our understanding of the world" (chakrabarty, "climate" 200) ? i show how the process of joining the dots prompts us to read human disease such as hiv/aids, in part at least, as an issue of environmental injustice. (writing during the covid-19 pandemic, as the world looks on with foreboding as president donald trump pulls the united states out of its relationship with the world health organisation and the virus makes its perilous march through immiserated communities like the hell-hole camps of war-torn syria and gaza, i notice the calls internationally to think through the environmental causes of the virus [cf. brown] .) of course, in the context of hiv/aids this risks apparently endorsing thabo mbeki's eccentric response to the aids crisis discussed in chapter 5, when mbeki argued that poverty causes aids, a response that consequently (and catastrophically) contributed towards the delay in rolling out arv programmes. yet notions of environmental justice can provide a meaningful, materialist intervention in our understanding of human health. in the process, they can also shed light on the medical humanities in which cancer until now has been regarded as the primal scene (viney 5) . (not incidentally, i would suggest, paul bannerman in get a life is being treated for an aggressive form of thyroid cancer.) a failure of the imagination and the corresponding corrective of joining the dots, i argue, are revealed both thematically and in the novels' literary forms. both novels depict disciplinary experts who are themselves victims of life-threatening disease, and who animate intellectual spaces on the links between global capitalism, environmental crisis and human health. these spaces are, in get a life, paul bannerman's childhood garden where his parents still live and in which he recuperates from his invasive radioactive iodine treatment for the cancer; and in high low the murder scene, arif's bedroom. mobile and in flux, such spaces enable dialogue and debate constitutive of the public sphere. by offsetting a failure of the imagination (paul describes nuclear annihilation as "the problem, we can't get people to believe" [gordimer, get 114] ) with scalar depictions of the ecosystem, and through irrealist literary forms that, borrowing from ian watt, i call "delayed decoding" (watt 175) , the novels wrestle with the question, what can we learn from the intersections and cross-fertilisation of these apparently distinct spheres of knowledge and existence? this is not to say, of course, that environmental justice concerns did not emerge in earlier south african novels published during the apartheid era (one only has to think of j. m. coetzee's life & times of michael k [1983] or alex la guma's time of the butcherbird [1979] [cf. graham, james, land 163] ); or that south african novelists are not responding to increasingly urgent environmental issues. moreover, as emily mcgiffin shows in her study of xhosa iimbongi or praise poets, other, indigenous forms have long engaged in an ecopoetics of the land and their poetry has performed a spiritual and healing role within their community (20) . but a more outward-looking gaze that envisages a planetary as well as a national and world scale (cf. clark, ecocriticism 99-100) is indicative of this transitional phase, which consequently has had repercussions in the cultural sphere as well. indeed, as james graham notices, gordimer's decision to focus on the garden-as-eden motif in get a life perhaps reflects this intellectual transition (graham, "from exceptionalism" 195) . the novel offsets notions of eden with references to the "cradle of mankind" world heritage site [get a life 115; 73] located near johannesburg, which is saturated with the earliest evidence of human life on earth (fossils, tools, humanoid remains), thereby entertaining the creationism vs evolution debate whilst at the same time populating and thus contesting afrikaner "vacant land" mythology which made land available to the coloniser with signs of indigenous human habitation. notions of a pristine landscape ("eden") are thereby tested by culture ("cradle of humankind")-in other words, by the principles of environmental justice. a clue to the links made implicitly by the novel between different epistemologies of beginnings as well as the connections between environmental and social crises is that a key reference to this cradle comes shortly after thapelo's lament about humankind's inability to grasp imminent assured self-destruction if there were a nuclear leak-"we can't get people to believe" (get a life 114). it was gordimer who some years before had written an ideologically scathing review in 1984 of coetzee's life & times, for presenting "the idea of gardening" as allegorising michael k's passive alternative to armed resistance: coetzee's epitomic anti-hero, gordimer argued, failed to represent those black south africans who demonstrated a selfdetermining and central role in the struggle ("idea of gardening" n.p.). perhaps gordimer at that juncture was guilty, even at a time when environmentalism was not widely considered a pressing issue, of the kind of failure of the imagination that has plagued the left globally on the question of the environment: the failure to bridge the gap in human understanding between human and planetary well-being of which coetzee, we may surmise, was already cognisant. what if, then, we were to take michael k's environmentalism seriously and read life & times as recognition of the symbiosis of human and planetary well-being with which postcolonial ecocritics would engage? crucially, an ecocritical reading should not entail wilfully overlooking the socio-political resonances of a novel-the ones with which, in the case of life & times, gordimer takes issue. after all, aside from the interpretative point that not only can metaphor and allegory function on multiple planes of signification simultaneously, society and culture, as environmentalists now recognise, are always already integral to the earth system (global igbp). in a socio-political reading of life & times, michael k's institutionalisation within south africa's multitudinous camps emerges figuratively through his emaciated, sick body and his refusal of institutional food (he is suffering from severe malnutrition which, in all likelihood, caused the dropsy that killed his mother). yet his starved body is symptomatic of the environment he inhabits: he is a poorly educated, impoverished and malnourished, so-called coloured, disabled male (he has a harelip which has never been surgically closed). his sickness and poverty are produced by this environment as an outcome of environmental injustice. a deeper green reading would also attend to the vast, global scale of planetary well-being, with michael k as a kind cosmic steward, tending his pumpkins (michael k "found his waking life bound tightly to the patch of earth he had begun to cultivate and the seeds he had planted there" [coetzee, life 59] ). but perhaps the most illuminating readings of coetzee's novel would be those drawing together the economic, the socio-political and the environmental. indeed, joining the dots between these spheres is fundamental to the principle of environmental justice mooted here (cf. cock, "connecting" 5). in the colonial and apartheid contexts we should, of course, be mindful of the historical association between conservation, environmentalism and imperial rule, which has resulted in a lingering suspicion amongst environmental justice campaigners and anti-colonial and anti-apartheid activists over environmental concerns. as william beinart and lotte hughes explain, "european imperialism was [] inseparable from the history of global environmental change. [… w]hile natural resources have been intensely exploited, a related process, the rise of conservationist practices and ideas, was also deeply rooted in imperial history" (beinart and hughes 1) . david a. mcdonald points out that in south africa many thousands of black peoples were "forcibly removed from their ancestral lands to make way for game parks" and nature conservation was prioritised over the needs of those living in the townships and homelands (mcdonald, david a. 1). more broadly, leftists have until more recently tended to perceive issues centring on the environment to be a "bourgeois diversion", as david harvey points out (328). writing in 1998, harvey goes on to argue that, whilst these suspicions of class inflections to environmentalist debate largely ring true (328), environmentalism needs to be resituated to put human needs at its core. it is this refiguring of environmentalism that positions and centres human agency within non-human agency that constitutes postcolonial environmentalism and environmental justice. mcdonald is one scholar making the necessary leap of the imagination by "connecting the red, the green and the brown" (the social, environmental and urban environmental concerns [cock, "connecting" 1; 11] ). he suggests that in the south african case urban environmentalism (so-called brown environmentalism)-attending to the "lack of basic services like sewage and sanitation for millions", including the provision of safe, clean wateris currently one of the "most pressing" environmental justice issues in south africa today (mcdonald 10). grass-roots activists like the antiglobalisation movement and people-centred environmentalist movements such as south african organisations earthlife-mentioned in get a lifethe environmental justice network forum, an umbrella organisation set up in south africa in 1994, and koeberg alert campaigning against the development of nuclear power sites on the cape, are putting human needs at the heart of environmental movements and in the process challenging the authority of elites. on the face of it, get a life and high low are two very different novels: indeed, the latter does not obviously touch upon environmental questions at all. get a life is an environmentalist parable about the risks encumbering the world-as-postlapsarian-eden (the hazards of the nuclear power, dam-building and mining industries) alongside environmentalist paul bannerman's very private experience of treatment for a potentially life-limiting cancer; high low is a murder mystery circling the death of a leading biomedical scientist, arif, working in a durban hospital at the cutting edge of research into hiv/aids. but the novels share a concern for the difficulties society has in joining the dots between a capitalist world economy (one that produces uneven experiences of modernity and various forms of state and private corruption), and environmental justice and human health; and both draw out, even if obliquely, the socioeconomic and environmental factors determining the causes, treatment and outcomes of life-threatening disease. both narratives explore notions of the "polluted" or diseased body and, in the case of get a life, the polluted land and a damaged eden, from the perspective of protagonists who are simultaneously experts in their disciplinary fields and suffer life-threatening disease. suggestive of the levelling of class privilege (which largely continues to be racially determined in south africa today), illness positions these professionalised, middle-class protagonists on a par with those on the peripheries whose cause they champion (to the extent that they all face death). when arif's doctor wife nafisa accidentally infects herself in high low with a needle she is using to perform a lumbar puncture on one of her hiv+ patients, millicent dhlomo, she "saw that [like her patients] she had a story of her own to tell. […] when it came to the quantity of tragedy, for the first time, there was no clear and bright line between her, her family, and the rest of the continent" (coovadia 133) . similarly, in get a life with the words, "who knows if the virus covertly hunts this child down as rogue cells may still be holed up somewhere along his bloodstream" (emphasis added; gordimer, get 154), paul's diseased body is linked implicitly to that of hiv-infected klara, the young black orphan whom lyndsay has adopted. nevertheless, we understand that the medical outcomes for the middle classes are far more hopeful given their privileged access to proper medical care and an education that gives them the capacity and sense of self-worth (cf. ramphele, laying ghosts 173) to seek proper help. paul bannerman in get a life is an ecologist and activist working with a "foundation for conservation and environmental control" (gordimer, get 6), currently campaigning on three projects: one to block the building of the koeberg nuclear pebble-bed reactor; a second to stop the damming of the okavango delta in botswana, an act which, raising environmental injustice concerns, bannerman says should properly be called "destructive development" (gordimer, get 92); and a third to build a toll road through pondoland by an australian mineral mining company, an area described by paul's colleague thapelo as ecologically unique and itself a kind of garden: "the centre of endemism, the great botanical treasure" (gordimer, get 84). paul, ironically, is himself "literally radiant" (gordimer, get 3) with toxic radioactive iodine that is treatment for his cancer; he describes his body as his very own "chernobyl" (gordimer, get 83) and "experimental pebble-bed nuclear reactor" (gordimer, get 59), and finds himself confined to a form of "quarantine" (gordimer, get 47). despite being part of a white, middle-class elite, and since potentially life-limiting illness situates him on a par with the poorest south africans suffering incurable disease, he thus is depicted as an albeit problematic cipher for what rob nixon would call "slow violence" afflicting the poorest communities of the world: a "violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all" (nixon, slow violence 2) . by situating paul in the subject position of those experiencing such violence on a daily basis, gordimer perhaps enables his thinking on the connections between poverty, environment and disease. this thinking, as we shall see, is facilitated by paul's retreat to the garden. in high low, not only does nafisa work in a hospital treating increasing numbers of patients presenting symptoms of hiv/aids, most of whom are black and impoverished, arif's research into hiv/aids sets him at odds with the south african president and his health minister, characters based on mbeki and then health minister manto tshabalala-msimang (the novel portrays the unnamed health minister's alcoholism, chiming with rumours swirling in the south african media about tshabalala-msimang's troubled private life). arif has impeccable anti-apartheid activist credentials. yet his research carried out post-1994 identifying a specifically african strain of the hiv virus is construed by government proponents of the african renaissance, including the president, as kowtowing to western imperialism and, relatedly, western pharmaceuticals distributing arvs; he is forced out of his post at the university where he works when the minister of health "files a defamation suit" (coovadia 97) against him for making such a claim in his research. it is ironic that, having dedicated his life to a just and equitable south africa, arif has an illegally trafficked organ transplanted to save him from kidney failure by his acolyte, surgeon govin mackey, who has become embroiled in a network of financial corruption. arif urges govin to come clean about the trafficking, but is shot before the case against govin and govin's surgeon partner david gerson is resolved. in what ways is human health an environmental justice issue? as jacklyn cock argues in "connecting the red, green and brown", environmentalists and health workers in south africa have largely failed to make the necessary connections between the environment and human disease, primarily because disease has been categorised as a health issue in order to sidestep the environmental question from which, with its historical associations, the poorest south african communities feel alienated. cock writes: even struggles over access to natural resources such as water are not framed as environmental struggles. according to one key informant this is because 'the environmental rights in the south african constitution are framed in health terms. you don't go to a poor community and talk about the environment, you talk about health. the environment has no rhetorical power. the discourse is about health and rights. water for example is a health issue and a rights issue. […] there is a failure to conceptualize environmental issues because of the constitutional framing of the environment in health terms and the legacy of authoritarian, wildlife conservation'. (interview, munnik 2004 ) (ellipsis in original; cock 2) in terms of hiv/aids, environmental factors may not directly cause infection as mbeki claimed when he suggested poverty causes aids (to such catastrophic effect), but they do contribute towards weakening the victim's immune system, making them more vulnerable to disease. recent research has shown how one's environment, including access to adequate resources-air, food, water, sanitation-impacts on the risk of transmission of the virus (cf. lewis, nghana 40; . as the hiv/aids crisis began to take hold in south africa from the mid-1990s, the multinational pharmaceutical industry was widely criticised for making anti-retroviral drugs too costly for many of those infected by the disease. documentary maker dylan gray called it "one of the great crimes in human history, whereby millions of people in africa and elsewhere were cynically allowed to die of aids, while western governments and pharmaceutical companies blocked access to available low-cost medication" (gray, "big pharma's excuses"; cf. sidley). south african high court judge edwin cameron, who disclosed his own hiv+ status in a highly personal yet overtly public bid to ameliorate the stigma associated with hiv/aids, alluded to the connections between poverty and health when he said, "those living in affluence […] often do not see, still less have any contact with, people suffering from preventable illness, avoidable hunger and remediable destitution" (emphasis added; rose). in 2001 more than 40 pharmaceutical companies joined forces to take the south african government to court to challenge its medicines and related substances act of 1997, which allowed it to import cheaper, generic arvs from overseas (sidley) . in 2017 us aid cuts meant that the cheaper arvs made available to south africa under the pricing programme set up between the un, african nation governments including south africa, the pharmaceutical industry, and the us president's emergency plan for aids relief (pepfar) were under threat (mythili sampathkumar). the controversy rumbled into 2014, with the south african government on the brink of "implementing a new law that would allow generic drugmakers to produce cut-price copies of patented medicines and make it harder for firms to register and roll over [sic] patents" (motsoeneng) . in 2017 one report estimated that, despite the doha declaration of 2001 on the trips agreement, 2 which endeavoured to override patenting laws in cases of "national emergency" to allow developing-world countries to import generic drugs, arvs still only reached 50% of the affected south african population (huddart et al.) . perhaps we can begin to see from this brief sketch of the arvs patenting scandal why mbeki viewed western multinationals as ciphers for imperialist hegemony (cf. ramphele 232-3), which led him controversially to stall arv programmes and to turn instead to african renaissance philosophy, advocating, for instance, traditional african healing practices employed by sangomas, or healers. commentators are beginning to make connections between legacies of colonialism, finance, human health and the environment, for instance, calling for organ trafficking and medical testing to be treated as issues of environmental injustice: organ theft amounts to the "colonization and use of [human] bodies as natural resource materials" (stein 210) . in a document titled, "principles of environmental justice" drawn up by the first national people of color environmental leadership summit in washington dc, october 1991, the movement calls for the "strict enforcement of principles of informed consent and a halt to the testing of experimental reproductive and medical procedures and vaccinations on people of color" (qtd. in stein 209) . nghana lewis yokes hiv infection to the process of decolonisation, interpreting "the hiv/aids risk factors with which rural sub-saharan african women contend today as extensions of the failures of environmental policies and regulatory schema put in place during sub-saharan africa's decolonization to promote the social and economic development of postcolonial african states" (40). processes meant to facilitate decolonisation in the region coupled with the mismanagement of water distribution, sanitation and health care in rural communities, have made women particularly vulnerable to ill health, including viruses like hiv/aids (lewis 40) . migration patterns amongst rural communities in south africa, often in the form of economic migration as male family members leave the home for long periods of time in order to work, are, in part, an effect of racial segregation and homeland policies implemented during apartheid and have compounded these risks. notably, in both novels analysed here, it is largely poor, black african women and girls who are presented as victims of hiv (the exception is middle-class, south african indian nafisa in high low, who accidentally infects herself whilst treating one of her patients). human disease in get a life and high low is portrayed as politically inflected, its outcome determined, in part, by income and class-which in the "new south africa", despite a burgeoning black middle class, continue largely to be drawn along lines of race. in high low, joining the dots between race, biomedical science and politics, nafisa as focaliser reflects, "before, in the old south africa, race had been politics. now race was medicine. and medicine was race, medicine was politics" (83). in get a life it is thapelo, paul's colleague, who makes the necessary connections between capital, human needs and the environment when thapelo collapses notions of "human reality" with the reality of the market: "so what is the reality. [sic] the human reality, chief, bra, however you're seen or you see yourself, the immediate, market reality -that's what counts in what you learn from the mother of your children, one in the womb, is the real world. okavango left to itself will renew eternally" (gordimer, get 183). notions of pollution and human disease are laid bare in the novels as, in part, effects of environmental injustice, whereby human life is valued according to the raced colour of one's skin and one's social status (cf. nixon 59). get a life more obviously addresses environmentalist concerns than coovadia's novel: the hazards of nuclear power are ironically mirrored in the protagonist paul bannerman's cancer treatment and, despite paul's whiteness and class privilege, his condition resonates with the slow violence of environmental injustice. but, like high low, the novel also portrays the impact of hiv/aids on the now democratic society when bannerman's newly single mother, lyndsay, adopts the aids orphan. the child was raped at the age of two, reflecting the superstition currently circulating within south africa that sexual intercourse with a virgin cures hiv/aids, and she has endured extensive gynaecological reconstructive surgery as a result. hiv/aids is thereby implicitly linked to conditions of poor education and high rates of violent crime, which in turn are legacies of apartheid. as we have seen, the narrative implicitly draws parallels between the child's illness and paul's, encouraging the reader to make connections between their suffering bodies, which both host "rogue cells" (gordimer, get 154). similarly, both patients would seem to have been miraculously cured: paul's wife manages to conceive his child post-treatment and the young girl's hiv levels are dropping, a medical phenomenon which, as lyndsay explains, is only possible in a child. as such, paul and klara hover between metaphors for the slow violence that afflicts south africa's poorest communities and for the miraculous birth of the new nation. of course the lives of these two patients are marked in distinctly different socio-economic ways. problematically, as rose notices, not only does get a life perpetuate white-woman-as-saviour mythology, the aids narrative also skirts around the pressing issue of mother-to-child infection which has been so catastrophic in the south african context (rose) . in coovadia's novel we follow the rapid decline of nafisa's patient millicent, who presents as the typical aids victim in south africa: heterosexual black african female and spouse to an internal migrant, a man who initially is reluctant to acknowledge the cause of his wife's illness or to be tested himself. nafisa's housekeeper, the exquisite estella, is also likely to be a victim to the disease: demographically, her chances of being hiv+ were as high as 1 in 4 during the period (muula) when the novel is set (between 1999 and 2008-the years of mbeki's presidency and tshabalala-msimang's period of office as health minister). nafisa comments on estella's promiscuous lifestyle, "you cannot be too careful as an african woman. […] this is the one thing which will lead to your comeuppance. you're crazy for men" (coovadia 12 ). estella's stubborn refusal to be tested is to the embarrassment of nafisa because, as the employee of two leading aids healthcare professionals, estella should be seen to set an example for the wider community. in the case of organ trafficking, govin and his colleague have been trafficking organs to israeli recipients from brazilian donors, clearly registering a core-periphery dynamic and, as described in the literature, a site of environmental injustice. govin, of course, skirts around this issue when he claims self-aggrandisingly that the money is "irrelevant": "the point is, we perform miracles. someday […] the dead will rise" (coovadia 262) . refracted between the intellectual sites of the garden and cradle-land, gordimer's novel offsets an environmentalist failure of the imagination (over the complexity of cosmic design; the vast scale of environmental crisis; and the means of overcoming it), against the recuperative effort to join the dots between different epistemological and intellectual spheres. the environmentalism conveyed in the novel then can first be approached through figurations of the garden. signifying multiply, the bannerman garden teases out the ideological intellectual inflections of "the land" (cf. james graham, land 1-2), always harking back via the cradle-land motif to the ways in which humans, and particularly those holding power, have impacted on or tried to harness their environment. the meanings of the garden in the novel linger between a damaged eden after the fall ("but it was in the garden that expulsion came once there was knowledge" [gordimer, get 58]) and a space outside humankind's impulse to "colonise". writing about the significations of "paradise", sharae deckard notices, "that the secularization of our age precludes belief in a literal terrestrial eden does not mean that paradise has ceased to operate as modern fantasy, regulating and expressing nostalgia for that which is absent or desired" (1) . in gordimer's novel, the garden figures rather differently via the religious idiom of the fall, whilst projecting a future-orientated utopia beyond the dominant will to colonise. the garden in get a life obliquely counters the robinsonade in which a castaway crusoe-figure-the eponymous coloniser-doggedly and meticulously records the passing of time (e.g. "this morning i began to order my times of work, of going out with my gun, time of sleep and time of diversion, viz" [robinson crusoe 72]). unlike the robinsonade, the bannerman garden stands outside time, or, more precisely, is space that paul does not wish to "colonise" by imposing time upon it. likening the garden to the unharnessed space of the wilderness, but in an imaginaryintellectualised form, paul reflects, "only out there, the garden, could the wilderness be gained, the unfinished homework be escaped. leg over the sill; lying on the grass the many hours not tallied with a stick tracing in the sand. the days" (emphasis added; gordimer, get 51). the garden represents a utopic space in which possible futures-not necessarily good ones-are imagined; refigured as wilderness, it enables reverie and contemplation beyond human efforts to comprehend and thereby "colonise" it: "to a naked upturned face; no sky; space. no cloud to give scale in the bleach of glare, no blue to give depth" [emphasis added; gordimer, get 38-9]). instead, it is paul's sick body that is unable to repel colonising forces, here of a potentially deadly disease: "he watches a few maverick cells dartingly escaping the knife, later fleeing the radiant iodine to set up a new base in what he experiences is the territory of his body" [emphasis added; gordimer, get 14]. thus, whilst levelling the differences between two very different victims of disease, the narrative also suggestively draws links between the environment (land) and human disease through the metaphor of the colonised sick body by rejigging the "body-as-land" trope of imperialist and (post)colonial literatures. yet, just as hulme has argued that "the island setting [in daniel defoe's novel], as in many utopias, facilitates the isolation necessary for such paradigmatic fables to develop" (187), so paul bannerman's island of isolation, the childhood garden, functions as a "simplifying crucible" (hulme 186) for gordimer's environmentalist parable. between an intellectually enabling wilderness and an uncolonised space, the garden becomes a "no-man's land" within a family drama (gordimer, get 30), facilitating a temporary truce in the conflict of conscience between paul and his wife benni, or berenice, whose work as an advertising agent situates her ideologically and ethico-politically at odds with paul. otherwise, their relationship appears loving and it is in part this that troubles paul's conscience: he is committed and loves someone whose ethico-political worldview and occupation are radically at odds with his own. berenice-benni's professionalised prosopopeia-is described as lacking convictions, "that persona who has no need of convictions. […] a terrible lack. a kind of awful purity? a virginity; or underdevelopment. that term fits" (gordimer, get 57). whilst the garden in get a life is riven with contradictions-simultaneously a space of isolation, cleansing and quarantine, "the place to be yourself, against orders" (gordimer, get 49)-above all, and suggestive of all these things, it provides the intellectual space necessary to facilitate dialogue, even if this is the inner "dialogue" of the self: "there is the wise presence that changes solitude of monologue into some kind of dialogue. a dialogue with questions; or answers never sought, heard, in the elsewhere" (gordimer, get 54). thus the garden, juxtaposed with the land as cradle, serves as an optic through which the novel channels its postcolonial environmentalism, which, by calling for environmental justice, resituates human needs at the core of environmental concerns (cf. graham, "from exceptionalism" 194) . in accord with the environmental justice movement, gordimer's environmentalism is governed by two environmental laws, "everything is connected to everything else" and "everything goes somewhere" (harvey, david 329 ). here is one example: [t]his garden resounds, echoes with the animation of its past. it's the quarters, now, where two men are absorbed in the work that informs their understanding of the world and their place as agents within it, from the perspective that everyone, like it or not, admit it or not, acts upon the world in some way. spray a weed-killer on this lawn and the hoopoe delicately thrusting the tailor's needle of its beak, after insects in the grass, imbibes poison. that's the philosophy of conservation from which paul is approaching the great issues in a draft petition of an environmentalist coalition to the state president he's writing between discussions in the garden. (gordimer, get 83) the novel also aligns itself with the deeper green, environmentally conservative notion that "nature knows best" (harvey, david 330): nature is "the greatest scientist of all" with which paul's "scientific" work is "in collaboration" (gordimer, get 20). david harvey argues that to suggest that nature "knows" anything "presume[s] that nature can 'know' anything". either this means that humankind fully understands nature (which it does not), or suggests a "conservative" "tread lightly on the surface of the earth" environmentalism based on the assumption that any human intervention will be damaging to the planet (harvey, david 330) . as a transitional space, the garden in get a life animates intellectual debate on the environment, which is portrayed as unfolding during the course of the narrative and is achieved through delayed decoding. in conrad in the nineteenth century (1980), watt defines delayed decoding as a form of "literary impressionism" (173), which "combines the forward temporal progression of the mind, as it receives messages from the outside world, with the much slower reflexive process of making out their meaning" (watt 175) . in watt's most well-known example-and conrad's most famous novel, heart of darkness -the reader experiences through this technique marlow's emerging realisation that his helmsman on their voyage down the congo has been hit by a spear: something big appeared in the air before the shutter, the rifle went overboard, and the man stepped back swiftly, looked at me over his shoulder in an extraordinary, profound, familiar manner, and fell upon my feet. the side of his head hit the wheel twice, and the end of what appeared a long cane clattered round and knocked over a little camp-stool. it looked as though after wrenching that thing from somebody ashore he had lost his balance in the effort. [… m]y feet felt so warm and wet that i had to look down. the man had rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both his hands clutched that cane. it was the shaft of a spear. (conrad, heart 77; qtd. in watt 177) "the text", watt explains, "gives us a chronological sequence of momentary sensations in the protagonist's mind; and the reader finds it quite natural that there should be a delay before marlow's brain finally decodes his impressions into their cause" (watt 176) . just as marlow will realise that "something big" is the spear that will kill his helmsman, simultaneously so too do we as readers. the wetness and warmness of marlow's feet, as we are soon to discover, are caused by the spilled blood of the mortally wounded helmsman. delayed decoding in gordimer's novel may account for the novel's complex, and often staccato sentence structures, particularly in the use of free indirect discourse, that have baffled reviewers. jane stevenson in the observer, for instance, writes, as the narrative opens, gordimer is therefore describing a group of people among whom a false, temporary normality is being created with enormous effort. much of the writing is from the viewpoint of an intelligent person for whom stunned reverie is temporarily the natural state of being. but in their separate ways, the other people who are probed in the course of the narrative are also in shock, which gives the book its curiously remote narrative tone, in which direct speech is quoted, but always as unscrolling memory. this is a novel of inner lives. we are always within a story which one or another of the principal characters is telling to himself or, at times, herself. (emphasis added; stevenson) this "remote narrative tone" is compounded by frequent instances of missing or incorrect punctuation and jarring syntax. graham riach in "the late nadine gordimer" argues that the difficultness of gordimer's late short stories (he names jump [1991] , loot [2003] and beethoven was one-sixteenth black [2007] ) can be attributed to her "late style", which theodor adorno and then edward said implicitly identify with the criticality of committed writing of which adorno writes in "commitment" and which typically is characterised by its "dissonance and fragmentation" (riach 1078)! one reviewer of loot, riach notes, even wondered if "penguin failed to supply an editor" (riach, "the late nadine" 1091-2). riach explains: adorno's conception of late style is characterised by its 'ravaged character', its refusal of synthesis, its unabashed foregrounding of the artwork's 'tears and fissures', and its transcendental temporality; late works, he says, are 't[orn] apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal'. building on adorno's short essay ["late style in beethoven"], said asks what we are to do with 'artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction'. in gordimer's postapartheid narratives, riach argues, this manifests as "a sense of temporal unsettledness [… as] a literary response to the timelagged, out-of-joint, post-apartheid disposition". in essence, gordimer's late short fiction (we might add, her late novels too), "time and style are at odds" (riach 1077-8) . for our purposes, this enables the consideration of the ways in which the content of get a life, including the public, discursive spaces it opens up through its dialogism, staccato style, narrative uncertainties and delayed decoding, is expressed through her aesthetic choices. late style, according to adorno and said's understanding, riach shows, is not simply a matter of an ageing author reflexively and imaginatively looking back upon a life, but "a conscious remodelling of language and experience in a historically particular set of social and political conditions" (riach 1080). incorrect or a lack of punctuation and awkward syntax are deliberate stylistic choices that embellishes the sense of disconsonancy the novel projects. in the irrealist delayed decoding the protagonists' sense of self in get a life emerges as the protagonists' thought processes take shape into reflections, as stevenson notices. but we might augment stevenson's analysis with the observation that not only do the protagonists tell (narrate) themselves, they also formulate their intellectual understanding of the world they inhabit. by this means, gordimer animates the development of a critical environmentalist consciousness-a kind of drama of consciousness, if you will (cf. parry, postcolonial studies 51)-and revivifies the (counter-) public sphere. the reader experiences at the same time the process of making the necessary connections between certain intellectual and epistemological spheres. so not only does the novel deals with political transition thematically, transition is encoded in its very form. in this example, paul reflects on the being of the eagle on a visit with his mother, son and his mother's newly adopted daughter, klara, to the local zoo: what is survival if not the end of poverty. [sic] it's been pledged at the third inauguration of democratic government: the end of poverty. and if abel has to be thrown from the next by cain; isn't that for a greater survival. [sic] the eagle allows this to happen, its all-powerful wings cannot prevail against it. survival. ten dams for one delta seen from space. civilisation goes against nature, that's the credo for what i do, i am. protect. preserve. but is that the law of survival. […] knowledge come in the quarantine of the childhood garden that perhaps whatever civilisation does to destroy nature, nature will find its solution in a measure of time we don't have […] , that knowledge doesn't go far enough. a cop-out. civilisation as you see it in your opposition of nature to the australians' mining, the ten dams in the okavango -it's child's play, a fantasy, when you admit the pragmatism in nature. no use returning to the photograph reproduced [of the eagle in the zoo's pamphlet] of the piece of fluff, morsel of life that is abel, and looking for a solution. (gordimer, in this passage, the reader experiences paul's developing consciousness of the connections between darwinian notions of survival of the fittest and of a greater common good across scales of existence, from the life of the eagle species, to the displacement of indigenous and local peoples by the mining industry. the passage reveals paul's deep-green politics as he reflects upon the idea that nature will prevail: civilisation is dwarfed in the context of natural history. and it is paul's encounter with the eagle that alchemises his inner dialogue. as his thoughts unfold, we experience with him his dawning realisation that there is "no use returning to the photograph […] and looking for a solution". in high low the bedroom murder scene constitutes the intellectual site in which the connections between capitalism, criminality, scientific research and environmental injustice converge. arif's family and friends endeavour through processes of logical deduction and intellectual debate to solve the mystery of his death, expressed through forms of investigative delayed decoding. the durban police investigating the death are depicted as ineffectual-a sign of national malaise. they are always one step behind arif's family in solving the crime, who in turn must therefore step into their shoes. nafisa's son shakeer (sharky) believes his father's case is blighted by the police's failure to make the necessary connections between the facts of the case: the police were pretending to begin the investigation. two constables from the westville station were rounding up the usual suspects. […] the police, under a new government, thought along the old lines. they planned to question the black workers in the neighbourhood[ . .…] the police pretence, the irrelevance, disturbed shakeer. they didn't connect the facts. there was no relationship shakeer could see between the london bank account and the workers in westville. (coovadia 94) racist assumptions about black subjectivity in the "new south africa" puncture the polished surfaces of rainbowism: the police, in this instance led by a white constable, fall back on ready stereotypes of black, workingclass criminality. ironically, macdonald gumede, the detective leading the enquiry, raises this very problem when he advises sharky, "just because the police force is run by africans, do not assume we are incompetent". he laments that such stereotyping is the greatest challenge the "new south africa" faces: "this is what our real struggle is against" (coovadia 102) . when the (white) constables pay sharky a visit, he is struck by their naivety: "they had no knowledge of another country, and another politics. they had lost privileges and recreated their innocence. they were the lucky ones. the accounts had been cancelled" (coovadia 96) . suggestive of the scales of justice, which ironically in the new south africa are tainted by their associations with the financial scales of the balance books, these young whites are let off the hook: recalling documented failures of the truth and reconciliation commission (trc), retributive justice and reparations have been wiped from the slate of accountability. the narrative circles arif's death in the manner of the classic murder mystery, but there are significant departures from the genre too. the methods of solving the crime, for instance, cannot be described as scientifically forensic: motive and murderer are "investigated" through the focalisation of nafisa and her son, sharky, but the clues they glean are drawn from their psycho-social understanding of arif's life and his relationships with family, former comrades, colleagues, government and friends rather than from forensic science. sharky, for instance, is convinced the death is not suicide for, "it's psychologically impossible. my father was energised by the opposition of the government[. …] i know that i am right. i am going to prove it" (coovadia 61) . by introducing arif's death some pages into the narrative, tucked at the end of a chapter, thereby simulating for the reader the sense of shock nafisa, through delayed decoding, would have experienced on finding him, the novel decentres the "ideal mystery". drawing on tzvetan todorov's "the typology of detective fiction" (1977), carl malmgren suggests such a mystery, "announces its murder on the very first page and devotes itself to the solution of that murder; the narrative begins with murder, without which it would not exist. the narrative telos is the solution of that murder, which alone can restore equilibrium and bring absolution" (malmgren 19) . crime functions as a marker of normative social values; as literary scholar leon de kock and sociologist émile durkheim argue: "society learns to know itself by coming to understand the nature of its own criminal shadow" (de kock 40). we must add that it comes to know itself too by the ways in which it responds to those crimes, as we have seen in the presentation of an ineffectual police force subject to pervasive stereotypes about black subjectivity and criminality. but in the decentred murder mystery, "[t]he evil in the world […] comes less from the quirks of deviant individuals … than from society itself" (second ellipsis in qtd. version; rabinowitz qtd. in malmgren 147). it is structural and systemic. we see how, in high low, the process of investigating arif's murder exposes the larger crime of neo-colonialist corruption, in which even nafisa with her ooplung (black) money (coovadia 21) has become embroiled, and of the capitalist system that normalises environmental injustice on issues of health and medical treatment. indeed, through processes of psycho-social investigation, sharky finds himself on a path to solving this larger crime. when he confronts swiss doctor hansel metzger, who he believes is a charlatan, he "felt as if a riddle was being posed" (coovadia 172) . metzger allies himself with mbeki's brand of african renaissance politics on hiv/aids, claiming that apartheid was a conspiracy by western pharmaceuticals to provide a ready and free supply of (black) subjects on which to test its products. instead metzger offers an alternative treatment to hiv/aids from that advocated by mainstream biomedical science. arif's research puts him in conflict with metzger, who does not hold back in sharing with sharky the details of the tense relationship he and arif shared, thereby positioning him as a potential suspect in the case. sharky pays metzger a visit, ostensibly to help unravel his father's case: "with his new sense of power shakeer decided to confront metzger in person. those tens of thousands of shades called for a tribune. even if he uncovered nothing he had stored up a thousand insults. he would stub the man out like a cigar" (coovadia 165)! sharky's new sense of power is the freedom that his father's death grants him, "in his father's absence, he could do anything he chose" (coovadia 145) . by pursuing those he suspects of murdering his father, sharky is driven towards the larger crime of the whitewashing of the hiv/aids crisis which led to countless unnecessary deaths ("tens of thousands of shades"). sharky sees his moral responsibility to fight the victims' cause. juxtaposing the murder of an individual against the calamitous story of the government's response in the 1990s to hiv/aids exposes the bigger crimes of forms of slow violence, both the obscenity of over-priced "big pharma" medicines and the institutionalised responses to the south african hiv/aids crisis that have been determined, in part, by an ostensible rejection of the capitalist worldsystem but that, through the portrayal of characters like metzger, reveal corruption and profiteering at their very core. high low's attentive, sleuth-like reader, drawing pleasure from the text as murder mystery, might have been duped into thinking the motive for the crime is arif's scientific research into the african strain of the hiv virus which has led to his fall from political favour and public grace and which has raised the ire of quacks like metzger. however, ultimately, we learn that the motive is not connected to arif's scientific research at all but to govin's desire to protect his own reputation as a surgeon after he has become embroiled in the illegal human organ trade-he and his partner gerson have been caught transplanting over one hundred brazilian donor organs into israeli recipients. govin's crime and his attempts to salvage his reputation and career are thus, in part, motivated by financial greed. we realise that: govin wanted the same mercedes, the same unaffordable crawford school education for his children, the same contribution at the temple, and the same steady band of the rolex watch on his wrist. that was indian materialism for you. this surgical genius had translated into nothing more outstanding than a large house, large wife, large car. (coovadia 158) the crimes of the individual in high low are collapsed into larger sociopolitical and environmental ills: govin, in a sense, becomes a metaphor for the corruption and environmental injustice of the capitalist system that produces, nourishes and props up his criminality. yet he persists in staking a claim to the moral high ground when he bemoans those "who fear the future" trying to "close us down": "the real culprits in the affair", he says, "have already skipped the country"; whilst gerson and govin have put their own houses forward as security for the business, vishensky "sits with his fortune in stock, protected by the constitution of israel" (coovadia 159) . so even though the surgeon is complicit in the trafficking, he presents financial corruption as the greater crime overshadowing his work, a crime on a far greater scale of injustice than arif's murder. testing the teleology of crime fiction, malmgren argues that, in the decentred version of the genre, notions of motivation, truth and justice are also pressed to their epistemological limits: [decentred d]etective fiction undermines the idea of motivation, both in behaviour and signification; in the world of detective fiction, there is no 'transcendent true story' to put an end to the play of signification (hall 113). detective fiction, in other words, documents and recounts the erosion of basic mystery signs, such as motivation, truth, and justice. (malmgren 137) we are presented with a series of murderers (or agents responsible for arif's death), guilty on varying scales of injustice and criminality. if delayed decoding in gordimer's novel emerges in its staging of the inner workings of the intellect as their reflections take shape (the drama of consciousness), in high low, a fairly straightforwardly realist text, irrealist interludes that press against a sense of reality emerge as what i call investigative delayed decoding: namely, the intellectual process of unravelling the evidence relating to arif's death. the narrative records one thought sparking another connected one in the emerging effort to solve the crime. the fact that arif has not committed suicide, for instance, dawns upon nafisa and sharky as they index their thought processes, and both separately come to realise that he was not capable, psychologically or socio-politically, of taking his own life. here, sharky reflects on the depth of arif's engagement with the notion of reality: sharky "had never met another man who thought into reality with such great concentration" [coovadia 97] ). this triggers a memory of arif's sense of urgency in researching the hiv virus, and then, connectedly, the government blaming the imf and the cia for the epidemic, and subsequently the consequent defamation case brought against arif. sharky recalls his mother, nafisa, phoning him to discuss the case in papua new guinea where he is on a photo assignment, and regrets that, "his mother was not a psychological person. she refused to step back and survey the canvas in its entirety" (coovadia 98) . just as trivial matters "prevented [nafisa] from seeing the main point" (coovadia 98) , sharky realises that he has struggled with his own perception of reality. he is unable to make sense of the fact of his father's death whilst the case remains unresolved by the bungling police: "his own feelings, as much as those of his mother, found no definition so long as their subject was indefinite. in this way the obscurity surrounding his father's actions had surrounded nafisa and him as well. it prevented some image from developing beneath his eyes " (emphasis added; coovadia 95). illustrating the novel's investigative delayed decoding as a form of literary irrealism, sharky and nafisa must consciously and continually press notions of reality to their limits to reveal "the truth"-not only the identity of arif's murderer, alluded to above as "some image" beneath sharky's eyes, but elsewhere the political truths of the aids crisis and organ trafficking which have been strategically obscured by, and in the interests of, free trade: from his studies [in philosophy and classics] shakeer had developed certain convictions. reality was only too happy to keep you at the furthest distance. reality -its endless sequence of doors which led inward -let you close only if you pushed past each door. it was a deliberate process, not something that just happened. it involved the will and, between two people, perhaps, a contest of wills to put down the illusions of one party. he was knocking on govin mackey's door. (emphasis added; coovadia 162) it is telling, therefore, that the psychological-intellectual act of pushing through to reality here leads sharky to corrupt medic govin's door. sharky's need to question, probe and investigate his father's death reflects a critical mindset: his interest in philosophy and classics "harmonised with some aspect of [his character]" because they "discontented you with the surface of things" (coovadia 162) . both narratives turn on a failure of imagination and its correlate, the endeavour to join the dots between discursive, intellectual and epistemological realms in the intellectual spaces of the garden in gordimer's novel and the murder scene in coovadia's. in the garden in get a life paul reflects on three different, though connected, configurations of a failure of imagination: the failure to grasp the scale and complexity of the planet's ecosystem; the (wilful) failure to imagine the scale of environmental crisis; and the (again wilful) failure to imagine how to make the necessary connections between apparently discreet forms of knowledge and expertise to do so. even paul's specialist training in environmentalism cannot, he realises, help him comprehend the intricate complexities and scale of the okavango delta. comparing his own to his wife's professionalism, paul realised he knew too abstractly, himself limited by professionalism itself, too little of the grandeur and delicacy, cosmic and infinitesimal complexity of an ecosystem complete as this. the okavango could never have been planned on a drawing-board by the human brain. its transformations, spontaneous, self-generated, could not have been conceived. […] the okavango delta in co-existence with a desert is a system of elements contained, maintained -by the phenomenon itself, unbelievably, inconceivably. the okavango is a primal feature of creation, so vast it can be seen by astronauts from outer space. this is an excitement that must be confirmed -he had to leave the garden of isolation to go into the house and dial thapelo. (gordimer, nature is presented as unfathomable, including in the discursive, professionalised world of the novel's protagonists by whom the natural world is mediated (cf. graham, "from exceptionalism" 199) . the novel points up the limits of this discursive realm in crossing epistemological, intellectual and material boundaries. the scale of the okavango delta can only be absorbed by the human eye from outer space, and of course this perspective, for all but a very few, will be a mediatised one, conveyed through photographic and televised images. in this passage, paul must remove himself from the idealised, intellectual space of the garden to convey his realisation that the delta's incredible capacity for self-renewal from salinisation might be the means by which the multinational "destructive develop[ers]" can be persuaded to abandon their plans. inconceivably, the delta manages the problem of salinisation to the extent that its water will eventually become safe again for human consumption. humankind's failure of imagination in comprehending nature is laid bare in the family's visit to the zoo-another kind of garden that, like south africa's nature reserves on which berenice casts her professional eye, can be harnessed, branded and packaged for tourist consumption. both the bannerman and zoological gardens represent forms of isolation (quarantine, in paul's case), including the isolation of being intellectually incompatible (unconnected) as benni and paul appear to be. the zoo, which is intended to educate children about "their existenceco-existence -with animals other than cats and dogs" (gordimer, get 158), holds a "dark memory" for paul of an eagle, "hunched on claws within the stone walls and close roof of a cage", and a "metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment" (gordimer, get 158-9). working through this image of "despair", paul "must find the eagle" (gordimer, get 163), but his memory of the abject creature is not reliable for now he is confronted by a thing "named eagle" (gordimer, get 163), one beyond the taxonimising impulse of humankind, "not hunched way back in despair, the sail of a huge black wing glancing[. …] they had appeared to be directed only by the intelligence of their own velocities, power over air and space" (gordimer, get 162-3). yet compare this image of freedom, including freedom from human epistemology and taxonomy, with the glossy brochure produced by the zoo, which fails to capture the complexities of the species: "the language of the pamphlet in hand fails to represent the being of the withdrawn black entity on the bed of dead wood and the other disappearing off into the sky and returning in the guise of a menace or as deliverance of omniscience, as the surveyors' plans and the reports he writes fail to represent the okavango or the pondoland dunes" (gordimer, get 167). as graham argues, the "being of the eagle […] cannot be discursively comprehended" ("from exceptionalism" 201-2), just as the okavango delta cannot be comprehended except from images beamed down from outer space. repeating the pattern of connectivity seen in the comparison of paul and klara's sick bodies under attack from "rogue cells", here the narrative correlates the failure to comprehend the being "eagle" with paul's own failure to capture the complexities of the okavango and pondoland dunes in his professionalised reports, thereby laying bare the process of joining the dots. the web of connectivity the novel emphasises is repeated through the analogy between the pairing of the two eagles and the pairing of paul and benni and of adrian and lyndsay, who all, supposedly, "mate for life" (gordimer, get 160; 161; 167), ironically undercut in lyndsay's case by her unwelcomed separation from paul's father adrian-an amateur archaeologist will leave her for the norwegian tour guide he met on their trip to mexico. it is through notions of reciprocity and reconciliation-the term is used deliberately here, just as the novel registers contemporary south african discourses of truth and reconciliation-that notions of discontinuity and irreconcilability are to be bridged within the ethical economy of the novel. indeed, the balancing of nature in the form of the two eaglets tellingly named cain and abel is paralleled with the balancing of the contrasting vocations paul and berenice pursue, just as the okavango delta "achieve[s]" a "balance between positive and negative" of the water's salt content (gordimer, get 92), which again is beyond human comprehension: "benni/berenice is right. lyndsay offers -she also gets kicked out, i suppose, it's a way of keeping the balance of nature, paul? neither too many nor too few males and females for breeding. but it's horrible" (gordimer, get 167) . if the garden is the space in which the connections between capitalism, the environment and human health are identified and debated, it is a space in which connections are severed too: there is no connection to be made between wild creatures, even the half-domesticated frequenters of the suburbs […], and the summons of technology. telephone ring. in the bush in the forest among the dunes the mangroves the swamps, the creatures ignore you. devices that regulate your being have nothing to do with theirs -unless they are hunted, expelled from their places in the universe-yes, air habitat as well as land-by logging, burning off, urban, industrial and rural pollution. radiant nuclear fallout. no connection between that quarantine room and out here. (emphasis added; gordimer, get 49) the alienating effects of technology only impact on the natural world, the narrative implies, in forms of destructive development, "by logging, burning off, urban, industrial and rural pollution". this experiential chasm between the technological world and nature corresponds with the lack of connectivity between paul and berenice's vocations, which, the novel suggests, have little-if anything-to offer each other intellectually or ideologically. it is in the garden that the ideological chasm widens between benni/berenice and paul. not surprisingly, this has implications for the intimate sphere of marriage as well and paul even mulls over the possibility of divorce: how could he, himself, whose work, reason-to-be is preserving life, live so long with an intimate, herself, who was successfully complicit in destroying it. living in isolation, all along. even when inside the woman. later, in the garden, away from the closeted emanation in that room, what is this all about but an obvious matter of the incompatibility between the advertising industry and environmental protection. […] can't even call it by its true term. irreconcilability. (gordimer, get 58) paul's life is governed, as he perceives it, by conviction, whereas berenice, recognising the marketing potential of south africa's rich flora and fauna, is unable to conceive of the wilderness because it is always already a commodity to be packaged, branded and sold by south africa's lucrative safari tourism industry to wealthy tourists, which paul calls "development disaster" (gordimer, get 57). here a conflict between paul's conviction of "being in the world" (gordimer, get 57) and berenice's commercially minded notion of selfhood, "that persona who has no need of convictions" (gordimer, get 57), converge: whom does berenice believe. [sic] him, her man, or the client. [sic] what is her conviction when he comes from the wilderness and tells of the irreplaceable forest felled to make way for the casino, the fish floating belly-up in all that's left of a water-course diverted to feed an olympic-size swimming pool and replica of one of the fountains of rome. [sic] (gordimer, the enormity of the environmental crises brought about by capitalism perhaps account in this passage for the absence of question marks (gordimer's "late style", if you will), registering a sense of hopelessness. unlike paul and berenice's working relationship, paul realises that he must join forces with his mother, lyndsay, whose professional expertise figured in the image of the legal loophole reveals to paul that within the context of the harsh realities of the polity under capitalist modernity he must compromise what here might be construed his "deeper green" environmentalism: his almost angry dedication, there were so many forces, political, economic, against it, had essential dependent connections with her work in the law that they had never really discussed before. the question of how, which rivers and seas should be exploited is decided ultimately by laws promulgated by governments. […] so environmentalists have need of consultation with lawyers who know what loopholes, under the law, used by project entrepreneurs, must be anticipated and exposed while independent research is in progress. (gordimer, in effect taking up the challenge to join the dots between issues of social justice and environmentalism outlined by cock, paul realises that a productive relationship between environmentalism and the law must be nurtured in the interests of environmental well-being, including human well-being-"humans as nature". this is seemingly unlike arif's disquiet in high low about the coming together of law and medical research in the defamation case brought against him by the health minister for raising the spectre of an african strain of the hiv virus, "doctors didn't like to be mixed up with lawyers" (coovadia 97 ). yet in gordimer's novel this conjoining of distinct professional spheres is figured as a necessary compromise. paul's is the view of a pragmatist, in which loopholeseffectively convenient legalistic errors or anomalies-must be drawn upon in order to win the case. paul must modify his earlier, overly idealised belief in the "nature knows best" maxim (the need for legal intervention suggests that nature cannot fully protect itself from or overcome the negative human impact under a capitalist economy). high low stages the difficulty south african society has in perceiving reality-another kind of failure of the imagination-through the conceit of the looking-glass world, coovadia's wry commentary on a polity in which reality is skewed, inverted, turned on its head. defined here in the oed, the looking-glass world is a parallel universe: looking-glass world n. an imaginary place conceived of as being visible in the image shown in a looking-glass, esp. one in which the principles which underpin the real world (as the rules of logic, the laws of physics, etc.) operate differently, or in reverse; also in extended use. (oed) sharky, for instance, is confounded when he finds himself examining police records on his father's murder, handed him by hapless detective, gumede: "anywhere else in the world, even in oakland, california, you would scarcely be sorting through the file concerning the death of a member of your own family. but this was a looking-glass society. nobody and nothing was in charge" (coovadia 103 ). in the ethico-political conditions the novel depicts, everyone is subject to the looking glass, govin implies: "there's no logic. the world is upside down and back to front" (coovadia 159) . in order to secure nafisa's support in clearing his name, govin even slyly reminds sharky of nafisa's own embeddedness in such an illogical, and at times corrupt, world: "confidentially, shakeer, i hear that nafisa has her own points of difference with the tax guys but i didn't want to say anything to her directly" (coovadia 159) . the looking-glass world, with the likes of metzger and govin as its agents, expresses the irrationality of mbeki's government's response to hiv/aids, whereby the ambassador to the un "assert[s] the non-existence of the epidemic which filled cemeteries and hospitals" (coovadia 168) . nafisa laments, "this continent! people will not believe in the reality of sickness. why, they won't believe in their own deaths" (coovadia 155) . the novel lampoons the government's african renaissance philosophy, which calls into question the statistical evidence on mortality rates: this at a time when the epidemic was the worst in the world. over the decade, the mortality had increased by a thousand a day. the government, of course, objected to these terms. first of all, who was counting? second of all, who were they to define a day? why should we simply accept the european definition of a day? it was the logic of the looking glass. (coovadia 151) metzger shirks responsibility for his part in the south african aids catastrophe. he implicates big pharma in apartheid segregationist practices-"segregation in this country was […] a conspiracy of the pharmaceutical companies" (coovadia 170)-and argues that, "the violence in this country is the direct result of policies dictated by the world bank". the university, metzger claims, therefore "is taking a stand against anglo-american multi-nationals" (coovadia 171) . it was for this reason that arif was ousted from an "institution which orients itself towards african scholarship" (coovadia 171) . in the face of such beliefs, sharky realises that "reason was useless": "the masterstroke of the looking-glass creature […] was to step from the mirror into the world beyond. then, so long as it never looked behind itself, it could argue there had never been a mirror in the first place. but you could catch its image in the looking glass" (coovadia 170) . by drawing the hiv/aids controversy under the same organising principle of the looking-glass society as issues around policing, corruption and so on, coovadia implicitly makes the necessary connections between capitalist enterprise, poverty and human disease. engaging in their different ways with a failure to imagine the connections between global capitalism, the environment and human health, both novels reflect upon perceptions of reality manifesting as forms of irreality: the experience of reality as unreal (not wholly dissimilar from the absurdity experienced during apartheid captured in corresponding absurdist literary forms). both novels show how perceptions of reality are malleable and can be produced according to one's political commitments and proclivities. paul recognises the need to lighten his deep-green politics and to compromise his environmentalist beliefs, for example, firstly, by acknowledging the usefulness of the law in supporting environmental causes, and, secondly, in challenging the pondoland toll road project by specifically invoking the human rights of the amadiba tribe, which his colleague thapelo implies will be more palatable to those in power and to those to whom the environmentalists make their appeal: "pleas for beauty destroyed in these issues are regarded as going soft, just sentimental opposition to progress[….] go for them [the amadiba]" (gordimer, get 85). berenice, as advertising agent, has a blinkered view of the wilderness as commodity on the global tourist market. this is not unlike sharky's perception of the commodified landscapes and environments he photographs in high low. he recalls images of the stone figures on easter island, which, presented in a travel brochure he received before his visit to the island, were "an over-used subject but the effect was still dramatic" (coovadia 41) . after dropping out of his university studies in philosophy and classics, and following a brief period in bosnia as a war photographer, he takes up professional photography of the ethnographic type, working for magazines like national geographic. his mother finds his exhibition of hindu sadhus of benares "curious" and "even outdated" (coovadia 28 ). sharky's visit with estella to the isangoma's (diviner's) township home to seek treatment for estella's daughter who suffers epilepsy develops his critical awareness of notions of truth and of the ethics of cultural mediation. sharky believes that "taking a photograph meant understanding the situation on the far side of the lens", though he realises he has not been able to achieve this with his mother (coovadia 203) . on the trip to eshowe with estella to visit the diviner, sharky realises that "[p]hotographs were irrelevant, unserious [when… p]eople were dying like flies" (coovadia 203 ). yet sharky continues to pursue his desire to capture good photographs: "the opportunity to take photographs of the ritual was a good one. shakeer had never taken an interesting photograph at home. he could never quite understand what he was looking at in durban, what he was supposed to make of it" (coovadia 208) . nonetheless, despite the isangoma using a photograph of estella's sick daughter to bring about her cure-magic in which sharky holds no faith, the photographs sharky takes of the isangoma's home appear to him inauthentic, for "she had a greedy look which none of the photographs had captured" (coovadia 215) . ideas of perception are compressed in the photography motif when sharky determinedly seeks metzger out at the hospital to confront him over his involvement in disgracing arif, "yet there were only photographs to confront" (coovadia 168) . sharky scans photographs of the swiss doctor with the south african president and with robert mugabe; in yet another he stands at the steps of the constitutional court-on the day of his defamation suit. in a poster sharky sees an image of metzger attending the united nations with the south african un ambassador, a visit marking the "ambassador's speech to the general assembly asserting the non-existence of the epidemic which filled cemeteries and hospitals". cognisant of the market forces driving corruption and quackery and reflected in metzger's ubiquitous presence at high-level meetings across the globe, sharky reflects that, "no wonder looking-glass creatures like metzger and sekolo set up shop in south africa" (coovadia 168) . when metzger finally does appear in person, reality and snapshots of a twodimensional, culturally produced reality in the form of the photographic image merge, for sharky "had the feeling that one of the photographs had come to life and was grasping him by the arm. he had the sense that, in person as in a photograph, metzger was flat from the side on. if he turned to the side he would disappear altogether" (coovadia 169) . the image captured in the looking glass and the photographic image coalesce. similarly, rather than centring on the physical reality of the environment, get a life shifts focus to the discursive realm of environmentalism as a political tool. as graham argues, "[t] he narrative is interspersed with paul's consciousness of nature [-] in-itself, yet the latter is invariably mediated by his professional, scientific knowledge of a given environment" ("from exceptionalism" 199) . it is in the garden where paul and his colleagues reflect upon how their environmentalism should be best managed and mediated within the public sphere. like eden in christian mythology, where humankind's (mis)handling of carnal knowledge precipitates the fall, it is in the garden where paul reflects upon the failure to conceive of the scale of looming environmental crisis (just as the cradleland hovers on the peripheries of paul's sphere of existence as a reminder of this failure to remember humankind's role in this crisis). in the discussion between thapelo and paul, for instance, in their attempts to get public and government opinion on board against the building of the pondoland toll road, thapelo demands, rhetorically, that the "government must vuka! open their eyes. see what's getting by in the name of development" (gordimer, get 85) . probing questions about what constitutes modernity and progress, paul bitterly terms this "destructive development", a "closed corporation of disaster" (gordimer, get 92). "we're chronically short of water and it's not understood that this -what, phenomenon, marvel, much, much more than that -this intelligence of matter, receives, contains, processes, finally distributes the stuff [salt] . […] and some fucking consortium's going to drain, block and kill what's been given, no contracts-" (gordimer, get 92-3). paul, as focaliser, reflects on humankind's incapacity to register or conceive of the sheer scale of the slow violence threatening life on earth: "maybe we see the disaster and don't, can't live long enough (that is, through centuries) to see the survival solution" (gordimer, get 93). here it is the very slowness of the damage done to the natural environment and its inhabitants that nixon identifies as a kind of (environmental) violence because, whilst we may not be able to imagine a way out of disaster, the human agents perpetrating it, even if environmental damage is not their objective, are cognisant of the damage they commit in the pursuit of profit. by invoking the environmentalist maxim, everything is connected to everything else, get a life engages with the failure to join the dots to enable environmental renewal and regeneration through notions of connectivity, figured in the novel, for instance, through the environmental concept of scale, which, as ecocritic timothy clark suggests, "usually enables a calibrated and useful extrapolation between dimensions of space or time" (ecocriticism 71). as chakrabarty puts it, the challenge facing postcolonial critics during "the current conjuncture of globalization and global warming" is "having to think of human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once" (chakrabarty "postcolonial" 1). he elaborates, "climate scientists raise a problem of scale for the human imagination, though they do not usually think through the humanistic implications of their own claim that, unlike the changes in climate this planet has seen in the past, the current warming is anthropogenic in nature" (chakrabarty, "postcolonial" 9). as i have been arguing, it is the close proximity of the land-as-eden and land-as-cradle in the narrative that serves as the necessary reminder of the anthropogenic aspect to the crisis. situated within the humanist field of ecocriticism, clark outlines a reading practice which enables connecting human history to a much longer, natural history, thereby bridging the culture/nature, human needs/environmental needs divide that hitherto have proved so thorny for leftists. this kind of literary telescoping or "mapping", as clark would call it, in turn reflects the material connections between human life forms and the natural world. to make such readings, clark augments the two scales literary scholars normally deploy, namely the familial and the national, with a global scale. he shows how in current literary practice, our readings of texts are typically derived, through literary devices like metaphor and allegory, from mapping the familial scale on to the national scale. so robinson crusoe maps on to (stands for) calvinistic individualism or the eponymous colonialist, depending on one's political positioning. national could constitute national or global in its common usage-a world peopled by interconnected communities (the so-called global village) across a more condensed human history. global, as clark deploys it, constitutes a planetary scale and would include the idea of natural history (cf. clark, ecocriticism 100). graham effectively makes such a ecocritical scalar reading when he maps a familial reading of the loss of intimacy in get a life on to the national and global scales: "having taken it for granted for so long, the survival of the bourgeois 'nuclear family' in the new south african society is revealed to be every bit as precarious as the fragile ecosystem paul defends" (graham, "from exceptionalism" 198) . so here the familial sphere, graham shows, maps on, or is analogous, to contemporary south african society and to the ecosystem: all are revealed to be in a "precarious" state of existence. clark argues that, by overlooking the vaster "global" scale in our literary mappings, "most given thought about literature and culture has been taking place on the wrong scale" (clark, "scale"). with a global/planetary scale (natural history) missing from our understanding of literary texts as well as the environment, ecocritics and environmentalists until relatively recently failed to draw the necessary connections between human and planetary agency, for example, humankind's role in global warming. deploying the term "derangements of scale", clark is critical of environmentalist models that centre on individual efforts rather than world-wide ones, to lessen our negative impact on the natural environment, efforts which, he points out, are futile. one example would be the notion that by reducing one's carbon footprint, the individual can have a positive impact on decelerating climate change. but clark's critics have claimed that he foregrounds the "global" or planetary scale of reading at the expense of the familial and national ones. such a move, effectively overriding human concerns of environmental crisis, would set him at odds with principles of environmental justice and a postcolonial environmentalism. clark takes up this point about his apparent "rejection of human agency" or "abdication of human agency" on the global scale (tavel clarke, halpern, and clark 14) through the example of the carbon footprint. he describes how, this useful concept relates to the issue of an individual's environmental impact on the atmosphere or, crudely speaking, the atmospheric pollution for which he or she could notionally be held responsible. however-and this is where scale effects come in-the size of anyone's carbon footprint could be of no interest or significance in itself [. …] scale effects are something beyond my individual horizon, perception, or even calculation. (tavel clarke, halpern, nonetheless, as i argue elsewhere, clark does not account for the interconnectedness of the national and the global scales enough: the former plays a significant part in producing the latter (humans as geological agents), but the resulting effects of this dynamic are realised in their uneven distribution; in other words, they constitute forms of environmental injustice (a nexus of race and class as well as gender) because, whilst the poorest communities in the world, very often postcolonial subjects, are in general worst affected by the impact of environmental crisis, they are also likely to produce smaller "footprints" than their richer, typically western, counterparts (poyner, "subalternity" 63) . get a life pins its environmentalist ethos on ecocritical theories of "scale"-a form of mapping or joining the dots. in the garden paul as focaliser reflects on the notion of scale: how long is forever. [sic] how old is the delta that is part of the cosmos visible from outer space? astronauts report it. will ten dams be visible, the scale of ponds, like all man-made scratchings and gougings in comparison with the planet's own design. maybe we see the disaster and don't, can't live long enough (that is, through centuries) to see the survival solution [….] this heresy is born of the garden, as evil was[ . …] whatever 'forever' means, irrevocably lost, or surviving eternally, himself in this garden is part of the complexity, the necessity. as a spider's web is the most fragile example of organisation, and the delta is the grandest. […] the inevitable grace, zest, in being a microcosm of the macrocosm's marvel. (gordimer, the narrative interweaves macro-and micro-scales of existence, from outer space to the microscopic cells of human disease, here, implicitly linking paul's radioactive treatment with cosmic design: "he and his wife were told, in the most tactful way such outer space instructions may be conveyed, that when he was discharged after a few days of total isolation in hospital he still would be radioactive and a threat to those in contact with him" (emphasis added; gordimer, get 11). to draw connections between the vast and the microscopic in this way is to highlight that these different scales of existence are connected in the first place, the environmental maxim, everything is connected. that is to say, it is a means of bridging the human-conceived gap between the social and the environmental. scalar mapping helps us to see our responsibility to nature because we are reconceived as part of nature, but also to recognise the fallacy that nature is a pristine edenic space that must be preserved at the cost of human needs. within the sphere of imaginative literature, linking the miniscule with the unimaginably vast helps us to bridge the failure of imagination that troubles environmentalist thought. despite diverging from a conventional environmentalist notion of scale, coovadia's novel, like gordimer's, telescopes divergent scales of reality. both, for instance, telescope the cosmic to the atomic. in high low, in a world in which logic has been turned upside down, human existence is scaled to the microscopic proportions of the atom. nafisa imagines herself as less than molecular, but her sense of becoming invisible is couched in terms of relief: "just as suddenly, just as perversely, nafisa realised that she had a piece of news which would remain with her rather than being passed on to arif. she was an atom where once she had been part of a molecule. […] she took strange pleasure in having thus ceased to exist" (coovadia 127) . at the mawlud, 3 sharky "wanted to be annihilated down to the very last atom … for this alteration to proceed in a split second so that he would have no knowledge of it and feel no pain, make no prediction. hiroshima was his idea of a happy exit" (original ellipsis; coovadia 112). but sharky remembers too, unhappily, his father's body "curled up on the big bed as if something singed him", which makes him realise "the stupidity of his fantasies about extinction" (coovadia 112) . the cataclysmic bomb reduces matter to its essential element of the atom. most notably for the discussion here is the way in which the aids crisis is framed in terms of scale: we read how the potentially deadly hiv virus which has impacted on human life in epidemic proportions in south africa, for example, has been unleashed upon nafisa "[through such a small portal, as small as the eye of a needle[;] a life was altered" (coovadia 134) . for nafisa, even making sense of family friend and old-school socialist jadwat, who preys on grieving widows and then unceremoniously vanishes as the women's affections take root and who is a creature of the looking-glass society, is possible by contemplating his substance atomically, which in turn, she reflects, can only be comprehended by the art of magic: "why, it was a feat of conjuring that the atoms which made up jadwat should assemble every morning. if she were jadwat, caught on her glare, she would have crumbled into dust a long time ago" (coovadia 143) . nafisa invokes einstein to defend her brother nawaz's name when jadwat suggests he might have been implicated in corrupt financial affairs and even in the murder of arif. jadwat curtly asks whether, if she were to wish for it enough, the matter of her brother's corruption would simply disappear: "so you think if you never mention something it will eventually vanish?" nafisa responds with an einsteinian maxim, "everything will eventually vanish. you don't have to be an einstein to figure that out" (coovadia 142) . but in south africa, where the scale of mortality from hiv/aids has been catastrophic, nafisa, as focaliser, ponders, "there were things to which these no-einsteins could hardly close their ears" (coovadia 143) . recalling the thriving coffin-making business in zakes mda's ways of dying (1995) , the coffin-making trade is "flourishing" and it has become "impossible not to know the cause and yet just as impossible to know" (coovadia 143) . the horrifying scale of the epidemic may be impossible to comprehend, but a knowing refusal to acknowledge it is, nafisa feels, a kind of "witchcraft" or "sorcery" for, "to refuse to know, to postpone comprehension, was to obtain a hold over things. life, love, music, just because they penetrated us before entering our understanding, were modes of sorcery" (coovadia 143 ). it will not have passed the attentive reader by, of course, that this idea equally applies to nafisa's own hiv+ status, just as nafisa reflects on the malevolent nurse rose witnessing her accidental self-infection, "you pushed things to the margin of consciousness where it [sic] could do no harm. her mind would never return to the existence of rose the nurse and her morning in the ward which had stuck her in the arm" (coovadia 143) . as the errant needle pierces nafisa's skin, she is sure she sees the faint trace of a smile pass rose's lips. aids is figured as a kind of slow violence when nafisa entertains the idea that rose has "murder [ed] her that morning in slow motion" (coovadia 141) . such violence is different, nevertheless, in nafisa's case from the slow violence of which nixon writes, because as middle class she has not been infected because she is forced to live in an impoverished environment. (indeed, her south asian ethnicity points up a fissure in nixon's thesis, which prioritises race over class in its analysis of the environmentalism of the poor.) nafisa ironically performs a kind of aids denialism prevalent amongst ordinary south africans that mbeki's government fostered under the guise of african renaissance philosophy. in her willed refusal to countenance what has happened to her, she thinks, "if she never did the numbers, if she never worked out the end result for herself, it would never take hold of her" (coovadia 135) . in both instances, nafisa as a middle-class doctor is resituated into the subject position of those she treats, not unlike bannerman as environmental scientist in get a life suffering toxicity and a potentially terminal illness that gives him a prognosis not unlike the aids orphan, klara. nafisa even experiences "enormous forces" at work inside her as political transformation becomes embodied. the national narrative, troubled by upheaval and transition, is condensed within the suffering (female) body, in nafisa's case through the circumstances of her bereavement and hiv infection: "there was some kind of transformation underway even before the accident in the morning. she could sense it inside herself. there were enormous forces in motion. they were a tide that ran against everything which had conspired to take arif's life away from her" (coovadia 144) . i began this chapter by asking, in the face of environmental injustice, what can be learned from joining the dots between different experiential, intellectual and epistemological spheres? how can fictional representations of human disease like hiv/aids meaningfully be incorporated into environmental debate, in so doing departing from literary critical spheres like the medical humanities which focus primarily on representations of disease as, first and foremost, biomedical condition? resituating aids within political debates pertaining to environmental justice by conjoining human health, global finance and environmental concerns allows the novels to cast light on the ways in which capitalist modernity contributes towards producing the necessary circumstances for disease to flourish and take hold, and in catastrophic proportions. indeed, the two novels analysed here, gordimer's get a life and coovadia's high low, thematise the very idea of connectivity as a means of overcoming a human failure of imagination, through (environmentalist) notions of scale, in which the minutest life forms are mapped on to the very largest. connectivity is expressed in the narrative textures, which i have defined as environmentalist and investigative delayed decoding. by animating intellectual debate and allowing the reader, alongside the protagonists, to experience the process of cognitive mapping alongside the theme of mapping across spheres of knowledge and lived experience, the novels contribute towards the mapping of intellectual spaces that are recognised as necessary work in the process of nation-building: anderson's "imagined political community" (anderson 6). the international geosphere-biosphere programme website identifies the "global economic system" as "the prime driver of change in the earth system" (igbp), and points out that 74% of economic activity from this period of acceleration has been within the oecd countries (the organisation for economic co-operation and development the trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (trips) agreement, implemented in 1995, sought to regulate intellectual property rights amongst member states of the world trade organisation (wto) a mawlud is a muslim celebration of the prophet mohammad's birth. works cited commitment imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism the pandemic is not a natural disaster the climate of history: four theses postcolonial studies and the challenge of climate change scale a joint project between the centre for civil society and the school 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companies sue south african government over generics bodily invasions: gene trading and organ theft in octavia butler and nalo hopkinson s speculative fiction review of get a life climate change, scale, and literary criticism: a conversation unimagined communities: sex, networks, and aids in uganda and south africa. berkeley; los angeles: u california p critical medical humanities: embracing entanglement, taking risks minerals and migrants: how the mining industry has shaped south africa combined and uneven development: towards a new theory of world-literature coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 1 aspiration, achievement and abandonment in ‘the world’s best country’: merit and equity or smoke and mirrors? david m. hoffman, sari pöyhönen, carine cools, anatoly stikhin, driss habti, taru siekkinen & thomas sama copyright©2015 david m. hoffman, sari pöyhönen, carine cools, anatoly stikhin, driss habti, taru siekkinen & thomas sama,. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. abstract. finland is internationally valorised for its education system, quality of life and high-tech, innovative, competitiveness. however, a critical focus on institutional dynamics and trajectories of higher education careers illuminates questions about the reproduction of global inequities, rather than the societal transformation finland’s education system was once noted for. the purpose of this self-ethnography of career trajectories within finnish higher education is designed to call attention to institutional social dynamics that have escaped the attention of scholarly literature and contemporary debates about academic work and practice within highly situated research groups, departments and institutes. our analysis illuminates emergent stratification, in a country and institution previously characterized by the absence of stratification and the ways in which this reinforces and is reinforced by – the tension between transnational academic capitalism, methodological nationalism and the resulting global division of academic labour that now cuts across societies, manifesting within the one institution finland’s general population trusts to explain, engage and ameliorate stratification: higher education. key words: academic work; mobility; transnational scholarly precariousness; stratification; self-ethnography. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 2 detailed table of contents title page & abstract……………………………………………………………………1 table of contents………………………………………………………………………..2 editorial note…………………………………………………………………………….4 1. foreword/forward: fighting fire with fire …............................................................6 1.1. audiences…………………………………………………………………………...7 1.2. our methodological universe – and yours……………………………….……....9 1.3. structure of the study……………………………………………………….……..10 2. introduction. context, purpose and objectives………………………………….….…15 2.1. transnational scholarly precariousness: a global story………………….….….15 2.1.1. transnational academic capitalism – a primer……………………………...15 2.2. the finnish story…………………………………………………………………..16 2.3. purpose and objectives……………………………………………………………17 3. theory: conceptual problematization of context…………………………………….19 3.1. the academy of finland project on migration and the labour market………...19 3.2. aspiration, achievement and abandonment and career trajectories in finnish higher education…………………………………………………………………...20 3.3. academic work…………………………………………………………………….20 3.3.1. unpacking bourdieu’s approach to scholarly trajectory – a primer……...22 3.3.2. unpacking the comparative study of academic work – a primer………...23 3.3.2.1. disciplinary cultures…………………………………………..23 3.3.2.2. mission emphasis……………………………………………...23 3.3.2.3. career stage………………………………………………….....24 3.3.2.4. competitive horizon………………………………………….. 24 3.4. ascriptive characteristics and social constructs in finnish society: the sacred and safe versus the profane and problematic…………………………………………..25 3.5. problematizing academic work and ascriptive characteristics: the tensions between aspiration, achievement and abandonment………………………………26 3.6. conceptualizing social dynamics and who we are really talking about………26 4. methodology. methodological shift from planned study to unplanned study……….29 4.1. key methodological risks, gaps and our methodological dilemma……………..30 4.1.1. the absence of collective agency……………………………………………31 coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 3 4.1.2. no tradition of critical introspection………………………………………...32 4.1.3. the nature of methodological nationalism in (finnish) higher education studies…………………………………………………………………………..33 4.1.4. speaking truth to power: a good idea?.......................................................33 4.1.5. social media and transnational scholarly precariousness…………………..34 4.2. the rationale of risk-taking and a methodological crossroads………………….35 4.3. moving forward, methodologically-speaking, with efficacy: our process………35 4.4. self-ethnography: ‘if you don’t write it down, it never happened’……………..36 4.4.1. data, methods and analysis…………………………………………………...41 4.4.1.1. rationale for ignoring convention……………………………...42 4.4.1.2. engaging methodological limitations: backyard research, in the first person………………………………………………………………..42 4.4.1.3. balancing anonymity, privacy and efficacy: incremental member check and impact aims………………………………………………….43 5. analysis. analysing our ‘academic limbo’…………………………………………...45 5.1. unquestioned assumptions and minimizing misrecognized transnational scholarly precariousness and exclusion……………………………………………………...45 5.2. the unintended consequences of group-think…………………………………..48 5.3. illuminating ‘disconnects’ and bringing aof back into the picture…………….51 5.3.1. connecting the dots: aspiration, achievement and abandonment in academic work……………………………………………………………………………52 5.3.2. ‘strategies’ of precedence and potential: hidden populations within parallel competitive horizons………………………………………………………….53 5.3.3. an institutional story…………………………………………………………53 5.3.4. the relationship between people, ideas and funding………………………55 5.3.5. the policy and practice of (human resources) ‘strategy’…………………...56 6. discussion. moving forward in terms of education studies, policy and practice……59 6.1. unquestioned assumptions: folk psychology, zombie discussions and ‘smoke and mirrors terminology’……………………………………………………………….60 6.2. unintended consequences: analysing methodological nationalism………………61 6.3. hidden populations: the nature of complex change in the general population, culture and society………………………………………………………………….62 7. methodological notes: an afterward/afterword………………………………………...64 references………………………………………………………………………………..66 biographical data on authors…………………………………………………………...75 coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 4 editorial note cornelis martin renes university of barcelona mrenes@ub.edu catalina ribas segura cesag, mallorca catymallorca@yahoo.com the following monographic study evolved from a paper given at the watershed cultural studies congress held at the university of barcelona, spain, 13-17 january in 2014. there, in a panel on the changing character of higher education, david hoffman addressed the issue of abandonment amongst immigrant scholars attempting to get a foothold in finnish academia. while finland is, in theory, a top performer in the education sector and the envy of many a country for its high standard of welfare, democracy, freedom and equality, hoffman argued that immigrant mobility within finnish academia actually pointed into an opposing direction, refuting the reputation of equal opportunity that the country had forged for itself over a long period of time. hoffman’s team’s research laid bare an emergent hierarchisation and stratification in finnish academia identifiable as ‘methodological nationalism’, which responds to the transnational character of capitalism and aims to contain the forces of globalisation within finnish academia inasmuch that access to, and mobility of immigrant scholars within the tertiary educational system are complicated precisely on the assumption that there is no competitive difference between national and foreign candidates for posts. in other words, there is a wishful thinking that in its assumption of equality and equity in fact obscures the very inequality that and informs permeates the career opportunities generated by the system. hoffman, of north-american origins, forms part of the finnish institute for educational research (fier) as a senior researcher and works together with a group of immigrant scholars in the research group education and social change, whose members had all signed the text that was submitted to the editors of the coolabah post-conference issue “after the water has been shed” in response to a call for papers. upon reading the essay, it became immediately clear that the topic addressed needed more space and attention than a mere article in a journal volume. the proposed essay was already 15,000 words long, and still felt it could do with more detail, development and clarification. the editors therefore contacted hoffman and his team and proposed the possibility of publishing a monographic issue of coolabah, entirely dedicated to their study. it would offer a springboard for a novel approach copyright© cornelis martin renes & catalina ribas segura, 2015. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. mailto:mrenes@ub.edu mailto:catymallorca@yahoo.com coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 5 to research in the tertiary educational sector by introducing auto-ethnography as the prevalent critical approach to tackle the problematics of researching a framework of which the researchers themselves form part, or from within. it would also offer a group of wellinformed young-career academics an opportunity to voice a set of controversial ideas in a larger, international arena and so find transcultural and transnational support for their analysis. in these times of increasingly precarious academic work, which affects our younger generations of scholars, one cannot offer less. cornelis martin renes, co-editor catalina ribas segura, guest-editor barcelona, 21 december 2015 coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 6 1. foreword/forward: studying and interpreting a context and topic versus engaging and changing a topic in context. fighting fire with fire we are not very sure how many people read ‘foreword’ sections. however, there are two types of scholars we have met during the course our study who might advise readers to read this foreword. these two types of colleagues are as follows: 1. many colleagues who are familiar with the work behind this publication have been highly encouraging and supportive of our efforts. we think this is because they have experienced – or are experiencing – the vague, arbitrary and harsh neoliberal, neocolonialization of education, as a social institution, set of organizations and as a profession. in addition, many of those supporting our work specialize in the study of the powerful structural dynamics our team found ourselves caught up in. some colleagues have both experienced similar situations and specialize in the study of scholarly precariousness. these three distinct groups are the scholars who got us through this. 2. many colleagues we have encountered are highly uncomfortable with our topic, the approach we have taken – or both – and have actively encouraged us not to pursue the work or to carry it out in a way other than the way we have chosen. they explicitly do not appreciate the type of study we carried out, do not generally acknowledge the necessity that drove our methodological choices, nor have they appeared to understood the necessity and nature of our actions. this is nothing new in the social sciences and humanities; especially when critique is focused on power relations within the social institution of education; within higher education institutions, in general, universities and the professoriate in particular and on the academic profession (abbas et al. 2013; alvesson 2003; bourdieu 1988, 2004; tight 2012). love us or hate us: these two groups of scholars – as different as they are – have an important feature in common: we have learned a great deal from both. we are indebted to all scholars who have used their valuable time to share their opinions, comments, advice, reviews, experiences, insights and perspectives. both sets of scholars have made valuable critical contributions which we have taken to heart. we would especially like to thank the editors of the open access publication coolabah, at the australian studies unit at the university of barcelona, dr. martin renes, dr. caty ribas and professor susan ballyn. their support and encouragement has been unwavering, from the moment of our first meeting till now. we are also are grateful to professor bill boyd, a longtime friend from southern cross university, australia, who invited us to present our research in our first major transdisciplinary conference, the 2014 watershed conference in barcelona. this event turned out to be a watershed for our study in the sense that we discovered a wildly diverse auditorium full of enthusiastic supporters from and across several countries, coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 7 disciplines and domains and met the editors of this publication. in addition, our sincere gratitude goes out to cheer professors louise morley, director of the centre for higher education and equity of research at the university of sussex, and paula mählck, department of education, university of stockholm, each of whom gave us detailed comments on our manuscript and whose support is more appropriately measured now in years, as we have developed this study. we sincerely thank the reviewers of this manuscript for the considerable time and thought they put into the blind review stage of this work. we express our sincere thanks to the academy of finland, whose funding allowed the authors the possibility to pursue this study in the way we did. last but not least, we thank the university of jyväskylä, in general and the finnish institute for educational research and centre for applied language studies, and especially the colleagues who took the time to attend the interventions and presentations grounded in or otherwise linked to our study and especially those who read and or commented on our manuscript as part of our member-checks. returning to our reviewers, it was their comments that opened our eyes to the advisability of making our text more reader friendly and gave us key insights as to how this might be done. the result is this forward section to our study. the format of this section firstly spotlights who might actually be interested in reading this study and why. ‘why’ is important because our study deals with power relations in the academy and the difference – paradigmatically speaking – between unquestioning deference to those in positions of power or talking truth to power and action aimed at constructive change. it is our position that unquestioning deference is a road to nowhere especially regarding the topic our study brings into focus: transnational scholarly precariousness. the ability to talk truth to power, in the way wildavsky (1987) articulates, is a bare minimum considering the challenges the social institution of education currently faces. our position of critical advocacy and action locates us in a fundamentally different paradigm from many we have encountered. if you are not fond of work of this type there is no need to read further. secondly, methodologically speaking, we locate and contextualize our journey with regard to two key dimensions that can be used to pinpoint nearly all qualitative research. these two dimensions are key to understanding both our methodological choices and the consequences of those choices. in addition, this section is designed – like a streetlamp – to turn perceived ‘dark and potentially dangerous places’ into ‘routine scholarly terrain’. in that regard, this section is especially relevant for individuals and groups considering action in the face of arbitrary and vague power relations with an eye on constructive change, particularly regarding our topic. while jumping straight into methodological discussion might seem like ‘putting the cart ahead of the horse’ to many, we ask the reader’s patience as we have come to understand that the dimensions we highlight illuminative fundamentally distinct sets of studies, all of which are interesting, but some of which are intuitively easier to grasp than others. this depends mainly on methodological convention and personal preferences. thirdly, we explicitly lay out the highly inductive, unplanned, yet serendipitous journey our team found ourselves on. that said, we also explicitly map out how our unplanned, opportunistic study maps on to a highly conventional reporting format. structurally speaking, we also introduce a few features of the text that give different types of audiences the level of detail they may need, depending on their purposes. we will now briefly elaborate each of the abovementioned features of our text more fully. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 8 1.1. audiences the most interesting tensions we wrestled with as a team while doing this study ultimately turned out to concern our assumptions about different types of audiences. because the authors are specialists from different generations, genders, countries, cultures, career stages, institutional settings and disciplinary communities, it took quite some time before we truly appreciated the nature of these tensions, which (considering our analysis) ironically turned out to be unquestioned assumptions. however, during the review stage, two important tensions that became clear to us concerned the distinction between ‘specialist audiences, who generally share many points of departure to the extent they need little or no explanation’ versus ‘everyone else’ – specifically, scholars or higher education actors and stakeholders present in the social institution of education, higher education institutions and our profession not primarily focused on the specialties that drew our team together. these specialties include international comparative higher education (two of us), international migration and ethnic relations (four of us), applied linguistics and communication (three of us) and, especially, scholars focused on academic work (three of us). the reason these particular focal specialties are important is because state-of-the-art findings in these specialties – within educational settings – by their nature potentially have important implications across education as a transnational social institution, a set of unique organizations and as a profession within networked knowledge societies (hoffman & välimaa et al. in press). because higher education is an extraordinary focal nexus (scollon & scollon 2007), when it comes to history, biography and their intersection within society (mills 1959), the second key audience this study might appeal to is within the general social science and humanities, especially specialists studying social stratification, scholarly precariousness and socioeconomic precarity (standing 2011) and related social justice issues. these specialists may also find our study unique and relevant to several established and emergent conversations within and across several national contexts. closely related to specialist audiences, are labour union and scholarly activists, as well as professional advocacy groups who may find the study highly interesting in an actionable way. this powerful paradigmatic, yet practical distinction separates our study from a vast body of work in the social sciences and humanities which has little or no practical utility. nothing against scholarship with no application value (much of our other work falls into this category), but the topic in focus in our study here needs action. our team neither shies away from being very explicit about this point, nor has it hesitated to report what we have done that has actually worked out fairly well. this is a fundamentally distinguishing feature of our study. beyond specialist audiences, we believe the work has a broad, general appeal to scholars everywhere concerned with the ways in which neoliberal ideology has resulted in a growing transnational layer of precarious scholars, increasingly at the mercy of a shrinking professorate, core faculty and body of permanently employed higher education managers and administrators who directly benefit from the continued stratification of an increasingly precarious global academic labour force. these people face very little actionable critique, as they are co-creating the neoliberal project to the determent of the social institution in which we work, our organizations and profession. we choose not to shy away from these colleagues and instead engage them on common ground – specifically, peer-reviewed publications and coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 9 organizational interventions based on our studies. in other words, as the title to our foreword/forward indicates: ‘fighting fire, with fire.’ last but not least, this publication will appeal to scholars in the social sciences and humanities with responsibilities in doctoral training, graduate-level course work and the supervision of early stage/career scholars, particularly those interested in the topic our study brings into focus and more particularly acting on it in a way that preserves the integrity and viability of our institution, organizations and profession. 1.2. our methodological universe – and yours methodologically speaking, to locate our study and contextualize our efforts we underline two key dimensions that empirically illuminate a field into which nearly all qualitative work falls. specifically: planned or unplanned studies; and studies carried out by methodological specialists or generalists. these dimensions, in a contingency table, empirically illuminate and conceptually problematize four distinct types of studies: 1. planned studies carried out by methodological specialists 2. unplanned studies carried out by methodological specialists 3. planned studies carried out by methodological generalists 4. unplanned studies carried out methodological generalists by ‘conceptually problematize’, we mean that the areas spotlighted by this conceptualization have important methodological implications. each of these kinds of studies has its own challenges and all are seen with regularity. the reason we draw attention to these fundamental distinctions is because the study we carried out falls squarely into type 4, specifically; an unplanned study, carried out by methodological generalists. unplanned studies are sometimes termed ‘opportunistic’ or ‘tangential studies’. by methodological specialists, we refer to scholars who tend to focus, over time on a particular type or set of methodologies to the extent they develop an expertise far beyond the level of a person not experienced with a particular methodology. a generalist, on the other hand, might draw on a wide variety of different methodological approaches in the course of their work. the most important assertion we stress, particularly because of the wide variety of work the authors have both done and reviewed is that none of these types is inherently ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than another, normatively speaking. empirically speaking, they simply constitute – symmetrically speaking – a set of possibilities. another key point which was very challenging to communicate in earlier version of this text is the fact that authors hoffman and pöyhönen originally began a very different (larger) ‘type 1’ study (or planned study carried out by methodological specialists), which was funded to run between 2011 and 2014 together with several close colleagues. it was during the course of our 2011-2014 study in which the authors – as a group – spotted the opportunity to do the ‘type 4 study’ that you are now reading. in other words, the unplanned study was grounded in a planned study, however the methodology and purpose(s) of the planned study were not a good ‘fit’ for the topic and circumstances that came into view. because of the compelling nature of the unplanned topic, the authors quite intentionally coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 10 selected a very specific methodological approach, self-ethnography as specified by alvesson (2003), which was designed precisely because this category of studies exists within a social institution (education), set of organizations (universities) and profession (scholars) which has a demonstrated persistent reluctance for robust self-critique, in general and in particular transnational scholarly precariousness. methodologically speaking, the most important methodological implication of choosing selfethnography was that the authors had never worked before, as a team, using this methodology. each of the authors do have their own methodological preferences, levels of experience, even specialist expertise, but not with the particular methodological approach that best fit this topic. that said, the methodology was a much better fit than several of us anticipated and we were able to obtain the types of data we achieved in this study was far better than data several other specialist colleagues obtain on the exact same topic (in the exact same context) using alternative methodological approaches – although they are highly complementary. the other key assertion our conceptual problematization lets us underline is that because this particular study was an unplanned study (by content specialists) carried out by methodological generalists, it bears very little resemblance to planned studies by methodical specialists (the conceptual ‘opposite’). while this might seem like ‘pointing out the obvious’ we can assure you this distinction has not been clear to several colleagues. the final feature of our study is another new section, following our discussion, focused on methodological reflection. this study was an incredibly rich learning experience. the level of interest in our topic is rising as academic freedom becomes more circumscribed (baez, rhoades, metcalfe & torres-olave 2015; hoffman forthcoming). because of our very recent experience, we feel positive about encouraging other scholars to use ethnographic methodologies, especially regarding our key content specialist, advocacy-group and graduate student audiences, who are not familiar with ethnographic approaches to qualitative research. our methodological afterward focuses on key thoughts, texts and ideas that have the potential to lower the threshold for actually carrying out ‘up close’ ethnographies. the reason we adopted self-ethnography is because it was, methodologically speaking, very ‘plug and play’ compared to many approaches practiced by specialist ethnographers. that said, precisely because of the fault lines, debates and disputes that divide ethnographers, it is all too easy for our team to see why many scholars might very well put off from using any type of ethnographic approach, particularly when exposed to the methodological gatekeeping our team encountered within and outside ethnography. this is not a criticism of ethnography; it happens in every approach, methodological orientation or mode of inquiry we are familiar with. in order to give future scholars a faster start than we had, our last section will detail a few key sources that we wish we would have been more familiar with, before we started. our intent with this afterward underlines the rationale of alvesson (2003), whose approach we chose to use specifically because it was an ideal ‘fit’, methodologically speaking, to the topic we in fact encountered, the way we encountered it and the setting in which the topic was encountered institutionally, organizationally and professionally. in other words, it is clear now – in hindsight – how we can do even better in future studies. in this sense, our final section has been designed to give a faster start to colleagues who wish to adopt an ethnographic approach to these types of studies on these types of topics and avoid the rough patches our team encountered. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 11 1.3. structure of the study having identified who might want to read this and why, as well as explaining our methodological point of departure, we now explicitly map the highly inductive qualitative study we did onto a conventional reporting format. in other words, what we did and how we did it. (see räsänen 2014 for an excellent analysis of autonomous academic practices or the relationship between who, why, what and how.) the structure of our study flows much like many types of scholarly texts. in our specific case:  foreword: fighting fire with fire  part i: introduction. context, purpose and objectives o (review of literature)  transnational scholarly precariousness: a global story  transnational academic capitalism – a primer o (description of context/setting): the finnish story o purpose and objectives  part ii: theory. conceptual problematization of context o the academy of finland project on migration and the labor market o aspiration, achievement and abandonment and career trajectories in finnish higher education o academic work  unpacking bourdieu’s approach to scholarly trajectory – a primer  unpacking the comparative study of academic work – a primer  disciplinary cultures  mission emphasis  career stage  competitive horizon o ascriptive characteristics and social constructs in finnish society: the sacred and safe versus the profane and problematic o problematizing academic work and ascriptive characteristics: the tensions between aspiration, achievement and abandonment o conceptualizing social dynamics and who we are really talking about  part iii: methodology. methodological shift from planned study to unplanned study o key methodological risks, gaps and our methodological dilemma  the absence of collective agency  no tradition of critical introspection  the nature of methodological nationalism in (finnish) higher education studies  speaking truth to power: a good idea?  social media and transnational scholarly precariousness o the rationale of risk-taking and a methodological crossroads o moving forward, methodologically-speaking, with efficacy: our process o methodology: self-ethnography. ‘if you don’t write it down, it never happened’  data, methods and analysis  rationale for ignoring convention coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 12  engaging methodological limitations: backyard research, in the first person.  balancing anonymity, privacy and efficacy: incremental member check and impact aims  part iv: analysis. analysis of ‘academic limbo’ o unquestioned assumptions and minimizing misrecognized transnational scholarly precariousness and exclusion o the unintended consequences of group-think o illuminating ‘disconnects’ and bringing aof back into the picture  connecting the dots: aspiration, achievement and abandonment in academic work  ‘strategies’ of precedence and potential: hidden populations within parallel competitive horizons  an institutional story  the relationship between people, ideas and funding  the policy and practice of (human resources) ‘strategy’  part v: discussion. moving forward in terms of education studies, policy and practice o unquestioned assumptions: folk psychology, zombie discussions and ‘smoke and mirrors terminology’ o unintended consequences: analytically illuminating methodological nationalism o hidden populations: the nature of complex change in the general population, culture and society  methodological notes: an afterward  references making the structure of our text very explicit and hierarchically outlining the flow of sections allows us firstly to highlight the conventional parts of the text in advance. especially because this study was unplanned, the reporting structure can be used to pinpoint key decision points where our team had to depart from convention – while ultimately staying within an overarching conventional process: a process of scholarly inquiry with a beginning, middle and end. the main ‘detours’ in conventional structure in our text come in part iii, our section focused on methodology. specifically, the point in the study where the planned methodological strategy: ‘case study’, was changed to ‘self-ethnography’. that point in time is both pinpointed and explicated in detail in the sections: the rationale of risk-taking and a methodological crossroads and moving forward, methodologically-speaking, with efficacy: our process. the justification of changing methodologies is explicated and articulated in terms of the risks, literature, knowledge, practice gaps and dilemmas we outline in the sections leading up to our decision to adopt a new methodological approach. once the new methodological strategy was agreed on, we give a detailed account of the new, particular approach we chose. the reasons for the selection of self-ethnography, as opposed to any other version of ethnographic approaches, were firstly because not all of our group were specialists with ethnographic approaches, with the exception of pöyhönen. ethnography, as a general coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 13 methodological approach or mode of inquiry covers an enormous literature. we selected alvesson’s 2003 approach to self-ethnography because it is very accessible to non-specialists and was in fact advanced, as a coherent approach, because personnel in higher education institutions are in an optimal position to take notice of far more than we often do in precisely the manner our team had the opportunity to do – and for exactly the same reason. it was even more appealing because each member of our team – as alvesson points out – had very limited opportunity to focus on this topic. regarding the switch from a planned to an unplanned study, what is interesting to the authors is that these sorts of changes are made all the time in large research projects, particularly in complex, mixed-method and multi-method designs that run several years (hoffman & horta in press; torres-olave et al. in press). what is even more interesting, however, is that these types of changes are rarely critically scrutinized. it is easier simply to ‘sweep them under the rug’ (bourdieu 2004) pretending they never happened. that said, because of the nature of this particular topic, we would claim that lack of reflection, critique and methodological creativity causes transnational scholarly precariousness (hoffman forthcoming). while cause is a term that usually does not find its way into qualitative research, our analysis (part iv) establishes the qualitative foundation for the explanation-building necessary to work in that direction (miles & huberman 1994). explicitly outlining the underlying structure (above) also highlights different ways our study can be read. because our resulting ethnographic study was principally developed with content specialist audiences in mind, we have integrated focused subsections or ‘primers’ within our original outline which summarize specialist topics for general audience(s). these subjections ‘unpack’ specialist topics for non-specialist audiences. these sections can easily be skipped for those familiar with the subtopic under discussion, but may be of interest, particularly for audiences who desire more detail. all this said, we hope this initial foreword was helpful for the reader. in retrospect, our study is an example of what a small group of academics decided to do when directly confronted with a highly situated, arbitrary and vague set of circumstances that explain how transnational scholarly precariousness manifests in a specific national and institutional context. more than that, our efforts have been carried out in such a manner that has allowed us to constructively contextualize and engage the negative initial circumstances we met in a manner that has benefitted the institutes that employ us, as well as the university in which the research institutes are located in, in applied, practical and concrete ways. the reason our efforts succeeded was because our team has successfully grounded our efforts in state-of-the-art literature that explains the transnational nature of our topic, in a manner sensitive to local conditions and power dynamics. because of our efforts, several new studies and interventions are in progress, as are our efforts aimed at contributing to the internationally significant advances reported in our study. both the context in which this study played out and the ways in which we chose to methodologically engage the topic are not generally known, nor practised. because of this, the qualitative study we have done can be fairly regarded as both unconventional and high risk. ironically, it is clear the transnational neoliberal policy (which cuts across the countries in which our key audiences are located) valorises unconventional, high-risk studies. what makes this so ironic is that scholars themselves often are reluctant to acknowledge or value coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 14 efforts that do not conform to (low-risk), convention or canon. this is particularly the case when scholars and higher education are in empirical and contextual focus. more than anything, we believe this explains the dismissal and disdain experienced by our team from our first presentation of this topic in our local research group, as detailed in our analysis. it also explains why other leading scholars, particularly content specialists in our own fields have expressed admiration and encouragement of our efforts. this type of ‘love or hate’ reaction is nothing new or surprising in the social sciences and humanities, which is explained in the review of the seminal theoretical specialist literature that informed our efforts and analysis. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 15 2. introduction: context, purpose and objectives 2.1. transnational scholarly precariousness: a global story this self-ethnography began in august, 2013. during this time members of our selfethnography team, the authors of this text, have presented or drawn on our evolving understanding of transnational scholarly precarity in eight presentations of our topic, in five different countries. our presentations have mainly focused on problematizing and explaining academic career trajectories and key career transitions experienced by scholars who aspired to both remain in higher education, as a career choice and finland, as their home. unlike many studies of migration related phenomena and (academic) mobility in finnish society, our self-ethnography (alvesson 2003) implicates native-born finnish scholars, temporarily mobile scholars and scholars with a migrant background, each of whom experience key career transitions which are outwardly similar. that said, there are features of these transitions which are analytically and empirically distinct, due to complex, misrecognized (bourdieu 1988) social dynamics within finland’s rapidly changing higher education system (author1, nokkala & välimaa forthcoming) and the tensions between established and emergent forms of transnational scholarly precariousness (author1 forthcoming). it is fitting that this study will be published in a journal focused on australian studies. while the usa and europe may be the heart of transnational academic capitalism (slaughter & cantwell 2012; kauppinen 2012), many might claim australia is the soul, as an early forerunner in implementing and modelling what would become the hallmarks and signature of the aggressive adoption of global, neoliberal, new public management and the commodification of higher education. and, similar to the usa, some of the most serious critique of the global stratification of higher education along private sector lines comes from australian-born scholars (currie & newson et al. 1998; marginson 2006; robertson 2014). in the context of finnish higher education studies, it was grant harman, the former editor-inchief of higher education, who on 5 september 2005 delivered a keynote in finland’s higher education symposium prophetically centred on the wave of higher education mergers sweeping across australia in the first decade of this century. his message seemed to have been alternatively interpreted as an ominous warning by some scholars of impending rationalization of higher education in the audience that this rationalization was in fact a great idea by others (i.e. government officials) and most likely not taken seriously by others. that said, many who did not fully appreciate the concerns expressed by harman, nor the enthusiastic response by a senior ministry of education official, now work in one of finland’s newly merged higher education institutions. our higher education system was rationalized within a few short years between harman’s warning and the uncritically, enthusiastic embrace of finland’s higher education system – as a whole – of the international agenda-setting that now defines, in part, transnational academic capitalism (kallo 2009; kauppinen 2012: slaughter & cantwell 2012). recent comparative analysis now indicates the marginal place social justice issues have in finland’s contemporary higher education system (hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). this self-ethnography questions the extent to which the nature of equality and inclusion in finland’s higher education system is quickly moving toward the social stratification characteristic of places like australia or the usa, or coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 16 whether this is seriously considered, or even noticed within higher education studies in finland. 2.1.1. transnational academic capitalism – a primer one of the most credible ‘big picture’ explanations for the emergence of transnational academic capitalism was recently advanced by (pashby et al. 2014) whose critical comparative analysis explains the continuity of ‘modern’ (kallo 2009) higher education, grounded in liberal ideology, in which prescriptive internationalization and higher education trends have never been subjected to serious critique. while mainstream social sciences and the humanities made considerable advances, liberal neo-colonial framing of internationalization and overly-narrow definitions of mobility were never subjected to theoretical debate and methodological development used in emancipatory paradigm shifts happening on the same campuses. those advances continue to define state-of-the-art scientific debate linked to widening access and demystifying faculties to all groups found within societies, not only elites (beck 1992; bourdieu 1988; pashby 2014, trow 1974). this lack of scholarly horsepower left higher education specialists ill-prepared for the transnational ideological shift in which neoliberal supplanted liberal ideology. while a few higher educational specialists engaged this ideological shift as it was happening, the seminal efforts (slaughter & leslie 1997; rhoades 1998; rhoades & slaughter 2004) were not aimed at internationalization, much less connected to the vibrant developments in thinking connected to mobilities or inclusion (kahn & pahlich 2001; stevens & dworkin et al. 2014; urry 2007). inside and outside finland, a few early efforts critiqued the global implications of transnational academic capitalism (currie & newson et al. 1998; marginson 2006; kallo 2009; ylijoki 2003) and incorporated more complex ways of thinking about mobilities (marginson, murphy & peters 2009; urry 2007). however, by the time pusser et al. (2012), slaughter & cantwell (2012), cantwell and lee (2010) cantwell and kauppinen et al. (2014) began to get traction on transnational academic capitalism, higher education across the globe had adopted neoliberal new public management and increasingly narrow operationalization of innovation and internationalization. finland passed neoliberal reforms as the 2008/9 global economic crisis unfolded, shifted its historical emphasis on inclusion and equality, in favour of high-profile internationalization and innovation. 2.2. the finnish story when viewed from the outside-looking-in, finland is frequently admired and valorised for the strength of its education system, quality of life and innovative, forward-looking artistic, high-tech achievements and economic competitiveness (radcliffe 2004; sachs 2004; partanen 2011; välijärvi 2006). however, from the inside-looking-around, a critical focus on mobility, broadly conceptualized, reveals key thresholds which have yet to be crossed by all population groups located in finnish society (forsander 2004; hoffman, sama, el-massri, raunio & korhonen 2013a; pöyhönen et al. 2011). in particular, our team’s focus on higher education career trajectories and key threshold transitions reveals the double-edged nature of mobility and migration dynamics within one of the few remaining models of the strong, universal, nordic welfare state (esping-andersen 1998). higher education systems, around coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 17 the world, are increasingly falling into step with the highly normative, neoliberal, international agenda-setting efforts of agencies like the oecd (cantwell & kauppinen 2014; currie & newson 1998; kallo 2009; shahjahan & kezar 2013; marginson 2006), the cumulative result of which is an uncritical adoption of an emergent form of transnational academic capitalism springing up in several major higher education systems, as well as any organization that – literally – wants to ‘do business’ with them (kauppinen 2012; rhoades & slaughter 2004; slaughter & cantwell 2012; slaughter & leslie 1997). amidst these trends, it becomes a fair question, following pusser et al. (2012) to problematize the extent to which the public good higher education could offer all in society actually exists; or, as hoffman et al. (2013a) query: are some groups and individuals ‘outside’ the working range of equity in contemporary higher education institutions in countries like finland? are there groups across societies that will not be found at certain strata of higher education systems or who are exploited across systems, as cantwell and lee (2010) argue? are there persistent aspiration gaps within education and between societies (bowden & doughney 2010) and if so, how do we better explain them? or are these types of questions, which once formed the bedrock of the finnish policy of ‘educational equality’, no longer of interest to policy makers and the strategic management of higher education institutions in finland – or relevant in finnish society? (hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press) 2.3. purpose and objectives the objectives of this article are to firstly present the background of this analysis, as it was a methodological response to an unanticipated opportunity that arose, within the context of a larger, ongoing study of migration issues related to the labour market in finland. secondly, we present the results of the self-ethnography (alvesson 2003) as an institutional analysis carried out by the authors, designed to critically address and problematize the uneasy coexistence of working conditions and career systems which are, on the surface, talked about in terms of collegial equality and merit, yet have seldom been seriously considered with respect to robust, conceptually-driven and empirically-grounded analysis as to whether claims to equity or merit can be sustained when it comes to higher education careers (hoffman 2007; hoffman et al. 2013a; husu 2000). we stress this because critical studies focused on our topic are not typically done in finnish higher education studies, nor in higher education studies generally, nor in many countries, outside well-known exceptions like the uk, north america, australia and new zealand (tight 2012; hoffman, blasi, cools, ćulum, dragšić, ewen, horta, nokkala, rios-aguilar and saarinen 2013b). as will be detailed below, this institutional analysis is distinct, in terms of scope, from two follow-on studies more narrowly focused on the experiences and perceptions of the authors and the use of selfethnography in organizational interventions. thirdly, in our discussion we underline the value of this general approach, in particular with regard to explaining, understanding and avoiding methodological path dependencies typical to higher education research on mainland europe in general and finland in particular. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 18 our analysis focuses on institutional dynamics in which questioning assumptions is not always welcome, unintended consequences are ignored and misrecognized. because of this, hidden populations – and their circumstances – do not exist. these are all important with regard to follow-on studies aimed at explaining key transitions which define a scholar’s trajectory over time (bourdieu 1988; baldwin & blackburn 1981) and in ways that will survive critical, comparative scrutiny outside finland. the key concern driving our methodological position, analysis and discussion is precisely our critical focus on the relationship between higher education institutions, the societies in which they are embedded and the implications of our analysis in the nordic context in general and finnish society in particular, because the system was noted for transformative equity in the 20 th century. the only way we can approach the global topic of transnational scholarly precariousness is to firstly lay a conceptually problematized, empirically grounded analysis of the way in which this manifests our highly situated local circumstances. secondly, problematizing this topic, robustly and methodologically engaging it, in a manner relevant to the state-of-the-art debate and international peer review is the only means available to both distance ourselves to the degree necessary for analysis that constitutes a contribution that merits anyone’s attention. thirdly, we assert the most meaningful contributions to the study of scholarly precariousness will be the relevance of findings to comparative designs which, in turn, offer the best road forward to critically framing, understanding and impacting scholarly precariousness in terms of scholarship, policy and practice. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 19 3. theory: conceptual problematization this study began in a deceptively conventional manner. our lives would have been easier had it stayed that way. however, this was not how things actually happened. the analysis we present below is instructive, especially in terms of the type of methodological reflexivity needed to pursue an unanticipated opportunity in the manner we chose for this study. more importantly, the authors are united in a need to articulate the reasons that justify questioning methodological convention, broadly speaking. specifically, during the course of this study we firstly became concerned with the relationship between methodological nationalism in the way shahjahan & kezar (2013) use that term, in the finnish context. secondly, as we went forward, we developed unease with knowingly contributing to the silent, scholarly capitulation criticized by currie and newson et al. (1998), marginson (2006) and robertson (2014), when faced with a choice of turning a blind eye to ‘international agenda setting’ (kallo 2009). as it links to neoliberal new public management, now entrenched across north america, europe and beyond (cantwell & kauppinen et al. 2014; slaughter & cantwell 2012), kauppinen (2012) aptly terms this transnational academic capitalism. as authors, we locate ourselves within the global scholarly conversations that have taken place over the last two decades and that trace their beginnings to slaughter and leslie’s (1997) coining of the term ‘academic capitalism’, along with pusser et al.’s (2012) sustained critique of the threat to the ideals of higher education as a public good. currently, “now that we (in finnish higher education) are in the business of academic capitalism, rather than simply studying it” (author1, nokkala & välimaa in press), our critical methodological positioning, with regard to these powerful trends, should become clear in the sections that follow. 3.1. the academy of finland project on migration and the labour market this self-ethnography is substantively grounded in a larger project titled: working age migrants in finland: the roles of language proficiency, multilingual and multicultural practices and identities in integration into employment and professional communities (here and after identified by the acronym aof). as we detail in our foreword section, the distinction between the larger aof study and this smaller ethnographic study was that the aof study was planned, while this self-ethnography was not originally part of that plan. in that sense, it was an opportunistic study. in the aof study, the research team normatively problematized finnish labour market dynamics in terms of aspiration: those who aspired to labour market participation; achievement: those who had achieved labour market participation; and abandonment: settings in which persons could be found outside institutions more accurately linked to aspiration or achievement (pöyhönen et al. 2011, 2013). our reason for problematizing social dynamics in this manner was grounded in the aof team members’ recent research in higher education studies and applied linguistics. when read together, our findings suggested many institutions inside or linked to finland’s labour market, particularly the research community focused on migration, had missed important social dynamics inherent in migration within finnish society, as the country made a subtle, yet important shift from being a country of net emigration to a country of net migration (jaakkola 2005). our approach, in aof, was to coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 20 carry out a series of arts-based, longitudinal, ethnographic, policy and case studies, focused on particular occupational sectors and in distinct focal settings. this included teachers, ict engineers, artists, policy actors active in the migration arena and particular areas (geographically and spatially) that had either come under stress or showed particular potential with regard to better understandings of contemporary migration phenomena in finnish society. our purpose for looking across these sectors, groups and settings was to qualitatively illuminate key facets of migration that remained opaque, especially amidst normative institutional reaction to migration-related phenomena. aof team members argued institutional reaction obscured far more than institutions had managed to constructively engage or impact. in order to do this the aof team developed a wide variety of unconventional strategies aimed at simultaneously providing better explanations of migration-related phenomena and impacting the settings, groups and individuals implicated by our participative strategies of engagement. these included an arts-based project of producing a theatre play, proactive participation in national-level policy debate and government service provision (pöyhönen & tarnanen 2015, hoffman 2013) and working within ngos. 3.2. aspiration, achievement and abandonment and career trajectories in finnish higher education within the aof study, as a higher education specialist, hoffman proposed to begin with a case study focused on the notion of abandonment, as he had become familiar with several scholars who had attempted migration to finland, but subsequently left for combinations of professional and personal reasons. hoffman had always been interested in these scholars as a source of unique experiences and perceptions, from an equally unique position. this perspective and position was qualitatively distinct from either scholars who were finnish nationals, by birth, scholars who only temporarily visited finland, with no intention of remaining or scholars who had migrated to finland and stayed (hoffman 2007). as the aof study began, hoffman began listing persons he wanted to request to participate in interviews, during the case study he would lead as a sub-project of aof. in order to guide a conceptually-driven purposeful selection, figure 1 was designed. 3.3. academic work the conceptual coordinates that illuminate the social dynamics which, to a large extent, shape the trajectories (bourdieu 2008) of scholars in higher education systems like finland are quite clear (hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). to construct an analytically-driven purposeful selection (creswell 2002) regarding the topics the aof team were interested in—which would also be conceptually and empirically meaningful in international comparative higher education studies—hoffman conceptualized a variation of a three-dimensional construct he had used in previous multiple case studies of finnish higher education focused on the mobility of university personnel (hoffman 2007, et al. 2013a, in press). the main conceptual starting points in a case study of this nature are drawn from theory of the middle range coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 21 figure 1. conceptualization of analytically-driven purposeful selection (merton 1968), relating to ways in which contemporary university mission or missions are geared towards public or private goods (pusser et al. 2012), career stage as a developmental process (baldwin & blackburn 1981), scholarly productivity (fairweather 2002) and disciplinary cultures (becher & trowler 2001). beginning with a purposeful selection inside universities based on these conceptual coordinates insures that fairly different perspectives within potential higher education positions are taken into account. scholars within columns (a,b,c&d), have a lot in common, as do scholars who have more or less duties with respect to university missions (levels or rows 1-4) (hoffman 2007). these conceptual coordinates, as a point of departure, especially when combined with the analytical approach developed by bourdieu (1988), explain career trajectory in a far more convincing fashion than most approaches to mobility, within the broad category of academic work (a staple category of higher education studies) in finnish higher education. this is because the complexity of what is either assumed, routinely ignored or entirely missed in finnish higher education employment, as is outlined in this self-ethnography, is far more interesting than what is routinely studied (see critical analyses by hoffman 2007; hoffman et al. 2013a; husu 2000, coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 22 2001). in the most simple terms possible, this is because the ‘professional side of the story’, conceptually speaking, is only ‘half a story’. the other ‘half’ of the story, in finnish higher education, is often unproblematized. 3.3.1. unpacking bourdieu’s approach to scholarly trajectory – a primer bourdieu’s (1988) conceptualization of field, capital and trajectory provided considerable insight into academic work during the social transformation associated with the student movement in france in the late 1960s. that said, his theorization and explanation of scholarly trajectory remains far more powerful – across many settings – than alternative explanations known to the authors (see hoffman et al., in press for the way in which this theorization was operationalized in a comparative higher education study). the homology of trajectory, as used by bourdieu (1988) is useful regarding insight into the path of individuals with respect to the tension between a priori social relationships and the human capacity for change or agency. trajectory is used to analyse the degree to which the career path of an academic is in part determined by essential properties which define a given field. a field is defined as a delimited social space where positions and relationships between positions are defined in terms of the possession of specific forms of capital. different forms of capital are specific types of power, used in a given field, that determine specific position, movement and indicate potential relevant to both. (bourdieu 1988; wacquant & bourdieu 1992). the positions an academic has occupied in the past, presently occupies, and is likely to occupy in the future, correspond to clear positions which are normally not created by that academic. rather, the positions exist in the field of higher education, in this case, the finnish national university system. whether or not movement between positions within a field is understood by the persons occupying them is clear in some fields, where the forms of capital are very clear, e.g. on a soccer field or battle-field, less clear in others, e.g. kinship relations in extended families in unfamiliar societies (bourdieu 1990; wacquant & bourdieu 1992). in any case, what remains clear in many fields is that objective positions exist, regardless of the people who occupy those positions. this in and of itself makes analysis of movement between those positions possible. the field-specific capitals of academic and scientific power are the two most important forms of capital which govern durable social relationship patterns that simultaneously delimit and determine power relations within distinct academic fields, as well as one’s trajectory through those fields. academics who act with respect to academic power are focused on the social dynamics which will reproduce the next generation of academics in a given faculty, institute, department or basic unit. academics concerned with scientific power are concerned with the advancement of state-of-the-art knowledge in their discipline. relative position in either type of field is maintained in fundamentally different ways; for example, the control of a subordinate’s time and departmental politics in the former and the publication of scientific texts and innovative lectures concerning disciplinary developments in the latter (bourdieu 1988). in his last work, bourdieu (2004) also advanced the concept of administrative power, as a particular form of emergent capital increasingly important in higher education coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 23 institutions, as well as specialized research institutes. this coincided with the attention given to transnational academic capitalism (kauppinen 2012), in particular in the work of rhoades (1998), slaughter and cantwell (2012); rhoades and slaughter (2004) and cantwell and kauppinen (2014). 3.3.2. unpacking the comparative study of academic work – a primer globally speaking, several focal theories of the middle range are fruitful when it comes to saying something relevant, in general or new, in particular, regarding academic work, as it is understood by higher education specialists. to zoom in on what we are talking about we present an excerpt of the purposeful selection strategy used by a finnish-based team in a recent six country comparative study of higher education (hoffman et al. in press). the conceptually-driven approach builds directly on and elaborates the work of bourdieu (1988, 2004). in order to establish a basis for comparison and develop future research designs with regard to replication and increasingly robust approaches; particularly with regard to the limitations of any qualitative methodology, the following substantive and conceptual starting points are discussed in terms of the analytically-driven purposeful selection (creswell, 2002; yin, 2003) that often inform empirical focus in studies of academic work. 3.3.2.1. disciplinary cultures becher and trowler’s (2001) analytical coordinates concern two focal points. one is the cognitive component of what is studied by an individual and basic units in terms of the hardsoft, pure-applied dimensions that delineate the substantive context to which scholars orientate – along with their attendant attention to theory and linked traditions of inquiry and discourse. the other is a social component that illuminate how individuals – and ultimately, basic units – carry out their scholarship, in terms of dimensions that draw our attention to distinctions illuminated by urban-rural spectrum, in relation to the settings in which scholarship is actually carried out, as well as convergent-divergent orientations to potential topic(s). 3.3.2.2. mission emphasis välimaa’s (2001b) analysis of career patterns in finnish higher education illuminates crucial distinctions between the missions of research and teaching in finnish higher education, in addition to mission related dynamics affecting scholars who assume administrative responsibilities. his findings clearly underscore the consequences in terms of career opportunities linked to the missions and activities within finnish heis. välimaa’s analysis was elaborated by hoffman (2007) and hoffman et al. (2013), who assert a more nuanced approach that seeks to illuminate the distinctions between activities in heis related to research, teaching, service, administration and strategic level leadership. in particular, in the coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 24 analysis leading to hoffman et al. (2013) a focus on the rapid expansion of ‘new professionals’ (rhoades 1998) who are neither teachers, researchers, strategic managers or engaged in service, i.e. any mission of the university, but whose activity is perceived to be critical for the control and steering of scholars by non-scholars (slaughter & cantwell, 2012; hoffman et al., 2013; rhoades, 1998). 3.3.2.3. career stage baldwin & blackburn’s (1981) study of career stage – as a developmental process – serves to underline the distinct perspectives researchers can expect to encounter when trying to understand phenomena within heis, from very different experienced-based assumptions. these perspectives manifest at different points in individual career trajectories. the views of an hei from the perspective of a senior strategic-level leadership position, a tenured professor, a lecturer, a temporarily employed graduate student or research assistant are akin to the blindfolded group of people describing the proverbial elephant. this empirical contrast is often far more meaningful, depending on the topic, than a focus informed by a single career stage or other perspective. while all of the aforementioned perspectives have potential value, the contrasts between early stage, early career, mid and late career operational, support and management personnel are particularly important in multiple case studies, if empiricallygrounded, holistic analysis is the ‘end game’ of a case study. 3.3.2.4. competitive horizon the heuristic of competitive horizons in contemporary finnish heis, was advanced and grounded analytically by välimaa & hoffman (2007) and empirically grounded by hoffman, välimaa & huusko (2008), raunio, korhonen & hoffman (2011), as well as conceptually problematized in relation to methodological nationalism (shajahan & kezar, 2013) by hoffman et al. (2013; in press). the heuristic illuminates three fundamental horizons can be analytically illuminated by the orientation of an individual or basic unit to their most important competitors, in terms of resources. the dynamics that underlie these orientations are produced by the tension between reproduction within the structure of a discipline and transformation of (or linked to) that same discipline. this tension was conceptually and empirically illuminated and advanced by bourdieu (1988), its implications highlighted by brennan (2002), and confirmed within the finnish context by hoffman et al. (2008; 2011.) attention to this heuristic draws attention to the social dynamics of basic units and individuals operating at the cutting edge of their disciplines/specialities at world class, where the most important norms are linked to scientific power (bourdieu, 1988; 2004), specifically, the power to transform one’s discipline/speciality. in contrast are local heroes who transmit and translate knowledge, but take no part in producing it, primarily orientating to the reproduction of the next generation of local scholars through the control of the time and resources of others. between these two extremes are national champions, middle tier scholars, who attempt some type of balance between transformation and reproduction, often without necessarily recognizing this as such. the heuristic of competitive horizons draw coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 25 attention to the challenges of managing heis, as activity at all horizons are in demand because they correspond to the global division of academic labour, while at the same time these are often thoroughly misrecognized (hoffman et al., 2011) in normative-level policy and organizational debate, where prescriptive fashions and fads (birnbaum, 2000) lag far behind, or are completely disconnected from the empirical space occupied by established and emergent stratification that defies convenient and obvious framing. the purposeful selection using these four criteria to the extent possible ensures that not too many similar types of personnel participate in interviews from units that are too similar. 3.4. ascriptive characteristics and social constructs in finnish society: the sacred and safe versus the profane and problematic in addition to occupational/professional coordinates, a complete range of ascriptive characteristics is needed to get full traction, conceptually and empirically speaking, in a purposeful selection of this nature. ascriptive characteristics are characteristics of a person or group that cannot be changed by individual effort, for example, gender, age, kinship, skin colour, national origin, sexual orientation, physical disability and ethnicity (beck 1992). complex intersectionality regarding the relationship between achieved or professional characteristics and the ascriptive characteristics that empirically exist in finnish society remains largely unproblematized in many studies of finnish higher education employment (hoffman 2007; hoffman et al. 2013a; husu 2000, 2001), as well as professional practice, as this study spotlights. this is the reason why it is easy to locate domestic or local ‘explanations’ of – and approaches to – academic work and career trajectories in higher education employment in finland that amount to little more than stilted folk psychology that more accurately illuminates the finnish variant of methodological nationalism than robust approaches needed to provide viable explanations of career trajectories (hoffman 2007; hoffman et al. 2013a; husu 2000, 2001; shajahan & kezar 2012) or robust, transparent hr policy. a specific example of this is detailed in the section: ‘the nature of methodological nationalism in (finnish) higher education studies’ (below). by ‘viable’, we mean designs or practices that would be conceptually or empirically meaningful in comparative studies geared to state-of-the art knowledge on academic work. the previous paragraph might be regarded as polemic in the finnish context by many. however, when contrasted to the convoluted social dynamics encountered during this study, the authors are more comfortable with being polemic. by ‘convoluted’, we mean the longstanding avoidance by higher education actors of directly engaging conceptually viable, empirically-grounded explanations of persistent challenges experienced by scholars caught up in migration and mobility or implicated by these dynamics. these social dynamics remain largely unexplored and fundamentally misunderstood in our local context. this is because some ascriptive characteristics, like gender, are actively linked to equity discourse, while others, like ethnicity, national origin, religion and skin colour, are thought about – in everyday practice – under a successive ‘hit parade’ (bourdieu 1988) of ill-defined and routinely unproblematized ‘smoke and mirrors discourses’, such as ‘multiculturalism’, ‘integration’, ‘internationalization’, ‘diversity’, ‘multiversity’ and ‘good relations’ (blommaert 2009; hoffman 2013; hoffman, saarinen & cools 2012). the notion of race as a coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 26 social construction (berger & luckmann 1966) is extremely problematic in the finnish context (cantwell & lee 2010; rastas 2009; beach & lunneblad 2013), where it is in many cases denied altogether – and ironically – by persons of colour, who realize what habti terms the ‘ethnic penalty’ of using his own name in email correspondence. while all ascriptive characteristics are ‘technically’ covered by legal statute concerning discrimination (as is the case in most countries), in everyday life the combination of ‘sacred and safe’ ascriptive characteristics like gender, mother-tongue and age rests uneasily alongside ascriptive characteristics covered by the umbrella of ‘smoke and mirrors discourses’, which are united by the fact that no one agrees on their meanings and they remain unoperationalized in research designs that purport to study academic work. both rest uneasily beside the ‘profane and problematic notion that shall not be mentioned’: race. what these three parallel discourses accomplish is the unintended consequence of thoroughly obscured, misrecognized (bourdieu 1988) constituents of biography that may – or may not – have relationships to the rather clear terminology (by contrast) linked to academic work and social theory that explains career trajectories. put another way, the unproblematized reality that results from de-linking achieved and ascriptive characteristics can be formulated in terms of the aphorism coined by w.i. thomas (marshall, 1994): the thomas theorem: “because equality in everyday academic life can be experienced as meaning nothing, it means nothing.” 3.5. problematizing academic work and ascriptive characteristics: the tensions between aspiration, achievement and abandonment mills (1959) wrote that the essence of the sociological imagination was the understanding of history, biography and their intersection in society. following mills, and bourdieu (1988), the relationship between academic work and ascriptive characteristics was problematized within the aof study, as we had a strong hunch this would shed light on key challenges across finnish society with regard to migration. this is because all teachers – as well as the majority professionals working with all of finland’s most important institutions, organizations and professions – are educated within finnish higher education. because the ‘intersection’ in focus in this particular study is higher education and the topic is academic work and migration, it is difficult to avoid ‘biography’ in the way which is routinely done inside contemporary finnish higher education institutions (hoffman 2007; hoffman et al. 2013a). we would further underline that, historically speaking, finnish society and education have been fairly characterized by the relative absence of social stratification (välimaa 2001a). this said, the rationale of the approach of the aof research project, in general, was a critical re-examination of contemporary migration-related dynamics. the most recent research of the authors suggests new approaches are needed to interrogate and problematize relationships like those brought into focus in this study. 3.6. conceptualizing social dynamics and who we are really talking about during the initial meetings of the aof research team, two key ideas came up that aof researchers felt were preconditions to articulating new knowledge on migration in the finnish coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 27 context. firstly, we had to avoid regarding aof’s conceptual problematization (aspiration, achievement and abandonment) of our approach as static, if we wished to avoid the normative thinking that we suspected of creating so many blind spots in the initial institutional reactions to migration-related social dynamics in finland in the previous two decades. aof researchers had a strong hunch that it was most likely undetected movement within and between actual settings and concrete focal contexts (aspiration, achievement and abandonment) that our approach brought into view as interesting and would provide new knowledge with regard to phenomena missed in first-generation studies of migration in finnish society. because much of hoffman’s previous work on academic work, mobility and migration had focused on bourdieu’s (1988) homology of trajectory in its relation to academic careers, the idea of dynamic complexity within institutional settings like higher education was unproblematic and in line with the aof study as planned. a second central idea, one that originally grounded the terms aspiration, achievement and abandonment, was that the aof team’s problematization, unlike many previous studies of migration substantively, conceptually and empirically illuminated the general population of finland, not only persons with a migrant background (pöyhönen et al. 2011, 2013). the importance of this, in the context of academic work in finland, is getting past the pseudo debate, most often carried out at the level of folk psychology, concerning precarious higher education employment in finland. this ‘debate’ often begins with anecdotal claims that nonfinnish scholars have perceived or experienced discrimination in competition for positions, especially permanent positions. a ‘debate’ of this nature played out in the finnish press during this study in which this type of assertion was levelled by rice (yle 2014). the inevitable responses to anecdotal assertions of discrimination are – of course – more anecdotal assertions, like “times are tough for foreigners and finns alike” (primmer 2014). in other words, ‘it makes no real difference who you are’. the challenges and opportunities faced by all academics in finnish higher education are ‘the same for everyone’. while it is not difficult to find willing participants for these pseudo ‘debates’, the similarity of both positions is that neither makes reference to the wide body of international research literature in which answers to these types of ‘claims’ are routinely illuminated, problematized and addressed, including the recent studies of this topic in the finnish context cited throughout this study. the reason this pseudo-debate is confined to the media, lecture halls and pubs is because actually substantiating these claims requires theory, methodology, data analysis and peerreview by content specialists. folk psychology, anecdotes and personal opinions do not contribute to explanations of the way in which transnational scholarly precariousness manifests in finnish higher education, except perhaps as ethnographic data explaining a great deal, in terms of context, what higher education actors focus their attention on and, more importantly, what they miss. in the context of higher education, it is clear that academic life – at all competitive horizons – is often very challenging for everyone involved (hoffman et al. in press). that said, concerning migration, the aof team had begun to doubt if a focus exclusively on persons with a migrant background, which many approaches take as a point of departure, missed important phenomena integral to better explanations regarding key institutions and social structure in a quickly changing society. what is clear is that media-driven pseudo debates, like many studies of academic work in finnish higher education, operate at very low levels of abstraction (folk psychology) that favour untenable personal projections, anecdotes and coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 28 opinions over robust methodology, theory and data analysis (teichler 1996; hoffman forthcoming), packaged in conceptually ungrounded, unproblematized, uncritical, asymmetrical approaches that over-focus on individuals, while ignoring social structure (hoffman et al. 2013). while the above-mentioned hunches of the aof team formed a promising point of departure to separate debates of folk psychology versus debates between scientists, the actual beginning of the interviews, in conjunction with wanting to focus on empirically illuminating and explaining trajectory within and between the focal settings of aspiration, achievement and abandonment in finnish higher education, spotlighted an immediate set of dilemmas and challenges. these dilemmas and challenges changed the course, methodologically speaking, of the studies and interventions hoffman would lead within the aof project. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 29 4. methodology: methodological shift as the aof studies got underway between 2011 and 2013, two series of events were happening concurrently—as so often in academe—which initially seemed quite unrelated. these two events were methodologically grounded in an entirely different set of studies and practice-orientated, related to hoffman’s position in his research group education and social change at the finnish institute for educational research (here and after, fier). however, the way in which these two events came to be highly interrelated shaped our subsequent approach, in part, to the self-ethnography and interventions carried out by the authors, all of which were grounded in the aof project, but unplanned. the first of these events was grounded in a series of studies focused on research team dynamics and ict-based research team collaboration, within a european science foundation (esf) research program (hoffman et al. 2014). during this series of studies, hoffman and his colleagues initially designed a conventional, mixed-methods (sequentialexploratory) study to engage an unanticipated opportunity to study an under-researched topic within higher education studies on academic work. during the initial write-ups of those efforts, hoffman and his colleagues received strong encouragement regarding the focal topic selection, but a stark caution, in particular, with regard to the use of interviews and surveys within higher education studies, which were already ‘over-relied’ on within the power-laden social dynamics of universities. specifically, a conference discussant advised the team to take a far more critical stance that combined with a methodological approach that better fit the unique perspective that the team was working from and which would allow them to avoid the traps inherent especially in interviews of university personnel. this was self-ethnography, as advanced by alvesson (2003). after reconsidering the topic with respect to the critique of that particular discussant, the team adopted a self-ethnographic approach within an advocacy/participatory paradigm (creswell 2002), aimed explicitly at improving the situation the team found themselves and their field of studies in. the second of these concurrent events occurred under the auspices of hoffman’s membership of a research group in fier, which was focused on higher education and social change. at that time hoffman was managing this group. in this capacity, hoffman, over the course of several months, had become increasingly aware of the circumstances of two early-career researchers with a migrant background, sama and cools, with respect to their aspirations at fier. both appeared to be capable researchers, having recently earned doctorates in two fields highly complementary to the interdisciplinary mission of fier: social and public policy and speech communication. in addition, an early-stage researcher and doctoral student, siekkinen, had recently joined the team and hoffman had been discussing potential project ideas with her, as she sought funding that would allow her to begin her dissertation. based on both of his previous studies of academic work and personal experience, negotiating the doctoral and post-doc career threshold as a migrant in the finnish university system, hoffman identified with the key career transitions sama, cools and seikkinen were in and the way in which these would define their career trajectories within higher education. in ideal circumstances, sama, cools and seikkinen would find ideas that were viable in terms of funding and institutional support, the key to a way forward along their respective trajectories. however, with regard to the problematization of aspiration, achievement and abandonment, it was equally clear that their institutional status was highly precarious and depended on social coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 30 dynamics that were as uncertain and contingent as they were misrecognized (bourdieu 1988), and dangerous (hoffman 2007, hoffman et al. 2013a). 4.1. key methodological risks and gaps: our dilemma what was equally clear, based on the methodological realities of this situation, was that sama, cools and siekkinen fell squarely into the conceptual problematization outlined by the aof study (aspiration, achievement and abandonment), and the sub-study that hoffman intended to begin focused on academic work within higher education. this was because each of them faced the imminent prospect of leaving an institution in which they had achieved a precarious foothold through research team membership in the case of siekkinen and cools, which sama also aspired to. based on his recent experience with self-ethnography (alvesson 2003; hoffman et al. 2014), hoffman now knew the original case study methodological approach planned for his focus on higher education (as a sub-study of aof) was actually problematic, both methodologically and ethically. this was because negotiating the career transition faced by a fresh post-doc, in the case of sama and cools, or an aspiring doctoral student, in the case of siekkinen, was both time-sensitive and urgent. hoffman had to consider, in light of fresh experience, whether or not adopting a more critical and participative research design, as he and his colleagues had done in their study of research team dynamics, was in order. specifically, the skill-set and socialization process post-docs and doctoral students rapidly need to learn was obviously what sama, cools and siekkinen needed, rather than to be merely interviewed as to their highly uncertain precarious situation. further, hoffman had studied the trajectories of academics in finnish universities and was familiar with the unique challenges regarding migration and mobility dynamics. in that light, interviewing sama, cools and siekkinen seemed to border on the unethical, compared to the potential inherent in actively seeking a better understanding of the nature of the structural dynamics, cultural forces and limits of agency that would in effect determine their professional outcomes in the field of finnish higher education in general, and fier in particular. hoffman, cools and seikkinen were already acutely aware of the risk entailed in studies of this nature, as higher education studies are generally not a showcase for critical approaches to power relations within academe (alvesson 2003; hoffman et al. 2014, 2013b; tight 2012), and in finnish higher education studies in particular (hoffman et al. 2013a; hoffman, saarinen & cools 2012). because of the obvious risks entailed in executing a novel, critical approach to studies of academic work in finnish higher education in the first person, hoffman contacted habti, one of the other scholars he had originally intended to interview in the aof case studies. this was because, unlike most mobility specialists in finland, habti’s recent dissertation firstly focused on the mobility of scholars with a migrant background – and secondly, he was, himself, a migrant as were sama, cools and hoffman. as a new funding period was approaching with regard to several national sources of post-doc support, both sama and habti had recently approached hoffman to discuss post-doc topics. habti, while recognizing the risks of this type of study, also understood the irony of the team’s position, in the sense that scholars the world over are generally encouraged to seek new knowledge in high-risk/high-gain studies. in the words of marja makarow, vice president for research, academy of finland, “your aim is to conduct cutting-edge research. our aim is to coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 31 fund it” (academy of finland 2014). that said, both habti and hoffman knew the approach they discussed, despite the fact that it was novel, high risk/high gain, posed serious risks within finnish higher education, where criticism is often personalized and contentious topics are not routinely raised in everyday communication (carbaugh 1996). while academic freedom offers a fig leaf of leeway for critique (kahn & pavlich 2001), all the authors of this self-ethnography are acutely aware that there exists no established tradition of pointed critique in higher education studies in finland on topics of this nature. there are numerous examples of early stage and early career researchers like sama, cools, siekkinen and habti invoking advocacy/participatory knowledge claims (creswell 2002) toward their own career trajectories, amidst the denial or minimization (bennett 1993) of the relationship between achieved and ascriptive characteristics and salient social constructions in the context of academic work (bird 1996; castellanos & jones et al. 2003; howardhamilton, morelon-quainoo, johnson, winkle-wagner & santiague 2009; li & beckett et al. 2006; thompson & loque 2005). this acknowledged, none of the studies cited in the previous sentence was carried out in finland or mainland europe. three clear risks needed to be understood by our team before we could move forward. 4.1.1. the absence of collective agency margaret archer (1995) draws the useful distinction between the agency of a single individual and the more powerful forms of agency inherent in groups of individuals. the reason why our team’s topic is not as obvious as the groups who have published the studies cited in the previous paragraph is a subtle combination of the very low numbers of persons with a migrant background in the finnish general population (as detailed below) and the even lower numbers in senior positions in the most important academic basic units and government agencies whose scope of interest could (potentially) include topics like the one on which our team has decided to focus in this study. as hoffman observed in his initial entry in the field notes kept during this study, on 23 august, 2013: …the most compelling of the potential interview participants are early career scholars (migrants)—at postdoc level (having recently completed their phds)—who are having significant difficulties in the key transition to their first post-phd post and early stage researchers, trying to get their phd going. regarding these persons, i find myself in a difficult position in one sense, as methodological approaches that have been used before for groups in this position are simply not in use in finland. the first reason they are not in use was the topic of our latest article (hoffman 2013a), i.e. methodological nationalism. and the second reason is that those types of studies have been carried out with homogenous groups that have at least a modicum of collective agency, in the sense they share key ascriptive characteristics. the group i have, though, is defined by complex intersectionality that is mot picked up by local framing. the post-docs, all at early-career, are thomas (sama), a black african male; driss (habti), a north african male who uses the term ‘ethnic penalty’ to describe him using his own name in correspondence, as well as the other ascriptive characteristics that describe him; carine (cools), a female early-career researcher from belgium; while coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 32 taru (siekkinen), a young, finnish female single parent at early-stage i . this primary group is also different, because we are both friends and colleagues. i am giving them advice and actively helping them in their efforts to go forward, including them in projects both of mutual benefit that—if successful—will allows [sic] them to advance in their careers. there are a lot of reasons to do this. the most important one is that—despite rhetoric on equality in finland—it’s much easier to make a case for emerging ethnic stratification than a ‘level playing field’, defined by merit. while some in higher education studies are not used to the presentation of data and field notes ‘in the methodology section’, we respectfully remind the reader that in empirical studies that confront convention, it is precisely methodological reflexivity that allows us – sometimes – to avoid the ‘blind spots’ made up of unquestioned assumptions, unintended consequences and which, in our case, hide entire populations in plain sight. specifically, in 2013, 22,119 persons of finland’s general population of 5,451,270 or 0.41% are “persons whose native language is a foreign language” (statistics finland 2014). the empirical distinction between the 5,429,151 native speakers of finnish, swedish or sami and what government statisticians refer to as “persons whose native language is a foreign language” grounds an interesting feature of methodological nationalism in the finnish case. specifically, these “persons whose native language is a foreign language” have nothing in common but for the fact they are non-native speakers of finnish, swedish or sami, yet they are frequently conceptually and empirically ‘aggregated’ in studies of education carried out by government agencies charged for evaluating the central challenges linked to this ‘group’, stretching that term quite broadly. 4.1.2. no tradition of critical introspection as bourdieu (1988) wrote, studying one’s situation amidst more powerful scholars who misrecognize that they are reproducing power relations – while believing they are entirely up to something else – is a sure-fire recipe for making life-long enemies and producing ‘books for burning.’ finnish higher education studies are not well known for taking a critical, inward-looking approach at the way in which we operate. this has not changed between the time bourdieu made the above-cited observation through tight’s (2012) recent review of higher education’s major journals and books, in which critical studies are conspicuously absent compared to mainstream social science and humanities literature. further, our own studies, which have been cited throughout this text and broached this area, have not produced any evidence contrary to these claims. rather, they have confirmed a persistent, uncritical path dependency, characterized by a lack of imagination, conformity to convention and risk aversion (hoffman 2013b, 2014). during this study, as things turned out, we would directly encounter this tendency on two distinct occasions, both of which are elaborated in our analysis below. there are solid examples of contemporary critique in finnish higher education studies (see kivistö & tirronen 2012) and even on academic capitalism and precariousness employment of scholars (see nikula 2012 & ylijoki 2003), but these studies, while critical, do not fully address contemporary migration, nor transnational scholarly coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 33 precariousness (hoffman forthcoming) in a way that is actionable within the settings in which it manifests. 4.1.3. the nature of methodological nationalism in (finnish) higher education studies we have published and are finalizing accounts that explain the elements that comprise the variant of methodological nationalism (shajahan & kezar 2012) one will encounter in finnish higher education (hoffman et al. 2013a; author1, nokkala & välimaa in press). the central element of this is explained in the cited studies in terms of the competitive horizons formed by the tension between reproduction and transformation and the social dynamics of scholars whose work results in one, the other or both in three distinct strata, all of which are in high demand in several countries around the world. the competitive horizons heuristic posits the strata of the world class, national champions and local heroes, all of which orient to three distinct sets of cultural logic which shape and define distinct social structure and the nature of agency within and between these strata. like shahjahan and kezar’s (2013), critique of methodological nationalism, the competitive horizons heuristic references the nature of the global division of scholarly labour and the way in which this manifests in highly situated circumstances. it follows that distinct sets of national idiosyncrasies (kogan 2002) and variations can be articulated – as has been done in the above-cited studies which our team has discussed – most often in ways that avoid discussion of methodological nationalism entirely. this is because, locally, the social dynamics that look like methodological nationalism at distinct competitive horizons (from outside highly situated settings like fier) comprise the beliefs, values and norms – or cultures – that inform the social dynamics of everyday life within the social structure of one’s immediate work environment in subtle, nuanced ways that cannot be ‘seen’ using the highly conventional methodological routines employed to ‘study’ academic work. a concrete example of this was a survey on academic careers received by hoffman, pöyhönen and siekkinen during this study, on 17 september 2014, from the university which employs them. in this survey, ‘equality’ was asked about in five questions, but only operationalized conceptually in terms of gender in two questions about equality and discrimination respectively. all other ascriptive characteristics and social constructions needed for a problematization of contemporary academic work and equality that would be relevant to state-of-the-art debate or international-level comparative studies of academic work were missing. there was one open-ended question: “what else would you like to say about your experiences of work or equality?” the substantive, methodological, theoretical and conceptual assumptions underlying the de-linkage of biography and academic work are beyond the scope of this study, but worth highlighting, as they underline the general approach to studies of academic work in higher education studies in finland. to be fair, it is also worth pointing out that this is an example of institutional research and should be judged in that context. to be critical, the intersectionality that is missed in ‘studies’ like these is more interesting than what is purported to be in focus. 4.1.4. speaking truth to power: a good idea? to be fair, it is not difficult to locate higher education researchers extremely aware of the (above) risks that needed to be pointed out to each member of the team who participated in coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 34 our self-ethnography. during the course of this study, hoffman participated in two key presentations as an organizer (hoffman, rhoades, lee & shajahan 2013) and as an audience participant (abbas, a., ashwin, p. & trahar, s. 2013), both aimed squarely at the conventions that prevents working scholars—in many cases—from getting traction on interesting topics and, in our case, topics that affect the nature of their very existence— ironically—through the study of that same existence. but, to be blunt, this community of critical scholars is spread out over vast distances, across far flung countries and continents. both of these presentations were in national and cultural settings (the usa and the uk), where critical scholarship on topics like these is more of a norm than frowned upon and where speaking truth to power in the way foucault (1979) or wildavsky (1997) use the phrase is lauded, not damned. in earlier studies hoffman and his colleagues (hoffman, elmassri, sama, korhonen & raunio 2011; hoffman et al. 2014) as well as habti (forthcoming) have encountered colleagues and reviewers who expressed reservations and thinly disguised suspicion or irritation about using the established methods and modes of inquiry cited throughout this text in which working scholars step out from behind the cloak of passive, third-person, anonymous convention to critically question power relations in ways apparently outside the experience, approval or working knowledge of those presenting extraparadigmatic critique. in all cases, the colleagues in question seemed to either be genuinely unaware that studies of this type are routinely carried out in several countries across the globe; unfamiliar with the paradigmatic basis that necessitates the wide variety of traditions and modes of inquiry currently in use in contemporary social sciences and humanities; and unable or unwilling to evaluate studies of these nature – or some combination of these possible explanations (hoffman 2013b). however, in no case did those same reviewers hesitate to attempt an extra-paradigmatic evaluation. as this type of amateur gatekeeping is unfortunately not unusual, the authors frame this as an opportunity to sharpen their argumentation, analysis and general scholarship skills. 4.1.5. social media and transnational scholarly precariousness regarding social media, the same ‘disconnect’ our team was experiencing between higher education studies in finland and mainstream research within the social sciences and humanities was true regarding the vibrant, ongoing global conversations which squarely address the exploitation of the aptly termed new faculty majority (2014). in social media, a population of precarious faculty (2014) that now outnumber permanent faculty and staff cuts across the globe; they make up an invisible adjunct nation (2014) in which “improving the quality of higher education by advancing professional equity and securing academic freedom for all adjunct and contingent faculty” is important, yet apparently unnoticed in groups and institutes like ours as emergent transnational scholarly precariousness (hoffman forthcoming). while these parallel social movements engage in “education and advocacy to provide economic justice and academic equity for all college faculty” by promoting “stable, equitable, sustainable, non-exploitative academic environments that promote more effective teaching, learning, and research” (new faculty majority 2014), and justice for adjuncts (2014), scholars in places like fier seem completely disconnected from these global sites of contention that frame and spotlight “non-negotiable sites of struggle” (mla subconference 2014) in which adjuncts and contingents together unite (2014) “adjunct and contingent professors at campuses … to address the crisis in higher education and the troubling trend toward a marginalized teaching faculty that endangers our profession”. methodologically coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 35 speaking, the idea we could better connect with ict-based activism bore fruit eventually, by connecting with members of finnish-based work life scholars hentonnen and lapointe (2015), who were using a combination of publications, training and a web-based approach (www.valtamo.fi) to engage the relationship between the ways in which transnational academic capitalism within finland manifested across finnish society. 4.2. the rationale of risk-taking and a methodological crossroads with respect to established and ongoing debates surrounding the ways in which the social stratification of the academic workforce clearly implicates higher education as a whole, along with the distinctive research literature on academic work, it is not problematic to conceptually and empirically locate the situation of the authors, locally speaking, within wider, established conversations and debates at the national and global level. that said, much of the active debate and above-mentioned research have missed the ways in which migration and mobility further complicate the social dynamics of academic work, with a few very important exceptions, such as cantwell & lee (2010), mamiseishvili (2010), pillay (2010) & torresolave (2013). while that might seem like ‘pointing out the obvious’ to some, the problem for our team was contending with the reality that those same individuals did not appear to be doing anything to ameliorate the scholarly precariousness. in terms of our direct experience, the obvious risks and the emergent trends in our field, our self-ethnography team as individuals and as a group was left with the decision to (also) turn a blind eye to the situation we found ourselves in locally, or attempt to constructively engage with it, through our scholarship, in ways that were going on primarily outside mainland europe and finnish higher education in general, and fier in particular. during the period of time hoffman became aware of the methodological crossroads the team was at, he decided to talk about risks with his colleagues, who were actually caught up in these dynamics to see what they thought, as individuals. 4.3. moving forward, methodologically-speaking, with efficacy: our process in the case of fier, hoffman met with sama, cools and siekkinen individually, and proposed that they, together, study their collective circumstances as a group because of the commonalities regarding the professional circumstances they were immediately facing or had faced in the past. we aimed to begin by studying our immediate circumstances and relate these both to the mainstream literature in the social sciences and the humanities focused on scholarly precariousness in general, and engage the way in which transnational academic capitalism was manifesting in fier, in ways that were being engaged in distant locations but which had not yet been apprehended locally in a way that we could connect with. in this sense, we decided to directly investigate transnational scholarly precariousness (hoffman forthcoming) and the way in which it manifested in our immediate surroundings. http://www.valtamo.fi/ coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 36 to do this, firstly as individuals and then as a group, we decided to target settings, seminars and conferences in which our ideas could be presented, advanced and critiqued. these could then be developed as conference presentations and papers, then journal articles, and other types of publications. these, in turn could support ideas for funding applications and for use in our respective teaching practice and service. we agreed and decided these efforts need not to be thought about as an exclusive future career focus or long-term orientation. rather, we approached this topic as a set of issues that is currently unresolved in our local environment and which are viable topics in their own right. moreover, it was clear that working with novel ideas, as they evolve from peer presentations in conferences and seminars, and then developed into viable publications and funding ideas, was a skill set all scholars who aspire to positions in academe are better off acquiring sooner, rather than later. finally it was equally clear that the precarious professional path finnish higher education scholars needed to negotiate was a minefield of unquestioned assumptions that were having unanticipated consequences far from understood with respect to ‘hidden populations’, especially those caught up in mobility and migration dynamics. ultimately, with respect to a wider, more critical appraisal of the literature and the larger, international-level on-going conversations that concerned our topic, our group had the option to ‘sit on the side-lines’, hoping someone else in a position of power would notice the literature, knowledge/practice gap we had identified and constructively address the situation, or act ourselves. this study is a result of a decision to act on these circumstances, rather than wait. the concrete set of practices the group agreed to was firstly to begin working on the topic – as perceived by the group, using self-ethnography, as outlined by alvesson (2003) for the same reasons hoffman and colleagues had chosen the approach in their 2014 study (cited above). in addition, we proposed to work on other distinct types of related, parallel efforts relevant to career development and service projects if and when chances presented themselves – whether discussing and developing funding ideas and publication proposals, in the case of siekkinen, sama and habti; or the review of journal article write-ups and discussing career strategy, in the case of cools. finally, hoffman asked the group members to begin keeping field notes, in order to record their observations and reflections and sent them alvesson’s (2003) article, which details the rationale and general approach of self-ethnography, the team would use. 4.4 self-ethnography: ‘if you don’t write it down, it never happened’ while the conventional researcher (with an anthropological orientation) may ask “what in hell do they think they are up to?” the self-ethnographer must ask “what in hell do we think we are up to? … on the whole, students of organizational culture within one’s own national context suffer from a lack of imagination making it possible to accomplish studies not caught up in the taken-for-granted assumptions and ideas that are broadly shared between the researcher and the researched. too much of organizational life is often too coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 37 familiar. for academics studying other academics this is an especially strong problem (alvesson 2003: 171&177). the moment the most urgent questions and preoccupations of scholars in universities mirror social transformation in society is precisely the time for sociologically-driven inquiry (bourdieu 2004). finnish society is facing a challenging transformation, especially in terms of demographic pressures, still too often thought about in inward-looking, normative, institutional terms that do not explain the alternatives open to us, because they obscure the global nature of the social dynamics shaping structural change in highly situated national and local settings. the extent to which this is actually recognized in a way that is actionable in higher education or society is not difficult to call into question (hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press; pöyhönen & tarnanen 2015). because this is the case and not otherwise, shifting methodology, in order to break away from approaches that seem to reproduce social stratification rather than ameliorate it, seemed worth a try. our analysis below focuses on data that cannot be framed using what beck & beckgernsheim (2012) term zombie categories or ‘smoke and mirrors’ jargon (hoffman, saarinen & cools 2012). zombie categories are ideas that once were used to explain a great deal (often by themselves) or by referencing grand theory, like class or globalization. smoke and mirrors jargon is ‘policy-speak: terms or discourse adopted, borrowed or translated from other countries which are used to design policy and practice aimed at what are seen, by some, as ‘new’ situations in finland, like migration and internationalization. examples include multiculturalism, diversity or good relations. these zombie categories and jargon are routinely substituted for conceptually viable and comparatively meaningful ideas that explain our topic at a higher level of abstraction. as an alternative to the methodological path dependency we critique above, producing an empirically-grounded qualitative analysis involving a small group is often the first step on the road to a deeper, wider understanding, explaining – even engaging – challenging topic. as a qualitative, ethnographic write-up, the work stands or falls on its own and can be evaluated by anyone familiar with the basic principles of qualitative research (creswell 2002). self-ethnography, although unfamiliar to many in finnish higher education, is a way to illuminate our topic, using the lived experience of those inside the institution of higher education. a variety of insider-ethnography, alvesson (2003) defines the approach as follows: a self-ethnography is a study and a text in which the researcher-author describes a cultural setting to which s/he has a “natural access”, is an active participant, more or less on equal terms with other participants. the researcher then works and/or lives in the setting and then uses the experiences, knowledge and access to empirical material for research purposes. this research is, however, not a major preoccupation, apart from at a particular time when the empirical material is targeted for close scrutiny and writing. the person is thus not an ethnographer in the sense of a professional stranger or a researcher primarily oriented to studying the specific setting. participant observation is thus not a good label in this case, observing participant is better. participation comes first and is only occasionally complemented with observation in a research focused sense … the idea of a self-ethnography is coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 38 to utilize the position one is in also for other, secondary purposes, i.e. doing research on the setting of which one is a part. (alvesson 2003: 174-175, emphasis added) it is very important in our case to underline the episodic nature of self-ethnography, in which fairly long periods of time go by between times the authors were able to focus on this study. this was first and foremost because this was a curiosity-driven, opportunistic study for most of the authors, except hoffman & pöyhönen. secondly, all of the authors were engaged in other studies and duties linked to our jobs alongside this study. finally, we had no explicit direction on the study other than what we decided was the most appropriate course of action given our circumstances. the main reason we chose alvesson’s (2003) approach was because it was articulated precisely for the institutional setting we were in, as well as a good fit for the very limited amount of time we had for the study. in addition, the approach was very intuitive and accessible. finally, the ethnographic data, in and of itself, proved far more interesting than the types of data many colleagues were using to study what outwardly was the same topic. alvesson draws an important distinction between self-ethnography and auto-ethnography. he points out that the ‘self’ in the former draws attention to what is happening around an individual, the social dynamics, structure and culture an individual is caught up in, while the ‘self’ in the latter focuses attention on deeply personal experiences felt inside an author and what they need to share with a wider audience. in other words, self-ethnography refers to notions of what others do and say when a person is a participant in the setting and the analysis of the meanings these doings and sayings might have while auto-ethnography focuses more on a person’s own doings and sayings in a certain setting (eriksson 2010). alvesson stresses the distinction between the “careful documentation and interpretation of social events that one is witnessing”, which is the signature of self-ethnography and the introspective, autobiographical, even confessional style of auto-ethnography. as in many ethnographic approaches, introspection is not necessarily out of place, as long as it relates to the overarching analysis, which is the goal – and central challenge of most ethnographic write-ups (alvesson 2003:174-175, emphasis added; also clifford & marcus et al. 1986; emerson, fretz & shaw 1995). because of the multiple roles we have inside the institution and the situations we are involved in, our study combines both aspects: a self-reflection of what others are doing and saying, and how we give meanings to these, and analysis of what we are doing and saying and the meanings behind these. the central advantage our team relied on was that direct observation (adler & adler 1998) in settings where naturally occurring events are taking place allows researchers to reduce their dependence on oversimplified, surface-level accounts that often remain at a very low level of abstraction. this allows researchers to craft an analysis of phenomena that those observed may be entirely unaware of, which by definition would be difficult if not impossible to engage in either in a survey or interview. alvesson also draws an additional distinction between ‘conventional’ ethnography and selfethnography, stressing that, rather than focusing on a setting outside one’s ‘home-base’, the focus is on one’s ‘home-base’. his elaboration of this is worth citing: coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 39 while conventional ethnography is basically a matter of the stranger entering a setting and “breaking in”, trying to create knowledge through understanding the natives from their point of view … self-ethnography is more of a struggle of “breaking out” from the taken for grantedness of a particular framework and of creating knowledge through trying to interpret the acts, words and material used by oneself and one’s fellow organizational members from a certain distance. in the first case, we have the researcher as burglar, in the second as a run-away. the burglar researcher wants to overcome obstacles in order to get in contact with a target of interest, the run-away-researcher struggles in order to create sufficient distance in order to get perspective on lived reality. (alvesson 2003: 176, emphasis added) our approach to ethnography also differs that from a conventional team ethnography in which an analysis of settings and situations in which research team members are not personally involved or ‘insiders’. our strategy breaks with what many view as ‘traditional methodology’ in order to analyse social dynamics that have not been adequately critiqued or analysed within our institutional settings. thus, it is not ‘breaking in’, but ‘breaking out’ and conceptually distancing and situating ourselves with regard to everyday activity, both as individuals and as a team. a major problem in higher education research in general, and finnish higher education studies in particular at this time, is the overly-narrow range of topics engaged and methodologies, theories and methods used. ‘what is not’ studied, like the topic we explore here, in some cases is far more interesting than ‘what is’. (abbas, ashwin & trahar 2013; ahola & hoffman et al. 2013; hoffman, rhoades lee & shajahan & 2013; shahjahan & kezar 2013; scott 2013). in a comparative sense, this topic seems equally ‘underexplored’ in several countries, illuminating the tension between areas linked to economic competitiveness (much more studied in finnish higher education) and social cohesion (much less studied in finnish higher education studies) (hoffman, saarinen & cools 2012). many topics, particularly academic work and migration (as two discrete topic areas in finland, each implicating two distinct groups of scholars) are studied via reactive implementation or ‘follow up’ studies, policy research, discourse analysis, and approaches that rely on surveys and different types of interviews. however, in the context of higher education studies, the authors have developed deep reservations about these conventional, over-used approaches, in particular that, in general, surveys in these areas are often conceptually ungrounded and unproblematized, as was the case in the career survey received from the author’s university (described above). interviews, in particular also, easily trigger ‘impression management’, ‘script following’ or ‘storytelling’, far more often than profound insights into everyday assumptions that seldom are questioned (alvesson 2003; johnson 2002). reactive or ‘follow up’ studies of reform focus on consensus-driven events, rather than the ‘bottom up’ logic of curiosity driven approaches that are sceptical, as a point of departure, of approaches that over-rely on the assumption that authority figures have a good grip on the most urgent needs linked to higher education and social change. higher educational settings, particularly universities, are often good candidates for selfethnography (alvesson (2003: 171, 176), because issues linked to personal, institutional and occupational prestige and reputation, complicated by organizational and professional loyalties, are often at the front of people’s minds—especially in interview situations. further, coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 40 self-initiated, emergent topics, while having the potential to be highly interesting and catch attention, demand, as we have found out, careful attention to methodological ‘fit’. the thick(er) description (geertz 1973) we opted for, in our development of this topic, carries many risks. however, these were assumed because we needed to methodologically move forward, in a manner that allowed critique by our peers and development of the topic and engagement, aiming at impact. impact, in particular, is not something higher education researchers in finland are famous for. while our efforts can only be understood as an initial first step, it is one that cannot be simply ‘skipped’ on the way to illuminating the most fundamental dynamics that run within and across national, organizational, cultural, generational and disciplinary settings whose relationships to each other are simply not understood as such (hoffman et al 2014; hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). alvesson (2003) warns that the self-ethnography carries the additional risk of ‘backing off’ sensitive topics and taboos, resulting in less-than-bold analysis in order that everyone involved ‘save face’. in order to avoid this, an incremental member-check (as detailed below) of participants within the scope of the study seems warranted in order to address this challenge. the approach to known challenges—the risks we face as we conduct this study and submit it for peer review—are summed up well by alvesson (2003:183-184, emphasis added): in general, research suffers from the inability of researchers to liberate themselves from socially shared frameworks. that evaluators agree may not be a sign of objectivity as much as culturally or paradigmatically shared biases … the trick is to get away from frozen positions, irrespective if they are grounded in personal experiences or shared frameworks. a problem is that staying within socially shared frames and biases may make research life easier – while what is seen as personal biases are sanctioned, proceeding from and reproducing socially shared biases may be applauded. it is highly probable that we will encounter colleagues in the course of these studies who would have appreciated us (more) for adopting the biases we critique in this study, while lauding the ‘egalitarian fabric’ of what is often uncritically represented as a ‘shared’ social feature of finnish society and her educational institutions. as should be very clear in our problematization of our topic above and our analysis and discussion below, we neither share the biases illuminated in this study, nor see uncritical framing as viable, especially where education is concerned. this is because education is the single finnish institution that almost everyone in the general population passes through, in some form or another (saukkonen 2013). if we as ‘clever scientists’ are unable to come to grips with how social change plays out within our own building(s), using the tools of our own areas of specialization, explaining this in any other context or topic seems dubious. finally alvesson’s (2003) attention to power dynamics, which is starkly evident in contemporary higher education institutions and manifests in the power to include or exclude (välimaa, papatsiba & hoffman in press), convinced us that a sustained examination of our topic would be well served by framing our efforts to date—as well as taking the next steps forward—in terms of self-ethnography. our scope of analysis includes individuals and groups with a great deal of power, working in tight proximity to individuals and groups who have none. because of this, methodologically speaking, we can hopefully engage our topic in a coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 41 constructive manner that allows us to lay a qualitative foundation for further development which is open for all concerned to critique. 4.4.1. data, methods and analysis the switch from hoffman’s original approach (within the aof study) from case study (in 2003) to our team’s new methodological strategy of self-ethnography immediately freed us both from the traps inherent in interviewing within higher education, especially those detailed in the previous section, and allowed us to rely primarily on our own direct observations (adler & adler 1998), which, ethnographically speaking, took the form of jottings in the margins of our calendars, on our phones and reflection in our field notes (emerson, fretz & shaw 1995). in addition to our field notes, an important source of data was email communication and recorded conversations of key meetings and discussions between aof team members, including pöyhönen and stikhin from our unversity’s centre for applied language studies (cals). as is noted by alvesson (2003), self-ethnography is not a full-time pursuit and is most usually episodic, in the sense that our team’s ethnographic access to our topic meant that while we engaged in collecting data, thinking and communicating about our topic, this study occurred in the background of the myriad of other responsibilities and life events each of us was involved in. while this is quite usual for some in our team, it was quite new for others. because of the methodological shift we experienced, our analysis is presented in the form of an ethnographic write-up, in which the evolving text has been continuously framed and reframed, in ongoing iterations amongst the authors, based on our data, focused conversations on this topic and with respect to successive presentations of this topic, in several types of venues, including local research team presentations at the finnish institute for educational research, where hoffman, cools and siekkinen were employed and the centre for applied language studies (here and after cals), where poyhönen & stikhin were employed, dating from august, 2013, and several international conferences, till the present time. our iterative writing process as analytical inquiry (richardson 1998) is aimed at the type of holistic ethnographic write-up you are reading. as such, our analysis of the ‘blind spot’ we discuss, is a methodological outcome of our team’s iterative reflection, collaborative writing and analysis of ways of thinking about and doing research that constitutes everyday reality to some researchers, while remaining completely invisible to others (hoffman et al. 2014). the analysis we present lays an empirical foundation for further efforts, including the analysis of policy and practice related to several substantive issues spotlighted during the time in which this journey took place, as well as the further conceptualizing of the topic we engage below. while those topics are all beyond the narrow scope of this article and handled in follow-on studies, what remains is this account of our initial insights, which resulted from taking a calculated risk on a methodological road less-travelled. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 42 4.4.1.1. rationale for ignoring convention surveys and interviews in particular stand little chance of gaining traction on this topic, unless as part of a mixed-method study, in which viable substantive and conceptual connections that will stand up to robust international peer review can be made. our assertion is based on tight’s (2012) observation that higher education researchers over-rely on the accounts of others, as opposed to observation and critical engagement of naturally occurring events. in a study of this topic, researchers relying solely on surveys or interviews will either be asking senior scholars or ‘key informants’ to account for phenomena they have caused (intentionally or inadvertently), or cannot otherwise explain or engage, despite research literature and discussion surrounding this issue as it exists in the global or finnish context. on the other hand one can query early stage/career or mid-career scholars about dynamics they may be entirely unaware of. given those realities, the idea of asking people questions they cannot answer may very well be a methodological ‘road to nowhere’. 4.4.1.2. engaging methodological limitations: backyard research, in the first person. researching one’s own professional context or ‘backyard research’ involves known difficulties, particularly regarding power issues, information disclosure and assumptions of bias (creswell 2002: 184). that said, these difficulties can be outweighed by the fact that one’s ‘backyard’ can also be a unique context which would pose other researchers significant access problems (johnson 2002). in this regard, it is our belief that researchers using the approaches we critique in this study would have little or no chance accomplishing the analysis and discussion we present below using the methodologies higher education researchers in finland are more comfortable with. despite the methodological advances made in the 20 th century, it is not difficult to find scholars who are very squeamish about stepping up and critiquing their own organization, institution and/or profession in the first person. this denies the empirical and conceptual reality that “sometimes, the social scientist becomes his or her own object of study: it is their life which is the focus … the focus may be on the sociologist’s own ‘insider’ life but it is connected through sociology to an ‘outsider’ world of wider social processes” (plummer 2001: 32). when the voices ‘connecting the dots’ between our biographies, history and a particular intersection in society (mills 1959) belong to the researcher, it is hard to deny ellis and bochner’s maxim “to show how important it is to make the researcher’s own experience a topic of investigation in its own right”, stepping away from writing “in passive third-person voice … written from nowhere by nobody” (ellis & bochner 2000: 734). this effort seeks to avoid “contributing to the flotilla of qualitative writing that is simply not interesting to read because adherence to the model requires writers to silence their own voices and view themselves as contaminants” (richardson 1998: 347). in short, our efforts involve connecting our own direct observations to a wider set of concerns central to social science and higher education. despite the voices immediately above, every time we have sent a study arising from the advocacy/empowerment paradigm (creswell 2002) we are working in for initial review to a higher education publication, the use of actual names and events within our own institution coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 43 and specialty, as bourdieu (1988) found, disturbs the sensibilities of some reviewers in the highly conservative higher education research community (hoffman et al. 2013b). to be frank, this issue has caused worries also amongst the authors of this very article, because of our knowledge that power issues are unavoidable. the risk to be excluded or marginalized even further is higher for some of us than others. this said, all of the studies have been published, with the names of the people in the situation. because this is so commonly seen as a limitation underlines the risks the authors are taking with their careers and credibility. that said, given the ‘disconnects’ we are working within, we would assert this is not actually a methodological limitation, especially as this study is well-situated in the international literature and the global debates relevant to our topic. rather, we are pointing out a normative limitation, in our fields of specialization and how – or if – our specializations inform state-of-the-art inquiry and impacts institutional practice. 4.4.1.3. balancing anonymity, privacy and efficacy: incremental member check and impact aims while we have no issues with calling attention to the topic we are explicitly researching, we do draw a distinction within the ever-widening group of colleagues who we did not originally anticipate becoming caught up in our analysis. as was noted by hoffman and his colleagues (2013b), the scope of a self-ethnography can sometimes widen, quite quickly, based on direct observation of unanticipated events related to a study already underway. these events which, by definition, cannot be anticipated, nevertheless introduce a valuable opportunity to actively engage people in the widening scope of analysis. since our study did involve a quickly evolving scope of analysis, our team is engaged in an incremental member check. we originally did this explicitly with the members of our research team in our initial seminar presentation of this topic (see analysis section, below). however, as becomes clear in the analysis, our actual scope of analysis could be said to be fier, as a whole, as well as the cals, in which the aof project and some of the authors (pöyhönen & stikhin) were based. when the study reached a point where a larger member check could be done, especially with regard to fier, an invitation to a conference presentation of our study (in progress) was made to fier personnel in august 2014. this, in turn generated a follow-up request by fier personnel to present our analysis within fier. this was carried out in october 2014 in an inservice training event. during that presentation we stressed that the data in our analysis below has been altered in such a way as to render identification of anyone other than the authors anonymous until such time that these persons indicate this is – or is not – necessary. finally, follow-on studies and interventions will result from our efforts, consistent with the rationale for the approach to transnational scholarly precariousness we have developed in general and the situation of the individual authors in particular. the first, this institutional analysis, is aimed at a contribution to the body of literature on academic work in higher education studies in general and finnish higher education in particular. it was presented at the august 2014 (finnish) national higher education symposium, in jyväskyä, finland. the second was more narrowly-focused on the potential of self-ethnography as a research-based organizational intervention, in the annual conference of the finnish society for the study of ethnic relations and migration, in helsinki, finland, in october 2014. a third paper on the coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 44 nature of transnational scholarly precariousness, focused on tensions illuminated by an ethnographic focus on the individual perceptions and experiences of scholars, was presented at the annual conference of the association for the study of higher education, in washington, d.c., in november, 2014. all participants in the scope of our research have been or will be made aware of and invited to attend these presentations and comment on the draft manuscripts of these studies. as the catch phrase of ‘evidence based policy’ is so often bandied about in the same uncritical manner as the ‘smoke and mirrors’ discourse we critique above, we assert our studies form both the basis for this, as well as further research on the issues we have identified in our studies, but which are outside the direct scope of this write-up. the added value of this type of incremental procedure is to stimulate discussion on the type of alternative, conceptually problematized, empirically-grounded analyses necessary to get traction on increasingly refined better explanations of the topics we bring into focus in studies of this type. active debate and discussion of this type is necessary to counter the tendency of asymmetrical consideration of topics, especially in studies of internationalization, migration and mobility, which often over-focus on only narrow facets of topics of this nature, at the expense of robust, symmetrical accounts which are comparatively viable and constitute new knowledge, ready for international peer review at the state-of-the-art. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 45 5. analysis: analysing our ‘academic limbo’ the following analysis, in the form of a focus on three vignettes, is a ‘thin slice of a thick description’. in order to achieve focus on the institutional context, along with the purposes of this set of studies (as detailed above), we have been selective in our initial focus, spotlighting particularly revealing and fundamental moments and events during the course of our study. in this regard, it is first and foremost the unquestioned assumptions, unintended consequences and hidden populations obscured by institutional dynamics that is the most relevant to our initial published account of this study. while this approach could be fairly criticized as ‘half a story’, we would firstly counter that higher education studies in finland, particularly those focused on internationalization and mobility, are flooded with studies that ignore the power of social structure at the expense of unquestioned assumptions linked to methods favoured by researchers operating within paradigms covered by the umbrella of methodological individualism. this specifically concerns the upward conflation (archer 1995) that results from an overreliance on interviews, surveys and policy research, combined with under-reliance on critique (teichler 1996, tight 2012; hoffman et al. 2013b). these researchers often assume and seek a focus on intentionality, rationality and agency, none of which we encountered during this study, nor typically encounter with regard to topics of this nature cited throughout this text. the methods and data most relevant to our institutional analysis is direct observation of naturally occurring events. secondly, the highly situated individual accounts, needed to form a more holistic, comprehensive picture of this analysis are handled in an identical manner, and published in the companion article as detailed above. the literature, policy and practice gap illuminated by our efforts as a whole indicate first and foremost analytically grounding a qualitative, empirical analysis that lends itself to further studies with respect to state-of-theart scholarship, policy analysis and collegial debate and practical organizational intervention. 5.1. unquestioned assumptions and minimizing misrecognized transnational scholarly precariousness and exclusion the nature of our situation, as a group, became clear the first time we presented our ideas to the research team in which hoffman, cools and siekkinen were based and in which sama was trying to become employed. this research group, education and social change, meets regularly to present its members’ research in progress, to discuss results and new ideas, and invite visitors whose work is of interest to the team. on 20 november 2013, our selfethnography team presented the set of ideas we had become interested in and received what was perceived by the authors as a ‘mixed reception’. hoffman had noticed on previous occasions that calling assumptions regarding the nature of equity into question in finnish society in general and finnish higher education employment patterns in particular sometimes provoked defensive reactions on the parts of individual group members. now that a group was doing work on this topic, the reactions seemed stronger, reminiscent of the first time hoffman, sama (along with el massri, raunio & korhonen) had presented the work which led to their 2011 and 2013a publications. following coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 46 this initial presentation, hoffman wrote up his thoughts in his field notes—as an email to the self-ethnography team—the following day: the most important ideas that came out of yesterday’s presentation is that we have a realistic chance to try something that’s not been done before in our institute, probably this university, maybe even finland … what i mean is that we find ourselves in a position in which ‘the normal way of doing things or framing issues’ is not consistent with a reality we are trying to pursue in our careers … last week, in a different conference (on a different continent), i organized a symposium panel that focused precisely on the type of situation our group is in at the moment. specifically, situations that have not been successfully resolved, adequately problematized, conceptually-speaking, nor studied in empirically meaningful terms. nevertheless, those kinds of situations exist and we are fully caught up in one of them … the point in our symposium (in the usa) was to spotlight scholars who had also encountered these sorts of situations and, recognizing them for what they were, created a novel approach that allowed them to overcome the ‘traps’ of normative substantive framing, inappropriate use of theory, using methodological approaches or methods that allowed the phenomena to remain obscure, vague, conflated, elided, etc. (methodology that obscures more than it reveals) and empirical foci that do not allow traction on the topic in focus. specifically, in our situation, the way in which things are normally dealt with and thought about is perpetuating the situation, rather than resolving the situation … the most important confirmation i got that we are really onto something were the comments, especially those offered by one of our senior colleagues, all of which i understood, but also which reveal the normative contours of how a topic like ours most ‘typically’ might be thought of, if approached by senior scholars in fier, drawing on the framing which – in many ways – has created the situation we are in at the moment. this is not the same as saying senior scholars in our system have deliberately created this situation. rather, the social dynamics have emerged, very slowly and subtly, over a long period of time. the reason we notice them now is because of the contradictions and paradoxes between what people ‘say’ they are trying to do and what they ‘actually’ do. this is nothing new in social science and the humanities – and these contradictions and paradoxes are precisely what we are going to study … a second set of comments from a different senior colleague were far more relevant and concrete as to what we need to do now, i.e. decide on the kind of data we will use and how it will be analyzed … my main point is: not many scholars get to identify and study a fundamentally ‘new’ topic … i recognize that the circumstances drawing us together at the moment are not ideal and i do not take them lightly. that said, this might be the most interesting, novel study being carried out in fier at the moment. we can change this situation, while at the same time, moving us forward in our respective career paths, in ways that are respected and recognized in our fields. thanks for yesterday! it was very clear, during our first presentation that some members of our team, especially senior scholars, were having difficulties trying to ‘place’ or take seriously the approach our self-ethnography team was using. one of these colleagues characterized sama’s comments coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 47 more as a form of ‘therapy’ than scholarship, suggesting we ‘re-label’ our approach in terms of approaches they were familiar with. however, another colleague, while unfamiliar with the approach we were using, offered practical, general hints that would help our team move toward types of generic framing that would help those unfamiliar with the overarching paradigm and methodological approach ‘get’ the idea via connecting the dots between substantive framing, theory, data, analysis and discussion. the most interesting aspect of this discussion for hoffman was not the reaction of the senior scholars in the research group, it was the negative reaction of the self-ethnography team, especially sama and cools, who perceived the reception of our ideas as the minimization of a situation the research group did not really understand, or as a rebuke for having brought the topic forward. as cools wrote in her field notes: i was not surprised of all these 'critiques' and negativity … the way our colleague said ‘yeah yeah i also had these periods of unemployment’ ... shows how unimportant and alien this subject is. or perhaps it’s actually ‘too close’ and that's why it is hard to talk about it more openly? … i agree some may have had the impression of having seen our presentation as a therapeutic kind of event; still, what we do is scientifically grounded. we know more about this because of what we’re doing. in the end, it may have a therapeutic effect on us, why wouldn't it? … afterwards, though, one always has very mixed feelings and wonders: did i reveal too much? do our efforts make me (therefore: us) too vulnerable? during the presentation, siekkinen and cools had been quite open about the fact that a common linkage between them, sama and habti was that they currently had no funding or formal positions. this was particularly problematic in siekkinen’s view, whose typical employment contacts had been mainly for extremely short periods of time, on very small contracts, often month-by-month. further, when asking advice on the way forward, siekkinen told hoffman a senior scholar had advised her to apply for mobility funding. this advice empirically illuminated two key links to both migration debates in the finnish context, which often only focus on persons with a migrant background, both of which have the important policy implications discussed in the last section of this study. the first of these was shown in siekkinen’s reaction to this suggestion, an emphatic “s/he knows i’m not going anywhere!” siekkinen, a young, single parent, has no desire at this time, nor the realistic possibility, to pursue the funding schemes she was advised were a ‘way forward’ in her career. even if she wanted to try this option, the practical difficulties would be considerable, compared to a person without a child. the structural consequences of early stage and early career mobility are serious, especially in the finnish university system, where mobility delays career progression and causes many to avoid mobility entirely (raunio, korhonen & hoffman 2010). local circulation patterns (vabø 2003) often confine the geographic territory of nordic scholars. the most important mobility pattern in finnish universities – specifically, the local and national patterns – is no mobility, a pattern entirely missed by many, as it is an assumption (hoffman 2007). ‘invisible’ mobility assumptions like these are seldom questioned, therefore they are unproblematized and projected, as was the case with siekkinen’s mobility ‘option’ for solving ‘her’ problem. this, by definition, means the migration-related implications are unseen, as well. siekkinen, when characterizing her own scholarly efforts termed her scholarly status during this period of time as ‘academic limbo’. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 48 looking back, the basic ideas our team presented on 20 november 2014 ironically underlined a set of truths that might be called uncomfortable except for the fact they are not recognized, as ‘truths’ at all. i use the word ironic to underline alvesson’s (2003) observation that it is the irony of the situation we find ourselves in within universities that justifies the use of ethnographic methods to more closely examine the difference between what we believe we are doing and what we are actually doing (bourdieu 1988). specifically, what we find ironic in our particular situation is that our fier research group specializes in the study of ‘academic work’ and has even sought funding during the time this study was in progress to study ‘why scholars leave academia’. it is clear, on the one hand, that many in fier could say the answer to this question is not particularly well understood in the finnish university system. however, the main difference between our self-ethnography team’s understanding of ‘why scholars leave academia’ and other approaches we are aware of is our direct experience of confronting the assumptions our analysis spotlights in this study, and the means we are using to actually answer that identical question. the main unquestioned assumptions we highlight appear above, in our problematization of our topic in terms of theory of the middle range (merton 1968) in the introduction to this study. first and foremost are assumptions that avoid questioning the relationship between robust conceptual explanations of social stratification, that have existed for decades, and the well-known conceptual coordinates of academic work, both of which are simultaneously masked and avoided in favor of the finnish variant of methodological nationalism as it plays out in basic units (becher & kogan 1992), focused on low competitive horizons like education (shajahan & kezar 2012; hoffman et al. 2013a). these social dynamics are so powerful that the connections between the circumstances of our self-ethnography team – discussed in our 20 november 2013 presentation – were not connected with the question ‘why scholars leave academia’ even though three scholars considering ‘leaving academia’ were sitting around the same table with other scholars actively seeking funding to ‘better understand’ the same topic. it was already in this session where we began to realize there were few or no ‘safe’ places for early-stage/career scholars to talk about their experiences without feeling ridiculed and patronized for raising the topic, inside our own institute. 5.2. the unintended consequences of group-think the type of social structure and organizational dynamics our team has become interested in cannot be problematized as intentional or a result of conscious thought any more than can the problematization of ‘why scholars leave academia’. rather, it is probably more accurate to assert that not thinking about emergent patterns of transnational precariousness (hoffman forthcoming) and what these patterns imply about our potential as an institute are a result of ‘group-think’. in other words, our policy and practice (group-think ), especially when it comes to apprehending the types of challenges we spotlight in this study, more accurately fall under the category of unintended consequences. the idea of unintended consequences was observed on 26 november 2013 as hoffman attended an institute-wide meeting of fier. the purpose of the meeting was re-thinking fier’s institutional strategy. hoffman has been employed in fier since 2002 and has participated in these types of events on two other occasions. what was striking, as the members of several different research groups, support staff and management gathered offsite in a local hotel, was not who was present, both generally and specifically. it was who was absent. the day after this meeting, hoffman coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 49 emailed two of the professors leading the reformulation of fier’s strategy. the body of the email reads as follows: i’m not sure exactly how the strategic development process will go from here, but i wanted to make one observation on the cluster of topics that included social inclusion yesterday. in our small group discussions i tried to raise the idea that we as an institute are not very good in this area, and for an educational research institute in finland, this is not viable. in terms of these types of topic, demographically speaking, the most interesting things that were discussed yesterday were not, in general, ‘the areas and themes in the exercise’ and ‘who’ was discussing those things, in terms of individuals and groups. the most interesting things, in terms of literature/knowledge/practice gaps were ‘who was not in that room’ and ‘the topics and themes this prevents us from seeing, articulating, problematizing and engaging’. as a group, i’m wondering if we really notice(d) what a homogenous group we are, in several aspects. when thought about, in terms of the global trends introduced in the opening lecture, i get the idea that ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’, which is dangerous, because of the power inherent in education as the only institution most people in society pass through. the capacity to constructively critique and study these types of topics are what i found most missing in much of yesterday’s discussion … i hope fier, as an institute can develop the critical capacity to engage topics like these, because some of our competitors in finland are already moving on this, but we might be in the best position to speak to this, in finland, if we chose. i think there are some significant potentials in this area, because – comparatively speaking – several european countries are in a similar situation because of demographically-driven phenomena. sorry if i’m repeating something someone else mentioned yesterday, but i never heard much critique within the ideas that were mentioned, except for our colleague’s observations about social inclusion. the other comments that came close to this had too many unquestioned assumptions that won’t stand up to the kind of robust conceptually driven, empirically grounded problematization i’m thinking of. hope this kind of comment is not too critical, it’s meant to be constructive, as it implies opportunities to research things that are ‘not seen’ by many, particularly in education. an excerpt from hoffman’s field notes from the same day gives further context to the email: what i found most odd ‘missing’ from that session were firstly the people on our (self-ethnography) team who are ‘unofficially here’ (like illegal migrants or something). secondly, of the 44 people in the room i found it surreal that there was such a narrow range of people, in terms of ascriptive characteristics. i especially thought it weird that people either did not notice this or if they did (which i really wonder about) chose not to talk about, when thinking of the ‘hot topics of the next two decades’. more specifically, the persons in the room on the day we discussed the best strategic fier focus can be mainly described in terms of ‘sacred and safe’ ascriptive characteristics. the coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 50 only two exceptions to this were hoffman and one other early-stage researcher from an eu member country. this is not the same thing as saying the ultra-narrow demographic profile of fier’s personnel is good or bad, in normative terms. but it is direct observations of this nature and thinking about their implications that, as was pointed out in the email to the strategy committee, illuminate the potential downside of ‘group-think’. the broader context for these observations concerns fier’s nationally mandated status as an autonomous, interdisciplinary research institute, thematically focused on education. in addition to semi-regular reformulations of institutional strategy, hoffman has also been present in panel fier’s presentations to two visiting international evaluation teams. on both occasions, fier did not shine, compared to other institutions on the campus in which fier is situated. the units who did exceptionally well on both occasions can be fairly said to operate at world class competitive horizons (see hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). this is not exceptional in the sense that no university is composed of world-class units – across the campus. what is highly interesting in fier’s case is that a traditional rationalization of our mediocre international evaluation results has been that visiting international panels have not ‘understood’ the nature and the importance of fier’s ‘national mission’, which can be easily missed if only the empirical proxies linked to world class competitive horizons are used when comparing fier with institutes which focus mainly on cutting-edge, high-risk/high-gain, state-of-the-art outcomes. alternative interpretations are that fier personnel might not be doing an excellent job in explaining the nature and importance of our national mission; that we actually do not understand what might be the most important aspects of the changing nature of the national mission ourselves or that international evaluation panels are ‘blind’ to what fier has presented in the past, because the empirical proxies that indicate the nature and importance of our national mission simply are not one of the criteria they have developed or been supplied with. it could also be the case that what we have regarded as very important ‘traditions’ are actually not all that interesting regarding the relationship between cutting-edge scholarship and high impact societal needs in 21 st century finland. the narrowly-framed, deductive, ‘inthe-box’ approach to a ‘strategy for the future’ carried out by a culturally homogeneous group of scholars seems like a sure-fire recipe for another mediocre international evaluation, rather than any other type of outcome. considering the bigger picture of global scholarship, the challenges and potentials of the institutional analysis presented in this self-ethnography are, ironically, beyond the state-ofthe-art in education in several countries with identical challenging demographic pressures finland now faces. specifically, there is a rapidly-aging, culturally-homogenous (in terms relative to other eu or oecd countries) and rapidly-retiring workforce in a culturally, linguistically and geographically isolated society, which is highly ambivalent about the ‘place’ migrants ‘should’ occupy in the workforce (forsander 2004; jaakkola 2005; koivukangas 2003; pöyhönen & tarnanen 2015). even generally, critical, conceptuallydriven, empirically-grounded comparative studies of the relationships between ascriptive characteristics and career trajectory within academic work are not what higher education specialists in mainland europe are known for (tight 2012; hoffman et al 2013b). because of fier’s relationship to education as a societal institution, the potential to more broadly approach strategy, in terms of policy, practice and what is actually known about europe and finland’s most exigent challenges, is open to us. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 51 in other words, the way in which we are ‘not thinking’ about how social stratification plays out within academic work, prevents us, by definition, from considering whether or not social stratification is any longer an issue of concern within our internationally valorised education system, of which fier occupies a unique position (hoffman forthcoming). an interesting subtext to this was the theme of the 2014 higher education symposium, hosted by fier, where this analysis was presented: eriarvoistuva korkeakoulutus? or: ‘is higher education becoming more unequal?’ the ‘strategy process’ observed during this study, if it relies on the kind of efforts defined by ‘driving through the rear-view mirror of precedence’, has not seriously grappled with that question in terms of policy, practice or impact, dismissing it as something that occurs under the zombie categories critiqued in our introduction and our discussion, that have never before yielded any progress, nor are likely to in the future (author1 2013). as long as the discourse on sacred and safe ascriptive characteristics remains ‘disconnected’ from the profane and problematic; short-circuiting meaningful analysis of both in relation to academic work, it is not easy to see how groups of the type involved in our ‘strategy process’ will be able to problematize and engage the theme of the conference they ironically hosted on the theme: eriarvoistuva korkeakoulutus? 5.3. illuminating ‘disconnects’ and bringing aof back into the picture up till this point, what was clear was that there were four fundamental ‘disconnects’ our team was experiencing. the most fundamental is a growing, global annoyance, amongst higher education specialists outside mainland europe, with conventional approaches that prevented us from creatively engaging topics that matter. this was clear both in the 2013 association for the study of higher education (ashe) and society for research on higher education (srhe) annual conferences in the usa and uk, and specifically in the above-cited symposium facilitated by hoffman and a workshop focused on novel methodological approaches to higher education in the srhe conferences (as cited above). while shahjahan and kezar (2013) and the srhe conference panel of the same year were both focused outwardly on methodology, shahjahan and marginson (personal communications in those presentations) underlined the importance of the need for a holistic appraisal of topic selection, general approach, the use of theory, methodology and methods, and write-up conventions. a second ‘disconnect’ was the perceived lack of interest in the type of topic we are focused on locally, in our research group and institute, when contrasted to more conventional and traditional modes of inquiry and topic selection. when analysed ethnographically, this disconnect manifests between the top floor and the shop floor (cantwell & lee 2010). this disconnect becomes visible when considering the lack of serious thought given to the ways in which transnational scholarly precariousness manifests in concrete settings like fier (hoffman forthcoming). the third area apparently outside the consciousness of those immediately around us was the way in which our topic was playing out, internationally, within social media. this seems a further irony, especially surprising because members of our fier research team are focused on both ‘why scholars leave academia’ and ‘the emancipatory potential of social media within networked knowledge societies’ (välimaa, papatsiba & hoffman in press). despite what we ‘say’ we are interested in and what is in fact happening in the world around us, our coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 52 fier team is having challenges drawing connections and conclusions ourselves, and putting these into practice within our own institution. the ‘disconnects’ between the state-of-the-art scholarship and academic practices focused on our topic and the precarious circumstances of the authors became visible in the fourth and most powerful way when presenting this topic to our peers outside finland. it was in front of critical audiences, in seven international presentations following upon the original presentation, to our local research group (above) as it evolved, and which ended, full circle, in finland in august 2014. in conversations with colleagues from across the globe, our topic evolved when speaking with peers interested in both the established literature on social stratification and the ways in which distinct forms of methodological nationalism, across several countries, generate a set of hollow rationalizations for ignoring the issues we were engaging, or for remaining ignorant of the relationships between social stratification in the ranks of higher education personnel and social stratification across societies. our general approach and specific topic resonated in the international conference audiences in the usa, uk, spain and germany. comments were encouraging, constructive and followed up after each presentation, with discussions from members of the audience who we now recognize as a transnational population which is visible – if one knows where and how to look – across several countries. that said, this population ‘vanishes’, like a magician’s trick within the smoke and mirrors of zombie categories, methodological nationalism and local institutional dynamics. 5.3.1. connecting the dots: aspiration, achievement and abandonment in academic work the last trip of the 2013 was a research team visit by several members of the aof research team to dublin. it was on this trip that it became clear that several members of the cals component of aof were, analytically speaking, in the same situation as the fier earlystage/career researchers cools and seikkinen or sama, who wanted to join our team. pöyhönen and hoffman discussed this and agreed that hoffman would brief stikhin on the self-ethnography and see if he was interested in joining. following that meeting, stikhin agreed to consider the approach, together with those of us who had begun in 2013. a further advantage of widening our team’s efforts to include specialists from cals was that the critical modes of inquiry that make higher education specialist squeamish are ‘business as usual’ in the scholarly landscape of cals. this structural feature underpinned the efforts that led to the hoffman’s collaboration on the aof project from the beginning. finally, the strategic focus of cals, when thought about in terms of our analytical framing (see figure 2, below) is much clearer than fier’s. the most interesting aspect of our focus on analytically illuminating academic trajectory, using a fundamentally different methodological approach, was a symmetrical series of empirically-grounded studies of the institutional nature of the set of phenomena that came into view, as well as key individual experiences and perceptions, the combination of which we believe may have remained untouched by the unquestioned assumptions that prop up the local variety of methodological nationalism we critique in this study, especially with regard coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 53 to higher education employment and transnational scholarly precariousness (hoffman forthcoming). as mentioned above, due to the narrow focus of this write-up, we make a virtue out of necessity and focus the last section of our ethnographically-driven analysis on institutional dynamics that better explain and situate the circumstances in which a scholar’s trajectory is characterized by further achievement beyond critical career thresholds or ends in abandonment. the most interesting question raised by our framing is the critical question: who abandons who? 5.3.2. ‘strategies’ of precedence and potential: hidden populations within parallel competitive horizons taking a step back, trying to gain conceptual clarity and distance to this topic, one thing becomes very clear. the central irony of developing a better understanding of our topic demands symmetrical conceptual problematization of the social dynamics this study brings into focus. this is especially clear with regard to the original problematization the aof team began with regarding aspiration, achievement and abandonment. what we have observed is the tendency to project, conflate and misrecognize individual narratives, anecdotes and projections and confuse these with ‘explanations’, while not realizing more powerful explanations are actually being obscured within the social structure of major societal institutions like higher education. this is a challenge that has been well addressed by scholars like archer (1995), beck (1992) and bourdieu (1988, 2004). in migration and mobility literature, in general and the aof project in particular, this presents a difficulty for addressing the focal notion of abandonment. can abandonment be explained in terms of particular individuals or is it more of an institutional story? in other words, who – or what – is abandoning who or what? 5.3.3. an institutional story the reason our approach and topic was misrecognized and disturbing (bourdieu 1988) in fier but recognized and resonated in the usa, the uk, spain and germany was because topics like ours are more powerful institutional stories than individual stories. and institutional stories are ‘out of reach’ to those using substantive framing that hides more than it clarifies, ideas not powerful enough to address complex topics; to those ignoring theoretical conversations in which important questions pertaining to topics like ours decades ago are asked, explained and answered; and to those employing methodological approaches that channel our efforts into seeking the wrong answers to the wrong questions from individuals who simply have no idea that the social dynamics that actually explain why what they perceive as ‘reality’ are remarkably different when viewed using a different set of assumptions. this is not the same thing as saying the experiences and perceptions of individuals are irrelevant. robust analyses of individual accounts are crucial to gaining symmetrical traction on the multiple accounts of these circumstances that exist. but it is the highly situated, coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 54 dynamic and particular set of intersecting cultures most relevant to the social structure we focus on in this study that already exist, before any of us ever stepped into the fier or cals research institutes, that institutional analysis illuminates. these social dynamics determine, define and delimit, to a very large extent, the positions and stakes within that field, which in turn illuminates both potential and actual individual scholarly trajectories. these social dynamics have not changed since bourdieu (1988) articulated the tensions and struggles that distinguished scholars who merely focus on simple reproduction, within their immediate sphere of influence from scholars who transform the world through their relentless search for new knowledge. because of the nature of today’s higher education institutions, the stratification of the global division of scholarly labour under a hegemonic regime of transnational academic capitalism, the power of the social structure that will be encountered by an early stage or early career scholar, stepping into, for example, fier or cals, is not usually comprehended any more than a fish comprehends water. the main challenge we face in the analysis of institutional dynamics, though, in higher education is that at institute or department level, the leadership was trained as scholars first. leadership, by contrast, prompted teichler to quip ‘higher education leadership, management and administration is the last bastion of amateurism’ (u. teichler, personal communication, august 28, 2002). in that instant teichler articulated a remarkably similar rationale to alvesson for using selfethnography, in order to avoid interviewing scholars about explaining anything having to do with institutional leadership. as he wrote earlier: ironically, research on all higher education, as well as the mobility and international aspects of interest to us here, is paradoxically both a rich and vulnerable position because it addresses actors who, besides believing that the nature of society and culture can only be fully understood through systematic research, are also convinced they understand their own living environment (i.e. higher education) perfectly well without it (teichler 1996: 343). teichler made these insights at the turn of the century and his position explains our pause about interviewing senior scholars about an institutional-level inability to grasp and engage the topic we present, via their own individual-level perceptions or projections; at least as an initial step. it is important to note the linkage here: both are important. in this study, within small or medium sized research teams and institutes, individuals were ‘not understanding each other’ – within an institutional framework. theoretically speaking, this is interesting because the way in which explaining trajectory from the moment aspiration is articulated till the moment abandonment occurs, in a comparatively viable, robust manner, has been possible for decades. we already know the empirical proxies, organizational practices and the essential analytical touchstones needed to do this, using several well-known approaches, at several levels of analysis, using tested methodologies suited to established goals that correspond to key audiences: our peers, students, policy-makers, practitioners, stakeholders and the communities our higher education institutions are located in. but regarding scholarly precariousness we don’t do any of those things. this is interesting, in and of itself. rather, we act ‘as if’ this were some kind of new situation, when in fact it is rather generic in terms of organizational dynamics and domain. what we sense many experience as ‘new’ is a complex combination of salient cultural (sets of) values that form the basis for the social structure that informs the social dynamics of each particular competitive horizon in any given higher education system, institution or basic unit. and in the case of our teams the types of understandings we have of these social dynamics give important hints as to the nature and coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 55 potential of agency, especially collective agency, which up to today presents urgent challenges to the authors of this study as individuals, the research group(s) we belong to and our respective research institutes. 5.3.4. the relationship between people, ideas and funding doesn’t happen all that often, but i woke up this morning, and sometime during the last 1.5 hours realized i’d cracked the conceptualization that might facilitate discussing the circumstances of our self-ethnography group that might lead to a better understanding (ourselves) while at the same time rendering this situation clear within fier. the reasons this happened are important, as they constitute a coincidence (literally) of several key events: realizing louise morley is on her way and the potential this brings our self-ethnography group in august; wanting to explain the potential of self-ethnography, in general and the nature of transnational scholarly precarity; an invitation received from mainz, germany to talk about this; my first fier board meeting and a board member’s incisive question regarding a permanent appointment and the policy analysis i did for the ministry of the interior on the (zombie) notion of ‘good relations.’ … in essence, it comes down to the institutional prism (fier) in this case and the nature of the work that occurs here, which can be explained (in many ways) by conceptual problematization (february, 2014: field notes/hoffman). hoffman, upon realizing the connections between these events and issues, got out of bed, made a pot of coffee and wrote up the field notes (above) and the conceptualization (below). it is important to note that several (other) key events that underpinned these thoughts fall much more under the scope of significant experiences and perceptions of individuals and, thus, fall outside the scope of this institutional analysis. of all the coincidental events and issues mentioned in the field notes entry (above), the single most significant concerned the meeting of fier’s board, of which hoffman was a new member in 2014. during the year’s first board meeting, on 30 january 2014, one of the agenda items was the nomination of a project researcher based on their considerable scholarly merit for a permanent position. hoffman was very familiar with this researcher, as they had gone through the same graduate program, had several areas of complementary interests and had worked in two very challenging research projects together, both of which turned out well and one of which— coincidentally – was a highly unconventional, critical self-ethnography (hoffman et al. 2014). in addition, this researcher had unique resources regarding established national and international networks, untypical to many research teams. because of all these things hoffman spoke strongly in favour of the hire. the most interesting thing, though, regarding this topic and the board’s transformation of a precarious position into a permanent position, was a question from one of fier’s board members to the professor who presented the nomination to the board. specifically, the board member firstly asserted that many scholars would like to attain the type of permanent position that the board was considering. but their question was more complex. s/he wanted to know how well known the procedures that resulted in a researcher becoming permanently hired by fier were. hoffman knew this was an awkward question, as there has never been a transparent procedure for this at fier. in coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 56 addition, it was equally clear that the candidate under consideration had worked it out. as clear, after working on the individual projects of our self-ethnography team, was that recruitment, selection, promotion and retention in fier remains a mystery shrouded in institutional-level dynamics, for many. this single question from the fier board member spotlighted one of the most interesting questions that can be asked in comparative higher education: what is the difference between ‘what we think and say we are doing’, as an institute and ‘what we are actually doing’ (bourdieu 1988; hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). 5.3.5. the policy and practice of (human resources) ‘strategy’ strategy of action, practices and outcomes purposeful linkage to strategically robust substantive framing and conceptually focused action, that can be elaborated empirically – and evaluated comparatively – in terms of domain & mission(s) ad hoc reaction to stimuli in the field (domain & mission[s]) strategy of policy (values, norms & beliefs) transparent, clear and unambiguous, with regard to pursuit of outcomes, within domain & respect to mission(s) transparent policy + robust action transparent policy + ac hoc reaction opaque, vague, and ambiguous, with regard to domain & mission(s) opaque policy + robust action opaque policy + ad hoc reaction figure 2. problematizing scholarly policy and practice in terms of our direct observation of strategically framing policy and practice at both the level of fier and within our own research group, the institutional context can be normatively coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 57 problematized, in terms of policy and practice, using a contingency table. in simple, pragmatic terms, the contingency table problematizes the tension between what we say we are going to do and what we actually do. this is important because the development of coherent, viable individual, group and institute-level scholarly agendas can be used to articulate the relationship between groups and institutes to people, ideas and the resources necessary for purposeful action in the field of higher education. because there are no more crucial resources in higher education than human resources, this is what hoffman believes the fier board member was driving at, as well as wanting to know if the procedures s/he questioned were fair and transparent. it is crystal clear that the answer to her question, in reality, is no for some scholars employed by fier. the evidence for this, in retrospect is evidenced in the ‘case by case’, de facto ‘procedure’ which is the only ‘procedure’ that has ever existed in fier regarding permanent positions. the fact that there are persons permanently employed means that a set of circumstances existed at the time of their hire. however, the flip-side of that procedure is that no one on the ‘outside’ can speculate what type of circumstances would have to arise, in order to trigger the chain of events leading to a permanent hire. from inside fier, this can be determined, but only within highly circumscribed circumstances of the type there were being considered in the board meeting hoffman attended. what is equally clear, upon more reflection, is that the degree to which the authors themselves accept the arbitrary and vague nature of policy and practice in fier. this ‘non-procedure hiring procedure’ is a good fit with the highly normative tenets of transnational academic capitalism that in fact creates, explains and sustains the darwinian necessity of an emerging transnational scholarly precariousness. but these understandings or – more precisely non-understandings – of the determinants of trajectory also illuminate another clear option: rejection. it could be the case that a scholar comes to understand the norms, values and beliefs that they perceive govern the institutional setting in which they aspire to work: the ‘worst of both worlds’ combination of opaque policy and ad hoc reaction combined with arbitrary and uncertain power relations. in this case, as morley (2014) points out, it is no surprise that outright rejection is a foreseeable outcome of this type of understanding. institutionally-speaking, it is quite clear that fier’s strategy, to any of us, is either:  transparent, clear and unambiguous with regard to the pursuit of outcomes within the domain of higher education and with regard to mission(s), or  opaque, vague, and ambiguous, with regard to domain and mission(s). the same is true of fier’s institutionally-framed actions. what we do day to day is either:  purposefully linked to strategically robust substantive framing and conceptually focused action, that can be elaborated empirically and evaluated comparatively in terms of domain and mission(s), or  ad hoc reaction to stimuli in the domain and with respect to mission(s). this type of either/or framing forces an exaggerated oversimplification because of the large number of ‘moving parts’ discussions of strategy and practice entail. that said, the points our analysis brings into view are key because, holistically speaking, a scholar aspiring to enter the field of higher education will find a place in the field in which they are comfortable – or not – coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 58 because of (or in spite of) their understanding of the social dynamics that can be used to situate them in relation to the global division of scholarly labour. a more important, underlying facet of this analysis is the idea whether or not an institute, group or individual has conceptually problematized policy or practice at all. it is not difficult to locate individuals, groups and basic units that have and those who have not. this idea, in turn, illuminates the institutional tension between teams, units, departments and institutes focused forward, on the transformative potential that defines the state-of-the-art in contrast to a referral backward, on the tradition and precedence of reproduction that have always determined collective action. whether or not an institution, basic unit or research team has articulated ‘why they do what they do’ is far more interesting than asking individual scholars or ‘key informants’ to answer that same question in a survey, interview or looking for clues as to these issues in policy documents. in the absence of clearly articulated hr strategy, or any other kind of strategy, the methods we have avoided (surveys, interviews, implementation studies) are open invitations to story-telling, script following impression management, folk psychology and ‘policy-based-evidence’ (alvesson 2003; hoffman et al. 2013b). the most important proposition this type of framing brings into view is foundational. a scholar who aspires to and achieves a viable and recognizable position in an institutional setting in which policy is transparent and practice is robust is in a fundamentally different position in the field than a scholar in an marginal and exceptional position in an institutional setting in which policy is opaque and practice is ad hoc (hoffman 2007). the trajectories available from these analytical coordinates illuminate the points of departure with which achievement and abandonment with regard to higher education career trajectories can be better explained than when using approaches that do not attend to the social structure which bears on career trajectory, the theory that explains it and data that allows something new to be said about it. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 59 6. discussion: moving forward in terms of higher education studies, policy and practice there are two central challenges our team faced in this study. they are inextricably fused within the same sentence. specifically, creating a conceptually viable, empirically-grounded shared understanding of the events and issues brought into focus in our analysis of contemporary academic trajectories through the field of finnish higher education. by conceptually viable, we mean an account that will survive the critical scrutiny of international peer review and also be interesting enough to constitute a meaningful contribution to the comparative study of the issues brought to light in our analysis. this is a challenging goal, because even a cursory examination of the intersections of situated migration dynamics and mobility phenomena within locally-framed debates will reveal far more examples of the unquestioned assumptions, unanticipated consequences and hidden populations obscured by combinations of persistent methodological nationalism and aspiration gaps than novel insights. however, more challenging than producing a study that is meaningful in terms of international state-of-the-art scholarship is working toward a shared account locally. this is not the same as saying an account where all involved parties agree on every aspect of the analysis and enjoy reading it. it is saying there is a daunting set of tensions illuminated by this study, even though the scope of our analysis is narrow. as is shown in our analysis, advances in this area are problematic, precisely because they are inextricably bound to topics scholars seldom problematize. in the case of academic trajectories, this can be seen in the contrast between institutional dynamics in fier that have evolved over a several generations. this has generally been an inward-looking, normative field of studies (education) versus cals (applied linguistics), which in general is home to greater methodological variety, much more at ease with critique and generally more international in character. yet, despite these outward-looking differences in research institutes that are located on the same campus, the highly heterogeneous ‘hidden’ population of scholars who are both implicated in migration dynamics and in highly precarious career situations are in plain sight, as is their situation. institutionally, our analysis suggests we accept a certain amount of collateral damage in our darwinian ‘train the best, discard the rest’ hr recruitment, selection, promotion and retention strategy. we use the term strategy broadly in the sense that ‘no strategy is strategy’. this said, the way forward in an analysis of this nature is paying close attention to the fundamentals of our craft:  what are the debates and issues in state-of-the-art scholarship and practice regarding this (or any) topic?  what are the optimal paradigmatic and methodological approaches that provide the ‘distance’ to think about and study a situation we are in the middle of?  what theory provides the best most potential, with regard to new knowledge?  what are the best questions we can now ask, as a result of what we’ve learned?  and what can we learn from alternative interpretations of identical events and critique?  are their better explanations or paths forward? coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 60  what are the implications of what we have learned? solid qualitative work allows analytically grounding better questions and setting up the circumstances, methodologically, in which the problematization necessary for explanations can be sought concerning situations that are not understood very well. at its best, qualitative designs even allow us to consider alternatives that were not visible prior to problematizing a topic, in a way that breaks the surface level friction of folk psychology, where unquestioned assumptions govern everyday reality. in the social sciences and humanities there are several alternative paradigm/methodology combinations from which most topics can be approached. the self-ethnography we chose for this study analytically illuminates new knowledge, in a manner that allows international-level, state-of-the-art critique and potential engagement of a highly situated set of circumstances that was not possible prior to the presentation and publication of the study. in addition, methodologically speaking, this type of study militates against the hazards of methodological nationalism in general and unnecessary over-reliance on a narrow spectrum of what is actually available in the worlds of paradigmatic approach, substantive framing, standpoint, operationalization of theory, methodology and methods. because of these features, highly problematic circumstances come into view, in a manner that can be further researched, even as new knowledge illuminates key policy topics, which in turn spotlight practice intervention points. regarding the substantive framing of our topic, we now turn to the problematization, introduced at the outset of this study to clarify our analysis and what it means within the context in which it was carried out. merit and equity, in any form, do figure in explanations of academic trajectory in many places. as our analysis indicates, what is interesting about their relationship is the extent to which this relationship is problematized, or, in our case, to what extent it is not. 6.1. unquestioned assumptions: folk psychology, zombie discussions and ‘smoke and mirrors terminology’ in the studies hoffman, cools, habti and sama have carried out on academic work, the internationalization of higher education, and the (academic) mobility and migration of university personnel, it is common for us to encounter ‘smoke and mirrors terms’ as they are bandied about in finnish society, like multiculturalism, internationalization, integration and diversity. these examples of zombie discussions (beck & beck-gernsheim 2012), par excellence. these terms have been used in many places to reference many types of issues. however, it is instructive to note that in the societies in which those terms were originally used, they illuminate far more fault lines and contentious conflicts than uncontested success stories of social cohesion. in finnish society and culture in general and finnish higher education in particular these terms, paraphrasing rhoades, might best be thought of as ‘terms that illuminate phenomena higher education researchers ought to be problematizing and studying, rather than mindlessly perpetuating neo-colonial stratification of the global academic workforce’ (hoffman, rhoades, lee & shajahan 2013). in finnish society, these zombie discussions obscure much more than they reveal, particularly when they take on the character of slogans, unthinkingly – and often unconsciously – used to bifurcate, reify and essentialise (clarke 1999) discourses used on sacred and safe ascriptive characteristics at the coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 61 expense of the profane and problematic characteristics and social constructions integral to our biographies we prefer to ignore and pretend do not exist, especially country of origin, mother tongue, race or skin colour. this topic can be understood and explained in a far more rigorous, critical manner that lends itself to comparative study and international-level peer review; it can be engaged, taught, mutually understood and critiqued. this cannot be done by everyone, but by more people in either positions of institutional responsibility, positions of trust and senior personnel than is the case at the moment in settings like fier. this said, as is evidenced by our analysis, the scholars who are analytically illuminated by our findings best not wait for senior-level scholars to figure this out. by the time they do, it may be too late. the stakes are highest for individuals in groups present in finnish society, but who are absent from the settings in which direct observations were made in this study. fier is not unique in this regard, rather it is representative of the key disciplinary fields and institutional settings from which scholarly critique, policy analyses and practical interventions could emanate, but have not, up till now, on the kinds of issues highlighted in this study. these types of focal settings are not difficult to locate in finnish higher education (hoffman 2007; raunio, korhonen & hoffman 2010). but, as our analysis suggests, finding leverage for intervention in the social structure that produces these sorts of settings, while less than obvious, first begins with their analytical illumination. 6.2. unintended consequences: analytically illuminating methodological nationalism more than anything else, our team is driving a methodological stake in the ground in sparsely populated territory, at least with respect to the overly-normative world of higher education in finland and finnish higher education studies. explaining higher education trajectories of groups and individuals is not particularly hard. it can be done a variety of ways, thanks to substantive, theoretical, methodological data analysis and general approaches and modes of inquiry that in many cases have existed for decades. what is more challenging, though, as forward thinking scholars in the social sciences and humanities have always known, is confronting the convention that blinds us and, by definition, limits our methodological options. during the course of this study in the major higher education conferences we highlighted in our analysis, international groups of higher education specialists were focused specifically on overcoming the self-inflicted limitations that seem to characterise higher education research and most probably explain why we, as a field, are simply not taken as seriously as other disciplines and fields of study who also regard higher education as an important focal context (kosmützky & nokkala 2014). the most important methodological advantage illuminated by our approach is the use of naturally occurring events that throw a spotlight on the difference between ‘what we believe we are doing’ and ‘what we are actually doing’, at the institutional level. we assert that while this only yields qualitative interpretations, we will happily compare our conceptually-driven, empirically grounded analysis against the folk psychology that produced and perpetuates the coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 62 dynamics we analyse and see which approach produces better explanations with regard to our topic, going forward. in the same way, remaining outside the networks in which the global stratification of the academic workforce is discussed every day while we busy ourselves with unthinking compliance with the international agenda of neoliberal transnational academic capitalism rather than our own introduces the question robertson poses: why? (2014). if we let others do our thinking for us on the issues that actually define the integrity of scholarship, we forgo choices that our (non)approach to academic practice obscures as choices at all. this includes our hr ‘strategy’ and whether it prevents us from seriously considering the theme of the most recent conference in which we presented this topic: ‘is higher education becoming unequal?’ the approach we take to this study may be controversial to many inside our research group, fier, university and at system-level. that said, what kind of social scientists or scholars in the humanities would wish to be employed in a setting in which alternative points of view are not actively sought, welcomed and critically debated? while it is not difficult to find settings that fit that description, state-of-the-art social science and humanities are not one of them. as the section heading explicitly indicates, our analysis does not indicate whether the kind of dynamics we focus on are purposeful. actually, the opposite is the case. our point is that, as scott (2013) bluntly pointed out when speaking about leadership in higher education, ‘we need to raise the level of our game. to get better at what it is we do and have the potential to deliver.’ while there are many ways to do that, they are not to be found using the approaches to this topic we critique in our analysis. 6.3. hidden populations: the nature of complex change in the general population, culture and society one of our original analytical points of departure in the aof project was empirically verified in this self-ethnography. migration and mobility phenomena, as general demographic phenomena, cannot be studied by drawing untenable conceptual and empirical distinctions that narrowly focus only on ‘persons with a migrant background’. migration and mobility dynamics – across all domains in finnish society – implicate the general population. this is especially the case within the institution of higher education, in which overly narrow forms of mobility are uncritically valorised, promoted and used as a major empirical proxy by some of the most well-known global rankings of higher education institutions. as siekkinen’s dilemma vividly illustrated, the career advice she routinely gets at regular intervals is identical to the advice sama gets: leave. to take this one step further, many of the authors have families in which the line between finnish citizens, residents and migrants become very blurry. the policy implication of this finding is crystal clear. where we go, they go (maybe). the second most immediate policy implication of this involves highly skilled knowledge workers in a society where the dependency ratio is headed in the wrong direction, regarding persons inside the labour force, supporting the rapidly retiring baby boom generation outside the labour force. in the permanent hire discussed in the analysis (above), hoffman summed up fier’s position when considering whether or not fier should permanently employ a coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 63 highly mobile and highly capable scholar: “we need her, a lot more than she needs us.” this was true of the highly mobile scholar in question, but it implicates the hidden population, many of who currently desire to work in fier in spite of the working conditions, not because of them. when this is the dynamic that defines the people doing the hiring – and those they hire – the potential of any basic unit or institute is fundamentally distinct from selecting personnel based on something other than ‘settling for what’s available in terms of past practice’. more complex is the question the ethnic stratification our analysis brings into view as it links to the data-driven decision-making inherent in transnational academic capitalism and the precariousness of an emergent heterogeneous ‘invisible’ precariat (standing 2011). regarding scholars with a migrant background an emerging policy question is: ‘who is it more advantageous to employ’: a highly performing mobile scholar, for example using the academy of finland’s fidipro funding scheme, or the eu marie curie mobility grants; or should we assume the much tougher job of developing local talent who survive the ‘train the best, discard the rest’ de facto hr policy, which thrives in conditions of institutional dynamics characterized by opaque policy and ad hoc reaction? in the second type of hr conditions ‘the most suitable candidates’ are often hired, not ‘the best candidates’ (raunio, korhonen & hoffman 2010; hoffman, nokkala & välimaa in press). this highlights institutional conditions where those sought are not necessarily scholars willing to take risks in opening new pathways in research, but confirming and continuing traditions and neither questioning nor upsetting status quo power relations. taken further, this illuminates a combination of temporarily employing top performers, while subjecting locals to the ‘train the best, discard the rest’ hr policy regarding recruitment, selection, promotion and retention. it is possible to ask, at the level of policy, whether this is ‘the best of both worlds’ or ‘the worst’. and according to whom? the policy implication of this combination illuminates a clear choice regarding groups which can be found in finnish society, but who are not employed by our research team, nor whom were present in the meeting in which fier sought to identify ‘the most challenging topics to study, regarding education in coming decades’. and the policy implication that follows, as was pointed out in the email to the professors in charge of the fier strategy group, is having a thematicallyfocused, interdisciplinary research institute in which assumptions that obscure these dynamics and policy implications are unnoticed, ignored, uninteresting or perpetually confused. this is specifically so as to whether there is a relationship between perpetuating reproduction of transnational, global inequities within a specific institutional setting, versus problematizing our ability to include the personnel best able to study any of this outside, and inside, the walls and halls of a university. coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 64 7. methodological notes: an afterword/afterward looking back on the interesting journey of our team leaves us with no regrets, but very clear ideas as to what we would do differently should this type of opportunity arise again. opportunistic, critical studies focused on power relations are not for everyone and there are some methodological tips we would underline for others, should they decide to adopt an ethnographic approach to topics like academic work in general, or scholarly precariousness in particular. the first concrete piece of advice we would stress is not to hesitate to use ethnographic approaches, but prepare if you do not have a great deal of experience with them. even for those generally familiar with specific types of qualitative strategies (other than ethnography), we advise reading creswell’s 1998 title qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five traditions. the distinguishing features of ethnography, contrasted to other types of distinct qualitative approaches, are not something to take lightly. more importantly, if collaborating with other team members who do not have a lot of experience with the general features of qualitative research in general, creswell’s 2002 research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method approaches offer’s solid contrast between the general approaches to research that your colleagues are familiar with versus those that are not. for a first time attempt at a qualitative, ethnographic approach, alvesson’s (2003) approach to selfethnography is a good choice, particularly for higher education specialists who decide to take the leap and say something theoretically meaningful about their immediate surroundings. that said, now that we’ve used self-ethnography, we’ve been fairly humbled by the depth of the literature as much as the power of the general approach, and considering other types of approaches has become very tempting. reading a range of the literature might be advisable as there is a wide range of choice, levels of rigour and directions one can take in this vast literature. reading through hastrup’s (1995) passage to anthropology, behar’s (1997) anthropology that breaks your heart or scollon and scollon (2007) on nexus analysis will quickly open your eyes as to the underlying range of debates and choices that characterize the issues ethnographers – to a greater or lesser extent – feel to be important when differentiating themselves amongst themselves. this brings us to our second, practical point. don’t get hung up on the arcane infighting amongst ethnographers that probably would be much more interesting to study than letting it dissuade you from a goldmine of data that most researchers (not using ethnographic approaches) simply miss. ethnography, as a general qualitative approach or orientation is characterized by divisive cleavages and, as scollon and scollon write, ‘ethnographers seldom agree on anything’. for the methodological generalist, it is important to be aware of this, going in, in the sense this constitutes a well-known limitation of ethnography, as a general approach. as is the case with all qualitative methodologies, the paradigms in which many ethnographers operate are at sharp odds with each other, which leading ethnographers understand. this can introduce difficulties, for example with a methodological specialist located in a clearly delineated paradigm evaluating work carried out in ‘anything other than that paradigm’. our advice on this is clear. pick one clear approach initially. should this situation arise again, we would strongly advise a training session for the team which focuses on the fundamentals of solid qualitative work using practical texts like miles & huberman’s 1994 methods text and stressing how this will be operationalized in terms of ethnographic coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 65 methods and analysis, especially underlining the importance of observational skills, whether direct observation, participant observation, and especially the role of field notes in this type of research. to be very clear, many early stage and early career researchers have a rather vague sense of what ethnography entails. if and when the opportunity arises to do an ethnographic study our most recent experience is that you will find others to collaborate with. simple willingness is not enough. our advice is to take enough time to ascertain that everyone is trained up and has a shared idea of the general approach, how it differs from the approach they usually use, the methods that will used, data how the team is going to analyse the data and – from the very beginning – introduce them to the highly iterative type of collaboration that leads to an ethnographically-grounded write-up. if team members seem reluctant to commit to this initial training and the idea of spending some time on expanding their skill set, consider this a solid indication they may not yet be ready for this type of study. this is especially the case were early stage/career scholars display interest. when considering the risks we detail in our methodology section it is very easy for scholars to get in over their heads. finally, we stress that higher education specialists in places where ethnographic approaches are not typically used should strongly consider this general orientation and methodological strategy to approach questions that are missed by many who have not bothered to reflect on very serious issues that play out in our immediate surroundings – every day, much less the consequences and broader implications of these unresolved situations. while several types of trendy and familiar approaches might be more palatable to colleagues and (especially) superiors concerning topic like transnational scholarly precariousness, our advice – having given this a try – is clear. in ethnography, for all of its limitations, you will find ways of tapping into data that others simply are not getting using ‘conventional’ and ‘inside-the-box’ approaches. in our study, a specific, pragmatic ethnographic approach gave us leverage to directly engage our topic in ways that have been perceived by others in our institute, university and wider networks as critical, yet constructive. this – in and of itself – is why we will not hesitate to continue to develop our skills with regard to its efficacy, as a general methodological orientation and continue to prepare for the next time a similar opportunity arises. 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newbury park: sage. yle. 2014, july. overseas academics claim discrimination in university recruitment. yle news. 14 july. internet edition. accessed 14 august from: http://yle.fi/uutiset/overseas_academics_claim_discrimination_in_university_recruitment/735 5139 ylijoki, o. 2003. entangled in academic capitalism? a case study on changing ideals and practices of university research. higher education 45(3), 307-335. http://yle.fi/uutiset/overseas_academics_claim_discrimination_in_university_recruitment/7355139 http://yle.fi/uutiset/overseas_academics_claim_discrimination_in_university_recruitment/7355139 coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 75 biographical data on authors thomas babila sama, phd, is a postdoctoral research associate in the social policy institute, university of helsinki, finland. the focus of dr. sama’s dissertation was a comparative study of ngos in finland and sweden. email contact: thomas.sama@helsinki.fi driss habti, phd, in sociology, is a postdoctoral researcher at the karelian institute, university of eastern finland, finland. dr habti’s main research interests include international migration and ethnic relations, highly skilled mobility, ethnicity and cultural diversity, career research, and sociology of work. his recent publications involve special issues on international highly skilled migration, internationalization of higher education, and ethnicity and cultural diversity in europe. he is member of the research network of borders, mobilities and cultural encounters, the nordic migration research association (nmr), and the european sociological association (esa). email contact: driss.habti@uef.fi carine cools, phd, born in belgium, completed her doctoral degree in speech/intercultural communication in 2011 in finland. in her doctoral dissertation she approached intercultural couples’ relationships in finland from the relational-dialectics perspective. during her research project, funded by the finnish academy she visited usf as a visiting scholar during fall 2012 to collaborate with dr. lasonen on the ongoing research and teaching on intercultural communication, which represents an important area in the changing global context for education and economy. her main interest areas are adaptation/transition issues in the context of intercultural communication research and migration studies. she has published in english in international journals, and has presented her research in numerous international and national conferences. dr cools has been lecturing about intercultural communication and research methods, in finland and abroad (australia, belgium, portugal) and has been supervising numerous students with their ma thesis. email: carine.a.cools@gmail.com. david m. hoffman, phd, is a senior researcher at the finnish institute for educational research at the university of jyväskylä, finland. dr. hoffman is the team leader of the internationalization, intersectionality, mobility and migration research group, is active in the higher education studies team as well as a co-founder of the collaboration development network. email contact: david.hoffman@jyu.fi sari pöyhönen, phd, is a professor at the centre for applied language studies, university of jyvaskyla, finland. her research focuses on language education policies, minorities and language rights, and notions on language and identity. her recent publications deal with policies and practices in adult second language teaching, and discourses and narratives of linguistic rights, migration, integration and work. email contact: sari.h.poyhonen@jyu.fi msc taru siekkinen is a project researcher and postgraduate student in the university of jyväskylä, finnish institute for educational research. her dissertation is about academic careers. she has been working in several different projects focused on higher education. her current projects are an assessment of the four-stage career model in finnish universities and the study of the academic careers and recruitment in finnish universities. email contact: taru.siekkinen@jyu.fi mailto:thomas.sama@helsinki.fi mailto:driss.habti@uef.fi mailto:carine.a.cools@gmail.com mailto:david.hoffman@jyu.fi mailto:sari.h.poyhonen@jyu.fi mailto:taru.siekkinen@jyu.fi coolabah, no.17, 2015, issn 1988-5946, observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona 76 anatoly stikhin received his english teacher qualifications in 1986 and his research-based degree (licentiate of philosophy) in linguistics from st. petersburg, russia in 1992. anatoly stikhin taught english and language-related courses at petrozavodsk state university for 20 years, simultaneously holding various administrative positions in the institution. from 2013 till present he has been a doctoral student at department of teacher education, university of jyväskylä, finland. email contact: anatoly.a.stikhin@jyu.fi i in terms of academic work, the most important tension operating in our study is scholarly precariousness itself, in the sense that career stage (baldwin & blackburn 1981) does not map onto the field of permanent and temporary positions in finnish higher education (välimaa 2001; hoffman 2007), nor trajectory (bourdieu 1988). because the relationship between ascriptive characteristics (beck 1992), social constructions (berger & luckmann 1969) and academic work is not usually problematized in research on finnish higher education, nor policy discussion, except as outlined in our critique (above), the tendency to claim, as primmer (2014) does, ‘it’s the same for all academics’ is irrelevant at the level of abstraction needed to substantiate or refute such a claim. complicating the situation of the authors more by taking into account the complex intersectionality of their ascriptive and achieved characteristics linked to hoffman and pöyhönen (permanently employed scholars), cools, siekkinen, stikhin, habti and sama (precarious employment) only underlines just how little the authors have in common except for the occupational sector they work in and their interest in this type of topic. we stress this type of topic only comes into view, for us, in ways relevant to state-of-the-art scholarship because of the approach originally developed by the aof team and further developed, in this self-ethnography. in total, the seven authors of this study come from six different countries, work across two universities, two faculties and two research institutes, four scholarly specializations and are spread out along the academic food chain from early-stage researcher, just beginning doctoral work to mid-career positions in four organizational units. it is our heterogeneity, with regard to the relationship between academic work, ascriptive characteristics and social constructions, along with our previous research (cited throughout this text), that ground our skepticism to claims not relevant to the complexity of the causes and consequences of transnational scholarly precariousness in general and the ways in which this manifests in finnish higher education,in particular. mailto:anatoly.a.stikhin@jyu.fi the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez universidad de valladolid reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez universidad de valladolid t 40 ab st ra ct mónica fernández jiménez is a junior researcher in the english department at universidad of valladolid. there she works on her doctoral thesis exploring the possibilities of a hemispheric caribbean-american aesthetic. as such, she has published articles in national and international journals dealing with caribbean and caribbean-american works like those of claude mckay, junot díaz, jamaica kincaid or derek walcott. as part of the department she teaches courses on american literature and history and british contemporary literature. as a researcher she is part of a recognised research project on u.s. ethnic literature. fernández jiménez, mónica. “the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels”. reden, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 39-48. recibido: 05 de noviembre de 2019. his article analyses three novels by julia alvarez–how the garcía girls lost their accents (1991), in the time of the butterflies (1994), and in the name of salomé (2000)– through the lenses of hemispheric american studies. inspired by the teachings of antonio benítez-rojo’s theoretical work the repeating island: the caribbean and the postmodern perspective (1992), i contend that the categorisation of these novels as latino literature is not enough to describe all of their richness. these novels portray throughout their pages social, political, and artistic relations that tie all of the americas together, and their analysis benefits from the essays written by caribbean post-essentialist critics who developed, during the 1990s, a discourse based on the cultural supersyncretism of the islands that helps us to understand the postmodern globalised worlds as it stands. the novels by alvarez reflect these theories, as they portray the realities of a new world constricted by the workings of race and racism, capitalism, and postcolonialism. key words: julia alvarez; caribbean literature; caribbean discourse; hemispheric american studies; multiculturalism. the saint lucian nobel prize winner derek walcott claimed in his essay “the caribbean: culture or mimicry” (1974) that, despite the shadow of empire being inescapable, caribbeans “were american even while [they] were british” (3). furthermore, the insistence on national identification is a result of power intentions in an “archipelago […] broken up into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity” (ibid). this is absurd, according to walcott, since it cannot be denied that west indian culture is american “not because america owes me a living from historical guilt, not that is needs my presence, but because we share this part of the world, and have shared it for centuries now, even as conqueror and victim, as exploiter and exploited” (4). such approach to caribbean literature became popularised in the 1990s thanks to essays such as édouard glissant’s, edward kamau brathwaite’s, and antonio benítez-rojo’s. florencia bonfiglio explains that the irruption of these texts transcending linguistic and national barriers was the result of an effort on the part of the authors to create a discourse “independent from its ‘mother’ literatures/euro-north-american hegemonic paradigms” (149). the most clearly postmodern approach to is expressed in antonio benítez-rojo’s the repeating island (1992), where he explains that the caribbean way of being and acting serves to transcend the very colonial violence which gave birth to the region as we know nowadays: a culturally heterogeneous place (27-28). if caribbean cultural productions, as walcott explained, are indeed american, what about caribbean migrants in the united states? can we trace back the caribbean roots—or routes—of their works? that is what benítez-rojo indeed suggested, as he claims that mobility is a characteristic feature of “the peoples of the sea” (25). a postcolonial perspective has indeed been taken by some critics in their analyses of cultural productions written by minorities in the united states. jenny sharpe’s much quoted phrase from her article “is the united states postcolonial?” (1995) expresses that: “given its history of imported slave and contract labor, continental expansion, and overseas imperialism, an implication of american culture in the postcolonial study of empires is perhaps long overdue” (181). after the student protests of the 1960s third world movement in american campuses, the state of ethnic minorities in the united states started to be considered a postcolonial matter (114), which still serves to challenge the 1980s multicultural model that ultimately serves to portray a static image of cultures as endangered objects to protect but paradoxically enters into conflict with the country’s capitalist demands (piper 15-18). while such approaches are accurate, specially in dismantling the exoticist—in salman rushdie’s view (67)—notion of multiculturalism, this is not the desirable approach to julia alvarez’s works, since her literature is not relegated to a united states setting; it also includes many chapters dealing with the locus specific situation of the characters’ homeland: the dominican republic. …the insistence on national identification is a result of power intentions in an “archipelago […] broken up into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity.” (walcott 3) reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 41 the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez if caribbean cultural productions, as walcott explained, are indeed american, what about caribbean migrants in the united states? can we trace back the caribbean roots–or routes–of their works? that is what benítez-rojo indeed suggested, as he claims that mobility is a characteristic feature of “the peoples of the sea” (25). 42 caribbean islands have always been a bastion of the economic powers at work because of their strategic geographical position. because of the popularity experienced by latino literature in the united states, one often forgets that places such as the dominican republic are caribbean nations with their own caribbean specificities such as the inescapable neo-colonial relationship with the united states. caribbean islands have always being a bastion of the economic powers at work because of their strategic geographical position. furthermore, such popularity has turned latino literature into an exotic desirable commodity (bost & aparicio 3). as suzanne bost and frances r. aparicio claim, while some novels adapt to the “fetishized traits” traditionally ascribed to latinos—“vibrant colored book covers, recipes for spicy food, or traditional spiritual practices”—and have thus turned into best sellers, others have been deemed to oblivion (3). even when the latino category considers “layers of conquest, colonialism, and cultural mixture” (boost & aparicio 2), it has also worked as an oppositional practice. in marta caminero-santangelo’s words: “‘latino’ as an ethnic label thus suggests a contrast with some ‘other’ people understood to be ‘non-latino’” (13). the heterogeneity of the locations, timelines, characters, and historical episodes present in the works of julia alvarez makes them quite aligned with benítez-rojo’s claim against the binary implications of mestizaje: “the literature of the caribbean can be read as a mestizo text, but also as a stream of texts in flight in intense differentiation among themselves and within whose complex coexistence there are vague regularities, usually paradoxical” (27). a clear example of this is alvarez’s 1994 novel in the time of the butterflies, which is completely set in the dominican republic. it narrates a fictionalised account of the mirabal sisters’ lives and their assassination by the trujillo dictatorship. but we will get to that later. to understand alvarez’s position as a caribbean writer let us retort to her 1998 collection something to declare. one of them, “doña aída, with your permission,” is an answer to an incident that took place at the caribbean studies association annual meeting, where alvarez was asked to deliver a plenary talk alongside the dominican poet aída cartagena portalatín. cartagena portalatín criticised alvarez for speaking english, and the latter’s answer—this essay—is deeply rooted in the previously mentioned 1990s caribbean discourse characterised by anti-essentialism. alvarez explains in the essay that: “doña aída embraced [her], but then in front of the mikes, she reamed [her] out. ‘eso parece mentira que una dominicana se ponga a escribir en inglés. vuelve a tu país, vuelve a tu idioma. tú eres dominicana’.” (“doña aída” 171) after explaining that she decided to write this essay because the moment did not seem adequate to offer an answer, she claims that the cultural situation she inhabits is “a world formed of contradictions, clashes, cominglings—the gringa and the dominican, and it is precisely that tension and richness that interests her].” (“doña aída” 173) whereas this reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 43 claim is quite specific of migration experiences to a country with a different language–and she mentions other migrant writers claiming that their belonging to several cultures has created very interesting literary works—she then continues to justify her language choice in this way: this final paragraph adds a caribbean perspective to her argument, as what she describes is characteristic of the history of postcolonial peoples, a history made up clashes, cominglings, and confluences, especially in the caribbean. alvarez’s claim that “we are islands, permeable countries” takes up the rhetoric on the aquatic worldview expressed by edward kamau brathwaite in his aethetic theory of tidalectics (as opposed to dialectics). the barbadian poet believes that western conceptualisation, epistemology, and philosophy do not work when defining the lives of the islanders and goes on to suggest alternative ways of reading and interpreting reality (hessler). in particular, brathwaite “is concerned with a sense of relation that is expressed in terms of connecting lines” (reckin 2). according to anna reckin, it is the layers which “[open] up the work to new contexts and to wider and deeper […] signification” (3) included in a narration that resemble the movement of the sea. the fragmented and multilayered, in terms of time and space, nature of alvarez’s novels embraces this philosophy. the 1991 novel how the garcía girls lost their accents has an inverse chronological order with time lapses between its chapters. it begins with the journey back to the dominican republic of one of the protagonist sisters, yolanda, who has the intention of staying there. then, as the novel progresses, we move on to the sisters’ previous time in the united states, their acculturation and identity struggles, such as racist attacks, and the political exile that made them leave their country. despite the title, this is not only a fiction of migration and acculturation in the united states, since the description of the girls’ typical second-generation struggles is only part of the book. it must be considered that the book opens and closes in the dominican republic and portrays the characteristic rhythms, colours, and aquatic lifestyle of the caribbean. during the narrative, mental health is also given big importance, stressing the double, triple, or quadruple consciousness experienced by the sisters living inbetween worlds, that which was described by alvarez in her essay as typical of the caribbean. this is also a narrative of return, not only of migration, as yolanda, the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez 44 think of it, the caribbean… a string of islands, a sieve of the continents, north and south, a sponge, as most islands are, absorbing those who come and go, whether indios in canoas from the amazon, or conquistadores from spain, or african princes brought in chains in the holds of ships to be slaves, or refugees from china or central europe or other islands. we are not a big continental chunk, a forbidding expanse that takes forever to penetrate, which keeps groups solidly intact, for a while anyhow. our beaches welcome the stranger with their carpets of white sand. in an hour you reach the interior; in another hour you arrive at the other coast. we are islands, permeable countries. it’s in our genes to be a world made of many worlds. ¿no es así? (“doña aída” 175) who has multiple cultural identities according to ana mª manzanas—“yo, joe, yoyo, joey, as the occasion requires” (38)–finds living in this multiplicity only possible in the caribbean (also meaning in the aquatic epistemology): “this time, however, yolanda is not so sure she’ll be going back [to the united states]. but that is a secret” (alvarez, garcía girls 7). the narrative coming and going from the united states to the dominican republic and vice versa across the caribbean sea depicted in the garcía girls novel reminds contemporary readers that the hybrid nature of these characters does not start on the land but in the sea, reflecting the different waves of migration that have created america. in the time of buterfflies is in fact, as already mentioned, completely set in the dominican republic, and tells a fictionalised account of an important chapter of the history of this country which has made a big impact on the cultural identity of its inhabitants: the assassination of the mirabal sisters by the trujillo regime (recognised by the united states). the issue at stake is that the novel is completely written in english (using some words in spanish as is characteristic of latino literature in the united states) while its subject is certainly dominican: it tells anglophone readers of an important chapter of the history of a non-anglophone country. this inserts into the united states cultural scene a history of the country’s hegemony presented from another perspective, the perspective of those affected by the neo-colonial imperialist relations the united states establishes with the countries of the caribbean. in fact, the story of the mirabal sisters has had an influence worldwide: the date of their assassination has been chosen for the date of the international day for the elimination of violence against women, the 25th of november. in in the name of salomé (2000) there is also more than one setting: the united states, the dominican republic, and cuba. the main character of the dominican republic plot, which is set in the second half of the 19th century, is salomé ureña, the national poet who wrote patriotic verses in order to arouse nationalist sentiments for encouraging revolutions against corrupt, colonial, and institutional power. the american setting protagonist, her daughter camila, a 66 years old university professor, does not feel at home in the united states, like the garcía girls’ yolanda, and writes a pros and reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 45 alvarez’s claim that “we are islands, permeable countries” takes up the rhetoric on the aquatic worldview expressed by edward kamau brathwaite in his aesthetic theory of tidalectics (as opposed to dialectics). the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez 46 cons list for any possible decision she will take once she retires. she feels only convinced by the idea of going to cuba to join the revolution. cuba is not her homeland but part of the caribbean archipelago which, according to benítez-rojo, is “a group of american nations whose colonial experiences and languages have been different, but which share certain undeniable features” (1). the protagonist also reflects this kind of thought when she recalls jose martí’s teachings: “why speak of cuba and santo domingo, when even the underwater cordillera that runs from island to island knows they belong together” (alvarez, salomé 164; emphasis mine). the word “even,” which i have emphasised, suggests that it is not only the cordillera which makes the islands belong together. camila’s decision to join the cuban revolution can be analysed through the lens of another caribbean discourse representative, édouard glissant, in terms of his poetics of relation, as he claims that this novel is characterised by the heterogeneity of the historical situations it relates, key moments in the story of the americas, in a hemispheric sense: the cuban revolution, the trujillo dictatorship, the ku klux klan attacks, and the colonial enterprises of spain in the caribbean, among others. it establishes the sometimes ignored notion that, as derek walcott has put it, that part of the world is shared and most of its culture comes from its past of “ghettos, its river-cultures, its plantations” (4). the metaphor of the archipelago, of a culture creating itself by the heterogeneous experiences of colonialism, is what can also be called the metaphor of america (walcott 5). glissant’s already mentioned theoretical book on a poetics of relation makes use of gilles deleuze and felix guattari’s concept of the narrative coming and going from the united states to the dominican republic and vice versa across the caribbean sea depicted in the garcía girls novel reminds contemporary readers that the hybrid nature of these characters does not start on the land but in the sea, reflecting the different waves of migration that have created america. errantry […] does not proceed from renunciation nor from frustration regarding a supposedly deteriorated (deterritorialized) situation of origin; it is not a resolute act of rejection or an uncontrolled impulse of abandonment. sometimes, by taking up the problems of the other, it is possible to find oneself […] that is very much the image of the rhizome, prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in relation. (18) reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 47 the rhizome. as an image of multiplicity, the rhizome, “chang[ing] its nature as it expands its connections” (deleuze & guattari 8), is something characteristic of the caribbean since, unlike the mediterranean, it is “a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. a sea that diffracts. without necessarily inferring any advantage whatsoever to their situation, the reality of archipelagos in the caribbean [...] provides a natural illustration of the thought of relation” (glissant 33). camila’s errantry is opposed to the idea of the monolingual root characteristic of the conquests that happened across the americas: “conquerors are the moving transient root of their people” (glissant 14). there are two kinds of nomadism, arrowlike (as in the conquerors example) and circular, endogamous and “overdetermined by the conditions of [its] existence” (glissant 12). errantry, standing not as an opposition but completely differing from these notions, is best understood when caribbean migrant writers in the united states like julia alvarez continue adopting an epistemology which is deeply postcolonial and caribbean. the errant, “prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in relation,” (glissant 18) transcends borders. conclusions while much has been written about the american perspective of caribbean texts and essays, such relationship has not been actively endorsed in order to look at caribbean latino novels in the united states even when considerations such as benítez rojo’s approach to chaos and multiplicity are reflected in the the fragmented nature of works like julia alvarez’s. the three novels analysed above deliberately and fluidly change settings between the unites states and the caribbean islands—often the dominican republic but also cuba–, emphasising the connections between the different nations of the americas. the transnationalism, rather than biculturalism, portrayed in julia alvarez’s novels is an attempt to recover josé martí’s approach to america—our america—as mentioned in in the name of salomé: “the america our poor, little countries are struggling to create” (121). as walcott points out when he claims that american culture is that of the plantations and ghettoes, this analysis of alvarez’s works brings back to mind the idea that identification according to nation-states is a mechanism which serves to ignore other socio-cultural realities that have led to shared historical injustices. in contrast, julia alvarez and the anti-essentialist caribbean essayists acknowledge the reality of specific landscapes, geographies, and migration routes which have been the real agents in shaping an american identity. the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez 48 alvarez, julia. “doña aída, with your permission”. something to declare. algonquin books of chapel hill, 2014. ---. how the garcía girls lost their accents. plume, 1991. ---. in the name of salomé. new york: plume, 2000. benítez-rojo, antonio. the repeating island: the caribbean and the postmodern perspective. duke up, 1992. bonfiglio, florencia. “notes on the caribbean essay from an archipelagic perspective (kamau brathwaite, édouard glissant and antonio benítez rojo).” caribbean studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015, pp. 147-173. bost, suzanne & frances r. aparicio. editors. the routledge companion to latino/a literature. routledge, 2013. caminero-santangelo, marta. “latinidad.” the routledge companion to latino/a literature, edited by suzanne bost & frances r. aparicio. routledge, 2013, pp. 13-24. deleuze, gilles & felix guattari. a thousand plateaus, translated by brian massumi. u of minnesota p, 1987. glissant, édouard. poetics of relation, translated by betsy wing. the u of michigan p, 1997. hessler, stephanie. tidalectics. thyssen-bornemiza art contemporary academy, 2017. manzanas, ana mª. “ethnicity, mestizaje, and writing.” narratives of resistance: literature and ethnicity in the united states and the caribbean, edited by ana mª manzanas & jesús benito. ediciones de la universidad de castilla-la mancha, 1999, pp. 25-39. piper, karen. “post-colonialism in the united states: diversity or hybridity?” post colonial literatures: expanding the canon, edited by deborah l. madsen. pluto press, 1999, pp. 14-28. reckin, anna. “tidalectic lectures: kamau brathwaite’s prose/ poetry as sound space.” anthurium: a caribbean studies journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1-16. rushdie, salman. imaginary homelands: essays and criticism, 1981-1991. granta books, 1991. sharpe, jenny. “is the united states postcolonial?: transnationalism, immigration, and race.” diaspora: a journal of transnational studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 1995, pp. 181-199. walcott, derek. “the caribbean: culture or mimicry?” journal of interamerican studies and world affairs, vol. 1, no. 16, 1974, pp. 313. references the new communists of the commons: 1 the new communists of the commons: 21st century proudhonists? by radhika desai to appear in international critical thought, no. 2, june 2011. radhika desai affiliation: department of political studies, university of manitoba, winnipeg, canada email: desair@cc.umanitoba.ca tel: 1-204-474-9818 mailing address: department of political studies, 527 fletcher argue, university of manitoba winnipeg mb, r3m 5v5 canada 2 the new communists of the commons: 21st century proudhonists radhika desai∗ department of political studies, university of manitoba, winnipeg, canada if proudhonism in the 19th century was, as marx argued, a petty bourgeois ideology, this paper argues that the new communism of the commons propounded by badiou, hardt and negri and žižek is a 21st century avatar of it. it speaks not for what poulantzas called the ‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’, as proudhon did, but for the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘non-productive wage-earners’, which has also lately styled itself the ‘creative class.’ a failure to comprehend the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and a general antipathy to any general organization of labour in society, and thus to any serious politics, are common to both. in addition, the paper shows that the protection of the cultural commons, the core of the project, is but a programme aiming for the continued reproduction of the creative class within capitalism. it is also prey to a series of misunderstandings of the concept of the commons itself, of contemporary capitalism whose dynamics forms the backdrop of their project and key economic and political ideas of marx whose authority they seek to attach to their project. keywords: commons; idea of communism; creative class; proudhonism; marxism the great recession and the financial crisis that broke in its midst appeared at first to have prompted a major break with the neoliberal orthodoxy that was so instrumental in causing them. governments around the world called for fiscal stimulus, easy monetary policies and massive state intervention, and many were forced to nationalize, support and regulate failing financial institutions. keynes, whom neoliberalism had so mightily struggled to displace was back, and nowhere with more vengeance than in neoliberalism’s anglo-american heartlands. president obama confirmed the massive bailouts undertaken by the outgoing bush jr administration and announced the heftiest stimulus package in the advanced industrial world while gordon brown ‘saved the world’ with his economic diplomacy in favour of fiscal stimuli. but as the crisis wore on, the contingency of the new commitment to keynesianism (patnaik 2009a) and a deeper political continuity – of the unbroken power of financial capital over government, particularly in the us and the uk – became clear. the bailouts for banks and austerity for working people further confirmed that neoliberalism, while doctrinally about the free markets and ‘rolling back the state,’ had practically always effected state action in favour of capital, particularly financial capital. it remains less widely appreciated that these continuities are dangerous and contradictory ∗ email: desair@cc.umanitoba.ca 3 for the very forces they benefitted in the past: the combination of austerity and bailouts is prolonging the great recession and is almost certain to lead to further financial crises. when they occur, the financial institutions that were too big to fail the last time around will have become too big to bail out by states too indebted to do so. why recall all this in a paper about the new communism of the commons? quite simply because that phenomenon, wherein a group of prominent western intellectuals on the left has boldly announced an apparently radical return to communism committed to ‘de-demonizing’ it, is akin to the apparently radical return to keynesianism by governments and intellectuals who remain committed to the interests of finance. the publication of alain badiou’s the communist hypothesis (2010), michael hardt and tony negri’s commonwealth (2009), the conference volume the idea of communism (2010) and associated publications has been hailed – by the authors themselves – as a major political departure. in the words of costas douzinas and slavoj žižek, their conference, originally planned for a modest audience of about 180 and then forced to expand to accommodate about 1200, … opened the way for a reactivation of the strong link between radical philosophy and politics. the massive participation, the amazing buzz that propelled the conference (strangers greeting each other like old friends), the good humoured and non-sectarian question and answer sessions (something rather rare for the left), all indicated that the period of guilt [over actually existing communism, one presumes] was over. if this conference was a major intellectual encounter, it was an even greater political event. (douzinas and žižek 2010, ix) not to be outdone in self-importance alain badiou claimed of the same conference that ‘in addition to the two people behind it (slavoj žižek and myself), the great names of the true philosophy of our times (by which i mean a philosophy that is not reducible to academic exercises or support for the ruling order) were strongly represented’ (badiou 2010, 36). prima facie, badiou’s proposition that the left end the ‘end of ideologies’ (badiou 2010a, 99) and return to the ‘idea of communism’ after decades of distancing, hardt and negri’s proposal that it be associated with the defense of the ‘commons’ – the natural and the cultural worlds we inhabit (hardt and negri 2009, vii) – and slavoj žižek’s extension of these ideas to include ‘the commons of internal nature’ (e.g. žižek 2010) as well as the ‘excluded’, such as slum-dwellers, add up to a very tall political order. this paper argues, however, that on closer scrutiny this new communism of the commons turns out to be little more than a 21st century avatar of the proudhonism of the 19th, which marx exposed as a petty bourgeois ideology, but with one historical difference. 19th century proudhonism was the ideology of what poulantzas called the ‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘small scale production and ownership, independent craftsmen and traders’ (poulantzas 1975, 204). the 21st century avatar is the ideology of what he called the new petty bourgeoisie, ‘nonproductive wage-earners’ (poulantzas 1975, 206). this class has since come to be dubbed variously as ‘knowledge workers’, ‘the professional managerial class’, ‘symbolic analysts’ or ‘cognitive workers’ and, last but not least, the ‘creative class’, people ‘who add economic value through their creativity’ (florida 2002, 68). if, speaking for the 19th century traditional petty bourgeoisie, proudhon’s socialism tragicomically sought revolution (proudhonists dominated the international working mens’ association element in the paris commune) if only to protect their class against its particular enemy, large scale capitalism, and proposed measures which assumed its continued existence, the new petty bourgeois new communism is, if anything, worse: an 4 harum-scarum manifesto, whose apparently radical fingering of large corporations who try to ‘privatise the general intellect’ (of which, needless to say, the ‘creative class’ is the embodiment), is not only based on new-fangled and badly tangled ideas about the nature of contemporary capitalism. it stops far short of socialism. like the reaction of the governing right to the crisis, the new communism of the left is more a symptom of the tension between the crisisinduced realization that the old grooves of thought and practice must be abandoned, and be seen to be abandoned, to retain credibility and relevance, and the inability of these intellectually and politically enervated representatives to actually do so. for all the incantations and intonations about marx and marxism, the new communists continue, as they have over the past many decades, to skirt the core of marx’s work, his critique of political economy. while it is unclear whether they accept the verdict of the majority of those who call themselves ‘marxist economists’ that marx’s account of capitalism is plagued by the so-called ‘transformation problem’ and inconsistent and hence mistaken about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (but see elson 1979, kliman 2007, freeman et al 2004, desai 2010), the new communists’ ability to treat it as an inexhaustible source of apparently profound but actually disjointed and mangled ideas is certainly helped by this sort of ‘marxism without marx’ (freeman 2010). the new communists also falsely pin on classical marxism a deficiency of political understanding which they profess to make good (for a critique of an earlier attempt at this see desai 2001). and they fundamentally mis-read the history of communism in the 20th century, largely accepting questionable mainstream, indeed neoliberal accounts of its problems and demise (for a critique and an alternative account see kotz 1997). just as the reaction of the right to the crisis betrayed its class character more clearly than was revealed in the free market rhetoric of the past three decades, so the reaction of these new communist intellectuals to the crisis betrays the extent to which the left of the past decades, including many self-proclaimed marxists, have read into marx and communism their own new petty bourgeois concerns. finally, just as the right’s reaction, rather than resolving the crisis and laying a new foundation for growth has, instead, laid one for the next crisis, so the new communists’ new found communism is little more than an express train headed for irrelevance. this is already becoming clear in that they have little of import to say to the wave of protest and liberation struggles that are sweeping over the middle-east, not to mention london or wisconsin. for though framed by much seemingly radical rhetoric about returning, now unabashedly, to communism, the new communism embodies little more than the left’s failed empty oppositionism, neatly cleft from any politics, of the past several decades. it has been, in effect, the left’s capitulation to neoliberalism. as badiou, brazenly or inadvertently as the case may be, reveals, this was the real legacy of may ’68, as the new communist intellectuals so eurocentrically interpret it. for, barring the honourable exceptions, and net of the increases in strictly liberal freedoms for some women and minorities, the chief political results of their may ’68, which left out of account the powerful anti-imperialist struggles and wars of so many millions in the third world and fondly privileged only their own youthful rebellion, were that as that generation matured and occupied positions of political and economic power, the right moved farther to the right under the banner of the new right and the left also moved to the right under ‘third way’ banners both on the pretext of increasing liberal freedoms, but actually undermining them too, for most people in the world. in what follows, i first identify what i consider the main components of the new communism. the critique that follows is but a preliminary, and necessarily compressed, outline. it is founded on a reading of marx, marxism and its history that contests the new communists’ 5 deeply problematic and selective appropriation of these. like the increased demand for capital so widely reported since the crisis began, the hundreds who flocked to the new communists’ conference represent a perfectly understandable intellectual hunger for radical ideas in the midst of crisis. however, the adulterated fare offered up by the new communists can hardly satisfy it. it can, however, so long as it is successfully marketed, prevent that hunger from being satiated by the real article. the critique of the new communism begins with a review of the main terms of marx’s criticism of proudhon: his rejection of the ‘general organization of labour in society’ which would be indispensable to any communism. it goes on to discuss common proudhonist and new communist misunderstanding of the state. the rest of the critique of the new communism concentrates on the new features of the new communists’ thinking which specifically expresses the interests and self-image of the new petty bourgeoisie or the ‘creative class’. they include the confusions surrounding their central category, the commons, the ideas of ‘cognitive workers’ as ‘fixed capital’, of rent replacing profit and, finally, žižek’s questionable ideas about the relationship between capitalism and democracy. the paper ends with some reflections on the form of value in communism, the centrality of the state in struggles to achieve it and their likely nature. the new communism the proposal with which, it appears, badiou kicked off the construction of the new communism was that the left should once gain ‘subjectivise’ itself, not to communism as such but to the ‘idea’ – a ‘synthesis of politics, history and ideology’ – of communism (badiou 2010b, 3, 4). if ‘[t]he communist idea exists only at the border between the individual and the political procedure, as that element of subjectivation that is based on a historical projection of politics’, the historical projection of politics on which badiou’s subjectivation is based is revealed in his discussions of may ’68, the chinese cultural revolution and the paris commune. for all the differences between these three events, badiou extracts two common themes from his discussions: a rejection of ‘statism’ and an associated rejection of the party as a revolutionary vehicle. indeed, badiou dismisses all ‘democratic politics’ as ‘nothing more than an eager willingness to service the needs of banks’. rejecting such ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’, he calls for a politics that ‘is far removed from state power’ and surmises that it will ‘probably remain so for a long time to come’. but what looks like a deferral of engagement with state power turns out to be a rejection. the ‘obligatory refusal of any direct inclusion in the state, of any request for funding from the state, of any participation in elections, etc., is also an infinite task, since the creation of new political truths will always shift the dividing line between statist, hence historical, facts and the eternal consequences of an event’ (badiou 2010b, 13). representing ‘the new proletarians who have come from africa and elsewhere and the intellectuals who are the heirs to the political battles of recent decades’ (such, one must presume, as himself), such a politics will ‘not have any organic relationship with existing parties or the electoral and institutional system that sustains them’ (badiou 2010a, 99). this rejection of state, politics and democracy claims kinship with the marxist concept of the ‘withering away of the state’ and rejects ‘communism as a goal to be attained through the work of a new state’ (badiou 2010b, 13). against such a conception of politics, badiou finds marx’s account of the paris commune ‘ambiguous’: 6 on the one hand, he [marx] praises everything that appears to lead to a dissolution of the state and, more sporadically, of the nation-state. in this vein he notes: the commune’s abolition of a professional army in favour of directly arming the people; all the measures it took concerning the election and revocability of civil servants; the end it put to the separation of powers in favour of a decisive and executive function; and of its internationalism (the financial delegate of the commune was german, the military leaders, polish, etc.). but on the other hand, he deplores incapacities that are actually statist incapacities [incapacités étatiques]: its weak military centralization; its inability to define financial priorities; and, its shortcomings concerning the national question, its address to other cities, what it did and did not say about the war with prussia and its rallying of provincial masses. (badiou 2010a, 179) badiou notes with satisfaction that ‘engels formalises the commune’s contradictions in the same way’ when he showed that the two main political tendencies in the commune, the blanquists and the proudhonists, ‘ended up doing exactly the opposite of their manifest ideology’ – the blanquist partisans of centralised and conspiratorial politics had to destroy the state bureaucracy while the proudhonist opponents of associations had to support large scale workers’ associations. to this, badiou poses the question of ‘how would the current that marx and engels represented in 1871, and even much later, [would] have been more adequate to the situation’ and ‘with what extra means would its presumed hegemony have endowed the situation’. badiou leaves us to imagine the answer, noting only that ‘the ambiguity of marx’s account will be carried [sera levee] both by the social-democratic disposition and its leninist radicalization, that is in the fundamental motif of the party, over a century’ (badiou 2010a, 181). this motif too must be discarded. for badiou, the paris commune ‘for the first and to this day only time, broke with the parliamentary destiny of popular and workers’ political movements’ (badiou 2010a, 196-7). though the cultural revolution ‘bears witness to the impossibility truly and globally to free politics from the framework of the party-state that imprisons it’, ‘all emancipatory politics’ must nevertheless ‘put an end to the model of the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics “without party”’, though without lapsing into anarchism (badiou 2010a, 155). if the left is ‘a set of parliamentary political personnel that proclaim that they are the only ones equipped to bear the general consequences of a singular political movement’, it is time to break with it (badiou 2010a, 198). indeed, ‘a rupture with the representative form of politics’ is necessary, even a ‘rupture with “democracy”’ (badiou 2010a, 227). more than ever, political power, as the current economic crisis with its single slogan of ‘rescue the banks’ clearly proves, is merely an agent of capitalism. revolutionaries are divided and only weakly organized, broad sectors of working class youth have fallen prey to nihilistic despair, the vast majority of intellectuals are servile. in contrast to all this, though just as isolated as marx and his friends were at the time when the retrospectively famous manifesto of the communist party came out in 1848, there are nonetheless more and more of us involved in organizing new types of political processes among the poor and working masses and in trying to find every possible way to support re-emergent forms of the communist idea in reality. (badiou 2010b, 14) to badiou’s idea of communism, which claims kinship with marx and marxism even as it rejects the principal elements of their politics, michael hardt and antonio negri add the proposal that communism be conceived as a resistance to the privatization of the ‘commons’. they agree with badiou that the project requires a non-statist and non-party approach. rejecting 7 both the ‘collapse theories’ which ‘envision the end of capitalist rule resulting from catastrophic crises, followed by a new economic order that somehow rises whole out of its ashes’ and ‘the notion of socialist transition that foresees a transfer of wealth and control from the private to the public, increasing state regulation, control and management of social production’, hardt and negri explain that ‘the kind of transition we are working with ... requires the growing autonomy of the multitude from both private and public control; the metamorphosis of social subjects through education and training in cooperation, communication and organizing social encounters; and thus a progressive accumulation of the common’ (hardt and negri 2009, 311). the resistance to the neoliberal privatization of the commons must not assume ‘that the only alternative to the private is the public, that is what is managed and regulated by states and other governmental authorities’ (hardt and negri 2009, viii). for hardt and negri, the commons include on the one hand ‘the commonwealth of the material world – the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty – which in classic european political texts is often claimed to be the inheritance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together’ and ‘those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects and so forth’ (hardt and negri 2009, viii). hardt justifies this new vision of communism through a re-reading of two passages from marx’s work, the section on ‘private property and communism’ in the 1844 paris manuscripts and one from the final part of capital, volume 1. in the former, hardt points out, marx equates communism with the abolition of private property. for marx this does not mean extending and generalizing private property to the whole community but rather ‘the abolition of .... property as such’ (hardt 2010, 139). hardt quotes marx saying ‘private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it’ (marx 1975, 351) and goes on to ask: what would it mean for something to be ours when we do not possess it? what would it mean to regard ourselves and our world not as property? has private property made us so stupid that we cannot see that? marx is searching here for the common. the open access and sharing that characterise use of the common are outside and inimical to property relations. we have been made so stupid that we can only recognize the world as private or public. we have become blind to the common. (hardt 2010, 139) [emphasis added] this search ends, hardt avers, in capital where marx speaks of how ‘capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation... [which] does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e. on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production’ (marx 1867/1977, 929). for hardt this means that capitalist development inevitably results in the increasingly central role of cooperation and the common, which in turn provides the tools for overthrowing the capitalist mode of production and constitutes the bases for an alternative society and mode of production, a communism of the common. (hardt 2010, 140) important as this is, hardt argues, this conception ‘grasps primarily the material elements in question’ and these are not ‘the dominant forms of capitalist production today’ (hardt 2010, 140). but here, the passages from the paris manuscripts come to the rescue, highlighting ‘the immaterial, really biopolitical aspects’. here, hardt argues, marx conceives communism as the ‘supersession of private property as human self-estrangement’, as the ‘true appropriation of the human essence through and for man’ and ‘the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being’. here appropriation is 8 ... no longer appropriation of the object in the form of private property but appropriation of our own subjectivity, our human, social relations. marx explains this communist appropriation ... in terms of the human sensorium and the full range of creative and productive powers. ‘man appropriates his integral essence in an integral way’, which he explains in terms of ‘all his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving’. i think the term ‘appropriation’ here is misleading because marx is not talking about capturing something that already exists, but rather creating something new. .... the positive content of communism, which corresponds to the abolition of private property, is the autonomous human production of subjectivity, the human production of humanity... (hardt 2010, 141) when hardt proposes that in such appropriation, ‘paradoxically the object of production is really a subject’ and ‘the ultimate object of capitalist production is not commodities but social relations or forms of life’ (hardt 2010, 142), he is subscribing to a view of contemporary capitalist production (shared by žižek and negri, as we see below) based on conceptions of ‘cognitive capitalism’, one of a family of diagnoses of contemporary capitalism cognate with ‘knowledge economy’, ‘information society’ etc., which claim that capitalism increasingly involves cultural rather than material production. in it, ‘the increasing centrality of the common on capitalist production – the production of ideas, affects, social relations and forms of life – are emerging as the conditions and weapons for a communist project’ (hardt 2010, 143). hardt also subscribes, again in common with žižek and negri, that such appropriation puts ‘[l]iving beings as fixed capital ...at the centre’ and involves ‘the production of forms of life [which is] becoming the basis of added value’ thanks to ‘human faculties, competences, knowledges, and affects – those acquired on the job but more importantly those accumulated outside work’ which ‘are directly productive of value’ (hardt 2010, 141). slavoj žižek stations himself farther to the left of the other new communists, though this turns out to be a largely rhetorical location. he endorses the need to revive the communist idea because liberal democratic capitalism ‘contains antagonisms powerful enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction’. these antagonisms include the corporate invasion of the two commons indentified by hardt and negri as well as two more: our genetic heritage, which also needs to be protected against neoliberal privatization and that between the included and the ‘excluded’. the last is particularly important because, žižek argues, without the ‘excluded’, ‘the global capitalist system’ can ‘survive its long term antagonism and simultaneously ... avoid the communist solution’ by reinventing ‘some kind of socialism – in the guise of communitarianism, populism, capitalism with asian values, or whatever’ and so ‘only the reference to the “excluded” justifies the term communism’ (žižek 2010, 214). žižek aligns the idea of the ‘excluded’ with badiou’s reference to the new proletarians, and proposes a radicalization of the concept of the proletariat ‘to an existential level well beyond marx’s imagination’, well beyond ‘the classic image of proletarians having “nothing to lose but their chains”’ to one in which ‘we are in danger of losing everything’. however, he detracts from badiou in insisting on the continuing importance of a politics focused on the state, even arguing for a reinstatement of the concept of a dictatorship of the proletariat in which ‘the state itself is radically transformed, relying on new forms of popular participation’ (žižek 2010, 220). he also endorses a democratic conception of struggle, žižek argues that whereas ‘till now, capitalism seemed inextricably linked with democracy’, ‘[n]ow ... the link ... has been broken’ (žižek 2010, 221). the reason lies in the emergence of ‘cognitive capitalism’ (vercellone 2008) in which ‘exploitation in the classic marxist sense is no longer possible – which is why it has to be 9 enforced more and more by direct legal measures, i.e. by non-economic force’ (žižek 2010, 224). in making this case, žižek refers to an argument of negri’s in which the latter interprets certain passages in the grundrisse to argue that the increasing role of fixed capital in capitalist production, which reflects ‘the development of general social knowledge,’ leads to a situation in which the fixed capital becomes ‘man himself’ because the ‘productive power of labour’ is ‘itself the greatest productive power’ (žižek 2010, 222). once this happens, ... the moment the key component of fixed capital is ‘man himself’, its ‘general social knowledge’, the very social foundation of capitalist exploitation is undermined, and the role of capital becomes purely parasitic; with today’s global interactive media, creative inventiveness is no longer individual, it is immediately collectivised, part of ‘common’, such that any attempt to privatise it through copyrighting become problematic – more and more literally, ‘property is theft’ here. (žižek 2010, 222) žižek agrees with negri when the latter says that ‘the wage epoch is over’ and that rather than ‘the confrontation between work and capital concerning wages’ we are witness to ‘the confrontation between the multitude and the state concerning the instauration of the citizen’s income’ (žižek 2010, 222). žižek notes negri’s conclusion from this that the task is ‘not [to] abolish capital, but to compel it to recognise the common good, i.e. one remains within capitalism’ (žižek 2010, 222, emphasis added). žižek, as is his style, also demurs a little, positioning his interlocutor, negri, as the supplier of merely a ‘standard’ (dare we say fordist?) ‘post-hegelian matrix of the productive flux which is always in excess with regard to the totality which tries to subdue and control it’. against this, žižek claims to provide something altogether more enticing – post-fordist, flexibly produced and custom-made, one presumes – a ‘parallax shift’ in which ‘we perceive the capitalist network itself as the true excess over the flow of the productive multitude’ (žižek 2010, 223). however, this appears more an exercise in brand placement than any registration of serious scholarly or intellectual difference. for he has rejoined negri by the next page in subscribing to carlo vercellone’s idea that contemporary capitalism is no longer about profit but rent. the increasing role of the ‘general intellect’ results, for žižek, not ‘as marx seems to have expected, [in] the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the transformation of profit into rent on the privatized general intellect’ (žižek 2010, 224-5). as the example of bill gates ‘who became the richest man on earth within a couple of decades by appropriating the rent received from allowing millions of intellectual workers to participate in that particular form of the “general intellect” that he privatizes and controls’, shows workers ‘are no longer separated from the objective conditions of their labour’ since they own their own computers, for instance, but ‘remain cut off from the social field of their work, for the “general intellect” – because the latter is mediated by private capital’ (žižek 2010, 225). what is true of the ‘commons of culture’ is also true of the ‘commons of external nature’: contemporary high prices of oil are, according to žižek, due to the ‘rent we pay the owners for this resource because of its scarcity and limited supply’ (žižek 2010, 225). žižek reads these changes as requiring an emphasis on the state and democratic politics and appears to part company with the other new communists. he argues that there is a fundamental ‘contradiction’ of today’s ‘postmodern’ capitalism: while its logic is deregulatory, ‘anti-statal’, nomadic/deterritorializing, etc., its key tendency towards the ‘becoming-rent-of-profit’ signals the strengthening role of the state whose (not only) regulatory function is ever more omnipresent. dynamic de-territorialization coexists with and relies on increasingly authoritarian interventions of the state and its legal and other apparatuses. what can be discerned at the horizon of our historical becoming is thus a 10 society in which personal libertarianism and hedonism coexist with (and are sustained by) a complex web of regulatory state mechanisms. far from disappearing, the state is today gaining in strength. (žižek 2010, 224) though žižek envisages a predominantly political fight against this rent-seeking predatory capitalism, its content belies this. in žižek’s view, the world’s working class consists of three groups – those involved in intellectual planning and marketing, material production and the provision of material resources, i.e. intellectual labourers, the old manual working class and the outcastes. unfortunately they are divided by their adherence to ‘enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism, populist fundamentalism and more extreme singular forms’. overcoming these divisions in a unity ‘is already their victory’ (žižek 2010, 226). the proudhonism of the new communists marx’s critique of proudhon in the poverty of philosophy of 1847 and in scattered references throughout his later economic works reveals proudhon’s ideas to be a compendium of the characteristic errors of vulgar political economy arising out of the fetishism of commodities (‘he wants to be the synthesis – he is a composite error.’ marx 1847, 107). unable, in particular, to differentiate between use value and value (or exchange value), he equated utility and value though they were in fact opposed (marx 1847, 32), assumed that commodity production could be reconciled with ‘labour money’ (marx 1947, 172-5 and marx 1867/1977, 188-9) and took the direct exchangeability of all commodities for granted (marx 1867/1977, 161). proudhon’s proposals attempted to articulate small producers’ interests. however, given that the petty bourgeois have no consistent interests, since they are contradicted on the one hand by those of the capitalists and on the other by any potential socialism, they can only constitute wishful thinking on the part of the petty bourgeois. as poulantzas was to point out, the petty bourgeoisie has, in the long run, no autonomous class position of its own. this simply means that, in a capitalist social formation, there is only the bourgeois way and the proletarian way (the socialist way): there is no such thing as the ‘third way’, which various theories of the ‘middle class’ insist on. ... this means, among other things, that the petty bourgeoisie has nowhere ever been the politically dominant class. ... [t]he class positions taken by the petty bourgeoisie must necessarily be located in the balance of forces between the bourgeoisies and the working class and thus link up (by acting for or against) either with the class positions of the bourgeoisie or with those of the working class. ... [in the latter case] they do so even while they are still marked by petty bourgeois ideological features. (poulantzas 1975, 297-8) below we see first how marx criticised proudhon for rejecting statism, in effect, any ‘general organization of labour in society’, because of a misunderstanding of the relationship between large scale capitalism and petty commodity production and go on to show that the new communists not only suffer from the same affliction but one made worse by their anticommunism. a critique of a number of new features of the new communists thinking and how it reflects their interests as a self-styled ‘creative class’ follows. divisions of labour: society and factory in their rejection of state and party, not only are the new communists simply preaching a new third way, even as they reject that of parliamentarist social democracy, they are, like proudhon, 11 refusing what marx calls below, ‘a general organization of labour in society’. instead, they affirm their faith in the market organization of society, and the order of property, private property, it presupposes. marx exposed the logic of this position as follows: the same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the livelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining ‘genius’ of the individual capitalist. it is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory. (marx 1867/1977, 477) in effect not only does the petty bourgeoisie fear proletarianization precisely because it knows, as only practioners can, what is involved in proletarian exploitation and oppression, but also because they can only think of socialism as the generalization of their current autonomy which rests on the radical heteronomy of others rather than as a socialised, collective, autonomy of all. marx was to remark ironically in capital how ‘[t]he sphere of circulation or commodity exchange ... is in fact the very eden of the innate rights of man. it is the exclusive realm of freedom, equality, property and bentham’ (marx 1867/1977, 280). this fictional idea formed the basis of the ‘socialism’ of petty bourgeois ‘socialists’ like proudhon: ‘proudhon creates his ideal of justice, of “justice éternelle”, from the juridical relations that correspond to the production of commodities: he thereby proves, to the consolation of all good petty bourgeois, that the production of commodities is a form as eternal as justice’ (marx 1867/1977, 178n). since such utopias rest on a narrowly one-sided view of capitalist society, ignoring the extraction of surplus labour in production, their proponents necessarily fail to appreciate how capitalism, and the wage labour which is its necessary foundation, alone generalises commodity production and the market, and does so necessarily at the expense of a ‘dialectical inversion’ of the laws of commodity production: only where wage-labour is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society as a whole; but it is also true that only there does it unfold all its hidden potentialities. to say that the intervention of wage labour adulterates commodity production is to say that commodity production must not develop if it is to remain unadulterated. to the extent that commodity production, in accordance with its own immanent laws, undergoes a further development into capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production must undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become the laws of capitalist appropriation. (marx 1867/1977, 733-4) engels in his introduction to german edition of the poverty of philosophy put his finger on the contradictory political kernel of proudhonism – its desire to abolish large scale industry and the proletariat which are the conditions of existence of petty commodity production. and the petty bourgeois especially, whose honest labour – even if it is only that of his workmen and apprentices – is daily more and more depreciated in value by the competition of large-scale production and machinery, this small-scale producer especially must long for a society in which the exchange of products according to their labour value is at last a complete and invariable truth. in other words, he must long for a society in which a single law of commodity production prevails exclusively and in full, but in 12 which the conditions are abolished in which it can prevail at all, viz., the other laws of commodity production and, later, of capitalist production. (marx 1847, 12) to this inability to understand that petty commodity production only exits on the basis of the generalization of commodity production which capitalism effects through large scale industry and wage labour, which formed the basis of proudhon’s anti-statism, the new communists add their own political baggage, a product of later history. the withering state of proletarian dictatorship when badiou alleges that marx’s account of the paris commune is ambiguous, marshals engels’ elaboration on it to testify further to this alleged ambiguity and rests his case against the statism of actually existing communism in the east and ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’ in the west on marx and engels’ writing on the paris commune, he pins on them a conception of the state they never had. this is the straightforward liberal and neoliberal conception of the state as the realm of coercion and the market as the realm of freedom. not only does it overlook the mutual interdependence of the two in capitalist society but, much more seriously, allows the conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be opposed to that of the ‘withering away of the state’. but in what marx and engels meant by the state, the former was the necessary instrument of the latter. for the state was not the administrative apparatus dreaded by liberals and neoliberals but an instrument of class domination. in this sense marx and engels’ assessment of the paris commune as an exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat – ‘do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like? look at the paris commune. that was the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (engels 1891) – was anything but ambiguous: its [the paris commune’s] true secret was this. it was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour. (marx 1871/1974, 212) in the civil war in france, marx records first the full extent of the force and fraud the counter-revolution headed by thiers had mustered against the popular cause. it was what gave the commune that character marx and engels would later recognise as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the necessary instrument of the ‘withering away’ of the state as class domination and its replacement by freely associated producers which is communism. ‘armed paris was the only serious obstacle in the way of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy’ (marx 1871/174, 198). he then emphasised the scrupulously defensive character of the commune’s fight against counterrevolution. in a few compressed paragraphs he traced the transformation of the feudal absolutist state into an instrument of capitalist class domination (marx 1871/1974, 206-8) before going on to describe the measures through which the commune, during its all-too-short life, began converting it into an instrument of workers’ power: ‘the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people’; the merging executive and legislative power; the enforcement of accountability on the police; public service at workmen’s wages; education and science freed from state and church influence and provided free; among others. contrary to the fashionable portrayal of marx as the ur-globalist through the repeated quotation of the same passages from the communist manifesto (for a fuller critique of this tendency see desai forthcoming), marx also saw the commune as reorganising ‘that unity of great nations which, if originally brought about by political force, has now become a powerful coefficient of social production’ (marx 1871/1974, 211) and doing so in a spirit of inter-nationalism. 13 of course, ‘the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the red flag, the symbol of the republic of labour, floating over the hôtel de ville’ (marx 1871/1974, 214) and the commune was brutally overpowered after a mere two months by the joint forces of thiers and bismarck, and this unparalleled breach of the law of nations, even as understood by the old-world lawyers, instead of arousing the ‘civilized’ governments of europe to declare the felonious prussian government ... an outlaw amongst nations, only incites them to consider whether the few victims who escape the double cordon around paris are not to be given up to the hangman at versailles! (marx 1871/1974, 231) the commune, the dictatorship of the proletariat was, marx noted in the first draft of the civil war in france, ‘the reabsorption of state power by society’ (marx 1871/1974, 250). it dispelled the delusion as if administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste – state parasites, richly paid sycophants and sinecurists, in the higher posts, absorbing the intelligence of the masses and turning them against themselves in the lower places of the hierarchy. (marx 1871/1974, 251) and the commune embodied the consciousness that the superseding of the economical conditions of the slavery of labour by the conditions of free and associated labour can only be the progressive work of time (that economical transformation), that they require not only a change of distribution, but a new organization of production, or rather the delivery (setting free) of the social forms of production in present organized labour (engendered by present industry), of the trammels of slavery, of their present class character and their harmonious national and international coordination. (marx 1871/1974, 253). [emphasis added] it is such ‘general organization of labour in society’ badiou and the new communists would reject. they are, of course, free to do so. what they are not free to do is assert that any ‘ambiguity’ in marx’s or engels’ accounts warrants it. nor are they free to assert that marx or engels criticised any ‘statist incapacities’ of the commune – certainly not in the civil war in france, or its first draft, or yet engels’ 1891 introduction. it was not out of any love for centralization or authority but because it was historically necessary in a society whose productive capacity had come to rest on large scale production that marx and engels so resolutely opposed anarchist tendencies and so scathingly criticised petty bourgeois fantasies about doing away with any overall coordination of the economy, fantasies that also rested, in effect, on accepting market coordination. but the reality that capitalism, necessarily large scale and based on wage labour alone generalised market relations and commodity production was bound to undermine the implementation of such fantasies. engels’ remarks on the fate of the proudhonists and the blanquists in his 1891 introduction highlight this contradiction. proudhonists, despite their ‘positive hatred’ for association, found that ‘large scale industry had so much ceased to be an exceptional case that by far the most important decrees of the commune instituted an organization of large scale industry and even of manufacture which was not based only on the association of workers in each factory, but also aimed at combining all these associations into one great union; in short an organization which, as marx quite rightly says in the civil war, must necessarily have led in the end to communism, that is to say, the direct antithesis of the proudhon doctrine’. for their part, the centralizing and conspiratorial blanquists, a majority in the commune, found themselves party to the fall of centralized and oppressive state 14 power (engels 1891). one may note in concluding this part that while žižek explicitly supports the importance of both party and state, in practice the unity of his three components of the working class appears to be the horizon of his conception of politics. everybody’s property versus common property the new communists’ incantation of marx and communism may signify a genuine desire to make their understanding of capitalism compatible with marx’s powerful critique, but in the case of all the main points on which they seek marx’s authority, they only end up proving that incantation never did require understanding. take their conception of that centrepiece of their project, the commons. as a very early critique (ciriacy-wantrup and bishop 1975) of the garret hardin’s (1968) understanding of ‘the commons’, which appears to underlie the new communists’ vision of communism, pointed out, the commons were never ‘everybody’s property’. rather the commons were defined by complex institutional arrangements which provided rights to some sets of users and explicitly excluded others. this implies two things. first, the earth, culture and language or even our genetic inheritance are only open to corporate predation to the extent that they are not protected by regimes of property rights, or when the regimes which do protect them are too weak. second, protecting them requires creating rules of access and use which have to be made and enforced by states. while under feudalism, with its dispersal of political power, such regimes were necessarily local, they are not under modern capitalist conditions and are unlikely to be at least in early socialist or communist ones. there is no alternative to state enforcement. but there is a question of whose interests such arrangements and their enforcement will protect. given marx’s complex chronicling of the use of political power to usurp common property and replace the rules governing them by private property (marx 1867/1977, 873-941), and his account of the manner in which the paris commune sought to transform the state into an instrument of workers power, including extending collective ownership over the means of production discussed above, he would have understood this point which appears to have evaded our new communists entirely. indeed, contrary to hardt, marx never spoke of communism as the abolition of property per se, only of private property (marx 1975, 348). when he quoted marx saying that ‘private property has made us so stupid that an object is only ours when we have it’, hardt did not tell us that marx continued thus: ‘when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short when we use it’. marx was, therefore, criticising private property, and capitalist private property, not property as such. as he saw it, under communism capitalist private property would be replaced with forms of collective property appropriate to the structures of production, those inherited from capitalism and those created anew. the abolition of property as such which hardt and negri appear to desire, would only lead to the sort of free-for-all that hardin, not to mention hobbes, feared, a sort of state of nature in which the powerful would be able to appropriate at the expense of the weak. no amount of poetry about sensuous human appropriation of the world can hide the fact that the new communists of the commons not only misunderstand their central category – the commons – but also marx’s position on it, even as they seek to licence so much of their discourse through it. marx was not ‘searching’ for any ‘common’ hardt would recognise. marx’s understanding of property, evinced not least in the economic and philosophical manuscripts to which hardt refers, was too grounded, not to mention historically sophisticated, to make that mistake. 15 vampire capitalism or zombie workers another critical and, prima facie, disingenuous, misunderstanding concerns the new communists’ account of capitalism and the place of their own ‘creative class’ in it. negri and žižek attempt to found carlo vercellone’s trendy account of ‘cognitive capitalism’ (see e.g. vercellone 2008; for a critique see camfield 2007) in marx’s own work. correctly quoting negri who was, in turn, quoting marx from the grundrisse on how the development of fixed capital expresses the extent to which ‘social knowledge has become a direct force of production’ (marx 1973, 706), žižek (2010, 222) goes on to claim, incorrectly, that with the development of general social knowledge, the ‘productive power of labour’ is thus ‘itself the greatest productive power. from the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital. this fixed capital is man himself’. marx certainly speaks of social knowledge becoming a direct force of production in many places. however, the matter of the worker, intellectual or otherwise, becoming ‘fixed capital’ is another matter altogether. for those conversant with capital, it is simply inconceivable that marx could have said such a thing. he distinguished clearly between the worker as living labour in contrast to constant (fixed and circulating) capital as dead labour, between the worker who adds value and the capital which only transfers all or part of its value (depending on whether it is used up entirely or only partially in a given production process). a closer look at the passages in question, and at the grundrisse where they occur, shows that marx does not, in fact, give up on this distinction, the keystone of his theory of value. martin nicolaus points out in his foreword to the grundrisse that in this work marx’s terminology, particularly relating to value, and money, ‘is not quite untangled from and clear of the ricardian lexicon’. this means that these questions are best studied from works marx prepared for publication after the grundrisse’ (nicolaus 1973, 16–17). but on the particular point at issue, žižek and negri’s argument cannot even be given the benefit of any doubts this might create. the phrase ‘this fixed capital being man himself’ occurs in a critique of the bourgeois conception of economy or saving which marx contrasts with ‘real economy.’ by that he means how economy or saving should be viewed, and would be, in a communist society: as the saving of labour time, the development of the human capacity to produce. whereas in capitalist society such saving takes the form of the accumulation of fixed capital, in a socialist society it would take the form of the development of human capacities. he adds that in a communist society, the development of human capacities, this sort of ‘saving,’ would be also inseparable from the human capacity to consume, completely upending the everyday bourgeois conception of saving as abstinence from consumption (marx 1973, 711–12). it is true that in this passage marx moves between using categories that apply to capitalist society alone, which form the focus of his discussion in capital, and those that emerge from the conception of ‘production in general’ which abstracts the common features of all social forms of production (marx 1973, 85) and which occur in capital only briefly, as for instance in the profound ruminations on labour and its history which serve to point up the specificity, not to mention absurdity and monstrosity, of capitalist conditions and categories (marx 1867/1977, 283–92). but he sets out the distinction between these two sets of categories at the outset of the grundrisse. while there are elements common to all forms of production, precisely those elements 16 . . .which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such, so that in their unity – which arises already fromt he identity of the subject, humanity, and of the object, nature – their essential difference is not forgotten. the whole profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting. for example, no production is possible without an instrument of production, even if this instrument is only the hand. no production without stored-up, past labour, even if it is only the facility gathered together and concentrated in the hand of the savage by repeated practice. capital is, among other things, also an instrument of production, also objectified, past labour. therefore capital is a general, eternal relation of nature; that is if i leave out just the specific quality which alone makes ‘instrument of production’ and ‘stored-up labour’ into capital (marx 1973, 85–6; emphasis added). so not only are we clear that for marx capital, fixed or otherwise, can occur only under capitalist conditions but also that it is precisely a characteristic of ‘modern economists’ and their apologia for capital that they confound the difference between stored-up past labour and capital. žižek and negri are welcome to agree with the modern economists, just not welcome to take marx’s authority for doing so. the weight of the distinction marx makes repeatedly in capital between the worker as living, value producing and value-transferring labour in contrast to constant (fixed and circulating) capital as dead labour simply crushes any attempt to argue that workers are, under any capitalist circumstances, ‘fixed capital’. marx often and appropriately spoke of capital as a vampire, dead labour subsisting and growing by extracting the blood, the labour, of living workers, but the conversion of workers under capitalism into another category of the ‘undead’ deserves a place in the annals of solecism. the knowledge producer cannot be fixed capital for two further reasons. on the one hand knowledge production is unproductive labour. that is to say, that while it is very useful, and thus productive of piles of use values, it is unproductive of value or surplus value. and those knowledge workers who resent this insinuation, as it were, simply fail to understand, or do not know, that according to marx the production of value is the basis only of the extraction of surplus value and that uniquely capitalist form of surplus labour, profit. by contrast, communism would be a system for the production of use values exclusively. if one understood this there would be no ground to disdain unproductive labour or resent being called an unproductive worker. secondly, žižek and negri also appear to be victims of the neoclassical and, in marx’s time, vulgar economic, illusion that capital is ‘productive’, an illusion that conveniently justifies profit which is, according to marx, rooted in the extraction of surplus value, and therefore exploitation. marx ridicules the ‘vulgar economists’ who speak of the ‘productivity of capital’ (e.g. marx 1867/1977, 426). thus, while žižek and negri see intellectual workers as fixed capital, marx would never make such a conflation. therefore, whatever the merit of the following claim, that ‘since capital organizes its exploitation by appearing as “fixed capital” against living labour, the moment the key component of fixed capital is “man himself”, its “general social knowledge”, the very social foundation of capitalist exploitation is undermined, and the role of capital becomes purely parasitic’ (žižek 2010, 222), it has no foundation in marx. 17 the value of knowledge and the knowledge of value indeed, it is only their general ignorance of marx’s critique of political economy, not to mention its hopeless conflation with the categories of bourgeois political economy which permits the new communists to announce the demise of some such as ‘profit’ and the emergence of other such as ‘profit-as-becoming-rent’. not only do the new communists rely on questionable ideas about the emergence of some sort of knowledge/information/cognitive capitalism (huws 1999), nothing could be farther from the truth than that ‘cognitive capitalism’, ‘information society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ and their attendant production processes are qualitatively different from the commodity production analysed by marx. as marx pointed out, all labour processes involve knowledge (marx 1867/1977, 284) and in this the so-called information commodities are no different except in degree. all such knowledge is social and is embodied in the collective worker and this, while making the working class as a whole more productive, in part by embodying more knowledge in some parts of it than others, by no means turns it, or any part of it, into fixed capital. knowledge does not create value. though it may generate ever greater heaps of use values and make labour more productive, it is not itself an intermediate good. the value of any intermediate good is only transferred to the product in being destroyed in the intermediate form and knowledge which is embodied in the collective worker is never destroyed but can be used repeatedly and for many different purposes. nor does knowledge have value – though it may have incomparable use value, it does not have value because it is the product of a long human history and not of capitalist production: as marx said, things are useful in many ways and ‘the discovery of these ways and hence of the manifold uses of things is the work of history’ (marx 1867/977, 126). just as, for marx, nature has use value but no value, so ‘science, generally speaking, costs the capitalist nothing, a fact that by no means prevents him from exploiting it’ (marx 1867/1977, 508n). even today, the further development of knowledge takes place within systems – whether public schools or universities, not to mention extra-institutional locations – which produce only use values. as fred block (2008) has recently recorded, this is especially true of the avowedly free market us in the past several decades where the attempt to create property rights over certain elements of knowledge has rested, nevertheless, on a ‘hidden developmental state’. thus, there has been no ‘privatization of the general intellect itself’ (žižek 2010, 224) and when žižek claims that marx overlooked it he is engaging in a double effrontery: falsely attributing the idea of the worker turned into fixed capital to marx and then accusing him of not anticipating the alleged ‘privatization of the general intellect’. rent versus profit? to speak of profit being replaced by rent is simply absurd. as marx and the classical political economy of his time clearly saw, rent is, like interest, an unearned deduction from profit and can never exist independently of, let alone replace, the latter in a commodity producing society. the idea could only have occurred to those unfamiliar with marx’s economic analysis: his labour theory of value which clearly states that the value of things is determined by the socially necessary labour embodied in it; his clear recognition that while things which do not have value can still have a price, payment of which represents deductions from wages and profits; his analysis of productive and unproductive labour; and his analysis of the distribution of profit to 18 the owners of land and money capital. the general unfamiliarity with these ideas is licensed by marxist economists long inured to adapting marx’s critique of political economy to neoclassical or marginalist economics even though it differed on the central idea of value, rejecting classical political economy’s conception of objective value in favor of a subjective idea of value, based on utility and individual preferences (clarke, 1991; desai 2010). this ‘marxism without marx’, as freeman (2010) calls it, habituates our new communists to think in neoclassical or vulgar economic terms such as factor endowments and incomes in which ‘land’ and ‘capital’, not to mention ‘knowledge’, are regarded as productive of value. as for the idea that the principal source of surplus in contemporary society is not profit extracted from workers but rent from the privatization of the ‘general intellect’ of the ‘creative class’, one can only admire the size of the creative class’s collective ego which assumes that the only ‘value’ these commodities embody is that of ‘millions of intellectual workers’ who are ‘no longer separated from the objective conditions of their labour since they own their own computers’ (žižek 2010, 225). quite apart from there being a big question whether the ‘general intellect’ has been privatized at all (archibugi and filipetti 2010), there is the small matter of the surplus value, and consequently profit, extracted from labour of those who produce the material objects which the products of ‘cognitive capitalism’ still are, not to mention those on which the ‘creative class’ must still subsist. the democracy of profit and the authoritarianism of rent? žižek’s associated argument that the turn towards authoritarianism is rooted in this transition from profit to rent is independently problematic. the idea that ‘till now, capitalism seemed inextricably linked with democracy’ betrays such a profoundly a-historical and unmarxist understanding as to take one’s breath away. capitalism’s relationship to liberal democracy was always profoundly conflicted. while the past thirty years of neoliberalism – with its rising inequality, attacks on unions, denaturing of democracy by money and the media and even the very idea of democracy – may have made this relationship even more antagonistic, it was hardly idyllic before that. that liberal democracy accompanied capitalism should surely be considered a tautology: it was hardly going to accompany feudalism. but it took generations of workers’, women’s, minorities and colonial peoples’ struggles to realise universal suffrage and democratise the liberal order of capitalist private property in country after country (a very partial and subjective list of key works on these themes: therborn 1977; cammack 1997; eley 2002; macpherson 1979; leys 1999; mair 2006). this should be familiar to any leftist. sadly, it is not. the new communists and marxism without marx perry anderson remarked long ago that western marxism, a product of defeat, ‘inverted the trajectory of marx’s own development....where the founder of historical materialism moved progressively from philosophy to politics and then economics, as the central terrain of this thought, the successors of the tradition that emerged after 1920 increasingly turned back from economics and politics to philosophy’, that they ‘concentrate[d] overwhelmingly on the study of superstructures’ and left ‘the central economic and political realities that have dominated world history’ out of account (anderson 1976, 52, 75, 103). however, even this judgement seems on reflection too lenient. for marx’s philosophy could hardly be separated from his economic and political analyses and not surprisingly the chief deficiencies of today’s new communist 19 philosophers lie precisely in their economic and political analyses and their misapprehensions of the very marxist ideas they wish to rely on. one may also note the historical incongruity of a conference of avowedly left intellectuals in the midst of the greatest economic crisis of capitalism for 70 years not only devoid of economic analysis but seeking to revive communism as an ‘idea’, rather than attempting, through economic and political analyses, to discern ‘the elements of the new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant’ indeed, worse, of discerning only themselves – the ‘creative class’ as fixed capital (!). it is this class which now becomes so central to capital that its income now is no longer profit from the extraction of surplus labour but rent from the ‘privatization of the general intellect’, namely themselves. even after making their own labour the fount of all value in contemporary society, their emancipatory vision can aspire to no more than the freedom of this class to acquire those ‘human faculties, competences, knowledges, and affects – those acquired on the job but more importantly those accumulated outside work’ which ‘are directly productive of value’ (hardt 2010, 141) through a liberation of the conditions of their social reproduction from neoliberal privatization. this is the stunted utopia of the class that stands to ‘lose everything’. as for those who do indeed have nothing to lose, corralled into the categories of ‘new proletarians’ and the ‘excluded’, they turn out to be little more than a phantom class, a product of a radicalization of the concept of the proletariat ‘to an existential level well beyond marx’s imagination’. indeed, for all its confusions, 19th century proudhonism cuts a rather more radical figure than its 21st century epigones. whereas proudhonism represented the independent commodity production, the new communists represent a ‘creative class’ whose leading edge are employees of big capital. whereas proudhonism proclaimed the abolition of capital, albeit equating it with big capital and the evil of wage labour, as their goal, the new communists appear at best confused and at worst disingenuous when they take the name of a movement which aimed at the revolutionary transformation of capitalism but aimed explicitly at its preservation. at best the new communists seek to prevent the abolition of their own conditions of labour through neoliberal privatization, though here too they are inconsistent, saying on the one hand that ‘any attempt to privatize [intellect] becomes problematic’ thanks to its social character and, on the other, launching their philippics against the possibility. in fact, they need not have bothered. in reality the intellectual property rights regime which the west and particularly the united states have attempted to impose on the world ‘has not and could not change the nature of knowledge and the ways in which this can be transferred [or not] among economic agents’ (archibugi and filipetti 2010, 146). the new communism of the commons is, moreover, unlikely to have emancipatory consequences for the vast masses whose name they conveniently invoke. their account of ‘cognitive capitalism’ not only does not criticise but in fact rests on the division of intellectual and manual labour whose consequences not only marx but also smith criticised so powerfully. indeed, so far it is also unclear how the interests of the poor might be affected if this relatively privileged class seeks, nimby-style, to protect nature, which it considers ‘the inheritance of humanity as a whole’, conveniently ignoring not only the division of humanity into nations but its division into rich and poor nations and their own location in the former, from ‘corporate control’, while explicitly rejecting any state role in doing so. such anti-statism forgets the reality of powerful state protections in the first world and would leave third world populations defenceless against the predations of foreign and domestic capital (for another critique of this 20 tendency see desai 2009). truly the new communists treat marxist and communist ideas as a grab-bag of accessories with which to trick out their absurd imaginings as communism. use values, the state and revolution in conclusion, i would like to reflect on three themes: why produce value? what’s exactly wrong with ‘statism’? what might revolution look like? the first point is easily dealt with: the flawed idea that the labour of the creative class has become ‘value’ rests on an all-too-common illusion that the production of value in capitalism was, according to marx, a good thing. while he necessarily focused on it in his critique of the logic of capital, the reality is that communism would, in marxist terms, require the cessation of the production of value and a vast expansion of the production of use-values and the welfare state, the great gain of the western working class and nothing if not the result of parliamentary and state-focused politics, and the mitigation of oppression it represents is, precisely, an expansion of the production of use values. that our new communists do not understand this is the result of a problem they share with the proudhonism of the 19th century: an inability to distinguish between value and use value. the expansion of all means of producing use values – whether home/autonomous production or through common/state production would, in any transition from capitalism, be part of a broader strategy of reducing the production of value and increasing the production of use-values. this brings us to our second point: just as the new communists conflate use values and exchange values, so they conflate regulation and the state. as i have already pointed out, deluded individualism of the new petty bourgeois concept of itself as a creative class leads them to defer and deny any possibility of ‘a general organization of labour in society’ and in this it is of little consequence that emancipation for most will involve precisely such a general organization of labour in society. for marx and engels, as we saw above, the state was above all an instrument of class domination. it is this stateness of the state that would wither away as soon as there was no need for class domination. by the same token, the need to administer the complex division of labour – in factories and in society – would remain at least in the transition period and, though later democratic decisions in favour of decentralization may diminish central authority, it is unlikely to be entirely eliminated. while as one side of the division between mental and manual labour the conditions of work of the ‘creative class’ who the new communists seem primarily to represent might resemble small scale workplaces, their very output enables ever more large scale and complex forms of divisions of labour within and between firms. and this is where most people work, or hope to work, and this productive apparatus would still have to be administered, and transformed. but the organization – the self-organization of producers – would no longer be a state in so far as there was no class (or gender or other, marx and engels would hardly have disagreed) domination and any revolution would have to be immediately consolidated by a dictatorship of the proletariat in so far as there was counter-revolutionary activity. finally, we come to revolution. revolutionary politics is widely and rightly contrasted with reformism, the belief that capitalism’s problems are limited and can be resolved without questioning its fundamental basis in private property in the means of production, is not the same as reforms. the latter may or may not be part of fundamental critiques of capitalism (or patriarchy, racism or imperialism) but that would not, and historically has not, prevented a wide range of political perspectives and forces from cooperating in them. moreover, what makes a 21 demand a reform or revolutionary depends on the historical conjuncture. a modest demand for, say, cheap bread, might turn out to be revolutionary if the ruling order was unable or unwilling to fulfill it and the political energy and organization existed behind it to inspire people to believe that if it is not going to be fulfilled it was time for people to remove the ruling order and fulfill it for themselves, and enable them to do so. nor is the achievement of reforms in itself to be disdained. the capitalist class opposes reforms for good reason: they strengthen the capacity and will of working classes to pursue more ambitious goals. kalecki (1943) had identified much the same logic in his analysis of the political implication of full employment – it was because full employment as a reform would have this effect that he recognized that it would be politically difficult for the bourgeoisie to accept. how reforms and revolution can be linked dialectically (patnaik 2009b) was illustrated in the case of sweden where a long history of working class gains led, at its culmination, in ‘reforms’ which entailed the gradual transfer of the ownership of the means of production to workers (korpi, 1983), though it failed thanks to a capitalist counteroffensive. this complex relationship between reform and revolution is especially important to understand because no one, not even the citizens of the most advanced capitalist country, lives in a ‘pure’ capitalism. actually existing capitalism everywhere necessarily (and not least because they are not abstract, universal capitalisms, no matter how universalizing the operation of the law of value, but national ones) rely on a number of political, social, and cultural structures and practices – both traditional and modern. while some of these serve to intensify oppression and exploitation, and reforms would ease but not eliminate them, others are precisely the result of reforms. they furnish the second aspect of karl polanyi’s (1944/1985) ‘double movement’ – the movement of social protection against the incursion of capitalism or what he called ‘market society’. these measures constitute, especially in the advanced capitalist world, a dense network of structures and practices – from city zoning restrictions to national regulatory and welfare structures – that modify the dynamics of capitalism quite substantially (elson, 1988, 2000). indeed, as critical legal scholars are reminding us, even in the most highly developed capitalist states, and even after three decades of neoliberalism, ‘the public-private, state-market dichotomies and the notions of “natural”, market-based laws of distribution which underlie much contemporary social, economic and legal analyses’ remain highly questionable. the ‘[d]istribution of the social product’ is ‘a phenomenon shaped by law’ and that ‘choice of law and policy remains pervasive’ (ireland 2003). making these legal and policy choices, rather than assuming they do not exist as the ‘myth of deregulation’ encourages us to do as much as the new communist mantra of a politics distanced from states and even democracies, is seamless with what elson calls ‘socializing the market’, in effect expanding non-capitalist production of use values in ways that favor working people and strengthen their organizations while limiting the prerogatives of capital and private property. all these are reforms worthy of achievement in their own right. their pursuit would be a more concrete form of revolutionary politics than the, in effect, magical conception of the new communists who cannot tell us how exactly the ‘instauration of the citizen’s income’ is to be achieved through a mere unity of the working classes, and apart from a politics focused on the state. if undertaken with sufficient organization, seriousness of purpose and political will to take on the inevitable opposition to them, there is no telling at what point determined struggles to extend the sphere of common services, use value production and reform in favour of working people will involve the replacement of the capitalist ruling classes and their order. the problem will certainly not be the reforms themselves, nor will it be engagement with parliamentary politics. it need not be, and is not, all ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’, 22 depressing though recent decades have been on this front. the ‘parliamentary destiny’ of the left is not only to be lamented. the decisive factor will be how ambitious we are in conceiving the reforms, how active we are in organizing for them, how capable we are of achieving them and how seriously we mean to achieve them. as a new cycle of protest begins around the world – from cairo to madison, clearly showing that the citizens of the former are as little subject to ‘populist fundamentalism’ as those of the latter are to ‘enlightened hedonism or liberal multiculturalism’ – it is perhaps time to treat the ‘legacy of may ’68’ less reverentially and reach further back to the real legacy of the spring of 1871: the first embodiment of popular power. acknowledgements this paper originated in my work for a workshop on “diminishing returns? feminist engagements with the return to the commons” at the kent centre for law, gender, and sexuality at the university of kent in canterbury. i am grateful to the workshop organizers, particularly stacy douglas, donatella alessandrini and brenna bhandar for their invitation and to all the participants for stimulating discussions. it provided a welcome opportunity to sort out my own thinking on the new communism of the commons. alan freeman’s comments on an earlier draft were both enthusiastic and penetrating. outstanding problems remain, of course, my responsibility. notes on the contributor radhika desai is professor of political studies in university of manitoba. she is the author of slouching towards ayodhya (2004) and intellectuals and socialism (1994), editor of developmental and cultural nationalisms (2009) and co-editor of research in political economy (volume 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the centrality of land in dakota cosmologies: mni sota makoce. the land where the waters are so clear they reflect the clouds. this land is where our grandmothers’ grandmothers’ grandmothers played as children. carried in our collective memories are stories of this place that reach beyond recorded history… no matter how far we go, we journey back home through language and songs and in stories our grandparents told us to share with our children. (mni sota makoce 23) not only do the stories affirm the significance of dakota places but they also explain complex and reciprocal relationships among human and non-human beings, originating from environmental conditions and rendered in the dakota. similarly, the connection between the land and all beings features prominently in westerman’s poetry. in “morning song” from the 2013 collection follow the blackbirds, a blackbird summons spring with his song and celebrates the seasonal return of all his relatives, human and non-human alike. “waŋna mitakuye hdipi” [now my relatives are coming home] (53, 70), rejoices the bird. while the world conceived in westerman’s poetry is governed by the principles of harmonious multispecies relationality, it also includes joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 75 images of damage and contamination caused by industrialization, its resulting environmental pollution, and climate change, all identified with the anthropocene. however, westerman’s lyrical world is not one of destruction either. rather, westerman acknowledges the changes brought about firstly by settler colonialism and secondly by industrialization and capitalism, and she traces possibilities for a continuation of harmonious coexistence in which human beings occupy neither central nor superior position in relation to their environment. what facilitates the continuation of the relationship with the land is the tribal knowledge built up over centuries about how to respectfully and responsibly interact with the environment. in this essay i am interested in the value that gwen westerman’s poetry ascribes to indigenous knowledge (ik) as a way to understand and react to environmental changes and preserve dakota values in these new contexts. as numerous indigenous scholars emphasize—winona laduke (anishinaabe), leanne betasamosake simpson (michi saagiig nishnaabeg), and gregory cajete (tewa) among them—traditional indigenous knowledge (tk), place-based and attentive to all forms of being, emphasizes adaptability to transformation as a framework to think about climate change and the resultant decrease in biodiversity. i believe that the most significant consequence of addressing the ecological state of the twenty-first-century world with indigenous knowledge is a disruption of the anthropocene narratives which identify humankind as the sole agent of change, the sole author of its scientific explanation, and finally, the possible solution to the problem. instead, westerman relies on a more nuanced model, which draws attention to the relational character of interactions with other species and beings (those which biology would refer to as nonlife) and thus decenters man in the enlightenment narrative of progress. moreover, westerman rejects the debilitating language of the anthropocene which describes affected lands transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 76 as “damaged,” contaminated,” and “impaired.” it is this last qualifier that is of special interest to me. following an illuminating presentation by disability studies scholar sunaura taylor, “disabled ecologies: living with impaired landscapes,” given at the university of california, berkeley, on march 5, 2019, i would like to draw attention to how definitions and descriptions of well-functioning ecosystems depend on how useful they are for human beings. these inherently anthropocentric perspectives introduce hierarchies in which landscapes severely affected by human activity are no longer viewed as ecologically or societally significant. taylor’s research on the hughes aircraft lagoon in tucson, arizona and the tucson aquifer led her to explore heavily loaded terminology used in environmental discourse. for instance, according to a definition provided by the environmental protection agency, waters are impaired when there is “detrimental effect on the biological integrity of a water body caused by an impact that prevents obtainment of the designated use” (qtd. in taylor). similarly, in the field of ecological risk assessment, an ecosystem is impaired not when it ceases to form meaningful and biologically efficient relations with other ecosystems and beings but when it is no longer significant for human consumption. the significance of the metaphor taken from disability studies is certainly not lost on taylor, who emphasizes how such language perpetuates the idea that impairment is a serious deficiency that needs to be cured or attended to. taylor draws attention to the fact that indigenous epistemologies do not sustain such human-oriented perspectives. instead, they “have long understood the environment as kin or as an extension of one’s body” (taylor). indigenous scholars have demonstrated this repeatedly and incessantly. nishnaabeg artist and activist leanne betasamosake simpson, quoted by taylor, commenting on the pollution on her tribal lands, explicitly articulates her commitment to land: “i can connect myself to every piece of my territory no matter what shape it is in, because we joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 77 cannot abandon our mother because she is sick” (“i am not;” my emphasis). this act of caring for kin, the mother, and all relatives, human and non-human is extensively described in the indigenous body of knowledge about environments and changes that they undergo. indigenous knowledge offers a perspective on the environment that disrupts anthropocentric narratives, with human agents as the makers and transformers of ecosystems. while the concept of indigenous knowledge or traditional environmental knowledge has recently gained a lot of attention in academic circles, it is by no means a new idea in native communities. as anishinaabe scholar deborah mcgregor asserts, ik is not an invention of non-indigenous people nor an academic discipline to be studied and approached in theoretical terms. instead, ik is a foundational element of indigenous epistemologies: it is regarded as a gift from the creator and provides instructions for appropriate conduct to all of creation and its beings. it not only instructs humanity but assigns roles and responsibilities to all of creation as well. indigenous knowledge comes from our relationship with creation. in an indigenous context, ik is by nature also environmental knowledge. (389)1 since it is passed on in the oral tradition and community practices, indigenous knowledge is often conceived as an accumulated experience and wisdom unique to native cultures and the environments in which they live. as melissa k. nelson (anishinaabe/metis) asserts, indigenous knowledge is a system of “local knowledges of specific places, geographies, and homelands. they are site-specific, place-based, in situ knowledges. local knowledge is about persistence in place and orientation. this orientation operates on a spatial level with both vertical and horizontal dimensions, among others” (198; emphasis in original). indigenous knowledge is hence understood as process rather than content. it is a way of life, manifested in actions rather than transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 78 theorized about (berkes 4-5). moreover, it is directly related to tribal sovereignty and decision-making processes on a community level and involves diverse areas of tribal governance such as food security, education, human and animal health, management of natural resources, and environmental justice (settee 61). if indigenous knowledge is a process, it needs to be responsive to changes, be they societal, technological, or environmental. as eugene hunn explains, the fact that indigenous knowledge is embedded in traditional practices, passed on for generations, does not preclude its ability to adapt to the changing world: “new ideas and techniques may be incorporated into a given tradition, but only if they fit into the complex fabric of existing traditional practices and understandings. thus traditions are enduring adaptations to specific places” (qtd. in berkes 3-4). faced with the effects of climate change, such as declining runs of fish (e.g., salmon and steelhead), declining populations of wildlife and game, loss of water supplies and many others, indigenous people are addressing regional environmental problems and developing responses based on a thorough knowledge and understanding of environments in which they live (marchand et al. 179-84). in the context of climate destabilization and its effects, it is not surprising that indigenous knowledge has been appropriated by academia and non-native scholars and researchers as a reservoir of observations about climate patterns (williams and hardison 532) and possible solutions to environmental problems. simpson draws attention to the political significance of this trend. what is very often forgotten or strategically glossed over is the fact that, although people now look to indigenous knowledge for solutions to the detrimental effects of environmental disasters, it had long been the target of assimilationist policies in the us and canada and discredited as superstition by western scientists. ik survived only thanks to joint communal efforts and perseverance (“traditional” 134-35). moreover, as simpson emphasizes, western joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 79 scientists are primarily interested in those aspects of indigenous knowledge that promise solutions to environmental problems afflicting the modern world, “while the spiritual foundations of ik and the indigenous values and worldviews that support it are of less interest often because they exist in opposition to the worldview and values of the dominating societies” (“anticolonial” 374). potawatomi biologist robin wall kimmerer emphasizes western scholars’ propensity for dismissing indigenous knowledge systems as unscientific and superstitious. “getting scientists to consider the validity of indigenous knowledge is like swimming upstream in cold, cold water,” writes kimmerer. “they’ve been so conditioned to be skeptical of even the hardest of hard data that bending their minds toward theories that are verified without the expected graphs or equations is tough” (160). this indiscriminate approach to indigenous knowledge mirrors the anthropocene narratives constructed from the perspective of “an unmarked masculine species deriving from the global north” (deloughrey 12) and dominating “what is an undeniably white intellectual space of the euro-western academy” (todd 247-48; emphasis in original). this euro-western orientation of the anthropocene discourse is signaled by the gesture of locating its beginnings in the mid-twentieth century, in itself a politically significant act, as heather davis and zoe todd (métis/otipemisiw) observe. rather than relying solely on data from geological strata, davis and todd draw attention to the power structure inherent in narratives about progress and the ensuing environmental transformation, and suggest the rise of settler colonialism as the starting date of changes that today result in, among others, climate destabilization. with the emphasis thus shifted, the discussion concerning political implications is expanded to include non-western epistemologies and societies. more importantly, however, to use a date that coincides with colonialism in the americas allows us to understand the current state of ecological crisis as inherently invested in a transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 80 specific ideology defined by proto-capitalist logics based on extraction and accumulation through dispossession—logics that continue to shape the world we live in and that have produced our current era. (davis and todd 764) analyzing the rhetoric of the original essay in which paul crutzen and eugene stoermer introduced the term, davis and todd assert that the anthropocene “replicates a eurowestern division of mind/thought from land when it is framed as the business of ‘research and engineering’” (768). such a framework stands in sharp contrast to many indigenous ontologies which reject the view of man as the center and agent of the world. thus, similarly, the anthropocene is an extension of a colonial logic of erasing difference, of brutally imposing “the right way of life” through genocide, forced assimilation, dispossession, relocation, and violent transformation of nature. “[f]orcing a landscape, climate, flora, and fauna into an idealized version of the world modelled on sameness and replication of the homeland” (769) was an integral part of the colonialist project and today is understood as one of the reasons for climate destabilization and the loss of biodiversity. indeed, in the united states, canada, and other settler states (e.g., new zealand and australia), indigenous people were forced to reckon with anthropogenic transformations long before the word “anthropocene” entered academic discourse. as potawatomi scholar kyle powys whyte observes, for native people, this highly disruptive moment occurred not in the twentieth century but with the coming of settlers, when many native communities were forced to discontinue their relationships with plants, animals, and ecosystems. therefore, if indigenous people experience the anthropocene in a different way, it is because after centuries of land dispossession, forced relocation, assimilation, and the loss and/or disruption of cultural continuity, they need to focus “their energies also on adapting to another kind of anthropogenic joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 81 environmental change: climate destabilization” (“our” 207; emphasis in original). moreover, not only did the anthropogenic change dramatically alter the environment through deforestation, industrialization, overharvesting, and pollution, but it also “obstructed indigenous peoples’ capacities to adapt to the changes” (whyte 208). and change, as pointed out earlier, has always been an integral part of indigenous knowledge which, based on centuries of observation and interaction with the surrounding world, instructs people how to react to transformations in ecosystems. gwen westerman’s follow the blackbirds features a world that is affected by environmental, cultural, and socio-economic changes. the collected poems portray a landscape of highways, asphalted roads, walgreens, and wired fences. it is a world transformed by the rule of the capitalocene, “a way of organizing… a nature in which human organizations (classes, empires, markets etc.) not only make environments, but are simultaneously made by the historical flux and flow of the web of life” (moore 7). however, it is also a world of blackbirds and the buffalo following their ancient migration routes. the lyrical voice carefully observes the new contexts and offers insightful and often ironic comments which reveal the short-sightedness of projects constructed around the desire to control nature. a responsible and reciprocal relationship with the environment is displaced by consumerism, unchecked extraction of natural resources, and settler colonial practices of land grabbing. yet, what the poems communicate, imparting indigenous knowledge, is that regardless of this violence perpetrated on the land and its inhabitants, environments—following the ancient cycles of destruction and renewal—find a way to seek balance and restoration. in “innocent captives,” westerman pointedly illustrates the scale and scope of changes introduced by capitalist industrialization. the poem traces the extent to which the capitalist economy is responsible for mass transformation of the landscape and the rupture in the natural balance. moreover, submitting nature to the rules of profit motive transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 82 displaces non-human beings that have lived in the area for centuries. the titular “innocent captives” are blackbirds that abundantly populate central and southern parts of north america. among the most commonly observed species are “red-winged blackbirds (agelaius phoeniceus), common grackles (quiscalus quiscula), yellowheaded blackbirds (xantbocephalus xanthocephalus), and brown-headed cowbirds (molotbrus ater)” (werner et al., 251-52). the poem emphasizes how blackbirds have been natural and rightful inhabitants of the area, taking advantage of the land’s seasonal abundance: “ancient memory guides them each spring and fall / along river valleys and wetlands” (westerman 10). however, in the capitalocene, marshes that feed blackbirds and other beings are “drained and fertilized for increased yield / and prized cash crops and condos grew” (10). the birds are greeted not by sustainable ecosystems but by agricultural fields, artificially enhanced for maximum production. the function of the intervention into the environment is not to counter the effects of earlier interference in ecosystems but to maximize profits. indeed, the blackbirds’ ancient home has become a site of mass-scale agricultural production whose logic displaces blackbirds and reevaluates their presence in the area. since the 1960s, north and south dakota have become the main regions of commercial sunflower cultivation, producing approximately 73% of the total 1.95 billion kg (national agricultural statistics service qtd. in blackwell et al 818). as expected, the plant “with oil-laden seeds” (westerman 10) attracts blackbirds, which appear in the area in spring. from the business-oriented angle, it is estimated that the losses caused by the birds’ activities in the sunflower fields (red-winged blackbirds are identified as the most prevalent and dangerous to crops) can amount to $2.8 million annually (blackwell et al 819). to prevent damage, the industry runs programs of baiting during spring with drc-1339 (3-choloro-4methalalanine)-treated rice: lured by a treat, the birds ingest the toxin and die (blackwell et al 818).2 the rationale behind joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 83 the practice is the focus on efficient production, which redefines the birds’ ontological status: from rightful seasonal inhabitants of the area, they are turned into a risk to an otherwise economically successful operation. the language used to describe the practice is striking. justifying the reasons for the use of lethal toxins and their potential effects on non-targeted species, bradley f. blackwell and colleagues thus describe the situation: “concurrent with the growth of the sunflower industry in the great plains have been increased conflicts associated with bird (primarily red-winged blackbird. . .) depredation of unharvested crops in late summer” (818; my emphasis). the apparently military imagery used to describe birds’ natural behavior endows them with agency oriented at calculated deceit. the term “depredation” inevitably evokes images of looting, plundering, and destruction, again associated with the disorder characteristic of war zones. thus the red-winged blackbird, rather than a natural element of the ecosystem, is redefined as an adversary. not only does the logic of the capitalocene intervene in a previously sustainable ecosystem but also it dictates which species are allowed to function in inherently altered landscapes. in the poem, westerman focuses on the very act of poisoning the birds and offers an acutely painful description of their death. moreover, she emphasizes the improvement of the baiting method: next to trays with poisoned rice, farmers place caged blackbirds, “innocent captives” of the poem’s title, whose role is to attract freeflying birds: “captured blackbirds call their unsuspecting relatives / to a feast placed away from fields of ripening sunflowers” (10). the cruelty of this practice concerns the ways in which caged birds are implicated in their kin’s demise. their presence is supposed to signal safety whereas in reality, the blackbirds invite their free-flying relatives to a feast of toxins: “on top of cages, brown rice glitters in toxic trays, / a tempting easy meal. / poisoned” (10). in dakota cosmologies, all living and non-living beings are intimately interrelated. in view of this, using captured blackbirds as bait is a transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 84 violent act that disrupts the reciprocal relationships in the ecosystem and among the species, not only by eliminating animals the industry deems dangerous but also by destroying intraspecies trust. the scene of the blackbirds’ death strongly resonates with the image of human violation of natural laws that regulate the presence of all beings in an ecosystem. the blackbirds need food to build muscles for their future migration and therefore, motivated by the instinct of survival, easily fall prey to poisoned rice. interestingly, in texts describing dcr-1339’s efficacy, the birds’ death is presented as quick and painless and the language employed is focused on the reliability of the chemical: “it has been noted that birds may be thirsty and seek water prior to death (a consequence of renal failure; . . .), but this is the only adverse effect recorded. birds that ingested a lethal dose of the compound died a quiet death; there was no flapping, convulsing, vocalisation or any other indication of pain or distress” (dawes 1). the impersonal passive voice implies an absence of anyone’s culpability; the absence of wing flapping and vocalizing is supposed to reassure the reader that no pain is felt. these deaths are supposed to be silent and invisible. this discourse of efficacy is contrasted with westerman’s closing stanza in which the birds’ death, though silent, is by no means without impact: “husks drop and rice scatters, as darkness falls / blackbirds roost / in a flash of black and red / and they fall / silent / among the blooms” (10). the contrast between blooming sunflowers and dying birds is striking. the abundance, “the blooming flowers,” is artificially produced and protected at the price of other beings’ lives, all to ensure profits in a capitalist economy. the birds, defined as a danger to profit optimalization practices, are judged expendable and thus killed. a similar critique of the capitalist discourse is found in “skin essentials.” here, westerman mocks the language of advertisements in which everything can be transformed into a product and become sellable: “shelves, endcaps, bins spill / over joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 85 with essences of everything—/ essential fragrances, essential products, / essential needs. . . ./ available for a limited time only / at a special introductory price. . . . / skin essentials—free after rebate!” (48). the discursively produced state of urgency urges the reader to purchase products that most likely are useless but are represented as indispensable. the second stanza of the poem focuses on the ambiguity of the word “essence” and its use in relation to definitions of identity. westerman emphasizes that some concepts are not subject to the rules of capitalist transactions. what constitutes indianness is connected with active “being” rather than accumulating objects: “prayers. / relatives. / ceremonies. / connections to what is real. / there is an essence to who we are. / and a coupon from walgreens / cannot be redeemed here” (49). hence westerman demonstrates the existence of contexts in which the logic of the capitalocene does not apply. while westerman’s poems do indeed document anthropogenic violence and destruction, they consistently draw attention to the way ecosystems seek to heal themselves and preserve the original balance, all of it meticulously described in indigenous knowledge. many blackbirds are killed with a man-made toxin but there are other species that resist capitalist-oriented transformation of the land. “where the buffalo roam” is a characteristic example of westerman’s insistence on depicting the perseverance of natural processes. the title already announces two important images that the poem intends to project: that of the buffalo, one of the fundamental species in cosmologies of the plains indians, and the idea of “roaming” that evokes associations with free, unobstructed movement of human and non-human beings across the land. as julia hobson haggerty and colleagues observe, “in traditional assiniboine and sioux belief systems, buffalo and humans are related through ancestral heritage. in this relational cosmology buffalo can communicate, act and relate with human beings” (23). this intimate relationship was disturbed and almost completely destroyed by the arrival transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 86 of europeans. overhunting and, later, slaughter of the buffalo calculated to disrupt native economies and ways of sustenance nearly obliterated the entire species. “the buffalo were killed to near extinction,” writes historian roxanne dunbar-ortiz, “tens of millions of dead within a few decades and only a few hundred left by the 1880s” (142).3 it is precisely the kind of anthropogenic change that whyte identifies with settler colonialism that long preceded the invention of the anthropocene. in the twentieth century, numerous preservation and restoration efforts on the part of native tribes have brought positive effects in an environmental and cultural sense, reintroducing the buffalo to their original habitats.4 in the poem, the buffalo return to the area of the great plains, now transformed and artificially divided by interstates, highways, and barbed wire fences. those travelling along these man-made lines are unaware of the land’s ancient heartbeat; they are “hypnotized by lines, lost without maps” (westerman 33). as if awoken by instinct, a small herd escapes from a minnesota ranch and is unmoved by human attempts to control its movement. the local press announces: “buffalo refuse to go home” (32). but what exactly is home? the lyrical voice asserts that the buffalo instinctively return home, which clearly is not an area of the ranch with fence posts, barbed wire, and pens. the buffalo know which direction to go, relying on a reservoir of knowledge, imprinted in their bodies, in the land, and in memories: “pulled by the tide / they return to the / bluestem grass and coneflowers” (32). evoking the metaphor of the body, the poem compares ancient routes of animal migrations to a pattern of veins that carry blood: “filled with life, / the ancient trails vein / through the tallgrass prairie / from valley to valley, age to age” (32). home and routes that lead to it are imprinted on the land, encoded in moon cycles, and remembered in the body. describing the buffalo’s journey home, the speaker juxtaposes the ancient geography remembered in the animals’ bodies with the industrial transformations of joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 87 the land. the buffalo cross states, “race across kansas highways and history,” indifferent to artificially constructed borders, and at sunset reach “okla humma” (32, 33). the invocation of the choctaw name of the area acknowledges the indigenous presence on the land and the time when the buffalo, rather than being “managed” and captured in pens, roamed freely. the concept of nature running its course is contrasted with images of land transformations conducted according to capitalist rationality. “acres for sale, prime development, master plan” (33) read the billboards that the buffalo pass on their way. while the speaker does not underestimate the scale of the environmental change, she asserts the significance of natural processes that govern the life of non-human beings and demonstrate the power of regeneration: “from the edge of extinction, the buffalo know by heart / the tracks laid down by the millions / who passed in a dream, on an ocean, on a highway / and they watch over those held back by fences / just waiting, waiting, / waiting” (33). the group of escapees seems to be waiting for their fellow-buffalo to join them on the journey to their traditional lands and thus rebuild a connection severed by settler colonialism. the dynamic and changing relationship with the land and its inhabitants is an important part of indigenous knowledge and is similarly stressed in westerman’s poetry. marie battiste (mi’kmaq) and james henderson (chickasaw/cheyenne) explain that knowledge is the expression of the vibrant relationships between people, their ecosystems, and other living beings and spirits that share their lands… to the indigenous ways of knowing, the self exists within a world that is subject to flux. the purpose of these ways of knowing is to reunify the world or at least to reconcile the world to itself. indigenous knowledge is the way of living within contexts of flux, paradox, and tension. (42) transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 88 the preservation of unity with the world has become even more instrumental and challenging in the context of the anthropogenic transformations which profoundly affect ecosystems. in “delisted” westerman asserts the continuity of the dakota people’s relationship with the land and non-human beings despite the harm done to ecosystems. more importantly, however, she reveals the arbitrariness of anthropocene logic. the poem retells one of many anthropocene-oriented stories about extinction or near-extinction of species due to industrialization and environmental pollution. in 1940, congress, alarmed by the dropping population, placed the bald eagle (haliaeetus leucocephalus) on the endangered species list (“history”). in 2007, after considerable preservation efforts and the reluctantly introduced reduction in the use of persistent organochlorine pesticides (such as ddt), the eagle was delisted and is now no longer under federal protection (“endangered”). thus, the criteria which define a species as endangered are arbitrarily constructed and reveal the political underpinnings of addressing ecological transformations and crises. sadly, they are rarely aimed to directly address preserving natural balance. according to whyte, the same logic, driven by the desire to manage ideological content, is detectable in anthropocene discourse. “epistemologies of crisis,” as he refers to the philosophical building blocks of the anthropocene, address climate change on a linear time frame as an unprecedented and imminent crisis, which obviously is a premise constructed from the euro-western perspective. “in thinking through the implications of unprecedentedness and urgency,” whyte asserts, climate change, as a concept, is a rhetorical device that people invoke so they can believe they are addressing a crisis without having to talk about colonial power. epistemologies of crisis are presentist in their narrative orientation… epistemologies of crisis then mask numerous forms of joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 89 power, including colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and industrialisation. (57) in other words, like davis and todd before him, whyte draws attention to the euro and anthropocentric orientation of discussing climate change and environmental transformations in terms of crisis only. the immediate questions that such a framework raises about the criteria used to identify a crisis and who is counted as a victim are conveniently ignored. therefore, he juxtaposes epistemologies of crisis with elements of indigenous knowledge, here called “epistemologies of coordination.” “different from crisis, coordination refers to ways of knowing the world that emphasise the importance of moral bonds—or kinship relationships—for generating the (responsible) capacity to respond to constant change in the world. epistemologies of coordination are conducive to responding to mundane and expected change without validating harm or violence,” writes whyte (53). thus, the relationship with the environment involves continuous nurturing of responsible and reciprocal connections, not only in a moment of a subjectively defined crisis but over generations. in portraying euro-western and dakota approaches to the environment, “delisted” evokes whytes’s epistemologies of crisis and coordination. the poem begins with placing of the eagle on the endangered species list and then its removal. while saving the bird from extinction appears to be a noble gesture, the speaker is quick to remind us that the reasons it is in danger are anthropogenic and directly result from settler colonialism and its practices: “forty years later, / the bald eagle has recovered / from loss of habitat, deliberate / killing, and ddt poisoning” (westerman 39; my emphasis). moreover, by referencing rachel carson’s 1962 silent spring, the poem emphasizes that the toxic effects of pesticides were known long before the book was published (lutts 211-12). despite vocal outcries, nothing or very little had been done to ban or limit the use of pesticides by 1962, as silent spring eloquently argued. transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 90 it was only when the bald eagle population dropped dramatically, leading to a situation that could be classified as a “crisis,” that appropriate legislation was introduced. in other words, what triggers action is a rupture in continuity rather than a concern for continuity itself. by contrast, the dakota relationship with the eagle is based on the epistemology of coordination, which organizes “knowledge through the vector of kinship relationships” (whyte, “against” 62). the intimate connection between humans and the eagle is forged on spiritual and emotional levels. for instance, as david c. posthumus reports, bald eagle feathers are often used in rituals and ceremonies and when attached to a person’s body the individual “embodies the characteristic attributes and bodily apparatus of the eagle and hence temporarily becomes an eagle” (194-5; emphasis in original). dakota cherish and revere the animal for its beauty and power and in return they receive protection. thus, the relationship is one of respect and reciprocity, illustrating the relationality of all beings: “for longer than time, / the eagle has been sacred / and in our songs we have / asked it to protect us” (39). the bald eagle is approached as kin rather than a part of the environment that needs to be managed due to pollution. moreover, each stanza concludes with the dakota words which celebrate the eagle and acknowledge his significance in the times predating settler colonialism: “ake wambdi kiŋ hdi” [again the eagle returns]; “wambdi kiŋ uŋkicidowaŋpi” [we sing for the eagle] (39, 69). thereby, the speaker demonstrates the continuity of the relationship between the dakota people and the eagle, which has been disrupted but not completely broken. thus, this connection is not established as a response to a crisis but instead accompanies and evolves with the changes induced by settler colonialism. despite the changes triggered by settler colonialism, the reciprocal relationships among all beings are encoded in the land, its geography, ecology, in every molecule joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 91 and in dna. in “quantum theory,” the speaker observes blood oozing from her finger cut by paper. the red liquid contains past generations as well as the promise of the future. most importantly, “blood carries stories of our origins from / beyond the stars,” thus validating the dakota people’s claim to the land as home. in “below the surface,” the dakota land is transformed by human intervention but it never ceases telling stories of its inhabitants. therefore, the speaker recognizes the blackbirds’ song, migration routes, and names of creeks and bluffs, now renamed with english terms. they may be changed but nevertheless they remain the same and retell the story about relational responsibilities of human and non-human beings. this message, located “below the surface” of what is visible, defines the speaker’s place in the world and her ontological status of a being that understands the non-verbal language of the land. “i am thirsty and / i know the way home” (65), she announces. this body of knowledge about the land and its inhabitants, indigenous knowledge, lies at the core of dakota culture and identity. it connects people, nonhumans and other beings in a network of interdependencies, which, while not necessarily hierarchical, create a balanced and sustainable system. the longevity and perseverance of this body of knowledge relies on intergenerational transmission. in “follow the blackbirds,” the poem opening the collection, the speaker recalls the last moments of her grandmother, confined to a hospital bed on the reservation. her grandmother describes the feeling of discomfort at the realization that death is approaching with an image of drought. the speaker elaborates on this image, referring to her grandmother’s body as “evaporating” (3). it is an important comparison: lack of water means death for all organisms, not only humans, which clearly signals an antianthropocentric perspective on the surrounding world. the grandmother’s message to her granddaughter is an example of how one’s survival depends on and is inextricably linked with understanding the environment and transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 92 its inhabitants. it is also a lesson in an epistemology of coordination (and cooperation), which “come to know the world through the state of kinship relationships” (whyte, “against” 59). “grandma told us / to look for / blackbirds, / she said, / that they always / go to the water. / you won’t ever / be lost / or thirsty / if / you follow / the blackbirds” (3), reports the speaker. the short, dynamic lines emphasize the urgency of the message as it ensures not only survival in a dry landscape but cultural survival as well. the speaker recognizes the significance of her grandmother’s words rendered in the continuation of the water/thirst imagery: “i drink in her fluttering voice / trying to quench / the imminent drought” (3; my emphasis). considering westerman’s consistent return to the theme of colonization and forced assimilation in boarding schools, the “drought” may also imply a threat to the life of dakota culture. thus, remembering that blackbirds will always lead the speaker to water constitutes a celebration of ik. in another poem, “this is my explaining ceremony,” the speaker again recalls the grandmother’s teachings: “a grandma’s words that can fill a rain barrel or wash away fences and / fields like a flood. / sounds that bring life ticking on a tin roof, that sting / bare legs and hearts. sounds of water flowing. sounds of water falling. / sounds of water filling” (27). words about water sustain life, in a physical and cultural sense. the speaker’s insistence on repeating her grandmother’s words is in turn an act of resisting the absence of indigenous ontologies in the euro-american context, which, according to sisseton wahpeton oyate scholar, kim tallbear, is a denial of native people’s vibrancy, survival, and endurance. “it is a denial of ongoing intimate relations between indigenous peoples,” writes tallbear, “as well as between us and nonhumans in these lands” (198). thus the ik that is contained in the speaker’s grandmother’s seemingly insignificant words in fact communicates a message about all life’s survival on the planet through relational responsibilities. joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 93 gwen westerman’s collection follow the blackbirds, with sunaura taylor’s illuminating presentation and leanne simpson’s powerful call about polluted tribal lands in mind, is an important reaction to the climate and environmental transformations we are facing today. westerman’s poems communicate indigenous knowledge about ecology, interactions between human and non-human, and ways of adapting to change, thus offering a different narrative than that of crisis. while undoubtedly the era of the anthropocene is a moment of irreversible loss, it cannot be forgotten, as westerman reminds us that there are still well-functioning connections in the environment. they provide instructions on how to deal effectively with anthropogenic transformations and need to be cherished. this body of knowledge constitutes a part of indigenous epistemologies, for so long dismissed by euro-western science. secondly, as taylor asserts, human activities that have produced the anthropocene and disabled environments are not only related to the rise of capitalism and technological advancement but are also related to systemic racism and injustice, and other manifestations of settler colonialism. westerman’s poetry is attentive to all these issues. on the one hand, the prevalent theme is the environment, mimed, impaired, but nevertheless, loved, appreciated and preserved in traditional stories, and thus becoming a building block of dakota identity. on the other hand, there is settler colonialism and its myriad practices aimed at the elimination of indigenous knowledges and people. yet, despite all these genocidal efforts, westerman demonstrates how the land remembers its people and how the people revere the land in a kinship-oriented ecology. notes 1 in certain contexts, the terms indigenous knowledge(s) and traditional ecological knowledge are used interchangeably, while some see tek as a part of ik. transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 94 2 on the question of whether the use of drc-1339 constitutes humane killing see joan dawes, “is the use of dcr-1339 humane? pestsmart.org.au, https://pestsmart.org.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/06/drc1339.pdf. 3 a more complex history of the demise of the buffalo can be found in andrew c. isenberg, the destruction of the bison: an environmental history, 1750-1920 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2000). 4 for more on buffalo restoration see e.g., ken zontek, buffalo nation: american indian efforts to restore the bison (lincoln: university of nebraska press, 2007). works cited battiste, marie, and james henderson. protecting indigenous knowledge and heritage. saskatoon sk: purich publishing, 2000. berkes, fikret. sacred ecology. 1999. new york and london: routledge, 2008. blackwell, bradley f., eric huszar et al. “lethal control of red-winged blackbirds to manage damage to sunflower: an economic evaluation.” the journal of wildlife management vol. 67, no. 4, oct., 2003) pp. 818-28. crutzen, paul, and eugene stoermer. “the anthropocene.” global change newsletter vol. 41, 2000, pp. 17-18. davis, heather, and zoe todd. “on the importance of a date, or decolonizing the anthropocene.” acme: an international journal for critical geographies vol. 16, no. 5, 2017, pp. 761-780 dawes, joan. “is the use of dcr-1339 humane? pestsmart.org.au, https://pestsmart.org.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/06/drc1339.pdf. accessed march 31, 2021. deloughrey, elizabeth m. allegories of the anthropocene. durham: duke university press, 2019. dunbar-ortiz, roxanne. an indigenous peoples’ history of the united states. boston: beacon press, 2014. joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 95 “endangered and threatened wildlife and plants; removing the bald eagle in the lower 48 states from the list of endangered and threatened wildlife.” 50 cfr part 17. federal register vol. 72, no. 130, 2007. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/fr-2007-07-09/pdf/07-4302.pdf. accessed march 18, 2021. haggerty, julia hobson, elizabeth lynne rink, et al. “restoration and the affective ecologies of healing: buffalo and the fort peck tribes.” conservation & society, vol. 16, no. 1, 2018, pp. 21-29. doi: 10.4103/cs.cs_16_90. “history of bald eagle decline, protection and recovery.” us fish & wildlife service. midwest region—bald and golden eagles. https://www.fws.gov/midwest/eagle/history/index.html. accessed march 18, 2021. lutts, ralph h. “chemical fallout: rachel carson’s silent spring, radioactive fallout, and the environmental movement.” environmental review vol. 9, no. 3 autumn, 1985, pp. 210-25. marchand, michael e. et al. the medicine wheel: environmental decision-making process of indigenous peoples. east lansing: higher education press / michigan state university press, 2020. mcgregor, deborah. “coming full circle: indigenous knowledge, environment, and our future.” the american indian quarterly, vol. 28, no. 3&4, summer/fall 2004, pp. 385-410. doi: http://doi.org/10.1353/aiq.2004.0101. moore, jason w. “introduction.” anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism, edited by jason w. moore. oakland, ca: pm press, 2016, pp. 1-11. nelson, melissa k. “indigenous science and traditional ecological knowledge: persistence in place.” the world of indigenous north america, edited by robert warrior. new york: routledge, 2015, pp. 188-214. transmotion vol 8, no 1 (2022) 96 posthumus, david c. all my relatives exploring lakota ontology, belief, and ritual. lincoln: university of nebraska press and the american philosophical society, 2018. settee, priscilla. “indigenous knowledge as the basis for our future.” original instructions: indigenous teachings for a sustainable future, edited by melissa k. nelson. rochester, vt: bear and company, 2008, pp. 59-64. simpson, leanne. “anticolonial strategies for the recovery and maintenance of indigenous knowledge.” american indian quarterly vol. 28, no. 3&4, summer/fall 2004, pp. 373-384. ---. “i am not a nation-state.” unsettling america: decolonization in theory & practice. https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/i-am-not-a-nationstate/. accessed january 24, 2019. ---. “traditional ecological knowledge: marginalization, appropriation and continued disillusion.” usak.ca. indigenous knowledge conference 2001, pp. 132-139. http://iportal.usask.ca/purl/ikc-2001-simpson.pdf. accessed feb 10, 2021. tallbear, kim. “beyond the life/not-life binary: a feminist-indigenous reading of cryopreservation, interspecies thinking, and the new materialisms.” cryopolitics: frozen life in a melting world, edited by joanna radin and emma kowal. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2017, pp. 179-202. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1n2ttqh.13 taylor, sunaura. “disabled ecologies: living with impaired landscapes.” haas institute for a fair and inclusive society. youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ooexlylht4. accessed may 12, 2020. todd, zoe. “indigenizing the anthropocene.” art in the anthropocene: encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies, edited by heather davis and etienne turpin. london: open humanities press, 2015, pp. 241-54. joanna ziarkowska “cherishing the impaired land” 97 wall kimmerer, robin. braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. minneapolis: milkweed editions, 2013. werner, scott j. et al. “evaluation of bird shield™ as a blackbird repellent in ripening rice and sunflower fields.” wildlife society bulletin vol. 33, no. 1, spring, 2005, pp. 251-57. westerman, gwen nell. follow the blackbirds. east lansing: michigan state university press, 2013. whyte, kyle powys. “against crisis epistemology.” routledge handbook of critical indigenous studies, edited by brendan hokowhitu, aileen moreton-robinson, linda tuhiwai-smith et al. new york: routledge, 2021, pp. 52-64. ---. “our ancestors’ dystopia now: indigenous conservation and the anthropocene.” the routledge companion to the environmental humanities, edited by ursula k. heise, jon christensen, and michelle niemann. london: routledge, 2017, pp. 20615. williams, terry, and preston hardison. “culture, law, risk and governance: contexts of traditional knowledge in climate change adaptation.” climatic change vol. 120, no. 3, 2013, pp. 531-44. 373hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389.doi: 10.15201/hungeobull.68.4.4 hungarian geographical bulletin 68 2019 (4) 373–389. introduction rural space has been for a long time perceived as something stable and unchangeable which (un)successfully avoids modernisation impulses in comparison to dynamically growing urban areas. however, this dichotomy doesn’t seem to be legitimated as also rural space constantly undergoes extensive transformations (woods, m. 2005, 30). the switch from the centrally planned to market economies is the most important transformation which has been discussed since the 1990s in the context of rural areas of central and eastern european (cee) countries. basic system, institutional and structural changes in national economies (synek, m. 2004) accompanied such transformation and significantly influenced fortunes of rural localities of these countries (e.g. swain, n. 1996; turnock, d. 1998, 2000; rey, v. and bachvarov, m. 1998; dingsdale, a. 2002; brown, d.l. 2002; gorlach, k. et al. 2008; pospěch, p. 2014; jucu, i.s. 2016). such changes had a large impact not only on agriculture (as it was dominantly stressed in many studies from the 1990s) but also other economic activities located in rural space such as mining, energy production or manufacturing. yet the level of success or failure of rural economic restructuring has been spatially very unequal – some of the rural localities have reported inflow of new economic activities during the restructuring period whereas other fall into the vicious circles of rural poverty and social exclusion. as a result, rural europe could be characterised by a new mosaic of rural regions with winners, in-betweens and losers (terluin, i.j. 2003). winning and losing rural localities of the post-socialist economic restructuring: case study of czechia vladan h r u šk a 1 and jan p íša 2 abstract retreat from socialism at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s conditioned significant social, economic and environmental changes for former socialist countries. transformation from the centrally planned economy under the authoritative regime to market economy and democratic system re-structured also economies of rural areas. as a result, the conversion to capitalism constructed successful rural localities enjoying growing wealth whereas, on the other hand, other rural localities struggle with high unemployment, low incomes and following emigration of qualified people. this paper, on the example of rural space in czechia, analyses time-spatial development of number of jobs on local level and reveals main factors which have been constructing economically successful and unsuccessful rural localities in the post-socialist period. based on this, six model responses to post-socialist economic rural restructuring are identified: globally integrated service-oriented, entrepreneurial, industrialised, post-productivist, deindustrialised and post-mining and energy-producing rural localities. keywords: post-socialism, economy, restructuring, rural, czechia 1 jan evangelista purkyně university in ústí nad labem, faculty of science, department of geography, české mládeže 8, 40096, ústí nad labem, czechia. corresponding author’s e-mail: vladan.hruska@ujep.cz 2 jan evangelista purkyně university in ústí nad labem, faculty of science, department of geography, české mládeže 8, 40096, ústí nad labem, czechia. e-mail: jan.pisa@ujep.cz hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389.374 many authors attempted to focus on this growing spatial differentiation and suggested various typologies of post-socialist rural localities. however, these attempts are very general – such as empirical typologies of rural space on the european level based on nuts iii regions (e.g. ballas, d. et al. 2003; baum, s. et al. 2004; copus, a.k. et al. 2006; scholz, j. 2009; weingarten, p. et al. 2010) and national typologies of rural space (with focus on the cee countries e.g. beluszky, p. and sikos, t.t. 2008; bogdanov, d. et al. 2008; perlín, r. et al. 2010; bański, j. and mazur, m. 2016; perger, é. et al. 2016). these typologies are usually holistic – focusing on each sphere of rural life, and based on a mix of statistical data. therefore, their results are hardly transferable into other spatial contexts (contrary to rather theoretical typologies of rural economies which are discussed in the next part of the paper). also, they dominantly link the post-socialist economic restructuring with agricultural restructuring and stress the processes which deteriorated economic conditions in rural localities but do not focus on processes which enabled economic growth. notable exception from this point of view is the typology of czech non-metropolitan regions by ženka, j. et al. (2017) who analysed economic profile of czech regions located out of the metropolitan areas. their typology identifies spatial variations in key factors, actors and mechanisms of development. however, in this analysis also urban areas were included therefore the results do not represent exclusively rural areas. moreover, if these typologies (apart from the typology by ženka, j. et al. 2017) focus on economic development, they are based on sectoral occupation of rural inhabitants with no regards to the fact where their employment is really situated – it means they do not analyse the structure of jobs which are really present in rural areas. as such, these typologies failed to discover what really happened during the post-socialist decades in rural areas. therefore, for a better understanding of differentiation of post-socialist rural restructuring (1) more detailed analysis of rural economies (based on very small spatial units) is needed and (2) this analysis must be focused on employment opportunities which are really present in rural areas – it is better to examine economic structure of rural localities based on jobs located there (contrary to employment which is ascribed to rural people but very often practised in urban areas). within our paper, we introduce the results of such analysis on the example of the post-socialist czechia. based on this, first, we identify rural localities with the best and worst economic performance (measured by the number of jobs) during the post-socialist period. second, after a close look on these winners and losers we indicate distinct processes which have dominantly formed the way of the post-socialist rural economic restructuring in rural czechia. rural localities and uneven economic dynamics at the beginning of the theoretical discussion, we would like to stress the key spatial concept for the following analysis – concept of (rural) localities. although hoggart, k. (1990) and other scholars before the onset of postmodern approaches in rural geography refused the existence of a specific ‘rural’ locality and suggested to ‘do away with rural’, the term ‘rural locality’ is acknowledged by rural scholars and finds frequent use in contemporary rural studies. its popularity has increased since its integration with definition of rural as a social construction. at the beginning of locality debates there was a question, to which extent are distinctive places results of local and non-local structuring processes. the structuring power of external processes of regional, national and global scale has been acknowledged and the discussion turned to the point what are the capacities of local actors to transform the external influences in order to avoid their negative impacts and generate benefits for a given local community. reflecting this, the locality is defined as active, semi-autonomous units (murdoch, j. and marsden, t. 1995) with a relative openness to external relations. as 375hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389. such, to a limited extent it also gives an opportunity to rural actors to influence the destiny of their own locality (murdoch, j. and marsden, t. 1994). on the other hand, moseley, j.m. (2003) argues that institutional capacities of local communities are still only limitedly able to influence processes from the national or even global level the concept of locality has been developed in order to grasp the increasingly diverse character of (rural) space as the consequence of intensive penetration of neo-liberal principles into spatial regulation and planning. many rural scholars (e.g. murdoch, j. et al. 2003; halfacree, k. 2004; hodge, i. and monk, s. 2004; holmes, j. 2006; brunori, g. and rossi, a. 2007; van der ploeg, j.d. et al. 2008) recognise growing differentiation of rural space and suggest specific models of rural localities which differ from each other based on their social, economic, cultural, environmental and institutional profile. in the next paragraphs, we will focus only on typologies which more deeply analyse diverse economic milieus of rural localities. typologies of farming systems were excluded (e.g. van der ploeg, j.d. et al. 2008; wilson, g. 2010) as we disagree with arguments which ascribe the central role in rural development to agriculture. marini, m. and mooney, p. (2006) developed typology purely focused on rural economies and suggest three distinctive types. first, rent-seeking economy is localised in rather peripheral rural areas whose economies are mostly based on rather large farms and firms in mining and extraction. these actors control high proportion of local land rent and like this they don’t have special motivation for further investment in local development. second, dependent economies are based on attraction of external sources (both of public and private origin) which expose them to a higher risk in the periods of fiscal austerity (decline of subventions) or economic downturn (outflow of foreign direct investment). on the other hand, third, entrepreneurial economies are based on valorisation of local assets by local enterprises. as such, in comparison of these three types, they are considered as the most resilient. woods, m. (2013) who engages with the impact of globalisation processes on rural localities suggests a typology of specific responses to these processes. he defines 9 modes of engagement more or less related to the economic dimension of globalisation process. global resource providers are rural localities rich in mineral and energy resources tightly integrated into global capital and markets. branch plant economies have been dominantly formed through the urban-rural shift in manufacturing driven by fdi since 1980s or 1990s. super-productivist farmers focus on large-scale, industrial and often export-oriented agricultural production. global playgrounds are structured by amenity immigration, growing consumption demand for rural space and related services. niche innovators are based on highly innovative companies or their cluster which use either local endogenous potential or focus on high-tech or service industries. trans-border networkers are localities who use their location with cross-border potential and offers special kind of assets (especially cheaper labour and services). economies of global conservators are limited due to their location in national parks or unesco biosphere reservations. re-localizers concentrate on intensification of local circuits of value in agri-food system or via public procurement etc. structurally marginalised regions are regions which are not able to use the positive potential of the globalization process. introduced typologies more or less consider the proximity of given rural localities to urban centres as an important factor of rural differentiation. from the economic point of view, it seems to be crucial. however, we can find some counter-tendencies when discussing the economic potential of rural localities based on their position on the urban-rural continuum. burger, m.j. et al. (2015) focus on presence of cultural amenities and discuss the concepts of ‘borrowed size’ (introduced by alonso, w. 1973) and ‘agglomeration shadows’ which typically occur in suburban rural localities. such localities enjoy ‘borrowed size’ effects as they host functions which were traditionally located hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389.376 in urban centres and that’s the reason why the functional importance of these localities largely exceeds its population importance. on the other hand, the concept of ‘agglomeration shadows’ is opposed to the former. in their later publication (meijers, e.j. and burger, m.j. 2017) they carefully scrutinize the term ‘borrowed size’ and complement it with terms ‘borrowed function/performance’ in order to cover the gaps related to the term ‘size’. in the context of our paper it means that some suburban rural localities can evidence over-average number of jobs (performance) or service/cultural amenities (function), whereas other localities in similar locations dispose with low number of jobs/less services and high level of work and leisure out-commuting to the neighbouring urban centre. during the 1980s and 1990s british scholars in the context of rural areas reported urbanrural shift in business activity and employment – first in manufacturing (e.g. keeble, d.e. 1980; fothergill, s. and gudgin, g. 1982; north, d. 1998), later also in the service sector (keeble, d.e. and tyler, p. 1995). within this shift, increased attractiveness of rural areas for relocation of businesses and employment opportunities has been recognized. most importantly, in some time spans remote rural areas evidenced more dynamic economic development than accessible rural areas (keeble, d.e. and tyler, p. 1995). rural scholars argue that this shift was partly caused by the immigration of former urban inhabitants usually well-endowed with entrepreneurial skills, knowledge, and creativity (atterton, j. et al. 2012) or human, social, and financial capital (gkartzios, m. and scott, m. 2014). anyway, the economic activity of rural entrepreneurs is not isolated within the rural space, instead they employ extra-regional linkages in order to gain knowledge and access to large markets located in urban areas. therefore, when considering rural entrepreneurship, it is necessary to consider also the urban dimension of everyday business activities of rural people (mayer, h. et al. 2016). identifying winners and losers of rural economies: data and methods our methodological approach has four important stages: 1. rural municipalities were defined and aggregated into larger spatial units; 2. indicator of number of jobs was quantified; 3. rural winners and losers were identified; 4. economic profile and history of these selected localities were analysed. first, when analysing larger spatial units, typically statistical (or descriptive by halfacree, k.h. 1993) definitions of rural space are used. based on this, a measurable indicator which defines the rurality of a given spatial unit must be determined. for our purposes we have chosen the indicator of population size which was applied on the municipality level (local administrative unit). in czechia the population size of 3,000 is usually used as a threshold value for identification of rural/urban municipality (such definition was used e.g. by perlín, r. et al. 2010; chromý, p. et al. 2011; bernard, j. 2012) despite the existence of rural municipalities (based on their physical structure and architecture) with more than 3,000 inhabitants especially in south and east moravia. in order to follow more easily the spatial pattern of results – municipalities with population less than 3,000 have been integrated in larger spatial units based on administrative districts of municipalities with authorised municipal authority (obce s pověřeným obecním úřadem opoú) which serve for purposes of state administration in czechia. in 2011 there were 389 administrative areas of opoú in czechia and five military areas. but in ten of them there was no rural municipality and therefore they were considered as urban and excluded from the analysis. finally, 379 administrative areas of opoú were analysed – hereinafter within the text they are referred to as ‘rural locality’ in compliance with the theoretical discussion above. second, indicator of number of jobs has been used for our research of the post-so377hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389. cialist economic restructuring. as there is no statistical source in czechia which would present these data on local level, we had to derive the number of jobs from the formula (this formula was used in other czech studies e.g. by hampl, m. 2005 and hampl, m. and marada, m. 2015): ja = eaa + eaa_in-com – eaa_out-com, where ja = number of jobs in the municipality a, eaa = economic active population of the municipality a, eaa_in-com = economic active population commuting into the municipality a from other municipalities, eaa_out-com = economic active population commuting out of the municipality a. concerning the data availability – they are based on the results of czech censuses from years 1991, 2001 and 2011 (more recent data are not available as the next census is planned for 2021). year 1991 doesn’t fully demonstrate the beginning of the restructuring period (for example in some agricultural cooperatives the transformation started immediately in 1990), yet this year is still very suitable for the description of the economic situation before the main restructuring processes started (the unemployment rate in 1991 was 2.3 per cent, thus, very close to the full employment typical for the communist era). year 2001 may transparently describe the situation of czech economy after the impact of main restructuring processes related to the privatisation process and retreat of the state from the national economy and before the start of the intensive inflow of fdi (at that time the unemployment rate reached 9.3%). year 2011 then demonstrates how rural localities adapted to the challenges of post-socialist restructuring including growing global integration of economy (the unemployment rate was 9.8%). indicator of number of jobs has been chosen due to its ability to transparently describe the economic situation of a given locality. contrary to the (un)employment indicator, it is strictly related to the selected spatial unit and therefore it can better describe the ability of a given locality to sustain or even generate economic growth. focus on jobs in rural areas is even more important as new jobs creation is a general target of rural development policies for remote rural areas. as freshwater argues ‘community may be able to improve the degree of social cohesion, they may be able to develop both their physical infrastructure and the level of human capital, but if jobs do not exist, it is unlikely that the community will survive.’ (freshwater, d. 2000, 6). concerning suburban areas, here the call for new jobs is seemingly not as urgent as in remote rural areas due to their accessibility to employment opportunities located in nearby urban centres. however, their presence (matching with qualification of local people) could decrease the over-dimensional traffic flows, congestions and pollution related to the intensive daily work commuting. on the other hand, in our approach this indicator has also some disadvantages. it doesn’t say us anything about the quality of such a job and hereby about its contribution to local economic development. from this point of view, these questions cannot be discussed intensively within this paper, however, some insights in the changing number of jobs are revealed by a more detailed examination of rural winners and losers. as regards the quality of the data from the censuses – results from the census 2011 are problematical. in comparison with earlier censuses its results were incomplete – the number of commuting person was lower by about 560 thousand than in 2001 (the total number of commuting people in 2001 was 1.70 million in comparison to 1.14 million in 2011), although the number of economic active employed people hadn’t changed much (hampl, m. and marada, m. 2015). from this reason, authors had to model the missing data (similarly as mulíček, o. and malý, j. 2019) in the categories of in-commuting, out-commuting and economic active residents by their proportional distribution based on the known value of residents living in a given municipality. third, rural winners and losers were defined as rural localities which until 2011 had created more than 40 per cent jobs or contrahruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389.378 ry, lost more than 60 per cent of jobs in comparison with 1991. based on these threshold values, for 2011 there were 42 rural winners and 25 rural losers (figure 1). last but not least, selected rural winners and losers were examined in detail in order to get information about the structure of local economy, the way of change and key employers both at the end of the socialist period and in the present. because there is no coherent database of companies or job structure at the end of the socialist period, information was gathered from various sources websites of relevant municipalities, daily media, older research studies which defined main employers in given rural localities (e.g. häufler, v. 1984) or by a direct contact with representatives of given rural municipalities. there are no data about jobs structure even for present situation but rural winners were at least analysed by the means of the bisnode albertina database (version 2018) which gathers information about businesses including their location and size in terms of employer number. this analysis serves later as an important input for development of model rural localities. post-socialist economic restructuring of czech rural space economic restructuring since the 1990s have produced different spatial impacts, as postsocialist transformation is a complicated process of institutional changes and behavioural adaptations of people, firms and institutions to new conditions of pluralist democracy and economy regulated by the free-market ideology in which the private companies play the key role. the shift towards market economy marked also the end of levelling tendencies in spatial distribution of sources characteristic for socialist mode of regulation (dostál, p. 2007). industrialisation policies of communist regime aimed to balance unequal economic potential among czechoslovak regions by supporting agricultural and industrial production in smaller towns and rural areas. and indeed, at the end of the socialist period the economic position of small local centres was relatively strong. however, under the newly established capitalist regime, their central position has been weakened or even disappeared due to selective deindustrialisation and tertiarisation processes (mulíček, o. and malý, j. 2019). in the new neo-liberal regime czechia has opened itself to the external world – not only from the physical point of view (more relaxed cross-border regime – removal of ‘iron curtain’ and demilitarisation of western borderland, implementation of the schengen treaty in 2007) but also as regards more fluid and less tangible impacts of trade liberalization and acceptation of european and global values leading to growing global (european) integration of czech society and economy. post-revolution performance of czech agriculture was influenced by processes of privatization, restitution and transformation of former cooperatives which destabilized agricultural production (e.g. kabrda, j. and jančák, v. 2007; hrabák, j. and konečný, o. 2018; žoncová, m. 2018). moreover, under the influence of the neo-liberalization rhetoric, state subventions decreased rapidly during the period 1989–2000 (věžník, a. 2002; bičík, i. and jančák, v. 2005). this process had a destructive impact especially on farms located in less favoured (sub-)mountain and very often peripheral (musil, j. and müller, j. 2008) areas. these areas had been economically lagging already before the socialist period and therefore socialist planners supported local agricultural fig. 1. frequency of rural localities based on the development of number of jobs in the period 1991–2011. source: czech statistical office 2011; federal statistical office 1993. authors’ own calculation. 379hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389. production massively in order to ensure employment for local people. nevertheless, such policy was at expense of economic productivity, high subsidization, excessive use of chemicals and consequent negative environmental impacts. therefore, these were just these areas, where calls for elimination of overproduction and more sustainable agricultural practices were implemented leading to rapid job losses in this economic sector. economic situation of czech farms started to improve not earlier than with the accession of czechia into the eu (bašek, v. 2010). similarly, mining and manufacturing registered decline in terms of their contribution to national employment and gdp (mulíček, o. and malý, j. 2019). in socialist countries coal mining had a privileged position as the capital-intensive industries and extensive mode of production of these countries (pavlínek, p. 2009; koutský, j. 2011) were based on high amount of inputs including energy. czechoslovak manufacturing production during the socialism could be characterised by low labour productivity and associated high costs of production, production of products whose technical standard was lagging behind western standards (synek, m. 2004). economies of some rural areas were diversified by old industries (textile, glass and ceramic industry) which dated back to the first waves of industrialization. from this point of view, the situation in czechia was different than in other cee countries – czech rural localities showed high proportion of industrial employment, whereas eastern parts of poland and hungary were predominantly focused on agriculture (ženka, j. et al. 2015). however, growing environmental concerns (pavlínek, p. 1998) suppressed during the socialist regime initiated new environmental measures and policies. their impact was particularly painful in rural areas integrated into old industrial regions of northwest czechia and ostrava agglomeration (pavlínek, p. 1998; klusáček, p. 2005; fig. 2. change of number of jobs in rural localities of czechia in the period 1991–2001 (1991 = 1.00). source: federal statistical office 1993; czech statistical office 2001; arcčr 500. authors’ own calculations. compiled by the authors. hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389.380 koutský, j. 2011). apart from them, rural areas dependent on old industries producing low value added products suffered from growing unemployment as these economic industries has been particularly vulnerable under the neo-liberal conditions of globally integrated economy. as a result, during the first decade of rural restructuring massive job loss could be observed in each of the nuts iii regions of czechia (figure 2), whereas in rural localities the economic downturn was more serious (in 2001 by 18% less jobs than in 1991) than in urban localities (job loss by 7%). on the other hand, since the beginning of the 2000s high inflow of foreign direct investment (fdi) to czechia driven by lower labour costs, skilled and well-educated labour, long manufacturing tradition, strategic geographical position in the eu (since 2004 czechia is a member state of the eu) and massive state investment incentives has been observed. koutský, j. (2011) labels this period as a period of organised re-industrialization and from this point of view, also in czech rural localities some patterns of urban-rural shift in manufacturing might be observed. fdi of transnational investors have significantly transformed and developed (at least quantitatively) also the service sector. their intensive development was partly preconditioned by an under-dimensioned service infrastructure from the socialist period (szczyrba, z. 2000). since the mid-1990s retail chains from western europe discover czechia as a new destination for investment of profits gained on domestic markets (coe, n.m. et al. 2013). the czech retail market got internationalised and concentrated quickly (kunc, j. et al. 2013) whereas buildings of new supermarkets and hypermarkets and logistics parks intensively transformed landscape of suburban rural localities and commuting patterns within urban agglomerations (mulíček, o. and malý, j. 2019). such suburban rural localities enjoy the ‘borrowed performance’ (burger, m.j. et al. 2015) effects when the number of jobs per capita significantly exceeds the average number in similar localities and sometimes even the number of local economic active population. on the other hand, the growth of entrepreneurial activity in services (including creative industries) in these localities has been driven also by local factors – entrepreneurial in-migrants (ženka, j. and slach, o. 2018; píša, j. and hruška, v. 2019). our additional analyses of entrepreneurial activity per capita in age +15 for year 2017 (czech statistical office 2018c) showed that among the top 20 rural localities with highest levels of entrepreneurial activity 15 were located in the prague metropolitan area and five in šumava and krkonoše mountains with strong recreational function accompanied by relevant services in retail and hospitality. strong entrepreneurial activity in recreational rural localities is a consequence of growing purchasing power of medium and upper class residents, individual car-ownership and increasing inflow of foreign visitors since the end of 1980s. new firms both in manufacturing and services generated new employment opportunities especially in peri-urban and well accessible rural areas (figure 3). in the period 2001–2011 (until the global economic downturn) the growth of employment opportunities was reported in rural areas (by 16%) whereas in urban areas the number of jobs decreased by 4 per cent. one could argue, that the growth of number of jobs in suburban rural localities is given by the growing population of these areas and their entrepreneurial attitudes. however, if we compare the development of number of jobs and economic active population in rural areas, the former is growing quicker in each of the nuts iii regions apart from the karlovy vary region. generally speaking, social and economic processes driving post-socialist restructuring have intensively transformed employment patterns in czechia. from the rural point of view, rapid loss of jobs was reported in agriculture and mining. on the other hand, de and re-industrialization process had highly unequal spatial distribution. as a result, the industrial employment in czechia has decreased only slightly since 1990 (table 1). 381hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389. models of rural winners and losers of the post-socialist economic restructuring based on the transformation of the rural economic orientation and performance, six basic models of rural winning and losing localities can be defined regarding the development of number of jobs during the period 1991–2011 (figure 4). these models demonstrate key processes and transformations shaping the most (un) successful rural localities (for their overview, see table 2) based on the development of number of jobs. these localities are manifestations of distinctive and relatively dominant economic processes which constructed czech rural space during the post-socialist period. as they are just ideal models, they don’t have their real spatial anchoring in the map – authors are aware that rural localities are always influenced by specific combinations of multifaceted economic processes. that’s why examples in the map below (figure 5) point to the localities which are close to the suggested models. moreover, we don’t have the ambition to cover the whole area of czechia – due to the fig. 3. change of number of jobs in rural localities of czechia in the period 2001–2011 (2001 = 1.00). source: czech statistical office 2001, 2011; arcčr 500. authors’ own calculations. compiled by the authors. table 1. employment development in basic economic sectors in the period 1990–2017 in czechia sector 1990 2000 2010 2017 agriculture, fishing and forestry (nace a) mining and quarrying (nace b) industry (nace c–e) construction (nace f) services (nace g–u) not found 9.9 3.0 31.3 8.6 47.2 0.0 4.9 1.5 28.4 9.6 55.6 0.0 3.1 1.0 27.5 9.5 58.6 0.3 2.8 0.6 29.9 7.5 58.4 0.8 source: own calculation based on the czech statistical office 2013, 2018a, 2018c. hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389.382 exclusive focus on rural winners and losers, we haven’t developed special models for localities formed by other, spatially less important processes as these processes first, didn’t formed the winning and losing localities and second, they were limited only to a small number of rural municipalities. for example, in some rural municipalities slight growth of number of jobs has been reported due to the growth of tourism or cross-border shopping tourism (along the border with germany and austria) or contrary, the number of jobs slightly decreased as a result of the de-militarization of border areas (especially along the former iron curtain border with bavaria and austria). models a, b and c could be labelled as winners of post-socialist restructuring as their economic transformation can be considered as relatively successful. model localities d, e and f are those which have suffered economically due to the failed restructuring of local enterprises. model a – globally integrated service-oriented rural localities: beneficial geographic location in metropolitan areas (especially in the prague metropolitan area) along major transport routes is the comparative advantage of these model localities which are largely shaped by commercial suburbanization process. concentration of plants of transnational companies in logistics and retail can be observed here which enjoy the benefits of their strategic location and large potential market in the core of the metropolitan area. an important factor for the location of logistic firms is also the lack of available land in the city or its high price. these economic activities have brought rapid growth of jobs in localities which used to be strongly dependent on lower number of jobs in agriculture or urban work-commuting during the socialism period. however, these localities (similarly as the following model b) are still dominantly integrated to the urban centre by commuting patterns, as newly created jobs are largely occupied by urban inhabitants and their structure doesn’t match with the qualificafig. 4. change of number of jobs in rural localities of czechia in the period 1991–2011 (1991 = 1.00). source: federal statistical office 1993; czech statistical office 2011; arcčr 500. authors’ own calculations. compiled by the authors. 383hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389. tion of well-educated suburbanizers (sýkora, l. and ouředníček, m. 2007). moreover, the economic sustainability of these jobs (due to their dependence on decision-making situated abroad) as well as their quality (in terms of average salaries) is disputable. model b – entrepreneurial rural localities: the significant growth of jobs in suburban rural localities of larger urban centres (prague, brno, ostrava and plzeň) can be explained also by the overall development of small business activity in services driven by well-educated urban newcomers supporting residential suburbanization process. during the socialist period (similarly as in the case of model a) these localities could have been characterised by low number of jobs (mostly in agriculture) and high intensity of work-commuting. new entrepreneurs use constantly growing metropolitan market as its population continues to grow and requires higher capacity of local commercial and public services which further generate new jobs. also, newcomers offer knowledge intensive business services with high value-added with focus on larger than local market. overall, these rural localities are characterized by a diversified economy of high local origin and control. model c – industrialised rural localities: in contrast to the previous two service-oriented localities, the economic success of these model localities (situated in well accessible locations with accessible cheap workforce) is based on manufacturing (very often automotive industry). these localities have been a target of rural industrialisation process driven both by fdi and by a successful transformation of former socialist companies. local economies may be structured by one dominant manufacturing company, cluster of larger manufacturing companies within one industrial park or more diffused cluster of many smes. anyway, their contribution to local development depends on the type of the economic activity and embeddedness of the business activity in the local entrepreneurial milieu. similarly, as in the case of the a-model localities, their vulnerability might ta bl e 2. o ve rv ie w o f k ey m od el s of r ur al w in ne rs a nd lo se rs o f t he p os tso ci al is t e co no m ic r es tr uc tu ri ng in d ic at or m od el a m od el b m od el c m od el d m od el e m od el f n um be r of jo bs g ro w th d ec lin e l oc at io n w el l a cc es si bl e lo ca ti on s in m et ro po lita n ar ea s m et ro po lit an a re as w el l a cc es si bl e ar ea s pe ri ph er al (s ub -) m ou nt ai n ar ea s p ro xi m it y to m in er al d ep os it s k ey a tt ri bu te s b ett er tr an sp or t an d /o r ec on om ic ac ce ss ib ili ty th an in ur ba n ce nt re s p ro xi m it y to u rb an ce nt re s; h ig h hu m an c ap it al a nd en tr ep re ne ur ia l ta le nt a cc es si bi lit y of ch ea p la bo ur ; g oo d tr an sp or t ac ce ss ib ili ty l es s fa vo ur ab le ag ri cu lt ur al a re as ; l ow h um an c ap it al u nc om pe ti ti ve m an uf ac tu ri ng ac ti vi ty w it h lo w va lu e ad d ed ; l ow h um an c ap it al (f or m er ) m in er al d ep os it s; l ow h um an c ap it al k ey p ro ce ss es c om m er ci al s ub ur ba ni sa ti on r es id en ti al s ub ur ba ni sa ti on in fl ow o f f d i p os tpr od uc ti vi st tr an si ti on d ein d us tr ia lis at io n; g lo ba l c om pe ti ti on d ein d us tr ia lis at io n; g ro w in g en vi ro nm en ta lis m hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389.384 be higher due to their dependence on one dominant employer or foreign ownership of local branch plant. model d – post-productivist rural localities: these localities are situated in the (sub-) mountain and peripheral areas of czechia. the decline of agricultural production and consequent job loss was, of course, a national matter, but in these areas the impact of this process was indeed intensive. rise of the neoliberal regime and consequent reduction of subsidies to agriculture combined with the growing demand for a better environment in this environmentally sensitive landscape have, thus, significantly affected the ability of newly transformed farms to sustain jobs. due to their peripheral location (also in terms of the quality of human resources – bernard, j. and šimon, m. 2017) these localities have been not able to create new start-ups or attract external investment. model e – deindustrialised rural localities: unsuccessful transformation of local manufacturing enterprises was another reason of rapid decline in jobs number in these localities. enterprises in old industries (glass, ceramic, textile) as well as in the wood-processing, metal-working and electromechanical industries appeared as less competitive on the global market. large decrease in the number of jobs was recorded mainly in the northern part of czechia which enjoyed rapid prosperity growth during the first waves of the industrial revolution. similarly to the post-productivist localities, their isolated location and low human capital of these localities made it impossible to compensate the job loss. model f – post-mining and energy-producing rural localities: rural localities which were until recently dependent on mining and energy industry could be labelled as absolute losers of post-socialist economic restructuring. these localities were economically dependent on labour-intensive lignite and coal mining, ores extraction (in czech case especially uranium) and electricity generation (based on burning of coal or lignite). the desire of the socialist state for its self-sufficiency fig. 5. overview map of close-to-model examples of winning and losing rural localities of czechia. source: arcčr 500, compiled by authors. 385hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389. in each aspects of economy led to the mining and extraction of raw materials even though their deposits were poor both in terms of quantity and quality of extracted materials. mining in some localities was maintained by high state subsidies which, similarly as in the case of agriculture, were stopped after the revolution. another reason for the job loss was also growing work productivity related to the technological modernization of mines or power stations. conclusions despite relatively good economic performance of czech rural localities during the second decade of the post-socialist restructuring, in no way this success has been distributed equally throughout the rural space. some rural localities which can be labelled as winners (based on our models globally integrated service oriented, entrepreneurial and industrialised rural localities) enjoyed economic growth whereas other localities (post-productivist, de-industrialised and post-mining and energy producing rural localities) struggle with economic decline. from this point of view, (de-)industrialisation process can serve as a good example of this highly unequal spatial development. well accessible rural winners registered growth of number of jobs in modern industries such as automotive contrary to more isolated rural localities which simultaneously suffered from the fall of traditional old industries. winning rural localities enjoy the effects of the ‘borrowed performance’ as they registered rapid growth of employment opportunities both of local (created by entrepreneurial individuals) and extra-local or even global (driven by inflow of fdi especially in services and in manufacturing) origin. from this point of view, urban proximity and/or location along the main transportation axes seems to be a very important factor influencing the ways of rural economic restructuring. on the other hand, the success of industrialised rural localities may not be permanent. their one-way orientation on foreign investors is risky, as they are dependent on the managerial decisions of the controlling headquarters situated in foreign countries. contrary, economies of post-productivist and post-mining and energy-producing rural localities suffered from the retreat of the state from the economy during the 1990s which started a vicious circle further reinforced by the brain drain and following weakening of entrepreneurial capacities of local people. our analysis didn’t prove an important role of tourism for post-socialist rural economies despite the fact that this economic activity is very often perceived as a panacea for local economic problems. only very small number of rural municipalities in the most attractive locations of national parks evidenced a growth in number of jobs. however, in the context of other cee countries with higher mountain ranges (high tatras, carpathian mountains and other mountain ranges of the balkan peninsula) the results might be different. similarly, the model of deindustrialised rural localities might not appear in other countries with different histories of industrialisation than in czechia and the existence of the industrialised rural localities is dependent on the overall ability of a given country to attract foreign fdi. this last remark brings us to the topic of urban-rural shift in employment which has been proved by our analysis for czechia. this process signalises, first, that it is not correct to consider rural space simply as space where jobs disappear – it is necessary to be aware of the diverse character of rural economies. second, it confirms the fact, that agriculture is no more the backbone of economies (terluin, i.j. 2003) even of the most rural regions of czechia and probably some other post-socialist countries. it is no more possible to view rural economy or rural development through the lenses of agriculture (hruška, v. et al. 2015). moreover, this new perspective opens up space for rural geographers of the cee countries to switch to new (albeit in western hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389.386 rural geographies relatively well-established) research topics. this study can serve as a point of departure for studies focusing on rural entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial rural in-migration, branch-plant rural economies, ‘old industrial rural areas’ (hruška, v. 2018) and similar topics with the whole array of implications for rural development policies and everyday lives of rural people. acknowledgements: vladan hruška would like to thank the european union, european social fund and the ministry of education, youth and sports of the czech 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(2): 143–158. hruška, v. and píša, j. hungarian geographical bulletin 68 (2019) (4) 373–389.390 microsoft word 980-article text-5781-1-11-20211013.docx transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 77 coeval worlds, alter/native words: healing in the inuit arctic abdenour bouich introduction split tooth (2018) is the debut novel of inuk throat singer and artist tanya tagaq. as a narrative that addresses colonial traumas in the peripheries of what is known today as the settler-colonial state of canada, the novel stands out notably for its plasticity in terms of form, style, and aesthetic techniques. it brings together prose, poetry, illustrations, narrative registers that are anchored in inuit ontologies, epistemologies, and worldviews along with tagaq’s own memoir. together, the novel is described by tagaq as “non-fiction, embellished non-fiction and pure fiction” (qtd. in doherty). indeed, there is no indication of when the fiction ends and the non-fiction memoir begins (nor vice-versa), “underscor[ing] the inability of those binaries of euro-defined disciplines to categorize, embrace, or discipline the exciting work of indigenous artists and scholars” (beard 317). by not conforming to those western literary genres of realism, fantasy, or science fiction, nor to experimental literary categories of magical realism, speculative fiction, and imaginative literature, split tooth presents itself as what cherokee scholar and writer daniel heath justice terms “indigenous wonderworks.” in his landmark study of indigenous literatures why indigenous literatures matter (2018), justice opens with an introduction titled “stories that wound, stories that heal” (1). he explains that, although many toxic stories were written about indigenous peoples— especially from a colonial eurocentric perspective—the most damaging of them all is that of “indigenous deficiency” (2, original emphasis). abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 78 according to this story, justice explains, lack in all its forms is inherent to indigenous peoples’ nature, whether it is a lack of “morals, laws, culture […] language […] a lack of responsibility” towards themselves and their families—a lack that this story attributes to indigenous biological, intellectual, and psychological deficiency (2). besides, justice states, this story asserts that lower rates of life expectancy, employment, and education, along with higher rates of homelessness, substance abuse, and suicide are due to the indigenous “lack of human decency” rather than a consequence of longstanding colonial violations of indigenous people’s lives, cultures, and identities (3). mental health issues related to trauma, depression, and despair, according to this story, find genesis in the indigenous peoples’ “lack of mental fitness” rather than being sustained by ongoing colonial oppressive and racist social structures (3). justice asserts that the story of “indigenous deficiency works as a protective shell hiding “settler colonial guilt and shame” while simultaneously exonerating society from taking “responsibility for the story’s devastating effects” (4). in the introduction of decolonizing methodologies (1999), linda tuhiwai smith explains that (post-)colonial and settler-colonial governments, states, institutions, and societies continue to ignore the “historical formations” of degrading conditions imposed upon indigenous peoples’ such as poverty, physical and mental health issues, alcoholism, and substance abuse that are direct results of colonialism as well as socio-political and economical marginalisation and oppression (34). instead, these institutions place the blame on indigenous peoples, trying to convince them that there is an inherent deficiency within them that explains their “worthlessness, laziness, dependence and lack of ‘higher’ order human qualities” (34). these are, indeed, part of the “stories that wound” to which justice refers in the title of his introduction. however, justice also insists that there are other stories, which he refers to as “stories that heal.” written from indigenous perspectives, these bring about transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 79 spiritual and bodily healing by reminding indigenous people that they are not “determined by the colonial narrative of deficiency” that have been long internalised and accepted as fatal truth (5). the author explains that these stories are found in indigenous literacies, yet they should not be understood simply as “diverse literary forms” or looked at from a narrow aesthetic prism, for “they perform other kinds of vital functions in their respective cultures, many of them ceremonial, ritual, and spiritual” (23). justice asserts that indigenous “speculative” literatures carry within them these “stories that heal.” in fact, he explains that indigenous speculative literatures provide “transformative modes” which, through a “complementary and distinctive range of reading and interpretive strategies,” make it possible to dismantle the monolithic and fatalist “models of ‘the real’” and provide transformative visions of other lives, experiences, and histories” (142). therefore, justice avers that the “ethical import” provided by speculative fiction–– whether fantasy, horror, or science fiction––demands to be looked at critically and pedagogically (142). he maintains that within indigenous speculative fiction, “the fantastic is an extension of the possible, not the impossible; it opens up and expands the range of options for indigenous characters (and readers); it challenges our assumptions and expectations of ‘the real,’ thus complicating and undermining the dominant and often domineering functions of the deficit model [of the real]” (149). however, justice questions the relevance of the terminology that informs speculative fiction when it is viewed from indigenous cultural and literary perspectives. he takes issue with terms such as “fantasy fiction” or “speculative/imaginative literature” as they are “burdened by dualistic presumptions of real and unreal” and “leave [no] legitimate space for other meaningful ways of experiencing this and other worlds” (152). even more problematic for indigenous cultures and literatures, explains justice, is that the term abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 80 “fantasy” suggests a kind of fabrication which, if understood from a freudian psychoanalytical perspective, could suggest a pathology of neurosis and delusion (152–3). instead, he proposes the concept of “wonderworks” that implies a polylithic understanding of the world and reality (152). justice explains that “[w]ondrous things are other and otherwise; they’re outside the bounds of the everyday and mundane […]. “they remind us that other worlds exist; other realities abide alongside and within our own” (153, original italics). indigenous wonderworks are grounded in indigenous peoples’ cultural specificities and experiences, allowing for the resurgence and the recovery of indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and politics that have long been dismissed by colonial discourses and narratives (154). furthermore, per justice, indigenous wonderworks subvert the “expectations of rational materialism” that insist on the inevitability and fatality of “the oppressive structures and conditions” as inherent to indigenous experiences (154–5). this article examines the ways in which split tooth revisits various sites of colonial and neo-colonial traumas that the inuit endured and still endure in the arctic region of what is known today as canada. the novel provides a vigorous critique of colonial capitalist modernity and its destructive “development” from which the inuit suffer, with a particular focus on the ecological disasters provoked by resource extraction and global warming brought about by global capitalism and canadian capitalist expansionism in the arctic region. in doing so, split tooth highlights the ways in which environmental disasters and their anthropogenic effects find geneses in colonialism’s ecocidal logics. in fact, this is precisely what is argued by settler-canadian scholar heather davis and métis anthropologist zoe todd in “on the importance of a date, or decolonizing the anthropocene” (2017). in their article, davis and todd call for a re-evaluation of the start date of the anthropocene by linking it to western colonisation and approaching it as a continuation and accumulation of colonial dispossessions, genocides, and ecocides (761). the transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 81 authors explain that the logic of the anthropocene resides in “the ruptures and cleavages between land and flesh, story and law, human and more-than-human” caused by colonialism and contemporary petrocapitalism (775). davis and todd’s parallel between the start of the anthropocene and the beginning of western colonialism of “the americas” suggests that indigenous peoples are well acquainted with its repercussions. in split tooth, the relationship between colonialism and canadian petrocapitalism, and environmental destruction in the arctic region is aesthetically registered not only through a panoply of narrative registers in which non-human agencies that pertain to inuit worldviews and knowledge systems are mobilised, but also through a subversive appropriation of the gothic and phantasmagoria. in parallel, aspects of the western gothic are deployed as a subversive strategy to capture the protagonist’s trauma of sexual abuse and rape that is implicitly equated with colonial encroachment and environmental destruction in the arctic. reflecting on the land’s agency and ability to exert an influence of human and the other-than-human beings in “indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans” (2013), vanessa watts writes: “our truth, not only anishnaabe and haudenosaunee people but in a majority of indigenous societies, conceives that we (humans) are made from the land; our flesh is literally an extension of soil” (27). this conceptualisation, which watts calls “place-thought,” is “based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts” (21). in split tooth, the protagonist inscribes her path of healing within the worldviews and knowledge systems that inform the inuit perspectives and visions of the natural environment and landscape of the arctic. as such, the power of tanya tagaq’s novel lies in the way in which it presents itself as a narrative of healing and survivance. abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 82 in the context of colonial traumas, survivance is, as anishinaabe writer gerald vizenor puts it, neither mere survival, nor endurance and passive presence; rather, “survivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy and victimry” (fugitive poses 15). in a recent article by valerie n. wieskamp & cortney smith, entitled ““what to do when you’re raped”” (2020), the authors conduct a rhetorical analysis of lucy m. bonner’s illustrated handbook what to do when you are raped (2016). in it, they explore the potential of the “rhetoric of survivance” in expanding the discussion about trauma and sexual violence within indigenous women and girls (73). wieskamp and smith start with a critique of the euro-american discourses of trauma and sexual violence that they consider incompatible with the experiences of women of colour (73). in addition to their racial and gendered tendencies, they explain, euro-american discourses of trauma follow a linear “traumatological timeline” which assumes a stable subject position before traumatisation. thus, traumatised individuals are capable “of being forever cured of that trauma, even if they cannot regain their initial subject position” (76). this understanding, the authors contend, victimises those who fail to detach themselves from their trauma (76). moreover, wieskamp and smith state that euro-american conceptions of trauma and healing are highly individualistic, such that the accountability of the state’s structural oppression is hidden via grammars of psychology and individual well-being (73). in split tooth, the narrator is not trapped in a traumatic compulsion. nor does she accept the status of a passive survivor of her trauma in which healing and recovery are, as deborah l. madsen points out, equated with a therapeutic reassimilation or reintegration of the fragmented self that aims to bring the patient “to a condition of cultural productivity,” and in which “the concept of psychic integration or assimilation” is imperatively conflated with social assimilation (“on subjectivity and survivance” 64). transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 83 as such, the novel can be read in terms of what yellowknives dene scholar glen coulthard calls, in red skins, white masks (2014), a rejection of the colonial politics of recognition (17). in this study, coulthard draws on fanon’s critique of the colonial politics of recognition to investigate the current situation of indigenoussettler state relations in canada (17). the author explains that fanon’s critique of the colonial politics of recognition consists of two dimensions. the first dimension presents a structural problem that lies at the heart of colonial recognition as it occurs in “in real world contexts of domination” such that “the terms of accommodation” concerning this recognition are regulated and shaped “by and in the interests of the hegemonic partner in the relationship” (17). the second dimension, he adds, presents a subjective problem that consists of the colonised people’s psychological and affective attachment to “structurally circumscribed modes of recognition” that facilitate and perennate “the economic and political structure of colonial relationships over time” (1718). in split tooth, the protagonist resists pathologisation and victimisation while simultaneously rejecting assimilation by asserting her self-determination through her historical consciousness, political agency, and cultural affirmation. in this way, the novel manifests what coulthard calls a “resurgent politics of recognition” which he conceives as a decolonial praxis that focuses on indigenous self-empowerment “through cultural practices of individual and collective self-fashioning” (18, original italics). as an indigenous wonderwork, not only does split tooth reflect indigenous perspectives on the world, reality, and existence, it also offers a decolonising reading of healing that is articulated as an ongoing process of survivance entrenched within the natural environment of the arctic. therefore, the novel presents itself as what justice calls a story that heals. traumatised land, traumatised bodies abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 84 split tooth is set in a small, peripheral town in the arctic region of nunavut, situated in the northern territories of what is known today as canada. the peripherality of the town is not limited to its geographic location in relation to the core-capitalist metropoles of the settler-colonial state of canada. indeed, through a myriad of narrative registers, such as non-human agencies, indigenous inuit narrative registers and storytelling, free-verse poetry, and scientific terminologies of geology, the author formally and aesthetically registers the town’s peripherality in a logic of an uneven and traumatic modernity produced by the expansion of canadian colonial capitalism. the plot of split tooth is told entirely from the first-person perspective of an unnamed adolescent girl and is centred on her life in a coming-of-age narrative through which she confronts the trauma of longstanding sexual abuse. from the first page of the novel, this unnamed narrator provides an overview of the economical precariousness that haunts this peripheral arctic town. amid this harsh arctic environment, she describes the house she lives in as made of “[f]ake-wood panel walls” (1, emphasis added). although short as a description, it is possible to discern the critique that lies behind it. the fragility of the house walls speaks volumes about the uneven modernity produced in the logic of colonial and neocolonial capitalism in canada. in combined and uneven development (2015), the warwick research collective (wrec) reflect on the uneven nature of development and modernity brought about by capitalism in the (semi-) peripheries of corecapitalist countries. they contend that modernity in an economic logic of a combined and uneven development “is coded into the fabric of built space[s]” (148). in the novel, the fallacious character of the walls being made of “fake-wood panels”—instead of real wood which, as a natural resource, is hardly lacking in settler-colonial countries like canada—provides a glimpse into the uneven distribution of wealth and the nature of development that a racially inscribed capitalism entails in the peripheries of these core-capitalistic settler-colonial countries transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 85 tagaq depicts the tormented life of an inuit child whose community is still plagued by longstanding colonial and neo-colonial traumas and their far-reaching psychological, social and economic repercussions. however, the novel focuses more on the traumatic impacts of the canadian residential school policies among indigenous inuit communities, shedding light on the social ills of alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and suicide among the youth. indeed, tagaq dedicates her novel “[f]or the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and survivors of residential schools” (split tooth vii, original italics). early in the novel, this traumatic environment, fuelled with alcohol and violence, is portrayed as the narrator’s everyday life. the opening sentence reads: “sometimes we would hide in the closet when the drunks came home from the bar. [...] sometimes there was only thumping, screaming, moans, laughter” (1). from childhood, the narrator is exposed to persistent molestation and sexual abuse, both in public and domestic spaces. during a routine day at school, she describes “[t]he teacher squirming his fingers under my panties. / […] he looks around and pretends he’s not doing it” (split tooth 4). later, speaking of the school custodian, she declares: “watch out for the old walrus. / the old man likes to touch young pussy. / [...] i wonder why nobody kicks him out” (4, emphasis added). in this way, the novel’s first poem exposes the educational environment that, ordinarily, is meant to offer security and fulfilment for children. yet, located in a peripheral town of a settler-colonial country infested by uneven-race relations, the school becomes another space where inuit children encounter institutionally facilitated oppression and abuse that the rhetorical question illuminates. tagaq’s critique of colonial capitalist modernity and the destructive “development” endured by the inuit of “canada” takes on other proportions when she addresses the ecological disasters provoked by resource extraction and global warming brought about by global capitalism and canadian capitalist expansionism abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 86 in the arctic region. the novel highlights the ways in which environmental disasters and their anthropogenic effects find genesis in colonialism’s ecocidal logics. in “on the importance of a date, or decolonizing the anthropocene” (2017), davis and todd contend that relating the anthropocene to the beginning of colonialism allows it to be set as a critical project through which it is possible to consider today’s “ecocidal logics” not as fatality or as something inherent to “human nature,” but rather as the outcome of a constellation of attitudes that “have their origins and reverberations in colonization” (763). by linking the anthropocene to colonialism, they demonstrate the way in which the emergence of ecological disaster is inherently tied to a western ideology that not only separates but also places the human above “geology and biota” (769). indeed, davis and todd argue that colonialism and settler-colonialism “[were] always about changing the land, transforming the earth itself, including the creatures, the plants, the soil composition and the atmosphere. it was about moving and unearthing rocks and minerals. all of these acts were intimately tied to the project of erasure that is the imperative of settler colonialism” (770). the logic of the anthropocene, they assert, resides in colonialism and contemporary petrocapitalism’s severing of the bonds between “humans and the soil, between plants and animals, between minerals and our bones” (770). by relating the anthropocene to colonialism, davis and todd concretely ground the concept in the current ecological and environmental crisis. as an indigenous wonderwork, split tooth captures the violence and the ecological impact of oil extraction in nunavut through a mixture of phantasmagoria and anthropomorphism. early in the novel, the narrator anthropomorphises “[g]lobal warming” through the use of active verbs, asserting that it “will release the deeper smells” and “coax stories out of the permafrost” (split tooth 6). later, in an ominous phantasmagorical tone, she wonders “what memories lie deep in the ice? who knows what curses?” (6). addressing such issues in their work, the wrec transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 87 contributors argue that in literary works that register ecological failures induced by violent resource extractions, there is often a self-conscious recourse to—and appropriation of—“catachrestic narrative devices,” fantastic tropes, and aesthetics of speculative fiction in order to “visualise spectral economies of oil and energy, hyper-commodity fetishism” and “to register the violent impact of petroleum extraction and reorganisation of socio-ecological relations” (combined and uneven 97–8). in the novel, the use of western aspects of phantasmagoria and the gothic to register the destructive impact of global warming can be read as a subversive strategy whereby the author explicitly links the attacks on the arctic environment to colonialism in general, and to the canadian neo-colonial policies of resource extraction in particular. in other passages that touch upon the same theme, the narrator addresses the land directly. yet, unlike “global warming,” which is gothicised and anthropomorphised, the land is approached as a character per se through a conferred agency that is reflected in the novel’s typography. in an interlude, the narrator enters in a direct conversation with the land as their gazes meet, “[b]lack eye on black eye” (64). she addresses the land as a human being with human organs using the second person pronoun “you” when she says: “your mouth opens and emits a toothless scream” and “[y]our hair falls out” (65). this embodiment of the land reaches an apotheosis when the narrator corporealises the suffering it endures while being stripped of its oil resources. first, she compares it to bleeding and haemorrhaging when she describes the way in which “[o]il begins to seep from all of [the land’s] orifices” (65). afterwards, she equates the process of well-drilling with the skinning of a caribou: “this is happening to you with invisible hands, and then the skin reattaches itself so you can feel that same thing again and again” (65). finally, the narrator considers the land as a traumatised body to which “[d]eath” would be “a thousand times more desirable than this” and for which she “will abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 88 always bear witness” (65). these passages register the stark differences that exist between indigenous worldviews and western conceptions of space and the environment. indeed, smith argues that, for the west, space is regarded “as being static or divorced from time. this view generates ways of making sense of the world as a ‘realm of stasis’, well-defined, fixed and without politics” (decolonizing methodologies 109). she writes: “land, for example, was viewed as something to be tamed and brought under control” (106). in fact, what is described in the above passages is precisely what davis and todd posit as the severed bonds between humans, other-than-humans, and the land caused by colonialism and later exacerbated by extractive capitalism. as discussed above, the wrec contributors consider the mobilisation of fantastic tropes and speculative fiction aesthetics a deliberate and purposeful technique that endeavours to invoke the shock and violence entailed by “petro-modernity’s blind dependence on oil and its unrelenting drive to expansion” (combined and uneven 109). nevertheless, in the case of indigenous wonderworks, the speculative and the fantastic are, as justice puts it, “an extension of the possible, not the impossible” and, by extension, the real, not the unreal (149). he argues that such works depict “experiential realities” found in “most traditional indigenous systems” that “don’t always fit smoothly into the assumptions of eurowestern materialism” (141–2). being an indigenous wonderwork, it would be inaccurate to consider the land’s sentience in the novel as mere fantasy or fabrication because concepts of other-than-human personhood and agencies are inherent to those “experiential realities” of many indigenous knowledge systems. the non-human agency with which the earth is endowed in split tooth is a deliberate technique on tagaq’s part to assert an inuit perspective on the land and the environment, in which both are considered living beings with agency. in this way, tagaq presents an acute critique of western colonisation’s commodification of transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 89 indigenous space through the oil industry—a commodification that is symptomatic of the destructive modernity lived by the inuit as a direct result of the canadian colonial and expansionist capitalism. as with the trauma of the land, the protagonist’s trauma is predominantly captured through narrative registers that pertain to the western gothic and is conveyed in episodic free-verse poems that predominantly ignore the novel’s overall linearity. it is worth noting that throughout the passages that describe scenes of sexual abuse, whether in the poetic or prosaic parts of the novel, the perpetrator is never referred to by name. commenting on this namelessness in her review of the novel, m. jacqui lambert notes that “it could serve as a true function of the reality within the story where the narrator prefers to play it safe, rather than naming her uncle, a parent’s friend or another man within the small community” (lambert). if, as mentioned above, tagaq’s novel does contain portions of her memoir, then lambert’s statement is plausible. however, what is at stake here is the aesthetic value and impact that is produced by this namelessness, particularly in a second untitled poem where the narrator spectralises the perpetrator as a reflection on the haunting impact of living under the constant horror of abuse. she writes: something is lurking […] something imperceptible something unseen something war-driven something obscene. (split tooth 35) here, the narrator depicts the rapist as a malicious presence, a menacing demon or ghost capable of concealing himself to better hunt her down and attack at a propitious moment. the rhythm produced by the anaphoric verses strengthens this phantasmagorical portrayal, such that it textually and aesthetically reproduces and reflects the narrator’s constant and anxious anticipation of abuse. moreover, in a abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 90 prosaic passage, she declares: “there are evil beings in the room near the ceiling waiting to take over the drunken bodies, grudges and frustrations slobbering at the chance to return to human form, to violate, to kill, to fornicate” (106). here, the narrator spectralises drunkenness itself, comparing it to a demonic possession. the mobilisation of western gothic tropes in this inuit literary text can, therefore, be read as a subversive strategy. on the one hand, it materialises tagaq’s endeavour to register a reality that, due to its extreme traumatic impact, cannot be embodied or grasped through a realist narrative register. on the other hand, doing so specifically by appropriating aspects of the western gothic, she conceives the narrator’s trauma and pain as, in one way or another, an aftermath of western colonialism, as well as the subsequent oppressive policies and the socio-political peripheralisation of the inuit in the settler-colonial state of canada. through references to human anatomy, as well as the intimacy of corporeality, tagaq’s split tooth captures the extent by which the deeply personal spaces of both the body and the home are violently intruded and encroached upon by the trauma of sexual abuse. indeed, the use of spatiality—more precisely corporeal spatiality—is recurrent within the novel. yet, in an untitled poem that captures another instance of rape, it is rather the absence of space that most profoundly registers that violence. the narrator states: “he keeps trying. / pushing his hard thing. / into a space that has no space” (22). the language of this poem furthers this corporeal violence by presenting the act of rape as an act through which a new, traumatic corporeal space is imposed upon the body. indeed, the two mentions of the word “space” are not synonymous. in the first instance, it denotes a corporeal container, a space into which something can enter. in the second instance, however, “space” is both physiological and psychological; to possess “no space” during this moment is a violent image that registers not only the act of rape but specifically the rape of a child. furthermore, it is a psychological construction transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 91 that, due to the narrator’s age and lack of sexual maturity, does not yet possess a referent. the infringement here, therefore, far exceeds the corporeal and threatens the “no space” that is, for the narrator, still an unknown space and which is, through this especially traumatic rape, instantaneously created and then destroyed. capturing the traumatic impact of her longstanding exposure to sexual abuse and violence in another poem, the narrator states: “i only work from the waist up / psychological epidural […] i was entered too young” (split tooth 41). these verses encapsulate the repercussions of the physiological and psychological intrusion and infringement discussed above and echoes precisely david lloyd’s definition of trauma as “violent intrusion and a sense of utter objectification that annihilates the person as subject or agent” (“colonial trauma” 214). indeed, the impact of this traumatic intrusion is simultaneously physiological and psychological, both of which veer towards an annihilation of agency and subjectivity. on the one hand, by describing herself as someone whose lower body does not “work,” the narrator seems to suggest a sense of dissociation, a loss of possession of that body part. on the other hand, this physical numbing is projected onto the psyche, conveyed here through the reference to an “epidural,” a medical procedure entailing the administration of anaesthesia to numb the spinal nerves, usually deployed during childbirth. to use the metaphor of “epidural” here is, therefore, to denote an induced psychological numbness, registering the traumatic annihilation of the narrator’s psychological agency and subjectivity, thus propelling her towards a path of substance abuse and, eventually, a suicide attempt. alter/native wor(l)ds of the arctic: as delineated above, davis and todd’s parallel between the start of the anthropocene and the beginning of western colonisation of the “americas” indicates that, far from being speculative, indigenous peoples have already gone abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 92 through its repercussions. nevertheless, despite having faced countless anthropogenic scenarios that unfolded along with colonisation and extractive capitalism, indigenous peoples, the authors assert, “contended with the end of their worlds, and continue to work to foster and tend to strong relationships to humans, other-than-humans, and land today” (“on the importance of a date” 773). in split tooth, it is precisely by striving to foster and tend to her relationships with otherthan-human persons, and the natural environment of arctic informed by inuit worldviews and ways of knowing that the protagonist initiates her path of healing, and which takes the form of a journey of constructing and strengthening her psychological and sexual agency. this is articulated when, at a given moment during her adolescence, the narrator experiences a kind of astral projection during which her spirit leaves her body and is carried by the wind to the ocean shore, ending up a “large ice floe” that is “swept out to sea” by the shifting wind (92). as the water starts to heat up and the floe melts into small pieces, the narrator is “plunged into the water,” stating that: “it is so cold that it burns. treading water and feeling the life leave my body, i accept” (93). suddenly, the small pieces that make up the ice floe morph into “miniature polar bears, dozens of them” and make “mewling noises” in an “indecipherable” language which the narrator understands as an attempt “to comfort [her]” (93). however, one of the small polar bears stands out. it grows and becomes massive, “his sphere of reality warming the ocean for [her]” (93, emphasis added). he gives her “his corporeality,” she states, such that the ocean becomes “like a warm bath” (93, emphasis added). these passages reflect a multiplicity and fluidity of realities that are intrinsic to inuit ways of knowing, captured here through what anishinaabe scholar grace dillon calls in walking the clouds (2012) “native slipstream” (3). dillon defines native slipstream as “a species of speculative fiction within the sf realm, [which] infuses stories with time travel, alternate realities and multiverses, and alternative histories” (3). in this way, the narrative concretises what justice considers a multiplicity of forms and experiences transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 93 of reality that “bleed into one another” (124). indeed, not only does the reality of the polar bear reach out to the narrator’s, it does so through its “corporeality,” endowing her with one its natural attributes: the ability to endure the cold arctic waters. nevertheless, the respective realities of the narrator and the polar bear do not simply interact; they merge into each other, becoming one. this fusion is articulated through an act of erotic communion; she declares: i mount his back and ride him. [...] we are lovers. we are married. [...] he keeps me safe and i am drunk on his dignity. [...] my skin melts where there is contact with my lover. the ocean and our love fuse the polar bear and me. he is i, his skin is my skin. our flesh grows together. [...] my whole body absorbs him and we become a new being. i am invincible. [...] i will live another year. (split tooth 93) the polar bear, or nanuq in the inuktitut language, holds a special position in various indigenous inuit knowledge systems, regarded as a resilient and strong totemic ancestor, and often associated with hunting. in “nanook, super-male” (1994), bernard d’anglure explains that, in “ancient times,” the boundaries between humans and animals were permeable with the polar bear as “the closest to man of all animals: when it metamorphosed it was recognizable by the size of its canine teeth and its pronounced liking for fat” (170). d’anglure writes that, “according to our informants, ‘the bear is the ancestor of man and its flesh much resembles that of human beings in colour, texture and taste’. [...] it was said that the soul of a bear was very dangerous, that it should be treated like that of a kinsperson” (174). accordingly, the above communion informs the novel’s assertion of “kinship with the other-than-human peoples” present in “most traditional indigenous systems” and reflected in indigenous wonderworks (justice, 141). abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 94 nevertheless, the agency and subjectivity conferred on the bear—for he is presented as a character with whom the narrator has sexual intercourse that leads to their fusion into a “new being”—makes this passage a quintessence of the aesthetics of survivance. among the neologisms that vizenor presents in his works is the concept of “transmotion,” an aesthetic strategy of native survivance. in “the unmissable” (2015), vizenor explains that the prefix “trans” in transmotion “initiates a sense of action or change, a literary and unitary motion, and a wider concept of the motion in images and words” (64). as an aspect of survivance aesthetics that celebrates indigenous ontologies, “transmotion” entails a representation of transformation that, according to madsen, includes “the interchangeable transformations of the human into animal and animal into human” (“tragic wisdom and survivance” 4). “native transmotion,” vizenor writes, “is survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty. native stories of survivance are the creases of transmotion and sovereignty” (fugitive poses 15). tagaq’s aesthetics of transmotion not only informs the natural motion of the narrator towards the ocean in a spiritual form, but also captures the transformation she undergoes after merging with the totemic animal. this fusion creates a “new being”, after which the narrator acquires a sense of dignity and invincibility. in split tooth, the narrator’s journey of reclaiming her psychological and sexual agency culminates when, in physical form, she walks to the sea for a second time. lying on the ice, her spirit “find[s] the smallest crack and slip[s] into the arctic water below” (111). now in spiritual form, the narrator explores the bottom of the arctic water, which she describes as “a stadium event of life” form which her “spirit” drinks (112). feeling her “body” slipping away, the narrator travels back to the surface and regains possession of it: “it takes a monumental effort to wiggle my toes and open my eyes after the exploration” (112). interestingly, the words transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 95 “body,” “spirit,” “life,” and “exploration” are capitalised in this passage, asserting the relationship that the inuit have with life, corporeality, and spirituality. indeed, justice underlines the significance of such capitalisation in indigenous literatures which, he contends, affirms the status of subjectivity and agency (6). this is expressed, for example, when the narrator declares that “body give[s] spirit permission to leave” and “spirit moves through it [water] differently than body does” (111). here, the body, the spirit, and the life of the narrator are characters in their own right, capable of exerting influence on the course of events. accordingly, this expresses tagaq’s assertion of an inuit specificity, according to which the relationship to these aspects extends beyond the material and utilitarian—indeed, beyond mere possession and objectification. this process of the separation and then reunion of body and spirit that the narrator calls “exploration” triggers a crucial event in her journey of healing. as her body and spirit reunite, she declares: the northern lights have descended upon me during my spirit journey. […] light leaves time and takes on physical form. the light morphs into faces and creatures, and then they begin to solidify into violent shards. this energy is not benign like that of the ocean dwellers; these are the masters of law and nature. (113) again, the capitalisation of “northern lights” and their designation as “master of law and nation”—which are, in turn, also capitalised, is not innocuous. in inuit worldviews, the phenomena of the northern lights (aurora borealis), known as “arqsarniq” in inuktitut, is believed to be the embodiment of the spirits of ancestors. in firebridge to skyshore (2009), siobhan logan explains that one of the most common traditional stories among the inuit is that of the “realm of spirits” that could only be reached by the ravens and the dead (10). according to these stories, logan adds, spirits of those who succeed to reach this realm are called “skyabdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 96 dwellers.” when the northern lights appear in the sky, these spirits are understood to be playing a football-like game using a walrus skull (10). in split tooth, the narrator contrasts the “northern lights” with the “oceandwellers”—a reference to the polar bears—stating that the energy of the former is more powerful. in yet another erotic scene, she lets the “lights” penetrate every orifice of her body and fill her womb. afterwards, she declares: i have felt renewed after the night on the ice. my tendons are thicker, my thoughts quicker. i am more capable. fear is learning to run from me, not the other way around. i am not afraid anymore, as if meekness is slinking away into the deeper corners where it cannot dominate my psyche. the night with the northern lights changed my whole life. […] this is where my lesson was learned: pain is to be expected, courage is to be welcomed. there is no choice but to endure. there is no other way than to renounce self-doubt. it is the time of dawning in more ways than one. the sun can rise, and so can i. (121–2) similar to her sexual communion with the polar bear, the narrator’s erotic encounter with the northern lights empowers her physically and, more importantly, psychologically. yet, while the former is provisional and allows her to “live another year,” the latter “changed [her] whole life” (93; 122). indeed, not only does she rebuke fear, she also ironises it by appropriating its very quality of “fright.” here, “fear” is metaphorised and depicted as a sentient being that no longer possesses control over her psyche. moreover, her interaction with what she calls “the masters of law and nature” embodied by the northern lights instils traits in her psyche that had been annihilated by psychological and sexual trauma. though she states that “pain is to be expected, courage is to be welcomed,” the narrator asserts her resilience and resistance as an imperative to confronting the pain of her trauma transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 97 (122). through the capitalisation of the word “dawning”—used here in its gerund form—the narrator parallels the quotidian victory of light over darkness. this is embodied by “the dawn,” with the need for an active and permanent sense of survival, resistance, and resilience in the face of the pain inflicted not only by a traumatised environment plagued by centuries of oppressive colonial policies and their far reaching traumatic impacts, but also by her own exposure to violent and cumulative sexual trauma. nonetheless, the narrator’s path to healing does not end here. the lesson that the northern lights want to teach her has only just begun. soon after this night, the narrator notices that she does not menstruate and begins to feel a “flipping in [her] belly” (132). she states: “all i know is that i am not alone anymore; i am protected now. [...] i have the twins in my belly. i speak with the twins every day, a boy and a girl” (132–3). strikingly, the spiritually conceived twins recall the divine conception of jesus by the virgin mary, as recorded in christian scriptures; yet the former subverts the latter in a number of ways. unlike the biblical figure of mary, the narrator’s pregnancy is the result of a consensual and welcomed sexual intercourse which empowers her both physically and psychologically. in addition, rather than a single male child, the narrator is expecting fraternal male-female twins, to whom she refers as her elders and not her children. she declares: “my elders are in my tummy. i respect and admire them. they know so much more than i do. [...] they are not my children but my equals and my leaders” (133, emphasis added). moreover, the narrator asserts that she can “communicate freely” with them by “leav[ing] [her] consciousness and com[ing] to them into [their] spirit world” (133, emphasis added). this passage explicitly asserts an indigenous inuit vision of life and death and the unique understanding and conceptualisation of the relationship between the living and the dead. abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 98 indeed, the northern lights in indigenous inuit worldviews are the embodiment of ancestors and the spirits of the dead. as discussed above, one of the aesthetic qualities and specificities that justice attributes to indigenous wonderworks is their ability to register the flexible and permeable relationship between the realms of the living and the spiritual worlds. according to this vision, respect and veneration extend to the dead, for they are “ancestors with continuing relationships with the living” (justice124–6). in split tooth, it is precisely within this logic that the narrator’s twins are presented; the narrator she considers them her elders and leaders, whom she respects and admires, for they have deeper and greater knowledge than she does. indeed, the narrator is soon imbued with the knowledge the twins embody, allowing her to understand not only the nature of her pain and trauma, but also the nature of healing and the way in which it can be fulfilled. when the narrator gives birth to the twins, whom she names savik and naja, she describes savik as “pointed, brooding” making people “cry in mourning or in grief” if they hold him in their hands for a long time (156). she states: “savik eats up the agony, and seems to grow stronger when he bears witnesses to suffering. [...] forcing out that agony leaves an open wound, it leaves people depleted. i notice that those who spend too much time with him grow ill and radiate a grey pallor” (156, emphasis added). naja, on the other hand, is “bright,” “calm and soft” with a voice that “heals anxiety” (158). unlike her twin brother, naja “inhales trouble and exhales solutions like a filtration system. she cleans people. […] i saw her healing my mother’s cold on a molecular level” (159). accordingly, the narrator comes to understand that her twins represent pain and healing respectively, with the ability to affect her and her entourage. tagaq plays with the motif of colours to provide a material manifestation of trauma and healing in her novel. while savik makes people sick and radiate that grey pallor, naja “brings sheen to people’s hair and glow to their cheeks” (163). transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 99 after some time, the narrator notices that savik grows bigger than naja, realising that “[t]here must be an imbalance of pain in the world” (159). the repercussions of this imbalance begin to impact the people around her, starting with her uncle, an alcoholic, who slowly dies from liver failure. indeed, savik’s ability to inflict and bring out pain eventually targets the narrator herself. while breastfeeding, he bites his mother’s breast, “biting off the end of [her] nipple” (177). here, the narrator notes that “there was no room for him on this earth” (177). she states: “i knew he would only grow stronger and his prey would not only be restricted to the old or sick, to the malevolent or weak. i knew his prey would become love” (177). it is precisely this fear that forces the narrator to kill savik by returning him to “the frozen ice” (180). instead of dying, however, savik transforms into a seal. in a violent scene of metamorphosis, his “neck hardens into a solid, boneless mass […]. he builds a wall of protection around his heart […]. my hands are burning, the bones in my hands are burning and there are a thousand boiling blisters where i am holding him. […] he is mutating”, becoming a seal that then “flops into the crack in the ice” (181). intertwined as they are, savik’s contact with the arctic waters impacts naja as well, and she dies of hypothermia in her mother’s arms. deciding to release naja’s body into the water, the narrator finds that savik “absorbs her flesh and they are one. she is he and he is she. finally they are whole […]. the seal looks up at me with love and hatred, death and life. it looks at me with the knowing. then the seal swims away” (181, emphasis added). tagaq’s choice of the “seal” is not fortuitous. kristen borré explains in “the healing power of the seal” (1994) that for many inuit communities seals and seal hunting have intrinsic social value [...] seal maintains the physical, mental and spiritual health of the individual, the social well-being of the community, and confidence in native power relations to maintain selfdetermination in the national and international world which is vested in the body politic. 1 abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 100 in the context of tagaq’s novel, the seal embodies that very same “physical, mental and spiritual health” to which borré refers, and through which the novel grounds its processes of physical and psychological healing. indeed, the seal is evidence of a healing that, the novel seems to be suggesting, is attainable only through a balance between pain and recovery. there is a lesson here to be learned—one which the northern lights intend to impart upon the narrator. if she had once believed that her healing is dependent on letting go of her pain, here she learns that this is impossible. there can be no healing without achieving the balance between savik (who imparts pain and trauma) and naja (who provides solace). their union is, therefore, the novel’s final aesthetic statement about the representation of a path of healing and survivance that is grounded in inuit epistemologies, ontologies, and worldviews. conclusion / introduction: the relationship between colonialism and canadian petrocapitalism, and environmental destruction in the arctic region is aesthetically registered not only through a panoply of narrative registers in which non-human agencies that pertain to inuit worldviews and knowledge systems are mobilised, but also through a subversive appropriation of the gothic and phantasmagoria. in parallel, aspects of the western gothic are also deployed as a subversive strategy to capture the protagonist’s trauma of sexual abuse and rape that is implicitly equated with the colonial encroachment and environmental destruction in the arctic. yet, it is precisely within the worldviews and knowledge systems that inform inuit perspectives and visions of the natural environment and landscape of the arctic that the protagonist inscribes her path of healing. indeed, in the second last poem of the novel, she states: transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 101 i do not forgive and forget i protect and prevent make them eat shame and repent i forgive me. (188) by rejecting entrapment in a traumatic compulsion, while also resisting the victimising label of passive survivor of a traumatic history, the novel can be read in line with what coulthard calls “indigenous anticolonialism as a resurgent practice of cultural self-recognition” (red skin, white masks 26). to explain this indigenous anticolonial formulation, coulthard draws on fanon’s “theory of anticolonial agency and empowerment” in which personal and collective self-determination lie entirely within the colonised subject’s striving for their “freedom and self-worth” and working through their “alienation/subjection against the objectifying gaze and assimilative lure of colonial recognition” (43). coulthard further explains this decolonising process, stating that the colonised subject must first acknowledge “themselves as free, dignified, and distinct contributors to humanity” (43, original italics). central to this decolonising project, he explains, is the imperative of a personal and collective reconsideration of culture and identity that “could serve as a source of pride and empowerment” (43–4). in split tooth, it is precisely the empowering virtues of identity, culture, and, by extension, the land that allows the narrator to confront the trauma of rape and sexual abuse and derive her agency and her self-determination. in addition, healing in the novel is not presented as linear and finite; rather, it is conceptualised as an ongoing process. this is reflected in the closing poem of the novel where the narrator declares: “cleanse me. wash the blood off. i am still working. i survive still. i am stronger now. / worship me. i am boundless. i stood up. i am worthy. / start again” (189, emphasis added). these closing lines reflect a need for a continuous survival, resistance, and self-determination to allow for an escape abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 102 from the cyclical nature of trauma. in ““what to do when you’re raped,”” wieskamp and smith explain that a rhetoric of survivance challenges the euro-american linear temporality of trauma and its assumed traumatological timeline (80). indeed, they state that, by resisting restriction to the past, present, or future, a rhetoric of survivance reflects what they call “infinitive’ temporality”, which allows past, present, and future to flow together and “embraces the role of one’s past to influence one’s present and future” (81). as such, wieskamp and smith argue that survivance in the face of trauma conceives survival/resistance as an ongoing process that, in contrast to the euro-american traumatological timeline, does not assume a “a trajectory towards brighter future, but presupposes surviving as a constant action” (81). in doing so, they assert, a rhetoric of survivance expresses an indigenous “temporal sovereignty by rendering native experiences visible and actionable” (81). in split tooth, it is precisely this non-linear and ongoing sense of healing that is formally and aesthetically registered in the novel, thus presenting itself as a narrative of survivance. works cited beard, laura. “split tooth (tanya tagaq).” transmotion, 5:1, 2019, 315-318. borré, kristen. “the healing power of the seal: the meaning of intuit health practice and belief.” arctic anthropology, 31:1, 1994, 1–15. coulthard, glen sean. red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. university of minnesota press, 2014. d’anglure, bernard saladin. “nanook, super-male: the polar bear in the imaginary space and social time of the inuit of the canadian arctic.” in signifying animals: human meaning in the natural world, edited by roy willis. routledge, 1994. 169-185. transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 103 davis, heather, and zoe todd. “on the importance of a date, or, decolonizing the anthropocene.” acme: an international journal for critical geographies, 16:4, dec. 2017, 761-780. dillon, grace l. walking the clouds. u of arizona p, 2012. doherty, mike. “the surprising sounds and sides of tanya tagaq.” macleans.ca, 2018, https://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/tanya-tagaq-on-her-desperateattempt-to-alleviate-indigenous-suffering/. justice, daniel heath. why indigenous literatures matter. kindle ed., wilfrid laurier university press, 2018. lambert, m. jacqui. “split tooth review: expressions of the circumpolar arctic.” denali sunrise publications, 2019, https://denalisunrisepublications.com/split-toothreview/. lloyd, david. “colonial trauma/postcolonial recovery?” interventions, vol 2:2, 2000, 212-228. logan, siobhan, and dolores logan. firebridge to skyshore. google books, 2009, https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/_/c3ga5fcnw1ec?hl=en&gbpv=1 &pg=pp1. madsen, deborah l. “on subjectivity and survivance: rereading trauma through the heirs of columbus and the crown of columbus.” survivance: narratives of native presence, edited by gerald vizenor. university of nebraska press, 2008, 61–87. ---. “preface: tragic wisdom and survivance.” rostkowski, j. conversations with remarkable native americans. suny press, 2013. smith, linda tuhiwai. decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. 2nd ed. zed books, 2012. tagaq, tanya. split tooth. kindle ed., penguin canada, 2018. abdenour bouich “coeval worlds, alter/native words” 104 vizenor, gerald. fugitive poses: native american indian scenes of absence and presence. university of nebraska press, 1998. ---. “the unmissable: transmotion in native stories and literature.” transmotion, 1:1, 2015, 63-75. watts, vanessa. “indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-humans (first woman and sky woman go on a european world tour!).” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 1, no.1, 2013, 20-34. wieskamp, valerie n., and cortney smith. ““what to do when you’re raped”: indigenous women critiquing and coping through a rhetoric of survivance.” quarterly journal of speech, 106:1, 2020, 72-94. wrec (warwick research collective). combined and uneven development: towards a new theory of world-literature. liverpool university press, 2015. harmonia vol ix no 1 tahun 2009.pdf aesthetic is not only presents beauty that give pleasure without any interest of the sense, but also gives an recognition for people in terms of developing social, economic, politic, and culture phenomenon. aesthetic which gives beauty has essence of recognition social and culture phenomenon changes system and culture, changes value system in society. reality life is imagination, fantasy, and absurd dreams, whereas the truth and kindness of beauty only occur in ideas which create beauty of life management and the value of culture system itself. art as a media of freedom is an effective alternative as a means of massage delivery about situation of social life that grow attempts of policies of decision maker and global capitalism who create system of culture value in society for capitalist interest. key: cord-0052990-lx2c60hs authors: spanedda, francesco; fusaro, matteo carmine title: new approaches to housing complexity: designing dwellings in the age of cognitive economy date: 2020-11-19 journal: city territ archit doi: 10.1186/s40410-020-00128-5 sha: fcae5750635e3e260918a6a3a7c049a12b6588b7 doc_id: 52990 cord_uid: lx2c60hs space is produced by a society in accordance with its habits, and habits, mostly in the western society, have been heavily influenced by forms of production. indeed, it is widely acknowledged that the industrial revolution definitely changed the space of modern landscapes, cities and dwellings life at all scales, and the way in which we perceive them. cognitive capitalism is no exception. since it fully established itself as one of the prevailing economic forces in the 21st century and in the western world, it produced deep changes in the way in which people work, connect, and live. starting from the assumption that changes in means of production generate new social relationships, this paper investigates how these changes might result in new ways of building architectural space. without indulging in a deterministic attitude, it focuses on housing as one of the fundamental artefacts where a society expresses its approach to space. the house is a basic element of complex urban systems and is, therefore, the one calling for a more radical conceptual rethinking, marking an effective distance with the forms inherited from the previous centuries. finally, the paper aims at understanding the repercussions of the digital paradigm on the space of dwelling, reasoning on some crucial questions to understand how housing might evolve, unfolding through its spatial configuration the new ways of life of the digital society. houses are among the most important constitutive elements of the cities. they could be viewed as physical structures that at the same time define a subsystem of the environment and a multi-faceted set of smaller spaces which support the life of a single family or a group (coolen and meesters 2012) . as a matter of fact, the spatial organisation of the house reflects and influences in more or less direct ways how the inhabitants interact among them and with the external world. in spite of the deep societal changes in the last decades, their spatial organisation still relies on the typologies established during the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century (kahler 2002) , when the second industrial revolution introduced radical changes in several aspects of everyday life, such as labour organisation, population distribution, wealth distribution, hygienic standards, building technology, and eventually in individual habits. instead of offering new typologies, the housing market currently fulfills the requests of contemporary society mostly by technology upgrades. as an example, environmental concerns result in a wider production of energyefficient housing by largely improving the performance of building envelopes and services, while financial limitations are met by low-cost building systems. however, just as in the past the shift to industrialism led to new ways to conceive modern housing, one can wonder if contemporary needs are calling for-if not introducing already-deeper spatial changes than just technological ones. therefore, this paper draws from castell's (1996) statement that all major social changes are ultimately characterized by a transformation of space and time in the human experience, and investigates actual and potential changes in the dwelling structure sparked off by the transition from industrial production to the production of information. a further point is wark's (2004) assertion that every change in the means of production brings to the emergence of new classes. one could therefore expect that the transition between the fossil paradigm at the core of the industrial revolution and the current digital paradigm might deeply influence today's society and most probably its housing since the history of dwelling shows how different forms of social stratification co-evolved with different housing types, producing several ways of living in cities and homes. just as modern housing was primarily an answer to the needs of the industrial working class-a circumstance that much irritated tom wolfe (1981) , outraged by socialist aesthetics spreading among the north american elite-might contemporary housing evolve together with the diffusion of what wark calls the hacker class, and of the other kinds of workers in the digital economy? purposely leaving in the background environmental and financial issues, which also question the traditional spatial organisation of houses, this paper tries to detect the traces and evidence of change in housing, induced by the new ways in which production influences everyday life. at the beginning of the second industrial revolution, architecture started to cope with the housing crisis throughout europe. the change in production methods established a discontinuity with the past, both in the localisation of production sites, since fossil fuels allowed to locate factories far from watercourses, windy hills or other energy sources, and in the organisation of time, because working hours became independent from seasons and the availability of natural resources. peasants became workforce, and had to leave the countryside to move closer to the factories. thus the new means of production, by changing the working conditions, structurally altered the relationship between people and places, clearing the way for deep changes in culture and habits. these changes directly concerned urban planning and architecture. the most important european cities dealt with these emerging issues by shifting from the 19th-century city to the 20th-century metropolis, in a process that developed both at the scale of the city and at the scale of the dwelling. the first radical change was the definitive separation of work and life, in contrast to the pre-modern household, a spatial structure that organises the greater part of the activities needed to survive by integrating work and family life. in farms or workshops, the whole family and its generations, when not different families, participate in the daily work without any actual separation between family care and labour, neither in space, nor in time (junestrand and tollmar 1998) . the establishment of factories disrupted this substantial continuity. work and labour were no longer a part of the house, but they found appropriate and well-organised spaces inside factories and offices. time split along with space, as coordinating the effort of workers living in different places required the scheduling of activities in a part of the day exclusively devoted to work. houses thus became a place dedicated to the private sphere: personal needs, spare time activities, and child care. under the pervasive influence of taylorism, hygienic issues and equalitarian aspirations were mainly solved through "the gradual transformation of life into economy and production" (aureli 2014) . domestic space was "no longer conceived as just the symbol of kinship and family bonds, but as an infrastructure devoted to the reproduction of life", which eventually resulted in houses becoming housing, that is the "functioning of the house" (ibid. p. 30). thus, housing becomes just a piece of the urban infrastructure, losing its specificity and achieving a status similar to that of a machine. the need arises to define the qualities of this new product, that for the first time comes to be an object of mass production. housing becomes at once a physical infrastructure and a political construction when its spatial arrangement frames the role of a group within the new society. social housing especially becomes the representation of a paternalistic relationship between employees and employers, or a tool of emancipation as the basis of welfare state. to define the character of the new living spaces, modern architects deployed two apparently opposite spatial strategies. the first strategy revolved around taylorism, and its implementation into the design process. notable examples are le corbusier's ville radieuse 1 (1935), alexander klein's studies on the dwelling layout (1934), and margarete schütte-lihotzky's frankfurt kitchen 2 (1926), respectively at the scale of the city, of the building, and of the room and furniture. all of them translate the tayloristic sequence of analysis, functional separation, and optimisation into the design of cities and dwellings. the whole city, the house, the rooms themselves, take the organisation of a factory. the demarcation between each function is clear without any overlap, the paths do not cross, aisles and corridors are reduced to the minimum. these proposals provide sharply defined, meticulous, and beautiful line drawings that are at once analytical tools and ways to communicate their findings. this graphical apparatus shows how the reductionist approach of taylorism leaked out of the design process of housing to become an organisational model for the life of the family occupying it. dwellings became thus one of the ways in which taylorism spread out of factories to become a pervasive organisational model for every part of the society, not limited to factories for workers and office for employees. the second strategy promoted flexibility, a concept which actually underpins two different design strands. the first strand ideologically exploits the technological innovation of structural concrete, conceiving dwellings as the stacking of free floors, in a spatial arrangement similar to that of factory buildings and turning housing, and therefore the city, in an extended factory. a clear example is the 1914 le corbusier's maison dom-ino 3 (aureli 2014, p. 30) , where the radical image suggested by the standardised grid of floors and pillars is balanced by allowing the owners to freely configure its facades. the other strand invokes flexibility as an antidote to standardisation and its spreading outside the factory. in his text about the woman as creator, bruno taut firmly expresses his contrariety in drawing floor plans so that "a living room is meant for living, and sleeping cabins for sleeping-and for nothing else… rather in the manner of an engineer who regards the standard family with three children as an undertaking for which he is constructing the machines and the factory" (taut 1924). in opposition to this, taut states that families do not follow any organisational model, but are the creative outcome of the work of housewives, whose constant effort deals with very specific conditions. therefore, to allow a family to freely organise its life, a dwelling needs just rooms of different size, whose function and relationship will be decided by the occupants. taut's work explicitly criticises the determinism of the tayloristic approach, even in its attempts to improve the housewife's life by imposing an organisation model, like in the case of lihotzky's frankfurt kitchen. with its emphasis on hygiene, comfort, privacy, authonomy, and eventually consumption, the modernist idea of dwelling became so pervasive that currently most literature, especially in the west, overlook the concoction of work and family life in the domestic space for a long time before industrialism, and that this commixture has been kept in rural areas until recent times. also, it is worth to remember that 90% of the dwellings on the world are not of the single-family type (oliver 2003) . thus, the separation of functions, spaces, and even between the family members is not something that has to be taken for granted. according to meloni (2014) , home boundaries are porous by nature: they establish connections with the external world and with different times, by opening views onto the landscape, collecting the memories of their inhabitants, and accommodating friends and sometimes strangers. this potential comes again to the fore in the digital age, when houses become the hubs of a networked life (miller 2008 ). in the 1990s information technology began to heavily contribute to industry's productivity increases. from that time on, the rise of the knowledge economy and then of cognitive capitalism in its different forms established a break with the industrial tradition. the production of value moved from actual products to immaterial, abstract activities of data gathering, of organisation of information, of decision-making, and finally of control. although the elaboration of knowledge and the collection and control of data accompanied industrial capitalism from its beginnings, two main factors boosted them significantly. on one hand, the spreading of ic technologies and computers, which are universal machines that rapidly became constitutive parts of the production process, and their ubiquitous networks that can operate globally and in real time (schmiede 2006; rasmussen and corbett 2008) . on the other end, the diffuse intellectually, the mass education, and the high level of training produced by the welfare state in late post-war time (vercellone and lucarelli 2013). hence the various definitions as informational capitalism (castells 1996) or vectorialism (wark 2004) . at the same time, factories shut down all over europe and the us since the late 1960s and 1970s, (florida 2005) showing how industrial capitalism was losing economic power, while a new form of production, strictly connected with technological progress, was gaining traction: the innovation industry (moretti 2014). among the main consequences of the dematerialisation of production, is the loss of importance of material capital in form of factories, buildings, large equipment, and the acknowledgment of the increasing value of the intellectual capital of a company, embodied in human beings and in their relational, emotional and cognitive faculties. along with these distinctive features, ic technologies amplify what harvey (1989) calls time-space compression: a condition of postmodernity revolutionising the objective qualities of time and space resulting from the condensation or elimination of spatial and temporal distances-similar to wark's (2004 p. 154 ) thelestesia. time-space compression thus annihilates also the boundaries between work, life, and leisure that permeate the modern cities and houses. wark (2015) , therefore, argues that this radical alteration of the parameters of space and time does not just affect production, but also the workers' way of life. while industrial capitalism considered the house as a safe and clean shelter with clear functions distributed in space and time in accordance with the new organisational doctrines, cognitive capitalism, thanks to its higher level of abstraction and its inherent fluidity, offers multiple interpretations of the interactions between working and dwelling. instead of producing new typologies, it builds on the housing types inherited from the previous times, adapting them to the pervasive digitalisation and the new types of labour and ways of life. although the consequences of this change are widespread and evident, there is still very little literature about them, and even less architectural concepts. in spite of this, there are some clues to start investigating the architectural consequences of this cultural change, as new forms of organisation necessarily influence the city and its spaces (cacciari 2004 ). according to bernardo secchi (2013) , at every occurrence of a shift in the relationship between capital and labor the city suffered an urban crisis, changing on its own, showing resilience and adaptation. since the new form of production depends on the intellectual qualities of the workers, the quality of the firm's material capital, like buildings and hardware becomes less important, and therefore from their localisation in space. thus, the relationship between workers, their workplaces and their homes changes again. moreover, the progressive digitalisation offers new opportunities of commodification. the rental market, traditionally limited to local customers, becomes accessible to customers all around the world, accessible from almost everywhere at a reasonable price thanks to low-cost flights. the change unfolds along several major trends: the return to of integration between house and workplace, similarly to the pre-modern era, now called soho (small office/home office); the use of housing as benefits to attract new employees and dampen the intrinsic precarity of the new low-term jobs, feebly echoing the paternalism of industrial capitalism; the transformation of housing in a palatable commodity that, in spite of its localisation, finds a worldwide market thanks to the digital economy; the swapping of the public and the private sphere between the interior and the exterior of the house. information and communication technologies played a key role in the transformation of production and ultimately of labour. the abstract, virtualised new production does not require proximity in space and time anymore. instead, employees are gradually turning into digital nomads, able to work "anytime anywhere" (roberlski, keller, harth, mache 2019). this opportunity is not offered just to creative freelancers traveling all across the world, but to a greater crowd of white collars, which can work from home telecommuting thanks to the massive presence of ict in the domestic environment. the so-called telework, as defined in 2002 by european social partners, can be defined as a transposition of the traditional way of working into the virtual sphere, especially practiced by those categories of workers operating in a different place than their company. smart work, an alternative working method to traditional office work also based on teleworking, allows people to decide how and when they should carry out their duties, beginning with their choice of space, time, programs and tools. this modus operandi also fits perfectly with the needs of the new generations of workers who are entering the labor market, the so-called digital natives. although digital natives are able to work wherever there is a wi-fi connection available, especially in those places where they can network, like co-working spaces, the house is rapidly becoming, at least for some social groups, a place fully equipped with itc. in spite of this, a difference remains between working from home and working at home. regus, a leading company in flexible workspaces all over the world, conducted a study on the emergence of smart working. the sample of respondents highlighted as problems the requests for attention from their family members, a slow or unreliable internet connection, the difficulties in accessing the main office equipment, the presence of background noise represented by the family and animals, and the presence of domestic noises. on the other hand, although part of the work can be done in a non-obtrusive way by exchanging emails and files, video calls, remote conferences, and receiving clients conflicts with the intimacy of the domestic space, which is still mainly built in accordance with the doctrine of functional separation advocated by the design culture of industrial capitalism. potentially, the return of work inside the space of the house is a jump back towards pre-modern schemes. however, the different nature of the dematerialised work, and the affirmation of new typologies during the industrial era, both suggest different forms of juxtaposition of family life and work. two different trends emerge from the scarce examples of buildings purposely designed around this theme. at one end of the spectrum is the jian wai soho quarter 4 designed by riken yamamoto & field shop in beijing (2004). the spatial concept envisions a cluster of towers, whose apartments feature a soho area between the most private part of the house and the hallways, freely accessible and configured as a pedestrian public space. the resulting space is a combination of a mall, given the public character of the passages and the shop windows of the soho rooms, and an apartment tower made of rather usual dwellings, whose rooms are dedicated to the traditional functions. work and family life here do not overlap, but simply juxtapose in order to coexist and interfere as less as possible, formulating a pragmatic, but not groundbreaking, proposal of mixed typology. at the opposite end of the spectrum is the pitt studio 5 by graft architects (1998), a space intended to accommodate a "hybrid lifestyle" where "living and working take place in the same space", according to the designers. the design concept features a wide surface without any functional subdivision, defined just by its enclosure. activities inside this apparently blank space are enabled by a central core, a scripted wall (with an obvious reference to the profession of the owner, a renowned actor) whose cladding unfolds, rotates and slides sideways to morph into table, seats, lights and niches. although the meticulous design of every part and its relationship with the other could resemble the analytical attitude of klein's drawing, there is no expectation to build spaces defined by functions, even if temporarily. each of the movable elements, or each possible combination of them, can activate separate, different activities, like a table can be used for eating or working. instead of working by juxtaposition, graft's spatial experiment interprets the inherent fluidity and openness of the new way of production, offering a stage to a multiplicity of situations. these two examples show two possible ways to bring together life and work under the same roof. however, they mostly address the needs of freelancers and creatives, which are just a part of the knowledge workers. at the time of writing, tele-working is receiving a massive boost due to the mobility limitations imposed by the sanitary policies against the coronavirus pandemic throughout the world. the advantages and shortcomings of white-collar work at home have been amplified, since homes became at once offices, schools, and malls. whole families are busy with,-or queuing for-remote activities. undoubtedly based on the tools deployed by cognitive capitalism, this particular condition is more depending on the coronavirus outbreak than in a change of means of production. there is, however, an increasing trend in allowing the employees to keep working from home (dwoskin 2020) , adducing reasons that oscillate between care of workers' satisfaction and savings on relocations. however, pandemic is a peculiar case that will be the subject of a different paper within this research. the delocalisation of production in different places has many other consequences than just being able to work at home. as stated by moretti (2014) , in industrial capitalism, the location of the factories determined the geographical distribution of workforce. similarly today, the location of innovative companies attracts workforce in the advanced countries (morrill and sommers 2005) , where the human capital populates some key areas with a high content of creativity. moreover, not just the material production, but also the immaterial one can be relocated either in places where there is a major concentration of innovative and skilled workers, or where the workforce is cheaper and the overall conditions are economically more rewarding for the employer. housing, therefore, gains a new role as one of the benefits that make a position attractive: in addition to its material value, a house also attains a potential value. this happens at all levels of recruitment: a house and a car are often fringe benefits supplementing a top position, but lodging could also be an added extra for workers with lower wages. as an example, customer service companies relocate their offices in specific areas of the world, and consequently also look for workers capable of complying with their qualitative standards. as a matter of fact, many call centres do not operate from the nation where the user calls, but in other parts of the world where such kinds of services are mostly concentrated. nonetheless, the operators answering by telephone, chat or email, should be able to interact perfectly in the customers' language. as a consequence, companies often recruit workers from the country where the service is being delivered, providing an employment contract that includes some benefits and perks including also a house shared with other colleagues. although these houses do not seem to be subject to design research, until now, they have a great potential for architectural investigation, bordering the risk of becoming gated communities on one side, and 21st century editions of the factory houses for workers on the other side. without falling in the reductionist trap of the perfect bubble for knowledge workers, their design can investigate whether a community could be really built around a working environment artificially implanted in a foreign context, which activities can be put in common, if there is a viable opportunity to combine life and work together, and, above all, how such a community can spatially relate with the surroundings. the american company airbnb started in 2008 as an online platform to rent empty rooms inside households. like many other success stories of the sharing economy, airbnb established another way of working. being an airbnb host quickly became a full-time occupation for many homeowners in touristic locations, often as an alternative to unemployment or declining liberal professions. after a slashing success with its digital product, the company raised its ambitions: in 2016, in fact, airbnb announced the birth of samara, a division tasked with designing and building architecture. backyard (samara 2018 ) is the first initiative of samara. it aims at investigating how a home designed and built for sharing should look and feel. according to the company, the prototypes should investigate the potential of the space in all its facets. backyard put several timely questions. the key points of the project concern new construction techniques, the use of ecological materials with reduced environmental impact, the reduction of construction waste, the use of smart home technologies, self-sufficiency, and the need for cohabitation. samara's first work in this direction is a prototype house presented at the house vision 2 exhibition held in tokyo and directed by the designer kenya hara; through the collaboration between samara and the japanese architect go hasegawa, airbnb has proposed yoshino cedar house, 6 (gebbia and hasegawa 2016) a housing model that involves the use of local materials, a communal space in the ground floor, and a cooperative hosting by a group of local residents. looking at the first built samara's house and at the pictures of architectural models on backyard's site, the whole exploration seems oriented towards flexible and dynamic home models trying to conjugate global hospitality and genius loci. more than in its promising, but still limited achievements, the interest in samara's work lies in its reasons. in fact, according to airbnb, the idea of establishing a design company surfaced when they realised that many of the company's hosts felt the need of modifying their homes to meet the guests' expectations. this means that the economic pressure exerted by short-term rentals are much more far reaching than expected. firstly, they produce a sudden change in roles: by sharing their private space, house owners lose their status and acquire the same rights of their guests, turning themselves into roommates. secondly, the short-term rentals modify urban occupation patterns, land value, availability, price of long-term rentals, and neighbouring economic activities (gurran and phibbs 2017; picascia et al. 2017) . finally, the motivation behind samara reveals that change is propagating at an architectural level, with a sneaky process of adaptation of spaces to new activities. whether hosting through airbnb is just another way of earning from owning an apartment, or a way to enrich own lives and the city by overcoming the equation stranger = danger (gebbia 2016) and offer hospitality in the next room, the entity of the transformation taking place in the body of cities and inside the buildings is becoming quite relevant. therefore, a critical revision of the changes induced by the sharing economy in the spatial structure of the house and of the city deserves a collective discussion that cannot be just led by the main economic player involved in it. between the 1960s and 1970s, sociologists highlighted the loss of meaning and importance of public space induced by socio-cultural transformations and ways of life changes. according to habermas (1962) , the public sphere embraces three dimensions: an ephemeral sphere, a physically staged dimension, and an abstract sphere, built by the combination of mass-media and their delocalised audience. sennett (2017) attributes responsibilities for transforming the concept of public space to economic policies. the transformation of public space results in a gradual loss of traction, while people increasingly retreat within the private domain, which in the meantime is experiencing an unprecedented evolution. in fact, this trend gains momentum due to the increasing role of ict technologies in expanding the availability of media and of their content, thus powering up the abstract sphere and affecting different areas of everyday life. furthermore, the expansion of digital services relocate within living rooms and bedrooms a great amount of the fundamental services for the person, and other activities that usually take part in public spaces: banking, food, shopping. this further shift makes public space potentially irrelevant (harvey 2006) . advancements in technology transformed living rooms in place of exchange, encounter and confrontation, absorbing the character of the town square in a dematerialised way. an emblematic case is the sociological phenomenon of the second screen: sitting in their domestic privacy, people are at the same time spectators of what happens outside their house, but capable of interaction with the events through social media. the home is not just a private space anymore, but an integrated space aiming at reconciling every component of contemporary life, the old ones and new ones arising from the ict paradigm. the aim of this paper is to provide an overview about the implications on housing design due to the shift from industrial to cognitive capitalism. the second industrial revolution sparked a great change in housing design. the modernist legacy is made of a great amount of typological studies of great interest. most of them show a reductionist approach to architectural design, deeply influenced by the managerial culture of industrial production and based on optimisation, on the definition of functions and their separations. in spite of the strong connection with their time, and of the swift changes that later occurred in economy and society, modern housing typologies are still widespread today. however, the change to cognitive economy and its related forms of capitalism swept away the linear thinking of industrialism. networking, real time calculations, telecommunications, allowed complexity to re-emerge in everyday life, disrupting not only the trust in spatial distribution and time schedules of industrial capitalism, but also the possibility of reorganising them again in deterministic terms. completely new ways of working and living, like home working, guest hosting, and media production are now laid on spaces that were designed with separation, privacy, and different functions in mind. on the other hand, the use of housing as a benefit in working contracts is reminiscent of the old paternalistic attitude of industrialism, but without the grand aspiration to produce new housing models. moreover, just like urban space lost part of its public character, housing lost its connotation of privacy and intimacy. houses are now places open to the countless digital encounters and confrontations, expanding themselves into the urban world into an urban dimension. the question arises, then, if the notion of typology is still useful in spite of these changes, or if the burgeoning digital environment is getting rid of any classification based on spatial patterns, if not of the whole concept of spatial organisation. the examples mentioned in this paper, though, show that spatial organisation is still an issue, that space is yet a field of discussion. while the idea of typology as a formally based spatial taxonomy is probably showing its limits, there are other ways to ground a typological discourse that could prove highly useful at the present time. drawing on lévi strauss (1962), martí arís (1993) radically disconnects typology from history, as two complementing parts of a discourse on architecture. while history focuses on transformations, typology investigates permanence. they are thus inextricable, because historical change brings the essence of an object to the fore, and essence becomes a cluster of potentialities available for further development. arís' typology is then twofold, as it concerns itself with the existing architectural space but also unveils its future potential. from a phenomenological point of view, gregotti (1972) formulates a definition of typology based on spatial relationships more than on form. such classification locates every architectural organism within a field of possibilities depending, on one side, from the tightness of the relationships between its internal components (its autonomy), and on the other side, by the quality of its connections with the context (its ability at establishing relationships at different levels). arís' epistemological investigations and gregotti's operative framework are two different examples of how typology can still overcome a reductionist approach to maintain its role as a designer's tool. there is still a great field to explore then, for a critical approach to housing design. the juxtaposition of typologies and functions, the possibility of thinking dwellings not as a sum of functions but as spaces activated by users-like some modernist experiences already suggested, the inner flexibility requested by the sharing economy, the design strategies to implant corporate housing inside urban areas, and finally the concept of housing as one of the multiple intersections between the physical and the digital space, are design challenges to bring complexity back as a working material. architecture is not probably able to answer all the deep social questions raised by cognitive capitalism, just like engels did not believe that urban science could contribute to solve the social problems related to the great industry. it could however try to advance proposals about organisation, connections, juxtapositions and modification through the space and over time, as a hinge between physical and digital, and at all scales, starting from the indispensable relationship between the city and the house, where changes propagate from one term to the other. dealing with the challenges thrown by cognitive economy, contemporary architecture should deal with the task of providing new physical systems of relationship between the spheres of dwelling and those of work, leisure and entertainment. the dom-ino problem: questioning the architecture of domestic space nomadi in prigione the rise of the network society the information age: economy, society, and culture editorial special issue: house, home and dwelling americans might never come back to the office, and twitter is leading the charge cities and the creative class. routledge, abingdon gebbia j (2016) how airbnb designs for trust pitt studio when tourists move in: how should 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hacker manifesto from bauhaus to our house springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations not applicable. the whole text is the result of the shared effort of the authors. both authors read and approved the final manuscript. this work was supported by "fondo di ateneo per la ricerca 2019", university of sassari. all data sources are cited within the text. not applicable. not applicable. the authors have no competing interests.received: 14 october 2020 accepted: 7 november 2020 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa7787 doi: 10.11143/7787 fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal under conditions of academic capitalism anssi paasi paasi, anssi (2013). fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal under conditions of academic capitalism. fennia 191: 1, pp. 1-13. issn 17985617. universities and academic publishing cultures are transforming in developed societies around the world. this is related to the changing relations between the state and universities and to the increasingly common approval of neoliberal new public management doctrines. this has led to the adoption of diverse evaluation and ranking systems in science policies that in the last resort have an impact on how resources are delivered to universities, faculties and individual departments. new imperatives that researchers have faced seem to emphasize articles written in the english language that are published in so-called international quality journals. this paper scrutinizes at first the changing institutional basis and pressures that characterize current international academic publishing cultures; secondly, how such tendencies reflect the rise of academic capitalism; and thirdly, the shifting position of the well-established finnish geographical journal fennia in the international publishing space. a major dividing line between contemporary journals seems to exist between those that are included in the web of science/isi-system of thomson reuters and those that are not. this paper shows by using the isi data that fennia has been, despite the fact that it is not an isi-listed journal, a widely used and circulated forum for a long time. a major challenge for the future reputation of the journal will be attracting more high-quality international submissions and articles, regardless of whether the journal will be included in the isi system. keywords: geography, academic publishing cultures, web of science, academic capitalism anssi paasi, department of geography, linnanmaa, 90014 university of oulu, finland, e-mail: anssi.paasi@oulu.fi introduction academic researchers have been facing substantial pressures during the last 10–15 years or so. increasing claims for better research performance or for winning more national or international research awards seem to be the order of the day around the world. it is also more and more common in the science policies of practically all developed countries to stress the importance of ‘internationalization’ – whatever this shibboleth means in practice in different national academic contexts. scientific communication across borders and geographical distances is a phenomenon that is as old as the scientific enterprise itself (hakala 2002), but present claims indicate altered premises. universities, “the bright satanic mills of the emerging global knowledge economy” (harding et al. 2007: 3), have all around the world adopted a new language of performativity including such expressions as ‘world class’, ‘excellence’, ‘top’ and ‘international’. the self-promotion of universities has vastly enlarged and through branding exercises they “parade their ostensible strengths and draw a discrete veil over any weaknesses”, write harding et al. (2007: 2). the recent changes have been closely associated with a variety of university, national, and international level ranking exercises based on comparable sets of performance metrics. 2 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi for academic scholars such external pressures often mean increasing demands to publish their research ‘more internationally’ in ‘better forums’. this has very likely led to a growing calculation, probably more often externally forced than voluntary, in which researches have to weigh the pros and cons of miscellaneous publication forums. should she or he write a monograph, an article for an edited collection, or a journal article? and if to write a journal article, the most conspicuous claim today, where to submit it, since the range of publication forums is also expanding. the current ethos of ranking individual scholars, academic departments, universities and even ‘nations’ on the basis of research performance, and the often one-sidedly mechanical measurement of research output and citations, are major features of contemporary, increasingly competition-oriented academia (cf. agnew 2009). citation counts are seen, as fuller (2002: 207) writes, “as votes cast in an ongoing election over whose work matters.” increasing claims for competitiveness and the actions taken to promote this condition in higher education – ‘market-like behaviour’ – have been labelled critically as academic capitalism (slaughter & leslie 1999). i will scrutinize three things in this article. at first i will look at the changing institutional basis of publishing cultures and the related pressures that characterize contemporary academia, and secondly, how such new tendencies relate to academic capitalism. thirdly, as an empirical example i will scrutinize the changing position of the by long established finnish geographical journal fennia. i will do this by locating the journal in a wider, perpetually transforming international publishing space that increasingly crosses national borders but is simultaneously uneven in many ways (paasi 2005a). this unevenness is related to (hegemonic) languages, national academic cultures and contexts, to the power of publishing houses in marketing and promoting journals, editorial policies and gatekeeping, and to the power of indexing and ranking such journals into various data sets (like scopus and/or web of science). the geographical society of finland labels fennia as an international journal of geography. it is hence interesting and important to examine briefly what the ongoing internationalization of publishing cultures means in practical terms for this journal, how international tendencies, ideologies and institutions in general shape how international publishing is understood and, finally, how these tendencies perhaps challenge and reposition fennia, by tradition a notable journal in the international publishing space. changing publishing cultures and contexts publishing cultures around the world seem to be in a state of rapid change. this is related to the changing relations between the state and universities, and to the increasingly common adoption of new, neoliberal public management policies. the state, academic institutions and individual scholars have always formed a complex network of power relations (granö 1981; paasi 2005b). however, new public management policies have led to the adoption of diverse evaluation and ranking systems in science policies that ultimately have an impact on how resources are consigned to universities, faculties and individual departments. new demands that researchers face in many states emphasize articles written in the english language published in so-called international quality journals. the latter, for their part, at present seem primarily to be journals that have been accepted into the web of science/isi database which has been developed and maintained by the multinational corporation thomson reuters. in spite of the recent efforts of geographers to seriously consider possibilities for specifically european publishing outlets as a counterweight to anglophone journals (gregson et al. 2003; aalbers & rossi 2006), the harsh fact is that inclusion in the isi database, a feature characteristic of most well-known anglophone human geographic journals, is more often than not acknowledged around the world as a synonym for ‘quality’. the academic reputation of a specific classified journal reinforces the power of this database and also modifies the prevailing understanding of what counts as relevant, high calibre science and what is not. neoliberal competitive pressures related to publishing in high impact factor journals (if) and money allocated on the basis of isi-classified articles also tend to transform academic publishing into power struggles over prestige between and within academic disciplines. it goes without saying that the use of the isi apparatus in evaluation is appreciated especially by the representatives of academic fields that gain some advantage (prestige, research money) of the use of such instruments and is opposed by fields fennia 191: 1 (2013) 3fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... that stand to lose. fields that gain advantage from the system are very likely to be characterized by large research groups or networks, as well as a deep departmental, national and international division of labour. such instruments are typically resisted by social scientists and humanists, especially outside of the anglophone world, who may still prefer monographs over brief articles and tend to publish in their national languages rather than in english. it seems that in both physical and human geography the isi system now has a worldwide presence, and publishers, for example, use the isi status and its impact factors in their advertising. impact factors are presented by thomson reuters annually on the basis of a journal’s citations during the two previous years. in spite of its apparent ‘objectivity’, the calculation of impact factors is complicated and relates to issues such as what items are ultimately calculated in the sum of citations and which articles are used in dividing the total number of citations – the procedure that ultimately defines the impact factor. calls to publish journal articles, rather than monographs, have thus emerged around the world. this tendency has also raised a critical debate amongst geographers. some scholars have suggested that such claims may lead to a situation where academic researchers deliberately begin to avoid substantial, complicated and time-consuming research themes and instead concentrate on relatively small, focused, ‘sexy’ topics that attract the interest of researchers around the world for some time and are then soon replaced by new sexy topics (castree et al. 2006; harvey 2006; amin & thrift 2007; ward et al. 2009). ‘fashion’ is the term that some scholars have recently used to criticize such ‘fast-food’ research tendencies (agnew 2012). in the worst case such approaches may lead to imitation and to the fast circulation of unvarying ideas around the world. this would present a problem since the social sciences deal with open systems, which argues for both contextual and conceptual sensitivity on the part of researchers, not moving ‘ready-made’ conceptual frameworks from one place to another. since the practice of academic research consists of, besides ‘hard work’, a very complicated constellation of power relations, practices and discourses related to grant systems, publications, review work, evaluation and rankings, it is no exaggeration to suggest that language plays a crucial role in this enterprise (bauder et al. 2010). another wide-ranging debate, closely related to the previous issue, emerged at the turn of the millennium. it was related to the ever more powerful, even hegemonic position of the english language as the new lingua franca of academic publishing (minca 2000; gutiérrez & lópez-nieva 2001; garcia-ramon 2003; gregson et al. 2003; kitchin 2005; best 2009). a major question in this debate has been how one specific language, english, has become a global synonym for ‘international’, even though the ideas about what international actually means might themselves be deeply contested and contextual. while the hegemony of the english language was questioned, some authors also proposed that the use of english in fact makes the communication between academic scholars across borders easier (rodríguez-pose 2004). as far as global communication between scholars is concerned, there does not seem to be many alternatives to the hegemony of english as a language, especially for small linguistic communities like finnish, but many journals have taken proactive steps towards a more equal position. the online journal acme, for example, publishes articles not only in english but also in french, italian, german and spanish. a further step taken by this journal is that articles written in other languages may be accepted for review after consultation with the editors. some other journals (like geoforum) have helped non-english speakers with language problems. the contested nature of the ‘international publishing space’ many researchers have now challenged an idea that is today often taken for granted in the academic world, namely that it is english language publications, preferably produced in the us and uk, that are ‘international’, while publications in other languages are ‘national’ or ‘parochial’ (cf. minca 2000; simonsen 2004). the international community of social scientists in particular has become much more sensitive not only to the fact that language and context are decisively related in the construction of scientific accounts, but also to the forms of power (or ‘geopolitics’) that are involved in such relations. not only geographers but also post-colonial scholars and the representatives of marketing science and international relations studies, for example, have participated in the debate (canagarajah 2002; tietze & dick 2009). 4 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi in geography, scholars operating outside of the anglophone world (especially in many european states such as germany, denmark, hungary, italy and spain), along with some in north america, the united kingdom, and the formerly colonized ‘peripheries’, have commented on the monopolization of the idea of ‘international publishing’ by a group of journals published in english in the uk or the us. this was part of a wider critique of the views of geography practised in the us and uk as the product of a global ‘core’ and that practised in other areas as a product of the ‘periphery’ (berg & kearns 1998; gutiérrez & lópez-nieva 2001; olds 2001; garcia-ramon 2003; gregson et al. 2003; berg 2004). johnston and sidaway (2004, cf. rodríguez-pose 2004) challenged the idea of a unified anglo-american geography by showing that, in spite of common roots, there are major differences between british and us-based studies. ulrich best (2009) has recently usefully summarized these wide debates on the anglophone hegemony and provided some theoretical interpretations of what centres and peripheries in practice mean. timár (2004), for her part, has reminded that from the perspective of the former eastern european countries, it is better to speak about a ‘western hegemony’ than merely about an ‘angloamerican’ one. in spite of these wide critiques the role of the english language as the language of science is nowadays powerfully supported by many national ministries of science outside of the english-speaking world, e.g. in scandinavia and in many continental european states (paasi 2013). these rather intense deliberations within geography as well as the empirical research motivated by such debates (paasi 2005a) have revealed that most of the ostensibly ‘internationally significant’ journals, particularly those classified by thomson reuters in isi data, were published by major publishing houses in the uk and us. the fact remains that even today, even though progressively more non-anglophone geographical journals have been accepted into the isi database during the last 5–7 years or so, almost 90% of authors publishing in anglophone journals represent the english-speaking world (banski & ferenc 2013). human geography journals were for a long time very poorly represented in the isi data, but during the last few years new geographic journals have been accepted into the isi system. surprisingly enough, many of these journals are published outside of the anglophone world, and also in other languages than english, for example, in german, french, spanish and even in minor languages such as czech and slovenian. this implies that thomson reuters has altered its policy in accepting journals into the database and that some sort of linguistic and national representativeness has come into play. this may be related to the earlier observations and critical comments on the poor international representativeness of the listed journals, especially with respect to the wider non-anglophone world (paasi 2005a). it may also be an expression of a tendency to widen the ‘market logic’ inside the database: the journals in each field are, at any rate, ‘automatically’ classified according to their impact factors and in practice ‘quality’ is still related to the journal’s position in this hierarchy. many colleagues, especially those based in the uk, have told how their head of department or dean often clearly specifies which journals they should publish in. these journals typically represent the top of the isi hierarchy. according to recent comments, this kind of coercive accountability has produced much anxiety and discontent and has instilled a destructive competitive spirit in the university system (acme 2007). putting previous tendencies in a context: the rise of academic capitalism the current claims regarding the internationalization of contemporary academia are one imperative element in the neoliberal globalization of academic life. the processes related to globalization are being shaped in complex ways in and by transformations of the world economy and geopolitics, and involve many core forces of social life such as transformations in capitalist production, technological innovation in communications, the spread of rationalism as a dominant knowledge framework and various forms of governance enabling the establishment of new regulatory frameworks (scholte 2000; paasi 2005a; harding et al. 2007). more often than not, a competitive market orientation has entered into higher education, often following the policies outlined in national ministries, and a whole new vocabulary has been created to depict the links between science, universities and society (e.g. mcuniversity, triple helix, for-profit higher education, mode 1 and 2). teichler (2004) has analysed the definitions of internationalization and makes an analytical distinction between interfennia 191: 1 (2013) 5fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... nationalization and globalization of science. he argues that the former typically refers to physical mobility, academic co-operation, academic knowledge transfer and international education. the latter, for its part, is often associated with competition and market steering, transnational education and commercial knowledge transfer. respectively, as some scholars have recognized, the ongoing changes in publishing cultures and the related, somewhat heated debates are not mere random events but have been part of wider tendencies taking place in academia around the world. one of the most obvious manifestations of neoliberalism is the rise of evaluation cultures and procedures where the science organizations of various countries both draw on and imitate one another (paasi 2005a, 2013; castree et al. 2006). these have been paralleled and also nourished by various kinds of university ranking systems that partly draw on isi data (jöns & hoyler 2013). the best known rankings are the academic ranking of world universities (arwu) made by shanghai jiao tong university and the times higher education world university rankings, which both have become increasingly powerful since the millennium. these rankings are now enthusiastically followed by political elites, ministries and university leaders, the key issue typically being where one’s ‘own’ university (or ‘nation’) is positioned in relation to other national or international ‘competitors’. the lists have considerable power in shaping social reality and social practices related to academic life. kauppi and erkkilä (2011) are ready to argue that “the global higher education map is different today than prior to the creation of the 2003 shanghai ranking of world universities. it has become more structured, and ranking lists have turned into established policy instruments for global governance of higher education, reinforcing the value of certain resources at the expense of others.” these tendencies clearly display a neoliberal ideology of competition that is penetrating pretty much everywhere. one background for these developments is the fact that the traditionally rather modest marketing of universities to attract students has been dramatically transformed into a fierce struggle over prestige, research money and students. this has created not only new marketing strategies but also an ‘evaluation industry’ in many countries and has resulted in a symbolic struggle that draws on assessments, rankings and material and symbolic distinctions (harding et al. 2007; paasi 2013). recent developments in higher education have strengthened the power and resources of new professional groups such as university managers and evaluators of research and teaching performance (kauppi & erkkilä 2011: 315). on the other hand, these processes are also fitting examples of policy transfer (dolowitz & marsh 1996) where certain policy practices and ideas travel from one societal context to another across national borders and then begin to shape the dominant ways of thought and material practices in these new contexts also. some researchers have interpreted these tendencies as expressions of the globalization of higher education, and more specifically, of the rise of academic capitalism (slaughter & leslie 1997; paasi 2005a, 2013; castree et al. 2006). one of the key international advisory institutions behind such tendencies towards increasing competiveness is the oecd, the organization that originally brought science indicators into international debate. the oecd is often regarded as an ‘objective knowledge producer’ and it carries out international comparisons of publication activities and citations between the ‘nations’, using the isi data as a gauge, hence upholding an attitude of ‘competition’ that is buttressed and coordinated by national higher education systems and individual universities. correspondingly national ministries and governments use the oecd reports to steer their science policies, and in many cases actually commission such reports from the oecd to support their decisions (kallo 2009). states around the world have adopted increasingly similar views of science policy and its instruments and forms of management (kauppi & erkkilä 2011). this has been part of the wider adoption of the new public management doctrine. the management of globalizing science around the world appears to be occurring through the standardization of scientific practice and the certification of ‘quality’. it is even possible to speak of a sort of science nationalism that is developing in the sense that in the new landscape of economic competition investments in science and its results are compared by states in firmly national frameworks, often following models created by the oecd (paasi 2013). these developments thus seem to fit under the ideological umbrella of neoliberalism that covers a number of areas in contemporary social life and human experience – even if this evasive word is itself difficult to define. this argument quite obviously requires some further evidence. there are 6 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi many current processes and events occurring at various spatial scales that can be noted here. think, for example, how the nature of academic publishing and the diverging publications themselves have become a crucial element in defining various forms of symbolic capital and prestige that characterize the supposed competition between contemporary universities. this competition is not related merely to symbolic capital but to an increasing degree also to concrete material resources: money. one of the most common present-day assumptions implied by the global university rankings is that academic departments, faculties and universities should compete with each other in global space over resources and symbolic capital. prevailing tendencies may manifest themselves in different ways in different national contexts. in finland, for example, universities are just now facing the new nationwide publication forum project, the jufo forum, a classification and ranking of selected journals into three quality categories, 1 (lowest), 2 and 3 (highest), and book publishers into two categories, 1 and 2. the models for this classification have been adopted primarily from norway and denmark. publishing in forums classified into these three categories will ultimately lead to certain sums of money being delivered to universities according to their ‘research output’. the aim of the jufo project has been to create a system in which scientific publication activity can be evaluated on the basis of ‘quality, not only quantity’. most publications in higher jufo categories represent english language, often isi-classified journals and are published by major international publishing houses. the isi classification thus leads to a certain path-dependency, i.e. it helps the journals to succeed in other rankings as well. the jufo project is a fitting example of the instrumentalization of scientific research and how the form of ‘productivity’, both from the angle of an individual researcher and the universities, has been determined externally (korvela 2013). the first proposal for a jufo classification raised strong resistance among social scientists and humanists, and altogether 60 scientific societies representing various fields claimed in a petition that journals published in the finnish language should be better recognized, proposing that they should be raised from the first level to the second in the jufo classification. heavy lobbying on behalf of certain finnish-language journals was undoubtedly carried out by representatives of the social science and humanities fields to categorize their journals at higher levels in order to create a more equal position for finnish and non-finnish journals, but surely also because of the explicit link between this classification and financial rewards. this resistance thus suggested that the quality of publications should not be related to the publishing language, that is, english. the protest was accepted and a number of finnish-language journals were upgraded to level 2. eventually this episode led to a rather odd situation where many new, high calibre international journals were actually placed on a lower level than some national journals published only in finnish. on the other hand, at least some finnish universities seem to be eschewing this tendency towards linguistic equity when applying for jufo classification in such ways that international journals, regardless of jufo level, are still regarded as more prestigious forums than finnish ones, for instance in the evaluation of successful tenure tracks. both finnish geographical journals, that is, fennia and terra, are classified as jufo level 1 even though they have a considerably longer history than many finnish journals accepted as level 2. another central feature in the contemporary neoliberal academia is the tendency to manage and modify the intentions and activities of individual scholars. one of jufo’s aims is to ‘educate’ scholars so that they know which publication forums in each field are of ‘high level’. the activities of scholars are controlled by various institutions today so much that it is even possible to imagine a brave new ‘neoliberal academic’ who is expected to arise from competition, internationalization and from the increasing management and control. such an actor is expected to follow a sort of utility calculation in her activities, to internalize the ethos of continual competition, to adapt to contemporary ranking systems and evaluations, be effective and rational in her personal choices yet flexible enough to co-operate with larger teams across the borders of academic fields, and, finally, to recognize that all this is for her ‘personal best’. in a word, these tendencies are part of a new neoliberal governmentality (acme 2007; moisio 2012). according to the principles of the new public management ethos, scholars should be competing as individuals with others, their departments are competing with other departments, universities are competing with each other, and nation-states are similarly competing in their national-scale perforfennia 191: 1 (2013) 7fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... mance in science. since the turn of the millennium we have even witnessed how the european union is, following the lisbon strategy, competing with other macro-geographic regional institutions, and indeed, how the eu should become the most ‘competitive entity’ in this international survival game between rescaled social spaces (cf. kauppi & erkkilä 2011). also the command order should be clear in this game. at the departmental level, the heads of departments are responsible for running this competition, at the faculty level deans should do the same, and at the level of the university the principals have the responsibility to overlook how their knowledge factories are being run. perhaps the respective ministers and civil servants in ministries are not responsible to anybody – they can just enjoy the international achievements and comparisons so long as the national ‘science mill’ is more productive than in other countries. if it fails to be, new activities and sticks and carrots are doubtless needed and developed to make the system more competitive. empirical illustration: fennia in the current international publishing space contemporary academic capitalism is thus characterized by incessant evaluations, classifications and rankings. we saw above the crucial significance of web of science/isi classifications for evaluation cultures. fennia is not listed among the isi journals. we may therefore raise a question, is it useful for a journal to be accepted to the seemingly prestigious family of the isi classified forums? and if so, under what circumstances? some new journals initiated by major anglophone publishing houses, and the journal of economic geography in particular, display one extreme: rapid success. this journal was almost immediately accepted to the isi system and it now has a very strong position among the listed journals, having one of the highest impact factors, which is based on its high citation numbers among scholars representing the field and intercitations by the representatives of other fields such as economics and marketing. in general, specialist topical journals in economic geography seem to dominate the ranking list, perhaps displaying the strength of this field but also a certain tribalism around certain key categories and themes that are conceived and circulated at an increasing pace. the community of economic geographers has been expanding, which can be seen from the establishment of new journals in this field. certain subfields of human geography, such as historical geography, display a different trajectory and citation patterns. the articles normally require timeconsuming archive work and rarely become widely cited. on the other hand, while the isi status seems to be increasingly important for the ranking of departments, universities and even nations, this status may also be a risky business for journals that are not part of the core of the wider anglophone publishing market, especially if journals are published in other languages than english. namely, it appears that in many cases new journals exist simply to swell the ’bottom’ of the if hierarchy of isi journals, and that their existence on the bottom is actually meant to underscore even more clearly the excellence of the very established, high impact factor journals coming from the solid core of anglophone publishing businesses. year after year a select few journals, such as annals of the association of american geographers, transactions of the institute of british geographers, progress in human geography and journal of economic geography, published in the uk and us dominate the if ranking list. at the bottom of the list of the 73 currently classified isi human geography journals are spanish, french, austrian and chilean journals, for example, which all have low impact factor values. the current if of the german geographische zeitschrift and the french sud-ouest européen is a flat 0.000. articles published in these journals have thus not been cited at all in isi journals during the period 2009–2010, when the 2011 impact factors were calculated. indeed, the articles in the latter, soe, have been cited only three times during the period 2006–2010. contrary to this, the czech geographic community’s geografie-prague has been able to achieve an if that is more than 1. an analysis of citation patterns and connections shows that the if derives largely from the citations of the czech community itself. the articles published in this journal have become important references for czech scholars and they are widely cited by this community in their articles both in this journal and other isi journals. what about fennia, then? how it is positioned in this wider hierarchical and transforming publication space and what is its role as an international journal as it is advertised by the society? i will lean in this section on the data provided by thom8 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi son reuter’s web of science, which seems to have become the standard data in most contemporary scientific evaluations. this data can also be used to analyse the internationalization of journals, but this seems to be much rarer than its typical use as an instrument of straightforward metrics. i will therefore scrutinize a few elements from this data that illustrate fennia’s international profile and its ‘interaction’ with the wider academic community. as a background it is pertinent to recognize that fennia has an exceptionally long, more than 120-years-long history among academic geographical periodicals: it has been published by the geographical society of finland since 1889. a few years ago this journal was changed into an online journal that is published twice a year. this decreased the ‘physical visibility’ of the journal, but this is not a unique development and perhaps not a major problem for the journal’s visibility, since scholars more and more often access individual articles from the internet rather than deal with paper copies of journal issues. online journals are becoming at the same time more and more common also in geography. the spanish scripta nova, recently accepted to the isi list, is an online journal and there are also some other, well-established online forums in geography, such as social geography, acme and geography compass. the editors of acme, for example, have made a deliberate political decision to refuse ranking and respectively have refused invitations to join the isi system (acme 2007). fennia has been for a long time a particularly significant publication forum for finnish physical geographers and other geoscientists. as human geography gradually became stronger in the finnish universities after world war ii, the studies carried out by human geographers, intended for international audiences, were also increasingly published in this journal. while the number of articles published by foreign scholars has been small, the international profile of the journal is evident in the fact that the articles (and until the late 1980s also sometimes larger monographs) published in fennia have been widely cited by foreign scholars. wos cited reference index (5/2/2013) includes altogether 776 papers published in fennia. they have been cited in total 2,180 times in isi journals over the years. most fennia papers have been cited only a few times, but there are three articles, related to dendrochronology (published in 1971; 145 citations), geology (1975; 110 citations) and regional theory (1986; 102 citations), that have been referred to more than one hundred times as well as three others (representing geology and botany) that have been cited more than 50 times. one hundred citations is a high figure for any academic geography journal but especially for social science journals. in general, the isi data shows that the papers have been most often quoted by geologists, physical geographers and environmental scientists and ecologists. fennia has also been a major publication forum for finnish – and to smaller extent foreign – human geographers, but according to the data, with few exceptions, human geographic papers have not been widely recognized or cited by foreign scholars. this probably implies the contextual and empirical character of human geographic themes that have traditionally dominated finnish geography. contrary to this, more theoretical human geographic articles in fennia have been better recognized. while the citations of fennia papers tend to be ‘concentrated’ in some core countries, its wide international profile is itself manifested in the fact that articles have been quoted by scholars from almost 60 countries. the following list of 12 leading countries displays that fennia has been predominantly a finnish journal but also that it has been important for anglophone and scandinavian scholars as well. country citations of fennia articles in isi journals by the country of authors finland 855 sweden 274 usa 227 england 208 canada 190 norway 158 germany 89 russia 86 estonia 69 switzerland 59 poland 45 netherlands 43 having such a home-base is certainly no exceptional feature and is common also for major anglophonic journals, such as annals of the association of american geographers and transactions of the institute of british geographers (cf. banski & ferenc 2013). wide international circulation of fennia has of course been possible due to english being the language of publication. many current geographical journals with isi status, published in non-anglophone languages, actually cannot disfennia 191: 1 (2013) 9fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... play such wide circulation. bajerski (2011), for example, has recently shown that articles written in german, french and spanish rarely find readers outside of the country or wider language area where the journals have been published. he also cites whitehand and edmondson (1977) who have shown that between 1954–74 there was, on the one hand, a significant drop in the percentage of works of french and german geographers among the works cited by researchers from the us, uk and canada, and on the other hand, a marked growth in citations of works of uk, us and canadian geographers by french and german researchers. thus internationalization that was occurring was not reciprocal. this shift occurring in the background helps explain why continental european geographers at the turn of the millennium raised their voices and commented on the hegemony of english in a number of papers. the list of 12 authors who have most often quoted papers published in fennia in their isi articles is dominated by geoscientists and physical geographers, and about half of these scholars are finnish geographers and geologists. fennia articles have thus doubtless provided an important window into the physical geographic research in scandinavia in particular. author times the author has referred to fennia articles seppä h 42 stoffel m 33 birks hjb 32 kullman l 30 korhola a 30 luoto m 28 seppälä m 28 macdonald gm 19 eronen m 18 hicks s 18 payette s 17 bollschweiler m 14 finnish human geographers did not publish very much in english between the 1970s and early 1990s, and it was exceptional to see an article that was published outside of finland. one explanation for this observation is that this period witnessed the establishment of applied and planning geography in finland and more often than not the publications related to these fields were published in finnish in policy reports, in departmental (‘grey’) series, in aluesuunnittelu, the journal of the association of planning geographers, or in terra, the geographical society’s secondary journal which publishes articles written in finnish or swedish. during the 1990s and especially since the millennium, new generations of researchers have been much more active in international publishing. this has doubtless both institutional and ideological backgrounds (paasi 2005b). since the 1990s internationalization has been a major priority in the policies of institutions such as the academy of finland and the ministry of education. in ideological terms this fact is related to the neoliberalization of finnish science policy in which international activities and publications have simply gained more importance and, indeed, have become a major prerequisite for attaining academic jobs and research money. the location of most finnish geography departments in the faculties of science has accentuated this fact since these faculties represent nowadays particularly competitive epistemic cultures (paasi 2005b). correspondingly, finnish physical geographers and to an increasing degree also human geographers have sought to publish their papers in isi classified journals since the 1990s. while the model of human geographers still favours publishing single-authored papers, physical geographers increasingly publish in teams. international publishing was perhaps at first related to the prestige that was in general associated with such journals but this quickly turned into an asset in the rivalry over academic jobs, research money and departmental success – features that were critically evaluated above. journal publishing among young scholars has been boosted by the fact that a finnish doctoral thesis nowadays typically consists of four international articles and a synopsis. this change in phd work culture has rapidly increased the pressure on young researchers to ‘publish international’. these tendencies have at the same time led to an increasing international visibility of finnish geography. indeed, it is now difficult to name any major international journal in geography where at least one finnish geographer has not published an article since the 1990s. internationalization has proceeded also in other forms. finnish geographers have edited major international journals and sat on the editorial boards of several key journals since the 1990s. 10 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi the future? as a result of the tendencies and competitive pressures depicted above, fennia has likely lost some of its earlier prestige as an international window into finnish geography and has perhaps also lost potential submissions of articles from scholars outside of finland, which in the end define a genuine and dynamic international publication forum. a clear future problem for this journal is that the prestige of academic journals, geography journals included, is today increasingly linked with the isi apparatus. whether we like its hegemony or not, this effect will only increase because isi classifications are used as a background measure in many other classifications systems that are today used in finland (like jufo) and elsewhere. a few other nordic journals, geografiska annaler a and b, norsk geografisk tidskrift, and the danish journal of geography, currently published by international (=anglophone) publishing houses have been admitted isi status by thomson reuters. the long history of each of these journals has definitely helped in achieving this status. 44 58 53 70 62 79 67 81 91 86 99 82 89 92 112 98 117 113 88 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 the same lists of course have ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, as the neoliberal market logic seems to require: my discussions with scholars in many countries (especially in the uk) make clear that even among the isi-listed journals there are forums that departments, universities, and science financers claim to avoid because of their low impact factors. this is a status that the publishers of isi-classified journals also boldly use in their promotion policies and seems to be an especially important factor for journals that dominate the lists that have been constructed on the basis of impact factors. fennia has a long history and in spite of the lack of isi status the journal has a solid reputation among geographers and other scholars. its articles are also widely cited in isi journals. as figure 1 shows, the number of such citations has been gradually increasing since the mid-1990s. the editors of the journal have also recently taken long steps towards driving its editorial policy more actively and the international editorial board of the journal is now much more internationally represented than before. further, its current editorial board members are all active dynamic researchers from various countries. this is highly important fig. 1. number of citations to articles published in fennia (in journals classified in isi database). fennia 191: 1 (2013) 11fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... come to its end and excessive ranking of pretty much everything – journals, departments and universities – will be passé. at the moment this looks unlikely since universities around the world seem to be under the spell of evaluations that are done in the name of accountability and competitiveness. meanwhile we can only hope that a pluralistic attitude can be preserved in academia. to take but one example from human geography, some debate has already emerged on the future of monographs vs. articles in journals, and this issue seems to be topical both in europe, asia and in the english-speaking world (ward et al. 2009). opinions as to what are or are not relevant publications are of course crucially related to power-knowledge relations, and one-sided, externally dictated views on this issue have to be resisted in the name of both pluralism and academic freedom. papers in journals, monographs and edited thematic collections must all have their place also in the future. acknowledgement this paper was originally presented at the annual meeting of the geographical society of finland in helsinki (october 2012) in a panel on the future of finnish geographical journals and publishing. i wrote the paper when i served as an academy professor in the academy of finland (research grant 218198/210442). i wish to thank the academy for support and the panelists and audience for lively discussions that helped to modify the final text. i am grateful to professor sami moisio and two anonymous referees for very useful comments. i dedicate this article to the memory of academician olavi granö (1925–2013), a mentor, a coeditor and a collegial friend since 1982, with whom i had the privilege to have long, thorough and critical conversations on geography and science policy until the last. references aalbers mb & rossi u 2006. beyond the angloamerican hegemony in human geography: a european view. geojournal 67, 137−138. http://dx. doi.org/10.1007%2fs10708-007-9041-8. acme editorial collective 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reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 79 ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival alberto andrés calvo independent scholar abstract this article aims at investigating the american folk horror revival of the 2010s, focusing on texts such as ari aster’s midsommar (2019) or robert eggers’s the vvitch (2015). this survey of the folk horror revival will inevitably lead us to the genre’s past, particularly to the so-called unholy trinity, comprised by three films released in great britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s. this temporal and geographical dislocation will be situated against a larger background of cultural production, arguing that the appearance of the folk horror revival sheds some light on the debate on nostalgia and pastiche as the predominant artistic modes under late capitalism. the notion of hauntology, as explored by jacques derrida, mark fisher, or katy shaw, will be used throughout the essay in order to provide a firm theoretical ground on which this debate can take place. keywords: american folk horror, hauntology, nostalgia, midsommar, the vvitch. i. introduction the past decade has seen an increase in the number and popularity of folk horror films. the re-emergence of this horror sub-genre is particularly intriguing because it involves not only a temporal relocation but also a geographical one. the origins of the folk horror film can be traced back to the late 1960s and early 1970s in britain with filmmakers such as robin hardy or michael reeves. however, many of the contemporary iterations of the genre come from across the atlantic (see robert eggers’s the vvitch [2015], ari aster’s midsommar [2019] or malgorzata szumowska’s us-produced the other lamb [2019], among others). unfortunately, and despite recent efforts by adam scovell, andy paciorek, and other scholars, folk horror alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 80 remains largely under-theorised. therefore, the first aim of this article is to contribute to the budding theorisation of folk horror. furthermore, this article also aims to investigate the folk horror revival through the lens of a wider debate on cultural production in late capitalism. the concept of hauntology is central to this debate. derived from jacques derrida’s late writings, hauntology can be understood as the study of cultural spectres, “a science of ghosts, a science of what returns. it destabilizes space as well as time” (shaw 2). hauntology has been seeping into discussions of art and nostalgia, first in popular music and gradually in film and literature as well. it ought to be stated that the relationship between folk horror and hauntology is entirely symbiotic. hauntology is as useful to folk horror studies as folk horror is to hauntology studies. the emergence of both terms in academia is a recent and, perhaps more importantly, geographically bound phenomenon. folk horror and hauntology studies have been so far tied almost exclusively to the british isles. however, the recent appearance of an american form of folk horror forces us to re-evaluate this geographical connection. at this point, it bears asking several questions: how does this new american folk horror compare to its british counterpart from past and present? can these new folk horror films be comfortably lumped with the rest of horror revivals and remakes being currently released? are the films of eggers and aster as ripe for hauntological analysis as their transatlantic cousins? ii. running out of past: remakes and revivals it is worth investigating this folk horror revival through the lens of a culture obsessed with its own past. writing in 2011 about the music trends of the 2000s, simon reynolds argues that the first decade of the new millennium “has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once” (10). his book retromania (2011) explores revivals and pastiche in popular music, following the steps of marxist literary critics like raymond williams or fredric jameson. the latter’s theories on the prevalence of the so-called “nostalgia mode” are echoed throughout reynolds’s work. although their scope and target are different, both jameson and reynolds suggest that artistic production in late capitalism is under a state of arrested development, incapable of escaping its past precisely because the hegemonic social order has forced us to forget “how to think historically in the first place” (jameson 1) and to altogether give up on progress, here understood as the establishment of a new social order. reynolds calls the 2000s the “re” decade, a span of time when the shadow of the past looms over cultural production more than at any other previous time, when revivals and pastiche reign supreme and occupy a privileged position in the music industry. ten years after the publication of reynolds’s book, his words still ring painfully true. though reynolds writes about popular music, film is not exempt from this backward-looking craze. a cursory glance at the 50 highest alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 81 grossing films of the 2010s reveals that almost all of them are sequels, remakes, spin-offs or some sort of combination of the three.1 horror film has also been hit by a nostalgia wave. although there might be an argument for horror as a genre that has always looked to its past and favoured film franchises,2 the truth is that the past few years have seen a proliferation of remakes (it [2017], child’s play [2019], a nightmare on elm street [2010], sequels/reboots halloween [2018] and blair witch [2016]), and purely nostalgia artifacts like stranger things (2016-ongoing) that take horror’s historical tendency to looking back at its past to the next level. now, folk horror has also been brought back to life. are the new folk horror films part of this revivalist tendency? in order to answer this question, an expanded discussion on nostalgia by way of hauntology will be provided. however, it is worthwhile to take a slight detour and delve into the specifics of folk horror first. iii. folk horror: a short history despite the genre’s origins harking back to the late 60s in film and much earlier in literature, the emergence of “folk horror” as a critical term is a very recent phenomenon,3 particularly when studied in opposition to others like giallo, gothic horror, or monster horror. in his book on folk horror, adam scovell argues that the term became popularised in 2010 when used by mark gatiss in his bbc documentary a history of horror, and that it was coined as late as 2004 by filmmaker piers haggard. haggard’s the blood on satan’s claw (1971) is one third of what is popularly known as the “unholy trinity,” completed by michael reeves’s witchfinder general (1968) and robin hardy’s the wicker man (1973). these three films, all by british directors and released within five years of each other, are usually regarded as the three foundational texts of folk horror film.4 the three films express similar anxieties, arguably as a knee-jerk 1 there are several sources for this, and the fact that the list of films only differs slightly according to each source makes the point stand even more strongly. the most reliable list is based on imdb-owned website box office mojo, which tracks box office revenue in an algorithmic way: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/ 2 after all, what are the first gothic and horror films but adaptations of previous literary material? david pirie’s book a heritage of horror (1973) offers an insightful look at the relationship between horror film and gothic literature, arguing that the british horror films are “in no way imitative of american and european models but derive in general from literary sources” (10). 3 there is no mention of the term “folk horror” even in recent academic studies like columbia university press’s european nightmares: horror cinema in europe since 1945, published in 2012, or wiley-blackwell’s a companion to the horror film, published in 2014. 4 in an attempt to avoid anglocentrism, it ought to be stated that folk horror film existed before the unholy trinity. horror scholars, scovell among them, have made a commendable effort in recent years to reconcile the film history of countries like finland with folk horror, citing erik blomberg’s the white reindeer (1952) as a prime example. alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 82 reaction to the countercultural movements of the late 1960s.5 rurality, anachronistic ways of living centred around tightknit societies, sexual liberation, cults: these are all thematic points of suture among the unholy trinity. however, each of the three films tackle these themes in a highly singular manner; they are simply too idiosyncratic and varied in tone for them to comprise a unified genre. the wicker man takes its cue from thrillers and even musicals, witchfinder general appropriates a number of tropes from the western, while the gory and racy the blood on satan’s claw borders on exploitation horror with its proneness to jump-scares and nudity. it might be argued that the delayed emergence of folk horror as a critical category owes as much to the cult status of many of its main examples as it does to the inconsistent nature of the texts we are working with. it would be easy to cite irreconcilable differences and altogether renounce studying folk horror film as its own phenomenon. a perhaps bolder approach, which is the one that will be taken here, is to embrace these discrepancies and recognise them as an integral element of the genre. if a set of films as dissimilar as the unholy trinity is to be taken as the bedrock of folk horror film, it is only logical to oppose gatekeeping and accept texts that might deviate from the (admittedly unstable) standard set by these three films. this flirtation with genre is not exclusive to the unholy trinity; in fact, it is at the heart of the films of the british filmmaker ben wheatley, who, alongside his partner amy jump, has penned some of the most compelling folk horrors in recent times. wheatley’s 2011 film kill list, for example, starts as a kitchen-sink drama, while 2013’s a field in england resembles a period comedy in its opening scenes only for it to gradually descend into horrific madness. folk horror should be accepted as a critical category intrinsically destabilised by its intermingling with other genres. that is not to say, however, that any horror film with a passing relation to folklore or the rural merits being studied as folk horror. a certain degree of accuracy should still be pursued. adam scovell resists offering a singular definition of the genre, and, as has just been exposed, for good reasons. perhaps the most satisfying definition of folk horror is one of the many offered by scovell in the introduction of his book, where he defines it as “a work that uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny or horrific purposes” (17). this definition touches on many shared features of folk horror films, from the musical numbers in the wicker man or a field in england to the folk legends behind the plots of the vvitch or witchfinder general. providing a taxonomy of folk horror is a near-impossible task, but the above-mentioned definition may still be expanded on by offering a set of tropes shared by several folk horror 5 once again adam scovell is the scholar to turn to. his book folk horror includes interesting discussions on the unholy trinity as a reaction to the cultural background of their time, tying the films’ concerns with hedonism to the counterculture’s interest in drugs or sexual liberation, and pointing out that the three of them were all released “during what can be called the british counter-culture movement, almost acting as signposts for its tidal high-point of 1968 in witchfinder and the dying, post-manson embers of wicker in 1973” (24). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 83 films. part of the horrific aspects of these films is that the events usually take place in the outside and in broad daylight, thus subverting horror’s predominant setting. the dark and closed spaces favoured by horror take the backseat; horrific events happen not only outside and during the day but also in communal settings. this is particularly true of these films’ climaxes, which, as in most horror, pivot around death. the individualistic murder is here often replaced by human sacrifice. the true source of the horrific is not the murder itself but the fact that there is an audience observing and sometimes celebrating it. folk horror tends to insert the viewer into these diegetic audiences, in what is effectively yet another turn on horror’s usual strategy of affect, here understood by following xavier aldana reyes’s description of it as the way in which “our bodies may be moved by those we see on the screen” (3). in horror, we experience fear and dread vicariously by reacting to the horrific events happening on-screen. folk horror adds another layer by which we are also horrified by the reaction (or lack thereof) of an audience that is more often than not complicit in this human sacrifice. the powerful last acts of the wicker man and midsommar serve as perfect examples for this point, as it might be argued that both films force their viewers to be complicit with the diegetic audience by presenting the sacrificed outsiders in opposition to the more enticing and adventurous natives. in the former, the painfully dull and sanctimonious sergeant howie stands in stark contrast to the sexually liberated natives of summerisle, while midsommar spends a good portion of its running time depicting christian as intellectually dishonest and emotionally abusive. following on the traits listed above, it might be argued that these films engage with the occult rather than the supernatural: it is also worth noting that, when the supernatural does emerge, it is usually after the characters have been exposed to drugs and other perceptionaltering substances (a field in england, midsommar), or by tying the supernatural to religious tradition (the vvitch or the blood in satan’s claw). these films are all marked by a necessarily isolating landscape—the banishment of the puritan family in the vvitch, sergeant howie’s inability to escape summerisle in the wicker man, or the constant references to phones not working properly in midsommar—, which can sometimes be outright oppressive and claustrophobic however open it might appear (a field in england). furthermore, precarious living conditions caused by the land itself are usually the triggers behind the plots (see the failing crops in the wicker man or the vvitch, or the quite literal image of the evil emerging from the ground in the blood on satan’s claw). in some of these films, folk horror works by contrasting the dominant cultural practices of westerners with those of the other. it usually involves a set of characters that are transposed to an unfamiliar setting, at odds with their culture and religion. think, for example, of the anthropology students—one of them conspicuously called christian—visiting a swedish cult in midsommar, or the banishment to the woods of the puritan family in the vvitch. scovell identifies these settings with “skewed belief systems” (30) as places where progress has stopped. the notion of progress stopping, particularly when referring to areas outside the alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 84 influence of western civilisation, is not without its problems. it would perhaps be more accurate to say that progress has taken an unexpected turn through a return of the occult. in any case, the introduction of progress grants folk horror a political and temporal dimension that eases our transition to hauntology. iv. hauntology a play on words between “haunt” and “ontology,” the term first appeared in jacques derrida’s essay “spectres of marx,” published in 1993 as an effort to reconcile deconstruction with marxism in the wake of the fall of communism. opposing francis fukiyama’s post-ideological defence of liberal democracy as the rightful ending point of history, derrida ponders on the ghosts of marxism that kept haunting world politics in the late 20th century. derrida builds on spectrality as an unavoidable non-presence: just like repressed and deferred meanings come back to haunt the text, so does marxism endlessly return to haunt the hegemonic social system: “no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of marx’s ghosts. haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (34). though not de-politised by any stretch, “hauntology” was adopted as a music genre descriptor in the mid-2000s by critics like mark fisher or simon reynolds, who expressed a concern about the omnipresence of revivals and pastiche in popular music in the opening decade of the 21st century. fisher, who became one of hauntology’s most eloquent theorists and championed the term’s inclusion in academic cultural studies, speaks of hauntology as a reaction to life under neoliberalism, where every single aspect of life is subject to market relations and late capitalist logic. hauntology evokes a lament for the stifling of imagination provoked by these material conditions, effectively wondering out loud whether we have lost the capacity to imagine a different future. the future, fisher argues, “is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production” (16). if there is no future in sight, fisher argues, then cultural production will remain stuck in an inescapable loop of repetition and pastiche. fisher and reynolds saw hauntology as an apt descriptor for artists keen on recovering lost futures whose implications went beyond aesthetics.6 they used the term in order to describe the works of a number of mostly british electronic music acts that focus on the materiality of recording technology through noises like vinyl crackle or through physical deterioration of the material source of sound. hauntological art foregrounds the interplay between technology and the past, exploring themes of longing and decay through sheer materiality. in 6 the politics of hauntology reflects a longing for a social order progressively wound down with the establishment of neoliberalism. however, it would be an error to say that hauntology is a naïvely optimistic look back at the past. what is being longed for is not the past social order but the futures that said social order allowed us to dream up, the fact that it allowed “the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live” (fisher 16). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 85 music, that is best exemplified by the omnipresent vinyl crackle and sampling of records of bygone eras in burial’s untrue (2007), or by william basinski’s the disintegration loops (2002 3), a series of four albums consisting of pieces of music that are being played on loop on a tape. the tape’s gradual deterioration transforms the recording itself to the point of no recognition. another prime example is the caretaker’s everywhere at the end of time. released in parts throughout the 2010s, this six-stage album mirrors the effects of dementia by progressively distorting pre-war ballroom vinyl samples until they become a ghost of their former selves, with a handful of leitmotifs appearing several times throughout the six-hour album under different guises. hauntology was initially posited in opposition to nostalgia. if nostalgia is the straight, sometimes uncritical introduction of past tropes tied up to a bygone social order, hauntology experiments with these tropes by granting them a ghostly character. however, the distinction between the two terms is not as clear-cut as many of the theorisers of hauntology wished it was. fisher’s short essay, “no future 2012” (2020), is a good example of how easy it is for hauntology to become tangled up with nostalgia. building his argument off fredric jameson’s seminal text on postmodern pastiche, fisher argues that the preoccupation with the past in hauntological music could easily be construed as “nostalgic.” but it is the very foregrounding of temporality that makes hauntology differ from the typical products of the nostalgia mode, which bracket out history altogether in order to present themselves as new (716). the counterargument to fisher’s point would be that products of the nostalgia mode can (and do) also foreground temporality, often through self-referentiality and self-awareness of their status as a recycled cultural artifact. what ultimately defines hauntology is not the foregrounding of temporality itself but the ways in which this foregrounding takes place through formal devices concerned with the materiality of the work of art. a nostalgic work might foreground temporality through self-awareness and meta commentary.7 however, that does not necessarily make it hauntological. by venturing beyond self-awareness and meta discourse, hauntology thematises the dialogue between past and present through formal techniques that highlight the temporal incongruities that fisher, taking up on derrida’s conception of time as “out of joint” (34) aptly names “the time-wound” (716). hauntological art opens and navigates this time-wound, establishing a dialogue between past and present. insisting on hauntology’s dimension outside aesthetics, fisher argues that the first hauntological records he encountered “sounded ‘ghostly,’ certainly, but the spectrality was not a mere question of atmospherics” (16). fisher’s point is evident: the spectrality of hauntological art goes beyond an aesthetic eeriness. nevertheless, those ghostly sounds (or, in the case of film, analogous formal devices 7 there are plenty of examples of this in horror film, particularly from the 90s onwards, like wes craven’s postmodern slasher scream (1996), whose investment in self-awareness grows with every sequel. more recent examples include drew goddard’s the cabin in the woods (2011) or the horror-influenced comedy what we do in the shadows (2014). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 86 that achieve the same effect) should be pushed to the fore if one is to differentiate between hauntology and nostalgia. in music, these ghostly atmospherics are achieved through samples that, as jamie sexton puts in his valuable re-negotiation between hauntology and nostalgia, “can be transformed into more eerie sonic markers when treated with effects such as reverberation” (564). sexton’s introduction of the word “eerie” is not casual, and it opens up yet another avenue of communication between horror and hauntology. “eerie” is, after all, a term commonly used to refer to unsettling art which involves questions of spectrality and presence. in his book the weird and the eerie, fisher argues that the eerie “occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something” (61). fisher’s notion of eeriness fits nicely into the formal thematization of the time-wound in hauntological art. formal devices like vinyl crackle or the degradation of physical tape exemplify that which is present where there should be nothing—we don’t expect recorded music to incorporate sounds sourced from the act of recording itself. as shown above, the link between hauntology and horror is not one that needs to be artificially drawn up. film, particularly horror, has always been central to an understanding of hauntology. note how, for instance, the hauntological music label ghost box draws samples from british horror films and tv from the late 1960s and early 1970s, from the work of nigel kneale to the unholy trinity.8 the dialogue between hauntological music and film is at its healthiest and more open. the anxieties expressed by hauntological musicians are now being transmitted by horror filmmakers, who are manifesting them through formal devices (as in ben wheatley’s a field in england, which will be expanded on below) or through a thematic exploration of the time-wound, as in the work of the americans aaron moorhead and justin benson, who specialise in science fiction-horror hybrids. as hinted at by its title, the latter’s 2017 film the endless involves a cult whose members are trapped for eternity in their own particular time loops. almost working as a remark on the conflict between self-aware nostalgia and hauntology, the endless presents a scenario where the terror stems precisely from self-awareness. some cult members are well aware of their time-prison and try to escape it through violent death only to reappear at the exact same time and place. in what can be read as a commentary on nostalgia and the futility of metafictional devices to open valuable dialogue with the past, the endless presents a situation where self-awareness never allows the cult members to escape the time-loops; on the contrary, it only sinks them deeper into despair. an additional point in common between hauntology and folk horror is that they are disciplines intrinsically attached to the preservation of an alternative heritage. both are interested in left-field forms of popular (we might even venture to call them “folk”) heritage, as jamie sexton argues: “ghost box and its affiliates can be partly related to this surge of interest in marginal national history, in preserving a form of alternative heritage” (572). while not 8 see sexton: “the wicker man and blood on satan’s claw have both been cited as influential by ghost box (and have also had their soundtracks released by trunk records)” (574). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 87 hegemonic, this heritage is still tightly bound with notions of nationality. at least in its musical manifestations, hauntology has mostly been regarded as a british discipline. the association between hauntology and britain is surely aided by the fact that most hauntology scholars are british (see the aforementioned fisher and reynolds, or more recent academics like katy shaw or adam scovell), a trait shared by the cultural artifacts these writers tend to prioritise. folk horror is one of these prioritised artefacts. again, the recurrent examples are british, whether they come from the past (the unholy trinity, nigel kneale’s tv dramas and films) or from the present (ben wheatley’s kill list and a field in england). fisher argues that hauntology’s britishness is not accidental but consequential of a longing caused by “the expectations raised by a public service broadcasting system and a popular culture that could be challenging and experimental” (18). however, the past few years have seen an increase in the number—and, perhaps more strikingly, in popularity—of american folk horror films. can we build a bridge between the new american iteration of the subgenre and hauntology? do these films engage with their pasts through hauntological devices? v. folk horror revival: hauntological or nostalgic? music is one of the keys to answer this question. robert eggers’s the vvitch (2015) serves as a particularly useful example. eggers’s brief to composer mark korven was to come up with a minimalistic and amelodic score that eschewed all electronics.9 as a result, the film’s soundtrack is comprised of traditional hymns like “alas! and did my savior bleed,”—which initially seem to be grounding the vvitch firmly as a period film—and a number of terrifying and atonal folk ambient pieces. the key word in folk ambient is “folk”: korven’s score bears a number of similarities with electronic ambient music, most notably the omnipresence of drones, but it achieves this through the use of obscure traditional instruments like the nyckelharpa instead of through any digital sources. this generates an overlapping of timelines that destabilises the vvitch’s status as a period film and opens up the time-wound. due to the use of left-field, drone-producing instruments, the score is ultimately more reminiscent of the electronic-laden ambient records of brian eno and grouper than of any folk music made with analogue instruments. the score’s spectral quality is indebted to the eeriness of the music itself as much as it is to the sheer materiality of the instruments used, allowing for the encounter between various temporalities—and, given that the film’s characters are english settlers, geographies—to take place. david church notes in his book on horror in the 2010s that composing the vvitch’s score pushed korven to commission the creation of a new instrument nicknamed “the apprehension engine.” as church points out, the instrument’s sound is more terrifying “because their source seems more obscure, less readily pinned down via common referents in the listener’s 9 see mark korven’s interview with fact magazine: https://www.factmag.com/2016/02/16/streamthewitch-score-mark-koven-interview/ alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 88 mind” (1). the absence of a common referent allows us to describe this sound as spectral. korven’s commissioning of the apprehension engine is a fascinating example of the conversation between material polar opposites opened by hauntology, whereby an analogue instrument is chasing the spectrality of the digital. although the vvitch predates the commissioning of the apprehension engine, its score features the same sort of spectral sounds which this new instrument emits. the vvitch recycles aesthetic settings and plot points from the past: there are innumerable examples of horror films set in the woods, and eggers’s film’s portrayal of a young woman whose christianity is put into question is not particularly innovative for the horror genre either. however, the film’s engagement with the past through the spectral nature of its score rescues it from the nostalgia mode; it is eminently hauntological in its exploration of the time-wound via an unresolved tug-of-war between analogue and digital. ben wheatley’s a field in england, scored by his frequent collaborator jim williams, offers a different approach to the time-wound. what is at work in the score for wheatley’s film is not dissimilar to the hauntological experiments of basinski and the caretaker. the film’s main theme is “baloo my boy,” a popular scottish song from the early modern period. the tune’s first appearance in the film is diegetic, as it is sung by one of the protagonists. as in the vvitch, the introduction of a centuries-old folk song fences a field in england as a period film. however, as the narrative advances and the deserters succumb to the mind-altering effects of the mushrooms they have consumed, the score turns more synth-based and experimental. by the film’s ending, “baloo my boy” appears not sung by a character but as a heavily distorted version that is just reminiscent of the song’s original form. the song’s degradation through electronic means is effectively a way to tear a hole into the film’s historical fabric, opening up the time-wound and shattering the barrier between diegetic and non-diegetic. this should be regarded as a hauntological trope: dis-synchronicity and anachronisms are brought about by formal devices concerned with the materiality of music, mirroring katy shaw’s argument on spectrality and temporality: “the encounter with the spectre marks the point at which multiple temporalities meet and cross” (15). as wheatley and williams explain in an interview in the blu-ray edition of the film, the shift from fairly traditional period music (from “baloo my boy” to the thundering drums as harbinger of war in the film’s opening scene) to psychedelic electronic mirrors the deserters’ changing perception of their physical surroundings once the effects of the mushrooms have finally kicked in. one might even go further and claim that it also mirrors the change of tone that occurs in the film’s last act, where the comedic elements are brushed aside in favour of an engulfing sense of claustrophobic dread. the juxtaposition of traditional folk and electronic music is reminiscent of the hauntological sonic experiments of the ghost box label and others: like julian house and jin jupp note, the artists working for the bbc radio workshop, from which hauntological music sources a series of samples, had “studied medieval music” (sexton 577) and even made an electronic folk album. alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 89 this juxtaposition also plays into the analogue/digital polarity explored in a field in england. the psychedelic last act of the film is completely reliant on visual effects that could only be achieved through digital technology. the blurring of the boundaries between analogue and digital, past and contemporary, heightens the film’s hauntological affect. and, in this case, such blurring is not only restricted to music. in his paper on a field in england, joel mckim mounts a strong argument for the film’s digital anachronism as the main indicator of its unsettling effect. mckim argues that the film’s digital colour grading brings about “a complicated set of overlapping historical temporalities—the civil war setting of the film viewed through the prism of a 1960s television aesthetic created via a contemporary digital technique” (48). as with the score in the vvitch, the time-wound is brought about by formal techniques whose concern with materiality situate the film at a temporal crossroads. wheatley’s exploration of the time-wound digs even deeper than eggers’s as it is not only limited to music. it might also be argued that it reinforces fisher’s argument about hauntology’s inherent britishness. one of the main exponents of the 1960s television aesthetic that mckim refers to is nigel kneale, whose sci-fi and horror work for the bbc in the 1950s and 1960s maintains its cult status in britain (it has often been sampled by british hauntological musicians) but remains largely unexplored elsewhere. so far, this essay’s efforts have been placed on contemporary folk horror films that extend the genre’s long-standing affair with hauntology. that is not the case of the work of ari aster, whose films hereditary and midsommar are among the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed horror titles of recent years. although hereditary bears a folk horror influence, the focus here will be on midsommar, a film that openly engages with the history of the subgenre. again, music is a convenient starting point. the score to midsommar, composed by the electronic artist the haxan cloak, presents a neat distinction between the folk-oriented orchestral pieces (“fire temple,” “maypole”) and the asphyxiating, over-pitched string pieces that, recycling a well-trodden horror trope, are reserved for the most shocking and horrifying scenes. the merger of digital and analogue present in a field in england or the vvitch is nowhere to be found here. the score does include electronic elements, but they are not on an equal footing with its folk numbers, nor is there any amalgamation between the two. unlike wheatley and eggers, aster is not interested in the hauntological exploration of the timewound through music. in fact, it could be argued that he is not interested in exploring the time-wound at all. although midsommar takes place in the present day, its setting in a remote rural commune in sweden suggests both a geographical and temporal dislocation. however, said dislocation is explored only through certain aesthetics features (e.g. the score’s nordic folk influence or the film’s costume design), not through formal devices related to the very materiality of the film as in eggers’s or wheatley’s films. in aster, the barrier between different temporalities and geographies remains firmly in place because there is no attempt to bring it down. alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 90 returning to jameson’s definition of nostalgia as ahistorical revisionism is particularly useful when discussing midsommar in these terms. as previously argued, historical explorations of material conditions are central to past and present folk horror titles. these precarious living conditions, always tightly bound to the land itself, are the driving forces behind the plots of the wicker man, where a sacrifice is needed after a season of failing crops, of the vvitch, in which hunger turns the family against each other, and even in titles set in the present day such as wheatley’s kill list, where the economic recession of the late 2000s forces two former british soldiers to accept a job offered by a shady cult. these material concerns are all but absent in midsommar other than in the form of a passing reference to climate change made by one of the cult leaders (“and what poetry that it’s now the hottest and brightest summer on record”) that is never picked up on again. following jameson, aster’s film could be regarded as nostalgic in that it is not interested in thinking in historical or material terms. due to this refusal, midsommar’s intense climax differs from the one in a field in england. both films make use of similar technical wonders during their drug-fuelled last acts, doing a commendable job of evoking horrific disorientation through dizzy camera work and nightmarish music. the difference is that the formal blurring of temporalities grants wheatley’s film a historical dimension. by presenting these aesthetic components in dialogue with the past, a field in england interrogates notions of decay and historical progress, whereas midsommar’s ending remains impressive merely aesthetically. this contrast brings back to mind fisher’s and reynold’s defence of hauntology against nostalgia. both are representations of backward glances, but hauntology ventures beyond aesthetics and encourages historical and political discussions of art. because of its ahistoricism, midsommar’s relationship to folk horror works mostly as an aesthetic scaffold on which its familiar horrors are built. unlike the folk horrors previously mentioned, aster’s film is not concerned with historical explorations of time and place but with the expression of affect. like ari aster’s 2017 debut hereditary, midsommar wears its scares on its sleeve: the film starts with a shocking image, as the protagonist’s sister kills her parents and commits suicide. it is not so much the deaths themselves that cause the shock but aster’s insistence on showing us the pain they inflict on dani, the protagonist. aster continues folk horror’s long-standing history of incorporating elements from other genres. the expression of grief by female characters is a recurrent trait in his work, which finds a middle ground between folk horror and exploitative, torture porn10 films like hostel or saw. the difference in that, in aster’s case, the torture is not only physical but also emotional. aster’s focus on pain not caused by physical threat but by emotional distress offers a twist on folk horror’s strategy 10 like folk horror, torture porn is another heavily contested subgenre. for an in-depth discussion of torture porn, see steve jones’s book torture porn: popular horror after saw (2013). the term is here to refer to a number of horror films released in the 21st century that are “primarily based around protagonists being imprisoned in confined spaces and subjected to physical and/or psychological suffering.” (jones 13). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 91 of affect through the appearance of diegetic audiences complicit with the horrific events. midsommar presents two of these complicit diegetic audiences. the most obvious one is the swedish dish cult, whose members celebrate the brutal sacrifices taking place during the festival. however, there is also a complicit audience to dani’s grief from the very first scenes, as christian and his friends remain apathetic to her tragedy, if not dismissive. aster’s incorporation of torture porn tropes into folk horror grants his films a sense of reckoning with grief and fear that goes beyond life-threatening bodily agony. like with the vvitch or a field in england, the spectre of familiarity haunts midsommar.11 unlike the two previously mentioned films, however, midsommar only engages with these spectres aesthetically, through the sort of ahistorical aping decried by fredric jameson as “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language” (17). in this sense, midsommar is a fitting example of art born out of the nostalgia mode favoured in late capitalism. whereas eggers’s and wheatley’s films engage with the past through symbiotic dialogue, aster simply stares at it from afar, letting past and present stand as clearly separate entities. although its exploration of grief is novel for folk horror, midsommar can ultimately be seen as folk horror pastiche: it does not engage with its past ghosts through formal conversation but is simply satisfied with wearing their mask. vi. conclusions the contrasting ways in which the folk horror revival films tackle their relationship with their past signals the opening of two diverging paths for folk horror. in the first one, traversed by the vvitch or a field in england, the films engage in symbiotic dialogue with their ghosts through formal devices, linking their concern with temporality to the material fabric that shape them. the second path, best exemplified by midsommar, involves a willing refusal to start a conversation with these ghosts. as has been demonstrated, connecting the folk horror revival to the wider conversation on late capitalist cultural production produces illuminating results on both counts, going beyond making value judgement on the aesthetic merits of these films. we can therefore conclude by stating that, in its myriad ways, the folk horror revival is paradigmatic of current modes of cultural logic. a solid argument has been made for hauntology as an effective theoretical framework to explore the new american folk horror, particularly when placed in opposition to its british counterpart. there are good reasons why hauntology remains mostly a field of study concerned with british films and music, and as previously explained, the magnitude of formal explorations of time and place is greater in the films of ben wheatley than in aster’s, or even eggers’s. however, an effort should be made to free hauntology from its constraining 11 this familiarity is amplified by the film’s paratext, perhaps more tellingly with the casting of william jackson harper as an out-of-place intellectual in what is effectively a reprise of the actor’s role in the popular netflix sitcom the good place (2016-2020). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 92 britishness, as its usefulness as a critical tool to inspect art’s relationship with its past overcomes all geographical bindings. hauntology’s concern with alternative heritage could open the door to an expansion of american folk horror film beyond the current revival, helping to draw up a genealogy of the subgenre that includes texts not previously studied under this light. works cited aldana reyes, xavier. horror film and affect: towards a corporeal model of viewership. routledge, 2016. aster, ari, director. midsommar. a24, 2019 —. hereditary. a24, 2017. basinski, william, musician. the disintegration loops. musex international, 2002-2003 bayer, samuel, director. a nightmare on elm street. new line cinema, 2010 benson, justin, and aaron moorhead, directors. the endless. snowfort pictures, 2017 bowe, miles. “the witch composer on making the most nightmarish horror score you’ll hear this year.” fact, https://www.factmag.com/2016/02/16/stream-the-witch-score-mark-koven-interview/. accessed 3 march 2021. burial, musician. untrue. hyperdub, 2007 church, david. post-horror: art, genre, and cultural elevation. edinburgh university press, 2021. clement, jermaine, and taika waititi. what we do in the shadows. paramount pictures, 2014. craven, wes, director. scream. dimension films, 2016 derrida, jacques. specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. routledge, 2006. duffer, matt, and ross duffer. stranger things. netflix, 2016. eggers, robert, director. the vvitch: a new england folktale. a24, 2015 fisher, mark. the weird and the eerie. repeater books, 2017. —. “what is hauntology?” film quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, 2012, pp. 16–24. —. ghosts of my life: writings on depression, hauntology, and lost futures. zero books, 2014. —. “no future 2012”. k-punk: the collected and unpublished writings of mark fisher. repeater books, 2020. goddard, drew, director. the cabin in the woods. lionsgate, 2011. gordon green, david, director. halloween. blumhouse productions, 2018. alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 93 haggard, piers, director. the blood on satan’s claw. tigon british film productions, 1971. hardy, robin, director. the wicker man. british lion films, 1973 imdb. 2021. the 50 highest grossing movies of the 2010s (worldwide) imdb, https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/. accessed 5 march 2021. jameson, fredric. postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. verso books, 2009. jones, steve. torture porn: popular horror after saw. palgrave macmillan, 2013. klevberg, lars, director. child’s play. orion pictures, 2019. mckim, joel. “the digital anachronisms of ben wheatley's a field in england.” critical quarterly, vol. 58, no. 1, 2016, pp. 46–51. muschietti, andy, director. it. new line cinema. 2017. pirie, david. a heritage of horror: the english gothic cinema 1946-1972. equinox books, 1973. reeves, michael, director. witchfinder general, 1971. reynolds, simon. retromania: pop culture’s addiction to its own past. faber & faber, 2011. scovell, adam. folk horror: hours dreadful and things strange. auteur publishing, leighton, 2017. sexton, jamie. “weird britain in exile: ghost box, hauntology, and alternative heritage.” popular music and society, vol. 35, no. 4, 2012, pp. 561–584. shaw, katy. hauntology: the presence of the past in twenty-first century english literature. palgrave macmillan, 2018. the caretaker, musician. everywhere at the end of time. history always favours the winners, 20162019. wheatley, ben, director. a field in england. rook films limited, 2013. —, and jim williams. a field in england: an interview. rook films limited, 2013. wingard, adam, director. blair witch. lionsgate, 2010. tsm2018.indd torun interna onal studies no. 1 (7) 2014 piotr walewicz*1 orcid: h p://orcid.org/0000-0001-6878-4380 “greening” the critical theory of international relations with the concept of world ecology abstract the article signals the need for a deepened theoretical analysis of environmental issues in international relations studies. it initializes the idea of “greening” the critical theory of international relations with critical concepts from other sciences. thus it proposes the scope of critical theory of ir to be expanded to cover not only the relations between power and capital, but the relations of power-capital-nature. it shows common points between the critical theory of ir and the concepts of world-ecology and the capitalocene by jason w. moore and proposes reforming some founding definitions that the critical theory of ir is based on. this includes re-conceptualizing the critique of capitalism as a way of organizing nature, but also distancing oneself from the cartesian dichotomy of society + nature, which is an obstacle to properly including environmental issues in ir research. keywords: theory of international relations, critical theory, environmental issues, world-ecology, capitalocene 1. introduction the necessity for the discipline of international relations to tackle environmental problems should be incontestable, given the predicted dominant causes of future tensions and conflicts. traditional methods of analysis inherent to international relations research will no longer be able to explain or predict local and global conflicts, while the origins thereof shift from purely economic or political into ecological ones. even though many of the issues in international relations over the past three decades were already predicated upon competion for space, soil and water, climate change will accelerate that process. some predict that if humanity does not * kaziemierz wielki university, bydgoszcz, e-mail: piotr@walewicz.com 2018, no. 1 (11), pp. 125–134 published online january, 2019 doi: h p://dx.doi.org/10.12775/tis.2018.011 p w126 take proper actions, climate wars will become the main driving force for violence around the world (welzer, 2010; busby, 2018). the fact that both political science in general and the discipline of international relations does not address (or if it does, it does so sluggishly) the issue of climate change has already been pointed out by one of its prominent theorists, robert o. keohane (2015). putting aside the possible policy frames proposed, he emphasized how political scientists could help avoid the paths of least resistance, reframe issues of climate change in ways that make political action feasible and find the conditions that let countries generate a constructive political discourse on environmental issues. pointing out the great historical trends of rising inequality, injustice and ignored problems of the international system has traditionally been the goal of the critical theory of international relations. thus it would seem plausible for this specific school of thought to be the best suited to explaining the relation between the ecological crisis, capitalism and the system of nation-states. the article aims to find some way of incorporating the concepts of world-ecology and the capitalocene by jason w. moore into the critical theory of international relations, thus “greening” it and updating it to be able to exert some influence upon the ways of thinking about and researching the biggest threat that humanity has ever faced and its relation to the contemporary international relations. therefore, the research questions are: what is the current state of environmental research in international relations discipline? what are the common points between the critical theory of international relations and the concepts by moore? how can they be merged? 2. environmental issues in international relations research targeted studies (green & hale, 2017) have recently shown that international relation scholars still have little to say about the environmental crisis. it appears that environmental issues are marginalized in international relations research, as fewer than 2% of the articles published in the top disciplinary journals are on environmental subjects even though the scholars themselves claim to recognize the importance of climate change (green & hale, 2017, p. 474). their opinion does not reflect their choice of research subjects and there is a huge discrepancy between what they perceive as important and what they choose to publish. other areas, such as human rights or humanitarian issues are also underrepresented, but not as much. what is also interesting, among those that do publish on environmental issues, there are much more women than in other fields of international relations research. environmental politics are also generally not taught to graduate students in the us, which can safely be extrapolated onto the whole western academia. any “green” theory of international relations rarely makes its way into academic textbooks used by polish students of international relations or political science. for example, there is no mention of it in probably the most popular and certainly very notable textbook by the polish author jacek czaputowicz (2007). another important textbook widely used by polish students, written by jackson and sørensen (2012), has only a small section on how environmental issues are becoming more prevalent on the international forum and are now the third most important issue for world politics. it presents a short and simplified picture “greening” the critical theory of international relations... 127 of the theoretical challenge that the environmental crisis brings into the field, proposing that either the traditional approaches can deal with it by slightly broadening the scope of their research subjects, or the traditional approaches could be shunned completely if one is a revolutionary “eco-radical” (jackson & sørensen, 2012, p. 284). the only major academic textbook on the theories of international relations that describes the green theory (ekologizm in polish) in one of its own chapters, treating it on a par with other paradigms, is the one by scott burchill et al. (2006). this is probably still the only source for international relations students in poland from which the latter can learn about a theoretical framework that can be used in developing a green theory of international relations. it is worth mentioning that post-colonial perspectives on international relations are also missing from academic textbooks available in poland (bógdał-brzezińska, 2012). given the fact that any school of thought directly contesting the legitimacy of western paradigms is marginalized, one may conclude that including environmental issues in international relations research may lead to an unprecedented contestation of the dominant ideas and theories, which is why they are being actively marginalized by their representatives. the green theory of international relations, whenever its existence is even acknowledged, is called a new and yet not fully formed concept. paterson (2005) writes that at its core there lies the rejection of anthropocentric world-view – ecocentrism – and the argument of “limits to growth”. another key plank to green politics are decentralization and “reclaiming the commons”, which have the most significant implications for international relations, according to paterson. he concludes that a green theory of international relations should be regarded as critical rather than problem-solving and is both explanatory and normative, but it usually distances itself from meta-theorizing and reflecting on its own theoretical toolkit. there is no identifiable green methodology, although some suggestions have been made to use the method of critique from traditional critical theory (frankfurt school) and further break down disciplinary boundaries in international relations. patterson points out the similarities between this image of green international relations theory that he constructed with other critical approaches, which include the matter of value distinction, resisting the concentration of power, emancipation and focus on political economy. it is also worth mentioning that environmental issues seem to be marginalized in non-western theoretical reflections on international relations as well. the analysis made by gawrycki, zajączkowski and bógdał-brzezińska (2012) does prove that international relations science is not universal in character and western models are adapted to the cultural and civilizational specificities of other countries, but the major problems of the modern world that are taken into account by non-western scholars are still only political, social or economic ones. along with critical and post-colonial scholarship the non-western thought challenged the confidence in the image of a global international society created via the universalization of european institutions, but a critique of how the whole world participates in the functioning of a system posing a threat to the environment is missing. this runs counter to the knowledge that it will be the non-european and non-north american countries that will bear the brunt of the detrimental effects of climate change (king & harrington, 2018). p w128 3. anthropogenic roots of the ecological crisis to provide some foundation for the stated necessity for international relations to tackle environmental problems, one may first reintroduce the concept of anthropocene. it entered the scientific discourse in 2000, proposed by paul j. crutzen and eugene f. stoermer (2000, p. 17–18) in their short article for the international geosphere-biosphere programme newsletter. crutzen and stoermer used various markers and indexes – such as demographic growth and the growing number of domestic animals, the progress of urbanization, use of fossil fuels, greenhouse gases emission, the scale of landscape transformation, diminishing fresh water sources, plant and animal extinction – to show the scale of anthropogenic changes in all ecosystems. they also pointed out humanity’s ever growing role in those processes and thus proposed the current geological epoch to be named after the anthropos. they later popularized the term by publishing in nature (crutzen, 2002). thus they became the authors of the most popular concept in environmental studies in the 21st century, which rightly entered and stayed in the scientific mainstream, but also somewhat unevenly in the public awareness, bringing along important questions that needed to be answered (moore, 2016, p. 2). the concept of anthropocene was not fully incorporated by academic environmental history textbooks only because of the problem of determining its beginning. crutzen and stoermer proposed the second half of the 18th century as the turning point of domination of anthropogenic factors, because of the first noticeable rise in the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which coincided with the outset of the industrial revolution. however, they also admitted to picking that moment in history arbitrarily and stated their openness to alternative proposals. even though the industrial revolution did indeed bring a new dimension to the relations between man and nature and it is very commonly associated with the beginning of anthropocene, alternative turning points did appear, as crutzen and stoermer had predicted. one of them pointed out the fact that the decimation of the population of americas during the long 16th century, mainly by the pathogens brought by europeans (crosby, 1999, p. 221–238; diamond, 2000, p. 221–222, 243), caused such a big change in the local ecosystems (loughlin et al., 2018) that its effects were global in scope. that is why some researchers opt for the beginning of the 17th century as the start of anthropocene. some even point directly at the year 1610, because geological research shows that the sudden drop in the population of americas caused lower metabolic cost incurred on the environment, which in turn caused natural forests to grow over now uninhabited and not cultivated land, eventually causing a large drop in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (lewis & maslin, 2015). still, the most common choice for marking the anthropocene is the industrial revolution because of the new technologies’ impact on energy consumption, which first led to massive deforestation and later to the growing extraction and burning of coal. the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide was noticeable and unquestionable, but the amount and the diachronic character of changes in the global geological markers make it difficult to point out a single date as the turning point in question (bińczyk, 2018, p. 85–86). anthropocene is sometimes also described as a geological period that has been starting in the last decades. the term used most commonly then is the great acceleration. it appeared in the first decade of this century, associated with the commonly known “hockey stick graphs”, presented in a 2004 report, which showed the correlation between anthropogenic environmental change markers and civilization growth indexes (steffen et al., 2004). the physical “greening” the critical theory of international relations... 129 data seems so undeniable that associating the great acceleration with the beginning of the antrhopocene is beyond dispute for many scholars (bińczyk, 2018, p. 86–93). what is important for this analysis is that the concept of anthropocene is not political in nature. it only tries to objectively show the current state of the earth’s ecosystem and the amount of human intervention, but it completely abstracts from the issue of the values lying at the bottom of this type of human activity. only after the anthropocene had begun to be incorporated by social scientists into their research, different systems of values (i.e. neoliberalism, communism, christianity etc.) were shown to have been closely tied to the human propensity for radical environment transformation. this allowed for the critique of the sociocentric paradigms and a constructive critique of the modern neoliberal model and its connection to the anthropocene and the current ecological crisis (connoly & macdonald, 2015). 4. the concept of capitalocene and the political question it brings moore claims the concept of anthropocene shows an overly monolithic image of humanity. he appreciates the argument that it is indeed anthropos that is responsible for most of the modern environment transformation and degradation, but calls it insufficient. he points directly at the inadequacy of calling the ecological crisis anthropogenic. for him it is “an old capitalist trick playing out through environmentalist discourse: take a problem created by the 1 percent, then tell the 99 percent it’s their fault” (moore, 2017b, p. 195). he emphasizes that the main factor of modern environmental change is “capitalogenic” and not anthropogenic. most notably, he points at the ontological mistake of treating humanity and nature as different categories. he is critical about separating parallel issues like environmental and social justice, ecological and economic imperialism, exploitation of nature and exploitation of labor, ecological crisis and economic crisis etc. this is because moore interprets capitalism not as a construct consisting of a sum of its social and environmental parts, but as a way of organizing nature. this, combined with his marxist inspirations, gave name to the concept of capitalocene (moore, 2015). he also proposed the category of world-ecology, which is an extensions of wallerstein’s (2007) world-economy. world-ecology, as moore says, is a paradigm that “is not only intellectually, but politically, necessary if we are to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century” (moore, 2015, p. 2–3). moreover, moore thinks it is necessary do leave behind the concept of interaction between humanity and nature in order to introduce a new dialectical category of the two worlds’ mutual and interdependent interaction as humanity-in-nature and/or nature-in-humanity (moore, 2015, p. 31–88). to give an example of how the socio-economic is interconnected with the environmental he writes about how it is wrong to differently and separately describe the farmers’ relation to their land and the financial operations in the global markets, because wall street is as dependent on the environment as agriculture is. almost all of the financial operations undertaken there are somehow connected to the ecological web on unprecedented scale (moore, 2017a, p. 20). capitalism is, as moore says, a system that develops itself through nature, not parallel to nature (moore, 2017c). only to dissociate oneself from the cartesian dualism of nature and society and to regards at the current crisis, as well as world history, as a multilayered process of environment transformation, power and capital p w130 creation and making of ideas can be truly fruitful. this is why moore criticizes the re-reading of marx made by john bellamy foster (2000) for still following the duality of “nature and society” and making the environment just another analytical object for marxists (moore, 2017c). the debate between moore and foster is ongoing, with the latter defending his own version of marxian ecological critique and accusing the former of a simplistic view of the distinction between dualism and monism and “turning marx on his head” (angus, 2016). despite obvious differences in the ways of reading marx, the main critique of moore’s work from eco-marxists and ecosocialists seems to be ideological in nature – for them moore is not an open proponent of revolution and thus is apologetic of capitalism. he does, however, stress the importance of postcolonial and feminist paradigms, which are essential to his own critique of capitalism, as they both describe the power and capital’s relation to cheap natures and cheap labor. as already shown, dating the beginning of the anthropocene is open to discussion. however, moore has already settled the turning point in history that marks the beginning of the capitalocene. his chronology runs counter to the commonly and often blindly picked turning points. he finds that environmentalists choose the moment of the appearance of modern machines, especially the steam engine. marxists choose the moment of the appearance of the proper class structure. economists choose the moment of the birth of new types of markets and institutional mechanisms that fuel smodern economies. moore admits that all of those were important, but they overshadow a much more important phenomenon, which was the appearance of a new way of organizing nature and shaping the environment in the long sixteenth century (moore, 2016, p. 97). moreover, it is the processes that shaped the birth of capitalism, related to the geographical discoveries and colonization, consisting of newly crystalized techniques of transforming space according to human needs, that explain the current patterns of relations between power, capital and nature (moore, 2017d). moore points at the colonization of madeira in the middle of the 15th century and sees the new kind of interaction between power, capital and nature that took place there. the spanish capital entered a specific new relation with monoculture crops, deforestation, slavery and imperialism. the new treatment of nature by man established the direction of development that still persists today. moore even claims that the columbian project which started in 1492 did not end, but rather, that is still remains operative. the long 16th century brought fundamental changes to market logic, including the imperative of the accumulation of capital and labor, but also the capitalization of nature and a new level of transforming land and labor. by tracking those processes moore came up with an internal periodization of the capitalocene, based on the dominant power centers or ideologies. it includes: 1) a germanic-iberian cycle (c. 1451–1648); 2) a dutch-led cycle (c. 1560s–1740s); 3) a british-led cycle, c. 1680s–1910s); 4) an american-led cycle (c. 1870s–1980s); 5) a neoliberal cycle that commenced in the 1970s and is still ongoing (moore, 2015, p. 119–120). each of these cycles was founded on key processes of acquiring new cheap natures (i.e. forests), including cheap energy (i.e timber, coal, oil) and cheap food (i.e. polish grains in the 17th century), with cheap labor (i.e. slavery or desperate english factory workers from the industrialization era). ewa bińczyk (2018, p. 158) insightfully summarizes moore’s thought, writing that “the contemporary phenomena of global warming and the financialization of the economy are neither purely social nor purely environmental processes […] we are faced with a dialectical combination of accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power and the processes of nature “greening” the critical theory of international relations... 131 reproduction”. even though the term “capitalocene” does not convince geologists and researchers from other natural sciences, its accuracy and its author’s rhetorical skill cannot be denied (bińczyk, 2018, p. 100). despite being treated with skepticism by natural sciences, it seems to be at least a useful supplement to – or at most the basis of – the critical view of the world, which should underlie any green theory of international relations. 5. the natural alliance between the critical theory of international relations and the concept of world ecology as per green and hale (2017), large areas of environmental problems remain untouched by international relations theorists. moreover, traditional approaches focusing on multilateral cooperation fail to solve complex issues of systemic nature, such as the ecological crisis. what is important though is that this complexity is an ideal laboratory for international relations scholars to study trends and developments, while being a fertile ground for new theoretical approaches. among those, some might unite the “greened” critical theory of international relations with the concepts of jason w. moore. what is important is that the whole concept of “greening” international relations theory is founded on the notion of a global ecology, with this notion being believed to be endowed with some explanatory power (paterson, 2005, p. 238). this makes the category of world-ecology by moore automatically craving for constructing a broader theoretical framework for analyzing international relations through a green scope. moreover, the central tenet of green thought is ecocentrism, which is opposed to anthropocentrism; and therefore the former tallies well with moore’s rejection of the “society and nature” dualism. the problem is that ecocentrism is in itself politically indeterminate, but the society-in-nature and nature-in-society categories combined with moore’s interpretation of capitalism make this key concept of green international relations theory politically determinate. by utilizing moore’s critique of capitalism, any green theory might get along much better with both neo-marxist theories and critical theory of international relations by coming up with possible transformations of forms of political community and the economic system. the idea that a theory is critical if it calls for emancipation, which has been present since marx, meshes well with the new idea that nature herself needs emancipation from the oppressive forces of capitalism and its discourses. however, in order to be “greened”, critical theory itself should have its definition updated to include the natural environment and distance itself from the nature vs society dualism. out of all political theories, critical theory seems to be the one that could achieve this goal most easily. according to horkheimer, critical theory should be explanatory, practical and normative, so that it should explain the faults of the contemporary social reality, point out the actors of change, provide clear frame of critique and knowledge about possible social transformation (walentowicz, 2001). now, simply by understanding social as ecological, or better yet world-ecological, by following moore’s society-in-nature and nature-in-society notions, it is perfectly viable for critical theory to be the scientific force of change of the current international order in relation to the ecological crisis. p w132 the above intuition is further strengthened by a reevaluation of robert cox’s understanding of a critical theory of international relations, pertaining to the critique of hegemonic discourses and the opinion that traditional paradigms – (neo)realism and (neo)liberalism – are unable to solve the most important problems in world politics. this critical theory of international relations is based on an analysis of the way in which the current world-order was established, how the dominant institutions and norms were created. most importantly, it is not a goal in itself, but a waypoint to better understanding of those mechanisms in order to carry out the emancipatory project for a better and more just world (dyduch et al., 2006, p. 62–64). there seems to be no obstacles in extending this historical analysis onto environmental issues, simply by drawing from moore’s history of the capitalocene. the tasks seems easy enough especially considering the fact that cox was one of the very few scholars of the 80s and 90s that was (impressively) aware of the threats to the biosphere that stemmed from globalizing capitalism and its fallout and emphasized the need for ecological sustainability. this understanding came long before any other international relations theorists looked at the issue of sustainability and its necessity for human well-being (falk, 2016). combined with moore’s acknowledgment of the inequalities and violence of race, class and gender, all of the above makes his theories fit together with those of all types of critical theorists of international relations, including neo-marxist, post-colonial and feminist researchers. they all share a commitment to challenging the legitimacy of the current world order and the acceptability of its relations of dominance and practices of power. critical theories find and explain the ways in which various modes of power are involved in the production of world order and are still as relevant as ever (duvall & varadarajan, 2003), but they usually ignore or simplify the relation with the environment. accepting the category of capital-power-nature as the basic tool of viewing those modes of power extrapolates the theory’s critical ability onto the whole world-ecology. 6. conclusion theories of international relations have long been under criticism. they are perceived as attempts to create reality by overinterpretting facts, manipulating history and juggling of ideas (mikiewicz, 2006, p. 172). giving environmental politics more space and weight in the discipline of international relations would bring numerous benefits. the discipline itself would be enriched and avoid the slowly approaching stagnation. the matters of global environmental politics would also test the current paradigms in ways that they have never been tested yet. most of all, it would be good for policy, giving policy makers new insights that come from scientific sources that they trust (green & hale, 2017). putting environmental issues on the forefront might benefit the critical theory of international relations even more. the traditional paradigms seem to be unable to tackle the great systemic ecological crises and are too rigid to extend their methodological tools to cover those, while still focusing on traditional international relations concepts like security or growth. given the findings of green and hale, environmental issues are marginalized by the discipline itself, but it is not clear whether they are treated the same way by scholars representing different paradigms. the fact that female researchers tend to focus on environmental problems more than men might suggest that critical scholars may also be more interested in those, but maybe lack the necessary tools. the concepts of world-ecology and the “greening” the critical theory of international relations... 133 capitalocene coined by jason w. moore could become those tools by re-conceptualizing the relations between power, capital and nature and the way they are used in international relations research. they could also re-conceptualize the critique of capitalism after rephrasing its definition to include organizing nature, and by stretching the notions of nature-in-society and society-in-nature, including the system of states and the way it projects itself onto the environment. this seems a good way for critical theory to avoid getting trapped by the discourse that it is attempting to deconstruct, which is based on the damaging dichotomy of society vs nature. after all, no human organization of any kind, including the main actors of international relations like states or transnational corporations, can be adequately understood when abstracted from 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(2010). wojny klimatyczne. za co będziemy zabijać w xxi wieku? warszawa: wydawnictwo krytyki politycznej. key: cord-0061026-kiaune4w authors: mclewis, channel c. title: the limits of choice: a black feminist critique of college “choice” theories and research date: 2021-03-12 journal: higher education: handbook of theory and research doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-44007-7_6 sha: dec0679a62dfd91221c5884efeb9667d5d8a5462 doc_id: 61026 cord_uid: kiaune4w research on the college decision-making process is extensive. however, fewer approaches have employed a critical lens to explore how power and its relation to students, schools, and higher education institutions shape students’ college pathways and trajectories. in this current chapter, black feminist thought (collins, social problems, 33(6):s14–s32, 1986; collins, black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, routledge, 2002) is employed to examine how intersecting systems of oppression (i.e., institutionalized racism, sexism, capitalism, etc.) and power shape the college “choice” process. i extend on previous literature on educational inequities to consider the structural forces that constrain educational opportunities. in particular, through the standpoint of black women and girls, i rely on constructs such as the matrix of domination and controlling images to highlight the limits of college “choice.” the aim is to the examine the various ways “choice” is constrained for black women and girls, in order to develop transformative mechanisms to improve access to adequate education, increase college participation, and enhance life opportunities. findings include how narrow depictions of black women and girls and the trope of the advantaged black woman in education stifle educational opportunity. increasing the proportion of completed degrees is a national priority for the united states to become the leader in global educational attainment (college board 2008) . thus, recent higher education inquiries and political agendas have shifted toward college completion, especially for low-income and/or black and brown students (gándara and hearn 2019) . although degree attainment is a pressing concern, student pathways first and foremost begin at the decision to pursue higher education. though more black students are graduating from high schools than in previous years, prevailing neoliberal logics and institutionalized forms of oppression that contradict equity and inclusion stifle their enrollment into higher education institutions. for example, among 18-to 24-year-olds, 93.8% of black students, and 94.8% of white students completed high school (mcfarland et al. 2019) . however, 70% of white high school students enrolled immediately into college, compared to 62% of black students (approximately the same rate nearly 20 years ago) (hussar et al. 2020) . situating college access within the context of neoliberalism and antiblackness exposes the significant challenges to increase black students' college entry and degree attainment. others have begun to point out that "little attention has been paid to applying critical theoretical models of power itself to understanding higher education" (pusser 2015, p. 61) . with a few exceptions, college access research has not typically considered the power dimensions that are embedded in institutional practices and that drive policies harmful to black progress. germinal to this chapter is how systemic forms of oppression and the possession of power shape student pathways, and in particular, the college decision-making process. the notion of access to and through college holds divergent and competing meanings for different stakeholders. on the one hand, there are efforts to enhance college access. for example, the goals of the college completion agenda include improving college counseling, aligning k-12 learning objectives with college admissions standards, and simplifying admissions and financial aid processes (college board 2008) . on the other, a commitment to broaden college access is not exercised by all institutions and, instead, is disproportionately relegated to community colleges, historically black colleges and universities (hbcus), tribal colleges and universities (tcus), other minority-serving institutions (e.g., hispanic-serving institutions), and regional comprehensive universities (baber et al. 2019; elliott et al. 2019; national academy of sciences, engineering, and mathematics 2018; orphan 2018) . the reduction of stateallocated funds and the rise of the neoliberal university promote institutions to invest in their own sustainability, which threatens higher education's commitment to public service (orphan 2018; slaughter and rhoades 2004) . within this market-driven climate, college rankings, institutional performance, and reputation have become lucrative currencies (mcdonough et al. 1998; monks and ehrenberg 1999; o'meara 2007) . some colleges and universities are striving toward "the pursuit of prestige within the academic hierarchy" (o'meara 2007, p. 122 ) by altering their purposes and making presumptions about student achievement and outcomes to inform their admission decisions (dougherty and hong 2005; orphan 2018 ). for example, institutions "game the system" (dougherty and reddy 2011, p. 38 ) by ratcheting up admission standards and rejecting competitive candidates to appear more selective (espeland and sauder 2007) . restricting college entry indicates how college admissions are a political and economic decision that impacts students' college destinations. the institution's fiscal dependency on student enrollment, as well as weeding out students in admissions of those judged unlikely to complete (however determined), produces constraints toward adequately addressing inequitable college access. further, policies that emphasize the recruitment of students who can pay out-of-state tuition dollars adversely impact not only the admission of in-state students, but also the admission of low-income and/or students of color (jaquette et al. 2016 ). however, restrictive pathways into college also reflect racial ideologies and racist institutional practices driven by attitudes about communities of color, particularly black students. for example, recent research mapping of university recruitment schedules on in-state and out-of-state geographic regions has indicated that high schools in key metropolitan areas where black and latinx communities are located receive the least campus visits, regardless of income level (salazar 2019) . thus, institutional activity is driven by both neoliberal trends as well as racial ideologies that are longstanding and continuously emergent. the struggle for adequate educational opportunities for black students continues to be met with the breach of the social contract, which in theory guarantees basic human rights (i.e., life), while upholding a racial contract that preordains and maintains white political and economic domination over racially minoritized groups (dancy et al. 2018; mills 1997) . though affirmative action in higher education was initially designed to redress racial disparities in educational attainment, enrollment rates into public 4-year institutions for black college students, particularly selective public institutions, continue to be relatively low (allen et al. 2018; espinosa et al. 2019; harper and simmons 2019; nichols and schack 2019) . although the number of black undergraduates is increasing, black college students are concentrated in community colleges and disproportionately attend for-profit institutions, with the proportion of black undergraduate students at for-profit institutions at 16% (espinosa et al. 2019) . the racial disparities in higher education are driven by the perpetuation of antiblack racism (allen et al. 2018; dancy et al. 2018) , which is exercised via not recognizing black students' forms of capital, counselors' and teachers' low expectations of black students, the false racial neutrality of college admission policies, and persistent attempts to dismantle affirmative action (harper et al. 2009; powell and coles 2020; yosso et al. 2004 ). these structural barriers make it difficult to improve black students' college entry, yet reflect the racial and racist ideologies perpetuated by institutions. how college and universities convey their meanings about race and racism are linked to what some scholars describe as an organizational habitus (byrd 2017; carter 2012; mcdonough 1997 ) that forms expectations and constrains aspirations regarding college opportunities. the notion that colleges and universities have an organizational racial habitus (byrd 2017 ) is pertinent to the study of college "choice." racial ideologies are "the racially-based frameworks used by actors to explain and justify (dominant race) or challenge (subordinate race or races) the racial status quo" (bonilla-silva 2003, p. 65) . colleges and universities are racialized organizations (ray 2019 ) that perpetuate their views of race through their organizational racial habitus (byrd 2017) . byrd (2017) contends higher education institutions have a "particular set of cultural dispositions and accepted patterns of interactions," which corresponds with how colleges prescribe "institutional fit" (p. 152). with the perspective that college decisions are an exchange between prospective students and higher education institutions (byrd 2017; hughes et al. 2019) , further inquiry is needed on the meaning-making process that occurs among marginalized students and communities in making college decisions. scholarship has demonstrated how ideologies impact how higher education institutions approach the college "choice" process (byrd 2017) ; however, less is known on how racism and its intersection with other forms of oppression frame students' college decision-making processes. while the habitus of students and their families contributes to decision-making, the present chapter expounds on how the intersection of systems of oppression can be an influential factor that shapes college pathways. this research underscores education as a site that reflects the racist and patriarchal ideological paradigms that marginalize black women, who also are seriously understudied in higher education. moreover, the challenges that shape black women's educational trajectories are often minimized in education research inquiry (muhammad and dixson 2008; patton et al. 2016) . black girls and undergraduate women are marginalized in education research, policies, and initiatives. research on women is primarily focused on white women, and research on the experiences of black people is usually focused on black men (hull et al. 1982; patton and croom 2017; smith and stewart 1983; winkle-wagner 2015) . further, college access and success initiatives like "my brother's keeper" and black male institutes on college campuses exclusively concentrate on addressing the racial disparities in educational attainment for black men (butler 2013; neal-jackson 2018) . however, there are far fewer similar programs for black women. the lack of a specific focus on black women's educational experiences obscures the understanding of their unique challenges and perpetuates divisive narratives that further marginalize black women from receiving institutional support toward college-going. within dominant discourses about academic success and educational attainment, black women are represented as magical because of our 1 ability to academically achieve despite the odds we encounter ). this portrait is divisive. as contended by lori patton davis and natasha croom (patton and croom 2017) , "the failure to account for racism/white supremacy and gender/patriarchy when considering black collegiate women's experiences is nonsensical at least and absurd at best" (p. 2). i contend that despite considerable empirical data and factual evidence that illustrates how black women are subjugated in different societal arenas (crenshaw 1988) , the negligence to include black undergraduate women in higher education literature stems from a broader and retold pathological mythology involving controlling images such as the black matriarch (moynihan 1965) , welfare queen (roberts 1999) , and superwoman (wallace 2015), which are utilized to dehumanize and justify the oppression of black women and girls (collins 2002) . i put forth that the trope of the advantaged black women is used to evade addressing how intersecting systems of oppression affect black women's educational experiences and to justify educational inequities for black students. further, "fantasies of academic success and #blackgirlmagic" (patton and croom 2017) do not reflect all the ways black women and girls are seen in education. black girls are also disciplined and pushed out of the educational pipeline (morris 2016) , which impacts their college "choice" processes. as researchers contextualize black women's educational pathways, it is imperative to examine the various ways systems of oppression shape college access. in postsecondary education, black women are disproportionately concentrated at 2-year and for-profit institutions (iloh and toldson 2013) , a trend that could be related to findings that black high school girls are overrepresented in vocational curricular tracks (muhammad and dixson 2008) . however, current analytical frameworks to guide scholarship on college "choice" do not fully account for a range of structural factors that distinctively affect black women's process of choosing colleges, such as the reasons behind the limited availability of outreach and mentoring 1 throughout this chapter, i interchangeably use "our" and "we" for black women for the reasons articulated by patricia hill collins. i share her view of "inserting myself in the text" in which the "both/and [researcher and lived experiences as a black woman] conceptual stance of black feminist thought allowed me to be both objective and subjective" (collins 2002, ix) . i "take up grappling with positionality not as fixed and located in a physical space where research occurs, but rather, as it travels with us, within, and across social and geographic locations and communities" (roegman et al. 2016, p. 47). programs tailored to black girls (butler 2013; hardaway et al. 2019; neal-jackson 2018) , the pervasive misconceptions surrounding black girls' talents and capabilities (collins et al. 2020; evans-winters 2011; ford et al. 2018; watson 2016) , and excessive disciplinary rates in the k-12 system (crenshaw et al. 2015a; hines-datiri and carter andrews 2017; morris 2016) . clearly, black women's college "choice" deserves more empirical inquiry in ways that take into account the intersections between racialized and patriarchal power structures. traditional frameworks that address college "choice" center high school students and depict the college decision-making process as a linear sequence of events (hossler and gallagher 1987; hossler et al. 1999) . new approaches to college-going literature have pivoted to more inclusive lenses to examine the diversity of students and the variation of their pathways and trajectories (acevedo-gil 2017; gildersleeve 2010; iloh 2018). for example, though many college "choice" theories focus on students graduating from high school, in fact, 32.7% of black undergraduates are over the age of 30 (espinosa et al. 2019) . newer approaches to college "choice" inquiry that recognize the recent shifts in student demographics and students' multifaceted identities, the processes of how students learn about college, and students' mobility patterns or entry in and out of many colleges (acevedo-gil 2017; gildersleeve 2010; iloh 2018), are better positioned to address the holistic factors affecting these students' postsecondary pathways. while each of these characteristics in college "choice" merits significant consideration, all are affected by larger social forces such as systemic racism, sexism, capitalism, and other forms of domination. as perspectives on college-going broaden, black feminist theory is suited to grapple with how racism intersects with capitalism, sexism, and other forms of domination, which are perpetuated by various systems of oppression. in examining the role of forms of domination in the college "choice" process, it is imperative to interrogate the meaning and connotation of the word "choice." as black feminist education scholar cynthia dillard (2006) asserts, language is politically and culturally constructed, and "the very language we use to define and describe a phenomena must possess instrumentality" (p. 3). therefore, throughout this chapter, i purposely use the terms college-going or "choice" instead of choice, to denote the "complicating conditions" (cox 2016, p. 10 ) that have historically and perpetually troubled minoritized students' postsecondary aspirations and plans, including those of black women. in this piece, i argue that the application of black feminist scholarship from the fields of black and africana studies, sociology, law, and gender studies can enhance inquiry about the college "choice," particularly of minoritized students. in their critique of sociology as a discipline, patricia hill collins (1986) described how "black women's outsider within status might generate a distinctive standpoint vis-avis existing sociological paradigms" and its benefits for social science research (p. s16). living within the margins, black women are granted a way of seeing reality, a standpoint that garners an outlook about the social world. collins (1986) contended that by placing black women "into the center of analysis may reveal aspects of reality obscured by more orthodox approaches" (p. s15). this approach can be applied to research in the field of higher education. black women and girls' perspectives and lived experiences provide mechanisms to perceive a reality that is typically obscured in traditional modes of higher education research. these perspectives, in particular, can reveal the intersections of systems of oppression that limit opportunity structures for not only black women, but for historically marginalized students in general. specifically, i contend that grounding conceptual and analytical frameworks from the standpoint of black feminist theory (collins 1986 (collins , 2002 can illuminate aspects of the college-going process that are obscured in privileged conceptions of "choice" that discount multiple and interlocking dimensions of oppression and power. this premise is fruitful for higher education because it not only positions black intellectual women as producers of knowledge, but also invites consideration on how insights from black feminist theory challenge and inform inquiry about college "choice." for example, how might understanding the college-going experiences of black girls and undergraduate women illuminate what we know and do not know about the social construction of college opportunities in general? in this chapter, i first review traditional theories of college "choice" and highlight aspects of college "choice" models that do not fully capture black women's education trajectories. then i provide an abbreviated overview of the history of black college access to illustrate the linkages between historical, material, and social conditions. next, i conduct an overview of theoretical and empirical research on black student's college decision-making processes. subsequently, i provide recommendations on how the application of black feminist thought (bft) can expand the understanding of students' college-going processes. i conclude by proposing that new research on students' college pathways and trajectories must continue to evaluate how power structures and the intersection of systems of oppression shape the higher education context and the experiences of students. in reviewing the literature, i follow black feminist scholar jennifer nash's (2019) spirit of critique, in that i envision this review of college-going frameworks as a "loving practice" (p. 58) to invite readers to consider and even reimagine perspectives of college-going that better examine power relationships between individual behaviors, institutions, and social structures. focusing on these multiple levels, and how power is enacted within and between them to expand or limit college opportunity structures, expands possibilities for scholars to influence research and practice in a transformative way that advances social justice. theoretical perspectives in college-going and college "choice" research as early as the 1920s, scholars in the united states became interested in how students determine what college to attend and the factors that shape students' decision-making processes (comfort 1925) . since the 1990s, the body of research on college "choice" has grown, advanced by scholars like mcdonough (1997) , who examined how socioeconomic status interacts with school, family, and community contexts to shape college decisions. college "choice" theories and models are used to describe the influences and processes that shape college matriculation decisions. while college "choice" has traditionally been restricted to frame the steps toward fulfilling one's higher education aspirations (hossler and gallagher 1987) , other scholars like perna (2006) have expanded the construct of college "choice" to include the process of "determining educational and occupational aspirations, which institutions to consider, whether to attend college, and which college to attend" (p. 126). the latter links the college decision-making process to college access in which the decision not to pursue higher education is recognized as an aspect of the college "choice" process (perna 2006) . within the literature, the underlying assumption of college "choice" theory is that students (and their families and communities) have the autonomy to pursue higher education, and moreover, the "choice" to decide which institution to attend. though a postsecondary institution must accept a college applicant before that applicant enrolls (a process that hughes et al. (2019) describe as "institutions choosing students"), the narrative of equal opportunity nonetheless portrays students as having full agency to apply (byrd 2017) . while scholars problematize the notion that all individuals, regardless of their backgrounds, have equal postsecondary opportunities, literature has treated "college choice" and "college access" as two different, though related, areas of study. gildersleeve (2010) describes how the field differentiates these areas of study in which college access research is framed as a "macro-level orientation that views the problem of educational opportunity as primarily structural" (p. 12), whereas college "choice" "addresses the micro-level processes of individual decision making" (p. 13). hughes et al. (2019) operationalize college access and college "choice" in which the term "access" conveys the strong influence of structural forces on patterns of collegegoing. that is, it suggests that variations in the availability of, and student participation in, educational opportunities predict variations in outcomes. conversely, the term "choice" focuses on individual determinants of college-going outcomes. using a choice framing, it is possible to understand how students with functionally the same educational opportunities arrive at disparate outcomes as a result of their own preferences as well as messages communicated by significant others of influence (e.g., parents, siblings, friends, teachers, guidance counselors, and coaches). studies of choice do not typically focus on how these patterns of disparate outcomes may reflect broader structural inequities (p. 416). scholars have contended that "the issues of college access complicate the study of college choice" (bergerson 2009, p. 2 ). yet, the framing of college access tends to focus on the role of social structures in affecting college opportunities, whereas college "choice" research focuses on how individuals and their behaviors shape college pathways. one of the major limitations of the "college choice" premise is that it minimizes how social structures and processes influence individuals' behaviors. yet, social structures not only dictate what "choices" are available, and to whom, but influence student perceptions about various pathways and their "choices." college decisions entail a meaning-making process in which there is a reflexive interaction between individuals and their social positions with the hierarchical organization of institutions in society. in this section, i review the evolution of college "choice" scholarship with a focus on traditional and emergent theoretical perspectives that have been used to study college opportunity. by reviewing key frameworks, their scholarly assumptions, strengths, and limitations, this section engages with two questions: (1) how do higher education scholars conceptualize and discuss college choice? and (2) in what ways are social categories (e.g., race and gender) and social structures addressed in the theorizing and development of conceptual models related to college choice? scholars have created models to systematically capture the complexity of the college "choice" process and to describe students' transitions into colleges (chapman 1981; hossler and gallagher 1987; iloh 2018; litten 1982; perna 2006) . these researchers have explored the multiple dimensions of the college-going process, including individual, organizational, and ecological influences through various approaches such as economic, psychological, sociological, and integrated approaches. reviews of the extensive body of college "choice" literature have pointed to the need to better address the inequalities and stratification in college access and "choice" research, policies, and practices (bergerson 2009; perna 2006) . for the purposes of this chapter, my focus is on the evolution of approaches to examine college decisionmaking for minoritized students and implicates how these perspectives address the issue of structural barriers in college access and "choice." combining both economic and sociological approaches, hossler and gallagher (1987) proposed a model to simplify the complexity of the college decision-making process. through use of primarily a student perspective, the three-stage model depicts the college "choice" process as a sequence on how a "student develops a predisposition to attend college, conducts a search for information about the college, and makes a choice that leads them to enroll at a particular institution" (hossler and gallagher 1987, p. 230) . the three-stage model captures the developmental process of college "choice," in particular, how "students move toward an increased understanding of their educational options as they seek a postsecondary educational experience" (hossler and gallagher 1987, p. 208) . it underscores how students' interactions with individual and organizational factors produce student outcomes at each stage of the college "choice" process, which culminates in students choosing a college to attend (hossler and gallagher 1987) . individual factors include student characteristics, significant others, educational activities, educational aspirations and values, and college search activities. germane to race and gender, the authors contend background characteristics are correlated with the predisposition stage and throughout the decision-making process. organizational factors encompass school characteristics, college recruitment, and college and universities' courtship activities. the model was employed in hossler et al. (1999) study that centered on achievement of educational aspirations. thus, the model focused on the individual level with attention to the role of parents, peers, and schools as contributors to students' information processing. they argued that "students' searches help them determine what characteristics they need and which colleges offer them" (p. 9). however, this approach is limited in that it misses the role of several social and environmental factors that include context (e.g., state policies on race and gender neutrality, longstanding effects of segregated higher education) and power differentials, and a white and upper middle-class assumption that all students have an equal opportunity to choose a college. shifting from hossler and gallagher's (1987) emphasis on individual student "choice" at various stages of process, mcdonough (1997) adopted a sociological approach, employing sociologist pierre bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus to examine how social class status and schools shaped high school students' college decision-making processes. mcdonough (1997) defined cultural capital as "the property that middle class and upper class families transmit...as a means of maintaining class status and privilege across generations" (p. 8). for mcdonough (1997), a college education is a symbolic good that is for "using, manipulating, and investing it for socially valued and difficult-to-secure purposes and resources" (p. 9). in a qualitative study conducted with white high school women from higher and lower socioeconomic status levels, and their parents, friends, and counselors, mcdonough (1997) found that the social class and context of families and schools contributed to patterns of and opportunities in college-going behavior. for example, high socioeconomic status parents used their cultural capital as a resource for their white daughters' college preparation and admission into college. their participation was further supplemented by school actors. other parents from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds, however, were not as involved in examining college options, often leaving the college decision-making process more up to their child and/or school personnel. such cases typically resulted in the child attending a less selective postsecondary institution, even if they were academically qualified for a more selective one. while the concept of cultural capital has been applied in diverse ways in education research, what is clear from emerging research on educational opportunity is that the forms of capital or wealth that marginalized students possess are often not valued in dominant spaces that are white, cisgender, and upper-class (bourdieu 1973; lareau and weininger 2003; rios-aguilar et al. 2011; sablan and tierney 2014; tichavakunda 2019; yosso 2005) . unchallenged, the devaluing of minoritized students forms of capital reproduces inequities, particularly in schools. mcdonough (1997) demonstrates how cultural capital contributes to the reproduction of social inequality in college access. in this instance, cultural capital is a resource for advantaged groups to maximize their privileged social position. in addition to examining the role of cultural capital, mcdonough (1997) relied on the notion of personal schemas to describe how students filtered their social worlds and educational opportunities, and on the extension of bourdieu's concept of individual habitus to understanding how a high school's organizational culture, or habitus, could enhance or constrain students' sensemaking of college opportunities. this approach contributed to the body of research on the role of both individual and organizational habitus in shaping college trajectories. in comparison to cultural capital, habitus is less applied in general education research (gaddis 2013) but is more often applied in college-going research (acevedo-gil 2017; griffin et al. 2012; horvat 1997; mcdonough 1997; nora 2004; núñez and bowers 2011; paulsen and st. john 2002; perna 2006; squire and mobley 2015; wells and lynch 2012) . bourdieu (1984) referred to habitus as a "structuring structure" and a "structured structure" (p. 170). habitus is the "common set of subjective perceptions held by all members of the same group or class that shapes an individual's expectations, attitudes, and aspirations" (mcdonough 1997, p. 9 ). in other words, "habitus is a result of the social conditions and related practices and interactions of everyday life that shape a person's perceptions of their location and relationship to others around them, and ultimately provides 'reason' for their actions while navigating the social world" (byrd 2017, p. 148) . put simply, habitus is a set of shared dispositions that are ingrained and derived from one's environment and social locations. some scholars extend the concept of habitus from a familial and communal dimension to an organizational level to argue social institutions have their own set of cultural practices and dispositions (byrd 2017; mcdonough 1997) . the organizational habitus of high schools, their contexts and cultures, shape whether and where students pursue higher education. on one hand, schools are a central hub for students to get to know more information about their college options. on the other hand, however, these institutions are "the mediator of collective social class consciousness" (mcdonough 1997, p. 10) . based on their organizational habitus, schools transmit and translate "college knowledge" (mcdonough et al. 1998 ) that is tailored to reflect the social positions of the majority of the students and families that they serve. the concept of habitus has provided a lens to make sense of the interplay between social contexts and college destinations. yet, how larger power structures affect social contexts, and the associated development of organizational and individual habitus that enhance or constrain individual student college "choices," is less specified and examined in the literature. that is, while many studies of how students' individual habitus affect college "choice" have been undertaken, far fewer have examined how students' habitus are situated within institutions or a field (horvat 1997; mcdonough 1997) that is historically designed to privilege opportunities for some groups and to marginalize those of others. that is, far fewer studies apply a structural approach to examine how students' responses to living in an oppressive society could shape their college "choices." black feminist theory, which analyzes intersecting power structures that perpetuate domination and oppression of minoritized groups, can offer insights about the social reproduction of inequality, which was a central focus of bourdieu's original work. in particular, black feminist theory can offer insights about the construction of the "field." the field is "a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions" (bourdieu and wacquant 1992, 97) . at the same time, bourdieu (1973) described habitus as a "system of dispositions which act as a mediation between structures and practice" (p. 487). consequently, in this perspective, habitus describes how individuals and organizations embody social structures, because this concept defines how individuals relate to each other and the structures of society. because habitus "reflects the internalization of structural boundaries and constraints" (perna 2006, p. 113 ) regarding college-going, it constructs the rationale for students' college "choice" behaviors. without addressing the concept of field that accounts for asymmetrical power relations, the sole application of habitus to phenomena like college "choice" runs the risk of reinforcing deficit orientations and narratives of a culture of poverty about minoritized groups. even still, bourdieusian class concepts such as habitus were not originally intended to examine institutionalized forms of power, but rather, the process of internalizing and embodying social structures that reproduce class inequality, including how power relations are centered around symbolic violence and how social beings comply and participate in the maintenance of social division and hierarchies (bourdieu and passeron 1990) . even as scholars have looked to examine racial and class stratification in college access, social class often becomes focal. college "choice" research has often highlighted academic preparation and social class status as the strongest predictors of college enrollment; however, a predominant emphasis on these factors minimizes the role of race and racism and its intersection with other forms of domination in shaping higher education pursuits (teranishi and briscoe 2006) . a limitation of habitus as a tool to explain disparate outcomes is that it is a means for singular axis analysis. as a strength of this framework, mcdonough (1997) takes into account social class and social context to understand the college decision-making process. however, the focus on class as opposed to its intersection with gender and the omission of race obscures how other social identities could shape students' trajectories. byrd (2017) argues that habitus is not limited to class but intertwines with race. the social identities of elite college students influence their social interactions and racial attitudes, and byrd (2017) demonstrates how habitus shapes students' views of opportunities and racial inequities. as it has typically been applied in research, the concept of habitus serves as a useful way to understand patterns among homogeneous student populations. yet, such applications of the concept may obscure variations of experiences within historically marginalized groups, including those along the lines of race and gender and the intersection of social identities. an emphasis on the perspective that high schools hold an organizational habitus that is class-based does not provide analytical tools to examine students' experiences with racial and gender discrimination within the same environment. for example, considering mcdonough's (1997) finding that white high school girls and those from higher income backgrounds at a more affluent school (compared with those at a less affluent school) were more prone to attend selective colleges, it is not clear to what extent and how the advantages of attending an affluent school in the college "choice" process were also afforded to its black students. on the one hand, we may argue that those that possess class cultural capital that is deemed congruent with the school's organizational habitus reap rewards of college counseling and other support. yet, studies have also found that schools have an organizational racial habitus (carter 2012) . when considering the disparate outcomes in student postsecondary destinations because of factors like tracking, counselor bias, and military recruitment, current models do not provide a clear framework to examine the full range of factors in an organizational habitus that shape postsecondary trajectories. lastly, there are debates about the extent to which actors in bourdieu's social reproduction theory have agency to determine their life pathways, or the extent to which these actors' life chances are already determined by societal structures (e.g., swartz 1997) . expanding on the work of st. john et al. (2001) and paulsen and st. john (2002) , perna (2006) developed a conceptual college "choice" model that conjoined human capital theory and sociological perspectives. based on their review of prior research, perna (2006) contended that separately economic and status attainment perspectives did not sufficiently address the college "choice" process, arguing economic approaches offer a framework for understanding decision making, but are limited by their failure to examine the nature of information that is available to decision makers. on the other hand, sociological approaches shed light on the ways in which individuals gather information, but do not identify the ways in which individuals make decisions based on this information (perna 2006, p. 114 ). in bridging these perspectives, perna (2006) presents an integrated model that "assumes that an individual's assessment of the benefits and costs of an investment in college is shaped by the individual's habitus, as well as the school and community context, the higher education context, and the social, economic, and policy context" (p. 101). through this approach, the model seeks to account for how there can be group differences in college decisions. perna (2006) outlines the structural contexts that shape students' college access and decision-making by capturing how levels of context are embedded and organize student's pathways. the most internal layer is a student's habitus which encompasses background characteristics and capital. layer two is organizational habitus which entails the structures, institutional agents, resources of schools and communities. next, layer three is the higher education context, which recognizes the place, role, and characteristics of colleges and universities. lastly, the outlying and allencompassing layer involves the larger economic, political, and social contexts that influence life decisions like college "choice." this approach has yielded a deeper understanding on how "situated contexts" shape the differences in educational attainment among social classes and racial groups (perna 2006, p. 116) , and has been advanced in more recent studies (e.g., deil-amen and tevis 2010; means et al. 2016; squire and mobley 2015) . perna (2006) also expanded their framework of college decision-making to more broadly examine student transitions and success. drawing from psychology, economics, sociology, and education, perna and thomas (2008) developed a conceptual framework to provide a comprehensive definition of student success to encompass how it is a longitudinal process with four key transitions: college readiness, college enrollment, college achievement, and post-college attainment. the integration of human capital and sociocultural aspects underscores the importance of examining individual's behaviors in their respective social contexts. however, this approach does not provide ways to examine how advantaged and minoritized groups' differential power and privilege in those contexts could affect students' trajectories. as carried out in earlier approaches, perna (2006) relies on habitus to describe how "the system of values and beliefs that shapes an individual's views and interpretations" (p. 115). while habitus accounts for the role of social context, the focus is on how individuals embody their social conditions. however, there is not a clear specification of what constitutes the field in this model to make sense of what social conditions are shaping behaviors. further, this approach does not address how systems of oppression create social conditions. examining further the concept of field and its associated systems of oppression could enhance the model, as the model strives to account for "sources of differences in college choices across groups" (perna 2006, p. 107) . for example, squire and mobley (2015) focus on the study of college "choice" to better understand how multiple marginalized social identities are negotiated in postsecondary decisionmaking. they found that, for black gay men, racial factors shaped their college decision-making, like the decision to attend a predominantly white institution in part because of "larger societal narratives surrounding sexual minorities within black communities" (squire and mobley 2015, p. 478) . in another example, a man described experiencing racist remarks during an admission interview for a predominantly white campus, which shaped his decision to attend a hbcu instead. although the racism evidenced in an admissions interview appeared to affect this student's college "choice," the use of perna (2006) did not provide well conceptualized analytical tools to examine how racism might have influenced this student's or other black students' college trajectories. a limitation of the employment of habitus in college "choice" frameworks is that it does not recognize the intersection of multiple systems of oppression, including racism and heterosexism, as "superstructures" (ray 2019) that can circumscribe life chances. though mcdonough's (1997) work spoke of how a high school's organizational habitus reflected the broader us social class structure, it did not address how intersecting systems of oppression and power structures could shape college "choice." similarly, while perna's (2006) model focuses on the role of social contexts in shaping college "choice," it is important to note that social contexts and the power relations that differentially affect individuals' life chances based on their social and economic identities are not one and the same. namely, a given social context involves the "internal dynamics of a given interpretive community" (collins 2019a, p. 46 ), while power is exercised "where groups with greater power oppress those with lesser amounts" (collins 2002, p. 274 ). more broadly, power also operates as "an intangible entity that circulates within a particular matrix of domination and to which individuals stand in varying relationships" (collins 2002, p. 274) . from this perspective, social contexts are situated in, but not the same as, the intersection of systems of oppression and power structures that shape experiences and inequities (collins 2019a) . black women and girls live in a particular political context where the "convergence of race, class, and gender oppression characteristic of u.s. slavery shaped all subsequent relationships that women of african descent had" (collins 2002, p. 5) . while recognizing that accounting for social contexts to enrich analysis of social inequities (collins 2019a) and to avoid essentializing individuals' and groups' experiences (patton and njoku 2019) , it is also imperative to recognize the larger structural forces of power that shape those contexts and educational opportunities (núñez 2014) . broadly, higher education research overwhelmingly examines students and their experiences, with less attention on the structural components (hurtado 2007; hurtado et al. 2012; núñez 2014) , and the structures that inhibit students' pathways. while perna (2006) contributes to framing how contexts influence each layer, the model does not account for racialized and gendered elements beyond demographic characteristics. new research on social inequities and social problems cannot be detached from complex theorization of power structures and systems of oppression. such considerations call for new questions on how systemic forms of power are structuring student and organizational habitus and the ways they are manifested in college decisionmaking. a different theoretical construct that conceptualizes a "structuring structure" (bourdieu 1984, p. 170 ) is the matrix of domination (collins 2002) . through a black feminist lens, the configuration of society and social life is understood centrally through social and power relations. collins (2002) approaches the analysis of power in two ways: (1) a dialectical approach that examines oppression and activism, and (2) an approach that examines the interconnected relationships between systems of oppression within their matrices of domination. collins (2019b) describes how a matrix is a "structuring structure" that "gives structure to dynamic phenomena" but how "intersectionality adds a political analysis to these generic understandings" (p. 173). to conceptualize how power is structured, collins' (2002) concept of a matrix of domination shows how power is organized in various contexts via different domains. the matrix of domination "refers to how political domination on the macrolevel of analysis is organized via intersecting systems of oppression" (collins 2019b, p. 171) . according to collins (2002 collins ( , 2019b , there are four domains of power: structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal, that each and together, shape domination. moreover, this framing provides a lens to analyze the arenas in which subordinate groups resist and seek empowerment. the structural domain describes how primary social institutions are interlocked and structured to perpetually subordinate black women and men. the structural domain is defined as a constellation of organized practices in employment, government, education, law, business, and housing that work to maintain an unequal and unjust distribution of social resources. unlike bias and prejudice, which are characteristics of individuals, the structural domain of power operates through the laws and policies of social institutions (collins 2002, p. 301 ). through laws, policies, and procedures, social institutions, like higher education, enforce a social hierarchy that functions to disenfranchise and exclude. for example, higher education has systematically excluded black students and other racially minoritized students from entering selective white institutions. historically, this has been orchestrated through laws and judicial decisions that reflected the broader social order of de jure segregation. today, the confluence of segregated housing, the placement of higher education institutions, and racial ideology continues the historical pattern of exclusion. amalia dache-gerbino (2018) employed a critical geography analysis to examine how the depopulation of cities where black and latinx folks reside impacted college access and "choice." within a context of deindustrialization, white flight, and racially biased admission policies, dache-gerbino (2018) found black and latinx students lived in areas with a "college desert," lacking 4-year institutions and limited to readily available community colleges and for-profit institutions. this finding is striking, as dache-gerbino illuminates, because college "choice" research has confirmed proximity is an influential factor in college decisions (turley 2009 ), especially for black and latinx students (braddock 1980; butler 2010; hillman 2016; means et al. 2016) . dache-gerbino's (2018) conclusions demonstrate how white patterns of settlement maintain power and domination through the interdependence of social institutions like availability of housing, employment opportunities, and higher education. the entrenchment and rigid establishment of social institutions presents a challenge to reform, let alone abolish, oppressive social structures. thus, focal to resisting within this domain is shifting the social order through changing laws of the land or establishing new doctrine. collins' (2002) examples of such a redistribution or reconciliation of the social order include revolutions, social movements, and war. widespread transformation sounded unlikely a decade ago, but we find ourselves in a historic moment for reimagining or abolishing systems due to public outcry over police brutality and antiblackness, structural inequalities uncovered by the world pandemic, and economic disruption today. these disruptions uncover large inequalities and call into question college "choice" frameworks that do not address the intersection of systems of oppression and the social structures that maintain the status quo. where the structural domain organizes domination, the disciplinary domain maintains hierarchies through bureaucracy and surveillance. this encompasses how power relations operate within a social institution, despite the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion. "discipline is ensured by keeping black women as a mutually policing subordinate population under surveillance" (collins 2002, p. 281) . with the perspective of "intersectional surveillance," simone browne (2015) contends racializing surveillance is a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a power to define what is in or out of place...reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines, and where the outcome is often discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized (p. 16). college admissions criteria may be considered a mechanism for surveillance because they serve to detect who belongs and who does not. studies have demonstrated that admissions criteria like standardized tests are biased against black and/or lowincome students (e.g., deil-amen and tevis 2010), and that performance on these tests is linked with access to material and human resources in one's high school (park and becks 2015) , as well as proclivity to stereotype threat (perry et al. 2003) , to which black and other minoritized students are more vulnerable. yet, these standardized tests continue to be used in college admissions, particularly to sort high numbers of applicants in selective public institutions. as a consequence, the doors of higher education are regulated in which access to selective white institutions is privileged and those who are "othered" are cascaded to other institutions (allen et al. 2018; contreras et al. 2018) . the use of surveillance is further conspicuous when considering that it has become a common practice for higher education institutions today to purchase the names of students and track their web browsing history to collect information about their demographic background for recruitment and enrollment purposes (macmillan and anderson 2019; selingo 2017; zinshteyn 2016). arguably, the use of surveillance technologies can further exacerbate inequalities, because it also informs institutions about whom to privilege or not privilege in recruiting, and the extent to which certain individuals might pose a "risk" to the institution in terms of factors like propensity to graduate (an example that illustrates how black and minoritized students would be at a disadvantage in such predictive models). discipline and surveillance occur before students submit their college applications. extending foucault's (1977) notion that schools are disciplinary institutions, black feminist scholars apply an intersectional lens to examine black women and girls' experiences with discipline, punishment, and surveillance within schools. in pushout: the criminalization of black girls in schools, monique morris argues that, similar to the experiences of black boys, black girls are under surveillance in school via mechanisms such as the use of metal detectors as a "security" measure, law enforcement in schools, and zero-tolerance policies (morris 2016) . however, for black girls, their experiences with surveillance stems from negative perceptions that render them as deviant because their behaviors are deemed "un-ladylike," because, as i will argue later, their behavior does not conform to narrow standards of white femininity (e.g., collins 2002; fleming 1983) . as i will later return to, this exercise of power is exhibited through education and warrants consideration on how discipline and surveillance in k-12 schools impact college access and "choice." resistance in this domain is typically achieved through shifting procedures and practices from within a given social institution or system. for example, black girls are unfairly disciplined in schools because of their choice of hairstyle. the crown act (2020) is a campaign to prohibit discrimination against students because of their choice of hair style; the implementation of crown act policies could decrease black students' receipt of school infractions. in contrast to the structural forms of power, the hegemonic domain of power involves "ideology, culture, and consciousness" (collins 2002, p. 284) . this domain provides the rationale for oppressive power relations. collins (2002) describes it as "a popular system of commonsense ideas that support [the dominant group's] right to rule" (p. 284). through narrow narratives and controlling images, hegemonic ideologies maintain false constructions about race, class, gender, sexuality, and other identities that are perpetuated by both the ruling class and subordinate groups. hegemonic ideologies are (re)produced in research, school curriculum, mass media and functions to "shape consciousness via the manipulation of ideas, images, symbols, and ideologies" (collins 2002, p. 285 ). in higher education, an example of a hegemonic ideology is the notion of "pell runners," defined as "people who purportedly find filing a fafsa and enrolling into college an expedient way to obtain a few thousand dollars" (goldrick-rab 2016, p. 69). the belief that financial aid recipients are potential scammers who take advantage of financial aid programs subscribes to a narrative to undermine the use of federal resources for students in real financial need (graves 2019) . hegemonic ideologies justify the use of other domains of power such as discipline because exercise of such power "protects" the social order, in this case, ensuring low-income and/or students of color do not receive money they do not deserve, though there is not sufficient evidence to merit financial verification processes (goldrick-rab 2016; graves 2019). graves (2019) argues that because it emboldens financial aid officers to implement detrimental policies and practices that delay students receiving their aid, the disproportionate emphasis on the existence of pell runners "has become a tool to inform policies such as verification and structured disbursement, which overregulate financial aid for students who need aid to access their higher education" (p. 111). graves's (2019) conclusion elucidates how pell runners as a controlling image justifies disciplining low-income and disproportionately students of color. resistance in this domain constitutes subordinated groups reclaiming, creating, and affirming their own self-definitions. the fourth domain of power is the interpersonal. the interpersonal domain encompasses how power is maintained at the microlevel through daily routines and interactions. according to collins (2002) , this domain involves the "discriminatory practices of everyday lived experience that because they are so routine typically go unnoticed or remain unidentified. strategies of everyday racism and everyday resistance occur in this domain" (p. 299). in higher education, an example of this is black respectability politics that manifests within hbcus and other black social institutions. higginbotham (1993) defined the politics of respectability as "reform of individual behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform of the entire structural system of american race relations" (p. 187). building on the work of higginbotham (1993) , harris (2003) describes how "respectability was part of uplift politics and had two audiences: african americans, who were encouraged to be respectable, and white people, who needed to be shown that african americans could be respectable" ( p. 213). while respectability politics has historically been perceived a mode to empower and used as a strategy for racial uplift, because it emphasizes challenging stereotypes of black people through acting "respectable." yet, there is an argument that emphasizes that black respectability politics has involved conforming to expectations of respectability defined by the white dominant social order in the usa. nadrea njoku, malika butler, and cameron beatty (2017) contend that black respectability politics has "helped maintain a racial order and hierarchy" (p. 787). the authors examine how the politics of respectability impacts students at hbcus and argue that the admonishment and condemnation of certain cultural esthetics and behaviors further marginalizes black poor people, black lgbtq people, and black women who refuse to yield to the paralyzing power of black respectability politics(p. 787). though hbcus have historically and continue to provide educational opportunities to minoritized students, it is also imperative for these campuses to foster environments for marginalized students within subordinate groups. disrupting the power within the interpersonal domain requires interrogating how individuals and groups participate in subordinating others. resistance in this domain can take on diverse forms because it is focused on how individuals with different identities interact with one another or how groups interact with reference to one another. among black collegians, researchers have found negative campus racial climates and the lack of racial diversity deters black students from enrolling into the university of california (contreras et al. 2018 ). in the aftermath of racial campus unrest at the university of missouri (brewer 2018 ) the share of first-time, first-year black undergraduate entrants at the university declined by 35% (brown 2017) , suggesting that some black students may have decided that it was unsafe to pursue college in such an environment. further, the pronounced racial hostility on white campuses has some students of color, and black students in particular, seeking refuge at historically black colleges and universities ( changes in black students' enrollment patterns may in part be attributed to perceptions of supportive campus cultures; however, campus climate is not limited to what happens at the college but also shaped by external sociohistorical forces, "the events or issues in the larger society, nearly always originating outside the campus, that influence how people view racial diversity in society" (hurtado et al. 1998, p. 282) . the prevalence of antiblack racism in us society may also contribute to black students' college "choice," especially given the culture and climate of universities reflect broader society (george mwangi et al. 2018) . factors like the expected cost of college, the amount of financial aid, and even academic qualifications do not sufficiently explain how students and families weigh safety, well-being, and humane treatment in the context of antiblackness and other systems of subordination. new approaches to examine the college "choice" process indeed, more emergent frameworks of college "choice" have interrogated to a greater extent the structural forces that shape students' college opportunity structures. in fracturing opportunity: mexican migrant students and college-going literacy, gildersleeve (2010) examined how mexican migrant students "come to know college access" (p. 11) with the perspective of college-going as a mediated meaning-making system. linking college opportunities and sustaining a democratic government in the united states, gildersleeve (2010) argued college-going can be understood as "pedagogically produced" in the sense that it is a "learned social practice co-constructed by multiple agencies that interact with various social structures" (p. 2). their critical inquiry on postsecondary educational opportunity applied cultural-historical activity theory and literacy theories to examine how college access is "a learned activity" that is "accomplished by the development of college-going literacies, which afford students the opportunity to respond to, navigate, and negotiate the complex power-laden processes that interact across collegegoing activity" (gildersleeve 2010, p. 34) . in sum, college-going can be "taught and enacted" (gildersleeve 2010, p. 184) . specifically, in his qualitative research examining how mexican migrant students practice college-going, gildersleeve found that for these students, academic preparation, college access, college admissions, and college "choice" were more integrated and mutually constituting processes. for example, gildersleeve underscored how study participants and their families had high aspirations to attend college. however, the students also had to learn "rules" to attend college, like (in their state of california), the requirement to pass the california exit exam in english to earn a high school diploma. gildersleeve conceptualized college-going literacy as "a learned social practice" (p. 33), which for participants in this study dependent on a "community of labor." the racialization of students in particular school contexts (including assumptions about their abilities due to factors like being latinx or english learners) and perceptions of financial ability to pay affected their meaning-making about college opportunities. their motivation and dedication to their communities also shaped how they made sense of their college opportunities. in acknowledging the sociocultural contexts that minoritized students navigate and negotiate, the author focused on the role of higher education institutions, schools, outreach programs, and families in shaping and supporting a culturally relevant college-going identity and college-going literacy. incorporating chicana feminism to existing college-going models, acevedo-gil (2017) presented college-conocimiento as a conceptual framework to examine intersecting identities and college pathways. bridging perna's (2006) model and use of habitus with gloria anzaldúa's (2002) theory of conocimiento, acevedo-gil (2017) argued college pathways are mediated by students' intersecting identities and inequitable educational resources. the college "choice" process for latinx students is complex because of the developmental process of conocimiento, "a theory of epistemological development that entails challenging oppressive conditions through individual consciousness and social justice actions" (acevedo-gil 2017, p. 833). the culturally relevant concept of conocimiento draws attention to an individual's consciousness and its interconnections with family, schools, and community. consciousness is a compass on how minoritized groups navigate college-going and their social worlds. the college-conocimiento framework reckons with the worlds latinx students navigate. college-conocimiento is defined as "a serpentine process where latinx students reflect on the college information that they receive in relation to their intersectional experiences when preparing for college" (acevedo-gil 2017, pp. 834-835). acevedo-gil (2017) approaches the study of college pathways through a critical lens to "account for racialization, interconnected identities, and multiple contexts" (p. 834). where deficit orientations about minoritized students proliferate, collegeconocimiento provides a culturally relevant model of college "choice" (garcia et al. 2020) . with the first space being el arrebato, the rupture and birth of something anew, the college-conocimiento framework describes an evolving, sevenstage progression toward an orientation of spiritual activism. the collegeconocimiento framework forges new ground in college "choice" literature in that it captures how aspirations and college decisions can be influenced by cultural aspects of particular social identities. for instance, in the college-conocimiento framework, el arrebato is conceptualized as the space where latinx students' develop college aspirations that stem from their individual, school, and community habitus. acevedo-gil (2017) advances college-going literature in connecting aspirational capital, defined as the familial and community motivation to attend college (yosso 2005) , to perna's (2006) application of habitus in college decisions. this approach employs a reflexive, asset-based perspective that affirms the agency of students as they process their educational opportunities and navigate oppressive conditions such as under-resourced high schools. acevedo-gil's (2017) research challenges the linearity of the hossler and gallagher (1987) model by demonstrating the circular and spiral-oriented movement between the predisposition, search, and "choice" stage. similar to iloh (2018) (later discussed), both authors underscore the importance of information and perceptions of opportunity; however, acevedo-gil takes it one step further in thinking about "the mind-body-spirit connection" (acevedo-gil 2017, p. 841). this culturally relevant perspective invites a fresh conceptualization of habitus that incorporates how students' multifaceted identities and cultures play into their college "choice." acevedo-gil (2019) also applied the college-conocimiento framework in an empirical study on the college "choice" process for low-income, first-generation latinx students. the author found that "participants considered various identities and knowledge of institutional resources to construct narratives about the likely obstacles they would experience in college" (acevedo-gil 2019, p. 121). other scholars have also applied this framework to examine the role of fathers in shaping chicanas higher education pursuits (garcia and mireles-rios 2019) , and first-generation and low-income latinx students' summer experiences that present challenges to successfully transition into college such as "summer melt" (tichavakunda and galan 2020) . though the college-conocimiento acknowledges oppressive conditions, this framework does not address the intersecting power systems that might constrain latinx and low-income students' perceptions of and capacity to pursue a full range of college opportunities. acevedo-gil (2017) aligns students' reflexivity to perna's (2006) discussion of habitus and suggests college-conocimiento allows a student to reflect on their "intersectional demographics within a deficit institutional context" and how that awareness of multiple identities "facilitates the student internalizing the possibilities of pursuing a postsecondary education" (acevedo-gil 2017, p. 840). while one's "intersectional demographic" could reflect one's level of power and disenfranchisement in society, examining the role of intersectional social identities in college "choice" does not necessarily equate to an analysis of systems of power. to this point, black and gender studies scholar jennifer nash (2019) articulates a black feminist perspective that "who people are can never be understood apart from the way things work" (p. 75). nash further elaborates that the stark distinctions drawn between identity and structure, distinctions that neglect how experiences of embodiment; projects of self-making, and self-performing; sensations of pleasure, pain, injury, desire, and so on are always fundamentally altered, shaped and constituted by social location, experiences of power and disempowerment (2019, p. 74-75). thus, students' subjectivities and the social structures that shape their experiences are inextricably interwoven. acevedo-gil's college-conocimiento framework situates one critical factor as affecting latinx students' college "choice" as the context of racially segregated high schools with fewer educational resources. however, this model can be expanded to better consider the ubiquitous nature of racism and its intersection with other forms of oppression. for acevedo-gil (2017), the crux of the framework is contextualizing how the gross inequities in the k-12 system shape students' college "choices." the statistical portrait of latinx educational outcomes, similar to that of black students, illuminates how structural inequities (i.e., lack of college guidance counselors, variation in academic preparation, and oppressive learning environments) limit college opportunities. schools, whether they are public or private, with predominantly white or majority students of color, in urban, suburbia, and/or rural areas, maintain practices that sustain inequities. this is pertinent to understanding the college-going process for minoritized students because scholars have found that even in well-resourced schools, race still matters in influencing college-going outcomes, with black students attending less selective institutions or receiving less support from their teachers and counselors, despite being equivalently academically qualified as others (chapman 2014; lewis and diamond 2015; lewis-mccoy 2014) . this is important to be mindful of as researchers determine where one might suspect inequities exist, and instead consider how all schools are susceptible in reproducing oppressive conditions. while arguing that empirical research on college "choice" tends to employ an economic perspective, a "rational process by which an individual estimates the economic and social benefits of attending college" (p. 229) or a sociological perspective in which "the extent to which high schools graduates' socioeconomic characteristics and academic preparation predispose them to enroll at a particular type of college" (p. 229), iloh (2018) argues that an ecological approach that takes into account a broader a way of settings is most appropriate to fully understand college decision-making parameters. the author employs an ecosystem perspective to advance considerations on the relationship between individuals, conditions and experiences, and the environments they inhabit. through her proposed framework, the author is attentive to how the context of information, time, and opportunity ultimately shape enrollment decision(s). in this framework, information describes "both the access to and the quality of information students harness in making college-going decisions" (p. 236), while time is a term employed to encompass the "moments and events that have occurred throughout one's life as well as an individual's chronological age" (p. 237). the dimension of context of opportunity is utilized to capture "the perceived and real opportunity any student has in their pursuit of higher education generally and specific institutions in particular" (p. 238). while iloh's framework calls for context-specific data collection to gather deeper understandings of students with diverse backgrounds and their pathways, the theory centers on the roles of the individual and their ecosystem, rather than how broader economic and social structures shape social realities, and therefore, college pathways. that is, although the framework takes into account a broader array of settings and students (including post-traditional students), how oppressive power dynamics shape student college pathways are not made as clear. taken together, traditional and new models have aided in advancing the understanding of the complexity of the college-going experience. however, one of the findings from this brief review of theories of college "choice" is that all have limited analytical capability to articulate interlocking systems of power and oppression that can also construct college opportunities. these limitations leave scholars without more precise perspectives, concepts, and language to address how institutionalized forms of oppression and power constitute structures that stifle college opportunity. the central objective of the rest of this chapter is to deepen the understanding about college pathways by applying black feminism, broadly, and black feminist thought (bft) specifically, to put forth an intersectional approach that considers how racism, sexism, and other forms of domination interlock and shape student pathways. the employment of an intersectional approach grounded in black feminist thought can encourage scholars to "engage in more critical analyses of their data and generate more accurate conclusions" (museus and griffin 2011, p. 6 ). more recently, scholars have underscored the importance of examining larger forces that contribute to shaping students' experiences and that shape institutional and social contexts (hurtado et al. 2012; núñez 2014) . however, this is often neglected in higher education research. núñez (2014) concluded "the application of intersectionality to empirical studies has largely been limited to descriptions of these actors' experiences, rather than organizational dynamics among social actors or other entities that shape those experiences" (p. 46, emphasis original). the current chapter seeks to further these developments in applying black feminist thought to understand how multiple dimensions of the college "choice" process are affected by intersecting systems of oppression and power structures. to be clear, this is not to suggest black feminist thought as a new college "choice" model, but rather, to position black feminist thought as having the potential to advance understanding of the various factors and forces that constrain and foster equitable access to college for black women and girls in particular, and minoritized students and systematically advantaged students more broadly. problematizing college "choice" moving toward a black feminist approach to examine students' college pathways and decision-making processes, i begin this section by problematizing the notion of "choice." previous scholarship has used "choice" to denote the inequities in college access for minoritized and nontraditional students (cox 2016; goldrick-rab 2006; iloh 2018; rodriguez and nuñez 2015) . similarly, i approach the limits of college "choice" from a critical race and black feminist standpoint that centers on how educational systems in the united states are entrenched with structural impediments that undermine college equity and reflect broader systems of oppression (collins 2002; harris 1993; ladson-billings 1998; patton 2016) . as contended by núñez (2014), collins's (2002) concept of the matrix of domination provides a lens to examine the intersection of systems of oppression and how higher education shapes and is shaped by power relations. applying the structural domain of power, how interlocking social institutions dominate through law and policies, entails identifying how power and oppression in higher education has constrained "choice" and evolved over time (collins 2002) . thus, i take into account a long-term historical perspective of the black struggle to access education (mustaffa 2017 ) that has been fortified by other social institutions such as the us legal system , and de jure and de facto patterns of racial segregation and housing (dache-gerbino 2018). examining the historicity, or "the macro-level role of history in shaping these broader dynamics" (núñez 2014, p. 52) , of "choice" elucidates the importance of taking a historical perspective in understanding how societal structures are constructed and evolve to circumscribe educational opportunities for minoritized groups. one of the issues that more traditional conceptions of "choice" overlook, particularly in college "choice" of black folks, is how historical violence has shaped opportunity structures and systematically restricted access to a quality education. the history of black people in higher education indicates that several interlocking and distinctive societal structuresincluding chattel slavery, de jure and de facto restrictions on access to postsecondary educationhave restricted their postsecondary opportunities (anderson 1988; dancy et al. 2018; evans 2008; harper et al. 2009; mustaffa 2017; rogers 2012) . in this section, i discuss the history and concept of educational violence (mustaffa 2017) to illustrate the limits of college "choice." education violence is a term to describe "how marginalized people both in and outside of formal systems of schooling have had their lives limited and ended due to white supremacy" (mustaffa 2017, p. 711, emphasis original) . this history of white supremacy goes back four centuries before the founding of the united states. as late as 1619, black folks were abducted, chained, battered, and rendered chattel: the african was represented as chattel in their economic image, as slaves in their political and social image, as brutish and therefore inaccessible to further development, and finally as negro, that is without history (robinson 2000, p. 187). the process of racializing and dehumanizing "the other" (collins 2002) in instituting chattel slavery laid the foundation for the formation of a racialized capitalist state. those who survived the gruesome transatlantic voyage to the eastern shores of colonial america were forced into slavery. enslaved african people were subjected to dehumanization, including being prohibited from and criminalized for learning how to read and write. in fact, it was deemed a crime to teach an enslaved or free black person (anderson 1988) . as the institution of slavery expanded into occupied indigenous land, the birth of us higher education institutions to serve the white ruling classes began. it is no mere coincidence that the same decade enslaved african people arrived in massachusetts, the first higher education institution, harvard university, was founded in cambridge in 1636. foundational to the development of colonial colleges was a dependency on the institution of slavery; exploited labor was instrumental in the construction of colleges. harvard university, then harvard college, was bestowed as the locale to train and prepare the elite class of white men for clergy and leadership positions, while enslaved african people were subjected to serve the constituents of the college (wilder 2013) . that is, "black people erected the buildings, cooked the food, and cleaned the dormitories and yet were not understood as laborers, but as property" (dancy et al. 2018, p. 182) , while black women who maintained the campus were abused, sexually assaulted, and raped on college grounds by students (wilder 2013) . the history of the development of the first us colleges exposes exclusion as a fundamental feature of higher education in the nation. since the founding of the colonial colleges, the "choice" to attend college was not afforded to racially minoritized groups and white women. for indigenous populations, the college served as grounds to impose evangelism (wilder 2013) . it was not until 1823, 187 years after the first colleges were established, that alexander lucius twilight became the first black american to earn a college degree from middlebury college (slater 1994) . for black women, receipt of a college education first occurred decades later, with lucy ann stanton earning a certificate in 1850, and mary jane patterson earning a degree in 1862, followed by fanny m. jackson and frances j. norris in 1865, all from oberlin college in ohio (commodore et al. 2018; evans 2008; perkins 1993; rogers 2012; slater 1994) . during the nineteenth century, it was disputed whether college participation should be afforded to black people, for we were viewed other than human (i.e., dred scott v. sandford) (anderson 1988) . amidst controversy and during an era when the majority of black americans were enslaved, oberlin college was one of the first higher education institutions to admit black students (perkins 1993; waite 2002) . under plessy v. ferguson, however, de jure segregation maintained "separate but equal" educational institutions in theory, a position supported and sustained by both northern and southern politicians and judges. oberlin college was made available to black folks from its inception (waite 2002) , whereas the majority of historically white institutions did not accept black students until the 1950s and 1960s (allen and jewell 2002; slater 1994) . the need for racially segregated institutions was affirmed in the morrill act of 1890, which established "land" grants to establish historically black colleges and universities (allen et al. 2007 ). the exclusion of black students from higher education in these times reflected a "possessive investment in whiteness" (lipsitz 1995) in which higher education and the right for white people to exclusively enjoy its benefits functioned as a form of "whiteness as property" (harris 1993; ladson-billings 1998) . in the aftermath of slavery, the education of black people was perpetually perceived as a threat to white dominance and the social order (browne 2015; hartman 2007) . for example, rogers (2012) describes how the expansion of black higher education through the great depression, particularly the atlanta university center consortium, was met with white resentment: "for many whites who did not attend college, and most did not, the presence of articulate, confident, polished black students oftentimes undermined their sense of superiority and thus their sense of self" (p. 23). after the 1954 brown v. board of education ruling that overturned the conception of "separate but equal" established in the 1896 plessy v. ferguson case, racial injustice and separation of postsecondary opportunities through segregation in higher education persisted. for instance, the case of adams v. richardson (1973) found that ten states were noncompliant to adhering to the civil rights act of 1964 because of their failure to desegregate their higher education systems (allen et al. 2018; egerton 1974) . today, scholars have shown how antiblack racism thwarts equitable access to education (allen et al. 2018; dancy et al. 2018; dumas and ross 2016; mustaffa 2017) , citing as evidence affirmative action bans (okechukwu 2019) , opposition of school integration and the aftermath of desegregation policy (dumas 2016) , overdisciplining black students in schools (powell and coles 2020; wun 2016) , and hostile racial climates in schools and universities (abrica et al. 2020; chapman 2014 ). an especially notable example is the perpetual underfunding of historically black colleges and universities, which provide significant and unique educational opportunities for black and other minoritized students ). hbcus constituted 2.2% of degree-granting institutions and 1.48% of total college enrollment in 2017 (nces 2019a, c). in 2017-2018, these institutions served approximately 9% of today's black college enrollment population, and conferred 13.5% of the bachelor's degree conferred to black students in 2017-2018 (nces 2019e, f). yet, they continue to receive far less funding than other institutions, although they provide educational opportunities to students who require much more academic and financial support than those at more well-funded institutions (carnevale and strohl 2013; nasem 2018) . the historical patterns of yesterday continue to impede the present educational conditions for black students, restricting access to full college "choice" for black students. despite the sociopolitical conditions that have limited black americans' postsecondary opportunities, black students, their families, and communities have always highly valued and strived to pursue higher education (e.g., freeman 2005) . formerly enslaved black americans seized their freedom and immediately sought education as a mechanism to improve their social position. education was yearned by free and formerly enslaved black people because education was viewed as a portal toward liberation (anderson 1988; collins 2002) . collins (2002) describes how black women's support for education encompasses how "education has long served as a powerful symbol for the important connections among self, change, and empowerment in african american communities" (p. 210). black women in particular were instrumental in using education as a tool for racial uplift (perkins 1993 (giddings 1984) . for black students, pursing higher education has been a site of struggle, but also perceived as a tool for liberation (horvat and davis 2011; sojoyner 2016) . this tension is worth exploring further when exploring the disparity between black students' higher education aspirations and attainment rates (freeman 2005) . early empirical research on college "choice" found that black americans "choose" postsecondary education pathways in ways that incorporate racial concerns. to investigate the role of race in the college "choice" process, mcdonough et al. (1997) expanded on hossler and gallagher's (1987) three-phase model to incorporate bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus as class-and race-specific constructs that impact how and where black students decide to attend a college or university. specifically, the authors compared factors that influenced black students' college "choice" process to attend hbcus or predominantly white institutions. they framed college "choice" as a "result of a complex relationship (not a simple matching) between background characteristics, high school activities, aspirations (which are affected by perception of available opportunities), college choice behaviors, and self-concept" (mcdonough et al. 1997, p. 12) . this model emphasizes how black students convert their cultural capital into what the authors describe as "social profits" (mcdonough et al. 1997, p. 15 ). this study's descriptive and regression analysis compared the characteristics and predictors of black student's enrollment into a hbcu or a predominantly white institution. it found that student religion, schools' reputation, parents' wishes, referrals, and belief that alums obtain good jobs positively influenced decisions to attend a hbcu. its findings were consistent with more recent findings that hbcu alumni in students' families and communities positively influence decisions to attend a hbcu (johnson 2019) . moreover, mcdonough et al. (1997) found a positive relationship between students' individual aspirations and self-concepts and subsequent decisions to enroll in a hbcu. in comparison, college guidance counselors, athletic involvement, the close proximity of the college to their home, availability of financial aid, and college's academic reputation and specialized programs were key indicators for matriculation into white institutions. the authors contended that students who are interested in promoting racial understanding may be more interested in improving race relations by attending a predominantly white institution . in conducting research about the disconnection between black students' high education aspirations and their low participation in higher education, kassie freeman (2005) advanced the hossler and gallagher's (1987) model to include her concept of predetermination. specifically, she explored how environmental "circumstances that are outside of the students' control" (p. 111), such as the culture and characteristics of one's high school, influence college decisions. freeman found that school officials' low expectations of black students negatively shaped students' perceptions of their ability, and, in turn, what higher education institutions they were "channeled" into. further, she found that culturally relevant curricula, services, and resources to support and guide college decision-making for black students were missing from schools. this finding highlighted the importance of structural factors, including differential resource allocation to schools, in shaping college "choice." further, freeman (2005) found that familial influence plays a significant role in college decisions, but not in the ways considered in preexisting "choice" frameworks. she found that, regardless of their educational attainment, black families instilled in their children high academic aspirations. in cases where these families had low or no postsecondary attainment, a central motivation for instilling these aspirations was for the students to achieve an educational level never before obtained in the family. considering that having higher parental educational attainment confers fewer benefits (including transmitting income and wealth) for black students than white students (bumpus et al. 2020) , it is important to expand consideration of how the role of educational attainment may differ for black students compared to other groups. black and latinx students are stratified in lower selectivity schools that provide fewer resources to encourage their persistence and completion, and trends indicate that, in recent years, the most "elite" colleges have become more predominantly white (carnevale and strohl 2013) . these findings have long-term occupational, income, and wealth implications, as black students who graduate from selective institutions are more likely to enroll in graduate school and earn higher salaries (e.g., bowen and bok 1998) . therefore, akin to the perpetual patterns of black exclusion in higher education, some studies on black students' college decisions have rightly focused on the factors that shape the type of institutions they attend (freeman 1999; johnson 2017; tobolowsky et al. 2005) . for example, van camp, barden, sloan, and clarke (2009) conducted a quantitative study with 167 black undergraduates of a hbcu to provide insight on the race-related factors that influenced their decisions. they found that racial composition and the opportunity to develop one's racial identity were two factors positively influencing black students' decisions to attend a hbcu. in another study, van camp et al. (2010) examined the role of race in the college decision to attend a hbcu. the authors found that students with fewer black intragroup interactions prior to college were more likely to attend a hbcu. in a similar vein, freeman (2005) found that black students who attended predominantly white high schools were more likely to want to attend a hbcu, because of a desire and sense of obligation to learn more about their culture and roots. such an opportunity might not have been available in their high schools. holland (2020) found that the quantity and quality of cross-racial interactions in high school and perceptions of how a college environment would prepare them to navigate diverse environments influenced black students' college "choice." van camp et al. (2010) found black high school students whose race was central to their identities were more likely to attend hbcus. likewise, in their study of black gay mens' college "choice," squire and mobley (2015) found that "participants who self-identified more with their race ultimately attended the hbcu. those who self-identified more as gay or neither identity attended the pwi" (p. 476). the authors also found students' perceptions of the campuses climates as an influential factor, in that some black gay men did not attend a white campus because of how they perceived the racial climate, and concluded that attending hbcus would enable them to feel more a part of a scholarly community, at an institution that valued their contributions (squire and mobley 2015) . the larger body of college "choice" literature also indicates that geographical proximity to a student's family of origin shapes college decisions. research about black college "choice" further indicates how geographical proximity or location interacts with systems of oppression and identity that shapes black students' college destinations. for example, a study on black gay men's college decisions found that their assessments of a college's location was linked to their perceptions of being able to "come out" (strayhorn et al. 2008 ). butler (2010) conducted a quantitative study to examine the relationship between the process of college "choice" and segregation. he interpreted the resulting association between being black and attending a hbcu in texas (where he conducted his analysis) as related to the disproportionate proximity of the hbcus to black students' homes in that state, itself a product of historical residential segregation in that state. in their study of black rural students' college "choice," means et al. (2016) found that these students aspired to attend college, but were concerned about leaving home and being away from their families. participants in this study lived in a "college desert" (dache-gerbino 2018), with even the "local" community college being 45 min away (means et al. 2016) . geographical location is also a reason why black students matriculate into community college and for-profit institutions. for example, lowry (2017) investigated the factors that led black students to "undermatch," that is, attend a community college, although they were academically eligible to attend a 4-year institution. students expressed how concerns about responsibilities to their families of origin, the capacity to pay for college, geographical proximity to their families, and potential to adjust smoothly to college shaped perceptions of where they could enroll. these considerations led them to perceive that community college was their only enrollment option. while lack of information about college options also played a role in these particular students' "choices," other research indicates that even among black high school students whose teachers and counselors encourage their higher education pursuits, some students still lack college-going knowledge or accurate information about financial aid because of the limited resources at their schools (means et al. 2016) , including limited access to school personnel (corwin et al. 2004) . studies have also found that, even when black students have demonstrated high academic ability, high educational aspirations, and high support and encouragement from their families, black students tend to be stigmatized by their high school teachers and counselors (chapman 2014; goings and sewell 2019; muhammad 2008) . many scholars have interrogated the underutilization of racial theories to examine racial disparities in society (bonilla-silva and baiocchi 2001; omi and winant 2014) . similarly, higher education scholars have argued that the development of educational theories that incorporate racial theories could significantly enhance the understanding of racial disparities in school inequities and student outcomes (harper 2012; ladson-billings and tate 1995; patton et al. 2007) . in response to these critiques, thandeka chapman et al. (2020) developed a model "for african american college choice and agency" (p. 12). previous scholarship has in fact utilized critical race theory to examine college "choice" (acevedo-gil 2015; comeaux et al. 2020; muhammad 2008; teranishi and briscoe 2008) . however, the strength of chapman and colleagues' framework is that it integrates critical race theory to develop a college "choice" framework that examines institutional and political forms of exclusion that circumscribe the said "choice." further, by recognizing the assets and community cultural wealth (yosso 2005 ) that black students hold in the "choice" process, their model challenges deficit frames of black underachievement. research on black women and college "choice" while research on black women's college experiences has emerged (chambers and sharpe 2012; commodore et al. 2018; patton et al. 2016; patton and croom 2017; porter et al. 2020; winkle-wagner 2015) , there were only 48 publications on black collegiate women in higher education-related research from 1991 to 2012 . within higher education journals, everett and croom (2017) surveyed 49 higher education journals and found that within the last 10 years, only 14 articles within 7 journals have publications focused on "black undergraduate womyn." the dearth of education research focused on black collegiate women warrants considering the theoretical implications and practical consequences when there is a vast erasure of a student group. at the minimum, we are obligated to question the breadth of what we think we know about these students and interrogate what is taken for granted. though literature on college "choice" is extensive, empirical research on black women's college "choice" is far less common. within the scant literature, empirical studies on black women's college decisions have focused on the roles of parental influence and schools (butner et al. 2001; horvat 1997; muhammad and dixson 2008; smith 2008) . notably, most studies on black women's college decision focus on the differences in college enrollment between black women and black men (smith and fleming 2006) . using the national longitudinal study of youth and integrated postsecondary education data system to examine gender differences in the college-going process, jez (2012) found that black women were more likely to come from low-income households, have higher academic achievement, apply to college, have higher expectations to complete college, have parents that are more confident that they will complete college, and discuss their college plans with their parents. to further examine these differences, jez (2012) controlled for habitus, cultural capital, and social capital by selectivity of institution and found no gender differences. jez (2012) concluded differences in academic achievement, household characteristics, expectations, peer group influences, parent involvement, and school type do not explain the gap in application and attendance rates between african american females and males (p. 54). such statistical analyses may not be able to account for exogenous factors that are not measured in these data sets, including factors found to be salient in other qualitative research in black women's college-going processes. put differently, such findings and conclusions can obscure other factors that employing a black feminist lens in the study of college "choice" can bring to light. the history of black exclusion from postsecondary education indicates that higher education institutions are racialized institutions (ray 2019) . this history calls on college "choice" scholarship to address the racialization of college opportunity structures. a black feminist approach is well-positioned to address this racialization because it illuminates the processes that create conditions of subordination and the unjust effects such processes have on minoritized groups' lived experiences. a black feminist perspective underscores the complex confluence of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation of origin, religion, disability, and other social identities and forms of domination that circumscribe life chances. in this section, i will provide a brief explanation and history of black feminism, followed by analyzing how concepts in black feminist thought provide conceptual tools to study the racialization of the college "choice" process. i will argue that black feminist thought provides an analytical apparatus to identify and examine "racialization" in college "choice" through concepts such as controlling images. such controlling images include the common positioning in research and in popular media of black women as a comparatively advantaged and resilient "model minority," despite considerable evidence otherwise. i also address how black feminist thought's concepts of self-definition and self-valuation can serve as a corrective to challenge stereotypes about black women that influence how they are supported (or not) in their educational advancement and postsecondary pursuits. the application of black feminism emphasizes that "if you could free the most oppressed people in society, then you would free everyone" (taylor 2017, p. 5) . black feminism is an endeavor that offers a way of knowing (dillard 2006) , being (collins 2002) , and reimagining (davis 2012 ) that might be pragmatic and/or radical in that it centers black perspectives as key to shaping the future. black feminist ontology and epistemology call for examining history as a perspective to inform how to navigate onward. the genealogy of black feminisms ties together black women's history of subjugation, invisibility, and empowerment with their contemporary social conditions, experiences, and activism. though often unnamed, unacknowledged, and "behind the scenes," black women were the architects in shaping social movements such as the civil rights, black nationalism (blain 2018) , and the black power and freedom movements (farmer 2017; ransby 2003; spencer 2016) . the lineage of black women's crusade for liberation can be traced to their leadership in resistance in slave quarters on plantations (davis 1972; hartman 2016) . black women were not mere bystanders of the process of their dehumanization but actively challenged their oppressions, in that they participated in slave rebellions and uprisings, or resisted enslavement through various forms, including death (davis 1972 ). for the current chapter, i situate black feminism in the historicity of black women's development and engagement with antiracist and antisexist discourses and their involvement in social movements and social justice projects, which are inextricably intertwined (e.g., collins 2019a). among the concepts in black feminism, that of intersectionality may be more familiar to a wider audience, because of its "travels" to various disciplines, including the field of higher education (harris and patton 2019) . the concept of intersectionality foundationally reflects a larger black feminist intellectual and activist tradition (collins 2019a; cooper 2016; hancock 2016; nash 2019) . common accounts denote the 1960s and 1970s as when the concept of intersectionality was initially developed (e.g., harris and patton 2019). however, before critical legal scholar and black feminist kimberlé crenshaw coined the term that emerged in academic and legal discourse as intersectionality in the late 1980s (collins 2019a), black women were describing and documenting how the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality shaped their treatment in us society. in 1861, harriet ann jacobs introduced the enslaved black woman as the subject while exposing the ills of american slavery in incidents in the life of a slave girl. early narratives and writings of scholars and activists like sojourner truth, maria stewart, anna julia cooper, ida b. wells, mary church terrell, frances beal, and angela davis also addressed the structural oppression of black women based on race and gender (see hancock 2016 , for an account of the evolution of black feminist theory and intersectionality since the 1800s). in 1974, the combahee river collective, a collective of black lesbian feminists, called for the "development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking" (hull et al. 1982, p. 13) . in framing this activity as black feminist theorizing, cooper (2016) states this body of proto-intersectionality theorizing advanced the idea that systems of oppressionnamely, racism, classim, sexism, and heterosexism-worked together to create a set of social conditions under which black women and other women of color lived and labored, always in kind of invisible but ever-present social jeopardy (p. 5), as evidenced in the teachings and praxis of black feminists, intersectionality is a social justice project that is invested in a political struggle against multiple systems of oppression that constrained those with marginalized identities' life chances (collins 2019b) . this chapter considers how the application of black feminist thought can be expanded beyond the concept of intersectionality to examine equity in higher education. black feminism includes intellectual lines of inquiry that incorporate diverse disciplinary origins, political connotations, and purposes. specifically, black feminism encompasses black feminist thought (collins 2002) , critical race feminism (wing 1997), intersectionality (crenshaw 1991) , and womanism (walker 2004 ). as such, black feminist thought is an "arm of black feminism" (collins 2019a) and is applied here to theorize college-going pathways. as outlined by collins (1986 collins ( , 2002 , there is not one prescriptive method on how to apply black feminism, but black feminism approaches center antiracist and antisexist research and activism (evans-winters 2019; guy-sheftall 1995) . black feminist thought is a critical social theory that "encompasses bodies of knowledge and sets of institutional practices that actively grapple with the central questions facing u.s. black women as a collectivity" (collins 2002, p. 9) . put differently, black feminist thought is the "ideas produced by black women that clarify a standpoint of and for black women (collins 1986 , p. s16). as a theory and methodological process, black feminist thought is a framework to analyze race, class, gender, and sexuality within a system of power and oppression. black feminist thought relies on black women's standpoints to analyze the construction of structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power that hinder life opportunities for black women. it postulates that analyzing these constructions can also lead to transformation and undoing of oppressive structures. as a theoretical approach, black feminist thought has the potential to advance the field of higher education and student affairs. scholars have applied black feminism to examine the experiences of undergraduate and doctoral students, faculty and administrators, and education leadership. in arguing that black feminist thought and critical race theory can be applied to enhance theories of student development and socialization, howard-hamilton (2003) contends that "the use of a single lens or perspective, even one including a "melting pot" view of diversity, cannot help all students, particularly african american women, to feel secure about immersing themselves in the university environment" (p. 20). following howard-hamilton's perspective that black feminist thought can enrich the field of higher education, i apply it to the study of college "choice." for this theoretical contribution, i apply three concepts of black feminist thought: (1) self-definition and self-valuation, (2) the interlocking nature of oppression, and (3) the importance of black women's culture to make sense of the factors that constrain black girl's and women's college "choice." in relation to these themes, i first discuss the importance of the black feminist concept of controlling images that necessitate self-definition and self-valuation as interventions to affirm the agency of black women and girls to draw on their cultural strengths to navigate college and life pathways, expanding their capacity to reach their highest potential. in the following section, i begin by describing what controlling images are to interrogate how various stereotypes about black women and girls influence institutional behaviors that shape college "choice." black feminist critics contend that controlling images are mechanisms to control, dehumanize, and exploit black women and black womanhood (collins 2002) . defined as external, socially constructed stereotypes, controlling images are used to objectify black women and justify discriminatory practices. as such, controlling images "make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life" (collins 2002, p. 69) . taken for granted, the stereotypes of black women and girls are hegemonic, ideological symbols that shape individual consciousness, relationships with others, and societal values. though often examined in public policy, cinema, and media (bogle 2002; hancock 2004; wallace-sanders 2008) , i apply the concept of controlling images to understand black women's educational experiences that are relevant to college "choice." historical and contemporary controlling images of black women include the mammy, the matriarch, the sapphire, and the black lady. the mammy is a stereotype of jolly black mothers that sacrifice their family and self (wallace-sanders 2008). the mammy "symbolizes the dominant group's perceptions of the ideal black female relationship to elite white male power" because she knows and accepts her subordinate position (collins 2002, p. 72) . within the context of the exploitation of black women's labor, the mammy as a controlling image depicts black women as aggressive, independent, asexual, and overly devoted to their work (collins 2002) . within the white gaze, the working status and position of the black matriarch within familial households emasculates black men, and black women's work commitments are also perverted to suggest how they are unable to properly care for their children and their educational needs (collins 2002) . originating in pioneer black sociologist edward franklin frazier's (1939) book the negro family in the united states, the concept of the black matriarch or "matriarchate" was invoked to describe black women's survival response to subordination under racism and capitalism. as pointed out by scholars, however, frazier's lack of specificity in defining this concept left it open to deficit interpretations and applications (allen 1995; collins 2002) , as evidenced in daniel patrick moynihan's (1965) study, the negro family: the case for national action, commonly referred to as the moynihan report. the moynihan report popularized an ideology that black women who failed to fulfill their traditional "womanly" duties at home contributed to social problems in black civil society (collins 2002, p. 75) . through the pervasiveness and durability of the controlling image of the black matriarch, "black women became scapegoats, responsible for the psychological emasculation of black men and for the failure of the black community to gain parity with the white community" (dill 1979, p. 548) . in the higher education setting, jacqueline fleming (1983) found that black undergraduate women on predominantly white campuses developed confident and assertive traits that could be associated with the black matriarch controlling image. in her interpretation, having to navigate and negotiate white supremacy and patriarchy in historically white institutions required black women to develop confidence and assertiveness. a contemporary version of a controlling image that bridges the mammy and matriarch is the black lady. black ladies are assertive black women that "stayed in school, worked hard, and have achieved much" and who have become "middle-class professional black women who represent a modern version of the politics of respectability advanced by the club women" (collins 2002, pp. 80-81) . similar to how collins (2002) demonstrates how the depictions of "welfare queen" and "black lady" work together to construct classed images of black women, their femininity, and work, the construction of black girls as either "loudies and ladies" (morris 2007) , "good and ghetto" (jones 2010) , and/or ratchet girls are controlling images that stigmatize and limit educational opportunity (morris 2016; watson 2016) . previous scholarship has also drawn connections between these deviant characterizations of black girls and the controlling image of the sapphire. the sapphire is described as "emasculating, loud, aggressive, angry, stubborn, and unfeminine" (epstein et al. 2017, 5) . there is evidence to indicate that controlling images of black women adversely shape black women and girls' educational experiences in the united states (evans-winters and esposito 2010) . in the schoolyard and in the classroom, black girls are often rendered as ghetto, "a euphemism for actions that deviate from social norms tied to a narrow, white middle-class definition of femininity" (morris 2016, p. 10) . sociologist nikki jones (2010) argues that the construction of ghetto black girls is juxtaposed to a black respectability politics that instructs and deems what is acceptable behavior, and black women following this respectability politics "distance themselves from behavioral displays of physical aggression or overt sexuality" (jones 2010, p. 8) . black respectability politics may impose expectations to conform to certain standards of behavior, including those of white femininity, but black girls, especially those who live in neighborhoods with pervasive structural and interpersonal violence, encounter myriad challenges to survive and defend themselves (jones 2010) . such conditions of economic deprival and exploitation, gendered racism, segregation, and gentrification necessitate resistive responses for protection and survival. locating "ghetto girls" outside the caricature of being a "black lady" or a "good girl" pervades school officials' perceptions about black girls and how they should behave. in schools, the image of black girls as ghetto is read as nonconformity, and there is evidence that it can be utilized to exercise what has been well documented as excessive discipline of black girls in the k-12 system (e.g., morris 2016) . moreover, black girls tend to be viewed as loud and abrasive when they are assertive in the k-12 classroom (fordham 1993; morris 2007) . howard-hamilton (2003) contends that the application of stereotypes of black women in higher education to educational practices can infringe on black women's educational and career opportunities. as a remnant of historical caricatures of black women and their roles in the community and wider society, including the trope of the black matriarch, black women have come to be portrayed as advantaged in comparison to black men, a framing that, as described below, encompasses terms like "resilience" and "model minority." here black girls and women are commonly framed as being "resilient," while black boys and men are perpetually in a "crisis" (neal-jackson 2018) or "endangered" (butler 2013) state. in a related vein, black women have come to be viewed as a "model minority" within their race (discussed in more detail below), and this phenomenon adversely affects resources for black women's education. interventions for black boys and adolescents have become well-funded to address their needs (dumas and nelson 2016) , for example, the my brother's keeper initiative, which aimed "to improve measurably the expected educational and life outcomes for and address the persistent opportunity gaps faced by boys and young men of color" (office of the press secretary, white house 2014), has received at least $200 million in funding (neal-jackson 2018). by contrast, although significant evidence indicates that black women face unique and comparative challenges to black men, the investment in the similar initiatives to serve black women and girls and women is estimated to be less than 1 million dollars (cooper 2014; neal-jackson 2018) . disparate resources afforded to black men and women's educational advancement initiatives circumscribe black women's college "choice." in association with the resilient controlling image, the model minority controlling image has also been applied to black women. the model minority image is a stereotypical image of high achievement and success that functions as a tool in "discrediting one racially minoritized group's real struggles with racial barriers and discrimination through the valorization of oversimplified stereotypes of another racially minoritized group" (poon et al. 2016, p. 474) . usually applied to asian americans in the media and popular discourse, the model minority myth has been critiqued by scholars (chang 2011; museus and kiang 2009) because it is an "insidious racial device used to uphold a global system of racial hierarchies and white supremacy" (poon et al. 2016, p. 474) . more recently, the model minority controlling image has been applied to black women in understanding their educational experiences and outcomes. for example, kaba (2008) states the model minority concept could now be extended to include black american women, because even more than asian americans, they have been the subgroup to have suffered the most in the history of not only the usa, but the entire western hemisphere or the new world. however, by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, black american women are among the most productive members of the american society (p.331). headlines of popular news media have crowned black women as the "most educated group" in the united states, although, as indicated earlier, the evidence distorts the realities of black women's educational attainment (bronner helm 2016; davis 2016) . for example, across all racial groups (not just among black folks), women are more likely to be enrolled in college compared to their male counterparts (nces 2019b), yet, as discussed earlier, there is an emphasis in research and policy on this enrollment gap among black students in particular. further, analyses of black women's college enrollment patterns reveal that they disproportionately attend for-profit institutions in comparison to other groups, a pattern that can adversely affect their educational attainment and college debt (davis et al. 2020; espinosa et al. 2019) . moreover, black women's 6-year graduation rates from 4-year institutions are among the lowest of all racial groups, with the exception of those of indigenous students (nces 2019f) . further, the research on black women's and girls' experiences in the united states carceral state disrupts the dominant narrative that black girls are shielded from gendered racism and state-sanctioned and education violence (wun 2016 (wun , 2018 . in reference to the murder of tamir rice, morris (2016) provides a particularly vivid portrayal of how black girls are adversely affected by police violence: even in high-profile cases involving boys, we often fail to see the girls who were right there alongside them...officers tackled his fourteen-year-old sister to the ground and handcuffed her. not only had she just watched her little brother die at the hands of these officers, but she was forced to grieve his death from the backseat of a police car (p. 2). assertions that black women, or any racially minoritized group, are an exemplar for other disenfranchised groups to emulate obscure how white supremacy, including that related to state sanctioned violence, impacts the everyday lives and opportunities of minoritized groups. the argument of a "new model minority" inflicts harm to black women and men because it implies that accountability for societal equity rests on the individual and/or status group to overcome institutional barriers, instead of interrogating how systems of oppression impede on the potential for equitable livelihoods across race and gender. as noted earlier, critics have pointed out that "the failure to account for racism/ white supremacy gender/patriarchy when considering black collegiate women's experiences is nonsensical at least and absurd at best" (patton and croom 2017, p. 2) . while the rhetoric of a "new model minority" may be absurd, given the evidence cited earlier, its implications nonetheless extend into empirical research as well as popular media. for example, black men are currently the most researched racial group in education studies (harper and newman 2016) . such research is warranted and definitely needed. yet, too often the rationale for research with black men and boys centers comparing their plights to black women and girls' educational attainment and perceived academic success. as noted before, the constant portrayal of black men and boys in crisis dominates social science literature and influences or reinforces the proliferation of outreach, policies, and initiatives that almost exclusively focus on enriching the education and life opportunities for black (and latinx) men (butler 2013; dumas and nelson 2016) , while initiatives to support black women are hardly resourced at all in comparison. the advantaged black woman trope, as a descendant of the black matriarch controlling image, reflects the accumulation of persistent trends to pathologize black woman and to misinterpret statistical data on educational attainment, including data related to college access and "choice." the failure to see black women and girls beyond hyperbolic caricatures of educational success results in inadequate approaches to address expanding black women's college access and cultivate enriching experiences that support their aspirations to reach their highest potential, thus compromising black women's potential for college "choice." in examining the historical and ideological underpinnings of the educational advantage of black women, we can identify the limitations of incomplete portrayals and move toward a research agenda that reframes black women and girls worthy of an education and a life that does not necessitate taxing endurance and resilience against adversity. further, organizing policy and programmatic approaches to address black girl's and women's unique needs can expand their potential to pursue a wider range of postsecondary possibilities and to expand their college "choice" options. evidence about the consequences of the prevalence and enactment of these controlling images of black women and girls indicates how these stereotypes perpetuate interlocking racialized, gendered, and class systems that can channel black girls' and women's opportunities into narrower confines of college "choice." for instance, studies have found how school officials and educator's negative perceptions of black girls are biased in that they reflect the personnel's preconceived notions about students, and yet penalize students and disrupt their educational pursuits (crenshaw et al. 2015a; morris 2016) . from this perspective, controlling images of black girls in the k-12 education can influence how institutional agents and teachers in schools treat these girls. in essence, this treatment embodies the enactment of interlocking systems of power in schools which can affect whether these girls are pushed out of the education system, pursue higher education, seek vocational training, in the criminal legal system, or follow other alternative life paths. one critical case where interlocking systems of power is exercised involves the disproportionate disciplinary rates of black girls by school officials and administrators (e.g., morris 2016). morris and perry (2017) have found that disciplinary action imposed on black girls is typically conducted through office referrals, and that black girls are often cited for dress code violations, disruptive behavior, and disobedience, which are offenses that open to officials' interpretation and susceptible to ambiguity, subjectiveness, and implicit bias. in their analysis of disciplinary data of denver public schools, annamma et al. (2019) found that black girls were suspended at rates higher than other girls, than white and latino boys, and more than the school district average. these researchers concluded that excessive discipline and policing practices are exercised through filters of controlling images and dominant narratives about black women and girls (annamma et al. 2019) . the punitive inequalities experienced by black girls are perpetuated by the dominant discourses about black girlhood and blackness. black girls often challenge hegemonic notions of docile femininity (morris 2007) , and behaving outside of white norms of feminity (e.g., collins 2002; fleming 1983) can lead school officials to render black girls outside of femininity itself. in such cases, "blackness compromises and modifies perceptions of appropriate femininity, which is coded as white" (morris and perry 2017, p. 144) . interlocking with racism and sexism, other systems of power including classism, heterosexism, able-bodiedness and colorism preclude black girls from confirming with narrow cis-white narratives of girlhood that are privileged in schooling. for example, morris (2016) found that a gender nonconforming black youth was characterized as a "distraction" and "disruptive" by their teachers, a characterization which led to excessive disciplinary measures against the student. such policing reflects a desire to surveillance and punish blackness and othered genders. and even more so, excessive and inappropriate policing deprives black girls of experiencing a full childhood (morris 2016) . historical analyses and current research indicate that over time, in contrast to their non-black peers, black girls have often not been perceived as children, but rather, as adults. adultification is a term that "comprises contextual, social, and developmental processes in which you are prematurely, and often inappropriately, exposed to adult knowledge and assume extensive adult roles and responsibilities within their family networks" (burton 2007, p. 329) . for black children, adultification has historical lineages to the institution of slavery. for example, enslaved black children were expected to work and live under the same repressive conditions as enslaved black adults and elders (dumas and nelson 2016) . further, enslaved black children were often separated from their families and auctioned to different plantations as a method to control and alienate the black child. the black child was systematically denied a "childhood." reflecting and mirroring the horrors of the past, there continues to be systemic cultural prejudice that becomes operationalized in social policy and everyday institutional practices. but more than prejudice, black children are subject to a process of dehumanization. while prejudice signifies negative attitudes that can lead to discrimination, dehumanization involves something far more dangerous: a construction of the other as not human, as less than human, and therefore undeserving of the emotional and moral recognition accorded to those whose share humanity is understood. (dumas and nelson 2016, p. 29) in a report, girlhood interrupted: the erasure of black girls' childhood, researchers conducted a community survey to elicit data on perceptions about children's innocence and adultification. among 325 adults, with 74% of participants being white, the survey data indicated that black girls are viewed by adults as knowing more about sex and adult topics than other girls (epstein et al. 2017) . they are also perceived as having independent personality characteristics, a perspective associated with school officials' views that black girls need less support and protection to navigate school. taken together, the educational violence that black girls endure in school contribute to a "spirit murdering," which is "the denial of inclusion, protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance because of fixed, yet fluid and moldable, structures of racism" (love 2016, p. 2) . the intersection of systems of oppression adversely impacts college-going pathways and decision-making as revealed in black women's educational experiences: "the criminalization of black girls is much more than a street phenomenon. it has extended into our schools, disrupting one of the most important protective factors in a girl's life: her education" (morris 2016, p. 3) . the unfair disciplinary practices that target black girls restrict their educational opportunities. as contended by annamma et al. 2019 , "channeling black girls out of schools and into carceral institutions, schools are protecting education for the most privileged...education is a property right instilled by whiteness, with the absolute right to exclude those outside of whiteness" (p. 217). the school-to-prison nexus indicates how disciplinary practices and punishment within schools can lead to educational pushout and incarceration. the sanctioning of students via suspension, expulsion, or grade retention is the strongest predictor of incarceration among adolescent girls (annamma et al. 2019; wald and losen 2003) . previous college "choice" studies have found repeating a grade (often necessitated with incarceration) is associated with being pushed out of high school and not pursuing college. further, incarceration can have a lasting impact on an individual's college and career aspirations. for example, incarceration and/or one's conviction can be used to deny college admissions (annamma 2018) and to restrict or deny financial aid eligibility for federal and many state programs (custer and akaeze 2019) . this is important, given that the provision of financial aid has been shown to influence decisions for low-income, black students and the growing population of formerly incarcerated students and students in prisons (castro and zamani-gallaher 2018) . moreover, the excessive exercise of school discipline interrupts academic and college preparation. even when punishment does not necessarily involve law enforcement, detention in school detracts from students' educational time to pursue required academic coursework for college. this is especially concerning given research that has shown academic and college preparation is the strongest predictor of college enrollment (e.g., cabrera and la nasa 2000) . excessive discipline also informs the biases of teachers and counselors on the extent to which certain students are provided college knowledge and who receives alternative options, if any at all. muhammad and dixson (2008) , addressing the well-documented fact that black girls are overrepresented in vocational tracks, questioned whether this condition is due to a ". . .concerted effort on the part of these students to get ahead in the workforce...or whether these women, who are most likely 'average' students, are being pushed out of the general curricular track on to tracks where more success for people 'like them' is perceived" (p. 171). in sum, academic and disciplinary trends regarding black girls in k-12 schooling can shape the extent to which these girls have full agency in college "choice." black women's culture, self-definition, and self-valuation black women's culture refers to "the ideological frame of referencenamely, the symbols and values of self-definition and self-valuationthat assist black women in seeing the circumstances shaping race, class, and gender oppression" (collins 1986, s22) . with the contention that black girls' socialization and identity development is racialized and gendered, consideration on how students come to know who they are, their social positions, and how to navigate their social worlds is imperative. research has expanded to apply an intersectional lens to examine the identity development and socialization of black women and girls (mims and williams 2020; porter 2017; porter et al. 2020) . lauren mims and joanna williams (2020) applied the multiple worlds model (phelan et al. 1991) to examine how families, peer groups, classrooms, and schools shape what and how black girls learn about race and racism. the authors approached the study with the assumption that black girls navigate different worlds that may or may not be congruent with each other (i.e., homelife and school). examining identity development within the context of systems of oppressions, the authors found black adolescent girls' understandings of race were based on their social interactions that predominantly occurred within schools. the prevalence of dehumanized portrayals of black women in the curriculum and experiences of being ridiculed by peers because of those of images influenced students' understandings of race and their own racial identity development. mims and williams (2020) concluded that "black girls' discussions of what being their own race meant to them indicated that they were connecting race with social processes related to bias and discrimination" (p. 118). the interplay between oppression, consciousness, and activism that is so salient to black women's lives and ways of knowing (collins 1986 ) could also be salient to their college "choice." collins (1986) argues that black women's culture suggests that the relationship between oppressed people's consciousness of oppression and the actions they take in dealing with oppressive structures may be far more complex than that suggested by existing social theory. conventional social science continues to assume a fit between consciousness and activity; hence, accurate measures of human behavior are thought to produce accurate portraits of human consciousness of self and social structure (p. s23). because black women and girls are not monolith, their college decisions and the processes that shape those decisions may vary. such processes may be attributed to the various ways that students exercise their agency as they navigate their social worlds. considering black women's potential to enact the agency in their educational pathways, the appeal of advancing a new positive trope in place of limiting and controlling images to apply to their educational experiences is captivating. however, collins (1986) asserts that "replacing negative stereotypes with ostensibly positive ones can be equally problematic if the function of stereotypes as controlling images remains unrecognized" (p. s17). to truly expand black women's college "choice" possibilities, it is critical to develop research and praxis perspectives and approaches that fully and authentically honor their humanity and well-being. accordingly, the black feminist concepts of self-definition and self-valuation are of particular relevance to understanding the capacity to broaden black women's educational opportunities. self-definition refers to affirming black women's lived experiences as fully human (collins 1986 ). self-valuation "stresses the content of black women's self-definitionnamely, replacing externally-derived images with authentic black female images" (collins 1986 , p. s17). this concept centers on black women as subjectspersons who are shaped and shaping their social context and the lives they live on their own terms. as noted, in her education research on the experiences of black collegiate women, fleming (1983) challenged the black matriarch controlling image, asserting that the persistence of this stereotype resulted from biased research that implicitly or explicitly compared the experiences of black women to those of white women with respect to work and labor: perhaps the real truth is not that black women are stronger or more dominant than black men, but rather that they are less passive and dependent less "feminine," in terms of white stereotypes than white women. (p. 43) her findings suggest the importance of understanding black women's postsecondary experiences on their own termsrather than in relationship to an inappropriate and unrealistic (and in this case majoritarian) standard. thus, fleming's (1983) findings confirmed the necessity of self-definition and self-valuation in examining women's experiences in domains such as higher education (collins 1986 (collins , 2002 . one recent example of self-valuation and self-definition can be found in a recent scholarly, praxis-oriented, and activist response to the pervasiveness of inaccurate narratives around how the carceral state affects black women and girls. the african american policy forum founded by kimberlé crenshaw and luke charles harris have developed initiatives (i.e., #whywecantwait) and campaigns (i.e., #sayhername) to address the status of black women in education and their suffering at the hands of state violence (crenshaw et al. 2015b ). this includes combatting the invisibility of black women in my brother's keeper and public discourses surrounding the movement for black lives (black lives matter) (which contradict controlling images of black women as advantaged). their report, black girls matter: pushed out, overpoliced, and underprotected analyzed how school discipline impacts black girls and has deepened the knowledge on the prison-to-school nexus (crenshaw et al. 2015a ). this form of knowledge production is linked to praxis that works to dismantle oppressive power relations and transform public policy and discourse. in the context of black women and girls' college "choice," self-definition and self-valuation challenge narrow orientations that reinforce intersection systems of oppression that subordinate black women and girls in education and society. as the evidence discussed in this review indicates, controlling images and tropes like "ladies and loudies" (morris 2007) or "good and ghetto" (jones 2010) , and the associated surveillance and over policing of black girls forecloses the capacity to obtain a full range of educational options in k-12 schooling, with significant consequences in constraining college "choice." conversely, when black girls are inappropriately perceived as being advantaged, their specific challenges become invisible, and opportunities are missed on how to fully address the challenges they may be encountering. a black feminist perspective and associated concepts can be applied to inquiry about college "choice" about populations beyond black women and girls. engaging with questions such as the following can expand considerations of how power structures enhance or constrain students' postsecondary options: (1) what controlling images and stereotypes affect a population's access to collegegoing resources? how do practices related to these controlling images expand or constrain such resources? for example, how does the model minority myth regarding asian americans affect the support offered by teachers and school personnel to hmong students and other asian american ethnic subgroups with far lower than average college-going rates? (e.g., museus et al. 2016 ). (2) what interlocking systems of power affect a population's capacity to pursue a full range of college options? for example, how do systems such as racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and nativism constrain or enhance postsecondary options for afro-latinx students who might be considering attending hbcus, where they might encounter distinctive kinds of microaggressions? (palmer and maramba 2015) . (3) how do members of minoritized communities draw on their cultural resources such as college conocimiento in the case of latinx students (acevedo-gil 2017) to challenge and navigate interlocking and oppressive power structures that constrain college "choice"? (4) how do self-definition and self-valuation based on a student's cultural background affect college "choice"? for example, how does an emphasis on "giving back" to one's community, as evidenced in u.s. native and indigenous communities (e.g, reyes 2019), influence where, how, and for what purpose members of these communities pursue postsecondary education? as evidenced in this review, such applications of black feminist theory show great potential to help scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and activists specify dimensions of economic, political, and social power structures that can serve as sites for interventions to expand college "choice" for minoritized groups and to identify and develop institutional processes that foster greater equity in college opportunity. looking to advance college "choice" research, policy and practice, bergerson (2009) called for increased attention to the specific experiences of groups with different social identities as they move through the college choice process. . . [and] solutions for the stratification of higher education in educational systems, social contexts, and policies...enhancing the ability to identify and address the barriers (p. 113). this review extends college "choice" research on the connection between racial identity and college pathways to invite examining black and minoritized students' college "choice" in ways that situate college decisions within structural systems of power and oppression. examining whether and to what extent students account for forms of domination like racism, patriarchy, classism, heteronormativity, and nativism when making a college "choice" can expand the understanding of how students construct a "consideration set" (mcdonough 1997) of college options. simultaneously, such an examination can also illuminate how these systems of power contribute to constructingand often limitingthat set of college options. like other critical social theories that focus on the role of institutional and societal power in affecting life chances, black feminist thought provides analytical tools to examine the oppression of minoritized students and to draw on the resulting knowledge to develop equitable pathways into higher education for all students, particularly black women and girls. black feminist thought provides a lens to examine power relations and the intersection of systems of oppression as forces that have shaped and continues to shape the higher education and who has access to college participation. realizing equity in educational and life opportunities requires transformative change in which systems that infringe upon minoritized groups are dismantled and abolished. collins (2002) argued that ". . . becoming empowered requires more than changing the consciousness of individual black women via black community development strategies. empowerment also requires transforming unjust social institutions that african-americans encounter from one generation to the next" (p. 273). her concept of the matrix of domination illuminates how societal power structures work in tandem to circumscribe college pathways and "choice." collins's (2002) concept of matrix of domination recognizes a full range of individual, cultural, and structural factors intertwined with interlocking systems of power shown to affect black students' college "choice" in this chapter's review. future studies can employ black feminist thought and other critical lenses to examine how racialized and gendered violence, homelessness, and criminalization contribute to limiting postsecondary opportunity structures for minoritized students (edwards 2020; huerta et al. 2020) . as of 2020, the advent of the covid-19 pandemic has raised significant uncertainty about how higher education will serve students with diverse backgrounds. further, the consequences of the pandemic could exacerbate the already widespread economic, social, political, and educational inequality. simultaneously, through worldwide protests, black folks 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student affairs social class and college costs: examining the financial nexus between college choice and persistence the role of education in the development of black feminist thought, 1860-1920 studying college access and choice: a proposed conceptual model theoretical perspectives on student success: understanding the contributions of the disciplines young, gifted, and black: promoting high achievement among african-american students students' multiple worlds: negotiating the boundaries of family, peer, and school cultures a critical review of the model minority myth in selected literature on asian americans and pacific islanders in higher education articulation of identity in black undergraduate women black women's socialization and identity development in college: advancing black feminist thought we still here': black mothers' personal narratives of sense making and resisting anti-blackness and the suspensions of their black children critical approaches to the study of higher education: a practical introduction ella baker and the black freedom movement: a radical democratic vision a theory of racialized organizations an indigenized phenomenology of giving back among native college graduates funds of knowledge for the poor and forms of capital for the rich? a capital approach to examining funds of knowledge. theory and research in education killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty constructing college "choice" for latino students: the organizational culture of an urban catholic high school from microscope to mirror: doctoral students' evolving positionalities through engagement with culturally sensitive research the black campus movement: black students and the racial reconstitution of higher education the changing nature of cultural capital the wealth and color of off-campus recruiting. dissertation how colleges use big data to target the students they want the growing gender gap in black higher education academic capitalism and the new economy: markets, state, and higher education college choice process of first generation black female students: encouraged to what end? african american parents in the search stage of college choice: unintentional contributions to the female to male college enrollment gap approaches to studying racism and sexism in black women's lives first strike: educational enclosures in black los angeles the revolution has come: black power, gender, and the black panther party in oakland negotiating race and sexual orientation in the college choice process of black gay males the role of finances in student choice: a review of theory and research factors affecting the college choice of african american gay male undergraduates: implications for retention culture and power: the sociology of pierre bourdieu how we get free: black feminism and the combahee river collective social capital and the racial stratification of college opportunity contextualizing race: african american college choice in an evolving affirmative action era about the crown act social identity pathways to college choice and attitudes toward help-seeking among black students at a minority serving institution an overdue theoretical discourse: pierre bourdieu's theory of practice and critical race theory in education the summer before college: a case study of first-generation, urban high school graduates the role of hbcus the college choice process of african americans in california college proximity: mapping access to opportunity total fall enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by attendance status, sex of student, and control of institution: selected years, 1947 through 2029 biennial survey of education in the united states; opening fall enrollment in higher education fall enrollment component; and enrollment in degree-granting institutions projection model total fall enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by level of enrollment, sex, attendance status, and race/ethnicity or nonresident alien status of student: selected years fall enrollment, degrees conferred, and expenditures in degree-granting historically black colleges and universities fall enrollment in degree-granting historically black colleges and universities, by sex of student and level and control of institution: selected years fall enrollment survey" (ipeds-ef:86-99); and ipeds spring selected statistics on degree-granting historically black colleges and universities, by control and level of institution: selected years fall enrollment component bachelor's degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by race/ethnicity and sex of student: selected years, 1976-77 through 2017-18 higher education general information survey (hegis) percentage distribution of first-time, full-time bachelor's degree-seeking students at 4-year postsecondary institutions 6 years after entry, by completion and enrollment status at first institution attended, sex, race/ethnicity, control of institution, and percentage of applications accepted: cohort entry years 2007 and 2012 integrated postsecondary education data system (ipeds), winter 2013-14 and winter 2018-19 graduation rates component; and ipeds fall choosing an hbcu: an opportunity to pursue racial self-development predictors of black students' race-related reasons for choosing an hbcu and intentions to engage in racial identity-relevant behaviors permission to remain among us: education for blacks in defining and redirecting a school-to-prison pipeline in search of our mothers' gardens: womanist prose mammy: a century of race, gender, and southern memory talking back": the perceptions and experiences of black girls who attend city high school delayed college entry and the socioeconomic gap: examining the roles of student plans ebony and ivy: race, slavery, and the troubled history of americas a response to racism: how hbcu enrollment grew in the face of hatred stories untold: counternarratives to anti-blackness and deficit-oriented discourse concerning hbcus critical race feminism: a reader having their lives narrowed down? the state of black women's college success unaccounted foundations: black girls, anti-black racism, and punishment in schools angered: black and non-black girls of color at the intersections of violence and school discipline in the united states whose culture has capital? a critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth from jim crow to affirmative action and back again: a critical race discussion of racialized rationales and access to higher education the colleges are watching her research investigates black participation in higher education, with an emphasis on the sociology of race, gender, and inequities in accessing postsecondary options. specifically, mclewis examines how black women, as they navigate the higher education terrain, experience intersecting systems of power and how they negotiate their multifaceted identities key: cord-0059149-xu3bghpa authors: marques, luiz title: climate emergency date: 2020-04-29 journal: capitalism and environmental collapse doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-47527-7_7 sha: c0c33cff520f2a0a2ab5512990f3630d1ff395bf doc_id: 59149 cord_uid: xu3bghpa the increasing earth’s energy imbalance (eei) is the most systemic and impending threat to humankind and to the biosphere in general. this chapter will address problems on which there is scientific consensus, notably expressed in the ipcc’s assessment reports, while the next one will deal more broadly with the uncertainties about these ongoing processes’ possible outcomes. both chapters present a unitary and articulated view of the current climate emergency and should, therefore, be considered together. there is clear evidence that the current atmospheric concentration of co(2) is unprecedented, considering the past three million years. as a result, average global warming reached 1 °c in 2015 and 1.2 °c in 2019 above the pre-industrial period. it is now accelerating toward 1.5 °c, a very dangerous level of warming, considered imminent by the majority of climate scientists. furthermore, given society’s weak political resistance and the current power of corporations to impose their worldviews and business plans on humanity, a global average warming below 2 °c is increasingly considered a social–physical impossibility. with the absence of drastic and immediate reductions in ghg emissions, the most likely scenarios lead to an average global warming between 3.1 °c and 4.8 °c by 2100. it is difficult to imagine the terribly inhospitable world that would be created by this catastrophic warming, but there are many attempts to highlight at least some of its most likely features. the physiochemical processes involving carbon release and removal from the atmosphere and oceans were in balance before the industrial revolution. in less than two centuries, and especially after 1950 (steffen et al. 2015) , deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels caused an increasing share of carbon-accumulated and stored in forests and underground during historical periods and preceding geological timesto be released into the earth system. we saw in chapter two that between 1800 and 2010, the growing globalization of capitalism was responsible for the destruction of ten million km 2 of forests on the planet. we also saw that between 2001 and 2018 alone, there was a global decrease in tree cover of 3.61 million km 2 ( fig. 2.3 ). due to deforestation, heavily concentrated in the last 50 years, only 450 gt of carbon was stored by the terrestrial biomass in 2018, a reduction of more than 50% compared to 916 gt of carbon present in the hypothetical absence of land use change, under current climate conditions (erb et al. 2018) . regarding co 2 emissions from 1750 to 2018, more than 1600 gtco 2 have been emitted into the atmosphere, especially by industrialized societies. the curve of increase in these emissions is so steep that already in 2014, when a combined 1480 gtco 2 had been released into the atmosphere, more than half of this release had occurred since 1988 (ironically, the year when, thanks to james hansen, the evidence of human-caused warming first became widely known), as shown in fig. 7 .1. more than half of the anthropogenic co 2 emissions since the industrial revolution has occurred in the last three decades, dominated by a runaway globalization of corporate capitalism. the unprecedented concentration of income generated by this process is expressed in the extreme carbon inequality: the richest 10% of people around the world are now responsible for almost 50% of global co 2 emissions, while the poorest 50% are responsible for only 10% of them (gore 2015) . we will discuss this in detail in chapter nine (demography and democracy), but it is worth remembering at the outset that, according to timothy gore, from oxfam, the richest 10% have average carbon footprints 11 times higher than the poorest half of the population and 60 times higher than the poorest 10%. an average australian or american generates 3.5 times the global average, almost 17 tons of co 2 per capita quéré et al. (2015) every year, or more than twice the amount of someone in europe and china (jackson and canadell 2019) . if regulations were to force the richest 10% to cut their co 2 footprint to the level of the european average citizen, global emissions would be reduced by 30% (anderson 2019) . the ngo atmosfair calculates that a simple return flight from london to new york generates almost one ton of co 2 per passenger. this estimate does not include emissions generated by building the airplane, nor any other emissions indirectly generated by this trip. it includes only the co 2 emitted by burning jet fuel. the average citizen of 56 countries in africa and south america emits less co 2 over the whole year than each passenger during that flight alone (kommenda 2019) . the unbridled consumption of the richest 10% explains why there is no deceleration in the increase in global co 2 emissions. figure 7 .2 shows the evolution of these emissions from the burning of fossil fuels between 1965 and 2018. note that in 2017 and 2018, the rate of increase in these emissions was the highest in the second decade and occurred at rates similar to those of the first decade. co 2 emissions went up in 2018 by more than 2%, the fastest rate of increase in the last 7 years. the usa, china, and india increased their emissions by 2.5%, 4.7%, and 6.3%, respectively. using aircraft measurements over canadian oil sands, john liggio and colleagues (2019) indicate that: co 2 emission intensities for oil sand facilities [in canada] are 13-123% larger than those estimated using publically available data. this leads to 64% higher annual ghg emissions from surface mining operations, and 30% higher overall oil sand ghg emissions (17 mt) compared to that reported by industry. according to the ipcc sr1. 5c (2018) , global emissions of co 2 must peak by 2020 to ensure a reasonable chance that global warming will not exceed 1.5 °c above the pre-industrial period until 2100. but, as seen in the previous two chapters, low-carbon renewables are not replacing fossil fuels. they are just diversifying and adding more alternatives to society's energy greed. there are no convincing signs that the fossil fuel consumption curve and, hence, global ghg emissions will begin its decline phase in a foreseeable future. global co 2 emissions hit an all-time high in 2019 (+0.6% from 2018 or about 43.1 gtco 2 , according to the global carbon project), and all projections indicate an increase in fossil fuel consumption over the next decade (andrews 2017). thanks to the measurement method created by charles david keeling (1928 keeling ( -2005 (ppm) at an altitude of 3400 m in the northern subtropics. other centers for measuring these concentrations exist in other countries and latitudes, with very close results. in 1750, these concentrations were at about 227 parts per million (ppm). in 2019, they had momentarily reached 415 ppm. since 2000, the increase in atmospheric co 2 concentrations has been around 20 ppm per decade, which is up to 10 times faster than any sustained rise in co 2 during the past 800,000 years (steffen et al. 2018) . in 2013, when these concentrations hit 400 ppm, ron prinn (2013) warned that there was more co 2 in the earth's atmosphere than ever before in the past three million years (see also rahmstorf 2017) . matteo willeit and colleagues (2019) confirmed this estimate: "the current co 2 concentration is unprecedented over the past three million years," that is, it is equivalent only to the pliocene (the epoch in the geologic timescale that extends from 5.33 million ton 2.58 million years bp). more worrying than the magnitude of these co 2 concentrations is its rate of increase, as shown in table 7 .1. between 1959 and 1997, there was no annual increase above 2.2 ppm. between 1998 and 2016, there were six annual increases above 2.2 ppm. in this most recent period, there were three real jumps of 2.93, 3.03, and 2.77 ppm in 1998, 2015, and 2016 , respectively, and the estimated margin of uncertainty at these growth rates is 0.11 ppm/ year. finally, between may 2018 and may 2019, there is a jump of about 3.5 ppm. three of the four highest annual increases in co 2 atmospheric concentrations have occurred in the past 4 years (2015-2018) . "the rate of co 2 growth over the last decade is 100-200 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age. this is a real shock to the atmosphere" (tans 2017). according to a review published in 2013 by the us national research council of the national academies (somero et al. 2013 ): past increases in co 2 occurred over periods of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, and thus differ considerably from the very rapid present day increase related to human activities. the current rate of increase in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is unprecedented over at least the past 55 million years. the rate is far greater than occurred in even the most rapid events known from earth history, and each of these past events were accompanied by important changes in ocean chemistry and mass extinctions of ocean or terrestrial life or both. 11 1995-2004 1.87 1985-1994 1.42 1975-1984 1.44 1965-1974 1.04 1959-1964 (6 years ken caldeira (2012) presents this same worry: "in geologic history, transitions from low to high-co 2 atmospheres typically happened at rates of less than 0.00001 degree a year. we are re-creating the world of the dinosaurs 5,000 times faster." if we consider the co 2 equivalent (ppm co 2 -eq), that is, the atmospheric concentrations of all ghgs expressed in terms of the atmospheric warming potential of co 2 , the current atmospheric concentration (2019) is not around 410 ppm, but 496 ppm co 2 -eq. (2018) , with a 30% increase in these concentrations in just 40 years: 1979 = 382 ppm; 1990 = 417 ppm; 2010 = 468 ppm; 2018 = 496 ppm (noaa/ aggi, spring 2019). between 2011 and 2018, the average rate of increase of these concentrations was 1.6% per year. if this rate is maintained (without further acceleration), the doubling of these concentrations from 496 ppm to 992 ppm will occur in 45 years, that is, by the mid-2060s, implying a likely average global temperature increase of 3-4 °c above the pre-industrial period. this level of warming is deemed incompatible with any civilization along the lines of what we know today. as the ipcc special report 1.5, 2018 asserted for the umpteenth time, "the total amount of co 2 emitted until we reach the threshold of zero global emissions largely determines the amount of warming to which we are committed. we know, therefore, that much more warming is coming. but any reflection on the future scenarios of the climate system and, thus, on the habitability of our planet, must begin with a brief description of the current state of the global climate system. "the average temperature of the last 5 years [2014-2018] was 1.1°c higher than the pre-industrial average (as defined by the ipcc)" (copernicus climate change service 2019). the 2019 global temperature was 1.2 °c warmer than in the 1880-1920 base period, according to the goddard institute for space studies global temperature analysis (hansen et al. 2020) . global average warming may exceed 1.2 °c by 2020 as "monthly temperatures over the past 12 months [october 2018 -september 2019] have averaged close to 1.2°c above the pre-industrial level." (copernicus climate change service, "surface air temperature for september 2019"). as can be seen, despite the interannual temperature variations caused by el niño and other geophysical phenomena, global warming has become, more than ever before, a certainty that is empirically measurable. this can also be inferred from the following evidence, based on data from giss-nasa, noaa, met office, and wmo: 1. global temperature hasn't been cooler than the twentieth-century average since 1976. 2. "each decade from the 1980s has been successively warmer than all the decades that came before. 2019 concludes the warmest 'cardinal' decade (those spanning years ending 0-9) in records that stretch back to the mid-19th century" (met office, press office, 15/i/2020). 3. of the 22 warmest years on record, 20 have occurred since 1998. 4. the last 6 years (2014-2019) rank as the warmest on record. 5. 2017 and 2019 were the warmest non-el-niño years on record. 6. already in 1999, michael mann, raymond bradley, and malcom hughes had shown, with the famous graphic dubbed hockey stick (mann 2012) , that in the late twentieth century, temperatures were warmer than during the past millennium. more recent research (marcott et al. 2013) , not only confirms the iconic hockey stick but also shows that the global temperature variation observed in the anthropocene (the proposed current geological epoch), especially since the 1980s, is greater than any other variation throughout the holocene (11.700 years ago -to 1950). during these almost 12 millennia, natural climate variability has not reached 0.5 °c above or below the 1961-1990 average. moreover, there is no evidence that the temperature variations observed during the holocene-the socalled medieval climate anomaly and the "little ice age"-were global phenomena. based on pages 2 k, a compilation including nearly 700 records from trees, ice, sediment, corals, cave deposits, and other sources of information, raphael neukom and colleagues (2019) can affirm that the warming observed in the late twentieth century alone occurred simultaneously in more than 98% of the globe. "this provides strong evidence that anthropogenic global warming is not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures, but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years." actually, the earth's current climate has already surpassed the warmest period of the holocene (marcott et al. 2013) and may be as warm as it was during the eemian, the prior interglacial period (hansen et al. 2016 ). 7. current warming exceeds the holocene's natural variability not only in magnitude, but also in speed. it is much greater than the warming that took place in geological times prior to the holocene (aengenheyster et al. 2018 ). 8. the acceleration of warming in the twenty-first century is absolutely exceptional, even in relation to the late twentieth century. the pace of warming multiplied by a factor of 2. there is, therefore, a consistent and growing body of evidence showing that the rise in the earth's average surface temperatures is not only occurring, but also accelerating. however, as is well-known, the earth has not warmed evenly over the past century. two major differentials should be noted in the spatial distribution of warming: (a) warming over continents is faster than over oceans (and, therefore, it tends to be faster in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere); and (b) warming at high latitudes is also faster than global average warming. figure 7 .6 discriminates between terrestrial and ocean warming between 1880 and 2018 relative to the 1880-1920 base period. compared to the 1880-1920 period, global land warming reached 1.8 °c in 2016, dropping to 1.6 °c in 2018, while global ocean warming, naturally much slower, reached 1 °c in 2016 and 0.8 °c in 2018. from the late 1970s on, land and sea warming rates have become more clearly divergent, with land warming increasing at a much faster rate. consequently, in various terrestrial regions of the planet, especially at high latitudes, the warming that occurred until 2019 has already exceeded the 2 °c threshold, when compared to the pre-industrial period. according to data from berkeley earth, roughly one-tenth of the planet surface has already warmed by more than 2 °c when the last 5 years (2014-2018) are compared with the mid-to late 1800. regarding the higher warming velocity at high latitudes when compared to the global average, measurements at the byrd station showed that average temperatures in central west antarctica had already risen by 2.4 °c (+/−1.2 °c) between 1958 and 2010 alone (bromwich et al. 2013 ). 1 over the past 50 years, the arctic region has warmed more than any other region on earth, a phenomenon known as arctic amplification. according to noaa, in the first half of 2010, air temperatures in the arctic were 4 °c warmer than the (box et al. 2019 ). due to these major climate anomalies, we find unprecedented weather patterns in the arctic. in 4 out of the past 5 years (2014-2018), the north pole has experienced the most intense heat waves ever recorded (historical records began in 1958), with temperatures of 17-19 °c above normal (samenow 2018) . in february 2016, parts of the arctic reached temperatures above freezing that were more than 16 °c above the average for this month. in february 2018, although it was still practically without sunlight, siberia's temperature reached 35 °c above the historical average for that month. in the middle of a february 2018 winter night, the temperature in greenland stayed above zero, three times the average of any previous year, for 61 successive hours (watts 2018) . in finland and scandinavia, temperatures have exceeded several historical records, with temperatures of around 33 °c sometimes at latitudes above 70 o n. on the night of july 18 to july 19, 2018, the temperature did not drop below 25.2 °c at 70.7 o n, the hottest night ever seen in northern scandinavia, on the shore of the barents sea in the arctic ocean. outside the arctic, temperatures in the northern hemisphere are also warming at an average rate faster than the southern hemisphere, because, as already mentioned, it contains more land. according to the japan meteorological agency, the rise in temperatures in the northern hemisphere has been consistently double that of the southern hemisphere; in 2018, this rise corresponded, respectively, to 0.41 °c and 0.20 °c above the 1981-2010 average. during the last decade (2008) (2009) (2010) (2011) (2012) (2013) (2014) (2015) (2016) (2017) , the average annual temperature in european land areas was between 1.6 °c and 1.7 °c above the pre-industrial level, but strong temperature anomalies are also found in the southern hemisphere. in the winter of 2015, temperatures reached 3-4 °c above normal in brazil (nobre et al. 2019) . in 2014, the southeastern region of brazil had already registered temperatures between 1 °c and 2 °c higher than the 1961-1990 average (marengo 2014) . and in the northeastern region of the country, the average temperature increased by 2.5 °c in the last decades compared to this same period. as shown also in fig. 7 .6, from 2014 onward, the rise in the temperature curve of ocean, as well as terrestrial areas, becomes steeper. this acceleration in ocean heating has been observed at increasing depths. in the first decade of the twenty-first century, about 30% of the heating was already occurring beyond a depth of 700 meters (balmaseda et al. 2013 ). there was a surge in ocean warming in 2017, by far the hottest year on record for the oceans, when the top two thousand meters of the oceans were 1.51 × 10 22 joules hotter than in 2015, the second hottest year of these records. as a reference, the increase in oceanic heat in 2017 alone was 699 times greater than all the electricity generated in china in 2016 (cheng and zhu 2018) . "the ocean has been heating at a rate of around 0.5-1 watt of energy per m 2 over the past decade, amassing more than 2 × 10 23 joules of energy -the equivalent of roughly five hiroshima bombs exploding every second -since 1990" (katz 2015) . the linear trend of ocean heat content (ohc) at a depth of 0-700 m during 1992-2015 shows a warming trend four times stronger than the 1960-1991 period (cheng et al. 2017 ). an average global warming of 0.74 °c already in 2005 (reported by the ipcc in 2007 2 ) was capable of triggering unbelievable socio-environmental crises in the history of civilization. the suffering inflicted on humans and on so many other lifeforms by the current warming is tremendously greater. it cannot, however, be grasped by abstract trends, such as a global average warming of 1-1.5 °c. in the world of concrete experience, these references are translated in many tragic ways. as stressed by the world health organization (who), vectors, pathogens, and hosts survive and reproduce within a range of optimal climatic conditions. changes in infectious disease transmission patterns are a likely major consequence of climate change. the increasing burden of insect-borne or tick-borne diseases caused by bacteria, viruses, and protozoa is now being exacerbated by higher temperatures. in july 2016, an outbreak of anthrax in siberia killed more than 2000 reindeers. populations of insects such as aedes aegypti and aedes albopictus or arachnids, like ticks, are clearly increasing at low latitudes and spreading toward higher latitudes, thanks to milder winters and longer and warmer summers. these vectors transmit a number of serious, and sometimes lethal, diseases that tend to acquire epidemic proportions. global warming is also fueling a rise in dangerous fungal infections. as pointed out by arturo casadevall, "as the climate has gotten warmer, some of these organisms, including candida auris, have adapted to the higher temperature, and as they adapt, they break through human's protective temperatures" (andrei 2019). global warming also increases ozone concentrations and atmospheric pollution and already decreases yields of major crops in some regions. global maize and wheat production, for instance, declined by 3.8 and 5.5%, respectively, between 1980 and 2008, relative to a counterfactual without climate trends (lobell et al. 2011) . furthermore, according to kristie ebi and irakli loladze (2019): increased concentrations of co 2 -by directly affecting plants-worsen the nutritional quality of food by decreasing protein and mineral concentrations by 5-15%, and b vitamins by up to 30%. higher co 2 concentrations increase photosynthesis in c 3 plants (e.g., wheat, rice, potatoes, barley), which can increase crop yields. but those increases come at the cost of lower nutritional quality as plants accumulate more carbohydrates and less minerals (e.g., iron and zinc), which can negatively affect human nutrition. current warming is the indirect cause of an increasing number of deaths from droughts, floods, landslides, extreme weather events, forest fires, agricultural crises, malnutrition, forced displacement, etc. moreover, it is the direct cause of heat waves, defined as a combined measure of temperature and relative humidity (heat index). an extreme heat wave occurs when summertime temperatures are much hotter and/or humid than is typical for a location. increasingly hot summers are now taking place with more frequent and extreme heat waves, such as the heat wave that swept europe in 2003, australia in 2012-2013 and 2019-2020, the "lucifer" heat wave in europe in 2017, and the heat waves that hit the northern hemisphere in 2018, 2019 and 2020. warmer winters also follow, sometimes (since the 1990s) with exceptional cold spikes in north america and eurasia (overland et al. 2016; kretschmer 2018) . but, the disproportion between hot and cold record temperatures is stark. in 2018, a year without el niño, weather stations recorded 40 cold records and 430 absolute heat records (wong 2019) . today, exposure, for just a few hours, to an extreme heat wave can cause damage to the brain and other vital organs or even death by hyperthermia, heat exhaustion, or heat stroke. this is especially the case after 2003, when the first of these welldocumented phenomena in europe caused about 70,000 premature deaths. from june to october 2010, a second heat wave with several record-breaking temperatures devastated the sahel, the eastern united states, the middle east, eastern europe, russia, and china, causing deadly forest fires. in several regions of russia, one of the countries most affected by these fires, temperatures in june and july 2010 ranged from 36 °c to 42.3 °c (belogorsk), with 44 °c being the highest temperature ever recorded in russia on july 11, 2010, in yashkul, near the black sea. since 2015, the world meteorological organization (wmo) has repeatedly acknowledged unbearable temperatures for the human body, between 45 °c and 54 °c, in china, india, pakistan (53.7 °c), afghanistan, iran, iraq, jordan, oman, turkey, france (45.9 °c), spain (47.7 °c), australia (49.9 °c), and kuwait (mitribah, 2016, 54 °c), the first country to make it illegal to work in the sun from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. between july 1 and august 31. according to the wmo archive of weather and climate extremes, the mitribah, kuwait temperature is now accepted as the highest temperature ever recorded for the continental region of asia. in june 2019, temperatures reached 48 °c in new delhi, the highest ever recorded in the capital in this month, and hundreds of people were killed in the eastern state of bihar, where a curfew was imposed, preventing people from going outside. the nature editorial of june 22, 2017, reflects the concern that heat waves are increasingly exceeding human thermoregulatory capacity: from extreme rainfall to rising sea levels, global warming is expected to wreak havoc on human lives. sometimes, the most straightforward impact -the warming itself -is overlooked. yet heat kills. the body, after all, has evolved to work in a fairly narrow temperature range. our sweat-based cooling mechanism is crude; beyond a certain combination of high temperature and humidity, it fails. to be outside and exposed to such an environment for any length of time soon becomes a death sentence. camilo mora and colleagues (2017) identified a global threshold beyond which daily mean surface air temperature and relative humidity become deadly and showed that around 30% of the world's population (13.6% of land area) is currently exposed to climatic conditions exceeding this deadly threshold for at least 20 days a year. also, the "lancet countdown," a collective effort published under the coordination of nick watts (2017) , affirms that: the evidence is clear that exposure to more frequent and intense heatwaves are increasing, with an estimated 125 million additional vulnerable adults exposed to heatwaves from 2000 to 2016. higher ambient temperatures have resulted in estimated reduction of 5.3% in labour productivity, globally, from 2000 to 2016. the current trend toward more intense, expansive, longer-lasting, and more frequent heat waves is clear. james hansen, makiko sato, and reto ruedy (2012) demonstrated a higher probability of extremely hot summers compared to the years 1951-1980 and "the emergence of a category of 'extremely hot' summers, more than 3σ [standard deviations] warmer than the base period mean" . moreover, while these extreme summer heat waves covered much less than 1% of earth's surface during the base period, they typically covered about 10% of the land area in 2012. concerning the number and the recurrence of extreme heat waves, "worldwide, the number of local record-breaking monthly temperature extremes is now on average five times larger than expected in a climate with no long-term warming" (coumou et al. 2013) . events that would occur twice a century in the early 2000s are now expected to occur twice a decade (christidis et al. 2014 ). referring to the european heat waves in the summer of 2018, peter stott declared at the cop24 (december 2018) that "the intensity of this summer's heatwave is around 30 times more likely than would have been the case without climate change." 3 the future will bring more severe and more lethal heat waves. mora and colleagues (2017) predict that a global warming of 2 °c could expose 48% of the population to deadly heat waves. they project that in 2100, this percentage will be about 74% of the global population, maintaining the current scenario of rising emissions with global warming at 4 °c above the pre-industrial period. the heat lethality threshold will then be reached for 365 days a year in the equatorial region, making it, therefore, uninhabitable and will condemn what remains of the amazon rainforest and of rainforests in general to final disappearance. the authors conclude: "an increasing threat to human life from excess heat now seems almost inevitable, but will be greatly aggravated if greenhouse gases are not considerably reduced." commenting on his own work, camilo mora concludes: "for heat waves, our options are now between bad or terrible. many people around the world are already paying the ultimate price of heatwaves" (as quoted by chow 2019). according to the ipcc's special report 1.5 °c (2018) , the difference between a warming of 1.5 °c and a warming of 2 °c in the tropics is equivalent to a difference in heat waves lasting 2 or 3 months. in europe, a heating of 1.5 °c or 2 °c is expected to cause the july 2018 heat wave to repeat itself every 2 years or every year, respectively. in the usa, by the mid-twenty-first century (2036-2065), the annual numbers of days with heat indices exceeding 37.8 °c and 40.6 °c are projected to double or triple under rcp4.5 and rcp8.5 emission scenarios, respectively, compared to a 1971-2000 baseline (dahl et al. 2019 ). in a historic ted talk, titled "why i must speak about climate change" (2012), james hansen, former director of nasa's goddard institute for space studies, made the most didactic and decisive argument on how the earth's system is already locked into successive temperature increases: there is a temporary energy imbalance. more energy is coming in than going out until earth warms up enough to again radiate to space as much energy as it absorbs from the sun. more warming is in the pipeline. it will occur without adding any more ghg. more recently, james hansen and colleagues (2016) reiterated the inevitability of this future warning: "earth is out of energy balance with present atmospheric composition, implying that more warming is in the pipeline." let us repeat once more: as long as this earth energy imbalance (eei) persists, the planet's temperature will inevitably increase, even "without adding any more ghg," as james hansen states. this imbalance is already huge. according to colleagues (2016, 2018) , the earth's current energy imbalance (eei) amounts to about 1 watt/ m 2 (0.9 +/− 0.3 w/m 2 ) or about 500 terawatts globally for the period of 2005-2014. how much is a terawatt (tw) or a million megawatts? in 2008, for example, humans used energy (this includes all types of energy, not just electricity) at an average rate of about 16.5 tw of power. 4 "even during the solar minimum," james hansen (2018) says, "it was equivalent to the energy of 400,000 hiroshima atomic bombs per day every day of the year." moreover, simulations done by catherine ricke and ken caldeira (2014)-on the time series of marginal warming for the first 100 years after co 2 emission-show that "maximum warming occurs a median of 10.1 years after the co 2 emission event." in other words, the more than 41gt of co 2 emitted by mankind in 2019 will have its full impact on global warming in the late 2020s. in short, we are warming the planet on credit. the ipcc and almost all statements on global warming take the "pre-industrial" period as their reference period and place it in the years 1850 -1900 . michael mann (2015 correctly disputes this conventional definition: [t] he base year implicitly used to define "pre-industrial" conditions is 1875, the mid-point of that interval. yet the industrial revolution, and the rise in atmospheric co 2 concentrations associated with it, began more than a century earlier. (…) it is evident that roughly 0.3 °c greenhouse warming had already taken place by 1900, and roughly 0.2 °c warming by 1870. while that might seem like a minor amount of warming, it has significant implications for the challenge we face in stabilizing warming below 2 °c, let alone 1.5 °c. if mann's adjustment is adopted, the current global warming average of 1.2 °c (2019) should be about 1.5 °c above the "true" pre-industrial period (1750-1850). but even if we adopt the conventional base period (the second half of the nineteenth century), the strong 2016 el niño effect caused the planet's average temperature to approach or even momentarily surpass the paris agreement target: in february 2016, for the first time, monthly average global warming exceeded 1.5 °c above the 1880-1899 average, and the year 2016, as a whole, was hotter than this same period by an average of 1.24 °c. in any case, a global warming average above 1.5 °c relative to the 1850-1900 average is considered imminent. the ipcc (sr1.5 2018) projects that "global warming is likely to reach 1.5°c between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate." this prediction was considered conservative by many scientists. as michael mann warned: "we are closer to the 1.5°c and 2°c thresholds than they [ipcc, sr1.5 2018] indicate and our available carbon budget for avoiding those critical thresholds is considerably smaller than they imply. in other words, they paint an overly rosy scenario by ignoring some relevant literature" (waldman 2018) . also for the european environment agency, the 1.5 °c mark can be reached much earlier than the ipcc suggests: "if the concentrations of the different greenhouse gases continue to increase at current rates, peak concentration levels required to stay below a temperature increase of 1.5°c above pre-industrial levels could be reached within the next 3-13 years." 5 the ipcc's prediction can be considered too cautious also because, as seen above (fig. 7.5 ), global warming is not increasing at the same rate. it is currently (2008) (2009) (2010) (2011) (2012) (2013) (2014) (2015) (2016) (2017) accelerating and unfolding at a rate of 0.43 °c per decade. according to the met office's decadal forecast (january 2020), during the 5-year period 2020-2024, global average temperature is expected to remain between 1.06 °c and 1.62 °c (90% confidence range) above the pre-industrial period (1850-1900) with a small (~10%) chance of 1 year temporarily exceeding 1.5 °c. this first possible breach of the 1.5 °c threshold in the global annual average by 2024 would still be momentary, that is, it is subject to the usual interannual temperature variations. but it may become irreversible as early as the second half of the third decade (henley and king 2017; stone 2017; xu et al. 2018 ). 6 kevin trenberth expresses the same view. he declared in 2016: "i don't see at all how we're going to not go through the 1.5 degree-number in the next decade or so" (schlossberg 2016) . more important than predicting the date-after 2025 or after 2030 (ipcc)when we will irreversibly go beyond 1.5 °c, is understanding that avoiding this threshold now seems to be a nearly impossible task. for chris field, co-director of the ipcc, "the 1.5°c goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. we should be under no illusions about the task we face" (mckie 2016). drew shindell, co-author of the ipcc sr1. 5 (2018) , affirmed in september 5 see eea's indicator assessment, published on 5/xii/2019, last modified 25/ii/2020. https:// www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/atmospheric-greenhouse-gas-concentrations-6/ assessment-1 6 see also climate central research report, "flirting with the 1.5 °c threshold." 20/iv/2016 2018: "it's extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5°c target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that. while it's technically possible, it's extremely improbable, absent a real sea change in the way we evaluate risk. we are nowhere near that" (milman 2019) . with the us decision to leave the paris agreement, the further increases in coal consumption in 2017 and 2018 (see chap. 6) , and the brutal regression in climate mitigation policies in brazil, australia, japan, and some eastern european countries, the current chances of slowing down global warming are virtually nil. that said, according to the laws of physics, what is the least amount of warming possible for this century? in november 2017, richard millar and colleagues maintained that keeping global warming below 2 °c, this century was not yet a geophysical impossibility: limiting cumulative post-2015 co 2 emissions to about 200 gtc would limit post-2015 warming to less than 0.6 °c in 66% of earth system model members of the cmip5 [coupled model intercomparison project phase 5] ensemble with no mitigation of other climate drivers, increasing to 240 gtc with ambitious non-co 2 mitigation. (…) assuming emissions peak and decline to below current levels by 2030, and continue thereafter on a much steeper decline, which would be historically unprecedented but consistent with a standard ambitious mitigation scenario (rcp2.6), results in a likely range of peak warming of 1.2-2.0 °c above the mid-nineteenth century. this projection has been the subject of much criticism. andrew schurer and colleagues (2018), for example, criticized the author's starting point, that is, the use of an observational dataset (hadcrut4) that does not include data from the arctic, which has been found to be warming at a rate much faster than the global mean. in fact, in 2017 global warming was already about 1.1 °c above the pre-industrial period, not "about 0.9°c from the mid-nineteenth century," as the authors propose. furthermore, millar and colleagues do not seem to take due account of the recent increase in atmospheric concentrations of methane and their potential positive feedbacks on the global climate system in a post-1. 5 °c world (wadhams 2015 5 °c world (wadhams , 2016 dean et al. 2018; beckwith 2019; see chap. 8, particularly sect. 8.2 the arctic methane conundrum). the increased vulnerability of all forests to fires and their diminishing ability to function as a carbon sink are other positive feedbacks that are not mentioned in the study in question. in fact, in terrestrial ecosystems, the vegetation canopy, from tropical and boreal forests to semi-arid vegetation (poulter et al. 2014) , is largely responsible for land sink, that is, the removal of carbon from the atmosphere by plants through photosynthesis. according to simon l. lewis (2009) , in the years of the first decade of the century, tropical forests were absorbing 18% of the co 2 added to the atmosphere each year from the burning of fossil fuels. in the tropics, however, biomass mortality increased, leading to a shortening of carbon residence times. thus, the benefit once provided by the net increase in biomass has been reversed and is declining in recent years, as shown by roel brienen and colleagues (2015) : atmospheric carbon dioxide records indicate that the land surface has acted as a strong global carbon sink over recent decades, with a substantial fraction of this sink probably located in the tropics, particularly in the amazon. (…) we find a long-term decreasing trend of carbon accumulation [in the amazon forest]. rates of net increase in above-ground biomass declined by one-third during the past decade compared to the 1990s. suppose for a moment, however, that millar and colleagues are correct in their affirmation that keeping global warming below 2 °c is not yet a "geophysical impossibility." that would be great news. the bad news is that, given society's weak political resistance and the current strong power of corporations to impose their paradigms, worldviews, and business plans on humanity, a global average warming below 2 °c is now considered a social-physical impossibility. the assumption that the great acceleration, which began around 1950 (steffen et al. 2015) , might be converted into a "great deceleration" while maintaining the political status quo is illusory. the ten editions of the emissions gap report produced by the united nations environment programme (unep) measure the gap between what countries have pledged to do to reduce their ghg emissions and what they need to do to meet the unfccc goals. niklas höhne and colleagues (2020) show that "the gap has widened by as much as four times since 2010." the hypothesis envisioned by millar and colleagues that we will not exceed a 200 gtc (about 730 gtco 2 ) carbon budget, based on 2015 emissions, is clearly disconnected from reality. global annual ghg emissions increased by 14% between 2008 and 2018. in the present scenario, nothing in the logic of the capital accumulation driving our thermo-fossil civilization toward its end allows for such a conjecture. from 2016 to 2018 alone, about 120 gtco 2 and about 160 gtco 2 -eq were emitted globally. these co 2 emission levels are projected to grow 0.6% in 2019. let us not fool ourselves. after an important, but probably ephemeral, reduction in 2020 caused by the covid-19 pandemic, global co 2 emissions will remain substantially unchanged or even increase further in the next years. it is practically certain, therefore, that between 2016 and 2024 at least an additional 320 gtco 2 will have been emitted globally; this is about 44% of the carbon budget allowed by the calculations of richard millar and colleagues in order to not exceed a warming of 2 °c above the pre-industrial period. figure 7 .7 shows how radical the reduction in anthropogenic emissions must be or should have been since 2016, in order to keep global average warming between 1.5 °c and 2 °c until 2100. depending on the chosen probability, a warming below 2 °c would imply that future emissions be limited to a range between 150 and 1050 gtco 2 . christiana figueres and colleagues (2017) work with the arithmetic mean of these two values (600 gtco 2 ). to reach this limit, net emissions should be zeroed by 2040 and remain zero throughout the century. in this way, if we had started the reduction curve in 2016, we would have until 2045 to permanently clear emissions. nothing indicates that we will begin a steep decline of co 2 emissions between 2020 and 2024. if we finally start the decline in net co 2 emissions by 2025, we will have to zero them by 2035 and keep them at zero after that. as christiana figueres and colleagues affirmed in 2017, "delaying the peak by a decade gives too little time to transform the economy." as is well-known, while the diplomats' applause still resounded, the paris agreement goal to limit global warming "well below" 2 °c above the pre-industrial period was immediately denounced by james hansen and others as a fictional play (milman 2015) : it's a fraud really, a fake. it's just bullshit for them to say: 'we'll have a 2c warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.' it's just worthless words. there is no action, just promises. as long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned. immediately thereafter, in january 2016, 11 eminent scientists affirmed that the paris agreement raised a false hope and that the 2 °c warming threshold had become unattainable without a massive use of geo-engineering (bawden 2016) 7 : the time for the wishful thinking and blind optimism that has characterized the debate on climate change is over. the time for hard facts and decisions is now. our backs are against the wall and we must now start the process of preparing for geo-engineering. we must do this in the knowledge that its chances of success are small and the risks of implementation are great. successive facts confirm these verdicts. continuing to invoke the pledges made by its signatories as an apotropaic formula cannot and should not conceal the emptiness of this agreement. such lack of credibility is underlined by david victor and colleagues (2017): no major advanced industrialized country is on track to meet its pledges to control the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change. wishful thinking and bravado are eclipsing reality (…) national governments are making promises that they are unable to honour. peter wadhams endorses this statement, reaffirming his disbelief in the ability of governments-partners in corporations' expansive strategies and also dependent on them-to fulfill their own commitments: "the [uk] government can make a commitment saying in 30 years time it will reduce our co 2 emissions by 80%. they can quote any number they like because they have no intention of keeping to it." 8 on may 2019, the uk parliament declared a "climate change emergency." hundreds of cities, towns, and countries have also declared "climate emergencies" during 2019. oxford dictionaries has declared "climate emergency" the word of the year for 2019 and defined it as "a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it." but, again, these declarations are not legally binding, and there is no clear definition of what they imply in economic and political terms (see nature 9/v/2019, p. 165). australia, canada, japan, south korea, and south africa are not even on track to achieve their now plainly inadequate 2015 pledges (höhne et al. 2020) . furthermore, we must keep in mind that the paris agreement is far from being universal. in 2019 it had not yet been ratified by 13 countries which together produce almost a quarter of world's oil, including angola, libya, iraq, iran, and kuwait. with the us decision to abandon the agreement, more than a third of the world's oil production comes from countries that cannot be accused of not complying with the paris agreement because they do not even officially recognize it. finally, the 2018 tragic election of a far-right government in brazil, the seventh largest co 2 emitter on the planet, is another major blow to the effectiveness of global governance. the dynamics of increased warming, driven by growing ghg emissions and by climate positive feedbacks (see chap. 8) , combined with the failure of the paris agreement, explain the scientific community's skepticism as to the possibility of not exceeding the 2 °c target. three years ago, adrian raftery and colleagues (2017) estimated that there was only a 5% chance that average global warming would be below 2 °c by 2100, compared to the pre-industrial period. also, in 2017, andrew simms surveyed the opinion of a number of experienced climatologists on what chances remain of us not exceeding a global warming of 2 °c above the preindustrial period: in short, not a single one of the scientists polled thought the 2c target likely to be met. bill mcguire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at university college london, is most emphatic. "my personal view is that there is not a cat in hell's chance." the ipcc special report 1.5 (2018) shows that a warming of 2 °c causes far more deleterious effects on human societies and biodiversity than a warming of 1.5 °c, which is already considered very dangerous. as might be expected from an ipcc report, its findings reflect the most representative positions of the scientific community. in fact, as early as 2017, sir brian hoskins had stated to andrew simms of the guardian: "we have no evidence that a 1.9°c rise is something we can easily cope with, and 2.1°c is a disaster." it is certainly a disaster for its reasonably known effects, based on the climate models, but perhaps and most importantly, it is to be feared for its still uncertain or unknown effects (discussed in the next chapter). also, for the scientists at realclimate, a "global warming of 2°c would leave the earth warmer than it has been in millions of years." 9 matteo willeit and colleagues (2019) give chronological precision to this statement: "global temperature never exceeded the preindustrial value by more than 2°c during the quaternary" (the last 2.58 million years). hence, it now seems inevitable that in the near future, the earth will experience an average temperature never faced by our species and, a fortiori, by agriculture and by the human civilizations that flourished in the 11.7 millennia of relative climatic stability of the holocene. if keeping the earth's temperature below 2 °c now seems like a social-physical impossibility, one question arises: when will average planetary temperatures exceed the columns of hercules of climate, this 2 °c limit of global warming that we could never allow ourselves to exceed? without any intention of weighing the uncertainties that hinder a more precise answer to this question, projections on a warming of 2 °c above the pre-industrial period converge to the second quarter of this century and, more precisely, to the period between 2035 and 2045. according to the potsdam institute for climate impact research (2012), "we could see a 2°c world in the space of one generation." michael mann (2014) projects that, maintaining the baseline scenario, we may exceed the 2 °c limit from 2036 onward. according to mann, to the balance of scientific evidence suggests that there will be a significant net harmful impact on ecosystem services worldwide if global mean surface temperature increases more than 2 °c above pre-industrial levels (medium certainty). this would require co 2 stabilization at less than 450 ppm (https://slideplayer.com/slide/711361/). the ipcc fourth assessment report (ar4 2007) reiterates this prognosis, even if less explicitly: "any co 2 stabilisation target above 450 ppm is associated with a significant probability of triggering a large-scale climatic event." 10 figure 7 .8, proposed by the global carbon project (gcp), reaffirms all these estimates. sonia seneviratne and colleagues (2016) point out that a 2 °c target for global warming implies increases much higher than 2 °c over most land regions. thus, although the authors consider that a 2 °c global warming above the industrial period will occur only by mid-2040, this warming threshold was already crossed in the arctic around the year 2000 and should be crossed regionally by 2030 "in the mediterranean, brazil and the contiguous u.s., under the business-as-usual (rcp8.5) emissions scenario." if we maintain the current trajectory of increasing ghg emissions, deforestation, biodiversity decline, and pollution, the destruction of the environmental foundations that enable the most basic functions of contemporary societies is unavoidable. an environmental collapse of unfathomable dimensions is indeed inevitable with a global warming of 2.6-4.8 °c, which should be reached by the end of this century, as shown in fig. 7.9 . figure 7 .9 shows the various projections of increase in average surface temperatures until 2100 in relation to the pre-industrial period and in correlation with ghg emission levels. they can be summarized in three scenarios: 1. scenario one, consistent with the paris agreement targets-a global warming "well below" 2 °c (between 1.3 °c and 1.7 °c) by 2100 above the pre-industrial period-assumes that the four conditions set by the ipcc special report 1.5 (2018) brazil is intensifying its oil production and the destruction of its forests, and peak oil demand will not be reached in the short term. indeed, according to eia's short-term energy outlook (11/iii/2020), global oil and liquid fuels demand will rise by less than 0.4 million b/d in 2020 and by 1.7 million b/d in 2021. therefore, this level of warming cannot be considered a likely scenario. 3. scenarios 3 and 4, thus, remain the most likely under current conditions. they lead to an average global warming between 3.1 °c and 4.8 °c by 2100. it should be kept in mind that these are global average temperatures. at high latitudes and over land, mostly across the northern hemisphere, the warming will likely be double that. according to most models, 4 °c global average surface temperature implies 5-6 °c global land mean. on the hottest days, there will be an increase of [6] [7] [8] [8] [9] [10] in central europe, and 10-12 °c in new york. in fact, according to the ipcc ar5 working group iii (2014), in the absence of strong climate mitigation policies capable of altering this trajectory (rcp 8.5 w/ m 2 ), an average global warming of 4.1-4.8 °c above the pre-industrial period will probably be reached during this century. these ipcc projections reiterate the unep's updated emissions gap report (2012), according to which current ghg emission trends are consistent with emission pathways that reach warming in the range of 3.5-5 °c by 2100. the same prognosis is proposed by the world energy outlook (iea 2012) and by turn down the heat: why a 4 °c warmer world must be avoided (2013), a report by the potsdam institute for climate impact research and climate analytics. according to this report: new assessments of business-as-usual emissions (…) as well as recent reevaluations of the likely emission consequences of pledges and targets adopted by countries, point to a considerable likelihood of warming reaching 4 °c above pre-industrial levels within this century. (…) the most recent generation of energy-economic models estimates emissions in the absence of further substantial policy action (business as usual), with the median projections reaching a warming of 4.7 °c above pre-industrial levels by 2100, with a 40% chance of exceeding 5 °c. this report also warns that in this scenario (rcp8.5 w/m 2 ), "warming continues to increase until the end of the century with global-mean land surface temperature for the northern hemisphere summer reaching nearly 6.5°c above the 1951-80 baseline by 2100." there is now a growing consensus, also reinforced by the ipcc, that a warming of 3 °c is considered "beyond adaptation." this is also what jean jouzel, former vice president of ipcc (2002) (2003) (2004) (2005) (2006) (2007) (2008) (2009) (2010) (2011) (2012) (2013) (2014) (2015) , affirms in an interview with le monde in 2019: "i believe that we will not be able to adapt to a warming of 3°c and that we will experience major conflicts" (herzberg 2019) . this emerging consensus fosters a new interpretation of the terms of the united nations framework convention on climate change (unfccc 1992). as is wellknown, the ultimate objective of this convention is to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference (dai) with the climate system." 11 in line with this goal, the ipcc third assessment report (2001) produced the famous five reasons for concern (rfcs), further updated by the fourth assessment report (2007) and again by joel smith and colleagues (2009). 12 returning to these two central notions of climate science-dai and rfcs-yangyang xu and veerabhadran ramanathan (2017) interpret the paris agreement in terms of three climate risk categories: we are proposing the following extension to the dai risk categorization: warming greater than 1.5 °c as "dangerous"; warming greater than 3 °c as "catastrophic?"; and warming in excess of 5 °c as "unknown??," with the understanding that changes of this magnitude, not experienced in the last 20+ million years, pose existential threats to a majority of the population. the question mark denotes the subjective nature of our deduction and the fact that catastrophe can strike at even lower warming levels. regarding a warming beyond 3 °c, the first major concern, state the authors, "is the issue of tipping points" (see also chap. 8): several studies have concluded that 3 to 5 °c global warming is likely to be the threshold for tipping points such as the collapse of the western antarctic ice sheet, shutdown of deep water circulation in the north atlantic, dieback of amazon rainforests as well as boreal forests, and collapse of the west african monsoon, among others. there is a collective effort to specify the most likely deadlines by which the planet's average temperatures could exceed 3 °c or 4 °c, maintaining the current trajectory of emissions and deforestation. projections converge on the third quarter of the century, as shown below: 11 see unfccc, article 2 -objective: "the ultimate objective of this convention (...) is to achieve (…) stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." see also mann (2009). 12 the five reasons for concern (rfc) are (1) unique and threatened systems; (2) frequency and severity of extreme climate events; (3) global distribution and balance of impacts; (4) total economic and ecological impacts, and (5) egorized "as 'unknown??', with the understanding that changes of this magnitude, not experienced in the last 20+ million years, pose existential threats to a majority of the population" (xu and ramanathan 2017) . and it should be remembered that the authors also add: "the question mark denotes the subjective nature of our deduction and the fact that catastrophe can strike at even lower warming levels." the global carbon project (gcp) estimates that, maintaining the 2016 level of co 2 emissions, there is a 66% chance of reaching a global warming of 3 °c by betts and colleagues (2011) project that our currently fossil intensive scenario "would lead to a warming of 4°c relative to pre-industrial during the 2070s. if carbon-cycle feedbacks are stronger carbon brief (mcsweeney 2018), and the project high-end climate impact and extremes (helix), supported by the european commission (richardson & bradshaw 2017), attempt to describe the world created by a global average warming between 3.1 °c and 4.8 °c above the pre-industrial period (scenarios 3 and 4) an increase of about 150% in acidity of the ocean. the death of entire coral reef ecosystems could occur well before 4 °c is reached global marine heat wave days per year multiply by 41 (3.5 °c) (mcsweeney probability of an ice-free arctic summer at least once before hitting temperature limit (3 °c) = 100% probability of an ice-free arctic summer in any 1 year (3 °c) = 63% average drought length (3 °c) = 10 months; eastern europe = 8 months southern europe (3 °c) = 12 months proportion of living creatures projected to lose over 50% of their climatic range (4.5 °c) (mcsweeney 2018): invertebrates = 68%; vertebrates = 44% an estimated 1.8 billion people will potentially reach unprecedented levels of vulnerability to food insecurity (4 °c it is the widely shared opinion in the scientific community that a 4 °c warmer world "would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level the point of no return for climate action: effects of climate uncertainty and risk tolerance going beyond dangerous climate change: exploring the void between rhetoric and reality in reducing carbon emissions. public lecture. london school of economics global warming fuels rise of dangerous fungal infections the gulf between the paris climate agreement and energy projections". energy matters, 18/i distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content cop21: paris deal far too weak to prevent devastating climate change, academics warn rise of the methane over time and latitude when could global warming reach 4°c? global, regional, and national fossil-fuel co2 emissions. carbon dioxide information analysis center key indicators of arctic climate change long-term decline of the amazon carbon sink central west antarctica among the most rapidly warming regions on earth the great climate experiment. how far can we push the planet? improved estimates of ocean heat content from 1960 to 2017 was the warmest year on record for the global ocean 10 worst-case climate predictions if we don't keep global temperatures under 1.5 degrees celsius dramatically increasing chance of extremely hot summers since the 2003 european heatwave last four years have been the warmest on record -and co 2 continues to rise historic and future increase in the global land area affected by monthly heat extremes increased frequency of and population exposure to extreme heat index days in the united states during the 21st century methane feedbacks to the global climate system in a warmer world elevated atmospheric co2 concentrations and climate change will affect our food's quality and quantity" the lancet unexpectedly large impact of forest management and grazing on global vegetation biomass three years to safeguard our climate emissions are still rising: ramp up the cuts". nature, 5/xii extreme carbon inequality perception of climate change ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2°c global warming could be dangerous". atmospheric chemistry and physics. an interactive open-access journal of the european geosciences union climate change in a nutshell: the gathering storm global temperature in 2018 and beyond". columbia university, 6/ ii/2019 global temperature in trajectories toward the 1.5°c paris target: modulation by the interdecadal pacific oscillation l'effondrement n'est pas imminent. je nous vois griller à petit feu emissions: world has four times the work or one-third of the time what's 'fair' when it comes to carbon emissions how long can oceans continue to absorb earth's excess heat carbon calculator: how taking one flight emits as much as many people do in a year more-persistent weak stratospheric polar vortex states linked to cold extremes don't deploy negative emissions technologies without ethical analysis global carbon budget 2014 increasing carbon storage in intact african tropical forests measured canadian oil sands co 2 emissions are higher than estimates made using internationally recommended methods climate trends and global crop production since defining dangerous anthropogenic interference how close are we to 'dangerous' planetary warming? a reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years o futuro clima do brasil cut emissions per capita to 1955 levels scientists warn world will miss key climate target". the guardian, 6/viii/2016. mcsweeney, robert emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °c james hansen, father of climate change awareness, calls paris talks 'a fraud global risk of deadly heat no evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial common era climate change risks in brazil nonlinear response of mid-latitude weather to the changing arctic turn down the heat: climate extremes, regional impacts, and the case for resilience. a report for the world bank by the potsdam institute for climate impact research and climate analytics contribution of semi-arid ecosystems to interannual variability of the global carbon cycle 400 ppm co 2 ? add other ghgs, and it's equivalent to 478 ppm less than 2°c warming by 2100 unlikely climate action and human wellbeing at a crossroads: historical transformation or backlash? assessment of the impacts of climate change on national level food insecurity using the hunger and climate vulnerability index". high-end climate impacts and extremes (helix) maximum warming occurs about one decade after a carbon dioxide emission another extreme heat wave strikes the north pole already shows record global temperatures interpretations of the paris climate target allowable co 2 emissions based on regional and impact-related climate targets a cat in hell's chance -why we're losing the battle to keep global warming below 2c assessing dangerous climate change through an update of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc) 'reasons for concern review of the federal ocean acidification research and monitoring plan the trajectory of the anthropocene: the great acceleration trajectories of the earth system in the anthropocene insights into earth's energy imbalance from multiple sources climate change and wildfires -how do we know if there is a link? phys. org, 10/viii arctic amplification, climate changing, global warming arctic warming: scientists alarmed by 'crazy' temperature rises the lancet countdown on health and climate change: from 25 years of inaction to a global transformation for public health mid-pleistocene transition in glacial cycles explained by declining co 2 and regolith removal well below 2°c: mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes global warming will happen faster than we think enduring resilience of capitalist power: the role of capitalist education as a technology of governance javed a. ansari sbb dewan university, pakistan livingduration@gmail.com asad shahzad institute of business management, pakistan asad.shahzad@iobm.edu.pk abstract capitalism has experienced several crises since its emergence but its present global dominance apparently remains unassailable. this paper argues that capitalism’s resilience is grounded in the systemic hegemony of capitalist individuality—an individuality, committed to freedom as an ultimate end and seeking abundance in this world. it has been argued that the successful manufacturing of capitalist subjectivity is significantly dependent on the inculcation of capitalist values to the subject of capital through capitalist education. section one focuses on freedom as capitalism’s telos and sketches the historical emergence of capitalist subjectivity formed by processes of capitalist governance. section two investigates the formational role of capitalist education as a technology of capitalist governance. it analyzes capitalist education as a means for the construction of capitalist individuality. section three argues that capitalism’s main antagonists, especially marxist socialism, cannot effectively challenge capitalist hegemony in the lifeworld or at the level of the state because they (i.e. main antagonists) endorse freedom (the 376vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) discussionjournal of education and educational development mailto:livingduration@gmail.com core capitalist value) as an ultimate end in itself. socialism does not propose to alter the subjectivity of an individual that the capitalist education constructs. keywords: capitalism, capitalist education, freedom, socialism, subjectivity introduction capitalism has emerged from the recent global crisis 2008 somewhat strengthened and apparently unassailable. this has been achieved by enhancing the affectivity of the technologies of freedom which are capitalism’s principle instruments of governance. this paper sketches the historical evolution of these technologies and argues that transcending capitalism requires their deconstruction. it argues that such deconstruction cannot be achieved by capitalism’s traditional opponent, socialists in particular–primarily because capitalism’s avowed opponents do not reject freedom as an ultimate value. freedom and the production of capitalist subjectivity freedom as an ideal and a creation of the enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century. from locke and rousseau, kant and hegel to marx and nietzsche all endorse freedom as a value. in other words, the above-mentioned philosophers do not embrace freedom merely as a human capacity, as for example, orthodox christianity does. autonomy and self-determination at the level of the individual, the community, or the human race as a whole is endorsed as the supreme value by all enlightenment thinkers and 377 vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) enduring resilience of capitalist power their followers to the present day (bauman, 1983). the achievement or enhancement of freedom in a negative or positive manner has invariably been the pre-eminent raison d’être of all enlightenment projects (berlin, 2002). historically the free individual and free societies have emerged as a consequence of the european transition from feudalism to capitalism and its accompanying colonization of the rest of the world. capitalism freed men, for they are not born free, as heidegger asserts that they are thrown into a world they do not choose. hayek remarks that “freedom is an artifact of civilization made possible by the gradual evolution of the discipline of civilization which is the discipline of freedom” (hayek, 1979, p. 314). the disciplines of freedom such as capitalist education and the capitalist state are the disciplines of capitalism. indeed, capital accumulation has been the most potent instrument for the enhancement of freedom. capitalism has historically shown itself to be the most effective mode of regulation and organization of free individuality and society. the freeing of the serfs and their reconstitution as a mass of wage laborers who voluntarily sold their labor power for monetary compensation was the first step in the construction of capitalist order. a worker became “a ‘free’ wage laborer who could be freely exploited by capital when not outright enslaved or indentured” (harvey, 2014, p. 57). capitalism embodies “a scale of ethical values in which the traditional scheme of christian values was almost exactly reversed” (tawney, 1949, p. 191). concurrently, market friendly state structures were created to render the people committed to the accumulation of wealth. 378vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) ansari & shahzad technologies of self and societal management have evolved throughout capitalism’s history but what remains constant throughout this historical epoch is the rule of capital ensured by the universalization of wage labor. typically, the capitalist state constructed the free market by educating people to think, reckon and behave as competitive profit and utility maximizing individuals (moore, 1969). john dryzek (2004) accentuates the need to formulate and impose specific mechanisms to bring in control the homo economicus “behavioral proclivities and their consequences” (dryzek, 2004, p. 147). the homo economicus subjectivity signifies the dedicated employee, the avid consumer, the conscientious bureaucrat, the efficient manager. the successful manufacturing of homo economicus is significantly dependent on the inculcation of capitalist values to the subject of capital through capitalist education. thus, in the modern socio-political landscape, “at the base of the modern social order stands not the executioner but the professor. not the guillotine, but the (aptly named) doctorat detat is the main tool and symbol of state power” (gellner, 1983, p. 34). the state functionaries and educationists in the capitalist order have played a key role through political and social governance in articulating the rationalities of freedom which determine the modern /hypermodern individual’s experiences both of the world he inhabits and of his own self. the ‘normalized’ capitalist individual has been produced in history by processes of governance, that is, by strategies for the calculated administration of life in the personal, cultural, economic and political spheres. producing free individuality is an object of capitalist governance in both society and state, and pursuit of this objective has required the use of a range of social technologies and 379 vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) enduring resilience of capitalist power social institutionalizations. building the hospital, the parliament the prison, and more specifically the school, has served as indispensible means for constructing autonomous capitalist individuality. capitalism governs by freeing the individual in the sphere of the market, the family, and the church by placing these spheres within the ambit of the rule of capital understood as the rule of law. the organization of urban space to free individuality was a political concern of capitalist countries during the nineteenth century. capitalist thinking was then haunted by the fear of the mob rioting in concentrated space. the discipline of town planning sought to restructure urban space so as to subject the free individual to the normative gazes of capitalist authority. police forces were constructed and instructed to control, patrol, inspect and supervise populations at district level. censuses were conducted to obtain and analyze micro level data. the police operated not through terror but by setting standards of behavior which separated the ‘normal’ from the ‘pathological’. architectural redesign of streets, squares, parks and access to lighting facilities was a means to institutionalize the expression of disciplined and regulated freedom at the mass level. museums, exhibitions and playgrounds took the place of the village green, the inn, and the parish church, and served to educate the masses through entertainment, thus popularizing capitalist codes of conduct. capitalist education as a technology of governance capitalist education has been employed as a significant means for almost unnoticed inculcation of capitalist values to produce capitalist subjectivity. capitalist education has played a 380vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) ansari & shahzad key role for the social control of physical and mental powers of the individual (harvey, 1992). the capitalist order is characterized by the “inescapable individuality that pervades all of the thinking around human action in the modern period as defined by the inception of the industrial revolution” (imre & griffiths, 2013, p. 99). thus, it was in the above historical context that the school was reinvented as an instrument for the capitalist ‘normalization’ of the child (donald, 1992). it normalized and individualized the pupil by a system of periodic examinations, the imparting of secular curricula, the organization of sport, the design of classrooms, the establishment of supervision systems and the implementation of time tables ensuring punctuality. the child was thus subjected to the gaze of capitalist authority. the school defined the behavioral and vocational norms of capitalist order and the child was judged and taught and disciplined himself/herself according to these norms (foucault, 1977). the school played a key role in the universalization of capitalist rationality. capital in its essence is pure quantity circulating through concrete substances but realizing itself always in the form of expanded quantity, that is capitalist money. teaching quantitative disciplines to the normal subject of capital is thus of vital importance because it enables him/her to practice capitalist rationality by calculating all social transactions using capitalist money as a standard. the growth of electronic mass communication—the television, the worldwide web— and the integration of the latter with education has facilitated the formation and consolidation of capitalist individuality. “education, training, persuasion, the mobilization of certain social sentiments…all play a role and are plainly mixed in with the formation of dominant ideologies cultivated by the mass 381 vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) enduring resilience of capitalist power media, religious and educational institutions” (harvey, 1992, p. 123124). the media seeks to universalize capitalist values by creating role model images, forming public opinion, and providing advice regarding domestic arrangements. unanimity of purpose between the dominant public (state) and private (market) agents of capital is nowhere as evident as in the media world and this accounts for the state facilitation of the rapid and extreme concentration of the global media industry since the early 21st century (upchurch, 2015), that is, antagonistic capitalist and anti-capitalist voices are by and large excluded from global media coverage. “the monopoly of legitimate education is now more important, more central than is the monopoly of legitimate violence” (gellner, 1983, p. 34). it is the ‘monopoly of legitimate education’ that is responsible for the creation of the expert that continues to dominate most aspects of decision-making in neoliberal capitalist order. the management accountant and the investment banker embody the capitalist norms and values (freedom and equality), which they are inculcated with through education. they rule and manipulate all global markets (through corporate planning). human relations and legal experts manage the inner life of the corporation. as the family has disintegrated, the role of the marriage counselor, the psychiatrist, the day care center, and old people’s home nurse in managing social life and personal relations has grown exponentially. in all spheres of life opinions and behavior continue to be formed by experts who legitimize the universalization of capitalist rationality. the contemporary postmodern education and the prevalence of neoliberalism has an inner connection. neoliberalism has succeeded as a social economic project because it has implanted 382vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) ansari & shahzad what nicholas rose and miller (1992) call ‘freely enacted activity’. it has succeeded in individualizing the antagonistic subject of capital to an extent never achieved by the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. the postmodern individual articulates his/her truth and pursues his/her good through the constant exercise of choice. his/her particular choices and calculative evaluations reflect the primacy of the choice for choice itself (capital). thus, the antagonistic subject of capital has acquired a new self-understanding which delegitimizes the quest for participation in a community. the subject of capital has developed a new commitment to selfsatisfaction and self-achievement. capital has been humanized not just in the work process, but throughout capitalist order by the atomization of its subjects. thus the atomized subject of capital is supremely concerned with the trivialities of his everyday life. he is contemptuous of all grand narratives. he takes capitalist order –its ethos, its rationalities, its power structures, its cultures –for granted and seeks self-achievement within the capitalist lifeworld, for in his view there can be no alternative. the purpose of the science of psychology is not to seek wisdom and knowledge for the sake of inner growth of personality but to strategize knowledge for enhancing the productivity of the employees and fueling the desires of the potential consumers. in other words, “knowledge itself becomes a commodity… knowledge of man himself, psychology, which…was held to be the condition for virtue…has degenerated into an instrument to be used for better manipulation of others and oneself, in market research, in political propaganda, in advertising, and so on” (fromm, 2013, 383 vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) enduring resilience of capitalist power p. 76). technologies of consumption—advertising, designing, marketing—construct the relationship between self-identification and commodity choice through a deliberate application of psychological conceptions of human behavior. an efficient marketing and advertising professional today must constantly brush up his/her knowledge of applied psychology which teaches him/ her to develop marketing strategies that intensify desires which can be satisfied through increased and increasingly differentiated commodities the production and sale of which generate surplus for capital accumulation. these technologies teach him/her how to turn commodities and their images into instruments for personality enrichment. commodities emit a social glow which is cast upon their consumer who basks in this light. to turn consumables into desire is the supreme purpose of market researchers, advertisers and marketing strategists. consumption–specially of images (i.e. spectacles of electronic and print media) – has become a prime tranquilizer for soothing anxieties in hypermodern capitalist civil society. the subject of capital is today ‘free to choose’ because he has been convinced that the choice for choice itself is the uniquely rational choice which expresses one’s individuality. one freely chooses subsumption in the capitalist order and freely endorses the view that there is no alternative to the capitalist lifeworld. the manager, the doctor, the therapist and other subjects of capital, that exercise authority in the capitalist lifeworld, are manufactured by the technologies of governance, specifically, education. a common citizen and a consumer achieve freedom by submission to the authority of the manager, the doctor, the therapist, a secular politician, the media scientist, and the fashion designer. in short 384vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) ansari & shahzad the autonomous individual achieves freedom by submitting to the authority of capitalist rationality and of the experts who effectively practice this rationality. in this sense freedom and its governance technologies such as capitalist education have been employed for the construction of capitalist individuality. transcending capitalism the hypermodern subject of capital is ubiquitous throughout metropolitan capitalist order—not just in europe and america but also in china, japan and most emergent economies. in these counties there are few significant social forces or social discourses seriously challenging hypermodern capitalist individuality. marx’s ‘species being’ has not appeared on the pages of history except for very brief periods. however, marx is also committed to the enlightenment conception of rationality; therefore, he recognizes no limitation to the abundance of production and desire for consumption. the new work culture is characterized by “autonomy… delayering of hierarchies, multitasking, openness to others, sensitivity to differences, informality and inter personal contacts” (boltanski & chiapello, 2007, p. 97). exploitation and distributional inequalities become more acceptable to workers as work process autonomy and flexibility is enhanced. class consciousness and the struggle against liberal state order became diffused. today union density and number of days lost due to strike action are lower than ever throughout the capitalist world. as the subject of capital becomes an ‘entrepreneur of the self’ the possibility of the appearance of the species being becomes more and more illusionary. 385 vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) enduring resilience of capitalist power the key question of course is how the subject of capital can be won over to the ideology and practices of sustainable human development? neither the marxist eco-socialists nor the pope advocate a reduction in aggregate global production/consumption. deconstructing capitalist individuality is not on the catholic or the marxist eco-socialist agenda. “foucault attacks marxists because they believe that they have deciphered the secret of history. for him [foucault], history is discontinuous and marxism is a global totalitarian theory which is out of date” (sarup, 1988, p. 106). as long as the individual remains committed to capitalist values— freedom, equality and progress—his activism and his protest will not threaten capitalist rationality. from within, capitalism is threatened by environmental catastrophes. if “sustainable development” is not achieved capitalism might become the end of human history. moreover, post modernists from lyotard to foucault to deleuze to derrida have argued retaining faith in enlightenment ontology and epistemology is becoming problematic. the impossibility of achieving freedom has been demonstrated by structuralists, for example, in declaring that “freedom and independence is a purely symbolic, mythical expression of a spurious subjectivity” (clarke, 1981, p. 107). it is evident from this analysis that neither socialism nor christianity poses a serious threat to capitalist order because neither of them challenges the value of freedom nor proposes an alternative program for unraveling and restructuring the capitalist subjectivity manufactured by the technologies of capitalist governance, specifically capitalist education. overcoming the existential threat which the ‘extremist’ poses 386vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) ansari & shahzad to capitalist order requires a revival of faith in capitalism’s ontological and epistemological presumptions. to do this “capitalism…will have to overcome its underlying class contradiction...[which] would mean the adoption of a new principle of organization. such a principle would involve a universalistic morality” (held, 1997, p. 295). the adoption of a new capitalist principle of organization would require the resumption of belief in capitalism as a metanarrative, whereas, according to postmodernists, “the certainties and metanarratives of the modern era are no longer sustainable” (watson, 2011, p. 71). however, the construction of new ‘golden ages’ for global capitalism (under chinese hegemony, for example) may not be impossible. capitalism’s survival is not at stake as long as the subject of capital remains committed to the enlightenment values of freedom, equality and progress, values enthusiastically endorsed both by socialist and capitalist technologies of governance. conclusion the key source of capitalist resilience is the subjectivity that has been produced by the technologies of capitalist governance, and that has historically transformed the virtue-directed individual into a subject of capital. capitalism remains unchallenged in terms of the subjectivity constructed by the technologies of governance such as capitalist education. antagonists of capitalism such as marxist socialism do not pose a serious challenge to the dominance of capitalism, essentially, because it does not question, but approves the value of freedom, central to capitalist order. capitalism also continues to have the potential for the accumulation of wealth. 387 vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) enduring resilience of capitalist power references bauman, z. 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(pp. 62-72) london: routledge 389 vol. 4 no. 2 (dec 2017) enduring resilience of capitalist power _goback __ddelink__594_211109485 _goback _goback _goback _goback _goback leadership behaviour in highperforming government boys secondary schools in quetta: a grounded theory analysis waheed bahadur amir bano dr. zarina waheed abdul wahab  importance of intrinsic and instrumental value of education in pakistan mahendar kumar stylistic analysis of ahmed ali’s short story our lane muhammad tufail chandio dr. faraz ali bughio abdul hameed panhwar sikander munir memon awareness and practices of oral hygiene among female undergraduates in a malaysian university zarina waheed munazza saeed rafey ahmad jameel quality of school work life of public school teachers: cases from turkey and pakistan muhammad akram abdurrahman ilgan oyku ozu ashfaque ahmad shah (corresponding author) a comparitive study of subject knowledge of b.ed graduates of formal and non-formal teacher education systems perveen saif dr. amjad reba jalal ud din role of starting school age in the academic performance at the tertiary level mahwish ali baber independent researcher mahwish_baber@yahoo.com nawaz ahmad value related practices used by teacher educators at a public university, islamabad dr. munazza mahmood dr. syed asad abbas rizvi uzma perveen iqbal’s inferences from the qur’an on education: developing the individual self muhammad abid ali suhailah hussien critical discourse analysis of business academia on the role and status of the national language aliya sikandar educating before birth via talking to the baby in the womb: prenatal innovations shelina bhamani enduring resilience of capitalist power: the role of capitalist education as a technology of governance javed a. ansari asad shahzad the 2nd international conference on experiential learning, 2017 (education track) fareeda ibad educación, capitalismo y desarrollo cultural alfebética y globolizacion anglosajona 248 key words: culture of literacy, capitalism, development, globalization. search tags : anglo-saxon race -globalization. capitalism. socioeconomic development. submission date:april 22nd, 2010 acceptance date: may 27th, 201 palabras clave: cultura alfabética, capitalismo, desarrollo, globalización. descriptores: pueblos anglosajones -globalización. capitalismo. desarrollo económico y social. recibido:abril 22 de 2010 aceptado: mayo 27 de 2010 education, capitalism and development. the culture of literacy and anglo-saxon globalization in this article we try to establish a relationship between social tradition and the expansion of the culture of literacy plus the development of capitalism, via the correspondences found in the countries members of the group of seven, i.e. the most “developed” in fields such as educational achievements, knowledge production, and industry and high technology exports. these correspondences are stronger in the anglosaxon countries and japan, and they might explain why globalization is an anglo-saxon phenomenon; why these countries lie at the heart of the capitalist world-system, and why “development” is impossible for countries in the periphery. educación, capitalismo y desarrollo. cultura alfabética y globalización anglosajona en este artículo se trata de establecer una relación entre la tradición y la expansión social de la cultura alfabética y el desarrollo del capitalismo, por medio de la correspondencia que exhiben los países del grupo de los siete, los más ‘desarrollados’, entre ámbitos de logro educativo, producción de conocimiento y exportaciones industriales y de alta tecnología. esta correspondencia es más fuerte en los países anglosajones y el japón, lo que explicaría por qué la globalización es un fenómeno anglosajón; por qué estos países se encuentran en el centro del sistema-mundo capitalista, y por qué el ‘desarrollo’ es imposible para los países de la periferia. origen del artículo este artículo hace parte de la disertación doctoral presentada por el autor en mayo de 2010, con el título educación, comunicación y capitalismo cultural, en el marco del doctorado interinstitucional en educación, de la universidad pedagógica nacional de colombia, la universidad distrital francisco josé de caldas y la universidad del valle. 249 ancízar narváez montoya* * ancízar narváez montoya. doctor en educación del programa interinstitucional de la universidad pedagógica nacional de colombia, la universidad distrital francisco josé de caldas y la universidad del valle. actualmente es profesor asociado de la universidad pedagógica nacional de colombia (upn). correo electrónico: ancizar.narvaez@gmail.com educación, capitalismo y desarrollo cultura alfabética y globalización anglosajona introducción en un libro de divulgación reciente, dos antropólogos españoles han descrito la aparición del hombre como el producto de ocho transiciones biológicas, la octava de las cuales es el paso “de las sociedades de primates a las sociedades humanas, con la aparición del lenguaje articulado, un sistema único [...] de transmisión de información” signo y pensamiento 57 · eje temático | pp 248-267 · volumen xxix · julio diciembre 2010 250 (arsuaga y martínez, 2001, pp. 334-336). de ello deducen que la especie humana (la especie elegida, como ellos la llaman), es una especie como cualquiera otra, pues biológicamente cumple todos los requisitos para ser considerada tal. pero, al mismo tiempo, advierten que no es igual a las otras especies, pues la posesión de ese sistema de transmisión de información le da unas posibilidades infinitamente superiores a las de las otras especies. la particularidad de dicho sistema consiste en que es ya un sistema digital, es decir, basado en unidades discretas y en reglas combinatorias susceptibles de aplicar en la producción de infinitas emisiones. así mismo, podemos decir que la cultura occidental es una cultura como las otras seis mil existentes en el planeta (a juzgar por el número de lenguas que se hablan), desde el punto de vista cualitativo, pues cumple con la estructura básica de cualquier cultura; pero, al mismo tiempo, es diferente a las otras culturas. lo que la hace diferente es contar con un sistema de codificación de la información completamente digital, más eficiente que cualquiera otro, como es la escritura alfabética, basada en las mismas características antes mencionadas de unidades discretas y reglas combinatorias. esto nos puede llevar a explicar, no a valorar, la situación presente: mientras la especie humana progresa, como lo explica gordon childe (1997, pp. 9-25), en el sentido de que crece su población sobre el planeta, las otras especies tienen dificultades para sobrevivir. así mismo, la cultura occidental se extiende por el planeta (se globaliza) y, con ella, los grupos y naciones que la han cultivado y adoptado, mientras las demás culturas del planeta se debaten entre la desaparición o la subsunción en la cultura occidental. en efecto, según huntington (2001, p. 70), el 20,8% de la población mundial habla las cinco principales lenguas occidentales como primera lengua (inglés, español, portugués, alemán y francés); tienen apenas 155 millones de habitantes en sus naciones de origen, es decir, poco más del 5% de la población; si a ello le sumamos 21 millones de hablantes de holandés y 65 millones del italiano, la proporción de hablantes de estas lenguas sería del 23,6%, mientras que la población de origen sería de 210 millones, o sea, el 3,5% de la población mundial (crystal, 1997, p. 289). en contraste, por ejemplo, a fines del siglo xix existían más de mil lenguas indígenas en brasil y, al finalizar el siglo xx, quedan menos de 200. además, un cuarto de las lenguas existentes hoy tienen menos de 1.000 hablantes nativos1, y la mitad de dichas lenguas tienen menos de 10.000, lo que hace pensar que en menos de cincuenta años habrán desaparecido como lenguas vivas (crystal, 1997, p. 286). pero estas dos situaciones, que parecen darwinismo cultural, no son completamente comparables: mientras que en el caso de las relaciones entre las especies todavía no es posible humanizar a las otras especies y hacerlas aprender el lenguaje articulado, en el caso de las relaciones entre los grupos humanos sí es posible alfabetizar a aquellos que practican tradiciones culturales distintas, incluso para fines de conservación y transformación de sus propias tradiciones, y hacer con ello más equitativo el acceso a ese universo cultural que está en la base o en la cúspide del sistema de desigualdades del mundo actual, pues no debe ser gratuito que entre las naciones del g-8 (grupo de los siete, más rusia), siete de ellos tengan la escritura alfabética como sistema de codificación de su lengua nacional y, de ellas, seis tengan alfabeto latino y una (rusia), alfabeto cirílico, mientras que japón está cambiando su silabario de 49 caracteres por un alfabeto de 30. 1. entendidos como aquellos que la tienen como primera lengua y la usan en su vida cotidiana. ancízar narváez montoya | educación, capitalismo y desarrollo 251 ¿existe alguna relación entre cultura alfabética, capitalismo y ‘desarrollo’? éste es el gran tema de esta discusión. se trata, entonces, de indagar sobre las relaciones de la cultura alfabética con el capitalismo contemporáneo, así como su incidencia en la configuración de las relaciones entre países (naciones) llamados desarrollados y países (naciones) llamados subdesarrollados. la hipótesis que se pretende defender es, entonces, que la relación entre cultura alfabética, capitalismo y desarrollo consiste en que el capitalismo contemporáneo se puede considerar, a la vez, como capitalismo cultural (en su modo de desarrollo o fuerza productiva predominante) y capitalismo global (en su modo de regulación o modelo de desarrollo), que aspira a imponer como sentido común una sociedad del conocimiento, por medio de la promoción intensiva de la cultura alfabética de alta calidad en la escuela competitiva. se asume que la cultura alfabética es la que provee la matriz para la producción del conocimiento y, por consiguiente, su apropiación genera competencias para la producción y distribución de éste (en sentido económico, como apropiación de la renta), es decir, para la acumulación. así las cosas, la apropiación en mayor o menor medida de la cultura alfabética se vuelve un problema de economía política del conocimiento, un problema de redistribución cultural entre grupos sociales y entre naciones, por cuanto implica mayor o menor capacidad relativa de producción (generación) y, por tanto, mayor o menor desarrollo autónomo relativo de la sociedad. esto se reflejaría en las desigualdades estructurales (no sólo cuantitativas, sino, también, cualitativas) entre naciones “desarrolladas” (con alto desarrollo de la cultura alfabética) y aquéllas “subdesarrolladas” (con bajo desarrollo proporcional de ésta), como sería el caso de españa y colombia, por un lado, y los países anglosajones y japón, por otro, cuya primacía en lo que se llama la cultura global está por demás relacionada con una fuerte presencia de la cultura alfabética. algunas precisiones teóricas ¿cuál es el punto en el que convergen cultura alfabética, capitalismo, desarrollo y globalización? empezaremos por la diferenciación que establece castells (1999, p. 40) entre modos de producción (capitalismo y estatismo) y modos de desarrollo (industrialismo e informacionalismo). los modos de producción: “definen las relaciones sociales de producción, determinando la existencia de clases sociales que se constituyen como tales mediante su práctica histórica. el principio estructural mediante el cual el excedente es apropiado y controlado caracteriza un modo de producción” (castells, 1999, p. 42). agrega luego: “las relaciones sociales de producción y, por tanto, el modo de producción, determinan la apropiación y usos del excedente” (1999, p. 42). de esto se puede inferir que el modo de producción se determina por la forma de propiedad vigente en la sociedad sobre los factores de producción, forma de propiedad que preexiste al excedente y, por tanto, determina la forma en que este último será apropiado y distribuido. es decir, cuando se habla de modo de producción se habla de relaciones sociales y políticas y de poder, y no de sistemas técnicos. los modos de desarrollo en cambio son: “los dispositivos tecnológicos mediante los cuales el trabajo actúa sobre la materia para generar el producto, determinando en definitiva la cuantía y calidad del excedente” (castells, 1999, p. 42). se trata, pues, de los recursos técnicos y de las fuerzas productivas disponibles y predominantes. el capitalismo habría pasado por varios modos de desarrollo (artesanal, manufacturero, industrial) hasta llegar a la actual etapa llamada, por castells, informacional. la discusión actual es si ésta es la forma apropiada de llamar al capitalismo contemporáneo, pues han surgido nombres alternativos como capitalismo cognitivo e intelectual a los que queremos agregar el nombre de capitalismo cultural, por ser más comprehensivo. pero como el capitalismo no es un asunto técnico, sino práctico (ético y político), no basta con diferenciar el modo de producción (categoría macro) 252 y caracterizar los modos de desarrollo (uno de sus componentes), pues al capitalismo lo rigen modos de regulación, conocidos también como formas institucionales (o estructurales), que se definen como: “toda codificación de una o varias relaciones sociales fundamentales” (boyer, 1992, p. 54), e incluyen el condicionamiento monetario, la configuración de la relación salarial, las formas de concurrencia, las modalidades de adhesión al régimen internacional y las formas de estado (1992, pp. 54-59). todo este marco regulatorio es lo que se suele llamar, en términos convencionales, modelo de desarrollo. en esta materia también el capitalismo ha experimentado diversas etapas, desde el mercantilismo hasta el capitalismo monopolista de estado (estado de bienestar), antes de llegar al modo de regulación actual, que llamaríamos capitalismo global o globalización neoliberal, cuyo centro de ataque ha sido el papel del estado en su función redistributiva, para convertirlo en un estado funcional a los intereses, sobre todo del capital financiero. en consecuencia, el desarrollo, como técnica y como política, es una característica inherente al capitalismo. en términos generales, se puede entender el desarrollo como: “fortalecimiento de la capacidad productiva, el bienestar social y la sostenibilidad ambiental” (sarmiento a., 2009b, p. 5). pero en el capitalismo global justamente lo que se hace es cambiar el concepto de desarrollo. como lo expresa robinson: “el banco mundial cambió su definición del término ‘desarrollo’ como crecimiento económico nacional; ahora lo define como ‘acertada’ participación en el mercado mundial” (2007, p. 141). esa acertada participación se especifica más adelante como un verdadero recetario. el nuevo modelo de desarrollo se basa en la rearticulación de cada país a los mercados mundiales, por medio de la introducción de nuevas actividades económicas ligadas a la acumulación global, el abaratamiento de la mano de obra […] para hacerla ‘competitiva’ y la apertura de los sectores públicos de cada país, las industrias protegidas y los recursos naturales a la explotación comercial. (robinson, 2007, p. 141) aquí entran las dos características del capitalismo contemporáneo. en primer lugar, el capitalismo global (robinson, 2007) como modo de regulación, como modelo de desarrollo, que conduce a profundizar el ‘subdesarrollo’ o, en todo caso, hace imposible el desarrollo para la periferia. ahora bien, ¿cuál es el modo de desarrollo (fuerza productiva predominante) (castells, 1999) en el cual se basará el nuevo modo de regulación (desregulación global) del modo de producción capitalista? desde este punto de vista se puede decir que el capitalismo global será, a la vez, un capitalismo cognitivo, inmaterial, intelectual, cultural o cualquier otro nombre que indique que la principal fuerza productiva será el trabajo intelectual en vez del trabajo físico. en consecuencia, las eficiencias económicas: productivas, comerciales y financieras (wallerstein, 2007, p. 117) y las eficiencias políticas: militares, administrativas y de integración (wallerstein, 1979, p. 492) que permiten a los diferentes países huir de la periferia o del subdesarrollo están dependiendo del conocimiento. pero con esta afirmación surgen más preguntas: ¿cuál es el conocimiento importante para el capital? ¿cómo se distribuye social y geográficamente ese conocimiento? asumiendo que el conocimiento válido y valioso para el capital es el conocimiento occidental llamado científico y que dicho conocimiento está codificado básicamente en inglés, nuevamente la globalización, o la asunción cuantitativa y cualitativa de la cultura alfabética en su versión de vanguardia, que es la anglosajona, vuelve a ser el objeto de lucha por la redistribución. pero aquí entramos en otro terreno, el de la geopolítica del conocimiento (sierra caballero, 2006), en el cual las diferencias de españa y colombia con el mundo anglosajón son prácticamente insalvables. ancízar narváez montoya | educación, capitalismo y desarrollo 253 un problema de economía política y cultura en efecto, hoy existen en el mundo 192 estadosnación, pero la riqueza del mundo, como proporción del producto interno bruto, está concentrada en diez de esas naciones, o sólo en ocho, si consideramos la producción per cápita. según datos del fondo monetario internacional (fmi) y de la organización mundial de comercio (omc), las primeras diez economías del mundo, por volumen, son las expuestas en la tabla 1. país pib (millones de u$) porcentaje del pib mundial población porcentaje de población mundial pib per cápita logro* educativo (%) mundo 54.583,800 100,00 25,19 6.670.800.000 100,0 8.182 estados unidos 13.751,400 25,19 308.700.000 4,6 22.448 49,0-36,2 japón 4.384,300 8,03 127.400.000 1,9 34.413 43,9-30,0 alemania 3.317,400 6,07 82.300.000 1,2 40.308 57,1-21,4 china 3.205,500 5,87 1.329.100.000 19,9 2.411 s. d. reino unido 2.772,000 5,07 60.900.000 0,9 45.517 s. d. francia 2.589,800 4,74 61.700.000 0,9 41.974 35,9-19,8 italia 2.101,600 3,85 59.300.000 0,9 35.440 30,4-10,1 canadá 1.329,900 2,43 32.900.000 0,5 40.422 38,1-38,2 españa 1.436,900 2,63 44.100.000 0,7 32.582 17,8-23,6 brasil 1.313,400 2,40 190.100.000 2,8 6.908 diez primeros 36.202.200 66,32 36.202.200 34,3 15.764 grupo de los siete 30.246.400 55,38 30.246.400 11,0 41.252 colombia 207.800 0,38 207.800 0,7 4.680 25,4-9,7 fuente: elaboración propia, con base en undp, hdr, 2009.. *aquí se trata del porcentaje de población mayor de 25 años que ha logrado concluir niveles de educación secundaria superior o postsecundaria no terciaria, es decir, para nuestro caso, algo como educación media y técnica. la segunda parte de la columna se refiere a la población que ha logrado concluir estudios universitarios. tabla 1. producto interno bruto, población y logro educativo por país (2007) signo y pensamiento 57 · eje temático | pp 248-267 · volumen xxix · julio diciembre 2010 254 una lectura inicial de la primera columna de la tabla 1 ya sugiere unos desequilibrios enormes en el mundo; por ejemplo, lo que se llama la economía mundial es una ‘conversación’ entre diez países, pues dos de cada tres dólares que se producen en el mundo lo producen ellos, aunque cuentan sólo con uno de cada tres habitantes del planeta. pero la conversación se reduce a menos participantes cuando pensamos en los países del llamada g-7 o g-8. en este caso, los participantes tienen una exigencia más de participación, pues si en el primer caso basta la producción absoluta, en el segundo es necesario mirar producciones per cápita. no sólo salen de la conversación países tan importantes como china, españa y brasil, por su baja producción por habitante, sino otros de altísimos niveles de producción per cápita, como holanda, bélgica o corea del sur, pero cuyos tamaños de población y territorio no les alcanzan para ser lo que en términos tradicionales se llaman potencias. y es que en verdad la producción por persona de china y brasil no tiene nada que ver con la del resto de países de la lista. el caso de españa es el típico caso de un estado semiperiférico, pues su pib es tan grande como el del último de los siete países del centro, pero no tan grande en términos per cápita como para desplazar a canadá. sin embargo, tampoco es un estado periférico. de tal suerte que si reducimos la conversación a los miembros del g-7, podemos decir que éstos dominan la economía mundial, por eso se reúnen y coordinan cada año sus acciones, pues ellos son responsables de más de la mitad de la producción mundial y apenas tienen el 11% de la población. la participación de rusia en el g-8 se explica por razones extraeconómicas. aunque sólo alcanza a ser la economía número quince del mundo, rusia es, sin embargo, el país más extenso de la tierra, con más de diecisiete millones de kilómetros cuadrados, lo cual le confiere un gran papel estratégico; en segundo lugar, es un productor de hidrocarburos y un gran exportador hacia europa occidental, lo que lo convierte en un socio obligado; en tercer lugar, es, de todas formas, un país de gran población, con más de 130 millones de habitantes, lo que lo convierte en un gran mercado; y, finalmente, la razón más importante es que es la segunda potencia nuclear del mundo, con más poder que el que tienen juntos el reino unido, francia y china, y, por tanto, un aliado obligado para la seguridad del norte. ahora bien, la última columna refleja un índice para medir la asunción de la cultura alfabética, distinto a los meros datos de alfabetización y de los también básicos de escolarización. en este caso, la parte derecha de la columna, la que indica la cantidad de personas con educación superior, muestra una fuerte diferencia, incluso de cuatro a uno, entre los países del centro del sistema mundial y los de la periferia, como colombia y brasil. cuando se hace la lectura combinada entre el porcentaje de personas con educación media superior y las que tienen educación terciaria, se aprecian unas correlaciones interesantes: por ejemplo, japón y los países germánicos tienen logros superiores al 70% (estados unidos, 85%), mientras que los países latinos están alrededor del 40% o 50% y los subdesarrollados, por el 30%. esta diferencia no es gratuita, como se intentará demostrar. todos estos datos sugieren una correlación no despreciable entre altos grados de desarrollo económico y altos niveles de desarrollo, en esas sociedades, de la cultura alfabética. de esta manera, ocuparse de los problemas de redistribución social de la cultura alfabética como cultura hegemónica o legítima es tan importante como ocuparse de la redistribución del valor, y es, por tanto, un asunto de la economía política de la cultura. la hegemonía anglosajona en el capitalismo cultural retomando la idea de b. de sousa santos (2002) de que la globalización es el proceso por el cual una entidad local tiene éxito en su expansión global, y logra poner a las entidades rivales en condición de locales, la condición local que ha logrado imponerse como global ha sido la anglosajona, una particularidad de la cultura occidental. ancízar narváez montoya | educación, capitalismo y desarrollo 255 en esta tradición se ha establecido una separación férrea entre ciencia y humanidades, entre ciencia y narrativa, en la que se establecen tres tipos de prohibiciones para el discurso científico: el tabú del ego, el de la narrativa y el de la metáfora (ortiz, 2009, p. 105). el primero, por cuanto en el mundo científico la posición del individuo es inferior al bien común, a lo colectivo, lo cual sugiere que el conocimiento es independiente de quien lo enuncia. el segundo, por cuanto la ciencia hace una distinción entre el mundo comentado, propio de ésta, que exige una actitud distante del autor, por un lado, y el mundo narrado, en el cual el narrador está involucrado, por otro; es una diferencia entre el él, lo comentado y el yo-tú, el comentador. en cuanto a la metáfora, porque es un recurso retórico, no descriptivo ni explicativo, basado en la semejanza y la diferencia (diríamos figurativo), diferente a la causalidad de la ciencia. lo propio de la narrativa es precisamente la metáfora, pues: “toda metáfora es un relato figurado; lo que se gana en evidencia se pierde en precisión conceptual” (ortiz, 2009, p. 124). las ciencias sociales estarían en una posición intermedia, pues la metáfora es ambivalente, encierra verdad y error. estas características nacen de unas condiciones particulares de surgimiento de la ciencia y de la tecnociencia. según merton “el vínculo entre puritanismo y utilitarismo es una condición necesaria para la existencia de un pensamiento racional y objetivo” (citado en ortiz, 2009, p. 142). pero, además, inciden: “el desarrollo del capitalismo, la minería y el transporte, así como los cambios en la fabricación de armas y la balística” (2009, p. 143), al igual que la urbanización, el aumento de la población y los cambios en la educación. así que “la ciencia se vincula con un contexto histórico determinado y es imposible comprenderla fuera de las condiciones que la rodean” (2009, p. 143). estamos hablando del siglo xvi en inglaterra. pero ortiz prácticamente asume la misma explicación para el surgimiento de la tecnociencia en el siglo xx. el desarrollo tecnológico, además de contar con un aparato científico teóricamente sofisticado, presupone la inversión continua de capital, la formación de equipos especializados y la construcción de laboratorios de investigación. estos tres factores se encontraron en estados unidos porque era el único país industrializado cuya infraestructura educativa y tecnológica permanecía intacta al terminar la segunda guerra mundial. también fue un momento de apogeo económico, con abundantes recursos estatales y privados destinados a inversiones. la expansión de la enseñanza superior y el desarrollo de los institutos de investigación, aliados a una política tecnológica que vinculaba las creaciones científicas a los descubrimientos y al perfeccionamiento de las técnicas, generó un florecimiento científico sin precedentes en las más diversas áreas del conocimiento: telecomunicaciones, investigación espacial, biología, etc. el ejemplo de la computadora es paradigmático. (2009, p. 96) lo extenso de la cita se justifica por cuanto refleja bien una condición de lo local que se hace global. como en el caso de las condiciones de la ciencia, tiene todos los elementos de la cultura occidental, es decir, capitalismo, deseo de invertir, política estatal, educación superior, tradición científica y retos técnicos. pero están concentrados en una sociedad específica en un momento específico. coincidencialmente, es una sociedad heredera de la tradición alfabética anglosajona. “no parece exagerado decir que muchos elementos clave de lo que entendemos por sociedad de la información (conceptos, modelos, procedimientos) fueron inicialmente elaborados en inglés” (ortiz, 2009, p. 97). en efecto, cuando castells describe los centros de desarrollo científico y tecnológico de los demás países, éstos aparecen como una réplica del sylicon valley: “si la primera revolución industrial fue británica —dice— la primera revolución de la tecnología de la información fue estadounidense, con una inclinación californiana” (1999, p. 81). y agrega luego: “nuestro descubrimiento más sorprendente es que las signo y pensamiento 57 · eje temático | pp 248-267 · volumen xxix · julio diciembre 2010 256 viejas grandes áreas metropolitanas del mundo industrializado son los principales centros de innovación y producción en tecnología de la información, fuera de los estados unidos” (cursivas mías) (castells, 1999, p 84). o sea que la sociedad de la información y la economía del conocimiento son una copia y una consecuencia de la experiencia anglosajona de urbanización, industrialización y capitalismo. por eso, es sorprendente que el autor mismo se asombre con una obviedad como ésta. ¿cómo podría ser de otra manera? la tradición científica es, pues, el producto de una experiencia particular del pensamiento occidental, desarrollada, principalmente, en el mundo anglosajón en lengua inglesa. los parámetros del conocimiento y de la cultura occidental, en general, están codificados en alfabeto latino y lengua inglesa. así es como ésta se ha convertido en lengua franca del conocimiento en el mundo, como lo fue en su tiempo el latín. de ahí en más, lo que viene es apenas la consecuencia lógica. si éste es el criterio de la ciencia, es normal que las publicaciones científicas estén en inglés. la utopía de la lengua universal cede su lugar a la hegemonía del inglés. así se puede constatar en algunos índices de publicaciones científicas de matemáticas, biología, física y química, que son las ciencias por antonomasia, según la versión anglosajona (tablas 2 y 3). estos son los índices más plurales; en otras combinaciones de índices, el predominio del inglés está en promedio en el 90% (ortiz, 2009, p. 98). el otro rasgo de preponderancia es la citación, o la lengua del material citado. es obvio que el material producido en lengua inglesa cite principalmente fuentes en inglés, aunque no necesariamente. para ilustrar esta situación, ortiz (2009, p. 98) menciona el caso de dos publicaciones geológicas, norteamericana y británica, cuyo porcentaje de citas en inglés asciende a 95,5% y 91,6%, respectivamente. pero lo relevante es que en las mismas materias, los journals publicados en otros países en su propia lengua siguen dando una preeminencia a la citación en inglés. esto nos da el panorama expuesto en la tabla 4. ya hemos visto que los países bajos no sólo son parte de la tradición anglosajona, sino que su vida académica se desarrolla en inglés. así que las publicaciones de este origen se vuelven sobre sí mismas en más de un 90%, mientras que las alemanas, a pesar de su fuerte tradición propia, también tienen como referencia mayoritariamente fuentes en inglés. en cambio, parece haber un divorcio con el mundo anglosajón y un acercamiento a las fuentes de su propia lengua o las afines en las publicaciones de origen latino. finalmente, el philosophical transactions, de la royal society, dice que el origen del material citado ha evolucionado, según se muestra en la tabla 5. hasta aquí no aparece el español, pese a que es la segunda lengua más hablada del mundo, por el número de hablantes nativos, y pese a ser heredera directa del latín y estar codificada alfabéticamente también en latín. los artículos de ciencias naturales y tecnología, que son los que se consideran científicos, pasaron de 11.747, en 1992, a 50.833, en 1996. sin embargo, no aparecen o disminuyen su participación en los índices (ortiz, 2009, p. 99). entonces, la pregunta geopolítica es: ¿no aparecen en los índex porque no son científicos?, ¿no aparecen porque no están en inglés?, ¿no están en inglés porque no son científicos?, ¿no son científicos porque no están en inglés? esta lógica se aplica al estudio de la misma ciencia, a la ciencia de la ciencia, la cual ha devenido en cientometría, una extensión de la bibliometría hacia las publicaciones científicas. en este caso, desde luego hay una medición de la calidad por la cantidad, es decir, se mide la calidad de las producciones por la cantidad de veces citadas o consultadas. pero las citas son siempre contextualizadas, o sea que tienen valor dentro de un argumento y sólo ahí se puede medir su pertinencia, su utilidad, su valor de uso. en la cientometría, sin embargo, las citas son descontextualizadas, reducidas a cantidad, a unidades de medición, de comparación; por tanto, a su ‘valor de cambio’, pues cada una es igual a otra y, por tanto, comparable. en consecuencia, es intercambiable en el mercado académico. para ello, ancízar narváez montoya | educación, capitalismo y desarrollo 257 matemáticas 1940 1980 inglés 49,7% 71,0% francés 31,2% 6,1% alemán 13,2% 1,6% biología 1926 1980 inglés 26,7% 55,9% francés 16,4% 1,0% alemán 50,0% 42,1% química 1978 1998 inglés 62,3% 82,5% ruso 19,5% 3,1% alemán 5,0% 1,6% francés 2,4% 0,5% journals citas en inglés (%) american association of petroleum geologist bulletin 95,5 journal of geological society 91,6 engineering geology (países bajos) 90,2 geologische rundschau 64,4 estudios geológicos 40,3 revista italiana di paleontología e stratigrafia 48,3 idioma de origen 1665 1750 1850 1900 1950 1990 inglés 48% 33% 56% 52% 81% 89% francés 12% 13% 23% 6% 7% 3% alemán 0% 0% 14% 41% 8% 5% latín 35% 47% 7% 0% otros 5% 7% 0% 1% 4% 3% área 1965 1988 biología 50% 70% ingeniería 82% 86% medicina 151% 75% matemáticas 54% 82% fuente:adaptado de ortiz (2009, p. 97). fuente:adaptado de ortiz (2009). fuente:adaptado de ortiz (2009, p. 98). fuente:adaptado de ortiz (2009, p. 97). tabla 2. matemáticas, biología y química: lengua de publicación tabla 4. journals y citas en inglés en geología tabla 5. material citado por lengua de origen tabla 3. publicación en inglés por áreas signo y pensamiento 57 · eje temático | pp 248-267 · volumen xxix · julio diciembre 2010 258 la cita tiene que vaciarse de contenido y quedar reducida a unidad de información, incluso si se trata de las ‘ciencias del sentido’. esta es la razón de ser de la estandarización. los criterios para adoptar esta forma de evaluar la producción científica son, por una parte, el aumento del número de publicaciones científicas en el mundo respecto a la población, lo cual se va convirtiendo en la primera ‘ley’ del desarrollo científico. la segunda ‘ley’ sería la de las publicaciones por individuo, lo cual divide a los autores entre prolíficos y normales y, por tanto, entre la ‘élite’ y ‘masa’, entre los mejores y los peores (ortiz, 2009, p. 151), un rasgo que lleva a la competitividad, no a la colaboración que se supone debe reinar en la ‘comunidad científica’. de hecho, los más publicados son los que tienen más reconocimiento y, al mismo tiempo, tienen más reconocimiento porque son más publicados. lo mismo sucede con las revistas. éstas se clasifican por su uso, o sea por la cantidad de veces que sean consultadas. con este criterio, la biblioteca científica de londres demostraba que menos del 10% de las 9.120 revistas científicas cubrían el 80% de la demanda, a juzgar por la cantidad de veces que habían sido consultadas durante un año. esto significa que las demás son prescindibles, independientemente de la calidad científica de sus contenidos. pero aquí nuevamente tenemos el efecto mateo (se dará más a quien tenga más…): si se consultan más, tienen más credibilidad, y si tienen más credibilidad, se consultan más. ¿hay algún factor asociado fuera de la calidad científica intrínseca que influya en la consulta y la citación? uno puede ser la lengua, otro puede ser la institución. en todo caso, juzgadas con criterio de mercado, cuantitativamente la mayoría de las publicaciones científicas tendrían que desaparecer, incluso en el mundo anglosajón. los mismos criterios se aplican a las ciencias sociales. pese a que éstas tienen otras características, pues tienen más anclaje lingüístico y, por tanto, son más sensibles al contexto y al mundo narrado, y no existe en ellas la sujeción al experimento, se les exige que estén codificadas en alfabeto y en inglés, como si las situaciones personales de los investigadores y las situaciones sociales a las que se aplican pudieran ser completamente traducibles. algunas bases de datos mencionadas por ortiz muestran el predominio del inglés en estas áreas. tabla 6. con esta sobrevaloración cuantitativa, el material publicado en inglés se convierte en parámetro de calidad. más o menos con estos criterios se funda el institute for science information (isi), que publica el science citation index, con idioma antropología ciencia política sociología economía humanidades (1990) inglés 49,7% 50,1% 49,7% 55,0% 82,5% francés 14,4% 16,5% 17,6% 13,0% 5,9% español 7,7% 6,3% 5,0% 5,0% 2,2% alemán 6,3% 7,9% 7,5% 7,5% 4,1% ruso 7,0% 6,1% 6,1% fuente:adaptado de ortiz (2009, p. 131). tabla 6. publicaciones en ciencias sociales por lengua (1985) ancízar narváez montoya | educación, capitalismo y desarrollo 259 el fin de proveer información relevante para los científicos (ortiz, 2009, p. 153). por medio de la organización para la cooperación y el desarrollo económico (ocde), nacida del plan marshall, sus criterios se extienden al mundo desarrollado, y, por medio de los organismos multilaterales, al tercer mundo. esto significa que una forma de verse y de medirse de los científicos anglosajones (norteamericanos, británicos y australianos, principalmente) se impone al resto del mundo; pero, como es obvio que esos parámetros son propios de una cultura local, los que no compartimos como nativos esa cultura estamos lejos de alcanzar los parámetros impuestos por ella y, por tanto, siempre seremos subdesarrollados, periféricos, locales. en efecto, el isi introduce como elemento de medición el ‘factor de impacto’, que calcula la probabilidad de que un artículo sea citado y, por consiguiente, la posible influencia de una revista sobre la literatura producida en cada disciplina. “los cimientos de este edificio son frágiles porque descansan sobre una lógica circular: los trabajos son citados porque son buenos; en consecuencia, son buenos porque son citados” (ortiz, 2009, p. 158). pero la lógica deja de ser tan circular si consideramos que en los criterios que tiene el isi para indexar revistas se incluyen recomendaciones como: “el inglés es esencial para los títulos de los artículos, resúmenes y palabras clave”; “también se recomiendan las referencias en inglés”; “la bibliografía en lengua inglesa sigue siendo esencial” (citado en ortiz, 2009, p. 171). esto conduce, desde luego, a una supremacía del inglés en todos los terrenos. no es sólo que las publicaciones anglosajonas se conviertan en las más citadas, indexadas, consultadas, etc., sino que las publicaciones científicas de otros países, para ser indexadas, tienen que hacerse en inglés. pero como el inglés no es la lengua nativa de los autores, como los lectores potenciales no son nativos, se pierden como público y, por consiguiente, como posibles referencias o citas. pierden así su propia relevancia cuantitativa, además de la cualitativa. así, por ejemplo, brasil tenía, en 1999, 17 revistas indexadas en el isi, sobre un total de 4.850 (un 0,35%), de las cuales una buena parte estaban en inglés; pero donde mejor se ve la relación incestuosa es en la cantidad de revistas isi que tienen los países de la unión europea. mientras que el reino unido y holanda (que publican en inglés) tienen el 44,4% y el 22,5% de sus revistas indexadas, respectivamente; alemania (germánica) tiene el 17%, y francia e italia (latinas) el 6,2 y 2,9, respectivamente. españa (también latina) llega sólo al 1,1% (ortiz, 2009, p. 172) y colombia, al 0,4%, si consideramos que tiene una revista indexada en el isi, sobre 245 que constituyen el publindex de 2008. si la situación de españa es deplorable, la de américa latina, desde luego, lo es mucho más, con apenas 49 títulos, y ni para qué hablar de colombia. en su orden, el número de revistas isi por país (ortiz, 2009, p. 172): • argentina: 5 • brasil: 17 • chile: 7 • colombia: 1 • costa rica: 1 • cuba: 1 • ecuador: 1 • méxico: 12 • perú: 1 • venezuela: 3 ¿qué se puede decir? no vale la pena comparar. ni siquiera españa existe como productora de conocimiento, aunque hoy es la novena economía del mundo por su pib; esto se debe a que la globalización cultural es anglosajona y autorreferida. en la última década del siglo xx se intensificó la preocupación por la globalización científica. para entonces, la situación de producción de conocimiento la presentaba así el doctor llinás (1998): • países industrializados: 94% • países en vías de desarrollo: 6% • latinoamérica : 1% • colombia: 0,01% signo y pensamiento 57 · eje temático | pp 248-267 · volumen xxix · julio diciembre 2010 260 de ese 1%, el 87% de las publicaciones científicas se produce en brasil, méxico y el cono sur, mientras que los países andinos y centroamérica en su conjunto producen el restante 13% (llinás, 1998, pp. 73-74). si se considera que en colombia existen 34 universidades públicas y más del doble de universidades privadas, y que de todas ellas sólo unas cinco o diez tienen algún reconocimiento por su tradición investigativa, las demás universidades y los académicos que pertenecemos a ellas no existimos realmente, no estamos globalizados en el mejor sentido. así que el diagnóstico está hecho desde hace más de una década, pero la política no cambia la situación. lo anterior se traduce en una cifra total de ediciones y traducciones que sólo reafirma la primacía del inglés en el mercado alfabético. en 2005, los datos de edición por país son, por número de títulos, los expuestos en la tabla 7, en los que se citan cifras de la organización de las naciones unidas para la educación, la ciencia y la cultura (unesco). hay que resaltar aquí que el volumen de edición de libros coincide prácticamente con la composición del grupo de los siete, exceptuando a canadá e incluyendo a holanda. hay que recordar que tanto el reino unido como españa fungen como centros de edición para sus respectivas comunidades lingüísticas, que suman 600 y 400 millones de hablantes, respectivamente. en cambio, alemania, japón, italia y holanda editan para sus respectivos mercados locales. las cifras de los dos primeros países superan en más de 60.000 títulos las de los siete siguientes; aunque son también países desarrollados, alfabetizados y en algunos casos centros de comunidades lingüísticas muy grandes, como españa y francia. el caso de holanda es prominente: edita casi el mismo número de títulos que españa, que tiene tres veces su población y es el centro de un mercado de 400 millones de hablantes (holanda tiene 15); así mismo, iguala a italia y a francia, que tienen cada uno cuatro veces su población, además de que francia es también el centro de la francofonía; lo mismo sucede respecto a rusia, que tiene 10 veces su población. en cuanto a españa, hay que considerar que, aunque edita un número de títulos ligeramente superior al de holanda, esta producción se ve influida enormemente porque las exportaciones españolas representan el 63% del total de las exportaciones de libros de iberoamérica, las cuales incluyen industrias tradicionalmente exportadoras, como las de méxico y argentina. sin embargo, las exportaciones no se dirigen mayoritariamente hacia el mercado de américa latina, que sólo absorbe un 27,3% de las exportaciones españolas, sino hacia la unión europea, que absorbe el 64% de éstas (rey, 2009, p. 240). no sólo estas ediciones sirven para el mercado lingüístico propio, sino que son la fuente principal de traducciones. aunque los datos no son tan actuales, la participación de las traducciones en los respectivos mercados era, en 1991, del 18% en francia, del 14% en alemania, del 26% en españa, del 25% en italia y del 40% en grecia. en cambio, en el reino unido era del 3% y en estados unidos, menos del 5%. entre tanto, la principal fuente de país ediciones reino unido 206.000 estados unidos 172.000 alemania 71.515 japón 56.222 españa 46.330 rusia 36.237 italia 35.236 francia 34.776 holanda 34.067 fuente:adaptado de ortiz (2009, p. 194). tabla 7. edición de libros por país, 2005 ancízar narváez montoya | educación, capitalismo y desarrollo 261 las traducciones es el inglés, con más del 61% de los textos fuente (ortiz, 2009, p. 194). es decir, los países que fungen como centros de la globalización extienden su producción, si no en su propia lengua, en traducciones al resto de los países, incluso del centro, al tiempo que cierran las puertas a las traducciones de otras lenguas. los anglosajones se encierran en el monolingüismo y en sus propias versiones, que consideran globales y universales, como lo fue en su tiempo el latín. en efecto, como lo señala un censo de incunables, los idiomas en los que se publicaban eran, en su orden: latín, 77,42%; italiano, 7,39%; alemán, 5,82%; francés, 4,56%; holandés y flamenco, 2,0% cada uno; español, 1,27% y, por último, el inglés, 0,66% (petrucci, 1999, p. 134), proporciones exactamente inversas a las de hoy. esto es una relación incestuosa y autorreferida. se consideran artículos científicos los que están en inglés o, en todo caso, si están en otro idioma deben ser vertidos al inglés para que desde allí se les juzgue. no se trata sólo de que un artículo cumpla los parámetros del discurso científico, sino de que estos parámetros sólo son claros en la lengua inglesa, pues es en ella que se formalizaron. aquí el código es la escritura inglesa y la emisión, el discurso científico. o, en nuestros términos, la escritura inglesa es la forma de la expresión, el discurso científico es la forma del contenido, mientras que los nuevos aportes, la sustancia del contenido, parece pasar a segundo plano ante el predominio de las formas. esa es la razón de la relegación de la producción científica en otros idiomas. como en todo campo cultural, lo fundamental es el manejo del código, de las formas, que permiten la generación de emisiones. si el código científico es la escritura inglesa (forma de la expresión), la producción científica pasa por el manejo de ésta, además del discurso científico (forma del contenido), antes que de los contenidos mismos (sustancias de contenido), los cuales, sin embargo, van atados a los códigos, a las formas. a pesar de la evidente supremacía en este mundo del conocimiento, estos países no se resignan a perder la vanguardia en lo básico, es decir, en el cultivo de las formas de la cultura. si miramos la tabla 1, en la que se describe la relación entre centros económicos mundiales y logros educativos como distribución social de la cultura alfabética, podemos ver cómo ahora se cierra el círculo, en el sentido de que las inversiones en educación e investigación se revierten en posiciones de supremacía en el mercado mundial, ahora con productos de alto contenido industrial y tecnológico. en efecto, si miramos la columna 2 de la tabla 8, es evidente una fuerte apuesta de los países centrales, incluyendo a españa, por la educación primaria, en una proporción que, teniendo menos necesidades, supera en cuatro y cinco veces la inversión colombiana. además, esta medición se hace sobre la base de la paridad de poder adquisitivo con el dólar norteamericano. en esas condiciones, según la explicación adjunta (nota al pie), el dólar trasladado a pesos tiene más poder adquisitivo, por lo menos el doble, de tal suerte que si estamos invirtiendo 1.250 dólares en poder adquisitivo en colombia, en realidad estamos invirtiendo la mitad, unos 650 dólares por estudiante. en cambio, trasladado a euros y yenes, el dólar pierde en promedio un 25% de su poder adquisitivo, de forma que estos países están invirtiendo, en realidad, un 25% más de lo que aparece en las cifras nominales, o sea que la distancia con la inversión colombiana se amplía y las diferencias de desarrollo se incrementan, en vez de disminuir. esta asimetría básica que, se podría suponer, tiene una inercia histórica, o sea que la sola educación primaria nos llevaría a ampliar la distancia en vez de diminuirla, se ve incrementada, sin embargo, con la inversión en investigación y desarrollo. la sola comparación con españa es desalentadora, pues al ver en la tabla 1 que el pib de este país es cuatro veces el de colombia (recordando que estamos hablando de la misma población) y aun así invierte más de cinco veces en investigación y desarrollo, la distancia se eleva a veinte veces. aún así, españa sólo llega a la mitad de la inversión que hace el g-7 en promedio, a pesar de que éste se ve disminuido signo y pensamiento 57 · eje temático | pp 248-267 · volumen xxix · julio diciembre 2010 262 por el pobre desempeño de italia, que se acerca cada vez más a las cifras de españa que a las del mundo anglosajón (tabla 8, columna 3). la distancia entre españa y colombia se ve reflejada casi con exactitud en el número de investigadores por millón de habitantes, pues en este caso la proporción sí es explícitamente de veinte a uno; así mismo, en este ítem, españa se acerca más al promedio de los países centrales que lo que nosotros nos acercamos a ella, aunque esto se debe nuevamente al mal desempeño de italia, pues la distancia con los centros anglosajones y japón, que son el centro del centro, sigue siendo muy amplia (tabla 8, columna 4). ahora bien, pasando ya del mundo virtual de la mera cultura, es decir, de las capacidades para producir a la producción propiamente dicha, y no sólo de bienes culturales, de valores de uso simbólico, sino de valores de uso material y valores económicos, estas ventajas se materializan en producciones bien tangibles. la manera como se produce el nexo entre la economía de la cultura —en este caso la economía del conocimiento— y la economía real se puede esquematizar de manera aproximada, como aparece en la tabla 9. en el estado actual de las cosas, lo que hemos visto hasta aquí es que si tomamos la economía de la país gasto por alumno en educación primaria (ppa* en u$) 2007 gasto en i&d (% del pib) investigadores en i&d (por millón de habitantes) patentes a residentes (por millón de habitantes) pagos recibidos por regalías y licencias (u$ por habitantes) estados unidos s. d. 2,6 4.484 281 178,2 japón s. d. 3,1 5.287 874 122,7 alemania 4.837 2,5 3.261 156 61,7 reino unido 5.596 1,9 2.706 64 202,1 francia 5.224 2,2 3.213 156 84,1 italia 6.347 1,2 1.213 s. d. 13,3 canadá s. d. 1,9 3.597 35 94,5 promedio g-7 2,2 3.394 261 108,1 españa 4.800 1,1 2.195 39 11,4 colombia 1.257 0,2 109 s. d. 0,2 fuente: columna 2, idh, 2009. columnas 3-6, adaptado del pnud, 2006 *ppa significa paridad de poder adquisitivo y quiere decir, lo que se necesita para adquirir el mismo producto en estados unidos y en cada país. por ejemplo, si la entrada a cine cuesta en colombia cinco dólares y en estados unidos cuesta 10 dólares, esto significa que en colombia se puede comprar con cinco dólares lo que se compra en estados unidos con 10. la paridad de poder adquisitivo de cinco dólares es 10 dólares. si en colombia se están gastando 10 dólares como paridad de poder adquisitivo, en realidad se están gastando 5. tabla 8. indicadores de investigación y desarrollo por país ancízar narváez montoya | educación, capitalismo y desarrollo 263 economía de la cultura formas expresivas formas de contenido nuevas sustancias de contenido nuevas sustancias expresivas valor de uso cuarto sector alfabética argumentativa analítica descriptiva nuevos conocimientos nuevas técnicas valor de uso simbólico nuevos aparatos y redes valor de uso material matemáticas física química tic valor de uso material economía real biología biotecnología (industrialización de la vida) valor de uso material sector secundario industria (nuevos materiales, nuevas máquinas, nuevos bienes de consumo) valor de uso material energía (nuevas fuentes de energía-energía nuclear) valor de uso material construcción (nueva infraestructura física) valor de uso material sector primario extracción (recursos naturales) valor de uso material fuente: elaboración propia tabla 9. de la economía del conocimiento a la economía real cultura como el cuarto sector, los países del centro, y específicamente los anglosajones y el japón, tienen la siguiente dinámica: una fuerte expansión social y una larga tradición de apropiación de la cultura alfabética en sus formas expresivas (alfabética) y de contenido (argumentativas, analíticas y descriptivas), por medio de la alfabetización y especialmente del logro en educación superior, donde se apropian las disciplinas (tabla 1). ello les permite producir nuevas sustancias de contenido, es decir, nuevos conocimientos en las denominadas ciencias básicas, paradigmáticas de esta cultura: matemáticas, física, química (no es necesario recordar de dónde son los premios nobel de estas ciencias). entonces, la aplicación de estas nuevas sustancias de contenido les permite producir nuevas sustancias expresivas para la cultura alfabética, como dijimos, pero también para las demás culturas (oral, icónica, narrativa, etc.), es decir, la tecnificación de cualquier cultura. a esto se le ha llamado tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (tic), las cuales tienen un alto valor de uso simbólico como técnicas, o sea, como formas de hacer, pero también presentan un alto valor de uso material en cuanto aparatos y redes. pero, por esta misma razón, las tic desbordan el mundo de la mera economía de la cultura; es decir, no se utilizan sólo para producir bienes de uso simbólico, para manipular la información o incluso para producir algún conocimiento nuevo, sino que su uso se extiende a la economía real. junto con los nuevos conocimientos producidos por la biología, producen lo que se llama la biotecnología, que es el punto más alto del desarrollo 264 industrial, como quiera que se trate de la industrialización de la vida. podemos decir, entonces, que la biotecnología es el punto de intersección entre la economía de la cultura y la economía real (tabla 9). de ahí en adelante, podemos hacer una escala descendente del desarrollo, según la cual los nuevos conocimientos y las nuevas técnicas (tecnociencia) van permitiendo a cada país desarrollar sectores cada vez más elevados en la producción de valor, en las eficiencias económicas, pero del sector secundario, o sea, el que transforma unos productos en otros. así, su aplicación a la industria genera nuevos materiales para no depender de las materias primas, nuevas máquinas, para mejorar los procesos de producción y, por supuesto, nuevos bienes. su aplicación en un sector crítico como la energía les permite acceder a nuevas fuentes de energía, específicamente, la máxima expresión de la manipulación tecnocientífica, que es la energía nuclear (robar el secreto del sol). aplicadas a la construcción, permiten generar nuevas infraestructuras para los asentamientos humanos, para el transporte y para el comercio. finalmente, se pueden aplicar a la extracción más eficiente (o más voraz) de los recursos naturales. así que una situación ideal de desarrollo sería aquélla en que una nación produjera, consumiera y exportara fundamentalmente productos de alta tecnología, o sea, que fuera productor, consumidor y exportador de tic y de biotecnología, a lo que se aproximan bastante países como el japón o corea. la situación extrema del subdesarrollo es la de aquellos países que sólo viven de la extracción, que son recolectores (de cualquier recurso) y que, por consiguiente, no agregan valor con su trabajo (en términos capitalistas). desde luego, esto se traduce en un alto valor económico. en efecto, antes de su caída en 2008, el citigroup empleaba a 25.000 programadores y: “lehman brothers […] aprovechaba 3.000 programas de software hospedados en 25.000 servidores” (schiller, 2009, p. 32). además: “sólo durante el año 2008, el sector privado y los gobiernos gastaron en conjunto 1 billón 750.000 millones de dólares en informática en general” (2009, p. 32). para tener una idea de la importancia económica de las tic vale la pena mencionar que, empezando 2009, mientras la crisis golpeaba al mundo, apple tenía unas reservas líquidas de 26.000 millones de dólares; cisco, de 20.000; microsoft, de 19.000; google, de 16.000; intel, de 10.000, y dell, de 6.000 millones de dólares (2009, p. 33). la mayoría de ellas mayores que las reservas internacionales de un país como colombia. finalmente, no hay que olvidar que todas estas empresas están en el centro del sistema, pues: “de las 25 firmas que dominaban el mercado del software y de internet en 2005, 19 eran estadounidenses” (2009, p. 33). lo que significa una transferencia del excedente de la periferia hacia el centro cada vez más desproporcionada2. el desarrollo de la economía del conocimiento se puede expresar en resultados correspondientes de la economía real. en primer lugar, el número de nuevos productos objeto de patente, es decir, nuevos objetos o procesos productivos, hacen una diferencia en materia de desarrollo y subdesarrollo, de centro y periferia. una de las maneras en que se nota que españa intenta llegar al centro del sistema mundial es por medio de la producción 2. queda aquí una zona oscura de la que no nos ocupamos, que es el llamado sector terciario de la economía, típicamente el sector de servicios, como el comercio, la banca y los servicios administrativos y personales. por ahora diremos que éste ocupa gran parte de la población, tanto en países desarrollados como subdesarrollados, pero en esencia, si no son actividades del cuarto sector, dependen del desarrollo de la economía real y, en general, no agregan gran valor a la economía. por otro lado, un sector como la construcción, pese a ser una producción real, no produce bienes transables, es decir, que se puedan exportar e importar, por lo que no suelen ser indicativos de un alto grado de desarrollo, puesto que no permiten ejercer la hegemonía en mercados ajenos. una de las causas de que la crisis se haya sentido tan fuertemente en españa en relación con los demás países de europa la atribuyen los economistas al hecho de que el desarrollo de españa en los últimos años se halla deformado por la hipertrofia de sectores no transables, como la construcción y los servicios, especialmente los relacionados con el turismo (hoteles, bares, restaurantes), los cuales no son ciertamente un ejemplo de productividad. ancízar narváez montoya | educación, capitalismo y desarrollo 265 país porcentaje de exportaciones industriales respecto a exportaciones totales porcentaje de exportaciones de alta tecnología respecto a exportaciones industriales estados unidos 83 34 japón 94 28 alemania 85 18 reino unido 82 32 francia 81 32 italia 88 9 canadá 64 19 promedio g-7 82,4 23,4 españa 78 8 colombia 34 7 fuente: tomado de sarmiento a. (2004). tabla 10. exportaciones industriales y de alta tecnología por países de patentes, la cual, sin embargo, no llega sino a una sexta parte del promedio del g-7, que es más o menos el de estados unidos, pero está todavía a una distancia de veinte a uno frente a japón. desde luego, colombia ni siquiera aparece en ese cuadro. esta producción se traduce en generación de valor, es decir, en producción de plusvalía que es la base de la acumulación de capital, lo cual se refleja en las regalías y pagos por licencia de uso de patentes que recibe un país, en este caso, cuantificadas por habitante. como se puede ver, en la realidad cruda y dura del mercado, españa apenas si llega a una décima parte de la valorización que generan en promedio los países centrales y casi a una vigésima de la plusvalía generada por los anglosajones. desde luego, la situación de colombia apenas es cuantificable, y difícilmente frente a la de españa, pues la proporción es, en números redondos, de cincuenta a uno. finalmente, como corolario, es esto lo que se refleja en las realidades del comercio mundial. no vamos a hablar de cifras, porque no tienen sentido las comparaciones cuantitativas entre países que como estados unidos y colombia tienen diferencias de tamaño casi de cien a uno. sí es pertinente, sin embargo, hablar de las diferencias cualitativas en el tipo de exportaciones, pues esto no es más que el resultado de la potenciación alfabética de las sociedades del centro del sistema mundo. cuando se habla de hegemonía en las relaciones económicas entre los países del centro, lo que se quiere decir es que los productos de un país están en condiciones de competir en calidad, en valor agregado, incluso con los productos de los demás países del centro. la manera como esto se puede medir es por medio del tipo de exportaciones, o sea si las exportaciones son de productos manufacturados, de alto valor agregado, de alta tecnología, o si son primarios, producto de la extracción y no de la elaboración (tabla 10). si miramos la tabla 10, encontramos una réplica de la situación cultural (cfr. tabla 8). el componente industrial de las exportaciones de los países del g-7 está por encima del 80%. aquí sigue pesando el atraso relativo de italia y la tendencia a nivelarse por lo bajo con españa, como países mediterráneos y latinos. si bien españa se acerca al promedio del g-7 en exportaciones industriales, en componentes de alta tecnología las diferencias con este grupo son de tres a uno, aunque aparentemente, pues si miramos el promedio de estados unidos, reino unido y japón, está por el 30%, y el de alemania, francia y canadá, por el 20%. así que italia, con un promedio por debajo del 10%, haría perfectamente grupo con españa y colombia en falta de presencia en el mercado tecnológico. la situación de españa se torna casi periférica, pues apenas llega a una cuarta parte del porcentaje de alta tecnología que tienen las exportaciones de los países anglosajones. signo y pensamiento 57 · eje temático | pp 248-267 · volumen xxix · julio diciembre 2010 266 conclusión hemos llegado, entonces, a cerrar el círculo. si en la tabla 1 mostramos cómo el desarrollo económico y la posición central de algunos países en el sistema mundo capitalista se relaciona con altos índices de cultura alfabética, aquí tratamos de mostrar la retroalimentación (tablas 8 y 10), o sea la manera como la fuerte presencia de la cultura alfabética en las sociedades se revierte en una fuerte presencia en el mercado global de bienes y servicios, pero no de cualquier tipo, sino de aquéllos de alto valor agregado, industrial y tecnológico, y, por consiguiente, con alto contenido cultural en su elaboración. esta es una condición en la que las sociedades anglosajonas y el japón son vanguardia indiscutible. por eso son el centro del moderno sistema mundial, de la economía-mundo capitalista y, desde luego, del capitalismo cultural. en estas condiciones, el desarrollo como posibilidad para la periferia es una utopía, pues éste, fuera de ser un invento de quienes están en el centro del sistema mundo y que se mide por sus parámetros, nos exige que tomemos en serio la asunción de esos parámetros, el más importante de ellos, la cultura alfabética. pero la situación en que hoy nos hallamos es el producto de las decisiones que hemos tomado históricamente y que seguimos tomando: queremos participar en el juego del desarrollo sin asumir la cultura que se inventó el desarrollo. aun así, siempre estaremos en desventaja frente a la producción alfabética anglosajona, en cantidad y calidad, en tradición y en expansión social y, por tanto, en la industrialización y la mercantilización de ésta, por cuanto no somos anglosajones ni podemos serlo. y como los parámetros son los suyos, siempre seremos una condición local frente a la suya que se considera global, siempre seremos subdesarrollados frente a su mundo que se considera desarrollado, y siempre estaremos más en la periferia, por cuanto la distancia con el centro se ensanchará en vez de cerrarse. estamos hablando de colombia, 3. en el plan visión del segundo centenario se preveía una inversión del 1,0% para 2010 y 1,5% para 2019, pero para 2010 sólo ha llegado al 0,18% o un poco más, según la forma de medición (montenegro, 2009). pero también de españa y brasil, que pese a ser semiperiféricos económicamente, son periféricos en la cultura global, como nos lo mostraron descarnadamente los datos. la reversión de esta tendencia: “supone una inversión en investigación, en ciencia y tecnología, que los analistas estiman, no debe ser inferior al 4% del producto interno bruto anual” (herrera, 2005, p. 193). pero la mayoría de los países de américa latina (excepto brasil) la mantienen alrededor del 0,5%, y colombia, alrededor del 0,2%3. sin embargo, el asunto difícil de asumir es que estas realidades son estructurales, es decir, no son cuantitativas, no se resuelven sólo incrementando la inversión o algo por el estilo, sino al reestructurar o definitivamente romper el sistema de relaciones, pues la capitalización (acumulación) de unos no puede llevarse a cabo sino mediante la transferencia de plusvalía de otros. de tal suerte que para hacer las inversiones necesarias es preciso romper la cadena de transferencia de plusvalía de la periferia al centro y de la producción a la especulación, al sector financiero, nacional y extranjero. así que la pretensión gubernamental de participar en el mercado global del conocimiento aplicando en el campo de la educación y la cultura criterios modernos anglosajones, como la mercantilización de la educación, la supremacía de la demanda sobre la oferta, la supremacía del aprendizaje sobre la enseñanza, la sustitución de la enseñanza por la tecnología o la supremacía de la tecnología sobre los agentes, ignora la falta de tradición alfabética y la persistencia de la tradición analfabeta, precapitalista, estamental y rural de la sociedad colombiana, forjada especialmente en el siglo xix y reforzada hasta la actualidad, por medio de la política de la “revolución educativa”. ancízar narváez montoya | educación, capitalismo y desarrollo 267 referencias arsuaga, j. l. y martínez, i. (2001), la especie elegida. la larga marcha de la evolución. madrid, booket. boyer, r. (1992), teoría de la regulación, valencia, edicions alfons el magnanim. castells, m. (1999), la era de la información, vol. iii, méxico, siglo xxi. crystal, d. (1997), the cambridge encyclopedia of language, 2.a ed., nueva york, cambridge university press. gordon childe, v. (1997), los orígenes de la civilización, bogotá, fce. hdr (2006), human development report [en línea], disponible en: http://hdr.undp.org/ en/media/hdr06-complete.pdf, recuperado: noviembre de 2009. herrera, b. (2005), globalización. el proceso real y financiero, bogotá, universidad nacional de colombia. huntington, s. (2001), el choque de civilizaciones, barcelona, paidós. llinás, r. (1998), “ciencia, educación y desarrollo: colombia en el siglo xxi”, en colombia: al filo de la oportunidad, bogotá, colciencias, tercer mundo editores. montenegro, s. (2009, 29 de octubre), “el mundo nos está dejando atrás”, en el espectador. ortiz, r. (2009), la supremacía del inglés en las ciencias sociales, buenos aires, siglo xxi. petrucci, a. (1999), alfabetismo, escritura y sociedad, barcelona, gedisa. pnud (2006), informe sobre desarrollo humano [en línea], disponible en: http://hdr.undp.org/ en /media/hdr_2009_es_complete.pdf, recuperado: noviembre de 2009. rey, g. (2009), “las reubicaciones de la lectura. libros, lectores y lecturas”, en pensamiento iberoamericano, núm. 4, 2.ª época, aecidfundación carolina, pp. 235-253. robinson, w. (2007), una teoría sobre el capitalismo global, bogotá, desde abajo. sarmiento a., l. (2004), sistema mundo capitalista. fábrica de riqueza y miseria, bogotá, desde abajo. — (2009a, octubre), “educación: entre la ilusión y la incertidumbre”, en le monde diplomatique [edición colombia], pp. 4-7. — (2009b, diciembre), “economía política del presupuesto general de la nación”, en le monde diplomatique, pp. 4-5. schiller, d. (2009, diciembre), “los gigantes de la pos-crisis”, en le monde diplomatique, pp. 32-33. sierra caballero, f. (2006), políticas de comunicación y educación. crítica y desarrollo de la sociedad del conocimiento, barcelona, gedisa. sousa santos, b. de (2002, julio), “hacia una concepción multicultural de los derechos humanos”, en el otro derecho. otras miradas sobre la justicia, núm. 28. pnud (programa de las naciones unidas para el desarrollo) (2006), human development report 2006 [en línea], pnud, disponible en http : // hdr.undp.org /en /media / hdr0 6 complete.pdf, recuperado: noviembre de 2009. wallerstein, i. (2007), la crisis estructural del capitalismo, bogotá, desde abajo. — (1979), el moderno sistema mundial (i). la agricultura capitalista y los orígenes de la economía-mundo europea en el siglo xvi, madrid, siglo xxi. who controls the fat controller the denning law journal 1 who controls the fat controller? alistair alcock∗ sir topham hatt, known to thomas and all the other engines on the isle of sodor as the ‘fat controller’, started his career as a humble railway engineer. yet he rose to become the chairman and chief executive of the railway board. sir topham, of course, inhabited a simpler world than ours. he was not, for example, subject to the strictures of the combined code on corporate governance that recommends the separation of the posts of chairman and chief executive. nor was he subject to the slings and arrows faced by his recent reallife equivalent, gerald corbett of railtrack, despite the appalling accident record of sodor railways, and of thomas in particular. in fact there is a website pointing out that the reverend awdry’s railway books are really elaborate apologias for capitalism, with the fat controller as a benign boss and the engines as recalcitrant, albeit in thomas’s case cheerful, communist workers.1 one might have expected that the collapse of communism and the apparent triumph of global capitalism would make life easier for the sir tophams. however, i am sure gerald corbett and many other directors will vouch that criticism of the boards of leading public companies has never been fiercer. it is as though, realising that it is impossible to get advanced democracies to vote against capitalism, its enemies have turned their attention to undermining its principal institution, the publicly quoted company. this assault has consisted of two not entirely compatible attacks. 1. directors are out to line their own pockets, through remuneration and other benefits, that in no way reflect the returns made for their ultimate paymasters, the shareholders. 2. directors only consider the interests of those ultimate paymasters, when, given the sheer power they have over modern economies, they should be balancing the interests of all stakeholders, employees, creditors, suppliers, customers, shareholders, local communities, even the environment at large. these, of course, are not new issues. looking at the first criticism in one railway case of 1854,2 the courts took a hard line against directors involved in ∗ professor of law at buckingham university. 1 thomas j clark’s site at www.angelfire.com/hi2/goalie/tommycommy.html. 2 aberdeen railway co v blaikie [1843-60] all er 249. http://www.angelfire.com/hi2/goalie/tommycommy.html the denning law journal 2 self-interested decisions. subsequently though, they stepped back allowing shareholders to give their directors a free hand through the internal rules of the company and leaving it to parliament to put any overriding restrictions in place3. even now, those restrictions allow directors of uk public companies to negotiate 5 year service contracts without shareholder approval.4 as all employment contracts are highly protected, in the case of directors they lead to the seven figure pay-offs when they are removed.5 railtrack’s shareholders may see no money from recent developments, but the directors will. generous service contracts have arisen despite the combined code’s recommendation that executive directors’ remuneration be settled independently by committees of non-executive directors. it is pointed out that directors’ remuneration in the uk appears to be well ahead of that on the continent, although still behind that in the us. however, to what extent this is a reflection of more accurate disclosure required by law and encouraged by lower taxes in the us and uk rather than real underlying differentials, is hard to ascertain.6 there are now proposals to limit directors’ service contracts to one year unless approved in some manner by shareholders.7 as, in the end, directors remuneration and severance terms are costs borne by shareholders, giving them full information and the final say in setting them seems the only practical restraint, short of some outdated pay policy. so in this talk i want to concentrate on the second criticism of directors which raises the question – to whom should directors be answerable? the uk courts have laid down that a directors’ duty is to act bona fide for the benefit of the company, although that benefit is to be determined in the light of the objects of the company laid out in its constitution. the benefit is generally held to be for the shareholders as a body although a company is free to adopt charitable or other objects.8 even where its objects are purely commercial, 3 clauses an a company’s articles releasing the directors from liability have been upheld in re city equitable fire insurance co ltd [1925] 1 ch 407 and movitex ltd v bulfield [1988] bclc 104 but are limited by companies act 1985, part x. 4 companies act 1985, ss 318 and 319. 5 companies act 1985, s 316(3); for an analysis of recent payoffs, see the guardian, 30th august 2001. 6 the recent mannesmann pay-offs suggest that continental practices may not be as straightforward as believed until now. 7 modern company law for a competitive economy: final report (dti, july 2001), para 6.13, although in other respects the proposals on self-interested transactions relax the current law. 8 a company’s memorandum can contain charitable and other objects, re horsley & weight ltd [1982] 3 all er 1045, 1052. the denning law journal 3 the courts have allowed directors a wide subjective discretion. as bowen lj said back in 1883 in another railway case:9 “a railway company, or the directors of the company, might send down all the porters at a railway station to have tea in the country at the expense of the company. why should they not? it is for the directors to judge, provided it is a matter which is reasonably incidental to the carrying on of the business of the company….” perhaps to the relief of many here, even charitable payments to educational establishments can be reasonably incidental.10 the one notorious case where the courts did intervene was in the 1960s, parke v daily news.11 this involved an attempt by a board winding up the company to make extra payments as redundancy to its employees rather than return the money to the shareholders. the court held this could not be for the benefit of the company as it no longer needed any employees. there followed a public outcry and a change in the law. directors were given a specific power to make such payments even if they were not in the interests of the company. a general duty was also imposed on directors to consider the interests of employees, albeit a duty not enforceable by those employees.12 i remember being puzzled as a student in the 1970s, why the daily news affair caused such a fuss. two things struck me: 1. if, as is usual, the company had been insolvent on winding up, no one would have suggested there should be extra payments to employees at the expense of say trade creditors. why should shareholders, who are in some respects only creditors with particularly weak contractual rights, be treated differently? 2. imposing duties on directors to consider interests without an enforcement mechanism ironically increases their power, because this gives directors defences against interests that might otherwise have been able to enforce, ie shareholders. however, in the uk, individual shareholders have almost no legal power to enforce their interests against the directors of publicly quoted companies. from 9 hutton v west cork railway co (1883) 23 chd 654, 672. 10 evans v brunner mond & co ltd [1921] 1 ch 359. 11 [1962] ch 927. 12 companies act 1985, ss 309 and 719. the denning law journal 4 the early decision of foss v harbottle in 1843,13 through percival v wright in 190214 to re blue arrow plc in 1987,15 it has been made clear by the courts that, except in the most egregious cases, dissatisfied shareholders of such companies should not resort to law. they must either use their votes to change the management or sell their shares. theirs is only a loose residual control. so has the wide freedom the courts have given directors left them free to pursue the stakeholder view of corporate governance, balancing the interests of employees, creditors, suppliers, customers, shareholders, local communities and the environment?16 certainly those who passionately espouse the stakeholder view think not and they are probably right.17 dissatisfied shareholders tend to sell their shares. that lowers the share price. to the extent that directors themselves have shares or options, this directly hits their pockets. even where, as on the continent, they do not, a falling share price means a rising cost of raising money from the market, and from other sources like banks as they in turn become more nervous. a company with a low share price and a concomitant high cost of capital is restricted in the investments it can afford to make and is vulnerable to takeover by its more successful competitors, which means no jobs for its directors. this is the crude discipline of the market against which the stakeholder view rebels. that rebellion has marked up some successes in recent years. in the united states, a number of states have adopted stakeholder duties in their corporation laws.18 the courts have supported this approach by allowing directors to use poison pills to stop hostile takeover approaches being put to shareholders – leaving the directors free to consider other interests, not least their self-interest in keeping their jobs.19 following this line, the european parliament rejected a draft directive earlier this year that would have outlawed such a use of poison pills across the european union.20 meanwhile, in the uk, the company law review steering group looking into company law reform, also seems to have succumbed to the stakeholder (or as it terms it, the pluralist) approach. it has usefully defined this approach as believing: 13 [1843] 2 hare 461. 14 [1902] 2 ch 421. 15 [1987] bclc 585. 16 this is what berle and means predicted in the modern corporation and private property (new york: macmillan, 1932; revised 1967). 17 eg parkinson corporate power and responsibility: issues in the theory of company law (oxford: clarendon press, 1993) (“parkinson”). 18 eg pennsylvania’s business corporation law of 1988 as amended by the takeovers act of 1990, ss 1714 to 1721. 19 paramount communications inc v time inc 571 a.2d 1140 (del 1989); unitrin v amrican general corp 651 a.2d 1361 (del 1995). 20 13th company law directive. the denning law journal 5 … the ultimate objective of maximising shareholder value will not achieve maximum prosperity and welfare… company law should be modified to include other objectives so that a company is required to serve a wide range of interests, not subordinate to, or as a means of achieving shareholder value…21 in other words, the stakeholder or pluralist view goes further than asking directors to consider all relevant stakeholder interests in trying to maximise the long term value of the company for shareholders. it wishes decisions benefiting those stakeholders to be taken even if it harms shareholder value, what professor parkinson, a keen exponent of this view and a member of the steering group, has dubbed ‘profit sacrificing social responsibility’. the steering group (a sort of unofficial royal commission) subsequently concluded: “the overall objective [of uk company law] should be pluralist in the sense that companies should be run in a way which maximises overall competitiveness and wealth and welfare for all…”22 so has this stakeholder or pluralist view triumphed? not yet. in the us, shareholders can still get poison pills lifted by threatening to vote off the directors and the courts have been reluctant to allow directors to protect themselves from such removal by current shareholders.23 in europe the 13th company law directive may still be revived and would not in any case affect the uk takeover panel’s firm line against defence tactics that prevent shareholders deciding on bids. and for all its rhetoric, the company law review steering group has not accepted the pluralist view. indeed, it proposes to replace all the current common law duties imposed on company law directors,24 with a statutory formula that includes a ferocious reaffirmation of shareholder primacy, namely: a director of a company must in any case 21 modern company law for a competitive economy: the strategic framework (dti, feb 1999), para 5.1.13 22 modern company law for a competitive society: developing the framework (dti: march 2000), para 2.21 23 bank of new york v irving bank corporation 139 misc.2d 665 (ny sup ct 1988); hilton hotels corporation v itt corporation 978 f supp 1342 (nev 1997) 24 draft companies bill, s 17 in modern company law for a competitive economy: final report, annex c. the denning law journal 6 a. act in the way he decides, in good faith, would be most likely to promote the success of the company for the benefit of its members as a whole…; and b. in deciding what would be most likely to promote that success, take account in good faith of all the material factors that it is practicable in the circumstances for him to identify. this seems a much tougher duty to forward shareholders’ interests than the current one imposed by the courts. there are no general overrides for charitable purposes or employees’ interests unless they appear specifically in the company’s constitution. even the interests of creditors may be downgraded.25 so where have all the much vaunted stakeholder or pluralist interests gone? they have been relegated to the notes explaining ‘the material factors that it is practicable in the circumstances for him to identify’ and not even to the primary factors. no, stakeholders are merely included in other factors and are listed as: a) the company’s need to foster its business relationships, including those with its employees and suppliers and the customers for its products or services; b) its need to have regard to the impact of its operations on the communities affected and on the environment; c) its need to maintain a reputation for high standards of business conduct; d) its need to achieve outcomes that are fair as between its members. notice, these ‘needs’ only arise to the extent that a reasonable director would consider them relevant in the circumstances to promote the success of the company for its members. they are awarded no special weighting and are certainly not given any mechanism for direct enforcement. indeed, the drafting puts as the primary factors: the likely consequences (short and long term) of the actions open to the director, so far as a person of care and skill would consider them relevant. this emphasises two matters of particular concern to the steering group, but which are both probably current law: 25 some duty currently arises under west mercia safety ltd v dodd [1988] bclc 250 when a director ought to have realised that insolvency was ‘more likely than not’. the steering group have contemplated removing this and leaving an overriding duty to creditors only arising when a director ought to have realised that was ‘no reasonable chance of avoiding’ insolvency, the position under insolvency act 1986, s 214. the denning law journal 7 1. directors should consider both the long as well as the short term consequences of their actions, an exhortation against ‘short-termism’; and 2. directors should apply an appropriate standard of skill and care to their tasks, not just that of an educated layman.26 by emphasising these two, any statutory general duties will undoubtedly add to the bureaucracy of decision-taking in publicly quoted companies as paperwork is assembled to show that short and long term issues were carefully considered. the stakeholder issues listed in ‘other factors’ will no doubt add to this trend. one can imagine public company boards being flooded with special pleading from innumerable pressure groups. whether this will improve the quality of the decisions is harder to say. what can not be made to go away are the underlying conflicts of interest that directors have to deal with. as the steering group starkly put it: the interests of the shareholders and others will clash… [eg] a decision whether to close a plant with associated redundancies or to terminate a long-term supply relationship, when continuation in either case is expected to make a negative contribution to shareholder returns… in such circumstances, the law must indicate whether shareholder interests are to be regarded as overriding, or some other balance should be struck.27 however much the steering group may try to disguise it with warm words and phrases, it has firmly concluded that ‘shareholder interests are to be regarded as overriding’. so is the war over? i fear not. we have not seen any government bill to date and as the steering group found on a number of other reform issues, its freedom to propose sensible measures was constrained by european directives. the experience of the 13th company law directive shows how the best laid plans can be destroyed in the european legislative process. also, no doubt to keep those with stakeholder views like professor parkinson on board, the steering group 26 the old and possibly outdated test in re city equitable fire insurance ltd [1925] 1 ch 407; but see norman v theodore goddard [1991] bclc 1028, 1030; re d’jan of london ltd [1993] bcc 646, 648. 27 modern company law for a competitive economy: the strategic framework, para 5.1.15. the denning law journal 8 avoided any ringing endorsement of traditional shareholder value. its objections are dressed up as largely practical: a few still supported a ‘pluralist’ approach, imposing a duty to balance the interests of relevant parties without necessarily giving priority to those of members; but none of those responses suggested a practicable means of dealing with the crucial question of how such a duty could be enforced. this is to our mind a key objection.28 this is a terribly british approach, disguising political, even moral issues as matters of practicalities. indeed, by now you are probably wondering why i have been dragging you through this mire of company law technicalities, but behind them lurk fundamental issues of freedom, political legitimacy and the rule of law. so in the second half of this lecture i would like to take the opportunity to demonstrate to you that the stakeholder view of corporate governance is not just impractical, it is deeply immoral. 1. the stakeholder attack on the traditional shareholder value approach comes in two slightly different guises: 2. other interests are just as vulnerable as shareholders and deserve equal consideration; and directors of large public companies are just too powerful to be left only to consider their shareholders’ interests. the first argument starts from the point that shareholders are not in a unique position of risk. others, like suppliers and employees, have to make ‘firm specific investment’ and, unless it is protected, they will be discouraged from making such investment. bluntly, in a post-industrial society, this is nonsense. computerisation has made most firm specific supplying easy and cheap. to the extent that satisfactory arrangements can not be secured by contract, there always remains the option of bringing the function in-house.29 the position has changed just as much for employees. the rise of the skilled ‘knowledge worker’30 and the protection of employment law have made 28 modern company law for a competitive economy: completing the structure, para 3.5. 29 as coase pointed out in the 1930s, that is the principal justification for functions being brought within the structure of a firm; coase ‘the nature of the firm’ in williamson and winters (eds), the nature of the firm: origins, evolution and development (new york: oup, 1993). 30 drucker, post-capitalist society (new york: harper collins, 1993) (“drucker”). the denning law journal 9 employees, at least of well-financed public companies one of the most privileged contracting groups in society. as we have seen, that is why executive directors, who have employment contracts, get such wonderful pay-offs. employees are merely a heterogeneous private interest group, sufficient of whom may form an alliance with the directors against any other interests. privatisation was not about finding new management or cheaper capital. the old management often remained and a stable government can always raise capital cheaper than private firms. no, it was, and still is, about breaking the restrictive practices of management and employees by cutting off the tax guarantee behind the nationalised industries and their boards. i look forward to see what railtrack mark 2 gets in the way of backing from the treasury. at this point, defenders of the stakeholder view usually point to the japanese and german models which in their different ways incorporate employees into their governance structures. but that is only half the story. both have depended upon a highly protected banking system providing the discipline that shareholder dissatisfaction provides in the anglo-american model. in japan, it can now be seen that the banks failed to exercise that discipline with disastrous consequences and in germany, they are beginning to lose the power to do so. this hardly seems the moment to adopt such an approach even if we had developed the necessary banking arrangements to do so, which we have not. so why does forwarding employees’ interests at the expense of shareholders’ still instinctively seem so moral? there still lurks the impression that, compared to honest toiling employees, shareholders are lazy good-for-nothing rentiers. in fact, shareholders in uk publicly quoted companies are largely the pension funds of, not just the privileged knowledge workers, but also the less privileged ‘service workers’ throughout the economy. of course, it can be argued that things do not have to be arranged this way. whether pensions are funded or not, pensioners remain dependent for their income on current workers. the continental pay-as-you-go tax based system could be adopted. however: 1. public expenditure pressures have already undermined that system in the uk and are now doing so elsewhere; and 2. such a system would be dependent on taxing an aging uk population. returns on publicly quoted companies are by their nature global, incorporating returns from younger, more vibrant economies. could we, in any case, do without shareholders? after all, ordinary shares are only a funny form of loan, which offers no pre-determined right to any interest or capital back. they just have a claim to the residual surplus on winding up after everyone else has been paid, with dividends as discretionary payments on account. the only contractual weapon given to their holders is a degree of the denning law journal 10 residual control in the form of a vote, in particular a vote to change the directors. investment theorists, like modigliani and miller,31 would argue that it does not matter whether a company is financed by debt or shares since all they are doing is allocating the risks and returns of the underlying business of the company. the company is just an allocative vehicle. but the debt-equity structure does matter, because companies reliant on debt, have to pay interest and capital on time which increases the risk of bankruptcy, and this is not costless. management, from its own self-interest and from emotional ties to the company and its employees, is likely to try and avoid this risk.32 the management of companies dependent on debt finance is therefore likely to reject high-risk projects and, if most companies in an economy are dependent on debt, the whole economy can become riskaverse. it was the need to issue shares to finance highly speculative railways in the 19th century that was the impetus behind the creation of uk company law in the first place. no share capital is vital because in a fickle world, it is permanent, a feature that european companies, until now dependent on bank finance, are increasingly appreciating. as the financial times pointed out yesterday, the government still has this problem if railtrack mark 2 is to get any outside funding.33 this brings me the second argument for the stakeholder view, which starts from the sheer size of the largest multinational companies. these have turnovers greater than the gdps of some quite substantial countries. the directors of these companies are making investment decisions that affect thousands of employees, the communities that they come from, even the whole environment. governments seem helpless in the face of such organisations as they shift capital and profits around the world. classical economists’ maintain that corporate behaviour is no more than a reflection of the popular will, expressed not through the ballot box, but via individual purchase decisions. but that seems unrealistic in the face of corporate giants like shell, microsoft, nike or mcdonalds. those holding stakeholder views point to at least three ways that the market does not operate efficiently: 1. the size and power of the established players allow them to create barriers to entry for competitors, leaving them room for manoeuvre; 2. companies have an informational advantage, eg unjustifiable claims through advertising, public relations etc. 31 modigliani and miller, ‘the cost of capital, corporation finance and the theory of investment’ (1958) 48 american econ rev 261. 32 management may fear not just a loss of employment and reputation, but personal liability under west mercia safetywear v dodd or insolvency act 1986, s 214, see above. 33 financial times, 8th october 2001, lex column. the denning law journal 11 3. externalities can be exploited, eg companies can poach trained staff or damage the environment without being made to pay. let us take each in turn: 1. the electronic and communications revolution have given even the largest companies far less room for manoeuvre than even twenty years ago. look at the car industry. in europe each country was dominated by one or two local manufacturers. now in the uk and rapidly through the rest of europe, no company has more than 20% of the local market. companies also have to be responsive to the vagaries of these markets, mcdonalds on the meat it serves in india, shell on the disposal of rigs in northern europe. these organisations are not quite the monoliths they first appear to be. 2. although it is never possible to produce a level playing field in information, again the electronic and communications revolution have made things much easier for consumers. indeed consumer and other pressure groups have been major exploiters of the internet. governments can always help by demanding the publication of more information and that is one of the major recommendations of the uk company law steering group. 3. externalities are also a matter for governments to settle. for example, how can companies regulate themselves as to what land may be exploited for oil, superstores or housing. on the other hand it has to be recognised that increased regulation is often loved by major corporate players because it raises the barriers against competitors entering the market. for a passionate espousal of this view, look no further than the recent cruickshank reports on banking and their attack on the proposed new financial regulation.34 even for the largest multi-nationals, market forces are intense and can not easily be willed away. as one commentator has put it: “the business executive who chooses voluntarily to spend until it hurts on the environment, on training, the handicapped, or on support of higher education, is likely to find that he is vulnerable 34 competition and regulation in financial services: striking the right balance, hm treasury, july 1999; competition in uk banking: a report to the chancellor of the exchequer, stationery office, march 2000. the denning law journal 12 to undercutting by firms without a social conscience that, by avoiding such outlays, can supply outputs more cheaply”.35 even professor parkinson at the end of his magisterial apologia for the stakeholder view was forced to admit: “any changes designed to increase corporate social responsiveness that are liable to add significantly to companies’ costs cannot in an increasingly global marketplace be safely introduced in one country. whether the changes are in governance structures or are measures to stimulate responsibility, or are more stringent conventional regulatory controls, they will need to apply more widely if domestic economies are not to be disadvantaged in the face of international competition. in europe, this emphasises the importance of the social, in addition to the economic, dimension of european collaboration”.36 but just think for a moment what is being said there. that is a plea for the creation of a protectionist europe, with a tariff wall and exchange controls, aimed at allowing european companies to indulge in profit sacrificing social responsibility, just like the old comecon businesses in the communist bloc. all this may seem a bit far-fetched at the moment, but listen to recent outbursts from the current french prime minister, lionel jospin and think what pressures might build up if we were now to face a prolonged recession. i think the new applicants to the european union from eastern europe might be surprised to find themselves re-entering a protectionist club. of course it can be argued that the stakeholder view does not require such extreme measures to be taken, at least to start with. a modicum of profit sacrificing social responsibility would be quite sufficient. but even that gives rise to serious difficulties. to allow it would require either: 1. directors to be given the power to consider all the various interests, which would be a massive increase in directors’ discretionary power; or 2. directors are given the duty to consider such interests, which would be a massive increase in the courts’ discretionary powers. 35 baumol ‘(almost perfect competition (contestability) and business ethics’ in baumol and blackman (eds), perfect markets and easy virtue: business ethics and the invisible hand (cambridge, mass: blackwell, 1991), p 53. 36 parkinson p 433. the denning law journal 13 either way, political power and decision making would be transferred to nonpoliticians, in the words of the steering group, ‘turning company directors from business decision-makers into moral, political or economic arbiters’.37 can you imagine how dangerous and anti-democratic this could be? as has been put most forcibly by levitt: “what we have, then, is the frightening spectacle of a powerful economic functional group (ie management) whose future and perception are shaped in a tight materialistic context of money and things but which imposes its narrow ideas about a broad spectrum of unrelated non-economic subjects on the mass of man and society”.38 if you think that is an exaggeration, think of the baleful effect the involvement of businessmen has had on education in this country. and what sort of political legitimacy would this new ‘nomenclatura’ have? professor parkinson and others proposing the stakeholder view suggest that legitimacy could be achieved with new structural checks and balances; but the only stakeholders whom it is easy to incorporate into corporate governance are employees. parkinson himself admits that state appointees do not have a happy track record. political interference over decades has reduced our railways to a ludicrously crash-averse, investment starved wreck. who is going to stand up and point out to railtrack mark 2 that the railways can afford to lose dozens of passenger lives a year and still be the safest form of transport in the uk. as for other stakeholders, like suppliers and customers, they can hardly be incorporated for fear of creating multiple restrictive practices and conflicts of interest. this leaves the employees which brings us back to the dangers of incorporating their interests which i have already described. so what are we left with overall? the proponents of the stakeholder view claim that it offers a 3rd way, a form of communitarianism. directors would be required to temper the financial success of their companies with policies to protect employees, suppliers and their communities and to respond to the various demands of environmentalists. after all, even under the steering group’s formulation of directors’ duties, these are matters that directors should, where appropriate, consider. but with one important difference. directors would still have a clear overriding goal, shareholder value. as drucker has pointed out, having a single focus is vital for the success of an organisation: 37 modern company law for a competitive society: developing the framework para 2.21. 38 levitt, ‘the dangers of social responsibility’ in marshall (ed) business and government: the problem of power (lexington: heath, 1970) p 27. the denning law journal 14 organisations are special-purpose institutions. they are effective because they concentrate on one task. if you go to the american lung association and say: “ninety per cent of all adult americans… suffer from ingrown toenails; we need your expertise in research, health education and prevention to stamp out this dreadful scourge,” you’d get the answer: “we are interested only in what lies between the hips and the shoulders.” that explains why the american lung association or the american heart association or any other organisation in the health field gets results… only a clear, focused and common mission can hold the organisation together and enable it to produce results.39 communitarians find such single-purposedness uncomfortable. they dream of a quiet, orderly, dare i say static world, the sort of world described in the reverend awdry’s railway books. the isle of sodor exists somewhere off the coast in never-never-land, free from global forces technological change never threatens steam trains, farmers somehow survive keeping the odd cow or pig, the fat controller never faces difficult pricing or investment decisions, like scrapping thomas. there is never a mention of death or taxation. of course, in the real world, decisions on the provision and funding of public services, on employee security, protection of local communities, land use and other environmental issues can not be avoided. but they must be taken by democratically elected politicians. it is their job to present issues to the electorate and create a framework of laws and taxes within which companies then have to operate. they have got to stop trying to palm off these decision onto others and hide them away from democratic comeback. already it is too easy to use the european union under the treaty of rome and the courts under the european convention of human rights. politicians bemoan the declining turn out at elections, but what is the point of voting if the critical decisions seem to made elsewhere. this evening we have traveled a long way from questions of directors’ remuneration and the technical drafting of their duties. may i leave you, however, with a nightmare scenario of what might happen if the stakeholder view were to triumph. if the stakeholder view is adopted, boards of publicly quoted companies, confronted with a range of conflicting interests, will start to take profitsacrificing decisions to meet some of them. this and the concomitant lack of focus of their businesses will slowly render them less competitive internationally. businessmen will increasingly call for tariffs and/or subsidies to survive. this will put them into the hands of government which in return, will make random 39 drucker, p 53. the denning law journal 15 demands on their companies to support governmental pet projects. corporate well-being will become less a matter of successful competition within a framework of laws and more a competition for special privileges from government, privileges that, as railtrack and its shareholders discovered, can be withdrawn at any time. this is a competition for survival that medieval barons would have recognised, or indeed more recently, industrialists in nazi germany. this is not cosy communitarianism, it is corporate feudalism. the united kingdom took three centuries and at least one civil war dismantling such arrangements. the united states took a further two civil wars. i am not saying that corporate feudalism can never work. it has allowed a number of asian countries to catch up economically and it could be argued that britain reverted to it to survive two world wars. but it is hardly a credible approach for a leading peace-time economy and even if it were, the price in terms of personal and business freedom is, in my opinion, far too high. by now i need hardly declare my colours, but lest any of you remain in doubt. i am not a cultural relativist, nor do i believe that you can go round borrowing bits and pieces from other systems. i am a fanatical believer in western liberal democracy, particularly as practised in anglo-saxon countries – not because it promotes economic wealth, although i think it does, but because, with all its manifold imperfections, it promotes freedom and transparency. stakeholder views are for me an anathema. they break down a critical separation of powers, not the usual separation of executive, legislature and judiciary, which has never been clearly accepted in this country, but the much more vital one between government and business. if the great corporations can not be dealt with on a fair arms-length basis, what hope is there for us mere mortals? on the isle of sodor, we never get to know who controls the fat controller, but i pray that here on the mainland, it remains, however loosely, the shareholders. who controls the fat controller? alistair alcock( perspective_politice_2017_decembrie.qxd implicaþiile echitãþii de gen în construcþia statului bunãstãrii abstract: the academic community suggests that there are multiple variations of the welfare state depending on its specific political and socio-economic background. considered a “novelty” of both modernity and capitalism (hence the term welfare capitalism), its main end goal is generally considered to be the just redistribution of wealth to the most disadvantaged and/or marginalized citizens via social policy, which can translate into retirement schemes, social and healthcare insurance, maternal leave plans, employment policies and so forth. feminist theory tries to analyze and emphasize the interaction between the public and private spheres, both being directly affected by the market and the state’s intervention upon it. this article sets out a brief historical account on the emergence of the concept of welfare state, which is then followed by a review of the main currents of thought and contentions within feminist literature on this topic. the main research question i am trying to address here is the following: is the welfare state an effective device of diminishing gender inequality and its inherent issues such as the feminization of poverty or the double burden? at the same time, can it be used as an instrument to balance the gender hierarchy? keywords: welfare state, gender equality, market forces, division of labour i. context istoric – raportul beveridge conceptul de „stat al bunãstãrii” a început sã capete contur începând din perioada postbelicã, când pagubele ºi cheltuielile uriaºe ale rãzboiului, în combinaþie cu climatul economic determinat de marea crizã economicã din 1929, schimbaserã aºteptãrile cetãþenilor din partea statului modern, care doreau un mai mare grad de securitate socialã. un exemplu timpuriu se regãseºte în germania, prin pachetul de politici sociale din timpul lui bismarck între 1883–1889, care implementase sisteme de pensii ºi asigurare medicalã (judt, 2005:72), însã, relevant mai ales dintr-o perspectivã de gen, este exemplul raportului beveridge din 1942, fundamentul direcþiei politice a partidului laburist din marea britanie. printre cele mai importante mãsuri menþionate în acest document se regãsesc: sistem naþional de sãnãtate, sistem de pensii etatizat, alocaþii pentru familii ºi politici de ocupare a forþei de muncã. la adresa acestui raport au apãrut critici aspre din partea feministelor venite din rândul clasei muncitoare, acesta acuzând prezumþiile patriarhale ºi discriminatorii care întãreau ºi mai mult ideea de dependenþã economicã faþã de soþ ºi de trecere a femeilor în categoria cetãþenelor de rang secund (blackburn, 1995:371), aspect ce contravine presupusei imparþialitãþi a statului bunãstãrii, aceea de a oferi sprijin tuturor prin redistribuirea resurselor, indiferent de variabila de gen. or, acest prinalexandru tudorache facultatea de ªtiinþe politice, ªcoala naþionalã de studii politice ºi administrative, alexandru.tudorache.15@politice.ro perspective_politice_2017_decembrie.qxd 12/12/2017 9:51 am page 81 cipiu este subminat de decizia lui beveridge de a determina femeile sã plãteascã mai puþine contribuþii la asigurãri, dar sã primeascã ºi mai puþin din beneficiile aferente, ºi a aºteptãrilor sale ca femeile sã renunþe la aceste beneficii în favoarea „zestrei” primite în urma cãsãtoriei, consecinþa cea mai dãunãtoare ca rezultat al combinaþiei acestor douã circumstanþe, similar unui cerc vicios, este cã, în cazul în care ar fi rãmas mame singure, singurul lor sprijin vine din partea aceluiaºi stat care le-a îngrãdit în primã instanþã din dreptul la contribuþie ºi beneficiu. în ciuda celor enumerate, bãrbaþii erau ºi ei supuºi unor standarde rigide de calificare pentru ajutor social, care era acordat timp de un an (mai târziu 6 luni), beveridge el însuºi asumând cã cei care vor gãsi mijloace sã evite prestarea muncii vor fi bãrbaþii, mai mult, existau disensiuni între diversele grupãri feministe (feminism libertarian, liberal, socialist, radical, negru º.a.m.d) care criticau acest raport, dar din unghiuri diferite în funcþie de ideologia proprie. ii. noþiuni teoretice – clivajul stat/piaþã din cauza acestei lipse de consens între curentele feministe, prerogativele ºi obiectivele specifice pe care statul bunãstãrii trebuie sã le aplice întâmpinã dificultãþi conceptuale care automat afecteazã ºi universalitatea sa, caracteristicã despre care este rezonabil sã presupunem cã este dezirabilã atunci când considerãm scopul general menþionat în începutul articolului. este nevoie, deci, de o claritate conceptualã sporitã. dezbaterea asupra rolului femeilor în construcþia statului bunãstãrii este împãrþitã astfel: pe de-o parte, statul este vãzut ca o structurã patriarhalã care nu diminueazã din problemele deja existente ale femeilor, plecãnd de la premisa cã familiile sunt formate pe baza modelului tradiþional de breadwinner male salariat ºi o soþie care presteazã muncã domesticã neremuneratã; pe de cealaltã parte, accentul se pune pe femeie ca actor social ºi impactul pe care îl are asupra structurii, misra & akins (1998) propun o abordare mai diversificatã care sã ia în calcul alte variabile adiacente statutului de femeie, precum clasa, rasa, sau etnia, în încercarea de a gãsi un teren comun pentru abordãrile scindate, evidenþiând eforturile individuale ºi colective ale femeilor ºi aportul lor în interiorul statului bunãstãrii. esping-andersen (1990) se distanþeazã de termenul generic de welfare state care de cele mai multe ori face trimitere la politicile sociale de ameliorare în favoarea folosirii termenului de welfare state regime, în încercarea de a evidenþia importanþa ºi totodatã complexitatea relaþiei dintre stat ºi piaþã. astfel, esping-andersen distinge între trei ideal-tipuri de stat al bunãstãrii: liberal, conservator, social-democratic, toate fiind circumscrise dihotomiei structuralism-instituþionalism, cele douã abordãri rivale în a explica relaþia dintre stat ºi piaþã. în timp ce structuralismul reprezintã o viziune holistã asupra sistemului social, susþinând ideea de liberalism laissez-faire, automat presupunând ºi neimplicarea statului în mecanismele pieþei, abordarea instituþionalistã propune tocmai opusul – statul ºi piaþa sunt inseparabile, în caz contrar, apar efecte nocive asupra societãþii. criteriul principal dupã care eficienþa unui asemenea stat poate fi mãsuratã este capacitatea acestuia de a permite tuturor cetãþenilor sã se bucure de un standard decent de trai, indiferent de constrângerile forþelor de piaþã. vorbim aici despre procesul de “decomodificare”, prin care fiecãrui individ îi este asigurat minimul necesar traiului în raport de independenþã cu piaþa, pe considerente de drept. briggs (1961:28) propune urmãtoarele caracteristici ca fiind indispensabile statului bunãstãrii: salariu minim pe economie garantat indiferent de valoarea individualã pe piaþa muncii; securitate socialã în faþa perspective_politice_2017_decembrie.qxd 12/12/2017 9:51 am page 82 potenþialelor probleme (social contingencies) pe viitor indiferent de statut sau clasã, ºi standardele serviciilor sociale sã fie echitabile pentru toþi. problema ridicatã de cãtre feministe cu privire la tipologia lui esping-andersen este cã premisa “decomodificãrii” este genizatã deoarece asumã de la bun început cã beneficiarul acestor politici sociale este un bãrbat. acest proces de “liberalizare” a individului în raport cu piaþa muncii poate determina o lipsã de atenþie a ceea ce se întâmplã în sfera privatã, mai specific, în interiorul familiei care, conform lui oakley (1986) ºi kolberg (1991), reprezintã, istoric, cea mai mare “sursã de bunãstare”, ºi precum în cazul unor state ca italia, belgia, olanda, luxemburg, germania, franþa sau austria (reprezentante ale modelului conservator al statului bunãstãrii) – reprezintã mijlocul principal de distribuþie a bunãstãrii. astfel, munca domesticã neplãtitã devine o constrângere pentru femei, în favoarea bãrbaþilor care se bucurã de o mobilitate socialã sporitã, determinându-le pe femei sã devinã “dependente de bunãstare”, adicã de modelul male breadwinner ºi diviziunea muncii aferentã. condiþiile de calificare pentru beneficierea de politici sociale sunt mai aspre în cazul femeilor din cauza unei anumite stratificãri a beneficiilor, prezentã îndeosebi în statele unite, având: beneficii bazate pe asigurare socialã (insurance-based benefits, considerate de prim rang ºi de care bãrbaþii se bucurã cel mai mult datoritã mobilitãþii pe piaþa muncii); ºi beneficii bazate pe asistenþã socialã (assistence-based benefits) specifice mamelor (nelson, 1990). orloff (1993:66) propune douã variabile utile unei analize genizate a statului bunãstãrii ºi a procesului de decomodificare: accesul la munca plãtitã, ºi capacitatea de a întemeia ºi întreþine o gospodãrie autonomã – “the ability of those who do most of the domestic and caring work – almost all women – to form and maintain autonomous households, that is, to survive and support their children without having to marry to gain access to breadwinners’s income.”. tot în acest sens, molyneux (1985) distinge între douã tipuri de interese de gen: interese practice de gen, cu scopul de a îmbunãtãþi situaþia materialã atât a femeilor cât ºi a bãrbaþilor fãra a modifica ierarhia de gen; ºi interese strategice gen, cu scopul de a modifica respectiva ierarhie. statul bunãstãrii pare sã nu satisfacã niciunul dintre aceste criterii prea bine, din cauza relaþiei de dependenþã descrise mai sus ºi a prevalenþei modelului male breadwinner, încurajând independenþa bãrbatului pe piaþa muncii ºi subordonarea în spaþiul privat a femeii. un argument poate fi, desigur, cã odatã ce statutul femeilor pe piaþa muncii este adus cel puþin pe picior de egalitate cu cel al bãrbaþilor, ne putem aºtepta ca ierarhia de gen sã fie mai flexibilã datoritã noilor condiþii economice, însã tot la fel de mult ne putem aºtepta la consecinþe nedezirabile pe plan economic, referindu-mã aici la exemplul reformelor hartz din germania, care au propus instituirea unor “mini-slujbe” în cadrul muncii domestice, cu avantajul cã erau parþial scutite de taxe ºi contribuþii sociale, dar care au determinat un deficit bugetar de pânã la 1 miliard de euro (rubery et al, 2003c). printr-o viziune pluralistã asupra echitãþii de gen care doreºte o reinterpretare a dihotomiei egalitate-diferenþã (“a plurality of distinct normative principles”), fraser (1994) traseazã la nivel teoretic potenþiale direcþii ale statului bunãstãrii post-industrial ºi ierarhiei de gen în after the family wage: gender equity and the welfare state. fraser propune în acest sens douã ideal-tipuri: modelul universal breadwinner, specific statelor unite, prin care se urmãreºte implementarea unor politici de angajare care sã favorizeze accesul femeilor pe piaþa muncii; ºi modelul caregiver parity, practicat în preponderenþã de statele europei de vest, care susþine cã echitatea de gen poate fi realizatã prin distribuþia simetricã a responsabilitãþilor domestice între femei ºi bãrbaþi. aceste douã modele sunt conceptualizate prin prisma a 4 principii normative care compun echitatea de gen: perspective_politice_2017_decembrie.qxd 12/12/2017 9:51 am page 83 1. principiul anti-sãrãciei: presupune stoparea riscului de sarãcie în rândul femeilor, precum în cazul familiilor monoparentale cu mame singure. 2. principiul anti-exploatãrii: este în strânsã legãturã cu conceptul de decomodificare, de a proteja femeile de a deveni dependente de forþele pieþei sau soþi abuzivi. 3. principiul anti-marginalizãrii: un stat al bunãstãrii care satisface primele douã principii poate în continuare sã tolereze excluziunea socialã, prin reducerea prezenþei femeilor în politicã sau activitãþile societãþii civile, deci, în sfera publicã, circumscriindu-le mai degrabã în sfera privatã. 4. principiul anti-androcentrismului: este similar cu noþiunea de interese strategice de gen a lui molyneux, acest concept vizând ierarhia de gen ºi restructurarea normelor de gen interiorizate atât de femei cât ºi de bãrbaþi. aceste principii doresc sã asigure egalitatea pe trei planuri majore: 1. egalitate de venit – ce presupune înlãturarea discrepanþei genizate de venit. 2. egalitate de timp liber (leisure time) – are în vedere o distribuþie echilibratã a îndatoririlor în sfera privatã ºi publicã. 3. egalitate de respect urmãreºte renunþarea la viziunea patriarhalã a obiectificãrii femeii ºi stereotipurilor/normelor restrictive de gen. însã, miza cea mare a atingerii acestui obiectiv prezintã o anevoioasã dependenþã de cale formatã între aceste principii, deoarece, cel puþin ipotetic vorbind, ordinea implementãrii lor propriu-zise prin intermediul statului va influenþa rezultatul în mãsura în care aceste trei tipuri de egalitate coexistã ierarhic ºi concurenþial din cauza costurilor financiale ºi sociale pe care le presupun. aceastã idee este evidenþiatã de cãtre esping-andersen în incomplete revolution: adapting welfare states to women’s new roles (2009), denumind-o “revoluþie incompletã”, argumentând cã incluziunea echitabilã a femeilor pe piaþa muncii este doar un prim pas în atingerea obiectivului echitãþii de gen, deoarece “diferenþele de clasã” în ceea ce priveºte statutul marital, fertilitatea, divorþul, locul pe piaþa muncii ºi “tiparele de producþie domesticã” (2009:172) nu vor fi înlãturate datã fiind premisa economicã a intervenþiei statului. modelul universal breadwinner pune foarte mult accent pe munca prestatã în sectorul public în detrimentul celei domestice, pentru a le capacita pe femei sã fie independente financiar faþã de bãrbaþi. deºi satisface principiile egalitãþii de venit, anti-sãrãciei ºi anti-exploatãrii, egalitatea de timp liber are de suferit din cauza accentului pus pe piaþa muncii în detrimentul vieþii ºi muncii domestice, cât ºi principiul anti-androcentrismului ºi egalitãþii de respect deoarece forþeazã oarecum includerea femeilor în sfera publicã tradiþional masculinã. aºadar, avem de-a face cu o viziune egalitarianã de tipul f=b. problema cea mai pregnantã în aceastã situaþie este dezbaterea încã nesoluþionatã ºi esenþialmente normativã cu privire la remunerarea muncii domestice prestatã predominant de cãtre femei. diferenþa de platã dintre sexe poate fi gânditã ca o consecinþã a lipsei de reconciliere dintre cariera profesionalã ºi munca domesticã (dubla zi de muncã), un consens existând în ceea ce priveºte efectele pozitive asupra bunãstãrii economice a muncii casnice (gãtit, spãlat, curãþenie, îngrijirea copiilor º.a.m.d), chiar dacã existã domenii unde femeile câºtigã anual mai mult decât bãrbãþii (smith & bettio, 2008). în medie, femeile petrec de douã ori mai mult timp ocupându-se de munca domesticã ºi de patru ori mai mult îngrijind copiii (duflo, 2012). calitatea vieþii de familie ar fi crescutã considerabil dacã ar exista o diviziune echitabilã a muncii în interiorul gospodãriei prin interperspective_politice_2017_decembrie.qxd 12/12/2017 9:51 am page 84 mediul unor politici de reconciliere (cum am avut în românia, ca exemplu, proiectul acces în cadrul posdru/144/6.3/s/128613), ca alternativã la clasicul model al bãrbatului breadwinner – cel care aduce venitul gospodãriei. aceste politici presupun soluþii practice precum concedii plãtite de creºtere a copilului, sistem flexibil de creºe ºi grãdiniþe, mai multã flexibilitate în orarul de lucru sau reducerea acestuia unde este cazul. modelul caregiver parity, în schimb, urmãreºte remunerarea muncii informale domestice (în combinaþie cu locuri de muncã part-time pentru a garanta flexibilitate) pentru a le permite femeilor sã se întreþinã singure, aducând, astfel, acest tip de muncã la aproximativ acelaºi nivel cu munca din sectorul public, cum autoarea însãºi afirmã: “the aim is not to make women’s lives the same as men’s, but rather to make difference costless” (fraser, 1990:606). se doreºte un program flexibil de muncã pentru ca femeile sã se poatã ocupa fãra piedici ºi de munca din spaþiul privat, tranziþia bruscã dintre sfera publicã ºi cea privatã trebuie sã fie relativ fãrã costuri financiare. acest model are cel mai mult de suferit din cauza randamentului nedezirabil al egalitãþii de venit ºi principiului anti-marginalizãrii, deoarece familiile cu doi membri vor tinde sã pãstreze diviziunea clasicã a muncii pentru a maximimiza beneficiile economice, drept consecinþã munca domesticã revenind predominant tot femeilor, fapt ce va întãri ºi mai mult normele tradiþionale de gen faþã de care principiul anti-marginalizãrii se opune. aºadar, acest model este cel mai “îndrãzneþ” deoarece preuspune o imensã restructurare a pieþei muncii ºi policitilor statului pentru a particulariza experienþa femeilor, de a o separa de cea a bãrbaþilor ºi de a spori prezenþa lor în sfera publicã (prin urmare, f=non-b). iii. concluzii dupã cum putem observa, statul bunãstãrii se bazeazã pe o legislaþie care menþine în continuare un grad de dependenþã al femeii faþã de bãrbat, holter (1984) considerându-l ca o tranziþie de la dependenþa privatã la dependenþa publicã, o extindere a patriarhatului, deºi nu putem ignora cã s-au realizat multe eforturi în vederea echitãþii de gen (ca în cazul suediei, de exemplu, cabinetul löfven declarându-se feminist). construcþia unui stat al bunãstãrii care sã ia în considerare ºi sã contribuie activ la îmbunãtãþirea condiþiei dezavantajate a femeilor este îngreunatã de cãtre bine-ºtiutul clivaj al sferei private/sferei publice, peste care intervine dezbaterea aprinsã dintre egalitarism ºi esenþialism ºi “conflictul” constant dintre stat ºi forþele pieþei. de asemenea, în contextul globalizãrii, datoritã creºterii competitivitãþii, discriminarea de gen în ceea ce priveºte plata devine o „risipã”, o alegere pãguboasã din punct de vedere al raportului cost-beneficiu, ceea ce determinã pierderi economice de partea angajatorilor ºi firmelor (becker 1971), cât ºi a pib-ului, din perspectivã macroeconomicã. teoria feministã, la momentul actual, nu poate ajunge la un consens din cauza miºcãrilor diverse ce abordeazã variabila de gen ºi societatea per ansamblu din unghiuri diferite, îndeosebi în contextul în care feminismul (atât ca ideologie cât ºi ca miºcare socialã) este vãzut ca o prioritzare nejustificatã sau nenecesarã (the politics of delay) a intereselor politice pe agenda publicã. însã un lucru este sigur, cã un stat al bunãstãrii universalist ºi just nu poate fi complet ºi integru dacã nu considerã echitatea de gen printre punctele de plecare prioritare. perspective_politice_2017_decembrie.qxd 12/12/2017 9:51 am page 85 referinþe becker, gary s. (1971). “the economics of discrimination”. university of chicago press blackburn, sheila (1995). “how useful are feminist theories of the welfare state?”. women’s history review, 4:3, 369-394. briggs, asa (1961). “the welfare state in historical perspective”. european journal of sociology, pp. 221-258. duflo, esther. 2012. “women empowerment and economic development”. journal of economic literature, 50(4): 1051-79. esping-andersen, gosta (1990). “the three worlds of welfare capitalism”. polity press, pp. 1-30. esping-andersen, gosta (2009). “incomplete revolution: adapting welfare states to women’s new roles”. polity press. fraser, nancy (1994). “after the family wage: gender equity and the welfare state”. sage publications inc., political theory, vol. 22 no. 4, november 1994, pp. 591-618. judt, tony (2005). “postwar: a history of europe since 1945”. the penguin press, pp. 63-80. lewis, jane (1997). “gender and welfare regimes: further thoughts”. oxford university press, pp. 161-177. misra & akins (1998). “the welfare state and women: structure, agency, and diversity”. oxford university press, pp. 260-285. orloff, ann (1996). “gender in the welfare state”. annual review of sociology, vol. 22 (1996), pp. 51-78, accesat la data de 14-05-2017 9:59 utc. perspective_politice_2017_decembrie.qxd 12/12/2017 9:51 am page 86 extreme geographies: a response from a dependent semi-periphery of the post-neoliberal europe urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa59633 doi: 10.11143/fennia.59633 reflections: extreme geographies extreme geographies: a response from a dependent semiperiphery of the post-neoliberal europe james riding riding, james (2017). extreme geographies: a response from a dependent semi-periphery of the post-neoliberal europe. fennia 195: 1, pp. 106–112. issn 1798-5617. we live in a time of paranoid borderism, a time of intense paranoia of the other, and a time where the privileging of the nation state as the symbolic container of space, our territory, seems to have made a lurid return to the european continent. the consequences of this socio-spatial ordering and othering, the legacy of euclidian thinking, and cartesian models of knowing the world, can become an extreme geography: a form of cartographic cleansing that seriously needs to be addressed. in this short response to the fennia lecture given by professor henk van houtum on extreme geographies, i offer a report from a region that has become a dependent semi-periphery of the new largely neoliberal europe that emerged post1989: a new europe that is now entering a post-neoliberal era and is becoming increasingly neofascist. i draw from this region as a warning from history, and argue that the hopeful politics of the new left in the former yugoslavia provide an answer. the new left, as it has been termed, in the post-yugoslav space, articulates the need for a new radically democratic european project: a project that is no longer neoliberal, but equally a project that does not turn to a nostalgic nationalism, a neofascism, or indeed any other form of authoritarian capitalism. keywords: cartography, borders, territory, nationalism, neofascism, yugoslavia, bosnia-herzegovina james riding, relate centre of excellence, kanslerinrinne 1, university of tampere, tampere, finland fi-33014, e-mail: james.riding@uta.fi at the heart of our disintegrating eu there lies a guilty deceit: a highly political, top-down, opaque decision-making process is presented as ‘apolitical’, ‘technical’, ‘procedural’ and ‘neutral’. its purpose is to prevent europeans from exercising democratic control over their money, communities, working conditions and environment. [...] the more they asphyxiate democracy, the less legitimate their political authority becomes, the stronger the forces of economic recession, and the greater their need for further authoritarianism. [...] this is the unseen process by which europe’s crisis is turning our peoples inwards, against each other, amplifying pre-existing jingoism, xenophobia. the privatisation of anxiety, the fear of the ‘other’, the nationalisation of ambition, and the re-nationalisation of policy threaten a toxic disintegration of common interests from which europe can only suffer. [...] europe’s pitiful reaction to its banking and debt crises, to the refugee crisis, to the need for a coherent foreign, migration and anti-terrorism policy, are all examples of what happens when solidarity loses its meaning. – democracy in europe movement (2015) © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 107james riding introduction in this short response to the fennia lecture given by professor henk van houtum on extreme geographies, at the annual meeting of finnish geographers, in joensuu, finland, 2016, i offer a report from a region that has become a dependent semi-periphery of the new largely neoliberal europe that emerged post-1989: a new europe that is now entering a post-neoliberal era and is becoming increasingly neofascist (arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015; riding 2016). i draw from this region as a warning from history, and argue that the hopeful politics of the new left in the former yugoslavia provide an answer. the new left, as it has been termed, in the post-yugoslav space, articulates the need for a new radically democratic european project: a project that is no longer neoliberal, but equally a project that does not turn to a nostalgic nationalism, a neofascism, or indeed any other form of authoritarian capitalism. the paper presented by van houtum is timely. we live in a time of paranoid borderism, a time of intense paranoia of the other, and a time where the privileging of the nation state as the symbolic container of space, our territory, seems to have made a lurid return to the european continent (paasi 1999; brenner & elden 2009; elden 2009; painter 2010; murphy 2013; elden 2013). and as van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy write in this issue of fennia, it has resulted in a normalization of extreme politics in europe (see also bueno lacy & van houtum 2013, 2015; ferrer-gallardo & van houtum 2014). for despite globalization, despite the increasing movement of people across national borders, despite the supranational european union, and despite a concerted marketing of multiculturalism in the urban centers of europe, the desire to find comfort in the ‘we’ of the nation, the continuing allure of dwelling in a nostalgic territorial fatherland, and the pre-defined ‘purity’ and singularity of a national identity, paradoxically remain (nancy 2000; van houtum et al. 2005). the consequences of this sociospatial ordering and othering, the legacy of euclidian thinking, and cartesian models of knowing the world, can become, as is reported here, an extreme geography, an ‘apartheid cartography’ (crampton 1996; campbell 1999). a form of cartographic cleansing that, as van houtum, kramsch and zierhofer (2005) have previously stated, seriously needs to be addressed. i have argued in previous work that “going back to a regional geography can be a way of moving forward” (riding 2015, 2016; see also thrift 1983, 1994). regional geography considers the view from below, or the view of social groups marginalized in orthodox political history (agnew 2013). it is precisely through studying regions and writing at a regional scale – which unlike the national scale does not represent a privileging of institutions associated with the interests and outlooks of political elites (agnew 2013) – that an emancipatory struggle can be physically placed in the landscape and an overbearing, often overtly nationalistic cartographic worldview can be deconstructed on-the-ground. similarly, van houtum (2010) argues in his work that geographers need to represent the mobility and dynamics of geography and geopolitics, the moving lines, the moving spaces, the moving minds, rather than focusing on and mapping the fixity. so, rather than merely presenting the dots, arrows and lines in geography and cartography geographers need to think about the choreography of geopolitics (van houtum 2010). as such, van houtum sets geographers the challenge to re-present the world, together with video-artists, photographers, and other imaginators (riding 2017). the void, the semi-periphery, the balkans i looked up at many maps of a europe on slideshows in the concrete rooms of joensuu during the annual meeting of finnish geographers, yet all contained a void, a space that was missing; it was simply not represented in the regional studies of europe. when it was represented, and not cut off the bottom or the side of the map, it appeared as a different color, usually white, meaning empty, noninformative space, lacking any useful comparative data. but this space of the world is also intensively mapped (elden 2005), it is overly-mapped and cartographically constructed in certain places when viewed at a national scale (crampton 1996; campbell 1999), so why is it now avoided, missed, forgotten, or represented as a corridor, a semi-periphery, a difficult region to explain in the largescale multidisciplinary studies of europe? it is now, perhaps, in fact, a symbol of the increased ordering of time-space, and a paranoid desire to create more borders, a precursor of the neofascist ethno-politics 108 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies we are now witnessing on the european continent again, in amongst the death throes of neoliberalism. slobodan milošević may indeed be the most influential politician of our time. down there, always somewhere a little further to the southeast, the balkans are still seemingly viewed as a photographic negative of what was until very recently cast as a tolerant, multicultural, post-political, post-ideological europe. a ‘postmodern racism’ has existed for the past two decades or more, žižek argues, where the balkans are seen as the intolerant other, while the rest of europe has supposedly come to terms with otherness in its much vaunted – indeed marketed – language of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism (žižek 2000, 1–2). yet, perhaps it is now time to return to the balkans, the former yugoslavia, and the cartographically constructed land of bosnia-herzegovina, to remind europe of its own difficult recent history, and to where a newly reemerging nationalism in europe and a carto-politics leads. the war in bosnia, is after all, despite the mythic separating-out of europe, a part of the european story (rieff 1995; riding 2015). the region with which this response is concerned has been forgotten, its history unheeded. and the encircling ‘cosmopolitan’ europeans (nancy 2000), repeating a balkanism (carter 1977; todorova 1997; goldsworthy 1998; glenny 1999; žižek 2000; mazower 2002), have ignored the devastating consequences of the endless post-socialist ‘transition’ in bosnia-herzegovina – after ethnic conflict and genocide – which has meant general impoverishment, mass unemployment and living under the post-democratic governance of divisive and corrupt elites (arsenijević 2011). while, in the neoliberal new europe, the very concept ‘transition’ is unilaterally and dogmatically followed. ‘transition’ though, as horvat and štiks (2015) argue, is an ideological construct based on the narrative of integration of the former socialist european countries into the western core. for horvat and štiks (2015), this actually hides a monumental neo-colonial transformation of this region into a dependent semiperiphery. they continue, arguing that adjunct concepts, such as a ‘failed’ or a ‘weak’ state, conceal the fact that these are not anomalies, they are instead the main products of ‘transition’ (ibid.). and since the ‘new’ liberal capitalist system is beyond questioning, widespread corruption must be related to culture dependent behaviour in the ‘east’ – an orientalist tradition imposed upon this region, understood under the term ‘the balkans’ (see horvat & štiks 2015). a warning from history, after the end of history the war in bosnia was eventually brought to an end in december 1995, when the dayton agreement was signed (glenny 1992; thompson 1992; rieff 1995; little & silber 1996; campbell 1998). ‘peace’ has lasted to this day, although the framework agreement created in dayton, ohio, which divided the country in roughly half along ethnic lines, has prevented bosnia-herzegovina from developing entirely beyond wartime divisions (toal & dahlman 2011; jeffrey 2013). preceded by an agreement between bosniaks and bosnian croats signed in washington in 1994, the country was separated into two political entities: the predominantly bosnian serb, republika srpska, and the mainly bosniak and bosnian croat, federation of bosnia and herzegovina, sometimes informally referred to as the bosniak-croat federation. locally, the country is further separated out, as the federation of bosnia and herzegovina has ten autonomous cantons with their own governments. each canton is known as majority bosnian croat, majority bosniak, or ‘mixed’ (nancy 2000). within the cantons are municipalities which further define the individuals living there. while republika srpska is lead more centrally from the de facto capital banja luka, there are still observable geographical divisions between the northern portion and southern portion of the state within a state. this cartographic representational idiosyncrasy, or more precisely ‘apartheid cartography’, enforces a nationalist overhaul of space upon citizens in bosnia-herzegovina (campbell 1999; crampton 1996). cartography has aided a post-socialist era of never-ending ‘transition’ politics, of brutal capitalism and diminished democracy, and the continuation of a nationalist governance that it was hoped would fade away (horvat & štiks 2015). resembling berlin after world war ii, sarajevo is a meeting point of the different lines that were drawn across bosnia-herzegovina and is partly in republika srpska and partly in the federation of bosnia and herzegovina. the de jure capital of republika srpska is sarajevo, the de facto capital of the federation of bosnia and herzegovina is sarajevo, and sarajevo is the capital of the country bosnia-herzegovina, where a weak central government also resides. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 109james riding it is no surprise therefore that mass protests erupted here in february 2014, deconstructing the divisions on the map, as sarajevo is a place that was for jean-luc nancy (2000), a mêlée, due to its long history of multiculturalism in a real and not prescribed sense. a historical regional focus as bridge between east and west and the old power blocs, sarajevo is a non-aligned space, a place where a profoundly anti-capitalist and radically democratic vision of society could form (harvey 2012; arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015; riding 2016). entangled within their emancipatory struggle protesters saw a present yugoslavia, which was bit by bit disappearing. and they sought to retain what remains there were of that socialist state, and to reclaim a socialist space in a space of postsocialism. most of all they sought to reclaim the commons, the factories, the museums, everything that the post-socialist ‘transition’ had in their eyes diminished. it is now over a decade since the constitutional charter of the state union of serbia and montenegro was adopted, becoming the successor to the federal republic of yugoslavia, rendering yugoslavia former. yet a socialist yugoslavia of brotherhood and unity, made up of six republics, and two autonomous provinces – bosnia-herzegovina, croatia, macedonia, montenegro, serbia, and slovenia, and vojvodina and kosovo – was destroyed years before 2003, in the days and months leading to ethnic conflict (glenny 1992; thompson 1992; rieff 1995; little & silber 1996; campbell 1998). there are though here on this rebel peninsula (harvey 2012; arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015), material and institutional remnants and lived personal experiences and memories of that bygone yugoslav socialist era (luthar & puznik 2010). the new left in the former yugoslavia organized autonomously, plenum are the most radical experiment in horizontal democracy that can be found across the balkans since the collapse of yugoslavia (arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015; riding 2016). plenum articulate socialism beyond the state and plenum are not aligned to a single political party. plenum are – in simply existing as they do outside of the traditional governmental and elite spirals and circles – post-nationalist spaces in a region that is heavily influenced by nationalist politics during the post-socialist ‘transition’ era. the political potential of space within a post-socialist country was taken up by those first protesters remembering yugoslavia in the present. in so doing bodies were made political and people were given the opportunity to discuss politics beyond the municipality, the canton, the entity; beyond yet within the lines the dayton agreement drew across the country, and separated citizens along. the following towns and cities now have their own plenum: sarajevo, tuzla, zenica, mostar, travnik, brčko, goražde, konjic, cazin, donji vakuf, fojnica, orašje and bugojno. there are core plenum principles, which translate as openness, transparency, and non-corruption. plenum opened a space, a possibility into which people can jump. almost everybody spoke at the plenum of citizens of sarajevo, as the space enabled a kind of collective therapy (arsenijević 2011). certain performances were demanded from those who attended: no one voice is greater than another and no individual voice is perceived as animal howl. it is, as such, a space for speech beyond prohibition, enabling a disjointed society to collectively mourn a traumatic past and its enduring traces. in the desert of postsocialism, at plenum, those present, imagine a forgotten future, a socialist future beyond the ethnonationalist divisions of the ‘transition’ era (arsenijević 2011; helms 2013; gilbert & mujanović 2015; gordy 2015; hromadžić 2015; jansen 2015; kraft 2015; kurtović 2015; majstorović et al. 2015; mujkić 2015; touquet 2015; murtagh 2016). as i have argued elsewhere, plenum are a eulogy for the mêlée, they are small eulogies for a yugoslavia, a bosnia, a sarajevo of the certain past, before ethnic cleansing (riding 2016; see nancy 2000). they are in a phenomenological sense the spirit of what jean-luc nancy (2000) calls, being singular plural. plenum claim existence is co-existence, they are part of an emancipatory struggle, and they are a vital beingwith, which the delineation of a formerly socialist space into nationalist segregation has denied for twenty years or more (crampton 1996; campbell 1999; toal & dahlman 2011; jeffrey 2013). documenting the morphology of regions and the fracturing of states, reveals here a nationalist overhaul of space, which manifests itself locally in the street, the city, the municipality, the canton, the entity, and indeed in the individual (see elden 2013; see also anderson 1983; campbell 1998; nancy 2000; brubaker 2002). 110 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies conclusion instead of division and fragmentation, the common language of balkanist literature, the formerly socialist yugoslav states have entered a new era of resistance after a recent rebirth of radical politics, as individuals forge a trajectory towards a democratic future (arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015; see bourdieu 1998). there is, as such, a region of the european continent, that part of the continent that has for so long been defined by its radical politics, which is rebelling against the core. embraced, subsumed and made dependently peripheral within the ‘new’ liberal global economy, there are now new reasons to engender a radical politics in this region for a post-cold war generation. beyond the capitalist anarchism associated with other socio-political movements of recent times, the plenum movement openly questions the new europe that emerged post-1989: a new europe that is now entering a post-neoliberal era and is becoming increasingly neofascist (arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015; riding 2016). in short, this socio-political movement strives for a revolution (smith 2010). with a rebranded fascism on the rise across europe, in what has become a suffocating postdemocratic age, the hopeful politics of the new left in the former yugoslavia provide an answer to the paradox van houtum outlines (see štiks 2015). in a time of globalization, where in which the european union is disintegrating, a paranoid desire to circumscribe the state and reinforce borders is growing, and is leading to less freedom within the states themselves. europe is building walls faster than ever before and reverting back to the nation state as a singular definition of an individual citizen, while europe’s pitiful reaction to its banking and debt crises, to the refugee crisis, to the need for a coherent foreign, migration and anti-terrorism policy, are all examples of what happens when solidarity loses its meaning (democracy in europe movement 2015). in response, the new radical politics in the old yugoslavia, emphasizes the need for a new radically democratic european project, a project that is no longer neoliberal, but equally a project that does not turn to a nostalgic nationalism, a neofascism, or indeed any other form of authoritarian capitalism. decades after the forgotten socialist geographer fred singleton (1985) spoke of a balkan federation of socialist states, as a response to yugoslavia’s fracturing, this region – which has exhausted the radical in many guises – once again provides a manifesto for a radically democratic future (štiks 2015). we must now, over twenty years after the collapse of yugoslavia, at the very least consider the unique position of the bastards of utopia living radical politics after socialism (rasza 2015). for the end of neoliberalism is nearing, perhaps the end of the european union as we know it, yet in its place an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist form of capitalism cannot be allowed to form. this region of europe, the place from where this response emerges out of, knows most of all and deeply understands where carto-politics, border-making, and an ethno-nationalism will lead. acknowledgements i would like to thank the chief editor of fennia, dr. kirsi pauliina kallio, for giving me the opportunity to respond to the first fennia lecture at the annual meeting of finnish geographers, in joensuu, finland, 2016, and professor henk van houtum for providing useful comments. references agnew, j.a. 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(2000) the fragile absolute: or why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? verso, london. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126093 https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126094 https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2012.696232 https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2016.1169060 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343409950078701 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00795.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00795.x https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566x.2015.1093917 https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2016.1260491 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474016647372 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00716.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00716.x https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2015.1089094 https://doi.org/10.1068/d010023 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23638-1_8 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23638-1_8 https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730360.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2015.1019430 key: cord-0060747-s00kk8fa authors: thompson, janice l. title: piecing together a puzzle: feminist materialist philosophy and nursing ethics date: 2020-06-19 journal: nursing ethics: feminist perspectives doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-49104-8_3 sha: 1af962d3d74df9b90b07d2edb5aa3237c5cc33de doc_id: 60747 cord_uid: s00kk8fa this chapter explores connections between discussions of nursing ethics in north america and the feminist materialist philosophy (fmp) of nancy fraser. the analysis first reviews key points of fraser’s philosophical critique of capitalism. these points include explanations of the ethics of recognition, redistribution, and representation in the context of capitalism. also considered are contradictions that fraser identifies in “post-socialist feminist” perspectives, as these are relevant for nursing ethics. finally discussed are fraser’s latest fmp explanations of financialized transnational corporate capitalism, including its social, political, and economic effects. the chapter next uses fraser’s critical theoretical explanation of capitalism to piece together some implications for nursing ethics. this critical exploration first focuses on discourses of caring in u.s. nursing, also exploring parallel developments in feminist care ethics. this analysis suggests that the ethics of care in nursing and beyond can be deepened and strengthened by greater consideration of fraser’s fmp, explicitly in considering capitalism. next, the discussion examines the discourse of social justice in nursing, acknowledging connections between care and social justice ethics in nursing literature. definitions of social justice are discussed as are recent analyses of social justice ethics in canadian and u.s. codes of ethics. selected examples of social justice scholarship in canadian and the u.s. nursing literature are next reviewed, pointing to similar theoretical and practice-oriented concerns. this review of social justice scholarship argues again that greater consideration of fraser’s fmp can strengthen accounts of social justice in nursing ethics by explicating contextual effects of capitalism. the chapter concludes in arguing that fraser’s work presents a puzzle for nursing ethics, a question about what form of professionalism nurses believe they are enacting under capitalism. in providing that critical approach to nursing ethics, fraser’s fmp ultimately invites nurses to define pragmatically what forms their professional moral agency will take under capitalism. in her 2011 article, piecing together a genealogical puzzle: intersectionality and american pragmatism, patricia hill collins (2011) presents a very helpful analysis of discourses in intersectionality and pragmatism. her work, including the metaphor and method of "piecing together a genealogical puzzle"-has been an inspiration and i appreciatively borrow that metaphor of "piecing together" here. i have chosen to organize the experience of assembling this analysis as a process of working out/on a puzzle. in that approach, i'm explicitly remembering the imagery and process of feminist literary methods (anderson 2017) , i.e., "piecing together" or assembling work that is part of a greater whole. here i hope to move toward something still not clear (to me) about nursing ethics, a hope for pattern recognition in a larger field of understanding that addresses moral agency and praxis in nursing. to circle a feminist pragmatist/critical theory of nursing ethics, i move within and between some selected fields of work. at the outset and perimeter of this analysis, i review in broad stitch the work of feminist materialist philosopher nancy fraser. i privilege fraser's analysis to create an opening, a discursive space. within that opening, i explore key elements and implications of her critical pragmatist, materialist feminist philosophy, relating these to nursing ethics. i view fraser's work as inviting a productive epistemic shift (not a rupture) in knowledge development for nursing ethics. that shift requires nurses to reconsider and engage/act on political-economic contexts of practice that are directly relevant to nursing ethics, taking into account the context of transnational corporate capitalism. fraser's work helps with this by providing analysis of political-economic contexts that influence moral agency. i argue that her work has important relevance for nursing ethics. after reviewing fraser's work-i move to reflect on the complexity involved in engaging fraser's analysis in nursing. i consider some reasons for why it may be both helpful and difficult to use fraser's work in nursing ethics. this reflective bracketing includes some discussion of anti-socialist feminist ambivalence, tendencies fraser identifies, that make it complicated for some nurse scholars to speak about nursing ethics using fraser's analysis. i counter this with reflections on the history of a critical social ethic in nursing, also identifying the presence of contemporary discourses in nursing ethics that could point toward more alignment with fraser's critical theory. that reflection considers how and why it may be productive at this moment to examine and use feminist materialist philosophy, as one approach (among others) that can support a critical nursing ethics. finally, i move on to piece together some connections between fraser's work and different discourses of moral agency in nursing ethics. i first consider some connections between her philosophy and the ethics of care. i take up selected pieces of work from theorists of care in nursing along with selected examples of work from feminist care ethicists. the analysis suggests that a feminist ethics of care may be coherently consistent for some feminist commitments in nursing, yielding reflective equilibrium in some cases. as fraser suggests, however, a feminist ethic of caring risks continuing a trend of mostly "post-socialist feminist" moral reasoning, evading the critique of capitalism. to address this, i suggest that a feminist ethics of care in nursing is productively deepened/strengthened by addressing intersections with fraser's feminist materialist philosophy. the discussion next similarly considers discourses of the ethics of social justice in nursing. this analysis includes a brief discussion of some contemporary theoretical approaches for the ethics of social justice in nursing in canada and the united states. while these approaches can be understood as consistent with a legacy ethics of social justice in nursing, they also are largely silent about capitalism, continuing a "post-socialist feminist" imaginary for moral agency around social justice. these discourses in nursing are viewed as being productively deepened and strengthened by addressing feminist materialist philosophy, as this is demonstrated in fraser's work. given these opportunities for connections between nursing ethics and fraser's critical theory, i conclude by commenting on some implications for a critical nursing ethics. i find the absence of a critique of capitalism in nursing ethics puzzling. to address this, i invite more dialogue about the emancipatory potential of using feminist materialist philosophy as one theoretical tool (among others) with relevance for a critical nursing ethics. u.s. critical theorist nancy fraser has worked carefully over three decades to articulate a complex and hopeful feminist ethics. in her moral and political philosophy, fraser insists that gender matters in the struggles and wishes of our times-and that an adequate understanding of gender must be located historically and accurately within political-economic contexts of capitalism (fraser 1985 (fraser , 1989 (fraser , 1990 (fraser , 1995a (fraser , b, 1997 (fraser , 2005 (fraser , 2009 (fraser , 2017 fraser and honneth 2003; fraser and jaeggi 2018; fraser and sunkara 2019; arruzza et al. 2019) . feminist materialist leanings in her work insist that intersections of social, political, and economic relations under capitalism are deeply organizing, i.e., that capitalism contextually shapes phronesis/or ethical conceptions of what is right and what is good in our current age. this sensitivity to capitalism acknowledges that power relations (like sexism, racism, classism, heteronormativity, ableism, ageism) do intersect to produce institutionalized social practices in democracies. she argues that the intersections of class, race, and gender are best explained by locating them in the political-economic context of capitalism-with an adequate understanding of how capitalism operates. unlike theories of intersectionality, which tend to be descriptive, focused on ways in which extant subject positions crosscut one another, my account is explanatory. looking beyond those subject positions, to the social order that generates them, i identify the institutional mechanisms through which capitalist society produces gender, race and class as transecting axes of domination. (fraser and jaeggi 2018, p. 109) fraser's political philosophy is a critical theoretical approach, a strand of moral and political philosophy that focuses on how power is constituted and reproduced in capitalist democracies. while not agreeing fully with marxist materialist philosophy, her work nevertheless does draw on materialist influences in critical theory. she emphasizes the effects of capitalism, focusing on relations that exist in capitalist modes of production and their influence. she also insists that gender matters deeply in how power relations are constituted under capitalism-thus providing a feminist materialist perspective. in this, she has challenged masculinist assumptions in critical theory (fraser 1985 (fraser , 1989 while also disagreeing with assumptions in the liberal feminist analysis (fraser 1990 (fraser , 1995a . in the last decades of the twentieth century, fraser (along with other feminist thinkers) was focused on political and moral questions about how best to correct gender injustice. an ally of women's liberation, she nevertheless challenged several assumptions present within second wave and radical feminist activism (fraser 1995b) . this included questioning the presumption of a unified, single, and common group-based identity among all women. fraser argued that under capitalism, important differences exist between women, based on political-economic group identity as well as sociocultural group identities. she argued that gender injustices based in sociocultural group or political-economic group identity could not be effectively addressed in activism that superficially celebrates the common gender identity for all women. in her articulation of a feminist materialist alternative analysis, fraser proposed the need to address gender injustices by tending to capitalism and the differentiated ways in which it operates. she specifically emphasized the need to consider sociocultural group-based identities among women, simultaneously accounting for their political-economic group-based identities. she emphasized that these two types of identity are associated with interests that do not synchronously align (fraser 1995b) . to address gender justice, fraser proposed three interrelated "scales" or components of social justice. she named these elements "moral recognition," "redistribution," and "representation" (fraser 1995a (fraser , b, 1997 (fraser , 2005 (fraser , 2009 (fraser , 2017 fraser and honneth 2003) . the scale of moral recognition addresses institutionalized relations of status subordination. this element of justice corrects for status inequality. moral recognition includes social practices of "empowerment" and related approaches that cultivate shared moral respect of persons as social, political, and cultural peers. fraser also emphasizes that moral recognition focuses on institutionalized power relations, and as such, it contributes to full and equal political and social participation in democracies (i.e., what she terms participatory parity) (fraser and honneth 2003, p. 101 note 39) . the scale of redistribution addresses economic inequality. by focusing on institutionalized class relations in the political economy of capitalism, fraser addresses injustices that reproduce economic disadvantage. in this element of her materialist feminist perspective, she describes economic redistribution as an important and necessary counterpart to moral recognition. redistribution is described as a transformative practice, rather than an affirmative one. fraser is especially concerned that under capitalism, the affirmative outcomes of moral recognition are not in themselves capable of correcting economic disadvantage. she argues that economic redistribution must be considered for how it aligns with or synergizes political efforts to achieve moral respect; also that redistribution must be considered for how it competes with, challenges or impedes prospects for moral recognition. her analysis presents a more complex and differentiated understanding of how simultaneous remedies of moral recognition and redistribution are both needed (fraser 1995a, b; fraser and honneth 2003) . finally, concerning a third scale of justice, fraser addressed the element of representation. representation includes institutionalized symbolic practices that legitimate political participation among subordinated groups. these institutionalized practices include symbolic strategies of deconstruction needed to undo stereotypes, encourage political participation among members of subordinated groups, and achieving full parity in political representation (fraser 1995b, p. 180; fraser and honneth 2003, pp. 73-88; fraser 2005, p. 305) . in considering representation, fraser emphasizes that parity in political representation is complicated by an increasingly globalized world. the relevance of fraser's complex analysis of gender justice becomes clear in nursing practice when considering contemporary challenges related to women's health in global contexts, refugee health, population health related to forced migration/immigration, human trafficking, and other transnational phenomena. health equity in these contexts would require consideration of the dynamic reinforcing effects of moral respect, correcting for maldistribution, and parity in political representation. this more complex transnational understanding of twenty-first-century capitalism is taken up in fraser's later work, reflected for example in scales of justice (fraser 2009 ) and capitalism: a conversation (fraser and jaeggi 2018) . in these publications, fraser traces a decline in the twentieth century of a westphalian economic paradigm where autonomous corporations were regulated by individual sovereign nation-states. she also discusses the related decline and loss of the international breton woods agreement which had temporarily stabilized post-wwii economies in europe and the united states. in the second half of the twentieth century, those agreements were replaced with entities like the international monetary fund (imf), the world bank, central banks, and trade-related intellectual property regimes (trips), created to "govern" or regulate international/global trade. fraser explains that given the support of these entities, financialized global capitalist economic expansion has produced starkly different outcomes in the twentyfirst century. she refers to this twenty-first-century reality as a new phase of capitalism, "financialized transnational corporate capitalism" (fraser and jaeggi 2018, pp. 75-77) . fraser insists that this new phase of capitalism has been accompanied by radical change in scales of justice. she points to growing challenges among many nation-states. these are defined by increasing popular unrest, also growing populist movements linking social and economic justice to transformative tasks of correcting economic maldistribution. fraser cautions about diminishing capabilities among individual nation-states to adequately address these challenges within their own borders-given transnational financialized corporate arrangements. she also identifies steadily growing gaps in wealth, precarious economic conditions, predatory debt, and increasing political complexity as influencing the international emergence of conservative populist movements. most recently, fraser coauthored three texts with analyses of current political and economic challenges relevant to this chapter (fraser and jaeggi 2018; fraser and sunkara 2019; arruzza et al. 2019) . in these texts, fraser carries forward earlier analyses of social justice, but her work demonstrates an important and noticeable epistemic shift (fraser and jaeggi 2018, pp. 29-31) . this shift depicts capitalism by metaphorically describing it, in part, as a "front story" of political-economic activity that is related to other necessary noneconomic backstories (fraser and jaeggi 2018, pp. 48-50) . she analyzes how the front story of capitalism influences and is influenced by "backstories" that operate in interconnected ways to perpetuate the social relations and practices of capitalist political economies. specifically, fraser describes storied struggles as occurring in four spheres: between (1) production and social reproduction; (2) between polity and economy; (3) between human and nonhuman nature; and (4) between exploitation and expropriation. her critical theory suggests that capitalism is characterized at a system level by "inter-realm struggles" within, among, and between these four spheres of activity (fraser and jaeggi 2018, pp. 143-144) . her theory also suggests that understanding these struggles or "backstories" produces better explanations of the structural or root causes of capitalism's oppressions. in relation to struggles occurring between production versus social reproduction, fraser explains that commodity production (wage labor) is not a stand-alone sphere of institutionalized economic relations. rather, commodity production under capitalism emerged historically as institutionalized activity in social practices that were stereotypically gendered and male. also historically, the sphere of activity involving social reproduction emerged under capitalism as an institutionalized realm of activity conforming to practices that were stereotypically gendered and female. fraser describes the sphere of social reproduction as including all "forms of provisioning, care giving and interacting that produce and maintain social bonds. variously called "care," affective labor," or subjectivation, this activity forms capitalism's human subjects, sustaining them as embodied, natural beings while also constituting them as social beings, forming their habitus and the socio-ethical substance in which they move. central here is the work of socializing the young, building communities and producing reproducing the shared meanings, affective dispositions, and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation, including the forms of cooperation-cum-domination that characterize commodity production." (fraser and jaeggi 2018, p. 31) like other feminists, fraser critiques the dominant/subordinate gendered assumptions and essentialized stereotypes historically tied to activities of production and social reproduction. her critical theory is more than gender-sensitive; she is explicitly critical of institutionalized power relations demonstrated in these stereotypes and her work is animated by a strong justice critique of that institutionalized array of power. she argues that far from being subordinate to production, social reproduction is essential and necessary, i.e., production could not exist without the paid and unpaid activities of social reproduction. sharing analytic ground with socialist and marxist feminists, she explains social reproduction as a necessary backstory in capitalism. the activity of social reproduction ensures that human beings are fed, protected, nurtured, sustained in health, and returned to health from illness. but beyond this embodied care activity, social reproduction also forms human beings as human subjects; it ensures that individuals are socialized as "human," that they internalize common social norms, e.g., norms of cooperation, mutual aid, justice, and freedom from oppression. the effects of social reproduction are crucial then not only to the sustained activity of commodity production. they are a necessary backstory contributing to species being, ensuring that for a period of history, there is sustained normative agreement about enduring political, economic, and environmental relations. from one angle of vision, social reproduction could be understood to ensure the replenishment of a sustained workforce. but fraser's conceptualization of social reproduction is not functionalist in this way. she argues that social reproduction creates and sustains capitalism's common shared ethical sphere: i am deliberately casting a broad net here. my aim is to develop an expanded conception of capitalism that can incorporate the insights of (several) paradigms…i would argue that insights of (philosophers) who focus on "ethical life" only receive their full meaning and importance when they are situated in relation to capitalism as a historically elaborated social totality. i think a full account of social reproduction must integrate the concerns of marxist-feminists and socialist-feminists with those of theorists of subjectivation, habitus, culture, lifeworld and "ethical life." (fraser and jaeggi 2018, p. 33) fraser deploys this wider conception of capitalism and social reproduction to explain how socioethical dimensions of capitalism are challenged and how capitalism changes at a system level. she suggests that socioethical crises and transitions for capitalism emerge at intersections where front story and backstories meet. those intersections include "boundary struggles" at sites were production meets reproduction, where polity meets economy, where struggles of exploitation and expropriation meet, and where human society meets nonhuman nature (fraser and jaeggi 2018, p. 167) . a recurring example of boundary struggles between production and social reproduction is presented in fraser's analysis of current times. she describes changes that have occurred under financialized corporate capitalism resulting in the now widespread requirement for two incomes in most households. for those who are working poor, working class or middle class, the post-wwii norm of a single income household is no longer common. when added to this, intersecting influences of race and gender find women and minorities disproportionately employed in service sector jobs, experiencing wage stagnation and the erosion of benefits such as private or public health care insurance and other sources of public support. in this context, the norm has shifted to widespread prevalence of multiple individuals in a household working multiple jobs (mcjobs) without social benefits. as fraser explains, time constraints involved in this economic arrangement produce "crises" around care for children, care for elders or parents, or care for disabled or ill family members living in the household. among two income households, these "care" responsibilities grow increasingly difficult or unsustainable. in contrast, for those individuals in upper middle-class or wealthy households, "care" activities can be commodified by employing others (usually women who are economically or socially disadvantaged) to provide housework, provisioning, food preparation, child/elder care, etc.). while fraser's analysis preceded the context of the covid19 pandemic, her explanation of boundary struggles between commodity production and social reproduction has profound relevance for the present moment. one example of that relevance is found in the challenges experienced among personal care workers employed in home care or congregate elderly care settings. these settings would be home for senior residents and patients from many income categories, including those whose investments have provided resources to pay for residential care outside of their families' homes as well as those who rely on their families or public funding. in the united states, elder care has become increasingly marketized and in that context, personal care assistants (still largely women) frequently carry the challenges of two income households that fraser discusses. among them, the norm may involve juggling multiple jobs or multiple shifts at more than one setting to make ends meet, while ironically and tragically not being able to afford health care insurance themselves. the time constraints of this arrangement for caregivers produce ubiquitous challenges for managing their own childcare requirements, provisioning their own homes, or caring for their own aging parents. the struggles involved in these backstories are extraordinarily challenging. most recently, the related pattern among elder care providers giving close personal care to vulnerable elders during the covid-19 pandemic has produced profoundly complex "boundary struggles" with devastating unanticipated effects. those effects in the united states have included early unintended asymptomatic transmission of the sars-cov-2 virus both by visitors and caregivers in elder congregate care settings. these effects have been due at least in part to consequences of insufficient production, planning, and implementation of pandemic-related testing-another example of how crises in spheres of production and social reproduction are related. given a corporatized model of staffing with personal care assistants necessarily moving between more than one employment context, and the asymptomatic transmission risks of this arrangement, a "storied struggle" in the sphere of caring can be understood as tied tragically to the institutionalized practices of capitalism. this backstory illustrates how a corporatized model of commodified "care" among personal care providers can intersect with stagnated wage arrangements and the realities of two+ income households under this phase of capitalism. corporatized arrangements produce crises in more than one sphere of activity, i.e., production, social reproduction, and as the pandemic continues, in the sphere where polity-economy meet. emerging news confirms growing disparities in covid 19-related infections and deaths among racialized minorities in the united states (african americans, latinyx, native americans). these data provide catalytic evidence of how the exploitation of structural racism yields health inequity under capitalism. finally relevant are the geopolitical contexts of many elements of this as a pandemic story, e.g., involving globalized production chains for vaccines, personal protective equipment, testing and treatments, patterns of international transmission via leisure or business-related travel, the fate of international caregivers, and finally the financialized transnational corporate capitalist economic landscape and framework for addressing global economic stability. (referenced in "health care workers risk spreading covid-19," eleanor laise, (barrons) april 9, 2020, retrieved 4/9/2020 at https://apple.news/apw_.) moving next to fraser's discussion of intersections between polity and economy, she notes that capitalism relies on the polity (public political powers) to establish and enforce its norms. she explains that a market economy is inconceivable in the absence of a legal framework that enforces private enterprise and market exchange. these arrangements include guaranteed property rights, enforced contracts, adjudication of contractual disputes, managing or preventing labor unrest, and other politically institutionalized practices focused on maintaining the financial arrangements that constitute capitalism's existence (fraser and jaeggi 2018, p. 38 ). fraser explains that struggles at the interface of polity and economy have been essential in transitions from feudal capitalism to mercantile, liberal-market capitalism, and to financialized transnational corporate capitalism. addressing the "backstory" of struggles at this interface, she emphasizes growing contradictions between an increasingly globalized, transnational capitalist economy, organized as a "world system," and a political world order still organized as an international system of sovereign, territorial nation-states. fraser names a third sphere or backstory of struggle as capitalism's "annexation of nature." she discusses this as a sphere of activity based on socially, politically, and economically constituted divisions between human and nonhuman nature. in describing this sphere, she emphasizes the necessity of normative understandings that constitute nature as "nonhuman." activity in this sphere is metaphorically described by invoking the image of faucet and sink-with nature operating both in the form of a "tap providing inputs to production" and as a sink "to absorb the waste" of production. nature here is made into a resource for capital, one whose value is both presupposed and disavowed. capitalists expropriate it without compensation or replenishment and treat it as costless in their accounts. so they implicitly assume it to be infinite. in fact, nature's capacity to support life and renew itself constitutes yet another necessary background condition for commodity production and capital accumulation …. after three centuries of capital's predation, capped by neoliberalism's current assault on what remains of the ecological commons, the natural conditions of accumulation have now become a central node of capitalist crisis. (fraser and jaeggi 2018, pp. 35-36) finally, in relation to a fourth backstory necessary for capitalism's existence, fraser focuses on struggles occurring in the sphere where exploitation intersects with expropriation. she describes these struggles as "racialized regimes of capitalist accumulation." occurring in different geographies (geopolitical core and periphery) simultaneously, both regimes have operated in early historical stages of capitalism and today. expropriation involves confiscation, enclosure, and plunder of land along with confiscation of human beings (e.g., racialized slavery, war, and genocide). exploitation involves abusive practices of replenishing labor at wages unacceptably less than those necessary to sustain life. economic predation and political subjugation show up structurally in both regimes (fraser and jaeggi 2018, pp. 104-108) . fraser asserts that these regimes of accumulation and their remnants continue today. the storied struggles of colonization, exploitation, and expropriation under capitalism reflect root causes of racist oppression. those oppressions show up in contemporary injustices centuries later, e.g., in ongoing struggles for decolonization among indigenous people, in persistent health inequities linked to structural racism and income inequality, in innumerable acts of racialized hatred, structural and individual racism. this structural explanation of expropriation and exploitation produces an understanding of racism that differs from an intersectional description of racist domination or oppression. it brings into focus an additional explanation of why intersectional aspects of racialized domination persist. that foregrounding of capitalism also draws attention to ongoing exploitation-now arranged in a fully transnational corporate context. given that context, contemporary features of human trafficking, complex waves of refugee migration, global health crises, deepening health inequity, human rights violations of migrant workers, and other transnational phenomena come into view differently. and their resolution is better understood as requiring something more and different than neoliberal political engagement by individuals in sovereign nation-states. taken together, fraser's analysis of "backstories" in polity/economy, production/ reproduction, human/nonhuman nature, and exploitation/expropriation does more than describe the intersection of gender, race, and class. her theory explains how and why those institutionalized relations are tied to a "front story" that is fully transnational. while affirming the descriptive insights of intersectionality, and its insistence on the articulating axes of class, race, and gender, fraser calls for more: i am proposing s unified theory in which all three modes of oppression (gender 'race' class) are structurally grounded in a single social formation-capitalism broadly conceived, as an institutionalized social order. and unlike theories of intersectionality which tend to be descriptive, focused on the ways in which extant subject positions crosscut one another, my account is explanatory. looking behind those subject positions, to the social order that generates them, i identify the institutional mechanism through which capitalist society produces gender, race and class as transecting axes of domination. (fraser and jaeggi 2018, p. 109) fraser's philosophy finally offers a complex oppositional or liberatory discourse, a way of understanding what would be at stake in the process of achieving widescale transformation and liberation. her work looks to the four spheres or "backstories" to identify specific sites where potential exists to transform the present constellation of capitalism. she argues that emancipatory social movements do still have the potential to intervene at these points of crisis, creating momentum at locations where these spheres of struggle meet. in her latest work, she insists that in liberatory projects, progressive populist movements can act at these sites, having determined that the life being led presently under capitalism is a life requiring transformation. in those movements, she suggests that a feminist materialist explanation of capitalism holds the potential to produce deep, democratic, and ethically mediated structural transformation. her proposed criteria for engaging these transformational, emancipatory struggles are "non-domination, functional sustainability, and democracy" (fraser and jaeggi 2018, p. 178) . these criteria of fraser's critical theory bring her work into alignment with feminist materialist and critical pragmatist commitments. while her work provides socioethical critique of capitalism and while she integrates neo-marxist analysis of class divisions in capitalism, her work is not accurately characterized as classically marxist. what she provides is coherent critical and feminist understanding of ethical challenges that reside in capitalism, refusing to evade these. her work includes an explicit critique of failed attempts at state-managed socialism. and she provides a framework to reconsider what a progressive populist, anti-imperialist, democratic, ecofeminist, and anti-racist political-economic reality would entail. i argue here that her philosophy is relevant as one component of a critical approach to nursing ethics. i see her approach as decisive in addressing the transformation of root causes of oppression in capitalism, including the exploitation of care activities. and i view that approach, not as disorienting, but rather as helpful in strengthening and deepening already existing approaches in nursing ethics. later sections of this chapter return to discuss how these contributions of fraser's critical theory have relevance for nursing ethics. finally, fraser's most recent coauthored texts from 2019 point more explicitly to current transnational contexts (fraser and sunkara 2019; arruzza et al. 2019 ). commenting on current political-economic consequences of transnational capitalism, fraser and colleagues comment on the effects of neoliberalism. these include: the removal of barriers to the 'free movement of capital,' deregulating banking, encouraging ballooning and predatory debt, weakening unions, deindustrializing, and spreading precarious, badly paid work… these policies have hollowed out working class and middle class living standards while transferring wealth and value upward, chiefly to the 1 percent … but also to the upper reaches of the professional managerial classes. (fraser and sunkara 2019, p. 12) fraser and colleagues argue that in tandem with neoliberalism, this shift in the distribution of wealth has been accompanied by the international rise of conservative right populist movements. responding to precariousness, and specifically opposing progressive liberal politics, reactionary conservative populism holds explicitly nationalist assumptions and commitments. it protests against immigration and insists on more rigid national borders, opposes left-liberal economic and social priorities, valorizes right conservative views as the views of ordinary people, opposes "elite" identity politics of multicultural difference, and takes up the rhetoric of white supremacist, heteronormative, and racist antagonism or hatred (fraser and jaeggi 2018; fraser and sunkara 2019; arruzza et al. 2019 ). fraser and colleagues insist that the international rise of this reactionary conservative populism is directly tied to economic and political effects resulting from transnational expansions in corporate capitalism. they also argue that the symbolic and political tenor of the times is currently defined by growing tensions between this political-economic divide: between "conservative right reactionary populism" and "progressive coalition-based neoliberalism." they argue that progressive, "diversity" oriented neoliberal politics will continue to be challenged by the appeal of conservative right populist movements, calling instead for an explicitly progressive populist movement, an example of which is their discussion of feminism for the 99% (arruzza et al. 2019 ). this feminist materialist alternative is presented as a complex and necessary response to capitalism's current crises, relying on anti-racist, anti-imperialist, queer, and material feminist analyses to transform the backstories of capitalism. this vision rests on achieving a more egalitarian economic order and democratic effects, including moral recognition, redistribution, and parity in representation. these latest examples from fraser's long line of work again demonstrate her concern to transform political-economic factors that persistently and structurally influence moral life under capitalism. toward a critical theory of nursing ethics why should this matter to nursing? the easy answer would be to say that, without understanding these structural-ethical analyses of "context or background," nurses, nursing scholars, and nursing leaders underestimate or miss a frame of reference that matters. if we are to base nursing practice and nursing ethics firmly in antioppressive, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, egalitarian, democratically just, environmentally respectful, and caring values, it is important to continue to study deeply and to reach out to work with others whose practice and analysis strengthens our understanding, even if that may trouble prevailing assumptions. in that spirit, this section provides some reflection about how/why feminist materialist analysis might be relevant for nursing ethics. taking up fraser's work in this way is complex, invoking contradictory thoughts and feelings for many nurses in the way it invites a closer look at capitalism. for nurse ethicists and scholars, this invitation to use feminist materialist philosophy also raises important genealogical questions about what can be asked, spoken, represented, or discursively engaged in nursing. asking a critical discourse analytic question, why is it that capitalism is largely unnamed as a meta-economic context that matters for nursing ethics? taking up fraser's critical theory of capitalism especially at this point in history may be challenging, in that it will be perceived by some as too political, too radical, not moving in professionally respectable directions, not supportive of nursing scholarship, and not aligned with the professional or disciplinary mandate of nursing. these reactions speak to "ambivalence" among some (not all) nurses about the focus and content of fraser's critical theory. when the subject of the "economic context" is taken up in discussions relevant to nursing ethics, an analysis of capitalism is usually not present. where there are anecdotal references to macroeconomic context, that analysis frequently is represented by using terms such as "the market economy" or by describing the "corporate" bureaucratic contexts of health care/hospitals (watson 2006; ray 1989a; turkel and ray 2000; ray and turkel 2012) . while these analyses of "market forces" invite and sometimes engage an analysis of corporate bureaucratic effects on nurses, they do not address or explain, as fraser does, these bureaucratic effects as tied to the commodification of caring. nor do they take up an analysis of how the "corporatization" of care is linked to the backstories of capitalism. in noticing this silence, i ask reflectively about the extent to which "ambivalence" in nursing, even and perhaps most importantly among second-wave liberal feminists, prevents us from critically considering the ethical contradictions of capitalism. an important task then in taking up fraser's work is to ask why a feminist materialist approach may produce ambivalence in nursing. it may be that use of the term "capitalism" is perceived as an "unspeakable" (georges 2011), for a ubiquitous silence or refusal to use the term "capitalism" suggests that the term cannot be said. the thesis of this chapter is that silence about capitalism is not helpful for nursing, having discursive and practical consequences that leave important contextual influences unaddressed. whether capitalism can be named depends on the availability and use of academically and professionally sanctioned discourses, in this instance, one that is capable of bringing attention to capitalism's influence in ways deemed productive for the discipline and the profession. as foucauldian scholars would clarify, the extent to which capitalism can be named, spoken about, considered, engaged, or thought of using fraser's feminist materialist philosophy depends on the "credibility" or "respectability" of a discourse that makes capitalism visible/recognizable. the academic status/power of that discourse also points to its discursive and practical consequences, what it brings into view and what it obscures among its professionalized members in nation-states where nurses practice. there are reasons that nurses may have ambivalence about examining capitalism. fraser's work (fraser 1989 (fraser , 1990 (fraser , 1995a (fraser , 1997 (fraser , 2005 (fraser , 2009 (fraser , 2017 jaeggi 2018) clarifies that we have inherited and live in a "post-socialist" discursive era. in that world, the term "capitalism" is semiotically (post-structurally) associated in opposition to its "failed" historical challenge, "socialism." and so, in this discursive space, among privileged persons, the critique of capitalism is understood to be an act of positing socialist solutions. for more than a generation, the historical failures of oppressive state-managed socialist economic regimes have been rightfully remembered, critiqued, and spoken of disparagingly. that discursive era has produced what fraser terms a "post-socialist" political imaginary-a world where among "ordinary people" "there is no alternative" to capitalism. living in a "post-socialist" era means that liberatory movements do not speak as strongly as they once did in discourses that address capitalism's contradictions of economic maldistribution through actions among organized labor (for example). as fraser explains, progressive liberatory movements have turned instead to an agenda that celebrates/affirms diversity in cultural-based group identities and neoliberal affirmations of identity politics. while acknowledging that a politics affirming positive cultural identity is an important element of moral recognition, fraser insists that the "ethos" of many of these liberatory movements also has evaded widespread transformation of structural economic disadvantage, leaving in place maldistribution that supports classist, white supremacist, and sexist social, political, and economic arrangements. in short, fraser's argument is that a "post-socialist" era and its neoliberal approach to moral respect and recognition fails to account for maldistribution in ways that could democratically transform capitalism. the conceptions of social justice circulating in this "post-socialist" context all too easily speak in terms that celebrate problematic group-based identity (e.g., "lean-in-feminism" and white supremacy). these are discursive and practical landscapes that matter, influenced by losing site of and not having language ready to hand, that would clarify interlocking requirements for recognition-redistribution-representation. in this context, the very notion of considering democratic socialist commitments is unthinkable, for some. similarly, the process of envisioning a more democratically constituted and regulated "moral capitalism" (cohen 2020) may address questions today that were engaged with populist support two generations ago. progressive populist economic struggles that previously did engage capitalism (e.g., during the great depression) have been less common during an era of "post-socialist" neoliberal progressive social movements, animated as they have been by a primary concern with communitarian ethics of recognition in cultural-based diversity. given this "post-socialist imaginary" context, ambivalence about what is perceived as "socialist" leanings in critical theory is real. perhaps a small introductory step may be helpful-beginning with a critical pragmatist approach to truth provides some invitation to dialogical engagement. from that democratic pragmatist standpoint, it is theory that determines what can be observed. and it is those observations and their interpretations that influence what is practically worked out in engagement in a field of practice or study (sherwin 2011) . these insights are perhaps more useful for some nurses in circling a critical nursing ethics. probing which discourses can be spoken, which theories are most productive for nursing, what questions cannot be asked, and which questions will be engaged to advance moral agency in nursing ethics is an important task for a critical nursing ethics. i am arguing that obscuring or not addressing the context of capitalism is unhelpful for nursing. if part of being silent about capitalism comes from a post-socialist (largely white, middle-class professionalized, heteronormative) liberal feminist imaginary about the ethics of care and social justice, an important project for nursing ethics is to engage a reflective dialogue about that professionalized standpoint and its contradictory amalgam of privilege. more helpful to that project would be a dialogical examination of fraser's socio-ethical critique and political philosophy, using it to examine the world we inhabit and to understand how the practices we engage could be transformative in contributing to caring and social justice. an invitation to seriously engage feminist materialist analysis in nursing in this way is also consistent with some elements of a legacy history of nursing ethics. that legacy demonstrates a history of social ethics, engaged with socio-ethical critique and animated by a wider understanding of social justice. fowler's (2015) studies of legacy nursing ethics "challenge the notion that nursing's ethics is simply bioethics or biomedical ethics (in part or at all) when its history would instead place it within the broader sphere of social ethics" (p. 14). in responding to fowler's invitation that nursing "stands in need of a thicker account of its ethics," this analysis argues that fraser's critical theory contributes productively to such an account. her socioethical critique of capitalism provides an important corrective, helpful among other approaches, in addressing the root causes of ethical dilemmas, moral crises, social injustice, suffering, and their effects on moral agency in nursing. in reading the work of nurse historians (christy 1969 (christy , 1970 burnam 1998) , it is instructive to recognize that nurse leaders like lavinia dock and lillian wald who worked in the early twentieth century u.s. settlement house tradition, possessed something other than a "post-socialist" feminist imaginary. they shared a kind of ethical literacy concerned simultaneously with democratic justice and caring. their work included practices of seeing, naming, and engaging the oppressive effects of industrialization, supporting immigrants and their inclusion in organized labor movements, activism in reforming hospital practice, addressing workers' health-related challenges, leading the establishment of community-based models of nursing and health care, and actively working for women's suffrage. they shared a wider vision of the social ethics needed in that early twentieth-century urban, industrialized, pre-suffrage context of capitalism. that capacity included the ability to see and engage with others in democratic struggles addressing what fraser would name moral recognition, redistribution, and representation. it seems clear that dock and wald-working as they did in the settlement house contexts of new york-were acutely aware of capitalism and how it operated in their time. their contexts and communities provided them with access to and use of democratizing languages of resistance, care, and social justice and they used those languages/theories in their practices of clinical care and advocacy. in considering the democratically transformative practices of these historical leaders, it again becomes clear that discourses of a wider social ethic of care and social justice are not new in nursing. second-wave feminist commitments continued to evolve in nursing in north america during the twentieth century. a generation of scholars in nursing then was influenced by transitions in feminist analysis, including intersections between liberal, socialist, cultural, black feminist, then postmodern, post-structuralist, lgbtq+ queer theoretical, and postcolonial feminist analysis. it is important to recall that these discourses included early critiques pointing toward the influences of capitalism, patriarchy, and paternalism. examples of that early work in the united states in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s include analysis by jo ann ashley (1975 ashley ( , 1976 ashley ( , 1980 , susan jo roberts (1983) , peggy chinn and charlene wheeler (1985) , denise connors (1980) , nancy greenleaf (1980 ), kathlyn macpherson (1983 , theresa chopoorian (1986) , susan reverby (1987) , and judith wuest (1994) . in more contemporary times, a critical theoretical "emancipatory" paradigm for nursing ethics (research and practice) has been demonstrated in north america, in both canada and the united states, with an ongoing commitment to an ethic of social justice (kagan et al. 2009 (kagan et al. , 2014 chinn and kramer 2011; georges 2013; ray and turkel 2014; walter 2017; wesp et al. 2018) . the extent to which these examples of critical theoretical approaches in nursing ethics reflect and support the use of fraser's feminist materialist philosophy is a compelling question. having established in this discussion interest in engaging that question, the following section of this chapter moves on to piece together some analysis about how the ethics of caring and social justice in nursing, can be strengthened by using fraser's work. examining the ethics of care and social justice in nursing in the last 50 years, as nursing scholars have focused on articulating "authentic" knowledge, they have worked steadily to explicate knowledge that defines the discipline and the profession. this has included an important period of theorizing about what defines key elements of nursing ethics, including the ethics of care in nursing. in these efforts, several nurse ethicists and scholars have maintained that an ethics of care and its evolution in nursing are significant influences for the discipline and the profession. these scholars of care ethics include barbara carper (1979) , delores gaut (1983) , sally gadow (1985) , jane brody (1988) , sara fry (1989) , anne bishop and john scudder (1991) , chris gastmans (1999) , and peggy chinn (2018) . others in nursing have also argued that care is central to the discipline, focusing more closely on the generation of nursing's scientific knowledge base. in this "paradigm" view, care has been understood as a humanistic, transcendent, metaphysical, or transcultural ethos-a way of "being-doing-knowing" that shapes nursing knowledge development, nursing science, research, and theory generation as well as professional values and ethics. theorists and philosophers in nursing in the united states who have articulated this view of the centrality of care in the discipline have included jean watson (1979 watson ( , 1985 watson ( , 2012 , madeline leininger (1988a, b) , dorothea orem (1980) , margaret newman et al. (1991) , marilyn ray (1989b) , jane sumner (2001) , and many others. a comprehensive taxonomy of care theory in nursing is found in the work of zane wolf and nancy france (2017) . within this discourse of care in nursing, others have addressed the ethics of care by focusing on nursing as a practice discipline. in this perspective, the sociology of practice is emphasized, with attention to the way in which professional and social practices shape ethics and disciplinary knowledge. for example, nursing scholars patricia benner (1984 benner ( , 1997 and benner and judith wrubel (1989) provide phenomenological analysis of the "primacy of caring" in nursing through their descriptions of expert practice. their philosophical treatment of care ethics in nursing is oriented by several theoretical influences, including pierre bourdieu's (1977) practice philosophy, the virtue ethics philosophy of alasdair macintyre (1981) , and integrations of care ethics (benner and gordon 1996) including the work of carol gilligan (1982) and joan tronto (1993) . in benner's approach to caring, one's "practice" is understood to develop over time and with experience, integrating knowledge, skill, and ethical comportment in a professional field of social practices (habitus). in theorizing care as a practice, benner endorsed the capacity of virtue ethics as one ethical tradition that can more adequately and coherently account for practice/nursing ethics. she drew on virtue ethics to explain how "the good" is ethically constituted in the particularities of practicing well. finally, her understanding of care ethics also influenced her understanding of the primacy of care. she relied on the groundbreaking feminist work of carol gilligan (1982) who disclosed the centrality of relational ethics in women's ways of knowing. though not emphasizing an alignment of her work with feminist care ethics, benner did propose that virtue ethics should be combined with care ethics to adequately account for a virtue ethic of caring in nursing. [m]edicine and nursing are good candidates for the restoration of virtue ethics, because notions of the good are essential to clinical and ethical comportment and reasoning, and because it is impossible to separate clinical and ethical reasoning in a practice. when my colleagues and i study the practice of nurses, we find that they are working out their notions of good practice in their daily encounters with patients. […] we need to articulate and attend to the moral art of attentiveness and caring relationships that protect patients in their vulnerability while fostering growth and limiting vulnerability. this calls for bringing caring practices in from the margins of our thinking about practice and combining care and virtue ethics. (benner 1997, p. 59) while benner's work was not primarily grounded in the then-current discourses of feminist care ethics, she clearly intended to integrate an ethics of care, along with virtue ethics, in her philosophy of nursing practice. her analysis of the primacy of care, however, was taken up in a way that positions her work in an important feminist debate. benner's approach to care as a moral practice can be understood as a gender-sensitive understanding of nursing ethics, though she never emphasizes that point explicitly. using practice philosophy, virtue ethics, and gender-neutral references to relational care, benner provided an empowerment approach, valorizing nurses' institutionalized practices, animated by a concern that nurses themselves may misunderstand the significance and complexity of their clinical practice as a moral practice (benner 2001, pp. 207-209) . while those intentions are laudable, she did this in ways that can unintentionally obscure gendered relations of power, and as feminists have cautioned, inadvertently contribute to the ongoing subordination of nurses' practice. commenting on this, feminist ethicists rosemary tong (1989) , joan liaschenko (1993) , and peta bowden (2000a) have argued that a valorization of caring in the absence of explicit gender justice critiques risks romanticizing "feminine" stereotypes. they critique a depoliticized "feminine" ethics of care, refusing to equate caring with prevailing stereotypical notions of "feminine" etiquette. they call instead for a feminist care ethics, one that explicitly critiques power relations, identifies gender-based domination and subordination, and critiques oppressive institutionalized social relations that subordinate care. in contrast to a gender-neutral embrace of care and virtue ethics, and explicitly deploying this kind of feminist critique, maureen sander-staudt (2006) considers risks of combining virtue ethics and care ethics and recommends against their wholesale combination. similarly, patricia rodney et al. (2013) provide a comparable critique of foregrounding an ethics of care in nursing. they argue that care, with its gendered connotation in western culture, is all too easily, in our view, reduced to feminine character and virtue and evaluation of what it means to be a "good nurse." attention is neither paid to the sociopolitical context of that work nor to the apparent unreasonableness of being overworked. for these reasons, care and the related social practices it entails become problematic as the moral foundation for nursing when issues of power, social justice and domination remain obscured and unaccounted for. (p. 167) the extent to which care ethics approaches have been capable of transforming contexts in ways that support nurses' moral practice is an important question. the emphasis on care and caring in nursing may be considered as occurring in a period when nurse scholars of care were increasingly concerned about the institutional settings of clinical practice, organized as they are within "bureaucratic contexts of managed care." drawing attention to the effects of "managerialism" in the united states-some care theory rightly focused on the bureaucratizing effects of diagnostic-related categories (drgs) and the meso-economic managerial strategies that have changed clinical environments. watson (2006) and marilyn ray and marian turkel (ray 1989a; turkel and ray 2000; ray and turkel 2012) have drawn attention to the ways in which economic contexts can erode an ethic of care. consistent with a post-socialist feminist, liberal feminist or postmodern feminist paradigm, these analyses focus on meso-level economic influences, locating those in the context of organizational culture and bureaucracy. in not engaging metaanalytic analysis of corporate capitalism, this approach misses an angle of vision that could theorize the corporatization of care differently. it also has the effect (perhaps unintended) of reinforcing a post-socialist feminist vision of caring. an important question is the extent to which that perspective about care could be engaged differently using fraser's philosophy. also consistent with prevailing notions of care in nursing, benner's research program took what appears to be a comparable post-socialist feminist approach to an ethic of care. her work addressed cultural recognition among nurses themselves, helping nurses to appreciate caring as a complex moral practice (benner 2001, pp. 207-220) . but the extent to which this "practice-centric," "virtue ethic of care" provides the profession and the discipline with a "radically" transformative blueprint for practice (sullivan and benner 2005) is again a compelling question. in the spirit of probing that question, it is worth asking how a feminist "virtue ethics of care" understanding of professional nursing is capable of calling attention to political-economic contexts that corporatize and commodify caring. in interesting ways, benner's practice-centric work did indirectly name or "call out" distorting influences of corporatized contexts, pointing to their negative effects on caring. she specifically referred to "market forces" and "commodity production"-as institutionalized practices that obscure, erase, or erode nurses' moral practices. bureaucratized market models of production achieve their efficiency by separating means and ends and substituting means for ends. this approach overlooks the craft, judgment, and relationship required for health care. (they) assume that attentiveness and excellent comportment require no more than commercial relationships based upon simple exchanges. but caring for vulnerable and ill persons requires more than a profit motive. compassion and caring practices are required. […] health care does not act like a commodity, in that the people most needing health care services are often least able to pay, or even request those services. the ethos of the buyer-seller relationship does not adequately capture the moral demands of caring for the disenfranchised, the vulnerable, and the suffering (benner 1997, pp. 51, 58) . just here, a surprising coherence with fraser's feminist materialist analysis is or could have been possible. fraser's analysis would suggest that the problem with "market" models of commodified caring is not that they are insufficient, but rather that they are structurally inconsistent with an ethos suited to the moral demands of caring. benner's ethics of care may have come closer to approximating a critical ethics of care, had it been strengthened by the use of feminist materialist philosophy. that integration would directly point to the predominance of gendered, classed, racialized, and heteronormative power relations in the backstories of social reproduction and "caring" work and the replication of that institutionalized array of power in nursing. consequences of this explanatory aspect of fraser's work point to the salience of using feminist materialist philosophy to recognize the effects of the macroeconomic context of capitalism. this suggests a need to be informed and to cue into sites of struggle where the political-economic contexts of capitalism can be transformed. obscuring or not accounting for those sites of transformation in capitalism is unhelpful. in the long view, evading an analysis of capitalism may not contribute as we imagine to a "respectable" image of the profession. instead, evading the analysis of macroeconomic context diminishes opportunities for nursing to contribute productively to democratic, progressive populist movements, advocating for transformations that are linked to the moral practice of caring and social justice. far from being irrelevant to the social and civic mandate of nursing, this specific critical theory provides a socio-ethical critique that is directly relevant to understanding nursing's moral practice. and in providing that socio-ethical critique, fraser's work makes an important contribution to helping nurses achieve the civic mandate of social justice in the profession, supporting democratic professionalism in nursing. contemporaneously and in parallel with the theorization of "care" in nursing, related work in a feminist relational ethics of care emerged elsewhere during the 1980s, 1990s, and early twenty-first century. in psychology and philosophy, women's moral agency was the subject of early research by gilligan (1982) , sarah ruddick (1989) , nel noddings (1984) (among others). these early scholars explicated gendered differences between men's and women's moral agency, a prelude to "founding" (klaver et al. 2014 ) a feminist relational ethics of care. proposing complimentary comparisons between a more logocentric, principled moral paradigm of justice among men and a relational ethic of care among women, this early feminist "ethics of care" work has continued through important critiques and elaborations, leading to what is now recognized as a formalized branch of feminist (care) ethics. feminist care ethicists have emphasized the moral status of relational caring as a normative ethic. recognized scholars in this field include peta bowden (1995 bowden ( , 1997 bowden ( , 2000a , eva kittay (2020; ethics of care 2013), virginia held (2006) , joan tronto (1993 tronto ( , 2013 fisher and tronto 1990) , and ann gallagher (2017) among others. they have provided important feminist analysis, theorizing the centrality of relational care practices in society (including in citizenship), in everyday life (mothering, friendship), and also in professional caring practices, including among nurses. feminist care ethicists have offered important analyses that situate care in social, political, economic, and global contexts. what is striking about this history of care ethics in feminist philosophy is that it has progressed well beyond a separation of care and justice, rejecting a "gender-sensitive ethics" based on stereotypically "feminine" images of caring. feminist ethicists of care have insisted on placing care within contexts that include institutionalized power relations, including gender, and also have emphasized the importance of critiquing the injustice of those power relations. in this work, feminist ethicists have steadfastly rejected a binary separation between the ethics of justice and the ethics of caring, as well as any gendered and essentialist assumptions about the way in which women and men care. they understand care as comprised of practices, relations, and values that are based in and that contribute to moral respect and moral recognition. they locate caring as central to democratic arrangements in civic society. and they insist that wider contexts of social, political, and economic injustice matter for caring. in her recent work, tronto (2013) extends her previous discussion of caring. while having consistently located caring in social and political contexts (tronto 1993) , her book, caring democracy: markets, equality, and justice, moves into more explicit feminist critique of intersecting contexts where polity-economy are relevant. the direction of tronto's analysis has emphasized the importance of different types of caring, their attributes, and the contexts of these. those types of caring identified in 1993 included: "caring about" (attentiveness), "caring for" (responsibility), "care giving" (competence), "care receiving" (responsiveness). her analysis clarifies that these types of care are not restricted to processes between individuals (whether in public or private realms); they involve relational caring with/in communities and are influenced by and have consequences for social, economic, and political arrangements. the direction of this feminist care ethic takes guidance from earlier work having conceptualized care in ways that resemble philosophical anthropology, viewing caring as a species activity, a requirement for species survival (tronto 1993, p. 103 ). tronto, however, argues more explicitly that the ethics of care has important consequences for the organization of the polis/public sphere, for conceptions of democracies and democratic life, and for the focus of political philosophy. she holds that caring (more than production) has or should have moral prominence in the political organization of democracies and that a central task of democracies is the political assignment of responsibility for caring writ large. the fifth element or type of caring emerging from this philosophy of care is democratic caring ("caring with"). in theorizing this form of caring, tronto's work does more than "add social justice and stir" for the ethics of care. in theorizing caring democracies, she defines democratic caring as a shared ethical commitment, but more forcefully, she holds that democratic caring should be the constitutive steering mechanism of the polity. emphasizing the shared political commitment to equality and care in caring democracies, she argues that [i] n democracies [...] democratic politics should center on assigning responsibilities for care, and for ensuring that democratic citizens are as capable as possible of participating in this assignment of responsibilities. [...] caring democracies thus require a commitment to equality of voice and of reducing power differentials [...] to create the conditions for a meaningful democratic discussion of the nature of responsibility (for care) in society. [...] politically, the feminist democratic ethic of care seeks to expose how social and political institutions permit some to bear the burdens (and joys) of care and allow others to escape them. (tronto, 2013, pp. 30, 32-33) tronto's understanding of the commodification of care in market economies clarifies that a feminist explanation of "the economy" has relevance for democratic caring. for tronto, caring about and with others in addressing structural sources of oppression is or should be a responsibility in caring democracies. this view of social and political structures and their influence on caring has much in common with recent feminist and communitarian commitments in critical paradigms for nursing ethics (kagan et al. 2009; chinn and kramer 2011) . here i argue that between tronto and fraser, an important dialogue about structural influences on democratic caring is needed. that conversation would have relevance for a critical theory of nursing ethics by addressing structures of oppression under capitalism and how these may be addressed among nurses. fraser's work adds explanatory depth by clarifying how those struggles are located at the intersections of polity and economy, including private, marketized, corporatized, and state-managed caring activity. her work further explains how those global "care" struggles are being influenced by exploitation, expropriation, and the annexation of nature under capitalism. her work clarifies the need for simultaneous scales of justice that address recognition, redistribution, and representation. and finally, fraser raises awareness about the rise of reactionary conservative populist movements and the prospects of progressive populist movements to engage "democratic caring" under capitalism. while tronto's latest work on caring democracies addresses several of these details, she does so in a different field of analysis, by focusing her political philosophy on the ethos of the polis. for nurses, these treatments of the significance of "the economy" versus "democracy" do matter in forming our vision of and understanding of care and social justice. a dialogue or deliberative conversation engaging the respective work of fraser and tronto would contribute to a deeper understanding of those visions in nursing ethics. in considering prospects for that kind of transdisciplinary dialogue, e.g., a conversation between tronto and fraser, an important point of clarification is needed. that point concerns the extent to which a "post-socialist feminist imaginary" is still present in feminist care ethics. when the subject of a feminist ethic of democratic care is considered in nursing, it is fair to ask specifically what "caring democracies" look like in the context of "financialized transnational corporate capitalism." that feminist materialist problematique speaks differently to nursing, challenging some unspoken assumption about the imbrication of care and social justice in nursing under capitalism. and if that work is to be taken up in nursing, it is important to ask whether and how a post-socialist feminist imaginary can be examined, challenged, or transformed in our deliberations. a final section of this analysis takes up the ethics of social justice in nursing and how that ethical discourse contributes to a critical theory of nursing ethics. as fowler (2015 fowler ( , 2016 fowler ( , 2017 has argued, nursing ethics is best understood as having demonstrated a legacy of social ethics, including a rich history of concerns for social justice. in agreement with that legacy ethic, there has been recent acknowledgment (woods 2012; peter 2011; liaschenko 1999; watson 2008; doane 2014) that nursing ethics encompasses an imbricated connection between relational ethics/the ethics of care and the ethics of social justice. how the ethics of care and the ethics of social justice "go together" in nursing is an important and compelling question, perhaps a puzzle, addressed differently by different scholars in nursing and by their use of different feminist, moral, and political perspectives. for example, the work of feminist moral and political philosopher iris marion young (1990 young ( , 2011 has been used heavily in nursing to examine the ethics of social justice. that approach, now common in nursing, foregrounds the ethics of moral recognition, emphasizing mutual respect across different "intersectional" social identities. yet in discussions of social justice in nursing, fraser's insight about simultaneously addressing the ethics of redistribution under capitalism is largely missing. i suggest that fraser's feminist materialist philosophy deserves more specific consideration in nursing ethics, contributing to better understanding how social justice is achieved under capitalism. that relevance is derived from her insistence that three scales of justice (recognition, redistribution, and representation) are relevant in capitalist democracies. a review of codes of ethics in nursing in canada and the united states supports the assertion that the discipline and the profession understand the ethics of care and the ethics of social justice to be connected in nursing. both codes identify commitments to relational caring and social justice. in the united states (in 2015), the american nurses association followed the canadian nurses association (in 2006 and 2010) in revising its code and social policy statement to reclaim and emphasize the ethics of social justice (fowler 2016) . a relevant detail includes the observation that while the canadian nurses association has insisted on the importance of emphasizing the ethics of social justice, regulators in canada expressed more ambivalence about that invocation of social justice in the code (peter 2011) . using fraser's work, it is helpful to consider how these codes rely on a paradigm of social justice based strongly on moral respect and moral recognition, speaking less directly about correcting for maldistribution (economic disadvantage) and infrequently about the ethics of representation (parity in political participation). whether and the extent to which codes of ethics in nursing conceptualize social justice as addressing redistribution in capitalist contexts is an important question. fraser's work speaks productively to these questions. her explanations focus directly on growing inequality in income distribution, predatory debt, precarious employment, and growing health inequity under capitalism. given this, she also cautions about the prevalence of a "post-socialist" feminist imaginary, a feminist vision that retains the "there is no alternative" to capitalism standpoint. these contradictions present compelling questions about what type of feminist moral philosophy resonates most comfortably for nursing ethics. in the last 10 years in north america, two concept analyses have produced different working definitions of the concept of social justice in nursing. first appearing in 2012 from u.s. scholars kelly buettner-schmidt and marie lobo (2012), social justice was defined as: full participation in society and the balancing of benefits and burdens by all citizens, resulting in equitable living and a just ordering of society. […]the attributes of social justice are: (1) fairness; (2) equity in the distribution of power, resources and processes that affect the sufficiency of the social determinants of health; (3) just institutions, systems, structures, policies and processes; (4) equity in human development, rights and sustainability; and (5) sufficiency of well-being. (p. 954) this definition foregrounds fairness, equity and a balance of burdens and benefits among citizens, echoing what some may view as aspects of rawlsian distributive justice. however, influenced perhaps by more contemporary movements for social justice, this definition also moves on to attributes that break away from a "veil" of detached impartiality. it acknowledges wider democratic commitments to fairness in the distribution of power, resources and processes that affect "sufficiency" of the social determinants of health and "sufficiency" of well-being. while stated in somewhat detached language, those attributes speak to understanding the structural nature of oppression, and if interpreted using a materialist feminist perspective, would account for social injustices under capitalism. a more explicit use of feminist materialist philosophy would strengthen the capacity of this definition to adequately address the ethics of recognition, redistribution and representation. next appearing in 2017 from canadian scholars angela matwick and roberta woodgate (2017) , social justice in nursing was defined as: a state of health equity characterized by both the equitable distribution of services affecting health and helping relationships. social justice is achieved through the recognition and acknowledgment of social oppression and inequity and nurses' caring actions toward social reform. (p. 182) this definition more clearly demonstrates language consistent with democratic caring. it points directly and indirectly to the importance of moral recognition and respect in overcoming oppression and inequity, also to acts of democratic caring to achieve social reform. mostly missing from this definition are explications of how social justice in nursing addresses structural sources of maldistribution or misrepresentation. these concerns can be clarified by engaging feminist materialist philosophy. these recent definitions of social justice in north american nursing illustrate how democratic caring and social justice may be related in nursing ethics. that understanding is also helped by considering some recent examples of scholarship that address the ethics of social justice in nursing. literature addressing the scholarship of social justice in nursing has been very productive during the last 30 years in north america. in the face of provocative challenges about the justification of social justice discourse in nursing (lipscomb 2012) , the nursing literature continues to include compelling work on the ethics of social justice. some (but not all) of this work would be located in what paula kagan, marlaine smith, peggy chinn, and maeona kramer have referred to as an "emancipatory" paradigm for nursing (chinn and kramer 2011; kagan et al. 2014) . while a robust integrative review of this and related social justice discourse in nursing is beyond the focus of this chapter, a brief review of some recent examples of social justice scholarship in nursing in north america is relevant. in canada, social justice discourse has been prominent in nursing scholarship. canadian work demonstrates several theoretical influences relevant to social justice including: intersectionality (van herk et al. 2011; smye et al. 2011) ; intersectionality/ feminist post-colonial philosophy (varcoe et al. 2014) ; critical theory (reimer kirkham and browne 2006) ; feminist moral and political philosophy (peter 2011) ; feminist post-colonial philosophy (anderson 2000; racine 2003 racine , 2009 racine and petrucka 2011; denison et al. 2013) ; feminist anti-racist pedagogy (garneau et al. 2018) ; cultural safety/anti-racist pedagogy (browne et al. 2009; gregory et al. 2010 (these "categories" are not meant to denote discreet thematic areas of emphasis since they frequently overlap/intersect.) finally, canadian authors annette browne and sheryl reimer-kirkham (2014) respectfully problematize some aspects of social justice discourse in nursing. these authors recommend continued examination of tensions in the ethics of social justice in nursing, also inviting a disciplinary "refocusing" in ways that are relevant for nursing (p. 35). in the united states, another diverse theoretical landscape has informed discussions of the ethics of social justice in nursing. this work includes years of scholarship leading up to and following the 2015 updated emphasis on social justice in the ana code of ethics (fowler 2016) . some theoretical influences in social justice literature in the united states include: upstream action and activism on sdh/structural inequity (bekemeier and butterfield 2005; butterfield 2017; thurman and pfitzinger-lippe 2017) ; philosophies and ethics of social justice in nursing (liaschenko 1999; boutain 2005 boutain , 2020 drevdahl 2013 drevdahl , 2018 ; critical research methodologies (dexheimer pharris & pavlish 2014; boutain 2014; evans-agnew et al. 2014 ; pedagogy: critical race theory and cultural safety; (puzan 2003; fahrenwald 2003; fahrenwald et al. 2007; hassouneh 2006; allen 2006; campesino 2008; canales and drevdahl 2014) ; feminist intersectionality (rogers and kelly 2011); postcolonial feminist praxis (mkandawire-valhmu et al. 2014 ); anti-racist, post-colonial, intersectional populist activism: (walter 2017; weitzell et al. 2020) . lastly, relevant is a recent critical discourse analysis by u.s. author, claire valderama-wallace (2017) addressing social justice ethics as demonstrated in the revised ana code of ethics and related documents. this discussion focuses on revisions to the 2015 code that make more visible the ana social mandate for social justice in nursing. given this important revision, valderama-wallace locates continuing sites of contradiction concerning poverty and racism in the ana documents. she also identifies ongoing ambivalence in the documents about how the social mandate for social justice aligns with prevailing conceptions of professionalism. the extent to which practicing nurses "at the bedside" see professional practice as including an internalized professional responsibility to address social justice continues to be a crucial point of conversation. the analysis suggests that ambivalence is expressed in response to emphasis on social justice, in calls for political advocacy-where individual nurses are called to support policy-level work among nursing's professional organizations and also to address for themselves their individual responsibilities in engaging social justice. taken together, these analyses demonstrate conversations in nursing in canada and the united states over the last 20 years, grappling with the moral terrain of social justice in practice, research, and education. increasingly, the literature reflects contradictions being recognized-across what fraser calls axes of moral respect, redistribution, and representation. these contradictions reflect growing awareness of the structural nature of social injustice, including micro-level interpersonal consequences, meso-level organizational effects, and macro-level structural persistence. it is noticeable that fraser's work is mostly not considered in these analyses. this lacuna is an important area of work for a critical theory of nursing ethics and addressing it will provide justifications (lipscomb 2012) for how and why nurses have important social justice contributions to make. in arguing that fraser's critical theory has relevance for nursing ethics, i have suggested that her work provides productive analysis for nursing, explaining as she does why capitalism presents persistent structural challenges for caring and social justice in nursing. i am not suggesting that feminist materialist philosophy is a panacea or that it can in-itself adequately account for all the moral challenges nurses' experience. but i am insisting that without this critical theory, the profession and the discipline miss an opportunity to reengage an important analytic tool-one that is ultimately consistent with the history of legacy ethics in nursing. this paper has reviewed fraser's philosophy, piecing together points of analysis that are relevant for nursing ethics. the discussion examines (a) the ethics of recognition, redistribution, and representation explicated in fraser's work; (b) her critique of a post-socialist feminist imaginary and its relevance for nursing ethics; and (c) her explanation of contemporary financialized transnational corporate capitalism and the relevance of that explanation for democratic transformation of the economics and politics of care and social justice. next, the paper probes the extent to which feminist commitments to caring and care ethics in nursing can be strengthened by taking fraser's explanation of capitalism and three scales of justice into account. in examining feminist care ethics, the paper also invites a closer comparison of tronto's philosophy of democratic caring in market economies and fraser's feminist materialist philosophy of capitalism. overlap and points of connection in this section of analysis invite a more focused conversation between the feminist philosophies of joan tronto and nancy fraser for nursing ethics. finally, the discussion takes up a review of recent scholarship in north america related to the ethics of social justice in nursing. that analysis demonstrates some common themes in recent research in canada and the u.s. responding to mandates for social justice found in both professional codes of ethics, researchers in both nations have addressed common theoretical approaches to understanding social justice. these include intersectional, feminist post-colonial, feminist anti-racist theory, and calls for social justice activism, present in the scholarship of nurses in both nations. even given crucial differences in their public versus privatized health care systems, this analysis nevertheless suggests that the mandate for social justice in nursing codes of ethics continues to produce compelling questions among nurse scholars, educators, and leaders. those questions emerge from grappling with the structural origins of injustices, their micro-personal and interpersonal expression, and ethical reflection on what forms of professional practice are necessary to adequately respond to these. in reviewing this scholarship, a compelling conversation about nursing codes of ethics, the ethics of social justice, and professional practices seems nascent: for scholars-what kinds of knowledge projects are needed and for what kind of professionalism? the analysis in this chapter finally suggests that these conversations can be helpfully informed by a deeper consideration of fraser's feminist materialist philosophy. in its insistence on the need to examine capitalism as a context that shapes the ways we live and the ways we practice, fraser's work provides something other than a "rupture" or disorientation for nursing ethics. her critical theory instead supports the ability to recall a legacy of social ethics in nursing. echoes of that ethic have been part of nursing's professionalization, despite increasingly undemocratic influences of privilege in a "democratically racist," heteronormative, corporatized, biomedically oriented, and environmentally unmindful health care industry-whether in a public welfare state or liberal and partially privatized arrangement. especially relevant are fraser's analyses of how the present times will compel political advocacy, invoking new awareness, convergence with allies, and activism in/among progressive populist movements. fraser and her colleagues point to the need for a new emerging kind of progressive populist response to the social injustices that are consequences of financialized transnational corporatized capitalism. there is evidence in reviews of recent social justice literature in nursing that this kind of understanding of nursing's social justice mandate is emerging. how nurses will reengage with this progressive form of professional advocacy and how that is understood to be consistent with democratic professionalism in nursing is an important question. it may help to keep reminding ourselves that this is not new and that other generations of nurses have led the way before us. ambivalence in nursing about progressive activism linked with caring social justice movements may be a function of uncertainty, disputes, or hostility (among some) about what kind of professionalism nurses understand themselves to be enacting. it is the thesis of this chapter that the kind of democratic caring and democratic professionalism demonstrated in nursing's legacy ethics are a preferred paradigm for professionalism for nursing under twenty-first-century capitalism. understanding that form of professionalism requires a robust respect for the knowledge and wisdom of those we serve, recognizing and respecting their experiences as peers, also engaging as allies in non-elite relations of advocacy, social justice activism, and caring with them, their communities, and others to address the structural injustices of our world. as i have suggested (thompson, 2014) , this form of "civic" professionalism requires a more radical awareness of how power operates in democracies under capitalism and how we are positioned in it to be the moral agents we want to be. whiteness and difference in nursing gender, 'race', poverty, health and discourses of health reform in the context of globalization: a postcolonial feminist perspective in policy research h.d.'s tapestry: embroidery, william morris and the sword went out to sea feminism for the 99% nurses in american history: nursing and early feminism power in structured misogyny: implications for the politics of care a critical review of the concept of social justice in 3 national nursing documents from novice to expert: excellence and power in clinical nursing practice from novice to expert: excellence and power in clinical nursing practice caring practice the primacy of caring: stress and coping in health and illness nursing: the practice of caring outline of a theory of practice social justice as a framework for professional nursing the identity, research and health dialogic interview: its significance for social justice-oriented research an "ethic of care" in clinical settings: encompassing "feminine" and "feminist virtue ethics, caring and nursing. scholarly inquiry for moving beyond description: closing the health equity gap by redressing racism impacting indigenous populations problematizing social justice discourses in nursing examining the potential of nurse practitioners from a critical social justice perspective cultural safety and the challenge of translating critically oriented knowledge in practice contested practice: political activism in nursing and implications for nursing education social justice: a concept analysis lavinia lloyd dock: an activist in nursing and social reform thinking upstream: a 25-year retrospective and conceptual model aimed as reducing health inequities beyond transculturalism: critiques of cultural education in nursing social justice: from educational mandate to transformative core value the ethics of caring the evolution of nursing's ethics of caring integrated theory and knowledge development in nursing feminism and nursing: can nursing afford to remain aloof from the women's movement? reconceptualizing the environment portrait of a leader: lavinia lloyd dock renew the deal piecing together a genealogical puzzle sickness unto death: medicine as mythic, necrophilic and iatrogenic aboriginal women's experiences of accessing health care when state apprehension of children is being threatened community-based collaborative action research: giving birth to emancipatory knowing cultivating relational consciousness in social justice practice injustice, suffering, difference: how can community health nursing address the suffering of others critical research methodologies and social justice issues: a methodological example using photovoice applying critical discourse analysis in health policy research: case studies in regional organization and global health. policy teaching social justice academic freedom and academic duty to teach social justice: a perspective and pedagogy for public health nursing faculty witnessing social injustice downstream and advocating for health equity upstream towards justice in health; an exemplar of speaking truth to power toward a feminist theory of caring heritage ethics: toward a thicker account of nursing ethics nursing's codes of ethics, social ethics, and social policy struggle over needs: outline of a socialist-feminist critical theory of late capitalist political culture from redistribution to recognition? dilemmas of justice in a 'post-socialist' age recognition or redistribution? a critical reading of iris young's justice and the politics of difference scales of justice: reimagining political space in a globalizing world redistribution or recognition? a political-philosophical exchange capitalism: a conversation in critical theory the old is dying and the new cannot be born the role of caring in a theory of nursing ethics the nurse and patient: the caring relationship care ethics and nursing practice drawing on antiracist approaches toward a critical anti-discriminatory pedagogy for nursing care as a moral attitude in nursing development of a theoretically adequate description of caring evidence of the unspeakable: biopower, compassion, and nursing a different voice: psychological theory and women's development sex-segregated occupations: relevance for nursing pedagogy as influencing nursing students' essentialized understanding of culture challenges faced by faculty of color in predominantly white schools of nursing the ethics of care: personal, political and global a nursing manifesto: an emancipatory call for knowledge development, conscience, and praxis philosophies and practices of emancipatory nursing: social justice as praxis supporting transvisibiltiy and gender diversity in nursing practice and education: embracing cultural safety love's labor: essays on women, equality and dependency demarcation of the ethics of care as a discipline: discussion article leininger's theory of nursing: cultural care diversity and universality can justice coexist with the supremacy of personal values in nursing practice? social justice special issue editorial enhancing our understanding of emancipatory nursing: a reflection on the use of critical feminist methodologies after virtue: a study in moral theory feminist methods. a new paradigm for nursing research social justice: concept analysis context matters: promoting inclusion with indigenous women teaching, research, and service synthesized as postcolonial feminist praxis the focus of the discipline of nursing caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education nursing: concepts of practice fostering social justice: the possibility of a socially connected model of moral agency the unbearable whiteness of being (in nursing) implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research related to non-western populations applying antonio gramsci's philosophy to postcolonial feminist social and political activism in nursing the enduring challenge of cultural safety in nursing enhancing decolonization and knowledge transfer in nursing research with non-western populations: examining the congruence between primary healthcare and postcolonial feminist approaches transcultural caring: political and economic visions a theory of bureaucratic caring for nursing practice in the organizational culture a transtheoretical evolution of caring science within complex systems caring as emancipatory nursing praxis: the theory of relational caring complexity toward a critical theoretical interpretation of social justice discourses in nursing health equity through action on the social determinants of health: taking up the challenge in nursing ordered to care: the dilemma of american nursing 1850-1945 oppressed group behavior: implications for nursing moral agency: relational connections and support feminist intersectionality: bringing social justice to health disparities research maternal thinking: toward a politics of peace the unhappy marriage of care ethics and virtue ethics looking backwards, looking forward: hopes for bioethics' next twenty-five years harm reduction, methadone maintenance treatment and the root causes of health and social inequities: an intersections lens in the canadian context challenges to professionalism: work integrity and the call to renew and strengthen the social contract of the professions caring in nursing: a different interpretation discourses of social justice: examining the ethics of democratic professionalism in nursing returning to the profession's roots: social justice in nursing education for the 21st century the ethics of care: a feminist virtue ethics of care for healthcare moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care relational complexity: a theory of the nurse-patient relationship within an economic context critical discourse analysis of social justice in nursing's foundational documents examining our privileges and oppressions: incorporating an intersectionality paradigm into nursing promoting social justice and equity by practicing nursing to address structural inequities and structural violence the efficacy of a health promotion intervention for indigenous women: reclaiming our spirits emancipatory nursing praxis: a theory of social justice in nursing nursing: human science and human care: a theory of nursing. norwalk: appleton century crofts social justice and human caring: a model of caring science as a hopeful paradigm for moral justice for humanity the role of nurses as allies against racism and discrimination an emancipatory approach to cultural competency: the application of critical race, postcolonial, and intersectionality theories caring in nursing theory exploring the relevance of social justice within a relational nursing ethic professionalism and the evolution of nursing as a discipline: a feminist perspective justice and the politics of difference 713palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 vol.15 no. 3 diciembre de 2012 el funcionamiento de los signos y de las semióticas en el capitalismo contemporáneo1 mauricio lazzarato2 con el posfordismo aparece una nueva distribución de las semióticas, una nueva división de lo sensible que atañe a los saberes y los signos. a pesar de que en las décadas de 1960 y 1970 la lingüística fue el paradigma de las ciencias sociales, son pocos los autores que han analizado esta con!guración. tomamos de deleuze y gua"ari la distinción entre semióticas asigni!cantes y semióticas signi!cantes, para referirnos a las diferentes funciones de signos, discursos y saberes que vimos operando en este con#icto. en las sociedades contemporáneas, los signos y las semióticas funcionan siempre bajo un doble registro. el primero es el de la “representación” y el “signi!cado”, organizado mediante semióticas signi!cantes (la lengua) con vistas a la producción del “sujeto”, del “individuo”, del “yo” [“je”]. el segundo es el registro maquínico, organizado mediante semióticas asigni!cantes (tales como los signos monetarios o bursátiles, los lenguajes informáticos que hacen que las máquinas funcionen, o numéricos de producción de imágenes, sonidos e información, las ecuaciones, las funciones, los diagramas de la ciencia, la música, etc.) “capaces de poner en juego signos que tienen por otra parte un efecto simbólico o signi!cante, pero cuyo propio funcionamiento no es ni simbólico ni signi!cante”. este segundo registro no busca la constitución del sujeto, sino la captura y activación de los elementos presubjetivos y preindividuales (afectos, 1 este texto ha sido publicado por primera vez en: vv.aa. (2007). producta50, generalitat de catalunya – department de cultura i mitjans de comunicació, barcelona. y se incluye en este número con autorización explícita de la casa editorial bajo la licencia creative commons. 2� 0dxul]lr�/d]]dudwr�hv�¿oyvrir��hvfulwru��froderudgru�kdelwxdo�gh�od�uhylvwd�futur antérieur�\�plhpeur�gho� frqvhmr�hglwruldo�gh�od�uhylvwd�multitudes. 714 el funcionamiento de los signos y de las semióticas en el capitalismo contemporáneo mauricio lazzarato emociones, percepciones), y transindividuales, para hacerlos funcionar como piezas, como engranajes de la máquina semiótica del capital. 1. las funciones de sometimiento social y de alienación subjetiva de las semióticas significantes el sistema capitalista, a través de la representación y el signi!cado, produce y distribuye roles y funciones, nos dota de una subjetividad y nos asigna una individuación (identidad, sexo, profesión, nacionalidad, etc.) de manera que todo el mundo queda atrapado en una trampa semiótica signi!can-te y representativa. esta operación de “sometimiento social” a identidades y roles establecidos, pasa por la subordinación de la multiplicidad y la heterogeneidad de las semióticas presigni!cantes o simbólicas al lenguaje y sus funciones de representación y signi!cado. las semióticas simbólicas corporales (todo medio de expresión preverbal, corporal, icónico –la danza, la mímica, la música, una somatización, una crisis nerviosa, un ataque de llanto, intensidades, movimientos, ritmos, etc.$) no dependen ni del lenguaje signi!cante ni de la conciencia. no ponen en juego un hablante y un oyente perfectamente discernibles, como ocurre en el modelo comunicacional y en el lingüístico; y la palabra no ocupa un primer plano. estas semióticas son avivadas por los afectos, y dan lugar a relaciones difícilmente asignables a un sujeto, a un yo [moi], a un individuo. desbordan los límites subjetivos individualizantes (de las personas, las identidades, los roles y funciones sociales) dentro de los cuales el lenguaje querría encerrarlos y reducirlos. el “mensaje” no pasa por cadenas lingüísticas sino por el cuerpo, posturas, ruidos, imágenes, mímicas, intensidades, movimientos, ritmos, etc. el empleo de semióticas signi!cantes tiene, según gua"ari, las siguientes consecuencias: “la subjetividad pática [afectiva] que está en la raíz de todos los modos de subjetivación, queda ocultada (...) y tiende a ser sistemáticamente evacuada de las relaciones de discursividad, a pesar de que los operadores de discursividad están esencialmente cimentados en ella” (gua"ari, 1992). 715palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 vol.15 no. 3 diciembre de 2012 el hecho de plegar estas modalidades de expresión a las semióticas signi!cantes es una operación política, ya que, por una parte, la “toma de signi!cado es siempre inseparable de una toma de poder” (gua"ari, 1980) y, por otra, no hay signi!cación ni representación independientemente de signi!cados y representaciones dominantes. la potencia de actuar de los signos lingüísticos y no lingüísticos se pliega a la lógica de la representación y signi!cado, que neutralizan y reprimen todas las demás funciones del lenguaje y de los signos. hay una pretensión común a la lógica capitalista de las sociedades disciplinarias y a la lógica socialista y comunista: la relación con lo real debe pasar forzosamente por una mediación. sin signi!cado y sin representación, no hay acceso a lo real. en la tradición del movimiento obrero, no hay política posible sin “toma de conciencia” (signi!cado) y sin “representación” del pueblo o la clase por el “partido”. semiótica y política, gobierno de los signos y gobierno del espacio político están estrechamente ligados. 2. las funciones de servidumbre3 maquínica de las semióticas asignificantes el concepto de sometimiento social de gua"ari coincide en muchos puntos con el concepto de “gobierno por medio de la individualización” que, según foucault, caracteriza las sociedades disciplinarias. las funciones de “servidumbre maquínica”, por el contrario, no encuentran ninguna correspondencia ni en las teorías políticas ni en las lingüísticas, siendo este concepto una de las contribuciones fundamentales de deleuze y gua"ari para la comprensión de las sociedades contemporáneas. 3 «asservissement» (en le texto original), tiene un doble sentido. a) servidumbre: la condición de siervo o de esclavo, el acto de subyugar (esclavitud, sujeción, sumisión) como sistema de dependencia que liga el siervo al feudo. el siervo es un individuo que no tiene derechos, que no dispone de su persona, ni de bienes, cuyos servicios están adscritos a la gleba, y como ésta, son transferibles. b) el sentido cibernético de mecanismo de servidumbre: sistemas de control automático, con retroalimentación (feed-back) aplicados profusamente a la industria mecánica, como multiplicadores de energía y cuya especialidad es el control de los procesos. en este contexto, las personas son consideradas como dispositivos que procesan (transforman) información para una acción conforme a las necesidades de un sistema dado. desde este punto de vista, las acciones humanas no se limitan a ser pensadas como adecuadas o no, en cuanto funciones de un sistema global (gua"ari, 2004). 716 el funcionamiento de los signos y de las semióticas en el capitalismo contemporáneo mauricio lazzarato el registro maquínico de la producción semiótica del capital funciona sobre la base de semióticas asigni!cantes, de los signos que, en vez de producir un signi!cado, provocan una acción, una reacción, un comportamiento, una actitud, una postura. estas semióticas no signi!can, pero ponen en movimiento, activan. para aclarar la función de servidumbre maquínica, utilizaremos la descripción que brian massumi ha hecho de la misma. en un bello artículo, nos explica que después del 11 de septiembre de 2001, la televisión se ha convertido en el “canal privilegiado de la modulación afectiva, en tiempo real, en momentos socialmente críticos” (massumi, 2005, pp. 31-48), es decir, que después de los atentados de nueva york y washington, se ha convertido en el canal privilegiado de la servidumbre maquínica. la o!cina de seguridad interna estadounidense estableció un sistema de alerta cifrado por colores (del verde al rojo) para calibrar la ansiedad del público ante la amenaza “terrorista”. este sistema de alerta no va dirigido a la cognición y la conciencia de los sujetos, sino “más bien a la irritabilidad de los cuerpos”, es decir a los componentes preverbales y preindividuales de la subjetividad. las señales perceptivas se utilizan para activar directamente la sensibilidad antes que para “reproducir una forma” o “transmitir un contenido de!nido”. las alertas son “señales sin signi!cado” que en sí mismas no llevan ningún sentido ideológico, ningún discurso, pero que activan una respuesta “re#eja (a saber, no re#exiva) de los cuerpos”. el término de!ne aquí una servidumbre mecánica. los mecanismos de servidumbre son normalmente diagramas de bloques que revelan la dependencia funcional entre los elementos y un sistema de control. esta respuesta a “signos perceptivos que el sistema tiene por objeto generar conecta, sin hilos, al gobierno con el sistema nervioso de cada individuo” (massumi, 2005, pp. 31-48). el objeto de gobierno es aún, como en foucault, la población, pero aquí “la población entera ha devenido nerviosidad en red”, una inmensa “red neuronal” que reacciona de manera re#eja a los estímulos que le son dirigidos (massumi, 2005, pp. 31-48). 717palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 vol.15 no. 3 diciembre de 2012 según massumi, no se trata de la transmisión de un mensaje, de un intercambio de información de contenido ideológico, sino de una intervención que actúa “allí donde surge la experiencia”. este sistema actúa sobre las condiciones de aparición de la emoción, de la palabra, de la acción. afecta a la subjetividad en su proceso de constitución mismo, dentro de modalidades de su propia producción. “se trata menos de una comunicación que de una germinación asistida de potenciales para la acción, cuyo resultado no puede determinarse con precisión de antemano, pero cuya determinación variable puede programarse en colores” (massumi, 2005, pp. 31-48). este sistema pierde en capacidad de determinación, ya que no puede controlar los efectos y las reacciones de los individuos, pero gana en posibilidad de formateado del desarrollo de la subjetividad. los signos monetarios y bursátiles, la televisión, la ciencia, la música, etc, pueden funcionar como máquinas de producción de signos que escriben directamente sobre lo real y sobre el cuerpo, sin pasar por un signi!cado o una representación. la circulación del miedo, de la angustia o del pánico que constituye la atmósfera y la tonalidad en las que están inmersas nuestras sociedades “de la seguridad pública”, se activa por medio de máquinas de signos que no van dirigidos a la conciencia, sino directamente al sistema nervioso, a los afectos, a las emociones. en lugar de estar centradas en la lengua, las semióticas simbólicas del cuerpo son actividad como tal por la producción industrial, maquínica, no humana de imágenes, sonidos, palabras, intensidades, movimientos, ritmos, etc. si las semióticas signi!cantes tienen una función de alienación subjetiva, de “sometimiento social”, las semióticas asigni!cantes tienen una función de “servidumbre maquínica”. las semióticas signi!cantes operan una 718 el funcionamiento de los signos y de las semióticas en el capitalismo contemporáneo mauricio lazzarato sincronización y una modulación de los componentes preindividuales y preverbales de la subjetividad, haciendo que los afectos, las percepciones, las emociones, etc. funcionen como piezas, componentes, elementos de una máquina (servidumbre maquínica). podemos funcionar exactamente igual a componentes de input/output de máquinas semióticas, como simples relés de televisión o enlaces de internet, que permiten y/o impiden el paso de la información, de la comunicación, de los afectos. a diferencia de las semióticas signi!cantes, las semióticas asigni!cantes no conocen ni personas, ni roles ni sujetos. mientras que el sometimiento involucra personas globales, representaciones subjetivas molares fácilmente manipulables, “la servidumbre maquínica agencia elementos infrapersonales, infrasociales, en razón a una economía molecular del deseo”. la potencia de estas semióticas reside en el hecho de que pasan a través de los sistemas de representación y signi!cado en los cuales “los sujetos individuados se reconocen y alienan” (gua"ari, 1980). la servidumbre maquínica no es pues la misma cosa que la servidumbre social. si esta última va dirigida a la dimensión molar, individuada de la subjetividad, la primera activa su dimensión molecular, preindividual, transindividual. en el primer caso, el sistema habla y hace hablar. reduce la multiplicidad de las semióticas presigni!cantes y simbólicas y la indexa al lenguaje y las cadenas lingüísticas, favoreciendo de este modo sus funciones representativas. mientras que, en el segundo caso, no hace discursos, no habla, funciona, pone en movimiento, conectándose directamente al “sistema nervioso, al cerebro, a la memoria, etc.”, activando relaciones afectivas, transitivistas, transindividuales difícilmente atribuibles a un sujeto, a un yo [moi]. estos dos registros semióticos trabajan juntos en la producción y el control de la subjetividad, a la vez en su dimensión molar y molecular. como vamos a ver, los mismos dispositivos semióticos pueden ser a la vez tanto dispositivos de servidumbre maquínica como de sometimiento social 719palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 vol.15 no. 3 diciembre de 2012 (la televisión, por ejemplo, puede constituirnos como sujetos, usuarios, o bien utilizarnos como simples relés que hacen pasar una información, una noticia, o signos que provocan una acción-reacción). tenemos el privilegio de estar sometidos por igual a los efectos de unos y otros. es preciso insistir en el sentido y el papel que juegan las semióticas asigni!cantes (la moneda, los dispositivos de producción maquínica de imágenes, de sonidos, de palabras, los signos, las ecuaciones, las fórmulas utilizadas por la ciencia, la música, etc.), ya que la mayoría de las teorías lingüísticas y políticas las ignoran, a pesar de que constituyen el pivote de las nuevas formas de gobierno capitalista. precisamente, a partir de estas semióticas asigni!cantes se establece una nueva distribución entre lo discursivo y lo no discursivo. las teorías lingüísticas y la !losofía analítica ignoran su existencia y funcionamiento, pues suponen que la producción y circulación de signos y palabras es un asunto esencialmente humano, de “intercambio” semiótico entre personas. tienen una concepción logocéntrica de la enunciación, cuando una parte creciente de las enunciaciones y de los signos es producida y trabajada por dispositivos maquínicos (televisión, cine, radio, internet, etc.). aquí la enunciación aún está territorializada y es logocéntrica, mientras que el capitalismo se caracteriza por una enunciación desterritorializada y maquinocéntrica. los medios de comunicación de masas y las telecomunicaciones duplican las antiguas relaciones “orales y escriturarias”, con!gurando nuevos agenciamientos de enunciación (individuales y colectivos). las teorías que hacen de la palabra y del lenguaje la forma más importante o la única forma de expresión política (arendt, rancière, virno), parecen desconocer igualmente las semiologías asigni!cantes, ya que el proceso de subjetivación (rancière) o individuación (virno) se desarrolla en un espacio público concebido como una escena teatral, donde los sujetos políticos se constituyen en su dimensión molar y representativa imitando la actuación del artista o del orador ante un público. la metáfora teatral me parece especialmente perjudicial para comprender el espacio político contemporáneo. 720 el funcionamiento de los signos y de las semióticas en el capitalismo contemporáneo mauricio lazzarato el proceso de subjetivación o individuación queda entonces mutilado, pues las semióticas y las máquinas asigni!cantes rediseñan y recon!guran por completo el espacio público y sus modalidades de expresión, afectando directa y profundamente a la “palabra política”. esta última ya no puede ser descrita por el funcionamiento de la potencia de actuar del lenguaje, tal y como se ejercía en la polis griega, como desde hanna arendt pretenden todas estas teorías. en el espacio público contemporáneo, la producción de la palabra se organiza “industrialmente”, antes que “teatralmente”. el proceso de subjetivación o individuación no puede reducirse al “sometimiento social”, ignorando por completo la “servidumbre maquínica”. paradójicamente, con todas estas teorías políticas y lingüísticas contemporáneas que directa o indirectamente hacen referencia a la polis y/o al teatro, nos encontramos en una situación precapitalista. 3. las técnicas del espíritu el contenido de la subjetividad de la sociedad de control depende de una multitud de sistemas maquínicos. para describir esta “entrada en máquina de la subjetividad”, como antaño se decía “hacerse religioso”, basta con recordar los gestos y las acciones que nosotros, hombres y mujeres del occidente desarrollado, realizamos todos los días en nuestra más sencilla cotidianidad. me levanto por la mañana y antes que nada enciendo la luz, activando así un dispositivo tecnológico que corresponde a la descodi!cación generalizada de #ujo propio del capitalismo. flujo cualquiera indiferente a todo producto, a toda actualización, pero que, compuesto de puntos-signo sin signi!cado, penetrará en todos los demás dispositivos tecnológicos que activaré a lo largo del día, y los hará funcionar. mientras desayuno, escucho la radio. las dimensiones espaciales y temporales habituales de mi mundo sonoro quedan en suspenso. se neutralizan los esquemas sensomotrices habituales sobre los que se funda la percepción sonora. la voz, la palabra y el sonido se desterritorializan, ya que han perdido toda relación con un cuerpo, un lugar, una situación, un territorio. la 721palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 vol.15 no. 3 diciembre de 2012 difusión radiofónica no restituye “la orientación, los límites y la estructura del espacio” de la enunciación, únicamente transmite “relaciones entre intensidades sonoras” (cardinal, 2004). la “radio capta menos los fragmentos sonoros como cualidades sensibles que remiten a un objeto que como una serie ilimitada de modos, de fuerzas pasivas y activas de afección...” (cardinal, 2004). “lo sonoro comporta fuerzas elementales (intensidades, tonos, intervalos, ritmo y tiempo) que tienen un impacto más directo sobre la gente que el sentido de las palabras: éste es el fundamento del arte radiofónico”, según arnheim (citado en: cardinal, 2004). pero también el fundamento de gobierno de las sociedades de control. antes de salir telefoneo para avisar de que llegaré media hora tarde. ¿dónde tiene lugar la comunicación? ¿en mi casa? ¿en la de mi interlocutor? ¿en el dispositivo de telecomunicación? ¿cuál es el contexto de esta enunciación? en la calle saco dinero de un cajero automático donde un dispositivo eléctrico, informático y telemático que emite solamente puntos-signos sin ningún signi!cado satisface mi demanda poniéndome a disposición de los signos monetarios que guardo en mis bolsillos. flujo de poder adquisitivo que, como sabemos, no tiene realmente ningún poder, salvo el de entrar en una relación de intercambio con otros signos mercancía, que se anuncian ostensiblemente en el pasillo del metro que debo coger. el cajero automático es un sistema de regulación y de control sin signi!cado, pero que puede no obstante producirlos, ya que me recuerda sin cesar el saldo de mis signos sin poder, y modula, así, constantemente la necesidad de trabajar. antes de entrar en el metro compro un periódico. su lectura me confronta con la especi!cidad capitalista de la escritura y con otra máquina de signos e información. 722 el funcionamiento de los signos y de las semióticas en el capitalismo contemporáneo mauricio lazzarato dejemos la palabra a gabriel tarde, que a !nales del siglo xix ya había subrayado la diferencia de este modo “mudo” de enunciación con relación al modelo de la polis griega. los oradores políticos griegos componían un discurso destinado a ser pronunciado en un “tiempo muy corto, en un espacio que jamás excedía el alcance de la voz humana” ante un restringido número de personas, “sustraído temporalmente a cualquier in#uencia circundante”, elaborado por el orador en un “mismo estado de ánimo” (tarde, 2003). la labor del periódico es de un carácter muy distinto. “el periódico se dirige a un público mucho más amplio, pero disperso, compuesto de individuos que, mientras leen su artículo, quedan expuestos a distracciones de todo tipo; oyen los murmullos que llegan desde las conversaciones próximas, en su círculo o su café, de ideas contrarias a las del escritor” (tarde, 2003). los lectores, como los oyentes de la radio, no ven nunca al escritor, ni sus gestos, sus posturas, como tampoco los rasgos de su rostro, y, a diferencia de la radio, tampoco oyen su voz ni su entonación. a diferencia del orador, que con un solo discurso in#uye en el juicio de los auditores, son necesarios varios artículos para obtener el mismo resultado, ya que “el artículo es sólo un eslabón en una cadena de artículos, que provienen en general de escritores diversos que componen la redacción del periódico”. este larguísimo y complejo “discurso mudo conocido como periódico” conduce nuestras democracias desde la revolución francesa. la gran di!cultad para un periódico consiste en formar a su público y conservarlo. no se establece un público ni se conserva con un cuerpo de ideas coherentes, con un despliegue armonioso de argumentos, como ocurre con la retórica del orador. “el contenido del periódico se compone de innumerables materias, incoherentes, suministradas cada mañana por el acontecimiento del día o de la víspera. es como si, en el transcurso de una arenga de demóstenes 723palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 vol.15 no. 3 diciembre de 2012 contra filipo, a cada instante se le hubieran acercado mensajeros con nuevas noticias y como si el relato o la interpretación de esta información hubiera constituido su discurso” (tarde, 2003, p. 259). ya de regreso en casa veo, junto a otros ocho millones de franceses, un telediario. formamos una inmensa red neuronal, una red de cuerpos y almas, afectos, emociones, pasiones simultáneamente sincronizados. constituimos un inmenso sistema nervioso expuesto a las consignas del poder. ¿quién habla en el televisor? ¿a quién se dirige? el talking head es sólo el terminal de un agenciamiento “industrial” de producción de enunciación, cuya redacción, periodistas, reporteros independientes, intermitentes son sólo una parte (y no necesariamente la más importante de la cadena de producción). la voz del presentador es una “polifonía”, pero nada simpática. en su voz resuenan las voces de los poderes establecidos, de los anunciadores publicitarios, de los otros medios de comunicación escritos y electrónicos, y las de presidentes y directores generales, cuyo proyecto “cultural” consiste en volver preparar los cerebros para el marketing de las empresas. en cada casa, cada uno de los ocho millones de telespectadores se encuentra él también en el centro de un agenciamiento, en la intersección de una serie de #ujo. los procedimientos para atraer la atención, la manera de organizar los programas, de presentar el material, recortan en diferentes lugares la experiencia de la lectura del periódico o de escuchar la radio. pero aparecen nuevos elementos, vinculados a la especi!cidad tecnológica del dispositivo. así entonces, delante del televisor soy la intersección “1. de una fascinación perceptiva provocada por el barrido luminoso del aparato, y que con!na al hipnotismo; 2. de una relación de captura con el contenido narrativo de la emisión, asociada a una vigilancia lateral con respecto a los acontecimientos circundantes (el agua que hierve en el fuego, el grito de un niño, el teléfono...); 3. de un mundo de fantasma que habita mi ensueño... mi sentimiento de identidad personal se desvanece así en diferentes direcciones” (gua"ari, 1992). 724 el funcionamiento de los signos y de las semióticas en el capitalismo contemporáneo mauricio lazzarato antes de ir al cine, respondo al correo electrónico que he recibido durante el día y entro en unos dispositivos de escritura y comunicación completamente diferentes, donde, para decirlo con bakhtin, la “comprensión y la responsividad activa” neutralizada por la televisión puede ejercerse. entro en otro espacio público. llego al cine justo a tiempo para la última sesión; tengo otra experiencia de la suspensión “ordinaria” del mundo. esta vez concierne a la percepción y sus datos habituales de espacio y tiempo. mi sistema sensomotriz desfallece, pues las imágenes y los movimientos ya no dependen ni de un objeto ni de mi cerebro, sino que son los productos automáticos de un dispositivo maquínico. el montaje perturba las conexiones entre situación, imagen y movimiento, haciéndome entrar en otro bloque de espacio-tiempo. en las semiologías presigni!cantes o simbólicas, las materias y las formas de expresión son paralelas y no articuladas de forma lineal, como en la lengua. en una película hay diferentes líneas de expresión: la sonora, la visual, de la luz, del color, etc. “no es cuestión de hablar de sintaxis o de clave, lo cual volvería homogénea la relación entre sus diferentes líneas”. la cuestión política que debe ponerse frente a los procesos de sometimiento y de servidumbre que acabamos de tratar, es la siguiente: ¿cómo sustraerse a estas relaciones de dominio y cómo desarrollar, a partir de estas mismas tecnologías, prácticas de libertad, procesos de subjetivación individuales y colectivos? conclusiones las semióticas signi!cantes y asigni!cantes juegan un papel fundamental en el proceso de subjetivación. este último es el resultado de la acción de una multiplicidad de elementos discursivos y no discursivos, lingüísticos y éticos, sociales y políticos, etc. en lugar de suponer su traducibilidad general en la unidad de las semióticas signi!cantes, es necesario más bien reconocer su disyunción, su digresión, su diferencia esencial. solamente 725palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 vol.15 no. 3 diciembre de 2012 trabajando la disyunción, la autonomía e independencia de estas componentes, podremos cartogra!ar sus efectos, sus funciones, sus modalidades de acción, su capacidad de producción, de transformación y de autoa!rmación existencial. así pues, la polivocidad de las componentes de enunciación (lingüísticos y no lingüísticos) implica un proceso de subjetivación que no puede ser reducido a un simple resultado de operación signi!cante o lógico-lingüística. se trata, al contrario, de cartogra!ar los “componentes de subjetivación y de enunciación en la heterogeneidad que le es más propia”, para poder determinar las funciones, los efectos y su eventual potencia de actuar. referencias gua"ari, f. (1992). chaosmose. parís: galilée. [trad. cast.: caosmosis, buenos aires: manantial, 1992]. gua"ari, f. (1980). la révolution moléculaire. parís: recherches. gua"ari, f. (2004). plan sobre el planeta. madrid: tra!cantes de sueños. massumi, b. (2005). “fear (%e sprectrum saids)”. positions. east asia cultures critique, 13, 31-48. cardinal, s. (2004). “la radio, modulateur de l’audible”. chimères, 53, p. 46. tarde, g. (2003). les transformations du pouvoir. parís: le seuil. o legado de paulo freire para as políticas de currículo e para o trabalho docente, no brasil to cite this article please include all of the following details: anwaruddin, sardar. (2013). can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1). http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci <access date> can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? sardar m. anwaruddin 1 university of toronto, canada introduction initiatives to internationalize the field of curriculum studies are relatively recent. before proceeding to a discussion of curriculum studies as an international field, i should clarify that “there has long been a well established field of international and comparative education, but curriculum studies is customarily contained within national and local boundaries in the form of educational practices that are embedded in local and national histories and cultures” (carson, 2009, p. 145). curriculum inquiry has traditionally occurred within national borders and has been shaped by the national policies and priorities. moreover, efforts to understand curriculum inquiry from an international perspective have been influenced by the curricular methods and concepts available in economically and technologically dominant nations. only the previous decade has witnessed a growing movement toward a true internationalization of curriculum studies. among the earliest attempts to internationalize the field was the oslo meeting under the leadership of professor bjorg gundem. this meeting called for a conversation between european and north american traditions of curriculum inquiry. william pinar (2003) believes that “if there develops someday a worldwide field of curriculum studies, it can be said to have been conceived in oslo in august 1995” (p. 3). the next breakthrough meeting to internationalize the field took place in 2000 at the louisiana state university (lsu). in his presidential address to the attendees of this meeting, pinar (2003) emphasized that the internationalization project “need[ed] to be constructed from the ground up” and the participants of the lsu conference were “on the ground floor” (p. 3). in this conference of scholars from all continents and twenty seven countries, pinar proposed a worldwide field of curriculum studies, which was not supposed to simply mirror the north american traditions of curriculum inquiry. pinar also made clear that the goal of this project was not to look “for new ‘markets’ for american conceptual products” (p. 5). rather, he warned everybody of the “unbelievable narcissism of american curriculum studies” (p. 4). while defining the character of this internationalization project, noel gough (2003) succinctly describes what it means to contest this narcissism: internationalizing curriculum inquiry might best be understood as a process of creating transnational ‘spaces’ in which scholars from different localities collaborate in reframing and decentering their own knowledge traditions and negotiate trust in each other’s contributions to their collective work. for those of us who work in western knowledge traditions, a first step must be to represent and perform our distinctive approaches to curriculum inquiry in ways that authentically demonstrate their localness. this may include drawing attention to the anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 53 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci characteristic ways in which western genres of academic textual production invite readers to interpret local knowledge as universal discourse. (p. 68) thus, at the heart of this project is to build transnational and transcultural solidarities which “requires a rethinking of the ways in which we perform and represent curriculum inquiry, so that curriculum work within a global knowledge economy does not merely assimilate national (local) curriculum discourses-practices into an imperial (global) archive” (gough, 2004, p. 1). since the lsu conference and the establishment of the international association for the advancement of curriculum studies (iaacs) in 2000, many scholars (see, for example, huber, 2010) have taken up the idea of internationalizing curriculum inquiry. in his recent book, paraskeva (2011) looks at the field of curriculum studies from a historical perspective. he uses the metaphor of a river to offer an understanding of how the field has evolved and how different theorists fought to control the flow of this river. referring to the current tensions in the field, paraskeva proposes an itinerant curriculum theory to fight against epistemicide. he emphasizes that curriculum theorists shift their focus and “deterritorialize their approaches and assume a critical itinerant position” (p. 3). this is necessary because he believes that the knowledges of western male scholars have dominated the field and that any other knowledges have been silenced or marginalized. paraskeva’s argument is grounded to a large extent in boaventura de sousa santos’s (2008) claim that there will be no global social justice without global cognitive justice. santos (2008) brings together social scientists from latin america, africa, and asia to show how another world of knowledge exists beyond the northern epistemic boundaries. one of santos’s key purposes is to respond to different forms of oppression stemming from the coloniality of knowledge and power. he focuses attention on how colonial epistemic monoculture affects our understanding of such concepts as modernity and development. santos, nunes, and meneses (2008) present nine theses in order to contribute to the opening of a different cannon of knowledge. among them, the following thesis is particularly relevant to this article as well as to paraskeva’s notion of an itinerant curriculum theory: “the decolonization of science is based on the idea that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice. the logic of the monoculture of scientific knowledge and rigor must be confronted with the identification of other knowledges and criteria of rigor that operate credibly in other social practices regarded as subaltern” (p. xlix, emphasis added). history is filled with accounts of how hegemonic forms of knowledge are produced, distributed, and consumed. the domination of northern epistemologies has remained ascendant with the rapid spread of the notion of “modernization” and the recent technological and economic globalization. a question that critical scholars, e.g., apple (1990) and giroux (1991) often ask is: whose knowledge is being globalized? they argue that forms of knowledge that do not fit in the western traditions are generally suppressed and ignored. scholars such as bennett (2007) call it epistemicide, in which “other” knowledges are skillfully rendered invisible or swallowed up. santos (2004) argues that the knowledges that do not exist are also produced, but they are produced as non-existent. in order to resist the hegemony of the northern epistemologies, these scholars demand for epistemological diversity and cognitive pluralism. along this line, paraskeva (2011) makes a strong argument for such diversity and pluralism and recommends that we “assume consciously that (an)other knowledge is possible,” and that we “go beyond the western anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 54 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci epistemological platform, paying attention to other forms of knowledge and respecting indigenous knowledge within and beyond the western space” (p. 152). an itinerant curriculum theory paraskeva (2011) argues for democratization of knowledges as a way of achieving social justice and cultural relevance in the curriculum. he proposes an itinerant curriculum theory to describe the struggle for this democratic and socially just curriculum. in the first 172 pages of his book conflicts in curriculum theory: challenging hegemonic epistemologies, paraskeva presents an extensive review of the history and development of curriculum studies as a field. it is only the final 16 pages of the book where he describes his proposed itinerant theory. although it is not my primary purpose in this article to thoroughly critique paraskeva’s itinerant curriculum theory, i briefly focus on some issues that arise from his proposal. in this paragraph, i deliberately use many quotations from paraskeva to capture the essence of his argument. borrowing from deleuze and guattari’s (1988) conception of deterritorialization, he emphasizes that “in essence, curriculum theory should give voice to an engineering of differences by deterritorializing itself and looking for new ways of thinking and feeling about education” (p. 174). he presents his theory as “a commitment to fight for a different research platform” (p. 176). quoting edward said, he says that the purpose of his curriculum theory “is to travel, to go beyond the limits, to move, and stay in a kind of permanent exile” (p. 177). then he moves on to a discussion of epistemology and argues that “western epistemological views need to pay attention and learn from other nonwestern epistemological views in and beyond the west” (p. 179). then he brings in linda smith (1999) and talks about decolonization of methodological frameworks. without digging much deeper into smith’s arguments, he presents boaventura de sousa santos and contends that his itinerant curriculum theory “challenges modern/post modern western thinking, which is abyssal thinking in which the knowledge of the other is produced as non-existent” (p. 185). paraskeva also believes that as “deliberate disrespect of the canon” (p. 184), his itinerant curriculum theory should celebrate differences by deterritorializing itself. in the final paragraph of his book, he claims that his itinerant curriculum theory “is the best path for critical progressive curriculum scholars” (p. 188). this snapshot view of paraskeva’s itinerant curriculum theory raises a number of concerns, some of which i briefly describe below. first, deleuze and guattari’s inspiration is obvious from paraskeva’s reference to the concept of deterritorialization. deleuze and guattari (1988) use the metaphor of a rhizome as a theoretical lens to describe concepts such as deterritorialization and multiplicity. a rhizome is a plant stem, often underground, that is capable of producing new plants. it “allows the parent plant to propagate vegetatively (asexually) and also enables a plant to perennate (survive an annual unfavorable season) underground” (rhizome, 2012, para. 1). if a rhizome is broken into pieces, each piece may produce a new plant. the metaphor of a rhizome becomes meaningful for us because it “spreads from horizontal, bulbous underground shoots and flourishes in unforeseen and unpredictable directions” (hagood, 2009, p. 39, emphasis added). for deleuze and guattari (1988), each rhizome contains lines of territorialisation as well as lines of deterritorialization. however, “there is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome” (p. 9). the rhizome is characteristically different from trees and their roots because it anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 55 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci “connects any point to any other point,” and therefore, it “is reducible neither to the one nor the multiple” (p. 21). it is not possible to understand the rhizome in terms of units or specific points or positions. it does not have binary relations between any two points. it “is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature” (p. 21). because the rhizome is only directions in motion, which are irreducible, and its lines are always tied to one another, deleuze and guattari do not want to “posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad” (p. 9). though paraskeva acknowledges his inspiration from deleuze and guattari, he takes binary logic to present his itinerant curriculum theory, which portrays west as the oppressor and non-west as the oppressed. his unwarranted and dichotomous claims—such as modern western thinking is abyssal and western knowledge system makes non-western knowledge invisible—are incongruent with deleuze and guattari’s concept of deterritorialization and multiplicity. this dichotomy leads to the second concern, i.e., an essentialist position that the proposed itinerant theory suggests. for deleuze and guattari, multiplicities are rhizomatic. unlike a tree or a root, a rhizome does not have any points or positions; it only has lines. these lines are not reducible to any one or many. in this sense, deleuze and guattari are resolutely anti-essentialist, but paraskeva’s emphasis on binary logic runs counter to their thought. in fact, the concept of rhizome has been used in post-colonial studies “to contest the binary, centre/margin view of reality that is maintained by colonial discourse. the key value of the term is to demonstrate that the repressive structures of imperial power themselves operate rhizomically rather than monolithically” (ashcroft, griffiths, & tiffin, 2000, p. 207). since power does not always operate in a simple vertical way, it is problematic to create essentialist political and cultural categories. colonial discourse theorists such as said (1979) and bhabha (1994) argue that these categories are fundamentally flawed because they constantly diffuse and intersect within the rhizomic networks of imperialism. additionally, in the concluding paragraph of his book, paraskeva claims that his itinerant curriculum theory “is the best path for critical progressive curriculum scholars” not only to understand concepts such as hegemony, power and ideology but also to address broader questions about schooling, curriculum, and social order (p. 188). by self-claiming the “best” position for his proposed theory, paraskeva follows a binary logic of dichotomy which is far away from deleuze and guattari’s concept of multiplicity. the third concern that arises from paraskeva’s proposal is his choice of the term “itinerant.” he does not provide an explanation of why he chose to call his theory “itinerant.” nonetheless, the use of this term implies that the journey of his curriculum theory is predictable and unidirectional—from west to non-west. this unidirectional journey/movement contradicts with deleuze and guattari’s (1988) theory of deterritorialization. the concept of nomad is of particular importance here, and it occupies an important place in deleuze and guattari’s philosophy. it is a powerful tool for understanding concepts such as state apparatus, smooth space, war machine, art, and religion. however, for our purpose here, i.e., to understand the notion of deterritorialization, let’s contrast the nomad with the migrant. although migrants go from one place to another and their destinations may be uncertain, their trajectory is different from that of nomads. the nomadic trajectory “does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road;” rather, “it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 56 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci non communicating” (deleuze & guattari, 1988, p. 380, original emphasis). both the nomad and the migrant move, but deleuze and guattari believe that there are qualitative differences between their movements. the migrant reterritorializes after moving to a new place. for this, deleuze and guattari believe that only “the nomad can be called the deterritorialized par excellence…because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant” (p. 381, original emphasis). in this sense, when paraskeva recommends that curriculum theory travel and “stay in a kind of permanent exile” (p. 177), he reinforces the unidirectional movement of the migrant. therefore, from the perspectives of deleuze and guattari, the term “nomadic” seems to be a better choice than “itinerant” to signify the multiplicity of a curriculum theory inspired by the concept of deterritorialization. in summary, the three concerns—a binary logic of domination, an essentialist categorization of west and non-west, and a unidirectional movement of his theory— obscure our understanding of an itinerant curriculum theory which, according to paraskeva, is supposed to facilitate global cognitive justice and the internationalization of curriculum studies. although “deleuze and guattari’s geophilosophy is particularly helpful in thinking about the unavoidable concept of difference (within and between nations/regions/cultures) and the opportunities and dilemmas for curriculum scholars that difference produces” (gough, 2007, p. 284), paraskeva’s interpretation and application of deleuze and guattari’s concept of deterritorialization does not enable us to sufficiently understand how his proposed theory will be helpful for curriculum scholars. in spite of paraskeva’s references to many scholars, including deleuze and guattari, i believe that his arguments are based primarily on the works of santos (2004; 2008), who argues strongly for global cognitive justice. paraskeva urges that the curriculum workers fight against the coloniality of knowledge and thus prevent epistemicide by embracing the cognitive pluralism and epistemological diversity of the world. building on santos’s arguments, he believes that an itinerant theory “will challenge one of the fundamental characteristic[s] of abyssal thinking: the impossibility of co-presence of the two sides of the line; it will challenge the cultural politics of denial, that produces a radical absence, the absence of humanity, the modern sub-humanity” (p. 188). again, in light of a rhizomic understanding of (neo)colonialism, hegemony—cultural, economic, or epistemic—operates through blurry, sometimes invisible, networks in which each line has many sides and intersecting points, not just two. though i find paraskeva’s binary logic problematic, i accept his call for freeing the curriculum from the western epistemological boundary. i also add that curriculum needs to be free from all epistemological boundaries, not just from the western boundary. we need to be mindful “of the dangers of simply reversing the categories of oppressed and oppressor” and “of the dangers of creating a new indigenous elite who would act merely as neo-colonial puppets” (ashcroft, griffiths, & tiffin, 2000, p. 78). therefore, we need to abolish all boundaries and resist any forms of epistemological domination if we want to create transnational spaces in which scholars from different geographic locations may collaboratively engage in curriculum inquiry (gough, 2004). these transnational spaces may play an important role “to initiate a vigorous debate/dialogue among scholars of all races” and thus to fight against epistemological racism (scheurich & young, 1997, p. 11). i believe that the concept of deterritorialization—which is not adequately fleshed out in paraskeva’s proposal for an itinerant curriculum theory—is crucial to global cognitive justice and the internationalization of curriculum studies. however, i argue that we need to ask: what are the challenges that an itinerant curriculum theory based on the anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 57 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci concept of deterritorialization is likely to face? paraskeva does not tell us the challenges and obstacles that his theory will have to overcome. while i accept paraskeva’s call for deterritorializing curriculum theory, i am afraid that his proposal for an itinerant curriculum theory may remain an unattainable goal if it fails to overcome the challenges of english linguistic imperialism (phillipson, 1992, 2009), geopolitics of academic writing (canagarajah, 2002), and academic capitalism (slaughter & leslie, 1997). simply put, my argument is that an itinerant curriculum theory—or any similar proposal for internationalizing the field—has to challenge and overcome these three obstacles; otherwise, the vision of a worldwide field of curriculum studies may remain unfulfilled. linguistic imperialism i argue that the first obstacle for an itinerant curriculum theory is english linguistic imperialism. since the early days of british colonialism, the english language has played crucial roles in creating a class of natives who collaborate with the colonizers. for example, english education in british india was intended “to form a class who may be interpreters between us [colonizers] and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, indian in blood and color, but english in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (macaulay, 1995, p. 430). in the present neo-colonial time, the english language is being used as a tool of colonizing the minds of those who do not speak english as a mother tongue. phillipson’s (1992) thesis of linguistic imperialism helps us understand how “the dominance of english is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between english and other languages” (p. 47). in this argument, “structural” refers to material properties such as institutions and financial allocations, and “cultural” means immaterial and ideological properties, e.g., pedagogic principles and beliefs. for phillipson (1992), linguistic imperialism is “a distinct type of imperialism,” and it “permeates all the types of imperialism” for two main reasons: the first is concerned with form and the second with content (p. 53). an interesting example of how english is used as an imperial language is robinson crusoe’s teaching of it to man friday. in most colonized territories, english was considered a language for success, and “was regarded as a force for the ‘modernizing’ of the country” (phillipson, 1992, p. 110). nowadays, many countries place heavy emphasis on teaching and learning of english as a means to “modernization” and “development.” neo-imperial organizations such as the british council seize this opportunity to teach english and make huge economic profits. we see such exploitive attitudes in the british council’s commonly used slogans, e.g., english for success and bridge to success (british council, 2012). in this age of economic globalization, english is being used as a hegemonic language that serves the interests of most western corporations and the u.s.-led neoempire. although many people around the world switch between two or more languages, this multilingualism is rarely observed in this neo-empire and its international affairs— political, business, or academic. thus, “where multilingualism characterizes the bottom of the world’s societies, monolingualism seems to be the rule at the top” (van dijk, 1997, p. 292). states around the world are imposing the english language not only on international business and politics, but also on internal affairs. this elimination of linguistic diversity and imposition of monolingualism have been described as linguicide which, for instance, was evident in “the internal colonization of the british isles, with the attempted extermination of welsh and gaelic, and in north america and hawai’ at the expense of first nations languages” (phillipson, 2009, p. 149). anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 58 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci some scholars take a rather naïve approach to english as a lingua franca, which generally refers to a common language used as a tool of communication between groups who do not share a common mother tongue. however, phillipson (2009) argues that lingua franca, as a culturally neutral term, is misleading and false. in many societies, english is used as a language of social inclusion and exclusion, and for formation of elite status. thus, the linguistic imperialism of english entails unequal rights of communication between diverse groups who speak different languages. the hegemonic status of english tries to legitimize such exploitation and social injustice. even more crucial than the fact that english is being used as a hegemonic language is the question of why people choose to use english (pennycook, 2001). what are the factors that affect people’s choice? in this sense, linguistic diversity is not an isolated matter; it is an integral part of fundamental human rights. according to unesco (2013), “it is estimated that, if nothing is done, half of 6000 plus languages spoken today will disappear by the end of this century. with the disappearance of unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge embedded, in particular, in indigenous languages” (para. 1). if this estimate is correct, then we are losing one language in every 11 days. this is alarming! in the countries where english is the language of the dominant group, other languages are constantly under pressure. in places where english is not the language of the dominant group, the neo-imperial countries and corporations are pushing for more use of english. inter-governmental organizations, e.g., the world bank, also prioritize teaching and learning of english in the countries where it is not widely used. today, english is being used for different purposes in different contexts. phillipson (2009) discusses various purposes of using english. some examples include english as a lingua economica, as a lingua academica, as a lingua emotive, as a lingua cultura, as a lingua bellica, and as a lingua divina. english as a lingua academica is of particular relevance to the purpose of this article. it refers to the use of english in scholarly publications, at international academic conferences, and as a medium of teaching and learning at educational institutions. this transnational use of english as a lingua academica feeds into what altbach (1995) describes as educational neocolonialism. thus, phillipson’s (1992; 2009) thesis of linguistic imperialism is a major barrier to paraskeva’s itinerant curriculum theory. drawing on macedo (2000), paraskeva touches briefly on the hegemony of the english language and how it devalues the knowledges of those who speak other languages. for this, he stresses the need to initiate conversations of curriculum in languages other than english. however, i believe that conversations have been occurring in other languages, but they are not being adequately heard by the englishspeaking curriculum scholars in the global north. the ability to speak does not guarantee equality; the act of speaking becomes meaningful only when the speaker is seriously listened to. as spivak (1990) succinctly puts: for me, the question ‘who should speak?’ is less crucial than ‘who will listen?’ ‘i will speak for myself as a third world person’ is an important position for political mobilization today. but the real demand is that, when i speak from that position, i should be listened to seriously; not with that kind of benevolent imperialism, really, which simply says that because i happen to be an indian or whatever…a hundred years ago it was impossible for me to speak, for the precise anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 59 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci reason that makes it only too possible for me to speak in certain circles now. (pp. 59-60) therefore, it is important that the english-speaking scholars listen to the curriculum conversations taking place in other languages. we need to keep in mind that ability to use the english language is not only a matter of international communication, but it is also related to the colonial legacy of cultural and racial discriminations. for many people around the world, an inability to speak and write in english has become a scholarly burden (van dijk, 1997). because of english linguistic imperialism and its role as an inclusion/exclusion mechanism, i am afraid that the deterritorialization of curriculum theory proposed by paraskeva will be very difficult, especially if the curriculum scholars writing in languages other than english are excluded from the curriculum conversations. geopolitics of academic writing i argue that the second obstacle for paraskeva’s itinerant curriculum theory is what canagarajah (2002) calls geopolitics of academic writing. the written medium has tremendous power to transmit information to the global audience. those who have resources and ability to control the written medium get the advantages of generating and disseminating knowledge. the abilities of the dominant groups in this respect include not only printing presses but also cost-effective technologies and global networks of marketing and distribution. canagarajah (2002) contends that these advantages have enabled most western communities to disseminate their knowledge and information and, at the same time, to appropriate the knowledges of other communities. canagarajah’s (2002) central argument consists of the following components: academic writing holds a central place in the process of constructing, disseminating, and legitimizing knowledge; however, for discursive and material reasons, third world scholars experience exclusion from academic publishing and communication; therefore the knowledge of third world communities is marginalized or appropriated by the west, while the knowledge of western communities is legitimated and reproduced; and as part of this process, academic writing/publishing plays a role in the material and ideological hegemony of the west. (p. 6) due to this geopolitics of academic writing, it will be very difficult for the critical curriculum river (paraskeva, 2011) to travel beyond the western epistemic harbor. in addition to the linguistic barrier for scholars who speak languages other than english, a lack of resources in the global south make it harder for them to undertake research projects and publish their academic writings. for example, if we analyze the global expenditures in research, we see that the united states has invested more than any other country in research. as lillis and curry (2010) report, “in 2005 the us share of global research expenditures was approximately 35%” (p. 11). thus, geographic locations of scholars and the language they speak greatly influence their ability to publish research findings and to contribute to the theorization in the field. unfortunately, scholars from all communities do not get equal rights to participate in this theorization. for many years, “research publications remain highly concentrated in a few countries, with more than 80% anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 60 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci of world scientific articles coming from the oecd area, nearly two-thirds of them g8 countries” (lillis & curry, 2010, p. 11). let’s take the field of curriculum studies as an example. as paraskeva (2011) has discussed, scholars from the united states have heavily dominated the field. recently, we have noticed some efforts to internationalize the field, for example, in the initiatives of organizations such as the international association for the advancement of curriculum studies. however, despite some gains in the internationalization project, “there is also strong evidence that the field remains steadily ensconced in the work of scholars located primarily in academic institutions in the united states, canada, britain, and, to a lesser extent, australia. this is perhaps most evident in the work being published in leading curriculum journals” (gaztambide-fernández & thiessen, 2012, p. 1). in this way, many western english-speaking scholars are controlling the projects of knowledge creation and distribution by publishing their academic writings and also by grounding their inquiries in the works of other western scholars. this politics of academic text production is central to santos’s (2008) notion of global cognitive justice. leaving out the vast majority of scholars who use languages other than english makes it impossible to achieve global cognitive justice. english linguistic imperialism discussed above has close connections with this politics of academic text production. for example, drawing on the data available on ulrich’s periodicals directory in 2009, lillis and curry (2010) show that 67% of the academic periodicals were published using some or all english. furthermore, there is an issue of prestige and academic rigor attached to the journals published in english. even though isi indexes claim to be international, they are extremely biased toward journals published in english in anglophone geographic contexts. most journals that are not published in english are excluded from various international indexes, and this exclusion means that the journals published in english enjoy higher impact factors (ifs). for this reason, many people arguably consider english as the language of knowledge and research. the institute of science index (2013) states on its website that “english is the universal language of science at this time in history. it is for this reason that we focus on journals that publish full text in english” (para. 8). this status of english in academic text production means that scholars around the world are always under pressure to write and publish their findings in english. this phenomenon puts the anglophone scholars in a privileged position, but many of them often seem to be unaware of their position and privileges (lillis & curry, 2010). hence, the geopolitics of academic writing is central to an understanding of whose knowledge is being globalized. as canagarajah (2012) believes: the knowledge of minority, remote, and under-resourced communities is marginalized or appropriated by the more developed communities. also the knowledge of wealthy communities is legitimated as established knowledge and spread to other communities. implicated in this process, academic writing/publishing plays a significant role in the material and ideological hegemony of certain privileged communities. (para. 4) we need to address this politics of academic writing and publishing if we want to have a successful itinerant curriculum theory. if the critical curriculum river travels beyond the western harbor and carries only the knowledges of western english-speakers in its anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 61 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci current, then we will not be able to achieve the global cognitive justice that santos (2008) advocates for. generating one-sided knowledge is not only unethical, but also impoverishing for all of us. citing several examples, canagarajah (2002) shows how the “periphery” scholars face great difficulty in publishing their writings in the “center” journals. in addition to the scholars’ identity, the geographical locations in which they live are also vital. as an example, he cites kailasapathy who, immediately after finishing his doctoral research at birmingham, published his work on classical tamil poetry with the oxford university press. however, after returning to sri lanka he was not able to publish his works with western publishers. in the meantime, his scholarship on classical tamil poetry was overshadowed by some western scholars who undertook research years after he had done so. canagarajah believes that a lack of resources is the key factor for why “periphery” scholars are unable to compete with the “center” scholars in terms of academic publishing. physical and financial resources as well as infrastructure for publishing and marketing journals and books are more readily available to “center” scholars than to the “periphery” ones. thus, canagarajah’s argument of geopolitics of academic writing provides insights for us to understand how knowledge is generated and disseminated at the global level. this geopolitics is a potential barrier for an itinerant curriculum theory (paraskeva, 2011) and consequently for the internationalization of curriculum studies (gough, 2003). academic capitalism the third major obstacle for an itinerant curriculum theory is academic capitalism. in last couple of decades, much discussion has been centered on the marketization of higher education (e.g., lynch, 2006). opinions regarding this issue are polarized. the pro-market group argues that universities are part of a competitive market; therefore, they must effectively showcase and sell their products for their own survival. financial gains and reputation of universities are dependent on how effectively they market their products— packages of knowledge as human capital—in a worldwide competitive marketplace. there is another group of scholars, educators, and students who believe that marketization devalues education, commodifies knowledge, and treats students as customers. members of this camp are also “concerned about the university as a social institution” and argue that “marketization is corrupting the university as an embodiment of public goods” (barnett, 2011, p. 39). due to this marketization, money values control and dictate universitycentered intellectual activities (inglis, 2004), and what is often ignored is the value of higher education as a public good (nixon, 2011). nevertheless, the proponents of marketmodel of education contend that the market is the best “means of social coordination whereby the supply and demand for a good or service are balanced through the price mechanism” (brown, 2011, p. 11). while much discussion is focused on the marketing of degree programs and maximizing profits from student tuition and other fees, little has been said about marketing and selling research findings. i argue that marketing of research findings has far-reaching impacts on the global scholarly community in terms of global cognitive and epistemological justice. in addition to english linguistic imperialism and geopolitics of academic writing, the west’s ability to sell research findings in the global market provides the western scholars with a monopoly of producing and distributing knowledge. as a consequence, the knowledges of the economically-weak communities are often marginalized or ignored. therefore, i argue that paraskeva’s itinerant curriculum theory anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 62 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci will be successful if the non-west can resist what slaughter and leslie (1997) call academic capitalism. although we can approach academic capitalism from the human capital perspective, for the purpose of this article, i look at academic capitalism through the lens of marketlike and market behaviors. according to slaughter and leslie (1997): marketlike behaviors refer to institutional and faculty competition for moneys, whether these are from external grants and contracts, endowment funds, university-industry partnerships, institutional investment in professors’ spinoff companies, or student tuition and fees. what makes these activities marketlike is that they involve competition from funds from external resource providers…market behaviors refer to for-profit activity on the part of institutions, activity such as patenting and subsequent royalty and licensing agreements, spinoff companies, arm’s-length corporations, and university-industry partnerships, when these have a profit component. (p. 11) i argue that through this academic capitalism, universities and other research institutes not only make money by selling research findings, but they also export their selfacclaimed scholastic superiority. a rising academic capitalism is evident in the policies of higher education in most western countries. scholars use various words/phrases to describe the changes that are taking place in the institutions of higher education. some terms that are currently being used include the commercialization of higher education, the corporate university, the marketization of higher education, the entrepreneurial university, and the like. at the heart of these changes is “the shift from earlier knowledge regimes to an academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime” (slaughter & rhoades, 2008, p. 20). under this new regime, universities and research institutes are competing with each other to enter the global marketplace to sell their research knowledge. one of the tenets of this academic capitalism, i argue, is the commodification of research. radder (2010) defines commodification in two ways: “in a narrow sense commodification is identified with commercialization, that is, the pursuit of profit by academic institutions through selling the expertise of their researchers and the results of their inquiries” (p. 4). in a broader sense, it refers to the economization of all human activities. from this perspective, “academic commodification means that all kinds of scientific activities and their results are predominantly interpreted and assessed on the basis of economic criteria” (p. 4). in the light of this definition, it seems that the western universities have been very successful in selling their research findings and thus maximizing their economic profits. while economic profit-making is on the very surface of this enterprise, i contend that there are multiple layers of benefits associated with this marketization. by distributing thousands of academic texts across the world, the english-speaking west assumes the role of the producer of “authentic” and “objective” knowledge. many non-english speaking local communities cannot but accept the scholastic superiority of the west. in this way, the market for the western knowledge is constantly expanding. the west is reaping economic benefits and, at the same time, creating an inferiority complex in the psyche of many nonwestern consumers of western knowledge. the non-west is remaining dependent on the west for “reliable and authentic” knowledge. thus, the west maintains an unequal relationship with rest of the world by means of its already established networks of anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 63 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci economic, social, and cultural capital (bourdieu, 1985). for example, there is a great demand of “native-speaker” teachers of english all over the world. organizations such as the british council provide these teachers with necessary connections (social capital) to teach english, which creates opportunities for earning money (economic capital) and for spreading western cultures and epistemologies (cultural capital). moreover, while travelling abroad, the western teachers can use their own language (linguistic capital) and do not have to learn other languages. this hierarchical relationship of giver and taker of knowledge severely harms the epistemological diversity of the world. for these reasons, the western academic capitalism is a major obstacle for an itinerant curriculum theory. concluding thoughts paraskeva (2011) claims that “non-western scholars know a lot more, in some cases in precise detail, about what has been called western epistemology than those in the west know, or care to know, about non-western epistemologies” (p. 186). if true, this claim has profound consequences for curriculum studies because the non-western scholars—by knowing less about their own epistemologies—remain dependent on the west. this situation resonates with alatas (2006) thesis of academic dependency, and may be understood from his discussion of problems that are plaguing the asian social sciences. alatas (2006) maintains that most theories and concepts that dominate the asian social sciences “originated from a greco-roman, latin-christian and european tradition” (p. 15). this fact in itself is not a problem, but he argues that it becomes problematic as “the concepts are passed off as universal when in fact they derive their characteristics from a particular cultural tradition” (p. 15). similarly, many current practices of curriculum inquiry invite the global audiences to interpret western knowledges as universal discourses (gough, 2003). this epistemological problem dates back to the beginning of colonialism since when the west has ignored, silenced, or appropriated the knowledges of other communities. in this way, the west has been able to establish and maintain its role as “giver” of knowledges. in the field of curriculum studies, this relationship of domination is evident in the fact that the western curricular artifacts and practices are being imported, institutionalized, and reproduced in most parts of the non-western world. being concerned about this epistemic hegemony of the english-speaking west, paraskeva (2011) proposes his itinerant curriculum theory which, he believes, will be a respectable way to tackle the crisis of epistemic violence. however, i would like to add that we also need to critically examine why the non-west consumes and reproduces the western curricular practices. is it only the west that deserves all the blames? or, are there any other factors that feed into the global cognitive injustice? if we look at these questions from the perspectives of deleuze and guattari (1988), we see that paraskeva’s theory suggests a binary position when it blames the west and idealizes the non-western epistemologies by claiming that curriculum theory will be free from domination once it crosses the western epistemic boundary. contrary to deleuze and guattari’s notion of multiplicity, the proposed itinerant theory conceptualizes deterritorialization as a unidirectional movement. thus, paraskeva’s delineation of his itinerant curriculum theory does not fully capture the idea of deterritorialization that makes a strong case for us to understand and respond to any form of hegemony in curriculum studies. deterritorialization of curriculum inquiry is of paramount importance to the internationalization of curriculum studies, which appears to be impossible if a monoculture of knowledge continues. many scholars have discussed how a monoculture of knowledge is being promoted and how other anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 64 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci knolwedges that do not fit this monoculture are being silenced or swallowed up. santos (2004) calls it a sociology of absences, and bennett (2007) describes it as epistemicide. similarly, many feminist and post-colonial scholars have protested against this monoculture of knowledge production and distribution (robertson, 2006). yet, the field of curriculum studies seems to have made little progress toward deterritorialization (deleuze & guattari, 1988) as a way of achieving global cognitive and epistemological justice. in conclusion, although paraskeva’s formulation and presentation of an itinerant curriculum theory suffers from conceptual and methodological confusions, the core of his argument, i.e., deterritorialization of curriculum inquiry, is a timely contribution to the debate of and struggle for freeing curriculum studies from western domination. however, it should be noted that a true rhizomic deterritorialization of the field requires freedom from all forms of hegemony and relations of domination—not just the western domination. a simple and essentialist category of west and non-west may blur our understanding of hegemony that operates in hazy, often invisible, networks of relationships based on power, control, and self-interest. in short, deleuze and guattari’s conception of deterritorialization may be a very powerful and inspiring methodological tool for those who work for the internationalization of curriculum studies. yet, as i argued in this article, deterritorialization as a means of fighting against epistemicide might remain an unattainable goal if we fail to address the issues of english linguistic imperialism, geopolitics of academic writing, and the western academic capitalism. i also believe that these three are the main obstacles for paraskeva’s itinerant curriculum theory, or any other similar proposals. while i welcome paraskeva’s call for an itinerant curriculum theory, i want to put a cautionary note that without overcoming these three obstacles, this theory may not be able to contribute much to what pinar (2003) envisioned as a worldwide field of curriculum studies. notes 1 s.anwaruddin@mail.utoronto.ca references alatas, s. f. 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(1994). the location of culture. london: routledge. mailto:s.anwaruddin@mail.utoronto.ca anwaruddin. can an itinerant curriculum theory travel? 65 transnational curriculum inquiry 10 (1) 2013 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci bourdieu, p. (1985). the forms of capital. in j. g. richardson (ed.), handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241-258). new york: greenwood. british council. (2012). retrieved april 16, 2012 from http://www.britishcouncil.org/hungary-teaching-centre-for-success.htm brown, r. (2011). the march of the market. in m. molesworth, r. scullion, & e. nixon (eds.), the marketisation of higher education and the student as consumer (pp. 1124). new york: routledge. canagarajah, a. s. (2012). personal webpage. retrieved april 14, 2012 from http://www.personal.psu.edu/asc16/mission.htm canagarajah, a. s. (2002). a geopolitics of academic writing. pittsburgh, pa: university of pittsburgh press. carson, t. r. 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(1997). editorial: the imperialism of english. discourse and society, 8(3), 291-292. submitted: may, 16th, 2013 approved: june, 15th, 2013 http://www.britannica.com/ebchecked/topic/501483/rhizome microsoft word artikel cipta final.docx publica: jurnal pemikiran administrasi negara p-issn 2085-6555 vol 12 no. 1 | juni 2020: 10-18 e-issn 2715-9256 ================================================================================== cipta lukmanul hakim & aip zaenal muttaqin administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum 10 administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum 1cipta lukmanul hakim, 2aip zaenal muttaqin 1sekolah tinggi ilmu ekonomi dan bisnis syariah nahdlatul ulama, indonesia; ciptalukmanulhakim@gmail.com 2sekolah tinggi agama islam persis garut, indonesia; aipzaenal81@gmail.com abstract the purpose of this study is to determine the state's protection of ownership both individual ownership and general ownership. the method used in this research is to use literature studies. after conducting a review of various information found that in islam economic arrangements are regulated in the qur'an and the sunnah of the prophet muhammad. then the islamic economy does not run alone as understanding or other conventional economic concepts. the focus of islamic economic studies or islamic economics one of which is regarding the ownership of property. in islam ownership is very flexible unlike capitalism which emphasizes freedom or socialism which forbids individual ownership. in the level of individual ownership, islam really values and even protects it. more than that ownership in islam can be more beneficial for others so that ownership does not depend on just one person. instruments in the ownership of individual islam accommodate through various things such as: the management of orphans' property, the distribution of inheritance, the obligation to pay zakat. keywords: islamic administration, government, civil right, zakat. pendahuluan ajaran islam tidak hanya bersifat praktik ritual keagamaan saja, tetapi menyangkut pada keseluruhan aspek kegiatan termasuk dalam kehidupan berbangsa dan bernegara. islam adalah agama yang penuh dengan kemaslahatan bagi manusia. maka dalam islam tidak mengenal kepada pemisahan antara agama dan negara atau sering orang menyebutnya dengan istilah sekularisme atau pemisahan antara agama dengan aspek aspek politik, negara, sosial ekonomi dan lain sebagainya. secara filosofis bahwa nilai-nilai islam harus mampu masuk dan berjalan beriringan dengan pokok-pokok konsep nilai administrasi. konsep administrasi islam ini memiliki maksud yaitu untuk memadukan nilai-nilai dan ajaran agama islam yang terkandung dalam alquran dan hadits kedalam kegiatan administrasi. dalam kegiatannya, administrasi islam hadir sebagai pemberi petunjuk atau menaungi dengan nilai-nilai pokok ajaran islam. begitupun dalam bernegara, nilai-nilai ajaran islam berperan sebagai penggabungan antara keduanya yakni agama dan negara kedalam kehidupan berbangsa dan bernegara. dalam bernegara, nilai-nilai ajaran islam harus diwujudkan dalam seluruh proses berbangsa dan bernegara, mulai dari pengambilan kebijakan maupun dalam aktivitas lainnya. dalam hal kebijakan negara, administrasi berperan sebagai proses dalam mengelola dan mengendalikan setiap kegiatan negara agar dapat berjalan sesuai dengan semestinya. kemudian juga dimaksudkan agar negara harus berada sebagai penengah atau bersifat netral tidak memihak kepada siapapun. negara harus mampu mengakomodir seluruh kepentingan publica: jurnal pemikiran administrasi negara p-issn 2085-6555 vol 12 no. 1 | juni 2020: 10-18 e-issn 2715-9256 ================================================================================== cipta lukmanul hakim & aip zaenal muttaqin administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum 11 setiap elemen bangsa, tidak seperti pada sistem kapitalis yang hanya mementingkan pada kaum pemodal saja atau seperti sistem sosialis yang hanya mementingkan kaum buruh saja. eulau & prewit (dalam jones, 1984) memberikan pengertian bahwa kebijakan publik adalah keputusan tetap yang dicirikan oleh konsistensi dan pengulangan (repetitiveness) tingkah laku dari mereka yang mematuhi keputusan tersebut. dalam kaitan tersebut, konsep ini seringkali diberikan makna sebagai tindakan politik, sejalan dengan pandangan friedrich (dalam wahab, 1997) bahwa kebijakan itu merupakan suatu tindakan yang mengarah pada tujuan yang diusulkan oleh seseorang, kelompok atau pemerintah dalam lingkungan tertentu sehubungan dengan adanya hambatan-hambatan tertentu seraya mencari peluang untuk mencapai tujuan atau mewujudkan sasaran yang diinginkan. pencapaian tujuan kebijakan memerlukan adanya pemahaman yang arif terhadap konteks lingkungan khusus (specific environmental context) atau kapabilitas lingkungan ecological capacity) dimana kebijakan itu diperhatikan. hogwood dan gunn (dalam wahab, 1997) berpendapat bahwa untuk dapat mengimplementasikan kebijakan publik secara sempurna, maka diperlukan beberapa syarat tertentu, yaitu kondisi eksternal yang dihadapi oleh badan atau instansi pelaksana tidak akan menimbulkan gangguan atau kendala yang serius; untuk pelaksanaan program tersedia waktu dan sumber yang cukup memadai; perpaduan sumber yang diperlukan benar-benar tersedia; kebijakan yang akan diimplementasikan didasari oleh suatu hubungan kausalitas yang andal; hubungan kausalitas bersifat langsung dan hanya sedikit mata rantai penghubungnya; hubungan saling ketergantungan harus kecil; pemahaman mendalam dan kesepakatan terhadap tujuan; tugas dirinci dan ditempatkan dalam urutan yang tepat; komunikasi dan koordinasi yang sempurna; pihak yang memiliki wewenang kekuasaan dapat menuntut dan mendapatkan kepatuhan yang sempurna. smith (1973) mengemukakan bahwa kebijakan pemerintah telah didefinisikan sebagai tindakan yang memiliki maksud tertentu oleh pemerintah untuk menetapkan pola atau lembaga transaksi baru atau untuk mengubah pola yang telah mapan dalam lembaga. kebijakan yang dirumuskan oleh pemerintah, kemudian, berfungsi sebagai kekuatan penghasil ketegangan di masyarakat. sementara kebijakan diterapkan, ketegangan, ketegangan dan konflik dialami oleh mereka yang menerapkan kebijakan dan oleh kebijakan tersebut. dari pendapat tersebut dapat ditarik suatu pemahaman bahwa kebijakan pemerintah telah didefinisikan sebagai suatu tindakan yang disengaja oleh pemerintah untuk menetapkan pola-pola transaksi maupun tindakan, ataupun kelembagaan ataupun mengubah pola-pola yang telah terbentuk lama di dalam lembaga. kebijakan yang telah dirumuskan oleh pemerintah kemudian berfungsi sebagai kekuatan serta menghasilkan ketegangan dalam masyarakat yang dalam hal ini tentunya terdapat kekuatan yang pro maupun kontra. saat kebijakan diimplementasikan adanya tention (ketegangan), strain, (ketegangan mental) dan konflik yang dialami oleh orang-orang yang melaksanakan kebijakan (implementor) dan oleh mereka yang dipengaruhi oleh kebijakan maupun mereka yang menjadi target kebijakan. sementara itu, konsep dasar kepemilikan adalah penguasaan seseorang terhadap barang atau harta dan barang tersebut dalam genggamannya baik secara nyata maupun secara hukum (munawwir 1977). kemudian abd as-salam memberikan pengertian bahwa kepemilikan adalah kepemilikan sebagai eksklusivitas syariat atas sebuah benda yang dimiliki oleh pemilik dengan wewenang hukum atas penggunaan dan penikmatannya serta pemusnahannya kecuali jika dilarang secara hukum (suntana 2010). secara garis besar bahwa kepemilikan adalah sesuatu yang berhubungan dengan harta benda. menurut wahbah al-juhaili bahwa pengertian harta adalah sesuatu yang dibutuhkan dan diperoleh manusia, baik berupa benda yang tampak seperti emas, perak, binatang, tumbuh-tumbuhan, maupun (yang tidak tampak), yakni manfaat. an-nabhani (2002), menguraikan bahwa kepemilikan dapat dibedakan menjadi tiga bagian publica: jurnal pemikiran administrasi negara p-issn 2085-6555 vol 12 no. 1 | juni 2020: 10-18 e-issn 2715-9256 ================================================================================== cipta lukmanul hakim & aip zaenal muttaqin administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum 12 besar yaitu, kepemilikan inividu, kepemilikan umum, kepemilikan negara. pembagian ini merupakan turunan ataupun efek dari nilai filsafat bahwa kepemilikan senantiasa tidaklah baku. catatan sejarah pada zaman dahulu yaitu pada zaman nabi muhammad saw, bagaimana pada waktu itu nabi membuat salah satu lembaga yang disebut dengan hisbah. dimana hisbah ini merupakan lembaga negara yang bertugas mengawasi dan mengendalikan kegiatan masyarakat dalam konteks perekonomian. sehingga pada saat itu kegiatan ekonomi dijamin dengan tidak adanya perlakuan tidak sesuai terhadap konsumen maupun penjaminan keamanan dan kesehatan beraktivitas (saefudin 2011). berbagai kebijakan ekonomi yang secara aturan dimuat dalam berbagai kerangka regulasi yang mengaturnya, maka penjaminan terhadap hak milik baik yang sifatnya pribadi maupun umum harus diakomodir dalam peraturan-peraturan tersebut. seperti halnya dalam menciptakan rasa adil, adanya pemerataan ekonomi, pemerataan pendapatan, membuat kesesuaian aturan kegiatan ekonomi. maka dengan demikian, atas uraian pendahuluan tersebut penulis tertarik untuk menulis artikel ini dengan tujuan yaitu untuk mengalisis bagaimana administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum. metode penelitian penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dengan jenis penelitian studi kepustakaan. implikasi dari menggunakan pendekatan ini terlihat dari alur berpikir penelitian yang induktif, yaitu dari umum ke khusus. selain itu, penelitian ini tidak membahas hubungan sebab-akibat, melainkan ingin lebih mendalami dan menelusuri suatu topik atau isu tertentu dikaitkan dengan konsep dan teori yang dalam hal ini adalah tentang bagaimana administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum. jenis data dan informasi yang dipilih yaitu data sekunder sehingga peneliti tidak perlu untuk melakukan penelitian lapangan. dalam rangka mengumpulkan data dan informasi, penelitian ini menghimpun berbagai pendapat dari ahli dan pakar dalam sejumlah literatur buku maupun dari kitab-kitab dengan kajian yang sesuai. kemudian penulis melakukan analisis terhadap pendapat-pendapat tersebut dan memberi tanggapan dan analisis. hasil dan pembahasan analisis teori hak milik pertama, kepemilikan individu, ialah harta benda yang kepemilikannya dimiliki oleh seseorang ataupun oleh individu. menurut al mishri (2006) ada beberapa ciri ataupun prasyarat untuk kepemilikan perorangan ataupun pribadi. 1. harta yang dimiliki harus senantiasa bermanfaat, artinya harta yang yang dimiliki tidak menjadi suatu kejelekan ataupun kemadharatan bagi kehidupan diantara sesama masyarakat. 2. pemahaman diantara semua masyarakat bahwa tidak setiap harta benda bisa dimiliki oleh perorangan ataupun individu. 3. kepemilikan harta benda tidak selamanya menjadi kepemilikan kita. akan tetapi, ada bagian ataupun kepemilikan orang lain atas harta benda perorangan ataupun individu. 4. perolehan ataupun cara pendapatan harta benda harus dari jalan yang baik ataupun halal. publica: jurnal pemikiran administrasi negara p-issn 2085-6555 vol 12 no. 1 | juni 2020: 10-18 e-issn 2715-9256 ================================================================================== cipta lukmanul hakim & aip zaenal muttaqin administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum 13 dalam memperoleh kekayaaan atau hak milik pribadi islam pun telah mengaturnya, tapi bukan dalam aturan untuk pembatasan mencari harta kekayaan. akan tetapi, penekannanya lebih kepada cara memperolehnya yaitu memperolehnya harus dengan jalan yang baik atau halal serta akhir dari pada penggunaan harta benda tersebut. kedua, kepemilikan umum dimana kepemilikan ini adalah yang kepemilikannya bisa dimanfaatkan untuk kepentingan bersama. karena pada dasarnya tidak semua benda atau barang tidak dapat kita kuasai secara pribadi karena dikhawatirkan akan terjadi praktik-praktik pengusaaan secara perseorangan ataupun monopoli. diantara benda-benda yang dapat dimanfaatkan oleh bersama antara lain adalah air, api, udara, sumber energi dan lain sebagainya. oleh karena itu maka, penguasaan terhadap benda-benda tersebut sebaiknya di dilimpahkan pada pihak yang dirasa mempunyai kewenangan untuk mengelolanya yaitu negara ataupun pihak lain yang disyaratkan mempunyai kemampuan untuk pengelolaannya yang sesuai dengan kaidah ataupun norma (nawawi 2009). sebagaimana yang dinukilkan dalam sabda nabi muhammad saw yang diriwayatkan oleh imam abu dawud yaitu dalam tiga hal, yakni air, api dan rerumputan. dengan makna dari hadits tersebut adalah sebaiknya penguasaan terhadap benda-benda yang sangat penting untuk kebutuhan hidup orang banyak sebaiknya di wewenangkan kepada pemerintah. suatu negara. dalam negara kesatuan republik indonesia sendiri, untuk benda-benda yang menyangkut hidup orang banyak diatur dalam aturan konstitusi negara yang termuat dalam undang undang dasar 1945. dengan bunyi sebagai berikut cabang-cabang produksi penting bagi negara dan menguasai hajat hidup orang banyak dikuasai oleh negara. dengan pemahaman seperti yang ditanggapi oleh jimly asshidiqie bahwa dipahami dalam makna dikuasai dalam pengertiannya yang luas, yaitu termasuk juga dimiliki oleh negara dan orang atau subjek asing tidak boleh menjadi pemilik hak atas tanah. ketiga, kepemilikan negara yaitu seluruh kegiatan baik pengelolaan maupun penggunannya harta benda di lakukan oleh negara melalui kewenangan kepala negara atau pemimpin. pemimpin memilik kewengan untuk menggunakannya yang dimana hasil dari pengelolaannya itu digunakan kembali untuk keperluan masyarakat luas dan juga untuk membiayai keperluan tugas pemimpin tersebut. peran negara menurut konsep administrasi islam makna dari keadilan sosial merupakan suatu hal yang sangat penting dalam perekonomian, karena itu mencerminkan bahwa berjalannya perekonomian dengan baik. dengan kata lain bahwa adanya peran negara hadir sebagai upaya untuk mewujudkan kesejateraan masyarakat ataupun kesejahteraan ekonomi. peran negara hadir untuk menyebarkan perekonomian yang bukan hanya milik individu akan tetapi dimiliki atau dinikmati oleh semua masyarakat. terdapat dua aspek yang bisa dilakukan oleh pemerintah dalam rangka pengaturan ekonomi, antara lain yaitu: 1. mengkonstruksi aturan-aturan atau regulasi yang bersumber dari nash syar’i maupun qath’i. supaya untuk menjamin kegiatan ekonomi masyarakat berjalan dengan baik tanpa melakukan kegiatan-kegiatan ekonomi yang dilarang. seperti, menimbum barang, kegiatan yang ribawi, jual beli yang salah dan lain sebagainya. 2. selalu melakukan diskusi dan dialog ataupun bahasa agamanya ijtihad oleh orang-orang yang mampu di bidangnya atau kredibel sehingga produk hukum terisi dengan konsepsi ekonomi dalam naungan hukum islam (hudda 2011). publica: jurnal pemikiran administrasi negara p-issn 2085-6555 vol 12 no. 1 | juni 2020: 10-18 e-issn 2715-9256 ================================================================================== cipta lukmanul hakim & aip zaenal muttaqin administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum 14 perlindungan terhadap hak milik baik pribadi maupun hak milik umum diejawantahkan melalui peraturan ataupun kerangka hukum perundang-undangan sebagai salah satu peran negara dalam mengeluarkan kebijakan. dengan adanya peraturan peraturan tersebut akan berdampak terhadap kehidupan masyarakat, misalnya dalam segi perlindungan terhadap harta benda milik masyarakat ataupun kesejahteraan masyarakat lainnya. sebagai gambaran terdapat beberapa contoh mengenai pola pemerintahan zaman kekhalifahan yang dimana pada waktu itu peran negara sangat muncul dalam melindungi masyarakatnya yaitu dengan dikeluarkannya kebijkan pemerintah atau negara terhadap perlindungan hak milik masyarakat oleh negara maupun oleh pihak yang lainnya. berikut beberapa contoh catatan sejarah pada zaman kekhalifahan bagaimana membuat sebuah kebijakan dalam rangka perlindungan terhadap warga masyarakatnya. yaitu, perlindungan terhadap hak-hak para petani antara lain: 1) tersedianya bantuan yang diberikan oleh pemerintah melalui lemabaga keuangan pemerintah terhadap para petani yang gagal terhadap pengelolaan pertaniannya. 2) adanya berbagai jaminan baik jaminan sakit, masa tua, ataupun ketidak mampuan mengelola pertanian. 3) pemerintah dalam hal ini khalifah selalu memperhatikan terhadap hasil pertanian, dan memberikan konvensasi apabila hasil dari pertanian itu mengalami kerusakan dengan sumber keuangan dari badan keuangan negara. 4) ketika terjadi relokasi lahan yang tidak dapat diindahkan untuk keperluan negara maka negara mengganti dengan sesuai ataupun melakukan pemindahan ke tempat lain dengan fasilitas-fasilitas yang cukup memadai (rahman 1995). perlindungan terhadap hak milik pribadi dan umum suatu barang yang kepemilikannya oleh pribadi pada prinsipnya hanya kepemilikan yang sementara taupun kepemilikan yang tidak absolut atau kepemilikannya mutlak, artinya setiap kepemilikan suatu barang atau kekayaan disana terdapat hak milik orang lain dengan kata lain ada pembatasan kepemilikan karena kekayaan atau harta tersebut untuk hajat hidup orang banyak. oleh karenanya maka, peran pemerintah dibutuhkan untuk ikut campur atau intervensi dalam rangka pengamanan barang-barang tersebut. al-mishri memberikan suatu pemahaman mengenai makna intervensi pemerintah, beliau memberikan gambaran dengan membagi makna intervensi kedalam beberapa klasifikasi diantaranya adalah: hukum mawaris atau pembagian harta warisan, harta anak yatim, kewajiban zakat dan mencegah kemadhorotan (al-mishri 2006). sedangkan baqir shadr mengemukakan bahwa pemerintah harus ikut campur tangan dalam kegiatan perekonomian sebagai upaya untuk mengamankan atau menjamin penyesuaian hukum-hukum islam yang berkaitan dengan kegiatan ekonomi (suntana 2010). 1. hukum mawaris (pembagian warisan) harta peninggalan orang yang sudah meninggal sebaiknya dibagikan kepada para ahli warisnya atau yang disebut dengan zawil furud. pembagian harta tersebut merupakan suatu keharusan dalam syariat islam. maka oleh karena itu harus adanya regulasi yang jelas untuk mengaturnya, karena sifatnya yang sangat rentan akan pertikaian apabila dibagikan dengan tidak sesuai atau tidak adil. sehingga di dalam kajian ilmu fiqih, hukum mawaris merupakan bagian yang terkhususkan yang sering dibahas dalam kajian fiqih mawaris. publica: jurnal pemikiran administrasi negara p-issn 2085-6555 vol 12 no. 1 | juni 2020: 10-18 e-issn 2715-9256 ================================================================================== cipta lukmanul hakim & aip zaenal muttaqin administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum 15 kemaslahatan atau kebaikan menjadi tujuan utama dalam pembagian harta waris ini, agar supaya jauh dari kemadharatan dan menghindari dari pertikaian dan perselisihan. maka makna kemaslahatan disini yaitu utuk menjaga dan memelihara maksud syara’ (hidayat 2009). para ulama ahli hadits memberikan pandangan menganai hadits tersebut, bahwa yang dimaksud dalam ashobah tersebut atau sisa harta warisan dibagikan kepada ahli waris laki-laki karena peran dan tanggungjawab laki-laki memberikan nafkah kepada keluarganya. sedangkan perempuan diberikan nafkah oleh suaminya. karena laki-laki merupakan penanggung jawab dalam rumah tangga dan sebagai pemimpin dalam rumah tangga dan anggota keluarganya, maka dari itu laki-laki harus mempunyai kekuatan keauangan yanga baik (mardani 2011). maka dengan demikian, kiranya perlu ada aturan atau regulasi yang mengatur pembagian harta waris tersebut. yaitu adanya sistem kerangka hukum yang mengatur terhadap pembagian warisan baik berupa perundang-undangan ataupun aturan dibawah undang-undang. akan tetapi harus digaris bawahi juga peraturan-peraturan yang dibuat baik undang-undang ataupun aturan dibawah undang-undang harus dibuat berdasarkan atau berpedoman pada hukum waris menurut syariat islam. atau dengan kata lain formalisasi hukum islam agar supaya kedudukan hukum islam tingkatannya lebih kuat dalam tata aturan perundang-undangan di indonesia. 2. harta anak yatim salah satu hal perlu adanya intervensi pemerintah atau negara adalah menjaga amanah harta anak yatim, sebagaimana para mufassir menjelaskan q.s an-nisa ayat 5 bahwa harta yang dimaknakan dalam ayat itu adalah harta anak yatim, akan tetapi secara hakikat bahwa harta itu pemberian dari allah swt kepada manusia untuk melakukan kehidupan. sehingga berkenaan dengan itu maka harta tersebut harus dikelola oleh orang yang mampu menggunakannya. sepanjang anak yatim tersebut belum mampu menggunakan hak atas harta tersebut. adapun ketika belum mampu menggunakan serta mengelolanya maka harta tersebut dilarang diberikannya sampai pada waktu mampu untuk mengelolanya. al mishri memberikan pendapat mengenai hal ini, pendapatnya mengatakan bahwa karena harta memiliki kedudukan yang sangat penting untuk kepentingan dalam hidup dan kehidupan maka harus ada sistem pengelolaan. disini negara hadir sebagai pemangku kekuasaan dan juga pemangku kepentingan untuk melakukan andil ambil bagian dalam pengelolaannya sebagai pemberi kemaslahatan untuk semuanya. amanah yang begitu besar dalam mengelola harta anak yatim ini menjadi suatu kebaikan dan kebajikan bagi yang benarbenar mengelolanya. peran pemerintah atau negara untuk ikut campur atau intervensi dalam pengelolaan harta anak yatim ini misalnya membentuk lembaga yang khusus menangani hal tersebut atau memberikan kewenangan pada lemabaga tertentu untuk memberikan penilaian ataupun pengujian kepada siapa harta ini akan diberikan sebagai pengelola. kemudian pemerintah atau negara juga hadir untuk melakukan evaluasi atas pengelolaan harta yang diberikan kepada yang diamanahi tersebut. 3. kewajiban zakat dalam tinjauan aspek bermuamalah zakat sangat berguna sekali sebagai sarana penyebaran harta dan juga sebagai sarana peningkatan produktivitas. penyebaran harta yang dimaksud adalah bagaimana zakat itu sendiri bisa digunakan sebagai sarana penyebaran harta dari yang berkecukupan kepada yang kurang mampu. sehingga dengan zakat ini akan menjadikan rasa kebersamaan terhadap sesama menjadi lebih terjaga. kemudian, zakat sebagai sarana untuk peningkatan produktivitas yaitu cara pengelolaan zakat yang tadinya hanya bersifat pada pemenuhan makanan saja akan tetapi dirubah kepada pola pengelolaan publica: jurnal pemikiran administrasi negara p-issn 2085-6555 vol 12 no. 1 | juni 2020: 10-18 e-issn 2715-9256 ================================================================================== cipta lukmanul hakim & aip zaenal muttaqin administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum 16 pemberdayaan. dengan kata lain bahwa zakat bukan hanya untuk kebutuhan yang sifatnya jangka pendek saja akan tetapi sebagai pemenuhan untuk jangka yang lebih panjang. ketika zakat digunakan sebagai pemenuhan jangka pendek artinya zakat hanya digunakan untuk keperluan konsumsi saja. namun, ketika zakat digunakan sebagai pemenuhan kebutuhan yang lebih panjang artinya zakat itu digunakan untuk pemberdayaan masyarakat. misalnya dengan pemberian bantuan finansial yang bersumber dari dana zakat kemudian dikelolanya sehingga dapat menghasilkan keuntungan bagi pihak pengelolanya tersebut. dengan aturan dan pola tersebut diharapkan nantinya pihak pengelola atau orang penerima dana zakat produktif ini akan berubah menjadi pemberi zakat. potensi zakat yang begitu besar dan juga memiliki efek yang sangat baik guna pembangunan ekonomi umat, maka sepatutnya pemerintah atau negara untuk turun tangan dalam pengelolaan dengan melakukan intervensi terhadap pengelolaan dana zakat ini. turun tangan pemerintah atau negara dalam hal ini bukan dimaksudkan untuk mengambil keuntungan dari dana zakat tersebut, akan tetapi negara atau pemerintah menjamin akan pengelolaan dana zakat sehingga dapat tersalurkan kepada yang berhak untuk menerimanya. selaian itu, turun tangan pemerintah atau negara terhadap pengelolaan zakat ini, bisa melakukan akselresai dalam pengumpulan dana zakat, karena dengan pengelolaan secara profesional dan modern sehingga para muzaki atau orang yang membayar zakat akan lebih tenang atau lebih nyaman. kemudian juga di sisi lain pemerintah atau negara bisa menggunakan kekuasaanya untuk melakukan terobosan dengan diterbitkannya aturan atau regulasi mengenai zakat ini. seperti misalnya kewajiban untuk membayar zakat diwajibkan namun apabila yang tidak ingin membayar zakat negara atau pemerintah dapat melakuka intervensi melalui aturan atau kebijakan yang dapat dibuatnya. sebagaimana terjadi pada zaman ke khalifahan abu bakar as shiddiq. 4. mencegah kemadharatan intervensi atau campur tangan pemerintah (negara) disini yaitu, selain pada aspek-aspek yang telah disebutkan di atas, maka campur tangan pemerintah bisa dilakukan untuk meminimalisir terhadap kemadharatan dari akibat pertikaian sesama umat. pemerintah harus menjadi penengah serta sebagai pengambil keputusan samapai pada penyelesaian masalah ketika terjadi perselisihan atau pertikaian yang terjadi diantara sesama warga masyarakat. karena kemadharatan bisa timbul akibat dari kepemilikan harta benda pribadi atau perorangan. kepemilikan pribadi pada prinsipnya tidak bermasalah dengan siapapun, akan tetapi akan bermasalah ketika barang asalnya pribadi itu dapat mengganggu orang lain yang sama ketika membutuhkan terhadap barang itu sendiri. dalam suatu riwayat yang di jelaskan oleh abu ja’far dari ayahnya ali zainal abidin menjelaskan bahwa: “samrah memiliki sebuah pohon kurma, dimana dahannya menjulur pada tembok rumah salah seotrang anshar, orang anshar dan dan keluarganya merasa terganggu dengan dahan tersebut, kemudian dia mengadu kepada rasulullah, rasulullah kemudian bersabda kepada orang yang mempunyai pohon kurma: ‘juallah pohon kurma itu’ ternyata dia tidak mau menjualnya. kemudian rasulullah bersabda: ‘potonglah pohon itu’ diapun tidak mau memotongnya. rasulullah bersabda: ‘berikanlah pohon itu kepadanya, maka engkau akan mendapatkan gantinya di surga” dan dia masih tidak mau. kemudian rasulullah berpaling dan berkata kepada orang itu: ‘engkau adalah sumber bencana’ dan selanjutnya rasulullah menghadap kepada orang anshar dan bersabda: ‘pergilah dan cabut pohon itu!’”. publica: jurnal pemikiran administrasi negara p-issn 2085-6555 vol 12 no. 1 | juni 2020: 10-18 e-issn 2715-9256 ================================================================================== cipta lukmanul hakim & aip zaenal muttaqin administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum 17 penjelasan dari hadits tersebut dapat dimaknai bahwa pemerintah atau negara dituntut untuk bisa menyelesaikan permasalahan yang terjdi ketika ada perselisihan diantara warga masyarakatnya. pemerintah dalam hal ini harus menjadi hakim ataupun pengambil keputusan yang dapat memuaskan kepada semuanya bahakan negara harus berposisi pada kebenaran. pemerintah atau negara harus mampu mencegah kemadharatan dan mencegah warga masyarakatnya dari kemadharatan. bukan pemerintah atau negara menikmati kemadhorotan yang ditimbulkan dari warga masyarakatnya, sebagaimana kaidah ushul fiqih menjelaskan bahwa menghidarkan kerusakan lebih diutamakan dan diprioritaskan dari pada mengambil kemaslahatan”. simpulan secara garis besar bahawa kepemilikan dapat di kategorikan menjadi tiga kategori besar antara lain adalah kepemilikan individu, kepemilikan umum dan kepemilikan negara. kepemilikan tersebut perlu dijaga dan diperhatikan, maka oleh karean itu, untuk menjaga kepemilikan tersebut harus adanya campur tangan pemerintah sebagai wujud untuk pemberian rasa aman terhadap kepemilikan tersebut. campur tangan pemerintah atau negara disini bisa melalui penyedian aturan-aturan perundang-undangan. dengan adanya regulasi atau aturan tersebut diharapkan bisa menjaga umat dari kepemilikannya baik harta maupun sampai pada kesejahteraannya. sebagai upaya untuk melaksanakan keputusan keputusannya tersebut negara dalam hal ini dilakukan oleh pemerintah memerlukan suatu alat untuk melaksanakan kebijakannya itu sendiri antara laian adalah kewajiban untuk mengeluarkan zakat, pembagian harta warisan, mencegah kemadharatan dan juga harta anak yatim. referensi abdul, k.a., et al. (1999) sistem, prinsip dan tujuan ekonomi islam. bandung: pustaka setia. al-juhaili, w. (1989). al-fiqh al-islami wa adillatuhu juz iv. damsyik: dar al-fikr. al-maliki. (2001). politik ekonomi islam. jatim: al-izzah. al-mishri. (2006). pilar-pilar ekonomi islam. yogyakarta: pustaka pelajar. ali, z. (2008). hukum ekonomi syariah. jakarta: sinar grafika. an-nabhani, t. (2002). membangun sistem ekonomi alternatif perspektif islam, oleh moh. maghfur wachid. surabaya: risalah gusti. asshiddiqie, j. (2013). komentar atas undang-undang dasar negara republik indonesia tahun 1945. jakarta: sinar grafika. ash-shidiqie, m.h. (2013). falsafah hukum islam. semarang: pt.pustaka rizki putra. budi, a.h. (2009). memahami dasar dasar ilmu fara’id. bandung: titian ilmu. departemen agama ri. (2009). al-qur’an dan tafsirnya jilid 1. jakarta: departemen agama ri. djazuli, a. (2009). fiqh siyasah. jakarta: prenada media group. idri. (2015). hadis ekonomi: ekonomi dalam perspektif hadis nabi. jakarta: prenadamedia group. karim, a. (2012). sejarah pemikiran ekonomi islam. jakarta: pt rajagrafindo persada. publica: jurnal pemikiran administrasi negara p-issn 2085-6555 vol 12 no. 1 | juni 2020: 10-18 e-issn 2715-9256 ================================================================================== cipta lukmanul hakim & aip zaenal muttaqin administrasi islam memandang kebijakan negara dalam melindungi hak milik pribadi dan umum 18 mardani. (2011). ayat-ayat dan hadis ekonomi syariah. jakarta: rajagrafindo persada. munawwir. (1997). kamus al munawwir. surabaya: pustaka progresif. muti, a., huda, n. (2011) keuangan publik islam: pendekatan al-khoroj. bogor: ghalia indonesia. naf’an. (2013). ekonomi makro: tinjauan ekonomi syariah. yogyakarta: graha ilmu. nawawi, i. (2009). ekonomi islam: perspektif teori, sistem, dan aspek hukum. surabaya: cv. putra media nusantara. praja, j.s. (2009). filsafat hukum islam. bandung: pt. lathifah press. qaradhawi, yusuf. (2005). spektrum zakat dalam membangun ekonomi kerakyatan. jakarta: zikrul hakim. qodri, a.a (2004). membangun fondasi ekonomi umat. yogyakarta: pustak pelajar. rahman, a. (1995). doktrin ekonomi islam jilid 1. yogyakarta: dana bhakti wakaf. rianto m.n. (2010). teori makro ekonomi islam. bandung:alfabeta saefudin, a.m. (2011). membumikan ekonomi islam. jakarta:pt ppa consultans. suhendi, h. (2014). fiqh muamalah. jakarta: pt rajagrafindo persada. sukirno, s. (2011). ekonomi pembangunan. jakarta: kencana prenada media group. suntana, i. (2010). politik ekonomi islam. bandung: cv pustaka setia. syafei, r. (2001). fiqh muamalah. bandung: cv pustaka setia. tanjung, s., izzan, a. (2007). refernsi ekonomi syariah: ayat ayat al-quran yang berdimensi ekonomi. bandung:pt.ramaja rosdakarya. umer, m.c. (2000) islam dan pembangunan ekonomi. jakarta:gema insani. key: cord-0057855-0idyoghw authors: murphy, raymond title: foresight or discounting danger? date: 2020-08-07 journal: the fossil-fuelled climate crisis doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-53325-0_11 sha: 06dcd34f82ea4b1e95a51c02b7359c77907ab205 doc_id: 57855 cord_uid: 0idyoghw first, suggestions to enhance foresight based on the previous analysis are presented: understand the science, communicate it in ways non-scientists can understand, make the fossil-fuelled threat concrete, create an app for carbon pollution, promote inclusion, and equal opportunity, focus on social practices not just discourse, promote timeliness, combat the fallacy that a carbon tax is a job killer, and value nature’s services. then other proposed solutions are evaluated: divestment, lawsuits, reducing consumption, moral suasion, offsetting, population restraint by educating girls, improving governance, transcending capitalism, and social democracy. after weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each solution, this book concludes that although none is perfect in a complex diverse world, they can make differential contributions specified in the book to mitigate the fossil-fuelled climate crisis. the priority given to foresight versus discounting danger will determine its outcome and the creeping threat to the sustainability of the beneficial habitat for humanity. scope of our problems. … we will do what is needed only when we fully appreciate the situation we face'. flannery (2015: ix) begins his book entitled atmosphere of hope: searching for solutions to the climate crisis by arguing that 'if we are to have real hope, we must first accept reality'. the reality is that, unless the present treadmill of fossil-fuelled social practices is changed to bring emissions in line with carbon withdrawals, societies will flounder on false hopes and be unlikely to prevent a climate catastrophe. carbon dioxide emissions causing a cumulative, long-lasting greenhouse effect in the atmosphere are imperceptible by the senses. this results in blind spots in perception and comprehension, what tong (2019) calls 'the reality bubble'. nevertheless, hidden truths come out of hiding because of scientific work. if the scientific understanding is accepted and acted upon, otherwise imperceptible environmental problems can be solved. the only thing more imperceptible than carbon dioxide and atmospheric carbon is the ozone layer and its depletion, but they were revealed by science resulting in international agreements that largely solved the problem. the same can be true for fossil-fuelled climate change. there exists a paradox concerning the fossil-fuelled climate crisis. scientific knowledge about it abounds in scientific journals and the media, but ignorance concerning it abounds too. there is a lack of practical understanding by the population of how fossil-fuelled social practices contribute to the climate crisis, and this affects not only their material practices but also their voting practices. why? scientists communicate in gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents, 2°c global temperature increase, global consequences for future generations, etc. although correct, this appears abstract to the non-scientific layperson. it is not propitious for inciting willingness to bear the costs of mitigation and change long-standing fossil-fuelled social practices. the 2°c global average temperature increase appears trivial. nevertheless, it is enough to melt glaciers, permafrost, the ice cover of the arctic ocean, and intensifies drought, wildfires, floods, hurricanes and other extreme weather. the scientific expression that these calamities 'are consistent with' fossilfuelled global warming also appears abstract and needs to be fleshed out. furthermore, the global scientific findings need to be disaggregated into an enormous number of mundane social practices on the local level. the nordhaus (2013: 19) example given at the beginning of this book bears repeating. if he drives 100 miles in his car, 'i consume 5 gallons of gasoline. this will produce about 100 pounds of co 2 , which will come out of the tailpipe and go into the atmosphere. i can't see it or hear it or smell it, and i generally do not even think about it. if i am like most people, i will probably assume that my trip will have no effect on the world's climate, and so i will ignore the consequences'. ignorance of emissions imperceptible by the senses and their long-term harm resulting from driving, flying, shipping, cruising, etc., foster these carbon polluting practices and support for fossil-fuel companies and political parties that favour fossil fuels. this contrasts with the visibility of wind farms, which incites fear of declining property values and opposition. it is essential to alert people to the danger of colourless, odourless carbon dioxide. that is done technically for colourless, odourless carbon monoxide by adding mercaptan to natural gas, which produces a potent rotten-egg odour if there is a leak. something similar could be added to gasoline for vehicles so that the carbon dioxide emitted would stink to alert drivers to the greenhouse gases they are emitting: heavy gas-guzzling vehicles would stink more than light, fuel-efficient ones. a jet-fuel additive could produce a huge black cloud when combusted by a plane. an additive to bunker fuel or other fuels used to propel ships could produce a blood-red stain on the water in its wake. additives to fossil fuels could make the greenhouse gases that factories, companies, and buildings emit visible to the eye and perceptible to the nose in proportion to their emissions. cement factories and fossil-fuelled social media servers would thereby result in ugly big stinks. however, i have no illusions technological innovations will be steered in this direction. the example demonstrates that technological innovation is not neutral and is steered by cultural and economic decisions. the illustrations are given to drive home that an informed citizenry needs a practical understanding of the consequences of fossil-fuelled practices in order to improve them, including voting practices, investing practices, etc. it is crucial to illustrate in everyday terms the otherwise imperceptible greenhouse gases and their consequences revealed by science. carbon dioxide emissions from driving, flying, taking a cruise on a huge boat, cremation, producing cement for buildings, and electricity for air conditioning and social media servers need to be understood in pounds or kilograms. this would bring home to people the consequences of social practices much more than speaking of a few gigatonnes emitted by the totality of these practices. this is especially true for carbon pollution by big oligopolistic polluters. translating the science of global warming into everyday units and illustrations would make them more meaningful to laypeople, whose support is needed if the climate crisis is to be mitigated. disseminating examples like these would give the population a clear, practical understanding of the problem. the goal is to promote restraint, support for a price on carbon pollution, stimulate low-carbon technological innovations, and voting for political parties that will enact legislation to implement mitigation and adaptation. a practical understanding would also allow people to remedy their own contributions to fossil-fuelled climate change, and avoid feeling guilty later when they, their children and grandchildren, belatedly discover the consequences of their social practices. similarly, understandable analogies are needed to enhance comprehension of the dynamics involved. a good example is the atmosphere visualized as a bathtub shown in fig. 11 .1. it is taken from the us environmental protection agency (epa 2017), but similar sketches can be found in pielke (2010: 9) , harvey and orbis (2018: 5) , and national geographic. the us environmental protection agency explains it as follows. 'if the amount of water flowing into a bathtub is greater than the amount of water leaving through the drain, the water level will rise. co 2 emissions are like the flow of water into the world's carbon bathtub. "sources" of co 2 emissions such as fossil-fuel burning, cement manufacture, and land use are like the bathtub's faucet. "sinks" of co 2 in the ocean and on land (such as plants) that take up co 2 are like the drain. today, human activities have turned up the flow from the co 2 "faucet", which is much larger than the "drain" can cope with, and the level of co 2 in the atmosphere (like the level of water in a bathtub) is rising' (epa 2017) . clear analogies like these, showing the importance of the net change in atmospheric carbon, have been used in specialized books but are not widely disseminated. they are needed to help people understand that global warming worsens if emissions exceed carbon withdrawals and to counter misleading claims of improvement, such as fewer emissions per unit of gdp or per barrel of oil, where the increase of gdp and the number of barrels worsen the fossil-fuelled climate crisis. knowledge itself does not guarantee that the climate problem will be solved, since it confronts powerful fossil-fuel oligopolies, long-standing social practices and habits, cultural predispositions, etc. nevertheless, a practical understanding by the population and decision-makers is a necessary condition for mitigating it, although not a sufficient condition. awareness of causal social practices is one significant part of transcending present predispositions of consumers and voters, namely solve the climate problem without changing fossil-fuelled practices or making them more expensive. framing the fossil-fuelled climate crisis as a threat to the planet is unconvincing and misleading. everyone knows the planet will not explode because of the combustion of fossil fuels. that framing is a sloppy way of speaking that fails to specify what is at stake. even if combustion of fossil fuels unleashed forces of nature so destructive they transform earth into a planet as barren as mars, our planet would still exist. however, its services to humanity would be destroyed by human socioeconomic practices. this loss of autonomous nature's beneficial services has to be emphasized. what may not survive is the beneficial habitat humans have enjoyed because of nature's services (ipbes 2019). framing the crisis as degrading the beneficial habitat for ourselves, our grandchildren, and by extension for humanity and as making nature more dangerous is more accurate and more likely to prompt corrective action. similarly, 'future generations' seems like an abstraction. people are concerned more concretely about themselves and their loved ones. they would likely be more motivated to change their fossil-fuelled social practices if the hazard were expressed in terms of danger for their significant others, as sociologists call them. it is important to emphasize how climate change will affect grandchildren born today who will have to live in a degraded habitat when they become older, will have to pay for floods and wildfires, and for solutions made more difficult by filling the atmospheric carbon dump. paying small carbon taxes now could help our grandchildren avoid much greater ones later. if a country, company, or person does not do its share to reduce emissions, then grandchildren will be forced to pay the unpaid externalized costs. explanations of how the monopolization of the atmospheric carbon sink by the fossil-fuelled practices of the present generation are leading to the exclusion of grandchildren from living standards their grandparents enjoy should not be avoided. people may be annoyed to learn their social practices are causing the problem, but awareness is a necessary condition for mitigating it. although the destructiveness of fossil-fuelled climate change will be greatest in the future and affect the most vulnerable who contributed least to it, the biggest carbon polluters are also being affected now. australia is a wealthy country and one of the principal carbon polluters in absolute and per capita terms because of reliance on its coal industry. in 2019 it suffered severe drought and in early 2020 catastrophic wildfires, as did california earlier. the wealthy canadian province of alberta is one of the world's largest carbon emitters because its economy is based on extracting and upgrading oil from its tar sands. drought in the boreal forest near the tar sands operations resulted in a catastrophic wildfire in 2016 that destroyed part of the city of fort mcmurray. drought-fostered wildfires in the area also devastated the communities of la ronge in 2015 and slave lake in 2011. any one disaster has complex causes, but shying away from explaining connections between fossil-fuel extraction and combustion, drought, and wildfires sustains support for fossil fuels. technological innovation is amazing. smartphones know where and how far we are driving, flying and cruising, and how many steps we take when walking. ride-hailing apps like uber have options to withdraw payment directly from one's account. dealing with a problem requires measuring it and making its magnitude visible, particularly to those causing the problem. until now, however, innovation has failed to make visible the harmful consequences of combusting fossil fuels. most people do not understand how much their fossil-fuelled social practices contribute to the crisis. margaret munro (2019: o3) suggests there should be what she calls 'a planetary conscience in every phone'. it would note whether a fuel-efficient lightweight vehicle or a gas-guzzling suv or pickup truck is being driven, or the type of plane or cruise ship, the number of passengers, the distance travelled. then it would calculate the number of pounds (or kilograms) of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions and each passenger's share. her flight from vancouver to montreal emitted an average of 1445 kilograms of co 2 per passenger according to a carbon tracker. making this visible with a little green icon that pops up and goes bing would inform people of the consequences of their flight, hopefully encouraging them to exercise fossil-fuel restraint when deciding whether to fly and purchase fuel-efficient vehicles. but it could go further. like uber's payment system, the icon could deduct payment to offset the emissions produced and place it directly into a certified carbon offset account. payment could be compulsory like the charge for uber's ridehailing, with everyone paying the full cost of their fossil-fuelled travel. this would implement the polluter pays principle and undermine the erroneous belief that carbon-dioxide pollution is free because it can't be seen or smelled. munro's idea could be extended to pollution meters in vehicles, indicating pounds of carbon dioxide emitted. technologically this is not beyond the capacity of manufacturers, but innovation needs to be steered in this pollution-indicating direction. speedometers incite drivers to restrain speeding when above the speed limit. similarly, pollution meters could prompt people to buy light fuel-efficient vehicles, use public transit, fly only when necessary, etc. visibility would extend to whether people are serious about mitigating climate change by exercising fossil-fuel restraint or whether they practice what thunberg calls 'empty words'. smartphones themselves could be made smart enough to indicate users' share of emissions generated by the massive fossil-fuelled servers used to make them function. there would be a debate about how to share responsibility for carbon pollution: drivers combusting fossil fuels, passengers, companies enticing purchases of vehicles, flights, cruises, etc. that is where debate belongs, rather than ignoring the consequences of fossil-fuelled practices. using the atmosphere as a carbon pollution dump causes a greenhouse effect, costly wildfires, floods, and extreme weather. a significant threat is that many of nature's services, such as glacier runoff, carbon storage in permafrost, reflection by white cover of the arctic ocean, will be closed off to latecomers, whether they be future generations or the poor whose countries develop later. they risk being excluded from opportunities that the affluent in this and previous generations have enjoyed. the threat of fossil-fuelled intergenerational downward mobility is emerging. prevention of fossil-fuelled climate change requires a more cosmopolitan orientation of keeping opportunities open to others, particularly future generations, and including them in benefits from the advantageous natural environment earlier generations have enjoyed. societies, such as nordic social democratic ones, which have had the most success in spreading opportunities to all members of society, have also been the best environmental performers in fostering inclusion and opportunities across space and between generations. this needs to be enhanced and inspire other societies. carbon polluters and supporting governments typically do not admit they are at fault. they advance the discourse that they are decreasing the carbon intensity of production (less emissions per unit of gdp). even if true, that is a false positive indicator of improvement. in detective work, the advice is: follow the money. similarly, for detecting the source of global warming, trace carbon-emitting social practices up the chain of command and determine whether emissions exceed withdrawals. this is how to transcend greenwashing. the timeliness of taking action is all-important for a cumulative threat like fossil-fuelled climate change. it is easier, less expensive, and more effective to deal with it early, much like a cancerous tumour, the covid-19 virus, and the fire at notre dame cathedral. nature's threatening dynamics have a runaway capacity if they are not nipped in the bud. fossil-fuel infrastructures like coal-burning electricity generating plants, extraction mines, pipelines, etc., constitute major investments, have long lifetimes, and are costly to shutter, hence they lock in emissions for decades. nordhaus calculated that the cost of delaying measures to mitigate fossil-fuelled climate change for fifty years would be around $6.5 trillion. research by 'virtually all other economic modellers, shows that acting now rather than waiting 50 years has substantial net benefits' (nordhaus 2013: 300) . the key word is 'net': reducing costs over the long term requires a willingness to pay the upfront full costs of fossil fuels and of replacing them. many decision-makers frame the global warming issue as 'economy versus the environment', with claims they are trying to reconcile the two. these claims are sometimes well-intentioned but uninformed whereas others involve deception. economic growth that causes climate change will harm the future economy (wagner and weitzman 2015) and will have long-term costs far exceeding near-term benefits of fossil fuels. the environmental economist heal (2017) analyses endangered economies: how the neglect of nature threatens our prosperity. he recognizes there were costs to preventing acid rain, but documented that the economic benefits were ten times greater. similarly, 'switching from fossil to carbon-free power need not raise the cost of power, as often asserted by the fossil fuel industry' (heal 2017: 189) . opponents of clean energy focus on its costs to the exclusion of benefits. upfront costs of mitigation bring long-term economic gain (stern 2009 ). hawken (2017: 220) agrees: 'we also look at the net operating cost or savings from climate solutions compared to continuing business as usual. the net operating savings is $74 trillion over thirty years'. the canadian province of british columbia implemented a carbon tax, which decreased emissions, and it led all provinces in economic growth, partly because the money raised reduced other taxes. money collected through pricing carbon pollution can stimulate the economy. sweden introduced the world's highest carbon tax in 1991. since 1995, its total emissions decreased by 25%, its intensity emissions per unit of gdp decreased by 65%, and its economic growth was 12% higher than the european average (ragan 2019: a11). australia had a carbon tax from 2012 to 2014, which reduced its emissions, and its gdp grew by 3% per year (flannery 2015: 70) . germany innovated feed-in tariffs to develop wind and solar energy and reduce dependence on coal and nuclear energy, which has not prevented it from being an economic powerhouse. economists agree that taxing bads like pollution is better for the economy and job creation than taxing goods like payrolls, income, profits, etc. (nordhaus 2013) . it promotes innovation, and shifts well-paying jobs to the renewable green energy sector. it is necessary to underscore the climate-change costs of combusting fossil fuels (wildfires, floods, extreme weather, ocean level rise, etc.). immediate tiny savings by rejecting carbon taxes will be made at the expense of much greater perpetual long-term costs. costs are merely displaced to paying for disasters. this is like refusing to pay for disaster mitigation, preparedness, robustness, etc., and then becoming compelled to pay far greater costs later when disaster strikes. carbon taxes are the most effective, transparent, and least costly way to decrease carbon pollution. the environmental economist heal (2017: 62) concludes that it 'is ironic and perhaps a comment on our political maturity that this is probably the least popular of all approaches'. carbon taxes will make fossil fuels less competitive against low-carbon energy, and will result in fewer jobs in the carbon-polluting sector. jobs will be transferred to the low-carbon energy sector. the process involves job shifting not job loss. heal (2017: 202) concludes that 'keeping the natural world intact is not expensive -it in fact yields a generous dividend. it's the destruction of the natural world that will cost us massively in the long run'. jobs were lost in the asbestos industries when it was found to be dangerous, but alternative products were innovated and safer jobs created. after it was confirmed that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, tobacco farmers could no longer sell their crop. they wisely shifted to vegetable and fruit crops, including winemaking, and prospered. there was initial resistance to changing long-standing practices, but the transition to safety was made and prosperity maintained. ecologists underscore the importance of ecosystem services to humanity. economists refer to them as 'natural capital' (heal 2017) . many of these services are being degraded by human practices (thornes 2010) . forests suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but many were clear-cut and others cleared for agriculture. oceans also absorb carbon dioxide, but as they become warmer and acidic because of emissions, they are less capable of providing this essential service. global warming melts glaciers, which previously supplied drinking water year-round in mountainous regions. it also melts the arctic ocean's ice cover, reducing the valuable albedo effect of white ice reflecting the sun's rays thereby mitigating warming. it melts permafrost, where methane is safely stored by nature, resulting in emissions from this powerful greenhouse gas, and possible runaway climate change. fossil fuels themselves were produced by the sun's energy and stored safely underground. the atmosphere is providing the service of a carbon sink, but it is limited. it is important to recognize, value, and protect these services of nature from being degraded by fossil-fuelled climate change. the chapter turns now to assessing other suggestions. pielke (2010: 228-229, 231) states 'the only way to a high carbon tax is to start low. … by explicitly connecting carbon pricing with energy innovation, a virtuous circle is enabled that allows those asked to pay the tax to see the benefits and thus builds the support necessary to sustain investments over decades and longer'. he gives the example of a fuel tax on gasoline that enabled the eisenhower administration to build the american interstate highway network. pielke's carbon tax would be dedicated to raising revenue for research to innovate energy sources cheaper than fossil fuels. it would be set upstream at extraction of fossil fuels. if his approach 'were to succeed, then decades hence the world will have a high carbon tax, widespread deployment of low-carbon technologies, and a decarbonized economy' (pielke 2010: 232) . although pielke correctly sees the political difficulty of implementing carbon taxes, starting low ensures that fossil-fuelled climate change will worsen (latin 2012 ) because emissions are currently high. unfortunately, the world would have a carbonized atmosphere, a greenhouse effect, global warming, and degraded oceans because the further accumulation of carbon emissions would intensify the vicious circle of melting arctic ice reducing its reflective capacity, melting permafrost releasing methane, etc. there would be no disincentive against combusting fossil fuels until research leads to innovations making low-carbon energy less expensive than fossil fuels, which could take a long time. a low, incrementally increasing carbon tax fails the urgency test. moreover, a low-carbon tax provides little money for the massive research needed, and whether desired innovations would result is uncertain. pielke argues that the carbon tax should be set at the highest price politically possible. agreed. however, that would be zero in the current us 'make america great again' administration. it would also yield zero monies for research in countries where the tax would have to be revenue-neutral to be accepted. furthermore, it is hard to find the climate equivalent of eisenhower building a small stretch of highway that motivates the population to pay taxes to build more. when a canadian province fought a national carbon tax in its supreme court, the latter concluded it is not a tax in a legal sense but instead a regulatory charge on emissions where revenues are not grabbed by the national government but rather returned to individuals and businesses in the province where it is raised. hence, instead of using the scary word 'tax', one suggestion is to use labels that are more acceptable: 'charge', 'levy', 'fee', or 'fine for pollution'. whether government regulations and taxes are acceptable to the population depends on the sociopolitical context. during the second world war, high taxes were imposed, the 'government enacted -and americans accepted -price controls. … gasoline was severely regulated, and a speed limit of 35 miles per hour was imposed nationally to reduce gas and rubber consumption' (safran foer 2019: 8). this illustration demonstrates that acceptability of taxes and regulations depends on the gravity and immediacy of the crisis. another possibility that could be popular would be for governments to subsidize retrofits of residential, commercial and public buildings to decrease fossil-fuel use for heating, air conditioning, and increase energy efficiency. resistance to deep retrofits is usually based on the upfront costs, and if these were subsidized, then they would be financially beneficial for owners after a few years. installing heat pumps where electricity is based on a low-carbon primary source and thermal retrofits to improve insulation could reduce fossil-fuel use. together with mandated codes for new buildings, this would decrease emissions significantly, since about 13% come from buildings. retrofits would have the co-benefit of increasing jobs to do the work. however, they would be expensive for governments, which would try to ensure additionality, namely finance the cost only if the retrofit would not be done without a subsidy. the fossil-fuel industry is arguably the wealthiest to have existed. its investors and shareholders profited from this carbon-polluting industry. there are now attempts to decelerate extraction and combustion by divesting from that industry. the best known promoter of divestment is former bank of england governor mark carney (carbon tracker 2015). the prototype was the successful divestment campaigns that contributed to bringing down south africa's apartheid regime. divestment is supported by (i) moral reasoning that fossil-fuel combustion degrades the environment future generations will need, and (ii) financial arguments that such investment will lose value as dangers of fossil-fuelled climate change become increasingly recognized (flannery 2015: 105-112) , much like what happened to investment in asbestos companies. if climate-protection legislation is enacted, the decline in value will be accelerated. however, such legislation is uncertain because divestment is opposed by powerful fossil-fuel lobbies. the institutions divesting have typically been environmental organizations and religious groups, which do not have much money invested. student organizations have attempted to convince university administrators to divest their endowment funds. the best-known case was at harvard where a student referendum was held, 1300 faculty and alumni signed a petition, and the president's office was occupied twice (rowe et al. 2016) . the administration staunchly opposed divestment from fossil fuels, which bring high returns, so it had limited success. investors who discount danger snap up the underpriced shares thereby counteracting divestment by the few investors with climate foresight (willis 2019: b1, b5 ). divestment has a role to play in mitigating carbon pollution, but it has limitations. litigation concerning harm undermined the asbestos industry and was instrumental in keeping asbestos stored safely in the ground. litigation is having similar success in regulating cigarettes and the tobacco industry. although at its beginning stages, litigation to compensate harm by the fossil-fuel industry and act as a deterrent to future harm could be part of mitigating the fossil-fuelled climate crisis. in the deepwater horizon case, lawsuits 'reduced the company's value by about $30 billion -a good example of the legal liability system operating to internalize some of the external costs that bp generated …. with bp agreeing to pay $18.7 billion in damages to the federal government and its agencies, and another $5.6 billion in damages to the various states affected' (heal 2017: 56) . environmental lawyers (wood 2013) have formulated a general legal argument based on the public trust doctrine. they contend all citizens have a constitutional right to a livable environment, and a democratic government has a duty to protect it. specifically, that includes water, forests, wildlife, air and the atmosphere. they argue that it refers to preventing future harm and repairing past damage threatening future generations. this is the legal basis of ongoing lawsuits. however, litigation is expensive, slow, and has unpredictable results. courts awarded $5 billion in punitive damages against exxon for its 1989 valdez oil spill in alaska, the largest oil spill ever, but the company has been appealing ever since and the money has not been paid. a technically simple solution to the fossil-fuelled climate crisis would be to use less fossil fuels even if they are not replaced by low-carbon energy. more generally, reducing overall consumption would mitigate most environmental problems. it would diminish the threat of a draconian exclusion from consumption for future generations (read grandchildren) forced upon them by global warming caused by the present generation's excessive consumption of carbon polluting fossil fuels. speth (2009: 115-116) argues that the 'powerful forces driving the clash of economy and environment thus will continue, and that makes it necessary to address those forces -growth, consumerism, corporate behavior among them. so it makes very good sense to question economic growth and the growth imperative. right now and for the foreseeable future, there's a trade-off: economy versus environment'. carbon emissions are closely related to economic growth: when it is strong, so are carbon emissions. global economic growth was relatively strong in 2017, and the international energy agency documented that 1.6 million more barrels of oil were combusted daily in 2017 than in 2016, which increased emissions and gave incentives for even more extraction. thus, one suggestion is to practice a bold cultural change of what is called 'degrowth' (klein 2014) . economic growth would no longer be the goal; instead, new social practices would enable populations to live well where consumption of material resources, especially fossil fuels, would be sharply reduced. in plain english, this implies conservation, economic contraction instead of growth, downsizing production, and eliminating perceived entitlements to which the population has become accustomed. advocates of degrowth and post-growth argue it would lead to greater well-being by pursuing happiness in terms of more time spent on family and community relations, nature, art, etc. it 'envisions major changes in values, lifestyles, and human behavior. it involves a deep change in social values -away from ever-increasing material consumption and toward close community and personal relationships, social solidarity, and a strong connection to nature' (speth 2009: 44) . enjoy nature in a nearby park rather than travelling to a distant nature reserve, visit local art galleries rather than the louvre, see local attractions instead of the world. decreasing consumption of fossil fuels implies decreasing consumer goods, often transported long distances in fossilfuelled cargo ships, trains, transport trucks, etc., and reducing travel practices in automobiles, planes, and cruise ships, which are increasing elements of consumption in the modern world. to be effective, degrowth needs to be done collectively rather than be only an individual choice by a few ecological saints. aviation is one area where reduction of fossil-fuelled social practices is the only remedy for its contribution to the climate crisis for the foreseeable future. presently, there is no technological alternative to jet fuel to power planes for rapid, comfortable flights. commercial aviation is currently experiencing rapid growth globally, resulting in more carbon emitted into the atmosphere. degrowth would change this. flying for pleasure would be curtailed. conferences would be transformed: jetfuelled participation would be replaced by tele-conferences; ideas would travel, but not people. the young climate activist greta thunberg's transatlantic trips highlighted that an important cause of climate change consists of combusting jet fuel. her extreme example could motivate less flying. will people be inspired by thunberg's actions, or will they dismiss her as a cute kid saying nice words and doing courageous actions? carolan argues in favour of a circular, sharing economy where people would be 'unburdened' by ownership. although there would be more time free from work, the desire to 'get away' would be reduced, with associated reductions in driving, flying, cruising, etc., and hence in emissions. very little would stay the same in this social reorganization of 'consuming collaboratively; working less; taxing bads/rewarding goods; democracy; creating walkable communities; making repairable goods; enforcing antitrust laws; a maximum wage (and on and on)' (carolan 2014: 208) . he adds that 'we have to realize that freedom ultimately requires restraint' (carolan 2014: 183) by consuming and wasting less, but this does not rest entirely on sacrifice (carolan 2014: 169) . limiting consumption and economic growth have appeal in theory, but have had little success in practice, and remain utopian. in the half-century since limits to growth (meadows et al. 1972) and overshoot (catton 1980) were published, global consumption and economic growth have accelerated. furthermore, increasing consumption and economic growth have been central to raising populations out of extreme poverty, for example in china. it is problematic to convince populations to reduce consumption of fossil fuels because they perceive it as sacrificing things they need or enjoy. it goes against the trend to greater consumption whether it be the poor acquiring air conditioning, the affluent combusting jet fuel to enjoy intercontinental tourism, and both using energy-glutton, carbon-emissions-intensive computer servers for data storage, social media mobile devices, etc. reducing consumption is strongly resisted by powerful, prosperous corporations and countries, by the middle class everywhere, and by poor countries and the poor in developed countries who see in economic growth a solution to their economic problems. pielke (2010: 219) contends that 'for the foreseeable future, efforts to reduce emissions through a willful contraction of economic activity are simply out of the cards. countries around the world -rich and poor, north and south -have expressed a commitment to sustaining economic growth, and these commitments are not going to change anytime soon, no matter how much activists, idealists, or dreamers complain to the contrary'. there is little chance that degrowth will be implemented at the scale and timeliness needed to deal with the urgent fossil-fuelled climate crisis. typically degrowth is involuntary, occurs only by means of recessions (usa 2008), wars (iraq, syria), civil unrest (south sudan, venezuela, nigeria), pandemics (usa, brazil, italy, spain 2020), and causes much suffering. nevertheless, restraint concerning fossil-fuelled social practices and fossil-fuel consumption is needed to mitigate global warming, especially with regard to aviation. fly when necessary, but limit flying for pleasure. if restraint is not practiced, then faith that a technological carbon-free alternative to jet fuel can be found is relied upon, but it is nowhere in sight. another solution would be to develop compassion, empathy, and a cosmopolitan orientation (roberts and parks 2007; beck 2015) . this would involve an appeal to the better angels of humanity and to altruism. 'at present, there is already a strong movement for realization of a third generation of human rights, which includes the right to a safe environment' (kahn and roberts 2013: 137) . human rights, empathy, and ethics to deal with the fossil-fuelled climate crisis are certainly worth promoting and maximizing. a concept of 'ethical energy' could be defined as energy that has the least harmful impact on future generations and vulnerable poor countries. unethical energy would be defined as that type which results in proportionately more greenhouse-gas emissions and hence greater adverse consequences for others. by this definition, wind, solar, and other types of low-carbon energy would be the most ethical, whereas coal, heavy oil from venezuela, and oil from alberta's tar sands would be the most unethical, as shown in table 2 .1 of chapter 2. however, ethics confronts interests and ingrained habitus, and has had limited success in environmental matters. in the usa, where kahn and roberts are located, a strong movement in 2016 elected donald trump, who increased carbon polluters' privileges and de-emphasized compassion, empathy, cosmopolitan orientations, and a safe environment. those virtues can be hoped for, but mitigating fossil-fuelled climate change should not have to depend on them. the greenhouse effect can be mitigated by drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. the growth of tropical forests is particularly effective at withdrawing atmospheric carbon and sequestering it in trees, roots, and other vegetation. much of this will be done by nature's processes if those forests are protected. brazil dramatically cut deforestation rates in the amazon, and was restoring the forest, at least until bolsonaro was elected president in 2019. hawken's (2017: 114-116) team estimates that protection and restoration of tropical forests over the next thirty years can draw 61 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. temperate forests are not as good at withdrawing carbon, but are still good. over the same period, if protected and restored, they can withdraw 22.6 gigatonnes (hawken 2017: 128-129) . afforestation is the term used for creating new forests in areas where there were none for fifty years because of pasture lands, mining, etc. planting forests there can result in a new sink drawing down 18 gigatonnes of carbon over the next thirty years (hawken 2017: 132-134) . despite deficiencies of offsetting indicated in chapter 4, it has an important role to play for compensating emissions from social practices for which there is no alternative to fossil fuels in the current state of technology, such as aviation. for example, swiss researchers calculated that a return flight between new york and london covering 11,100 km results in 1.8 tonnes of greenhouse gases per passenger in economy class, which is 3800 pounds or 20 times the weight of an average 190-pound passenger, and the offsetting cost would be us$54 if spent in developing countries (myclimate 2020 ). this would not be an exorbitant increase in the ticket price of a return flight between new york and london. the equivalent estimate for more spacious business class shared by fewer passengers was 3.4 tonnes of greenhouse gases per passenger, which is 6800 pounds and the offsetting cost would be us$103. even more spacious first class would produce 5.3 tonnes of greenhouse gases per passenger or 10,600 pounds and the offsetting cost would be us$160. tickets are presently cheap because the cost of damage to the environment is not included in the price and is left to be paid belatedly by others in the form of costly global warming and extreme weather. since there were over 4 billion passengers flying in the world in 2019 and the number is growing, aviation's contribution to fossil-fuelled global warming and its related costs are enormous. if offsetting were included in the price of tickets, it would provide a huge increase in financing for mitigating fossil-fuelled climate change, for example not only afforestation but also financing solar energy in poor southern countries to replace coal thereby mitigating global warming and benefiting everyone everywhere. note that if spent in wealthy countries with high labour costs, the same mitigation benefits of offsetting would add twice as much to the ticket price. offsets should be certified to ensure they result in additional emissions reductions that would not have occurred without them. most importantly, offsets should be mandatory and increased to include the full cost of damaging emissions rather than being voluntary and tiny, as done presently for aviation. offsetting that finances additional solar and wind energy and energy efficiency retrofits are better than planting trees because a wildfire or logging can put all the carbon back into the atmosphere (suzuki and hanington 2017: 234-237) . monies raised could be used to finance (i) the replacement of fossil-fuel-powered electricity generation by low-carbon energy and (ii) the transition to electrical vehicles, networks of charging stations, and especially (iii) research into improving the storage of emissions-free energy. this would increase the price of plane tickets, result in a decrease in air traffic, and mitigate aviation's contribution to fossil-fuelled climate change, but it would face considerable opposition. hence, effective offsetting has been shelved and token voluntary offsetting persists. this needs to be changed. state offsetting is already being done by norway, which is using part of its oil wealth to finance afforestation in developing countries, thereby compensating some emissions from its north sea oil. in 2008, norway agreed to pay brazil $1 billion to reduce its rate of deforestation of the amazon rainforests 75% by 2015; brazil achieved the goal and received norway's payment. since states that base their economies on oil extraction are unlikely to keep the oil in the ground, offsetting is a needed alternative, with social democratic norway being an exemplary role model. however, there is resistance in most oil extracting and consuming countries to sending money abroad because it reduces profits, royalties, and jobs. global warming must not be mitigated by keeping people in extreme poverty. economic growth of poor countries is necessary. but imagine the global warming impact if poor countries, with their high populations and birth rates, reached the same per capita level of fossil-fuel consumption as wealthy ones, for example, if madagascar's annual emissions of 0.1 tonnes per person increased to the american rate of 18 tonnes (hawken 2017: 81) . hence hawken (2017: 78-82) argues that educating girls and family planning constitute important means of restraining emissions and mitigating global warming. far from government and market action being mutually exclusive, a government cap on emissions or carbon tax is needed to harness the market to solve this urgent global problem. apparent market-based remedies are actually hybrid market-state solutions. government regulations forcing polluters to reduce emissions, or prohibiting the worse carbon-polluting practices and types of fossil fuels, is also necessary (jaccard 2018) . currently, coal-fired power provides 40% of the world's electricity. 'a dramatic change of course is required if the world is to avoid a climate-change disaster. and, of course, dramatic shifts require decisive government action -to limit coal use and encourage new technologies by putting an effective price on carbon. otherwise cheap, dirty coal, with its vast already-built and paid-off infrastructure, will prevail' (flannery 2015: 186) . the closing of coal-fired electricity generation by the ontario government reduced greenhouse-gas emissions and had co-benefits of decreasing urban smog, air pollution, and fatalities among asthma sufferers. harvey and orbis (2018: 12) documented that 'a strong building code that continuously strengthens over time and has a strong monitoring and enforcement mechanism, as in california, can dramatically reduce energy use and emissions. and we know fuel economy standards for vehicles, when designed well, can dramatically improve fuel efficiency'. germany increased its use of renewable energy for electricity through government-mandated feed-in tariffs by reverse auctions where the lowest bid wins the supply contract. to reduce emissions, governments 'removing subsidies for fossil fuels is the first step -though still widely ignored. next, policymakers must incorporate the cost of externalities, such as adding a carefully derived social cost of carbon or setting a carbon cap' (harvey and orbis 2018: 18) . government action is required to promote densification of cities to reduce commuting emissions, construct dedicated bicycle lanes to foster this carbon-free transportation, build rapid mass transit and high-speed electric rail to reduce short-haul plane travel and jet-fuel emissions, improve fuel-efficiency standards, etc. (flannery 2015: 91-92) . harvey and orbis (2018: 300) assessed the efficacy of government policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. in a country that cannot afford electrified subways, they documented how bus rapid transit on dedicated lanes and high-density development near stations decreased automobile use and emissions in bogota, columbia. some remedies require changes in cultural aesthetics. governments could paint the infrastructure and its roofs white so that the sun's rays would be reflected back into space, which many southern european countries do to some extent (flannery 2015: 137) . governments promoting vegetarianism and best practices management of livestock would also reduce emissions (flannery 2015: 152) . conservative governments, called different names in different countries, are typically the most reluctant to mitigate fossil-fuelled climate change. nevertheless, the urgency of the fossil-fuelled climate crisis requires that all forms of governance act to mitigate it, rather than having left-wing governments acting then having it undone by right-wing ones. and conservative governments have mitigated climate change in some cases. angela merkel's conservative christian democrats led the way with wind and solar energy by innovating feed-in tariffs. uk conservative governments pushed forward wind energy. in france, macron's government is not left-wing nonetheless attempted to implement carbon taxes. in the usa, international agreements were implemented during republican regimes to phase out cfcs to diminish ozone layer depletion, leaded gasoline was banned under reagan, and george h. w. bush initiated cap-and-trade to alleviate acid rain. in 1988, the canadian conservative party held the first international meeting on climate change. most remarkable is the 1989 speech before the united nations general assembly by the icon of conservatism, margaret thatcher, best known for promoting individual rights, free markets, deregulation, etc. 'the problem of global climate change is one that affects us all, and action will only be effective if it is taken at the international level. it is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay. … put in its bluntest form: the main threat to our environment is more and more people and their activities. the land they cultivate more intensively. the forests they cut down and burn. the mountainsides they lay bare. the fossil fuels they burn. the rivers and seas they pollute. the result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world's climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way. … there will be no profit or satisfaction for anyone if pollution continues to destroy our planet' (quoted in reguly 2020: b4). she called for a framework convention on climate change, which she branded 'a good conduct guide for all nations'. her knowledge of science, having studied chemistry at oxford, likely explains her early awareness of the danger of global warming, since its source is the chemical reaction of carbon with oxygen. unfortunately, conservatives ignored thatcher's climate warnings. the american republican party long denied anthropogenic climate change, attacked the science, and refused to change fossil-fuelled social practices (jacques et al. 2008; dunlap and jacques 2013; dunlap et al. 2016) . conservatives everywhere should heed thatcher's 'good conduct guide' to mitigate climate change, otherwise little progress will be made given the swings in democratic electoral politics. every country has to lower its carbon pollution through legally binding, enforced international agreements between governments, which would amount to paris agreements plus sanctions for recalcitrants. an international rules-based governance order mandating carbon pollution restraint is necessary. the key concept is disproportionately (freudenburg 2006) : countries that are disproportionately high per capita emitters have the most responsibility to lower their emissions; otherwise wealthy, high-emitting, low population countries like canada will blame poor, populous countries like india as an excuse for keeping emissions high. high per capita emissions, wealthy societies like luxembourg (cdiac 2018) need to lead in reducing their emissions, even if they account for a small percentage of overall emissions, because they are disproportionately causing harm to future generations. speth (2009: 116) argues that 'the planet cannot sustain capitalism as we know it'. his solution is to reinvent the political economy constructing 'america the possible' (speth 2012: xiii) by transforming the capitalist market and politics, decreasing consumption and inequality, simple living, respecting nature, and pursuing happiness in non-material pleasures. 'the future described herein rests on massive change that will be realized only if the american people insist on it. so the book is more about what can be than what will be' (speth 2012: preface) . it is true that capitalism, as we know it, has engendered the fossil-fuelled climate crisis, must be transformed, and political economy reinvented (foster, clark, and york 2011) . but what will that involve? a leap into the unknown of massive change can be done quickly in theory, but its implementation in the messy real-world of power, interests, and practices is likely too slow, too partial, and too problematic for the urgent climate crisis. it would probably have less chance of success than a merely good solution. harvey and orbis (2018: 63) argue that a 'highly abating and perfectly designed policy is not worth pursuing if there is no chance it can be implemented'. speth's proposal resembles that of bernie sanders, which even primary voters in the american democratic party did not accept. that a massive change of capitalism 'will be' in practice in the urgent time frame required for dealing with the climate crisis is a long shot. speth is not suggesting replacing 'capitalism as we know it' with socialism 'as we know it'. but it is a misleading comparison to contrast the worst excesses of capitalism with the best ideals of theoretical socialism which has never existed. what does his proposed transformation of the market consist of? ambiguity is an escape hatch in speth's theory. his proposal might consist of a utopia never before seen and likely will not be seen. or the transformation of 'capitalism as we know it' could mean implementing 'capitalism as we don't know it in america', namely social democratic capitalism inspired by the nordic model. it could consist of improving and scaling up real-world political systems that have been the best performers in mitigating environmental problems, monopolization, exclusion, and inequality of opportunity, thereby reducing social closure. that would be social democracy. fairbrother notes that neo-marxist approaches see no significant reduction in externalities unless the capitalist market is abolished, and that ecological modernization (mol et al. 2009; sonnenfeld 2009 ) is based on vague, questionable indicators of improvement (for critiques see york and rosa 2003; york 2012; york and mcgee 2016). fairbrother (2016: 380) argues that 'an externalities perspective focuses on the political question of why the state may or may not take regulatory action against externalities in a given case'. this converges with the focus of closure theory on specific political action to mitigate exclusion, monopolization, and environmental problems. such political action is typically, though not uniquely nor always, accomplished through social democratic governance. evidence demonstrates that social democracy is the governance with the best environmental performance record, including for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions (germanwatch 2012 (germanwatch , 2019 yale university 2012 , 2018 cdiac 2018) . minimizing monopolization of wealth and mitigating exclusion, which are more characteristic of social democracy than of other forms of governance, has been extended to future generations and poor countries by reducing impacts on the environment they will need. this involves a more cosmopolitan orientation, as beck (2015) recommended, and greater empathy for others distant in time or space. social democracy has the best record of creating institutions, values, and social practices that foster equality of opportunity, inclusion, environmental justice, and intergenerational justice. for example, states with large oil reserves typically elect conservative governments opposed to carbon taxes and restraints on carbon pollution. oil extraction has become the principal basis of prosperity for norway, but it is done in social democratic ways that obtain the most value for the least emissions. norway formed a state-owned company to exploit this resource so that it would benefit all norwegians. it allowed private companies to exploit north sea oil only by paying huge royalties (75%), and created a sovereign wealth fund of savings to benefit future generations. it introduced carbon taxes to decrease emissions and promote technological innovations, built an electric transit network, and financed reforestation of brazil's and indonesia's tropical rainforests to offset norway's carbon emissions. this is not as good for mitigating fossil-fuelled global warming as keeping its oil in the ground under the sea. nonetheless, it is the best any major oil extracting country has done. there is a need to learn from nordic social democracies, notwithstanding that their collectivist values are not easily transferable to individualistically oriented states, such as the usa. social democracy is the form of governance most closely related to inclusionary solutions deduced from the social closure theoretical framework. that framework takes radical analyses into account, such as those of speth (2009 speth ( , 2012 , but redirects them towards real world, social democratic resolution of fossil-fuelled climate change holding inequalities and processes of monopolization in check, especially fossil-fuel oligopolies. for the urgent crisis of fossil-fuelled climate change, it stresses the need for prompt implementation of solutions. the fossil-fuelled climate crisis has been caused socioeconomically, will have socioeconomic consequences, and will need socioeconomic remedies if it is to be mitigated. three possible outcomes of the crisis are foreseeable. one possibility is that societies, prodded on by fossil-fuel industries, refuse to change their fossil-fuelled social practices. emissions continue to exceed carbon withdrawals and more and more carbon is transferred from ground to sky. impact science's warnings of future harm are discounted. high-carbon emitting countries legitimate their pollution by claiming it is pointless to stop because other countries will continue theirs. near-term economic benefits are enjoyed, with faith future generations will implement just-in-time technological solutions even though the present generation has not. societies believe they can adapt to anything nature throws at them, be resilient, and ride runaway global warming, which is like assuming there is no need to close the faucet because adaptation can succeed by mopping up the overflow from the bathtub. this constitutes a failure of foresight, a race to the bottom, and the incubation of disaster. the biggest danger is that fossil-fuelled global warming unleashes second-order global warming by nature's dynamics and uncontrollable climate change. even if societies belatedly stop emissions, the evil genie is out and vicious feedback forces of nature are let loose. insufficient mitigation is a possible energy future, with future generations paying the environmental costs of previous generations' refusal to pay the full cost of their fossil-fuelled social practices. foresight requires that this possible energy future not be dismissed in order to take action to avoid it. there is awareness that if this generation does not reduce consumption voluntarily, runaway climate change will impose it on future generations. moral considerations replace individualistic orientations with cosmopolitan ones of caring for future generations and poor countries. wealth is shared with poor societies. consumption willingly decreases, especially fossil-fuel consumption and corresponding social practices. people drive less, fly less, cruise less, cremate less, use less cement, less air conditioning, less social media servers, etc. the emphasis is on enjoying non-fossil-fuelled pleasures and nature, sights, sports, art galleries, and the like near home. urban sprawl and commuting are decreased by choosing to live near work in dense cities, like seoul and amsterdam, and raising children in apartment blocks rather than in detached houses with a yard. reduced consumption means economic growth stops and degrowth begins, but sharing work avoids unemployment, and people need less money because travel and consumption decrease. fossil fuels remain safely underground. opposition from fossil-fuel industries and states is overcome. the aspirations of beck (2015), speth (2009 speth ( , 2012 and klein (2014) become reality. this bold massive change mitigates global warming. unless catastrophic consequences become visibly imminent as in wartime, this energy future is unlikely to occur because it will be perceived as incurring major sacrifices of social practices people enjoy. by the time consequences become grave, it will be too late to undo the accumulation of carbon pollution in the sky, as giddens states. the full cost of fossil fuels is paid upon purchase because governments impose a price on carbon pollution through taxes, cap-and-trade, or regulations. this incentivizes using solar, wind, tidal, hydro, and geothermal energy, and provides financing for technological innovations improving energy storage, electric vehicles, and low-carbon energy. emissions are decreased to the level of carbon withdrawals. most fossil fuels remain safely stored underground. internationally enforced agreements ensure compliance by all nations. although costly to pay the hitherto unpaid externalized costs of fossil-fuel combustion, this option consists of only sacrificing cheap fossil fuels. carbon-free energy, which may become cheap in the future, replaces them. there would be little sacrifice of consumption and social practices, with social media servers, air conditioning, and transportation powered by carbon-free energy. economic growth continues with global warming mitigated. although technically challenging and facing opposition from consumers who have a sense of entitlement to cheap fossil fuels, as well as from fossil-fuel industries and states, it is the most promising possibility to replace the dangerous fossil-fuelled energy future with a safe, low-carbon energy future. which of these energy futures will predominate is presently unforeseeable because of uncertainties concerning whether decision-makers and populations will respond (i) with foresight to the well-documented fossil-fuelled global warming or (ii) by discounting the danger. researchers documented that prior to disasters there is typically a period where signs of danger are discounted, which they call a 'failure of foresight' resulting in the 'incubation' of 'man-made disasters' (turner and pidgeon 1978) . scientific evidence indicates that humanity is incubating the slow onset, cumulative global catastrophe of fossil-fuelled climate change. it is largely imperceptible by the senses and risks closing off resources and opportunities to groups distant in space and time from those causing the problem. the objective of this book has been to analyse this dangerous incubation and assess solutions in order to enhance foresight and promote socioeconomic practices in harmony with nature's dynamics. analyzing the depth and gravity of the fossil-fuelled climate crisis and translating the findings of science into words and analogies understandable by non-scientists will hopefully encourage low-carbon social practices, including voting practices. hope, as opposed to blind faith in a last-minute technological cure-all, rests on evidence-based assessments. none of the solutions and remedies appraised in this chapter and book is perfect, and all have varying gradations of value. a whole range of solutions was assessed to indicate the value, limitations, and possibilities of each so that they could be used appropriately and in combination to meet this multifaceted challenge. mitigation has to occur quickly because the longer climate change worsens, the more draconian the required solution. to accomplish this and promote carbon-free energy, the polluter pays principle has to be implemented in terms of users of fossil fuels paying their full cost by including the cost of harm they cause in their price. this will make low-carbon energy more competitive and finance its development to the long-run benefit of everyone. i resist the temptation to end the book with a pre-determined happy conclusion or an apocalypse. human agents choosing their social practices individually and collectively in a structure of social and biophysical constraints will determine which result prevails. this is not as emotionally satisfying as enunciating perfect solutions in the abstract, but it is the only candid conclusion. the priority given to foresight versus discounting danger will determine the outcome of the fossil-fuelled climate crisis and its creeping threat to the sustainability of the beneficial habitat for humanity. note 1. note that discounting here is used in the broad sociological sense rather than in the technical way economists use the concept. see heal (2017: 145-149) for a good discussion of its use in environmental economics. mark carney warns investors face huge climate change losses cheaponomics: the high cost of low prices overshoot: the ecological basis of revolutionary change climate change denial books and conservative think tanks: exploring the connection the political divide on climate change: partisan polarization widens in the u united states environmental protection agency externalities: why environmental sociology should bring them atmosphere of hope: searching for solutions to the climate crisis the ecological rift: capitalism's war on the earth environmental degradation, disproportionality, and the double diversion ccpi: the climate change performance index results designing climate solutions: a policy guide for low-carbon energy the ecology of commerce: a declaration of sustainability, rev drawdown: the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming endangered economies: how the neglect of nature threatens our prosperity divisive carbon taxes are much ado about nothing. the globe and mail the organization of denial: conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism towards a binding adaptation regime: three levers and two instruments this changes everything: capitalism vs the climate climate change policy failures jorgen randers, and william behrens. 1972. the limits to growth the ecological modernisation reader: environmental reform in theory and practice green screen: a planetary conscience in every phone? there should be an app for that my climate: shape our future. zurich: foundation myclimate the climate casino: risk, uncertainty, and economics for a warming world the climate fix borrowing policies is canada's best policy trump's davos talk shows he's no thatcher. the globe and mail a climate of injustice: global inequality, north-south politics, and climate policy the power of fossil fuel divestment (and its secret) we are the weather: saving the planet begins at breakfast contradictions of ecological modernisation the bridge at the edge of the world: capitalism, the environment, and crossing from crisis to sustainability america the possible: manifest for a new economy a blueprint for a safer planet just cool it: the climate crisis and what we can do atmospheric services the reality bubble:blind spots, hidden truths, and the dangerous illusions that shape our world man-made disasters climate shock: the economic consequences of a hotter planet the future is plastics: murray edwards, li ka-shing add to oil patch holdings as others flee epi environmental performance do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels? understanding the jevons paradox key challenges to ecological modernization theory 1palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano: una mirada local en el horizonte mundial del mercado cinematográfico lucila hinojosa córdova1 recibido: 27/05/2018 enviado a pares: 31/05/2018 aprobado por pares: 27/09/2018 aceptado: 19/10/2018 doi: 10.5294/pacla.2019.22.3.5 para citar este artículo / to reference this article / para citar este artigo hinojosa, l. (2019). nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano: una mirada local en el horizonte mundial del mercado cinematográfico. palabra clave, 22(3), e2235. doi: http://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2019.22.3.5 resumen este trabajo tiene como propósito destacar la recuperación que ha tenido el cine mexicano del tercer milenio, en el contexto de las condiciones de producción, exhibición y asistencia a las salas de cine comercial que en el periodo de 2010 a 2017 han prevalecido en el país, luego de recuperarse de una etapa de gran crisis que en la década de los noventa casi lo hizo desaparecer. el estudio forma parte de una línea de investigación que sobre la economía política del cine mexicano se ha venido realizando mediante la aplicación de una metodología mixta, en que se combinan la investigación documental, el análisis de contenido, la encuesta y la entrevista. los resultados que aquí se muestran señalan que a partir de 2000 la industria cinematográfica mexicana empezó a recuperar sus indicadores de producción, asistencia y recaudación en taquilla; no obstante, esta recuperación no se ve en la exhibición de películas nacionales en las salas de cine comercial, que 1 orcid.org/0000-0003-0541-5347. universidad autónoma de nuevo león, méxico. lucila.hinojosacr@uanl.edu.mx http://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2019.22.3.5 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0541-5347 http://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2019.22.3.5 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0541-5347 mailto:lucila.hinojosacr@uanl.edu.mx 2 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova está condicionada por una legislación inequitativa para el sector que se modificó para integrarse a las demandas del capitalismo global. los resultados también se comparan con los indicadores de otros países iberoamericanos y se complementan con datos empíricos obtenidos de estudios locales sobre los públicos que asisten a las salas de cine comercial de una importante ciudad del noreste de méxico. con este estudio, se busca aportar conocimiento al campo de las industrias culturales en américa latina. palabras clave (fuente: tesauro de la unesco) cine; cine mexicano; industria cinematográfica; producción audiovisual; exhibición; públicos; usuario cultural; audiencias. 3palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 the new golden age of mexican cinema: a local view of the global horizon of the film market abstract this paper aims to highlight the recovery of third millennium mexican cinema in relation to the conditions of production, exhibition and attendance at commercial movie theaters that have prevailed in the country between 2010-2017, after a serious crisis that almost made it disappear in the 1990s. the study is part of a line of research into the political economy of mexican cinema that has been conducted using a mixed method, combining documentary research, content analysis, surveys, and interviews. results suggest that, since 2000, the mexican film industry has been improving its production, attendance and box office indicators. still, this is not reflected in the exhibition of national films at commercial movie theaters, which is conditioned by inequitable legislation for the sector that was amended to meet the demands of global capitalism. results are also compared with indicators of other ibero-american countries and supplemented by empirical data obtained from local studies about the audiences attending commercial movie theaters of an important city in northeastern mexico. this study seeks to contribute knowledge to the field of cultural industries in latin america. keywords (source: unesco thesaurus) film; mexican cinema; film industry; film making; exhibitions; public; cultural users; audiences. 4 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova nova época de ouro para o cinema mexicano: um olhar local no horizonte mundial do mercado cinematográfico resumo este trabalho tem como objetivo destacar a recuperação que o cinema mexicano do terceiro milênio vem tendo no contexto das condições de produção, exibição e audiência que, entre 2010 e 2017, prevaleceram no país, após se recuperar de uma grande crise que, na década de 1990, quase fez com que desaparecesse. este estudo faz parte de uma linha de pesquisa sobre a economia política do cinema mexicano mediante a aplicação de uma metodologia mista, que abrange pesquisa documental, análise de conteúdo, questionário e entrevista. os resultados demonstram que, a partir de 2000, a indústria cinematográfica mexicana começou a recuperar seus indicadores de produção e bilheteria; contudo, essa recuperação não se vê na exibição de filmes nacionais nas salas comerciais, que estão condicionadas por uma legislação desigual para o setor que se modificou para integrar-se às demandas do capitalismo global. os resultados também são comparados com os indicadores de outros países ibero-americanos e complementados com dados empíricos de estudos locais sobre os públicos que vão às salas de cinema comercial de uma importante cidade do nordeste do méxico. com este estudo, pretende-se contribuir para o campo das indústrias culturais na américa latina. palavras-chave (fonte: tesauro da unesco) cinema; cinema mexicano; indústria cinematográfica; produção audiovisual; display; público; usuário cultural; audiências. 5palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 introducción la historia reciente de la industria del cine mexicano tiene un antes y un después de la firma del tratado de libre comercio de américa del norte (tlcan), el cual se firmó en 1992 y ahora se encuentra en renegociaciones con los estados unidos y canadá. esto trajo consigo un gran cambio social e histórico para nuestro cine. aun cuando en 1990 ya se empezaba a observar un declive en la producción con respecto a los años anteriores, ese año todavía se produjeron 75 películas, de las cuales se estrenaron 74 en los cines; en ese entonces, méxico contaba con 1896 salas de cine comercial, es decir, el 28,6 % de la cantidad con las que de 2017 registra (6,633), pero a las que todavía asistieron 197 millones de espectadores, cuando la población era entonces de 80,08 millones de habitantes, de acuerdo con las estadísticas del instituto nacional de geografía y estadística (inegi), lo que promediaba 2,4 de asistencia/habitante y el precio del boleto en taquilla era regulado como parte de la canasta básica. pero la situación cambió a causa de la firma del tlcan y de los cambios a la legislación de cine. la firma del tlcan significó para méxico la entrada al proceso globalizador, con la adopción oficial de las políticas económicas neoliberales que desde la década de los ochenta imponía el capitalismo global, la apertura de los mercados, las privatizaciones y la desregulación de algunos sectores productivos y de servicios del país. lo cierto es que méxico se integró al proceso globalizador sin prepararse para una competencia que por mucho era asimétrica en igualdad de condiciones para algunos sectores productivos, como lo fue para el sector de la industria cinematográfica mexicana. en ese entonces, la legislación de cine vigente hasta 1992 establecía que las películas nacionales podían ser exhibidas hasta en un 50 % del total de pantallas a nivel nacional. si bien no siempre se obtenía una producción que aprovechara esta cuota de pantalla, al menos existía esta regulación como medida proteccionista para el sector. hoy, las reformas a la legislación cinematográfica, resultado de los cambios regulatorios para negociar 6 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova este sector en el tlcan, establecen que a partir de 1997 se podrán exhibir películas nacionales hasta en un 10 % de nuestras pantallas, con lo que los estrenos de películas extranjeras, por no decir estadounidenses, han venido a ocupar un lugar preponderante, no solo en las salas de cine comercial, sino también en el consumo audiovisual del espectador en otras plataformas como la televisión abierta, de paga e internet. esta apertura del mercado, los cambios regulatorios y las privatizaciones del sector trajeron consigo una gran crisis del cine mexicano en la década de los noventa, de forma que en 1997 se produjeron solo nueve películas, crisis de la cual se comenzó a recuperar a partir de 2000, primero con altas y bajas, luego ya con un crecimiento sostenido desde 2006. en 1997, ante la crisis de la industria, el gobierno federal implementó dos estímulos para la producción: el fondo para la producción cinematográfica de calidad (foprocine) y el fondo de inversión y estímulos al cine (fidecine), que aún y cuando la comunidad cinematográfica se dividió con algunos a favor y otros en contra, desde entonces han funcionado apoyando la producción. otra medida importante para la recaudación fue la aprobación del artículo 189 de la ley del impuesto sobre la renta (isr), con la que se creó estímulo fiscal a proyectos de inversión en la producción y distribución cinematográfica nacional (eficine), que permite acreditar el 10 % del pago anual del isr a los contribuyentes que inviertan en la producción cinematográfica, lo que ha permitido obtener recursos extraordinarios hasta por mxn 500 millones anuales. esta medida ha permitido impulsar la producción de películas mexicanas a corto y mediano plazo, así como su distribución, aunque limitada, ya que luego los cineastas se topan con los exhibidores controlados en su mayoría por las distribuidoras transnacionales que privilegian la exhibición de sus propias películas en las salas de cine. a pesar de estas dificultades, a la vuelta de dos décadas (1997-2017), se ha visto una notable recuperación del cine nacional con un significativo incremento en la producción, en el número de salas de cine, en la asisten7palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 cia y en la recaudación en taquilla, una franca transformación con respecto a la década de mayor crisis en la historia reciente del cine mexicano, la de los noventa. sin embargo, la asistencia del público a ver películas nacionales todavía no alcanza los índices que tenía antes de la entrada del tlcan, ya que, con todo y que ahora somos más y la industria ha mejorado, todavía no alcanzamos esos niveles de proporción equilibrada entre la producción, la exhibición y la asistencia a las salas de cine a ver películas nacionales que se tenían antes del tlcan. sin embargo, nuestro cine se recupera y con ello sus públicos. en realidad, la vuelta del público a ver su cine es uno de los factores de mayor impacto en esta recuperación. a partir de nuevos modelos de negocio y de buscar temáticas más cercanas a la vida cotidiana de los espectadores, nuevas generaciones de cineastas y productores han estado trabajando más con voluntad e iniciativa propia que con grandes presupuestos en la realización de sus películas para recuperar a su público, el cual ha tenido una gran participación en esta nueva etapa que para algunos es una nueva época del cine mexicano en el siglo xxi. metodología este artículo forma parte de una línea de investigación que se ha venido desarrollando desde 1998, con el propósito de analizar el impacto que las medidas que se adoptaron con motivo del tlcan han tenido en el circuito cinematográfico de la producción, la exhibición y el consumo en las salas de cine comercial, de la cual se han publicado varios trabajos. es un estudio descriptivo, longitudinal, en el que se han venido aplicando técnicas de investigación como la revisión documental, cuantitativas como el análisis de contenido y la encuesta y cualitativas como la entrevista. en la revisión documental, se analiza la información publicada en los informes oficiales del instituto mexicano de cinematografía (imcine), informes internacionales, documentos y artículos científicos, reportajes y entrevistas publicados en la prensa para contrastar los datos con los empíricos obtenidos a nivel local y, con ello, obtener una perspectiva global/local del fenómeno de estudio. 8 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova el análisis de contenido se aplica a las carteleras cinematográficas publicadas en la prensa local para observar el origen y la cantidad de películas por país que se exhiben en las salas de cine comercial, lo cual se ha publicado en otros artículos, no en el que nos ocupa. la encuesta se utiliza para conocer las opiniones y preferencias de los públicos que asisten a las salas de cine. y la entrevista se realiza a especialistas y cineastas para profundizar en las variables de estudio, también publicado en otros trabajos. en este artículo, solo se presenta un análisis actualizado de la información estadística consultada, enfocada, particularmente, en mostrar el lugar que ocupa actualmente el cine mexicano en el contexto iberoamericano en lo referente a producción y exhibición, y el rol que los públicos de cine están teniendo en esta nueva etapa para el cine nacional, mediante los resultados de los estudios empíricos locales realizados a los espectadores que acostumbran asistir a las salas de cine comercial distribuidas en el área metropolitana de la ciudad de monterrey, en méxico, a quienes se les solicitó contestar de manera voluntaria un cuestionario (instrumento de la encuesta) acerca de sus hábitos y preferencias cinematográficas. monterrey cuenta a 2018 con una población de alrededor de 4 500 000 de habitantes. con el fin de determinar el tamaño de la muestra para la encuesta, se seleccionó como universo de estudio a los adultos de 18 años o más que asisten regularmente a las salas de cine comercial de la localidad. el tamaño de la muestra se determinó para un mínimo de 400, siguiendo el criterio de autores como levin (1979), reconocido estadístico, quien señala que, cuando la población estudiada sobrepasa los 100 000 casos, 400 es un número suficientemente representativo. otros autores como hernández, fernández y baptista (2000, p. 224) mencionan que “las muestras regionales, las que representan algún estado o país o algún municipio o región, están entre rangos de 400 a 700 sujetos”. por su parte, lópez (1998, p. 50), nos indica que para un universo de 1 000 000 a 50 000 000 sujetos un tamaño de muestra suficiente es de 380 sujetos, considerando un nivel de confianza del 95 % y un margen de error de más o menos el 5 %. considerando estos criterios, el tamaño de muestra que se utilizó para las encuestas que se aplicaron en los años cuyos resultados se mues9palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 tran en este artículo (2001-2017) variaba en un rango de 400 a 600 espectadores. el muestreo fue no probabilístico, de sujetos tipo (que hubiesen visto películas mexicanas en las salas de cine en los últimos meses), voluntarios, mayores de 18 años, de ambos sexos, cuidando la paridad de género (mitad hombres y mitad mujeres), seleccionados a discreción para aplicarles el instrumento al salir de las salas de proyección. resultados las transformaciones: la producción se descentraliza luego de una época de crisis, y a la vuelta de una generación, el cine mexicano se recupera. a 2017, el imcine reporta una producción de 176 películas nacionales y 88 estrenos. también reporta 22,4 millones de espectadores de cine mexicano, un indicador más bajo que el de 2016, que fue de 30,5 millones, sin embargo, es el cuarto año con más alta asistencia en las tres últimas décadas detrás de 2016 (30,5 millones), 2013 (30,1 millones) y 2014 (24 millones). aunque el público que fue a ver películas mexicanas a los cines disminuyó en un 24 % en el último año, de 2010 a 2017 el porcentaje de público que asistió a ver películas mexicanas se ha incrementado casi el doble, del 11,5 al 22,4 % durante este periodo. por otra parte, la producción se descentraliza. si bien la ciudad de méxico, capital del país, es la entidad con mayor producción de cine nacional, con el 36 % del total, en 2017 este porcentaje fue siete puntos menos que en 2016 y 14 puntos menos que en 2015, lo que refleja la descentralización de la actividad cinematográfica hacia otros estados y regiones del país. en 2017 se realizaron filmes en 28 entidades federativas, cinco más que en 2016. mientras que en 2015 la producción de películas cubría el 68 % de las entidades, este año abarcó alrededor del 90 % de méxico. jalisco ocupó el segundo lugar con el 7 % de la producción total a nivel nacional y en tercer lugar quedó oaxaca con el 5 %. este año nuevo león (estado de origen de quien esto escribe), que en años anteriores se había ubicado en el tercer lugar, ahora bajó al cuarto con el 3 %, junto con baja california, guanajuato y chiapas. 10 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova en resumen, en la última década, se ha visto un crecimiento sostenido en la producción, el número de salas, la asistencia total a los cines y los ingresos en taquilla. el indicador de la asistencia a películas mexicanas ha tenido altas y bajas; sin embargo, puede decirse que en general se ha recuperado. como se muestra en la tabla 1, el cine mexicano se recupera, pero no todo ha sido favorable en esta transformación. la exhibición de películas nacionales en el país desafortunadamente sigue siendo la tarea pendiente, ya que no ha tenido los mismos incentivos que la producción. si bien en los últimos años se ha incrementado el número de estrenos en pantalla, incluso con apoyo de estímulos federales, las cifras no llegan a la cantidad de estrenos que se tenían antes de los cambios en la legislación que se dieron paralelamente a la entrada del tlcan, estrenos que eran más proporcionales a la producción, favoreciendo ahora más a las películas extranjeras, básicamente estadounidenses. tabla 1. el cine mexicano en números (2010-2017) 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 pantallas cinematográficas 4905 5166 5303 5547 5678 5977 6225 6633 películas extranjeras estrenadas 313 321 319 364 330 334 317 336 asistencia total* 190 205 228 248 240 286 321 338 películas mexicanas estrenadas 56 62 67 101 68 80 90 88 asistencia a ver películas mexicanas* 11,5 13,5 10,9 30,1 24 17,5 30,5 22,4 ingresos en taquilla** 9032 9755 10 674 11 860 11 237 13 334 14 808 16 142 *millones de personas **millones de pesos fuente: anuario estadístico de cine mexicano (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017). 11palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 paradójicamente, en el tlcan se declara que “el treinta por ciento del tiempo anual en pantalla en cada sala puede ser reservado a las películas producidas por personas mexicanas dentro o fuera del territorio de méxico” (anexo i, lista de méxico), con lo que resulta que el tlcan es más benévolo con nuestro cine que su propia legislación. habrá que ver si en las negociaciones que se están llevando a cabo actualmente se hace algún cambio a lo establecido para el sector. hasta ahora, tal parece que la industria cultural del cine no está en la agenda de las negociaciones. el cine mexicano en el contexto iberoamericano: el valor de la mirada latina méxico ocupa actualmente un primer lugar en número de pantallas, asistencia total e ingresos en taquilla con respecto a los países iberoamericanos. en un análisis comparativo con datos a 2015, el número de pantallas en méxico, que ya sobrepasa las 6600, sitúa al país como el primero en el contexto iberoamericano y el cuarto en el mundo, por detrás de los estados unidos, china y la india. el número de entradas vendidas también ubica al país como el primer país iberoamericano y el cuarto en el mundo en asistencia de espectadores a los cines, aun cuando el precio promedio del boleto en taquilla es uno de los más baratos en iberoamérica. un dato interesante es que en república dominicana la cuota de espectadores de cine dominicano (casi el 30 %) fue la más alta entre los países iberoamericanos. cinco estrenos dominicanos se colocaron en el ranking de más espectadores, de modo que es el país iberoamericano con más producciones exitosas en su propio país en 2015. el crecimiento en el número de espectadores por año en méxico solo es superado a nivel mundial por china. en 2014 y 2015, disminuyó en casi el 10 % la asistencia al cine a nivel mundial con respecto a 2013 (tabla 2). 12 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova tabla 2. comparativo del mercado cinematográfico entre méxico, iberoamérica y estados unidos en 2015 méxico brasil colombia españa argentina perú república dominicana estados unidos población en millones 121,7 204,2 46,7 46,4 43,4 30,4 10,4 321,3 pantallas cinematográficas 5977 3013 935 3588 872 553 182 40 547 películas extranjeras 334 279 265 388 246 239 199 323 asistencia total* 283,3 172,9 59,1 96,1 52.1 45,6 5,3 1214,5 % cuota mercado cine nacional 6,1 13,0 9,8 19,3 14,5 12,3 29,6 91,3 asistencia a ver películas nacionales* 17,5 22,5 5,8 18,6 7,5 5,6 1,6 1109,0 ingresos en taquilla** 842,1 715,2 179,9 638,4 342,0 158,3 23,1 10 201,4 *millones de personas **millones de dólares nota: se incluyó también a estados unidos como referencia. fuente: anuario estadístico de cine mexicano (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017). ¿qué condiciones propiciaron que españa, argentina y brasil tuvieran las cuotas más altas para su cine nacional? españa, con una cuota de mercado para su cine nacional del 19,3 % en 2015 tiene medidas de apoyo para las salas de exhibición que en su programación anual incluyan, en proporción superior al 40 %, largometrajes comunitarios e iberoamericanos. las salas de exhibición están obligadas a programar dentro de cada año natural obras cinematográficas de los estados miembros de la unión europea (ue) de al menos el 25 % del total de las funciones que se hayan programado con obras cinematográficas coproducidas. argentina, que tuvo una cuota de mercado para el cine nacional del 14,5 % en 2015, establece que la cantidad mínima de películas argentinas que deben exhibirse obligatoriamente en cada una de las salas cinematográficas del país en cada trimestre calendario será de una película por sala, como mínimo una semana. 13palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 brasil, con el 13 % de cuota de mercado para su cine nacional, tiene como política cinematográfica que cada año se va estableciendo por decreto el mínimo de días y la cantidad de títulos que deben estrenarse, según estudios técnicos que realiza esta entidad; el mínimo es de 28 días anuales y dos títulos brasileños por sala. también busca fomentar audiencias estableciendo un bono de cultura y subsidio de acceso gratuito. tristemente, y de acuerdo con la legislación de cine vigente, méxico reserva el 10 % del total de pantallas a nivel nacional para las películas mexicanas con una semana como mínimo para su exhibición. esto propicia que nuestros cineastas mexicanos tengan que emigrar para hacer sus películas en el extranjero, ya que ¿quién va a querer que su película se exhiba solo en 10 de cada 100 pantallas? tiene que irse a producir a los estados unidos para que luego la distribuya una empresa transnacional y su película se exhiba en un gran número de salas de cine en su propio país. miradas que valen son poco estudiadas en la tradición de la investigación social en méxico son muy escasos los estudios sobre el cine y, todavía más, de sus públicos. zavala señala que, “desde sus orígenes hasta nuestros días, la investigación del cine que se ha realizado en el país se ha visto reducida, en su mayor parte, a perspectivas provenientes del periodismo y de la historia, y en mucho menor medida de la sociología, la psicología o la crítica literaria” (2010, p. 87). en un balance de los trabajos que sobre cine se han realizado en méxico, zavala señalaba que de los 30 considerados por él como los más relevantes producidos en los últimos 40 años (de 1968 a 2009), considerando el prestigio académico de sus autores, 25 eran de carácter historiográfico y solo cinco sobre procesos de recepción (lo más cercano a los estudios sobre los públicos). entre estos estudios, son reconocidos los históricos de de los reyes (1983), de compilación de garcía riera (1992) y los de reseña y crítica cinematográfica de ayala blanco (2003). más enfocados en los espectadores podemos citar los de garcía canclini (1995, 2006, 2007), los de rosas 14 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova (2006, 2012, 2017) y cortázar (2013). pocos se introducen en la exploración en particular de la recepción cinematográfica, pero podemos citar los trabajos de iglesias (2001), de torres (2006) y fernández-poncela (2016), y sobre los espectadores de cine en su encuentro con las nuevas tecnologías de gómez (2015) y bárcenas y lemus (2015). en uno de sus trabajos, rosas señalaba que “el público ha sido el gran ausente en los estudios sobre el cine, tanto de los históricos como de los del campo de la comunicación” (2012, p. 42), y que los balances bibliográficos al respecto coincidían en que en méxico no se habían realizado sistemáticamente estudios empíricos de los públicos de cine. una de las principales dificultades para la realización de estudios sobre los públicos, añade rosas, ha sido la carencia de fuentes de primera mano. conscientes de ello, los investigadores se dedican a buscar en periódicos, revistas, documentos y mapas en hemerotecas y oficinas para acceder a esta información. no es sencillo estudiar, de manera integral, las prácticas de consumo cultural como la cinematográfica. si bien en las últimas décadas han surgido más estudios históricos, sociales, antropológicos y comunicacionales en torno al cine y sus públicos, estos todavía no alcanzan en cantidad y proyección a los de otras industrias culturales. como señala rosas: “requerimos sumar a las tareas de visibilización de las películas, la investigación sobre las condiciones de transformación de los espectadores contemporáneos. las condiciones de acceso, la disposición interactiva, pautan otras experiencias cinematográficas que habrá que contemplar desde la producción y las modalidades de oferta” (2017, p. 310). en este sentido, partimos de que las condiciones de producción y exhibición cinematográfica determinan en cierta medida los procesos de consumo y recepción de los espectadores. bajo esta premisa, wasko (2006, pp. 101-102), investigadora de la economía política de la comunicación y la cultura, nos señala que la economía política, como enfoque teórico, representa una perspectiva diferente y distinta del estudio del cine, aunque no haya recibido el reconocimiento debido en el campo de los estudios fílmicos. un análisis desde la perspectiva 15palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 de la economía política del cine, afirma wasko, nos ayuda a entender cómo las películas son producidas y distribuidas como mercancía dentro de una estructura industrial capitalista, a describir no solo el estado de esta industria, sino también su desarrollo y relaciones sociales. la economía política del cine incorpora aquellas características que definen la economía política de una industria cultural tan importante como la cinematográfica en un contexto determinado y a través de las cuales podemos describir y explicar su estado actual. estas características son el cambio social e histórico de la industria, la totalidad social, la base moral y la praxis. el público detrás de la nueva historia del cine nacional hacen falta estudios empíricos que den cuenta del comportamiento de los públicos de cine desde una perspectiva global/local. ello nos permitiría profundizar en sus actitudes, opiniones, preferencias y valoraciones hacia los films, con lo que se obtendría información muy valiosa que podría utilizarse por los cineastas, los exhibidores, distribuidores y para elaborar iniciativas con las que promover políticas culturales que apoyen de forma más pertinente a esta industria. una mirada local a la asistencia y al consumo de cine en las salas comerciales de una entidad mexicana nos dará una idea de cómo el regreso del público del cine mexicano es el que ha contribuido a que la industria se recupere. la entidad local es monterrey, estado de nuevo león, una de las ciudades más importantes del noreste de méxico. las últimas estadísticas del anuario estadístico de cine mexicano publicados por el imcine señalan que nuevo león es una buena plaza para la exhibición cinematográfica. de 2013 a 2016, el estado fue el tercero con mayor número de espectadores de cine mexicano, después del distrito federal y jalisco. nuevo león también es el cuarto estado en producción de cine a nivel nacional (hasta el año pasado era el tercero). actualmente, cuenta con más de 600 salas de cine, es el segundo estado con más salas de cine después de ciudad de méxico y el estado con más pantallas en proporción al número de habitantes. 16 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova la variedad de películas que en promedio se exhiben por día en las salas de cine fluctúa entre 29 y 38, dependiendo de la temporada y si hay algún festival, de las cuales de 4 a 7 son nacionales. en 2017, disminuyó a 48 el número de películas mexicanas estrenadas en las salas de cine, de 50 que se exhibieron en 2016. del total de la asistencia a las salas de cine en 2017, el 5 % fue para ver películas mexicanas; en 2016, fue del 7 %. estos porcentajes, aunque pequeños, son significativos si se contrastan con el número de películas mexicanas que se exhiben en promedio por día. en las dos décadas pos-tlcan, en monterrey, como en el resto del país, la oferta de las películas mexicanas exhibidas en promedio en las salas de cine locales ha sido muy fluctuante y la de películas de origen estadounidense es la que más ha predominado en las pantallas; sin embargo, y a pesar de la escasa oferta de películas mexicanas en las salas comerciales de la ciudad, el público de monterrey está yendo a verlas. como se mencionó, este estudio es parte de una línea de investigación en la que se han venido haciendo análisis empíricos sobre los públicos de las salas de cine comercial en monterrey y su percepción sobre el cine mexicano exhibido en el periodo de 2001 a 2017. la técnica que se ha venido utilizando es la encuesta y como instrumento un cuestionario de once preguntas, algunas abiertas y otras de opción múltiple, el cual se ha aplicado a espectadores voluntarios de ambos sexos, mayores de edad, a la salida de los cines (el tamaño y proceso de selección de la muestra se describe en el apartado del método de este artículo). las preguntas versaron sobre película que asistió a ver a la sala; factor que influyó en la selección de la película (se la recomendaron, consultó la cartelera, por la publicidad que la hicieron, por los actores); si ha visto películas mexicanas en los últimos tres meses (sí, no); si la respuesta es sí, que mencione las últimas tres que haya visto; película mexicana que haya visto últimamente y que le haya gustado más; cómo califica las nuevas películas mexicanas en cuanto producción, actuaciones y temática (muy buenas, 17palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 buenas, regulares, malas, muy malas); en cuanto al contenido en qué medida ha encontrado identificación con los personajes, conocimiento e información, refuerzo de valores, temas de conversación, emociones (mucho, poco, nada); si considera que estas películas tienen semejanza con la realidad (si, no); cuáles películas prefiere ver más (mexicanas, extranjeras); si se exhibieran más películas mexicanas, si asistiría a verlas (sí, no); frecuencia con la que asiste al cine (cada semana, cada quince días, una vez al mes, casi nunca). además, se tomaron datos sobre sexo, edad, escolaridad, trabajo, estado civil y municipio de residencia. la tabla 3 muestra que el comportamiento de los patrones de consumo del público de películas mexicanas que asisten a las salas de cine en monterrey se ha mantenido constante en los años estudiados (salvo en 2009), con una percepción favorable hacia las nuevas películas mexicanas, lo que evidencia que al menos en monterrey existe un público que valora y consume las producciones mexicanas, aunque su oferta sea escasa. en 2001, el 56 % contestaron haber asistido a ver películas mexicanas en los últimos tres meses; en 2002, el 73,5 %; en 2006, el 51 %; en 2007, el 57 %; en 2008, el 65 %; en 2009, el 43 %; en 2010, el 53 %. en 2017, se llevó a cabo una réplica de la encuesta que se había venido aplicando hasta 2010. los resultados fueron significativos. tabla 3. espectadores que vieron películas mexicanas en las salas de cine comercial de monterrey en los últimos tres meses en 2001, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2017 vieron películas mexicanas 2001 (%) 2002 (%) 2006 (%) 2007 (%) 2008 (%) 2009 (%) 2010 (%) 2017 (%) sí 56 73,5 51 57 65 43 53 55 no 44 26,5 49 43 35 57 47 45 no contestaron 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 total 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 fuente: elaboración propia. 18 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova cabe señalar que en 2002, cuando se registró un 73,5 % que había asistido a ver películas mexicanas en los últimos tres meses, fue el estreno de la película el crimen del padre amaro, protagonizada por gael garcía, la cual fue vista, según contestaron, hasta tres veces por algunos de los espectadores encuestados. en 2008, se estrenó rudo y cursi, protagonizada por gael garcía y diego luna, película mexicana que también atrajo a un buen número de asistentes. por otra parte, si bien en 2009 el porcentaje de asistentes que vieron películas mexicanas disminuyó al 43 %, en 2010, se volvió a incrementar de nuevo a un 53 %, año en que también se incrementó el número de películas mexicanas exhibidas en las salas de cine con motivo de los festejos del centenario de la revolución mexicana y el bicentenario de la independencia, lo que llevó al interrogante de que, ¿si se exhibieran más películas mexicanas en los cines, la gente iría a verlas? esta pregunta se agregó al cuestionario que se aplicó a 480 espectadores en mayo de 2011 y a 450 en noviembre de 2017, cuyos resultados se muestran en la tabla 4. tabla 4. si se exhibieran más películas mexicanas, ¿vendría a verlas? encuesta a espectadores en las salas de cine en el periodo de 2011 a 2017 respuesta 2011 (%) 2017 (%) sí 72 80 no 27 20 no contestó 1 0 total 100 100 fuente: elaboración propia. en la última encuesta de 2017, también se les preguntó a los sujetos que de qué manera acostumbraban a ver más las películas: el 48 % contestaron que en las salas de cine, el 26 % que en la tv de paga, el 16 % que las baja de internet, el 5 % que las ve en tv abierta, el 3 % que rentadas y el 2 % que compradas. si bien las nuevas plataformas de internet son atractivas para que los jóvenes vean las películas, todavía casi la mitad prefiere verlas en 19palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 las salas de cine. de los 450 encuestados, el 84 % tenían un rango de edad de entre los 18 a los 35 años. de lo anterior se desprende que las salas de cine siguen siendo todavía una opción de acceso preferente para los cinéfilos. un dato interesante, y que reafirma que monterrey es una buena plaza para el cine mexicano, es que, a pesar de que nuevo león fue uno de los estados con menor cuota de mercado para el cine nacional en 2017, el estado ocupó el tercer lugar en asistencia a ver películas mexicanas a nivel nacional. es decir, que, aunque se exhibieron menos películas mexicanas en las salas de cine que en el resto de los estados del país, el público fue a verlas. el perfil de este público no ha cambiado en el transcurso del periodo que abarca nuestro estudio. desde 2001 se detectó que el perfil de los asistentes a las salas de cine comercial sigue siendo en su mayor parte de jóvenes de entre los 18 a los 25 años (64 %), con estudios profesionales, solteros y con trabajo (el 60 %, en promedio, han contestado contar con trabajo en el momento de responder el cuestionario), de lo que se infiere que el público que asiste a las salas de cine comercial a ver películas mexicanas se está convirtiendo en una “élite”, dejando a gran parte de la población (clases populares) fuera del disfrute de este patrimonio cultural. en un país donde, de acuerdo con las métricas de la endutih 2017 (encuesta nacional de uso de las tecnologías de información en los hogares), 17,4 millones de hogares en el país (50,9 % del total) disponen de una conexión a internet y la contabilidad de usuarios de internet asciende a 71,3 millones, esto es, 63,9 de cada 100 mexicanos de 6 años o más, ver películas en las salas de cine comercial puede seguir siendo una opción viable de disfrute para quienes no tienen acceso a las tecnologías de la información y de la comunicación (tic), considerando que el costo del boleto puede ser accesible dependiendo de la ubicación del complejo cinematográfico. en monterrey, varía de mxn 35 a 150. conclusiones como se expuso en este trabajo, luego de una etapa de gran crisis, el cine mexicano se recupera mostrando incrementos en la producción, en el 20 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova número de salas de cine, en los indicadores de asistencia y taquilla, en una transformación en su nueva etapa y en la vuelta del público que tiene un gran papel en su recuperación. sin embargo, seguimos viendo una continuidad en la escasa exhibición en salas y en la inercia de nuestros legisladores para no trabajar en una reforma legislativa del sector que propicie las condiciones estructurales para que el cine mexicano tenga un fomento, promoción y difusión sostenidos. por otra parte, si bien la industria cinematográfica mexicana ocupa un lugar preponderante con respecto a otros países iberoamericanos, se encuentra rezagada en cuanto a la cuota de pantalla que destina al cine nacional. también son pocos los estudios comparativos sobre los públicos entre países iberoamericanos; los que realizan entidades internacionales como la entidad de gestión de derechos de los productores audiovisuales (egeda, 2016) son valiosos, pero hacen falta más estudios empíricos que contrasten lo global con lo local, conocer más acerca de los públicos de nuestros países para ver de qué manera podemos desarrollar iniciativas que coadyuven a fomentar la formación de públicos para nuestras cinematografías. tenemos que aprovechar que los países iberoamericanos compartimos una lengua en común, cultura, historia e idiosincrasias, pero también el mismo control que las distribuidoras transnacionales ejercen sobre la exhibición de nuestros films. en resumen, el cine mexicano está viviendo un cambio social e histórico con su recuperación nacional y proyección internacional gracias a los éxitos que en el extranjero están obteniendo algunos de sus cineastas; la totalidad social, si bien somos testigo de ello, no todos tenemos una participación justa y equitativa, los cineastas en la producción y exhibición, y los espectadores en su consumo y disfrute; en su base moral, están esta inequidad y la necesidad de invocar la voluntad política de nuestros legisladores para trabajar en una reforma que permita que nuestros cineastas no tengan que emigrar para ser reconocidos y que su producción beneficie al país, y que más mexicanos disfruten de estos bienes culturales para que el producto de la praxis cinematográfica sea más inclusivo. 21palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 ¿qué proponemos para que esta industria siga con este crecimiento sostenido? es imperante una política cultural congruente y consistente de parte del gobierno federal para el cine mexicano que fomente su desarrollo, promoción y exhibición. aprovechar al menos la prerrogativa que nos concede el tlcan actual del 30 % de pantalla para las películas mexicanas, mientras sigue vigente, reformando nuestra legislación de cine. recuperar el cine como un emprendimiento tanto comercial como cultural, con más y mayores apoyos federales para la producción y exhibición. crear una cuota para el desarrollo cinematográfico en la que distribuidores y exhibidores contribuyan con un porcentaje de los ingresos obtenidos por la venta o negociación de derechos de ingreso a la exhibición o comercialización cinematográficas en salas de cine. formar públicos/espectadores críticos desde el nivel básico de educación. socializar el acceso al cine mediante promociones como bonos para trabajadores y entradas gratuitas para los sectores marginales (como se hace en brasil). recuperar el cine como un espacio social de esparcimiento, formación de identidad nacional, respeto por la diversidad y promoción cultural. colofón durante el último lustro, tres cineastas mexicanos han acaparado los premios óscar a mejores películas produciendo un cine transnacional y dejando la mayor parte de las ganancias en los estados unidos. primero fue alfonso cuarón (gravity, 2014); luego alejandro gonzález iñárritu (birdman, 2015; the revenant, 2016); y ahora guillermo del toro (the shape of water, 2018). ninguno de ellos siguió un camino convencional por el cine 22 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova nacional, sino que los tres tuvieron que emigrar para que su trabajo fuera reconocido; las temáticas de sus películas no tienen que ver con nuestra cultura mexicana. el triunfo, pues, ha sido de los cineastas, no del cine mexicano. también están los triunfos de un cine más comercial, pero atractivo para el público, de eugenio derbez, no se aceptan devoluciones (2013), cómo ser un latin lover (2016) y hombre al agua! (2018). la primera, producida en méxico, en la que produce y actúa derbez; las dos últimas fueron realizadas en los estados unidos y en ellas actúa derbez. estas películas están dirigidas a un público hispano que se globaliza. el público no nace como tal, sino que el público se hace, se forma, se educa. terminamos este trabajo con nuestra hipótesis milenaria que sigue abierta a la investigación: si se estimulara más la producción y exhibición de películas nacionales, nuestros cineastas harían más películas en el país y tendríamos más espectadores que las verían. y sus miradas valen. referencias anuario estadístico de cine mexicano 2013. recuperado de https://www. imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico anuario estadístico de cine mexicano 2014. recuperado de https://www. imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico anuario estadístico de cine mexicano 2015. recuperado de https://www. imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico anuario estadístico de cine mexicano 2016. recuperado de https://www. imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico anuario estadístico de cine mexicano 2017. recuperado de https://www. imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico ayala blanco, j. (2003). el cine actual: desafío y pasión. ciudad de méxico, méxico: océano. https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/publicaciones/anuario-estadistico 23palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 bárcenas curtis, c. y lemus pool, m. c. (2015). el espectador cinematográfico en un contexto digital. cambios y continuidades en las prácticas y hábitos. versión: estudios de comunicación y política, 36, 23-41. recuperado de http://version.xoc.uam.mx/tabla_contenido.php?id_fasciculo=710 cortázar rodríguez, f. j. (2013). cines y públicos en guadalajara, 19922009. el ojo que piensa, revista de cine iberoamericano, 4(7), 1-37. recuperado de http://www.elojoquepiensa.cucsh.udg.mx/index. php/elojoquepiensa/article/view/140 de los reyes, a. (1983). cine y sociedad en méxico 1896-1930. vol. 1: vivir de sueños (1896-1920). ciudad de méxico, méxico: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico. entidad de gestión de derechos de los productores audiovisuales. (2016). panorama audiovisual iberoamericano 2016. madrid, españa: autor. recuperado de http://www.egeda.com/documentos/panorama_audiovisual_iberoamericano_2016.pdf fernández-poncela, a. m. 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(2007). lectores, espectadores e internautas. barcelona, españa: gedisa. http://version.xoc.uam.mx/tabla_contenido.php?id_fasciculo=710 http://version.xoc.uam.mx/tabla_contenido.php?id_fasciculo=710 http://www.elojoquepiensa.cucsh.udg.mx/index.php/elojoquepiensa/article/view/140 http://www.elojoquepiensa.cucsh.udg.mx/index.php/elojoquepiensa/article/view/140 http://www.egeda.com/documentos/panorama_audiovisual_iberoamericano_2016.pdf http://www.egeda.com/documentos/panorama_audiovisual_iberoamericano_2016.pdf http://www.revistarazonypalabra.org/index.php/ryp/article/view/34 http://www.revistarazonypalabra.org/index.php/ryp/article/view/34 24 nueva época de oro para el cine mexicano... lucila hinojosa córdova garcía riera, e. (1992). historia documental del cine mexicano. número 2, 1938-1942. guadalajara, méxico: conaculta/imcine/universidad de guadalajara gómez, h. (2015). hacer vida en las pantallas. de fans en tiempos del cine después del cine: post-cine, post-culturas, post-fandoms. versión: estudios de comunicación y política, 36, 42-64. recuperado de http://version.xoc.uam.mx/tabla_contenido.php?id_fasciculo=710 hernández sampieri, r., fernández collado, c. y baptista lucio, p. (2000). metodología de la investigación. ciudad de méxico, méxico: mcgraw-hill. iglesias, n. (2001). al danzón que me toquen salgo: subjetividad, cine y recepción por género. en y. mercader martínez y p. luna (comps.), cruzando fronteras cinematográficas. ciudad de méxico, méxico: universidad autónoma metropolitana, unidad xochimilco. ley federal de cinematografía, nueva ley publicada en el diario oficial de la federación el 29 de diciembre de 1992. levin, j. (1979). fundamentos de la estadística en la investigación social. ciudad de méxico, méxico: harla. lópez, h. (1998). la metodología de encuesta. en l. j. galindo cáceres (coord.), técnicas de investigación en sociedad, cultura y comunicación (pp. 33-73). ciudad de méxico, méxico: addison wesley longman. organización de los estados americanos (s. f.). tratado de libre comercio de américa del norte. recuperado de http://www.sice.oas.org/trade/nafta_s/anexo1b.asp rosas mantecón, a. (2006). las batallas por la diversidad: exhibición y públicos de cine en méxico. en n. garcía canclini, a. rosas mantecón y e. sánchez ruiz (coords.), situación actual y perspectivas de http://version.xoc.uam.mx/tabla_contenido.php?id_fasciculo=710 http://version.xoc.uam.mx/tabla_contenido.php?id_fasciculo=710 http://www.sice.oas.org/trade/nafta_s/anexo1b.asp http://www.sice.oas.org/trade/nafta_s/anexo1b.asp 25palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 3 julio de 2019. e2235 la industria cinematográfica en méxico y en el extranjero (pp. 263292). guadalajara, méxico: universidad de guadalajara. rosas mantecón, a. (2012). públicos de cine en méxico. alteridades, 22(44), 41-58. recuperado de https://alteridades.izt.uam.mx/ index.php/alte/article/view/87 rosas mantecón, a. (2017). ir al cine: antropología de los públicos, la ciudad y las pantallas. barcelona, españa: gedisa. torres san martín, p. (2006). la memoria del cine como extensión de la memoria cultural. revista culturales, 2(4), 50-79. recuperado de http://culturales.uabc.mx/index.php/culturales/article/view/30 wasko, j. (2006). la economía política del cine. cuadernos de información y comunicación, 11, 95-110. recuperado de http://revistas.ucm. es/index.php/ciyc/article/view/ciyc0606110095a zavala, l. (2010). los estudios sobre cine en méxico: un terreno en construcción. en m. moguillansky, a. molfetta y m. a. santaguada (coords.), teorías y prácticas audiovisuales: actas del primer congreso internacional de la asociación argentina de estudios de cine y audiovisual (pp. 49-77), buenos aires, argentina: teseo. https://alteridades.izt.uam.mx/index.php/alte/article/view/87 https://alteridades.izt.uam.mx/index.php/alte/article/view/87 http://culturales.uabc.mx/index.php/culturales/article/view/30 http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ciyc/article/view/ciyc0606110095a http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ciyc/article/view/ciyc0606110095a cover luar phenomena vol 16 no. 2 rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 178 capitalism as an ideology criticized through allegory in ryūnosuke akutagawa’s kappa rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani elisa@usd.ac.id department of english letters, universitas sanata dharma abstract ryunosuke akutagawa‟s novel entitled kappa (1926) is believed to be the allegory of japanesetructure of politics and the economy in the 20th century japan. yet, none of the study focused on describing the function of this allegorical kappaland and its society to criticize the system of capitalism in japan. thus, the writer finds it important to scrutinize how the author of the story employs the allegory, as a rhetorical device of literary works, to criticize the reign of the dominant class in japanese systems of politics and economy. focusing on the allegorical characters, setting, and significant events, this study seek for, the evidence that kappa is the representation of japanese society. some events are created to signify the real condition of japan in the early of 20th century, after the meiji restoration. the effect of industrial revolution brings several questions, including the role of the state and its apparatuses, to be problematized in this study. in addition, akutagawa points out some of the lacks and shortcomings of humans through the allegorical characters and events in kappaland. the settings are employed to show the life-likeness of kappa and humans and support the wholeness of allegory. analysis on parallelism of kappaland and japan is deemed important to reveal the criticism akutagawa raises through the characters and the significant events. the setting of the story is pretty similar to what japan was experienced, for instance the massive industrial production linked to the capitalist mode of production, the accumulation of power and wealth to the small amount of the dominant class. it is observed that kappa is a disgusting and deformed mirror akutagawa gives to humans to reflect their life. keywords: capitalism, ideology, akutagawa introduction the idea of capitalism grew in japan during the meiji period (1868-1912), as the island empire emerged from over two centuries of feudal isolation. japan realized that the western countries were far more advanced in the economic and political matter. then, to be advanced, they had to imitate the way western countries run their economic affair. it then marked the rise of industrialization in japan. many businesses were developed; the chance to export goods to outside countries was widely open. during the time, the mode of production of japanese society altered from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production. it was when the production of goods and materials no longer took place in the house of individuals as a home industry. rather, the production was held in factories which were owned by individuals or groups who paid the people to work in their company. this is what marx, describes as the system of production in which a number of craftsmen were assembled under one roof. this system had characterized the european industry from about the middle of the sixteenth century to the last third of the eighteenth century (ike, 1949:186). vol. 16 no. 2 – october 2016 179 a well-known economic historian takao tsuchiya in ike argued that japanese industry had not been sufficiently advanced to develop into a modern capitalist industry on its own power. he asserted that the shift to modern factory industry had been achieved through the intervention of the meiji government (1949:186). many critics argue that the japanese model of the economy is a state-sponsored capitalism, which means the economic system under the government investment to certain sectors of the economy to stimulate the industries in the private sector. “industrialization in japan produced a new economic elite who, as the leaders of modern business enterprise, were responsible for mobilizing the nation‟s resources and creating economic institutions suitable to an industrial society” (marshall, 1967:2). japan was the only non-western society to successfully industrialize in the 19th century (fulcher, 2004:73). however, japan manages a distinctive capitalism in which the state played a directive role and corporate concentration took the form of industry groups that expanded across the economy. the weakness of labor organization was another distinctive feature japan had. because of the growth of the machine, and above mentioned distinctive features were further developed during the postwar period, japan maintained to grab the position as the second largest economy in the world (fulcher, 2004:74). however, even if the state invested in the new or specific industries to stimulate the growth, on the practical level, the greater amount of capital remains privately owned. the capital, including the land and economic production, is not shared fairly for the greater good of every level of society. this case highlights the similar characteristic that is found under any kind of capitalism, the one that is held in the western countries or in the east. the characteristic is, the working class is treated like commodity since they sell their labor power to the owner of land and capital. they are prone to suffer unemployment when their labor power brings no profit in the transaction. within the marxism discourse, the relation between the bourgeoisie, the dominant class who control and own the means of production, and the proletariat, the subordinate class who do not own and control the means of production, became the key concept to understand what is unfair under the capitalist system and industrial society. the capitalist class accumulates more and more wealth by running companies and taking advantage of the labour power from the working class, while the proletariat is forced by a socio-economic compulsion to sell its labour-power to the capitalist owners of the means of production. contradictory character of capitalism manifests itself in the accumulation of wealth „at one pole‟, and of poverty and misery at the other (giddens, 1971:58). such change in social, political, and economical condition is often recorded by some authors in their literary works as the response of that major alteration. at the end of taisho period, ryunosuke akutagawa finished writing kappa, a novel containing 17 short chapters. portraying the life of human from japan who set foot in the land of kappas, in which their existence is still disputable. some similarities of japanese society and events can be seen in the life of kappas. however the different mentality of kappas as a gap and the critics of kappa upon the human condition, especially the political and economic condition, frequently emerge in the story. it was primarily put in by taiji as “a distillation of the author‟s feeling of revulsion from the whole of human life” (healey in akutagawa, 2009:40). the novel was firstly published in japan in march 1927. kappa, according to japanese folklore, is a scaly creature about the size of a small child, with a face like a tiger‟s and a sharply pointed beak (healey in akutagawa, 2009:35). concerning the relation between literary works and politics akutagawa points out that literature is not unrelated to politics; it is in fact one of the major characteristics of literature (yu, 1972:50). his view is similar to what luk{cs in eagleton believes that “all great art is socially progressive in the sense rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 180 that, whatever the author‟s conscious political allegiance, it realizes the vital „world-historical‟ forces of an epoch which make for change and growth, revealing their unfolding potential in its fullest complexity” (2002:27). to satirize the life of japanese society during the rise of capitalism, akutagawa used the symbol of kappa to portray how this ideology brings a great amount of privilege and power to the owner of the mode of production. yu (1972:50) in his critical study of akutagawa stated, “steeped in the tradition of swift, voltaire, france, and shaw, akutagawa also had an ability to adapt even fairy tales to his satirical purposes.” in his work, akutagawa chose the role of capitalists, philosopher, judge, and several kinds of kappas to represent the human world in an exaggerating way. some values in the human world and in the kappaland are intentionally collided to make the readers think that there is something wrong with the system working in the society and thus a moral reform is necessary to be pursued. yu asserted that with akutagawa‟s sense of wit and irony and his angle of vision, he was an accomplished satirist (1972:86). under the light of marxist literary criticism, this study concerns with the capitalist mode of production and the class oppression raised by akutagawa in the novel, which is somewhat similar to the problem in the human world, specifically japan as the home country of the main character and akutagawa himself. this thesis focus on figuring out the parallelism used by akutagawa and answering why he used the kappas as an allegory instead of projecting the problem with the human character. after proving that the characters in kappa are the allegory of japanese society, the writer then analyzes how capitalism as an ideology works in both kappaland and japanese especially in 1920s. this study is necessary to be taken because the writers want to prove that how the practice of capitalism in japanese society raised during the 1920s documented in a literary work. two particular points are going to be closely examined. the first is how the society of japan is revealed through the allegory in the novel, and the second is how is capitalism as an ideolgy criticized through the allegory. allegory allegory is a form of extended metaphor in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, either in prose or verse, are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself (holman, 1960:11). the outcome of allegory is representing one thing in the guise of another, which forms an abstraction of a concrete image. the characters in the allegory are usually personifications of abstract qualities, the action and the setting representative of the relationships among these abstractions. holman makes it clear that through the characters, events and setting created by the author, allegory is intended to reveal the meaning beneath the story. such meaning may be religious, moral, political, personal, or satiric (1960:11). one might find difficulties in distinguishing allegory and symbol for these two literary devices suggest the other level of meaning. however, allegory differs from symbol in the sense that symbol is “an expression of experience perceived as selfsufficient, completely adequate in itself” (cowan, 1981:110). while, it is suggested by holman that “an allegory the objective referent evoked is without value until it is translated into the fixed meanings that it has in its own particular structure of ideas” (1960:436). literary allegory has been treated by turns as a genre, a mode, a technique, or a rhetorical device or trope, related to metaphor and sometimes defined as extended or continued metaphor. however, boyd (1860: 86) argued that even if allegory is generally considered, as a continuation of metaphor, no continuation of metaphor ever becomes an allegory. he explains that there are several essential properties that distinguish allegory and metaphor. the essential features he points out is that allegory presents to immediate view of the secondary object only; metaphor always vol. 16 no. 2 – october 2016 181 presents the primary also. metaphor always imagines one thing to be another; allegory, never. everything asserted in the allegory is applied to the secondary object; everything asserted in the metaphor is applied to the principal. in the metaphor there is but one meaning; in the allegory there are two, a literal and a figurative (1860: 86). as a rhetorical device, which is a means intended to influence people, allegory is suggested as “a paradigmatic instance of rhetoric and rhetorical language, of the sign whose meaning cannot be fixed but is continually deferred, both calling for and resisting interpretation” (copeland, 2010:10). additionally, it is argued that allegory, as a sign of deferred or absent meaning, has occupied a critical position, as the tropes of tropes, by its very name (“other-speaking‟) announcing itself as the definitive mark of the contingency of language and its referential claims. in relation to this issue, de man famously suggests that “all reading, all critical practice, is allegoresis, that is allegorical interpretation” (copeland, 2010:10). thus, to get the sense of the meaning beyond the story, the readers might apply allegorical reading, a reading with the interest in locating some hidden, another meaning under the surface of a story or any literary works. to form an allegory, boyd (1860: 86) proposes that “the mind must look out for a likeness that will correspond in a variety of circumstances, and form an independent whole”. his argument might explain the essential feature allegory employs, which is the likeliness of the story with the situations in the world of the author and the reader. it explains that there is a correspondence between an independent whole story of an allegory with the variety of circumstances happen in the world of human. this feature does not appear when one tries to employ metaphor. boyd argues to form a metaphor, what writers should do is a slight exertion of imagination, and it requires no study. another figure allegory has is that it should have a lively and interesting story as possible. keeping the distinction between the figurative expression and the literal is essential. the distinction also functions to introduce nothing unsuitable to the nature, either the thing spoken of, or of the thing mentioned in an indirect way. in other word, the allegory should have its individuality and distinction with the reality of the author and the reader. between the surface signifier and its hidden referent exists a bond of meaning that is not capricious, but rather essential (fletcher, 1964:70). the true criterion for allegory fletcher suggests: the whole point of the allegory is that it does not need to be read exegetically it often has a literal level that makes good enough sense all by itself. but somehow this literal surface suggests a peculiar doubleness of intention, and while it can, as it were, get along without interpretation, it becomes much richer and more interesting if given interpretation. even the most deliberate fables, if read naively or carelessly, may seem mere stories, but what counts in our discussion is a structure that lends itself to a secondary reading, or rather, one that becomes stronger when given a secondary meaning as well as a primary reading (1964:7). an allegory becomes political if it covers a political event or situation by producing a subtle commentary on it using other symbols. the term political allegory can also be applied to the use of fictional characters as direct substitutions for real politicians. however, not all political allegory is intended. using the objects, characters, figures or colors to represent an abstract idea or concepts, the author might use the allegory as a rhetorical device to criticize or satirize the political condition and the ruling government in their era. this is similar to the notion that allegory can function as “a means of making satire direct and immediate” leyburn (1948: 329). edgar johnson in leyburn suggests that there is always “the possibility of letting the author step aside from his allegorical structure and affords a detachment infinetely valuable to the satirist”(1948:329). rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 182 theory of ideology according to marx ideology is the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group. there are three major characteristics of ideology when understood through marxist perspective. thefirst character is that to be of any value, ideology must reflect the real and practical social conditions within a society. the second, the social conditions in a society that serve as the basis for an ideological framework will reflect the productive forces in that society. the last is that an ideology that reflects productive forces will serve to promote the interest of the dominant social group or class within the relations of production (spisso, 2006: 83-84). ideology, for althusser, is not a mere concept. it has a material existence, because “an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices” (1971:112). his concept of ideological state apparatus, which is the apparatus of the state which contributes to the reproduction of the relation of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation, was the realization of ideology (the unity of these different regional ideologies religious, ethical, legal, political, aesthetic— being assured by their subjection to the ruling ideology). he presents two theses, in order to approach his central thesis on the structure and functioning of ideology. the first concerns the object which is “represented‟ in the imaginary form of ideology, the second concerns the materiality of ideology. his first thesis is that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real condition of existence”. he argues that so many world outlooks are there in our life, for instance, what we commonly call religious ideology, ethical ideology or political ideology. these world outlooks, he argues, are largely imaginary, i.e. do not „correspond to reality‟. in other words, althusser said that ideology constitute an illusion. it does make allusion to reality, and that they need only be “interpreted‟ to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world. what is reflected in the imaginary representation of the world found in an ideology is the conditions of existence of men, i.e. their real world. althusser thesis supposes that “it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that „men‟ represent to themselves in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there” (1971:164). what he means by the quotation above is that ideology is not a distorted image of reality, but rather an imaginary distortion of people‟s relation to reality. he further argues that what is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live. theory on state apparatus 1. repressive state apparatus marxists classics in its theory of state claimed that the state is the repressive state apparatus. meaning that the state always uses political and military force to control a group of people and restrict their freedom. in his attempt to explain how ideology works, french philosopher, louis althusser (1971) notes that this theory of states suggests several theses. first, state power and state apparatus must be distinguished. second, the objective of the class struggle concerns state power, and in consequence the use of the state apparatus by the classes (or alliance of classes or of fractions of classes) holding state power as a function of their class objectives; fourth, the proletariat must seize state power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois state apparatus and, in a first phase, replace it with a quite different, proletarian, state apparatus, then in the later phases set in motion a radical process, that of the destruction of the state (the end of state power, the end of every state apparatus). althusser expands the theory of states in which he believes not only the state apparatus and the state power must be vol. 16 no. 2 – october 2016 183 distinguished, the state apparatus also has two different groups that must be set apart. in his essay on ideology, he proposes the idea of repressive state apparatus (rsa) and ideological state apparatus (isa). the definition of repressive state apparatus is generally similar to what marxist theorists propose before him, which is any apparatuses controlling society‟sbehaviour and freedom using the means of repression. he claims that all the state apparatuses function both by repression and by ideology, with the difference that the repressive state apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression, whereas the ideological state apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology. the example suggests that “the army and the police also function of ideology both to ensure their own cohesion and reproduction, and in the „values‟ they propound externally” (althusser, 1971:145) this ideological function of rsa works when the academy of police or army recruits new members. to alter the civilians of nonapparatuses to become a repressive apparatus they should not be treated by force or repression. some ideological values should be introduced and internalized as the means of reproduction of the corps. in addition, by functioning through ideology the repressive state apparatuses are able to get society‟s supports for their repressive action. insofar as it is a repressive apparatus, the role of repressive state apparatus consists essentially in securing by force (physical or otherwise) the political conditions of the reproduction of relations of production which are in last resort relations of exploitation. not only does the state apparatus contribute generously to its own reproduction (the capitalist state contains political dynasties, military dynasties, etc.), but also, above all, the state apparatus scores by repression (from the most brutal physical force, via mere administrative commands and interdictions, to open and tacit censorship) the political conditions for the action of the ideological state apparatuses. repressive state apparatus also provides „shield‟ for the ideological state apparatus to secure the reproduction specifically of the relations of production. it is here that the role of the ruling ideology is heavily concentrated, the ideology of the ruling class, which holds state power. 2. ideological state apparatus according to althusser, ideology has the material condition which is the materialization of ideas into a practice. althusser suggests that ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, prescribing material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief. its material condition is ensured by the existence of ideological state apparatuses (isa). a relatively large number of ideological state apparatuses were listed by althusser (1971:143). they are the educational apparatus, the religious apparatus, the family apparatus, the political apparatus, the tradeunion apparatus, the communication apparatus, and the „cultural‟ apparatus. he proposes that isa should not be confused with the rsa by saying that “there is one repressive state apparatus, there is a plurality of ideological state apparatus” (1971:144). the unified repressive state apparatus belongs entirely to the public domain, which suggests that rsa is under the control of one unit, the state. on the other hand, ideological state apparatuses are part of the private domain, namely churches, political parties, trade union, families, some schools, most newspapers, and cultural ventures. to tackle the arguments which question why above listed agents are regarded as the agent of the state despite of their attachment to the private institution, althusser (1971:144) argues that “what matters is how they function. private institutions can perfectly well „function‟ as ideological state apparatuses”. when an agent in the private domain functions massively and rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 184 predominantly by the ideology of the ruling class, it serves the function as the ideological state apparatus. the isas work as the agent to formulate and materialize the teaching of ideology in a realization of action. this realization in a small part of the apparatus is, for instance the school day, a funeral, a minor match at a sports club or a political party meeting. however, no ideological state apparatus is purely ideological, as althusser proposes: ideological state apparatus functions massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic. thus, there is no such thing as a purely ideological apparatus (1971: 145) some ideological state apparatus might work as the agent of punishment, expulsion and selection. schools and churces are the example of isa which function is to discipline their students and followers. marxist theory on capitalism the concept of capitalism denotes a mode of production in which capital in its various forms is the principal means of production. capital, in the forms of credit or money, is important to buy the labour power and materials of production such as raw materials and machinery. the prominent feature of capitalism as a mode of production is “the private ownership of capital in the hand of a class—the capitalist class as an exclusion of the mass of population” (bottomore, 1991:7172). the investment on capital in the expectation of large profit differentiates the capitalist mode of production from the previous mode of production. according to marx, the key to capitalism—or any other mode of production, for that matter—is the organization of production. under capitalism, labour power becomes a commodity, bought and sold on the market just like any other commodities, and for many people the sale of that labour power is their only source of livelihood. in contrast to feudalism, capitalism is characterized not by the coercive power or landowners over peasants, but by the sale of labour power on the basis of a wage contract (howell, 1995:4). in other words, capitalism as mode of production is a market where labor power— the working class‟ only means of survival—is bought and sold. the control of the production (labour) process is on the hand of the capitalist or his managerial agent, which covers the power over hiring and firing workers. in addition, the implication also covers the choice of techniques, the output, the work environment and the arrangement for selling the output (bottomore, 1991:72). capitalism developed by destroying the feudal mode of production and replacing it with one based on absolute private property and the market, which made possible far higher levels of productivity (commodity production). in the feudal mode of production, the ownership of the property remains in the hand of the lord, while the serfs are forced to work in the land owned by the landlords. meanwhile, in the capitalist mode of production, workers who had owned their looms or tools eventually had nothing to sell but their labour. the inherent contradiction is expressed in the conflict of interest between capitalist and worker. the central to the nature of the capitalist mode of production is the private accumulation of capital as the foundation of factory working. the capitalists want to pay the working class‟ labour power as low as possible to generate more profit and accumulate more wealth. in the other hand, the working class struggles to get paid higher than they should be. capitalist mode of production began to emerge when individuals who had accumulated the first capital created workshop, that is enterprises where workers labored side by side for a wage and on their employer‟s account. these workers had formerly been independent masters of the product of their labor. yet, because they are deprived of the mode of production, these workers control nothing but their labour power: vol. 16 no. 2 – october 2016 185 the working class consists of those who own nothing but their own labour power. because workers have no other access to the means of production and have to sell something in order to live they are forced to sell their labour power and cannot make use of its value-creating property themselves. so workers are exploited not by unequal exchange in the labour market, for they sell their labour power at its value, but through class position of having to enter the capitalist production process wherein exploitation actually occurs (bottomore, 1991:529). the process of buying and selling labour power in the capitalist mode of production is exploiting in the sense that workers must bargain in the condition of fear to face starvation or losing a home whereas the capitalist bargains under no pressure to employ the workers. furthermore, as the central exploitation, the owner of the means of production extracts the surplus value, which is the value created by the labour over and above the value of his labor power which is appropriated without payment by the capitalist. under the capitalist mode of production, class was a uniquely prominent feature— class itself is a product of the bourgeoisie. marx in bottomore argues that in so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class (1991). the invention of automatic machinery made it possible to replace the craft workers with the less skilled and cheaper labour. by hiring the less skilled and cheaper labour, the factory is able to minimize the wage cost apart from holding wage rates down (fulcher, 2004:6). keeping the wage cost of workers down is the form of exploitation generates by the capitalists. additionally, capitalist mode of production fosters exploitation by disciplining the workers. moreover, capitalists get the profit by exploiting the surplus labor time of workers. what is called by marxists theorist as surplus value that is well explained by bottomore: surplus value is the difference between the two, the value produced by the worker which is appropriated by the capitalist without equivalent given in exchange (1991:529) . review of the tokugawa – meiji periods a well-known notion pronounces that “where feudalism ends, the capitalist regime commences‟. this historical background shows the transformation from feudalism to capitalism from the tokugawa period (16031867) until the meiji period (1868-1912) in japan. the essential character of the new meiji state was not substantially different from that of the tokugawa regime and farmers were exploited as severely as they had been hitherto. from this point of view, the meiji state can be considered as a semi feudal state which is a natural continuation of the tokugawa regime. however, the type of economy established after the meiji revolution was very far from that type of capitalism in which england started to advance. the central and various local governments operated productive and commercial business either directly (i.e. by using their own samurai for management or work force) or indirectly (i.e. by leaving the business in the hands of their chartered merchants) (morishima, 1986:18). two types of merchants emerged in japan during tokugawa regime. the first is in castle towns and the latter in villages. receiving a number of privileges from the clan government, the former were allowed to form guilds (kabu-nakama) which gave them a monopoly of the right to trade in town, whereas in many respects, the town merchants dominated the village merchants. they were capitalists who had a more advantageous position that the merchants in the castle towns, because they were able to rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 186 control the industries to earn for themselves the profits from production. new western style workshops were established toward the end of the tokugawa era. as the remnant of the tokugawa era, the system of clan still be retained. clans were responsible for districts and areas. for instance, saga clan, which was asked by the tokugawa to be responsible for nagasaki were advantageous compared with other clans of easier access to western technology. the satsuma clan started a wool-spinning workshop in 1819 developed their business to produce cannons, guns, medicines and glass in 1846. after the revolution known as meiji revolution, the central government abolished the clans and the caste system within a few years. the government took over many of the factories and other organizations such as school which had been owned by clans. in the early days of the meiji era, the state owned factories played an important role. the modern factory equipped with completely western style machines of the satsuma clan, which was taken over by the new government played an important role in promoting the new western method of production (morishima, 1986:21). in the early 20th century, japan was acquainted with the sub-division of manufacturing industry, which is categorized into five groups: (1) food and drink, (2) paper, ceramics and chemicals, (3) machinery and tools, (4) dyeing and weaving, and (5) miscellaneous. each of them can be subdivided into the small, medium-sized and large factory sectors, according to the number of workers of the factory. the small factory employed between 5 and 49 labour, while the mediumsized employed between 50 and 499 labour. the large factory employed more than 500 labour (morishima, 1986:24). in japan, the transformation to capitalism was very much evolutionary, not revolutionary, the political upheaval of the restoration period notwithstanding. capitalist production had already begun to emerge in the early nineteenth century japan, and the tokugawa state had already begun to formulate a response—albeit an inadequate one—before it fell in 1868. the succeeding meiji regime completed its accomodation to capitalism over the remainder of the nineteenth century, with the result that scattered instances of capitalist productive relations gave way to a capitalist mode of production (howell, 1995:5). parallelism between kappanese and japanese society 1. allegory of setting whenever a guest pays a visit for the main character, inmate no.23, in the mental hospital, he will tell his story of travelling to kappaland. it is a place where he lived in several months with the mythological creature, kappa. kappaland is the particular physical location in which the story takes place. it thus serves the function as the setting of the story. inmate no. 23 fell into the kappaland because of his curiosity of the mythological creature. one fine summer, he encountered a kappa when he was hiking to the mount hodaka. to catch the kappa he encountered in azuza valley, he ran into the shadow of the kappa and immediately snatched it. eventually, it led him slipping into a hole to kappaland. out of the main character’s surprise, the kappas live in a very different kind of life which is commonly portrayed in several mythological books. some books and folklore records in the world of the narrator describe kappa as a mythological creature who live in the river or the lake. however, inmate no. 23 found that they are not living that way. one might think that kappa lives in a wild area, just as how the animals live. supposing that they are mythological creature, the storytellers in the book of mythology would not assume that they have a civilized structure of society. however, what kappaland is drawn by inmate no. 23 is different from theirs. vol. 16 no. 2 – october 2016 187 in kappaland, kappas live as a well organized society with a developed culture and way of live. their civilized society is progressing under the rule of government. kappas own a developed city, housing, even use cars as the mode of transportation. in addition, they live under the state with the parliamentary system, which employs the police and the army as the state apparatuses. akutagawa, through inmate no. 23 describes the setting of kappaland as follows: “then we went for several hundred yards along a street which, for all i could see, looked just like ginza, the main street in tokyo” (akutagawa, 2009:52). after some time loosing his consciousness, inmate no. 23 was awakened in the kappaland. when inmate no.23 gained his consciousness, he was aware that he was carried through the throng of kappas passing a street which resembles ginza. it is not too difficult to notice that the setting of kappaland resembles japan. inmate no.23 himself as a human who all of the time lives in japan notices the similarity between kappaland and japan. he says that “it had a similar line of beech trees on each side and a steady stream of cars filled the road between them. in the shade cast by these trees, there were rows of shops; these dealt in everything you could think of and each sported its sunshade” (akutagawa, 2009:52). the representation of japan also appears in the concert hall of kappaland. inmate no. 23 once came to a concert with tok, the kappa poet. he thinks that “of course, there was hardly any difference between the layout of kappa concert halls and ours in japan. theirs, too, had rows of gradually banked seats, and all the other things i know so well” (akutagawa, 2009:75). these similarities might be one of the reasons why inmate no. 23 was able to adapt and live in kappaland for several months. in other words, kappaland can be regarded as a miniature of cultured life of japan. ranging from the streets that resembles ginza, tokyo; the house arrangement, the concert hall, and the cultural practice of the inhabitants who love to enjoy and express themselves through art performance. all of this parallelism indicates that the story of kappa is a correspondence of the japanese people. there is something that akutagawa wants to say through such setting. if not, he would rather create a setting such as the life of kappas on the river or lakes, similar to what the author of mythological books describes about kappa’s life and civilization. allegory of characters: gael as the representation of japanese capitalist gael is the director of a glass corporation in kappaland, which is along the story is called capitalist kappa. among the other kappa represented in this story, he is a prominent character who is very often engaged in the discussion with inmate no. 23 and several kappas, including chak, the doctor kappa, and pep, the judge. even if gael is in the form of kappa—not a human—he is considered as a character because he represents particular moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities of what a person says and does. gael frequently invites his fellow friends to eat in his luxurious house where the whole room, including the tables and chairs, is in secessionist style, with a thin gold rim on white ground. inmate no. 23 suggests that “from time to time, i used to go out to gael’s house for dinner, in the company of either judge pep or drchak” (akutagawa, 2009: 81). inviting the reader to get a closer look at the physical features of gael, inmate no. 23 describes gael. to some extend, inmate no.23 considers gael’s appearance disgusting. inmate no. 23 utters that no one in kappaland is as disgusting as gael. he reveals that “not even in this land of fat paunches was there one that sagged and bellied out quite as disgustingly as gael’s” (akutagawa, 2009: 81). one should not read this description literally, for kappa and human’s physical appearance are essentially different. accordingly, this judgement will make a sense when it is read metaphorically. gael’s ‘sagged and bellied out fat paunches’ is used by the author to criticize the nature of a capitalist, who, at some point is disgusting as rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 188 he accumulates the resources and capital to enrich self. the description associated human’s greed. from time to time, by the accompany of gael inmate no. 23, went to gael’s club— where kappas spend their time listening to the music and dance with other visitors—and spent an extremely delightful evening with him there. this is another indication that gael lives in an extravagant life. not all kappas are lucky or rich enough to own a club. compared to the fisher kappa, bag, gael lives a very luxurious life. bag, as described by inmate no. 23 is living in a cottage. even if the narrator does not give any further explanation about the life of bag, the reader may draw a conclusion that the life of gael and the fisher kappa are in any way different. as the director of a huge glass corporation he owns the means of production, such as the land, the factory, and the machines, which serve as the means to ensure the production. the ownership of the means of production distinguishes him from other kappas who do not possess them. the marxist view suggests that it is the ownership of the means of production that determine ones’ position in the relation of production. also, as a capitalist, gael is not compelled to sell his labour-power in order to survive. instead, he buys the labour-power to work for him in order to generate profit. in short, his amount of daily life does not belong to someone who buys his labour-power. in one way or another, gael is connected with the other capitalists, as it is suggested by inmate no. 23. he asserts that “gael would often give me introductions for visits to a great variety of factories or plants which were connected in some way either with him or with one of his many friends” (akutagawa, 2009: 81). commodities in which gael’s factory produces are significant to the development of allegory. glass and coal are the products made by japanese workers during the meiji restoration (1868-1912). thus, gael’s identity as the owner of glass corporation and the supplier of coal during the war is parallel with the condition of japan at the beginning of 20th century. allegory of events 1. the use of highly mechanized tools in factory in kappaland, the highly mechanized tools are used in the factory. the director of a glass corporation, gael, once introduces inmates no.23 to one of the factories in kappaland, the book manufacturing, which inmate no.23 found fascinating. inmate no.23 was shown around the factory by a young kappa engineer. they stopped to look at an enormous contraption driven by hidro electric power then inmate no. 23 said to himself, “once more, i found myself astonished by the advance state of mechanization in the industries of kappaland” (akutagawa, 2009:82). the volume of production in the book manufacturing factory reached the region of seven million. this was due to the characteristics of the machines they used. “the ingredients are fed into the machine and, in barely five seconds, they are ejected as octavos, duodecimos, royal octavos and so on” (akutagawa, 2009:82). surely, all of the fascinating gesture made by the machine and the rate of production in only several seconds cannot be done by human or kappas in general. meiji restoration has transformed japan’s economy. industrial production rose five times and exports soared, and japan had become a creditor nation by 1920: industrial production was almost doubled during the period between 1914 and 1919. the average profit rate for industry, which in the first half of 1914 was 40.8 per cent, rose during the three-year period 1917-1919 to 55,2 per cent. during this time, in areas like shipping, ship-building, and mining, the profit rate even rose as high as 160 to 200 per cent (kato, 1998: 32) extending their interests in all kinds of industrial activity, the zaibatsu (cohesive family-controlled groups of monopolistic companies in key economic areas), like mitsui and mitsubishi, grew in power. vol. 16 no. 2 – october 2016 189 the portrayal of mechanization in kappaland industries is in line with the japan government agenda to promote industrialization and modernization. “the process of japan’s emergence as a modern state necessarily involved an institutional transition from feudalism to capitalism” shigeto (2000: 283). japan adapted imported capital-intensive technology to more effectively utilize labor. before japan imported a single cotton-spinning machine or built a single mile of railroad, the state completed a reverbatory furnace in 1852, imported a lathemachine in 1856, and constructed a shipyard for steam-operated warships in 1863 (shigeto, 2000: 284). the use of highly mechanized tools is the sign of modernity and efficiency in making goods. more and more tools are produced to support that mode of production. as in the depiction of industrial production, akutagawa’s kappa suggests that “...in an average month kappaland sees the invention of as many as seven or eight hundred new devices of this kind” (akutagawa, 2009:83). akutagawa portrayed the condition when human realizes that to maximize the quantity of production as well as their profit, they should rely on mechanization and thus produce more powerful and efficient production devices. japan was regarded by ike (1949) as “the most successful (country in asia) in adopting modern methods of industrial production”. the individuals who had acquired their wealth through commercial operations and the practice of lending money at the very high rates of interest became industrial capitalist. this is one of the origin of japanese industrialization. in the early 20th century, japan was acquainted with the sub-division of manufacturing industry, which is categorized into five groups: (1) food and drink, (2) paper, ceramics and chemicals, (3) machinery and tools, (4) dyeing and weaving, and (5) miscellaneous (morishima, 1986: 24). 2. war with neighboring country kappaland was at some time after a war when inmate no.23 stayed there. the war waged between kappa and otters. otters are neighbor to kappa since they are living near kappaland. inmate no. 23 knows the fact through gael, the capitalist. gael explains that kappa was engaged in a war with otter, the constant potential enemy. “yes, i’m afraid that’s just about it.... but something like that war incident of seven years ago, for instance...” (akutagawa, 2009:89). the conversation below between inmate no.23 and gael, the capitalist, shows that kappanese happened to experience a war and they managed to win the war: “who won the war, then” “we did, of course! 369,500 kappas fell nobly in the campaign. but compared with the losses they enemy suffered this was pretty negligible. practically every piece of fur in this country is otter” (akutagawa, 2009:91) this similar condition happened in japan during the taisho period, that they were engaged in war with several countries. kappa war with otters is parallel with the fact that japan had been in the sino-japan war in in 1894-1895 and the russo-japan war in 1904-1905. following the lack possesion and inadequate natural resources, japan set a war with her neighboring country, china. the raw materials were needed to supply growing manufacturing industries. this fact motivated them to invade china, causing huge loss in the other side. growing political rivalry to dominate korea and manchuria trigger japan and russia to set the war. through the war with china in 18941895 and with russia in 1904-1905, japan experienced a rapid expansion of capitalist industry and the growth of an impoverished proletariat, whose wages were held back by the still proportionately massive peasantry and rural unemployed (bottomore, 1991: 365). 3. censorship and ban on cultural products the vivid image of the state showed up in the form of policemen. during a performance of krabach, the kappa rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 190 composer, a group of kappa policemen halt the music to be played. it was started with a policeman who sit behind inmate no. 23 who “lolled back sumptuously in his seat...even more loudly than on the first occasion” (akutagawa, 2009: 77) ‘stop the performance!’ and then... an then, all hell broke loose. shouts and screams echoed and re-echoed across the body of the hall. ‘down with police tyranny!’ ‘play on krabach! play on!’ ‘you bloody fool!’ ‘you filthy bastard!’ ‘get out! get out of here!’ ‘dont’t let yourself be browbeaten, krabach. play on!’ (akutagawa, 2009: 77) in the middle of the performance the kappa policeman shouted to krabach the composer to stop the performance in an intimidating voice. however, the composer was not at any point willing to stop his performance. krabach did not want to stop. instead, he kept playing in the midst of chaos. the kappa police as an apparatus of the state, is employed to set the standard in the music. the performance of music with the unclear message will be prohibited and banned. to the extend whenever the live performance of the unaccepted music is held, the police should come and prohibit the performance to be continued. when inmate no. 23 asked about what is going on, mag answers him with: “this you mean? oh, it’s nothing to fuss about: it’s always happening here! the essence of painting and writing....” (akutagawa, 2009: 78). mag explains to inmate no. 23 that such action is happening all the time. the state is not only prohibit the music but also the painting and writing. those cultural products must have clear meaning, so that the readers, or listeners and everyone know the writer or composer’s intention and expression behind the products they make. mag explains that the essence of painting and writing is that it should be absolutely obvious to anyone and everyone what it is that the artist and the writer aim to give expression to. as a result, this country we have never practiced anything on the lines of a prohibition on sale or exhibition akutagawa (2009: 78) the cencorship on cultural products also happened in japan. since the raise of naturalism between 1906-1902, supression became more intense during the years of growing militarism. not to mention during the war years, japan’s twentieth-century literature, the state and the conservatives saw the literature with individualism, naturalism, modernism, socialism and libertarianism theme as a fall on the moral and behaviour. thus, it should be prohibited. capitalism as an ideology criticized through allegory 1. how capitalism works in kappaland according to althusser, ideology is embodied in material practices. he suggests that “an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. this existence is material” (1971: 166). he admits that ideology does not correspond to reality. instead, it creates an illusion. in other words, ideology make allusion to reality. to unfold the reality of the world behind the imaginary representation of that world, ideoloy should be interpreted. in the story narrated by inmate no. 23, the author shows how the capitalist mode of production is promoted in kappaland. the capitalist mode of production is the system of production within a capitalist society, where the ownership of the means of production, such as the raw materials, the factory, the machines and tools are in the hand of the private entity. the means of production are usually held by the owner of capital, while the ones who do not own capital works as wagelaborers. here are some practices of capitalism in kappaland as the material existence of capitalist ideology. first, the private ownership of mode of production. most of the factories in kappaland are owned by private entities. one of the examples is the glass corporation that is owned by gael. as a managing director of the huge glass corporation he has no much vol. 16 no. 2 – october 2016 191 work to do. he does not have the responsibility to engage in the simple manual labour, but specialized into a privilege work. by employing the working class, he can live a prosperous life: ...when he lounged in his easy chair at home, surrounded by his wife (she was, by the way, the image of a litchi) and by his cucumber-shaped children, gael was the picture of bliss (akutagawa, 2009: 81). second, the mass production and the growing number of machines. during his visit to kappaland, inmate no. 23 finds that the mode of production in one of the factories is supported by the use of machines. in his visit to a book factory, he watched all the “different sized books cascading from the machine like a torrent...” (akutagawa, 2009: 82). the production of the books is no longer supported by the kappa workers. the same sort things occur also in the production of both art and music. this is the indication that the capitalism has grown into a more sophisticated form. third, the government law to slaughter the unemployed kappa. the capitalist ideology is not only working in the mode of production, but also influence the law that the state enact. in the midst of the massive unemployment, the state of kappaland is not enacting a law to prevent the working class to be laid off. the state does not provide a safety net for the unemployed kappas so that they will not suffer much from the condition. instead, the state allows the unemployed kappas to be slaughtered. it is revealed when pep, the judge kappa explain to inmate no. 23. pep says “you see, we have a statute covering the butchery of the worker” (akutagawa, 2009: 84). from the three examples above, it can be concluded that the factories in kappaland apply the capitalist mode of production. not only it is seen from the mode of production, but also the law enacted by the state covering the subordination of the working class. the system of capitalism has been working in kappaland through the relation of production, i.e. the dominant class subjects the working class. moreover, it is supported by the government through its law. thus, it shows that the ideology of capitalism, as the system of ideas which dominate the mind of a man or social group, is working in the kappaland. 2. the role of government on the capitalist mode of production as an allegorical story, the author of kappa employs some features to criticize the japanese people’s life by comparing to the behaviour of kappa in the kappaland with the people in japan in the early 20th century. in this section, the writer of this thesis highlights the allegorical setting, which is role of government in kappaland in promoting the capitalistic ideas. the writer believes that this depcition is intentionally made by the author as one of the criticism toward human’s quality. kappaland is a capitalistic state, in which the government supports the capitalist socioeconomic system to grow in their country. before explaining the role of the government in promoting the capitalistic ideas to the kappa civilians, one has to aware that kappaland is the country ruled by government. kappa has a developed society in which they choose several people to be the representative in the top of governance. in the story, the state, as the agent which holds the power in kappaland is proven to favor the dominant class than the working class. the state has a role in letting the capitalist ideology grow. as the proof, in this novel the state is clearly showing its stance on the side of owner of the means of production in the case of retaining condition of the relation of production in kappaland. the state does not provide any safety net for the proletariat—the wage earner—if in any case they are fired by the owner of the means of production. in short, the state supports the relation of production in the kappaland, where the dominant class exploits the working class. these two entities are paying taxes to the government, but preference action is given by the state to the dominant class in the society. in the case of industrial unemployment, the state takes the stance on the capitalists. rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 192 to be clear, the state passes a regulation that legalize the act of slaughtering the unemployed kappas. the term ‘slaughtering’ in kappaland contains a literal meaning. in one of the discussion between inmate no. 23 and the kappas, pep the judge, says “what gael means was that we slaughter any worker who loses his job...” (akutagawa, 2009: 88). in this story, ‘slaughtering’ kappa is not a figurative expression . the expression suggests an action of killing a large number of kappas in one time for their meat. this action could happen because of the legalization by the state. slaughtering kappas who loses their jobs is an act of double repression. first, the unemployed kappas has loses their sustainable income. they are no longer able to afford a living, including the shelter, the clothes, and most importantly the food. the state action to slaughter the working class kappa who are laid off by the companies is an easy way out. by slaughtering the working class kappa, the government will not be responsible to take care of their lives when they are no longer have sustainable income. kappas who are fired by the owner of capital will be soon or later suffers from starvation for they cannot afford food. it is suggested that “by such action, the state takes over and saves a man all the bother of suicide or death by starvation” (akutagawa, 2009: 84). the law enacted by the state is a clear statement. it shows that the state of kappaland is the agent of repression who works for the interest of the dominant class. althusser argues that the state is a repressive apparatus which caters the interest of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. the state is controlled by the economically dominant class: the state is a ‘machine’ of repression, which enables the ruling classes (in the nineteenth century the bourgeois class and the ‘class’ of big landowners) to ensure their domination over the working class, thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion (i.e. to capitalist exploitation) (althusser, 1971:137) the repression comes in many ways, including the visible repressive way and the imperceptible way. the means to ensure the dominance of the ruling class is helped by the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. the repressive state apparatus, which functions by violence, contains the government, the administration, the army, the police, the courts, the prisons. the act of repression by the repressive state apparatuses might take physical or nonphysical forms. the ideological state apparatus, is described by althusser as the system of school, politics, family and communication. the way kapanese government passes the law on slaughtering unemployed kappa as a just action may spread the message to the rest of citizens that it is just and normal to treat the working class as a subordinate civilians. if the workers are no longer productive, they might cause more problems, including the raise on the poverty rate, which force the government to help them by raising the tax or cutting the government expense for other public necessity. that is why the government makes a law to banish the unemployed kappa from the kappaland as soon as possible by slaughtering them. in addition, they are able to get the meat of the workers, so the price of the meat decrease. this working class, in this case, is the victim of the capitalistic way of production. they had sold their labor power, in order to earn money for a living, but they are not treated like humans. workers tend to be treated as one of the factors of production; not any higher than machines. when they are no longer productive or cannot comply with the target, they are dumped like trash. the phenomenon of replacing human with machine in a mode of production can be read as a deterioration of humanity. conditioning human as one of the commodity happens only in a capitalistic mode of production. human is treated like a commodity, besides raw material, fixed installations (building), and any instruments of production for instance machines to produce goods and services in the capitalistic mode of production. vol. 16 no. 2 – october 2016 193 when the target of production is raised by the capitalists—which is actually unnecessary—in order to gain more profit, the human power will be automatically taken over by the machine. the machine is known as a tool with nearly zero mistakes. it has a prominent ability to produce more goods and services in no time compared to human. the owner of the means of production will tend to argue that that is the time to lay off workers and run the machines instead. the cost of ensuring human to produce the same amount of energy and labor power to present in the factory in the next days will be much higher than the costs to buy and maintain the machines; as in fact machines could do better than human in terms of quantity. as althusser (1971) posits in order to reproduce the labor of power, the firm should give the labor material means to reproduce itself, which is the wage capital. the wage capital is in fact not the result of the worker’s work in the factory, but the material means to reproduce the “wherewithal to pay for housing, clothing and in short to enable the wage earner to present himself again at the factory gate the next day”. the act of slaughtering kappas cannot be related with the literal meaning in the japanese relation of production. when reading this action we should not take it into account. according to tambling “reading involves choices, deciding, perhaps unconsciously, what should be taken literally, at face value, and what should be taken allegorically” (tambling, 2010: 15). one of the possible meanings of this surface story suggests is that capitalistic mode of production in japan results in industrial unemployment. akutagawa employs the exaggerative way, which is to make something worse than it really is, to highlight the exploitative system of capitalist production. capitalism, by its nature, is exploitative. the owner of the means of production exploits the working class to accumulate wealth. this system enables the concentration of capital and the means of production (factories, business, machinery) at the hand of the relatively small amount of people, the dominant class. associated with unfair distribution of wealth and power, capitalism also has a tendency toward economic and cultural exploitation. one of the economic exploitation that capitalism generates is its treatment of labour, which makes labour analogous to all other commodities, namely factories, land, raw materials and machines. labour power is bought at the minimum price so that the capitalists, the owner of the means of production, able to gain more wealth from the price gap. while the capitalists control all the means of production, the only thing workers can control is their labor power. they are, either with consent or not, exploited by this vicious cycle of selling their labor power at a minimum price and as the return get the wage in order to survive. workers must allow their labor power to be exploited or face starvation. the exploitation of working class is what akutagawa criticizes in his allegory of government in kappaland. 3. the role of capitalists, media and ruling party in this section the writer highlights the relation between capitalist, media and ruling party in the capitalistic state. capitalism as an ideology cannot stand alone to retain its position in the mind of every civilians of a state. the ideology needs apparatuses of the states to ensure the dominance of the ruling class and the subordination of the working class. in addition, the ideology is used to ensure the relation of production in the capitalistic mode of production, which requires the workers to be willing to stay subjected. in kappa, akutagawa throws a vivid image that in order to prolong its dominance in a state, the capitalists must control some of the key elements in the state, namely media and ruling party. the relation between capitalists, media, and ruling party is powerful to control the mind of citizens. each of the elements is deemed essential to preserve submissiveness of the working class and control the rest of the state. rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 194 the writer of this thesis found some essential roles of media and political party in kappaland as it is depicted by akutagawa in kappa. the quotation below might well represent how the power of media is held by the capitalists, the upper class with the tendency to control the head of the lower class “but don’t run away with the idea,” went on gael, “that this qui qui is his own boss. not a bit of it—there’s yet one more person above and beyond him, none other than gael you see in front of you” (akuagawa, 2009: 88) in the quotation above gael, the director of glass corporation, mentions that he is a person above and beyond qui qui, the owner of poufou paper, one of the prominent paper in kappaland. gael knows that the media essentially function as the means to spread information, as the ground of society for making decisions, and may lead the public opinion. through its framing and editorial policy media could inject certain ideology and values intended by the ruling ideology. the capitalists, are by their very nature, always seek for profit and benefit to reach a certain target and to manipulate the government regulation to support their interest. the dominant class will use their power of controlling media because they are not a social institution which do not seek for their own benefit. moreover, the media has the power to control the people’s mind through its selective data and news produced in daily basis. gael’s control over the poufou paper is quite surprising for inmate no. 23 when in fact he knows that this newspaper is the ally of the worker. he feels terrible to imagine that the leader of media, which associates with the working class turns out to be under the capitalist’s control. he speaks through his inner voice that “as i watch gael, i felt not so much hatred of the man himself, as a deep sympathy for the wretched poufou reporters,” (akutagawa, 2009: 88). explicitly gael reveals that without his help, qui qui, the owner of the media as well as its reporters will not survive: “the poufou reporters, naturally, are all for the working man, as you’d expect. but, well, you’ll agree that they are influenced and controlled by their boss, qui qui—and qui qui, off course, couldn’t survive without support from me.” (akutagawa: 2009: 88) the quotation above shows that there is a mutual relation between gael and the owner of the media, qui qui. most of the time, the media face the hardship to retain its position as a company. to maintain its existence, the media can not only rely on the newspaper selling profit, but also from the money generates from the advertisement space and other means of partnership. dualism as a company and as the communication means makes it hard for the media to stay idealist in terms of serving the news for the humanity and the society’s greater good. gael, as the owner of capital, benefits from this condition. in return, he hopes that his help to the media will bring more benefit for him. because capitalists believe that there is no such thing as free lunch. what he gives is not a donation to the media. the benefits that might be gained are first the promotion of the product that his company sells. every company has to be known by the society thus they need the media to advertise its products and services. second, from this relation the media will ensure that they will not scrutinize any bad practices of the company. it means they will project the good side of the company. third, media can be the agent of conditioning the workers for not making any political unrest by normalizing the exploitation they undergo. it is, not to mention, that the media has also planted in the people’s mind the idea that the capitalistic way of production is justifiable and necessary to be followed. in fact, this media can be regarded as what althusser suggests, the ideological state apparatus, which is the apparatus which is working massively and predominantly by ideology. this isa operates in a subtle way and avoids repression to internalize values and ideologies to the society. the way it goes through somebody’s mind is not very vol. 16 no. 2 – october 2016 195 noticeable so that they cannot see and reject it. as an institution, the media owned by qui qui is not a government’s media. yet, from althusser’s perspective, this private media is still regarded as an ideological state apparatus for it serves the same goal as the government’s goal, which is to ensure that the domination of the ruling ideas will last long and contribute generously to the reproduction of relations of production which is the capitalists relations of exploitation. the isa teaches the modesty, resignation, submissiveness to the domination of the owner of capital. althusser, on this matter, suggests that “it is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are ‘public’ or ‘private’. what matters is how they function” (1971:144). the other things criticized by akutagawa in kappa is gael’s influence to the political party by controlling the head of the political party. quorax party, the ruling party in kappaland at that time, is controlled by the poufou paper. this poufou paper is controlled by gael. in short, the party, including its quorax cabinet is also controlled indirectly by this capitalist kappa. inmate no. 23 gets the sense that the ruling party, the quorax party is not serving the interest of all kappanese, but the dominant class. as a non-kappa resident, he is told a secret by gael that loppe, the head of the party, is controlled by the owner of the poufou paper. this quotation below shows how this relation works. “it’s loppe i want to talk about, not his speeches or his lies. now, loppe—he’s in control of the quorax party. but there’s someone behind loppe, and in control of him—and that’s qui qui, the president of the poufou newspaper” (akutagawa, 2009: 87) gael’s control over poufou paper and quorax party is a significant quality akutagawa attaches to the allegorical characters. since, gael represents the japanese capitalist, akutagawa wants to say through his story that this is how the ideology of capitalism works in japan. the capitalist can retain its position as the dominant class by overpowering the elements of the state. by strengthening their influence to the political sphere, those capitalists secure their interest as well as discipline the working class by the implementation of social order through education. keeping the relation of production in the capitalist mode of production, in which the working class is subjected by the owner of the means of production, is the goal of those capitalists. how the allegory can be regarded as a criticism the first problem formulation answered the parallelism between kappalandsociety with the japanese. in this sub-chapter, the writer of the thesis attempts to uncover the function of allegory as a means to criticize and how each element of allegory contributes to the critics uttered by akutagawa to the ruling ideology in japan. to answer the question of how allegory is employed in criticizing the ruling ideology in kappaland as well as in japan, there are some allegorical devices that should be uncovered, namely the allegorical setting, the characters, significant events and some exaggeration used by the author. as leyburn (1948) suggests that allegory can function as “a means of making satire direct and immediate”. in kappa, akutagawa employs the mythological creature to present human weakness, such as human’s greed, ignorance, even the inhumane and immoral behavior. the form of kappa as an allegory of human is a kind of direct criticism, which is used to show the weakness and disgusting side of human. akutagawa actually presents a true face of human with a deformed mirror by using kappa as the character. in his story kappa might be a reflection of human in many ways, including the evil side in human’s personality and traits. the mass slaughter of the unemployed kappas and cannibalism are the representation of japanese society, who in daily basis, promotes and involves in the capitalistic mode of production either as the rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 196 part of the dominant class or the working class. the capitalist mode of production in japan is suggested by fujita in ike (1949) that “as industrialization proceeded, the communal life in japan tended to disintegrate, and the role of capital in both agriculture and industry became more important. moreover, ‘feudal labor’ was converted into ‘de facto wage labor’”. the livelihood of working class japan in the industrialization era depends on the wage as the labor. under the capitalist mode of production the status of most labor in japan from ‘feudal labor’ was converted into ‘wage labor’. however, the coercive power of the feudals in the feudal mode of production is essentially similar with the coercion in the capitalist system, which is compelling the working class to sell their labour power to the owner of the capital. one should discover the meaning beneath the story to get into the sense of akutagawa criticism. as it is suggested by tambling: the other meaning of allegory may conceal a secret significance, in that it may persuade readers to probe for another meaning, it may enrich the meaning that has been given, or it may draw attention to a split between the surface meaning and what is underneath (2010: 28). the surface story of akutagawa’s kappa is about the institutionalized mass slaughter of unemployed kappas and how kappas are allowed to eat the flesh of working class kappa who are fired and replaced them by the machines. this story should not be read literally. rather, it should be understood as an allegory. the mass slaughter might suggest a criticism toward the class relation and the nature of capitalism in japan during taisho period. by its very nature, capitalism is exploitative. it enables the subjection of the working class by the owner of the means of production. additionally, the way capitalists generate their profit by extracting working class’ surplus value is a form of exploitation. mass unemployment in kappaland that leads to mass slaughter is an exaggeration used by akutagawa to show that the working class is subjected by the capitalists. in the capitalistic mode of production, the proletariat are compelled to sell their labour power. in fact, the working class in japan also happened to face the unemployment in the early 20th century, as kato suggests: needless to say, the 1920s were from the beginning characterized by a large amount of unemployment. little of the enormous profit from the war reached the working class, who first suffered from low wages, then inflation, and then from the threat of unemployment. they thus had little or no hope of escaping misery in crowded urban industrial areas, and some workers protested, petitioned, went on strike, demonstrated in the streets, and often clashes with police. for the first time in modern japan, labor conflict became a social problem of importance (1998:32). however, the mass killing and cannibalism do not take place in japan. this is the form of exaggeration in the allegory to strengthen the idea that capitalism might kill the working class once their labor power is no longer compelling to be used in the process of production. the unemployed working class is unable to afford the living, including the meal and shelter once their source of income is cut off. moreover, they are the class who is deprived of the means of production, which is hard to get into the process of production, for the only power they have is the power over their labor power. the ownership of the means of production is centralized to the capitalists. the capitalist are those who are not engaged in the simple manual labor, but specialized privileged work. in his story akutagawa also shows how capitalism positions the labor power of the working class as a commodity, the part of the means of production, while the bourgeoisie are benefited from exploiting the working class. he contests the idea of capitalism by creating an allegorical character who is vol. 16 no. 2 – october 2016 197 attributed with the label of ‘capitalist’. the description is shown in inmate no. 23’s comment on gael’s appearance and his nature. inmate no. 23 says that gael is “the capitalist to end all capitalist” (akutagawa, 2009: 81). this capitalist kappa is used by akutagawa to show how capitalism works in kappaland. first, gael invites the narrator to one of the factories in kappaland which produces a mass number of books. in the factory, inmate no. 23 observes the demonstration of how the book production is held and describes it as in kappaland, all they do to produce a book is to pour paper, ink and a greylooking powder into a funnel-mouthed machine. the ingredients are fed into the machine and, in barely five seconds, they are ejected as octavos, duodecimos, royal octavos and so on (akutagawa, 2009) the production of books in kappaland is quick and resulted in very plentiful number. however, the critic lays on the substitution of working class kappas with the highly mechanized tools. this critic is supported by the setting and characters that akutagawa employs in the allegory. gael tells inmate no. 23 that in an average month kappaland sees the invention of as many as seven or eight hundred new devices of this kind. this shows how in kappanese “the process of introducing mass production is going ahead at very rapid pace” (akutagawa, 2009:83). as a result of this mass production, no less than forty or even fifty thousand kappas lost their jobs. the second criticism of the capitalist mode of production is targeted to the role of the state and its apparatuses in supporting the exploitation of the working class. the fact that the mass production in kappaland sacrifices the occupation of thousands of working class kappas and the cannibalism is issued by the state as the simple escape mechanism shows that the state is ruled by the capitalist ideology. pep, kappa judge, makes it clear that kappas “have a statute covering the butchery of the worker” (akutagawa, 2009: 84). moreover, pep emphasizes that the state does the mass killing as humane as possible to be seen as the savior of those unemployed kappas by saying that “by such action, the state takes over and saves a man all the bother of suicide or death by starvation” (akutagawa, 2009:84). at this point, akutagawa aims an attack to criticize the nature of the state as it is suggested by althusser: the state is a ‘machine’ of repression, which enables the ruling classes (in the nineteenth century the bourgeois class and the ‘class’ of big landowners) to ensure their domination over the working class, thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion (i.e. to capitalist exploitation) (althusser, 1971:137). the reproduction of the relation of production should be ensured by the power of the state. thus, in this sense, the state and its apparatuses, including the army, police, the media and political party are the agent of capitalists to dominate the working class and extort their surplus value. conclusion starting with analyzing the parallels between the world of kappa and the real the world of japan in the early 20th century, this thesis aims to prove that kappa is a social and political representation of the world in which the author, akutagawa lived. the elements that are scrutinized in the first problem formulation is the allegorical characters, allegorical setting, and allegorical events. those elements signify the life-likeness of the real japan. the rapid industrialization, the war between neighboring countries, the vicious cycle of capitalism and the restriction of establishing union labor as well as halting the strikes aims to accommodate the interest of the working class are highlighted as the surface and beneath of the story. in getting this clear picture of meaning, the writer of this thesis employed the theory of allegory. the result of the first problem formulation leads to the second problem formulation, which is how this allegory used rosa vania setiowati & elisa dwi wardani 198 to criticize the ideology of capitalism in japan. the allegorical characters, the setting, and significant events are employed by the author to direct the reader to certain meaning in the story beneath. these elements of allegory are employed to criticize human’s lacks and shortcomings, that sometimes they are not aware of. kappa, the mythological creature, is deliberately chosen by the author to exploit certain values. by exaggerating its tendency and actions akutagawa presents a deformed mirror to human. it is to signify that humans are as disgusting as kappa. inmate no. 23 becomes the representation of innocent but critical man, the idealization of human in general. this specially protected person in kappaland, is unaware of its shortcomings and tend to criticize the practice of kappa. the characters of kappa are attributed to certain values and characteristics. gael is attributed with the opportunist, profitoriented, and capitalist nature. mag is regarded as a kappa with the critical thinking and depth analysis, to answer the difference between kappaland and the human world. in addition, lap is the kappa students who guided and accompanied inmate no. 23 to know the kappaland better. in addition, the second problem formulation contains the question of how this allegorical kappaland criticizes the practices in the human world. the theory of the ideology contributes in explaining how the ideology of capitalism is internalized to ensure the existence of the state with the capitalist mode of production. using the theory formulated by the french marxist philosopher, louis althusser, the writer of this thesis found that the ideological state apparatus (isa) works in many channels and ways. it goes along with the system of politics and through the media. those two essential elements are, in fact, controlled by the kappa capitalist, gael. what this fact signifies is that in the real human world, there are apparatuses, the ideological state apparatuses, which are hand in hand, reproducing the means of production, and to ensure the relation of production i.e. domination and exploitation by the ruling class to the working class continues. at the end of analysis, it is proved that allegory in akutagawa’skappa is a device to criticize the life of japanese society in the early 20th century. first, akutagawa employs the kappas as the reflection of human in japan whose mode of production is a capitalistic way. it tends to subject the working class japanese similar to what kappanese do to their working class. second, through the 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of human experience”. on politics (2006): pp. 83 93. tambling, jeremy. allegory: the new critical idiom. new york: routledge, 2010. tsuruta, kinya. review. monumenta nipponica, vol 27, no. 1. tokyo: sophia university, 1972. -------------------. akutagawaryunosuke: his concept of life and art. dissertation. seattle: university of washington, 1967. widiharyanto, norbertus i nyomanedy. “the functions of allegory in hemingway‟sthe old man and the sea”. undergraduate thesis. yogyakarta: sanata dharma university, 2001. yu, beongcheon. akutagawa: an introduction. detroit: wayne state university press, 1972. page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5 pheno vol 16 2.pdf (3) artikel 1 putu (arina) ed-2 (4) artikel 2 indri (arina) ed-1 (5) artikel 3 ose (hir) ed-2 (6) artikel 4 alvian & anna (arina) ed-2 (7) artikel 5 eilen & hir (hir) ed-2 (8) artikel 6 elisabeth ratih & ni luh (hir) ed-2 (9) artikel 7 munthe & ria (arina) ed-2 (10) artikel 8 rosa vania & elisa (hir) ed-2 (11) artikel 9 pramesthi & mul (hir) ed-2 (13) index vol 16 no 2 oktober 2016-1 (14) contributor's notes-1 the american journal of islamic social science vol. 5 , no. 1, 1988 129 research notes sijlrah quraysh by salim rashid for the civilizing (taming) of the quraysh for their civilizing we have caused the caravans to move forth in winter and in summer so let them worship the lord of this house who has fed them against hunger and has made them safe from fear f i e glorious qurbn (siirah 106) (translated by m. pickthall) the nature and scope of an islamic economic system has been the subject of considerable discussion in recent years. while there is something of a consensus on the point that islamic economics is neither capitalism nor socialism, there is considerably more debate on the prevalence and extent of state intervention in an islamic economy. perhaps a closer look at siiruh quraysh may be helpful in this context. the siirah is one of the earliest siirahs to be revealed and it belongs to a period when islam was laying forth its general ideological outlines to the idolators of makkah. it extracts a message from commercial life of quraysh and it adumbrates a world view which can be helpful in guiding us to fmt principles. the translation i am using is that of pickthall and it is important that he tries to provide as literal an interpretation of the holy qur’iin as is feasible. the word “i-la-f,” which pickthall translates as ’’taming” civilizing” has been variously translated by other authors as “gathering,” “security,” and ”union.” without claiming any expertise in arabic etymology, it may be pointed out that neither “gathering” nor “union” is quite consistent with the subsequent text, which focuses on the commercial success of quraysh due to the location of the ka0ah at makkah. it is not quraysh who were “gathered” or ”united”, at the religious fairs, if one may so term the occasions. “security,” on the \ other hand, is not in direct opposition to the meaning of the next siimh but the connotation, as relating to armed warhe, is inappropriate in this context. dr. salim rashid is professor of economics at the university of illinois, champaign, illinois. 130 the american journal of islamic social science vol. 5 , no. 1 , 1988 i shall argue this at greater length below. pickthall's rendering as "civilization" is therefore used in what follows. the intent of siimh quruysh is to persuade the qumysh of their obligation to worship allah. how is this obligation established? the quruysh are told that allah (swt) provided them with both security and prosperity, civilization at the edge of a barren desert. in response to this bounty they are urged to be grateful and give thanks. this overarching theme of the bounty of allah is strengthened when we remember that siiruh quruysh closely follows siimh ul el, (the elephant) in which quruysh are reminded of abraha's attempt to conquer the ka'buh with elephants and how allah (swt) turned back this attack. considered together, the two siimhs serve to emphasize the kindness of allah (swt) in providing for both the physical safety and independence of qumysh and their prosperity and well-being. it follows that the fundamental religious attitude towards allah (swt) is that of gratitude (shukr). this point receives added force when we recall that the arabic word commonly used for unbelief, kufr does not refer to an intellectual state of mind but rather to ingratitude. h.a.r. gibb has dealt at length with the sources of religious belief in his essay on the structure of religious thought in islam: taqwii meant originally the guarding of oneself against the wrath of the divinity by taking steps to propitiate it, and its verb ittaqii is still employed in the qur'an in that sense. the prior evolution of these words as technical religious terms is still unknown; but the occurrence of tuqwii as early as siiruh 96, v. 12, suggests an established usage. possibly, therefore, taqwii had already acquired the sense of religious awe. for muhammad himself, its foundation was fear of the judgment day and of hell fire, and his insistence upon this as fundamental in the religious life is reflected in the dominant place which it held in the thought of later generations. but while tuqwii never lost this association with fear of hell, by the later siiruhs of the qur'in it has clearly come to mean also reverence in the wider sense, and in two particularly significant passages (5:3 and 58:lo) it is conjoined with birr to denote that relationship to god, which issues in willing obedience and motivates all good works. gibb appears to have overlooked the import of the earlier siimhs a1 fil and qumysh, where gratitude, rather than f m , receives primary emphasis. it is scarcely possible to stress the importance, from a theological point of view, of the suggestion that gratitude is the primary feeling imposing on us our religious obligations. this naturauy leads us back into considering more closely the nature of the temporal blessings conferred by allah (swt), salim k. rashid surah quraysh 131 for the civilizing of quruysh for their civilizing . . . the emphasis given in the two opening lines clearly points to the fact that “civilizing” is a ,good-something to be desired and hence a boon one should be grateful to receive. primitivism, or a life of backward solitude and ignorance, is not given any encouragement at all. however much the wandering bedouin may conform to a stereotypical picture of the muslim, they cannot be considered to be models of the islamic ideal. this is to be interpreted in a dynamic and not just a static manner. for example, while the personal law of a benevolent despot is consistent with the transition from barbarism to civilization, the continuation of civilization requires the institution of impartial and impersonal laws. hence the injunction to accept civilization is also an injunction to accept one of its necessary accompaniments-the rule of law. as allah (swt) has stressed how quruysh have been provided with civilization as a good, so too must islamic forces aim at providing for that complex seam of achievements collectively termed “civilization.” it is well known that the muslim civilization, which subsequently arose, was both based on law and urban culture. my point, however, is to urge that perhaps these historical outcomes should be looked upon as the necessary consequences of the world view urged by the holy qur’gn in its using of gratitude and belief upon quruysh. the last lines of the siiruh return to the basic theme and remind us in concrete terms of the benefits of the ”taming” of quruysh by a bountiful allah, who has fed them against hunger and who has made them safe from fear this provision of basic needs is to be seen as one of the attributes of allah (swt) and serves to remind us of the importance of economic development. while the duty to develop economically has been generally considered as binding on muslims so that we may feed and clothe and provide self-respect for those who already are muslim, the context of siiruh quruysh would also appear to suggest that by succeeding in spreading economic prosperity we shall also help others to become muslim. it is not just a question of self-preservation but also of conversion. the intermediate lines of siiruh quruysh occupy a position of some importance for the student of the social sciences. we have caused the caravans to move forth in winter and in summer 132 the american journal of islamic social science vol. 5 , no. 1, 1988 is it not strkng how allah (swt) accepts responsibility for the movement of the caravans? any realistic observer m u l d have made the obvious retort-”but it is greed which moves the caravans, greed for wealth”. it would appear that, in seeking only to aggrandize themselves, quruysh were working out the will of allah (swt) . there is a long and well established christian tradition which explores how god works in our daily affairs through indirect means; a tradition which received its secular formulation in adam smith’s famous use of the “invisible hand.” in siimh qumysh we have a clear indication of the workings of an “invisible hand.” a number of muslim scholars have rejected strongly any attempt to use “invisible hand” reasoning in islamic economics. this would appear to be based on a misreading of the role played by such phmes. they are not meant to be blanket assertions of global harmony, whereby all potential ills are righted by the workings of some invisible hand. on the contrary, they are admissions of the fact that our limitations only permit us to see as through a glass darkly. as our knowledge does not enable us to assert that we will never come across untoward circumstances, we rely on the correctness of our first principles to guide us through such occasions. the use of the “invisible hand” is meant to remind us that those features of social life which are the most obvious need not be those which are most deeply effectual. the quruysh in all their self-sufficient pride felt they were maximizing their own worldly wealth and position. all the while, in reality, their pursuit of self-interest was only a means used by allah (swt) to provide for the civilization of mankind-note how civilization arises out of self interest-and to make the gratitude due to allah (swt) self-evident. in terms of the long-standing discussion on whether islam displays more capitalist or socialist attitudes, siirah quraysh, as interpreted above, would appear to tilt the balance towards capitalism. the redistributive emphasis of islam is strong, as exemplified in the duty of zakah, and the cooperative urge is well-attested, as in the multitude of pronouncements on suduquh. in this connection, the 20 percent zakah on natural resources has been taken as an example, with middle east oil revenues in mind, how islam can provide minimal standards of food and housing for all citizens and is seen to emphasize a sort of socialism inherent in islam. the point, however, cannot have a general importance because it is of no relevance to those muslims who have not blessed with a plentitude of natural resources, such as the people of bangladesh. not only in terms of its acquiescence of the privately-run economy of arabia but also in terms of the theological nuances of such a system, siimh quruysh appears to present islam as a system which provides for equity and justice within a framework of individualism. while the variety of translations provided, as well as the seemingly descriptive style of siiruh quruysh, appears to have hidden some of the deeper significance of the siirah from muslims in general and from economists in salim k . rashid surah quraysh 133 particular, the above interpretation, if acceptable, would indicate that siirah quruysh not only appears to enjoin civilization upon mankind as a means of securing the faith of believers and gaining that of new converts, but also informs us that the self-interest of rightly-guided men is not a contradiction in terms but rather a fruitful way of achieving the will of allah (swt). references h.a.r. gibb, studies on the civilization of islam (boston: beacon, 1382 the factual basis of traditional views of the makkan trade has recently been challenged by patricia crone in meccan trade and the rise of islam (blackwell: london, 1407 aha987 ac). whether or not her thesis is eventually sustained, it does not bear directly on the religious interpretation of quraysh hegemony, the topic of this note. aha962 ac.), 190-191. appendix evangelical christians have often looked upon the roman empire as a means employed by god to ensure the dissemination of christianity. i hope it is permissible to engage in some similar thoughts regarding quruysh, whose commercial prominence rested upon the fact that the direct trade route to india was temporarily blocked and therefore necessitated a detour through the arabian desert. the superiority of quruysh was based on their control of the ka‘buh referred to in siirah al €3and permitted their rise to economic superiority. they impressed everyone by their acquisition of leadership qualities of @izm-”the diplomatic ability, the style of speaking, the ready rejoiners always apropos, the precision of their eloquence.’’ the rest of the story is best repeated in words of henri lammens (encyclopedia of islam: art. “kuraish”) : their cohesion and the prosperity of the capital, makkah, (mecca) depended entirely on commerce. now in quite unexpected fashion, at least for the beduins, the conquests of islam upset all the economic conditions of western arabia. the direct mute from india via mesopotamia was opened up again by the reunion under one rule of the valley and mouth of the euphrates, and international trade avoided the difficult detour by the arabian desert deserted by commerce, the barren valley of makkah (mecca), strangled 134 the american journal of islamic social science vol. 5, no. 1, 1988 as in a vice between two ranges of bare hills, could not maintain its former inhabitants, all brokers, caravaners and traders for generations past. gradually shops and offices closed and their owners came to madinah, now the capital of the caliphate, to rejoin their fellow-citizens who had made new positions for themselves here. the old “kuruish” had foreseen this decline. they had talked of it to muhammad when their ardent fellow-townsmen has urged them to adopt islam. these shrwed conservatives were reluctant to upset the religious and social institutions to which they attributed the prosperity of their town. “allah will not fail to provide,” the prophet replied, “he will furnish them ample compensation; he will enrich them of his abundance when he thinks the time has come.” (qur’ln (kuran) ix. 28; xxviii, 57). nor was it a false promise. with the rise of islam the tribe may have dispersed but quraysh as individuals benefited greatly: henceforth they were to command armies, to govern provinces and for several centuries, to rule the whole arab empire. one marvels at the number of remarkable men who sprang from this city of shop-keepers and tried their skill in careers hitherto unknown to them, such as governors and generals. what is no less surprising than the novelty of these roles is the aptitude and decision of character with which they filed them-and this prevents us from regarding the (kuruish) founders of the caliphate as mere novices. the fact is that for them, commerce on a large scale as it has been practiced in (mecca) before the (hijrah) had been for them a long preparation for a political career. according to such western schoiars as lammens and wellhausen, it is com merce that taught the quruysh how to lead men. it is not curious how a rup ture in a traditional trade route provided for the rise of an obscure tribe; and how commerce provided for their taming and civilization and likewise train ed them in those qualities that would prepare them to create and govern em pires after the prophet (saas) had preached islam to them? muslims therefore can clearly discern a pattern, by allah’s (swt) grace which prepared the quraysh for their destiny. 1palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías de la comunicación: notas sobre la trayectoria del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano mauricio herrera-jaramillo1 césar bolaño2 recibido: 22/02/2018 enviado a pares: 23/02/2018 aprobado por pares: 30/03/2018 aceptado: 30/04/2018 doi: 10.5294/pacla.2019.22.2.7 para citar este artículo / to reference this article / para citar este artigo herrera-jaramillo, m. y bolaño, c. (2019). estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías de la comunicación. notas sobre la trayectoria del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano. palabra clave, 22(2), e2227. doi: 10.5294/pacla.2019.22.2.7 resumen este trabajo identifica la primera escuela crítica en comunicación y el estructuralismo latinoamericano como bases teóricas de la economía política de la comunicación (epc) y de la cultura brasileña. basados en la trayectoria de luis ramiro beltrán, y de manera específica en su trabajo la revolución verde y el desarrollo rural latinoamericano, en que trabaja la categoría de efecto de demostración, son analizadas las limitantes teóricas de esta escuela una vez identifica la naturaleza estructural del subdesarrollo en américa latina. así, partiendo de la necesidad de evidenciar la doble contradicción del capital (capital/trabajo y economía/cultura), la epc pone el problema del papel de los medios de comunicación de masas en el plano de las mediaciones sociales, basados en la apropiación por parte del capital de los elementos de la cultura popular que, pasando primero por un momento inicial de acumulación primitiva de conocimiento, constituirá posteriormen1 orcid.org/0000-0001-5740-547x. universidad de são paulo, brasil. mauricio.herreraj@usp.br 2 orcid.org/0000-0001-5756-7049. universidade federal de sergipe, brasil. bolano@ufs.br http://dx.doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2019.22.2.7 http://dx.doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2019.22.2.7 http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5740-547x mailto:mauricio.herreraj@usp.br http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5756-7049 mailto:bolano@ufs.br 2 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro te la cultura industrializada. emerge, entonces, la industria cultural como la instancia de mediación característica del capitalismo monopolista, y es precisamente allí, apoyado en la teoría de la dependencia cultural de celso furtado, desde donde la epc brasileña supera la limitante ya identificada por ingrid sarti, al plantear que, bajo la idea de cultura de masas, se encubre la existencia de una cultura de clase. palabras clave (fuente: tesauro de la unesco) pensamiento crítico; dependencia cultural; economía política de la comunicación; economía política de la comunicación y de la cultura; medios de comunicación de masas; luis ramiro beltrán; brasil; celso furtado; ingrid sarti; estructuralismo histórico. 3palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 historical structuralism, political economy and communication theories: notes on the development of latin american critical thinking abstract this paper identifies the first school of communication criticism and latin american structuralism as theoretical bases of the political economy of communications (pec) and brazilian culture. in reference to the career of luis ramiro beltrán, specifically his work la revolución verde y el desarrollo rural latinoamericano—in which he discusses the category of demonstration effect—, the theoretical limitations of this school are analyzed after identifying the structural nature of underdevelopment in latin america. thus, starting from the need to show the double contradiction of capital (capital/labor and economy/culture), the pec raises the problem of the role of mass media at the level of social mediations, based on capital’s adoption of popular culture elements that—passing first through a moment of primitive knowledge accumulation—will later constitute the industrialized culture. then, the cultural industry emerges as the mediation authority that characterizes monopoly capitalism, and this is where, supported by celso furtado’s theory of cultural dependence, the brazilian pec exceeds the constraint already recognized by ingrid sarti when she stated that the idea of mass culture conceals the existence of a class culture. keywords (source: unesco thesaurus) critical thinking; cultural dependence; political economy of communication; political economy of communication and culture; mass media; luis ramiro beltrán; brazil; celso furtado; ingrid sarti; historical structuralism. 4 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro estruturalismo histórico, economia política e teorias da comunicação: notas sobre a trajetória do pensamento crítico latino-americano resumo este trabalho identifica a primeira escola crítica de comunicação e o estruturalismo latino-americano como bases teóricas da economia política da comunicação (epc) e da cultura brasileira. com base na trajetória de luis ramiro beltran e, especificamente, em sua obra a revolução verde e o desenvolvimento rural da américa latina, na qual trabalha a categoria de efeito de demonstração, são analisadas as limitações teóricas dessa escola, já que se identifica a natureza estrutural do subdesenvolvimento na américa latina. sendo assim, a partir da necessidade de destacar a dupla contradição do capital (capital/trabalho e economia/cultura), a epc coloca o problema do papel dos meios de comunicação de massa no âmbito das mediações sociais, com base na apropriação que o capital faz de elementos da cultura popular que, primeiramente, passando por um momento inicial de acumulação primitiva de conhecimento, constituirá posteriormente a cultura industrializada. emerge, então, a indústria cultural como a instância de mediação característica do capitalismo monopolista e é exatamente nela, com base na teoria da dependência cultural de celso furtado, que a epc brasileira excede a limitante já identificada por ingrid sarti, que propõe que sob a perspectiva da cultura de massas encobre-se a existência de uma cultura de classe. palavras-chave (fonte: tesauro da unesco) pensamento critico; dependência cultural; economia política da comunicação; economia política da comunicação e cultura; meios de comunicação social; luis ramiro beltrán; brasil; celso furtado; ingrid sarti; estruturalismo histórico. 5palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 introducción este artículo parte de la idea de que, a diferencia de la proletarización vía expansión de la relación salarial que se dio en el campo latinoamericano con la revolución tecnológica que representaron los monocultivos de maíz, arroz, trigo, entre otros, donde la subordinación al capital podía expresarse bajo la fórmula marxiana de la transición de la subsunción formal a la real, en las comunidades rurales, la subordinación se produjo bajo los moldes de lo que proponemos llamar “subsunción por imposición de conocimiento”. recurriendo al caso del pequeño propietario de tierra que produce tabaco en el estado brasileño de santa catalina, quien sometido al poder del monopolio-monopsonio de la gran industria tabacalera internacional debía comprar todos los insumos a aquella industria, incluso recurriendo a crédito ofrecido por ella misma o sus filiales comerciales o financieras, y además tenía que comprometer la venta de todo su producto a ella, eximiéndose, aquella empresa, de toda la responsabilidad que implicaría mantener un cuadro de trabajadores rurales asalariados, planteamos que no existe entonces, en ese caso, subsunción formal y, por ende, tampoco se puede hablar de subsunción real del trabajo en el capital. sin embargo, sí existe claramente una forma muy desarrollada de subsunción material, en la medida en que el proceso concreto de trabajo queda completamente bajo el control efectivo del referido gran capital. esta nueva forma de control se establece gracias a la superioridad científica y tecnológica norteamericana, desarrollada, principalmente, a partir del siglo pasado bajo la difusión del modelo de la revolución verde, que representa una nueva forma de acumulación primitiva de capital que, reproduciendo las condiciones de trabajo libre y permitiendo que el campesino acceda a la tierra, encubre el carácter explotador del capital. pues, en la medida en que integra el trabajador “independiente” a la lógica del mercado (del consumo), atomizando y fragmentando las comunidades y con ello los valores y principios asociados a sus modos de vida tradicionales, crea materialmente las condiciones objetivas para el control del trabajo. 6 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro en cuanto que ese análisis muestra la importancia de variables extraeconómicas a la hora de analizar la relación desarrollo-subdesarrollo, tema clave en las discusiones principalmente económicas de las décadas de los sesenta y setenta, es recuperada la discusión en torno a la relación cultura-desarrollo traída por celso furtado y, en general, por el estructuralismo latinoamericano, la cual permite redimensionar el problema del subdesarrollo, al entenderlo, principalmente, como un proceso, primero, de histórica dependencia cultural y, después, en el momento de la industrialización periférica, de dependencia tecnológica, la cual se materializa como un proceso de enraizamiento en la estructura productiva de aquella dependencia cultural, pues los avances de la técnica se dan jalonados por las necesidades de satisfacer la diversificación de los patrones de consumo de los grupos privilegiados de las periferias. la base del proyecto modernizador norteamericano de superioridad científica fue la generación de una nueva estructura de relaciones internacionales con américa latina, sustentada en una doble estrategia de difusión científica y penetración cultural. para ello, tres elementos fueron claves: ciencia, educación y comunicación, los cuales, más que procesos aislados, se materializaron de forma simultánea basados en una infraestructura institucional común y particular (en torno a la organización de las naciones unidas [onu]). con el propósito de aportar al elemento de comunicación de esta estrategia, este trabajo propone el diálogo con al menos tres importantes bibliografías: el estructuralismo histórico latinoamericano y las teorías del desarrollo, las teorías de la dependencia o del imperialismo cultural, derivadas de las teorías de la dependencia y que a la postre forman la primera escuela crítica del pensamiento comunicacional latinoamericano, y la llamada economía política de la comunicación y de la cultura, que encuentra también en américa latina particularidades que la diferencian de otras escuelas, europeas y norteamericanas de enfoque similar. dados los límites de extensión de este artículo, no desarrollamos un diálogo amplio entre estas y otras corrientes importantes de pensamiento como la de los estudios culturales, también referenciado en el texto; sin embargo, consideramos 7palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 que puede contribuir también a esta escuela al profundizar muy específicamente en una categoría transversal a las tres corrientes planteadas: el efecto de demostración. la estrategia argumentativa que adoptamos fue la de poner en diálogo dos de los más importantes intelectuales vinculados a las dos primeras escuelas citadas, celso furtado y luis ramiro beltrán, respectivamente, con la intención de presentar la forma de apropiación de esta categoría por la vertiente crítica de la economía política de la comunicación y de la cultura (epc), a la cual los autores de este trabajo pertenecen. recuperar este viejo concepto tiene por objetivo proponer un diálogo necesario para el avance del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano en un momento de cambios fundamentales que afectan los diferentes campos intelectuales, en particular el de la comunicación. por tanto, la contribución es innovadora, no solo respecto de su contenido específico, sino especialmente por constituirse en una propuesta de diálogo inédita, basada en una metodología poco utilizada de revisitar los clásicos para promover el diálogo entre contribuciones aparentemente distantes, según una categoría focal, a partir de la cual otros desarrollos, otros diálogos, pueden ser realizados, explorando una particular frontera de conocimiento. en un primer momento, y con el objetivo de contextualizar el marco internacional en el que surge la comunicación para el desarrollo en américa latina, uno de los mecanismos utilizados para la ejecución de la doble estrategia antes mencionada, presentamos de manera sintética su contenido destacando su materialización a través de la subsunción por imposición de conocimiento. a continuación, se da cuenta del contexto en que surge la primera escuela de pensamiento crítico latinoamericana en comunicación (dependencia cultural o imperialismo cultural), para entonces evidenciar la crítica hecha a finales de la década de los setenta por ingrid sarti respecto de que, bajo la idea de cultura de masas, resaltada desde un análisis de relaciones entre naciones, se encubre la existencia de una cultura de clase y su contradicción inherente. puesta esta crítica, recuperamos el concepto de efecto de demostración a partir de los aportes de dos grandes representantes de las escuelas puestas en discusión, con el objetivo de mostrar las potencialidades y limitantes del concepto para explicar la profundización 8 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro del subdesarrollo y la dependencia en los países de américa latina por la vía de la modernización de los patrones de consumo. finalmente, si en las teorías del imperialismo cultural el problema de la dependencia, como veremos, era entendido como un proceso de imposición cultural a través de los medios masivos, desde la perspectiva de la epc, tal como aquí se defiende, articulada con el estructuralismo latinoamericano de furtado, las industrias culturales deben ser entendidas como una instancia de mediación que desempeña un doble papel, pues, por un lado, favorece la integración internacional de los países periféricos, pero, por otro, de manera contradictoria, incentiva procesos de desintegración interna en favor de grupos privilegiados locales. así, entonces, la epc pone el problema del papel de los medios de comunicación de masas en el plano de las mediaciones sociales, basados en la apropiación por parte del capital de los elementos de la cultura popular que, pasando primero por un momento inicial de acumulación primitiva de conocimiento (bolaño, 2013), constituirá posteriormente la cultura industrializada. emerge, entonces, la industria cultural como la instancia de mediación característica del capitalismo monopolista, y es precisamente allí donde, apoyada en la teoría de la dependencia cultural en furtado, la epc brasileña propone una alternativa para superar la limitante identificada por sartri y el concepto de educación para el desarrollo (ed) propuesto históricamente para entender el subdesarrollo fuera del sistema de producción. así entonces, la reproducción de la dependencia cultural implica modificación de modos de consumo y de vida en consonancia con los cambios en las relaciones sociales de producción, en que la dependencia tecnológica también se reproduce, modificando las formas de subsunción del trabajo y los procesos productivos. como diría marx, una vez concluido, el proceso no deja huellas. entenderlo exige aclarar su génesis y las diferentes estrategias a través de las cuales el capital se ha apropiado de las culturas tradicionales, dejando en manos de las industrias culturales (y otras instancias de mediación) el papel de mediación social por subsunción del trabajo cultural en el capital. 9palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 difusión científica y penetración cultural hegemonía de los estados unidos y el pensamiento crítico latinoamericano el punto de partida de la propuesta que desarrollamos es la reformulación de la política de relaciones internacionales para américa latina que los estados unidos estructuran a partir de la década de los treinta con el objetivo de alinear a américa latina de su lado como estrategia política y económica ante la guerra. así, iniciando con la política de buena vecindad del presidente franklin d. roosevelt en la década de los treinta, posteriormente el punto iv de harry truman en 1948 y finalmente la alianza para el progreso de john f. kennedy, se estructuraría una estrategia de relaciones internacionales basada en dos pilares fundamentales: por un lado, la difusión científica, y por el otro, la penetración cultural. las bases de esta estrategia son resultado de décadas de trabajo norteamericano en investigación y experimentación en germoplasma, cultivo y evaluación de semillas modificadas genéticamente y diversos tipos de programas de naturaleza “social” (extensión rural, crédito, alfabetización, etc.), bajo el liderazgo de nelson rockefeller, quien promovió y orquestó una serie de alianzas entre capital privado y público norteamericano con las élites locales y los gobiernos de los países latinoamericanos a través de toda una infraestructura institucional complementaria a la multilateral (banco mundial [bm], fondo monetario internacional [fmi], etc.), que garantizaron, vía política pública y de cooperación internacional, esa doble estrategia fundada en la superioridad científica y tecnológica, y en el mito del desarrollo. si bien todos los desarrollos tecnológicos propios de la carrera armamentista de la segunda guerra mundial fueron fundamentales para estos avances, serían proyectos como el centro internacional del mejoramiento de maíz y trigo (cimmyt) los que posteriormente abrirían las fronteras “agriculturales” nacionales e internacionales para la circulación de semillas y variedades entre regiones y países, “consolidando” la idea de un proyecto de acumulación de capital a partir del mejoramiento genético de plantas y venta de semillas (ortoll, 2003). asimismo, fue el trabajo diplomático de 10 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro rockefeller evidenciado en el entramado de alianzas, de aprendizaje en cooperación entre capitales externos y locales, más la ayuda invaluable de los gobiernos latinoamericanos, el que facilitó la consolidación de ese proyecto. como ya se mencionó, para la materialización de esta doble estrategia, tres importantes eventos focalizados en la investigación científica, la educación y la comunicación fueron fundamentales. en cuanto a la investigación y la educación, adicional a centros de investigación del germoplasma como el cimmyt (primer evento), la creación en 1942 del instituto interamericano de ciencias agrícolas (iica) (segundo evento) desempeñó un papel protagónico en relación con el desarrollo del servicio de extensión en américa latina durante la segunda mitad de la década de los cuarenta. de manera conjunta con el gobierno de los estados unidos, formó en su escuela para graduados (intercambios científicos) los primeros extensionistas, quienes posteriormente eran enviados a sus países con la idea de replicar los conocimientos o, en algunos casos, a integrarse a los ministerios de agricultura o instituciones relacionadas con el tema agrario, así como en la reorganización de los programas de ciencias agrarias en los países de américa latina. desde allí se darían avances teóricos y experimentales en sociología rural, trascendiendo la esfera de lo estrictamente productivo, con el objetivo de aproximarse a la realidad rural comunitaria y pensar la forma más adecuada para potenciar los cambios sociales y culturales que era necesario generar sobre el campesino y las comunidades a fin de que este apropiara la idea del aumento de la productividad bajo el paradigma norteamericano. del lado de la comunicación (tercer evento), a finales de la década de los cincuenta, por iniciativa de la united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco), y con el respaldo de la universidad central del ecuador, sería creado el centro internacional de estudios superiores de comunicación para américa latina (ciespal). la proyección de esta institución estaría fundamentada en la idea de la comunicación para el desarrollo, fruto de las recomendaciones de la asamblea general de las naciones unidas, según la cual los países subdesarrollados deberían in11palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 cluir en sus planes para el crecimiento económico la inversión de recursos para expandir y mejorar la comunicación, inspirados en estudios de investigadores como daniel lerner (1958), everett rogers (1962), wilbur schramm (1964) y académicos vinculados al massachusetts institute of technology como lucien pye e ithiel de sola poo. se generó así todo un movimiento que, basado en los proyectos internacionales de alfabetización, extensión rural, radios comunitarias, servicios de salud, programas de crédito agrícola, entre otros, atribuía a los medios masivos de comunicación y a la educación un papel clave en los cambios sociales necesarios para la modernización (sánchez, 1986). son varios los acontecimientos que pueden ser definidos como las raíces de la comunicación para el desarrollo. sin embargo, todas tienen en común entender las estructuras cognoscitivas, culturales y conductuales en los países de la periferia como un obstáculo al desarrollo y, por tanto, ven en su transformación la posibilidad de cambiar sus modos de vida para hacerlos instrumentales a la reproducción del capital. así entonces, la comunicación para el desarrollo surge como un modelo de comunicación correspondiente con el modelo de desarrollo económico capitalista que los estados unidos buscaban difundir en aquel momento para legitimar el tipo de relaciones internacionales adecuado a sus intereses económicos, políticos y estratégicos. para ello, contaba con una enorme superioridad científico-tecnológica que era la base de la doble estrategia mencionada de difusión científica y penetración cultural. la primera escuela crítica latinoamericana de comunicación será formada, precisamente, por los jóvenes intelectuales reclutados para ese proyecto en los diferentes países de américa latina, para los cuales el enfoque funcionalista se presentará crecientemente como una barrera. nuestra hipótesis de fondo es que, en esas condiciones, los aportes críticos del pensamiento histórico-estructural latinoamericano —que incluyen las teorías de la dependencia— se presentan como la opción natural que esos jóvenes investigadores encontrarán para avanzar en su rebeldía epistemológica. con esto, se incorporan a todo un campo de pensamiento crítico que está en la base de lo que vendría a ser, más tarde, la epc. 12 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro hegemonía y subsunción por imposición de conocimiento dos movimientos sucesivos marcan el proceso que lleva del precapitalismo, bajo el comando del capital mercantil europeo, a la revolución industrial y la implantación del modo de producción capitalista: uno de acumulación primitiva de conocimiento (bolaño, 2013), que, en la producción mercantil, marca la transición del artesanado medieval a la industria, en el periodo manufacturero, y otro, de subsunción por imposición de conocimiento, en que el capital se vale de los desarrollos tecnológicos que pudo realizar según aquella expropiación originaria para revertir la relación sujeto-objeto e implantar su propio modo de producción. en el mundo rural, este mismo proceso se presentará en un periodo mucho más amplio, que inicia en la constitución del mercado mundial, obra del gran capital mercantil y del absolutismo europeo, hasta la modernización del campo conocida como revolución verde en la segunda mitad del siglo xx. entre uno y otro momento, procesos fundamentales de apropiación, deslegitimación e imposición de conocimiento se desarrollaron por todo el mundo; sin embargo, solo será a partir de la consolidación del proyecto modernizador de la potencia norteamericana al final de la segunda guerra mundial que avanzarán las relaciones de producción específicamente capitalistas sobre el agro. al contrario de lo que ocurriera en los países del centro, en américa latina, el progreso tecnológico, incorporado inicialmente por la vía del consumo de las élites criollas, define un tipo de modernización que, favoreciendo inicialmente la incorporación imitativa de patrones de consumo y de vida, convirtió la dependencia cultural en un problema estructural del subdesarrollo. es celso furtado quien aclara este problema, al incorporar el concepto antropológico de difusión cultural para entender la histórica dependencia cultural que américa latina ha vivido desde el momento mismo de la reconfiguración de su inserción en el mercado mundial durante la segunda mitad del siglo xix, cuando los grupos internos consiguieron apropiarse parcialmente de la expansión del excedente, el cual tuvo como principal destino financiar una rápida diversificación de sus hábitos de consumo, vía importación de mercancías. sin embargo, entrado el siglo xx, se hizo ne13palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 cesario que parte de dicho excedente fuera canalizado hacia la compra de tecnología para acompañar el proceso de diversificación de patrones de consumo. se dará durante este periodo, señala furtado, el enraizamiento del problema de la dependencia cultural en el sistema de producción, es decir, la dependencia cultural ahora se torna también dependencia tecnológica. en este sentido, es necesario ver en la difusión del progreso tecnológico centro-periferia un mecanismo que incide, no solo en la transformación de los modos de producción, sino también en el proceso de formación de la sociedad capitalista en la periferia, la cual requiere la generación de una serie de mediaciones para permitir la valorización del capital. siguiendo el concepto de modo de vida propuesto por andré granou (1972),3 podemos plantear que, de la mano de la profundización del proceso de dependencia cultural, hay un proceso, principalmente a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo xx, de transformación de los modos de vida tradicionales en américa latina, entre ellos, el campesino. esos procesos son buen ejemplo de subsunción por imposición de conocimiento, pues, mientras son despojados los conocimientos tradicionales asociados a los cultivos y las prácticas pecuarias, así como el germoplasma de las variedades con que cuentan estos países, un nuevo conocimiento bajo el título de “científico” es difundido a técnicos, empresarios y productores. no queda duda, entonces, de que el capital intervino, y sigue interviniendo, de manera violenta, deslegitimando y subordinando las culturas tradicionales latinoamericanas en nombre de la ciencia occidental. es decir, mientras en el campo económico y político, involucrado en el proceso de industrialización por sustitución de importaciones se daba la expansión de los grandes conglomerados norteamericanos, de forma paralela en el campo social y cultural, involucrado en el proceso de revolución verde, se daba la imposición de las estructuras cognoscitivas, culturales y conductuales (valores y principios) ligados a la sociedad occidental. el 3 por modo de vida debe entenderse “una totalidad concreta [citando a kosik, 1963] producida y reproducida por el propio desarrollo del modo de producción, lo que exige analizar sus transformaciones como un proceso de destrucción del antiguo modo de vida, destrucción que es en sí misma una condición para que surja un nuevo modo de vida que coincida con las nuevas condiciones de producción” (granou, 1972, p. 49). 14 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro carácter modernizador de ambos procesos enmascaraba lo esencial, la dominación imperialista que era el garante de la implantación de las relaciones capitalistas en la periferia. la doble estrategia aparece como mediadora de la difusión del progreso tecnológico a los países de la periferia, sometiendo de forma indirecta, no solo a un cercamiento en términos productivos a las comunidades rurales (al imponer al campesino la compra de todos los insumos necesarios para sus sistemas productivos y la reproducción de su familia, y la venta de su producción a estas grandes empresas), sino también en términos culturales, pues el conjunto de valores, principios y pautas de consumo asociadas a esas tecnologías modifican los modos de vida de las comunidades. lo interesante de toda esta estrategia del capital es que, sin necesidad de un vínculo directo salarial ni la posesión de la tierra, como convencionalmente el capital lo hizo y lo sigue haciendo, recrea una novedosa forma de acumulación primitiva de capital. así, podemos plantear que, vía subsunción por imposición de conocimiento, la modernización de la periferia4 conlleva, no solo la transformación de los modos de producción tradicionales, sino también, y principalmente, la transformación de los modos de vida. en este proceso de modernización capitalista en américa latina, se evidencia una estrecha relación entre modelos de desarrollo, de ciencia, de educación y de comunicación, lo cual puede verse claramente en el caso que venimos exponiendo respecto de la difusión del progreso tecnológico que representó la revolución verde. en este caso, era fundamental transmitir a los campesinos la idea de que el aumento de la productividad era necesario para alcanzar el progreso y el desarrollo, que se verían reflejados en el incremento de la calidad de vida de las comunidades (es decir, la modernización). es en este escenario que la comunicación para el desarrollo, basada en un modelo educativo que, en los términos de paulo freire, citado por kaplún (1985), se denomina “modelo bancario” (de tipo funcionalis4 furtado propone entender por esta idea “el proceso de adopción de patrones de consumo sofisticados (privados y públicos) sin el correspondiente proceso de acumulación de capital y progreso en los métodos de producción” (1975, p. 81). 15palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 ta), sería utilizada para promover (imponer) un modelo de desarrollo de base capitalista, excluyente y deshumanizador. se habla respecto de la imposición de conocimiento, porque, lejos de ser una construcción conjunta de conocimiento para encontrar respuestas a los problemas específicos de las realidades latinoamericanas, este proceso se basa en la difusión de adaptaciones de tecnologías encontradas en los estados unidos a la realidad local soportadas en las innovaciones tecnológicas norteamericanas. comunicación para el desarrollo: ¿un modelo para la deshumanización del desarrollo (comunicación dependiente)? el iica y la formación de profesionales remontándonos a la evolución histórica de las relaciones internacionales de los estados unidos con américa latina enunciadas, la creación del iica se convierte en un hito fundador de la comunicación para el desarrollo, pues es el núcleo institucional que integra y replica muchos de los programas de educación, extensión rural, administración agropecuaria y de instrumentos teóricos y metodológicos que fundamentaron esas acciones. uno de estos programas fue la formación de profesionales y posgraduados, con el cual un número importante de jóvenes latinoamericanos viajó a los estados unidos para formarse en diferentes áreas, con énfasis en lo agrícola.5 tal es el caso de un grupo de jóvenes vinculados a proyectos de extensión y desarrollo agrícola que viajó en 1954 a vermont (burlington), para realizar visitas a centros y universidades con énfasis en desarrollo agrícola por invitación del departamento de agricultura de los estados unidos. sería en esta experiencia que juan díaz bordenave y luis ramiro beltrán, dos grandes referentes de la escuela de pensamiento crítico latinoamericano en comunicación, se conocerían y establecerían una larga amistad en lo personal y lo académico. fruto de ese ejercicio los dos llegarían posteriormente, en la segunda mitad 5 conforme al iica (1992), entre 1950 y 1959, fueron adiestrados 10 000 profesionales en áreas como dasonomía, ecología, extensión agrícola, fitotecnia, entre otras. 16 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro de la década de los sesenta, a la universidad estatal de míchigan donde obtendrían el título de doctor en 1967 y 1968, respectivamente. el papel protagónico que la agricultura (educación y extensión rural) aporta en el desarrollo de la comunicación como eje fundamental para la promoción del desarrollo en américa latina puede evidenciarse en el proceso laboral y de estudios que siguió luis ramiro beltrán (tabla 1), el cual, tras iniciar en su natal oruro el servicio de comunicador para la secretaría de sanidad, rápidamente viajaría a los estados unidos para recibir formación para convertirse en diseminador de esas ideas al retorno a su país. posteriormente, ingresaría al iica donde trabajaría durante dieciocho años. allí participó del proceso de descentralización de esa institución (19501959), periodo en que se consolidaría el servicio de intercambio científico y el proyecto 39 del programa de cooperación técnica de la organización de los estados americanos (oea), así como del periodo denominado de nueva dimensión (1960-1969), momento en el que, bajo los fundamentos de la alianza para el progreso, la comunicación agrícola sería definida como una de las seis áreas de acción de esta institución (iica, 1992). tabla 1. relación de la actividad laboral de luis ramiro beltrán y las agencias de cooperación norteamericana (1954-1970) fuente: elaboración propia según beltrán (1971) y herrera (2014). año actividad o trabajo asociado a los programas de cooperación norteamericana 1953 trabaja en la jefatura departamental de sanidad de oruro adscrito al servicio agrícola interamericano participa del primer seminario internacional de educación audiovisual auspiciado por la foreign operations administration (foa) en puerto rico 1954 viaja a los estados unidos, a vermont, burlington, por invitación del departamento de agricultura para realizar visitas a centros y universidades con énfasis en desarrollo agrícola hace escala de regreso en el iica, turrialba, costa rica, para familiarizarse con el servicio de intercambio científico por recomendación del estratega colombiano de desarrollo agrícola armando samper 1956-1957 toma cursos de formación en comunicación para el desarrollo rural 1958 indicado como especialista en información del proyecto 39 del programa de cooperación técnica de la organización de los estados americanos en costa rica en el iica 1961 indicado como director del iica zona andina dirige la misión de la agencia para el desarrollo internacional de los estados unidos en bolivia primer curso nacional de liderato en comunicación educativa en el centro audiovisual del punto iv bajo la dirección de loren mcintyre 1965-1970 maestría y doctorado en la universidad del estado de míchigan bajo orientación de everett rogers y david berlo 1971 director del centro internacional de desarrollo rural y reforma agraria (iica-cira) 17palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 el imperialismo cultural y la primera escuela crítica de comunicación en américa latina ahora bien, en el trasegar de los pioneros en comunicación en américa latina (beltrán, bordenave, pascuali, kaplún, etc.), hay un punto de inflexión que definirá el surgimiento de la primera escuela crítica latinoamericana en comunicación. josé marques de melo en su trabajo los tiempos heroicos: la formación de la comunidad latinoamericana de ciencias de la comunicación (2004), documenta el periodo de 1972 a 1978 como el momento histórico que delimita la creación e institucionalización de asociación latinoamericana de investigadores de la comunicación (alaic), y lo llama la batalla por la hegemonía. conforme al autor, ese periodo está marcado por una coyuntura particular en que se destaca la inclusión de la cuestión de la comunicación en el movimiento de países no alineados, la incorporación de la investigación comunicacional en la agenda de las organizaciones intergubernamentales y la integración de américa latina en la geografía de la comunidad mundial de las ciencias de comunicación en el congreso de la international association for media and communication research (iamcr) en 1972. algunos hitos fundadores de este movimiento crítico en comunicación fueron, primero, la creación del centro de estudios de la realidad nacional (ceren) en 1968 en la universidad católica de chile, con la participación de armand mattelart y héctor schmucler, y posteriormente la creación de la revista comunicación y cultura de ese centro a inicios de la década de los setenta, propuestas teórico-críticas que bebían en aquel momento de la circulación de ideas sobre la dependencia en el laboratorio chileno (beigel, 2006); y segundo, la invitación a luis ramiro beltrán a la conferencia bienal de iamcr en leipzig (alemania oriental) en 1974, para hacer un balance crítico de la investigación comunicacional en la región, donde presentó el trabajo titulado investigación comunicacional con los ojos vendados, en el cual “explicita la fértil trayectoria latinoamericana, finalizando con la duda sobre los caminos inmediatos, teniendo en vista el embate entre ‘funcionalistas’ y ‘críticos’. sugiere claramente una ‘tercera vía’, combinando el rigor metodológico de la tradición funcionalista con la osadía teórica de la corriente ‘crítica’” (marques de melo, 2004, p. 14). 18 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro este contexto es bien definido por aguirre (2016), quien, al referirse al trabajo de bordenave y beltrán, plantea que el gen del compromiso con la realidad social desde cada uno de sus puntos de origen fue significativo en cuanto sirvió para hablar en el seno mismo de la teorización de lo comunicativo a nombre de todo un continente, y justamente mostrar que en estas regiones la voluntad de comunicación y así de la mentada adopción de innovaciones no resultaba de la falta de voluntad hacia el cambio o hasta carencia de espíritu innovador de los campesinos, sean estos en paraguay, bolivia, perú, brasil, y otros lugares, sino que el modelo desarrollista de promoción de un cambio inducido por agencias de desarrollo, medios tecnológicos, más la presión de gobiernos, no se alcanzaba porque en medio estaba el factor de la desigualdad social, la mala distribución del poder en las estructuras políticas de las sociedades, y sobre todo hacía presencia la marcada pobreza de origen socio estructural e histórica en la que vivían grandes sectores de sus habitantes. (pp. 148-149) será, entonces, en torno a elementos como comunicación, cultura, subdesarrollo y dependencia que tendrán origen las teorías del imperialismo o de la dependencia cultural, la cual tendrá entre sus representantes, adicional a matterlart y schmucler, a bordenave, beltrán, pasquali, sunkel, fuenzalida, reyes mata y evelina dagnino (sarti, 1979). para sarti, la dependencia cultural representa un avance respecto de un par de teorías que criticaron profundamente las teorías de la comunicación y el desarrollo que colocaban a los medios de comunicación de masas como un instrumento capaz de atenuar el problema del subdesarrollo.6 sin embargo, a pesar de superar los abordajes evolucionistas (etapas) y funcionalistas (modernización) que ven en el subdesarrollo una etapa atrasada del desarrollo, la solución, integrando al análisis de los medios de comunicación de masa el concepto althuseriano de aparatos ideológicos de estado (aie), los cuales, en américa latina, cumplían “la función ideológica de reforzar el carácter dependiente de las relaciones de producción” (sarti, 1979, p. 235), sigue insuficiente, en la medida en que se 6 la primera vertiente se enfocó en la función ideológica de los medios masivos de comunicación, mientras la segunda se centró en el estudio sobre los contenidos de los mensajes. ya la teoría de la dependencia estaría orientada al análisis de los efectos de esos procesos. 19palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 hace hincapié en las relaciones entre naciones, dejando el análisis de clase en segundo plano. estando de acuerdo con la crítica de sarti, bolaño (2015) trata de señalar la necesidad de retomar la definición de dependencia cultural de celso furtado, anterior y distinta de las que informaron el campo de la comunicación en aquel momento. aquí defendemos que una conexión entre la teoría estructuralista de la dependencia cultural de furtado y la teoría marxista de la comunicación (bolaño, 2013), no solo contribuiría a llenar el vacío señalado por sarti respecto del análisis de clase en las teorías de la dependencia o del imperialismo cultural, sino que también sería clave para comprender el papel de los medios de comunicación en la mediación de la difusión del progreso tecnológico en américa latina que, en el campo, la visualizamos a través de la difusión de la revolución verde. desde el punto de vista epistemológico, se propone, en ese sentido, tender puentes —de forma no ecléctica en lo que nos concierne— entre los dos campos disciplinarios, la economía política y la comunicación, desde la génesis del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano, que la epc hereda y trata de superar. un ejemplo de articulación no ecléctica de ese tipo se presenta en lo que sigue. el concepto de efecto demostración y sus límites: la recepción crítica de nurkse en beltrán y furtado y las bases teóricas de la epc latinoamericana en 1971, luis ramiro beltrán, como director del centro interamericano de desarrollo rural y reforma agraria (iica-cira), publica un artículo titulado “la revolución verde y el desarrollo rural latinoamericano”, en que da cuenta de la contradicción generada en el proceso de difusión de la revolución verde a américa latina. advierte que, al contrario de lo esperado, los beneficios de la relación aumento de productividad-aumento de calidad de vida estaban quedando en manos de pocos, mientras el problema de la desigualdad social se estaba profundizando. 20 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro en busca de respuestas a este problema, beltrán trabaja un concepto con fuertes antecedentes en el estructuralismo latinoamericano: el efecto de demostración.7 este concepto recuperado por ragnar nurkse a inicios de la década de los cincuenta para discutir el problema de la formación de capitales en los países subdesarrollados desde el lado de la demanda, coincide con los esfuerzos iniciales de raúl prebisch en la comisión económica para américa latina y el caribe (cepal), en el mismo periodo, por entender “la influencia ejercida sobre los países más pobres por los patrones de consumo de los más adelantados” (furtado, 1997, t. 1, p. 260). la originalidad del trabajo de nurkse radica en que introduce la propensión al consumo de los países subdesarrollados dentro de una teoría general del comportamiento del consumidor, al extrapolar la idea inicialmente planteada por james duesenberry para el análisis de las desigualdades en la sociedad norteamericana al análisis de la desigualdad entre países (furtado, 1952). conforme a la teoría del comportamiento del consumidor de duesenberry, las funciones de consumo individuales son interdependientes (no independientes), de tal forma que el nivel de ahorro realizado por un individuo depende, no solo del nivel de su renta real, sino también, y posiblemente de manera predominante, de la relación entre su renta real y el nivel superior de la renta de otras personas con las cuales tiene contacto. en esta perspectiva, nurkse se pregunta si esta misma hipótesis puede ser válida para las relaciones económicas internacionales, es decir, si las funciones de consumo de los diferentes países son igualmente interdependientes. el autor advierte que, durante el proceso de difusión del progreso tecnológico a los países subdesarrollados, surgen nuevos productos “que modifican los modos de vida existentes y frecuentemente se tornan necesidades” (p. 53), planteando, entonces, que en esos países “es más fácil adoptar hábitos superiores de consumo que mejores métodos de producción”. así entonces, un primer factor que intensifica el efecto de demostración es el tamaño de las disparidades de la renta real y de los patrones de consumo. un 7 conforme a nurkse, este es un fenómeno según el cual, cuando los individuos establecen contacto con bienes superiores o patrones de consumo superiores, como nuevos artículos o nuevos medios para satisfacer viejas necesidades, quedan después de algún tiempo sujetos a cierta insatisfacción; su imaginación es estimulada, sus deseos y propensión al consumo son incrementados (1957, p. 50). 21palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 segundo factor es el grado de conocimiento que el pueblo adquiere de tal fenómeno, y allí el autor otorga a la educación y a la comunicación un papel fundamental, pues “probablemente estos tienden a estimular los deseos antes que mejorar la productividad” (p. 56). la recuperación que hace beltrán del concepto está referida, principalmente, al segundo factor planteado por nurkse: el grado de conocimiento del efecto, pues él lo entiende como una fuerza generadora de frustración, no en una perspectiva funcional, sino respecto de sus posibles consecuencias sobre la estabilidad de las relaciones sociales. para beltrán, el problema es estructural: en la práctica, salvo muy contadas excepciones, la voluntad de cambio —la resolución política para procurar el verdadero desarrollo humano— parece todavía adormecida, si es que no ausente, de la escena latinoamericana. la minoría que domina la sociedad de esta región se resiste aún obstinadamente a ceder sus privilegios. la cuasi-colonial estructura de poder luce al principio de esta década no solo intacta en lo esencial, sino tal vez fortalecida en comparación al comienzo en la década anterior. (1971, p. 31) en suma, al analizar la difusión de la revolución verde en américa latina, beltrán define el efecto de demostración como un problema estructural asociado a la búsqueda del desarrollo, dejando de lado aquella hipótesis funcionalista conforme a la cual son los obstáculos cognitivos o “culturales” inherentes a estas comunidades que profundizan el subdesarrollo de las sociedades periféricas. en este sentido, se pregunta: ¿cómo se puede esperar, en tales circunstancias, que haya un verdadero desarrollo rural en las américas? ¿por qué se acusa a la masa campesina de superstición y tradicionalismo, de ausencia de aptitud empresarial, de indecisión de afrontar riesgos, de carencia de sentido del ahorro y del afán de inversión, y de resistencia al cambio? ¿es que no se percibe que esas características negativas son el producto de la estructura social en que esos campesinos viven atrapados? (1971, p. 18) beltrán adopta, de hecho, una idea ampliamente generalizada en el periodo, que entendía los medios de comunicación como directos respon22 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro sables de promover e intensificar el efecto de demostración. si bien para él es claro que bajo la revolución verde los medios de comunicación fueron claves para el proceso de difusión del progreso tecnológico, también es consciente de que estimularon procesos de concentración de la tierra y de los ingresos, en detrimento de las mayorías, de tal forma que la promesa del progreso técnico, el aumento de la productividad y la calidad de vida solo emergen como propulsores de frustración, de generación de promesas y sueños que nunca serán materializados. deja claro, por tanto, que el problema se enraíza en la estructura social de las comunidades que actúa como propulsor de potenciales transformaciones en los modos de producción y especialmente en los modos de vida.8 sin embargo, al intentar hacer una propuesta dentro del esquema democrático burgués, identifica la idea de voluntad política y la necesidad de planificación como ejes básicos para revertir la situación. así, por ejemplo, analizando el caso del plan puebla,9 proyecto que buscaba llevar los beneficios de la revolución verde a pequeños productores rurales en méxico, muestra cómo este incluso puede convertirse en una “revolución roja si su aplicación no va paralela con una dedicación política de justicia social que reduzca las grandes desigualdades económicas y sociales existentes en muchos de los países en vías de desarrollo” (beltrán, 1971, p. 25). en este aspecto, se encuentra perfectamente de acuerdo con el desarrollismo típico del momento histórico. y es precisamente allí donde radica la limitante del enfoque, no solo de beltrán, sino de la mayor parte de la escuela de pensamiento a que se filia. la perspectiva crítica de la epc, como crítica interna a esa escuela, a partir de las décadas de los ochenta y noventa, tendrá justamente que superar esas limitaciones según las herramientas intelectivas del materialismo histórico. 8 sobre las frustraciones, cita a brown (1970): “es probable que ellas sean una fuerza a favor del cambio mayor que ninguna tecnología o ideología introducidas jamás en los países pobres” (beltrán, 1971, p. 11). 9 sobre este proyecto ver, por ejemplo, centro internacional de mejoramiento de maíz y trigo (s. f.). 23palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 las críticas de celso furtado al trabajo de nurkse, por su parte, publicadas en la revista brasileira de economia, de la fundación getúlio vargas (fgv), en 1952, resaltan el rescate que hace este último de las limitantes a la formación de capital desde el lado de la demanda, en la medida en que la propensión al consumo resultante de las disparidades internacionales en la renta real emerge a la postre como un factor condicionante del desarrollo de los países de la periferia. ahora bien, lo interesante de este planteamiento de furtado es su reflexión respecto de las limitantes del análisis económico para entender el proceso histórico del desarrollo de la economía capitalista, pues para él la propensión al consumo es fuertemente influenciado por factores institucionales, lo cual está estrechamente relacionado con un amplio proceso de cambio cultural. ya hemos visto más arriba la perspectiva de furtado sobre la relación entre cultura y desarrollo y su teoría de la dependencia cultural. sin embargo, desde las críticas a nurkse, a principios de la década de los cincuenta, el autor ya entiende que la dinámica del progreso tecnológico implica una secuencia lógica de generación de nuevos productos, modificación de modos de vida (patrón de vida) y generación de nuevas necesidades, de tal forma que, gracias a la enorme fuerza de los medios de propaganda y comunicación, los hábitos de consumo van en la frente, como el carro va adelante del burro (furtado, 1952, p. 27). posteriormente, furtado (1955) explora la capacidad del concepto de excedente social para explicar los procesos de cambio social, en la medida en que hay una relación estrecha entre la organización social, la formación del excedente y la forma en que este es canalizado, pues solo ciertas formas de dominación social canalizan el excedente para la acumulación. son básicamente estos los elementos teóricos a partir de los cuales furtado, durante el periodo de exilio, pasará a entender que el proceso de difusión del progreso tecnológico a américa latina se materializaría por la vía indirecta, es decir, resultado de la apropiación de los patrones de consumo y los modos de vida inherentes a las élites del centro, con una mínima penetración de las técnicas de producción responsables de la diversificación de este consumo. sus análisis darían sustento, entonces, a una propuesta 24 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro innovadora para entender el subdesarrollo latinoamericano, primero como un problema de dependencia cultural, y solo después, como un problema de dependencia tecnológica. en este sentido, el fenómeno de dependencia tecnológica solo podría ocurrir cuando, fruto de la difusión del progreso tecnológico a inicios del siglo xx, se difundieron también patrones de consumo avanzados que solo podrían ser acompañados, si eran apropiadas técnicas de producción de igual nivel, de forma que la apropiación de tal tecnología tenía previamente enraizada la dependencia cultural inherente a las pautas de consumo, es decir, la difusión de la tecnología se daba como una necesidad, y única alternativa, para las élites locales de la periferia de acompañar los patrones de consumo del centro. en palabras de furtado (1973), para entender lo que él denomina el desarrollo dependiente, la tecnología en la periferia, a diferencia de lo que sucedió con los países del centro, pasa de ser un medio para alcanzar el desarrollo, a ser un fin, pues, en estos últimos, el motor que dinamiza el subdesarrollo son las modificaciones en el perfil de la demanda y las respectivas modificaciones estructurales que se generan. reconstruir caminos: estructuralismo latinoamericano y epc seguir esta línea argumentativa, partiendo de este viejo debate sobre el efecto demonstración, para llegar al problema del subdesarrollo, que, para furtado, es prioritariamente, en el sentido en que lo estamos tratando de aclarar, un problema de dependencia cultural, nos sirve para recuperar la contribución de las teorías de la dependencia cultural, liberándolas de las limitantes bien señaladas por sarti (1979). para ello, se hace necesario mostrar que la contradicción manifiesta del capital, que tradicionalmente se devela solo en la fórmula capital-trabajo (subsunción del trabajo en el capital), requiere de manera urgente evidenciar también, la contradicción economía/cultura (subsunción de la cultura popular en la economía). es a partir del reconocimiento de esta doble contradicción desde donde la epc brasileña hace sus aportes para la superación del debate sobre el efecto de demostración (bolaño, 2015). 25palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 así entonces, reconociendo el papel clave de los medios de comunicación de masas en los problemas estructurales propios de las sociedades de occidente, la epc avanza en la discusión respecto del papel otorgado a los medios de comunicación de masas desde el imperialismo cultural, para situarlos en la discusión de las mediaciones sociales. refiriéndose críticamente a los estudios culturales, bolaño (2015) plantea el problema en los siguientes términos: el problema es que al relegar a un segundo plano el problema de orden económico que soporta la cultura de masas, jamás considera el hecho, absolutamente esencial, de que la mediación es realizada, de manera general, por capitales individuales en competencia, que movilizan un tipo particular de trabajo (cultural o creativo, si se prefiere) que es precisamente el elemento subjetivo que garantiza efectivamente la colonización de la lebenswelt, en los términos de habermas. (p. 101) en este sentido, hay un proceso de apropiación por parte del capital de los elementos de la cultura popular que, pasando primero por un momento inicial de acumulación primitiva de conocimiento (bolaño, 2013), constituirá posteriormente la cultura industrializada. en este sentido, la subsunción del trabajo cultural es lo que garantiza el diálogo permanente de la industria cultural con las culturas populares, dinamizándose el conjunto y garantizando, con eso, la reproducción de la hegemonía. es a través del trabajo por tanto, que lo popular determina lo masivo y es a través del trabajo que el capital cultural ejerce su hegemonía sobre lo popular. la tecnología sirve para subsumir aquel trabajo popular particular, que dispone de conocimiento tácito derivado en su origen, de su extracción popular, de modo que para que la hegemonía se ejerza, la subsunción siempre será de alguna forma limitada siendo eso lo que explique las especificidades de la economía política de la comunicación y la cultura y no la herencia de la unicidad de la obra de arte como lo presenta la economía política de la comunicación francesa. (bolaño, 2015, p. 101) en estos términos, entonces, la industria cultural emerge como la instancia de mediación característica del capitalismo monopolista, y es precisamente allí, apoyado en la teoría de la dependencia cultural de furtado, desde donde la epc brasileña supera la limitante ya identificada por sar26 estructuralismo histórico, economía política y teorías... mauricio herrera-jaramillo y otro tri (1979), al plantear que, bajo la idea de cultura de masas, se encubre la existencia de una cultura de clase. así entonces, la industria cultural es la instancia de mediación característica del capitalismo monopolista, la forma específicamente capitalista de producción y difusión de bienes culturales, que se estructura a partir de la apropiación por el capital cultural (en el sentido de marx, no de bourdieu), de la cultura popular, a través del trabajo cultural que ella emplea. (bolaño, 2015, p. 100) será esta la base teórica que la primera escuela crítica de la comunicación latinoamericana ignora y, a su vez, será la teoría que permita tejer un puente entre el estructuralismo latinoamericano y la epc, para superar el concepto de efecto de demostración y encontrar en la industria cultural una nueva categoría que permita explicar la histórica dependencia cultural latinoamericana. si bien no cabe al objetivo de este trabajo avanzar en la aplicación de este referente teórico al problema abordado por beltrán, sí consideramos importante, por lo menos, referir algunas ideas que esbozan el camino para emprender un análisis del proceso de integración al capitalismo del campesino latinoamericano durante el proceso de difusión de la revolución verde desde la década de los cincuenta. proyectos como las estaciones experimentales norteamericanas durante la segunda guerra mundial o las escuelas radiofónicas y los cuerpos de paz durante la segunda posguerra, cumplieron de manera particular este espacio de mediación, primero subvalorando y despojando a los campesinos de sus conocimientos tradicionales, su cultura tradicional, para posteriormente imponer un nuevo conocimiento (occidental) que transformaba los modos de vida tradicionales, colocando otros valores, principios y formas de ver y entender el mundo, ajenos a las realidades de las comunidades. no nos es posible avanzar más en tal dirección en este trabajo, sin embargo, es importante resaltar que el retorno desde una perspectiva crítica a los principios de la primera escuela crítica latinoamericana de comunicación no se pretende realizar solo desde el plano teórico, al revés, por ejemplo, de la categoría de efecto de demostración, sino también en el plano de 27palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 22 no. 2 abril de 2019. e2227 las acciones de la comunicación para el desarrollo, incluso aquellas paradigmáticas relacionadas con la comunicación rural. queda, entonces, como una invitación para continuar el proyecto propuesto por la epc desde la primera década del silgo xxi y que fue presentado de una manera más estructurada en el libro campo aberto: para a crítica da epistemologia da comunicação (bolaño, 2015). referencias aguirre, j. l. 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(2003). orígenes de un proyecto agrícola: la fundación rockefeller y la revolución verde. sociedades rural, producción y media ambiente, 4(1), 81-96. recuperado de http://132.248.9.34/hevila/sociedadesruralesproduccionymedioambiente/2003/vol4/ no1/8.pdf sánchez ruiz, e. (1986). réquiem por la modernización: perspectivas cambiantes en estudios del desarrollo. ciudad de méxico, méxico: universidad de guadalajara. sarti, i. (1979). comunicação e dependência cultural: um equivoco. en j. werthein (ed.), meios de comunicação: realidade e mito (pp. 230251). são paulo, brasil: nacional. http://132.248.9.34/hevila/sociedadesruralesproduccionymedioambiente/2003/vol4/no1/8.pdf http://132.248.9.34/hevila/sociedadesruralesproduccionymedioambiente/2003/vol4/no1/8.pdf http://132.248.9.34/hevila/sociedadesruralesproduccionymedioambiente/2003/vol4/no1/8.pdf 280 vol. 22 no. 2, october 2022, pp. 280 – 292 doi: 10.24071/joll.v22i2.4149 available at https://e-journal.usd.ac.id/index.php/joll/index this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-sharealike 4.0 international license. issues of inequality and the political economy in 1990s singapore: a marxist reading on alfian bin sa’at’s “birthday” bima iqbal khadafi bimaiqbalk@gmail.com graduate program of english language studies, universitas sanata dharma, indonesia abstract article information this research closely reads a short story by alfian bin sa’at entitled “birthday” in relation to the historical narrative and the political economy of 1990s singapore using the perspective of terry eagleton’s marxist literary criticism. the result of this study shows 1) that alfian challenges a portion of the historical narrative of singapore’s political economy in the 1990s at which ideology works to justify the power hierarchy, yet altogether highlights the other portion of it to shed some light on the oppressed; 2) that challenging and, at the same time, highlighting the historical narrative are alfian’s strategy to endorse his political commitment while not being openly partisan; and 3) that alfian carefully configures the literary form and content of his work – through his use of multilingualism and singaporean english – to advocate his idea of the future of singapore and – through his use of simple sentences that build a stream-of-consciousness plot – to underline the complex social realities whereby issues of inequality (gender, racial, and class) are correlated. this study implies that the use of marxist literary criticism in reading a literary work from a formerly colonized country cannot neglect the traces of neo and/or colonial experiences since colonialism itself, following marx and postcolonial theorists, is a more acute form of capitalism. however, this paper finds that, different from the usual postcolonial reading, the singaporeans (its capitalists and government) are as complicit as the western neo-colonial enterprises for the inequalities and oppression happening in the region. keywords: marxist literary criticism; political economy; postcolonialism; inequality; alfian bin sa’at received: 10 january 2022 revised: 20 april 2022 accepted: 30 april 2022 https://e-journal.usd.ac.id/index.php/joll/index journal of language and literature vol. 22 no. 2 – october 2022 issn: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) 281 introduction it has been a general agreement among literary scholars that ‘serious’ literature of modern singapore deals with a dialectical grappling between the issues of individual existence (on identity, the sense of belonging, intersubjective relationship, etc.) and the social realities (the power hierarchy governing economic, sexual, racial, ethnic, and religious structure) that situate them (holden, 2013; zhang, 2015; and gui, 2017). this tension results in the sense of “not being at home” (tay, 2011); or, in homi bhabha’s (2004) term, of “unhomeliness.” the recent article aims, in general, to show how this is also the case with the works of alfian bin sa’at by focusing only on his short story entitled “birthday” which was first published in his short story anthology, corridor (1999). as a contemporary author famous for his plays and poems—exquisite works that have won him several prestigious literary awards— alfian bin sa’at was born into a moslem singaporean family of minangkabau, javanese, and chinese hakka descent on 18 july 1977 in the city of singapore. he has gained international fame as an author as his works being translated into german and swedish; widely read in london, zurich, hamburg, and munich; and being on the reading list of the university of london, the university of new york, and the west virginia university (sin, 2016). however, in both malaysia and singapore, alfian is considered controversial. on the one hand, as he himself said in an interview reported by bahrawi (2016), he is a vehement political writer and has, throughout his works, criticized the socio-political issues of his country; but, on the other hand, he grapples to connect issues of sexuality with his religious upbringing (“a moment with…,” 2012; bahrawi, 2016). despite gaining the status of a celebrated author, alfian’s works are still understudied. previous studies on his works can be categorized into two: those following poon (2016), insisting that the central issue in alfian’s works is the religious discrimination of moslem singaporeans, and those following bahrawi (2019), arguing that it is the racial discrimination of malay singaporeans that occupies him. both of these studies, different as they are, share one basic similarity: they believe that the discrimination (either racial or religious) has something to do with the neo and/or colonial experience of singapore. these kinds of reading, although having some truths in themselves, risk reducing the complex phenomenon of discrimination by projecting the blame into the west; they neglect to look carefully and closely at the enigmatic yet deeper structure from which the phenomenon of discrimination emerges. but what is this structure? or perhaps the question one should more precisely ask: how can we approach this structure? there are many ways to approach it with each way leading to a different appearance (in a hegelian term; see hegel, 2019) of deep structure. social psychology, for example, will lead one to discover the unconscious structure of a certain community, as done by chew (2018), from which one could diagnose the cause of racism. this paper, however, uses marxist approach postulating that any practice of discrimination is conditioned by what karl marx calls the economic base; that the phenomenon of discrimination is just the tip of the iceberg reflecting a much more complex social reality intertwined with economy and politics—a reality that changes from time to time in accordance with the change of class formation. this study, hence, hypothesizes that the discrimination (racial, religious, and/or others) that alfian depicts in his works is the result of his reflection of the singaporean political economy. to test this hypothesis, this article aims to scrutinize the particular types of discrimination that alfian depicts in his “birthday” and how they correspond to the political economy of 1990s singapore. methodology this article specifically used terry eagleton’s (2002) interpretation of marx to analyze alfian’s “birthday.” his theorizing has the advantage of not being reductive the way the orthodox marxists (e.g. el guabli, 2020) and the anarchists (e.g. clark, 2018) do; and in the fact that its domains of study are specific, so that this research can focus on specific issues without getting distracted by, for instance, psycho-social analyses the way journal of language and literature issn: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) bima iqbal khadafi 282 freudo-marxists (e.g. sanka, 2019) do. in interpreting marxism as a tool for literary criticism, eagleton focuses on four domains: 1) literature’s alignment with history; 2) the configuration between literary form and content; 3) the author’s political commitment; and 4) the author’s attitude as a producer. for the sake of brevity, this paper, however, deals only with the first three. the relationship between literature and history should be looked at from the configuration between the base and the superstructure situating it. consisting of productive forces (i.e. labor power and the means of production) and relations of production (i.e. social, economic, and technological relationships in a workplace), the base is the basic social reality from which the superstructure—consisting of the institutional systems (e.g. the government, the school, the military) and the collective consciousness (e.g. arts, religions, philosophical ideas)—emerges. from the superstructure, ideology, which are certain forms of social consciousness, emerges to preserve the power hierarchy. meanwhile, marxists view art and literature, as parts of the superstructure, as “not mysteriously inspired, or explicable simply in terms of their authors’ psychology. they are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world; and as such they have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world, which is the social mentality or ideology of an age” (eagleton, 2002, pp. 5-6). it must be noted that the superstructure is never a mere reflection of the base. in his “letter to joseph bloch” (1973), friedrich engels explicitly denies any arguments saying that the relationship between the two is always mechanical (i.e. the superstructure is always determined by the base). he explains that any social realities of the superstructure simultaneously reflect upon and react back to the economic base. in other words, the superstructure—despite being conditioned or contextualized by the base—has a certain degree of independence that can always influence and even change the base. now, as the relationship between the base and the superstructure is always dialectical, so is the case with that between art and ideology: art and literature can challenge ideology and hence be the agent of historical change. meanwhile, on the configuration of literary form and content, marx believes that any literary works should reveal a unity between the two. but eagleton (2002, p. 20) interprets this unity as marx’s suspicion “of excessively formalistic writing”. he argues that “mere stylistic exercises led to ‘perverted content,’ which in turn impresses the ‘stamp’ of vulgarity of literary form (ibid.)”. hence, the relationship between literary content and form should always be dialectical despite, as what happens in between the base and the superstructure or in between ideology and art, the latter is conditioned by the former. but then again, the form “reacts back upon it in a double-edged relationship (ibid.)”. lastly, on the author’s commitment, marx and engels always judge the quality of a literary work based on certain political predilections. yet, they do not endorse the formula of explicit political correctness being the primary benchmark of literary aesthetics. engels explicitly states, in his “letter to minna kautsky” (1973), that to be openly partisan in writing is never an effective and efficient strategy for an author to challenge the ideology. only in an indirect way, through metaphor and metonymy (which are the mechanisms of the dream-work in psychoanalysis), for instance, can a revolutionary literature work effectively since what it aims is to raise class consciousness (to bring forth the unconscious impulse and desire to the surface; to gaze the real that is suppressed by the symbolic order). in this sense, marxist literary criticism originally rejects the reflectionist theory stating that literary works should teach certain political attitudes toward social realities as explicitly as possible. this paper implemented eagleton’s marxist literary criticism to reads its primary source of data, alfian’s short story “birthday”. after explaining the historical narrative of the political economy of 1990s singapore, this study traced in detail the issues of inequality in alfian’s short story and how they challenge, complement, or correspond to the narrative. the similarities and the disjunctions between journal of language and literature vol. 22 no. 2 – october 2022 issn: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) 283 the story and the historical narrative provided this article with insights into alfian’s political commitment. lastly, this research scrutinized how the configuration of form and content in “birthday” can further explicate alfian’s stance. in addition, this article used secondary data to elaborate its findings. they are previous studies exploring singaporean political economy in the 1990s, articles on alfian bin sa’at, and scientific works on singaporean literature. results and discussion before discussing the results of marxist reading on alfian’s “birthday”, it is crucial to look at the historical development that modern singapore had undergone in and prior to the 1990s. the following section deals exactly with the general description of 1990s singapore’s political economy and how the country had come to that point. 1990s singapore: history and political economy there are at least three characteristics of singapore that need to be highlighted in the beginning of our discussion: 1) singapore (and the majority of southeast asian countries) were the victims of western colonialism; 2) prior to being colonized by the west, the region consists of some local and independent kingdoms trying to conquer each other (thus nationalism is a relatively new concept); and 3) the geographical location of singapore has invited many ethnicities other than the west to settle around the region. as the last characteristic is perhaps the most important for our discussion, it must be noted that orang laut or the sea gypsies (arguably the natives of the region), has settled for a long time side by side with the chinese before thomas raffles came (swee-hock, 2012). additionally, when william farquhar took over the region that had become the new free port of great britain, foreign traders such as the bugis, the peranakan chinese, and the arabs flocked to the region. lastly, with singapore later being grouped (together with penang and malacca) by the british east india company as the straits settlement, a residency and subdivision of the presidency of bengal, in 1826, many indians came over to the region (chew & lee, 1991). thus was the origin of the multiracial, multicultural singapore. as a nation, although its independence was established gradually thanks to the echoes of “merdeka!” spreading all over the region after the japanese defeated the british, singapore achieved its complete independence in march 1957 when britain finally granted singapore its internal self-government. singapore would later have its own citizenship, a legislative assembly whose seats were expanded to fifty-one which are voted entirely by its citizens, a prime minister who was able to control all aspects of the government except defense and foreign affairs, and yang-di-pertuan negara as the leader of the state (chew & lee, 1991). in the 1959 election, the people’s action party (a left-wing party; abbreviated as pap) won the election— despite being condemned by the british at that time—giving its leader, lee kuan yew, the privilege of being the first prime minister of singapore. as a consequence of this political evolution, out of fear of the party’s stance on communism, many private businesses shifted their headquarters from singapore to kuala lumpur; but, thankfully, the pap successfully handled the situation by embarking on several programs to increase the nation’s economic and social development. however, the pap believed that the future of singapore was to merge with malaysia. the reasons for this are: 1) the strong historic and economic ties between the two; 2) singapore’s lack of natural resources; and 3) the rise of crucial problems that singapore faced such as the declining entrepôt trade and the fastgrowing population needing jobs and lands to settle on. therefore, on 16 september 1963, both countries, including north borneo and sarawak, merged (chew & lee, 1991). but, the union between the two was rocky from the start and would give rise to a series of racial disasters between the malays and the chinese (and non-malay) singaporeans as an effect of the infamous article 153 of the constitution of malaysia promulgating discriminatory policies that benefited the former in social, political, and financial sectors over the latter. the tension culminated in the 1964 race riot on 21 journal of language and literature issn: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) bima iqbal khadafi 284 july, killing twenty-three people and injuring hundreds. following this tragedy, on 9 august 1965, the union was completely broken off and singapore became the republic of singapore with yusof bin ishak as its first president. these successive tragic events can be seen as the cause of racial disparity between the chinese and malay singaporeans in contemporary singapore, with the former now being the dominating group over the latter. because of the failure of the union between singapore and malaysia out of racial issues, the republic of singapore insisted on establishing a new nation that is inherently and vehemently multiracial, as lee kuan yew himself says: we are going to have a multiracial nation in singapore. we will set the example. this is not a malay nation, this is not a chinese nation, this is not an indian nation. everybody will have his [or her] place. equal. language, culture, religion. and finally, let us, really, singaporeans, we unite, regardless of race, language, religion, culture. (cited by pak, 2021, p. 4). hence, the government has created several laws to prohibit racist attitudes. the most famous one is perhaps the sedition act of singapore which prohibits any ill wills, remarks, and gestures that might offend other races and social classes in the country. another one is the penal code chapter 224 which controls specific offences for racial remarks: “[o]ffenders will be either fined, imprisoned for up to three years, or both” (chew, 2018, p. 2). however, even with this strict regulation, racism has not yet vanished in the region. according to pak (2021), the multiracialism that was dreamed of by yew is not actually a celebration of multiculturalism per se, but a political mandate given by the government to impose a multicultural environment; which can also be seen as, faut de mieux, a revenge policy made by the chinese singaporeans to the malay-dominated malaysia because of the bitter experiences during the union. on this, i am tempted to argue that the establishment of the laws concerning racial attitudes has led singaporeans, especially the chinese ones, into an externalization of the super ego (as opposed to the internalization of the super ego; see žižek, 2006) that can result in the figuration of the other (in this case, the malay singaporeans) as someone whose characteristics appear in the unconscious structure of the chinese singaporeans as lazy, filthy, disgusting, even dangerous, and (paradoxically) racist (even if they are necessarily not) while denying the fact that it is them who are the racist ones. this unconscious racism emanates in two major realities: a reluctance to discuss racial issues (or an insistence that there is no racial inequaliy in the region; thus the multicultural atmosphere feels very superficial) and a preference for meritocracy that favors the chinese singaporeans (chew, 2018). that being said, the very formula for multiracialism of singapore, the cmio framework (chinese, malay, indian, and other—a framework which is the legacy of the british; see goh & holden, 2009) actually preserves the very practices of racism in the country. this unconscious racism has also affected some crucial domains in the social institutions of the nation, especially the education (moore, 2000; khoo & lim, 2004) and economic ones (low, 2001). as for its political economy, according to cahyadi et al (2004), in general, there are three categories of singapore’s strategy: 1) the government’s strategic role; 2) the mobilization of human capital; and 3) the infrastructure development. in the 1960s, the strategy that the country took was to import highly capitalistic western ideas by asking the united nations to send a team of economic advisors that would be led by a dutch industrialist albert winsemius. this resulted in the establishment of the economic development board (edb) in 1961 whose main purpose was to attract foreign capitals to enter singaporean markets. the edb successfully brought western economic powers (especially the us) and some japanese firms to enter the country’s markets by developing the jurong industrial town and creating the economic expansion incentive act, giving the foreign corporations tax benefits up to five years – is this not a different form of western colonialism practiced in the newly so-called independent state of singapore? journal of language and literature vol. 22 no. 2 – october 2022 issn: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) 285 although those strategies gave fruition to the country’s economic development in the early 1970s, there were crucial problems faced by the edb: the unemployment rate was about 10% of the population, skepticisms over the british withdrawal from the region, the indonesian policy of confrontation, and the singapore-malaysia separation. the edb solved the problems by 1) extending the tax benefit up to ten years; 2) nationalizing private companies such as the development bank of singapore (dbs), the singapore airlines (sa), and the sembawang shipyard; 3) extending the use of the central provident fund (cpf) for housing purchase and medical benefits; and 4) surprisingly (or perhaps not) forcing labor unions to merge into the national trades union congress (ntuc) to control employment and wage and to attract more foreign corporations. all these mark the rise of singaporean capitalists to dominance, after a deal with the western enterprises, over the region and its dominated groups. of course, what follows from those strategies was none other than the protests over the workers’ wages culminating in the early 1980s. in addition, the emerging economic markets of singapore’s neighbors made it no longer afford in becoming a market of low-wage workers anymore. therefore, the edb started to focus on converting the labor forces from unand semiskilled labors into skilled and professional ones by establishing the national computer board (ncb) for opening the path toward what low (2001) calls the knowledge-based economy (kbe) and the information and communication technology (ict) revolution. the government also strove to build new infrastructures and continued giving tax incentives and benefits to multinational and pioneering companies; making singapore the leading country in southeast asia in economy. in the 1990s, to further accelerate the kbe and ict revolution, the government established higher schools like the national university of singapore (nus) and the nanyang technological university (ntu). the edb also initiated the singapore-johor-riau (sijori) triangle to relocate singaporean manual-production-based companies to the nearby areas of johor, malaysia and the islands of bintan and batam in riau, indonesia. the reason behind the edb’s initiation of sijori follows pang’s (2009) logic of creative labor: creative or intellectual labor, can only replace the manual one as the main productive forces in the region only if the manual productive activities are done in a different society. in other words, for singapore to completely adopt the kbe scheme, the country needs to relocate its manual productive activities to different regions outside its own. hence, it can be said that after gaining enough capital for its own, singapore made use of its neighbors, malaysia and indonesia, to fulfil its needs for manual labor for it to become a new western enterprise. in the late 1990s, to come to terms with the 1997 crisis the edb was forced to adopt different strategies. they are 1) privatizing some nation-owned companies, 2) cutting salaries and wages (chong, 2007), and 3) importing low-wage labor from foreign countries (low, 2001). the ict revolution was continued after the crisis had ended to further expand the scope of the country’s kbe (vu, 2013). in so doing, the republic of singapore adopted a politico-economic strategy that chong (2009, p. 952) calls “liberal economics with a mercantilist tinge” by widening its doors for the free market while maintaining a strong level of influence to control it. it also has developed a narrative that singaporean citizens are always driven by a survivalist need, “an insatiable hunger for progress” (bahrawi, 2019, p. 504), as reflected by lee kuan yew’s memoir from the third world to first (2000) whose title serves as the evidence of what i have argued in the previous paragraph, that singapore strove to be the new capitalistic western enterprise. this argument is supported by dass’ findings (2014) stating that singapore opened itself the most for globalization among other southeast asian countries by aligning “its foreign and domestic policies to maximize growth” (p. 293) and adopting a kind of economic-based curricula. although they had led singapore to economic and political success in the global contestation, these ambitious policies have led the country to the crisis of cultural identity as the result of sacrificing its people for the neocolonial gods residing in the west and using its journal of language and literature issn: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) bima iqbal khadafi 286 neighbors as the sources of manual labors. furthermore, because of its complex (and arguably superficial) idea of multiracialism as well as its complex history of inequality, its figures on literary, social, and humanism (including alfian bin sa’at) have struggled to search for the idea of nationalism and cultural identities that could transcend the racial and religious boundaries (patke & holden, 2010; tay, 2011). sections that follow show how alfian in “birthday” reflects upon the historical narrative of the political economy of 1990s singapore just discussed and how the narrative closes its eyes to the issues of inequality. the oppressed women’s “birthday” alfian’s “birthday” follows a story of a female malay singaporean factory worker named rosminah, a mother of two children, who despite being married to her husband, awang bin razali, has neither felt happy being with him nor actually been in love with him. in the quiet of the kitchen, the refrigerator hums soothingly. rosminah fixes herself some orange squash and settles into one of the kitchen stools. those lights still going on during the night, still blinking. wedding gifts, the vcr and airpot, and the rice cooker and electric kettle, which are not turned on at the moment. rosminah wonders; if she had a hundred electrical appliances and set them running all at the same time, would their small function lights flood her kitchen like an entire constellation? maybe they could form a shape, like neon letters in the dark, a sign, lucid answers. her question: did she love the man she married? or should the question be: did she marry the man she loved? (alfian bin sa’at, 2010, pp. 45-46). perhaps one thing that makes rosminah unhappy is the fact that her family lacks economic capitals. although alfian does not provide a detailed account of awang’s job, two things are certain: that rosminah has to work at a factory to support her family’s well-being and that awang frequently demands his wife’s money for whatever reasons. but the most important thing that might be the reason for rosminah’s unhappiness is the fact that her marital relationship lacks loving experiences: never in the story does awang show sufficient care, love or tenderness to his wife. instead, awang seems to selfishly love his self-value more as shown by a passage telling how careful rosminah must be in delivering the money that her husband borrows from her to him: she is also used to his anger when she places the money directly into his hand, with her eyes looking into his face such that he has to turn away. at one such instance, his face had crumpled and he flew into a rage, asking rosminah if she really thought that he was poor, that he really needed her money that badly. (pp. 32-33). awang even seems to neither love nor care much about his children. in a dialogue between him and rosminah, after snatching the money, he asked how the children were doing, yet the very questions he posed to his wife signifies a pretension that he somehow cared about them, which is a made-up, obvious lie from how alfian depicts the scene: “how are the children?” he asks next, cocky and unable to stay silent. rosminah clasps the button on her purse with a click which she will remember days later. with patience she replies, talking to the reflection of her husband in the bedroom mirror. “they are all right.” “any problems in school?” “no.” “anything for me to sign?” “no. nothing.” “i don’t sign if i see red marks.” “our children don’t get red marks.” “i know. i just don’t sign if i see that they have been lazy.” “our children aren’t lazy.” “i know.” her husband pauses to compose himself. “i know all that, you don’t have to tell me.” her husband then starts to yawn. it could have been a real yawn or he could have made it up. (pp. 33-34) the depiction of the rosminah-awang relationship, therefore, reveals the patriarchal oppression rusminah is under. there is journal of language and literature vol. 22 no. 2 – october 2022 issn: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) 287 neither reciprocal care nor love in it, only the fact that the marriage is used by awang to extort rosminah’s body. for awang, rosminah is nothing but a mere resource to fulfil his sexual desire (although, because of its obviousness, no description of sexual activities between the two is given) and his economic needs, and a tool to preserve his line of descent as a cultural obligation. on this, one can sense how rosminah has lived her life for the sake of others (awang and the children) without actually fulfilling her own needs of freedom, desire, and dream. the subalterns’ “birthday” in addition to the patriarchal oppression rosminah is under, one cannot neglect the terrible experiences that rosminah had undergone on her first day at the factory: she was five months pregnant with siti nuraeni (her second child), she was estranged from the environment of the factory and was even bullied by her co-workers. if we follow marx’s theorizing of labor, these suggest that rosminah is doubly oppressed: first by the patriarchy and second by the capitalists. how she is unable to speak of the oppressions she is under and can only sob in the silence of the night signifies that she is what gayatri spivak (2010) calls the subaltern who lives in what bhabha (2004) calls an unhomely life. she is overshadowed by the feeling that she is not at home in any circumstances in her life, even when she is inside of her own home, sleeping with her husband and caressing her children. the only one who can comfort rosminah from her miseries and unhomeliness is her indian singaporean girlfriend kala. kala is the one defending rosminah from the bullies at the factory. she is the only person who ever gives rosminah a gift on her birthday. indeed, the whole narrative actually deals with how rosminah struggled to pay back the gift she had received from kala (a sandwich maker an ordinary household object which also reflects their status in the class formation of society) by planning to buy a gift for kala’s upcoming birthday as a symbol that their relationship is a reciprocal and loving one. the reason why kala can comfort rosminah is that she can also be seen as a subaltern who lives an unhomely life. the difference, however, is that kala is not oppressed by the figure of a husband, but of a boyfriend who lied to her about the fact that he has married despite having already had sex with her. kala is also oppressed by her own parents, who blame her that it is because of her body (that alfian depicts as male-like) that she is unable to get a husband. the experiences that kala and rosminah have been through suggest—following marxist feminists like emma goldmann (2002), michèle barrett (2004), and lillian robinson (1978)—that women are treated as commodities in a capitalistic society. here, i am tempted to argue that kala’s parents, by blaming kala’s body for not attracting men, can be said to wail over the fact that the commodity in their hands is not sufficient to meet the demand of the patriarchal market. the term that i used to describe the position that rosminah and kala occupy in their society, the subaltern, and the experience that follows it, the unhomely life, are not actually of marxist but of postcolonial theorizing. the reason i chose the two is that “birthday” itself cannot be read without acknowledging the fact that it depicts the lives of two oppressed subjects living in a neocolonial background: 1990s singapore. on this, the factory that rosminah and kala work at can be seen as the most explicit signifier of neocolonialism in the story. according to the co-worker bullying rosminah, the factory produces the spare parts for nasa rockets. why, then, would nasa be dependent on a factory outside the us over the spare parts of its rockets? the question can be answered, again, by following pang’s (2009) logic of creative labor. as the historical narrative mentioned earlier suggests, western enterprises (in this case, the us) make use of singapore (a market of low-wage labors) as a region in which its manual productive activity is done, so that their productive forces can evolve into the creative and intellectual ones; so that nasa can focus on scientific experiments and on developing mathematical and cosmological formulas instead of building rocket parts. alfian’s depiction on this matter, therefore, is in line with the politico-economic strategy of singapore the way it gives itself up to the west for the sake of economic progress. journal of language and literature issn: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) bima iqbal khadafi 288 however, according to the historical narrative of singapore’s political economy given by political economists described earlier, the strategy of giving itself up to the west was implemented in the 1960s-1980s while “birthday” is set presumably after the 1980s. does this mean that alfian is historically incorrect in depicting the climate of singapore’s political economy during the period? i do not believe so. what alfian does is actually revising (or rather, challenging) the narrative of singaporean politico-economic history. he shows his readers that even if the state focused on the kbe and ict revolution during this time, the actuality shows that the two had not been fully implemented yet; as singapore could not escape from the grip of the west as it was still a region of manual labor, the new productive forces (the intellectual and the creative) had not yet fully populated singapore. this is why i stated at the beginning of this paper that studies like those of poon (2016) and bahrawi (2019) do indeed have some truths in them—that alfian’s works cannot be read separately from the reality of neo-colonialism as the result of the western capitalism. the victims of this neo-colonial experience are none other than the singaporean proletariats (factory workers, lower-class society) and especially the female ones as they are the ones who suffer the most: they are oppressed not only by the colonial enterprises and the capitalists, but also by the patriarchal subjects. what this paper adds to the usual postcolonial reading is that the singaporean capitalists and government are equally complicit in the sufferings of the proletariats and of the subalterns since it is for the sake of the former’s hunger for capital that the neo-colonial practice flourished in the region, that the latter continued to suffer. touching upon the issue of subalternity, “birthday” can be seen to illustrate spivak’s argument that the subaltern cannot speak. alfian, through the rosminah-kala relationship, provides a solution for the subalterns similar to that given by bhabha at the end of the location of culture (2004) concerning the unhomely lives: social solidarity. on this, one must highlight that deep in her heart, rosminah loves kala more than her family as shown in the passage: “but this gift for kala was something different. it was to be done in secret” (alfian bin sa’at, 2010, p. 43). it is because rosminah finds her sense of self, the shared experience of a subaltern living in an unhomely life, in the figure of kala that she loves kala more than her family although it is a love that cannot be spoken of with anybody since nobody will ever understand. the social solidarity among the unhomely lives, among the subalterns – this is the exact form of a loving relationship between rosminah and kala that keeps them surviving the neocolonial, capitalistic cataclysms. unfortunately, at the end of the story, rosminah failed in taking back the check from her husband’s pocket, consisting of the fifty singaporean dollars money that was supposed to be used for buying kala a birthday present. yet rosminah still wanted kala to hear her unspoken voice that might explain why she failed to do so. as rosminah dropped the sandwich maker (kala’s gift for her), she imagined that kala heard her unspoken voice and was in disbelief at her failure by projecting kala, in her mental functioning, into the figure of her son who was was at the scene. as rosminah does neither tell her husband that she needed the money to buy kala a birthday present, nor explain to her children what she was going through, nor tell kala that she had wanted to give her a birthday present but unable to do so; the subaltern still cannot speak, but this does not mean that it does not want to be heard—“birthday” is an invitation to hear the unspoken voice of the subaltern. no “birthday” for racists there exists in “birthday” another form of inequality. given that the majority of modern singaporeans consists of chinese (velayutham, 2009; chew, 2018; pak, 2021), it is surprising that the only chinese figure existing in the story is just an old man smoking without paying attention to rosminah and kala when the latter told rosminah about her irresponsible boyfriend. this old man is ised by alfian as a mere part of the background of that particular scene. following pierre macherey (2006), there is a social reality that alfian wants to highlight by, because of its obviousness, not talking about it (which is also the case with rosminah-awang sexual relationship discussed earlier): the ethnic journal of language and literature vol. 22 no. 2 – october 2022 issn: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) 289 issue in singapore. why, then, there are no chinese in both rosminah’s and kala’s lives? by not answering, alfian wants to show the obvious fact: that the chinese singaporeans are of a different class from them. on this, a report given by the singapore straits times in 1998 can be used as a clue of singapore’s structure of relations of production. according to the report, there are three types of labor in 1990s singapore: 1) the professional (whose monthly earnings are above s$ 3500, e.g. managers, administrators); 2) the skilled (whose monthly earnings are in between s$ 2000 to s$ 3500, e.g. technicians, architects); and 3) the unskilled (with around s$ 100 worth of monthly earning). in discussing the report, low (2001) implies that the majority of chinese singaporeans occupied the first two since they have more privileges to higher education than any other ethnicities in singapore (see also mutalib, 2011; chew, 2018). the protagonist who is of malay descent and her friend kala who is of indian descent (seen from the economic condition they have, the labor position they are in, and, following the two, their level of education) are, needless to say, below the higher social class occupied by chinese singaporeans. this reading is thus in line with the historical fact discussed previously. alfian’s “birthday”, by not talking about it, accentuates the bitter racial reality of 1990s singapore. between the form and content of “birthday” and alfian’s political commitment hence, transcending its length, “birthday” deals with the complex reality of inequalities in singapore. not only does it suggest the racial disparity between chinese singaporeans and other ethnicities in the region, but it also tells the neo-colonial experience of the region, the struggle of the proletariats, and the patriarchal oppression of singaporean women. the way alfian challenges the politico-economic narrative of 1990s singapore by depicting that singapore had not yet fully adopted the kbe and ict scheme but still was a market of lowwage manual labor for the west, while highlighting the historical fact concerning the racial disparity between the chinese singaporeans and other races in the region reflects his commitment as one of the leading figures of social justice in singapore who supports not only racial equality but also gender equality, justices for the proletariats, and the social solidarity among the subalterns. in so doing, he neither condescendingly teaches his readers about the political party they should follow, nor gives any cliché speeches in the story, but shows his readers the realistic depiction of the female malay and indian proletariats under the oppression by the patriarchal subjects, the capitalists, the dominating race, and the western enterprises. in addition, similar to smith’s (2015) research, this article finds that the language that alfian uses in his work is not what is usually called the “standard” english whose structure, pronunciation, and lexicons follow either british or american english. instead, alfian uses a mixture of chinese, malay and tamil in his singaporean english. this is most evident in some exclamations employed in the text such as “what lah,” “oi!” or “aiyoo.” the use of this singaporean english can be interpreted as alfian’s view of singaporean national identity. for alfian, singaporean national identity is a dialectical processing between the native identity, the western influences, and the multiculturalism of modern singapore that would produce a sublation—in hegel’s (2019) term—of the three; or an imagined future that is continually formed by present conditions (smith, 2015; bahrawi, 2019). alfian also uses simple prosody and style in his sentence structure. but there exists a sense of modernism in his plot structure through the use of stream of consciousness. the plot itself in general actually moves linearly. it starts from the night before rosminah’s family went to sleep, when awang borrowed the money, and ends on the next morning when her children awoke. during the night, rosminah was unable to sleep and started to recall random events that had led her to the dilemma of kala’s birthday present. in recalling these events, she follows not the temporal order but the stream of her feeling. she recalled first the event happening to her children the previous morning, her meeting with kala in the factory, her lunch with kala, her dream of giving the present to kala, her marriage to awang, and lastly about the time journal of language and literature issn: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) bima iqbal khadafi 290 when kala tells rosminah about her boyfriend and her parents. hence, “birthday” moves back and forth between the past, present, and future. this movement results in the story being so simple but needed a complex process of interpretation; a complexity that allows the story to convey a complex reality of inequalities in 1990s singapore. conclusion in the introduction of a recent anthology in which “birthday” is included, sui (2010) states that the short story deals with an obsession of a middle-aged woman to give her friend a birthday gift. she then equalizes this obsession with that in poe’s stories or in picasso’s paintings—a psychological obsession that is universal in world literature. there are, of course, some truths in her remark, but inscribing the epithet “universal” to describe alfian’s works (indeed, to any works of art and literature) can sometimes be misleading. the marxist reading just implemented, despite only applied to only one short story, suggests that alfian’s “birthday” corresponds to the historical (and, especially, the politico-economic) context of his society by the time it was written—that is, “birthday”, as is the case with any literary works across the world, is very particular. in its relation to the historical narrative whereby most of the time ideology is at work, the story challenges the usual portrayal of the 1990s singapore’s political economy proclaiming that the country had adopted the knowledge-based economy and had converted the manual productive activities into the intellectual and creative ones. the story of rosminah and kala working at the factory producing spare parts for nasa rockets suggests that far from being politically and economically independent, singapore was still overshadowed by the west—it was still under the neo-colonial oppression under the seemingly innocent banners of globalization and economic progress. yet at the same time, the story underlines the historical fact of the racial disparity between chinese and nonchinese singaporeans. both the challenge to and the highlight on some portions of the historical narrative of 1990s singapore in “birthday” signifies alfian’s strong commitment to gender equality, justice for proletariats, and social solidarity among the subalterns while not being openly partisan. this commitment is strengthened by alfian’s configuration of literary form and content: on the one hand, he advocates a future singapore that synthesizes the native culture, western influence, and the present multiculturalism through his use of multilingualism and singaporean english; on the other hand, he recommends a closer reading of complex social realities with all the elements comprising them (psychological, gender, racial, economic, and politics) through his seemingly simple sentences arranged in a stream-of-consciousness plot. in addition, this paper has shown that marxist reading on a literary work from a formerly colonized country cannot neglect the experience of neoand/or colonialism. for, following both the marxist and postcolonial tradition, colonialism, in its very essence, is a more acute form of capitalism; it has to do with the capitalist urge to collect profit. however, different from the usual postcolonial reading, this paper finds that the singaporean capitalists and government can be said to be as equally complicit in oppression and inequality happening in the region as the western neocolonial enterprises. references “a moment with … playwright alfian bin sa’at.” (2012, 2 feb). lifestyle asia. retrieved from http://www.lifestyleasia.com/sg/en/cult ure/feature/a-moment-with-playwrightalfian-saat-10651/. alfian bin sa’at. 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(2006). how to read lacan. new york and london: w. w. norton & co. 205 celtic: a journal of culture, english language teaching, literature and linguistics vol. 9, no. 2, december 2022 http://ejournal.umm.ac.id/index.php/celtic/index “grief and resilience live together”: an assessment of arthur miller’s death of a salesman philomena ama okyeso yeboah, paul otoo, james gyimah manu*, philip kwame freitas department of english, faculty of social sciences, kwame nkrumah university of science and technology, kumasi, ghana abstract the present study was carried out to assess mrs. obama’s assertion, “grief and resilience live together”, in miller’s tragedy, death of a salesman, from the theoretical perspectives of marxism and psychoanalysis. using a qualitative content analysis, the paper finds that even though the protagonist meets his tragic end through his sufferings and disillusion, he displays unparalleled courage, resilience and optimism, as a common man, in a battle with the capitalist society. the paper affirms the aforesaid statement and limns the defects of capitalism and its consequences on its victims – more so their psyche and mental state. with this paper, the researchers seek to expose the ills of capitalism and its devastating effects on the working-class members of the society. keywords: grief; modern tragedy; marxism; psychoanalysis; resilience abstrak penelitian ini dilaksanakan untuk menilai pernyataan mrs. obama, “grief and resilience live together”, dalam tragedi miller, death of a salesman, dari sudut pandang teoretis marxisme dan psikoanalisis. dengan menggunakan analisis konten kualitatif, penelitian ini menemukan bahwa meskipun tokoh protagonis menemui ajalnya yang tragis melalui penderitaan dan kekecewaan, dia menunjukkan keberanian, ketahanan, dan optimisme yang tak tertandingi, sebagai orang biasa, dalam sebuah pertempuran melawan masyarakat kapitalis. penelitian ini menegaskan pernyataan sebelumnya dan menjabarkan cacat kapitalisme dan konsekuensinya terhadap para korbannya – terlebih lagi kondisi jiwa dan mental mereka. dengan penelitian ini, para peneliti berusaha mengungkap sisi negatif kapitalisme dan dampaknya yang meresahkan terhadap anggota masyarakat kelas pekerja. kata kunci: grief; marxism; psikoanalisis; resilience; tragedi modern introduction michelle lavaughn robinson obama, a former first lady of the united states of america, asserts in her memoir, becoming, thus: “grief and resilience live together”. amongst many other things, mrs. obama sheds light on the significance of finding hope and strength amidst pain and loss. particularly, she refers to the grief of losing children to gun violence and natural calamities, and the ordeals faced by soldiers and their resultant effects on their families. for the former first lady, the pain, grief and agony that are experienced by the affected people, consequently, mould them into resilient individuals and evoke the spirit of hope for a better future. the present study is set on the idea of ascertaining the truism e-issn: 2621-9158 p-issn:2356-0401 *correspondence: jgyimahmanu@gmail.com submitted: 30 november 2022 approved: 28 december 2022 published: 30 december 2022 citation: yeboah, p., a., o., otoo, p., manu, j.g., & freitas, p.k. (2022). “grief and resilience live together”: an assessment of arthur miles’s death of a salesman. celtic: a journal of culture, english language teaching, literature and linguistics, 9(2),205218. doi: 10.22219/celtic.v9i2.23114. mailto:jgyimahmanu@gmail.com philomena ama okyeso yeboah, paul otoo, james gyimah manu, philip kwame freitas “grief and resilience live together”: an assessment of arthur miller’s death of a salesman 206 or otherwise of the aforesaid assertion, by mrs. obama, in arthur miller’s death of a salesman. writers always write to reflect the socio-politico-cultural conditions of the societies and eras in which they find themselves. this is what makes literature an indispensable aspect of human life. rachmayanti and andini (2014, p. 84) therefore posit that “literature is the reflection about life, thought, feeling, behaviour and attitude of human being”. wahyuni (2014, p. 64) adds that “language and literature is the product of culture”. death of a salesman highlights the plights of willy loman, a man who has lost his identity and self because of the harsh economic conditions and the pursuit of the american dream – to live a better and luxurious life. willy is a sixty-three-year-old man who has been a travelling salesman for thirty-four years yet possesses nothing. in the realization of his failure over the years as a salesman, he vents his frustrations on his two sons, happy and biff, by battling verbally with them and accusing them of failing in life. the sufferings that come with the fast-changing world, the evils of capitalism, and the disappointment of not attaining his dreams in a highly competitive world, drive him away from reality and leaves him suicidal. he ends his life so his family can claim his life insurance for a better life – willy becomes a subject of the tragic. although miller’s play was written in 1949, its relevance reverberates the presentday world across all continents. it is against this backdrop that this study is positioned to assess the assertion, “grief and resilience live together”, in miller’s tragedy, death of a salesman, from the theoretical perspectives of marxism and psychoanalysis. while we glean the economic conditions that propel willy to pursue the american dream through the application of the marxist theory, the psychoanalytic theory help delve into the mind of willy for a better understanding of his mental state and his psychological motivations. miller (1949, p. 1) defines tragedy as “the consequences of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly”. he outlines the tenets of modern tragedy in his essay tragedy and the common man. this also serves as a preface for his play, death of a salesman, which had been criticized for its deviation from the aristotelian principles of tragedy. he opines that tragedy should not be restricted to characters that belong to royalty and nobility. miller’s concept of tragedy retains the catastrophic ending of the aristotelian tragedy, arguing that this last appeal is necessary to realize the truth about death for us to strengthen ourselves for life. it also maintains the idea of the tragic flaw by defining it as the “inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he, the tragic hero, conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status” (miller, 1949, p. 2). he, however, challenges the view that tragic plays should revolve around kings and people of nobility by noting that: tragedy could be understood and cherished by a majority of mankind if it revolves around a hero who they can relate to, the everyday or ordinary man. if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone capable of understanding it (miller, 1949, p. 1). celtic: a journal of culture, english language teaching, literature and linguistics vol. 9, no. 2, december 2022 http://ejournal.umm.ac.id/index.php/celtic/index 207 this, miller believes necessitates the invocation of the tragic feeling within the audience. williams (1966) shows a firm support to the idea of the common man as the tragic hero in modern tragedy by noting that every man is important hence, the death of everyone is tragic. he challenges the classical view that the death of a king is more tragic than that of a commoner. for him, the greeks presented kings as their tragic heroes for the purpose of exciting pity and fear but considering recent happenings in the world today, every sad incident may be assessed in its own way as tragedy. as noted earlier, the paper is anchored on two principal viewpoints – marxism and psychoanalysis. propounded by karl heinrich marx and friedrich engels and often referred to as “political economy” (heyman, 2018, p. 1), marxism focuses on the struggle between capitalists and the working class. it holds the view that the power relationship between capitalists and the workers are inherently exploitative (whyman, 2022). exploitation and alienation can be said to be the two main effects of capitalism. in marxism, a person is exploited if he performs more labour than is necessary to produce the goods that he consumes. on the other hand, a person is an exploiter if he works fewer hours than needed to sustain his consumption. it holds the view that it is unfair for or unjust that some individuals would be able to earn an income without working, while others who work would be deprived of it. ideology, according to marxist critics, is a belief system, and all belief systems are products of cultural conditions. this means that theories such as capitalism, communism, religion, humanism, ethical systems, and marxism are ideologies. in the german ideology, marx and engels (1972, p. 47) define ideology thus: tyson (2006; 2014), however, stresses on the fact that not all ideologies are productive or desirable. undesirable ideologies tend to be repressive ideologies presented to citizens and in order to ensure their acceptance, they pass themselves as the natural way of doing things. presented as the natural way of seeing things, such repressive ideas prevent people from understanding the material or historical conditions which they live in because they tend to believe that those conditions have no bearings on their way of seeing and understanding the world. it is one such ideology, capitalism, which marxism sets out to attack. tyson (2006; 2014) cites the american dream, which is aptly represented in arthur miller’s modern tragedy, the death of a salesman, as one of such false and repressive ideologies. the american dream makes people believe that it is only natural to get better in life and live luxuriously. a marxist analysis of the play reveals that the american dream is an ideology, a belief system that supports the socioeconomic inequalities of capitalist countries in which the means of production – financial, natural, and human resources – are privately owned, making those who own them the dominant class. this is why tyson (2006, p. 58) argues that “the success of the american dream – the acquisition of a wealthy lifestyle for a few rests on the misery of the many”. it represents the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, all that men say, imagine and conceive, and include such things as politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. philomena ama okyeso yeboah, paul otoo, james gyimah manu, philip kwame freitas “grief and resilience live together”: an assessment of arthur miller’s death of a salesman 208 the psychoanalytic viewpoint first became prominent in the late 19th century as part of the wave of critical discourse pertaining to psychological treatment after 1960. proponents of the theory are sigmund freud, carl gustav jung, alfred adler and later, jacques lacan. generally, psychoanalytic theories explain human behaviours based on the interactions of various components. lipner, mendelsohn and muran (2017, p.2) assert that “psychoanalysis is a generic term for both a set of psychological theories and a group of techniques, each of which emphasizes the unconscious as an essential factor in human adaptation and behaviour”. concerning the unconscious, tyson (2006, p. 12) indicates that “the notion that human beings are motivated, even driven, by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware – that is unconscious” was one of sigmund freud’s most radical insights and it still governs psychoanalysis today. freud notes that humans are motivated by desires, fears, needs and conflict between these forces which they are not aware of. the unconscious mind happens to be where sad experiences are stored. such experiences are suppressed within the unconscious mind. freud’s fundamental contribution was to ignite the systematic study of the unconscious and provide the needed linguistic expressions for such studies (habib, 2005; 2011). analysing miller’s text from the theoretical perspectives of marxism and psychoanalysis afford the researchers the opportunity to: assess capitalism and its effects on the working class and delve into the psyche of the protagonist for a better understanding of his mental state, respectively. miller’s death of a salesman has been explored from diverse angles by literary critics over the years. some critics have regarded it as a communist propaganda, denouncing the evils of capitalism whilst others have seen it as a sympathetic study of the problems of big businesses (wood, 1969). wood further notes that it has also been analysed in freudian terms and attributed to its author abstruse psychological theories whereas from the point of view of catholicism, it has been approvingly regarded as a warning of the meaninglessness of life where there is no religious faith. for zhao (2016), miller has successfully characterized the tragedy of a common salesman in america. analyzing willy’s death mainly from three main perspectives of tragedy – a personal tragedy, a family tragedy and a social tragedy – zhao (2016) concludes that willy’s death reveals some social problems behind personal and family tragedy in current societies, arousing our reflection on ethical and moral standard in a money-oriented society. qingxia (2019) establishes willy loman as a tragic hero of a modern era by attributing his flaw to the american dream and his victory to his willingness to sacrifice himself for a better life for his family. although miller’s death of a salesman has received enormous scholarly attention, no attention has been given to it with regards to its connection with michelle obama’s assertion in her 2018 memoire, becoming, that “grief and resilience live together”. consequently, this present study, leaning on the marxist and psychoanalytic theories, seeks to examine the truism of the aforementioned quotation based on the happenings in arthur miller’s tragic play. method this study employs the qualitative research approach in analysing arthur miller’s death of a salesman. the qualitative research approach grants the celtic: a journal of culture, english language teaching, literature and linguistics vol. 9, no. 2, december 2022 http://ejournal.umm.ac.id/index.php/celtic/index 209 researcher the opportunity to critically observe the data and offer detailed explanation and description to it (kuntjara, 2006; babbie, 2016; 2020; atrridestirling, 2001). to achieve the objective of assessing mrs. obama’s assertion in the context of the named play from the theoretical perspectives of marxism and psychoanalysis, the qualitative content analysis was used by the present researchers. this is a systematic investigation of texts to understand meanings that are present in them (leavy, 2017). findings from the marxist and psychoanalytic standpoints, the researchers find that the happenings in arthur miller’s death of a salesman, corroborate michelle obama’s assertion that “grief and resilience live together”. even though willy loman dies at the end of the play, his persistent pursuit of the american dream and eventual death expose the detrimental impact of capitalism on the ordinary working-class member of the society. willy’s resilience is unmatched as he battles fiercely to rise above the prescriptions of a society that does not recognize his kind. his death therefore can be considered as an assertion of “victory”. from the marxist perspective, the researchers find that through class struggle and willy’s quest for economic success and equality in a capitalistic society, he and his family plunge into untold hardship, difficulty and grief. even though the entire story revolves around loman, his wife, linda, whose lamentations and sympathy for willy makes her an advocate for the working class and the exploited, brings out vividly, the sorrow and grief registered in the play as she constantly laments her husband’s condition. through the psychoanalytic viewpoint, the researchers unravel a deeper understanding of the push factors and psychological motivations that compel willy to engage in such fierce battle with a society that he cannot possibly conquer. the resilience that willy exhibits is clearly seen through his position as a modern tragic hero – his total compulsion to evaluate himself justly in the society and also, being one who does not remain passive in the face of what he considers a threat to his dignity. this compels him to patronize the american dream – the need to get ahead, the need to be better than before and the need to be better than others. he becomes a disillusioned salesman who thinks he can be just as good as anyone else in the society. through his death, willy loman does not only sacrifice himself for his family but also for anyone who is exploited and discriminated against simply because of the level of stratification that exist within our societies. as evident from the discussion, willy’s quest for success and recognition in a highly capitalistic society destroys his personality, ruins his relationship with his sons and leaves him suicidal. this is indicative of how undesirable and repressive capitalism is as an ideology and an economic system. discussion miller’s (1949, p. 1) definition of tragedy as “the consequences of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly” rightly matches michelle obama’s assertion that “grief and resilience live together”. naturally, when one faces difficulties, he or she sets out to overcome them but it is often not devoid of challenges. in miller’s play, death of a salesman, readers are introduced to a tragic hero who refuses to remain passive in a society of great economic difficulty and philomena ama okyeso yeboah, paul otoo, james gyimah manu, philip kwame freitas “grief and resilience live together”: an assessment of arthur miller’s death of a salesman 210 inequality. in the process of clinging to a resilient ideology of also becoming somebody who is successful and well-liked by everyone, he and his family experience immense grief and hardship. willy is in constant altercation with his son biff because he (willy) always projects his fears and failures on him. his pursuit of the american dream makes him ascribe his fears and unfulfilled desires to his son and condemns him for it. willy condemns his son (biff) for not being successful at the age of thirty. he tells his wife: for willy, a man is nothing unless he is successful. he fears that his son might end up being a failure like himself since he seems to have accomplished nothing at the age of thirty. it is for this reason that he pushes biff to pursue the american dream like he does with little or no regard for the consequences. this is evident in one of willy’s imaginary conversations with ben, his dead brother: this shows willy’s determination to secure a dignified spot in the society for his sons. he therefore extends his frustrations to biff and expects him to be all that he is not and cannot be. the difficulty that accompanies this agenda only makes him a daydreamer. this is what psychoanalysts term “projection” – ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desires to someone and then condemning him or her for it, in order to deny that we have it ourselves (tyson 2006, p. 15). willy believes that for one to secure a reputable place in the society, he or she must be well-liked and successful – hence, his desperation to be liked. he tells his sons: …because the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead, be liked and you will never want. you take me, for instance. i never have to wait in line to see a buyer. “willy loman is here! that’s all they have to know, and i go right through” (p. 20). willy: how can he find himself on a farm? is that a life? a farmhand? in the beginning, when he was young, i thought, well, a young man, it’s good for him to tramp around, take a lot of different jobs. but it’s more than ten years now and he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week! linda: he’s finding himself, willy. willy: not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace...the trouble is he’s lazy, goddammit! (p. 5) ben: william, when i walked into the jungle, i was seventeen. when i walked out i was twenty-one. and, by god, i was rich! willy …was rich! that’s just what the spirit i want to imbue them with! to walk into a jungle! i was right! i was right! i was right! (p. 35) celtic: a journal of culture, english language teaching, literature and linguistics vol. 9, no. 2, december 2022 http://ejournal.umm.ac.id/index.php/celtic/index 211 willy’s fascination with individual success clearly stems from his relentless quest to protect his dignity and that of his family. this, according to tyson (2006, p. 65), is in line with the ideology of the american dream which stipulates that self-worth is only acquired through economic success. as a salesman, he tries futilely to challenge a capitalistic system that seeks to exploit and repress him after working over thirty years for a company. he is therefore disillusioned by his quest to prove his self-worth, gain respect, and become rich in the society. he reassures and motivates himself with statements such as, ‘personality always wins the day’ and ‘start big and you’ll end big’. mr. loman is obsessed with living a luxurious life to the extent that he finds it almost impossible to differentiate between reality and illusion. he tells happy and biff: the first-person narration often employed in such instances makes it difficult for the audience to make out the authenticity of willy’s claims. this is because, with the first-person narrative, readers only see what the narrator sees and what the narrator chooses to share (guo, 2021; tucker, 2011). however, one cannot help but to think that willy, a dreamer as he is, is only living in his mind, a luxurious life that he can’t possibly afford to live in reality. this substantiates the claim of psychoanalysts that what a person cannot express or do because of social rules will be expressed and accomplished in dreams, where there are no social rules (adler, 1957, p. 358). similarly, in willy’s mind and imagination, he seems to be insulated from the belligerent forces of capitalism than in reality. this is why he constantly boast of a deluxe life that he cannot possibly have in the economically harsh society that he finds himself. this is what psychoanalysts call “wishfulfilment”. according to pataki (2014), wish-fulfilment is a psychoanalytic concept that applies to situations in which some agent with a frustrated desire represents the world as he would like it to be rather than as it actually is. willy even boasts of how massive his funeral will be because he believes he is well known. this is seen in his imaginary conversation with ben: america is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. and they know me, boys, they know me up and down new england. the finest people. and when i bring you fellas up, there’ll be open sesame for all of us, ‘cause one thing, boys: i have friends. i can park my car in any street in new england, and the cops protect it like their own (p. 18). …but the funeral – (straightening up) ben, that funeral will be massive! they’ll come from maine, massachusetts, vermont, new hampshire! all the old-timers with the strange licence plates – that boy will be thunder-struck, ben, because he never realized – i am known! rhode island, new york, new jersey – i am known! (p. 97) philomena ama okyeso yeboah, paul otoo, james gyimah manu, philip kwame freitas “grief and resilience live together”: an assessment of arthur miller’s death of a salesman 212 miller’s tragic hero obviously does not want to accept his place in the society as a common man, but chases after unrealistic dreams of becoming a known man. this is why miller (1949) asserts that the tragic hero’s flaw is his intrinsic reluctance to be unconcern about the challenges or ordeals that pose as a threat to his dignity. it is apparent that willy loman knows his place in the society as a salesman but he refuses to accept his fate submissively. his resilience is explained to some extent by alfred adler’s psychoanalytic view as a unified driving force of human attitudes and experiences (hofman, 2020). adler (1957; 2013) calls this driving force “the striving for perfection”. this view shifts more towards the idea of selfactualization: the desire to fulfil our potentials, the strife to become better versions of ourselves, and to reach our ideals. he first called this “striving for perfection” then later as “the aggression drive”. willy goes every length just to prove that he is just as good as everyone else. discussing freud’s theory of perfectionism, cohen (2020) calls this achievement perfectionism – a type of perfectionism which centres on self-gratification. before biff goes to stanley to seek a job, willy advises his son to lie about himself and his accomplishments just so he does not appear as someone without a purpose. willy tells biff: every decision that willy takes seems to be influenced by his relentless pursuit of the american dream – his desire to be rich and successful – even if it means concocting lies and living a pretentious life. he doesn’t want to simply accept his fate as a common man in a society in which classism is the order of the day. although martin (2019) suggests that perfectionism may be caused by a combination of personality traits, childhood experiences, demanding parents, or culture, it is obvious that in the case of willy in death of a salesman, his quest for perfection is as a result of the economic pressures that accompany capitalism. nilsen (1994, p. 155) therefore asserts that the fault lies in the “impairment of willy’s conscience and sanity by intolerable economic pressures”. clearly, willy’s quest for self-identity in a capitalistic commercialized world causes him to lose his sanity as he drowns in the pool of depression. this reflects hamachek’s multidimensional approach to perfectionism. perfectionism could be normal or neurotic (ho, 2015). the latter corroborates the form of perfectionism that willy displays. hamachek (1978) describes this kind of perfectionism as displayed by willy as the strive for unrealistic and often unattainable goals. undoubtedly, willy’s pursuit of the american dream makes him a neurotic perfectionist. this is evident in his persistent pursuit and desire to become someone in the society. for ho (2015, 9. 20), hall (2006) explains willy’s actions better when he argues that “the neurotic perfectionist engages in an unhealthy form of intense achievement striving which is fuelled by a fear of failure…” and if anything falls off the desk while you’re talking to him – like a package or something – don’t you pick it up. they have office boys for that… tell him you were in business in the west. not farm work. and don’t undersell yourself. no less than fifteen thousand dollars. because you got a greatness in you, biff, remember that. you are all kinds of greatness… (p. 48) celtic: a journal of culture, english language teaching, literature and linguistics vol. 9, no. 2, december 2022 http://ejournal.umm.ac.id/index.php/celtic/index 213 willy’s struggle with the society that he finds himself limns precisely the intensity of the grief registered in miller’s play and that which michelle obama makes reference to in her memoir. as indicated by mccabe (2018), marxism identifies two mutually contradictory classes in the society – the capitalist and the working class. willy definitely can be associated with the latter. he is a salesman who after working for over thirty-years for a company is stripped off his salary and put on straight commission work. his wife, linda, laments willy’s plight, the exploitation and class inequality in a capitalistic society: willy’s wife, like a communist activist, condemns this repressive economic system by recounting willy’s bitter experiences as a member of the working class with the capitalists, those who own and manage businesses in their own interests with the aim of making profit. consequently, she brings to bare the devastating effects of capitalism on the common man and the untold grief and hardship that comes with the system. she laments again: the above extract is replete with rhetorical questions. such questions are not designed or expected to illicit an answer (wales, 2014; yankah, 1994). they were utilized in the extract to charge emotions and to express strong feelings of outrage and vehement indignation (abioye, 2009, p. 3). their usage is a deliberate attempt to highlight the grief that is registered in the play. the rhetorical questions posed by linda clearly indicate how undesirable capitalism is for the working class and the intensity of their pain. willy borrowing money from charley and lying to his wife that it is his salary only shows the level of economic hardship his family has been subjected to because of the competitiveness of the business world. linda willy loman never made a lot of money. his name was never in the paper. he’s not the finest character that ever lived. but he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. so attention must be paid. he’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person. you called him crazy... what goes through a man’s mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent? why shouldn’t he talk to himself? why? when he has to go to charley and borrow fifty dollars a week and pretend to me that it’s his pay? how long can that go on? how long? (p. 38-39) a small man can be just as a great man, he works for a company thirty-six years this march, opens up unheard-of territories to their trademark, and now in his old age they take his salary away…for five weeks he’s been on straight commission, like a beginner, an unknown!...those ungrateful bastards. when he brought them business, when he was young, they were glad to see him but now his old friends, the buyers that loved him so and always found some order to hand him in a pinch – they are all dead, retired (p. 39). philomena ama okyeso yeboah, paul otoo, james gyimah manu, philip kwame freitas “grief and resilience live together”: an assessment of arthur miller’s death of a salesman 214 seems to sympathize with her husband. she tries to justify willy’s actions and exonerates him completely of them whilst putting the blame directly at the door steps of the capitalistic society in which they find themselves. without speculating, one can even argue that for linda, willy falls into tragedy through no fault of his but because of his attempt to live up to the expectation of a capitalistic society and in the process, maintain his dignity. the harsh economic conditions willy experiences his salary being taken away, working on commission, his inability to pay his insurance, being fired by howard after working in the company for over thirty years and borrowing money from charley just to pretend it is his salary – are circumstances that will definitely wrench the soul of any mortal and squeeze every bit of joy and happiness within. no wonder willy becomes suicidal. linda reveals this to biff: willy ’s suicide attempts and hallucinations reveal the psychological torture and stress he is subjected to almost each and every day in a society where the rich enrich themselves by mercilessly exploiting the poor. the level of financial stress experienced by willy can indubitably make him suicidal. this is why the american foundation for suicide prevention (2018) warns that stressful life events (which willy’s situation is no exception), can trigger suicidal behaviour in some people. at the requiem, a section of the play where grief is predominantly registered, charley paints a clear picture of willy’s predicaments and that of the members of the working class in general. he says: charley in the extract above helps the audience to better understand willy’s actions and status in the society. we can deduce from charley’s statement that willy is just a common man who is neither an engineer, a law maker nor a doctor, linda: he’s dying biff… biff: why is he dying? linda: he’s been trying to kill himself biff: how? linda: remember i wrote to you that he smashed up the car again? in february? the insurance inspector came. he said that they have evidence. that all these accidents in the last year – weren’t – weren’t accidents (p. 4041) nobody dast blame this man. you don’t understand; willy was a salesman and for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. he don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. he’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. and when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake…nobody dast blame this man. a salesman is got to dream boy. it comes with the territory (p. 107). celtic: a journal of culture, english language teaching, literature and linguistics vol. 9, no. 2, december 2022 http://ejournal.umm.ac.id/index.php/celtic/index 215 but instead a simple salesman who only relies on the smiles and approvals of others in high places. charley also admits that it is only normal for such a person to have dreams of becoming successful. the grief and loneliness that clouds the lives of willy and his family is further exacerbated as none of his so-called acquaintances shows up at his funeral. this is seen in the ensuing dialogue: the intensity of the grief experienced by willy’s family at this point validates the marxist view of capitalism being a repressive ideology that blinds the working class and keeps them subservient to the ruling power system (tyson, 2006, p. 57). even though the entire story principally revolves around willy loman, it is also clear from the foregoing that a discussion on grief and resilience in the play will definitely be incomplete without the mention of his wife, linda. she seems to be the glue that binds the entire family together. she sympathizes with willy when no one seems to care about him. she defends him whenever the need arises. she bitterly laments the loss of her husband when excused by charley, happy and biff thus: linda’s lamentation which is filled with repetitions and rhetorical questions, shows the level of grief and sorrow that shrouds willy’s life in his quest to obtain a dignified spot in the society. as seen in the extract above, the grief registered in the play is so great that linda finds it difficult to cry. she asks questions that she possibly cannot get answers to. the idea that they have been able to make the last payment on their house but willy is not alive to witness it makes the grief much more glaring and arouses pity in the audience. conclusion the present study was carried out to assess the assertion, “grief and resilience live together” in miller’s tragedy, death of a salesman, from the theoretical perspectives of marxism and psychoanalysis. the marxist perspective paints a clear picture of class struggle, willy’s quest for economic success and equality in a capitalist society. with this, he and his family plunge into untold forgive me, dear. i can’t cry. i don’t know what it is, but i can’t cry. i don’t understand it. why did you ever do that? help me, willy, i can’t cry. it seems to me that you’re just on another trip. i keep expecting you. willy, dear, i can’t cry. why did you do it? i search and search and i search, and i can’t understand it, willy, i made the last payment on the house today. today, dear. and there’ll be nobody home. (a sob rises in her throat.) we’re free and clear. (sobbing more fully, released) we’re free (p. 108). linda: why didn’t anybody come? ... but where are all the people he knew? ... biff: he had the wrong dreams. all, all, wrong... he never knew who he was (p. 106). philomena ama okyeso yeboah, paul otoo, james gyimah manu, philip kwame freitas “grief and resilience live together”: an assessment of arthur miller’s death of a salesman 216 hardship, difficulty and grief. the lamentations and sympathy for willy from linda make her an advocate for the working class and the exploited, and vividly brings out the sorrow and grief registered in the play. the psychoanalytic perspective affords us to know the psyche and mental state of willy in order to better understand his resultant actions. the idea that grief has the potential of evoking hope and resilience is clearly seen in the play through the theoretical perspectives employed for this study. it has been established that the happenings in the play corroborates mrs. obama’s assertion. willy’s death, just as the case of sir thomas moore in a robert bolt’s man for all seasons, shows how one can raise awareness and unravel the follies in society. willy’s grief for having worked for over thirty years as a salesman without being a successful man, in the eyes of the society, made him live with some resilience of accomplishing the supposed dream, albeit in an excessive way which led to his tragic death. his struggles and death do not only represent the failure of an ordinary man, a father and a husband, but reveal the truth about the harsh economic realities experienced in societies whose prescriptions cause people to blindly chase unrealistic dreams. even though willy dies tragically, his death opens doors for us to scorn economic inequality and makes the system of capitalism unappealing. references abioye, t. o. 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(1994). rhetoric: anthropological perspectives. the encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 3, 3568-3571. zhao, j. (2016). an analysis of willy loman’s tragedy in death of a salesman. 6th international conference on electronics, mechanics, culture and medicine (emcm 2015) (pp. 403-406). atlantis press. microsoft word 02_4821_osmond_24.2_final   © 2016 pamela osmond. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative  commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the  material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any  purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.  citation: literacy and numeracy studies 2016, 24(2): 4821,  http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i2.4821    l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 2 2 0 1 6 3   what happened to our community of practice? the early development of adult basic education in nsw through the lens of professional practice theory pamela osmond       abstract the field of adult basic education had its genesis as a named field of education in the english speaking world in the mid-1970s, emerging from humanist discourses of social justice and a sociocultural view of literacy. subsequent decades of its development have involved recurrent and destabilising periods of change with a major and overriding theme being the move away from the humanist philosophy, towards an economically driven, human capital view of literacy, which mirrors the story of a number of other social programs in their trajectory towards the ‘new capitalism’. this paper considers the first fifteen years, or genesis, of the field of adult basic education in the state of new south wales in australia through official documents and archival material and through the stories from practice told by the teachers. analysis of these stories using a theory of professional practice knowledge demonstrates the ways in which the early field of professional practice emerged as a product of its particular socio-political climate, and demonstrates also the strong convergence between the public discourses and the professional discourses surrounding the field in this period; a convergence which was progressively weakened in subsequent decades. introduction the 1970s in much of the english-speaking world witnessed a period of general optimism in a new world order and heightened concern for human rights and social justice. this included a concern for opportunities for educationally disadvantaged adults and gave rise o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       4 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   to the development of adult literacy programs as a recognised and funded sector of many adult education systems (for example, hamilton and hillier 2006, street 1995). in australia, the early development of adult literacy programs took slightly different paths in each of the eight states and territories, since adult literacy policy was initially largely a state responsibility, with the federal australian government setting overall policy priorities. the study that this paper draws on is a study of the field in nsw which has been subject to its own particular influences, producing state-specific responses to national and international pressures (see osmond forthcoming). in australia, as in other similar countries, this concern for social justice and the humanist philosophy of education which drove the early programs, began to decline by the early 1980s. by this time, the narrative of economic decline had taken control of the public discourse with the result that the newly-minted field of adult literacy became co-opted into the task of economic reform (wickert et al. 2007, wickert and zimmerman 1991). this narrative of literacy development as human capital existed along-side the discourse of human rights for another decade or so, but in the view of many, it has come to displace it almost completely (for example, lo bianco 2010). by 2000, as changes in the socio-political climate which drove the field began to accelerate, lee and wickert noted that since there had been no substantial history or systematic analysis of the australian field written, ‘teachers have few places to go to contextualise their own practice’ (2000:143-4) adding that ‘in order to intervene in and assume control of the future of their field, teachers must develop an understanding of the complexities and inconsistencies that constitute the field’ (pp. 140-1). although some state-based histories have been written (campbell 2009, searle 1999), there has previously been no attempt to document a significant history of the adult basic education field in nsw. the study from which this paper draws begins to address the gap in the telling of the history of adult basic education in nsw by investigating how the discourses and practices in nsw have developed and changed. while the history of the field could be traced through a number of different lenses, for example, policy or learner groups, it is the changes in the educational practice of adult basic education that is of interest in this study. such a study is timely in the current context of fluidity and volatility of the vocational education and training (vet) context to which the field of adult basic   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 5   education is currently tied; a context which has driven significant change in the educational practices and discourses of the field. it is timely also in that it is important that the memories of professional practice in the field be documented while the institutional memory is still alive in the minds of those professionals who helped to shape those practices. thus the study examines the genesis of the field in nsw through the lens of a theory of professional practice knowledge that encompasses the socio-political background against which development of adult basic education practice has taken place. the larger study is titled adult basic education in nsw 1975–2015: official stories and stories from practice (osmond forthcoming) the stories from practice and selections of archival and documentary evidence serve to illuminate and illustrate the opportunities and tensions that have characterised this field. an analysis of the development of the field through the lens of the bodies of professional practice knowledge that have characterised it may help to guide present and future practitioners to an understanding of those complexities since it will highlight those aspects of the political and economic background of the practice over which they have no control, and those over which they may be able to exert some agency. although the study that this paper draws on covers the entire 40 year history of the field in nsw, this paper is concerned only with the first fifteen years of that period; the period which covers the genesis and initial growth of the field, before the transformation of the field began to accelerate, from the early 1990s. interview data from the study has indicated that this period is of particular interest as practitioners reflected with enthusiasm on a community of practice which was particularly energetic, productive and vibrant, in stark contrast to the current context of practice (black 2010). the data is analysed using conceptual resources of professional practice theories which provide a means of understanding the development of and changes in the field. in particular, i adopt kemmis’ (2009) concept of an ‘exoskeleton’ of practice to describe features such as the social contexts and discourses which are the background to practice. i will trace the exoskeleton of the adult literacy field in nsw in its first fifteen years, followed by an analysis of the body of professional practice knowledge of that period, with ‘stories from practice’ of practitioners who shared that community of practice. i will briefly discuss the present context of provision and will conclude with a reflection on what this view of the development o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       6 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   of the field suggests to present and future practitioners as they consider what influence they may be able to exert on the future directions of their practice. terminology the professional field which is the subject of this study has been identified by a number of different labels over the past 40 years. unesco first named and defined a field as adult literacy in the 1950s, in relation to developing nations (jones 2006, cited in hamilton 2012:15). this was the label by which it was generally known in the early years in britain and usa, and adopted in australia, although its definition was wider than that originally suggested by unesco. the term adult basic education soon came into general use, especially in nsw. it is the term which i favour, largely because of the priority given to ‘education’ thus connecting it to a wider narrative. it is therefore the term which will be generally used in this study. the term refers to programs which are designed for adults who wish or need to improve their reading, writing and numeracy skills. it is also used to refer to the field in general, its social meanings and implied ideologies and discourses. the acronym lln (language, literacy, numeracy) has come into common use more recently, as the discourse of the field has moved from ‘education’ towards ‘training’. although the term adult basic education is the chosen terminology for this study, other terms will occasionally be used as appropriate to the discussion of particular discourses or contexts of provision. in general, the terms have similar denotative meanings, although they can be interpreted as code for different discourses. the study the study, adult basic education in nsw 1975–2015: official stories and stories from practice is an historical interpretive study utilising the qualitative methodology of narrative inquiry (andrews, squire and tamboukou 2013, connelly and clandinin 1990, riessman 1993). it is considered that this is an appropriate research approach since it most closely reflects the educational philosophies and theories of literacy that have underpinned the subject of the proposed research; in particular, the social context view of literacy (for example, hamilton and hillier 2006). it is ontologically and epistemologically sympathetic to the adult literacy field, valuing, as it   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 7   does, the participant viewpoint. furthermore, the chosen methodology of narrative inquiry validates the place of the researcher as a participant in the inquiry, a position which i value in the case of my relationship to this study, as a long-term practitioner in the field. reflections of adult basic education practices were collected using semi-structured interviews and focus groups with participants selected on the basis of their longevity in the field, evidence of their active engagement in the field and representation across the key periods of change and sites of provision. this paper will draw on interview data from eight of those participants; practitioners who were employed during the early years of the field. all were at the time permanent full-time employees of the department of technical and further education (tafe) since tafe nsw was the main provider of adult basic education programs in the foundation stages of the field. interviewees are not named in this paper, with the exception of kath white, who holds a particularly significant position as the first adult basic education teacher employed by tafe nsw and the foundation coordinator of the adult literacy information office (alio) (johnston, kelly and johnston 2001). a desktop audit was also conducted on archival material (such as teaching resources, conference proceedings, newsletters) to add a further dimension to the data. professional practice knowledge the interview and archival data in the study is analysed against a framework of professional practice knowledge: the professional beliefs and practices that are shared by members of a particular community of practice (lave 1991). nicolini draws our attention to the ‘broad family of theoretical approaches’ (2013:1) which attach themselves to the label of practice theory in an attempt to explain the social world we inhabit. one such approach is schatzki’s (2005) social ontology in which his practice theory is described as consisting of nexuses of practices (or organised human activities) and material arrangements that cohere to form nets of practice-arrangement bundles which in turn can mesh and overlap with other practice-arrangement bundles and form even larger confederation of nets. this understanding of practice resonates well with descriptions of the field of adult basic education and the web of influences brought to bear on its development. stephen kemmis’ theory of professional practice (kemmis 2005a, 2005b, 2009, kemmis et al. 2014) is similar to schatzki’s in o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       8 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   its focus on the extra-individual features such as the social contexts and discourses which are the background to practice. kemmis refers to these as the exo-skeleton of a practice (2009); in schatzki’s terms, the other practice-arrangement bundles in a confederation of nets. kemmis’ framework is particularly appropriate to the field of adult basic education because, importantly, it highlights the central role and inseparability which the ‘exoskeleton’ of a practice plays in understanding the community of practice, an understanding which is crucial for an appreciation of the genesis of the field of adult basic education. he draws on a number of theorists including bourdieu and foucault to show that ‘beyond the individual person of the practitioner, practice is also socially, discursively, culturally and historically formed’ (2005a:23). he refers to these extra-individual spaces as a kind of ‘exoskeleton’ of arrangements which cause the performance to be realised in particular ways characteristic of this or that profession or this or that location … these extraindividual features might better be described as the mediating preconditions of practice, arranged in terms of cultures and discourses, social and political structures and dynamics, and material and economic conditions under which a practice is practised. (2009:33) kemmis’ interpretation of the ways in which members of a community of practice experience these intersubjective spaces through language, in space-time in the material world, and in social relationships will also be drawn on in the examination of the community of practice which is the subject of this paper. secondly, kemmis’ framework acknowledges the position of the client as aspect of an understanding of professional practice knowledge the nature and role of the client being one of the important factors which have characterised the field and its transformation. although the term ‘client’ was not one used by the profession in the early days, the data indicates a central focus on the needs and perspectives of the individual students (lee and wickert 2000, white 1985). it is indicative of the change in the field that the definition of client has shifted in recent years from student to industry or funding body (for example black 2010, yasukawa and black 2016: vii ix). the aspects of professional practice knowledge which are referred to as ‘sayings, doings and relatings’ (kemmis et al. 2014:3) also provide a useful framework for the following discussion and   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 9   analysis. this representation of sayings, doings and relatings is mirrored in higgs et al’s taxonomy of  propositional, theoretical or scientific knowledge;  professional craft knowledge or knowing how to do something;  personal knowledge about oneself as a person and in relationship with others’. (cited in kemmis 2005b:396) in other words, professional practice knowledge involves knowing cognitively, performatively and affectively. the range of features which are represented in kemmis’ framework thus provides a useful lens for interpreting participants’ reflections on their practice and their professional practice knowledge and to illustrate the ways in which the body of professional practice knowledge came to be created and disseminated amongst the members of the communities of practice. in the first years of the development of the field, participants referred to a rich mix of influences brought to bear on these communities of practice. abe’s professional practice knowledge in the early years the body of professional practice knowledge that emerged in these early years of the profession was, predictably, given its sociopolitical context, grounded in a discourse of individual rights and progressive liberalism. lee and wickert (1994:58) report that when teachers were asked about the principles that underpinned their practice, they typically produced lists of principles such as the following: • student-centred and student-directed learning; • curriculum based on student needs; • concern with student as a whole person; • use student experience as a resource for teaching; • negotiate learning with student; • relevant and purposeful learning activities; • no external assessment; • learning which develops student independence; • reflection; • student as active participant these firmly held foundation principles of adult basic education reflected humanistic and liberal adult education (merriam, caffarella and baumgartner 2012) and were more or less consistent across place in western democracies such as australia (hamilton and hillier 2006). these principles arose, however, in spite of the fact that there o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       10 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   was little research and published literature specific to the field (lee and wickert 2000, mccormack 2009, mchugh, nevard and taylor 2001). mccormack (2009) notes that, particularly in the early, formative years, none of the early practitioners were ‘lln natives; we [were] all “lln immigrants’’’ (p.9) having learnt our pedagogies in other fields of education. interview data from my study serves to highlight the ways in which that body of knowledge came into being; how the ‘lln immigrants’ created this robust body of lln professional practice knowledge. whilst this list of principles, or propositional knowledge, was in itself a product of the exo-skeleton of the field, the ways in which teachers became initiated into the community of practice which those principles represent, was also a product of the era. it was an era in which practitioners’ professionalism and agency was respected and opportunities were made available for development and expression of that professionalism. the exoskeleton of the early years: 1975 – 1990 the beginnings of the field of adult literacy (as it was known then) and the body of professional practice knowledge that developed around it cannot be understood without an understanding of the sociopolitical context that gave rise to it and which can be thought of as part of its ‘exoskeleton’. the development of this new field of adult education in the mid-1970s in western, developed nations such as australia had its roots in the vibrant socio-political climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s. the sense that ordinary citizens could contribute to a new world order gave rise to worldwide liberation movements such as the gay rights movement, black power movement and the feminist movement, as a discourse of human rights became a rallying cry for many socially conscious citizens. a general concern for the rights of adults who could not read therefore found fertile ground. the post-war years in australia were boom years, with a growth in population from migration, and strong economic growth supported by expansion of industry and commerce. keynesian economic policies, which informed most western economies in the 1940s to early 1970s, argued for strong fiscal government intervention in the effort to bring about optimum macroeconomic outcomes (marginson 1997). australia therefore had the economic ability supported by this economic rationale for a major increase in public spending on   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 11   education and other social programs. ‘no social problem seemed beyond solution. a tremendous confidence in government was developing and education was becoming a primary governmental instrument for solving problems’ (marginson 1997:14). the election of the whitlam labor government in australia in 1972 reflected this optimism with the whitlam reforms placing a new emphasis on social equality and on the ability and responsibility of governments to address social inequality. this was an important part of the platform on which the whitlam government was elected, with whitlam declaring at his policy speech that ‘education should be seen as the great instrument for the promotion of equality’ (marginson 1997:46). a number of watershed government reports from the 1970s provide a further critical aspect of the exoskeleton of the field. the first was the kangan report, titled tafe in australia: report on needs in technical and further education (kangan 1974). the central recommendation of this report was that the brief of the vocational training system be widened to encompass those who had traditionally been excluded from technical training. this was a highly influential report which foregrounded access and equity concerns and life-long liberal education alongside the technical focus of traditional technical colleges, and changed the name of the sector to technical and further education (tafe). the second tafe in australia report however, made specific recommendations related to adult literacy and charged state tafe departments with accepting responsibility for developing provision in the area (richardson 1975:95). the report also made specific recommendations that an effective literacy program will almost certainly have to be conducted outside the formal institutional framework. literacy task forces of special staff are needed to research the problem, including the methodology of teaching, and to develop and provide programs, materials and kits for mobile teaching of small groups. ways of reaching the adult illiterate will need to be explored, by personal contact through community development officers, social workers, and others, and by advertising literacy programs through the medium of tv. adult literacy should be regarded by tafe as a major challenge. the committee urges state tafe authorities to regard literacy programs as a high priority in their use of australian government funds (1975:96). o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       12 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   the nsw department of tafe in particular took up this challenge enthusiastically and within a very short time had appointed a large number of permanent adult basic education teachers. the fact that tafe nsw had become the major provider of adult basic education programs and the major employer of practitioners in the field, facilitated the resultant integration of adult basic education into the vocational education and training (vet) sector. this did not happen to the same extent in all states in australia. zimmerman and norton write that ‘new south wales provision has been the most comprehensive and secure structurally with adult literacy officers and adult basic education teachers in every tafe college funded from state revenue.’ (zimmerman and norton 1990:145) this recommendation to locate adult basic education policy and programs within the vocational education and training policy area however, was to have a range of crucial implications and foreshadowed the tensions which have characterised the field in the decades to follow (mckenna and fitzpatrick 2004). it was one of the ‘mediating preconditions’ (kemmis 2009:33) which positioned adult basic education in nsw for a decline along with the decline of vet in recent years. stories from practice ‘learning stuff together’ the data indicates a rich mix of influences which practitioners brought to the field; from their formal tertiary studies in associated disciplines, professional development workshops, professional journals, and informal influence of colleagues. however, underpinning this, was the sense of agency which the early practitioners felt. kath white, the first adult literacy teacher appointed in the new division of adult basic education in tafe nsw reflected that ‘there was an openness in tafe policy…i had freedom to do whatever i wished with terry’s [assistant director] approval and the director’s knowledge’. several other participants reflected nostalgically on the fact that they had the ability to create the field as they went. ‘i always did what i had to do. and we were learning all the time. we were learning new stuff. working in this common thing, and learning stuff together, feeling part of something that was a good thing to be doing.’ the ‘learning stuff together’ was facilitated in a large way by the establishment of the adult literacy information office (alio) in   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 13   1979. alio was established as a referral and resource agency and professional development centre for the field in nsw, loosely following the model of britain’s adult literacy resource agency. its first coordinator was kath white, who had been a significant figure in the lobbying for government funding for its establishment. alio became a highly valued part of the exoskeleton of the field. one interviewee said that when she started working in the field ‘i didn’t know anyone so i went to alio’. it became a melting pot for ideas. in the early days, when commercial resources were scarce, alio published student-written stories and teacher-developed resources. workshops were held regularly with sessions delivered by local practitioners or visiting academics such as canadian frank smith and australian brian cambourne, both early proponents of the whole language approach to literacy development. when asked about the influences on their practice, many respondents noted the importance of these professional development sessions at alio: ‘especially in the early days when alio was doing all that stuff there was a lot of really good professional development.’ although the professional discourses which practitioners espouse and which are represented by the principles listed above are largely of the propositional knowledge category, the workshops and seminars which alio developed and many of the resources which they published were of the ‘craft knowledge’ category (kemmis 2005b:396). sharing examples of craft knowledge, or practical pedagogy became one of the central functions of alio, particularly in the early, formative years for the field, and was perhaps the aspect which most excited practitioners. the british publications from the bbc campaign of the 1970s were disseminated through alio, as were a number of their own publications. amongst the early publications was the periodical broadsheet and a series of occasional papers, some of which were aimed at introducing practitioners to the new approach of whole language. the periodical good practice in australian literacy and basic education was a national project, published with federal funding. all of these publications, especially in the early years, were very much concerned with pedagogy, and a desk audit of some of these publications demonstrates that the pedagogy reflects very closely the propositional knowledge or discursive aspects of the field referred to above. for example, the first issue of good practice in australian literacy and basic education was devoted to the theme student-centred learning and contained o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       14 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   articles which not only provided a rationale for student-centred learning in adult basic education, but examples of the theory in action. many of the practitioners interviewed reflected on the importance of these publications in informing their practice. as one interviewee said ‘i read omnivorously in the field and of course in those early days we were very influenced, as kath was, by the system that had begun in england a couple of years earlier so i imbibed a lot of that.’ thus the system that had begun in england a couple of years earlier also formed an important part of the early exoskeleton of the emerging field in australia. kath white had visited the uk on a selffunded study tour to document their programs and their use of volunteer tutor programs in particular. in 1978 she wrote that what has happened in britain has been influential in the seminal stages of literacy provision in australia. although there have been comparable developments, including the use of volunteers, in the usa and canada, the literature in which they have been reviewed has not been as accessible to australians as has been the english material. official british reports and other publications have found their way into library collections and the holdings of the british council soon after release [in a way that the usa and canadian materials had not]. (white 1978:17) practitioners’ own moral judgement a number of the interviewees however also spoke of influences on their practice coming from their own moral judgement, or what higgs et al describe as ‘personal knowledge about oneself as a person and in relationship with others’ (cited in kemmis 2005b:396). when asked how she initially knew what to do with a new student or group of students, kath related her experience of setting up the first individual learning centre in tafe in 1975, prior to the development of the adult literacy field. [we] were working on what might be a curriculum; i had planned a mix of phonic and sight word program but as soon as i started to use it with real students i knew it didn’t work, because that was not their intention – they wanted to pass a driver’s license or they wanted to keep a job and they had an immediate need to be able to read the words for their job so that was all very enlightening once you met the real people. another high-school trained teacher related a similar experience from her pre-adult literacy employment, teaching a group of fire   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 15   brigade employees who were being given some extra tuition to help them pass their exams for promotion. and i am stuck in this terrible situation – i don’t actually know what to do, except naively i had some gut feelings so i set it up as … individual programs for each student ….i did stuff that i didn’t even know was part of literacy [teaching]. i’d have them to tell me something and i’d write it down and then i’d get them to read it back. i’d never seen that but it just seemed to be like a sensible thing to do because it would be their words. this is the reflection-in-action which kemmis (2005b) refers to as searching for saliences, the drawing on the life-experience of the practitioner reflexively in order to address particular practical problems. some anomalies: ‘this isn't what i thought adult literacy was about’ the relationship however, between the field’s propositional knowledge (that list of firmly held principles) and the craft knowledge or practical pedagogy in evidence appears to be in some aspects tenuous. the literature questions the extent to which this early discourse was reflected in the pedagogy of the time and suggests that in some respects, it was not (lee and wickert 2000; white 1985). this is particularly evident in respect to the freirean discourse of emancipation which was prominent in the propositional knowledge of the early years. brazilian educator paulo freire had visited melbourne as a speaker at a world council of churches seminar in 1972. his visit there is partly responsible for the commitment of victorian literacy workers to adult education as an agent of social change through their community based programs. it is evident though that ‘freire's teachings took much longer to penetrate the other states [including nsw] and with much less effect’ (wickert and zimmerman 1991:181) although the concepts of emancipation and liberation were prominent in the professional discourse for some decades as part of the propositional knowledge of many practitioners, but with a range of interpretations of what it might mean in affluent australia. i read freire omnivorously in those first years. i said … ‘can we call ourselves freireans when we live in an affluent society?’ we are aiming at emancipation but surely it is a different kind of emancipation. o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       16 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   most of the interviewees who were employed in the field from these early years still related to freire’s philosophies. ‘one of my underpinning [principles] is still ‘liberating, not domesticating’. it is doubtful however, that freire would recognise anything of his emancipation ideology in the pedagogy that was actually practiced along-side this discourse. when asked what a typical adult basic education class might have looked like at the time most mentioned individualised programs. each student had an individual folder in which the teacher would place some pre-prepared, customised materials or worksheets. the student: teacher ratio of the time of 6:1 made this possible. the following response was also very typical: every single lesson was something current from the newspaper, an interesting story and it’s normally something like animals or sharks or those sort of topical things that will get people talking and … a comprehension exercise with questions after and i remember thinking at the time, this isn't what i thought adult literacy was about – this is almost like school teacher stuff – you give them a worksheet, get them all chatting, relax them, make sure everyone says something and then heads down, and then alright, let’s do the real stuff…and i think a lot of people did the same thing. it is likely that the fact that the program had become the responsibility of tafe had rendered it institutionalised and as such, freire’s concept of literacy as a political tool was not likely to become a reality in nsw. in spite of the 1975 recommendation to the australian government of the richardson committee that ‘an effective literacy program will almost certainly have to be conducted outside the formal institutional framework’ (richardson 1975:96), classes were conducted in most instances in an institutional framework (with the exception of the volunteer tutor arm of the program). whilst, in the initial stages, at least, tafe management was willing to accede to requests for flexibility on many issues because ‘our students are different’, most of those students were nevertheless in classes in which the social context was irrelevant to their real lives and with fellow students from usually vastly mixed demographic backgrounds. there were some exceptions to this, for example in the case of classes which were set up for indigenous students. in general however, any discursive suggestions of literacy as a tool for class struggle or even gender based struggle was therefore likely to remain in the realms of rhetoric alone.   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 17   the emergence of a distinct but eclectic abe pedagogy all of the interviewees spoke warmly of the spirit of sharing in those early years. ideas and resources were readily shared around: ‘we had meetings and talked about good ideas that worked and no one seemed to be ‘this is mine’. i think we were very generous and we were accepting as well.’ a number of the interviewees who had worked in the western area of sydney reflected on the fact that the teachers in that region developed an active informal professional development circle, meeting regularly in their own time. ‘we did a lot of sharing in those days. we borrowed from each other. we were very collaborative.’ interviewees agreed on the eclectic nature of the pedagogy in the early days; ‘there was no strong theoretical framework, it was pretty much a hotch potch of worksheets, cloze, filling in gaps, trying to adapt newspaper stuff, workbooks, grammar, cvc worksheets. the theory if any was smith, goodman, cambourne, process writing.’ this concept of an eclectic pedagogy would seem a contradiction to the concept of a body of professional practice knowledge, which suggests a shared orthodoxy. there were however, clearly some regulatory forces involved to determine which aspects of pedagogy would be admitted to the hotch potch of shared activities. theories of adult education, made popular in the early 1970s (for example, knowles 1973) were prominent in the professional discourse of the new field and seem to be the main filter through which the eclectic pedagogy was screened. one of the interviewees recalled that, as a high-school trained, newly recruited adult literacy teacher, she offered to lead one of the professional development workshops and was firmly taken to task for suggesting ageinappropriate activities. many of the respondents mentioned adult learning theory when asked what the drivers of their practice were in those early years: ‘i think the pedagogy was certainly very heavily influenced by adult learning theory.’ the other teaching approach which quickly came to be filtered out from the shared craft knowledge was the teaching of phonics as a stand-alone or decontextualized activity. phonics programs were common in the very early years, before the whole language approach became common but quickly it became clear that this was not part of the shared professional practice knowledge: ‘we didn’t really do any phonics, in fact that was actually quite “mmm, you shouldn’t do that”. whole language was promoted for example, through o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       18 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   professional development programs developed by alio and through professional journals. interview data and archival material highlight the central position which the client (still called the ‘student’ in this era) played in the professional practice knowledge of the early years. genuine attempts were made to turn the rhetoric of participatory education in to practical effect. the early journals of the nsw adult literacy council had a section devoted to student writing, conference programs featured a student stream, with that part of the program organised by students, and the executive committee of the nsw adult literacy council had an ex-officio position for a student member. these may have been tokenistic gestures that touched only a very small proportion of the hundreds of students in programs throughout the state, but they are practical exemplars of the discourse of participatory education which was evident in the education field in general in that era. in terms of pedagogy also, interviewees mentioned consideration of the needs of the student as being a primary driver of their practice: ‘i think it is all about student-centred. that’s what it is really about. student centred was definitely the key because each student came with a different idea of who they were and whether they could do anything.’ it is hard to over-emphasise the impact on the genesis of the field of the exoskeleton which i have outlined. some of it was tangible, but some was ethereal: ‘it was a movement there is no religious in me, but you just had that bit of fervour because you believed in don’t ask me why. it was empowering’. this sense of being part of a movement was mentioned by several interviewees and was particular to this era. ‘i still have a wonderful sense of the energy and camaraderie that was around in, i guess, the 80s and very early 90s as adult literacy just burgeoned as a movement and you had a sense that you were building this fantastic, useful, powerful, (sorry, i’m getting a bit carried away)… it was fantastic.’ the present context by the late 1980s the public discourse had changed and greater government involvement weakened practitioners’ sense of agency to create their field, or even to respond to students’ needs as they saw them. the public discourse became centred around employmentrelated literacy, literacy as human capital. the client ceased to be the   o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e     o s m o n d 19   student and the government or accrediting body was now the demanding client. with this came a regime of public management, compliance measures and an ‘audit culture’ (black 2010, lo bianco 1997). the creative community of practice of the earlier era, with its discourse of student centred learning became colonised by this audit culture. this was a constant theme in the interview data, with consensus amongst interviewees that it is perhaps time to return adult basic education provision to its former ideals as a social justice project. conclusions this article has traced the genesis of the field of adult basic education in nsw through the lens of a theory of professional practice knowledge in order to distinguish those aspects of the field which are amenable to influence for change and those that are likely to be an intractable aspect of the new capitalism. much of what interviewees reflected on as being central to the early field could be seen to fit into what kemmis refers to as the exoskeleton of the field which includes the socio-political context and discourses of the era. the public discourse of liberal humanism of the 1970s and 80s promoted generous government funded opportunities for dissemination of ideas amongst the developing community of practice. it provided the context for provision of formal professional development opportunities, the growth of professional journals and newsletters, and even provided the context for the informal opportunities for exchange of ideas which interviewees refer to. thus a vital body of shared professional practice knowledge was generated in the first fifteen years of the field. kemmis’ theory of professional knowledge also provides a framework against which to discuss the anomalies in practitioners’ reflections, such as that between some aspects of the shared propositional knowledge, and the practical pedagogy or craft knowledge evident at the time. it also accounts for practitioners’ own in-the-head knowledge involving their own moral judgement; an aspect of professional practice knowledge which may not be dependent on the socio-political context or exoskeleton of the field. the challenge of future practitioners may be to use this moral judgement to attempt to regain some of the lost sense of professional agency and to find a new site of practice; a new exoskeleton in which to create a new body of professional practice knowledge which is again responsive to student needs. o u r c o m m u n i t y o f p r a c t i c e       20 l i t e r a c y a n d n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s   the interview data recalled an energetic community of practice, creating a distinct body of professional practice knowledge and adult basic education pedagogy which mirrored the more liberal public discourses of the era. the humanist adult education principle of student-centredness was central to both the public and professional discourse. current practitioners reflect on this wistfully. they regard much of that discourse as potentially relevant still, in this more hostile environment of the ‘new capitalism’ where public discourses centred on human capital assume priority in sites of publically funded adult basic education provision. references 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cord-0066911-1luldzsa authors: woodly, deva; brown, rachel h.; marin, mara; threadcraft, shatema; harris, christopher paul; syedullah, jasmine; ticktin, miriam title: the politics of care date: 2021-08-24 journal: contemp polit theory doi: 10.1057/s41296-021-00515-8 sha: a1dc1f60188b506568ac8968ca54280a4901d525 doc_id: 66911 cord_uid: 1luldzsa editors rachel brown and deva woodly bring together mara marin, shatema threadcraft, christopher paul harris, jasmine syedullah, and miriam ticktin to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? the answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. the politics of care is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive. since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, discussions about the politics of care have proliferated within and beyond the academy. this welcome attention to care demands we revisit care in the context of ongoing and new forms of state violence. the present moment invites a re-engagement with care as a political theory, an ethic and a political praxis that reorients people toward new ways of living, relating, and governing. the 21st-century approach to the politics of care aims at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. the politics of care is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive. the political theoretic genealogies that the authors of this exchange draw from include black feminisms, indigenous and decolonial feminisms, and social reproduction theory. these contributions argue that a politics of care seeks not only to exceed 20th century liberal frameworks but also to elaborate an abolitionist orientation that is capable of diagnosing, undoing, and building new political horizons. as an ethic, care does more than require a posture of mutual respect, responsibility, and obligation between individuals. as christopher paul harris states in this critical exchange, 'the only horizon of an ethics of care is a world collaboration between elements of colonial rights discourse and care discourse' (1995, p. 133) , while dean spade positions mutual aid as 'an often devalued iteration of radical collective care' allowing us to re-envision what is politically imaginable (2020a, b, p. 131) . leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha (2018) calls for interlocking 'care webs' through a queer-of-color and disability studies lens, while in 1988 audre lorde famously called care for oneself 'an act of political warfare' in the context of anti-black violence, misogyny and homophobia. parvati raghuram (2016) argues for a 'multiplicity in care ethics' beyond the global north, and indigenous feminist scholars melanie yazzie and cutcha risling baldy see care as a form of 'radical relationality' with human and non-human life alike (2018, p. 2) . beyond the academy, collective care is a site of mutual aid, consciousness raising, and political organizing. the abundant examples include act up organizing around hiv/aids, the black panther free breakfast for children program, zapatista practices of community self-organization, and palestinian food distribution programs under israeli settler colonialism. abolitionist organizers have used existing mutual aid networks to provide hygiene supplies to incarcerated populations since the onset of covid-19, advocating the release of vulnerable individuals from prison as one step towards a dismantling of the carceral system. the contributions included in this critical exchange draw on such examples to make normative claims about an abolitionist, anti-dominative horizon of care that is already immanent within radical spaces of organizing and political transformation. if tronto's path-breaking work (2013) points us to the lack of 'caring institutions' under late capitalism, our contributors build on and expand this theme, asking how various institutions themselves have been historically constituted by racism, colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and cisheteropatriarchy. going further, the contributors ask what kinds of questions and commitments would be required to unmake institutions to deliver more just relations of power and structural conditions. they use care as a method -a mode of systematic analysis, planning, and action -to identify, understand, and change the way we assess and engage the world we share, within and beyond the state. stylistically varied and drawing on a range of genealogical traditions, they illuminate the necessity of theorizing the political beyond the bounds of abstracted ideal theory. they explore care as a practice that commons the reproductive tasks required for collective survival against state disinvestment and violence. they position care as an epistemic commitment addressing historic and ongoing forms of misrecognition. finally, they inspire crucial questions about the places where care, rather than violence, is distributed; collective care as a form of place making; and how racialized and gendered spaces prescribe what gets counted as care. mara marin begins our critical exchange by observing that, though the covid-19 pandemic laid bare the necessity of care in all its forms, there is a contradiction at the heart of modern ideologies of governance, encouraging people and polities to applaud care while disparaging and/or misrecognizing its material value. marin asserts that this misrecognition rests on a conceptual division between 'menial and spiritual' labor which maps onto and maintains a gendered and racialized division of care. shatema threadcraft argues, along with abolitionists like davis, gilmore, and kaba that mass incarceration represents a colossal failure of collective care in both principle and practice. she illustrates this lack by exploring the example of 'the sexual assault to juvenile detention pipeline,' a phenomenon that subjects girls and women who have been victims of abuse to carceral punishment -rather than providing systems of support that could contribute to the recognition of the very conditions that produce their predicament and remedies that would enable them to live free and self-determined lives. christopher paul harris highlights the sharp limitations of any ethics of care that does not purposely identify and divest from anti-blackness, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy. he emphasizes that a useful ethic of care cannot be built on sentiment but must be invested in unsettling and undoing totalizing systems of knowledge that socially construct, politically maintain, and theoretically justify 'the suffering of others.' miriam ticktin underscores the immanence of this necessary undoing in our current politics. she suggests how a 'decolonial feminist commons' is a space of non-hierarchal care, respect, and mutuality where people, through their collective work, make living possible outside, and in defiance of, institutions that bar them from being able to care for themselves and others -including the institution of private property. importantly, the commons are places where notions of deservingness are irrelevant because people's entitlement to the means of living are not proscribed by their comportment, social status, legal citizenship, or other factors routinely disqualifying people from the narrow circle of neoliberal care. care, by these lights, is material, practical and independent of moral dispositions. jasmine syedullah concludes this critical exchange with a meditation on abolitionist care as a classroom pedagogy, which draws on traditions in black feminist thought to explore what she calls 'congregational care' methods of being and learning together. this form of care asks people to lean into their lived experience, embrace an improvisational orientation, and understand the essential and deeply generative space created when we admit that we do not know with certainty how to undo the world that creates structural conditions of suffering for most people, most of the time. in productive conversation with threadcraft, this contribution suggests the limitations of political recognition, which requires legitimation by -and legibility to -the state, as a constitutively violent and anti-black formation. taken together, these contributions set a new horizon for the vocation of political theory. the task before us, they argue, is one of colossal import: a collaborative, collective effort to exceed the world modernity made and discover a path forward toward a contemporary era -the name of which we do not yet knowbased on the mutually affirmed conviction that we must make the road toward more just power relations and more flourishing societies, by leaning into our questions, relying on abolitionist principles, and discovering through imagination and improvisation, a practicable politics of care. rachel brown and deva woodly the racial division of carework and the devaluation of care last spring, amid the uncertainty and insecurity created by the covid-19 crisis, one thing seemed clear: the importance of care, in its many forms, and the dependence of our societies on it. from the emotional support, we could no longer receive from meeting with friends and family, to the new relationships we created with neighbors, from the essential work we gratefully received from bus drivers, immigrant agricultural workers, and workers in extended care facilities and grocery stores, it became clear that care comes in many forms and is essential for the basic functioning of our societies. from the public acknowledgement of the work of nurses, doctors, hospital janitors, and nurse aids to the immense burden felt by parents as they tried to work from home, homeschooling their children while supporting their mental health and need for physical exercise, it seemed that the veil that had made the work of care invisible was finally lifting. suddenly, it was publicly and intimately felt that care work -by which i mean any human activity that supports life, in the sense of a good life rather than just survival -is crucially important to everything else we do. among the loud pan banging to thank essential workers, to hearts displayed in windows across north america, there was reason to hope that our societies would no longer take for granted that care flows naturally, or that it reaches all the right places without social support. there was also reason to hope that our societies would no longer treat those who provide care as low skilled, deserving of low pay and low social status. yet, a year later, a certain familiar ambivalence towards care is back. on the one hand, parents' need for childcare is still publicly acknowledged. on the other hand, it is not accompanied by an acknowledgement that care workers are among the lowest paid, least protected workers. for example, the biden administration justifies its proposal to provide free, high-quality universal pre-school childcare for all three-and four-year-olds as support for working parents, especially working mothers, not as a long-overdue increase in the pay of childcare workers. given that the biden administration has dropped legislation that would have raised the federal minimum wage, and in the absence of a robust public understanding of the demands of care on its workers and the important benefits care provides, there is little reason to think that care workers will be treated any differently in the future. if we add that hopes for a world without the pandemic are expressed as hopes for the world before the pandemic -rather than for a world transformed by the pandemic into one with a different, more just organization of care -we find little reason to think otherwise. and still, care continues to be more visible, i.e., visible enough to motivate the biden administration's relatively bold proposal. what explains this ambivalence? how shall we understand the fact that, when it comes to care, we are able to both discursively acknowledge its value and devalue its workers? the answer, i contend, has to do with the organization of care along racial and gender lines, and in particular, the ideological formation responsible for the position of women of color within it. my understanding of care is related to the notion of social reproduction as discussed by socialist feminists. social reproduction refers to the activities that create and sustain human subjects, both on a daily basis and intergenerationally (glenn, 1992, p. 1) . these activities sustain human beings as embodied beings, while also constituting them as social beings. they involve creating and maintaining social meanings, building social relations and sustaining communities, and take place in a variety of spaces, settings and institutions, both public and private, and in all societies. i argue that our understanding of social reproduction is distorted by an ideology that frames care as divided into menial, 'dirty' tasks and nurturant, spiritual tasks. this menial/spiritual split is responsible for the fact that women of color, often immigrant women, do most of the lowest paid, most demanding jobs of care (glenn, 2010, p. 4) . it is also an outgrowth of the 19th century ideology of femininity that justified white bourgeois women's confinement to the home, and the separation between home and market. analyzing the menial/spiritual split reveals that while white women and women of color occupy opposite positions in the hierarchy of care work, these positions are interconnected, both resulting from developments in the ideology of femininity that accompanied the rise of capitalism and justified the development of a separate sphere of the home. the menial/spiritual split has stabilized -by instituting the racial division of care work -the home/market divide against its self-generated contradictions, and has, thus, contributed to the devaluation of not only work designated as 'menial' and relegated to women of color but also of 'spiritual' forms of care. moreover, the spiritual/menial split mischaracterizes the nature of care work by obscuring the fact that housework is simultaneously both. this symbolic construction of care as divided between hard, undesirable tasks and meaningful, desirable tasks continues to condition our misperception of care work and to justify the contradictory tendencies to sentimentalize care while materially undervaluing it. marxist feminist scholars have shown that the separation between productive work and reproductive, or caring work is a relatively recent phenomenon, associated with the rise of capitalism and its need to produce and reproduce labor power. begun in the late 15th century with the expropriation of the peasantry from the commons, this process -which encountered vigorous resistance -was only partly completed in the 19th century when the 'modern family,' with the full-time housewife doing unpaid reproductive labor in the home, was generalized to the working class in england and later in the us (federici, 2014; folbre, 1991) . on this account, women's coercion into social reproduction is a product of this process of separation between productive and reproductive work and of the women's exclusion from the wage. in a social world where survival depends on access to a wage, women's constrained access to employment requires them to become housewives, responsible for social reproductive work and subordinated to the male head of the household through whom they gain indirect access to a wage. in the process, their work gets redefined as love, not work (federici, 2014) . this separate sphere arrangement served capitalism and capital accumulation by extracting women's labor -made invisible under the designation of 'care' -and transferring its value to capital, by ensuring the reproduction of labor power on a daily basis and from one generation to the next, by disciplining the male worker (federici, 2012, p. 17 ) and by isolating workers in their private families, rendering solidarity impossible (davis, 2000, pp. 168-169) . women's work in the home is then central to the functioning of the capitalist system even as it is segregated to the presumably separate sphere of the home, and women's domination by men ultimately serves the interests of capital (federici, 2012) . however, this model of the full-time housewife was never extended to women of color in the us (threadcraft, 2016) . they were forced to work outside the home, not excluded from the wage. during slavery, black women were forced to work as hard as black men to profit their enslavers, and after slavery, when the racial dual labor systems assigned men of color to occupations that did not pay enough to support a family, to support their families (davis, 1981, p. 5; davis, 2000, p. 172; glenn, 1991 glenn, , p. 1337 ) as a result, men and women of color were mutually dependent and similarly impacted by the inadequate level of overall family income in a colonial labor system (glenn, 1985, p. 103) . to a large extent, women of color were employed as domestic servants in middle-class households (glenn, 1991 (glenn, , 1992 and as such were subordinated to white families, who benefited from their work. this made the position of women of color in the organization of labor and their relation to the separate sphere of the home very different from that of white middleclass women (glenn, 1985) , and they did not fit the standards of femininity that evolved in the 19th century (davis, 1981, p. 5) . nevertheless, i argue that their subordinated position in the structure of care work was directly related to those ideological standards of femininity that excluded them, to the productive/ reproductive split justified by those standards, and to the position of white women within that split that was dictated by that ideology of femininity. it is this ideology that continues to haunt our misrepresentations of the value of care. casting women as fragile beings of a superior spiritual and moral nature unsuitable for the market, this ideology justified the productive/reproductive split (roberts, 1997a, p. 55) . it also expanded white middle-class women's domestic obligations by contributing to the cult of domesticity, emphasizing women's roles as nurturing mothers, and creating higher standards of cleanliness within the larger process of the sentimentalization of the family as a 'haven in a heartless world' (glenn, 1992, p. 7) . this new elaboration of their reproductive responsibilities created a problem for middle-class women. not only did their reproductive responsibilities expand, the vast amount of hard labor in the housework was also now in conflict with the image of the fragile woman they were supposed to embody. the solution was to separate the 'menial' from the 'spiritual' aspects of housework and to relegate the former to women of color, recent immigrants, and working-class women who were hired to perform most of the hard and undesirable tasks of household work (glenn, 1992, pp. 6-7) . but adopting this solution had two effects, both of which contributed to our ambivalent attitude towards care and solidified its racial divisions. first, by adopting the menial/spiritual split, white women endorsed the denial of materiality implicit in this ideology of femininity. the problem faced by white women was that their role was ideologically defined in a way that came into conflict with the material reality of their role. their elaboration of the ideology through the menial/spiritual split introduced an ambivalence towards work that is inescapably material and embodied, yet valued only for its non-material aspects. while the ideology seemed to elevate care, it simultaneously communicated that its essential materiality is problematic, creating an ambivalence that continues to reverberate in our public understandings of care. second, they also elaborated this ideology of femininity as a racial ideology. by elaborating the domestic code around the menial/spiritual split, they contributed to an ideology that denies the capacity of women of color for spiritual housework and feeds into images of black mothers as unfit for motherhood (roberts, 1997a, p. 62) . they also created a hierarchical division between white women and women of color among care workers, which continued when large parts of the work of social reproduction moved from the household to the market in the second part of the twentieth century (glenn, 1992) , and which continues to structure the current organization of care. this racial division within the work of care enabled white women to hold positions of power by being associated with the meaningful, elevated aspects of care, by enabling them to join the workforce and by occupying the positions of power and responsibility in the workplace. however, while white women received and continue to receive benefits from this hierarchy of work, i contend that these benefits come at a cost. the cost is that the menial/spiritual split contributes to the devaluation of all women's work of care and continues to feed our ambivalent attitude toward care. it does so in two ways. first, the menial/spiritual split stabilizes the home/market separation against the problems it generates, and consequently the devaluation of care that follows from that separation, including the devaluation of the so-called 'spiritual' work of care. without separating the hard labor of the housework from the nurturant aspects of motherhood and transferring the former to women of color, white women would not have been able to enact in practice the ideology of the fragile, spiritual woman that supported the home/market separation, and thus, the process that placed their labor outside the sphere of real work. in accepting the menial/spiritual split, white women accepted and buttressed the home/market split and their position in it. moreover, by accepting and contributing to the endurance of the home/market split through their endorsement of the menial/spiritual split, white women also contributed to the endurance of the capitalist system that relies on these interconnected separations. to the degree to which we continue to accept these interconnected ideological separations responsible for the devaluation of care, we too buttress the capitalist system, and thus, the devaluation of the work of all workers. second, the spiritual/menial split mischaracterizes the nature of care work that all women do, obscuring the real value it creates, which in turn supports the processes of devaluation of care. by accepting the split, women accepted to be separated from the physical aspect of care, and thus, from claiming the full value of their work. separating 'menial,' from 'spiritual' tasks obscures the fact that housework is simultaneously both; it is 'an inseparable combination of manual labor and social nurturing' (roberts, 1997a, p. 79) . it is labor of love that involves manual labor. care answers needs and particular needs at particular moments. that has a mental aspect, as needs have to be interpreted, understood in their particular demands, and as they change (marin, 2014, pp. 341-342) . but it also has a physical aspect, as needs are embodied. through the work of care, children are clothed, cleaned, and fed. a particular set of cultural standards is involved in any clothing, cleaning of feeding. any labor that answers needs enacts cultural norms and contributes to their maintenance. it is work that involves physical as well as spiritual labor. continuing to enact this ideology is not the only possible response available to us, as it was not the only possible response available to white women in the 19 th century. before the civil war, feminists were advocating for a joint property regime based on the value of wives' household labor, which they only abandoned after the civil war in favor of the argument that women could only achieve equality with men by working outside the home for a wage (siegel (1994) , cited in roberts, 1997a, p. 77) . it is also not the response of black communities, who have instead developed extended, multi-generational families, which incorporated members beyond those related by blood (davis, 2000, p. 169; roberts, 1997b, p. 53) . we could abandon our ambivalence towards care and instead embrace care as an embodied labor of love that connects social meaning making to care of bodies, and that reveals the communal nature of carework, the connections we inevitably find ourselves in as beings who need care. prison abolitionists have called the phenomenon of mass incarceration many things. angela davis sees the prison as representing a failure to confront our social problems (2003) . ruth wilson gilmore argues that prisons are a spatial/geographic solution to political, economic, and environmental problems (2007). prisons, she says, represent a response to changes in industrial investment and natural disasters wherein men of color and poor white men in the prime of life, for whom there are no longer jobs, are moved out of urban centers and into former agricultural lands. one of the most compelling cases they make against incarceration is that it represents a collective failure of care. what we have come to call 'mass incarceration' has its roots in our post-civil rights criminalization of black and brown urban space in response to collective mobilization for racial equality and our investments in policing and prisons as a way to manage 'the material manifestations of joblessness, a lack of access to healthcare, failing schools and subpar housing' and the targeting of black and brown communities for militarized overpolicing. (hinton, 2021) . the fact that punishment is the default solution to a broad array of social problems is evident in what has been named the 'sexual assault to prison pipeline' wherein young black survivors of sexual assault are not offered counseling but are instead imprisoned in youth detention facilities. it is evident in the fact that black caretakers, who often are forced to choose among bad housing options in under-resourced communities, are often survivors of unpunished housing crimes. they are, then, not only disproportionately targeted for eviction, but they are surveilled and punished, often when they are, again, survivors of harm, including intimate partner violence. it could be otherwise. we could offer people in under-resourced communities the things that have been proven to decrease violence and harm, we could devote resources to preventing harm and not simply punishing it: adequate housing, mental and physical health care, flexible childcare and flexible and proximate jobs that recognize and support the disproportionate caregiving work that black women provide. we should also be sure to allow communities to participate in the processes by which we determine what they themselves need. in short, we could follow the advice of abolitionists. what if we change the frame about the appropriate way to deal with harm? approaches to addressing harm that are focused on making survivors lives better rather than making perpetrators lives worse would demand a comprehensive rethinking of what constitutes justice in theory and practice. as it is, our society expends far more time and resources on the punishment and criminalization of not only perpetrators but also survivors and rarely acknowledges the ways that these categories can overlap. this is rooted in our collective decisions to individualize responsibility for harm rather than taking collective responsibility to change the ã� 2021 the author(s), under exclusive licence to springer nature limited. 1470-8914 contemporary political theory social contexts in which (disproportionately racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic) harm takes place -rather than focusing our efforts on meeting the needs of survivors collectively and taking the time to consider, again collectively, what might make their lives better and decrease their exposure to future harm. our tendency to resource punishment over care is not only a moral problem -it is indeed wrong -it is also a political one. luckily, we have significant untapped resources in our midst. political theorists, following the lead of the great iris marion young (2011) , must look to abolitionist social movements and their models for how communities can come together to meet survivor needs and think about the best design for institutions of collective care. there is perhaps no better illustration of mass incarceration as a failure to provide care than 'the sexual assault to juvenile detention pipeline.' malika saada saar et al write that, 'the most common crimes for which girls are arrestedincluding running away, substance abuse, and truancy -are also the most common symptoms of abuse. indeed, child sexual abuse experts list these behaviors as warning signs that an adolescent has been abused and needs therapeutic intervention' (2019, p. 9). our society's impulse to punish and not protect is not simply a problem for young girls. kimberlã© crenshaw draws attention to the role intimate partner violence and the hyperregulation of public housing plays in driving black women's incarceration (2012). many black women are in jail as a result of the war on drugs. they are often guilty by association and very often survivors of male violence (mustakeem 2014) . the mainstream anti-violence movement, she says, has no interest in them. it is also unclear how well the women would fair if said movement did take an interest in the violence they experience. as beth richie has argued, the mainstream anti-violence movement's carceral turn, their 'uncritical positioning around state policy and punitive interventions' have contributed to an 'ongoing escalation of male violence against black women' (2014, p. 326). even in a context of alleged concern about the problem of violence against women -public campaigns against human trafficking, for example -there is clearly no care. survivors are far more likely to be prosecuted than the perpetrators in these human trafficking cases. on the issue of housing, an issue situated within a wider cultural context where women bear greater responsibility for caring for children and other dependents, black women are survivors of unpunished housing discrimination crimes, crimes that lead them into hyperregulated public housing and, thus, put them at the mercy of a housing subsidy surveillance regime that includes both police and neighborhood watch. we have a society that distributes violence and not care. this commitment to distributing violence not only increases the levels of interpersonal violence that black women confront but presents considerable obstacles to their ability to do the privatized and community care work they are tasked with, a burden that is made heavier because of the society wide turn away from care. eviction is an important example of this phenomenon, as our laws and policies make survivors of violence more likely to be evicted, threatening the family security and stability that black women are unduly encumbered with providing, and they also conscript landlords and neighbors into state surveillance work, facilitating the breakdown of communities and discouraging mutual aid. the disproportionate violence black people experience is itself rooted in centuries of unanswered recognition claims: black people have not been recognized as equal self-determining agents; they have been misrecognized, stereotyped, and criminalized. black equality claims have been met with criminalization and state violence, first in the post-emancipation 'worse than slavery' period and, second, in response to the modern civil rights movement. heather ann thompson (2010) argues that the rise of the carceral state --a phenomenon worthy of our attention as it has been central to the decline of the power of organized labor, the recent rightward drift in our politics and to our mid-20th century urban crises -was driven by the criminalization of urban space, space criminalized in response to black demands for equal citizenship. a key mechanism of said criminalization was drug legislation. elizabeth hinton, too, sees mass incarceration as a response to the gains of the civil rights movement and as a response to black urban rebellions, rebellions in which blacks, again, protested their unequal treatment and misrecognition (2017, 2021) . those rebellions, she holds, were key in moving liberals from a critique of poverty to an embrace of crime control. drugs were, hinton writes, a pretext for greater government involvement in low-income communities, as the federal government collapsed ending discrimination and ending poverty into the necessity of 'fighting crime.' criminalization and incarceration represent an ongoing misrecognition, one that has delivered political products in the forms of practices, policy, and law, which are rooted in the idea that black people require distinct forms of social control because they are beings of a different kind. conversely, recognition is what is necessary to move us from incarceration to care, and to date, social movements are the best vehicle in existence for achieving something approaching genuine recognition in societies marked by misrecognition, including in our multi-racial democracy characterized by long-standing racial and gender hierarchies and the stereotypes they generate. misrecognition has led our society to distribute disproportionate violence to the misrecognized; recognition is a crucial step in building a society characterized by public care. as it happens, many of the social movements organized around building caring communities, in fact, have done much to facilitate bringing about genuine recognition for the most marginalized in our society. they have done so by creating a space for the misrecognized to engage in storytelling that allows them to be recognized on their own terms. deva woodly argues that social movements are necessary to democracy, as such, and particularly to the possibility of multi-racial democracy in a nation long stamped by group-based oppression. they are, she says, democracy's fifth estate. woodly argues that social movements change our associations, public understandings and the scope of political possibility (woodly, 2015) . one fascinating way in which they do so is by creating space within the dominant public sphere that allows oppressed people to engage in storytelling about themselves and their experiences, in self-authorship in the dominant public sphere. through social movements, oppressed people become a part of authoring the values by which we all collectively live. recently, black people have come to author themselves, name themselves in a movement that has called on us to say the names of our dead. woodly cites jeremy sawyer and anup gampa's work, which states that social movements are the only phenomena that have been successful in changing societywide attitudes. in addition to the critically important role they play in developing long-neglected political capacities among marginalized peoples, they alone are capable of creating new associations with the groups participating in them and can change observers' implicit evaluations of the group. they are capable of such changes in a way that exposure to exceptional individuals, like barack obama, are not. speech appears to play an important role in bringing about these changes. woodly writes: blm rallies, interviews and media coverage have given black people the opportunity to directly voice their opinions on race, racism and racial issues. this is potentially significant because listening to opinions, expressed through speech, seems to increase the likelihood that individuals will attribute human-like qualities to those expressing the opinion -even if they do not currently share that opinion (woodly, 2021 ). this is interesting. as the movement for black lives (m4bl) has transformed from a movement for police reform to an avowedly abolitionist one, to a push towards care and away from cops, we must reflect on the importance of storytelling in this process and devote resources to said storytelling, as this form of public speech appears crucial to getting us to a place of public care. i should note that mariame kaba's organizing work contains elements of all that i have highlighted in this piece. much of what is compelling about kaba's work, for example, is that it is survivor-, and not perpetrator-centered, and it is focused on how collectives can respond to survivor needs. for example, in one landmark case in chicago, a 20-year history of police torture at hidden sites took place in the 1970s and 1980s under the command of jon burge. though burge was charged and convicted of these crimes long after the fact, what is most interesting about this episode is that activists and organizers successfully won reparations for surviving victims of police torture and their descendants (stafford 2015) . in addition to cash payments of up to $100,000 for survivors (baker 2019) , the reparations settlement addresses the issue of knowledge production. as a part of the 2015 settlement, descendants of survivors will be guaranteed free tuition at any public city or state ã� 2021 the author(s), under exclusive licence to springer nature limited. 1470-8914 contemporary political theory university that they choose to attend. most importantly, there will be a public memorial and a requirement that students in public schools and colleges will be taught about the long-running torture scheme. it, therefore, will change the stories told about policing and police violence as a way to facilitate the recognition of the humanity of all survivors. we must also recognize that all black people do not have equal access to this recognition-affirming storytelling, for many reasons, including our dominant, masculinist frames regarding racial violence and black men's greater control over the means of symbolic production, which includes the symbolic dominance of lynching in the stories of black peoplehood and what kristie dotson has called 'epistemic oppression' (2014). kimberlã© crenshaw implores us to attend to the flaws in our storytelling and she speaks of a need to redistribute narrative capital and expand our narrative frames, so that black women's stories of violence resonate and are amplified both in black counterpublic spheres and dominant publics as much as black male stories currently do (2012). this narrative redistribution might enable those stories to go on to occasion equal political mobilization. without this, she says, we will fail to see the sites of mass incarceration beyond the prison, including in public housing and welfare offices. without this, we may fail to care adequately for those who disproportionately provide care among us. we must resource and amplify caregiver storytelling just as we give resources to abolitionist experiments in offering care and not punishment. yet caregiver storytelling is very often survivor storytelling. so, it is necessary to resource storytelling while recognizing the ways in which storytelling often burdens survivors of gender-based violence in particular. as much of the violence against black women in our society goes unreported and unrecognized, here the aspect of public acknowledgement and education in reparation for harm is key. such provisions can improve the lives of survivors, facilitating greater survivor recognition, without requiring their individual testimony, which often seems to put survivors on trial for the harm done to them. this is extremely important, as we know that very few survivors seek individual help from the state in our current system. this kind of intervention acknowledges that the systems we design should not depend on such individual testimony but should always commit to facilitating storytelling while providing critical care for survivors' well-being. political theorists must be among the ranks of those considering the mechanisms and institutions through which we might best be able to do this necessary work. shatema threadcraft (caring for) the world that must be undone (2013) first phase of care. it stipulates, perhaps unsurprisingly that we ought to care for and go about undoing the world. which is to say, the only horizon of an ethics of care is a world undone. by undoing the world, i mean the practice and process of extracting ourselves and each other from the ideas, values, and institutions of western modernity. in that sense, i align myself with recent calls for abolition and decolonization, which have become staples of black and brown-led organizing and activism in the years following the emergence of #blacklivesmatter. at its core, to undo towards an otherwise world is to refuse our violent and totalizing system of knowledge anchored in and (re)produced by anti-blackness, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy. call it an insurrection of the mind at the 'blood-stained gate' of the west. a rebellion that no longer takes for granted the legitimacy of what we've inherited or readily accepts entrenched ideologies that masquerade as truth. to alter ever-soslightly the last line of a james baldwin's (1993) address: '[they] made the world we're living in and we have to make it over.' animated by a desire for something else, something more, the practice and process of undoing and then remaking the world offers the possibility of a different kind of relation, an unbounded with and for on the other side of domination. i might go as far as to say it is a project that aims to bring us to what fred moten and stefano harney (2013) refer to as the 'beyond of politics.' after all, as an ethos and analytic, 'the modality of life's constant escape' from both coercion and captivity, blackness troubles the very idea of politics itself. because the primary aim of politics -to govern, 'governance,' which, for moten and harney, represents 'the extension of whiteness on a global scale' -carries the burdensome weight of democracy, the liberal state, and the nation, concepts produced by and that have, thus, far sustained the anti-black and colonial logics of the enlightenment. in other words, it is as yet impossible to disentangle politics from the protocols of racial rule (hesse, 2017) . anti-blackness is everywhere, and where there is anti-blackness, there can be no politics that cares. for this reason, 'it's not a matter of ''doing politics differently,''' as the french anarchist collective the invisible committee (2018) if we fail to pursue such a world, one that is materially, discursively, and ideationally undone, care and care ethics will remain, as christina sharpe (2016, p. 5) has put it, a 'problem for thought,' particularly as it concerns blackness, black life, and the racial regimes that define them (karerea, 2019). to be transformational, care and care ethics must fully account for the specificity of anti-black violence and the repetition of black death as constituent to, but located outside of, what calvin warren (2017, p. 391) describes as 'the cultural space of ethics, relationality, and the sacred.' an ethics of care needs to regard the non-relationality of black pain (karerea, 2019; harris, 2019) as the bottom line that situates and organizes all forms of racialized, classed, and gendered otherings: the object to be controlled, the deviant to be suppressed, the thing to be disposed of or turned away as defined in contradistinction with the criminal mythologies of white supremacy, which requires this abjection for its coherence and preservation (wilderson, 2020). care and care ethics must therefore directly confront anti-blackness and white supremacy as the foundation of the current world and the basis upon which we undo its principles towards an unseen and unknown elsewhere. to bring this closer to the ground, consider several examples from the past 12-plus months, which represent just a snapshot of the impossibility of care as it concerns politics: the government, the law, and the legislature. according to a recent centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) report, covid-19 related fatalities, which have now surpassed 575,000, helped drive the total number of deaths in the united states to more than 3.3 million in 2020, a spike of around 16% compared to last year (johnson, 2021) . it was the highest such increase since 1918, when the country was simultaneously engaged in war, battling a flu pandemic and spatially defined by racial segregation and acts of racial terror. (in may of that same year, mary turner, a black woman, was lynched while eight months pregnant after speaking out against her husband's lynching the day before. her baby was cut from her womb and stomped to death. turner was already doused with gasoline and lit on fire when her captors riddled her body with bullets.) these covid-19 numbers are grim on their own, particularly since health officials in the former administration have acknowledged that many, if not most of those deaths, were preventable. but they are all the more enraging if you consider their racial and class dimensions. on the one hand, large corporations like amazon saw their profits soar throughout the pandemic. american billionaires saw their wealth dramatically increase. on the other and worse still, the distribution of loss among black, brown, and indigenous communities was disproportionate, owing to the long-standing structural inequalities that make our communities more vulnerable. taken together, covid-19 is a 'once in a generation' event that makes crystal clear that black and other marginalized people live in ongoing cycles of precarity ordained by the 'world that must be undone,' while the privileged profit, without any clear way out. this cycle, of course, is one many of us have come to expect. black people are always on the frontlines of disaster. while the pandemic raged, the country again bore witness to this world's violent and repetitive repercussions when former police officer derrick chauvin's knee robbed george floyd of his life. his death, along with the murders of breonna taylor, ahmaud arbury, toni mcdade, and others, sparked a summer of unprecedented uprisings across the united states and beyond its borders. refrain after refrain told us that america would finally 'reckon' with its anti-black past and address systemic racism. yet more than a year after floyd's death, and in the wake of several additional police killings of black and brown people, black politicians from across the political spectrum told us america was, in fact, 'not a racist country' -as if blinded by a base desire to leave the great american mythos intact, no matter the deadly consequences of doing so. in the end, chauvin was found guilty, a rare occurrence, but there can be no justice for the dead. nor can there be accountability since a 'bad apple' can't be held accountable if the police as an institution are at fault. and the police will never be blamed if politics will not allow those in power to see and name america and its institutions for what they are and have always been: racist and anti-black. regardless of intent, the widespread pronouncements of care about black life and death in 2020 are meaningless and actual care impossible if our political culture continues to insist america is 'not a racist country. ' we cannot care about or address what we refuse to see or choose to ignore. ironically, that appears to be the arithmetic, the 'pantomime of care,' behind the wave of new election laws proposed or enacted in republican-led state legislatures across the country following the historic turnout in the 2020 elections. driven by racist lies about voter 'irregularities' and fraud -mainly in predominately black counties and districts -there are now over 360 bills aimed at in some way restricting the vote, most notoriously in georgia. the restrictions in these bills are likely to impact black voters the most. nevertheless, republican officials tell us we need them because we cannot simply ignore the voting irregularities of 2020, especially if we claim to care about and want to regain lost trust in 'free and fair' elections. it is not only black voters who are targets for disenfranchisement by the cooptation of care and its ability to reinscribe vectors of domination. since the beginning of the year, more than 100 discriminatory anti-transgender bills, a record number, are making their way through statehouses across 33 states (krishnakumar, 2021) . these bills overwhelmingly impact trans-youth, from restricting participation in sports to gender-affirming medical care. what is worse is that they do not correspond to existing problems or concerns brought forth by community members. and in many cases, they have taken precedent over more pressing matters, particularly as it pertains to the pandemic, all in the name of 'protecting' young people. meanwhile, transgender murders are up 100% compared to the first four months of last year. the majority of the dead are black (good, 2021 ). an ethics of care must therefore rupture the frames that (re)produce injustice but can only accomplish this if it can apprehend the depth and source of the injury as experienced by the injured. the failure to apprehend the specificity of black life and suffering and that of the most vulnerable has made the (im)possibility of care most acute. and it is precisely the naming of concrete harms that drives brunella casalini's (2020) assessment of care ethics. against the flattening universalism that informs the ideal-moral approach to justice first articulated by john rawls and later revised to better account for and incorporate care and care ethics, casalini champions a non-ideal theory as a corrective methodology. this non-ideal approach centers injustice as experienced in the every day lives of a specific person or groups of people. the ability for the dominant order to hear and see epistemic violence is, in casalini's view, fundamental to an inclusive theory of care that not only questions but completely remakes our understanding of what justice is. preventing the level of identification necessary to hear and see epistemic violence is the socially constructed and politically maintained ignorance one is able to assume about the suffering of others -a failure to listen that leads to an inability or unwillingness to know. rather than facilitating a view of interdependence and responsibility as advocated by care ethicists, our 'hegemonic epistemic framework' bounds how we apply notions of worthiness to those bodies we do not or cannot identify with as like our own (p. 70). it creates the condition of possibility for othering, as such, preventing recognition as human meriting care and concern. for casalini, to remedy this wrong, what is needed is a democracy that is attentive to voice and difference. such a democracy would encourage the full participation of diverse experiential knowledges. in making this case, casalini points to what she describes as the increasingly important role of social movements in giving voice to the unheard in the arena of democratic politics. social movements disrupt common sense (woodly, 2008) and expand the parameters of responsibility by undoing hegemonic understanding with counter-hegemonic discourse. they offer a subversive form of storytelling, claims for recognition that create new opportunities for what threadcraft refers to in this exchange as 'public care. ' thinking care and injustice together as a way to trouble the meaning of justice itself is notable for its attentiveness to the structural nature of what must be undone to achieve a 'caring' society. however, what is less clear is whether care ethics fully ascertains what such an undoing would require. for all her talk of specificity, of being attentive to concrete cases, casalini never names the hegemonic framework that she's writing against. anti-blackness is conspicuous in its absence. as a result, we lose the opportunity to differentiate one 'epistemic violence' from another, and to substantively deal with the multiple dimensions of ignorance used to foreclose seeing and knowing. more crucially, we overlook that the problem may not be a matter of ignorance at all. i argue the problem is not a matter of ignorance but design, and no amount of 'counter-hegemonic discourses' or 'caring to know' will disrupt extant anti-black institutions without undoing them altogether. recourse to already existing concepts and practices will reproduce already existing grammars of captivity and subjection. it will not point us towards something else. the task of undoing the world has always been a defining characteristic of black radicalism. and it is currently one of the driving forces of m4bl, understood as both a network of organizations, organizers, and cultural workers and a defining political and cultural zeitgeist separating the current moment in black social movement from the past. consider the abolitionist demand to defund the police, popularized during the 2020 uprisings. it directly calls for initiating a process of undoing the police and policing. importantly, however, defunding and abolishing the police would do more than simply eliminate a violent, anti-black institution rooted in slavery. it would also level a forceful blow at america's carceral logic and invite a much-needed re-imagining of what safety is and might be. accordingly, to defund the police would be to participate in a practice of care transformative in the here and now. care, in this case, dismantles so it can create and let live. it lets live those who might have found themselves the recipient of a bullet, a chokehold, or a knee to the neck. in that way, it honors the dead by tending to the living (sharpe, 2016) . through this ethics of care, the practice of undoing creates the opportunity to build what does not yet exist, a new horizon. such a process can powerfully change how we relate to each other and ourselves, what some scholars and activists call 'abolitionist care.' in her essay 'free us all' kaba (2021) opens up a space to consider efforts to support incarcerated people through defense campaigns as an 'ethic and a practice of abolitionist care.' for kaba, defense campaigns offer the chance to engage 'criminalized individuals through various tactics (including letter writing, financial support, prison visits, and more).' in doing so, these grassroots efforts 'connect people in a heartfelt, direct way that teaches specific lessons about the brutality of prisons' and 'underscores that our fates are intertwined, and our liberation is interconnected' (p. 111). the power of defense campaigns, then, is their ability to initiate a process of undoing. a kind of abolition of the parts of ourselves tethered to the systemic carceral presuppositions we have come to accept as right and just. this collective undertaking of self-abolition, in turn, opens the door to further steps to refuse and withdraw from the racial and punitive regimes of our current episteme. to borrow from jasmine syedullah in this exchange, it is a way for people to 'shed what is no longer serving them. ' similarly, china medel (2017) describes the work of 'no more deaths,' a volunteer organization performing direct aid actions at a treacherous stretch of the us/mexico border, as abolitionist care. their efforts not only offer aid to migrants in need but create what she calls 'a relational ethic of interdependency' (p. 875). by doing so, volunteers and migrants alike come together to generate 'a living space of an ongoing abolitionist gesture, one in which people innovate and practice ways of protecting disavowed life' (p. 875). they 'prefigure' another world, one lacking the learned demarcations of citizen and worthiness and rejecting the 'systemic and racially distributed effects of neoliberal policy in the americas that work to value and devalue different kinds of life' (p. 879). like defense campaigns, the care work performed by no more deaths provides an opportunity for volunteers to transform themselves into 'accomplices' to undo the restrictions on mobility that define the boundaries of the nation-state. far from an abstract idea, these examples and their approaches to abolition demonstrate that the process of undoing the world is already taking place, informed by an ethics of care that understands that a world undone is the only option to break the cycle of racial violence and precarity that situates and organizes racialized, classed and gendered otherings. they also show that extracting oneself from the logics of western modernity is a collective enterprise in the spirit of what miriam ticktin describes in this exchange as a 'decolonial feminist commons.' this fugitive undertaking involves slowly but intentionally abolishing the parts of ourselves that operate according to the rules of anti-blackness, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy -to fashion ourselves anew. ultimately, the (im)possibility of care and care ethics will hinge on our ability to not only consider, but attempt to inhabit and think from beyond the existing 'cultural space of ethics, relationality, and the sacred' (2017, p. 391). to move from the standpoint of the wake (sharpe, 2016) , which is to say, the excluded outside of blackness, is the horizon of our future elsewhere, a world undone and remade. christopher paul harris who are we to make diamonds of coal? or, to reorient to disorient democratic progress with 'confrontation teaching' how do commonplace, every day expressions of care begin to break the mold of colonial, capitalist, and carceral logics? who do we see when we peel back the historical sentiments and sediments of contemporary care culture? after unpacking practices of capture, correction, and control, what do we make of the remains? what remains? more meditation than argument, this contribution borrows from traditions of black study and maroon formations to outline a pedagogy of care rooted in abolitionist politics. how might a black maroon's politics of care reorient to disorient the present trajectory of democratic development? bringing an embodied praxis of black liberation to spaces of care with an eye towards abolition asks that we confront the tendencies within ourselves, our cultures, and our political systems to practice care as a paternalist extension of colonial patriarchal power, and get free from the inside out, charting trajectories of progress otherwise. beyond the limit spaces of what we mean when we say we care, take care, be careful, lies a poetics of relationship with the unknown, an invitation to inquiry and improvisation that retreats from respectability, and reckons with the punitive element at work within contemporary cultures of care -from the prison to policing, and even within the places we, in the academy, call home, our campuses and classrooms. in a 1981 interview with audre lorde, adrienne rich asks about a course lorde taught in 1969, in the wake of martin luther king's murder. 'you taught a course on racism for white students at lehmann?' rich asked. lorde described the context, the stakes were high. 'lehmann used to be 99 percent white, and it was these students coming out of the education department who were going to teach black children in city schools.' she would playact with them and, 'all the fear and loathing of these young white college students would come pouring out; it had never been addressed â�¦ they felt like unwilling sacrifices' (lorde, 1981, p. 726) . in what follows i ground my discussion of care in both a pedagogy of not knowing and a process of reflection that grows out from the limit spaces of our habituated culture of care, releasing what's not serving us to make room for the kinds of care that tend to cultivate joy, choice, and a kind of resilience that can only be forged from feeding a daily practice of becoming more human than the modern era currently affords: â�¦love is a word another kind of open-as a diamond comes into a knot of flame i am black because i come from the earth's inside take my word for jewel in your open light. drawing from the academic and poverty scholarship of maroon abolition feminisms past and present, we might think about present-day prison abolition movements as the new enlightenment, with fire this time. the unfinished work of nineteenth century maroons and fugitive abolitionists, the ongoing, reparative work of waking the dead, walking with ancestors, fighting to feel more than hunted, more than humiliated, dispossessed, and abject, becoming more than possessive individualism could ever hope to contain, prophetic praxes of black, brown, and indigenous liberation are carried from generation to generation, burning hot enough in the flesh of earth to turn coal to jewels that quake and crack the foundation from below, to invoke the poetics of lorde cited above. for lorde, like many of us who strive to teach liberation as a theory and a practice, classrooms become something more than spaces of intellectual consumption or mere contemplation. they become more spaces of protest and popular education, extensions of the maroon formations, congregations, the public or secreted assembly of those, 'teetering on the edge of invisibility, dis-ease and insanity'; the classroom is an alchemic catalyst for change, for us to build the kinds of futures so-called free people cannot yet know to yearn for, much less imagine (smith, 2016, p. 73) . when contradictions are revealed, something new can enter the frame. sometimes teaching feels like this, like exorcism. helping students notice how we learn, not just with our minds but with our whole bodies, absorbing lessons we may or may not have chosen for ourselves, then creating the conditions that can support them in shedding what no longer serves the kinds of learning they notice they are missing. lorde called this pedagogy, 'confrontation teaching.' she not only taught future teachers, she taught police officers wearing guns at john jay the following year: 'we had cops and kids off the block in the same class â�¦ i did that course in the same way i did all the others, which was learning as i went along, asking the hard questions, not knowing what was coming next' (lorde, 1981, pp. 726-727) . teaching students to notice and unlearn carceral, capitalist, and colonial logics of care from a place of not knowing can only 'work' when one teaches from their feet up, in a practice of literally physically feeling one's feet on the ground. it means connecting the lived knowledges of oppression already in the room, building intimate relationship with the figurative root systems of race, place, gender and belonging that link the people in the room to the geographies of the plantation and to architectures of prisonscapes. as lorde describes, the aim is less about offering up 'chunks of information,' but rather, 'the learning process [as] something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot' (p. 727). we who believe we can render prisons obsolete move by the authority of not knowing, by feeling our feet on the earth and 'improvising on reality.' from emmitt till to rodney king we know that the social forces that link our personal safety to protocols of public safety are not the same everywhere for everyone. when we study the continuities and discontinuities of our collective proximities to safety and power, the police cannot be seen as a central site of safety. conventional safety seems to serve and protect wealth, whiteness, punitive surveillance, and property to the exclusion of people living on the margins of political power. to decenter the police not only requires seeing the ways it reproduces and relies upon anti-black violence, it also requires turning inward, shining light enough on our own deep seeded tendencies to watch for flaws in each other, only to turn our weaponry on ourselves. the kind of care that centers the lives of those most directly impacted by present-day protocols of public security, patrol, and punishment, means we, as a political community, must first confront the fact that we don't know how to promote a public safety protocol that won't reproduce violence. this is the first step towards transformation. beginning from a place of not knowing, as kaba' teaches, allows us to be more fully present to the process of uncertainty choosing healing asks of us, feeling space to build relationship with the less familiar spaces, encounters, and confrontations that expose us to our epistemic edges. when we get curious about them and learn them from the inside out, not knowing becomes richly layered, nuanced, full of useful information. '[w]e have to be right here right nowâ�¦ the fear, the anger, the vengeance feelings, the back and forth sliding against one day you want them dead, the next day you're okay. we just have to be here holding this right now. so that's what i mean â�¦ it's not a healing space. because healed is not a destination. you're just always in process' (2021, p. 145) . in teaching kaba's text to both students and peers, i found this insight one of the most challenging for folks to engage, likely due to how we have been conditioned to know justice, not as a process, but as a place, as a measurable and determinate duration of time. however, prisons and policing cannot repair the past we have inherited. we must learn to confront these overlapping histories of poverty, racial, gender, and indigenous violence, dispossession, and decreased life chances as they land in our bodies, on the land, on our tongues, in the desires of the people we call home. but the invitation from those committed to abolitionist futures, is not to meet moments of confrontation with the same protocols of so-called 'care' that bore them here through centuries of so-called 'enlightened progress' to live among us. instead of confronting to conquer, to extinguish, or control, what if we animated an abolitionist practice of confrontation as a politics of care that emerges otherwise, more from the breath than the discourse? what if repair were to ground our culture of care? reflecting on care in times of physical isolation and social distance, ashon crawley asks us to consider 'the need for tenderness, its cultivation and care, sharply in this moment of distance' (crawley, 2020 ). crawley's read of care moves with both radical traditions of abolitionist theory and the lived experience of those who, as lorde teaches in her poem, were 'never meant to survive' (lorde, 1978) . he draws his emphasis on tenderness and tending from a poetics of possibility that is emergent, which blooms upon our return, time and again, from 'the stillness that vibrates out' of reflection. to love black people requires we all learn from the endless expanse that comprises ongoing struggles for black life, all black lives. lives lived and lost, told and taught, smudged and conjured, black life is the ground of abolitionist futures, and self-care means transforming our own. that means the demand of the moment is one of divestment from conventional notions of care. as mary hooks of southerners on new ground, puts it:'' divest! divest! divest from prisons, jails, courts. the vision of justice for us does not include cages. the vision of justice for us allows us to walk in our communities with safety and dignity for all black people: those that are differently abled, black women, black children, queer bodies, trans women. all of our brilliance deserves that. that is public safety. so, whoever is defining it come talk to us, because we have a different vision. get behind it or get beside us and the organizations, and the communities, and the people we representâ�¦ '' (song, 2016) . divesting from conventional cultures of care requires confronting ourselves in order to transform what justice means from the inside out, and we are only just beginning. in this way, abolition is more than a big idea: it is a radical act of intimate, willful vulnerability. it is a tradition of feeling free that was born at the same historical moment as liberal democracy, capitalism, and settler colonialism, but became illegible under their reign. anti-slavery abolition, as manisha sinha writes, 'was a radical, democratic movement that questioned the enslavement of labor â�¦ '[m]odern racial slavery fostered the growth of early capitalism â�¦ the movement to abolish it is, at the very least, its obverse' (sinha, 2016, p. 3) . abolition is about daring to feel more than flesh. it allowed people to express more than consent, to labor for more than mere survival, to embody more than the will of another, to have a felt sense of each other's collective presence that could not be contained, commodified, or consumed. all of these things had been deemed criminal. while bodies, like borders, were rigorously patrolled and policed. transgressions punished. bonds battered. working together to learn to lose the chains and press back against the physical and epistemic constraints of confinement, care in such conditions could be costly, increasing the risks of reaching out to one another. yet, this is how abolition is won, not with 'unwilling sacrifice,' but with the will to move as one. the urgency of abolition flows like this: out of feeling more than flesh. it bubbles up to disrupt the tides of so-called 'progress' that shape and limit conventional orientations to safety. this includes the ways we are taught to feel at home on stolen land, the ways we feel we belong here. it muddies the solid ground of self-preservation and demands we protect ourselves by reaching out for each other, for roots, for rafts, for all of us or none. 'abolition,' as julia chinyere oparah reminds us, 'is therefore not only about ending the violence of imprisonment, but also about claiming public resources and declaring the value of human life over corporate profit' (sudbury, 2008, p. 11) . oparah teaches us that when people free themselves from the prison of being no more than flesh, no more than property, they transform the ways they relate to themselves, their labor, each other, and the land. care in this context is necessarily about interconnection and interdependence. oparah draws lessons from those fugitives who created freedom, not by way of political recognition, or respectability, but through the co-created self-determination of maroon communities. her thinking moves with them to consider the challenges of building activist abolitionist communities of care today. '[ma]roon communities existed outside of the violent social control of the slave state, they were both under threat by and at war with re-enslaving forces. as maroon abolitionists, black gender-oppressed activists know that the consequences of failing to achieve abolition are that they themselves, their family members, and their loved ones will continue to be disappeared' (p. 11). and indeed, since the rise of the m4bl, a number of activists have inexplicably died and disappeared. oluwatoyin salau, a housing insecure nineteen-year-old organizer and activist in florida was found dead in june 2020 in the pandemic shrouded heat of what would be called the summer of reckoning with racism and anti-black violence. her friend, danaya hemphill was reported as sharing, 'toyin, she was like a light in a dark room. that was toyin' (feldman, 2020) . i am led by lorde, kaba, and others to confront what abolition teaches us about feeling ourselves beyond the conceits and comforts of capital. to reiterate the question with which we began, how might a black maroon's politic of care reorient to disorient the present trajectory of democratic development? what freedoms might we find when we reprogram, deprogram and get down, in the words of janelle monae's q.u.e.e.n, with the willful vulnerability of radical traditions of black care: when we rise to create abolitionist horizons of public safety en masse? at the core of what we might call black abolitionist apertures past and present, is the conscious choice for once commodified communities to confront the constraints of naming and confinement that bind them, by first feeling the alchemic power of their collective presence. then, by extending care to the collective over and against the personal risk of being reduced to flesh, they tend to the flourishing of a new concept of the political, a culture of caring otherwise. at the level of the body, especially in positions of professional academic achievement, i feel how dissociated we are from feeling connected, from feeling ourselves and feeling each other. privileging fear and competition over fellowship or unity is an act of self-betrayal, one in which we default to practices of abstraction and isolation over the truth that we are all embodied, and therefore, 'managing' feelings of harm, internalizing and rationalizing experiences of violence, bypassing opportunities to hold each other accountable, too closed off to lean into generative confrontation or conflict as a collective. to move closer towards a feeling-sense of abolition's transformative effects, we have to meet this moment from the feet up, grounded by the willful and receptive vulnerability of lorde's 'not knowing what was coming next,' to show up in professional, intimate, and congregational spaces with an eye towards the possibility of cultivating refuge and repair (lorde, 1981, p. 726) . these are places where we and our students can learn how to confrontation teach together, in real time, allowing space for the unknown -in our syllabi, in our lesson plans, and programming. this would create spaces of shared learning and unlearning that retreat from 'the university as a place of enlightenment' and drop into the paradoxical truth, danger, and allure that 'sprout,' as alexis pauline gumbs teaches us, 'out of the wet places in our eyes' (moten and harney, 2004, p. 101; gumbs, 2008, p. 145; gumbs, 2017) . what teaching maroon abolition requires, first and foremost, are daily practices for leaving school to 'jazz june,' to invoke the poetics of gwendolyn brooks. it requires staying in relation and conversation with what we collectively don't know, most fear, and dearly desire, in our flight from the familiar. in doing so, this unknown becomes steady enough to hold on to, to congregate around, return to, to shape and be shaped by, to understand, and realize -that our posture of study takes root where we stand, more in the breath than in the discourse. jasmine syedullah in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in care, one grounded in the belief that care can be retooled to address persistent forms of exclusion and domination. there are many animating forces for this reclaiming of 'care' as a concept, including new forms of need resulting from austerity and anti-immigration policies, ultra-right-wing forms of abandonment, and, most recently the world-changing covid-19 pandemic and the deep racial stratification and violence it has revealed. these kinds of care work to counter dominant liberal forms of political care, such as welfare or humanitarianism which have been imagined and enacted at the level of the nation-state, or of humanity, relying on exclusionary political frameworks. welfare excludes non-citizens; as for humanitarianism, not all qualify as equally human. furthermore, such forms of liberal care are driven by limited moral sentiments such as sympathy, pity, or compassion, which create hierarchies by distinguishing between deserving and undeserving individuals; indeed, they have worked in large part by saving those deemed 'innocent' but in so doing, they criminalize 'perpetrators' (ticktin, 2011 (ticktin, , 2017 (ticktin, , 2020 . in this sense, practices of care have (unintentionally) fed the carceral state, deciding whose lives deserve attention and whose do not. in the contemporary, reworked versions, care is at once an affective state, a practice, and an ethicopolitical obligation (tronto, 1993; puig de la bellacasa, 2017; martin, myers, and viseu, 2015; stevenson, 2014) . increasingly scholars, anti-racist activists and black and transnational feminists are reclaiming the power of care, as everyday and mundane, but with a revolutionary, transformative potential. people are returning to audre lorde (1988) , who stated that, for those who are marginalized, care is a form of political warfare: to engage in care is to uphold the right to survive. similarly, saidiya hartmann (2016) argues that the labor of care produced through the violent structures of slavery and subsequently exploited by racial capitalism is not exhausted by either of these violent formations: this care enables those who were never meant to survive to do just that, even in the most brutal of contexts. while i have long critiqued forms of care such as humanitarianism (ticktin, 2006 (ticktin, , 2011 , i join this interest in renewed and emerging forms of materially grounded care, insofar as they are co-constitutive of a new set of political formations -what i'm calling a decolonial, feminist commons. that is, there is a version of care at the heart of the commons, insofar as the commons are about radical resource redistribution and undoing forms of domination and enclosure to produce horizontal relationships of equality, mutuality and responsibility. care is one of the methods used to imagine, prefigure and enact alternative ways of being together in a fundamentally non-exclusionary, non-sentimental manner. indeed, we might say that, by enacting what woodly (2020) calls 'structural care,' which is ã� 2021 the author(s), under exclusive licence to springer nature limited. 1470-8914 contemporary political theory about healing social ills through social action based on a vision of everyone as interdependent, new political formations come into being; care helps to bring a new collective subject into being. in this contribution, i introduce the idea of the commons, and then illustrate these emergent political formations with two case studies. the commons has come to mean many things (and is practiced by many different people, from indigenous communities to black and brown communities, to ecologists to anarchists), but it is often referred to as a struggle against enclosures, the privatization of spaces of freedom, exclusion, and, perhaps most importantly, private property. it can also mean the sharing of wealth and resources on the basis of collective decision-making; sometimes it is spoken of as grounded in social relations built on reciprocity, respect, mutuality, and responsibility (hardt and negri, 2009; starblanket, 2017; dardot and laval, 2019; federici, 2019) . feminist scholar-activists like silvia federici (2019) emphasize the feminist nature of the commons in terms of the communing of reproductive activitiesmeaning the day-to-day activities that are producing people's lives. examples include the collective kitchen, urban gardens, and squats. federici states that the commons is not just a site of reproduction and redistribution: it is also a site of struggle. it builds the grounds of resistance, refusing to separate the time of political organization from that of reproduction. abolitionist politics arguably offers the strongest example of this, insisting on the interconnection between carework and political organizing, where, for example, mothers of those who are incarcerated model collective ways of being by taking responsibility for each other's children, and extend their care to friends, neighbors and cell mates (naber et al 2020) . in this sense, the commons is also necessarily anti-racist and decolonial. black and brown activists and scholars have reassured those who worry that the goal of equivalence in a (future) commons would erase or ignore existing differences in power; instead, young scholars like maimuna touray (2021) actually suggest that the commons could work as a method of reparation, while queer theorist josã© estaban muã±oz (2020) argues for the 'brown commons' as a process of thinking and imagining otherwise in the face of shared wounding (p. 6). touray envisions the commons as a set of connections to the land shared with indigenous communities that extend a notion of value anathema to capitalist enclosures and center responsibility, care and radical belonging. believing that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, touray proposes the commons as a form of reparation beyond restitution or one-time payments, insofar as it expands a way of living in which enslaved people shared knowledge and decided collectively how to prioritize their well-being. after centuries of caring for and stewarding the land, commoning involves being claimed by the land, recognizing human interdependence with other life forms and with the earth. it 'places the human in common with other-thanhuman-beings' (touray, 2021) . in this context, care is about a set of relational arrangements, not moral dispositions; it is grounded in the material. it is also necessarily non-innocent. that is, it moves away from liberal goals of purity and deservingness. to care requires admitting to and managing forms of violence, not trying to evict, expunge or expel it. caring and killing can be intertwined: for example, people kill viruses; they eat plants and animals; and they burn forests to maintain them. as mã©tis-scholaractivist michelle murphy (2015) suggests, one of the definitions of care that is often overlooked is that of being troubled, worried, uneasy, unsettled. in this sense, to care in unsettling ways, and to be unsettled by care, means to work without a clear, normative vision, requiring instead to be attuned to relationships and to place, constantly improvising. care is not necessarily clean; to care is to be creative, to be willing to imagine otherwise, to deal with messiness and contamination. indeed, 'unsettling' means that it has radical transformative potential. in what follows, i briefly mention two emergent forms of structural care that build, and build on, an idea of the commons. to be clear, to exist, the commons needs, as harris argues in this exchange, to undo the world as we know it, and its inequalities and forms of domination; but it is important to acknowledge that commoning already exists all around us, if we look carefully -it grows in the uncaptured excesses of racial capitalism, and prefigures alternative ways of being. i describe two of these extant experiments, each taking place at a different scale: the first is global -for this, i discuss 'no borders' movements; the second is local, and here i discuss practices of mutual aid. they each have their own affective dimensions. and each does different work with relation to the commons: the first helps to form a common collective political subject and to rework space, the second furthers material redistribution. i begin with the political forms being imagined and enacted by undocumented immigrants -renamed 'people-on-the-move' by these folks themselves, to get away from legal categories built on exclusion and hierarchy, like refugee, asylum seeker and economic immigrant -and the centrality of care to many of these movements. indeed, one of the activists engaged in sanctuary work -which i see as part of a larger network of no-borders movements -stated that she thought of the project of sanctuary as the 'embodied, collective action of care,' where care is about spurring the imagination, and 'training for the not-yet. ' occupations are a key aspect of this embryonic politics of and by people-on-themove: occupations of abandoned buildings and land. people are not just fighting for the freedom to move but the 'freedom to inhabit' (paik et al., 2019, p.10) . in particular, i have been drawn by people-on-the-move attempting to create space to live, in ways not condoned by forms of liberal capitalist governance. i am aware of how troubling the term 'occupation' is, particularly in relation to settler colonialism. the question is if such acts can be repurposed toward freedom; that is, if no-borders movements can practice decolonial politics, working with indigenous communities against the nation-state to undo rather than further the settler colonial project (fortier, 2017) . the point is not to imagine or claim the land as empty or available, but precisely to refuse the authority of the state, challenging its right to decide who resides where. but even when evoked against the settler colonial project, the concept of occupation recalls violent histories. in this sense, commoning is necessarily a non-innocent practice -we all inherit and live in the wake of these histories, we are all shaped by violence, even if we are differently situated in relation to it. to claim innocence is a liberal aspiration; it is not a goal of the commons, where exclusion based on moral stratification is not an option. people-on-the-move are re-imagining both space and how to be together, asserting their presence against experiences of dispossession and inequality, and doing so beyond judgments of deserving or undeserving, rescue and protection: beyond innocence or guilt. they are building alternative forms of governance against the state and against what they see as unjust treatment, including the lack of basic care and shelter. they do this by occupying liminal spaces, challenging regimes of private property. togetherness is grounded on sharing resources, in ways that require reciprocity and mutuality, but not necessarily love -this is a form of care or concern that does not require liking those with whom one lives. it requires inclusion and respect. whoever needs a home -and for however longcan occupy any welcoming, unlived in or abandoned space. these include border zones, hotels, monuments and churches. in many ways, these occupations are forcing a more equitable distribution of resources, and as part of this, they include the refusal of discourses and hierarchies of moral deservingness. occupations have taken different forms, from the now famous french sans papiers movement of the 1990s which occupied churches, to 'the jungle' -the make-shift camp on the outskirts of calais, france that lasted from january 2015 to october 2016 (agier, 2018; king, 2019) . but france is not the only place where such occupations are occurring. in the summer of 2018, as part of the multiple mobilities research cluster, i went to the occupied plaza hotel in athens, greece, one of about twelve occupied buildings which, under the new right-wing government, has now been shut down. plaza is an example of the autonomous organization of people-on-the-move, without an ngo working top-down to manage them or provide services. these occupations originated in the dissident history of the district of exarcheia, where abandoned buildings have been the site of collective living and action since the 1970s. 'refugees' and locals worked and occupied the hotel together. rather than being contained on the margins of the greek polity, as with so many refugee camps, these people-on-the-move live in athens, indistinguishable from the many who require shelter, particularly since greece's debt crisis. they were all houseless, out-of-place, and as such, they reclaimed space together. plaza challenged liberal models of care. for example, plaza residents worked to enable children to go to school regardless of how long they would be in athens, decoupling social services from nation-states -indeed, as one of the plaza residents explained to me, the local teachers organized and went on strike to enable this. this was an experiment in how social services can be accessible to people beyond citizenship status or the state, beyond identity, as part of a larger commons, driven by participation, presence and mutuality. in these circumstances, care is enacted by creating and sharing spaces to live, in a non-exclusionary manner; it manifests in other material concerns such as creating access to healthcare and education. in plaza, there were communal kitchens, so people could prepare food and eat as a collective. practices of care like these work to even out hierarchies, and create a world where people all have access to resources to live. this does not mean that such occupations work without violence or conflict. rather, violence is something that people inevitably share from living under racial capitalism and imperialism. the idea is to learn to use an attuned, caring manner to resolve issues, rather than resorting to strategies like incarceration or expulsion. starting from a situation of enforced marginalization and dispossession, people-on-the move and those in solidarity have created a series of transnational, commoning nodes -an emergent feminist decolonial commonsgrounded on forms of radical care, respect and collective self-governance; in the process, they are prefiguring a new collective political subject. my second example is an experiment in reworking material infrastructures to deepen connections between people at more local levels. this is the project of free community or 'friendly' fridges set up across all the boroughs of new york city. the first refrigerators were put in place in february 2020 by a group of anarchists working to combat hunger in underserved communities during the economic crisis and pandemic, but they have far exceeded that goal: they are resources that anyone can share in, anonymously, without giving reasons or showing deservingness. they trust people to take what they need and give back if they can. it creates a new set of relations grounded in material equality, not in exploitation and extractivism (colyar, 2020; rosa, 2020) . these fridges prefigure forms of politics grounded on the idea of care as simply about need and survival, not on a notion of 'community' that foregrounds only positive -and often exclusionary -affective ties. even as they help to imagine an otherwise, these fridges build on the long and colorful histories of mutual aid, which are based on the idea of social solidarity and cooperation, and build new social relationships grounded in collaboration, participation, and equality (spade, 2020a, b) . mutual aid is about radical collective care and it is feminist in that it works against forms of paternalism or top-down giving. even as indigenous communities may have the longest history of such practices, many black feminists have claimed mutual aid as a key element of abolitionism. the care embedded in this project is about respect and reciprocity; resources are shared, regardless of who one is, what one does, and how one inhabits the world. to be sure, just as mutual aid is not new, neither are 'free' projects: we need only think of the black panther party's survival programs, which included free breakfast, or occupy encampments where resources were shared. there are many creative feminist examples, such as the 'eating in public' project by gaye chan and nandita sharma, which started with free stores and expanded to include fridges, as one part of a series of experiments in planting guerilla gardens, food trees, eating and teaching about weeds and holding 'diggers dinners,' all inspired by the seventeenth-century english commoners: serfs who were pushed off communal land at the outset of the private-property revolution, who engaged in activist planting to take back their commons and to eat (ganaden, 2014) . they distinguish their experiments from charity insofar as the free store and fridge are for everyone: rich and poor alike. the affective ties cultivated by these forms of commoning are less about individuality than the collective, more about equality than hierarchy. togetherness is about co-existing in ways that ensure everyone's survival. 'care' in these times looks like respect for everyone's fear, anxiety, anger, and frustration. it looks like humility in the face of the unknown and uncontrollable, and openness to new imaginative possibilities. it also looks like a demand for collective responsibility, and what m4bl among others have prefigured as an 'irresistible impulse to justice' (mcleod, 2019, p. 267) . miriam ticktin chicago, reparations aren't just an idea. they're the law. the guardian nobody knows my name: more notes of a native son 2020) care and injustice the social construction of black feminist thought the secondhand refrigerators feeding new yorkers. the cut provisions #4: 'here in a foreign place, my thoughts of you sharpen from private violence to mass incarceration: thinking intersectionally about women, race, and social control common: on revolution in the 21st century women and capitalism: dialectics of oppression and liberation are prisons obsolete? conceptualizing epistemic oppression reproducing labor inequalities: challenges for feminists conceptualizing care at the intersections of gender, race, and class care ethics and animal welfare revolution at point zero. housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle caliban and the witch. women, the body and primitive accumulation re-enchanting the world: feminism and the politics of the commons 19-year-old florida black lives matter activist found dead days after tweeting about being sexually assaulted the unproductive housewife: her evolution in the nineteenth-century economic thought unsettling the commons: social movements within, against, and beyond settler colonialism golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california racial ethnic women's labor: the intersection of race, gender and class oppression cleaning up/kept down: a historical perspective on racial inequality in 'women's work from servitude to service work: historical continuities in the racial division of paid reproductive labor forced to care. coercion and caregiving in america deaths of transgender individuals up 20% in first 4 months of 2021. diversityinc abolition now! ten years of strategy and struggle against the prison industrial complex coal: black matter oracle the black scholar the undercommons: fugitive planning and black study the belly of the world: a note on black women's labors democracy: past, present, and possible futures', alternatives author(s), under exclusive licence to springer nature limited. 1470-8914 contemporary political theory critical exchange white sovereignty â�¦, black life politics: 'the n****r they couldn't kill from the war on poverty to the war on crime: the making of mass incarceration rethinking obligation covid-19 pushed total us deaths beyond 3.3 million last year we do this 'til we free us: abolitionist organizing and transforming justice blackness and the pitfalls of anthropocene ethics open borders: in defense of free movement love's labor: essays on women, equality and dependency this record-breaking year for anti-transgender legislation would affect minors the most. cnn a burst of light an interview with audre lorde notes from the kitchen, the crossroads, and everywhere else, too: ruptures of thought, word, and deed from the 'arbiters of blackness itself care, oppression, and marriage the politics of care in technoscience dear science and other stories law, critique and the undercommons abolitionist care in the militarized borderlands the university and the undercommons: seven theses the sense of brown unsettling care: troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices suffering at the margins: (re)centering black women in discourses of violence and crime radical mothering for abolitionist futures post-covid-19 colonialism and its others: considerations on rights and care discourses frontiers of justice sanctuary's radical networks care work: dreaming disability justice matter of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds locating care ethics beyond the global north spiritual and menial housework killing the black body see that fridge on the sidewalk? it's full of free food the wake: on blackness and being home as work: the first woman's rights claims concerning wives' household labor, 1850-1880 the capacity contract towards a black feminist model of black atlantic liberation: remembering beatriz nascimento the mandate: a call and response from black lives matter atlanta mutual aid: building solidarity during this crisis (and the next) solidarity not charity: mutual aid for mobilization and survival chicago agrees to pay $5.5 million to victims of police torture in 1970s and 80s. guardian being indigenous feminists: resurgences against contemporary patriarchy life beside itself: imagining care in the canadian arctic maroon abolitionists: black gender-oppressed activists in the anti-prison movement in the u why mass incarceration matters: rethinking crisis, decline, and transformation in postwar american history intimate justice. the black female body and the body politic where ethics and politics meet: the violence of humanitarianism in france casualties of care: immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in france a world without innocence' building a feminist commons in the time of covid-19 plotting liberation: a scheme for the commons as reparations. atm magazine moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care caring democracy: markets, equality, and justice the politics of common sense: how social movements use public discourse to change politics and win acceptance the politics of care reckoning: the movement for black lives and the democratic necessity of social movements indigenous peoples and the politics of water justice and the politics of difference the authors wish to thank joan tronto for her generous engagement with these pieces -her work has paved the way. we would also like to thank the students of the spring 2021 racial capitalism seminar at the university of victoria, especially karen hira, morag champagne-holland, angela rodriguez, isabel simons and annika svalestuen. finally, we are indebted to the people practicing abolitionist care in communities, organizations, and institutions around the world -their work is immanently theoretical in the same way that we hope these pieces are immanently practical -may our recognition of each other's contributions make new ways of thinking and acting together both possible and probable. springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. mobile tv: where we are and the way forward regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) 99 sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público regulation of new markets and innovation: a study based on entrepreneurial state and public interest submetido(submitted): 05/12/2019 lucas sena* parecer(revised): 16/12/2019 aceito(accepted): 26/01/2020 abstract purpose – the purpose of this study is to generate contributions to the field of economic regulation, especially to bring the regulatory state closer to functions beyond the mere correction of market failures. methodology/approach/design – the starting point considers the market as a social arena whose interaction among its agents can result in the creation of new niches and specialize the economic arenas. in this sense, some concepts such as regulatory capitalism, resignified by john braithwaite, and the regulatory state and entrepreneurial state are addressed to understand how innovation can be attributed to the public interest. about the methodology and research techniques, the bibliographic review and documentary analysis are used to construct this theoretical analysis. findings – this study aims to outline a theoretical discussion on how the regulation of new markets can be influenced by approaches related to the entrepreneurial state and the notion of public interest. finally, possibilities of future paths for the continuity of this research are suggested. keywords: new markets. innovation. public interest. regulatory state. resumo propósito – o propósito deste estudo é gerar contribuições para o campo da regulação econômica, sobretudo na tentativa de aproximar o estado regulador de funções para além da mera correção de falhas do mercado. metodologia/abordagem/design – o ponto de partida considera o mercado como uma arena social cuja interação entre seus agentes pode resultar na criação de novos nichos e especializar as arenas econômicas. neste sentido, abordam-se conceitos tais quais o capitalismo regulatório, ressignificado por john braithwaite, e estado regulador e empreendedor para se compreender como a inovação pode ser atribuída ao interesse público. no que concerne à metodologia e às técnicas de pesquisa, utilizam -se a revisão bibliográfica e a análise documental para uma construção analítico-teórico deste trabalho. *mestrando em direito, estado e constituição pela faculdade de direito da unb (ppgd fd-unb). cientista político pela unb. pesquisador do geopp. e-mail: lucassena21@gmail.com. mailto:lucassena21@gmail.com 100 regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. resultados – este estudo objetiva traçar uma discussão teórica sobre como a regulação de novos mercados pode ser influenciada pelas abordagens relacionadas ao estado empreendedor e ao interesse público na regulação. por fim, sugerem-se possibilidades de caminhos futuros para a continuidade desta pesquisa. palavras-chave: novos mercados. inovação. interesse público. estado regulador. introdução o debate acerca da intervenção no mercado como política regulatória começou na década de 1930, nos eua, como uma estratégia de correção de falhas do mercado. em termos gerais, o objetivo era promover o bem-estar econômico da população por meio da proteção do interesse público. nesse sentido, a teoria do interesse público afirmava que, se deixados à própria sorte, os mercados eram frágeis e, portanto, precisavam da regulação governamental para sobreviverem (posner, 2004, p. 50). de certa maneira, a intervenção na economia tinha objetivos considerados nobres, tais como impedir que houvesse monopolização dos mercados, e contribuía para que regiões desfavorecidas tivessem suas economias fomentadas e estimuladas (posner, 2004). no entanto, por causa das críticas, sobretudo da escola de chicago, de que esse modelo de intervenção resultava em mais gastos do que incentivos e que essas políticas regulatórias tinham como fim não a correção de falhas do mercado, mas, de fato, a proteção de interesses da indústria, esse modelo começou a ter declínio a partir da década de 1980, sobretudo com o crescimento das políticas econômicas neoliberais (da silva, 2014; braithwaite, 2008). diante das dificuldades elencadas para se manter esse tipo de política regulatória, esse modelo passou a ser conhecido como estado regulador e sofreu algumas modificações. sendo assim, o intuito deste estudo visa abordar a função do estado regulador para o estímulo a novos mercados. para isso, utilizam-se como base teórica as discussões a respeito do interesse público, do estado empreendedor e capitalismo regulatório para se refletir acerca da inovação como elemento interligado à função de fomento do estado. para tanto, este estudo estrutura-se em cinco partes, a saber: (i) mercado, nichos e dinamicidade; (ii) regulação e interesse público; (iii) capitalismo regulatório, regulação responsiva e estado empreendedor no processo de formação de novos mercados; (iv) estado regulador e inovação como ferramenta regulatória para os novos mercados; e (v) considerações finais e perspectivas futuras. no que concerne à metodologia e às técnicas de pesquisa, regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) 101 sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. utilizam-se a revisão bibliográfica e a análise documental para a construção deste estudo analítico-teórico. mercado, nichos e dinamicidade a sociologia dos mercados tende a descrevê-los como arenas sociais nas quais há diversos atores em constante interação (granovetter, 1985; beckert, 2007; fligstein, dauter, 2012). a partir desse prisma, de maneira geral, há três correntes teóricas que ajudam a entender seu surgimento. na tradição de redes, observam-se os laços tradicionais existentes entre os atores e a estrutura social. a corrente institucionalista, por outro lado, analisa as regras e contextos relacionados ao poder e às normas que contextualizam a ação dos mercados. por último, os estudos de performatividade se debruçam sobre os processos tecnológicos e artefatos da ação econômica, que são entendidos por meio de processos de cálculos. (fligstein, dauter, 2012) além dessas correntes, a economia política também se revela uma importante abordagem teórica para uma definição de mercado. por meio da economia política, os mercados são entendidos em relação aos estados, as legislações que neles operam e os sistemas de governança existentes. para a visão neoclássica, por exemplo, os mercados podem ser traduzidos em trocas passageiras de bens e serviços entre atores. a troca é determinada pela oferta e demanda do produto; assim como o preço representa o seu meio de troca. contudo, a troca já não se determina por meio do câmbio de bens equivalentes. hoje, a atividade mercantil, além de ser o meio pelo qual as trocas são realizadas, necessita de mecanismos formais e informais que garantam o funcionamento dos mercados. (fligstein, dauter, 2012) ao passo que o elo entre comprador e vendedor evolui, a competitividade entre os produtos também aumenta. para controlar e estimular a concorrência, o estado cria estratégias regulatórias que são usadas à medida que os agentes atuam. dauter e fligtein (2012) argumentam que, para impulsionar a concorrência, um dos principais mecanismos utilizados é o estímulo à competição. com ele, a capacidade de criação de novos nichos tende a se intensificar. essa interpretação diz respeito à abordagem da ecologia populacional sobre os mercados (durand, khaire, 2017). para a corrente da ecologia populacional, os mercados são produzidos como consequência direta dos efeitos da competição. no estudo where do markets come from? harrison c. white (1981) afirma que os mercados são estruturas capazes de, por meio do controle do preço e da diferenciação dos produtos, se reproduzirem. no raciocínio do autor, os arranjos econômicos podem diferenciar produtos e, por consequência, se distinguirem a tal ponto que 102 regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. o nicho pode ser dividido, ou resultar na criação de novos mercados. isso implica dizer que a diversificação se tornou uma estratégia não só para criar artimanhas à concorrência, mas também para gerar novos nichos. na visão de white (2002), os mercados não são apenas definidos por um conjunto de compradores ou vendedores; para ele, são estruturas sociais que agem por meio de expectativas racionais, a partir das quais as empresas observam a concorrência e o comportamento de outros atores. nesse processo de observação, as expectativas são confirmadas ou negadas e os custos para a atuação nem sempre são tangíveis, pois podem variar conforme os atributos afetam as estruturas. desse modo, white (1981, p. 521) relata que as empresas podem se diferenciar em termos de estrutura de custos e, ainda, de valorização de seus produtos pelos compradores. por conseguinte, a formação de novos nichos se explicaria pelo fato de que “firms seek niches in a market in much the same way as organisms seek niches in an ecology” (white, 1981, p. 520). a interpretação que se pode ter da afirmação anterior denota que a formação de nichos no mercado faz parte de uma ação natural para a sobrevivência das relações entre compradores exigentes e produtores dispostos a acompanhar essa exigência. o desenvolvimento do mercado, portanto, é influenciado pela construção de novos nichos, isto é, conforme os agentes econômicos buscam inovar em relação ao produto, maior se torna a segmentação do mercado. por sua vez, a segmentação e a criação de nichos são estratégias para (i) ampliar o consumo de determinados produtos em função do atendimento de demandas específicas do consumidor; (ii) atender a concorrência de um mercado específico; e (iii) eliminar o problema da informação incompleta sobre o consumidor (azevedo, 2000, p. 71). além das três estratégias citadas acima, a diferenciação e a diversificação são elementos-chave para o funcionamento do mercado e para a competitividade. a diferenciação significa o processo que busca distinguir o produto de uma empresa das demais concorrentes; já a diversificação, por seu turno, diz respeito à expansão do leque de bens ou serviços que são oferecidos pelas empresas. (azevedo, 2000, pp. 74-75) regulação e interesse público a correlação que se dá entre direito e regulação fundamenta-se à medida que o estado passa a ter como funções a mediação, o controle, a fiscalização e a regulação das relações econômicas e sociais. posto isso, a regulação é um mecanismo de controle estatal, cujo conceito é político-econômico (ogus, 2004). dessa forma, anthony ogus explica que a regulação é uma ação regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) 103 sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. coercitiva do estado no sentido de prover regulação social (social regulation) e regulação econômica (economic regulation). para ogus, existe uma dicotomia entre “razões econômicas” e “razões não econômicas” para a regulação. diante disso, a regulação social refere-se a um conjunto de normas jurídicas que são formuladas para disciplinar as ações em coletividade, gerar bem-estar social e, se for o caso, distribuir renda; já a regulação econômica está relacionada ao controle e intervenção estatal na economia, de modo a determinar regras jurídicas para o funcionamento do mercado (ogus, 2004). posner (apud da silva, 2014, p. 1202) afirma que a regulação econômica ocorre também por meio de sanções econômicas, regras e controles impostos pelo estado para restringir o comportamento econômico e corrigir falhas. em certa medida, a regulação traçada pelo interesse público justifica-se pelo incentivo governamental aos serviços públicos, o que gera uma competência do estado para com a prestação desses serviços (grotti, 2002; garcia, 2003; justen filho, 2006; carvalho, 2007; feintuck, 2010; di pietro, 2010). com base nisso, carlos carvalho (2007) direciona o entendimento sobre a prestação de serviços públicos pelo poder público como um instrumento de realização da justiça social. neste seguimento, a justiça social a que se refere o interesse público trata-se da ampliação da cobertura social e da universalização dos serviços. entretanto, definir o que seria a regulação em face do interesse público tem sido uma matéria de difícil resolução. garcia, porém, (2003) utiliza o conceito de regulação como elemento que assegura a prestação de serviços essenciais. as noções de regulação são amplas e passeiam por definições que podem levar em conta a regulação civil ou institucional, a regulação social e a regulação econômica (garcia, 2003, p. 6-8). o viés institucional da regulação diz respeito ao estado prover condições necessárias para o desenvolvimento da liberdade individual. em contrapartida, o social esforça-se para conciliar o desenvolvimento da atividade individual com as exigências do interesse público. além disso, a interface econômica parte do pressuposto de que os mercados estão sujeitos a conflitos internos que demandam intervenção governamental sobre a atuação de um setor específico, seja para se fazer cumprir ou resolver problemas (garcia, 2003, p. 6-8). como consequência direta da regulação econômica, os agentes privados têm a sua atuação limitada ou restringida. o objetivo da restrição da atuação econômica nem sempre significa limitar as possibilidades de escolha de seus agentes, mas, de fato, criar condições para que a atividade econômica possa ser desenvolvida e plenamente estimulada (garcia, 2003; iório, 2018; lopes, 2018). 104 regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. nesse ínterim, os sistemas regulatórios podem adotar dois modelos. o primeiro trata-se de medidas estruturais que são capazes de evitar condutas indesejáveis; as medidas estruturais tendem a ser adotadas por intermédio de restrições ou barreiras específicas. o segundo, por seu turno, exibe modelos que podem determinar medidas de conduta, as quais incidem sobre a forma de se realizar determinada atividade. (garcia, 2003, pp. 8-9) contudo, a eficácia de um modelo não pode se basear apenas em restrições ou limitações para seus agentes. segundo o professor othon de azevedo lopes (2018, p. 184), a regulação proporciona um espaço compartilhado que se denomina arena regulatória. nela, atores de diferentes participações articulam-se por meio de práticas, rotinas e temas comuns para fornecer produtos. portanto, devido à complexidade organizacional do espaço regulatório, condições para a aplicação de padrões de constrangimentos coercitivos, mais conhecidos como mecanismos de enforcement, são desenhados em conjunto com o modelo regulatório (lopes, 2018, p. 184). avançando-se nesse ponto, os desenhos regulatórios dialogam com o contexto e os valores constitucionais de um país (feintuck, 2010). a busca para se correlacionar interesse público e regulação revela-se tarefa árdua para os aplicadores do direito. os aspectos econômicos e sociais presentes nas diretrizes constitucionais instauram a discussão a respeito de como seria possível encontrar uma agenda factível de interesse público. a função do direito, grosso modo, deve ser a de perquirir caminhos que garantam à sociedade operar como sociedade (feintuck, 2010). embora essa afirmação seja ampla, a regulação baseada no interesse público surge como uma perspectiva que arrisca observar elementos para além dos aspectos econômicos (cesetti, 2018). mike feintuck (2010) indica que a definição de interesse público é vista quase imediatamente em relação aos aspectos econômicos: “massive problems remain with identifying a unifying construct of public interest to inform regulation by way counterpoint to dominant accounts informed by the economics of private interest. what has been suggested, however, is that there are concepts currently in play which can be found to have strong claims of legitimacy and which pursue objectives which clearly extend beyond, and will often conflict directly with, the dominant values of the market.” (feintuck, 2010, p. 57) a divergência de significados de interesse público leva à compreensão quase essencialmente econômica dos indivíduos. segundo o autor, há conceitos em jogo que reivindicam a mesma legitimidade dos valores dominantes do mercado na construção de um desenho regulatório. nesse sentido, a construção do conceito de interesse público deve ampliar a visão sobre o cidadão para ele regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) 105 sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. não seja apenas um consumidor, mas que possa ser reconhecido efetivamente como cidadão (feintuck, 2010, p. 59). diante disso, a ampliação do conceito de interesse público advém da importância de se determinar prioridades que, embora possam se chocar com interesses econômicos, devem capturar o conjunto de valores fundamentais do exercício da cidadania (feintuck, 2010). com base nessa colocação, arrisco a resumir o conceito de interesse público de feintuck (2008) na seguinte equação: interesse público = expectativas de cidadania + valores fundamentais a representação equacional acima pode ser melhor compreendida definindo-se que as expectativas de cidadania devem estar somadas aos valores para se atribuir o interesse público. logo, o interesse público seria a função que resulta do somatório entre expectativas de cidadania e valores fundamentais. no mesmo entendimento, o conjunto ideológico e político oriundo da maneira pela qual a regulação captura os interesses sociais e econômicos tem de dialogar com os valores fundamentais e democráticos, os quais não se limitam em interesses econômicos. maria sylvia zanella di pietro (2010) também crê na potencialidade de amplificação do significado do interesse público. para ela, o conceito de interesse público foi se desenvolvendo ao longo do tempo. nos primórdios do estado liberal, o direito administrativo enxergava pela ótica do individualismo. a ideia centrada no individualismo dificultava a determinação de um conceito comum para os cidadãos, pois a base individualista do estado liberal enfocava em diretrizes privadas. a inobservância das mazelas das desigualdades, no entanto, diminuiu quando do período do estado social de direito (di pietro, 2010, p. 92). é com a percepção de que as desigualdades sociais deveriam ser corrigidas que o estado social de direito foi demandado a utilizar de seu poder público para prover atividades de prestação de serviços públicos essenciais. então, o estado de natureza jurídica individualista passa a ser estado prestador de serviços e, com isso, nasce o princípio da supremacia do interesse público (di pietro, 2010, p. 92). além desse aspecto, di pietro (2010) examina uma dicotomia no nascimento do direito administrativo: proteção aos direitos individuais e satisfação de interesses públicos se contrastam. a proteção aos direitos individuais é fundamento sine qua non para o princípio da legalidade, o qual é elemento constituinte do estado de direito. por meio dele, a administração pública está sujeita a exercer a sua função somente em conformidade com a lei. 106 regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. não apenas a administração pública, mas todos os cidadãos devem se basear na legalidade para exercerem suas atividades da vida. nesse ponto, a liberdade do indivíduo está condicionada à conformidade com os ditames da lei. sendo assim, o poder público, ao exercer o seu poder legalmente conferido, limita e restringe as liberdades individuais. muitas vezes, essa limitação advém para a realização e satisfação de interesses públicos. (di pietro, 2010) entretanto, a ponderação de di pietro (2010) não interfere em sua colocação sobre a importância do princípio do interesse público para o nascimento de direitos sociais e econômicos. o binômio autoridade-liberdade, elemento definidor do direito administrativo, reverbera na defesa de interesses difusos do estado democrático e de direito. no que toca à regulação, a proteção do interesse público transita entre regulação econômica e social. desse modo, infere-se o interesse público não somente como a soma de vários interesses individuais, mas, de fato, como função estatal que busca, reconhece e promove proteções e garantias relacionadas aos interesses coletivos. acima disso, a própria noção de democracia está fundada na construção de preceitos baseados em interesses coletivos, os quais são representados por valores comuns (cohen, 1997; gomes, 2018). posto isso, a base do princípio do interesse público não está somente na função administrativa do poder público. na seara do direito administrativo, a supremacia desse princípio está presente na determinação do conceito de função administrativa do estado, que se desdobra no provimento de serviço público, fomento, intervenção e polícia administrativa (di pietro, 2010, p. 95). especificamente, a atividade de fomento do estado se resguarda no princípio do interesse público porque se relaciona com o atendimento às demandas coletivas (di pietro, 2010, p. 96). fomentar, subsidiar e incentivar a inciativa privada contribui não só em realizar uma função administrativa do estado, mas exerce consequência direta nas esferas social e econômica. a atividade de fomento é necessária para a consolidação de novos arranjos econômicos. para fortalecer essa afirmação, argumenta-se a seguir que o interesse público auxilia também no incentivo à inovação. os exemplos do estado empreendedor e do capitalismo regulatório são usados como mecanismos que promovem atenção regulatória no processo de formação de novos mercados. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) 107 sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. capitalismo regulatório, regulação responsiva e estado empreendedor no processo de formação de novos mercados como aponta braithwaite (2008), capitalismo regulatório não é o mesmo que apostar em aspectos neoliberais. para o professor australiano, o neoliberalismo nada em corrente contrária à regulação. em sentido explicativo, a visão neoliberal enfoca em aspectos como a privatização, a desregulação e a diminuição da esfera pública como estratégias para dinamizar a economia. desde o neoliberalismo de thatcher, em 1979, no reino unido, e de reagan, em 1980, nos eua, as políticas econômicas de vários países foram influenciadas a seguir os caminhos da desregulação, da privatização e da diminuição da presença estatal. para a corrente neoliberal, a busca pela diminuição da presença do estado se fazia necessária por causa das conjunturas política e econômica presenciadas ao longo do século xx (braithwaite, 2008). as estratégias de privatização utilizadas por thatcher e reagan em áreas específicas, tais quais as telecomunicações e o setor financeiro, deram vazão para que agências fossem criadas para traçar desenhos regulatórios para esses setores. nesse sentido, braithwaite (2008, pp. 8-12) interpreta a desregulação como um mito criado para a atuação mais facilitada das corporações em mercados internacionais, mas não para os mercados internos. a título demonstrativo, no mercado interno de pequenas empresas, nos eua da década de 1980, o governo estadunidense, por meio do small business innovation development act, criou uma série de mecanismos regulatórios para estimular que agências governamentais concedessem recursos orçamentários e financeiros para que pequenas empresas realizassem estudos e pudessem traçar vias de estabilização no mercado (mazzucato, 2008, p. 57). para braithwaite (2008), o estado regulatório está relacionado a uma interação recíproca entre regular e criar corporações. sobre essa relação, o autor aponta como exemplos a regulação antitruste e o fato de que megacorporações fomentam o capitalismo regulatório. o argumento do autor utiliza, ainda, a criação de um mercado privado de segurança, sobretudo no que concerne ao caso da privatização das prisões na austrália e nos eua, e no incentivo regulatório para que as companhias privadas ofereçam um mercado de segurança para os cidadãos. dessa forma, nos eua, no reino unido e na austrália, o aumento da privatização de alguns mercados fez com que se gerasse maior necessidade de agências reguladoras (braithwaite, 2008, p. 9). o ponto-chave da abordagem de braithwaite (2008) acerca do capitalismo regulatório debruça-se no fato de que os mercados não são naturais 108 regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. e demandam aspectos regulatórios para o seu pleno funcionamento. a criação de técnicas específicas que ajudem no processo regulatório é um eixo determinante. em certa medida, essa afirmação dialoga com elementos mais avançados da regulação responsiva, defendida pelo autor em obras como responsive regulation and developing countries e the essence of responsive regulation (braithwaite, 2006; 2011). por esse ângulo, a regulação responsiva tem como ideia central a noção de pirâmides de apoios e sanções que podem ser traduzidas como estratégias regulatórias cujas camadas possuem dimensões específicas a depender do contexto. as estratégias responsivas são contextuais, integradas e unidas, de modo que a sua aplicação depende de um conjunto simples de heurísticas que precisa ser considerado no decorrer do processo regulatório responsivo (braithwaite, 2011). no livro em coautoria com ian ayres, responsive regulation¸ os autores demonstraram que mercados privados totalmente desregulados tendem a apresentar menor competitividade se comparados aos mercados que possuem o estado participando estrategicamente da dinâmica econômica (braithwaite; ayres, 1992). dado isso, a teoria da regulação responsiva indica que os contextos devem ser observados para a aplicação da melhor técnica regulatória. pensar o contexto é a primeira heurística que fomenta as ideias centrais da regulação piramidal1. além dessa, existem ainda mais oito princípios auxiliadores da regulação responsiva (braithwaite, 2011). 1ao total, john braithwaite (2011) apresenta nove heurísticas que precisam ser percebidas no processo regulatório responsivo. são elas: “1. think in context; don't impose a preconceived theory. 2. listen actively; structure dialogue that: * gives voice to stakeholders; * settles agreed outcomes and how to monitor them; * builds commitment by helping actors find their own motivation to improve; * communicates firm resolve to stick with a problem until it is fixed. 3. engage those who resist with fairness; show them respect by construing their resistance as an opportunity to learn how to improve regulatory design. 4. praise those who show commitment: * support th eir innovation; * nurture motivation to continuously improve; * help leaders pull laggards up through new ceilings of excellence. 5. signal that you prefer to achieve outcomes by support and education to build capacity. 6. signal, but do not threaten, a ra nge of sanctions to which you can escalate; signal that the ultimate sanctions are formidable and are used when necessary, though only as a last resort. 7. network pyramidal governance by engaging wider networks of partners as you move up a pyramid. 8. eli cit active responsibility (responsibility for making outcomes better in the future), resorting to passive responsibility (holding actors responsible for past actions) when active responsibility fails. 9. learn; evaluate how well and at what cost outcomes h ave been achieved; communicate lessons learned” (braithwaite, 2011, p. 476). regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) 109 sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. em se tratando de pensar o contexto, a regulação responsiva sugere que os reguladores não sejam dogmáticos, isto é, nenhuma teoria regulatória pode ser levada a estrito senso sem que se denote o contexto no qual a regulação será exercida. sobre isso, brathwaite relata: “in different contexts from 2008, privatizing firms or whole markets that had previously been public could be what is commended by thinking responsively about that market during that period of history. in some contexts, abolition of the entire industry is the best regulatory response, as with some large industries such as the nuclear and chemical weapons industries, the land mines industry, the gambling and casino industry, the global pedophilia trade, the market in slaves, and the market in certain illicit drugs. in other contexts, creation of an industry that did not really exist before is cleverly responsive to context, as was the case with the australian trade practices commission of the 1980s and 90s showing the lead toward creating a new corporate compliance consulting industry in australia. in some contexts, writing rules about (for example) carbon emissions may be less central as a regulatory strategy than putting a price on carbon." (braithwaite, 2011, p. 492) logo, o contexto deve ser observado a partir de elementos da história e do momento. ou seja, a regulação responsiva sugere que os reguladores utilizem como ferramenta uma espécie de “think in a stream of time”, que, em tradução literal, corresponde a “pensar em um fluxo de tempo”. diante dessa observação, questões importantes devem ser administradas para se pensar o contexto, são elas: o que, quem, como, quando, onde, por qual linha de tempo da história (braithwaite, 2011, p. 492). as perguntas citadas servem para se conhecer o contexto no qual haverá a necessidade de regulação, assim, elas são caminhos que podem ser usados para se refletir acerca da regulação de novos mercados e como seria possível traçar desenhos regulatórios para eles. no que se refere ao desenvolvimento de novos mercados, a abordagem do estado empreendedor dialoga com a heurística de se pensar o contexto. foi pensando o contexto de incentivos à inovação e à tecnologia que mariana mazzucato (2011) observou que o mercado de inovações anseia incentivos governamentais para se tornar bem-sucedido. em termos econômicos, os incentivos regulatórios envolvem financiamento e estabelecem novas possibilidades para o uso comercial das inovações. o estado empreendedor pensado por mazzucato (2011) tenta romper as barreiras dicotômicas entre quais de fato seriam os papeis público e privado na dinâmica entre desenvolvimento de novas tecnologias e governo. dessa maneira, o estado possui um caráter inovador e dinâmico que ultrapassa a função de corretor de falhas de mercado. por causa disso, apoiado no papel estimulador do estado, a intervenção na economia se amplia, se dinamiza e fundamenta o impulsionamento de novas tecnologias. em certa medida, a regulação por meio do estado empreendedor entende o estado como agente 110 regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. vivo, empreendedor e que assume investimentos de risco (mazzucato, 2011). por suposto, o comportamento estatal sistemático em prol do empreendedorismo estatal tende a suprir uma lacuna na inovação, na ciência e na tecnologia que os agentes privados da economia, geralmente, não estão dispostos a arcar, haja vista a existência de investimentos que não são factíveis para o ambiente privado. mazzucato (2014) identifica que, majoritariamente, os empresários não estão dispostos a lidar com os ônus dos investimentos de risco no desenvolvimento da inovação e da tecnologia. segundo a autora, “a história mostra que essas áreas do cenário de risco (dentro dos setores, em qualquer momento; e no início, quando novos setores estão surgindo), que são definidas pelo grande investimento financeiro, alto nível tecnológico e grande risco mercadológico, tendem a ser evitadas pelo setor privado e têm exigido grandes montantes de financiamento (de diferentes tipos) do setor público, assim como a visão e o espírito de liderança do setor público para decolar. o estado está por trás da maioria das revoluções tecnológicas e longos períodos de crescimento. é por isso que um “estado empreendedor” é necessário para assumir o risco e a criação de uma nova visão, em vez de apenas corrigir as falhas do mercado.” (mazzucato, 2011, pp. 25-26) os exemplos citados por mazzucato (2011) passeiam pelas indústrias farmacêutica, de computadores, da internet e de tecnologia verde em países como o brasil e os estados unidos. para ela, a presença do estado como criador de oportunidades permitiu que se formasse uma rede descentralizada de pesquisa e inovação e, em seguida, de desenvolvimento tecnológico e comercialização (mazzucato, 2011, pp. 24-25). portanto, esse seria um dos influxos que o estado empreendedor segue para fomentar a inovação e estimular a formação de novos arranjos comerciais. estado regulador e inovação como ferramenta regulatória para os novos mercados o significado etimológico de regulação, quando pensado a partir do olhar jurídico, diz respeito ao estabelecimento de regras e normas e, em outro sentido, à manutenção equilibrada do funcionamento de um sistema (oliveira, 2014, p. 1201). desses significados, extrai-se que regulação pode ser entendida por duas interpretações principais: primeiro, como um mecanismo de imposição de normas e regras, uma vez que o direito regularia a sociedade e, por conseguinte, a regulação se aproximaria de regulamentação (baldwin et al, 2012); segundo, se observada em relação ao funcionamento de um sistema, seria entendida como essencial para a sua manutenção e organização (barroso, 2014). regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) 111 sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. o estado empreendedor pode ser mais bem abordado a partir do aprofundamento da compreensão de seu conceito. para isso, o exercício teórico que se faz é perquirir sua metalinguagem. a metalinguagem significa a percepção dos pontos-de-partida de uma ideia ou concepção, ainda que não presentes explicitamente no discurso (anjos, 2016, p. 298). anjos (2016) mapeou duas premissas do estado empreendedor, são elas: (i) intervencionismo do estado na economia, nos mercados, na sociedade e (ii) os mercados são compreendidos como ambientes institucionalmente criados e regulados pelo estado. a começar pela segunda premissa, a noção de se entender os mercados como não naturais também está presente nas concepções advindas do conceito de capitalismo regulatório, como abordado na seção anterior. em segundo lugar, a intervenção do estado na economia, nos ambientes comerciais e na sociedade remete ao fato de que o estado empreendedor é também dirigista (anjos, 2016). por sua vez, ser dirigista está atrelado ao estado regulador. o estado regulador define-se por meio da coordenação entre intervenção indireta e gerenciamento estatais no mercado, de modo a regular e facilitar o desenvolvimento econômico e social. o ponto diferencial era que, ao invés da interferência direta, a intervenção passou a ser indireta e a relação entre mercado e estado tornou-se interdependente (baldwin et al, 2012; d’albuquerque, 2012). é por meio do estado regulador que outros mecanismos podem ser estimulados. a complexidade do mercado, suas pressões socioeconômicas e os mecanismos jurídicos e políticos existentes exigem que a função regulatória do estado seja mais do que corrigir pequenas falhas (teubner, 1986; anjos, 2016; lopes, 2018). ao direito, como sistema regulador abrangente de toda a sociedade, referindo-se ao mundo da vida, ao sistema econômico e ao poder políticoburocrático, cabem operações reflexivas que abranjam não apenas a sua função e performance, mas também a de outros sistemas, numa configuração coordenadora para preservação da integração social. é isso que se pode chamar de estado regulador, em que o poder político-burocrático assume a configuração de um “sistema administrativo protegido diante de partidos e do público”, configurando um planejamento compreensivo e apresentando-se como “uma autoridade responsável pela expansão do horizonte de possibilidades”, em que se fundem ciência e administração e que se vale de um direito como meio sobrecarregado por estabilizações cognitivas e imperativos pragmáticos. (lopes, 2018, p. 113) justen filho (apud d’albuquerque, 2012, p. 20) relata que são três os principais elementos que destacam o estado regulador na atividade econômica: (i) a transferência para a iniciativa privada de atividades desenvolvidas pelo estado, isto é, a permissão do estado para que o mercado 112 regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. administre, desde que sob enfoque na racionalidade econômica, atividades que eram exclusivamente estatais e (ii) inversão da relevância do instrumento interventivo, ou seja, o estado passa a fazer parte do domínio econômico, mas não exerce diretamente as atividades; (iii) a ação regulatória do estado será de ordem política ou social e não mais para corrigir as falhas do mercado. sendo assim, é com a inserção do estado regulador que novos personagens da organização burocrática surgem, ou melhor, criam-se agências reguladoras que passam a ser responsáveis por disciplinar e regular a prestação de serviços públicos e outros serviços por particulares. no contexto brasileiro, a constituição federal de 1988 positiva o estado regulador brasileiro nos artigos 170 e 174, os quais, respectivamente, dispõem sobre os fundamentos da ordem econômica e das ações de fiscalização, incentivo, regulação e planejamento, que devem ser funções do estado. a carta política brasileira de 1988 determina que a regulação seja exercida com planejamento e gerenciamento. segundo o texto constitucional, a função do legislador, ademais de ser acompanhar continuamente os setores regulados, deve basear-se no gerenciamento normativo da realidade. a regulação do estado se explica de maneira mais fidedigna a sua intervenção na economia e nos mercados. muitas vezes, sua atuação se fundamenta em elementos de controle concorrencial (aranha, 2018). regular a concorrência requer estímulos à participação das empresas no processo de desenvolvimento dos mercados. a inovação advém, dessa forma, como um resultado que merece atenção do regulador. portanto, a infraestrutura dos mercados tem se tornado cada vez mais especializada e as preferências dos consumidores mais específicas. no méxico, o estado regulador tem operado no sentido de elaborar estratégias que promovam a equidade concorrencial entre os produtos do setor do agronegócio. no setor do agronegócio mexicano, o oferecimento de empréstimos para que os produtores de amendoim elaborem sua produção, façam estudos sobre o mercado e invistam em crescimento é uma maneira de fomentar a inovação em novos nichos de mercado (hellin et al, 2013, p. 325). conclusão o desenvolvimento econômico está atrelado à construção de novos mercados, os quais são fortemente influenciados por aspectos regulatórios que servem para estimular a ciência, a tecnologia e a inovação e fortalecer variáveis comerciais, econômicas e sociais. nesse seguimento, cada vez mais, a inovação tem sido peça fundamental para o desenvolvimento econômico (arbix et al, 2010). regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... (p. 99-116) 113 sena, lucas. regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado empreendedor e do interesse público. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 6, nº 1, p. 99-116, maio 2020. no cenário internacional, a inovação tem estimulado o avanço tecnológico, gerado crescimento econômico e inserido mercados de produtos na dinâmica competitiva e concorrencial, além de ter ainda elevado o nível social, pois auxilia no processo de educação dos cidadãos (abrix et al, 2010; anjos, 2016). o incentivo à inovação pode ocorrer por meio de políticas públicas que fomentem aspectos concorrenciais de determinado nicho de mercado. os incentivos regulatórios podem incorrer de políticas públicas de concessão de empréstimo para pequenos e médios empresários investirem em seus negócios e até mesmo prover a elaboração de um plano de ação para mercados empreendedores. nessa perspectiva, é possível traçar uma relação entre o interesse público e o estado empreendedor. ao passo que a função de o estado empreender as relações comerciais e a concorrência proporciona a formação de novos arranjos econômicos, o interesse público, sobretudo baseado na função de fomentar a economia e a sociedade, se realiza. estudos como a de mazzucato (2014) e braithwaite (2008) demonstram que os mercados não são arranjos naturais e, por conta disso, demandam regulações específicas para o seu pleno funcionamento. as consequências da regulação empreendedora governamental e do capitalismo regulatório vão no sentido de gerar benefícios que ultrapassam a seara privada e fazem com que a inovação se assegure como um princípio basilar do interesse público na regulação. como sugestão de pesquisa futura, pretende-se dar continuidade ao estudo aqui desenvolvido para se pensar análises empíricas, estatísticas e normativas acerca de como o estado regulador, baseado no empreendedorismo de mercado e no capitalismo regulatório, se correlaciona com a atuação altiva do poder público para fomentar a inovação e, consequentemente, efetivar aspectos do interesse público. no mesmo sentido, o estímulo à ciência, tecnologia e inovação também poderá vir a ser alvo futuro, especialmente no processo de formação de mercados especializados. referências bibliográficas anjos, edmundo berlamino ribeiro dos. pressupostos conceituais do estado empreendedor na constituição federal de 1988. revista de direito setorial e regulatório, brasília, v. 2, n. 1, p. 289-322, maio 2016. 114 regulação de novos mercados e inovação: uma abordagem a partir do estado... 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(2016): 14-20 http://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eot 14 e-issn: 2407-392x. p-issn: 2541-0857 nyepi holiday package: between commercialization, commodification and revolting to hegemony nararya narottama lecturer at the bali international tourism institute corresponding author: naro_osh@yahoo.co.id article info received 29 september 2015 accepted 01 february 2016 available online 07 march 2016 abstract nyepi is a sacred and a holy day for hindus in bali, indonesia. it only happens once a year. at nyepi time, for one day, all day activities in bali are stopped, and the hindus shall carry catur bratha penyepian, which consist of: amati karya (not working), amati geni (not light a fire), amati lelungan (not traveling) and amati lelanguan (not having fun/entertainment). along with the rapid development of tourism in bali, a nyepi ritual is also inseparable from the shadow of tourism commercialization. in the last decade, more and more businesses are offering nyepi holiday packages to tourists. surely this is contrary to the real essence of nyepi. the purpose of this research is to reveal what tourism through the commercialization of nyepi holiday packages which has been done through the commodification of nyepi as compared to its real meaning and how does nyepi become a new hegemony in the sphere of social multiculturalism. this research approach is qualitative description, and the theorical used, among others: the commodification theory, the theory of hegemony and the theory of consumerism. the result show that the influence of commercialization and commodification of balinese culture is an outcome of the advancement of tourism. nyepi commodification occurs in the process of modernization, which is rooted in capitalism and the increasing of heterogeneity in bali. this phenomenon appears as an attempt by revolts against prevailing hegemony of nyepi in bali. keywords: nyepi, holiday package, commercialization, commodification, hegemony, consumerism introduction the tourism concept developed in bali cannot be separated from culture and religion, as this is its soul. through the "bali regional seminar on cultural tourism" in 1971, the concept of "cultural tourism" formally adapted and used as a slogan to bali's tourism (picard, 2006). this was confirmed by the regional regulation (perda) no. 3 of 1974 issued by the government of bali, and then updated by perda no. 3 of 1991 on cultural tourism. more than a decade later, this concept is reinforced through the bali provincial regulation no. 2 of 2012 on cultural tourism of bali. so from the beginning, it has been declared, that the kind of tourism developed in bali is tourism based on the culture of bali, which are inspired by the teachings of hinduism, and a philosophy of tri hita karana. all activities of the majority of the people of bali are inseparable from hinduism in its foundation. as part of the effort to draw closer to god, the hindu community implemented a series of ceremonies nyepi in bali. this is in accordance with the decision of phdi (parisadha hindu dharma indonesia the highest assembly of hindus in indonesia), e-journal of tourism vol.3. no.1. (2016): 14-20 http://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eot 15 e-issn: 2407-392x. p-issn: 2541-0857 nyepi in indonesia is a celebration for the çaka new year from india. nyepi ritual includes seclusion, purification, restriction of movement of the body and the mind, introspection and contemplation. it is expected that this be done, in silence and solitude so the hindus in gain spiritual enlightenment and get closer to god. the celebration of nyepi is a day that is sacred to the hindu community in bali, when nyepi starts, during one day, all activities in bali stop, including the closure of roads, seaports and airports. lighting, transportation and electronics should not be used. they hope all of the balinese hindu community can peacefully implement catur bratha penyepian, which consists of: amati karya (not working), amati gni (not light a fire), amati lelungan (not traveling) and amati lelanguan (not having fun/entertainment). however, nyepi is also inseparable from the shadow of commercialization and commodification of tourism. in the last decade, more and more tourism businesses are offering nyepi holiday packages to tourists. surely this is contrary to the real essence of nyepi itself. problems try to convey, among others: what tourism, through the commercialization of nyepi holiday packages, has done with the commodification of nyepi as compared to its real meaning? as well, how nyepi has become a new hegemony in the sphere of social multiculturalism? this research is important, given that the hindu religion is the soul of the balinese culture, and also the roots of bali's tourism. a culture intact will provide great benefits for the sustainability of bali's tourism in the future. research objective the purpose of this research is to study about commercialization of nyepi holiday packages which has been done through the commodification of nyepi compared to its real meaning and how does nyepi become a new hegemony in the sphere of social multiculturalism. literature review as far as the authors' concern, no studies have specifically discussed the commercialization and commodification of nyepi holiday packages in bali. however, there are some references in this study, among others: first, the study entitled identitas dan komodifikasi budaya dalam pariwisata budaya bali cultural commodification in bali cultural tourism (putra, 2008). in this study, he discussed how tourism and the presence of tourists could influence social and cultural life of a nation. the artists’ orientations are no longer in religious art, but more on the commercial orientation, and art has experienced commoditization, where the value of art has been measured by money (market value). second, a study entitled komodifikasi budaya populer dalam pariwisata commodification of popular culture in tourism (surbakti, 2008). in this study, he emphasized that industrialization led to the commodification of tourism has really happened in bali, not only by tourism investors, but also by their own local communities. popular tourism products in postmodernist culture are suspected of being culturally shallow and simply considered a negative impact of tourism. both researchers bring the concept of thinking, about the practices of the commodification of popular cultures in bali. while, this study focuses more on the commodification of balinese culture through commercialization on nyepi holiday packages, in addition, this study also discusses 'cultural rebellion' as a result of the hegemony of nyepi in bali. theoretical concepts nyepi is the hindu's feast day to celebrate the çaka new year (tilem kesanga). nyepi became known and formally adopted by the public in 1983, and the ogohogoh (a giant, monsters like puppet as a symbol bhuta kala / negative energy, which is then burned in night before nyepi starts) on the eve of nyepi is a new phenomenon (pringle, 2004). as a new tradition, nyepi has been considered an important day in the hindu tradition in bali. especially, nyepi is the only hindu feast that gained legitimacy as a national holiday in indonesia. e-journal of tourism vol.3. no.1. (2016): 14-20 http://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eot 16 e-issn: 2407-392x. p-issn: 2541-0857 the main purpose of the celebration of nyepi is to invoke the presence of god almighty, to cleanse bhuana alit (human nature / microcosmos) and bhuana agung (universe / macrocosmos). at the peak of nyepi ritual, the hindu people do catur brata penyepian, which consists of: amati geni (do not use or turn on the fire, including the use of electricity and turned off the light), amati karya (not working), amati lelungan (not traveling), amati lelanguan (not entertained, by either tv, internet, or radio), as well as be more focused to do meditation, tapa, brata, yoga, and samadhi (contemplation). catur brata penyepian lasts for 36 hours starting at 06:00 am in the morning, till 06:00 pm the next day. a series of ceremonies nyepi, among others: melasti ceremony doing the cleaning to the sea / river, tawur (pecaruan) offerings ritual, pengrupukan now dominated by parading ogoh-ogoh, nyepi and ngembak geni phase to end tapa, bratha, yoga and samadhi, then visiting families and relatives, then forgiving one another, as well as praying together with all family members (suwantana, 2010). implementation of nyepi has a spiritual power that can strengthen the mental and self-identity of the people. through the concept of self-control and contemplation (by look inside themselves), nyepi can reinforce the integration of mankind in the universal sense. methodology the method used in this research is a descriptive qualitative with the phenomenological approach, in which the researchers tried to explore the meanings and identify the commercialization of nyepi holiday packages. data collection techniques used were in-depth interviews with tourism stakeholders and religious figures, literature reviews and documentation. results and discussion bali is an icon of tourism in indonesia, as it has attracted many tourists, both local and international. of course, in addition to providing benefits to bali, tourism also has consequences in the form of negative impacts. one of them is the commodification of culture. commodification is a real phenomenon in bali, especially in the sectors of tourism industry. in bali, commodifications also arise in the context of spirituality and religion. bali tourism has forced people to be part of the international multi-cultural society, and unconsciously has brought local communities sandwiched between maintaining traditions and culture (which is a commodity that can be sold), while on the other hand the process of internationalization through tourism means banging the culture with the modern world (narottama, 2011). in addition, the balinese are known to be very strict in applying and passing on cultural traditions to the social environment among themselves, but on the other hand, very loose application to foreigners / outsiders. since the balinese people are aware of the role of tourism in improving the economy, the balinese people no longer seem to restrict tourism to be present in all aspects of their lives, and tourism can easily fit in the realm of customs, traditions, religions and cultures. balinese society is able to adhere to the tradition and culture among them, and be able to take advantage of the cultural traditions and economic benefits for the purpose of tourism. along with the increase in demand in the tourism industry, a small portion of local people in bali later became an intermediary of culture (cultural broker), and materialism has made the balinese people consciously modify their cultural products for tourist consumption. nevertheless, the people of bali are still able to distinguish the performances for themselves, for their gods, and those especially for tourists, besides that, they know the boundaries between which products are sold to tourists and which should be protected from commercial exploitation (howe, 2006). the term commodification began to be well known about this last decade. commodification commonly is known also by the term of commercialization, capitalization, commoditization, touristification (ritzer, 1999; picard, 2006). commodification is to make something directly and intentionally (with full consciousness) as a commodity. commodification refers to the symptoms of contemporary economy, and tourism is a e-journal of tourism vol.3. no.1. (2016): 14-20 http://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eot 17 e-issn: 2407-392x. p-issn: 2541-0857 sample of perfect commodification (surbakti, 2008). commodification or touristification is a form that capital owners desire with full awareness and business calculations utilizing cultures with various symbols, icons and religious art and culture as a commodity for markets (redaksi, 2008). figure 1. an advertisement that offers nyepi package at a resort in ubud. the picture show how we asked that not to make any voice -the models show by its body language and schhhh ...! because of nyepi. there clearly implied how the values of nyepi has been commodified and commercialized. according to barker (2004: 408 in surbakti, 2008), commodification is the process associated with capitalism in which the object, quality, and a sign are used as commodity and the commodity is something whose sole purpose is to sell in the market. nyepi ceremony and the entire rituals, was originally not intended for commercial use, but in reality, the ritual has been commodified in such a way to be commercial because of the grip of materialism and capitalism tourism. culture, as a tourist attraction in bali often undergoes a process of compromise for the sake of improvement "selling points" to tourists. unfortunately, religious values are often packaged together to attract tourists. initially, a nyepi holiday package is to accommodate travelers; international, domestic and non-hindu balinese people who do not celebrate nyepi. over time, more and more tourists are on holiday, who are interested to know the atmosphere of bali during nyepi. figure 2: 'nyepi vaganza' package in a hotel at denpasar the above figure tell us that the word 'vaganza' means festive, massive. this is really deviate from the essence of nyepi, like restraint, inward contemplation and simplicity. in the last decade, the promotion of nyepi holiday packages are more intense, and it’s mostly held in luxury hotels. this is due to the intensity of marketing in various mass media. the packages are promoted through print media (newspapers, magazines, tabloids) and electronic media (internet). the price range offered is quite varied, depending on duration of stay, the programs and the hotel class. prices range from eight hundred thousand rupiah, up to fourteen million rupiah for two days. activities offered in the nyepi holiday package are also diverse, from dining at the restaurant, watching movies / dvd, spa treatments, and also making some nyepi's ornaments. the presence of tourists with all the customary habits often creates the effect of e-journal of tourism vol.3. no.1. (2016): 14-20 http://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eot 18 e-issn: 2407-392x. p-issn: 2541-0857 "mimic" by the locals. the habit, which imitated, could be good, or even bad, and in a certain period of time, it can shift the values of the local culture (putra, 2008). the consumer of the package are not only non-hindu locals, domestic tourists and foreign tourists, but has started to be consumed also by the local hindu in bali. thus, hotel is seems like an escape for those who do not celebrate nyepi. when a ritual of nyepi takes place, there are those (balinese and non-balinese, hindu and non-hindu) who feel constrained and overburdened. they feel uncomfortable on the various limitations during nyepi. this discomfort increased with the new rules that prohibit local tv and radio broadcasts during nyepi day. this inconvenience they shed through social networking sites. they blaspheme and revile the ritual of nyepi in bali, one of which is the case of ibnu rachel farhansyah's facebook status that angered the people of bali a few years ago. although nyepi is just a day, they feel compelled, hegemony and marginalized. by "escape" to the hotel, they feel freed and satisfied. nyepi package at the hotel seemed to establish themselves into popular culture in the community. in addition to local and foreign tourists, many customers are new families and derived from the group, which are capable financially. gramsci (1971) in his book: selections from the prison notebooks uses the term 'hegemony' to refer to the way the dominant group in a society gains support from groups in subordination through the process of "leadership" of intellectuals and morals. hegemony is domination by consensus or agreement, directly or indirectly, and openly or secretly which influences the cognitive structures and affective controlled group (surbakti, 2008). they are in revolt over nyepi hegemony that has lasted for decades. instead of doing tapa, yoga, semadhi and self-contemplation for themselves, they prefer to take off and satisfy the senses and rebel rebelled against important symbols of the religious culture of bali. figure 3. variables of change on nyepi ritual, past and present. increasingly widespread marketing of nyepi packages in a variety of mass media, showed that this tourism product can be received and absorbed by the market. in addition to foreign tourists, the other consumers are the balinese people who want to release the senses' thirst and want to feel a different sensation from the nyepi celebration in previous years. surely this cannot be separated from the modern urban lifestyle that has embraced today's society. the term 'consumerism' is defined as understanding / lifestyle that considers goods (luxury) as a measure of happiness, pleasure, not frugal lifestyle, etc. consumerism is a mindset and actions where people buy things not because he/she needs the goods, but because the act of buying itself gives satisfaction to him/her (soedjatmiko, 2007). consumption is not only to meet preference and basic human needs, but also deals with symbolic elements to mark class, status, or a particular social symbol. consumption is also used as a tool to express social differentiation. to do a nyepi holiday package at the hotel is no longer a necessity, but it has turned into a form of prestige, to show an increase in a person's socio-economic class. according to baudrillad, in consumerism, the underlying thought is not the logic of needs, but is shaped by man's desire, which assumes that all needs can be met by consumption (baudrillard, 1970). consumerism itself has become a life style of contemporary society. through advertising and promotion in various media, e-journal of tourism vol.3. no.1. (2016): 14-20 http://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eot 19 e-issn: 2407-392x. p-issn: 2541-0857 consumption is always present wherever and whenever, even used as a solution when a problem arises. when a person thinks that doing catur bratha penyepian is considered a burden, then by buying a nyepi holiday package, he/she can eliminate the burden, as well as raise their prestige. conclusion it is very common in bali, that art and religious traditions wrapped in culture are commercialized and serve as a major tourist attraction. along with this, the presence of foreign tourists as well as their culture is considered a threat called 'cultural pollution', and is regarded as a' trigger of degradation' of the balinese culture. unfortunately, bali has already opened itself to international tourism. this is the reason the people of bali easily adopt tourism as an important sector for their economy sustainability. in fact, tourism can, and often appears in the realm of religion in society. thus, balinese cannot differentiate between its own values with the values brought by foreign tourists. although at first, nyepi has nothing to do with tourism and commercial purposes. but in fact, nyepi holiday packages are sold in hotels. this indicates that nyepi ritual has commoditized, because it was created with the primary objective to become a commodity for the sake of tourism. increasingly the widespread marketing of nyepi holiday packages, prove that the market can accept these commodities. it is feared, authentic balinese cultural traditions herded into a touristic culture, which is the confusion between cultural values and tourism. religious rituals are no longer only for spiritual, but also an economic issue, and it often becomes a commodity. a sacred ritual, for the capitalists, was no longer as something that is upwards to divinity, but it could be, something that makes their merchandise sell, and their revenue increase dramatically. nyepi commodification occurs in the process of modernization, rooted on capitalism, and the increasing cultural heterogeneity in bali. on one hand, this phenomenon appears as an attempt by revolts against prevailing hegemony on nyepi in bali. references barker, c. (2004) cultural studies, teori dan praktik. yogyakarta: bentang budaya. baudrillard, j. (1970) la société dé consommation. paris: danoel. gramsci, a. (1971) ‘the philosophy of praxis’, selections from the prison notebooks of antonio gramsci. lawrence & wishart london. howe, l. (2006) the changing world of bali: religion, society and tourism. routledge. narottama, n. (2011) pariwisata budaya dan komodifikasi, suatu pergulatan kebudayaan. available at: http://sangikankecil.blogspot.com/201 1/12/pariwisata-budaya-dankomodifikasi. (accessed: 22 january 2014). picard, m. (2006) bali: pariwisata budaya dan budaya pariwisata. kepustakaan populer gramedia. pringle, r. (2004) a short history of bali: indonesia’s hindu realm. allen & unwin australia. putra, a. m. (2008) ‘identitas dan komodifikasi budaya dalam pariwisata budaya bali’, jurnal analisis pariwisata, 8(2), pp. 7–16. redaksi (2008) ‘pengantar’, analisis pariwisata, 8(2). ritzer, g. (1999) enchanting a disenchanted world, revolutionizing the means of consumption. thousand oaks: ca: pine forge press. soedjatmiko, h. (2007) saya berbelanja maka saya ada: ketika konsumsi dan desain menjadi gaya hidup konsumeris. jalasutra. surbakti, a. (2008) ‘komodifikasi budaya populer dalam pariwisata’, analisis pariwisata: komodifikasi budaya dalam pariwisata, 8(2). e-journal of tourism vol.3. no.1. (2016): 14-20 http://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eot 20 e-issn: 2407-392x. p-issn: 2541-0857 suwantana, g. (2010) nyepi tradisi dan esensi. majalah hindu raditya. available at: http://www.parisada.org/index.php?op tion=com_content&task=view&id=16 70&itemid=29 (accessed: 21 january 2014). the studio as contemporary autonomous zone:crisis and creativity in electronic music dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1): 48–65 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.10 the studio as contemporary autonomous zone: crisis and creativity in electronic music paul chambers university of adelaide (australia) abstract this article explores electronic music making in a context of precarity and climate crisis. i use ethnographic research conducted in the australian city of adelaide and the provocative ideas of nineteenth century german philosopher, max stirner, to situate the electronic music studio as a contemporary autonomous zone, an interface between creative expression and capitalist existence. i argue that the studio functions as a physical and psychological space to develop what stirner termed “ownness”, taking possession and realizing one’s own capacity and power. i propose ownness as a theoretical tool for understanding the studio as a site of self-realisation and micropolitical action, investigating how electronic music practice shapes subjectivity, autonomy and resistance. the contemporary studio emerges as a refuge from the anxieties and uncertainties of late-capitalism, a therapeutic outlet and means of becoming , an opportunity to find voice and vocation in the violence of the present. keywords: studio, creativity, electronic music, autonomy, stirner paul cha mber s obtained his phd from the university of adelaide in 2019. he started clubbing in the 1980s, was a dj and promoter through the 1990s and continues to make and perform electronic music. he is currently assisting dianne rodger in research into how hip-hop programs are being used as an educational tool in workshops designed for and attended by aboriginal and torres strait islander youth. email: <paul.chambers@adelaide.edu.au>. feature article chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 49 introduction this article explores how contemporary music makers situated themselves, their art and creative practice in response to the alienation of late-capitalism and existential crisis. the studio in electronic music can take the form of a bed, a bedroom or a dedicated music space, and production technologies range from a cheap laptop and cracked software to thousands of dollars of hardware. using ethnographic research conducted between july 2016 and january 2018 in the australian city of adelaide, i attempt to understand how contemporary uncertainties around precarity, employment and environmental issues were influencing subjectivity. i consider the electronic music studio as a contemporary autonomous zone, a physical and psychological interface between creative expression and capitalist existence. this observation is an update on what bey termed a taz, or temporary autonomous zone (1991), an impermanent space outside structures of control. born made a similar comparison, arguing that musical practice could function as a “space of exception to larger structures of social power” (2010: 235). i apply the ideas of nineteenth century german philosopher, max stirner, to show how the music studio could enable the individual to achieve a meaningful sense of ontological freedom (newman 2017: 156). drawing inspiration from stirner’s philosophy of ownness, i investigate three ways that contemporary electronic music practice worked to shape subjectivity, autonomy and resistance. firstly, i show how the studio was used to forge new modes of self-expression. in his key work the ego and its own (1845), stirner emphasised the importance of individualism and “uniqueness”; to be free in a real sense, one must become an “owner” in terms of self-will and self-possession (1971: 238).1 the powerful and often relatively accessible musical tools of the contemporary music studio allowed infinite opportunities to produce music and the self. the studio functioned as a space where subjectivity was composed and enacted through creative processes, aided by skills and technologies and achieved with commitment and perseverance. the stories of dedication, invention and becoming through music practice, i argue, were suggestive of stirnerian strategies of self-construction. secondly, i situate the studio as a refuge from what jeong termed the “melancholy of modernity”, an oasis from the existential anxieties and uncertainties of late-capitalist existence (2017: 4). stirner was an early critic of democratic modernity, suspicious of state power and subservient faith in moral idealism. he perceptively understood the vulnerability of autonomy to the economic competition and government coercion of emerging liberal societies in the nineteenth century.2 stirner located an innate capacity for freedom within the individual as a bedrock from which to build “self-defining , self-constituting and ‘egoistic’ forms of subjectivity outside of any prescribed standard or norm” (newman 2017: 156). as apocalyptic scenarios and austerity attenuated hopes for the future, electronic music was reported by over a third of my interlocutors as a therapeutic outlet; the studio emerged as a space that could evade and escape societal systems of control. music practice became a vital way of processing the present, a means of achieving autonomy in the face of structural conditions seen as manipulative and alienating. dancecult 12(1)50 thirdly, the studio allowed sonic strategies of resistance to articulate what i call a politics of the personal, a response to contextual circumstances rooted in subjective experience.3 i demonstrate how music’s enduring potential for rebellion, coupled with the technological affordances of the modern studio, enabled intensely personal and counter-hegemonic expression. in the striving to realise one’s own creative voice i identify an echo of stirner’s exhortation for the individual to actualise their own path of freedom. i propose ownness as a theoretical tool that could understand the studio as a self-directed space where music became an empowering practice of creative self-mastery and personal fulfilment. stirner and the studio i first encountered stirner’s ideas while working in an anarchist bookshop in the late 1980s, a collectively-run operation that seriously attempted to put into practice its members’ political convictions. stirner was and remains something of a controversial outlier even for this most radical of political philosophies.4 contrary to his contemporary karl marx, the ownership of private property was considered an inevitability which stirner extended to all aspects of the self (1971: 169). he saw property offering the potential for autonomy and constituting a problem of access rather than possession. however, to be free in a real sense, one had to become an owner in terms of self-will, someone independent and indifferent to social and moral laws: “ownness . . . is my whole being and existence, it is i myself. i am free from what i am rid of, owner of what i have in my power or what i control” (stirner 1971: 112). stirner believed action at the level of the large group or society could only be warranted by an appeal to an abstraction such as freedom and morality, what he termed the “spooks” of the humanist age (1971: 56). he avoided making prescriptive statements about what freedom was or should be, arguing that as an expression of the individual’s power and capacity, freedom could only be determined by the self and its particular interests (newman 2019: 159). this uncompromising standpoint has left his work open to a range of evaluation. it has been called a “philosophy of unsparing nihilism” (paterson 1971: ix), psychological egoism of self-interested motivation ( jenkins 2009: 224) and an ideological foundation for libertarian hyper-capitalism (ashford 2014: 979).5 newman has arguably gone furthest in rehabilitating stirner’s influence; he identified a poststructuralist aspect to stirner’s anarchism, rejected notions of an essential form of subjectivity and advocated the subject’s ongoing self-constitution (2017: 172). if power and freedom were always relational and unstable, autonomy would become less a final state of emancipation that one reaches and more an ongoing experimentation with different forms of existence and ways of relating to oneself (newman 2011b: 204). postmodern notions of identity conceived of multiple narratives of the self and described identity as a becoming rather than being (frith 1996: 109). such ideas had a close connection to the way music functions in identity construction (born & tilley 2011: 381). denora showed how chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 51 music worked to affect individual memories and emotional states and to construct personal meanings, describing it as a central component in the “conglomerate” of the self (2006: 24). i acknowledge stirner’s emphasis on self-construction downplayed the individual’s constitutive relationship with wider society, well argued as it was in social theory.6 however, his philosophy did identify the possibility of personally meaningful transformation that ultimately can only be done for oneself. i argue the studio allowed adelaide’s music makers to experience this self-in-process through an engagement with music. in his anthropological study of power, rapport identified a capacity of the individual to “create personally meaningful and viable environments and to traverse these in the pursuit of their own life-projects” (2003: 3). rapport saw a potential in everyone to apply a seriousness and commitment to practice that allowed the subject to escape from the control and influence of external forces. for stirner, an intrinsic egoism affirmed the self even in the absence of external freedom and formed the basis for self-liberation. it was this reading of stirner that resonated with my ethnographic material and led me to apply his philosophy to a contemporary context. in allowing the synthesis of a range of processes, objects and contexts through aesthetic expression, the studio was central to how my participants constructed their subjectivity. i therefore consider the electronic music studio as a place of liberation in this stirnerian sense, “an ontologically anarchic space of subjectification” which gave the subject the possibility to define their own path, or paths, of freedom (newman 2017: 18). methods and results a total of 62 participants aged between 18 and 52 took part in semi-structured interviews focussed on the practice of electronic music production, with an average age of 30.25 and a mode age of 24. the project aimed to examine the impact of digitalization on society by exploring the subjectivities and capabilities of a cross-section of music makers with respect to how and why they make their music. my interview questions covered the context of commencing electronic music practice, how music was produced, attitudes to digital platforms and their perceived influence, the importance of social relationships within music and how my participants’ practice related to their beliefs and values. i identified 85 per cent of my participants as male, a figure closer to 70 per cent for those 25 and under, although attitudes to gender and sexuality were nuanced and fitted more into a fluid spectrum of possibility. 27 of my participants used a mixture of software and hardware to make their music. of the 26 who only used software, 18 were aged 25 and under. the results highlighted the importance of the age variable with a clear enthusiasm for digital methods of music making further down the age range. this predilection was expressed in attitudes towards computer technolog y elsewhere in life, such as engagement with social media, developing and maintaining friendships online and acquiring musical preferences. my fieldwork period in adelaide fruitfully coincided with a brief “golden age” in the city’s electronic music milieu. the scene itself was a patchwork of various micro-scenes, often dancecult 12(1)52 with little contact with each other.7 despite its fragmented nature, it was soon clear that there was loads going on. i attended 88 events where electronic music was performed, but 3 in particular became significant case studies. sidechain was a fortnightly event showcasing four live electronic acts. the monthly experimental music night featured three live acts, often electronically-based. and club sync was a sporadic club night playing disparate music sourced from across the world but featuring a strong cohort of local producers. all 3 events had an implicitly inclusive policy of booking acts that ensured a wide diversity of music makers had the chance to perform, often for the first time. this abundance of research material meant i was forced to select who to approach for the project. the objective requirements of my research question demanded a broad data base, and i always aimed for a representative demographic and stylistic range. significantly for this paper, however, i also found myself following an instinctive feeling for those i perceived to have an original voice in their music. i promised to keep my participants’ identities anonymous as i wanted everyone to speak deeply and sincerely, without any expectation that what they said would be identified by others and considered “cool” or “correct”. consequently, i asked people to come up with a pseudonym, or leave it to me to think of one. my research provides an insight into an invisible sector of contemporary music making , often ignored in music writing since finnegan’s 1989 ethnography the hidden musicians. as someone with a long history around electronic music, it quickly became apparent that electronic dance music culture (edmc) had expanded to accommodate a wide array of electronic music makers; experimental musicians, sound art creators and laptop-tweaking singer-song writers were among those i encountered. as i visited studios and witnessed performances, delved into musical histories and creative processes, the motivations and ambitions, hopes and fears of a diverse range of music makers emerged. when i asked participants how the contemporary conditions of life may be affecting their music, 60 per cent replied that the wider context of world events and social issues was significantly reflected in their music practice.8 of the other 40 per cent, two thirds said instead that their music was all about their personal and/ or emotional experiences.9 23 (37 per cent) of my interlocutors reported that music practice for them functioned as personal therapy.10 what made the repeated accounts of music’s role in strategies of personal development and wellbeing significant was their representation across the age range and stylistic spectrum. seeking to understand how electronic musicians display a personally meaningful relationship with musical practice drew me to the ideas of stirner. “freedom” was a word that often came up throughout my discussions with electronic music participants in which the studio ser ved as a space of possibility outside of the restrictive pressures of society. stirner’s notion of ownness became a theoretical tool that i could use to understand the electronic music studio as a place for constructing new modes of subjectivity and ways of life. chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 53 the studio and the self one question i increasingly asked participants as my research progressed was whether they considered “a sense of self-development” as an important part of their music practice. on reflection, this was an ambiguous and ill-defined concept on my part, but 41 of my interlocutors agreed, with an average age of 30.4. the following accounts refuted the power of economic determinism as a driver in music creation by describing how participants defined self-development in their practice. personal values and experiences were the bedrock and foundation of individual expression, nurtured in sonic safe spaces and manifested with the musical means available. the comparative affordability of adelaide, compared with the major metropolitan centres of sydney and melbourne, made a domestic music room a realistic proposition, but headphones or even earbuds were enough to turn on, zone in and let it out. jane (19) was one of my youngest interlocutors but a prolific music maker, who described “being in the zone” as extremely important, the zone being the space “where everything comes from”. jane’s account raised the important question about the boundaries of autonomous space in the networked age. this was a time when software upgrades and the influence and inspiration of specific social media platforms provided a seemingly infinite choice of cultural options to explore and articulate. feeling unable to make music casually as something on the side, jane had to “lock herself in” spatially and psychologically, focusing with tunnel vision on her musical process. she recalled a lifelong desire to make music that, given her lack of music education, seemed a distant possibility until the internet provided the inspiration and the means to make it happen. youtube rapidly matured her tastes, and downloading ableton—a daw with an intuitive user-interface—allowed her to express her expanding and eclectic aesthetics.11 jane was in no doubt about music’s role in her self-development, associating her practice with personal discovery: “i’m always thinking about that actually, like where am i going from here? and it seems like naturally to happen, i develop more and more”. her early attempts, “a lot of atonal noise stuff ”, were considered an important phase of expression, and she had begun exploring a range of styles including ambient and jersey club, a process that she felt was organic and reflected the broad and shifting interests of her personality.12 her attitudes to musical expression articulated a politics of the personal. jane: for the most part it is about honing-in on hyper specific emotions that i have had in the past, that are sort of reoccurring. yeah, it is more to do with myself and my feelings and self-expression, more than the world around me. brother lucid (37) talked in a similar way about the studio as a creative sanctuary. having immersed myself in his extensive bandcamp discography, it was clear that his adhd diagnosis, late in life, was now an important part of his personal identity and an inspiration for his music. it emerged in his online promotion, in his track titles and as soon as we started talking. like others with adhd, the need to block out internal and external dancecult 12(1)54 distractions meant he would get “mad scientist in the laboratory” about his studio work: hyper-focussed, not eating. he saw the impulsivity and hyper-creativity of adhd more widely in the information age. for people with adhd, the short attention spans and mad scrolling through social media feeds was “mental, really crazy”. in the studio brother lucid made his music simply, looping beats into audition on his laptop and playing in everything else manually over the top in separate takes.13 he described the elements like certain “characters”. he told me that with every track he needed to be doing something that he hadn’t heard anyone else do, a constant challenge as he couldn’t afford lots of gear and had to adapt whatever was to hand. he labelled this process as “postapocalypse diy ”. bloodbottler (27) was happy to describe himself as “a bit of an anarchist at heart”, and his up-tempo brand of breakbeat bricolage fused fast-cut vocal samples from cult films with juxtaposed snippets of saccharine pop. the aim was to startle and offend an audience into questioning what he saw as the manipulation of the powerful. he first learnt music by trying to recreate drum and bass tracks on an electribe sampler before developing his own style. youtube tutorials provided him the knowledge of how to use daw software like pro-tools and reason. bloodbottler acknowledged that music practice had made him put in “a lot more effort” than other areas of his life; it was something he could focus on and develop. he described getting a new piece of equipment as an extension of the self and learning to do more through it: “i feel like the better i get at producing , the better i get as a person. that sounds really stupid and egotistical, but it is true”. this association with learning , self-development and new equipment provided a fresh insight into associations of excessive consumerism regarding studio gear, perhaps exemplified in the name of a producer forum like gearslutz.14 any new equipment was a rare occurrence for bloodbottler, who was looking for work and made do with a minimal hardware set-up and an old apple laptop which he used to maximum effect. after meeting makers of eye candy instagram videos featuring impressive studios and twinkling modular monoliths, my suspicions of shameless displays of cultural capital were supplanted by the tangible joy of those sharing an intimate and usually long-gestating relationship with sound. kyle (34) was a case in point, with a well-honed social media presence and a studio set-up reinforced by the corporate sponsorship of a japanese synthesizer company. kyle started off making music in his teens using a basic tracker program on an amiga computer.15 now he made commercially popular big room club music and considered his music as a form of self-expression that could connect with people on a fundamental level. he saw the need to “upgrade this vehicle” with more forms of self-expression as an important factor, but it was clear that sound itself was paramount. “i have pure joy in playing keyboard, you know, at home, just turning the keyboard on, and just playing keys, that’s it”. i first met him shortly after his performance at a very well-known australian music festival. he was at the stage of his career that many i spoke with would like to get to, yet it obviously came with its own inherent complications. chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 55 like many musicians, kyle’s identity revolved around the individuality and self-expression of the “authentic artist” and the aim to make music that was satisfying for himself as a musician and music fan. a sense of self-development emerged when he talked of his ability to successfully adapt to the shifting tastes of the market; he saw it as a way to challenge himself and bring in new ideas. he admitted to going through his own low periods of selfdoubt, and said he made music against the side of himself that would drag him down. his was a work against his shadow side: “i’m not sure if it reaches the psychological level of self-actualisation, but it is close enough to it because i wouldn’t have known how to express myself if it wasn’t for music”. peter (22) was a young producer also aspiring to make commercially popular music. i first met him after a performance at sidechain toward the end of my fieldwork. as soon as the music began, my ears pricked up. everything was fat, sharp and clean, and the harmonies were really good. peter’s investment in his craft was evident in his production quality. at our interview he told me how he allocated a few hours a day to the process. he was happy to try and make music a career but only by doing music he liked, although he hoped other people would enjoy it. peter considered self-development in music as facing what you did not know, particularly at the performance stage when he said it was easy to stop learning. as an example, he suggested taking a break from song-writing to learn a new synth until you were confident with it, as it was easy to get distracted by just making songs. music had always been an emotional outlet for peter. he recounted how teenage awkwardness had been relieved through learning the guitar and how to write expressively, a process he had transplanted into making electronic music on ableton. he saw society becoming more “closed off ” in terms of physical interaction with each other because of social media and considered music as a way to understand himself and express emotions. his accounts spoke of an inherent sincerity and honesty in self-composed music that was always emergent, regardless of conscious intention. peter: when you are making music, you are letting out your subconscious emotions. even if you don’t think you are doing it, you are. you just make something and then you think, well that is a part of me, that was in me somewhere but now i have got it. it was important to distance these stories of self-development from a neoliberal agenda of entrepreneurialism, consumption choices and self-aggrandisement. these accounts placed the studio as a separate space, physically and psychologically, from the normative ideals and control structures of society, which emphasized the liberating creativity of the present moment. the studio allowed the development of subjectivity through music; it enabled the music maker to answer what jenkins considered a fundamental stirnerian question: “have i been able to determine what and who i am?” ( jenkins 2014: 19). the studio as refuge while advances in computing and communication enabled more people “to envisage themselves as active producers of information, knowledge, capability and meaning” (stalder 2016: 22), such technologies have also been considered as a lubricant for the spread of dancecult 12(1)56 globalisation and neoliberalism.16 in the contemporary condition of late-capitalism, debt servitude, right wing populism and post-fordist work practices conspired to encourage alienation and paranoia.17 optimism around the potential of capitalism to open avenues for more varied forms of independent work ignored the reality that creative opportunities were used by many in adelaide during their free time as an escape and as a way to deal with contextual conditions.18 making music had elements of diversion and the chance to live vicariously through creative activity, and stirner’s own biography revealed some uncanny parallels with studio practice. carroll said of the writer that “a drab and inconsequential reality was compensated by an assertive philosophy concerned with limitless possibility” (1971: 17). research by gross and musgrave confirmed the importance of music to a person’s well-being and sense of self-identity, but they also stressed that the precarity and conditions of the environment a person worked in was the source of problems with mental health (2017: 7). for many of my interlocutors the studio provided a safe space, an opportunity to disengage from the restrictions and pressures of external conditions but also to envisage an alternative. roy (18) saw the studio as a refuge and path of self-discovery. his studio set-up was basic; using ableton and a couple of hardware synths, he sang his own songs along to his music. this process allowed him to be “super-personal”, more than he felt he could be with his friends. roy: it is like my deepest feelings, my deepest thoughts and emotions. really just enjoying that with myself. that is what i feel is the beauty of making music, because it just enables you to do that. i suppose that it is like an escape, to make music for me. just an escape from everything , just zone out, just like go into my own world, and create my own art, and just feel comfortable with it. although he considered himself something of a “misfit” in his school community, roy felt his style of music has helped other people understand and accept what he was like and how he was feeling. music had become all about freeing himself up to “do whatever the hell i want”. his recent album, released on bandcamp and spotify, contained songs that related to him personally and to how he thought other people might feel in society. he said that in helping him reflect on who he was as a person, making music had been a huge part of his personal growth and developing maturity. roy: i am slowly learning my own morals and everything on the way as a result. i feel it is definitely really important, it is the direction i would like to keep going , to keep making music, and learning from my own music, and learning about myself through my own artistic process. andy (43) evidenced similar attitudes to his music practice. a veteran of adelaide electronic music, he told me stories of the heyday of rave in the city, when it was easy to get venues in the abandoned buildings of the inner city. we discovered a shared a punk background, a biographical feature of six other male interlocutors from across the age range in my chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 57 research, that signalled a possible musical and ideological rite of passage. now he preferred to “hunker down” in the studio with a nord drum machine and modular gear to focus on creating quality and “timeless music”. again, the studio’s value as an expressive conduit and safe haven were made clear: andy: i couldn’t survive without it; it is a sanctuary for me. i know that i can walk in there and kind of almost decompress life through it. . . . the way you are feeling really comes out in the sounds you are creating. andy said he had to have an artistic outlet, a voice in the world, or he “would go crazy”. electronic music could be this outlet because there was more room for different frequencies that were emotive and could create and communicate feeling. he was in no doubt that music and self-development were like a symbiotic process, “like a therapy process”. at the present moment with “the world in turmoil”, he found himself returning to the ideals of punk, using music as a platform to express hidden statements in some of his tracks. he said he always had hope and had seen it in the youth and their desire to save the planet. moe (29) was a producer/performer currently leading a high-profile existence in adelaide edmc. she had a savvy and strategic media presence, and she described herself in our interview as the “social media queen”. many of her posts and promotional shots featured glamourous poses and scenes of hedonism and hands-in-the-air elation. yet when she discussed her social media “brand” in our interview, moe acknowledged there was a certain happy and bubbly persona that she had to maintain. she told me how she would suppress aspects of her personality, such as illness or depression, because she did not want to show weakness or engender sympathy. as a self-confessed “control freak” with a past in band performance, the studio allowed moe the space to work to her own timeframe, to play and record everything herself through ableton. music allowed moe the opportunity to mine her emotional history, to transmute autobiography into therapeutic release through music and lyrics. she described the process as “more like a therapy for me, what i’m going through”. she thought of music as an extension of herself, especially in “darker themes” which she felt could be relatable for people going through hard times; perhaps it helped them to know others had experienced the same feelings. jay (39), a hip-hop producer well-known locally in the genre’s australian “golden age” of the early 2000s, was similarly forthright about the therapeutic value music provided in his life. he made music on logic but highly valued “crate-digging” for elusive sampling gold. i conducted the interview in a food hall in a southern suburb of adelaide, and it was clear by the frequent waves and smiles to passers-by as we talked that he was well-known in the local community. yet jay confided bouts of depression that coincided with a relationship separation. music was the medium he used to get through this episode. jay: i really used it as a therapy, i had a lot of drama, when i was making a beat i was off with the fairies, so i used it as therapy, i was unhappy, and a lot of my good music came from being unhappy. dancecult 12(1)58 jay reported that the music he made was not political in the protest sense but was deeply connected to his individual experiences. he was adamant that he wanted to prove his individuality, and he reasoned upon reflection that he was driven by himself and by a desire to contribute to australian music more broadly. although jay said the times when people had told him his music had helped them through life were important, music as therapy and self-development was not dependent on positive feedback and validation from others. instead he felt “you should always be expanding. like anything in life, you should always be learning”. amber (24) was a classically-trained musician for whom the computer made it easy to sequence music without having to own instruments. a lack of finance kept her studio down to a laptop, soundcard and headphones. she used fl studio, a daw at the more affordable end of music production. amber saw herself as a musician, artist and writer and described creativity as the “centre” of her identity. “i think i am a very individualistic kind of person, to be honest, i have a bit of an ego, and that’s why i see myself as an artist”. like many other producers at the creative coalface, genre took second place to personal expression, as amber proclaimed an aim to be different from everyone else and not influenced by trends. in a poignant moment in the interview, when she talked about promoting inclusivity in her music that extended to all humans and species, a small bird flew down to her feet. like others in this article, amber wanted her music to move others on an emotional level; in her case, her listener might have considered their “spiritual connection” with the land. she said her lyrics could be taken as political and she made music against those who wanted to uphold the status quo, or who were “selfish and unaware of their privilege”. but most often her music was more about escape. she felt a sense of helplessness and despair for the generations to come and, while optimistic about the tolerance of the young , she wanted her music to be an escape from austerity as well as a reminder. “its real bleak. . . . we all need to escape from reality when it gets too dark, too horrid. but we also need to be reminded about it so we do something about it if we can”. the studio provided a refuge from the pressures of existential angst, a physical space that could alleviate the alienation of late-capitalism and release feelings that may have been easier to express elsewhere in less-restrictive periods in the past. while stirner found his own identity and independence through his writing , music for my participants worked to survive or subvert contemporary conditions; it functioned as a fulfilling creative practice and as an outlet for generating affinity and micro-ethical expression. the studio as resistance stirner’s solutions to ensuring the individual requirements of living through the need for collective enterprise were transitory associations of egoists; the micro-political and ethical strategies he favoured needed to be created for people by themselves. rather than committing to cooperative goals or serving altruistic intentions, each egoist would benefit from undertaking a shared activity of mutual interest (shone 2013: 233). this kind of informal social arrangement based on shared affinity resonated with the patchwork of chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 59 micro-scenes, networked interest groups and shifting taste coalitions that characterised the contemporary adelaide electronic music milieu. sharing some parallels with cooper’s conception everyday utopias, the city’s sonic socialities and music studios could be viewed as networks and spaces that offered the chance to perform everyday life in a different fashion, creating change by building new forms of experiencing the world (2014: 227). many of my interlocutors revealed an ethical driver to their creative practice, one that did not fit with any defined political identity or allegiance. while for some this was about choosing to ignore the political, seeking an escape and release from real world pressures, for others their music was an explicit part of an ethical identity through which they could express and comment upon the experiences of day to day living. one of the emerging features of adelaide electronic music was the rise of singer-song writers utilising electronics and vocals in their recorded works and performance. i encountered producers singing or speaking the lyrics of a personal statement about themselves, their relationships, vulnerabilities and values along to their own productions, often accompanied by little more than a laptop and midi controller, unencumbered by any need to make people dance. it was expressed by one of my interlocutors, ali (22), as writing music “in terms of a realism people can relate to”. ali was a classically-trained musician who had realised composing her own music, rather than playing someone else’s, was far more fulfilling. she turned to the laptop because it allowed her to make “radio-worthy” music more easily. ali used the laptop as a midi controller and sequencer—playing notes in by hitting letters on the laptop keyboard or drawing them in on the ableton graphic user interface timeline—to overcome certain musical weaknesses like drumming.19 she also enjoyed the problem-solving part of the process: “like i hear something in a track, and i want to do that and i don’t know how to do that. i will literally sit there for two hours until i figure out how to do it”. the internet’s resources for cracked software allowed her to try out an array of studio tools, and she felt some of the plug-ins now available could “make anything sound amazing”. her current music reflected her own circumstances of life. ali: i don’t write new music about a certain topic, you know. like a social stance or something. but i do write music that i feel relates to people my age in terms of realism and just how it is to be like alive and living in your own bubble. not everyone was relying on the spoken word to channel these understandings. the gentle music of william (23) articulated a connection to geographic place with a sense of the political firmly rooted in personal experience. he described his music as process-driven and very much based in the computer where he began with a “seed of audio”, a sample or riff which went through various processes to get something he wanted. sound was something malleable, pulling details out, chopping it all up, reversing and stretching. he described his work as music to fall asleep to, or that would sit with you, as music that that allowed for melancholy and was open to interpretation. for william it was a way of dealing with life. he likened his practice to mindfulness and being in “the zone” for long periods. dancecult 12(1)60 william’s music was designed for connected listening and intimate engagement, for a focus on the subtle changes and dynamics that could convey the conceptual intentions of the composer. it was also aimed at others; william made it available to torrent for free in a low sound quality format, as well as through bandcamp at a higher bit rate. he considered music a part of bringing society closer together, and he started a label with friends in order to “be the change”. while he thought about the prevailing context of the times when composing , he viewed his music as more of a subjective journey, exploring personal issues. william: i’m not one for obvious stuff. . . . it gets to a point where you are not looking at frequencies, you are not looking at what you are hearing , you are looking at what you are actually feeling in your gut as you are doing it. this sense of an inner moral compass was echoed by red robin (35), a prolific musician with a similar commitment to music as process. he saw his practice as an effort to express an understanding of the world he lived in, an attempt to make it a “better” place though whatever means and skills he had to do so. a long-running piece of sound art he was working on explored the famous 1865 goyder’s line that delineated the boundary of land in south australia that received sufficient rainfall to allow cropping. due to climate change, recent projections had brought the line further southwards. characteristic of many of his recordings it brought together a strong sense of place and an ecological sensibility. the work consisted of two saw tooth waves fed into a vocoder and outboard effects. the carrier frequency was based upon the traditional goyder’s line and the second was the modulation frequency, based on a prediction of the future trajectory of goyder’s line incorporating climate change. the sounds played against each other, creating a drone and subtle modulations. the programming software max msp in ableton live was used to map the lines, and the piece conveyed the sparseness of the landscape that inspired red’s work. although stressing that his work was firmly bounded in reality, red was drawn to the dystopian near-future science fiction of the black mirror television series. he viewed the contemporary times as weird and dangerous, “terrified of climate change”; it is this terror from which his music was an escape and to which his music offered a challenge. red: the best thing i can do for the sake of my optimism and my mental health and sustaining relationships and friendships with people, before i take to the streets with a sandwich-board shouting the end is nigh, is really working within my own space. i interviewed nix (34) shortly after his attendance at an outback “diy survivalist” festival. a veteran of experimental free jazz and psych rock bands for around 15 years, he now preferred to perform and improvise electronic music with hardware. most of his gear was bought second-hand and housed in a home-made road-case on a self-built table. he felt most of the music he was making with a poet collaborator was all about “the potential apocalypse”, with lots of dark eerie textures. nix: there is often this kind-of immanence, and this feeling of something is about to happen, or you are in this zone of the unknown, and stuff like that. and i do feel that we are in a place where things could just easily topple over the edge at any time. chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 61 nix considered his music and art was all part of a process of “constant self-development and transformation” that tied into a spiritual understanding of himself as a “part of everything else”. his music was an attempt to help catalyse and transform the people and everything around him, to get “myself and people moving to the next step where they need to be, keep going forward and growing , not in some linear evolutionary terms, but just however you want to see it”. nix’s music articulated these aspects in himself as “a personal, self-driven thing” that he wanted to share with others to make them “feel inspired or uplifted or intense or whatever”. a sense of self-construction was a major part of his art, personal path and mytholog y : “i’ve started to come to terms with and understand the feeling there’s a role. . . . it’s a constant self-development, and its transformation”. nix’s comments seemed to combine a stirnerian sense of self-mastery with a distinctly social dimension, to fuse music’s potential for instigating a personal sense of renewal with a wider social project. there was a sense in these accounts of an ethical foundation for creative practice from music-makers engaged with an open and personal sense of what constituted the political outside of fixed ideologies. stirner’s psychological focus on change saw improvement occurring through individual effort and collective understanding , rather than through causes and ideals (newman 2011a: 9). the studio was a means to articulate fears and relieve existential anxieties but also to affect and nurture a sense of affinity with others. conclusion it was clear when talking to people about music practice that self-expression was considered valuable in and of itself, regardless of whether you could make a living from it. as the space for this to happen, the studio was the story behind the music you listened to and the tunes you danced to, from big room anthems and tech house chuggers to modular explorations and ambient excursions. away from festival euphoria and the excitement of clubland or gallery chatter, as a music maker, sooner or later, it was just you and the machines. every creative ego has to deal with its own. in a society saturated in digital communication channels and media seductions, in moral panics and negative news, the studio was a chance for my interlocutors to disable distractions and enter “the zone”, an unrestricted play space and uninterrupted flow state. given the number of people that talked of music practice as therapy, it was possible to see music practice as a form of spiritual and philosophical estrangement from many aspects of contemporary life: technologies of control, climate change, growing wealth disparity and precarity and an economic condition that prioritised desire over meaningful fulfilment. the importance of creativity to health and well-being was supported by the centrality of music practice to my interlocutors’ lives. the limitations of applying a nineteenth century philosopher’s ideas to twenty-first century music producers were obvious. what about digitalisation and dynamic range? streaming platforms and social media? while changes in external context are constant, dancecult 12(1)62 the internal challenges of finding meaning and satisfaction in them are timeless. there was something in stirner’s insistence for individuals to work it out for themselves that held as true today as ever. his non-prescriptive openness and belief in the individual fit well with the wide cast of colourful characters from my research who resisted any reductionist move to essentialise identity, let alone musical style. stirner argued that the egoist could freely determine their own practices, relations and ways of living outside of the control of centralized institutions. he perceptively saw through the hollow illusions of the emerging political and economic landscape, the sacrificial subservience to ideals of freedom, democracy and progress. his philosophy of ownness was a refutation of passivity and leaving things to others. the exhortation to conscious egoism and ethical responsibility appeared as a different path for liberation and psychological wellbeing , different from waiting for government policy, benevolent capitalism or “leaders” that always disappointed. i argue that in the contemporary autonomous zone of the studio, in attitude and spirit, many music makers have come to a similar conclusion. acknowledgements this work was supported by the provision of an australian government research training program scholarship. no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. notes 1 for a succinct overview of stirner’s ideas and influence on anarchist benjamin tucker, see steve shone’s “max stirner: hanging out with one’s own” in american anarchism (2013: 207-35). shone’s focus is on what stirner’s individualist approach can contribute to those dissatisfied with the contemporary political system in america. 2 autonomy is defined here as “self-determination” (hesmondhalgh 2010: 235). 3 resistance here is used in both of moore’s conceptualisations of the term: as “symbolically subversive practices” that can be vulnerable to being subsumed into consumer culture; and as the active engagement in resisting “the dominant ideologies encoded in the texts and commodities they consume” (2011: 1213). 4 see marshall 2010 on bakunin’s collectivist anarchism; kropotkin 1902 on kropotkin’s non-hierarchical organisation; and mueller (2018) on recent debates that use the collectivist approaches of proudhon. 5 other scholarly interest in stirner has focussed on questions of anarchist orthodoxy (e.g. schmidt and van der walt [2009] and ferguson [2011]) or philosophical interpretation (e.g. welsh [2010] and jenkins [2014]). 6 see for example bourdieu’s 1984 text distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. 7 i use straw’s understanding of the term “scene” here to denote the multiple aspects of electronic music practice in adelaide (2014: 477). 8 28 of 47 (with an average age of 30.5) replied that the wider context of world events and social issues was significantly reflected in their music practice. 2 of 47 (with an average age of 27.5) chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 63 were unsure and 17 of 47 (with an average age of 29) said that there was no connection. 9 12 of 17 said instead that their music was all about their personal and/or emotional experiences. 10 23 of 62 of my interlocutors said their practice functioned as a form of therapy, with an average age of 30.6. this figure may be conservative as the theme emerged during interviews and became further explored as the research progressed. 11 a digital audio workstation is an all-in-one music software platform that provides a virtual studio complete with instruments, effects and a timeline architecture in which to combine the elements of music production. 12 jersey club is an electronic dance music genre, developing in the nineties, with a fast 130-140 bpm tempo and characterised by chopped staccato beats and vocals. 13 audacity is a free recording and audio editing application software. 14 gearslutz is one of several online electronic music producer forums that emerged in the 2000s as a site for discussion between music makers of varying levels of experience, and as a resource for researching and reviewing music making equipment. 15 a basic tracker is sequencing software characterised by positioning notes on a vertical timeline. it is heavily dependent on the use of samples. 16 taylor claimed digital technologies were not only facilitating neoliberal policies but had helped to introduce them into work and culture (2015: 120). 17 for more on the contemporary condition of late capitalism, see stahl (2010), braidotti (2013) and harvey (2018). 18 see florida (2004) and banks (2010) for optimistic takes on capitalism and creative work. 19 musical instrument digital interface is a communications protocol to connect instruments such as synthesizers or samplers via cable or usb so they can communicate with each other. references ashford, david. 2015. “‘a new concept of egoism’: the late modernism of ayn rand”. modernism / modernity 21(4): 977–95. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2014.0084>. banks, mark. 2010. “autonomy guaranteed? cultural work and the ‘art–commerce relation’”. journal 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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/ © 2016 erik jacobson. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon th material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: literacy and & numeracy studies 2016, 24(1): 4898, http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4898 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s v o l 2 4 n o 1 2 0 1 6 3 workforce development rhetoric and the realities of 21st century capitalism erik jacobson abstract increasingly, the provision of adult education (including literacy and training programs) is influenced by a rhetoric of workforce development that tasks education with closing a supposed ‘skills gap’ between the skills that workers have and what employers are looking for. this deficit model of education blames adult learners for their own condition, as well as for larger problems in the economy. in addition to arguing for broader goals for adult education, those in the field also need to question the economic premises of this rhetoric. a review of current economic conditions points to fundamental aspects of capitalism as the source of instability, which means that education and training programs have a limited ability to move large numbers of people out of poverty. for this reason, students and teachers in adult education should focus on developing structural analyses of the situation and push for substantive changes in the economy. introduction as with education more broadly, adult education has long been contested ideological territory. for example, efforts that stress the need for adult education to support the economy by developing human capital clash with those focused on helping learners realise political liberation. proponents of critical pedagogy believe that the ideological nature of education should itself be part of the curriculum, with students and teachers working together to examine and resist the dynamics of oppression, whether in brazil (freire 1970), the united states (eubanks 2012) or japan (osawa 1990). by contrast, approaches that focus on economic development typically present themselves as a non-ideological response to an evolving labor market. alongside the rise of neoliberal discourse, it is this economic model that has increasingly come to dominate adult education practice and https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v24i1.4898 w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 4 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s policy. the rhetoric of workforce development holds that education should be about meeting the needs of the employers, rather than helping individuals or communities realise a wide variety of goals they set for themselves. programs are given legitimacy when they are perceived as contributing to the greater economic good. furthermore, this rhetoric takes a deficit approach to education, beginning with the assumption that adults (as workers) have problems with skills that need to be addressed. for example, in the united states, federal support for training and adult basic education is now provided under the workforce innovation and opportunity act (wioa). passage of this act in 2014 was accompanied by expected proclamations about the nation’s workforce not being competitive with other workforces around the world (us department of education 2015). this same alarm has been raised repeatedly over the last few decades – the nation is said to be at risk economically because of adults’ limited literacy, numeracy and job-specific skills that industry demands. politicians of the two major political parties in the united states (goldstein 2012) and many adult literacy advocates (e.g., national commission of adult literacy 2008) frame their calls for funding in economic terms. this workforce development rhetoric is not only shaping employmenttraining programs, it is also increasingly influential in adult basic education, as well. for example, under wioa adult literacy and high school equivalency classes are now expected to be part of a ‘career pathway’ leading to employment in particular industries or sectors of the economy. the effectiveness of all federal-funded adult basic education programs is now primarily judged according to economic outcomes (e.g., the number of learners who found work) rather than educational ones. of course, there have been vocal critics of policies that have prioritised the workforce development model (e.g., greene 2015, rivera 2008, among many others). not only have people continued to champion the cause of adult literacy and education for civic participation and social justice (nash 2006, ramdeholl 2011), there have also been analyses that focus on structural issues within capitalism that call into question assumptions about the ability of programs to deliver on the promise of employment or promotion (mayo 2009, nesbitt 2006). in keeping with this tradition, i will focus on specific aspects of the rhetoric of workforce development and how this rhetoric serves to dissemble the realities of 21st century capitalism. i will suggest that confronting this rhetoric not only calls w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 5 for a continued commitment to a liberatory ethos, it also necessitates directly questioning the economic premises that support a workforce development approach that blames the workers for their own conditions. the paper will challenge claims about workers’ supposed lack of skills and will critique discourse that blames workers for economic crises. the paper will also address the limited impact education has had on poverty reduction. although advocates should argue for a robust adult education system, the economy remains the defining location of class struggle. the crisis in the workforce in their white paper reach higher america, the national commission on adult literacy (2008) provides a rigorous critique of the united states’ system of adult basic education and workforce development, suggesting that without a complete transformation the system will not produce desired outcomes. at the root of the problem, they suggest, is that a failure to address ‘america’s adult education and workforce skills needs is putting [our] country in great jeopardy and threatening [our] nation’s standard of living and economic viability’ (p. v). the fact that this report was released in june of 2008, just months before a devastating world-wide economic crisis, means that it would not take long for the focus on workers’ skills to be shown as misplaced. worries about an under-regulated financial sector were abundant before the crash (due to its increasingly risky behavior), but here workers are posited as the vulnerability in the economy. as noted above, the suggestion that the limited skills of the workforce are a threat to the country is not new. in the united states there has been a long history of ‘crises’ founded on the idea that the public school system is not providing students with the skills they need to be successful in the world (e.g., national commission on excellence in education 1983). these warnings about the threat posed by low-skilled workers are not limited to the united states. for example, in the united kingdom, the skills for life initiative was based in part on reports of the damage low-skilled workers were thought to be doing to the economy (department for education and employment 2001). in australia, the national foundational skills strategy for adults was driven by the perception that a ‘crisis’ in workers’ skills was a serious threat to that nation’s economy (black & yasukawa 2011, black, yasukawa & brown 2013). brine’s (2006) w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 6 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s review of european commission policy statements on lifelong learning suggests that, ‘low knowledge-skilled workers are not only those at risk, they are increasingly constructed as the risk’ (p. 649). rather than addressing how larger economic and sociopolitical structures create instability and vulnerability for workers, in adult education discourse and policy the workers themselves are blamed for economic volatility and underperformance. this crisis is often framed as a ‘skills-gap’ between what employers want and what workers possess (the white house 2015). this has become such a ‘common sense’ (gramsci 1987) appraisal of the economy that proponents are not often asked to provide evidence that such a gap exists. in fact, there is evidence that the ‘skills gap’ is mostly a rhetorical device. for example, shierholz (2014) explains that if there were a shortage of workers that met industry’s needs, incumbent workers would be asked to work longer hours to make up the difference. there is no evidence that is happening. additionally, if there were a limited supply of workers, companies would have to raise wages in order to compete for the staff they need. shierlholz suggests that at the present time there is no evidence of this, either. instead, shierholz suggests that finding work is difficult for many people due to a decrease in the aggregate demand – businesses do not need more workers – not because they lack skills. shierholz concludes that, ‘more education and training to help workers make job transitions could help some individuals, but it’s not going to generate demand.’ carnevale (cited by goldstein 2012:79) reminds us that, ‘jobs create training, not the other way around. and people get that backwards all the time. in the real world, down at the ground level, if there’s no demand for magic, there’s no demand for magicians.’ not only does there not seem to be a generalised lack of skills, there are studies that point to larger numbers of workers who have higher levels of skills than their job requires (goldstein 2012, pellizzari & fichen 2013). for example, levine’s (2013) study of the labor market in the state of wisconsin in the united states concludes that the skills gap is the inverse of what is typically promoted – ‘it is a mismatch of too many highly educated workers chasing too few “good jobs”’ (p. 5). additionally, it may be company actions that are keeping positions unfilled, not a lack of potential employees. for example, cappelli (2012, cited by popp 2013:41) notes, ‘when i hear stories about the difficulties in finding applicants, i always ask employers if they have tried raising wages, which have not gone up in w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 7 years. the response is virtually always that they believe their wages are high enough.’ even when there is an abundance of skilled workers (thus driving wages down), if a company is not willing to pay qualified workers a reasonable wage that position may remain unfilled. in one case, a company expressed frustration over not being able to find workers while offering a wage that was nearly 33% lower than the average wage for that position (popp 2013:41). along these same lines, gilpin (2014:17) reports that, ‘when pressed, one manufacturing ceo acknowledged that for him, the ‘skills gap’ meant an inability to find enough highly qualified applicants, with no ‘union-type experience’ willing to start at $10 an hour.’ this is very different than the way the ‘skills-gap’ is typically presented and lays bare capital’s desire to maximise profit and find workers who will not organise and advocate for better working conditions. by placing the blame on workers’ skills, workforce development rhetoric keeps the conversation at the individual level rather the socioeconomic. larger structural problems in the economy are thus rendered invisible, in particular how the capitalist economic system itself creates crises. indeed, crises would appear to be endemic to capitalism (brenner 2006, harvey 1999). for example, kunkel (2014) notes several consistent elements of economic crisis within capitalist economies– an overproduction of commodities (that cannot find a market), an over-accumulation of capital (that cannot realise its expected return on investment), and the vulnerability of the system to speculation (leading to cycles of collapse and stagnation). it is these structural problems, rather than a lack of skill in the workforce, that lead to periodic crises. in fact, when skilled workers in a given area develop the necessary leverage to negotiate for higher salaries, companies will often move to locations where they can keep labor costs low. when those new workers eventually request higher wages, the company will move yet again. harvey (1999) suggests that this ‘spatial fix’ is necessarily temporary and is thus bound to produce instability when companies lay people off or close up shops when they move their operations. this cycle arises from the nature of profit in capitalism, rather than any deficit on the part of a worker or workforce. the national commission on adult literacy (in the us) seems to take the wrong lesson from this situation. they write, ‘states must invest in the skills of their workers so that increased productivity helps offset the effect of low-cost labor furnished by developing countries. business must be an active partner in this effort’ (2008:viii). w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 8 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s to begin with, the wages paid to those workers in other countries should be called out as exploitative. but more directly to their point, the suggested answer to deal with the movement of capital looking for more profitability (through lower labor costs) is for workers in the united states to do better work. however, productivity is not an issue. in fact, between 1973 and 2011, productivity was up by 80%, while the real hourly wages grew less than 4% (mishel & gordon 2012). this is a gap of a different kind – workers are not being fairly compensated for the profits their increased productivity is creating. despite the fact that the capitalist economic system creates instability in the job market, the rhetoric of workforce development increasingly holds adult basic education and training programs accountable for the state of the workforce and for helping students find jobs and increase their earnings. if they accept the concept of a ‘skills gap’ to explain problems in the economy or as the reason adult education programs should get funded, adult learners and teachers are letting capital define the nature of the crisis. in this formulation, workers are being held accountable for crises in the system, rather than capitalism itself. the trouble ahead while the current situation is defined by a supposed gap in skills, projections about the future tend to be just as dire. the office of vocational and adult education (2013) in the united states analysed the results of the program of international assessment of adult competencies (piaac) and suggested that, ‘adults who have trouble reading, doing math, solving problems, and using technology will find the doors of the 21st-century workforce closed to them.’ the pervasive idea is that breakthroughs in technology and the organisation of work are sparking large-scale changes in the skills needed to be successful. it is common to hear that young people will end up working in jobs that have not even been invented yet and that to negotiate this uncertain future, learners need to develop a higher level of skills. one report concludes that by 2018, 63% of new job openings will require workers with at least some college education (carnevale, smith & strohl 2010:13). the suggestion is that those without credentials will be left out of an evolving workforce. however, to date the 21st century workforce doesn’t appear to be moving in a positive direction. rather than technology leading to growth across the labor force, the economy is being restructured in unequal ways. although it is true that there has been increased w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 9 demand for highly skilled, white collar workers, autor (2010) notes the united states has experienced a disproportionate growth in lowskill, low-wage work that started in the 1990s and has continued to accelerate (p. 3). this is not only the case in the united states, an analysis of 16 european union countries (goos, manning & salomons 2009) found that from 1993-2006 most of the nations studied experienced a growth in low-wage occupations (11 out of 16) and high-wage occupations (13 out of 16), and that all the nations experienced a decrease in middle-wage occupations (cited by autor 2010:4). the simultaneous increase in demand for high-skilled, white-collar workers and low-skilled workers has led to what has been called a polarisation of the workforce. that is, job growth at both ends of the skills and wage spectrum accompanied by a hollowing out of the middle. this polarisation is ignored when leaders trumpet the future of it and technology related-fields. those industries are fast growing, but that rate is calculated by percentage increases in the size of that particular sector of the workforce, not by the raw number of new positions that are now available. for example, in the united states from 2002 to 2006 there was an increase ‘of 4.7 million jobs paying a poverty-level wage’ (roberts & povich nd:2). the fact that this doesn’t represent as dramatic a change in rate of growth as in it industries means that there was already a large amount of povertylevel jobs. in the united states, ‘more than one in five jobs, or 22 percent, is in an occupation paying wages that fall below the federal poverty threshold. in eight states, more than one third of all jobs are in poverty-wage occupations’ (p. 4). these are the conditions for programs that are being judged by how quickly they can get learners into the workforce. the pressure is on to get any job, whether or not it will pay above poverty level wages. indeed, supporters of the workforce development approach do seem to ignore the prevalence of poverty level work. in a briefing designed to promote the effectiveness of investment in workforce training, ridley and kenefick (2011) note increases in wages for those who have gone through training programs as evidence the programs are working. one study they reference (hollenbeck et al. 2005) found that participating in training was associated with an $800 per quarter rise in median income (in 2000 dollars). a closer look at the study reveals that with that raise these workers were now earning roughly $18,000/year. this clears the us governments’ (often criticised) poverty threshold of $8,794 (circa 2000), but comes w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 10 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s nowhere close to meeting other calculations of requirements for economic security. for example, the basic economic security tables (best) index developed by wider opportunities for women concludes that a single individual needs nearly 300% of the us government’s target to make ends meet (mcmahon & horning 2014). adding any dependents moves the person further below the real poverty line. a raise of $800 is welcome, but not enough to move out of economic vulnerability. in addition to an increase in jobs that don’t pay enough to move out of poverty, there are other shifts in the economy that negatively impact low-wage workers. competition for jobs may be coming from those who have traditionally held higher wage positions. beaudry, green and sand (2013) suggest that there has been what they refer to as ‘a great reversal in the demand for skill and cognitive tasks.’ their analysis of trends in the workforce suggests that up until 2000, there had been an increase in the demand for skills, or ‘cognitive tasks often associated with high educational skill’ (p. 1), but since that time there has been a steady decline. in part they attribute this to a model of ‘skill-biased technological change…[that] can create a boom-bust cycle in the demand for cognitive tasks along with a continuous decline in the demand for routine tasks’ (p. 6). without jobs that demand and compensate for their abilities, highly skilled workers find themselves forced to take jobs that were traditionally filled by lowskill, low-wage workers. beaudry, green and sand (2013:i) note, ‘this deskilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together’. the approach of ‘upskilling’ learners in adult basic education or training programs into the labor force now runs into the reality that there are fewer jobs that demand mid-level skills and that students will be in competition with individuals who may already have higher levels of skills. thus, training alone cannot overcome a polarised economic structure that is rewarding fewer workers with higher pay and increasing the number of people getting lower wages. after a midtwentieth century in which some gains were made in terms of income distribution, the 21st century is trending back to earlier patterns of wealth concentration and wide-spread economic insecurity. the rhetoric of workforce development speaks of the need for adults to join the labor force and contribute, but it doesn’t address what the prospects actually are for learners and workers. w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 11 education, training and moving individuals out of poverty one reason the rhetoric of workforce development is so persuasive for many is that it is consistent with analyses that point out the connection between literacy skills, education and income. at the demographic level, it is clear that lower levels of skills are associated with economic vulnerability. in their policy briefing about the need to upskill the workforce, the obama administration notes that adults scoring below a 1 on the piaac assessment of literacy earn an average of $20,000, while those at levels 4/5 earn an average of $55,000 a year (the white house, 2015). reder (2010:1) points out that high school dropouts are more than twice as likely to be living in poverty as high school graduates (24% to 11%). the us census reports that in 2014, those with less than a ninth grade education had a mean income of $25,028, those with a high school diploma (or equivalent) earned a mean income of $34,099, while those with a bachelor’s degree earned a mean of $62,466 (us census nd). the clear advantage gained by graduating from college is one reason adult basic education systems in the united states are developing transition programs for adults moving onto post-secondary education (see the work of the national transition network at http://www.collegetransition.org/home.html). however, moving from the individual as the unit of analysis to the larger society provides a different picture of the impact of education. for example, marsh (2011) points out that starting in the late 1960s, the united states enacted policies that supported the education of young children (with programs such as head start) and also grew the numbers of people graduating high school and college. in 1972, when federal programs were firmly in place, the poverty rate was 19.2% percent, and in 1980 (when the programs should have been demonstrating long term effects) it was 19.5% (p. 118). he suggests that, ‘the consensus seems to be that these programs, although they may have expanded equality of opportunity, did relatively little to reduce poverty’ (p 118). marsh concludes that we cannot educate our way out of poverty given the types of economic inequality and exploitation built into capitalism. in a similar fashion we can look at poverty during the era of the workforce investment act (the precursor to wioa in the united states). when it was enacted in 1998, 12.7% of the us population lived in poverty, and in 2013, 15.8% of the population did. granted, these have been turbulent times for the us economy, marked by w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 12 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s unfunded wars and tax-cuts and a deregulated financial industry, but it would seem clear that the workforce training approach is not enough to overcome these large structural problems and reduce poverty rates. rather, marsh (2011) notes that data from the 1990s indicate that people fell into poverty because of a reduction in paid working hours, the loss of work, changes in personal situations (like divorce or separation) and ill-health. he concludes that more education might reduce the risk of experiencing poverty, but ‘so long as the economy produces jobs that pay povertyand near-poverty level wages, somebody must take those jobs. without a change in wages or job security, those who occupy those jobs will remain at risk of falling into poverty’ (p. 87). we can’t educate or train everybody out of poverty-level wage jobs if poverty-wage jobs are pervasive. this point appears to be lost in some analyses of the role that education can play in addressing economic vulnerability. for example, bruno, jin and norris (2010) suggest that adult basic education and training programs should focus on giving learners the skills they need to get jobs that pay $10.50/hour (the rate they conclude needs to be met to move beyond being working poor). however, since these jobs are in limited supply, not everybody can upskill into such positions. somebody moving into such a job will potentially be displacing somebody else rather than filling a recently created new position. in turn, the dislocated worker may be in the position of having to take a job that pays less than $10.50/hour, joining a large number of people who cycle in and out of poverty. as marsh (2011) suggests, with this approach you may change who is living in poverty, but not the number of people doing so (p. 88). an alternative solution would be to ensure that all jobs pay a living wage, not just selected ones. thus, rather than keeping with the neoliberal model of having workers compete with each other to make ends meet, the focus should be on making sure all workers are compensated at a rate that moves them beyond being working poor. this guarantee of a living wage regardless of the type of employment is essential because workers at the lower end of the skills continuum experience a great deal of job churn, due to rapid changes in industry and markets (eubanks 2012:61). they may indeed train for a job that pays $10.50, but even if they secure employment there is no guarantee how long that job will last. their next job may pay less, and then to regain lost earning power they may be encouraged to enter another training program. adults in this position end up on with what seems like a sysiphean task of never ending training with little w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 13 hope of breaking out of the cycle. the loss of employment can create a downward trajectory that is difficult to stop simply with education. one study of dislocated workers who went to college for training in new fields found that they actually were less likely to be employed and had lower earnings than those who did not go back for training (goldstein 2012). this could have been for a number of reasons (such as those less likely to be rehired in the first place ended up going to training), but it points again to a fundamental truth – if there is no work or jobs that pay well, no amount of education or training will help individuals secure employment with life-sustaining wages. a focus on measures of individual success, in terms of leveraging education for higher wages, serves to divert attention from the class structure of capitalist economics and larger trends in the number of people in living in poverty. rather than addressing the conditions that lead people to fall in and out of poverty, the adult basic education and training system is predicated upon working with individuals as they come through classes and apply for services. referring to racial disparities regarding enrolment in higher education, specifically for african american men, one college student criticised approaches that work with individual students who need support in getting to college. he concluded, ‘you can’t keep putting a band-aid on a big wound. we need to figure out why people keep falling in the river. you don’t just keep jumping in and saving that one individual. you run upstream, and you figure out why they are falling in’ (center for community college student engagement 2014:30). this is also a necessity for adult basic education classes and other efforts to support the poor and working class. we cannot train our way out of poverty one worker at a time. yet despite these built-in limitations, the training continues. the rhetoric of the ‘skills gap’ crisis helps drives money into subsidised programs that train workers, relieving companies of the need to provide on-the-job training. those who work in the provision of services get paid for parceling out money, for setting up accountability regimes, and for engaging in quality assurance activities. even if these programs do not move people into jobs that pay a living wage, the focus remains on the skills of the workers rather than the structure of the system. the rhetoric of workforce development limits the scope of adult basic education and perpetuates competition between workers for scarce resources. some critics have long held that public education efforts work to reinforce social class inequalities rather than counter them (bowles & gintis 1976/2011, w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 14 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s graff 1991). when education provided by the state is focused on the needs of capital rather than individuals it is part of the problem, not part of the solution. along these lines, greene (2015) believes that current adult education efforts have a ‘domesticating educational agenda that prepares adults exclusively for the job market and the submissiveness required to insure [sic] their social control’ (pp. 3334). that agenda might not always be realised, as there are students and teachers who work to conduct adult education classes on their own terms, but trends in policy and discourse are not promising. implications to be clear, ending centuries of systemic exploitation and inequity will require a fundamental transformation of the economy rather than small-scale alterations or adjustments. as noted above, education alone is not enough to move a whole class of people out of poverty, nor will it be sufficient to create a break from capitalism. however, generations of adult learners and educators have recognised the ideological nature of literacy and have connected their work to larger struggles for social and economic justice (greene 2015, purcell-gates & waterman 2000). the history of such efforts is not typically part of teacher or tutor training or ongoing professional development. that means that teachers do not necessarily hear about slaves teaching themselves to read at the risk of death, workers organising labor colleges (altenbaugh 1990), or revolutionary literacy campaigns in places like cuba. rather than having opportunities to think through and discuss multiple goals and approaches, those working the field are encouraged to develop what macedo and bartolomè (1999) describe as a ‘methods fetish.’ that is, professional development activities focus almost exclusively on technical answers to improve education (e.g., better teaching methods, better curriculum, better evaluation) rather than addressing the socioeconomic and sociopolitical conditions that education takes place in. the issue is not solely related to teacher training. for example, teachers in japan with a long-standing commitment to adult literacy and social justice work believe that younger teachers coming into the field do not easily make connections between the classrooms they are working in and movements for social justice because they did not enter the field when such activities were common (jacobson 2015). veteran teachers believe that these younger teachers do not know alternate models of pedagogy are even an option. of course, w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 15 this may not just be a function of age, for teachers of any age might enter programs with little experience of social justice work. it is also the case that not all adult basic education students want their classes to focus on or connect to social justice issues and they may embrace the workforce development rhetoric themselves. thus, teachers need to navigate the difficult terrain of inviting critique of current socioeconomic conditions without negating student agency. bowles and gintis (1976/2011) in their own critique forcefully conclude, ‘we cannot move forward through the band-aid remedies of liberal education reform. the people of the united states do not need a doctor for the moribund capitalist order; we need an undertaker’ (p. 288). yet they also suggest that the process will be long and arduous and that ‘socialist educators should take seriously the need to combine a long-range vision with winning victories in the here and now’ (p. 287). to that end, i will suggest two strategies that focus on concrete ways to push back against the dehumanizing effects of the workforce development rhetoric described above. the first is to focus on students’ and teachers’ abilities to think at the structural level and the second is to identify structural reforms to advocate for. afocus on thinking structurally brookfield and holst (2011) suggest that adult education programs aiming to work against oppression need to ask a series of questions about their approach. for example, they believe programs should ask ‘does our work help the dispossessed understand the historic nature of their existence, and does it expose the growing contradictions within existing sociopolitical economic relations?’ (p. 100). with regards to rhetoric of workforce development we can ask do programs help learners understand the nature of the polarised economy, how the prevalence of poverty-wage jobs makes it difficult for large numbers of people to move beyond poverty and how workers themselves are blamed for the crises that capitalism creates? additionally, do programs help students understand the contradictions involved in castigating people for being unemployed in an economic system that depends upon a standing army of the unemployed to suppress wages and maximise profits? for most programs the answer would be ‘no’. for example, over the last few decades many adult education programs have developed ‘financial literacy’ courses for their students. although there are exceptions (see united for a fair economy in the united states at http://www.faireconomy.org/), these courses tend to focus on topics w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 16 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s like managing bills, shopping for deals and managing credit rather than the nature of economy and workers’ roles in it. analysing these socioeconomic relations demands what brookfield and holst (2011) term a ‘structuralised’ worldview that interprets ‘individual experiences in terms of broader social and economic forces’ (p. 60). this holds for both teachers and students, and each can model structural thinking for each other. indeed, it is not the case that the teacher is in the position of lecturing learners about the systemic oppression they face. rather, learners and teachers can work together to identify how all of their experiences are shaped by larger socioeconomic forces (purcell-gates & waterman 2000) and how they should respond to inequality and oppression. similarly, freire asserts the need for learners and teachers to work towards political clarity, which he describes as the ability to think through fragmented bits of information to achieve a ‘rigorous understanding of the facts’ (freire & macedo 1987:131). recently an adult educator told me about a training project she was working on. through her program immigrant adults had been placed at a factory that wrapped lettuce for distribution. one of the trainees approached her and said, ‘i was a farmer in vietnam. now i work all week wrapping lettuce and after i get my paycheck i cannot even afford to buy lettuce. what i am doing here?’ it is a good question and one that programs should be encouraging students and teachers to ask. prioritising structural thinking can help teachers question the terms of a workforce education system that continues to blame workers for their own vulnerable economic status and qualifies securing a job with poverty-level wages as a successful outcome of training. in the case just noted, the teacher decided to connect the student to people involved in a community gardening project where he could put his agricultural skills to good use and to help him find other work that paid better than training wages. badvocate for policies that address structural issues greene (2015) suggests that teachers and others involved in adult education should not be afraid to be radical because the solutions to the problems facing society are too large to be fixed with small steps. when budgets for adult basic education and training are cut, advocates rally to restore them, sometimes quite effectively. however, that often results in a return to the status quo of limited opportunities for individual mobility and little change in the overall amount of poverty. since we cannot educate or train our way out of w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c j a c o b s o n 17 systemic economic insecurity, not only do we need to want more from education, we need to demand more on the economic level. those who make a connection between their work in adult education and their commitment to social justice should join efforts that are pushing for the type of radical change that would have a profound effect on their students’ lives. for example, rather than hoping to train some learners to move out of poverty wage jobs, students and teachers should join efforts to raise the pay of all low-wage workers. in the united states this has taken the form of arguing for raising the minimum wage to $15/hour. many different groups of people have taken this up as an issue, particularly unions and advocacy groups, including those in adult basic education. for example, students and teachers at make the road new york (see http://www.maketheroad.org/), a community-based education and advocacy organisation, combine esol classes with planning and carrying out outreach and protests that speak directly to raising the pay of workers in a variety of industries. for adults who currently don’t have work, the demand should be for jobs programs, not training programs. as has been said, employment, not employability. to address the economic meltdown of 2008, the obama administration initiated a stimulus program that has been criticised as being too small, rather than too large (krugman 2010). indeed, it left unaddressed large issues with the united states’ economy and infrastructure that should be addressed with a large and sustained federal jobs program. for example, calculations suggest that a jobs program focused on a concerted effort to deal with the many dangerous bridges, tunnels and roads in the united states would create millions of jobs and pay dividends by making the transportation system more efficient and reliable (brun et. al. 2014). political opposition to anything that calls for federal involvement has stymied efforts in the past, but requests for small increases in funds for jobs training should not serve to obviate the need for a profound effort to address both the economy and the environment. in this area the demands have to be larger, not smaller. finally, as marsh (2011) notes, education efforts did not make as much of a difference in reducing poverty as other government programs that provided direct support. he argues that it was aid in the form of food subsidies (food stamps), medical support (medicare and medicaid) and increases in social security that reduced the number of people living in poverty. however, it is just these kinds of programs that are reduced when governments cut budgets. those w o r k f o r c e d e v e l o p m e n t r h e t o r i c 18 l i t e r a c y & n u m e r a c y s t u d i e s concerned with the lives of adult education students and the community as a whole must push back against the type of austerity measures that have wreaked havoc on communities and economies. as with the misleading rhetoric of a skills gap, it is not those who are reliant upon social welfare that are causing economic volatility, and blaming them is a way to move attention away from systemic problems within capitalism. to make progress towards a more just society, those involved in adult basic education should reject the rhetoric of workforce development and the illusory economic premises that it is based upon. we need to stop working on capital’s terms by accepting the notion that workers are the problem, rather than capitalism itself. we cannot be satisfied if education and training move a few people out of poverty when more people continue to join the ranks of the working poor. in the face of calls for austerity we need to ask for more, not accept less. this may seem audacious, but as brookfield 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institute commentary, retrieved 4 oct 2015 from http://www.epi.org/publication/shortage-skilled-workers. u.s. census (nd) pinc-04. educational attainment--people 18 years old and over, by total money earnings in 2014, work experience in 2014, age, race, hispanic origin, and sex, u.s. census, washington, dc. u.s. department of education (2015) making skills everyone’s business: a call to transform adult learning in the united states, u.s. department of education, office of career, technical, and adult education, washington, dc. the white house (2015) president obama’s upskill initiative, the white house, washington, dc. http://www.epi.org/publication/shortage-skilled-workers abstract introduction the crisis in the workforce the trouble ahead education, training and moving individuals out of poverty implications afocus on thinking structurally badvocate for policies that address structural issues references microsoft word b8400 fullissue.docx journal of education, 2021 issue 84, http://journals.ukzn.ac.za/index.php/joe doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2520-9868/i84a01 online issn 2520-9868 print issn 0259-479x crises and disruptions: educational reflections, (re)imaginings, and (re)vitalization yusuf sayed school of education and social work, university of sussex, falmer, united kingdom centre for international teacher education, cape peninsula university of technology, cape town, south africa sayed.cite@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-4049 adam cooper human sciences research council, south africa chair in youth unemployment, employability and empowerment, nelson mandela university, gqeberha, south africa acooper@hsrc.ac.za https://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-3605-2032 vaughn m. john school of education, university of kwazulu-natal, south africa johnv@ukzn.ac.za https://orcid.org/ 0000-0001-5991-5019 (received: 17 september 2021; accepted: 29 october 2021) abstract covid-19 has illuminated and exacerbated inequities, yet, as a crisis, it is not exceptional in its effect on education. we start this critical essay by situating the crisis in its historical, economic, and political contexts, illustrating how crisis and violence intersect as structural conditions of late modernity, capitalism, and their education systems. situating the current crisis contextually lays the foundation to analyse how it has been interpreted through three sets of policy imaginaries, characterised by the notions of learning loss and building back better and by solutions primarily based on techno-education. these concepts reflect and are reflective of the international aid and development paradigm during the pandemic. building on this analysis, we present, in the final section, an alternative radical vision that calls on a sociology of possibilities and pedagogies of hope that we see to be central to a new people-centred education imaginary to disrupt current inequalities and provide a new way of doing rather than a return to a business-as-usual approach in and through education. keywords: covid-19, interlocking crises, violence, education policy, techno-education, inequalities, pedagogies of hope 10 journal of education, no. 84, 2021 introduction covid-19 has illuminated and exacerbated the stark inequities between and within societies. yet, as a crisis, it is not exceptional or unique in its effect on education. refugees and displaced populations, children, and youth in conflict-affected and environmentally precarious contexts have invariably suffered educational interruption and disruption. we begin this critical essay by situating the crisis in its historical, economic, and political contexts, illustrating how crisis and violence intersect as both structural conditions of late modernity and capitalism, interlocking with existing inequities and fragilities. in this context, we point to how such crises (re)shape education systems, purpose, and values. we then consider the many diverse ways in which the covid-19 crisis has been interpreted and narrated, focusing on three sets of images and imaginings that have been repeatedly used in education policy discourse, the media, and everyday life. the first set of images refer to learning loss, learning crises and learning poverty, the second set speak to imagining a way out of the crisis, including building back better, coping with the new normal and reset, while the third set cleave around the solution for the crisis, primarily techno-educational learning alternatives. the three sets of images are reflected in the international aid and development paradigm that we then discuss. in the final section of the essay, we present an alternative vision to the one currently in circulation. this vison advocates for a set of radical policy related provocations that we see as central to a new education imaginary that could make building back better a genuine attempt to disrupt current inequalities, rather than a slogan that heralds the return to business as usual. this alternative vision considers critically what education is for and whose interests it serves. in the global context, the pandemic calls for a hard reset in which the prevailing development paradigm is upended in favour of an alternative southern development and educational epistemology that (re)centres itself on the global south, its interests, and its people. situating the covid-19 crisis as interlocking and intersecting with violence despite covid-19 exacerbating inequities between and within societies, it is not exceptional as a crisis that has effects on education. conflict, natural disasters, and systemic poverty invariably cause educational interruption and disruption. covid-19 has certainly amplified pre-existing inequalities across the global north and south, but it is unclear how this crisis differs from other crises. what is clear is that covid-19 has garnered infinitely more attention and responses from policymakers in comparison to other crises. as a crisis the spread of the coronavirus rapidly became global because, in part, of its effects on the global economy and the fact that its social effects, such as school lockdowns and closures, affected the middle class and upper classes extensively, calling into question how we understand crisis generally and what constitutes effective policy responses. koselleck and richter’s (2006) review of the concept of crisis helps to clarify the conceptual plurality of it across disciplines and time, aiding an analysis of this crisis and how it intersects sayed, cooper & john: crises and disruptions 11 with crises of violence, environmental degradation, conflict, societal divisions, and anomie. the pandemic allows us to see this plurality; early medical use of the notion of crisis referred to opposite and binary outcomes rather than to multiple intersecting factors since a patient either recovered and lived or died (koselleck & richter, 2006). like the medical use of the term, crisis regularly invokes images and discussions of ends and beginnings, birth and death, and apocalypse and portals of renewal. the early medical use of the term crisis resonates with the term crisis as a turning point where “systems face ruptures, radical changes or strengthening” (rikowski, 2020, p. 12) that can result in positive or negative change, since, as we argue in this essay, rather than interpreting crisis as a binary opposition, it is more usefully thought of as a set of intersecting forces. crises certainly create instability, affecting individuals, groups, and societies (gamble, 2010). a marxist reading of crisis, as endemic to capitalism, is founded on particular modes and relations of production structurally prone to negative rupturing events and cyclical instability. yet, from crises synthesis and potential for fundamental social change also emerge. crisis compels a search for alternatives in response to an unstable equilibrium, resulting in possibilities that can be positive and/or negative in their effects. crisis in a capitalist social formation cleaves societal strata through the market-based organisation of public goods, such as health and education services. klein (2007) theorized this as the “shock doctrine” (see the title of her book) in that crises further commodify public goods, drawing attention to diswelfare caused by capitalism (titmuss, 1965) and harming marginal groups excluded from the market-based provision of health, education, and welfare services. socially fragmenting effects of the shock doctrine enable neo-liberal polices to claim that there is no alternative to the market. this sense of crisis is particularly relevant to examinations of covid-19-related government decisions regarding the opening and closing of educational institutions, the procurement of personal protective equipment (ppe), school sanitizing contracts and vaccine programmes, the provision of learning technologies essential for on-line education, and whose knowledges and voices were included and excluded in such crisis decision-making (see sayed & singh, 2020). crises become the vector of, and portal to, particular policy imaginaries that are ideologically driven. in this way, ideological propositions of neo-liberalism are presented as a natural thrust or the only viable emergency response and naturalised as policy common-sense. the coronavirus interlocks with capitalism’s search for growth and excessive individualist consumption that has resulted in an assault on the natural world through deforestation and animal trading, for example. world wildlife fund (wwf) global science (2020) argues that zoonotic diseases, such as sars and mers in which a virus is transferred from animals to humans represent the majority (more than 60%) of emerging infectious disease (eids) worldwide. zoonotic diseases also involve transmission from humans to animals. an economic order that privileges human growth fails to see the human eco-system as part of an overall eco-system that includes the environment, as the notion of anthropocentricism has illuminated (crutzen, 2006; haraway, 2015). in this sense, such diseases are arguably reflective of the violence that a capitalist social order aggrandises by promoting individual consumption and economic growth since more and more of the natural environment is 12 journal of education, no. 84, 2021 destroyed, and humans are encroaching on the habitat of the animal and natural world, making possible these zoonotic diseases. the short-term model of economic growth results in the kind of crises and pandemics that the world is witnessing. the structural violence inherent in capitalism that drives crisis is often also accompanied by physical violence. wars and armed conflict in many different contexts are almost always accompanied by physical violence against the vulnerable, particularly women and girls (akinwotu, 2021). however, crises as systems of violence interlock in situated and conjunctural ways. some crises are felt more intensely in particular contexts, making them appear to be local crises, while others are truly global but experienced differently. systemic violence intersects with and exacerbates inequality and alienation, contributing to localised social disruptions, as is being witnessed during this pandemic. in south africa, a spate of criminality and violence in july 2021 resulted in the death of 130 people and billions of rands’ worth of damage in a period of just eight days. the violence started in the province of kwazulu-natal (kzn) and spread to parts of gauteng but was quickly contained there. many small and large businesses were stripped bare, and a large number of buildings were razed to the ground. over a hundred schools in kzn and gauteng were ransacked, vandalized, or completely destroyed during the mayhem. while several social and political forces coalesced, there are clear indications that this event also involved orchestrated violence and manufactured crisis. at a webinar on the july violence, activist busisiwe diko (2021) used the term “lockdown anger” to describe the way in which pandemic frustrations, particularly for people in informal settlements, have spilled over into most aspects of life, creating conditions for physical violence to erupt. conceptually then, in this instance at least, crisis cannot be decoupled from violence. crises also reflect a violence against the social values and bonds that bind citizens and nation states. crises like the corona crisis and protest movements reveal the weak and fragile social ties that bind citizens to the state in unequal capitalist societies. in the absence of collective forms of solidarity, identity, and vision, responses to the crisis that catalyse social justice are difficult to produce. yet, as the vortex of violence in south africa during july 2021 demonstrated, there were examples of solidarities that transcended race, religion, gender, and sexuality. these collectivist responses of, for example, cleaning up damaged shops and towns, supplying food when the national supply chain broke down, and protecting communities were starker in the absence of state (in)action that was marked by indecision, hesitation, and internal divisions within the ruling party. while some solidarities transcended race, others revealed traditional fault lines of racial division and racialized inequality when some civic responses opened spaces for vigilantism and criminality in the unfolding chaos. crises then, as in the case of the corona crisis, interlock both with existing frailties and coalitions and intersect with existing challenges against colonialism, subjugation, and marginalisation. the corona crisis occurred and overlapped with the black lives matter protest, and the protests against the amendments to the citizenship act in india that sought to disenfranchise millions while selectively enfranchising particular groups in favour of a sayed, cooper & john: crises and disruptions 13 narrow hindutva ideology. 1 the corona crisis reflects not only a notion of change but is reflective of the deep-seated and unequal relations in society, exposing and exacerbating these as many have noted (mccann & matenga, 2020). in this sense, crisis and crisisresponses are inherently political acts in terms of the power to pivot and change. in many instances the interlocking, intersecting, and inter-relational nature of the corona crisis is seen to deepen vulnerabilities. but pivoting and advancing effects are not easy to find in contexts of educational and social inequality. violence is also observed in the way in which covid-19 policy attention displaced and marginalised other pre-existing crises, such as tb programmes, as well as child vaccination programmes and school feeding programmes. an important consequence of the hegemony of the covid-19 pandemic is, therefore, the way in which it has exacerbated other crises. masri (2021) called for attention to be paid to the more than 82 million displaced persons because of a much larger global crisis than the pandemic. likewise, john (2020) employed a metaphorical coupling by associating the invisible enemy against which the sa president was marshalling the nation to fight with another larger and long-term invisible enemy— inequality. in similar vein, smith et al. (2021) penned the double burden of covid-19 to highlight the covid-19-inequality nexus. reference to the triple pandemics of covid-19, poverty, and gender-based violence has emerged (moletsane, 2020). a recent call for papers for the american educational research association (2021) went on to identify four pandemics in its claim that “education faces a myriad of challenges and opportunities. among them are residual effects of the four pandemics . . . the covid-19 pandemic, the pandemic of systemic racism, the economic crisis, and the climate crisis” (para. 1). it is significant that in all these couplings of other so-called pandemics to covid-19, attention is being drawn to different forms of structural violence and long-term struggles for class, race, gender, and climate justice. understanding and situating the corona crisis, therefore, suggests that it has become a signifier of the absences, silences, and marginality of other chronic endemic crises. ignoring its interlocking, inter-relational, and intersectional character may result in poorly conceived policy choices and policy options. in acknowledging the covid-19 pandemic as a polyvalent crisis requires providing voice to multiple actors and civil society organisations in policymaking. instructive in this respect is the legal action taken by the south african ngo, equal education, to ensure that the department of basic education continues with the national school nutrition programme (nsnp) that had been stopped because of covid-19. interlocking and inter-relational crises thus require a policy approach that does not ignore important existing programmes and interventions for the marginalised, nor silence the voices of those most impacted. a stark warning about ignoring crises as interlocking was offered by ahunna eziokonwa, lead author of a major undp report on the effect of the pandemic on africa, as cited by burke (2021, august 13) in the guardian. 1 hindutva ideology refers to the form of nationalism sponsored by the currently ruling bharatiya janata party (bjp) in india. in broad terms it evokes and mobilises on narrow ethnic, social, religious, and cultural lines invoking an ideal of what it means to be a pure hindu in india, thus othering those who fall outside of the reductionist and homogenising tendencies of such a movement. the bjp is the current ruling party in india and its policies, it is argued, reflect a hindutva ideology. 14 journal of education, no. 84, 2021 people have nothing to lose any more. when they are on the edge, they are that much more given to being violent or being instrumentalised by politicians who exploit their anger, and that is a clear and present danger . . . the least acknowledged form of violence during crises may therefore be epistemic violence, that includes the lack of consultation with those in the front line, a narrow reliance on particularist forms of knowledge to justify the response to the pandemic, and the denial of the view of the subaltern, manifest in the ways in which many knowledges were (not) recognised during the pandemic. imaginings and the narration of crisis as systems of disruption, crises are also about policy choices offering possibilities for the emergence of new ideas and critiques of current practices and for finding new ways of innovatively and collectively resolving social problems and forging ahead. disruption, seen this way, is redolent of recognition and progressive potential but also, as argued below, of policy blind spots. these problems and possibilities are evident in the ways in which crises are narrated and the images used to describe them. in the case of the covid-19 pandemic the images that have captured the possible education responses have been driven by three sets of imaginings. the first imagining has been presented as learning loss, learning crises, and learning poverty, thus addressing the accumulating deficits in the time required to complete curriculum coverage and attain benchmarked learning outcomes. these images narrate the crisis as the real loss of learning content since schools are shut or have been partially reopened to offer rotational access for leaners. this imagining of the crisis re-focuses the education enterprise as one of learning content and this crisis has rendered this difficult to implement as intended and designed. equity is woven into these images of a poverty of learning with marginalised and impoverished learners suffering greater learning loss and sinking deeper into a learning crisis. while undeniably true, it is the narrow range of policy prescriptions that are contestable in their focusing on a recovery mode that privileges a narrow idea of cognitive learning, curriculum coverage, and completion as the hallmark of recovery. the second set of images speaks to an alternative imagining of the way out of the crisis. building back better, coping with the new normal, and resetting capture the search for an alternative way of educating and developing education systems. these voluntaristic imaginings suggest a rupture or break from the past and present that is conceived of as failing and riven by weaknesses. yet it is never fully articulated what these exact weaknesses are, what is being reset, what defines the new normal, and what building back better looks like. these aspects remain opaque and elusive, defying definition and shifting shape and form in the discursive ways in which crisis solutions are narrated by the powerful. the third set of images adhere around the solution to the crisis. they are the syntheses that are invoked to resolve the crises as antithesis. these are primarily techno-education images that privilege technology-driven learning alternatives. the techno-education imaginary, as sayed, cooper & john: crises and disruptions 15 critiqued by langthaler (2021), conceives of the pandemic as being aligned to the fourth industrial revolution (4ir) that emphasises greater technologisation and digitalisation of teaching and learning. these imaginings advocate the flipped classroom and hybrid/blended/hy-flex learning as vital modalities of education, in and for the future. herrera (2020) described covid-19 as the “great accelerator” (para. 4) of the digital transformation of education and edtech in egypt. such approaches manifested early in the pandemic and suggested emergency responsive teaching as the imaginary, thus capturing the zeitgeist of the pandemic. in the context of education digitalisation, the door is flung open for large education companies and the growing intensification of educational corporatisation to control the architecture of the education enterprise and take ownership of content. the risk of technoeducation is that [t]hrough the provision of digital tools, private edtech corporations have gained significant influence on curricula, methods and administrative procedures in schools and universities . . . in particular in africa, international education providers use digitalization to marketize their business models . . . the goal is to replace costly professionals by low-skilled operators and to reduce the cost of infrastructure. (langthaler, 2021, para. 2, 4) clearly, we need more research into who benefits from techno educational interventions in times of crisis and beyond. techno-education as a solution to the crisis is evident across all contexts, albeit unevenly so. techno-education as online learning has been firmly embedded in the provision of education as a response to the crisis, as well as a modality for future education provision in many countries. in others, including, for example, india and south africa, techno-education takes the form of online private tutoring and hybrid learning in better-resourced schools and homes, while marginalising important aspects of education provision such as adult education. in south africa specifically, forms of techno-education, located in contrasting parts of the education system, played out differently for a range of learners and their families. the dual structure of south african schooling means that about 67% of schools are no-fee ones that service the impoverished black majority, and the rest are, largely, former model c and elite independent schools (vally, 2019). forms of blended learning were favoured by former model c and independent schools, combining techno-education with face-to-face instruction. more affluent schools followed a path that suited their educators and learners without much interference from authorities. these schools transitioned to blended learning in combining online and face-to-face instruction, using techno-educational resources of home laptops, internet connections, and data to ensure that teaching and learning continued (reddy et al., 2020; taylor, 2020). wealthier schools provided families with printed materials to take home as well as detailed instructions and support through, for example, whatsapp chat groups, explaining tasks to be completed and giving instructions on how to use sites like google classroom or d6 communication platforms (taylor, 2020). this created a structured home learning environment enabled by coordinated efforts between the school and the home. privileged schools, therefore, continued to operate, partially online, through various forms of 16 journal of education, no. 84, 2021 techno-education, drawing on the range of social, cultural, and material capital that well-off parents and their homes provide and blending the resources of the home and school in eclectic ways that were minimally governed. online private tutoring in both school and tertiary education through the shadow education industry (bray, 2021) privatised the public space of education, reinforcing systems of privilege and advantage. poor schools were brought to a virtual standstill since learners attending no-fee schools in south africa generally struggled to find quiet work places, desks, computers, internet connectivity, and parents or other adults with the capacity to supervise learning at home (parker et al., 2020: reddy, 2021). lockdown experiences were therefore radically different for families in the poorer no-fee segment of the education system. the prohibitive costs of data and lack of access to devices like smart phones and computers made it difficult for poor parents to communicate with schools and download documents, not to mention addressing insecurities about drawing up work programmes at home (taylor, 2020). poor parents remain reduced to peripheral supporters of school educators, checking homework, serving on the school governing body, and attending meetings at school, activities that are endorsed by the south african education system (daniels, 2020). affluent parents were able to assist with techno-educational provision, serving as co-educators responsible for the academic socialisation of their children, a role that american research has shown to be most conducive to fostering academic success (hill & tyson, 2009). the three images reveal a particular policy imaginary of effect and response, varied across nations. what is known as a crisis of learning metamorphises into the techno-education policy imaginary, particularly for the poor, that is the building back better and the imagined reset. the past is presented as troubled, broken, and faulty; the so-called new normal is presented as natural and as the only alternative. the policy choices available and the policy imaginary are narrowed to a limited range that present a reduced focus on learning content. the expansive approach of educational doing and being and the privileging of other goals of education, including the affective, are effectively delegitimated. rooted in a circumscribed imaginary of education crises, the future becomes one of education recovery, as captured in the urgent 10-point plan proposed by the world bank (2021). the 10 actions named by the bank that countries can take to recover and accelerate learning include assessing and monitoring learning loss, providing remedial education and socio-emotional support, restructuring the academic calendar, adapting the curriculum, supporting teachers and school management, communicating with stakeholders, encouraging re-enrolment, minimising disease transmission, and supporting learning at home (world bank, 2021). the recovery mode described above circumscribes education as content acquisition, with cognitive learning the ostensible key. even where the affective is acknowledged, this is instrumentalised as support for catch-up, retention, and stress management, rather than as promoting educator well-being and preventing burnout. the image-laden narration of the pandemic reveals an overriding concern with the diminished learning time and content, measured in the number of teaching days lost, leading to decreases in projected cognitive learning outcomes. projected content learning loss (world bank, 2021) invokes a language of sayed, cooper & john: crises and disruptions 17 learning crisis and learning poverty, as noted above. yet, this approach instrumentalises learning and diminishes the focus on the affective and relational, failing to acknowledge a more holistic understanding and approach to education quality. the techno-education approaches are argued as being consistent with the imperatives of 4ir. proponents of technology have seen the crisis as the solution to the preparation of young people for the new industrial revolution marked by block chain technology and technological competencies (see world bank, 2020). yet such advocates rarely speak of the deep-seated inequality that marks the 4ir. in policy deliberations and choices about education, the striking issue that emerges is how the so-called solutions proposed not only reveal but also exacerbate education inequalities and render silent and absent a particular economic order being proposed (chowdury & jomo, 2020). and, in particular, the techno-education approach facilitates the ongoing privatisation creep into education that undermines the idea of education as a common public good. techno-education, as referred to in this paper, is reflective of how neo-colonialism continues to hold the global south in a dependent relationship through the new technologies and new platforms evident during the pandemic, resulting in what some have called digital colonisation (see kwet, 2021) these forms of neo-colonialism are evident in the ownership of software learning packages, learning platforms, and communication tools owned and managed by large corporations such as google, amazon, microsoft (ferreira et al., 2020; kwet, 2021). this digital colonisation is evident in the extraction of raw resources and commodities such as cobalt for new technologies from africa as well as the exploration of cheap advanced technology labour in what kwet (2021) refers to as the silicon valleys of the global south. crisis and international aid: rethinking the education and development paradigm the pandemic reveals not only inequities between and within nation states but also the regressive fault lines of the current international development architecture and aid system, with many countries in the global north cutting back on aid and retreating into chauvinistic nationalism, including through vaccine nationalism, for example (khoo, 2020). the current crisis is not an exceptional event but is part of the system of neoliberalism, marked by the increasing privatisation of social sectors, the growing inequalities between and within nation states, and the emphasis on the individual at the expense of collective and social solidarity. in particular, the pandemic reveals how the international system seems paralysed to act in concert globally as it seeks to work with and mitigate the behaviours of pharmaceutical corporations driven by the profit motive. during the crisis this form of capitalism has revealed how knowledge (about vaccine manufacture, for example) that should be part of a global public good and commons is privatised and nation states in the global south are unable to negotiate with corporations. at the same time, the approach of a country like cuba, for example, demonstrates excellent work towards the benefit of people globally by, for example, sharing the vaccine it has developed and providing health expertise to many 18 journal of education, no. 84, 2021 countries in the global south. yet cuba struggles to gain a foothold in the health system since its vaccine is neither globally recognised nor supported. this inequality in the way in which the global system operates is manifest in the fact that of 4.8bn covid-19 vaccine doses delivered around the world to date, around 75% have gone to just 10 countries (the guardian, 2021, 13 august). in africa, where a third wave of the virus has been on the march since may 2021, less than 2% of the continent’s population has received a first dose. while high-income countries around the globe have administered about 100 doses for every 100 citizens, the equivalent figure for low-income countries is 1.5. britain has played a leading role in opposing calls for intellectual property rights for vaccines to be temporarily waived. the pandemic also reveals what khoo (2020) termed “unknowing” and what he described as “cognitive frames that present development” as a question of “northern knowledge” and competence versus “southern lack of knowledge or incompetence” resulting in “active production of global ignorance, with serious effect” (khoo, 2020, p. 7). khoo’s thesis on the pandemic is significant in its revelation of a developmental paradigm in which the gaze is on the south but that fails to note that there have been previous global pandemics from which the north could have learnt from the south, as in the case of the ebola crisis in sierra leone. more significantly, the pandemic shines a spotlight on the paradigm of development that assumes that the other, namely the south, is unprepared in comparison to the north that is presented as prepared, ready, and able to manage. if anything, the pandemic has revealed that inequality, poor governance, corruption, along with despotic and authoritarian actions, are not the sole preserve of states in the global south (sayed & singh, 2020). the pandemic calls for new ways of understanding development that see the world not only in terms of geographical boundary positions of rich and poor and north and south, but also as riven by systems of production and forms of governance underpinned by relational inequality. in this way it speaks to a notion of development that the sustainable development goals (sdgs) framework sought to articulate, i.e., that poverty remains as titmuss (1965) suggested, the unacceptable stigmatising face of inequality, a global problem that pits the wealthy against the impoverished, the strong against the weak, and is not a specific feature of a particular state or space or time. it is important to recognise that during the first phase of the pandemic (april to june 2020) the top five billionaires saw a 26% increase in their wealth (makau, 2021). the multilateral global system came under sustained attacked as chauvinistic nationalism rapidly displaced the impulse, advocated most prominently by dr tedros adhanom ghebreyesus, head of the world health organisation (who), for a collective, solidaristic global response to the pandemic. the subsequent paranoid attack, in particular by the demagogic populist donald trump, on the who reflected such a chauvinistic trend (makau, 2021). further, with perhaps the rare exception of the scandinavian social democracies such as sweden (larsen, 2021) countries in the global north privileged access to vaccines in favour of their states to the detriment of those most needing them. large pharmaceutical companies sought to delay as long as possible making knowledge about their vaccine available, asserting their intellectual rights to commodify health products and thus preclude sayed, cooper & john: crises and disruptions 19 countries in the global south from developing their own vaccines. these examples reflect the enduring efforts by certain countries and large corporations to continue the neo-colonial dependency of the global south. comfort ero, the african programme director of international crisis group as cited in the guardian by burke (2012, para. 4), stated, it is a story in two parts . . . in the first chapter, the continent appeared more resilient in the face of the pandemic than many more developed parts of the world. there were lots of concerns that it would all go to hell but it didn’t. the next chapter may see all the things that didn’t play out in 2020 beginning to reveal themselves. the things that did not play out in the first chapter include increases in extreme poverty, unemployment, infant mortality, graduate unemployment, food hunger and scarcity, loss of remittances and insecurity, and a reduction in aid budgets, all of which threaten the achievement of the sdgs. a study 2 by united nations development programme (undp) (2021, p. 69) noted that even after the health crisis has been controlled by limiting the spread of the virus and eventually distributing a vaccine, the impacts of the pandemic will be far from over, with long-term increases in disease prevalence and mortality across countries, longterm changes to economic structures, shifts in patterns of international trade, and wide, predominantly negative implications for government investment and human progress in areas such as education, health, poverty eradication and child mortality. yet, the pandemic reveals an alternative progressive imaginary, albeit an inchoate one still in formation: the cuban public health doctors sent to south africa and italy; the cuban abdala vaccine, produced entirely independently of the circuits of global pharmaceutical capital; the crisis recovery facility created by the asian infrastructure investment bank (aiib) to provide $13bn of financing for recovery; and the low cost, progressive pandemic response by resource-constrained contexts like vietnam and india’s kerala state (chowdury & jomo, 2020). in the case of kerala, it is significant that the state used progressive ideas and messaging such as substituting the term social distancing with physical distancing to signify a rupture with the alienating class and caste estrangement suggested by the former term and used the metaphor of breaking the chains to signify overcoming oppression (chowdury & jomo, 2020). in these ways the kerala state suggested an alternative model of development in using progressive and inclusive socialist values and ideas to counter the socially alienating effects of the pandemic and build broad-based class and cast solidarity. these examples speak to alternative forms of development, or what makua (2021) referred to as a paradigm shift that has the potential to facilitate new horizontal and equitable approaches to international development and displace the current outmoded hierarchical international 2 this study was led by eziakonwaa including willem verhagen, david k bohl, jakkie cilliers, barry b, hughes, stellah kwasi, kaylin mcneil, marius oosthuizen, luca picci, mari-lise du preez, yutang xiong, and jonathan d. moyer. 20 journal of education, no. 84, 2021 development architecture that has proven unfit for purpose (organisation for economic cooperation and development [oecd], 2020). the warning of santos (2001, p. 187) is important here. one possible future is therefore the spread of societal fascism. there are many signs that this is a real possibility. if the logic of the market is allowed to spill over from the economy to all fields of social life and to become the sole criterion for successful social and political interaction, society will become ungovernable and ethically repugnant . . . an alternative framing of ways of knowing and doing development, in which development is presented as a linear trajectory and crises are seen as minor to major road bumps to be overcome along the journey, could change the modernity thesis. in contrast, makau (2021) and khoo (2020) have called for an alternative development imaginary rooted in and based on the voices of the marginal, those on the global periphery i.e., people whose lived experiences and priorities are generally not reflected in the mainstream development paradigm. crises and an alternative policy imaginary the writer arundhati roy (2020) suggested in the title of her article that “the pandemic is a portal”, and that the appalling inequalities regarding health and life that have been revealed are simply the newest manifestation of a continual crisis with an accompanying demand for reckoning, opened up by the struggles in the global south. to this end we offer a vision of education that is an alternative to the current proposals in circulation in its outlining of a progressive approach to education innovation in response to the pandemic. this plan is marked by changing the discourse and policy imaginary. many of the current education approaches and much of the messaging unduly and disproportionately speak to a contextual vision predicated on loss and crisis. reponses to such a context are couched in the language of curriculum recovery and remedial catch up in a deficit discourse that presumes that nothing has or can been learnt. while there is some merit in such a concern, we argue, following the agency model of kerala, india, that this should be couched in an equity focused and social justice driven approach that speaks to an alternative pedagogy of affirmation and hope. such a pedagogy of hope should foreground the experiences of the educator and the marginalised learner and illuminate a pathway through the crisis mapped on eradicating educational inequality and overcoming epistemic violence. to this end, we advocate an educational vision that speaks to eradicating learning inequality by affirming and validating the knowledge of the marginalised and impoverished. this should, in other words, constitute a point of pedagogical departure, and not be viewed, condescendingly, as a knowledge deficit to be filled up through either a catch-up or deposit process debunked by paulo freire (1970) more than 50 years ago. achieving this “new pedagogy of the oppressed”, to quote the title of freire’s (1970) work, for the marginalised in the global order requires a humble form of unknowing. much of the sayed, cooper & john: crises and disruptions 21 coronavirus discourse could be seen as a modernist project with the virus perceived as disrupting a linear development trajectory. however, as argued above, the virus calls into question the development paradigm that currently dominates thinking in calling, instead, for alternative southern epistemologies and a development paradigm that is centred on the south. this would turn on development as a humane and empathetic practice focused on people and growth that is respectful of the environment, equitable, and inclusive. this call for what we are calling an unknowing education system and curriculum (re)centres the subaltern and marginal knowledges, displacing the specific northern-centric ways of knowing that have an exclusionary hegemonic dominance. ladson-billings (2021, p. 72) has talked about the need for a “hard re-set”, since “going back” for black students in the us means returning to an oppressive education system. she called for a culturally relevant pedagogy as part of this hard re-set, one that “better reflects students’ lives and cultures” and “the purposes of education in a society that is straining from the problems of anti-black racism, police brutality, mass incarceration, and economic inequality.” a hard re-set, to use her example of new orleans and the devastating effect of hurricane katrina, does not see the crisis as an opportunity to move public education in the direction and favour of market-based, neo-liberal charter school education approaches. a social justice pedagogy underpinned by unknowing supports learning to nurture social consciousness and develop global solidarity, ensuring that learners have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to understand the natural eco-system and how human action and instrumentalist notions of growth result in the crises and has resulted in the pandemic we witness today. such a pedagogy would include a focus on education for sustainable development, education for human rights and justice, respect for diversity, critical digital literacies, and conflict resolution. more importantly, such a curriculum would provide the understanding that individual action should be accompanied by structural change. for example, we cannot tackle carbon emission only by curricula and individual action but also by recognising that 71% of carbon emission is the result of no more than about 100 companies. we need to empower learners with the competence and agency to rethink the world order and see their individual action as part of a broader set of transformative actions required to change how the world functions, how we want it to function, and whom it should serve. such an approach does not see learning and education as the prerogative of the young, but as an integral task of all human activity through the lifespan. to this end, adult learning and education (ale) has received very little attention in covid-19-related crisis discourses. this is an extension of the usual silence and absence (santos, 2001) related to this sector in many countries where ale has historically been marginal and mostly underfunded. all the teaching and learning activities of this sector would have been affected by covid-19, as have been the lives and livelihoods of educators and the learning opportunities for adults. yet one would be hard pressed to find any media coverage of this phenomenon. the disruptions and learning loss concerns for learners in schools and higher education continue to dominate. and so, too, the monitoring, scholarship, and activism around ale during and because of the pandemic, are invisible. the ongoing absence of ale is telling. why are there no learning 22 journal of education, no. 84, 2021 loss concerns for adults and why a lack of urgency about plans to reopen or build back better? part of the answer to these questions is that ale has long been in compensatory, redress, and second-chance modes in several countries. instead of being fashioned as vibrant, proactive, and developmental, lifelong learning and education as expressed in global frameworks such as the delors report (1996) and the sustainable development goals (united nations, 2015), ale is still firmly cast as provision for the miss-educated and miseducated. in other words, it is for those who missed out on formal education and those who attended school but were failed by this system and thus need a second chance. there is a sense that these learners can wait a little longer and there are seemingly fewer consequences for the economy and society from disruptions and learningloss here. yet the levels of violence and inequality discussed throughout this article call for a revitalisation of this sector to contribute to the urgent projects of recovery, rebuilding, and rehumanisation. to be clear, such calls are nothing new; they were signalled by neglected pillars of the 1996 delors report that called for greater attention to be paid to “[l]earning to live together, by developing an understanding of other people and an appreciation of interdependence” (p. 97). goal 16 of the sustainable development goals to “[p]romote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels” is a more recent endorsement of the direction signalled by the delors framework for a less crisis-prone development model (united nations, 2015, p. 21). besides breaking down age and generational boundaries in reimagining education for all, divisions between homes and schools also need to be reinvented to foster inter-connected educational ecologies that build vibrant democratic participation. home and school are too often perceived as independent spaces, rather than a set of inter-connected relationships that form part of overall educational ecologies. the notion of blended learning, so prominent during the pandemic, has highlighted inter-connections between spaces and the ways in which inequalities are exacerbated through connected educational ecologies. moves to blended learning have resonated with the home-schooling movement that has proliferated in the us and that has effectively cocooned affluent students in a technologically enhanced bubble, exacerbating existing inequalities through home-school intersections. american home-schooling has negatively affected democratic citizenship and common reference points. charter school legislation made provision for what was called independent study. two decades ago, charter schools comprised 50% of california’s schools (apple, 2000) and continue to insulate privileged minorities from the general population, thus engaging in a form of cocooning. home-schooling functions like other semi-segregated sectors of society, such as gated living communities, to provide a physical and ideological security zone to which individuals can retreat, thus avoiding crime, taxes, poor schools, and undesirable ideas (apple, 2000). similarly, the form that blended learning has taken during the pandemic cocoons affluent students and families and keeps them away from the public sphere, insulating them from participating in democratic forms of citizenship and from being exposed sayed, cooper & john: crises and disruptions 23 to a range of reference points. choosing to live in specific cocoons undermines the basis of democracy because common experiences and information form the cornerstone of mutual understanding, empathy, and social cohesion (apple, 2000). rather than cocooning, new forms of educational justice should aspire to redraw educational ecologies by opening the doors of learning in ways that enhance solidarity and invigorate democracy. part of the challenge inherent in reimagining educational ecologies involves creating spaces that promote the transcending of neoliberal understandings of choice in catalysing public spaces that support forms of collective and connective action. globally, in the four decades prior to the crisis, schools and educators were increasingly reigned in and governed through marketised, neoliberal logics based on choice, competition, and managerialism. this produced a form of conservative modernisation in which education, as one component of democracy, was reduced to consumption practices and citizenship to individual choice (apple, 2001, 2003). the effects of this kind of logic were exacerbated during the crisis, including in south africa. for example, after the first covid-19 wave, the south african government emphasised that parents could choose home education or send their children back to school. the terms that needed to be adhered to for curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment meant that no poor parent could realistically choose home education. 3 the supposed choice portrayed through the home education policy was hopelessly out of touch with the lived realities of most south african parents, problematically assuming the home and school to be segregated spaces with independent functions. however, more affluent schools and the learners who attend them were able to transcend this binary choice, creating, instead, a larger spectrum of options, simply by blending resources from the home and school in various forms to create unique learning ecologies. in this and in many other ways, discourses of neoliberal choice have become entrenched in marketised education provision, shaping institutional arrangements, material conditions, and ideological effects that make particular pathways available for different groups, based on their position in society. discourses that emphasise the freedoms of the decision-making individual protecting their family and cultural heritage function to enable privileged groups to use “the market . . . as a class strategy . . . creating a mechanism that can be exploited by the middle classes as a strategy of reproduction in their search for relative advantage, social advancement, and mobility” (ball, 1993, p. 17). racialising effects are bound up in these processes since dominant groups are able to insulate themselves and their children through this sort of choice (apple, 2009; gillborn, 2008; lauder & hughes, 1999). the crisis has therefore highlighted the need for educational institutions to be underpinned by practices that embody alternative logics and ideologies to those associated with this apparent choice, promoting forms of collective and connective action that enhance democratic participation and interactions across class, as well as raced and gendered lines. an alternative to neoliberal choice discourses so integral to current education logics that promote competition and conflict, must foster forms of empathy and care, characterised by forms of affective learning. the corona crisis has revealed a glaring gap in the education system as far as empowering and equipping learners with the non-cognitive or the affective 3 see https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/202005/home%20education%20policy%20.pdf 24 journal of education, no. 84, 2021 dimension of learning is concerned. learning to live together, learning to care, learning to be empathetic, learning to be both a critical national and global citizen are important aspects of education that have been neglected and delegitimated in favour of a narrow curriculum focus on the basics with the core reduced to literacy and numeracy. while these are important, they are patently inadequate for supporting learners in a period of crisis requiring socio-emotional learning, citizenship learning, resilience learning, along with conflict resolution, crisis adaptation, and management skills. all these aspects are part of a required focus on the affective and relational that is privileged here as equally important, if not more so, than the cognitive. affective learning needs to create empathy rather than hostility towards teachers, a group too often characterised as lazy, uninterested, and the reason behind low-quality education for the poor. the corona crisis has shown that teachers are front-line agents who need to be protected. too often teachers have been marginalised and placed on the periphery of decision making with their needs largely ignored. yet it is teachers who are ultimately the fundamental policy frontline workers for the tasks of mitigating and responding to crises. their marginal positioning is reinforced by the techno-education discussed earlier that places curriculum change, decision-making, and agency in the hands of scripted online learning and learning tools. breaking the chain of education inequality requires bringing to the fore the agential autonomy of teachers as knowing actors. the notion of teachers as autonomous agents hints at a form of meaningful democratic participation that should extend to policymaking. equitable policy participation and engagement is, especially in times of crisis, too often relegated to the realm of the unimportant in favour of emergency modes of acting. invoking states of emergency and emergency regulations akin to periods of conflict and war, while perhaps understandable in the short term, denies grassroots actors and organisations the space in which to engage in deliberative policymaking. in particular, marginalised actors and organisations, representing the majority, the impoverished, and the voiceless, often find it difficult to secure a place at the policymaking table. the centralised nature of policy formation is often cloaked in, and resorts to, the technocracy of so-called scientific knowledge that underestimates or misrecognises the social nature of crises. this has become patently apparent in education policymaking in many countries. inclusion and valorisation of peoples’ knowledge and what radical educators call really useful knowledge, generated from solidarities from below, can help to mitigate some crises and to humanise crisis responses. inclusive forms of policymaking may help to eradicate the structural violence experienced by the impoverished, by, for example, protecting girls and women from gender-based violence in their homes and communities: many education institutions are not safe spaces for them. one indicator of gender-based violence in schools and communities are the statistics related to learner pregnancy in gauteng province, south africa. over 23,000 learners fell pregnant in the year ending march 2021, while 934 girls between the ages of 10 and 14, gave birth (bhengu, 2021). education institutions need to recognise the imperative to become safe protective spaces and nurturing environments for all and, in particular, the marginalised. sayed, cooper & john: crises and disruptions 25 these measures discussed above are part of a strategy to build, create, and nurture responsive and resilient education systems that are prepared for crises and that support equitable and quality learning and lifelong education for all, particularly the most disadvantaged and marginalised. resilient and responsive systems are able not only to mitigate the shock of future systems but to proactively support and prepare critical citizens able to engage meaningfully in society for their own, familial, community, societal, and global benefits. this requires an education approach that opposes the creeping privatisation of public education and the use of techno-education without reflecting on whom it benefits. such an alternative approach that advocates for a hard new reset (ladson-billings, 2021) will fail if it is not part of an integrated, progressive, socialist set of measures and actions in which we rethink development paradigms and do not promote economic growth at all costs. we need a social order that fundamentally tackles inequality and that deviates from the linear economic growth-at-all-cost model of development. the founding mandate of the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) points out the importance of the origin and ending of wars. in a similar way, the post pandemic world requires a mindset that imagines a future that is equitable, one in which the human eco-system contributes positively to the wider environment, rather than current models of growth and economic production that are wanting and/or damaging. we need to imagine a way of reading the world (freire, 1970) in which it is possible to see humanist, collectivist, solidaristic, and equitable values that implement a caring and inclusive growth paradigm centred on human development, humanisation, and respect for the natural world. this can build resilient countries with resilient populations, thus contributing to a resilient world order. this would be a more sustainable and hopeful model of building back better, for all. conclusion in this essay, we have highlighted the complex interplay in understanding the effects of the covid-19 pandemic on education at the global, regional, and national level. the crisis, arguably a natural zoonotic phenomenon, has in its social manifestation sharply illuminated and intensified inequities in and through education, revealing frailties and fragilities that have been glossed over. it has intersected and interlocked with existing crises rendering the vulnerable and marginalised more impoverished, pushing millions into extreme poverty, in contrast to the wealthy and the powerful who have often become wealthier and more powerful. yet it has, as santos (2001) has argued, been a powerful narrative of a sociology of silence and absence, a silencing that reveals a very narrow set of educational priorities that neglect adult and community education, for example. it has relegated to the margins a concern with pedagogy as a relational and repackaged neo-liberal education solution of choice, privatisation, and individual aggrandisement. yet as a portal it has pointed to an inchoate, opaque, fleeting-but-powerful narrative of the emergence of an alternative orthodoxy along with projecting possibilities, developing collectivities, and solidaristic thinking. in so doing, it points to a sociology of possibilities and pedagogies of hope that should avoid the glib rhetoric of building back better. instead, it is about a collective conversation and consciousness, an alternative and humanistic educational vision rooted in the idea of global common and public goods. the pandemic is about more than building back 26 journal of education, no. 84, 2021 differently; it is a reminder that mitigating its effects requires sustained, increased, and continued investment in public infrastructure, public delivery systems, and, most importantly, people, as cuba and vietnam demonstrate. the shock doctrine of crises should not lead to an even more egregious, greedy, and pernicious capitalism. references bhengu, l. 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[unpublished internal science brief]. www.ilrigsa.org.za/webinar-sa-unrest-how-do-we-understand-what-happened/ consumer capitalism meets inquiry analytic teaching and philosophical praxis volume 36 (2015-16) 55 consumer capitalism meets inquiry wayne henry introduction e, in the educational community, would be remiss if we did not arm our students with the reflective tools to handle pervasive influences in our society that are detrimental to their long-term well-being. such a determining yet invisible force is consumer capitalism (cc). that it is invisible and hence particularly pernicious, is a function of the fact that it is so pervasive. if we lived in an all-blue world, we would not recognize that we were surrounded and hence influenced by the colour blue. in this paper, then, it will be assumed that any serious inquiry requires an alternative from which to examine the issue in question; that if we want to analyze whether or not it is a good thing to live in an all-blue world, we would have to be able to at least imagine what it would be like to live in, say, a yellow world. thus, in what is to follow, i will briefly describe the basic dynamics of capitalism and some of its most pernicious dangers and then go on to describe a potential alternative to cc, known as natural capitalism (nc). it is important to keep in mind that i am not, here, making a case for nc per se, any more than i would be making a case for yellow if i wanted to encourage an examination of the potential dangers of living in an allblue world. what i am arguing is that in order to examine the forces of capitalism, and in order to avoid a straw person argument, it is imperative that we not only outline the perils of consumerist forces, but also that we construct an alternative that is at least not implausible so that we can examine from without what it is like to live within. after briefly outlining these two positions, i will then go on to sketch how one might construct a community of philosophical inquiry (cpi) with regard to these two positions, with the goal being that students will begin to acquire the tools to be more reflective of the consumer forces that impinge upon them and which potentially rob them of their capacity for self-legislation. so let us begin: the individual amdist consumer capitalist forces a consumer capitalist system is, by necessity, compelled to stimulate consumption to achieve desired growth outcomes. capitalism generally is committed to the premise that there must be continual growth of the economy; in contrast to, for instance, a steady-state economy of the sort envisaged by john stuart mill. cc, though, differs from the industrial capitalism that characterized pre-war western economies. in a capitalist state that is investing its capital to build its productive capacity, growth is achieved by the resulting productive efficiencies and the consequent trade advantages. but once a mature state of industrial development has been reached, the extraction of further efficiencies becomes increasingly expensive, insufficient to deliver the required economic growth.1 at this point, further growth requires the stimulation of domestic consumption and this is w analytic teaching and philosophical praxis volume 36 (2015-16) 56 the transition to cc. the important point to emphasize is that capitalism is an historical artefact, a human invention of relatively recent origin, ostensibly designed to benefit us all. 2 it has been continually adapted as circumstances have changed, but thus far all adaptation has been in the service of enhancing profit exclusively. thus, if we, as citizens, decide that cc is no longer maximally beneficial, it can be altered again under motives other than mere profit maximization, if we can find the will to do so. now, consider how cc seeks to meet its growth objectives. clearly, advertising plays a crucial role. the official narrative is that advertising merely informs brand choice for individuals who have already made the decision to buy. in no way does it compel or even encourage consumption. but everyone knows this is facetious, and at least two models have emerged that purport to explain the real role of advertising in a consumer society. one model holds that advertising, as a discipline, is in the business of finding the hidden psychological levers that compel consumption. the other narrative argues that we willingly submit to the lure of the pretty baubles dangled before us to fill a void in our otherwise meaningless lives. according to the former view, the “madmen” of wall street have succeeded at transcending our conscious awareness of the tactics they employ: our consumption is both compulsive and subconscious. however, upon reflection, this seems absurd: if compulsion were that easy to achieve, free will would be meaningless. the latter suggests we are willing participants in a system that is transparently obvious, but this fails to comport with our experience. the feeling of living meaningless lives is hardly universal. in fact, the truth is far subtler than either of these models would suggest. what the mandarins of wall street have discovered is the power of ideology – an ideology that defines one’s identity and self-worth in terms of one’s possessions.3 thus, the crucial claim is that cc plays a significant role in shaping our identities, how we conceive of ourselves and of our relation to others. moreover, the narrative about identity and selfworth in cc is fundamentally at odds with personal autonomy and democratic citizenship, particularly in a multicultural society. to the best of my knowledge, c. b. macpherson was the first to explore this conception of the self in 1962 in a book titled, possessive individualism. my own focus here is on an ideology that combines locke’s theory of private property with smith’s theory of the laissez faire market, and utilitarian moral theory.4 a central plank of the laissez faire market is that, under appropriate conditions (i.e., there is no coercion, no fraud, and no relevant information is withheld) individuals are left maximally free to pursue their preferences. this is all that personal autonomy is conceived to consist of on this view. it is impossible under this ideology to categorize preferences as immoral, or perverse, or otherwise. where there is an unmet demand, the self-interest of market participants will motivate someone to exploit that niche. under these conditions of market freedom, every deal that is concluded must reflect the preferences of the participants and that is all that matters. it is a kind of preference utilitarianism: the best situation is the one that maximizes preferences for as many individuals as possible. any attempts to limit this are, prima facie, limits on personal freedom. and happily we needn’t concern ourselves with the naked self-interest of market transactions, for we are assured that under conditions of maximal freedom, perfect competition will have the effect, as though guided by an invisible hand, of maximizing social welfare. so under this conception, we are conceived as bare repositories of wants, and autonomy consists of nothing more than pursuing these wants self-interestedly in the market. now as such bare analytic teaching and philosophical praxis volume 36 (2015-16) 57 repositories of wants, we are, metaphorically, one-dimensional beings. thus, the possessions we surround ourselves with become the physical manifestations of our character. in this sense, they define who we are by becoming, quite literally, the outward projection of our character (i.e., they provide the depth our characters otherwise lack). moreover, they are also the outward manifestation of success. for on this view, the only measure there can be of success is one’s ability to satisfy as many of one’s preferences as possible in the market place. in this way, i would argue, the satisfaction of our wants becomes the measure of our self-worth and our self-esteem. in fact, there is a tri-partite conflation here: on the one hand, one’s self-identity is conflated with self-worth, and the latter is, in turn, conflated with self-esteem. thus, the more stuff one has, the more successful one is, and one is encouraged to see this as the true measure of one’s self-worth and of one’s self-esteem. notice the implicit assumption that the conditions of a free market society are simultaneously the conditions of a meritocracy. thus, where one ends up in society reflects what you deserve. selfishness is a virtue and one’s position in society is a reflection of one’s willingness to work hard and bargain hard, it is a measure of your ambition and drive. in these ways, cc undermines empathy and the notion of identity through dialogue and self-discovery. in addition to being in conflict with genuine autonomy, this conception of the self is in tension with diversity and plurality, principally in virtue of the imperative to seek the economies of scale that maximize profit. consider, for instance, the role of globalization and multi national corporations (mnc’s) in the context of cc. mass production of mnc’s has a powerful homogenizing effect on markets. call it the mcdonald’s effect: everywhere you go, a big mac is the same. in fact, mnc’s expend great efforts to shape our expectations such that this has become, for many, how we prefer things. we take great comfort in knowing that the big mac we order in moscow, istanbul, wherever, will be the same as the one we order when we’re home. and due to their economic might, these same mnc’s are able to push smaller, local players out of the market, thus reducing diversity. and remember, this applies as much to the commodification of the arts and culture as it does to cuisine. now one might object that mcdonalds (and every other successful mnc) tailors its products to individual markets. so, in moscow you can also go to mcdonalds and get, say, borscht or perogies. while this is true, it is traditional cuisines filtered through the profit-driven imperatives of a western mnc. even setting aside the difficult question of authenticity, there will be the same effect locally of reducing the once diverse offerings of borscht from the local eateries to the standard set by the fast food market. there is the same re-education of the local palettes; in time, locals have their expectations re-set and come to regard ‘this’ as borscht.5 natural capitalism natural capitalism is the name given to a particular model of capitalism as presented in the book, natural capitalism, published in 1999 by amory lovins, hunter lovins, and paul hawken. there is a cluster of related ideas in the field usually referred to as the dematerialization of capitalist society.6 the principle idea unifying the various discussions is to significantly reduce the consumption of resources (and, thus, the correlated production of wastes) relative to a fixed level of services provided. the system is properly called capitalism because it is still based on free market exchange and private ownership, but, for the broadest range of goods possible, we seek to replace the sale of durable goods to consumers as end users with the sale of services. analytic teaching and philosophical praxis volume 36 (2015-16) 58 the value of the book by hawkens, et al, is the richness of the detail.7 in their discussion, the model is based on four principle ideas. first, is to maximize resource productivity (i.e., the quantity of useable product per quantity of inputs). the authors present evidence for the claim that technologies and methods of production are already available that could achieve 70 to 80% enhancements of resource productivity in most sectors. there are two aspects to achieving this desideratum. one is the fullest implementation possible of best existing practices and technologies, and the other is full system design. on this last point, most mass production facilities are presently designed to maximize worker efficiency (i.e., fordism). this from a time when worker inputs were the most expensive limit to production costs. but with modern production techniques (including robot technologies) this is no longer the case. full system designs must now seek to minimize material and energy inputs. put the other way around, the goal is to maximize resource efficiency. the second idea is biomimicry, otherwise known as “closing the loops,” which further enhances resource productivity by focusing on the elimination of waste. the idea is that in nature there is no such thing as waste, certainly no such thing as toxic waste. everything that is produced as “waste” by one organism becomes the food or input to another organism or the support of some ecological niche. so, this desideratum requires us to model our production systems on the operating principles of biological systems, such that, at every stage of production, what would formerly have been treated as an unintentional by-product, hence waste, becomes the input to some later stage of the process or is rendered inert/harmless (e.g.: by the use of specially designed bacteria). the third idea is the notion of a “service and flow” economy. this is the fulcrum notion that will require the active participation of consumers, as it will require them to accept giving up ownership of durable goods in exchange for the purchase of services. the perfect example to keep in mind is the photocopier leasing model as it applies to educational institutes, law firms, and such. these devices are complex and finicky, but essential to many businesses. xerox was the first to realize that their customers didn’t want to own a bunch of expensive devices, difficult to maintain and often constituting a bottleneck to their operations. what they wanted was “document copying services” and xerox moved to a leasing business model now emulated by all players in this industry. the service provider leases the machines as part of a package that includes a needs analysis, maintenance and upgrade as required. the benefits for the consumer include hassle-free delivery of the needed service and on-going access to state of the art technology (as a result of competition between service providers). significantly for the service provider there is the benefit of regular cash flow; the elimination of the normal ups and downs of the business cycle that results in significant market volatility. this business model, together with facilitating cradle-to-cradle legislation incentivizes producers to abandon planned obsolescence in favour of goods built to last, thus resulting in significantly less resource consumption and waste production for delivery of equivalent services. it is also localizes exactly where consumers, by their conscious choices, can have a decisive impact on actual outcomes. and the fourth idea is the restoration of natural capital, e.g., our forests, water, meadows, etc., which we will have the luxury to indulge once the other elements of nc are in place. consider, for example, the devastation wrought on new orleans by hurricane katrina in 1995. the standard narrative of this event fails to mention the role played by the loss of natural wetlands along the coast analytic teaching and philosophical praxis volume 36 (2015-16) 59 of louisiana, destroyed by decades of agricultural effluents flowing down the mississippi. no human constructed dikes can, on their own, protect against future events of this sort. the idea here is that, in the fullness of time, as the other three desiderata of nc have the effect of lowering the draw on natural resources and the output of wastes into the environment, we will have the “space” needed to do the hard work required to assist the processes of natural restoration. consumer capitalism meets inquiry having made the case that cc can have a destructive impact on self-identity, autonomy, selfworth, and diversity (to say nothing of its deleterious impact on the environment), and having presented a plausible alternative to cc that acts as a stimulus to the imagination, participants of a cpi are positioned to recognize that they are not victims of inevitable forces, and are ready to genuinely reflect on how they ought to live. whereas heretofore their lives were shaped in large part by what may very well have been invisible forces, they can now reflect on, for example, the degree to which they believe that it is true that their identities are constructed by what they own; whether it ought to be the case that their identities are constructed by what they own, and, if not, what is the alternative; the pros and cons of homogeneity; and in general to examine alternatives life styles that might be more conducive to human well-being that is within their own purview. ultimately, discussion of the detrimental impact of cc is, at best, a waste of time if such an inquiry does not lead to participant empowerment. inquiry questions while, students themselves can be encouraged to come up with inquiry questions in light of the above presentation, i personally have found the following questions helpful in jump-starting the discussion. in fact, i give out printed copies of the questions below before even beginning the discussion, in an attempt to short-circuit politically correct responses to cc descriptions, e.g., “i don’t construct my identity by what i own.” we then return to these questions following the presentation. the following is a sample of the sorts of questions that might be helpful in this regard. 1. are there any material objects in your life that you would be very unhappy to do without? 2. if so, why? 3. would you still be unhappy if those objects were replaced by low budget but equally serviceable substitutes? 4. if so, why? if not, why not? give an example. 5. if you found out that you had been hypnotized by a group of local dealers to buy what you have bought, e.g., the red sneakers, would you be annoyed? would you value what you bought any less? 6. would the world be better if we all wore exactly the same clothes, read exactly the same books, watched exactly the same movies? if so, why? if not, why not? 7. if we all looked pretty much the same, how would you show to others that you are special? is it important to have ways to show others that we are special? do the ways that we use to show that we are special matter? analytic teaching and philosophical praxis volume 36 (2015-16) 60 concluding remarks the foregoing is the scaffolding on which i stand to conduct a cpi with participants on the topic of consumer capitalism. exactly what information i include in any instance is largely a matter of circumstance and the particular dynamics of the group before me. however, in all cases, the strategy is the same. i characterize this strategy in terms of four stages. i always begin, by some sort of mechanism that will eventually show that the participants themselves are indeed being sucked in by the persuasive forces of cc (e.g., handing out questions of the sort listed above before giving the presentation). i then proceed to make explicit the presuppositions of cc and trace out some of the consequences of those presuppositions. then, in the third stage, my goal is to stimulate their imaginations with an alternative model, another way of seeing how the world might be. in the final stage, the cpi begins in earnest by returning the original set of questions that tend to demonstrate the degree to which their own identities are a function of what they own, and then proceed to prodding inquiry as to how they might construct their respective identities if they were not a function of conspicuous consumption. this, interestingly, often leads to chicken-egg discussions of whether altering how we construct identities needs to first take place before we can mitigate the forces of cc, or whether we need to first nudge cc to some alternative (such as natural capitalism) so that changes in the process of identity formation will emerge more organically. one way or another, though, i think it is safe to say that participants in such discussions are unlikely to be as blind to the potential deleterious personal impact of consumer forces. as well, with an alternative glued in by the discussion, they will have less of a tendency to feel victimized by forces that hitherto may very well have been seen as immutable. endnotes 1 this explains, in large part, the sudden and dramatic economic collapse of the soviet union. after competing with the west for decades as it ramped up its industrial capacity, it had no way to stimulate domestic consumption consistently with the premises of a centrally planned economy, and economic stagnation resulted. 2 this is the only official justification there can be for capitalism. even if one cynically supposes that the system is really designed and/or manipulated to enrich the propertied class at the expense of the rest of us, this could never be the official justification. the political legitimacy of capitalism requires that it be intended to benefit all of us, and that it does so better than any alternative arrangement of the economy. the tension arises from the discrepancy between the official justification and the capacity of the system to deliver the goods. 3 this also explains the remarkable resilience of capitalism, a resilience that marxists failed to predict. marx predicted that the proletariat would grow tired of their exploitation and would rise in rebellion to reject capitalism, but you don’t (can’t) reject what is central to your self-identity. thus, citizens of capitalist nations will perceive threats to their lifestyle as existential in nature. it is significant, in this regard, that george w. bush, while addressing america from the rubble of ground zero said, “my job is to keep you safe. you just keep doing what you ordinarily do. go shopping.” and this with a complete absence of irony, it must be noted. analytic teaching and philosophical praxis volume 36 (2015-16) 61 4 utilitarianism as filtered through the economic theory of vilfredo pareto, which i will not pursue here. 5 not wanting to sound overly cynical, one must take notice of the enormous effort exerted by mcdonald’s in particular to cater to children. shaping the untutored palette is far easier than reeducating mature palettes. 6 see, e.g., meadows, et al., limits to growth. 7 a very helpful précis, by the same authors, has been published in the harvard business review, july-august 2007. works cited galbraith, john kenneth (1998) the affluent society (4oth anniversary updated edition). new york: houghton mifflin company. hawken, paul, amory lovins & l. hunter lovins (1999) natural capitalism: creating the next industrial revolution. new york: little, brown and company. hill, christopher “understanding possessive individualism,” http://understandingsociety.blogspot.ca/2011/08/possessive-individualism.html. lovins, amory b., l. hunter lovins & paul hawken (2007) “a road map for natural capitalism” in, harvard business review, july-august, pp.172-183. macpherson, c.b. (1962) the political theory of possessive individualism: hobbes to locke. oxford: clarendon press. meadows, donna, jorgen randers & dennis meadows (2004) limits to growth: the 30-year update. vermont: chelsea green publishing company. address correspondences to: wayne henry department of philosophy, university of the fraser valley 33844 king road, abbotsford, b.c. canada v2s 7m8 wayne.henry@ufy.ca key: cord-0060240-50gxszkj authors: salmon, j. warren; thompson, stephen l. title: history of the corporatization of american medicine: the market paradigm reigns date: 2020-12-16 journal: the corporatization of american health care doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-60667-1_1 sha: 1f1572008a215b5991f17909bbf3bbdddb847279 doc_id: 60240 cord_uid: 50gxszkj economic systems have been analyzed and debated by economists and governmental leaders for centuries. historically, economic systems have been assessed by the products and techniques of production and how they are distributed, today with capitalism predominant and with mounting inequality within every society. under global capitalism, ownership of land and productive capital is chiefly in private hands, with the role of the state fiercely debated with continual attempts seeking to restrain its oversight. social justice in more liberal advanced societies has been championed over time, but the rise of finance capital and its presence in corporate-dominated economies has emerged with a massive concentration of ownership in almost every sector of the american economy. with its tendency toward managerial and administrative quantifications to fix existing flaws in the system, neoclassical economics has prevailed; few alternative or opposing perspectives rarely get debated. thus, the overall structure is taken as a given and immutable. global efforts toward privatization and monopolization mark the current stage of development. the institutional structure of american health care became elaborated under this system of capitalism and reflects much of the larger political economy. as seen in the medical-industrial complex, we are now witnessing a corporate takeover of the supply industries, insurance sector, and provider segments for their profit-making possibilities. what was once a professional dominated service sector with not-for-profit providers has now witnessed a rapid corporate transformation. economic systems have been analyzed and debated by economists and governmental leaders for centuries. historically, economic systems have been assessed by the products and techniques of production and how they are distributed, today with capitalism predominant and with mounting inequality within every society (piketty, 2016) . under global capitalism, ownership of land and productive capital is chiefly in private hands, with the role of the state fiercely debated with continual attempts seeking to restrain its oversight (o'connor, 1973) . social justice in more liberal advanced societies has been championed over time, but the rise of finance capital and its presence in corporate-dominated economies has emerged with a massive concentration of ownership in almost every sector of the american economy. with its tendency toward managerial and administrative quantifications to fix existing flaws in the system, neoclassical economics has prevailed; few alternative or opposing perspectives rarely get debated. thus, the overall structure is taken as a given and immutable (hunt & schwartz, 1972) . global efforts toward privatization and monopolization mark the current stage of development. when analyzing the united states, one observes that almost every sector of the economy-industrial, financial, construction, agriculture, communications and media, and even services-is dominated by just a few large national, if not multinational, firms (baran & sweezy, 1966; o'connor, 1973 o'connor, , 1974 barnet & muller, 1974; hermann, 1981) . this monopolization has been ongoing over the last century. however, today there is an incredible degree of concentration and centralization of capital, which is an indicator of the strong political influence that large corporations exert on public policy at all levels of government: federal, state, and local. therefore, it is not difficult to realize that the american healthcare system would eventually reflect this larger concentrated economy. health care is not alone, as this phenomenon is also seen in higher education, private prison management, and, under president donald j. trump, immigration detention camps. given current political trends, we may see upswings among other public and "not-for-profit" services becoming targets for further privatization, usually masked as being for increased "cost control" and "efficiency" and always with the epitaph that "the private sector can do it better." this book's analytic perspective is broad, seeking to define the overall structure to delineate the changing context of medical practice under which costly medical malpractice reigns within a profit-based medical-industrial complex functions. grasping the dominant social relationships that compose the healthcare system requires a political economic lens to reduce the overriding ideology of the marketplace and to discern its underlying dynamics. ushered in during the reagan administration, the heightened fetish for cost containment in health care reflects the republican disdain over the distribution of healthcare expenditures, not just by the federal government, but within the entire economy. it was the time when economists rose to prominence in health policy discussions (fox, 1979) , the majority of whom seemed much less focused on access to care and more on providing improving amenities to their well-heeled clients. it is not a surprise that cost containment often went together with disenfranchisement of the poor, disabled, and minorities, who had previously secured some access through federal programs, but basically excluded many other vulnerable population groups in need. nelson (2018, p. 2) critiques the economics profession as vulnerable to groupthink, along with its lack of diversity, especially at the highest echelons of economic policymaking. such is the case that provides the lack of attention to issues that address minorities in economic research to macroeconomic models used in public policy decisions. in effect, the profession has less chance to serve the public effectively and remains a tool of those in power; this became obvious from the 1980s on with health policy. critics have chimed in on the dismal cost of economics' lack of racial diversity that surely has affected what questions get asked and what issues get readily dismissed for lack of "scientific study." privatization has been rampant across the developed capitalist world for decades as many governments divest themselves. prime minister margaret thatcher privatized public utilities, healthcare facilities, and much more without necessary oversight to prevent thereafter exploitation (ford & plimmer, 2018) . president emmanuel macron in france has sought privatization schemes to fund infrastructure projects; many transactions are complicated with murky implications (kegshae, 2018) . even space exploration is being privatized (pasztor, 2020) . since president ronald reagan's first inaugural address in 1981when he proclaimed, "government is not the solution, it is the problem," the very thought of reforming the public sector has faded from the general consciousness. consider, after a number of veterans administration (va) hospital scandals over access and quality from the george w. bush years through trump, the federal budget was seen as bountiful for subsidizing private entities for care of our veterans and military, and perhaps to entirely transition to private insurance coverage. while local news media had reported extensively on the va for years to enumerate multiple issues, many democrats and most veterans groups oppose such a move to privatize care (bhagwati, 2019) . propublica reported that trump's "private care program gave companies billions and vets longer waits" including higher overhead (arnsdorf and greenberg, 2018) . opening access may shorten waits, provide more choices, and perhaps lessen co-pays, although switching vast numbers of veterans to private hospitals (a massive endeavor itself) may actually strain care in parts of the private sector (steinhauser & philipps, 2019; . even before this dramatic policy change, the government accountability office (gao) examination of one of the nation's largest health systems found a crucial need for improved oversight and greater clarity over roles and responsibilities (gao, 2019b)-the operative word is oversight! the va was previously charged with grievously not reviewing credentialing of practitioners (gao, 2019a) , keeping on doctors despite misconduct allegations (luthi, 2019) . at the same time, the va and the us department of defense (dod) are together attempting to create a new electronic health record (ehr) system, which could transition active duty servicemen to local va care. a huge government contract will be awarded to a private firm (likely, cerner) for its development. in 2019 mckesson technologies was awarded a $400 million contract for the department of defense digital imaging network picture archiving and communications health it system. in many cases, governments lack the expertise to carry out functions to greatly advance their agency; the issue then becomes assuring performance-based contracting and avoiding the typical cost overruns, where excess private profit can be gained-particularly given the outlandish history of dod military outsourcing. thus, privatization is widely overtaking multiple aspects of the american healthcare system, as the corporate for-profit basis of reorganizing our citizenry's health care seems substantially entrenched at huge taxpayer costs. the trump administration is also planning to privatize fannie mae and freddie mac, the core of american housing finance; they hold nearly half the total outstanding in america (the economist, 2019b ). more such moves will likely spread under the trump administration, since awards of taxpayer's money to private firms-like huge corporate tax cuts-provide the cycle of reelection campaign donations. this direction goes hand in hand with his massive deregulation efforts. there are surely better ways to proceed. lessons can be learned from abroad, as noted by the political and cultural differences seen in japan's privatizing its railways versus the slack, highly unpopular british railway privatization under thatcher. the much-criticized franchise system in britain has endured a catastrophically botched timetable change, major delays and cancellations at the worst level in a decade, and a passenger usage decline; ticket prices have risen twice as fast as wages since 2010 (how rising rail fares and falling punctuality, 2019). unreliable service due to poor performance by the british rails became symbolic of the broader discontent with privatization and neoliberal economics since thatcher. in contrast, harding (2019, p. 7) reports in the financial times that japan's private enterprise has a robust system of regulation, and rail companies feel a responsibility to society; they also operate on consumer payments without public subsidy. introduction reich (2018) points out that privatization boosting efficiency and reducing taxes is a myth; rather privatization often only boosts corporate bottom lines. he warns "don't privatize when the purpose of the service is to bring us together-reinforcing our communities" to connect across class and race, "linking up americans who'd otherwise be isolated or marginalized… don't privatize when the people who are supposed to get the services have no power to complain when services are poor" or maybe cannot recognize their poor quality (2018, p. 2) . these are surely apropos to health care for americans. this chapter will provide an overview of the historical development of american health care from its nineteenth-century cottage system to the onset of its now dominant corporate for-profit form. the main characteristic of private ownership with public subsidy reveals the lack of moral national commitment to health care for all citizens. interventions by powerful economic forces have been key from reorganizing medical education through business sources arranging for financing strategies for the hospital industry to the current encroachment by the it industry firms. the chapter traces the beginning concentration of capital in the medical-industrial complex (mic) through various social interventions that allowed profit-making to emerge. actions by capitalist philanthropic foundations at the turn of the twentieth century reorganized medical education to promote scientific medicine which greatly advanced productive health resources. as the delivery system started to industrialize, the committee on the costs of medical care (ccmc) in the late 1920s proposed hospitals to become the employment center for physicians and other professionals to deliver organized care for populations, but its ideas were staunchly defeated by the medical profession. as an alternative, solo fee-for-service medical practice was preserved so hospitals sought their own cost-plus reimbursement through employment-based voluntary insurance. this model supported by blue cross persisted with broad support until the 1960s when the federal government grafted on medicare and medicaid with a similar payment mechanism. as a result, costs exploded to warrant president richard m. nixon's healthcare crisis declaration in 1968. the genesis of corporatization came with his health maintenance organization strategy, which in effect unleashed market forces for the advancement of profit-making in multiple segments of the healthcare industry. this chapter spells out the rise to supremacy of marketplace medicine with the emergence of the proprietary hospital chains, the growth of the medical-industrial complex, and the societal confrontation over access, cost, quality, and accountability issues up against progressive calls for universal coverage for all americans. the chapter will reveal that historically the private sector's pursuit of profit in health care with heavy public subsidization leaves less than desirable outcomes for the public's health. the commoditization of health needs runs opposite to consideration of a collective public health. practices." yet hospitals joining together seems in part to be a response to rising information technology (it) costs, among other cost trends (see chaps. 2 and 5). the cost burden in the executive suite usually becomes an issue in that already high salaries tend to balloon. it is important to point out that consolidation is not the same as integration of services (owens, 2019) . for example, a local hospital chain here in chicago, almost a decade after merging, still cannot transfer medical records from the flagship to an affiliate in the suburbs. knowles reports that when institutions merge and competition declines, mortality rates and adverse health outcomes increase (2019, p. 91) . beyond changing historic hospital names, local disruptions occur, which altered the range of services residents have been used to providing, e.g., women's health when catholics chains absorb, hiv/aids care cuts, closing ers and opds, and elimination of other not-so-profitable services. research has shown that closures take a huge toll on a local economy, besides the surrounding community (mclafferty, 1986; whiteis, 2000; rich, 1982; sager, 1983; oloroso, 1988 oloroso, , 1989 friedman, 1978; dranove & white, 1997) . community characteristics often determine payor mix and thus financial stability; overtime viability of the hospital puts poorer folks most at risk. hospital competition under the uneven playing field and m&as are both chiefly responsible for the decimation of many local community hospitals from the 1980s through today. the marketplace for hospitals has been highly unstable for decades, where today 1 in 5 rural hospitals remain at high risk for closing (gooch, 2019) . modern healthcare annually publishes its resource guide, a listing of the firms in each line of health business, from management consulting, law, electronic health records (ehrs), investment banks, outsourcing vendors, to professional membership organizations, among others (modern healthcare, 2018a , 2018b , 2018c . this is a valuable tool for recognizing the concentration that parallels every segment of the healthcare industry. the larger proprietary and "not-for-profit" chains are delineated (see chap. 2). in recent years, the wide range of corporate health entities has been caught up in a frenzy of amalgamations, including the so-called "not-for-profit" hospital systems, the pharmaceutical industry, managed health care, pharmacy benefit managers, specialty pharmacy groups, health information technology firms, and chain drug stores and retail clinics. this has resulted in a few firms dominating in most of these arenas, also including facility construction, consulting, and legal and accountancy firms, and other firms specializing in the health sector. marketplace medicine yields a plethora of entrepreneurial startups in multiple areas to grab what they can get with innovative spins (just witness exhibitors at any health professional meeting and trade show). ideological support can be garnered from the powerful charitable foundations that have long been influential across the healthcare system. with handsome returns on investment to be made, achieving greater market size has become the modus operandi. a prominent example of health sector transformation is the distorted growth of health expenditures directed toward medical marketing reaching $30 billion in 2016 (tanner, 2019). among the top 20 firms grossing over $40 million listed by modern healthcare (2018a, 2018b, 2018c, p. 42) was omnicom health group with $739 million in revenues in 2017. such "health" expenditures add to the per capita cost of care (sic) for every american. often in response to the strengthened market power they must confront, physician groups have gotten larger as well. iqvia's review finds 50 largest medical group parents that own and manage about 20,757 medical group locations, employing an estimated 102,600 physicians (schember, 2018). likewise, there will be no letup in m&as across all segments of health care given republican policies for healthcare market "reform." of late, vertical integration appears to be more prevalent than horizontal mergers-combining separate business lines, as in the cvs-aetna and other pharmacy benefit management arrangements (japsen, 2018) . such amalgamations challenge organizational theorists for conceptualizing sets of complex functions across the rapidly changing field (etzioni, 1961) . in addition, the host of large corporate firms, long constituting the medicalindustrial complex (mic) to supply providers for services provision (box 1.1), has substantially grown given generous pass-through providers from employer and federal/state funding. several of the economy's largest corporate giants (including amazon, buffett's berkshire hathaway, morgan stanley, apple, google, microsoft, ibm, and general electric, among numerous other fortune 500 firms) are staking out new much larger investments in health care. their strategies in health appear to be ripe for both innovations and exploitation. is a new wave of corporate transformation of american health care underway as the technology-driven invasion by behemoth it entities swoops into the health sector? (see chap. 5). mckinlay (1984) offers an excellent class analysis of what has been happening in the structural development of our american health care as it has spread across the globe. his main point is that the us medical-industrial complex (mic) tied in with other northern global powers, yielding a worldwide mic. this is properly understood mainly by seeing how multinational corporations in general as a class develop and preside over new markets much as they wield their power inside the united states. it is believed that innovation drives deep changes in the structure of economies. this predicted larger corporate involvement follows the pattern that truly transformative effects are still mostly concentrated in specific sectors (donay, 2018) . but is this a prelude to "better things to come," as techno-optimists may have us believe? mckinlay points out that the "types of health services research that dominate the health field around the world" are "much atheoretical, frequently ahistorical, usually apolitical, and usually defensive of the status quo, and normally dominated by managerialism." to understand the true dynamics, he suggests a structural analysis of political economic forces that influence the shape and the content of medicine and its institutions to evidence the broad corporate involvements. it is much broader than interactions of merely professionals and provider institutions (navarro, 1976) . the actual mic expansion in size and power over several decades is reflective of the larger capitalist society. mckinlay states: the phenomenal and uncontrolled expansion of the medical industrial complex over the last 50 years has paralleled the now uncontrollable requirements of advanced capitalism. … in order to explain why the ideologies and institutions comprising the health care complex have developed as they have, we require first, some understanding of the logic, pressures, and contradictions with which capitalism is beset; and second, an awareness of the reasons why predatory corporations had penetrated and now dominate health-related activities around the world. … the term "predatory" is employed here to characterize the rapinous activities of large-scale capitalist institutions (mainly banks, insurance companies, and industrial corporations): the act of invading, exploiting, and ultimately despoiling a field of endeavor --with no necessary humane commitment to it --in order to seize and carry away an acceptable level of profit. (mckinlay, p. 2) in mckinlay's same volume, bodenheimer (1984) examines transnational corporate plans to operate on a global scale, particularly given the pharmaceutical industry's near 20-year patents where they hold a monopoly on each compound. this monopoly allows the shifting of product lines to other industrial activities, as well as many developing economies, to gain footholds to guarantee profit flows transnationally. through our book here, the authors will lay out numerous data points to demonstrate how this structural approach is preferable to other examinations of american medicine that ignore or discount power and wealth (navarro, 1976) . borrowing heavily from mckinlay, the logic of this expansionary activity can be applied to the corporate provider entry into healthcare provision and the subsequent changes wrought since the mid-1960s. some forms of competition led to expansion of the total productive services output, yet questions may be raised over the "use value" of what was, and is being, produced, i.e., inappropriate care, huge administrative waste, plus fraud and abuse-estimated to reach $272 billion in 2014 (the $272 billion swindle, 2014). trump's preoccupied department of justice is reported to have recovered only $2.5 billion in fraud and false claims in 2018 (boggs, 2019). all of these production downsides tend to characterize the recent functioning of providers. if the aim of production is to primarily result in expanded profits, which are then reinvested in more enterprises and more technologically efficient production this might conceivably improve delivery of health services. however, this has led to creation of a commodity fetish promulgated by deceptive advertising for even higher utilization. kennedy examined the significant impact of for-profit organizations on voluntary and public hospitals by the mid-1980s to find reduced overall access and rising costs resulted while professional standards were lessened (kennedy, 1985) . more attention becomes directed at foreign markets when regulatory constraints develop domestically (bell, 1996) ; multinational expansions seek even higher returns on their investment (roi) amidst likely less regulation abroad, though social and cultural barriers can be challenging (perez-stable, 1999) . the ideological sales program for us health care has been that it is far superior to any other nations and that american medicine and technology (and its capital sponsors) are unsurpassed (human development network, 1997) . multinational health corporations sped into other nations' markets (berliner & burlage, 1990; maier & engelberts, 1986; berliner & regan, 1987) . witness american proprietary hospitals in latin america, asia, england, and europe (euro-fiet, 1987; milmo, 1987; hagland, 1998; berliner & regan, 1990; salmon, 1984) ; hmos across latin america and elsewhere (snow, 1996; ham, 1995; hensley, 1999; bosch, 2000) ; academic medical centers in the middle east and asia (marquee brand, 2016) ; clinical trials outsourcing across asia and the caribbean; and a variety of pbms all over (navarro, 1995a (navarro, , 1995b (navarro, , 1998 hotchkiss & jacobalis, 1999; stocker, iriart, & waitzkin, 1999) . some of this overseas investment is tied into the widespread private profit-based medical tourism industry (medical tourism, 2013; salmon & aruru, 2019) . in several national healthcare systems, these advanced for-profit organizational forms may make some innovative contributions in addressing their current cost, access, and quality problems (meyer, 1997) . unfortunately, innovative and/or advanced services usually stay confined to multinational employees, well-insured upper-class residents, and medical tourists-not the bulk of ordinary citizens. more lately, a mckinsey executive, among other corporate spokesmen, report american systems and big pharma lie in wait while building sales and r&d infrastructures to move into developing private insurance markets in places like india and china (carroll, 2012) . ongoing and longer-term effects are diminishing existing public health sectors through privatization schemes that open foreign markets to american multinationals (com, 2002; degroote et al., 2008; alvarez, salmon, & swartzman, 2011) . writing in modern healthcare, about corporate managed care making money off the state medicaid, terhune in a piece "as billions in tax dollars flow to private medicaid plans, who's minding the store?" notes that these privately managed medicaid plans do not provide sufficient oversight of patient care and the quality of that care to the 54 million people now on medicaid managed care. the expansion of medicaid managed care now consumes $300 billion annually, and yet we have little information as to what we are getting for the money (terhune, 2018, p. 14) . in another modern healthcare article, terhune (2019, p. 1) explores how the legion of private subcontractors control crucial decisions over care denials of services for the millions of low-income americans on medicaid managed care. dr. arnold relman clearly saw mounting consequences arising from unfettered marketplace medicine (relman in salmon & todd, 1988) . it is important to reiterate that relman (1980) noted the emergence of a "new medical-industrial complex" that arose from the late 1960s to capture a part of the influx of federal largess; it was also positioned to capture benefits from the democratic-constructed affordable care act of 2018, which failed to safeguard against such practices. for-profit care is subjected to management control from distant centers accountable to stockholders, not communities, nor in fact to patients themselves when safeguards against such practices interfere with care patterns. the growing variety of corporate entities today reap handsome returns on their investments, by selectively choosing locations and patient groups, still highly subsidized from the public trough. in conclusion, public policymaking remains largely shaped by powerful firms to satisfy their vested interests, which are often at odds with the overall public's health. regulatory constraints imposed by government to redirect efforts to address the public's health are stiffly resisted in this medical marketplace. thus, the quest for financial gain underlies the passion to forge larger more powerful, diversified, and integrated entities to gain, and try to dominate, market share. their grip on policymaking comes from their lobbying strength, and the widespread acceptance that this corporate healthcare system seems to be the one the american people supposedly want. the populous remains uniformed of the most crucial issues and unfortunately can be easily manipulated by prevailing ideology. following business support for urban sanitation measures in the 1890s, interventions by the carnegie and rockefeller foundations post flexner report in 1910 marked the first major phase of business involvement in american health care (salmon, 1978) . the rockefeller foundation's huge funding of scientific medical schools, and its infectious disease programs through 1914, in effect reshaped medical education (ludmerer, 1985) and transformed the entire healthcare delivery system by changing the nature of doctoring (salmon, 1990 (salmon, , 1994 . the medical profession became principally upper middle-class white males thereafter (brown, 1976; berliner, 1984) . in the 1960s a beginning feminization of medicine began with more women admitted to medical schools, with sporadic minority physician numbers up too, many being foreign medical graduates, growing now to about 20% today (see chap. 3). ironically, for-profit medical schools lost out with the flexnerian reforms after 1910 after the carnegie and rockefeller foundations reorganized medical education to a 4-year, university-based curricula to professionalize medicine. the advent of scientific medicine eventually improved the quality of doctoring, the specialties emerged in academic medical centers, and hospitals modernized to no longer be "places to die" (lefanu, 1999) . most us hospitals then were religiously sponsored, traditionally non-profit, and charitable to serve their communities. in the late 1920s, the privately funded committee on the cost of medical care sought to set in place the concept of an industrialized hospital system. government had established urban public health facilities to control epidemic diseases; the need for public hospitals during the great depression led to widespread building under the federal works progress administration (wpa) to open access to poorer areas and for the unemployed across the nation. this public effort continued with subsidization of private non-profits with the hill-burton hospital construction act of 1947 (stevens, 1999; starr, 1982) . by the 1960s overbedding (the high ratio of beds to community residents) was established, so hospital costs zoomed since a "bed built was a bed filled" (roemer's law) (roemer & shain, 1959) . thus, the predominant configuration of the delivery system and its reimbursement increased access while ballooning costs primarily within inpatient care, generally disregarding ambulatory care until higher profit margins began to be mined in later decades. with care centered in hospitals, the mic found a growing market for medical supplies and technology, etc. undertaken without proper population-based health planning, the necessity for better outcomes now for americans has led marketplace medicine to begin to craft its "new solutions" to cost control (e.g., prospective payment, health savings accounts, vertical integration, narrower networks, value-based care, outright disenfranchisement of certain population segments, etc.), but unfortunately such solutions come under the auspice of private gain. these early interventions occurred against the backdrop of successive stages in the organizational and technological transformation of american healthcare delivery. it is important to grasp the transitions from cottage industry through small-scale competitive entrepreneurship to the now emerging corporate monopolization stages (kelman, 1971) . each stage can be demarcated by imbalances between larger societal productive forces and the existing social organization of health services (dreitzel, 1971) . the nineteenth-century guild-like petty commodity production under the cottage system gave way to the beginning of the modern hospital as medical education was substantially upgraded to 4-year laboratory-based university training. a new division of labor under the hospital administrator was established with physicians over other health worker categories, as well as with the specialization of medicine (stevens, 1971) . each health worker category, in its self-interest, sought a respective professionalization on its own to help advance the productive health forces. with modernization, the hospital's earlier role changed as an institution of social control, particularly in urban areas to house the deviant and undesirable: the insane, criminal, handicapped, and orphaned, including the sick (goffman, 1961) . scientific discoveries and new medical breakthroughs greatly improved hospital care and altered its purpose and organization. anesthesia, the contributions of pasteur and lister in antisepsis, and pharmaceutical advancement contributed to more sophisticated care and efficacious surgery and more. the germ theory of disease amidst rudolf virchow's laboratory discoveries on cellular structure, along with improvements in laboratory medicine and pathology techniques, led to refinements for more effective patient and population interventions (rosen, 1958) . along with radiology, such advances massively changed diagnostic and treatment procedures. the glamour of rapid change in hospital care left behind the image of the "place to die." these advances attracted greater religious group sponsorship and upperclass charity to build more and larger hospitals, as well as upgrade existing ones. public institutions advanced as well, with federal public health service hospitals at ports and municipal-sponsored hospitals, addressing infectious outbreaks. medicine as a social institution thus legitimized itself, which in turn provided the material basis for industry growth through the vast funding that subsequently followed. medical specialties came to dominate the larger urban hospitals, mainly in a non-wage-contract relationship as they were outside private practitioners. in addition to practicing in homes and community agencies, nurses made up almost the entire waged hospital workforce, some of whom began to resist their "handmaiden" status to the doctor (moccia, 1994) . hospitals had established formal schools of nursing to exploit the unpaid labor of students, as well as to secure their employment upon graduation for their increasing technical labor needs. nurses were almost exclusively female and white working class, while medical school entrants post-flexnerian reforms increasingly came from white wealthier ranks (berliner, 1984) . professional nursing began with the advancement of the hospital, with its nursing elite attempting to upgrade the discipline by establishing rn registration upon completion of accredited schooling and passing state boards (reverby, 1994) . as with medicine, adherence to nursing practice standards was to raise quality of care. other health professional categories followed similar paths to attempt semiprofessional identity and some self-regulation, e.g., social workers, physical therapists, laboratory and radiological technicians, nutritionists, etc. (friedson, 1973 (friedson, , 1974 . professionalization among these various "semiprofessions" under medicine (friedson, 1971) at times led to challenges to the white male-dominated upper middle-class status of the doctor, but such challenges have yet to break down the class, gender, and racial hierarchy that prevails in american health care through today (navarro, 2017) . even with rising demands for women's rights across society, doctors continue to rule over the generally female nursing ranks and still mostly dominate in clinical decision-making (donbek, 2003) . the role of nurses being the so-called handmaiden to the physician was altered over time as middle-class women chose nursing careers with their professional rank forging new avenues of expertise in credentialed advanced practice roles (price, 2013) . masters and doctoralprepared nurses came from upgraded curricula, with greater independence sought. nurses had been at the forefront of public health in the community in public health departments, visiting nurse associations, and community health centers in the 1960s. many gains coincided with the societal women's movement evolving as medicine itself became feminized with greater medical school enrollments of women. more collaborative team functioning has been sought that blurred traditional roles too. recently, the institute of medicine (iom) has recognized the valuable role of the three million nurses in the frontlines of patient care (institute of medicine, 2011). advances in nursing education and everyday practice eroded past images of the nurse, all feeding into improved interprofessional relations. as perceptions and expectations of work life altered, stereotypes among the public changed as patients came to appreciate and rely upon nurses for clinical care and guidance. nurses became respected in and out of the hospital setting for their knowledge, skills, as well as greater time spent with patients. similarly, this response has been fueling the rise of the chain drug store clinics where nurse practitioners handle primary care, and now chronic care conditions, among the populace. the iom urges bachelor's degree bsn curriculum to prepare more technically competent graduates and urges the preparation of more nursing doctorates, as colleges of nursing are doing along with residencies for more students. while remuneration of advanced nurses has climbed, their pay has never come close to physicians and especially well behind administrators. it is interesting to note how the ideas of industrial capitalism did come to permeate medicine in not so subtle ways. while the delivery system moved rather haphazardly, an industrial model influenced doctors who relayed to the public an explanation of the human body in mechanistic terms: the heart was a pump; the lungs were bellows; the kidneys were filters; and later the brain became conceived as a computer. such a mechanistic and materialist representation of the body and one's health neglects or downplays a broader sense of self that includes the human mind and spirit (frank, 1963; frankl, 1955; hastings, fadiman, & gordon, 1980; ferguson, 1978; krippner & villoldo, 1976; pelletier, 1976) . from the 1970s onward, the rise of the holistic health movement (berliner & salmon, 1980; salmon & berliner, 1980) and its entrepreneurial practitioners have capitalized on the limitations of modern medicine with an expanded notion of human existence and healing (salmon, 1984) . more among the world's populations exclaim, as the german alternative health movement has, that "gesundheit ist mehr," which translates to "health is more" than just medical care (salmon & gallo, 1985; salmon & goepel, 1990) . on a sadder note, social media has fueled diverse notions of alternative medicines in a generally unregulated marketplace (liu & salmon, 2010) of nostrums with dubious value that tend to confuse peoples' minds. despite reasonable due skepticism, the anti-vaccine movement has eroded needed institutional trust for addressing twenty-first-century global health problems. the larger context of the health sector development was the society's rapid industrialization in most spheres across the twentieth century's economy, particularly in the urbanized northeast and midwest. both industrialization and urbanization brought migration and sped up the economy, which eventually demanded a more highly trained, specialized workforce for its expanding division of labor. this reality edged in becoming recognized as needed for more rapid capitalist development. in 1890 germany, chancellor otto von bismarck enacted national health insurance for workers to essentially prepare for germany's industrialization and later european armed aggression. in modern societies, formal education has taught necessary skills, as well as how to get up and go to work, properly behave, and relate to authority and competition (aronowitz & giroux, 1985; dileo, giroux, mcclennan, & saltman, 2013) . certain segments of us industrial capital came to realize that their labor force also required greater protection from infectious diseases, as well as the ravages of the production processes themselves; issues of frail population health began to be seen as delimiting the rate of capital accumulation and fomenting underlying social unrest, as bismarck had understood: replacement of valued skilled, professional, and managerial workers due to disease was disruptive to production and very costly. european capital amidst the relative strength of their labor unions seems to have made note that government and their own investments in population health is integral to economic development; thus universal health coverage was implemented earlier in europe, unlike no path chosen by us corporations (navarro, 1975) . in the united states, business interests started to see that improvements beyond the workplace might also be necessary for social development. george rosen (1975, p. 10) reported: concern with the relation of environmental conditions to ill health was not limited to industrial workers. it was recognized that the health of the worker in the plants could not be compartmentalized. conditions of life in the home, as well as conditions in the factory, could deleteriously affect the worker's health so that effective prevention required action along several interrelated lines. the federal commission on the conservation of natural resources, established by president theodore roosevelt, recognized the value of a healthier labor force to production and for overall economic development. federal, state, and municipal governments were urged to protect people from diseases and conserve this "basic natural resource." the elites of the society were more mindful that interventions into the social sphere of the individual and community life accrued benefits to the business class as a whole (fisher, i., committee of one hundred on national health., united states. national conservation commission, 1909) . roosevelt faced what historian gabriel kolko (1963) describes as a dominant tendency in the american economy toward growing competition with economic decentralization rather than increasing monopolization of industry and finance. therefore, "many leaders of big business became the chief imitators of progressive legislation to maintain existing social and power relations in a new economic context." this was a time when banking regulation, a federal trade commission, meat inspection, and other vital aspects of "progressivism" came as a surprise to many, but the regulatory agencies became essentially captured by powerful economic interests, which we observe continuing to this day (kolko, 1963, book cover) . o'toole, a biographer of theodore roosevelt, claims that tr was able to persuade congress to pass the meat inspection act and the pure food and drug act. he succeeded by seizing on public outrage over the putrid disease-causing conditions described in upton sinclair's bestselling novel, the jungle, which exposed the stomach-turning conditions in chicago's meatpacking plants. both laws, enacted on the same day in 1906, were considered huge achievements in improving the health and well-being of americans (o'toole, 2019, a23). the ideas behind the roosevelt agenda or "ostensible goals" were economic, but its mandate also called for flood control, soil reclamation, and pollution abatement, all boons to the public health regarding his natural parks and waterways commission. when roosevelt later ran for the national progressive party's ticket, his platform called for universal health insurance; a national public health service; insurance for the elderly, the unemployed, and the disabled; the end of child labor; the abolition of the 7-day work week; and a living wage. the point to be realized from these past times in america is that government leaders, with tacit going along by the business sector, reflected views long gone as part of the trump era policymaking. tr's perspective, as well as later his relative president franklin delano roosevelt, offered a different political economic vision for america than that we find expressed today. significantly, the carnegie and rockefeller foundations' interventions in the beginning of the twentieth century had virtually rebuilt the entire medical care system by endowing research institutes and select medical schools (brown, 1976) . this funding cleaned up the inadequate situation of poor-quality medical education, leading many private for-profit schools to close (berliner, 1977) . it can be interpreted that the organization of medical practice under the previous cottage industry had then come into conflict with the aims of industrial capitalists. the developing delivery system was ripening for change, and groups began a process of reimaging health services, much as we may be witnessing this decade. by the 1920s, the committee on the costs of medical care (ccmc) became perhaps the most significant historical attempt to mold a new organization form for american health services delivery (salmon, 1978) . funded by eight philanthropic foundations, the ccmc assembled a host of health providers with insurance and banking representatives from the private sector. staff issued 28 major reports from extensive investigation into the "economics of medical care and prevention of illness." in 1929, health expenditures were at $3.5 billion, merely 4% of the gross national product (gnp). approximately 30% of this amount, however, was allocated directly to private physicians, which was then considered exorbitant for the perceived safety and quality of care. consumers paid 79% of their healthcare costs directly out of pocket. philanthropy and local government operations were present, but these would be quelled with the oncoming great depression. the suggested major restructuring was to create large-scale production to reduce the cost of its "unit product," the worker (salmon, 1978) . the final volume of the ccmc published in 1933 recommended that: …medical service should be furnished largely by organized groups of physicians, dentists, nurses, and pharmacists and other associated personnel. such groups should be organized around a hospital for rendering complete home, office, and hospital care. the form of organization should encourage the maintenance of high standards and the development of preservation of a personal relationship between patient and physicians. (committee on the costs of medical care, 1932, p. 109) thus, the ccmc endorsed an industrial model of group medical practices under the control of the hospital factory to be financed by prepaid group insurance for defined enrolled populations. this proposal aimed to consolidate a more rational division of medical labor to maximize productivity with voluntary insurance to cover costs equally distributed over the enrollee group and over periods of time. doctors and hospitals would be assured more stable financing, while consumers would be required to pay for their medical care through fixed prepayment, supplemented by employers. this required insertion of middlemen, which adds to the administrative overhead. it is not difficult to grasp why the medical profession, full of rugged individualists, opposed the design espoused by the committee. traditionally, doctors were supposed to "hang out a shingle" and mostly practice from their homes or a small office; this ethos continued for the next forty-some years. by the time the work of the committee ended, general practitioners in private practice had been hit hard by the depression. they organized to combat most of the ideas expressed in the reports; this reform was labeled erroneously as "socialized medicine." the power of hospitals in no way matched that of organized medicine; the outcome was that essentially doctors resisted their losing private practice status to become hospital captured employees, i.e., proletarians. organized medicine would keep up the mantra "no interference to the private practice of medicine," preserving the sanctity of the "doctor-patient relationship." later the american medical association (ama) opposed the franklin roosevelt administration leading to the elimination of health insurance from the social security act in 1935. yet, the medical profession was not really united as a whole, for some physicians in certain locales chose group practices of the prepayment sort, for example, ross-loos in los angeles, among several union-sponsored plans in major cities; physicians also joined group practices based on the fee-for-service model as seen in mayo, cleveland, and guthrie clinics (rorem, 1931 ). besides regional divisions, the varying medical sects of homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, and eclecticism separated from the allopathic membership of the ama and eventually lost importance (shryock, 1936) . nevertheless, the general instability and insecurity endured by all of society during the great depression hindered the implementation of all the committee's recommendations. financing group practices remained tenuous, but certain models in different locales found physicians who preferred group practice over solo practice. in addition, a wide variety of payers (unions certain employers, coops), along with consumers, preferred the advantages from this type of medical practice (maccoll, 1966) . the most noteworthy prepaid group practice began with the kaiser permanente medical care program, a corporate initiative by the mining, aluminum, and shipbuilding magnate henry j. kaiser. in the early 1930s, kaiser workers at isolated construction sites had no access to doctors and hospitals until the company leadership brought services to places where the employees lived and worked (saward & fleming, 1980) . industrial and family medicine integration was then seen worthwhile for assuring labor productivity (spencer, 1973) . other sites across the west were built on this model in competition to fee-for-service practice. during the great depression, hospitals saw charity donations wither, with unemployed and poor patients having no money for their care. in the absence of financing for health care, the voluntary hospital insurance movement arose on a number of local fronts, bringing about self-interested hospital insurance-only plans that eventually united under the blue cross association in chicago in the late 1930s (anderson, 2005) . the structural arrangement of solo fee-for-service physician practice and the cost reimbursement of hospital care then became entrenched with the advent of provider-controlled blue cross and subsequently blue shield payments. the prepaid group practice (ppgp) model had been conceptualized, advocated, and operationalized under traditional not-for-profit designations (saward, 1980 ). yet it did not take widespread root across the country, but only established in isolated locations. just as hospitals became aware of their key role in the advancement of scientific medicine, many institutions faced bankruptcy due to occupancy declines and an inability to collect from patients with little or no income. most hospitals barely staved off bankruptcy through local charity support since income-depleted upper-class patrons and religious groups no longer could subsidize their communities' care. blue cross plans began to sell hospital coverage for select employer groups usually under community-rated (i.e., one price for everyone, collectively sharing costs of care). the plans secured their financial base as the major player; employment-based voluntary insurance became the alternative that ruled out consideration of national health insurance. of note, most hospitals were "not-for-profit," and the blue cross blue shield plans were established in this same vein. hospital administrators and local employers (who were usually hospital board members) ran the blue cross plans (anderson, 2005; miller, 1992) . with cost reimbursement, hospitals were able to expand their services and facilities, to increase their workforces, and to cover any overhead from research and teaching activities, plus some bad debt expenses or charity care. by 1938, the american hospital association (aha) was officially approving blue cross plans; this incestuous relationship between the national blue cross of america and the aha would last through the 1970s when conflicts over cost containment between insurers and hospitals were exacerbated. likewise, state and county medical associations initiated blue shield organizations to remunerate certain medical services by, at first, hospital-based physicians, such as radiologists and pathologists, and for doctors who practiced on hospitalized patients under fee-for-service. blue shield plans provided an alternative to any federal proposals for national health insurance. the doctor-patient relationship, ideologically considered sacrosanct, had resisted "third-party" interference until medical society-controlled blue shield plans set up a suitable payment program to pay themselves well-but at least it was not government money! when industrial unions under john l. lewis won medical coverage as a fringe benefit during the roosevelt administration wage-frozen war years (alinsky, 1950) , the dominant position of blue cross blue shield in the insurance market chiefly became secured during the 1940s. the removal of the patient from this equation created a moral hazard for insured groups who were insulated from the full cost of care; thus they tended not to be concerned with what was being charged by providers. the strong belief in health insurance has, however, begun to erode across the past few decades with increased burden from ever-rising premiums, deductibles, co-pays, and exclusions. both consumers and some payers have differing perspectives on provider behavior today. consumers were not aware of the true care costs, except their out-of-pocket spending, which today has become fully understood due to very high co-pays. the resultant burgeoning cost dilemma and the parties who benefit will be addressed in chap. 2. to sum up this earlier history, healthcare providers established a financing mechanism that separated physician practice and hospital care. medical professionals and hospital interests maintained complete control over their respective activities, that is, the physician stayed independent and not employed by the hospital itself. with costs covered, hospital worker categories were elaborated to include pharmacists, medical social workers, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, laboratory technicians, dieticians, as well as a stratified hierarchy of nursing personnel. services became commoditized and billable. the hospital workers in these roleswhile not paid by physicians-served their admitted patients under physicians' supervision. outside of the hospital setting, dentists, optometrists, podiatrists, chiropractors, and a few other categories remained independent, like physicians, as fee-for-service private practitioners. they usually collected from self-pay patients until commercial insurance companies broadened benefit coverage to undercut the local blue cross monopolies. the desire of the ccmc to industrialize the entire medical care operation was never achieved. the corporate vision of business rationality through the prepaid group practice model attached to the hospital factory was yet to be realized. financing medical care in united states was thus imbedded with solo fee-forservice medicine and cost-plus reimbursed hospital care, a structural arrangement that was inherently inflationary, with financial incentives to yield significant inappropriate care, increasing huge administrative overhead, in addition to fraud and abuse. there has been demonstrated ineffectiveness, with employers starting to see this arrangement as costly expenses-rather than investment in workers' health, or a worthwhile investment for the general population! this payment structure, however, was so acceptable to providers and insurers that later in the 1960s, both medicare and medicaid were crafted with the same reimbursement, even though the several prepaid group practices that did evolve seemed superior in performance for cost, effectiveness, and consumer acceptability (brindle, 1969; maccoll, 1966; saward, 1969a saward, , 1969b prussian, 1972) . provider political strength at the time of legislative passage foreclosed the debate that later surfaced with justification for the nixon's health maintenance organization strategy in the late 1960s. the crucial policy issues remain about the longer-term solvency of the medicare trust fund and the strain on federal general revenues that fund the care for both seniors and the disabled (munnell, 1985) . ongoing debates across decades for tighter cost controls recognize the demographic shift of more elderly people needing greater cash to cover costs, with less labor force participants paying taxes. the search for new or restricted payments remains contentious in order to get costs under better control; prepayment is considered in various ways. health maintenance organizations helped some, along with diagnostic-related groupings reimbursement, and now value-based care. nevertheless, considerable controversy persists over the terms for altering the health cost trend with a spectrum of philosophical differences and vested interests behind each step. there remain feasible ways to save funds to pay for care, but most will involve cutting provider incomes and pushing more burden on patients. solving the long-term medicare financing will need to be addressed given aging cohorts and now with calls for "medicare for all." the method and level of payments to providers will affect both beneficiaries and the health system as a whole far beyond the immediate transactions at the cash nexus (vladek, 1985) . republican market-based policies for cost controls seek cuts to providers and more cost-sharing by patients, whose origins and continuation began in the nixon/reagan/bush administrations and now trump. the passage of medicare and medicaid for the aged and indigent drove overall health expenditures upward from 1965, along with other great society programs (brown, 1983) . the subsequent nixon administration sought to eliminate programs through cutbacks and rescissions to curtail outlays, as all subsequent republican administrations seek to undo previous democrat established programs. total health expenditures had grown to reach $69.2 billion and 7.2% of gdp (salmon, 1978, p. 136 ). yet, the opening of access for the two large uninsured populations of aged and indigent greatly pleased providers, besides all in the medical-industrial complex, which had grown to attract new powerful players. after medicare, blue cross blue shield plans began to lose market dominance to giant commercial insurance companies (aetna, metropolitan, prudential, travelers, cigna, etc.); the latter competitors packaged health benefits into their other insurance product lines sold to large corporations, to undercut rates by the non-profits who lost rapidly in many locales. blue cross of philadelphia was said to see its 90% market share fall precipitously to the commercial firms. blue cross negotiated friendly cost-plus contracts, while the commercial plans paid hospital charges for each item of service. thus, while generally less ill, commercial patients brought more profits to hospitals. at the same time, the sector's largess and potential returns began to entice investment capital into proprietary hospital and nursing home firms to explore profit-making opportunities in the delivery of services (salmon, 1990) . the nixon administration planners sought out their business friends, who also witnessed huge increases in employee health outlays, so employers came to believe in the health maintenance organization (hmo) as a favored model (morgan guaranty survey, 1972; conference board, 1972) . nixon's proclaimed in his "healthcare crisis" speech in 1971 that it was chiefly the concern with costs: costs in the economy, costs to the corporate class as employers, and costs to the government for medicare/medicaid recipients. he ambitiously declared hmos to be the cornerstone of his restructuring of the entire healthcare system. a totally new configuration was being shaped through his hmo strategy, along with added proposals for health systems agencies (hsas), area health education centers (ahecs), professional standards review organizations (psros), and nixon's own national health insurance plan. these newly designed federal interventions were intended to revamp the entire sector (i.e., health planning, professional education, quality assessment, and financing) (salmon, 1978) . dr. paul ellwood, known as the "father of the hmo," essentially took the ccmc recommendations for prepaid group practices and reformulated them into the hmo concept, only updated for corporate bottom-line pursuits. in essence, the hmo was intended to embody a group practice of physicians as part of a coordinated delivery system to offer a benefit package to an enrollee group that prepays the fixed premiums for care (ellwood, 1971 (ellwood, , 1973 . nixon was faced with escalating expenditures under federal and state health programs, while his vietnam war effort remained unabated and very expensive. he also heard from his friends among the corporate class who were alarmed by their rising outlays for workers' health insurance during a tough economy. several corporate planning bodies issued widely publicized major reports (e.g., washington business group on health, business roundtable, conference board, us chamber of commerce, among others). at the same time, dozens of conservative ideological entrepreneurs urged health policy restructuring to favor their class interests; essentially a chorus broke out all singing the same song for hmo restructuring to contain costs (salmon, 1977) . a burgeoning business literature also carried forth, along with a popular press, to foment widespread hmo support (rothfeld, 1973; salmon, 1984) . being from california, nixon was enamored with the kaiser permanente systemcorporate-initiated private large-scale group practice of medicine (saward, 1970; saward, blank, & greenlick, 1968; fleming, 1971; williams, 1971 williams, , 1972 . so ellwood envisioned a thousand kaiser-like giant hmos across the united states to reduce costs and improve care to the working population while tightening up services to the aged and poor-which were considered by businesses to be a "social drag" on the economy. this was part of the agenda to bring government beneficiaries into organized systems of care to get a grip on their overutilization (schneider & stern, 1975) . the very structure of the hmo was designed for profit-taking: costs for providing services under the benefit package contract would be deducted from prepaid revenues, yielding the profit margin, which would become the measure of success. taking care of patients would later be termed "medical loss ratio" as greed became evidenced in many fast-buck hmos or the poorly managed plans: according to ellwood, the hmo strategy will strengthen the role of "competition" by introducing "economic incentives" and minimize the need for "regulation" by relying upon "market mechanisms." the promise of a rational, well-organized delivery system of hmos sounds convincing to cost conscious employers who purchase the bulk of health insurance for their employees, and to individual consumers who face problems of cost, quality, accessibility, and availability of services. as alford [1972] points out, those pro-posing "solutions" of corporate rationalization gained support from consumers who are hard pressed for improved health care services. (salmon, 1990, p. 86) profitability was introduced to the picture as the key to hmo growth and survival; this legitimation of profits in health care would propel the corporate takeover of american medicine our nation faces in the twenty-first century. ellwood invited private corporations to lend their "industrial know-how" because they are experienced in "the application of modern management" and had the ability to generate effectively used capital resources. the nixon administration was intent on attracting private capital to invest; corporate takeover mechanisms were designed to entice commercial insurance companies, industrial employers, and workplace integration of industrial medicine with family medical care (macleod & prussin, 1973; salmon, 1975) . by 1974, a flurry of activity in the marketplace saw 177 operational hmos, 204 in the "formational" stage and 88 in the "planning" stage. about seven million people were actually covered in hmos by this time, which was not considered an impressive number. quite a number had been in the earlier prepaid group practices. almost all newly initiated hmos were for profit, while by the 1990s, several of the earlier managed care plans would come to a "biblical conversion" like paul on the road to damascus. blue cross plans (e.g., anthem, wellpoint, among others) reorganized as for-profit corporations, a kind of "why doth thou not pursue huge profits when one can?" by this time, marketplace ideology had become so ingrained in the healthcare consciousness. surely executives would reap greater bounty for themselves, which they in fact did! contextual developments in the larger society had much to do with this policy failure. the economic recession occasioned from the opec (organization of the petroleum exporting countries) crisis resulted in an abrupt rise in the price of oil with the long waits in gas station lines. this, in turn, spun the world economy into recession amidst troublesome inflation. additionally, on the political front, the watergate scandal led to nixon's downfall, massively disrupting the district of columbia bureaucracy and subsequently eroded republican health reform effort after his resignation. federal funds for hmo development had been limited, often taken from other agencies' budgets (bauman, 1976) . private capital found other investment alternatives during the recession; so, this was a disappointing response to the cheerleading of the nixon and later ford administrations. federal health policy under the ford administration carried forth enactment of professional standards review organizations (psros) for quality monitoring and health systems agencies (hsas) for local health planning. hsas incidentally grew more corporate over the great society's comprehensive health planning agencies, which had been filled with inner city activists (health information and action group, 1975) . the dozen or more proposals for extending national health insurance all died in congress. of note, most major players in the health sector had a submitted proposal to suit their vested interests, including nixon's own in anticipation of its enactment, opposing that of senator ted kennedy's liberal standard. by 1974 the idea of making explicit profits in health care did, however, firmly take hold. several large fortune 500 firms began to explore developing their own in-house clinics for their employees. the concept of integrating industrial medicine with family medical care was being tested out by certain firms because they recognized assuring employee health might lead to enhancing their labor productivity, along with getting control over climbing expenses. moreover, replacement costs of managerial, technical, and highly skilled personnel (particularly in tight labor markets) run high; to this day, recruitment remains a difficult task for hr departments in many industries due to the unavailability of specialized employee pools. this industrial medicine model has occasionally surfaced in business circles up until today. corporate planning bodies, which had "discovered" the need for "efficiencies" in healthcare delivery, widely publicized their major policy reports and began to lobby in new ways for policy changes (rothfeld, 1973 : salmon, 1976 ). this phase of corporate involvement in health care, however, witnessed many twists and turns, which represents the interconnected complexity of "health reform," the huge learning curve to grasp our dynamic health sector, as well as divisions among vested interests that persist until today. revenue seeking by all parties comes up against imposed cost constraints, which have been stiffly resisted. oppositions can usually forestall forward movement. still, the vision and direction of the nixon administration hmo planners was never quite embraced. private investors in hmos had been explicitly encouraged for healthcare profit-taking by nixon officials (salmon, 1984) , so it became a natural outcome that other health endeavors would be seen similarly for lucrative returns. dr. charles edwards, under secretary of health, education and welfare, had been recruited from booz allen and hamilton, a corporate consulting group, so past democratic public health service commissioned corps officers were replaced by business-oriented staffers with a larger corporate orientation and connections. the hmo movement engendered by the bipartisan hmo act of 1973 mandated the dual option where employees were to be offered a prepaid plan versus a fee-forservice plan, which the employer both decided, while simultaneously the feds spurred on medicare and medicaid managed care (bauman, 1976 ). an influx of commercial insurance companies, employers, and hospital systems, among other providers, slowly adopted this new prepaid delivery arrangement, which significantly began to impact the culture of medicine (young, 2013) . while staff model hmos employed doctors, private practitioners defensively banded together in prepaid independent practice associations (ipas) to keep their patient base from being syphoned off by local hmos. physicians around this time started to see the lessening of their autonomy and feel the erosion of their independence. also, there were some observable differences between for-profit and the more traditional hmos (schlesinger, blumenthal, & schlesinger, 1986 ), but such began to ease over the decade as competitive behaviors converged. profit was becoming the accepted underlying motor force for the sector development, with investment capital coming in, spurring more job creation, and boosting the entire economy (fuchs, 2013; healthcare is going gangbusters for the economy, 2018). concentration and centralization in the delivery of health services proceeded with pursuit of ever-larger revenues with higher margins becoming central. after a while, the outmoded "not-for-profit" designation became camouflaged and blurred. the delivery system was now officially businesses competing for their economic growth under a changing reimbursement environment. the marketplace became a struggle for gain, or, in some cases, survival. as a catholic nun administrator aptly stated to the author while researching hospital closures in chicago: "no margin, no mission" (whiteis & salmon, 1990a) . convergence of organizational behaviors had come to no longer distinguish the two camps. while hmos nationally failed to attain the market penetration previously predicted, almost a dozen investor-owned for-profit hospital chains arose and rapidly advanced during this time in the 1970s (e.g., the earliest entrants, humana, hospital corporation of america, national medical enterprises, american medical international, universal, among several others). across the next two decades, more firms joined the proprietaries as new business line combinations, takeovers, and mergers ensued and continued lasting until today's ridiculously consolidated and integrating stage. from out of this, wall street became enthralled. backed by investment capital acquired from hedge funds and the stock and bond markets, such proprietary chains initially built smaller modern facilities in growing well-insured middle-class communities. later the chains strategically absorbed certain hospitals and then started bringing endangered institutions under their management contracts, but the latter without any capital outlay for ownership. this added revenue to the lucrative supply chains from bulk purchasing pharmaceuticals to using sophisticated information technology. the chains attracted physicians by financially incentivizing them to hospitalize their patients there. the concept of an organization conducting a patient "wallet biopsy" was put into effect so that top-flight insurance and cash-rich patients filled their beds to boost bottom lines; profits were reinvested for greater growth and more takeovers. the uninsured and medicaid patients were screened out and "dumped" to the public sector or to nearby "not-for-profit" hospitals that still were able to maintain a little charitable impulse to serve their surrounding communities, or could not easily turn them away. objective measurement of the extent of this tragedy across the nation was difficult to assess by the us inspector general in 1988 since no record keeping was required. the us commission on civil rights told president barack obama many years later in 2014 that lack of enforcement of the emergency medical treatment and active labor act (emtala), which had been signed by reagan to prevent patient dumping, had not stopped this practice of refusing needy patients (commission on civil rights, 2014). the law failed to provide financing its mandate, so violations were common by providers (meyer, 2016) . estimates of hospitals believed to experience acts of dumping at least once a month was 45%-after president bill clinton again signed cobra in 1993. the political stand for prohibiting the practice was by dr. ron anderson at parkland hospital in dallas, texas (hudson, 1986; kutscher; 2014) . enforcement across texas was exemplary for eventually provoking the cobra action by president clinton for a national prohibition. but policies that are not strictly enforced usually do not mean much. working out a methodology to monitor dumping patients, studies at cook county hospital in chicago (schiff et al., 1986) were absolutely key to such "wallet biopsies" that risked death and/or deterioration of clinical status in such unwarranted transfers. patient dumping is thought to continue today as bottom-line dictates have continued to prevail (can a hospital emergency room delay or refuse care, 2017). dr. quentin young, founder of the physicians for a national health program, made the observation of the "vampire effect" (young, 1995) : once bitten, the socalled "not-for-profit" providers became just like the for-profits-the only difference they don't pay taxes! in a short while, it became difficult to distinguish the two camps within the uneven playing field; a series of convergent behaviors were becoming apparent as reimbursements tightened. multihospital systems were grabbing up doctors' practices as smaller well-situated institutions in most urban areas became engulfed into larger entities (salmon in ginzberg et al., 1993) ; other hospitals added to the hospital closure trend, 15 in chicago alone in the 1980s (whiteis, 1992) . the far distant corporate chain management presiding over dozens of scattered hospitals lent itself to the preference for contracting out services over actual building or buying hospitals; this proved much less risky and more profitable since any acquisition under the management contract enriched returns from the corporate bulk purchase supply chain. multihospital systems also became prominent in the socalled "not-for-profit" sphere as well; all sector parties saw an amazing surge in m&a fervor to better compete, as numerous hospital closures became more evident (whiteis, 1992) : between 1974-77, eighty-five public hospitals closed. twenty-one county hospitals in california were closed or sold during the last six years of the [1980s] . in new york city alone, twenty-nine hospitals were closed between 1976 and 1980, seventeen were considered "financially distressed" in 1982 along with a total of 160 hospitals nationwide according to the u.s. department of health and human services. (salmon, 1990, p.61) in the better-off proprietaries, centralization took form in aspects, such as combined dietary, laundry, and housekeeping services; bulk purchasing of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and supplies; and health information technology. this centralization achieved real profit enhancements as more hospitals were engulfed into the chain orbit without substantial investment. not uncommon with takeovers were lower-level workers losing jobs to enhance the chain's profit levels. hospital cutbacks also restricted emergency services and former outpatient departments affecting the greater size communities they had supported (salmon, 1993) . independent doctor offices were acquired by hospitals, and new clinical buildings attracted specialists, who could be fed by the primary care physicians. understand andre gunder frank's development in the face of underdevelopment contradiction (whiteis & salmon, 1990a) . using systems theory, frank analyzed within interregional global capitalism that certain sectors advance, but often at the expense of other sectors that lag behind. in brief, they tend to go hand in hand but structured for the advantage of the dominant. the proprietary chains slowed their acquisition of failing hospitals to morph more toward hospital management contracting strategically to enrich their size without high capital outlays. smaller public hospitals in rural areas and failing urban institutions were gobbled up in large numbers without much effort; these could be abandoned if corporate metrics were not achieved in a few years. these changing partners in the hospital industry dance led to many geographic relocations across the nation as large chains sought to maintain their profit levels from their glory days, at the expense of the communities they served (whiteis, 2000) . significant care access issues ensued with abandonments and economic misery with loss of jobs in rural and inner-city areas. saint anne's hospital in the austin community of chicago, a 400+ bed facilitythe largest hospital closing to date then-majorly impacted its residential area beyond the denial of health services. doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other professionals could obtain jobs elsewhere; however, lower-paid staff, who lived in the surrounding community, would eventually face neighborhood business failures, deteriorating housing stock, and policing reductions for a crime surge. local stores that once thrived abruptly closed with no more hospital visitors and staff customers; property values plummeted, insurance costs increased, and more, until noticeable change in social support came when community activists mobilized replacement of health and human services to preserve a safety net. several agencies restored the ambulatory building and attracted a cvs drug store-no more pharmacy wasteland! black community leadership then was strong, with some charitable and academic help, to create a success story. nonetheless, across the country many closed facilities remain abandoned as dead capital. around this time, outsourcing by many hospitals became a standard practice of the privatization trend (ginzberg et al., 1993) . many hospital administrations found hazards in contracting out due to a lack of due diligence. degroote, paepe, and unger (2005) note conditions to be met to avoid potential calamities: (1) real competition must exist between competent and substantial private providers and suppliers; (2) adequate capacity must be present to assess needs and negotiate and monitor contract terms; (3) a legal and political environment must exist to enforce regulations and resist patronization and corruption (mills, 1998) . such conditions are most critical for public systems in developing nations where privatization ran rampantly. careful watch was not always adhered to, as some us hospitals became shells with a variety of private entities from consultants to clinical services taking operational and clinical responsibilities off premises. nursing homes are notorious for such outsourcing practices (see chap. 2). over time, the american healthcare system-which had previously been based upon thousands of practitioner entrepreneurs and smaller-scale provider organizations except large firms in the peripheral supply role-began to be transformed in structure, control, purpose, and ethics, partly due to the tightening umbilical cord from the us treasury (young, 1999) . overall, professional altruism and the charitable impulse of community hospitals waned. all sector parties saw an amazing amount of m&as to expand their size to better compete. outpatient departments and emergency rooms were scaled back, while private physician practices were acquired by hospitals in the quest to fill beds with paying patients and for better control over the means of medical production. community cutbacks were deemed necessary to restrict unprofitable patients and clinical services. such combinations and cutbacks were forged for "economies of scale" and "cost-efficiency" but were always sold under the banner of "serving the public better." other business ideas and behaviors crept into a broad swath of provider management as highly paid mbas took the reins. by the late 1960s through the 1980s, at the operational level, a new breed of financial and marketing managers found employment supposedly to handle new complex issues, create "efficiencies," and enlarge the now defined "customer base." these managers over time tended to displace medical professionals in key decision-making roles. in particular, proprietary firms set off heavy marketing campaigns to advertise their "superiority" as modern. they had newer facilities built in areas near the wellinsured populations instead of being hospitalized in well-worn urban institutions placed near poorly insured areas. this was the age of roadside billboards and tv spots to advertise firms with what was to hopefully entice patients into changing providers. it was also the time of increasing managerial buildups in hospital ranks for the added sophistication needed to compete in a rapidly changing and challenging marketplace and to handle the complex financial conditions. larger amalgamations, however, led to much higher administrative overheads, which in the calculation meant less money given to caregivers. higher overheads included expanding their profit margins markedly; subsequently, this allowed certain firms to branch out internationally (salmon, 1984 (salmon, , 1990 . thus, the new medical-industrial complex (mic) arose as a vigorous and varied group of investor-owned entities to serve those able to pay. patients became "customers" who could sustain their growth for continued profit levels; wall street loved these rising stars as the new american wave of health care. this is the very expanse that relman designated as "the most important recent development in american health care." (relman, 1980, p. 963) . the rapid growth of for-profit providers included investor-owned hospital and nursing home corporations, diagnostic labs, mental health and home care agencies, hemodialysis centers, freestanding ambulatory, surgicenters, mri units, and emergency centers and a variety of other services. this grouping soon produced between $35 and $40 billon dollars (25% of personal health expenses) in 1979, a percentage much greater today. in 2018, the american hospital association listed 1035 investor-owned entities or 21% of hospitals accounting for the $902,891,035 expenditure (aha, 2017). outside contractors in the supply side ballooned (especially administrative, consulting, and information technology) during the restructuring, alongside physicians and hospital executives witnessing administration becoming vastly dense. modern healthcare (2017a, 2017b) lists the largest management consultant firms making billions in health care (#1 deloitte taking in $2.6 billion annually from 12,000 contracts) and the largest public relations and marketing agencies again with contract revenues in billions (#1 omnicom health group billing $808 million in 2016). medicare and medicaid initially had made little change in the actual delivery system beyond bestowing a massive provider subsidization under the fee-for-service and cost reimbursed financing mechanism. these market improvements did grant better access as millions of americans received needed care; however, inflationary pressures with little price accountability created problems for both government, employers, and consumers. importantly, the government largess invited a plethora of firms to jump on the healthcare bandwagon, which they did in droves with sales to providers. this collectivity joined all the other mic firms to feed off the constant federal funding. in effect, medicare and medicaid accelerated and aggravated both federal and state policy problems, to reveal major structural defects in the system. neither federal financing program challenged the historic provider-preferred premise of underwriting virtually any expenditure physicians chose for patient care. it was the public and private funding largess, amidst a lack of regulatory oversight, that attracted the host of investors, including fast-buck operators. the more is better philosophy had taken firm root in the system with more service utilization, more technology, more growth, more layers of management, and assuredly more profits. this perversion was accompanied also by more admissions, more unnecessary surgery, more inappropriate prescribing, more diagnostic testing, more fraud and abuse, more days in the hospital, more readmissions, and more of whatever made more money. such were the results of the now fading structural arrangement for financing. while the private market during this period provided many innovative changes that advanced care for some americans, the direction did not seem to contribute to the public's overall health (mckinlay, mckinlay, & beaglehole, 1989) . many americans continued to face significant access barriers as the price of care continued to spiral out of control. moreover, the overall medical measures of mortality and morbidity were found not to be declining (mckinlay, mckinlay, & beaglehole, 1989 ). yet, the medical marketplace remained heralded for all its attributed splendor by those who were richly benefiting. the one-term ford and carter administrations launched few health policies of much significance. president gerald ford implemented nixon's psros and signed the health planning legislation to establish health systems agencies (hsas), replacing the former democrat-passed community-based comprehensive health planning agencies, which ceded influence over local health planning to more corporate entities (health information & action group, 1975) . some block granting for medicaid to the states was also established (ford, 2017) . president jimmy carter's voluntary effort (ve) failed to impact hospital cost inflation, since the private sector went back to business as usual right when constraints were lifted after 1 year (carter, 1977) . the explosion of federal and employer budget costs later provoked the reagan fetish for cost controls and cutbacks. economists saw their star rise, while concerns for access and quality took a back seat in policy discussions; again, huge policy reversals were set in place for market-driven ideology after democrat carter left office. health care as a percentage of gdp nearly doubled from 1965 to 10.5% by 1980. so it became clear to federal policymakers-and their corporate class sponsorsthat not just the inflationary spiral but the allocation of those dollars and their outcomes deserved stronger policy attention. during the reagan administration, the health care financing administration (hcfa) began to wield enormous power, as did the office of management and budget (omb) (etheredge, 1983) . the former conducted utilization review, but in subsequent years, the agency morphed into utilization management; the latter review challenged provider behaviors. as the clinical decision-makers on patient care, doctors tended to be targeted as cost drivers (schlesinger, blumenthal, & schlesinger, 1986) . victim-blaming patients for lifestyle behaviors and noncompliance for therapies and their subsequent utilization became prevalent (ryan, 1976 : knowles, 1977 crawford, 1977 crawford, , 1978 crawford, , 1979 crawford, , 1980 . it might be recognized that hmos were not easy to establish due to needed upfront funding and technical expertise which came at a high cost. many existing providers shied away from the challenges presented with a break from the fee-forservice market. thus, the superiority of organized systems did not hold up as an argument necessarily against the lucrative and entrenched vested interests at that time. additionally, the conservative antipathy to extending any more access to the poor, disabled, elderly, women, and children kept alive the fetish for cost control in federal outlays. profound economic shifts over time became evident. as hmos engulfed greater portions of fee-for-service markets across the country (mechanic, 1991) , preferred provider organizations (ppos) by commercial insurance firms emerged, taking aim at the doctor-sponsored independent practice associations (ipas), which had been physicians' preferred model to mitigate patient migration toward hmos. employees usually had a choice between a few options, but it was the employers deciding on what local insurance plans would be chosen, their benefits, and amounts of patient cost-sharing. ipas faced a competitive disadvantage against ppos, which had larger networks of hospitals and providers. as a result, ppos became the instruments of hospital chains and insurance companies. as premiums rose, benefit packages with greater consumer cost-sharing shifted the burden from government and corporations at a time of declining living standards. an insufficient number of health professionals spoke out about consumer health cost controls under the reagan administration and its class nature (navarro, 2017) . policies emphasizing cheaper front-end ambulatory services were not regarded as a health improvement if the price was the sacrifice of necessary hospital, rehabilitation, and end-stage care for certain patient segments. the bulk of private investment was situated in the higher-cost multihospital systems and academic medical centers. case in point, the hiv/aids crisis arose in the early 1980s, and reagan simply denied its existence (cohen, 1985) . tax act of 1981 coincided with a sharp increase in revenues by the four major hospital management companies. investor capital flooded into these companies and other proprietary ventures while their stocks climbed. nascent health information technology (hit) enabled hospital financial executives to examine specific departmental costs to carry out greater rationalization of the labor process and to reduce expenditures within hospital operations. across the globe, computerized systems continue to be developed in the rush to build "big data" to gain control over healthcare activities and to further scrutinize the appropriateness of services and practitioners' output (the 2019-2014 world outlook for internet, 2018). this burgeoning segment of american health information technology, today concentrated into four-or five nation-wide firms, began to play a critical role in tracking physician performance. the obama administration's medicare access and children's health insurance program reauthorization act (macra) of 2010 later further extended such monitoring (feinglass & salmon, 1994; glassman et al., 1996; hyans et al., 1996) . malpractice investigations took on greater meaning with hit advances (perna, 2018) , with physician resistance to such electronic health records being a factor (wigger, 1996) . hit systems have come a long way over this past decade, and with greater big it firms bringing greater sophistication into health care, it remains to be seen how such hit systems may evolve: who designs and controls the metrics for what chosen analytics, for what purposes, and what directions. whether the trump administration moves more aggressively on the macra implementation may be in doubt; cms seems at times to rely upon private sector initiatives setting directions. certainly, today's accountable care organizations (acos) are using their own performance monitoring of costs and quality in varying ways, as will later be explored. by the time reagan introduced diagnostic-related group (drg) reimbursement for medicare, expenditures had climbed substantially. drg categories established set amounts for diagnosis upon admission, and hospitals sought their profit by minimizing services, or as many consulting firms helped them to benefit through various managerial techniques. hospitals sought contracts with a burgeoning array of consultants that sprung up to populate health trade shows and professional meetings. this demand for expertise led to a burgeoning healthcare management consulting industry, sporting firms like deloitte, optum, and navigant, among a couple dozen others, raking in as high as $3 billion per year (largest healthcare management, 2018, p. 34). drgs supported widespread profit-seeking within the hospital industry. even with cost reductions in certain spheres, the fundamental belief in the private market for the bottom line remained the primary sign of "success." each diagnostic group received a fixed payment for an admission with generally multihospital systems and larger hospitals able to maximize payment excesses. as a result, larger firms with specialized internal staff or outside private consultants won out by gaming the system. state medicaid plans and private insurers followed suit with prospective payment soon thereafter, greatly complicating hospital reimbursement across the 1980s. rearranging incentives, however, does not necessarily reduce overall cost outlays. certain clinical services were driven out of the hospital setting-a loss to physicians not jumping on the ambulatory bandwagon. physician and corporate-sponsored surgicenters and diagnostic centers sprung up all over, completely unregulated and causing much local disruption. any medicare part a drg hospital budget "savings" were soon gobbled up under medicare part b physician payments. this is where the "vampire effect" became much more noticeable in many urban centers where so-called not-for-profits came up against the proprietary chains (ginzberg et al., 1993) . across the 1980s, for-profit hospital systems owned about 20% of nongovernment acute general hospital beds and more than 50% of nongovernment psychiatric beds. yet this "development" went together with an "underdevelopment" of the less fortunate hospitals in poorer communities, as economist andre gunder frank has said characterizes the capitalist system (1967) . the 1970s growth in facilities and bed numbers in the proprietary sector contrasts dramatically to the contraction in the "not-for-profit" voluntaries and government segments of the industry who were left to serve the poor, minorities, and uninsured. two major and interconnected issues became public and voluntary hospital failure in the face of the rapid encroachment by the for-profit sector (whiteis & salmon, 1990b) . a modern healthcare survey revealed a 15% increase in the total beds owned, leased, or managed by investor-owned multihospital chains between 1982 and 1983 and a similar 15.1% increase between 1983 and 1984, where the profits of investorowned chains rose 28.5%. this continued trend had shown a 37.7% profit increase between (modern healthcare, 1990 . this examination of hospitals reveals the financial crisis among those unable to tap into capital reserves, as well as compete for better-paying privately insured patients. financing their futures, many larger non-profit systems pursued taxexempt bonds to expand to compete. however, 156 community hospitals closed between 1980 and 1984, with the single greatest concentration of closings (almost 30%) being in large metropolitan areas with populations over 1.5 million, the areas with the greatest health needs. these hospitals that closed tended not to be part of multihospital systems (whiteis & salmon, 1994) . underdevelopment was seen in the huge losses by public hospital systems, which recorded a $360 million deficit for 1984, 57.2% greater than the $229 million deficit in the year before. in this era of cost cutting and retrenchment under reagan policies (mckenzie, 1994) , many hospitals and their served communities remained in jeopardy. federal policy exacerbated the financial damages on hospitals that were most at risk. restrictions on access for the uninsured and medicaid patients, and the later impact of "dumping" patients on already overcrowded financially burdened public institutions, were noted in studies (schiff et al., 1986) . corporate concentration-under the guise of competition-led to a rapid and insidious trend, with insufficient policy concern for the massive disruption across the entire health system, including its profound impact on the culture of medicine (stoeckle, 1994) . as whiteis and salmon (1990a, p. 119) summed up: in the wake of this push toward corporate consolidation, those left behind --the working poor, the unemployed, racial minorities, many elderly women, and children [were] gradually being denied access to the vital resources needed to participate actively in their own health and the health of their communities. … the structure of the health care industry, its long history of technological-intensive intervention, and the current trends toward for-profit care with the removal of services to those left behind in the wake of the corporate siphoning of public resources are all of a piece. they are signs and symptoms of the larger illness, the underdevelopment of public resources under corporate development. this corporate takeover of health care coincided with the huge growth in the ranks of the uninsured, which rose dramatically during the reagan years of neglect, continuing to balloon to 47 million americans under the second george w. bush administration. simultaneously, the number of underinsured (those with chronic diseases with poor coverage) has been estimated to be about equal in number. in addition, from the reagan through george h.w. bush years, economic crisis and hospital closure among institutions serving the poor and minority populations in major us cities created an access dilemma unaddressed by any public policy until the affordable care act gave insurance coverage to some 20+ million. the national health insurance failure by the clintons in 1993 (starr, 2011) stood beside the initiation of the children's health insurance program, which has aided some families with sick kids, but again became a subsidization to private insurance firms that had long neglected this cohort as unprofitable without federal largess. clinton's approved health plans, while settled in the private sector, came with federal oversight that the insurance and pharmaceutical firms decided were not palatable. they chose to go on their own ways with the market. community hospital failures during the 1980s had multiple impacts to declining communities; closures displaced many unskilled and semiskilled workers who lived in adjacent neighborhoods delivering a double whammy to many urban and rural communities (whiteis, 2000) . doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other professionals could find jobs elsewhere, but unskilled workers did not easily regain employment. an accompanying disruption was the small businesses formerly sustained by the hospital traffic that closed, as the surrounding housing stock faced disintegration as well (whiteis, 1992) . globally, the move toward privatization in health care as well as for public services led to the removal of many state-guaranteed public services and instead provided private services across many nations (navarro, 1984) . often inspired by the us and international financial institutions (alvarez, salmon, & swartzman, 2011; degroote, 2005) , the ideology of marketplace medicine was majorly exported and fostered multitiered healthcare systems in several nations, being shaped where larger social policies and processes were promulgated by increasing multinational corporate power and economic consolidation (homedes, ugalde, & rovira 2005) . the ideological significance lies in the accompanying decrease in the provision of human services and economic support to those considered "unproductive" segments of the population and their respective communities. with the growth of corporate hospital profits, these firms moved into related areas of care. the sector saw a continuum of investor activity popping up in diversified areas of freestanding health centers, surgical, mri and other diagnostic centers, and home healthcare agencies. despite the contraction of services at the bottom layer of health institutions serving the less fortunate, services sold to well-off insured patients became money making enterprises. retail store eye and dental centers, ambulance services and other profit-seeking entities filled the vacuum once provided by hospitals. more recently, chain drug stores diversified into primary care clinics-an entry which blindsided community physicians (see chap. 2). today these clinics pose significant threats to primary care physicians and represent another intrusion of "marketplace competition" which has long been heralded by conservatives and investors as an example of innovation and improvement that can only be possible in a free market health system (woodson, 2017) (sic) . physicians then began to realize that their own remuneration was to be similarly subjected to conserving by both government and private insurance monies: "incentivizing" by the resource-based relative value scale (rbrvs) reimbursement began to set physician fees. rbrvs is based upon predetermined resource costs to provide various services, with the policy intention to stabilize the payment system while continuously trying to constrain outlays. this doctor reimbursement was reagan's centers for medicare & medicaid services (cms) new way to reduce doctor income. physicians over time adapted to this regulatory constraint, but further restricted payments would lie ahead in the medicare part b reimbursement changes and then obama's macra further tightening. in their heyday, "free market" health economists (fox, 1997) carried out studies to appeal to the corporate and governmental focus for cost containment. advocacy and critique took a backstage to policy journals' focus on articles about provider reductions and higher consumer out-of-pocket payments as attempts to curtail expenditure growth. the president of the federation of american hospitals, the lobbying arm for the proprietary hospital chains, explained: …an administration opposed to government regulation of our industry, opposed to comprehensive national health insurance, opposed to cost controls, opposed to planning, and receptive to new ideas… we have never been in a better position in our history. (federation of american hospitals, 1981, p. 2) the vampire effect was clearly in full swing with most "not-for-profits" obviously choosing bottom-line oriented strategies. operating surpluses instead of profits are produced by so-called "not-for-profit" voluntary hospitals, which are manifested in higher executive salaries and expense accounts for administrative personnel, trustees, and their business associates who may furnish services or products to the hospital and, indirectly, the medical staff. modern healthcare's executive compensation survey in 2019 (kacik, 2019a (kacik, , 2019b revealed average pay for hospital administrators above a half million dollars, with larger systems' ceos making well into tens of millions in payments per year, all increasing by 6.8% annually-far surpassing the average hospital worker's increases. as mentioned previously, the medicalindustrial complex suppliers, who benefit by the pass-through federal/state and private funds, hyped up the purchase of new fancy equipment and supplies supposedly for competition's sake (mckinlay, 1984) . thus, provider competition, and tougher reimbursement for patient care, created a climate that tended to lessen the enhancement of the population's health in their surrounding communities. what was more apparent was selective marketing to more desirable patients, and "demarketing" to others, along with efforts to build larger systems through diversification schemes. the rhetoric was for a "costeffective, business-like basis" often with physicians being blamed for high utilization decisions for their patients. the object was to provide greater billable service to those patients who may likely not need more care, but who possessed good coverage for reimbursement and then provide less to those who may very well need more care, but possessed little or no reimbursements. the magnitude of this proprietary presence and its rapid growth in a new realm of ambulatory entities remains completely unique to the us healthcare system. no other national health system across the globe has such a large and powerful medicalindustrial complex with such a heavy corporate provider presence. nowhere else is profit the main driving force in health care, though this may be changing in several nations. other nations have traditionally constructed public healthcare and/or notfor-profit systems, though many nations are now privatizing often with the same collection of american health corporations currently making inroads into international markets (berliner and burlage, 1994) . with a change in values and purpose of the overall healthcare enterprise, corporate forces abandoned a public health orientation while directing the entire system to their commodity production purposes. similar ideologies brought along employers who bought the arguments for hmos, deregulation, and no national health insurance. across this time, the industrialization of the sector seems directed more toward delimiting the allocation of resources to certain population segments. individualistic solutions took precedence over communal approaches toward public health; the admonitions favoring social medicine fell on deaf ears among the professions. corporatization has altered the nature of doctoring and will continue in the future in more dramatic ways (stoeckle, 1994) . in our healthcare system today, profits subsidized from public funds (which amounts to almost 50% of total us expenditures) give ample reason for these powerful entities to exert influence over policymaking; their proposals are often at odds with the overall public's health. regulatory constraints imposed by the government to redirect efforts to address public health is stiffly resisted in this medical marketplace, estimated to be around 2-3% of total health expenditures. thus, the mission of underfunded healthcare entities to further the public's health will continue to erode substantially. one might pose the question: how did this corporate transformation of us health care occur so fast? not long ago, the medical profession was considered to be the dominant power in us health care; almost all hospitals were "not-for-profit," as was the largest insurer, blue cross blue shield, and the largest health maintenance organization, kaiser permanente. fading of late, the ethics of professionalism spoke to a calling to public service for physicians, nurses, and other practitioners while maintaining a caring purpose to alleviate suffering from disease in their patients and their communities. in the halcyon days of the 1950s, physicians were once "the captain of the ship" and used to be their own agents, with personal relationships with their patients, who used to come from communities of which they were both apart. patients were patients-not considered "customers." such an agency relationship has been fundamentally altered today (white, salmon, & feinglass, 1994) . back then, insurance under blue cross blue shield did not interfere in those doctor-patient relationships, nor much in hospital dealings. in fact, payments worked to the clear benefit of providers who were generally happy with the relationship and their funding. hospitals were paid cost-plus by blue cross, and when medicare and medicaid came into being in the mid-1960s, reimbursement was similarly designed. doctors got fee-for-service crafted with hospital payments under the creed that "more is better"-"whatever it takes for patient care." clearly more in this case meant free reign for getting higher provider revenues. the overriding paradigm was that services were always indicated if a physician ordered them, and they surely did so; use of facilities and newer technologies in greater quantities naturally exploded costs. nonetheless, this structural payment arrangement proved to be highly inflationary and packed full of unnecessary and inappropriate utilization, as well as documented iatrogenesis (doctor-or health system-caused disease) both clinical and social (illich, 1976) . social iatrogenesis addresses the widespread medicalization of social problems and the created dependency on pharmaceuticals and medical care; over 90% of physician visits result in prescriptions. federal and state governments felt the burden of exploding costs, and employers became upset over their uncontrollable outlays for workers' benefits with little gains in improved productivity, nor in overall population health (salmon, 1973) . consumers constantly face higher and higher premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, still wildly escalating under both the obama and trump administrations. while stronger cost controls appeared highly needed, the system's excesses and inefficiencies mounted, while excess greed prevailed and was increasingly identified but rarely addressed. the united states has not sought strong pathways for social prevention for broader occupational and environmental actions; these were opposite to the republican policy agenda. therefore, the ongoing corporate transformation spread rapidly as marketplace ideology heralded private interests; health sector corporations became powerfully involved in policymaking across all segments of the sector and then shaped it to their own self interests. physicians seem to have been slow to grasp implications from their loss of authority, but recent conditions and the surging burnout make it more evident, maybe to spur a new consciousness (see chap. 6). the anti-government sentiments, historically expressed by organized medicine, may have tended to obscure threats from the encroaching corporate players. the profession can be characterized as highly fragmented. it now finds itself divided into dwindling private practitioners, paid employees (over 50% of the total practicing), as well as specific segmented divisions: primary care, specialty care, subspecialties, contract physicians, and an administrative class. its professional elite in leadership roles has often wavered more in narrow self-interest than advocacy stands for the entire population's health and well-being. many physicians feel bewildered as they watch mega-corporate health groups and the insurance industry gather performance data to evaluate their clinical decision-making about their now insurer-owned customers-no longer doctors' patients (feinglass & salmon, 1994) . physician professional groups like the american medical association remain acutely disturbed by governmental actions into their professional affairs; nevertheless, they appeared to have been blindsided by the encroachment of private administrative entities over the practice of medicine. relman foresaw the emergence of explicitly for-profit entities, but his voice and a few others failed to echo across the wider profession. bitten by the vampire forprofit providers in the competitive struggle, the "not-for-profits" began to emulate them with convergent marketplace behaviors: creating patient barriers to entry, scaling back on not-so-profitable community-based services, building service lines that yielded attractive returns on investment, eliminating unprofitable service lines, and dumping patients who were unfunded or underfunded. these overall conditions were promulgated by government policies, and part of the unplanned marketplace medicine left to the desires of numerous vested interests. the uneven playing field gave way to common bottom-line practices that mimicked across all provider systems. moreover, administrative functions have now greatly expanded, so physicians find their autonomy more at risk (white, salmon, & feinglass, 1994) . the above highlights prevailing conditions and issues before the election of barack obama: marketplace medicine was advancing, while 47 million americans went uninsured, with many denied services; perhaps an equal number were underinsured due to high out-of-pocket outlays; insurance company practices were blatantly discriminatory; and many more health providers became financially at risk. despite their substantial subsidization by george w. bush's medicare part d, drug company price increases were seen as even more outrageous. forces of corporatization had grown steadily since the defeat of the clinton reforms back in 1993, but the democrats under obama now seemed willing to deal and to use massive subsidization for a segment of the uninsured. obama spoke to the national need to extend coverage while campaigning against insurance company practices. waitzkin and hellander (2016) , however, note that: with funding from the insurance industry and financial corporations linked to wall street, obama became the first presidential candidate in history able to turn down government funds for his campaign. one wonders where his campaign funding came from other than the many small donors who flocked to his campaign of hope. subsequently, the obama administration would obtain both insurance and pharmaceutical industry support for the affordable care act by providing over $600 billion in funds to the insurance industry, with a continuation of bush's promise not to regulate drug prices. the marketplace would benefit with new federal funds and minimal regulation. while obama inherited an economy in shambles, his administration dumped an additional $700 billion bailout of wall street and the banking industry, as bush had previously performed such a stimulus of a similar amount. there remains little ideological difference on each party's support for corporate health care even given republican hostilities toward obama. on health matters, both parties have generally been centrist since the liberal days of president lyndon johnson with his passage of medicare and medicaid in 1965. neither party has supported universal health coverage, preferring incremental and minor adjustments to extending access, which tended to serve certain vested interests (see chap. 2). corporate health parties backed many financing modifications so that more government dollars flowed into the medical-industrial complex while consistently preventing regulatory oversight and resisting the push for insurance for everyone. coming after the johnson administration, republican policies changed from administrative reform giving way to budget cuts, deregulation, and tax credits: from practical insights on how to improve operations to cutbacks (which nixon called "rescissions"). administrative science parlayed in business schools at this time was not prevalent in health care. agency history, mission, constituency, and ideology were changing with a different party in control. republicans followed a tendency that rejected the character and competency of the past democratic direction to extend access to new groups in need; they fell into managerialism as seen in nixon's new restructuring. the role of policy in the larger political economy was constrained by the executive branch, congress, and the courts, so proposing that health services merely required better management was rather simplistic. nevertheless, republican's cynical ideological support for all things in the medical marketplace does not restrain costs as it is increasingly witnessing that price increases across the sector are the major culprit. neither party will likely choose to tackle price controls in hospitals, pharmaceuticals, and every other health expenditure partially as the result of relying on campaign funding from these very industries. thus, leaving the status quo in place means growing expenditures and a shift of costs to employees and consumers. republicans have heralded the status quo for private interests in health care; there was a continuum of shifts back and forth without much harmonious agreements between the parties on policies. much of the dispute centered on entitlement programs in the great society health and social programs; diametrically opposed policy goals existed over any extension of access. since their enactment medicare and medicaid both boomed to consume greater federal dollars, considered expenses for "unproductive groups" versus investment for workers' health. some in democratic circles held a value orientation for providing greater coverage, but they also responded to traditional health providers lobbying for more subsidization, plus being aware of ways to solidify their voter base through advocacy, if not legislative passage. the nixon administration's emphasis on restructuring and managerialism gave way to reagan's stricter cost controls. both facilitated economists to gain prominence in health circles to formulate technocratic "solutions" in service to republican party market-oriented policies. with provider largess under fee-for-service discredited, prepayment incentives were championed. hmos and drgs demanded boosting analytical capabilities developed by business types whom nixon brought into the bureaucracy, along with academic economists and consultants who festered over climbing costs in their reports and studies. the aging of the population and the pent-up demand from historic lack of access amidst poor social conditions led to the realization that the scope of chronic disease and their future costs in current health care delivery was never taken into account by the government planners. there were a series of failures to hold the line on utilization until reagan's bargaining with providers to curtail reimbursements. unfortunately, once the providers found what would be paid for expenditures just shifted from medicare part a to the medical side part b as for-profit ambulatory services increased substantially. given this cost obsession, imperfect analytic capabilities along with a bottom-line mentality forsook greater focus on quality and hindered care coordination which is so key in chronic disease treatment and control. overall, reagan's cost control fetish became the rationale for prohibiting extension of health care access to all americans, but allowed for vested health care interests to benefit handsomely. republican health policies have historically been slanted toward market-based solutions with heavy investment into private corporations; it is worthwhile to point toward the brief review in chap. 2 to see how special vested interests have advanced during past administrations. in brief, republicans have been recycling failed ideas for a long time. now an untested promise of big data on steroids is being promulgated within the medical marketplace (see chap. 5). this comes amidst compassion fatigue across the society for those left behind-over 23 million and growing under trump. buried deep in the house of medicine's reductionism and fetish for the cellular bits and body parts, the medical profession can no longer identify the social and environmental causations of disease in population groups. confusion persists among health professionals who need to awaken to their changing social context and return to being a noble profession in the oslerian tradition of early last century-seeing and talking to patients to know them beyond their disease (osler, 2008) . this lineage of the johns hopkins university professor of medicine, william osler, who urged physicians to be utmost devoted to their patient as a person and the populace was lost (bliss, 1999; silverman et al., 2008) . notwithstanding republican opposition, the democrats and the obama administration failed to enact more progressive health policies (medicare for all, public option, infrastructure development, etc.) when they held the majority of congress and ultimately fed the corporate monster. even with the affordable care act decreasing the number of uninsured by 41% in 2017, some 20+ million remained uninsured, many without access to health insurance at any cost. to reiterate, the aca giving someone an insurance card is not in reality granting access. access to care means assuring availability of affordable, comprehensive, quality care that is continuous by lowering social and cultural barriers to that care. this means guaranteeing substantial infrastructural improvements in communities so that physicians are there for relationships with patients and families, which the aca did not do! even while some funds for community health centers were made available with the disproportionate share hospital (dsh) monies, only small segments of the populace received improved health services. reflecting on the affordable care act a decade later, it is important to understand the ambitious effort that was carved out during venomous republican opposition aiming at its voluminous details. many aspects of the affordable care act needed to be launched at the same time upon an already complex and dynamic healthcare system; this made it difficult to coordinate the changes being implemented and gave the law's opponents fodder to attack government incompetency (blumenthal & abrams, 2020) . the aca did solidify a commitment for what employers wanted: introducing value-based payment to change incentives from fee-for-service medical practice; the idea linking physician compensation to monitored performance by using information technology received broad acceptance. as an attempt to reduce costs by targeting quality of care, hospitals-the largest expenditure of any medical care component-got particular attention. under the historic medicare and medicaid programs, cost reimbursement (or rather cost-plus reimbursement) had been the basis of payment, obviously being highly inflationary over decades. the aca reduced payments to hospitals in various ways. medicare advantage plans run by private insurers saw reduced payments. the idea that got the hospital buy-in to aca was that some 20 million of the uninsured would be brought into the system, thus reducing uncompensated care. the downside was that the federal government would begin to look at quality of care through the hospital readmissions reduction program which intended to have hospitals take responsibility for patients unduly readmitted for their clinical conditions soon after discharge. wide variations in medicare readmissions had been found (as high as 24.7% among patients with certain conditions). identified hospitals with aboveaverage risk-adjusted rates of readmission within 30 days were found unable to quickly alter their practices, so they received federal penalties, estimated to be 50% of the nation's hospitals the following year-an indicator of how difficult redirecting engrained practices are for quality improvement! another area of concern was hospital-acquired conditions; its program sought to identify how to measure and limit those conditions in groups of people occurring disproportionately. hospital safety has been improving under the aca, but it is unclear if the law actually produced such improvement or other factors contributed (blumenthal & abrams, 2020) . much more over the future needs to be done in hospital safety, with better studies to guide directions too (see chap. 4). the major significant introduction of the aca was accountable care organizations (acos) which were designed to measure and reward physician practices based upon much greater scrutiny over physician decision-making with particular attention to costs and quality. fifteen hundred acos were begun by hospitals and physician groups resulting in enrolling 44 million medicare patients. while getting these public and private organizations off the ground from a policy perspective, as well as operationally, seemed formidable, the trump administration has not followed through with cms emphasis as was the intent of obama. yet, as acos yield different performance with their control over quality and finances, questions remain whether many of their innovations will be proven worthwhile after assessment by good health services research and what it will take to replicate the worthwhile ones in other settings. in this era of big data with improved analytics, will the colossal it firms sweep in with capabilities that will be used to serve consumers to lower costs and advance their health literacy? or will marketplace disruptions locally, regionally, and nationally mount with lesser providers losing out? will national health policy attempt to make health services available to all citizens? will the nation be able to advance health promotion and protection for the whole population? social, occupational, and environmental conditions for healthier communities need to be fully recognized, researched, and addressed beyond just cost-efficiencies in medical care, which is only part of improved population health. for the most part, acos have modest net savings in the different types of acos, likely due to nuances of their design features and the sponsoring operational management. physicians and hospitals also found the high-cost questionable quality procedures addressed through the bundled payments for care improvement program, the idea being that providers would receive a single prospective payment for treatment of a medical or surgical condition and could retain savings or absorb excess costs in order to meet imposed quality criteria. over a thousand hospitals and physician groups participated in this, again having mixed results, but some surgical procedure expenditures (such as hip and knee replacements) saw some cost restraint; while most of the program "was less promising with more chronic conditions" (joynt maddox, oray, zheng, & epstein, 2019) . the aca also looked to improve performance by strengthening the nation's primary care infrastructure. increased monies were channeled into community health centers, and further support for hospitals came with the dsh initiative; designated safety net hospitals received enhanced reimbursement for taking care of more uninsured people. the comprehensive primary care initiative sought increased payments from both public and private sources in order to reduce emergency department visits. approximately 15,000 primary care practitioners were given enhanced payments, but the results of this remain to be determined (peikes, dale, & ghosh, 2018) . obama's goal of remaking the healthcare system (pear, 2009) was beset by an ailing economy that exacerbated concerns over its eventual costs and stern opposition from the republicans. his predecessor george w. bush had poured $700 billion into wall street, and obama repeated the transaction for another $700 billion to save the banking industry. for the aca, health providers remained skeptical of new "efficiencies" that supposedly would help to control costs, though the aca really did not have much in cost and quality controls, nor stiff regulation. the "46 million uninsured" was not a rallying cry that could dampen the ominous republican opposition, who formed themselves into the tea party caucus to express its bitter dismay over government intrusion into the healthcare market. republicans in congress stood as "deficit hawks" seeking to cut the federal debt and limit executive power. the now evolved albeit diluted freedom caucus clowns now have had their wings clipped under trump's military buildup and huge tax cuts, leading to the biggest federal deficits in history. the bailout bills to get the "economy back" ballooned the deficit even more with the cares act following the covid-19 pandemic lasting through 2020. the aca implementation did not balloon costs in a huge way, yet the republican budget hawks always objected to obama spending. increased spending and deficits under president trump apparently don't stir the same dire warnings as we heard back during the obama administration. in fact, there was a modest increase in total health expenditures between 2010 and now before covid-19 took hold. employersponsored benefit spending also did not jump in a great way, partly because benefit packages were changed, less uncompensated care costs shifted to the private sector, and the health insurance exchanges took over some employees. besides the overall complexity of the aca law, sad mistakes in its startup (especially with the website used to apply for coverage), and its slow implementation, the aca proposed a federal "marketplace" to be run by the government for roughly 2/3 of the states, offering a set of benefit plans by private insurers (bronze, silver, and gold levels) with three added silver options for people qualified for cost-sharing reductions based on their income. the federal outlay was estimated to be over $650 billion. states were to receive extra funds to sign up their uninsured citizens plus a few years of federal subsidization in their medicaid programs; several republicanheld states refused this medicaid expansion. private insurers were not required to offer standardized plans on the federal and the individual state marketplaces, an obscureness which tended to baffle consumers. republicans seized upon talking points that revolved around taking your private health insurance away and not being able to keep your doctor. alaskan governor and then vice-presidential candidate sarah palin's fictitious "death panels" took hold with notions of killing grandma all in the service of the affordable care act mandates. the administration's promises of no changes in americans' usual health care proved to be a stretch, so the opposition seized on that false claim. regardless of these missteps, 20 million of the 47 million received some access to coverage, even if the aca popularity was tarnished by its inability to cover more and the determined opponents who continue to seek the law's "repeal and replace." through the spectrum of these previous events, one can witness that the popular mandate for health reforms from the late 1980s through the early 1990s had called for an overall restructuring of the entire system (sommers, maylone, blendon, oray, & epstein, 2017) . nevertheless, criticisms of the aca were able to turn the tide during its complex implementation. this was aided by its slowness to deliver what was promised and its widely felt startup problems and confusion. the original federal website for signups failed at first. the exchanges proved to be too difficult to comprehend, were often misunderstood and that was if you were able to get through to the actual website. one major outcome was that low-income adults benefited well after a few years (sommers, maylone, blendon, oray, & epstein, 2017) . awareness of price increases by providers, insurers, and drug companies did emerge during this period of cost containment. now it appears widely acknowledged as a key cost push in the overall expenditure. constraints to ease into valuebased reimbursement are a trend. experimentation with these different programs and the acos has created an altered condition for payment practices. quality appears to no longer just be rhetoric, with designs being put in place to bring about serious discussions with some concerted interventions. to its partial credit, the aca brought necessary attention to evidence-based medical practice with its series of attempted cleanups. comparative effectiveness for drug evaluations are now seen as so necessary built upon real-world data. whether routing out the non-useful and harmful results in drug therapies, and how fast, remains to be seen in the current insurer/pbm industry. tools are on the way to aid physicians and pharmacists in this clinical decision-making, so that practitioners can make better informed choices without being bludgeoned by administrators! existing patterns of testing and treatment can be scrutinized through electronic health records (ehrs) with new information technology capabilities and analyticsdepending upon who controls these new tools. it is not clear if medical experts will prevail, or merely cost-cutting corporate administrators stay in charge of this direction; nevertheless, it is absolutely necessary that protocols receive sufficient physician participation in their development and give feedback on their utility for quality improvements. practitioners should not be dictated to! maintaining such dialogues will be critical if we are to see a system-wide reduction in the dramatic variations in medical practice and find better strategies for chronic disease control. the authors, as academicians ourselves, would prefer studies by health services researchers that get peer reviewed, rather than leave observations and "studies" at the whim of the marketplace. clinical practice must be balanced with practitioners, obtaining better understandings of evidence generated on solid scientific foundation-not by some newly designed corporate ai system. surely, comparative effectiveness for pharmaceuticals cannot be left to the pharmaceutical firms. a new policy perspective should reach awareness that powerful economic actors must be held in check so that society heads toward more progressive directions toward social justice and health equity. demanding new accountability by the vested interests is a step toward breaking up the monopolies that have so controlled medical practice and medical science itself. drug therapies should be scrutinized in ways that the pharmacy benefit managers have never chosen because of their profit-taking. millions of americans are on a multitude of drugs that may not really be helping them as much as they have been told, and in fact in many cases could be harming them. the aca urged outcome studies which must be developed and funded with new trends for designing overall system performance. had the aca not received such staunch republican resistance and undermining, the obama administration may have been able to move forward on some of these activities in a better and clearer way. for sure, the issue of accountability is more pronounced policymaking debates. the recent explosion of many urban health conditions due to the coronavirus may provoke new demands for improvement in new accountable forms also. to its partial credit, the aca brought attention to evidence-based medical practice with its series of attempted cleanups. comparative effectiveness for drug evaluations are now seen as so necessary to rout out the non-useful and harmful. tools are on the way to aid physicians and pharmacists in this clinical decision-making, so that practitioners can make better informed choices. the outside power of the pharmaceutical industry may be required to be curtailed for real progressive reforms. existing patterns of testing and treatment can be scrutinized through ehrs and new information technology capabilities and analytics-depending upon who controls these new directions. it is not clear if medical experts and professionals are in charge of medical care usage instead of cost-cutting corporate administrators. it will be necessary that protocols receive sufficient physician participation and feedback so that there is buy-in and practitioners who will use the tool will not feel dictated to. maintaining dialogues between providers and payers are critical if we are to see a systemic end to, or reductions, in significant variations in medical practice. demanding new accountability by the vested interests may be a step toward breaking up the monopolies that have so controlled medical practice and medical science itself. drug therapies should be scrutinized in ways that the pharmacy benefit managers have never chosen because of their profit-taking. millions of americans are on polypharmacy that may not really be helping them, and in fact in many cases is harming them (manasse, 1989) . the aca urged outcome studies to be developed and funded with new trends for designing overall system performance. the 45th president caused many americans to disbelieve and distrust the institution of the presidency. for some americans, it began with the actual election and followed by inauguration and later for many who may have voted for him but gradually came after continuous shenanigans. indicators point to his incompetence in addressing the covid-19 pandemic and an economy in free fall only to be compounded by protests after the george floyd killing by minneapolis police in late may 2020. trump's election to the presidency dismayed a huge portion of the american population. as president, trump continues to secure and support his base versus an everenlarging defined enemy of democrats, "establishment elites," including the media, intelligence community, and everything done within the past obama administration. it has been reported he does fail to read many reports coming across his desk, nor does he seek advice from his advisors and cabinet. in the absence of a coherent governing strategy, trump has consistently continued to campaign and has never pivoted from that to running the government as the chief executive. after fbi director james comey told him of russian influence over the american elections (and all top intelligence agencies confirmed the interference), trump reacted against the intelligence community and the media by promoting the idea of a "deep state" and haranguing about "fake news" and "very dishonest people." his performance led to much skepticism and criticism by the public that has in some ways allowed him to get away with it by maintaining what was called "america's great divide" (frontline: america's great divide, 2020). in his inaugural address, trump appealed to his base, the forgotten men and women, aka the "deplorables" to begin to continue to accentuate the divide between them and everyone else. the largest protests in american history came shortly after his inauguration with women in the hundreds of thousands protesting in early 2017. here was when the idea of "alternative facts" emerged, which presents us with an orwellian sense of a dangerous and unstable environment that may allow a person to believe whatever one wants to believe in the great divide. nothing gets accepted at face value; thus the trump administration rescinded nearly 200 obama executive orders on the aca, the environment, immigration, and whatever else president obama had done. in his ongoing efforts to roll back all aspects of the aca with an eye upon his base, his administration took away transgender protections allowing doctors and hospitals to discriminate citing religious reasons (armour, 2020) . the first acts against the affordable care act were designed to strip it of its powers. his prime directive was to keep immigrants out of the united states by building the border wall and fighting hispanics on the immigration issue; restricting daca students; and going after muslim "terrorists" by blocking seven muslim nations with a travel ban. in response to the charlottesville "unite the right" rally in 2017 which wound up with a right-wing supporter killing a protester with his car, the president merely dismissed the violence as there were many "good people on both sides." and his crude and mostly unsuccessful trade dealings with china, europe, mexico, and canada have perpetually gyrated the financial markets. and yet for some reason his base remains loyal, supportive, and are very vocal, and the corporate sector enjoyed the tax cuts and easing regulations. the trump administration has not followed through with obamacare's emphasis on acos; instead he has singularly sought to totally dismantle the aca. sixtyfive attempts by the republican congress to end obamacare and two supreme court decisions, plus trump's own executive orders, greatly interfered with its implementation over time, but to date the affordable care act remains albeit with growing appreciation. nevertheless, when it became time for republican legislation to "remove and replace," there were no ideas for the "replace" part. the gop game plan was merely to repeal a somewhat popular entitlement that a democratic congress and president had enacted with zero plans by the opposition to replace. their idea was simply to revert to the system that existed in 2010 that would throw millions of people off the health insurance rolls. so after trump had continually boasted he would deliver the "a wonderful plan," "the best care," and "for every american," trump and the republicans (proved this time to be the party of no ideas) pressed on to strip the medicaid expansion away from the several states who have signed on (eilperin & goldstein, 2017) . most americans will remember the infamous john mccain's fateful senate "thumbs down" vote that defeated senate majority leader mitch mcconnell's attempt to repeal the aca. in his second year of office, trump slashed outreach efforts for navigators to enroll more eligible persons to help the aca to "implode" (sullivan, 2017). hard-pressed folks would still sign up, though in small numbers. the veniality of trump has been exacerbated by his poor response and incompetence to the covid-19 pandemic. was it clear to the white house the virus would cull the ranks of minorities, the aged and disabled, the homeless, native americans, and prisoners? or were they holding back widespread testing and their supply chain mismanagement after it was seen who was dying? or did they just not care believing ultimately that they were dealing with "just the flu" and that this outbreak would run its course like the seasonal flu? historians will hopefully delve into this clash of politics and public health. during the trump administration, under both secretary price and alex azar, cms made a wide range of temporary adjustments to medicare and medicaid, with exceptions for value-based services and delaying the mips incentive payments (brady, 2020). acos will benefit from these cms actions. the first cares act bailout law gave a $175 billion package for hospitals. the trump administration proceeded to distribute the funds-not to the neediest facilities facing the luge of coronavirus patients-but to wealthier hospital chains (drucker, silver-greenberg, & kliff, 2020) . regrettably, hospitals serving low-income patients did not fare well against the wealthiest who benefited; most of the former hospitals have insufficient cash on hand to finance operations during the epidemic (cohrs, 2020). a high number are at risk for closure. laid off workers who lost their coverage face a 60-day sign-up for obamacare or medicaid if eligible (alonso-zaldivardo, 2020). more folks quickly obtaining coverage may keep certain hospitals afloat. up until the minneapolis police murder of george floyd in may of 2020, and the death of 100,000 americans from the covid-19 virus, trump's approval rating stayed in the 30 to 40 percent range. now democratic presidential nominee joe biden is leading in the polls based on anti-trump sentiment as seen by the nationwide protests in almost every city, with some rioting and new calls for defunding police over a series of racist actions that resulted in multiple deaths, which have lessened trump's approval rating, putting his reelection in jeopardy. the recent implosion of several urban health conditions and ravaging state budgets (mervosh & harmon, 2020; kelton, 2020) due to the coronavirus points out the paucity of analysis as trump's basis of what to do. delays, improper supply chain actions, and untimely travel bans may have actually compounded his administration's response to covid-19. his playbook that wasn't revealed a systematically dismantled pandemic preparation commission and then subsequent cuts to the national institutes of health and centers for disease control and prevention budgets, along with his antagonisms to the world health organization. he also failed to act more quickly on travel bans, with little decent national management over testing, and the supply chain for masks, gloves, swabs, and other medical personal protective gear. it is clear that the increased potential death and case rates can be laid squarely at the feet of president trump and his administration and his response, or more accurately lack of response, were criticized widely (media outlets examine trump response to covid-19 pandemic, 2020) . his continued push to restart and reopen the economy driven by his reelection campaign is likely to backfire with states in the south and west that saw little in the way of covid-19 cases and deaths, but now are starting to show large increases in both. reopening the economy before the pandemic was under better control in a number of states likely accounts for a second wave of infections and maybe reach the 200,000 death mark before the election (stacey & crow, 2020; kuchler, 2020). it's ironic that many of the states that had lax "stay-at-home" and no required mask orders, plus an earlier opening, have faced the fastest spread of the coronavirus. and these are trump states of florida, arizona, and texas, among others (masson, 2020). ironically it seems this desperate push to reopen the economy, decrease unemployment, buoy the stock market, and bounce consumer confidence may actually wind up costing the president the very voters he was counting on to get reelected. what is clear is that we will never see a progressive national health policy agenda ever arise under these sordid conditions of crisis. the calamity of a pandemic, depression-era unemployment, widespread national protests, and a clueless administration can only mean more hardship for the already hard-hit population. how will all of this be debated over the election campaign remains to be seen with facts, reasonable analyses, understanding, and reconciling of divergent perspectives. this is an expectation of a decent civil campaign. locally, governors and mayors are greatly perplexed over strategies, not just to address the popular health conditions but also for funding dilemmas that obviously delimits their ability to resolve their impending respective health crises in 2021. the resulting double whammy of the economic effect of the pandemic coupled with systemic community disinvestment (harrison, 2020), give these communities cause to remain very angry. coupled with spending on the pandemic, states have little room to address any other issues in their already strained economic situation. the opening of schools is an especially disheartening management decision for local areas. marketplace players, however, are planning to sweep in to explore the multitude of new opportunities, from state database constructions to software for contact tracing. yamey and jamison (2020) calculate the us death rate is a hundred times greater than it is in china. other nations that acted early and effectively on available information avoided their worst-case scenarios; however, the trump administration still lingers well behind for improved public health programming to address the epidemic and financial assistance to providers. americans justifiably have psychological uncertainty over the society in which we live. despite campaign promises to replace with the "best," "everyone covered," and "pre-existing conditions protected," no alternative plan was ever suggested. his vilifying china for his economic problems and other twitter rants mean trump needs issues for a comeback, even perhaps to maintain his loyal republican ranks. this is key given how central health has become in the american consciousness. while the gop and the trump administration have never actually had an idea for replacing the aca, or reforming it in any ways other than vindictive rhetoric, the recent events of both the covid-19 pandemic, the huge unemployment and loss of insurance coverage, and the protests surrounding the george floyd killing may eventually renew interest in concerted healthcare reform. let us see what the presidential campaign reveals in the near term. today's mega-mergers of insurers, pbms, and the sight of other large-scale crosscorporate amalgamations cannot help but provoke new deeper ponderings on the future of medical practice over the twenty-first century (mckinlay & stoeckle, 1994) . beyond the entry of for-profit corporations into the delivery of care, other forces were endemic to the overall health system leading into the transformation of the sector. corporate entities from pharmaceuticals and hospital equipment and supplies through accounting and legal firms had secured a strong foothold. all sought to enrich themselves to maintain the supply function to the delivery of health care. it remains all of the same piece. in the 1860s karl marx made the point (o'connor, 1981) which remains critical today for health care: production thus produces consumption. when we examine modern medicine, it is important to note that true objective health needs are hidden by mere medical care utilization, which is how the system defines as health. here is where illich's conception of social iatrogenesis becomes crucial. what has evolved over time is what has been offered in its commodified form of services; does utilization truly reflect either a patient's or the population's health and well-being? an ongoing critique of modern medicine in its current form has displayed many aspects, and it is worthwhile to ponder its questioning (cousins, 1976; carlson, 1976; bishop, 1977 bishop, , 1980 bishop, , 1981 waitzkin, 1978) . the definition of health has been argued and debated over time as the ideology and content of modern medicine has been critiqued (mcneely, 2002; roemer, 1956 roemer, , 1978 waitzkin, 1978; szasz, 1977; kelman, 1984; illich et al., 1977; zola, 1972; geiger, 1976; thomas, 1976; anderson, smith, & sidel, 2005; dossey, 1982; salmon, 1984) . the authors believe in a broader conception of public health, and we hope to contribute insights into overall healthcare system dynamics so people might begin to question its purpose and organization; we believe such an approach can assist making better choices for policy changes toward the sustenance of well-being of the entire population-apart from merely the clinical condition of an individual patient's doctor-designated services. this includes the broader social, political economic, and ecological context in a given society for varying cohorts, as well as the societal commitment to health care as a basic human right. since the 1970s corporate health care has been reorganizing the production of health services, yielding new production techniques, producing many new products and services, and reaping bountiful profits, some extracted by executives and investors, others reinvested. all of this is changing relationships between patients and health professionals. through these processes, different expectations and new needs have arisen. these processes also create additional needs that production in a variety of ways attempts to satisfy, if profits can be made; nevertheless, these new discovered needs may be manufactured and not be helpful for advancing true public health for the entire population. they instead are designed to be suitable as more high-tech costly procedures to feed the medical-industrial complex. the profit-based means to satisfy designed health needs are always changing, but a few constants remain. medicine continues to seek out advancements to prolong life and supposedly improve quality of life. in a perverse way, it seems that american health care in particular is engaged in a desperate search for a cure for death and is willing to spend any amount of money to achieve it. so, is the nation ready to spend whatever is necessary to keep death at bay? without a doubt, the medical-industrial complex stands ready to do those things for people provided the funds are given to pay for them. availability of new technologies multiplies production possibilities and further offers commoditized versions of what is to be consumed, usually with explosive costs. for example, a new drug introduction onto the market can become a blockbuster, leading to often billions of new expenditures in a few years. rarely are pharmacoeconomic studies performed to demonstrate any other downstream system savings: should this be an fda requirement even after the introduction, let alone, before it becomes embedded as standard care? technology assessments need to become standard fare especially given the history and makeup of the mic. the pharmaceutical industry has come up with a plethora of drugs to address unwanted adverse drug reactions (or combo drugs that fuse two older drugs of shown ineffectiveness and more recently add-on drugs when the earlier ones don't work that well as the dtc ads reveal), which are created by use of other prescribed drugs. firms advertise entities directly to consumers to stimulate demand often around restrictive pbm formularies. such production and promotion require many people to buy into the constructed system rather unquestioningly (o'connor, 1974) . in a convoluted manner, the market and financing determine what gets produced, while at the same time, what gets produced has usually received payment to benefit providers and suppliers. the impact on costs for bringing in large numbers of uninsured has been notable. healthcare costs rose phenomenally from 2007 to 2015 with certain components doing better. drug costs rose 15.8% in 2015 alone with existing brand drugs seeing new price increases to bring healthcare expenditures up to 19.2% of gdp. back in 2015, a family of four was estimated to be spending $25,826 dollars per year for health care. for 2020, overall expenditures for health care in the united states reached $4 trillion annually, which may jump considerably with covid-19, going beyond a fifth of the gross domestic product. this sum remains a significant "expense" to the larger economy, which conservatives feel is burdensome on employers for competitiveness abroad, all government budgets, and their wealthy donors. beyond the weight upon consumers themselves, corporate employers have dealt with increasing health expenses. republicans seeking entitlement reductions propose cuts in medicaid, medicare, and other health programs. they are crafting coverage schemes (e.g., health savings accounts, narrow networks, short-term and skinny benefit plans, etc., along with changing disproportionate share hospital payments) to limit benefits and impose large caps, as was their agenda in the rollback of the aca. most of such ideas are unlikely to be well-received by the working and middle class and completely unmindful for the less fortunate among us. the object of these policy directions is rooted in the belief that people should be responsible for their own health and if one wants something, then just go out and earn the necessary funds to pay for it; otherwise, the person is likely to be deemed undeserving of help from the rest of us. this victim-blaming perspective is anathema to the premise of health as a fundamental human right with universal coverage! capital flooding into any sector of the economy tends to create bubbles, which typically suddenly deflate when better opportunities for investment arise elsewhere. renewed attempts to keep the present system intact appear to many as both untenable and unsustainable. policymakers beyond the "slash and burn" ultraconservatives may come up with a twisted option, instead of that of progressive democratic presidential candidates "medicare4all," but perhaps a vastly limited legislated medicaid for all form may evolve-such may have the cms contract with insurers to handle back end functions of insurance and payment much like many private insurance firms do now under medicare contracting. the current democratic presidential nominee joe biden does not seem to be on board the single-payer bandwagon, so the articulation of the design and its implementation of something new beyond "build upon the aca" has a very long way to go. do the congressional democrats have the wherewithal to come up with a winnable legislative set of real solutions and to resist compromise in such a manner as mentioned above? a fear should arise that such a compromise arrangement to gain feasible passage would likely be designed to remove risk from insurance companies, whereas finance capital might end up dictating more restricted conditions for health providers. rate setting, along with other mechanisms, could be established at state levels, supposedly favored by republicans (i.e., work requirements for medicaid recipients). other ideas should be explored to oppose the more draconian reforms led by the trump administration, like "skimpier health plans" pushed by us secretary of health and human services azar (armour, 2018) . in the final analysis, the authors here believe that our nation should guard against what may lie ahead as conservative health policies that favor those who wish to privatize the gain and give the public the losses-while medicaid recipients and uninsured cohorts may go with limited options for the interim, particularly in states that didn't expand medicaid. however, popularity for the aca has never been higher as witnessed in voters choosing medicaid additions last election in 2016. in short, well-connected private entities that are better-managed and connected stand to do well financially, while many other providers may face closure (goldsmith, 1985) . in the meanwhile, patient cohorts can expect increased outlays, restricted access, and worsening health outcomes. health care in america has become solidly more corporate as the next chapter will demonstrate, with many americans agreeing that profit seems to drive most aspects of the healthcare delivery system, including providers, pbms and insurance companies, retail clinics, and peripheral supply firms, such as the pharmaceutical industry. their purpose appears not to be enhancing the entire population's health and assuring access to needed services, nor especially raising the larger public health. this is not so easy to state since most physician and practitioners have devoted their careers to serving their patients, and many provider institutions do seek to perform to their utmost under challenging 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commitment to health and health care as a basic human right is fundamental. microsoft word special-issue-xcoax2020.docx citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 41 forging strategic alliances: the agency of human–algorithmic curation under conditions of platform capitalism gaia tedone centre for the study of the networked image, london south bank university, uk --- gaia.tedone@gmail.com ---- abstract under conditions of so-called platform capitalism, software and algorithms undertake the important task of designing the interaction amongst online users and establishing criteria of relevance for content. as such, they operate as curatorial agents of platforms’ content, establishing what is there to see, know and consume. this state of affairs calls for a revision of the traditional role of the (human) curator who is confronted with an online environment characterised by the unprecedented collision of commercial, aesthetic, cultural and political interests. the question of what kind of relationship the curator shall create with the algorithm then becomes crucial: is this a relationship of antagonism, resistance or alliance? how do these two curatorial agents influence each other? in this article, i analyse a cluster of hybrid artistic and curatorial experiments (including my own curatorial work) that foregrounds online platforms as discrete modes of socio-technical assemblages that curate particular forms of connectivity amongst networks of users, data layers and technical infrastructures. by doing so, i argue for the forging of strategic alliances between human and machinic curators as a strategy to channel new forms of creativity and cooperation under conditions of platform capitalism and to operationalise humanalgorithmic curation as a political and aesthetic practice within the networked culture. keywords platform capitalism; strategic alliances; human and algorithmic curation; curatorial biases; visibility gatekeeping. 1 | introduction over the last few years, the notion of platform capitalism (lobo 2014; srnicek 2017) has come to designate the present-day environment of internet business models based upon the ownership of algorithms, hardware and digital infrastructures that foster the extraction and control of data. this concept has helped to foreshadow two important conditions that characterise the present socio-technical juncture: the first concerns the evolution of the platform from an “operating and gaming system” (weatherby 2018) into a “socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalization” (langley and leyshon 2017). the platform, in other words, has become “the computational interface between society and capital” (weatherby 2018) by virtue of hosting processes of cultural and economic production and extraction that are centred around “the intensive techno-creative labour of users” (mcquire 2013). the second condition concerns the role of algorithms as proprietary assets of such online platforms and business models whose specific encoding shapes the distinctive ways in which users’ online activities, preferences and interactions get operationalised and hence monetised. under these conditions, the public debate around the social and cultural implications of algorithms has remained largely polarised between an understanding of algorithms as impenetrable “black boxes” on the one hand, and their condemnation as guilty parties for all platforms and social media sites’ misconducts, on the other. meanwhile, a new wave of literature coming from the fields of critical algorithmic studies (rutz 2016; kitchin 2017; bucher 2018) and experimental humanities (finn 2017) is attempting to problematise this schism, by creating new interpretative roadmaps for understanding the agency of algorithms in shaping social, cultural and economic life. figure 1 | book covers of art platforms and cultural production on the internet by olga goriunova and of platform capitalism by nick srnicek. citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 42 in parallel to these discussions, artists and cultural practitioners have begun to take issues with the current conditions of platform capitalism by either exposing and disrupting the power asymmetries, value systems and hidden financial infrastructures of online platforms (ubermorgen, femke herregraven), or by challenging the specific mechanics of particular algorithms, bots and pieces of software (constant dullaart, erica scourti, matthew plummer-fernandez). in the context of both these theoretical investigations and practical experiments, the role of the algorithm is often paralleled to that of the online curator. this is because algorithms are accountable for the organisation and arrangement of visual content on the web through activities such as searching, collating, grouping, sorting, analysing, visualising. within online platforms, they sort out content according to criteria of relevance for users as well as manage the interactions between them. while this view rightfully attributes curatorial capacity to algorithms, the danger is that it reduces the activity of curating to a purely computable task, discarding the fact that the latter also involves cognitive faculties, such as contextualising, interpreting, reflecting, sensing out, imagining, criticising and inserting humour. on the opposite side of this debate is the position held by those human curators who want to assert their superiority over machinic agents at all costs, maintaining that they do serve the public “in a way that big data and learning algorithms cannot” (byrne 2015). so, the issue at stake is what kind of relationship can the curator create with the algorithm: in what ways can such relationship be described? as a relationship of antagonism, resistance or alliance? how do these two curatorial agents influence each other? in this article, i want to argue that both curators and algorithms are key “organizational nodes in cultural systems” (nagler and del pesco 2011) and acknowledge their growing interdependence in everyday socio-technical systems. as such i suggest the necessity to further explore the terrain of human and algorithmic curation, recognising in the forging of strategic alliances the potential to overcome the “gap between computation and culture” (finn 2017, p.55) by means of creativity and new forms of cooperation amongst human and technical agents. in what follows, i will analyse a cluster of hybrid artistic and curatorial projects, each of which enters in a different relationship with the curatorial agency of the algorithm. while the analysis of the first project cosmos carl (2014–) opens broader reflections on the current conditions of platform capitalism, the account of the following two projects – angie waller’s ebay longing and my own experiment with the ebay algorithm cassini – more closely look at the mechanics of the algorithm of ebay at different points in time. the last example discussed brings the issue of human-algorithmic curation more closely within the perimeter of the institutional art-world, through a critique of hal 101, the web crawler conceived and programmed by the curatorial team of the museum of digital art (muda) in zurich. through the analysis of such experiments, i want to argue for the forging of “strategic alliances” between human and non-human curators as a strategy to channel new forms of creativity and cooperation under conditions of platform capitalism and to operationalise online curation as a political and aesthetic practice within the networked culture. i adopt the term “strategic alliances” from the language of business, where it is usually employed as a synonym for “strategic partnership” – an agreement for cooperation between two parties who decide to work together towards common objectives, capitalising on each other’s strengths, while maintaining their independence. here, i employ it to suggest that human-algorithmic curation is a networked practice that could engender new forms of cooperation between humans and technical agents within an online environment where the boundaries between corporate work, cultural production and social interaction are becoming increasingly blurred. 2 | cosmos carl: a platform parasite working with technology against its own grain has been a preoccupation of cultural practitioners and net artists since the early 1990s, when the space of the web was still an uncharted territory characterised by “the endless joy of serendipity and strong feeling of responsibility” (lialina in andrew and papadimitriou 2018). with the development of the commercial web in the early 2000s, artists and curators began to shift their attention towards online platforms as sites for sociological and anthropological investigation on the one hand, and for emancipatory and political practices, on the other. an interesting example of a hybrid artistic and curatorial experiment working with technology against its own grain is offered by cosmos carl, an initiative launched in 2014 by artists frederique pisuisse and saemundur thor helgason. cosmos carl consists of an online repository which hosts links to embedded projects occurring in external platforms such as google drive, torrent, pinterest, youtube, etsy, instagram and ebay among others. by clicking on the links featured on cosmos carl website, visitors are re-directed to artists projects that are active or eventually “no longer available” on the internet elsewhere. the interventionist character of the project is reflected in its underlining politics, which follows the legacy of 1960s cultural jamming practices and of early net art, respectively concerned with “the targeted application of the very method one intends to critique” (elbaor 2018) and the resistance towards privately owned art. as pisuisse and helgason observe: cosmos carl artworks are not necessarily political, but by utilizing platforms for the display of art, the contributions disrupt the citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 43 platforms’ usual traffic. in that way, the works potentially protest global platforms like google and facebook, even though they simultaneously accept their terms and conditions. (pisuisse and helgason 2017) as the above statement reveals, the projects that cosmos carl promotes play out a key tension: that between online users’ automatic habit of accepting platforms’ terms of service and the reflexive choice (often carried out by artists and creative practitioners) of breaching them to make their procedures more visible. moreover, because of the embedded nature of all the artistic and curatorial interventions it activates and hosts, the project operates in a grey area of practice between “not-just-art” (fuller 1997) and “not-just-art-curating” (tyzlik-carver 2016). two additional dimensions of interest are specific to cosmos carl. the first, is that it brings to the fore the agential dimension of the technology underpinning each platform or social media site, as this forges the kinds of creative interventions that are possible under conditions of online embeddedness. for instance, an intervention on pinterest poses a diverse set of challenges and opportunities than one on tumblr or instagram in terms of interface, image display and audience experience. figure 2 | cosmos carl_wet unboxing_2018_alex frost in this respect, cosmos carl foregrounds a complex understanding of the platform not simply as a “networked repository or connective archive”, but crucially as a mechanism of cultural production and as an “apparatus that observes the world and generates ordering statements” (mckenzie 2018). the second dimension is its distributed and collective character, which is the ability to coordinate different interventions in several platforms. this aspect significantly increases the impact of the overall operation, which spreads like a “slow virus” (pisuisse and helgason 2017), providing a connecting tissue for all the various interventions activated. what cosmos carl suggests is that the effects of such modes of practice cannot be judged in isolation or within a short timeframe but can be valued in the long term and in concert with other similar operations. in other words, that their force lies in the ability to be part of and form a network of relations, that is to establish strategic alliances amongst creative practitioners and technical agents on the basis of shared and differential values, intents and agendas. in the case of cosmos carl the aim is to produce a creative rupture in the system of platform capitalism and to reveal how platforms curate different networks of connectivity. by drawing attention towards the behaviours of various commercial platforms and their apparatuses, the project emphasises how the cocreation of value passes through the interplay between the platform’s infrastructure, community of users and data layers. taking into the account all these three dimensions, the following section zooms into the socio-technical configuration of a particular commercial platform – ebay – via a joined discussion of angie waller’s work ebay longing (2003) and my curatorial experiment with the platform’s algorithm cassini (2017) as part of my participation to the project #exstrange (http://exstrange.com). 3 | working with the ebay algorithm 3.1 ebay longing (2003) pre-facebook and pre-tinder, ebay is one of the first online platforms that allowed users to interact with strangers on the web. the platform was officially launched in 1997, two years after its founder pierre omidyar wrote the code for auctionweb (its first iteration). soon it established itself as an open marketplace dedicated to bringing together buyers and sellers and producing “an army of bubble wrap entrepreneurs” (lewis 2008, p. 7). among the several artistic projects that have creatively investigated the commercial platform of ebay and engaged with its community (john d. freyer’s all my life for sale, 2000; emily spivack’s sentimental value, 2007–), angie waller’s ebay longing (2003) is the only identified that specifically explored the platform’s search algorithm and technical infrastructure. waller’s intervention consisted of scraping the ebay database during the years of the so-called “war on terrorism” using the word “afghanistan” as the search query. the aim of this quasi-anthropological study was to explore the shift in the sale of objects in countries such as syria, afghanistan and iraq through the collection of a few hundred images. the images depicted objects spanning from memorabilia and souvenirs to american-made t-shirts bearing slogans in support of the war, alongside bumper stickers and miscellaneous items that the troops were sending back home. waller’s intention with this project was to critically reflect upon the relationship between users’ activity and the performance of the algorithm as influenced by specific cultural trends and contingent political biases. in the artist’s own words, the project was intended to track “how the consumer goods of an online bartering database reflect the sentiment of its active online community” (waller 2016, p.223). the outcome of her intervention foreshadows that commercial platforms are not only sites for the citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 44 production of economic value, but that they also generate social value through the affective interplay between user behaviours, networked architecture and algorithmic systems. additionally, the project emphasised how ebay is a particular coming together of “code and commerce” (langley and leyshon 2017), which synthesizes every kind of exchange amongst users as searchable data. more broadly, it pointed to the problem of human and algorithmic curation and its entanglement with broader questions of power and control associated with the use and implementation of technology. this is a topic that waller continued to explore in her subsequent works, such as for instance data mining with amazon (2003) and how to look at artist networks (2015) – works concerned respectively with the algorithms of amazon database and google knowledge graph. waller’s experiment paved the way for my exploration of the later ebay’s algorithm cassini (2013) as part of my participation as a guest curator to the project #exstrange (2017). 3.2 curatorial consultancy service with cassini on #exstrange (2017) project #exstrange was an initiative mobilised by curators marialaura ghidini and rebekah modrak that used the online marketplace of ebay as “a site of artistic production and cultural exchange and as an artistic intervention into capitalism” (ghidini and modrak 2017) [1]. the premise of the project was to treat the idea of the auction as an artwork: hence the category chosen, the images uploaded, the prize and the description. everything was to be considered part of the artwork and each auction would run for seven days. all auctions and interactions with buyers were documented on the project’s website [2] and in a catalogue published in the summer of 2017. through this conceptual framework, the curators were aiming to place art in a context where it could solicit an “exchange with a stranger”, from where the title #exstrange developed. when reflecting upon the actual visibility of the project #exstrange and its penetration within the ebay platform, it became clear that the latter was executing a key operation of mediation between the project and its publics by means of its search engine and “best match system”. further to exploring ebay analytics i soon discovered that the ebay search algorithm was enhanced in 2013 to improve the platform’s overall performance, selling standards and costumer satisfaction. interestingly, ebay renamed its algorithm after a nasa space probe dedicated to a famous italian-born astronomer of the seventeenth century, giovanni domenico cassini [3]. cassini replaced ebay’s previous search engine, voyager, revealing the consistent fascination of ebay developers with the imaginary of the nasa. its implementation, led by the then ebay’s vice president of experience and search hugh williams, was part of a rebranding strategy which began around 2008 and that marked a new era in the platform’s history: the move from a selleroriented marketplace to a customer-centred one. essentially cassini ranks highly listings that are honest and clear, informative, categorized correctly, and supported with excellent customer service. to foster the platform’s computational culture, cassini values engagement over everything else. the algorithm is also described as “data-driven, valuesdriven, shopper-oriented” (hsiao 2017), being based upon ebay’s four corporate values of “relevance”, “value”, “trust”, and “convenience” (hsiao 2017). if these values are observed, the visibility of a listing is optimized and long-term relationships between users are maintained. through analysing and understanding the effect of cassini it became clear to me that the algorithm was a crucial curatorial agent: it sorted and selected content according to criteria of relevance and managed the interactions between users. for this reason, i decided to forge a strategic alliance with the algorithm by means of circulating and selling on the platform a joint curatorial consultancy service. unlike waller’s earlier project, which more overtly pursued a hacking strategy, consisting in the actual scraping of the data generated on the platform, my strategic alliance with cassini aimed to produce a moment of dissonance, ambiguity and critical reflection. figure 3 | cassini, the algorithm of engagement the parameters and visual language of my strategic alliance with cassini were defined through the process of interacting with the platform’s interface and database, from the choice of the listing’s category to its full descriptive text and the images uploaded. the little-known ebay subcategory chosen for my auction “specialty services > ebay auction services > appraisal & authentication” assisted the purpose of highlighting that the sale consisted in an unusual service and that such service was closely related to the mechanisms of validation of the platform itself. the “item specifics” described a mode of human and algorithmic curation, which aimed at merging a quality usually associated to humans (reliability) with one generally attributed to machines (efficiency), through the common channel of creativity. the latter was citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 45 framed and put forward as a property that cannot be located in either humans or machines alone, but “it is found in their interrelationships, in-between” (goriunova 2007). although available to all ebay users, the service was specifically addressed to artists or curators interested in exploring the currency of their name and their listing in the liminal space between the commercial platform – the so-called “ebay universe of happy transactions” (hsiao 2017) – and the art world. the curatorial consultancy service placed particular emphasis on two key success markers – visibility and criticality – which weigh the relevance of an artist or a work of art in both the art market and the institutional establishment. these success markers are usually hard to quantify and control since they depend upon highly subjective and volatile criteria, such as fame, chance, taste and market fluctuations. by invoking the calculating capacity of the cassini algorithm in the process of evaluating them, through the strategic alliance, i performed a double mandate: on the one hand, i aimed at exposing the arbitrary mechanisms of the art world and its market – mechanisms of judgement, validation, inclusion and exclusion – and traded them as assets in a commercial exchange; on the other hand, i wished to confront “a certain tyranny to the curator’s role” (brand 2011), by testing a more open and transparent approach through the involvement of a non-human agent. overall, i attempted to perform an institutional critique of the system of art curating by recognising the influential role the curator plays in shaping not only “the public tastes but the very value system of art” (tyżlik-carver 2016, p.51). the affordable price of the consultancy service – only $15 – reiterated the urgency to challenge mechanisms of curatorial gatekeeping and to redistribute agency more evenly across all agents – artists, curators, algorithms and online users – involved in the process of curating. a number of actual benefits were offered as part of the consultancy, including: unlimited skype and telephone assistance towards the creation of a listing that the algorithm cassini would rank well; the cocreation with cassini of an ebay collection tailored on the buyer’s listing and personal tastes; the fabrication of an electronic report summarising the key findings emerging from this experimental mode of human and algorithmic curation; a special announcement during a public event in a prestigious london gallery which aimed at extending the buyer’s visibility from the platform to the art world. the visuals accompanying the listing drew together the language of astronomy, search optimisation and online curation. they included satellite-generated images produced by the cassini space probe, a lithograph of the astronomer giovanni domenico cassini and two screenshots taken from the platform featuring the error messages that appear when a given listing cannot be seen or accessed in a specific location or at a given time: “this listing has been removed, or this item is not available” and “this item isn’t available in your location”. the function of the latter was to hint at the possibility that a mode of human-algorithmic curation could help circumnavigating visibility problems on the platform and fashioning new modes of visibility. the listing went live on march 23, 2017 at 10:00 uk time. it was artist alessandro sambini, registered on ebay as user “afaja”, who purchased it. as part of the consultancy, i conferred with sambini and guided him through the production of a brand-new listing entitled portable wildlife image instance [4]. sambini’s auction ranked at the top of the ebay search. this was due to its original title, witty description and highquality photographs — three features that the previous study of cassini had revealed as key. after fierce competition and thirty-two different bids, user “temporama” bought portable wildlife image instance at the price of $44.00, for an increased market value of 40.5%. the kind of operation the strategic alliance with cassini produced can be first and foremost described as conceptual, in the sense of working with different planes of imagination, and critical, in the sense of soliciting a reflection about the algorithm’s concealed role within the platform. the polysemy of the word cassini on the web was instrumental for these purposes, since it enabled to put in relation different concepts (cassini the astronomer, cassini the space probe and cassini the algorithm), fields (science, culture, technology) practices (art curating, business, hacking) and regimes of visibility (the human language of signs and symbols and the computational code of numbers and data). to provide a foundation to the strategic alliance with the algorithm, a new aesthetic and semantic coherence was created out of the remix of these different planes of information and imaginaries. such remix was enabled by the simple operations of cut-and-paste, which are available to online users and that allow the de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation of content (paul 2006; groys 2016). in this case, human and algorithmic curation operated as a method to forge a conceptual and cultural reading of the algorithm and to re-envision technical practice as a crucial aspect of culture from which poetic performance can originate. however, through the course of the experiment, the premises of my strategic alliance with cassini, which were based upon the complementarity of aims and actions between the algorithm and myself, were complicated. this is because i discovered that the curatorial capacity of the algorithm was inextricably linked to the wider dynamics of control over users’ data and behaviours that ebay implements because it is a commercial platform. in other words, the cassini algorithm was acting as a visibility gatekeeper, determining what users see, know and citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 46 consume on the platform. additionally, it also created an “art filter bubble” (tedone 2019) – an algorithmically delineated community of artists and art professionals whose online preferences and searches qualify them as already part of a particular system. consequently, the circulation of my project and its sale remained confined within the perimeter defined by the project #exstrange, even if its premise was to open up such confines by challenging the conventional paradigm of art curating through a mode of human and algorithmic curation. this outcome points to an important paradox which describes the state of artistic and curatorial interventions online: either they exist within predefined contours that link them back to specific systems of reference and fields – these being for instance the contemporary art and new media worlds or the academia – perpetuating old institutional separations that the logic of the web attempts to disrupt – or they risk dissolving within the plethora of content produced online or disappearing entirely from the web. while the latter risk was detected in the case of both waller’s project and the interventions undertaken under the umbrella of cosmos carl, the next project runs into the opposite problem, that of reinforcing the logic of the “art filter bubble” (tedone 2019) and perpetuating the biases already engrained in the process of curating and in the fabric of the internet. 4 | the algorithm–curator and its biases: hal 101 the recently funded museum of digital art (muda) in zurich represents a case in point of small and flexible institution that is currently experimenting with a mode of human and algorithmic curation. the team at the museum has decided to open its curatorial process to the participation of hal 101, a web crawler that searches the web in order to index and select potential artists to exhibit. in this way, the museum does not only create a strategic alliance with the algorithm, but it also takes this interaction a step further through the actual programming of hal 101. the premises behind this project are therefore different from my own intervention with cassini, which operated at a conceptual, imaginative and critical level. the muda project also diverges from the other two examples discussed above (cosmos carl’s parasite project and angie waller’s intervention) in which algorithms where pushed to work against the grain to create fissures in the systems of commercial platforms. the fact that muda is a non-profit cultural organisation whose mission is that of “untangling the digital fabric connecting data, algorithms and society” (muda website), frees this mode of human and algorithmic curation from the logic of profit, offering the opportunity to test the pursuit of a cultural agenda. however, the parameters that are used to encode the algorithm and the specific kinds of actions it executes under this allegedly transparent agenda remain opaque. as can be learned from the museum’s website, hal 101 has been instructed to look for artists whose data traces correspond with those initially chosen by the curatorial team for the museum’s inaugural set of exhibitions (hendricks 2017; muda website). therefore, the working of the algorithm mirrors and executes decisions previously made by the curatorial team. the parameters upon which the algorithm has been programmed are not publicly disclosed and the information available is limited to the claim that the algorithm’s search ensures that “nationality, age, gender or financial factors don't override the decisionmaking process” (muda website). in the framing of hal 101 as a curatorial agent, the muda team thus emphasises how the scope and reach of the algorithm prevents the perpetration of biases that might affect the selection process – biases based, for instance, on an artist’s previous participation in a particular biennale or an exhibition in an established gallery. the algorithm is indeed presented as an agent that can offer visibility for artists who are not already in the public eye. the fact that the algorithm creates a scoring system that is not personal and does not differentiate between and judge different information sources is presented as evidence of the algorithm’s democratic approach. but what such an argument disregards is that technology can in fact never be neutral or democratic (chun 2009; hendricks 2017; bucher 2018) and that considerations of the context and provenance of any information form part of a process of critical evaluation and analysis. figure 4 | web crawler free icon. available from online web fonts. in its attempt to overcome the curatorial biases associated with the activities of search, selection and evaluation, hal 101 inevitably amplifies biases that are already built-in on the internet itself, and potentially also creates new ones. its logic of objectivity and transparency is undermined by the fact that its choices are precisely based on information that is already visible online – information such as an citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 47 artist’s name, and the titles and specifications of artworks represented online and have already been indexed by search engines. as such its attempt to critically reflect on the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that the very process of curating articulates, is not substantiated by an equally necessary awareness of the biases the algorithm itself generates and reproduces. in its work as a curator, the algorithm primarily serves here as a tool that simplifies the operations of searching and selecting, reduces complexity in the decision-making process and absolves human curators from the difficult task of operating “cautious differentiation” (goriunova 2012, p.45) from within the aesthetic complexity of the networked culture. such differentiation involves attentiveness to the nuances between cultural appropriation and plagiarism, user creativity and savvy marketing strategies, web parody and defamation – all differentiations that rely upon the use of human cognitive faculties such as critical reflexivity [5] and knowledge. what such a shortcoming points to, is the need for online curatorial practices to encompass not only a sophisticated knowledge of algorithms but also their very own critique – understood not as some automatic dismissal of the potential of algorithms to transform the practice of curation, but as an opportunity to explore more thoroughly their wider socio-cultural impact. as bucher lucidly puts it: algorithms matter in a variety of ways: in their capacity to govern participation on platforms, distribute information flow, embed values in design, reflect existing societal biases and help reinforce them by means of automation and feedback loops, and in their power to make people feel and act in specific ways. (bucher 2018, p.120) consequently, she further observes, “knowing algorithms might involve other kinds of registers than code” (bucher 2018, p.113), such as the register of critical analysis, speculative inquiry and poetic imagination. 5 | conclusions the comparative analysis of these examples suggests that a nuanced approach should be developed in regard to the kind of relationship the online curator shall create with the algorithm and that the forging of strategic alliances between human and technical agents is not devoid of frictions and biases. it also revealed that curators and algorithms similarly take up the role of cultural and visibility gatekeepers since they both operate through mechanisms of filtering and selection; such gatekeeping mechanisms, if not attentively recognised and monitored, could even be amplified through their cooperation. for this reason, the development of strategic alliances between curators and algorithms must be based upon the critical awareness of both their complementary roles and potentially similar biases. more precisely, these strategic alliances would need to recognise online platforms as discrete sociotechnical intermediaries that “condition how networks come together” (langley and leyshon 2017), whilst remaining attentive to the contingent and performative nature of their algorithms. moreover, they would need to incorporate a critical reading of both the algorithm and the curatorial process involved, their potential biases and filtering mechanisms; the parameters of such alliances would need to be negotiated case by case; their outcomes would depend on the kinds of values that are encoded in the algorithmic system and which the alliances aim to produce and co-create. in other words, in order to understand what strategic alliances can achieve, it is important to first recognise that the social and cultural role of both the algorithm and the curator are still very much up for debate and contestation and that the values of sharing, aggregation and cooperation need to be built into technical systems in order to challenge the logic of platform capitalism. under this light, experiments in the field of human and algorithmic curation can offer the opportunity to implement a mode of “processual criticism that is both reflexive and playful” (finn 2017, p.13), whilst also bringing to the public attention urgent debates concerning the wider implications algorithms have on society and the increasing interdependence between humans and machines in everyday life. their social and cultural remit could serve the purpose of understanding that humanalgorithmic curation is a subtle operation whose politics lies in opening up small brackets of intervention against current power asymmetries and in envisioning new dynamics of value co-creation amongst users and technical agents. as such, the forging of strategic alliances between humans and algorithmic agents can help developing a fine-grained reading, interpretation and informed questioning of the socio-technical transformations brought about by the algorithmic and “platformed” (weatherby 2018) world. endnotes [1] for an in-depth description and analysis of my contribution to the project’s #exstrange, see my essay for its catalogue co-curating with cassini: from the abyss of commodification to the exploration of space curation (tedone 2017) and my forthcoming doctoral dissertation, curating the networked image: circulation, commodification, computation (tedone 2019). [2] see: http://exstrange.com. [3] cassini was the first to take successful measurements of the solar system latitude and to discover what became known as the cassini division in the rings of saturn. the cassini mission to saturn, citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 48 which started in the early 1980s and terminated on september 15, 2017, was one of nasa’s most renewed missions in recent times. [4] sambini’s listing played with the tropes of contemporary landscape photography and dada ready-made and sold half of a shopping bag of the multinational retailer tesco depicting the image of a generic countryside view. [5] ‘critical reflexivity’ is here understood as a quality belonging to humans only. my use of the term draws upon alvesson and köldberg’s framing of reflexivity as “ways of seeing which act back on and reflect existing ways of seeing” (clegg & hardy, 1996, p.4 cited in alvesson & köldberg, 2009, p.271), whereby the act of seeing is “inseparable from the perspective, it is perspectival” (alvesson & köldberg 2009, p.6). it is coupled with scott lash’s understanding of critical reflexivity as a mode of reflexivity whose reference shifts ‘from everyday experience to “system”, of commodities, bureaucracy, or reification of life forms’ (lash 1994, p.140). references alvesson, m. and köldberg, k. (2009) reflexive methodologies. 2nd ed., london: sage. andrew, g. and papadimitriou, i. (2018). search engine art. london: digital futures, victoria and albert museum. brand, w. (2011). an algorithmic future: can computers curate?. retrieved from: http://artfcity. com. bucher, t. (2018). if ... then: algorithmic power and politics. oxford: oxford university press inc. byrne, d. (2015). david byrne: a great curator beats any big company’s algorithm. new statesman. retrieved from: http://www. newstatesman.com/2015/05/manversusalgorithm. chun, w.h.k. (2009). introduction: race and/as technology; or, how to do things to race, camera obscura 24 (1 (70)): 7-35. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-013. elbaor, c. (2018). cosmos carl allows artists to commandeer amazon and facebook, retrieved from: https://garage.vice.com/ en_us/contributor/caroline-elbaor. finn, e. (2017). what algorithms want, imagination in the age of computing. cambridge, ma: the mit press. fuller, m. (1997). a means of mutation notes on i/o/d 4: the web stalker. retrieved from: http://bak.spc.org/iod/ mutation.html. ghidini, m., and modrak, r. (2017). #exstrange: a curatorial intervention on ebay. ann arbor: michigan publishing, maize books. groys, b. (2016). in the flow, london: verso. hendricks, m. (2017). the algorithm as a curator: in search of a non-narrated collection’. retrieved from: https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/algorithmcurator-search-non-narrated-collectionpresentation. hsiao, a. (2017). make ebay’s cassini search work for you understand and manipulate ebay’s cassini search engine. retrieved from: https://www.thebalance.com/makeebay-scassini-search-work-for-you-1140402-2017, 2017. kitchin, r. (2017). thinking critically about and researching algorithms. journal information, communication & society. vol. 20, no. 1, 14– 29. langley, p. and leyshon, a. (2017). platform capitalism: the intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation. finance and society, 3(1): 11-31, https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.v3i1.1936. lash, s. (1994). reflexivity and its doubles: structure, aesthetics, community’ in reflexive modernization. politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order. eds. beck, ulrich, giddens, antony and lash, scott. cambridge: polity press. lobo, s. (2014). never mind the sharing economy: here’s platform capitalism, network cultures blog, 16 october. retrieved from: http://networkcultures.org/mycreativity/2014/10/ 16/never-mind-the-sharing-economyheresplatform capitalism. mckenzie, a. (2018). from api to ai: platforms and their opacities’ in information, communication & society, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2018.147656 9 nagler, c and del pesco, j. (2011). curating in the time of algorithms, fillip, (15). retrieved from: http://www. delpesco.com/fillip15_delpesco_nagler. pdf. paul, c. (2006). flexible contexts, democratic filtering and computer-aided curating. in curating immateriality: the work of the curator in the age of network systems, edited by joasia krysa. new york, nj: autonomedia. pisuisse, f. and thor helgason, s. (2017). “spreading like a slow virus”: parasitizing the commercial web with cosmos carl’, retrieved from: https://www.aqnb. com/2017/03/21/spreading-like-a-slowvirusparasitizing-the-commercial-webwith-cosmoscarl. rutz, h. h. (2016). ‘agency and algorithms’, citar journal, volume 8, no. 1 – special issue: xcoax, 2016. srnicek, n. (2016). platform capitalism. cambridge: polity press. tedone, g. (2017). co-curating with cassini: from the abyss of commodification to the exploration of space curation’. in #exstrange: a curatorial intervention on ebay, edited by marialaura ghidini and rebekah modrak. ann arbour: citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 49 maize books, an imprint of michigan publishing, pp. 180-185, 2017 tedone, g. (2019). curating the networked image. circulation, commodification, computation. phd dissertation, london south bank university, centre for the study of the networked image. tyżlik-carver, m. (2016). curating in/as commons posthuman curating and computational cultures. phd dissertation. aarhus university. weatherby l. (2018). delete your account: on the theory of platform capitalism. los angeles review of books. retrieved from: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-youraccount-on-the-theory-of-platform-capitalism. law flexibilization and changes in romanian capitalism abstract: in the this paper i will analyze the 2011 flexibilization of labor law and trade union law/social dialogue law in romania. the theoretical framework used is the varieties of capitalism approach related to flexibilization. the analysis will focus on 5 types of flexibilization: i. numerical flexibility; ii. salary flexibility; iii. organizational flexibility; iv. labor time flexibility (cato & stoller, 2004, 34; atkinson, 1984; barbieri, 2009, 621) and v. social dialogue flexibilization. the documents i will compare are a) the labor law from 2003 and the labor law from 2011 and b) the collective bargaining law from 1996, changed into the social dialogue law in 2011. for comparing the labor laws from 2003 and 2011 i analyze the same articles corresponding with every flexibilization type and identify if there existed any changes. for the second pair of laws (the collective bargaining law and the social dialogue law) i mostly analyze the articles related with collective bargaining and the role of social dialogue institutions. the main idea is to identify if there were any changes in the model of market economy after the flexibilization of the labor law and trade union/ social dialogue law. keywords: flexibilization, varieties of capitalism, labor law, social dialogue law, romanian market economy. 1. introduction since 2008, europe has faced two big crises: the financial crisis that started in 2008 in the united states of america, and the crisis of public indebtedness that started in the eurozone in 2010 (rubery, 2015, 728). basically, these two moments have brought about great changes in europe, both in the european union and its member states. for example, at the european union level has been created a new macroeconomic governance regime (that includes rules and institutions to coordinate member states) via the euro plus pact, the stability and growth pact, the fiscal compact and a ‘six-pack’ of eu regulations (lombardo, 2017). at the member states level, austerity measures like changing the labor law in spain (lombardo, 2017) and cutting social spending in italy (kazeprov & ranci, 2017, 95) were applied. states like greece, spain, portugal, ireland, italy were hit hard by the indebtedness crisis and they did some changes in the way they spend the public money. sometimes, the changes in the way they spend the public money means domestication of the gender regime in spain (lombardo, 2017) or even cutting from social spending in italy (kazeprov & ranci, 2017), but the changes were focused in many cases on labor market as well. if the changes of labor laws were radically different, there is a possibility to change the way capitalism is functioning. alexandru liþã ma in labor studies, national university of political and administrative studies (nupas), bucharest email: alexandru.lita.14@politice.ro perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 5 states from eastern europe, such as romania, bulgaria and the baltic countries (latvia, lithuania, estonia) were not really hit hard by the crisis, but still their governments imposed austerity measures (blyth, 2013). one of the countries that has adopted the toughest austerity measures is romania. in 2011, the government decided to cut salaries, to cut public spendings and also to dramatically change the labor laws (trif, 2013). regarding the change of labor laws, romanian scholars opinions are divided, some of them are arguing that the effect of changing the labor laws was positive for some trade unions (in the public health sector) (adascalitei & muntean, 2014), others are arguing that the effects were devastating for all trade unions (trif, 2013). in romania, the crisis started out of nowhere in 2010, after the presidential elections had taken place (december 2009). traian bãsescu won the elections and he became president of romania for the second time (in a row). he made publicly that romania was in crisis and state that the romanian state need austerity measures. the president and the prime minister used to be members in the same political party so they collaborated for implementing the austerity measures. they imposed salary cuts and social insurances cuts (pirvoiu, 2010), finally they started to change the main laws (e.g. labor law) in favor of investors. the romanian labor law had a very powerful corporatist influence before the crisis. the corporatist influence came into the romanian legislation via the french labor law. in 2003, romanian lawyers used the french law as a model of writing the first romanian labor law. but in 2011, the government decided to change the law 53/2003 (the labor law) and 130/1996 (the collective bargaining law) after a lobby campaign done by the foreign investors council. from 2011, the law 53/2003 lost a significant element from the corporatist heritage, and the law 130/2996 was simply abolished and replaced by another law without any corporatist influences. the following paper is structure on 4 chapters, i. introduction divided in 2 sub-chapters (research question, hypothesis and methodology); ii. theoretical framework; iii. legal framework; iv. conclusions. in the first chapter (introduction) i am going to describe the international and the romanian political context, then i am going to state the research question and hypothesis, finally i am going to describe the methodology used in my research. 1.1. research question and hypothesis the main question in this context is: what has changed in romanian capitalism after the flexibilization of the labor law in 2011? thus, to clarify the main question, and for a deeper understanding of the situation and its changes, i came up with two sub-questions as follows: a) what are the concrete changes in the labor legislation texts (social dialogue law and labor law)?; b) how these reforms change romanian capitalism? 1.2. hypothesis in this sub-chapter i am going to describe the context of this research and paper, then i am going to point a specificity of the romanian capitalism and finally i will present my hypothesis. the recession was also used as a pretext by the centre-right government to reform the industrial relations system. the so-called social dialogue act was passed unilaterally by the government without being debated in parliament and without involving the social partners. (trif, 2013, 236). 6 perspective politice perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 6 some romanian scholars argue that romanian capitalism turn into an authoritarian neoliberalism system (trif, 2013, 236) which is regulated into the directions of avoiding social dialogue by making the trade unions and workers to obey the state and the employers. the goal of this type of regulations it is to attract the foreign investors/capital. in this context social peace looks like it is done with the help of physical power/coercion. the romanian capitalism seen from bohle and greskovits (2012) perspective is poorly regulated by the weak romanian state and the trade unions are neglected. i would say that the legal framework before 2010 had corporatist influence (like i already said via french labor law), but since then, they change the law in order to avoid the social dialogue. so, we couldn’t say is poorly regulated, because the regulations were there before, the law makers know what is going on and they decided not to give so much power to the social dialogue institutions. they just change some articles from social dialogue act in order to make it more friendly to the investors. the working idea looks like the labor laws were flexibilized in favour of employers and investors (in some key points) and as a consequence, romanian capitalism has changed into a free market economy not poorly regulated, but which not imply social partners into a dialogue, open to welcoming foreign capital (more than before), more dependent on foreign capital market. 1.3. methodology in this sub-chapter i am going to describe the way i did the research and what i will take into account from my research in the next chapters. the purpose of this paper is to analyze the labor legislation before and after the 2011 flexibilization and then to analyze if those changes affect are related with the romanian capitalism. the research method will be document analysis and i am going to analyze the labor law and the trade union law. for both of them i am going to analyze both versions of a law (before and after 2011). for the labor law i analyze in comparison the law 53/2003 (the version before 2011) and the law 53/2003 (the version modified in 2011). for the trade union law i analyze in comparison the law 130/1996 (the collective bargaining law), which is the version before 2011, with the social dialogue law (law 62/2011) the version which is use now since 2011. the collective bargaining law was abolished in 2011 and the lawmakers voted the social dialogue law. i found all versions of both laws on internet via www.lege5.ro . the analysis is focus on 5 directions of flexibility: numerical flexibility; salary flexibility; organizational flexibility; labor time flexibility (cato & stoller, 2004, 34; atkinson, 1984; barbieri, 2009, 621) and social dialogue flexibility. all five directions will focus on flexibility of the labor laws in favor of employers in comparison with the previous legislative framework. i am going to describe in the theoretical chapter every type of flexibility. the first four directions of flexibility (numerical flexibility, salary flexibility, organizational flexibility and working time flexibility) are related with the labor law. in contrast, the social dialogue flexibility is related with the social dialogue laws (the collective bargaining law and the social dialogue law) and it includes: the role of social dialogue institutions and the collective bargaining (when this means the way collective bargaining is reached). iunie 2018 7perspective politice perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 7 2. theoretical framework in this chapter i am going to set the theoretical framework for the further analysis. first of all, i am going to present the varieties of capitalism (voc) approach, then i am going to argue for the importance of the legal framework of the voc approach. finally i will describe the theoretical framework for flexibilization. 2.1. varieties of capitalism in order to identify and to understand the differences and similarities across the western democracies and economies the social scientists developed several approaches, but two of them are the most important. the welfare state centered approach, developed in the 90s and the actor-centered approach or varieties of capitalism (voc) approach which have been developed in 2000’s (hamann & kelly, 2008, 131). the welfare state approach is based on the three worlds of welfare capitalism by esping-andersen (1990). he identify 3 types of welfare capitalism: liberal, conservative and social-democratic. this distinction is based on cross-class coalitions and working class mobilization (hamann & kelly, 2008, 131; esping-andersen, 1990, 31). the voc approach is actor centered, so this theory is centered on the actors, as firms, producer groups and governments (hall & soskice, 2001, 6). this approach is based on neocorporatist literature and it offers an answer to the way institutions are functioning in the framework of neoliberal capitalism (arpad, 2015, 82). basically, the voc approach identifies two types of market economies: liberal market economies (lme) and coordinated market economies (cme). this differentiation is based on: industrial relations, vocational training and education, corporate governance, interfirm relations, relationship with employees (hall & soskice, 2001; hassel, 2015). moreover, other types of market economies have been developed; for instance dependent market economy, which is specific in the eastern european area. mostly, this type of market economies is defining the market economy from ex-communist countries and, also, the dependence of foreign capital. in the following paragraphs i am going to describe briefly these three types of market economy. „in coordinated market economies, firms depend more heavily on non-market relationships to coordinate their endeavors with other actors and to construct their core competencies” (hall & soskice, 2001, 8). basically, the firms cooperate with each other in order to achieve their goals, also the relations between workers or trade unions and their employers are friendly and they are not literally struggling but cooperating and negotiating. the countries that can be included in this type of market economy are: denmark, sweden, austria, finland, germany, south korea, belgium, the netherlands, switzerland (hall & gingerich, 2009, 454; hall & soskice, 2001). liberal market economies define a type of capitalism based on hierarchies at the firm level and competitive market arrangements at inter-firm level (hall & soskice, 2001, 8). „market relationships are characterized by the arm’s-length exchange of goods or services in a context of competition and formal contracting” (hall & soskice, 2001, 8). therefore, the relations between firms are based just on economic relations with no desire of cooperation, basically their relations are regulated by demand and supply. some examples of lme: usa, great britain, australia, canada, new zealand, ireland (hall & gingerich, 2009, 454; hall & soskice, 2001). 8 perspective politice perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 8 dependent market economy is a type of capitalism specific in easter european countries (ban, 2014, 219; nolke & vliegenhard, 2009; bohle & greskovits, 2012) but, i would say not only. low paid workforce and laws in favor of employers in the context of the nonexistence of local investors and poverty. basically this type of market economy looks like an assembly line for big companies. in the global capitalism, the role of dependent market economies is to assemble the products, and based on it, the investment in research are useless (nolke & vliegenhard, 2009). in order for a market economy to be attractive for the foreign capital it has to: 1. move the fiscal burden from the capital to workers and consumers; 2. eliminate or diminish the powers of institutions that could create too high costs for capital and production; 3. tightening access to unemployment benefits and social services (ban, 2014, 217). 2.2. varieties of capitalism and the legal framework the legal framework is essential to understand the way capitalism is functioning (in every country, not only in romania). for example for the varieties of capitalism approach the legal framework is essential, but is the unnamed component of the theory. this varieties of capitalism approach to the political economy is actor centered, which is to say we see the political economy as a terrain populated by multiple actors, each of whom seeks to advance his interests in a rational way in strategic interaction with others (scharpf 1997a). the relevant actors may be individuals, firms, producer groups, or governments (hall & soskice, 2001, 6) the voc is an actor centered approach, but the framework which creates the specific types of interaction between actors (firms, producer groups, governments or even trade unions) is the legal framework. coordinated market economies (cme) function in this way because the legislation regulate the interaction between actors, the same as in liberal market economies (lme), the market economy is liberal because the legal framework allow actors to have a different way to interact than in cme. in other words, i would say that the legal framework is the most important factor in defining the different types of market economy. in order to support my point of view, i would give you the example of working councils in germany, they exist because the legislation stipulate it and regulate their way of functioning, otherwise, if the legislation would not regulate the working councils they would never exist. another example is related with social dialogue institutions, and the starting point is the romanian labor law. the social dialogue institutions (before 2011) were important and the employers could avoid the participation in those councils very hard (national level, sectoral level etc.) because the legislation allowed them to be part of social dialogue institutions. but after 2011 flexibilization, they could avoid the participation in social dialogue institutions and except the collective bargaining at the firm level none is obligatory for so called social partners (trif, 2013). the point is, the legal framework is very important for the interactions between actors; actually it creates the interactions and the context in which interactions are made. as a counter argument to my point of view one can say that for varieties of capitalism the labor legislation is not the only thing important, and is true. hassel (2015), hall & soskice (2001), hamann & kelly (2008), and others scholars say that for voc approach are important the following sphere: industrial relations, vocational training and education, corporate governance, interfirm relations, relationship with employees. but, for all of these fields the nationiunie 2018 9perspective politice perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 9 al legislation is very important because it can design the interactions between actors. if the actors are encouraged to collaborate with each other, the competition feeling would be weakened. at least for 2 out of 5 important fields for voc the labor legislation is important because it design the interactions between firms and employees (or employees organizations). so, i would say that the labor legislation (when it means labor laws and social dialogue laws) is very important for voc approach because it design the interactions between social partners and sometimes even the interactions between firms. 2.3. the flexibilization the labor markets and the market economies are very different from a state to another, and, as in other domains, they are different because of legislation (but not only). every state pick up a strategy in order to develop its market economy and labor market. romania as a european union member state is bound to creating flexible labor market in accordance with work place security (albu, caraiani & iordan, 2012, 48). but the security part of the flexicurity concept never came, so the romanian government only did a flexibilization of the labor market. the flexibilization in the international relations language means the hegemony of north american model (fernandez & otis, 2007, 64), and in marxist language means imperialism. therefore, the flexibilization, in the voc context, is moving the market economy from the previous place towards a more liberal model of the market economy. the flexibilization of labor market means the existence of legislative stipulations that grant relaxed conditions and a set of obligations to the employers, lower than the previous legislative framework. those legislative stipulations can regard: the working time, the payment of the employees, the possibility to change the economic activity, the duration of the contract and, also, the collective bargaining and trade unionism conditions. in order to analyze the labor law situation, this analysis is going to be focus on five types of flexibilization: numerical flexibility; salary flexibility; organizational flexibility; labor time flexibility (cato & stoller, 2004, 34; atkinson, 1984; barbieri, 2009, 621); and social dialogue flexibility. numerical flexibility is aimed mainly at weakening measures based on contracts of indefinite duration and adapting to the labor needs of enterprises faced with longor short-term changes in demand or technologies. the instruments are varied and include piecework, fixed-term contracts, and seasonal employment (cato & stoller, 2004, 34). salary flexibility is based on the understanding of salary as a mix between a fixed component and a variable one (based on productivity of the worker or based on profitability of the firm). this form of payment in general and of flexibility in our case is focus on reducing the employer’s social obligations (when that means retirement benefits, insurance, etc.) (cato & stoller, 2004, 34). organizational flexibility is related to the ability of a firm to use new organizational techniques to increase its productivity or even to respond in a flexible way to the uncertain situations. for example, job rotation, work teams, retraining and even outsourcing of work (cato & stoller, 2004, 34). labor-time flexibility includes the setting of normal or maximum numbers of hours (on a weekly, monthly, or annualized basis), the tallying of discontinuous (interrupted) work, and the 10 perspective politice perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 10 determination of overtime, weekend, and night wage rates, as well as how vacation time is handled. (cato & stoller, 2004, 34) social dialogue flexibility is related with the lowering the importance of the collective bargaining, lowering the importance of the social dialogue institutions and the role of trade unions. for instance, if the collective bargaining was obligatory for the national level and after the flexibilization of the social dialogue law the collective bargaining is mandatory only at the firm level, this is flexibilization and correlated with changing the statute of social dialogue institutions to be only consultative (basically to have no power – also this mean that the role of the trade unions is weakened), it means that is social dialogue flexibility. 3. the legal framework in the following chapter i am going to compare the labor law adopted in 2003 (law 53/2003) and its modified version republished on 18 may 2011 on four levels (labor-time flexibility, organizational flexibility, salary flexibility and numerical flexibility). also, i am going to compare the collective bargaining law (law 130/1996) and its equivalent after 2011, the social dialogue law (law 62/2011) on social dialogue flexibility which includes collective bargaining flexibility and social dialogue institutions flexibility. 3.1. numerical flexibility numerical flexibility means the measures that weakened the indefinite period contract. this aspect of flexibility refers to the existence and frequency of fixed-term contracts and seasonal employment (cato & stoller, 2004, 34, atkinson, 1984, barbieri, 2009, 621). transposed into legislation, these regulations signify a decrease in the number of contracts for indefinite period, as well as an increased control of employers over employees behavior. in both laws (53/2003 and its version republished in 2011), title ii, chapter 1 defines the individual contract (indefinite period) and determines the conditions under which it can be concluded. article 10 defines the conditions of the individual contract and article 11 refers to the clauses it may have. article 12 stipulates that: „any individual contract is concluded for an indefinite period and paragraph 2 states that there may also be exceptions from article 1”. in this context, the individual fixed-term contract should be an exception in both legislations. in order to understand the conditions under which individual fixed-term contracts can be concluded, i propose an analysis of article 81 of law 53/2003 and article 83 of its version republished in 2011. the numbering of articles differs because some other articles have been added in 2011. the situations in which the fixed-term contract was accepted in the 2003s legislation were: a) the replacement of an employee in the event of suspension of his/her employment contract, except in the case when the employee participating in a strike; b) the temporary increase of the employer’s activity; c) the development of seasonal activities; d) when it is concluded under certain legal provisions emitted with the purpose of temporarily favoring certain categories of persons without employment; e) in other cases expressly stipulated by special laws. iunie 2018 11perspective politice perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 11 in 2011 were added the following points: f) hiring a person who, within 5 years from the date of employment, fulfills the retirement conditions for the age limit; g) occupying an eligible position within trade unions, employers organizations or nongovernmental organizations during the term of office; h) employing pensioners who, under the law, can accumulate the salary pension; and the last point was completed with: i) in other cases expressly provided by special laws or for carrying out works, projects or programs. thus, the first 3 points added cannot explicitly provide a very high number of fixed-term contracts. however, the completion with the last point (h) allows for the conclusion of individual fixed-term contracts for a large number of sectors of activity. moreover, another major difference between the two labor laws is the maximum number (in a row) of fixed-term contracts and the maximum duration for which they can be concluded. according to law 53/2003, article 82, the individual employment contract can only be concluded for a maximum of 18 months, and article 80 (3) mentions that the maximum number of fixed-term contracts concluded consecutively is 2. the legislation adopted in 2011 stipulates in article 82 (4) that a maximum of 3 consecutive fixed-term contracts may be concluded. article 84 (1) states that the first contract cannot be concluded for a period longer than 36 months, and the following 2, in accordance with article 82 (5), cannot be longer (each) than 12 months. basically, under the 2011 legislation, the fixed-term individual contract is no longer an exceptional case, but by article 83 (h) it can become a rule. from the point of view of the number of months for which a fixed term contract can be concluded, it is 60. in other words, an employer may have for 5 consecutive years in a job only employee with an individual contract for a determined period. we can say that at this level, the labor law was highly flexibilized, there is a big difference in favor of employers between the labor law from 2003 and its version from 2011. 3.2. salary flexibility the salary flexibility refers to how is paid the work. basically, wages include two components; the first one is fixed, while the second is based on employee productivity (cato & stoller, 2004, 34). according to article 154 (53/2003), paragraph 1, respectively article 159 (according to the version republished in 2011), paragraph 1: “salary is the payment of the work done by the employee on the basis of the individual labor contract”. and “the salary includes basic salary, allowances, bonuses, and other [special – my note] bonuses” (art. 155, 53/2003, 160, 345/2011). forcibly, because wages bonuses cannot be banned, a way to pay employees and employees for their performance is legitimate. in this situation, the performance is obligatory to reach a goal imposed by the company. performance can also be translated into overwork programmed but unpaid (paid only via bonuses), all in order to reach the target. regarding salary flexibility, the labor law does not clearly state what the conditions are in this situation, but by accepting other salary supplements/ bonuses, flexibility is allowed. performance spores are allowed as long as the basic salary is legally granted according to a cer12 perspective politice perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 12 tain number of hours worked between the employee and the employer. this kind of flexibility also existed in the labor code before 2011 and the current one. 3.3. organizational flexibility both labor laws stipulates that professional reconversion can be triggered by socio-economic restructuring (345/2011, article 192, paragraph 1, letter d; 53/2003, article 188, paragraph 1, letter d). it is also noted that training can be made to adapt the employee to the job requirements (53/2003, article 189, paragraph 1, letter b, 345/2011, article 193, paragraph 1, letter b). the employees can conclude contracts for professional qualification if they have minimum the age of 16, who have not acquired a qualification or have acquired a qualification that does not allow them to maintain the job at that employer (53/2003, article 199, paragraph 2, 345 / 2011, article 202, paragraph 2). in other words, the employer have the flexibility to change his / her economic activity and employees and employees can apply for retraining, but it is legal as well, for the employer to fire those who do not correspond professionally at the job they are employed (53/2003, article 61, letter d; 345/2011, article 61, letter d). regarding the organizational flexibility, the labor legislation before 2011 was already showing an increased level of flexibility to the employer, but the security afforded to employees and employees was at a minimum level. in conclusion, a certain degree of organizational flexibility is still in place before 2011, and this level has not been the subject flexibilization. 3.4. labor time flexibility the flexibility of labor time involves the determining of maximum number of labor hours, the number of discontinuous labor hours and even setting the way in which vacation leave is provided (cato & stoller, 2004, 34). the articles 112 (345/2011)/109 (53/2003) guarantee that the working time is 40 hours per week and 8 hours per day. the articles 114 (345/2011) and 111 (53/2003), which provide the framework for overwork, set that an individual cannot work more than 8 hours overwork per week, basically an employee cannot overcome 48 working hours/ week, and not more than 4 months. but, in 2011 the lawmakers add 2 paragraphs to the article 114 (345/2011). they specify that overwork can achieve 48 hours per week for a year for some special working sectors (but the sectors are not specified, they stipulate that the overwork for more than 4 mounts can be set only via collective bargaining – firm level). the point is they can encourage abuses via the new labor code in the overwork issue. i could say, regarding the labor time, there is a high degree of flexibility of labor law from 2011 compared to the labor code of 2003. paragraphs 3 and 4 provide derogations over a long period from the normal application of articles 1 and 2. these derogations can only be to the detriment of employees and in favor of employers. the main problem is that such measures have been introduced without any measures in the safety of employees. the unequal work program is regulated by articles 115 and 116 of law 345/2011, respectively 112 and 113 of law 53/2003. in the law adopted in 2011, no additional article or some form of flexibility has emerged. thus, in the both laws it is stipulated that for certain sectors or work units work programs may be established for less than or over 8 hours / day. in addiiunie 2018 13perspective politice perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 13 tion, the 12-hour work program brings a 24-hour break, with the maximum number of hours worked in a week being 40 (the exceptions are regulated buy articles 114 (345/2011) and 111 (53/2003)). and “unequal working hours can only function if it is specified in the individual labor contract” (345/2011, article 116, paragraph 2, 53/2003, article 113, paragraph 2). the determination of the periods during which the employees are entitled to the holidays shall be made by the end of the calendar year for the following year (53/2003, article 143, paragraph 1, 345/2011, article 148, paragraph 1). the minimum number of days of annual leave is 20 working days (53/2003, article 140, paragraph 1, 345/2011, article 145, paragraph 1). the labor time has been the subject of flexibility, as i have shown before. practically, flexibility in working time has taken place, but not entirely, excluding the flexibility of holidays. 3.5. social dialogue flexibility since 2011 there were a couple of laws which were used to regulate what the social dialogue law regulates now. there were the trade union law, the employers’ law, the collective bargaining law and some other. my analysis regarding social dialogue flexibilization is focus on collective bargaining law and on the role of the social dialogue institutions. regarding the collective bargaining, the law 130/1996 regulated that the collective bargaining at the firm level is obligatory for all the firms with more than 21 workers (article 3, paragraph 1). the law 62/2011 stipulates that „the collective bargaining is obligatory just for firm level) (article 129, paragraph 1). furthermore, the law 130/1996 mentions that is obligatory to have just one collective bargaining for one sector, as well for national level (article 11, paragraph 2). the law 62/2011 stipulates that for each level (firm, sectoral and national) can be just one collective bargaining (article 133, paragraph 2). in the law 62/2011 they use some tricks to avoid the compulsoriness of collective bargaining for sectoral and national level (they add the word „just” to make clear that the collective bargaining is compulsory only for firm level and nothing more, and they specify „there can be maximum one collective bargaining” instead of „there have to be maximum one” (article 11, paragraph 2, law 130/1996). the rhetoric of the law 130/1996 was like the collective bargaining is an instrument of the trade unions to counterbalance the power of the employers. for example, the article 5 mentions some penalties for the employers if they refuse to bargain. but in both laws (130/1996 and 62/2011) the initiative to bargain belongs to employers and in the situation when they don’t call for bargaining, the trade unions are allow to do it. in this context we can say that the social dialogue flexibilization has taken place because the new legislation avoid successfully the collective bargaining at sectoral and national level and also the role of social dialogue institutions became less important and they were no longer a trade union instrument to counterbalance the employers power. 4. conclusions the voc approach developed by hall & soskice (2001) only deals with states with a consolidated capitalist economy in the early 2000s. the subsequent evolution of policies and practices in the central and eastern european states (former states of the warsaw pact) led to the emergence of a new model of market economy, so called the dependent market economy (ban, 2014, 219, nolke & vliegenhard, 2009; bohle & greskovits, 2012). this new model of capitalism is 14 perspective politice perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 14 dependent to foreign capital and to a flexibility of the labor market, which leads the investors to high profits (ban, 2014, 219, nolke & vliegenhard, 2009; bohle & greskovits, 2012). romanian capitalism, from a type of “cocktail capitalism” (ban, 2014, 219) evolved, through flexibilization towards a dependent market economy model. the political environment has always sought to create an attractive economy for the foreign investors via: 1. move the fiscal burden from the capital to workers and consumers; 2. eliminate or diminish the powers of institutions that could create too high costs for capital and production; 3. tightening access to unemployment benefits and social services (ban, 2014, 217). the law 130/1996 and the law 53/2003 were already flexible for the employers in some points, but the lawmakers create two new laws (53/2003 – modified in 2011 and 62/2011) in order to create an attractive economy for the foreign investors. both laws from 2011 introduce a high degree of regulations whose purpose was to avoid the social dialogue institutions and the collective bargaining. the flexibilization of salary and the organizational flexibility have not taken place in 2011, this sectors were already flexible when the labor law was modified. but the legislation was highly flexibilized at labor time, numerical and social dialogue levels. the labor law (modified in 2011) and the social dialogue law has undergone changes in favor of employers in 2011 (what we call flexibility) without being in agreement with employee security. however, the toughest changes in labor relations have been made via the law of social dialogue rather than labor code (trif, 2015; chivu, ciutacu, dimitriu and þiclea, 2013). basically, the legislation was flexibilzed but the market economy model have not changed that much. even before 2011 the market economy model was a dependent market economy, so the changes have not radically change the type of market economy. moreover, the collective bargaining has not functioning since 2010 because the employers denouncing the collective contract which use to function since 2007. since then, no national collective contract has been 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dialogul social în timpul crizei economice: supravietuierea negocierilor colective in sectorul industrial din romania. 16 perspective politice perspective_politice_2018_iunie.qxd 7/27/2018 7:50 am page 16 perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd the effects of foreign direct investments on structuring the varieties of capitalism in the post-communist states abstract: i investigate some of the most important theoretical approaches to some of the most important economic factor that shaped the economic transformation in the post-communist states, namely the foreign direct investments (fdi). i investigate how, depending on the theoretical framework we employ, the multiple structural effects fdi had on the economies of the transition economies, as well as other parts of the social and political life can be causally interpreted. keywords: foreign direct investments, post-communism, economic development 1. introduction in this article i investigate several theoretical questions regarding the causal relation between the foreign direct investment flowing in specific countries and on the types of varieties of capitalism developing the post-communist countries. i review the literature that approaches directly or indirectly these issues in order to set out an research design aimed to investigate one of the least understood aspects of globalization, namely the interaction between the fdi and existing institutional framework, interaction that lead economic actors to employ different types of coordination, coordination that influences the economic benefits that can be obtained in specific countries. also, my inquiry is also driven by the following normative question: under what conditions does globalization brings the presumed universal benefices in terms of economic growth? and from a policy point of view, this approach is concerned with the limits of the ability of politicians to design policies that can both attract fdi and maximize the benefit from its presence. the fall of communism pushed most of the post-communist countries into a period “great transformations” (polanyi 1957) that represented instantaneous reforms in the areas of politics, economics, and society, and in some case a national state formation too. in the first part of the transition process the main international institutions, as the imf and wb, prescribed a universal solution that would solve most problems of transition from a authoritarian, centralized, and state owned economy to a democratic and market-based privatized one. these policy instruments, synthesized in the form of the “washington consentodor arpad1 lector univ. dr., fsp, snspa perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 79 sus”2 (wiliamson 2002), met strong political and social resistance in many cases (nelson 1997), which delayed their implementation or caused an inconsequence between reforms. the success of this approach was much more limited than expected (kolodko 1998), with the closest to the neoliberal type being least successful in offering both social protection and economic development (greskovits & bohle 2007). overall, these policies have neglected the construction of country-specific institutional frameworks (shalfiqul 1993, balcerowicz 1995, stiglitz 1999, roland 2002) that would coordinate the state, market and other stakeholders in a deliberative structure (stark & bruszt 1998). the academic debate focused on the big bang vs. gradualist approach to reforms, and the degree of insulation of governments during this period, neoliberalism and neoetatism (stark & bruszt 1998). while most of the “washington consensus” policies concerned macroeconomic stability, the most significant in terms of institutional restructuring concerned the privatization of the state-owned economy. privatization was pushed at any cost, based on the coasian argument3 and the undisputed assumption that policies based on the experience of western countries would direct countries to an almost unique type of capitalism. however, in recent years a mounting body literature has shown that although globalization pushes some homogenization processes, the advanced capitalist countries are far from converging in terms of both economic organization (kenworthy 2006, sullivan 2003, siaroff 1999, steinmo 2014) and welfare systems (pontusson 2005, iversen 2005). the present inquiry stands at the intersection of two different theoretical strands of political economy, the voc literature (hall and soskice 2001) and the global production network (gpn) literature (gerrefi 2005). in the same time, since both literatures represent to a central extent a response to the standard orthodoxy of neoliberal approaches to contemporary problems of economic development, this literature will be analyzed too. first, i survey of the literature on post-communist economic evolutions, and subsequently i analyze the significance of fdi as a factor of globalization will be analyzed. third, i will present of the voc and gpn literatures. the fourth section will present a literature review on the effects of fdi, while the last section will develop some theoretical questions concerning fdi and institutional change 2. fdi as an aspect of globalization the history of post-communist privatization is full with examples of states assets sold to foreign investors for low prices but with the promise (formalized through privatization contracts) of large investments that would bring a flourishing economic revival that was never to come. it might be the case that this is not the predominant story, but nevertheless there are plenty examples of industries in various post-communist countries that virtually disappeared following a ‘successfully’ privatization. while the literature of the first decade of transition focused on the process of privatization and its effects (stark and bruszt 1998; eyal et al 1998), as the easteuropean countries started the process of eu accession negotiation, the effects of globalization and transnational integration become more and more important. discussing the distinctive features of the contemporary global economy, 1960s to the present, gerrefi asses that while in terms of trade volume, the actual level was close in the pre first world war period, the actual period is unique through its volume of fdi and de-nationalization of production through the emergence of international trade and production networks. for example between 1983 and 1990 flows of fdi have grown three times faster than trade flows and almost four times faster than output between 1983 and 1990 (wade 1996, 63), 80 perspective politice perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 80 leading to the situation where, trans national corporations (tncs) control one-third of the world’s private sector productive assets (unctad 1993, 1). according to dicken (2003, 198) this totally new phenomena is determined by the fact that tncs are the only type of institutions that have the ability to coordinate and control supply chain operations in more than one country, even in absence of direct ownership. one of the first theoretical developments that appeared as a reaction to these evolutions is the marxist inspired dependency theory. according to gerrefi the 1970s dependency theory literature have focused on the shifting balance of power from national states to tncs. since these the tncs had the ‘power, the resources, and the global reach to thwart the territorially based objectives of national governments in both developed and developing countries’ (2001, 165) (see bergsten, horst, and moran 1978; barnet and müller 1974; evans 1979; gereffi 1983). nevertheless, due to the reorganization of global production networks toward an intensive outsourcing and the rise of tertial sector, the power of vertically integrated, industrial tncs has been reduced. thus, the economic vs. political power relationship has become of secondary interest after 1980s, rebirthing only with the fall of the communism. nevertheless, most importantly, the deregulation of financial markets and the decreased economic barriers lead to the situation that caital in general and especially fdi an ‘systemic power’ embedded in the institutional substructure of the economy, especially related to business’ liberty in terms of ‘exit options’” (pontusson 1992, 233). on the one hand, fdi flow is far from being enhanced by authoritarian regimes. busse (2003) analyzes the relationship between fdi and political rights and civil liberties in different countries. according to him, the presumed alliance among tnc and repressive regimes is rather spurious since ceteris paribus except for the 1970s when a significant amount of fdi went to non-democratic countries, fdi is significantly higher in democratic countries, thereby refuting the hypothesis that political repression fosters fdi. on the other hand, it is rather difficult to separate those reforms made under the pressure of fdi from those purely endogenous, since as hanke (2001) argues, many times the management of domestic firms may use the rhetoric of external finance to proceed with reforms that they would like to do anyway. according to hanke the institutional adjustments that happened in france since the 80s can be best explained if we approach the process through the point of view of evolving interest of firm management. while in the beginning of 80s the french economy was state-directed autarchic investment regime with one third of manufacturing gdp under direct state’s control (308), in 1998 fdi attracted by france is highest in continental europe, a low unionization and low frequency of strikes and an increase sub-contracting structure of production. under the pressure of economic recession the french large firms have been forced to reorganize their internal structure process that needed and increase managerial autonomy (both from the state, other stakeholders and the market). 3. voc and global network of production literatures the neo-institutionalist paradigm focuses on governance system of modern capitalist economies and has as their main unit the national state. according to gerrefi (2001, 169) the following approaches could be grouped within this paradigm: ‘regulation theory (aglietta 1980; boyer 1989), national systems of innovation (lundvall 1992; nelson 1993), social systems of production (campbell, hollingsworth, and lindberg 1991; hollingsworth, schmitter, and streeck 1994; hollingsworth and boyer 1997), and varieties of capitalism (berger and dore 1996; kitschelt et al. 1999; hall and soskice 2001). decembrie 2015 81perspective politice perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 81 built on the literatures of neo-corporatism (schmitter 1974) and aimed at offering an alternative explanation to the neoliberal framework, the literature on varieties of capitalism (voc) provides an original explanation of the variations within the oecd countries (hall & soskice, 2001). voc theory defines two system equilibria – lmes (liberal market economies) and cmes (coordinated market economies – overlapping to the corporatist type of economy) – each of them based on a distinctive logic of coordination, market-based vs. institutionalized coordination (both on horizontal and with the political and social environment). market economies differ depending economic policy making, social policy and the mechanism employed by firms to fulfill their core competencies of coordination in five areas: structuring industrial relations, education and vocational training, inter-firm relations, corporate governance (regulates access to financial capital) and employee relations (employment practices). as these relations are interconnected and generate institutional complementarities5 that generate a comparative advantage in the globalize economy, the differences between these two types of economies are reinforced. on the continuum created by positioning on these areas, germany stands as a paradigmatic cme (closely followed by austria and scandinavian countries) while us as a paradigmatic lme (with most english speaking countries). nevertheless, although the approach is an actor centered the authors admit that these relationships depend on the institutional support provided for them in the political economy as a whole and need active support for coordination that must be mobilized relatively continuous basis. (hall & thelen 2005, 2). although the voc approach is well fitted to explain the logic of the functioning of advanced capitalist countries, it is less appropriate for explaining institutional change and the emergence of a new capitalist economy. nevertheless, the logic of this approach can be adapted for use in studying the emergence of capitalism systems in developing countries. using a mechanic application of the voc approach, feldman (2006) finds that estonia and slovenia are very good examples of liberal and coordinated market economies. according to gerrefi (2001), the voc literature and global production networks approach although focus on the same kind of issues, they are totally separate literature. gpn literature focuses on the economic connections between countries at different state of development created by tncs and interfirm networks from different sectors. thus governance is not understood as a national system of coordination but as a function exercised by lead firms in global industries. one theoretical development located within the institutionalist approach but that takes into consideration the sectoral differences is the sectoral approach. according to hollingsworth, schmitter and streeck (1994, 11) the increasing globalization of economy increases the importance of sectoral institutional regimes of governance compared with the national institutional order. thus, analyzing how different modes of governance are embedded in the social environment needs to take into account both the local conditions and the localization of a sector in the global chain of production. as the transactions in specific sectors are more and more insulated from the direct intervention of the national institutions, the evolution of governance should follow the logic of the ‘specific productive structures and of the constrains imposed by their particular technologies’ (1994, 11). accordingly, instead of observing a convergence among national governance systems as a whole, we should observe a sectoralbased differentiation. one corollary of this argument is that, fdi should embed in the specific locations, not only according to the institutional environment, but according to its integration in the global production system. nevertheless, while hollingsworth, schmitter and streeck focused on ‘the comparison of sectoral regimes from the viewpoint of their economic 82 perspective politice perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 82 performance’ (1994, 12), the present approach focus on comparing the influence of fdi in different sectoral regimes from the point of view of its influence on the local economies. another approach within the neo-institutionalist framework that aims to offer an alternative interpretation of institutional change is proposed by crouch (2005). in an attempt to develop an framework for understanding the sources of change within the governance system of the capitalism economies, the author focuses on the recombination of governance mechanism by ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ that try to resolve different coordination problems. in contrast with the voc framework that stresses the institutional coherence as a platform for obtaining efficient coordination and thus economic growth, crouch assesses that the presence of a variety of alternative governance mechanism that can be recombined in different ways is more conducive to efficient coordination. given the changing conditions, accelerated in the last decades by globalization, flexibility obtained through hybrid governance is an asset more and more important for economic actors. crouch takes his empirical challenge on voc approach by using the core example of lme ideal, the californian biotechnology and ict sectors. the author asses that at a closer analysis, the californian high-tech clusters exhibit some of the features of lme while others are closer to a cme. from the point of view of embeddedness two features are of particular relevance. the financial governance of the biotechnology sector is far from resembling the pure model of financial market spot and impersonal transactions with an easy exit capacity. in fact, given that the time horizon from developing a product and marketing it can be from 6 to 10 years and may come under high uncertainty, this sector needs capital that is both high-risk and patient (crouch 2005, 130). thus, in order to manage the specific needs of both the industry and the capital, a dense network of information exchange have arise, where often venture capitalist take seats in the board of companies. the knowledge base of these industries, base that constitutes an important part of the added value of the products developed is far from being a pure market-driven one. not only that the initial stages of these industries were driven by the military-led research, but also at this stage an important part of the research cost is not internalized by the firms, but supported by public funds through university research programs. 3.1. industrial upgrading literature according to gerrefi (2001) industrial upgrading is ‘the process by which economic actors— nations, firms, and workers—move from low-value to relatively high value activities in global production networks.’ (2004, 171). the industrial-upgrading approach focuses on the feasible upgrading pathways of developing countries. the evolution of this process depends on a complex mix of government policies, institutions, corporate strategies, technologies, and worker skills are associated with upgrading success. the gpn literature is linked with the industrial-upgrading literature due to the fact that the reorganization of international trade and production networks became one of the most relevant alternatives for developing countries to ameliorate their positions in the value chains of diverse industries. when focusing on state policies the key theoretical focus is on the success of developing countries’ attempts to improve their position in the global economy, global economy characterized ‘both by power asymmetries and by opportunities for learning through networks.’ (2001, 169) nevertheless, there should be taken into consideration that there is no recipe for success even in the case of advanced industrial countries, not to talk of emerging economies. for example, hanke shows how governance reform in france undertook in the 1980s inspired from decembrie 2015 83perspective politice perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 83 other countries (especially germany) have produced different results, as different actors had different ability to take advantage of them. while the financial deregulation resulted in a elitecontrolled cross-shareholding system instead of a public capitalism, the aroux workplace reforms that intended to decentralize employees – employers have wakened even more the unions capacity (2001, 333). 3.2. neoclassical approach to fdi effects economists writing within the neoclassical framework tend to ignore institutional aspects and focus on productivity and technology transfer effects. for example, goldberg (2007), in an attempt to bridge research on real-side fdi and financial sector fdi, argues that both real-side and financial sector fdi can induce limited technology transfers and productivity gains. beside increasing one country’s integration into world business cycles, financial sector fdi may foster institutional development through improvements to regulation and supervision (2007, 12). the most documented effects of fdi entrance in new countries range from technology transfers, productivity spillovers, wage effects, macroeconomic growth, institutional development, and fiscal and tax concerns. (goldberg 2007, 4). goldberg synthesis the main effects of fdi as being: allocative efficiency, technology transfer and diffusion, wage spillovers, institution building, altered macroeconomic cycles, and overall economic stability. allocative efficiency is generated by reducing local monopolistic distortions and heightening competitive pressure or some demonstration effect that lead local firms to use employ more efficient methods of using and generating resources. fdi increases the rates of transfer and diffusion of technology that subsequently stimulate economic growth. in the same time fdi into host countries also induces higher wages, increase that may be limited to the foreign-owned production facilities and do not spill over more broadly. in the same time, the institutional change generated by fdi can improve regulation and supervision. nevertheless, in the last years a series of research using advanced econometric methods show that the effect of fdi is far from being the same independently on the local economic and institutional conditions. for example, hale and cheryl (2007) discussing the presumed fdi spillover of productivity and innovation in china, found evidence that there is no unidirectional link. instead the authors argue that many positive results appear due to aggregation bias or failure to control for endogenity of fdi. instead, private firms tend to invest less in innovation in the presence of fdi phenomena determined by the fact that domestic private firms tend to be more involved in providing inputs and intermediary goods for foreign firms. in their discussion on the influence of fdi on domestic entrepreneurship ayyagari and kosova (2007) czech republic discovered that fdi presence stimulates the entry of domestic firms at the industry level (both horizontal and vertical) aspect that indicates a positive horizontal spillovers from fdi effect. nevertheless, this effect is not general but industry specific. while in service industries spillovers are strong in all directions, manufacturing industries do not experience entry spillovers of any kind. even more, mayer-foulkes and nunnenkamp (2005) analyzing the effect of us fdi and fdi related economic activities find that this factor is not correlated with income growth. nevertheless, even these authors agree that ‘the central challenge facing policymakers is not to attract fdi, but to improve the local conditions required to benefit from the widely perceived unique advantages of fdi.’ (2005, 1) 84 perspective politice perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 84 3.3. economic effects of fdi in emerging economies while the neoclassical approach aims to explain why the economic variables lead to a failure of fdi to produce positive effect, gallagher and zarsky (2007), analyzing the evolution of it industry in mexico showed that under certain conditions (especially a poor regulative capacity of the state) fdi inflow not only that can drive to bankruptcy the existent industry, but also can have no positive effects in term of ‘technological’ spillovers – but can even hamper the development of state’s regulative capacity. discussing the italian textile and clothing industries realocation of production in eastern europe, graziani (1998) argues that the main factors that emerged in the beginning of 1990s and created incentives for realocation were: stagnation of consumption growth, increasing of price elasticity, increasing of concentration rate at the industry level and appreciation of the italian lira. focusing on the type of institutional changes that help countries to restrict their economies as to obtain economic growth and promote democracy, mcdermott (2002) argues that these institutions can not be simply created by state through legislative change but they are the product of ‘specific conflicts that emerge from the interaction between the micro-attempts to reproduce past sociopolitical networks and the macro-level attempts to impose state policy designs’ (2002, 2). thus, the various patterns of intranetwork conflicts influences the way different institutional rules are rewritten, resources are redistributed and different actors are redefined. thus, neither market (through defining the property-rights) nor hierarchies (especially through developmental states) are theoretical lenses that can explain what happened during the transition of postcommunist economies. in a similar line of argumentation, snyder (2001) asses that the neoliberal policies of deregulation in mexico were followed by a response in terms of re-regulation at a more local level. while mcdermott focuses on the intranetwork conflicts, snyder focuses on the conflicts between coffee producers, distributors and local politicians in four regions of mexico. according to snyder, the different recomposition of governance mechanism in the four regions was determined by the different interest, organization powers and strategy conflict of these actors. according to campino (2007) the main approaches on the fdi decisions to enter new markets are the managerial and the trade literatures, both of them focusing on production side considerations. the managerial perspective (stephen hymer 1960) tnc aims at transfering intermediate products across borders, while retaining operational control. the most important factor that help firms increase their market-power is the structural market imperfections that allow firms to overcome some of the disadvantages in competing with domestic firms in foreign markets. the trade literature approach focus on the emergence of monopolistic competition models and incorporate concepts as of increased returns to scale, imperfect competition, and product differentiation to explain the inter-industry and intraindustry trade in the global economy. for example horstmann and markusen (1992) analyze the relationship between the firm size and plant specific costs as a method to endogenously determine the presence of fdi. according to campino (2007) in studying the attractiveness fdi seeking to enter new markets is determined not by the average income level but by its distribution in income decile level. using this approach he manages to obtain a better prediction of fdi presence in different markets. decembrie 2015 85perspective politice perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 85 4. implications: fdi, institutional change, voc one of the most important research puzzle that stems at the intersection of these literatures is: why did a set of countries with relatively similar economic and political features, that entered simultaneously in the transition process from communism to a democratic and capitalist system under relatively similar homogenizing factors (wb, imf, eu) developed different types of capitalist systems? (bohle and greskovits 2007) further, another puzzle that has to be investigated refers to the reasons why did this happen before a developed market and a state with strong policy capacity implementation, driven mediating institutions in advanced capitalist countries, were established during the transition process? by analyzing fdi, on of the strongest homogenizing factor, in relation with policy process and other correlative processes (macro-economic policies, welfare system reform, institutional developments) the present investigation attempts to build a framework for understanding the outcomes of the post-communist transition process in terms interaction between path-dependency and freedom in policymaking during transition. given the significant impact fdi had during these transformative years, its is fundamental to investigate how fdi and associated policies as a source of variety (hall & soskice 2001) within the political economy of countries in transition to a capitalist system. a comparative approach to the post-communist transition will be used to generate a most similar system design research on the extent to which the path dependency, given both by the communist legacy and the decisions taken in the period of ‘extraordinary politics (balcerowicz 1995) and policies undertaken further during the transition, and the characteristics of fdi created the base for divergent outcomes (greskovits and bohle 2007, feldman 2006, buchen 2005). first, the investigation focuses on the institutional environment that would lead economic actors to employ a specific type of coordination. dynamic interaction among fdi and the existing environment, or in other words how fdi does becomes embedded in the existing economy, and what makes the difference between a success and a bad story concerning fdi. a second issue that is usually ignored in the fdi literature is the country-of origin source of fdi as a factor that affects the way different investments accommodate in new environments. the represent approach employs voc thesis that capital is not footless, and the source of fdi can influence the type of coordination system at the sector level. in can be presumed that the higher the presence of fdi from a lme or cme and concentration in specific sectors, the higher the chances that the investors to search to use the same type of coordination as in the home country, thus the higher the chance to develop a specific type of variety of capitalism. given the time inconsistencies, and initial success, presence of fdi and country origin of fdi, difference of privatization, in the initial stages of transition, different sectors could have developed different types of coordination. nevertheless, as time passes, especially in more coherent systems of coordination, most of the areas should converge toward a common system. all in all, testing this hypothesis would require a significant methodological effort to avoid the “noise” caused by short term evolutions. second, concerning the policies concerning privatization (on the four main dimensions) undertaken during the transition (as an outcome of political debates, external influences like the imf and wb in the initial period and the eu accession negotiations), their more or less successfully implemented, and coherence with previous policies (path dependency4), context (interest constellation and strength of stakeholders, economic developments) and state institutional capacity (evans 1992, schmitter 1995) will be an86 perspective politice perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 86 alyzed as one of the factors that created the base for the initial fdi market entrance. szanyi (2013, 14) voices that fdi was crucial in the process of technology upgrading and funding investments within these countries. thus: “ …cee became integrated part of global world economy with strong ties to international production networks. high level of openness, important role of foreign companies, dependence from foreign markets on the side of exports and from energy imports coming from cis (mainly russia) create the external environment of these economies. the relatively larger domestic market of poland gives this country a little bit more maneuvering room, but the polish economy is also strongly linked with the global economy. this economic structure gave rise to impressive increase of productivity, which was in many years faster than increases in wage. unit labor costs remained rather low compared to developed market economies (szanyi, 2003). this helped boosting international competitiveness. in case of hungary and the czech republic trade surplus was achieved during the past 5 years (túry – vida, 2012).” (szanyi 2013, 20) nevertheless, after 25 years of continuous integration within the world economy, the 10nms are among the most globalized countries in the world. is there another developmental path that could ensure an relatively fast process of convergence with their eu counterparts? or they are doomed to remain within the same area of semi-specialization. the issue of path dependency and endogenous institutional change: question should use institutional settings as exogenous or try to take into account the endogenity in problem of change? to put it in other words i would try to see how institutions are selected. thus, institutions should be understood not only as the rules of the game or sanctions and incentives to which actors respond in relatively passive fashion, but as resources that actors use to attain their ends, in some cases switching from one institution to another when it seems more likely to serve their purposes hall and thelen (2005, 7). in this sense i would use stark &bruszt definition of path dependency and as that initial architecture of transition was created by the complex heritage in terms of networks, political order, and economy that shape actors expectations and reactions (individuals and institutions) toward the reforms in this period. one of the most challenging aspect of this research is related to choosing the an appropriate level for analyzing the interaction between fdi and the institutional infrastructure. besides the effect at the firm and sectoral level on fdi should i try to understand how fdi creates a pressure for a specific institutional (regulative) change? in order to test whether employs voc hypothesis that capital is not footless, i should try to understand how different sources of fdi can influence the type of coordination system at the sector level including the regulative framework that supports it. if i should look at all aspects of fdi governance or i should approach it simply in terms source of money that translates some standard operating procedure – and to compare its effect with other sources of money (banking sectors, capital market, state subsidies). the type of methodological approach regarding the effects among fdi presence and the regulatory framework – and especially the aspects related to the importance of private governance organism. decembrie 2015 87perspective politice perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 87 notes 1 bursier în cadrul proiectului „burse doctorale ºi postdoctorale pentru tinerii cercetãtori în domeniile ªtiinþe politice, ªtiinþe administrative, ªtiinþele comunicãrii ºi sociologie” posdru/159/1.5/s/134650, finanþat prin programul operaþional sectorial dezvoltarea resurselor umane 2007-2013, cofinanþat prin fondul social european. 2 limited fiscal deficits, public expenditure priorities, tax reform, market-determined interest rates, competitive exchange rate, import liberalization, similar conditions for fdi, privatization, deregulation, property rights. 3 the initial private owners do not matter too much since ‘the market’ soon reallocates the assets to the efficient owners. 4 the concept will be used in the sense proposed by stark & bruszt (1998) and not the one used by historical institutionalism. path dependency is created by the complex heritage in terms of networks, political order, and economy that shape actors expectations and reactions (individuals and institutions) toward the reforms in this period. this actor centered approach is coherent with varieties of capitalism approach (hall & soskice 2001) that explain institutional complementarities in term of actor’s expectation toward markets and politics. reference 1. allen, matthew 2004 “the varieties of capitalism paradigm: not enough variety?” socio-economic review 2, 87-108 2. amable, bruno. 2003. the diversity of modern capitalism, oxford: oxford university press. 3. balcerowicz, leszek. 1995. socialism, capitalism, transformation. budapest: central european university press. 4. bohle, dorothee and béla greskovits. 2007. “neoliberalism, embedded neoliberalism, and neocorporatism: paths towards transnational capitalism in central-eastern europe” in west european politics (may). 5. brusis, martin. 2003. “developing governance capacity a review of causes and effects”. strategy paper for the transformation thinkers conference berlin, 30 november – 5 december 2003 6. bruszt lászló and greskovits, béla. (2009) „transnationalization, social integration, and capitalist diversity in the east and the south“, studies in comparative international development, vol 44: 411–4 7. busse, matthias. 2003. „democracy and fdi“ hwwa discussion paper no. 220. (http://ssrn.com/abstract=384480) 8. cernat l. 2006, europeanization, varieties of capitalism and economic performance in central and eastern europe. geneva: ilo 9-56. 9. evans, peter. 1992. the state as problem and solution: predation, embedded autonomy, and structural change. in the politics of economic adjustment eds. stephan haggard and robert kaufman princeton: princeton university press. 10. evans, peter. 1992. the state as problem and solution: predation, embedded autonomy, and structural change. in the politics of economic adjustment eds. stephan haggard and robert kaufman princeton: princeton university press. 11. eyal, gil, ivan szelenyi, and eleanor townsley. (1998)making capitalism without capitalists: class formation and elite struggles in post-communist central europe, london: verso. 12. farkas b. 2011, the central and eastern european model of capitalism. post-communist economies 23:01, 15-34 13. feldmann, magnus. 2006. “emerging varieties of capitalism in transition countries: industrial relations and wage bargaining in estonia and slovenia.” comparative political studies, 39 (september): 829-54. 14. feldmann, magnus. 2006. “emerging varieties of capitalism in transition countries: industrial relations and wage bargaining in estonia and slovenia.” comparative political studies, 39 (september): 829-54. 88 perspective politice perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 88 15. gary gereffi. 2005. the global economy: organization, governance, and development, in the handbook of economic sociology, 2nd ed., edited by neil j. smelser and richard swedberg (eds.) (2005), princeton, nj: princeton university press and russell sage foundation, 160-182 16. greskovits, béla (1998). the political economy of protest and patience. east european and latin american transformations compared. budapest: central european university press. 17. hall, peter a, thelen, kathleen. 2005. “institutional change in varieties of capitalism”. paper presented at the international sociological association, reseach committee 19 annual conference, chicago, illinois, september. 18. hall, peter a. and david soskice, eds. (2001). varieties of capitalism, the institutional foundations of comparative advantage. oxford: oxford university press 19. hancke, bob. 2001. “revisiting the french model: coordination and restructuring in french industry”, in varieties of capitalism, edited by peter a. hall and david soskice. oxford university press. 20. hellman, joel, geraint jones, and daniel kaufmann. 2002. seize the state, seize the day. state capture, corruption, and influence in transition. journal of comparative economics, no. 31: 273-293. 21. hollingsworth, j. rogers, schmitter, philippe c. and streeck, wolfgang. 1994. governing capitalist economies: performance and control of economic sectors. oxford university press. 22. hopner, martin. 2005. “epilogue to ‘explaining institutional complementarity’. what we learnt? complementarity, coherence and institutional change” in socio-economic review 3, 383-38 23. iversen, torben. 2005. capitalism democracy and welfare. cambridge. cambbridge university press. 24. kaufmann, d., kraay, a. and zoido-lobatón, p. (2002). governance matters ii: updated indicators for 2000/01. 25. kaufmann, daniel, aart kraay and massimo mastruzzi. 2005. governance matters iv: governance indicators for 1996-2004. draft. 26. king l.p. 2007, central european capitalism in comparative perspective. in: hancké b. – rhodes m. – thatcer m. eds: beyond varieties of capitalism. conflicts, contradictions and complementarities in the european economy. oxford: oxford university press 27. mcdermott, gerald a. 2002. embedded politics. industrial networks & institutional change in postcommunism. the university of michigan press. 28. nelson, joan. 1997. “social costs, social sector reforms, and politics in post-communist transformation. in joan nelson, charles tilly, and lee walker, eds. transforming post-communist political economies. washington. d.c national academy press 29. peter a. hall and daniel w. gingerich, varieties of capitalism and institutional complementarities in the macroeconomy. an empirical analysis. mpi cologne discussion paper 04/5 (download from the website at http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/) 30. peter a. hall and david soskice, eds, varieties of capitalism: the institutional foundations of comparative advantage (oxford: oxford university press, 2001); 31. polányi, karl (1957). the great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time. boston: beacon press. 32. pontusson, jonas. 2005.inequality and prosperity. social europe vs. liberal america.. ithaca and london: cornell university press. 33. roland, g. (2001). transition and economics. cambridge, ma: mit press. 34. schmitter, philippe c. et al. 2005. “democratization and state capacity. prepared for x congreso internatioanl del clad sobre la reforma del estado y de la administracion publica, santiago, chile. 35. stark, david and lászló bruszt (1998). postsocialist pathways: transforming politics and property in east central europe. cambrige: cambridge university press. 36. the world bank, stanford university. available at www.worldbank.org/research/growth. decembrie 2015 89perspective politice perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 89 perspective_politice_2015_decembrie.qxd 12/13/2015 4:54 pm page 90 digital capitalism and critical media education issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4224 ©2021 (horst niesyto). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. digital capitalism and critical media education horst niesyto former ludwigsburg university of education1 email: niesyto@ph-ludwigsburg.de abstract digital capitalism has produced a new concentration of capital, knowledge, and power unprecedented in history. quantification is fundamental to digital and capitalistic structural principles. in view of a comprehensive quantification and measurement of life and society, questions of meaning and significance must be asked beyond quantifying process structures. the first part of the article identifies capitalistic and digital structural principles, showing affinities between both principles. the second part points out central challenges and problem areas of digital capitalism. the third part discusses the manoeuvres of the it industry in germany to gain more influence on the education sector. against the background of these developments, the last part outlines the need for alternative pathways and presents dimensions of a critical media education.2 keywords: digital capitalism, it-industry, commercialization, digitalization, datafication, media education, media criticism, alternative pathway 1 retired since 2017 2 the article is based on two german language publications (niesyto, 2017a, 2021). https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4224 digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 digital capitalism – selected aspects of analysis the american scientist dan schiller published a book on digital capitalism in 1999. his analyses mainly refer to the development of transnational telecommunications companies and to the history of the internet: in this book, i show that the internet and, indeed, the greater telecommunications system with which the internet has intertwined comprise a leading edge of this epic transnationalization of economic activity (…) networks are directly generalizing the social and cultural range of the capitalist economy as never before. that is why i refer to this new epoch as one of digital capitalism (schiller, 1999, p. xiv). schiller elaborates on how a transformation process is taking place through capital formation processes to a digital capitalism. he also addresses negative effects on education and social services: ‘digital capitalism has already begun to prey on education, placing some of the most sensitive processes of social learning at the mercy of a proprietary market logic’ (ibid.). in the same year peter glotz (1999) published a book in german dealing with cultural struggles in digital capitalism. glotz was a communication scientist and politician.3 he analysed four basic trends that are closely linked to digitalisation: dematerialisation, decentralisation, acceleration, globalisation. glotz referred to the ‘point-to-point structure’ of new, digital forms of communication and analysed the strengthening of a ‘nomadic lifestyle’. regarding the further development of society, at that time he predicted: ‘unchecked and uncontrolled, the development triggered by digitalisation will inevitably lead to a division of society: into an elite that willingly keeps up with the high (working) speed, and into a new underclass that will be fed to a large extent by dropouts and refuseniks’ (glotz, 1999).4 this prognosis certainly contains elements of current developments. in germany, the sociologist of technology ulrich dolata had already presented a study in 2014 on the markets and power of internet corporations. this study analysed the global corporations google, facebook, apple, amazon and microsoft. dolata summarised: the five corporations studied not only shape the main services and markets of the internet. as operators of the central infrastructures, they also regulate access to the network, structure the communication possibilities of the users and are essential 3 glotz was a member of the social democratic party of germany (spd) and was the spd's federal executive director for several years. 4 the citation is from the blurb of his book. translation by h.n.; original text (german): ‘ungebremst und ungesteuert führt die durch die digitalisierung angestoßene entwicklung unweigerlich zu einer spaltung der gesellschaft: in eine elite, die das hohe (arbeits-)tempo bereitwillig mitmacht, und in eine neue unterschicht, die sich zu einem guten teil aus aussteigern und verweigerern speist’. digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 drivers of the innovation process. not decentralisation, democratisation and cooperation, but concentration, control and power are, according to the thesis, the key processes and categories with which the essential development trends of the (commercial) internet can be adequately classified (dolata 2014, abstract).5 it is actually well over 20 years since the publications of schiller and glotz. global digital capitalism has since developed as different variants and in several stages. today, it permeates almost all areas of society. in the meantime, various analyses are available that accentuate different aspects and dimensions.6 i would like to highlight the publication by the us economist shoshana zuboff entitled the age of surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2019). as an important feature, the author names the expropriation and datafication of our experience as a free resource for the hidden commercial operations of surveillance capitalism. a 'surveillance economy' – according to zuboff – is the origin of a 'new instrumental power' that claims dominion over society. and the german sociologist philipp staab (2019) drew particular attention – in a continuation of the analysis by dolada (2014) – to the system of ‘proprietary markets’ that characterise digital capitalism: ‘classical monopoly companies operate on markets; the leading companies of digital capitalism, on the other hand, are markets’ (ibid., p. 30; italics by staab).7 in a recent publication, oliver nachtwey and timo seidl (2020) focus on the ‘spirit of capitalism’ and analyse normative foundations of entrepreneurial action in the digital economy. these and other analyses from the field of cultural and media studies (e.g. hepp, 2020; stalder, 2018) illustrate the need to view digitalisation not primarily from a technological perspective. without a doubt, a basic understanding of algorithmic processes, the approach of 'computational thinking' and the formability of digital-technological artefacts is also important for media pedagogy. however, technological developments cannot be detached from economic, political, cultural and social, ethical, and aesthetic questions. people's personal development and coexistence in communities and societies are inextricably linked with questions of enabling and limiting social living conditions, structures of economic and social inequality, power and domination relationships, and processes that promote and endanger democracy. 5 translation by h.n.; original text (german): ‘die fünf untersuchten konzerne prägen nicht nur wesentliche angebote und märkte des internets. sie regeln als betreiber der zentralen infrastrukturen auch die zugänge zum netz, strukturieren die kommunikationsmöglichkeiten der nutzer und sind wesentliche treiber des innovationsprozesses. nicht dezentralisierung, demokratisierung und kooperation, sondern konzentration, kontrolle und macht sind, so die these, die schlüsselprozesse und -kategorien, mit denen sich die wesentlichen entwicklungstendenzen des (kommerziellen) internets angemessen erfassen lassen’ (dolata, 2014, abstract). 6 see an overview of selected publications from various academic perspectives in niesyto (2017a). 7 translation by h.n.; original text (german): ‘klassische monopolunternehmen agieren auf märkten; die leitunternehmen des digitalen kapitalismus hingegen sind märkte’. digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 with the current efforts to describe and analyse the phenomena and structures of digital capitalism, it would not be helpful to refer in a generalised manner to a 'system of orientation' that was developed by karl marx (1867) about 150 years ago. this would not do justice to the multiple changes and the complexity of economic systems and social relations. this also includes a differentiated view of the mutual relations of 'base' and 'superstructure' and the overcoming of thinking in antagonisms and in categories of 'right' and 'wrong' consciousness. different variants of capitalism have also emerged worldwide in the context of different political systems (from parliamentary-democratic constitutions to autocratic and dictatorial regimes). nevertheless, the question of the analysis and critique of certain structural patterns and the transformation possibilities that counteract a growing gap between rich and poor, a permanent educational disadvantage and an overexploitation of natural resources. since the global financial crisis of 2008/09, basic capitalist structures and their effects on almost all areas of society have again increasingly become the subject of analysis, often in academic contexts. important questions in this context are: which basic elements of 'classical' capitalism analysis are still relevant in today's technological, economic, and (world) social conditions? what has changed in digital capitalism? capitalistic structural principles different types, such as advanced capitalism, finance capitalism, free-market capitalism, or welfare capitalism have a few characteristics in common that can be summarised as follows (cf. niesyto, 2017a, p. 16-17): 1. the principle of capital accumulation (pursuit of profit) on the basis of private property (land, raw materials, means of production, shares, etc.); linked to this: the principle of thinking in terms of quantitative growth. 2. the principle of monopolisation in order to achieve permanent dominance of the capitalistic structured (world) market through capital concentration processes; linked to this: globalisation in the sense of opening up and densifying globally distributed development, production, distribution, and sales locations. 3. the principle of reducing the costs of human labour in order to save capital in the long term through the use of new technologies; linked to this: acceleration and flexibilisation of work processes; computerisation and immaterialisation. 4. the principle of economising as many areas of society as possible in order to constantly open up new areas for the accumulation of capital; linked to this: quantification and measurement of institutions, 'consumers', and 'customers' – all the way into sensitive and intimate areas. the thesis is that the outlined capitalistic structural principles are still valid, and that capitalism received a huge boost through the utilisation of digital technologies. one of the reasons for this is that these principles have an affinity with digital structural principles digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 and that digital technology has opened up new social areas for the accumulation of capital. it is about affinities; the connectivity of both structural principles. no determinant interdependencies are assumed. digital technologies can be used for different purposes. this needs to be reflected again and again. digital structural principles the following structural principles should be mentioned here in particular (cf. niesyto, 2017a, p. 18): 1. the principle of binarisation: conversion of analogue signals into binary values (a complex series of 0 and 1 values), which appear only as grid points; numerical representation of data of the most varied kinds and their use, storage, processing, distribution, and representation in a binary coded form; binarisation as a precondition for the algorithmisation of processes and problems to be solved. 2. the principle of variability and simulation as the opportunity to enter into any media artefacts, to reprocess and change them bit by bit, to recreate imaginary spaces. writing, sounds, images, moving images, graphics, language, sounds, and music can be electronically processed and recreated. 3. principle of instantaneousness [german: augenblicklichkeit]: information, sounds, images, and so on, are transported at the speed of light and enable interactivity and worldwide networking in real time (point-to-point accessibility). 4. the principle of miniaturisation of individual components into functional blocks whose temporal circuits are in the nanosecond range (billionths of a second), as well as the principle of modularisation, namely the arbitrary exchangeability and compilation of digital production elements. affinity between digital and capitalistic structural principles above all, quantification is a fundamental common feature: the measurability of processes, cost factors, and profit rates corresponds closely with numerical representations of data. thus, big data projects in particular are in demand, which, in the face of huge amounts of data, enable targetted, rational, and efficient filtering and processing for various purposes on the basis of algorithmic procedures.8 in combination with the digital structural principle of instantaneousness, huge capital profit can be achieved in the shortest possible time in these quantifying processes, for instance in high-frequency trading on the stock exchanges (cf. vogl, 2011, p. 94, 107). this form of financial capitalism completely separates value creation processes from concrete objects and human labour and simulates financial worlds that have no equivalent in the 'real economy'. in general, digital networking and interactivity enable the constant and flexible 8 on quantification, see also the analysis by steffen mau: das metrische wir. über die quantifizierung des sozialen (mau, 2017). [english: the metric we. on the quantification of the social.] digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 availability of people and machines. in particular, spatial and temporal flexibility demands on manpower can be specifically implemented through the use of digital technologies. it is known from various fields of work that the constant accessibility, acceleration, and compression of work processes can lead to permanent overload and stress from the point of view of the employees concerned by the absence of regulations (time limits). the flexible, worldwide availability of people and machines is a central factor in being able to drive capital accumulation as a ‘global player’ in the direction of capital concentration and monopolisation (the search for the most cost-effective development, production, and distribution locations and their global networking). the digital structural principles of variability and simulation fit very well with capitalist structural principles that aim for permanent adaptability, efficiency, and economic usability. the 'internet of things' is an area in which it is currently becoming very clear how the interplay of physical and data worlds (also simulations) is becoming ever more fluid and intensive. the measurement of almost all life worlds and of one's own body (selftracking etc.) offer the optimisation of everyday life and the self (cf. mau, 2016). however, they have a hard capitalist core: the development of new sales markets, the commercialisation of more and more areas of life, the control and surveillance of the body. the miniaturisation and modularisation of digital components are important technological preconditions for reducing the amount of work and materials required, for computerising production technology and logistics in machine-to-machine communication (industry 4.0) and for pushing the human–computer interface in the direction of human enhancement. originally, the focus was on assistive computer technologies to support people with disabilities. in the meantime, numerous new fields of application are emerging. keywords: artificial intelligence, robotics, data glasses, augmented reality. whereas in the past media technologies primarily enabled forms of medial extension (to reach into the distance, e.g. telegraphy, television), digital technologies now extend these possibilities into the body. this is what i would like to describe as medial incorporation. it can be assumed that bioinformatics in particular will be heavily courted by various commercial enterprises in the future in order to open up new markets through the use of corresponding technologies. connected to this are fundamental anthropological, ethical, and social questions of being a human and a subject in digitalised societies. keywords: farewell to the autonomy of the subject, new forms of totalitarian surveillance and domination (cf. zuboff, 2019). digital capitalism – some challenges the analysis of structural affinities between digital and capitalistic structural principles is important in order to recognise connections between technological, economic, political, cultural, and also socialisation developments. for example, the (cultural) sociologist digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 richard sennett pointed out as early as 1998 in his book der flexible mensch. die kultur des neuen kapitalismus, the problematic aspects of a permanent pressure to which people are exposed in globalised network capitalism (see also sennett, 2007). structural principles such as constant, flexible availability and permanent adaptability promote a mode of socialisation that accelerates fragmentation in life-world contexts. what is required – according to sociologists lothar böhnisch and wolfgang schröer – is behaviour that is oriented from situation to situation, from point to point. people should be distracted from asking about the power structures associated with the demands for flexibility (böhnisch et al., 2009, p. 133). similarly, the sociologist hartmut rosa analysed increasing ‘short-short patterns’ of time perception: experiences remain episodic and are no longer linked to each other, to history, and to each person's own identity (rosa, 2005, p. 470). the structural principles and development trends outlined have the potential to fundamentally change everyday life and work as well as the way individuals live together in society. in particular, profitand technology-driven models of the future that ultimately subordinate the complexity of being human to profit maximisation and the precision of algorithmic calculations and unambiguities are to be critically evaluated. at the same time, it should be noted that digital technologies are being used in numerous areas for enlightened, critical, democratic, and participatory purposes. we are dealing with a contradictory situation: on the one hand, capitalism proves its self-renewal power by placing the systematic utilisation of digital data at the centre of its capital accumulations and (so far) manages to sell data expropriation processes to large parts of the population as an unproblematic concomitant and even personal advantage, in accordance with the motto: ‘i have nothing to hide, receive targetted information and offers in return, and can participate in the lives of many people’. on the other hand, the active use of digital technologies is associated with hopes and developments such as the sharing economy, decentralisation, cooperation, open access instead of the principle of ownership, democratisation of manufacturing, strengthening of social–ecological forms of economy, and so on. identifying these contradictions and dealing with them is a social and educational challenge and task. personality development is inextricably linked to questions about social living conditions, structures of social inequality, power and dominance relations, and processes that promote and endanger democracy. strengthening a perspective that is critical of society and the media is especially necessary in a situation where problem areas of digitalisation are becoming increasingly clear in the context of economic and political interests. the following problem areas are examples: • the commercial expropriation and exploitation of personal data profiles and the enormous commercialisation of life worlds linked to this; keywords: commercialisation of media communication and social spaces, influencer advertising, spread of a market-shaped way of thinking in many areas of life (e.g. digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 reißmann, 2014); • the emergence of new, partly totalitarian power structures in connection with big data, including the filter bubble problem, social bots, micro targetting; new forms of social control, monitoring, steering, and manipulation in many areas, also in education (e.g. pariser, 2011; gapski, 2015; zuboff, 2018; iske et al., 2020); • social inequalities and disadvantages, especially for older population groups and people with minimal formal education, or those who do not have sufficient resources and whose future is particularly uncertain in view of the digital transformation and new working relationships (e.g. hargittai, 2002; kutscher & iske, 2020); • the further technical and social acceleration of everyday life and work processes. keywords: tendency to dissolve spatio-temporal continuities and social milieus, fluid relationships, fragmentation of public spheres, constant excitement of media attention, loss of reflexivity (e.g. rosa, 2009; niesyto, 2012). the advance of the it industry in the education sector has developed into a special problem area. it involves various dimensions ranging from the targetted use of the buzzwords 'digital education' [‘digitale bildung’] to broad education policy lobbying and networking as well as subtle and overt forms of influence and advertising at schools and universities (hardware and software, learning platforms, digital learning materials, certification of additional qualifications, free offers, etc.). several analyses are now available under the term 'education industrial complex' or edtech (education technology) industry.9 the following section focusses on some aspects of it in germany and outlines how the buzzwords 'digital education' have developed into another ‘approach lane’ for the it industry in the education sector in recent years. the advance of the it economy in the education sector with the 'digitalpakt schule' (‘digital pact for schools’), the german government has for some time been making more public funds available for the digital-technological infrastructure equipment of schools. at the same time, considerably more public funds are needed for teacher training so that media-related education and learning processes can be supported. so far, the ministries of education and science in germany have failed to establish media education either in teacher training or in schools in a broad-based and sustainable manner (cf. niesyto, 2017b, pp. 182-188). apparently, education policy is now 9 see, among others, the publications by picciano & spring (2013), verger et al. (2017), williamson & hogon (2020). for publications in german language see for instance förschler (2018), münch (2018), hug & madritsch (2020), bernhard et al. (2020). digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 counting on the it industry to become more involved also in teacher training and ‘digital education’. the influence of the it industry on education has increased considerably in germany using the buzzwords 'digital education'. the prevailing education policy in germany focusses primarily on 'digitalisation'. everything is becoming digital, also research on 'digital education' is to be intensified (bmbf, 2020). it is true that 'digital education' is a catchy word that seems suitable for education policy arenas. but there are more and more critical voices. among other things, it is pointed out that the adjective 'digital' is factually incorrect with regard to education because there can be no 'digital' theory of education. ‘educational processes remain educational processes – with or without the aid of digital technology’, says the council for cultural education in a statement (kulturelle bildung, 2019; p. 22; cf. also fuchs, 2021, p. 163 and kübler, 2018). at the same time, the word 'digital education' shortens the view of the multidimensionality of the pedagogical task. basic competences that are elementary for educational and learning processes, such as the ability to reflect and criticise, educational and learning theory basics, and elementary pedagogical-didactic and media pedagogical competences are increasingly marginalised (cf. dgfe, 2017). finally, the digital hype overlooks the fact that besides change and 'disruption' there are also continuities. digital technology and digital aesthetics change previous analogue systems of symbols and signs. it is important to acquire competences in algorithmic processes and in handling and creating with digital media. but digital techniques and aesthetics do not replace basic knowledge and competences in symbol and sign systems, for instance in the field of visual design and communication with photos and film/video. in germany, business-related initiatives, foundations, and platforms have been significantly increasing their influence in public education for some time. these include the bündnis für bildung [alliance for education], the bundesverband digitale bildung [federal association for digital education}, the forum bildung digitalisierung [digitalisation education forum] and the netzwerk digitale bildung [digital education network] (cf. förschler, 2018).10 in the meantime, the it industry, in cooperation with the gesellschaft für informatik (gi), has succeeded in gathering voices from various fields for the support of a 'digital education charter'.11 this charter focusses on 'digital competences' in connection with 'digital education' with euphonious words such as the ‘ability to judge, creativity, self-determination, creative ability, sense of responsibility’. media education is no longer mentioned in the charter – although there was previously an exchange between representatives of computer science and media education.12 10 cf. https://www.bfb.org/; https://bvdb.org/; https://www.forumbd.de; https://www.netzwerk-digitale-bildung.de/ 11 cf. https://charta-digitale-bildung.de 12 cf. ‚dagstuhl-erklärung‘ (gi, 2016), ‚frankfurt-dreieck‘ (initiative kbom, 2019) https://www.bfb.org/ https://bvdb.org/ https://www.forumbd.de/ https://www.netzwerk-digitale-bildung.de/ https://charta-digitale-bildung.de/ digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 media education has been increasingly marginalised in recent years, while the it industry has spread into the education sector. this development becomes clear when one takes a look at the very important task of media criticism for media education, for example. fundamental dimensions of media criticism and an analysis of questions of digital capitalism and data capitalism are not desired by the initiatives mentioned previously and lobby groups. an analysis of documents of business-related it initiatives shows, among other things, that with the reference to 'digital sovereignty', it is primarily about an individual expansion of competences in order to constantly adapt to digital innovations and, in particular, contexts of economic exploitation (e.g. vereinigung der bayerischen wirtschaft e. v., 2018, p. 60 f.).13 it is also no coincidence that at national and eu levels, corresponding policy papers and funding programmes are increasingly being used to realise interpretive dominance and to enforce objectives in the education and science sector that are closely oriented to the economy . a study by altenrath et al. (2020), for example, comes to the conclusion that in the programmes and funding guidelines examined, economic competitiveness is the essential background for the argument (ibid., p. 6) and 'digital competence' is largely regarded as an individual prerequisite for employability (ibid, p. 8). although critical or creative competences in dealing with digital media are mentioned, they are not a focus – it is more about technological sovereignty (ibid., p. 14).14 the british media educator david buckingham comes to a similar conclusion: ‘advocates of digital education have increasingly recognized the need for young people to acquire digital media literacy. however, this idea is often seen in instrumental terms, and is rarely implemented in any coherent or comprehensive way’ (cf. buckingham, 2019). concepts of 'media education' and a broad understanding of 'media literacy' play virtually no role in economy-related documents and strategies.15 at the international political level (eu and unesco), there is now a tendency to equate 'digital literacy' with 'media literacy' (cf. trültzsch-wijnen, 2020, p. 218)—a tendency that has also been observed for some time in education policy in germany. while science ministries and most universities do not yet see themselves in a position to 13 regarding these adaptations, see also valentin dander in his article on ideological aspects of 'digitalisation'. in his summary, he states, among other things: ‘the formative task thus consists primarily in the adaptation that institutions and individuals have to carry out, and hardly in creating contextual conditions that make the use of digital technologies more likely, for example for social justice’ (dander, 2018b, p. 271; translation by h.n.; original text (german): „die gestaltungsaufgabe besteht demnach primär in der anpassungsleistung, die institutionen wie individuen an sich zu vollziehen haben, und kaum darin, kontextbedingungen zu schaffen, die den einsatz digitaler technologien etwa für soziale gerechtigkeit wahrscheinlicher werden lassen’ (dander, 2018, s. 271). see also dander's article in this issue of seminar.net 14 see also the article by altenrath et al. in this issue of seminar.net 15 at both national and eu level, there are also other policy papers and funding programmes in various fields of action that pursue not only economy-related objectives. as an example, the following can be mentioned with regard to the eu level: european guidelines for digital youth work (2019): https://www.digitalyouthwork.eu/wpcontent/uploads/sites/4/2019/09/european-guidelines-for-digital-youth-work-web.pdf https://www.digitalyouthwork.eu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2019/09/european-guidelines-for-digital-youth-work-web.pdf https://www.digitalyouthwork.eu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2019/09/european-guidelines-for-digital-youth-work-web.pdf digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 establish media pedagogy in a broad and obligatory way – especially in the form of basic media education16 – in pedagogical courses, various it companies offer schools workshops for teachers and teaching materials (in addition to selling hardware and software), including many free offers. there are now subtle and overt forms of influence via various advertising measures (schmerr, 2019). examples: apple encourages teachers around the world to train as apple distinguished educators in order to subsequently promote apple products in schools and at congresses; in a similar way, microsoft tries to gain influence in schools with its microsoft innovative educator experts program; google also advertises its own devices and software products with free teaching materials in order to generate brand loyalty among children as young as elementary school age. martina schmerr analyzes that the interests of the digital economy in the education sector are manifold – they range from improving their own market position, image cultivation and early brand loyalty to collecting data from young people and lesson designs from teachers (schmerr, 2019, 59f.). at the same time, there is a lack of reflection and regulation to ensure the quality of digital educational media. in a dossier on the activities of the digital industry in the education sector, the gewerkschaft erziehung wissenschaft (gew, 2019) analysed the large it corporations apple, microsoft, google, samsung electronics and the lobby association bitkom (germany). with regard to bitkom, the dossier summarises the association thus: ‘a one-sided focus on digital media becomes clear, in line with the orientation of the member companies, whose use is exclusively and fundamentally evaluated positively’ (ibid., p. 9). published in recent years, these in-depth analyses and articles are recommended on the topic of education, digitalisation, and the it economy: • annina förschler (2018) elaborated a critical and detailed policy network analysis on the 'who’s who?' of the german education digitalisation agenda. on the basis of a network ethnographic survey, it is shown that private-sector interests in the edtech industry are becoming increasingly closely linked to education policy programmes. the influence of various edtech actors is elaborated and detailed in particular using the example of the bündnis für bildung (bfb; engl.: alliance for education). • in a study on the economisation of school education, tim engartner (2020) analyses, among other things, how extremely lucrative sales markets are being created for it companies within the framework of the so-called 'digitalpakt schule'. engartner shows how digitalisation in schools has so far been shaped more by economic interests than by pedagogical concepts and how ministries have often 16 cf. imort/niesyto (2014), https://www.keine-bildung-ohne-medien.de/grundbildungmedien-uebersicht/ and https://horst-niesyto.de/medienpaedagogische-grundbildung/ https://www.keine-bildung-ohne-medien.de/grundbildungmedien-uebersicht/s https://horst-niesyto.de/medienpaedagogische-grundbildung/ digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 declared the application and usability of education for the labour market to be the standard of school teaching and learning processes. • sigrid hartong (2020) points out that a serious problem in the basic logic of digitalisation is the related datafication and algorithmisation of education. hartong states that a debate ‘about the powerful politics of modelling in educational software, school platforms, but also in school administration or school supervision software is so far almost completely missing’ – ‘and this although these systems increasingly influence decisions of educational actors’ (ibid.).17 • in an article, theo hug and reinhold madritsch (2020) first summarise the previous international discussion on education industry developments and then analyse the situation in austria. in their conclusion they state, among other things, that an ‘intensified support of the globalised education industry has taken place without broad public discussion’.18 they point out that there is much to be said against excessive outsourcing of the core tasks of the education system relevant to civil society and the rule of law to private service providers or tech companies (ibid., p. 35). antoni verger et al. (2017) present an analysis of the rise and consequences of a global education industry (gei), which describes new forms of private-sector, profit-oriented activities in education at the international level and explains this using selected examples (see also bernhard et al., 2018; münch, 2018). on the state of the development of googlefication of the classroom in the usa, natasha singer, among others, provides a (partial) insight into the state of commercialisation in the us education system: ‘the tech giant is transforming public education with low-cost lap tops and free apps (...) schools may be giving google more than they are getting: generations of future customers’ (singer, 2017). 17 translation by h.n.; original text (german): hartong konstatiert, dass eine debatte „um die machtvolle politik der modellierung bei lernsoftware, schulplattformen, aber auch bei schulverwaltungsoder schulaufsichtssoftware bislang fast vollständig’ fehlt – „und das, obgleich diese systeme in wachsendem maße entscheidungen von bildungsakteuren beeinflussen’ (ebd.). see also earlier publications on the subject area by sigrid hartong: https://www.hsu-hh.de/sozgov/team/prof-dr-sigrid-hartong/. a recent article presents a study on the implementation and transformation of state education monitoring systems in germany and the usa (hartong & förschler, 2020). 18 translation by h.n.; original text (german): ‘in ihrem fazit halten sie u.a. fest, dass eine „intensivierte förderung der globalisierten bildungsindustrie ohne breite öffentliche diskussion’ erfolgte’. see also the article by theo hug in this issue of seminar.net https://www.hsu-hh.de/sozgov/team/prof-dr-sigrid-hartong/ digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 strengthening alternative pathways and critical media education it is not only with regard to school education that the question arises of alternatives to the commercial offers of the large it corporations that are suitable for educational institutions and do not involve the constant expropriation of data. challenges are emerging here at various levels, including data protection issues, open access, and interoperability of systems. europe has enormous research and technology capacities – why is it not possible for hardware and software systems to be developed at eu level that offer a real alternative to the commercial offerings of the global it corporations in terms of usability which are at the same time compatible with local infrastructures? it also needs to be clarified how the quality of digital learning materials will be ensured in pedagogical contexts in the future. various actors need to be involved in this, especially pedagogical specialists and teachers, and also pupils and students – not only the providers of materials and representatives of state administration. this also applies to materials and platforms offered in the context of open educational resources (oer). quality assurance also includes a ban on advertising it industry products in public education institutions and various data protection issues. this requires, for example, data management systems that are compatible with the gdpr and whose compliance is also monitored (cf. hug & madritsch, 2020, p. 11 f.). and above all, there is a need for a basic media education for all pedagogical staff and in-depth studies in media education (cf. imort & niesyto, 2014). many fields of media education are still dominated by project-related funding and there is a structural lack of permanent staff positions. to overcome the situation of dependency on the system of ‘proprietary markets’ of digital capitalism (staab, 2019), political and legal framework conditions for global it corporations are necessary. this is not only about addressing the economic power structures of it corporations, but also the dependency structures that platform operators have now created via opaque algorithmic structuring of social relations and social communication (cf. dolata, 2020). at the same time, the development of democratic, public welfare oriented digital infrastructures and resource-saving processes beyond the commercial-capitalist exploitation interests of corporations is urgently needed. media and communication scientist robin mansell drew attention to the general need for dialogue on alternative pathways in connection with fundamental questions of the digital transformation: a dialogue is needed about possible alternative pathways, that is, alternative social imaginaries which themselves can start to shape action that leads to shifts in investment, in business models and in policies that will guide our choices about digital innovation pathways. (...) the ‘datafication’ of our lives is only a predetermined outcome if we persist in believing that it is (mansell, 2018, p. 61). digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 political forces that are not part of the education industrial complex should support the development at an eu level of an alternative infrastructure to the data capitalism of it corporations to be made available to public education as soon as possible. in this context, we need a discourse by society as a whole on the guiding principles of future social, economic, and media development – and also in its importance for the education system. for example, schools should open up substantially more new spaces for the experience of self-efficacy and for social participation and use the potential of digital media for this. it is a very important task of media education to participate in this discourse with a strong voice and to articulate its own proposals and demands. developing media education as a critical media and social analysis and at the same time as a subject-oriented, reflexive science of action and a pedagogical work area is not a contradiction. both are necessary: on the one hand, an orientation towards people, their needs, interests and ways of life, ambivalences, and contradictions is needed and on the other hand, the investigation of social media patterns and structures that influence people's perception, thinking and actions. it is necessary to strengthen a media-critical perspective as an elementary task of media pedagogy (niesyto & moser, 2018). in the following passage, i will outline three dimensions that, in my view, are primarily associated with 'media-critical'. first of all, it is about a critical-reflexive basic attitude (cf. niesyto, 2012, p. 48f., 59f.). the latin root of 'reflection' goes back to ‘reflexio’: to turn, to bend. to turn a thought and a position back and forth (re-flect), to put oneself in another position, to look at a situation from different perspectives is part of the standards of good education and science. this process of re-thinking is inseparably linked to the ability to criticise. the greek root of 'criticism' goes back to ‘krinein’: to distinguish, to decide, to separate. it is about distinguishing, comparing, evaluating facts, objects, actions. in the process of turning and comparing a thought, a thing, a situation (‘reflexio’) we discover differences. at the same time, we need criteria, standards for evaluating and classifying differences and for the question of what we decide (‘krinein’). the naming of criteria or standards is linked to norms and values, which are an important part of choice and evaluation processes. these processes are complex and also require (media) ethical reflections. it is not only a matter of conscious, rational considerations, but also of dealing with emotional-affective attitudes, unquestioned patterns of perception and behaviour, socialisation, and individual characters and dispositions. another dimension refers to the subject matter of media criticism. in an academic context, media criticism is a term used in various disciplines, especially in media and communication studies, journalism, and media education. media criticism in pedagogical contexts emphasises above all a quality-related analysis of social media offerings and reflection on one's own use, production, and communication with media. the broad spectrum of media-critical analyses and activities ranges from the analysis of stereotypical digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 images of roles and society in the media to the discovery of media sound and image manipulation possibilities in addition to reflexive phases in projects of active media work and the evaluation of various media products by children and young people, for instance in the context of film juries, reviews of computer games, or the evaluation of digital learning materials.19 in current discourses it becomes clear that media criticism in pedagogical contexts has additional requirements especially for well-founded data and technology criticism (e.g. dander, 2018a; iske et al., 2020; knaus, 2020) and of a critical analysis of media and society (e.g. niesyto, 2020). in this context, it is also about questions of social situations and educational inequality (permanently inadequate cultural, social, media, and economic resources), the explanation and reflection of normative orientations, and media criticism as part of a political-cultural and milieu-sensitive media education. for this, it is necessary to promote the ability of media criticism in a vivid and practical way in connection with one's own media productions – especially in structurally disadvantaged educational and social milieus (niesyto, 2017b, ch. 4-6; cf. also the approach 'digital citizenship', moser, 2018). finally, a critical media education is faced with the task of positioning itself more clearly again in the social context of education and professional policy (cf. niesyto, 2021). the goals and structures of profitand technology-driven digitalisation must be questioned, also in connection with differentiated technology impact assessments. media education should actively participate in this. many initiatives and fields of inquiry have developed to support education for sustainable development (esd). in german-language media education, there are currently contributions that also refer more strongly to these activities under media aspects (e.g. barberi et al., 2020; ring, 2020; schluchter, 2020). overall, it is about addressing social imbalances in the relationship between people, the economy, technology, culture, and nature, and about aspects of sufficiency in the production, use, and disposal of media as well as the development of alternative pathways to capitalist forms of digitalisation. for this, a broad alliance of media education with interested partners in as many areas as possible is essential to gain more attention and influence in the public and political sphere. without such a broad alliance, it will hardly be possible to realise sufficient infrastructural framework conditions for a considerably broader support of media education in the long term.20 at the european level, it would be desirable for media educators to become more involved in discourses and networks supporting alternative pathways (mansell, 2018) to the current 19 for theory, research and current discourses regarding media pedagogical media criticism, see niesyto (2020). see also a compact presentation on the net: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/medienkritik_(medienpädagogik). 20 see, among others, the demands and proposals of the initiative no education without media!: https://www.keinebildung-ohne-medien.de https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/medienkritik_(medienpädagogik) https://www.keine-bildung-ohne-medien.de/ https://www.keine-bildung-ohne-medien.de/ digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 mainstream of strategies of digitalisation. in a report in the context of the corona crisis, williamson & hogon (2020) clearly make reference to a tension in view of increasing commercialisation in education: the shift in authority from the state to private actors might make sense on efficiency grounds, but also entails the undermining of democratic control of public education. (…) the commercial activities we have documented in this report indicate an emerging tension that will be at the core of any debates about education after the pandemic has passed: a tension over the very purposes of education, and of what knowledge or skills should be taught in schools to achieve those purposes. will this continued shift in authority to private actors further undermine democratic control of public education? (williamson & hogan, 2020, p. 66 f.) in this situation, it is an important task of scientists to articulate themselves publicly and, on the basis of a well-founded analysis, to oppose the increasing commercialisation in education and to participate in the development of alternative pathways. references altenrath, m., helbig, c., hofhues, s. 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https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisation_privatisation digital capitalism and critical media education abstract digital capitalism – selected aspects of analysis capitalistic structural principles digital structural principles affinity between digital and capitalistic structural principles digital capitalism – some challenges the advance of the it economy in the education sector strengthening alternative pathways and critical media education references microsoft word 973-article text-5766-2-11-20211012.docx transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 54 the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent: capitalism’s destruction of people, culture, and nature holly may treadwell “capital was born from extinction, and from capital, extinction has flowed.” justin mcbrien, anthropocene 116 the capitalocene, as an alternative to the anthropocene, claims it is not merely human activity that is having such detrimental effects on the planet, but the activities of capitalism specifically. the concept of the anthropocene puts equal blame on all humans and ”fits comfortably with a view of population, environment and history governed by food and resource use – and abstracted from class and empire” (moore, “the capitalocene part ii” 238); that is, the concept overlooks the disproportionate role big corporations play in climate change. as the working class are denigrated for using plastic straws and charged to buy plastic bags, just twenty of the biggest companies continue to emit a third of all carbon emissions (taylor and watts). the capitalocene, in contrast, focuses on the role of big industry, and recognises that it is capitalism and its values that have historically caused and continue to cause the most damage to the environment. a central theorist of the concept, jason moore states that ”global warming is capital’s crowning achievement” (“the capitalocene part ii” 237) and “‘accumulation by extinction’ has been fundamental to capitalism from the beginning” (moore, ”introduction” 8). ”the accumulation of capital is the accumulation of potential extinction—a potential increasingly activated in recent decades” (moore, “introduction” 8). extinction here is taken to refer to the “‘extinguishing of cultures and languages,’ genocide, and holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 55 spectrum of biospheric changes understood as anthropogenic” (moore, “introduction” 7; see also mcbrien). the rise of global capitalism came hand in hand with the “founding” of the new world (quijano 533), sharing a central aim of progress, development, and profit above all, and ”life in all its diversity – in people and in nature – seems to have been sacrificed to [this] progress’ (shiva xii). the central victims of this extinction are the subaltern, colonial subjects of this regime, and yet their stories, challenges, and deaths are often omitted by the scholarship around the concept. indeed, there is a ”long history of ‘political exchange’ between the owners of capital and the purveyors of imperial violence” (moore, “the capitalocene part ii” 242). however, ”the dangers and challenges that threatened and still haunt the communities of the amazon, such as death, dispossession, exploitation, destruction of their habitat and acculturation” are not often explored by any media (mutis 32). an exception to this is ciro guerra’s embrace of the serpent, which follows the story of karamakate, the last surviving member of the cohiuano tribe who were eradicated in the rubber holocaust (rivera 49). the film follows two timelines: the first is set in 1909 and features a young karamakate. the protagonist is approached by a fictionalised version of german ethnologist and explorer, theodor “theo” koch-grünberg, who is searching for the yakruna plant to cure his malaria. the second timeline is set in 1940 with an older karamakate approached by a fictionalised version of american biologist richard evans schultes (referred to in the film as evan), who intends to procure the yakruna plant in order to increase the purity of the americans’ rubber trees. whilst the two western characters are based on real explorers and the narrative inspired by their diaries, karamakate is a completely fictional character and the cohiuano are a fictional community. guerra himself explains the decision, stating that as a non-indigenous film-maker he ”didn’t have the right to make a fiction about a real tribe” (guerra in guillén). the cohiuano and indeed karamakate, however, were heavily inspired by the actor who played transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 56 the older character, antonio bolívar salvador. salvador was one of the last ocaina people remaining and was displaced by the rubber holocaust, escaped, and lived his life with a different community in order to survive (salvador in mathiesen; guerra in guillén). in this way, the fictionalised narrative is a reflection of a truth lived by many indigenous peoples throughout the amazon and this made the work incredibly valuable to the communities who are continually facing the destruction of their cultures (salvador in mathiesen). indeed, according to pinzón, the film ”is the elaboration of a loss insofar as it invites us to witness the end of a world”; that is, the native and natural world. the thirty-year expanse of the film foregrounds the effects of the rubber trade and ”illustrates how much the amazon has changed, become commercialized and overcome by colonialism” (ramji 2). the film demonstrates how capitalism ”leaves in its wake the disappearance of species, languages, cultures, and peoples,” and how this extinction is no accident, but is achieved through labour, murder, deforestation, depletion of resources, and dispossession all in the name of progress (mcbrien 117). this study examines the ways in which capitalism causes the destruction of people, culture, and nature through slavery, mass extraction of resources, and the destruction of land. firstly, this paper will explore the depiction of the cohiuano’s environmental practices and knowledges, before going on to analyse the contrasting practices and ignorance of global capitalists. secondly, it will examine how embrace of the serpent presents the effects of these practices. specifically, how they led to the destruction of land and biodiversity in favour of mass extraction and consumption, how this extraction led to the displacement and enslavement of indigenous communities, and how this enslavement and genocide led to the deaths of their cultures. as arturo escobar explains, ”the capitalisation of nature has been central to capitalism ever since primitive accumulation and the enclosure of the commons. the history of capital is thus the history of exploitation of production conditions” (encountering development 200). capitalism, at its very holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 57 essence, exploits its environment. this paper aims to show how embrace of the serpent presents extinction as a result of capitalism, and thus demonstrates the dangerous reality of the capitalocene. the film presents indigenous knowledges and practices through karamakate’s conservation, understanding, and respect for his environment. karamakate states that the ”jungle is fragile, and if you attack her, she strikes back. she will only allow us to travel if we respect her” (embrace). the pronoun ”she,” the concept of respect, and the necessity of her permission personify the environment and give it autonomy, showing that the cohiuano people’s relationship is one of ”respectful coexistence and awareness of the fragility of nature. this attitude speaks more to current ecological concerns and processes of rainforest exploitation” (d’argenio 137), so the focus on the necessity of respect could be seen as a criticism of the colonisers’ disrespect. in the same scene, karamakate states that they ”must not eat meat or fish until the rains begin and we ask for permission to the owners of animals. we can’t cut any tree from its root” (embrace). the idea that they must ”ask permission” connotes the necessity of consent. this, in turn, further endows a sense of autonomy to nature, since the ”very setting of rules of behaviour implies an understanding of the jungle as an ‘earth-being’” (d’argenio 137), showing the ”dynamic relationship which [karamakate’s] people have with both the stars and the earth” (martin-jones 17). this ”dynamic relationship” suggests an active, two-way connection between the tribespeople and forest. furthermore, the cohiuano’s “rules” for interacting with nature infer that their relationship—like many indigenous silvical practices—is based on the ”sustainable and renewable maximisation of all the diverse forms and functions of forests and trees” (shiva 58); they ”try to maintain their harmony and comply with certain rules that over the years they have determined are necessary for everything to continue to flow harmoniously” (ibáñez et al 175). therefore, the rules are based on acquired knowledge and experience, transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 58 figure 1 so the abstention from eating meat or fish before the rains may be in place to avoid destroying the populations of animals who are already struggling during the dry season. likewise, the rule to not ”cut any tree from its root” ensures that the tree will grow back. these rules, then, display a deep understanding of, as well as respect for, nature’s needs, and the way in which the ”jungle is for [karamakate] an extension of his own existence” (ibáñez et al 175). the film further presents the cohiuano’s relationship with the jungle as a judicious one through a scene where butterflies fly around karamakate (figure 1). their proximity, volume, and the calmness of all parties is the perfect example of ”[hu]man's capacity to merge with [nature’s] rhythms and patterns intellectually, emotionally and spiritually” (shiva 54). whilst this moment could be seen to facsimile the stereotyping of indigenous peoples as being at one with nature, it functions more to demonstrate karamakate’s respect and understanding of nature. indeed, butterfly swarms are a natural and normal occurrence, so the scene does not extend into the stereotypical presentation of shamanism and non-human companions. the focus in this scene is more on karamakate’s reaction to them (or lack thereof): he ignores them as they ignore him. he simply exists within the same space as them and is content to share it: he does not brush them away as a nuisance, nor does he move to get away from them. this lack of reaction contrasts to the capitalists’ belief in holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 59 human supremacy as karamakate appears to accept their coexistence and recognises that both human, non-human animal, and the natural world live with rather than against one another. the use of butterflies in particular also emphasises this connection. butterflies are generally solitary creatures, which is reflective of karamakate as the last surviving member of his tribe. nevertheless, some butterflies (such as the coliadinae family) often spend time in groups near bodies of water, which facsimiles karamakate’s home and his reliance on community (burger and gochfeld 489). indeed, as burger and gochfeld’s study revealed, the larger the group of butterflies, the better their chance of survival (482). in addition, many types of butterflies have been shown to retain memories and knowledge from when they were caterpillars, despite the extreme metamorphosis they undergo in the cocoon (blackiston et al). this fact can also be paralleled to karamakate. despite the complete transformation of his country, the forest, and many other tribespeople’s ways of life, and notwithstanding his later difficulty remembering some practices, karamakate holds on to his culture. he refuses to assimilate and does his best to maintain traditional practices, evincing a kinship between the human and the creature. transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 60 figure 2 in addition, the use of butterflies could function to further support karamakate’s “forest rules” by referring to the butterfly effect. this phenomenon claims that ”a butterfly flaps its wings in china and sets off a tornado in texas,” drawing on the ways in which ”small events compound and irreversibly alter the future of the universe” (boeing 14). this is reminiscent of karamakate’s understanding that eating animals during the dry season could have disastrous effects on the ecosystem as a whole. this kinship and the significance of the butterfly as a symbol of both change and cultural retention is emphasised by the dream sequence towards the end, which finishes on the image of a human figure drawn inside a butterfly (figure 2). this could be a metaphor for the way in which the activities of humans and nature interlink and affect one another. indeed, butterflies’ ”flight activity has provided important evidence of global climate change,” indicating the ways in which human activity in the context of the capitalocene can have disastrous effects on nature (parmesan 2006). the image also reflects karamakate’s understanding of humans as a part of nature by literally depicting us living within it. embrace of the serpent conveys the cohiuano people’s conservational practices as karamakate appears to possess ”botanical wisdom beyond that developed by western civilisation” in scenes such as the first visit to the missionary temple (martin-jones 19). karamakate teaches the kidnapped boys about the chiricaspi plant, explaining it is a ”gift to our karipulakena ancestors from the gods. we received the sun’s semen when yeba, the sun’s daughter, scratched his penis and ground the semen to dust. we must do the same with this plant before boiling holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 61 it […] this is the strongest defence we have against any disease” (embrace). the belief that the plant is a ”gift” embeds nature as a sacred being to be treasured, and the plant’s healing qualities demonstrate the two-way relationship, as the jungle gives back to those who take the time to understand and care for it. karamakate and the cohiuano show a ”far superior knowledge of and engagement with the rainforest ecosystem,” a rapport that clearly prioritises the health of the forest and its inhabitants (martin-jones 20). indeed, many indigenous populations’ commitment to and interaction with their environment is based on such pragmatic conservation efforts. for example, using trees’ produce to survive whilst conserving the trees themselves and only taking what is needed (shiva 62). this prioritisation of sustained instead of maximised resource extraction is deployed as grounds for capitalists and colonialists to position indigenous communities as unproductive (shiva 10). correspondingly, capitalist invasion of the amazon meant that ”[r]esource flows to maintain nature's cycles and local needs of water and diverse vegetation have been replaced by cash-flows as a measure of ’yield’ and ’growth’” (85). as escobar attests, ”capitalism impairs or destroys the social and environmental conditions on which it relies (including nature and labour),” replacing long-term sustainability with short-term profit and productivity (encountering development 200). the film contrasts these sustainable practices and relationships against capitalist activities and attitudes towards the environment. the exploitative capitalist ”way of being in the world” is sharply criticised by guerro and his team (martinjones 16). karamakate describes the white people as ”ants. they’ll eat anything, and they die fat. [they’ll] devour everything” (embrace). karamakate’s in-depth knowledge of nature would tell him that ants hoard food and are often destructive (cook et al). accordingly, the film may be referring to capitalism’s tendency to eschew long-term survival in favour of short-term profit, in the shape of mass extraction and consumption (lumsden). moreover, ants represent an apt metaphor transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 62 figure 3 for colonial forces and their agents, as they ”occupy virtually all major terrestrial habitats” and are known as an ”invasive species” (ward 550). karamakate tells the children that ”[o]ne day [the colombians] will finish all the food in the jungle,” emphasising their lack of regard for sustainability, lack of general respect for the environment, and their one-way association with the place. as karamakate explains, his mission was to share the belief and understanding that ”every plant, every tree, every flower is full of wisdom” with the children of his tribe, ”but the rubber barons and colombians came” (embrace). the syntactical prioritisation of the barons suggests that it is the extraction of rubber and, by extension, the commodification of nature that brought the colonisers, and it was this incumbent capitalism that stopped him sharing his culture. the extinction of many indigenous peoples’ way of life ”is grounded in the experience of alienation and the [colonists’] attitude of entitlement” (crist 29); their relationship with the ecosystem is one of possession and domination. embrace of the serpent demonstrates how the locals’ relationship— predicated on understanding and respect—is sundered by the invasion of capitalism. practices of conservation are replaced by creeds of commodification. the film accomplishes this through the presentation of the colonisers’ disregard for the cohiuano’s prohibitions (such as not eating meat or fish before the rains begin), both in the christian mission where the travellers are offered fish for dinner (embrace) and when theo, addled by delirium, protests the rules. ”permission from whom?,” he shouts, “you? the owner of the fishes? i’m sick holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 63 figure 4 because of respecting your ridiculous prohibitions! […] this river is full of fish! one less won't change anything!” (embrace). the derogatory, mocking tone— particularly evident in the phrase ”owner of the fishes” as a mimicry of the cohiuano’s beliefs regarding the “owner of the animals”—indicate the level of disrespect that even “nice” colonisers like theo have for indigenous cultures as well as nature itself. theo’s claim that ”one less fish” won’t make a difference reveals his disregard for the importance of each and every life that the cohiuano treasure. it also encapsulates his ignorance regarding the dramatic effects the smallest of actions can have; that is, the ‘fragility’ of the jungle that karamakate warned of earlier in the film. evan’s propensity for throwing his cigarette butts into the river entrenches this disrespect further (figure 4). he pollutes the waterway without considering that this could harm the plants, animals, and humans that rely on the water itself. these violations demonstrate the capitalist view that ”humans could and indeed should control nature”, rejecting any form of judicious coexistence (mcbrien 125). thus, the colonisers jeopardise the health of the ecosystem due to their perceived entitlement and view of nature as a commodity that exists for their own use. these attitudes reflect a larger cultural narcissism and human supremacy that white capitalist societies partake in. the film goes on to depict the effects of this mass extraction of resources and ignorance of the land to illustrate how ”capitalism imposes a relentless pattern of violence on nature, humans included” (moore, ”introduction” 5). commercial transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 64 figure 5 demands have ”frequently resulted in large-scale forest destruction.” (shiva 58-9) embrace of the serpent presents and criticises this destruction of land and the resultant ligation of biodiversity, laying bare the impacts of these losses on the indigenous communities who rely on that land. karamakate claims that the white man's science only leads to ”violence, death” as it is dependent upon and derivative of profit (embrace). a prime example of this kind of dominance in the film is the rubber tree, the commodification of which destroyed entire forests through ”armed conflict over the control of areas where rubber can be harvested” (martin-jones 16). here, ”control” indicates the colonisers’ wish to dominate the land, rather than live and interact with it. moreover, the conflict is inferred to be military in nature, and thus violent. this is emphasised as karamakate asks, ”you want to steal yakruna? what else will you turn into death?” for ”rubber means death,” which, considering the context of the rubber trade, can be seen as paraphrasis for “the capitalist commodification of nature causes death” (embrace). embrace of the serpent articulates capitalism as ”a colonising force on the biosphere stripping it of its biological wealth and potential” (crist 23) through the cultivation and consequential exploitation of nature ”by the capitalist mode of production” (shiva ix-x). the cohiuano’s sacred traditions hold that ”yakruna must not be cultivated”, potentially referring to the pejorative biological effects of cultivation (embrace); what is known as “green revolution agriculture” decreases genetic diversity, inhibits their medicinal value, and increases the vulnerability of plants to diseases, and therefore extinction (shiva xiii). this drive to extinction is also holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 65 evinced by the plant’s supposed caretakers, who have given up protecting it from capitalist development, been reduced to drunks, and are shown ”toasting the end of the world!” (embrace). the camera alternates between shots of the sacred plant being cultivated and its caretakers toasting (figure 5), which reinforces the link between the two events. this connection presents the ”systematic desecration and prosecution of ancient indigenous knowledge” and practices by capitalism. (rivera 49). whilst the tribespeople see yakruna as ecologically valuable and consider it their ”greatest knowledge”, western colonisers merely want it for its exploitable properties—specifically its capacity to enhance the purity of rubber, which the americans believe will help them win world war ii (embrace). capitalism values only commercially useful nature. this view prepares and precipitates the felling of forests full of trees that ”maintain the life of the soil and water and of local people” but do not generate profit, and so are viewed as weeds and ”an obstruction to agriculture” (shiva 74; 59). these “weeds” are replaced by ecologically damaging trees or commercially grown crops that provoke hydrological changes which ravage the forest, alluding back to the butterfly effect and demonstrating how damage to one part of an ecosystem can imperil another. such deforestation could “lead to the loss of a large number of plant species, which in turn would seriously threaten the tribespeople’s way of life and their food security” (ibáñez et al 177). as déborah danowski and eduardo viveiros de castro note, the people of the amazon are experiencing “a desynchronization of seasonal rhythms and hydrological cycles, and a consequent perturbation of the biosemiotic interactions characteristic of these peoples’ traditional habitats” (75). this disruption derives from the ”generalized and mounting violent destruction of these environments by the programs for the acceleration of growth pushed forward by nation-states in thrall to integrated world capitalism’ (danowski and de castro 75). such extinction, then, can be seen as a direct result of the colonisers’ lack of regard for, desecration of, and commodification of nature. transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 66 embrace of the serpent proceeds to express how this mass extraction and the consequent destruction of environment catalyses the destruction of indigenous communities through displacement, lack of access to resources, and even murder. in many countries, colonial capitalism functions to limit local peoples’ access to the forests they previously relied on for survival (shiva xiv; 78) and threatens ”their way of life and their food security” (ibáñez et al 177). evidently, the capitalocene ignores ”the rights of communities to their territories and resources,” enacting ”tremendously uneven patterns of global consumption, environmental impact, and structures of exploitation” (escobar, encountering development xxiii). moreover, the capitalist mode of development in regions such as the amazon and india does not draw on ”surplus produced over and above the needs of the community” (shiva 4). these extractive forces take everything and indigenous communities are left in poverty. as vandana shiva states, these ”resources which supported their survival were absorbed into the market economy,” suggesting that these people are displaced by capitalism (11). such displacement has resulted in 456 million people starving or being malnourished, giving rise to ”a crisis of poverty rooted in ecological devastation” and shows that the usurpation of tribal land in favour of capitalist plantations leads to the extinction of indigenous people (shiva xiii; xvi). the effects of this displacement are addressed by the older karamakate, who reminisces that stones, trees, and animals all used to talk to him (embrace). the past tense is crucial in this scene, as the character explains that he can no longer read the petroglyphs he himself drew; ”now they’re just pictures on rocks. now i’m empty. i’m a chullachaqui.” in the film, it is explained that a chullachaqui is a creature ”which looks exactly like the person but is empty and hollow, a copy that drifts like a ghost” (embrace). this claim thereby connotes that karamakate’s displacement from his land and the extinction of his community has compromised his connections with his environment and culture, rendering him ”hollow” and ”lost” (embrace). indeed, mutis paraphrases guerra in claiming that ”the chullachaqui is a metaphor for what holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 67 figure 6 the amazon tribes feel, who fear that their culture, languages and traditions are being lost” (mutis 39). the decimation of land in favour of rubber plantations rides high in the film, providing commentary on the connective tissue between disease and deforestation. sickness also contributes to the extinction of people through theo’s malaria, characterised by his sweating, shivering, and fever (crump). the relentless demand for rubber caused the ecological homogenisation of areas ”whose native diversity was destroyed and replaced by a few staple crops such as sugar, tobacco, and coffee,”, and in this case latex, which fed almost entirely luxury exports to the global west that held no use to the locals (mcbrien 120). this paucity of ecological diversity in favour of profit ”allowed for malaria and yellow fever to thrive to new epidemic proportions,” showing how the exploitation of nature indirectly drives the extinction of indigenous populations (120). another mode of destruction highlighted by the film is direct murder, with karamakate himself the last survivor of ”an indigenous tribe eradicated during armed conflict over the region’s rubber” (martin-jones 17). the character regularly reminds the audience that the ”cohiuano don’t exist anymore” because white people ”killed them all” (embrace). these lines evidence that the extermination of karamakate’s people was a genocide committed by white colombians seeking to commodify the sharinga trees. this is emphasised when the travellers stumble upon a mass grave and witness bodies hanging from trees at rubber plantations (figure 6). the kind of genocidal activity karamakate speaks of was not a rarity during the rubber boom of the early 20th century and is part of the rubber transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 68 figure 8 figure 7 holocaust (rivera 49). furthermore, karamakate states that his people were killed by the ”caucheros,” who ”razed everything,” implicating the concomitant combination of murder and dispossession deployed by the rubber barons who destroyed his people in order to make room for plantations. the people’s death is conveyed as the result of capitalist exploitation in regard to the rubber trade. the film’s end credits explicitly inscribe this theme; embrace of the serpent is ”dedicated to all the peoples whose song we will never know” (embrace). embrace of the serpent ties the scale of these plantations and the mass extraction performed by the capitalists directly to the enslavement and extinction of indigenous peoples and their cultures. this extinction was executed through forced labour, as the ”arrival of the rubber boom [meant that] many were converted to slavery” (ibáñez et al 175). karamakate immediately recognises the lacerations on theo’s indigenous companion, manduca (visible in figure 7). they are patently inflicted by the rubber barons, illustrating the violent prevalence of plantations where barons ”brutally subjected the indigenous peoples to forced labor” (prasch 93). such brutality is foregrounded by the mutilated local that the travellers come across, who has only one arm, serious facial scarring, a limp, and an improvised cast on his leg (figure 8). the man begs manduca to kill him and, when the others holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 69 figure 9 protest, manduca states that ”if i don’t [kill him], they’ll torture him to death. […] nobody deserves this hell” (embrace). the invocation of ”hell” and its attendant connotations of evil gesture toward the extent of the horrors on the plantation. it is telling that death is considered better than being a slave there. furthermore, manduca’s knowledge of the man’s fate suggests that it is a common one among the slaves. this slavery is the torture that the indigenous peoples suffer, who ”either were murdered or died because of the cruel treatment they received from the rubber barons” (rivera 49). suffering and death in this formulation are a direct result of capitalism’s drive for profit, as the native people ”were forced to extract the latex; if they did not deliver the fees demanded by the rubber tappers, they were punished in the stocks, flogged and tortured [and when they did deliver] they were given certain goods at exorbitant prices” (ibáñez et al 176). here we see how the native people were forced to participate in the colonial economy as well as being turned into labourers in the interest of that same economy’s proliferation. the extent of the commodification of nature, capitalism’s demand for maximum profit, and the pressure put on the slaves are condensed in wade davis’ claim that a single worker would “tap over four hundred trees a day” (306). this enslavement is shown to be causal to the extinction of indigenous cultures, evidenced in the christian mission, which was based in a former rubber plantation (d’argenio 141; figure 9). the aim of such missions was to ”civilise the savages and convert them into sons of god and of the homeland” (pérez benavides 108). amongst this erasure was the changing of children’s names and banning their native languages, making it “easier” to instil the ideology of capitalism into the local transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 70 population (embrace). indeed, the missions turned the local children into a ”(subaltern) workforce.” in conjunction ”with the rise of global capitalism and need for primary goods (d’argenio 141), the missions received state funding to kidnap more children in order to provide more labourers to keep up with demand, demonstrating how the ”capitalocene [as extinction] signifies also the ’extinguishing of cultures and languages’” (moore, ”introduction” 7). these scenes also outline capitalism’s influence in changing ”the role of homo sapiens” from ”member and citizen” of the land to ”conqueror” (leopold 204). this pattern transformed ”nature from terra mater into a machine and a source of raw material; [removing] all ethical and cognitive constraints against its violation and exploitation” (shiva xiv). embrace of the serpent ends with evan experiencing a hallucination after karamakate prepares the last yakruna plant for him to consume, with karamakate stating, ”i wasn’t meant to teach my people. i was meant to teach you”. whilst this ending could be seen as an example of the white saviour complex, it more likely functions to embed the superiority of the cohiuano’s understanding and knowledge over capitalist greed. evan pursues the plant in order to utilise its profitable properties (i.e., purifying rubber). conversely, karamakate instead uses the last of it to show him a snippet of his people’s views, knowledges, and understanding of the jungle. in this way, the scientist is enlightened regarding both his own personal ignorance and the ignorance of his culture more broadly. when he awakens, however, karamakate has disappeared, leaving evan with no answers or explanations—no full understanding of what he has witnessed. evan’s western, capitalist views and knowledge structure are thus diminished as he is shown how much he and the culture he represents do not know. earlier in the film, manduca warns that ”if we can’t get the whites to learn, it will be the end of us. the end of everything” (embrace). this final scene returns to this notion as karamakate realises holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 71 figure 10 that the only thing he can do is teach “the whites” their own ignorance. through this scene and indeed karamakate and evan’s journey more broadly, the filmmakers emphasise the direct correlation between the extinction of people, culture, and nature. karamakate regains his lost culture and knowledge just as evan realises that his own capitalist views are ignorant and destructive. as capitalist views and practices are challenged, rejected, and broken within the narrative, indigenous knowledges and cultures are reclaimed. through its presentation of the indigenous slave trade and the rubber trade, the indigenous peoples’ judicious relationship with nature in contrast to capitalism’s destruction of it, and the domination and cultivation of nature, guerra’s embrace of the serpent evinces the interlinked ways by which capitalism causes the extinction of indigenous people, cultures, and nature. by depicting this extinction, the film brings to light the songs of many communities who have suffered from the effects of capitalist greed and will continue to be the prime victims of the capitalocene. it demonstrates the claim that some activities that man has carried out in these lands have brought and continue to bring negative impacts on [indigenous] ecosystems and natural resources. economic activities, especially extractive activities, although they have generated wealth for some, have been negative for both their inhabitants and the environment. (ibáñez et al 177) the film’s depiction of this story from the perspective of an indigenous person, as indicated by the frequent positioning of the camera looking over karamakate’s shoulder (figure 10), attempts to combat—to some degree—the erasure of such stories and the transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 72 ignorance of the disastrous effects that damage and destroy native communities. since the film is spoken ”mostly in cubeo, uitoto, ticuna and guanano,” indigenous languages are prioritised over spanish, german, or english (d’argenio 136). this counteracts erasure, as it allows indigenous stories to be told in their own languages. while the west’s environmental concerns have a tendency to focus on the aesthetic (the loss of the coral reefs’ beauty for example), temperature changes and volatile sea levels represent the catalysts of a new genocide in the global south. as escobar explains, ”in the sustainable development discourse nature is reinvented as environment so that capital, not nature and culture, may be sustained’ (escobar, “constructing nature” 49). the very focus of sustainability needs to change. potent warnings of the kind that embrace of the serpent delivers are vital now more than ever, as is the acknowledgement of the capitalocene’s historical and ongoing destruction of people, culture, and nature. works cited blackiston, douglas j., elena silva casey, and martha r. weiss. “retention of memory through metamorphosis: can a moth remember what it learned as a caterpillar?” plos one, 3:3, 2008, 1-7. boeing, geoff. “visual analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems: chaos, fractals, self-similarity and the limits of prediction.” systems, 4:37, 2016, 1-18. burger, joanna, and michael gochfeld. “smooth-billed ani (crotophaga ani ) predation on butterflies in mato grosso, brazil: risk decreases with increased group size.” behavioral ecology and sociobiology, 49:6, may 2001, 482-492. cook, steven c., micky d. eubanks, roger e. gold, and spencer t. behmer. “seasonality directs contrasting food collection behavior and nutrient regulation strategies in ants.” plos one, 6:9, 2011, 1-8. holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 73 crist, eileen. “on the poverty of our nomenclature.” anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism, edited by jason w. moore. pm press, 2016, 14-32. crump, andy. “embrace of the serpent review: into the amazon’s heart of darkness.” birth. movies. death., mar. 4, 2016. https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/03/04/embrace-of-the-serpent-reviewinto-the-amazons-heart-of-darkness. d’argenio, maria chiara. “decolonial encounters in ciro guerra’s el brazo de la serpiente: indigeneity, coevalness and intercultural dialogue.” postcolonial studies, 21:2, 2018, 131-153. danowski, déborah, and eduardo viveiros de castro. the ends of the world. polity press, 2016. davis, wade. one river: explorations and discoveries in the amazon rain forest. vintage books, 2014 embrace of the serpent. directed by ciro guerra, peccadillo pictures, 2015. escobar, arturo. ”constructing nature. elements for a poststructural political ecology.” liberation ecologies. environment, development, social movements, edited. by richard peet and michael watts, routledge, 1996, 46-68. ---. encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. princeton university press, 2012. guillén, michael. “embrace of the serpent: an interview with ciro guerra.” cineaste, 41:2, 2016,: np. ibáñez, laura moratal, analía domínguez, marina wallinger, and pablo rubino. “las medicinas tradicionales y los conocimientos ancestrales. el abrazo de la serpiente (2015).” revista de medicina y cine, 14:3, 2018, 173-179. leopold, aldo. a sand county almanac, and sketches here and there. oxford university press, 1989. transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 74 lumsden, stephanie. “from wilderness to raw material: how the dispossession of native land enables the prison industrial complex.” ucla: center for the study of women, mar. 3, 2017. https://csw.ucla.edu/2017/03/03/wildernessraw-material-dispossession-native-land-enables-prison-industrial-complex/. martin-jones, david. cinema against doublethink: ethical encounters with the lost pasts of world history. routledge, 2018. mathiesen, karl. “embrace of the serpent star: ’my tribe is nearly extinct’.” the guardian, jun. 8, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jun/08/embrace-of-the-serpent-starmy-tribe-is-nearly-extinct. mbembe, achille. “necropolitics.” public culture 15:1, 2003, 11-40. mcbrien, justin. “accumulating extinction: planetary catastrophism in the necrocene.” anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism, edited by jason w. moore. pm press, 2016, 116-137. mcneely, deldon. “embrace of the serpent. 2015. written by ciro guerra and jacques toulemonde vidal. directed by ciro guerra.” psychological perspectives, 60:2, 2017, 265-267. moore, jason w. “introduction.” anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism, edited by jason w. moore. pm press, 2016, 111. ---. “the capitalocene part ii: accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy.” the journal of peasant studies, 45:2, 2018, pp 237279. mutis, ana maría. “elabrazo de la serpiente o la re-escritura del amazonas dentro de una ética ecológica y poscolonial.” hispanic research journal, 19:1, 2018, 29-40. parmesan, camille. “ecological and evolutionary responses to recent climate change.” annual review of ecology and systematics, 37, 2006, 637-669. holly may treadwell “the capitalocene in embrace of the serpent” 75 pérez benavides, amada carolina. “fotografía y misiones. los informes de misión como performance civilizatorio.” maguaré, 30:1, 2016, 103-139. pinzón, felipe martínez. “el abrazo el abrazo de la serpiente: una pregunta por el futuro de la humanidad.” razon publica, jan. 17, 2016. https://www.razonpublica.com/index.php/economía-y-sociedad/9154-elabrazo-de-la-serpiente-una-pregunta-por-el-futuro-de-la-humanidad.html. prasch, thomas. “embrace of the serpent (el abrazo de la serpiente) dir. by ciro guerra (review).” film & history: an interdisciplinary journal, 46:2, winter 2016, 93-95. quijano, aníbal. “coloniality of power, eurocentrism and latin america.” nepantla: views from the south, 1:3, 2000, 533–580. ramji, rubina. “embrace of the serpent.” journal of religion & film, 20:2, april 2016, 1-2. rivera, mauricio. “the embrace of the serpent and the dark legacy of the rubber holocaust.” senses of cinema, 87, june 2018, p. 49. shiva, vandana. staying alive: women, ecology, and development. zed books ltd, 1988. srygley, robert, robert d. udley, evandro g. oliveiraz, rafael aizpru, nicole z. pelaez, and andre j. riveros. “el niño and dry season rainfall influence hostplant phenology and an annual butterfly migration from neotropical wet to dry forests.” global change biology, 16, 2010, 936-945. taylor, matthew, and jonathan watts. “revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions.” the guardian, oct. 9, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed-20-firmsthird-carbon-emissions. tighe, scott. “‘of course we are crazy’: discrimination of native american indians through criminal justice.” justice policy journal, 11:1, spring 2014, 1-38. transmotion vol 7, no 2 (2021) 76 ward, philip. “phylogeny, classification, and species-level taxonomy of ants.” linnaeus tercentenary: progress in invertebrate taxonomy, edited by william shear and zhi-qiang zhang. magnolia press, 2007, pp 1-766. watts, jonathan. “we have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns un.” the guardian, oct. 8, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warmingmust-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report. refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4268 ©2021 (jeremy knox). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education jeremy knox university of edinburgh email: jeremy.knox@ed.ac.uk abstract this paper examines the concept of the ‘division of learning’ (zuboff 2019), and the broader thesis of ‘surveillance capitalism’ within which it is situated, in terms of its relevance to education. it begins with defining the term, before suggesting two key ways in which aligning the ‘division of learning’ with perspectives from educational research provides productive insights. the first considers the impact of increasing ‘datafication’ in education, where platform technologies are proliferating as powerful actors that both mediate and shape educational activity. here the ‘division of learning’ offers useful insights concerning the disparities resulting from learning in and learning from educational platforms. the second explores the extent to which education theory might offer ways to develop the concept of the ‘division of learning’, through critique of the term ‘learning’ itself, as well as the foregrounding of questions about educational ‘purpose’. here the ‘division of learning’ is suggested to maintain, rather than challenge, the dominant practices of data exploitation, for which further engagement with a purposive, political, and emancipatory form of ‘data science’ is suggested. keywords: ‘division of learning’; ‘surveillance capitalism’; datafication; platformisation; learnification; education https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4268 refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 introduction this paper begins with a definition of the concept of the ‘division of learning’ (zuboff 2019), before suggesting two key ways in which the concept might be relevant to the discussion of education and its increasing relations with a data-fuelled technology industry. concerning the first, the ‘division of learning’ will be suggested to highlight important issues of privacy, inequality, and authority where data-driven platform software is increasingly subjecting educational activity to the same kinds of datafication practices that are more usually identified in wider society. an important separation, and contrast, will be highlighted here between the ‘learning’ undertaken by students within platform software, and the ‘learning’ undertaken by machines and their private owners, deriving from the resulting student data. this student data can be understood as behavioural data, in the sense that it is predominantly derived from the ways students interact with platform software, and analysed using theories of behavioural learning (knox et al. 2020). the concept of the ‘division of learning’ will be proposed, therefore, as a valuable means of identifying potentially significant inequalities emerging directly from the activities of public education, particularly where private companies have intensified their interests in educational activity as a result of the recent covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown of schools, colleges, and universities in some countries. in the second, ideas from educational theory will be suggested to offer critical perspectives on the concept of the ‘division of learning’. while zuboff’s (2019) work is critical of the power and influence accrued by private companies, it doesn’t necessarily challenge some of the problematic ways in which ‘learning’ itself is defined. here, the ‘division of learning’ will be examined for the extent to which it focuses exclusively on the narrow idea of ‘training’ in the technical skills required to benefit from datafication, rather than on the broader socially-oriented arrangement of formal education. drawing on the work of biesta (2009; 2013; 2015), this section draws a distinction between discursive representations of ‘learning’ as individualised, self-directed and ‘life-long’ in duration, and ‘education’ as public, institutionalised, and fundamentally concerned with collective purposes. making connections with work in ‘critical data literacy’ (sander 2020), this analysis will suggest, not only more critical ways of understanding ‘learning’ in the datafied society, but also the need for better recognition of the role that formal education can play in addressing the associated issues of power and inequality. this paper therefore aims to emphasise educational concerns within the broader discourses around data-driven technologies. firstly, by highlighting how prominent ideas, such ‘surveillance capitalism’, are specifically relevant to the practice of education. and secondly, how perspectives from education can critically develop wider public discourse about the relationships between technology and learning. refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 defining the division of learning zuboff’s (2019) concept of ‘the division of learning’ is grounded in a wider thesis of ‘surveillance capitalism’, which has emerged as a key term in a field of critique focused on the relationships between powerful ‘big tech’ companies and wider society, and the ways such associations are increasingly mediated through data-driven systems and their attendant technologies of machine learning and analytics. zuboff suggests that ‘just about everything we now do is mediated by computers that record and codify the details of our daily lives’ (p182), and it is this codification that has become central to a new form of datafuelled capitalism. the concept of the ‘division of learning’ is the notion that there is a barrier between the ability to access, understand, and benefit from this data, and the practice of simply producing it. in this way zuboff posits a significant rupture between ‘big tech’ companies and the wider population, where the former are able to gain unprecedented advantages through fine-grained analyses of societal behaviours, accelerating their ability to dominate markets and accumulate wealth, in ways that manifest a stark contrast between those with knowledge of data-driven systems and those without. google in particular are singled out for their aggressive corporate approach to the exploitation of data, through which zuboff suggests that they have ‘amassed world-historic concentrations of knowledge and power’ (2019, p179). the phrase ‘division of learning’ is proposed as a revision of the concept of the ‘division of labour’1, and as such is suggested to form a foundational theory and definitive way of understanding the ordering principles of data-capitalism. the ‘division of learning’ is, for zuboff, ‘the axial principle of social order in an information civilisation’ (2019, p179), and the ‘ascendant principle of social ordering in our time’ (2019, p181). here zuboff (2019) reveals the centrality of this concept within her broader critique, but also a primary interest in the notion of an ‘information age’ and its accessibility, a position which will be examined further in subsequent sections. as a route to resolving the suggested dilemmas of ‘knowledge, authority, and power’ surfaced by the ‘division of learning’, zuboff poses three key questions: ‘who knows?’; ‘who decides?’; and ‘who decides who decides?’ (2019, p180). the first question concerns the accessibility of knowledge, and ‘whether one is included or excluded from the opportunity to learn’, for which zuboff’s answer is an ‘elite cadre able to wield the analytic tools to trouble shoot and extract value from information’ (2019, p180). this, as will be elaborated below, appears to be zuboff’s (2019) primary concern, directed towards the privatised realm of the ‘big tech’ companies. the second and third questions concern authority and power respectively, through which zuboff suggests both an exclusory system that maintains control of who is allowed to engage in ‘learning’ 1 zuboff (2019) draws specifically from durkheim’s work on the ‘division of labour’ (1964), and the proposition that such organisation and specialisation constituted a kind of ‘natural law’ of developing societies (and organic life more generally, although zuboff focuses specifically on society). the division of learning thus ‘follows the same migratory path from the economic to the social domain’ (zuboff 2019, p184) refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 from data, as well as an underlying driving force of ‘financial capital bound to the disciplines of shareholder-value maximisation’ (2019, p181). these questions appear to add a critical depth to the concept of the ‘division of learning’, however the final section of this paper will return to the themes of authority and power in order to assess whether they are carried through in zuboff’s (2019) work. one of the central ideas in the concept of the ‘division of learning’ is what zuboff defines as the ‘shadow text’. this is developed from her earlier work on the notion of a ‘new electronic text’ (zuboff 2019, p182), produced primarily in workplace settings and taking the form of data about manufacturing processes and associated labour. given the great proliferation of data collection practices in more recent times, zuboff suggests that ‘the dilemmas of knowledge, authority, and power’ that were intrinsic to the production and use of this electronic text ‘have burst through the walls of the workplace to overwhelm our daily lives’ (2019, p181). for this reason, zuboff extends this idea into two texts: a ‘public-facing text’, comprised of the participatory and information-rich spaces of the web, much of which is produced by ‘us’, and a second ‘shadow text’, for which the first text ‘functions as the supply operation’ (2019, p185). in essence, the ‘shadow text’ is composed of the surplus extracted from the first text, rendered into ‘raw material to be accumulated and analysed as means to others’ market ends’ (zuboff 2019, p185). for zuboff, ‘surveillance capitalism’ has ultimate control over both texts, the ‘shadow text’ hidden from view and used to extract value from our behavioural data, as well as the public text of the web, which is manipulated into forms that best serve the ‘shadow text’ beneath it. in this sense ‘surveillance capitalists’ hold ‘asymmetrical power that enables them to bend the division of learning to their interests’ (zuboff 2019, p187). in this sense, the distinction between the ‘public-facing’ and ‘shadow’ texts constitutes the ‘division of learning’, where the ultimate benefit comes from the ability to access, comprehend, and derive value from the hidden side of the partition. the ‘division of learning’ and education as noted by williamson (2019), zuboff’s work on ‘surveillance capitalism’, including the specific proposition of the ‘division of learning’, makes no explicit reference to education. instead, as we have seen above, zuboff (2019) centres on the term ‘learning’, which is framed as the practice of extracting, understanding, and deriving value from data, and suggested to be undertaken by a small and elite group of knowledgeable experts and their sophisticated learning machines. in this sense, we might understand concepts such as the ‘division of learning’, despite the critique of technology, as fundamentally aligned with a sector that has long called for the disruption of traditional education through technological intervention (christensen et al. 2008). without any consideration of formal education, two central questions become relevant. firstly, what useful insights can educationalists derive from the concept, given that zuboff (2019) provides no examples of ‘surveillance refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 capitalism’ in the context of education? and secondly, how might the concept of the ‘division of learning’ itself be (re)considered in the light of perspectives from education? in answer to the first question, given the increasing prevalence of data-driven platforms in education (decuypere et al. 2021), the ‘division of learning’ may provide a useful conceptual framework through which to examine the impact on educational activity. in this sense, research from outside of education, and specifically that concerning the relationships between technology, capitalism, and society, can strengthen the ways we might develop understanding about the changing structures, pedagogies, and subjectivities of increasingly datafied institutions and classrooms. even before the covid-19 pandemic drastically altered the ability of institutions around the world to conduct educational activities, a commercial ‘ed tech’ industry was a significant and growing sector that had been promising to disrupt education for decades (selwyn 2013), as well as exerting considerable influence over teaching practices and student experiences through increasingly powerful data-driven software. however, as emerging scholarship is highlighting (see williamson and hogan 2020), the covid-19 pandemic is ushering in unprecedented relations between public education systems and private education companies, often with little apparent government oversight or in-depth engagement with the far-reaching consequences. the ‘big tech’ companies examined by zuboff (2019), such as google, have now moved, with all their infrastructural might, into mainstream educational spaces, situating their convenient software tools at the very core of teaching and learning functions. zuboff’s (2019) critique of ‘big tech’ is therefore now as relevant to education as it has been to wider debates about social media. given that the pandemic has intensified concerted efforts by a range of commercial ‘ed tech’ actors to further privatise the future of education systems (williamson and hogan 2020), education research would do well to engage with ideas such as the ‘division of learning’, which emphasise the key issues of privacy and inequality that characterise such developments. in answer to the second question, foregrounding educational theory offers an important route to developing the ways ‘learning’ itself is theorised in relation to ‘surveillance capitalism’. broader considerations of education can suggest ways, to not only move beyond the rather narrow visions of technical training and data analysis assumed by zuboff (2019), but also to problematise the underlying assumptions about behaviour that appear to ground both sides of the ‘division of learning’. as knox et al. (2020) suggest, particular behaviouristic understandings of ‘learning’ are becoming entrenched in the era of data-driven technologies, both in terms of the human learning supposedly enhanced through educational analytics, as well as in the sense of the learning undertaken by machines, often derived from psychological theories such as ‘reinforcement learning’ (see sutton & bardo 2018). in other words, the idea of ‘learning’ itself needs better theorisation in order to contend with the significant issues of privacy and inequality that the concept of the ‘division of learning’ suggests, for which educational theory offers productive insights. zuboff suggests of the ‘division of learning’ that it ‘reflects the primacy of learning, refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 information, and knowledge in today’s quest for effective life’ (2019, p184-5), seeming to underscore a general conviction in the autodidactism of the internet age. however, it is precisely this idea of the ‘primacy of learning’ that has undergone considerable critique in the field education, encapsulated most directly in biesta’s concept of ‘learnification’ (2005; 2009; 2013), which surfaces the inherent politics of ‘self-direction’ and an all-too-easy alignment with neoliberal ideology. further, better recognition of specific theories of learning helps to identify a range of contested assumptions about the human condition embedded within the data-driven technologies that zuboff (2019) examines in such detail. this understanding, as will be suggested below, supports a much deeper form of critique and resistance to ‘big tech’ corporate practices than merely ‘upskilling’ in the very same techniques of data exploitation that remain inaccessible through the ‘division of learning’. the ‘division of learning’ in education platforms the ‘datafication’ of education has emerged as a central concern in the field of educational research, as powerful data-driven systems are increasingly being integrated in policy and governance (williamson 2017), as well as deployed in everyday teaching and learning practices (see brown 2020; bulger 2016). this deployment usually occurs through the establishment of a software ‘platform’, designed with functions to supposedly facilitate teaching and learning activities, as well as a range of administrative functions. the concept of ‘platformisation’ (van dijck et al. 2018; poell et al. 2019) which concerns the processes through which platform software and its associated practices become involved in the transformation of markets, institutions, governance, and cultural practices – is therefore now highly relevant to the study of education (decuypere et al. (2021). writing before the covid-19 pandemic, selwyn et al. predict a movement towards ‘classrooms on platforms rather than platforms in classrooms’ (2020, p2), which appears now to be a prescient encapsulation of the ‘the expansion and embedding of digital technologies and media in education systems, institutions and practices across the world’ (williamson et al. 2020, p107) as a consequence of school, college, and university closures in some countries. however, ‘platformisation’ has been a longer trend in education, where software has been developed for: the provision of online learning, the management of learning in blended settings, home learning and early childhood education, the promotion of classroom engagement, language learning, test-preparation, the design of innovative schools, school administration and learning analytics (grimaldi and ball 2021, p115) given that for every aspect of education ‘there seems to exist a corresponding digital platform used within (and often especially made for) the educational field’ (decuypere et al. 2021, p1), there is a pressing need for conceptual tools with which to analyse the impact of this platformisation. however, as decuypere et al. stress, the specificities of education platforms need to be acknowledged: refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 the educational sphere is at once characterized by its adoption of a huge variety of global platforms entering education ‘from the outside’ and by the circulation and adoption of various locally produced platforms that have been programmed and designed with the educational sector exclusively in mind. (decuypere et al. 2021, p3) education is therefore impacted by the wider reorganisational logics of platformisation at the societal level, while at the same time rearticulating the form of the platform itself according to particular visions of productive teaching, learning, and educational management. this is one of the key tensions into which the concept of the ‘division of learning’ might be applied. motivated by the question of what kind of learning happens in such educational platforms, three interrelated forms might be identified: firstly, the learning undertaken by students through their involvement with the software platform as part of their formal educational activity; secondly, the learning about students undertaken by teachers and institutions through their use of the analytic tools provided by the platform; and thirdly, the learning about ‘users’ (in this case students, teachers, and institutional administrators) undertaken by the owners of the platform software. as perrotta et al. (2021) suggest in the case of ‘big tech’ companies such as google, this third form of learning might also extend into a broader ecosystem of applications on the web, either directly owned by google or linked to its extensive infrastructure. all of these kinds of learning are co-constitutive of one another, in the sense that teachers are supposed to make pedagogical decisions based on the insights from data analytics in order to intervene in student behaviours (van barneveld et al. 2012), while the platform software in turn often adapts to individual student responses, particularly in the case of so-called ‘personalised’ systems (bulger 2016). first and foremost, the concept of the ‘division of learning’ helps to articulate concerns related to the form of learning about users, where private companies appear to extract value from the conduct of teachers and students engaged in public education. one of the central functions of the platform is to extract value from the data traces that are produced from those using the software (srnicek 2017), and this, of course, underpins the educational use of such systems, where the activities of teachers and learners are ‘rendered as observable and measurable behavior’ and ‘turned into transactional data’ (decuypere et al. 2021, p6). it is important to see this, not as a by-product of the platform’s involvement in educational activity, but a core function. perrotta suggests ‘digital platforms turn data into intangible assets, channelling them along financial circuits and subjecting them to capitalisation’ (perrotta et al. 2021, p107), identifying value-extraction as a guiding rationale for the ways such systems work. this doesn’t mean that the other forms of learning in educational platforms are necessarily superficial or insincere, but rather that the driving force of the platform design appears to be for the benefit of the learning refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 undertaken by platform owners. as perrotta et al. further contend in an examination of the functioning of the google classroom platform, ‘google’s extractive tendencies in education acquire a mission-critical purpose’ (perrotta et al. 2021, p107). thus the ‘division of learning’ might be seen as an important indicator of which form of learning is most privileged in relation to educational platforms, and where concerns about inequality might be situated. this precise division is identified in the functioning of google classroom, with, on the one hand a ‘façade’ comprised of a ‘readable and actionable interface engineered to facilitate a particular form of coded pedagogy’, and on the other, an ‘underlying text of algorithmic surveillance, which is hidden from view and accessible only to google’s epistemic elites’ (perrotta et al. 2021, p107). the ‘division of learning’ (zuboff 2019) suggests that the benefits of this hidden form of privileged learning are considerable. however, the question remains whether students also benefit from this relationship, for which there is ample empirical research attempting to link platform use to ‘learning outcomes’ (see passey & higgins 2011). however, it is worth emphasising that any sense of an ‘enhanced learning’ facilitated by data-driven systems is highly contested, precisely because of the ways platforms work to restructure education in profound ways. educational platforms ‘make specific forms of education visible, knowable, thinkable, and, ultimately, actionable, in ways that reformat, redo, restructure, and reconceive what education is or could be about’ (decuypere et al. 2021, p7). one example of this tendency is the rise in a culture of surveillance and performativity in education (for example, see manolev et al. 2019), where platform software, rather than serving as a neutral conduit for connecting students, teachers, and resources, acts to discipline and control users towards particular kinds of behaviours. referring to the same educational platform as manolev et al. (2019), williamson suggests ‘classdojo amply illustrates the combination of behavioural data extraction, behaviourist psychology and monetization strategies that underpin surveillance capitalism’ (2019). in reference to the concept of the ‘division of learning’ specifically, williamson further contends that ‘[t]he prospect of smart machines as educational engines of social reproduction should be the subject of serious future interrogation.’ (williamson 2019). the supposed neutrality of platforms, therefore, needs to be questioned: [r]ather than simply hosting content, activity and interactions, platforms set the stage for how all this can come about, and which specific sorts of content, activities and interactions are possible and permissible (and which not). (decuypere et al. 2021, p5) perrotta et al. identify this influence in google classroom specifically as a ‘bidirectional algorithmic pedagogy’ (2021, p109), where the technology is not only structured in ways that enable machines to learn from extracted behavioural data, but designed to manage and automate the conduct of teachers and students. that this managed behaviour is then itself datafied and used to extract value, warrants, for perrotta et al., the acknowledgement refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 of a ‘shadow labour’ (2021, p106) undertaken by students and teachers for the benefit of platform owners. focusing usefully on the student experience in educational software platforms, grimaldi and ball (2021) suggest paradoxical notions of value. on the one hand ‘the value of achievement, of competence and realisation, and of the capacity to address a task and an assignment’ becomes possible, but on the other ‘a relative and analytical value that depends on the positioning of datafied performance within a hierarchical order’ conditions the experience (grimaldi and ball 2021, p123). thus, ‘[o]n one side, the learner is invited to be active and enterprising’ while [o]n the other side, this involves continuous work on and the policing and solicitation of an online self through the datafied visualisation of its value’ (grimaldi and ball 2021, p123-4). the result of this is a paradoxical state of learner subjectivity, where students are ‘invited to be different’ at the same time as ‘continuously “normalised” through performance data’ (grimaldi and ball 2021, p125). in these ways one might see the ‘division of learning’ as resonating particularly well with the rise of datafication in education, where, not only are platform owners imbued with substantial advantages through the extraction of data, but students and teachers are left with impoverished, laborious, and contradictory educational experiences, as teaching and learning becomes increasingly managed by platform software. however, while there may well be an extreme ‘division of learning’ between the epistemic elites who own the platforms and the users who merely undertake activities teaching and learning through them, understanding the specific character of this learning would be essential to any attempt to address the supposed inequality. refocusing the ‘division of learning’ on education examining zuboff’s (2019) discussion of the ‘division of learning’ in detail reveals a tendency to focus on the perceived inequality resulting from the division, rather than on the nature of the learning presumed to be taking place. as appears to be de rigueur for discussions of the influence of the internet on society and its knowledge, zuboff draws comparison with the gutenberg press, suggesting that through the ‘division of learning’ society ‘reverts to a pre-gutenberg order’ where learning is ‘captured by a narrow priesthood of privately employed computational specialists, their privately owned machines, and the economic interests for whose sake they learn’ (p189). following the analogy that moveable type printing supposedly dismantled barriers to elite and exclusionist centres of power, zuboff’s (2019) argument here appears to be that the ‘shadow text’, and the abilities to understand, process, and benefit from its contents, need to be distributed more fairly in society. the solution is therefore not one which seems necessarily concerned with the practices of data exploitation itself, rather only with the ways it is excluded from the wider population. refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 this appears to overlook, not only a more thorough interrogation of the forms of ‘learning’ undertaken by the ‘surveillance capitalists’, but also the question of whether such practices are indeed desirable for wider society. indeed, it is the lack of public access to the techniques of ‘data science’ that seems to be zuboff’s primary concern, particularly in the suggestion that an: unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power: asymmetries that must be understood as the unauthorized privatisation of the division of learning in society. (zuboff 2019, p191, emphasis original) ultimately, zuboff’s (2019) discussion of the ‘division of learning’ appears to distil a critical perspective into a struggle for privacy and the ownership of data, rather than a more profound consideration of how data-driven approaches are entrenching problematic views of society and how individuals learn within it. this ends up endorsing the power of datafuelled behaviourism by assuming that it is indeed a new and authoritative way of knowing and shaping society. in terms of proffering solutions for the overcoming of the ‘division of learning’, at times zuboff appears fatalistic: ‘every attempt at understanding, predicting, regulating or prohibiting the activities of surveillance capitalists will fall short’ (2019 p193). however, such an impasse may result, at least in part, from a lack of attention to the forms of learning assumed to take place across the ‘division of learning’. zuboff labels the knowledge elites ‘the new priesthood’ (2019, p186): ‘the 10,000 or so professionals on the planet who know how to wield the technologies of machine intelligence to coax knowledge from an otherwise cacophonous data continent’ (zuboff 2019, p188). however, rather than probe the substance or efficacy of this knowledge, the main contention seems to be that there are not enough of experts: ‘[t]he huge salaries of the tech firms have lured so many professionals that there is no one left to teach the next generation of students’ (zuboff 2019, p188). at the same time as condemning the inequalities created through the ‘division of learning’, this appears to end up valorising the specialist expertise employed by the ‘surveillance capitalists’, rather than seeking to challenge it. zuboff certainly poses pertinent critical questions, for example: ‘which people, institutions, or processes determine who is included in learning, what they are able to learn, and how they are able to act on their knowledge’ (zuboff 2019, p180). however, democratising the ability to gain skills in ‘data science’, and therefore to understand and extract value from the ‘shadow text’ of behavioural data, would seem likely to create new frontiers and barriers, complicating the ‘division of learning’ rather than dispelling it. turning to education theory may be one way to better theorise the forms of learning assumed in concepts such as the ‘division of learning’, and suggest more robust ways of challenging the assumptions about human behaviour that underpin the rise of data-driven capitalism. firstly, the concept of ‘learnification’ (biesta 2005; 2009; 2013; 2015) provides refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 a useful critique of the dominance of ‘the language of learning’ (biesta 2005, p54), particularly over notions of formal teaching and expertise in general. primarily directed at the field of education, ‘learnification’ refers to a wholesale reorientation of institutional and pedagogical arrangements around the idea of a centralised, self-directing, and individual ‘learner’ (biesta 2005; 2009; 2013; 2015). however, to borrow a phrase from zuboff (2019) quoted earlier, we might say that the language of learning has ‘burst through the walls of the classroom to overwhelm our daily lives’. not only are there calls for a ‘learning society’, in which the figure of the ‘lifelong learner’ (yang and valdés-cotera 2001) is required to constantly update their expertise in order to remain relevant and employable in a swiftly shifting marketplace (and the ability to analyse data clearly figures centrally in this vision), but machines are now also ‘learning’ in supposedly powerful new ways that society needs to pay increasing attention to (domingos 2017; alpaydin 2016). the ‘division of learning’ might be seen as part of this wider trend in the way that it positions expert data-analytic ‘learning’ as the privileged practice of our times, and a desirable condition to which wider populations should aspire. the problem here is that such a focus on learning, as biesta (2005; 2009; 2013; 2015) warns, tends to be blind to questions about how aspirations are negotiated and established, and what kind of power underlies such processes. further, if we consider a straightforward application of the ‘division of learning’ in educational contexts, as explored above, one might see ‘learning’ as constituting both sides of the divide; students ‘learning’ (often in ‘personalised’ and selfdirected ways) through platforms on one side, and the owners of the platforms ‘learning’ from user-data on the other. despite the notion that the latter is a much more privileged and beneficial form of learning, it is also worth recognising the entrenchment of particular behaviouristic ideas about learning across both sides of the divide. radical behaviourist ideas are being reintroduced into educational practices through the use of data-driven platforms (also see knox et al. 2020), while at the same time underpinning the techniques of data extraction undertaken by the platform owners. secondly, in order to move beyond the limited purview of ‘learning’, biesta differentiates ‘education’ as a practice that is defined by purpose: ‘when we are engaged in decision making about the direction of education we are always and necessarily engaged in value judgements – judgements about what is educationally desirable’ (biesta 2009, p35). learning is further distinguished from education by suggesting that the former is ‘basically a process term’ denoting ‘processes and activities but is open – if not empty – with regard to content and direction’ (biesta 2009, p39), while the latter ‘always raises the question of its purpose’ (biesta 2015, p84). it is this idea of education that might usefully develop the concept of the ‘division of learning’, by suggesting a route to overcoming data-driven inequality, not through simply widening access to the behaviourist techniques of machine learning, but rather through concerted ongoing efforts to define collective purposes for working with data. biesta distinguishes between three domains of educational purpose: qualification, the domain of skills acquisition; socialisation, the ways individuals become refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 part of society; and subjectification, which concerns how individuals become autonomous (2013; 2015). while one might see the ‘division of learning’ as straightforwardly concerned with the domain of qualification, and the important questions of how accessible those qualifications are, and who gets to define them, there is little to discern in the way of engagement with a social or subjective purpose to becoming skilled in the techniques of data analytics and machine learning. for all of zuboff’s detailed examination of the inequality, discrimination, and injustice produced through datafication, there is little to suggest a clear social objective or rationale for democratising access to the ‘shadow text’, other than to reclaim ‘the larger promise of an information capitalism aligned with a flourishing third modernity’ (2019, p194)2. engaging with the domain of socialisation would require considerations of collective purposes for the mass deployment of data-driven technologies. as has already been noted, recent years have seen the proliferation of opportunities to undergo technical training in machine learning and other analytic techniques, often in the form of open-access, selfdirected online courses, justified through discourses of impending technological unemployment, and accompanied by criticisms of formal schooling as antiquated in comparison (knox 2019). however, there appears to be little in this drive for technical training beyond the idea of future-proofed employment. addressing the social purpose of datafication might be achieved through more recognition of the inherent politics of data (bigo et al. 2019) and the agonistic and contested ways in which its attendant technologies are developed (crawford 2016), rather than its assumed objectivity or neutrality. an educational approach, as opposed to straightforward technical training, might therefore frame the emerging discipline of ‘data science’, for example, as ‘a form of political action’ (green 2019, p7). green further suggests: ‘[d]ata scientists must recognize themselves as political actors engaged in normative constructions of society and, as befits political work, evaluate their work according to its downstream material impacts on people's lives’ (green 2019, p7). such an approach would seem to direct attention towards forging tangible connections with society, as opposed to merely extracting data from it. in a similar way, calls for greater ‘big data literacy’ (d’ignazio and bhargava 2015), ‘personal data literacies’ (pangrazio & selwyn 2019), or ‘critical data literacy’ (sander 2020) have made the case for widening public understanding of the social impacts of datafication. related to this work, a range of accessible tools and strategies have been developed to promote broader civic awareness of issues such as privacy, surveillance, inequality, and discrimination as they relate to the use of data-driven technologies (for examples see yates et al. 2020 and sander 2020). while the suggestions in this paper align with much of this work in terms of its interest in 2 this commitment to capitalism, albeit a more inclusion form, is suggested elsewhere too: ‘[l]et it be an insistence that raw surveillance capitalism is as much a threat to society as it is to capitalism itself’ (zuboff 2019, p193), and criticised in detail by morozov (2019). refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 developing the critical understanding of datafication, there remain important questions about how collective purposes for the development of ‘data science’ might be achieved. in developing a useful typology for the plethora of online tools and resources that have been developed in recent years, sander (2020) found not only a diverse range of forms, but also categorical differences to the kinds of criticality such materials presented. further, and surprisingly for sander, ‘the sample did not include any resources from governmental or public service institutions, nor from traditional educational avenues and only very few efforts on the part of academia’ (2020, p9), most being produced by non-government organisations. given the central role of formal public education in society, such an institution would seem to be the ideal place to consider collective (social) purposes for the development of ‘data science’. however, as raffaghelli et al. (2020) discuss in the context of higher education, there are often underlying tensions between the institutional desire to produce functional benefits through the deployment of data-driven technologies, and a concern for ‘ethical’ and ‘fair’ data cultures. biesta’s final domain of subjectification, perhaps being the most profound, emphasises transformation and liberation as a fundamental purpose of education: subjectification has an orientation towards emancipation – that is, towards ways of doing and being that do not simply accept the given order, but have an orientation towards the change of the existing order so that different ways of doing and being become possible. (biesta 2013, p6) while the concept of the ‘division of learning’ appears committed to democratising, and therefore disseminating and replicating the existing techniques of ‘big data’ analysis, there appears to be little opportunity for the kind of weighty individual emancipation referred to here, or the prospect of overcoming the established orders of data exploitation. as discussed above, the public pedagogy of ‘critical data literacy’ (sander 2020) suggests tangible routes through which individuals might re-think their relationships with data, and perhaps emerge as critically-minded citizens in the era of datafication. however, significant questions remain about, not only the diversity and fragmentation of the online resources produced for this purpose, but also the capacity for formal educational institutions to take up greater responsibility in providing the kind of education that can provide an alternative to the dominant rationales of ‘data-skills’ acquisition. conclusions while zuboff’s (2019) ‘surveillance capitalism’ is undoubtedly a seminal text in the emerging understanding of the societal impacts of datafication, the question of how educationalists might relate to this work is less clear. this paper has attempted to suggest two possible responses. firstly, where data-driven platforms ‘are in the process of significantly transforming the educational sector’ (decuypere et al. 2021, p2), this paper refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 has suggested the ‘division of learning’ to be a productive concept through which to examine concerns about increasing privatisation and inequality in education. here the methods through which private companies derive commercial benefits from platform data, and the labour of the students, teachers, and administrators that produce it, appears to far outweigh the benefits students experience from ‘learning’ with the use of data-driven platforms. critical attention to issues of accountability are therefore needed, echoing perrotta et al’s recent concerns in relation to google’s expansion as a provider of mainstream education: the role of google (and other platform owners operating in a similar capacity) as a mere data operator needs to be challenged and, ideally, replaced by its unequivocal categorisation as an educational actor with considerably higher responsibilities. (perrotta et al. 2021, p109) secondly, this paper has argued that, for all of zuboff’s criticism of ‘surveillance capitalism’ as operating ‘by predicting, influencing, and controlling human behaviour’ (2019, p189), the emphasis often appears to be on widening access to such methods, rather than questioning data-driven behaviour-manipulation itself. in order to challenge this view, this paper has suggested the need for perspectives from educational research that emphasise collective purposes to the project of education, as opposed to a narrow and individualistic idea of learning as ‘training’ in data skills. drawing from an already flourishing domain of public pedagogy around ‘critical data literacy’, formal institutional education might therefore adopt a more central role in developing a ‘data science’ with social and emancipatory purpose; one that is foundationally engaged in collective justificatory practices about how and why particular technologies and techniques should be developed, as well as attentive to the kind of individual citizen-subjects produced through such methods. references alpaydin, e. 2016. machine learning: the new ai. cambridge: mit press.
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(2019). the ‘creative, problem-solving entrepreneur’: alternative futures for education in the age of machine learning? in m. peters, p. jandrić, & a. means (eds.) education and technological unemployment, springer, 297-312. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6225-5_19 manolev, j., sullivan, a. & slee, r. (2019). the datafication of discipline: classdojo, surveillance and a performative classroom culture, learning, media and technology, 44:1, 36-51, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1558237 morozov, e. (2019). capitalism’s new clothes. the baffler. https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov pangrazio, l., & selwyn, n. (2019). ‘personal data literacies’: a critical literacies approach to enhancing understandings of personal digital data. new media & society, 21(2), 419–437. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818799523 passey, d. & higgins, s. 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(2020). what is critical big data literacy and how can it be implemented?. internet policy review, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.2.1479 selwyn, n. (2013). discourses of digital ‘disruption’ in education: a critical analysis. paper presented to fifth international roundtable on discourse analysis, city university, hong kong, may 23-25, 2013 selwyn, n., hillman, t., eynon, r., ferreira, g., knox, j., macgilchrist, f. & sancho-gil, j.m. (2020). what’s next for ed-tech? critical hopes and concerns for the 2020s, learning, media and technology, 45:1, 1-6, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694945 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6225-5_19 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1558237 https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818799523 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2011.626783 https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1425 https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2020.1855597 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-020-00235-w https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.2.1479 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694945 refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 sutton and barto. (2018). reinforcement learning: an introduction, 2nd ed. cambridge: mit press. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xeudvgwguuv1ccumazhjlej2c7aafwy/view van barneveld, angela, kimberly e. arnold, and john p. campbell. 2012. analytics in higher education: establishing a common language. eli paper 2012 (1): 1–11. van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connectiveworld. oxford university press williamson, b. (2019). learning from surveillance capitalism. code acts in education. https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/learning-fromsurveillance-capitalism/ williamson, b. & hogan, a. (2020). commercialisation and privatisation in/of education in the context of covid-19. education international. available https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialis ation_privatisation?fr=szdjkyje1oda2mtq williamson, b, eynon, r & potter, j 2020, 'pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency', learning, media and technology, 45 (2): 107-114. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1761641 yang, j. & valdés-cotera, r. (eds) (2001) conceptual evolution and policy developments in lifelong learning. hamburg: unesco institute for lifelong learning. yates, s., carmi, e., pawluczuk, a., lockley, e., wessels, b. & gangneux, j. 2020. me and my big data report 2020: understanding citizens' data literacies: thinking, doing & participating with our data. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/research/heroimages/me-and-my-bigdata-report-1.pdf zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. london: profile books https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xeudvgwguuv1-ccumazhjlej2c7aafwy/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xeudvgwguuv1-ccumazhjlej2c7aafwy/view https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/learning-from-surveillance-capitalism/ https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/learning-from-surveillance-capitalism/ https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisation_privatisation?fr=szdjkyje1oda2mtq https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisation_privatisation?fr=szdjkyje1oda2mtq https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1761641 https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/research/heroimages/me-and-my-big-data-report-1.pdf https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/research/heroimages/me-and-my-big-data-report-1.pdf refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education abstract introduction defining the division of learning the ‘division of learning’ and education the ‘division of learning’ in education platforms refocusing the ‘division of learning’ on education conclusions references in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a 49 t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a sean sturm and stephen turner to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university prophecy spinoza, as the dutch ambassador to new zealand, rob zaagman, reminded us in his welcome to the arts of spinoza + pacific spinoza, interstices under construction symposium held in auckland in may 2017, radically undercut received wisdom, orthodox religion, and the political status quo. in the spirit of this radical spinoza, we ask after the grounds of knowledge in the place now known as “the university of auckland” (or te whare wānanga o tāmaki makaurau). we take as our starting point the literal grounds of our university, which not only provided the site for the symposium’s discussion about spinoza and the pacific, but which also establishes the parameters of what counts as knowledge through the grounding provided by its faculties, schools, and disciplines. we ask about the university’s provenance, about the grounds it has secured for its functions—teaching, research, and service—and about the “built pedagogy” of its architecture and environs (sturm & turner, 2011). to do so, we read into the university the history of its own construction, in order to get at the grounds of university-based knowledge more generally.1 the remit that spinoza gives us to do so is partly supported by the university of auckland’s own aspiration to world excellence, which makes it a university just like any other aspiring world-excellent university, one which can stand in for the university in general, for the “idea of the university” today (newman, 1996; jaspers, 1959; habermas, 1987). indeed, the world-excellent university opens itself to the generic drive of all-inclusive or “transcendental capitalism” (de cauter, 2002: 273). we argue that the optics of a spinozan radical enlightenment enables us to ask after the grounds of knowledge, to ask what the university makes visible, and what, at the same time, is occluded by this visibility. in “the tyranny of transparency”, marilyn strathern argues that, in the university today, “visibility as a conduit for knowledge is elided with visibility as an instrument for control” (2000: 309). but the university is not simply a producer of knowledge, it is also an instrument of its control, one that establishes what can be known and how it comes to be known (foucault, 1981: 94-95). the apparatus of the university, to borrow gilles deleuze’s (1992) description of foucault’s dispositif (apparatus), is an “optical machine”: it is “made of lines of light […] distributing the visible and the invisible, giving rise to objects which are dependent 50 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a on it for their existence, and causing them to disappear” (160). in turn, this optical machine constructs “regimes of enunciation” (160), determining who can speak and what can be said within its panoptical ambit. this is to say that certain “lines of force […] act as go-betweens between seeing and saying and vice versa, acting as arrows which continually cross between words and things, constantly waging war between them” (160). to adapt deleuze and félix guattari’s distinction from a thousand plateaus (1987), visibility thus becomes the “majoritarian” (given, normative) discourse, and invisibility the “minoritarian” (created, singular) discourse. of course, who constitutes the “major” and the “minor” and how they speak in a settler-indigenous situation altogether depend on the time and place the question is posed and by whom. in the case of the university of auckland, deleuze’s idiosyncratic reading of spinoza’s “optical geometry” (1997: 142) in “spinoza and the three ‘ethics’” suggests to us a way to construct the settler imagination and its relation to a māori place as a matter of movement. what moves in this place and, importantly, what moves us as denizens of this place are the more-than-human bodies that make up the “composite body” of the university of auckland (spinoza, 1992: 74; see ruddick, 2017). to ask after the grounds of the university is to respond to its more-than-human— and more-than-present—elements and to reconstruct, on that basis, a “common notion” (spinoza, 1992: 89) of our inhabitation that constitutes its ground and the true grounds of knowledge. this enterprise, this “working on the ground” (deleuze, 1992: 159), demands a certain prophetic procedure. we suggest, as a first step, actually walking the grounds of the university, touching its older standing structures, and thinking and talking about what it is that the newer ones have displaced.2 this process mirrors the situationist dérive (drift), but is motivated less by “being drawn by the attractions of the terrain” (debord, 2006: 8) than by opening up to the less-than-visible indigenous presence of the place. it might enable us to understand the operation of the tohu (signs) of the place by exploring their effects and affects (deleuze, 1997)—their immediacy, or “firstness” (peirce, 1974).3 fig. 1 sean sturm (2017). old government house and lawn from the grove of oaks planted for the 1869 visit of prince alfred, duke of edinburgh [photograph]. 51 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a before we describe that prophetic procedure, we acknowledge another prophecy that marks the university as a māori place—one signalled in the welcome to the spinoza symposium by michael steedman from ngāti porou (one of the tāngata whenua, or peoples with customary authority, of the region). rehearsing an ancestral tauparapara (incantation), he talked about the enduring need for spiritual connection to the land and a matakite (prophecy) by the seer titai that foretold the coming of europeans to aotearoa/new zealand and their landing at tāmaki makaurau/auckland. the signs of their coming—namely, their sail as nautilus shell drifting in on the northerly wind and their flagstaff as carved post—constituted a prophecy that would in time transform the place of the tāngata whenua: he aha te hau e wawara mai? he tiu! he raki! nana i a mai te pupu tarakihi ki uta e tikina atu e au te kotiu, koia te pou whakairo ka tu ki waitemata i aku wai te rangi e! what is the breeze which gently hither blows? it is a wind of the north-west and north which drifts hither the shell of the nautilus. were i to bring hitherward from the north-west the ornamental post to stand here in waitemata fulfilled would be my vision, e! (stone, 2001: 185–86) but the bringing of enlightenment, which was explicit in the mission of captain cook (sahlins, 1995: 10–11) and implicit in the machinations of the antipodean settlers who arrived in his wake, was at the same time a darkening of indigenous peoples’ worlds. it created the now all-too-familiar racial chiaroscuro of light and shadow, good and bad, reason and unreason, scientific and superstitious knowledge. however, it is possible—contra spinoza’s critique of prophecy in the theologicalpolitical treatise (2007)—to be drawn into the shadowlands of enlightened knowledge through a kind of prophecy by signs, a second sight that sees through the territorialising of place by the architectonics of cartography, cadastral and statistical survey, and systems of “accountability” that dominate the design and operation of social institutions like the university today (carter, 1987; hoskin, 1996; shore & wright, 2000). such an encounter with that fundament (papatūānuku, or earth mother), as carl mika (2017) remarked at the symposium, is imbued with uncertainty. indeed, the knowledge of prophecy is coloured by uncertainty, ignorance, and existential dread. such knowledge is described by spinoza (2007) in terms of the hebrew word for spirit, ruagh, which means wind, variously conceived as life-breath, courage, capacity, sentiment, or indeed “the quarters of the world (because of the winds that blow from them), and also the sides of anything which look towards those quarters” (20–21). taken in the context of tāmaki makaurau/auckland, spinoza’s natura naturans (nature naturing; spinoza, 1992: 52) could be read as the winds of change bringing colonising settlers to an indigenous place, or hau, the breath of life that māori see as an enduring vitality that makes itself felt in the lands and waters of a place like 52 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a the university of auckland campusbut also through its absence in architecture like the university’s owen g. glenn business building (see sturm & turner, 2011). we propose a prophetic procedure that attends to the domain of the university of auckland campus demarcated by the albert barracks wall. we ask why and how this structure exists, and what it tells us about “what happened here” and the grounds of local knowledge. we contend that the ongoing presence of the barracks wall unsettles the grounds of university knowledge in this place, making of it a whenua tautohetohe (mead, 1997), a contested territory.4 first, let us allow the historical archive to speak to how the campus came into being. circumscription on 18 september 1840, 3000 acres on the tāmaki isthmus, where the north island (then “new ulster”) narrows to a few kilometres in width, was ceded or sold to her majesty’s government by te kawau (ariki tauaroa, or paramount chief ), his son reweti, tinana, and horo (rangatira, or chiefs) of ngāti whātua-oōrākei for an advance of six pounds—and some tobacco.5 the governor, captain william hobson, had claimed “autea” [aotea] a week prior in a letter to his chief magistrate, william symonds (f. & s. mathew, 1940: 182–183). the signing of what the settlers took to be a provisional deed of sale was solemnised by toasts to the queen, boat races and the raising of a flagstaff into which was cut the date and the name “auckland” (mathew 1940: 191)—named after the then governor-general of india, lord auckland. on 20 october 1840, the parties signed the final deed of purchase for the isthmus (in total, ngāti whātua-o-ōrākei received cash and goods worth £281, with a second payment of £60 in 1842). on 14 november 1840, having surveyed the isthmus, surveyor-general felton mathew submitted his town plan for approval (f. & s. mathew, 1940: 196). fig. 2 felton mathew (1842). plan of the town of auckland, new ulster, the capital of the colony of new zealand [map, sir george grey special collections, auckland libraries]. 53 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a “cobweb” mathew planned the town of auckland as a series of concentric circular streets radiating out from a circus on the elevated site of albert hill (rangipuke), taking its cue from the circular volcanic plateau on which it sits and the volcanoes which define auckland’s landscape (mathew, 1940: 197; see brand, 2011). although the plan (see figure 2), probably based on that by john nash for regent’s park and regent street (brand, 2011; douglas, 2015; cf. hamer, 1990), was approved by governor william hobson,  it was never fully enacted, perhaps because of a shortage of surveyors or, indeed, a lack of political will to invest in such a grand design. fig. 4 edward ashworth (1842–1843). government house, auckland: nw view [watercolour, alexander turnbull library]. fig. 3 george pulman (1863). pulman’s register map of the city of auckland [map, sir george grey special collections, auckland libraries]. with the exception of two quadrants skirting one side of the field that became albert park and the precincts of government house, auckland was reduced to a grid that was creased by the gully that divided it, and down which flowed the “queen street river” (known then to māori as waihorotiu and later as the ligar canal) on the western border of what eventually became the main street of auckland (see figure 3 and douglas, 2015). it ranged around a fortified barracks, rather than a circus, in an uncanny echo of the pukerangi pā (village) that once occupied the site (bulmer, 1994, citing graham, 1980). the first government house at auckland was a sixteen-room wooden structure prefabricated in london and modelled on that built in 1821 to house napoleon on saint helena, longwood house. it was imported in 1841 by governor hobson and erected on waterloo quadrant on a gently sloping tract of land to the northeast of the albert barracks. when it burned down in june 1848 during the governorship of george gray, it was replaced with a larger italianate house, again wooden but designed to look like stone (see inset in figure 3, and figure 4). once the seat of 54 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a government was relocated to wellington in 1865, it became the northern residence for the governor and official guests like prince alfred the duke of edinburgh and queen elizabeth ii (mclean, 2006). in 1969, it was absorbed by the university of auckland and became known as old government house. it now houses the staff club and is planned to become home to the faculty of law. fig. 5 unknown (c. 1860–1870s). government house, auckland [photograph, alexander turnbull library]. these extant documents make albert hill the centre of the new town of, capital for a time (1841–1865) of, the new colony of new zealand. located on an existing elevated settlement (rangipuke), the unsurveyed site is first overwritten by the town plan, then cleared for the albert barracks, then occupied by the first government house and its levelled surrounds. a precinct—literally, “encirclement” in latin—is as good a word as any for the bounded space of the would-be government’s house, behind which snakes the military barracks wall in a circle that would accommodate, enclose, and protect the small settler population from the tāngata whenua beyond. from the outset, then, the imagined threat of conflict underlay the settlers’ governance of the territory, which would expand through land confiscation to the rest of auckland, the north island, and ultimately the whole country—the move of the university’s faculty of law to this building that has been mooted in the university’s building programme parallels these acts of circumscription upon which the law is founded. beyond the cartography of town plans based on british models, the rationale of national law—before the ‘nation’ existed as such—required surveyors to establish the bounded plots of sections, suburbs, parks, farms, and roads. governance thus hinged on the sovereign determination of property and its administration, which in turn founded the basis of law and suffrage in the new country. in this way, what giselle byrnes calls the “calligraphy of colonisation” (2001: 77) formalised the topography (literally, “land-writing”)—via survey chains and theodolites—that enabled surveyors to measure and thereby create plots. the “ratio” of the chain (66 feet or 100 links in length, with an acre being 10 square chains) quite literally supplied the rationale for settlement and a law of circumscription. dr john johnson, colonial surgeon, painted accounts of what david filer (1999) has referred to as “life on the frontier” from the signing of the treaty of the waitangi onward. this watercolour sketch from the last year of his life shows a parade of the 58th (rutlandshire) regiment of foot at the albert barracks before lieutenantgeneral sir george charles d’aguilar, in the presence of a phlegmatic audience of tāngata whenua. the regiment was deployed in new zealand from 1845–1859 and was commanded from 1851–1864 by general edward buckley wynyard, who gave his name to the auckland landmarks of wynyard wharf, street, and, later, quarter. 55 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a no doubt, the rebuilt government house, panopticon-like in its stately and forbidding survey of its surrounds, was read as a sign of the country-to-come. its linearity, squareness, and stone construction appear at odds with the rolling landscape cleared for its establishment. architecturally out-sized and out of place, as even settler critics of the italianate design observed at the time (sinclair & mcnaughton, 1983), its military activities, distinguished royal guests, and social and recreational events all worked to establish and secure a new mode of panoptical inhabitation. the building can be seen to have its eye on the local population, but, equally, the tāngata whenua have set their eyes on it and are fully attendant to the signifying work of settlement that it performs—hence the way in which the volcanic mound of maungawhau/mt eden, once a pā of te wai-o-hua (the iwi [tribe] defeated by ngāti whātua-o-ōrākei in the mid-18th century), looms over it. their lawful—or “lore”-ful (barclay, 2005: 202)—gaze contests the grounding of the building, despite the ‘legal’ transaction that afforded settlers this foothold. government house can be taken as a sign of things to come, as the property regime of encroaching settlement, and the agents and equipment of survey and militia that supported it, resulted in further contestation of land throughout the country (belich, 2015) and spawned the defiant movements of māori prophetsfrom te ua haumēne (pai mārire/hauhau), te whiti-o-rongomai (at parihaka), te kooti arikirangi te turuki (ringatū) to rua tapunui kenana (at maungapohatu) (elsmore, 1989). the prophets were led by the existential dread occasioned by the settler spectacle to situate the spread of settlement in stories of regeneration of the peoples now calling themselves “māori” (see binney, 1999). in the context of signs that were read in both new and older terms of place—across the short settler history and the longer indigenous occupation—the law that government house signifies and enacts quite literally a matter of where you stand, or sit … with the past in front of you. fig. 6 john johnson (1848). new barracks, auckland, 1848 [watercolour, auckland war memorial museum]. 56 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a the albert barracks was built between 1846 and 1852 to supplement fort britomart and to reassure the auckland population after hone heke’s ‘rebellion’ led to the flagstaff war (1845–1846) in the bay of islands. it was soon to house more than 500 troops. george graham of the royal engineers supervised the construction of a 1300-metre wall to enclose the 22 acres (8.9 ha) of the barracks and a number of buildings, including a magazine, a hospital, and a commissariat. most were built by the more than 100 māori stonemasons and builders from volcanic basalt blocks brought from the nearby mt eden quarry (sinclair & mcnaughton, 1983). graham later claimed that the fortification of the barracks wasn’t necessary but would prevent the subdivision of the hill and allow the area to become a park in a time of peace. the barracks was sent two russian guns captured in the crimea (see figure 8): one is now at the akarana yacht club in auckland; the other, at the waiouru army museum, while other military artefacts remain in albert park today. it was customary in the design of barracks from the 1830s to 1850s to centre on a parade ground for drills and punishments, but also leisure activities (douet, 1998). to this end, in 1856 the parade ground was levelled and manicured by the military cricket club in preparation for cricket season (see figure 9) (clough, et al. 2003). the barracks was largely abandoned after the colonial capital was shifted to wellington in 1865. the buildings and most of the wall were fig. 7 author unknown (1866). plan shewing the locality of the old military barracks [map, sir george grey special collections, auckland libraries]. fig. 8 j. d. richardson (1860s). inside albert barracks [photograph, sir george grey special collections, auckland libraries]. 57 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a demolished in 1870–1871 and the stone reused elsewhere, including in the construction of the local jail at mt eden (coates, 1990; clough, et al. 2003). 85 metres of the wall remain, dividing the old “100 sector” of the university from the newer “300 sector” and general library. fig. 10 sean sturm (2017). barracks wall as seen from the university general library side of the wall [photograph]. fig. 9 author unknown (1869). cricket match at albert barracks, auckland, 1869 [photograph, alexander turnbull library]. walking the barracks wall today (see figure 10), we sense the complete circle it once formed. it is such acts of circumscription that establish settlers’ claim to lawful presence. the instruments of survey and governance not only created a clearing, but also brought the sense of threat (threatening, but more importantly, being threatened) that gives the law its military foundation and produces, in sequence, a para-military, police, and prisons. faced with questions of a constitutional nature, settlers (pākehā [non-māori new zealanders] and migrants) today will tend to draw the same circle of fear and imagine a conflict that ultimately springs from their disavowal of other and older modes of inhabitation—and of māori law/lore as “first law” (mikaere, 2011: 14). in the case of the government house precinct, given their fidelity to the settled site as is, it takes something akin to a leap of faith—a prophet-like act of imagination, indeed—for them to encounter the place beyond the flat circle of the barracks wall’s inscription. 58 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a circumspection however, the panoptics of such circumscription obscures a shadow discourse, or scotoptics, that hides invisible “lines of flight”, of “subjectivation” and “fracture” (deleuze, 1992: 161). what moves and moves us in this place as we walk exceeds what is visible to the eye—although, thanks to john johnson’s painting (figure 6), we can imagine that everything that takes and has taken place here is beheld, like the soldiers in the group portrait (figure 9), by tāngata (peoples) and whenua (land). we can sense, as carl mika claimed in his probing of the mystery of ground (papatūānuku) at the spinoza symposium (2017), that even a tree may be “infused with the all”. so may the trees dedicated to prince albert in the grounds of government house (see figure 1) be seen as bearing witness to the processes of settlement that led to the building of government house and the installation of the colonial government. and thanks to deleuze’s (1997) reading of spinoza’s semiotics in the ethics, we can see the signs of the place at work by exploring their effects and affects. we can read structures that express the place as “scalar” signs (scalar because they express the state of something at a moment in time). scalar signs such as indices, icons, and symbols produce effects that are variously sensible (“indicative”), logical (“abstractive”), moral (“imperative”), or hermeneutic (“interpretive”) (deleuze, 1997: 138–140). government house, for example, is altogether solid, upstanding, and progressive, a symbol of the early colony and the university of new zealand. but we can also read the structures as “vectorial” signs (vectorial because they express the change in something over time). vectorial signs produce affects that are variously “augmentative”, “diminutive”, or “ambiguous”, generating a play of light and dark (or joy and sadness, for spinoza) that constitutes “degrees of chiaroscuro” (deleuze, 1997: 140–141). the clocktower, for example (see figure 1), is a pou whakairo (ornamental post) that drills into history and proliferates the affects of settlement, just as the raising of the flagstaff at tāmaki must have done for māori, for whom it was the fulfilment of the ambivalent prophecy of the coming of pākehā. to be alert to such signs represents a kind of second sight—which is really a matter of seeing oneself or other things as other to the place, or better, of being seen by the place and its peoples as other. seen this way, settlers and their history are “broken” (turner, 2002): they are unsettled and their history is unfounded in the place. nonetheless, their unsettlement signals the possibility of “lines of flight” (disappearances) that occasion “lines of fracture” or “subjectivation” such as ruptures in time and/or space or new forms of becoming (deleuze, 1992: 161).6 to be moved by ground in a māori place is thus to be beheld by tāngata and whenua. when we walk the grounds of the campus in the shadow of the wall, we are called to circumspection. to come upon michael parekowhai’s security guard in the ironic pose of the modern māori warrior is to become aware of the barracks wall and the university’s general library looming above it.7 the circumscription of the wall initialises the settler presence and secures the ground for the expansion of settler institutions and their archive. but the library is not the only repository of knowledge in this place, nor the only means by which it is secured. and what the security guard—māori, as is not untypical in new fig. 11 sean sturm (2017). michael parekowhai’s kapa haka (2008), from the old government house side of the barracks wall [photograph]. 59 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a fig. 12 local time (2014). te wai ariki [map]. argos aotearoa, 1, 5. zealand—might be securing remains obscure. the figure is a troubling transversal of the university’s optics, an unsettling sign that might stand for the university as a site of knowledge and apparatus of control (and for its teachers as disciplinarians), or for māori as both agents of settler securitisation and māori circumspection.8 altogether, it represents a composite body. for spinoza (1992: 74, 88), bodies moving or being moved in concert can resonate to form “composite bodies”, of which “common notions” can be formed (as in when, for deleuze [1997: 143], an “associative chain” becomes an “automatic chain”). the “human body” is one example of a composite body about which we form common notions; the “university of auckland” is another—which implies that a body can be composed of human and more-than-human bodies (it’s common knowledge today that the human body is composed of human elements allied with flora and often fauna). susan ruddick, in her keynote presentation at the symposium, went further. she took this capacity to be affected as indicative of ecological alliances at work between human and more-than-human bodies. seen this way, the “composite body” of the university campus might be considered a “composition of forces” (ruddick, 2017: 125), in other words, a body both tangible and intangible, human and others, that encompasses institution, archive, statue—and the ground on which they stand. a “common notion” of the university campus alert to its “degrees of chiaroscuro” (deleuze, 1997: 141), to its lights and shadows, would thus have to encompass, extend, and even excavate its ground. three pā occupied rangipuke at different times: tangihanga pukeā was situated on rerenga-ora-iti (later fort britomart); te reuroa, near the present day high court; and pukerangi, in the north-western corner of albert park (auckland city, 2009: 26). as the local time collective write, all had ready access to the natural spring te wai ariki (chiefly waters) located in what are now the grounds of the university of auckland faculty of law. in 60 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a the waterways from which te wai ariki springs lived the taniwha [water spirit] horotiu, after whom the stream that ran down present-day queen street and flowed into the bay horotiu (later commercial bay) was named […] its waters and taniwha now move under the streets of the cbd. (local time, 2014: 4) the series of pā and the fort that underlie the university of auckland campus might seem alike in their military function and their elevated survey of the surrounding lands, but the fort enacts circumscription, whereas the pā enact circumspection. the pā access the sacred subterranean spring, te wai ariki, that is overseen by its taniwha, horotiu (see figure 12). taniwha, as laid down by ancient tohunga (priests), are tohu (signs) and natural forces, guardians and dangers, that anchor and sustain a local community (marsden, 2003: 19). given the interdependence of pā residents and the spring, the taniwha calls for circumspection, an ethics of care towards its life-giving waters (the sewer canal later laid over its outlet in what is now queen street signifies a total ignorance of this knowledge [douglas, 2015: 58]). all that happens in the place is beheld by, and beholden to, the taniwha, the agent and principle of uncertain ground, that looked on as the place was apparently transformed by the arrival of settlers, militia, government, and universities. among other things, what this shadow discourse discloses is that the university occupies a transcendental-colonial-māori place, a territory that is palimpsestic and contested, a whenua tautohetohe (mead, 1997: 235). a common notion of this uncommon composition moves beyond the enlightened optics centred on the visible; it requires that the uncertainty of its less visible ground be attended to (as philip armstrong [2011] does when he hears the rumblings of rūaumoko in the earthquake-torn landscape of christchurch). to do so might enable settlers to seek a solidarity grounded in their relative ignorance and to approach the grounds of (this) place with an uncertainty that would enable the real encounters and alliances otherwise foreclosed by their self-circumscription. such encounters and alliances might also reveal that the university too is more than it seems, which it must be if it is to be a “pluriversity” (cf. de sousa santos, 2009): a place of possibilities, upbuilding, and practical wisdom; a wānanga (place of learning) and not just another placeless neoliberal university that produces nothing but certain and circumscribed knowledge. thus, one way in which we as scholars can ask after the ground rules of our university—or perhaps of any university in an indigenous place—is to ask after the ground on which it sits. ours is sited on a former colonial fort, albert barracks, and on the site of a number of former indigenous pā. the barracks wall conspicuously bisects the campus; the te wai ariki stream that sustained the pā issues inconspicuously via a tap in the carpark of the faculty of law (see figure 13). but seeing the university, as it were, in view of the place in which it sits and of everything that has happened there means more than reading the place as a historical palimpsest; it means seeing the correspondences between its military history and the paramilitary nature of management in the “university of excellence” (readings, 1996: 11; see hoskin, macve, & stone, 2006), and between its enterprise and that of militant colonialism and neo-colonialism (chatterjee & maira, 2014). moreover, it is to see it as an “uncommon commons” (turner, fig. 13 sean sturm (2017). te wai ariki spring outlet, university of auckland faculty of law carpark [photograph]. 61 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a 2013: 26), an eruption of place in the generic “non-place” (augé, 1995) of the transcendental “university of excellence” (readings, 1996: 11). and that uncommon commons might even presage an oceanic “undercommons”, to borrow a term from harney & moten (2013; see hau’ofa, 1993), shared by indigenous peoples across the pacific, but not necessarily by non-indigenous peoples—though they might otherwise “share” the same place. such is the hope that an ethic of care toward the place and its peoples holds out—a fidelity to what moves and to being moved—such that we scholars tautoko (affirm) the whakatauki “toitū te whenua; toitū te tangata” (as the land endures, so do the people). 62 to see or be seen? the grounds of a place-based university t h e a r t s o f s p i n o z a + p a c i f i c s p i n o z a in t e r s t ic e s s p in o z a brand, d. 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(1997). landmarks, bridges and visions: aspects of māori culture: essays. wellington, new zealand: victoria university press. michels, c., & beyes, t. (2014). performing university space: multiplicity, relationality, affect. in p. temple (ed.), the physical university: space and place in higher education (pp. 15–33). abingdon, uk: routledge. mika, c. (2017). pacific spinoza/ pacific spaces. presentation at the interstices under construction symposium: the arts of spinoza + pacific spinoza. auckland, new zealand, 26–28 may 2017. mikaere, a. (2011). colonising myths/maori realities: he rukuruku whakaaro. wellington, new zealand: huia & te tākupu, te wānanga-o-raukawa. newman, j. h., & turner, f. m. (ed.). (1996). the idea of a university. new haven, ct: yale university press. pierce, c. s. (1974). collected papers of charles sanders peirce (vol. 5, c. hartshorne & p. weis, eds.). cambridge, ma: belknap press. plan showing the locality of the old military barracks, which at times was occupied by h.m. 12th, 14th, 18th, 40th, 43rd, 50th, 58th, 65th, and 70th, regiments as well as detachments of the royal artillery, royal engineers and land transport corps. (1866). reference number: nz map 4616. auckland, new zealand: sir george grey special collections, auckland libraries. retrieved from http://www. aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/ heritageimages/images/maps/ maps157f/4621.jpg pulman, g. (1863). pulman’s register map of the city of auckland. reference number: nz map 4475–1. auckland, new zealand: sir george grey special collections, auckland libraries. readings, b. (1996). the university in ruins. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. richardson, j. d. (1860s). inside albert barracks. reference number: 4–423. auckland, new zealand: sir george grey special collections, auckland libraries, retrieved from http://www. aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/ heritageimages/images/photos/ p20f/img0057.jpg richardson, t. (2014). a schizocartography of the university of leeds: cognitively mapping the campus. disclosure: a journal of social theory, 23(1), 131–153. retrieved from http:// uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/ vol23/iss1/10 ruddick, s. (2017). rethinking the subject, reimagining worlds. dialogues in human geography, 7(2), 119–139. sahlins, m. (1995). how “natives” think: about captain cook, for example. chicago, il: university of chicago press. shore, c., & wright, s. (2000). coercive accountability: the rise of audit culture in higher education. in m. strathern (ed.), audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy (pp. 57–89). london, uk: routledge. sinclair, k., & mcnaughton, t. 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(2013). the university beside itself. in t. besley and m.a. peters (eds.), reimagining the creative university (pp. 49–59). rotterdam, netherlands: sense. turner, s. (2002). being colonial/ colonial being. journal of new zealand literature (jnzl), 20, 39–66. turner, s. (2013). anglosphericism. journal of new zealand literature (jnzl), 31(2), 15–34. waitangi tribunal. (1987). report of the waitangi tribunal on the orakei claim (wai 9). wellington, new zealand: waitangi tribunal, department of justice. endnotes 1 for jacques derrida’s reading of the university in terms of the physical grounds of cornell university, see “the principle of reason: the university in the eyes of its pupils” (derrida, 1983). 2 for other examples of psychogeographical critical university studies, see beyes & michels (2014) and richardson (2014). 3 compare deleuze (1986: 98–99) on firstness. 4 according to mead, the concept of whenua tautohetohe, or “debateable lands” on the shared boundary between the lands of iwi (tribes), “allows for dynamic political and social relations between neighbouring tribes and reflects the ebb and flow of iwi politics” (1997: 236), unlike the fixed boundary of surveyed lands. 5 the deed comprised a wedge of land running along the waitematā foreshore from hobson bay to the whau creek and inland to maungawhau (mt eden). for the vexed status of the deed of sale of the tāmaki isthmus, see stone (2001: 261–262) and waitangi tribunal (1987). 6 deleuze and guattari’s term lignes de fuite is often translated “lines of flight”, but strictly speaking it denotes the lines that converge on a vanishing point in linear perspective. fuite literally means “escape”, “leak” or “disappearing into the distance” (deleuze & guattari 1987: xvi). 7 the title of parekowhai’s sculpture, kapa haka (literally, “line-dance”), draws an ironic link between the ritualised gestures of māori performing arts and a common pose of security guards in new zealand, many of whom are of māori descent. 8 it is a little-known fact that the university of auckland was the recipient of endowments of land confiscated from several north island iwi, in particular, ngāti awa and tainui, as linda mead (later linda tuhiwai-smith) documents in her phd thesis nga aho o te kakahu matauranga (mead, 1996: 96, citing sinclair & mcnaughton, 1983: 30). microsoft word special-issue-xcoax2020.docx citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 18 on false augmented agency and what surveillance capitalism and user-centered design have to do with it rodrigo hernández-ramírez iade, universidade europeia, lisbon, portugal unidcom/iade, lisbon, portugal ---- rodrigo.ramirez@universidadeeuropeia.pt ---- abstract recently, there has been a surge in ai-powered products. often marketed as “free”, these services operate as hooks to lure unsuspecting users into voluntarily giving up data about every aspect of their life. their data is the primary fuel of surveillance capitalism, a new economic system that exclusively benefits so-called big tech organisations at the expense of personal privacy and freedom of choice. this paper argues the ways these ai-powered products are being imagined and designed is further generalising a kind of “enframing” that encourages a bureaucratic relationship with the world disguised as (a false sense of) augmented agency. this paper shows that technologically informed philosophical reflections can contribute to getting ourselves back into the feedback loop of technological mediation by helping us recognise our “becoming” with technologies as a design process. keywords augmented agency; bureaucratic technologies; philosophy of technology; self-transformation; surveillance capitalism; user-centered design. 1 | introduction in the last years, thanks to recent developments in ai methods, computing hardware, and network connectivity, there has been a surge in “smart” devices claiming to improve people’s lives. thanks to ubiquitous computing, multitudes of objects in our built environment can double as interactive and interconnected nodes for the internet, and as sensors that gather data about every aspect of human life. the growing stream of information generated by the internet of things (iot) is allowing organisations employing new machine learning methods and data gathering to make detailed, albeit questionably accurate, forecasts about our behaviour (mcneil, 2018; o’neil, 2016; thompson, 2019; van dijck, 2014; varghese, 2019). the rationale behind the development of ai-powered devices and services often invokes user-centered design (ucd) principles, as well as weiser’s (1991/1999) optimistic vision of ubiquitous computing. the reasoning is first that by anticipating people’s needs and providing relevant contextual information and suggestions, technologies will become not only more usable but useful and meaningful; secondly, that by offering this level of tailoring while blending unobtrusively into the background and remaining ready-to-hand, smart devices and services will further improve people’s overall experience of daily life. however, recent events such as the cambridge analytica scandal (gadwalladr & graham-harrison, 2018) and the role of youtube in the growth of far-right politics (fischer & taub, 2019) have raised serious questions about our relationship with smart technologies at large and with so-called big tech in particular. automating tasks with the help of artificial devices is arguably a defining human feature (martinhotruswell, 2018). while humans are not the only creatures that employ tools, no other animal’s development, behaviour, and well-being is so strongly shaped by technology as ours (ihde & malafouris, 2018). so called big tech organisations providing data-based ai-powered products are surreptitiously exploiting with impunity our technological susceptibilities. their business models have given rise to “surveillance capitalism”. this economic system follows a radically new logic of accumulation fuelled by data analytics that is curtailing our privacy, our freedom of choice (naughton, 2019; zuboff, 2015, 2019), and even our capacity to self-transform. through dishonest forms of automation that “hypernudge” (yeung, 2016) and effectively lock people into behaviours and processes “for which they have no legitimate need or desire” (girardin, 2019), the new “data barons” (mayerschönberger & cukier, 2013) alienate people from their information and decision-making. [1] moreover, these levels of control show the degree to which the “corporate bureaucratic culture” (graeber, 2012) has taken over society, deliberately putting otherwise “poetic technologies” [2] entirely under the service of “total bureaucratisation”. this paper argues the way ai-powered iot devices are being designed is not only consolidating citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 19 surveillance capitalism but also promoting a limiting technological “enframing” (see zwier, blok, & lemmens, 2016) disguised as augmented agency. it shows that despite claiming to follow ucd principles, smart devices and services offering hyperpersonalisation are generalising plutocratic, unimaginative interactions with the world. this paper admits there are no immediate solutions to “fix” the above issues, but claims that a good starting point is making sure that, when it comes to augmenting agency, human freedom of choice is always privileged. it contends that keeping humans on the (decision) feedback loop means calling into question the idea that ai-powered devices need to operate seamlessly in the background of human experience, for this often implies trading human control for technical convenience. furthermore, it argues that we need to rethink what we understand by the user’s real needs and requirements and what ucd means in the age of smart automation. 2 | the perils of surveillance capitalism in our “hyperhistorical” information-dependent societies, [3] the built environment is being increasingly populated by billions of sensors embedded within iot devices. human activities have become overwhelmingly mediated by computational technology. this is a radical shift because, unlike previous forms of automation, [4] computers “informate” processes; i.e., they generate data about when they are used, for which purpose, and by whom, thus making the most minute details about their usage knowable (zuboff, 2015). as a result, potentially every human activity can be “datafied”, [5] i.e., “rendered in a new symbolic dimension as events, objects, processes”, thus making people and their behaviour “visible, knowable, and shareable” (2015, p. 78). this availability of data (rather than breakthroughs in algorithm design per se) is what allows contemporary ai methods to achieve the unprecedented levels of efficiency and accuracy they exhibit today. the vast amounts of data generated directly or indirectly by smart devices are collected, stored, abstracted, aggregated, and analysed [6] by big tech and by every emerging organisation wanting to take part in the contemporary economy. usually, these organisations contend that it is only by knowing their users intimately (i.e., by gaining access to their everyday data), that the products and services they offer can reduce “frictions”, i.e., become more efficient, usable, more comfortable to live with, and desirable. this argument echoes the general principles of ucd, which is arguably the dominant approach in product development, interaction design, user experience design, and other fields within the tech industry. ucd, a cluster of processes with its origins in early human–computer interaction (hci) research, privileges a humanistic outlook, arguing that user’s needs ought to be put above the system’s functional requirements when designing (baek, cagiltay, boling, & frick, 2007; norman & draper, 1986; wallach & scholz, 2012). knowing users nowadays is not merely reduced to carrying out market research in the traditional sense (floridi, 2019; ruckenstein & granroth, 2019). it makes sense for organisations to engage in large-scale data collection. whether this information yields actual knowledge about the user is beyond the point. the problem, however, is that having in mind the user’s needs is rarely the case, particularly when it comes to ai-powered devices and services. automation has, at least since the industrial revolution, allowed organisations to reduce costs and increase revenues; adopting ai-driven automation is, therefore, a reasonable, logical step. ai is data-hungry; it needs vast amounts of input to operate, adapt and grow; this explains in part why organisations are also eagerly adopting big data schemes and practices. [7] however, there is another more disturbing reason why most organisations now deliberately design their products and services to extract as much data as possible from their customers: users themselves have become the resource and the product as well as their target. as foster & mcchesney (2014) and zuboff (2015) argue, big data embodies the new logic of appropriation and accumulation underpinning a novel economic system which they have named “surveillance capitalism”. surveillance capitalism emerged from the auction-style advertising model google pioneered in the early 2000s, wherein companies pay to have their ads tailored based on user’s data and behaviour patterns. since then, this model has been adopted and refined by the faangs [8] (facebook, apple, amazon, netflix, and spotify) and by almost every other major technology company. under surveillance capitalism, organisations appropriate people’s “data exhaust”—that is, the data people shed as a by-product of their actions and movements in the world (mayer-schönberger & cukier, 2013)—to forecast and modify their behaviour to increase revenue and obtain further market control (zuboff, 2015, pp. 75–80). under surveillance capitalism, people are offered access to convenient services they presumably want (e.g., participating in a social network) in exchange for accepting an unrelenting invasion of their privacy. the problem, as zuboff (2015) notes, is that privacy implies deciding whether one wants to keep something secret or not. by “hyper-nudging” (see yeung, 2016) users into surrendering their ability to keep their information, their beliefs, and their wishes, the new data barons are limiting people’s capacity to choose and, therefore, are curtailing their fundamental rights. along with being illegitimate, this kind of pact is citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 20 faustian because users often ignore the scope, degree, and frequency of the surveillance they will be subjected to. their consent thus often resembles that of the compulsive gambling addict, as yeung (2016, pp. 131–132) notes. under surveillance capitalism, there are no contractual reciprocities. data extraction is automated and unidirectional, a process that leaves no space for negotiation or the kind of lawful relationships based on social trust. users’ behaviours when interacting with a given service may be rewarded or punished based on opaque automated decisions—e.g., users may be expelled from the service (kurtis, 2019). this “formal indifference” towards the people who are both the sources of data and the target of big data analytics is the hallmark that distinguishes surveillance capitalism from previous economic systems (zuboff, 2015, pp. 76– 80). the “free” services provided by data barons are not objects of value that are exchanged in a transaction but rather serve as “hooks” that lure unsuspecting users into an asymmetrical and indifferent relationship with a technology (yeung, 2016; zuboff, 2015). voluntary submission into constant surveillance not only curtails our freedom of choice but erodes our capacity to self-transform because technologies in general and these, in particular, have tremendous influence over how we perceive the world, as we will see in the following section. 2.1 | becoming through technology traditionally, humanistic analyses concerning technological agency, including critical theory (in the “narrow” and “wide” senses (see bohman, 2016)) and the early philosophy of technology (heidegger, 1954/1977b; e.g., mumford, 1967), regarded technologies mostly in pessimistic terms. they usually establish a sharp division between human nature and technics; portraying technology as a tyrannical force that “enframes” [9] our mindset and threatens to overwhelm human agency. in the last decades, however, there have been two important shifts in the way philosophers of technology think about “being human”. first, they now recognise the artificial dimensions of human nature; they have realised that human beings actually “become constituted through making and using technologies” because tools shape our minds and augment our capacities (ihde & malafouris, 2018). secondly, there are more attempts to rethink the place of humans in the world; to “re-place” human agency (galanos, 2017) and develop frameworks that account for the agency of non-human agents in our environment. most contemporary posthumanist currents endorse— with varying degrees of strength—both stances, including actor-network theory (ant), postphenomenology, speculative realism, new materialism, and informational structural realism, to name a few (see for example bogost, 2012; cudworth & hobden, 2014; floridi, 2002; rosenberger, 2014). crafting and using tools is not exclusive to humans. the fact that other animals, such as great apes, birds, or cetaceans develop and share technologies, and also enjoy doing so is well documented (garber, 2014; jacobs, bayern, & osvath, 2016; mccoy et al., 2019). what distinguishes us from non-human animals in terms of technology is not merely the degree to which we have incorporated it into our lives (which is unparalleled). we use technologies to enhance our capacities, but we do it largely by delegating tasks to autonomous systems (martinhotruswell, 2018). [10] in so doing, we become dependent and hence, intrinsically linked with the myriads of devices populating our built environment. unlike non-human animals, our lebenswelt or lifeworld is defined by a constantly evolving relationship with artificial objects. [11] it follows, as ihde & malafouris (2018) suggest, that even though human evolution has been usually characterised in terms of adaptation, it would be more appropriate to describe it in dialectical terms, as a technicallymediated and often intentional “becoming”. unlike non-human animals, we fabricate our tools and therefore we also fabricate our circumstances. to paraphrase ortega y gasset (1939/1964), a defining feature of being human is our constant struggle to “make our existence” to bring about what is yet to be. as a species, humans are outstanding makers. our technical capacities allow us not only to design and manipulate things in our environment but also to determine when and how we change; how we selfconsciously “become” (ihde, 2009). this “selffabrication” implies that we continuously find ourselves “first and foremost, in the situation of the technician” (ortega y gasset 1939/1964, p. 341). technically mediated human becoming has arguably been going on for a long time, perhaps as far back as the time of acheulean axes (roughly 1.7 million years ago). however, in the last decades, we have made our world friendlier towards devices that have comparatively more agency and autonomy and, therefore, a stronger influence over human actions and decisions. these artefacts are often “inflexible, stubborn, intolerant of mistakes, and unlikely to change”; whereas humans tend to be exactly the opposite (floridi, 2012). clumsy automation can be either the result of unintentional “bad design” caused by biases, disregard for edge cases, or poor calibration; but it can also be deliberately created for dishonest reasons, as girardin (2019) notes. as our dependency on smart devices increases so do the chances that they end up calling the shots; distorting and constraining our behaviour and our physical and conceptual environments to further accommodate us to them instead of the other way around (floridi, 2012). the danger is that instead of citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 21 establishing healthy dialectic relationships we end up adapting to their “needs” only “because that is the best, or sometimes the only, way to make things work” (2012, pp. 252–3). examples abound where things have to be done in cumbersome ways to accommodate the use of a given technology, even if we no longer notice it—e.g., how human movement and urban planning, in general, have been conditioned by the adoption of motor vehicles. choosing which technologies we incorporate into our lives is a crucial matter since they play a key role in our self-design (pitt, 2011). the problem, however, is that we lack a method or framework to do so beyond simple heuristics because we cannot know in advance (only speculate) how a given technology will affect our lives in the long term. the problem is made worse because we are being surrounded by an increasing number of sophisticated systems that are specifically designed to influence our behaviour. 3 | from poetic to bureaucratic technologies arguably, the “formal indifference” characterising surveillance capitalism is symptomatic of the broader cultural shifts brought by more than four decades of gradual merging between private and public power in the name of profit—i.e., of neoliberalism (see brown, 2015). chief amongst these cultural changes is total bureaucratisation: “the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations […] backed up by the threat of force” (graeber, 2015, p. 32) over every aspect of daily life, in such a pervasive manner that people cannot imagine things could be done differently. as a result of this process, bureaucracy has become “the water in which we swim” (2015, p. 4) and every resource, particularly technological change (a.k.a. “innovation”) has been put to the service of management. so although in the minds of those belonging to the managerial class, both private and public organisations now prioritise creativity and innovation thanks to them, reality shows the exact opposite is true. instead of investing in technologies that could bring alternative, more egalitarian futures, organisations have prioritised the development of more sophisticated systems to increase further “labour discipline and social control” (graeber, 2015, p. 120). organisations have not addressed the challenges famously identified by keynes (1930/2011) almost a hundred years ago. nor have they brought more radical changes such as establishing a “four-hour workweek” or universal income, nor developed fantastic innovations such as building flying cars, and colonies on the moon. instead, we ended up with infallible atms, high-speed trading, and an unhealthy enthusiasm for surveillance devices that would put the stasi to shame. rather than fulfilling the ideals of ted nelson (1974) or stewart brand, [12] and freeing us from administrative responsibilities, software and ubiquitous computing have “turned us all into part or full-time administrators” (graeber, 2015, p. 140). what could otherwise be “poetic technologies” have become “bureaucratic technologies” (2015, p. 141). even more worrying is the fact that the humanistic panoply deployed by ucd, which in many ways contributed to widespread adoption of computing in the last decades, is serving to perpetuate not only this state of affairs but, as we will see next, a false sense of augmented agency. 4 | against a false sense of augmented agency surveillance capitalism and the type of technologies this system fosters are fundamentally bureaucratic. bureaucracy is, by definition, arbitrary, inflexible, alienating, inefficient, and taxing (in the broad meaning of the word). nonetheless, bureaucratic procedures are often justified by claiming that they will achieve precisely the contrary: that they will make procedures cheaper, expedite, transparent, and meritocratic. bureaucratic procedures replace organic tête-à-tête negotiation and bargaining (which presuppose some form of symmetrical relationship between actors) with reductive, generalised imperatives (grounded on hierarchies and asymmetries) that follow the simple formulation “if, then, else”. bureaucracy, like violence in general, is fundamentally unimaginative. violence allows people to get away with arbitrary actions; to replace the negotiations and clarifications expected to occur within more egalitarian human exchanges with schematic imperatives. that is why no amount of rhetorical imaginative effort can efficiently counter the simplicity of a threat such as “cross the line and i will shoot you” (graeber, 2015). despite the above, to the best of our knowledge, humans have the unique capacity to picture things in their mind’s eye; consequently, we can project our ideas and ourselves into hypothetical past and future scenarios. this means that unless we have some damage in our frontal lobes, we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes and imagine what it would be like to stand in their position. this requires interpreting, understanding, and (to varying degrees) caring for other people, their circumstances, and needs. bureaucracy, on the other hand, is imposed as a remedy against the above; as a substitute for the myriad complex exchanges and negotiations that people need to carry out when interacting with other people. bureaucratic procedures are imposed to manage relationships that are already extremely unequal in terms of interpretative (empathic) labour. bureaucracy embodies and institutionalises “lopsided structures of the imagination”. thus, as graeber citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 22 (2015) contends, bureaucracy is not so much an embodiment of stupidity but a way to manage circumstances that are stupid because they depend on pre-existing inequalities underpinned by structural violence. power allows people to behave crassly towards other people. those in a situation of power and privilege tend to unabashedly avoid engaging in imaginative identification, particularly towards people they see as their inferiors. attempting to imagine how their subordinates feel is nothing short of a burden; after all, “in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don’t have to worry about, don’t have to know about, and don’t have to do” (2015, p. 101). imaginative, emphatic, and caring labour is usually the responsibility of people serving those in the upper echelons of society. after all, servants are people who have to anticipate the needs, desires, whims, and moods of those in power; whereas in turn these “can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them” (2015, p. 81). the current trends in iot consumer technologies seem focused on generalising precisely such bureaucratic/lopsided attitude towards the world. only this time, the interpreting labour is carried out by smart devices. the emergence of various ai personal assistants (alexa, google assistant, siri, and cortana) and smart environments (e.g., kohler’s numi 2.0 or whirlpool’s smart kitchens) exemplify such trend. smart, voice-controlled systems that unlock doors, regulate temperature and lights, play music or do our laundry simulate the kind of relationship plutocrats have with those around them. tech companies such as google, amazon, and apple are engaged in a cutthroat competition to make aipowered devices that offer more people the sensation of having the world respond to their desires, that is, transforming the luxuries of the plutocracy into affordable necessities even for those in the lower strata of society. this form of privileged augmented agency [13] (having one’s whims satisfied by an artificial agent at the sleight of one’s hand), however, comes at a cost that far exceeds the benefits. these systems can potentially realise such (distorted) utopia not because they are outstandingly prescient but, as was earlier discussed, thanks to the massive amounts of data extracted from the very people they are sold to. for the plutocrat the underling is disposable and easily replaceable; regardless of how intimate or longstanding their relationship might have been, there is no doubt about who holds power. conversely, the power (and liberty of choice) the average joe has over his growing network of alexa-controlled devices is, at best, illusory. what might seem as an innocuous indulgence is, in reality, a key element in the kind of faustian pacts encouraged by surveillance capitalism. using an alexa-controlled musical toilet that lifts its cover and washes and dries one’s rear end grants amazon the possibility of, say, creating a schedule of one’s bowel movements and selling it to data brokers for whatever purpose. as of today, iot devices are not providing kinetic powers but rather a false consciousness sense of augmented agency. in the age of surveillance capitalism tailoring is tantamount to encroachment, the kind that only an extremely efficient spy can get off with. surveillance capitalism and bureaucratic technologies are not only generalising a false sense of augmented agency; they are hampering human capacity to self-transformation. previously, we saw that from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of technology, a defining feature of human beings is that we self-fabricate our lives, that we can regard our existence as a technical enterprise or rather, as a design process. designing is an activity concerned with problem-solving, planning and projection, but its defining feature is iteration, a reliance on feedback loops. machines and tools are objects ideally conceived “to defeat the world’s resistance” (flusser, 1991/2014, p. 14), to overcome our “natural” limitations by augmenting or enhancing our physical or cognitive capacities. as intrinsically artificial creatures, we are the sum of the technological enhancements we choose to incorporate in our lives (pitt, 2011), and these include everything from our means of transportation to our clothing and entertainment. in many ways, we are our technologies. as we progress in life, we experiment, we tinker with myriads of such choices, we test and see whether they fit in our lives and contribute or not to what we wish to become. ideally, throughout this process, we make adjustments and corrections, we engage in a feedback loop, not unlike those characterising every design project. this formulation assumes that we have not only the capacity to choose but the means to evaluate our choices. however, in this age, this possibility is becoming the exception rather than the rule. under the guise of customisation, bureaucratic technologies are curtailing human freedom of choice—all the while promoting the idea that we have too many choices, as the “fobo” phenomenon suggests (reagle, 2015). through the appropriation of users’ behavioural data—which companies regard as a free-range resource “for the taking”—to create tradable “prediction products” (zuboff, 2019), most tech companies relying on big data aim to manipulate user’s decisions. as noted earlier, the economic model pioneered by google has been adopted not only by faangs, but by virtually every other company selling insurance, healthcare, retail, entertainment, education, finance, and other services (2019). as zuboff suggests, any iot product currently labelled as “smart” is either already playing a role in the behavioural data supply-chain or is capable of doing so. major companies and data brokers are continually working their way to circumvent obstacles against data collection, including users’ explicit rejection; for example, by gathering inference data from public sources and users’ unrelated activities— citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 23 particularly from so-called “data exhaust”. under such conditions, users do not have access nor control over their behavioural data and how it is being interpreted and for which ends. as zuboff points out, we are not only being “exiled” from our own behaviour but from the “knowledge” it yields (naughton, 2019). this circumstance highlights yet another divide characterising surveillance capitalism: an asymmetric relationship between those who know (but hide behind inscrutable and often dangerously biased “algorithms”) and those who are known and for whom privacy is no longer a right but a luxury. the type of social relations that emerge within surveillance capitalism resemble those of pre-modern absolutism where territory and rights are concentrated on a single entity. big tech is rapidly depriving people of their liberty to choose which information about their lives remains undisclosed. what these organisations are accumulating is not only “surveillance assets”—i.e., data and the technical means to handle it—and capital, but also human rights (naughton, 2019). this appropriation and exploitation of informational resources also have a territorial dimension. big tech has claimed ownership of the “infosphere”, the expanding environment inhabited by humans and other informational agents resulting from the merger of our physical world and our “onlife” (floridi, 2005, 2007). for zuboff (2015), this appropriation echoes the plundering of the so-called new world started half a millennia ago. [14] for big tech, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about their users; nowadays, they seek to surreptitiously automate their behaviour too by manipulating their contexts. (naughton, 2019). as the world becomes more enveloped by smart devices, we find ourselves continuously ambushed by nudges [15]. having our decisions micromanaged and our choices engineered means we are being denied access to our own experiential feedback loop. this in turn means that our capacity to design ourselves, to tinker and explore other possibilities of being-with-technologies is severely hampered. in these days and age, we are our information and what becomes of it (floridi, 2014). since technologies hold such power over what we are, it is vital to imagine new ways in which we can establish a healthier, freer relationship with them. however, first we ought to question and challenge the inevitability that surveillance capitalism has attached to information technologies (its). surveillance capitalism and protection of privacy are fundamentally incompatible, and surely neither total bureaucratisation nor surveillance capitalism could have existed without its, but it does not follow that its are to blame for their existence. the emergence of services designed with privacy in mind is proof there is an economical alternative to google’s “free” surveillance assets. bureaucratic thinking (purely concerned with procedures) has taken over our relationship with technologies, and hence over our capacity to change according to our own designs. in our daily struggle to work out our existence (and hence to transform our environment) we now hardly ever question the motives for incorporating a given technology into our lives. designers, even those subscribing to ucd, are no longer questioning the ontological and deontological dimensions of technologies but are merely caring about the methodological aspects of it. to paraphrase flusser (2014a), they are leaving aside the “what’s” and “why’s” of our technological needs to focus solely on the “how’s”. as it is currently being imagined and instantiated, automation is not one that brings more leisure time, a healthier, safer, environmentally sound, and egalitarian society where human autonomy is nurtured for good. arguably, then, we need some way to challenge this status quo; to reclaim the role of our technologies from bureaucracy and turn them once again into poetic tools. to use bureaucracy and technologies “to bring wild, impossible fantasies to life” (graeber, 2015, p. 141). what we are missing is ways to imagine different relationships with our technologies but also the means (concepts) to talk about our shifting circumstances. whenever we confront the unknown, the first task we need to accomplish is naming, for “naming is the first step toward taming” (naughton, 2019). that is why we need insights into the true nature of the phenomena that is changing our world in such radical ways. criticisms such as zuboff’s and graeber’s provide a sociological framework for contextualising our critique, but something else is also missing: the capacity to imagine how things could be different. technologically informed philosophical reflection understood as conceptual design (floridi, 2013), might take us a long way into that objective. 5 | conclusions and future work surveillance capitalism and the type of technologies that it is fostering are fundamentally bureaucratic. current trends in iot consumer services are generalising a false sense of augmented agency that mimics the lopsided, unimaginative and careless relationship plutocracies establish with the world around them. promising to transform the seemingly innocuous laziness of the powerful into an accessible necessity, bureaucratic technologies are forcing people into nothing short of faustian pacts. by incorporating systems designed to extract as much behavioural data from them to predict and influence their behaviour, users of bureaucratic technologies are surrendering their capacity to self-transform; to develop as individuals. bureaucratic technologies are alienating users from their own experiences, from the uncertainties that help nurture constructive existential feedback loops. this, of course, is not the way such powerful technologies should operate. citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 24 philosophical reflection, in general, can help to challenge this state of affairs by instilling doubts about notions that are taken for granted, but also by designing new conceptual tools to understand current technological changes. philosophy of technology provides a critical framework embraces the multistable nature of technologies and recognises their role as fundamental components of human nature. this critical mindset should be used to question why ai, its current and future operational limitations and consequences are often misrepresented or deliberately obfuscated (e.g., by equating intelligence with capacity to predict) to promote dishonest forms of automation. furthermore, we need to direct our criticism towards current practices in design. we need to challenge and update frameworks such as ucd and rethink what “user’s needs” mean in the age of smart automation, and what kind of trade-offs we are assuming in the name of supposedly unobtrusive devices. a genuinely humanistic ucd should make sure humans are kept on the loop. user experience should imply a richer instead of a narrower understanding of the world; it should mean more agency and autonomy, rather than nudging, and manipulation. a truly rich technologically mediated human experience should favour not bureaucracy, coercion, and control; but rather possibilities for creating and imagining new ways to be. the analysis here offered is currently at an initial stage and there is still much work to do. acknowledgements the author would like to thank all the members of the xcoax organising committee and the editors of this special issue for their thoughtful comments, guidance, and help to turn this article into readable form. endnotes [1] the nefarious consequences of dishonest automation are particularly visible in politics, as shown by a recent study on the influence of youtube’s optimisation algorithm on political and health debates in brazil (fischer & taub, 2019). [2] graeber (2015) is referring to “the use of rational and technical means to bring wild fantasies to reality”. “fantasies” here meaning building pyramids and transcontinental railroads or exploring space. [3] for a full description of the differences between historical and posthistorical societies see floridi (2014 ch.1). floridi’s concept is roughly equivalent to flusser’s (1985/2011) conception of “posthistory”; for a thorough comparison see galanos (2016). [4] here, automation is being understood broadly as outsourcing physical or cognitive tasks to an artificial system (danaher, 2018). [5] datafication differs from digitisation, insofar as the latter merely involves turning an analogue signal into bits; whereas the former implies an explanatory or hermeneutical desire to quantify, record, and interpret phenomena. for a critical view on datafication, see van dijck (2014). [6] datasets may undergo various similar cycles. once processed, a dataset may be re-packaged by data brokers, sold, further analysed, and then sold again (zuboff, 2015). [7] although there is no definitive consensual definition of big data, the term often serves as a shorthand for the combination of (a) technical infrastructure (information processing hardware) and (b) techniques for gathering, sorting, and querying vast amounts of data at high speeds. by adopting big data schemes and practices, organisations seek to discover new patterns in systems’ behaviours, distil them into “predictive analytics” and apply the resulting information onto new datasets (yeung, 2016). [8] an alternative acronym, “gafam” places microsoft instead of netflix and spotify. [9] for heidegger (1954/1977a), technological rationality embodied in the notion of gestell induces us to see everything in the world, including ourselves, as resources that can be put to the service of a technological system. this utilitarian mindset is dangerous because it “undermines our creative engagement with reality, alienates us from ourselves and each other, and leads to the destruction of our habitat” (merwin, wendland, & hadjioannou, 2018, p. 1). [10] here, “autonomy” is being understood in the broad sense of completing a given process from start to finish without the need of human intervention and oversight beyond the establishment of the initial course of action (johnson & verdicchio, 2017). thus put, a bow and arrow, a windmill, and a self-driving car are autonomous. [11] as ihde & malafouris (2018) further note, “the kind of minds we have depend on the kind of tools we make and use”. this echoes nietzsche’s alleged claim that “our tools are also working on our thoughts” (in kittler, 1999). [12] in the late 1960s brand, editor of the whole earth catalogue (published between 1968 and 1972), and the most visible voice for the so-called “new communalists” (campbell-kelly, aspray, ensmenger, & yost, 2014), along with nelson advocated widespread adoption of computational technology. deeply influenced by norbert wiener, mcluhan, buckminster fuller and vannevar bush, brand and nelson regarded computers as powerful diy tools for achieving personal liberty and happiness. citar journal, volume 11, no. 2 · special issue: xcoax 2019 25 [13] here, “agency” is broadly understood as the capacity of an agent to bring about specific changes in the world; this implies the agent can decide to act (or not), choose to do it in a certain way, and execute the action (bunnin & yu, 2009). [14] as zuboff notes, now that surveillance capitalism has become more visible, the term “digital native” has gained bleakly ironic overtone. 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(2016). phenomenology and the empirical turn: a phenomenological analysis of postphenomenology. philosophy & technology, 29(4), 313–333. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0221-7 biographical information rodrigo hernández-ramírez (b. 1982) is assistant professor and coordinator of the master programme in interaction design at iade, universidade europeia. he is an integrated member of unidcom/iade, as well as member of cieba (fbaul). his research interests stand at the intersection of philosophy of technology, design, and new media. he is particularly interested in human– technology relations and how technologies shape the way we understand the world and ourselves. www.jsser.org journal of social studies education research sosyal bilgiler eğitimi araştırmaları dergisi 2017: 8(1), 69-92 © 2017 journal of social studies education research, issn: 1309-9108 developing globally minded, critical media literacy skills jason harshman1 abstract the transnational movement of people and ideas continues to reshape how we imagine places and cultures. considering the volume of information and entertainment delivered and consumed via mass media, global educators are tasked with engaging students in learning activities that help them develop skill sets that include a globally minded, critical media literacy. grounded in cultural studies and framed by andreotti’s (2006) theory of critical gce and appadurai’s (1996) concept of mediascapes, this article examines how eleven global educators in as many countries used films to teach about what they considered to be the “6 c’s” of critical global media literacy: colonialism, capitalism, conflict, citizenship, and conscientious consumerism. how global educators foster globally minded, critical media literacy in their classrooms, the resources they use to teach about perspectives too often marginalized in media produced in the global north, and how educating students about media informs action within global citizenship education is discussed. findings from the study revealed that the opportunities to interact with fellow educators around the world inspired teacher’s to revisit concepts such as interconnectedness and crosscultural learning, along with shifts in thinking about how to teach media literacy by analyzing the coded messages present in the resources they use to teach about the world. keywords: critical literacy, global education, films, mediascapes. introduction technologies that include netflix, youtube, hulu, satellite television, tablets, and smartphones, to name a few, have democratized production and consumption, as well as provided cheaper and quicker access to information and entertainment in some parts of the world. researchers argue that because of this increased access, many u.s. students are more likely to learn about history and the current state of the planet by engaging with film and web-based media outside of a classroom rather than reading books or conducting primary source research in one (stoddard & marcus, 2010). as more avenues of access become available and cultures are deterritorialized, social studies teachers are faced with challenges and opportunities to include more voices and perspectives when teaching about culture, conflict, and citizenship in our global society (appadurai, 1996; gaudelli & siegel, 2010; merryfield, 1998). already charged with developing civic literacy, social studies educators are well positioned to utilize films as texts for 1 assist. prof., university of iowa, jason-harshman@uiowa.edu mailto:jason-harshman@uiowa.edu journal of social studies education research 2017: 8(1), 69-92 70 building critical thinking, disrupting how students imagine the world, and including voices too often marginalized by media produced about the global south in the global north. using films that elevate counter-narratives within world history is an important, but rare approach when developing students’ global perspectives. relying upon richard attenborough’s film gandhi (1982) to teach about india’s fight for independence or ridley scott’s black hawk down (2001) to teach about east africa or post-cold war u.s. foreign policy, instead of films produced in the places where the events one is teaching about transpired and/or that center on perspectives that disrupt narratives that favor the global north, tend to perpetuate a colonizer’s gaze. based on data drawn from a research project that included educators from around the world, this article couples theory and practice to answer the question: how do educators teach about perspective to develop globally minded critical media literacy skills? findings from a five-month study that utilized on-line discussion forums to bring 120 international baccalaureate (ib) teachers in 36 countries together revealed that educators used films to: (1) help students think more critically about images and messages encoded in media; (2) introduce the perspectives of those who are often marginalized in films produced in the global north to develop perspective consciousness and a critical lens for analyzing inequity within global systems; and (3) prompt students to reflect on media production and consumption habits away from school as a way to selfevaluate their media and civic literacy skills. the positionality of the teachers who participated in the study is also considered, since participants came from countries that have been, and to some extent still are, colonizers and colonized. participants shared that because the discussion forums gave them opportunity to interact with educators who teach a similar curriculum but live in different parts of the world and are from different cultural backgrounds, the importance of context and perspective when teaching about people and places became clearer to them. data analysis revealed that teachers in the global south tended to challenge the ways in which narratives were constructed and the degree of criticality used to analyze films more often than teachers in the global north. teachers in the global south not only discussed problems they see with films, but offered alternatives to better capture the perspectives of people who live in the areas and who deal with the issues teachers identified as part of the ib curriculum. these perspectives—which ib teachers agreed are not often included within discussion of film and other texts—provided new ways of thinking about how to teach about inequality and power dynamics within a shared curriculum. jason harshman 71 data show that across the history, english, science, art, and civics courses that were represented in the discussion forums, the most frequently discussed global issues were capitalism, citizenship, and colonialism, along with concepts related to conflict and consuming media. yet, how the teachers approached the issues and the films they use differed, and the discussion forums provided space for deep discussions about experiences related to these global issues, and the shaping of their own perspectives and biases. these “6 c’s”—capitalism, citizenship, colonialism, conflict, and conscientious consumerism—provide a framework that global educators can employ when they teach critical thinking skills related to global issues and media consumption. the films that teachers used, the questions and concepts they presented to students, and what these practices mean for the future of critically minded global education and digital media literacy are discussed below. cultural studies and critical global education teaching students about culture and its complexities, while trying to provide a conceptual understanding with which they can work, is a “messy” endeavor (mcrobbie, 1992). teaching about culture is further complicated because the expedited movement of people and ideas in our global age means that cultures “have their locations, but it is no longer easy to say where they originate” (hall, 2006, p. 164). as “an interdisciplinary endeavor concerned with the analysis of cultural forms and activities,” cultural studies can inform the work of global educators, because like critical global education, cultural studies provides theoretical tools for analyzing the power relations “which condition [the] production, circulation, deployment and, of course, effects” of culture (bennett, 1998, p. 60). for ib teachers and global educators alike, teaching for global mindedness, or world mindedness as the concept is referred to within the ib curriculum, comprises “a frame of reference, or value orientation, favoring a worldview of the problems of humanity, with mankind, rather than nationals of a particular country as the primary reference group” (sampson & smith, 1957). developing global mindedness also involves a willingness to be open-minded (merryfield, 2012) and continual reflection upon why and how people come to have a different perspective of global systems and global issues (case, 1993; hanvey, 1976; tarman, 2016). pertinent to the geopolitical dynamics present within this study—where participants teach as well as the production sites of the films they used—is andreotti’s (2006) distinction between soft and critical gce. journal of social studies education research 2017: 8(1), 69-92 72 when analyzing the “justification for positions of privilege (in the global north and south),” a “soft gce” tends to focus on tropes about the north that emphasize “development, [a] harder work [ethic], better use of resources, and technology,” whereas a “critical gce” approach includes analyzing systems of oppression that examines how people and nations “benefit from and [execute] control over unjust and violent systems and structures” that disproportionately disadvantage the global south (andreotti & pashby, 2013, p. 426). critical examination of these global systems requires including people from a spectrum of places and social positions, however, despite their best intentions, educators often use films to teach about the world that are produced by american and european companies and often wrought with biases and incomplete narratives of historical events or contemporary global issues (merryfield, 1998). interested in the extent to which global educators think critically about media resources used in the classroom, this article features the films and strategies used by educators in countries still scarred by colonialism, yet largely absent from work in global education. attention is given to the questions and strategies used to analyze the content of films, as well as the significance of who directs, produces, and stars in a film. culture and media studies media constitutes the whole range of modern communications—television, cinema, video, radio, internet, music, magazines, and games—and media texts are the programs, films, images, websites, and more consumed by mass audiences (buckingham, 2003, p. 2). meaning making through media is an on-going process of encoding and decoding messages that are widely distributed because the codes are often learned at an early age (such as racism, sexism, and “othering” more broadly) and thus reach near universal or “naturalized” meaning (hall, 2006, p. 165). the symbols and “naturalized” codes embedded in films and television programming that are often passively consumed by audiences have, over time, combined to form a mass or popular culture that works to build consensus around shared values and beliefs. consequently, the (re)presentations of people, time, and place that are presented to us in school or that we consume at home and in public spaces shape how we imagine the world, what we purchase, and what we come to accept as “normal” behaviors. the development of a media and culture industry during the twentieth century combined to form a dialectic between economic production and social and cultural production (giroux, 2011, p. 22). adorno argued that a “non-spontaneous, reified, phony” ideological mass or popular culture jason harshman 73 had been manufactured by the culture industry so that “the subliminal message of almost all that passed for art was conformity and resignation” (jay, 1972, p. 216). while critiques of hollywood’s role as a homogenizing force have not elapsed, according to giroux (2011), a more contemporary analysis of the relationship between media and mass culture finds that industrial capitalism has infiltrated education since society and schools have became saturated with media technology and consumerism (giroux, 2011, p. 23). concern with the manufacturing of an americanized mass culture that is disseminated through media—what hoggart termed “shiny barbarism”— frames this discussion about why the use of film to teach about global issues in schools must include analysis of the production process as well as the product. theorizing global media consumption through “scapes” as global communication networks expand, “the processes of so-called free and forced migrations are changing the composition, diversifying the cultures and pluralizing the cultural identities of the older dominant nation states…and indeed the globe itself” (hall, 1999, p. 16). appadurai’s (1996) mediascapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes help us understand that “as the shapes of cultures grow less bounded and tacit, more fluid and politicized, the work of cultural reproduction becomes a daily hazard” (p. 45), thus requiring a critical global media literacy education aimed at ensuring that the subaltern speak and are heard in social studies classrooms (spivak, 1988). the suffix “scape” “allows us to point to the fluid, irregular landscapes…that are constructed according to perspectives formed across multiple, intersecting networks” (appadurai, 1996, p. 3). it is important to see “scapes” not as the physical wires, satellites, or other means by which information and signals are transferred (although these play a role), but the political, historical, and linguistic situation of individuals across interconnected networks that influence how they imagine the world. therefore, we understand mediascapes to be transmitters of images that are embedded with “codes” that serve to reify the meanings mass media outlets want to convey about people, places, cultures, events, and ideas (appadurai, 1996; hall, 2006). similar to anderson’s (1991) discussion of the formation of “imagined communities” through print culture, mediascapes disseminate information digitally and, due to a growing rate of accessibility, erase distance to provide a sense of connectedness for people around the world who may never meet in person. regardless of the medium, consumers must recognize that information can be manipulated journal of social studies education research 2017: 8(1), 69-92 74 to highlight differences as part of a national and transnational project undertaken by nation-states and media producers to mold ideologies for political purposes (p. 15). politicizing media images to counter ideologies that aim to undermine state power constitute ideoscapes (p. 36). important to understanding the function of ideoscapes is that they are flexible and often the meaning ascribed to an image, idea, or place differs from how they are received. increased accessibility due to technoscapes—the fluid, global configurations that include high and low, mechanical and informational technologies that move across multiple boundaries (p. 34)—furthers the reach of ideoscapes, but the views and voices included remain inequitable and disproportionately from the global north. as multinational media conglomerates such as time warner, news corp, the star media group, naspers, to name a few, continue to expand globally, examining transnational mediascapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes is important for understanding how power holders shape ideology and manipulate culture through media. methodology discussion forums were identified as the most appropriate tool for conducting research because in order to discuss teaching about global perspectives, it is important to include as many educators from as many places as possible (harshman & augustine, 2013). a benefit of online research is a high level of participant interaction, leading to greater emphasis on participant perspective and a decrease in researcher bias, therefore increasing the credibility of the study (gaiser, 2008). the flexibility afforded by the use of asynchronous communication compared to in-person interviews meant participating teachers could focus on topics they found interesting or relevant to their teaching responsibilities and avoid those that were not (hewson & laurent, 2008; kazmer & xie, 2008; wang, 2011). since exchanges in the forums often generated new topics under the general research questions, participants, rather than the researchers, determined whom they interacted with, what topics they focused on, and what new topics they were interested in pursuing (harshman & augustine, 2013). participants representatives of the international baccalaureate organization (ibo) at the hague contacted 150 teachers about participating in the study and 120 in 36 different countries agreed to participate. a four-person research team was organized at a large midwestern university in the united states to create, facilitate, and troubleshoot the online discussions and produce a research jason harshman 75 report based on data generated within the forums for the ibo. upon giving consent, each participant was randomly assigned to a discussion forum of 10-15 teachers based on recommendations that small groups are more conducive for conducting on-line discussions so that participants do not have to navigate an exhaustive number of messages (mann & stewart, 2000). although assigned to a discussion group, participants could read posts in any forum and one forum was designated for spanish speakers so as not to privilege english as the only language in which one could participate. the spanish language forum included participants from the united states, mexico, guatemala, colombia, and ecuador and a translator was hired to help facilitate discussions and transcribe forum posts. all of the teachers featured in this article were part of one of the twelve discussion forums that were used during the study. table 1 participant demographics. teachers (*all names are pseudonyms) birth country location of school subject(s) taught martin canada taiwan environmental science vijay india india theory of knowledge, humanities joyce england england humanities marlene hungary hungary art betty ghana ghana theory of knowledge nadine india india history, civics shawn united states united states economics angela china canada history, global issues luis dominican republic costa rica humanities maria colombia colombia literature llana brazil brazil art data analysis triangulation, or the use of different sources of information during research, enhances the validity of the research as well as the accuracy with which the participants’ descriptions of their lived experiences is represented (moustakis, 1990). data were drawn from written responses by teachers to questions posed by the researchers and fellow participants in the discussion forums, one-on-one skype interviews with participants who volunteered to speak with a researcher about ideas generated around media literacy and resources, a review of lesson plans and resources posted journal of social studies education research 2017: 8(1), 69-92 76 by teachers to the discussion forum, and email correspondence between teachers and researchers that included an exit reflection on one’s participation in the project. in total, participants contributed 1,465 messages over the course of five months, with six participants volunteering to participate in one, thirty-minute skype interview after their respective on-line sessions concluded (augustine, harshman, & merryfield, 2015). discussion posts, emails, interview transcripts, and resources posted to the forum were collated and identifying data such as names and schools were replaced with pseudonyms to protect confidentiality. the country in which the participants teach, the types of schools in which participants work (public, independent, international), and the subject(s) they teach were maintained. using the constant comparative method of content analysis, the researchers coded the data and organized it into categories of tentative findings. categories were initially created in relation to the first part of the research question—how do educators teach about perspectives?— and what emerged included: cross-cultural learning, analyzing stereotypes, multiple texts, selfreflection, guest speakers, inquiry and research, use of films and other media, and interacting with people in the community. interested in pursuing the role of media in the classroom and how teachers develop critical literacy skills by teaching with media, the initial categories were further analyzed to develop new categories to answer the second part of the research question: how do teachers develop globally minded critical media literacy skills? while teachers identified music, books, online news sources, blogs, and youtube videos as tools for teaching perspective and literacy skills in tandem, films were clearly the preferred means for teaching these skills and concepts. the categories that emerged from data drawn from twelve discussion forums were compared by the researchers for inter-rater reliability on interpretation of data into emergent categories. categories on how teachers conceptualize and teach about perspectives using films that emerged include: open-mindedness; attitudes and values such as empathy, respect, and caring; perspective consciousness; and cross-cultural learning. closer analysis, however, revealed that the geographic location of the teachers was important to evaluations of films because teachers living in areas of the world that had been or remain under colonial structures—which also constituted the areas of the world that ib teachers living in the global north more often associated with global issues such as poverty, conflict, human rights, injustice, etc.—raised questions and offered points that were more critical of films identified as “good resources” for teaching about global issues. jason harshman 77 this led researchers to pursue how participants, in discussing the tools and strategies they use to teach for perspective building and critical media literacy, also engaged one another in a critical analysis of the films they recommend and use in their classrooms to accomplish these goals within the discussion forums. analysis of categories and examples shared by participants showed that teachers tend to highlight what i am calling “6 c’s” when using films to teach for and about perspectives and critical global media literacy: colonialism, capitalism, conflict, citizenship, and conscientious consumerism. the questions and conceptualizations provided in table 2 are derived from analysis of discussions between participants on how they use films to teach about global issues while building media literacy skills and, within those discussions, points raised that challenged the way in which narratives about “others” were presented. the recommended questions were generated from a synthesis of lesson ideas shared by teachers in the forums, one-on-one skype interviews on how films are used to teach concepts and skills pertinent to developing critical media literacy about global power dynamics, and the questions participants asked each other regarding the films and media sources they use. table 2. teaching and learning critical global media literacy skills “six c’s” conceptualization recommended questions colonialism (including neocolonialism and anticolonialism) beyond political and economic forces, cultural hegemony operates as a neocolonial force that can cause people to compromise cultural practices, take actions to resist the “soft power” of culture, and/or engage in practices that demonstrate cultural hybridity. colonialism should not be treated as a backdrop or relegated to the past when viewing films, but understood as a constant presence across time and place. how is power distributed in the film?, who are the writers, directors, producers, and stars of the film?, what stereotypes did filmmakers rely upon to represent a people or place? how does the film making process operate as a colonizing force and/or provide agency? capitalism in addition to discussions of wealth, poverty, and who and what constitutes the middle class, issues of labor, property, access, scarcity, freedom of choice, and the significance of transnational global institutions, including hollywood, bollywood, nollywood, and more, can be analyzed. how are issues of class and inequity depicted or ignored in the film?, how does global capitalism directly or indirectly affect the characters and plot lines?, what myths regarding capitalism are portrayed and/or disrupted in journal of social studies education research 2017: 8(1), 69-92 78 the film? conflict examine macro and micro-level systems and institutions, as well as person vs. person, person vs. self, person vs. nature, and person vs. technology. all other aspects of this table can be explored through this lens. how do issues and people change over time within the film?, what are the counter arguments to the narrative presented in the film?, are the solutions presented in the film sustainable, responsible, ethical, and inclusive? citizenship citizenship includes, but is not limited to, issues of civil and human rights, belonging, inequality, mobility, “othering”, and privilege. films can be used to evaluate how citizenship and belonging is engaged or denied based on intersections of geography, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, language, religion, history, ability and disability, age, class, culture, and institutions. who is represented in, and absent from, the film?, what statuses and identities are privileged and marginalized in the film?, in what ways is citizenship presented as being local, national, and/or global, and for whom? conscientious consumerism critically self-reflect on preferred sources of information and entertainment, including examination of what takes place “behind the scenes” to create the film and one’s connectedness to the issues presented in the films. what and who did the narrative(s) presented in the film leave out?, what sources and new information are needed to develop a more wellrounded perspective on the issues depicted?, what roles do viewers play in perpetuating and/or what are the viewer’s responsibilities for minimizing the issues and concerns viewed in the film? the online forums provided space for teachers to start new discussion threads around topics they were interested in pursuing, thus decentering the role of researcher as facilitator. data collected over the five month study revealed that teachers in the global north, though working to improve student understanding of the world, often relied upon resources about the global south that were not produced in those areas of the world. the opportunity for teachers in the global north to interact with teachers who lived and taught in the countries depicted in the films and other media sources they used to teach about global issues provided more context and sometimes counter narratives to the perspectives included in the films teachers in the global north described in the discussion forums as “insightful” and “balanced.” as a result, participants were simultaneously discussing how they teach for critical global media literacy while engaging in cross-cultural jason harshman 79 learning experience that assisted in their own perspective building and critical media literacy. findings films are often used as a “visual textbook” to convey what happened in history or to teach historiography, as well as prompt analysis of the accuracy and reliability of the images and narratives students are bombarded with in and out of a classroom (gaudelli & siegel, 2010; russell, 2012a, 2012b). also considered to be an entertaining way of presenting content information, films, as texts to be interpreted, help students develop literacy skills applicable beyond the classroom (kaya & çengleci, 2011). further, as the production of visual entertainment has become decentered, allowing more people to create and distribute videos, as well as lowbudget motion pictures and documentaries, more perspectives on global issues are available for consideration. although covering all perspectives and angles of a global issue is not possible in a given class session or even school year, introducing students to different ways of thinking about the world so that they can develop a skill set as critically minded consumers of global media is possible. for joyce, an ib humanities teacher in england, students “can engage in the global community by striving to be informed through a variety of sources of information; [particularly] their home media and that which they can access from abroad.” similarly, marlene, who grew up in hungary when it was under soviet occupation and is now an ib art teacher there, emphasized the importance of “looking for voices not typically included in curricula and mainstream media” so as to consider global issues for multiple perspectives that include people across the socioeconomic spectrum. according to martin, an ib environmental science teacher in taiwan, in order for educators to teach about global mindedness, they must be aware that much of our academic knowledge and news reflects a western perspective and is limited by cultural assumptions. understanding people different from us seems more necessary because of the world’s increasing globalisation and our own interconnectedness with it but to create genuinely global students we need to be genuinely global teachers. the essence of martin’s argument couples andreotti’s call for critical perspectives when teaching and learning about the world with appadurai’s theoretical discussion of the distribution of power and privilege through media and information technology. by teaching about biases within journal of social studies education research 2017: 8(1), 69-92 80 media, as martin suggests, globally minded educators not only reflect upon their own media consumption habits, but help students develop similar habits of mind and skills as part of critical global media literacy education. the remainder of the article discusses the three most common issues addressed by teachers across their respective courses—global capitalism, colonialism, and citizenship—and how the approaches taken by ib teachers in the study generated the aforementioned framework that can inform how social studies educators use films to teach about and for critical global media literacy. teaching about capitalism with films for betty, a theory of knowledge teacher in ghana, discussions about capitalism and poverty are often colored by the privilege most of her students possess. betty posted in a discussion forum that it is not uncommon for her students to “comment negatively on people’s poverty as self-inflicted or generalize the reasons of poverty. therefore, my task as a teacher seems to [be to] work on clarification on the variety of reasons of poverty and the privilege of other factors such as education, socioeconomic circumstances, etc.” betty’s post led nadine to share a few resources she uses to teach about poverty, including websites (mostly produced in the global north, including the bbc and the media awareness network), the value of using youtube, and her use of bollywood produced films. however, it was her use of a film about an indian family produced by a branch of the walt disney corporation located in india that included the most detailed discussion. nadine’s choice of the film do dooni char (2010) is significant because it was the first disney international film produced in india. in this film the family patriarch and main character, santosh duggal, must balance family honor and multiple jobs—including the familiar trope of working at a call center in india—as santosh tries to become more “western” by purchasing his own car. although produced and directed by indian filmmakers, life for people in the city of delhi (where most of the movie was filmed) appears destitute. part commentary on income inequality in india, cultural norms are also called into question as problems are created and resolved when characters, to an extent, compromise indian culture by comsuimg what represents western culture (i.e. clothing, a car, music, etc.). in fact, comparing the presentation of india in do dooni char with disney’s depiction of nineteenth century india in around the world in 80 days (2004), as was suggested by the research team in the discussion forum, not only reveals the continued presence of colonialism in the more contemporary disney film, but a troubled narrative that favors jason harshman 81 cultural binaries instead of hybridity created through cross-cultural and technologically mediated exchanges (appadurai, 1996; bhabha, 1994). to learn more about how nadine uses a film, a skype interview was conducted after the discussion forums concluded. recognizing that the film is incomplete and depicts only a certain sector of india’s population, nadine uses the story of dhirubhai ambani, the founder of reliance industries—the largest corporate conglomerate in india and located only five miles from where nadine teaches. nadine stated that it is well known that the man who became the ceo of reliance—a company ranked 135th on the 2014 forbes global 2000 list—was born into extreme poverty (chen, murphy, & bigman, 2014). ambani achieved a place of power and great wealth not because of where he went to school, according to nadine, but how he received it and what he did with it. through this local example, students discuss the extent to which upward mobility is possible in india and whether such opportunity is equally accessible for everyone, and compare their research with the narrative presented in do dooni char. most students, nadine reported, point out that while capitalism may allow some people to advance in society, the film does not address the social hierarchies and cultural traditions around class, gender, and religion in india that prevent all people from doing the same. some students in her classes see the compromises that santosh and his family are willing to make with regard to their cultural practices as necessary in order to advance in society, while others thought that the film is just a modern version of how globalization can destroy local cultures and economies. some of the questions listed in table 2 were generated from the examples nadine shared as part of her work with students on developing deeper understandings of how neo-colonialism operates as an oppressive force, the complexity of cultures, and different forms of resistance against poverty and cultural imperialism across time and place. nadine’s discussion of how she teaches about the intersection of culture and capitalism prompted shawn, an ib economics teacher in the united states, to share how he uses the documentary film the end of poverty (2008). narrated by american actor martin sheen, the film interjects images of slums in south africa and latin america with interviews with nobel prize winning economists and scholars joseph stiglitz and amartya sen, as well as activists from venezuela, brazil, kenya, and tanzania. for shawn, this film is a useful tool for not only teaching students about the causes of institutionalized poverty around the world, but also fostering critical media literacy through consideration of questions that require them to analyze who was involved journal of social studies education research 2017: 8(1), 69-92 82 with the production and distribution of the film: an american narrator, scholars and academics who are not currently living or working in the areas discussed in the film, and a director, phillippe diaz, who has produced a number of films about neo-colonialism and the global south, and activists seeking to end the damaging effects of global capitalism. shawn’s approach reflects appadurai’s discussion of infoscapes and mediascapes because he used the film to teach critical thinking not just about global issues, but about how media is constructed and distributed, and how points of view are privileged depending on who tells the story. shawn also exemplifies the need for teachers to alert students to the fact that even the best intentions to include discussion of global systems and oppression can be incomplete if one relies upon films produced in the global north to teach about the global south because they too often perpetuate and fail to critically address another example of the “6 c’s” framework: colonialism. teaching about colonialism with films colonialism and the “soft power” of media culture have not only marginalized the voices of many people, but from a cultural studies perspective, as nadine, an ib history and civics teacher in india pointed out, “colonization has had a major impact on how we see our culture and our rigid traditions. it hasn’t enabled people to think beyond the social norms that have been laid down by the community and that is one of the reasons that this social disparity between classes still exists.” as a tenth grade history and global issues teacher in canada, angela encourages her students to think of the world as being made up of “many different economies that create many different worlds, all in one.” to help her students understand the perspectives of colonizers and the colonized with regard to global economics, angela uses a case study and films to study jamaica and ethiopia. the film life and debt (2001) focuses on attempts at decolonization as well as the continued control exerted by the international monetary fund (imf) over jamaica when the country “tried to open markets to trade, particularly bananas, and how that has basically been detrimental to jamaica.” angela’s unit also includes a case study on ethiopia and use of the film black gold (2006) to examine the multiple parties and perspectives involved in the production and trade of coffee in the world market. when asked during a skype interview why she uses these films to teach about poverty, angela pointed out that a single film does not cover enough and jason harshman 83 if students are to understand the consequences of their purchases and the way the world conducts trade, they have to see people affected by those systems. poverty has different levels, not just living on the street. when students see working conditions and corrupt governments, but the countries involved practice democracy, they see these types of poverty and how they are connected. the role it [poverty] plays in developing nations, so they [students] ask themselves: do i need this? while effective teaching tools, angela admitted that she was conflicted over the fact that the aforementioned films were produced and distributed by american film companies. although the films address the complexities and conflicts of colonialism and capitalism that led to poverty in jamaica and ethiopia, like shawn’s approach to teaching about mediascapes, angela goes beyond the content of film by teaching about who the producers of these films are and the presence of biases in the storytelling. angela’s use of questions such as “what stereotypes did filmmakers rely upon to represent a people or place?” and “how does the film making process operate as a colonizing force and/or provide agency?” (listed in table two), prompts students to analyze the power structures that shape the codes and scapes involved in the production and consumption of films. in response to angela’s discussion of films and colonialism, luis, a humanities teacher in costa rica, shared why he used blood in the mobile (2010) to teach about conflict caused by in the democratic republic of congo over the illegal mining of minerals used to make cellular phones. according to luis, this film provides opportunity to “teach students about how complex global issues are and, as a teacher, why talking about imperialism and colonialism as nineteenth century topics that disappeared after wwii is just not true. we are still living in a world of colonizers and colonized and the phones students use literally connect them to those issues.” class discussions about blood in the mobile included reflection by students on their responsibility as conscientious consumers since they use phones that contain the very minerals people in the film dig out of the ground. luis shared that some of the questions he posed to students included “how does global capitalism directly or indirectly affect the characters and plot lines?” and “what roles do viewers play in perpetuating and/or what are the viewer’s responsibilities for minimizing the journal of social studies education research 2017: 8(1), 69-92 84 issues and concerns depicted in the film?” (see table two). luis’s students also analyze advertisements sponsored by the corporations mentioned in blood in the mobile as part of a discussion on how mediascapes and technoscapes can be manipulated by power holders to provide a one-sided narrative about the benefits of globalization and technology. how students consume and the extent to which they critically examine these codes related to global issues such as migration, borders, technology, and more, is an integral component of critical global citizenship (andreotti, 2006). teaching about citizenship with films maria, a literature teacher in colombia, believes it is important that students understand that the hardships people experience in bogota, colombia are, in some ways, shared across multiple places. to accomplish this goal she uses the film al otro lado (“the other side”) (2001) to teach about the complexities of citizenship, emigration, and immigration, with particular attention to the multiple local and international causes of poverty. based on the experiences of three different children who are looking to reconnect with their respective fathers, the films addresses immigration and citizenship in mexico, the united states, morocco, spain, and cuba. this spanish language film was written and directed by gustavo loza, who was born and still lives in mexico and not only addresses the push and pull factors often associated with migration, but also how where a person is and/or who they are effects the extent to which they possess a sense of belonging and citizenship. of particular significance to this film is the issue of gender, as all three children are looking to reconnect with their fathers, providing students with an opportunity to discuss patriarchy within and across cultures, as well as the intersection of gender and citizenship through the use of case studies. maria shared that when her students watch al otro lado, they discuss national and global citizenship, how national borders came to be drawn, and how the continued displacement of indigenous peoples around the world impacts debates about citizenship today. in response to maria’s discussion post about al otro lado, llana, an ib art teacher in brazil, started a new thread on women and citizenship in film. llana recommended the 2009 iranian film zanan-e bedun-e mardan (“women without men”) because, as she wrote in the discussion forum, “it tells the story of how four iranian women stand up to the oppressive beliefs and abuses of the men in their lives (mostly relatives) and religion while the country deals with the political and cultural influence of the united states.” mention of this film led teachers to jason harshman 85 recommend two other films about women in in the middle east. one, entitled veiled voices (2009), is a one-hour documentary about women who serve as religious leaders in syria, egypt, and lebanon. what makes the film compelling is that although the views of the women in the film focus on what islam entails could be considered conservative, their movement to unite women across the middle east is interpreted as liberal since they are engaging in resistance against their exclusion from positions of power by men. the second film recommended by teachers was persepolis (2007)—based on the graphic novel published in 2000—because the protagonist in the story is an iranian woman seeking to be free of the oppressive manner in which women are treated despite being citizens of iran. set in the late 1970s at the time of the iranian revolution, persepolis is opposed to the conservative cultural change that is taking place and resists the oppressive nature of her family, her culture, and her country. the “6 c’s” of what to address when teaching for critical global media literacy through film—colonialism, capitalsm, conflict, citizenship, and conscientious consumerism—are present across all of the films shared by the ib teachers. while the use of films from around the world, and the development of a critical media literacy to dissect how films are constructed, are positive steps towards teaching for global mindedness, teachers identified making connections to local issues of capitalism, colonialism, and citizenship to be a limitation of using films to teach about global issues. the most often cited reasons for this difficulty is the belief by students that poverty is faced by people in “other” countries, colonialism ended decades ago, and becoming a citizen requires a few forms and passing a test. discussion students are often situated between social studies curricula that prioritize the past and personal technologies that connect them almost exclusively to current trends and issues. although increased access and connectivity to multiple global “scapes” is a reality for some, the existence of a digital divide between and within the global north and south means many people are not equitably represented in classrooms. for vijay, an ib humanities and theory of knowledge teacher in india, access to technology and media “are a privilege, not a right [and] coming from a developing nation, i came to understand that…there is a language power structure: the amount of quality content varies across languages—english seems to take over in the digital realm. what happens with those who don’t speak english?” as consumers of digital media, it is important that journal of social studies education research 2017: 8(1), 69-92 86 students and teachers not only think critically about the messages encoded in a film, but the power holders who determine what and who is edited out as part of education for digital citizenship (goode, 2010). teaching about global issues with film, while important, has limits since all films contain mediated codes that are often incomplete and produced in the interest of advancing a particular perspective. engagement by teachers and students in analysis of the “scapes” that operate behind the scenes (so to speak), and that disseminate the narratives and messages that are present in all films, is of equal importance to reading for information in literacy education. that is, using a film to teach about a topic, era, or event in history must be accompanied by discussion of the company or companies involved in the production of the film, the reliance upon or attempt to disrupt stereotypes, and the evidence offered to forward an argument, just as one would with any text used in a classrom. the strategies, conceptualizations, and discussion questions offered by the teachers involved in this project are part of the broader application of the digital media literacy skills students need to be prepared to employ when they are away from the classroom (greenhow, 2010). global educators who use some or all of the questions listed in table two can create learning experiences that require students to think deeper about the narratives used to teach about places and people, as well as those that are not discussed in a visual, audio, or print text. the teachers who participated in this study illustrate well the benefits of bringing educators together to converse with people in the places they teach about in order to develop more nuanced understandings of perspectives and issues. findings from the study revealed that the opportunities to interact with fellow educators around the world inspired teacher’s to revisit concepts such as interconnectedness and cross-cultural learning, along with shifts in thinking about how to teach media literacy by analyzing the coded messages present in the resources they use to teach about the world. the absence of a central task in favor of a decentered space allowed participants to initiate and participate in a range of discussion topics and proved to provide a greater level of ownership on their part. many participants shared in post-study reflections that the discussion forums provided a rare and valuable opportunity to learn from colleagues from around the world; something that they had not previously experienced. conversations about environmentalism, citizenship, and the resources used to teach about global perspectives revealed that educators in the global south, by sharing local realities and perspectives on a global issue that fellow participants taught about, provided insights that even the most well researched films overlooked. jason harshman 87 the very nature of the on-line group discussions meant that teachers were engaged in the critical text analysis they all agreed was important for students to complete. the on-line discussion forums proved to be a valuable tool that not only provided participants with new resources, but challenged them to re-evaluate how they used films to teach about point of view analysis, power, and media production. a limitation to the study, however, was that beyond the biographies, not much time was spent exploring the relationship that exists, if any, between a teacher’s experiences and how they approached teaching about a global issue. building perspective consciousness—a key component of global mindedness (hanvey, 1976)—means going beyond the surface of one’s opinion to better understand the intersecting influences that makeup one’s view of the world. the extent to which a teacher’s cultural, historical, political, and educational background influenced their decision making when teaching about capitalism, colonization, citizenship, and other topics discussed above, was not fully investigated within this project. future research that brings educators from around the world together through a virtual discussion forum would do well to ask participants to reflect on how their life experiences shape their global mindedness, the biases they still possess, and how these characteristics consciously and unconsciously influence what they choose to include and leave out of the curriculum. research that uses on-line discussion forums to pursue these lines of inquiry would provide opportunities for participants to ask questions and pursue topics that can help them and others better understand the complexities of cultures, histories, places, and more so that educators can transfer this type of thinking and work on cross-cultural learning into their classroom. the “6 c’s” provide teachers and students with concepts and tools to analyze the messages encoded in any audio, video, or print text, while also ensuring students consider the importance of authorship and point of view analysis. the questions and resources provided can also be used to foster reflection by students on how influences that “emanate from multiple points in the global system” affect their sense of identity and citizenship, as well as how they imagine the organization of nations (pike, 2000, p. 71). further, this framework aids in the facilitating of critical thinking exercises that interrogate both the means (“scapes” and technologies) and the messages (codes and content) that continue to deterritorialize as well as define cultures. global educators are right to use sources that allow people to speak for themselves because if “the strangeness of their ways [are to] become less strange” students need to develop a perspective consciousness that includes journal of social studies education research 2017: 8(1), 69-92 88 “getting inside the heads of those strangers and looking out at the world through their eyes” (hanvey, 1976, p. 165). supporting students in the development of critical media literacy skills based in global education is essential to their ability to look beyond the arbitrary divisions used to organize the world. as we exist in an evermore interconnected and media saturated world, critical media literacy and global education are integral if students, as citizens, are to become responsible consumers and producers of information. jason harshman 89 references 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(2011). instructional design for cross-cultural online collaboration: grouping strategies and assignment design. australasian journal of educational technology, 27(2), 243-258. 992 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other commodification and digital political participation: the “15-m movement” and the collectivization of the internet josé manuel robles1 ana maría córdoba-hernández2 recibido: 2017-11-29 aprobado por pares: 2018-02-20 enviado a pares: 2018-02-07 aceptado: 2018-03-23 doi: 10.5294/pacla.2018.21.4.3 para citar este artículo / to reference this article / para citar este artigo robles, j. m. y córdoba-hernández, a. m. (2018). commodification and digital political participation: the “15-m movement” and the collectivization of the internet. palabra clave, 21(4), 992-1022. doi: 10.5294/pacla.2018.21.4.3 abstract the objective of this article is to analyze an emerging process in the network society: the commodification of the internet and political communication. this strategy of technological capitalism is becoming increasingly present in the lives of citizens around the world, and it represents a new challenge for critical thinking. in this article we will show the debate around this process and we will point out a few examples. however, despite the existence of this process of commodification, society is not taking a passive attitude. on the contrary, we have cases of social movements, such as the spanish 15-m, which identified this process and designed a strategy to try to reverse it. however, and despite the efforts of this movement, many of the achievements of the 15-m against commodification have lost their validity. in this paper we review the current state of the debate on the commercialization 1 orcid.org/0000-0003-1092-3864. universidad complutense de madrid, spain. jmrobles@ccee.ucm.es 2 orcid.org/0000-0002-4752-9724. universidad de la sabana, colombia. ana.cordoba@unisabana.edu.co http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1092-3864. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4752-9724. 993palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 of politics and, through a qualitative study, we show how the 15-m defined this process and established instruments to fight it. in the conclusions we discuss this process and show its current situation in spain. keywords digital political participation; 15-m movement; commodification; social movements; social change; cultural change (source: unesco thesaurus). 994 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other la mercantilización y la participación política digital: el “movimiento 15-m” y la colectivización de internet resumen el objetivo de este artículo es analizar un proceso emergente en la sociedad red: la mercantilización de internet y la comunicación política. esta estrategia de capitalismo tecnológico está cada vez más presente en las vidas de los ciudadanos de todo el mundo y representa un nuevo desafío para el pensamiento crítico. en este artículo mostraremos el debate sobre este proceso y señalaremos algunos ejemplos. sin embargo, a pesar de la existencia de este proceso de mercantilización, la sociedad no está adoptando una actitud pasiva. por el contrario, existen casos de movimientos sociales, como el español 15-m, que identificó este proceso y diseñó una estrategia para tratar de revertirlo. no obstante, pese a los esfuerzos de este movimiento, muchos de los logros del 15-m contra la mercantilización han perdido su validez. en este trabajo revisamos el estado actual del debate sobre la comercialización de la política y, a través de un estudio cualitativo, mostramos cómo el 15-m definió este proceso y estableció instrumentos para combatirlo. en las conclusiones discutimos este proceso y mostramos su situación actual en españa. palabras clave participación política digital, movimiento 15-m, mercantilización, movimientos sociales, cambio social, cambio cultural (fuente: tesauro de la unesco). 995palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 a mercantilização e a participação política digital: o movimento 15-m e a coletivização da internet resumo o objetivo deste artigo é analisar um processo emergente na sociedade conectada: a mercantilização da internet e da comunicação política. essa estratégia de capitalismo tecnológico está cada vez mais presente na vida dos cidadãos do mundo inteiro e representa um novo desafio para o pensamento crítico. neste artigo, mostraremos o debate sobre esse processo e daremos alguns exemplos. contudo, apesar da existência desse processo de mercantilização, a sociedade não está adotando uma atitude passiva. pelo contrário, existem casos de movimentos sociais, como o espanhol 15-m, que identificou esse processo e desenhou uma estratégia para tentar revertê-lo. no entanto, embora os esforços desse movimento, muitas das conquistas do 15-m contra a mercantilização têm perdido sua validade. neste trabalho, revisamos o estado atual do debate sobre a comercialização da política e, por meio de um estudo qualitativo, mostramos como o 15-m definiu esse processo e estabeleceu instrumentos para combatê-lo. nas conclusões, discutimos esse processo e mostramos sua situação atual na espanha. palavras-chave participação política digital; movimento 15-m; mercantilização; movimentos sociais; mudança social; mudança cultural (fonte: tesauro da unesco). 996 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other introduction the rise of the network society is a central theme in twenty-first-century research in sociology, social anthropology, economics and political sciences (castells, 1999; miller & slater, 2000; benkler, 2006; bennett & segerberg, 2013). substantial and ample academic literature has been developed that addresses the extent to which the expanded use of digital technology affects political participation (rheingold, 2002; wilson & peterson, 2002; surowiecki, 2005; juris, 2006; bennett & segerberg, 2013; bonilla & rosa, 2015; bennett, segerberg, & knüfer, 2017). these studies are based on middle-range theories (boudon, 1991) that seek to integrate “big theories” about social and cultural change and empirical studies. this paper is framed in this common line of enquiry and will attempt to bring together a general theory, a middle-range theory, and an empirical case to move forward the study of how political activists frame the role of digital technologies for political participation in a context of network society. here we take the concept of commodification as a general theoretical framework for socio-economic and culture change. commodification refers to the transformation of ideas, services and other concepts into commodities and was coined by polanyi (1944) to analyze the development of industrial capitalism. over the last few decades, polanyi’s theory has generated an interesting and extensive theoretical debate among social scientists (gudeman, 2001; block, 2003; maucourant, 2006). according to experts, the neoliberal system that defines the policies of most developed countries is reactivating a commodification strategy and extending it to new areas (de castro & pedreño, 2012), one of which is politics. from as far back as 1942 schumpeter argued that politics is organized as a competition for votes and is based on a limited offering of candidates and programs (political market). we have stated in previous works that, in a network society, where the internet is one of the most central resources for social and political interactions (castells, 1999), the commoditization of politics is also affecting collective action and non-conventional political participation (robles et. al, 2015). 997palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 in this context, we will consider social movements, following in the footsteps of classical works such as those by melucci (1989) and laraña (1999) as reflexive agents that offer society a diagnosis of—and a set of alternatives to—collective problems. given that social movements are reflexive agents and that nowadays these movements have to face the processes of social and technological change, how do these agents understand the ways in which new technological structures are incorporated into society? thus, reflexivity will play the role of a middle-range theory connecting the general theories about social change and the discourses of the activists (diez & laraña, 2018). we take this set of theories as inspiration to examine an empirical case. our hypothesis argues that, nowadays, some social movements have identified and are evaluating, as reflexive agents, the commodification process that affects the collective action. at the same time, these social movements are creating mechanisms that allow them to operate outside of this process. the 15-m movement will be considered here as an example of this kind of movement. our hypothesis is useful to study social movements in the context of a network society, as it allows us to describe the strategies used by social movements to adapt to (and sometimes hold out for) new technological contexts. to achieve our objectives, we will proceed as follows: first, we will offer a general theoretical framework about the concept of commodification and the current debate about its meaning in the context of a network society. then, we will summarize middle-range theories on the internet and social movements, and we will support the idea of social movements as reflexive agencies. next, we present the results of our fieldwork, which are based on a set of interviews with activists from the 15 may protests in spain (the 15-m protests). using these interviews, we will demonstrate how the idea of the commodification of political participation remains a constant within this movement and how this commodification fosters a reactive strategy. we conclude by describing how the 15-m protests offer a diagnosis of, and solution to, the problem of commodification on the internet. 998 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other the commodification of collective action in a long tradition of studies on social movements, numerous publications use middle-range theories (boudon, 1991) to link empirical results and general sociological and social anthropological theories (mcadam et al., 1999; gibb, 2001). in addition, in studies regarding social movements and the internet, we find middle-range theories such as normalization theories (ward & gibson, 2009) or theories focused on the logic of collective action (bennett & segerberg, 2013). however, these studies do not always clearly specify the principles of the general theories with which they are linked. our study tries to avoid this constraint by summarizing the characteristics of our general theory and its implications for our case study. our work is inspired by polanyi’s book, the great transformation, particularly by his review of the concept of commodification and the current debate about the extension of this commercial process. from a classical perspective, commodification refers to the transformation of goods and services—in addition to ideas and other concepts—into commodities. a commodity is a good or service produced by human activity and slated for sale on a specific market. one of polanyi’s most well-known theses offers an argument regarding how the development of capitalism is accompanied by a three -stage process of commodification: the commodification of land, work, and money. from his perspective, this commodification process becomes the social, political, and economic foundation of the new social system, which is impossible unless the government proposes laws that favor the development of this process and the new economic institutions that accompany it. the concept of commodification has inspired the work of a significant number of authors, who have tried to discuss the social effects of the commercial economic system in recent decades. for example, russell (2008) notes how, during the second part of the 20th century, the market economy transformed the realm of intimacy into a commodified sphere. accordingly, within the households of developed countries, an adoption process of the very means of production is developing alongside a growing process of externalized services, both of which then transform this private environment into a productive unit. 999palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 according to different authors, the political system has also been affected by this process. after world war ii, the so-called “political market model” was consolidated. this model seeks a balance between liberal democracy and the market system through the articulation of the following principles: an oligopolistic system of party competition, the intervention of the state through social protection policies, new information technologies (especially tv as mass media), and a market that penetrates everyday life thanks to mass consumption and advertising. all these factors will create a conception of conventional political participation based on the idea of a political market. for authors like schumpeter (1942), citizens participate politically by choosing (consuming) their preferred political party. building on previously mentioned seminal works, further studies have delineated the various boundaries that the market system has been traversing since its inception. however, all these boundaries revolve around a common axis: the development process of the market system is based on converting these varied activities, objectives, and ideas—which were not originally developed for commercial purposes—into commodities; in other words, this process seeks to convert things such as land, work, and private lives into commercial products. in this sense, polanyi’s thesis acquires particular salience. with the advent of the 21st century, the role of digital technologies has become pivotal. these technologies have been earmarked as being the means to take a further step in the process of commodification (han, 2017). this is not exclusive to the internet. indeed, several authors have elaborated upon how this process has evolved within the context of other technologies, such as television (smythe, 1981). however, in recent decades, the liberal development of digital technologies has enabled the commodification of social and creative expression (han, 2017) and—most important to the objectives of this study—the expression of political demands and political action itself (robles et al., 2015). taking polanyi’s thesis as reference, we consider that this process is structured around four factors that enable and affect the commodification of collective action: the socio political context, technological development, the role of the government, and the role of business. 1000 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other we will attempt to describe the social factors involved in this process, which are primarily defined by the notion of public disaffection in major western democracies. we understand this disaffection to be a subjective feeling of inefficiency, cynicism, and a lack of confidence in the political process, public representation, and the democratic institutions. however, this disaffection does not question the democratic political regime (torcal & montero, 2012), which is of particular importance within the context of the global economic crisis. within this context, some authors have understood the internet as being a vehicle of technological and political opportunity for citizens (robles, et, al., 2016). in fact, according to a survey conducted as part of project cso 25556, which was financed by spain’s ministry of science and innovation, approximately 60% of spanish citizens consider the internet to be a tool with which they can influence power. in other words, the internet is conceived of as a tool that enables citizen involvement in political matters, a context in which they might otherwise feel alienated. thus, the first factor focuses on how, within the context of public disaffection, citizens perceive the internet as being a mechanism through which they can express themselves and participate politically. however, the technologies in which citizens place their confidence can be defined as public -private partnerships. the primary platforms and networks in which spanish citizens express themselves, coordinate collective action, and/or socialize politically, are dual online spaces, i.e., both public and private. they are public because anyone can access them, but they are also private because their governance remains in the hands of business enterprises. most tools used by spanish people for political purposes belong to international businesses, such as google, microsoft, and facebook. these businesses dictate the rules of the new political game, which involve the commodification of the space in which political demands are made. however, in a traditional public space (on the street, for example), politics remains regulated by public laws, and citizens have rights and responsibilities; by contrast, the new public space is regulated by market rules. 1001palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 as emphasized by our second factor, this commodification is even greater thanks to a technology known as big data (han, 2017). modern digital businesses are able to store and systematize information on every single movement initiated by citizens on the internet. we call this systematic and massive warehousing of political expressions and actions “political big data.” indeed, online participation is produced in publicprivate spaces, in which each and every political expression is collected and stored for potential commercial use. the commodification process that we describe herein is produced as part of a set of governmental measures intended to strengthen the private sector on the internet. for example, within the framework of our third factor, we find that the spanish congress enacted the sinde law (ley sinde) in february 2011, which was created to prosecute “illegal” internet downloads, with the support of every major political party, namely the partido socialista obrero español (psoe), partido popular (pp), and convergència i unió (ciu). near the end of his term, former spanish president josé luis rodríguez zapatero announced the rescission of this law as a result of, among other reasons, the online pressure from various collectives and citizen groups against it. although a repackaged sinde wert law (ley sindewert) is moving forward, citizens have not stopped expressing, more or less belligerently, their discontent. at an international level, measures such as the anti -counterfeiting trade agreement (acta), the protect ip act (pipa, or preventing real online threats to economic creativity and theft of intellectual property act), and the stop online piracy act (sopa)3 have generated similar outrage. according to all this process, in recent years we have observed a proliferation of private online tools that offer space for activities such as coordination, collective action, decision making, and the expression of political demands. tools such as appagree and civitana enable citizens to engage in political activities on their smart phones or their wireless laptops in a quick 3 acta is an international, free-access treaty that protects intellectual property rights on the internet. sopa and pipa are tools developed by the united states’ government to protect copyrightable intellectual property on the internet. 1002 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other and precise manner from almost any location. we have seen how the private sector considers such political action to be a growing commercial market. the development of such tools is yet another step in the commodification process. these tools are specially designed for political participation and thus are more efficient in collecting information about their activist users. in short, commodification is a cross phenomenon in the development of capitalist societies. as polanyi points out, this phenomenon is characterized by the transformation of any activity, idea or social process into a commodity. we have seen how commodification has been increasingly transforming society and how, in recent years, it also seems to be affecting the collective action that social movement organizations have made on the internet. social movements and the internet. the middle-range theories and the idea of reflexive agents the literature about the internet and social movements is extensive and fruitful. in it we find heterogeneous analytical strategies that focus on issues as diverse as the effect of the internet on the organization of social movements ( juris, 2006), the individualization of participation (segerberg & bennet, 2011; bennett, segerberg, & knüfer, 2017), the democratization of organizations (cottle & lester, 2011), and the ethnographic approach to digital media and social movements (coleman, 2010). however, for the purposes of our work, we use another classic middle-range theory: the conception of social movements as reflexive agents (laraña, 1999; diez & laraña, 2018). thus, the concept of social reflexivity will help us link the internet and social movements to even broader theories regarding social change, such as those addressing the commodification process. as has been previously said, there is a wide selection of literature regarding information and communications technologies (icts) as interactive tools for social mobilization processes ( juris, 2012; loader & mercea, 2011; earl & kimport, 2011; horning, 2017). in general terms, we can posit that these 1003palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 studies consider this transformation from two perspectives—one that is organizational and another one that is strategic. first, the internet is transforming movements into online organizations. as juris (2006) affirms, the internet not only provides movements with a technological infrastructure, but also fortifies their organizational logic on the basis of network-like configurations, using multiple channels that are radically decentralized to facilitate coordination and communication; however, such configurations run the risk of having weaker and less cohesive structures (mosca & della porta, 2009). the dynamics and effects of social mobilization on the internet normally engage with such “programming/reprogramming and linking” mechanisms via platforms such as twitter and facebook. however, the current discussion revolves around whether participants need to prefabricate these processes or whether they simply stumble upon them accidentally (watts & dodds, 2007). certainly, there is a relative consensus regarding how social networks on the internet continue to have some type of programming—whether premeditated or accidental—and (most importantly) a group of activists who stand out from the masses and become visible symbols of events, protests, and social movements, whether they wish to or not (postil, 2014; torres, 2015; sunstein, 2017). as noted above, a second aspect highlighted by the studies of social movements and the internet is the transformation of communicative strategies. the internet has reduced many movements’ dependency on traditional media and on the cultural codes, values and social and political interests that the traditional media implicitly transmit. as a result of alternative networks, we see the beginning of what juris (2006) calls “an informational utopia”—a combination of movements’ strategies that not only maximize internet resources but also seek to develop tools to organize, inform, and counter program the established media networks (downing, 2000; rodríguez; 2001; harlow & harp, 2012). this task is not easy, given that the established networks are multimodal, diversified, and omnipresent; in addition, they are designed to cap1004 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other ture public opinion, limiting the impact of expressions that are independent of, or that diverge from, such networks. however, as castells (2009) argues, as self-communication among the masses expands, there are ample opportunities for social movements to enter into public spaces, either via alternative communication networks with greater autonomy or via mass media by adapting their language and modes of interaction. notably, movements can benefit from one of the most prominent and visible aspects of the internet in the social sphere: its instantaneous reshaping of perceptions of space and time into “real time.” importantly, this reshaping greatly facilitates mobilization. rheingold’s (2002) smart mobs raises the possibility that making decisions on the fly makes internet users reluctant to divide their lives into temporal slots. he also questions whether we have dissociated the definition of “presence” from physical space and then develops the concept of a social network, which projects itself beyond a single, particular space. as ito (2005) notes, actions are certainly projected beyond a specific space, as people are always present insofar as they participate in group communications. users can remain linked to the social network even when simultaneously participating in other events that do not require their physical presence. empirical and theoretical studies have thus far presented a common perspective based on how the internet can affect social movements’ activities and actions. all these studies have advanced an understanding of the processes that transform the structures of these political organizations in their objectives and their coordination efforts. however, despite the important legacy of these studies, they mostly provide us with knowledge regarding periods of organization and execution for collective action (della porta & mosca, 2005; juris, 2012; vicari, 2014; bonilla & rosa, 2015). in this sense, the literature might be read as covering the dimension that refers to the protest process, in tarrow’s terminology. according to tarrow (1994), collective action cycles pass through another equally important period: the latency period. during this period, social movements dedicate their efforts to, first and foremost, reelaborating and reflecting upon their objectives as well as to the most urgent social problems from their particular perspective. using different terminology, they 1005palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 create or reflexively reelaborate the framework defining their particular movement (snow & bendford, 2006). the study of the relationship between the internet and social movements during this latency phase may, for example, focus on questions regarding the degree to which this medium facilitates a process of collective discourse. however, from the perspective of constructivist logic, the internet can also be taken as an object of collective reflection. in the general context of the network society (castells, 1999; benkler, 2006), technology transforms itself into a fundamental component of social order. reflecting on this technology necessarily involves discussing one of the social and political foundations of this new social model. therefore, instead of analyzing how the internet affects social movements’ activities and structures, we focus on how social movements view the internet. in so doing, we refer to the classical concept of movements’ social reflexivity, which is understood as a collective mechanism of self -analysis. from this perspective, these organizations function as laboratories of ideas in which content is shared and reelaborated and in which processes and transformations that affect society are discussed (melucci, 1989; laraña, 1999; diez & laraña, 2018). in our particular case, one of the landscapes of greater social reflexivity in current movements focuses on offering updated ideas regarding the social role of technology. our middle-range theory, which attempts to link our data and our more general theories, is in itself social reflexivity. a case study of the 15-m protests and the commodification of political participation the empirical study created for this article intends to delve into the opinions and attitudes of the 15-m activists with regard to the use of online communication tools, such as twitter and facebook. we are particularly interested in identifying their perceptions of the role that the internet plays in the general process of social change, their opinions about the socio political effects of current internet development, and the alternatives to this process. from our point of view, the approach taken by the 15-m is very useful to 1006 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other advance the study of one of the most important processes of collective action in recent spanish political history (romanos, 2013, 2017). in general terms, spain is a country in which citizens put considerable faith in the internet as a political instrument. recent studies have shown that one half of spanish citizens believe that the internet increases their ability to exercise influence over authority (65.5%), whereas only 20% disagree with this assertion (robles et al., 2015; robles et al., 2016). another characteristic highlighted in this descriptive analysis is the pervasive nature of these beliefs in spain; spanish citizens of various ages and educational backgrounds share this belief in similar proportions. this finding is relevant because it demonstrates the extent to which spanish citizens believe that the internet is capable of empowering them politically and that it can act as an instrument of change. however, in this study we have focused on the collective that we have generically regarded as the “digital cyber activists of 15-m or the 15-m activists.” this collective consists of people who have played a—directly or indirectly—fundamental role in the policy making of the movement’s online communication, based on their protagonist roles on social networks or their coordination efforts. during the most active moment of the 15-m movement, this organization created a commission to coordinate communication between the movement and society. this commission was formed by young experts in social networks and played a central axis in this process of collective action. all the interviewees for this study were part, to some extent, of this commission. for this reason, they are key informants for the purposes of this research. the way of contact was through “the snowball” technique. that is, we got in touch with a person who was part of this commission, this activist introduced us to other people and, from these new contacts, we expanded the network of interviewees. the objective was to “saturate” certain profiles (age, level of studies, etc.). once we had contacted enough young activists with a high level of study, etc., we proceeded to select only activists from this committee who 1007palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 had different profiles. in this way, we made sure to have a heterogeneous sample of 15-m technology activists. the segmentation variables that we employ to select the activists with whom we have worked are gender, age, and any previous roles in organizations or social movements. the technique for information collection consisted of indepth, semistructured interviews. we designed a script for the interviews through which we asked all the interviewees about the same topics. in general terms, we asked about his/her activist career, his/her first experiences with communication through digital networks, and his/her opinion about the relationship between technologies and politics and strategies to improve society through technological tools. in this study, we conducted a total of twelve interviews, and we have excerpted a set of testimonies. in the next section, we offer the results of our fieldwork and an analysis of the interviews. this analysis is based on a selection of the opinions offered by interviewees and the theoretical background summarized above. the empirical analysis the first analytical theme involves the central thesis of this article: the commodification process in the context of the network society. in interviews with the 15-m activists, this discourse is strictly linked with ideas about what is common and what is shared. according to one activist’s opinion, as shown in the excerpt below, publically accessible content plays an enormous role on the internet, but it does so only at the expense of common content. this opinion is relevant because it offers a portrayal of a notion of an ideal technology, according to the interviewed activists—a technology free of domination. it also yields clues about how the interviewed activists perceive the development of the internet and its limitations. first, it is important to note that the activist is sharing with us an exercise of reflection on the process of development of the internet. this is precisely the type of activity we wanted to look at across our interviews and emphasizes the idea of social movements as reflexive agencies. however, it 1008 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other is even more interesting to note that this reflection is made about a broader process related to technological and economic change. one of the most important lines of research in the study of the network society emphasizes the role of the so-called “peer economy” (benkler, 2006). from this point of view, the economy of the network society is characterized by the ability of citizens to share content, services and products via the internet. “sharing” would be the central value in the new networked economy. here we see that this activist made a critical reading of this process of social change and notes that “sharing” is a way to destroy that which originally has no owner (the kind of society that he/she is trying to preserve). this is, from our point of view, a very clear definition of commodification. the first step in the commodification process is to eliminate communal property, and the second is to force citizens to share or to rent the taken resources. interviewee 4, a male activist from madrid, said that which is shared is devouring that which is common, and the difference between the common and the shared is that what is shared doesn’t belong to anyone and what is common belongs to everyone. these days we are tired of seeing and witnessing how they steal things that belong to everyone all the time. polanyi (1944) describes how this process occurred: the first time was with land, thanks to the enclosure acts. as is well known, the enclosure acts were a series of acts of parliament in the united kingdom, which enclosed open fields and common land in the country, creating legal property rights to land that was previously considered common. just as polanyi (1944) maintained, commodification is impossible without government action, which strengthens this process using favorable and legal recourses. in the next excerpt, the interviewee mentions concerted legal actions approved by the spanish government, i.e., the sinde law (ley sinde), and the united states government, i.e., acta. in both cases, their objectives were to guarantee authorship rights on the internet and to limit access to the internet content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/acts_of_parliament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_field_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/common_land 1009palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 interviewee 5, a female activist from madrid, said first, the mercantilization of the internet space has to do with the fact that…at the time that i started, when i experienced how businesses during the dot -com bubble suddenly built portals such as terra back then and supersaturated every space with publicity, we saw how certain content was favoured according to publicity interests. later, when i saw things more clearly, we then saw the sinde law and acta. what the interviewee is pointing out here is very important for the purposes of this article. her opinion allows us to state that the 15-m activists were aware of the role that the spanish government and other governments around the world were playing in the commodification of the internet. it is, therefore, proof of the reflective nature of this movement because 15-m activists are a warning of the social and economic processes that affect citizens of the network society. similarly, it is proof that these activists are pointing to those responsible for this process. these types of activities have been described by constructivist theories as basic strategies of social movements (melucci, 1989; laraña, 1999). up to this point, activists have shown us how the 15-m becomes a reflexive agent that offers society a diagnosis on the process of the commodification of the internet and the role of governments in the development of this process. all of this fits in with the first part of our hypothesis. that is, the capacity of 15-m, as a reflexive agent, to identify and evaluate the process of commodification. however, the discourse of the activists interviewed goes further and will now align with the second part of our hypothesis: the commodification of collective action. the commodification of the internet will advance, in the words of the same activists, until it reaches the same expressive actions and mechanisms of various social movements and collective action processes. according to the activists interviewed, participation via various social networks means sharing information, strategies, and plans that can potentially be transformed into commodities. previously, we noted the role of the concept of “political big data” to theoretically explain the way in which the actions and political ex1010 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other pressions of citizens are transformed into commodities. from this point of view, the capacity of current computer systems allows them to collect and organize large volumes of information that are subsequently offered in the market as a commodity. this explanatory concept, inspired by the work of han (2014), can be identified in the discourse of the 15-m activists. in the following excerpt, the interviewee posits that the information that movements pour onto the internet is transformed into a commodity that businesses use for “their end,” i.e., to generate profit. through this process, the values and the original sense of the political actions of citizens are subsumed by the logic of the market and, largely, sold out. interviewee 8, an activist from barcelona, said in many cases, businesses such as facebook or google store all the information we [the activists of the social movements] post there, and then they traffic that information. i mean, they sell it to countries or simply allow governments and businesses to use the information for their objectives. the costs of transforming political ideas and political activism into commodities are high and may include persecution in nondemocratic political contexts. the following passage is an excerpt from an interview when the activist is discussing the political use of the internet in authoritarian countries, such as china or iran: we know of cases in which businesses—be it for money or for purposes of government collaboration—have put the lives of activists who are devoted to freedom at risk. however, the consulted activists propose a wider framework with which to interpret the problem. from their perspective, the commodification of political participation is not produced only for the commercial use of the information posted by movements on social networks, such as facebook. according to an explanation from one of the participants, there is an important increase in public resources (maintaining the sense of the word previously used) that are incubated by private businesses to channel activist participation. again, in this case, a surge in instruments operating in a 1011palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 manner similar to appgree (http://www.appgree.com/en/) or to critizen (https://www.critizen.com) in spain, offer tools to both organizations and citizens with which to facilitate coordination, to search for consensus, or to agree on demands regarding various social and political topics. what the interviewee is pointing out here is a further step in the commodification of collective action. commercial interest in the political activities of citizens has led to the emergence of a set of private and commercial tools that provide citizens with services in order to participate politically. this circumstance has, from our point of view, important consequences, such as the transformation of a traditional political space, regulated by the state, into a political space that is governed by the rules of the companies that offer these services. now, it is not only political information that is gathered from generic social networks, but new services have also been specifically created to collect information about such actions. interviewee 3, a female 15-m activist from madrid, said on the other hand, here we have these new tools that offer you the ability to participate in everything. those businesses that own these tools are the ones with commercial interests. from our perspective, interviewee 3 encapsulates this discourse in the following statement: “it is impossible to tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools.” this phrase, which may well be a slogan for our interviewees, implies that the internet obeys the will of real political and economic powers. the question then becomes, “what are the alternatives that activists can offer or exploit once this diagnosis regarding the commodification of the internet is found to be accurate?” as has occurred with numerous social movements in recent years, the 15-m activists aggressively used the internet as a tool to coordinate collective action and/or to inform the public about its objectives, among other things. this evidence, which was also gathered during these interviews, concerns the theses regarding the internet’s impact on social movements, as detailed in this work. 1012 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other however, this movement presents a peculiarity that is strictly linked to the discourse of internet commodification, particularly regarding political participation through this medium. specifically, the movement created an online space for alternative interactions operated and controlled by the movement itself. according to the interviewees, the internet spurred the 15-m protests. these activists argue that the internet is a reference area for the development of the movement, as it has become a key vehicle in constructing the diagnostic framework regarding spain’s political and social reality. it is particularly relevant in this regard that, within this “original” diagnosis of the movement, laws stipulating and protecting intellectual property rights related to internet content (such as the sinde law) had already been passed. according to interviewee 3, the 15-m [protests were] convened by a group of people who communicated via the internet. thus, these protests occurred in cities throughout the nation simultaneously as in the fight against the sinde law and the “don’t vote for them” movement, and i believe that this was one of the ways in which the discontent was channeled. additionally, in keeping with the study of social movements and the internet, we find participant testimony in which this medium is discussed as being of particular importance for the operation and organization of collective action. in this sense, we can see how the internet in general—and social networks in particular—first become catalysts for unrest and “indignation” and then become a “breeding ground” for direct action. interviewee 2 said i remember a period beginning in march when i would receive— through my email or my twitter account or whatever—news of this nature in which you would see how people were upset and that there was a predisposition for mobilization and that there were more people talking politics on the internet and sharing information regarding political topics, which called people to mobilize. this kind of breeding ground urging people to go out into the streets would not have been possible without the internet. mass and corporate media do not disseminate such information—or they provide no space for it. 1013palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 however, one of the elements that differentiate the 15-m protests from other protests in spain is the central role played by the commodification of the internet, both in its discourse and in its practices. as the activists interviewed have shown, internet commodification occurs through two convergent processes. on the one hand, we see the proliferation of that which is shared, and on the other, the commercial purposes that private industry imposes on the content that activists create via the internet. for this reason, the 15-m protests chose to create a tool, n 1, which achieved two of the collective’s goals. n 1 is a social network that was created during the height of the movement’s activity, and its fundamental objective was to channel the discourse and activity of citizens linked with the movement in one way or another. operated by the organization, n 1 allowed authority over, and control of, the content rights shared by the activists, while simultaneously offering activists the chance to autonomously operate their interactive space. certainly, this tool was believed to empower the movement in terms of online participation and action, as noted by interviewee 10: n 1 was created as a space to share our interests and to expand our audience in terms of our objectives and demands. we created a network that we operated ourselves in order to control the medium at every moment. the creation of this network is an example of collective action whose aim is to collectivize one of the main assets of the internet: information. this action represents an act of active resistance against the commodification of internet represented by the political big data and clearly identified in the discourse of activists. the 15-m is a social movement that thinks and acts in the context of the network society because it identifies one of the main problems of this process of social change (the commoditization), identifies those responsible (the market and the government of spain), and offers an alternative (n1). this alternative demonstrates the ways in which this process of collective action adapts itself to the landscape of the network society described above. in this sense, n 1 is the crystallization of a reactionary and innova1014 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other tive strategy against the commodification of the internet; the movement could thus operate reflexively, and this reflexivity extends beyond the diagnosis of social problems into the realm of offering a tangible alternative. this movement, as an example of the disagreement with de commercial values of the net, uses the n1 network to respond to the system. conclusions this article aimed to analyze some of the discourse developed by social movements—specifically the 15-m protests—to elucidate the perception and opinions of activists about the social and political role of the internet. to do so, first we have drawn from the diagnosis (big theory) developed by various authors with regard to the process of commodification; in this regard, we draw from polanyi (1944), in general, and from han (2017) and fuchs (2012), specifically, in terms of internet commodification, and then we take the conception of social movements as reflexive agents (middle-range theory) to connect the general theory with our case of study. the ideas that follow have inspired our work. in general terms, some authors noted that one of the market system’s basic strategies involves transforming objects, ideas, or other things into commodities. theoretical literature demonstrates that this process, instead of slowing down, has continued to progress in recent decades. thus, following polanyi’s (1944) diagnosis regarding the transformation of land, work, and money into commodities, other authors have demonstrated how this tendency has reached the landscape of private life (russel, 2008), television audiences (smythe, 1981), the internet (fuchs, 2012), and even collective action (robles et al., 2015), among other realms. in addition, the idea of social movements as reflexive agents enables us to provide a dynamic picture of the society in which social groups are able to provide answers to the threats that affect them. this is largely what polanyi (1944) proposed through his concept of double movement. as a result of the above, our hypothesis argues that nowadays some social movements have identified and are evaluating, as reflexive agents, the commodification process that affects collective action. 1015palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 in empirical terms, the activists interviewed for this work offer us an interpretation of the process of technological change based on the common versusshared polarity.4 for these activists, the internet increasingly operates as a mixed good. these types of goods are not exclusive to one particular consumer; however, they also do not seem to be equally beneficial for everyone and some agents appear to benefit greatly from their existence. in other words, we all share the information circulating on the internet but, in doing so, a capital gain is generated for technology companies that organize and trade the information. much like toll roads, mixed goods imply a certain commercial exchange; thus, the internet is available for everyone but also relies on the support of the industries operating in that sector (for example, roadways rely on the businesses that operate them). thus, the internet relies on those businesses that create and sell online tools. the activists regard the information superhighway as a toll information superhighway. payment occurs not only from internet publicity but also when serviceprovider industries exploit the information that citizens in general—and activists in particular—provide. this process embodies the particular commodification that we defined in our theoretical background and that the activists interviewed confirmed in their interviews; technologies such as “political big data” and government support via copyright protection make this type of commodification possible. this process implies a variety of costs. essentially, political participation will not exclusively occur in public and politically regulated spaces (for example, the marketplace or town square). it will increasingly occur in publicprivate spaces that operate under the supervision of private industry. in terms of their rights as citizens, political agents will find themselves defenseless against the decisions made by those who operate these new participatory spaces. for these reasons, among others, activists demand an internet that is constituted as a different type of good. in other words, they demand that 4 from the interviewees’ perspective, the internet’s very nature makes it impossible for it to become a repository for opposition resources, which are understood as resources that, once used by one specific user, cannot be used by other people. this circumstance helps it to maintain a certain level of democracy with regard to media access. 1016 commodification and digital political participation... josé manuel robles and other the internet be a good that maximizes majority use. according to ostrom (2002), there are different types of goods. from our perspective, the good that best encapsulates the concept described by the activists in our interviews is the “common” good, and it refers to goods that are managed by a group of people or by a variably dispersed community. the 15-m activists not only demanded an internet based on this notion of a common good but also created an online tool, n 1, for the express purpose of serving as a shared good.5 the real advantage of n 1 is that it allows citizens to use and depend on a tool created and managed by a collective whose benefits remain solely in the service of the greater interest (in this case, the interests of 15-m). thus, contrary to popular belief and from a cyber -optimistic perspective of the internet’s role in political participation, some movements are beginning to reveal and question the intertwined and political-commercial fabric that these tools camouflage. moreover, discovering this underlying fabric pushes movements to design new and alternative means of communication that place these movements in (dis)accordance with the internet. however, several years after the 15-m, the current situation of this process, as well as the life of the technologies developed by this movement, have changed a lot. first of all, the demands of the 15-m movement have been, to a large extent, included in the proposals of the “podemos” political party. in this sense, this movement has made, as the ecologist movement did, a transit of the streets to the parliament. this, to a large extent, helps the aspirations of the 15-m to have a greater presence in the field of representative politics but, at the same time, it supposes a loss of horizontality and direct participation of citizens in the challenges that affect spain. on the other hand—and what is most important for this work—, the n-1 platform, which is the central axis of the 15-m strategy to fight against commodification, is currently a tool with very limited use. to explain this situation, technical and political reasons can be adduced. in technical terms, n-1 was a very unintuitive and unfriendly tool to use. this circumstance made it very difficult for large groups of the spanish population to begin 5 n 1 risks becoming a resource known as an “association joint.” in other words, it might become a resource controlled or administered by a group—in this case, by the very activists at the forefront of the movement. 1017palabra clave issn: 0122-8285 eissn: 2027-534x vol. 21 no. 4 octubre de 2018. 992-1022 to use it intensively. on the other hand, as “podemos” was replacing the socio-political mission that the 15-m was leading, other commercial tools began to be used. among these, we highlight some commercial and private tools, such as “appgree.” this circumstance blurs, to a large extent, the technological achievements of 15-m and its capacity to oppose the commercialization of the 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(2002). the anthropology of online communities. annual review of anthropology, 31, 449–467. retreived from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4132888 journal of education, 2017 issue 69, http://joe.ukzn.ac.za struggles for teacher education in the age of the anthropocene marie brennan (received 22 may 2017; accepted 20 july 2017) abstract major shifts in the world ‘order’ – especially the urgency of climate change and biosphere destruction – pose challenges for education which require significant changes of practice in schools and universities, and thus to teacher education. this paper starts from a brief summary of issues at stake in the ‘anthropocene age’, arguing that the converging environmental crises have to be linked to the crises of capitalism. pragmatist philosophy and the practice turn in the human sciences provide directions for rethinking the tasks which teacher education can contribute to an activist-oriented development of education in these difficult times for humans and the planet. === rose reminds of what is at stake in the age of the anthropocene: we are spectators in the unmaking of the world we have known; we are spectators in the mass death of other creatures and the misery of numerous and diverse forms of life, including humans; we may indeed become spectators of our own demise (2013/2014, p.211). introduction: learning to educate in the anthropocene age in cape town, during the last week of august 2016, the international anthropocene working party (awp, 2016) presented its findings and recommendations to the 35 international geological conference. theseth recommendations, supported by a very significant majority of the awp, still need to be endorsed by their parent body, the international stratigraphic 44 journal of education, no. 69, 2017 commission, for the anthropocene to come into force as an official geological term. the anthropocene, they argue, is an ‘epoch’; it marks the enduring changes to the planet and their impact on the biosphere for thousands of years to come. if this terminology is adopted, it would mean that the holocene has finished, but that we remain within the quaternary period and cenozoic era. however, whether or not the awp’s recommendations are accepted, the ‘anthropocene’ is a concept around which action has been mobilised, as well as hard thinking. there are, of course, significant debates in the physical sciences about what counts as a new ‘epoch’, and about when the human-caused changes started – joined by social scientists who point to the inextricable linkage between humans and ‘environment’ co-producing one another in a ‘web of life’ (moore 2015). most recognise that human presence has always altered nature, just as nature has made possible and constrained what humans can do; climate change (including the last ice age, for example) and major events such as earthquakes and volcanos have always been present. wars lead to famine, as we can see in the northern countries of africa at the moment, and colonialism exacerbated effects of droughts and floods (davis 2000). yet the acceleration of planetary changes, particularly since the end of wwii, emerging as a result of radiation from the atom bomb and the massive growth of use of fossil fuels, has constituted a major threat to species, including our own, and to eco-systems, to the future of the planet. in this paper, i argue that it is imperative that we in education explore more systematically some of the multiple debates about the crises arising in the intertwining of the anthropocene and capitalism, crises that are difficult to face, to understand, to explain – let alone work out what to do. we put our heads in the sand; we peek like children at the scary world, and look away fast. we depress our knowledge of the significance of the converging crises and then act surprised when there are uprisings, demands, movements which try to address elements and consequences of these crises. or we try to explain them away, as relatively self-contained issues rather than connected to major shifts in economics, politics, democracy, sociality, the planet – even modernity itself. in education we tend to relegate such issues to a brief topic coverage within social studies or to a single subject subject, environmental education, which is often not on either school or university syllabi (pace the talloires declaration, 1990). or we say it belongs to another discipline area – to politics, to economics, not education. we do not follow up injunctions from environmental educators or critical pedagogy activists that what is needed is fundamental and radical: to reconstruct our curricula and pedagogies, and repurpose our institutions. brennan: struggles for teacher education. . . 45 it is, of course, much easier to say the planet is past its tipping point, that capitalism is unstoppable, and there’s nothing we can do, to allow ourselves to become paralysed with uncertainty or despair. environmental groups, including environmental educators, have been warning us to attend to these matters for a considerable time (carson, 1961; stevenson, brody, dillon & wals, 2013), as have critical theorists (apple, 1982; freire, 1970; ladsonbillings & tate, 1995). it is too easy to be suspicious of these warnings as ‘catastrophising’ but we should not ignore the ‘sudden and massive shift in earth history’ (semal, 2015, p.92): tipping points can lead to fast and unpredictable shifts, even in economics. there is indeed reason to fear – and, as naomi klein suggests, fear is “a survival response” (2014, p.28). educators are invested in ‘survival’ of the human species so we need to take notice; however, educational institutions have not been good at dealing with emotions (bozelak, carolissen, leibowitz & boler, 2013 ; zembylas, 2008), particularly the ‘darker’ ones (zipin, 2009) such as fear. what happens when the prevailing stories no longer make sense of the world? the serious, interwoven challenges of the crises of capitalism with ecological and climate change pose key questions that are unable to be addressed within the frames of the dominant stories of our day, requiring significant new analyses and even structures of knowledge. this has major implications for the work of education, in all its sectors – building new knowledge and knowledge structures in conjunction with new practices that are necessary to produce these knowledges. schools are responsible, usually with families/communities, for passing on the ‘grand narratives’ of the society, the frameworks for thinking and being – those practices which produce ways of organising thinking, saying and doing (schatzki, 2002; kemmis, 2009). however, education is not only about passing on past knowledges and practices but importantly about entrusting the future to the next generations, equipping them with capacities to survive, to organise, to think and plan and act. it has long been debated how we balance these two dimensions of education; the current dominant curriculum policy trend focusses mostly on passing on past knowledges. we are thus illequipped to deal with disruptions, to work with young people on the present and future, to connect knowledge and action. to do our job responsibly in education, we need to come to grips with a complex reading of the world, as global citizens and members of multiple communities, including those of world-wide education workers in the 21st 46 journal of education, no. 69, 2017 century. we cannot afford to be illiterate about the changing world and this means becoming much more familiar with a wider range of physical and social science findings and with local spaces/places. in particular, we need to see ourselves as part of ‘nature’, avoiding treating humans and nature as a binary – the same binary that underpins the development of capitalism and colonialism and that continues to underpin many assumptions of human lives. importantly, we have to ask how changing our narratives of the world might also challenge curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, the purposes of schooling, training, higher education – and the work of teachers, academics, and our students. learning to educate in these times means paying attention both to our own learning and that of our students. our imaginations cannot afford to be stuck in forms of stupid optimism, nor paralysed nihilism. the needed stories and actions will be diverse and situation-specific. i am situated in melbourne, australia. my ponderings come out of continuing histories of british colonialism, genocidal relations with indigenous peoples, immigration policies that aim for assimilation into an ‘australian’ imaginary of the dominant anglo-establishment, heavy reliance on international capital, and systematic skewing of access to the ‘goods’ of education away from students who are indigenous, poor, rural and with disabilities, in favour of those from already privileged backgrounds. this is not identical to the south african experience; and the differences between our countries matter in terms of analysis of the present and in what it is possible to imagine and act upon. in this paper, i first outline the two dominant stories of the day, those that underpin most of the world’s practices of life: the ‘grand’ stories of capitalism and of ecological change, drawing on jason moore’s analysis of ‘capitalism in the web of life’ (2015). my stories here can only be at a ‘101’ level, trying to bring together for non-specialists issues drawn from environmental, capitalist, political, philosophical and change theories as starters for sharpening our educational analysis. i do not claim expertise in all these sciences, but write as an educator who urges the importance, for educational work, of appreciating the complexity of the issues and what is at stake, and the need to keep learning, sharing ideas and moving towards action. this overview suggests not only domains where our own and local schools and universities might need to concentrate attention but also provides directions for exploring links between local and global which might be fruitful for inter-disciplinary work across physical and social sciences. i am not naïve enough to suggest that we already have pedagogical strategies ready to address the learning that is needed to navigate our way as a species in concert with nature. nor do i brennan: struggles for teacher education. . . 47 believe it is possible to grasp the full complexity of things. we can only work towards narratives that make fuller and better sense in the urgency of working on issue/s. i thus move towards a framework for connecting knowledge-work with action, drawing on stengers’ critical pragmatist philosophical arguments (2015; pignarre & stengers 2011) about the need to act on events in the world, as a means to produce new knowledges about events. the challenge is how we might proceed with teacher education that does not attempt to ‘save the world’, yet does further educational thinking and acting that contributes towards local-global pro-action. the final sections of the paper give some indications of directions for such work. the ‘anthropocene’ and capitalism: co-produced crises ‘anthropocene’ is a contested term in part because it suggests that all humans were equally responsible for the massive acceleration in the effects of humannature relations and their mutually constitutive effects, rather than sub-sets of humans, particularly in the advanced capitalist world. the term does not recognise that the planet has set up conditions for human possibility as well, treating the world as a separate ‘object’ to be acted upon. nevertheless, ‘anthropocene’ has good international recognition and does acknowledge that human interactions with the planet have altered the planet irreversibly. i use the term here as a political marker of the importance of the debates, signalling the need for human beings to come to terms with what has occurred on planet earth and the ways in which we, and planet, are intertwined. since only a minority of teacher educators come from physical sciences background, i here summarise some of the physical science discussion of environmental changes. the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc), in their 5th major report – the 6th is due in 2022 – summarised evidence to date of human-induced shifts in climate. the level of agreement about humans’ impact on the planet across many areas of physical sciences has only gained strength since the ipcc’s first assessment report in 1990. their most recent online summary for policy-makers puts it strongly: human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems. (ipcc 2014-pm) 48 journal of education, no. 69, 2017 the ippc report points to the warming of the global climate system, including both atmosphere and ocean, with diminished amounts of snow and ice, and rising sea levels. as a result, extreme weather and climate events are more common and more devastating. into the future, climate change, the report argues, will amplify existing risks and create new risks for natural (including human) systems; but risks are unevenly distributed, having greater impacts on less advantaged communities and countries. even a few findings which have medium to high confidence among scientists are enough to suggest the magnitude of the problems policy makers and ordinary people in every region are already facing. in the last two decades sea levels rose almost double the eight inches of the previous century. ocean acidification, largely as a result of absorbing excess co levels in the atmosphere, has grown over 30% since the2 beginning of the industrial revolution, about half of that amount in the past 40 years. the panel notes the resultant mass extinction of many species, accompanied by food insecurity and need for migration of humans and many other species. they conclude that: many aspects of climate change and associated impacts will continue for centuries, even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are stopped. the risks of abrupt or irreversible changes increase as the magnitude of the warming increases. (ipcc (pm), 2014). the physical science evidence is clear: the planet is altering significantly through the interaction of the human species with other species and biosystems. the awp nominates the start of the anthropocene as 1945, pointing to the increasing impact of technologies in shaping what has become known as the ‘great acceleration’ since atom bombs in 1945 spread radiation around the atmosphere, followed by massive expansion of the use of fossil fuels and their emissions of carbon into the atmosphere in the second half of c20 and up to the present. th the ‘date’ of locating the anthropocene’s ‘beginning’ has been subject to dispute because interaction between humans and planet has always occurred. early forms of agriculture, technological development and the spread of humans altered biospheres, which in turn framed possibilities for the spread of and activities of humankind. good overviews of the debates on the anthropocene, including starting dates and terminology, can be found in an edited collection edited by hamilton, bonneuille and gemenne (2015). such debates include arguments that point to the role of machines, particularly the brennan: struggles for teacher education. . . 49 steam engine invented by watt in 1784, and the ways technology developed for the industrial revolution and the interplay of old and new worlds in making possible the modern world and its emphasis on fossil fuels. should this ‘new’ era perhaps be called the technocene? others see the most recent periods of acceleration of consequences of human activity as continuing a logic of capitalist accumulation of wealth, and associated forms of colonialism, suggesting that the anthropocene commenced around 500 years ago with capitalism’s emergence into formation as a world system (wallerstein, 1983). indeed, some suggest that referring to this period as ‘capitalocene’ would be more appropriate (moore, 2016, see also haraway, 2015). such a term recognises the central capitalist ideology of ‘cheap nature’, as merely a resource to be used for the benefit of the concentration of powerful accumulators in geographic ‘metropoles’, typically through exploitation and expropriation of resources from colonies or trade agreements. indeed, moore suggests that capitalism itself is a world ecological regime, a “way of organizing nature” by the “co-production of earth-moving, idea-making, and power-creating across the geographical layers of human experience” (2015, p. 2, 3). these debates point up the need for more comprehensive interor transdisciplinary explanations. we have to be able to understand how human action was involved and how the world acts back on such action. yet many activists around poverty and inequality have signally failed to address environmental issues whilst many environmental activists have stopped short of including the role of capitalism in their analyses and suggestions for action. for humans to alter course on planet earth, we have to understand how capitalism is inextricably bound up with changes to climate, ecosystems, biodiversity, atmosphere and associated living systems. yet, as jameson (2003) so rightly quipped, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. capitalism is a system that is not only economic but also social and environmental, a roughly 500-year-old world system (wallerstein, 1983). its underlying logic is accumulation, which requires continual growth and expansion – a capitalism that can sustain itself, most economists agree, works on at least a 3% compound growth of profit annually. if such growth slows or stops, then accumulated profits decline or are destroyed (harvey, 2011), so capitalising entities are always in search of new innovations to expand reach and capacity to profit in competition with others. capitalism has to evolve in order to continue to expand. as wallerstein’s history of capitalism argues, the 50 journal of education, no. 69, 2017 dominant forms have altered, from agrarian enclosure capitalism, to mercantilism, to industrialisation, through to the contemporary forms of globalisation and financialisation (see braudel, 1979; harvey, 2011). european colonialism has been an essential means of spreading capitalist practices, expanding geographic space, and giving access to resources and new labour frontiers, such that capitalism had spread across the globe, as a networked ‘world system’ with a power to limit alternatives to its logic, by the late c19 (wallerstein, 1983). th the recent crises of capitalism (e.g. the global financial crisis of 2008) have not led to widespread reform of neoliberal capitalism, and its emphasis on financialisation rather than production as the ‘engine’ of expansion. rather, those crises have largely been subsumed in the old stories: the banks are now ‘safer’, we are told; emphases on increased productivity – perhaps in the global south – will strengthen the global economy; austerity measures will bring back fiscal responsibility; and new technologies will resolve the problems experienced by the planet, including humans. of course, there are still many groups of people for whom these stories can no longer be taken seriously, but few people, seeing the crises of their governments, really believe there is anything they can do. larger-scale demonstrations – seattle, the occupy movement, the middle eastern countries’ search for democratic governance – have been contained in their effects; and capitalism appears to have prevailed (but precariously so), muting address to environmental challenges, which get put on backburner while capitalism is returned to ‘business-as-usual’. historically, capitalism has exploited periods of cyclical crises by evolving its mechanisms, while also accelerating the effects of contradictions that inhere in its logic of continually expansive accumulation growth, including impacts of social and environmental shift. yet the effects of contradictions are accelerating; and it is highly questionable whether ongoing growth through a capitalising logic can continue sustainably. moore (2015, p.17) argues that capitalist expansion has relied on what he calls the “four cheaps: labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials”. now we are at the end of sustainability of these ‘cheaps’. there are few new ‘frontiers’ for capitalism to exploit and colonise to continue expanding. moore argues that capitalism and environment co-produce one another through what he calls a ‘double internality’, so capitalism is in nature. like wallerstein, he points to the continuity of capitalism in the past 500 or so years, and the interaction of humans with other parts of nature over this time, as constituting “new brennan: struggles for teacher education. . . 51 conditions for successive eras of capitalist restructuring across the longue durée” (p. 176). during this period, argues moore, there have been three main ‘revolutions’: landscape (e.g. the medieval enclosures, c17 colonial clearingth of forests in brazil or the vistula basin); labour productivity (e.g. the crisis of feudalism after the black death in europe, the african slave trade and sugarslave nexus); and the techniques of global appropriation, especially of ‘natural’ resources. a number of major macro-historians/sociologists of capitalism recently explored the question: “does capitalism have a future?” (wallerstein, collins, mann, derlugian & calhoun, 2013), presenting divergent and convergent perspectives. they agree that the ‘western great recession’ of 2007–8 has shifted the global economy and its instantiation in nation states, marking the end of the ‘old left’ currents: the liberal reformism of the first world states, the communist revolutionary dictatorships of the industrialising ‘second world’, and the national populist movements of the ‘third world’. accumulation, and un-equal redistribution of wealth to the benefit of those ‘above’, continue apace, creating greater stratification within and across nations; and power seems to have shifted from the euro-american axis towards asia. wallerstein and collins each suggest that capitalism is now reaching a structural limit-point: a dangerous juncture with major exacerbation of internal contradictions, profit squeeze, and, collins adds, the replacement of much middle class work by automation, making consumption levels necessary for at least 3% growth in profit-accumulation impossible to sustain. mann and calhoun both suggest that capitalism remains flexibly adaptive, and so may persevere – however, with major alterations necessary, and facing precarities due to crises that capitalism is significant in creating. mann sees environmental disasters, possible use of nuclear weapons, and weakly responsive political mobilisation, as major threats which capitalism in its current form is unlikely to tame; while calhoun argues that the institutions which neoliberalism has eroded would need (perhaps impossible) rejuvenations if capitalism is to have any chance of continuing. it has only been through social movements, points out naomi klein, that governments are forced to pay attention to major threats. she notes that climate change “has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders [compared to terrorism or bailing out banks], despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than collapsed banks or collapsed buildings” (2014, p. 6). governments started negotiating on action to alter carbon emissions in 1990; yet by 2013, carbon dioxide emissions had 52 journal of education, no. 69, 2017 increased by 61% on 1990 levels. perhaps the paris agreement in 2015 might have more chance of both recognition and action, but the precedent of governments’ previous avoidances of keeping to agreements do not hold out much hope – despite ever more severe scientific warnings about the level of warming and irreversibility of current effects on the planet. james (2013/14, p. 2) suggests that the “constant deferral of fundamental action on basic questions has slipped between the modern dialectical struts of hope and despair”. it takes “real effort”, he suggests, to go along with the idea of business as usual: that “life on our planet can go on much as before, so long as it is supported by a ‘digital revolution’ and enhanced technological platforms” (ibid). it is indeed hard for many of those in advanced capitalist countries even to imagine how their ‘lifestyles’ are supported by exploitation of other humans, species and biosystems. in the same volume, hinkson (2013–2014) points to massive development of techno-sciences since world war ii through global markets, such that “western culture has become locked into technological solutions as a deep form of cultural response to complex change” (p.60). such faith in the techno-sciences as our saviour induces us to defer the need to rethink fundamentally the form of the hyper-mobile, consumption-heavy and growth-based social freedom that presents itself as the raison d’etre of “sustainable development” (james, 2013–2014, p.2–3). continued capitalist investment in climate change denial, through think tanks and research sponsorships, has warded off attention to groups who raise environmental issues. it is in capital’s interest to promote accommodation with ‘green lite’: simplistic techno-‘fixes’ to environmental problems that suggest individual responsibility, rather than structural change, as what is needed. beck noted that global risk is produced largely by wealthy decisionmakers (including those hired or co-opted to serve them), whose lives are not as directly harmed by consequences of their decisions: those who are taking the decisions are not accountable from the perspective of those who are affected by the risks, and those who are affected have no real way of participating in the decision-making process. this is what i call organized irresponsibility. (2014, p.76). such irresponsibility on the part of capital, with nation-states in thrall, helps to create conditions of fear without much capacity to imagine what to do about the situation, as we transition from one era to the next. brennan: struggles for teacher education. . . 53 if we consider only physical science definitions of the problem, then we are more likely to restrict ourselves to technical and market-oriented answers – a tendency to concentrate on ‘nature’ but not how social assumptions structure our relations within it (hinkson, 2013–2014). and while environmental movements have fostered some inter-disciplinary work, the continuing separation of social-only and physical-sciences-only explanations leads to ‘science as usual’ (stengers, 2015), rather than reinventing sciences appropriate to the complexity of the issues under investigation. moreover, there may not be effective physical science ‘solutions’ since good explanations of the problem do not necessarily translate to good ‘answers’ or recommendations for action – especially if the ‘solution’ required that action be taken before the current degree of crisis was reached. capitalist expansion since world war ii, reliant on fossil fuels and growth of consumerism, accompanied by movement of the majority of the world’s population into cities, has left unmistakeable signals in geological strata (awp, 2016). other sciences, including human sciences, provide more indication on the outcomes for humans and other living species and the planet overall. it is now most likely that we will have to learn to live within conditions that are less than optimal for human survival and flourishing. i note here the ipcc’s assertion that the consequences of global warming, climate change and destruction of species and habitats have most impact on those who are poorest and most marginal in the world capitalist system. learning how to focus on reinventing practice in crisisridden times what might these crises mean for education as a field and teacher education in particular? i argue that there are huge implications for those of us in education, at a time when – internationally – education is being pushed backwards by narrowing curriculum, standardised testing and competition, and lack of adequate investment in high quality public education for all. all modern institutions are under strain from the converging and interwoven crises of capitalism and the environment. in australia, for example, a group schools in a poor rural region where i have done research were, within a fouryear period, thrice affected by serious floods which had ramifications for the lives of students’ and their families, some living in large groups in shared housing and garages two and three years later. school staff also lost housing, not to mention loss of library stock in schools, and shift in school functions 54 journal of education, no. 69, 2017 when they served as emergency shelters. as researchers we had to cancel visits, and to alter our plans, including our data instruments. but the floods did make us rethink our curriculum work with schools and their communities, and what educators’ ‘accountability’ might mean in such contexts. pragmatist approaches to knowledge in action seem most appropriate here. isabelle stengers, an activist philosopher of science, reminds us that pragmatism is the ‘care of the possible’ (stengers, 2015; stengers & bordeleau, 2011), rather than working out a replacement macro vision. pragmatism gives ethical emphasises to uses of knowledge in connection with pro-action in the world – to forms of praxis – which has been elaborated in a range of educational traditions. as reckwitz (2002, p. 259) proposes, practice theory decentres “mind, texts and conversation” while “[s]imultaneously, it shifts bodily movements, things, practical knowledge and routine to the centre of its vocabulary” – paying attention, adds schatzki (2002, p. 12), to practices as “embodied, materially interwoven”. such attention to educational practices may enable us to build on strengths in ways that exceed the institutions within which those practices have been developed, creating new configurations of practice: of ‘doings, sayings and relatings’ (kemmis, 2009). practices and knowledge develop in association, emerging through concrete action by social beings in particular places and times. we cannot wait for ‘full evidence’ to come before acting: life on this planet is too precarious for that. part of the problem of ‘evidence-based’ approaches is that the cited ‘evidence’ is from what is past, while present and future continue to emerge in changing contexts that may require attention to what was not ‘evident’ before. what is applicable can only be tested in action, which in turn changes what emerges. large-scale dynamics of environment, capitalism and their interwoven crises are experienced by us in our locals as ‘glitches’ in the infrastructure of our lives, as lauren berlant (2016, p.393) observes: . . . at some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. a glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission. a glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure…. infrastructure is not identical to system or structure, as we currently see them, because infrastructure is defined by the movement or patterning of social form. it is the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure. roads, bridges, schools, food chains, finance systems, prisons, families, districts, norms all the systems that link ongoing proximity to being in a world-sustaining relation. brennan: struggles for teacher education. . . 55 glitches tend to be site-specific, place-based, and so to be understood not only as generalisable effects of widespread structural phenomena, but also as expressing particular histories and conditions in the local. in this sense, the ‘glocal’ is a helpful term pointing to the inter-relationships of people and places, institutions and biosystems. glitches in the local – always relational to other locales, i.e. to ‘the global’ – are phenomena that offer sites to start investigating possibilities for new educational praxis, with a view to collective pro-actions – including the diverse range of actors who are affected in the situation – that can generate situated knowledge. i suggest that pursuing action around glitches in our regions offers us a focus for reinventing education and teacher education. struggling to reinvent teacher education teacher education has been tied to global policy shifts, with particular effects in different countries. as green, reid and brennan (2017, p.39) have recently argued, this creates a “churn” of reform that keeps attention away from our own practice and focussed on policy and compliance with its speedy shifts: the ongoing and escalating struggle for control of teacher education in countries around the world reflects the difficult and contested position of teacher education within what is experienced as a chaotic churn of reform … government has sought to constrain and ‘improve’ teacher education in the interests of competitive (inter)national struggles for economic power. within the terms of this struggle between teacher education and the global state, we argue here that there is an urgent need for attention to the everyday work of teacher educators, their students and the school systems they serve – the practice of teacher education, which is to say, the ‘soul’ or animus that makes teacher education what it is. stengers’ version of pragmatism provides an important corrective here. she asks to think from where we are, and act on the issues which are problematic in that site, rather than focussing on policy. we do have resources on which to build, despite being caught up and implicated in ‘business-as-usual’, to address glitches in the infrastructure of our lives and the reinvention of our educational institutions. for a start, much of our work is invested in intergenerational activity. whilst some of this is far too bound up with modernist ideas of ‘progress’, working with the next generation brings particular responsibilities in helping them navigate their ways in changing conditions. this is not to replace silly forms of optimism that ignore the current crises but rather to keep ‘grounded’ in renewal of practice thereby avoiding the paralysis of despair and cynicism. working alongside our students (and in 56 journal of education, no. 69, 2017 turn their students), we can help to problematise the old grand narratives with stronger analysis of why those dominant narratives may have come into being, and why they are inaccurate. new generations can be part of building new and multiple narratives that are connected to place, and linked to other places. these narratives can help rebuild some new discourses, that draw on multiple disciplines and on local expertise, weaving together the ‘web of life’ that jason moore points out, seeing the human endeavour as part of the ‘natural’ world, working against capitalist appropriations and assumptions, and towards a renewed connection among humans and with the planet and its biosystems. in building new narratives, we have to work with the local/regional glitches, bringing together old and emerging knowledges and practices to understand more of how the local is linked to other locals. this is necessary to build new complex narratives that specify the big issues challenging local lives and open up spaces of action. teacher education is fortunately placed for such work. many countries’ teacher education programmes share a number of features, although realised in different historical circumstances. they generally work within government policies, operate within universities, with a few remnant ‘teachers’ colleges’, and are usually linked to regional or national school authorities, which specify school curriculum to be addressed and/or employment requirements for teachers. programs often include broad education studies (such as educational history, sociology, philosophy, psychology), subject teaching methods, specialist disciplinary study and some form of placement. countries differ in whether pre-service teachers come in as graduates or as undergraduates, opportunities for placement and levels of specialisation, in whether educationspecific studies are included and in the kinds of relationships with schools. placement, and the necessary relationships with schools in a region, which underpin successful learning through professional experience, opens up many opportunities for teacher educators and pre-service teachers to work with local communities to delineate the big issues challenging their lives. through expanding relationships beyond the school into communities, teacher educators can also source local knowledge action workers who have the potential to contribute to examining, defining and acting upon issues, providing access to networks and joining local expertise with academic expertise to address those issues. teacher education could thus act as a clearinghouse point to establish, sponsor or join transdisciplinary teams working on these key issues, with a particular brief to take an educative stance. this may require drawing on understanding the translation and brennan: struggles for teacher education. . . 57 selection of content, suggesting communication and pedagogical strategies, and supporting students as researchers of these issues. teacher educators are helpfully placed in universities as sites of multiple disciplinary resources which can be brought to bear on key problematics experienced locally/regionally, and more widely. among ourselves, we are less a ‘discipline’ than a field, already multi-disciplinary, so potentially better equipped to bring together multi-disciplinary teams to work on local ‘big issues’. teacher education could become a fulcrum point for linking university academics and knowledge workers (staff and students) to spheres of research and action, using the school as an entry point to local communities and their issues – a focus for inter-disciplinary research linked to action. the work of the global alliance for community-based research (http://www.guninetwork.org/articles/knowledge-world-we-want-emergenceglobal-alliance-community-engaged-research-gacer) has a good track record in this regard. in the process of such engagement, schools, teacher education and university-based research are all reinvented. as teacher educators we cannot be expert in all issues – nobody can. however, what we do have is a repertoire of ‘signature pedagogies’ (hooley, 2017) and experience in pedagogising knowledge, ‘delocating a discourse, for relocating it, for refocusing it’ (bernstein, 1996, p.47) for use in teaching. these strategies can be drawn upon for the reinvention of teacher education, curriculum and pedagogies. we can also draw on histories of critical pedagogy and praxis traditions, e.g. developing and sharing new knowledges and practices as a form of freire’s (1970) ‘conscientisation’ for/in/with the society. among us, we also have environmental educators, citizenship educators, social educators and science educators with histories of problemoriented project work. despite being very much tied into national framings and policies, we also have significant international networks, which can be put into service for linking up our students and school students in constructing ‘globalisation from below’. supporting mobilisation around local problematics to help map and deepen their readings of issues, practices and relationships, teacher educators can also build linkages across local sites to build new knowledges and learning from one another’s actions. pre-service teachers (psts) form a large cadre of potential knowledge workers who can be put to diverse uses in supporting students and teachers in schools, as well as bringing to bear their own knowledge and experiential backgrounds. rather than being positioned only as incompetent novices to be http://www.guninetwork.or g/articles/knowledge-world-we-want-emergence-global-alliance-community-engaged-research-gacer http://www.guninetwork.or g/articles/knowledge-world-we-want-emergence-global-alliance-community-engaged-research-gacer 58 journal of education, no. 69, 2017 inducted into current practices, psts can assist schools in supporting students to become researchers, building their own capacities as researchers, as part of their work in becoming teachers, while learning to understand their students, and their communities and the place in which they are located. in the process, they too contribute to reinventing schools in a future-action-oriented way, through the collaborative invention of new practices that link schools, communities and action on big issues. it is an important part of their education as teachers to be oriented to community and to redefine teachers’ work as including knowledge developed through action and research, the invention of new practices of and for school communities and teaching. researching big issues for/in/with communities is also a way for building new paradigms of research and reinventing research away from the capitalising logic of the ‘knowledge economy’-driven university in the current times. it may well be that teacher educators can find ways of ‘double dipping’ in ‘counting’ and measuring community-oriented research in the climate of measurement, using ‘impact’ measures but this ought not drive such efforts wherever possible. traditions of place-based curriculum (gruenewald & smith, 2003), funds of knowledge (moll & gonzalez, 1997) can be added to environmental education research (stevenson et al., 2013) that position teacher education well to work on situated knowledge work on ‘glitches’. building such research as core to our practice (green, 2009) has important spin-offs for developing agency for students, pre-service teachers, community and ourselves as teacher educators. we have to take ourselves seriously as coproducers of knowledge through new forms of action, including teaching, and helps to de-pathologise young people (both school and university students), giving them respect as co-agents in knowledge-in-action (bottrell 2015; brunila, 2014). working on big issues together may also help to address programmatic design in teacher education, often left as a collection of individual subject areas rather than coherent design. ‘web of life’ principles and use-value rather than exchange-value orientations to teacher education can thus contribute to sustainability of humans with the planet in curriculum terms (barab & roth, 2006; hicks, 2014; paige, lloyd & smith, 2016). the curriculum of teacher education, and the curriculum of schooling seem to have become narrower and narrower in parallel over the neoliberal policy ascendancy. opening beyond this set of constraints (reddy & schreuder, 2004) does require new kinds of politics for the field but can be developed through attention to building new practices that satisfy a wide range of practitioners and brennan: struggles for teacher education. . . 59 communities who can support such politics. unless programmatic design and relationships with school communities alter, then such projects will remain tethered to individual university classrooms, with little scope for changing the basic framing of universities or teacher education, as has too often been the case with activist innovations. … some tentative steps towards further action the ongoing struggles to change teacher education will make such suggested community-oriented, big-issue-oriented research and action quite difficult to achieve. like school education – to which it is connected by origin, governmental policy, historical practice and shared concerns – teacher education has been inextricably bound up with the project of modernity and the formation of the nation state. the ideal-typical focus has been on universal provision of education on the premise that each individual will achieve academically according to ‘merit’ (supposed ‘inborn ability’ and hard work), learn to be good citizens, and gain appropriate credentials for further education and/or work. unesco on world teachers’ day (october 5, 2016) suggested the world will need close to 69 million more teachers by 2030 – 17 million in sub-saharan africa alone – if the world is to reach the goal to provide universal primary and secondary schooling. so education academics are not likely to run out of work, presuming that universities continue to be funded and that states require teachers to have credentials. still, education in various forms, including the non-institutional forms, will need resourcing for the ongoing survival of the human species. however, if we are to contribute to the survival of the next generation, then we need to change our game quite significantly. in the contemporary global settlement around higher education, neoliberal assumptions predominate; as with other sub-sectors, there have been moves into standardisation, credentialism, and economism, through focus on entrepreneurship, performativity, vocationalism and knowledge for sale. this has been accompanied by a tendency to blame teacher education for the breakdown in the promise of credentialism leading to employment (furlong, cochran-smith & brennan, 2008). thus there are political, social and intellectual challenges for teachers and teacher education – challenges that are both shared with other occupational groupings and specific to our field. 60 journal of education, no. 69, 2017 specific to our field, we will have to unpack our modernist our concepts of education and their institutional practices, replete with binaries, including the mind/body dualism, the academic/manual split and the binary of the split between humans and nature – all being highly anthropo-centric. we will need to alter the balance of knowledge to value prospective/future orientations, as well as bringing the most appropriate past knowledge to address current and emerging issues. this requires knowledge to be recontextualised in the frame of local communities, reconnected to place, relationships and action. our ‘performance management’ will need significant redefining in audit cultures that have been eviscerated of meaningful connection to students, communities and schools. in this paper, i have tried to outline a positionality for teacher education and teachers without falling into the trap of nominating ourselves as responsible for ‘hope’ and ‘salvation’ of the world, or even education. in uncertain times without large-scale convincing narratives of problems or solutions, claims to have ‘the’ answer can easily fall into hubris, without actually acknowledging, humbly, that we cannot possibly have an answer. education cannot ‘save’ society but we do need to contribute to more civility, more civic spaces, more informed dialogue – with teachers who see this as core to their work. we can contribute to focus on local action and to joining up local praxis – action with knowledge – to make it possible to do otherwise and to produce knowledges through this further action. as i suggested, within the university and in our communities, we are well placed to link diverse resources, including pulling together diverse disciplinary expertise, to add to local knowledges of students and communities so the action on issues can be as informed as possible – and as future-oriented as possible. such an orientation relies on us to build our own capacities to ‘read the world’ and deal with uncertainty. the darkness of the views of the intertwined crises of capitalism and environmental changes challenges us all, whilst removing more traditional institutional responses. imagining new options into existence is indeed a tough ask. we have a desperate need for other stories, not fairy tales in which everything is possible for the pure of heart, courageous souls, or the reuniting of goodwill, but stories recounting how situations can be transformed when thinking they can be, achieved together by those who undergo them. not stories about morals but “technical” stories about this kind of achievement, about the kinds of traps that each had to escape, constraints the importance of which had to be recognized. in short, histories that bear on thinking together as a work to be done. and we need these histories to affirm their plurality, because it is not a matter of brennan: struggles for teacher education. . . 61 constructing a model but of a practical experiment. because it is not a matter of converting us but of repopulating the devastated desert of our imaginations. 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(2009). dark funds of knowledge, deep funds of pedagogy: exploring boundaries between lifeworlds and schools. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 30(3), 317– 331. marie brennan extraordinary professor stellenbosch university south africa mtbocbrennan@gmail.com http://ulsf.org/talloires-declaration/ mailto:mtbocbrennan@gmail.com 66 journal of education, no. 69, 2017 article title (size 12; bold; times new roman) www.jsser.org journal of social studies education research sosyalbilgilereğitimiaraştırmalarıdergisi 2020:11 (1),192-212 192 teaching values of islamic communism in surakarta: issues in the first quarter of the 20th century syamsul bakri1 abstract this study explores teaching values of islamic communism in the colonial era in surakarta indonesia in the 20th century. as islam and communism are generally viewed as being incompatible, this looked at the distinctive and uncommon fusion of these two ideologies and the main ideas behind islamic communism. using content analysis this study examined three popular magazines in this era whose news affected political and social changes in the overall java. four steps of historical methods were applied including: heuristic, source critic, interpretation, and historiography. results show that the history of the indonesian movement and its ideologies included a blend of ideas from islam and communism, which later led to the notion of islamic communism. to achieve this, its proponents sought to find the matching points between the two ideologies and erase any notion that might disassociate them allowing syncretism ideology. the two ideologies, when combined, were employed in the struggle against capitalism and colonialism. islam was perceived as defending the rights of the indigenous people being oppressed by colonialism. the emergent of communists then claimed that their doctrine, which rejected colonialism and capitalism, was wholly in line with islamic jihadism idea in terms of fighting the negative effects of the above two ideologies. keywords: islamic communism, ideology of resistance, theology of liberation, revolution, anti-capitalism introduction mainstream muslims view islam and communism from a polarized point of view. much like christianity and liberalism, communism is largely viewed as an enemy of islam. the integration of islam and communism is therefore unusual, because communism is perceived as an antireligious ideology (marx and engels, 2009). however, in certain historical epochs, such as the movement period in surakarta, the integration of communism and islam became a popular notion. indeed, the actions of the leftist scholars in surakarta during the colonial era of the early 20th century were viewed as a radical movement. 1assoc. prof. state islamic institute (iain) of surakarta, indonesia; syamsbakr99@gmail.com mailto:syamsbakr99@gmail.com journal of social studies education research 2020: 11(1), 192-212 islamic communism once flourished in surakarta in the early 20thcentury. this school of thought was driven by pious scholars, such as hadji misbach, achmad dasoeki and haroenrasjid, as well as the religious teachers at moe’allimin mardi boesono surakarta (misbach, 2000; hongxuan, 2018). they criticized capitalism, colonialism, and the establishment through theirspeeches (redaksi kbbi, 2002). these peasant-based activists viewed communism as being compatible with basic islamic principles (ricklefs, 2007), something that is considered unconventional among mainstream muslims. this research was inspired by several previous studies, including shiraishi’s (1997) study entitled zaman bergerak: radikalisme rakyat di jawa, 1912–1926 (an age in motion: popular radicalism in java, 1912-1926). this study explored the political movement of the early 20thcentury that became a source of inspiration for modern indonesian politics and the forerunner of indonesian nationalism and islamic communism as a political movement. other research by huda (2013), entitled discourse on islamism and communism: tracking intellectual genealogy of hadji mohammad misbach 1876-1926), tracks the intellectual roots of hadji misbach, and early communist figure who raised the idea of islam and communism. recent research conducted by hongxuan (2018) examined the confluence of islam and communism in the netherlands east indies from 1915 to 1927. it examined the nature of the discourses linking communism with islam by exploring the profusion of anti-colonial printed works from the period. it also includes a brief examination of dutch reports and oral testimonies about the role of islam and communism in motivating participants in the 1926–1927 communist uprisings. however, none of those studies specifically discussed islamic communist thinking, which resulted from a unique blend that existed only in the dutch east indies in the early quarter of the 20th century. we outline this research to figure out the integration of communism and islam and the character of islamic communism, namely its basic nature (penyusun, 1990). in terms of its thinking, the character of islamic communism considered in this study differed from other schools of thought at the time. indeed, a different interpretation of islam emerged through the combination of islam and communism (ranuwihardjo, 2000), resulting in a revolutionary new religious outlook that opposed colonial government and sided with the oppressed. specifically, we focus two issues on syncretism thoughts and characteristic of islamic communism doctrines. the islamic communism doctrines are elaborated into (a) islam as the foundation of islamic struggle bakri progressiveness, (b) radicalism in anti-capitalism, (c) commitment to social advocacy, (d) islamic anti-formalism, and (e) the “equally equal” principle. methods this study was a content analysis from which corpora were analyzed. thematic content analysis that emphasized on qualitative content approach was applied. definitely, this research assigned a historical method, which consisted of four stages, namely heuristic, source criticism, interpretation, and historiography. the primary data source for this research was three popular magazines published in surakarta from the early quarter of the 20th century, the so-called movement period. these magazines were medan moeslimin (published 1915–1926), islam bergerak (published 1917–1923), and ra’jat bergerak (published 1923). in the heuristic stage, we searched for material on which to work to acquire sources of information and focus on the magazines available. in the criticism, we made appraisement of the material or sources from the viewpoint of evidential values that pertained to islamic values, communism and social phenomena. we conducted evaluation and criticism to find the accurate data and verify to achieve a fixed data. having the data accurate, we made synthesis and exposition by defining formal statement of the findings of heuristic and criticism, and writing the historical data (spinning clino, 2005). in the last step, we wrote systematically in logical view about the people, meanings, events, and ideas, and themes of the past that shaped the present (ecu university australia, 2019). findings and discussion syncretism ideological thoughts the first section of the findings is syncretism of islamic thoughts. this study found that islamic communism was a blend of ideas that later transformed into a social movement. syncretism is a new idea formed from an amalgamation of two or more different ideas to make something that is harmonious and balanced (redaksi, 2002), and the anti-capitalist movement of islamic communism is an example of this. communism is a political ideology that embraces the teachings of karl marx and friedrich engels, as written in their manifest der kommunistischen partei (manifesto of the communist party) (marx & engels, 2007), which was first published on february 21, 1848 in london and soon reached paris. this manifesto covered communist theory journal of social studies education research 2020: 11(1), 192-212 and an analysis of the class struggle, and it later became the basis of one of the most influential political movements in the world of international politics (misbach, 1925a; turner, 1981). communism teaches that social improvement needs to begin with the workers (the proletariat). the proletariat’s struggle against the hegemony of the bourgeoisie (i.e., the capitalists) has affected the emergence of communism as a political movement in various parts of the world. from the perspective of communism, the history and dynamics of society is essentially a history of class inequality (turner, 1981). communism attempts to mobilize the proletariat in the struggle against the bourgeoisie to eliminate social divides. the term proletariat, which derives from the latin word proletarius for the lowest class of roman citizens, was used by marx and engels to refer to paid laborers, who, having no means of independent production, sell their labor to continue surviving (hunt, 1957). the term bourgeoisie, meanwhile, refers to the capitalists that own the means of production and capital and thus employ laborers for their economic activities. communism is actually not just a political dogma. following karl marx’s death, communism developed into a comprehensive worldwide view as a political doctrine (outhwaite, 2008). based on the magazine archives de philosophie, which was published in france before world war ii, njoto (1962) describes how the teachings of karl marx were not merely related to the procedures and the design of government. they represented not just a technical solution to an economic problem, an alternative stance, or a catchy slogan in a moving speech but rather a vast interpretation of humanity’s history, of beings and society, and of nature and god. in short, it is a comprehensive system. as such a comprehensive system, communism is built upon three interrelated concepts of political economics, philosophy, and history. the material dialectic that became one of its philosophies distanced it from religion (communism, n.d.). communism is, in essence, a revolutionary movement presuming that the entire structure of society must be improved (hunt, 1957). it is therefore classified as leftist. however, there is a distinction between a leftist and a communist, although there is some overlap. soekarno (1966) claimed that a communist is a leftist, but a leftist is not necessarily a communist. indeed, any desire to enhance social justice can be said to be leftist. socialism, meanwhile, refers to providing welfare for the economically vulnerable people in order to achieve social and political stability (islam bergerak, september 1, 1919, 1). to achieve social welfare in a political and economic system, it is necessary to make some capital public bakri property. some movements perceive socialism as apolitical and economic system that expects the results of production to become public property by removing the property and capital of individuals. such a socialist doctrine is part of the larger leftist ideology (socialism), but while every communist is also a socialist, not every socialist is a communist (islam bergerak, august 1, 1922 p. 2.) communism is a socialist ideology that has its own distinctive philosophical model that includes political radicalism, proletarian revolution, revolutionary social movement, and militant action against capitalism (schwartz, 2009; soekarno, 1963). islam, meanwhile, is one of the abrahamic religions that teaches monotheistic principles. islam has an ideology of change, as well as a culture in social life. it occupies the same position as previous religions, such as judaism and christianity (saikal, 2007). from a theological perspective, islam and communism are often perceived as being diametrically opposed. in a socio-political context, movements rooted in religious principles are often viewed as being right wing, while communism is left wing. communism is also seen as anti-religious, because marx and engels (2009, p.8–9) called religion “the opium of the people.” however, not all people feel a need to alienate communism from religion, as seen in various regions, including the east indies, where communism began to support the movement of muslims (soekarno, 1963). the integration of islam and communism occurred because both have a corresponding social doctrine, namely an attitude of responsibility toward the weak. what is more, the universal nature of islam has implications for the emergence of the interpretive variants of this religion. in this context, islamic communism is viewed as a model of islam for the world of anti-capitalist movements. the communist movement, which aims to fight for the workers, is considered by anti-capitalist islamists as being in line with islam (ricklefs, 2007). in addition, communism and leftist movements tend to flourish in societies where people’s quality of life is deteriorating (gie, 1999). in the colonial era, most of the affected indigenous people were marginalized. they were poor and oppressed, and they were often referred to as krama (materu, 1970; hm nasruddin anshoriy, 2008). to liberate themselves from the grip of the capitalist colonial rulers, the krama embarked on a socialist revolution (islamic communism, 2004). in the history of the national movement, efforts to integrate socialism and islam were widely pursued. tan malaka, who was well aware of the contradiction between islam and communism, presented a view for merging pan-islamism and communism (schwartz, 2009). marco also initiated the integration of socialism and islam, while misbach presented the case of communism journal of social studies education research 2020: 11(1), 192-212 as a form of islamic struggle (gie, 1999). tjokroaminoto (2003) also presented a concept for harmonizing the ideals of socialism and islam, one that explains islam from the perspective of the people’s struggle against the evil of capitalism. the integration of islam and communism was intended to bring about a just social order under a religious command and thus prevent capitalism from exploiting people. both conform to ideals of equality, and they echoed the struggle of the oppressed indonesian people (soekarno, 1963). by ignoring the element of atheism, it became possible to combine communism with islam. this led to the thoughts and movements that came to be referred to as islamic communism (ricklefs, 2007; mcvey, 2006). misbach (1925d, 1926a), however, referred to the movement as revolutionary islam or the islamic communist party of indonesia. islamic communism is therefore regarded as a variant of islam (tim syarikat, 2003), but this understanding is flawed because the noun in the phrase is “communism” rather than “islam.” the term islamic communism therefore implies an islamic tone in a communist movement, thus emphasizing a concern for the plight of oppressed people (islam bergerak, august 20, 1922 p. 2). this movement was intended to address the challenges of the socio-political dynamics of the early 20thcentury in the east indies. islamic communism differs from the islamic socialism of modern intellectuals like agoes salim and tjokroaminoto. it is defined as a movement to implement the teachings of islam using the case of communism. the term islamic communism is considered more appropriate than the term communist muslim or communist islam (effendi, 2010). the term communist muslim would refer to a communist-minded muslim, but this would be far from unique because most indonesian communists were muslims. this study also avoids the term communist islam to avoid confusing it as an islamic sect. instead, islamic communism is an islamic movement that uses the perspective of communism as a tool for its struggle. it is a movement to realize the ideals of islam through communism, namely by freeing people from the oppression and misery caused by capitalism and colonialism. from this perspective, islamic communism can be viewed as an ideology of resistance (syari’ati, 1994). as syari’ati (1994) argues, islam needs to be viewed as an ideological and political superstructure in order to shape human nature and create just societies. it is a revolutionary ideology that transforms the status quo into a humanistic social order. in a more concrete form, islam needs to be regarded as a protest religion and the ideology of resistance to oppression. bakri islamic communism is, in essence, an interpretation of the religion from the perspective of communism (gie, 1994). this perspective then becomes a form of thought based on religious beliefs (islam), using communism as a way to struggle (tim syarikat, 2003). islam is often associated with indigenous interests, thus acting as a unifying force against the “infidel” aggressors. this interpretive variant of islam, in the history of thought and its aftermath, is often confronted by a dominant islamic ideology that views islam at one end of the spectrum and communism at the opposite end. despite the constant resistance from the guardians of islamic orthodoxy, however, the strong communists consistently showed their militancy in their struggle to defend the oppressed. characteristics of islamic communism thought the second findings describe islamic communism doctrines by which integration of communism ideology and islam is persuasively used as the tool of the struggles. the doctrines infuse five teachings whose values have been acculturated to the recent contexts of the struggle at that time. the doctrines are (a) islam as the foundation of islamic struggle progressiveness, (b) radicalism in anti-capitalism, (c) commitment to social advocacy, (d) islamic anti-formalism, and (e) the “equally equal” principle the strong communist group intended to do what casanova (1994) called religious deprivatization, which is an effort to bring religion into the public sphere. islam is therefore used as the ideology of resistance in social and political thought. the character of islamic communist thinking is depicted through six points: 1) islam as the foundation of struggle, 2) progressive islam, 3) radical anti-capitalism, 4) commitment to social advocacy, 5) islamic anti-formalism, and 6) the “equally equal” principle. islam as the foundation of struggle a common feature of islamic communism is to use the holy verses of the qur’an to show the compatibility between islam and communism (pringgodigdo, 1967). misbach (1926a) meanwhile, made islam a cornerstone of the struggle while at the same time fighting for islam using the case of communism. islamic communism uses the teachings of islam as the basis for fighting the slander that stems from the existence of capitalism. misbach (1926b) also called the struggle a war against the causes of people’s suffering. islamic communist thinking, as s. journal of social studies education research 2020: 11(1), 192-212 hardjowijoto put it in the vergadering of sarekat islam (si) in pekalongan on december 23–24, 1923, was intended to fight capitalism as an obstacle to indigenous people exercising their religion (verslag pendek, 1923). misbach, meanwhile, asked muslims to review the qur’an before undertaking various activities. in the vergadering of si in kebumen on may 14, 1920, he said that anyone who did not obey the qur’an did not practice islam correctly (wongsodimedjo & slamet, 1920). from this perspective, acting according to the qur’an is compatible with a having a communist spirit and fighting capitalism. misbach therefore activated islam as a religion of protest with the ideology of resistance to capitalism and colonialism. islam is then implemented in the world of thought as follows: “i. b. views islam not to be separated from politics, but i. b. views islam not just as words and abase for the suppression of fellow human beings” (pembatja kita, november 10, 1922). he also said that the effort to uphold justice is an obligation for every muslimin order to achieve public salvation regardless of tribe and religion. the obligation for muslims is not just to foster individual transition but also emphasize the importance of promoting social transition through the world of thought (misbach, 1926a). from the perspective of islamic communism, revolutionary thought wars against people who worship lust and spread corruption with oppression (capitalism and imperialism) (i.e., people only interested in self-pleasures, including foreign and domestic capitalists). the struggle of communists is viewed as a struggle to ground islamic values in the context of social improvement and economic and political order to make society more just and civilized. the concept of misbach’s thinking can also be called a theology of liberation, which is a theology from the perspective of struggling to liberate society from colonialism. islam as practiced by communists is not merely intended to position islam as a principle of legal, symbolic, and organizational formality—it may be better interpreted as a mindset that puts islam at the base of thought, spirit, and morality, as well as a source of value. the presence of islamic communism, from the perspective of the intellectuals, is seen as favoring islam because the strong communists in surakarta were able to playa role in a liberation that generally left behind the leaders of islamic associations. in explaining the relationship between islam and communism, misbach quotes the qur’an, specifically letter az-zumar verse 18, about the necessity for a muslim to be a true muslim by way of communism (misbach, 1925b). this bakri means that communism is viewed as an effort to bring salvation to people in the world, as well as in the hereafter. this thought is similar to the idea of islamic teachings. in medan moeslimin, there is a strict expression: “muslims must involve themselves in the communist movement” (verslaggever 1925). this expression arises from the fact that it is the communists who are squarely focused on the struggle against capitalism and colonialism, while other indigenous people have become accomplices of the invaders. achmad dasoeki also used the verses of the qur’an as the basis for the struggle. he and sastrowidjono claimed that the way to allah (sabilillah) lay in communism (solo dan pemikirannja, 1924). in the vergadering of the sarekat indies (insulinde) in surakarta on 21–22 march, 1920, dasoeki described how the revolutionary struggle against the capitalists and the government was in accordance with islam (sastrosiswojo, 1920). islam became the foundation of every activity for misbach and the strong adherents of communism. when asked about public instigations against the policies of the colonial rulers, misbach firmly replied that such attitudes arose because they were motivated by islamic factors (verslaggever, 1920). capitalism is regarded as the enemy of islam, because it is considered the root cause of the collapse of morality, humanity, and religion (misbach, 1925a). for the strong adherents of communism, capitalism is considered to have lured muslims away from their religion because it only concerns itself with monetary gains, which is an affront to religion. in a meeting, the clerics of surakarta shouted anti-capitalist slogans like “insult religion! get down! get down!” while using a hammer as a symbol for the communist party of indonesia (pki)” (soekirno, 1923a). after misbach left java, islam was still considered to be a source of value in the communist struggle. in the si vergadering in mangkuyudan, surakarta on november 22–23, 1924, it was agreed that si and pki were true practices of muslim expression (redaksi, 1914). islamic communism viewed itself as part of an islamic social missionary endeavor, because islam suggests a fight against evil (gie, 1999). it is this islamic spirit that makes the strong adherents of communism radical in the fight against capitalism and the government. such an islamic perspective was not found in the doctrines of the comintern and the pki, so it became a distinctive characteristic of islamic communism. journal of social studies education research 2020: 11(1), 192-212 progressive islam as an ideology of resistance, islamic communism also opposed fatalistic religious ideology (deterministic, predestination) (glasse, 2002), such as the decrees of religious leaders who consider oppression as part of god’s will. the fatalistic view of this era of thought was represented by a group that considered poverty and oppression to be rules and plans unrelated to capitalism and colonialism (fakih, 2002). the condition is rather considered part of humanity’s long journey from which people must gain wisdom, because it is a situation created by god. this fatalistic view of islam is considered as weakening the anti-oppression spirit, so it opposes the ideology of resistance, where communists engaged in a progressive interpretation of islam in response to a static islamic understanding (jumud). in addition to undermining the spirit of revolution, fatalistic ideals helped the oppressors to assert their control more (sastrosiswojo, 1919). a student at jamsaren islamic boarding school asked muslims to interpret patience progressively rather than as a passive doctrine (djamsaren, 1920). this opinion came to be adopted by the people of surakarta, especially those emerged in the world of thought. misbach and his followers made efforts to ground islam in the realm of thought, and they regarded fatalistic theology as poison for the people. the communists conflicted with the politieke economische bond (djama’atoel chasanah) because this organization stressed the importance of a receptive attitude, passive (fatalistic) patience, and not resisting the oppressors (choesen, 1923). although the strong communist group was anti-fatalistic and opposed traditional islamists, this does not imply that they belonged to a modernist group. this group was actually in an opposite position to the modernist islamic group (mcvey, 2006), as represented by muhammadiyah and central sarekat islam (csi), because the modernist group cooperated with the dutch east indies government and the capitalists, and they did not want a revolutionary struggle. based on this explanation, it can be concluded that the strong communists deliberately developed a progressive interpretation of islam to counter the fatalistic orthodox understanding, as well as the modernists who did not view islam as an ideology of resistance. at the same time, it became the spirit of the anti-government and anti-capitalism struggle. bakri radicalism in anti-capitalism islamic communist thinking was radical and uncompromising toward capitalism (choesen, 1923). this can be seen in the calls in islam bergerak to use radical thought against the arbitrary acts perpetrated by the usurper (perpemikiran di hindia, 1918). in general, radical thinking often uses a distinctive idiom, such as revolution. the radical way of thinking was a central feature throughout misbach’s history and the communist struggle in surakarta. radical and revolutionary thought was seen as an effective way of resisting colonialism and capitalism (rachmad, 1919).revolution is therefore a religious command, just as misbach expressed in the sarekat islam (si) vergadering in kebumen: “brothers! the muslims are god’s warrior. they are obliged to sweep away any slander” (wongsodimedjo & slamet, 1920) and “al-quran letter 2, verse 189 says fight all slanders until they are cleansed” (misbach, 1923c). the call to fight against the enemies of islam shows that misbach’s thinking was radical and uncompromising in upholding the truth. the radicalism of the strong communists arose from cumulative events. the hatred culminating from tyranny was then systematically acquired in the form of islamic teachings and the platform of communism, because there is a doctrine in both that fosters a radical attitude in the fight against injustice (islam bergerak, august 1, 1918 p. 1). politically speaking, the radical attitude of islamic communism was influenced by semaun’s revolutionary thought. when he led the si of semarang, he undertook a paradigmatic revolution in politics and managed to influence half of the local sarekat islam associations. misbach himself was mentioned as semaun’s cadre in influencing the si in solo to become revolutionary (gie, 1999). this radical style emerged when anti-oppressive action was rarely voiced by members of indigenous associations. sjarief (1919), a student of a boarding school in surakarta, criticized the islamic leaders because they did not act decisively or play an active role in declaring islam in this mode of thought. the use of islamic teachings against oppression is seen as a fundamental aspect of islam. this radical style was an antithesis to capitalism and imperialism, as well as to the islamic formalists who remained silent. this attitude, which characterized the thinking of islamic communism, was very effective in mobilizing people. indeed, radicalism, from the perspective of social thought, was a prerequisite for mobilizing mass action. journal of social studies education research 2020: 11(1), 192-212 commitment to social advocacy the main similarity between the teachings of islam and communism lies in the commitment to social advocacy, especially defending the rights of the oppressed. applying the teachings of communism is therefore seen as practicing the teachings of islam without intending to equate the two. in essence, communist thinking is then a form of islamic practice (sirodj, 1923). islamic communism strongly condemned those who are solely concerned with their own affairs and refuse to enter the world of thought. they were referred to as a sleeping fool who need to be awakened (djalasoetra, 1923). the government of the dutch east indies fooled people in two ways, namely expanding the world of education and promoting moral decay through a culture of drinking liquor (redaksi, 1924). the former made people more sympathetic to the government, while the latter made people lazy and impoverished, so they had little opportunity to sharpen their minds. social advocacy is also achieved by rejecting the interest-based financial system that further adds to the suffering of the economically weak. this rejection is part of islamic communist thinking (islam bergerak, august 20, 1922, 2) while muhammadiyah strengthened the issue of economic practice with an interest-based financial system. based on this explanation, it can be inferred that the strong communist commitment to social advocacy is shown in populist thinking, namely that which directly touches upon the problem of poverty. this was characteristic of the communists when the bourgeoisie developed a discourse of indigenous progress through western models of education and the orthodox guardians of islam. islamic anti-formalism the communists viewed themselves as opponents of the islamic formalism from clerics, the leaders of islamic societies, and muslims who lacked any real political desire to oppose persecution. this attitude implies that the role of worship in cultivating social transgressions does not necessarily bring about political thought (hurgronje, 1999). they were opposed by misbach’s group for not wanting to carry out their religious duty, namely to fight oppression, and misbach called them hypocrites (misbach, 1922; red, 1919). misbach also dared to say that a true islamist is not a formal muslim but rather one who hones god’s teachings for salvation. the formalist islam group, in the opinion of the communists, was considered as too often feeling that it was always right, and it only thought about its own benefit, bakri especially for the leaders. on the other hand, true muslims are those who view religion as a guide and path to salvation, both in the world and the hereafter (misbach, 1925b). in the vergadering of the si of pekalongan, misbach opposed discussing the problem of religious formalism, which was not related to the expression of thought. theoretical discussion was considered to be an unproductive, non-transformative way of liberating the oppressed nation. misbach actually led the idea of islamic communism while criticizing the religious leaders and the bourgeoisie in the vergadering (verslag pendek dari open bare open lucht vergaddering si pekalongan pada tanggal 23-24 desember 1922, 1923). the orthodox guardian leaders of islam were accused of making islam a theory rather than practicing it (loebis, 1923). true islam, from the perspective of the communists, was a form of islam manifested in the world of political thought (dasoeki, 1923). islamic groups who withdrew from the world of political thought, such as muhammadiyah and djama’atoel chasanah, were considered to be organizations that reduced islam to a theory. the same was put to al-irsyad in betawi, which he called an opportunistic wahhabist who refused to enter the world of thought (jufrij, 1923). for the communists, religion had to be used as an inspiration for the anti-capitalism struggle. the islam practiced by the silent clerics was therefore questionable. islam in that era of thought in surakarta was dynamically activated by the strong communists as an ideology of change. the muhammadiyah leaders were also criticized as sycophants (troenodjojo, 1921). misbach and the strong communists considered muhammadiyah, djama’atoel chasanah, and the politieke economische bond (peb) as hypocritical and untrue islamic groups (islam bergerak, january 20,1922). the discourse of true islamists and the mild (i.e., pseudo, hypocritical) islamists became a distinctive feature of islam bergerak after the split between the satv revolutionary group and thesatv muhammadiyah. muhammadiyah and peb were accused of being mild islamist groups that sold religion for personal and group interests (islam bergerak, april 10, 1923, 2). the peb was considered a slave to the capitalists and a colonial spy (soekirno, 1923a). in turn, the muhammadiyah group accused misbach’s group of being traitors to muhammadiyah, sarekat islam, and muslims in general (oetoesan hindia, 1922). from the perspective of islamic communism, islamic associations such as muhammadiyah, central sarekat islam (csi), and djama’atoel chasanah were more engaged in islamic thought in a symbolic sense, especially for typical formal islamic issues (e.g., mahdloh worship, morals, islam, etc.). they did not discuss matters of injustice, oppression, and exploitation, and they journal of social studies education research 2020: 11(1), 192-212 were perceived as being trapped in the world of colonialism and capitalism, thus preventing religion from plunging into the world of thought. the peb group accused misbach of creating an atheistic form of thinking that went against islamic principles (soekirno, 1923a). thecsi, under the leadership of tjokroaminoto, also viewed communism as a danger that could mislead muslims. the book of islam and socialism, written in 1924, was intended to ensure that muslims acted consistently with religion-based socialism, and rejected marxism, which was thought to diminish the importance of religion (tjokroaminoto, 2003). csi and muhammadiyah were representative islamic associations that consistently advocated socialism based on islam, namely the progress of manners and virtue in society according to the teachings of muhammad (tjokroaminoto, 2003). the pki itself, however, claimed it did not diminish religious beliefs. communist thinking in the east indies was so strict that the pki maintained the sanctity of religion, but it opposed any group that used religion as a mask (soekirno, 1923b). the islamic associations representing the status quo were referred to as masked moslems, because they talked about religion but never sought to resist capitalism, which was the major cause of public suffering (soetera, 1923b). for misbach, islam had to manifest in the form of reflection by seeking the causes of people’s suffering and removing them (misbach, 1923a). through this way of thinking, misbach and the communists of surakarta assumed that the mild islamic associations refused to entertain anti-capitalism thinking (misbach, 1925a). misbach’s harsh attitude in attacking muhammadiyah and the peb actually triggered a negative response from some muslims. the attack was seen as a clumsy attempt, one likened to burning down a house to kill the rats, to cleanse islam of hypocrites by destroying islam itself (choesen, 1923). in response to such criticism, the editor of islam bergerak claimed that muhammadiyah was just an association and not a religion, so criticizing muhammadiyah did not constitute attacking islam (red, 1923). the “equally equal” principle the term “equally equal” was first used by marco kartodikromo (1918a) in the sinar djawa newspaper (sinar djawa, number 81 on 10 april 10, 1918). on april 16, 1918, kartodikromo (1918b) wrote another article entitled equally equal in the same newspaper. this article sought to ask the indigenous people to get along well and think about the condition of oppression and bakri occupation being imposed by foreign nations. the term then became popular among the mindset and was adopted as a communist idiom (islam bergerak august 1, 1922 and red (1919) this was not surprising given how this term resonated with popular thought, which was antithetical to capitalism (soedjopranoto, 1921). by the end of 1919, the formation of a democratic “equally equal” government was an aspiration of various indigenous groups in vorstenlanden (s. h., 1919). this ideal was a typical manifestation of the struggle to create a classless society, as evidenced in the political doctrine of karl marx. this idea is also considered compatible with islamic teaching, which views that all human beings have the same value (pakoealaman, 1922; rachmad, 1919). froman islamic perspective, this principle could be interpreted as al-musawah (egalitarianism) (boeroeh, 1918), and it became the forerunner to the struggle to create a rule based on togetherness and public interest, which is an important part of islamic teaching (misbach, 1923b). the basic idea behind islamic communism is achieving egalitarianism by creating a classless society (i.e. an “equally equal” society) (misbach, 1926). like misbach, dasoeki (1921) also claimed that being “equally equal” was the utopian ideal of a classless society achieved by upholding justice. indeed, justice is part of islamic teaching and a prerequisite for achieving an egalitarian society (hidajat, 1918). the doctrine of “equally equal” can be interpreted as religious egalitarianism in that god alone is greater, with all others having the same value. the notion was not just theoretical, because it had the practical effect of evoking the indigenous people’s attitude against the oppressors (prawirowinoto, 1919). the emergent islamic communist thinking was actually intended as a protest against muslim leaders who promoted islam as merely formal worship. they judged them as liking to question amoral behavior but preferring to be silent about anti-social behavior (ranuwihardjo, 2000). the communists thus came to oppose religious formalism because it was seen as diminishing religious thought. islamic communism emphasized an effort to bring religion into the public sphere, while the proponents of the status quo desired to lead religion into the private sphere. journal of social studies education research 2020: 11(1), 192-212 conclusion and pedagogical implication our study has described syncretism in the islamic communism and doctrines of islamic communism as the main ideology of surakarta communism. in summary, the integration of communism and islam in surakarta in the early quarter of the 20thcentury was a syncretism fusion, one where communist thinking could not be separated from the perspective of islam. in other words, islam was interpreted through the lens of communism. this demonstrates how islamic thought grows and evolves according to the historical dynamics surrounding it. the basic idea behind islamic communism doctrine is achieving egalitarianism by creating a an “equally equal” of society apparently appears in capitalism. the early quarter of the 20thcentury was a time of movement for the indigenous people of indonesia, specifically in terms of a growing desire to resist colonialism and capitalism. at the same time, this popular movement grew in tandem with both moslems and communists. due to having similar views about the causes of the indigenous people’s oppression, the ideologies within islam and communism were considered compatible, so islamic communism became established. this fact asserts that islamic communism has a revolutionary style with a religious spirit, and it can be viewed as an ideology of resistance. it gained strong support in surakarta in the first quarter of the twentieth century, because islamic communism begins with the assumption that the poverty and suffering of people are caused by injustices in the economic systems and structures, culture, and social and political systems. from the perspective of islamic communism, islam is viewed as a religion that should encourage resistance to various forms of oppression. the findings of the study evidently identify that recent phenomena that address islam and radicalism addressed and polarization of destructive islamic values are misleading issues. this implies that teaching history should define distinctive historical value between communism and islam. future researches are suggested to focus on recent development of the doctrines viewing islamic teaching that are now growing in the society in harmony. references arkoun, m. 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(july 1, 1920). openbare vergadering kring s. i. alijan (keboemen) pada 14 mei 1920. islam bergerak. perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd flexibilizarea legislatiei muncii în contextul modelelor capitalismului abstract: in the this paper i will analize the 2011`s flexibilization of labor law in the theoretical framework of varieties of capitalism. the analysis will focus on 4 types of flexibilization: numerical flexibilization, salary flexibility, organizational flexibility and labor-time flexibility. the documents i will compare are the labor law from 2003 and the labor law from 2011. for both laws i have analyzed the same articles corresponding with every flexibilization type and i have identified if there existed any changes. the main idea was to identify if there were any changes in the model of market economy after flexibilization of labor law. keywords: flexibilization, varieties of capitalism, liberal market economy, liberal market economy, dependent market economy. în articolul de fata voi analiza situatia flexibilizarii legislatiei muncii din 2011 în contextul modelelor capitalismului. practic, voi analiza gradul de flexibilizare al pietei muncii si modalitatea în care a fost influentata tipologia economiei de piata de schimbarile din domeniul legislatiei muncii. analiza mea se va concentra pe 4 tipuri de flezibilizare: flexiblilitate numerica; flexibilitatea salariului; flexiblitate organizationala si flexibilitate a timpului de lucru (cato & stoller, 2004, 34; atkinson, 1984; barbieri, 2009, 621), iar documentele analizate vor fi codurile muncii din 2003 (legea 53/2003) si din 2011 (codul muncii din 2003 repulicat în monitorul oficial, partea i, nr. 345, din 18 mai 2011). în final voi încerca sa încadrez capitalismul românesc într-una dintre tipologiile modelelor capitalismului aparute în literatura de specialitate. 1. modele ale capitalismului abordarea modelelor capitalismului (voc) este concentrata mai degraba pe actorii pe care îi putem identifica si care sunt priviti de reglementarile de la nivel politic. în plus, identifica economia politica drept un loc în care îsi desfasoara activitatea multiplii actori, iar fiecare dintre ei încearca sa ghideze actiunile în functie de interese strategice (howell, 2003; scharpf, 1997). „actorii relevanti pot fi indivizii, firmele, grupurile de producatori sau guvernele” (hall & soskice, 2001, 6). aceasta abordare pleaca de la literatura neo-corporatista si încearca oferirea unui raspuns nou cu privire la functionarea institutiilor în cadrul capitalismului neoliberal (arpad, 2015, 82). alexandru liþã masterul studii de muncã, s.n.s.p.a. an ii, masterand perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd 3/24/2017 2:52 pm page 29 putem identifica economia de piata liberala ca situatia în care firmele îsi coordoneaza activitatile prin intermediul ierarhiilor si prin intermediul competitiei de pe piata. economia de piata coodronata depinde într-un grad ridicat de relatii non-comerciale pentru a-si coordona interactiunile cu alti actori (hall & soskice, 2001, 8; hall & gingerich, 2009, 452). în general, literatura de specialitate considera ca tara cea mai apropiata ca forma a institutiilor de modelul economiei de piata liberala este statele unite ale americii, în timp ce germania este asociata cu economia de piata coordonata (nölke & vliegenthart, 2009, 670; arpad, 2015, 82). personal consider ca de modelul economiei de piata coordonate sunt mai apropiate, ca practici, politici si institutii, statele scandinave (danemarca, suedia, chiar si norvegia). domeniile pe care teoreticienii si teoreticienele abordarii modelelor capitalismului le au în vedere atunci când diferentiaza între cele doua tipuri de economie de piata (liberala si coordonata) sunt: structurarea relatiilor industriale, pregatirea vocationala si educatia, relatiile dintre companii, guvernarea corporatista si relatiile dintre angajati (hall & soskice, 2001, 6-7; arpad, 2015, 82). 1.1. economia de piata liberala modelul economiei de piata liberale este tipic pentru statele ce adopta politici neo-liberale (în special sua). pentru acest model, companiile folosesc capital propriu (de la investitori) marcat printr-un nivel de transparenta crescut, iar accesul companiilor la finante externe depinde de oferta. sindicatele sunt destul de slabe, piata muncii este fluida, iar din aceasta cauza contractul de munca este mai degraba rezultatul negocierii dintre angajator si angajat. în ceea ce priveste educatia, din cauza fluiditatii pietei muncii, tinerii si tinerele sunt nevoiti sa investeasca în aptitudini generale, nu specifice. transferul de tehnologie este realizat prin licenta sau printr-un expert personal, iar standardele sunt stabilite prin intermediul pietei. managerii beneficiaza de un grad crescut de autoritate în toate aspectele care privesc compania . în general, firmele sunt în competitie cu alti actori (alte firme, sindicate, etc) si nu colaboreaza cu acestia. ca exemple pentru acest model sunt: sua, marea britanie, australia, canada, noua zeelanda, irlanda (hall & gingerich, 2009, 454; hall & soskice, 2001). 1.2. economia de piata coordonata de cealalta parte, în economiile de piata coordonate observam ca firmele sunt conectate la retele de co-participatii, iar managerii sunt mai putin sensibilil la probleme legate de profitabilitate imediata. sindicatele sunt puternice, exista consilii de munca, de asemenea, puternice, protectia angajatilor este si ea crescuta, în timp ce piata muncii este mai putin fluida. managerii companiilor au un grad de autoritate scazut, deciziile la nivelul companiilor ce îi implica si pe angajati fiind importante. ca ultim aspect, educatia este concentrata mai degraba pe oferirea de cunostiinte specifice unui anumit domeniu decât pe oferirea de cunostiinte generale. tarile care se încadreaza în aceasta tipologie sunt: danemarca, suedia, norvegia, germania, corea de sud, austria, finlanda, japonia, belgia, olanda si elvetia (hall & gingerich, 2009, 454; hall & soskice, 2001). 30 perspective politice perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd 3/24/2017 2:52 pm page 30 1.3. economia de piata dependenta un alt model al capitalismului este economia de piata dependenta. acest tip de economie de piata este specific în statele din europa centrala si de est si se evidentiaza printr-o dependenta crescuta fata de capitalul strain (ban,2014, 219; nolke & vliegenhard, 2009; bohle & greskovits, 2012). practic, mana de lucru ieftina alaturi de ansamblul de legi care garanteaza profitabilitatea capitalului strain (de care aceste economii este dependent) creaza linii de asamblare. în tot procesul capitalist global, rolul economiilor de piata dependente este de asamblare, iar acest lucru aduce de la sine inutilitatea investitiilor în cercetare (nolke & vliegenhard, 2009). perioada de început a capitalismului românesc, denumita de cornel ban si „capitalism cocktail” (2014, 219), îmbina politici si practici atât din ceea ce acum numim economie de piata coordonata cât si din economia de piata liberala. practic, institutiilor negocierii colective li se alaturau masuri precum cota unica de impozitare sau masuri flexibile pentru angajator în ceea ce priveste schimbarea activitatii economice a companiei. treptat, neoliberalismul a devenit ideologia/doctrina economica dominanta si acceptata de catre mediul economic si politic (ban, 2014). acest lucru a însemnat flexibilizarea pietei muncii, flexibilizarea relatiilor industriale si chiar crearea unui nivel crescut de atractivitate a economiei românesti pentru investitorii straini (ban, 2014, 217). cel din urma aspect presupune: 1. mutarea poverii fiscale de pe umerii capitalului pe umerii muncii si consumului; 2. eliminarea sau diminuarea competentelor institutiilor ce ar putea crea costuri prea mari pentru capital si productie; 3. înasprirea accesului la ajutoare de somaj si la servicii sociale (ban, 2014, 217). astfel, economia de piata româneasca a devenit una de dependenta, care se încadreaza perfect în tiparul economiilor de piata dependente. iar pentru economiile de piata dependente, deci pentru atractivitatea economiei, este important ca legislatia (în principiu cea care tine de munca, dar nu numai) sa fie flexibila. 2. flexibilizarea pietei muncii pietele fortei de munca difera foarte mult de la un stat la altul si, la fel, ca în multe alte domenii, acestea sunt date de legislatia în vigoare (dar nu numai de aceasta). fiecare stat (uneori alaturi de partenerii sociali) îsi alege strategia pe care vrea sa o adopte în ceea ce priveste dezvoltarea pietei fortei de munca. în unele situatii îsi asuma o strategie prin apartenenta la diferite institutii internationale sau transnationale. spre exemplu, prin apartenanta la uniunea europeana, prin strategia lisabona statele membre (pentru ca au ratificat tratatul de la lisabona) si-au asumat ca se angajeaza sa favorizeze flexibilitatea pietei muncii în armonie cu siguranta locului de munca (albu, caraiani & iordan, 2012, 48). în alte cazuri, statul stabileste reglementarile ce se aplica pietei fortei de munca prin consultarea diferitelor grupuri de interese (patronate, sindicate sau/si alti actori impliati). flexibilizarea în termenii relatiillor internationale înseamna hegemonia modelului nord american (fernandez & otis, 2007, 64), în timp ce în termeni marxisti înseamna imperialism. practic, flexibilizarea este catalogata drept o schimbare în directia modelului economiei de piata liberale, luând ca reper cadrul modelelor capitalismului descris în capitolul anterior. flexibilizarea pietei muncii semnifica existenta unor prevederi legislative ce permit angajatorului conditii mai laxe si un set mai restrâns de obligatii fata de un cadru legislativ anterior. aceste prevederi legisltive care determina flexibilizarea pot viza: timpul de lucru, plata angajatilor, posibilitatea de schimbare a activitatii economice, durata contractelor de munca, dar decembrie 2016 31perspective politice perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd 3/24/2017 2:52 pm page 31 si conditiile de organizare sindicala si negociere colectiva (desi aceste ultime doua aspect nu va fi inclus n aceasta lucrare). de asemenea, desi prin flexibilizare unii autori înteleg si tranzitia reusita din sistemul de educatie la locul de munca, de la un loc de munca la altul, pâna la iesirea de pe piata muncii (stanculescu, 2009, 67), aceasta conditie nu este obligatorie. în mod analog, o piata a muncii reglementata (deci mai putin flexibila) presupune un set de conditii specifice. flexibilizarea pietei muncii, dintr-o perspectiva practica, poate fi înteleasa pe 4 paliere: flexiblilitate numerica; flexibilitatea salariului; flexiblitate organizationala si flexibilitate a timpului de lucru (cato & stoller, 2004, 34; atkinson, 1984; barbieri, 2009, 621). flexibilitatea numerica semnifica masuri de slabire a contractului pe perioada determinata si cresterea frecventei contractelor pe perioada determinata. flexibilitatea salariului face referire la doua componente existente în plata: partea fixa (salariul de baza) si partea flexibila (sub forma sporurilor de performana acordate la atingerea unor „target-uri”). flexibilitatea organizationala vizeaza abilitatea unitatii de productie de a combina modelele organizationale existente cu noi tehnici de organizare la locul de munca. flexibilitatea timpului de lucru implica stabilirea numarul maxim de ore lucrate, numarul de ore discontinue de munca si chiar stabilirea modalitatii prin care este asigurat concediul de odihna (cato & stoller, 2004, 34; atkinson, 1984; barbieri, 2009, 621). pentru mai multa claritate voi devini mai pe larg aceste 4 categorii la momentul analizarii legislatiei. o limita pe care o are aceasta teorie este legata de excluderea altor paliere legislative în analiza flexibilizarii. spre exemplu, în românia în momentul 2011, au fost supuse modificarilor si legislatia care prevedea crearea dialogul social. unde dialog social însemana: crearea de sindicate, obtinerea reprezentativitatii, negocieri colective, conditiile în care se declara o greva, precum si alte aspecte ce nu au fost enumerate. astfel, piata muncii din românia a suferit o flexibilizare ce nu poate fi încadrata în niciuna dintre categoriile enumerate de teorie. cu toate acestea, analiza mea se va concentra doar pe codurile muncii (din 2003 si 2011) din perspectiva directiilor propuse de teorie. 3. codurile muncii comparate în aceasta parte a articolului meu voi compara codul muncii adoptat în 2003 (legea 53/2003) si varianta sa republicata în monitorul oficial nr. 345 din 18 mai 2011. palierele pe care voi compara aceste doua cadre legislative (legi) sunt: flexiblilitate numerica; flexibilitatea salariului; flexiblitate organizationala si flexibilitate a timpului de lucru. cum am afirmat anterior, desi flexibilizarea legislatiei care vizeaza dialogul social este foarte importanta si constituie esenta flexibilizarii pietei muncii din 2011, nu o voi avea în vedere în acest moment. pentru fiecare directie de flexibilizare voi trata comparativ articolele cele mai importante pentru fiecare palier al flexibilizarii. astfel, urmaresc sa identific care este gradul în care s-a facut flexibilizarea si daca aceste aspecte influenteaza în mod radical tipul de economie de piata existent în românia. 3.1. flexibilitatea numerica flexibilitatea numerica semnifica masurile de slabire a contractului pe durata nedeterminata. acest aspect al flexibilizarii vizeaza existenta, dar si frecventa contractelor pe perioada determinata, angajare sezoniera si munca în acord (cato & stoller, 2004, 34; atkinson, 1984; bar32 perspective politice perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd 3/24/2017 2:52 pm page 32 bieri, 2009, 621). transpuse în legislatie, aceste reglementari semnifica scaderea numarului de contracte pe perioada nedeterminata, precum si un control crescut al angajatorilor fata de activitatea angajatilor. în ambele legi (53/2003 si varianta sa republicata în 2011), titlul ii, capitolul 1, defineste contractul individual de munca si stabileste conditiile în care se poate încheia acesta. articolul 10 defineste termenul de contract indivudual de munca, iar aticolul 11 face referire la clauzele pe care le poate avea acesta. articolul 12 stipuleaza ca: orice contract individual se încheie pe perioada nedeterminata, iar alineatul 2 mentioneaza ca pot exista si exceptii de la articolul 1. în aceasta ordine de idei, contractul individual de munca pe perioada determinata ar trebui sa constituie o exceptie în ambele legislatii. pentru a întelege care sunt conditiile în care se pot încheia contracte individuale de munca pe perioada determinata propun analizarea articolului 81 din legea 53/2003 si a articolului 83 din varianta republicata în 2011. numerotarea difera întru-cât au mai fost adaugate articole în 2011. situatiile în care era acceptat contractul pe perioada determinata în legislatia din 2003 erau: a) inlocuirea unui salariat in cazul suspendarii contractului sau de munca, cu exceptia situatiei in care acel salariat participa la greva; b) cresterea temporara a activitatii angajatorului; c) desfasurarea unor activitati cu caracter sezonier; d) in situatia in care este incheiat in temeiul unor dispozitii legale emise cu scopul de a favoriza temporar anumite categorii de persoane fara loc de munca; e) in alte cazuri prevazute expres de legi speciale. la acestea s-au adaugat în 2011: e) angajarea unei persoane care, in termen de 5 ani de la data angajarii, indeplineste conditiile de pensionare pentru limita de varsta; f) ocuparea unei functii eligibile in cadrul organizatiilor sindicale, patronale sau al organizatiilor neguvernamentale, pe perioada mandatului; g) angajarea pensionarilor care, in conditiile legii, pot cumula pensia cu salariul; iar ultimul punct a fost completat cu: h) in alte cazuri prevazute expres de legi speciale ori pentru desfasurarea unor lucrari, proiecte sau programe. astfel, primele 3 puncte adaugate nu asigura în mod explicit un numar sensibil mai mare de contracte încheiate pe perioada determinata. însa completarea adusa ultimului punct da posibilitatea încheierii contractelor individuale pe perioada determinata pentru un numar mare de sectoare de activitate. o alta diferenta majora între cele doua coduri ale muncii este reprezentata de numarul maxim al contractelor individuale de munca pe durata determinata precum si durata maxima pentru care se pot încheia acestea. conform legii 53/2003, articolul 82, contractul individual de munca poate fi încheiat doar pentru maxim 18 luni, iar articolul 80, alineatul 3 mentioneaza ca numarul maxim de contracte pe perioada determinata încheiate consecutiv este de 2. în alta ordine de idei, perioada pe care se încheie contracte de munca pe perioada determinata nu poate depasi 18 luni sub nicio forma, iar ca numar, acestea nu pot fi mai mult de doua consecutive. legislatia adoptata în 2011 stipuleaza la articolul 82, alineatul 4 ca se pot încheia maxim 3 contracte consecutive pe perioada determinata. articolul 84, alineatul 1 mentioneaza ca primul decembrie 2016 33perspective politice perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd 3/24/2017 2:52 pm page 33 contract nu poate fi încheiat pe o perioada mai lunga de 36 de luni, iar urmatoarele 2, conforma articolului 82, alineatul 5, nu pot avea fiecare o durata mai lunga de 12 luni. practic, conform legislatiei din 2011, contractul individual pe perioada determinata nu mai este un caz exceptional ci, prin articolul 83, litera h, poate deveni o regula. din punct de vedere al numarului de luni pentru care se poate încheia contract pe perioada determinata, acesta, cumulat, este de 60. cu alte cuvinte, un angajator poate avea pentru 5 ani consecutivi, pe un post, doar angajati cu contract individual pe perioada determinata. munca pentru un agent temporar este un alt aspect legislativ care se încadreaza la flexibilitate numerica. aceasta era reglementata si în codul muncii din 2003, însa, companiile puteau beneficia de serviciile unui agent de munca temporar doar în urmatoarele cazuri: a) pentru inlocuirea unui salariat al carui contract individual de munca este suspendat, pe durata suspendarii; b) pentru prestarea unor activitati cu caracter sezonier; c) pentru prestarea unor activitati specializate ori ocazionale în codul muncii post 2011 aceste reglementari au fost înlaturate din forma finala, oferind posibilitatea angajatorilor de a realiza activitati doar prin agenti de munca temporara. si în acest caz este vorba de flexibilizarea relatiilor de munca si de acceptarea unor practici în mod expres în favoarea angajatorilor si în dauna securitatii în munca a angajatilor si angajatelor. având în vedere articolele care privesc contractul individual pe perioada determinata din ambele coduri ale muncii, ceea ce pâna în 2011 a fost o exceptie, din 2011 au devenit practici acceptabile din punct de vedere legislativ. legislatia a fost flexibilizata din punct de vedere (asa cum literatura de specialitate l-a denumit) numeric. în alta ordine de idei, legislatia a devenit mai acceptanta cu tipuri de contract ce pâna în 2011 erau acceptate doar în cazuri exceptionale. 3.2. flexibilitatea salariului flexibilitatea salariului face referire la cum este remunerata munca. practic, salariile includ doua componente, prima dintre acestea este fixa, în timp ce cea de-a doua este bazata pe productivitatea angajatului/angajatei (cato & stoller, 2004, 34; atkinson, 1984; barbieri, 2009, 621). pentru a întelege mai bine realitatea la care face referire acest aspect teoretic vom lua ca exemplu salariul agentilor de vânzari. salariul unui agent de vânzari în românia se împarte în: salariul fix, în general minimum pe economie si partea flexibila ce este acordata în functie de atingerea tintei (un anumit numar de produse vândute) stabilita de catre angajator. în aceasta forma angajatorul îsi reduce obligatiile sociale pentru ca ele vor fi achitate numai pentru partea fixa din care este compus salariul, în timp ce pentru partea flexibila nu se achita contributii sociale. conform articolului 154 (53/2003), alineatul 1, respectiv 159 (conform variantei republicata în 2011), alineatul 1: „salariul reprezinta contraprestatia muncii depuse de salariat în baza contractului individual de munca”. iar „salariul cuprinde salariul de baza, indemnizatiile, sporurile, precum si alte adaosuri” (art 155, 53/2003; 160, 345/2011). în mod fortat, pentru ca adaosurile la salariu nu pot fi interzise, este legitimat un mod de a plati angajatii si angajatele dupa performanta depusa. în aceasta situatie performanta depusa este obligatoriu sa se regaseasca în atingerea unui scop impus de catre companie. performanta depusa se poate traduce si în ore lucrate peste program dar neremunerate, totul cu scopul de a atinge „target-ul”. în acest caz este edificator articolul scris de laura stefanut (2017), în care este tratata, printre al34 perspective politice perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd 3/24/2017 2:52 pm page 34 tele, situatia tintelor stabilite de angajator, pe care angajatii si angajatele nu le pot atinge decât prin lucru peste program. în privinta flexibilitatii salariului, codul muncii nu stipuleaza în mod clar care sunt conditiile în aceasta situatie, însa, prin acceptarea altor adaosuri la salariu este permisa flexiblitatea. sporurile de performanta sunt permise atâta timp cât salariul de baza este acordat în mod legal conform unui anumit numar de ore de munca stabilite între cele doua parti (angajat si angajator). astfel, acest tip de flexibilitate a existat si în codul muncii anterior anului 2011 si în cel actual. 3.3. flexiblitatea organizationala flexibilitatea organizationala vizeaza abilitatea unitatii de productie de a combina modelele organizationale existente cu noi tehnici de organizare la locul de munca. de asemenea, în aceeasi idee, de partea angajatilor identificam necesitatea de adoptare a unor valori precum rotatia locului de muna, echipe de munca, recalificare profesionala sau chiar adaptare la noi conditii si noi atributii de munca (cato & stoller, 2004, 34; atkinson, 1984; barbieri, 2009, 621). în ceea ce priveste rotatia la locul de munca, un bun exemplu poate fi cazul muncitoarelor de la fabrica de`longhi, care, dupa o greva spontana au fost redistribuite de pe linia brown (cea pe care lucrau în mod normal) pe alte linii de productie si alte schimburi pentru a nu mai putea comunica (maxim, 2017). ambele coduri ale muncii prevad ca reconversia profesionala poate fi determinata de restructurari socioeconomice (345/2011, articolul 192, alineatul 1, litera d; 53/2003, articolul 188, alineatul 1, litera d). de asemenea, este mentionat si faptul ca formarea profesionala poate fi facuta pentru adaptarea angajatului/angajatei la cerintele postului (53/2003, articolul 189, alineatul 1, litera b; 345/2011, articolul 193, alineatul 1, litera b). pot incheia contracte de calificare profesionala salariatii cu varsta minima de 16 ani impliniti, care nu au dobandit o calificare sau au dobandit o calificare ce nu le permite mentinerea locului de munca la acel angajator (53/2003, articolul 199, alineatul 2; 345/ 2011, articolul 202, alineatul 2). cu alte cuvinte, angajatorul are flexibilitatea de a-si schimba activitatea economica, iar angajatii si angajatele pot solicita reconversia profesionala, însa, la fel de legal este si ca angajatorul sa disponibilizeze persoanele care nu corespund profesional la locul de munca în care sunt încadrate (53/2003, articolul 61, litera d; 345/2011, articolul 61, litera d). în aceasta privinta (a flexibilitatii organizationale), legislatia muncii anterioara anului 2011 dadea dovada deja de un nivel crescut de flexibilitate fata de angajator, însa, securitatea oferita angajatilor si angajatelor fiind la un nivel minim. în concluzie un anumit grad de flexibilitate organizationala exita înca dinaintea anului 2011, acestui domeniu nemaifiind necesara flexibilizarea. 3.4. flexibilitatea timpului de lucru flexibilitatea timpului de lucru implica stabilirea numarul maxim de ore lucrate, numarul de ore discontinue de munca si chiar stabilirea modalitatii prin care este asigurat concediul de odihna (cato & stoller, 2004, 34; atkinson, 1984; barbieri, 2009, 621). în aceasta situatie numarul maxim de ore lucrate pe saptamâna tinde sa fie în crestere, sau în unele cazuri chiar inexistent (acest lucru însemnând ca o persoana poate sa lucreze oricâte ore doreste). decembrie 2016 35perspective politice perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd 3/24/2017 2:52 pm page 35 în ceea ce priveste timpul de munca, articolul 112 (345/2011)/109 (53/2003) stipuleaza (1) pentru salariatii angajati cu norma întreaga durata normala a timpului de munca este de 8 ore pe zi si de 40 de ore pe saptamâna. (2) în cazul tinerilor în vârsta de pâna la 18 ani durata timpului de munca este de 6 ore pe zi si de 30 de ore pe saptamâna. în plus, articolul 114 (345/2011) si 111 (53/2003) reglementeaza ca: (1) durata maxima legala a timpului de munca nu poate depasi 48 de ore pe saptamana, inclusiv orele suplimentare. (2) prin exceptie, durata timpului de munca, ce include si orele suplimentare, poate fi prelungita peste 48 de ore pe saptamana, cu conditia ca media orelor de munca, calculata pe o perioada de referinta de 4 luni calendaristice, sa nu depaseasca 48 de ore pe saptamana. în cadrul articolului 114 (345/2011) au fost introduse doua alineate care flexibilizeaza timpul de lucru în privinta orelor suplimentare în cazuri speciale. acestea mentioneaza ca: (3) pentru anumite activitati sau profesii stabilite prin contractul colectiv de munca aplicabil, se pot negocia, prin contractul colectiv de munca respectiv, perioade de referinta mai mari de 4 luni, dar care sa nu depaseasca 6 luni. (4) sub rezerva respectarii reglementarilor privind protectia sanatatii si securitatii in munca a salariatilor, din motive obiective, tehnice sau privind organizarea muncii, contractele colective de munca pot prevedea derogari de la durata perioadei de referinta stabilite la alin. (3), dar pentru perioade de referinta care in niciun caz sa nu depaseasca 12 luni. în privinta timpului de munca identificam la codul muncii adoptat în 2011 un grad de flexibilitate foarte mare fata de varainta codului muncii din 2003. alineatele 3 si 4 stipuleaza derogari, pe o perioada întinsa, de la aplicarea normala a articolelor 1 si 2. aceste derogari nu pot fi decât în dauna angajatilor si în favoarea angajatorilor. principala problema fiind faptul ca astfel de masuri au fost introduse fara o contrapondere care sa fie vizibila în ceea ce priveste securitatea muncii angajatilor si angajatelor. programul de lucru inegal este reglementat de articolele 115 si 116 din legea 345/2011, respectiv 112 si 113 din legea 53/2003. în legea adoptata în 2011 nu a aparut niciun articol suplimentar sau vreo forma de flexibilizare. astfel, în cele doua legi este stipulat ca pentru anumite sectoare sau unitati de lucru se pot stabili programe de lucru mai mici sau mai mari de 8 ore/zi. în plus, programul de lucru de 12 ore aduce de la sine o pauza de 24 de ore, cu mentiunea ca numarul maxim de ore lucrate într-o saptamâna sa fie 40 sau sa respecte conditiile descrise în articolele 114 (345/2011) si 111 (53/2003). iar „programul de lucru inegal poate functiona numai daca este specificat expres în contractul individual de munca” (345/2011, articolul 116, alineatul 2; 53/2003, articolul 113, alineatul 2). stabilirea perioadelor în care salariatii si salariatele beneficiaza de concediul de odihna se face pâna la sfârsitul anului calendaristic pentru anul urmator (53/2003, articolul 143, alineatul 1; 345/2011, articolul 148, alineatul 1). numarul minim de zile de concediu de odihna anuale este 20 de zile lucratoare (53/2003, articolul 140, alineatul 1; 345/2011, articolul 145, alineatul 1). reglementarile ce privesc concediul de odihna si acordarea acestuia nu au facut subiectul niciune flexibilizari, înca, pentru ca „dreptul la concediu de odihna anual nu poate forma obiectul vreunei cesiuni, renuntari sau limitari” (53/2003, articolul 139, alineatul 2; 345/2011, articolul 144, alineatul 2). cu toate acestea, timpul de lucru a facut subiectul flexibilizarii, asa 36 perspective politice perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd 3/24/2017 2:52 pm page 36 cum am aratat anterior. practic, a avut loc flexibilizarea timpului de lucru, însa nu în totalitate, excluzând flexibilizarea aspectelor ce tin de concediul de odihna. 4. concluzii generale teoria modelelor capitalismului dezvoltata de hall & soskice (2001) are în vedre în ceea ce priveste analiza doar statele cu o economie capitalista consolidata la momentul de început al anilor 2000. evolutia ulterioara a politicilor si practicilor din statele din centrul si estul europei (foste state ale pactului de la varsovia) a dus la constituirea unui nou model de economie de piata, numita si economie de piata dependenta (ban,2014, 219; nolke & vliegenhard, 2009; bohle & greskovits, 2012). acestui nou tip de capitalism îi este specifica dependenta fata de capitalul strain si o oarecare flexibilitate a pietei muncii, ce permite investitorilor profituri mari (ban,2014, 219; nolke & vliegenhard, 2009; bohle & greskovits, 2012). din punct de vedere al apropierii fata de un anumit model de capitalism dintre cele doua initiale, acest ultim tip este mai apropiat (din punct de vedere al reglementarilor) de economia de piata liberala. capitalismul românesc, dintr-un tip de „capitalism cocktail” (ban, 2014, 219) a evoluat, prin dereglementare si flexibilizare spre un model de economie de piata dependenta. mediul politic a urmarit permanent crearea unei economii atractive, iar acest lucru a însemnat 1. mutarea poverii fiscale de pe umerii capitalului pe umerii muncii si consumului; 2. eliminarea sau diminuarea competentelor institutiilor ce ar putea crea costuri prea mari pentru capital si productie; 3. înasprirea accesului la ajutoare de somaj si la servicii sociale (ban, 2014, 217). tradus în masuri concrete a însemnat flexibilizarea pietei muncii pentru a permite angajatorilor un grad cât mai mare de autonomie. codul muncii din 2003 a prezentat un anumit grad de flexibilitate, în sensul în care, desi era constrângator în anumite privinte, cum ar fi contractul pe perioada determinata, în alte privinte cum ar fi salarizarea dadea dovada de flexibilitate. munca pentru un agent de munca temporar era permisa doar în anumite cazuri exceptionale, ceea ce înseamna ca legislatia era destul de rigida în aceasta privinta. reglementarile care priveau salariul si schimbarea activitatii economice a angajatorului erau flexibile, permitând diferite tipuri de plata (cum ar fi plata în functie de performanta) si schimbarea activitatii economice a angajatorului. în schimb, articolele care priveau timpul de lucru, dadeau dovada de o anumita flexibilitate, însa foarte scazuta. codul muncii republicat în 2011 a însemnat o serie de schimbari, dereglementari si flexibilizari. în termenii stabiliti de teoria la care m-am raportat, flexibilizarea salariului si flexibilizarea organizationala nu au avut loc în 2011, legea fiind deja foarte permisiva cu angajatorii în aceasta privinta. flexibilizarea timpului de munca a fost, în mod categoric realizata în 2011, desi legislatia adoptata în 2003 permitea un nivel scazut de elasticitate. flexibilizarea numerica a fost realizata în cel mai clar mod în 2011. reglementarile ce priveau contractul de munca individual pe perioada determinata si munca pentru un agent de munca temporar au fost cel mai puternic afectate de flexibilizare. codul muncii a suferit modificari în favoarea angajatorilor în 2011 (ceea ce numim flexibilizare), fara sa fie în acord cu securitatea angajatilor. cu toate acestea, modificarile cele mai dure cu privire la relatiile de munca au fost facute de legea dialogului social si nu de codul muncii (trif, 2015; chivu, ciutacu, dimitriu si ticlea, 2013). practic, cele mai puternice efecte au venit din elaborarea legii dialogului social, sectiune ce pâna în 2011 era reglementata de un set de legi (a sindicatelor, a patronatelor, legea privind contractul colectiv de munca, etc.) decembrie 2016 37perspective politice perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd 3/24/2017 2:52 pm page 37 bibliografie albu. lucian-liviu, caraiani. petre & iordan. marioara, 2012, perspectivele pietei muncii din românia în contextul strategiei europa 2020, editura economica, bucuresti. albu. lucian-liviu, caraiani. petre & iordan. marioara, 2012, perspectivele pietei muncii din românia în contextul strategiei europa 2020, editura economica, bucuresti. arpad. todor, 2015, the effects of foreign direct investments on structuring the varieties of capitalism în the post-communist states, perspective politice, vol. 8, nr. 2, pp. 79-89. atkinson. john, 1984, manpower strategies for flexible organisations, personnel management, no. 16, pp. 28-31. ban. cornel, 2014, dependenta si dezvoltare: economia politica a capitalismului românesc, editura tact, cluj-napoca. barbieri. paolo, 2009, flexible employment and inequality in europe, european sociological review, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 621-628. bohle. dorothee & greskovits. bela, 2012, capitalist diversity on europe’s periphery, croatian economic survey, vol 16 : no. 2, pp. 147-159. cató. sebastián & stoller. richard, 2004, the impact of labor flexibility on the argentine telecommunications sector, latin american perspectives, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 32-44. chivu. luminita, ciutacu. constantin, dimitriu. raluca si ticlea. tiberiu, 2013. impactul reformelor legislative asupra relatiilor industriale din românia. organizatia internationala a muncii. codul muncii: legea nr. 53 din 24 ianuarie 2003. publicata în monitorul oficial, partea i, nr. 72 din 5 februarie 2003. codul muncii: legea nr. 53 din 24 ianuarie 2003. publicata în monitorul oficial, partea i, nr. 345 din 18 mai 2011. fernández. castillo & otis. martha, 2007, hegemony and the u.s. labor model, latin american perspectives, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 64-72. hall, peter, and gingerich. daniel, 2009. varieties of capitalism and institutional complementarities in the political economy: an empirical analysis. british journal of political science vol.39, no. 3, pp. 449-482. hall. peter & soskice. david, 2001, varieties of capitalism: the institutional foundations of comparative advantage, oxford university press, new york. howell. chris, 2003, review: varieties of capitalism: and then there was one?, comparative politics, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 103-124. maxim. irina, 2017, muncitori ai fabricii de’longhi, obligaþi sa-ºi dea demisia dupa ce au facut greva înainte de craciun, someseanul.ro, accesat online 1. 06. 2017 la http://someseanul.ro/muncitori-ai-fabricii-delong hi-obligati-sa-si-dea-demisia-dupa-ce-au-facut-greva-inainte-de-craciun/. nolke. andreas & vliegenhart. arjan, 2009, enlarging the varietes of capitalism: the emergence of dependent market economies în east central europe, world politics, vol. 61 : no. 4, pp 670-702. scharpf. fritz, 1997, games real actors play: actor-centered institutionalism in policy research. colorado westview press, boulder. stanculescu. manuela. sofia, 2009, riscuri, vulnerabilitati si solutii pe piata muncii, în riscuri si inechitati sociale în românia, coordonat de marian preda, editura poliron, iasi. stefanut. laura, 2017, angajare: românul munceºte, dar ramâne sarac, brrlog, accesat online pe 2.02.2017 la https://brrlog.com/draft-munca-%c3%aen-rom%c3%a2nia-5a200943ec6#.xiyxxwxus. trif. aurora, 2015, dialogul social în timpul crizei economice: supravietuierea negocierilor colective in sectorul industrial din romania. 38 perspective politice perspective_politice_2016_decembrie.qxd 3/24/2017 2:52 pm page 38 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute tina magazzini1 abstract: this article aims at problematizing the relation between identity recognition, economic redistribution, and political representation in the debate around roma inclusion in contemporary europe. given that culture has increasingly become politicized, by analyzing the emergence of the european roma institute for arts and culture i reflect on the political and economic potential and drawbacks that cultural identity holds in a european society in which capitalism has turned into a cultural trait. keywords: european roma institute, cultural diversity, recognition, minority inclusion summary: i. introduction; ii. a european roma institute (for arts and culture); iii. discrimination of a “true european minority” and the ethnicization of marginality; iv. roma politics, eri’s positioning and a note on methodology; v. main criticisms. the cultural, the economic and the political; v.1 cultural concerns (or concerns about culture) and counter arguments; v.2 socioeconomic concerns and counter arguments; v.3 political concerns and counter arguments; vi. conclusions. on elitism, culture and ‘the important things in life’ british democracy recognizes that you need a system to protect the important things of life, and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians. things like the opera, radio three, the countryside, the law, the universities...both of them! (sir humphrey, yes prime minister) 1 human rights institute. university of deusto, bilbao (tina.magazzini@deusto.es). an earlier version of this article was presented at the ipsa congress in poznan, poland, 23-28 july 2016. i would like to thank julija sardelic and diana popescu for organizing the panel 'from misrecognition to redistribution: ethnic discrimination and the politics of difference' and providing insightful comments, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 50 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute i. introduction within the debate on cultural diversity management and antidiscrimination in european societies, the roma2 have come to constitute—particularly in the last decade—a minority towards which a full set of ad hoc integration legislation, measures and policies have been adopted. in parallel there has been a rapidly growing literature in the fields of political science and sociology addressing roma representations in politics and policies. the increase in research on roma-targeted policies from scholars such as aidan mcgarry, mihai surdu, peter vermeersch, huub van baar, katrin simhandl, martin kovats, joanna kostka, nicolae gheorghe, will guy, nidhi trehan (among others) have explicitly addressed socio-economic mobility of roma migrants in the context of contemporary european policies on migration and ethnic minority protection. this literature necessarily builds upon anthropological reflections on the nature of ethnic identity and identification, and call into cause debates such as spivak’s strategic essentialism, how to operationalize group ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ into rights (and negation of rights) linked to these identity markers, and discussions around the legacy of gyspsy studies in modern romani scholarship. while a comprehensive review of the existing literature on minority rights in general, and roma identity politics in particular, is out of the scope of this article3, it is loosely within this strand of research that the following reflections can be situated. this article aims at locating the recent european recognition and categorization of the roma as an ethno-cultural minority by analyzing the emergence of a new institutional body intended at promoting roma culture—the european roma institute for arts and culture. the contribution of this article to the wider discussion on identity and cultural integration that this special issue tackles is to analyze and problematize the existing tensions revolving around the issues of cultural legitimacy and knowledge production of minority cultures. because narratives about identity are defined by structures of power (how they are told; by whom; in what context, etc.) i believe that a better understanding of the creation of the european roma institute, and the resistance it encountered, has implications that go beyond the potential for success or for harm that this specific institute holds. such reflections aim at raising some of the dissonances, overlaps and contradictions in how identity politics can be framed in a european society in which capitalism has turned into a cultural trait. 2the term “roma” is used in political documents of the european commission, european parliament and the european council as an umbrella expression “which includes groups of people who have more or less similar cultural characteristics and a history of persistent marginalisation in european societies, such as sinti, travellers, kalé, etc.” (european commission, 2010). this definition, its usage in policy documents and its implications will be problematized later in the article (see section iii). 3for a thorough analysis of expert practices of roma classification see the recently published book those who count (surdu, 2016). the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 51 tina magazzini since the narratives of poverty migration and hostility towards the ‘ethnic other’ are often conflated, the initiatives to tackle such issues can also find themselves entangled into more than one aspect at once. in other words, in an enlarged european union in which roma from cee countries have been the great losers of the nineties’ transition to a market economy (kovats, 2012; sigona, 2011; vermeersch, 2012) how can the risk of displacement (in which identity politics tend to displace struggles for redistribution), reification (the essentialization of a culture or a minority) and misframing (the political dimension of misrepresentation) be dealt with and overcome? (fraser, 2000, p. 108, 2005, p. 9) how does a european roma institute for arts and culture affect other policies addressed to the same minority, and what are the strengths and liabilities of this project? in order to explore this conundrum, this article will a) outline what the object of the study is –eri–, and why it is relevant b) provide an overview of the context, in the form of a brief history of how we got to the present debate, and of who the main stakeholders are c) give an account on how the information was collected and situate the specificities of the eri debate d) draft a resumed yet systematized assessment of what the main criticisms that have been brought so far to the eri project are, how they have been addressed by the supporters of the alliance for eri, and organize them according to the three broad themes that emerge as the most relevant ones for this debate (the cultural, the economic and the political)4. the vocabulary used (recognition, redistribution, misframing) is borrowed from nancy fraser’s theory of justice, but the approach taken in this article incorporates the critiques moved to fraser (and much of the recognition theory) which, rather than seeing the problems of displacement and reification as pertaining primarily to social movements and their potentially contradictory claims for recognition, acknowledge the central role of institutions and of the political arena. ii. a european roma institute (for arts and culture) in march 2015 a joint article by george soros, founder and chair of the open society foundations, and thorbjørn jagland, currently serving his second term as the secretary general of the council of europe, announced on the european voice that a european roma institute (from now on eri) was being set up (soros & thorbjørn, 2015). while acknowledging that some of the most salient issues with regard to europe’s roma population are racism and inequality of opportunity, the raison d’être of eri as an institute “of arts and culture” was presented as fundamentally a matter of 4 this analysis is rooted in the conviction that some of the most salient issues in contemporary’s europe culturally complex societies are class, exclusion and racism. for the purpose of this article i will concentrate on the discussion around roma culture/ recognition, with the european roma institute debate as a backdrop, but questions relating to power dynamics and structural (particularly socio-economic) inequalities are impossible to overlook completely. the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 52 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute recognition and of implementing art. 27 of the iccpr to the right for roma to “enjoy their own culture”; in short, it has to do with those traits which the first article of this special issue has identified as defining cultural elements of minority groups. more specifically, the opening statement of the article explaining the creation of eri read: “for more than four decades europe’s roma community have wanted to establish an institution that would give their music, art and unique traditions their own stage. across the continent, such bodies exist to celebrate an array of cultures, nationalities and identities. yet, there is nothing of this kind for roma. many feel this absence, particularly among romani campaigners, educators and intellectuals. it compounds a sense of exclusion and denies all of us the opportunity to celebrate the roma influence on our shared cultural life. we are joining forces to help put this right”(soros & thorbjørn, 2015). the article then went on to speak about exclusion, marginalization and segregation, a vocabulary which romani studies scholars, policy analysts and the general public alike have grown accustomed to find systematically linked to the descriptions of europe’s roma. the answers to the question that gave the title to the story (“why we are setting up a european roma institute”) offered by soros and the coe’s secretary general are however fundamentally rooted in matters of cultural identity, rather than socio-economic ones. the main justifications provided for the need of the eri are: 1) combating the negative stereotypes about roma 2) the belief that eri will become a powerful source of self-esteem: “it would act as an important symbol—and symbols are important, as is the ability to tell one’s story in one’s own voice. […] perhaps most important, it would provide a landmark for roma children to look upon and feel a sense of belonging and pride.” (soros & thorbjørn, 2015) 3) explore the ways in which roma life has shaped, and been shaped, by other cultures and forces, underlining similarities as well as differences (this point is however expressed more as a tentative possibility, the main issue remaining that of stereotypes and self-esteem). this core message was reiterated a few months afterwards, when in september 2015 jagland issued the statement: “the council of europe wants to help celebrate the contribution of roma art, history, and tradition to our shared cultural heritage. […] the european roma institute for arts and culture will spread greater understanding of roma culture and challenge unhelpful stereotypes. i hope that over time it will become a source of pride and self-esteem for our european roma citizens” (council of europe, 2015). these affirmations were accompanied by the specification that the project will be roma-led –which it is: the bios of the 16 members of the alliance for eri are available online, as are the details of the four ngo members5– and that funding, resources and political support would be provided by the council of europe and the open society 5see the webpage of the alliance for the european roma institute. the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 53 tina magazzini institute (which according to the consultation document prepared by the council of europe secretariat towards a creation of a “european roma institute” in 2014, will be contributing 200,000 euros each per year)6. for anyone who has been following the politics of roma identity over the past years, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the creation of the eri (or rather, the declaration of intention of the creation of the eri) was accompanied by perplexities and criticism “from the inside”: on whether this is an endeavor that should be taken up by a public body such as the council of europe; on whether this is an effective avenue to pursue the stated aims; and on whether roma should be framed as a cultural minority to begin with. the relatively small but vastly diverse universe of academics, policy makers, activists, non-governmental and international organizations who can loosely be defined as being invested in the cause of advancing rights for europe’s roma have had as divergent opinions on eri as their background and scopes are. arguably, the heated and often personal and confrontational debates that this debate triggered go beyond the set-up of the eri itself. revolving around the concepts of roma authenticity, legitimacy, ethnic representation and cultural hegemony such exchanges have tapped into a complex set of underlying assumptions that often go unproblematized, and whose analysis can help bring some clarity to understanding wider struggles around roma identity politics. so far no criticism towards eri has come from right wing parties nor from mainstream media (possibly, because it is still in the making), but the accusations between roma and pro-roma associations, activists and academics has been particularly polarizing. on the one hand, eri has been welcomed by a number of individuals and organizations as a beacon of hope for addressing stereotypes and countering a negative image of roma identity that is rife in mainstream media and politics; on the other hand it has been accused of doing more harm than good to the advancement of the roma cause by others. the wider question that i believe this controversy raises is: how does the cultural and identitarian debate (the recognition and valorization of roma culture via an institute backed by the council of europe) reflect and/ or shape the political process of representation and of economic redistribution at the eu policy-making level? iii. discrimination of a “true european minority” and the ethnicization of marginality as illustrated in the first article of this issue, europe’s approach to the democratic management of cultural diversity has been –and is– a complex and everchanging compromise between political ideals (the defense of cultural diversity as an ethical imperative), practical needs or potential conflicts that require regulation, and the 6 in the coe secretariat consultation document the estimates given speak about the coe contributing to one third of the budget with 200k euro per year, osf also contributing to one third of the budget with 200k euro per year, and the rest coming from other funders (council of europe, 2014, p. 4). the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 54 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute existing gaps and inconsistencies in interpretations of what the “cultural third sphere” to be defended and promoted amounts to (see ruiz vieytez in this issue). while only recently acknowledged by eu policies, ethnic origin and religion are increasingly important markers recognized as basis for discrimination. the latest european legislation seems to take stock of these developments and of the changing attitudes towards cultural diversity, as demonstrated by the ‘tackling discrimination’ section of the european commission dg justice legislation’s repository opening statement. such inception reads “for many years the focus of eu action in the field of non-discrimination was on preventing discrimination on the grounds of nationality and gender. a few years ago, however, the eu countries approved unanimously new powers to combat discrimination on the grounds of racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation” (european commission dg just, 2016). the attention towards relatively new categories of discrimination (where the “newness” refers to the categories and not to the discriminations, obviously) with regard to ethnic origin, sexual orientation, age, religion/ beliefs and disability are important steps forward in anti-discrimination laws and policies. if compared to the eurobarometer reports of the seventies, eighties and nineties, the difference in vocabulary, content and concerns are strikingly telling7. additionally, beyond the abovementioned categories (and the possibility of multiple and intersectional discrimination between them), in the last two decades—with a steep curve in policy measures over the past few years—the roma have come to be recognized, or constructed, as a “category” of its own in european directives, recommendations, and reports (surdu & kovats, 2015). generally not subsided under neither of the said groups, yet they are invariably included amongst those minorities considered to be most at risk of discrimination (a quick look to any survey on attitudes towards minorities in europe shows that this concern is well-founded)8, and are often featured in surveys and policies as a stand-alone category. this trajectory is the product of both political and historical circumstances: the balkan wars of the nineties and the breakup of yugoslavia, the swift move of that 7 in a 1970 report detailing the results of a survey study on the “europeans and european unification” (in the six countries of the european community at the time), a large section was dedicated to analyzing what is filed under “cultural resistance of the ethnocentric type”. this was described as inability to identify with a larger community, with the attachment to one’s cultural identity (expressed as the fear to lose this identity) and translated into “a deeply felt, basic kind of resistance [towards a european integration]” (commission of the european communities, 1970, p. 19). it therefore seems that we have come a long way towards building a europe that is more open to cultural diversity, despite the recent rise of populist anti-immigrant parties. 8 every second roma interviewed for the eu minorities and discrimination survey (eu-midis) in 2011 reported that he or she had been discriminated against in the previous 12 months (european union agency for fundamental rights, 2011), and the eu-midis ii from 2015 shows similar data (european union agency for fundamental rights, 2016). according to the pew research center, in 2015, 86% of italians, 60% of french, and more than a third of spanish, german and british populations hold negative sentiments about roma (stokes, 2015). the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 55 tina magazzini region towards a market economy, the breakup of the ussr and the eu’s increased attention towards minority protection and rights with the copenhagen criteria for accession, in ways however that inherently encouraged “form over practice” (vermeersch, 2012, p. 6). as a result, central european countries adopted the framework convention for the protection of national minorities and most of them currently recognize the roma as a national minority, but discrimination has all but decreased over the past two decades. in most of western european, despite the fact that roma communities have been residing for centuries in countries such as italy, france or germany, they have not been granted the status of national minority9, and the eu enlargements of 2004 and 2007 have been narrated by mainstream media as carrying the danger of a ‘roma invasion’ from the east (solimene, 2011). with recommendation 1203 “gypsies in europe” (1993), based on a report by josephine verspaget (who later became chair of the council of europe’s special group on roma/gypsies) the parliamentary assembly of the council of europe identified the roma (even though the terminology ‘roma’ in policy emerged later, and the eu documents from the early nineties invariably refer to ‘gypsies’) as a “true european minority”, and more specifically a cultural one, stating that “[a] special place among the minorities is reserved for gypsies. living scattered all over europe, not having a country to call their own, they are a true european minority, but one that does not fit into the definitions of national or linguistic minorities. […] gypsies greatly contribute to the cultural diversity of europe […] be it by language and music or by their trades and crafts” (council of europe, 1993, p. 1).10 the europeanization of the roma issue was further institutionalized by the european parliament resolution of january 2008 which called for a eu strategy on roma, based on a motion by hungarian mep lívia járóka (jároká, 2008)11, and eventually found a middle ground between european political will (and funding) and national responsibility in the approval of the national roma integration strategies (european commission, 2012)12. 9the roma are officially recognized as a national minority in austria, croatia, the czech republic, hungary, montenegro, fyr macedonia, norway, poland, romania, serbia, slovakia, sweden, ukraine; as a ‘traditional national minority’ in finland, and as a ‘racial group protected under the race relation act of 1976’ by the united kingdom. they have no special legal status in most other european countries (bunescu, 2014, pp. 66–67). 10 italics added. for a critical analysis of how, over the 1990s, the roma issue has been increasingly defined in cultural terms, see the article “problems of intellectual and political accountability in respect of emerging european roma policy” (kovats, 2001). kovats’ main argument is that framing the presence of the roma people in europe as a matter of discrimination and of cultural identity, rather than identifying the causes of socio-economic problems faced by many roma people such as poverty, unemployment, poor housing, health etc. serves the interests of mainstream institutions, but is detrimental to the roma communities themselves. 11 the parliament’s resolution was supported by the european roma policy coalition (erpc) as well as by governments of member countries of the decade of roma inclusion, an international initiative launched in 2005 by the world bank and the open society institute to support the adoption and implementation of roma-targeted action plans in eleven former communist countries plus spain. 12 the decision of the european commission to adopt a common strategic framework was largely based on the inability demonstrated by european governments to guarantee access to fundamental rights to its the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 56 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute the growing commitment of european institutions towards the so-called ‘roma issue’ has given heed to questions related to the need to adopt social and cultural policies explicitly directed at an ethnic minority (which however shy away from being affirmative action policies) and to whom the beneficiary population of such policies is composed of13. therefore to identify or be identified as ‘roma’ has come to constitute, particularly in the last decade, an ad hoc category in surveys on discrimination, inclusion/exclusion and marginalization. for instance, the standard classification of discriminated groups according to the latest eurobarometer report “discrimination in the eu in 2015” can be appreciated in the following sample question: “do you have friends or acquaintances who are…? 1) people whose ethnic origin is different from yours 2) roma 3) gay, lesbian or bisexual 4) disabled 5) of a different religion or have different beliefs than you 6) transgender or transsexual” (european commission dg just, 2015, p. 10). according to the formulation of the survey we can draw the conclusion that roma should not be treated as an ethnic minority within other “people whose ethnic origin is different from yours”, nor as a group which has “different beliefs” from the mainstream, but rather as a category of their own. the previous eurobarometer of 2012 went further, and included a specific chapter titled “the case of the roma” which presented roma as “europe’s biggest ethnic minority” (european commission dg just, 2012, pp. 107–117) yet at the same time it clearly set them apart from the section on “ethnic origin as grounds for discrimination” (european commission dg just, 2012, pp. 28–34). similarly, the 2014 report by the secretary general of the council of europe “state of democracy, human rights and the rule of law in europe” featured a stand-alone category of roma14 which was set apart from the section on “ethnic and national minorities” (jagland, 2014, pp. 46–48). in practice, it seems to be a banal platitude to state that roma are an ethnic minority15 (as a matter of fact, they are generally presented as europe’s largest and most discriminated against ethnic minority), even though one that comprises of many highly diverse and dispersed groups (european commission dg empl, 2004, p. 6; tremlett, 2014)16, but their ethnicity is framed as somehow of a ‘different kind’ from that of most roma minorities through the already existing policies and legislation, such as the equal treatment directive (european commission, 2000). 13 since european institutions have no binding power over how each state chooses to identify and recognize its minorities, every country has built its own roma strategy identifying its beneficiaries based on the national perception of what the ‘problem’ is and who counts as ‘roma’ (surdu, 2016). 14 in this report, the definition used is the following: “the term “roma” used at the council of europe refers to roma, sinti, kale and related groups in europe, including travellers and the eastern groups (dom and lom), and covers the wide diversity of the groups concerned, including persons who identify themselves as gypsies.” 15 the issue of whether they are one ethnic minority or many is debatable. roma elites have however always claimed, to the best of my knowledge, that despite great diversity they constituted one people, and that claims to the contrary were attempts to divide and disempower the roma movement. in 2000, the international romani union (iru) publically announced that the roma people constituted a nation. 16the situation of the roma in an enlarged european union released by the ec dg employment and social affairs (2004) specified: “at a number of points in this study, the term “roma” or “romani” is used as shorthand for the broad umbrella of groups and individuals. in no way should this choice of the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 57 tina magazzini other ethnicities –even though there is no legal definition of ethnicity, as discussed in the first article of this special issue and elsewhere (see ruiz vieytez, 2014, p.14). thus, if ethnic origin alone (in the sense of constituting a visible minority with a shared indian ethnic origin) is considered insufficient to understand the representation of roma identity in the public sphere, the issue of cultural specificity must be addressed (how does it differ from mainstream european national cultures, or how has it been constructed as being different from the mainstream?). the council of europe, as mentioned earlier, has played an important role in establishing a narrative that puts the concept of a shared roma cultural identity at the center of the discourse. almost one decade after the earlier cited recommendation 1203 (1993) the parliamentary assembly of the council of europe passed another recommendation 1557 (2002) on the “legal situation of the roma in europe”, picking up and developing the “gypsies in europe” document, but also introducing a radically new element, the concept of roma as a ‘socially disadvantaged group’. point 4 of the recommendation reads: “roma form a special minority group, in so far as they have a double minority status. they are an ethnic community and most of them belong to the socially disadvantaged groups of society” (parliamentary assembly of the council of europe, 2002). while it is well documented that the roma are amongst the groups most at risk of discrimination, and that there are wide gaps in the access to education, housing, health and employment between roma and non roma (european union agency for fundamental rights undp, 2012) by framing this as a sort of intrinsic characteristic of the roma themselves (and not of the structural and institutional racism of europe’s majoritarian societies, surmountable by changing the dynamics and power relations at play within these societies) within a wider framework that, up to that moment, had emphasized roma’s minority culture status, it risks conflating the two issues. while well intentioned, and founded upon a legitimate concern for a real situation of disadvantage, this kind of language can potentially entrench, rather than help overcome, stereotypes on roma, naturalizing the criteria used to evaluate roma’s human capital as one of poverty, exclusion and marginalization. examples of this approach of thinking of the roma as intrinsically problematic abound, and further articulation of this can be seen in point 9 of the same recommendation, which states “[t]he majority population must accept roma into society without assimilating them, and support roma as a disadvantaged social group. roma have to accept the rules governing society as a whole, and they can be called upon to be more active in handling their own problems, but this must be associated with appropriate conditions, encouragement and incentives provided by the state.” above and beyond the paternalistic tone, such statement seems to identify the roma as both the victims and responsible of exclusion, forgetting that the drivers of marginalization are wider structures of economic and political power17, and terminology be taken as an endorsement of approaches aimed at homogenizing roma and other groups perceived as ‘gypsies’ in europe or at eliminating the rich diversity among roma, gypsies, travellers and other groups perceived as ‘gypsies’.” 17point 5 of the same recommendation states: “most roma are currently faced with a rather severe economic situation in most of the member countries of the council of europe. despite efforts in the social the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 58 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute making the implicit assumption that roma culture is somehow at odds with ‘the rules governing society as a whole’. this definition is not inconsequential, as it has informed much of the recent european policy-making on roma inclusion. it is interesting to observe how, in different settings, the definition of ‘who the roma are’ has been declined to fit different agendas over the past years (surdu, 2016), and particularly the definition of the roma that ended up being adopted in the european commission communication 173 “an eu framework for national roma integration strategies up to 2020” is (european commission, 2011). this reads: “the term ‘roma’ is used—similarly to other political documents of the european parliament and the european council—as an umbrella expression which includes groups of people who have more or less similar cultural characteristics, such as sinti, travellers, kalé, gens du voyage, etc. whether sedentary or not; around 80% of roma are estimated to be sedentary” (european commission, 2011, p. 2). this definition follows and references another similar one, the commission staff working document (european commission, 2010) which is cited at note 2 of this article, and with which the only significant difference is that the definition from 2010 does not explicitly cite the gens du voyage18, it includes the sentence “they share a history of persistent marginalization in european societies”, and (importantly) there is no mention of the issue of nomadism/ sedentary lifestyle. it thus seems reasonable to interpret this gradual shift in definitions as an attempt, on behalf of the european commission, to emphasize the socio-economic dimension of disadvantage of the roma while moving away from the cultural stigma element—particularly in the form of atavic and romanticized nomadism that the council of europe had been promoting. the shift towards a focus on the socio-economic dimension is substantiated by the contents of the communication on the framework for the national strategies of 2011, which opens with a section titled “improving the situation of roma: a social and economic imperative for the union and its member states”, and the fact that in the whole document the word socio-economic appears 29 times, while the word culture not even once. field, the market economy, especially the neo-liberal version of it, has marginalized disadvantaged social groups including roma even in the most developed european countries. in central and eastern europe the economic and political transition has aggravated their socially disadvantaged situation” (parliamentary assembly of the council of europe, 2002). 18 the suggestion that the addition might not be coincidental is purely speculative. however, given the statement of viviane reding, dg justice commissioner at the time, who likened sarkozy’s government deportation of over a thousand romanians and bulgarians of roma ethnicity to vichy france’s treatment of jews during the second world war—a policy that was developed after an incident in loir-et-cher involving french gens du voyage— it is not so far-fetched (doytcheva, 2015). the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 59 tina magazzini iv. roma politics, eri’s positioning and a note on methodology above and beyond the council of europe, the european commission, and the european parliament, some of the most relevant actors, stakeholders and policies in shaping the discourse on roma identity in the past decades have been19: the iru (international roma union), which promoted the first romani congress in 1971 and obtained consultative status at the un, and can be seen as the birth of romani nationalism; the germany-based roma national congress (rnc), which advocated for the rights of roma immigrants in the 80s and 90s; the european roma and travellers forum (ertf), created in 2004 with the support of the finnish government, functions as an umbrella body of different romani grassroots organizations. it managed to maintain privileged relations with the council of europe, where it held consultative status until 2015. it developed the largest and possibly most representative network of roma civil society, but lost much of its leadership and status in the past few years. on 30 march 2015, the ertf issued a (explicitly negative) position paper on eri; academia, and particularly the gypsy lore society –founded in 1888 in great britain with the stated goals of promoting “the study of gypsy, traveler, and analogous peripatetic cultures worldwide; [the] dissemination of accurate information aimed at increasing understanding of these cultures in their diverse forms” (the gypsy lore society, 2016)– and the european academic network on romani studies (earns), a joint programme of the european commission and the council of europe created in 2011 as an interface between academic researchers and political decision makers, with the objective of allowing “for the implementation of better conceived policy initiatives based on reliable evidence” but whose funding was not renewed in 2015 (matras, 2015). opinions within these networks have been mixed, but yaron matras, a linguist and member of eanrs’ scientific committee, has been one of the most vocal critics of eri; the project on ethnic relations (per, 1991-2012) was founded in anticipation of interethnic conflicts that were to erupt following the collapse of communism with the support of the us department of state. it had a prominent role in setting the agenda for the joint council of european and osce human dimension seminar, and included leading activists nicolae gheorghe and andrzej mirga (one of the founders of the alliance for eri), as well as romani scholar and linguist ian hancock, and resulted in the creation of a ‘contact point for roma and sinti’; the open society foundations and george soros, the key supporter of eri, has been involved with pro-roma projects for over two decades, promoting initiatives such as the european roma rights centre (errc), the roma 19 a full analysis of the romani civil society movements and ngos is out of the scope of the analysis, nor could a few paragraphs do it justice. the purpose of this section is simply to situate eri within the constellation of roma and pro-roma institutions, associations and activist groups that have emerged in the past few decades. for a more in-depth analysis, see, among others (bíró, gheorghe, & kovats, 2013; bunescu, 2014; friedman et al., 2015; matras, 2013). the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 60 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute participation programme, the european roma coalition programme (ercp), the european roma grassroots organization (erio) and the roma education fund (ref); other initiatives include the european language curriculum and the central council of german sinti and roma (the latter is amongst the founders of the alliance for eri); in the last decade other institutional projects have emerged, such as the decade for roma inclusion (2005-2015) –a multinational project backed by the world bank, osi, undp, osce, the coe, the ertf and national governments aimed at promoting roma inclusion– and the european platform for roma inclusion (from 2008 onwards) which brings together the eu, ios and national governments20; the nris (national roma integration strategies, 2011-2020), were developed in almost all eu countries in 2011-2012 following ten basic principles (european commission, 2012), and revolved mainly around ‘bringing up to level’ roma communities with mainstream european societies on the four pillars of health, housing, education and employment. additionally, the programmes romed (roma mediators) and romact (capacity-building for local administrations to work with vulnerable roma population) have been implemented, albeit not in all countries and managed by the council of europe21. the alliance of cities and regions for the inclusion of roma is another coe-sponsored platform that has endorsed the eri. against the background of roma-targeted european policy developments, of the wider changes in migration and integration politics of the past few years, and of the evolution of the roma civil society movement(s), eri has been in need to situate itself among the already existing roma networks, policies and programmes, and so far has struggled to do so. there are a number or reasons for this, and its supporters might argue that its mandate and mission have been grossly misinterpreted. in the next section i will go over the main criticism that it has received, organized by what i identify as being the three main ‘threats’ or liabilities of the project. these are, i argue, the dangers of reification (that eri’s recognition struggle might end up simplifying and reifying roma identity), of displacement (that eri’s recognition struggle risks eclipsing the socioeconomic issues of redistribution) and of misframing (that eri’s recognition struggle is elitist, undemocratic, nontransparent and that it misrepresents the community’s boundaries). these reflections, which attempt to problematize the existing debate rather than resulting in any strong “taking of position” on the desirability or not of eri, are based on qualitative analysis, and the empirical material they build upon has been gathered according to the principle of triangulation between secondary sources (legal and policy 20 some see in these recent multinational projects that attempt to bridge the european level and national governments on roma inclusion the weakening of the ertf (jacquot & vitale, 2014). 21 for information on the national roma integration strategies, see “eu and roma” at http://ec.europa.eu/justice/discrimination/roma/index_en.htm. for information on the romed and romact programmes, see http://coe-romact.org/. the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 61 http://ec.europa.eu/justice/discrimination/roma/index_en.htm http://coe-romact.org/ tina magazzini documents pertaining to the eri’s creation and to roma targeted policies and legal definitions more in general), participant observation by taking part in a number of events that have been carried out over the past few years by the epistemic community that works on this topic, by following the ongoing email exchanges within the earns, as well as through informal conversations with promoters of eri, eu officers and other stakeholders involved in the process22. this article being part of a larger long-term research, some of the background information was also drawn from interviews with national policy-makers involved with the drafting and/ or implementation of the roma integration strategies (in italy and spain), personal involvement in european commission and council of europe activities, programmes and projects, as well as in a wider ongoing reflection amongst colleagues working in academia, in ngos and in governmental organizations on how to bridge information and transfer knowledge between (and within) different fields to contribute to evidence-based inclusion policies. v. main criticisms. the cultural, the economic and the political analyzing the debates, the concept notes, the exchanges between the different actors that have expressed their opinion on the set up of a european roma institute so far, taking into account their official and unofficial statements23, the main concerns of the critics to eri seem to be of three fundamental types: cultural (the problem of reification), socioeconomic (the problem of displacement) and political (the problem of misframing). i here summarize the main concerns of each, in order to make explicit the issues raised and the spheres of concern, to see which have been or can be successfully addressed, and which ones not (or with more difficulties). also, a close look at each individual aspect can help challenge broad generalizations and distinguish between critiques based on the form the institute is taking, on its competences, and help avoid misinterpretations. 22 in practice, this consisted of closely following the development of the eri over the past two years, particularly by taking part in the two days closed workshop and one day open conference “nothing about us without us”, where the eri project was presented and debated (budapest, october 2014) and which resulted in a special issue of the rights journal of the errc (ryder et al., 2015); by participating in various eanrs meetings and in its final showcase event, which took place in strasbourg in april 2015 and included a roundtable reflection with ulrich bunjes, coe’s special representative of the of the secretary general for roma issues at the time, accompanied by formal and informal reflections around the material circulated on this topic, such as yaron matras’ post-mortem or ‘balance sheet’ of the network, which was mostly about eri (matras, 2015). other events and conferences attended in which the role and desirability of a roma cultural institute were discussed include “when the oil runs out, people will need horses” (london, june 2015) and “challenging romanophobia” (university of brighton, november 2015), in which members of the alliance for eri presented their vision of the institute and made a case for its necessity. 23 for a not exhaustive, but still relevant and useful chronology of the plans for a european roma institute, see a chronology: plans for a european institute (fosztó, 2015). the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 62 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute v.1 cultural concerns (or concerns about culture) and counter arguments some of the criticisms raised to the eri have revolved around the legitimacy of cultural production. preoccupation on behalf of (mostly non roma) romani scholars that the eri would lay claim to academic authority and turn into some kind of censor or official arbiter for the standardizing of what romanipé is or should be, have been echoed by the european roma travellers forum’s statement on eri: “culture is intimately linked to the life and identity of the community. it can be promoted and assisted but it cannot and should not be directed from above by a political organization. a top-down imposition of a standard culture would deny the rich pluralism of genuine roma traditions” (european roma and travellers forum, 2015, p. 2). on a similar note, monica rossi has noted: “theoretically, the idea of a ‘roma culture’ (any culture, really) as a unique block is meta historic as a category […]. the term ‘culture’ refers to an anthropological concept ideated in 1871 by e.b. tyler and is a tool which was born under a scientific paradigm that contemporary anthropologist call ‘essentialism’. in the globalized and fundamentally intercultural world we are living in, the use of such concept is unsustainable in scientific terms as it suggests a static vision of human groups that no longer exists, thus making the very name of the institute obsolete” (rossi, 2014)24. in response to this critique, eri promoters have noted that cultural institutes have been set up in history by virtually every national, regional and cultural minority. one member of the alliance put it this way: “well, i see eri as a space for cultural autonomy of roma, where roma get together and refine this public space. not as a national state, but for issues that are important for our identity, for our priorities, for shaping a discourse, reacting to something. i think that was the general hope.” reflections upon the role of the institute invariably bring up, as is to be expected, questions about ownership and roma cultural production. one supporter of the institute reflected upon the role that the eri could play by calling into cause the issue of roma participation and having a voice in shaping the ways in which roma are portrayed: “in terms of culture i think we need to take the initiative: we know what our culture is, we can share our cultural experience, and it’s for us to share it. it’s not for other people to define us. this is where i see the role of arts and culture. […] and i think that if we do a good job artistically— good quality writing, good character development, just like any good piece of art, that has universal themes and concepts, then that will translate and will be something to be shared with non roma as well, because we’ll be sharing the universality of our human experience. but we can only do that if we are in control, through institutes like eri, 24this brings up the open-ended debate on whether the roma can and should be considered one ethnic minority to begin with, which has been explored in detail elsewhere (friedman et al., 2015; mcgarry, 2014; van baar, 2011; vermeersch, 2012). the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 63 tina magazzini through artists that have a vision of something creative, original and that can be shared. […] we need culture, we need stories, we need paintings, we need poetry, we need everything. that is what establishes a relationship.” there is, of course, always an inherent risk in the institutionalization of any expression of identity and culture, in that such an operation always requires a simplification of sorts, but this is far from being a case unique to the roma, or about roma cultural identity. it should suffice to remember france’s attempt to organize a forum to debate and define “frenchness” a few years ago and its failure, despite the body politics behind it being one of the oldest, most centralized and homogenized existing nation-states25. the wider issue with respect to the roma has to do with the fact that this process is still in the making, and as such there seems not to be (as of yet) shared foundational myths or cultural traits that are already agreed upon and accepted by the whole of the groups included under the cloak of roma—other than the past and present widespread discrimination, which in turn risks being framed as an identity trait in and of itself. referring to the european commission’s definition used in the framework strategy document of 2012, matras has rightfully pointed out that “although an effort can be recognized here to confront stereotypes through emphasizing that the majority of roma are sedentary, the definition is self-contradictory in referring, on the one hand, to completely separate populations such as sinti/kale, the gens de voyage and the vague notion of ‘travellers’, and on the other hand, to ‘similar cultural characteristics’. there are, empirically, no similar cultural characteristics that can help identify the groups named in this definition” (matras, 2013, pp. 37–38). however, very similar statements could be made with respect to virtually every people now constituting a nation, previously to the processes of nation-building and state-building that took place over the past centuries. the difference and specific difficulty of the roma in producing and establishing a set of ‘similar cultural characteristics’ is not so much that romanés is not spoken by all roma, but rather that this endeavor involves a minority that does not have a strong territorial concentration and whose members are also, beyond being roma, nationals of different european countries who have an already strong(er) identity they often subscribe to. another criticism raised to eri that falls in the cultural realm is that it claims to want to educate non roma about roma culture, but that by creating a arts and culture institute which is explicitly romani, it fosters cultural self-segregation. to this, one of the eri founders has responded: “the role of eri is to help roma artists to give them visibility, to come together and work together. and they are of course free not to do so or to go mainstream, but there are currently 10.000 roma works rotting in 25 in 2009 nikolas sarkozy charged éric besson, the minister of immigration, integration, national identity and mututally-supportive development at the time to organize a “[g]reat debate on national identity”(see jeannot, tomc, & totozani, 2011; le monde, 2009a, 2009b). the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 64 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute archives and improper spaces in central and eastern europe, and do you know how many roma artists were ever exhibited in mainstream cultural spaces? two of them. so how can we talk about segregating romani arts and culture, when it doesn’t in fact have any visibility at all?” all these critiques are, in one way or another, rooted in the preoccupation that the identity model of recognition tends also to reify identity. in nancy fraser’s words, “stressing the need to elaborate and display an authentic, self-affirming and selfgenerated collective identity, it puts moral pressure on individual members to conform to a given group culture. cultural dissidence and experimentation are accordingly discouraged, when they are not simply equated with disloyalty. so, too, is cultural criticism” (fraser, 2000, p. 6). the by-product of recognition can be, in this sense, misrecognition: by reifying group identity it might overshadow the struggles internal to the group for authority and the politics of cultural identification, lending itself to simply reproducing the dynamics it was born to fight against. whether the eri is successful in its bid for the promotion of arts and culture as a means to empower roma artists and intellectuals largely lays in the mechanisms and structures that it will set up to cope with this risk. one of its supporters elaborated on the potential of the content of roma artistic production with the following: “when i’m talking about a culture of roma, by roma, for roma, i am talking about creating something new, something avant-garde. i am talking about creating something that is not excluding traditional roma dance and music, but not exclusive to that. there are new things that we can develop because we are a culture, and we are a people, and just as every other culture and other people we are continuing to evolve. there are new things that are happening: we are not stuck in time, even though often we are studied as if we were stuck in time, in anthropology and sociology. and i think that that is something that art and culture can help bring to light.” v.2 socioeconomic concerns and counter arguments these kind of criticism largely stem from the fact that the meaning of integration, originally used in eu documents as a policy to fight social exclusion (daly, 2006) has in more recent times come to indicate immigrant minorities’ route to becoming part of their host country, and has been further redefined in the case of roma to (re)include a socioeconomic dimension. as monica rossi wrote in her position piece on the eri, “regardless of how you portray the roma (music, artistic contributions etc. etc.) citizens will continue to have in mind the image of destitute roma begging with their children and living in shanty towns […]. it is not clear how the situation of destitute roma will be improved by the existence of this institute. […] if you solve the problems at the ground level, also the perception of roma citizens by non roma citizens are going to improve, but it must be based on the creation of real life opportunities for mutual exchange. in a europe the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 65 tina magazzini dominated by the crisis which is affecting all member states with severe cuts to social services, money should be invested in initiatives which are sustainable under a costbenefit perspective” (rossi, 2014, p. 2). without entering the debate on the sustainability of culture (littoz-monnet, 2007; psychogiopoulou, 2006; tretter, 2011), this position makes a claim that cultural productions can neither serve as a substitute to anti-discrimination, nor that it is realistic to expect that cultural performance and the arts can fill a gap in the fight against prejudice and exclusion, or encourage states to enforce equality and human rights legislation. this is a rebuttal of the claim made in the concept note for eri: “sectoral policy achievements have […] been insufficient to produce a major and deep change, not least because they address primarily socio-economic challenges without tackling the root causes that stand in the way of meaningful progress: ignorance, hatred and mistrust” (the alliance for the european roma institute, 2015, p. 2) and can be articulated in a few different points. on the one hand, roma cultural performances have been widely appreciated (and at time appropriated) by majoritarian societies over the centuries, yet racism against roma continued to prevail. on the other hand, the european roma and travellers forum has claimed that “is absurd to decry socio-economic efforts. ignorance, hatred and mistrust are intimately linked to the living conditions of a majority of the roma and the first step against anti-gypsyism and eliminating stereotypes is to provide the roma with decent housing, education and employment and helping them to enter into roles in which they have hitherto not been accepted.” (european roma and travellers forum, 2015, p. 1)26.on a similar note, martin kovats, ex advisor to the office of commissioner spidla on the development of the european roma platform and common basic principles for roma integration27, and more recently special adviser to ex employment commissioner lászló andor, formulated in clear terms what, borrowing from fraser, i have called the risk of displacement: “aren’t ignorance, hatred and mistrust more likely to be symptomatic of social and economic relations than their ‘root cause’? […] in making the ‘root causes’ of poverty, exclusion and discrimination (as well as of multimillion euro policy failure) matters of the mind, no consideration need be given to the structural and systemic factors that many of us believe play an important role in how roma is understood. the system is fine, just the people that are wrong. they think wrong thoughts about roma. furthermore, it is suggested that these wrong thoughts are essentially a legacy of the past (rather than 26the odd thing in the official statement issued by the ertf on the non-paper that was leaked about the initial plans to set up eri was that they reproduced, practically verbatim, the positions expressed by yaron matras in eanrs. 27the 10 common basic principles for roma integration constitute the guiding principles for the framework on roma integration 2020, and are: 1) constructive, pragmatic and non-discriminatory policies; 2) explicit but not exclusive targeting; 3) inter-cultural approach; 4) aiming for the mainstream; 5) awareness of the gender dimension; 6) transfer of evidence-based policies; 7) use of european union instruments; 8) involvement of regional and local authorities; 9) involvement of civil society; 10) active participation of the roma. while point 3 can be interpreted in ways that might lead to cultural recognition policies, the whole approach is clearly geared to achieve equality of opportunities in the socio-economic dimension. the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 66 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute generated within contemporary society). what is required is re-education or at least some good pr and the promotion of a ‘positive image’. these neo-liberal ideology may be the answer, but there is no reason to think so” (kovats 2015, earns email exchange). nancy fraser, in her 2000 article on rethinking recognition, identified two different possible branches of the issue of displacement: one possibility is to see misrecognition as a problem of cultural depreciation, so that the origins of injustice are seen in discourses, and not as socially grounded, institutionalized norms. the other option is to acknowledge that cultural injustices are linked to economic ones, but to see the problem from a culturalist perspective, thus assuming that maldistribution is simply a secondary effect of misrecognition. the eri positioning, as presented in its original concept note, could be associated to this second way of seeing things which understands economic inequalities as expressions of cultural hierarchies: “it follows from this view that all maldistribution can be remedied indirectly, by a politics of recognition: to revalue unjustly devalued identities is simultaneously to attack the deep sources of economic inequality; no explicit politics of redistribution is needed” (fraser, 2000, p. 4). in short, what comes first, poverty or the stereotypes about the poor? this begs an additional question of whether, and eventually how much, the stereotypes about the roma have to do with mental associations of the stereotypes of marginalization with an ethnic group, what kind of contact exists between members of majority society and roma individuals and communities, and what role cultural production and representation (particularly mainstream media) plays in this. one commentary of an eri supporter when asked to locate the socio-economic issue within the making of the eri was: “because when we start talking about the confusion between class/ socio-economic status and ethnicity, when that becomes a problem, as it is in media and very much in europe today… if we have people who are roma and who are middle class but who are passing for white, then maybe at some point they intermarry and maybe they don’t share everything with their children, and roma people are also forgetting that they are roma, of romani heritage. that’s also a problem.” v.3 political concerns and counter arguments the main criticism related to what i have identified as the problem of misframing has to do with whether eri is an independent institute or part of an intergovernmental agreement within the council of europe (something similar to what the ertf used to be). according to the alliance, eri is to be an independent body, with no ambition of turning into a political representative organization aiming at replacing existing structures or competing with them (brooks june 2015, earns email exchange). the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 67 tina magazzini in response to this claim, concern has been expressed about the difficulty of playing a genuinely independent role when the funders are two big players of roma identity politics themselves (matras september and november 2015, kovats july 2015, earns email exchange). the opening statement of the 2015 alliance for eri concept note on the creation of the institute reads “ the ‘european roma institute’ (eri) is proposed as an independent organization with the mission of increasing the self-esteem of roma and decreasing negative prejudice of the majority towards the roma by means of arts, culture, history, media” (the alliance for the european roma institute, 2015, p. 1). the same concept note, however, also identified as one of eri’s core functions that of providing policy advice: “as a policy adviser eri will provide expert advice in its areas of competence, when required by the council of europe, its members and other partners” (the alliance for the european roma institute, 2015, p. 3). it can of course be argued that “its areas of competence” having been identified as arts and culture, there is no competition between the eri and organizations such as the ertf, nor is there necessarily a conflict of interest in being the beneficiary of the council of europe’s policies, and providing advice to the same body on issues regarding roma culture. this however becomes less clear cut should eri start advising the council of europe, its members, or other partners on topics that are of political nature, such as inclusion policies and plans for roma minorities. this is a different matter from the debate around who holds legitimacy of cultural production on roma. as mentioned in the section on cultural criticism, some scholars expressed their concern about the potential consequences of appointing an official arbiter (eri) in matters of (roma) cultural legitimacy. regarding power structures and the vision of eri as a threat that might ‘police culture’ and oppose scholarly meritocracy, it has been pointed out that there already is, and there has been for quite a long time, a strand of literature and of specialized scholarship on romani culture that has, for better or for worst, shaped the terms of the debate up until now. the fact that these studies have so far come mostly from non-roma academics, and not from roma activists, artists or lobbyists does not make them, per se, more objective, since meritocracy itself is shaped by a cultural understanding of worth and deservingness. in the words of a member of the alliance for eri: “on the issue of power structures i think we have to go beyond just talking about media: of course it is an important factor in reproducing and strengthening anti-gyspsysm, but we have to look beyond it. and another important arena where anti-gypsysm is produced and reproduced is academia. we have to touch on this, because what happened, and what has been an interesting experience to observe about eri, is that opposition to this initiative has come from two circles, mainly: one were some roma from the ertf, because they have a vested interests in securing more resources for themselves; and then it was a bunch of non roma academics manipulating discourses and ideas about eri that we chose not to answer to. about meritocracy and the objective, scientific the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 68 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute approach to social sciences dealing with roma, this critique really is nonsense: because on the one hand it is assumed that academia is guided by meritocracy, when it is very clear that is not only guided by that. [...]too often you hear the argument that if you are roma, you cannot be an academic on roma studies, just because you would be biased. i don’t know how to react to this, and how to overcome these discourses, because i would expect a more friendly environment, i expect that these scholars would understand what romani culture is. and there are moral and ethical considerations…i simply don’t know how to work on that.” while the issue of knowledge production and roma-led cultural representations pertain to the field of recognition, it is difficult for it not to ‘spill over’ into politics. going back to the ‘areas of competence’ of the eri (on which advise might be sought from policy-makers), categories become somewhat blurred. should eri be exclusively an artistic endeavor, it would most likely not have been met with the same degree of hostility from certain sectors. art and culture are however never politically ‘neutral’, and even less so in contemporary europe, where culture—due to its flexibility and ambiguity—has become a very apt concept for those wanting to defend the existing political order. the idea that racism and inequality are fundamentally a culturalized problem to be tackled by culturalized measures has been found problematic by many (mokre, 2013), ever more so when it is met by a “trickle down minority social integration” approach in politics, which translates into the proposition “growth first, social and minority inclusion will follow” (cianetti, 2016, p. 18). additionally, frame-setting has to do not only with how the problem is addressed, but also with the ‘scale’ at which it is addressed, which is among the most consequential of political decisions. according to fraser, the problem of misframing concerns the boundary-setting of the political, and can be considered the defining form of injustice in the globalizing age. she identifies the problem of misframing where social movements impose ‘a national frame on a global problem’ (for example by ignoring the responsibility of the financial markets, global economy and offshore factories on social dumping). in the case of roma identity politics, the critique seems to go along similar lines, but the directionality is reversed, since the concern is that roma identity is being framed as a european transnational one while what is being overlooked and overridden are the rights of eu citizens who have not only an ethnicity and minority culture, but also citizenship rights. the wider preoccupation of many scholars is with the ‘europeanization of roma’ (friedman et al., 2015; van baar, 2015; vermeersch, 2013). in practice, the main concern is that framing roma as a transnational european minority might have the unintended consequence of ‘absolving’ single eu member states from (culturally, among other things) integrating the roma minorities who live on their territory28. the 28by cultural integration i do not mean assimilation, but rather a comprehensive set of policies that could incorporate roma culture and history into school textbooks while providing roma with equal opportunities. the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 69 tina magazzini risk, as seen by some, is that of naturalizing the fact that roma minorities are treated as second-class citizens in their own countries. vi. conclusions. on elitism, culture and ‘the important things in life’ after providing some background for the emergence of roma identity politics in contemporary europe, in the previous section i grouped the critiques moved to the project of a european roma institute according to three broad categories: cultural (the problem of reification), economic (the problem of displacement) and political (the problem of misframing). in elizabeth andersons’ vocabulary, these can be thought of as inequalities of esteem –when some groups stigmatize, demean and monopolize honorable status to themselves–, socio-economic inequalities –when different set of rules apply to different groups depending on their socio-economic status–, and inequalities of standing –or political power, in the sense of a society which weights the interests of members of some groups more heavily than others (anderson, 2010, 2015). according to the documents, exchanges and debates held about eri to date, the declared purpose of its proponents is clearly that of tackling the first set of issues: that of cultural recognition and esteem. nonetheless, given that there are increasing instances in which economic and social problems are constructed as “cultural issues” (particularly in relation to migrant communities, with marginality seen as a ‘cultural’ ill of the poor), the ways in which eri will carry out its activities, and what kind of definition of culture its members will adopt, will determine whether the institute is capable of addressing the identified challenges. the wider picture in which the eri debate can be situated is that, in modern times, the concept of ‘race’ has gradually turned into ‘ethnicity’, and ‘ethnicity’ into ‘culture’, which has come to occupy a more subtle, pervasive and versatile social space –a good example of which is what has been labeled “reasonable anti-gypsism” (van baar, 2011). in this sense, while the hybridity of roma identities makes it difficult for roma to present a coherent ‘romani voice’ in cultural terms, mcgarry has suggested that “it is the political identity of roma which has the capacity to change through formal representation in the public sphere with roma actively determining how they are understood” (mcgarry, 2014, p. 770). however, there is no reason to show that political unity might be more easily achieved than cultural representation. cultural identity as an economic, status, or upward mobility opportunity also plays a role: roma culture has historically been appreciated, but generally as a ‘low culture’ compared to things such as the opera and academic scholarship. this calls into question what the purpose of culture is to begin with, and what is its function. in this regard, one of the alliance members commented: “the main focus of eri will be to address roma in a positive way. because up until now the dominant discourse is that roma are an issue, the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 70 cultural institutions as a combat sport. reflections on the european roma institute they have problems, they are a problem … and we want to show that you can look at roma from another perspective. […] to give you an example, when we talk about roma events, it is always about music, and dancing. that’s a folklorization of what we mean by romani arts and culture. nobody talks about the works of roma artists who deserve recognition and visibility. so when people think of roma culture it is not ‘high culture’, we always think of roma ‘low culture’…so at one moment, as a joke, i was thinking that we could give eri a more controversial name, something like ‘roma academy for verifying arts, high culture, and top sciences’.” beyond the irony, this statement raises the important point of conceptualizing culture and cultural systems as extensions of power. the fact that berlin was chosen as the city where eri will be set up holds an important symbolic value, as does the recent appointment of valeriu nicolae, a romanian roma that comes from grassroots activism, as special representative for the secretary general for roma issues at the council of europe. the decision regarding who is appointed as executive director of eri (an open call was launched by the alliance in august 2016) will give a better sense of the direction in which the project is moving. as bourdieu wrote in his distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste, “for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature, etc., one would have to analyze fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself” (bourdieu, 1987, p. 18). in order to contribute to a meaningful interpretation of these struggles, the role of academia in general, and romani studies in particular, could and should be that of adopting a more inter-disciplinary and intersectoral approach to the topics of ethnicity, culture, and knowledge production. the age of human rights journal, 7 (december 2016) pp. 50-76 issn: 2340-9592 doi: 10.17561/ tahrj.n7.9 71 tina magazzini references anderson, e. 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[sqrt] has been used to represent square root (radical) sign. a full list of errors that have been changed can be found at the end.] rare masterpieces of philosophy and science edited by dr. w. stark the accumulation of capital published on the louis stern memorial fund the accumulation of capital by rosa luxemburg _translated from the german by agnes schwarzschild (doctor iuris)_ _with an introduction by joan robinson_ new haven yale university press 1951 this translation first published in the united states by yale university press new haven connecticut designed by sean jennett and printed in great britain by butler and tanner ltd london and frome contents translator's note _page_ 7 a note on rosa luxemburg 9 introduction 13 section one the problem of reproduction i. the object of our investigation _page_ 31 ii. quesnay's and adam smith's analyses of the process of reproduction 48 iii. a criticism of smith's analysis 64 iv. marx's scheme of simple reproduction 76 v. the circulation of money 93 vi. enlarged reproduction 107 vii. analysis of marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction 120 viii. marx's attempt to resolve the difficulty 139 ix. the difficulty viewed from the angle of the process of circulation 155 section two historical exposition of the problem first round sismondi-malthus _v._ say-ricardo, macculloch x. sismondi's theory of reproduction _page_ 173 xi. macculloch _v._ sismondi 191 xii. ricardo _v._ sismondi 203 xiii. say _v._ sismondi 211 xiv. malthus 219 second round the controversy between rodbertus and von kirchmann xv. v. kirchmann's theory of reproduction _page_ 227 xvi. rodbertus' criticism of the classical school 238 xvii. rodbertus' analysis of reproduction 252 third round struve--bulgakov--tugan baranovski v. vorontsov--nikolayon xviii. a new version of the problem _page_ 271 xix. vorontsov and his 'surplus' 276 xx. nikolayon 284 xxi. struve's 'third persons' and 'three world empires' 292 xxii. bulgakov and his completion of marx's analysis 298 xxiii. tugan baranovski and his 'lack of proportion' 311 xxiv. the end of russian 'legalist' marxism 324 section three the historical conditions of accumulation xxv. contradictions within the diagram of enlarged reproduction _page_ 329 xxvi. the reproduction of capital and its social setting 348 xxvii. the struggle against natural economy 368 xxviii. the introduction of commodity economy 386 xxix. the struggle against peasant economy 395 xxx. international loans 419 xxxi. protective tariffs and accumulation 446 xxxii. militarism as a province of accumulation 454 index 469 translator's note this is an original translation not only of the main body of the work but also of a number of quotations from foreign authors. page references thus usually indicate the original foreign sources. in so far as possible, however, i have availed myself of existing translations and have referred to the following standard works: karl marx: _capital_, vol. i (transl. by moore-aveling, london, 1920); vol. ii (transl. by e. untermann, chicago, 1907); vol. iii (transl. by e. untermann, chicago, 1909) _the poverty of philosophy_ (translator's name not given, london, 1936). sismondi's introduction to the second edition of _nouveaux principes_ is quoted from m. mignet's translation of selected passages by sismondi, entitled _political economy and the philosophy of government_, london, 1847. no english translation exists of marx's _theorien ueber den mehrwert_. unfortunately, not all the west european texts, and none of the russian--except engels' correspondence with nikolayon--were accessible to me, and i regret having been unable to trace some quotations and check up on others. in such cases, the english version follows the german text and will at least bring out the point the author wanted to make. to save the reader grappling with unfamiliar concepts, i have converted foreign currencies and measures into their english equivalents, at the following rates: 20 _marks_--25 _francs_--$5--l1 (gold standard); 1 _hectare_--(roughly) 2.5 acres; 1 _kilometre_--5/8 mile. i am glad of this opportunity to express my gratitude to dr. w. stark and mrs. j. robinson for the helpful criticism and appreciation with which my work has met. agnes schwarzschild a note on rosa luxemburg rosa luxemburg was born on 5 march 1870, at zamosc, a little town of russian poland, not far from the city of lublin. she came from a fairly well-to-do family of jewish merchants, and soon showed the two outstanding traits which were to characterise all her life and work: a high degree of intelligence, and a burning thirst for social justice which led her, while still a schoolgirl, into the revolutionary camp. partly to escape the russian police, partly to complete her education, she went to zurich and studied there the sciences of law and economics. her doctoral dissertation dealt with the industrial development of poland and showed up the vital integration of polish industry with the wider economic system of metropolitan russia. it was a work not only of considerable promise, but already of solid and substantial achievement. her doctorate won, rosa luxemburg looked around for a promising field of work and decided to go to germany, whose working-class movement seemed destined to play a leading part in the future history of international socialism. she settled there in 1896, and two years later contracted a formal marriage with a german subject which secured her against the danger of forcible deportation to russia. now, at that moment the german social-democratic party was in the throes of a serious crisis. in 1899, eduard bernstein published his well-known work _die voraussetzungen des sozialismus und die aufgaben der sozialdemokratie_, which urged the party to drop its revolutionary jargon and to work henceforth for tangible social reforms within the given economic set-up, instead of trying to bring about its final and forcible overthrow. this 'reformism' or 'revisionism' seemed to rosa luxemburg a base as well as a foolish doctrine, and she published in the same year a pamphlet _sozialreform oder revolution?_ which dealt with bernstein's ideas in no uncertain fashion. from this moment onward, she was and remained one of the acknowledged leaders of the left wing within the german working-class movement. the events of the year 1905 gave rosa luxemburg a welcome opportunity to demonstrate that revolution was to her more than a subject of purely academic interest. as soon as the russian masses began to move, she hurried to warsaw and threw herself into the fray. there followed a short span of feverish activity, half a year's imprisonment, and, finally, a return journey to berlin. the experiences of the warsaw rising are reflected in a book entitled _massenstreik, partei und gewerkschaften_, which was published in 1906. it recommends the general strike as the most effective weapon in the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. the international socialist congress which met at stuttgart in 1907 prepared and foreshadowed the sorry history of rosa luxemburg's later life. on that occasion she drafted, together with lenin, a resolution which demanded that the workers of the world should make any future war an opportunity for the destruction of the capitalist system. unlike so many others, she stuck to her resolution when, seven years later, the time of testing came. the result was that she had to spend nearly the whole of the first world war in jail, either under punishment or in protective custody. but imprisonment did not mean inactivity. in 1916, there appeared in switzerland her book _die krise der sozialdemokratie_, which assailed the leaders of the german labour party for their patriotic attitude and called the masses to revolutionary action. the foundation of the spartacus league in 1917, the germ cell out of which the communist party of germany was soon to develop, was vitally connected with the dissemination of rosa luxemburg's aggressive sentiments. the collapse of the _kaiserreich_ on 11 november 1918, gave rosa luxemburg her freedom and an undreamt-of range of opportunities. the two months that followed must have been more crowded and more colourful than all her previous life taken together. but the end of her career was imminent. the fatal spartacus week, an abortive rising of the berlin workers, led on 15 january 1919, to her arrest by a government composed of former party comrades. during her removal to prison she was attacked and severely beaten by soldiers belonging to the extreme right, a treatment which she did not survive. her body was recovered days later from a canal. a type not unlike trotsky, rosa luxemburg had her tender and sentimental side, which comes to the surface in her correspondence, especially in the _briefe aus dem gefaengnis_ printed in 1922. as a thinker she showed considerable honesty and independence of mind. _the accumulation of capital_, first published in 1913, which is undoubtedly her finest achievement, reveals her as that rarest of all rare phenomena--a marxist critical of karl marx. w. stark introduction academic economists have recently returned from the elaboration of static equilibrium to the classical search for a dynamic model of a developing economy. rosa luxemburg, neglected by marxist and academic economists alike, offers a theory of the dynamic development of capitalism which is of the greatest interest. the book is one of considerable difficulty (apart from the vivid historical chapters), and to those accustomed only to academic analysis the difficulty is rendered well-nigh insurmountable by the marxist terminology in which it is expressed. the purpose of this preface is to provide a glossary of terms, and to search for the main thread of the argument (leaving the historical illustrations to speak for themselves) and set it out in simpler language. the result is no doubt too simple. the reader must sample for himself the rich confusion in which the central core of analysis is imbedded, and must judge for himself whether the core has been mishandled in the process of digging it out.[1] our author takes her departure from the numerical examples for simple reproduction (production with a constant stock of capital) and expanded reproduction (production with capital accumulating) set out in volume ii of marx's _capital_. as she points out,[2] marx completed the model for simple reproduction, but the models for accumulation were left at his death in a chaos of notes, and they are not really fit to bear all the weight she puts on them (heaven help us if posterity is to pore over all the backs of old envelopes on which economists have jotted down numerical examples in working out a piece of analysis). to follow her line of thought, however, it is necessary to examine her version of marx's models closely, to see on what assumptions they are based (explicitly or unconsciously) and to search to the succeeding analysis. to begin at the beginning--gross national income (for a closed economy) for, say, a year, is written _câ + vâ + s_; that is, constant capital, variable capital and surplus. variable capital, _v_, is the annual wages bill. surplus, _s_, is annual rent, interest, and net profit, so that _vâ + s_ represents net national income. (in this introduction surplus is used interchangeably with rent, interest and net profit.) constant capital, _c_, represents at the same time the contribution which materials and capital equipment make to annual output, and the cost of maintaining the stock of physical capital in existence at the beginning of the year. when all commodities are selling at normal prices, these two quantities are equal (normal prices are tacitly assumed always to rule,[3] an assumption which is useful for long-period problems, though treacherous when we have to deal with slumps and crises). gross receipts equal to _câ + vâ + s_ pass through the hands of the capitalists during the year, of which they use an amount, _c_, to replace physical capital used up during the year, so that _c_ represents costs of raw materials and wear and tear and amortisation of plant. an amount, _v_, is paid to workers and is consumed by them (saving by workers is regarded as negligible[4]). the surplus, _s_, remains to the capitalists for their own consumption and for net saving. the professional classes (civil servants, priests, prostitutes, etc.) are treated as hangers-on of the capitalists, and their incomes do not appear, as they are not regarded as producing _value_.[5] expenditure upon them tends to lessen the saving of capitalists, and their own expenditure and saving are treated as expenditure and saving out of surplus. in the model set out in chapter vi there is no technical progress (this is a drastic simplification made deliberately[6]) and the ratio of capital to labour is constant (as the stock of capital increases employment increases in proportion). thus real output per worker employed is constant (hours of work per year do not vary) and real wages per man are constant. it follows that real surplus per man is also constant. so long as these assumptions are retained marxian _value_ presents no problem. _value_ is the product of labour-time. _value_ created per man-year is constant because hours of work are constant. real product per man year being constant, on the above assumptions, the _value_ of a unit of product is constant. for convenience we may assume money wages per man constant. then, on these assumptions, both the money price of a unit of output and the _value_ of a unit of money are constant. this of course merely plasters over all the problems of measurement connected with the use of index numbers, but provided that the technique of production is unchanging, and normal prices are ruling, those problems are not serious, and we can conduct the analysis in terms of money values.[7] (rosa luxemburg regards it as a matter of indifference whether we calculate in money or in _value_.[8]) the assumption of constant real wages presents a difficulty which we may notice in passing. the operation of the capitalist system is presumed to depress the level of wages down to the limit set by the minimum subsistence of the worker and his family. but how large a family? it would be an extraordinary fluke if the average size of family supported by the given wage of a worker were such as to provide for a rate of growth of population exactly adjusted to the rate of accumulation of capital, and she certainly does not hold that this is the case.[9] there is a reserve army of labour standing by, ready to take employment when the capitalists offer it. while they are unemployed the workers have no source of income, but are kept alive by sharing in the consumption of the wages of friends and relations who are in work.[10] when an increase in the stock of capital takes place, more workers begin to earn wages, those formerly employed are relieved of the burden of supporting some unemployed relations, and their own consumption rises. thus either they were living below the subsistence minimum before, or they are above it now. we may cut this knot by simply postulating that real wages per man are constant,[11] without asking why. the important point for the analysis which we are examining is that when employment increases the total consumption of the workers as a whole increases by the amount of the wages received by the additional workers.[12] we may now set out the model for simple reproduction--that is, annual national income for an economy in which the stock of capital is kept intact but not increased. all output is divided into two departments: i, producing capital equipment and raw materials, (producers' goods), and ii, producing consumption goods. then we have i: _c_{1} + v_{1} + s_{1} = c_{1} + c_{2}_ ii: _c_{2} + v_{2} + s_{2} = v_{1} + v_{2} + s_{1} + s_{2}_ thus _c_{2} = v_{1} + s_{1}_ this means that the net output of the producers' goods department is equal to the replacement of capital in the consumers' goods department. the whole surplus, as well as the whole of wages, is currently consumed. before proceeding to the model for accumulation there is a difficulty which must be discussed. in the above model the stock of capital exists, so to speak, off stage. rosa luxemburg is perfectly well aware of the relationship between annual wear and tear of capital, which is part of _c_, and the stock of fixed capital,[13] but as soon as she (following marx) discusses accumulation she equates the addition to the stock of capital made by saving out of surplus in one year to the wear and tear of capital in the next year. to make sense of this we must assume that all capital is consumed and made good once a year. she seems to slip into this assumption inadvertently at first, though later it is made explicit.[14] she also consciously postulates that _v_ represents the amount of capital which is paid out in wages in advance of receipts from sales of the commodities produced. (this, as she says, is the natural assumption to make for agricultural production, where workers this year are paid from the proceeds of last year's harvest.)[15] thus _v_ represents at the same time the annual wages bill and the amount of capital locked up in the wages fund, while _c_ represents both the annual amortisation of capital and the total stock of capital (other than the wages fund). this is a simplification which is tiresome rather than helpful (it arises from marx's ill-judged habit of writing _s/(câ + v)_ for the rate of profit on capital), but it is no more than a simplification and does not invalidate the rest of the analysis. another awkward assumption, which causes serious trouble later, is implicit in the argument. savings out of the surplus accruing in each department (producers' and consumers' goods) are always invested in capital in the same department. there is no reason to imagine that one capitalist is linked to others in his own department more than to those in the other department, so the conception seems to be that each capitalist invests his savings in his own business. there is no lending by one capitalist to another and no capitalist ever shifts his sphere of operations from one department to another. this is a severe assumption to make even about the era before limited liability was introduced, and becomes absurd afterwards. moreover it is incompatible with the postulate that the rate of profit on capital tends to equality throughout the economy,[16] for the mechanism which equalises profits is the flow of new investment, and the transfer of capital as amortisation funds are re-invested, into more profitable lines of production and away from less profitable lines.[17] the assumption that there is no lending by one capitalist to another puts limitation upon the model. not only must the total rate of investment be equal to the total of planned saving, but investment in each department must be equal to saving in that department, and not only must the rate of increase of capital lead to an increase of total output compatible with total demand, but the increase in output of each department, dictated by the increase in capital in that department, must be divided between consumers' and producers' goods in proportions compatible with the demand for each, dictated by the consumption and the investment plans in each department. there is no difficulty, however, in choosing numbers which satisfy the requirements of the model. the numerical examples derived from marx's jottings are cumbersome and confusing, but a clear and simple model can be constructed on the basis of the assumptions set out in chapter vii. in each department, constant capital is four times variable capital.[18] (constant capital is the stock of raw materials which is turned over once a year; variable capital is the wages bill, which is equal to the capital represented by the wages fund.) surplus is equal to variable capital (net income is divided equally between wages and surplus) and half of surplus is saved.[19] savings are allotted between constant and variable capital in such a way as to preserve the 4 to 1 ratio. thus four-fifths of savings represents a demand for producers' goods, and is added to constant capital each year, and one-fifth represents a demand for consumers' goods, and is added to the wages fund (variable capital). these ratios dictate the relationship between department i (producers' goods) and department ii (consumers' goods).[20] it can easily be seen that the basic assumptions require that the output of department i must stand in the ratio of 11 to 4 to the output of department ii.[21] we can now construct a much simpler model than those provided in the text. _c_ _v_ _s_ _gross output_ department i 44 11 11 66 department ii 16 4 4 24 - total 90 in department i, 5â·5 units are saved (half of _s_) of which 4â·4 are invested in constant capital and 1â·1 in variable capital. in department ii 2 units are saved, 1â·6 being added to constant and 0â·4 to variable capital. the 66 units of producers' goods provide 44â + 4â·4 constant capital for department i and 16â + 1â·6 constant capital for department ii and the 24 units of consumers' goods provide 11â + 4 wages of labour already employed, 5â·5â + 2 for consumption out of surplus, and 1â·1â + 0â·4 addition to variable capital, which provide for an addition to employment. after the investment has been made, and the labour force increased in proportion to the wages bill, we have _c_ _v_ _s_ _gross output_ department i 48â·4 12â·1 12â·1 72â·6 department ii 17â·6 4â·4 4â·4 26â·4 ---- total 99 the two departments are now equipped to carry out another round of investment at the prescribed rate, and the process of accumulation continues. the ratios happen to have been chosen so that the total labour force, and total gross output, increase by 10 per cent per annum.[22] but all this, as rosa luxemburg remarks, is just arithmetic.[23] the only point of substance which she deduces from marx's numerical examples is that it is always department i which takes the initiative. she maintains that the capitalists in department i decide how much producers' goods to produce, and that department ii has to arrange its affairs so as to absorb an amount of producers' goods which will fit in with their plans.[24] on the face of it, this is obviously absurd. the arithmetic is perfectly neutral between the two departments, and, as she herself shows, will serve equally well for the imagined case of a socialist society where investment is planned with a view to consumption.[25] but behind all this rigmarole lies the real problem which she is trying to formulate. where does the demand come from which keeps accumulation going? she is not concerned with the problem, nowadays so familiar, of the balance between saving and investment. marx himself was aware of that problem, as is seen in his analysis of disequilibrium under conditions of simple reproduction (zero net investment).[26] when new fixed capital comes into existence, part of gross receipts are set aside in amortisation funds without any actual outlay being made on renewals. then total demand falls short of equilibrium output, and the system runs into a slump. contrariwise, when a burst of renewals falls due, in excess of the current rate of amortisation, a boom sets in. for equilibrium it is necessary for the age composition of the stock of capital to be such that current renewals just absorb current amortisation funds. similarly, when accumulation is taking place, current investment must absorb current net saving.[27] it is in connection with the problem of effective demand, in this sense, that marx brings gold-mining into the analysis. when real output expands at constant money prices, the increasing total of money value of output requires an increase in the stock of money in circulation (unless the velocity of circulation rises appropriately). the capitalists therefore have to devote part of their savings to increasing their holdings of cash (for there is no borrowing). this causes a deficiency of effective demand. but the increase in the quantity of money in circulation comes from newly mined gold, and the expenditure of the gold mining industry upon the other departments just makes up the deficiency in demand.[28] rosa luxemburg garbles this argument considerably, and brushes it away as beside the point. and it _is_ beside the point that she is concerned with. she does not admit the savings and investment problem, for she takes it for granted that each individual act of saving out of surplus is accompanied by a corresponding amount of real investment, and that every piece of investment is financed by saving out of surplus of the same capitalist who makes it.[29] what she appears to be concerned with is rather the inducement to invest. what motive have the capitalists for enlarging their stock of real capital?[30] how do they know that there will be demand for the increased output of goods which the new capital will produce, so that they can 'capitalise' their surplus in a profitable form? (on the purely analytical plane her affinity seems to be with hobson rather than keynes.) needless to say, our author does not formulate the problem of the inducement to invest in modern terminology, and the ambiguities and contradictions in her exposition have left ample scope for her critics to represent her theory as irredeemable nonsense.[31] but the most natural way to read it is also the clearest. investment can take place in an ever-accumulating stock of capital only if the capitalists are assured of an ever-expanding market for the goods which the capital will produce. on this reading, the statement of the problem leads straightforwardly to the solution propounded in the third section of this book. marx has his own answer to the problem of inducement to invest, which she refers to in the first chapter.[32] the pressure of competition forces each individual capitalist to increase his capital in order to take advantage of economies of large-scale production, for if he does not his rivals will, and he will be undersold. rosa luxemburg does not discuss whether this mechanism provides an adequate drive to keep accumulation going, but looks for some prospective demand outside the circle of production. here the numerical examples, as she shows, fail to help. and this is in the nature of the case, for (in modern jargon) the examples deal with _ex post_ quantities, while she is looking for _ex ante_ prospects of increased demand for commodities. if accumulation does take place, demand will absorb output, as the model shows, but what is it that makes accumulation take place? in section ii our author sets out to find what answers have been given to her problem. the analysis she has in mind is now broader than the strict confines of the arithmetical model. technical progress is going on, and the output of an hour's labour rises as time goes by. (the concept of _value_ now becomes treacherous, for the _value_ of commodities is continuously falling.) real wages tend to be constant in terms of commodities, thus the _value_ of labour power is falling, and the share of surplus in net income is rising (_s/v_, the rate of exploitation, is rising). the amount of saving in real terms is therefore rising (she suggests later that the proportion of surplus saved rises with surplus, in which case real savings increase all the more[33]). the problem is thus more formidable than appears in the model, for the equilibrium rate of accumulation of capital, in real terms, is greater than in the model, where the rate of exploitation is constant. at the same time the proportion of constant to variable capital is rising. she regards this not as something which is likely to happen for technical reasons, but as being necessarily bound up with the very nature of technical progress. as productivity increases, the amount of producers' goods handled per man-hour of labour increases; therefore, she says, the proportion of _c_ to _v_ must increase.[34] this is an error. it arises from thinking of constant capital in terms of goods, and contrasting it with variable capital in terms of _value_, that is, hours of labour. she forgets marx's warning that, as progress takes place, the _value_ of the commodities making up constant capital also falls.[35] it is perfectly possible for productivity to increase without any increase in the _value_ of capital per man employed. this would occur if improvements in the productivity of labour in making producers' goods kept pace with the productivity of labour in using producers' goods to make consumers' goods (capital-saving inventions balance labour-saving inventions, so that technical progress is 'neutral'). however, we can easily get out of this difficulty by postulating that as a matter of fact technical progress is mainly labour-saving, or, a better term, capital-using, so that capital per man employed is rising through time. rosa luxemburg treats the authors whom she examines in section ii with a good deal of sarcasm, and dismisses them all as useless. to some of the points raised her answers seem scarcely adequate. for instance, rodbertus sees the source of all the troubles of capitalism in the falling proportion of wages in national income.[36] he can be interpreted to refer to the proportion of wages in gross income. in that case, she is right (on the assumption of capital-using inventions) in arguing that a fall in the proportion of wages is bound up with technical progress, and that the proportion could be held constant only by stopping progress. he can also be taken to refer to the share of wages in net output, and this is the more natural reading. on this reading she argues that the fall in share of wages (or rise in rate of exploitation) is necessary to prevent a fall in the rate of profit on capital[37] (as capital per man employed rises, profit per man employed must rise if profit per unit of capital is constant). but she does not follow up the argument and inquire what rise in the rate of exploitation is necessary to keep capitalism going (actually, the statisticians tell us, the share of wages in net income has been fairly constant in modern industrial economies[38]). it is obvious that the less the rate of exploitation rises, the smaller is the rise in the rate of saving which the system has to digest, while the rise in real consumption by workers, which takes place when the rate of exploitation rises more slowly than productivity in the consumption good industries, creates an outlet for investment in productive capacity in those industries. the horrors of capitalism, and the difficulties which it creates for itself, are both exaggerated by the assumption of constant real-wage rates and, although it would be impossible to defend rodbertus' position that a constant rate of exploitation is all that is needed to put everything right, he certainly makes a contribution to the argument which ought to be taken into account. tugan-baranovski also seems to be treated too lightly. his conception is that the rising proportion of constant capital in both departments (machines to make machines as well as machines to make consumers' goods) provides an outlet for accumulation, and that competition is the driving force which keeps capitalists accumulating. rosa luxemburg is no doubt correct in saying that his argument does not carry the analysis beyond the stage at which marx left it,[39] but he certainly elaborates a point which she seems perversely to overlook. her real objection to tugan-baranovski is that he shows how, in certain conditions, capitalist accumulation might be self-perpetuating, while she wishes to establish that the coming disintegration of the capitalist system is not merely probable on the evidence, but is a logical necessity.[40] the authors such as sismondi, malthus and vorontsov, who are groping after the problem of equilibrium between saving and investment, are treated with even less sympathy (though she has a kindly feeling for sismondi, to whom she considers that marx gave too little recognition[41]) for she is either oblivious that there is such a problem, or regards it as trivial.[42] we leave the discussion, at the end of section ii, at the same point where we entered it, with the clue to the inducement to invest still to find. section iii is broader, more vigorous and in general more rewarding than the two preceding parts. it opens with a return to marx's model for a capitalist system with accumulation going on. our author then sets out a fresh model allowing for technical progress. the rate of exploitation (the ratio of surplus to wages) is rising, for real wages remain constant while output per man increases. in the model the proportion of surplus saved is assumed constant for simplicity, though in reality, she holds, it would tend to rise with the real income of the capitalists.[43] the ratio of constant to variable capital is rising for technical reasons. (the convention by which the annual wear and tear of capital is identified with the stock of capital now becomes a great impediment to clear thinking.) the arithmetical model shows the system running into an _impasse_ because the output of department i falls short of the requirements of constant capital in the two departments taken together, while the output of department ii exceeds consumption.[44] the method of argument is by no means rigorous. nothing follows from the fact that one particular numerical example fails to give a solution, and the example is troublesome to interpret as it is necessary to distinguish between discrepancies due to rounding off the figures from those which are intended to illustrate a point of principle.[45] but there is no need to paddle in the arithmetic to find where the difficulty lies. the model is over-determined because of the rule that the increment of capital within each department at the end of a year must equal the saving made within the same department during the year. if capitalists from department ii were permitted to lend part of their savings to department i to be invested in its capital, a breakdown would no longer be inevitable. suppose that total real wages are constant and that real consumption by capitalists increases slowly, so that the real output of department ii rises at a slower rate than productivity, then the amount of labour employed in it is shrinking. the ratio of capital to labour however is rising as a consequence of capital-using technical progress. the output of department i, and its productive capacity, is growing through time. capital invested in department i is accumulating faster than the saving of the capitalists in department i, and capitalists of department ii, who have no profitable outlet in their own industries for their savings, acquire titles to part of the capital in department i by supplying the difference between investment in department i and its own saving.[46] for any increase in the stock of capital of both departments taken together, required by technical progress and demand conditions, there is an appropriate amount of saving, and so long as the total accumulation required and total saving fit, there is no breakdown. but here we find the clue to the real contradiction. these quantities might conceivably fit, but there is no guarantee that they will. if the ratio of saving which the capitalists (taken together) choose to make exceeds the rate of accumulation dictated by technical progress, the excess savings can only be 'capitalised' if there is an outlet for investment outside the system. (the opposite case of deficient savings is also possible. progress would then be slowed down below the technically possible maximum; but this case is not contemplated by our author, and it would be irrelevant to elaborate upon it.) once more we can substitute for a supposed logical necessity a plausible hypothesis about the nature of the real case, and so rescue the succeeding argument. if in reality the distribution of income between workers and capitalists, and the propensity to save of capitalists, are such as to require a rate of accumulation which exceeds the rate of increase in the stock of capital appropriate to technical conditions, then there is a chronic excess of the potential supply of real capital over the demand for it and the system must fall into chronic depression. (this is the 'stagnation thesis' thrown out by keynes and elaborated by modern american economists, notably alvin hansen). how then is it that capitalist expansion had not yet (in 1912) shown any sign of slackening? in chapter xxvi rosa luxemburg advances her central thesis--that it is the invasion of primitive economies by capitalism which keeps the system alive. there follows a scorching account of the manner in which the capitalist system, by trade, conquest and theft, swallowed up the pre-capitalist economies,--some reduced to colonies of capitalist nations, some remaining nominally independent--and fed itself upon their ruins. the thread of analysis running through the historical illustrations is not easy to pick up, but the main argument seems to be as follows: as soon as a primitive closed economy has been broken into, by force or guile, cheap mass-produced consumption goods displace the old hand production of the family or village communities, so that a market is provided for ever-increasing outputs from the industries of department ii in the old centres of capitalism, without the standard of life of the workers who consume these commodities being raised.[47] the ever-growing capacity of the export industries requires the products of department i, thus maintaining investment at home. at the same time great capital works, such as railways, are undertaken in the new territories.[48] this investment is matched partly by savings from surplus extracted on the spot, but mainly by loans from the old capitalist countries. there is no difficulty here in accounting for the inducement to invest, for the new territories yield commodities unobtainable at home.[49] we might set out the essence of the argument as follows: cloth from lancashire pays for labour in america, which is used to produce wheat and cotton. these provide wages and raw materials to the lancashire mills, while the profits acquired both on the plantations and in the mills are invested in steel rails and rolling stock, which open up fresh territories, so that the whole process is continuously expanding. moreover, apart from profits earned on capital actually invested in the new territories, great capital gains are made simply by acquiring possession of land and other natural resources.[50] labour to work the resources may be provided by the local dispossessed peasantry or by immigration from the centres of capitalism.[51] investment in equipment for it to use is more profitable than in that operated by home labour, partly because the wretched condition of the colonial workers makes the rate of exploitation higher,[52] but mainly just because they are on the spot, and can turn the natural resources seized by the capitalists into means of production. no amount of investment in equipment for british labour would produce soil bearing cotton, rubber or copper. thus investment is deflected abroad[53] and the promise of profit represented by the natural resources calls into existence, by fair means or foul, the labour and capital to make it come true. the process of building up this capital provides an outlet for the old industries and rescues them from the contradictions inherent in deficiency of demand. the analysis of militarism in the last chapter over-reaches itself by trying to prove too much. the argument is that armaments are built up out of taxes which fall entirely on wages.[54] this can be regarded as a kind of 'forced saving' imposed on the workers. these savings are extra to the saving out of surplus. they are invested in armaments, and that ends the story. on this basis the armaments, in themselves, cannot be held to provide an outlet for the investment of surplus (though the use of the armaments, as in the opium war,[55] to break up primitive economies is a necessary condition for the colonial investment already described) and capital equipment to produce armaments is merely substituted for capital formerly producing consumers' goods. the analysis which best fits rosa luxemburg's own argument, and the facts, is that armaments provide an outlet for the investment of surplus (over and above any contribution there may be from forced saving out of wages), which, unlike other kinds of investment, creates no further problem by increasing productive capacity (not to mention the huge new investment opportunities created by reconstruction after the capitalist nations have turned their weapons against each other). all this is perhaps too neat an account of what our author is saying. the argument streams along bearing a welter of historical examples in its flood, and ideas emerge and disappear again bewilderingly. but something like the above seems to be intended. and something like it is now widely accepted as being true. rosa luxemburg, as we have seen, neglects the rise in real wages which takes place as capitalism develops, and denies the internal inducement to invest provided by technical progress, two factors which help to rescue capitalism from the difficulties which it creates for itself. she is left with only one influence (economic imperialism) to account for continuous capital accumulation, so that her analysis is incomplete. all the same, few would deny that the extension of capitalism into new territories was the mainspring of what an academic economist has called the 'vast secular boom' of the last two hundred years,[56] and many academic economists account for the uneasy condition of capitalism in the twentieth century largely by the 'closing of the frontier' all over the world.[57] but the academic economists are being wise after the event. for all its confusions and exaggerations, this book shows more prescience than any orthodox contemporary could claim. joan robinson _cambridge._ footnotes: [1] for a totally different interpretation see sweezy; _the theory of capitalist development_, chap. xi, section 9. [2] see p. 166. [3] cf. the quotation from _capital_, vol. iii, p. 331. [4] see p. 132. [5] see p. 135. [6] see p. 130. [7] exchanges between industries, however, must take place at 'prices of production' not at _values_. see below, p. 15, note. [8] see p. 113. [9] see p. 361. [10] see p. 134. [11] later it is assumed that real wages can be depressed by taxation (p. 455). [12] see p. 116. [13] see p. 85. [14] see p. 355. [15] see p. 76, note 355. [16] see p. 79. [17] in the numerical example quoted in chap. vi. (p. 117) the rate of profit is much higher in department ii than in i. marx has made the rate of exploitation equal in the two departments, and the ratio of constant to variable capital higher in department i. this is evidently an oversight. the two departments must trade with each other at market prices, not in terms of _value_. therefore _s_{1}_ must represent the profits accruing to department i, not a proportion (half in the example) of the _value_ generated in department i. _s_{1}/v_{1}_ should exceed _s_{2}/v_{2}_ to an extent corresponding to the higher organic composition of capital in department i. the point is interesting, as it shows that when off guard marx forgot that he could make prices proportional to _values_ only when the organic composition of capital is the same in all industries. [18] see p. 129. [19] see p. 130. [20] since, in this model, the organic composition of capital is the same in the two departments, prices correspond to _values_. [21] of total gross output, 2/3 is replacement of constant capital; surplus is 1/6 of gross output, and of surplus half is saved; thus savings are 1/12 of gross output; of saving 4/5 is added to constant capital; thus 1/15 of gross output is added to constant capital. the output of department i is therefore 2/3â + 1/15 or 11/15 of total gross output. similarly, the output of department ii is 4/15 of total gross output. [22] this model bears a strong family resemblance to mr. harrod's 'warranted rate of growth'. _towards a dynamic economics_, lecture iii. [23] see p. 119. [24] see p. 125. [25] see p. 128. [26] see p. 91. [27] see p. 115. [28] see p. 102. the phrase '_zahlungsfã¤hige nachfrage_', translated 'effective demand', is not the effective demand of keynes (roughly, current expenditure) but appears often to mean demand for new capital, or, perhaps, prospective future demand for goods to be produced by new capital. [29] this assumption is made explicit later (p. 342). [30] see pp. 131 et seq. [31] see sweezy, loc. cit. [32] see p. 40. [33] see p. 303. [34] see p. 258. [35] this point is, however, later admitted (p. 337). [36] see p. 252. [37] see p. 259. marx himself failed to get this point clear. cf. my _essay on marxian economics_, chap. v. [38] cf. kalecki, _essays in the theory of economic fluctuations_, pp. 14 et seq. [39] see p. 323. [40] see p. 314. marx did not find himself in this dilemma because he held that there is a fundamental 'contradiction' in capitalism which shows itself in a strong tendency for the rate of profit on capital to fall as technical progress takes place. but rosa luxemburg sees that the tendency to a falling rate of profit is automatically checked and may even be reversed if real-wage rates are constant (p. 338). [41] see p. 217, note. [42] one passage suggests that she sees the problem, but thinks it irrelevant to the real issue (p. 342). [43] see p. 338. [44] see p. 337. [45] in this model the rate of exploitation is different in the two departments. this means that the numbers represent money value, not _value_. [46] rosa luxemburg seems to regard this process as impossible, but for what reason is by no means clear (p. 341). [47] see p. 352. [48] see p. 352. [49] see p. 358. [50] see p. 370. [51] see p. 428. [52] see p. 435. [53] see p. 421. [54] see p. 455. [55] see p. 387. [56] hicks, _value and capital_, p. 302, note. mr. hicks himself, however, regards the increase in population as the mainspring. [57] cf. _a survey of contemporary economics_ (ed. ellis), p. 63. _section one_ the problem of reproduction _chapter i_ the object of our investigation karl marx made a contribution of lasting service to the theory of economics when he drew attention to the problem of the reproduction of the entire social capital. it is significant that in the history of economics we find only two attempts at an exact exposition of this problem: one by quesnay, the father of the physiocrats, at its very inception; and in its final stage this attempt by marx. in the interim, the problem was ever with bourgeois economics. yet bourgeois economists have never been fully aware of this problem in its pure aspects, detached from related and intersecting minor problems; they have never been able to formulate it precisely, let alone solve it. seeing that the problem is of paramount importance, their attempts may all the same help us to some understanding of the trend of scientific economics. what is it precisely that constitutes this problem of the reproduction of total capital? the literal meaning of the word 'reproduction' is repetition, renewal of the process of production. at first sight it may be difficult to see in what respect the idea of reproduction differs from that of repetition which we can all understand--why such a new and unfamiliar term should be required. but in the sort of repetition which we shall consider, in the continual recurrence of the process of production, there are certain distinctive features. first, the regular repetition of reproduction is the general _sine qua non_ of regular consumption which in its turn has been the precondition of human civilisation in every one of its historical forms. the concept of reproduction, viewed in this way, reflects an aspect of the history of civilisation. production can never be resumed, there can be no reproduction, unless certain prerequisites such as tools, raw materials and labour have been established during the preceding period of production. however, at the most primitive level of man's civilisation, at the initial stage of man's power over nature; this possibility to re-engage in production depended more or less on chance. so long as hunting and fishing were the main foundations of social existence, frequent periods of general starvation interrupted the regular repetition of production. some primitive peoples recognised at a very early stage that for reproduction as a regularly recurring process certain measures were essential; these they incorporated into ceremonies of a religious nature; and in this way they accepted such measures as traditional social commitments. thus, as the thorough researches of spencer and gillen have taught us, the totem cult of the australian negroes is fundamentally nothing but certain measures taken by social groups for the purpose of securing and preserving their animal and vegetable foodstuffs; these precautions had been taken year by year since time immemorial and thus they became fossilised into religious ceremonials. yet the circle of consumption and production which forms the essence of reproduction became possible only with the invention of tillage with the hoe, with the taming of domestic animals, and with cattle-raising for the purpose of consumption. reproduction is something more than mere repetition in so far as it presupposes a certain level of society's supremacy over nature, or, in economic terms, a certain standard of labour productivity. on the other hand, at all stages of social development, the process of production is based on the continuation of two different, though closely connected factors, the technical and social conditions--on the precise relationship between man and nature and that between men and men. reproduction depends to the same degree on both these conditions. we have just seen how reproduction is bound up with the conditions of human working techniques, how far it is indeed solely the result of a certain level of labour productivity; but the social forms of production prevailing in each case are no less decisive. in a primitive communist agrarian community, reproduction as well as the whole plan of economic life is determined by the community of all workers and their democratic organs. the decision to re-engage in labour--the organisation of labour--the provision of raw materials, tools, and man-power as the essential preliminaries of labour--the arrangement of reproduction and the determination of its volume are all results of a planned co-operation in which everybody within the boundaries of the community takes his part. in an economic system based on slave labour or _corvã©e_, reproduction is enforced and regulated in all details by personal relations of domination. here the volume of reproduction is determined by the right of disposal held by the ruling _ã©lites_ over smaller or larger circles of other people's labour. in a society producing by capitalist methods, reproduction assumes a peculiar form, as a mere glance at certain striking phenomena will show us. in every other society known to history, reproduction recurs in a regular sequence as far as its preconditions, the existing means of production and labour power, make this possible. as a rule, only external influences such as a devastating war or a great pestilence, depopulating vast areas of former cultural life, and consequently destroying masses of labour power and of accumulated means of production, can result in a complete interruption of reproduction or in its contraction to any considerable extent for longer or shorter periods. a despotic organisation of the plan of production may on occasion lead to similar phenomena. when in ancient egypt pharaoh's will chained thousands of fellaheen for decades to the building of the pyramids; when in modern egypt ismail pasha ordered 20,000 fellaheen to forced labour on the suez canal; or when, about two hundred years before christ, the emperor shi hoang ti, founder of the chin dynasty, allowed 400,000 people to perish of hunger and exhaustion and thus sacrificed a whole generation to his purpose of consolidating the great wall at china's northern frontier, the result was always that vast stretches of arable land were left fallow and that regular economic life was interrupted for long periods. in all these cases the causes of these interruptions of reproduction obviously lay in the one-sided determination of the plan of reproduction by those in power. societies which produce according to capitalist methods present a different picture. we observe that in certain periods all the ingredients of reproduction may be available, both labour and means of production, and yet some vital needs of society for consumer goods may be left unfulfilled. we find that in spite of these resources reproduction may in part be completely suspended and in part curtailed. here it is no despotic interference with the economic plan that is responsible for the difficulties in the process of production. quite apart from all technical conditions, reproduction here depends on purely social considerations: only those goods are produced which can with certainty be expected to sell, and not merely to sell, but to sell at the customary profit. thus profit becomes an end in itself, the decisive factor which determines not only production but also reproduction. not only does it decide in each case what work is to be undertaken, how it is to be carried out, and how the products are to be distributed; what is more, profit decides, also, at the end of every working period, whether the labour process is to be resumed, and, if so, to what extent and in what direction it should be made to operate.[58] in capitalist society, therefore, the process of reproduction as a whole, constitutes a peculiar and most complicated problem, in consequence of these purely historical and social factors. there is, as we shall see, an external characteristic which shows clearly this specific historical peculiarity of the capitalist process of reproduction. comprising not only production but also circulation (the process of exchange), it unites these two elements. capitalist production is primarily production by innumerable private producers without any planned regulation. the only social link between these producers is the act of exchange. in taking account of social requirements reproduction has no clue to go on other than the experiences of the preceding labour period. these experiences, however, remain the private experiences of individual producers and are not integrated into a comprehensive and social form. moreover, they do not always refer positively and directly to the needs of society. they are often rather indirect and negative, for it is only on the basis of price fluctuations that they indicate whether the aggregate of produced commodities falls short of the effective demand or exceeds it. yet the individual private producers make recurrent use of these experiences of the preceding labour period when they re-engage in reproduction, so that glut or shortage are bound to occur again in the following period. individual branches of production may develop independently, so that there may be a surplus in one branch and a deficiency in another. but as nearly all individual branches of production are interdependent technically, glut or shortage in some of the larger branches of production lead to the same phenomenon in most of the others. thus the general supply of products may alternate periodically between shortage and surplus relative to the social demand. herein lies the peculiar character of reproduction in a capitalist society, which differs from all other known forms of production. in the first place, every branch of production develops independently within certain limits, in a way that leads to periodical interruptions of production of shorter or longer duration. secondly, the individual branches of reproduction show deviations from social requirements amounting to all-round disparity and thus resulting in a general interruption of reproduction. these features of capitalist reproduction are quite characteristic. in all other economic systems, reproduction runs its uninterrupted and regular course, apart from external disturbance by violence. capitalist reproduction, however, to quote sismondi's well-known dictum, can only be represented as a continuous sequence of individual spirals. every such spiral starts with small loops which become increasingly larger and eventually very large indeed. then they contract, and a new spiral starts again with small loops, repeating the figure up to the point of interruption. this periodical fluctuation between the largest volume of reproduction and its contraction to partial suspension, this cycle of slump, boom, and crisis, as it has been called, is the most striking peculiarity of capitalist reproduction. it is very important, however, to establish quite firmly and from the very outset that this cyclical movement of boom, slump, and crisis, does not represent the whole problem of capitalist reproduction, although it is an essential element of it. periodical cycles and crises are specific phases of reproduction in a capitalist system of economy, but not the whole of this process. in order to demonstrate the pure implications of capitalist reproduction we must rather consider it quite apart from the periodical cycles and crises. strange as this may appear, the method is quite rational; it is indeed the only method of inquiry that is scientifically tenable. in order to demonstrate and to solve the problem of pure value we must leave price fluctuations out of consideration. the approach of vulgar economics always attempts to solve the problem of value by reference to fluctuations in demand and supply. classical economists, from adam smith to karl marx, attack the problem in the opposite way, pointing out that fluctuations in the mutual relation between demand and supply can explain only disparities between price and value, not value itself. in order to find the value of a commodity, we must start by assuming that demand and supply are in a state of equilibrium, that the price of a commodity and its value closely correspond to one another. thus the scientific problem of value begins at the very point where the effect of demand and supply ceases to operate. in consequence of periodical cycles and crises capitalist reproduction fluctuates as a rule around the level of the effective total demand of society, sometimes rising above and sometimes falling below this level, contracting occasionally even to the point of almost complete interruption of reproduction. however, if we consider a longer period, a whole cycle with its alternating phases of prosperity and depression, of boom and slump, that is if we consider reproduction at its highest and lowest volume, including the stage of suspension, we can set off boom against slump and work out an average, a mean volume of reproduction for the whole cycle. this average is not only a theoretical figment of thought, it is also a real objective fact. for in spite of the sharp rises and falls in the course of a cycle, in spite of crises, the needs of society are always satisfied more or less, reproduction continues on its complicated course, and productive capacities develop progressively. how can this take place, leaving cycles and crises out of consideration? here the real question begins. the attempt to solve the problem of reproduction in terms of the periodical character of crises is fundamentally a device of vulgar economics, just like the attempt to solve the problem of value in terms of fluctuations in demand and supply. nevertheless, we shall see in the course of our observations that as soon as economic theory gets an inkling of the problem of reproduction, as soon as it has at least started guessing at the problem, it reveals a persistent tendency suddenly to transform the problem of reproduction into the problem of crises, thus barring its own way to the solution of the question. when we speak of capitalist reproduction in the following exposition, we shall always understand by this term a mean volume of productivity which is an average taken over the various phases of a cycle. now, the total of capitalist reproduction is created by an unlimited and constantly changing number of private producers. they produce independently of one another; apart from the observation of price fluctuations there is no social control--no social link exists between the individual producers other than the exchange of commodities. the question arises how these innumerable disconnected operations can lead to the actual total of production. this general aspect of our problem indeed strikes us immediately as one of prime importance. but if we put it this way, we overlook the fact that such private producers are not simply producers of commodities but are essentially capitalist producers, that the total production of society is not simply production for the sake of satisfying social requirements, and equally not merely production of commodities, but essentially capitalist production. let us examine our problem anew in the light of this fact. a producer who produces not only commodities but capital must above all create surplus value. the capitalist producer's final goal, his main incentive, is the production of surplus value. the proceeds from the commodities he has manufactured must not only recompense him for all his outlay, but in addition they must yield him a value which does not correspond with any expense on his part, and is pure gain. if we consider the process of production from the point of view of the creation of surplus value, we see that the capital advanced by the capitalist is divided into two parts: the first part represents his expenses on means of production such as premises, raw material, partly finished goods and machinery. the second part is spent on wages. this holds good, even if the capitalist producer does not know it himself, and in spite of the pious stuff about fixed and circulating capital with which he may delude himself and the world. marx called this first part constant capital. its value is not changed by its utilisation in the labour process--it is transferred _in toto_ to the finished product. the second part marx calls the variable capital. this gives rise to an additional value, which materialises when the results of unpaid labour are appropriated. the various components which make up the value of every commodity produced by capitalist methods may be expressed by the formula: _câ + vâ + s_. in this formula _c_ stands for the value of the constant capital laid out in inanimate means of production and transferred to the commodity, _v_ stands for the value of the variable capital advanced in form of wages, and _s_ stands for the surplus value, the additional value of the unpaid part of wage labour. every type of goods shows these three components of value, whether we consider an individual commodity or the aggregate of commodities as a whole, whether we consider cotton textiles or ballet performances, cast-iron tubes or liberal newspapers. thus for the capitalist producer the manufacture of commodities is not an end in itself, it is only a means to the appropriation of surplus value. this surplus value, however, can be of no use to the capitalist so long as it remains hidden in the commodity form of the product. once the commodity has been produced, it must be realised, it must be converted into a form of pure value; that is, into money. all capital expenses incorporated in the commodity must shed their commodity-form and revert to the capitalist as money to make this conversion possible so that he can appropriate the surplus value in cash. the purpose of production is fulfilled only when this conversion has been successful, only when the aggregate of commodities has been sold according to its value. the proceeds of this sale of commodities, the money that has been received for them, contains the same components of value as the former aggregate of commodities and can be expressed by the same formula _câ + vâ + s_. part _c_ recompenses the capitalist for his advances on means of production that have been used up, part _v_ recompenses him for his advances on wages, and the last part, _s_, represents the expected surplus, the capitalist's clear profit in cash.[59] this conversion of capital from its original form, from the starting point of all capitalist production, into means of production, dead and living, such as raw materials, instruments, and labour; its further conversion into commodities by a living labour process; and its final reconversion into money, a greater amount of money indeed than at the initial stage--this transformation of capital is, however, required for more than the production and appropriation of surplus value. the aim and incentive of capitalist production is not a surplus value pure and simple, to be appropriated in any desired quantity, but a surplus value ever growing into larger quantities, surplus value _ad infinitum_. but to achieve this aim, the same magic means must be used over and over again, the means of capitalist production--the ever repeated appropriation of the proceeds of unpaid wage labour in the process of commodity manufacture, and the subsequent realisation of the commodities so produced. thus quite a new incentive is given to constantly renewed production, to the process of reproduction as a regular phenomenon in capitalist society, an incentive unknown to any other system of production. in every other economic system known to history, reproduction is determined by the unceasing need of society for consumer goods, whether they are the needs of all the workers determined in a democratic manner as in an agrarian and communist market community, or the despotically determined needs of an antagonistic class society, as in an economy of slave labour or _corvã©e_ and the like. but in a capitalist system of production, it is not consideration of social needs which actuates the individual private producer who alone matters in this connection. his production is determined entirely by the effective demand, and even this is to him a mere means for the realisation of surplus value which for him is indispensable. appropriation of surplus value is his real incentive, and production of consumer goods for the satisfaction of the effective demand is only a detour when we look to the real motive, that of appropriation of surplus value, although for the individual capitalist it is also a rule of necessity. this motive, to appropriate surplus value, also urges him to re-engage in reproduction over and over again. it is the production of surplus value which turns reproduction of social necessities into a _perpetuum mobile_. reproduction, for its part, can obviously be only resumed when the products of the previous period, the commodities, have been realised; that is, converted into money; for capital in the form of money, in the form of pure value, must always be the starting point of reproduction in a capitalist system. the first condition of reproduction for the capitalist producer is thus seen to be a successful realisation of the commodities produced during the preceding period of production. now we come to a second important point. under a system of private economy, it is the individual producer who determines the volume of reproduction at his discretion. his main incentive is appropriation of surplus value, indeed an appropriation increasing as rapidly as possible. an accelerated appropriation of surplus value, however, necessitates an increased production of capital to generate this surplus value. here a large-scale enterprise enjoys advantages over a small one in every respect. in fine, the capitalist method of production furnishes not only a permanent incentive to reproduction in general, but also a motive for its expansion, for reproduction on an ever larger scale. nor is that all. capitalist methods of production do more than awaken in the capitalist this thirst for surplus value whereby he is impelled to ceaseless expansion of reproduction. expansion becomes in truth a coercive law, an economic condition of existence for the individual capitalist. under the rule of competition, cheapness of commodities is the most important weapon of the individual capitalist in his struggle for a place in the market. now all methods of reducing the cost of commodity production permanently amount in the end to an expansion of production; excepting those only which aim at a specific increase of the rate of surplus value by measures such as wage-cutting or lengthening the hours of work. as for these latter devices, they are as such likely to encounter many obstacles. in this respect, a large enterprise invariably enjoys advantages of every kind over a small or medium concern. they may range from a saving in premises or instruments, in the application of more efficient means of production, in extensive replacement of manual labour by machinery, down to a speedy exploitation of a favourable turn of the market so as to acquire raw materials cheaply. within very wide limits, these advantages increase in direct proportion to the expansion of the enterprise. thus, as soon as a few capitalist enterprises have been enlarged, competition itself forces all others to expand likewise. expansion becomes a condition of existence. a growing tendency towards reproduction at a progressively increasing scale thus ensues, which spreads automatically like a tidal wave over ever larger surfaces of reproduction. expanding reproduction is not a new discovery of capital. on the contrary, it had been the rule since time immemorial in every form of society that displayed economic and cultural progress. it is true, of course, that simple reproduction as a mere continuous repetition of the process of production on the same scale as before can be observed over long periods of social history. in the ancient agrarian and communist village communities, for instance, increase in population did not lead to a gradual expansion of production, but rather to the new generation being expelled and the subsequent founding of equally small and self-sufficient colonies. the old small handicraft units of india and china provide similar instances of a traditional repetition of production in the same forms and on the same scale, handed down from generation to generation. but simple reproduction is in all these cases the source and unmistakable sign of a general economic and cultural stagnation. no important forward step in production, no memorial of civilisation, such as the great waterworks of the east, the pyramids of egypt, the military roads of rome, the arts and sciences of greece, or the development of craftsmanship and towns in the middle ages would have been possible without expanding reproduction; for the basis and also the social incentive for a decisive advancement of civilisation lies solely in the gradual expansion of production beyond immediate requirements, and in a continual growth of the population itself as well as of its demands. exchange in particular, which brought about a class society, and its historical development into the capitalist form of economy, would have been unthinkable without expanding reproduction. in a capitalist society, moreover, expanding reproduction acquires certain characteristics. as we have already mentioned, it becomes right away a coercive law to the individual capitalist. capitalist methods of production do not exclude simple or even retrogressive reproduction; indeed, this is responsible for the periodical phenomenon of crises following phases, likewise periodical, of overstrained expansion of reproduction in times of boom. but ignoring periodical fluctuations, the general trend of reproduction is ever towards expansion. for the individual capitalist, failure to keep abreast of this expansion means quitting the competitive struggle, economic death. moreover, there are certain other aspects to be considered. the concept of expanding reproduction applies only to the quantity of products, to the aggregate of manufactured objects. so long as production rests solely or mainly upon a natural economy, consumption determines the extent and character of the individual labour process, as well as that of reproduction in general, as an end in itself: this applies to the agrarian and communist village communities of india, to the roman _villa_ with its economy of slave labour, and to the medieval feudal farm based on _corvã©e_. but the picture is different in a capitalist economic system. capitalist production is not production for the purpose of consumption, it is production for the purpose of creating value. the whole process of production as well as of reproduction is ruled by value relationships. capitalist production is not the production of consumer goods, nor is it merely the production of commodities: it is pre-eminently the production of surplus value. expanding reproduction, from a capitalist point of view, is expanding production of surplus value, though it takes place in the forms of commodity production and is thus in the last instance the production of consumer goods. changes in the productivity of labour during the course of reproduction cause continual discrepancies between these two aspects. if productivity increases, the same amount of capital and surplus value may represent a progressively larger amount of consumer goods. expanding production, understood as the creation of a greater amount of surplus value, need not therefore necessarily imply expanding reproduction in the capitalist meaning of the term. conversely, capital may, within limits, yield a greater surplus value in consequence of a higher degree of exploitation such as is brought about by wage-cutting and the like, without actually producing a greater amount of goods. but in both cases the surplus value has a twofold aspect: it is a quantity of value as well as an aggregate of material products, and from a capitalist point of view, its elements in both instances are thus the same. as a rule, an increased production of surplus value results from an increase of capital brought about by addition of part of the appropriated surplus value to the original capital, no matter whether this capitalist surplus value is used for the expansion of an old enterprise or for founding a new one, an independent offshoot. capitalist expanding reproduction thus acquires the specific characteristics of an increase in capital by means of a progressive capitalisation of surplus value, or, as marx has put it, by the accumulation of capital. the general formula for enlarged reproduction under the rule of capital thus runs as follows: _câ + vâ + s/xâ + sâ´_. here _s/x_ stands for the capitalised part of the surplus value appropriated in an earlier period of production; _sâ´_ stands for the new surplus value created by the increased capital. part of this new surplus value is capitalised again, and expanding reproduction is thus, from the capitalist point of view, a constantly flowing process of alternate appropriation and capitalisation of surplus value. so far, however, we have only arrived at a general and abstract formula for reproduction. let us now consider more closely the concrete conditions which are necessary to apply this formula. the surplus value which has been appropriated, after it has successfully cast off its commodity-form in the market, appears as a given amount of money. this money-form is the form of its absolute value, the beginning of its career as capital. but as it is impossible to create surplus value with money, it cannot, in this form, advance beyond the threshold of its career. capital must assume commodity-form, so that the particular portion of it which is earmarked for accumulation can be capitalised. for only in this form can it become productive capital; that is, capital begetting new surplus value. therefore, like the original capital, it must again be divided into two parts; a constant part, comprising the inanimate means of production, and a variable part, the wages. only then will our formula _câ + vâ + s_ apply to it in the same way as it applied to the old capital. but the good intent of the capitalist to accumulate, his thrift and abstinence which make him use the greater part of his surplus value for production instead of squandering it on personal luxuries, is not sufficient for this purpose. on the contrary, it is essential that he should find on the commodity market the concrete forms which he intends to give his new surplus value. in the first place, he must secure the material means of production such as raw materials, machines etc. required for the branch of production he has chosen and planned, so that the particular part of the surplus value which corresponds to his constant capital may assume a productive form. secondly, the other, variable part of his surplus value must also be convertible, and two essentials are necessary for this conversion: of first importance, the labour market must offer a sufficient quantity of additional labour, and secondly, as the workers cannot live on money alone, the commodity market, too, must offer an additional amount of provisions, which the workers newly to be employed may exchange against the variable part of the surplus value they will get from the capitalist. all these prerequisites found, the capitalist can set his capitalised surplus value to work and make it, as operating capital, beget new surplus value. but still his task is not completely done. both the new capital and the surplus value produced still exist for the time being in the shape of an additional quantity of some commodity or other. in this form the new capital is but advanced, and the new surplus value created by it is still in a form in which it is of no use to the capitalist. the new capital as well as the surplus value which it has created must cast off their commodity-form, re-assume the form of pure value, and thus revert to the capitalist as money. unless this process is successfully concluded, the new capital and surplus value will be wholly or partly lost, the capitalisation of surplus value will have miscarried, and there will have been no accumulation. it is absolutely essential to the accumulation of capital that a sufficient quantity of commodities created by the new capital should win a place for itself on the market and be realised. thus we see that expanding reproduction as accumulation of capital in a capitalist system is bound up with a whole series of special conditions. let us look at these more closely. the first condition is that production should create surplus value, for surplus value is the elementary form in which alone increased production is possible under capitalist conditions. the entire process of production must abide by this condition when determining the relations between capitalist and worker in the production of commodities. once this first condition is given, the second is that surplus value must be realised, converted into the form of money, so that it can be appropriated for the purposes of expanding reproduction. this second condition thus leads us to the commodity market. here, the hazards of exchange decide the further fate of the surplus value, and thus the future of reproduction. the third condition is as follows: provided that part of the realised surplus value has been added to capital for the purpose of accumulation, this new capital must first assume its productive form of labour and inanimate means of production. moreover, that part of it which had been exchanged for labour must be converted into provisions for the workers. thus we are led again to the markets of labour and commodities. if all these requirements have been met and enlarged reproduction of commodities has taken place, a fourth condition must be added: the additional quantity of commodities representing the new capital plus surplus value will have to be realised, that is, reconverted into money. only if this conversion has been successful, can it be said that expanding capitalist reproduction has actually taken place. this last condition leads us back to the commodity market. thus capitalist production and reproduction imply a constant shifting between the place of production and the commodity market, a shuttle movement from the private office and the factory where unauthorised persons are strictly excluded, where the sovereign will of the individual capitalist is the highest law, to the commodity market where nobody sets up any laws and where neither will nor reason assert themselves. but it is this very licence and anarchy of the commodity market which brings home to the individual capitalist that he is dependent upon society, upon the entirety of its producing and consuming members. the individual capitalist may need additional means of production, additional labour and provisions for these workers in order to expand reproduction, but whether he can get what he needs depends upon factors and events beyond his control, materialising, as it were, behind his back. in order to realise his increased aggregate of products, the individual capitalist requires a larger market for his goods, but he has no control whatever over the actual increase of demand in general, or of the particular demand for his special kind of good. the conditions we have enumerated here, which all give expression to the inherent contradiction between consumption and private production and their social interconnection, are nothing new, and it is not only at the stage of reproduction that they become apparent. these conditions express the general contradiction inherent in capitalist production. they involve, however, particular difficulties as regards the process of reproduction for the following reasons. with regard to reproduction, especially expanding reproduction, the capitalist method of production not only reveals its general fundamental character, but, what is more, it shows, in the various periods of production, a definite rhythm within a continuous progression--the characteristic interplay of individual wills. from this point of view, we must inquire in a general way how it is possible for every individual capitalist to find on the market the means of production and the labour he requires for the purpose of realising the commodities he has produced, although there exists no social control whatever, no plan to harmonize production and demand. this question may be answered by saying that the capitalist's greed for surplus value, enhanced by competition, and the automatic effects of capitalist exploitation, lead to the production of every kind of commodity, including means of production, and also that a growing class of proletarianised workers becomes generally available for the purposes of capital. on the other hand, the lack of a plan in this respect shows itself in the fact that the balance between demand and supply in all spheres can be achieved only by continuous deviations, by hourly fluctuations of prices, and by periodical crises and changes of the market situation. from the point of view of reproduction the question is a different one. how is it possible that the unplanned supply in the market for labour and means of production, and the unplanned and incalculable changes in demand nevertheless provide adequate quantities and qualities of means of production, labour and opportunities for selling which the individual capitalist needs in order to make a sale? how can it be assured that every one of these factors increases in the right proportion? let us put the problem more precisely. according to our well-known formula, let the composition of the individual capitalist's production be expressed by the proportion _40câ + 10vâ + 10s_. his constant capital is consequently four times as much as his variable capital, and the rate of exploitation is 100 per cent. the aggregate of commodities is thus represented by a value of 60. let us now assume that the capitalist is in a position to capitalise and to add to the old capital of this given composition half of his surplus value. in this case, the formula _44câ +â 11vâ + 11sâ = 66_ would apply to the next period of production. let us assume now that the capitalist can continue the annual capitalisation of half his surplus value for a number of years. for this purpose it is not sufficient that means of production, labour and markets in general should be forthcoming, but he must find these factors in a proportion that is strictly in keeping with his progress in accumulation. footnotes: [58] 'if production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction' (_capital_, vol. i, p. 578). [59] surplus value in our exposition is identical with profit. this is true for production as a whole, which alone is of account in our further observations. for the time being, we shall not deal with the further division of surplus value into its component parts: profit of enterprise, interest, and rent, as this subdivision is immaterial to the problem of reproduction. _chapter ii_ quesnay's and adam smith's analyses of the process of reproduction so far we have taken account only of the individual capitalist in our survey of reproduction; he is its typical representative, its agent, for reproduction is indeed brought about entirely by individual capitalist enterprises. this approach has already shown us that the problem involves difficulties enough. yet these difficulties increase to an extraordinary degree and become even more complicated, when we turn our attention from the individual capitalist to the totality of capitalists. a superficial glance suffices to show that capitalist reproduction as a social whole must not be regarded simply as a mechanical summation of all the separate processes of individual capitalist reproduction. we have seen, for instance, that one of the fundamental conditions for enlarged reproduction by an individual capitalist is a corresponding increase of his opportunities to sell on the commodity market. but the individual capitalist may not always expand because of an absolute increase in the absorptive capacity of the market, but also as a result of the competitive struggle, at the cost of other individual capitalists. thus one capitalist may win what another or many others who have been shouldered from the market must write off as a loss. this process will enable one capitalist to increase his reproduction by the amount that it compels others by losses to restrict their own. one capitalist will be able to engage in enlarged reproduction because others cannot even achieve simple reproduction. in the same way, one capitalist may enlarge his reproduction by using labour power and means of production which another's bankruptcy, that is his partial or complete retirement from reproduction, has set free. these commonplaces prove that reproduction of the social capital as a whole is not the same as the reproduction of the individual capitalist raised to the _n_th degree. they show that the reproductive activities of individual capitalists ceaselessly cut across one another and to a greater or smaller degree may cancel each other out. therefore we must clarify our concept of reproduction of capital as a whole, before we examine the laws and mechanisms of capitalist total reproduction. we must raise the question whether it is even possible to deduce anything like total reproduction from the disorderly jumble of individual capitals in constant motion, changing from moment to moment according to uncontrollable and incalculable laws, partly running a parallel course, and partly intersecting and cancelling each other out. can one actually talk of total social capital of society as an entity, and if so, what is the real meaning of this concept? that is the first question a scientific examination of the laws of reproduction has to consider. at the dawn of economic theory and bourgeois economics, quesnay, the father of the physiocrats, approached the problem with classical fearlessness and simplicity and took it for granted that total capital exists as a real and active entity. in his famous _tableau ã�conomique_, so intricate that no one before marx could understand it, quesnay demonstrated the phases of the reproduction of aggregate capital with a few figures, at the same time taking into account that it must also be considered from the aspect of commodity exchange, that is as a process of circulation.[60] society as quesnay sees it consists of three classes: the productive class of agriculturists; the sterile class containing all those who are active outside the sphere of agriculture--industry, commerce, and the liberal professions; and lastly the class of landowners, including the sovereign and the collectors of tithes. the national aggregate product materialises in the hands of the productive class as an aggregate of provisions and raw materials to the value of some 5,000 million livres. of this sum, 2,000 millions represent the annual working capital of agriculture, 1,000 millions represent the annual wear and tear of fixed capital, and 2,000 millions are the net revenue accruing to the landowners. apart from this total produce, the agriculturists, here conceived quite in capitalist terms as tenant farmers, have 2,000 million livres cash in hand. circulation now takes place in such a way that the tenant class pay the landowners 2,000 millions cash as rent (as the cost of the previous period of production). for this money the landowning class buy provisions from the tenants for 1,000 millions and industrial products from the sterile class for the remaining 1,000 millions. the tenants in their turn buy industrial products for the 1,000 millions handed back to them, whereupon the sterile class buy agricultural products for the 2,000 millions they have in hand: for 1,000 millions raw materials etc., to replace their annual working capital, and provisions for the remaining 1,000 millions. thus the money has in the end returned to its starting point, the tenant class; the product is distributed among all classes so that consumption is ensured for everyone; at the same time the means of production of the sterile as well as of the productive class have been renewed and the landowning class has received its revenue. the prerequisites of reproduction are all present, the conditions of circulation have all been fulfilled, and reproduction can start again on its regular course.[61] we shall see later in the course of our investigation that this exposition, though showing flashes of genius, remains deficient and primitive. in any case, we must stress here that quesnay, on the threshold of scientific economics, had not the slightest doubt as to the possibility of demonstrating total social capital and its reproduction. adam smith, on the other hand, while giving a more profound analysis of the relations of capital, laid out what seems like a maze when compared with the clear and sweeping outlines of the physiocrat conception. by his wrong analysis of prices, smith upset the whole foundation of the scientific demonstration of the capitalist process as a whole. this wrong analysis of prices ruled bourgeois economics for a long time; it is the theory which maintains that, although the value of a commodity represents the amount of labour spent in its production, yet the price consists of three elements only: the wage of labour, the profit of capital, and the rent. as this obviously must also apply to the aggregate of commodities, the national product, we are faced with the startling discovery that, although the value of the aggregate of commodities manufactured by capitalist methods represents all paid wages together with the profits of capital and the rents, that is the aggregate surplus value, and consequently can replace these, there is no component of value which corresponds to the constant capital used in production. according to smith, _vâ + s_ is the formula expressing the value of the capitalist product as a whole. demonstrating his view with the example of corn, smith says as follows: these three parts (wages, profit, and rent) seem either immediately or ultimately to make up the whole price of corn. a fourth part, it may perhaps be thought, is necessary for replacing the stock of the farmer, or for compensating the wear and tear of his labouring cattle, and other instruments of husbandry. but it must be considered that the price of any instrument of husbandry, such as a labouring horse, is itself made up of the same three parts: the rent of the land upon which he is reared, the labour of tending and rearing him, and the profits of the farmer who advances both the rent of this land and the wages of this labour. though the price of the corn, therefore, may pay the price as well as the maintenance of the horse, the whole price still resolves itself either immediately or ultimately into the same three parts of rent, of labour and profit.'[62] sending us in this manner 'from pillar to post', as marx has put it, smith again and again resolved constant capital into _vâ + s_. however, he had occasional doubts and from time to time relapsed into the contrary opinion. he says in the second book: 'it has been shown in the first book, that the price of the greater part of commodities resolves itself into three parts, of which one pays the wages of the labour, another the profits of the stock, and a third the rent of the land which had been employed in producing and bringing them to market.... since this is the case ... with regard to every particular commodity, taken separately; it must be so with regard to all the commodities which compose the whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country, taken complexly. the whole price or exchangeable value of that annual produce must resolve itself into the same three parts, and be parcelled out among the different inhabitants of the country, either as the wages of their labour, the profits of their stock, or the rent of their land.'[63] here smith hesitates and immediately below explains: 'but though the whole value of the annual produce of the land and labour of every country is thus divided among and constitutes a revenue to its different inhabitants, yet as in the rent of a private estate we distinguish between the gross rent and the neat rent, so may we likewise in the revenue of all the inhabitants of a great country. 'the gross rent of a private estate comprehends whatever is paid by the farmer; the neat rent, what remains free to the landlord after deducting the expense of management, of repairs, and all other necessary charges; or what, without hurting his estate, he can afford to place in his stock reserved for immediate consumption, or to spend upon his table, equipage, the ornaments of his house and furniture, his private enjoyments and amusements. his real wealth is in proportion, not to his gross, but to his neat rent. 'the gross revenue of all the inhabitants of a great country comprehends the whole annual produce of their land and labour; the neat revenue, what remains free to them after deducting the expense of maintaining, first, their fixed, and secondly, their circulating capital, or what, without encroaching upon their capital, they can place in their stock reserved for immediate consumption, or spend upon their subsistence, conveniences, and amusements. their real wealth too is in proportion, not to their gross, but to their neat revenue.'[64] here smith introduces a portion of value which corresponds to constant capital, only to eliminate it the very next moment by resolving it into wages, profits, and rents. and in the end, the matter rests with this explanation: 'as the machines and instruments of trade, etc. which compose the fixed capital either of an individual or of a society, make no part either of the gross or the neat revenue of either, so money, by means of which the whole revenue of the society is regularly distributed among all its different members, makes itself no part of that revenue.'[65] constant capital, the fixed capital of adam smith, is thus put on the same level as money and does not enter into the total produce of society, its gross revenue. it does not exist within this total product as an element of value. you cannot get blood out of a stone, and so circulation, the mutual exchange of the total product constituted in this manner, can only lead to realisation of the wages (_v_) and of the surplus value (_s_). however, as it cannot by any means replace the constant capital, continued reproduction evidently must become impossible. smith indeed knew quite well, and did not dream of denying, that every individual capitalist requires constant capital in addition to his wages fund, his variable capital, in order to run his enterprise. yet the above analysis of commodity prices, when it comes to take note of capitalist production as a whole, allows constant capital to disappear without a trace in a puzzling way. thus the problem of the reproduction of capital is completely muddled up. it is plain that if the most elementary premise of the problem, the demonstration of social capital as a whole, were on the rocks, the whole analysis was bound to fail. ricardo, say, sismondi and others took up this erroneous theory of adam smith, and they all stumbled in their observations on the problem of reproduction over this most elementary difficulty: the demonstration of social capital. another difficulty is mixed up with the foregoing from the very outset of scientific analysis. what is the nature of the total capital of a society? as regards the individual producer, the position is clear: his capital consists of the expenses of his enterprise. assuming capitalist methods of production, the value of his product yields him a surplus over and above his expenses, that surplus value which does not replace his capital but constitutes his net income, which he can consume completely without encroaching upon his capital and which is thus his fund of consumption. it is true that the capitalist may save part of this net income, not consuming it himself but adding it to his capital. but that is another matter, a new step, the formation of a new capital which again must be replaced by subsequent reproduction and must again yield him a surplus. in any case, the capital of an individual always consists of what he requires for production, together with his advances on the running of his enterprise, and his income is what he himself actually consumes or may consume, his fund of consumption. if we ask a capitalist: 'what are the wages you pay your workers?' his answer will be: 'they are obviously part of my working capital.' but if we ask: 'what are these wages for the workers who have received them?'--it is impossible that he should describe them as capital, for wages received are not capital for the workers but income, their fund of consumption. let us now take another example. a manufacturer of machinery produces machines in his factory. the annual output is a certain number of machines. in its value, however, this annual output contains the capital advanced by the manufacturer as well as the net income that has been earned. part of the manufactured machines thus represent income for the manufacturer and are destined to realise this income in the process of circulation and exchange. but the person who buys these machines from the manufacturer does not buy them as income but in order to use them as a means of production; for him they are capital. these examples make it seem plausible that an object which is capital for one person may be income for another and _vice versa_. how can it be possible under these circumstances to construct anything in the nature of a total capital of society? indeed almost every scientific economist up to the time of marx concluded that there is no social capital.[66] smith was still doubtful, undecided, vacillating about this question; so was ricardo. but already say declared categorically: 'it is in this way, that the total value of products is distributed amongst the members of the community; i say, the _total_ value, because such part of the whole value produced, as does not go to one of the consuming producers, is received by the rest. the clothier buys wool of the farmer, pays his workmen in every department, and sells the cloth, the result of their united exertion, at a price that reimburses all his advances, and affords himself a profit. he never reckons as profit, or as the revenue of his own industry, anything more than the _net_ surplus, after deducting all charges and outgoings; but those outgoings are merely an advance of their respective revenues to the previous producers, which are refunded by the _gross_ value of the cloth. the price paid to the farmer for his wool is the compound of the several revenues of the cultivator, the shepherd and the landlord. although the farmer reckons as _net_ produce only the surplus remaining after payment of his landlord and his servants in husbandry, yet to them these payments are items of revenue--rent to the one and wages to the other--to the one, the revenue of the land, to the other, the revenue of his industry. the aggregate of all these is defrayed out of the value of the cloth, the whole of which forms the revenue of some one or other, and is entirely absorbed in that way.--whence it appears that the term _net_ produce applies only to the individual revenue of each separate producer or adventurer in industry, but that the aggregate of individual revenue, the total revenue of the community, is equal to the _gross_ produce of its land, capital and industry, which entirely subverts the system of the economists of the last century, who considered nothing but the net produce of the land as farming revenue, and therefore concluded, that this net produce was all that the community had to consume; instead of closing with the obvious inference, that the whole of what had been created, may also be consumed by mankind.'[67] say proves his theory in his own peculiar fashion. whereas adam smith tried to give a proof by referring each private capital unit to its place of production in order to resolve it into a mere product of labour, but conceived of every product of labour in strictly capitalist terms as a sum of paid and unpaid labour, as _vâ + s_, and thus came to resolve the total product of society into _vâ + s_; say, of course, is cocksure enough to 'correct' these classical errors by inflating them into common vulgarities. his argument is based upon the fact that the entrepreneur at every stage of production pays other people, the representatives of previous stages of production, for the means of production which are capital for him, and that these people in their turn put part of this payment into their own pockets as their income and partly use it to recoup themselves for expenses advanced in order to provide yet another set of people with an income. say converts adam smith's endless chain of labour processes into an equally unending chain of mutual advances on income and their repayment from the proceeds of sales. the worker appears here as the absolute equal of the entrepreneur. he has his income advanced in the form of wages, paying for it in turn by the labour he performs. thus the final value of the aggregate social product appears as the sum of a large number of advanced incomes and is spent in the process of exchange on repayment of all these advances. it is characteristic of say's superficiality that he illustrates the social connections of capitalist reproduction by the example of watch manufacture--a branch of production which at that time and partly even to-day is pure 'manufacture' where every worker is also an entrepreneur on a small scale and the process of production of surplus value is masked by a series of successive acts of exchange typical of simple commodity production. thus say gives an extremely crude expression to the confusion inaugurated by adam smith. the aggregate of annual social produce can be completely resolved as regards its value into a sequence of various incomes. therefore it is completely consumed every year. it remains an enigma how production can be taken up again without capital and means of production, and capitalist reproduction appears to be an insoluble problem. if we compare the varying approaches to the problem from the time of the physiocrats to that of adam smith, we cannot fail to recognise partial progress as well as partial regression. the main characteristic of the economic conception of the physiocrats was their assumption that agriculture alone creates a surplus, that is surplus value, and that agricultural labour is the only kind of labour which is productive in the capitalist sense of the term. consequently we see in the _tableau ã�conomique_ that the unproductive class of industrial workers creates value only to the extent of the same 2,000 million livres which it consumes as raw materials and foodstuffs. consequently, too, in the process of exchange, the total of manufactured products is divided into two parts, one of which goes to the tenant class and the other to the landowning class, while the manufacturing class does not consume its own products. thus in the value of its commodities, the manufacturing class reproduces, strictly speaking, only that circulating capital which has been consumed, and no income is created for the class of entrepreneurs. the only income of society that comes into circulation in excess of all capital advances, is created in agriculture and is consumed by the landowning class in the form of rents, while even the tenant class do no more than replace their capital: to wit, 1,000 million livres interest from the fixed capital and 2,000 million circulating capital, two-thirds being raw materials and foodstuffs, and one-third industrial products. further it is striking that it is in agriculture alone that quesnay assumes the existence of fixed capital which he calls _avances primitives_ as distinct from _avances annuelles_. industry, as he sees it, apparently works without any fixed capital, only with circulating capital turned over each year, and consequently does not create in its annual output of commodities any element of value for making good the wear and tear of fixed capital (such as premises, tools, and so on).[68] in contrast with this obvious defect, the english classical school shows a decisive advance above all in proclaiming every kind of labour as productive, thus revealing the creation of surplus value in manufacture as well as in agriculture. we say: the english classical school, because on this point adam smith himself occasionally relapses quietly into the physiocrat point of view. it is only ricardo who develops the theory of the value of labour as highly and logically as it could advance within the limits of the bourgeois approach. the consequence is that we must assume all capital investment to produce annual surplus value, in the manufacturing part of social production as a whole no less than in agriculture.[69] on the other hand, the discovery of the productive, value-creating property of every kind of labour, alike in agriculture and in manufacture, suggested to smith that agricultural labour, too, must produce, apart from the rent for the landowning class, a surplus for the tenant class over and above the total of their capital expenses. thus, in addition to the replacement of capital, an annual income of the tenant class comes into being.[70] lastly, by a systematic elaboration of the concepts of _avances primitives_ and _avances annuelles_ introduced by quesnay, which he calls fixed and circulating capital, smith has made clear, among other things, that the manufacturing side of social production requires a fixed as well as a circulating capital. thus he was well on the way to restoring to order the concepts of capital and revenue of society, and to describing them in precise terms. the following exposition represents the highest level of clarity which he achieved in this respect: 'though the whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country is, no doubt, ultimately destined for supplying the consumption of its inhabitants and for procuring a revenue to them, yet when it first comes either from the ground or from the hands of the productive labourer, it naturally divides itself into two parts. one of them, and frequently the largest, is, in the first place, destined for replacing a capital, or for renewing the provisions, materials, and finished work, which had been withdrawn from a capital; the other for constituting a revenue either to the owner of this capital, as the profit of his stock, or to some other person, as the rent of his land.'[71] 'the gross revenue of all the inhabitants of a great country comprehends the whole annual produce of their land and labour; the neat revenue, what remains free to them after deducting the expense of maintaining, first, their fixed, and secondly, their circulating capital; or what, without encroaching upon their capital, they can place in their stock reserved for immediate consumption, or spend upon their subsistence, conveniencies, and amusements. their real wealth too is in proportion, not to their gross, but to their neat revenue.'[72] the concepts of total capital and income appear here in a more comprehensive and stricter form than in the _tableau ã�conomique_. the one-sided connection of social income with agriculture is severed and social income becomes a broader concept; and a broader concept of capital in its two forms, fixed and circulating capital, is made the basis of social production as a whole. instead of the misleading differentiation of production into two departments, agriculture and industry, other categories of real importance are here brought to the fore: the distinction between capital and income and the distinction, further, between fixed and circulating capital. now smith proceeds to a further analysis of the mutual relations of these categories and of how they change in the course of the social process, in production and circulation--in the reproductive process of society. he emphasises here a radical distinction between fixed and circulating capital from the point of view of the society: 'the whole expense of maintaining the fixed capital must evidently be excluded from the neat revenue of the society. neither the materials necessary for supporting their useful machines and instruments of trade, their profitable buildings, etc., nor the produce of the labour necessary for fashioning those materials into the proper form, can ever make any part of it. the price of that labour may indeed make a part of it; as the workmen so employed may place the whole value of their wages in their stock reserved for immediate consumption. but in other sorts of labour, both the price and the produce go to this stock, the price to that of the workmen, the produce to that of other people whose subsistence, convenience and amusements are augmented by the labour of those workmen.'[73] here smith comes up against the important distinction between workers who produce means of production and those who produce consumer goods. with regard to the former he remarks that they create the value--destined to replace their wages and to serve as their income--in the form of means of production such as raw materials and instruments which in their natural form cannot be consumed. with regard to the latter category of workers, smith observes that conversely the total product, or better that part of value contained in it which replaces the wages, the income of the workers together with its other remaining value, appears here in the form of consumer goods. (the real meaning latent in this conclusion, though smith does not say so explicitly, is that the part of the product which represents the fixed capital employed in its production appears likewise in this form.) in the further course of our investigation we shall see how close smith has here come to the vantage point from which marx tackled the problem. the general conclusion, however, maintained by smith without any further examination of the fundamental question, is that, in any case, whatever is destined for the preservation and renewal of the fixed capital of society cannot be added to society's net income. the position is different with regard to circulating capital. 'but though the whole expenses of maintaining the fixed capital is thus necessarily excluded from the neat revenue of the society, it is not the same case with that of maintaining the circulating capital. of the four parts of which this latter capital is composed, money, provisions, materials and finished work, the three last, it has already been observed, are regularly withdrawn from it and placed either in the fixed capital of the society, or in their stock reserved for immediate consumption. whatever portion of those consumable goods is not employed in maintaining the former, goes all to the latter, and makes a part of the neat revenue of the society, besides what is necessary for maintaining the fixed capital.'[74] we see that smith here simply includes in this category of circulating capital everything but the fixed capital already employed, that is to say, foodstuffs and raw materials and in part commodities which, according to their natural form, belong to the replacement of fixed capital. thus he has made the concept of circulating capital vague and ambiguous. but a further and most important distinction crops up and cuts right through this conception: 'the circulating capital of a society is in this respect different from that of an individual. that of an individual is totally excluded from making any part of his neat revenue, which must consist altogether in his profits. but though the circulating capital of every individual makes a part of that of the society to which he belongs, it is not upon that account totally excluded from making a part likewise of their neat revenues.'[75] in the following illustration smith expounds what he means: 'though the whole goods in a merchant's shop must by no means be placed in his own stock reserved for immediate consumption, they may in that of other people, who, from a revenue derived from other funds, may regularly replace their value to him, together with its profits, without occasioning any diminution either of his capital or theirs.'[76] here smith has established fundamental categories with regard to the reproduction and movement of circulating social capital. fixed and circulating capital, private and social capital, private and social revenue, means of production and consumer goods, are marked out as comprehensive categories, and their real, objective interrelation is partly indicated and partly drowned in the subjective and theoretical contradictions of smith's analysis. the concise, strict, and classically clear scheme of the physiocrat theory is dissolved here into a disorderly jumble of concepts and relations which at first glance appears an absolute chaos. but we may already perceive new connections within the social process of reproduction, understood by smith in a deeper, more modern and vital way than was within quesnay's grasp, though, like michelangelo's slave in the unhewn block of marble, they are still inchoate. this is the only illustration smith gives of this problem. but at the same time he attacks it from another angle--by an analysis of value. this very same theory which represents an advance beyond the physiocrats--the theory that it is an essential quality of all labour to create value; the strictly capitalist distinction between paid labour replacing wages, and unpaid labour creating surplus value; and, finally, the strict division of surplus value into its two main categories, of profit and rent--all this progress from the analysis of the physiocrats leads smith to the strange proposition that the price of every commodity consists of wages, plus profits, plus rent, or, in marx's shorthand, of _vâ + s_. in consequence, the commodities annually produced by society as a whole can be resolved completely, as to value, into the two components: wages and surplus value. here the category of capital has disappeared all of a sudden; society produces nothing but income, nothing but consumer goods, which it also consumes completely. reproduction without capital becomes a paradox, and the treatment of the problem as a whole has taken an immense backward step against that of the physiocrats. the followers of adam smith have tackled this twofold theory from precisely the wrong approach. before marx nobody concerned himself with the important beginnings of an exact exposition of the problem in smith's second book, while most of his followers jealously preserved smith's radically wrong analysis of prices, accepting it, like ricardo, without question, or else, like say, elaborating it into a trite doctrine. where smith raised fruitful doubts and stimulating contradictions, say flaunted the opinionated presumption of a commonplace mind. smith's observation that the capital of one person may be the revenue of another induced say to proclaim every distinction between capital and income on the social scale to be absurd. the absurdity, however, that income should completely absorb the total value of annual production which is thus consumed completely, assumes in say's treatment the character of an absolutely valid dogma. if society annually consumes its own total product completely, social reproduction without any means of production whatever must become an annual repetition of the miracle of the creation. in this state the problem of reproduction remained up to the time of karl marx. footnotes: [60] 'quesnay's _tableau ã�conomique_ shows ... how the result of national production in a certain year, amounting to some definite value, is distributed by means of the circulation in such a way, that ... reproduction can take place.... the innumerable individual acts of circulation are at once viewed in their characteristic social mass movement--the circulation between great social classes distinguished by their economic function' (_capital_, vol. ii, p. 414). [61] cf. _analyse du tableau ã�conomique_, in _journal de l'agriculture, du commerce et des finances_, by dupont (1766), pp. 305 ff. in oncken's edition of _oeuvres de f. quesnay_. quesnay remarks explicitly that circulation as he describes it is based upon two conditions: unhampered trade, and a system of taxation applying only to rent: 'yet these facts have indispensable conditions; that the freedom of commerce sustains the sale of products at a good price, ... and moreover, that the farmer need not pay any other direct or indirect charges but this income, part of which, say two sevenths, must form the revenue of the sovereign' (op. cit., p. 311). [62] adam smith, _an enquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations_ (ed. macculloch, edinburgh london, 1828), vol. i, pp. 86-8. [63] op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 17-18. [64] ibid., pp. 18-19. [65] ibid., p. 23. [66] as to the concept of 'national capital' specific to rodbertus, see below, section ii. [67] j. b. say, _a treatise on political economy_ (transl. by c. r. prinsep, vol. ii, london, 1821); pp. 75-7. [68] attention must be drawn to the fact that mirabeau in his _explications_ on the _tableau ã�conomique_ explicitly mentions the fixed capital of the unproductive class: 'the primary advances of this class, for the establishment of manufactures, for instruments, machines, mills, smithies (ironworks) and other factories ... (amount to) 2,000 million livres' (_tableau ã�conomique avec ses explications_, 1760, p. 82). in his confusing sketch of the _tableau_ itself, mirabeau, too, fails to take this fixed capital of the sterile class into account. [69] smith accordingly arrives at this general formulation: 'the value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of their employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced' (op. cit., vol. i, p. 83). further, in book ii, chap. 8, on industrial labour in particular: 'the labour of a manufacturer adds generally to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance and of his master's profit. the labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. though the manufacturer has his wages advanced to him by his master, he in reality costs him no expense, the value of those wages being generally restored, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed' (op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 93-4). [70] 'the labourers ... therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner's profit, but of a much greater value. over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord' (ibid., p. 149). [71] ibid., pp. 97-8. yet already in the following sentence smith converts capital completely into wages, that is variable capital: 'that part of the annual produce of the land and labour of any country which replaces a capital, never is immediately employed to maintain any but productive hands. it pays the wages of productive labour only. that which is immediately destined for constituting a revenue, either as profit or as rent, may maintain indifferently either productive or unproductive hands' (ibid., p. 98). [72] ibid., p. 19. [73] smith, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 19-20. [74] ibid., vol. i, pp. 21-2. [75] ibid., p. 22. [76] ibid. _chapter iii_ a criticism of smith's analysis let us recapitulate the conclusions to which smith's analysis has brought us: (1) there is a fixed capital of society, no part of which enters into its net revenue. this fixed capital consists in 'the materials necessary for supporting their useful machines and instruments of trade' and 'the produce of labour necessary for fashioning those materials into the proper form'.[77] by singling out the production of such fixed capital as of a special kind, and explicitly contrasting it with the production of consumer goods, smith in effect transformed fixed capital into what marx calls 'constant capital'--that part of capital which consists of all material means of production, as opposed to labour power. (2) there is a circulating capital of society. after eliminating the part of fixed, or constant, capital, there remains only the category of consumer goods; these are not capital for society but net revenue, a fund of consumption. (3) capital and net revenue of an individual do not strictly correspond with capital and net revenue of society. what is nothing but fixed, or constant capital for society as a whole cannot be capital for the individual; it must be revenue, too, a fund of consumption, comprising as it does those parts of fixed capital which represent the workers' wages and the capitalists' profits. on the other hand, the circulating capital of the individuals cannot be capital for society but must be revenue, especially in so far as it takes the form of provisions. (4) as regards the value of the total annual social product, no trace of capital remains. it can be resolved completely into the three kinds of income: wages, profits of capital, and rents. if we tried from this haphazard collection of odd ideas to build up a picture of the annual reproduction of total social capital, and of its mechanism, we should soon despair of our task. indeed, all these observations leave us infinitely remote from the solution of the problem how social capital is annually renewed, how everybody's consumption is ensured by his income, while the individuals can nevertheless adhere to their own points of view on capital and income. yet if we wish to appreciate fully marx's contribution to the elucidation of this problem, we must be fully aware of all this confusion of ideas, the mass of conflicting points of view. let us begin with adam smith's last thesis which alone would suffice to wreck the treatment of the problem of reproduction in classical economics. smith's basic principle is that the total produce of society, when we consider its value, resolves itself completely into wages, profits and rents: this conception is deeply rooted in his scientific theory that value is nothing but the product of labour. all labour performed, however, is wage labour. this identification of human labour with capitalist wage labour is indeed the classical element in smith's doctrine. the value of the aggregate product of society comprises both the recompense for wages advanced and a surplus from unpaid labour appearing as profit for the capitalist and rent for the landowner. what holds good for the individual commodity must hold good equally for the aggregate of commodities. the whole mass of commodities produced by society--taken as a quantity of value--is nothing but a product of labour, of paid as well as unpaid labour, and thus it is also to be completely resolved into wages, profits, and rents. it is of course true that raw materials, instruments, and the like, must be taken into consideration in connection with all labour. yet is it not true also that these raw materials and instruments in their turn are equally products of labour which again may have been paid or unpaid? we may go back as far as we choose, we may twist and turn the problem as much as we like, yet we shall find no element in the value of any commodity--and therefore none in the price--which cannot be resolved purely in terms of human labour. we can distinguish, however, two parts in all labour: one part repays the wages and the other accrues to the capitalist and landlord. there seems nothing left but wages and profits--and yet, there is capital, individual and social capital. how can we overcome this blatant contradiction? the fact that marx himself stubbornly pursued this matter for a long time without getting anywhere at first as witness his _theories of the surplus value_,[78] proves that this theoretical problem is indeed extremely hard to solve. yet the solution he eventually hit on was strikingly successful, and it is based upon his theory of value. adam smith was perfectly right: nothing but labour constitutes the value of the individual commodity and of the aggregate of commodities. he was equally right in saying that from a capitalist point of view all labour is either paid labour which restores the wages, or unpaid labour which, as surplus value, accrues to the various classes owning the means of production. what he forgot, however, or rather overlooked, is the fact that, apart from being able to create new value, labour can also transfer to the new commodities the old values incorporated in the means of production employed. a baker's working day of ten hours is, from the capitalist point of view, divided into paid and unpaid hours, into _vâ + s_. but the commodity produced in these ten hours will represent a greater value than that of ten hours' labour, for it will also contain the value of the flour, of the oven which is used, of the premises, of the fuel and so on, in short the value of all the means of production necessary for baking. under one condition alone could the value of any one commodity be strictly equal to _vâ + s_; if a man were to work in mid-air, without raw materials, without tools or workshop. but since all work on materials (material labour) presupposes means of production of some sort which themselves result from preceding labour, the value of this past labour is of necessity transferred to the new product. the process in question does not only take place in capitalist production; it is the general foundation of human labour, quite independent of the historical form of society. the handling of man-made tools is a fundamental characteristic of human civilisation. the concept of past labour which precedes all new labour and prepares its basis, expresses the nexus between man and nature evolved in the history of civilisation. this is the eternal chain of closely interwoven labouring efforts of human society, the beginnings of which are lost in the grey dawn of the socialisation of mankind, and the termination of which would imply the end of the whole of civilised mankind. therefore we have to picture all human labour as performed with the help of tools which themselves are already products of antecedent labour. every new product thus contains not only the new labour whereby it is given its final form, but also past labour which had supplied the materials for it, the instruments of labour and so forth. in the production of value, that is commodity production into which capitalist production also enters, this phenomenon is not suspended, it only receives a particular expression. here the labour which produces commodities assumes a twofold characteristic: it is on the one hand useful concrete labour of some kind or other, creating the useful object, the value-in-use. on the other hand, it is abstract, general, socially necessary labour and as such creates value. in its first aspect it does what labour has always done: it transfers to the new product past labour, incorporated in the means of production employed, with this distinction only, that this past labour, too, now appears as value, as old value. in its second aspect, labour creates new value which, in capitalist terms, can be reduced to paid and unpaid labour, to _vâ + s_. thus the value of every commodity must contain old value which has been transferred by labour _qua_ useful concrete labour from the means of production to the commodity, as well as the new value, created by the same labour _qua_ socially necessary labour merely as this labour is expended hour by hour. this distinction was beyond smith: he did not differentiate the twofold character of value-creating labour. marx once claimed to have discovered the ultimate source of smith's strange dogma--that the aggregate of produced values can be completely resolved into _vâ + s_--in his fundamentally erroneous theory of value.[79] failure to differentiate between the two aspects of commodity-producing labour as concrete and useful labour on the one hand, and abstract and socially necessary labour on the other, indeed forms one of the most important characteristics of the theory of value as conceived not only by smith but by all members of the classical school. disregarding all social consequences, classical economics recognised that human labour alone is the factor which creates value, and it worked out this theory to that degree of clarity which we meet in ricardo's formulation. there is a fundamental distinction, however, between marx's theory of value and ricardo's, a distinction which has been misunderstood not only by bourgeois economists but also in most cases by the popularisers of marx's doctrine: ricardo, conceiving as he did, of bourgeois economy in terms of natural law, believed also that the creation of value, too, is a natural property of human labour, of the specific and concrete labour of the individual human being. this view is even more blatantly revealed in the writings of adam smith who for instance declares what he calls the 'propensity to exchange' to be a quality peculiar to human nature, having looked for it in vain in animals, particularly in dogs. and although he doubted the existence of the propensity to exchange in animals, smith attributed to animal as well as human labour the faculty of creating value, especially when he occasionally relapses into the physiocrat doctrine: 'no equal capital puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than that of the farmer. not only his labouring servants, but his labouring cattle, are productive labourers....'[80] 'the labourers and labouring cattle, therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner's profits, but of a much greater value. over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord.'[81] smith's belief that the creation of value is a direct physiological property of labour, a manifestation of the animal organism in man, finds its most vivid expression here. just as the spider produces its web from its own body, so labouring man produces value--labouring man pure and simple, every man who produces useful objects--because labouring man is by birth a producer of commodities; in the same way human society is founded by nature on the exchange of commodities, and a commodity economy is the normal form of human economy. it was left to marx to recognise that a given value covers a definite social relationship which develops under definite historical conditions. thus he came to discriminate between the two aspects of commodity-producing labour: concrete individual labour and socially necessary labour. when this distinction is made, the solution of the money problem becomes clear also, as though a spotlight had been turned on it. marx had to establish a dynamic distinction in the course of history between the commodity producer and the labouring man, in order to distinguish the twin aspects of labour which appear static in bourgeois economy. he had to discover that the production of commodities is a definite historical form of social production before he could decipher the hieroglyphics of capitalist economy. in a word, marx had to approach the problem with methods of deduction diametrically opposed to those of the classical school, he had in his approach to renounce the latter's faith in the human and normal element in bourgeois production and to recognise their historical transience: he had to reverse the metaphysical deductions of the classics into their opposite, the dialectical. on this showing smith could not possibly have arrived at a clear distinction between the two aspects of value-creating labour, which on the one hand transfers the old value incorporated in the means of production to the new product, and on the other hand creates new value at the same time. moreover, there seems to be yet another source of his dogma that total value can be completely resolved into _vâ + s_. we should be wrong to assume that smith lost sight of the fact that every commodity produced contains not only the value created by its production, but also the values incorporated in all the means of production that had been spent upon it in the process of manufacturing it. by the very fact that he continually refers us from one stage of production to a former one--sending us, as marx complains, from pillar to post, in order to show the complete divisibility of the aggregate value into _vâ + s_--smith proves himself well aware of the point. what is strange in this connection is that he again and again resolves the old value of the means of production, too, into _vâ + s_, so as finally to cover the whole value contained in the commodity. 'in the price of corn, for example, one part pays the rent of the landlord, another pays the wages of maintenance of the labourers and labouring cattle employed in producing it, and the third pays the profit of the farmer. these three parts (wages, profit, and rent) seem either immediately or ultimately to make up the whole price of corn. a fourth part, it may perhaps be thought, is necessary for replacing the stock of the farmer, or for compensating the wear and tear of his labouring cattle and other instruments of husbandry. but it must be considered that the price of any instrument of husbandry, such as a labouring horse, is itself made up of the same three parts: the rent of the land upon which he is reared, the labour of tending and rearing him, and the profits of the farmer who advances both the rent of this land and the wages of this labour. though the price of the corn, therefore, may pay the price as well as the maintenance of the horse, the whole price still resolves itself either immediately or ultimately into the same three parts of rent, of labour, and profit.'[82] apparently smith's confusion arose from the following premises: first, that all labour is performed with the help of means of production of some kind or other--yet what are these means of production associated with any given labour (such as raw materials and tools) if not the product of previous labour? flour is a means of production to which the baker adds new labour. yet flour is the result of the miller's work, and in his hands it was not a means of production but the very product, in the same way as now the bread and pastries are the product of the baker. this product, flour, again presupposes grain as a means of production, and if we go one step further back, this corn is not a means of production in the hands of the farmer but the product. it is impossible to find any means of production in which value is embodied, without it being itself the product of some previous labour. secondly, speaking in terms of capitalism, it follows further that all capital which has been completely used up in the manufacture of any commodity, can in the end be resolved into a certain quantity of performed labour. thirdly, the total value of the commodity, including all capital advances, can readily be resolved in this manner into a certain quantity of labour. what is true for every commodity, must go also for the aggregate of commodities produced by a society in the course of a year; its aggregate value can similarly be resolved into a quantity of performed labour. fourthly, all labour performed under capitalist conditions is divided into two parts: paid labour which restores the wages advanced, and unpaid labour which creates profit and rent, or surplus value. all labour carried out under capitalist conditions thus corresponds to our formula _vâ + s_.[83] all the arguments outlined above are perfectly correct and unassailable. smith handled them in a manner which proves his scientific analysis consistent and undeviating, and his conceptions of value and surplus value a distinct advance on the physiocrat approach. only occasionally, in his third thesis, he went astray in his final conclusion, saying that the aggregate value of the annually produced aggregate of commodities can be resolved into the labour of that very year, although he himself had been acute enough to admit elsewhere that the value of the commodities a nation produces in the course of one year necessarily includes the labour of former years as well, that is the labour embodied in the means of production which have been handed down. but even if the four statements enumerated are perfectly correct in themselves, the conclusion smith draws from them--that the total value of every commodity, and equally of the annual aggregate of commodities in a society, can be resolved entirely into _vâ + s_--is absolutely wrong. he has the right idea that the whole value of a commodity represents nothing but social labour, yet identifies it with a false principle, that all value is nothing but _vâ + s_. the formula _vâ + s_ expresses the function of living labour under capitalism, or rather its double function, first to restore the wages, or the variable capital, and secondly, to create surplus value for the capitalist. wage labour fulfils this function whilst it is employed by the capitalists, in virtue of the fact that the value of the commodities is realised in cash. the capitalist takes back the variable capital he had advanced in form of wages, and he pockets the surplus value as well. _vâ + s_ therefore expresses the relation between wage labour and capitalist, a relationship that is terminated in every instance as soon as the process of commodity production is finished. once the commodity is sold, and the relation _vâ + s_ is realised for the capitalist in cash, the whole relationship is wiped out and leaves no traces on the commodity. if we examine the commodity and its value, we cannot ascertain whether it has been produced by paid or by unpaid labour, nor in what proportion these have contributed. only one fact is beyond doubt: the commodity contains a certain quantity of socially necessary labour which is expressed in its exchange. it is completely immaterial for the act of exchange as well as for the use of the commodity whether the labour which produced it could be resolved into _vâ + s_ or not. in the act of exchange all that matters is that the commodity represents value, and only its concrete qualities, its usefulness, are relevant to the use we make of it. thus the formula _vâ + s_ only expresses, as it were, the intimate relationship between capital and labour, the social function of wage labour, and in the actual product this is completely wiped out. it is different with the constant capital which has been advanced and invested in means of production, because every activity of labour requires certain raw materials, tools, and buildings. the capitalist character of this state of affairs is expressed by the fact that these means of production appear as capital, as _c_, the property of a person other than the labourer, divorced from labour, the property of those who themselves do not work. secondly, the constant capital _c_, a mere advance laid out for the purpose of creating surplus value, appears here only as the foundation of _vâ + s_. yet the concept of constant capital involves more than this: it expresses the function of the means of production in the process of human labour, quite independently of all its historical or social forms. everybody must have raw materials and working tools, the means of production, be it the south sea islander for making his family canoe, the communist peasant community in india for the cultivation of their communal land, the egyptian fellah for tilling his village lands or for building pharaoh's pyramids, the greek slave in the small workshops of athens, the feudal serf, the master craftsman of the medieval guild, or the modern wage labourer. they all require means of production which, having resulted from human labour, express the link between human labour and natural matter, and constitute the eternal and universal prerequisites of the human process of production. _c_ in the formula _câ + vâ + s_ stands for a certain function of the means of production which is not wiped out in the succession of the labour process. whereas it is completely immaterial, for both the exchange and the actual use made of a commodity, whether it has been produced by paid or by unpaid labour, by wage labour, slave labour, forced labour or any other kind of labour; on the other hand, it is of decisive importance, as for using it, whether the commodity is itself a means of production or a consumer good. whether paid or unpaid labour has been employed in the production of a machine, matters to the machinery manufacturer and to his workers, but only to them; for society, when it acquires this machine by an act of exchange, only the quality of this machine as a means of production, only its function in the process of production is of importance. just as every producing society, since time immemorial, has had to give due regard to the important function of the means of production by arranging, in each period of production, for the manufacture of the means of production requisite for the next period, so capitalist society, too, cannot achieve its annual production of value to accord with the formula _vâ + s_--which indicates the exploitation of wage labour--unless there exists, as the result of the preceding period, the quantity of means of production necessary to make up the constant capital. this specific connection of each past period of production with the period following forms the universal and eternal foundation of the social process of reproduction and consists in the fact that in every period parts of the produce are destined to become the means of production for the succeeding period: but this relation remained hidden from smith's sight. he was not interested in means of production in respect of their specific function within the process to which they are applied; he was only concerned with them in so far as they are like any other commodity, themselves the product of wage labour that has been employed in a capitalist manner. the specifically capitalist function of wage labour in the productive process completely obscured for him the eternal and universal function of the means of production within the labour process. his narrow bourgeois approach overlooked completely the general relations between man and nature underneath the specific social relations between capital and wage labour. here, it seems, is the real source of adam smith's strange dogma, that the total value of the annual social product can be resolved into _vâ + s_. he overlooked the fact that _c_ as the first link in the formula _câ + vâ + s_ is the essential expression of the general social foundation of exploitation of wage labour by capital. we conclude that the value of every commodity must be expressed by the formula _câ + vâ + s_. the question now arises how far this formula applies to the aggregate of commodities within a society. let us turn to the doubts expressed by smith on this point, the statement that an individual's fixed and circulating capital and his revenue do not strictly correspond to the same categories from the point of view of society. (cf. above, p. 64, no. 3.) what is circulating capital for one person is not capital for another, but revenue, as for instance capital advances for wages. this statement is based upon an error. if the capitalist pays wages to the workers, he does not abandon his variable capital and let it stray into the workers' hands, to become their income. he only exchanges the value-form of his variable capital against its natural form, labour power. the variable capital remains always in the hand of the capitalist, first as money, and then as labour power, to revert to him later together with the surplus value as the cash proceeds from the commodities. the worker, on the other hand, never gains possession of the variable capital. his labour power is never capital to him, but it is his only asset, the power to work is the only thing he possesses. again, if he has sold it and taken a money wage, this wage is for him not capital but the price of his commodity which he has sold. finally, the fact that the worker buys provisions with the wages he has received, has no more connection with the function this money once fulfilled as variable capital in the hands of the capitalist, than has the private use a vendor of a commodity can make of the money he has obtained by a sale. it is not the capitalist's variable capital which becomes the workers' income, but the price of the worker's commodity 'labour power' which he has sold, while the variable capital, now as ever, remains in the hands of the capitalist and fulfils its specific function. equally erroneous is the conception that the income of the capitalist (the surplus value) which is hidden in machines--in our example of a machinery manufacturer--which has not as yet been realised, is fixed capital for another person, the buyer of the machines. it is not the machines, or parts of them, which form the income of the machinery manufacturer, but the surplus value that is hidden in them--the unpaid labour of his wage labourers. after the machine has been sold, this income simply remains as before in the hand of the machinery manufacturer; it has only changed its outward shape: it has been changed from the 'machine-form' into the 'money-form'. conversely, the buyer of this machine has not, by its purchase, newly obtained possession of his fixed capital, for he had this fixed capital in hand even before the purchase, in the form of a certain amount of cash. by buying this machine, he has only given to his capital the adequate material form for it to become productive. the income, or surplus value, remains in the hands of the machinery manufacturer before and after the sale of the machine, and the fixed capital remains in the hands of the other person, the capitalist buyer of the machine, just as the variable capital in the first example always remained in the hands of the capitalist and the income in the hands of the worker. smith and his followers have caused confusion because, in their investigation of capitalist exchange, they mixed up the use-form of the commodities with their relations of value. further, they did not distinguish the individual circulations of capitals and commodities which are ever interlacing. one and the same act of exchange can be circulation of capital, when seen from one aspect, and at the same time simple commodity exchange for the purpose of consumption. the fallacy that whatever is capital for one person must be income for another, and _vice versa_, must be translated thus into the correct statement that what is circulation of capital for one person, may be simple commodity exchange for another, and _vice versa_. this only expresses the capacity of capital to undergo transformations of its character, and the interconnections of various spheres of interest in the social process of exchange. the sharply outlined existence of capital in contrast with income still stands in both its clearly defined forms of constant and variable capital. even so, smith comes very close to the truth when he states that capital and income of the individual are not strictly identical with the same categories from the point of view of the community. only a few further connecting links are lacking for a clear revelation of the true relationship. footnotes: [77] _an enquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations_, vol. i, p. 19. [78] _theorien ã¼ber den mehrwert_ (stuttgart, 1905), vol. i, pp. 179-252. [79] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 435. [80] smith, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 148. [81] ibid., p. 149. [82] op. cit., vol. i, pp. 86-7. [83] in this connection, we have disregarded the contrary conception which also runs through the work of smith. according to that, the _price_ of the commodity cannot be resolved into _vâ + s_, though the _value_ of commodities consists in _vâ + s_. this distinction, however, is more important with regard to smith's theory of value than in the present context where we are mainly interested in his formula _vâ + s_. _chapter iv_ marx's scheme of simple reproduction let us now consider the formula _câ + vâ + s_ as the expression of the social product as a whole. is it only a theoretical abstraction, or does it convey any real meaning when applied to social life--has the formula any objective existence in relation to society as a whole? it was left to marx to establish the fundamental importance of _c_, the constant capital, in economic theory. yet adam smith before him, working exclusively with the categories of fixed and circulating capital, in effect transformed this fixed capital into constant capital, though he was not aware of having achieved this result. this constant capital comprises not only those means of production which wear out in the course of years, but also those which are completely absorbed by production in any one year. his very dogma that the total value is resolved into _vâ + s_ and his arguments on this point lead smith to distinguish between the two categories of production--living labour and inanimate means of production. on the other hand, when he tries to construe the social process of reproduction on the basis of the capitals and incomes of individuals, the fixed capital he conceives of as existing apart from these, is, in fact, constant capital. every individual capitalist uses for the production of his commodities certain material means of production such as premises, raw materials and instruments. in order to produce the aggregate of commodities in a given society, an aggregate of all material means of production used by the individual capitalists is an obvious requisite. the existence of these means of production within the society is a real fact, though they themselves exist in the form of purely private individual capitals. this is the universal absolute condition of social production in all its historical forms.[84] the specific capitalist form manifests itself in the fact that the material means of production function as _c_, as constant capital, the property of those who do not work; it is the opposite pole to proletarianised labour power, the counterpart of wage labour. the variable capital, _v_, is the aggregate of wages actually paid in the society in the course of a year's production. this fact, too, has real objective existence, although it manifests itself in an innumerable mass of individual wages. in every society the amount of labour power actually engaged in production and the annual maintenance of the workers is a question of decisive importance. where this factor takes the specific capitalist form of _v_, the variable capital, it follows that the means of subsistence first come to the workers in form of a wage which is the price of the labour power they have sold to another person, the owner of the material means of production who does not work himself; under this aspect, it is the latter's capitalist property. further, _v_ is an aggregate of money, that is to say it is the means of subsistence for the workers in a form of pure value. this concept of _v_ implies that the workers are free in a double sense--free in person and free of all means of production. it also expresses the fact that in a given society the universal form of production is commodity production. finally, _s_, the surplus value, stands for the total of all surplus values gained by the individual capitalists. every society performs surplus labour, and even a socialist society will have to do the same. it must perform surplus labour in a threefold sense: it has to provide a quantity of labour for the maintenance of non-workers (those who are unable to work, such as children, old people, invalids, and also civil servants and the so-called liberal professions who do not take an immediate part in the satisfaction of material[85] wants), it has to provide a fund of social insurance against elementary disasters which may threaten the annual produce, such as bad harvests, forest fires and floods; and lastly it must provide a fund for the purpose of increasing production, either because of an increase in the population, or because higher standards of civilisation lead to additional wants. it is in two respects that the capitalist character manifests itself: surplus labour comes into being (1) as surplus value, i.e. in commodity-form, realisable in cash, and (2) as the property of non-workers, of those who own the means of production. similarly, if we consider _vâ + s_, these two amounts taken together, we see that they represent objective quantities of universal validity: the total of living labour that has been performed within a society in the course of one year. every human society, whatever its historical form, must take note of this datum, with reference to both the results that have been achieved, and the existing and available labour power. the division into _vâ + s_ is a universal phenomenon, independent of the society's particular historical form. in its capitalist form, this division shows itself not only in the qualitative peculiarities of both _v_ and _s_ as already outlined, but also in their quantitative relationship: _v_ tends to become depressed to a minimum level, just sufficient for the physiological and social existence of the worker, and _s_ tends to increase continually at the cost of, and relative to, _v_. the predominant feature of capitalist production is expressed in this last circumstance: it is the fact that the creation and appropriation of surplus value is the real purpose of, and the incentive to, production. we have examined the relations upon which the capitalist formula of the aggregate product is based, and have found them universally valid. in every planned economy they are made the object of conscious regulation on the part of society; in a communist society by the community of workers and their democratic organs, and in a society based upon class-rule by the nucleus of owners and their despotic power. in a system of capitalist production there is no such planned regulation. the aggregate of the society's capitals and the aggregate of its commodities alike consist in reality of innumerable fragments of individual capitals and individual items of merchandise, taken together. thus the question arises whether these sums themselves mean anything more in a capitalist society than a mere statistical enumeration which is, moreover, inexact and fluid. applying the standards of society as a whole, we perceive that the completely independent and sovereign individual existence of private enterprises is only the historically conditioned form, whereas it is social interconnections that provide the foundation. although individual capitals act in complete independence of one another, and a social regulation is completely lacking, the movement of capitals forms a homogeneous whole. this movement, too, appears in specifically capitalist forms. in every planned system of production it is, above all, the relation between all labour, past and present, and the means of production (between _vâ + s_ and _c_, according to our formula), or the relation between the aggregate of necessary consumer goods (again, in the terms of our formula, _vâ + s_) and _c_ which are subjected to regulation. under capitalist conditions, on the other hand, all social labour necessary for the maintenance of the inanimate means of production and also of living labour power is treated as one entity, as capital, in contrast with the surplus labour that has been performed, i.e. with the surplus value _s_. the relation between these two quantities _c_ and (_vâ + s_) is a palpably real, objective relationship of capitalist society: it is the average rate of profit; every capital is in fact treated only as part of a common whole, the whole of social capital, and assigned the profit to which it is entitled, according to its size, out of the surplus value wrested from society, regardless of the quantity which this particular capital has actually created. thus social capital and its counterpart, the whole of social surplus value, are not merely real quantities, having an objective existence, but, what is more, the relation between them, the average profit, guides and directs the whole process of exchange. this it does in three ways: (1) by the mechanism of the law of value which establishes the quantitative relations of exchange between the individual kinds of commodities independently of their specific value relationship; (2) by the social division of labour, the assignment of certain portions of capital and labour to the individual spheres of production; (3) by the development of labour productivity which on the one hand stimulates individual capitals to engage in pioneering work for the purpose of securing a higher profit than the average, and on the other hand extends the progress that has been achieved by individuals over the whole field of production. by means of the average rate of profit, in a word, the total capital of society completely governs the seemingly independent motions of individual capitals. the formula _câ + vâ + s_ thus applies to the aggregate of commodities produced in a society under capitalism no less than to the value composition of every individual commodity. it is, however, only the value-composition for which this holds good--the analogy cannot be carried further. the formula is indeed perfectly exact if we regard the total product of a capitalistically producing society as the output of one year's labour, and wish to analyse it into its respective components. the quantity _c_ shows how much of the labour of former years has been taken over towards the product of the present year in the form of means of production. quantities _vâ + s_ show the value components of the product created by new labour during the last year only; the relation between _v_ and _s_ finally shows us how the annual labour programme of society is apportioned to the two tasks of maintaining the workers and maintaining those who do not work. this analysis remains valid and correct also with regard to the reproduction of individual capital, no matter what may be the material form of the product this capital has created. all three, _c_, _v_, and _s_, appear alike to a capitalist of the machinery industry in the form of machinery and its parts; to the owner of a music hall they are represented by the charms of the dancers and the skill of the acrobats. so long as the product is left undifferentiated, _c_, _v_, and _s_ differ from one another only in so far as they are _aliquot_ components of value. this is quite sufficient for the reproduction of individual capital, as such reproduction begins with the value-form of capital, a certain amount of money that has been gained by the realisation of the manufactured product. the formula _câ + vâ + s_ then is the given basis for the division of this amount of money; one part for the purchase of the material means of production, a second part for the purchase of labour power, and a third part--in the case of simple reproduction assumed in the first instance--for the capitalist's personal consumption. in the case of expanding reproduction part three is further subdivided, only a fraction of it being devoted to the capitalist's personal consumption, the remainder to increasing his capital. in order to reproduce his capital actually, the capitalist must, of course, turn again to the commodity market with the capital he has divided in this manner, so that he can acquire the material prerequisites of production such as raw materials, instruments, and so on. it seems a matter of course to the individual capitalist as well as to his scientific ideologist, the 'vulgar economist', that he should in fact find there just those means of production and labour power he needs for his business. the position is different as regards the total production of a society. from the point of view of society as a whole, the exchange of commodities can only effect a shifting around, whereby the individual parts of the total product change hands. the material composition of the product, however, cannot be changed by this process. after this change of places, as well as before it, there can be reproduction of total capital, if, and only if, there is in the total product of the preceding period: first, a sufficient quantity of means of production, secondly, adequate provisions to maintain the same amount of labour as hitherto, and, last but not least, the goods necessary to maintain the capitalist class and its hangers-on in a manner suitable to their station. this brings us to a new plane: we are now concerned with material points of view instead of pure relations of value. it is the use-form of the total social product that matters now. what the individual capitalist considers nobody else's business becomes a matter of grave concern for the totality of capitalists. whereas it does not make the slightest difference to the individual capitalist whether he produces machinery, sugar, artificial manure or a progressive newspaper--provided only that he can find a buyer for his commodity so that he can get back his capital plus surplus value--it matters infinitely to the 'total capitalist' that his total product should have a definite use-form. by that we mean that it must provide three essentials: the means of production to renew the labour process, simple provisions for the maintenance of the workers, and provisions of higher quality and luxury goods for the preservation of the 'total capitalist' himself. his desire in this respect is not general and vague, but determined precisely and quantitatively. if we ask what quantities of all three categories are required by the 'total capitalist', the value-composition of last year's total product gives us a definite estimate, as long, that is, as we confine ourselves to simple reproduction, which we have taken for our starting point. hitherto we have conceived of the formula _câ + vâ + s_ as a merely quantitative division of the total value, applicable alike to total capital and to individual capital, and representing the quantity of labour contained in the annual product of society. now we see that the formula is also the basis of the material composition of the product. obviously the 'total capitalist', if he is to take up reproduction to the same extent as before, must find in his new total product as many means of production as correspond to the size of _c_, as many simple provisions for the workers as correspond to the sum of wages _v_, and as many provisions of better quality for himself and his hangers-on as correspond to _s_. in this way our analysis of the value of the society's aggregate product is translated into a general recipe for this product as follows: the total _c_ of society must be re-embodied in an equal quantity of means of production, the _v_ in provisions for the workers, and the _s_ in provisions for the capitalists, in order that simple reproduction may take place. here we come up against palpable differences between the individual capitalist and the total capitalist. the manner in which the former always reproduces his constant and variable capital as well as his surplus value is such that all three parts are contained in the same material form within his homogeneous product, that this material form, moreover, is completely irrelevant and may have different qualities in the case of each individual capitalist. the 'total capitalist', for his part, reproduces every component of the value of his annual product in a different material form, _c_ as means of production, _v_ as provisions for the workers, and _s_ as provisions for the capitalists. in the case of the reproduction of individual capitals, there is no discrepancy between relations of value and material points of view. besides, it is quite clear that individual capital may concentrate on aspects of value, accepting material conditions as a law from heaven, as self-evident phenomena of commodity-exchange, whereas the 'total capitalist' has to reckon with material points of view. if the total _c_ of society were not reproduced annually in the form of an equal amount of means of production, every individual capitalist would be doomed to search the commodity market in vain with his _c_ realised in cash, unable to find the requisite materials for his individual reproduction. from the point of view of reproducing the total capital, the formula _câ + vâ + s_ is inadequate. this again is proof of the fact that the concept of total capital is something real and does not merely paraphrase the concept of production. we must, however, make general distinctions in our exposition of total capital: instead of showing it as a homogeneous whole, we must demonstrate its three main categories; and we shall not vitiate our theory if, for the sake of simplicity, we consider for the present only two departments of total capital: the production of producer goods, and that of consumer goods for workers and capitalists. we have to examine each department separately, adhering to the fundamental conditions of capitalist production in each case. at the same time, we must also emphasise the mutual connections between these two departments from the point of view of reproduction. for only if each is regarded in connection with the other, do they make up the basis of the social capital as a whole. we made a start by investigating individual capital. but we must approach the demonstration of total capital and its total product in a somewhat different manner. quantitatively, as a quantity of value, the _c_ of society consists precisely in the total of individual constant capitals, and the same applies to the other amounts, _v_ and _s_. but the outward shape of each has changed--the _c_ of constant capitals re-emerges from the process of production as an element of value with infinitely varied facets, comprising a host of variegated objects for use, but in the total product it appears, as it were, contracted into a certain quantity of means of production. similarly with _v_ and _s_, which in the case of the individual capitalist re-emerge as items in a most colourful jumble of commodities, being provisions in adequate quantities for the workers and capitalists. adam smith came very close to recognising this fact when he observed that the categories of fixed and circulating capital and of revenue in relation to the individual capitalist do not coincide with these categories in the case of society. we have come to the following conclusions: (1) the formula _câ + vâ + s_ serves to express the production of society viewed as a whole, as well as the production of individual capitalists. (2) social production is divided into two departments, engaged in the production of producer and consumer goods respectively. (3) both departments work according to capitalist methods, that is to say they both aim at the production of surplus value, and thus the formula _câ + vâ + s_ will apply to each of them. (4) the two departments are interdependent, and are therefore bound to display a certain quantitative relationship, namely the one department must produce all means of production, the other all provisions for the workers and capitalists of both departments. proceeding from this point of view, marx devised the following diagram of capitalist reproduction: i. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ means of production ii. _2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000_ articles of consumption.[86] the figures in this diagram express quantities of value, amounts of money which are chosen arbitrarily, but their ratios are exact. each department is characterised by the use-form of the commodities produced. their mutual circulation takes place as follows: department i supplies the means of production for the entire productive process, for itself as well as for department ii. from this alone it follows that for the undisturbed continuance of reproduction--for we still presume simple reproduction on the old scale--the total produce of department i (i 6,000) must have the same value as the sum of constant capitals in both departments: (i 4,000_c_â + ii 2,000_c_). similarly, department ii supplies provisions for the whole of society, for its own workers and capitalists as well as for the workers and capitalists of department i. hence it follows that for the undisturbed course of consumption and production and its renewal on the old scale it is necessary that the total quantity of provisions supplied by department ii should equal in value all the incomes of the employed workers and capitalists of society [here ii 3,000â = i(_1,000vâ + 1,000s_)â + ii(_500vâ + 500s_)]. here we have indeed expressed relationships of value which are the foundation not only of capitalist reproduction but of reproduction in every society. in every producing society, whatever its social form, in the primitive small village community of the bakairi of brazil, in the _oikos_ of a timon of athens with its slaves, or in the imperial _corvã©e_ farm of charlemagne, the labour power available for society must be distributed in such a way that means of production as well as provisions are produced in adequate quantities. the former must suffice for the immediate production of provisions as well as for the future renewal of the means of production themselves, and the provisions in their turn must suffice for the maintenance of the workers occupied in the production alike of these same provisions and of the means of production, and moreover for the maintenance of all those who do not work. in its broad outline, marx's scheme corresponds with the universal and absolute foundation of social reproduction, with only the following specifications: socially necessary labour appears here as value, the means of production as constant capital, the labour necessary for the maintenance of the workers as variable capital and that necessary for the maintenance of those who do not work as surplus value. in capitalist society, however, the connections between these two great departments depend upon exchange of commodities, on the exchange of equivalents. the workers and capitalists of department i can only obtain as many provisions from department ii as they can deliver of their own commodities, the means of production. the demand of department ii for means of production, on the other hand, is determined by the size of its constant capital. it follows therefore that the sum of the variable capital and of the surplus value in the production of producer goods [here i(_1,000vâ + 1,000s_)] must equal the constant capital in the production of provisions [here ii(2,000_c_)]. an important proviso remains to be added to the above scheme. the constant capital which has been spent by the two departments is in reality only part of the constant capital used by society. this constant capital is divided into two parts; the first is fixed capital--premises, tools, labouring cattle--which functions in a number of periods of production, in every one of which, however, only part of its value is absorbed by the product, according to the amount of its wear and tear. the second is circulating capital such as raw materials, auxiliary semi-finished products, fuel and lighting--its whole value is completely absorbed by the new product in every period of production. yet only that part of the means of production is relevant for reproduction which is actually absorbed by the production of value; without becoming less correct, an exact exposition of social circulation may disregard the remaining part of the fixed capital which has not been absorbed by the product, though it should not completely forget it. this is easy to prove. let us assume that the constant capital, 6,000_c_, in the two departments, which is in fact absorbed by the annual product of these departments, consists of 1,500_c_ fixed and 4,500_c_ circulating capital, the 1,500_c_ of fixed capital representing here the annual wear and tear of the premises, machinery and labouring cattle. this annual wear and tear equals, say, 10 per cent of the total value of the fixed capital employed. then the total social capital would really consist of _19,500câ + 1,500v_, the constant capital in both departments being 1,500_c_ of fixed and 4,500_c_ of circulating capital. since the term of life of the aggregate fixed capital, with a 10 per cent wear and tear, is ten years _ex hypothesi_, the fixed capital needs renewal only after the lapse of ten years. meanwhile one-tenth of its value enters into social production in every year. if all the fixed capital of a society, with the same rate of wear and tear, were of equal durability, it would, on our assumption, need complete renewal once within ten years. this, however, is not the case. some of the various use-forms which are part of the fixed capital may last longer and others shorter, wear and tear and duration of life are quite different in the different kinds and individual representations of fixed capital. in consequence, fixed capital need not be renewed--reproduced in its concrete use-form--all at once, but parts of it are continually renewed at various stages of social production, while other parts still function in their older form. our assumption of a fixed capital of 15,000_c_ with a 10 per cent rate of wear and tear does not mean that this must be renewed all at once every ten years, but that an annual average renewal and replacement must be effected of a part of the total fixed social capital corresponding to one-tenth of its value; that is to say, department i which has to satisfy the needs of society for means of production must reproduce, year by year not only all its raw and partly finished materials, etc., its circulating capital to the value of 4,500, but must also reproduce the use-forms of its fixed capital--premises, machinery, and the like--to the extent of 1,500, corresponding with the annual wear and tear of fixed capital. if department i continues in this manner to renew one-tenth of the fixed capital in its use-form every year, the result will be that every ten years the total fixed capital of society will have been replaced throughout by new items; thus it follows that the reproduction of those parts disregarded so far is also completely accounted for in the above scheme. in practice, the procedure is that every capitalist sets aside from his annual production, from the realisation of his commodities, a certain amount for the redemption of his fixed capital. these individual annual deductions must amount to a certain quantity of capital, therefore the capitalist has in fact renewed his fixed capital, that is, he has replaced it by new and more efficient items. this alternating procedure of building up annual reserves of money for the renewal of fixed capital and of the periodical employment of the accumulated amounts for the actual renewal of fixed capital varies with the individual capitalist, so that some are accumulating reserves, while others have already started their renewals. thus every year part of the fixed capital is actually renewed. the monetary procedure here only disguises the real process which characterises the reproduction of fixed capital. on closer observation we see that this is as it should be. the whole of the fixed capital takes part in the process of production, for physically the mass of usable objects, premises, machinery, labouring cattle, are completely employed. it is their peculiarity as fixed capital, on the other hand, that only part of the value is absorbed in the production of value, since in the process of reproduction (again postulating simple reproduction), all that matters is to replace in their natural form the values which have been actually used up as means of subsistence and production during a year's production. therefore, fixed capital need only be reproduced to the extent that it has in fact been used up in the production of commodities. the remaining portion of value, embodied in the total use-form of fixed capital, is of decisive importance for production as a labour process, but does not exist for the annual reproduction of society as a process of value-formation. besides, this process which is here expressed by relations of value applies equally to every society, even to a community which does not produce commodities. if once upon a time, for instance, say ten years' labour of 1,000 fellaheen was required for the construction of the famous lake moeris and the related nile canals--that miraculous lake, which herodotus tells us was made by hand--and if for the maintenance of this, the most magnificent drainage system of the world, the labour of a further 100 fellaheen was annually required (the figures, of course, are chosen at random), we might say that after every hundred years the moeris dam and the canals were reproduced anew, although in fact the entire system was not constructed as a whole in every century. this is manifestly true. when, amid the stormy incidents of political history and alien conquests, the usual crude neglect of old monuments of culture set in--as displayed, e.g. by the english in india when the reproductional needs of ancient civilisations were understood no longer--then in the course of time the whole lake moeris, its water, dikes and canals, the two pyramids in its midst, the colossus upon it and other marvellous erections, disappeared without a trace, as though they had never been built. only ten lines in herodotus, a dot on ptolemy's map of the world, traces of old cultures, and of villages and cities bear witness that at one time rich life sprang from this magnificent irrigation system, where to-day there are only stretches of arid desert in inner lybia, and desolate swamps along the coast. there is only one point where marx's scheme of simple reproduction may appear unsatisfactory or incomplete in relation to constant capital, and that is when we go back to that period of production, when the total fixed capital was first created. indeed, society possesses transformed labour amounting to more than those parts of fixed capital which are absorbed into the value of the annual product and are in turn replaced by it. in the figures of our example the total social capital does not consist of _6,000câ + 1,500v_, as in the diagram, but of _19,500câ + 1,500v_. though 1,500 of the fixed capital (which, on our assumption, amounts to 15,000) are annually reproduced in the form of appropriate means of production, an equal amount is also consumed by the same production each year, though the whole of the fixed capital as a use-form, an aggregate of objects, has been renewed. after ten years, society possesses in the eleventh, just as in any other year, a fixed capital of 15,000, whereas it has annually achieved only 1,500_c_; and its constant capital as a whole is 19,500, whereas it has created only 6,000. obviously, since it must have created this surplus of 13,500 fixed capital by its labour, it possesses more accumulated past labour than our scheme of reproduction warrants. even at this stage, the annual labour of society must be based on some previous annual labour that has been hoarded. this question of past labour, however, as the foundation of all present labour, brings us to the very first beginning which is as meaningless with regard to the economic development of mankind as it is for the natural development of matter. the scheme of reproduction grasps the social process as perpetually in motion, as a link in the endless chain of events, it neither wants to demonstrate its initial origin, nor should it do so. the social reproductive process is always based on past labour, we may trace it back as far as we like. social labour has no beginning, just as it has no end. like the historical origin of herodotus' lake moeris, the beginnings of the reproductive process in the history of civilisation are lost in the twilight of legend. with the progress of techniques and with cultural development, the means of production change their form, crude paleoliths are replaced by sharpened tools, stone implements by elegant bronze and iron, the artisan's tool by steam-driven machinery. yet, though the means of production and the social organisation of the productive process continually change their form, society already possesses for its labour process a certain amount of past labour serving as the basis for annual reproduction. under capitalist methods of production past labour of society preserved in the means of production takes the form of capital, and the question of the origin of this past labour which forms the foundation of the reproductive process becomes the question of the genesis of capital. this is much less legendary, indeed it is writ in letters of blood in modern history. the very fact, however, that we cannot think of simple reproduction unless we assume a hoard of past labour, surpassing in volume the labour annually performed for the maintenance of society, touches the sore spot of simple reproduction; and it shows that simple reproduction is a fiction not only for capitalist production but also for the progress of civilisation in general. if we merely wish to understand this fiction properly, and to reduce it to a scheme, we must presume, as its _sine qua non_, results of a past productive process which cannot possibly be restricted to simple reproduction but inexorably points towards enlarged reproduction. by way of illustration, we might compare the aggregate fixed capital of society with a railway. the durability and consequently the annual wear and tear of its various parts is very different. parts such as viaducts and tunnels may last for centuries, steam engines for decades, but other rolling stock will be used up in a short time, in some instances in a few months. yet it is possible to work out an average rate of wear and tear, say thirty years, so that the value of the whole is annually depreciated by one thirtieth. this loss of value is now continually made good by partial reproduction of the railway (which may count as repairs), so that a coach is renewed to-day, part of the engine to-morrow, and a section of sleepers the day after. on our assumption then, the old railway is replaced by a new one after thirty years, a similar amount of labour being performed each year by the society so that simple reproduction takes place. but the railway can only be reproduced in this manner--it cannot be so produced. in order to make it fit for use and to make good its gradual wear and tear, the railway must have been completed in the first place. though the railway can be repaired in parts, it cannot be made fit for use piecemeal, an axle to-day and a coach to-morrow. indeed, the very essence of fixed capital is always to enter into the productive process in its entirety, as a material use-value. in order to get this use-form ready in the first place, society must apply a more concentrated amount of labour to its manufacture. in terms of our example, the labour of thirty years that is used for repairs, must be compressed into, say, two or three years. during this period of manufacture, society must therefore expend an amount of labour far greater than the average, that is to say it must have recourse to expanding reproduction; later, when the railway is finished, it may return to simple reproduction. though we need not visualise the aggregate fixed capital as a single coherent use-object or a conglomeration of objects which must be produced all at once, the manufacture of all the more important means of production, such as buildings, transport facilities, and agricultural structures, requires a more concentrated application of labour, and this is true for the modern railway or steamship as much as it was for the rough stone-axe and the handmill. therefore it is only in theory that simple reproduction can be conceived as alternating with enlarged reproduction; the latter is not only a general condition of a progressive civilisation and an expanding population, but also the _sine qua non_ for the economic form of fixed capital, or those means of production which in every society correspond to the fixed capital. marx deals with this conflict between the formation of fixed capital and simple reproduction but indirectly, in connection with fluctuations in the wear and tear of the fixed capital, more rapid in some years than in others. here he emphasises the need for perpetual 'over-production', i.e. enlarged reproduction, since a strict policy of simple reproduction would periodically lead to reproductive losses. in short, he regards enlarged reproduction under the aspect of an insurance fund for the fixed capital of the society, rather than in the light of the actual productive process.[87] in quite a different context marx appears to endorse the opinion expressed above. in _theories on the surplus value_, vol ii, part 2, analysing the conversion of revenue into capital, he speaks of the peculiar reproduction of the fixed capital, the replacement of which in itself already provides a fund for accumulation. he draws the following conclusion: 'the point we have in mind is as follows: even if the aggregate capital employed in machine manufacture were just large enough to make good the annual wear and tear of the machines, many more machines could be annually produced than are required, since the wear and tear is in parts merely _idealiter_ and must be made good _realiter_, _in natura_, only after a certain number of years. capital so employed supplies each year a mass of machinery which becomes available for, and anticipates new, capital investments. let us suppose, for instance, a machine manufacturer who starts production this year. during this year, he supplies machines for â£12,000. if he were merely to reproduce the machines he has manufactured, he would have to produce, during the subsequent eleven years, machines for â£1,000 only, and even then, a year's production would not be consumed within the year. still less could it be consumed, if he were to employ the whole of his capital. to keep this capital working, to keep it reproducing itself every year, a new and continuous expansion of the branches of manufacture that require these machines, is indispensable. this applies even more, if the machine manufacturer himself accumulates. in consequence, even _if the capital invested in one particular branch of production is simply being reproduced_,[88] a continuous accumulation in the other branches of production must go with it.'[89] we might take the machine manufacturer of marx's example as illustrating the production of fixed capital. then the inference is that if society maintains simple reproduction in this sphere, employing each year a similar amount of labour for the production of fixed capital (a procedure which is, of course, impossible in practical life), then annual production in all other spheres must expand. but if here, too, simple reproduction is to be maintained, then, if the fixed capital once created is to be merely renewed, only a small part of the labour employed in its creation can be expended. or, to put it the other way round: if society is to provide for investment in fixed capital on a large scale, it must, even assuming simple reproduction to prevail on the whole, resort periodically to enlarged reproduction. with the advance of civilisation, there are changes not only in the form of the means of production but also in the quantity of value they represent--or better, changes in the social labour stored up in them. apart from the labour necessary for its immediate preservation, society has increasingly more labour time and labour power to spare, and it makes use of these for the manufacture of means of production on an ever increasing scale. how does this affect the process of reproduction? how, in terms of capitalism, does society create out of its annual labour a _greater_ amount of capital than it formerly possessed? this question touches upon enlarged reproduction, and it is not yet time to deal with it. footnotes: [84] for the sake of simplicity, we shall follow general usage and speak here and in the following of annual production, though this term, strictly speaking, applies in general to agriculture only. the periods of industrial production, or of the turnover of capitals, need not coincide with calendar years. [85] the distinction between intellectual and material labour need not involve special categories of the population in a planned society, based on common ownership of the means of production. it will always find expression in the existence of a certain number of spiritual leaders who must be materially maintained. the same individuals may exercise these various functions at different times. [86] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 459. [87] _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 544-7. cf. also p. 202 on the necessity of enlarged reproduction under the aspect of a reserve fund. [88] marx's italics. [89] _theorien ã¼ber den mehrwert_, vol. ii, part 2, p. 248. _chapter v_ the circulation of money in our study of the reproductive process we have not so far considered the circulation of money. here we do not refer to money as a measuring rod, an embodiment of value, because all relations of social labour have been expressed, assumed and measured in terms of money. what we have to do now is to test our diagram of simple reproduction under the aspect of money as a means of exchange. quesnay already saw that we shall only understand the social reproductive process if we assume, side by side with the means of production and consumer goods, a certain quantity of money.[90] two questions now arise: (1) by whom should the money be owned, and (2) how much of it should there be? the answer to the first question, no doubt, is that the workers receive their wages in the form of money with which they buy consumer goods. from the point of view of society, this means merely that the workers are allocated a certain share of the fund for consumption: every society, whatever its historical form of production, makes such allocations to its workers. it is, however, an essential characteristic of the capitalist form of production that the workers do not obtain their share directly in the form of goods but by way of commodity exchange, just as it is an essential feature of the capitalist mode of production that their labour power is not applied directly, as a result of a relation of personal domination, but again by way of commodity exchange: the workers selling their labour power to the owners of the means of production, and purchasing freely their consumer goods. variable capital in its money form is the expression and medium of both these transactions. money, then, comes first into circulation by the payment of wages. the capitalist class must therefore set a certain quantity of money circulating in the first place, and this must be equal to the amount they pay in wages. the capitalists of department i need 1,000 units of money, and the capitalists of department ii need 500 to meet their wages bill. thus, according to our diagram, two quantities of money are circulating: i(1,000_v_) and ii(500_v_). the workers spend the total of 1,500 on consumer goods, i.e. on the products of department ii. in this way, labour power is maintained, that is to say the variable capital of society is reproduced in its natural form, as the foundation of all other reproductions of capital. at the same time, the capitalists of department ii dispose of their aggregate product (1,500) in the following manner: their own workers receive 500 and the workers of department i receive 1,000. this exchange gives the capitalists of department ii possession of 1,500 money units: 500 are their own variable capital which has returned to them; these may start circulating again as variable capital but for the time being they have completed their course. the other 1,000 accrue to them year by year out of the realisation of one-third of their own products. the capitalists of department ii now buy means of production from the capitalists of department i for these 1,000 money units in order to renew the part of their own constant capital that has been used up. by means of this purchase, department ii renews in its natural form half of the constant capital ii_c_ it requires. department i now has in return 1,000 money units which are nothing more than the money originally paid to its own workers. now, after having changed hands twice, the money has returned to department i, to become effective later as variable capital. this completes the circulation of this quantity of money for the moment, but the circulation within society has not yet come to an end. the capitalists of department i have not yet realised their surplus value to buy consumer goods for themselves; it is still contained in their product in a form which is of no use to them. moreover, the capitalists of department ii have not yet renewed the second half of their constant capital. these two acts of exchange are identical both in substance and in value, for the capitalists of department i receive their goods from department ii in exchange for the i(1,000_c_) means of production needed by the capitalists of department ii. however, a new quantity of money is required to effect this exchange. it is true that the same money which has already completed its course, might be brought into circulation again for this purpose--in theory, there could be no objection to this. in practice, however, this solution is out of the question, for the needs of the capitalists, as consumers, must be satisfied just as constantly as the needs of the workers--they run parallel to the process of production and must be mediated by specific quantities of money. hence it follows that the capitalists of both departments--that is to say all capitalists--must have a further cash reserve in hand, in addition to the money required as variable capital, in order to realise their own surplus value in the form of consumer goods. on the other hand, before the total product is realised and during the process of its production, certain parts of the constant capital must be bought continually. these are the circulating parts of the constant capital, such as raw and auxiliary materials, semi-finished goods, lighting and the like. therefore, not only must the capitalists of department i have certain quantities of money in hand to satisfy their needs as consumers, but the capitalists of department ii must also have money to meet the requirements of their constant capital. the exchange of 1,000s i (the surplus value of department i contained in the means of production) against goods is thus effected by money which is advanced partly by the capitalists of department i in order to satisfy their needs as consumers, and partly by the capitalists of department ii in order to satisfy their needs as producers.[91] both lots of capitalists may each advance 500 units of the money necessary for the exchange, or possibly the two departments will contribute in different proportions. at any rate, two things are certain: (_a_) the money set aside for the purpose by both departments must suffice to effect the exchange between i(1,000_s_) and ii(1,000_c_); (_b_) whatever the distribution of this money between the two departments may have been, the exchange transaction completed, each department of capitalist production must again possess the same amount of money it had earlier put into circulation. this latter maxim applies quite generally to social circulation as a whole: once the process of circulation is concluded, money will always have returned to its point of origin. thus all capitalists, after universal exchange, have achieved a twofold result: first they have exchanged products which, in their natural form, were of no use to them, against other products which, in their natural form, the capitalists require either as means of production or for their own consumption. secondly, they have regained possession of the money which they set in circulation so as to effect these acts of exchange. this phenomenon is unintelligible from the point of view of simple commodity circulation, where commodity and money continually change places--possession of the commodity excluding the possession of money, as money constantly usurps the place which the commodity has given up, and _vice versa_. indeed, this is perfectly true with regard to every individual act of commodity exchange which is the form of social circulation. yet this social circulation itself is more than mere exchange of commodities: it is the circulation of capital. it is, however, an essential and characteristic feature of this kind of circulation, that it does not only return to the capitalist the value of his original capital plus an increase, the surplus value, but that it also assists social reproduction by providing the means of production and labour power in the natural form of productive capital, and by ensuring the maintenance of those who do not work. possessing both the means of production and the money needed, the capitalists start the total social process of circulation; as soon as the social capital has completed its circuit, everything is again in their hands, apportioned to each department according to the investments made by it. the workers have only temporary possession of money during which time they convert the variable capital from its money form into its natural form. the variable capital in the capitalists' hands is nothing but the outward shape of part of their capital, and for this reason it must always revert to them. so far, we have only considered circulation as it takes place between the two large departments of production. yet 4,000 units of the first department's produce remain there in the form of means of production to renew its constant capital of 4,000_c_. moreover 500 of the consumer goods produced in department ii [corresponding to the surplus value ii(500_s_)] also remain in this department in the form of consumer goods for the capitalist class. since in both departments the mode of production is capitalistic, that is unplanned, private production, each department can distribute its own products--means of production in department i and consumer goods in department ii--amongst its own capitalists only by way of commodity exchange, i.e. by a large number of individual sale transactions between capitalists of the same department. therefore the capitalists of both departments must have a reserve of money with which to perform these exchange transactions--to renew both the means of production in department i and the consumer goods for the capitalist class in department ii. this part of circulation does not present any features of specific interest, as it is merely simple commodity circulation. vendor and purchaser alike belong to the same category of agents of production, and circulation is concerned only with money and commodity changing hands within the same class and department. all the same, the money needed for this circulation must from the outset be in the hands of the capitalist class: it is part of their capital. so far, the circulation of total social capital presents no peculiarities, even if we consider the circulation of money. from the very outset it is self-evident that society must possess a certain quantity of money to make this circulation possible, and this for two reasons: first, the general form of capitalist production is that of commodity production which implies the circulation of money; secondly, the circulation of capital is based upon the continuous alternation of the three forms of capital: money capital, productive capital, and commodity capital. and as it is this very money, finally, which operates as capital--our diagram referring to capitalist production exclusively--the capitalist class must have possession of this money, as it has possession of every other form of capital; it throws it into circulation in order to regain possession as soon as the process of circulation has been completed. at first glance, only one detail might strike us: if the capitalists themselves have set in motion all the money which circulates in society, they must also advance the money needed for the realisation of their own surplus value. thus it seems that the capitalists as a class ought to buy their own surplus value with their own money. as the capitalist class has possession of this money resulting from previous periods of production, even prior to the realisation of the product of each working period, the appropriation of surplus value at first sight does not seem to be based upon the unpaid labour of the wage labourer--as it in fact is--but merely the result of an exchange of commodities against an equivalent quantity of money both supplied by the capitalist class itself. a little reflection, however, dispels this illusion. after the general completion of circulation, the capitalists, now as before, possess their money funds which either reverted to them or remained in their hands. further, they acquired consumer goods for the same amount which they have consumed. (note that we are still confining ourselves to simple reproduction as the prime condition of our diagram of reproduction: the renewal of production on the old scale and the use of all surplus value produced for the personal consumption of the capitalist class.) moreover, the illusion vanishes completely if we do not confine ourselves to one period of production but observe a number of successive periods in their mutual interconnections. the value the capitalist puts into circulation to-day in the form of money for the purpose of realising his own surplus value, is in fact nothing but his surplus value resulting from the preceding period of production in form of money. the capitalist must advance money out of his own pocket in order to buy his goods for consumption. on the one hand, the surplus value which he produces each year either exists in a natural form which renders it unfit for consumption, or, if it takes a consumable form, it is temporarily in the hands of another person. on the other hand, he (the capitalist) has regained possession of the money, and he is now making his advances by realising his surplus value from the preceding period. as soon as he has realised his new surplus value, which is still embodied in the commodity-form, this money will return to him. consequently, in the course of several periods of production, the capitalist class draws its consumer goods from the pool, as well as the other natural forms of its capital. the quantity of money originally in its possession, however, remains unaffected by this process. investigation of the circulation of money in society shows that the individual capitalist can never invest the whole of his money capital in production but must always keep a certain money reserve to be employed as variable capital, i.e. as wages. further, he must keep a capital reserve for the purchase of means of production at any given period, and in addition, he must have a cash reserve for his personal consumption. the process of reproducing the total social capital thus entails the necessity of producing and reproducing the substance of money. money is also capital, for marx's diagram which we have discussed before, conceives of no other than capitalist production. thus the diagram seems incomplete. we ought to add a further department, that of production of the means of exchange, to the other two large departments of social production [those of means of production (i) and of consumer goods (ii)]. it is, indeed, a characteristic feature of this third department that it serves neither the purposes of production nor those of consumption, merely representing social labour in an undifferentiated commodity that cannot be used. though money and its production, like the exchange and production of commodities, are much older than the capitalist mode of production, it was only the latter which made the circulation of money a general form of social circulation, and thus the essential element of the social reproductive process. we can only obtain a comprehensive diagram of the essential points of capitalist production if we demonstrate the original relationship between the production and reproduction of money and the two other departments of social production. here, however, we deviate from marx. he included the production of gold (we have reduced the total production of money to the production of gold for the sake of simplicity) in the first department of social production. 'the production of gold, like that of metals generally, belongs to department i, which occupies itself with means of production.'[92] this is correct only in so far as the production of gold is the production of metal for industrial purposes (jewellery, dental stoppings, etc.). but gold in its capacity as money is not a metal but rather an embodiment of social labour _in abstracto_. thus it is no more a means of production than it is a consumer good. besides, a mere glance at the diagram of reproduction itself shows what inconsistencies must result from confusing means of exchange with means of production. if we add a diagrammatic representation of the annual production of gold as the substance of money to the two departments of social production, we get the following three sets of figures: i. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ means of production ii. _2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000_ means of subsistence iii. _20c + 5v + 5s = 30_ means of exchange this quantity of value of 30, chosen by marx as an example, obviously does not represent the quantity of money which circulates annually in society; it only stands for that part which is annually reproduced, the annual wear and tear of the money substance which, on the average, remains constant so long as social reproduction remains on the same level. the turnover of capital goes on in a regular manner and the realisation of commodities proceeds at an equal pace. if we consider the third line as an integral part of the first one, as marx wants us to do, the following difficulty arises: the constant capital of the third department consists of real and concrete means of production, premises, tools, auxiliary materials, vessels, and the like, just as it does in the two other departments. its product, however, the 30_g_ which represent money, cannot operate in its natural form as constant capital in any process of production. if we therefore include this 30_g_ as an essential part of the product of department i (6,000 means of production) the means of production will show a social deficit of this size which will prevent departments i and ii from resuming their reproduction on the old scale. according to the previous assumption--which forms the foundation of marx's whole diagram--reproduction as a whole starts from the product of each department in its actual use-form. the proportions of the diagram are based upon this assumption; without it, they dissolve in chaos. thus the first fundamental relation of value is based upon the equation: i(6,000) equals i(4,000_c_)â + ii(2,000_c_). this cannot apply to the product iii(30_g_), since neither department can use gold as a means of production [say, in the proportion of i(20_c_)â + ii(10_c_)]. the second fundamental relation derived from this is based upon the equation i(1,000_v_)â + i(1,000_s_)â = ii(2,000_c_). this would mean, with regard to the production of gold, that as many consumer goods are taken from department ii as there are means of production supplied to it. but this is equally untrue. though the production of gold removes concrete means of production from the total social product and uses them as its constant capital, though it takes concrete consumer goods for the use of its workers and capitalists, corresponding to its variable capital and surplus value, the product it supplies yet cannot operate in any branch of production as a means of production, nor is it a consumer good, fit for human consumption. to include the production of money in the activities of department i, therefore, is to run counter to all the general proportions which express the relations of value in marx's diagram, and to diminish the diagram's validity. the attempt by marx to find room for the production of gold within department i (means of production) moreover leads to dubious results. the first act of circulation between this new sub-department (called by marx i_g_) and department ii (consumer goods) consists as usual in the workers' purchase of consumer goods from department ii with the money obtained as wages from the capitalists. this money is not yet a product of the new period of production. it has been reserved by the capitalists of department i_g_ out of the money contained in their product of an earlier period. this, indeed, is the normal procedure. but now marx allows the capitalists of department ii to buy gold from i_g_ with the money they have reserved, gold as a commodity material to the value of 2. this is a leap from the production of money into the industrial production of gold which is no more to do with the problem of the production of money than with the production of boot-polish. yet out of the 5 i_g v_ that have been reserved, 3 still remain, and as the capitalist, unable to use them as constant capital, does not know what to do with them, marx arranges for him to add them on to his own reserve of money. marx further finds the following way out to avoid a deficit in the constant capital of ii which must be exchanged completely against the means of production (i_v_â + i_s_): 'therefore, this money must be entirely transferred from ii_c_ to ii_s_, no matter whether it exists in necessities of life or articles of luxury, and vice versa, a corresponding value of commodities must be transferred from ii_s_ to ii_c_. result: a portion of the surplus-value is accumulated as a hoard of money.'[93] a strange result, in all conscience! we have achieved an increase in money, a surplus of the money substance, by simply confining ourselves to the annual wear and tear of the money fund. this surplus value comes into existence, for some unknown reason, at the expense of the capitalists in the consumer goods department. they practise abstinence, not because they may want to expand their production of surplus value, let us say, but in order to secure a sufficient quantity of consumer goods for the workers engaged in the production of gold. the capitalists of department ii, however, get poor reward for this christian virtue. in spite of their abstinence, they are not only unable to expand their reproduction, but they are no longer even in the position to resume their production on its former scale. even if the corresponding 'commodity value' is transferred from ii_g_ to ii_c_, it is not only the value but its actual and concrete form which matters. as the new part of the product of i now consists of money which cannot be used as a means of production, department ii, in spite of its abstinence, cannot renew its constant material capital on the old scale. as our diagram presupposes simple reproduction, its condition are thus violated in two directions: surplus value is being hoarded, and the constant capital shows a deficit. marx's own results, then, prove that the production of gold cannot possibly find a place in either of the two departments of his diagram; the whole diagram is upset as soon as the first act of exchange between departments i and ii has been completed. as engels remarks in his footnote, 'the analysis of the exchange of newly produced gold within the constant capital of department i is not contained in the ms.'[94] besides, the inconsistency would then only have been greater. the point of view we advocate is confirmed by marx himself when he gives an exhaustive answer to the question, as striking as it is brief: 'money in itself is not an element of actual reproduction.'[95] there is another important reason why we should put the production of money in a third and separate department of social production as a whole: marx's diagram of simple reproduction is valid as the starting-point and foundation of the reproductive process not only for capitalism but also, _mutatis mutandis_, for every regulated and planned economic order, for instance a socialist one. however, the production of money, just like the commodity-form of the products, becomes obsolete when private ownership of the means of production is abolished. it constitutes the 'illegitimate' liabilities, the _faux frais_ of the anarchic economy under capitalism, a peculiar burden for a society based upon private enterprise, which implies the annual expenditure of a considerable amount of labour on the manufacture of products which are neither means of production nor yet consumer goods. this peculiar expenditure of labour by a society producing under capitalism will vanish in a socially planned economy. it is most adequately demonstrated by means of a separate department within the process of reproducing social capital. it is quite immaterial in this connection whether we picture a country which produces its own gold or a country which imports gold from abroad. the same expenditure of social labour which in the first case is necessary for the direct production of gold, is required in the second case to effect the exchange transactions. these observations show that the problem of the reproduction of total capital is not so crude as it often appears to those who approach it merely from the point of view of crises. the central problem might be formulated as follows: how is it possible that, in an unplanned economy, the aggregate production of innumerable individual capitalists can satisfy all the needs of society? one answer that suggests itself points to the continual fluctuations in the level of production in accordance with the fluctuating demand, i.e. the periodical changes in the market. this point of view, which regards the aggregate product of society as an undifferentiated mass of commodities, and treats social demand in an equally absurd way, overlooks the most important element, the _differentia specifica_ of the capitalist mode of production. we have seen that the problem of capitalist reproduction contains quite a number of precisely defined relations referring to specific capitalist categories and also, _mutatis mutandis_, to the general categories of human labour. the real problem consists in their inherent tendencies towards both conflict and harmony. marx's diagram is the scientific formulation of the problem. inquiry must now be made into the implications of this diagram analytic of the process of production. has it any real bearing on the problems of actual life? according to the diagram, circulation absorbs the entire social product; all consumers' needs are satisfied, and reproduction takes place without friction. the circulation of money succeeds the circulation of commodities, completing the cycle of social capital. but what is the position in real life? the relations outlined in the diagram lay down a precise first principle for the division of social labour in a planned production--always providing a system of simple reproduction, i.e. no changes in the volume of production. but no such planned organisation of the total process exists in a capitalist economy, and things do not run smoothly, along a mathematical formula, as suggested by the diagram. on the contrary, the course of reproduction shows continual deviations from the proportions of the diagram which become manifest (_a_) in the fluctuations of prices from day to day; (_b_) in the continual fluctuations of profits; (_c_) in the ceaseless flow of capital from one branch of production to another, and finally in the periodical and cyclical swings of reproduction between over-production and crisis. and yet, apart from all these deviations, the diagram presents a socially necessary average level in which all these movements must centre, to which they are always striving to return, once they have left it. that is why the fluctuating movements of the individual capitalists do not degenerate into chaos but are reduced to a certain order which ensures the prolonged existence of society in spite of its lack of a plan. in comparison, the similarities and the profound discrepancies between marx's diagram of reproduction and quesnay's _tableau ã�conomique_ strike us at once. these two diagrams, the beginning and end of the period of classical economics, are the only attempts to describe an apparent chaos in precise terms, a chaos created by the interrelated movements of capitalist production and consumption, and by the disparity of innumerable private producers and consumers. both writers reduce this chaotic jumble of individual capitals to a few broadly conceived rules which serve, as it were, as moorings for the development of capitalist society, in spite of its chaos. they both achieve a synthesis between the two aspects which are the basis of the whole movement of social capital: that circulation is at one and the same time a capitalist process of producing and appropriating surplus value, and also a social process of producing and consuming material goods necessary to civilised human existence. both show the circulation of commodities to act as a mediator for the social process as a whole, and both conceive of the circulation of money as a subsidiary phenomenon, an external and superficial expression of the various stages within the circulation of commodities. it is socially necessary labour which creates value. this inspired fundamental law of marx's theory of value which provided the solution of the money problem, amongst others, further led him first to distinguish and then to integrate those two aspects in the total reproductive process: the aspect of value and that of actual material connections. secondly, marx's diagram is based upon the precise distinction between constant and variable capital which alone reveals the internal mechanisms of the production of surplus value and brings it, as a value-relationship, into precise relation with the two material categories of production: that of producer and consumer goods. after quesnay, some classical economists, adam smith and ricardo in particular, came fairly close to this point of view. ricardo's contribution, his precise elaboration of the theory of value, has even been frequently confused with that of marx. on the basis of his own theory of value, ricardo saw that smith's method of resolving the price of all commodities into _vâ + s_--a theory which wrought so much havoc in the analysis of reproduction--is wrong; but he was not much interested in smith's mistake, nor indeed very enthusiastic about the problem of reproduction as a whole. his analysis, in fact, represents a certain decline after that of adam smith, just as smith had partly retrogressed as against the physiocrats. if ricardo expounded the fundamental value categories of bourgeois economy--wages, surplus value and capital--much more precisely and consistently than his predecessors, he also treated them more rigidly. adam smith had shown infinitely more understanding for the living connections, the broad movements of the whole. in consequence he did not mind giving two, or, as in the case of the problem of value, even three or four different answers to the same question. though he contradicts himself quite cheerfully in the various parts of his analysis, these very contradictions are ever stimulating him to renewed effort, they make him approach the problem as a whole from an ever different point of view, and so to grasp its dynamics. ultimately, it was the limitation of their bourgeois mentalities which doomed both smith and ricardo to failure. a proper understanding of the fundamental categories of capitalist production, of value and surplus value as living dynamics of the social process demands the understanding of this process in its historical development and of the categories themselves as historically conditioned forms of the general relations of labour. this means that only a socialist can really solve the problem of the reproduction of capital. between the _tableau ã�conomique_ and the diagram of reproduction in the second volume of _capital_ there lies the prosperity and decline of bourgeois economics, both in time and in substance. footnotes: [90] in his seventh note to the _tableau ã�conomique_, following up his arguments against the mercantilist theory of money as identical with wealth, quesnay says: 'the bulk of money in a nation cannot increase unless this reproduction itself increases; otherwise, an increase in the bulk of money would inevitably be prejudicial to the annual production of wealth.... therefore we must not judge the opulence of states on the basis of a greater or smaller quantity of money: thus a stock of money, equal to the income of the landowners, is deemed much more than enough for an agricultural nation where the circulation proceeds in a regular manner, and where commerce takes place in confidence and full liberty' (_analyse du tableau ã�conomique_, ed. oncken, pp. 324-5). [91] marx (_capital_, vol. ii, p. 482) takes the money spent directly by the capitalists of department ii as the starting point of this act of exchange. as engels rightly says in his footnote, this does not affect the final result of circulation, but the assumption is not the correct condition of circulation within society. marx himself has given a better exposition in _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 461-2. [92] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 548. [93] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 550. [94] ibid., p. 551. [95] ibid., p. 572. _chapter vi_ enlarged reproduction the shortcomings of the diagram of simple reproduction are obvious: it explains the laws of a form of reproduction which is possible only as an occasional exception in a capitalist economy. it is not simple but enlarged reproduction which is the rule in every capitalist economic system, even more so than in any other.[96] nevertheless, this diagram is of real scientific importance in two respects. in practice, even under conditions of enlarged reproduction, the greater part of the social product can be looked on as simple reproduction, which forms the broad basis upon which production in every case expands beyond its former limits. in theory, the analysis of simple reproduction also provides the necessary starting point for all scientific exposition of enlarged reproduction. the diagram of simple reproduction of the aggregate social capital therefore inevitably introduces the further problem of the enlarged reproduction of the total capital. we already know the historical peculiarity of enlarged reproduction on a capitalist basis. it must represent itself as accumulation of capital, which is both its specific form and its specific condition. that is to say, social production as a whole--which on a capitalist basis is the production of surplus value--can in every case be expanded only in so far as the social capital that has been previously active is now augmented by surplus value of its own creation. this use of part of the surplus value (and in particular the use of an increasing part of it) for the purpose of production instead of personal consumption by the capitalist class, or else the increase of reserves, is the basis of enlarged reproduction under capitalist conditions of production. the characteristic feature of enlarged reproduction of the aggregate social capital--just as in our previous assumption of simple reproduction--is the reproduction of individual capitals, since production as a whole, whether regarded as simple or as enlarged production, can in fact only occur in the form of innumerable independent movements of reproduction performed by private individual capitals. the first comprehensive analysis of the accumulation of individual capitals is given in volume i of marx's _capital_, section 7, chapters 22, 23. here marx treats of (_a_) the division of the surplus value into capital and revenue; (_b_) the circumstances which determine the accumulation of capital apart from this division, such as the degree of exploitation of labour power and labour productivity; (_c_) the growth of fixed capital relative to the circulating capital as a factor of accumulation; and (_d_) the increasing development of an industrial reserve army which is at the same time both a consequence and a prerequisite of the process of accumulation. in the course of this discussion, marx deals with two inspired notions of bourgeois economists with regard to accumulation: the 'theory of abstinence' as held by the more vulgar economists, who proclaim that the division of surplus value into capital, and thus accumulation itself, is an ethical and heroic act of the capitalists; and the fallacy of the classical economists, their doctrine that the entire capitalised part of the surplus value is used solely for consumption by the productive workers, that is to say spent altogether on wages for the workers employed year by year. this erroneous assumption, which completely overlooks the fact that every increase of production must manifest itself not only in the increased number of employed workers but also in the increase of the material means of production (premises, tools, and, certainly, raw materials) is obviously rooted in that 'dogma' of adam smith which we have already discussed. moreover, the assumption that the expenditure of a greater amount of capital on wages is sufficient to expand production, also results from the mistaken idea that the prices of all commodities are completely resolved into wages and surplus value, so that the constant capital is disregarded altogether. strangely enough, even ricardo who was, at any rate occasionally, aware of this element of error in smith's doctrine, subscribes most emphatically to its ultimate inferences, mistaken though they were: 'it must be understood, that all the productions of a country are consumed; but it makes the greatest difference imaginable whether they are consumed by those who reproduce, or by those who do not reproduce another value. when we say that revenue is saved, and added to capital, what we mean is, that the portion of revenue, so said to be added to capital, is consumed by productive, instead of unproductive labourers.'[97] if all the goods produced are thus swallowed up by human consumption, there can clearly be no room to spare in the total social product for such unconsumable means of production as tools and machinery, new materials and buildings, and consequently enlarged reproduction, too, will have to take a peculiar course. what happens--according to this odd conception--is simply that staple foodstuffs for new workers will be produced to the amount of the capitalised part of surplus value instead of the choice delicacies previously provided for the capitalist class. the classical theory of enlarged reproduction does not admit of any variations other than those connected with the production of consumer goods. after our previous observations it is not surprising that marx could easily dispose of this elementary mistake of both ricardo and smith. just as simple reproduction requires a regulated renewal of the constant capital, the material means of production, quite apart from the production of consumer goods in the necessary quantity for labourer and capitalist, equally so in the case of expanding production must part of the new additional capital be used to enlarge the constant capital, that is to add to the material means of production. another law, marx discovered, must also be applied here. the constant capital, continually overlooked by the classical economists, increases relative to the variable capital that is spent on wages. this is merely the capitalist expression of the general effects of increasing labour productivity. with technical progress, human labour is able to set in motion ever larger masses of means of production and to convert them into goods. in capitalist terms, this means a progressive decrease in expenses for living labour, in wages, relative to the expenses for inanimate means of production. contrary to the assumption of adam smith and ricardo, enlarged reproduction must not only start with the division of the capitalised part of the surplus value into constant and variable capital, but, as the technique of production advances, it is bound to allocate in this division ever increasing portions to the constant, and ever diminishing portions to the variable capital. this continuous qualitative change in the composition of capital is the specific manifestation of the accumulation of capital, that is to say of enlarged reproduction on the basis of capitalism.[98] the other side of this picture of continual changes in the relation between the portions of constant and variable capital is the formation of a relative surplus population, as marx called it, that is to say that part of the working population which exceeds the average needs of capital, and thus becomes redundant. this reserve of unemployable industrial labour (taken here in a broader sense, and including a proletariat that is dominated by merchant capital) is always present. it forms a necessary prerequisite of the sudden expansion of production in times of boom, and is another specific condition of capitalist accumulation.[99] from the accumulation of individual capitals we can therefore deduce the following four characteristic phenomena of enlarged reproduction: (1) the volume of enlarged reproduction is independent, within certain limits, of the growth of capital, and can transcend it. the necessary methods for achieving this are: increased exploitation of labour and natural forces, and increased labour productivity (including increased efficiency of the fixed capital). (2) all real accumulation starts with that part of the surplus value which is intended for capitalisation being divided into constant and variable capital. (3) accumulation as a social process is accompanied by continuous changes in the relation between constant and variable capital, whereby that portion of capital which is invested in inanimate means of production continually increases as compared with that expended on wages. (4) concomitant with the accumulative process, and as a condition of the latter, there develops an industrial reserve army. these characteristics, derived from the reproductive process as it is performed by the individual capitals, represent an enormous step forward as compared with the analyses of bourgeois economists. now, however, our problem is to demonstrate the accumulation of the aggregate capital which originates from these movements of individual capitals, and on the basis of the diagram of simple reproduction to establish the precise relations between the aspects of value prevalent in the production of surplus value and the material considerations in the production of consumer and producer goods, with a view to accumulation. the essential difference between enlarged reproduction and simple reproduction consists in the fact that in the latter the capitalist class and its hangers-on consume the entire surplus value, whereas in the former a part of the surplus value is set aside from the personal consumption of its owners, not for the purpose of hoarding, but in order to increase the active capital, i.e. for capitalisation. to make this possible, the new additional capital must also find the material prerequisites for its activity forthcoming. here the concrete composition of the aggregate social product becomes important. marx says already in volume i, when he considers the accumulation of individual capitals: 'the annual production must in the first place furnish all those objects (use-values) from which the material components of capital, used up in the course of the year, have to be replaced. deducting these there remains the net or surplus-product, in which the surplus-value lies. and of what does this surplus-product consist? only of things destined to satisfy the wants and desires of the capitalist class, things which, consequently, enter into the consumption fund of the capitalists? were that the case, the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing but simple reproduction would ever take place.--to accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product into capital. but we cannot, except by a miracle, convert into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour-process (i.e. means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the labourer, (i.e. means of subsistence). consequently, a part of the annual surplus-labour must have been applied to the production of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity of these things required to replace the capital advanced. in one word, surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital.'[100] additional means of production, however, and additional consumer goods for the workers alone are not sufficient; to get enlarged reproduction really going, additional labour is also required. marx now finds a specific difficulty in this last condition: 'for this the mechanism of capitalist production provides beforehand, by converting the working class into a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only for its maintenance, but for its increase. it is only necessary for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion of surplus-value into capital is complete.'[101] this is the first solution which marx gave to the problem of the accumulation of the aggregate capital. having dwelt on this aspect of the question already in volume i of _capital_, marx returns to the problem at the end of the second volume of his main work whose concluding 21st chapter is devoted to accumulation and enlarged reproduction of the aggregate capital. let us examine marx's diagrammatic exposition of accumulation more closely. on the model of the diagram of simple reproduction with which we are already familiar, he devised a diagram for enlarged reproduction, the difference appearing most clearly if we compare the two. assuming that society's annual aggregate product can be represented by an amount to the value of 9,000 (denoting millions of working hours, or, in capitalist monetary terms, any arbitrary amount of money), the aggregate product is to be distributed as follows: i. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ ii. _2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000_ ---- total: 9,000 department i represents means of production, department ii consumer goods. one glance at the proportion of the figures shows that in this case simple reproduction alone is possible. the means of production made in department i equal the total of the means of production actually used by the two departments. if these are merely renewed, production can be repeated only on its previous scale. on the other hand, the aggregate product of department ii equals the total of wages and surplus value in both departments. this shows that the consumer goods available permit only the employment of just as many workers as were previously employed, and that the entire surplus value is similarly spent on consumer goods, i.e. the personal consumption of the capitalist class. now let us take the same aggregate product of 9,000 in the following equation: i. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ ii. _1,500c + 750v + 750s = 3,000_ ---- total: 9,000 here a double disproportion confronts us: 6,000 means of production are created--more than those which are actually used by the society, i.e. _4,000câ + 1,500c_, leaving a surplus of 500. similarly, less consumer goods (3,000) are produced than the sum of what is paid out in wages (i.e. _1,000vâ + 750v_, the requirement of the workers), plus the aggregate of surplus value that has been produced (_1,000sâ + 750s_). this results in a deficit of 500. since our premises do not allow us to decrease the number of workers employed, the consequence must be that the capitalist class cannot consume the entire surplus value it has pocketed. this proves fully consistent with the two material preconditions of enlarged reproduction on a capitalist basis: part of the appropriated surplus value is not to be consumed but is used for the purposes of production; and more means of production must be produced so as to ensure the use of the capitalised surplus value for the actual expansion of reproduction. in considering the diagram of simple reproduction, we saw that its fundamental social conditions are contained in the following equation: the aggregate of means of production (the product of department i) must be equivalent to the constant capital of both departments, but the aggregate of consumer goods (the product of department ii) must equal the sum of variable capitals _and_ surplus values of the two departments. as regards enlarged reproduction, we must now infer a precise inverse double ratio. the general precondition of enlarged reproduction is that the product of department i must be greater in value than the constant capital of both departments taken together, and that of department ii must be so much less than the sum total of both the variable capital and the surplus value in the two departments. this, however, by no means completes the analysis of enlarged reproduction; rather has it led us merely to the threshold of the question. having deduced the proportions of the diagram, we must now pursue their further activities, the flow of circulation and the continuity of reproduction. just as simple reproduction may be compared to an unchanging circle, to be repeated time and again, so enlarged reproduction, to quote sismondi, is comparable to a spiral with ever expanding loops. let us begin by examining the loops of this spiral. the first general question arising in this connection is how actual accumulation proceeds in the two departments under the conditions now known to us, i.e. how the capitalists may capitalise part of their surplus value, and at the same time acquire the material prerequisites necessary for enlarged reproduction. marx expounds the question in the following way: let us assume that half the surplus value of department i is being accumulated. the capitalists, then, use 500 for their consumption but augment their capital by another 500. in order to become active, this additional capital of 500 must be divided, as we now know, into constant and variable capital. assuming the ratio of 4 to 1 remains what it was for the original capital, the capitalists of department i will divide their additional capital of 500 thus: they will buy new means of production for 400 and new labour for 100. this does not present any difficulties, since we know that department i has already produced a surplus of 500 means of production. yet the corresponding enlargement of the variable capital by 100 units of money is not enough, since the new additional labour power must also find adequate consumer goods which can only be supplied by department ii. now the circulation between the two large departments is shifting. formerly, under conditions of simple reproduction, department i acquired 1,000 consumer goods for its own workers, and now it must find another 100 for its new workers. department i therefore engages in enlarged reproduction as follows: _4,400c + 1,100v_. department ii, in turn, after selling these consumer goods to the value of 100, is now in a position to acquire additional means of production to the same amount from department i. and in fact, department i still has precisely one hundred of its surplus product left over which now find their way into department ii, enabling the latter to expand its own reproduction as well. yet here, too, the additional means of production alone are not much use; to make them operate, additional labour power is needed. assuming again that the previous composition of capital has been maintained, with a ratio of 2 to 1 as regards constant and variable capital, additional labour to the tune of 50 is required to work the additional 100 means of production. this additional labour, however, needs additional consumer goods to the amount of its wages, which are in fact supplied by department ii itself. this department must therefore produce, in addition to the 100 additional consumer goods for the new workers of department i and the goods for the consumption of its own workers, a further amount of consumer goods to the tune of 50 as part of its aggregate product. department ii therefore starts on enlarged reproduction at a rate of _1,600câ + 800v_. now the aggregate product of department i (6,000) has been absorbed completely. 5,500 were necessary for renewing the old and used-up means of production in both departments, and the remaining 500 for the expansion of production: 400 in department i and 100 in department ii. as regards the aggregate product of department ii (3,000), 1,900 have been used for the increased labour force in the two departments, and the 1,100 consumer goods which remain serve the capitalists for their personal consumption, the consumption of their surplus value. 500 are consumed in department i, and 600 in department ii where, out of a surplus value of 700, only 150 had been capitalised (100 being expended on means of production and 50 on wages). enlarged reproduction can now proceed on its course. if we maintain our rate of exploitation at 100 per cent, as in the case of the original capital, the next period will give the following results: i. _4,400c + 1,100v + 1,100s = 6,600_ ii. _1,600c + 800v + 800s = 3,200_ ---- total: 9,800 the aggregate product of society has grown from 9,000 to 9,800, the surplus value of department i from 1,000 to 1,100, and of department ii from 750 to 800. the object of the capitalist expansion of production, the increased production of surplus value, has been gained. at the same time, the material composition of the aggregate social product again shows a surplus of 600 as regards the means of production (6,600) over and above those which are actually needed (4,400â + 1,600), and also a deficit in consumer goods as against the sum total made up by the wages previously paid (_1,100vâ + 800v_) and the surplus value that has been created (_1,100sâ + 800s_). and thus we again have the material possibility as well as the necessity to use part of the surplus value, not for consumption by the capitalist class, but for a new expansion of production. the second enlargement of production, and increased production of surplus value, thus follows from the first as a matter of course and with mathematical precision. the accumulation of capital, once it has started, automatically leads farther and farther beyond itself. the circle has become a spiral which winds itself higher and higher as if compelled by a natural law in the guise of mathematical terms. assuming that in the following years there is always capitalisation of half the surplus value, while the composition of the capital and the rate of exploitation remain unchanged, the reproduction of capital will result in the following progression: _2nd year:_ i. _4,840c + 1,210v + 1,210s = 7,260_ ii. _1,760c + 880v + 880s = 3,520_ ----- total: 10,780 _3rd year:_ i. _5,324c + 1,331v + 1,331s = 7,986_ ii. _1,936c + 968v + 968s = 3,872_ ----- total: 11,858 _4th year:_ i. _5,856c + 1,464v + 1,464s = 8,784_ ii. _2,129c + 1,065v + 1,065s = 4,259_ ----- total: 13,043 _5th year:_ i. _6,442c + 1,610v + 1,610s = 9,662_ ii. _2,342c + 1,172v + 1,172s = 4,686_ ----- total: 14,348 thus, after five years of accumulation, the aggregate social product is found to have grown from 9,000 to 14,348, the social aggregate capital from (_5,500câ + 1,750vâ = 7,250_) to (_8,784câ + 2,782vâ = 11,566_) and the surplus value from (_1,000sâ + 500sâ = 1,500_) to (_1,464sâ + 1,065sâ = 2,529_), whereby the surplus value for personal consumption, being 1,500 at the beginning of accumulation, has grown to 732â + 958â = 1,690 in the last year.[102] the capitalist class, then, has capitalised more, it has practised greater abstinence, and yet it has been able to live better. society, in a material respect, has become richer, richer in means of production, richer in consumer goods, and it has equally become richer in the capitalist sense of the term since it produces more surplus value. the social product circulates _in toto_ in society. partly it serves to enlarge reproduction and partly it serves consumption. the requirements of capitalist accumulation correspond to the material composition of the aggregate social product. what marx said in volume i of _capital_ is true: the increased surplus value can be added on to capital because the social surplus product comes into the world from the very first in the material form of means of production, in a form incapable of utilisation except in the productive process. at the same time reproduction expands in strict conformity with the laws of circulation: the mutual supply of the two departments of production with additional means of production and consumer goods proceeds as an exchange of equivalents. it is an exchange of commodities in the course of which the very accumulation of one department is the condition of accumulation in the other and makes this possible. the complicated problem of accumulation is thus converted into a diagrammatic progression of surprising simplicity. we may continue the above chain of equations _ad infinitum_ so long as we observe this simple principle: that a certain increase in the constant capital of department i always necessitates a certain increase in its variable capital, which predetermines beforehand the extent of the increase in department ii, with which again a corresponding increase in the variable capital must be co-ordinated. finally, it depends on the extent of increase in the variable capital in both departments, how much of the total may remain for personal consumption by the capitalist class. the extent of this increase will also show that this amount of consumer goods which remains for private consumption by the capitalist is exactly equivalent to that part of the surplus value which has not been capitalised in either department. there are no limits to the continuation of this diagrammatic development of accumulation in accordance with the few easy rules we have demonstrated. but now it is time to take care lest we should only have achieved these surprisingly smooth results through simply working out certain fool-proof mathematical exercises in addition and subtraction, and we must further inquire whether it is not merely because mathematical equations are easily put on paper that accumulation will continue _ad infinitum_ without any friction. in other words: the time has come to look for the concrete social conditions of accumulation. footnotes: [96] 'the premise of simple reproduction, that i(_vâ + s_) is equal to ii_c_, is irreconcilable with capitalist production, although this does not exclude the possibility that a certain year in an industrial cycle of ten or eleven years may not show a smaller total production than the preceding year, so that there would not have been even a simple reproduction, compared to the preceding year. indeed, considering the natural growth of population per year, simple reproduction could take place only in so far as a correspondingly larger number of unproductive servants would partake of the 1,500 representing the aggregate surplus-product. but accumulation of capital, actual capitalist production, would be impossible under such circumstances' (_capital_, vol. ii, p. 608). [97] ricardo, _principles_, chap. viii, 'on taxes'. macculloch's edition of ricardo's works, p. 87, note. (reference not given in original.) [98] 'the specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the productive power of labour corresponding to it, and the change thence resulting in the organic composition of capital, do not merely keep pace with the advance of accumulation, or with the growth of social wealth. they develop at a much quicker rate, because mere accumulation, the absolute increase of the total social capital, is accompanied by the centralisation of the individual capitals of which that total is made up; and because the change in the technological composition of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change in the technological composition of the original capital. with the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. if it was originally say 1â : 1, it now becomes successively 2â : 1, 3â : 1, 4â : 1, 5â : 1, 7â : 1, etc., so that, as the capital increases, instead of 1/2 of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, etc., is transformed into labour-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production. since the demand for labour is determined not by the amount of capital as a whole, but by its variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the increase of the total capital, instead of, as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. it falls relatively to the magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases. with the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or the labour incorporated in it, also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion. the intermediate pauses are shortened, in which accumulation works as simple extension of production, on a given technical basis. it is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of labourers, or even, on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already functioning. in its turn, this increasing accumulation and centralisation becomes a source of new changes in the composition of capital, of a more accelerated diminution of its variable, as compared with its constant constituent' (_capital_, vol. i, pp. 642-3). [99] 'the course characteristic of modern industry, viz., a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. in their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction' (ibid., pp. 646-7). [100] _capital_, vol. i. pp. 593-4. [101] ibid., p. 594. [102] op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 596-601. _chapter vii_ analysis of marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction the first enlargement of reproduction gave the following picture: i. _4,400c + 1,100v + 1,100s = 6,600_ ii. _1,600c + 800v + 800s = 3,200_ ---- total: 9,800 this already clearly expresses the interdependence of the two departments--but it is a dependence of a peculiar kind. accumulation here originates in department i, and department ii merely follows suit. thus it is department i alone that determines the volume of accumulation. marx effects accumulation here by allowing department i to capitalise one-half of its surplus value; department ii, however, may capitalise only as much as is necessary to assure the production and accumulation of department i. he makes the capitalists of department ii consume 600_s_ as against the consumption of only 500_s_ by the capitalists of department i who have appropriated twice the amount of value and far more surplus value. in the next year, he assumes the capitalists of department i again to capitalise half their surplus value, this time making the capitalists of department ii capitalise more than in the previous year--summarily fixing the amount to tally exactly with the needs of department i. 500_s_ now remain for the consumption of the capitalists of department ii--less than the year before--surely a rather queer result of accumulation on any showing. marx now describes the process as follows: 'then let department i continue accumulation at the same ratio, so that 550_s_ are spent as revenue, and 55_s_ accumulated. in that case, 1,100 i_v_ are first replaced by 1,100 i_c_, and 550 i_s_ must be realised in an equal amount of commodities of ii, making a total of 1,650 i(_vâ + s_). but the constant capital of ii, which is to be replaced, amounts only to 1,600, and the remaining 50 must be made up out of 800 ii_s_. leaving aside the money aspect of the matter, we have as a result of this transaction: 'i. _4,400câ + 550s_ (to be capitalised); furthermore, realised in commodities of ii for the fund for consumption of the capitalists and labourers of i, 1,650 (_vâ + s_). 'ii. _1,650c + 825v + 725s_. 'in department i, 550_s_ must be capitalised. if the former proportion is maintained, 440 of this amount form constant capital, and 110 variable capital. these 110 must be eventually taken out of 725 ii_s_, that is to say, articles of consumption to the value of 110 are consumed by the labourers of i instead of the capitalists of ii, so that the latter are compelled to capitalise these 110_s_ which they cannot consume. this leaves 615 ii_s_ of the 725 ii_s_. but if ii thus converts these 110 into additional constant capital, it requires an additional variable capital of 55. this again must be taken out of its surplus value. subtracting this amount from 615 ii_s_, we find that only 560 ii_s_ remain for the consumption of the capitalists of ii, and we obtain the following values of capital after accomplishing all actual and potential transfers: i. _(4,400c+440c) + (1,100v+110v) = 4,840c + 1,210v = 6,050_ ii. _(1,600c+50c+110c) + (800v+25v+55v) = 1,760c + 88v = 2,640_ ---- total: 8,690'[103] this quotation is given at length since it shows very clearly how marx here effects accumulation in department i at the expense of department ii. in the years that follow, the capitalists of the provisions department get just as rough a deal. following the same rules, marx allows them in the third year to accumulate 264_s_--a larger amount this time than in the two preceding years. in the fourth year they are allowed to capitalise 290_s_ and to consume 678_s_, and in the fifth year they accumulate 320_s_ and consume 745_s_. marx even says: 'if things are to proceed normally, accumulation in ii must take place more rapidly than in i, because that portion of i(_vâ + s_) which must be converted into commodities of ii_c_, would otherwise grow more rapidly than ii_c_, for which it can alone be exchanged.'[104] yet the figures we have quoted fail to show a quicker accumulation in department ii, and in fact show it to fluctuate. here the principle seems to be as follows: marx enables accumulation to continue by broadening the basis of production in department i. accumulation in department ii appears only as a condition and consequence of accumulation in department i: absorbing, in the first place, the other's surplus means of production and supplying it, secondly, with the necessary surplus of consumer goods for its additional labour. department i retains the initiative all the time, department ii being merely a passive follower. thus the capitalists of department ii are only allowed to accumulate just as much as, and are made to consume no less than, is needed for the accumulation of department i. while in department i half the surplus value is capitalised every time, and the other half consumed, so that there is an orderly expansion both of production and of personal consumption by the capitalists, the twofold process in department ii takes the following erratic course: 1st year: 150 are capitalised, 600 consumed 2nd 240 660 3rd 254 626 4th 290 678 5th 320 745 here there is no rule in evidence for accumulation and consumption to follow; both are wholly subservient to the requirements of accumulation in department i. needless to say, the absolute figures of the diagram are arbitrary in every equation, but that does not detract from their scientific value. it is the _quantitative ratios_ which are relevant, since they are supposed to express strictly determinate relationships. those precise logical rules that lay down the relations of accumulation in department i, seem to have been gained at the cost of any kind of principle in construing these relations for department ii; and this circumstance calls for a revision of the immanent connections revealed by the analysis. it might, however, be permissible to assume the defect to lie in a rather unhappy choice of example. marx himself, dissatisfied with the diagram quoted above, proceeded forthwith to give a second example in order to elucidate the movements of accumulation, where the figures of the equation run in the following order: i. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ ii. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ ---- total: 9,000 in contrast to the previous example, the capital of both departments is here seen to have the same composition, i.e. constant and variable capital are in a ratio of 5 to 1. this already presupposes a considerable development of capitalist production, and accordingly of social labour productivity--a considerable preliminary expansion of the scale of production, and finally, a development of all the circumstances which bring about a relatively redundant surplus population in the working class. we are no longer introduced to enlarged reproduction, as in the first example, at the stage of the original transition from simple to enlarged reproduction--the only point of that is in any case for the sake of abstract theory. this time, we are brought face to face with the process of accumulation as it goes on at a definite and rather advanced stage of development. it is perfectly legitimate to assume these conditions, and they in no way distort the principles we must employ in order to work out the individual loops of the reproductive spiral. here again marx takes for a starting point the capitalisation of half the surplus value in department i. 'now take it that the capitalist class of i consumes one-half of the surplus-value, or 500, and accumulates the other half. in that case (_1,000vâ + 500s_) i, or 1,500, must be converted into 1,500 ii_c_. since ii_c_ amounts to only 1,430, it is necessary to take 70 from the surplus-value. subtracting this sum from 285_s_ leaves 215 ii_s_. then we have: 'i. _5,000câ + 500s_ (to be capitalised)â + 1,500(_vâ + s_) in the fund set aside for consumption by capitalists and labourers. 'ii. _1,430câ + 70s_ (to be capitalised)â + _285vâ + 215s_. as 70 ii_s_ are directly annexed by ii_c_, a variable capital of 70â : 5, or 14, is required to set this additional constant capital in motion. these 14 must come out of the 215_s_, so that only 201 remain, and we have: 'ii _(1,430) + 70c + (285v + 14v) + 201s_.'[105] after these preliminary arrangements, capitalisation can now proceed. this is done as follows: in department i the 500_s_ which have been capitalised are divided into five-sixths (417_c_)â + one-sixth (83_v_). these 83_v_ withdraw a corresponding amount from ii_s_ which serves to buy units of constant capital and thus accrues to ii_c_. an increase of ii_c_ by 83 involves the necessity of an increase in ii_v_ by 17 (one-fifth of 83). after the completion of this turnover we therefore have: i. _(5,000c + 417s) + (1,000v + 83s)v = 5,417c + 1,083v = 6,500_ ii. _(1,500c + 83s) + (299v + 17s) = 1,538c + 316v = 1,899_ ---- total: 8,399 the capital of department i has grown from 6,000 to 6,500, i.e. by one-twelfth; in department ii it has grown from 1,715 to 1,899, i.e. by just over one-ninth. at the end of the next year, the results of reproduction on this basis are: i. _5,417c + 1,083v + 1,083s = 7,583_ ii. _1,583c + 316v + 316s = 2,215_ ---- total: 9,798 if the same ratio is maintained in the continuance of accumulation, the result at the end of the second year is as follows: i. _5,869c + 1,173v + 1,173s = 8,215_ ii. _1,715c + 342v + 342s = 2,399_ ----- total: 10,614 and at the end of the third year: i. _6,358c + 1,271v + 1,271s = 8,900_ ii. _1,858c + 371v + 371s = 2,600_ ----- total: 11,500 in the course of three years, the total social capital has increased from i.6,000â + ii.1,715â = 7,715 to i.7,629â + ii.2,229â = 9,858, and the total product from 9,000 to 11,500. accumulation in both departments here proceeds uniformly, in marked difference from the first example. from the second year onwards, both departments capitalise half their surplus value and consume the other half. a bad choice of figures in the first example thus seems to be responsible for its arbitrary appearance. but we must check up to make sure that it is not only a mathematical manipulation with cleverly chosen figures which this time ensures the smooth progress of accumulation. in the first as well as in the second example, we are continually struck by a seemingly general rule of accumulation: to make any accumulation possible, department ii must always enlarge its constant capital by precisely the amount by which department i increases (_a_) the proportion of surplus value for consumption and (_b_) its variable capital. if we take the example of the first year as an illustration, the constant capital of department ii must be increased by 70. and why? because this capital was only 1,430 before. but if the capitalists of department i wish to accumulate half their surplus value (1,000) and to consume the other half, they need consumer goods for themselves and for their workers to the tune of 1,500 units which they can obtain only from department ii in exchange for their own products--means of production. since department ii has already satisfied its own demand for producer goods to the extent of its own constant capital (1,430), this exchange is only possible if department ii decides to enlarge its own constant capital by 70. this means that it must enlarge its own production--and it can do so only by capitalising a corresponding part of its surplus value. if this surplus value amounts to 285 in department ii, 70 of it must be added to the constant capital. the first step towards expansion of production in department ii is thus demonstrated to be at the same time the condition for, and the consequence of, increased consumption by the capitalists of department i. but to proceed. hitherto, the capitalists of department i could only spend one-half of their surplus value (500) on personal consumption. to capitalise the other half, they must redistribute these 500_s_ in such a way as to maintain at least the previous ratio of composition, i.e. they must increase the constant capital by 417 and the variable capital by 83. the first operation presents no difficulties: the surplus value of 500 belonging to the capitalists of department i is contained in a natural form in their own product, the means of production, and is fit straightway to enter into the process of production; department i can therefore enlarge its constant capital with the appropriate quantity of its own product. but the remaining 83 can only be used as variable capital if there is a corresponding quantity of consumer goods for the newly employed workers. here it becomes evident for the second time that accumulation in department i is dependent upon department ii: department i must receive for its workers 83 more consumer goods than before from department ii. as this is again possible only by way of commodity exchange, department i can satisfy its demands only on condition that department ii is prepared for its part to take up products of department i, producer goods, to the tune of 83. since department ii has no use for the means of production except to employ them in the process of production, it becomes not only possible but even necessary that department ii should increase its own constant capital by these very 83 which will now be used for capitalisation and are thus again withdrawn from the consumable surplus value of this department. the increase in the variable capital of department i thus entails the second step in the enlargement of production in department ii. all material prerequisites of accumulation in department i are now present and enlarged reproduction can proceed. department ii, however, has so far made only two increases in its constant capital. the result of this enlargement is that if the newly acquired means of production are indeed to be used, the quantity of labour power must be increased correspondingly. maintaining the previous ratio, the new constant capital of 153 requires a new variable capital of 31. this implies the necessity to capitalise a corresponding further amount of the surplus value. thus the fund for the capitalists' personal consumption in department ii comes to be what remains of the surplus value (285_s_) after deduction of the amounts used for twice enlarging the constant capital (70â + 83) and a commensurate increase in the variable capital (31)--a fund of 101, after deducting a total of 184. similar operations in the second year of accumulation result for department ii in its surplus value being divided into 158 for capitalisation and 158 for the consumption of its capitalists, and in the third year, the figures become 172 and 170 respectively. we have studied this process so closely, tracing it step by step, because it shows clearly that the accumulation of department ii is completely determined and dominated by the accumulation of department i. though this dependence is no longer expressed, as in marx's first example, by arbitrary changes in the distribution of the surplus value, it does not do away with the fact itself, even if now the surplus value is always neatly halved by each department, one-half for capitalisation and the other for personal consumption. though there is nothing to choose between the capitalists of the two departments as far as the figures are concerned, it is quite obvious that department i has taken the initiative and actively carries out the whole process of accumulation, while department ii is merely a passive appendage. this dependence is also expressed in the following precise rule: accumulation must proceed simultaneously in both departments, and it can do so only on condition that the provisions-department increases its constant capital by the precise amount by which the capitalists of the means-of-production-department increase both their variable capital and their fund for personal consumption. this equation (increase ii_c_â = increase i_v_â + increase i_s.c_.)[106] is the mathematical cornerstone of marx's diagram of accumulation, no matter what figures we may choose for its concrete application. but now we must see whether capitalist accumulation does in actual fact conform to this hard and fast rule. let us first return to simple reproduction. marx's diagram, it will be remembered, was as follows: i. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ means of production ii. _2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000_ means of consumption ---- 9,000 total production here, too, we established certain equations which form the foundation of simple reproduction; they were: (_a_) the product of department i equals in value the sum of the two constant capitals in departments i and ii. (_b_) the constant capital of department ii equals the sum of variable capital and surplus value in department i--a necessary consequence of (_a_). (_c_) the product of department ii equals the sum of variable capital and surplus value in both departments--a necessary consequence of (_a_) and (_b_). these equations correspond to the conditions of capitalist commodity production (at the restricted level of simple reproduction, however). equation (_b_), for instance, is a result of the production of commodities, entailed by the fact, in other words, that the entrepreneurs of either department can only obtain the products of the other by an exchange of equivalents. variable capital and surplus value in department i together represent the demand of this department for consumer goods. the product of department ii must provide for the satisfaction of this demand, but consumer goods can only be obtained in exchange for an equivalent part of the product of department i, the means of production. these equivalents, useless to department ii in their natural form if not employed as constant capital in the process of production, will thus determine how much constant capital there is to be in department ii. if this proportion were not adhered to, if, e.g., the constant capital of department ii (as a quantity of value) were larger than i(_vâ + s_), then it could not be completely transformed into means of production, since the demand of department i for consumer goods would be too small; if the constant capital (ii) were smaller than i(_vâ + s.c_), either the previous quantity of labour power could not be employed in this department, or the capitalists could not consume the whole of their surplus value. in all these cases, the premises of simple reproduction would be violated. these equations, however, are not just an exercise in mathematics, nor do they merely result from the system of commodity production. to convince us of this fact, there is a simple means at hand. let us imagine for a moment that, instead of a capitalist method of production, we have a socialist, i.e. a planned society in which the social division of labour has come to replace exchange. this society also will divide its labour power into producers of means of production and producers of means of consumption. let us further imagine the technical development of labour to be such that two-thirds of social labour are employed in the manufacture of producer goods and one-third in the manufacture of consumer goods. suppose that under these conditions 1,500 units (reckoned on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis) suffice to maintain the whole working population of the society, one thousand of these being employed, according to our premise, in department soc. i (making means of production), and five hundred in department soc. ii (making consumer goods), and that the means of production dating from previous labour periods and used up during one year's labour, represent 3,000 labour units. this labour programme, however, would not be adequate for the society, since considerably more labour will be needed to maintain all those of its members who do not work in the material, the productive sense of the term: the child, the old and sick, the civil servant, the artist and the scientist. moreover, every society needs certain reserves against a rainy day, as a protection against natural calamities. taking it that precisely the same quantity of labour and, similarly, of means of production as that required for the workers' own maintenance is needed to maintain all the non-workers and to build up the reserves, then, from the figures previously assumed, we should get the following diagram for a regulated production: i. _4,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 6,000_ means of production ii. _2,000c + 500v + 500s = 3,000_ means of consumption here _c_ stands for the material means of production that have been used, expressed in terms of social labour time; _v_ stands for the social labour time necessary to maintain the workers themselves and _s_ for that needed to maintain those who do not work and to build up the reserves. if we check up on the proportions of this diagram, we obtain the following result: there is neither commodity production nor exchange, but in truth a social division of labour. the products of department i are assigned to the workers of department ii in the requisite quantities, and the products of department ii are apportioned to everyone, worker or no, in both departments, and also to the reserve-fund; all this being the outcome not of an exchange of equivalents but of a social organisation that plans and directs the process as a whole--because existing demands must be satisfied and production knows no other end but to satisfy the demands of society. yet all that does not detract from the validity of the equations. the product of department i must equal i_c_â + ii_c_: this means simply that department i must annually renew all the means of production which society has used up during one year's labour. the product of department ii must equal the sum of i(_vâ + s_)â + ii(_vâ + s_): this means that society must each year produce as many consumer goods as are required by all its members, whether they work or not, plus a quota for the reserve fund. the proportions of the diagram are as natural and as inevitable for a planned economy as they are for a capitalist economy based upon anarchy and the exchange of commodities. this proves the diagram to have objective social validity, even if, just because it concerns _simple_ reproduction, it has hardly more than theoretical interest for either a capitalist or a planned economy, finding practical application only in the rarest of cases. the same sort of scrutiny must now be turned on the diagram of enlarged reproduction. taking marx's second example as the basis for our test, let us again imagine a socialist society. from the point of view of a regulated society we shall, of course, have to start with department ii, not with department i. assuming this society to grow rapidly, the result will be an increasing demand for provisions by its members, whether they work or not. this demand is growing so quickly that a constantly increasing quantity of labour--disregarding for the moment the progress of labour productivity--will be needed for the production of consumer goods. the quantities required, expressed in terms of social labour incorporated in them, increase from year to year in a progression of, say, 2,000â : 2,215â : 2,399â : 2,600 and so on. let us further assume that technical conditions demand an increasing amount of means of production for producing this growing quantity of provisions, which, again measured in terms of social labour, mounts from year to year in the following progression: 7,000â : 7,583â : 8,215â : 8,900 and so on. to achieve this enlargement of production, we must further have a growth in the labour performed _per annum_ according to the following progression: 2,570â : 2,798â : 3,030â : 3,284. [the figures correspond to the respective amounts of i(_vâ + s_)â + ii(_vâ + s_).] finally, the labour performed annually must be so distributed that one-half is always used for maintaining the workers themselves, a quarter for maintaining those who do not work, and the last quarter for the purpose of enlarging production in the following year. thus we obtain the proportions of marx's second diagram of enlarged reproduction for a socialist society. in fact, three conditions are indispensable if production is to be enlarged in any society, even in a planned economy: (1) the society must have an increasing quantity of labour power at its disposal; (2) in every working period, the immediate needs of society must not claim the whole of its working time, so that part of the time can be devoted to making provision for the future and its growing demands; (3) means of production must be turned out year after year in sufficiently growing quantities--without which production cannot be enlarged on a rising scale. in respect of all these general points, marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction has objective validity--_mutatis mutandis_--for a planned society. it remains to test whether it is also valid for a capitalist economy. here we must ask first of all: what is the starting point of accumulation? that is the approach on which we have to investigate the mutual dependence of the accumulative process in the two departments of production. there can be no doubt that under capitalist conditions department ii is dependent upon department i in so far as its accumulation is determined by the additional means of production available. conversely, the accumulation in department i depends upon a corresponding quantity of additional consumer goods being available for its additional labour power. it does not follow, however, that so long as both these conditions are observed, accumulation in both departments is bound, as marx's diagram makes it appear, to go on automatically year after year. the conditions of accumulation we have enumerated are no more than those without which there can be no accumulation. there may even be a desire to accumulate in both departments, yet the desire to accumulate plus the technical prerequisites of accumulation is not enough in a capitalist economy of commodity production. a further condition is required to ensure that accumulation can in fact proceed and production expand: the effective demand for commodities must also increase. where is this continually increasing demand to come from, which in marx's diagram forms the basis of reproduction on an ever rising scale? it cannot possibly come from the capitalists of departments i and ii themselves--so much is certain right away--it cannot arise out of their personal consumption. on the contrary, it is the very essence of accumulation that the capitalists refrain from consuming a part of their surplus value which must be ever increasing--at least as far as absolute figures are concerned--that they use it instead to make goods for the use of other people. it is true that with accumulation the personal consumption of the capitalist class will grow and that there may even be an increase in the total value consumed; nevertheless it will still be no more than a part of the surplus value that is used for the capitalists' consumption. that indeed is the foundation of accumulation: the capitalists' abstention from consuming the whole of their surplus value. but what of the remaining surplus value, the part that is accumulated? for whom can it be destined? according to marx's diagram, department i has the initiative: the process starts with the production of producer goods. and who requires these additional means of production? the diagram answers that department ii needs them in order to produce means of consumption in increased quantities. well then, who requires these additional consumer goods? department i, of course--replies the diagram--because it now employs a greater number of workers. we are plainly running in circles. from the capitalist point of view it is absurd to produce more consumer goods merely in order to maintain more workers, and to turn out more means of production merely to keep this surplus of workers occupied. admittedly, as far as the individual capitalist is concerned, the worker is just as good a consumer, i.e. purchaser of his commodity, as another capitalist or anyone else, provided that he can pay. every individual capitalist realises his surplus value in the price of his commodity, whether he sells it to the worker or to some other buyer. but this does not hold true from the point of view of the capitalist class as a whole. the working class in general receives from the capitalist class no more than an assignment to a determinate part of the social product, precisely to the extent of the variable capital. the workers buying consumer goods therefore merely refund to the capitalist class the amount of the wages they have received, their assignment to the extent of the variable capital. they cannot return a groat more than that; and if they are in a position to save in order to make themselves independent as small entrepreneurs, they may even return less, though this is the exception. part of the surplus value is consumed by the capitalist class itself in form of consumer goods, the money exchanged for these being retained in the capitalists' pockets. but who can buy the products incorporating the other, the capitalised part of the surplus value? partly the capitalists themselves--the diagram answers--who need new means of production for the purpose of expanding production, and partly the new workers who will be needed to work these new means of production. but that implies a previous capitalist incentive to enlarge production; if new workers are set to work with new means of production, there must have been a new demand for the products which are to be turned out. perhaps the answer is that the natural increase of the population creates this growing demand. in fact, the growth of the population and its needs provided the starting point for our examination of enlarged reproduction in an hypothetical socialist society. there the requirements of society could serve as an adequate basis, since the only purpose of production was the satisfaction of wants. in a capitalist society, however, the matter is rather different. what kind of people are we thinking of when we speak of an increase in the population? there are only two classes of the population according to marx's diagram, the capitalists and the workers. the natural increase of the former is already catered for by that part of the surplus value which is consumed inasmuch as it increases in absolute quantity. in any case, it cannot be the capitalists who consume the remainder, since capitalist consumption of the entire surplus value would mean a reversion to simple reproduction. that leaves the workers, their class also growing by natural increase. yet a capitalist economy is not interested in this increase for its own sake, as a starting point of growing needs. the production of consumer goods for i_v_ and ii_v_ is not an end in itself, as it would be in a society where the economic system is shaped for the workers and the satisfaction of their wants. in a capitalist system, department ii does not produce means of consumption in large quantities simply to keep the workers of departments i and ii. quite the contrary: a certain number of workers in departments i and ii can support themselves in every case because their labour power is useful under the obtaining conditions of supply and demand. this means that the starting point of capitalist production is not a given number of workers and their demands, but that these factors themselves are constantly fluctuating, 'dependent variables' of the capitalist expectations of profit. the question is therefore whether the natural increase of the working class also entails a growing effective demand over and above the variable capital. and that is quite impossible. the only source of money for the working class in our diagram is the variable capital which must therefore provide in advance for the natural increase of the workers. one way or the other: either the older generation must earn enough to keep their offspring--who cannot, then, count as additional consumers; or, failing that, the next generation, the young workers, must turn to work in order to obtain wages and means of subsistence for themselves--in which case the new working generation is already included in the number of workers employed. on this count, the process of accumulation in marx's diagram cannot be explained by the natural increase of the population. but wait! even under the sway of capitalism, society does not consist exclusively of capitalists and wage labourers. apart from these two classes, there are a host of other people: the landowners, the salaried employees, the liberal professions such as doctors, lawyers, artists and scientists. moreover, there is the church and its servants, the clergy, and finally the state with its officials and armed forces. all these strata of the population can be counted, strictly speaking, neither among the capitalist nor among the working class. yet society has to feed and support them. perhaps it is they, these strata apart from the capitalists and wage labourers, who call forth enlarged reproduction by their demand. but this seeming solution cannot stand up to a closer scrutiny. the landowners must as consumers of rent, i.e. of part of the surplus value, quite obviously be numbered among the capitalist class; since we are here concerned with the surplus value in its undivided, primary form, their consumption is already allowed for in the consumption of the capitalist class. the liberal professions in most cases obtain their money, i.e. the assignment to part of the social product, directly or indirectly from the capitalist class who pay them with bits of their own surplus value. and the same applies to the clergy, with the difference only that its members also obtain their purchasing power in part from the workers, i.e. from wages. the upkeep of the state, lastly, with its officers and armed forces is borne by the rates and taxes, which are in their turn levied upon either the surplus value or the wages. within the limits of marx's diagram there are in fact only the two sources of income in a society: the labourers' wages and the surplus value. all the strata of the population we have mentioned as apart from the capitalists and the workers, are thus to be taken only for joint consumers of these two kinds of income. marx himself rejects any suggestion that these 'third persons' are more than a subterfuge: 'all members of society not directly engaged in reproduction, with or without labour, can obtain their share of the annual produce of commodities--in other words, their articles of consumption ... only out of the hands of those classes who are the first to handle the product, that is to say, productive labourers, industrial capitalists, and real estate owners. to that extent their revenues are substantially derived from wages (of the productive labourers), profit and ground rent, and appear as indirect derivations when compared to these primary sources of revenue. but, on the other hand, the recipients of these revenues, thus indirectly derived, draw them by grace of their social functions, for instance that of a king, priest, professor, prostitute, soldier, etc., and they may regard these functions as the primary sources of their revenue.'[107] and about the consumers of interest and ground rent as buyers, marx says: 'now, if that portion of the surplus-value of commodities, which the industrial capitalist yields in the form of ground rent or interest to other shareholders in the surplus-value, cannot be in the long run converted into money by the sale of the commodities, then there is an end to the payment of rent and interest, and the landowners or recipients of interest can no longer serve in the role of miraculous interlopers, who convert aliquot portions of the annual reproduction into money by spending their revenue. the same is true of the expenditure of all so-called unproductive labourers, state officials, physicians, lawyers, etc., and others who serve economists as an excuse for explaining inexplicable things, in the role of the 'general public'.[108] seeing that we cannot discover within capitalist society any buyers whatever for the commodities in which the accumulated part of the surplus value is embodied, only one thing is left: foreign trade. but there are a great many objections to a method that conceives of foreign trade as a convenient dumping ground for commodities which cannot be found any proper place in the reproductive process. recourse to foreign trade really begs the question: the difficulties implicit in the analysis are simply shifted--quite unresolved--from one country to another. yet if the analysis of the reproductive process actually intends not any single capitalist country but the capitalist world market, there can be no foreign trade: all countries are 'home'. this point is made by marx already in the first volume of _capital_, in connection with accumulation: 'we here take no account of export trade, by means of which a nation can change articles of luxury either into means of production or means of subsistence, and _vice versa_. in order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.'[109] the same difficulty presents itself if we consider the matter from yet another aspect. in marx's diagram of accumulation we assumed that the portion of the social surplus value intended for accumulation exists from the first in a natural form which demands it to be used for capitalisation. 'in one word, surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital.'[110] in the figures of our diagram: i. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ means of production ii. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ means of consumption here, a surplus value of 570_s_ can be capitalised because from the very outset it consists in means of production. to this quantity of producer goods there correspond besides additional consumer goods to the amount of 114_s_ so that 684_s_ can be capitalised in all. but the process here assumed of simply transferring means of production to constant capital on the one hand, consumer goods to variable capital on the other, in commensurate quantities, is in contradiction with the very structure of capitalist commodity production. whatever natural form the surplus value may have, there can be no immediate transfer to the place of production for the purpose of accumulation. it must first be realised, it must be turned into hard cash.[111] of the surplus value in department i, 500 are fit to be capitalised, but not until they have first been realised; the surplus value has to shed its natural form and assume the form of pure value before it can be added to productive capital. this is true for each individual capitalist and also for the 'aggregate capitalist' of society, it being a prime condition for capitalist production that the surplus value must be realised in the form of pure value. accordingly, regarding reproduction from the point of view of society as a whole-'we must not follow the manner copied by proudhon from bourgeois economy, which looks upon this matter as though a society with a capitalist mode of production would lose its specific historical and economic characteristics by being taken as a unit. not at all. we have, in that case, to deal with the aggregate capitalist.'[112] the surplus value must therefore shed its form as surplus product before it can re-assume it for the purpose of accumulation; by some means or other it must first pass through the money stage. so the surplus product of departments i and ii must be bought--by whom? on the above showing, there will have to be an effective demand outside i and ii, merely in order to realise the surplus value of the two departments, just so that the surplus product can be turned to cash. even then, we should only have got to the stage where the surplus value has become money. if this realised surplus value is further to be employed in the process of enlarging reproduction, in accumulation, an even larger demand must be expected for the future, a demand which is again to come from outside the two departments. either the demand for the surplus product will therefore have to increase annually in accordance with the rate of increase of the accumulated surplus value, or--_vice versa_--accumulation can only proceed precisely in so far as the demand outside i and ii is rising. footnotes: [103] _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 598-9. [104] ibid., p. 599. [105] _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 600-1. [106] surplus consumption. [107] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 429. [108] ibid., pp. 531-2. [109] op. cit., vol. i, p. 594, note 1. [110] ibid., p. 594. [111] here we can leave out of account instances of products capable in part of entering the process of production without any exchange, such as coal in the mines. within capitalist production as a whole such cases are rare (cf. marx, _theorien_ ..., vol. ii, part 2, pp. 255 ff.). [112] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 503. _chapter viii_ marx's attempt to resolve the difficulty complete abstraction from the circulation of money, though making the process of accumulation so smooth and simple in the diagram of enlarged reproduction, has great disadvantages of its own, we see. there was much to be said for this method in the analysis of simple reproduction, where consumption is the be-all and end-all of production. money there had an ephemeral part, mediating the distribution of the social product among the various groups of consumers--the agent for the renewal of capital. in the process of accumulation, however, the money form has an essential function: it no longer serves as a mere agent in the circulation of commodities--here it has come to be a feature of capital itself, an element in the circulation of capital. even if the transformation of the surplus value is not essential to real reproduction, it is the economic _sine qua non_ of capitalist accumulation. in the transition from production to reproduction, the surplus product is thus subjected to two metamorphoses: first it casts off its use-form and then it assumes a natural form which is fit for the purpose of accumulation. the point here is not that the different cycles of production are counted off in units of years. it would be just as well to take the month; for that matter, the successive transformation of individual portions of the surplus value in departments i and ii may even intersect in time. series of years here do not mean units of time but really intend the sequence of economic transformations. what matters is that this sequence must be observed if accumulation is to keep its capitalist character, whether it extends over a longer or a shorter period of time. this brings us back to the old question: how, and by whom, is the accumulated surplus value to be realised? marx was well aware that his seemingly water-tight scheme of accumulation did not cover this point adequately, and he himself kept reviewing the problem from various angles. what he says is this: 'it has been shown in volume i, how accumulation works in the case of the individual capitalist. by the conversion of the commodity-capital into money, the surplus-product, in which the surplus-value is incorporated, is also monetised. the capitalist reconverts the surplus-value thus monetised into additional natural elements of his productive capital. in the next cycle of production the increased capital furnishes an increased product. but what happens in the case of the individual capital, must also show in the annual reproduction of society as a whole, just as we have seen it does in the case of reproduction on a simple scale, where the successive precipitation of the depreciated elements of fixed capital in the form of money, accumulated as a hoard, also makes itself felt in the annual reproduction of society.'[113] he examines the mechanism of accumulation further from this very point of view, focusing on the fact that surplus value must pass through the money stage before it is accumulated. 'for instance, capitalist a, who sells during one year, or during a number of successive years, certain quantities of commodities produced by him, thereby converts that portion of the commodities, which bears surplus-value, the surplus-product, or, in other words, the surplus-value produced by himself, successively into money, accumulates it gradually, and thus makes for himself a new potential money-capital. it is potential money-capital on account of its capacity and destination of being converted into the elements of productive capital. but practically he merely accumulates a simple hoard, which is not an element of actual production. his activity for the time being consists only in withdrawing circulating money out of circulation. of course, it is not impossible that the circulating money thus laid away by him was itself, before it entered into circulation, a portion of some other hoard.'[114] 'money is withdrawn from circulation and accumulated as a hoard by the sale of commodities without a subsequent purchase. if this operation is conceived as one taking place universally, then it seems inexplicable where the buyers are to come from, since in that case everybody would want to sell in order to hoard, and no one would want to buy. and it must be so conceived, since every individual capital may be in process of accumulation. 'if we were to conceive of the process of circulation as one taking place in a straight line between the various divisions of annual reproduction--which would be incorrect as it consists with a few exceptions of mutually retroactive movements--then we should have to start out from the producer of gold (or silver) who buys without selling, and to assume that all others sell to him. in that case, the entire social surplus-product of the current year would pass into his hands, representing the entire surplus-value of the year, and all the other capitalists would distribute among themselves their relative shares in his surplus-product, which consists naturally of money, gold being the natural form of his surplus-value. for that portion of the product of the gold producer, which has to make good his active capital, is already tied up and disposed of. the surplus-value of the gold producer, in the form of gold, would then be the only fund from which all other capitalists would have to derive the material for the conversion of their annual surplus-product into gold. the magnitude of its value would then have to be equal to the entire annual surplus-value of society, which must first assume the guise of a hoard. absurd as this assumption would be, it would accomplish nothing more than to explain the possibility of a universal formation of a hoard at the same period. it would not further reproduction itself, except on the part of the gold producer, by one single step. 'before we solve this _seeming difficulty_, we must distinguish....'[115] the obstacle in the way of realising the surplus value which marx here calls a 'seeming difficulty' nevertheless is important enough for the whole further discussion in _capital_, volume ii, to be concentrated on overcoming it. as a first attempt, marx proffers the solution of a hoard which, owing to the separation of the different individual constant capitals in the process of circulation, will inevitably be formed in a capitalist system of production. inasmuch as different capital investments have different spans of life, and there is always an interval before the parts of a plant are due for renewal, at any given moment we may find that one individual capitalist is already busy renewing his plant, while another is still building up reserves from the proceeds yielded by the sale of his commodities against the day when he will have enough to renew his fixed capital. 'for instance, let a sell 600, representing _400câ + 100vâ + 100s_ to b, who may represent more than one buyer. a sells 600 in commodities for 600 in money, of which 100 are surplus-value which he withdraws from circulation and hoards in the form of money. but these 100 in money are but the money-form of the surplus-product in which a value of 100 was incorporated.'[116] in order to comprehend the problem in complete purity, marx here assumes the whole of the surplus value to be capitalised, for which reason he ignores altogether that part of the surplus value is used for the capitalists' personal consumption; in addition, aâ´, aâ´â´ and aâ´â´â´ as well as bâ´, bâ´â´ and bâ´â´â´ here belong to department i. 'the formation of a hoard, then, is not a production, nor is it an increment of production. the action of the capitalist consists merely in withdrawing from circulation 100 obtained by the sale of his surplus-product, in holding and hoarding this amount. this operation is carried on, not alone on the part of a, but at numerous points of the periphery of circulation by other capitalists named aâ´, aâ´â´, aâ´â´â´.... however, a accomplishes the formation of a hoard only to the extent that he acts as a seller, so far as his surplus-product is concerned, not as a buyer. his successive production of surplus-products, the bearers of his surplus-value convertible into money, is therefore a premise for the formation of his hoard. in the present case, where we are dealing only with the circulation within department i, the natural form of the surplus-product, and of the total product of which it is a part, is that of an element of constant capital of i, that is to say it belongs to the category of a means of production creating means of production. we shall see presently what becomes of it, what function it performs, in the hands of the buyers such as b, bâ´, bâ´â´, etc. 'it must particularly be noted at this point that a, while withdrawing money from circulation and hoarding it, on the other hand throws commodities into it without withdrawing other commodities in return. the capitalists, b, bâ´, bâ´â´, etc., are thereby enabled to throw only money into it and withdraw only commodities from it. in the present case, these commodities, according to their natural form and destination, become a fixed or circulating element of the constant capital of b, bâ´, etc.'[117] there is nothing new about this whole process. marx had already described it extensively in connection with simple reproduction, since it alone can explain how a society is able to renew constant capital under conditions of capitalist reproduction. how this process can lay the besetting problem of our analysis of enlarged reproduction is far from self-evident. the difficulty had been that for the purpose of accumulation, part of the surplus value is not consumed by the capitalists but added to capital in order to expand production, giving rise to the question of buyers for this additional product. the capitalists do not want to consume it and the workers are not able to do so, their entire consumption being covered in every case by the available variable capital. whence the demand for the accumulated surplus value? or, as marx would have it: whence the money to pay for the accumulated surplus value? if, by way of answer, we are referred to the process of hoarding attendant upon the gradual renewal of the constant capital by the individual capitalists at various times, the connection between these two points remains obscure. as long as b, bâ´ and bâ´â´, etc., buy producer goods from their colleagues a, aâ´ and aâ´â´ in order to renew their constant capital that has in fact been used up, the limits of simple reproduction are not transcended, and the whole thing has nothing to do with our problem. the moment the producer goods purchased by b, bâ´, bâ´â´, etc., serve to increase their constant capital, however, for purposes of accumulation, a number of new questions clamour for attention. first and foremost where do the b's get the cash to buy an additional product from the a's? the only way they could have made their money is by sale of their own surplus product. before they can acquire new means of production for expanding their enterprises, before they appear as buyers, that is to say, of the surplus product that is to be accumulated, they must first have disposed of their own surplus product--in a word, b, bâ´, bâ´â´, etc., must have been vendors themselves. but who could have bought their surplus product? it is obvious that the difficulty is simply shifted from the a's to the b's without having been mastered. at one stage of the analysis it really does seem for a time as if a solution were found at last. after a short digression, marx returns to the main line of his investigation in the following words: 'in the present case, this surplus-product consists at the outset of means of production used in the creation of means of production. it is not until it reaches the hands of b, bâ´, bâ´â´, etc., (i), that this surplus-product serves as an additional constant capital. but it is virtually that even in the hands of the accumulators of hoards, the capitalists a, aâ´, aâ´â´, (i), before it is sold. if we consider merely the volume of values of the reproduction on the part of i, then we are still moving within the limits of simple reproduction, for no additional capital has been set in motion for the purpose of creating this virtual additional capital (the surplus-product), nor has any greater amount of surplus-labour been performed than that done on the basis of simple reproduction. the difference is here only one of the form of the surplus-labour performed, of the concrete nature of its particularly useful service. it is expended in means of production for department i_c_ instead of ii_c_, in means of production of means of production instead of means of production of articles of consumption. in the case of simple reproduction it had been assumed that the entire surplus-value was spent as revenue in the commodities of ii. hence it consisted only of such means of production as restore the constant capital of ii_c_ in its natural form. in order that the transition from simple to expanded reproduction may take place, the production in department i must be enabled to create fewer elements for the constant capital of ii and more for that of i.... considering the matter merely from the point of view of the volume of values, it follows, then, that the material requirements of expanded reproduction are produced within simple reproduction. it is simply a question of the expenditure of the surplus-labour of the working class of i for the production of means of production, the creation of virtual additional capital of i. the virtual additional money-capital, created on the part of a, aâ´, aâ´â´, by the successive sale of their surplus-product, which was formed without any capitalist expenditure of money, is in this case simply the money-form of the additional means of production made by i.'[118] on this interpretation, the difficulty seems to dissolve into thin air at our touch. accumulation requires no new sources of money at all. before, when the capitalists themselves consumed their surplus value, they had to have a corresponding money reserve in hand, the analysis of simple reproduction already having proved that the capitalist class must itself put into circulation the money needed for the realisation of their surplus value. now, instead of consumer goods, the capitalist class, or rather b, bâ´, and bâ´â´, buy an equivalent amount of means of production in order to expand their production. in this way, money to the same value is accumulated in the hands of the other capitalist group, viz. a, aâ´, aâ´â´, etc. 'this hoarding ... does not in any way imply an addition to the wealth in precious metals, but only a change of function on the part of money previously circulating. a while ago it served as a medium of circulation, now it serves as a hoard, as a virtual additional money-capital in process of formation.'[119] and that is that! yet this way out of the difficulty is open to us only on one condition, and that is not far to seek: marx here takes accumulation in its first rudiments, _in statu nascendi_, as it begins to evolve from simple reproduction. in respect of the amount of value, production is not yet enlarged, it has only been rearranged so that its material elements are grouped in a different way. that the sources of money also seem adequate is therefore not surprising. this solution, however, is only true for one specific moment, the period of transition from simple reproduction to enlarged reproduction--in short, a moment that has no reference to reality and can only be conceived speculatively. once accumulation has been established for some time, when increasing amounts of value are thrown upon the market in every period of production, buyers for these additional values cannot fail to become a problem. and on this point the proffered solution breaks down. for that matter, it was never more than a seeming solution, _not a real one_. on closer scrutiny, it fails us even at the precise instant it appears to have smoothed the way for us. for if we take accumulation just at the very moment of its emergence from simple reproduction, the prime condition it demands is a decrease in the consumption of the capitalist class. no sooner have we discovered a way to expand reproduction with the means of circulation already at hand, than we find previous consumers trickling away at the same rate. what, then, is the good of expanding production; who is there able to buy from b, bâ´ and bâ´â´ this increased amount of products which they could turn out only by denying themselves the money they need for buying new means of production from a, aâ´ and aâ´â´? that solution, we see, was a mere illusion--the difficulty still persists. marx himself at once re-opens the question where b, bâ´ and bâ´â´ get the money to buy the surplus product of a, aâ´ and aâ´â´. 'to the extent that the products created by b, bâ´, bâ´â´, etc., (i) re-enter in their natural form into their own process, it goes without saying that a corresponding portion of their own surplus-product is transferred directly (without any intervention of circulation) to their productive capital and becomes an element of additional constant capital. to the same extent they do not help to convert any surplus-product of a, aâ´, aâ´â´ etc., (i) into money. aside from this, where does the money come from? we know that they have formed their hoard in the same way as a, aâ´, etc., by the sale of their respective surplus-products. now they have arrived at the point where their accumulated hoard of virtual money-capital is to enter effectually upon its function as additional money-capital. but this is merely turning around in a circle. the question still remains: where does the money come from, which the various b's (i) withdrew from the circulation and accumulated?'[120] his prompt reply again seems surprisingly simple: 'now we know from the analysis of simple reproduction, that the capitalists of i and ii must have a certain amount of ready money in their hands, in order to be able to dispose of their surplus-products. in that case, the money which served only for the spending of revenue in articles of consumption returned to the capitalists in the same measure in which they advanced it for the purpose of disposing of their commodities. here the same money reappears, but in a different function. the a's and b's supply one another alternately with the money for converting their surplus-product into virtual additional capital, and throw the newly formed money-capital alternately into circulation as a medium of purchase.'[121] that is harking back to simple reproduction all over again. it is quite true, of course, that the capitalists a and the capitalists b are constantly accumulating a hoard of money bit by bit so as to be able to renew their constant (fixed) capital from time to time, and in this way they really are assisting one another in realising their products. yet this accumulating hoard does not drop from the clouds--it is simply a natural precipitation of the fixed capital that is (in terms of value) continually being transferred in instalments to the products which are then one by one realised in the process of sale. owing to its very nature, the accumulated hoard can only cover the renewal of the old capital; there cannot possibly be enough to serve further for purchasing additional constant capital. that means that we are still within the limits of simple reproduction. perhaps, though, that part of the medium of circulation which hitherto served the capitalists for their personal consumption, and is now to be capitalised, becomes a new source of additional money? for that to be true, however, we should have to be back at the unique and fleeting moment that has no more than theoretical existence--the period of transition from simple to enlarged reproduction. beyond this gap accumulation cannot proceed--we are in truth going round in circles. so the capitalist hoarding will not do as a way out of our difficulties. this conclusion should not come as a surprise, since the very exposition of the difficulty was misleading. it is not the source of money that constitutes the problem of accumulation, but the source of the demand for the additional goods produced by the capitalised surplus value; not a technical hitch in the circulation of money but an economic problem pertaining to the reproduction of the total social capital. quite apart from the question which had claimed marx's entire attention so far, namely where b, bâ´, etc., (i), get the money to buy additional means of production from a, aâ´, etc., (i), successful accumulation will inevitably have to face a far more serious problem: to whom can b, bâ´, etc., now sell their increased surplus-product? marx finally makes them sell their products to one another: 'it may be that the different b, bâ´, bâ´â´, etc., (i), whose virtual new capital enters upon its active function, are compelled to buy from one another their product (portions of their surplus-product) or to sell it to one another. in that case, the money advanced by them for the circulation of their surplus-product flows back under normal conditions to the different b's in the same proportion in which they advanced it for the circulation of their respective commodities.'[122] 'in that case'--the problem simply has not been solved, for after all b, bâ´, and bâ´â´ have not cut down on their consumption and expanded their production just so as to buy each other's increased product, i.e. means of production. even that, incidentally, would only be possible to a very limited extent. marx assumes a certain division of labour in department i itself: the a's turn out means of production for making producer goods and the b's means of production for making consumer goods, which is as much as to say that, though the product of a, aâ´, etc., need never leave department i, the product of b, bâ´, etc., is by its natural form predestined from the first for department ii. already the accumulation of b, bâ´, etc., it follows, must lead us to circulation between departments i and ii. thus marx's analysis itself confirms that, if department i is to accumulate, the department for means of consumption must, in the last resort, increase its immediate or mediate demand for means of production, and so it is to department ii and its capitalists that we must look for buyers for the additional product turned out by department i. sure enough, marx's second attack on the problem takes up from there: the demand of capitalists in department ii for additional means of production. such a demand inevitably implies that the constant capital ii_c_ is in process of expanding. this is where the difficulty becomes truly formidable: 'take it now that a(i) converts his surplus-product into gold by selling it to a capitalist b in department ii. this can be done only by the sale of means of production on the part of a(i) to b(ii) without a subsequent purchase of articles of consumption, in other words, only by a one-sided sale on a's part. now we have seen that ii_c_ cannot be converted into the natural form of productive constant capital unless not only i_v_ but also at least a portion of i_s_, is exchanged for a portion of ii_c_, which ii_c_ exists in the form of articles of consumption. but now that a has converted his i_s_ into gold by making this exchange impossible and withdrawing the money obtained from ii_c_ out of circulation, instead of spending it for articles of consumption of ii_c_, there is indeed on the part of a(i) a formation of additional virtual money-capital, but on the other hand there is a corresponding portion of the value of the constant capital b(ii) held in the form of commodity-capital, unable to transform itself into natural productive constant capital. in other words, a portion of the commodities of b(ii), and at that a portion which must be sold if he wishes to reconvert his entire constant capital into its productive form, has become unsaleable. to that extent, there is an over-production which clogs reproduction, even on the same scale.'[123] department i's efforts to accumulate by selling its additional product to department ii have met with an unlooked-for result: a deficit for the capitalists of department ii serious enough to prevent even simple reproduction on the old scale. having got to this crucial point, marx seeks to lay bare the root of the problem by a careful and detailed exposition: 'let us now take a closer look at the accumulation in department ii. the first difficulty with reference to ii_c_, that is to say the conversion of an element of the commodity-capital of ii into the natural form of constant capital of ii, concerns simple reproduction. let us take the formula previously used. (_1,000vâ + 1,000s_) i are exchanged for 2,000 ii_c_. now, if one half of the surplus-product of i, or 500_s_, is reincorporated in department i as constant capital, then this portion, being detained in department i, cannot take the place of any portion of ii_c_. instead of being converted into articles of consumption, it is made to serve as an additional means of production in department i itself.... it cannot perform this function simultaneously in i and ii. the capitalist cannot spend the value of his surplus-product for articles of consumption, and at the same time consume the surplus-product itself productively, by incorporating it in his productive capital. instead of 2,000 i(_vâ + s_), only 1,500 are exchangeable for 2,000 ii_c_, namely _1,000vâ + 500s_ of i. but 500 i_c_ cannot, be reconverted from the form of commodities into productive constant capital of ii.'[124] by now, hardly anybody could fail to be convinced that the difficulty is real, but we have not taken a single step nearer a solution. this, incidentally, is where marx has to do penance for his ill-advised continual recourse in an earlier over-simplification, to a fictitious moment of transition--in order in elucidate the problem of accumulation--from simple reproduction to enlarged reproduction, making his major premise accumulation at its very inception, in its feeble infancy instead its vigorous stride. there was something to be said, at least, for this fiction, so long as it was just a question of accumulation within department i. the capitalists of department i, who denied themselves part of what they had been wont to consume, at once had a new hoard of money in hand with which they could start capitalisation. but when it comes to department ii, the same fiction only piles on the difficulties. the 'abstinence' of the capitalists in department i here finds expression in a painful loss of consumers for whose expected demand production had largely been calculated. since the capitalists of department ii, on whom we tried the experiment whether they might not possibly be the long-sought buyers of the additional product of accumulation in department i, are themselves in sore straits--not knowing as yet where to go with their own unsold product--they are even less likely to be of any help to us. there is no shutting our eyes to the fact that an attempt to make one group of capitalists accumulate at the expense of the other is bound to get involved in glaring inconsistencies. yet another attempt to get round the difficulty is subsequently mentioned by marx who at once rejects it as a subterfuge. the unmarketable surplus value in department ii that is the result of accumulation in department i might be considered a reserve of commodities the society is going to need in the course of the following year. this interpretation marx counters with his usual thoroughness: '(1) ... the forming of such supplies and the necessity for it applies to all capitalists, those of i as well as of ii. considering them in their capacity as sellers of commodities, they differ only by the fact that they sell different kinds of commodities. a supply of commodities of ii implies a previous supply of commodities of i. if we neglect this supply on the one side, we must also do so on the other. but if we count them in on both sides, the problem is not altered in any way. (2) just as this year closes on the side of ii with a supply of commodities for the next year, so it was opened by a supply of commodities on the same side, taken over from last year. in the analysis of annual reproduction, reduced to its abstract form, we must therefore strike it out at both ends. by leaving this year in possession of its entire production, including the supply held for next year, we take from it the supply of commodities transferred from last year, and thus we have actually to deal with the aggregate product of an average year as the object of our analysis. (3) the simple circumstance that the difficulty which must be overcome did not show itself in the analysis of simple reproduction proves that it is a specific phenomenon due merely to the different arrangement of the elements of department i with a view to reproduction, an arrangement without which reproduction on an expanded scale cannot take place at all.'[125] the last remark, be it noted, is equally damaging to his own earlier attempt at resolving the specific difficulties of accumulation by moments pertaining to simple reproduction, viz. the formation of a hoard consequent upon the gradual turnover of the fixed capital in the hands of the capitalists which was previously adduced as the explanation of accumulation in department i. marx then proceeds to set out enlarged reproduction in the form of diagrams. but no sooner does he begin to analyse his diagram, than the same difficulty crops up anew in a slightly different guise. assuming that the capitalists of department ii must for their part convert 140_s_ into constant capital so as to make accumulation possible for the others, he asks: 'therefore department ii must buy 140_s_ for cash without recovering this money by a subsequent sale of its commodities to i. and this is a process which is continually repeated in every new annual production, so far as it is reproduction on an enlarged scale. where does ii get the money for this?'[126] in the following, marx tries out various approaches in order to discover this source. first the expenditure on variable capital by the capitalists in department ii is closely scrutinised. true, it exists in the form of money; but its proper function is the purchase of labour power, and it cannot possibly be withdrawn and made to serve, maybe, for purchasing additional means of production. 'this continually repeated departure from and return to the starting point, the pocket of the capitalist, does not add in any way to the money moving in this cycle. this, then, is not a source of the accumulation of money.'[127] marx then considers all conceivable dodges, only to show them up as evading the issue. 'but stop!' he exclaims. 'isn't there a chance to make a little profit?'[127] he considers whether the capitalists could not manage to save a little of the variable capital by depressing the wages of the workers below the normal average and thus to tap a new source of money for accumulation. a mere flick of his fingers, of course, disposes of this notion: 'but it must not be forgotten that the wages actually paid (which determine the magnitude of the variable capital under normal conditions) do not depend on the benevolence of the capitalists, but must be paid under certain conditions. this does away with this expedient as a source of additional money.'[127] he even explores what hidden methods there may be of 'saving' on the variable capital, such as the truck system, frauds, etc., only to comment finally: 'this is the same operation as under (1), only disguised and carried out by a detour. therefore it must likewise be rejected as an explanation of the present problem.'[128] all efforts to make the variable capital yield a new source of money for the purpose of accumulation are thus unrewarded: 'in short, we cannot accomplish anything with 376 ii_v_ for the solution of this question.'[128] marx next turns to the cash reserves which the capitalists in department ii keep for the circulation of their own consumption and investigates whether none of this money can be diverted to the purposes of capitalisation. yet this, he allows, is 'still more impossible'. 'here the capitalists of the same department are standing face to face, heavily buying and selling their articles of consumption. the money required for these transactions serves only as a medium of circulation and must flow back to the interested parties in the normal course of things, to the extent that they have advanced it to the circulation, in order to pass again and again over the same course.'[129] the next attempt to follow belongs, as was to have been expected, to the category of those 'subterfuges' which marx ruthlessly refutes: the attempt to explain that money-capital can be formed in the hands of one capitalist group in department ii by defrauding the other capitalists within the same department--viz. in the process of the mutual selling of consumer goods. no time need be wasted on this little effort. then comes a more sober proposition: 'or, a certain portion of ii_s_, represented by necessities of life, might be directly converted into new variable capital of department ii.'[130] it is not quite clear how this can help us over the hurdle, help to get accumulation going. for one thing, the formation of additional variable capital in department ii is not much use if we have no additional constant capital for this department, being in fact engaged on the task of finding it. for another thing, our present concern is to see if we can find in department ii a source of money for the purchase of additional means of production from i, and department ii's problem how to place its own additional product in some way or other in the process of production is beside the point. further, is the implication that the respective consumer goods should be used 'direct', i.e. without the mediation of money, in the production of department ii, so that the corresponding amount of money can be diverted from variable capital to the purpose of accumulation? if so, we could not accept the solution. under normal conditions of capitalist production, the remuneration of the workers by consumer goods direct is precluded, one of the corner-stones of capitalist economy being the money-form of the variable capital, the independent transaction between the worker as buyer of commodities and producer of consumer goods. marx himself stresses this point in another context: 'we know that the actual variable capital consists of labour-power, and therefore the additional must consist of the same thing. it is not the capitalist of i who among other things buys from ii a supply of necessities of life for his labourers, or accumulates them for this purpose, as the slave holder had to do. it is the labourers themselves who trade with ii.'[131] and that goes for the capitalists of department ii just as much as for those of department i, thus disposing of marx's last effort. marx ends up by referring us to the last part of _capital_, volume ii, chapter 21, the 'concluding remarks _sub iv_', as engels has called them. here we find the curt explanation: 'the original source for the money of ii is _vâ + s_ of the gold producers in department i, exchanged for a portion of ii_c_. only to the extent that the gold producer accumulates surplus-value or converts it into means of production of i, in other words, to the extent that he expands his production, does his _vâ + s_ stay out of department ii. on the other hand, to the extent that the accumulation of gold on the part of the gold producer himself leads ultimately to an expansion of production, a portion of the surplus-value of gold production not spent as revenue passes into department ii as additional variable capital of the gold producers, promotes the accumulation of new hoards in ii and supplies it with means by which to buy from i without having to sell to it immediately.'[132] after the breakdown of all conceivable attempts at explaining accumulation, therefore, after chasing from pillar to post, from a i to b i, and from b i to a ii, we are made to fall back in the end on the very gold producer, recourse to whom marx had at the outset of his analysis branded as 'absurd'. the analysis of the reproductive process, and the second volume of _capital_ finally comes to a close without having provided the long sought-for solution to our difficulty. footnotes: [113] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 571. [114] ibid., p. 572. [115] ibid., pp. 573-4. [116] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 375. [117] ibid., pp. 575-6. [118] _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 579-81. [119] ibid., p. 581. [120] _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 583-4. [121] ibid., p. 584. [122] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 585. [123] ibid., pp. 586-7. [124] ibid., pp. 588-9. [125] _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 590-1. [126] ibid., p. 593. [127] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 594. [128] ibid., p. 595. [129] ibid., p. 595. [130] ibid., p. 596. [131] ibid., p. 601. [132] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 610. _chapter ix_ the difficulty viewed from the angle of the process of circulation the flaw in marx's analysis is, in our opinion, the misguided formulation of the problem as a mere question of 'the sources of money', whereas the real issue is the effective demand, the use made of goods, not the source of the money which is paid for them. as to money as a means of circulation: when considering the reproductive process as a whole, we must assume that capitalist society must always dispose of money, or a substitute, in just that quantity that is needed for its process of circulation. what has to be explained is the great social transaction of exchange, caused by real economic needs. while it is important to remember that capitalist surplus value must invariably pass through the money stage before it can be accumulated, we must nevertheless try to track down the economic demand for the surplus product, quite apart from the puzzle where the money comes from. as marx himself says in another passage: 'the money on one side in that case calls forth expanded reproduction on the other, because the possibility for it exists without the money. for money in itself is not an element of actual reproduction.'[133] and in a different context, marx actually shows the question about the 'sources of money' to be a completely barren formulation of the problem of accumulation. in fact, he had come up against this difficulty once before when examining the process of circulation. still dealing with simple reproduction, he had asked, in connection with the circulation of the surplus value: 'but the commodity capital must be monetised before its conversion into productive capital, or before the surplus-value contained in it can be spent. where does the money for this purpose come from? this question seems difficult at the first glance, and neither tooke nor anyone else has answered it so far.'[134] and he was then quite uncompromising about getting to the root of the matter: 'the circulating capital of 500 p.st. advanced in the form of money-capital, whatever may be its period of turn-over, may now stand for the total capital of society, that is to say, of the capitalist class. let the surplus-value be 100 p.st. how can the entire capitalist class manage to draw continually 600 p.st. out of the circulation, when they continually throw only 500 p.st. into it?'[135] all that, mind you, refers to simple reproduction, where the entire surplus value is used for the personal consumption of the capitalist class. the question should therefore from the outset have been put more precisely in this form: how can the capitalists secure for themselves consumer goods to the amount of â£100 surplus value on top of putting â£500 into circulation for constant and variable capital? it is immediately obvious that those â£500 which, in form of capital, always serve to buy means of production and to pay the workers, cannot simultaneously defray the expense of the capitalists' personal consumption. where, then, does the additional money come from?--the â£100 the capitalists need to realise their own surplus value? thus all theoretical dodges one might devise for this point are summarily disposed of by marx right away: 'it should not be attempted to avoid this difficulty by plausible subterfuges. 'for instance: so far as the constant circulating capital is concerned, it is obvious that not all invest it simultaneously. while the capitalist a sells his commodities so that his advanced capital assumes the form of money, there is on the other hand, the available money-capital of the buyer b which assumes the form of his means of production which a is just producing. the same transaction, which restores that of b to its productive form, transforms it from money into materials of production and labour-power; the same amount of money serves in the two-sided process as in every simple purchase c-m. on the other hand, when a reconverts his money into means of production, he buys from c, and this man pays b with it, etc., and thus the transaction would be explained. 'but none of the laws referring to the quantity of the circulating money, which have been analysed in the circulation of commodities (vol. i, chap, iii), are in any way changed by the capitalist character of the process of production. 'hence, when we have said that the circulating capital of society, to be advanced in the form of money, amounts to 500 p.st., we have already accounted for the fact that this is on the one hand the sum simultaneously advanced, and that, on the other hand, it sets in motion more productive capital than 500 p.st., because it serves alternately as the money fund of different productive capitals. this mode of explanation, then, assumes that money as existing whose existence it is called upon to explain. 'it may be furthermore said: capitalist a produces articles which capitalist b consumes unproductively, individually. the money of b therefore monetises the commodity-capital of a, and thus the same amount serves for the monetisation of the surplus-value of b and the circulating constant capital of a. but in that case, the solution of the question to be solved is still more directly assumed, the question: whence does b get the money for the payment of his revenue? how does he himself monetise this surplus-portion of his product? 'it might also be answered that that portion of the circulating variable capital, which a continually advances to his labourers, flows back to him continually from the circulation, and only an alternating part stays continually tied up for the payment of wages. but a certain time elapses between the expenditure and the reflux, and meanwhile the money paid out for wages might, among other uses, serve for the monetisation of surplus-value. but we know, in the first place, that, the greater the time, the greater must be the supply of money which the capitalist a must keep continually in reserve. in the second place, the labourer spends the money, buys commodities for it, and thus monetises to that extent the surplus-value contained in them. without penetrating any further into the question at this point, it is sufficient to say that the consumption of the entire capitalist class, and of the unproductive persons dependent upon it, keeps step with that of the labouring class; so that, simultaneously with the money thrown into circulation by the labouring class, the capitalists must throw money into it, in order to spend their surplus-value as revenue. hence money must be withdrawn from circulation for it. this explanation would merely reduce the quantity of money required, but not do away with it. 'finally it might be said: a large amount of money is continually thrown into circulation when fixed capital is first invested, and it is not recovered from the circulation until after the lapse of years, by him who threw it into circulation. may not this sum suffice to monetise the surplus-value? the answer to this is that the employment as fixed capital, if not by him who threw it into circulation, then by some one else, is probably implied in the sum of 500 p.st. (which includes the formation of a hoard for needed reserve funds). besides, it is already assumed in the amount expended for the purchase of products serving as fixed capital, that the surplus-value contained in them is also paid, and the question is precisely, where the money for this purpose came from.'[136] this parting shot, by the way, is particularly noteworthy in that marx here expressly repudiates the attempt to explain realisation of the surplus value, even in the case of simple reproduction, by means of a hoard formed for the periodical renewal of fixed capital. later on, with a view to realising the surplus value under the much more difficult conditions of accumulation, he makes more than one tentative effort to substantiate an explanation of this type which he himself dismissed as a 'plausible subterfuge'. then follows a solution which has a somewhat disconcerting ring: 'the general reply has already been given: when a mass of commodities valued at _x_ times 1,000 p.st. has to circulate, it changes absolutely nothing in the quantity of the money required for this circulation, whether this mass of commodities contains any surplus-value or not, and whether this mass of commodities has been produced capitalistically or not. in other words, _the problem itself does not exist_. all other conditions being given, such as velocity of circulation of money, etc., a definite sum of money is required in order to circulate the value of commodities worth _x_ times 1,000 p.st., quite independently of the fact how much or how little of this value falls to the share of the direct producers of these commodities. so far as any problem exists here, it coincides with the general problem: where does all the money required for the circulation of the commodities of a certain country come from?'[137] the argument is quite sound. the answer to the general question about the origin of the money for putting a certain quantity of commodities into circulation within a country will also tell us where the money for circulating the surplus value comes from. the division of the bulk of value contained in these commodities into constant and variable capital, and surplus value, does not exist from the angle of the circulation of money--in this connection, it is quite meaningless. but it is only from the angle of the circulation of money, or of a simple commodity circulation, that the problem has no existence. under the aspect of social reproduction as a whole, it is very real indeed; but it should not, of course, be put in that misleading form that brings us back to simple commodity circulation, where it has no meaning. we should not ask, accordingly: where does the money required for realising the surplus value come from? but: where are the consumers for this surplus value? it is they, for sure, who must have this money in hand in order to throw it into circulation. thus, marx himself, although he just now denied the problem to exist, keeps coming back to it time and again: 'now, there are only two points of departure: the capitalist and the labourer. all third classes of persons must either receive money for their services from these two classes, or, to the extent that they receive it without any equivalent services, they are joint owners of the surplus-value in the form of rent, interest, etc. the fact that the surplus-value does not all stay in the pocket of the industrial capitalist, but must be shared by him with other persons, has nothing to do with the present question. the question is: how does he maintain his surplus-value, not, how does he divide the money later after he has secured it? for the present case, the capitalist may as well be regarded as the sole owner of his surplus-value. as for the labourer it has already been said that he is but the secondary point of departure, while the capitalist is the primary starting point of the money thrown by the labourer into circulation. the money first advanced as variable capital is going through its second circulation, when the labourer spends it for the payment of means of subsistence. 'the capitalist class, then, remains the sole point of departure of the circulation of money. if they need 400 p.st. for the payment of means of production, and 100 p.st. for the payment of labour-power, they throw 500 p.st. into circulation. but the surplus-value incorporated in the product, with a rate of surplus-value of 100 per cent, is equal to the value of 100 p.st. how can they continually draw 600 p.st. out of circulation, when they continually throw only 500 p.st. into it? from nothing comes nothing. the capitalist class as a whole cannot draw out of circulation what was not previously in it.'[138] marx further explodes another device which might conceivably be thought adequate to the problem, i.e. a more rapid turnover of money enabling a larger amount of value to circulate by means of a smaller amount of money. the dodge will not work, of course, since the velocity of money in circulation is already taken into account by equating the aggregate bulk of commodities with a certain number of pounds sterling. but then at last we seem in sight of a proper solution: 'indeed, paradoxical as it may appear at first sight, it is the capitalist class itself that throws the money into circulation which serves for the realisation of the surplus-value incorporated in the commodities. but, mark well, it is not thrown into circulation as advanced money, not as capital. the capitalist class spends it for their individual consumption. the money is not advanced by them, although they are the point of departure of its circulation.'[139] this lucid and comprehensive account is the best evidence that the problem is not just imaginary but very real. it provides a solution, not by disclosing a new 'source of money' for the realisation of the surplus value, but by pointing out at last the consumers of this surplus value. we are still, on marx's assumption, within the bounds of simple reproduction; the capitalist class, that is to say, use the whole of their surplus value for personal consumption. since the capitalists are the consumers of surplus value, it is not so much a paradox as a truism that they must, in the nature of things, possess the money for appropriating the objects of consumption, the natural form of this surplus value. the circulatory transaction of exchange is the necessary consequence of the fact that the individual capitalist cannot immediately consume his individual surplus value, and accordingly the individual surplus product, as could, for instance, the employer of slave labour. as a rule the natural material form of the surplus product tends to preclude such use. the aggregate surplus value of the capitalists in general is, however, contained in the total social product--as long as there is simple reproduction--as expressed by a corresponding quantity of consumer goods for the capitalist class, just as the sum total of variable capital has its corresponding equivalent in the quantity of consumer goods for the working class, and as the constant capital of all individual capitalists taken together is represented by material means of production in an equivalent quantity. in order to exchange the unconsumable individual surplus values for a corresponding amount of consumer goods, a double transaction of commodity exchange is needed: first, the sale of one's own surplus product and then the purchase of consumer goods out of the surplus product of society. these two transactions can only take place among members of the capitalist class, among individual capitalists, which means that their agent, the money, thereby merely changes hands as between one capitalist and another without ever being alienated from the capitalist class in general. since simple reproduction inevitably implies the exchange of equivalents, one and the same amount of money can serve year by year for the circulation of the surplus value, and only an excess of zeal will inspire the further query: where does the money which mediates the capitalists' own consumption come from in the first place? this, question, however, reduces to a more general one: how did money capital initially come into the hands of the capitalists, that money capital of which they always retain a certain part for their personal consumption, apart from what they use for productive investment? put in this way, however, the question belongs in the chapter of so-called 'primitive accumulation', i.e. the historical genesis of capital, going beyond the framework of an analysis of the process of circulation as well as of reproduction. thus the fact is clear and unequivocal--so long as we remain within the bounds of simple reproduction. here the problem is solved by the premises themselves; in fact, the solution is already anticipated by the very concept of simple reproduction which indeed is based on the entire surplus value being consumed by the capitalist class. this implies that it must also be the latter who buy it, that is to say, individual capitalists must buy it from each other. 'in the present case', marx says himself, 'we had assumed, that the sum of money which the capitalist throws into circulation until the first surplus-value flows back to him, is exactly equal to the surplus-value which he is going to produce and monetise. this is obviously an arbitrary assumption, so far as, the individual capitalist is concerned. but it must be correct when applied to the entire capitalist class, when simple reproduction is assumed. it expresses the same thing that this assumption does, namely, that the entire surplus-value is consumed unproductively, but it only, not any portion of the original capital stock.'[140] but simple reproduction on a capitalist basis is after all an imaginary quantity in economic theory: no more and no less legitimate, and quite as unavoidable as [sqrt](-1) in mathematics. what is worse, it cannot offer any help at all with the problem of realising the surplus value in real life, i.e. with regard to enlarged reproduction or accumulation. marx himself says so for a second time in the further development of his analysis. where does the money for realising the surplus value come from if there is accumulation, i.e. not consumption but capitalisation of part of the surplus value? marx's first answer is as follows: 'in the first place, the additional money-capital required for the function of the increasing productive capital is supplied by that portion of the realised surplus-value which is thrown into circulation by the capitalists as money-capital, not as the money form of their revenue. the money is already present in the hands of the capitalists. only its employment is different.'[141] our investigation of the reproductive process has already made us familiar with this explanation, and we are equally familiar with its defects; for one thing, the answer rests on the moment of the first transition from simple reproduction to accumulation. the capitalists only yesterday consumed their entire surplus value, and thus had in hand an appropriate amount of money for their circulation. to-day they decide to 'save' part of the surplus value and to invest it productively instead of squandering it. provided that material means of production were manufactured instead of luxury goods, they need only put part of their personal money fund to a different use. but the transition from simple reproduction to expanded reproduction is no less a theoretical fiction than simple reproduction of capital itself, for which reason marx immediately goes on to say: 'now, by means of the additional productive capital, its product, an additional quantity of commodities, is thrown into circulation. together with this additional quantity of commodities, a portion of the additional money required for its circulation is thrown into circulation, so far as the value of this mass of commodities is equal to that of the productive capital consumed in their production. this additional quantity of money has precisely been advanced as an additional money-capital, and therefore it flows back to the capitalist through the turn-over of his capital. here the same question reappears, which we met previously. where does the additional money come from, by which the additional surplus-value now contained in the form of commodities is to be realised?'[142] the problem could not be put more precisely. but instead of a solution, there follows the surprising conclusion: 'the general reply is again the same. the sum total of the prices of the commodities has been increased, not because the prices of a given quantity of commodities have risen, but because the mass of the commodities now circulating is greater than that of the previously circulating commodities, and because this increase has not been offset by a fall in prices. the additional money required for the circulation of this greater quantity of commodities of greater value must be secured, either by greater economy in the circulating quantity of money--whether by means of balancing payments, etc., or by some measure which accelerates the circulation of the same coins,--or by the transformation of money from the form of a hoard into that of a circulating medium.'[143] all this amounts to an exposition along these lines: under conditions of developing and growing accumulation, capitalist reproduction dumps ever larger masses of commodity values on the market. to put this commodity mass of a continually increasing value into circulation requires an ever larger amount of money. this increasing amount of money must be found somehow or other. all this is, no doubt, plausible and correct as far as it goes, but our problem is not solved, it is merely wished away. one thing or the other! either we regard the aggregate social product in a capitalist economy simply as a mass, a conglomeration of commodities of a certain value, seeing under conditions of accumulation, a mere increase in this undifferentiated mass of commodities and in the bulk of its value. then all we need say is that a corresponding quantity of money is required for circulating this bulk of value, that with an increasing bulk of value the quantity of money must also increase, unless this growth of value is offset by acceleration of, and economy in, the traffic. and the final question, where does all money originally come from, could then be answered on marx's recipe: from the gold mines. this, of course, is one way of looking at things, that of simple commodity circulation. but in that case there is no need to drag in concepts such as constant and variable capital, or surplus value, which have no place in simple commodity circulation, belonging essentially to the circulation of capitals and to social reproduction; nor is there need to inquire for sources of money for the realisation of the social surplus value under conditions of first simple, and then enlarged, reproduction. under the aspect of simple commodity circulation puzzles of this kind are without meaning or content. but once these questions have been raised, once the course has been set for an investigation into the circulation of capitals and social reproduction, there can be no appealing to the sphere of simple commodity circulation, where there is no such problem at all, and consequently no solution to it. there can be no looking for the answer there, and then saying triumphantly that the problem has long been solved and in fact never really existed. all this time, it appears, marx has been tackling the problem from a wrong approach. no intelligent purpose can be served by asking for the source of the money needed to realise the surplus value. the question is rather where the demand can arise--to find an effective demand for the surplus value. if the problem had been put in this way at the start, no such long-winded detours would have been needed to show whether it can be solved or not. on the basis of simple reproduction, the matter is easy enough: since all surplus value is consumed by the capitalists, they themselves are the buyers and provide the full demand for the social surplus value, and by the same token they must also have the requisite cash in hand for circulation of the surplus value. but in this showing it is quite evident that under conditions of accumulation, i.e. of capitalisation of part of the surplus value, it cannot, _ex hypothesi_, be the capitalists themselves who buy the entire surplus value, that they cannot possibly realise it. true, if the capitalised surplus value is to be realised at all, money must be forthcoming in adequate quantities for its realisation. but it is quite impossible that this money should come from the purse of the capitalist class itself. just because accumulation is postulated, the capitalists cannot buy their surplus value themselves, even though they might, _in abstracto_, have the money to do so. but who else could provide the demand for the commodities incorporating the capitalised surplus value? 'apart from this class (the capitalists), there is, according to our assumption--the general and exclusive domination of capitalist production--no other class but the working class. all that the working class buys is equal to the sum total of its wages, equal to the sum total of the variable capital advanced by the entire capitalist class.'[144] the workers, then, are even less able than the capitalist class to realise the capitalised surplus value. somebody must buy it, if the capitalists are still to be able to recover the capital they have accumulated and advanced; and yet--we cannot think of any buyers other than capitalists and workers. 'how can the entire capitalist class accumulate money under such circumstances?'[144] realisation of the surplus value outside the only two existing classes of society appears as indispensable as it looks impossible. the accumulation of capital has been caught in a vicious circle. at any rate, the second volume of _capital_ offers no way out. if we should now ask why marx's _capital_ affords no solution to this important problem of the accumulation of capital, we must bear in mind above all that this second volume is not a finished whole but a manuscript that stops short half way through. the external form of its last chapters in particular proves them to be in the nature of notes, intended to clear the author's own mind, rather than final conclusions ready for the reader's enlightenment. this fact is amply authenticated by the man best in the position to know: friedrich engels, who edited the second volume. in his introduction to the second volume he reports in detail on the conditions of the preliminary studies and the manuscripts marx had left, which were to form the basis of this volume: 'the mere enumeration of the manuscripts left by marx as a basis for volume ii proves the unparalleled conscientiousness and strict self-criticism which he practised in his endeavour to fully elaborate his great economic discoveries before he published them. this self-criticism rarely permitted him to adapt his presentation of the subject, in content as well as in form, to his ever widening horizon, which he enlarged by incessant study. 'the material ... consists of the following parts: first, a manuscript entitled "a contribution to the critique of political economy", containing 1,472 quarto pages in 23 divisions, written in the time from august, 1861, to june, 1863. it is a continuation of the work of the same title, the first volume of which appeared in berlin, in 1859.... this manuscript, valuable though it is, could not be used in the present edition of volume ii. 'the manuscript next following in the order of time is that of volume iii.... 'the period after the publication of volume i, which is next in order, is represented by a collection of four manuscripts for volume ii, marked i-iv by marx himself. manuscript i (150 pages) presumably written in 1865 or 1867, is the first independent, but more or less fragmentary, elaboration of the questions now contained in volume ii. this manuscript is likewise unsuited for this edition. manuscript iii is partly a compilation of quotations and references to the manuscripts containing marx's extracts and comments, most of them relating to the first section of volume ii, partly an elaboration of special points, particularly a critique of adam smith's statements as to fixed and circulating capital and the source of profits; furthermore, a discussion of the relations of the rate of surplus-value to the rate of profit, which belongs in volume iii. the references furnished little that was new, while the elaborations for volumes ii and iii were rendered valueless through subsequent revisions and had to be ruled out for the greater part. manuscript iv is an elaboration, ready for printing, of the first section and the first chapters of the second section of volume ii, and has been used in its proper place. although it was found that this manuscript had been written earlier than manuscript ii, yet it was far more finished in form and could be used with advantage for the corresponding part of this volume. i had to add only a few supplementary parts of manuscript ii. this last manuscript is the only fairly completed elaboration of volume ii and dates from the year 1870. the notes for the final revision, which i shall mention immediately, say explicitly: "the second elaboration must be used as a basis." 'there is another interruption after 1870, due mainly to ill health. marx employed this time in his customary way, that is to say he studied agronomics, agricultural conditions in america and especially russia, the money market and banking institutions, and finally natural sciences, such as geology and physiology. independent mathematical studies also form a large part of the numerous manuscripts of this period. in the beginning of 1877, marx had recovered sufficiently to resume once more his chosen life's work. the beginning of 1877 is marked by references and notes from the above named four manuscripts intended for a new elaboration of volume ii, the beginning of which is represented by manuscript v (56 pages in folio). it comprises the first four chapters and is not very fully worked out. essential points are treated in footnotes. the material is rather collected than sifted, but it is the last complete presentation of this most important first section. a preliminary attempt to prepare this part for the printer was made in manuscript vi (after october, 1877, and before july, 1878), embracing 17 quarto pages, the greater part of the first chapter. a second and last attempt was made in manuscript vii, dated july 2, 1878, and consisting of 7 pages in folio. 'about this time marx seems to have realised that he would never be able to complete the second and third volume in a manner satisfactory to himself, unless a complete revolution in his health took place. manuscripts v-viii show traces of hard struggles against depressing physical conditions far too frequently to be ignored. the most difficult part of the first section had been worked over in manuscript v. the remainder of the first, and the entire second section, with the exception of chapter 17, presented no great theoretical difficulties. but the third section, dealing with the reproduction and circulation of social capital, seemed to be very much in need of revision. manuscript ii, it must be pointed out, had first treated of this reproduction without regard to the circulation which is instrumental in effecting it, and then taken up the same question with regard to circulation. it was the intention of marx to eliminate this section and to reconstruct it in such a way that it would conform to his wider grasp of the subject. this gave rise to manuscript viii, containing only 70 pages in quarto. a comparison with section iii, as printed after deducting the paragraphs inserted out of manuscript ii, shows the amount of matter compressed by marx into this space. 'manuscript viii is likewise merely a preliminary presentation of the subject, and its main object was to ascertain and develop the new points of view not set forth in manuscript ii, while those points were ignored about which there was nothing new to say. an essential part of chapter 17, section ii, which is more or less relevant to section iii, was at the same time drawn into this discussion and expanded. the logical sequence was frequently interrupted, the treatment of the subject was incomplete in various places, and especially the conclusion was very fragmentary. but marx expressed as nearly as possible what he intended to say on the subject. 'this is the material for volume ii, out of which i was supposed "to make something", as marx said to his daughter eleanor shortly before his death.'[145] we cannot but admire this 'something' which engels managed to 'make' from material of such a kind. as far as our present problem is concerned, however, this detailed report makes it clear that no more than the first two of the three sections that make up volume ii were anything like ready for print in the manuscripts marx left: the section 'on the circulation of money and commodity capital' and on 'the causes of circulation and the turnover of capital'. the third section which treats of the reproduction of total capital is merely a collection of fragments which marx himself considered to be 'very much in need of revision.' yet it is the last part of this section, i.e. chapter 21, 'on accumulation and enlarged reproduction', which is of primary importance in the present context, and of the whole book this is the most incomplete. it comprises thirty-five pages of print in all and breaks off right in the middle of the analysis. besides this extraneous circumstance, we would suggest another point of great influence. marx's investigation of the social reproductive process starts off, as we have seen, from the analysis of adam smith which came to grief, among other reasons, because of the erroneous doctrine that the price of all commodities is composed of _vâ + s_. polemics against this dogma dominated marx's entire analysis of the reproductive process. he devoted all his attention to proving that the total capital of society must serve, not only for consumption to the full amount of the various sources of revenue, but also for renewal of the constant capital. and inasmuch as the purest theoretical form for this line of reasoning is given, not by enlarged reproduction, but by simple reproduction, marx tends to consider reproduction mainly from a point of view that is the very opposite of accumulation, from the assumption that the entire surplus value is consumed by the capitalists. how greatly these polemics influenced his analysis is proved by his returning time and again in the course of his work to the attack on adam smith from the most various angles. so already in volume i, the following pages are devoted to it: vol. i, sect. 7, chap. 24, (2), pp. 588-602, and in vol. ii, pp. 417-56, p. 473, pp. 504-8, and pp. 554 f. marx again takes up the question of total reproduction in volume iii but from the start becomes once more involved with the problem set by smith to which he devotes the whole of his 49th chapter and most of chapter 50 (pp. 968-92 and 992-1022). finally, in _theorien ueber den mehrwert_, we again find detailed polemics against smith's dogma: pp. 164-253 in vol. i, and pp. 92, 95, 126, 233, and 262 in vol. ii, part 2. marx repeatedly stressed and emphasised the fact that he considered replacement of the constant capital from the aggregate social product the most difficult and important problem of reproduction.[146] the other problem, that of accumulation, i.e. realisation of the surplus value for the purpose of capitalisation, was thus pushed into the background, so that in the end marx hardly touched upon it. this problem being of such paramount importance for capitalist economy, it is not surprising that bourgeois economists have dealt with it again and again. attempts to grapple with this vital question for capitalist economy, with the question whether capital accumulation is possible in practice, come up time and again in the history of economic theory. to these historical attempts, before and after marx, at solving this problem we shall now turn. footnotes: [133] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 572. [134] _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 380-1. [135] ibid., p. 381. [136] _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 381-3. [137] ibid., p. 383. [138] _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 384-5. [139] ibid., p. 385. [140] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 387. [141] ibid., p. 397. [142] ibid., p. 397. [143] ibid., pp. 397-8. [144] _capital_, vol. ii, p. 401. [145] _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 8 ff. [146] cf. e.g. _capital_, vol. ii, pp. 430, 522, and 529. _section two_ historical exposition of the problem first round sismondi-malthus _v._ say-ricardo--macculloch _chapter_ x sismondi's theory of reproduction the first grave doubts as to the divine character of the capitalist order came to bourgeois economists under the immediate impact of the first crises of 1815 and 1818-19 in england. even then it had still been external circumstances which led up to these crises, and they appeared to be ephemeral. napoleon's blockade of the continent which for a time had cut off england from her european markets and had favoured a considerable development of home industries in some of the continental countries, was partly responsible; for the rest the material exhaustion of the continent, owing to the long period of war, made for a smaller demand for english products than had been expected when the blockade was lifted. still, these early crises were enough to reveal to the contemporary world the sinister aspects of this best of all social orders. glutted markets, shops filled with goods nobody could buy, frequent bankruptcies--and on the other hand the glaring poverty of the toiling masses--for the first time all this starkly met the eyes of theorists who had preached the gospel of the beautiful harmonies of bourgeois _laissez-faire_ and had sung its praises in all keys. all contemporary trade reports, periodicals and travellers' notes told of the losses sustained by english merchants. in italy, germany, russia, and brazil, the english disposed of their commodity stocks at a loss of anything between 25 per cent and 33â 1/3 per cent. people at the cape of good hope in 1818 complained that all the shops were flooded with european goods offered at lower prices than in europe and still unmarketable. from calcutta there came similar complaints. from new holland whole cargoes returned to england. in the united states, a contemporary traveller reports, 'there was no town nor hamlet from one end to the other of this immense and prosperous continent where the amount of commodities displayed for sale did not considerably exceed the means of the purchasers, although the vendors tried to attract custom by long-term credits, all sorts of facilities for payment, payment by instalments and acceptance of payment in kind'. at the same time, england was hearing the desperate outcry of her workers. the _edinburgh review_ of 1820[147] quotes an address by the nottingham frame-work knitters which contained the following statements: 'after working from 14 to 16 hours a day, we only earn from 4_s._ to 7_s._ a week, to maintain our wives and families upon; and we farther state, that although we have substituted bread and water, or potatoes and salt, for that more wholesome food an englishman's table used to abound with, we have repeatedly retired, after a heavy day's labour, and have been under the necessity of putting our children supperless to bed, to stifle the cries of hunger. we can most solemnly declare, that for the last eighteen months we have scarcely known what it was to be free from the pangs of hunger.'[148] then owen in england, and sismondi in france, almost simultaneously raised their voices in a weighty indictment of capitalist society. owen, as a hard-headed englishman and citizen of the leading industrial state, constituted himself spokesman for a generous social reform, whereas the petty-bourgeois swiss rather lost himself in sweeping denunciations of the imperfections of the existing social order and of classical economics. and yet, by so doing, sismondi gave bourgeois economics a much harder nut to crack than owen, whose fertile practical activities were directly applied to the proletariat. sismondi explained in some detail that the impetus for his social criticism came from england, and especially her first crisis. in the second edition of his _nouveaux principes d'ã�conomie politique ou de la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population_,[149] eight years after the publication of the first edition in 1819, he writes as follows: 'it was in england that i performed the task of preparing the new edition. england has given birth to the most celebrated political economists: the science is cultivated even at this time with increased ardour.... universal competition or the effort always to produce more and always cheaper, has long been the system in england, a system which i have attacked as dangerous. this system has used production by manufacture to advance with gigantic steps, but it has from time to time precipitated the manufacturers into frightful distress. it was in presence of these convulsions of wealth that i thought i ought to place myself, to review my reasonings and compare them with facts.--the study of england has confirmed me in my "new principles". in this astonishing country, which seems to be subject to a great experiment for the instruction of the rest of the world, i have seen production increasing, whilst enjoyments were diminishing. the mass of the nation here, no less than philosophers, seems to forget that the increase of wealth is not the end in political economy, but its instrument in procuring the happiness of all. i sought for this happiness in every class, and i could nowhere find it. the high english aristocracy has indeed arrived to a degree of wealth and luxury which surpasses all that can be seen in other nations; nevertheless it does not itself enjoy the opulence which it seems to have acquired at the expense of the other classes; security is wanting and in every family most of the individuals experience privation rather than abundance.... below this titled and not titled aristocracy, i see commerce occupy a distinguished rank; its enterprises embrace the whole world, its agents brave the ices of the poles, and the heats of the equator, whilst every one of its leading men, meeting on exchange, can dispose of thousands. at the same time, in the streets of london, and in those of the other great towns of england, the shops display goods sufficient for the consumption of the world.--but have riches secured to the english merchant the kind of happiness which they ought to secure him? no: in no country are failures so frequent, nowhere are those colossal fortunes, sufficient in themselves to supply a public loan to uphold an empire, or a republic, overthrown with as much rapidity. all complain that business is scarce, difficult, not remunerative. twice, within an interval of a few years, a terrible crisis has ruined part of the bankers, and spread desolation among all the english manufacturers. at the same time another crisis has ruined the farmers, and been felt in its rebound by retail dealers. on the other hand, commerce, in spite of its immense extent, has ceased to call for young men who have their fortunes to make; every place is occupied, in the superior ranks of society no less than in the inferior; the greater number offer their labour in vain, without being able to obtain remuneration.--has, then, this national opulence, whose material progress strikes every eye, nevertheless tended to the advantage of the poor? not so. the people of england are destitute of comfort now, and of security for the future. there are no longer yeomen, they have been obliged to become day labourers. in the towns there are scarcely any longer artisans, or independent heads of a small business, but only manufacturers. the operative, to employ a word which the system has created, does not know what it is to have a station; he only gains wages, and as these wages cannot suffice for all seasons, he is almost every year reduced to ask alms from the poor-rates.--this opulent nation has found it more economical to sell all the gold and silver which she possessed, to do without coin, and to depend entirely on a paper circulation; she has thus voluntarily deprived herself of the most valuable of all the advantages of coin: stability of value. the holders of the notes of the provincial banks run the risk every day of being ruined by frequent and, as it were, epidemic failures of the bankers; and the whole state is exposed to a convulsion in the fortune of every individual, if an invasion or a revolution should shake the credit of the national bank. the english nation has found it more economical to give up those modes of cultivation which require much hand-labour, and she has dismissed half the cultivators who lived in the fields. she has found it more economical to supersede workmen by steam-engines; she has dismissed ... the operatives in towns, and weavers giving place to power-looms, are now sinking under famine; she has found it more economical to reduce all working people to the lowest possible wages on which they can subsist, and these working people being no longer anything but a rabble, have not feared plunging into still deeper misery by the addition of an increasing family. she has found it more economical to feed the irish with potatoes, and clothe them in rags; and now every packet brings legions of irish, who, working for less than the english, drive them from every employment. what is the fruit of this immense accumulation of wealth? have they had any other effect than to make every class partake of care, privation and the danger of complete ruin? has not england, by forgetting men for things, sacrificed the end to the means?'[150] this mirror, held up to capitalist society almost a century before the time of writing, is clear and comprehensive enough in all conscience. sismondi put his finger on every one of the sore spots of bourgeois economics: the ruin of small enterprise; the drift from the country; the proletarisation of the middle classes; the impoverishment of the workers; the displacement of the worker by the machine; unemployment; the dangers of the credit system; social antagonisms; the insecurity of existence; crises and anarchy. his harsh, emphatic scepticism struck a specially shrill discord with the complacent optimism, the idle worship of harmony as preached by vulgar economics which, in the person of macculloch in england and of say in france, was becoming the fashion in both countries. it is easy to imagine what a deep and painful impression remarks like the following were bound to make: 'there can only be luxury if it is bought with another's labour; only those will work hard and untiringly who have to do so in order to get not the frills but the very necessities of life.'[151] 'although the invention of the machine which increases man's capacity, is a blessing for mankind, it is made into a scourge for the poor by the unjust distribution we make of its benefits.'[152] 'the gain of an employer of labour is sometimes nothing if not despoiling the worker he employs; he does not benefit because his enterprise produces much more than it costs, but because he does not pay all the costs, because he does not accord the labourer a remuneration equal to his work. such an industry is a social evil, for it reduces those who perform the work to utmost poverty, assuring to those who direct it but the ordinary profits on capital.'[153] 'amongst those who share in the national income, one group acquires new rights each year by new labours, the other have previously acquired permanent rights by reason of a primary effort which makes a year's labour more advantageous.'[154] 'nothing can prevent that every new discovery in applied mechanics should diminish the working population by that much. to this danger it is constantly exposed, and society provides no remedy for it.'[155] 'a time will come, no doubt, when our descendants will condemn us as barbarians because we have left the working classes without security, just as we already condemn, as they also will, as barbarian the nations who reduced those same classes to slavery.'[156] sismondi's criticism thus goes right to the root of the matter; for him there can be no compromise or evasion which might try to gloss over the dark aspects of capitalist enrichment he exposed, as merely temporary shortcomings of a transition period. he concludes his investigation with the following rejoinder to say: 'for seven years i have indicated this malady of the social organism, and for seven years it has continuously increased. i cannot regard such prolonged suffering as the mere frictions which always accompany a change. going back to the origin of income, i believe to have shown the ills we experience to be the consequence of a flaw in our organisation, to have shown that they are not likely to come to an end.'[157] the disproportion between capitalist production and the distribution of incomes determined by the former appears to him the source of all evil. this is the point from which he comes to the problem of accumulation with which we are now concerned. the main thread of his criticism against classical economics is this: capitalist production is encouraged to expand indefinitely without any regard to consumption; consumption, however, is determined by income. 'all the modern economists, in fact, have allowed that the fortune of the public, being only the aggregation of private fortunes, has its origin, is augmented, distributed and destroyed by the same means as the fortune of each individual. they all know perfectly well, that in a private fortune, the most important fact to consider is the income, and that by the income must be regulated consumption or expenditure, or the capital will be destroyed. but as, in the fortune of the public, the capital of one becomes the income of another, they have been perplexed to decide what was capital, and what income, and they have therefore found it more simple to leave the latter entirely out of their calculations. by neglecting a quality so essential to be determined, say and ricardo have arrived at the conclusion, that consumption is an unlimited power, or at least having no limits but those of production, whilst it is in fact limited by income.... they announced that whatever abundance might be produced, it would always find consumers, and they have encouraged the producers to cause that glut in the markets, which at this time occasions the distress of the civilised world; whereas they should have forewarned the producers that they could only reckon on those consumers who possessed income.'[158] sismondi thus grounds his views in a theory of income. what is income, and what is capital? he pays the greatest attention to this distinction which he calls 'the most abstract and difficult question of political economics'. the fourth chapter of his second book is devoted to this problem. as usual, sismondi starts his investigation with robinson crusoe. for such a one, the distinction between capital and income was still 'confused'; it becomes 'essential' only in society. yet in society, too, this distinction is very difficult, largely on account of the already familiar myth of bourgeois economics, according to which 'the capital of one becomes the income of another', and _vice versa_. adam smith was responsible for this confusion which was then elevated to an axiom by say in justification of mental inertia and superficiality. it was loyally accepted by sismondi. 'the nature of capital and of income are always confused by the mind; we see that what is income for one becomes capital for another, and the same object, in passing from hand to hand, successively acquires different denominations; the value which becomes detached from an object that has been consumed, appears as a metaphysical quantity which one expends and the other exchanges, which for one perishes together with the object itself and which for the other renews itself and lasts for the time of circulation.'[159] after this promising introduction, sismondi dives right into the difficult problem and declares: all wealth is a product of labour; income is part of wealth, and must therefore have the same origin. however, it is 'customary' to recognise three kinds of income, called rent, profit and wage respectively, which spring from the three sources of 'land, accumulated capital and labour'. as to the first thesis, he is obviously on the wrong tack. as the wealth of a society, i.e. as the aggregate of useful objects, of use-values, wealth is not merely a product of labour but also of nature who both supplies raw materials and provides the means to support human labour. income, on the other hand, is a concept of value. it indicates the amount to which an individual or individuals can dispose over part of the wealth of society or of the aggregate social product. in view of sismondi's insistence that social income is part of social wealth, we might assume him to understand by social income the actual annual fund for consumption. the remaining part of wealth that has not been consumed, then, is the capital of society. thus we obtain at least a vague outline of the required distinction between capital and income on a social basis. at the very next moment, however, sismondi accepts the 'customary' distinction between three kinds of income, only one of which derives exclusively from 'accumulated capital' while in the other two 'land' or 'labour' are conjoined with capital. the concept of capital thus at once becomes hazy again. however, let us see what sismondi has to say about the origin of these three kinds of income which betray a rift in the foundations of society. he is right to take a certain development of labour productivity as his point of departure. 'by reason of the advances both in industry and science, by which man has subjugated the forces of nature, every worker can produce more, far more, in a day than he needs to consume.'[160] sismondi thus rightly stresses the fact that the productivity of labour is an indispensable condition for the historical foundation of exploitation. yet he goes on to explain the actual origin of exploitation in a way typical of bourgeois economics: 'but even though his labour produces wealth, this wealth, if he is called upon to enjoy it, will make him less and less fit for work. besides, wealth hardly ever remains in the possession of the man who must live by the work of his hands.'[160] thus he makes exploitation and class antagonism the necessary spur to production, quite in accord with the followers of ricardo and malthus. but now he comes to the real cause of exploitation, the divorce of labour power from the means of production. 'the worker cannot, as a rule, keep the land as his own; land, however, has a productive capacity which human labour but directs to the uses of man. the master of the land on which labour is performed, reserves a share in the fruits of labour to which his land has contributed, as his remuneration for the benefits afforded by this productive capacity.'[161] this is called rent. and further: 'in our state of civilisation, the worker can no longer call his own an adequate fund of objects for his consumption, enough to live while he performs the labours he has undertaken--until he has found a buyer. he no longer owns the raw materials, often coming from far away, on which he must exercise his industry. even less does he possess that complicated and costly machinery which facilitates his work and makes it infinitely more productive. the rich man who possesses his consumption goods, his raw materials and his machines, need not work himself, for by supplying the worker with all these, he becomes in a sense the master of his work. as reward for the advantages he has put at the worker's disposal, he takes outright the greater part of the fruits of his labour.'[162] this is called capital profits. what remains of wealth, after the cream has been taken off twice, by landlord and capitalist, is the wage of labour, the income of the worker. and sismondi adds: 'he can consume it without reproduction.'[163] thus, sismondi makes the fact of non-reproduction the criterion of income as distinct from capital for wages as well as for rent. in this, however, he is only right with regard to rent and the consumed part of capital profits; as for the part of the social product which is consumed in form of wages, it certainly does reproduce itself; it becomes the labour power of the wage labourer, for him a commodity by whose sale he lives, which he can bring to market again and again; for society it becomes the material form of variable capital which must reappear time and again in the aggregate reproduction of a year, if there is to be no loss. so far so good. hitherto we have only learned two facts: the productivity of labour permits of the exploitation of the workers by those who do not work themselves, and exploitation becomes the actual foundation of the distribution of income owing to the divorce of the worker from his means of production. but we still do not know what is capital and what income, and sismondi proceeds to clarify this point, starting as usual with robinson crusoe: 'in the eyes of the individual all wealth was nothing but a provision prepared beforehand for the time of need. even so, he already distinguished two elements in this provision ... one part which he budgets to have at hand for immediate or almost immediate use, and the other which he will not need until it is to afford him new production. thus one part of his corn must feed him until the next harvest, another part, reserved for sowing, is to bear fruit the following year. the formation of society and the introduction of exchange, permit to increase this seed, this fertile part of accumulated wealth, almost indefinitely, and this is what is called capital.'[164] balderdash would be a better name for all this. in using the analogy of seed, sismondi here identifies means of production and capital, and this is wrong for two reasons. first, means of production are capital not intrinsically, but only under quite definite historical conditions; secondly, the concept of capital covers more than just the means of production. in capitalist society--with all the conditions sismondi ignores--the means of production are only a part of capital, i.e. they are constant capital. sismondi here lost his thread plainly because he tried to establish a connection between the capital concept and the material aspects of social reproduction. earlier, so long as he was concerned with the individual capitalist, he listed means of subsistence for the workers together with means of production as component parts of capital--again a mistake in view of the material aspects of the reproduction of individual capitals. yet as soon as he tries to focus the material foundations of social reproduction and sets out to make the correct distinction between consumer goods and means of production, the concept of capital dissolves in his hands. however, sismondi well knows that the means of production are not the sole requisites for production and exploitation; indeed, he has the proper instinct that the core of the relation of exploitation is the very fact of exchange with living labour. having just reduced capital to constant capital, he now immediately reduces it exclusively to variable capital: 'when the farmer has put in reserve all the corn he expects to need till the next harvest, he will find a good use for the surplus corn: he will feed what he has left over to other people who are going to work for him, till his land, spin and weave his hemp and wool, etc.... by this procedure, the farmer converts a part of his income into capital, and in fact, this is the way in which new capital is always formed.... the corn he has reaped over and above what he must eat while he is working, and over and above what he will have to sow in order to maintain the same level of exploitation, is wealth which he can give away, squander and consume in idleness without becoming any poorer; it was income, but as soon as he uses it to feed producers, as soon as he exchanges it for labour, or for the fruits to come from the work of his labourers, his weavers, his miners, it is a permanent value that multiplies and will no longer perish; it is capital.'[165] here there is some grain mixed up with quite a lot of chaff. constant capital seems still required to maintain production on the old scale, although it is strangely reduced to circulating capital, and although the reproduction of fixed capital is completely ignored. circulating capital apparently is also superfluous for the expansion of reproduction, for accumulation: the whole capitalised part of the surplus value is converted into wages for new workers who evidently labour in mid-air, without material means of production. the same view is expressed even more clearly elsewhere: 'when the rich man cuts down his income in order to add to his capital, he is thus conferring a benefit on the poor, because he himself shares out the annual product; and whatever he calls income, he will keep for his own consumption; whatever he calls capital, he gives to the poor man to constitute an income for him.'[166] yet at the same time sismondi gives due weight to the 'secret of profit-making' and the origin of capital. surplus value arises from the exchange of capital for labour, from variable capital, and capital arises from the accumulation of surplus value. with all this, however, we have not made much progress towards a distinction between capital and income. sismondi now attempts to represent the various elements of production and income in terms of the appropriate parts of the aggregate social product. 'the employer of labour, as also the labourer, does not use all his productive wealth for the sowing; he devotes part of it to buildings, mills and tools which render the work easier and more productive, just as a share of the labourer's wealth had been devoted to the permanent work of making the soil more fertile. thus we see how the different kinds of wealth successively come into being and become distinct. one part of the wealth accumulated by society is devoted by every one who possesses it to render labour more profitable by slow consumption, and make the blind forces of nature execute the work of man; this part is called _fixed capital_ and comprises reclaiming, irrigation, factories, the tools of trade, and mechanical contrivances of every description. a second part of wealth is destined for immediate consumption, to reproduce itself in the work it gets done, to change its form, though not its value, without cease. this part is called _circulating capital_ and it comprises seed, raw materials for manufacture, and wages. finally, a third part of wealth becomes distinguishable from the second: it is the value by which the finished job exceeds the advances which had to be made: this part is called _income_ on capitals and is destined to be consumed without reproduction.'[167] after this laborious attempt to achieve a division of the aggregate social production according to incommensurable categories, fixed capital, circulating capital, and surplus value, sismondi soon shows unmistakable signs that he means constant capital when he speaks of fixed capital, and variable capital when he speaks of circulating capital. for 'all that is created', is destined for human consumption, though fixed capital is consumed 'mediately' while the circulating capital 'passes into the consumption fund of the worker whose wage it forms'.[168] thus we are a little nearer to the division of the social product into constant capital (means of production), variable capital (provisions for the workers) and surplus value (provisions for the capitalists). but so far sismondi's explanations are not particularly illuminating on the subject which he himself describes as 'fundamental'. in this welter of confusion, at any rate, we cannot see any progress beyond adam smith's 'massive thought'. sismondi feels this himself and would clarify the problem 'by the simplest of all methods', sighing that 'this movement of wealth is so abstract and requires such great power of concentration to grasp it properly'.[168] thus again we put on blinkers with a focus on robinson [crusoe], who in the meantime has changed to the extent that he has produced a family and is now a pioneer of colonial policy: 'a solitary farmer in a distant colony on the border of the desert has reaped 100 sacks of corn this year; there is no market where to bring them; this corn, in any case, must be consumed within the year, else it will be of no value to the farmer; yet the farmer and his family eat only 30 sacks of it; this will be his expenditure, constituting the exchange of his income; it is not reproduced for anybody whatever. then he will call for workers, he will make them clear woods, and drain swamps in his neighbourhood and put part of the desert under the plough. these workers will eat another 30 sacks of corn: this will be their expenditure; they will be in a position to afford this expenditure at the price of their revenue, that is to say their labour; for the farmer it will be an exchange: he will have converted his 30 sacks into fixed capital. in the end, he is left with 40 sacks. he will sow them that year, instead of the 20 he had sown the previous year; this constitutes his circulating capital which he will have doubled. thus the 100 sacks will have been consumed, but of these 100 sacks 70 are a real investment for him, which will reappear with great increase, some of them at the very next harvest, and the others in all subsequent harvests.--the very isolation of the farmer we have just assumed gives us a better feeling for the limitations of such an operation. if he has only found consumers for 60 of the 100 sacks harvested in that year, who is going to eat the 200 sacks produced the following year by the increase in his sowing? his family, you might say, which will increase. no doubt; but human generations do not multiply as quickly as subsistence. if our farmer had hands available to repeat this assumed process each year, his corn harvest will be doubled every year, and his family could at the most be doubled once in 25 years.'[169] though the example is naã¯ve, the vital question stands out clearly in the end: where are the buyers for the surplus value that has been capitalised? the accumulation of capital can indefinitely increase the production of the society. but what about the consumption of society? this is determined by the various kinds of income. sismondi explains this important subject in chapter v of book ii, 'the distribution of the national income among the various classes of citizens', in a resumed effort to describe the components of the social product. 'under this aspect, the national income is composed of two parts and no more; the one consists in annual production ... the profit arising from wealth. the second is the capacity for work which springs from life. this time we understand by wealth both territorial possessions and capital, and by profit the net income accruing to the owners as well as the profit of the capitalist.'[170] thus all the means of production are separated from the national income as 'wealth', and this income is divided into surplus value and labour power, or better, its equivalent, the variable capital. this, then, though still far too vague, is our division into constant capital, variable capital and surplus value. but 'national income', it soon transpires, means for sismondi the annual aggregate product of society: 'similarly, annual production, or the result of all the nation's work in the course of a year, is composed of two parts: one we have just discussed--the profit resulting from wealth; the other is the capacity for work, which is assumed to equal the part of wealth for which it is exchanged, or the subsistence of the workers.'[171] the aggregate social product is thus resolved, in terms of value, into two parts: variable capital and surplus value--constant capital has disappeared. we have arrived at smith's dogma that the commodity price is resolved into _vâ + s_ (or is composed of _vâ + s_)--in other words, the aggregate product consists solely of consumer goods for workers and capitalists. sismondi then goes on to the problem of realising the aggregate product. on the one hand, the sum total of incomes in a society consists of wages, capital profits and rents, and is thus represented by _vâ + s_; on the other hand, the aggregate social product, in terms of value, is equally resolved into _vâ + s_ 'so that national income and annual production balance each other (and appear as equal quantities)', i.e. so that they must be equal in value. 'annual production is consumed altogether during the year, but in part by the workers who, by exchanging their labour for it, convert it into capital and reproduce it; in part by the capitalists who, exchanging their income for it, annihilate it. the whole of the annual income is destined to be exchanged for the whole of annual production.'[172] this is the basis on which, in the sixth chapter of book ii, 'on reciprocal determination of production and consumption', sismondi finally sets up the following precise law of reproduction: 'it is the income of the past year which must pay for the production of the present year.'[173] if this is true, how can there be any accumulation of capital? if the aggregate product must be completely consumed by the workers and capitalists, we obviously remain within the bounds of simple reproduction, and there can be no solution to the problem of accumulation. sismondi's theory in fact amounts to a denial of the possibility of accumulation. the aggregate social demand being the bulk of wages given to the workers and the previous consumption of the capitalists, who will be left to buy the surplus product if reproduction expands? on this count, sismondi argues that accumulation is objectively impossible, as follows: 'what happens after all is always that we exchange the whole of production for the whole production of the previous year. besides, if production gradually increases, the exchange, at the same time as it improves future conditions, must entail a small loss every year.'[174] in other words, when the aggregate product is realised, accumulation is bound each year to create a surplus that cannot be sold. sismondi, however, is afraid of drawing this final conclusion, and prefers a 'middle course', necessitating a somewhat obscure subterfuge: 'if this loss is not heavy, and evenly distributed, everyone will bear with it without complaining about his income. this is what constitutes the national economy, and the series of such small sacrifices increases capital and common wealth.'[174] if, on the other hand, there is ruthless accumulation, this surplus residue becomes a public calamity, and the result is a crisis. thus a petty-bourgeois subterfuge becomes the solution of sismondi: putting the dampers on accumulation. he constantly polemises against the classical school which advocates unrestricted development of the productive forces and expansion of production; and his whole work is a warning against the fatal consequences of giving full rein to the desire to accumulate. sismondi's exposition proves that he was unable to grasp the reproductive process as a whole. quite apart from his unsuccessful attempt to distinguish between the categories of capital and income from the point of view of society, his theory of reproduction suffers from the fundamental error he took over from adam smith: the idea that personal consumption absorbs the entire annual product, without leaving any part of the value for the renewal of society's constant capital, and also, that accumulation consists merely of the transformation of capitalised surplus value into variable capital. yet, if later critics of sismondi, e.g. the russian marxist ilyin,[175] think that pointing out this fundamental error in the analysis of the aggregate product can justify a cavalier dismissal of sismondi's entire theory of accumulation as inadequate, as 'nonsense', they merely demonstrate their own obtuseness in respect of sismondi's real concern, his ultimate problem. the analysis of marx at a later date, showing up the crude mistakes of adam smith for the first time, is the best proof that the problem of accumulation is far from solved just by attending to the equivalent of the constant capital in the aggregate product. this is proved even more strikingly in the actual development of sismondi's theory: his views involved him in bitter controversy with the exponents and popularisers of the classical school, with ricardo, say and macculloch. the two parties to the conflict represent diametrically opposed points of view: sismondi stands for the sheer impossibility, the others for the unrestricted possibility, of accumulation. sismondi and his opponents alike disregard constant capital in their exposition of reproduction, and it was say in particular who presumed to perpetuate adam smith's confused concept of the aggregate product as _vâ + s_ as an unassailable dogma. the knowledge we owe to marx that the aggregate product must, apart from consumer goods for the workers and capitalists (_vâ + s_), also contain means of production to renew what has been used, that accumulation accordingly consists not merely in the enlargement of variable but also of constant capital, is not enough, as amply demonstrated by this entertaining turn of events, to solve the problem of accumulation. later we shall see how this stress on the share of constant capital in the reproductive process gave rise to new fallacies in the theory of accumulation. at present it will suffice to put on record that the deference to smith's error about the reproduction of aggregate capital is not a weakness unique to sismondi's position but is rather the common ground on which the first controversy about the problem of accumulation was fought out. scientific research, not only in this sphere, proceeds in devious ways; it often tackles the upper storeys of the edifice, as it were, without making sure of the foundations; and so this conflict only resulted in that bourgeois economics took on the further complicated problem of accumulation without even having assimilated the elementary problem of simple reproduction. at all events, sismondi, in his critique of accumulation, had indubitably given bourgeois economics a hard nut to crack--seeing that in spite of his transparently feeble and awkward deductions, sismondi's opponents were still unable to get the better of him. footnotes: [147] in the review of an essay on _observations on the injurious consequences of the restrictions upon foreign commerce, by a member of the late parliament, london, 1820_ (_edinburgh review_, vol. lxvi, pp. 331 ff.). this interesting document, from which the following extracts are taken, an essay with a free trade bias, paints the general position of the workers in england in the most dismal colours. it gives the facts as follows: 'the manufacturing classes in great britain ... have been suddenly reduced from affluence and prosperity to the extreme of poverty and misery. in one of the debates in the late session of parliament, it was stated that the wages of weavers of glasgow and its vicinity which, when highest, had averaged about 25_s._ or 27_s._ a week, had been reduced in 1816 to 10_s._; and in 1819 to the wretched pittance of 5-6_s._ or 6_s._ they have not since been materially augmented.' in lancashire, according to the same evidence, the direct weekly wage of the weavers was from 6_s._ to 12_s._ a week for 15 hours' labour a day, whilst half-starved children worked 12 to 16 hours a day for 2_s._ or 3_s._ a week. distress in yorkshire was, if possible, even greater. as to the address by the frame-work knitters of nottingham, the author says that he himself investigated conditions and had come to the conclusion that the declarations of the workers 'were not in the slightest degree exaggerated'. [148] ibid., p. 334. [149] paris, 1827. [150] preface to the second edition. translation by m. mignet, in _political economy and the philosophy of government_ (london, 1847), pp. 114 ff. [151] _nouveaux principes_ ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. 79. [152] _nouveaux principes_ ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. xv. [153] ibid., p. 92. [154] ibid., pp. 111-12. [155] ibid., p. 335. [156] op. cit., vol. ii, p. 435. [157] ibid., p. 463. [158] op. cit., vol. i, p. xiii (pp. 120-1 of mignet's translation). [159] _nouveaux principes_ ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. 84. [160] ibid., p. 85. [161] ibid., p. 86. [162] ibid., pp. 86-7. [163] _nouveaux principes_ ..., vol. i, p. 87. [164] ibid., pp. 87-8. [165] ibid., pp. 88-9. [166] _nouveaux principes_ ..., vol. i, pp. 108-9. [167] ibid., pp. 93-4. [168] ibid., p. 95. [169] _nouveaux principes_ ..., vol. i, pp. 95-6. [170] ibid., pp. 104-5. [171] ibid., p. 105. [172] ibid., pp. 105-6. [173] ibid., pp. 113, 120. [174] _nouveaux principes_ ..., vol. i, p. 121. [175] vladimir ilyich [lenin], _economic studies and essays_, _st. petersburg_, 1899. _chapter xi_ macculloch _v._ sismondi sismondi's emphatic warnings against the ruthless ascendancy of capital in europe called forth severe opposition on three sides: in england the school of ricardo, in france j. b. say, the commonplace vulgariser of adam smith, and the st. simonians. while owen in england, profoundly aware of the dark aspects of the industrial system and of the crises in particular, saw eye to eye with sismondi in many respects, the school of that other great european, st. simon, who had stressed the world-embracing conception of large industrial expansion, the unlimited unfolding of the productive forces of human labour, felt perturbed by sismondi's alarms. here, however, we are interested in the controversy between sismondi and the ricardians which proved the most fruitful from the theoretical point of view. in the name of ricardo, and, it seemed, with ricardo's personal approval, macculloch anonymously published a polemical article[176] against sismondi in the _edinburgh review_ in october 1819, i.e. immediately after the publication of the _nouveaux principes_. in 1820, sismondi replied in rossi's _annales de jurisprudence_ with an essay entitled: 'does the power of consuming necessarily increase with the power to produce? an enquiry.'[177] in his reply sismondi[178] himself states that his polemics were conceived under the impact of the commercial crisis: 'this truth we are both looking for, is of utmost importance under present conditions. it may be considered as fundamental for economics. universal distress is in evidence in the trade, in industry and, in many countries certainly, even in agriculture. such prolonged and extraordinary suffering has brought misfortune to countless families and insecurity and despondency to all, until it threatens the very bases of the social order. two contrasting explanations have been advanced for the distress that has caused such a stir. some say: we have produced too much, and others: we have not produced enough. "there will be no equilibrium," say the former, "no peace and no prosperity until we consume the entire commodity surplus which remains unsold on the market, until we organise production for the future in accordance with the buyers' demand."--"there will be a new equilibrium," say the latter, "if only we double our efforts to accumulate as well as to produce. it is a mistake to believe that there is a glut on the market; no more than half our warehouses are full; let us fill the other half, too, and the mutual exchange of these new riches will revive our trade."'[179] in this supremely lucid way, sismondi sets out and underlines the real crux of the dispute. macculloch's whole position in truth stands or falls with the statement that exchange is actually an interchange of commodities; every commodity accordingly represents not only supply but demand. the dialogue then continues as follows: 'demand and supply are truly correlative and convertible terms. the supply of one set of commodities constitutes the demand for another. thus, there is a demand for a given quantity of agricultural produce, when a quantity of wrought goods equal thereto in productive cost is offered in exchange for it; and conversely, there is an effectual demand for this quantity of wrought goods, when the supply of agricultural produce which it required the same expense to raise, is presented as its equivalent.'[180] the ricardian's dodge is obvious: he has chosen to ignore the circulation of money and to pretend that commodities are immediately bought and paid for by commodities. from the conditions of highly developed capitalist production, we are thus suddenly taken to a stage of primitive barter such as we might find still flourishing at present in central africa. there is a distant element of truth in this trick since money, in a simple circulation of commodities, plays merely the part of an agent. but of course, it is just the intervention of an agent which separates the two transactions of circulation, sale and purchase, and makes them independent of one another in respect of both time and place. that is why a further purchase need not follow hard upon a sale for one thing; and secondly, sale and purchase are by no means bound up with the same people: in fact, they will involve the same performers only in rare and exceptional cases. macculloch, however, makes just this baseless assumption by confronting, as buyer and seller, industry on the one hand and agriculture on the other. the universality of these categories, _qua_ total categories of exchange, obscures the actual splitting up of this social division of labour which results in innumerable private exchange transactions where the sale and purchase of two commodities rarely come to the same thing. macculloch's simplified conception of commodity exchange in general which immediately turns the commodity into money and pretends that it can be directly exchanged, makes it impossible to understand the economic significance of money, its historical appearance. sismondi's answer to this is regrettably clumsy. in order to show that macculloch's explanation of commodity exchange has no application for capitalist production, he takes recourse to the leipsic book fair.[181] 'at the book fair of leipsic, booksellers from all over germany arrive, each with four or five publications of his own in some 40 or 50 dozen copies; these are exchanged for others and every seller takes home 200 dozen books, just as he has brought 200 dozen, with the sole difference, that he brought four different works and takes home 200. this is the demand and the production which, according to m. ricardo's disciple, are correlative and convertible; one buys the other, one pays for the other, one is the consequence of the other. but as far as we are concerned, for the bookseller and for the general public, demand and consumption have not even begun. for all that it has changed hands at leipsic, a bad book will still be just as unsold (a bad mistake of sismondi's, this!), it will still clutter up the merchants' shops, either because nobody wants it, or because everyone has a copy already. the books exchanged at leipsic will only sell if the booksellers can find individuals who not only want them but are also prepared to make sacrifices in order to withdraw them from circulation. they alone constitute an effective demand.'[182] although this example is rather crude, it shows clearly that sismondi was not side-tracked by his opponent's trick, that he knows after all what he is talking about. macculloch then attempts to turn the examination from abstract commodity exchange to concrete social conditions: 'supposing, for the sake of illustration, that a cultivator advanced food and clothing for 100 labourers, who raised for him _food_ for 200; while a master-manufacturer also advanced food and clothing for 100, who fabricated for him _clothing_ for 200. then the farmer, besides replacing the food of his own labourers, would have food for 100 to dispose of; while the manufacturer, after replacing the clothing of his own labourers, would have clothing for 100 to bring to market. in this case, the two articles would be exchanged against each other, the supply of food constituting the demand for the clothing, and that of the clothing the demand for the food.'[183] what are we to admire more in this hypothesis: the absurdity of the set-up which reverses all actual relations, or the effrontery which simply takes for granted in the premises all that is later claimed proved? in order to prove that it is always possible to create an unlimited demand for all kinds of goods, macculloch chooses for his example two commodities which pertain to the most urgent and elementary wants of every human being: food and clothing. in order to prove that commodities may be exchanged at any time, and without regard to the needs of society, he chooses for his example two products in quantities which are right from the start in strict conformity with these needs, and which therefore contain no surplus as far as society is concerned. and yet he calls this quantity needed by society a surplus--_viz._ as measured against the producer's personal requirements for his own product, and is consequently able to demonstrate brilliantly that any amount of commodity 'surplus' can be exchanged for a corresponding 'surplus' of other commodities. finally, in order to prove that different privately produced commodities can yet be exchanged, although their quantity, production costs and social importance must of course be different, he chooses for his example commodities whose quantity, production cost and general social necessity are precisely the same right from the start. in short, macculloch posits a planned, strictly regulated production without any over-production in order to prove that no crisis is possible in an unplanned private economy. the principal joke of canny mac, however, lies elsewhere. what is at issue is the problem of accumulation. sismondi was worried by, and worried ricardo and his followers with, the following question: if part of the surplus value is capitalised, i.e. used to expand production over and above the income of society, instead of being privately consumed by the capitalists, where are we to find buyers for the commodity surplus? what will become of the capitalised surplus value? who will buy the commodities in which it is hidden? thus sismondi. and the flower of ricardo's school, its official representative on the chair of london university, the authority for the then english ministers of the liberal party and for the city of london, the great mr. macculloch replies--by constructing an example in which no surplus value whatever is produced. his 'capitalists' slave away in agriculture and industry in the name of charity, and all the time the entire social product, including the 'surplus', is only enough for the needs of the workers, for the wages, while the 'farmer' and 'manufacturer' see to production and exchange without food and clothing. sismondi, justly impatient, now exclaims: 'the moment we want to find out what is to constitute the surplus of production over consumption of the workers, it will not do to abstract from that surplus which forms the due profit of labour and the due share of the master.'[184] macculloch's only reaction is to multiply his silly argument by a thousand. he asks the reader to assume '1,000 farmers', and 'also 1,000 master-manufacturers' all acting as ingenuously as the individuals. the exchange, then, proceeds as smoothly as can be desired. finally, he exactly doubles labour productivity 'in consequence of more skilful application of labour and of the introduction of machinery--thus that every one of the 1,000 farmers, by advancing food and clothing for 100 labourers, obtains a return consisting of ordinary food for 200 together with sugar, grapes and tobacco equal in production cost to that food', while every manufacturer obtains, by an analogous procedure, in addition to the previous quantity of clothing for all workers, 'ribbands, cambrics and lace, equal in productive cost, and therefore in exchangeable value, to that clothing'.[185] after such complete reversal of the chronological order, the assumption, that is, of first the existence of private property with wage labour, and then, at a later stage, such level of labour productivity as makes exploitation possible at all, he now assumes labour productivity to progress with equal speed in all spheres, the surplus product to contain precisely the same amount of value in all branches of industry, and to be divided among precisely the same number of people. when these various surplus products are then exchanged against one another, is it any wonder that the exchange proceeds smoothly and completely to everybody's satisfaction? it is only another of his many absurdities that macculloch makes the capitalists who had hitherto lived on air and exercised their profession in their birthday suits, now live exclusively on sugar, tobacco and wine, and array themselves only in ribbons, cambrics and lace. the most ridiculous performance, however, is the _volte-face_ by which he evades the real problem. the question had been what happens to the capitalist surplus, that surplus which is used not for the capitalist's own consumption but for the expansion of production. macculloch solves it on the one hand by ignoring the production of surplus value altogether, and on the other, by using all surplus value in the production of luxury goods. what buyers, then, does he advance for this new luxury production? the capitalists, evidently; the farmers and manufacturers, since, apart from these, there are only workers in macculloch's model. thus the entire surplus value is consumed for the personal satisfaction of the capitalists, that is to say, simple reproduction takes place. the answer to the problem of the capitalisation of surplus value is, according to macculloch, either to ignore surplus value altogether, or to assume simple reproduction instead of accumulation as soon as surplus value comes into being. he still _pretends_ to speak of expanding reproduction, but again, as before when he pretended to deal with the 'surplus', he uses a trick, _viz._ first setting out an impossible species of capitalist production without any surplus value, and then persuading the reader that the subsequent _dã©but_ of the surplus value constitutes an expansion of production. sismondi is not quite up to these scottish acrobatics. he had up to now succeeded in pinning his mac down, proving him to be 'obviously absurd'. but now he himself becomes confused with regard to the crucial point at issue. on the above rantings of his opponent, he should have declared coldly: sir, with all respect for the flexibility of your mind, you are dodging the issue. i keep on asking, who will buy the surplus product, if the capitalists use it for the purpose of accumulation, i.e. to expand production, instead of squandering it altogether? and you reply: oh well, they will expand their production of luxury goods, which they will, of course, eat up themselves. but this is a conjuring trick, seeing that the capitalists consume the surplus value in so far as they spend it on their luxuries--they do not accumulate at all. my question is about the possibility of accumulation, not whether the personal luxuries of the capitalists are possible. answer this clearly, if you can, or else go play with your wine and tobacco, or go to blazes for all i care. but sismondi, instead of putting the screws on the vulgariser, suddenly begins to moralise with pathos and social conscience. he exclaims: 'whose demand? whose satisfaction? the masters or the workers in town or country? on this new conception [of mac's] there is a surplus of products, an advantage from labour--to whom will it accrue?'[186] and gives his own answer in the following impassioned words: 'but we know full well, and the history of the commercial world teaches us all too thoroughly, that it is not the worker who profits from the increase in products and labour; his pay is not in the least swelled by it. m. ricardo himself said formerly that it ought not to be, unless you want the social wealth to stop growing. on the contrary, sorry experience teaches us that wages nearly always contract by very reason of this increase. where, then, does the accumulation of wealth make itself felt as a public benefit? our author assumes 1,000 farmers who profit, while 100,000 workers toil; 1,000 entrepreneurs who wax rich, while 100,000 artisans are kept under their orders. whatever good may result from the accumulation of the frivolous enjoyment of luxuries is only felt by a 100th part of the nation. and will this 100th part, called upon to consume the entire surplus product of the whole working class, be adequate to a production that may grow without let or hindrance, owing to progress of machinery and capitals? in the assumption made by the author, every time the national product is doubled, the master of the farm or of the factory must increase his consumption a hundredfold; if the national wealth to-day, thanks to the invention of so many machines, is a hundred times what it was when it only covered the cost of production, every employer would to-day have to consume enough products to support 10,000 workers.'[187] at this point sismondi again believes himself to have a firm grasp on how crises begin to arise: 'we might imagine, if put to it, that a rich man can consume the goods manufactured by 10,000 workers, this being the fate of the ribbons, lace and cambrics whose origin the author has shown us. but a single individual would not know how to consume agricultural product to the same tune, the wines, sugar and spices which m. ricardo [whom sismondi evidently suspected of having written the article since he only got to know 'anonymous' of the _edinburgh review_ at a later date] conjures up in exchange, are too much for the table of one man. they will not sell, or else the strict proportion between agricultural and industrial products, apparently the basis of his whole system, cannot be maintained.'[188] sismondi, we see, has thus fallen into macculloch's trap. instead of waiving an answer to the problem of accumulation which refers to the production of luxuries, he pursues his opponent into this field without noticing that the ground under his feet has shifted. here he finds two causes for complaint. for one thing, he has moral objections to macculloch's allowing the capitalists instead of the workers to benefit by the surplus value, and is side-tracked into polemising against distribution under capitalism. from this digression, he unexpectedly reverts to the original problem which he now formulates as follows: the capitalists, then, consume the entire surplus value in luxuries. let it be so. but could anyone increase his consumption as rapidly and indefinitely as the progress of labour productivity makes the surplus value increase? and in this second instance, sismondi himself abandons his own problem. instead of perceiving that it is the lack of consumers other than workers and capitalists which accounts for the difficulty in capitalist accumulation, he discovers a snag in simple reproduction because the capitalists' capacity to consume has physical limits. since the absorptive capacity of the capitalists for luxuries cannot keep up with labour productivity, that is to say with the increase in surplus value, there must be crises and over-production. we have encountered this line of thought once before in the _nouveaux principes_--so sismondi himself was manifestly not quite clear about the problem at all times. and that is hardly surprising, since one can really come to grips with the whole problem of accumulation only when one has fully grasped the problem of simple reproduction, and we have seen how much sismondi was at fault in this respect. yet in spite of all this, the first time that sismondi crossed swords with the heirs of the classical school, he proved himself by no means the weaker party. on the contrary, in the end he routed his opponent. if sismondi misunderstood the most elementary principles of social reproduction and ignored constant capital, quite in keeping with adam smith's dogma, he was in this respect no worse at any rate than his opponent. constant capital does not exist for macculloch either, his farmers and manufacturers 'advance' merely food and clothing to their workers, and food and clothing between them make up the aggregate product of society. if there is, then, nothing to choose between the two as far as this elementary blunder is concerned, sismondi towers heads above mac because of his intuitive understanding of the contradictions in the capitalist mode of production. in the end, the ricardian was at a loss to answer sismondi's scepticism concerning the possibility of realising the surplus value. sismondi also shows himself more penetrating in that he throws the nottingham proletarians' cry of distress in the teeth of the apostles and apologists of harmony with their smug complacency, of those who deny 'any surplus of production over demand, any congestion of the market, any suffering', when he proves that the introduction of the machine must of necessity create a 'superabundant population', and particularly in the end, when he underlines the tendency of the capitalist world market in general with its inherent contradictions. macculloch denies outright that general over-production is possible. he has a specific for every partial over-production up his sleeve: 'it may be objected, perhaps, that on the principle that the demand for commodities increases in the same ratio as their supply, there is no accounting for the gluts and stagnation produced by overtrading. we answer very easily--a glut is an increase in the supply of a particular class of commodities, unaccompanied by a corresponding increase in the supply of those other commodities which should serve as their equivalents. while our 1,000 farmers and 1,000 master-manufacturers are exchanging their respective surplus products, and reciprocally affording a market to each other, if 1,000 new capitalists were to join their society, employing each 100 labourers in tillage, there would be an immediate glut in agricultural produce ... because in this case there would be no contemporaneous increase in the supply of the manufactured articles which should purchase it. but let one half of the new capitalists become manufacturers, and equivalents in the form of wrought goods will be created for the new produce raised by the other half: the equilibrium will be restored, and the 1,500 farmers and 1,500 master-manufacturers will exchange their respective surplus products with exactly the same facility with which the 1,000 farmers and 1,000 manufacturers formerly exchanged theirs.'[189] sismondi answers this buffoonery which 'very easily' pokes about in a fog, by pointing to the real changes and revolutions which take place before his own eyes. 'it was possible to put barbarous countries under the plough, and political revolutions, changes in the financial system, and peace, at once brought cargoes to the ports of the old agricultural countries which almost equalled their entire harvest. the recent russian conquest of the vast provinces on the black sea, the change in the system of government in egypt, and the outlawing of piracy in high barbary, have suddenly poured the granaries of odessa, alexandria and tunis into the italian ports and have put such an abundance of corn on the markets that all along the coasts the farmer's trade is fighting a losing battle. nor is the remainder of europe safe from a similar revolution, caused by the simultaneous ploughing under of immense expanses of new land on the banks of the mississippi, which export all their agricultural produce. even the influence of new holland may one day be the ruin of english industry, if not in the price of foodstuffs, which are too expensive to transport, at least in respect of wool and other agricultural products which are easier to transport.'[190] what would macculloch have to advise in view of such an agrarian crisis in southern europe? that half the new farmers should turn manufacturer. whereupon sismondi counters: 'such counsel cannot seriously apply to the tartars of the crimea or to the fellaheen of egypt.' and he adds: 'the time is not yet ripe to set up new industries in the regions oversea or in new holland.'[191] sismondi's acuity recognised that industrialisation of the lands overseas was only a matter of time. he was equally aware of the fact that the expansion of the world market would not bring with it the solution to the difficulty but would only reproduce it in a higher degree, in yet more potent crises. his prediction for the expansive tendency of capitalism is that it will reveal an aspect of fiercer and fiercer competition, of mounting anarchy within production itself. indeed, he puts his finger on the fundamental causes of crises in a passage where he states the trend of capitalist production precisely as surpassing all limits of the market. at the end of his reply to macculloch he says: 'time and again it has been proclaimed that the equilibrium will re-establish itself, that work will start again, but a single demand each time provides an impetus in excess of the real needs of trade, and this new activity must soon be followed by a yet more painful glut.'[192] to such a profound grasp of the real contradictions in the movements of capital, the _vulgarus_ on the chair of london university with his harmony cant and his country-dance of 1,000 beribboned farmers and 1,000 bibulous manufacturers could find no effective answer. footnotes: [176] the article in the _edinburgh review_ was really directed against owen, sharply attacking on 24 pages of print the latter's four treatises: (1) 'a new view of society, or essays on the formation of human character', (2) 'observations on the effects of the manufacturing system', (3) 'two memorials on behalf of the working classes, presented to the governments of america and europe', and finally (4) 'three tracts' and 'an account of public proceedings relative to the employment of the poor'. 'anonymous' here attempts a detailed proof that owen's reformist ideas by no means get down to the real causes of the misery of the english proletariat, these causes being: the transition to the cultivation of barren land (ricardo's theory of ground rent!), the corn laws and high taxation pressing upon farmer and manufacturer alike. free trade and _laissez-faire_ thus is his alpha and omega. given unrestricted accumulation, all increase in production will create for itself an increase in demand. owen is accused of 'profound ignorance' as regards say and james mill.--'in his reasonings, as well as in his plans, mr. owen shows himself profoundly ignorant of all the laws which regulate the production and distribution of wealth.'--from owen, the author proceeds to sismondi and formulates the point of contention as follows: 'he [owen] conceives that when competition is unchecked by any artificial regulations, and industry permitted to flow in its natural channels, the use of machinery may increase the supply of the several articles of wealth beyond the demand for them, and by creating an excess of all commodities, throw the working classes out of employment. this is the position which we hold to be fundamentally erroneous; and as it is strongly insisted on by the celebrated m. de sismondi in his _nouveaux principes d'ã�conomie politique_, we must entreat the indulgence of our readers while we endeavour to point out its fallacy, and to demonstrate, that the power of consuming necessarily increases with every increase in the power of producing' (_edinburgh review_, oct. 1819, p. 470). [177] the original title is: _examen de cette question: le pouvoir de consommer s'accroã®t-il toujours dans la sociã©tã© avec le pouvoir de produire?_ we have not been able to obtain a copy of rossi's _annales_, but the essay as a whole was incorporated by sismondi in the second edition of his _nouveaux principes_. [178] at the time of writing, sismondi was still in the dark as to the identity of 'anonymous' in the _edinburgh review_. [179] sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 376-8. [180] macculloch, loc. cit., p. 470. [181] incidentally, sismondi's leipsic book fair, as a microcosm of the capitalist world, has staged a come-back after 55 years--in eugen duehring's 'system'. engels, in his devastating criticism of that unfortunate 'universal genius' adduces this idea as proof that duehring, by attempting to elucidate a real industrial crisis by means of an imaginary one on the leipsic book fair, a storm at sea by a storm in a teacup, has shown himself a 'real german _literatus_'. but, as in many other instances exposed by engels, the great thinker has simply borrowed here from someone else on the sly. [182] sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 381-2. [183] macculloch, loc. cit., p. 470. [184] sismondi, op. cit, vol. ii, p. 384. [185] macculloch, loc. cit., p. 471. [186] sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 394-5. [187] ibid., pp. 396-7. [188] ibid., pp. 397-8. [189] macculloch, loc. cit., pp. 471-2. [190] sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 400-1. [191] sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 401. [192] ibid., pp. 405-6. _chapter xii_ ricardo _v._ sismondi macculloch's reply to sismondi's theoretical objections evidently did not settle the matter to ricardo's own satisfaction. unlike that shrewd 'scottish arch-humbug', as marx calls him, ricardo really wanted to discover the truth and throughout retained the genuine modesty of a great mind.[193] that sismondi's polemics against him and his pupil had made a deep impression is proved by ricardo's revised approach to the question of the effects of the machine, that being the point on which sismondi, to his eternal credit, had confronted the classical school of harmony with the sinister aspects of capitalism. ricardo's followers had enlarged upon the doctrine that the machine can always create as many or even more opportunities for the wage labourers as it takes away by displacing living labour. this so-called theory of compensation was subjected to a stern attack by sismondi in the chapter 'on the division of labour and machinery'[194] and in another chapter significantly entitled: 'machinery creates a surplus population',[195] both published in the _nouveaux principes_ of 1819, two years later than ricardo's main work. in 1821, after the macculloch-sismondi controversy, ricardo inserted a new chapter in the third edition of his _principles_, where he frankly confesses to his error and says in the strain of sismondi: 'that the opinion entertained by the labouring classes, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy.'[196] he, like sismondi, had to defend himself against the suspicion that he is opposing technical progress, but, less ruthless, he compromises with the evasion that the evil emerges only gradually. 'to elucidate the principle, i have been supposing, that improved machinery is _suddenly_ discovered, and extensively used; but the truth is, that these discoveries are gradual, and rather operate in determining the employment of the capital which is saved and accumulated, than in diverting capital from its actual employment.'[197] yet the problem of crises and accumulation continued to worry ricardo also. in 1823, the last year of his life, he spent some days in geneva in order to talk the problem over face to face with sismondi. the result of these talks is sismondi's essay 'on the balance between consumption and production', published in the _revue encyclopã©dique_ of may 1824.[198] in his _principles_, ricardo had at the crucial points completely accepted say's trite doctrine of harmony in the relations between production and consumption. in chapter xxi he had declared: 'm. say has, however, most satisfactorily shown, that there is no amount of capital which may not be employed in a country, because demand is only limited by production. no man produces, but with a view to consume or sell, and he never sells, but with an intention to purchase some other commodity, which may be immediately useful to him, or which may contribute to future production. by producing, then, he necessarily becomes either the consumer of his own goods, or the purchaser and consumer of the goods of some other person.'[199] to this conception of ricardo's, sismondi's _nouveaux principes_ were a powerful challenge, and the dispute as a whole turned also on this point. ricardo could not deny the fact of crises which had but recently passed over england and other countries. what was at issue was the explanation for them. right at the outset of their debate, sismondi and ricardo had agreed on a remarkably lucid and precise formulation of the problem, excluding the question of foreign commerce altogether. sismondi grasped the significance and necessity of foreign trade for capitalist production, its need for expansion, well enough; in this line he was quite in step with ricardo's free traders, whom he considerably excelled in his dialectical conception of the expansionist needs of capital. he fully admitted that industry 'is increasingly led to look for its vents on foreign markets where it is threatened by greater revolutions'.[200] he forecast, as we have seen, the rise of a dangerous competition for european industry in the overseas countries. this was after all a creditable achievement in the year 1820, and one which reveals sismondi's deep insight into the relations of capitalist world economy. but even so, sismondi was in fact far from conceiving the problem of realising the surplus value, the problem of accumulation, to depend on foreign commerce as its only means of salvation, a view attributed to him by later critics. on the contrary, sismondi was quite explicit in the sixth chapter of volume i:[201] 'in order to make these calculations with greater certainty and to simplify these questions, we have hitherto made complete abstraction from foreign trade and supposed an isolated nation; this isolated nation is human society itself, and what is true for a nation without foreign commerce, is equally true for mankind.' in other words: in considering the entire world market as one society producing exclusively by capitalist methods, sismondi grounds his problem in the same premises as marx was to do after him. that was also the basis on which he came to terms with ricardo. 'from the question that troubled us, we had each of us dismissed the instance of a nation that sold more abroad than it needed to buy there, that could command a growing external market for its growing internal production. in any case, it is not for us to decide whether fortunes of war or politics could perhaps bring forth new consumers for a nation--what is needed is proof that a nation can create these for itself simply by increasing its production.'[202] this is how sismondi formulated the problem of realising the surplus value in all precision, just as it confronts us throughout the ensuing era in economics, in contrast with ricardo who actually maintains along with say, as we are already aware and shall show in further detail, that production creates its own demand. ricardo's thesis in the controversy with sismondi takes the following form: 'supposing that 100 workers produce 1,000 sacks of corn, and 100 weavers 1,000 yards woollen fabric. let us disregard all other products useful to man and all intermediaries between them, and consider them alone in the world. they exchange their 1,000 yards against the 1,000 sacks. supposing that the productive power of labour has increased by a tenth owing to a successive progress of industry, the same people will exchange 1,100 yards against 1,100 sacks, and each will be better clothed and fed; new progress will make them exchange 1,200 yards for 1,200 sacks, and so on. the increase in products always only increases the enjoyment of those who produce.'[203] the great ricardo's standards of reasoning, it must regretfully be stated, are if anything even lower than those of the scottish arch-humbug, macculloch. once again we are invited to witness a harmonious and graceful country-dance of sacks and yards--the very proportion which is to be proved, is again taken for granted. what is more, all relevant premises for the problem are simply left out. the real problem--you will recollect--the object of the controversy had been the question: who are the buyers and consumers of the surplus product that comes into being if the capitalists produce more goods than are needed for their own and their workers' consumption; if, that is to say, they capitalise part of their surplus value and use it to expand production, to increase their capital? ricardo answers it by completely ignoring the capital increase. the picture he paints of the various stages of production is merely that of a gradually increasing productivity of labour. according to his assumptions, the same amount of labour first produces 1,000 sacks and 1,000 yards textiles, then 1,100 sacks and 1,100 yards, further 1,200 sacks and 1,200 yards, and so on, in a gracefully ascending curve. not only that the image of a marshalled uniform progression on both sides, of conformity even in the number of objects brought to exchange, is wearisome, the expansion of capital is nowhere as much as mentioned in the model. here we have no enlarged but simple reproduction with a greater bulk of use-values indeed, but without any increase in the value of the aggregate social product. since only the amount of value, not the number of use-values is relevant to the exchange transaction, and this amount remains constant in the example, ricardo makes no real advances, even though he seems to analyse the progressive expansion of production. finally, he is quite oblivious of the relevant categories of reproduction. macculloch had begun by making the capitalists produce without any surplus value and live on air, but at least he recognised the existence of the workers, making provision for their consumption. ricardo, however, does not even mention the workers; for him the distinction between variable capital and surplus value does not exist at all. besides this major omission, it is of small account that he, just like his disciple, takes no notice of constant capital. he wants to solve the problem of realising the surplus value and expanding capital without positing more than the existence of a certain quantity of commodities which are mutually exchanged. sismondi was blind to the fact that the venue has been changed altogether. yet he tried faithfully to bring the fantasies of his famous guest and opponent down to earth and to analyse their invisible contradictions, plaintively saying that these assumptions, 'just like german metaphysics, abstract from time and space'.[204] he grafts ricardo's hypothesis on to 'society in its real organisation, with unpropertied workers whose wage is fixed by competition and who can be dismissed the moment their master has no further need of their work ... for'--remarks sismondi, as acute as he is modest--'it is just this social organisation to which our objection refers'.[205] he lays bare the many difficulties and conflicts bound up with the progress of labour productivity under capitalism, and shows that ricardo's postulated changes in the technique of labour, from the point of view of society, lead to the following alternative: either a number of workers corresponding to the increase in labour productivity will have to be dismissed outright--then there will be a surplus of products on the one hand, and on the other unemployment and misery--a faithful picture of present-day society. or the surplus product will be used for the maintenance of the workers in a new field of production, the production of luxury goods. here sismondi undoubtedly proves himself superior: he suddenly remembers the existence of the constant capital, and now it is he who subjects the english classic to a frontal attack: 'for setting up a new industry for manufacturing luxuries, new capital is also needed; machines will have to be built, raw materials procured, and distant commerce brought into activity; for the wealthy are rarely content with enjoying what is immediately in front of them. where, then, could we find this new capital which may perhaps be much more considerable than that required by agriculture?... our luxury workers are still a long way from eating our labourers' grain, from wearing the clothes from our common factories; they are not yet made into workers, they may not even have been born yet, their trade does not exist, the materials on which they are to work have not arrived from india. all those among whom the former should distribute their bread, wait for it in vain.'[206] sismondi now takes constant capital into account, not only in the production of luxuries, but also in agriculture, and further raises the following objection against ricardo: 'we must abstract from time, if we make the assumption that the cultivator, whom a mechanical discovery or an invention of rural industry enables to treble the productive power of his workers, will also find sufficient capital to treble his exploitation, his agricultural implements, his equipment, his livestock, his granaries: to treble the circulating capital which must serve him while waiting for his harvest.'[207] in this way sismondi breaks with the superstition of the classical school that with capital expanding all additional capital would be exclusively spent on wages, on the variable capital. he clearly dissents from ricardo's doctrine--which did not, however, prevent his allowing all the errors arising out of this doctrine three years later again to creep into the second edition of his _nouveaux principes_. in opposition to ricardo's facile doctrine of harmony, sismondi underlines two decisive points: on the one hand, the objective difficulties of the process of enlarged reproduction which works by no means so smoothly in capitalist reality as it does in ricardo's absurd hypothesis; on the other hand, the fact that all technical progress in social labour productivity is always achieved under capitalism at the expense of the working class, bought with their suffering. sismondi shows himself superior to ricardo in yet a third point: he represents the broad horizon of the dialectical approach as against ricardo's blunt narrow-mindedness with its incapacity to conceive of any forms of society other than those of bourgeois economics: 'our eyes,' he exclaims, 'are so accustomed to this new organisation of society, this universal competition, degenerating into hostility between the rich and the working class, that we no longer conceive of any mode of existence other than that whose ruins surround us on all sides. they believe to prove me absurd by confronting me with the vices of preceding systems. indeed, as regards the organisation of the lower classes, two or three systems have succeeded one another; yet, since they are not to be regretted, since, after first doing some good, they then imposed terrible disasters on mankind, may we conclude from this that we have now entered the true one? may we conclude that we shall not discover the besetting vice of the system of wage labour as we have discovered that of slavery, of vassalage, and of the guilds? a time will come, no doubt, when our descendants will condemn us as barbarians because we have left the working classes without security, just as we already condemn, as they also will, as barbarian the nations who have reduced those same classes to slavery.'[208] sismondi's statement, putting in a nutshell the vital differences between the parts played by the proletariat in a modern society and in the society of ancient rome, shows his profound insight into historical connections. he shows no less discernment, in his polemics against ricardo, when analysing the specific economic character of the slave-system and of feudal economy as well as their relative historical significance, and finally when emphasising, as the dominant universal tendency of bourgeois economy, 'that it severs completely all kind of property from every kind of labour'. the second round, no more than the first, between sismondi and the classical school, brought little glory for sismondi's opponents.[209] footnotes: [193] it is typical that on his election to parliament in 1819, when he already enjoyed the highest reputation on account of his economic writings, ricardo wrote to a friend: 'you will have seen that i have taken my seat in the house of commons. i fear i shall be of little use there. i have twice attempted to speak but i proceeded in the most embarrassed manner, and i have no hope of conquering the alarm with which i am assailed the moment i hear the sound of my own voice' (_letters of d. ricardo to j. r. macculloch_, n.y., 1895, pp. 23-4). such diffidence was quite unknown to the gasbag macculloch. [194] _nouveaux principes_ ..., book iv, chap. vii. [195] ibid., book vii, chap. vii. [196] d. ricardo, _on the principles of political economy and taxation_ (3rd edition, london, 1821), p. 474. [197] ibid., p. 478. [198] this essay, _sur la balance des consommations avec les productions_, is reprinted in the second edition of _nouveaux principes_, vol. ii, pp. 408 ff. sismondi tells us about this discussion: 'm. ricardo, whose recent death has been a profound bereavement not only to his friends and family but to all those whom he enlightened by his brilliance, all those whom he inspired by his lofty sentiments, stayed for some days in geneva in the last year of his life. we discussed in two or three sessions this fundamental question on which we disagreed. to this enquiry he brought the urbanity, the good faith, the love of truth which distinguished him, and a clarity which his disciples themselves had not heard, accustomed as they were to the efforts of abstract thought he demanded in the lecture room.' [199] ricardo, op. cit., p. 339. [200] sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 361. [201] _nouveaux principes_ ..., book iv, chap, iv: 'comment la richesse commerciale suit l'accroissement du revenu' (vol. i, p. 115). [202] sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 412. [203] ibid., p. 416. [204] ibid., p. 424. [205] ibid., p. 417. [206] sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 425-6. [207] ibid., p. 429. [208] ibid., pp. 434-5. [209] thus, if tugan baranovski, championing say-ricardo's views, tells us about the controversy between sismondi and ricardo (_studies on the theory and history of commercial crises in england_, p. 176), that sismondi was compelled 'to acknowledge as correct the doctrine he had attacked and to concede his opponent all that is necessary'; that sismondi himself 'had abandoned his own theory which still finds so many adherents', and that 'the victory in this controversy lies with ricardo', this shows a lack of discrimination--to put it mildly--such as is practically unheard-of in a work of serious scientific pretensions. _chapter xiii_ say _v_. sismondi sismondi's essay against ricardo in the _revue encyclopã©dique_ of may 1824, was the final challenge for j. b. say, at that time the acknowledged 'prince of economic science' (_prince de la science ã©conomique_), the so-called representative, heir and populariser of the school of adam smith on the continent. say, who had already advanced some arguments against sismondi in his letters to malthus, countered the following july with an essay on 'the balance between consumption and production' in the _revue encyclopã©dique_, to which sismondi in turn published a short reply. the chronology of sismondi's polemical engagements was thus inverse to the sequence of the opposing theories, for it had been say who first communicated his doctrine of a divinely established balance between production and consumption to ricardo who had in turn handed it down to macculloch. in fact, as early as 1803, say, in his _traitã© d'ã�conomie politique_, book i, chapter xii, had coined the following peremptory statement: 'products are paid for with other products. it follows that if a nation has too many goods of one kind, the means of selling them would be to create goods of a different kind.'[210] here we meet again the all too familiar conjuring recipe which was accepted alike by ricardo's school and by the 'vulgar economists' as the corner-stone of the doctrine of harmony.[211] essentially, sismondi's principal work constitutes a sustained polemic against this thesis. at this stage say charges to the attack in the _revue encyclopã©dique_ with a complete _volte-face_, as follows: 'objection may be made that, because of man's intelligence, because of the advantage he can draw from the means provided by nature and artifice, every human society can produce _all_ the things fit to satisfy its needs and increase its enjoyment in far larger quantities than it can itself consume. but there i would ask how it is possible that we know of no nation that is supplied with everything. even in what rank as prospering nations seven-eighths of the population are lacking in a multitude of things considered necessities in ... i will not say a wealthy family, but in a modest establishment. the village i live in at present lies in one of the richest parts of france; yet in 19 out of 20 houses i enter here, i see but the coarsest fare and nothing that makes for the well-being of the people, none of the things the english call comforts.'[212] there is something to admire about the effrontery of the excellent say. it was he who had maintained that in a capitalist economy there could be no difficulties, no surplus, no crises and no misery; since goods can be bought one for the other, we need only go on producing more and more and everything in the garden will be lovely. it was in say's hands that this postulate had become a tenet of the doctrine of harmony, that doctrine so typical of vulgar economics, which had evoked a sharp protest from sismondi who proved this view untenable. the latter had shown that goods cannot be sold in any quantity you like, but that a limit is set to the realisation of goods by the income of society in each case, by _vâ + s_; inasmuch as the wages of the workers are depressed to a mere subsistence level, and inasmuch as there is also a natural limit to the consumptive capacity of the capitalist class, an expansion of production, sismondi says, must inevitably lead to slumps, crises and ever greater misery for the great masses. say's come-back to this is masterly in its ingenuity: if you will insist that over-production is possible, how can it happen that there are so many people in our society who are naked, hungry and in want? pray, explain this contradiction if you can. say, whose own position excels by contriving blithely to shrug off the circulation of money altogether by operating with a system of barter, now censures his critic for speaking of an over-abundance of products in relation not only to purchasing power but to the real needs of society, and that although sismondi had left no doubt at all about this very salient point of his deductions. 'even if there is a very great number of badly fed, badly clothed and badly housed people in a society, the society can only sell what it buys, and, as we have seen, it can only buy with its income.'[213] a little further on, say concedes this point but alleges that his opponent has made a new mistake: 'it is not consumers, then, in which the nation is lacking,' he says, 'but purchasing power. sismondi believes that this will be more extensive, when the products are rare, when consequently they are dearer and their production procures ampler pay for the workers.'[214] that is how say attempts to degrade, in his own trite method of thought, or better, method of canting, sismondi's theory which attacked the very foundations of capitalist organisation and its mode of distribution. he burlesques the _nouveaux principes_, turning them into a plea for 'rare' goods and high prices, and holds up to them the mirror of an artfully flattered capitalist accumulation at its peak. if production becomes more vigorous, he argues, labour grows in numbers and the volume of production expands, the nations will be better and more universally provided for, and he extols the conditions in countries where industrial development is at its highest, as against the misery of the middle ages. sismondi's maxims he declares subversive to capitalist society: 'why does he call for an inquiry into the laws which might oblige the entrepreneur to guarantee a living for the worker he employs? such an inquiry would paralyse the spirit of enterprise. merely the fear that the authorities might interfere with private contracts is a scourge and harmful to the wealth of a nation.'[215] not to be diverted from his purpose by this indiscriminate apologia of say's, sismondi once more turns the discussion on the fundamental issue: 'surely i have never denied that since the time of louis xiv france has been able to double her population and to quadruple her consumption, as he contends. i have only claimed that the increase of products is a good if it is desired, paid for and consumed; that, on the other hand, it is an evil if, there being no demand, the only hope of the producer is to entice the consumers of a rival industry's products. i have tried to show that the natural course of the nations is progressive increase of their property, an increase consequent upon their demand for new products and their means to pay for them, but that in consequence of our institutions, of our legislation having robbed the working class of all property and every security, they have also been spurred to a disorderly labour quite out of touch with the demand and with purchasing power, which accordingly only aggravates poverty.'[216] and he winds up the debate by inviting the preacher of harmony to reflect upon the circumstance that, though a nation may be rich, public misery no less than material wealth is constantly on the increase, the class which produces everything being daily brought nearer to a position where it may consume nothing. on this shrill discordant note of capitalist contradictions closes the first clash about the problem of accumulation. summing up the general direction of this first battle of wits, we must note two points: (1) in spite of all the confusion in sismondi's analysis, his superiority to both ricardo and his followers and to the self-styled heir to the mantle of adam smith is quite unmistakable. sismondi, in taking things from the angle of reproduction, looks for concepts of value (capital and income) and for factual elements (producer and consumer goods) as best he can, in order to grasp how they are interrelated within the total social process. in this he is nearest to adam smith, with the difference only that the contradictions there appearing as merely subjective and speculative, are deliberately stressed as the keynote of sismondi's analysis where the problem of capital accumulation is treated as the crucial point and principal difficulty. sismondi has therefore made obvious advances on adam smith, while ricardo and his followers as well as say throughout the debate think solely in terms of simple commodity production. they only see the formula c--m--c, even reducing everything to barter, and believe that such barren wisdom can cover all the problems specific to the process of reproduction and accumulation. this is a regress even on smith, and over such myopic vision, sismondi scores most decisively. he, the social critic, evinces much more understanding for the categories of bourgeois economics than their staunchest champions--just as, at a later date, the socialist marx was to grasp infinitely more keenly than all bourgeois economists together the _differentia specifica_ of the mechanism of capitalist economy. if sismondi exclaims in the face of ricardo's doctrine: 'what, is wealth to be all, and man a mere nothing?'[217] it is indicative not only of the vulnerable moral strain in his petty-bourgeois approach compared to the stern, classical impartiality of ricardo, but also of a critical perception, sharpened by social sensibilities for the living social connections of economy; an eye, that is, for intrinsic contradictions and difficulties as against the rigid, hidebound and abstract views of ricardo and his school. the controversy had only shown up the fact that ricardo, just like the followers of adam smith, was not even able to grasp, let alone solve the puzzle of accumulation put by sismondi. (2) the clue to the problem, however, was already impossible of discovery, because the whole argument had been side-tracked and concentrated upon the problem of crises. it is only natural that the outbreak of the first crisis should dominate the discussion, but no less natural that this effectively prevented either side from recognising that crises are far from constituting _the_ problem of accumulation, being no more than its characteristic phenomenon: one element in the cyclical form of capitalist reproduction. consequently, the debate could only result in a twofold _quid pro quo_: one party deducing from crises that accumulation is impossible, and the other from barter that crises are impossible. subsequent developments of capitalism were to give the lie to both conclusions alike. and yet, sismondi's criticism sounds the first alarm of economic theory at the domination of capital, and for this reason its historical importance is both great and lasting. it paves the way for the disintegration of a classical economics unable to cope with the problem of its own making. but for all sismondi's terror of the consequences attendant upon capitalism triumphant, he was certainly no reactionary in the sense of yearning for pre-capitalistic conditions, even if on occasion he delights in extolling the patriarchal forms of production in agriculture and handicrafts in comparison with the domination of capital. he repeatedly and most vigorously protests against such an interpretation as e.g. in his polemic against ricardo in the _revue encyclopã©dique_: 'i can already hear the outcry that i jib at improvements in agriculture and craftsmanship and at every progress man could make; that i doubtless prefer a state of barbarism to a state of civilisation, since the plough is a tool, the spade an even older one, and that, according to my system, man ought no doubt to work the soil with his bare hands. 'i never said anything of the kind, and i crave indulgence to protest once for all against all conclusions imputed to my system such as i myself have never drawn. neither those who attack me nor those who defend me have really understood me, and more than once i have been put to shame by my allies as much as by my opponents.'--'i beg you to realise that it is not the machine, new discoveries and inventions, not civilisation to which i object, but the modern organisation of society, an organisation which despoils the man who works of all property other than his arms, and denies him the least security in a reckless over-bidding that makes for his harm and to which he is bound to fall a prey.'[218] there can be no question that the interests of the proletariat were at the core of sismondi's criticism, and he is making no false claims when he formulates his main tendency as follows: 'i am only working for means to secure the fruits of labour to those who do the work, to make the machine benefit the man who puts it in motion.'[219] when pressed for a closer definition of the social organisation towards which he aspires, it is true he hedges and confesses himself unable to do so: 'but what remains to be done is of infinite difficulty, and i certainly do not intend to deal with it to-day. i should like to convince the economists as completely as i am convinced myself that their science is going off on a wrong tack. but i cannot trust myself to be able to show them the true course; it is a supreme effort--the most my mind will run to--to form a conception even of the actual organisation of society. yet who would have the power to conceive of an organisation that does not even exist so far, to see the future, since we are already hard put to it to see the present?'[220] surely it was no disgrace to admit oneself frankly powerless to envisage a future beyond capitalism in the year 1820--at a time when capitalism had only just begun to establish its domination over the big industries, and when the idea of socialism was only possible in a most utopian form. but, as sismondi could neither advance beyond capitalism nor go back to a previous stage, the only course open to his criticism was a petty-bourgeois compromise. sceptical of the possibility of developing fully both capitalism and the productive forces, he found himself under necessity to clamour for some moderation of accumulation, for some slowing down of the triumphant march of capitalism. that is the reactionary aspect of his criticism.[221] footnotes: [210] 'l'argent ne remplit qu'un office passager dans ce double ã©change. les ã©changes terminã©s, il se trouve qu'on a payã© des produits avec des produits. en consã©quence, quand une nation a trop de produits dans un genre, le moyen de les ã©couler est d'en crã©er d'un autre genre' (j. b. say, _traitã© d'ã�conomie politique_, paris, 1803, vol. i, p. 154). [211] in fact, here again, say's only achievement lies in having given a pompous and dogmatic form to an idea that others had expressed before him. as bergmann points out, in his _theory of crises_ (stuttgart, 1895), the work of josiah tucker (1752), turgot's annotations to the french pamphlets, the writings of quesnay, dupont de nemours, and of others contain quite similar observations on a natural balance, or even identity, between demand and supply. yet the miserable say, as marx once called him, claims credit as the evangelist of harmony for the great discovery of the '_thã©orie des dã©bouchã©s_', modestly comparing his own work to the discovery of the principles of thermo-dynamics, of the lever, and of the inclined plane. in the preface and table of contents, e.g. to the 6th edition of his _traitã©_ (1841, pp. 51, 616) he says: 'the theory of exchange and of vents, such as it is developed in this work, will transform world politics.' the same point of view is also expounded by james mill in his 'commerce defended' of 1808, and it is he whom marx calls the real father of the doctrine of a natural equilibrium between production and demand. [212] say in _revue encyclopã©dique_, vol. 23, july 1824, pp. 20 f. [213] _nouveaux principes_ ..., vol. i, p. 117. [214] say, loc. cit., p. 21. [215] say, loc. cit., p. 29. say indicts sismondi as the arch-enemy of bourgeois society in the following ranting peroration: 'it is against the modern organisation of society, an organisation which, by despoiling the working man of all property save his hands, gives him no security in the face of a competition directed towards his detriment. what! society despoils the working man because it ensures to every kind of entrepreneur free disposition over his capital, that is to say his property! i repeat: there is nothing more dangerous than views conducive to a regulation of the employment of property' for 'hands and faculties ... are also property' (ibid., p. 30). [216] sismondi, op. cit., pp. 462-3. [217] ibid., p. 331. [218] sismondi, op. cit., p. 432-3. [219] ibid., p. 449. [220] ibid., p. 448. [221] marx, in his history of the opposition to ricardo's school and its dissolution, makes only brief mention of sismondi, explaining: 'i leave sismondi out of this historical account, because the criticism of his views belongs to a part with which i can deal only after this treatise, the actual movement of capital (competition and credit)' (_theorien ã¼ber den mehrwert_, vol. iii, p. 52). later on, however, in connection with malthus, he also deals with sismondi in a passage that, on the whole, is comprehensive: 'sismondi is profoundly aware of the self-contradiction of capitalist production; he feels that its forms, its productive conditions, spur on an untrammelled development of the productive forces and of wealth on the one hand, yet that these conditions, on the other, are only relative; that their contradictions of value-in-use and value-in-exchange, of commodity and money, of sale and purchase, of production and consumption, of capital and wage-labour, and so on, take on ever larger dimensions, along with the forward strides of the productive forces. in particular, he feels the fundamental conflict: here the untrammelled development of productive power and of a wealth which, at the same time, consists in commodities, must be monetised; and there the basis--restriction of the mass of producers to the necessary means of subsistence. he therefore does not, like ricardo, conceive of the crises as merely incidental, but as essential, as eruptions of the immanent conflicts on ever grander scale and at determinate periods. which faces him with the dilemma: is the state to put restrictions on the _productive forces_ to adapt them to the productive conditions, or upon the _productive conditions_ to adapt them to the _productive forces_? frequently he has recourse to the past, becomes _laudator temporis acti_, and seeks to master the contradictions by a different regulation of income relative to capital, or of distribution relative to production, quite failing to grasp that the relations of distribution are nothing but the relations of production _sub alia specie_. he has a perfect picture of the contradictions immanent in bourgeois production, yet he does not understand them, and therefore fails also to understand the process of their disintegration. (and indeed, how could he, seeing this production was still in the making?--r.l.) and yet, his view is in fact grounded in the premonition that _new_ forms of appropriating wealth must answer to the productive forces, developed in the womb of capitalist production, to the material and social conditions of creating this wealth; that the bourgeois forms of appropriation are but transitory and contradictory, wealth existing always with contrary aspects and presenting itself at once as its opposite. wealth is ever based on the premises of poverty, and can develop only by developing poverty' (ibid., p. 55). in _the poverty of philosophy_, marx opposes sismondi to proudhon in sundry passages, yet about the man himself he only remarks tersely: 'those, who, like sismondi, wish to return to the true proportions of production, while preserving the present basis of society, are reactionary, since, to be consistent, they must also wish to bring back all the other conditions of industry of former times' (_the poverty of philosophy_, london, 1936, p. 57). two short references to sismondi are in _on the critique of political economy_: once he is ranked, as the last classic of bourgeois economics in france, with ricard in england; in another passage emphasis is laid on the fact that sismondi, contrary to ricardo, underlined the specifically social character of labour that creates value.--in the _communist manifesto_, finally, sismondi is mentioned as the head of the petty-bourgeois school. _chapter xiv_ malthus at the same time as sismondi, malthus also waged war against some of the teachings of ricardo. sismondi, in the second edition of his work as well as in his polemics, repeatedly referred to malthus as an authority on his side. thus he formulated the common aims of his campaign against ricardo in the _revue encyclopã©dique_: 'mr. malthus, on the other hand, has maintained in england, as i have tried to do on the continent, that consumption is not the necessary consequence of production, that the needs and desires of man, though they are truly without limits, are only satisfied by consumption in so far as means of exchange go with them. we have affirmed that it is not enough to create these means of exchange, to make them circulate among those who have these desires and wants; that it can even happen frequently that the means of exchange increase in society together with a decrease in the demand for labour, or wages, so that the desires and wants of one part of the population cannot be satisfied and consumption also decreases. finally, we have claimed that the unmistakable sign of prosperity in a society is not an increasing production of wealth, but an increasing demand for labour, or the offer of more and more wages in compensation for this labour. messrs. ricardo and say, though not denying that an increasing demand for labour is a symptom of prosperity, maintained that it inevitably results from an increase of production. as for mr. malthus and myself, we regard these two increases as resulting from independent causes which may at times even be in opposition. according to our view, if the demand for labour has not preceded and determined production, the market will be flooded, and then new production becomes a cause of ruin, not of enjoyment.'[222] these remarks suggest far-reaching agreement, a brotherhood in arms of sismondi and malthus, at least in their opposition against ricardo and his school. marx considers the _principles of political economy_, which malthus published in 1820, an outright plagiarism of the _nouveaux principes_ which had been published the year before. yet sismondi and malthus are frequently at odds regarding the problem with which we are here concerned. sismondi is critical of capitalist production, he attacks it sharply, even denounces it, while malthus stands for the defence. this does not mean that he denies its inherent contradictions, as say or macculloch had done. on the contrary he raises them quite unmercifully to the status of a natural law and asserts their absolute sanctity. sismondi's guiding principle is the interests of the workers. he aspires, though rather generally and vaguely, towards a thoroughgoing reform of distribution in favour of the proletariat. malthus provides the ideology for those strata who are the parasites of capitalist exploitation, who live on ground rent and draw upon the common wealth, and advocates the allocation of the greatest possible portion of the surplus value to these 'unproductive consumers'. sismondi's general approach is predominantly ethical, it is the approach of the social reformer. improving upon the classics, he stresses, in opposition to them, that 'consumption is the only end of accumulation', and pleads for restricted accumulation. malthus, on the contrary, bluntly declares that production has no other purpose than accumulation and advocates unlimited accumulation by the capitalists, to be supplemented and assured by the unlimited consumption of their parasites. finally, sismondi starts off with a critical analysis of the reproductive process, of the relation between capital and income from the point of view of society; while malthus, opposing ricardo, begins with an absurd theory of value from which he derives an equally absurd theory of surplus value, attempting to explain capitalist profits as an addition to the price over and above the value of commodities.[223] malthus opposes the postulate that supply and demand are identical with a detailed critique in chapter vi of his _definitions in political economy_.[224] in his _elements of political economy_, james mill had declared: 'what is it that is necessarily meant, when we say that the supply and the demand are accommodated to one another? it is this: that goods which have been produced by a certain quantity of labour, exchange for goods which have been produced by an equal quantity of labour. let this proposition be duly attended to, and all the rest is clear.--thus, if a pair of shoes is produced with an equal quantity of labour as a hat, so long as a hat exchanges for a pair of shoes, so long the supply and demand are accommodated to one another. if it should so happen, that shoes fell in value, as compared with hats, which is the same thing as hats rising in value compared with shoes, this would simply imply that more shoes had been brought to market, as compared with hats. shoes would then be in more than the due abundance. why? because in them the produce of a certain quantity of labour would not exchange for the produce of an equal quantity. but for the very same reason hats would be in less than the due abundance, because the produce of a certain quantity of labour in them would exchange for the produce of more than an equal quantity in shoes.'[225] against such trite tautologies, malthus marshals a twofold argument. he first draws mill's attention to the fact that he is building without solid foundations. in fact, he argues, even without an alteration in the ratio of exchange between hats and shoes, there may yet be too great a quantity of _both_ in relation to the demand. this will result in both being sold at less than the cost of production plus an appropriate profit. 'but can it be said on this account', he asks, 'that the supply of hats is suited to the demand for hats, or the supply of shoes suited to the demand for shoes, when they are both so abundant that neither of them will exchange for what will fulfil the conditions of their continued supply?'[226] in other words, malthus confronts mill with the possibility of general over-production: '... when they are compared with the costs of production ... it is evident that ... they may all fall or rise at the same time'.[227] secondly, he protests against the way in which mill, ricardo and company are wont to model their postulates on a system of barter: 'the hop planter who takes a hundred bags of hops to weyhill fair, thinks little more about the supply of hats and shoes than he does about the spots in the sun. what does he think about, then? and what does he want to exchange his hops for? mr. mill seems to be of opinion that it would show great ignorance of political economy, to say that what he wants is money; yet, notwithstanding the probable imputation of this great ignorance, i have no hesitation in distinctly asserting, that it really is money which he wants....'[228] for the rest, malthus is content to describe the machinery by which an excessive supply can depress prices below the cost of production and so automatically bring about a restriction of production, and _vice versa_. 'but this tendency, in the natural course of things, to cure a glut or a scarcity, is no ... proof that such evils have never existed.'[229] it is clear that in spite of his contrary views on the question of crises, malthus thinks along the same lines as ricardo, mill, say, and macculloch. for him, too, everything can be reduced to barter. the social reproductive process with its large categories and interrelations which claimed the whole of sismondi's attention, is here completely ignored. in view of so many contradictions within the fundamental approach, the criticism of sismondi and malthus have only a few points in common: (1) contrary to say and the followers of ricardo, they both deny the hypothesis of a pre-established balance of consumption and production. (2) they both maintain that not only partial but also universal crises are possible. but here their agreement ends. if sismondi seeks the cause of crises in the low level of wages and the capitalists' limited capacity for consumption, malthus, on the other hand, transforms the fact of low wages into a natural law of population movements; for the capitalists' limited capacity for consumption, however, he finds a substitute in the consumption of the parasites on surplus value such as the landed gentry and the clergy with their unlimited capacity for wealth and luxury. 'the church with a capacious maw is blest.' both malthus and sismondi look for a category of consumers who buy without selling, in order to redeem capitalist accumulation and save it from a precarious position. but sismondi needs them to get rid of the surplus product of society over and above the consumption of the workers and capitalists, that is to say, to get rid of the capitalised part of the surplus value. malthus wants them as 'producers' of profit in general. it remains entirely his secret, of course, how the _rentiers_ and the incumbents of the state can assist the capitalists in appropriating their profits by buying commodities at an increased price, since they themselves obtain their purchasing power mainly from these capitalists. in view of these profound contrasts, the alliance between malthus and sismondi does not go very deep. and if malthus, as marx has it, distorts sismondi's _nouveaux principes_ into a malthusian caricature, sismondi in turn stresses only what is common to them both and quotes malthus in support, giving the latter's critique of ricardo a somewhat sismondian cast. on occasion, no doubt, sismondi actually succumbs to the influence of malthus; for instance, he takes over the latter's theory of reckless state expenditure as an emergency measure in aid of accumulation and so becomes involved in contradictions with his own initial assumptions. on the whole, malthus neither rendered an original contribution to the problem of reproduction, nor even grasped it fully. in his controversy with the followers of ricardo, he operated with the concepts of simple commodity circulation, just as they did in their controversy with sismondi. his quarrel with that school turns on the 'unproductive consumption' by the parasites of the surplus value; it is not a quarrel about the social foundations of capitalist reproduction. malthus' edifice tumbles to the ground as soon as the absurd mistakes in his theory of profits are uncovered. sismondi's criticism remains valid, and his problems remain unsolved even if we accept ricardo's theory of value with all its consequences. footnotes: [222] _nouveaux principes_ ..., vol. ii, p. 409. [223] cf. marx, _theorien ã¼ber den mehrwert_, vol. iii, pp. 1-29, which gives a detailed analysis of malthus' theory of value and profits. [224] dedicated to james mill and published in 1827. [225] james mill, _elements of political economy_ (3rd edition, london, 1826), pp. 239-40. [226] malthus. _definitions in political economy_ (london, 1827), p. 51. [227] ibid., p. 64. [228] malthus, _definitions in political economy_ (london, 1827), pp. 53-4. [229] ibid., pp. 62-3. _section two_ historical exposition of the problem second round the controversy between rodbertus and von kirchmann _chapter xv_ v. kirchmann's theory of reproduction the second theoretical polemics about the problem of accumulation was also started by current events. if the first english crisis and its attendant misery of the working class had stimulated sismondi's opposition against the classical school, it was the revolutionary working-class movement arisen since which, almost twenty-five years later, provided the incentive for rodbertus' critique of capitalist production. the risings of the lyons silk weavers and the chartist movement in england were vastly different from the shadowy spectres raised by the first crisis, and the ears of the bourgeoisie were made to ring with their criticism of the most wonderful of all forms of society. the first socio-economic work of rodbertus, probably written for the _augsburger allgemeine zeitung_ in the late thirties but not published by that paper, bears the significant title, _the demands of the working classes_,[230] and begins as follows: 'what do the working classes want? will the others be able to keep it from them? will what they want be the grave of modern civilisation? thoughtful people have long realised that a time must come when history would put this question with great urgency. now, the man in the street has learned it too, from the chartist meetings and the birmingham scenes.' during the forties, the leaven of revolutionary ideas was most vigorously at work in france in the formation of the various secret societies and socialist schools of the followers of proudhon, blanqui, cabet, louis blanc, etc. the february revolution and the june proclamation of the 'right to work' led to a first head-on clash between the two worlds of capitalist society--an epoch-making eruption of the contradictions latent in capitalism. as regards the other, visible form of those contradictions--the crises--the available data for observation at the time of the second controversy were far more comprehensive than in the early twenties of the century. the dispute between rodbertus and v. kirchmann took place under the immediate impact of the crises in 1837, 1839, 1847, and even of the first world crisis in 1857--rodbertus writing his interesting pamphlet _on commercial crises and the mortgage problem of the landowners_[231] in 1858. thus the inherent contradictions of capitalist society meeting his eyes were in strident discord with the doctrine of harmony held by the english classics and their vulgarisers both in england and on the continent, quite unlike any critique in the times when sismondi had raised his voice in warning. incidentally, a quotation from sismondi in rodbertus' first writing proves that the former's strictures immediately influenced rodbertus. he was thus familiar with contemporary french writings against the classical school, though perhaps less so with the far more numerous english literature. there is no more than this flimsy support for the myth of the german professors about the so-called 'priority' of rodbertus over marx in the 'foundation of socialism'. accordingly, professor diehl writes in his article on rodbertus in _handwã¶rterbuch der staatswissenschaften_: 'rodbertus must be considered the real founder of scientific socialism in germany, since in his writings between 1839 and 1842, even before marx and lassalle, he provided a comprehensive socialist system, a critique of adam smith's doctrine, new theoretical foundations and proposals for social reform.' this piece of god-fearing, pious righteousness comes from the second edition of 1901, after all that had been written by engels, kautsky and mehring to destroy this learned legend, and in spite of it. quite inevitably, of course, and proof against any evidence to the contrary, however weighty, it was only right in the eyes of all the learned german economists that the palm of 'priority' should be wrested from marx, the revolutionary anarchist, by rodbertus, the 'socialist' with monarchist, prussian and nationalist leanings, the man who believed in communism five hundred years from now, but for the present supported a steady exploitation rate of 200 per cent. however, we are interested in another aspect of rodbertus' analysis. the same professor diehl continues his eulogy as follows: 'rodbertus was not only a pioneer of socialism; political economy as a whole owes much stimulation and furtherance to him; economic theory in particular is indebted to him for the critique of classical economics, for the new theory of the distribution of income, for the distinction between the logical and historical categories of capital, and so on.' here we shall deal with these latter achievements of rodbertus, especially with the 'and so on'. rodbertus' decisive treatise, _towards the understanding of our politico-economic conditions_[232] of 1842, set the ball rolling. v. kirchmann replied in _demokratische blã¤tter_ with two essays--_on the social aspects of ground rent_[233] and _the society of barter_[234]--and rodbertus parried in 1850 with his _letters on social problems_.[235] thus the discussion entered the same theoretical arena where malthus-sismondi and say-ricardo-macculloch had fought out their differences thirty years earlier. in his earliest writings, rodbertus had already expressed the thought that the wages of labour present an ever diminishing part of the national product in modern society where the productivity of labour is increasing. he claimed this to be an original idea, and from that moment until his death thirty years later he did nothing but reiterate it and formulate it in various ways. this 'declining wage rate' is for him the root of all evils to be found in modern society, in particular of pauperism and the crises, whose combination he calls 'the social problem of our times'. v. kirchmann does not agree with this explanation. he traces pauperism back to the effects of a rising ground rent; crises, on the other hand, to a lack of markets. about the latter especially he says: 'the greatest part of social ills is caused not by defects of production but by a lack of markets for the products ... the more a country can produce, the more means it has for satisfying every need, the more it is exposed to the danger of misery and want.'--the labour-problem is here included as well, for 'the notorious right to work ultimately reduces to the question of markets'. 'we see', he concludes, 'that the social problem is almost identical with the problem of markets. even the ills of much-abused competition will vanish, once markets are secure; its advantages alone will remain. there will remain a spirit of rivalry to supply good and cheap commodities, but the life-and-death struggle will disappear which is caused only by insufficient markets.'[236] the difference between the points of view of rodbertus and v. kirchmann is evident. rodbertus sees the root of the evil in a faulty distribution of the national product, and v. kirchmann in the limitations of the markets for capitalist production. notwithstanding all the confusion in his expositions, especially in his idealist vision of a capitalist competition content with a laudable rivalry for better and cheaper commodities, and also in his conception of the 'notorious right to work' as a problem of markets, v. kirchmann up to a point still shows more understanding for the sore spot of capitalist production, i.e. the limitations of its market, than rodbertus who clings to distribution. thus it is v. kirchmann who now takes up the problem which sismondi had originally put on the agenda. nevertheless, he by no means agrees with sismondi's elucidation and solution of the problem, siding rather with the opponents of the latter. not only does he accept ricardo's theory of ground rent, and adam smith's dogma that 'the price of the commodity is composed of two parts only, of the interests on capital and the wages of labour' (v. kirchmann transforms the surplus value into 'interest on capital'); he also subscribes to the thesis of say and ricardo that products are only bought with other products and that production creates its own demand, so that if one side appears to have produced too much, it only means there was not enough production on the other. v. kirchmann, we see, faithfully follows the classics, if in a somewhat 'german edition'. he begins by arguing, e.g., that say's law of a natural balance between production and demand 'still does not give a comprehensive picture of reality', and adds: 'commerce involves yet further hidden laws which prevent this postulated order from obtaining in complete purity. they must be discovered if we are to explain the present flooding of the market, and their discovery might perhaps also show us the way to avoid this great evil. we believe that there are three relations in the modern system of society which cause these conflicts between say's indubitable law and reality.' these relations are (1) 'too inequitable a distribution of the products'--here, as we see, v. kirchmann somewhat approximates to sismondi's point of view; (2) the difficulties which nature puts in the way of human labour engaged in production; and (3) finally, the defects of commerce as a mediator between production and consumption. disregarding the last two obstacles to say's law, we shall now consider v. kirchmann's reasoning of his first point. 'the first relation', he explains, 'can be put more briefly as too low a wage of labour, which is thus the cause of a slump. those who know that the price of commodities is composed of two parts only, of the interest on capital and the wage of labour, might consider this a startling statement; if the wage of labour is low, prices are low as well, and if one is high, so is the other.' (we see v. kirchmann accepts smith's dogma even in its most misleading form: the price is not _resolved_ into wage of labour and surplus value, but is _composed_ of them as a mere sum--a view in which adam smith strayed furthest from his own theory of the value of labour.) 'wage and price thus are directly related, they balance each other. england only abolished her corn laws, her tariffs on meat and other victuals, in order to cause wages to fall and thus to enable her manufacturers to oust all other competitors from the world markets by means of still cheaper commodities. this, however, only holds good up to a point and does not affect the ratio in which the product is distributed among the workers and the capitalists. too inequitable a distribution among these two is the primary and most important cause why say's law is not fulfilled in real life, why the markets are flooded although there is production in all branches.' v. kirchmann gives a detailed illustration of this statement. using the classical method, he takes us, of course, to an imaginary isolated society which makes an unresisting, if thankless, object for the experiments of political economy. v. kirchmann suggests we should imagine a place (_ort_) which comprises 903 inhabitants, no more, no less, _viz._ three entrepreneurs with 300 workers each. _ort_ is to be able to satisfy all needs by its own production--in three establishments, that is to say, one for clothing, a second for food, lighting, fuel and raw materials, and a third for housing, furniture and tools. in each of these three departments, the 'capital together with the raw materials' is to be provided by the entrepreneur, and the remuneration of the workers is to be so arranged that the workers obtain as their wage one half of the annual produce, the entrepreneur retaining the other half 'as interest on capital and profits of the enterprise'. every business is to produce just enough to satisfy all the needs of the 903 inhabitants. _ort_ accordingly has 'all the conditions necessary for general well-being', and everybody can therefore tackle his work with courage and vigour. after a few days, however, joy and delight turn into a universal misery and gnashing of teeth: something has happened on v. kirchmann's island of the blessed which was no more to be expected than for the skies to fall: an industrial and commercial crisis according to all modern specifications has broken out! only the most essential clothing, food and housing for the 900 workers has been produced, yet the warehouses of the three entrepreneurs are full of clothes and raw materials, and their houses stand empty: they complain of a lack of demand, while the workers in turn complain that their wants are not fully satisfied. what has gone wrong? could it be that there is too much of one kind of produce and too little of another, as say and ricardo would have it? not at all, answers v. kirchmann. everything available in _ort_ in well-balanced quantities, just enough to satisfy all the wants of the community. what, then, has thrown a spanner into the works, why the crisis? the obstruction caused by distribution alone--but this must be savoured in v. kirchmann's own words: 'the obstacle, why nevertheless no smooth exchange takes place, lies solely and exclusively in the distribution of these products. they are not distributed equitably among all, but the entrepreneurs retain half of them for themselves as interest and profit, and only give half to the workers. it is clear that the worker in the clothing department can exchange, against half of his product, only half of the food, lodging, etc., that has been produced, and it is clear that the entrepreneur cannot get rid of the other half since no worker has any more products to give in exchange. the entrepreneurs do not know what to do with their stocks, the workers do not know what to do for hunger and nakedness.' nor does the reader, we might add, know what to do with v. kirchmann's constructions. his model is so childish that every advance leads deeper into the maze. first of all, there seems to be no reason whatever why, and to what purpose, v. kirchmann should devise this splitting-up of production into three parts. if analogous examples by ricardo and macculloch usually confront tenant farmers and manufacturers, that is presumably only inspired by the antiquated physiocrat conception of social reproduction which ricardo had adopted, although his own theory of value as against the physiocrats deprived it of all meaning, and although adam smith had already made a good start in considering the real material foundations of the social reproductive process. still, we have seen that the tradition of distinguishing between agriculture and industry as the foundation of reproduction was kept up in economic theory until marx introduced his epoch-making distinction of the two productive departments in society for producer and consumer goods. v. kirchmann's three departments, however, have no real significance at all. obviously, no material consideration of reproduction can have been responsible for this supremely arbitrary division which jumbles up tools and furniture, raw materials and food, but makes clothing a department in its own right. one might as well postulate one department for food, clothing and housing, another for medicines and a third for tooth brushes. v. kirchmann's primary concern, no doubt, is with the social division of labour; hence the assumption of as nearly equal quantities of products as possible in the transactions of exchange. yet this exchange, on which the argument turns, plays no part at all in v. kirchmann's example since it is not the value which is distributed but the quantities of products, the bulk of use-values as such. in this intriguing _ort_ of v. kirchmann's imagining, again, the products are distributed first, and only afterwards, when the distribution is accomplished, is there to be universal exchange, whereas on the solid ground of capitalist production it is, as we know, the exchange which inaugurates the distribution of the product and serves as its agent. besides, the queerest things happen in v. kirchmann's distributive system: 'as we all know', the prices of the products, i.e. the price of the aggregate product of society, consist of _vâ + s_, of wage and capital interest alone--so that the aggregate product must be distributed entirely among workers and entrepreneurs; but then unhappily v. kirchmann dimly remembers the fact that production needs things like raw materials and tools. so _ort_ is provided with raw materials furtively introduced among the food, and with tools among the furniture. but now the question arises: who is to get these indigestible items in the course of general distribution? the workers as wages, or the capitalists as profits of enterprise? they could hardly expect a warm welcome from either. and on such feeble premises the star turn of the performance is to take place: the exchange between workers and entrepreneurs. the fundamental transaction of exchange in capitalist production, the exchange between workers and capitalists, is transformed by v. kirchmann from an exchange between living labour and capital into an exchange of products. not the first act, that of exchanging labour power for variable capital, but the second, the realisation of the wage received from the variable capital is put at the centre of the whole machinery, the entire commodity exchange of capitalist society being in turn reduced to this realisation of the labour-wage. and the crowning glory is that this exchange between workers and entrepreneurs, the king-pin of all economic life, dissolves into nothing on a closer scrutiny--it does not take place at all. for as soon as all workers have received their natural wages in the form of half their product, an exchange will be possible only among the workers themselves; every worker will only keep one-third of his wage consisting exclusively of either clothing, food or furniture, as the case may be, and realise the remainder to equal parts in the two other product-groups. the entrepreneurs no longer come into this at all; the three of them are left high and dry with their surplus value: half the clothing, furniture and food that has been produced by the society; and they have no idea what to do with the stuff. in this calamity of v. kirchmann's creation, even the most generous distribution of the product would be of no use. on the contrary, if larger quantities of the social product were allotted to the workers, they would have even less to do with the entrepreneurs in this transaction: all that would happen is that the exchange of the workers among themselves would increase in volume. the surplus product which the entrepreneurs have on their hands would then contract, it is true, though not indeed because the exchange of the surplus product would be facilitated, but merely because there would be less surplus value altogether. now as before, an exchange of the social product between workers and entrepreneurs is out of the question. one must confess that the puerile and absurd economics here crammed into comparatively little space exceed the bounds even of what might be put up with from a prussian public prosecutor--such having been v. kirchmann's profession, though he must be credited with having incurred disciplinary censure on two occasions. nevertheless, after these unpromising preliminaries, v. kirchmann goes right to the root of the matter. he admits that his assuming the surplus product in a concrete use-form is the reason why the surplus value cannot be usefully employed. as a remedy he now allows the entrepreneurs to devote half of the social labour appropriated as surplus value to the production not of common goods but of luxuries. the 'essence of luxury-goods being that they enable the consumer to use up more capital and labour power than in the case of ordinary goods', the three entrepreneurs manage to consume by themselves in the form of laces, fashionable carriages and the like, their entire half-share in all the labour performed by the society. now nothing unsaleable is left, and the crisis is happily avoided; over-production is made impossible once and for all, capitalists and workers alike are safe; the name of v. kirchmann's magic cure which has brought all these benefits to pass, and which re-establishes the balance between production and consumption, being: luxury. in other words, the capitalists who do not know what to do with their surplus value which they cannot realise, are advised by the dear fellow--to eat it up! as it happens, luxury is in fact an old familiar invention of capitalist society, and still there are recurrent crises. why is this? v. kirchmann enlightens us: 'the answer can only be that in real life sluggish markets are entirely due to the fact that there are still _not enough_ luxuries, or, in other words, that the capitalists, i.e. those who can afford to consume, still consume too little.' this misguided abstinence of the capitalists, however, results from a bad habit which political economists have been ill-advised to encourage: the desire to save for purposes of 'productive consumption'. in other words: crises are caused by accumulation. this is v. kirchmann's principal thesis. he proves it again by means of a touchingly simple example: 'let us assume conditions which economists praise as more favourable,' he says, 'where the entrepreneurs say: we do not want to spend our income to the last penny in splendour and luxury, but will re-invest it productively. what does this mean? nothing but the setting-up of all sorts of productive enterprises for delivering new goods of such a kind that their sale can yield interest (v. kirchmann means profits) on a capital saved and invested by the three entrepreneurs from their unconsumed revenues. accordingly, the three entrepreneurs decide to consume only the produce of a hundred workers, that is to say to restrict their luxury considerably, and to employ the labour power of the remaining 350 workers together with the capital they use for setting up new productive enterprises. the question now arises in what kind of productive enterprises these funds are to be used.' since, according to v. kirchmann's assumption, constant capital is not reproduced, and the entire social product consists entirely of consumer goods, 'the three entrepreneurs can only choose again between enterprises for the manufacture of ordinary goods or for that of luxuries'. in this way, however, the three entrepreneurs will be faced with the already familiar dilemma: if they turn out 'common goods', there will be a crisis, since the workers lack means to purchase these additional provisions, having been bought off with half the value of their produce. if they go in for luxuries, they will have to consume them alone. there is no other possibility. the dilemma is not even affected by foreign trade which would 'only increase the range of commodities on the home market' or increase productivity. 'these foreign commodities are therefore either common goods--then the capitalist will not, and the worker, lacking the means, cannot buy them, or they are luxuries, in which case the worker, of course, is even less able to buy them, and the capitalist will not want them either because of his efforts to save.' this argument, however primitive, yet shows quite nicely and clearly the fundamental conception of v. kirchmann and the nightmare of all economic theory: in a society consisting exclusively of workers and capitalists, accumulation will be impossible. v. kirchmann is therefore frankly hostile to accumulation, 'saving', 'productive consumption' of the surplus value, and strongly attacks these errors advocated by classical economics. his gospel is increasing luxury together with the productivity of labour as the specific against crises. we see that v. kirchmann, if he grotesquely aped ricardo and say in his theoretical assumptions, is a caricature of sismondi in his final conclusions. yet it is imperative to get v. kirchmann's approach to the problem perfectly clear, if we are to understand the import of rodbertus' criticism and the outcome of the whole controversy. footnotes: [230] _die forderungen der arbeitenden klassen._ [231] _die handelskrisen und die hypothekennot der grundbesitzer._ [232] _zur erkenntnis unserer staatswirtschaftlichen zustã¤nde._ [233] _ã�ber die grundrente in sozialer beziehung._ [234] _die tauschgesellschaft._ [235] _soziale briefe._ [236] rodbertus quotes v. kirchmann's arguments explicitly and in great detail. but according to his editors, no complete copy of _demokratische blã¤tter_ with the original essay is obtainable. _chapter xvi_ rodbertus' criticism of the classical school rodbertus digs deeper than v. kirchmann. he looks for the roots of evil in the very foundations of social organisation and declares bitter war on the predominant free trade school--not against a system of unrestricted commodity circulation or the freedom of trade which he fully accepts, but against the manchester doctrine of _laissez-faire_ within the internal social relations of economy. at that time, after the period of storm and stress of classical economics, a system of unscrupulous apologetics was already in full sway which found its most perfect expression in the 'doctrine of harmony' of m. frã©dã©ric bastiat, the famous vulgarian and idol of all philistines, and quite soon the various schultzes were to flourish as commonplace, german imitations of the french prophet of harmony. rodbertus' strictures are aimed at these unscrupulous 'peddlers of free trade'. in his first _letter on social problems_[237] he exclaims: 'because of their paltry incomes, five-sixths of the population are not only deprived of most of the benefits of civilisation, but are in constant danger of the most terrible outbreaks of real distress to which they sometimes succumb. yet they are the creators of all the wealth of the society. their labours begin at dawn and end at dusk, continuing even after night has fallen--but no exertion can change this fate; they cannot raise their income, and only lose that little leisure which ought to remain nowadays for the improvement of their minds. hitherto it might have seemed as if all this suffering were necessary to the progress of civilisation, but now that a series of the most wonderful discoveries and inventions have increased human labour power more than a hundredfold, new prospects of changing these grim conditions are suddenly revealed. as a result, the wealth and assets of a nation increase at a growing rate as compared with the population. could anything be more natural, i ask, or more justly demanded, than that this increase should also somehow benefit the creators of this old and new wealth? that their incomes should be raised or their working-hours shortened, or that they might join in increasing numbers the ranks of the lucky ones, privileged to reap the fruits of labour? yet state economy, or better, national economy has only achieved the opposite result. increasing poverty of these classes goes together with increasing wealth of the nation, there is even need of special legislation, lest the working day become longer, and finally, the working classes swell in number out of proportion with the others. even that is not enough! the hundredfold increase of labour efficiency which was powerless to relieve five-sixths of the population, even threatens periodically the remaining sixth of the nation and thus society as a whole.' 'what contradictions in the economic sphere in particular! and what contradictions in the social sphere in general! the wealth of society is growing, and this growth is accompanied by a growth of poverty.--the creative efficiency of the means of production is increasing, and the consequence is that they are scrapped. social conditions demand that the material position of the working classes should be raised to the level of their political status, and economic conditions, by way of answer, depress them further. society needs the unrestricted growth of wealth, and contemporary leaders of production must create restrictions, in order to discourage poverty. in a single respect alone is there harmony: just as wrong as the conditions is the authoritative section of the society with its inclination to look for the root of the evil everywhere except in the right place. this egotism, which only too often dons the scholar's gown, also accuses the vices of the workers of being the cause of poverty. the responsibility for the crimes committed against them by all-powerful facts is ascribed to their alleged discontent and shiftlessness, and where even such egotism cannot close its eyes to their innocence, it makes an elaborate dogma of the "necessity of poverty". unremittingly, it exhorts the workers only to work and to pray, impresses upon them the duty of abstinence and economy, and at best infringes upon their rights by the institution of compulsory saving, adding to the misery of the workers. it does not see that a blind force of commerce has transformed the prayer for work into the curse of enforced unemployment, that ... abstinence is impossible or cruel, and that, lastly, morals always remain ineffective if commended by those of whom the poet says that they drink wine in secret but preach water in public.'[238] thirty years after sismondi and owen, twenty years after the indictment made by the english socialists, the followers of ricardo, and last but not least, after the publication of the communist manifesto, such bold words alone cannot claim to break new ground. what matters above all now is the theoretical foundation of this indictment. rodbertus here proposed a complete system which can be reduced to the following simple statements. owing to the laws of an economy left to its own devices, the high level of labour productivity achieved by history, together with the institutions of positive law, that is to say the right of private ownership, a whole series of wrong and unethical phenomena had emerged: (1) in the place of 'normal', 'constituted' value we have exchange value, and accordingly coined money instead of a proper 'paper' or 'labour' currency which would genuinely correspond to the concept of money. the first principle is that all economic goods are products of labour, or, as we might put it, that labour alone is creative. this statement, however, does not imply that the value of the product must always equal the cost of labour, or that, in other words, value is even now measured in terms of labour. the truth is rather 'that this still has not become a _fact_, but is only an _idea_ of political economy'.[239] 'if the value could be constituted in accordance with the labour expended on the product, we might imagine a kind of money which would be, as it were, a leaf torn from the public account-book, a receipt written on the most rubbishy material, on rags, which everyone would receive for the value he has produced, and which he would realise as a voucher for an equivalent part of the national product subsequently under distribution.... if, however, for some reason or another, it is _impossible_ or _not yet possible_ to establish this value, money as such must still retain the value it is designed to liquidate; made of an intrinsically valuable commodity like gold or silver, it has to represent a pledge or pawn of the same value.'[240] 'as soon as capitalist commodity production has come into existence, everything is turned upside down: there can no longer be a constituted value, since it can only be exchange value',[241] and, 'since the value cannot be constituted, money cannot be _purely_ money, it cannot fully conform to its concept'.[242] in an equitable exchange, the exchange value of the products would have to equal the quantity of labour needed for producing them, and an exchange of products would always mean an exchange of equal quantities of labour. even assuming, however, that everybody produced just those use-values which another person requires, yet, 'since we are here concerned with human discernment and human volition, there must always be for a start a correct calculation, adjustment and allocation of the labour quantities contained in the products for exchange, there must be a _law_ to which the facts will conform'.[243] it is well-known that rodbertus, in his discovery of 'constituted value', laid great stress on his priority to proudhon which we shall gladly concede him. marx, in his _poverty of philosophy_, and engels in his preface to it, have comprehensively shown that this 'concept' is a mere phantom, still used in theory but in practice buried already in england well before rodbertus' time, that it is but a utopian distortion of ricardo's doctrine of value. we therefore need not deal further with this 'music of the future, performed on a toy trumpet'. (2) the 'economy of exchange' resulted in the 'degradation' of labour to a commodity, the labour wage being determined as an item of expenditure (_eichmann's der arbeit_) instead of representing a fixed rate of the national product. by a daring jump in history, rodbertus derives his wages law indirectly from slavery and regards the specific traits which a capitalist production of commodities imposes on exploitation as no more than a lying deception against which he fulminates from a moral point of view. 'so long as the producers themselves remained the property of those who were not producing, so long as slavery was in existence, it was the advantage of the "masters" alone which unilaterally determined the volume of this share (of the workers). with the producers attaining full liberty of person, if nothing more as yet, both parties agree on the wage in advance. the wage, in modern terminology, is the object of a "free contract", that is to say, an object of competition. labour is therefore as a matter of course subjected to the same laws of exchange as its products: labour itself acquires exchange value; the size of the wage depends on the effects of supply and demand.' rodbertus, after having thus turned everything upside down, after deriving the exchange value of labour from competition, now immediately derives its value from its exchange value. 'under the laws of exchange value, labour, like produced goods, comes to have a kind of "cost value" which exercises some magnetic effects upon its exchange value, the amount of the labour wage. it is that particular amount of payment which is necessary for the "maintenance" of labour, in other words, which enables labour to continue, if only in the persons of its progeny--it is the so-called "minimum of subsistence".' for rodbertus, however, this is not a statement of objective economic laws, but merely an object for moral indignation. he calls the thesis of the classical school, that labour is worth no more than the wages it can command, a 'cynical' statement, and he is determined to expose the 'string of lies' leading to this 'crude and unethical' conclusion.[244] 'it was a degrading view to estimate the wages of labour in accordance with the "necessary subsistence", like so many machines to be kept in repair. now that labour, the fountainhead of all commodities, has itself become a commodity of exchange, it is no less degrading to speak of its "natural price", of its "costs", just as we speak of the natural price and costs of its product, and to include this natural price, these costs, in the amount of goods that is necessary to call forth a continuous flow of labour on the market.' this commodity character of labour power, however, and the corresponding determination of its value, are nothing but a malicious misrepresentation of the free trade school. like the good prussian he was, rodbertus put capitalist commodity production as a whole in the dock, as offending against the obtaining constitutional law, instead of pointing out its inherent contradiction, the conflict between determining the value of labour and determining the value _created by_ labour, as the english disciples of ricardo had done. 'stupid beyond words', he exclaims, 'is the dualist conception of those economists who would have the workers, as far as their legal status is concerned, join in deciding the fate of society, and would for all that, have these same workers from an economic point of view, always treated as mere commodities!'[245] now it only remains to find out why the workers put up with such stupid and blatant injustice--an objection which hermann for instance raised against ricardo's theory of value. rodbertus is ready with this answer: 'what were the workers to do after their emancipation other than to agree to these regulations? imagine their position: when the workers were freed, they were naked or in rags, they had nothing but their labour power. the abolition of slavery or serfdom, moreover, rescinded the master's legal or moral obligation to feed them and care for their needs. yet these needs remained, they still had to live. how, then, could their labour power provide them with a living? were they simply to grab some of the capital existing in the society for their maintenance? the capital of society was already in the hands of other people, and the organs of the "law" would not have tolerated such a step. what, then, could the workers have done? only these alternatives were before them: either to overthrow the law of society or to return, under roughly the same conditions as before, to their former masters, the owners of the land and of capital, and to receive as wages what was formerly doled out to them to keep them fed.'[246] it was fortunate for mankind and the prussian state that the workers were 'wise' enough not to overthrow civilisation and preferred to submit to the 'base demands' of their 'former masters'. this, then, is the origin of the capitalist wage system, of the wages law as 'a kind of slavery' resulting from an abuse of power on the part of the capitalists, and from the precarious position and the meek acquiescence on the part of the proletariat--if we are to believe the highly original explanations of that very rodbertus whose theories marx is reputed to have 'plagiarised'. let rodbertus claim 'priority' in this particular theory of value without challenge, seeing that english socialists and other social critics had already given far less crude and primitive analyses of the wage-system. the singular point about it all is that rodbertus' display of moral indignation about the origin and the economic laws of the wages system does not lead up to the demand for doing away with this abominable injustice, the 'dualism stupid beyond words'. far from it! he frequently reassures his fellow-men that he does not really mean anything very serious by roaring--he is no lion fell, only one snug the joiner. indeed, an ethical theory of the wages law is necessary only to achieve a further conclusion: (3) since the 'laws of exchange value' determine the wage, an advance in labour productivity must bring about an ever declining share in the product for the workers. here we have arrived at the archimedean fulcrum of rodbertus' system. this 'declining wage rate' is his most important 'original' discovery on which he harps from his first writings on social problems (probably in 1839) until his death, and which he 'claims' as his very own. this conception, for all that, was but a simple corollary of ricardo's theory of value and is contained implicit in the wages fund theory which dominated bourgeois economics up to the publication of marx's _capital_. rodbertus nevertheless believed that this 'discovery' made him a kind of galileo in economics, and he refers to his 'declining wage rate' as explaining every evil and contradiction in capitalist economy. above all, he derives from the declining wage rate the phenomenon of pauperism which, together with the crises, in his opinion constitutes the social question. it would be as well to draw the attention of contemporaries, 'out for marx's blood', to the fact that it was not marx but rodbertus, a man much nearer their own heart, who set up a whole theory of progressive poverty in a very crude form, and that he, unlike marx, made it the very pivot, not just a symptom, of the entire social problem. compare for instance his argument in his first _letter on social problems_ to v. kirchmann on the absolute impoverishment of the working class. the 'declining wage rate' must serve in addition to explain the other fundamental phenomena of the social problem--the crises. in this connection rodbertus tackles the problem of balancing consumption with production, touching upon the whole lot of cognate controversial issues which had already been fought out between the schools of sismondi and ricardo. rodbertus' knowledge of crises was of course based upon far more material evidence than that of sismondi. in his first _letter on social problems_ he already gives a detailed description of the four crises in 1818-19, 1825, 1837-9 and 1847. since his observations covered a much longer period, rodbertus could by and large gain a much deeper insight into the essential character of crises than his predecessors. as early as 1850 he formulated the periodical character of the crises which recur at ever shorter intervals and at the same time with ever increasing severity: 'time after time, these crises have become more terrible in proportion with the increase in wealth, engulfing an ever greater number of victims. the crisis of 1818-19, although even this caused panic in commerce and inspired misgivings in economics, was of small importance compared to that of 1825-6. the first crisis had made such inroads on the capital assets of england that the most famous economists doubted whether complete recovery could ever be made. yet it was eclipsed by the crisis of 1836-7. the crises of 1839-40 and 1846-7 wrought even greater havoc than previous ones.'--'according to recent experiences, however, the crises recur at ever shorter intervals. there was a lapse of 18 years between the first and the third crisis, of 14 years between the second and the fourth, and of only 12 years between the third and the fifth. already the signs are multiplying that a new disaster is imminent, though no doubt the events of 1848 put off the catastrophe.'[247] rodbertus remarks that an extraordinary boom in production and great progress in industrial technique always are the heralds of a crisis. 'every one of them [of the crises] followed upon a period of outstanding industrial prosperity.'[248] from the crises in history he demonstrates that 'they occur only after a considerable increase of productivity'.[249] rodbertus opposes what he terms the vulgar view which conceives of crises as mere disturbances in the monetary and credit system, and he criticises the whole of peel's currency legislation as an error of judgment, arguing the point in detail in his essay _on commercial crises and the mortgage problem_. there he makes the following comment among others: 'we would therefore deceive ourselves if we were to regard commercial crises merely as crises of the monetary, banking, or credit system. this is only their outer semblance when they first emerge.'[250] rodbertus also shows a remarkably acute grasp of the part played by foreign trade in the problem of crises. just like sismondi, he states the necessity of expansion for capitalist production, but he simultaneously emphasises the fact that the periodical crises are bound to grow in volume. 'foreign trade', he says, 'is related to slumps only as charity is related to poverty. they ultimately only enhance one another.'[251] and further: 'the only possible means of warding off further outbreaks of crises is the application of the two-edged knife of expanding foreign markets. the violent urge towards such expansion is largely no more but a morbid irritation caused by a sickly organ. since one factor on the home market, productivity, is ever increasing, and the other factor, purchasing power, remains constant for the overwhelming majority of the population, commerce must endeavour to conjure up a similarly unlimited amount of purchasing power on the foreign market.'[252] in this way, the irritation may be soothed to some extent so that at least there will not be a new outbreak of the calamity right away. every foreign market opened defers the social problem in a like manner. colonisation of primitive countries would have similar effects: europe rears a market for herself in places where none had been before. yet such a medicine would essentially do no more than appease the ill. as soon as the new markets are supplied, the problem will revert to its former state--a conflict between the two factors: limited purchasing power versus unlimited productivity. the new attack would be warded off the small market only to re-appear, in even wider dimensions and with even more violent incidents, on a larger one. and since the earth is finite and the acquisition of new markets must some time come to an end, the time will come when the question can no longer be simply adjourned. sooner or later, a definite solution will have to be found.'[253] rodbertus also recognises the anarchical character of capitalist private enterprise to be conducive to crises, but only as one factor among many, seeing it as the source of a particular type of crises, not as the real cause of crises in general. about the crises at v. kirchmann's _ort_, e.g., he says: 'i maintain that a slump of this kind does not occur in real life. the market of to-day is large, there are countless wants and many branches of production, productivity is considerable and the data of commerce are obscure and misleading. the individual entrepreneur does not know how much others are producing, and so it may easily happen that he over-estimates the demand for a certain commodity with which he will then overstock the market.' rodbertus says outright that the only remedy for these crises is the 'complete reversal' of contemporary property-relations or a planned economy, concentrating all means of production 'in the hands of a single social authority'. to set troubled minds at rest, however, he is quick to add that he reserves judgment as to whether there can actually be such a state of affairs--'yet this would be the only possible way to prevent slumps of this kind'. thus he expressly regards anarchy in the modern mode of production as responsible for only a specific and partial manifestation of crises. rodbertus scornfully rejects say-ricardo's axiom of a natural equilibrium between consumption and production; just like sismondi, he emphasises that everything turns on the purchasing power of society, and also takes it to be dependent upon the distribution of income. all the same, he does not endorse sismondi's theory of crises and disagrees sharply with the conclusions drawn from it. if sismondi saw the source of all evil in the unlimited expansion of production without regard to the limitations of incomes, and advocated a restriction of production, rodbertus, quite on the contrary, champions the most powerful and unrestricted expansion of production, of wealth and of the productive forces, believing this to be a social necessity. whoever rejects the wealth of society, rejects at the same time its power, its progress, and, with its progress, its virtues. whoever stands in the way of growing wealth, stands in the way of all social progress whatever. every increase in knowledge, resolve and capacity is conceived as bound up with an increase in wealth.[254] from this point of view, rodbertus is strongly in favour of issuing houses which he regards as the indispensable foundations for a rapid and unrestricted expansion of company promoting. both his essay of 1859 on the mortgage problem and the treatise on the _financial crisis in prussia_[255] are devoted to this plea. he even polemises outright against the sismondian type of _caveat_, as usual broaching the matter first from his peculiar utopian ethics. 'the entrepreneurs', he holds forth, 'are essentially civil servants of economy. by the institution of property, they are once and for all entrusted with the nation's means of production. if they set them to work and strain all their energies in the process, they do but their duty, since capital--let me repeat--exists entirely for the sake of production.' and a further, factual argument: 'or would you have them (the entrepreneurs) turn acute attacks of suffering into a chronic state by working persistently and from the first with fewer forces than are given by the means of production; are they to pay for a less severe form of the evil with its permanent duration? even if we were silly enough to give them this advice, they would not be able to follow it. how could the entrepreneurs of the world recognise the limits beyond which the market would cease to be healthy? they engage in production without knowing the one of the other, they are producing in the most distant corners of the earth for a market hundreds of miles away, they produce with such vast forces that a month's production may already overstep the limit. how could production--so divided and yet so powerful--conceivably estimate in good time what will be enough? where, for instance, are the organisations, the up-to-date statistical bureaux and the like to help them in this task? what is worse, the price alone, its rise and fall, indicates the position of the market, and this is not like a barometer which predicts the temperature of the market, but more like a thermometer which only registers it. if the price falls, the limit has been passed already, and the evil is with us.'[256] these thrusts, obviously aimed at sismondi, exhibit quite fundamental differences between the two opponents. if engels then says in his _anti-duehring_ that sismondi first explained the crises as resulting from under-consumption, and that rodbertus borrowed this view from him, he is not strictly accurate. all that rodbertus and sismondi have in common is their opposition against the classical school and the general explanation of crises as the result of the distribution of incomes. even in this connection rodbertus mounts his own particular hobby horse: over-production is not caused by the low level of working class incomes, nor yet, as sismondi maintains, by the capitalists' limited capacity for consumption, but solely by the fact that with a growing productivity of labour, the workers' income, in terms of value, represents an ever smaller share of the product. rodbertus takes pains to convince the opposition that it is not the small volume of the workers' share which causes the crises. 'just imagine', he goes on to lecture v. kirchmann, 'these shares to be so small as to ensure only a bare subsistence for those who are entitled to them. as long as you establish them as representing a proportion of the national product, you will have a constant "vessel for value" which can absorb ever increasing contents, and an ever increasing prosperity of the working classes as well.... and now imagine on the contrary as large a share for the working classes as you please, and let it become an ever smaller fraction of the national product that grows with increasing productivity. then, provided it is not reduced to the present pittance, this share will still protect the workers from undue privations since the amount of products it represents will still be considerably greater than it is to-day. once this share begins to decline, however, there will be spreading discontent, culminating in a commercial crisis for which the capitalists are not to blame inasmuch as they did no more than their duty in laying down the volume of production according to the given magnitude of these shares.' that is why the 'declining wage rate' is the real cause of crises. it can only be counteracted by legal measures to ensure that the workers' share represents a stable and unchanging rate of the national product. this grotesque notion takes some understanding if we are to do justice to its economic implications. footnotes: [237] to v. kirchmann, in 1880. [238] dr. carl rodbertus-jagetzow, _schriften_ (berlin, 1899), vol. iii, pp. 172-4, 184. [239] op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 104 f. [240] op. cit., vol. i, p. 99. [241] ibid., p. 173. [242] ibid., p. 176. [243] op. cit., vol. ii, p. 65. [244] _schriften_, vol. i, pp. 182-4. [245] ibid., pp. 182-4. [246] ibid., p. 72. [247] _schriften_, vol. iii, pp. 110-11. [248] ibid., p. 108. [249] op. cit., vol. i, p. 62. [250] _schriften_, vol. iv, p. 226. [251] in _towards the understanding of our politico-economic conditions_, part ii, n. 1. [252] in _on commercial crises and the mortgage problem of the landowners_, quoted above (op. cit., vol. iii, p. 186). [253] op. cit., vol. iv, p. 233. it is interesting to note in this connection how rodbertus appears in practice as an extremely sober and realistically-minded prophet of capitalist colonial policy, in the manner of the present-day 'pan-germans', his moral ranting about the unhappy fate of the working classes notwithstanding. in a footnote to the above quotation, he writes: 'we can go on to glance briefly at the importance of the opening up of asia, in particular of china and japan, the richest markets in the world, and also of the maintenance of english rule in india. it is to defer the solution of the social problem.' (the eloquent avenger of the exploited ingenuously discloses the means by which the profiteering exploiters can continue 'their stupid and criminal error', their 'flagrant injustice' for as long as possible.) 'for the solution of this problem, the present lacks in unselfishness and moral resolution no less than in intelligence.' (rodbertus' philosophical resignation is unparalleled!) 'economic advantage cannot, admittedly, constitute a legal title to intervention by force, but on the other hand, a strict application of modern natural and international law to all the nations of the world, whatever their state of civilisation, is quite impracticable.' (a comparison with dorine's words in moliã¨re's _tartuffe_ is irresistible: 'le ciel dã©fend, de vraie, certains contentements, mais il y a avec lui des accommodements.')--'our international law has grown from a civilisation of _christian_ ethics, and since all law is based upon reciprocity, it can only provide the standard for relations between nations of the same civilisation. if it is applied beyond these limits, it is sentiment rather than natural and international law and the indian atrocities should have cured us of it. christian europe should rather partake of the spirit which made the greeks and the romans regard all the other peoples of the world as barbarians. the younger european nations might then regain the drive for making world history which impelled the ancients to spread their native civilisation over the countries of the globe. they would reconquer asia for world history by _joint action_. such common purpose and action would in turn stimulate the greatest social progress, a firm foundation of peace in europe, a reduction of armies, a colonisation of asia in the ancient roman style--in other words, a genuine solidarity of interests in all walks of social life.' the vision of capitalist colonial expansion inspires the prophet of the exploited and oppressed to almost poetical flights, all the more remarkable for coming at a time when a civilisation of christian ethics accomplished such glorious exploits as the opium wars against china and the indian atrocities--that is to say, the atrocities committed by the british in their bloody suppression of the indian mutiny.--in his second _letter on social problems_, in 1850, rodbertus had expressed the conviction that if society lacks the 'moral resolution' necessary to solve the social question, in other words, to change the distribution of wealth, history would be forced to 'use the whip of revolution against it' (op. cit., vol. ii, p. 83). eight years later, however, the stalwart prussian prefers to crack the whip of a colonial policy of christian ethics over the natives of the colonial countries. it is, of course, what one might expect of the 'original founder of scientific socialism in germany' that he should also be a warm supporter of militarism, and his phrase about the 'reduction of armies' is but poetic licence in his verbal fireworks. in his essay _on the understanding of the social question_ he explains that the 'entire national tax burden is perpetually gravitating towards the bottom, sometimes in form of higher prices for wage goods, and sometimes in form of lower money wages'. in this connection, he considers conscription 'under the aspect of a charge on the state', explaining that 'as far as the working classes are concerned, it is nothing like a tax but rather a confiscation of their entire income for many years'. he adds immediately: 'to avoid misunderstanding i would point out that i am a staunch supporter of our present military constitution (i.e. the military constitution of counter-revolutionary prussia)--although it may be oppressive to the working classes and demand great financial sacrifices from the propertied classes' (op. cit., vol. iii, p. 34). that does not even sound like a lion's roar! [254] _schriften_, vol. iii, p. 182. [255] published already in 1845. [256] _schriften_, vol. iv, p. 231. _chapter xvii_ rodbertus' analysis of reproduction to begin with, what does it mean that a decrease in the workers' share is bound immediately to engender over-production and commercial crises? such a view can only make sense provided rodbertus takes the 'national product' to consist of two parts, _vide_ the shares of the workers and of the capitalists, in short of _vâ + s_, one share being exchangeable for the other. and that is more or less what he actually seems to say on occasions, e.g. in his first _letter on social problems_: 'the poverty of the working classes precludes their income from giving scope to increasing production. the additional amount of products from the entrepreneurs' point of view lowers the value of the aggregate product so far as to bar production on the former scale, leaving the workers at best to their accustomed straits, though, if it could be made available to the workers, it would not only improve their lot but would further act as a counterweight by increasing the value of what is retained by the capitalists (and so enable the latter to keep their enterprises at the same level).'[257] the 'counterweight' which in the hand of the workers increases the 'value' of 'what is retained' by the entrepreneurs, can in this context only be the demand. once again, we have landed happily at the familiar _ort_ of v. kirchmann's where workers and capitalists exchange their incomes for the surplus product, and where the crises arise because variable capital is small and the surplus value large. this peculiar notion has already been dealt with above. there are other occasions, however, when rodbertus advances a somewhat different conception. the interpretation of his theory in the fourth _letter on social problems_ is that the continual shifts in the relations of demand, evident in the share of the working class and caused by the share of the capitalist class, must result in a chronic disproportion between production and consumption. 'what if the entrepreneurs endeavour to keep always within the limits of those shares, yet the shares themselves are all the time on the decline for the great majority of the society, the workers, decreasing gradually, unnoticeably, but with relentless force?--what if the share of these classes is continually decreasing to the same extent as their productivity is increasing?'--'is it not really the fact that the capitalists of necessity organise production in accordance with the present volume of shares in order to make wealth universal, and that yet they always produce over and above this volume (of previous shares), thereby perpetuating dissatisfaction which culminates in this stagnation of trade?'[258] on this showing, the explanation of crises should be as follows: the national product consists of a number of 'common goods', as v. kirchmann puts it, for the workers, and of superior goods for the capitalists. the wages represent the quantity of the former, and aggregate surplus value that of the latter. if the capitalists organise their production on this footing, and if at the same time there is progressive productivity, a lack of proportion will immediately ensue. for the share of the workers to-day is no longer that of yesterday, but less. if the demand for 'common goods' had involved, say, six-sevenths of the national product yesterday, then to-day it involves only five-sevenths, and the entrepreneurs, having provided for six-sevenths of 'common goods', will find to their painful surprise that they over-produced by one-seventh. now, wiser by this experience, they try to organise to-morrow's output of 'common goods' to a mere five-sevenths of the total value of the national product, but they have a new disappointment coming to them, since the share of the national product falling to wages to-morrow is bound to be only four-sevenths, and so on. in this ingenious theory there are quite a few points to make us wonder. if our commercial crises are entirely due to the fact that the workers' 'wage rate', the variable capital, represents a constantly diminishing portion of the total value of the national product, then this unfortunate law brings with it the cure for the evil it has caused, since it must be an ever smaller part of the aggregate product for which there is over-production. although rodbertus delights in such terms as 'an overwhelming majority', 'the large popular masses' of consumers, it is not the number of heads that make up the demand, but the value they represent which is relevant. this value, if rodbertus is to be believed, forms a more and more trifling part of the aggregate product. crises are thus made to rest on an ever narrowing economic basis, and all that remains to discover is how in spite of it all it can still happen that the crises are universal and increasingly severe besides, as rodbertus is fully aware. the purchasing power lost by the working classes should be gained by the capitalist class; if _v_ decreases, _s_ must grow larger to make up for it. on this crude scheme, the purchasing power of society as a whole cannot change, as rodbertus says in so many words: 'i know very well that what is taken from the workers' share goes ultimately to swell that of the "rentiers" (rent and surplus value are used as synonyms, _r.l._), and that purchasing power remains constant on the whole and in the long run. but as far as the product on the market is concerned, the crisis always sets in before this increase can make itself felt.'[259] in short, the most it can amount to is that there is 'too much' of 'common goods' and 'too little' of superior goods for the capitalists. quite unawares, and by devious ways, rodbertus here falls in with the say-ricardian theory he so ardently contested, the theory that over-production on one side always corresponds to under-production on the other. seeing that the ratio of the two shares is persistently shifting to the advantage of the capitalists, our commercial crises might be expected on the whole to take on increasingly the character of periodical underinstead of over-production! enough of this exercise in logic. the upshot of it all is that rodbertus conceives the national product in respect of its value as made up of two parts only, of _s_ and _v_, thus wholly subscribing to the views and traditions of the classical school he is fighting tooth and nail, and even adding his own flourish that the capitalists consume the entire surplus value. that is why he repeatedly says without mincing his words, as in the fourth _letter on social problems_: 'accordingly, we must abstract from the reasons which cause the division of rent in general into rent proper and capital rent, to find the basic principle underlying the division of rent (surplus value) in general, the principle underlying _the division of the labour product into wage and rent_.'[260] and, in the third _letter_: 'ground rent, capital profit and the wage of labour are, let me repeat, revenue. by this means landlords, capitalists and workers must live, must satisfy, that is to say, their immediate human necessities. they must therefore draw their income in the form of goods suitable for this purpose.'[261] the misrepresentation of capitalist economy has never been formulated more crudely, and there is no doubt that rodbertus claims the palm of 'priority'--not so much over marx as over all popular economists--with full justification. to leave the reader in no doubt about the utter muddle he has made, he goes on, in the same letter, to rank capitalist surplus value as an economic category on the same level as the revenue of the ancient slave-owner: 'the first state (that of slavery) goes with the most primitive natural economy: that portion of the labour product which is withheld from the income of workers or slaves and forms the master's or owner's property, will undividedly accrue to the one man who owns the land, the capital, the worker and the labour product; there is not even a distinction of thought between rent and capital profits.--the second state entails the most complicated money economy: that portion of the labour product, withheld from the income of the now emancipated workers, and accruing to the respective owners of land, and capital, will be further divided among the owners of the raw material and the manufactured product respectively; the one rent of the former state will be split up into ground rent and capital profits, and will have to be differentiated accordingly.'[262] rodbertus regards the splitting-up of the surplus value 'withheld' from the workers' 'income' as the most striking difference between exploitation by slavery and modern capitalist exploitation. it is not the specific historical form of sharing out newly created value among labour and capital, but the distribution of the surplus value among the various people it benefits, which, irrelevant to the productive process, is yet the decisive fact in the capitalist mode of production. in all other respects, capitalist surplus value remains just the same as the old 'single rent' of the slave-owner: a private fund for the exploiter's own consumption! yet rodbertus again contradicts himself in other places, remembering all of a sudden the constant capital and the necessity for its renewal in the reproductive process. thus, instead of bisecting the aggregate product into _v_ and _s_, he posits a triple division: _c_, _v_, and _s_. in his third _letter on social problems_ he argues on the forms of reproduction in a slave-economy: 'since the master will see to it that part of the slave labour is employed in maintaining or even improving the fields, herds, agricultural and manufacturing tools, there will be "capital replacement", to use a modern term, in which part of the national economic product is immediately used for the upkeep of the estate, without any mediation by exchange or even by exchange value.'[263] and, passing on to capitalist reproduction, he continues: 'now, in terms of value, one portion of the labour product, is used or set aside for the maintenance of the estate, for "capital replacement", another, for the workers' subsistence as their money wage; and the owners of the land, of capital, and of the labour product retain the last as their revenue or rent.'[264] this, then, is an explicit expression of the triple division into constant capital, variable capital, and surplus value. again, in this third _letter_, he formulates the peculiarity of his 'new' theory with equal precision: 'on this theory, then, and under conditions of adequate labour productivity, the portion of the product which remains for wages after the replacement of capital, will be distributed among workers and owners as wages and rent, on the basis of the ownership in land and capital.'[265] it does seem now as if rodbertus' analysis of the value of the aggregate product represents a distinct advance over the classical school. even adam smith's 'dogma' is openly criticised a little further on, and it is really surprising that rodbertus' learned admirers, messrs. wagner, dietzel, diehl & co. failed to claim their white-headed boy's 'priority' over marx on such an important point of economic theory. as a matter of fact, in this respect no less than in the general theory of value, rodbertus' priority is of a somewhat dubious character. if he seems on occasion to gain true insight, it immediately turns out to be a misunderstanding, or at best a wrong approach. his criticism of adam smith's dogma affords a supreme example of his failure to cope with the triple division of the national product towards which he had groped his way. he says literally: 'you know that all economists since adam smith already divided the value of the product into wage of labour, rent, and capital profit, that it is therefore not a new idea to ground the incomes of the various classes, and especially the various items of the rent, in a division of the product. but the economists at once go off the track. all of them, not even excepting ricardo's school, make the mistake, first, not to recognise that the aggregate product, the finished good, the national product as a whole, is an entity in which workers, landowners, and capitalists all share, but conceiving the division of the unfinished product to be of one kind shared among three partners, and that of the manufactured product as of another kind again, shared between only two partners. for these theories both the unfinished product and the manufactured product constitute as such separate items of revenue. secondly,--though both sismondi and ricardo are free from this particular error--they regard the natural fact that labour cannot produce goods without material help, i.e. without the land, as an economic fact, and take the social fact for a primary datum that capital as understood to-day is required by the division of labour. thus they set up the fiction of a fundamental economic relationship on which they base also for the shares of the various owners, ground rent springing from the contribution of the land lent by the owner to production, capital profits from the contribution of capital employed by the capitalist to this end, and the wages finally from labour's contribution, seeing that there are separate owners of land, capital, and labour in the society. say's school, elaborating on this mistake with much ingenuity, even invented the concept of productive service of land, capital, and labour in conformity with the shares in the product of their respective owners, so as to explain these shares as the result of productive service.--thirdly, they are caught up in the ultimate folly of deriving the wage of labour and the items of rent from the value of the product, the value of the product in turn being derived from the wage of labour and the items of rent, so that the one is made to depend on the other and _vice versa_. this absurdity is quite unmistakable when some of these authors attempt to expound "the influence of rent upon production prices" and "the influence of production prices upon rent" in two consecutive chapters.'[266] yet for all these excellent critical comments--the last, particularly acute, actually does to some extent anticipate marx's criticism of this point in _capital_, volume ii--rodbertus calmly falls in with the fundamental blunder of the classical school and its vulgar followers: to ignore altogether that part of the value of the aggregate product which is needed to replace the constant capital of the society. this way it was easier for him to keep up the singular fight against the 'declining wage rate'. under capitalist forms of production, the value of the aggregate social product is divided into three parts: one corresponding to the value of the constant capital, the second to the wage total, i.e. the variable capital, and the third to the aggregate surplus value of the capitalist class. in this composition, the portion corresponding to the variable capital is relatively on the decline, and this for two reasons. to begin with, the relation of _c_ to (_vâ + s_) within _câ + vâ + s_ changes all the time in the direction of a relative increase of _c_ and a relative decrease of _vâ + s_. this is the simple law for a progressive efficiency of human labour, valid for all societies of economic progress, independently of their historical forms, a formula which only states that living labour is increasingly able to convert more means of production into objects for use in an ever shorter time. and if (_vâ + s_) decreases as a whole, so must _v_, as its part, decrease in relation to the total value of the product. to kick against this, to try and stop the decrease, would be tantamount to contending against the general effects of a growing labour productivity. further, there is within (_vâ + s_) as well a change in the direction of a relative decrease in _v_ and a relative increase in _s_, that is to say, an ever smaller part of the newly created value is spent on wages and an ever greater part is appropriated as surplus value. this is the specifically capitalist formula of progressive labour productivity which, under capitalist conditions of production, is no less valid than the general law. to use the power of the state to prevent a decrease of _v_ as against _s_ would mean that the fundamental commodity of labour power is debarred from this progress which decreases production costs for all commodities; it would mean the exemption of this one commodity from the economic effects of technical progress. more than that: the 'declining wage rate' is only another expression of the rising rate of surplus value which forms the most powerful and effective means of checking a decline of the profit rate, and which therefore represents the prime incentive for capitalist production in general, and for technical progress within this system of production in particular. doing away with the 'declining wage rate' by way of legislation would be as much as to do away with the _raison d'ãªtre_ of capitalist society, to deal a crippling blow to its entire system. let us face the facts: the individual capitalist, just like capitalist society as a whole, has no glimmering that the value of the product is made up from the sum total of labour necessary in the society, and this is actually beyond his grasp. value, as the capitalist understands it, is the derivative form, reversed by competition as production costs. while in truth the value of the product is broken down into the values of its component fragments _c_, _v_ and _s_, the capitalist mind conceives of it as the summation of _c_, _v_ and _s_. these, in addition, also appear to him from a distorted perspective and in a secondary form, as (1) the wear and tear of his fixed capital, (2) his advances on circulating capital, including workers' wages, and (3) the current profits, i.e. the average rate of profit on his entire capital. how, then, is the capitalist to be compelled by a law, say of the kind envisaged by rodbertus, to maintain a 'fixed wage rate' in the face of the aggregate value of the product? it would be quite as brilliant to stipulate by law for exactly one-third, no more, no less, of the total price of the product to be payable for the raw materials employed in the manufacture of any commodity. obviously, rodbertus' supreme notion, of which he was so proud, on which he built as if it were a new archimedean discovery, which was to be the specific for all the ills of capitalist production, is arrant nonsense from all aspects of the capitalist mode of production. it could only result from the muddle in the theory of value which is brought to a head in rodbertus' inimitable phrase: that 'now, in a capitalist society, the product must have value-in-exchange just as it had to have value-in-use in ancient economy'.[267] people in ancient society had to eat bread and meat in order to live, but we of to-day are already satisfied with knowing the price of bread and of meat. the most obvious inference from rodbertus' monomania about a 'fixed wage rate' is that he is quite incapable of understanding capitalist accumulation. previous quotations have already shown that rodbertus thinks solely of simple commodity production, quite in keeping with his mistaken doctrine that the purpose of capitalist production is the manufacture of consumer goods for the satisfaction of 'human wants'. for he always talks of 'capital replacements', of the need to enable the capitalists to 'continue their enterprise on the previous scale'. his principal argument, however, is directly opposed to the accumulation of capital. to fix the rate of the surplus value, to prevent its growth, is tantamount to paralysing the accumulation of capital. both sismondi and v. kirchmann had recognised the problem of balancing production and consumption to be indeed a problem of accumulation, that is to say of enlarged capitalist reproduction. both traced the disturbances in the equilibrium of reproduction to accumulative tendencies denying the possibility of accumulation, with the only difference that the one recommended a damper on the productive forces as a remedy, while the other favoured their increasing employment to produce luxuries, the entire surplus value to be consumed. in this field, too, rodbertus follows his own solitary path. the others might try with more or less success to comprehend the _fact_ of capitalist accumulation, but rodbertus prefers to fight the very concept. 'economists since adam smith have one after the other echoed the principle, setting it up as a universal and absolute truth, that capital could only come about by saving and accumulating.'[268] rodbertus is up in arms against this 'deluded judgment'. over sixty pages of print he sets out in detail that (_a_) it is not saving which is the source of capital but labour, that (_b_) the economists' 'delusion' about 'saving' hails from the extravagant view that capital is itself productive, and that (_c_) this delusion is ultimately due to another: the error that capital is--capital. v. kirchmann for his part understood quite well what is at the bottom of capitalist 'savings'. he had the pretty argument: 'everyone knows that the accumulation of capital is not a mere hoarding of reserves, an amassing of metal and monies to remain idle in the owners' vaults. those who want to save do it for the sake of re-employing their savings either personally or through the agency of others as capital, in order to yield them revenue. that is only possible if these capitals are used in new enterprises which can produce so as to provide the required interest. one may build a ship, another a barn, a third may reclaim a desolate swamp, a fourth may order a new spinning frame, while a fifth, in order to enlarge his shoe-making business, would buy more leather and employ more hands--and so on. only if the capital that has been saved is employed in this way, can it yield interest (meaning profit), and the latter is the ultimate object of all saving.'[269] that is how v. kirchmann described somewhat clumsily, but on the whole correctly, what is in fact the capitalisation of surplus value, the process of capitalist accumulation, which constitutes the whole significance of saving, advocated by classical economists 'since adam smith' with unerring instinct. declaring war on saving and accumulation was quite in keeping with v. kirchmann's premises, considering that he, like sismondi, saw the immediate cause of the crises in accumulation. here, too, rodbertus is more 'thorough'. having learned from ricardo's theory of value that labour is the source of all value, and consequently of capital, too, he is completely blinded by this elementary piece of knowledge to the entire complexity of capitalist production and capital movements. since capital is generated by labour, both the accumulation of capital, i.e. 'saving', and the capitalisation of the surplus value are nothing but eyewash. in order to untangle this intricate network of errors by 'economists since adam smith', he takes, as we might expect, the example of the 'isolated husbandman' and proves all that he needs by a long-drawn vivisection of the unhappy creature. here already he discovers 'capital', that is to say, of course, that famous 'original stick' with which 'economists since adam smith' have hooked the fruits of a theory of capital from the tree of knowledge. 'would saving be able to produce this stick?' is his query. and since every normal person will understand that 'saving' cannot produce any stick, that robinson [crusoe] must have made it of wood, we have already proved that the 'savings' theory is quite mistaken. presently, the 'isolated husbandman' hooks a fruit from the tree with the stick, and this fruit is his 'income'. 'if capital were the source of income, already this most elementary and primitive event would have to give evidence of this relation. would it be true to say, then, without doing violence to facts and concepts, that the stick is a _source_ of income or of part of the income consisting in the fruit brought down? can we trace income, wholly or in part, back to the stick as its _cause_, may we consider it, wholly or in parts, as a _product_ of the stick?'[270] surely not. and since the fruit is the product, not of the stick which brought it down, but of the tree which grew it, rodbertus has already proved that all 'economists since adam smith' are grossly mistaken if they maintain that income derives from capital. after a clear exposition of all fundamental concepts of economics on the example of robinson [crusoe]'s 'economy', rodbertus transfers the knowledge thus acquired first to a fictitious society 'without ownership in capital or land', that is to say to a society with a communist mode of possession, and then to a society 'with ownership in capital and land', that is to say contemporary society, and, lo and behold--all the laws of robinson [crusoe]'s economy apply point for point to these two forms of society as well. rodbertus contrives here a theory of capital and income which is the very crown of his utopian imagination. since he has discovered that robinson [crusoe]'s 'capital' is the means of production pure and simple, he identifies capital with the means of production in capitalist economy as well. thus reducing capital, with a wave of his hand, to constant capital, he protests in the name of justice and morality against the fact that the wages, the workers' means of subsistence, are also considered capital. he contends furiously against the _concept_ of variable capital, seeing in it the cause of every disaster. 'if only', he grieves, 'economists would pay attention to what i say, if only they would examine without prejudice whether they are right or i. this is the focal point of all errors about capital in the ruling system, this is the ultimate source of injustice against the working classes, in theory and practice alike.'[271] for 'justice' demands that the goods constituting the 'real wages' of the workers be counted, not as part of capital, but as belonging to the category of income. though rodbertus knows very well that the capitalist must regard the wages he has 'advanced' as part of his capital, just like the other part laid out on immediate means of production, yet in his opinion this applies only to individual capitals. as soon as it is a question of the social aggregate product, of reproduction as a whole, he declares the capitalist categories of production an illusion, a malicious lie and a 'wrong'. 'capital _per se_ (properly so-called), the items which make up capital, capital from the nation's point of view, is something quite different from private capital, capital _assets_, capital _property_, all that "capital" in the modern use of the term usually stands for.'[272] an individual capitalist produces by capitalist methods, but society as a whole must produce like robinson [crusoe], as a collective owner employing communist methods. 'it makes no difference from this general and national point of view that greater or smaller parts of the aggregate national product are now owned in all the various phases of production by private persons who must not be numbered among the producers proper, and that the latter always manufacture this national aggregate product as servants--without sharing in the ownership of their own product--of these few owners.' certain peculiarities of the relations within the society as a whole no doubt result from this, namely (1) the institution of 'exchange' as an intermediary, and (2) the inequality in the distribution of the product. 'yet all these consequences do not affect the movements of national production and the shaping of the national product which are always the same, now as ever (under the rule of communism), no more than they alter in any respect, as far as the _national point of view_ is concerned, the contrast between capital and income so far established.' sismondi had laboured in the sweat of his brow, as had smith and many others, to disentangle the concepts of capital and income from the contradictions of capitalist production. rodbertus has a simpler method and abstracts from the specific forms determined by capitalist production for society as a whole; he simply calls the means of production 'capital' and the article of consumption 'revenue' and leaves it at that. 'the essential influence of ownership in land and capital applies only to individuals having traffic with one another. if the nation is taken as a unit, the effects of such ownership upon the individuals completely disappear.'[273] we see that as soon as rodbertus comes up against the real problem, the capitalist aggregate product and its movements, he exhibits the utopian's characteristic obtuseness in respect of the historical peculiarities of production. marx's comment on proudhon, that 'speaking of society as a whole, he pretends that this society is no longer capitalist' therefore fits him like a glove. the case of rodbertus again exemplifies how every economist before marx had been at a loss when it came to harmonising the concrete aspects of the labour process with the perspective of capitalist production which regards everything in terms of value, to mediating between the forms of movement performed by individual capitals and the movement of social capital. such efforts as a rule vacillate from one extreme to another: the shallow approach of say and macculloch, recognising only the conceptions of individual capital, and the utopian approach of proudhon and rodbertus who recognise only those of the process of labour. that is the context in which marx's penetration appears in its true light. his diagram of simple reproduction illuminates the entire problem by gathering up all these perspectives in their harmony and their contradictions, and so resolves the hopeless obscurities of innumerable tomes into two rows of figures of striking simplicity. on the strength of such views on capital and income as these, capitalist appropriation is clearly quite impossible to understand. indeed, rodbertus simply brands it as 'robbery' and indicts it before the forum of the rights of property it so blatantly violates. 'this personal freedom of the workers which ought legally to involve ownership in the value of the labour product, leads in practice to their renunciation of the proprietary claims extorted under pressure of ownership in land and capital; but the owners do not admit to this great and universal wrong, almost as though they were instinctively afraid that history might follow its own stern and inexorable logic.'[274] rodbertus' 'theory in all its details is therefore conclusive proof that those who praise present-day relations of ownership without being able at the same time to ground ownership in anything but labour, completely contradict their own principle. it proves that the property relations of to-day are in fact founded on a universal violation of this principle, that the great individual fortunes being amassed in society nowadays are the result of cumulative robbery mounting up in society with every new-born worker since time immemorial.'[275] since surplus value is thus branded as 'robbery', an increasing rate of surplus value must appear 'as a strange error of present-day economic organisation'. brissot's crude paradox with its revolutionary ring--'property is theft'--had been the starting point for proudhon's first pamphlet, but rodbertus' thesis is quite another matter, arguing that capital is theft perpetrated on property. it need only be set side by side with marx's chapter on the transformation of the laws of ownership into the laws of capitalist appropriation--this triumph of historical dialectics in vol. i of marx's _capital_--in order to show up rodbertus' 'priority'. by ranting against capitalist appropriation under the aspect of the 'right of property', rodbertus closed his mind to capital as the source of surplus value just as effectively as he had previously been prevented by his tirades against 'saving' from seeing the surplus value as a source of capital. he is thus in an even worse position than v. kirchmann, lacking all qualifications for understanding capitalist accumulation. what it amounts to is that rodbertus wants unrestricted expansion of production without saving, that is to say without capitalist accumulation! he wants an unlimited growth of the productive forces, and at the same time a rate of surplus value stabilised by an act of law. in short, he shows himself quite unable to grasp the real foundations of capitalist production he wishes to reform, and to understand the most important results of the classical economics he criticises so adversely. it is no more than to be expected, therefore, that prof. diehl should declare rodbertus a pioneer of economic theory on the strength of his 'new theory of income' and of the distinction between the logical and the historical categories of capital (capital properly so-called in contrast to individual capital), that prof. adolf wagner should call him the 'ricardo of economic socialism', proving himself ignorant at once of ricardo, rodbertus and socialism alike. lexis even judges that rodbertus is at least the equal of 'his british rival' in power of abstract thinking, and by far his superior in 'virtuosity to lay bare the phenomena in their ultimate connections', in 'imaginative vitality', and above all in his 'ethical approach to economic life'. rodbertus' real achievements in economic theory however, other than his critique of ricardo's ground rent, his at times quite clear-cut distinction between surplus value and profit, his treatment of the surplus value as a whole in deliberate contrast with its partial manifestations, his critique of smith's dogma concerning the analysis of commodities in terms of value, his precise formulation of the periodical character of the crises and his analysis of their manifestations--all these attempts to carry the investigation beyond smith, ricardo and say, promising as such, though doomed to failure because of the confused basic concepts, are rather above the heads of rodbertus' official admirers. as franz mehring already pointed out, it was rodbertus' strange fortune to be lauded to heaven for his alleged prowess in economics by the same people who called him to task for his real merits in politics. this contrast between economic and political achievements, however, does not concern us here: in the realm of economic theory, his admirers built him a grand memorial on the barren field he had dug with the hopeless zeal of the visionary, while the modest beds where he had sown a few fertile seeds, were allowed to be smothered with weeds and forgotten.[276] it cannot be said that the problem of accumulation had on the whole been much advanced beyond the first controversy by this prusso-pomeranian treatment. if in the interim the economic theory of harmony had dropped from the level of ricardo to that of a bastiat-schultze, social criticism had correspondingly declined from sismondi to rodbertus. sismondi's critique of 1819 had been an historical event, but rodbertus' ideas of reform, even on their first appearance, were a miserable regression--still more so on their subsequent reiteration. in the controversy between sismondi on the one hand and say and ricardo on the other, one party proved that accumulation was impossible because of the crises, and therefore warned against full development of the productive forces. the other party proved that crises were impossible and advocated an unlimited development of accumulation. though all argued from wrong premises, each was logically consistent. v. kirchmann and rodbertus both started, were bound to start, from the fact of crises. here the problem of enlarged reproduction of aggregate capital, the problem of accumulation, was completely identified with the problem of crises and side-tracked in an attempt to find a remedy for the crises, although the historical experience of fifty years had shown all too clearly that crises, as witnessed by their periodical recurrence, are a necessary phase in capitalist reproduction. one side now sees the remedy in the complete consumption of the surplus value by the capitalist, that is to say in refraining from accumulation, the other in stabilisation of the rate of surplus value by legislative measures which comes to the same thing, i.e. renouncing accumulation altogether. this special fad of rodbertus' sprang from his fervent and explicit belief in an unlimited capitalist expansion of the productive forces and of wealth, without accumulation of capital. at a time when capitalist production was developed to a degree which was soon to enable marx to make his fundamental analysis, the last attempt of bourgeois economics to cope with the problem of reproduction degenerated into absurd and puerile utopianism. footnotes: [257] _schriften_, vol. iii, p. 176. [258] op. cit., vol. i, pp. 53, 57. [259] _schriften_, vol. i, p. 206. [260] ibid., vol. i, p. 19. [261] op. cit., vol. ii, p. 110. [262] ibid., p. 144. [263] _schriften_, vol. ii, p. 146. [264] ibid., p. 155. [265] ibid., p. 223. [266] _schriften_, vol. ii, p. 226. [267] ibid., p. 156. [268] _schriften_, vol. i, p. 40. [269] op. cit., vol. ii, p. 25. [270] _schriften_, vol. i, p. 250. [271] ibid., p. 295. rodbertus reiterates during a lifetime the ideas he had evolved as early as 1842 in his _towards the understanding of our politico-economic conditions_. 'under present conditions, we have, however, gone so far as to consider not only the wage of labour part of the costs of the goods, but also rents and capital profits. we must therefore refute this opinion in detail. it has a twofold foundation: (_a_) a wrong conception of capital which counts the wage of labour as part of the capital just like materials and tools, while it is on the same level as rent and profit; (_b_) a confusion of the costs of the commodity and the advances of the entrepreneur or the costs of the enterprise' (_towards the understanding of our politico-economic conditions_, neubrandenburg & friedland, g. barnovitz, 1842, p. 14). [272] _schriften_, vol. i, p. 304. just so already in _towards the understanding of our politico-economic conditions_, 'we must distinguish between capital in its narrow or proper sense, and the fund of enterprise, or capital in a wider sense. the former comprises the actual reserves in tools and materials, the latter the fund necessary for running an enterprise under present conditions of division of labour. the former is capital absolutely necessary to production, and the latter achieves such relative necessity only by force of present conditions. hence only the former is capital in the strict and proper meaning of the term; this alone is completely congruent with the concept of national capital' (ibid., pp. 23-4). [273] _schriften_, vol. i, p. 292. [274] op. cit., vol. ii, p. 136. [275] ibid., p. 225. [276] a memorial of the worst kind, by the way, was that of the editors who published his works after his death. these learned gentlemen, messrs. wagner, kozak, moritz wuertz & co., quarrelled in the prefaces to his posthumous writings like a rough crowd of ill-mannered servants in an antechamber, fighting out publicly their petty personal feuds and jealousies, and slanging one another. they did not even bother in common decency to establish the dates for the individual manuscripts they had found. to take an instance, it needed mehring to observe that the oldest manuscript of rodbertus that had been found was not published in 1837, as laid down autocratically by prof. wagner, but in 1839 at the earliest, since it refers in its opening paragraphs to historical events connected with the chartist movement belonging, as a professor of economics really ought to know, in the year 1839. in professor wagner's introduction to rodbertus we are constantly bored by his pomposity, his harping on the 'excessive demands on his time'; in any case wagner addresses himself solely to his learned colleagues and talks above the heads of the common crowd; he passes over in silence, as befits a great man, mehring's elegant correction before the assembled experts. just as silently, professor diehl altered the date of 1837 to 1839 in the _handwã¶rterbuch der staatswissenschaften_, without a word to say when and by whom he had been thus enlightened. but the final touch is provided by the 'popular', 'new and inexpensive' edition of puttkamer and muehlbrecht (1899). some of the quarrelling editors collaborated on it but still continue their disputes in the introductions. wagner's former vol. ii has become vol. i in this edition, yet wagner still refers to vol. ii in the introduction to vol. i. the first _letter on social problems_ is placed in vol. iii, the second and third in vol. ii and the fourth in vol. i. the order of the _letters on social problems_, of the _controversies_, of the parts of _towards the understanding_ ..., chronological and logical sequence, the dates of publication and of writing are hopelessly mixed up, making a chaos more impenetrable than the stratification of the soil after repeated volcanic eruptions. 1837 is maintained as the date of rodbertus' earliest ms., probably out of respect to professor wagner--and this in 1899, although mehring's rectification had been made in 1894. if we compare this with marx's literary heritage in mehring's and kautsky's edition, published by dietz, we see how such apparently superficial matters but reflect deeper connections: one kind of care for the scientific heritage of the authority of the class-conscious proletariat, and quite another in which the official experts of the bourgeoisie squander the heritage of a man who, in their own self-interested legends, had been a first-rate genius. _suum cuique_--had this not been the motto of rodbertus? _section two_ historical exposition of the problem third round struve-bulgakov-tugan baranovski _v._ vorontsov-nikolayon _chapter xviii_ a new version of the problem the third controversy about capitalist accumulation takes place in an historical setting quite different from that of the two earlier ones. the time now is the period from the beginning of the eighties to the middle of the nineties, the scene russia. in western europe, capitalism had already attained maturity. the rose-coloured classical view of smith and ricardo in a budding bourgeois economy had long since vanished ... the self-interested optimism of the vulgarian manchester doctrine of harmony had been silenced by the devastating impact of the world collapse in the seventies, and under the heavy blows of a violent class struggle that blazed up in all capitalist countries after the sixties. even that harmony patched up with social reformism which had its hey-day after the early eighties, especially in germany, soon ended in a hangover. the trial of twelve years' special legislation against the social democratic party had brought about bitter disillusionment, and ultimately destroyed all the veils of harmony, revealing the cruel capitalist contradictions in their naked reality. since then, optimism had only been possible in the camp of the rising working class and its theorists. this was admittedly not optimism about a natural, or artificially established equilibrium of capitalist economy, or about the eternal duration of capitalism, but rather the conviction that capitalism, by mightily furthering the development of the productive forces, and in virtue of its inherent contradictions, would provide an excellent soil for the historical progress of society towards new economic and social forms. the negative, depressing tendency of the first stage of capitalism, at one time realised by sismondi alone and still observed by rodbertus as late as the forties and fifties, is compensated by a tendency towards elation: the hopeful and victorious striving of the workers for ascendancy in their trade-union movement and by political action. such was the setting in western europe. in the russia of that time, however, the picture was different indeed. here, the seventies and eighties represent in every respect a period of transition, a period of internal crises with all its agonies. big industry only now staged its real entry, fostered by the period of high protective tariffs. in particular, the introduction of a tariff on gold at the western frontier in 1877 was a special landmark in the absolutist government's new policy of forcing the growth of capitalism. 'primitive accumulation' of capital flourished splendidly in russia, encouraged by all kinds of state subsidies, guarantees, premiums and government orders. it earned profits which would already seem legendary to the west. yet the picture of internal conditions in contemporary russia was anything but attractive and auspicious. on the plains, the decline and disintegration of rural economy under the pressure of exploitation by the exchequer and the monetary system caused terrible conditions, periodical famines and peasant risings. in the towns, again, the factory proletariat had not yet been consolidated, either socially or mentally, into a modern working class. for the greater part, it was still closely connected with agriculture, and remained semi-rural, particularly in the large industrial parts of moscow-vladimir, the most important centre of the russian textile industry. accordingly, primitive forms of exploitation were countered by primitive measures of defence. not until the early eighties did the spontaneous factory revolts in the moscow district with their smashing up of machines provide the impetus for the first rudiments of factory legislation in the czarist empire. if the economic aspect of russian public life showed at every step the harsh discords of a period of transition, there was a corresponding crisis in intellectual life. 'populism', the indigenous brand of russian socialism, theoretically grounded in the peculiarities of the russian agrarian constitution, was politically finished with the failure of the terrorist party of 'narodnaya volya', its extreme revolutionary exponent. the first writings of george plekhanov, on the other hand, which were to pave the way in russia for marxist trains of thought, had only been published in 1883 and 1885, and for about a decade they seemed to have little influence. during the eighties and up to the nineties the mental life of the russian, and in particular of the socialist intelligentsia with their tendency towards opposition, was dominated by a peculiar mixture of 'indigenous' 'populist' remnants and random elements of theoretical marxism. the most remarkable feature of this mixture was scepticism as to the possibility of capitalist development in russia. at an early date, the russian intelligentsia had been preoccupied with the question whether russia should follow the example of western europe and embark on capitalist development. at first, they noticed only the bleak aspects of capitalism in the west, its disintegrating effects upon the traditional patriarchal forms of production and upon the prosperity and assured livelihood for the broad masses of the population. as against that, the russian rural communal ownership in land, the famous _obshchina_, seemed to offer a short-cut to the blessed land of socialism, a lead direct to a higher social development of russia, without the capitalist phase and its attendant misery as experienced in western europe. would it be right to fling away this fortunate and exceptional position, this unique historical opportunity, and forcibly transplant capitalist production to russia with the help of the state? would it be right to destroy the system of rural holdings and production, and open the doors wide to proletarisation, to misery and insecurity of existence for the toiling masses? the russian intelligentsia was preoccupied with this fundamental problem ever since the agrarian reform, and even earlier, since hertzen, and especially since chernishevski. this was the wholly unique world view of 'populism' in a nutshell. an enormous literature was created in russia by this intellectual tendency ranging from the avowedly reactionary doctrines of the slavophiles to the revolutionary theory of the terrorist party. on the one hand, it encouraged the collection of vast material by separate inquiries into the economic forms of russian life, into 'national production' and its singular aspects, into agriculture as practised by the peasant communes, into the domestic industries of the peasants, the _artel_, and also into the mental life of the peasants, the sects and similar phenomena. on the other hand, a peculiar type of _belles lettres_ sprang up as the artistic reflection of the contradictory social conditions, the struggle between old and new ways which beset the mind at every step with difficult problems. finally, in the seventies and eighties, a peculiarly stuffy philosophy of history sprang up from the same root and found its champions in peter lavrov, nicolai mikhailovski, professor kareyev and v. vorontsov. it was the 'subjective method in sociology' which declared 'critical thought' to be the decisive factor in social development, or which, more precisely, sought to make a down-at-heel intelligentsia the agent of historical progress. here we are interested only in one aspect of this wide field with its many ramifications, _viz_: the struggle of opinions regarding the chances of capitalist development, and even then only in so far as these were based upon general reflections on the social conditions of the capitalist mode of production, since these latter were also to play a big part in the russian controversial literature of the eighties and nineties. the point at issue was to begin with russian capitalism and its prospects, but this, of course, led further afield to the whole problem of capitalist development. the example and the experiences of the west were adduced as vital evidence in this debate. one fact was of decisive importance for the theoretical content of the discussion that followed: not only was marx's analysis of capitalist production as laid down in the first volume of _capital_ already common property of educated russia, but the second volume, too, with its analysis of the reproduction of capital as a whole had already been published in 1885. this gave a fundamentally new twist to the discussion. no more did the problem of crises obscure the real crux of the problem: for the first time, the argument centred purely in the reproduction of capital as a whole, in accumulation. nor was the analysis bogged any longer by an aimless fumbling for the concepts of income and of individual and aggregate capital. marx's diagram of social reproduction had provided a firm foothold. finally, the issue was no longer between _laissez-faire_ and social reform, but between two varieties of socialism. the petty-bourgeois and somewhat muddled 'populist' brand of russian socialists stood for scepticism regarding the possibility of capitalist development, much in the spirit of sismondi and, in part, of rodbertus, though they themselves frequently cited marx as their authority. optimism, on the other hand, was represented by the marxist school in russia. thus the setting of the stage had been shifted completely. one of the two champions of the 'populist' movement, vorontsov, known in russia mainly under the _nom de plume_ v. v., (his initials), was an odd customer. his economics were completely muddled, and as an expert on theory he cannot be taken seriously at all. the other, nikolayon (danielson), however, was a man of wide education, and thoroughly conversant with marxism. he had edited the russian translation of the first volume of _capital_ and was a personal friend of marx and engels, with both of whom he kept up a lively correspondence (published in the russian language in 1908). nevertheless it was vorontsov who influenced public opinion among the russian intelligentsia in the eighties, and marxists in russia had to fight him above all. as for our problem: the general prospects of capitalist development, a new generation of russian marxists, who had learned from the historical experience and knowledge of western europe, joined forces with george plekhanov in opposition to the above-mentioned two representatives of scepticism in the nineties. they were amongst others professor kablukov, professor manuilov, professor issayev, professor skvortsov, vladimir ilyin, peter v. struve, bulgakov, and professor tugan baranovski. in the further course of our investigation we shall, however, confine ourselves to the last three of these, since every one of them furnished a more or less finished critique of this theory on the point with which we are here concerned. this battle of wits, brilliant in parts, which kept the socialist intelligentsia spellbound in the nineties and was only brought to an end by the walkover of the marxist school, officially inaugurated the infiltration into russian thought of marxism as an economico-historical theory. 'legalist' marxism at that time publicly took possession of the universities, the reviews and the economic book market in russia--with all the disadvantages of such a position. ten years later, when the revolutionary risings of the proletariat demonstrated in the streets the darker side of this optimism about capitalist development, none of this pleã¯ad of marxist optimists, with but a single exception, was to be found in the camp of the proletariat. _chapter xix_ vorontsov and his 'surplus' the representatives of russian 'populism' were convinced that capitalism had no future in russia, and this conviction brought them to the problem of capitalist reproduction. v. v. laid down his theories on this point in a series of articles in the review _patriotic memoirs_ and in other periodicals which were collected and published in 1882 under the title _the destiny of capitalism in russia_. he further dealt with the problem in 'the commodity surplus in the supply of the market',[277] 'militarism and capitalism',[278] _our trends_,[279] and finally in _outlines of economic theory_.[280] it is not easy to determine vorontsov's attitude towards capitalist development in russia. he sided neither with the purely slavophil theory which deduced the perversity and perniciousness of capitalism for russia from the 'peculiarities' of the russian economic structure and a specifically russian 'national character', nor with the marxists who saw in capitalist development an unavoidable historical stage which is needed to clear the way towards social progress for russian society, too. vorontsov for his part simply asserts that denunciation and acclamation of capitalism are equally futile because, having no roots in russia, capitalism is just impossible there and can have no future. the essential conditions of capitalist development are lacking in russia, and love's labour's lost if the state tries to promote it artificially--one might as well spare these efforts together with the heavy sacrifices they entail. but if we look into the matter more closely, vorontsov's thesis is not nearly so uncompromising. for if we pay attention to the fact that capitalism does not mean only the accumulation of capital wealth but also that the small producer is reduced to the proletarian level, that the labourer's livelihood is not assured and that there are periodical crises, then vorontsov would by no means deny that all these phenomena exist in russia. on the contrary, he explicitly says in his preface to _the destiny of capitalism in russia_: 'whilst i dispute the possibility of capitalism as a form of production in russia, i do not intend to commit myself in any way as to its future as a form or degree of exploiting the national resources.' vorontsov consequently is of the opinion that capitalism in russia merely cannot attain the same degree of maturity as in the west, whereas the severance of the immediate producer from the means of production might well be expected under russian conditions. vorontsov goes even further: he does not dispute at all that a development of the capitalist mode of production is quite possible in various branches of production, and even allows for capitalist exports from russia to foreign markets. indeed he says in his essay on 'the commodity surplus in the supply of the market' that 'in several branches of industry, capitalist production develops very quickly'[281] [in the russian meaning of the term, of course--r. l.]. 'it is most probable that russia, just like any other country, enjoys certain natural advantages which enable her to act as a supplier of certain kinds of commodities on foreign markets. it is extremely possible that capital can profit by this fact and lay hands upon the branches of production concerned--that is to say the (inter)national division of labour will make it easy for our capitalists to gain a foothold in certain branches. this, however, is not the point. we do not speak of a merely incidental participation of capital in the industrial organisation of the country, but ask whether it is likely that the entire production of russia can be put on a capitalist basis.'[282] put in this form, vorontsov's scepticism looks quite different from what might have been expected at first. he doubts whether the capitalist mode of production could ever gain possession of the entire production in russia; but then, capitalism has not so far accomplished this feat in any country of the world, not even in england. such a brand of scepticism as to the future of capitalism appears at a glance quite international in outlook. and indeed, vorontsov's theory here amounts to a quite general reflection on the nature and the essential conditions of capitalism; it is based upon a general theoretical approach to the reproductive process of social capital as a whole. vorontsov gives the following very clear formulation of the specific relations between the capitalist mode of production and the problem of markets: 'the (inter)national division of labour, the distribution of all branches of industry among the countries taking part in international commerce, is quite independent of capitalism. 'the market which thus comes into being, the demand for the products of different countries resulting from such a division of labour among the nations, has intrinsically nothing in common with the market required by the capitalist mode of production.... the products of capitalist industry come on the market for another purpose; the question whether all the needs of the country are satisfied is irrelevant to them, and the entrepreneur does not necessarily receive in their stead another material product which may be consumed. their main purpose is to realise the surplus value they contain. what, then, is this surplus value that it should interest the capitalist for its own sake? from our point of view, it is the surplus of production over consumption inside the country. every worker produces more than he himself can consume, and all these surplus items accumulate in a few hands; their owners themselves consume them, exchanging them for the purpose against the most variegated kinds of necessities and luxuries. yet eat, drink and dance as much as they like--they will not be able to squander the whole of the surplus value: a considerable remnant will be left over, of which they have to dispose somehow even though they cannot exchange it for other products. they must convert it into money, since it would otherwise just go bad. since there is no one inside the country on whom the capitalists could foist this remnant, it must be exported abroad, and that is why foreign markets are indispensable to countries embarking on the capitalist venture.'[283] the above is a literal translation, showing all the peculiarities of vorontsov's diction, so that the reader may have a taste of this brilliant russian theorist with whom one can spend moments of sheer delight. later, in 1895, vorontsov summarised the same views in his book _outlines of economic theory_ now claiming our attention. here he takes a stand against the views of say and ricardo, and in particular also against john stuart mill who denied the possibility of general over-production. in the course of his argument he discovers something no one had known before: he has laid bare the source of all errors the classical school made about the problem of crises. this mistake lies in a fallacious theory of the costs of production to which bourgeois economists are addicted. no doubt, from the aspect of the costs of production (which according to vorontsov's equally unheard-of assumption do not comprise profits), both profit and crises are unthinkable and inexplicable. but we can only appreciate this original thought to the full in the author's own words: 'according to the doctrine of bourgeois economists, the value of a product is determined by the labour employed in its manufacture. yet bourgeois economists, once they have given this determination of value, immediately forget it and base their subsequent explanation of the exchange phenomena upon a different theory which substitutes "costs of production" for labour. thus two products are mutually exchanged in such quantities that the costs of production are equal on both sides. such a view of the process of exchange indeed leaves no room for a commodity surplus inside the country. any product of a worker's annual labour must, from this point of view, represent a certain quantity of material of which it is made, of tools which have been used in its manufacture, and of the products which served to maintain the workers during the period of production. it [presumably the product--r. l.] appears on the market in order to change its use-form, to reconvert itself into objects, into products for the workers and the value necessary for renewing the tools. as soon as it is split up into its component parts, the process of reassembling, the productive process, will begin, in the course of which all the values listed above will be consumed. in their stead, a new product will come into being which is the connecting link between past and future consumption.' from this perfectly unique attempt to demonstrate social reproduction as a continuous process in the light of the costs of production, the following conclusion is promptly drawn: considering thus the aggregate bulk of a country's products, we shall find no commodity surplus at all over and above the demand of society; an unmarketable surplus is therefore impossible from the point of view of a bourgeois economic theory of value.' yet, after having eliminated capitalist profit from the costs of production by an extremely autocratic manhandling of the bourgeois theory of value, vorontsov immediately presents this deficiency as a great discovery: 'the above analysis, however, reveals yet another feature in the theory of value prevalent of late: it becomes evident that this theory leaves no room for capitalist profits.' the argument that follows is striking in its brevity and simplicity: 'indeed, if i exchange my own product, representing a cost of production of 5 roubles, for another product of equal value, i receive only so much as will be sufficient to cover my expense, but for my abstinence [literally so--r. l.] i shall get nothing.' and now vorontsov really comes to grips with the root of the problem: 'thus it is proved on a strictly logical development of the ideas held by bourgeois economists that the destiny of the commodity surplus on the market and that of capitalist profit is identical. this circumstance justifies the conclusion that both phenomena are interdependent, that the existence of one is a condition of the other, and indeed, so long as there is no profit, there is no commodity surplus.... it is different if the profit comes into being inside the country. such profit is not originally related to production; it is a phenomenon which is connected with the latter not by technical and natural conditions but by an extraneous social form. production requires for its continuation ... only material, tools, and means of subsistence for the workers, therefore as such it consumes only the corresponding part of the products: other consumers must be found for the surplus which makes up the profit, and for which there is no room in the permanent structure of industrial life, in production--consumers, namely, who are not organically connected with production, who are fortuitous to a certain extent. the necessary number of such consumers may or may not be forthcoming, and in the latter case there will be a commodity surplus on the market.'[284] well content with the 'simple' enlightenment, by which he has turned the surplus product into an invention of capital and the capitalist into a 'fortuitous' consumer who is 'not organically connected with capitalist production', vorontsov now turns to the crises. on the basis of marx's 'logical' theory of the value of labour which he claims to 'employ' in his later works, he expounds them as an immediate result of the surplus value, as follows: 'if the working part of the population consumes what enters into the costs of production in form of the wages for labour, the capitalists themselves must destroy [literally so--r. l.] the surplus value, excepting that part of it which the market requires for expansion. if the capitalists are in a position to do so and act accordingly, there can be no commodity surplus; if not, over-production, industrial crises, displacement of the workers from the factories and other evils will result.' according to vorontsov, however, it is '_the inadequate elasticity of the human organism_ which cannot enlarge its capacity to consume as rapidly as the surplus value is increasing', which is in the end responsible for these evils. he repeatedly expresses this ingenious thought as follows: 'the achilles heel of capitalist industrial organisation thus lies in the incapacity of the entrepreneurs to consume the whole of their income.' having thus 'employed' marx's 'logical' version of ricardo's theory of value, vorontsov arrives at sismondi's theory of crises which he adopts in as crude and simplified a form as possible. he believes, of course, that he is adopting the views of rodbertus in reproducing those of sismondi. 'the inductive method of research', he declares triumphantly, 'has resulted in the very same theory of crises and of pauperism which had been objectively stated by rodbertus.'[285] it is not quite clear what vorontsov means by an 'inductive method of research' which he contrasts with the objective method--since all things are possible to vorontsov, he may conceivably mean marx's theory. yet rodbertus, too, was not to emerge unimproved from the hands of the original russian thinker. vorontsov corrects rodbertus' theory merely in so far as he eliminates the stabilisation of the wage rate in accordance with the value of the aggregate product which, to rodbertus, had been the pivot of his whole system. according to vorontsov, this measure against crises is a mere palliative, since 'the immediate cause of the above phenomena (over-production, unemployment, etc.) is not that the working classes receive too small a share of the national income, but that the capitalist class cannot possibly consume all the products which every year fall to their share.'[286] yet, as soon as he has refuted rodbertus' reform of the distribution of incomes, vorontsov, with that 'strictly logical' consistency so peculiar to him, ultimately arrives at the following forecast for the future destiny of capitalism: 'if industrial organisation which prevails in w. europe is to prosper and flourish further still, it can only do so provided that some means will be found to destroy [_verbatim_--r. l.] that portion of the national income which falls to the capitalists' share over and above their capacity to consume. the simplest solution of this problem will be an appropriate change in the distribution of the aggregate income among those who take part in production. if the entrepreneurs would retain for themselves only so much of all increase of the national income as they need to satisfy all their whims and fancies, leaving the remainder to the working class, the mass of the people, then the rã©gime of capitalism would be assured for a long time to come.'[287] the hash of ricardo, marx, sismondi and rodbertus thus is topped with the discovery that capitalist production could be radically cured of over-production, that it could 'prosper and flourish' in all eternity, if the capitalists would refrain from capitalising their surplus value and would make a free gift to the working class of the corresponding part of the surplus value. meanwhile the capitalists, until they have become sensible enough to accept vorontsov's good advice, employ other means for the annual destruction of a part of their surplus value. modern militarism, amongst others, is one of these appropriate measures--and this precisely to the extent to which the bills of militarism are footed by the capitalists' income--for vorontsov can be counted upon to turn things upside down--and not by the working masses. a primary remedy for capitalism, however, is foreign trade which again is a sore spot in russian capitalism. as the last to arrive at the table of the world market, russian capitalism fares worst in the competition with older capitalist countries and thus lacks both prospects as to foreign markets and the most vital conditions of existence. russia remains the 'country of peasants', a country of 'populist' production. 'if all this is correct,' vorontsov concludes his essay on 'the commodity surplus in the supply of the market', 'then capitalism can play only a limited part in russia. it must resign from the direction of agriculture, and its development in the industrial sphere must not inflict too many injuries upon the domestic industries which under our economic conditions are indispensable to the welfare of the majority of the population. if the reader would comment that capitalism might not accept such a compromise, our answer will be: so much the worse for capitalism.' thus vorontsov ultimately washes his hands of the whole thing, declining for his part all responsibility for the further fortunes of economic development in russia. footnotes: [277] an essay in _patriotic memoirs_, may 1883. [278] an essay in the review _russian thought_, september 1889. [279] a book published in 1893. [280] a book published in 1895. [281] _patriotic memoirs_, vol. v: 'a contemporary survey', p. 4. [282] ibid., p. 10. [283] _patriotic memoirs_, vol. v: 'a contemporary survey', p. 14. [284] _outlines of economic theory_ (st. petersburg, 1895), pp. 157 ff. [285] 'militarism and capitalism' in _russian thought_ (1889), vol. ix, p. 78. [286] 'militarism and capitalism' in _russian thought_ (1889), vol. ix, p. 80. [287] ibid., p. 83. cf. _outlines_, p. 196. _chapter xx_ nikolayon the second theorist of populist criticism, nikolayon, brings quite a different economic training and knowledge to his work. one of the best-informed experts on russian economic relations, he had already in 1880 attracted attention by his treatise on the capitalisation of agricultural incomes, which was published in the review _slovo_. thirteen years later, spurred on by the great russian famine of 1891, he pursued his inquiries further in a book entitled _outlines of our social economy since the reform_. here he gives a detailed exposition, fully documented by facts and figures, of how capitalism developed in russia, and on this evidence proceeds to show that this development is the source of all evil, and so of the famine, also, so far as the russian people are concerned. his views about the destiny of capitalism in russia are grounded in a definite theory about the conditions of the development of capitalist production in general, and it is this with which we must now deal. since the market is of decisive importance for the capitalist mode of economy, every capitalist nation tries to make sure of as large a market as possible. in the first place, of course, it relies on its home market. but at a certain level of development, the home market is no longer sufficient for a capitalist nation, and this for the following reasons: all that social labour newly produces in one year can be divided into two parts--the share received by the workers in the form of wages, and that which is appropriated by the capitalists. of the first part, only so many means of subsistence as correspond, in value, to the sum total of the wages paid within the country can be withdrawn from circulation. yet capitalist economy decidedly tends to depress this part more and more. its methods are a longer working day, stepping up the intensity of labour, and increasing output by technical improvements which enable the substitution of female and juvenile for male labour and in some cases displace adult labour altogether. even if the wages of the workers still employed are rising, such increase can never equal the savings of the capitalists resulting from these changes. the result of all this is that the working class must play an ever smaller part as buyers on the home market. at the same time, there is a further change: capitalist production gradually takes over even the trades which provided additional employment to an agricultural people; thus it deprives the peasants of their resources by degrees, so that the rural population can afford to buy fewer and fewer industrial products. this is a further reason for the continual contraction of the home market. as for the capitalist class, we see that this latter is also unable to realise the entire newly created product, though for the opposite reason. however large the requirements of this class, the capitalists will not be able to consume the entire surplus product in person. first, because part of it is needed to enlarge production, for technical improvements which, to the individual entrepreneur, will be a necessary condition of existence in a competitive society. secondly, because an expanding capitalist production implies an expansion in those branches of industry which produce means of production (e.g. the mining industry, the machine industry and so forth) and whose products from the very beginning take a use-form that is incapable of personal consumption and can only function as capital. thirdly and lastly, the higher labour productivity and capital savings that can be achieved by mass production of cheap commodities increasingly impel society towards mass production of commodities which cannot all be consumed by a mere handful of capitalists. although one capitalist can realise his surplus value in the surplus product of another capitalist and _vice versa_, this is only true for products of a certain branch, for consumer goods. however, the incentive of capitalist production is not the satisfaction of personal wants, and this is further shown by the progressive decline in the production of consumer as compared to that of producer goods. 'thus we see that the aggregate product of a capitalist nation must greatly exceed the requirements of the whole industrial population employed, in the same way as each individual factory produces vastly in excess of the requirements of both its workers and the entrepreneur, and this is entirely due to the fact that the nation is a capitalist nation, because the distribution of resources within the society does not aim to satisfy the real wants of the population but only the effective demand. just as an individual factory-owner could not maintain himself as a capitalist even for a day if his market were confined to the requirements of his workers and his own, so the home market of a developed capitalist nation must also be insufficient.' at a certain level, capitalist development thus has the tendency to impede its own progress. these obstacles are ultimately due to the fact that progressive labour productivity, involving the severance of the immediate producer from the means of production, does not benefit society as a whole, but only the individual entrepreneur; and the mass of labour power and men-hours which has been 'set free' by this process becomes redundant and thus is not only lost to society but will become a burden to it. the real wants of the masses can only be satisfied more fully in so far as there can be an ascendancy of a 'populist' mode of production based upon the union between the producer and his means of production. it is the aim of capitalism, however, to gain possession of just these spheres of production, and to destroy in the process the main factor which makes for its own prosperity. the periodical famines in india, for instance, recurring at intervals of ten or eleven years, were thus among the causes of periodical industrial crises in england. any nation that sets out on capitalist development will sooner or later come up against these contradictions inherent in this mode of production. and the later a nation embarks on the capitalist venture, the more strongly will these contradictions make themselves felt, since, once the home market has been saturated, no substitute can be found, the outside market having already been conquered by the older competing countries. the upshot of it all is that the limits of capitalism are set by the increasing poverty born of its own development, by the increasing number of redundant workers deficient in all purchasing power. increasing labour productivity which can rapidly satisfy every effective demand of society corresponds to the increasing incapacity of ever broader masses of the population to satisfy their most vital needs; on the one hand, a glut of goods that cannot be sold--and on the other, large masses who lack the bare necessities. these are nikolayon's general views.[288] he knows his marx, we see, and has turned the two first volumes of _capital_ to excellent use. and still, the whole trend of his argument is genuinely sismondian. it is capitalism itself which brings about a shrinking home market since it impoverishes the masses; every calamity of modern society is due to the destruction of the 'populist' mode of production, that is to say the destruction of small-scale enterprise. that is his main theme. more openly even than sismondi, nikolayon sets the tenor of his critique by an apotheosis of small-scale enterprise, this sole approach to grace.[289] the aggregate capitalist product cannot, in the end, be realised within the society, this can only be done with recourse to outside markets. nikolayon here comes to the same conclusion as vorontsov, in spite of a quite different theoretical point of departure. applied to russia, it is the economic scientific ground for a sceptical attitude towards capitalism. capitalist development in russia has been without access to foreign markets from the first, it could only show its worst aspects--it has impoverished the masses of the people. in consequence, it was a 'fatal mistake' to promote capitalism in russia. on this point, nikolayon fulminates like a prophet of the old testament: 'instead of keeping to the tradition of centuries, instead of developing our old inherited principle of a close connection between the immediate producer and his means of production, instead of usefully applying the scientific achievements of w. europe to their forms of production based on the peasants' ownership of their means of production, instead of increasing their productivity by concentrating the means of production in their hands, instead of benefiting, not by the forms of production in w. europe, but by its organisation, its powerful co-operation, its division of labour, its machinery, etc., etc.--instead of developing the fundamental principle of a landowning peasantry and applying it to the cultivation of the land by the peasants, instead of making science and its application widely accessible to the peasants--instead of all this, we have taken the opposite turning. we have failed to prevent the development of capitalist forms of production, although they are based on the expropriation of the peasants; on the contrary, we have promoted with all our might the upsetting of our entire economic life which resulted in the famine of 1891.' though the evil is much advanced, it is not too late even now to retrace our steps. on the contrary, a complete reform of economic policy is just as urgently needed for russia in view of the threatening proletarisation and collapse, as alexander's reforms after the crimean war were necessary in their time. now a social reform as advocated by nikolayon is completely utopian. his attitude exhibits an even more blatant petty-bourgeois and reactionary bias than sismondi's ever did, considering that the russian 'populist' writes after a lapse of seventy years. for in his opinion, the old _obshchina_, the rural community founded on the communal ownership of the soil, is the raft to deliver russia from the flood of capitalism. on it, the discoveries of modern big industry and scientific technique are to be grafted by measures which remain his own secret--so that it can serve as the basis of a 'socialised' higher form of production. russia can choose no other alternative: either she turns her back upon capitalist development, or she must resign herself to death and decay.[290] after a crushing criticism of capitalism nikolayon thus ends up with the same old 'populist' panacea which had as early as the fifties, though at that time with greater justification, been hailed as the 'peculiarly russian' guarantee of a higher social development, although its reactionary character as a lifeless relic of ancient institutions had been exposed in engels' _fluechtlingsliteratur_ in _volksstaat_ (1875). engels wrote at the time: 'a further development of russia on bourgeois lines would gradually destroy communal property there too, quite apart from any interference of the russian government "with the knout and with bayonets" (as the revolutionary populists imagined). under the pressure of taxes and usury, communal landownership is no longer a privilege, it becomes an irksome chain. the peasants frequently run away from it, either with or without their families, to seek their living as itinerant labourers, and leave the land behind. we see that communal ownership in russia has long since passed its flower and there is every indication that its decay is approaching.' with these words, engels hits right on the target of the _obshchina_ problem--eighteen years before the publication of nikolayon's principal work. if nikolayon subsequently with renewed courage again conjured up the ghost of the _obshchina_, it was a bad historical anachronism inasmuch as about a decade later the _obshchina_ was given an official burial by the state. the absolutist government which had for financial reasons tried during half a century artificially to keep the machinery of the rural community going was compelled to give up this thankless task on its own accord. the agrarian problem soon made it clear how far the old 'populist' delusion was lagging behind the actual course of economic events, and conversely, how powerfully capitalist development in russia, mourned and cursed as still-born, could demonstrate with lightning and thunder its capacity to live and to multiply. once again, and for the last time, this turn of events demonstrates in quite a different historical setting how a social critique of capitalism, which begins by doubting its capacity for development, must by a deadly logic lead to a reactionary utopianism--both in the france of 1819 and in the russia of 1893.[291] footnotes: [288] cf. _outlines of our social economy_, in particular pp. 202-5, 338-41. [289] vladimir ilyich [lenin] has given detailed proof of the striking similarity between the position of the russian 'populists' and the views of sismondi in his essay _on the characteristics of economic romanticism_ (1897). [290] _outlines of our social economy_, p. 322. friedrich engels appraises the russian situation differently. he repeatedly tries to convince nikolayon that russia cannot avoid a high industrial development, and that her sufferings are nothing but the typical capitalist contradictions. thus he writes on september 22, 1892: 'i therefore hold that at present industrial production necessarily implies big industry, making use of steam power, electricity, mechanical looms and frames, and lastly the manufacture of the machines themselves by mechanical means. from the moment that railways are introduced in russia, recourse to all these extremely modern means of production becomes inevitable. it is necessary that you should be able to mend and repair your engines, coaches, railways and the like, but to do this cheaply, you must also be in a position to make at home the things needing repair. as soon as the technique of war has become a branch of industry (armour-plated cruisers, modern artillery, machine guns, steel bullets, smokeless gun powder, etc.) a big industry that is indispensable for the production of such items has become a political necessity for you as well. all these items cannot be made without a highly developed metal industry which on its part cannot develop unless there is a corresponding development of all other branches of production, textiles in particular' (marx-engels to nikolayon, st. petersburg, 1908, p. 75). and further in the same letter: 'so long as russian industry depends on the home market alone, it can only satisfy the internal demand. the latter, however, can grow but slowly, and it seems to me that under present conditions of life in russia it is even bound to decrease, since it is one of the unavoidable consequences of high industrial development that it destroys its own home market by the same process which served to create it: by destroying the bases of the peasants' domestic industry. yet peasants cannot live without such a domestic industry. they are ruined as peasants, their purchasing power is reduced to a minimum, and unless they grow new roots in new conditions of life, unless they become proletarians, they will only represent a very small market for the newly arising plants and factories. 'capitalist production is a phase of economic transition, full of inherent contradictions which only develop and become visible to the extent that capitalist production develops. the tendency of simultaneously creating and destroying a market is just one of these contradictions. another is the hopeless situation that will ensue, all the sooner in a country like russia which lacks external markets than in countries more or less fit to compete in the open world market. these latter can find some means of relief in this seemingly hopeless situation by heroic measures of commercial policy, that is to say by forcibly opening up new markets. china is the most recent market to be opened up for english commerce, and it proved adequate for a temporary revival of prosperity. that is why english capital is so insistent on railroad building in china. yet railways in china mean the destruction of the entire foundation of china's small rural enterprises and her domestic industry. in this case, there is not even a native big industry developed to compensate for this evil to some extent, and hundreds of millions will consequently find it impossible to make a living at all. the result will be mass emigration, such as the world has never yet seen, and america, asia and europe will be flooded with the detested chinese. this new competitor on the labour market will compete with american, australian and european labour at the level of what the chinese consider a satisfactory standard of living, which is well known to be the lowest in the whole world. well then, if the whole system of production in europe has not been revolutionised by then, that will be the time to start this revolution' (ibid., p. 79). engels, though he followed russian developments with attention and keen interest, persistently refused to take an active part in the russian dispute. in his letter of november 24, 1894, i.e. shortly before his death, he expressed himself as follows: 'my russian friends almost daily and weekly bombard me with requests to come forward with my objections to russian books and reviews which not only misinterpret but even misquote the sayings of our author (marx). my friends assure me that my intervention would suffice to put matters right. yet i invariably and firmly refuse all such proposals because i cannot afford to become involved with a dispute held in a foreign country, in a tongue which i, at least, cannot read as easily and freely as the more familiar w. european languages, and in a literature which is at best accessible to me only in fortuitous glimpses of some fragments, and which i cannot pursue anything like systematically enough in all its stages and details without neglecting my real and serious work. there are people everywhere who, once they have taken up a certain stand, are not ashamed to have recourse to misinterpreting the thoughts of others and to all kinds of dishonest manipulations for their own ends, and if that is what has happened to our author, i am afraid they will not deal more kindly with me, so that in the end i shall be compelled to interfere in the dispute, first to defend others, and then in my own defence' (ibid., p. 90). [291] we might mention that the surviving champions of 'populist' pessimism, and vorontsov in particular, to the last remained loyal to their views, in spite of all that happened in russia--a fact that does more credit to their character than to their intelligence. referring to the 1900 and 1902 crises, vorontsov wrote in 1902: 'the doctrinaire dogma of the neo-marxists rapidly loses its power over people's minds. that the newest successes of the individualists are ephemeral has obviously dawned even on their official advocates.... in the first decade of the twentieth century, we come back to the same views about economic development in russia that had been the legacy of the 1870's' (cf. the review _political economics_, october 1902, quoted by a. finn yenotayevski in _the contemporary economy of russia 1890-1910_, st. petersburg, 1911, p. 2.) even to-day, then, this last of the 'populist' mohicans deduces the 'ephemeral character', not of his own theory, but of economic reality. what of the saying of barrã¨re: 'il n'y a que les morts qui ne reviennent pas'. _chapter xxi_ struve's 'third persons' and 'three world empires' we now turn to the criticism of the above opinions as given by the russian marxists. in 1894, peter v. struve who had already given a detailed appraisal of nikolayon's book in an essay 'on capitalist development in russia',[292] published a book in russian,[293] criticising the theories of 'populism' from various aspects. in respect of our present problem, however, he mainly confines himself to proving, against both vorontsov and nikolayon, that capitalism does not cause a contraction of the home market but, on the contrary, an expansion. there can be no doubt that nikolayon has made a blunder--the same that sismondi had made. they each describe only a single aspect of the destructive process, performed by capitalism on the traditional forms of production by small enterprise. they saw only the resulting depression of general welfare, the impoverishment of broad strata of the population, and failed to notice that economic aspect of the process which entails the abolition of natural economy and the substitution of a commodity economy in rural districts. and this is as much as to say that, by absorbing further and further sections of formerly independent and self-sufficient producers into its own sphere, capitalism continuously transforms into commodity buyers ever new strata of people who had not before bought its commodities. in fact, the course of capitalist development is just the opposite of that pictured by the 'populists' on the model of sismondi. capitalism, far from ruining the home market, really sets about creating it, precisely by means of a spreading money economy. struve in particular refutes the theory that the surplus value cannot possibly be realised on the home market. he argues as follows: the conviction that a mature capitalist society consists exclusively of entrepreneurs and workers forms the basis of vorontsov's theory, and nikolayon himself operates with this concept throughout. from this point of view, of course, the realisation of the capitalist aggregate product seems incomprehensible. and vorontsov's theory is correct in so far as it states the fact that neither the capitalists' nor the workers' consumption can realise the surplus value, so that the existence of 'third persons' must be presumed.[294] but then, is it not beyond any doubt that some such 'third persons' exist in every capitalist society? the idea of vorontsov and nikolayon is pure fiction 'which cannot advance our understanding of any historical process whatever by a hair's breadth'.[295] there is no actual capitalist society, however highly developed, composed exclusively of capitalists and workers. 'even in england and wales, out of a thousand self-supporting inhabitants, 543 are engaged in industry, 172 in commerce, 140 in agriculture, 81 in casual wage labour, and 62 in the civil service, the liberal professions and the like.' even in england, then, there are large numbers of 'third persons', and it is they who, by their consumption, help to realise the surplus value in so far as it is not consumed by the capitalists. struve leaves it open whether these 'third persons' consume enough to realise all surplus value--however that may be, 'the contrary would have to be proved'.[296] this cannot be done, he claims, for russia, that vast country with an immense population. she, in fact, is in the fortunate position to be able to dispense with foreign markets. in this--and here struve dips into the intellectual treasures of professors wagner, schaeffle, and schmoller--she enjoys the same privileges as the united states of america. 'if the example of the n. american union stands for anything, it is proof of the fact that under certain circumstances capitalist industry can attain a very high level of development almost entirely on the basis of the home market.'[297] the negligible amount of industrial exports from the u.s.a. in 1882 is mentioned in support of this statement which struve formulates as a general doctrine: 'the vaster the territory, and the larger the population of a country, the less does that country require foreign markets for its capitalist development.' he infers from this, in direct opposition to the 'populists', 'a more brilliant future (for russia) than for the other countries'. on the basis of commodity production, the progressive development of agriculture is bound to create a market wide enough to support the development of russian industrial capitalism. this market would be capable of unlimited expansion, in step with the economic and cultural progress of the country, and together with the substitution of a monetary for a natural economy. 'in this respect, capitalism enjoys more favourable conditions in russia than in other countries.'[298] struve paints a detailed and highly coloured picture of the new markets which, thanks to the trans-siberian railway, are opening up in siberia, central asia, asia minor, persia and the balkans. but his prophetic zeal blinds him to the fact that he is no longer talking about the 'indefinitely expanding' home market but about specific foreign markets. in later years, he was to throw in his lot, in politics too, with this optimistic russian capitalism and its liberal programme of imperialist expansion, for which he had laid the theoretical foundations when still a 'marxist'. indeed, the tenor of struve's argument is a fervent belief in the unlimited capacity for expansion of capitalist production, but the economic foundation of this optimism is rather weak. he is somewhat reticent as to what he means by the 'third persons' whom he considers the mainstay of accumulation, but his references to english occupational statistics indicate that he has in mind the various private and public servants, the liberal professions, in short the notorious _grand public_ so dear to bourgeois economists when they are completely at a loss. it is this 'great public' of which marx said that it serves as the explanation for things which the economist cannot explain. it is obvious that, if we categorically refer to consumption by the capitalists and the workers, we do not speak of the entrepreneur as an individual, but of the capitalist class as a whole, including their hangers-on--employees, civil servants, liberal professions, and the like. all such 'third persons' who are certainly not lacking in any capitalist society are, as far as economics is concerned, joint consumers of the surplus value for the greater part, in so far, namely, as they are not also joint consumers of the wages of labour. these groups can only derive their purchasing power either from the wage of the proletariat or from the surplus value, if not from both; but on the whole, they are to be regarded as joint consumers of the surplus value. it follows that their consumption is already included in the consumption of the capitalist class, and if struve tries to reintroduce them to the capitalists by sleight-of-hand as 'third persons' to save the situation and help to realise the surplus value, the shrewd profiteer will not be taken in. he will see at once that this great public is nothing but his old familiar retinue of parasites who buy his commodities with money of his own providing. no, no, indeed! struve's 'third persons' will not do at all. struve's theory of foreign markets and their significance for capitalist production is equally untenable. in this, he defers to the mechanist approach of the 'populists' who, along with the professors' textbooks, hold that a capitalist (european) country will first exploit the home market to the limit, and will only look to foreign markets when this is almost or completely exhausted. then, following in the footsteps of wagner, schaeffle and schmoller, struve arrives at the absurd conclusion that a country with vast territories and a large population can make its capitalist production a 'self-contained whole' and rely indefinitely on the home market alone.[299] in actual fact, capitalist production is by nature production on a universal scale. quite contrary to the bookish decrees issued by german scholars, it is producing for a world market already from the word _go_. the various pioneering branches of capitalist production in england, such as the textile, iron and coal industries, cast about for markets in all countries and continents, long before the process of destroying peasants' property, the decline of handicraft and of the old domestic industries within the country had come to an end. and again, is it likely that the german chemical or electrotechnical industries would be grateful for the sober advice not to work for five continents, as they have done from the beginning, but to confine themselves to the german home market which, being largely supplied from abroad, is evidently far from exhausted in respect of a whole lot of other german industries? or that one should explain to the german machine industry, it should not venture yet upon foreign markets, since german import statistics are visible proof that a good deal of the demand in germany for products of this branch is satisfied by foreign supplies? no, this schematic conception of 'foreign trade' does not help us at all to grasp the complexity of the world market with its uncounted ramifications and different shades in the division of labour. the industrial development of the u.s.a. who have already at the time of writing become a dangerous rival to britain both on the world market and even in england herself, just as they have beaten german competition, e.g. in the sphere of electrotechnics, both in the world market and in germany herself, has given the lie to struve's inferences, already out-of-date when they were put on paper. struve also shares the crude view of the russian 'populists' who saw hardly more than a merchant's sordid concern for his market in the international connections of capitalist economy, and its historical tendency to create a homogeneous living organism based on social division of labour as well as the countless variety of natural wealth and productive conditions of the globe. moreover he accepts the three empire fiction of wagner and schmoller (the self-contained empires of great britain, russia and the u.s.a.) which completely ignores or artificially minimises the vital part played by an unlimited supply of means of subsistence, of raw and auxiliary materials and of labour power which is just as necessary for a capitalist industry computed in terms of a world market as the demand for finished products. alone the history of the english cotton industry, a reflection in miniature of the history of capitalism in general, spreading over five continents throughout the nineteenth century, makes a mockery of the professors' childish pretensions which have only one real significance: to provide the theoretical justification for the system of protective tariffs. footnotes: [292] published in _sozialdemokratisches zentralblatt_, vol. iii, no. 1. [293] _critical comments on the problem of economic development in russia._ [294] op. cit., p. 251. [295] ibid., p. 255. [296] ibid., p. 252. [297] ibid., p. 260. 'there can be no doubt that struve's attempt to refute what he calls the pessimist outlook on the analogy of the u.s.a. is fallacious. he says that russia can overcome the evil consequences of the most recent capitalism just as easily as the u.s.a. but what he forgets is that the u.s.a. from the first represent a new bourgeois state, that they were founded by a petty bourgeoisie and by peasants who had fled from european feudalism to set up a purely bourgeois society. in russia, on the other hand, we have a primitive communist foundation, a society of _gentes_, as it were, in the pre-civilised stage which, though it is already disintegrating, still serves as a material basis upon which the capitalist revolution (for it is in fact a social revolution) can take place and become effective. in america, a monetary economy had been stabilised more than a century ago, whereas a natural economy had until recently prevailed in russia. it should be obvious therefore that this revolution in russia is bound to be much more ruthless and violent, and accompanied by immensely more suffering than in america' (engels to nikolayon, october 17, 1893, _letters_ ..., p. 85). [298] _critical comments_ ..., p. 284. [299] professor schmoller, amongst others, clearly reveals the reactionary aspect of the 'three empire theory' (viz. great britain, russia and the u.s.a.) evolved by the german professors. in his handbook of commercial policy (_handelspolitische sã¤kularbetrachtung_), the venerable scholar dolefully frowns upon 'neo-mercantilism', that is to say upon the imperialist designs of the three arch-villains. 'in the interests of a higher intellectual, moral and aesthetic civilisation and social progress' he demands a strong german navy and a european customs union. 'out of the economic tension of the world there arises the prime duty for germany to create for herself a strong navy, so as to be prepared for battle in the case of need, and to be desirable as an ally to the world powers'--which latter, however, professor schmoller says elsewhere, he does not wish to blame for again taking the path of large-scale colonial expansion. 'she neither can nor ought to pursue a policy of conquest like the three world powers, but she must be able, if necessary, to break a foreign blockade of the north sea in order to protect her own colonies and her vast commerce, and she must be able to offer the same security to the states with whom she forms an alliance. it is the task of the three-partite union (germany, austro-hungary, and italy) to co-operate with france towards imposing some restraint, desirable for the preservation of all other states, on the over-aggressive policy of the three world powers which constitutes a threat to all smaller states, and to ensure moderation in conquests, in colonial acquisitions, in the immoderate and unilateral policy of protective tariffs, in the exploitation and maltreatment of all weaker elements. the objectives of all higher intellectual, moral and aesthetic civilisation and of social progress depend on the fact that the globe should not be divided up among three world empires in the twentieth century, that these three empires should not establish a brutal neo-mercantilism' (_die wandlungen der europã¤ischen handelspolitik des 19. jahrhunderts_, 'changes in the european commercial policy during the 19th century', in _jahrb. fã¼r gesetzgebung, verwaltung und volkswirtschaft_, vol. xxiv, p. 381). _chapter xxii_ bulgakov and his completion of marx's analysis the second critic of 'populist' scepticism, s. bulgakov, is no respecter of struve's 'third persons' and at once denies that they form the sheet-anchor for capitalist accumulation. 'the majority of economists before marx', he declares, 'solved the problem by saying that some sort of "third person" is needed, as a _deus ex machina_, to cut the gordian knot, i.e. to consume the surplus value. this part is played by luxury-loving landowners (as with malthus), or by indulgent capitalists, or yet by militarism and the like. there can be no demand for the surplus value without some such extraordinary mediators; a deadlock will be reached on the markets and the result will be over-production and crises.'[300] 'struve thus assumes that capitalist production in its development, too, may find its ultimate mainstay in the consumption of some fantastic sort of "third person". but if this great public is essentially characterised as consuming the surplus value, whence does it obtain the means to buy?'[301] for his part, bulgakov centres the whole problem from the first in the analysis of the social aggregate product and its reproduction as given by marx in the second volume of _capital_. he has a thorough grasp of the fact that he must start with simple reproduction and must fully understand its working in order to solve the question of accumulation. in this context, he says, it is of particular importance to obtain a clear picture of the consumption of surplus value and wages in such branches of production as do not turn out goods for consumption, and further, to understand fully the circulation of that portion of the social aggregate product which represents used-up constant capital. this, he argues, is a completely new problem of which economists had not even been aware before marx brought it up. 'in order to solve this problem, marx divides all capitalistically produced commodities into two great and fundamentally different categories: the production of producer and consumer goods. there is more theoretical importance in this division than in all previous squabbles on the theory of markets.'[302] bulgakov, we see, is an outspoken and enthusiastic supporter of marx's theory. the object of his study, as he puts it, is thus a critique of the doctrine that capitalism cannot exist without external markets. 'for this purpose, the author has made use of the most valuable analysis of social reproduction given by marx in volume ii of _capital_ which for reasons unknown has scarcely been utilised in economic theory. though this analysis cannot be taken as fully completed, we are yet of opinion that even in its present fragmentary shape it offers an adequate foundation for a solution of the market problem that differs from that adopted by messrs. nikolayon, v. v. and others, and which they claim to have found in marx.'[303] bulgakov gives the following formulation of his solution which he has deduced from marx himself: 'in certain conditions, capitalism may exist solely by virtue of an internal market. it is not an inherent necessity peculiar to the capitalist mode of production that the outside market be able to absorb the surplus of capitalist production. the author has arrived at this conclusion in consequence of his study of the above-mentioned analysis of social reproduction.' and now we are eager to hear the arguments bulgakov has based on the above thesis. at first sight, they prove surprisingly simple: bulgakov faithfully reproduces marx's well-known diagram of simple reproduction, adding comments which do credit to his insight. he further cites marx's equally familiar diagram of enlarged reproduction--and this indeed is the proof we have been so anxious to find. 'consequent upon what we have said, it will not be difficult now to determine the very essence of accumulation. the means-of-production department i must produce additional means of production necessary for enlarging both its own production and that of department ii. ii, in its turn, will have to supply additional consumption goods to enlarge the variable capital in both departments. disregarding the circulation of money, the expansion of production is reduced to an exchange of additional products of i needed by ii against additional products of ii needed by i.' loyally following marx's deductions, bulgakov does not notice that so far his entire thesis is nothing but words. he believes that these mathematical _formulã¦_ solve the problem of accumulation. no doubt we can easily imagine proportions such as those he has copied from marx, and _if there is expanding production_, these _formulã¦_ will apply. yet bulgakov overlooks the principal problem: who exactly is to profit by an expansion such as that whose mechanism he examines? is it explained just because we can put the mathematical proportions of accumulation on paper? hardly, because just as soon as bulgakov has declared the matter settled and goes on to introduce the circulation of money into the analysis, he right away comes up against the question: where are i and ii to get the money for the purchase of additional products? when we dealt with marx, time and again the weak point in his analysis, the question really of consumers in enlarged reproduction, cropped up in a perverted form as the question of additional money sources. here bulgakov quite slavishly follows marx's approach, accepting his misleading formulation of the problem without noticing that it is not straightforward, although he knows perfectly well that 'marx himself did not answer this question in the drafts which were used to compile the second volume of _capital_'. it should be all the more interesting to see what answer marx's russian pupil attempted to work out on his own. 'the following solution', bulgakov says, 'seems to us to correspond best to marx's doctrine as a whole: the new variable capital in money-form supplied by ii for both departments has its commodity equivalent in surplus value ii. with reference to simple reproduction, we have already seen that the capitalists themselves must throw money into circulation to realise their surplus value, money which ultimately reverts to the pocket of the very capitalist it came from. the quantity of money required for the circulation of the surplus value is determined in accordance with the general law of commodity circulation by the value of the commodities that contained it, divided by the average amount of money turnover. this same law must apply here; the capitalists of department ii must dispose of a certain amount of money for the circulation of their surplus value, and must consequently possess certain money reserves. these reserves must be ample enough for the circulation both of that portion of the surplus value which represents the consumption fund and of that which is to be accumulated as capital.' bulgakov further argues that it is immaterial to the question how much money is required to circulate a certain amount of commodities inside a country, whether or not some of these commodities contain any surplus value. 'in answer to the general question as to money sources inside the country, however, our solution is that the money is supplied by the producer of gold.'[304] if a country requires more money consequent upon an 'expansion of production', the production of gold will have to be increased accordingly. so here we are again: the producer of gold is again the _deus ex machina_, just as he had been for marx. in fact, bulgakov has sadly disappointed us in the high hopes we had of his new solution. his 'solution' of the problem does not go a step beyond marx's own analysis. it can be reduced to three extremely simple statements as follows: (1) question: how much money do we need for the realisation of capitalised surplus value? answer: just as much as is required in accordance with the general law of commodity circulation. (2) q.: where do the capitalists get the money for the realisation of capitalised surplus value? a.: they are supposed to have it. (3) q.: how did the money come into the country in the first place? a.: it is provided by the producer of gold. the extreme simplicity of this method of explanation is suspicious rather than attractive. we need not trouble, however, to refute this theory which makes the gold producer the _deus ex machina_ of capitalist accumulation. bulgakov has done it himself quite adequately. eighty pages on, he returns to the gold producer in quite a different context, in the course of a lengthy argument against the theory of the wages fund in which he got involved for some mysterious reason. here he suddenly displays a keen grasp of the problem: 'we know already that there is a gold producer amongst other producers. even under conditions of simple reproduction, he increases, on the one hand, the absolute quantity of money circulating inside the country, and on the other, he buys producer and consumer goods without, in his turn, selling commodities, paying with his own product, i.e. with the general exchange equivalent, for the goods he buys. the gold producer now might perhaps render the service of buying the whole accumulated surplus value from ii and pay for it in gold which ii can then use to buy means of production from i and to increase its variable capital needed to pay for additional labour power so that the gold producer now appears as the real external market. 'this assumption, however, is quite absurd. to accept it would mean to make the expansion of social production dependent upon the expansion of gold production. (hear, hear!) this in turn presupposes an increase in gold production which is quite unreal. if the gold producer were obliged to buy all the accumulated surplus value from ii for his own workers, his own variable capital would have to grow by the day and indeed by the hour. yet his constant capital as well as his surplus value should also grow in proportion, and gold production as a whole would consequently have to take on immense dimensions. (hear, hear!) instead of submitting this sophistical presumption to statistical tests--which in any case would hardly be possible--a single fact can be adduced which would alone refute this presupposition: it is the development of the institution of credit which accompanies the development of capitalist economy. (hear, hear!) credit has the tendency to diminish the amount of money in circulation (this decrease being, of course, only relative, not absolute); it is the necessary complement of a developing economy of exchange which would otherwise soon find itself hampered by a lack of coined money. i think we need not give figures in this context to prove that the rã´le of money in exchange-transactions is now very small. the hypothesis is thus proved in immediate and evident disagreement with the facts and must be confuted.'[305] bravo! bravissimo! this is really excellent! bulgakov, however, thus 'confutes' also his former explanation of the question, in what way and by whom capitalised surplus value is realised. moreover, in refuting his own statements, bulgakov has only explained in somewhat greater detail what marx expressed in a single word when he called the hypothesis of a gold producer swallowing up the entire surplus value of society--'absurd'. admittedly, bulgakov's real solution and that of russian marxists in general who deal extensively with the problem must be sought elsewhere. just like tugan baranovski and ilyin [lenin], bulgakov underlines the fact that the opposing sceptics made a capital error with respect to the possibility of accumulation in analysing the value of the aggregate product. they, especially vorontsov, assumed that the aggregate social product consists in consumer goods, and they all started from the false premise that consumption is indeed the object of capitalist production. this, as the marxists now explain, is the source of the entire misunderstanding--of all the imaginary difficulties connected with the realisation of the surplus value, with which the sceptics racked their brains. 'this school created non-existent difficulties because of this mistaken conception. since the normal conditions of capitalist production presuppose that the capitalists' consumption fund is only a part of the surplus value, and the smaller part at that, the larger being set aside for the expansion of production, it is obvious that the difficulties imagined by this (the _populist_) school do not really exist.'[306] the unconcern with which bulgakov here ignores the real problem is striking. apparently it has not dawned on him that the question as to the ultimate beneficiaries, quite irrelevant so long as personal consumption of the entire surplus value is assumed, only becomes acute on the assumption of enlarged reproduction. all these 'imaginary difficulties' vanish, thanks to two discoveries of marx's which his russian pupils untiringly quote against their opponents. the first is the fact that, in terms of value, the social product is composed, not of _vâ + s_, but of _câ + vâ + s_. secondly, the ratio of _c_ to _v_ in this sum continually increases with the progress of capitalist production, and at the same time, the capitalised part of the surplus value as against that part of it that is consumed, is ever growing. on this basis, bulgakov establishes a complete theory of the relations between production and consumption in a capitalist society. as this theory plays such an important part for the russian marxists in general, and bulgakov in particular, it will be necessary to get better acquainted with it. 'consumption,' bulgakov says, 'the satisfaction of social needs, is but an incidental moment in the circulation of capital. the volume of production is determined by the volume of capital, and not by the amount of social requirements. not alone that the development of production is unaccompanied by a growth in consumption--the two are mutually antagonistic. capitalist production knows no other than effective consumption, but only such persons who draw either surplus value or labour wages can be effective consumers, and their purchasing power strictly corresponds to the amount of those revenues. yet we have seen that the fundamental evolutionary laws of capitalist production tend, despite the absolute increase, to diminish the relative size of variable capital as well as of the capitalists' consumption fund. we can say, then, _that the development of production diminishes consumption_.[307] the conditions of production and of consumption are thus in conflict. production cannot and does not expand to further consumption. expansion, however, is an inherent fundamental law of capitalist production and confronts every individual capitalist in the form of a stern command to compete. this contradiction is negligible in view of the fact that expanding production as such represents a market for additional products. "inherent contradictions are resolved by an extension of the outlying fields of production."'[308] (bulgakov here quotes a saying of marx which he has thoroughly misunderstood; we shall later have occasion to deal with it once more.) 'it has just been shown how this is possible.' (a reference to the analysis of the diagram of enlarged reproduction.) 'evidently, the greater share of the expansion is apportioned to department i, to the production, that is to say, of constant capital, and only a (relatively) smaller part to department ii which produces commodities for immediate consumption. this change in the relations of the two departments shows well enough what part is played by consumption in a capitalist society, and it indicates where we should expect to find the most important demand for capitalist commodities.'[309] 'even within the narrow limits of the profit motive and the crises, even on this strait and narrow path, capitalist production is capable of unlimited expansion, irrespective of, and even despite, a decrease in consumption. the russian literature frequently points out that in view of diminishing consumption a considerable increase of capitalist production is impossible without external markets, but this is due to a wrong evaluation of the part played by consumption in a capitalist society, the failure to appreciate that consumption is not the ultimate end of capitalist production. capitalist production does not exist by the grace of an increase in consumption but because of an extension of the outlying fields of production which in fact constitute the market for capitalist products. a whole progression of malthusian investigators, discontented with the superficial harmony doctrine of the school of say and ricardo, have slaved away at a solution of the hopeless undertaking: to find means of increasing consumption which the capitalist mode of production is bound to decrease. marx was the only one to analyse the real connections: he has shown that the growth of consumption is fatally lagging behind that of production, and must do so whatever "third persons" one might invent. consumption and its volume then should by no means be considered as establishing the immediate limits to the expansion of production. capitalist production atones by the crises for deviating from the true purpose of production, but it is independent of consumption. the expansion of production is alone limited by, and dependent upon, the volume of capital.'[310] the theory of bulgakov and tugan baranovski is here directly attributed to marx. in the eyes of the russian marxists, it is on the whole the direct consequence of marx's doctrine, of which it forms an organic part. on another occasion bulgakov says even more clearly that it is a faithful interpretation of marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction. once a country has embraced capitalist production, its internal movement develops along the following lines: 'the production of constant capital makes up the department i of social reproduction, thereby instituting an independent demand for consumption goods to the extent of both its own variable capital and the consumption fund of its capitalists. department ii in its turn starts the demand for the products of department i. _thus a closed circle is already formed at the initial stage of capitalist production, in which it depends on no external market but is self-sufficient and can grow, of itself, as it were, by means of accumulation._'[311] in the hands of the russian marxists this theory becomes the favourite stick with which to beat their opponents, the 'populist' sceptics, in the question of markets. we can only appreciate its daring to the full when we look at its amazing discrepancy with everyday practice, with all the known facts of capitalist economy. a thesis pronounced so triumphantly as the purest marxist gospel is even more deserving of our admiration when we consider that it is grounded in an extremely simple confusion. we shall have further occasion to deal with this confusion when we come to the doctrine of tugan baranovski. bulgakov further develops a completely erroneous theory of foreign commerce, based upon his misapprehension of the relations between consumption and production in capitalist economy. a picture of reproduction like the above in fact has no room for foreign commerce. if capitalism forms a 'closed circle' in every country from the very beginning, if, chasing its tail like a puppy and in complete 'self-sufficiency', it is able of itself to create an unlimited market for its products and can spur itself on to ever greater expansion, then every capitalist country as such must also be a closed and self-sufficient economic whole. in but a single respect would foreign commerce appear reasonable: to compensate, by imports from abroad, for certain deficiencies due to the soil and the climate, i.e. the import of raw materials or foodstuffs from sheer necessity. completely upsetting the thesis of the 'populists', bulgakov in fact advances a theory of international commerce among capitalist states which gives pride of place to the import of agricultural products, with industrial exports merely providing the requisite funds. international traffic in commodities does not here seem to flow from the character of the mode of production but from the natural conditions of the countries concerned. this theory at any rate has not been borrowed from marx but from the economic experts of the german bourgeoisie. just as struve took over from wagner and schaeffle his three empire theory, so bulgakov adopts from the late list (_r.i.p._) the division of states on the basis of 'agriculture' and 'mixed agriculture and manufacture', or rather adapts it, in deference to the times, to the categories of 'manufacture' and 'mixed manufacture and agriculture'. nature has afflicted the first category with a deficiency in raw materials and foodstuffs, making it thus dependent upon foreign commerce. the second category has been liberally endowed with all it needs; here foreign trade is of no account. the prototype of the first category is england, of the second--the u.s.a. the stoppage of foreign commerce would mean the economic death-blow to england, but only a temporary crisis in the u.s.a. with a guarantee of full recovery. 'production there is capable of unlimited expansion on the basis of the internal market.'[312] this theory, a hoary relic of german economics even now, has obviously not the least grasp of the interrelations obtaining in an international capitalist economy. it conceives of modern international trade in terms that may have been appropriate to the times of the phoenicians. just listen to the lecture of professor buecher: 'although the liberalist era has greatly facilitated international traffic, it would be a mistake to infer from this that the period of a national economy is nearing its end, to be replaced by a period of international economy.... granted that we see in europe to-day a number of small countries that are not independent nations in respect of their commodity supply, being compelled to import substantial amounts of their foodstuffs and luxuries, while their industrial productivity is in excess of the national needs and creates a permanent surplus for which employment must be found in alien spheres of consumption. yet although countries of industrial production and those producing raw materials exist side by side and depend upon one another, such "international division of labour" should not be regarded as a sign that mankind is about to attain to a higher stage of development which it would be proper to contrast, under the label of world economy, with the ... previous stages. no stage of economic development has ever permanently guaranteed full autonomy in the satisfaction of wants. every one of them has left certain gaps which had to be filled in by some means or other. so-called "international economy", on the other hand, has not, at any rate so far, engendered any phenomena which are essentially different from those of national economy, and we very much doubt that such phenomena will appear in the near future.'[313] as far as bulgakov is concerned, this conception at any rate results in an unexpected conclusion: his theory of the unlimited capacity for development of capitalism is confined to certain countries with favourable natural conditions. capitalism in england is foredoomed because the world market will be exhausted before long. in the u.s.a., india and russia it can look forward to an unlimited development because these countries are 'self-sufficient'. apart from these obvious peculiarities, bulgakov's arguments about foreign commerce again imply a fundamental misconception. against the sceptics, from sismondi to nikolayon, who believed that they had to take recourse to outside markets for the realisation of capitalist surplus value, he chiefly argues as follows: 'these experts obviously consider external commerce as a "bottomless pit" to swallow up in all eternity the surplus value which cannot be got rid of inside the country.' bulgakov for his part triumphantly points out that foreign commerce is indeed not a pit and certainly not a bottomless one, but rather appears as a double-edged sword, that exports always belong with imports, and that the two usually counterbalance one another. thus, whatever is pushed out over one border, will be brought back, in a changed use-form, over another. 'we must find room for the commodities that have been imported as an equivalent of those exported, within the bounds of the given market, and as this is impossible, _ex hypothesi_, it would only generate new difficulties to have recourse to an external demand.'[314] on another occasion he says that the way to realise the surplus value found by the russian 'populists', viz. external markets, 'is much less favourable than that discovered by malthus, v. kirchmann and vorontsov himself when he wrote the essay _on militarism and capitalism_'.[315] although bulgakov fervently copies marx's diagram of reproduction, he here exhibits no grasp whatever of the real problem towards which the sceptics from sismondi to nikolayon were groping their way. he denies that foreign commerce solves the difficulty as pretended, since it again brings the surplus value that has been disposed of into the country, although in a 'changed form'. in conformity with the crude picture of v. kirchmann and vorontsov, he thus believes the problem to be that of destroying a certain quantity of the surplus value, of wiping it from the face of the earth. it simply does not occur to him that the real problem is the realisation of the surplus value, the metamorphosis of commodities, in fact the 'changed form' of the surplus value. bulgakov thus finally arrives at the same goal as struve, though by a different route. he preaches the self-sufficiency of capitalist accumulation which swallows up its own product as kronos swallows up his children, and breeds ever more vigorously without help from outside. now only one further step is needed for marxism to revert to bourgeois economics, and this, as luck would have it, was taken by tugan baranovski. footnotes: [300] s. bulgakov, _on the markets of capitalist production. a study in theory_ (moscow, 1897), p. 15. [301] ibid., p. 32, footnote. [302] ibid., p. 27. [303] ibid., pp. 2-3. [304] _on the markets of capitalist production_, pp. 50, 55. [305] _on the markets of capitalist production_, p. 132 ff. [306] ibid., p. 20. [307] bulgakov's italics. [308] _capital_, vol. iii, p. 387. [309] bulgakov, op. cit., p. 161. [310] ibid., p. 167. [311] bulgakov, op. cit., p. 210 (our italics). [312] ibid., p. 199. [313] k. buecher; the rise of national economy (_die entstehung der volkswirtschaft_), 5th edition, p. 147. professor sombart's theory is the most recent contribution in this field. he argues that we are not moving towards an international economy but rather farther and farther away from it. 'i maintain, on the contrary, that commercial relations to-day do not form a stronger but rather a weaker link between the civilised nations, in relation to their economy as a whole. individual economy takes not more but rather less account of the world market than it did a hundred or fifty years ago. at least ... it would be wrong to assume that the relative importance of international relations with regard to modern political economy is increasing. the opposite is the case.' sombart scornfully rejects the assumption of a progressive international division of labour, of a growing need for outside markets owing to an inelastic home demand. he in his turn is convinced that 'the individual national economies will develop into ever more perfect microcosms and that the importance of the home market will increasingly surpass that of the world market for all branches of industry' (_die deutsche volkswirtschaft im 19. jahrhundert_, 2nd edition, 1909, pp. 399-420). this devastating discovery admittedly hinges on a full acceptance of the professor's peculiar conception which, for some reasons, only considers those as 'exporting countries' who pay for their imports with a surplus of agricultural products over and above their own needs, who pay 'with the soil'. in this scheme russia, rumania, the u.s.a. and the argentine are, but germany, england and belgium are not, 'exporting countries'. since capitalist development will sooner or later also claim the surplus of agricultural products for the home demand in russia and the u.s.a., it is evident that there will be fewer and fewer 'exporting countries' in the world--international economy will vanish.--another of sombart's discoveries is that great capitalist 'non-exporting' countries increasingly obtain 'free' imports in form of interest on exported capital--but the capital exports as well as exports of industrial commodities are of absolutely no account to professor sombart. 'in the course of time we shall probably get to a point where we import without exporting' (p. 422). modern, sensational, and precious! [314] bulgakov, op. cit., p. 132. [315] ibid., p. 236. a quite uncompromising version of the same view is given by v. ilyin [lenin]: 'the romanticists (as he calls the sceptics) argue as follows: the capitalists cannot consume the surplus value; therefore they must dispose of it abroad. i ask: do the capitalists perhaps give away their products to foreigners for nothing, throw it into the sea, maybe? if they sell it, it means that they obtain an equivalent. if they export certain goods, it means that they import others' (_economic studies and essays_, p. 2). as a matter of fact, his explanation of the part played by external commerce in capitalist production is far more correct than that of struve and bulgakov. _chapter xxiii_ tugan baranovski and his 'lack of proportion' we have left this theorist to the end, although he already developed his views in russian in 1894, i.e. before struve and bulgakov, partly because he only gave his theories their mature form in german at a later date,[316] and also because the conclusions he draws from the premises of the marxist critics are the most far-reaching in their implications. like bulgakov, tugan baranovski starts from marx's analysis of social reproduction which gave him the clue to this bewildering maze of problems. but while bulgakov, the enthusiastic disciple of marx, only sought to follow him faithfully and simply attributed his own conclusions to the master, tugan baranovski, on the other hand, lays down the law to marx who, in his opinion, did not know how to turn his brilliant exposition of the reproductive process to good account. tugan baranovski's most important general conclusion from marx's principles, the pivot of his whole theory, is that, contrary to the assumptions of the sceptics, capitalist accumulation is not only possible under the capitalist forms of revenue and consumption, but is, in fact, completely independent of both. it is not consumption, he says, but production itself which makes for the best market. production and the market are therefore the same, and since the expansion of production is unlimited in itself, the market, the capacity to absorb its products, has no limits either. 'the diagram quoted', he says, 'was to prove conclusively a postulate which, though simple enough, might easily give rise to objections, unless the process be adequately understood--the postulate, namely, that capitalist production creates a market for itself. so long as it is possible to expand social production, if the productive forces are adequate for this purpose, the proportionate division of social production must also bring about a corresponding expansion of the demand inasmuch as under such conditions all newly produced goods represent a newly created purchasing power for the acquisition of other goods. comparing simple reproduction of the social capital with its reproduction on a rising scale, we arrive at the most important conclusion that in capitalist economy the demand for commodities is in a sense independent of the total volume of social consumption. absurd as it may seem to "common-sense", it is yet possible that the volume of social consumption as a whole goes down while at the same time the aggregate social demand for commodities grows.'[317] and again further on: 'arising from the abstract analysis of the reproductive process of social capital we have formed the conclusion that nothing will be left over of the social product in view of the proportionate division of the social capital.'[318] accordingly tugan baranovski subjects marx's theory of crises to a revision which he claims to have developed from sismondi's 'over-consumption'. 'marx is in substantial agreement with the general view that the poverty of the workers, i.e. of the great majority of the population, makes it impossible to realise the products of an ever expanding capitalist production, since it causes a decline in demand. this opinion is definitely mistaken. we have seen that capitalist production creates its own market--consumption being only one of the moments of capitalist production. in a planned social production if the leaders of production were equipped with all _information_ about the demand and with the _power_ to transfer labour and capital freely from one branch of production to another, then, however low the level of social consumption, the supply of commodities would not exceed the demand.'[319] the only circumstance which periodically causes the market to be flooded is a lack of proportion in the enlargement of production. on this assumption, therefore, tugan baranovski describes the course of capitalist accumulation as follows: 'what would the workers ... produce if production were organised on proportionate lines? obviously their own means of subsistence and production. with what object? to expand production in the second year. the production of what products? again of means of production and subsistence for the workers--and so on _ad infinitum_.'[320] this game of question and answer, mind you, is not a form of self-mockery, it is meant in all seriousness. 'if the expansion of production has no practical limits, then we must assume that the expansion of markets is equally unlimited, for _if social production is proportionately organised, there is no limit to the expansion of the market other than the productive forces available_.'[321] since production thus creates its own demand, foreign commerce of capitalist states is also assigned that peculiar mechanistic function we have already met in bulgakov. a foreign market, for instance, is an absolute necessity for england. 'does not this prove that capitalist production creates a surplus product for which there is no room on the internal market? why, come to that, does england require an external market? the answer is not difficult: because a considerable part of england's purchasing power is expended on obtaining foreign commodities. the import of foreign commodities for the english home market also makes it essential to export english commodities abroad. since england cannot manage without importing from abroad, exports are a vital condition for that country, since without them she would not be able to pay for her imports.'[322] here again agricultural imports are described as a stimulating and decisive factor, quite in accordance with the scheme of the german professors. what, then, is the general line of reasoning on which tugan baranovski supports his daring solution of the problem of accumulation, the new revelation on the problem of crises and a whole lot of others? hard to believe, but quite incontrovertible for all that, tugan baranovski's proof consists exclusively and entirely--in marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction, no more no less. although he repeatedly refers rather pompously to his 'abstract analysis of the reproductive process of social capital', to the 'conclusive logic' of his analysis, this entire analysis is nothing but a copy of marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction, with a different set of figures. nowhere in the entire works of tugan baranovski shall we find a trace of any other argument. in marx's diagram, admittedly, accumulation, production, realisation and exchange run smoothly with clockwork precision, and no doubt this kind of 'accumulation' can continue _ad infinitum_, just as long, that is to say, as ink and paper do not run out. and it is this harmless written exercise with mathematical equations which tugan baranovski quite seriously considers a _demonstration_ of such a course in real events. 'the diagrams we have adduced are bound to prove conclusively that....' on another occasion he counters hobson, who is convinced that accumulation is impossible, with the following words: 'diagram no. 2 of the reproduction of social capital on a rising scale corresponds to the case of capital accumulation hobson has in mind. but does this diagram show a surplus product to come into being? far from it.'[323] hobson is refuted and the matter settled because 'in the diagram' no surplus product comes into being. admittedly, tugan baranovski knows quite well that in hard fact things do not work out so smoothly. there are continual fluctuations in the exchange relations and periodical crises. but these crises happen only because in the expansion of production the proper proportions are not maintained, because, that is to say, the proportions of 'diagram no. 2' are not observed in the first place. if they were, there would be no crisis, and capitalist production could get along as nicely as it does on paper, in every detail. tugan baranovski is committed to the view that we can ignore the crises if we consider the reproductive process as a continuous process. although the 'proportion' may be upset at any moment, yet on average it will always be re-established by different deviations, by price-fluctuations from day to day, and in the long run by periodical crises. that on the whole this 'proportion' is more or less maintained is proved by the fact that capitalist economy is still going strong--otherwise it would long ago have ended in chaos and collapse. in the long run, then, tugan baranovski's 'proportion' is observed by and large, and we must conclude that reality obeys 'diagram no. 2'. and since this diagram can be indefinitely extended, it follows that capitalist accumulation can also proceed _ad infinitum_. what is striking in all this is not tugan baranovski's conclusion that the diagram corresponds to the actual course of events--as we have seen, bulgakov also shared this belief; the really startling fact is that tugan baranovski sees no necessity for as much as _inquiring_ whether the diagram is correct, that, instead of proving the diagram, he considers this, the arithmetical exercise on paper, as proof of the actual state of affairs. bulgakov honestly tried to project marx's diagram on the real concrete relations of capitalist economy and of capitalist exchange; he endeavoured to overcome the difficulties resulting from it, though without success, it is true, remaining to the last involved with marx's analysis, which he himself recognised to be incomplete and fragmentary. but tugan baranovski does not need any proof, he does not greatly exercise his brains: since the arithmetical sums come out satisfactorily, and may be continued _ad lib._, this is to him proof that capitalist accumulation can also proceed without let or hindrance--provided the said 'proportion' obtains, which it will have to do by hook or by crook, as he himself would not dream of denying. tugan baranovski, however, has one indirect proof that the diagram with its strange results corresponds to, and truly reflects, reality. this is the fact that capitalist production, quite in accordance with marx's diagram, puts human consumption second to production, that it conceives of the former as a means and of the latter as an end in itself, just as it puts human labour, the 'worker', on a par with the machine. 'technical progress is expressed by the fact that the means of labour, the machine, increases more and more in importance as compared to living labour, to the worker himself. means of production play an ever growing part in the productive process and on the commodity market. compared to the machine, the worker recedes further into the background and the demand resulting from the consumption of the workers is also put into the shade by that which results from productive consumption by the means of production. the entire workings of capitalist economy take on the character of a mechanism existing on its own, as it were, in which human consumption appears as a simple moment of the reproductive process and the circulation of capitals.'[324] tugan baranovski considers this discovery as a fundamental law of the capitalist mode of production, which is confirmed by a quite tangible phenomenon: with the progress of capitalist development department i goes on growing relatively to, and at the expense of, department ii. it was marx himself who, as we all know, set up this law in which he grounded the schematic exposition of reproduction, though in the further development of his diagram he ignored subsequent alterations for simplicity's sake. this, the automatic growth of the producer goods as compared with the consumer goods department affords tugan baranovski the only objective proof of his theory: that in capitalist society human consumption becomes increasingly unimportant, and production more and more an end in itself. this thesis forms the corner-stone of his entire theoretical edifice. 'in all the industrial countries', he proclaims, 'we are confronted with the same type of development--the development of national economy everywhere follows the same fundamental law. the mining industry which creates the means of production for modern industry comes more and more to the fore. the relative decrease in the export of immediately consumable manufactured goods from britain is thus also an expression of the fundamental law governing capitalist development. the further technical progress advances, the more do consumer goods recede as compared with producer goods. human consumption plays an ever decreasing part as against the productive consumption of the means of production.'[325] although this 'fundamental law' like all his other 'fundamental' laws, in so far as they mean anything at all, is borrowed ready-made from marx, baranovski does not rest content with this and immediately proceeds to preach the marxist gospel to marx himself. scrabbling about like a blind hen, marx has turned up another pearl--tugan will give him that--only he does not know what to do with it. it needed a tugan baranovski to know how to make it useful to science, and in his hand the newly discovered law suddenly throws a new light on the whole workings of capitalist economy. this law of the expansion in the department of producer goods at the cost of that of consumer goods reveals clearly, concisely, exactly, and in measurable terms, that capitalist society attaches progressively less importance to human consumption, putting man on the same level as the means of production, and that marx was therefore completely wrong both in assuming that man alone, not the machine, too, can be the creator of surplus value, and in saying, further, that human consumption represents a limit for capitalist production which is bound to cause periodical crises in the present, and the collapse and terrible end of capitalist economy in the near future. in short, the 'fundamental law' governing the increase of producer as compared to consumer goods reflects the singular nature of capitalist society as a whole which marx had not understood and which to interpret happily fell to the lot of tugan baranovski. we have seen above the decisive part played by the 'fundamental law' of capital in the controversy between the russian marxists and the sceptics. bulgakov's remarks we already know; another marxist already referred to, vladimir ilyin, expresses himself in similar terms in his polemics against the 'populists': 'it is well known that the law of capitalist production consists in the fact that the constant capital grows more rapidly than the variable capital, that is to say an ever increasing part of the newly formed capital falls to the department of social production which creates producer goods. in consequence, this department is absolutely bound to grow more rapidly than the department creating consumer goods, that is to say, the very thing happens which sismondi declared to be "impossible", "dangerous", etc. in consequence, consumer goods make up a smaller and smaller share of the total bulk of capitalist production, and this is entirely in accordance with the historical "mission" of capitalism and its specific social structure: the former in fact consists in the development of the productive forces of society (production as an end in itself), and the latter prevents that the mass of the population should turn them to use.'[326] in this respect, of course, tugan baranovski goes even farther. with his love of paradox he actually permits himself the joke of submitting a mathematical proof that accumulation of capital and expansion of production are possible even if the absolute volume of production decreases. in this connection, karl kautsky has pointed out, he had recourse to a somewhat dubious scientific subterfuge, namely that he shaped his daring deductions exclusively for a specific moment: the transition from simple to enlarged reproduction--a moment which is exceptional even in theory, but certainly of no practical significance whatever.[327] as to tugan baranovski's 'fundamental law', kautsky declares it to be a mere illusion due to the fact that tugan baranovski considered the organisation of production only in the old countries of capitalist big industry. 'it is correct', kautsky says, 'that with a progressive division of labour, there will be comparatively fewer and fewer factories etc. for the production of goods direct for personal consumption, together with a relative increase in the number of those which supply both the former and one another with tools, machines, raw materials, transport facilities and so on. while in original peasant economy an enterprise that cultivated the flax also made the linen with its own tools and got it ready for human consumption, nowadays hundreds of enterprises may share in the manufacture of a single shirt, by producing raw cotton, iron rails, steam engines and railway trucks that bring it to port, and so on. with international division of labour it will happen that some countries--the old industrial countries--can only slowly expand their production for personal consumption, while making large strides in their production of producer goods which is much more decisive for the heartbeat of economic life than the production of consumer goods. from the point of view of the nation concerned, we might easily form the opinion that producer goods can be turned out on a constantly rising scale with a more rapid rate of increase than in the production of consumer goods, and that their production is not bound up with that of the latter.' the opinion, that producer goods can be produced independent of consumption, is of course a mirage of tugan baranovski's, typical of vulgar economics. not so the fact cited in support of this fallacy: the quicker growth of department i as compared with department ii is beyond dispute, not only in old industrial countries but wherever technical progress plays a decisive part in production. it is the foundation also of marx's fundamental law that the rate of profit tends to fall. yet in spite of it all, or rather precisely for this reason, it is a howler if bulgakov, ilyin and tugan baranovski imagine to have discovered in this law the essential nature of capitalist economy as an economic system in which production is an end in itself and human consumption merely incidental. the growth of the constant at the expense of the variable capital is only the capitalist expression of the general effects of increasing labour productivity. the formula _c_ greater than _v_ (_c > v_), translated from the language of capitalism into that of the social labour process, means only that the higher the productivity of human labour, the shorter the time needed to change a given quantity of means of production into finished products.[328] this is a universal law of human labour. it has been valid in all pre-capitalist forms of production and will also be valid in the future in a socialist order of society. in terms of the material use-form of society's aggregate product, this law must manifest itself by more and more social labour time being employed in the manufacture of producer than of consumer goods. in a planned and controlled social economy, organised on socialist lines, this transformation would in fact be more rapid even than it is in contemporary capitalist economy. in the first place, rational scientific techniques can only be applied on the largest scale when the barriers of private ownership in land are abolished. this will result in an immense revolution in vast provinces of production which will ultimately amount to a replacement of living labour by machine labour, and which will enable us to tackle technical jobs on a scale quite impossible under present day conditions. secondly, the general use of machinery in the productive process will be put on a new economic basis. at present the machine does not compete with living labour but only with that part of it that is paid. the cost of the labour power which is replaced by the machine represents the lowest limit of the applicability of the machine. which means that the capitalist becomes interested in a machine only when the costs of its production--assuming the same level of performance--amount to less than the wages of the workers it replaces. from the point of view of the social labour process which is the only one to matter in a socialist society, the machine competes not with the labour that is necessary to maintain the worker but with the labour he actually performs. in other words, in a society that is not governed by the profit motive but aims at saving human labour, the use of machinery is economically indicated just as soon as it can save more human labour than is necessary for making it, not to mention the many cases where the use of machinery is desirable even if it does not answer this economic minimum--for reasons of health and similar considerations, in the interest of the workers themselves. however that may be, the tension between the respective economic usefulness of the machine in (_a_) a capitalist, and (_b_) a socialist society is at least equal to the difference between labour and that part of it that is paid; it is, in other words, the precise equivalent of the whole capitalist surplus value. consequently, if the capitalist profit motive is abolished and a social organisation of labour introduced, the marginal use of the machine will suddenly be increased by the whole extent of the capitalist surplus value, so that an enormous field, not to be gauged as yet, will be open to the triumphal march of the machine. this would be tangible proof that the capitalist mode of production, alleged to spur on to the optimum technical development, in fact sets large social limits to technical progress, in form of the profit motive on which it is based. it would show that as soon as these limits are abolished, technical progress will develop such a powerful drive that the technical marvels of capitalist production will be child's play in comparison. in terms of the composition of the social product, this technical transformation can only mean that, compared to the production of consumer goods, the production of producer goods--measured in units of labour time--must increase more rapidly in a socialist society than it does even to-day. thus the relation between the two departments of social production which the russian marxists took to reveal typical capitalist baseness, the neglect of man's need to consume, rather proves to be the precise manifestation of the progressive subjection of nature to social labour, which will become even more striking when production is organised solely with a view to human needs. the only objective proof for tugan baranovski's 'fundamental law' thus collapses as a 'fundamental' confusion. his whole construction, including his 'new theory of crises', together with the 'lack of proportion', is reduced to its foundations on paper: a slavish copy of marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction. footnotes: [316] _studies on the theory and history of commercial crises in england_ (jena, 1901) and _theoretical foundations of marxism_ (1905). [317] _studies on the theory and history_ ..., p. 23. [318] ibid., p. 34. [319] ibid., p. 333. [320] ibid., p. 191. [321] ibid., p. 231, italics in the original. [322] ibid., p. 305. [323] _studies on the theory and history_ ..., p. 191 [324] ibid., p. 27. [325] _studies on the theory and history_ ..., p. 58. [326] v. ilyin [lenin] 'studies and essays in economics' (_oekonomische studien und artikel. zur charakterisierung des ã¶konomischen romantizismus_, st. petersburg, 1899), p. 20.--incidentally, the same author is responsible for the statement that enlarged reproduction begins only with capitalism. it quite escapes him that under conditions of simple reproduction, which he takes to be the rule for all pre-capitalist modes of production, we should probably never have advanced beyond the stage of the paleolithic scraper. [327] _die neue zeit_, vol. xx, part 2, _krisentheorien_, p. 116. kautsky's mathematical demonstration to tugan baranovski that consumption is bound to grow, and 'in the precise ratio as the bulk of producer goods in terms of value', calls for two comments: first, like marx, kautsky paid no attention to the progress in the productivity of labour so that consumption appears to have a relatively larger volume than it would in fact have. secondly, the increase in consumption to which kautsky here refers is only a consequence, a result of enlarged reproduction, it is neither its basis nor its aim; it is mainly due to the growth of the variable capital, the continual employment of additional workers. the upkeep of these workers, however, neither is nor ought to be the object of the expansion of reproduction--no more, for that matter, than the increasing personal consumption of the capitalist class. kautsky's argument no doubt refutes tugan baranovski's pet notion: the whimsy to construe enlarged reproduction with an absolute decrease in consumption. but for all that, he does not get anywhere near the fundamental problem, the relations between production and consumption under the aspect of the reproductive process, though we are told in another passage of the same work: 'with the capitalists growing richer, and the workers they exploit increasing in numbers, they constitute between them a market for the consumer goods produced by capitalist big industry which expands continually, yet it does not grow as rapidly as the accumulation of capital and the productivity of labour, and must therefore remain inadequate.' an additional market is required for these consumer goods, a market outside their own province, among those occupational groups and nations whose mode of production is not yet capitalistic. this market is found and also widens increasingly, but the expansion is again too slow, since the additional market is not nearly so elastic and capable of expansion as the capitalist productive process. as soon as capitalist production has developed to the big industry stage, as in england already in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, it is capable of expanding by leaps and bounds so as soon to out-distance all expansions of the market. every period of prosperity subsequent to a considerable extension of the market is thus from the outset doomed to an early end--the inevitable crisis. this, in brief, is the theory of crises established by marx, and, as far as we can see, generally accepted by the "orthodox" marxists' (ibid., p. 80). kautsky, however, is not interested in harmonising this conception of the realisation of the aggregate product with marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction, perhaps because, as our quotation also shows, he deals with the problem solely from the aspect of crises, regarding, in other words, the social product as a more or less homogeneous bulk of goods and ignoring the fact that it is differentiated in the reproductive process. l. bouding seems to come closer to the crucial point. in his brilliant review on tugan baranovski he gives the following formulation: 'with a single exception to be considered below, the existence of a surplus product in capitalist countries does not put a spoke in the wheel of production, not because production will be distributed more efficiently among the various spheres, or because the manufacture of machinery will replace that of cotton goods. the reason is rather that, capitalist development having begun sooner in some countries than in others, and because even to-day there are still some countries that have no developed capitalism, the capitalist countries in truth have at their disposal an outside market in which they can get rid of their products which they cannot consume themselves, no matter whether these are cotton or iron goods. we would by no means deny that it is significant if iron goods replace cotton goods as the main products of the principal capitalist countries. on the contrary, this change is of paramount importance, but its implications are rather different from those ascribed to it by tugan baranovski. it indicates the beginning of the end of capitalism. so long as the capitalist countries exported commodities for the purpose of consumption, there was still a hope for capitalism in these countries, and the question did not arise how much and how long the non-capitalist outside world would be able to absorb capitalist commodities. the growing share of machinery at the cost of consumer goods in what is exported from the main capitalist countries shows that areas which were formerly free of capitalism, and therefore served as a dumping-ground for its surplus products, are now drawn into the whirlpool of capitalism. it shows that, since they are developing a capitalism of their own, they can by themselves produce the consumer goods they need. at present they still require machinery produced by capitalist methods since they are only in the initial stages of capitalist development. but all too soon they will need them no longer. just as they now make their own cotton and other consumer goods, they will in future produce their own iron ware. then they will not only cease to absorb the surplus produce of the essentially capitalist countries, but they will themselves produce surplus products which they can place only with difficulty' (_die neue zeit_, vol. xxv, part 1, _mathematische formeln gegen karl marx_, p. 604). bouding here broaches an important aspect of the general relations pertaining to the development of international capitalism. further, as a logical consequence, he comes to the question of imperialism but unfortunately he finally puts the wrong kind of edge on his acute analysis by considering the whole of militarist production together with the system of exporting international capital to non-capitalist countries under the heading of 'reckless expenditure'.--we must say in parenthesis that bouding, just like kautsky, holds that the law of a quicker growth in the means-of-production department relative to the means-of-subsistence department is a delusion of tugan baranovski's. [328] 'apart from natural conditions, such as fertility of the soil, etc., and from the skill of independent and isolated producers (shown rather qualitatively in the genus than quantitatively in the mass of their products), the degree of productivity of labour, in a capitalist society, is expressed in the relative extent of the means of production that one labourer, during a given time, with the same tension of labour-power, turns into products. the mass of means of production which he thus transforms, increases with the productiveness of his labour. but those means of production play a double part. the increase of some is a consequence, that of the others a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. e.g., with the division of labour in manufacture, and with the use of machinery, more raw material is worked up in the same time and, therefore, a greater mass of raw material and auxiliary substances enter into the labour-process. that is the consequence of the increasing productivity of labour. on the other hand, the mass of machinery, beasts of burden, mineral manures, drainpipes, etc., is a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. so also is it with the means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces, means of transport, etc. but whether condition or consequence, the growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the labour-power incorporated with them, is an expression of the growing productiveness of labour. the increase of the latter appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective factor of the labour-process as compared with the objective factor' (_capital_, vol. i, pp. 635-6). and yet another passage: 'we have seen previously, that with the development of the productivity of labour, and therefore with the development of the capitalist mode of production, which develops the socially productive power of labour more than all previous modes of production, there is a steady increase of the mass of means of production, which are permanently embodied in the productive process as instruments of labour and perform their function in it for a longer or shorter time at repeated intervals (buildings, machinery, etc.); also, that this increase is at the same time the premise and result of the development of the productivity of social labour. it is especially capitalist production, which is characterised by relative as well as absolute growth of this sort of wealth' (_capital_, vol. i, chap. xxiii, 2). 'the material forms of existence of constant capital, the means of production, do not consist merely of such instruments of labour, but also of raw material in various stages of finished and of auxiliary substances. with the enlargement of the scale of production and the increase in the productivity of labour by co-operation, division of labour, machinery, etc., the mass of raw materials and auxiliary substances used in the daily process of reproduction, grows likewise' (_capital_, vol. ii, p. 160). _chapter xxiv_ the end of russian 'legalist' marxism the russian 'legalist' marxists, and tugan baranovski above all, can claim the credit, in their struggle against the doubters of capitalist accumulation, of having enriched economic theory by an application of marx's analysis of the social reproductive process and its schematic representation in the second volume of _capital_. but in view of the fact that this same tugan baranovski quite wrongly regarded said diagram as the solution to the problem instead of its formulation, his conclusions were bound to reverse the basic order of marx's doctrine. tugan baranovski's approach, according to which capitalist production can create unlimited markets and is independent of consumption, leads him straight on to the thesis of say-ricardo, i.e. a natural balance between production and consumption, between supply and demand. the difference is simply that those two only thought in terms of simple commodity circulation, whilst tugan baranovski applies the same doctrine to the circulation of capital. his theory of crises being caused by a 'lack of proportion' is in effect just a paraphrase of say's old trite absurdity: the over-production of any one commodity only goes to show under-production of another; and tugan baranovski simply translates this nonsense into the terminology used in marx's analysis of the reproductive process. even though he declares that, say notwithstanding, general over-production is quite possible in the light of the circulation of money which the former had entirely neglected, yet it is in fact this very same neglect, the besetting sin of say and ricardo in their dealings with the problem of crises which is the condition for his delightful manipulations with marx's diagram. as soon as it is applied to the circulation of money, 'diagram no. 2' begins to bristle with spikes and barbs. bulgakov was caught in these spikes when he attempted to follow up marx's interrupted analysis to a logical conclusion. this compound of forms of thought borrowed from marx with contents derived from say and ricardo is what tugan baranovski modestly calls his 'attempt at a synthesis between marx's theory and classical economics'. after almost a century, the theory of optimism which holds, in the face of petty-bourgeois doubts, that capitalist production is capable of development, returns, by way of marx's doctrine and its 'legalist' champions, to its point of departure, to say and ricardo. the three 'marxists' join forces with the bourgeois 'harmonists' of the golden age shortly before the fall when bourgeois economics was expelled from the garden of innocence--the circle is closed. there can be no doubt that the 'legalist' russian marxists achieved a victory over their opponents, the 'populists', but that victory was rather too thorough. in the heat of battle, all three--struve, bulgakov and tugan baranovski--overstated their case. the question was whether capitalism in general, and russian capitalism in particular, is capable of development; these marxists, however, proved this capacity to the extent of even offering theoretical proof that capitalism can go on for ever. assuming the accumulation of capital to be without limits, one has obviously proved the unlimited capacity of capitalism to survive! accumulation is the specifically capitalist method of expanding production, of furthering labour productivity, of developing the productive forces, of economic progress. if the capitalist mode of production can ensure boundless expansion of the productive forces, of economic progress, it is invincible indeed. the most important objective argument in support of socialist theory breaks down; socialist political action and the ideological import of the proletarian class struggle cease to reflect economic events, and socialism no longer appears an historical necessity. setting out to show that capitalism is possible, this trend of reasoning ends up by showing that socialism is impossible. the three russian marxists were fully aware that in the course of the dispute they had made an about-turn, though struve, in his enthusiasm for the cultural mission of capitalism, does not worry about giving up a useful warrant.[329] bulgakov tried to stop the gaps now made in socialist theory with another fragment of the same theory as best he could: he hoped that capitalist society might yet perish, in spite of the immanent balance between production and consumption, because of the declining profit rate. but it was he himself who finally cut away the ground from under this somewhat precarious comfort. forgetting the straw he had offered for the salvation of socialism, he turned on tugan baranovski with the teaching that, in the case of large capitals, the relative decline in the profit rate is compensated by the absolute growth of capital.[330] more consistent than the others, tugan baranovski finally with the crude joy of a barbarian destroys all objective economic arguments in support of socialism, thus building in his own spirit 'a more beautiful world' on an ethical foundation. 'the individual protests against an economic order which transforms the end (man) into a means (production) and the means (production) into an end.'[331] our three marxists demonstrated in person that the new foundations of socialism had been frail and jerry-built. they had hardly laid down the new basis for socialism before they turned their backs on it. when the masses of russia were staking their lives in the fight for the ideals of a social order to come, which would put the end (man) before the means (production), the 'individual' went into retreat, to find philosophical and ethical solace with kant. in actual fact, the 'legalist' bourgeois marxists ended up just where we should expect them to from their theoretical position--in the camp of bourgeois harmonies. footnotes: [329] struve says in the preface to the collection of his russian essays (published in 1901): 'in 1894, when the author published his "critical comments on the problem of economic development in russia", he inclined in philosophy towards positivism, in sociology and economics towards outspoken, though by no means orthodox, marxism. since then, the author no longer sees the whole truth in positivism and marxism which is grounded in it (!), they no longer fully determine his view of the world. malignant dogmatism which not only browbeats those who think differently, but spies upon their morals and psychology, regards such work as a mere "epicurean instability of mind". it cannot understand that criticism in its own right is to the living and thinking individual one of the most valuable rights. the author does not intend to renounce this right, though he might constantly be in danger of being indicted for "instability"' (_miscellany_, st. petersburg, 1901). [330] bulgakov, op. cit., p. 252. [331] tugan baranovski, _studies on the theory and history_ ..., p. 229. _section three_ the historical conditions of accumulation _chapter xxv_ contradictions within the diagram of enlarged reproduction in the first section, we ascertained that marx's diagram of accumulation does not solve the question of who is to benefit in the end by enlarged reproduction. if we take the diagram literally as it is set out at the end of volume ii, it appears that capitalist production would itself realise its entire surplus value, and that it would use the capitalised surplus value exclusively for its own needs. this impression is confirmed by marx's analysis of the diagram where he attempts to reduce the circulation within the diagram altogether to terms of money, that is to say to the effective demand of capitalists and workers--an attempt which in the end leads him to introduce the 'producer of money' as a _deus ex machina_. in addition, there is that most important passage in _capital_, volume i, which must be interpreted to mean the same. 'the annual production must in the first place furnish all those objects (use-values) from which the material components of capital, used up in the course of the year, have to be replaced. deducting these there remains the net or surplus-product, in which the surplus-value lies. and of what does this surplus-value consist? only of things destined to satisfy the wants and desires of the capitalist class, things which, consequently, enter into the consumption fund of the capitalists? were that the case, the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing but simple reproduction would ever take place. 'to accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product into capital. but we cannot, except by a miracle, convert into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour-process (i.e. means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the labourer (i.e. means of subsistence). consequently, a part of the annual surplus-labour must have been applied to the production of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity of these things required to replace the capital advanced. in one word, surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product, whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital.'[332] the following conditions of accumulation are here laid down: (1) the surplus value to be capitalised first comes into being in the natural form of capital (as additional means of production and additional means of subsistence for the workers). (2) the expansion of capitalist production is achieved exclusively by means of capitalist products, i.e. its own means of production and subsistence. (3) the limits of this expansion are each time determined in advance by the amount of surplus value which is to be capitalised in any given case; they cannot be extended, since they depend on the amount of the means of production and subsistence which make up the surplus product; neither can they be reduced, since a part of the surplus value could not then be employed in its natural form. deviations in either direction (above and below) may give rise to periodical fluctuations and crises--in this context, however, these may be ignored, because in general the surplus product to be capitalised must be equal to actual accumulation. (4) since capitalist production buys up its entire surplus product, there is no limit to the accumulation of capital. marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction adheres to these conditions. accumulation here takes its course, but it is not in the least indicated who is to benefit by it, who are the new consumers for whose sake production is ever more enlarged. the diagram assumes, say, the following course of events: the coal industry is expanded in order to expand the iron industry in order to expand the machine industry in order to expand the production of consumer goods. this last, in turn, is expanded to maintain both its own workers and the growing army of coal, iron and machine operatives. and so on _ad infinitum_. we are running in circles, quite in accordance with the theory of tugan baranovski. considered in isolation, marx's diagram does indeed permit of such an interpretation since he himself explicitly states time and again that he aims at presenting the process of accumulation of the aggregate capital in a society consisting solely of capitalists and workers. passages to this effect can be found in every volume of _capital_. in volume i, in the very chapter on 'the conversion of surplus-value into capital', he says: 'in order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.'[333] in volume ii, the assumption repeatedly returns; thus in chapter 17 on 'the circulation of surplus-value': 'now, there are only two points of departure: the capitalist and the labourer. all third classes of persons must either receive money for their services from these two classes, or, to the extent that they receive it without any equivalent services, they are joint owners of the surplus-value in the form of rent, interest, etc.... the capitalist class, then, remains the sole point of departure of the circulation of money.'[334] further, in the same chapter 'on the circulation of money in particular under assumption of accumulation': 'but the difficulty arises when we assume, not a partial, but a general accumulation of money-capital on the part of the capitalist class. apart from this class, there is, according to our assumption--the general and exclusive domination of capitalist production--no other class but the working class.'[335] and again in chapter 20: '... there are only two classes in this case, the working class disposing of their labour-power, and the capitalist class owning the social means of production and the money.'[336] in volume iii, marx says quite explicitly, when demonstrating the process of capitalist production as a whole: 'let us suppose that the whole society is composed only of industrial capitalists and wage workers. let us furthermore make exceptions of fluctuations of prices which prevent large portions of the total capital from reproducing themselves under average conditions and which, owing to the general interrelations of the entire process of reproduction, such as are developed particularly by credit, must always call forth general stoppages of a transient nature. let us also make abstraction of the bogus transactions and speculations, which the credit system favours. in that case, a crisis could be explained only by a disproportion of production in various branches, and by a disproportion of the consumption of the capitalists and the accumulation of their capitals. but as matters stand, the reproduction of the capitals invested in production depends largely upon the consuming power of the non-producing classes; while the consuming power of the labourers is handicapped partly by the laws of wages, partly by the fact that it can be exerted only so long as the labourers can be employed at a profit for the capitalist class.'[337] this last quotation refers to the question of crises with which we are not here concerned. it can leave no doubt, however, that the movement of the total capital, 'as matters stand', depends in marx's view on three categories of consumers only: the capitalists, the workers and the 'non-productive classes', i.e. the hangers-on of the capitalist class (king, parson, professor, prostitute, mercenary), of whom he quite rightly disposes in volume ii as the mere representatives of a derivative purchasing power, and thus the parasitic joint consumers of the surplus value or of the wage of labour. finally, in _theories of surplus value_,[338] marx formulates his general presuppositions with regard to accumulation as follows: 'here we have only to consider the forms through which capital passes during the various stages of its development. thus we do not set out the actual conditions of the real process of production, but always assume that the commodity is sold for what it is worth. we ignore the competition of capitalists and the credit system; we also leave out of account the actual constitution of society which never consists exclusively of the classes of workers and industrial capitalists, and where there is accordingly no strict division between producers and consumers. the first category (of consumers, whose revenues are partly of a secondary, not a primitive nature, derived from profits and the wage of labour) is much wider than the second category (of producers). therefore the manner in which it spends its income, and the extent of such income, effects very large modifications in the economic household, and especially so in the process of circulation and reproduction of capital.' speaking of the 'actual constitution of society', marx here also considers merely the parasitic joint consumers of surplus value and of the wage of labour, i.e. only the hangers-on of the principal categories of capitalist production. there can be no doubt, therefore, that marx wanted to demonstrate the process of accumulation in a society consisting exclusively of workers and capitalists, under the universal and exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production. on this assumption, however, his diagram does not permit of any other interpretation than that of production for production's sake. let us recall the second example of marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction: 1st year: i. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ means of production ii. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ means of subsistence ---- 9,000 2nd year: i. _5,417c + 1,083v + 1,083s = 7,583_ means of production ii. _1,583c + 316v + 316s = 2,215_ means of subsistence ---- 9,798 3rd year: i. _5,869c + 1,173v + 1,173s = 8,215_ means of production ii. _1,715c + 342v + 342s = 2,399_ means of subsistence ----- 10,614 4th year: i. _6,358c + 1,271v + 1,271s = 8,900_ means of production ii. _1,858c + 371v + 371s = 2,600_ means of subsistence ----- 11,500 here accumulation continues year after year without interruption, the capitalists in each case consuming half of the surplus value they have gained and capitalising the other half. in the process of capitalisation, the same technical foundation, that is to say the same organic composition or division into constant and variable capital and also the same rate of exploitation (always amounting to 100 per cent) is consecutively maintained for the additional capital as it was for the original capital. in accordance with marx's assumption in volume i of _capital_, the capitalised part of the surplus value first comes into being as additional means of production and as means of subsistence for the workers, both serving the purpose of an ever expanding production in the two departments. it cannot be discovered from the assumptions of marx's diagram for whose sake production is progressively expanded. admittedly, production and consumption increase simultaneously in a society. the consumption of the capitalists increases (in terms of value, in the first year it amounts to 500â + 142, in the second year to 542â + 158, in the third year to 586â + 171, and in the fourth year to 635â + 185); the consumption of the workers increases as well; the variable capital increasing year after year in both departments precisely indicates this growth in terms of value. and yet, the growing consumption of the capitalists can certainly not be regarded as the ultimate purpose of accumulation; on the contrary, there is no accumulation inasmuch as this consumption takes place and increases; personal consumption of the capitalists must be regarded as simple reproduction. rather, the question is: if, and in so far as, the capitalists do not themselves consume their products but 'practise abstinence', i.e. accumulate, for whose sake do they produce? even less can the maintenance of an ever larger army of workers be the ultimate purpose of continuous accumulation of capital. from the capitalist's point of view, the consumption of the workers is a consequence of accumulation, it is never its object or its condition, unless the principles (foundations) of capitalist production are to be turned upside down. and in any case, the workers can only consume that part of the product which corresponds to the variable capital, not a jot more. who, then, realises the permanently increasing surplus value? the diagram answers: the capitalists themselves and they alone.--and what do they do with this increasing surplus value?--the diagram replies: they use it for an ever greater expansion of their production. these capitalists are thus fanatical supporters of an expansion of production for production's sake. they see to it that ever more machines are built for the sake of building--with their help--ever more new machines. yet the upshot of all this is not accumulation of capital but an increasing production of producer goods to no purpose whatever. indeed, one must be as reckless as tugan baranovski, and rejoice as much in paradoxical statements, to assume that this untiring merry-go-round in thin air could be a faithful reflection in theory of capitalist reality, a true deduction from marx's doctrine.[339] besides the analysis of enlarged reproduction roughed out in _capital_, volume ii, the whole of marx's work, volume ii in particular, contains a most elaborate and lucid exposition of his general views regarding the typical course of capitalist accumulation. if we once fully understand this interpretation, the deficiencies of the diagram at the end of volume ii are immediately evident. if we examine critically the diagram of enlarged reproduction in the light of marx's theory, we find various contradictions between the two. to begin with, the diagram completely disregards the increasing productivity of labour. for it assumes that the composition of capital is the same in every year, that is to say, the technical basis of the productive process is not affected by accumulation. this procedure would be quite permissible in itself in order to simplify the analysis, but when we come to examine the concrete conditions for the realisation of the aggregate product, and for reproduction, then at least we must take into account, and make allowance for, changes in technique which are bound up with the process of capital accumulation. yet if we allow for improved productivity of labour, the material aggregate of the social product--both producer and consumer goods--will in consequence show a much more rapid increase in volume than is set forth in the diagram. this increase in the aggregate of use-values, moreover, indicates also a change in the value relationships. as marx argues so convincingly, basing his whole theory on this axiom, the progressive development of labour productivity reacts on both the composition of accumulating capital and the rate of surplus value so that they cannot remain constant under conditions of increasing accumulation of capital, as was assumed by the diagram. rather, if accumulation continues, _c_, the constant capital of both departments, must increase not only absolutely but also relatively to _vâ + c_ or the total new value (the social aspect of labour productivity); at the same time, constant capital and similarly the surplus value must increase relatively to the variable capital--in short, the rate of surplus value, i.e. the ratio between surplus value and variable capital, must similarly increase (the capitalist aspect of labour productivity). these changes need not, of course, occur annually, just as the terms of first, second and third year in marx's diagram do not necessarily refer to calendar years but may stand for any given period. finally, we may choose to assume that these alterations, both in the composition of capital and in the rate of surplus value, take place either in the first, third, fifth, seventh year, etc., or in the second, sixth and ninth year, etc. the important thing is only that they are allowed for somewhere and taken into account as periodical phenomena. if the diagram is amended accordingly, the result of this method of accumulation will be an increasing annual surplus in the consumer at the expense of producer goods. it is true that tugan baranovski conquers all difficulties on paper: he simply constructs a diagram with different proportions where year by year the variable capital decreases by 25 per cent. and since this arithmetical exercise is successful enough on paper, tugan triumphantly claims to have 'proved' that accumulation runs smoothly like clockwork, even if the absolute volume of consumption decreases. even he must admit in the end, however, that his assumption of such an absolute decrease of the variable capital is in striking contrast to reality. variable capital is in point of fact a growing quantity in all capitalist countries; only in relation to the even more rapid growth of constant capital can it be said to decrease. on the basis of what is actually happening, namely a greater yearly increase of constant capital as against that of variable capital, as well as a growing rate of surplus value, discrepancies must arise between the material composition of the social product and the composition of capital in terms of value. if, instead of the unchanging proportion of 5 to 1 between constant and variable capital, proposed by marx's diagram, we assume for instance that this increase of capital is accompanied by a progressive readjustment of its composition, the proportion between constant and variable in the second year being 6 to 1, in the third year 7 to 1, and in the fourth year 8 to 1--if we further assume that the rate of surplus value also increases progressively in accordance with the higher productivity of labour so that, in each case, we have the same amounts as those of the diagram, although, because of the relatively decreasing variable capital, the rate of surplus value does not remain constant at the original 100 per cent--and if finally we assume that one-half of the appropriated surplus value is capitalised in each case (excepting department ii where capitalisation exceeds 50 per cent, 184 out of 285 being capitalised during the first year), the result will be as follows: 1st year: i. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ means of production ii. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ means of subsistence 2nd year: i. _(5,428â 4/7)c + (1,071â 3/7)v + 1,083s = 7,583_ means of production ii. _(1,587â 5/7)c + (311â 2/7)v + 316s = 2,215_ means of subsistence 3rd year: i. _5,903c + 1,139v + 1,173s = 8,215_ means of production ii. _1,726c + 331v + 342s = 2,399_ means of subsistence 4th year: i. _6,424c + 1,205v + 1,271s = 8,900_ means of production ii. _1,879c + 350v + 371s = 2,600_ means of subsistence if this were a true picture of the accumulative process, the means of production (constant capital) would show a deficit of 16 in the second year, of 45 in the third year and of 88 in the fourth year; similarly, the means of subsistence would show a surplus of 16 in the second year, of 45 in the third year and of 88 in the fourth year. this negative balance for the means of production may be only imaginary in part. the increasing productivity of labour ensures that the means of production grow faster in bulk than in value, in other words: means of production become cheaper. as it is use value, i.e. the material elements of capital, which is relevant for technical improvements of production, we may assume that the quantity of means of production, in spite of their lower value, will suffice for progressive accumulation up to a certain point. this phenomenon amongst others also checks the actual decline of the rate of profit and modifies it to a mere tendency, though our example shows that the decline of the profit rate would not only be retarded but rather completely arrested. on the other hand, the same fact indicates a much larger surplus of unsaleable means of subsistence than is suggested by the amount of this surplus in terms of value. in that case, we should have to compel the capitalists of department ii to consume this surplus themselves, which marx makes them do on other occasions; in which case, and in so far as those capitalists are concerned, there would again be no accumulation but rather simple reproduction. alternatively, we should have to pronounce this whole surplus unsaleable. yet would it not be very easy to make good this loss in means of production which results from our example? we need only assume that the capitalists of department i capitalise their surplus value to a greater extent. indeed, there is no valid reason to suppose, as marx did, that the capitalists in each case add only half their surplus value to their capital. advances in labour productivity may well lead to progressively increasing capitalisation of surplus value. this assumption is the more permissible in that the cheapening of consumer goods for the capitalist class, too, is one of the consequences of technological progress. the relative decrease in the value of consumable income (as compared with the capitalised part) may then permit of the same or even a higher standard of living for this class. we might for instance make good the deficit in producer goods by transferring a corresponding part of surplus value i to the constant capital of this department, a part which would otherwise be consumed, since this surplus value, like all other products of the department, originally takes the form of producer goods; 11â 4/7 would then be transferred in the second year, 34 in the third year and 66 in the fourth year.[340] the solution of one difficulty, however, only adds to another. it goes without saying that if the capitalists of department i relatively restrict their consumption for purposes of accumulation, there will be a proportionately greater unsaleable residue of consumer goods in department ii; and thus it becomes more and more impossible to enlarge the constant capital even on its previous technological basis. if the capitalists in department i relatively restrict their consumption, the capitalists of department ii must relatively expand their personal consumption in proportion. the assumption of accelerated accumulation in department i would then have to be supplemented by that of retarded accumulation in department ii, technical progress in one department by regression in the other. these results are not due to mere chance. the adjustments we have tried out on marx's diagram are merely meant to illustrate that technical progress, as he himself admits, must be accompanied by a relative growth of constant as against variable capital. hence the necessity for a continuous revision of the ratio in which capitalised surplus value should be allotted to _c_ and _v_ respectively. in marx's diagram, however, the capitalists are in no position to make these allocations at will, since the material form of their surplus value predetermines the forms of capitalisation. since, according to marx's assumption, all expansion of production proceeds exclusively by means of its own, capitalistically produced means of production and subsistence,--since there are here no other places and forms of production and equally no other consumers than the two departments with their capitalists and workers,--and since, on the other hand, the smooth working of the accumulative process depends on that circulation should wholly absorb the aggregate product of both departments, the technological shape of enlarged reproduction is in consequence strictly prescribed by the material form of the surplus product. in other words: according to marx's diagram, the technical organisation of expanded production can and must be such as to make use of the aggregate surplus value produced in departments i and ii. in this connection we must bear in mind also that both departments can obtain their respective elements of production only by means of mutual exchange. thus the allocation to constant or variable capital of the surplus value earmarked for capitalisation, as well as the allotment of the additional means of production and subsistence (for the workers) to departments i and ii is given in advance and determined by the relations between the two departments of the diagram--both in material and in terms of value. these relations themselves, however, reflect a quite determinate technical organisation of production. this implies that, on the assumptions of marx's diagram, the techniques of production given in each case predetermine the techniques of the subsequent periods of enlarged reproduction, if accumulation continues. assuming, that is to say, in accordance with marx's diagram, that the expansion of capitalist production is always performed by means of the surplus value originally produced in form of capital, and further--or rather, conversely--that accumulation in one department is strictly dependent on accumulation in the other, then no change in the technical organisation of production can be possible in so far as the relation of _c_ to _v_ is concerned. we may put our point in yet another way: it is clear that a quicker growth of constant as compared with variable capital, i.e. the progressive metamorphosis of the organic composition of capital, must take the material form of faster expansion of production in department i as against production in department ii. yet marx's diagram, where strict conformity of the two departments is axiomatic, precludes any such fluctuations in the rate of accumulation in either department. it is quite legitimate to suppose that under the technical conditions of progressive accumulation, society would invest ever increasing portions of the surplus value earmarked for accumulation in department i rather than in department ii. both departments being only branches of the same social production--supplementary enterprises, if you like, of the 'aggregate capitalist',--such a progressive transfer, for technical reasons, from one department to the other of a part of the accumulated surplus value would be wholly feasible, especially as it corresponds to the actual practice of capital. yet this assumption is possible only so long as we envisage the surplus value earmarked for capitalisation purely in terms of value. the diagram, however, implies that this part of the surplus value appears in a definite material form which prescribes its capitalisation. thus the surplus value of department ii exists as means of subsistence, and since it is as such to be only realised by department i, this intended transfer of part of the capitalised surplus value from department ii to department i is ruled out, first because the material form of this surplus value is obviously useless to department i, and secondly because of the relations of exchange between the two departments which would in turn necessitate an equivalent transfer of the products of department i into department ii. it is therefore downright impossible to achieve a faster expansion of department i as against department ii within the limits of marx's diagram. however we may regard the technological alterations of the mode of production in the course of accumulation, they cannot be accomplished without upsetting the fundamental relations of marx's diagram. and further: according to marx's diagram, the capitalised surplus value is in each case immediately and completely absorbed by the productive process of the following period, for, apart from the portion earmarked for consumption, it has a natural form which allows of only one particular kind of employment. the diagram precludes the cashing and hoarding of surplus value in monetary form, as capital waiting to be invested. the free monetary forms of private capital, in marx's view, are first the money deposited gradually against the wear and tear of the fixed capital, for its eventual renewal; and secondly those amounts of money which represent realised surplus value but are still too small for investment. from the point of view of the aggregate capital, both these sources of free money capital are negligible. for if we assume that even a portion of the social surplus value is realised in monetary form for purposes of future investment, then at once the question arises: who has bought the material items of this surplus value, and who has provided the money? if the answer is: other capitalists, of course,--then, seeing that the capitalist class is represented in the diagram by the two departments, this portion of the surplus value must also be regarded as invested _de facto_, as employed in the productive process. and so we are back at immediate and complete investment of the surplus value. or does the freezing of one part of the surplus value in monetary form in the hands of certain capitalists mean that other capitalists will be left with a corresponding part of that surplus product in its material form? does the hoarding of realised surplus value by some imply that others are no longer able to realise their surplus value, since the capitalists are the only buyers of surplus value? this would mean, however, that the smooth course of reproduction and similarly of accumulation as described in the diagram would be interrupted. the result would be a crisis, due not to over-production but to a mere intention to accumulate, the kind of crisis envisaged by sismondi. in one passage of his _theories_,[341] marx explains in so many words that he 'is not at all concerned in this connection with an accumulation of capital greater than can be used in the productive process and might lie idle in the banks in monetary form, with the consequence of lending abroad'. marx refers these phenomena to the section on competition. yet it is important to establish that his diagram veritably precludes the formation of such additional capital. competition, however wide we may make the concept, obviously cannot create values, nor can it create capitals which are not themselves the result of the reproductive process. the diagram thus precludes the expansion of production by leaps and bounds. it only allows of a gradual expansion which keeps strictly in step with the formation of the surplus value and is based upon the identity between realisation and capitalisation of the surplus value. for the same reason, the diagram presumes an accumulation which affects both departments equally and therefore all branches of capitalist production. it precludes expansion of the demand by leaps and bounds just as much as it prevents a one-sided or precocious development of individual branches of capitalist production. thus the diagram assumes a movement of the aggregate capital which flies in the face of the actual course of capitalist development. at first sight, two facts are typical for the history of the capitalist mode of production: on the one hand the periodical expansion of the whole field of production by leaps and bounds, and on the other an extremely unequal development of the different branches of production. the history of the english cotton industry from the first quarter of the eighteenth to the seventies of the nineteenth century, the most characteristic chapter in the history of the capitalist mode of production, appears quite inexplicable from the point of view of marx's diagram. finally, the diagram contradicts the conception of the capitalist total process and its course as laid down by marx in _capital_, volume iii. this conception is based on the inherent contradiction between the unlimited expansive capacity of the productive forces and the limited expansive capacity of social consumption under conditions of capitalist distribution. let us see how marx describes this contradiction in detail in chapter 15 on 'unravelling the internal contradictions of the law' (of the declining profit rate): 'the creation of surplus-value, assuming the necessary means of production, or sufficient accumulation of capital, to be existing, finds no other limit but the labouring population, when the rate of surplus-value, that is, the intensity of exploitation, is given; and no other limit but the intensity of exploitation, when the labouring population is given. and the capitalist process of production consists essentially of the production of surplus-value, materialised in the surplus-product, which is that aliquot portion of the produced commodities, in which unpaid labour is materialised. it must never be forgotten, that the production of this surplus-value--and the re-conversion of a portion of it into capital, or accumulation, forms an indispensable part of this production of surplus-value--is the immediate purpose and the compelling motive of capitalist production. it will not do to represent capitalist production as something which it is not, that is to say, as a production having for its immediate purpose the consumption of goods, or the production of means of enjoyment for the capitalists. (and, of course, even less for the worker. r. l.) this would be overlooking the specific character of capitalist production, which reveals itself in its innermost essence. the creation of this surplus-value is the object of the direct process of production, and this process has no other limits than those mentioned above. as soon as the available quantity of surplus-value has been materialised in commodities, surplus-value has been produced. but this production of surplus-value is but the first act of the capitalist process of production, it merely terminates the act of direct production. capital has absorbed so much unpaid labour. with the development of the process, which expresses itself through a falling tendency of the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced is swelled to immense dimensions. now comes the second act of the process. the entire mass of commodities, the total product, which contains a portion which is to reproduce the constant and variable capital as well as a portion representing surplus-value, must be sold. if this is not done, or only partly accomplished, or only at prices which are below the prices of production, the labourer has been none the less exploited, but his exploitation does not realise as much for the capitalist. it may yield no surplus-value at all for him, or only realise a portion of the produced surplus-value, or it may even mean a partial or complete loss of his capital. the conditions of direct exploitation and those of the realisation of surplus-value are not identical. they are separated logically as well as by time and space. the first are only limited by the productive power of society, the last by the proportional relations of the various lines of production and by the consuming power of society. this last-named power is not determined either by the absolute productive power or by the absolute consuming power, but by the consuming power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduces the consumption of the great mass of the population to a variable minimum within more or less narrow limits. the consuming power is furthermore restricted by the tendency to accumulate, the greed for an expansion of capital and a production of surplus-value on an enlarged scale. this is a law of capitalist production imposed by incessant revolutions in the methods of production themselves, the resulting depreciation of existing capital, the general competitive struggle and the necessity of improving the product and expanding the scale of production, for the sake of self-preservation and on penalty of failure. the market must, therefore, be continually extended, so that its interrelations and the conditions regulating them assume more and more the form of a natural law independent of the producers and become ever more uncontrollable. this eternal contradiction seeks to balance itself by an expansion of the outlying fields of production. but to the extent that the productive power develops, it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest. on this self-contradictory basis it is no contradiction at all that there should be an excess of capital simultaneously with an excess of population. for while a combination of these two would indeed increase the mass of the produced surplus-value, it would at the same time intensify the contradiction between the conditions under which this surplus-value is produced and those under which it is realised.'[342] if we compare this description with the diagram of enlarged reproduction, the two are by no means in conformity. according to the diagram, there is no inherent contradiction between the production of the surplus value and its realisation, rather, the two are identical. the surplus value here from the very beginning comes into being in a natural form exclusively designed for the requirements of accumulation. in fact it leaves the place of production in the very form of additional capital, that is to say it is capable of realisation in the capitalist process of accumulation. the capitalists, as a class, see to it in advance that the surplus value they appropriate is produced entirely in that material form which will permit and ensure its employment for purposes of further accumulation. realisation and accumulation of the surplus value here are both aspects of the same process, they are logically identical. therefore according to the presentation of the reproductive process in the diagram, society's capacity to consume does not put a limit to production. here production automatically expands year by year, although the capacity of society for consumption has not gone beyond its 'antagonistic conditions of distribution'. this automatic continuation of expansion, of accumulation, truly is the 'law of capitalist production ... on penalty of failure'. yet according to the analysis in volume iii, 'the market must, therefore, be continually extended', 'the market' obviously transcending the consumption of capitalists and workers. and if tugan baranovski interprets the following passage 'this eternal contradiction seeks to balance itself by an expansion of the outlying fields of production' as if marx had meant production itself by 'outlying fields of production', he violates not only the spirit of the language but also marx's clear train of thought. the 'outlying fields of production' are clearly and unequivocally not production itself but consumption which 'must be continually extended'. the following passage in _theorien ã¼ber den mehrwert_, amongst others, sufficiently shows that marx had this in mind and nothing else: 'ricardo therefore consistently denies the necessity for an _expansion of the market_ to accompany the expansion of production and the growth of capital. the entire capital existing within a country can also be profitably used in that country. he therefore argues against adam smith who had set up his (ricardo's) opinion on the one hand but also contradicted it with his usual sure instinct.'[343] in yet another passage, marx clearly shows that tugan baranovski's notion of production for production's sake is wholly alien to him: 'besides, we have seen in volume ii part iii that a continuous circulation takes place between constant capital and constant capital (even without considering any accelerated accumulation), which is in so far independent of individual consumption, as it never enters into such consumption, but which is nevertheless definitely limited by it, because the production of constant capital never takes place for its own sake, but solely because more of this capital is needed in those spheres of production whose products pass into individual consumption.'[344] admittedly, in the diagram in volume ii, tugan baranovski's sole support, market and production coincide--they are one and the same. expansion of the market here means extended production, since production is said to be its own exclusive market--the consumption of the workers being an element of production, i.e. the reproduction of variable capital. therefore the limit for both the expansion of production and the extension of the market is one and the same: it is given by the volume of the social capital, or the stage of accumulation already attained. the greater the quantity of surplus value that has been extracted in the natural form of capital, the more can be accumulated; and the greater the volume of accumulation, the more surplus value can be invested in its material form of capital, i.e. the more can be realised. thus the diagram does not admit the contradiction outlined in the analysis of volume iii. in the process described by the diagram there is no need for a continual extension of the market beyond the consumption of capitalists and workers, nor is the limited social capacity for consumption an obstacle to the smooth course of production and its unlimited capacity for expansion. the diagram does indeed permit of crises but only because of a lack of proportion within production, because of a defective social control over the productive process. it precludes, however, the deep and fundamental antagonism between the capacity to consume and the capacity to produce in a capitalist society, a conflict resulting from the very accumulation of capital which periodically bursts out in crises and spurs capital on to a continual extension of the market. footnotes: [332] _capital_, vol. i, pp. 593-4. [333] ibid., p. 594, note 1. [334] op. cit., vol. ii, p. 384. [335] ibid., pp. 400-1. [336] ibid., p. 488. [337] _capital_, vol. iii, p. 568. [338] _theorien_ ..., vol. ii, part 2, 'the accumulation of capital and crises', p. 263. [339] 'it is never the original thinkers who draw the absurd conclusions. they leave that to the says and maccullochs' (_capital_, vol. ii, p. 451).--and--we might add--to the tugan baranovskis. [340] the figures result from the difference between the amounts of constant capital in department i under conditions of technical progress, and under marx's stable conditions. [341] _theorien ã¼ber den mehrwert_, vol. ii, part 2, p. 252. [342] _capital_, vol. iii, p. 285 ff. [343] _theorien_ ..., vol. ii, part 2, p. 305. [344] _capital_, vol. iii, p. 359. _chapter xxvi_ the reproduction of capital and its social setting marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction cannot explain the actual and historical process of accumulation. and why? because of the very premises of the diagram. the diagram sets out to describe the accumulative process on the assumption that the capitalists and workers are the sole agents of capitalist consumption. we have seen that marx consistently and deliberately assumes the universal and exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production as a theoretical premise of his analysis in all three volumes of _capital_. under these conditions, there can admittedly be no other classes of society than capitalists and workers; as the diagram has it, all 'third persons' of capitalist society--civil servants, the liberal professions, the clergy, etc.--must, as consumers, be counted in with these two classes, and preferably with the capitalist class. this axiom, however, is a theoretical contrivance--real life has never known a self-sufficient capitalist society under the exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production. this theoretical device is perfectly admissible so long as it merely helps to demonstrate the problem in its integrity and does not interfere with its very conditions. a case in point is the analysis of simple reproduction of the aggregate social capital, where the problem itself rests upon a fiction: in a society producing by capitalist methods, i.e. a society which creates surplus value, the whole of the latter is taken to be consumed by the capitalists who appropriate it. the object is to present the forms of social production and reproduction under these given conditions. here the very formulation of the problem implies that production knows no other consumers than capitalists and workers and thus strictly conforms to marx's premise: universal and exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production. the implications of both fictions are the same. similarly, it is quite legitimate to postulate absolute dominance of capital in an analysis of the accumulation of individual capitals, such as is given in _capital_, volume i. the reproduction of individual capitals is an element in total social reproduction but one which follows an independent course, contrary to the movements of the other elements. in consequence it will not do simply to take together the individual movements of the respective capitals in order to arrive at the total movement of social capital, since the latter is essentially different. the natural conditions of reproducing individual capitals therefore neither conform with one another, nor do they conform to the relations of the total capital. under normal conditions of circulation, every individual capital engages in the process of circulation and of accumulation entirely on its own account, depending upon others only in so far, of course, as it is compelled to find a market for its product and must find available the means of production it requires for its specific activities. whether the strata who afford this market and provide the necessary means of production are themselves capitalist producers or not is completely immaterial for the individual capital, although, in theory, the most favourable premise for analysing the accumulation of individual capital is the assumption that capitalist production has attained universal and exclusive domination and is the sole setting of this process.[345] now, however, the question arises whether the assumptions which were decisive in the case of individual capital, are also legitimate for the consideration of aggregate capital. 'we must now put the problem in this form: _given universal accumulation_, that is to say provided that in all branches of production there is greater or less accumulation of capital--which in fact is a condition of capitalist production, and which is just as natural to the capitalist _qua_ capitalist as it is natural to the miser to amass money (but which is also necessary for the perpetuation of capitalist production)--what are the _conditions_ of this universal accumulation, to what elements can it be reduced?' and the answer: '_the conditions for the accumulation of capital are precisely those which rule its original production and reproduction in general_: these conditions being that one part of the money buys labour and the other commodities (raw materials, machinery, etc.) ... accumulation of new capital can only proceed therefore under the same conditions under which already existing capital is reproduced.'[346] in real life the actual conditions for the accumulation of the aggregate capital are quite different from those prevailing for individual capitals and for simple reproduction. the problem amounts to this: if an increasing part of the surplus value is not consumed by the capitalists but employed in the expansion of production, what, then, are the forms of social reproduction? what is left of the social product after deductions for the replacement of the constant capital cannot, _ex hypothesi_, be absorbed by the consumption of the workers and capitalists--this being the main aspect of the problem--nor can the workers and capitalists themselves realise the aggregate product. they can always only realise the variable capital, that part of the constant capital which will be used up, and the part of the surplus value which will be consumed, but in this way they merely ensure that production can be renewed on its previous scale. the workers and capitalists themselves cannot possibly realise that part of the surplus value which is to be capitalised. therefore, the realisation of the surplus value for the purposes of accumulation is an impossible task for a society which consists solely of workers and capitalists. strangely enough, all theorists who analysed the problem of accumulation, from ricardo and sismondi to marx, started with the very assumption which makes their problem insoluble. a sure instinct that realisation of the surplus value requires 'third persons', that is to say consumers other than the immediate agents of capitalist production (i.e. workers and capitalists) led to all kinds of subterfuges: 'unproductive consumption' as presented by malthus in the person of the feudal landowner, by vorontsov in militarism, by struve in the 'liberal professions' and other hangers-on of the capitalist class; or else foreign trade is brought into play which proved a useful safety valve to all those who regarded accumulation with scepticism, from sismondi to nicolayon. because of these insoluble difficulties, others like v. kirchmann and rodbertus tried to do without accumulation altogether, or, like sismondi and his russian 'populist' followers, stressed the need for at least putting the dampers on accumulation as much as possible. the salient feature of the problem of accumulation, and the vulnerable point of earlier attempts to solve it, has only been shown up by marx's more profound analysis, his precise diagrammatic demonstration of the total reproductive process, and especially his inspired exposition of the problem of simple reproduction. yet he could not supply immediately a finished solution either, partly because he broke off his analysis almost as soon as he had begun it, and partly because he was then preoccupied, as we have shown, with denouncing the analysis of adam smith and thus rather lost sight of the main problem. in fact, he made the solution even more difficult by assuming the capitalist mode of production to prevail universally. nevertheless, a solution of the problem of accumulation, in harmony both with other parts of marx's doctrine and with the historical experience and daily practice of capitalism, is implied in marx's complete analysis of simple reproduction and his characterisation of the capitalist process as a whole which shows up its immanent contradictions and their development (in _capital_, vol. iii). in the light of this, the deficiencies of the diagram can be corrected. all the relations being, as it were, incomplete, a closer study of the diagram of enlarged reproduction will reveal that it points to some sort of organisation more advanced than purely capitalist production and accumulation. up to now we have only considered one aspect of enlarged reproduction, the problem of realising the surplus value, whose difficulties hitherto had claimed the sceptics' whole attention. realisation of the surplus value is doubtless a vital question of capitalist accumulation. it requires as its prime condition--ignoring, for simplicity's sake, the capitalists' fund of consumption altogether--that there should be strata of buyers outside capitalist society. buyers, it should be noted, not consumers, since the material form of the surplus value is quite irrelevant to its realisation. the decisive fact is that the surplus value cannot be realised by sale either to workers or to capitalists, but only if it is sold to such social organisations or strata whose own mode of production is not capitalistic. here we can conceive of two different cases: (1) capitalist production supplies consumer goods over and above its own requirements, the demand of its workers and capitalists, which are bought by non-capitalist strata and countries. the english cotton industry, for instance, during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, and to some extent even now, has been supplying cotton textiles to the peasants and petty-bourgeois townspeople of the european continent, and to the peasants of india, america, africa and so on. the enormous expansion of the english cotton industry was thus founded on consumption by non-capitalist strata and countries.[347] in england herself, this flourishing cotton industry called forth large-scale development in the production of industrial machinery (bobbins and weaving-looms), and further in the metal and coal industries and so on. in this instance, department ii realised its products to an increasing extent by sale to non-capitalist social strata, and by its own accumulation it created on its part an increasing demand for the home produce of department i, thus helping the latter to realise its surplus value and to increase its own accumulation. (2) conversely, capitalist production supplies means of production in excess of its own demand and finds buyers in non-capitalist countries. english industry, for instance, in the first half of the nineteenth century supplied materials for the construction of railroads in the american and australian states. (the building of railways cannot in itself be taken as evidence for the domination of capitalist production in a country. as a matter of fact, the railways in this case provided only one of the first conditions for the inauguration of capitalist production.) another example would be the german chemical industry which supplies means of production such as dyes in great quantities to asiatic, african and other countries whose own production is not capitalistic.[348] here department i realises its products in extra-capitalist circles. the resulting progressive expansion of department i gives rise to a corresponding expansion of department ii in the same (capitalistically producing) country in order to supply the means of subsistence for the growing army of workers in department i. each of these cases differs from marx's diagram. in one case, the product of department ii exceeds the needs of both departments, measured by the variable capital and the consumed part of the surplus value. in the second case, the product of department i exceeds the volume of constant capital in both departments, enlarged though it is for the purpose of expanding production. in both cases, the surplus value does not come into being in that natural form which would make its capitalisation in either department possible and necessary. these two prototypes continually overlap in real life, supplement each other and merge. in this contest, one point seems still obscure. the surplus of consumer goods, say cotton fabrics, which is sold to non-capitalist countries, does not exclusively represent surplus value, but, as a capitalist commodity, it embodies also constant and variable capital. it seems quite arbitrary to assume that just those commodities which are sold outside the capitalist strata of society should represent nothing but surplus value. on the other hand, department i clearly can in this case not only realise its surplus value but also accumulate, and that without requiring another market for its product than the two departments of capitalist production. yet both these objections are only apparent. all we need remember is that each component of the aggregate product represents a proportion of the total value, that under conditions of capitalist production not only the aggregate product but every single commodity contains surplus value; which consideration does not prevent the individual capitalist, however, from computing that the sale of his specific commodities must first reimburse him for his outlay on constant capital and secondly replace his variable capital (or, rather loosely, but in accordance with actual practice: it must first replace his fixed, and then his circulating capital); what then remains will go down as profit. similarly, we can divide the aggregate social product into three proportionate parts which, in terms of value, correspond to (1) the constant capital that has been used up in society, (2) the variable capital, and (3) the extracted surplus value. in the case of simple reproduction these proportions are also reflected in the material shape of the aggregate product: the constant capital materialises as means of production, the variable capital as means of subsistence for the workers, and the surplus value as means of subsistence for the capitalist. yet as we know, the concept of simple reproduction with consumption of the entire surplus value by the capitalists is a mere fiction. as for enlarged reproduction or accumulation, in marx's diagram the composition of the social product in terms of value is also strictly in proportion to its material form: the surplus value, or rather that part of it which is earmarked for capitalisation, has from the very beginning the form of material means of production and means of subsistence for the workers in a ratio appropriate to the expansion of production on a given technical basis. as we have seen, this conception, which is based upon the self-sufficiency and isolation of capitalist production, falls down as soon as we consider the realisation of the surplus value. if we assume, however, that the surplus value is realised outside the sphere of capitalist production, then its material form is independent of the requirements of capitalist production itself. its material form conforms to the requirements of those non-capitalist circles who help to realise it, that is to say, capitalist surplus value can take the form of consumer goods, e.g. cotton fabrics, or of means of production, e.g. materials for railway construction, as the case may be. if one department realises its surplus value by exporting its products, and with the ensuing expansion of production helps the other department to realise its surplus value on the home market, then the fact still remains that the _social_ surplus value must yet be taken as realised outside the two departments, either mediately or immediately. similar considerations enable the individual capitalist to realise his surplus value, even if the whole of his commodities can only replace either the variable or the constant capital of another capitalist. nor is the realisation of the surplus value the only vital aspect of reproduction. given that department i has disposed of its surplus value outside, thereby starting the process of accumulation, and further, that it can expect a new increase in the demand in non-capitalist circles, these two conditions add up to only half of what is required for accumulation. there is many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. the second requirement of accumulation is access to material elements necessary for expanding reproduction. seeing that we have just turned the surplus product of department i into money by getting rid of the surplus means of production to non-capitalist circles, from where are these material elements then to come? the transaction which is the portal for realising the surplus value is also, as it were, a backdoor out of which flies all possibility of converting this realised surplus value into productive capital--one leads to the nether regions and the other to the deep sea. let us take a closer look. here we use _c_ in both departments i and ii as if it were the entire constant capital in production. yet this we know is wrong. only for the sake of simplifying the diagram have we disregarded that the _c_ which figures in departments i and ii of the diagram is only part of the aggregate constant capital of society, that is to say that part which, circulating during one year, is used up and embodied in the products of one period of production. yet it would be perfectly absurd if capitalist production--or any other--would use up its entire constant capital and create it anew in every period of production. on the contrary, we assume that the whole mass of means of production, for the periodical total renewal of which the diagram provides in annual instalments--renewal of the used-up part--lies at the back of production as presented in the diagram. with progressing labour productivity and an expanding volume of production, this mass increases not only absolutely but also relatively to the part which is consumed in production in every case, together with a corresponding increase in the efficiency of the constant capital. it is the more intensive exploitation of this part of the constant capital, irrespective of its increase in value, which is of paramount importance for the expansion of production. 'in the extractive industries, mines, etc., the raw materials form no part of the capital advanced. the subject of labour is in this case not a product of previous labour, but is furnished by nature gratis, as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, etc. in these cases the constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments of labour, which can very well absorb an increased quantity of labour (day and night shifts of labourers, e.g.). all other things being equal, the mass and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labour expended. as on the first day of production, the original produce-formers, now turned into the creators of the material elements of capital--man and nature--still work together. thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant capital.--in agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased without the advance of more seed and manure. but this advance once made, the purely mechanical working of the soil itself produces a marvellous effect on the amount of the product. a greater quantity of labour, done by the same number of labourers as before, thus increases the fertility, without requiring any new advance in the instruments of labour. it is once again the direct action of man on nature which becomes an immediate source of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital. finally, in what is called manufacturing industry, every additional expenditure of labour presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure of raw materials, but not necessarily of instruments of labour. and as extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacturing industry with its raw materials and those of its instruments of labour, the additional product the former have created without additional advance of capital, tells also in favour of the latter.--general result: by incorporating with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labour-power and the land, capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude, or by the value and the mass of the means of production, already produced, in which it has its being.'[349] in addition, there is no obvious reason why means of production and consumer goods should be produced by capitalist methods alone. this assumption, for all marx used it as the corner-stone of his thesis, is in conformity neither with the daily practice, and the history, of capital, nor with the specific character of this mode of production. in the first half of the nineteenth century, a great part of the surplus value in england was produced in form of cotton fabrics. yet the material elements for the capitalisation of this surplus value, although they certainly represented a surplus product, still were by no means all capitalist surplus value, to mention only raw cotton from the slave states of the american union, or grain (a means of subsistence for the english workers) from the fields of serf-owning russia. how much capitalist accumulation depends upon means of production which are not produced by capitalist methods is shown for example by the cotton crisis in england during the american war of secession, when the cultivation of the plantations came to a standstill, or by the crisis of european linen-weaving during the war in the east, when flax could not be imported from serf-owning russia. we need only recall that imports of corn raised by peasants--i.e. not produced by capitalist methods--played a vital part in the feeding of industrial labour, as an element, that is to say, of variable capital, for a further illustration of the close ties between non-capitalist strata and the material elements necessary to the accumulation of capital. moreover, capitalist production, by its very nature, cannot be restricted to such means of production as are produced by capitalist methods. cheap elements of constant capital are essential to the individual capitalist who strives to increase his rate of profit. in addition, the very condition of continuous improvements in labour productivity as the most important method of increasing the rate of surplus value, is unrestricted utilisation of all substances and facilities afforded by nature and soil. to tolerate any restriction in this respect would be contrary to the very essence of capital, its whole mode of existence. after many centuries of development, the capitalist mode of production still constitutes only a fragment of total world production. even in the small continent of europe, where it now chiefly prevails, it has not yet succeeded in dominating entire branches of production, such as peasant agriculture and the independent handicrafts; the same holds true, further, for large parts of north america and for a number of regions in the other continents. in general, capitalist production has hitherto been confined mainly to the countries in the temperate zone, whilst it made comparatively little progress in the east, for instance, and the south. thus, if it were dependent exclusively on elements of production obtainable within such narrow limits, its present level and indeed its development in general would have been impossible. from the very beginning, the forms and laws of capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of productive forces. capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world, it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society. the problem of the material elements of capitalist accumulation, far from being solved by the material form of the surplus value that has been produced, takes on quite a different aspect. it becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of production, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to find productive employment for the surplus value it has realised. the process of accumulation, elastic and spasmodic as it is, requires inevitably free access to ever new areas of raw materials in case of need, both when imports from old sources fail or when social demand suddenly increases. when the war of secession interfered with the import of american cotton, causing the notorious 'cotton famine' in the lancashire district, new and immense cotton plantations sprang up in egypt almost at once, as if by magic. here it was oriental despotism, combined with an ancient system of bondage, which had created a sphere of activity for european capital. only capital with its technical resources can effect such a miraculous change in so short a time--but only on the pre-capitalist soil of more primitive social conditions can it develop the ascendancy necessary to achieve such miracles. another example of the same kind is the enormous increase in the world consumption of rubber which at present (1912) necessitates a supply of latex to the value of â£50,000,000 _per annum_. the economic basis for the production of raw materials is a primitive system of exploitation practised by european capital in the african colonies and in america, where the institutions of slavery and bondage are combined in various forms.[350] between the production of surplus value, then, and the subsequent period of accumulation, two separate transactions take place--that of realising the surplus value, i.e. of converting it into pure value, and that of transforming this pure value into productive capital. they are both dealings between capitalist production and the surrounding non-capitalist world. from the aspect both of realising the surplus value and of procuring the material elements of constant capital, international trade is a prime necessity for the historical existence of capitalism--an international trade which under actual conditions is essentially an exchange between capitalistic and non-capitalistic modes of production. hitherto we have considered accumulation solely with regard to surplus value and constant capital. the third element of accumulation is variable capital which increases with progressive accumulation. in marx's diagram, the social product contains ever more means of subsistence for the workers as the material form proper to this variable capital. the variable capital, however, is not really the means of subsistence for the workers but is in fact living labour for whose reproduction these means of subsistence are necessary. one of the fundamental conditions of accumulation is therefore a supply of living labour which can be mobilised by capital to meet its demands. this supply can be increased under favourable conditions--but only up to a certain point--by longer hours and more intensive work. both these methods of increasing the supply, however, do not enlarge the variable capital, or do so only to a small extent (e.g. payment for overtime). moreover, they are confined to definite and rather narrow limits which they cannot exceed owing to both natural and social causes. the increasing growth of variable capital which accompanies accumulation must therefore become manifest in ever greater numbers of employed labour. where can this additional labour be found? in his analysis of the accumulation of individual capital, marx gives the following answer: 'now in order to allow of these elements actually functioning as capital, the capitalist class requires additional labour. if the exploitation of the labourers already employed does not increase, either extensively or intensively, then additional labour-power must be found. for this the mechanism of capitalist production provides beforehand, by converting the working class into a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only for its maintenance, but for its increase. it is only necessary for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion of surplus-value into capital is complete.'[351] thus the increase in the variable capital is directly and exclusively attributed to the natural physical increase of a working class already dominated by capital. this is in strict conformity with the diagram of enlarged reproduction which recognises only the social classes of capitalists and workers, and regards the capitalist mode of production as exclusive and absolute. on these assumptions, the natural increase of the working class is the only source of extending the labour supply commanded by capital. this view, however, is contrary to the laws governing the process of accumulation. the natural propagation of the workers and the requirements of accumulating capital are not correlative in respect of time or quantity. marx himself has most brilliantly shown that natural propagation cannot keep up with the sudden expansive needs of capital. if natural propagation were the only foundation for the development of capital, accumulation, in its periodical swings from overstrain to exhaustion, could not continue, nor could the productive sphere expand by leaps and bounds, and accumulation itself would become impossible. the latter requires an unlimited freedom of movement in respect of the growth of variable capital equal to that which it enjoys with regard to the elements of constant capital--that is to say it must needs dispose over the supply of labour power without restriction. marx considers that this can be achieved by an 'industrial reserve army of workers'. his diagram of simple reproduction admittedly does not recognise such an army, nor could it have room for it, since the natural propagation of the capitalist wage proletariat cannot provide an industrial reserve army. labour for this army is recruited from social reservoirs outside the dominion of capital--it is drawn into the wage proletariat only if need arises. only the existence of non-capitalist groups and countries can guarantee such a supply of additional labour power for capitalist production. yet in his analysis of the industrial reserve army[352] marx only allows for (_a_) the displacement of older workers by machinery, (_b_) an influx of rural workers into the towns in consequence of the ascendancy of capitalist production in agriculture, (_c_) occasional labour that has dropped out of industry, and (_d_) finally the lowest residue of relative over-population, the paupers. all these categories are cast off by the capitalist system of production in some form or other, they constitute a wage proletariat that is worn out and made redundant one way or another. marx, obviously influenced by english conditions involving a high level of capitalist development, held that the rural workers who continually migrate to the towns belong to the wage proletariat, since they were formerly dominated by agricultural capital and now become subject to industrial capital. he ignores, however, the problem which is of paramount importance for conditions on the continent of europe, namely the sources from which this urban and rural proletariat is recruited: the continual process by which the rural and urban middle strata become proletarian with the decay of peasant economy and of small artisan enterprises, the very process, that is to say, of incessant transition from non-capitalist to capitalist conditions of a labour power that is cast off by pre-capitalist, not capitalist, modes of production in their progressive breakdown and disintegration. besides the decay of european peasants and artisans we must here also mention the disintegration of the most varied primitive forms of production and of social organisation in non-european countries. since capitalist production can develop fully only with complete access to all territories and climes, it can no more confine itself to the natural resources and productive forces of the temperate zone than it can manage with white labour alone. capital needs other races to exploit territories where the white man cannot work. it must be able to mobilise world labour power without restriction in order to utilise all productive forces of the globe--up to the limits imposed by a system of producing surplus value. this labour power, however, is in most cases rigidly bound by the traditional pre-capitalist organisation of production. it must first be 'set free' in order to be enrolled in the active army of capital. the emancipation of labour power from primitive social conditions and its absorption by the capitalist wage system is one of the indispensable historical bases of capitalism. for the first genuinely capitalist branch of production, the english cotton industry, not only the cotton of the southern states of the american union was essential, but also the millions of african negroes who were shipped to america to provide the labour power for the plantations, and who later, as a free proletariat, were incorporated in the class of wage labourers in a capitalist system.[353] obtaining the necessary labour power from non-capitalist societies, the so-called 'labour-problem', is ever more important for capital in the colonies. all possible methods of 'gentle compulsion' are applied to solving this problem, to transfer labour from former social systems to the command of capital. this endeavour leads to the most peculiar combinations between the modern wage system and primitive authority in the colonial countries.[354] this is a concrete example of the fact that capitalist production cannot manage without labour power from other social organisations. admittedly, marx dealt in detail with the process of appropriating non-capitalist means of production as well as with the transformation of the peasants into a capitalist proletariat. chapter xxiv of _capital_, vol. i, is devoted to describing the origin of the english proletariat, of the capitalistic agricultural tenant class and of industrial capital, with particular emphasis on the looting of colonial countries by european capital. yet we must bear in mind that all this is treated solely with a view to so-called primitive accumulation. for marx, these processes are incidental, illustrating merely the genesis of capital, its first appearance in the world; they are, as it were, travails by which the capitalist mode of production emerges from a feudal society. as soon as he comes to analyse the capitalist process of production and circulation, he reaffirms the universal and exclusive domination of capitalist production. yet, as we have seen, capitalism in its full maturity also depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata and social organisations existing side by side with it. it is not merely a question of a market for the additional product, as sismondi and the later critics and doubters of capitalist accumulation would have it. the interrelations of accumulating capital and non-capitalist forms of production extend over values as well as over material conditions, for constant capital, variable capital and surplus value alike. the non-capitalist mode of production is the given historical setting for this process. since the accumulation of capital becomes impossible in all points without non-capitalist surroundings, we cannot gain a true picture of it by assuming the exclusive and absolute domination of the capitalist mode of production. sismondi and his school, when they attributed their difficulties entirely to the problem of realising the surplus value, indeed revealed a proper sense for the conditions vital to accumulation. yet the conditions for augmenting the material elements of constant and variable capital are quite a different matter from those which govern the realisation of surplus value. capital needs the means of production and the labour power of the whole globe for untrammelled accumulation; it cannot manage without the natural resources and the labour power of all territories. seeing that the overwhelming majority of resources and labour power is in fact still in the orbit of pre-capitalist production--this being the historical _milieu_ of accumulation--capital must go all out to obtain ascendancy over these territories and social organisations. there is no _a priori_ reason why rubber plantations, say, run on capitalist lines, such as have been laid out in india, might not serve the ends of capitalist production just as well. yet if the countries of those branches of production are predominantly non-capitalist, capital will endeavour to establish domination over these countries and societies. and in fact, primitive conditions allow of a greater drive and of far more ruthless measures than could be tolerated under purely capitalist social conditions. it is quite different with the realisation of the surplus value. here outside consumers _qua_ other-than-capitalist are really essential. thus the immediate and vital conditions for capital and its accumulation is the existence of non-capitalist buyers of the surplus value, which is decisive to this extent for the problem of capitalist accumulation. whatever the theoretical aspects, the accumulation of capital, as an historical process, depends in every respect upon non-capitalist social strata and forms of social organisation. the solution to this problem which for almost a century has been the bone of contention in economic theory thus lies between the two extremes of the petty-bourgeois scepticism preached by sismondi, v. kirchmann, vorontsov and nicolayon, who flatly denied accumulation, and the crude optimism advocated by ricardo, say and tugan baranovski who believed in capital's unlimited capacity for parthenogenesis, with the logical corollary of capitalism-in-perpetuity. the solution envisaged by marx lies in the dialectical conflict that capitalism needs non-capitalist social organisations as the setting for its development, that it proceeds by assimilating the very conditions which alone can ensure its own existence. at this point we should revise the conceptions of internal and external markets which were so important in the controversy about accumulation. they are both vital to capitalist development and yet fundamentally different, though they must be conceived in terms of social economy rather than of political geography. in this light, the internal market is the capitalist market, production itself buying its own products and supplying its own elements of production. the external market is the non-capitalist social environment which absorbs the products of capitalism and supplies producer goods and labour power for capitalist production. thus, from the point of view of economics, germany and england traffic in commodities chiefly on an internal, capitalist market, whilst the give and take between german industry and german peasants is transacted on an external market as far as german capital is concerned. these concepts are strict and precise, as can be seen from the diagram of reproduction. internal capitalist trade can at best realise only certain quantities of value contained in the social product: the constant capital that has been used up, the variable capital, and the consumed part of the surplus value. that part of the surplus value, however, which is earmarked for capitalisation, must be realised elsewhere. if capitalisation of surplus value is the real motive force and aim of production, it must yet proceed within the limits given by the renewal of constant and variable capital (and also of the consumed part of the surplus value). further, with the international development of capitalism the capitalisation of surplus value becomes ever more urgent and precarious, and the substratum of constant and variable capital becomes an ever-growing mass--both absolutely and in relation to the surplus value. hence the contradictory phenomena that the old capitalist countries provide ever larger markets for, and become increasingly dependent upon, one another, yet on the other hand compete ever more ruthlessly for trade relations with non-capitalist countries.[355] the conditions for the capitalisation of surplus value clash increasingly with the conditions for the renewal of the aggregate capital--a conflict which, incidentally, is merely a counterpart of the contradictions implied in the law of a declining profit rate. footnotes: [345] 'if capital and the productivity of labour advance and the standard of capitalist production in general is on a higher level of development, then there is a correspondingly greater mass of commodities passing through the market from production to individual and industrial consumption, greater certainty that each particular capital will find the conditions for its reproduction available in the market' (_theorien_ ..., vol. ii, part 2, p. 251). [346] _theorien_ ..., vol. ii, part 2, p. 250: _akkumulation von kapital und krisen_. (the accumulation of capital and the crises.) marx's italics. [347] the following figures plainly show the importance of the cotton industry for english exports: in 1893, cotton exports to the amount of â£64,000,000 made up 23 per cent, and iron and other metal exports not quite 17 per cent, of the total export of manufactured goods, amounting to â£277,000,000 in all. in 1898, cotton exports to the amount of â£65,000,000 made up 28 per cent, and metal exports 22 per cent, of the total export of manufactured goods, amounting to â£233,400,000 in all. in comparison, the figures for the german empire show the following result: in 1898, cotton exports to the amount of â£11,595,000 made up 5â·75 per cent of the total exports, amounting to â£200,500,000. 5,250,000,000 yards of cotton bales were exported in 1898, 2,250,000,000 of them to india (e. jaffã©: _die englische baumwollindustrie und die organisation des exporthandels_. schmoller's jahrbã¼cher, vol. xxiv, p. 1033). in 1908, british exports of cotton yarn alone amounted to â£13,100,000 (_statist. jahrb. fã¼r das deutsche reich_, 1910). [348] one-fifth of german aniline dyes, and one-half of her indigo, goes to countries such as china, japan, british india, egypt, asiatic turkey, brazil, and mexico. [349] _capital_, vol. i, pp. 615-16. [350] the english blue book on the practices of the peruvian amazon company, ltd., in putumayo, has recently revealed that in the free republic of peru and without the political form of colonial supremacy, international capital can, to all intents and purposes, enslave the natives, so that it may appropriate the means of production of the primitive countries by exploitation on the greatest scale. since 1900, this company, financed by english and foreign capitalists, has thrown upon the london market approximately 4,000 tons of putumayo rubber. during this time, 30,000 natives were killed and most of the 10,000 survivors were crippled by beatings. [351] _capital_, vol. i, p. 594. similarly in another passage: 'one part of the surplus value, of the surplus means of subsistence produced, must then be converted into variable capital for the purpose of purchasing new labour. this can only be done if the number of workers grows or if their working time is prolonged.... this, however, cannot be considered a ready measure for accumulation. the working population can increase if formerly unproductive workers are transformed into productive ones, or if parts of the population who previously performed no work, such as women, children and paupers, are drawn into the process of production. here, however, we shall ignore this aspect. lastly, the working population can increase through an absolute increase in population. if accumulation is to proceed steadily and continuously, it must be grounded in an absolute growth of the population, though this may decline in comparison with the capital employed. an expanding population appears as the basis of accumulation conceived as a steady process. an indispensable condition for this is an average wage which is adequate not only to the reproduction of the working population but permits its continual increase' (_theorien ã¼ber den mehrwert_, vol. ii, part 2, in the chapter on 'transformation of revenue into capital' (_verwandlung von revenue in kapital_), p. 243). [352] _capital_, vol. i, pp. 642 ff. [353] a table published in the united states shortly before the war of secession contained the following data about the value of the annual production of the slave states and the number of slaves employed--for the greatest part on cotton plantations: _year_ _cotton: _slaves_ dollars_ 1800 5,200,000 893,041 1810 15,000,000 1,191,364 1820 26,300,000 1,543,688 1830 34,100,000 2,009,053 1840 74,600,000 2,487,255 1850 101,800,000 3,197,509 1851 137,300,000 3,200,000 (simons, 'class struggles in american history'. supplement to _neue zeit_ (_klassenkã¤mpfe in der geschichte amerikas._ _ergã¤nzungsheft der 'neuen zeit'_), nr. 7, p. 39.) [354] bryce, a former english minister, describes a model pattern of such hybrid forms in the south african diamond mines: 'the most striking sight at kimberley, and one unique in the world, is furnished by the two so-called "compounds" in which the natives who work in the mines are housed and confined. they are huge inclosures, unroofed, but covered with a wire netting to prevent anything from being thrown out of them over the walls, and with a subterranean entrance to the adjoining mine. the mine is worked on the system of three eight-hour shifts, so that the workman is never more than eight hours together underground. round the interior of the wall are built sheds or huts in which the natives live and sleep when not working. a hospital is also provided within the inclosure, as well as a school where the work-people can spend their leisure in learning to read and write. no spirits are sold.... every entrance is strictly guarded, and no visitors, white or native, are permitted, all supplies being obtained from the store within, kept by the company. the de beers mine compound contained at the time of my visit 2,600 natives, belonging to a great variety of tribes, so that here one could see specimens of the different native types from natal and pondoland, in the south, to the shores of lake tanganyika in the far north. they come from every quarter, attracted by the high wages, usually eighteen to thirty shillings a week, and remain for three months or more, and occasionally even for longer periods.... in the vast oblong compound one sees zulus from natal, fingos, pondos, tembus, basutos, bechuanas, gungunhana's subjects from the portuguese territories, some few matabili and makalaka; and plenty of zambesi boys from the tribes on both sides of that great river, a living ethnological collection such as can be examined nowhere else in south africa. even bushmen, or at least natives with some bushman blood in them, are not wanting. they live peaceably together, and amuse themselves in their several ways during their leisure hours. besides games of chance, we saw a game resembling "fox and geese" played with pebbles on a board; and music was being discoursed on two rude native instruments, the so-called "kaffir piano" made of pieces of iron of unequal length fastened side by side in a frame, and a still ruder contrivance of hard bits of wood, also of unequal size, which when struck by a stick emit different notes, the first beginning of a tune. a very few were reading or writing letters, the rest busy with their cooking or talking to one another. some tribes are incessant talkers, and in this strange mixing-pot of black men one may hear a dozen languages spoken as one passes from group to group' (james bryce, _impressions of south africa_, london, 1897, pp. 242 ff.). after several months of work, the negro as a rule leaves the mine with the wages he has saved up. he returns to his tribe, buying a wife with his money, and lives again his traditional life. cf. also in the same book the most lively description of the methods used in south africa to solve the 'labour-problem'. here we are told that the negroes are compelled to work in the mines and plantations of kimberley, witwatersrand, natal, matabeleland, by stripping them of all land and cattle, i.e. depriving them of their means of existence, by making them into proletarians and also demoralising them with alcohol. (later, when they are already within the 'enclosure' of capital, spirits, to which they have just been accustomed, are strictly prohibited--the object of exploitation must be kept fit for use.) finally, they are simply pressed into the wage system of capital by force, by imprisonment, and flogging. [355] the relations between germany and england provide a typical example. _chapter xxvii_ the struggle against natural economy capitalism arises and develops historically amidst a non-capitalist society. in western europe it is found at first in a feudal environment from which it in fact sprang--the system of bondage in rural areas and the guild system in the towns--and later, after having swallowed up the feudal system, it exists mainly in an environment of peasants and artisans, that is to say in a system of simple commodity production both in agriculture and trade. european capitalism is further surrounded by vast territories of non-european civilisation ranging over all levels of development, from the primitive communist hordes of nomad herdsmen, hunters and gatherers to commodity production by peasants and artisans. this is the setting for the accumulation of capital. we must distinguish three phases: the struggle of capital against natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for the remaining conditions of accumulation. the existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system. for all these purposes, forms of production based upon a natural economy are of no use to capital. in all social organisations where natural economy prevails, where there are primitive peasant communities with common ownership of the land, a feudal system of bondage or anything of this nature, economic organisation is essentially in response to the internal demand; and therefore there is no demand, or very little, for foreign goods, and also, as a rule, no surplus production, or at least no urgent need to dispose of surplus products. what is most important, however, is that, in any natural economy, production only goes on because both means of production and labour power are bound in one form or another. the communist peasant community no less than the feudal _corvã©e_ farm and similar institutions maintain their economic organisation by subjecting the labour power, and the most important means of production, the land, to the rule of law and custom. a natural economy thus confronts the requirements of capitalism at every turn with rigid barriers. capitalism must therefore always and everywhere fight a battle of annihilation against every historical form of natural economy that it encounters, whether this is slave economy, feudalism, primitive communism, or patriarchal peasant economy. the principal methods in this struggle are political force (revolution, war), oppressive taxation by the state, and cheap goods; they are partly applied simultaneously, and partly they succeed and complement one another. in europe, force assumed revolutionary forms in the fight against feudalism (this is the ultimate explanation of the bourgeois revolutions in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); in the non-european countries, where it fights more primitive social organisations, it assumes the forms of colonial policy. these methods, together with the systems of taxation applied in such cases, and commercial relations also, particularly with primitive communities, form an alliance in which political power and economic factors go hand in hand. in detail, capital in its struggle against societies with a natural economy pursues the following ends: (1) to gain immediate possession of important sources of productive forces such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc. (2) to 'liberate' labour power and to coerce it into service. (3) to introduce a commodity economy. (4) to separate trade and agriculture. at the time of primitive accumulation, i.e. at the end of the middle ages, when the history of capitalism in europe began, and right into the nineteenth century, dispossessing the peasants in england and on the continent was the most striking weapon in the large-scale transformation of means of production and labour power into capital. yet capital in power performs the same task even to-day, and on an even more important scale--by modern colonial policy. it is an illusion to hope that capitalism will ever be content with the means of production which it can acquire by way of commodity exchange. in this respect already, capital is faced with difficulties because vast tracts of the globe's surface are in the possession of social organisations that have no desire for commodity exchange or cannot, because of the entire social structure and the forms of ownership, offer for sale the productive forces in which capital is primarily interested. the most important of these productive forces is of course the land, its hidden mineral treasure, and its meadows, woods and water, and further the flocks of the primitive shepherd tribes. if capital were here to rely on the process of slow internal disintegration, it might take centuries. to wait patiently until the most important means of production could be alienated by trading in consequence of this process were tantamount to renouncing the productive forces of those territories altogether. hence derives the vital necessity for capitalism in its relations with colonial countries to appropriate the most important means of production. since the primitive associations of the natives are the strongest protection for their social organisations and for their material bases of existence, capital must begin by planning for the systematic destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development. with that we have passed beyond the stage of primitive accumulation; this process is still going on. each new colonial expansion is accompanied, as a matter of course, by a relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and labour power. any hope to restrict the accumulation of capital exclusively to 'peaceful competition', i.e. to regular commodity exchange such as takes place between capitalist producer-countries, rests on the pious belief that capital can accumulate without mediation of the productive forces and without the demand of more primitive organisations, and that it can rely upon the slow internal process of a disintegrating natural economy. accumulation, with its spasmodic expansion, can no more wait for, and be content with, a natural internal disintegration of non-capitalist formations and their transition to commodity economy, than it can wait for, and be content with, the natural increase of the working population. force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to the present day. from the point of view of the primitive societies involved, it is a matter of life or death; for them there can be no other attitude than opposition and fight to the finish--complete exhaustion and extinction. hence permanent occupation of the colonies by the military, native risings and punitive expeditions are the order of the day for any colonial regime. the method of violence, then, is the immediate consequence of the clash between capitalism and the organisations of a natural economy which would restrict accumulation. their means of production and their labour power no less than their demand for surplus products is necessary to capitalism. yet the latter is fully determined to undermine their independence as social units, in order to gain possession of their means of production and labour power and to convert them into commodity buyers. this method is the most profitable and gets the quickest results, and so it is also the most expedient for capital. in fact, it is invariably accompanied by a growing militarism whose importance for accumulation will be demonstrated below in another connection. british policy in india and french policy in algeria are the classical examples of the application of these methods by capitalism. the ancient economic organisations of the indians--the communist village community--had been preserved in their various forms throughout thousands of years, in spite of all the political disturbances during their long history. in the sixth century b.c. the persians invaded the indus basin and subjected part of the country. two centuries later the greeks entered and left behind them colonies, founded by alexander on the pattern of a completely alien civilisation. then the savage scythians invaded the country, and for centuries india remained under arab rule. later, the afghans swooped down from the iran mountains, until they, too, were expelled by the ruthless onslaught of tartar hordes. the mongols' path was marked by terror and destruction, by the massacre of entire villages--the peaceful countryside with the tender shoots of rice made crimson with blood. and still the indian village community survived. for none of the successive mahometan conquerors had ultimately violated the internal social life of the peasant masses and its traditional structure. they only set up their own governors in the provinces to supervise military organisation and to collect taxes from the population. all conquerors pursued the aim of dominating and exploiting the country, but none was interested in robbing the people of their productive forces and in destroying their social organisation. in the moghul empire, the peasant had to pay his annual tribute in kind to the foreign ruler, but he could live undisturbed in his village and could cultivate his rice on his _sholgura_ as his father had done before him. then came the british--and the blight of capitalist civilisation succeeded in disrupting the entire social organisation of the people; it achieved in a short time what thousands of years, what the sword of the nogaians, had failed to accomplish. the ultimate purpose of british capital was to possess itself of the very basis of existence of the indian community: the land. this end was served above all by the fiction, always popular with european colonisers, that all the land of a colony belongs to the political ruler. in retrospect, the british endowed the moghul and his governors with private ownership of the whole of india, in order to 'legalise' their succession. economic experts of the highest repute, such as james mill, duly supported this fiction with 'scientific' arguments, so in particular with the famous conclusion given below.[356] as early as 1793, the british in bengal gave landed property to all the _zemindars_ (mahometan tax collectors) or hereditary market superintendents they had found in their district so as to win native support for the campaign against the peasant masses. later they adopted the same policy for their new conquests in the agram province, in oudh, and in the central provinces. turbulent peasant risings followed in their wake, in the course of which tax collectors were frequently driven out. in the resulting confusion and anarchy british capitalists successfully appropriated a considerable portion of the land. the burden of taxation, moreover, was so ruthlessly increased that it swallowed up nearly all the fruits of the people's labour. this went to such an extreme in the delhi and allahabad districts that, according to the official evidence of the british tax authorities in 1854, the peasants found it convenient to lease or pledge their shares in land for the bare amount of the tax levied. under the auspices of this taxation, usury came to the indian village, to stay and eat up the social organisation from within like a canker.[357] in order to accelerate this process, the british passed a law that flew in the face of every tradition and justice known to the village community: compulsory alienation of village land for tax arrears. in vain did the old family associations try to protect themselves by options on their hereditary land and that of their kindred. there was no stopping the rot. every day another plot of land fell under the hammer; individual members withdrew from the family unit, and the peasants got into debt and lost their land. the british, with their wonted colonial stratagems, tried to make it appear as if their power policy, which had in fact undermined the traditional forms of landownership and brought about the collapse of the hindu peasant economy, had been dictated by the need to protect the peasants against native oppression and exploitation and served to safeguard their own interests.[358] britain artificially created a landed aristocracy at the expense of the ancient property-rights of the peasant communities, and then proceeded to 'protect' the peasants against these alleged oppressors, and to bring this illegally usurped land into the possession of british capitalists. thus large estates developed in india in a short time, while over large areas the peasants in their masses were turned into impoverished small tenants with a short-term lease. lastly, one more striking fact shows the typically capitalist method of colonisation. the british were the first conquerors of india who showed gross indifference to public utilities. arabs, afghans and mongols had organised and maintained magnificent works of canalisation in india, they had given the country a network of roads, spanned the rivers with bridges and seen to the sinking of wells. timur or tamerlane, the founder of the mongol dynasty in india, had a care for the cultivation of the soil, for irrigation, for the safety of the roads and the provision of food for travellers.[359] the primitive indian rajahs, the afghan or mongol conquerors, at any rate, in spite of occasional cruelty against individuals, made their mark with the marvellous constructions we can find to-day at every step and which seem to be the work of a giant race. 'the (east india) company which ruled india until 1858 did not make one spring accessible, did not sink a single well, nor build a bridge for the benefit of the indians.'[360] another witness, the englishman james wilson, says: 'in the madras province, no-one can help being impressed by the magnificent ancient irrigation systems, traces of which have been preserved until our time. locks and weirs dam the rivers into great lakes, from which canals distribute the water for an area of 60 or 70 miles around. on the large rivers, there are 30 to 40 of such weirs.... the rain water from the mountains was collected in artificial ponds, many of which still remain and boast circumferences of between 15 and 25 miles. nearly all these gigantic constructions were completed before the year 1750. during the war between the company and the mongol rulers--and, be it said, _during the entire period of our rule in india_--they have sadly decayed.'[361] no wonder! british capital had no object in giving the indian communities economic support or helping them to survive. quite the reverse, it aimed to destroy them and to deprive them of their productive forces. the unbridled greed, the acquisitive instinct of accumulation must by its very nature take every advantage of the 'conditions of the market' and can have no thought for the morrow. it is incapable of seeing far enough to recognise the value of the economic monuments of an older civilisation. (recently british engineers in egypt feverishly tried to discover traces of an ancient irrigation system rather like the one a stupid lack of vision had allowed to decay in india, when they were charged with damming the nile on a grand scale in furtherance of capitalist enterprise.) not until 1867 was england able to appreciate the results of her noble efforts in this respect. in the terrible famine of that year a million people were killed in the orissa district alone; and parliament was shocked into investigating the causes of the emergency. the british government has now introduced administrative measures in an attempt to save the peasant from usury. the punjab alienation act of 1900 made it illegal to sell or mortgage peasant lands to persons other than of the peasant caste, though exceptions can be made in individual cases, subject to the tax collector's approval.[362] having deliberately disrupted the protecting ties of the ancient hindu social associations, after having nurtured a system of usury where nothing is thought of a 15 per cent charge of interest, the british now entrust the ruined indian peasant to the tender care of the exchequer and its officials, under the 'protection', that is to say, of those draining him of his livelihood. next to tormented british india, algeria under french rule claims pride of place in the annals of capitalist colonisation. when the french conquered algeria, ancient social and economic institutions prevailed among the arab-kabyle population. these had been preserved until the nineteenth century, and in spite of the long and turbulent history of the country they survive in part even to the present day. private property may have existed no doubt in the towns, among the moors and jews, among merchants, artisans and usurers. large rural areas may have been seized by the state under turkish suzerainty--yet nearly half of the productive land is jointly held by arab and kabyle tribes who still keep up the ancient patriarchal customs. many arab families led the same kind of nomad life in the nineteenth century as they had done since time immemorial, an existence that appears restless and irregular only to the superficial observer, but one that is in fact strictly regulated and extremely monotonous. in summer they were wont, man, woman and child, to take their herds and tents and migrate to the sea-swept shores of the tell district; and in the winter they would move back again to the protective warmth of the desert. they travelled along definite routes, and the summer and winter stations were fixed for every tribe and family. the fields of those arabs who had settled on the land were in most cases the joint property of the clans, and the great kabyle family associations also lived according to old traditional rules under the patriarchal guidance of their elected heads. the women would take turns for household duties; a matriarch, again elected by the family, being in complete charge of the clan's domestic affairs, or else the women taking turns of duty. this organisation of the kabyle clans on the fringe of the african desert bears a startling resemblance to that of the famous southern slavonic _zadruga_--not only the fields but all the tools, weapons and monies, all that the members acquire or need for their work, are communal property of the clan. personal property is confined to one suit of clothing, and in the case of a woman to the dresses and ornaments of her dowry. more valuable attire and jewels, however, are considered common property, and individuals were allowed to use them only if the whole family approved. if the clan was not too numerous, meals were taken at a common table; the women took it in turns to cook, but the eldest were entrusted with the dishing out. if a family circle was too large, the head of the family would each month ration out strictly proportionate quantities of uncooked food to the individual families who then prepared them. these communities were bound together by close ties of kinship, mutual assistance and equality, and a patriarch would implore his sons on his deathbed to remain faithful to the family.[363] these social relations were already seriously impaired by the rule of the turks, established in algeria in the sixteenth century. yet the turkish exchequer had by no means confiscated all the land. that is a legend invented by the french at a much later date. indeed, only a european mind is capable of such a flight of fancy which is contrary to the entire economic foundation of islam both in theory and practice. in truth, the facts were quite different. the turks did not touch the communal fields of the village communities. they merely confiscated a great part of uncultivated land from the clans and converted it into crownland under turkish local administrators (_beyliks_). the state worked these lands in part with native labour, and in part they were leased out on rent or against payment in kind. further the turks took advantage of every revolt of the subjected families and of every disturbance in the country to add to their possessions by large-scale confiscation of land, either for military establishments or for public auction, when most of it went to turkish or other usurers. to escape from the burden of taxation and confiscation, many peasants placed themselves under the protection of the church, just as they had done in medieval germany. hence considerable areas became church-property. all these changes finally resulted in the following distribution of algerian land at the time of the french conquest: crownlands occupied nearly 3,750,000 acres, and a further 7,500,000 acres of uncultivated land as common property of all the faithful (_bled-el-islam_). 7,500,000 acres had been privately owned by the berbers since roman times, and under turkish rule a further 3,750,000 acres had come into private ownership, a mere 12,500,000 acres remaining communal property of individual arab clans. in the sahara, some of the 7,500,000 acres fertile land near the sahara oases was communally owned by the clans and some belonged to private owners. the remaining 57,000,000 acres were mainly waste land. with their conquest of algeria, the french made a great ado about their work of civilisation, since the country, having shaken off the turkish yoke at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was harbouring the pirates who infested the mediterranean and trafficked in christian slaves. spain and the north american union in particular, themselves at that time slave traders on no mean scale, declared relentless war on this moslem iniquity. france, in the very throes of the great revolution, proclaimed a crusade against algerian anarchy. her subjection of that country was carried through under the slogans of 'combating slavery' and 'instituting orderly and civilised conditions'. yet practice was soon to show what was at the bottom of it all. it is common knowledge that in the forty years following the subjection of algeria, no european state suffered so many changes in its political system as france: the restoration of the monarchy was followed by the july revolution and the reign of the 'citizen king', and this was succeeded by the february revolution, the second republic, the second empire, and finally, after the disaster of 1870, by the third republic. in turn, the aristocracy, high finance, petty bourgeoisie and the large middle classes in general gained political ascendancy. yet french policy in algeria remained undeflected by this succession of events; it pursued a single aim from beginning to end; at the fringe of the african desert, it demonstrated plainly that all the political revolutions in nineteenth-century france centred in a single basic interest: the rule of a capitalist bourgeoisie and its institutions of ownership. 'the bill submitted for your consideration', said deputy humbert on june 30, 1873, in the session of the french national assembly as spokesman for the commission for regulating agrarian conditions in algeria, 'is but the crowning touch to an edifice well-founded on a whole series of ordinances, edicts, laws and decrees of the senate which together and severally have as the same object: the establishment of private property among the arabs.' in spite of the ups and downs of internal french politics french colonial policy persevered for fifty years in its systematic and deliberate efforts to destroy and disrupt communal property. it served two distinct purposes: the break-up of communal property was primarily intended to smash the social power of the arab family associations and to quell their stubborn resistance against the french yoke, in the course of which there were innumerable risings so that, in spite of france's military superiority, the country was in a continual state of war.[364] secondly, communal property had to be disrupted in order to gain the economic assets of the conquered country; the arabs, that is to say, had to be deprived of the land they had owned for a thousand years, so that french capitalists could get it. once again the fiction we know so well, that under moslem law all land belongs to the ruler, was brought into play. just as the english had done in british india, so louis philippe's governors in algeria declared the existence of communal property owned by the clan to be 'impossible'. this fiction served as an excuse to claim for the state most of the uncultivated areas, and especially the commons, woods and meadows, and to use them for purposes of colonisation. a complete system of settlement developed, the so-called _cantonments_ which settled french colonists on the clan land and herded the tribes into a small area. under the decrees of 1830, 1831, 1840, 1844, 1845 and 1846 these thefts of arab family land were legalised. yet this system of settlement did not actually further colonisation; it only bred wild speculation and usury. in most instances the arabs managed to buy back the land that had been taken from them, although they were thus incurring heavy debts. french methods of oppressive taxation had the same tendency, in particular the law of june 16, 1851, proclaiming all forests to be state property, which robbed the natives of 6,000,000 acres of pasture and brushwood, and took away the prime essential for animal husbandry. this spate of laws, ordinances and regulations wrought havoc with the ownership of land in the country. under the prevailing condition of feverish speculation in land, many natives sold their estates to the french in the hope of ultimately recovering them. quite often they sold the same plot to two or three buyers at a time, and what is more, it was quite often inalienable family land and did not even belong to them. a company of speculators from rouen, e.g., believed that they had bought 50,000 acres, but in fact they had only acquired a disputed title to 3,425 acres. there followed an infinite number of lawsuits in which the french courts supported on principle all partitions and claims of the buyers. in these uncertain conditions, speculation, usury and anarchy were rife. but although the introduction of french colonists in large numbers among the arab population had aimed at securing support for the french government, this scheme failed miserably. thus, under the second empire, french policy tried another tack. the government, with its european lack of vision, had stubbornly denied the existence of communal property for thirty years, but it had learned better at last. by a single stroke of the pen, joint family property was officially recognised and condemned to be broken up. this is the double significance of the decree of the senate dated april 22, 1864. general allard declared in the senate: 'the government does not lose sight of the fact that the general aim of its policy is to weaken the influence of the tribal chieftains and to dissolve the family associations. by this means, it will sweep away the last remnants of feudalism [_sic!_] defended by the opponents of the government bill.... the surest method of accelerating the process of dissolving the family associations will be to institute private property and to settle european colonists among the arab families.'[365] the law of 1863 created special commissions for cutting up the landed estates, consisting of the chairman, either a brigadier-general or colonel, one _sous-prã©fet_, one representative of the arab military authorities and an official bailiff. these natural experts on african economics and social conditions were faced with the threefold task, first of determining the precise boundaries of the great family estates, secondly to distribute the estates of each clan among its various branches, and finally to break up this family land into separate private allotments. this expedition of the brigadiers into the interior of africa duly took place. the commissions proceeded to their destinations. they were to combine the office of judge in all land disputes with that of surveyor and land distributor, the final decision resting with the governor-general of algeria. ten years' valiant efforts by the commissions yielded the following result: between 1863 and 1873, of 700 hereditary estates, 400 were shared out among the branches of each clan, and the foundations for future inequalities between great landed estates and small allotments were thus laid. one family, in fact, might receive between 2â·5 and 10 acres, while another might get as much as 250 or even 450 acres, depending on the size of the estate and the number of collaterals within the clan. partition, however, stopped at that point. arab customs presented unsurmountable difficulties to a further division of family land. in spite of colonels and brigadiers, french policy had again failed in its object to create private property for transfer to the french. but the third republic, an undisguised regime of the bourgeoisie, had the courage and the cynicism to go straight for its goal and to attack the problem from the other end, disdaining the preliminaries of the second empire. in 1873, the national assembly worked out a law with the avowed intention immediately to split up the entire estates of all the 700 arab clans, and forcibly to institute private property in the shortest possible time. desperate conditions in the colony were the pretext for this measure. it had taken the great indian famine of 1866 to awaken the british public to the marvellous exploits of british colonial policy and to call for a parliamentary investigation; and similarly, europe was alarmed at the end of the sixties by the crying needs of algeria where more than forty years of french rule culminated in wide-spread famine and a disastrous mortality rate among the arabs. a commission of inquiry was set up to recommend new legislation with which to bless the arabs: it was unanimously resolved that there was only one life-buoy for them--the institution of private property; that alone could save the arab from destitution, since he would then always be able to sell or mortgage his land. it was decided therefore, that the only means of alleviating the distress of the arabs, deeply involved in debts as they were because of the french land robberies and oppressive taxation, was to deliver them completely into the hands of the usurers. this farce was expounded in all seriousness before the national assembly and was accepted with equal gravity by that worthy body. the 'victors' of the paris commune flaunted their brazenness. in the national assembly, two arguments in particular served to support the new law: those in favour of the bill emphasised over and over again that the arabs themselves urgently desired the introduction of private property. and so they did, or rather the algerian land speculators and usurers did, since they were vitally interested in 'liberating' their victims from the protection of the family ties. as long as moslem law prevailed in algeria, hereditary clan and family lands were inalienable, which laid insuperable difficulties in the way of anyone who wished to mortgage his land. the law of 1863 had merely made a breach in these obstacles, and the issue now at stake was their complete abolition so as to give a free hand to the usurers. the second argument was 'scientific', part of the same intellectual equipment from which that worthy, james mill, had drawn for his abstruse conclusions regarding indian relations of ownership: english classical economics. thoroughly versed in their masters' teachings, the disciples of smith and ricardo impressively declaimed that private property is indispensable for the prevention of famines in algeria, for more intensive and better cultivation of the land, since obviously no one would be prepared to invest capital or intensive labour in a piece of land which does not belong to him and whose produce is not his own to enjoy. but the facts spoke a different language. they proved that the french speculators employed the private property they had created in algeria for anything but the more intensive and improved cultivation of the soil. in 1873, 1,000,000 acres were french property. but the capitalist companies, the algerian and setif company which owned 300,000 acres, did not cultivate the land at all but leased it to the natives who tilled it in the traditional manner, nor were 25 per cent of the other french owners engaged in agriculture. it was simply impossible to conjure up capitalist investments and intensive agriculture overnight, just as capitalist conditions in general could not be created out of nothing. they existed only in the imagination of profit-seeking french speculators, and in the benighted doctrinaire visions of their scientific economists. the essential point, shorn of all pretexts and flourishes which seem to justify the law of 1873, was simply the desire to deprive the arabs of their land, their livelihood. and although these arguments had worn threadbare and were evidently insincere, this law which was to put paid to the algerian population and their material prosperity, was passed unanimously on july 26, 1873. but even this master-stroke soon proved a failure. the policy of the third republic miscarried because of the difficulties in substituting at one stroke bourgeois private property for the ancient clan communism, just as the policy of the second empire had come to grief over the same issue. in 1890, when the law of july 26, 1873, supplemented by a second law on april 28, 1887, had been in force for seventeen years, 14,000,000 francs had been spent on dealing with 40,000,000 acres. it was estimated that the process would not be completed before 1950 and would require a further 60,000,000 francs. and still abolition of clan communism, the ultimate purpose, had not been accomplished. what had really been attained was all too evident: reckless speculation in land, thriving usury and the economic ruin of the natives. since it had been impossible to institute private property by force, a new experiment was undertaken. the laws of 1873 and 1887 had been condemned by a commission appointed for their revision by the algerian government in 1890. it was another seven years before the legislators on the seine made the effort to consider reforms for the ruined country. the new decree of the senate refrained in principle from instituting private property by compulsion or administrative measures. the laws of february 2, 1897, and the edict of the governor-general of algeria (march 3, 1898) both provided chiefly for the introduction of private property following a voluntary application by the prospective purchaser or owner.[366] but there were clauses to permit a single owner, without the consent of the others, to claim private property; further, such a 'voluntary' application can be extorted at any convenient moment if the owner is in debt and the usurer exerts pressure. and so the new law left the doors wide open for french and native capitalists further to disrupt and exploit the hereditary and clan lands. of recent years, this mutilation of algeria which had been going on for eight decades meets with even less opposition, since the arabs, surrounded as they are by french capital following the subjection of tunisia (1881) and the recent conquest of morocco, have been rendered more and more helpless. the latest result of the french regime in algeria is an arab exodus into turkey.[367] footnotes: [356] mill, in his _history of british india_, substantiates the thesis that under primitive conditions the land belongs always and everywhere to the sovereign, on evidence collected at random and quite indiscriminately from the most varied sources (mungo park, herodotus, volney, acosta, garcilasso de la vega, abbã© grosier, barrow, diodorus, strabo and others). applying this thesis to india, he goes on to say: 'from these facts only one conclusion can be drawn, that the property of the soil resided in the sovereign; for if it did not reside in him, it will be impossible to show to whom it belonged' (james mill, _history of british india_ (4th edition, 1840), vol. i, p. 311). mill's editor, h. h. wilson who, as professor of sanskrit at oxford university, was thoroughly versed in the legal relations of ancient india, gives an interesting commentary to this classical deduction. already in his preface he characterises the author as a partisan who has juggled with the whole history of british india in order to justify the theories of mr. bentham and who, with this end, has used the most dubious means for his portrait of the hindus which in no way resembles the original and almost outrages humanity. he appends the following footnote to our quotation: 'the greater part of the text and of the notes here is wholly irrelevant. the illustrations drawn from the mahometan practice, supposing them to be correct, have nothing to do with the laws and rights of the hindus. they are not, however, even accurate and mr. mill's guides have misled him.' wilson then contests outright the theory of the sovereign's right of ownership in land, especially with reference to india. (ibid., p. 305, footnote.) henry maine, too, is of the opinion that the british attempted to derive their claim to indian land from the mahometans in the first place, and he recognises this claim to be completely unjustified. 'the assumption which the english first made was one which they inherited from their mahometan predecessors. it was that all the soil belonged in absolute property to the sovereign,--and that all private property in land existed by his sufferance. the mahometan theory and the corresponding mahometan practice had put out of sight the ancient view of the sovereign's rights which, though it assigned to him a far larger share of the produce of the land than any western ruler has ever claimed, yet in nowise denied the existence of private property in land' (_village communities in the east and west_ (5th edition, vol. 2, 1890), p. 104). maxim kovalevski, on the other hand, has proved thoroughly that this alleged 'mahometan theory and practice' is an exclusively british legend. (cf. his excellent study, written in russian, _on the causes, the development and the consequences of the disintegration of communal ownership of land_ (moscow, 1879), part i.) incidentally, british experts and their french colleagues at the time of writing maintain an analogous legend about china, for example, asserting that all the land there had been the emperor's property. (cf. the refutation of this legend by dr. o. franke, _die rechtsverhã¤ltnisse am grundeigentum in china_, 1903.) [357] 'the partitions of inheritances and execution for debt levied on land are destroying the communities--this is the formula heard nowadays everywhere in india' (henry maine, op. cit., p. 113). [358] this view of british colonial policy, expounded e.g. by lord roberts of kandahar (for many years a representative of british power in india) is typical. he can give no other explanation for the sepoy mutiny than mere 'misunderstandings' of the paternal intentions of the british rulers. '... the alleged unfairness of what was known in india as the land settlement, under which system the right and title of each landholder to his property was examined, and the amount of revenue to be paid by him to the paramount power, as owner of the soil, was regulated ... as peace and order were established, the system of land revenue, which had been enforced in an extremely oppressive and corrupt manner under successive native rulers and dynasties, had to be investigated and revised. with this object in view, surveys were made, and inquiries instituted into the rights of ownership and occupancy, the result being that in many cases it was found that families of position and influence had either appropriated the property of their humbler neighbours, or evaded an assessment proportionate to the value of their estates. although these inquiries were carried out with the best intentions, they were extremely distasteful to the higher classes, while they failed to conciliate the masses. the ruling families deeply resented our endeavours to introduce an equitable determination of rights and assessment of land revenue.... on the other hand, although the agricultural population greatly benefited by our rule, they could not realise the benevolent intentions of a government which tried to elevate their position and improve their prospects' (_forty one years in india_, london, 1901, p. 233). [359] in his _maxims on government_ (translated from the persian into english in 1783), timur says: 'and i commanded that they should build places of worship, and monasteries in every city; and that they should erect structures for the reception of travellers on the high roads, and that they should make bridges across the rivers. 'and i commanded that the ruined bridges should be repaired; and that bridges should be constructed over the rivulets, and over the rivers; and that on the roads, at the distance of one stage from each other, kauruwansarai should be erected; and that guards and watchmen should be stationed on the road, and that in every kauruwansarai people should be appointed to reside.... 'and i ordained, whoever undertook the cultivation of waste lands, or built an aqueduct, or made a canal, or planted a grove, or restored to culture a deserted district, that in the first year nothing should be taken from him, and that in the second year, whatever the subject voluntarily offered should be received, and that in the third year, duties should be collected according to the regulation' (james mill, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 493, 498). [360] count warren, _de l'ã�tat moral de la population indigã¨ne_. quoted by kovalevski, op. cit., p. 164. [361] _historical and descriptive account of british india_ from the most remote period to the conclusion of the afghan war by hugh murray, james wilson, greville, professor jameson, william wallace and captain dalrymple (edinburgh, 4th edition, 1843), vol. ii, p. 427. quoted by kovalevski, op. cit. [362] victor v. leyden, _agrarverfassung und grundsteuer in britisch ostindien. jahrb. f. ges., verw. u. volksw._, vol. xxxvi, no. 4, p. 1855. [363] 'when dying, the father of the family nearly always advises his children to live in unity, according to the example of their elders. this is his last exhortation, his dearest wish' (a. hanotaux et a. letournaux, _la kabylie et les coã»tumes kabyles_, vol. ii, 1873, 'droit civil', pp. 468-73). the authors, by the way, appraised this impressive description of communism in the clan with this peculiar sentence: 'within the industrious fold of the family association, all are united in a common purpose, all work for the general interest--but no one gives up his freedom or renounces his hereditary rights. in no other nation does the organisation approach so closely to equality, being yet so far removed from communism.' [364] 'we must lose no time in dissolving the family associations, since they are the lever of all opposition against our rule' (deputy didier in the national assembly of 1851). [365] quoted by kovalevski, op. cit., p. 217. since the great revolution, of course, it had become the fashion in france to dub all opposition to the government an open or covert defence of feudalism. [366] g. anton, _neuere agrarpolitik in algerien und tunesien. jahrb. f. gesetzgebung, verwaltung und volkswirtschaft_ (1900), pp. 1341 ff. [367] on june 20, 1912, m. albin rozet, on behalf of the commission for the reform of the 'indigenat' (administrative justice) in algeria, stated in his speech to the french chamber of deputies that thousands of algerians were migrating from the setif district, and that 1,200 natives had emigrated from tlemcen during the last year, their destination being syria. one immigrant wrote from his new home: 'i have now settled in damascus and am perfectly happy. there are many algerians here in syria who, like me, have emigrated. the government has given us land and facilities to cultivate it.' the algerian government combats this exodus--by denying passports to prospective emigrants. (cf. _journal officiel_, june 21, 1912, pp. 1594 ff.) _chapter xxviii_ the introduction of commodity economy the second condition of importance for acquiring means of production and realising the surplus value is that commodity exchange and commodity economy should be introduced in societies based on natural economy as soon as their independence has been abrogated, or rather in the course of this disruptive process. capital requires to buy the products of, and sell its commodities to, all non-capitalist strata and societies. here at last we seem to find the beginnings of that 'peace' and 'equality', the _do ut des_, mutual interest, 'peaceful competition' and the 'influences of civilisation'. for capital can indeed deprive alien social associations of their means of production by force, it can compel the workers to submit to capitalist exploitation, but it cannot force them to buy its commodities or to realise its surplus value. in districts where natural economy formerly prevailed, the introduction of means of transport--railways, navigation, canals--is vital for the spreading of commodity economy, a further hopeful sign. the triumphant march of commodity economy thus begins in most cases with magnificent constructions of modern transport, such as railway lines which cross primeval forests and tunnel through the mountains, telegraph wires which bridge the deserts, and ocean liners which call at the most outlying ports. but it is a mere illusion that these are peaceful changes. under the standard of commerce, the relations between the east india company and the spice-producing countries were quite as piratical, extortionate and blatantly fraudulent as present-day relations between american capitalists and the red indians of canada whose furs they buy, or between german merchants and the negroes of africa. modern china presents a classical example of the 'gentle', 'peace-loving' practices of commodity exchange with backward countries. throughout the nineteenth century, beginning with the early forties, her history has been punctuated by wars with the object of opening her up to trade by brute force. missionaries provoked persecutions of christians, europeans instigated risings, and in periodical massacres a completely helpless and peaceful agrarian population was forced to match arms with the most modern capitalist military technique of all the great powers of europe. heavy war contributions necessitated a public debt, china taking up european loans, resulting in european control over her finances and occupation of her fortifications; the opening of free ports was enforced, railway concessions to european capitalists extorted. by all these measures commodity exchange was fostered in china, from the early thirties of the last century until the beginning of the chinese revolution. european civilisation, that is to say commodity exchange with european capital, made its first impact on china with the opium wars when she was compelled to buy the drug from indian plantations in order to make money for british capitalists. in the seventeenth century, the east india company had introduced the cultivation of poppies in bengal; the use of the drug was disseminated in china by its canton branch. at the beginning of the nineteenth century, opium fell so considerably in price that it rapidly became the 'luxury of the people'. in 1821, 4,628 chests of opium were imported to china at an average price of â£265; then the price fell by 50 per cent, and chinese imports rose to 9,621 chests in 1825, and to 26,670 chests in 1830.[368] the deadly effects of the drug, especially of the cheaper kinds used by the poorer population, became a public calamity and made it necessary for china to lay an embargo on imports, as an emergency measure. already in 1828, the viceroy of canton had prohibited imports of opium, only to deflect the trade to other ports. one of the peking censors commanded to investigate the question gave the following report: 'i have learnt that people who smoke opium have developed such a craving for this noxious drug that they make every effort to obtain this gratification. if they do not get their opium at the usual hour, their limbs begin to tremble, they break out in sweat, and they cannot perform the slightest tasks. but as soon as they are given the pipe, they inhale a few puffs and are cured immediately. 'opium has therefore become a necessity for all who smoke it, and it is not surprising that under cross-examination by the local authorities they will submit to every punishment rather than reveal the names of their suppliers. local authorities are also in some cases given presents to tolerate the evil or to delay any investigation already under way. most merchants who bring goods for sale into canton also deal in smuggled opium. 'i am of the opinion that opium is by far a greater evil than gambling, and that opium smokers should therefore be punished no less than gamblers.' the censor suggested that every convicted opium smoker should be sentenced to eighty strokes of the bamboo, and anybody refusing to give the name of his supplier to a hundred strokes and three years of exile. the pigtailed cato of peking concludes his report with a frankness staggering to any european official: 'apparently opium is mostly introduced from abroad by dishonest officials in connivance with profit-seeking merchants who transport it into the interior of the country. then the first to indulge are people of good family, wealthy private persons and merchants, but ultimately the drug habit spreads among the common people. i have learnt that in all provinces opium is smoked not only in the civil service but also in the army. the officials of the various districts indeed enjoin the legal prohibition of sale by special edicts. but at the same time, their parents, families, dependants and servants simply go on smoking opium, and the merchants profit from the ban by increased prices. even the police have been won over; they buy the stuff instead of helping to suppress it, and this is an additional reason for the disregard in which all prohibitions and ordinances are held.'[369] consequently, a stricter law was passed in 1833 which made every opium smoker liable to a hundred strokes and two months in the stocks, and provincial governors were ordered to report annually on their progress in the battle against opium. but there were two sequels to this campaign: on the one hand large-scale poppy plantations sprang up in the interior, particularly in the honan, setchuan, and kueitchan provinces, and on the other, england declared war on china to get her to lift the embargo. these were the splendid beginnings of 'opening china' to european civilisation--by the opium pipe. canton was the first objective. the fortifications of the town at the main arm of the perl estuary could not have been more primitive. every day at sunset a barrier of iron chains was attached to wooden rafts anchored at various distances, and this was the main defence. moreover, the chinese guns could only fire at a certain angle and were therefore completely ineffectual. with such primitive defences, just adequate to prevent a few merchant ships from landing, did the chinese meet the british attack. a couple of british cruisers, then, sufficed to effect an entry on september 7, 1839. the sixteen battle-junks and thirteen fire-ships which the chinese put up for resistance were shot up or dispersed in a matter of forty-five minutes. after this initial victory, the british renewed the attack in the beginning of 1841 with a considerably reinforced fleet. this time the fleet, consisting in a number of battle-junks, and the forts were attacked simultaneously. the first incendiary rocket that was fired penetrated through the armour casing of a junk into the powder chamber and blew the ship with the entire crew sky-high. in a short time eleven junks, including the flag-ship, were destroyed, and the remainder precipitately made for safety. the action on land took a little longer. since the chinese guns were quite useless, the british walked right through the fortifications, climbed to a strategic position--which was not even guarded--and proceeded to slaughter the helpless chinese from above. the casualty list of the battle was: for the chinese 600 dead, and for the british, 1 dead and 30 wounded, more than half of the latter having been injured by the accidental explosion of a powder magazine. a few weeks later, there followed another british exploit. the forts of anung-hoy and north wantong were to be taken. no less than twelve fully equipped cruisers were available for this task. what is more, the chinese, once again forgetful of the most important thing, had omitted to fortify the island of south wantong. thus the british calmly landed a battery of howitzers to bombard the fort from one side, the cruisers shelling it from the other. after that, the chinese were driven from the forts in a matter of minutes, and the landing met with no resistance. the ensuing display of inhumanity--an english report says--will be for ever deeply deplored by the british staff. the chinese, trying to escape from the barricades, had fallen into a moat which was soon literally filled to the brim with helpless soldiers begging for mercy. into this mass of prostrate human bodies, the sepoys--acting against orders, it is claimed--fired again and again. this is the way in which canton was made receptive to commodity exchange. nor did the other ports fare better. on july 4, 1841, three british cruisers with 120 cannon appeared off the islands in the entrance to the town of ningpo. more cruisers arrived the following day. in the evening the british admiral sent a message to the chinese governor, demanding the capitulation of the island. the governor explained that he had no power to resist but could not surrender without orders from peking. he therefore asked for a delay. this was refused, and at half-past two in the morning the british stormed the defenceless island. within eight minutes, the fort and the houses on the shore were reduced to smouldering rubble. having landed on the deserted coast littered with broken spears, sabres, shields, rifles and a few dead bodies, the troops advanced on the walls of the island town of tinghai. with daybreak, reinforced by the crews of other ships which had meanwhile arrived, they proceeded to put scaling-ladders to the scarcely defended ramparts. a few more minutes gave them mastery of the town. this splendid victory was announced with becoming modesty in an order of the day: 'fate has decreed that the morning of july 5, 1841, should be the historic date on which her majesty's flag was first raised over the most beautiful island of the celestial empire, the first european flag to fly triumphantly above this lovely countryside.'[370] on august 25, 1841, the british approached the town of amoy, whose forts were armed with a hundred of the heaviest chinese guns. these guns being almost useless, and the commanders lacking in resource, the capture of the harbour was child's play. under cover of a heavy barrage, british ships drew near the walls of kulangau, landed their marines, and after a short stand the chinese troops were driven out. the twenty-six battle-junks with 128 guns in the harbour were also captured, their crews having fled. one battery, manned by tartars, heroically held out against the combined fire of three british ships, but a british landing was effected in their rear and the post wiped out. this was the finale of the notorious opium war. by the peace treaty of august 27, 1842, the island of hongkong was ceded to britain. in addition, the towns of canton, amoy, futchou, ningpo and shanghai were to open their ports to foreign commerce. but within fifteen years, there was a further war against china. this time, britain had joined forces with the french. in 1857, the allied navies captured canton with a heroism equal to that of the first war. by the peace of tientsin (1858), the opium traffic, european commerce and christian missions were admitted into the interior. already in 1859, however, the british resumed hostilities and attempted to destroy the chinese fortifications on the peiho river, but were driven off after a fierce battle in which 464 people were wounded or killed.[371] after that, britain and france again joined forces. at the end of august 1860, 12,600 english and 7,500 french troops under general cousin-montauban first captured the taku forts without a single shot having been fired. then they proceeded towards tientsin and on towards peking. a bloody battle was joined at palikao, and peking fell to the european powers. entering the almost depopulated and completely undefended city, the victors began by pillaging the imperial palace, manfully helped by general cousin himself, who was later to become field marshal and count of palikao. then the palace went up in flames, fired on lord elgin's order as an imposed penance.[372] the european powers now obtained concessions to set up embassies in peking, and to start trading with tientsin and other towns. the tchi-fu convention of 1876 guaranteed full facilities for importing opium into china--at a time when the anti-opium league in england agitated against the spreading of the drug habit in london, manchester and other industrial districts, when a parliamentary commission declared the consumption of opium to be harmful in the extreme. by all treaties made at that time between china and the great powers any european, whether merchant or missionary, was guaranteed the right to acquire land, to which end the legitimate arguments were ably supported by deliberate fraud. first and foremost the ambiguity of the treaty texts made a convenient excuse for european capital to encroach beyond the treaty ports. it used every loophole in the wording of the treaties to begin with, and subsequently blackmailed the chinese government into permitting the missions to acquire land not alone in the treaty ports but in all the provinces of the realm. their claim was based upon the notorious bare-faced distortion of the chinese original in abbã© delamarre's official translation of the supplementary convention with france. french diplomacy, and the protestant missions in particular, unanimously condemned the crafty swindle of the catholic padre, but nevertheless they were firm that the rights of french missions obtained by this fraud should be explicitly extended to the protestant missions as well.[373] china's entry into commodity exchange, having begun with the opium wars, was finally accomplished with a series of 'leases' and the china campaign of 1900, when the commercial interests of european capital sank to a brazen international dogfight over chinese land. the description of the dowager empress, who wrote to queen victoria after the capture of the taku forts, subtly underlines this contrast between the initial theory and the ultimate practice of the 'agents of european civilisation': 'to your majesty, greeting!--in all the dealings of england with the empire of china, since first relations were established between us, there has never been any idea of territorial aggrandisement on the part of great britain, but only a keen desire to promote the interests of her trade. reflecting upon the fact that our country is now plunged into a dreadful condition of warfare, we bear in mind that a large proportion of china's trade, seventy or eighty per cent, is done with england; moreover, your customs duties are the lightest in the world, and few restrictions are made at your sea-ports in the matter of foreign importations; for these reasons our amiable relations with british merchants at our treaty ports have continued unbroken for the last half century, to our mutual benefit.--but a sudden change has now occurred and general suspicion has been created against us. we would therefore ask you now to consider that if, by any conceivable combination of circumstances, the independence of our empire should be lost, and the powers unite to carry out their long-plotted schemes to possess themselves of our territory'--(in a simultaneous message to the emperor of japan, the impulsive tzu hsi openly refers to 'the earth-hungry powers of the west, whose tigerish eyes of greed are fixed in our direction'[374])--'the results to your country's interests would be disastrous and fatal to your trade. at this moment our empire is striving to the utmost to raise an army and funds sufficient for its protection; in the meanwhile we rely on your good services to act as mediator, and now anxiously await your decision.'[375] both during the wars and in the interim periods, european civilisation was busy looting and thieving on a grand scale in the chinese imperial palaces, in the public buildings and in the monuments of ancient civilisation, not only in 1860, when the french pillaged the emperor's palace with its legendary treasures, or in 1900, 'when all the nations vied with each other to steal public and private property'. every european advance was marked not only with the progress of commodity exchange, but by the smouldering ruins of the largest and most venerable towns, by the decay of agriculture over large rural areas, and by intolerably oppressive taxation for war contributions. there are more than 40 chinese treaty ports--and every one of them has been paid for with streams of blood, with massacre and ruin. footnotes: [368] 77,379 chests were imported in 1854. later, the imports somewhat declined, owing to increased home production. nevertheless, china remained the chief buyer. india produced just under 6,400,000 tons of opium in 1873/4, of which 6,100,000 tons were sold to the chinese. to-day [1912] india still exports 4,800,000 tons, value â£7,500,000,000, almost exclusively to china and the malay archipelago. [369] quoted by j. scheibert, _der krieg in china_ (1903), vol. 2, p. 179. [370] scheibert, op. cit., p. 207. [371] an imperial edict issued on the third day of the eighth moon in the tenth year of hsien-feng (6/9/1860) said amongst other things: 'we have never forbidden england and france to trade with china, and for long years there has been peace between them and us. but three years ago the english, for no good cause, invaded our city of canton, and carried off our officials into captivity. we refrained at that time from taking any retaliatory measures, because we were compelled to recognise that the obstinacy of the viceroy yeh had been in some measure a cause of the hostilities. two years ago, the barbarian commander elgin came north and we then commanded the viceroy of chihli, t'an ting-hsiang, to look into matters preparatory to negotiations. but the barbarian took advantage of our unreadiness, attacking the taku forts and pressing on to tientsin. being anxious to spare our people the horrors of war, we again refrained from retaliation and ordered kuei liang to discuss terms of peace. notwithstanding the outrageous nature of the barbarians' demands we subsequently ordered kuei liang to proceed to shanghai in connection with the proposed treaty of commerce and even permitted its ratification as earnest of our good faith. 'in spite of all this, the barbarian leader bruce again displayed intractability of the most unreasonable kind, and once more appeared off taku with a squadron of warships in the eighth moon. seng ko lin ch'in thereupon attacked him fiercely and compelled him to make a rapid retreat. from all these facts it is clear that china has committed no breach of faith and that the barbarians have been in the wrong. during the present year the barbarian leaders elgin and gros have again appeared off our coasts, but china, unwilling to resort to extreme measures, agreed to their landing and permitted them to come to peking for the ratification of the treaty. 'who could have believed that all this time the barbarians have been darkly plotting, and that they had brought with them an army of soldiers and artillery with which they attacked the taku forts from the rear, and, having driven out our forces, advanced upon tientsin!' (i. o. bland and e. t. blackhouse, _china under the empress dowager_ (london, 1910), pp. 24-5. cf. also in this work the entire chapter, 'the flight to yehol'.) [372] these european exploits to make china receptive to commodity exchange, provide the setting for a charming episode of china's internal history: straight from looting the manchu emperor's summer palace, the 'gordon of china' went on a campaign against the rebels of taiping. in 1863 he even took over command of the imperial fighting forces. in fact, the suppression of the revolt was the work of the british army. but while a considerable number of europeans, among them a french admiral, gave their lives to preserve china for the manchu dynasty, the representatives of european commerce were eagerly grasping this opportunity to make capital out of these fights, supplying arms both to their own champions and to the rebels who went to war against them. 'moreover, the worthy merchant was tempted, by the opportunity for making some money, to supply both armies with arms and munitions, and since the rebels had greater difficulties in obtaining supplies than the emperor's men and were therefore compelled and prepared to pay higher prices, they were given priority and could thus resist not only the troops of their own government, but also those of england and france' (m. v. brandt, _33 jahre in ostasien, 1911, vol. iii, china_, p. 11). [373] dr. o. franke, _die rechtsverhã¤ltnisse am grundeigentum in china_ (leipzig, 1903), p. 82. [374] bland and blackhouse, op. cit., p. 338. [375] ibid., p. 337. _chapter xxix_ the struggle against peasant economy an important final phase in the campaign against natural economy is to separate industry from agriculture, to eradicate rural industries altogether from peasant economy. handicraft in its historical beginnings was a subsidiary occupation, a mere appendage to agriculture in civilised and settled societies. in medieval europe it became gradually independent of the _corvã©e_ farm and agriculture, it developed into specialised occupations, i.e. production of commodities by urban guilds. in industrial districts, production had progressed from home craft by way of primitive manufacture to the capitalist factory of the staple industries, but in the rural areas, under peasant economy, home crafts persisted as an intrinsic part of agriculture. every hour that could be spared from cultivating the soil was devoted to handicrafts which, as an auxiliary domestic industry, played an important part in providing for personal needs.[376] it is a recurrent phenomenon in the development of capitalist production that one branch of industry after the other is singled out, isolated from agriculture and concentrated in factories for mass production. the textile industry provides the textbook example, but the same thing has happened, though less obviously, in the case of other rural industries. capital must get the peasants to buy its commodities and will therefore begin by restricting peasant economy to a single sphere--that of agriculture--which will not immediately and, under european conditions of ownership, only with great difficulty submit to capitalist domination.[377] to all outward appearance, this process is quite peaceful. it is scarcely noticeable and seemingly caused by purely economic factors. there can be no doubt that mass production in the factories is technically superior to primitive peasant industry, owing to a higher degree of specialisation, scientific analysis and management of the productive process, improved machinery and access to international resources of raw materials. in reality, however, the process of separating agriculture and industry is determined by factors such as oppressive taxation, war, or squandering and monopolisation of the nation's land, and thus belongs to the spheres of political power and criminal law no less than with economics. nowhere has this process been brought to such perfection as in the united states. in the wake of the railways, financed by european and in particular british capital, the american farmer crossed the union from east to west and in his progress over vast areas killed off the red indians with fire-arms and blood-hounds, liquor and venereal disease, pushing the survivors to the west, in order to appropriate the land they had 'vacated', to clear it and bring it under the plough. the american farmer, the 'backwoodsman' of the good old times before the war of secession, was very different indeed from his modern counterpart. there was hardly anything he could not do, and he led a practically self-sufficient life on his isolated farm. in the beginning of the nineties, one of the leaders of the farmers' alliance, senator peffer, wrote as follows: 'the american farmer of to-day is altogether a different sort of man from his ancestor of fifty or a hundred years ago. a great many men and women now living remember when farmers were largely manufacturers; that is to say, they made a great many implements for their own use. every farmer had an assortment of tools with which he made wooden implements, as forks and rakes, handles for his hoes and ploughs, spokes for his wagon, and various other implements made wholly out of wood. then the farmer produced flax and hemp and wool and cotton. these fibres were prepared upon the farm; they were spun into yarn, woven into cloth, made into garments, and worn at home. every farm had upon it a little shop for wood and iron work, and in the dwelling were cards and looms; carpets were woven, bed-clothing of different sorts was prepared; upon every farm geese were kept, their feathers used for supplying the home demand with beds and pillows, the surplus being disposed of at the nearest market town. during the winter season wheat and flour and corn meal were carried in large wagons drawn by teams of six to eight horses a hundred or two hundred miles to market, and traded for farm supplies for the next year--groceries and dry goods. besides this, mechanics were scattered among the farmers. the farm wagon was in process of building a year or two; the material was found near the shop; the character of the timber to be used was stated in the contract; it had to be procured in a certain season and kept in the drying process a length of time specified, so that when the material was brought together in proper form and the wagon made, both parties to the contract knew where every stick of it came from, and how long it had been in seasoning. during winter time the neighbourhood carpenter prepared sashes and blinds and doors and moulding and cornices for the next season's building. when the frosts of autumn came the shoemaker repaired to the dwellings of the farmers and there, in a corner set apart to him, he made up shoes for the family during the winter. all these things were done among the farmers, and a large part of the expense was paid with products of the farm. when winter approached, the butchering season was at hand; meat for family use during the next year was prepared and preserved in the smoke house. the orchards supplied fruit for cider, for apple butter, and for preserves of different kinds, amply sufficient to supply the wants of the family during the year, with some to spare. wheat was threshed, a little at a time, just enough to supply the needs of the family for ready money, and not enough to make it necessary to waste one stalk of straw. everything was saved and put to use. one of the results of that sort of economy was that comparatively a very small amount of money was required to conduct the business of farming. a hundred dollars average probably was as much as the largest farmers of that day needed in the way of cash to meet the demands of their farm work, paying for hired help, repairs of tools, and all other incidental expenses.'[378] this arcadian life was to come to a sudden end after the war of secession. the war had burdened the union with an enormous national debt, amounting to â£1,200,000, and in consequence the taxes were considerably increased. on the other hand, a feverish development of modern traffic and industry, machine-building in particular, was encouraged by the imposition of higher protective tariffs. the railway companies were endowed with public lands on an imposing scale, in order to promote railroad construction and farm-settlements: in 1867 alone, they were given more than 192,500,000 acres, and so the permanent way grew at an unprecedented rate. in 1860 it amounted to less than 31,000 miles, in 1870 it had grown to more than 53,000 miles and in 1880 to more than 93,000 miles. (during the same period--1870-1880--the permanent way in europe had grown from 80,000 miles to 100,000 miles.) the railways and speculations in land made for mass emigration from europe to the united states, and more than 4â 1/2 million people immigrated in the twenty-three years from 1869 to 1892. in this way, the union gradually became emancipated from european, and in particular from british, industry; factories were set up in the states and home industries developed for the production of textiles, iron, steel and machinery. the process of revolutionary transformation was most rapid in agriculture. the emancipation of the slaves had compelled the southern planters to introduce the steam plough shortly after the civil war, and new farms had sprung up in the west in the wake of the railways, which from the very beginning employed the most modern machinery and technique. 'the improvements are rapidly revolutionising the agriculture of the west, and reducing to the lowest minimum ever attained, the proportion of manual labour employed in its operations.... coincident with this application of mechanics to agriculture, systematic and enlarged business aptitudes have also sought alliance with this noble art. farms of thousands of acres have been managed with greater skill, a more economical adaptation of means to ends, and with a larger margin of real profit than many others of 80 acres.'[379] during this time, direct and indirect taxation had increased enormously. on june 30, 1864, during the civil war, a new finance bill was passed which is the basis of the present system of taxation, and which raised taxes on consumption and income to a staggering degree. this heavy war levy served as a pretext for a real orgy of protective tariffs in order to offset the tax on home production by customs duties.[380] messrs. morrill, stevens and the other gentlemen who advanced the war as a lever for enforcing their protectionist programme, initiated the practice of wielding the implement of a customs policy quite openly and cynically to further private profiteering interests of all descriptions. any home producer who appeared before the legislative assembly with a request for any kind of special tariff to fill his own pocket saw his demands readily granted, and the tariff rates were made as high as any interested party might wish. 'the war', writes the american taussig, 'had in many ways a bracing and ennobling influence on our national life; but its immediate effect on business affairs, and on all legislation affecting moneyed interests, was demoralising. the line between public duty and private interests was often lost sight of by legislators. great fortunes were made by changes in legislation urged and brought about by those who were benefited by them, and the country has seen with sorrow that the honour and honesty of public men did not remain undefiled.'[381] this customs bill which completely revolutionised the country's economic life, and remained in force unchanged for twenty years, was literally pushed through congress in three days, and through the senate in two, without criticism, without debate, without any opposition whatever.[382] down to the present day it forms the basis of u.s. customs legislation. this shift in u.s. fiscal policy ushered in an era of the most brazen parliamentary log-rolling and of undisguised and unrestrained corruption of elections, of the legislature and the press to satisfy the greed of big business. '_enrichissez-vous_' became the catchword of public life after the 'noble war' to liberate mankind from the 'blot of slavery'. on the stock exchange, the yankee negro-liberator sought his fortunes in orgies of speculation; in congress, he endowed himself with public lands, enriched himself by customs and taxes, by monopolies, fraudulent shares and theft of public funds. industry prospered. gone were the times when the small or medium farmer required hardly any money, when he could thresh and turn into cash his wheat reserves as the need arose. now he was chronically in need of money, a lot of money, to pay his taxes. soon he was forced to sell all his produce and to buy his requirements from the manufacturers in the form of ready-made goods. as peffer puts it: 'coming from that time to the present, we find that everything nearly has been changed. all over the west particularly the farmer threshes his wheat all at one time, he disposes of it all at one time, and in a great many instances the straw is wasted. he sells his hogs, and buys bacon and pork; he sells his cattle, and buys fresh beef and canned beef or corned beef, as the case may be; he sells his fruit, and buys it back in cans. if he raises flax at all, instead of putting it into yarn and making gowns for his children, as he did fifty years or more ago, he threshes his flax, sells the seed, and burns the straw. not more than one farmer in fifty now keeps sheep at all; he relies upon the large sheep farmer for the wool, which is put into cloth or clothing ready for his use. instead of having clothing made up on the farm in his own house or by a neighbour woman or country tailor a mile away, he either purchases his clothing ready made at the nearest town, or he buys the cloth and has a city tailor make it up for him. instead of making implements which he uses about the farm--forks, rakes, etc.--he goes to town to purchase even a handle for his axe or his mallet; he purchases twine and rope and all sorts of needed material made of fibres; he buys his cloth and his clothing; he buys his canned fruit and preserved fruit; he buys hams and shoulders and mess pork and mess beef; indeed, he buys nearly everything now that he produced at one time himself, and these things all cost money. besides all this, and what seems stranger than anything else, whereas in the earlier time the american home was a free home, unencumbered, not one case in a thousand where a home was mortgaged to secure the payment of borrowed money, and whereas but a small amount of money was then needed for actual use in conducting the business of farming, there was always enough of it among the farmers to supply the demand. now, when at least ten times as much is needed, there is little or none to be obtained, nearly half the farms are mortgaged for as much as they are worth, and interest rates are exorbitant. as to the cause of such wonderful changes ... the manufacturer came with his woollen mill, his carding mill, his broom factory, his rope factory, his wooden-ware factory, his cotton factory, his pork-packing establishment, his canning factory and fruit preserving houses; the little shop on the farm has given place to the large shop in town; the wagon-maker's shop in the neighbourhood has given way to the large establishment in the city where ... a hundred or two hundred wagons are made in a week; the shoemaker's shop has given way to large establishments in the cities where most of the work is done by machines.'[383] finally, the agricultural labour of the farmer himself has become machine work: 'he ploughs and sows and reaps with machines. a machine cuts his wheat and puts it in a sheaf, and steam drives his threshers. he may read the morning paper while he ploughs and sit under an awning while he reaps.'[384] sering estimated in the middle eighties that the necessary cash 'for a very modest beginning' of the smallest farm in the north west is â£240 to â£280.[385] this revolution of american agriculture after the 'great war' was not the end. it was only the beginning of the whirlpool in which the farmer was caught. his history brings us automatically to the second phase of the development of capitalist accumulation of which it is an excellent illustration.--natural economy, the production for personal needs and the close connection between industry and agriculture must be ousted and a simple commodity economy substituted for them. capitalism needs the medium of commodity production for its development, as a market for its surplus value. but as soon as simple commodity production has superseded natural economy, capital must turn against it. no sooner has capital called it to life, than the two must compete for means of production, labour power, and markets. the first aim of capitalism is to isolate the producer, to sever the community ties which protect him, and the next task is to take the means of production away from the small manufacturer. in the american union, as we have seen, the 'great war' inaugurated an era of large-scale seizure of public lands by monopolist capitalist companies and individual speculators. feverish railroad building and ever more speculation in railway shares led to a mad gamble in land, where individual soldiers of fortune and companies netted immense fortunes and even entire counties. in addition a veritable swarm of agents lured the vast flow of emigrants from europe to the u.s.a. by blatant and unscrupulous advertising, deceptions and pretences of every description. these immigrants first settled in the eastern states along the atlantic seaboard, and, with the growth of industry in these states, agriculture was driven westward. the 'wheat centre' which had been near columbus, ohio, in 1850, in the course of the subsequent fifty years shifted to a position 99 miles further north and 680 miles further west. whereas in 1850 51â·4 per cent of the total wheat crop had been supplied by the eastern states, in 1880 they produced only 13â·6 per cent, 71â·7 per cent being supplied by the northern central and 9 per cent by the western states. in 1825, the congress of the union under monroe had decided to transplant the red indians from the east to the west of the mississippi. the redskins put up a desperate resistance; but all who survived the slaughter of forty red indian campaigns were swept away like so much rubbish and driven like cattle to the west to be folded in reservations like so many sheep. the red indian had been forced to make room for the farmer--and now the farmer in his turn was driven beyond the mississippi to make way for capital. following the railway tracks, the american farmer moved west and north-west into the land of promise which the great land speculators' agents had painted for him in glowing colours. yet the most fertile and most favourably situated lands were retained by the companies who farmed them extensively on completely capitalistic lines. all around the farmer who had been exiled into the wilderness, a dangerous competitor and deadly enemy sprang up--the 'bonanza farms', the great capitalist agricultural concerns which neither the old world nor the new had known before. here surplus value was produced with the application of all the resources known to modern science and technology. 'as the foremost representative of financial agriculture we may consider oliver dalrymple, whose name is to-day known on both sides of the atlantic. since 1874 he has simultaneously managed a line of steamers on the red river and six farms owned by a company of financiers and comprising some 75,000 acres. each one is divided into departments of 2,000 acres, and every department is again subdivided into three sections of 667 acres which are run by foremen and gangleaders. barracks to shelter 50 men and stable as many horses and mules, are built on each section, and similarly kitchens, machine sheds and workshops for blacksmiths and locksmiths. each section is completely equipped with 20 pairs of horses, 8 double ploughs, 12 horse-drawn drill-ploughs, 12 steel-toothed harrows, 12 cutters and binders, 2 threshers and 16 wagons. everything is done to ensure that the machines and the living labour (men, horses and mules) are in good condition and able to do the greatest possible amount of work. there is a telephone line connecting all sections and the central management. 'the six farms of 75,000 acres are cultivated by an army of 600 workers, organised on military lines. during the harvest, the management hires another 500 to 600 auxiliary workers, assigning them to the various sections. after the work is completed in the fall, the workers are dismissed with the exception of the foreman and 10 men per section. in some farms in dakota and minnesota, horses and mules do not spend the winter at the place of work. as soon as the stubble has been ploughed in, they are driven in teams of a hundred or two hundred pairs 900 miles to the south, to return only the following spring. 'mechanics on horseback follow the ploughing, sowing and harvesting machines when they are at work. if anything goes wrong, they gallop to the machine in question, repair it and get it moving again without delay. the harvested corn is carried to the threshing machines which work day and night without interruption. they are stoked with bundles of straw fed into the stokehold through pipes of sheet-iron. the corn is threshed, winnowed, weighed and filled into sacks by machinery, then it is put into railway trucks which run alongside the farm, and goes to duluth or buffalo. every year, dalrymple increases his land under seed by 5,800 acres. in 1880 it amounted to 25,000 acres.[386] in the late seventies, there were already individual capitalists and companies who owned 35,000-45,000 acres of wheat land. since the time of lafargue's writing, extensive capitalist agriculture in america has made great strides in technique and the employment of machinery.[387] the american farmer could not successfully compete with such capitalist enterprises. at a time when the general revolution in the conditions of finance, production and transport compelled him to give up production for personal needs and to produce exclusively for the market, the great spreading of agriculture caused a heavy fall in the prices of agricultural products. and at the precise moment when farming became dependent on the market, the agricultural market of the union was suddenly turned from a local one into a world market, and became a prey to the wild speculations of a few capitalist mammoth concerns. in 1879, a notable year for the history of agricultural conditions in europe as well as in america, there began the mass export of wheat from the u.s.a. to europe.[388] big business was of course the only one to profit from this expanding market. the small farmer was crushed by the competition of an increasing number of extensive farms and became the prey of speculators who bought up his corn to exert pressure on the world market. helpless in the face of the immense capitalist powers, the farmer got into debt--a phenomenon typical for a declining peasant economy. in 1890, secretary rusk of the u.s. department of agriculture sent out a circular letter with reference to the desperate position of the farmers, saying: 'the burden of mortgages upon farms, homes, and land, is unquestionably discouraging in the extreme, and while in some cases no doubt this load may have been too readily assumed, still in the majority of cases the mortgage has been the result of necessity.... these mortgages ... drawing high rates of interest ... have to-day, in the face of continued depression of the prices of staple products, become very irksome, and in many cases threaten the farmer with loss of home and land. it is a question of grave difficulty to all those who seek to remedy the ills from which our farmers are suffering. at present prices the farmer finds that it takes more of his products to get a dollar wherewith to buy back the dollar which he borrowed than it did when he borrowed it. the interest accumulates, while the payment of the principal seems utterly hopeless, and the very depression which we are discussing makes the renewal of the mortgage most difficult.'[389] according to the census of may 29, 1891, 2â·5 million farms were deep in debt; two-thirds of them were managed by the owners whose obligations amounted to nearly â£440,000. 'the situation is this: farmers are passing through the "valley and shadow of death"; farming as a business is profitless; values of farm products have fallen 50 per cent since the great war, and farm values have depreciated 25 to 50 per cent during the last ten years; farmers are overwhelmed with debts secured by mortgages on their homes, unable in many instances to pay even the interest as it falls due, and unable to renew the loans because securities are weakening by reason of the general depression; many farmers are losing their homes under this dreadful blight, and the mortgage mill still grinds. we are in the hands of a merciless power; the people's homes are at stake.'[390] encumbered with debts and close to ruin, the farmer had no option but to supplement his earnings by working for a wage, or else to abandon his farm altogether. provided it had not yet fallen into the clutches of his creditors like so many thousands of farms, he could shake from off his feet the dust of the 'land of promise' that had become an inferno for him. in the middle eighties, abandoned and decaying farms could be seen everywhere. in 1887, sering wrote: 'if the farmer cannot pay his debts to date, the interest he has to pay is increased to 12, 15 or even 20 per cent. he is pressed by the banker, the machine salesman and the grocer who rob him of the fruits of his hard work.... he can either remain on the farm as a tenant or move further west, to try his fortunes elsewhere. nowhere in north america have i found so many indebted, disappointed and depressed farmers as in the wheat regions of the north western prairies. i have not spoken to a single farmer in dakota who would not have been prepared to sell his farm.[391] 'the commissioner of agriculture of vermont in 1889 reported a wide-spread desertion of farm-lands of that state. he wrote: "... there appears to be no doubt about there being in this state large tracts of tillable unoccupied lands, which can be bought at a price approximating the price of western lands, situated near school and church, and not far from railroad facilities. the commissioner has not visited all of the counties in the state where these lands are reported, but he has visited enough to satisfy him that, while much of the unoccupied and formerly cultivated land is now practically worthless for cultivation, yet very much of it can be made to yield a liberal reward to intelligent labour."'[392] the commissioner of the state of new hampshire issued a pamphlet in 1890, devoting 67 pages to the description of farms for sale at the lowest figures. he describes 1442 farms with tenantable buildings, abandoned only recently. the same has happened in other districts. thousands of acres once raising corn and wheat are left untilled and run to brush and wood. in order to resettle the deserted land, speculators engaged in advertising campaigns and attracted crowds of new immigrants--new victims who were to suffer their predecessors' fate even more speedily. a private letter says: 'in the neighbourhood of railroads and markets, there remains no common land. it is all in the hands of the speculators. a settler takes over vacant land and counts for a farmer; but the management of his farm hardly assures his livelihood, and he cannot possibly compete with the big farmer. he tills as much of his land as the law compels him to do, but to make a comfortable living, he must look for additional sources of income outside agriculture. in oregon, for instance, i have met a settler who owned 160 acres for five years, but every summer, until the end of july, he worked twelve hours a day for a dollar a day at road-making. this man, of course, also counts as one of the five million farmers in the 1890 census. again, in the county of eldorado, i saw many farmers who cultivated their land only to feed their cattle and themselves. there would have been no profit in producing for the market, and their chief income derives from gold-digging, the felling and selling of timber, etc. these people are prosperous, but it is not agriculture which makes them so. two years ago, we worked in long caã±on, eldorado county, living in a cabin on an allotment. the owner of this allotment came home only once a year for a couple of days, and worked the rest of the time on the railway in sacramento. some years ago, a small part of the allotment was cultivated, to comply with the law, but now it is left completely untilled. a few acres are fenced off with wire, and there is a log cabin and a shed. but during the last years all this stands empty; a neighbour has the key and he made us free of the hut. in the course of our journey, we saw many deserted allotments, where attempts at farming had been made. three years ago i was offered a farm with dwelling house for a hundred dollars, but in a short time the unoccupied house collapsed under the snow. in oregon, we saw many derelict farms with small dwelling houses and vegetable gardens. one we visited was beautifully made: a sturdy block house, fashioned by a master-builder, and some equipment; but the farmer had abandoned it all. you were welcome to take it all without charge.'[393] where could the ruined american farmer turn? he set out on a pilgrimage to follow the wheat centre and the railways. the former had shifted in the main to canada, the saskatchewan and the mackenzie river where wheat can still thrive on the 62nd parallel. a number of american farmers followed--and after some time in canada, they suffered the old fate.[394] during recent years, canada has entered the world market as a wheat-exporting country, but her agriculture is dominated to an even greater extent by big capital than elsewhere.[395] in canada, public lands were lavished upon private capitalist companies on an even more monstrous scale than in the united states. under the charter of the canadian pacific railway company with its grant of land, private capital perpetrated an unprecedented act of robbing the public. not only that the company was guaranteed a twenty years' monopoly of railway-building, not only that it got a building site of about 713 miles free of charge, not only that it got a 100 years' state guarantee of the 3 per cent interest on the share capital of â£m. 20--to crown it all, the company was given the choice of 25 million acres out of the most fertile and favourably situated lands, not necessarily in the immediate vicinity of the permanent way, as a free gift. all future settlers on this vast area were thus at the mercy of railway capital from the very outset. the railway company, in its turn, immediately proceeded to sell off 5 million acres for ready cash to the north-west land company, an association of british capitalists under the chairmanship of the duke of manchester. the second group of capitalists which was liberally endowed with public lands was the hudson bay company, which was given a title to no less than one-twentieth of all the lands between lake winnipeg, the u.s. border, the rocky mountains, and northern saskatchewan, for renouncing their privileges in the north-west. between them, these two capitalist groups had gained possession of five-ninths of all the land that could be settled. a considerable part of the other lands was assigned by the state to 26 capitalist 'colonising companies'.[396] thus the canadian farmer was practically everywhere ensnared by capital and capitalist speculation. and still mass immigration continued--not only from europe, but also from the united states! these are the characteristics of capitalist domination on an international scale. having evicted the peasant from his soil, it drives him from england to the east of the united states, and from there to the west, and on the ruins of the red indians' economy it transforms him back into a small commodity producer. then, when he is ruined once more, he is driven from the west to the north. with the railways in the van, and ruin in the rear--capital leads the way, its passage is marked with universal destruction. the great fall of prices in the nineties is again succeeded by higher prices for agricultural products, but this is of no more avail to the small american farmer than to the european peasant. yet the numbers of farmers are constantly swelling. in the last decade of the nineteenth century they had grown from 4,600,000 to 5,700,000, and the following ten years still saw an absolute increase. the aggregate value of farms had during the same period risen from â£150,240,000 to â£330,360,000.[397] we might have expected the general increase in the price of farm produce to have helped the farmer to come into his own. but that is not so; we see that the growing numbers of tenant farmers outstrip the increase in the farming population as a whole. in 1880, the proportion of tenant farmers amounted to 25â·5 per cent of the total number of farmers in the union, in 1890 it was 28â·4 per cent, in 1900 35â·3 per cent, and in 1910 37â·2 per cent. though prices for farm produce were rising, the tenant farmer was more and more rapidly stepping into the shoes of the independent farmer. and although much more than one-third of all farmers in the union are now tenant farmers, their social status in the united states is that of the agricultural labourer in europe. constantly fluctuating, they are indeed wage-slaves of capital; they work very hard to create wealth for capital, getting nothing in return but a miserable and precarious existence. in quite a different historical setting, in south africa, the same process shows up even more clearly the 'peaceful methods' by which capital competes with the small commodity producer. in the cape colony and the boer republics, pure peasant economy prevailed until the sixties of the last century. for a long time the boers had led the life of animal-tending nomads; they had killed off or driven out the hottentots and kaffirs with a will in order to deprive them of their most valuable pastures. in the eighteenth century they were given invaluable assistance by the plague, imported by ships of the east india company, which frequently did away with entire hottentot tribes whose lands then fell to the dutch immigrants. when the boers spread further east, they came in conflict with the bantu tribes and initiated the long period of the terrible kaffir wars. these god-fearing dutchmen regarded themselves as the chosen people and took no small pride in their old-fashioned puritan morals and their intimate knowledge of the old testament; yet, not content with robbing the natives of their land, they built their peasant economy like parasites on the backs of the negroes, compelling them to do slave-labour for them and corrupting and enervating them deliberately and systematically. liquor played such an important part in this process, that the prohibition of spirits in the cape colony could not be carried through by the english government because of puritan opposition. there were no railways until 1859, and boer economy in general and on the whole remained patriarchal and based on natural economy until the sixties. but their patriarchal attitude did not deter the boers from extreme brutality and harshness. it is well known that livingstone complained much more about the boers than about the kaffirs. the boers considered the negroes an object, destined by god and nature to slave for them, and as such an indispensable foundation of their peasant economy. so much so that their answer to the abolition of slavery in the english colonies in 1836 was the 'great trek', although there the owners had been compensated with â£3,000,000. by way of the orange river and vaal, the boers emigrated from the cape colony, and in the process they drove the matabele to the north, across the limpopo, setting them against the makalakas. just as the american farmer had driven the red indian west before him under the impact of capitalist economy, so the boer drove the negro to the north. the 'free republics' between the orange river and the limpopo thus were created as a protest against the designs of the english bourgeoisie on the sacred right of slavery. the tiny peasant republics were in constant guerilla warfare against the bantu negroes. and it was on the backs of the negroes that the battle between the boers and the english government, which went on for decades, was fought. the negro question, i.e. the emancipation of the negroes, ostensibly aimed at by the english bourgeoisie, served as a pretext for the conflict between england and the republics. in fact, peasant economy and great capitalist colonial policy were here competing for the hottentots and kaffirs, that is to say for their land and their labour power. both competitors had precisely the same aim: to subject, expel or destroy the coloured peoples, to appropriate their land and press them into service by the abolition of their social organisations. only their methods of exploitation were fundamentally different. while the boers stood for out-dated slavery on a petty scale, on which their patriarchal peasant economy was founded, the british bourgeoisie represented modern large-scale capitalist exploitation of the land and the natives. the constitution of the transvaal (south african) republic declared with crude prejudice: 'the people shall not permit any equality of coloured persons with white inhabitants, neither in the church nor in the state.'[398] in the orange free state and in the transvaal no negro was allowed to own land, to travel without papers or to walk abroad after sunset. bryce tells us of a case where a farmer, an englishman as it happened, in the eastern cape colony had flogged his kaffir slave to death. when he was acquitted in open court, his neighbours escorted him home to the strains of music. the white man frequently maltreated his free native labourers after they had done their work--to such an extent that they would take to flight, thus saving the master their wages. the british government employed precisely the opposite tactics. for a long time it appeared as protector of the natives; flattering the chieftains in particular, it supported their authority and tried to make them claim a right of disposal over their land. wherever it was possible, it gave them ownership of tribal land, according to well-tried methods, although this flew in the face of tradition and of the actual social organisation of the negroes. all tribes in fact held their land communally, and even the most cruel and despotic rulers such as the matabele chieftain lobengula merely had the right as well as the duty to allot every family a piece of land which they could only retain so long as they cultivated it. the ultimate purpose of the british government was clear: long in advance it was preparing for land robbery on a grand scale, using the native chieftains themselves as tools. but in the beginning it was content with the 'pacification' of the negroes by extensive military actions. up to 1879 were fought 9 bloody kaffir wars to break the resistance of the bantus. british capital revealed its real intentions only after two important events had taken place: the discovery of the kimberley diamond fields in 1869-70, and the discovery of the gold mines in the transvaal in 1882-5, which initiated a new epoch in the history of south africa. then the british south africa company, that is to say cecil rhodes, went into action. public opinion in england rapidly swung over, and the greed for the treasures of south africa urged the british government on to drastic measures. south africa was suddenly flooded with immigrants who had hitherto only appeared in small numbers--immigration having been deflected to the united states. but with the discovery of the diamond and gold fields, the numbers of white people in the south african colonies grew by leaps and bounds: between 1885 and 1895, 100,000 british had immigrated into witwatersrand alone. the modest peasant economy was forthwith pushed into the background--the mines, and thus the mining capital, coming to the fore. the policy of the british government veered round abruptly. great britain had recognised the boer republics by the sand river agreement and the treaty of bloemfontein in the fifties. now her political might advanced upon the tiny republics from every side, occupying all neighbouring districts and cutting off all possibility of expansion. at the same time the negroes, no longer protected favourites, were sacrificed. british capital was steadily forging ahead. in 1868, britain took over the rule of basutoland--only, of course, because the natives had 'repeatedly implored' her to do so.[399] in 1871, the witwatersrand diamond fields, or west griqualand, were seized from the orange free state and turned into a crown colony. in 1879, zululand was subjected, later to become part of the natal colony; in 1885 followed the subjection of bechuanaland, to be joined to the cape colony. in 1888 britain took over matabele and mashonaland, and in 1889 the british south africa company was given a charter for both these districts, again, of course, only to oblige the natives and at their request.[400] between 1884 and 1887, britain annexed st. lucia bay and the entire east coast as far as the portuguese possessions. in 1894, she subjected tongaland. with their last strength, the matabele and mashona fought one more desperate battle, but the company, with rhodes at the head, first liquidated the rising in blood and at once proceeded to the well-tried measure for civilising and pacifying the natives: two large railways were built in the rebellious district. the boer republics were feeling increasingly uncomfortable in this sudden stranglehold, and their internal affairs as well were becoming completely disorganised. the overwhelming influx of immigrants and the rising tides of the frenzied new capitalist economy now threatened to burst the barriers of the small peasant states. there was indeed a blatant conflict between agricultural and political peasant economy on the one hand, and the demands and requirements of the accumulation of capital on the other. in all respects, the republics were quite unable to cope with these new problems. the constant danger from the kaffirs, no doubt regarded favourably by the british, the unwieldy, primitive administration, the gradual corruption of the _volksraad_ in which the great capitalists got their way by bribery, lack of a police force to keep the undisciplined crowds of adventurers in some semblance of order, the absence of labour legislation for regulating and securing the exploitation of the negroes in the mines, lack of water supplies and transport to provide for the colony of 100,000 immigrants that had suddenly sprung up, high protective tariffs which increased the cost of labour for the capitalists, and high freights for coal--all these factors combined towards the sudden and stunning bankruptcy of the peasant republics. they tried, obstinately and unimaginatively, to defend themselves against the sudden eruption of capitalism which engulfed them, with an incredibly crude measure, such as only a stubborn and hide-bound peasant brain could have devised: they denied all civic rights to the _uitlanders_ who outnumbered them by far and who stood for capital, power, and the trend of the time. in those critical times it was an ill-omened trick. the mismanagement of the peasant republics caused a considerable reduction of dividends, on no account to be put up with. mining capital had come to the end of its tether. the british south africa company built railroads, put down the kaffirs, organised revolts of the _uitlanders_ and finally provoked the boer war. the bell had tolled for peasant economy. in the united states, the economic revolution had begun with a war, in south africa war put the period to this chapter. yet in both instances, the outcome was the same: capital triumphed over the small peasant economy which had in its turn come into being on the ruins of natural economy, represented by the natives' primitive organisations. the domination of capital was a foregone conclusion, and it was just as hopeless for the boer republics to resist as it had been for the american farmer. capital officially took over the reins in the new south african union which replaced the small peasant republics by a great modern state, as envisaged by cecil rhodes' imperialist programme. the new conflict between capital and labour had superseded the old one between british and dutch. one million white exploiters of both nations sealed their touching fraternal alliance within the union with the civil and political disfranchisement of five million coloured workers. not only the negroes of the boer republics came away empty-handed, but the natives of the cape colony, whom the british government had at one time granted political equality, were also deprived of some of their rights. and this noble work, culminating under the imperialist policy of the conservatives in open oppression, was actually to be finished by the liberal party itself, amid frenzied applause from the 'liberal cretins of europe' who with sentimental pride took as proof of the still continuing creative vigour and greatness of english liberalism the fact that britain had granted complete self-government and freedom to a handful of whites in south africa. the ruin of independent craftsmanship by capitalist competition, no less painful for being soft-pedalled, deserves by rights a chapter to itself. the most sinister part of such a chapter would be out-work under capitalism;--but we need not dwell on these phenomena here. the general result of the struggle between capitalism and simple commodity production is this: after substituting commodity economy for natural economy, capital takes the place of simple commodity economy. non-capitalist organisations provide a fertile soil for capitalism; more strictly: capital feeds on the ruins of such organisations, and although this non-capitalist _milieu_ is indispensable for accumulation, the latter proceeds at the cost of this medium nevertheless, by eating it up. historically, the accumulation of capital is a kind of metabolism between capitalist economy and those pre-capitalist methods of production without which it cannot go on and which, in this light, it corrodes and assimilates. thus capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist organisations, nor, on the other hand, can it tolerate their continued existence side by side with itself. only the continuous and progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organisations makes accumulation of capital possible. the premises which are postulated in marx's diagram of accumulation accordingly represent no more than the historical tendency of the movement of accumulation and its logical conclusion. the accumulative process endeavours everywhere to substitute simple commodity economy for natural economy. its ultimate aim, that is to say, is to establish the exclusive and universal domination of capitalist production in all countries and for all branches of industry. yet this argument does not lead anywhere. as soon as this final result is achieved--in theory, of course, because it can never actually happen--accumulation must come to a stop. the realisation and capitalisation of surplus value become impossible to accomplish. just as soon as reality begins to correspond to marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction, the end of accumulation is in sight, it has reached its limits, and capitalist production is _in extremis_. for capital, the standstill of accumulation means that the development of the productive forces is arrested, and the collapse of capitalism follows inevitably, as an objective historical necessity. this is the reason for the contradictory behaviour of capitalism in the final stage of its historical career: imperialism. marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction thus does not conform to the conditions of an accumulation in actual progress. progressive accumulation cannot be reduced to static interrelations and interdependence between the two great departments of social production (the departments of producer and consumer goods), as the diagram would have it. accumulation is more than an internal relationship between the branches of capitalist economy; it is primarily a relationship between capital and a non-capitalist environment, where the two great departments of production sometimes perform the accumulative process on their own, independently of each other, but even then at every step the movements overlap and intersect. from this we get most complicated relations, divergencies in the speed and direction of accumulation for the two departments, different relations with non-capitalist modes of production as regards both material elements and elements of value, which we cannot possibly lay down in rigid formulã¦. marx's diagram of accumulation is only the theoretical reflection of the precise moment when the domination of capital has reached its limits, and thus it is no less a fiction than his diagram of simple reproduction, which gives the theoretical formulation for the point of departure of capitalist accumulation. the precise definition of capitalist accumulation and its laws lies somewhere in between these two fictions. footnotes: [376] until recently, in china the domestic industries were widely practised even by the bourgeoisie and in such large and ancient towns as ningpo with its 300,000 inhabitants. 'only a generation ago, the family's shoes, hats, shirts, etc., were made by the women themselves. at that time, it was practically unheard-of for a young woman to buy from a merchant what she could have made with the labour of her own hands' (dr. nyok-ching tsur, 'forms of industry in the town of ningpo' (_die gewerblichen betriebsformen der stadt ningpo_), tuebingen, 1909, p. 51). [377] admittedly, this relation is reversed in the last stages of the history of peasant economy when capitalist production has made its full impact. once the small peasants are ruined, the entire work of farming frequently devolves on the women, old people and children, while the men are made to work for their living for capitalist entrepreneurs in the domestic industries or as wage-slaves in the factories. a typical instance is the small peasant in wuerttemberg. [378] w. a. peffer, _the farmer's side. his troubles and their remedy_ (new york, 1891), part ii, 'how we got here', chap. i, 'changed conditions of the farmer', pp. 56-7. cf. also a. m. simmons, _the american farmer_ (2nd edition, chicago, 1906), pp. 74 ff. [379] report of the u.s.a. commissioner of agriculture for the year 1867 (washington, 1868). quoted by lafargue: _getreidebau und getreidehandel in den vereinigten staaten_ in _die neue zeit_ (1885), p. 344. this essay on grain cultivation and the grain trade in the u.s.a. was first published in a russian periodical in 1883. [380] 'the three revenue acts of june 30, 1864, practically formed one measure, and that probably the greatest measure of taxation which the world has seen.... the internal revenue act was arranged, as mr. david a. wells has said, on the principle of the irishman at donnybrook fair: "whenever you see a head, hit it, whenever you see a commodity, tax it"' (f. w. taussig, _the tariff history of the united states_ (new york-london, 1888), pp. 163-4). [381] ibid., pp. 166-7. [382] 'the necessity of the situation, the critical state of the country, the urgent need of revenue, may have justified this haste, which, it is safe to say, is unexampled in the history of civilised countries' (taussig, op. cit., p. 168). [383] peffer, op. cit., pp. 58 ff. [384] ibid., p. 6. [385] 'agricultural competition in north america' (_die landwirtschaftliche konkurrenz nordamerikas_) leipzig, 1887, p. 431. [386] lafargue, op. cit., p. 345. [387] the thirteenth annual report of the commissioner of labour (washington, 1899) tables the advantages of machinery methods over hand methods so far achieved as follows: --------------------------------------------------------------- | _labour time per unit_ |-------------------------- _type of work_ | _machine_ | _hand_ |-------------+------------ |_hrs._|_min._|_hrs._|_min._ ------------------------------------+------+------+------+----- planting small corn | - | 32â·7 | 10 | 55 harvesting and threshing small corn | 1 | - | 46 | 40 planting corn | - | 37â·5 | 6 | 15 cutting corn | 3 | 4â·5 | 5 | - shelling corn | - | 3â·6 | 66 | 40 planting cotton | 1 | 3 | 8 | 48 cultivating cotton | 12 | 5 | 60 | - mowing grass (scythe _v._ mower) | 1 | 0â·6 | 7 | 20 harvesting and baling hay | 11 | 3â·4 | 35 | 30 anting potatoes | 1 | 2â·5 | 15 | - anting tomatoes | 1 | 4 | 10 | - cultivating and harvesting tomatoes | 134 | 5â·2 | 324 | 20 ---------------------------------------------------------------[388] wheat exports from the union to europe: _year_ _million bushels_ _year_ _million bushels_ 1868-9 17â·9 1885-6 57â·7 1874-5 71â·8 1890-1 55â·1 1879-80 153â·2 1899-1900 101â·9 (juraschek's _uebersichten der weltwirtschaft_, vol. vii, part i, p. 32). simultaneously, the price per bushel wheat _loco_ farm (in cents) declined as follows: 1870-9 105 1896 73 1880-9 83 1897 81 1895 51 1898 58 since 1899, when it had reached the low level of 58 cents per bushel, the price is moving up again: 1900 62 1903 78 1901 62 1904 92 1902 63 (ibid., p. 18). according to the 'monthly returns on external trade' (_monatliche nachweise ã¼ber den auswã¤rtigen handel_), the price (in marks) per 1,000 _kg._, was in june 1912: berlin 227â·82 london 170â·96 new york 178â·08 odessa 173â·94 mannheim 247â·93 paris 243â·69 [389] peffer, op. cit., part i, 'where we are', chap, ii, 'progress of agriculture', pp. 30-1. [390] ibid., p. 4. [391] sering, op. cit., p. 433. [392] peffer, op. cit., pp. 34 f. [393] quoted by nikolayon, op. cit., p. 224. [394] 49,199 people immigrated to canada in 1902. in 1912, the number of immigrants was more than 400,000--138,000 of them british, and 134,000 american. according to a report from montreal, the influx of american farmers continued into the spring of the present year [1912]. [395] 'travelling in the west of canada, i have visited only one farm of less than a thousand acres. according to the census of the dominion of canada, in 1881, when the census was taken, no more than 9,077 farmers occupied 2,384,337 acres of land between them; accordingly, the share of an individual (farmer) amounted to no less than 2,047 acres--in no state of the union is the average anywhere near that' (sering, op. cit., p. 376). in the early eighties, farming on a large scale was admittedly not very widely spread in canada. but already in 1887, sering describes the 'bell farm', owned by a limited company, which comprised no fewer than 56,700 acres, and was obviously modelled on the pattern of the dalrymple farm. in the eighties, sering, who regarded the prospects of canadian competition with some scepticism, put the 'fertile belt' of western canada at three-fifths of the entire acreage of germany, and estimated that actually only 38,400,000 acres of this were arable land, and no more than 15,000,000 acres at best were prospective wheat land (sering, op. cit., pp. 337-8). the _manitoba free press_ in june 1912, worked out that in summer, 1912, 11,200,000 acres were sown with spring wheat in canada, as against 19,200,000 acres under spring wheat in the united states. (cf. _berliner tageblatt, handelszeitung_, no. 305, june 18, 1912.) [396] sering, op. cit., pp. 361 ff. [397] ernst schultze, '_das wirtschaftsleben der vereinigten staaten_', _jahrb. f. gesetzg., verw. u. volkswirtschaft 1912_, no. 17, p. 1724. [398] article 9. [399] 'moshesh, the great basuto leader, to whose courage and statesmanship the basutos owed their very existence as a people, was still alive at the time, but constant war with the boers of the orange free state had brought him and his followers to the last stage of distress. two thousand basuto warriors had been killed, cattle had been carried off, native homes had been broken up and crops destroyed. the tribe was reduced to the position of starving refugees, and nothing could save them but the protection of the british government which they had repeatedly implored' (c. p. lucas, _a historical geography of the british colonies_, part ii, vol. iv (geography of south and east africa), oxford, 1904, p. 39). [400] 'the eastern section of the territory is mashonaland where, with the permission of king lobengula, who claimed it, the british south africa company first established themselves' (ibid., p. 72). _chapter xxx_ international loans the imperialist phase of capitalist accumulation which implies universal competition comprises the industrialisation and capitalist emancipation of the _hinterland_ where capital formerly realised its surplus value. characteristic of this phase are: lending abroad, railroad constructions, revolutions, and wars. the last decade, from 1900 to 1910, shows in particular the world-wide movement of capital, especially in asia and neighbouring europe: in russia, turkey, persia, india, japan, china, and also in north africa. just as the substitution of commodity economy for a natural economy and that of capitalist production for a simple commodity production was achieved by wars, social crises and the destruction of entire social systems, so at present the achievement of capitalist autonomy in the _hinterland_ and backward colonies is attained amidst wars and revolutions. revolution is an essential for the process of capitalist emancipation. the backward communities must shed their obsolete political organisations, relics of natural and simple commodity economy, and create a modern state machinery adapted to the purposes of capitalist production. the revolutions in turkey, russia, and china fall under this heading. the last two, in particular, do not exclusively serve the immediate political requirements of capitalism; to some extent they carry over outmoded pre-capitalist claims while on the other hand they already embody new conflicts which run counter to the domination of capital. these factors account for their immense drive, but at the same time impede and delay the ultimate victory of the revolutionary forces. a young state will usually sever the leading strings of older capitalist states by wars, which temper and test the modern state's capitalist independence in a baptism by fire. that is why military together with financial reforms invariably herald the bid for economic independence. the forward-thrusts of capital are approximately reflected in the development of the railway network. the permanent way grew most quickly in europe during the forties, in america in the fifties, in asia in the sixties, in australia during the seventies and eighties, and during the nineties in africa.[401] public loans for railroad building and armaments accompany all stages of the accumulation of capital: the introduction of commodity economy, industrialisation of countries, capitalist revolutionisation of agriculture as well as the emancipation of young capitalist states. for the accumulation of capital, the loan has various functions: (_a_) it serves to convert the money of non-capitalist groups into capital, i.e. money both as a commodity equivalent (lower middle-class savings) and as fund of consumption for the hangers-on of the capitalist class; (_b_) it serves to transform money capital into productive capital by means of state enterprise--railroad building and military supplies; (_c_) it serves to divert accumulated capital from the old capitalist countries to young ones. in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the loan transferred capital from the italian cities to england, in the eighteenth century from holland to england, in the nineteenth century from england to the american republics and australia, from france, germany and belgium to russia, and at the present time [1912] from germany to turkey, from england, germany and france to china, and, via russia, to persia. in the imperialist era, the foreign loan played an outstanding part as a means for young capitalist states to acquire independence. the contradictions inherent in the modern system of foreign loans are the concrete expression of those which characterise the imperialist phase. though foreign loans are indispensable for the emancipation of the rising capitalist states, they are yet the surest ties by which the old capitalist states maintain their influence, exercise financial control and exert pressure on the customs, foreign and commercial policy of the young capitalist states. pre-eminently channels for the investment in new spheres of capital accumulated in the old countries, such loans widen the scope for the accumulation of capital; but at the same time they restrict it by creating new competition for the investing countries. these inherent conflicts of the international loan system are a classic example of spatio-temporal divergencies between the conditions for the realisation of surplus value and the capitalisation thereof. while realisation of the surplus value requires only the general spreading of commodity production, its capitalisation demands the progressive supercession of simple commodity production by capitalist economy, with the corollary that the limits to both the realisation and the capitalisation of surplus value keep contracting ever more. employment of international capital in the construction of the international railway network reflects this disparity. between the thirties and the sixties of the nineteenth century, railway building and the loans necessary for it mainly served to oust natural economy, and to spread commodity economy--as in the case of the russian railway loans in the sixties, or in that of the american railways which were built with european capital. railway construction in africa and asia during the last twenty years, on the other hand, almost exclusively served the purposes of an imperialist policy, of economic monopolisation and economic subjugation of the backward communities. as regards russia's railroad construction in eastern asia, for instance, it is common knowledge that russia had paved the way for the military occupation of manchuria by sending troops to protect her engineers working on the manchurian railway. with the same object in view, russia obtained railway concessions in persia, germany in asia minor and mesopotamia, and britain and germany in africa. in this connection, we must deal with a misunderstanding concerning the capital investments in foreign countries and the demand of these countries for capital imports. already in the early twenties of the last century, the export of british capital to america played an important part, being largely responsible for the first genuine industrial and commercial crises in england in 1825. since 1824, the london stock exchange had been flooded with south american stocks and shares. during the following year, the newly created states of south and central america raised loans in london alone for more than â£20,000,000, and in addition, enormous quantities of south american industrial shares and similar bonds were sold. this sudden prosperity and the opening up of the south american markets in their turn called forth greatly increased exports of british commodities to the latin americas. british commodity exports to these countries amounted to â£2,900,000 in 1821 which had risen to â£6,400,000 by 1825. cotton textiles formed the most important item of these exports; this powerful demand was the impetus for a rapid expansion of british cotton production, and many new factories were opened. in 1821, raw cotton to the value of â£m. 129 was made up in england, and in 1826 the amount had risen to â£m. 167. the situation was thus fraught with the elements of a crisis. tugan baranovski raises the question: 'but from where did the south american countries take the means to buy twice as many commodities in 1825 as in 1821? the british themselves supplied these means. the loans floated on the london stock exchange served as payment for imported goods. deceived by the demand they had themselves created, the british factory-owners were soon brought to realise by their own experience that their high expectations had been unfounded.'[402] he thus characterises as 'deceptive', as an unhealthy, abnormal economic phenomenon the fact that the south american demand for english goods had been brought about by british capital. thus uncritically he took over the doctrine of an expert with whose other theories he wished to have nothing in common. the opinion had been advanced already during the english crisis of 1825 that it could be explained by the 'singular' development of the relations between british capital and south american demand. none other than sismondi had raised the same question as tugan baranovski and given a most accurate description of events in the second edition of his _nouveaux principes_: 'the opening up of the immense market afforded by spanish america to industrial producers seemed to offer a good opportunity to relieve british manufacture. the british government were of that opinion, and in the seven years following the crisis of 1818, displayed unheard-of activity to carry english commerce to penetrate the remotest districts of mexico, columbia, brazil, rio de la plata, chile and peru. before the government decided to recognise these new states, it had to protect english commerce by frequent calls of battleships whose captains had a diplomatic rather than a military mission. in consequence, it had defied the clamours of the holy alliance and recognised the new republics at a moment when the whole of europe, on the contrary, was plotting their ruin. but however big the demand afforded by free america, yet it would not have been enough to absorb all the goods england had produced over and above the needs of consumption, had not their means for buying english merchandise been suddenly increased beyond all bounds by the loans to the new republics. every american state borrowed from england an amount sufficient to consolidate its government. although they were capital loans, they were immediately spent in the course of the year like income, that is to say they were used up entirely to buy english goods on behalf of the treasury, or to pay for those which had been dispatched on private orders. at the same time, numerous companies with immense capitals were formed to exploit all the american mines, but all the money they spent found its way back to england, either to pay for the machinery which they immediately used, or else for the goods sent to the localities where they were to work. as long as this singular commerce lasted, in which the english only asked the americans to be kind enough to buy english merchandise with english capital, and to consume them for their sake, the prosperity of english manufacture appeared dazzling. it was no more income but rather english capital which was used to push on consumption: the english themselves bought and paid for their own goods which they sent to america, and thereby merely forwent the pleasure of using these goods.'[403] from this sismondi drew the characteristic conclusion that the real limits to the capitalist market are set by income, i.e. by personal consumption alone, and he used this example as one more warning against accumulation. down to the present day, the events which preceded the crisis of 1825 have remained typical for a period of boom and expansion of capital, and such 'singular commerce' is in fact one of the most important foundations of the accumulation of capital. particularly in the history of british capital, it occurs regularly before every crisis, as tugan baranovski himself showed by the following facts and figures: the immediate cause of the 1836 crisis was the flooding of the american market with british goods, again financed by british money. in 1834, u.s. commodity imports exceeded exports by â£m. 1â·2 but at the same time their imports of precious metal exceeded exports by nearly â£m. 3â·2. even in 1836, the year of the crisis itself, their surplus of imported commodities amounted to â£m. 10â·4, and still the excess of bullion imported was â£m. 1. this influx of money, no less than the stream of goods, came chiefly from england, where u.s. railway shares were bought in bulk. 1835/6 saw the opening in the united states of sixty-one new banks with a capital of â£m. 10â·4, predominantly british. again, the english paid for their exports themselves. the unprecedented industrial boom in the northern states of the union, eventually leading to the civil war, was likewise financed by british capital, which again created an expanding market for british industry in the united states. and not only british capital--other european capitals also made every possible effort to take part in this 'singular commerce'. to quote schaeffle, in the five years between 1849 and 1854, at least â£m. 100 were invested in american shares on the various stock exchanges of europe. the simultaneous revival of world industry attained such dimensions that it culminated in the world crash of 1857.--in the sixties, british capital lost no time in creating similar conditions in asia as well as the united states. an unending stream was diverted to asia minor and east india, where it financed the most magnificent railroad projects. the permanent way of british india amounted in 1860 to 844 miles, in 1870 to 4,802 miles, in 1880 to 9,361 miles and in 1890 to 16,875 miles. this at once increased the demand for british commodities. no sooner had the war of secession come to a close, than british capital again flowed into the united states. it again paid for the greater part of the enormous railroad constructions in the union during the sixties and seventies, the permanent way amounting in 1850 to 8,844 miles, in 1860 to 30,807 miles, in 1870 to 53,212 miles, in 1880 to 94,198 miles, and in 1890 to 179,005 miles. materials for these railways were also being supplied by england--one of the main causes for the rapid development of the british coal and iron industries and the reasons why these industries were so seriously affected by the american crises of 1866, 1873 and 1884. what sismondi considered sheer lunacy was in this instance literally true: the british with their own materials, their own iron etc., had built railroads in the united states, they had paid for the railways with their own capital and only forwent their 'use'. in spite of all periodical crises, however, european capital had acquired such a taste for this madness, that the london stock exchange was seized by a veritable epidemic of foreign loans in the middle of the seventies. between 1870 and 1875, loans of this kind, amounting to â£m. 260, were raised in london. the immediate consequence was a rapid increase in the overseas export of british merchandise. although the foreign countries concerned went periodically bankrupt, masses of capital continued to flow in. turkey, egypt, greece, bolivia, costa rica, ecuador, honduras, mexico, paraguay, peru, st. domingo, uruguay, and venezuela completely or partially suspended their payments of interest in the late seventies. yet undeterred by this, the fever for exotic state loans burst out again at the end of the eighties--the south american states and south african colonies were lent immense quantities of european capital. in 1874, for instance, the argentine republic borrowed as much as â£m. 10 and the loan had risen to â£m. 59 by 1890. england built railways with her own iron and coal in all these countries as well, paying for them with her own capital. in 1885, the argentine permanent way had been 1,952 miles, in 1893 it was 8,557 miles. exports from england were rising accordingly: --------------------------- | 1886 | 1890 ----------+--------+------- | â£m. | â£m. iron | 21â·8 | 31â·6 machinery | 10 | 16â·4 coal | 9 | 19 ---------------------------british total exports (mainly to the argentine) amounted to â£m. 4â·7 in 1885 and to â£m. 10â·7 a mere four years later. at the same time, british capital flowed into australia in the form of state loans. at the end of the eighties the loans to the three colonies victoria, new south wales and tasmania amounted to â£m. 112, â£m. 81 of which were invested in railway construction. the permanent way of australia extended over 4,900 miles in 1880, and over 15,600 miles in 1895. britain, supplying capital and materials for these railways, was also embroiled in the crises of 1890 in the argentine, transvaal, mexico, uruguay, and in that of 1893 in australia. the following two decades made a difference only in so far as german, french and belgian capital largely participated with british capital in foreign investments, while railway construction in asia minor had been financed entirely by british capital from the fifties to the late eighties. from then on, german capital took over and put into execution the tremendous project of the anatolian railway. german capital investments in turkey gave rise to an increased export of german goods to that country. in 1896, german exports to turkey amounted to â£m. 1â·4, in 1911 to â£m. 5â·65. to asiatic turkey, in particular, goods were exported in 1901 to the value of â£m. 0â·6 and in 1911 to the value of â£m. 1â·85. in this case, german capital was used to a considerable extent to pay for german goods, the germans forgoing, to use sismondi's term, only the pleasure of using their own products. let us examine the position more closely: realised surplus value, which cannot be capitalised and lies idle in england or germany, is invested in railway construction, water works, etc. in the argentine, australia, the cape colony or mesopotamia. machinery, materials and the like are supplied by the country where the capital has originated, and the same capital pays for them. actually, this process characterises capitalist conditions everywhere, even at home. capital must purchase the elements of production and thus become productive capital before it can operate. admittedly, the products are then used within the country, while in the former case they are used by foreigners. but then capitalist production does not aim at its products being enjoyed, but at the accumulation of surplus value. there had been no demand for the surplus product within the country, so capital had lain idle without the possibility of accumulating. but abroad, where capitalist production has not yet developed, there has come about, voluntarily or by force, a new demand of the non-capitalist strata. the consumption of the capitalist and working classes at home is irrelevant for the purposes of accumulation, and what matters to capital is the very fact that its products are 'used' by _others_. the new consumers must indeed realise the products, pay for their use, and for this they need money. they can obtain some of it by the exchange of commodities which begins at this point, a brisk traffic in goods following hard on the heels of railway construction and mining (gold mines, etc.). thus the capital advanced for railroad building and mining, together with an additional surplus value, is gradually realised. it is immaterial to the situation as a whole whether this exported capital becomes share capital in new independent enterprises, or whether, as a government loan, it uses the mediation of a foreign state to find new scope for operation in industry and traffic, nor does it matter if in the first case some of the companies are fraudulent and fail in due course, or if in the second case the borrowing state finally goes bankrupt, i.e. if the owners sometimes lose part of their capital in one way or another. even the country of origin is not immune, and individual capitals frequently get lost in crises. the important point is that capital accumulated in the old country should find elsewhere new opportunities to beget and realise surplus value, so that accumulation can proceed. in the new countries, large regions of natural economy are open to conversion into commodity economy, or existing commodity economy can be ousted by capital. railroad construction and mining, gold mining in particular, are typical for the investment of capitals from old capitalist countries in new ones. they are pre-eminently qualified to stimulate a brisk traffic in goods under conditions hitherto determined by natural economy and both are significant in economic history as mile-stones along the route of rapid dissolution of old economic organisations, of social crises and of the development of modern conditions, that is to say of the development of commodity economy to begin with, and further of the production of capital. for this reason, the part played by lending abroad as well as by capital investments in foreign railway and mining shares is a fine sample of the deficiencies in marx's diagram of accumulation. in these instances, enlarged reproduction of capital capitalises a surplus value that has already been realised (in so far as the loans or foreign investments are not financed by the savings of the petty bourgeoisie or the semi-proletariat). it is quite irrelevant to the present field of accumulation, when, where and how the capital of the old countries has been realised so that it may flow into the new country. british capital which finds an outlet in argentine railway construction might well in the past have been realised in china in the form of indian opium. further, the british capital which builds railways in the argentine, is of english origin not only in its pure value-form, as money capital, but also in its material form, as iron, coal and machinery; the use-form of the surplus value, that is to say, has also come into being from the very beginning in the use-form suitable for the purposes of accumulation. the actual use-form of the variable capital, however, labour power, is mainly foreign: it is the native labour of the new countries which is made a new object of exploitation by the capital of the old countries. if we want to keep our investigation all on one plane, we may even assume that the labour power, too, has the same country of origin as the capital. in point of fact new discoveries, of gold mines for instance, tend to call forth mass emigration from the old countries, especially in the first stages, and are largely worked by labour from those countries. it might well be, then, that in a new country capital, labour power and means of production all come from the same capitalist country, say england. so it is really in england that all the material conditions for accumulation exist--a realised surplus value as money capital, a surplus product in productive form, and lastly labour reserves. yet accumulation cannot proceed here: england and her old buyers require neither railways nor an expanded industry. enlarged reproduction, i.e. accumulation, is possible only if new districts with a non-capitalist civilisation, extending over large areas, appear on the scene and augment the number of consumers. but then, who are these new consumers actually; who is it that realises the surplus value of capitalist enterprises which are started with foreign loans; and who, in the final analysis, pays for these loans? the international loans in egypt provide a classical answer. the internal history of egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century is characterised by the interplay of three phenomena: large-scale capitalist enterprise, a rapidly growing public debt, and the collapse of peasant economy. until quite recently, _corvã©e_ prevailed in egypt, and the wali and later the khedive freely pursued their own power policy with regard to the condition of landownership. these primitive conditions precisely offered an incomparably fertile soil for the operations of european capital. economically speaking, the conditions for a monetary economy had to be established to begin with, and the state created them by direct compulsion. until the thirties, mehemet ali, the founder of modern egypt, here applied a method of patriarchal simplicity: every year, he 'bought up' the fellaheen's entire harvest for the public exchequer, and allowed them to buy back, at a higher price, a minimum for subsistence and seed. in addition he imported cotton from east india, sugar cane from america, indigo and pepper, and issued the fellaheen with official directions what to plant and how much of it. the government again claimed the monopoly for cotton and indigo, reserving to itself the exclusive right of buying and selling these goods. by such methods was commodity exchange introduced in egypt. admittedly, mehemet ali also did something towards raising labour productivity. he arranged for dredging of the ancient canalisation, and above all he started the work of the great kaliub nile dams which initiated the series of great capitalist enterprises in egypt. these were to comprise four great fields: (1) irrigation systems, in which the kaliub works built between 1845 and 1853 take first place--quite apart from unpaid forced labour, they swallowed up â£m. 2â·5 and incidentally proved quite useless at first; (2) routes for traffic--the most important construction which proved ultimately detrimental to egypt being the suez canal; (3) the cultivation of cotton, and (4) the production of sugar cane. with the building of the suez canal, egypt became caught up in the web of european capitalism, never again to get free of it. french capital led the way with british capital hard on its heels. in the twenty years that followed, the internal disturbances in egypt were coloured by the competitive struggle between these two capitals. french capital was perhaps the most peculiar exponent of the european methods of capital accumulation at the expense of primitive conditions. its operations were responsible for the useless nile dams as well as for the suez canal. egypt first contracted to supply the labour of 20,000 serfs free of charge for a number of years, and secondly to take up shares in the suez company to the tune of â£m. 3â·5, i.e. 40 per cent of the company's total capital. all this for the sake of breaking through a canal which would deflect the entire trade between europe and asia from egypt and would painfully affect her part in this trade. these â£m. 3â·5 formed the nucleus for egypt's immense national debt which was to bring about her military occupation by britain twenty years later. in the irrigation system, sudden transformations were initiated: the ancient _sakias_, i.e. bullock-driven water-wheels, of which 50,000 had been busy for 7 months in the year in the nile delta alone, were partially replaced by steam pumps. modern steamers now plied on the nile between cairo and assuan. but the most profound change in the economic conditions of egypt was brought about by the cultivation of cotton. this became almost epidemic in egypt when, owing to the american war of secession and the english cotton famine, the price per short ton rose from something between â£30 and â£40 to â£200-â£250. everybody was planting cotton, and foremost among all, the viceroy and his family. his estates grew fat, what with large-scale land robbery, confiscations, forced 'sale' or plain theft. he suddenly appropriated villages by the score though without any legal excuse. within an incredibly short time, this vast demesne was brought under cotton, with the result that the entire technique of egyptian traditional agriculture was revolutionised. dams were thrown up everywhere to protect the cotton fields from the seasonal flooding of the nile, and a comprehensive system of artificial irrigation was introduced. these waterworks together with continuous deep ploughing--a novel departure for the fellah who had until then merely scratched his soil with a plough dating back to the pharaohs--and finally the intensive labours of the harvest made between them enormous demands on egypt's labour power. this was throughout the same forced peasant labour over which the state claimed to have an unrestricted right of disposal; and thousands had already been employed on the kaliub dams and the suez canal and now the irrigation and plantation work to be done on the viceregal estates clamoured for this forced labour. the 20,000 serfs who had been put at the disposal of the suez canal company were now required by the khedive himself, and this brought about the first clash with french capital. the company was adjudged a compensation of â£m. 3â·35 by the arbitration of napoleon iii, a settlement to which the khedive could all the more readily agree, since the very fellaheen whose labour power was the bone of contention were ultimately to be mulcted of this sum. the work of irrigation was immediately put in hand. centrifugal machines, steam and traction engines were therefore ordered from england and france. in their hundreds, they were carried by steamers from england to alexandria and then further. steam ploughs were needed for cultivating the soil, especially since the rinderpest of 1864 had killed off all the cattle, england again being the chief supplier of these machines. the fowler works were expanded enormously of a sudden to meet the requirements of the viceroy for which egypt had to pay.[404] but now egypt required yet a third type of machine, cotton gins and presses for packing. dozens of these gins were set up in the delta towns. like english industrial towns, sagasis, tanta, samanud and other towns were covered by palls of smoke and great fortunes circulated in the banks of alexandria and cairo. but already in the year that followed, this cotton speculation collapsed with the cotton prices which fell in a couple of days from 27_d._ per pound to 15_d._, 12_d._, and finally 6_d._ after the cessation of hostilities in the american union. the following year, ismail pasha ventured on a new speculation, the production of cane sugar. the forced labour of the fellaheen was to compete with the southern states of the union where slavery had been abolished. for the second time, egyptian agriculture was turned upside down. french and british capitalists found a new field for rapid accumulation. 18 giant sugar factories were put on order in 1868-9 with an estimated daily output of 200 short tons of sugar, that is to say four times as much as that of the greatest then existing plant. six of them were ordered from england, and twelve from france, but england eventually delivered the lion's share, because of the franco-german war. these factories were to be built along the nile at intervals of 6â·2 miles (10 _km._), as centres of cane plantations of an area comprising 10 sq. _km._ working to full capacity, each factory required a daily supply of 2,000 tons of sugar cane. fellaheen were driven to forced labour on the sugar plantations in their thousands, while further thousands of their number built the ibrahimya canal. the stick and _kourbash_ were unstintingly applied. transport soon became a problem. a railway network had to be built round every factory to haul the masses of cane inside, rolling stock, funiculars, etc., had to be obtained as quickly as possible. again these enormous orders were placed with english capital. the first giant factory was opened in 1872, 4,000 camels providing makeshift transport. but it proved to be simply impossible to supply cane in the quantities required by the undertaking. the working staff was completely inadequate, since the fellah, accustomed to forced labour on the land, could not be transformed overnight into a modern industrial worker by the lash of the whip. the venture collapsed, even before many of the imported machines had been installed. this sugar speculation concluded the period of gigantic capitalist enterprise in egypt in 1873. what had provided the capital for these enterprises? international loans. one year before his death in 1863, said pasha had raised the first loan at a nominal value of â£m. 3â·3 which came to â£m. 2â·5 in cash after deduction of commissions, discounts, etc. he left to ismail pasha the legacy of this debt and the contract with the suez canal company, which was to burden egypt with a debt of â£m. 17. ismail pasha in turn raised his first loan in 1864 with a nominal value of â£m. 5â·7 at 7 per cent and a cash value of â£m. 4â·85 at 8â 1/4 per cent. what remained of it, after â£m. 3â·35 had been paid to the suez canal company as compensation, was spent within the year, swallowed up for the greater part by the cotton gamble. in 1865, the first so-called daira-loan was floated by the anglo-egyptian bank, on the security of the khedive's private estates. the nominal value of this loan was â£m. 3â·4 at 9 per cent, and its real value â£m. 2â·5 at 12 per cent. in 1866, _fruehling & goschen_ floated a new loan at a nominal value of â£m. 3 and a cash value of â£m. 2. the ottoman bank floated another in 1867 of nominally â£m. 2, really â£m. 1â·7. the floating debt at that time amounted to â£m. 30. the banking house _oppenheim & neffen_ floated a great loan in 1868 to consolidate part of this debt. its nominal value was â£m. 11â·9 at 7 per cent, though ismail could actually lay hands only on â£m. 7â·1 at 13â 1/2 per cent. this money made it possible, however, to pay for the pompous celebrations on the opening of the suez canal, in presence of the leading figures in the courts of europe, in finance and in the _demi-monde_, for a madly lavish display, and further, to grease the palm of the turkish overlord, the sultan, with a new baksheesh of â£m. 1. the sugar gamble necessitated another loan in 1870. floated by the firm of _bischoffsheim & goldschmidt_, it had a nominal value of â£m. 7â·1 at 7 per cent, and its cash value was â£m. 5. in 1872/3 _oppenheim's_ floated two further loans, a modest one amounting to â£m. 4 at 14 per cent and a large one of â£m. 32 at 8 per cent which reduced the floating debt by one-half, but which actually came only to â£m. 11 in cash, since the european banking houses paid it in part by bills of exchange they had discounted. in 1874, a further attempt was made to raise a national loan of â£m. 50 at an annual charge of 9 per cent, but it yielded no more than â£m. 3â·4. egyptian securities were quoted at 54 per cent of their face value. within the thirteen years after said pasha's death, egypt's total public debt had grown from â£m. 3â·293 to â£m. 94â·110,[405] and collapse was imminent. these operations of capital, at first sight, seem to reach the height of madness. one loan followed hard on the other, the interest on old loans was defrayed by new loans, and capital borrowed from the british and french paid for the large orders placed with british and french industrial capital. while the whole of europe sighed and shrugged its shoulders at ismail's crazy economy, european capital was in fact doing business in egypt on a unique and fantastic scale--an incredible modern version of the biblical legend about the fat kine which remains unparalleled in capitalist history. in the first place, there was an element of usury in every loan, anything between one-fifth and one-third of the money ostensibly lent sticking to the fingers of the european bankers. ultimately, the exorbitant interest had to be paid somehow, but how--where were the means to come from? egypt herself was to supply them; their source was the egyptian fellah--peasant economy providing in the final analysis all the most important elements for large-scale capitalist enterprise. he provided the land since the so-called private estates of the khedive were quickly growing to vast dimensions by robbery and blackmail of innumerable villages; and these estates were the foundations of the irrigation projects and the speculation in cotton and sugar cane. as forced labour, the fellah also provided the labour power and, what is more, he was exploited without payment and even had to provide his own means of subsistence while he was at work. the marvels of technique which european engineers and european machines performed in the sphere of egyptian irrigation, transport, agriculture and industry were due to this peasant economy with its fellaheen serfs. on the kaliub nile dams and on the suez canal, in the cotton plantations and in the sugar plants, untold masses of peasants were put to work; they were switched over from one job to the next as the need arose, and they were exploited to the limit of endurance and beyond. although it became evident at every step that there were technical limits to the employment of forced labour for the purposes of modern capital, yet this was amply compensated by capital's unrestricted power of command over the pool of labour power, how long and under what conditions men were to work, live and be exploited. but not alone that it supplied land and labour power, peasant economy also provided the money. under the influence of capitalist economy, the screws were put on the fellaheen by taxation. the tax on peasant holdings was persistently increased. in the late sixties, it amounted to â£2 5_s._ per _hectare_, but not a farthing was levied on the enormous private estates of the royal family. in addition, ever more special rates were devised. contributions of 2_s._ 6_d._ per _hectare_ had to be paid for the maintenance of the irrigation system which almost exclusively benefited the royal estates, and the fellah had to pay 1_s._ 4_d._ for every date tree felled, 9_d._ for every clay hovel in which he lived. in addition, every male over 10 years of age was liable to a head tax of 6_s._ 6_d._ the total paid by the fellaheen was â£m. 2â·5 under mehemet ali, â£m. 5 under said pasha, and â£m. 8â·15 under ismail pasha. the greater the debt to european capital became, the more had to be extorted from the peasants.[406] in 1869 all taxes were put up by 10 per cent and the taxes for the coming year collected in advance. in 1870, a supplementary land tax of 8_s._ per _hectare_ was levied. all over upper egypt people were leaving the villages, demolished their dwellings and no longer tilled their land--only to avoid payment of taxes. in 1876, the tax on date palms was increased by 6_d._ whole villages went out to fell their date palms and had to be prevented by rifle volleys. north of siut, 10,000 fellaheen are said to have starved in 1879 because they could no longer raise the irrigation tax for their fields and had killed their cattle to avoid paying tax on it.[407] now the fellah had been drained of his last drop of blood. used as a leech by european capital, the egyptian state had accomplished its function and was no longer needed. ismail, the khedive, was given his _congã©_; capital could begin winding up operations. egypt had still to pay 394,000 egyptian pounds as interest on the suez canal shares for â£m. 4 which england had bought in 1875. now british commissions to 'regulate' the finances of egypt went into action. strangely enough, european capital was not at all deterred by the desperate state of the insolvent country and offered again and again to grant immense loans for the salvation of egypt. cowe and stokes proposed a loan of â£m. 76 at 9 per cent for the conversion of the total debt, rivers wilson thought no less than â£m. 103 would be necessary. the _crã©dit foncier_ bought up floating bills of exchange by the million, attempting, though without success, to consolidate the total debt by a loan of â£m. 91. with the financial position growing hopelessly desperate, the time drew near when the country and all her productive forces was to become the prey of european capital. october 1878 saw the representatives of the european creditors landing in alexandria. british and french capital established dual control of finances and devised new taxes; the peasants were beaten and oppressed, so that payment of interest, temporarily suspended in 1876, could be resumed in 1877.[408] now the claims of european capital became the pivot of economic life and the sole consideration of the financial system. in 1878, a new commission and ministry were set up, both with a staff in which europeans made up one half. in 1879, the finances of egypt were brought under permanent control of european capital, exercised by the _commission de la dette publique ã�gyptienne_ in cairo. in 1878, the tshifliks, estates of the viceregal family, which comprised 431,100 acres, were converted into crown land and pledged to the european capitalists as collateral for the public debt, and the same happened to the daira lands, the private estates of the khedive, comprising 485,131 acres, mainly in upper egypt; this was, at a later date, sold to a syndicate. the other estates for the greatest part fell to capitalist companies, the suez canal company in particular. to cover the cost of occupation, england requisitioned ecclesiastical lands of the mosques and schools. an opportune pretext for the final blow was provided by a mutiny in the egyptian army, starved under european financial control while european officials were drawing excellent salaries, and by a revolt engineered among the alexandrian masses who had been bled white. the british military occupied egypt in 1882, as a result of twenty years' operations of big business, never to leave again. this was the ultimate and final step in the process of liquidating peasant economy in egypt by and for european capital.[409] it should now be clear that the transactions between european loan capital and european industrial capital are based upon relations which are extremely rational and 'sound' for the accumulation of capital, although they appear absurd to the casual observer because this loan capital pays for the orders from egypt and the interest on one loan is paid out of a new loan. stripped of all obscuring connecting links, these relations consist in the simple fact that european capital has largely swallowed up the egyptian peasant economy. enormous tracts of land, labour, and labour products without number, accruing to the state as taxes, have ultimately been converted into european capital and have been accumulated. evidently, only by use of the _kourbash_ could the historical development which would normally take centuries be compressed into two or three decades, and it was just the primitive nature of egyptian conditions which proved such fertile soil for the accumulation of capital. as against the fantastic increase of capital on the one hand, the other economic result is the ruin of peasant economy together with the growth of commodity exchange which is rooted in the supreme exertion of the country's productive forces. under ismail's rule, the arable and reclaimed land of egypt grew from 5 to 6â·75 million acres, the canal system from 45,625 to 54,375 miles and the permanent way from 256â·25 to 1,638 miles. docks were built in siut and alexandria, magnificent dockyards in alexandria, a steamer-service for pilgrims to mecca was introduced on the red sea and along the coast of syria and asia minor. egypt's exports which in 1861 had amounted to â£4,450,000 rose to â£m. 14â·4 in 1864; her imports which under said pasha amounted to â£m 1â·2 rose under ismail to between â£m. 5 and â£m. 5â·5. trade which recovered only in the eighties from the opening up of the suez canal amounted to â£m. 8â·15 worth of imports and â£m. 12â·45 worth of exports in 1890, but in 1900 the figures were â£m. 144 for imports and â£m. 12â·25 for exports, and in 1911--â£m. 27â·85 for imports and â£m. 26â·85 for exports. thanks to this development of commodity economy which expanded by leaps and bounds with the assistance of european capital, egypt herself had fallen a prey to the latter. the case of egypt, just as that of china and, more recently, morocco, shows militarism as the executor of the accumulation of capital, lurking behind international loans, railroad building, irrigation systems, and similar works of civilisation. the oriental states cannot develop from natural to commodity economy and further to capitalist economy fast enough and are swallowed up by international capital, since they cannot perform these transformations without selling their souls to capital. their feverish metamorphoses are tantamount to their absorption by international capital. another good recent example is the deal made by german capital in asiatic turkey. european capital, british capital in particular, had already at an early date attempted to gain possession of this area which marches with the ancient trade route between europe and asia.[410] in the fifties and sixties, british capital built the railway lines smyrna-aydin-diner and smyrna-kassaba-alasehir, obtained the concession to extend the line to afyon karahisar and also leased the first tract for the anatolian railway ada-bazar-izmid. french capital gradually came to acquire influence over part of the railway building during this time. in 1888, german capital appeared on the scene. it took up 60 per cent of the shares in the new merger of international interests, negotiated principally with the french capitalist group represented by the _banque ottomane_. international capital took up the remaining 40 per cent.[411] the anatolian railway company, a turkish company, was founded on the 14th redsheb of the year 1306 (march 4, 1889) with the _deutsche bank_ for principal backer, to take over the railway lines between ada-bazar and izmid, running since the early seventies, as also the concession for the izmid-eskisehir-angora line (525 miles). it was further entitled to complete the ada-bazar-scutari line and branch lines to brussa, in addition to building the supplementary network eskisehir-konya (278 miles) on the basis of the 1893 concession, and finally to run a service from angora to kaisari (264 miles). the turkish government gave the company a state guarantee of annual gross earnings amounting to â£412 per km. on the ada-bazar line and of â£600 per km. on the izmid-angora lines. for this purpose it wrote over to the _administration de la dette publique ottomane_ the revenue from tithes in the _sandshaks_ of izmid, ertoghrul, kutalia and angora, with which to make up the gross earnings guaranteed by the government. for the angora-kaisari line the government guaranteed annual gross earnings of 775 turkish pounds, i.e. â£712 per km., and 604 turkish pounds, i.e. approximately â£550, provided, in the latter case, that the supplementary grant per km. did not exceed 219 turkish pounds (â£200 a year). the government was to receive a quarter of the eventual surplus of gross earnings over the guaranteed amount. the _administration de la dette publique ottomane_ as executor of the government guarantee collected the tithes of the _sandshaks_ trebizonde and gumuchhane direct and paid the railway company out of a common fund which was formed of all the tithes set aside for this purpose. in 1898, the eskisehir-konya maximum grant was raised from 218 to 296 turkish pounds. in 1899, the company obtained concessions to build and run a dockyard at ada-bazar, to issue writs, to build corn-elevators and storerooms for goods of every description, further the right to employ its own staff for loading and unloading and, finally, in the sphere of customs policy, the creation of a kind of free port. in 1901, the company acquired a concession for the baghdad railway konya-baghdad-bazra-gulf of persia (1,500 miles) which connects with the anatolian line by the konya-aregli-bulgurlu line. for taking up this concession, a new limited company was founded which placed the order of constructing the line, at first to bulgurlu, with a building company registered in frankfort-on-the-main. between 1893 and 1910, the turkish government gave additional grants--â£1,948,000 for the ada-bazar-angora line and 1,800,000 turkish pounds for the eskisehir-konya line--a total of â£3,632,000.[412] finally, by the concession of 1907, the company was empowered to drain the karavirar lake and to irrigate the konya plain, these works to be executed within six years at government expense. in this instance, the company advanced the government the necessary capital up to â£780,000 at 5 per cent interest, repayable within thirty-six years. in return the turkish government pledged as securities: (1) an annual sum of 25,000 turkish pounds, payable from the surplus of the tithes' fund assigned to the _administration de la dette publique ottomane_ to cover the railway grants and other obligations; (2) the residual tithes over the last 5 years in the newly irrigated regions; (3) the net proceeds from the working of the irrigation systems, and (4) the price of all reclaimed or irrigated land that was sold. for the execution of this work, the frankfort company had formed a subsidiary company 'for the irrigation of the konya plain' with a capital of â£m. 5â·4 to take this work in hand. in 1908 the company obtained the concession for extending the konya railway as far as baghdad and the gulf of persia, again with inclusion of a guaranteed revenue. to pay for this railway grant, a german baghdad railway loan was taken up in three instalments of â£m. 2â·16, â£m. 4â·32 and â£m. 4â·76 respectively, on the security of the aggregate tithes for the _vilayets_ aydin, baghdad, mossul, diarbekir, ursa and aleppo, and the sheep-tax in the _vilayets_ konya, adana, aleppo, etc.[413] the foundation of accumulation here becomes quite clear. german capital builds railways, ports and irrigation works in asiatic turkey; in all these enterprises it extorts new surplus value from the asiatics whom it employs as labour power. but this surplus value must be realised together with the means of production from germany (railway materials, machinery, etc.). how is it done? in part by commodity exchange which is brought about by the railways, the dockyards, etc., and nurtured in asia minor under conditions of natural economy. in part, i.e. in so far as commodity exchange does not grow quickly enough for the needs of capital, by using force, the machinery of the state, to convert the national real income into commodities; these are turned into cash in order to realise capital plus surplus value. that is the true object of the revenue grants for independent enterprises run by foreign capital, and of the collateral in the case of loans. in both instances so-called tithes (_ueshur_), pledged in different ways, are paid in kind by the turkish peasant and these were gradually increased from about 12 to 12â 1/2 per cent. the peasant in the asiatic _vilayet_ must pay up or else his tithe would simply be confiscated by the police and the central and local authorities. these tithes, themselves a manifestation of ancient asiatic despotism based on natural economy, are not collected by the turkish government direct, but by tax-farmers not unlike the tax-collectors of the _ancien rã©gime_; that is to say the expected returns from the levy in each _vilayet_ are separately auctioned by the state to tax-farmers. they are bought by individual speculators or syndicates who sell the tithes of each _sandshak_ (district) to other speculators and these resell their shares to a whole number of smaller agents. all these middlemen want to cover their expenses and make the greatest possible profit, and thus, by the time they are actually collected, the peasants' contributions have swollen to enormous dimensions. the tax-farmer will try to recoup himself for any mistake in his calculations at the expense of the peasant, and the latter, nearly always in debt, is impatient for the moment when he can sell his harvest. but often, after cutting his corn, he cannot start threshing for weeks, until indeed the tax-farmer deigns to take his due. his entire harvest is about to rot in the fields, and the tax-farmer, usually a grain merchant himself, takes advantage of this fact and compels him to sell at a low price. these tax-collectors know how to enlist the support of the officials, especially the muktars, the local headmen, against complaining malcontents.[414] along with the taxes on salt, tobacco, spirits, the excise on silk, the fishing dues, etc., the tithes are pledged with the _conseil de l'administration de la dette publique ottomane_ to serve as security for the railway grant and the loans. in every case the _conseil_ reserves to itself the right to vet the tax-farmers' contracts and stipulates for the proceeds of the tithe to be paid directly into the coffers of its regional offices. if no tax-farmer can be found, the tithes are stored in kind by the turkish government; the warehouse keys are deposited with the _conseil_ which then can sell the tithes on its own account. thus the economic metabolism between the peasants of asia minor, syria and mesopotamia on the one hand and german capital on the other proceeds in the following way: in the _vilayets_ konya, baghdad, bazra, etc., the grain comes into being as a simple use-product of primitive peasant economy. it immediately falls to the tithe-farmer as a state levy. only then, in the hands of this latter, does it become a commodity, and, as such, money which falls to the state. this money is nothing but converted peasant grain; it was not even produced as a commodity. but now, as a state guarantee, it serves towards paying for the construction and operation of railways, i.e. to realise both the value of the means of production and the surplus value extorted from the asiatic peasants and proletariat in the building and running of the railway. in this process further means of production of german origin are used, and so the peasant grain of asia, converted into money, also serves to turn into cash the surplus value that has been extorted from the german workers. in the performance of these functions, the money rolls from the hands of the turkish government into the coffers of the _deutsche bank_, and here it accumulates, as capitalist surplus value, in the form of promoters' profits, royalties, dividends and interests in the accounts of messrs. gwinner, siemens, stinnes and their fellow directors, of the shareholders and clients of the _deutsche bank_ and the whole intricate system of its subsidiary companies. if there is no tax-farmer, as provided in the concessions, then the complicated metamorphoses are reduced to their most simple and obvious terms: the peasant grain passes immediately to the _administration de la dette publique ottomane_, i.e. to the representatives of european capital, and becomes already in its natural form a revenue for german and other foreign capital: it realises capitalist surplus value even before it has shed its use-form for the asiatic peasant, even before it has become a commodity and its own value has been realised. this is a coarse and straightforward metabolism between european capital and asiatic peasant economy, with the turkish state reduced to its real rã´le, that of a political machinery for exploiting peasant economy for capitalist purposes,--the real function, this, of all oriental states in the period of capitalist imperialism. this business of paying for german goods with german capital in asia is not the absurd circle it seems at first, with the kind germans allowing the shrewd turks merely the 'use' of their great works of civilisation--it is at bottom an exchange between german capital and asiatic peasant economy, an exchange performed under state compulsion. on the one hand it makes for progressive accumulation and expanding 'spheres of interest' as a pretext for further political and economic expansion of german capital in turkey. railroad building and commodity exchange, on the other hand, are fostered by the state on the basis of a rapid disintegration, ruin and exploitation of asiatic peasant economy in the course of which the turkish state becomes more and more dependent on european capital, politically as well as financially.[415] footnotes: [401] the permanent way (in kilometres). --------------------------------------------------------------------- _year_ | _europe_ | _america_ | _asia_ | _africa_ |_australia_ ----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+---------- 1840 | 2,925 | 4,754 | - | - | - 1850 | 23,405 | 16,064 | - | - | - 1860 | 51,862 | 53,955 | 1,393 | 455 | 376 1870 | 104,914 | 93,193 | 8,185 | 1,786 | 1,765 1880 | 168,983 | 174,666 | 16,287 | 4,646 | 7,847 1890 | 223,869 | 331,417 | 33,724 | 9,386 | 18,889 1900 | 283,878 | 402,171 | 60,301 | 20,114 | 24,014 1910 | 333,848 | 526,382 | 101,916 | 36,854 | 31,014 ---------------------------------------------------------------------accordingly, the increase was as follows: --------------------------------------------------------------------- | % | % | % | % | % 1840/50 | 710 | 215 | - | - | - 1860/70 | 102 | 73 | 486 | 350 | 350 1870/80 | 61 | 88 | 99 | 156 | 333 1880/90 | 32 | 89 | 107 | 104 | 142 1890/1900 | 27 | 21 | 79 | 114 | 27 ---------------------------------------------------------------------[402] tugan baranovski, _studies on the theory and history of commercial crises in england_, p. 74. [403] sismondi, _nouveaux principes_ ..., vol. i, book iv, chap. iv: 'commercial wealth follows the growth of income', pp. 368-70. [404] engineer eyth, a representative of fowler's, tells us: 'now there was a feverish exchange of telegrams between cairo, london and leeds.--"when can fowler's deliver 150 steam ploughs?"--answer: "working to capacity, within one year."--"not good enough. expect unloading alexandria by spring 150 steam ploughs."--a.: "impossible."--the works at that time were barely big enough to turn out 3 steam ploughs per week. n.b. a machine of this type costs â£2,500 so that the order involved â£m. 3â·75. ismail pasha's next wire: "quote cost immediate factory expansion. viceroy willing foot bill."--you can imagine that leeds made hay while the sun shone. and in addition, other factories in england and france as well were made to supply steam ploughs. the alexandria warehouses, where goods destined for the vice-regal estates were unloaded, were crammed to the roof with boilers, wheels, drums, wire-rope and all sorts of chests and boxes. the second-rate hostelries of cairo swarmed with newly qualified steam ploughmen, promoted in a hurry from anvil or share-plough, young hopefuls, fit for anything and nothing, since every steam plough must be manned by at least one expert pioneer of civilisation. wagonloads of this assorted cargo were sent into the interior, just so that the next ship could unload. you cannot imagine in what condition they arrived at their destination, or rather anywhere but their destination. ten boilers were lying on the banks of the nile, and the machine to which they belonged was ten miles further. here was a little heap of wire-rope, but you had to travel another 20 hours to find the appropriate pulleys. in one place an englishman who was to set up the machines squatted desolate and hungry on a pile of french crates, and in another place his mate had taken to native liquor in his despair. effendis and katibs, invoking the help of allah, rushed to and fro between siut and alexandria and compiled endless lists of items the names of which they did not even know. and yet, in the end, some of this apparatus was set in motion. in upper egypt, the ploughs belched steam--civilisation and progress had made another step forward' (_lebendige krã¤fte, 7 vortrã¤ge aus dem gebiete der technik_, berlin, 1908, p. 21). [405] cf. evelyn baring, earl of cromer, _egypt today_ (london, 1908), vol. i, p. 11. [406] incidentally, the money wrested from the egyptian fellah further fell, by way of turkey, to european capital. the turkish loans of 1854, 1855, 1871, 1877 and 1886 were based on the contributions from egypt which were increased several times and paid direct into the bank of england. [407] 'it is stated by residents in the delta', reports _the times_ of march 31, 1879, 'that the third quarter of the year's taxation is now collected, and the old methods of collection applied. this sounds strangely by the side of the news that people are starving by the roadside, that great tracts of country are uncultivated, because of the physical burdens, and that the farmers have sold their cattle, the women their finery, and that the usurers are filling the mortgage offices with their bonds, and the courts with their suits of foreclosure' (quoted by th. rothstein, _egypt's ruin_, 1910, pp. 69-70). [408] 'this produce', wrote the correspondent of _the times_ from alexandria, 'consists wholly of taxes paid by the peasants in kind, and when one thinks of the poverty-stricken, overdriven, under-paid fellaheen in their miserable hovels, working late and early to fill the pockets of the creditors, the punctual payment of the coupon ceases to be wholly a subject of gratification' (quoted by rothstein, op. cit., p. 49). [409] eyth, an outstanding exponent of capitalist civilisation in the primitive countries, characteristically concludes his masterly sketch on egypt, from which we have taken the main data, with the following imperialist articles of faith: 'what we have learnt from the past also holds true for the future. europe must and will lay firm hands upon those countries which can no longer keep up with modern conditions on their own, though this will not be possible without all kinds of struggle, when the difference between right and wrong will become blurred, when political and historical justice will often enough mean disaster for millions and their salvation depend upon what is politically wrong. all the world over, the strongest hand will make an end to confusion, and so it will even on the banks of the nile' (op. cit., p. 247). rothstein has made it clear enough what kind of 'order' the british created 'on the banks of the nile'. [410] already in the early twenties of the last century, the anglo-indian government commissioned colonel chesney to investigate the navigability of the river euphrates in order to establish the shortest possible connection between the mediterranean and the persian gulf, resp. india. after detailed preparations and a preliminary reconnaissance in winter 1831, the expedition proper set out in 1835/7. in due course, british staff and officials investigated and surveyed a wider area in eastern mesopotamia. these efforts dragged on until 1866 without any useful results for the british government. but at a later date great britain returned to the plan of connecting the mediterranean with india by way of the gulf of persia, though in a different form, i.e. the tigris railway project. in 1879, cameron travelled through mesopotamia for the british government to study the lie of the land for the projected railway (max freiherr v. oppenheim, _vom mittelmeer zum persischen golf durch den hauran, die syrische wã¼ste und mesopotamien_, vol. ii, pp. 5 and 36). [411] s. schneider, _die deutsche bagdadbahn_ (1900), p. 3. [412] saling, _bã¶rsenjahrbuch 1911/12_, p. 2211. [413] saling, op. cit., pp. 360-1. engineer pressel of wuerttemberg, who as assistant to baron v. hirsch was actively engaged in these transactions in european turkey, neatly accounts for the total grants towards railway-building in turkey which european capital wrested from the turkish government: --------------------------------------------------------------------- | _length | _paid guarantee | in km._ | in francs_ -------------------------------------------+---------+--------------- 3 lines in european turkey | 1888â·8 | 33,099,352 | | turkish permanent way in asia completed | | before 1900 | 2313â·2 | 53,811,538 | | commissions and other costs connected with | | the guaranteed railway grants paid to the | | a.d.p.o. | | 9,351,209 -------------------------------------------+---------+--------------- total | | 96,262,099 ---------------------------------------------------------------------all this refers only to the period before 1899; not until that date were the revenue grants paid in part. the tithes of no less than 28 out of the 74 _sandshaks_ in asiatic turkey had been pledged for the revenue grants, and with these grants, between 1856 and 1900, a grand total of 1,576 miles of rails had been laid down in asiatic turkey. pressel, the expert, by the way gives an instance of the underhand methods employed by the railway company at turkish expense; he states that under the 1893 agreement the anatolian company promised to run the railway to baghdad via angora, but later decided that this plan of theirs would not work and, having qualified for the guarantee, left the line to its fate and got busy with another route via konya. 'no sooner have the companies succeeded in acquiring the smyrna-aydin-diner line, than they will demand the extension of this line to konya, and the moment these branch lines are completed, the companies will move heaven and earth to force the goods traffic to use these new routes for which there are no guarantees, and which, more important still, need never share their takings, whereas the other lines must pay part of their surplus to the government, once their gross revenue exceeds a certain amount. in consequence, the government will gain nothing by the aydin line, and the companies will make millions. the government will foot the bill for practically the entire revenue guarantee for the kassaba-angora line, and can never hope to profit by its contracted 25 per cent share in the surplus above â£600 gross takings' (w. v. pressel, _les chemins de fer en turquie d'asie_ (zurich, 1900), p. 7). [414] charles moravitz, _die tã¼rkei im spiegel ihrer finanzen_ (1903), p. 84. [415] 'incidentally, in this country everything is difficult and complicated. if the government wishes to create a monopoly in cigarette paper or playing cards, france and austro-hungary immediately are on the spot to veto the project in the interest of their trade. if the issue is oil, russia will raise objections, and even the powers who are least concerned will make their agreement dependent on some other agreement. turkey's fate is that of sancho panza and his dinner: as soon as the minister of finance wishes to do anything, some diplomat gets up, interrupts him and throws a veto in his teeth' (moravitz, op. cit., p. 70). _chapter xxxi_ protective tariffs and accumulation imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment. still the largest part of the world in terms of geography, this remaining field for the expansion of capital is yet insignificant as against the high level of development already attained by the productive forces of capital; witness the immense masses of capital accumulated in the old countries which seek an outlet for their surplus product and strive to capitalise their surplus value, and the rapid change-over to capitalism of the pre-capitalist civilisations. on the international stage, then, capital must take appropriate measures. with the high development of the capitalist countries and their increasingly severe competition in acquiring non-capitalist areas, imperialism grows in lawlessness and violence, both in aggression against the non-capitalist world and in ever more serious conflicts among the competing capitalist countries. but the more violently, ruthlessly and thoroughly imperialism brings about the decline of non-capitalist civilisations, the more rapidly it cuts the very ground from under the feet of capitalist accumulation. though imperialism is the historical method for prolonging the career of capitalism, it is also a sure means of bringing it to a swift conclusion. this is not to say that capitalist development must be actually driven to this extreme: the mere tendency towards imperialism of itself takes forms which make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe. classical economics, in its period of storm and stress, had had high hopes of a peaceful development of the accumulation of capital and of a trade and industry which can only prosper in times of peace, evolving the orthodox manchester ideology of the harmony of interests among the world's commercial nations on the one hand, and between capital and labour on the other. these hopes were apparently justified in europe by the short period of free trade in the sixties and seventies, which was based upon the mistaken doctrine of the english free traders that the only theoretical and practical condition for the accumulation of capital is commodity exchange, that the two are identical. as we have seen, ricardo and his whole school identified accumulation and its reproductive conditions with simple commodity production and the conditions of simple commodity circulation. this was soon to become even more obvious in the practices of the common free trader. the special interests of the exporting lancashire cotton manufacturers in manchester determined the entire line of argument of the cobden league. their principal object was to get markets, and it became an article of faith: 'buy from foreign countries and thus in turn sell our industrial product, our cotton goods, on the new markets.' cobden and bright demanded free trade and cheaper foodstuffs in particular in the interest of consumption; but the consumer was not the worker who eats the bread, but the capitalist who consumes labour power. this teaching never expressed the interests of capitalist accumulation as a whole. in england herself it was given the lie already in the forties, when the harmony of interests of the commercial nations in the east were proclaimed to the sound of gunfire in the opium wars which ultimately, by the annexation of hongkong, brought about the very opposite of such harmony, a system of 'spheres of interest'.[416] on the european continent, free trade in the sixties did not represent the interests of industrial capital, because the foremost free trade countries of the continent were still predominantly agrarian with a comparatively feeble development of industry. rather, the policy of free trade was implemented as a means for the political reconstruction of the central european states. in germany, under bismarck and manteuffel, it was a peculiarly prussian lever for ousting austria from the _bund_ and the _zollverein_ and to set up the new german empire under prussian leadership. economically speaking, the mainstays of free trade were in this case the interests both of commercial capital, especially in the hansa towns to whom international trade was vital, and of agrarian consumers; among industry proper, it was otherwise. the iron industry was won over only with difficulty and in exchange for the abolition of the rhine tolls. but the cotton industry in southern germany remained irreconcilable and clung to protective tariffs. in france, 'most favoured nations' clause' agreements, the basis of the free trade system all over europe, were concluded by napoleon iii without the consent, and even against the will, of parliament, industrialists and agrarians, who constituted an absolute majority, being in favour of protective tariffs. the government of the second empire only took the course of commercial treaties as an emergency measure--britain accepted it as such--in order to get round political opposition in france and to establish free trade behind the back of the legislature by international action. the first principal treaty between england and france simply rode rough-shod over public opinion in france.[417] two imperial decrees abolished the old system of french protective tariffs which had been in force from 1853 to 1862. with scant observance of the formalities they were 'ratified' in 1863. in italy, free trade was a prop of cavour's policy, depending as it did on french support. under pressure of public opinion, an inquiry was made in 1870 which revealed that those most intimately concerned were hostile to the policy of free trade. in russia, finally, the tendency towards free trade in the sixties was but the first step towards creating a broad basis for commodity economy and industry on a large scale, coming at the same time as the abolition of serfdom and the construction of a railway network.[418] thus the very inception of an international system of free trade shows it to be just a passing phase in the history of capitalist accumulation, and it shows up the fallacy of attributing the general reversion to protective tariffs after the seventies simply to a defensive reaction against english free trade.[419] such an explanation is vitiated by the fact that both in germany and france the leaders in the reversion to protective tariffs were the agrarian interests, that the measures were directed not against british but against american competition, and that not england but germany constituted the chief danger to the rising home industry in russia, and france to that in italy. nor was britain's monopoly the cause for the world-wide depression which prevailed since the seventies and induced the desire for protective tariffs. we must look deeper for the reasons responsible for the change of front on the question of protective tariffs. the doctrine of free trade with its delusion about the harmony of interests on the world market corresponded with an outlook which conceived of everything in terms of commodity exchange. it was abandoned just as soon as big industrial capital had become sufficiently established in the principal countries of the european continent to look to the conditions for its accumulation. as against the mutual interests of capitalist countries, these latter bring to the fore the antagonism engendered by the competitive struggle for the non-capitalist environment. when the free trade era opened, eastern asia was only just being made accessible by the chinese wars, and european capital had but begun to make headway in egypt. in the eighties the policy of expansion became ever stronger, together with a policy of protective tariffs. there was an uninterrupted succession of events during the eighties: the british occupation of egypt, germany's colonial conquests in africa, the french occupation of tunisia together with the tonkin expedition, italy's advances in assab and massawa, the abyssinian war and the creation of a separate eritrea, and the english conquests in south africa. the clash between italy and france over the tunisian sphere of interest was the characteristic prelude to the franco-italian tariff war seven years later, by which drastic epilogue an end was made to the free trade harmony of interests on the european continent. to monopolise the non-capitalist areas at home and abroad became the war-cry of capital, while the free-trade policy of the 'open door' specifically represented the peculiar helplessness of non-capitalist countries in the face of international capital and the natural equilibrium which was aimed at by its competition in the preliminary stage of the partial or total occupation of these areas as colonies or spheres of interest. as the oldest capitalist empire, england alone could so far remain loyal to free trade, primarily because she had long had immense possessions of non-capitalist areas as a basis for operations which afforded her almost unlimited opportunities for capitalist accumulation. until recently, she had thus in fact been beyond the competition of other capitalist countries. these, in turn, universally strove to become self-sufficient behind a barrier of protective tariffs; yet they buy one another's commodities and come to depend ever more one upon another for replenishing their material conditions of reproduction. indeed, protective tariffs have by now completely lost their use for technical development of the productive forces, all too often being the instrument for the artificial conservation of obsolete productive methods. the inherent contradictions of an international policy of protective tariffs, exactly like the dual character of the international loan system, are just a reflection of the historical antagonism which has developed between the dual interests of accumulation: expansion, the realisation and capitalisation of surplus value on the one hand, and, on the other, an outlook which conceives of everything purely in terms of commodity exchange. this fact is evidenced particularly in that the modern system of high protective tariffs, required by colonial expansion and the increasing inner tension of the capitalist medium, was also instituted with a view to increasing armaments. the reversion to protective tariffs was carried through in germany as well as in france, italy, and russia, together with, and in the interests of, an expansion of the armed services, as the basis for the european competition in armaments which was developing at that time, first on land, and then also at sea. european free trade, with its attendant continental system of infantry, had been superseded by protective tariffs as the foundation and supplement of an imperialist system with a strong bias towards naval power. thus capitalist accumulation as a whole, as an actual historical process, has two different aspects. one concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced--the factory, the mine, the agricultural estate. regarded in this light, accumulation is a purely economic process, with its most important phase a transaction between the capitalist and wage labourer. in both its phases, however, it is confined to the exchange of equivalents and remains within the limits of commodity exchange. here, in form at any rate, peace, property and equality prevail, and the keen dialectics of scientific analysis were required to reveal how the right of ownership changes in the course of accumulation into appropriation of other people's property, how commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes class-rule. the other aspect of the accumulation of capital concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making their appearance on the international stage. its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system--a policy of spheres of interest--and war. force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process. bourgeois liberal theory takes into account only the former aspect: the realm of 'peaceful competition', the marvels of technology and pure commodity exchange; it separates it strictly from the other aspect: the realm of capital's blustering violence which is regarded as more or less incidental to foreign policy and quite independent of the economic sphere of capital. in reality, political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process. the conditions for the reproduction of capital provide the organic link between these two aspects of the accumulation of capital. the historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking them together. 'sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe' characterises not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step, and thus capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions. footnotes: [416] and not only in england. 'even in 1859, a pamphlet, ascribed to diergardt of viersen, a factory owner, was disseminated all over germany, urging that country to make sure of the east-asiatic markets in good time. it advocated the display of military force as the only means for getting commercial advantages from the japanese and the eastern asiatic nations in general. a german fleet, built with the people's small savings, had been a youthful dream, long since brought under the hammer by hannibal fischer. though prussia had a few ships, her naval power was not impressive. but in order to enter into commercial negotiations with eastern asia, it was decided to equip a ship. graf zu eulenburg, one of the ablest and most prudent prussian statesmen, was appointed chief of this mission which also had scientific objects. under most difficult conditions he carried out his commission with great skill, and though the plan for simultaneous negotiations with the hawaiian islands had to be given up, the mission was otherwise successful. though the berlin press of that time knew better, declaring whenever a new difficulty was reported, that it was only to be expected, and denouncing all expenditure on naval demonstrations as a waste of the taxpayers' money, the ministry of the new era remained steadfast, and the harvest of success was reaped by the ministry that followed' (w. lotz, _die ideen der deutschen handelspolitik_, p. 80). [417] following on the preliminary discussion between michel chevalier and richard cobden on behalf of the french and english governments, 'official negotiations were shortly entered upon and were conducted with the greatest secrecy. on january 1, 1860, napoleon iii announced his intentions in a memorandum addressed to m. fould, the minister of state. this declaration came like a bolt from the blue. after the events of the past year, the general belief was that no attempt would be made to modify the tariff system before 1861. feelings ran high, but all the same the treaty was signed on january 23' (auguste devers, _la politique commerciale de la france depuis 1860. schriften des vereins fã¼r sozialpolitik_, vol. 51, p. 136). [418] between 1857 and 1868, the revision along liberal lines of the russian tariffs and the ultimate writing-off of the insane system of _kantrin_ with regard to protective tariffs were a manifestation and corollary of the progressive reforms which the disastrous crimean wars had made inevitable. but the reduction of customs duties reflected the concern of the landowning gentry who, both as consumers of foreign goods and as producers of grain for export, were interested in unrestricted commerce between russia and western europe. the champion of agrarian interests, the 'free economic association' stated: 'during the last sixty years, between 1822 and 1882, agriculture, russia's largest producer, was brought to a precarious position owing to four great setbacks. these could in every case be directly attributed to excessive tariffs. on the other hand, the thirty-two years between 1845 and 1877 when tariffs were moderate went by without any such emergency, in spite of three foreign wars and one civil war [meaning the polish insurrection of 1863--_r. l._], every one of which proved a greater or less strain on the financial resources of the state' (_memorandum of the imperial free economic association on revising russian tariffs_ (st. petersburg, 1890), p. 148). as late as the nineties, then, the scientific spokesman of the free trade movement, the said 'free economic association', had to agitate against protective tariffs as a 'contrivance to transplant' capitalist industry to russia. in a reactionary 'populist' spirit, it denounced capitalism as a breeding ground for the modern proletariat, 'those masses of shiftless people without home or property who have nothing to lose and have long been in ill repute' (p. 191). this is proof enough that until most recent times the russian champions of free trade, or at least of moderate tariffs, did not to any appreciable extent represent the interests of industrial capital. cf. also k. lodyshenski: _the history of the russian tariffs_ (st. petersburg, 1886), pp. 239-58. [419] this is also the opinion of f. engels. in one of his letters to nikolayon, on june 18, 1892, he writes: 'english authors, blinded by their patriotic interests, completely fail to grasp why the whole world so stubbornly rejects england's example of free trade and adopts in its place the principle of protective tariffs. of course, they simply dare not admit even to themselves that the system of protective tariffs, by now almost universal, is merely a defensive measure against english free trade which was instrumental in perfecting england's industrial monopoly. such a defence policy may be more or less reasonable--in some cases it is downright stupid, as for instance in germany who under the system of free trade had become a great industrial power and now imposes protective tariffs on agricultural products and raw materials, thus increasing the cost of her industrial production. in my view this universal reversion to protective tariffs is not a mere accident but the reaction against england's intolerable industrial monopoly. the form which this reaction takes, as i said before, may be wrong, inadequate and even worse, but its historical necessity seems to me quite clear and obvious' (_letters_ of karl marx and frederick engels to nikolayon (st. petersburg, 1908), p. 71). _chapter xxxii_ militarism as a province of accumulation militarism fulfils a quite definite function in the history of capital, accompanying as it does every historical phase of accumulation. it plays a decisive part in the first stages of european capitalism, in the period of the so-called 'primitive accumulation', as a means of conquering the new world and the spice-producing countries of india. later, it is employed to subject the modern colonies, to destroy the social organisations of primitive societies so that their means of production may be appropriated, forcibly to introduce commodity trade in countries where the social structure had been unfavourable to it, and to turn the natives into a proletariat by compelling them to work for wages in the colonies. it is responsible for the creation and expansion of spheres of interest for european capital in non-european regions, for extorting railway concessions in backward countries, and for enforcing the claims of european capital as international lender. finally, militarism is a weapon in the competitive struggle between capitalist countries for areas of non-capitalist civilisation. in addition, militarism has yet another important function. from the purely economic point of view, it is a pre-eminent means for the realisation of surplus value; it is in itself a province of accumulation. in examining the question who should count as a buyer for the mass of products containing the capitalised surplus value, we have again and again refused to consider the state and its organs as consumers. since their income is derivative, they were all taken to belong to the special category of those who live on the surplus value (or partly on the wage of labour), together with the liberal professions and the various parasites of present-day society ('king, professor, prostitute, mercenary'). but this interpretation will only do on two assumptions: first, if we take it, in accordance with marx's diagram, that the state has no other sources of taxation than capitalist surplus value and wages,[420] and secondly, if we regard the state and its organs as consumers pure and simple. if the issue turns on the personal consumption of the state organs (as also of the 'mercenary') the point is that consumption is partly transferred from the working class to the hangers-on of the capitalist class, in so far as the workers foot the bill. let us assume for a moment that the indirect taxes extorted from the workers, which mean a curtailment of their consumption, are used entirely to pay the salaries of the state officials and to provision the regular army. there will then be no change in the reproduction of social capital as a whole. both departments ii and i remain constant because society as a whole still demands the same kind of products and in the same quantities. only _v_ as the commodity of 'labour power' has changed in value in relation to the products of department ii, i.e. in relation to the means of subsistence. this _v_, the same amount of money representing labour power, is now exchanged for a smaller amount of means of subsistence. what happens to the products of department ii which are then left over? instead of the workers, the state officials and the regular army now receive them. the organs of the capitalist state take over the workers' consumption on the same scale exactly. although the conditions of reproduction have remained stable, there has been a redistribution of the total product. part of the products of department ii, originally intended entirely for the consumption of the workers as equivalent for _v_, is now allocated to the hangers-on of the capitalist class for consumption. from the point of view of social reproduction, it is as if the relative surplus value had in the first place been larger by a certain amount which is added on to the consumption of the capitalist class and its hangers-on. so far the crude exploitation, by the mechanism of indirect taxation, of the working class for the support of the capitalist state's officials amounts merely to an increase of the surplus value, of that part of it, that is to say, which is consumed. the difference is that this further splitting off of surplus value from variable capital only comes later, after the exchange between capital and labour has been accomplished. but the consumption by the organs of the capitalist state has no bearing on the realisation of _capitalised_ surplus value, because the additional surplus value for this consumption--even though it comes about at the workers' expense--is created afterwards. on the other hand, if the workers did not pay for the greater part of the state officials' upkeep, the capitalists themselves would have to bear the entire cost of it. a corresponding portion of their surplus value would have to be assigned directly to keeping the organs of their class-rule, either at the expense of production which would have to be curtailed accordingly, or, which is more probable, it would come from the surplus value intended for their consumption. the capitalists would have to capitalise on a smaller scale because of having to contribute more towards the immediate preservation of their own class. in so far as they shift onto the working class (and also the representatives of simple commodity production, such as peasants and artisans) the principal charge of their hangers-on, the capitalists have a larger portion of surplus value available for capitalisation. but as yet _no opportunities for such capitalisation_ have come into being, no new market, that is to say, for the surplus value that has become available, in which it could produce and realise new commodities. but when the monies concentrated in the exchequer by taxation are used for the production of armaments, the picture is changed. with indirect taxation and high protective tariffs, the bill of militarism is footed mainly by the working class and the peasants. the two kinds of taxation must be considered separately. from an economic point of view, it amounts to the following, as far as the working class is concerned: provided that wages are not raised to make up for the higher price of foodstuffs--which is at present the fate of the greatest part of the working class, including even the minority that is organised in trade unions, owing to the pressure of cartels and employers' organisations[421]--indirect taxation means that part of the purchasing power of the working class is transferred to the state. now as before the variable capital, as a fixed amount of money, will put in motion an appropriate quantity of living labour, that is to say it serves to employ the appropriate quantity of constant capital in production and to produce the corresponding amount of surplus value. as soon as capital has completed this cycle, it is divided between the working class and the state: the workers surrender the state part of the money they received as wages. capital has wholly appropriated the former variable capital in its material form, as labour power, but the working class retains only part of the variable capital in the form of money, the state claiming the rest. and this invariably happens after capital has run its cycle between capitalist and worker; it takes place, as it were, behind the back of capital, at no point impinging direct on the vital stages of the circulation of capital and the production of surplus value, so that it is no immediate concern of the latter. but all the same it does affect the conditions for the reproduction of capital as a whole. the transfer of some of the purchasing power from the working class to the state entails a proportionate decrease in the consumption of means of subsistence by the working class. for capital as a whole, it means producing a smaller quantity of consumer goods for the working class, provided that both variable capital (in the form of money and as labour power) and the mass of appropriated surplus value remain constant, so that the workers get a smaller share of the aggregate product. in the process of reproduction of the entire capital, then, means of subsistence will be produced in amounts smaller than the value of the variable capital, because of the shift in the ratio between the value of the variable capital and the quantity of means of subsistence in which it is realised, with the money wages of labour remaining constant, according to our premise, or at any rate not rising sufficiently to offset the increase in the price of foodstuffs. this increase represents the level of indirect taxation. how will the material relations of reproduction be adjusted? when fewer means of subsistence are needed for the renewal of labour power, a corresponding amount of constant capital and living labour becomes available which can now be used for producing other commodities in response to a new effective demand arising within society. it arises from the side of the state which has appropriated, by way of tax legislation, the part wanting of the workers' purchasing power. this time, however, the state does not demand means of subsistence (after all that has already been said under the heading of 'third persons', we shall here ignore the demand for means of subsistence for state officials which is also satisfied out of taxes) but it requires a special kind of product, namely the militarist weapons of war on land and at sea. again we take marx's second diagram of accumulation as the basis for investigating the ensuing changes in social reproduction: i. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ means of production ii. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ means of subsistence now let us suppose that, owing to indirect taxation and the consequent increase in the price of means of subsistence, the working class as a whole reduces consumption by, say, a 100 value units of the real wages. as before, the workers receive _1,000vâ + 285vâ = 1,285v_ in money, but for this money they only get means of subsistence to the value of 1185. the 100 units which represent the tax increase in the price of foodstuffs go to the state which receives in addition military taxes from the peasants, etc., to the value of 150 units, bringing the total up to 250. this total constitutes a new demand--the demand for armaments. at present, however, we are only interested in the 100 units taken from the workers' wages. this demand for armaments to the value of 100 must be satisfied by the creation of an appropriate branch of production which requires a constant capital of 71â·5 and a variable capital of 14â·25, assuming the average organic composition outlined in marx's diagram. _71â·5c + 14â·25v + 14â·25s = 100_ weapons of war this new branch of production further requires that 71â·5 means of production be produced and about 13 means of subsistence, because, of course, the real wages of the workers are also less by about one-thirteenth. you could counter by saying that the profit accruing to capital from this new expansion of demand is merely on paper, because the cut in the actual consumption of the working class will inevitably result in a corresponding curtailment of the means of subsistence produced. it will take the following form for department ii: _71â·5c + 14â·25v + 14â·25s = 100_ in addition, department i will also have to contract accordingly, so that, owing to the decreasing consumption of the working class, the equations for both departments will be: i. _4,949c + 989â·75v + 989â·75s = 6,928â·5_ ii. _1,358â·5c + 270â·75v + 270â·75s = 1,900_ if, by the mediation of the state, the same 100 units now call forth armament production of an equal volume with a corresponding fillip to the production of producer goods, this is at first sight only an extraneous change in the material forms of social production: instead of a quantity of means of subsistence a quantity of armaments is now being produced. capital has won with the left hand only what it has lost with the right. or we might say that the large number of capitalists producing means of subsistence have lost the effective demand in favour of a small group of big armament manufacturers. but this picture is only valid for individual capital. here it makes no difference indeed whether production engages in one sphere of activity or another. as far as the individual capitalist is concerned, there are no departments of total production such as the diagram distinguishes. there are only commodities and buyers, and it is completely immaterial to him whether he produces instruments of life or instruments of death, corned beef or armour plating. opponents of militarism frequently appeal to this point of view to show that military supplies as an economic investment for capital merely put profit taken from one capitalist into the pocket of another.[422] on the other hand, capital and its advocates try to overpersuade the working class to this point of view by talking them into the belief that indirect taxes and the demand of the state would only bring about a change in the material form of reproduction; instead of other commodities cruisers and guns would be produced which would give the workers as good a living, if not a better one. one glance at the diagram shows how little truth there is in this argument as far as the workers are concerned. to make comparison easier, we will suppose the armament factories to employ just as many workers as were employed before in the production of means of subsistence for the working class. 1,285 units will then be paid out as wages, but now they will only buy 1,185's worth of means of subsistence. all this looks different from the perspective of capital as a whole. for this the 100 at the disposal of the state, which represent the demand for armaments, constitute a new market. originally this money was variable capital and as such it has done its job, it has been exchanged for living labour which produced the surplus value. but then the circulation of the variable capital was stopped short, this money was split off, and it now appears as a new purchasing power in the possession of the state. it has been created by sleight of hand, as it were, but still it has the same effects as a newly opened market. of course for the time being capital is debarred from selling 100 units of consumer goods for the working class, and the individual capitalist considers the worker just as good a consumer and buyer of commodities as anyone else, another capitalist, the state, the peasant, foreign countries, etc. but let us not forget that for capital as a whole the upkeep of the working class is only a necessary evil, only a means towards the real end of production: the creation and realisation of surplus value. if it were possible to extort surplus value without giving labour an equal measure of means of subsistence, it would be all the better for business. to begin with indirect taxation has the same effects as if--the price of foodstuffs remaining constant--the capitalists had succeeded in depressing wages by a hundred units without detracting from the work performed, seeing that a lower output of consumer goods is equally the inevitable result of continuous wage cuts. if wages are cut heavily, capital does not worry about having to produce fewer means of subsistence for the workers, in fact it delights in this practice at every opportunity; similarly, capital as a whole does not mind if the effective demand of the working class for means of subsistence is curtailed because of indirect taxation which is not compensated by a rise in wages. this may seem strange because in the latter case the balance of the variable capital goes to the exchequer, while with a direct wage cut it remains in the capitalists' pockets and--commodity prices remaining equal--increases the relative surplus value. but a continuous and universal reduction of money wages can only be carried through on rare occasions, especially if trade union organisation is highly developed. there are strong social and political barriers to this fond aspiration of capital. depression of the real wage by means of indirect taxation, on the other hand, can be carried through promptly, smoothly and universally, and it usually takes time for protests to be heard; and besides, the opposition is confined to the political field and has no immediate economic repercussions. the subsequent restriction in the production of means of subsistence does not represent a loss of markets for capital as a whole but rather a saving in the costs of producing surplus value. surplus value is never realised by producing means of subsistence for the workers--however necessary this may be, as the reproduction of living labour, for the production of surplus value. but to come back to our example: i. _5,000c + 1,000v + 1,000s = 7,000_ means of production ii. _1,430c + 285v + 285s = 2,000_ means of subsistence at first it looks as if department ii were also creating and realising surplus value in the process of producing means of subsistence for the workers, and department i by producing the requisite means of production. but if we take the social product as a whole, the illusion disappears. the equation is in that case: _6,430c + 1,285v + 1,285s = 9,000_ now, if the means of subsistence for the workers are cut by 100 units, the corresponding contraction of both departments will give us the following equations: i. _4,949c + 989â·75v + 989â·75s = 6,928â·5_ ii. _1,358â·5c + 270â·75v + 270â·75s = 1,900_ and for the social product as a whole: _6,307â·5c + 1,260â·5v + 1,260â·5s = 8,828â·5_ this looks like a general decrease in both the total volume of production and in the production of surplus value--but only if we contemplate just the abstract quantities of value in the composition of the total product; it does not hold good for the material composition thereof. looking closer, we find that nothing but the upkeep of labour is in effect decreased. fewer means of subsistence and production are now being made, no doubt, but then, they had had no other function save to maintain workers. the social product is smaller and less capital is now employed--but then, the object of capitalist production is not simply to employ as much capital as possible, but to produce as much surplus value as possible. capital has only decreased because a smaller amount is sufficient for maintaining the workers. if the total cost of maintaining the workers employed in the society came to 1,285 units in the first instance, the present decrease of the social product by 171â·5--the difference of (9,000-8,828â·5)--comes off this maintenance charge, and there is a consequent change in the composition of the social product: _6,430c + 1,113â·5v + 1,285s = 8,828â·5_ constant capital and surplus value remain unchanged, and only the variable capital, paid labour, has diminished. or--in case there are doubts about constant capital being unaffected--we may further allow for the event that, as would happen in actual practice, concomitant with the decrease in means of subsistence for the workers there will be a corresponding cut in the constant capital. the equation for the social product as a whole would then be: _6,307â·5c + 1,236v + 1,285s = 8,828â·5_ in spite of the smaller social product, there is no change in the surplus value in either case, and it is only the cost of maintaining the workers that has fallen. put it this way: the value of the aggregate social product may be defined as consisting of three parts, the total constant capital of the society, its total variable capital, and its total surplus value, of which the first set of products contains no additional labour, and the second and third no means of production. as regards their material form, all these products come into being in the given period of production--though in point of value the constant capital had been produced in a previous period and is merely being transferred to new products. on this basis, we can also divide all the workers employed into three mutually exclusive categories: those who produce the aggregate constant capital of the society, those who provide the upkeep for all the workers, and finally those who create the entire surplus value for the capitalist class. if, then, the workers' consumption is curtailed, only workers in the second category will lose their jobs. _ex hypothesi_, these workers had never created surplus value for capital, and in consequence their dismissal is therefore no loss from the capitalist's point of view but a gain, since it decreases the cost of producing surplus value. the demand of the state which arises at the same time has the lure of a new and attractive sphere for realising the surplus value. some of the money circulating as variable capital breaks free of this cycle and in the state treasury it represents a new demand. for the technique of taxation, of course, the order of events is rather different, since the amount of the indirect taxes is actually advanced to the state by capital and is merely being refunded to the capitalists by the sale of their commodities, as part of their price. but economically speaking, it makes no difference. the crucial point is that the quantity of money with the function of variable capital should first mediate the exchange between capital and labour power. later, when there is an exchange between workers and capitalists as buyers and sellers of commodities respectively, this money will change hands and accrue to the state as taxes. this money, which capital has set circulating, first fulfils its primary function in the exchange with labour power, but subsequently, by mediation of the state, it begins an entirely new career. as a new purchasing power, belonging with neither labour nor capital, it becomes interested in new products, in a special branch of production which does not cater for either the capitalists or the working class, and thus it offers capital new opportunities for creating and realising surplus value. when we were formerly taking it for granted that the indirect taxes extorted from the workers are used for paying the officials and for provisioning the army, we found the 'saving' in the consumption of the working class to mean that the workers rather than the capitalists were made to pay for the personal consumption of the hangers-on of the capitalist class and the tools of their class-rule. this charge devolved from the surplus value to the variable capital, and a corresponding amount of the surplus value became available for purposes of capitalisation. now we see how the taxes extorted from the workers afford capital a new opportunity for accumulation when they are used for armament manufacture. on the basis of indirect taxation, militarism in practice works both ways. by lowering the normal standard of living for the working class, it ensures both that capital should be able to maintain a regular army, the organ of capitalist rule, and that it may tap an impressive field for further accumulation.[423] we have still to examine the second source of the state's purchasing power referred to in our example, the 150 units out of the total 250 invested in armaments. they differ essentially from the hundred units considered above in that they are not supplied by the workers but by the petty bourgeoisie, i.e. the artisans and peasants. (in this connection, we can ignore the comparatively small tax-contribution of the capitalist class itself.) the money accruing to the state as taxes from the peasant masses--as our generic term for all non-proletarian consumers--was not originally advanced by capital and has not split off from capital in circulation. in the hand of the peasant it is the equivalent of goods that have been realised, the exchange value of simple commodity production. the state now gets part of the purchasing power of the non-capitalist consumers, purchasing power, that is to say, which is already free to realise the surplus value for capitalist accumulation. now the question arises, whether economic changes will result for capital, and if so, of what nature, from diverting the purchasing power of such strata to the state for militarist purposes. it almost looks as if we had come up against yet another shift in the material form of reproduction. capital will now produce an equivalent of war materials for the state instead of producing large quantities of means of production and subsistence for peasant consumers. but in fact the changes go deeper. first and foremost, the state can use the mechanism of taxation to mobilise much larger amounts of purchasing power from the non-capitalist consumers than they would ordinarily spend on their own consumption. indeed the modern system of taxation itself is largely responsible for forcing commodity economy on the peasants. under pressure of taxes, the peasant must turn more and more of his produce into commodities, and at the same time he must buy more and more. taxation presses the produce of peasant economy into circulation and compels the peasants to become buyers of capitalist products. finally, on a basis of commodity production in the peasant style, the system of taxation lures more purchasing power from peasant economy than would otherwise become active. what would normally have been hoarded by the peasants and the lower middle classes until it has grown big enough to invest in savings banks and other banks is now set free to constitute an effective demand and an opportunity for investment. further the multitude of individual and insignificant demands for a whole range of commodities, which will become effective at different times and which might often be met just as well by simple commodity production, is now replaced by a comprehensive and homogeneous demand of the state. and the satisfaction of this demand presupposes a big industry of the highest order. it requires the most favourable conditions for the production of surplus value and for accumulation. in the form of government contracts for army supplies the scattered purchasing power of the consumers is concentrated in large quantities and, free of the vagaries and subjective fluctuations of personal consumption, it achieves an almost automatic regularity and rhythmic growth. capital itself ultimately controls this automatic and rhythmic movement of militarist production through the legislature and a press whose function is to mould so-called 'public opinion'. that is why this particular province of capitalist accumulation at first seems capable of infinite expansion. all other attempts to expand markets and set up operational bases for capital largely depend on historical, social and political factors beyond the control of capital, whereas production for militarism represents a province whose regular and progressive expansion seems primarily determined by capital itself. in this way capital turns historical necessity into a virtue: the ever fiercer competition in the capitalist world itself provides a field for accumulation of the first magnitude. capital increasingly employs militarism for implementing a foreign and colonial policy to get hold of the means of production and labour power of non-capitalist countries and societies. this same militarism works in a like manner in the capitalist countries to divert purchasing power away from the non-capitalist strata. the representatives of simple commodity production and the working class are affected alike in this way. at their expense, the accumulation of capital is raised to the highest power, by robbing the one of their productive forces and by depressing the other's standard of living. needless to say, after a certain stage the conditions for the accumulation of capital both at home and abroad turn into their very opposite--they become conditions for the decline of capitalism. the more ruthlessly capital sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata at home and in the outside world, the more it lowers the standard of living for the workers as a whole, the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. it becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodical economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer. but even before this natural economic impasse of capital's own creating is properly reached it becomes a necessity for the international working class to revolt against the rule of capital. capitalism is the first mode of economy with the weapon of propaganda, a mode which tends to engulf the entire globe and to stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and soil. although it strives to become universal, and, indeed, on account of this its tendency, it must break down--because it is immanently incapable of becoming a universal form of production. in its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. at a certain stage of development there will be no other way out than the application of socialist principles. the aim of socialism is not accumulation but the satisfaction of toiling humanity's wants by developing the productive forces of the entire globe. and so we find that socialism is by its very nature an harmonious and universal system of economy. footnotes: [420] dr. renner indeed makes this assumption the basis of his treatise on taxation. 'every particle of value created in the course of one year is made up of these four parts: profit, interest, rent, and wages; and annual taxation, then, can only be levied upon these' (_das arbeitende volk und die steuern_, vienna, 1909). though renner immediately goes on to mention peasants, he cursorily dismisses them in a single sentence: 'a peasant e.g. is simultaneously entrepreneur, worker, and landowner, his agricultural proceeds yield him wage, profit, and rent, _all in one_.' obviously, it is an empty abstraction to apply simultaneously all the categories of capitalist production to the peasantry, to conceive of the peasant as entrepreneur, wage labourer and landlord all in one person. if, like renner, we want to put the peasant into a single category, his peculiarity for economics lies in the very fact that he belongs neither to the class of capitalist entrepreneurs nor to that of the wage proletariat, that he is not a representative of capitalism at all but of simple commodity production. [421] it would go beyond the scope of the present treatise to deal with cartels and trusts as specific phenomena of the imperialist phase. they are due to the internal competitive struggle between individual capitalist groups for a monopoly of the existing spheres for accumulation and for the distribution of profits. [422] in a reply to vorontsov, professor manuilov, for example, wrote what was then greatly praised by the russian marxists: 'in this context, we must distinguish strictly between a group of entrepreneurs producing weapons of war and the capitalist class as a whole. for the manufacturers of guns, rifles and other war materials, the existence of militarism is no doubt profitable and indispensable. it is indeed quite possible that the abolition of the system of armed peace would spell ruin for krupp. the point at issue, however, is not a special group of entrepreneurs but the capitalists as a class, capitalist production as a whole.' in this connection, however, it should be noted that 'if the burden of taxation falls chiefly on the working population, every increase of this burden diminishes the purchasing power of the population and hence the demand for commodities'. this fact is taken as proof that militarism, under the aspect of armament production, does indeed 'enrich one group of capitalists, but at the same time it injures all others, spelling gain on the one hand but loss on the other' (_vesnik prava_, journal of the law society (st. petersburg, 1890), no. 1, 'militarism and capitalism'). [423] ultimately, the deterioration of the normal conditions under which labour power is renewed will bring about a deterioration of labour itself, it will diminish the average efficiency and productivity of labour, and thus jeopardise the conditions for the production of surplus value. but capital will not feel these results for a long time, and so they do not immediately enter into its economic calculations, except in so far as they bring about more drastic defensive measures of the wage labourers in general. index abstinence, 43, 102, 108, 118, 150, 235, 240, 280, 334 accumulation, its impossibility respective unrestricted possibility _23_, 188f., 198ff., 216, 237, 268, 303, 311, 325 -primitive, 161, 272, 364, 369f., 454 africa, 352, 363f., 382, 386; south, 411ff., 420, 451 algeria, under french rule, 371, 377ff.; under turkish rule, 378 allard, general, 381 america, 290, 352, 420, 422, 428; united states of, 173, 293ff., 297, 307f., 357f., 362f., 379, 396, 398, 402, 404f., 409ff., 424ff., 432; states of south, 420, 422ff. american civil war (war of secession), 357f., 363, 396, 398f., 402, 424f., 430 anton, g., 385 arabs, 377, 380, 382ff. asia, 247, 290, 420ff., 443ff., 450 australia, 420, 426f. baring, e., earl of cromer, 434 barter, 213, 215f., 222, 229 bastiat-schultze, f., 238, 268 bentham, j., 372 bergmann, 211 bismarck, 448 blackhouse, e. t., 392, 394 blanc, l., 227 bland, l. o., 392, 394 blanqui, 227 boer republics, 411, 414ff. -war, 415 bouding, 319f. brandt, m. v., 392 bright, 447 brissot, 265 bruce, general, 391 bryce, j., 363, 412 buecher, prof., 307f. bulgakov, 275, 298-310, 311, 313, 315, 317, 320, 324ff. cabet, 227 cameron, 439 canada, 408f. capital and income (marx), 108; (rodbertus), 262ff.; (say), 56; (sismondi), 179ff., 215, 423; (adam smith), 53f., 58ff., 74ff., 83 -circulating, 37, 57ff., 64, 74ff., 83, 85f., 156f., 166, 183ff., 259, 354 -constant, _13_f., _18_f., _22_f., 38, 44, 51, 53, 64, 72f., 83, 85f., 88, 94f., 97, 100ff., 109ff., 123ff., 137, 141, 143, 147, 149, 153, 156ff., 187ff., 200, 208, 236, 256, 258, 298f., 302, 304f., 336f., 339, 344, 354ff., 359, 361, 365f., 458, 463 --definition of, 37, 72, 76f. -fixed, _19_, 50, 53, 57ff., 74ff., 83, 85ff., 111, 140, 147, 158, 166, 184ff., 259, 341, 354 -national (_per se_), 54, 263 -productive, 43f., 97, 140, 148f., 157, 163, 420 -total social, 31, 49f., 53f., 59, 65, 79, 83, 86, 88, 96f., 101, 103, 107f., 110, 118, 147, 156, 169, 180, 341, 349f. -variable, _14_, _18_f., _22_, 38, 44, 74f., 85, 94ff., 99, 101, 105, 109ff., 114ff., 123, 125ff., 134, 137, 151ff., 156, 159, 161, 182f., 185ff., 207, 209, 234, 253, 256, 258, 302, 306, 334, 336, 344, 346, 350, 354f., 357, 359ff., 365f., 428, 457f., 460, 463f.; definition, 37, 77; in relation to surplus value, 252, 258, 337; in relation to constant capital, 111, 303, 317, 321, 337, 339f. cavour, 449 chartist movement, 227, 267 chernishevski, 273 chesney, colonel, 439 chevalier, m., 448 china, 41, 247, 289, 353, 373, 386ff., 419, 428; dowager empress of, 392ff. class antagonism, 181 -rule, 78, 452, 456, 464 -society, 41 cobden, r., 447f. colonial policy, 185, 247, 363f., 369ff., 419, 425, 451f., 454, 466 --english in india, 88, 247, 371, 374f., 383 --french in north africa, 371, 380, 382 commodity economy, _see_ economy -exchange, 81f., 85, 93f., 97ff., 118, 129f., 193f., 233, 270, 386, 428, 438, 443, 452, 454 -surplus, 195ff., 276-83 communism, 263, 369, 378, 384 compensation, theory of, 203 competition, _21_, _23_, 40, 46, 48, 191, 202, 205, 207, 209, 230, 242, 259, 283, 297, 332, 342, 344, 368, 416, 419, 446, 450, 457, 466; 'peaceful --', 386, 452 contradictions latent in capitalism, 202, 218, 227f., 239, 271, 286ff. corn laws, 231 _corvã©e_, 33, 39, 42, 84, 369, 395 crises, _14_, 35f., 41, 46, 103f., 173, 176f., 191, 194, 199, 201ff., 211, 213, 216, 218, 222, 227f., 232, 235ff., 244ff., 261, 268, 272, 274, 281f., 286, 298, 305, 312ff., 318f., 323f., 332, 342, 346f., 419, 422, 424, 426, 428, 467 crusoe, robinson, 179, 182, 185, 261ff. dalrymple, oliver, 403f., 409 declining wage rate, _20_f., 229, 241, 244, 250f., 253, 258f. delamarre, abbã©, 393 demand and supply (production), 36, 46, 133, 192f., 195, 200, 206, 212, 220ff., 230f., 242, 248, 324 -effective, _20_, 34, 39, 131, 134, 155, 164f., 193f., 286, 329, 458, 461, 465f. devers, a., 448 dialectical approach, 69, 205, 209, 265, 366 diehl, prof., 228f., 256, 266f. division of labour, 79, 104, 128f., 148, 193, 233, 278, 297, 307f., 319, 321f. duehring, 194 east india company, 375f., 386f., 411 economics, bourgeois, 31, 49, 51, 68f., 106, 108, 112, 137, 170, 173f., 177, 179, 181, 189f., 209, 215, 218, 244, 268, 271, 279f., 295, 310, 325f.; classical, 35, 57, 65, 67ff., 105, 108f., 179, 188f., 200, 203, 208, 210, 216, 227ff., 237, 238-252, 254, 256, 258, 266, 279, 325, 383, 446; vulgar, 35f., 81, 108, 177, 211f., 320 economy, commodity, 368ff., 386-394, 402, 417, 419f., 427f., 449, 465 -natural, 42, 255, 293, 368-385, 386, 402, 415, 417, 419, 427, 443 -peasant, handicrafts and domestic industries, 41, 289, 296, 358, 369, 374, 395-418, 435, 438, 444f., 465 -rural, 272 egypt, 41, 201f., 353, 358, 425, 429ff., 450f. elgin, lord, 391f. engels, friedrich, 95, 102, 154, 166, 168, 194, 228, 241, 250, 275, 288ff., 294, 449f. england, 173ff., 191, 218f., 227ff., 241, 245, 277, 286, 293, 297, 307f., 313, 316, 318, 352, 357, 366f., 391, 393, 410, 412, 420ff., 447ff. english cotton industry, 297, 342, 352, 357f., 362, 422 exploitation, _17_, _21_ff., 46, 73f., 108, 116, 181ff., 196, 220, 228, 241, 247, 255, 334, 343f., 358ff., 364, 374, 386, 428, 445, 451, 456 eyth, engineer, 431, 437 family associations, 374, 377, 380f. feudal system, 210, 293, 365, 368f., 381f. foreign trade, 136, 205f., 236, 246, 282, 297, 306, 309, 313, 350; _see also_ market fowler's works, 431 france, 174, 177, 191, 214, 218, 227, 291, 296, 379, 391, 393, 420f., 431f., 445, 448ff. franke, o., 373, 393 free trade, 205, 238, 242, 447ff. general public (_grand public_), 135, 295, 298 germany, 173, 271, 296f., 308, 366f., 420ff., 427, 442, 448ff. gold, production of, 99ff., 141, 154, 301f. great britain, _see_ england gros, 392 hangers-on of the capitalist class, cf. also third persons, _14_, 81f., 112, 134f., 222f., 295, 332f., 350, 420, 454ff., 464 hanotaux, a., 378 hansen, _26_ harmony, doctrine of, 173, 177, 200, 203f., 211ff., 228f., 238, 271, 305, 325f., 446f. harrod, _19_ hermann, 243 herodotus, 88f., 372 hertzen, 273 hicks, _28_ hobson, _21_, 314 ilyin, v., 189, 275, 287, 303, 309, 317, 320 imperialism, _28_, 320, 368, 416ff., 421, 445f., 452 india, 41f., 72, 88, 247, 286, 308, 352f., 365, 371ff., 380, 387, 425, 428, 454 indian famine, 376, 382 -mutiny, 247, 374 industrial reserve army, _15_, 108, 111, 361 intelligentsia, 273ff. ismail pasha, 33, 431ff., 438 issayev, prof., 275 italy, 173, 449ff. japan, 247, 353 kablukov, prof., 275 kaffir, 411ff. -wars, 411, 413 kalecki, _23_ kant, i., 326 kareyev, 274 kautsky, k., 228, 267, 318ff. keynes, lord, _20_f., _26_ kirchmann, v., 227-37, 238, 244, 248, 250, 252f., 260f., 266, 268, 309f., 351, 366 kovalevski, m., 373, 375f., 384 labour, abstract and concrete, 67ff., 72, 105 -intellectual and material, 77 -paid and unpaid, 37ff., 55, 62, 65ff., 71, 73, 75, 98, 322f., 343 -past and present, 66f., 70, 75, 80, 88f. -problem, 363f. labour, progressive productivity of, its capitalist and general social expression, 258, 321f., 335f., 349, 357 lafargue, 399, 404 _laissez-faire_, 173, 238, 274 lassalle, f., 228 lavrov, p., 274 lenin, vladimir ilyich, _see_ ilyin letournaux, a., 378 lexis, 266 leyden, v. v., 377 list, f., 307 livingstone, dr., 411 loans, international, 387, 419-45, 451f. lodyshenski, k., 449 lotz, w., 448 lucas, c. p., 414 luxury goods, 81, 102, 163, 197ff., 208, 235ff., 260, 277 macculloch, j. r., 177, 189, 191-202, 203, 206f., 211, 220, 222, 229, 233, 264, 335 maine, sir henry, 373f. malthus, _24_, 181, 211, 217, 219-23, 229, 298, 305, 309, 350 manuilov, prof., 275, 460 market, internal and external, 236, 246, 277f., 283ff., 292, 294f., 299, 306ff., 316 -concept revised, 366 -problem of, 229f., 235, 277, 284, 289, 312ff., 345ff. marx, k., _13_f., _16_ff., 31, 36f., 43, 49, 51, 54, 60, 62ff., 76-92, 95, 99ff., 120-38, 139-54, 155ff., 189, 203, 205, 212, 215, 217f., 220, 223, 228, 233, 241, 243f., 255f., 258, 264, 268, 274f., 281f., 287, 295, 298-310, 311f., 316ff., 320, 324f., 329ff., 348, 350f., 357, 359ff., 417; his diagram of capitalist reproduction, 84, 97, 99ff., 104, 113, 118f., 127, 274, 298-310, 311, 417, 428, 455; his diagram of enlarged reproduction, 120-138, 304f., 313ff., 318, 323f., 329-47, 348, 353f., 359, 361, 417, 458ff.; his diagram of simple reproduction, 76, 92, 103, 107, 112, 114, 173, 264, 299, 351, 361, 418 marxism, 272ff., 310, 326; 'legalist', 275, 292, 294, 303, 305f., 317, 323, 324-6, 460; 'orthodox', 318 mehemet ali, 429, 435 mehring, f., 228, 266f. mikhailovski, prof., 274 militarism, _27_, 248, 276, 282, 298, 309, 350, 371, 439, 454-67 mill, james, 191, 212, 220ff., 372f., 375, 383 mill, john stuart, 279 money, as form of pure value, 38f., 43f., 76, 140 -circulation, _20_, 50, 93-106, 139ff., 148, 193, 213, 300ff., 324 -sources, 144ff., 151ff., 156, 158ff., 300ff. monroe, president, 402 moravitz, c., 443, 445 most favoured nations clause, 448 napoleon bonaparte, 173 napoleon iii, 431, 448 negroes, 362ff., 411ff. neo-marxists, 291 neo-mercantilism, 296 nikolayon, 275, 284-91, 292f., 299, 309, 351, 366, 408 non-capitalist strata necessary for accumulation, 319f., 351ff., 357, 359, 361ff., 368, 386, 416, 427, 429, 446, 450, 452, 466 nyok ching tsur, dr., 395 _obshchina_, 273, 288, 290 opium wars, _27_, 247, 387, 391, 393, 447 oppenheim, m. v., 439 _ort_, 231f., 248, 252 over-production, 91, 104, 149, 195, 199f., 213, 221, 235, 250, 252, 254, 279, 281f., 298, 324, 342 owen, robert, 174f., 191, 240 palikao, count, 392 pan-germans, 247 peasantry, _27_; their expropriation, 288, 296, 362, 364, 369, 374f. peel, sir robert, 245 peffer, senator, 396, 398, 400f., 406f. physiocrats, 31, 49, 51, 56f., 62, 68, 71, 106, 233 planned economy, 78f., 103f., 128ff., 195, 248, 312, 323 plekhanov, prof., 272, 275 population increase, _15_, 41, 78, 91, 107, 133f., 239, 360f., 371 populism, 272ff., 283, 286ff., 303, 306, 309, 317, 325, 351 positivism, 326 pressel, engineer, 441f. primitive social organisations, 32, 39, 41f., 72, 362, 368ff., 377, 415, 428, 454 private enterprise, 79, 103, 248 production, and consumption, 45f., 204, 211, 218, 244, 253, 260, 304f., 324, 326, 343, 349 -for social requirements, 37, 42, 129, 133, 139, 220, 260, 285, 304f., 316 -its two departments, _16_, _18_f., _23_, _25_, 83ff., 95ff., 99, 102, 114ff., 123ff., 127ff., 137, 233, 299, 323, 334, 336, 339ff., 353, 355, 417, 434 -capitalist, as creation of surplus value, 37ff., 42, 78, 84, 107, 343, 367, 427 --as end in itself, 311, 316f., 320, 333, 346 --its universal domination, 216f., 331, 333, 348, 351, 353, 361, 365, 410, 417, 467 productive consumption, 236f., 316 profit, of enterprise, 38, 232, 234 -motive, 34, 305, 322f. profit, rate, _17_, _23_f., 79f., 167; (declining) 259, 320, 326, 338, 343f., 367 progress, _28_, 79, 89, 130f., 204, 216, 245, 249, 258f., 274, 296, 320, 323, 339 property, ownership, 214, 248f., 265, 380f., 413 -communal, 77, 248, 289, 379, 381 -in land, 256, 262, 264f., 370 --vested in sovereign, 372f., 380f. -private, 196, 240, 322, 378, 380, 382ff. proudhon, 137, 227, 241, 264f. punjab alienation act, 376 quesnay, 31, 48ff., 57, 62, 104f., 211 railway construction, 289, 353, 398, 402, 409, 419ff., 425ff., 439, 445 renner, k., 455 rent, 38, 50ff., 57ff., 64, 68, 135, 181, 254f., 257, 266 _rentier_, 223, 254 reproduction, enlarged, _13_, 40ff., 80, 89ff., 102, 107-19, 151, 155, 169, 184, 197, 209, 268, 300, 303, 312, 317f., 329, 335, 339f., 351, 353, 355, 429 -simple, _13_, _15_, _19_, 41, 48, 98, 102, 104, 107f., 112f., 115, 127f., 130, 139, 143ff., 155f., 160ff., 165, 169, 187, 190, 197, 199f., 298, 300, 302, 312, 317, 329, 334, 338, 348, 351, 354 -transition from simple to enlarged, 123, 144f., 147, 150, 162f., 318; _see also_ marx rhodes, cecil, 413f., 416 ricardo, d., 53f., 57, 62, 67f., 105f., 109f., 179, 181, 189, 191, 194ff., 203-10, 211, 215ff., 229f., 232f., 237, 240f., 243ff., 248, 254, 257, 261, 266, 268, 271, 279ff., 305, 324f., 345f., 350, 366, 383, 447 'right to work', 227, 229f. roberts of kandahar, lord, 374 rodbertus, _22_f., 54, 227ff., 237, 238-51, 252-68, 271, 274, 281f., 351 rothstein, th., 436ff. rozet, a., 385 rusk, secretary, 406 russia, 167, 173, 271f., 275ff., 283f., 287ff., 297, 308, 326, 357, 419ff., 445, 449f., 452 st. simon, 191 said pasha, 433ff. saling, 441 saving, _17_f., _20_ff., _22_f., _27_, 163, 236f., 239, 260f., 265f. say, j. b., 53ff., 62f., 177ff., 189, 191, 204, 206, 210, 211-18, 219f., 222, 229ff., 237, 248, 254, 257, 264, 266, 268, 279, 305, 324f., 335, 366 schaeffle, prof., 293, 295, 307, 424 scheibert, j., 388, 390 schmoller, prof., 293, 295ff. schneider, s., 440 schultze, e., 410 sering, 401, 407, 409f. severance of labour power from the means of production, 181, 210, 402 -of agriculture and trade (industry), 369, 395f. simmons, a. m., 398 simons, 363 sismondi, _24_, 35, 53, 115, 173-90, 191-202, 203-10, 211-18, 219f., 222f., 227ff., 237, 240, 245, 248ff., 256, 260, 264, 268, 271, 274, 281f., 287f., 292, 309, 312, 317, 342, 350ff., 365f., 423ff. skvortsov, prof., 275 slavery, 33, 39, 72f., 84, 161, 209f., 241, 243, 255f., 359, 363, 369, 379, 400, 412, 432 slavophiles, 273, 276 smith, adam, 36, 48, 50ff., 83, 105f., 108ff., 166, 169, 180, 185, 187ff., 191, 210f., 215, 228, 230f., 233, 256f., 260ff., 264, 266, 271, 346, 351, 383 socialism, 228f., 266, 274, 325f., 467; english, 244; utopian, 217; and marx's analysis, 131 sombart, prof., 308 spheres of interest, 445, 447, 452 state as consumer, 223, 454ff., 458, 460, 463, 466 struve, peter v., 275, 292-97, 298, 307, 309ff., 325f., 350 suez canal, 33, 430f., 433, 435ff. surplus value, _14_, _18_f., 38, 62, 78, 109ff., 128, 135, 139, 141, 185ff., 199, 207, 220, 234f., 253, 255ff., 265ff., 298, 301f., 310, 317, 332ff., 342f., 350, 353f., 357f., 365ff., 454, 456, 463, 466; its capitalisation, 108, 112ff., 132, 136, 140, 142, 146f., 151f., 163, 165, 170, 184, 188, 196, 198, 237, 330f., 338, 340f., 345, 355, 357, 359f., 367, 417, 421, 428, 446, 451, 456, 464; its consumption, 159ff., 169, 197, 254, 298, 303, 348, 354; 'destruction', 281f., 310, 344; definition, 37f., 77; realisation, 98ff., 132, 139, 142, 155ff., 165, 170, 200, 205ff., 278, 292f., 300, 303, 309f., 329, 341f., 346, 351, 355, 359, 365, 386, 417, 419, 421, 426, 428f., 442, 444, 451, 454, 461f.; contradiction between its production and realisation, 345, 365 sweezy, _13_, 21 tariffs, protective, 231, 297, 399, 446-53, 456 taussig, 399f. taxation, 369, 373f., 379, 381, 383, 394, 396, 399, 435ff., 443, 455, 458, 464f.; indirect, 455ff., 460f., 463f. tax collector, 372f., 443f. 'third persons', 135, 159, 292-7, 298, 305, 348, 350, 458 'three world empires', 292-7 timur (tamerlane), 375 tooke, 156 trade unions, 271, 461 tucker, josiah, 211 tugan baranovski, prof., _23_, 210, 275, 303, 305f., 310, 311-23, 324ff., 330, 335f., 346, 366, 422ff. turkey, 353, 385, 419, 425f., 436, 439, 442, 445 unemployment, 177, 208, 240, 282 usury, 373, 377, 381, 383f. utopianism, 249, 262, 264, 268, 288, 291 value, problem of pure, 35f. -marx's theory of, 66, 68, 105, 281 -ricardo's theory of, 68, 105 -rodbertus' theory of, 240ff., 256, 259 value, adam smith's theory of, 62, 64ff., 105f. -relationships and material points of view, 81f., 105, 112, 264, 336, 354, 417 victoria, queen, 393 violence, 371, 446, 452 vorontsov, v., _24_, 274f., 276-83, 287, 291ff., 299, 303, 309f., 350, 366, 460 wagner, prof., 256, 266f., 293, 295, 297, 307 warren, count, 375 wilson, h. h., 372f. wilson, james, 376 world (international) commerce, 205, 307f., 359 world market, 200, 202, 205, 296f., 308 _zadruga_, 378 [transcriber's notes: list of errors: page 20 "stook" changed to "stock" ("requires an increase in the stock") page 31 "quesney" changed to "quesnay" ("of this problem: one by quesney,") page 121 missing "(" added ("(_800vâ + 25vâ + 55v_)") pages 175 and 192 "e" replaced with "ã�" ("_nouveaux principes d'ã�conomie politique_") page 220 footnote reference to 224 altered from original 9, assumed to be 2 page 227 "simulated" changed to "stimulated" ("the working class had stimulated sismondi's opposition") page 255 "irelevant" changed to "irrelevant" ("irrelevant to the productive process,") page 275 "." changed to "," ("one of the two champions of the 'populist' movement,") page 275 second "." added as in "v. v." ("vorontsov, known in russia mainly under the _nom de plume_ v. v.,") page 293 "'" added ("open whether these 'third persons'") page 293 """ changed to "'" ("entirely on the basis of the home market.'") page 300 two instances of "formulae" changed to "formulã¦" page 340 space added to betweenthe ("determined by the relations between the two departments") page 354 "producduction" changed to "production" ("the sphere of capitalist production,") page 379 "57,500,000,000 acres" changed to "57,000,000 acres" [based on the german text "23.000.000 hektar" converted to acres and rounded] page 381 "assocations" changed to "associations" ("of accelerating the process of dissolving the family associations") page 434 "." removed after "per cent" ("an annual charge of 9 per cent") page 441 "alleppo" changed to "aleppo" ("_vilayets_ aydin, baghdad, mossul, diarbekir, ursa and aleppo") page 474 "," changed to ";" ("443, 455, 458, 464f.;") footnote 180 missing "." added to "470." ("macculloch, loc. cit., p. 470.") footnote 213 "noveaux" changed to "nouveaux" ("_nouveaux principes_ ..., vol. i, p. 117.") footnote 233 "socialer" changed to "sozialer" ("_ã�ber die grundrente in sozialer beziehung._") footnote 239 "f," changed to "f." ("op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 104 f.") footnote 260 missing "." added to "ibid.," ("ibid., vol. i, p. 19.")] the ragged trousered philanthropists by robert tressell contents 1 an imperial banquet. a philosophical discussion. the mysterious stranger. britons never shall be slaves 2 nimrod: a mighty hunter before the lord 3 the financiers 4 the placard 5 the clock-case 6 it is not my crime 7 the exterminating machines 8 the cap on the stairs 9 who is to pay? 10 the long hill 11 hands and brains 12 the letting of the room 13 penal servitude and death 14 three children. the wages of intelligence 15 the undeserving persons and the upper and nether millstones 16 true freedom 17 the rev. john starr 18 the lodger 19 the filling of the tank 20 the forty thieves. the battle: brigands versus bandits 21 the reign of terror. the great money trick 22 the phrenologist 23 the 'open-air' 24 ruth 25 the oblong 26 the slaughter 27 the march of the imperialists 28 the week before christmas 29 the pandorama 30 the brigands hold a council of war 31 the deserter 32 the veteran 33 the soldier's children 34 the beginning of the end 35 facing the 'problem' 36 the obs 37 a brilliant epigram 38 the brigands' cave 39 the brigands at work 40 vive la system! 41 the easter offering. the beano meeting 42 june 43 the good old summer-time 44 the beano 45 the great oration 46 the 'sixty-five' 47 the ghouls 48 the wise men of the east 49 the undesired 50 sundered 51 the widow's son 52 'it's a far, far better thing that i do, than i have ever done' 53 barrington finds a situation 54 the end preface in writing this book my intention was to present, in the form of an interesting story, a faithful picture of working-class life--more especially of those engaged in the building trades--in a small town in the south of england. i wished to describe the relations existing between the workmen and their employers, the attitude and feelings of these two classes towards each other; their circumstances when at work and when out of employment; their pleasures, their intellectual outlook, their religious and political opinions and ideals. the action of the story covers a period of only a little over twelve months, but in order that the picture might be complete it was necessary to describe how the workers are circumstanced at all periods of their lives, from the cradle to the grave. therefore the characters include women and children, a young boy--the apprentice--some improvers, journeymen in the prime of life, and worn-out old men. i designed to show the conditions relating from poverty and unemployment: to expose the futility of the measures taken to deal with them and to indicate what i believe to be the only real remedy, namely--socialism. i intended to explain what socialists understand by the word 'poverty': to define the socialist theory of the causes of poverty, and to explain how socialists propose to abolish poverty. it may be objected that, considering the number of books dealing with these subjects already existing, such a work as this was uncalled for. the answer is that not only are the majority of people opposed to socialism, but a very brief conversation with an average anti-socialist is sufficient to show that he does not know what socialism means. the same is true of all the anti-socialist writers and the 'great statesmen' who make anti-socialist speeches: unless we believe that they are deliberate liars and imposters, who to serve their own interests labour to mislead other people, we must conclude that they do not understand socialism. there is no other possible explanation of the extraordinary things they write and say. the thing they cry out against is not socialism but a phantom of their own imagining. another answer is that 'the philanthropists' is not a treatise or essay, but a novel. my main object was to write a readable story full of human interest and based on the happenings of everyday life, the subject of socialism being treated incidentally. this was the task i set myself. to what extent i have succeeded is for others to say; but whatever their verdict, the work possesses at least one merit--that of being true. i have invented nothing. there are no scenes or incidents in the story that i have not either witnessed myself or had conclusive evidence of. as far as i dared i let the characters express themselves in their own sort of language and consequently some passages may be considered objectionable. at the same time i believe that--because it is true--the book is not without its humorous side. the scenes and characters are typical of every town in the south of england and they will be readily recognized by those concerned. if the book is published i think it will appeal to a very large number of readers. because it is true it will probably be denounced as a libel on the working classes and their employers, and upon the religious-professing section of the community. but i believe it will be acknowledged as true by most of those who are compelled to spend their lives amid the surroundings it describes, and it will be evident that no attack is made upon sincere religion. chapter 1 an imperial banquet. a philosophical discussion. the mysterious stranger. britons never shall be slaves the house was named 'the cave'. it was a large old-fashioned three-storied building standing in about an acre of ground, and situated about a mile outside the town of mugsborough. it stood back nearly two hundred yards from the main road and was reached by means of a by-road or lane, on each side of which was a hedge formed of hawthorn trees and blackberry bushes. this house had been unoccupied for many years and it was now being altered and renovated for its new owner by the firm of rushton & co., builders and decorators. there were, altogether, about twenty-five men working there, carpenters, plumbers, plasterers, bricklayers and painters, besides several unskilled labourers. new floors were being put in where the old ones were decayed, and upstairs two of the rooms were being made into one by demolishing the parting wall and substituting an iron girder. some of the window frames and sashes were so rotten that they were being replaced. some of the ceilings and walls were so cracked and broken that they had to be replastered. openings were cut through walls and doors were being put where no doors had been before. old broken chimney pots were being taken down and new ones were being taken up and fixed in their places. all the old whitewash had to be washed off the ceilings and all the old paper had to be scraped off the walls preparatory to the house being repainted and decorated. the air was full of the sounds of hammering and sawing, the ringing of trowels, the rattle of pails, the splashing of water brushes, and the scraping of the stripping knives used by those who were removing the old wallpaper. besides being full of these the air was heavily laden with dust and disease germs, powdered mortar, lime, plaster, and the dirt that had been accumulating within the old house for years. in brief, those employed there might be said to be living in a tariff reform paradise--they had plenty of work. at twelve o'clock bob crass--the painters' foreman--blew a blast upon a whistle and all hands assembled in the kitchen, where bert the apprentice had already prepared the tea, which was ready in the large galvanized iron pail that he had placed in the middle of the floor. by the side of the pail were a number of old jam-jars, mugs, dilapidated tea-cups and one or two empty condensed milk tins. each man on the 'job' paid bert threepence a week for the tea and sugar--they did not have milk--and although they had tea at breakfast-time as well as at dinner, the lad was generally considered to be making a fortune. two pairs of steps, laid parallel on their sides at a distance of about eight feet from each other, with a plank laid across, in front of the fire, several upturned pails, and the drawers belonging to the dresser, formed the seating accommodation. the floor of the room was covered with all manner of debris, dust, dirt, fragments of old mortar and plaster. a sack containing cement was leaning against one of the walls, and a bucket containing some stale whitewash stood in one corner. as each man came in he filled his cup, jam-jar or condensed milk tin with tea from the steaming pail, before sitting down. most of them brought their food in little wicker baskets which they held on their laps or placed on the floor beside them. at first there was no attempt at conversation and nothing was heard but the sounds of eating and drinking and the drizzling of the bloater which easton, one of the painters, was toasting on the end of a pointed stick at the fire. 'i don't think much of this bloody tea,' suddenly remarked sawkins, one of the labourers. 'well it oughter be all right,' retorted bert; 'it's been bilin' ever since 'arf past eleven.' bert white was a frail-looking, weedy, pale-faced boy, fifteen years of age and about four feet nine inches in height. his trousers were part of a suit that he had once worn for best, but that was so long ago that they had become too small for him, fitting rather tightly and scarcely reaching the top of his patched and broken hob-nailed boots. the knees and the bottoms of the legs of his trousers had been patched with square pieces of cloth, several shades darker than the original fabric, and these patches were now all in rags. his coat was several sizes too large for him and hung about him like a dirty ragged sack. he was a pitiable spectacle of neglect and wretchedness as he sat there on an upturned pail, eating his bread and cheese with fingers that, like his clothing, were grimed with paint and dirt. 'well then, you can't have put enough tea in, or else you've bin usin' up wot was left yesterday,' continued sawkins. 'why the bloody 'ell don't you leave the boy alone?' said harlow, another painter. 'if you don't like the tea you needn't drink it. for my part, i'm sick of listening to you about it every damn day.' 'it's all very well for you to say i needn't drink it,' answered sawkins, 'but i've paid my share an' i've got a right to express an opinion. it's my belief that 'arf the money we gives 'him is spent on penny 'orribles: 'e's always got one in 'is hand, an' to make wot tea 'e does buy last, 'e collects all the slops wot's left and biles it up day after day.' 'no, i don't!' said bert, who was on the verge of tears. 'it's not me wot buys the things at all. i gives the money i gets to crass, and 'e buys them 'imself, so there!' at this revelation, some of the men furtively exchanged significant glances, and crass, the foreman, became very red. 'you'd better keep your bloody thruppence and make your own tea after this week,' he said, addressing sawkins, 'and then p'raps we'll 'ave a little peace at meal-times.' 'an' you needn't ask me to cook no bloaters or bacon for you no more,' added bert, tearfully, 'cos i won't do it.' sawkins was not popular with any of the others. when, about twelve months previously, he first came to work for rushton & co., he was a simple labourer, but since then he had 'picked up' a slight knowledge of the trade, and having armed himself with a putty-knife and put on a white jacket, regarded himself as a fully qualified painter. the others did not perhaps object to him trying to better his condition, but his wages--fivepence an hour--were twopence an hour less than the standard rate, and the result was that in slack times often a better workman was 'stood off' when sawkins was kept on. moreover, he was generally regarded as a sneak who carried tales to the foreman and the 'bloke'. every new hand who was taken on was usually warned by his new mates 'not to let the b--r sawkins see anything.' the unpleasant silence which now ensued was at length broken by one of the men, who told a dirty story, and in the laughter and applause that followed, the incident of the tea was forgotten. 'how did you get on yesterday?' asked crass, addressing bundy, the plasterer, who was intently studying the sporting columns of the daily obscurer. 'no luck,' replied bundy, gloomily. 'i had a bob each way on stockwell, in the first race, but it was scratched before the start.' this gave rise to a conversation between crass, bundy, and one or two others concerning the chances of different horses in the morrow's races. it was friday, and no one had much money, so at the suggestion of bundy, a syndicate was formed, each member contributing threepence for the purpose of backing a dead certainty given by the renowned captain kiddem of the obscurer. one of those who did not join the syndicate was frank owen, who was as usual absorbed in a newspaper. he was generally regarded as a bit of a crank: for it was felt that there must be something wrong about a man who took no interest in racing or football and was always talking a lot of rot about religion and politics. if it had not been for the fact that he was generally admitted to be an exceptionally good workman, they would have had little hesitation about thinking that he was mad. this man was about thirty-two years of age, and of medium height, but so slightly built that he appeared taller. there was a suggestion of refinement in his clean-shaven face, but his complexion was ominously clear, and an unnatural colour flushed the think cheeks. there was a certain amount of justification for the attitude of his fellow workmen, for owen held the most unusual and unorthodox opinions on the subjects mentioned. the affairs of the world are ordered in accordance with orthodox opinions. if anyone did not think in accordance with these he soon discovered this fact for himself. owen saw that in the world a small class of people were possessed of a great abundance and superfluity of the things that are produced by work. he saw also that a very great number--in fact the majority of the people--lived on the verge of want; and that a smaller but still very large number lived lives of semi-starvation from the cradle to the grave; while a yet smaller but still very great number actually died of hunger, or, maddened by privation, killed themselves and their children in order to put a period to their misery. and strangest of all--in his opinion--he saw that people who enjoyed abundance of the things that are made by work, were the people who did nothing: and that the others, who lived in want or died of hunger, were the people who worked. and seeing all this he thought that it was wrong, that the system that produced such results was rotten and should be altered. and he had sought out and eagerly read the writings of those who thought they knew how it might be done. it was because he was in the habit of speaking of these subjects that his fellow workmen came to the conclusion that there was probably something wrong with his mind. when all the members of the syndicate had handed over their contributions, bundy went out to arrange matters with the bookie, and when he had gone easton annexed the copy of the obscurer that bundy had thrown away, and proceeded to laboriously work through some carefully cooked statistics relating to free trade and protection. bert, his eyes starting out of his head and his mouth wide open, was devouring the contents of a paper called the chronicles of crime. ned dawson, a poor devil who was paid fourpence an hour for acting as mate or labourer to bundy, or the bricklayers, or anyone else who wanted him, lay down on the dirty floor in a corner of the room and with his coat rolled up as a pillow, went to sleep. sawkins, with the same intention, stretched himself at full length on the dresser. another who took no part in the syndicate was barrington, a labourer, who, having finished his dinner, placed the cup he brought for his tea back into his dinner basket, took out an old briar pipe which he slowly filled, and proceeded to smoke in silence. some time previously the firm had done some work for a wealthy gentleman who lived in the country, some distance outside mugsborough. this gentleman also owned some property in the town and it was commonly reported that he had used his influence with rushton to induce the latter to give barrington employment. it was whispered amongst the hands that the young man was a distant relative of the gentleman's, and that he had disgraced himself in some way and been disowned by his people. rushton was supposed to have given him a job in the hope of currying favour with his wealthy client, from whom he hoped to obtain more work. whatever the explanation of the mystery may have been, the fact remained that barrington, who knew nothing of the work except what he had learned since he had been taken on, was employed as a painter's labourer at the usual wages--fivepence per hour. he was about twenty-five years of age and a good deal taller than the majority of the others, being about five feet ten inches in height and slenderly though well and strongly built. he seemed very anxious to learn all that he could about the trade, and although rather reserved in his manner, he had contrived to make himself fairly popular with his workmates. he seldom spoke unless to answer when addressed, and it was difficult to draw him into conversation. at meal-times, as on the present occasion, he generally smoked, apparently lost in thought and unconscious of his surroundings. most of the others also lit their pipes and a desultory conversation ensued. 'is the gent what's bought this 'ouse any relation to sweater the draper?' asked payne, the carpenter's foreman. 'it's the same bloke,' replied crass. 'didn't he used to be on the town council or something?' ''e's bin on the council for years,' returned crass. ''e's on it now. 'e's mayor this year. 'e's bin mayor several times before.' 'let's see,' said payne, reflectively, ''e married old grinder's sister, didn't 'e? you know who i mean, grinder the greengrocer.' 'yes, i believe he did,' said crass. 'it wasn't grinder's sister,' chimed in old jack linden. 'it was 'is niece. i know, because i remember working in their 'ouse just after they was married, about ten year ago.' 'oh yes, i remember now,' said payne. 'she used to manage one of grinder's branch shops didn't she?' 'yes,' replied linden. 'i remember it very well because there was a lot of talk about it at the time. by all accounts, ole sweater used to be a regler 'ot un: no one never thought as he'd ever git married at all: there was some funny yarns about several young women what used to work for him.' this important matter being disposed of, there followed a brief silence, which was presently broken by harlow. 'funny name to call a 'ouse, ain't it?' he said. '"the cave." i wonder what made 'em give it a name like that.' 'they calls 'em all sorts of outlandish names nowadays,' said old jack linden. 'there's generally some sort of meaning to it, though,' observed payne. 'for instance, if a bloke backed a winner and made a pile, 'e might call 'is 'ouse, "epsom lodge" or "newmarket villa".' 'or sometimes there's a hoak tree or a cherry tree in the garding,' said another man; 'then they calls it "hoak lodge" or "cherry cottage".' 'well, there's a cave up at the end of this garden,' said harlow with a grin, 'you know, the cesspool, what the drains of the 'ouse runs into; praps they called it after that.' 'talking about the drains,' said old jack linden when the laughter produced by this elegant joke had ceased. 'talking about the drains, i wonder what they're going to do about them; the 'ouse ain't fit to live in as they are now, and as for that bloody cesspool it ought to be done away with.' 'so it is going to be,' replied crass. 'there's going to be a new set of drains altogether, carried right out to the road and connected with the main.' crass really knew no more about what was going to be done in this matter than did linden, but he felt certain that this course would be adopted. he never missed an opportunity of enhancing his own prestige with the men by insinuating that he was in the confidence of the firm. 'that's goin' to cost a good bit,' said linden. 'yes, i suppose it will,' replied crass, 'but money ain't no object to old sweater. 'e's got tons of it; you know 'e's got a large wholesale business in london and shops all over the bloody country, besides the one 'e's got 'ere.' easton was still reading the obscurer; he was not about to understand exactly what the compiler of the figures was driving at--probably the latter never intended that anyone should understand--but he was conscious of a growing feeling of indignation and hatred against foreigners of every description, who were ruining this country, and he began to think that it was about time we did something to protect ourselves. still, it was a very difficult question: to tell the truth, he himself could not make head or tail of it. at length he said aloud, addressing himself to crass: 'wot do you think of this 'ere fissical policy, bob?' 'ain't thought much about it,' replied crass. 'i don't never worry my 'ed about politics.' 'much better left alone,' chimed in old jack linden sagely, 'argyfying about politics generally ends up with a bloody row an' does no good to nobody.' at this there was a murmur of approval from several of the others. most of them were averse from arguing or disputing about politics. if two or three men of similar opinions happened to be together they might discuss such things in a friendly and superficial way, but in a mixed company it was better left alone. the 'fissical policy' emanated from the tory party. that was the reason why some of them were strongly in favour of it, and for the same reason others were opposed to it. some of them were under the delusion that they were conservatives: similarly, others imagined themselves to be liberals. as a matter of fact, most of them were nothing. they knew as much about the public affairs of their own country as they did of the condition of affairs in the planet of jupiter. easton began to regret that he had broached so objectionable a subject, when, looking up from his paper, owen said: 'does the fact that you never "trouble your heads about politics" prevent you from voting at election times?' no one answered, and there ensued a brief silence. easton however, in spite of the snub he had received, could not refrain from talking. 'well, i don't go in for politics much, either, but if what's in this 'ere paper is true, it seems to me as we oughter take some interest in it, when the country is being ruined by foreigners.' 'if you're going to believe all that's in that bloody rag you'll want some salt,' said harlow. the obscurer was a tory paper and harlow was a member of the local liberal club. harlow's remark roused crass. 'wot's the use of talkin' like that?' he said; 'you know very well that the country is being ruined by foreigners. just go to a shop to buy something; look round the place an' you'll see that more than 'arf the damn stuff comes from abroad. they're able to sell their goods 'ere because they don't 'ave to pay no dooty, but they takes care to put 'eavy dooties on our goods to keep 'em out of their countries; and i say it's about time it was stopped.' ''ear, 'ear,' said linden, who always agreed with crass, because the latter, being in charge of the job, had it in his power to put in a good--or a bad--word for a man to the boss. ''ear, 'ear! now that's wot i call common sense.' several other men, for the same reason as linden, echoed crass's sentiments, but owen laughed contemptuously. 'yes, it's quite true that we gets a lot of stuff from foreign countries,' said harlow, 'but they buys more from us than we do from them.' 'now you think you know a 'ell of a lot,' said crass. ''ow much more did they buy from us last year, than we did from them?' harlow looked foolish: as a matter of fact his knowledge of the subject was not much wider than crass's. he mumbled something about not having no 'ed for figures, and offered to bring full particulars next day. 'you're wot i call a bloody windbag,' continued crass; 'you've got a 'ell of a lot to say, but wen it comes to the point you don't know nothin'.' 'why, even 'ere in mugsborough,' chimed in sawkins--who though still lying on the dresser had been awakened by the shouting--'we're overrun with 'em! nearly all the waiters and the cook at the grand hotel where we was working last month is foreigners.' 'yes,' said old joe philpot, tragically, 'and then thers all them hitalian horgin grinders, an' the blokes wot sells 'ot chestnuts; an' wen i was goin' 'ome last night i see a lot of them frenchies sellin' hunions, an' a little wile afterwards i met two more of 'em comin' up the street with a bear.' notwithstanding the disquieting nature of this intelligence, owen again laughed, much to the indignation of the others, who thought it was a very serious state of affairs. it was a dam' shame that these people were allowed to take the bread out of english people's mouths: they ought to be driven into the bloody sea. and so the talk continued, principally carried on by crass and those who agreed with him. none of them really understood the subject: not one of them had ever devoted fifteen consecutive minutes to the earnest investigation of it. the papers they read were filled with vague and alarming accounts of the quantities of foreign merchandise imported into this country, the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving, and their destitute conditions, how they lived, the crimes they committed, and the injury they did to british trade. these were the seeds which, cunningly sown in their minds, caused to grow up within them a bitter undiscriminating hatred of foreigners. to them the mysterious thing they variously called the 'friscal policy', the 'fistical policy', or the 'fissical question' was a great anti-foreign crusade. the country was in a hell of a state, poverty, hunger and misery in a hundred forms had already invaded thousands of homes and stood upon the thresholds of thousands more. how came these things to be? it was the bloody foreigner! therefore, down with the foreigners and all their works. out with them. drive them b--s into the bloody sea! the country would be ruined if not protected in some way. this friscal, fistical, fissical or whatever the hell policy it was called, was protection, therefore no one but a bloody fool could hesitate to support it. it was all quite plain--quite simple. one did not need to think twice about it. it was scarcely necessary to think about it at all. this was the conclusion reached by crass and such of his mates who thought they were conservatives--the majority of them could not have read a dozen sentences aloud without stumbling--it was not necessary to think or study or investigate anything. it was all as clear as daylight. the foreigner was the enemy, and the cause of poverty and bad trade. when the storm had in some degree subsided, 'some of you seem to think,' said owen, sneeringly, 'that it was a great mistake on god's part to make so many foreigners. you ought to hold a mass meeting about it: pass a resolution something like this: "this meeting of british christians hereby indignantly protests against the action of the supreme being in having created so many foreigners, and calls upon him to forthwith rain down fire, brimstone and mighty rocks upon the heads of all those philistines, so that they may be utterly exterminated from the face of the earth, which rightly belongs to the british people".' crass looked very indignant, but could think of nothing to say in answer to owen, who continued: 'a little while ago you made the remark that you never trouble yourself about what you call politics, and some of the rest agreed with you that to do so is not worth while. well, since you never "worry" yourself about these things, it follows that you know nothing about them; yet you do not hesitate to express the most decided opinions concerning matters of which you admittedly know nothing. presently, when there is an election, you will go and vote in favour of a policy of which you know nothing. i say that since you never take the trouble to find out which side is right or wrong you have no right to express any opinion. you are not fit to vote. you should not be allowed to vote.' crass was by this time very angry. 'i pays my rates and taxes,' he shouted, 'an' i've got as much right to express an opinion as you 'ave. i votes for who the bloody 'ell i likes. i shan't arst your leave nor nobody else's! wot the 'ell's it got do with you who i votes for?' 'it has a great deal to do with me. if you vote for protection you will be helping to bring it about, and if you succeed, and if protection is the evil that some people say is is, i shall be one of those who will suffer. i say you have no right to vote for a policy which may bring suffering upon other people, without taking the trouble to find out whether you are helping to make things better or worse.' owen had risen from his seat and was walking up and down the room emphasizing his words with excited gestures. 'as for not trying to find out wot side is right,' said crass, somewhat overawed by owen's manner and by what he thought was the glare of madness in the latter's eyes, 'i reads the ananias every week, and i generally takes the daily chloroform, or the hobscurer, so i ought to know summat about it.' 'just listen to this,' interrupted easton, wishing to create a diversion and beginning to read from the copy of the obscurer which he still held in his hand: 'great distress in mugsborough. hundreds out of employment. work of the charity society. 789 cases on the books. 'great as was the distress among the working classes last year, unfortunately there seems every prospect that before the winter which has just commenced is over the distress will be even more acute. already the charity society and kindred associations are relieving more cases than they did at the corresponding time last year. applications to the board of guardians have also been much more numerous, and the soup kitchen has had to open its doors on nov. 7th a fortnight earlier than usual. the number of men, women and children provided with meals is three or four times greater than last year.' easton stopped: reading was hard work to him. 'there's a lot more,' he said, 'about starting relief works: two shillings a day for married men and one shilling for single and something about there's been 1,572 quarts of soup given to poor families wot was not even able to pay a penny, and a lot more. and 'ere's another thing, an advertisement: 'the suffering poor sir: distress among the poor is so acute that i earnestly ask you for aid for the salvation army's great social work on their behalf. some 600 are being sheltered nightly. hundreds are found work daily. soup and bread are distributed in the midnight hours to homeless wanderers in london. additional workshops for the unemployed have been established. our social work for men, women and children, for the characterless and the outcast, is the largest and oldest organized effort of its kind in the country, and greatly needs help. l10,000 is required before christmas day. gifts may be made to any specific section or home, if desired. can you please send us something to keep the work going? please address cheques, crossed bank of england (law courts branch), to me at 101, queen victoria street, ec. balance sheets and reports upon application. 'bramwell booth.' 'oh, that's part of the great 'appiness an' prosperity wot owen makes out free trade brings,' said crass with a jeering laugh. 'i never said free trade brought happiness or prosperity,' said owen. 'well, praps you didn't say exactly them words, but that's wot it amounts to.' 'i never said anything of the kind. we've had free trade for the last fifty years and today most people are living in a condition of more or less abject poverty, and thousands are literally starving. when we had protection things were worse still. other countries have protection and yet many of their people are glad to come here and work for starvation wages. the only difference between free trade and protection is that under certain circumstances one might be a little worse that the other, but as remedies for poverty, neither of them are of any real use whatever, for the simple reason that they do not deal with the real causes of poverty.' 'the greatest cause of poverty is hover-population,' remarked harlow. 'yes,' said old joe philpot. 'if a boss wants two men, twenty goes after the job: ther's too many people and not enough work.' 'over-population!' cried owen, 'when there's thousands of acres of uncultivated land in england without a house or human being to be seen. is over-population the cause of poverty in france? is over-population the cause of poverty in ireland? within the last fifty years the population of ireland has been reduced by more than half. four millions of people have been exterminated by famine or got rid of by emigration, but they haven't got rid of poverty. p'raps you think that half the people in this country ought to be exterminated as well.' here owen was seized with a violent fit of coughing, and resumed his seat. when the cough had ceased he sat wiping his mouth with his handkerchief and listening to the talk that ensued. 'drink is the cause of most of the poverty,' said slyme. this young man had been through some strange process that he called 'conversion'. he had had a 'change of 'art' and looked down with pious pity upon those he called 'worldly' people. he was not 'worldly', he did not smoke or drink and never went to the theatre. he had an extraordinary notion that total abstinence was one of the fundamental principles of the christian religion. it never occurred to what he called his mind, that this doctrine is an insult to the founder of christianity. 'yes,' said crass, agreeing with slyme, 'an' thers plenty of 'em wot's too lazy to work when they can get it. some of the b--s who go about pleading poverty 'ave never done a fair day's work in all their bloody lives. then thers all this new-fangled machinery,' continued crass. 'that's wot's ruinin' everything. even in our trade ther's them machines for trimmin' wallpaper, an' now they've brought out a paintin' machine. ther's a pump an' a 'ose pipe, an' they reckon two men can do as much with this 'ere machine as twenty could without it.' 'another thing is women,' said harlow, 'there's thousands of 'em nowadays doin' work wot oughter be done by men.' 'in my opinion ther's too much of this 'ere eddication, nowadays,' remarked old linden. 'wot the 'ell's the good of eddication to the likes of us?' 'none whatever,' said crass, 'it just puts foolish idears into people's 'eds and makes 'em too lazy to work.' barrington, who took no part in the conversation, still sat silently smoking. owen was listening to this pitiable farrago with feelings of contempt and wonder. were they all hopelessly stupid? had their intelligence never developed beyond the childhood stage? or was he mad himself? 'early marriages is another thing,' said slyme: 'no man oughtn't to be allowed to get married unless he's in a position to keep a family.' 'how can marriage be a cause of poverty?' said owen, contemptuously. 'a man who is not married is living an unnatural life. why don't you continue your argument a little further and say that the practice of eating and drinking is the cause of poverty or that if people were to go barefoot and naked there would be no poverty? the man who is so poor that he cannot marry is in a condition of poverty already.' 'wot i mean,' said slyme, 'is that no man oughtn't to marry till he's saved up enough so as to 'ave some money in the bank; an' another thing, i reckon a man oughtn't to get married till 'e's got an 'ouse of 'is own. it's easy enough to buy one in a building society if you're in reg'lar work.' at this there was a general laugh. 'why, you bloody fool,' said harlow, scornfully, 'most of us is walkin' about 'arf our time. it's all very well for you to talk; you've got almost a constant job on this firm. if they're doin' anything at all you're one of the few gets a show in. and another thing,' he added with a sneer, 'we don't all go to the same chapel as old misery,' 'old misery' was ruston & co.'s manager or walking foreman. 'misery' was only one of the nicknames bestowed upon him by the hands: he was also known as 'nimrod' and 'pontius pilate'. 'and even if it's not possible,' harlow continued, winking at the others, 'what's a man to do during the years he's savin' up?' 'well, he must conquer hisself,' said slyme, getting red. 'conquer hisself is right!' said harlow and the others laughed again. 'of course if a man tried to conquer hisself by his own strength,' replied slyme, ''e would be sure to fail, but when you've got the grace of god in you it's different.' 'chuck it, fer christ's sake!' said harlow in a tone of disgust. 'we've only just 'ad our dinner!' 'and wot about drink?' demanded old joe philpot, suddenly. ''ear, 'ear,' cried harlow. 'that's the bleedin' talk. i wouldn't mind 'avin 'arf a pint now, if somebody else will pay for it.' joe philpot--or as he was usually called, 'old joe'--was in the habit of indulging freely in the cup that inebriates. he was not very old, being only a little over fifty, but he looked much older. he had lost his wife some five years ago and was now alone in the world, for his three children had died in their infancy. slyme's reference to drink had roused philpot's indignation; he felt that it was directed against himself. the muddled condition of his brain did not permit him to take up the cudgels in his own behalf, but he knew that although owen was a tee-totaller himself, he disliked slyme. 'there's no need for us to talk about drink or laziness,' returned owen, impatiently, 'because they have nothing to do with the matter. the question is, what is the cause of the lifelong poverty of the majority of those who are not drunkards and who do work? why, if all the drunkards and won't-works and unskilled or inefficient workers could be by some miracle transformed into sober, industrious and skilled workers tomorrow, it would, under the present conditions, be so much the worse for us, because there isn't enough work for all now and those people by increasing the competition for what work there is, would inevitably cause a reduction of wages and a greater scarcity of employment. the theories that drunkenness, laziness or inefficiency are the causes of poverty are so many devices invented and fostered by those who are selfishly interested in maintaining the present states of affairs, for the purpose of preventing us from discovering the real causes of our present condition.' 'well, if we're all wrong,' said crass, with a sneer, 'praps you can tell us what the real cause is?' 'an' praps you think you know how it's to be altered,' remarked harlow, winking at the others. 'yes; i do think i know the cause,' declared owen, 'and i do think i know how it could be altered--' 'it can't never be haltered,' interrupted old linden. 'i don't see no sense in all this 'ere talk. there's always been rich and poor in the world, and there always will be.' 'wot i always say is there 'ere,' remarked philpot, whose principal characteristic--apart from thirst--was a desire to see everyone comfortable, and who hated rows of any kind. 'there ain't no use in the likes of us trubblin our 'eds or quarrelin about politics. it don't make a dam bit of difference who you votes for or who gets in. they're hall the same; workin the horicle for their own benefit. you can talk till you're black in the face, but you won't never be able to alter it. it's no use worrying. the sensible thing is to try and make the best of things as we find 'em: enjoy ourselves, and do the best we can for each other. life's too short to quarrel and we'll hall soon be dead!' at the end of this lengthy speech, the philosophic philpot abstractedly grasped a jam-jar and raised it to his lips; but suddenly remembering that it contained stewed tea and not beer, set it down again without drinking. 'let us begin at the beginning,' continued owen, taking no notice of these interruptions. 'first of all, what do you mean by poverty?' 'why, if you've got no money, of course,' said crass impatiently. the others laughed disdainfully. it seemed to them such a foolish question. 'well, that's true enough as far as it goes,' returned owen, 'that is, as things are arranged in the world at present. but money itself is not wealth: it's of no use whatever.' at this there was another outburst of jeering laughter. 'supposing for example that you and harlow were shipwrecked on a desolate island, and you had saved nothing from the wreck but a bag containing a thousand sovereigns, and he had a tin of biscuits and a bottle of water.' 'make it beer!' cried harlow appealingly. 'who would be the richer man, you or harlow?' 'but then you see we ain't shipwrecked on no dissolute island at all,' sneered crass. 'that's the worst of your arguments. you can't never get very far without supposing some bloody ridclus thing or other. never mind about supposing things wot ain't true; let's 'ave facts and common sense.' ''ear, 'ear,' said old linden. 'that's wot we want--a little common sense.' 'what do you mean by poverty, then?' asked easton. 'what i call poverty is when people are not able to secure for themselves all the benefits of civilization; the necessaries, comforts, pleasures and refinements of life, leisure, books, theatres, pictures, music, holidays, travel, good and beautiful homes, good clothes, good and pleasant food.' everybody laughed. it was so ridiculous. the idea of the likes of them wanting or having such things! any doubts that any of them had entertained as to owen's sanity disappeared. the man was as mad as a march hare. 'if a man is only able to provide himself and his family with the bare necessaries of existence, that man's family is living in poverty. since he cannot enjoy the advantages of civilization he might just as well be a savage: better, in fact, for a savage knows nothing of what he is deprived. what we call civilization--the accumulation of knowledge which has come down to us from our forefathers--is the fruit of thousands of years of human thought and toil. it is not the result of the labour of the ancestors of any separate class of people who exist today, and therefore it is by right the common heritage of all. every little child that is born into the world, no matter whether he is clever or full, whether he is physically perfect or lame, or blind; no matter how much he may excel or fall short of his fellows in other respects, in one thing at least he is their equal--he is one of the heirs of all the ages that have gone before.' some of them began to wonder whether owen was not sane after all. he certainly must be a clever sort of chap to be able to talk like this. it sounded almost like something out of a book, and most of them could not understand one half of it. 'why is it,' continued owen, 'that we are not only deprived of our inheritance--we are not only deprived of nearly all the benefits of civilization, but we and our children are also often unable to obtain even the bare necessaries of existence?' no one answered. 'all these things,' owen proceeded, 'are produced by those who work. we do our full share of the work, therefore we should have a full share of the things that are made by work.' the others continued silent. harlow thought of the over-population theory, but decided not to mention it. crass, who could not have given an intelligent answer to save his life, for once had sufficient sense to remain silent. he did think of calling out the patent paint-pumping machine and bringing the hosepipe to bear on the subject, but abandoned the idea; after all, he thought, what was the use of arguing with such a fool as owen? sawkins pretended to be asleep. philpot, however, had suddenly grown very serious. 'as things are now,' went on owen, 'instead of enjoying the advantages of civilization we are really worse off than slaves, for if we were slaves our owners in their own interest would see to it that we always had food and--' 'oh, i don't see that,' roughly interrupted old linden, who had been listening with evident anger and impatience. 'you can speak for yourself, but i can tell yer i don't put myself down as a slave.' 'nor me neither,' said crass sturdily. 'let them call their selves slaves as wants to.' at this moment a footstep was heard in the passage leading to the kitchen. old misery! or perhaps the bloke himself! crass hurriedly pulled out his watch. 'jesus christ!' he gasped. 'it's four minutes past one!' linden frantically seized hold of a pair of steps and began wandering about the room with them. sawkins scrambled hastily to his feet and, snatching a piece of sandpaper from the pocket of his apron, began furiously rubbing down the scullery door. easton threw down the copy of the obscurer and scrambled hastily to his feet. the boy crammed the chronicles of crime into his trousers pocket. crass rushed over to the bucket and began stirring up the stale whitewash it contained, and the stench which it gave forth was simply appalling. consternation reigned. they looked like a gang of malefactors suddenly interrupted in the commission of a crime. the door opened. it was only bundy returning from his mission to the bookie. chapter 2 nimrod: a mighty hunter before the lord mr hunter, as he was called to his face and as he was known to his brethren at the shining light chapel, where he was superintendant of the sunday school, or 'misery' or 'nimrod'; as he was named behind his back by the workmen over whom he tyrannized, was the general or walking foreman or 'manager' of the firm whose card is herewith presented to the reader: rushton & co. mugsborough ------ builders, decorators, and general contractors funerals furnished estimates given for general repairs to house property first-class work only at moderate charges there were a number of sub-foremen or 'coddies', but hunter was the foreman. he was a tall, thin man whose clothes hung loosely on the angles of his round-shouldered, bony form. his long, thin legs, about which the baggy trousers draped in ungraceful folds, were slightly knock-kneed and terminated in large, flat feet. his arms were very long even for such a tall man, and the huge, bony hands were gnarled and knotted. when he removed his bowler hat, as he frequently did to wipe away with a red handkerchief the sweat occasioned by furious bicycle riding, it was seen that his forehead was high, flat and narrow. his nose was a large, fleshy, hawklike beak, and from the side of each nostril a deep indentation extended downwards until it disappeared in the dropping moustache that concealed his mouth, the vast extent of which was perceived only when he opened it to bellow at the workmen his exhortations to greater exertions. his chin was large and extraordinarily long. the eyes were pale blue, very small and close together, surmounted by spare, light-coloured, almost invisible eyebrows, with a deep vertical cleft between them over the nose. his head, covered with thick, coarse brown hair, was very large at the back; the ears were small and laid close to the head. if one were to make a full-face drawing of his cadaverous visage it would be found that the outline resembled that of the lid of a coffin. this man had been with rushton--no one had ever seen the 'co.'--for fifteen years, in fact almost from the time when the latter commenced business. rushton had at that period realized the necessity of having a deputy who could be used to do all the drudgery and running about so that he himself might be free to attend to the more pleasant or profitable matters. hunter was then a journeyman, but was on the point of starting on his own account, when rushton offered him a constant job as foreman, two pounds a week, and two and a half per cent of the profits of all work done. on the face of it this appeared a generous offer. hunter closed with it, gave up the idea of starting for himself, and threw himself heart and mind into the business. when an estimate was to be prepared it was hunter who measured up the work and laboriously figured out the probably cost. when their tenders were accepted it was he who superintended the work and schemed how to scamp it, where possible, using mud where mortar was specified, mortar where there ought to have been cement, sheet zinc where they were supposed to put sheet lead, boiled oil instead of varnish, and three coats of paint where five were paid for. in fact, scamping the work was with this man a kind of mania. it grieved him to see anything done properly. even when it was more economical to do a thing well, he insisted from force of habit on having it scamped. then he was almost happy, because he felt that he was doing someone down. if there were an architect superintending the work, misery would square him or bluff him. if it were not possible to do either, at least he had a try; and in the intervals of watching, driving and bullying the hands, his vulture eye was ever on the look out for fresh jobs. his long red nose was thrust into every estate agent's office in the town in the endeavour to smell out what properties had recently changed hands or been let, in order that he might interview the new owners and secure the order for whatever alterations or repairs might be required. he it was who entered into unholy compacts with numerous charwomen and nurses of the sick, who in return for a small commission would let him know when some poor sufferer was passing away and would recommend rushton & co. to the bereaved and distracted relatives. by these means often--after first carefully inquiring into the financial position of the stricken family--misery would contrive to wriggle his unsavoury carcass into the house of sorrow, seeking, even in the chamber of death, to further the interests of rushton & co. and to earn his miserable two and a half per cent. it was to make possible the attainment of this object that misery slaved and drove and schemed and cheated. it was for this that the workers' wages were cut down to the lowest possible point and their offspring went ill clad, ill shod and ill fed, and were driven forth to labour while they were yet children, because their fathers were unable to earn enough to support their homes. fifteen years! hunter realized now that rushton had had considerably the best of the bargain. in the first place, it will be seen that the latter had bought over one who might have proved a dangerous competitor, and now, after fifteen years, the business that had been so laboriously built up, mainly by hunter's energy, industry and unscrupulous cunning, belonged to rushton & co. hunter was but an employee, liable to dismissal like any other workman, the only difference being that he was entitled to a week's notice instead of an hour's notice, and was but little better off financially than when he started for the firm. fifteen years! hunter knew now that he had been used, but he also knew that it was too late to turn back. he had not saved enough to make a successful start on his own account even if he had felt mentally and physically capable of beginning all over again, and if rushton were to discharge him right now he was too old to get a job as a journeyman. further, in his zeal for rushton & co. and his anxiety to earn his commission, he had often done things that had roused the animosity of rival firms to such an extent that it was highly improbable that any of them would employ him, and even if they would, misery's heart failed him at the thought of having to meet on an equal footing those workmen whom he had tyrannized over and oppressed. it was for these reasons that hunter was as terrified of rushton as the hands were of himself. over the men stood misery, ever threatening them with dismissal and their wives and children with hunger. behind misery was rushton, ever bullying and goading him on to greater excesses and efforts for the furtherance of the good cause--which was to enable the head of the firm to accumulate money. mr hunter, at the moment when the reader first makes his acquaintance on the afternoon of the day when the incidents recorded in the first chapter took place, was executing a kind of strategic movement in the direction of the house where crass and his mates were working. he kept to one side of the road because by so doing he could not be perceived by those within the house until the instant of his arrival. when he was within about a hundred yards of the gate he dismounted from his bicycle, there being a sharp rise in the road just there, and as he toiled up, pushing the bicycle in front, his breath showing in white clouds in the frosty air, he observed a number of men hanging about. some of them he knew; they had worked for him at various times, but were now out of a job. there were five men altogether; three of them were standing in a group, the other two stood each by himself, being apparently strangers to each other and the first three. the three men who stood together were nearest to hunter and as the latter approached, one of them advanced to meet him. 'good afternoon, sir.' hunter replied by an inarticulate grunt, without stopping; the man followed. 'any chance of a job, sir?' 'full up,' replied hunter, still without stopping. the man still followed, like a beggar soliciting charity. 'be any use calling in a day or so, sir?' 'don't think so,' hunter replied. 'can if you like; but we're full up.' 'thank you, sir,' said the man, and turned back to his friends. by this time hunter was within a few yards of one of the other two men, who also came to speak to him. this man felt there was no hope of getting a job; still, there was no harm in asking. besides, he was getting desperate. it was over a month now since he had finished up for his last employer. it had been a very slow summer altogether. sometimes a fortnight for one firm; then perhaps a week doing nothing; then three weeks or a month for another firm, then out again, and so on. and now it was november. last winter they had got into debt; that was nothing unusual, but owing to the bad summer they had not been able, as in other years, to pay off the debts accumulated in winter. it was doubtful, too, whether they would be able to get credit again this winter. in fact this morning when his wife sent their little girl to the grocer's for some butter the latter had refused to let the child have it without the money. so although he felt it to be useless he accosted hunter. this time hunter stopped: he was winded by his climb up the hill. 'good afternoon, sir.' hunter did not return the salutation; he had not the breath to spare, but the man was not hurt; he was used to being treated like that. 'any chance of a job, sir?' hunter did not reply at once. he was short of breath and he was thinking of a plan that was ever recurring to his mind, and which he had lately been hankering to put into execution. it seemed to him that the long waited for opportunity had come. just now rushton & co. were almost the only firm in mugsborough who had any work. there were dozens of good workmen out. yes, this was the time. if this man agreed he would give him a start. hunter knew the man was a good workman, he had worked for rushton & co. before. to make room for him old linden and some other full-price man could be got rid of; it would not be difficult to find some excuse. 'well,' hunter said at last in a doubtful, hesitating kind of way, 'i'm afraid not, newman. we're about full up.' he ceased speaking and remained waiting for the other to say something more. he did not look at the man, but stooped down, fidgeting with the mechanism of the bicycle as if adjusting it. 'things have been so bad this summer,' newman went on. 'i've had rather a rough time of it. i would be very glad of a job even if it was only for a week or so.' there was a pause. after a while, hunter raised his eyes to the other's face, but immediately let them fall again. 'well,' said he, 'i might--perhaps--be able to let you have a day or two. you can come here to this job,' and he nodded his head in the direction of the house where the men were working. 'tomorrow at seven. of course you know the figure?' he added as newman was about to thank him. 'six and a half.' hunter spoke as if the reduction were already an accomplished fact. the man was more likely to agree, if he thought that others were already working at the reduced rate. newman was taken by surprise and hesitated. he had never worked under price; indeed, he had sometimes gone hungry rather than do so; but now it seemed that others were doing it. and then he was so awfully hard up. if he refused this job he was not likely to get another in a hurry. he thought of his home and his family. already they owed five weeks' rent, and last monday the collector had hinted pretty plainly that the landlord would not wait much longer. not only that, but if he did not get a job how were they to live? this morning he himself had had no breakfast to speak of, only a cup of tea and some dry bread. these thoughts crowded upon each other in his mind, but still he hesitated. hunter began to move off. 'well,' he said, 'if you like to start you can come here at seven in the morning.' then as newman still hesitated he added impatiently, 'are you coming or not?' 'yes, sir,' said newman. 'all right,' said hunter, affably. 'i'll tell crass to have a kit ready for you.' he nodded in a friendly way to the man, who went off feeling like a criminal. as hunter resumed his march, well pleased with himself, the fifth man, who had been waiting all this time, came to meet him. as he approached, hunter recognized him as one who had started work for rushton & co early in the summer, but who had left suddenly of his own accord, having taken offence at some bullying remark of hunter's. hunter was glad to see this man. he guessed that the fellow must be very hard pressed to come again and ask for work after what had happened. 'any chance of a job, sir?' hunter appeared to reflect. 'i believe i have room for one,' he said at length. 'but you're such an uncertain kind of chap. you don't seem to care much whether you work or not. you're too independent, you know; one can't say two words to you but you must needs clear off.' the man made no answer. 'we can't tolerate that kind of thing, you know,' hunter added. 'if we were to encourage men of your stamp we should never know where we are.' so saying, hunter moved away and again proceeded on his journey. when he arrived within about three yards of the gate he noiselessly laid his machine against the garden fence. the high evergreens that grew inside still concealed him from the observation of anyone who might be looking out of the windows of the house. then he carefully crept along till he came to the gate post, and bending down, he cautiously peeped round to see if he could detect anyone idling, or talking, or smoking. there was no one in sight except old jack linden, who was rubbing down the lobby doors with pumice-stone and water. hunter noiselessly opened the gate and crept quietly along the grass border of the garden path. his idea was to reach the front door without being seen, so that linden could not give notice of his approach to those within. in this he succeeded and passed silently into the house. he did not speak to linden; to do so would have proclaimed his presence to the rest. he crawled stealthily over the house but was disappointed in his quest, for everyone he saw was hard at work. upstairs he noticed that the door of one of the rooms was closed. old joe philpot had been working in this room all day, washing off the old whitewash from the ceiling and removing the old papers from the walls with a broad bladed, square topped knife called a stripper. although it was only a small room, joe had had to tear into the work pretty hard all the time, for the ceiling seemed to have had two or three coats of whitewash without ever having been washed off, and there were several thicknesses of paper on the walls. the difficulty of removing these papers was increased by the fact that there was a dado which had been varnished. in order to get this off it had been necessary to soak it several times with strong soda water, and although joe was as careful as possible he had not been able to avoid getting some of this stuff on his fingers. the result was that his nails were all burnt and discoloured and the flesh round them cracked and bleeding. however, he had got it all off at last, and he was not sorry, for his right arm and shoulder were aching from the prolonged strain and in the palm of the right hand there was a blister as large as a shilling, caused by the handle of the stripping knife. all the old paper being off, joe washed down the walls with water, and having swept the paper into a heap in the middle of the floor, he mixed with a small trowel some cement on a small board and proceeded to stop up the cracks and holes in the walls and ceiling. after a while, feeling very tired, it occurred to him that he deserved a spell and a smoke for five minutes. he closed the door and placed a pair of steps against it. there were two windows in the room almost opposite each other; these he opened wide in order that the smoke and smell of his pipe might be carried away. having taken these precautions against surprise, he ascended to the top of the step ladder that he had laid against the door and sat down at ease. within easy reach was the top of a cupboard where he had concealed a pint of beer in a bottle. to this he now applied himself. having taken a long pull at the bottle, he tenderly replaced it on the top of the cupboard and proceeded to 'hinjoy' a quiet smoke, remarking to himself: 'this is where we get some of our own back.' he held, however, his trowel in one hand, ready for immediate action in case of interruption. philpot was about fifty-five years old. he wore no white jacket, only an old patched apron; his trousers were old, very soiled with paint and ragged at the bottoms of the legs where they fell over the much-patched, broken and down-at-heel boots. the part of his waistcoat not protected by his apron was covered with spots of dried paint. he wore a coloured shirt and a 'dickey' which was very soiled and covered with splashes of paint, and one side of it was projecting from the opening of the waistcoat. his head was covered with an old cap, heavy and shining with paint. he was very thin and stooped slightly. although he was really only fifty-five, he looked much older, for he was prematurely aged. he had not been getting his own back for quite five minutes when hunter softly turned the handle of the lock. philpot immediately put out his pipe and descending from his perch opened the door. when hunter entered philpot closed it again and, mounting the steps, went on stripping the wall just above. nimrod looked at him suspiciously, wondering why the door had been closed. he looked all round the room but could see nothing to complain of. he sniffed the air to try if he could detect the odour of tobacco, and if he had not been suffering a cold in the head there is no doubt that he would have perceived it. however, as it was he could smell nothing but all the same he was not quite satisfied, although he remembered that crass always gave philpot a good character. 'i don't like to have men working on a job like this with the door shut,' he said at length. 'it always gives me the idear that the man's 'avin a mike. you can do what you're doin' just as well with the door open.' philpot, muttering something about it being all the same to him--shut or open--got down from the steps and opened the door. hunter went out again without making any further remark and once more began crawling over the house. owen was working by himself in a room on the same floor as philpot. he was at the window, burning off with a paraffin torch-lamp those parts of the old paintwork that were blistered and cracked. in this work the flame of the lamp is directed against the old paint, which becomes soft and is removed with a chisel knife, or a scraper called a shavehook. the door was ajar and he had opened the top sash of the window for the purpose of letting in some fresh air, because the atmosphere of the room was foul with the fumes of the lamp and the smell of the burning paint, besides being heavy with moisture. the ceiling had only just been water washed and the walls had just been stripped. the old paper, saturated with water, was piled up in a heap in the middle of the floor. presently, as he was working he began to feel conscious of some other presence in the room; he looked round. the door was open about six inches and in the opening appeared a long, pale face with a huge chin, surmounted by a bowler hat and ornamented with a large red nose, a drooping moustache and two small, glittering eyes set very close together. for some seconds this apparition regarded owen intently, then it was silently withdrawn, and he was again alone. he had been so surprised and startled that he had nearly dropped the lamp, and now that the ghastly countenance was gone, owen felt the blood surge into his own cheeks. he trembled with suppressed fury and longed to be able to go out there on the landing and hurl the lamp into hunter's face. meanwhile, on the landing outside owen's door, hunter stood thinking. someone must be got rid of to make room for the cheap man tomorrow. he had hoped to catch somebody doing something that would have served as an excuse for instant dismissal, but there was now no hope of that happening. what was to be done? he would like to get rid of linden, who was now really too old to be of much use, but as the old man had worked for rushton on and off for many years, hunter felt that he could scarcely sack him off hand without some reasonable pretext. still, the fellow was really not worth the money he was getting. sevenpence an hour was an absurdly large wage for an old man like him. it was preposterous: he would have to go, excuse or no excuse. hunter crawled downstairs again. jack linden was about sixty-seven years old, but like philpot, and as is usual with working men, he appeared older, because he had had to work very hard all his life, frequently without proper food and clothing. his life had been passed in the midst of a civilization which he had never been permitted to enjoy the benefits of. but of course he knew nothing about all this. he had never expected or wished to be allowed to enjoy such things; he had always been of opinion that they were never intended for the likes of him. he called himself a conservative and was very patriotic. at the time when the boer war commenced, linden was an enthusiastic jingo: his enthusiasm had been somewhat damped when his youngest son, a reservist, had to go to the front, where he died of fever and exposure. when this soldier son went away, he left his wife and two children, aged respectively four and five years at that time, in his father's care. after he died they stayed on with the old people. the young woman earned a little occasionally by doing needlework, but was really dependent on her father-in-law. notwithstanding his poverty, he was glad to have them in the house, because of late years his wife had been getting very feeble, and, since the shock occasioned by the news of the death of her son, needed someone constantly with her. linden was still working at the vestibule doors when the manager came downstairs. misery stood watching him for some minutes without speaking. at last he said loudly: 'how much longer are you going to be messing about those doors? why don't you get them under colour? you were fooling about there when i was here this morning. do you think it'll pay to have you playing about there hour after hour with a bit of pumice stone? get the work done! or if you don't want to, i'll very soon find someone else who does! i've been noticing your style of doing things for some time past and i want you to understand that you can't play the fool with me. there's plenty of better men than you walking about. if you can't do more than you've been doing lately you can clear out; we can do without you even when we're busy.' old jack trembled. he tried to answer, but was unable to speak. if he had been a slave and had failed to satisfy his master, the latter might have tied him up somewhere and thrashed him. hunter could not do that; he could only take his food away. old jack was frightened--it was not only his food that might be taken away. at last, with a great effort, for the words seemed to stick in his throat, he said: 'i must clean the work down, sir, before i go on painting.' 'i'm not talking about what you're doing, but the time it takes you to do it!' shouted hunter. 'and i don't want any back answers or argument about it. you must move yourself a bit quicker or leave it alone altogether.' linden did not answer: he went on with his work, his hand trembling to such an extent that he was scarcely able to hold the pumice stone. hunter shouted so loud that his voice filled all the house. everyone heard and was afraid. who would be the next? they thought. finding that linden made no further answer, misery again began walking about the house. as he looked at them the men did their work in a nervous, clumsy, hasty sort of way. they made all sorts of mistakes and messes. payne, the foreman carpenter, was putting some new boards on a part of the drawing-room floor: he was in such a state of panic that, while driving a nail, he accidentally struck the thumb of his left hand a severe blow with his hammer. bundy was also working in the drawing-room putting some white-glazed tiles in the fireplace. whilst cutting one of these in half in order to fit it into its place, he inflicted a deep gash on one of his fingers. he was afraid to leave off to bind it up while hunter was there, and consequently as he worked the white tiles became all smeared and spattered with blood. easton, who was working with harlow on a plank, washing off the old distemper from the hall ceiling, was so upset that he was scarcely able to stand on the plank, and presently the brush fell from his trembling hand with a crash upon the floor. everyone was afraid. they knew that it was impossible to get a job for any other firm. they knew that this man had the power to deprive them of the means of earning a living; that he possessed the power to deprive their children of bread. owen, listening to hunter over the banisters upstairs, felt that he would like to take him by the throat with one hand and smash his face in with the other. and then? why then he would be sent to gaol, or at the best he would lose his employment: his food and that of his family would be taken away. that was why he only ground his teeth and cursed and beat the wall with his clenched fist. so! and so! and so! if it were not for them! owen's imagination ran riot. first he would seize him by the collar with his left hand, dig his knuckles into his throat, force him up against the wall and then, with his right fist, smash! smash! smash! until hunter's face was all cut and covered with blood. but then, what about those at home? was it not braver and more manly to endure in silence? owen leaned against the wall, white-faced, panting and exhausted. downstairs, misery was still going to and fro in the house and walking up and down in it. presently he stopped to look at sawkins' work. this man was painting the woodwork of the back staircase. although the old paintwork here was very dirty and greasy, misery had given orders that it was not to be cleaned before being painted. 'just dust it down and slobber the colour on,' he had said. consequently, when crass made the paint, he had put into it an extra large quantity of dryers. to a certain extent this destroyed the 'body' of the colour: it did not cover well; it would require two coats. when hunter perceived this he was furious. he was sure it could be made to do with one coat with a little care; he believed sawkins was doing it like this on purpose. really, these men seemed to have no conscience. two coats! and he had estimated for only three. 'crass!' 'yes, sir.' 'come here!' 'yes, sir.' crass came hurrying along. 'what's the meaning of this? didn't i tell you to make this do with one coat? look at it!' 'it's like this, sir,' said crass. 'if it had been washed down--' 'washed down be damned,' shouted hunter. 'the reason is that the colour ain't thick enough. take the paint and put a little more body in it and we'll soon see whether it can be done or not. i can make it cover if you can't.' crass took the paint, and, superintended by hunter, made it thicker. misery then seized the brush and prepared to demonstrate the possibility of finishing the work with one coat. crass and sawkins looked on in silence. just as misery was about to commence he fancied he heard someone whispering somewhere. he laid down the brush and crawled stealthily upstairs to see who it was. directly his back was turned crass seized a bottle of oil that was standing near and, tipping about half a pint of it into the paint, stirred it up quickly. misery returned almost immediately: he had not caught anyone; it must have been fancy. he took up the brush and began to paint. the result was worse than sawkins! he messed and fooled about for some time, but could not make it come right. at last he gave it up. 'i suppose it'll have to have two coats after all,' he said, mournfully. 'but it's a thousand pities.' he almost wept. the firm would be ruined if things went on like this. 'you'd better go on with it,' he said as he laid down the brush. he began to walk about the house again. he wanted to go away now, but he did not want them to know that he was gone, so he sneaked out of the back door, crept around the house and out of the gate, mounted his bicycle and rode away. no one saw him go. for some time the only sounds that broke the silence were the noises made by the hands as they worked. the musical ringing of bundy's trowel, the noise of the carpenters' hammers and saws and the occasional moving of a pair of steps. no one dared to speak. at last philpot could stand it no longer. he was very thirsty. he had kept the door of his room open since hunter arrived. he listened intently. he felt certain that hunter must be gone: he looked across the landing and could see owen working in the front room. philpot made a little ball of paper and threw it at him to attract his attention. owen looked round and philpot began to make signals: he pointed downwards with one hand and jerked the thumb of the other over his shoulder in the direction of the town, winking grotesquely the while. this owen interpreted to be an inquiry as to whether hunter had departed. he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders to intimate that he did not know. philpot cautiously crossed the landing and peeped furtively over the banisters, listening breathlessly. 'was it gorn or not?' he wondered. he crept along on tiptoe towards owen's room, glancing left and right, the trowel in his hand, and looking like a stage murderer. 'do you think it's gorn?' he asked in a hoarse whisper when he reached owen's door. 'i don't know,' replied owen in a low tone. philpot wondered. he must have a drink, but it would never do for hunter to see him with the bottle: he must find out somehow whether he was gone or not. at last an idea came. he would go downstairs to get some more cement. having confided this plan to owen, he crept quietly back to the room in which he had been working, then he walked noisily across the landing again. 'got a bit of stopping to spare, frank?' he asked in a loud voice. 'no,' replied owen. 'i'm not using it.' 'then i suppose i'll have to go down and get some. is there anything i can bring up for you?' 'no, thanks,' replied owen. philpot marched boldly down to the scullery, which crass had utilized as a paint-shop. crass was there mixing some colour. 'i want a bit of stopping,' philpot said as he helped himself to some. 'is the b--r gorn?' whispered crass. 'i don't know,' replied philpot. 'where's his bike?' ''e always leaves it outside the gate, so's we can't see it,' replied crass. 'tell you what,' whispered philpot, after a pause. 'give the boy a hempty bottle and let 'im go to the gate and look to the bikes there. if misery sees him 'e can pretend to be goin' to the shop for some hoil.' this was done. bert went to the gate and returned almost immediately: the bike was gone. as the good news spread through the house a chorus of thanksgiving burst forth. 'thank gord!' said one. 'hope the b--r falls orf and breaks 'is bloody neck,' said another. 'these bible-thumpers are all the same; no one ever knew one to be any good yet,' cried a third. directly they knew for certain that he was gone, nearly everyone left off work for a few minutes to curse him. then they again went on working and now that they were relieved of the embarrassment that misery's presence inspired, they made better progress. a few of them lit their pipes and smoked as they worked. one of these was old jack linden. he was upset by the bullying he had received, and when he noticed some of the others smoking he thought he would have a pipe; it might steady his nerves. as a rule he did not smoke when working; it was contrary to orders. as philpot was returning to work again he paused for a moment to whisper to linden, with the result that the latter accompanied him upstairs. on reaching philpot's room the latter placed the step-ladder near the cupboard and, taking down the bottle of beer, handed it to linden with the remark, 'get some of that acrost yer, matey; it'll put yer right.' while linden was taking a hasty drink, joe kept watch on the landing outside in case hunter should suddenly and unexpectedly reappear. when linden was gone downstairs again, philpot, having finished what remained of the beer and hidden the bottle up the chimney, resumed the work of stopping up the holes and cracks in the ceiling and walls. he must make a bit of a show tonight or there would be a hell of a row when misery came in the morning. owen worked on in a disheartened, sullen way. he felt like a beaten dog. he was more indignant on poor old linden's account than on his own, and was oppressed by a sense of impotence and shameful degradation. all his life it had been the same: incessant work under similar more or less humiliating conditions, and with no more result than being just able to avoid starvation. and the future, as far as he could see, was as hopeless as the past; darker, for there would surely come a time, if he lived long enough, when he would be unable to work any more. he thought of his child. was he to be a slave and a drudge all his life also? it would be better for the boy to die now. as owen thought of his child's future there sprung up within him a feeling of hatred and fury against the majority of his fellow workmen. they were the enemy. those who not only quietly submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to alter it. they were the real oppressors--the men who spoke of themselves as 'the likes of us,' who, having lived in poverty and degradation all their lives considered that what had been good enough for them was good enough for the children they had been the cause of bringing into existence. he hated and despised them because they calmly saw their children condemned to hard labour and poverty for life, and deliberately refused to make any effort to secure for them better conditions than those they had themselves. it was because they were indifferent to the fate of their children that he would be unable to secure a natural and human life for his. it was their apathy or active opposition that made it impossible to establish a better system of society under which those who did their fair share of the world's work would be honoured and rewarded. instead of helping to do this, they abased themselves, and grovelled before their oppressors, and compelled and taught their children to do the same. they were the people who were really responsible for the continuance of the present system. owen laughed bitterly to himself. what a very comical system it was. those who worked were looked upon with contempt, and subjected to every possible indignity. nearly everything they produced was taken away from them and enjoyed by the people who did nothing. and then the workers bowed down and grovelled before those who had robbed them of the fruits of their labour and were childishly grateful to them for leaving anything at all. no wonder the rich despised them and looked upon them as dirt. they were despicable. they were dirt. they admitted it and gloried in it. while these thoughts were seething in owen's mind, his fellow workmen were still patiently toiling on downstairs. most of them had by this time dismissed hunter from their thoughts. they did not take things so seriously as owen. they flattered themselves that they had more sense than that. it could not be altered. grin and bear it. after all, it was only for life! make the best of things, and get your own back whenever you get a chance. presently harlow began to sing. he had a good voice and it was a good song, but his mates just then did not appreciate either one of the other. his singing was the signal for an outburst of exclamations and catcalls. 'shut it, for christ's sake!' 'that's enough of that bloody row!' and so on. harlow stopped. 'how's the enemy?' asked easton presently, addressing no one in particular. 'don't know,' replied bundy. 'it must be about half past four. ask slyme; he's got a watch.' it was a quarter past four. 'it gets dark very early now,' said easton. 'yes,' replied bundy. 'it's been very dull all day. i think it's goin' to rain. listen to the wind.' 'i 'ope not,' replied easton. 'that means a wet shirt goin' 'ome.' he called out to old jack linden, who was still working at the front doors: 'is it raining, jack?' old jack, his pipe still in his mouth, turned to look at the weather. it was raining, but linden did not see the large drops which splashed heavily upon the ground. he saw only hunter, who was standing at the gate, watching him. for a few seconds the two men looked at each other in silence. linden was paralysed with fear. recovering himself, he hastily removed his pipe, but it was too late. misery strode up. 'i don't pay you for smoking,' he said, loudly. 'make out your time sheet, take it to the office and get your money. i've had enough of you!' jack made no attempt to defend himself: he knew it was of no use. he silently put aside the things he had been using, went into the room where he had left his tool-bag and coat, removed his apron and white jacket, folded them up and put them into his tool-bag along with the tools he had been using--a chisel-knife and a shavehook--put on his coat, and, with the tool-bag slung over his shoulder, went away from the house. without speaking to anyone else, hunter then hastily walked over the place, noting what progress had been made by each man during his absence. he then rode away, as he wanted to get to the office in time to give linden his money. it was now very cold and dark within the house, and as the gas was not yet laid on, crass distributed a number of candles to the men, who worked silently, each occupied with his own gloomy thoughts. who would be the next? outside, sombre masses of lead-coloured clouds gathered ominously in the tempestuous sky. the gale roared loudly round the old-fashioned house and the windows rattled discordantly. rain fell in torrents. they said it meant getting wet through going home, but all the same, thank god it was nearly five o'clock! chapter 3 the financiers that night as easton walked home through the rain he felt very depressed. it had been a very bad summer for most people and he had not fared better than the rest. a few weeks with one firm, a few days with another, then out of a job, then on again for a month perhaps, and so on. william easton was a man of medium height, about twenty-three years old, with fair hair and moustache and blue eyes. he wore a stand-up collar with a coloured tie and his clothes, though shabby, were clean and neat. he was married: his wife was a young woman whose acquaintance he had made when he happened to be employed with others painting the outside of the house where she was a general servant. they had 'walked out' for about fifteen months. easton had been in no hurry to marry, for he knew that, taking good times with bad, his wages did no average a pound a week. at the end of that time, however, he found that he could not honourably delay longer, so they were married. that was twelve months ago. as a single man he had never troubled much if he happened to be out of work; he always had enough to live on and pocket money besides; but now that he was married it was different; the fear of being 'out' haunted him all the time. he had started for rushton & co. on the previous monday after having been idle for three weeks, and as the house where he was working had to be done right through he had congratulated himself on having secured a job that would last till christmas; but he now began to fear that what had befallen jack linden might also happen to himself at any time. he would have to be very careful not to offend crass in any way. he was afraid the latter did not like him very much as it was. easton knew that crass could get him the sack at any time, and would not scruple to do so if he wanted to make room for some crony of his own. crass was the 'coddy' or foreman of the job. considered as a workman he had no very unusual abilities; he was if anything inferior to the majority of his fellow workmen. but although he had but little real ability he pretended to know everything, and the vague references he was in the habit of making to 'tones', and 'shades', and 'harmony', had so impressed hunter that the latter had a high opinion of him as a workman. it was by pushing himself forward in this way and by judicious toadying to hunter that crass managed to get himself put in charge of work. although crass did as little work as possible himself he took care that the others worked hard. any man who failed to satisfy him in this respect he reported to hunter as being 'no good', or 'too slow for a funeral'. the result was that this man was dispensed with at the end of the week. the men knew this, and most of them feared the wily crass accordingly, though there were a few whose known abilities placed them to a certain extent above the reach of his malice. frank owen was one of these. there were others who by the judicious administration of pipefuls of tobacco and pints of beer, managed to keep in crass's good graces and often retained their employment when better workmen were 'stood off'. as he walked home through the rain thinking of these things, easton realized that it was not possible to foresee what a day or even an hour might bring forth. by this time he had arrived at his home; it was a small house, one of a long row of similar ones, and it contained altogether four rooms. the front door opened into a passage about two feet six inches wide and ten feet in length, covered with oilcloth. at the end of the passage was a flight of stairs leading to the upper part of the house. the first door on the left led into the front sitting-room, an apartment about nine feet square, with a bay window. this room was very rarely used and wan. the mantelpiece was of wood painted black and ornamented with jagged streaknamented with jagged streaks of red and yellow, which were supposed to give it the appearance of marble. on the walls was a paper with a pale terra-cotta ground and a pattern consisting of large white roses with chocolate coloured leaves and stalks. there was a small iron fender with fire-irons to match, and on the mantelshelf stood a clock in a polished wood case, a pair of blue glass vases, and some photographs in frames. the floor was covered with oilcloth of a tile pattern in yellow and red. on the walls were two or three framed coloured prints such as are presented with christmas numbers of illustrated papers. there was also a photograph of a group of sunday school girls with their teachers with the church for the background. in the centre of the room was a round deal table about three feet six inches across, with the legs stained red to look like mahogany. against one wall was an old couch covered with faded cretonne, four chairs to match standing backs to wall in different parts of the room. the table was covered with a red cloth with a yellow crewel work design in the centre and in each of the four corners, the edges being overcast in the same material. on the table were a lamp and a number of brightly bound books. some of these things, as the couch and the chairs, easton had bought second-hand and had done up himself. the table, oilcloth, fender, hearthrug, etc, had been obtained on the hire system and were not yet paid for. the windows were draped with white lace curtains and in the bay was a small bamboo table on which reposed a large holy bible, cheaply but showily bound. if anyone had ever opened this book they would have found that its pages were as clean as the other things in the room, and on the flyleaf might have been read the following inscription: 'to dear ruth, from her loving friend mrs starvem with the prayer that god's word may be her guide and that jesus may be her very own saviour. oct. 12. 19--' mrs starvem was ruth's former mistress, and this had been her parting gift when ruth left to get married. it was supposed to be a keepsake, but as ruth never opened the book and never willingly allowed her thoughts to dwell upon the scenes of which it reminded her, she had forgotten the existence of mrs starvem almost as completely as that well-to-do and pious lady had forgotten hers. for ruth, the memory of the time she spent in the house of 'her loving friend' was the reverse of pleasant. it comprised a series of recollections of petty tyrannies, insults and indignities. six years of cruelly excessive work, beginning every morning two or three hours before the rest of the household were awake and ceasing only when she went exhausted to bed, late at night. she had been what is called a 'slavey' but if she had been really a slave her owner would have had some regard for her health and welfare: her 'loving friend' had had none. mrs starvem's only thought had been to get out of ruth the greatest possible amount of labour and to give her as little as possible in return. when ruth looked back upon that dreadful time she saw it, as one might say, surrounded by a halo of religion. she never passed by a chapel or heard the name of god, or the singing of a hymn, without thinking of her former mistress. to have looked into this bible would have reminded her of mrs starvem; that was one of the reasons why the book reposed, unopened and unread, a mere ornament on the table in the bay window. the second door in the passage near the foot of the stairs led into the kitchen or living-room: from here another door led into the scullery. upstairs were two bedrooms. as easton entered the house, his wife met him in the passage and asked him not to make a noise as the child had just gone to sleep. they kissed each other and she helped him to remove his wet overcoat. then they both went softly into the kitchen. this room was about the same size as the sitting-room. at one end was a small range with an oven and a boiler, and a high mantelpiece painted black. on the mantelshelf was a small round alarm clock and some brightly polished tin canisters. at the other end of the room, facing the fireplace, was a small dresser on the shelves of which were neatly arranged a number of plates and dishes. the walls were papered with oak paper. on one wall, between two coloured almanacks, hung a tin lamp with a reflector behind the light. in the middle of the room was an oblong deal table with a white tablecloth upon which the tea things were set ready. there were four kitchen chairs, two of which were placed close to the table. overhead, across the room, about eighteen inches down from the ceiling, were stretched several cords upon which were drying a number of linen or calico undergarments, a coloured shirt, and easton's white apron and jacket. on the back of a chair at one side of the fire more clothes were drying. at the other side on the floor was a wicker cradle in which a baby was sleeping. nearby stood a chair with a towel hung on the back, arranged so as to shade the infant's face from the light of the lamp. an air of homely comfort pervaded the room; the atmosphere was warm, and the fire blazed cheerfully over the whitened hearth. they walked softly over and stood by the cradle side looking at the child; as they looked the baby kept moving uneasily in its sleep. its face was very flushed and its eyes were moving under the half-closed lids. every now and again its lips were drawn back slightly, showing part of the gums; presently it began to whimper, drawing up its knees as if in pain. 'he seems to have something wrong with him,' said easton. 'i think it's his teeth,' replied the mother. 'he's been very restless all day and he was awake nearly all last night.' 'p'r'aps he's hungry.' 'no, it can't be that. he had the best part of an egg this morning and i've nursed him several times today. and then at dinner-time he had a whole saucer full of fried potatoes with little bits of bacon in it.' again the infant whimpered and twisted in its sleep, its lips drawn back showing the gums: its knees pressed closely to its body, the little fists clenched, and face flushed. then after a few seconds it became placid: the mouth resumed its usual shape; the limbs relaxed and the child slumbered peacefully. 'don't you think he's getting thin?' asked easton. 'it may be fancy, but he don't seem to me to be as big now as he was three months ago.' 'no, he's not quite so fat,' admitted ruth. 'it's his teeth what's wearing him out; he don't hardly get no rest at all with them.' they continued looking at him a little longer. ruth thought he was a very beautiful child: he would be eight months old on sunday. they were sorry they could do nothing to ease his pain, but consoled themselves with the reflection that he would be all right once those teeth were through. 'well, let's have some tea,' said easton at last. whilst he removed his wet boots and socks and placed them in front of the fire to dry and put on dry socks and a pair of slippers in their stead, ruth half filled a tin basin with hot water from the boiler and gave it to him, and he then went to the scullery, added some cold water and began to wash the paint off his hands. this done he returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table. 'i couldn't think what to give you to eat tonight,' said ruth as she poured out the tea. 'i hadn't got no money left and there wasn't nothing in the house except bread and butter and that piece of cheese, so i cut some bread and butter and put some thin slices of cheese on it and toasted it on a place in front of the fire. i hope you'll like it: it was the best i could do.' 'that's all right: it smells very nice anyway, and i'm very hungry.' as they were taking their tea easton told his wife about linden's affair and his apprehensions as to what might befall himself. they were both very indignant, and sorry for poor old linden, but their sympathy for him was soon forgotten in their fears for their own immediate future. they remained at the table in silence for some time: then, 'how much rent do we owe now?' asked easton. 'four weeks, and i promised the collector the last time he called that we'd pay two weeks next monday. he was quite nasty about it.' 'well, i suppose you'll have to pay it, that's all,' said easton. 'how much money will you have tomorrow?' asked ruth. he began to reckon up his time: he started on monday and today was friday: five days, from seven to five, less half an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner, eight and a half hours a day--forty-two hours and a half. at sevenpence an hour that came to one pound four and ninepence halfpenny. 'you know i only started on monday,' he said, 'so there's no back day to come. tomorrow goes into next week.' 'yes, i know,' replied ruth. 'if we pay the two week's rent that'll leave us twelve shillings to live on.' 'but we won't be able to keep all of that,' said ruth, 'because there's other things to pay.' 'what other things?' 'we owe the baker eight shillings for the bread he let us have while you were not working, and there's about twelve shillings owing for groceries. we'll have to pay them something on account. then we want some more coal; there's only about a shovelful left, and--' 'wait a minnit,' said easton. 'the best way is to write out a list of everything we owe; then we shall know exactly where we are. you get me a piece of paper and tell me what to write. then we'll see what it all comes to.' 'do you mean everything we owe, or everything we must pay tomorrow.' 'i think we'd better make a list of all we owe first.' while they were talking the baby was sleeping restlessly, occasionally uttering plaintive little cries. the mother now went and knelt at the side of the cradle, which she gently rocked with one hand, patting the infant with the other. 'except the furniture people, the biggest thing we owe is the rent,' she said when easton was ready to begin. 'it seems to me,' said he, as, after having cleared a space on the table and arranged the paper, he began to sharpen his pencil with a table-knife, 'that you don't manage things as well as you might. if you was to make a list of just the things you must have before you went out of a saturday, you'd find the money would go much farther. instead of doing that you just take the money in your hand without knowing exactly what you're going to do with it, and when you come back it's all gone and next to nothing to show for it.' his wife made no reply: her head was bent over the child. 'now, let's see,' went on her husband. 'first of all there's the rent. how much did you say we owe?' 'four weeks. that's the three weeks you were out and this week.' 'four sixes is twenty-four; that's one pound four,' said easton as he wrote it down. 'next?' 'grocer, twelve shillings.' easton looked up in astonishment. 'twelve shillings. why, didn't you tell me only the other day that you'd paid up all we owed for groceries?' 'don't you remember we owed thirty-five shillings last spring? well, i've been paying that bit by bit all the summer. i paid the last of it the week you finished your last job. then you were out three weeks--up till last friday--and as we had nothing in hand i had to get what we wanted without paying for it.' 'but do you mean to say it cost us three shillings a week for tea and sugar and butter?' 'it's not only them. there's been bacon and eggs and cheese and other things.' the man was beginning to become impatient. 'well,' he said, 'what else?' 'we owe the baker eight shillings. we did owe nearly a pound, but i've been paying it off a little at a time.' this was added to the list. 'then there's the milkman. i've not paid him for four weeks. he hasn't sent a bill yet, but you can reckon it up; we have two penn'orth every day.' 'that's four and eight,' said easton, writing it down. 'anything else?' 'one and seven to the greengrocer for potatoes, cabbage, and paraffin oil.' 'anything else?' 'we owe the butcher two and sevenpence.' 'why, we haven't had any meat for a long time,' said easton. 'when was it?' 'three weeks ago; don't you remember? a small leg of mutton,' 'oh, yes,' and he added the item. 'then there's the instalments for the furniture and oilcloth--twelve shillings. a letter came from them today. and there's something else.' she took three letters from the pocket of her dress and handed them to him. 'they all came today. i didn't show them to you before as i didn't want to upset you before you had your tea.' easton drew the first letter from its envelope. corporation of mugsborough general district and special rates final notice mr w. easton, i have to remind you that the amount due from you as under, in respect of the above rates, has not been paid, and to request that you will forward the same within fourteen days from this date. you are hereby informed that after this notice no further call will be made, or intimation given, before legal proceedings are taken to enforce payment. by order of the council. james leah. collector, no. 2 district. district rate .......................... l13 11 special rate ........................... 10 2 ________ l1 4 1 the second communication was dated from the office of the assistant overseer of the poor. it was also a final notice and was worded in almost exactly the same way as the other, the principal difference being that it was 'by order of the overseers' instead of 'the council'. it demanded the sum of â£1 1s 5-1/2d for poor rate within fourteen days, and threatened legal proceedings in default. easton laid this down and began to read the third letter- j. didlum & co ltd. complete house furnishers quality street, mugsborough mr w. easton, sir: we have to remind you that three monthly payments of four shillings each (12/in all) became due on the first of this month, and we must request you to let us have this amount by return of post. under the terms of your agreement you guaranteed that the money should be paid on the saturday of every fourth week. to prevent unpleasantness, we must request you for the future to forward the full amount punctually upon that day. yours truly, j. didlum & co. ltd he read these communications several times in silence and finally with an oath threw them down on the table. 'how much do we still owe for the oilcloth and the furniture?' he asked. 'i don't know exactly. it was seven pound odd, and we've had the things about six months. we paid one pound down and three or four instalments. i'll get the card if you like.' 'no; never mind. say we've paid one pound twelve; so we still owe about six pound.' he added this amount to the list. 'i think it's a great pity we ever had the things at all,' he said, peevishly. 'it would have been better to have gone without until we could pay cash for them: but you would have your way, of course. now we'll have this bloody debt dragging on us for years, and before the dam stuff is paid for it'll be worn out.' the woman did not reply at once. she was bending down over the cradle arranging the coverings which the restless movements of the child had disordered. she was crying silently, unnoticed by her husband. for months past--in fact ever since the child was born--she had been existing without sufficient food. if easton was unemployed they had to stint themselves so as to avoid getting further into debt than was absolutely necessary. when he was working they had to go short in order to pay what they owed; but of what there was easton himself, without knowing it, always had the greater share. if he was at work she would pack into his dinner basket overnight the best there was in the house. when he was out of work she often pretended, as she gave him his meals, that she had had hers while he was out. and all the time the baby was draining her life away and her work was never done. she felt very weak and weary as she crouched there, crying furtively and trying not to let him see. at last she said, without looking round: 'you know quite well that you were just as much in favour of getting them as i was. if we hadn't got the oilcloth there would have been illness in the house because of the way the wind used to come up between the floorboards. even now of a windy day the oilcloth moves up and down.' 'well, i'm sure i don't know,' said easton, as he looked alternatively at the list of debts and the three letters. 'i give you nearly every farthing i earn and i never interfere about anything, because i think it's your part to attend to the house, but it seems to me you don't manage things properly.' the woman suddenly burst into a passion of weeping, laying her head on the seat of the chair that was standing near the cradle. easton started up in surprise. 'why, what's the matter?' he said. then as he looked down upon the quivering form of the sobbing woman, he was ashamed. he knelt down by her, embracing her and apologizing, protesting that he had not meant to hurt her like that. 'i always do the best i can with the money,' ruth sobbed. 'i never spend a farthing on myself, but you don't seem to understand how hard it is. i don't care nothing about having to go without things myself, but i can't bear it when you speak to me like you do lately. you seem to blame me for everything. you usen't to speak to me like that before i--before--oh, i am so tired--i am so tired, i wish i could lie down somewhere and sleep and never wake up any more.' she turned away from him, half kneeling, half sitting on the floor, her arms folded on the seat of the chair, and her head resting upon them. she was crying in a heartbroken helpless way. 'i'm sorry i spoke to you like that,' said easton, awkwardly. 'i didn't mean what i said. it's all my fault. i leave things too much to you, and it's more than you can be expected to manage. i'll help you to think things out in future; only forgive me, i'm very sorry. i know you try your best.' she suffered him to draw her to him, laying her head on his shoulder as he kissed and fondled her, protesting that he would rather be poor and hungry with her than share riches with anyone else. the child in the cradle--who had been twisting and turning restlessly all this time--now began to cry loudly. the mother took it from the cradle and began to hush and soothe it, walking about the room and rocking it in her arms. the child, however, continued to scream, so she sat down to nurse it: for a little while the infant refused to drink, struggling and kicking in its mother's arms, then for a few minutes it was quite, taking the milk in a half-hearted, fretful way. then it began to scream and twist and struggle. they both looked at it in a helpless manner. whatever could be the matter with it? it must be those teeth. then suddenly as they were soothing and patting him, the child vomited all over its own and its mother's clothing a mass of undigested food. mingled with the curdled milk were fragments of egg, little bits of bacon, bread and particles of potato. having rid his stomach of this unnatural burden, the unfortunate baby began to cry afresh, his face very pale, his lips colourless, and his eyes red-rimmed and running with water. easton walked about with him while ruth cleaned up the mess and got ready some fresh clothing. they both agreed that it was the coming teeth that had upset the poor child's digestion. it would be a good job when they were through. this work finished, easton, who was still convinced in his own mind that with the aid of a little common sense and judicious management their affairs might be arranged more satisfactorily, said: 'we may as well make a list of all the things we must pay and buy tomorrow. the great thing is to think out exactly what you are going to do before you spend anything; that saves you from getting things you don't really need and prevents you forgetting the things you must have. now, first of all, the rent; two weeks, twelve shillings.' he took a fresh piece of paper and wrote this item down. 'what else is there that we must pay or buy tomorrow?' 'well, you know i promised the baker and the grocer that i would begin to pay them directly you got a job, and if i don't keep my word they won't let us have anything another time, so you'd better put down two shillings each for them. 'i've got that,' said easton. 'two and seven for the butcher. we must pay that. i'm ashamed to pass the shop, because when i got the meat i promised to pay him the next week, and it's nearly three weeks ago now.' 'i've put that down. what else?' 'a hundred of coal: one and six.' 'next?' 'the instalment for the furniture and floor-cloth, twelve shillings.' 'next?' 'we owe the milkman four weeks; we'd better pay one week on account; that's one and two.' 'next?' 'the greengrocer; one shilling on account.' 'anything else?' 'we shall want a piece of meat of some kind; we've had none for nearly three weeks. you'd better say one and six for that.' 'that's down.' 'one and nine for bread; that's one loaf a day.' 'but i've got two shillings down for bread already,' said easton. 'yes, i know, dear, but that's to go towards paying off what we owe, and what you have down for the grocer and milkman's the same.' 'well, go on, for christ's sake, and let's get it down,' said easton, irritably. 'we can't say less than three shillings for groceries.' easton looked carefully at his list. this time he felt sure that the item was already down; but finding he was mistaken he said nothing and added the amount. 'well, i've got that. what else?' 'milk, one and two.' 'next?' 'vegetables, eightpence.' 'yes.' 'paraffin oil and firewood, sixpence.' again the financier scrutinized the list. he was positive that it was down already. however, he could not find it, so the sixpence was added to the column of figures. 'then there's your boots; you can't go about with them old things in this weather much longer, and they won't stand mending again. you remember the old man said they were not worth it when you had that patch put on a few weeks ago.' 'yes. i was thinking of buying a new pair tomorrow. my socks was wet through tonight. if it's raining some morning when i'm going out and i have to work all day with wet feet i shall be laid up.' 'at that second-hand shop down in high street i saw when i was out this afternoon a very good pair just your size, for two shillings.' easton did not reply at once. he did not much fancy wearing the cast-off boots of some stranger, who for all he knew might have suffered from some disease, but then remembering that his old ones were literally falling off his feet he realized that he had practically no choice. 'if you're quite sure they'll fit you'd better get them. it's better to do that than for me to catch cold and be laid up for god knows how long.' so the two shillings were added to the list. 'is there anything else?' 'how much does it all come to now?' asked ruth. easton added it all up. when he had finished he remained staring at the figures in consternation for a long time without speaking. 'jesus christ!' he ejaculated at last. 'what's it come to?' asked ruth. 'forty-four and tenpence.' 'i knew we wouldn't have enough,' said ruth, wearily. 'now if you think i manage so badly, p'raps you can tell me which of these things we ought to leave out.' 'we'd be all right if it wasn't for the debts,' said easton, doggedly. 'when you're not working, we must either get into debt or starve.' easton made no answer. 'what'll we do about the rates?' asked ruth. 'i'm sure i don't know: there's nothing left to pawn except my black coat and vest. you might get something on that.' 'it'll have to be paid somehow,' said ruth, 'or you'll be taken off to jail for a month, the same as mrs newman's husband was last winter.' 'well, you'd better take the coat and vest and see what you can get on 'em tomorrow.' 'yes,' said ruth; 'and there's that brown silk dress of mine--you know, the one i wore when we was married--i might get something on that, because we won't get enough on the coat and vest. i don't like parting with the dress, although i never wear it; but we'll be sure to be able to get it out again, won't we?' 'of course,' said easton. they remained silent for some time, easton staring at the list of debts and the letters. she was wondering if he still thought she managed badly, and what he would do about it. she knew she had always done her best. at last she said, wistfully, trying to speak plainly for there seemed to be a lump in her throat: 'and what about tomorrow? would you like to spend the money yourself, or shall i manage as i've done before, or will you tell me what to do?' 'i don't know, dear,' said easton, sheepishly. 'i think you'd better do as you think best.' 'oh, i'll manage all right, dear, you'll see,' replied ruth, who seemed to think it a sort of honour to be allowed to starve herself and wear shabby clothes. the baby, who had been for some time quietly sitting upon his mother's lap, looking wonderingly at the fire--his teeth appeared to trouble him less since he got rid of the eggs and bacon and potatoes--now began to nod and doze, which easton perceiving, suggested that the infant should not be allowed to go to sleep with an empty stomach, because it would probably wake up hungry in the middle of the night. he therefore woke him up as much as possible and mashed a little of the bread and toasted cheese with a little warm milk. then taking the baby from ruth he began to try to induce it to eat. as soon, however, as the child understood his object, it began to scream at the top of its voice, closing its lips firmly and turning its head rapidly from side to side every time the spoon approached its mouth. it made such a dreadful noise that easton at last gave in. he began to walk about the room with it, and presently the child sobbed itself to sleep. after putting the baby into its cradle ruth set about preparing easton's breakfast and packing it into his basket. this did not take very long, there being only bread and butter--or, to be more correct, margarine. then she poured what tea was left in the tea-pot into a small saucepan and placed it on the top of the oven, but away from the fire, cut two more slices of bread and spread on them all the margarine that was left; then put them on a plate on the table, covering them with a saucer to prevent them getting hard and dry during the night. near the plate she placed a clean cup and saucer and the milk and sugar. in the morning easton would light the fire and warm up the tea in the saucepan so as to have a cup of tea before going out. if ruth was awake and he was not pressed for time, he generally took a cup of tea to her in bed. nothing now remained to be done but to put some coal and wood ready in the fender so that there would be no unnecessary delay in the morning. the baby was still sleeping and ruth did not like to wake him up yet to dress him for the night. easton was sitting by the fire smoking, so everything being done, ruth sat down at the table and began sewing. presently she spoke: 'i wish you'd let me try to let that back room upstairs: the woman next door has got hers let unfurnished to an elderly woman and her husband for two shillings a week. if we could get someone like that it would be better than having an empty room in the house.' 'and we'd always have them messing about down here, cooking and washing and one thing and another,' objected easton; 'they'd be more trouble than they way worth.' 'well, we might try and furnish it. there's mrs crass across the road has got two lodgers in one room. they pay her twelve shillings a week each; board, lodging and washing. that's one pound four she has coming in reglar every week. if we could do the same we'd very soon be out of debt.' 'what's the good of talking? you'd never be able to do the work even if we had the furniture.' 'oh, the work's nothing,' replied ruth, 'and as for the furniture, we've got plenty of spare bedclothes, and we could easily manage without a washstand in our room for a bit, so the only thing we really want is a small bedstead and mattress; we could get them very cheap second-hand.' 'there ought to be a chest of drawers,' said easton doubtfully. 'i don't think so,' replied ruth. 'there's a cupboard in the room and whoever took it would be sure to have a box.' 'well, if you think you can do the work i've no objection,' said easton. 'it'll be a nuisance having a stranger in the way all the time, but i suppose we must do something of the sort or else we'll have to give up the house and take a couple of rooms somewhere. that would be worse than having lodgers ourselves. 'let's go and have a look at the room,' he added, getting up and taking the lamp from the wall. they had to go up two flights of stairs before arriving at the top landing, where there were two doors, one leading into the front room--their bedroom--and the other into the empty back room. these two doors were at right angles to each other. the wallpaper in the back room was damaged and soiled in several places. 'there's nearly a whole roll of this paper on the top of the cupboard,' said ruth. 'you could easily mend all those places. we could hang up a few almanacks on the walls; our washstand could go there by the window; a chair just there, and the bed along that wall behind the door. it's only a small window, so i could easily manage to make a curtain out of something. i'm sure i could make the room look quite nice without spending hardly anything.' easton reached down the roll of paper. it was the same pattern as that on the wall. the latter was a good deal faded, of course, but it would not matter much if the patches showed a little. they returned to the kitchen. 'do you think you know anyone who would take it?' asked ruth. easton smoked thoughtfully. 'no,' he said at length. 'but i'll mention it to one or two of the chaps on the job; they might know of someone.' 'and i'll get mrs crass to ask her lodgers: p'raps they might have a friend what would like to live near them.' so it was settled; and as the fire was nearly out and it was getting late, they prepared to retire for the night. the baby was still sleeping so easton lifted it, cradle and all, and carried it up the narrow staircase into the front bedroom, ruth leading the way, carrying the lamp and some clothes for the child. so that the infant might be within easy reach of its mother during the night, two chairs were arranged close to her side of the bed and the cradle placed on them. 'now we've forgot the clock,' said easton, pausing. he was half undressed and had already removed his slippers. 'i'll slip down and get it,' said ruth. 'never mind, i'll go,' said easton, beginning to put his slippers on again. 'no, you get into bed. i've not started undressing yet. i'll get it,' replied ruth who was already on her way down. 'i don't know as it was worth the trouble of going down,' said ruth when she returned with the clock. 'it stopped three or four times today.' 'well, i hope it don't stop in the night,' easton said. 'it would be a bit of all right not knowing what time it was in the morning. i suppose the next thing will be that we'll have to buy a new clock.' he woke several times during the night and struck a match to see if it was yet time to get up. at half past two the clock was still going and he again fell asleep. the next time he work up the ticking had ceased. he wondered what time it was? it was still very dark, but that was nothing to go by, because it was always dark at six now. he was wide awake: it must be nearly time to get up. it would never do to be late; he might get the sack. he got up and dressed himself. ruth was asleep, so he crept quietly downstairs, lit the fire and heated the tea. when it was ready he went softly upstairs again. ruth was still sleeping, so he decided not to disturb her. returning to the kitchen, he poured out and drank a cup of tea, put on his boots, overcoat and hat and taking his basket went out of the house. the rain was still falling and it was very cold and dark. there was no one else in the street. easton shivered as he walked along wondering what time it could be. he remembered there was a clock over the front of a jeweller's shop a little way down the main road. when he arrived at this place he found that the clock being so high up he could not see the figures on the face distinctly, because it was still very dark. he stood staring for a few minutes vainly trying to see what time it was when suddenly the light of a bull's-eye lantern was flashed into his eyes. 'you're about very early,' said a voice, the owner of which easton could not see. the light blinded him. 'what time is it?' said easton. 'i've got to get to work at seven and our clock stopped during the night.' 'where are you working?' 'at "the cave" in elmore road. you know, near the old toll gate.' 'what are you doing there and who are you working for?' the policeman demanded. easton explained. 'well,' said the constable, 'it's very strange that you should be wandering about at this hour. it's only about three-quarters of an hour's walk from here to elmore road. you say you've got to get there at seven, and it's only a quarter to four now. where do you live? what's your name?' easton gave his name and address and began repeating the story about the clock having stopped. 'what you say may be all right or it may not,' interrupted the policeman. 'i'm not sure but that i ought to take you to the station. all i know about you is that i find you loitering outside this shop. what have you got in that basket?' 'only my breakfast,' easton said, opening the basket and displaying its contents. 'i'm inclined to believe what you say,' said the policeman, after a pause. 'but to make quite sure i'll go home with you. it's on my beat, and i don't want to run you in if you're what you say you are, but i should advise you to buy a decent clock, or you'll be getting yourself into trouble.' when they arrived at the house easton opened the door, and after making some entries in his note-book the officer went away, much to the relief of easton, who went upstairs, set the hands of the clock right and started it going again. he then removed his overcoat and lay down on the bed in his clothes, covering himself with the quilt. after a while he fell asleep, and when he awoke the clock was still ticking. the time was exactly seven o'clock. chapter 4 the placard frank owen was the son of a journeyman carpenter who had died of consumption when the boy was only five years old. after that his mother earned a scanty living as a needle-woman. when frank was thirteen he went to work for a master decorator who was a man of a type that has now almost disappeared, being not merely an employer but a craftsman of a high order. he was an old man when frank owen went to work for him. at one time he had had a good business in the town, and used to boast that he had always done good work, had found pleasure in doing it and had been well paid for it. but of late years the number of his customers had dwindled considerably, for there had arisen a new generation which cared nothing about craftsmanship or art, and everything for cheapness and profit. from this man and by laborious study and practice in his spare time, aided by a certain measure of natural ability, the boy acquired a knowledge of decorative painting and design, and graining and signwriting. frank's mother died when he was twenty-four, and a year afterwards he married the daughter of a fellow workman. in those days trade was fairly good and although there was not much demand for the more artistic kinds of work, still the fact that he was capable of doing them, if required, made it comparatively easy for him to obtain employment. owen and his wife were very happy. they had one child--a boy--and for some years all went well. but gradually this state of things altered: broadly speaking, the change came slowly and imperceptibly, although there were occasional sudden fluctuations. even in summer he could not always find work: and in winter it was almost impossible to get a job of any sort. at last, about twelve months before the date that this story opens, he determined to leave his wife and child at home and go to try his fortune in london. when he got employment he would send for them. it was a vain hope. he found london, if anything, worse than his native town. wherever he went he was confronted with the legend: 'no hands wanted'. he walked the streets day after day; pawned or sold all his clothes save those he stood in, and stayed in london for six months, sometimes starving and only occasionally obtaining a few days or weeks work. at the end of that time he was forced to give in. the privations he had endured, the strain on his mind and the foul atmosphere of the city combined to defeat him. symptoms of the disease that had killed his father began to manifest themselves, and yielding to the repeated entreaties of his wife he returned to his native town, the shadow of his former self. that was six months ago, and since then he had worked for rushton & co. occasionally when they had no work in hand, he was 'stood off' until something came in. ever since his return from london, owen had been gradually abandoning himself to hopelessness. every day he felt that the disease he suffered from was obtaining a stronger grip on him. the doctor told him to 'take plenty of nourishing food', and prescribed costly medicines which owen had not the money to buy. then there was his wife. naturally delicate, she needed many things that he was unable to procure for her. and the boy--what hope was there for him? often as owen moodily thought of their circumstances and prospects he told himself that it would be far better if they could all three die now, together. he was tired of suffering himself, tired of impotently watching the sufferings of his wife, and appalled at the thought of what was in store for the child. of this nature were his reflections as he walked homewards on the evening of the day when old linden was dismissed. there was no reason to believe or hope that the existing state of things would be altered for a long time to come. thousands of people like himself dragged out a wretched existence on the very verge of starvation, and for the greater number of people life was one long struggle against poverty. yet practically none of these people knew or even troubled themselves to inquire why they were in that condition; and for anyone else to try to explain to them was a ridiculous waste of time, for they did not want to know. the remedy was so simple, the evil so great and so glaringly evident that the only possible explanation of its continued existence was that the majority of his fellow workers were devoid of the power of reasoning. if these people were not mentally deficient they would of their own accord have swept this silly system away long ago. it would not have been necessary for anyone to teach them that it was wrong. why, even those who were successful or wealthy could not be sure that they would not eventually die of want. in every workhouse might be found people who had at one time occupied good positions; and their downfall was not in every case their own fault. no matter how prosperous a man might be, he could not be certain that his children would never want for bread. there were thousands living in misery on starvation wages whose parents had been wealthy people. as owen strode rapidly along, his mind filled with these thoughts, he was almost unconscious of the fact that he was wet through to the skin. he was without an overcoat, it was pawned in london, and he had not yet been able to redeem it. his boots were leaky and sodden with mud and rain. he was nearly home now. at the corner of the street in which he lived there was a newsagent's shop and on a board outside the door was displayed a placard: terrible domestic tragedy double murder and suicide he went in to buy a copy of the paper. he was a frequent customer here, and as he entered the shopkeeper greeted him by name. 'dreadful weather,' he remarked as he handed owen the paper. 'it makes things pretty bad in your line, i suppose?' 'yes,' responded owen, 'there's a lot of men idle, but fortunately i happen to be working inside.' 'you're one of the lucky ones, then,' said the other. 'you know, there'll be a job here for some of 'em as soon as the weather gets a little better. all the outside of this block is going to be done up. that's a pretty big job, isn't it?' 'yes,' returned owen. 'who's going to do it?' 'makehaste and sloggit. you know, they've got a place over at windley.' 'yes, i know the firm,' said owen, grimly. he had worked for them once or twice himself. 'the foreman was in here today,' the shopkeeper went on. 'he said they're going to make a start monday morning if it's fine.' 'well, i hope it will be,' said owen, 'because things are very quiet just now.' wishing the other 'good night', owen again proceeded homewards. half-way down the street he paused irresolutely: he was thinking of the news he had just heard and of jack linden. as soon as it became generally known that this work was about to be started there was sure to be a rush for it, and it would be a case of first come, first served. if he saw jack tonight the old man might be in time to secure a job. owen hesitated: he was wet through: it was a long way to linden's place, nearly twenty minutes' walk. still, he would like to let him know, because unless he was one of the first to apply, linden would not stand such a good chance as a younger man. owen said to himself that if he walked very fast there was not much risk of catching cold. standing about in wet clothes might be dangerous, but so long as one kept moving it was all right. he turned back and set off in the direction of linden's house: although he was but a few yards from his own home, he decided not to go in because his wife would be sure to try to persuade him not to go out again. as he hurried along he presently noticed a small dark object on the doorstep of an untenanted house. he stopped to examine it more closely and perceived that it was a small black kitten. the tiny creature came towards him and began walking about his feet, looking into his face and crying piteously. he stooped down and stroked it, shuddering as his hands came in contact with its emaciated body. its fur was saturated with rain and every joint of its backbone was distinctly perceptible to the touch. as he caressed it, the starving creature mewed pathetically. owen decided to take it home to the boy, and as he picked it up and put it inside his coat the little outcast began to purr. this incident served to turn his thoughts into another channel. if, as so many people pretended to believe, there was an infinitely loving god, how was it that this helpless creature that he had made was condemned to suffer? it had never done any harm, and was in no sense responsible for the fact that it existed. was god unaware of the miseries of his creatures? if so, then he was not all-knowing. was god aware of their sufferings, but unable to help them? then he was not all-powerful. had he the power but not the will to make his creatures happy? then he was not good. no; it was impossible to believe in the existence of an individual, infinite god.. in fact, no one did so believe; and least of all those who pretended for various reasons to be the disciples and followers of christ. the anti-christs who went about singing hymns, making long prayers and crying lord, lord, but never doing the things which he said, who were known by their words to be unbelievers and infidels, unfaithful to the master they pretended to serve, their lives being passed in deliberate and systematic disregard of his teachings and commandments. it was not necessary to call in the evidence of science, or to refer to the supposed inconsistencies, impossibilities, contradictions and absurdities contained in the bible, in order to prove there was no truth in the christian religion. all that was necessary was to look at the conduct of the individuals who were its votaries. chapter 5 the clock-case jack linden lived in a small cottage in windley. he had occupied this house ever since his marriage, over thirty years ago. his home and garden were his hobby: he was always doing something; painting, whitewashing, papering and so forth. the result was that although the house itself was not of much account he had managed to get it into very good order, and as a result it was very clean and comfortable. another result of his industry was that--seeing the improved appearance of the place--the landlord had on two occasions raised the rent. when linden first took the house the rent was six shillings a week. five years after, it was raised to seven shillings, and after the lapse of another five years it had been increased to eight shillings. during the thirty years of his tenancy he had paid altogether nearly six hundred pounds in rent, more than double the amount of the present value of the house. jack did not complain of this--in fact he was very well satisfied. he often said that mr sweater was a very good landlord, because on several occasions when, being out of work, he had been a few weeks behind with his rent the agent acting for the benevolent mr sweater had allowed linden to pay off the arrears by instalments. as old jack was in the habit of remarking, many a landlord would have sold up their furniture and turned them into the street. as the reader is already aware, linden's household consisted of his wife, his two grandchildren and his daughter-in-law, the widow and children of his youngest son, a reservist, who died while serving in the south african war. this man had been a plasterer, and just before the war he was working for rushton & co. they had just finished their tea when owen knocked at their front door. the young woman went to see who was there. 'is mr linden in?' 'yes. who is it?' 'my name's owen.' old jack, however, had already recognized owen's voice, and came to the door, wondering what he wanted. 'as i was going home i heard that makehaste and sloggit are going to start a large job on monday, so i thought i'd run over and let you know.' 'are they?' said linden. 'i'll go and see them in the morning. but i'm afraid i won't stand much chance, because a lot of their regular hands are waiting for a job; but i'll go and see 'em all the same.' 'well, you know, it's a big job. all the outside of that block at the corner of kerk street and lord street. they're almost sure to want a few extra hands.' 'yes, there's something in that,' said linden. 'anyhow, i'm much obliged to you for letting me know; but come in out of the rain. you must be wet through.' 'no; i won't stay,' responded owen. 'i don't want to stand about any longer than i can help in these wet clothes.' 'but it won't take you a minit to drink a cup of tea,' linden insisted. 'i won't ask you to stop longer than that.' owen entered; the old man closed the door and led the way into the kitchen. at one side of the fire, linden's wife, a frail-looking old lady with white hair, was seated in a large armchair, knitting. linden sat down in a similar chair on the other side. the two grandchildren, a boy and girl about seven and eight years, respectively, were still seated at the table. standing by the side of the dresser at one end of the room was a treadle sewing machine, and on one end of the dresser was a a pile of sewing: ladies' blouses in process of making. this was another instance of the goodness of mr sweater, from whom linden's daughter-in-law obtained the work. it was not much, because she was only able to do it in her spare time, but then, as she often remarked, every little helped. the floor was covered with linoleum: there were a number of framed pictures on the walls, and on the high mantelshelf were a number of brightly polished tins and copper utensils. the room had that indescribably homelike, cosy air that is found only in those houses in which the inhabitants have dwelt for a very long time. the younger woman was already pouring out a cup of tea. old mrs linden, who had never seen owen before, although she had heard of him, belonged to the church of england and was intensely religious. she looked curiously at the atheist as he entered the room. he had taken off his hat and she was surprised to find that he was not repulsive to look at, rather the contrary. but then she remembered that satan often appears as an angel of light. appearances are deceitful. she wished that john had not asked him into the house and hoped that no evil consequences would follow. as she looked at him, she was horrified to perceive a small black head with a pair of glistening green eyes peeping out of the breast of his coat, and immediately afterwards the kitten, catching sight of the cups and saucers on the table, began to mew frantically and scrambled suddenly out of its shelter, inflicting a severe scratch on owen's restraining hands as it jumped to the floor. it clambered up the tablecloth and began rushing all over the table, darting madly from one plate to another, seeking something to eat. the children screamed with delight. their grandmother was filled with a feeling of superstitious alarm. linden and the young woman stood staring with astonishment at the unexpected visitor. before the kitten had time to do any damage, owen caught hold of it and, despite its struggles, lifted it off the table. 'i found it in the street as i was coming along,' he said. 'it seems to be starving.' 'poor little thing. i'll give it something.' exclaimed the young woman. she put some milk and bread into a saucer for it and the kitten ate ravenously, almost upsetting the saucer in its eagerness, much to the amusement of the two children, who stood by watching it admiringly. their mother now handed owen a cup of tea. linden insisted on his sitting down and then began to talk about hunter. 'you know i had to spend some time on them doors to make 'em look anything at all; but it wasn't the time i took, or even the smoking what made 'im go on like that. he knows very well the time it takes. the real reason is that he thinks i was gettin' too much money. work is done so rough nowadays that chaps like sawkins is good enough for most of it. hunter shoved me off just because i was getting the top money, and you'll see i won't be the only one.' 'i'm afraid you're right,' returned owen. 'did you see rushton when you went for your money?' 'yes,' replied linden. 'i hurried up as fast as i could, but hunter was there first. he passed me on his bike before i got half-way, so i suppose he told his tale before i came. anyway, when i started to speak to mr rushton he wouldn't listen. said he couldn't interfere between mr hunter and the men. 'ah! they're a bad lot, them two,' said the old woman, shaking her head sagely. 'but it'll all come 'ome to 'em, you'll see. they'll never prosper. the lord will punish them.' owen did not feel very confident of that. most of the people he knew who had prospered were very similar in character to the two worthies in question. however, he did not want to argue with this poor old woman. 'when tom was called up to go to the war,' said the young woman, bitterly, 'mr rushton shook hands with him and promised to give him a job when he came back. but now that poor tom's gone and they know that me and the children's got no one to look to but father, they do this.' although at the mention of her dead son's name old mrs linden was evidently distressed, she was still mindful of the atheist's presence, and hastened to rebuke her daughter-in-law. 'you shouldn't say we've got no one to look to, mary,' she said. 'we're not as them who are without god and without hope in the world. the lord is our shepherd. he careth for the widow and the fatherless.' owen was very doubtful about this also. he had seen so many badly cared-for children about the streets lately, and what he remembered of his own sorrowful childhood was all evidence to the contrary. an awkward silence succeeded. owen did not wish to continue this conversation: he was afraid that he might say something that would hurt the old woman. besides, he was anxious to get away; he began to feel cold in his wet clothes. as he put his empty cup on the table he said: 'well, i must be going. they'll be thinking i'm lost, at home.' the kitten had finished all the bread and milk and was gravely washing its face with one of its forepaws, to the great admiration of the two children, who were sitting on the floor beside it. it was an artful-looking kitten, all black, with a very large head and a very small body. it reminded owen of a tadpole. 'do you like cats?' he asked, addressing the children. 'yes,' said the boy. 'give it to us, will you, mister?' 'oh, do leave it 'ere, mister,' exclaimed the little girl. 'i'll look after it.' 'so will i,' said the boy. 'but haven't you one of your own?' asked owen. 'yes; we've got a big one.' 'well, if you have one already and i give you this, then you'd have two cats, and i'd have none. that wouldn't be fair, would it?' 'well, you can 'ave a lend of our cat for a little while if you give us this kitten,' said the boy, after a moment's thought. 'why would you rather have the kitten?' 'because it would play: our cat don't want to play, it's too old.' 'perhaps you're too rough with it,' returned owen. 'no, it ain't that; it's just because it's old.' 'you know cats is just the same as people,' explained the little girl, wisely. 'when they're grown up i suppose they've got their troubles to think about.' owen wondered how long it would be before her troubles commenced. as he gazed at these two little orphans he thought of his own child, and of the rough and thorny way they would all three have to travel if they were so unfortunate as to outlive their childhood. 'can we 'ave it, mister?' repeated the boy. owen would have liked to grant the children's request, but he wanted the kitten himself. therefore he was relieved when their grandmother exclaimed: 'we don't want no more cats 'ere: we've got one already; that's quite enough.' she was not yet quite satisfied in her mind that the creature was not an incarnation of the devil, but whether it was or not she did not want it, or anything else of owen's, in this house. she wished he would go, and take his kitten or his familiar or whatever it was, with him. no good could come of his being there. was it not written in the word: 'if any man love not the lord jesus christ, let him be anathema maran-atha.' she did not know exactly what anathema maran-atha meant, but there could be no doubt that it was something very unpleasant. it was a terrible thing that this blasphemer who--as she had heard--did not believe there was a hell and said that the bible was not the word of god, should be here in the house sitting on one of their chairs, drinking from one of their cups, and talking to their children. the children stood by wistfully when owen put the kitten under his coat and rose to go away. as linden prepared to accompany him to the front door, owen, happening to notice a timepiece standing on a small table in the recess at one side of the fireplace, exclaimed: 'that's a very nice clock.' 'yes, it's all right, ain't it?' said old jack, with a touch of pride. 'poor tom made that: not the clock itself, but just the case.' it was the case that had attracted owen's attention. it stood about two feet high and was made of fretwork in the form of an indian mosque, with a pointed dome and pinnacles. it was a very beautiful thing and must have cost many hours of patient labour. 'yes,' said the old woman, in a trembling, broken voice, and looking at owen with a pathetic expression. 'months and months he worked at it, and no one ever guessed who it were for. and then, when my birthday came round, the very first thing i saw when i woke up in the morning were the clock standing on a chair by the bed with a card: 'to dear mother, from her loving son, tom. wishing her many happy birthdays.' 'but he never had another birthday himself, because just five months afterwards he were sent out to africa, and he'd only been there five weeks when he died. five years ago, come the fifteenth of next month.' owen, inwardly regretting that he had unintentionally broached so painful a subject, tried to think of some suitable reply, but had to content himself with murmuring some words of admiration of the work. as he wished her good night, the old woman, looking at him, could not help observing that he appeared very frail and ill: his face was very thin and pale, and his eyes were unnaturally bright. possibly the lord in his infinite loving kindness and mercy was chastening this unhappy castaway in order that he might bring him to himself. after all, he was not altogether bad: it was certainly very thoughtful of him to come all this way to let john know about that job. she observed that he had no overcoat, and the storm was still raging fiercely outside, furious gusts of wind frequently striking the house and shaking it to its very foundations. the natural kindliness of her character asserted itself; her better feelings were aroused, triumphing momentarily over the bigotry of her religious opinions. 'why, you ain't got no overcoat!' she exclaimed. 'you'll be soaked goin' 'ome in this rain.' then, turning to her husband, she continued: 'there's that old one of yours; you might lend him that; it would be better than nothing.' but owen would not hear of this: he thought, as he became very conscious of the clammy feel of his saturated clothing, that he could not get much wetter than he already was. linden accompanied him as far as the front door, and owen once more set out on his way homeward through the storm that howled around like a wild beast hungry for its prey. chapter 6 it is not my crime owen and his family occupied the top floor of a house that had once been a large private dwelling but which had been transformed into a series of flats. it was situated in lord street, almost in the centre of the town. at one time this had been a most aristocratic locality, but most of the former residents had migrated to the newer suburb at the west of the town. notwithstanding this fact, lord street was still a most respectable neighbourhood, the inhabitants generally being of a very superior type: shop-walkers, shop assistants, barber's clerks, boarding house keepers, a coal merchant, and even two retired jerry-builders. there were four other flats in the house in which owen lived. no. 1 (the basement) was occupied by an estate agent's clerk. no. 2--on a level with the street--was the habitat of the family of mr trafaim, a cadaverous-looking gentleman who wore a top hat, boasted of his french descent, and was a shop-walker at sweater's emporium. no. 3 was tenanted by an insurance agent, and in no. 4 dwelt a tallyman's traveller. lord street--like most other similar neighbourhoods--supplied a striking answer to those futile theorists who prate of the equality of mankind, for the inhabitants instinctively formed themselves into groups, the more superior types drawing together, separating themselves from the inferior, and rising naturally to the top, while the others gathered themselves into distinct classes, grading downwards, or else isolated themselves altogether; being refused admission to the circles they desired to enter, and in their turn refusing to associate with their inferiors. the most exclusive set consisted of the families of the coal merchant, the two retired jerry-builders and mr trafaim, whose superiority was demonstrated by the fact that, to say nothing of his french extraction, he wore--in addition to the top hat aforesaid--a frock coat and a pair of lavender trousers every day. the coal merchant and the jerry builders also wore top hats, lavender trousers and frock coats, but only on sundays and other special occasions. the estate agent's clerk and the insurance agent, though excluded from the higher circle, belonged to another select coterie from which they excluded in their turn all persons of inferior rank, such as shop assistants or barbers. the only individual who was received with equal cordiality by all ranks, was the tallyman's traveller. but whatever differences existed amongst them regarding each other's social standing they were unanimous on one point at least: they were indignant at owen's presumption in coming to live in such a refined locality. this low fellow, this common workman, with his paint-bespattered clothing, his broken boots, and his generally shabby appearance, was a disgrace to the street; and as for his wife she was not much better, because although whenever she came out she was always neatly dressed, yet most of the neighbours knew perfectly well that she had been wearing the same white straw hat all the time she had been there. in fact, the only tolerable one of the family was the boy, and they were forced to admit that he was always very well dressed; so well indeed as to occasion some surprise, until they found out that all the boy's clothes were home-made. then their surprise was changed into a somewhat grudging admiration of the skill displayed, mingled with contempt for the poverty which made its exercise necessary. the indignation of the neighbours was increased when it became known that owen and his wife were not christians: then indeed everyone agreed that the landlord ought to be ashamed of himself for letting the top flat to such people. but although the hearts of these disciples of the meek and lowly jewish carpenter were filled with uncharitableness, they were powerless to do much harm. the landlord regarded their opinion with indifference. all he cared about was the money: although he also was a sincere christian, he would not have hesitated to let the top flat to satan himself, provided he was certain of receiving the rent regularly. the only one upon whom the christians were able to inflict any suffering was the child. at first when he used to go out into the street to play, the other children, acting on their parents' instructions, refused to associate with him, or taunted him with his parents' poverty. occasionally he came home heartbroken and in tears because he had been excluded from some game. at first, sometimes the mothers of some of the better-class children used to come out with a comical assumption of superiority and dignity and compel their children to leave off playing with frankie and some other poorly dressed children who used to play in that street. these females were usually overdressed and wore a lot of jewellery. most of them fancied they were ladies, and if they had only had the sense to keep their mouths shut, other people might possibly have shared the same delusion. but this was now a rare occurrence, because the parents of the other children found it a matter of considerable difficulty to prevent their youngsters from associating with those of inferior rank, for when left to themselves the children disregarded all such distinctions. frequently in that street was to be seen the appalling spectacle of the ten-year-old son of the refined and fashionable trafaim dragging along a cart constructed of a sugar box and an old pair of perambulator wheels with no tyres, in which reposed the plebeian frankie owen, armed with a whip, and the dowdy daughter of a barber's clerk: while the nine-year-old heir of the coal merchant rushed up behind... owen's wife and little son were waiting for him in the living room. this room was about twelve feet square and the ceiling--which was low and irregularly shaped, showing in places the formation of the roof--had been decorated by owen with painted ornaments. there were three or four chairs, and an oblong table, covered with a clean white tablecloth, set ready for tea. in the recess at the right of fireplace--an ordinary open grate--were a number of shelves filled with a miscellaneous collection of books, most of which had been bought second-hand. there were also a number of new books, mostly cheap editions in paper covers. over the back of a chair at one side of the fire, was hanging an old suit of owen's, and some underclothing, which his wife had placed there to air, knowing that he would be wet through by the time he arrived home... the woman was half-sitting, half lying, on a couch by the other side of the fire. she was very thin, and her pale face bore the traces of much physical and mental suffering. she was sewing, a task which her reclining position rendered somewhat difficult. although she was really only twenty-eight years of age, she appeared older. the boy, who was sitting on the hearthrug playing with some toys, bore a strong resemblance to his mother. he also, appeared very fragile and in his childish face was reproduced much of the delicate prettiness which she had once possessed. his feminine appearance was increased by the fact that his yellow hair hung in long curls on his shoulders. the pride with which his mother regarded this long hair was by no means shared by frankie himself, for he was always entreating her to cut it off. presently the boy stood up and walking gravely over to the window, looked down into the street, scanning the pavement for as far as he could see: he had been doing this at intervals for the last hour. 'i wonder wherever he's got to,' he said, as he returned to the fire. 'i'm sure i don't know,' returned his mother. 'perhaps he's had to work overtime.' 'you know, i've been thinking lately,' observed frankie, after a pause, 'that it's a great mistake for dad to go out working at all. i believe that's the very reason why we're so poor.' 'nearly everyone who works is more or less poor, dear, but if dad didn't go out to work we'd be even poorer than we are now. we should have nothing to eat.' 'but dad says that the people who do nothing get lots of everything.' 'yes, and it's quite true that most of the people who never do any work get lots of everything, but where do they get it from? and how do they get it?' 'i'm sure i don't know,' replied frankie, shaking his head in a puzzled fashion. 'supposing dad didn't go to work, or that he had no work to go to, or that he was ill and not able to do any work, then we'd have no money to buy anything. how should we get on then?' 'i'm sure i don't know,' repeated frankie, looking round the room in a thoughtful manner, 'the chairs that's left aren't good enough to sell, and we can't sell the beds, or your sofa, but you might pawn my velvet suit.' 'but even if all the things were good enough to sell, the money we'd get for them wouldn't last very long, and what should we do then?' 'well, i suppose we'd have to go without, that's all, the same as we did when dad was in london.' 'but how do the people who never do any work manage to get lots of money then?' added frankie. 'oh, there's lots of different ways. for instance, you remember when dad was in london, and we had no food in the house, i had to sell the easy chair.' frankie nodded. 'yes,' he said, 'i remember you wrote a note and i took it to the shop, and afterwards old didlum came up here and bought it, and then his cart came and a man took it away.' 'and do you remember how much he gave us for it?' 'five shillings,' replied frankie, promptly. he was well acquainted with the details of the transaction, having often heard his father and mother discuss it. 'and when we saw it in his shop window a little while afterwards, what price was marked on it?' 'fifteen shillings.' well, that's one way of getting money without working. frankie played with his toys in silence for some minutes. at last he said: 'what other ways?' 'some people who have some money already get more in this way: they find some people who have no money and say to them, "come and work for us." then the people who have the money pay the workers just enough wages to keep them alive whilst they are at work. then, when the things that the working people have been making are finished, the workers are sent away, and as they still have no money, they are soon starving. in the meantime the people who had the money take all the things that the workers have made and sell them for a great deal more money than they gave to the workers for making them. that's another way of getting lots of money without doing any useful work.' 'but is there no way to get rich without doing such things as that?' 'it's not possible for anyone to become rich without cheating other people.' 'what about our schoolmaster then? he doesn't do any work.' 'don't you think it's useful and and also very hard work teaching all those boys every day? i don't think i should like to have to do it.' 'yes, i suppose what he does is some use,' said frankie thoughtfully. 'and it must be rather hard too, i should think. i've noticed he looks a bit worried sometimes, and sometimes he gets into a fine old wax when the boys don't pay proper attention.' the child again went over to the window, and pulling back the edge of the blind looked down the deserted rain washed street. 'what about the vicar?' he remarked as he returned. although frankie did not go to church or sunday school, the day school that he had attended was that attached to the parish church, and the vicar was in the habit of looking in occasionally. 'ah, he really is one of those who live without doing any necessary work, and of all the people who do nothing, the vicar is one of the very worst.' frankie looked up at his mother with some surprise, not because he entertained any very high opinion of clergymen in general, for, having been an attentive listener to many conversations between his parents, he had of course assimilated their opinions as far as his infant understanding permitted, but because at the school the scholars were taught to regard the gentleman in question with the most profound reverence and respect. 'why, mum?' he asked. 'for this reason, dearie. you know that all the beautiful things which the people who do nothing have are made by the people who work, don't you?' 'yes.' 'and you know that those who work have to eat the very worst food, and wear the very worst clothes, and live in the very worst homes.' 'yes,' said frankie. 'and sometimes they have nothing to eat at all, and no clothes to wear except rags, and even no homes to live in.' 'yes,' repeated the child. 'well, the vicar goes about telling the idlers that it's quite right for them to do nothing, and that god meant them to have nearly everything that is made by those who work. in fact, he tells them that god made the poor for the use of the rich. then he goes to the workers and tells them that god meant them to work very hard and to give all the good things they make to those who do nothing, and that they should be very thankful to god and to the idlers for being allowed to have even the very worst food to eat and the rags, and broken boots to wear. he also tells them that they mustn't grumble, or be discontented because they're poor in this world, but that they must wait till they're dead, and then god will reward them by letting them go to a place called heaven.' frankie laughed. 'and what about the idlers?' he asked. 'the vicar says that if they believe everything he tells them and give him some of the money they make out of the workers, then god will let them into heaven also.' 'well, that's not fair doos, is it, mum?' said frankie with some indignation. 'it wouldn't be if it were true, but then you see it's not true, it can't be true.' 'why can't it, mum?' 'oh, for many reasons: to begin with, the vicar doesn't believe it himself: he only pretends to. for instance, he pretends to believe the bible, but if we read the bible we find that jesus said that god is our father and that all the people in the world are his children, all brothers and sisters. but the vicar says that although jesus said "brothers and sisters" he really ought to have said "masters and servants". again, jesus said that his disciples should not think of tomorrow, or save up a lot of money for themselves, but they should be unselfish and help those who are in need. jesus said that his disciples must not think about their own future needs at all, because god will provide for them if they only do as he commands. but the vicar says that is all nonsense. 'jesus also said that if anyone tried to do his disciples harm, they must never resist, but forgive those who injured them and pray god to forgive them also. but the vicar says this is all nonsense too. he says that the world would never be able to go on if we did as jesus taught. the vicar teaches that the way to deal with those that injure us is to have them put into prison, or--if they belong to some other country--to take guns and knives and murder them, and burn their houses. so you see the vicar doesn't really believe or do any of the things that jesus said: he only pretends.' 'but why does he pretend, and go about talking like that, mum? what does he do it for?' 'because he wishes to live without working himself, dear.' 'and don't the people know he's only pretending?' 'some of them do. most of the idlers know that what the vicar says is not true, but they pretend to believe it, and give him money for saying it, because they want him to go on telling it to the workers so that they will go on working and keep quiet and be afraid to think for themselves.' 'and what about the workers? do they believe it? 'most of them do, because when they were little children like you, their mothers taught them to believe, without thinking, whatever the vicar said, and that god made them for the use of the idlers. when they went to school, they were taught the same thing: and now that they're grown up they really believe it, and they go to work and give nearly everything they make to the idlers, and have next to nothing left for themselves and their children. that's the reason why the workers' children have very bad clothes to wear and sometimes no food to eat; and that's how it is that the idlers and their children have more clothes than they need and more food than they can eat. some of them have so much food that they are not able to eat it. they just waste it or throw it away.' 'when i'm grown up into a man,' said frankie, with a flushed face, 'i'm going to be one of the workers, and when we've made a lot of things, i shall stand up and tell the others what to do. if any of the idlers come to take our things away, they'll get something they won't like.' in a state of suppressed excitement and scarcely conscious of what he was doing, the boy began gathering up the toys and throwing them violently one by one into the box. 'i'll teach 'em to come taking our things away,' he exclaimed, relapsing momentarily into his street style of speaking. 'first of all we'll all stand quietly on one side. then when the idlers come in and start touching our things, we'll go up to 'em and say, "'ere, watcher doin' of? just you put it down, will yer?" and if they don't put it down at once, it'll be the worse for 'em, i can tell you.' all the toys being collected, frankie picked up the box and placed it noisily in its accustomed corner of the room. 'i should think the workers will be jolly glad when they see me coming to tell them what to do, shouldn't you, mum?' 'i don't know dear; you see so many people have tried to tell them, but they won't listen, they don't want to hear. they think it's quite right that they should work very hard all their lives, and quite right that most of the things they help to make should be taken away from them by the people who do nothing. the workers think that their children are not as good as the children of the idlers, and they teach their children that as soon as ever they are old enough they must be satisfied to work very hard and to have only very bad good and clothes and homes.' 'then i should think the workers ought to be jolly ashamed of themselves, mum, don't you?' 'well, in one sense they ought, but you must remember that that's what they've always been taught themselves. first, their mothers and fathers told them so; then, their schoolteachers told them so; and then, when they went to church, the vicar and the sunday school teacher told them the same thing. so you can't be surprised that they now really believe that god made them and their children to make things for the use of the people who do nothing.' 'but you'd think their own sense would tell them! how can it be right for the people who do nothing to have the very best and most of everything thats made, and the very ones who make everything to have hardly any. why even i know better than that, and i'm only six and a half years old.' 'but then you're different, dearie, you've been taught to think about it, and dad and i have explained it to you, often.' 'yes, i know,' replied frankie confidently. 'but even if you'd never taught me, i'm sure i should have tumbled to it all right by myself; i'm not such a juggins as you think i am.' 'so you might, but you wouldn't if you'd been brought up in the same way as most of the workers. they've been taught that it's very wicked to use their own judgement, or to think. and their children are being taught so now. do you remember what you told me the other day, when you came home from school, about the scripture lesson?' 'about st thomas?' 'yes. what did the teacher say st thomas was?' 'she said he was a bad example; and she said i was worse than him because i asked too many foolish questions. she always gets in a wax if i talk too much.' 'well, why did she call st thomas a bad example?' 'because he wouldn't believe what he was told.' 'exactly: well, when you told dad about it what did he say?' 'dad told me that really st thomas was the only sensible man in the whole crowd of apostles. that is,' added frankie, correcting himself, 'if there ever was such a man at all.' 'but did dad say that there never was such a man?' 'no; he said he didn't believe there ever was, but he told me to just listen to what the teacher said about such things, and then to think about it in my own mind, and wait till i'm grown up and then i can use my own judgement.' 'well, now, that's what you were told, but all the other children's mothers and fathers tell them to believe, without thinking, whatever the teacher says. so it will be no wonder if those children are not able to think for themselves when they're grown up, will it?' 'don't you think it will be any use, then, for me to tell them what to do to the idlers?' asked frankie, dejectedly. 'hark!' said his mother, holding up her finger. 'dad!' cried frankie, rushing to the door and flinging it open. he ran along the passage and opened the staircase door before owen reached the top of the last flight of stairs. 'why ever do you come up at such a rate,' reproachfully exclaimed owen's wife as he came into the room exhausted from the climb upstairs and sank panting into the nearest chair. 'i al-ways-for-get,' he replied, when he had in some degree recovered. as he lay back in the chair, his face haggard and of a ghastly whiteness, and with the water dripping from his saturated clothing, owen presented a terrible appearance. frankie noticed with childish terror the extreme alarm with which his mother looked at his father. 'you're always doing it,' he said with a whimper. 'how many more times will mother have to tell you about it before you take any notice?' 'it's all right, old chap,' said owen, drawing the child nearer to him and kissing the curly head. 'listen, and see if you can guess what i've got for you under my coat.' in the silence the purring of the kitten was distinctly audible. 'a kitten!' cried the boy, taking it out of its hiding-place. 'all black, and i believe it's half a persian. just the very thing i wanted.' while frankie amused himself playing with the kitten, which had been provided with another saucer of bread and milk, owen went into the bedroom to put on the dry clothes, and then, those that he had taken off having been placed with his boots near the fire to dry, he explained as they were taking tea the reason of his late homecoming. 'i'm afraid he won't find it very easy to get another job,' he remarked, referring to linden. 'even in the summer nobody will be inclined to take him on. he's too old.' 'it's a dreadful prospect for the two children,' answered his wife. 'yes,' replied owen bitterly. 'it's the children who will suffer most. as for linden and his wife, although of course one can't help feeling sorry for them, at the same time there's no getting away from the fact that they deserve to suffer. all their lives they've been working like brutes and living in poverty. although they have done more than their fair share of the work, they have never enjoyed anything like a fair share of the things they have helped to produce. and yet, all their lives they have supported and defended the system that robbed them, and have resisted and ridiculed every proposal to alter it. it's wrong to feel sorry for such people; they deserve to suffer.' after tea, as he watched his wife clearing away the tea things and rearranging the drying clothing by the fire, owen for the first time noticed that she looked unusually ill. 'you don't look well tonight, nora,' he said, crossing over to her and putting his arm around her. 'i don't feel well,' she replied, resting her head wearily against his shoulder. 'i've been very bad all day and i had to lie down nearly all the afternoon. i don't know how i should have managed to get the tea ready if it had not been for frankie.' 'i set the table for you, didn't i, mum?' said frankie with pride; 'and tidied up the room as well.' 'yes, darling, you helped me a lot,' she answered, and frankie went over to her and kissed her hand. 'well, you'd better go to bed at once,' said owen. 'i can put frankie to bed presently and do whatever else is necessary.' 'but there are so many things to attend to. i want to see that your clothes are properly dry and to put something ready for you to take in the morning before you go out, and then there's your breakfast to pack up--' 'i can manage all that.' 'i didn't want to give way to it like this,' the woman said, 'because i know you must be tired out yourself, but i really do feel quite done up now.' 'oh, i'm all right,' replied owen, who was really so fatigued that he was scarcely able to stand. 'i'll go and draw the blinds down and light the other lamp; so say good night to frankie and come at once.' 'i won't say good night properly, now, mum,' remarked the boy, 'because dad can carry me into your room before he puts me into bed.' a little later, as owen was undressing frankie, the latter remarked as he looked affectionately at the kitten, which was sitting on the hearthrug watching the child's every movement under the impression that it was part of some game: 'what name do you think we ought to call it, dad?' 'you may give him any name you like,' replied owen, absently. 'i know a dog that lives down the road,' said the boy, 'his name is major. how would that do? or we might call him sergeant.' the kitten, observing that he was the subject of their conversation, purred loudly and winked as if to intimate that he did not care what rank was conferred upon him so long as the commisariat department was properly attended to. 'i don't know, though,' continued frankie, thoughtfully. 'they're all right names for dogs, but i think they're too big for a kitten, don't you, dad?' 'yes, p'raps they are,' said owen. 'most cats are called tom or kitty, but i don't want a common name for him.' 'well, can't you call him after someone you know?' 'i know; i'll call him after a little girl that comes to our school; a fine name, maud! that'll be a good one, won't it dad?' 'yes,' said owen. 'i say, dad,' said frankie, suddenly realizing the awful fact that he was being put to bed. 'you're forgetting all about my story, and you promised that you'd have a game of trains with me tonight.' 'i hadn't forgotten, but i was hoping that you had, because i'm very tired and it's very late, long past your usual bedtime, you know. you can take the kitten to bed with you tonight and i'll tell you two stories tomorrow, because it's saturday.' 'all right, then,' said the boy, contentedly; 'and i'll get the railway station built and i'll have the lines chalked on the floor, and the signals put up before you come home, so that there'll be no time wasted. and i'll put one chair at one end of the room and another chair at the other end, and tie some string across for telegraph wires. that'll be a very good idea, won't it, dad?' and owen agreed. 'but of course i'll come to meet you just the same as other saturdays, because i'm going to buy a ha'porth of milk for the kitten out of my penny.' after the child was in bed, owen sat alone by the table in the draughty sitting-room, thinking. although there was a bright fire, the room was very cold, being so close to the roof. the wind roared loudly round the gables, shaking the house in a way that threatened every moment to hurl it to the ground. the lamp on the table had a green glass reservoir which was half full of oil. owen watched this with unconscious fascination. every time a gust of wind struck the house the oil in the lamp was agitated and rippled against the glass like the waves of a miniature sea. staring abstractedly at the lamp, he thought of the future. a few years ago the future had seemed a region of wonderful and mysterious possibilities of good, but tonight the thought brought no such illusions, for he knew that the story of the future was to be much the same as the story of the past. the story of the past would continue to repeat itself for a few years longer. he would continue to work and they would all three continue to do without most of the necessaries of life. when there was no work they would starve. for himself he did not care much because he knew that at the best--or worst--it would only be a very few years. even if he were to have proper food and clothing and be able to take reasonable care of himself, he could not live much longer; but when that time came, what was to become of them? there would be some hope for the boy if he were more robust and if his character were less gentle and more selfish. under the present system it was impossible for anyone to succeed in life without injuring other people and treating them and making use of them as one would not like to be treated and made use of oneself. in order to succeed in the world it was necessary to be brutal, selfish and unfeeling: to push others aside and to take advantage of their misfortunes: to undersell and crush out one's competitors by fair means or foul: to consider one's own interests first in every case, absolutely regardless of the wellbeing of others. that was the ideal character. owen knew that frankie's character did not come up to this lofty ideal. then there was nora, how would she fare? owen stood up and began walking about the room, oppressed with a kind of terror. presently he returned to the fire and began rearranging the clothes that were drying. he found that the boots, having been placed too near the fire, had dried too quickly and consequently the sole of one of them had begun to split away from the upper: he remedied this as well as he was able and then turned the wetter parts of the clothing to the fire. whilst doing this he noticed the newspaper, which he had forgotten, in the coat pocket. he drew it out with an exclamation of pleasure. here was something to distract his thoughts: if not instructive or comforting, it would at any rate be interesting and even amusing to read the reports of the self-satisfied, futile talk of the profound statesmen who with comical gravity presided over the working of the great system which their combined wisdom pronounced to be the best that could possibly be devised. but tonight owen was not to read of those things, for as soon as he opened the paper his attention was riveted by the staring headline of one of the principal columns: terrible domestic tragedy wife and two children killed suicide of the murderer it was one of the ordinary poverty crimes. the man had been without employment for many weeks and they had been living by pawning or selling their furniture and other possessions. but even this resource must have failed at last, and when one day the neighbours noticed that the blinds remained down and that there was a strange silence about the house, no one coming out or going in, suspicions that something was wrong were quickly aroused. when the police entered the house, they found, in one of the upper rooms, the dead bodies of the woman and the two children, with their throats severed, laid out side by side upon the bed, which was saturated with their blood. there was no bedstead and no furniture in the room except the straw mattress and the ragged clothes and blankets which formed the bed upon the floor. the man's body was found in the kitchen, lying with outstretched arms face downwards on the floor, surrounded by the blood that had poured from the wound in his throat which had evidently been inflicted by the razor that was grasped in his right hand. no particle of food was found in the house, and on a nail in the wall in the kitchen was hung a piece of blood-smeared paper on which was written in pencil: 'this is not my crime, but society's.' the report went on to explain that the deed must have been perpetrated during a fit of temporary insanity brought on by the sufferings the man had endured. 'insanity!' muttered owen, as he read this glib theory. 'insanity! it seems to me that he would have been insane if he had not killed them.' surely it was wiser and better and kinder to send them all to sleep, than to let them continue to suffer. at the same time he thought it very strange that the man should have chosen to do it that way, when there were so many other cleaner, easier and more painless ways of accomplishing the same object. he wondered why it was that most of these killings were done in more or less the same crude, cruel messy way. no; he would set about it in a different fashion. he would get some charcoal, then he would paste strips of paper over the joinings of the door and windows of the room and close the register of the grate. then he would kindle the charcoal on a tray or something in the middle of the room, and then they would all three just lie down together and sleep; and that would be the end of everything. there would be no pain, no blood, and no mess. or one could take poison. of course, there was a certain amount of difficulty in procuring it, but it would not be impossible to find some pretext for buying some laudanum: one could buy several small quantities at different shops until one had sufficient. then he remembered that he had read somewhere that vermillion, one of the colours he frequently had to use in his work, was one of the most deadly poisons: and there was some other stuff that photographers used, which was very easy to procure. of course, one would have to be very careful about poisons, so as not to select one that would cause a lot of pain. it would be necessary to find out exactly how the stuff acted before using it. it would not be very difficult to do so. then he remembered that among his books was one that probably contained some information about this subject. he went over to the book-shelf and presently found the volume; it was called the cyclopedia of practical medicine, rather an old book, a little out of date, perhaps, but still it might contain the information he wanted. opening it, he turned to the table of contents. many different subjects were mentioned there and presently he found the one he sought: poisons: chemically, physiologically and pathologically considered. corrosive poisons. narcotic poisons. slow poisons. consecutive poisons. accumulative poisons. he turned to the chapter indicated and, reading it, he was astonished to find what a number of poisons there were within easy reach of whoever wished to make use of them: poisons that could be relied upon to do their work certainly, quickly and without pain. why, it was not even necessary to buy them: one could gather them from the hedges by the road side and in the fields. the more he thought of it the stranger it seemed that such a clumsy method as a razor should be so popular. why almost any other way would be better and easier than that. strangulation or even hanging, though the latter method could scarcely be adopted in that house, because there were no beams or rafters or anything from which it would be possible to suspend a cord. still, he could drive some large nails or hooks into one of the walls. for that matter, there were already some clothes-hooks on some of the doors. he began to think that this would be an even more excellent way than poison or charcoal; he could easily pretend to frankie that he was going to show him some new kind of play. he could arrange the cord on the hook on one of the doors and then under pretence of play, it would be done. the boy would offer no resistance, and in a few minutes it would all be over. he threw down the book and pressed his hands over his ears: he fancied he could hear the boy's hands and feet beating against the panels of the door as he struggled in his death agony. then, as his arms fell nervelessly by his side again, he thought that he heard frankie's voice calling. 'dad! dad!' owen hastily opened the door. 'are you calling, frankie?' 'yes. i've been calling you quite a long time.' 'what do you want?' 'i want you to come here. i want to tell you something.' 'well, what is it dear? i thought you were asleep a long time ago,' said owen as he came into the room. 'that's just what i want to speak to you about: the kitten's gone to sleep all right, but i can't go. i've tried all different ways, counting and all, but it's no use, so i thought i'd ask you if you'd mind coming and staying with me, and letting me hold you hand for a little while and them p'raps i could go.' the boy twined his arms round owen's neck and hugged him very tightly. 'oh, dad, i love you so much!' he said. 'i love you so much, i could squeeze you to death.' 'i'm afraid you will, if you squeeze me so tightly as that.' the boy laughed softly as he relaxed his hold. 'that would be a funny way of showing you how much i love you, wouldn't it, dad? squeezing you to death!' 'yes, i suppose it would,' replied owen huskily, as he tucked the bedclothes round the child's shoulders. 'but don't talk any more, dear; just hold my hand and try to sleep.' 'all right,' said frankie. lying there very quietly, holding his father's hand and occasionally kissing it, the child presently fell asleep. then owen got up very gently and, having taken the kitten out of the bed again and arranged the bedclothes, he softly kissed the boy's forehead and returned to the other room. looking about for a suitable place for the kitten to sleep in, he noticed frankie's toy box, and having emptied the toys on to the floor in a corner of the room, he made a bed in the box with some rags and placed it on its side on the hearthrug, facing the fire, and with some difficulty persuaded the kitten to lie in it. then, having placed the chairs on which his clothes were drying at a safe distance from the fire, he went into the bedroom. nora was still awake. 'are you feeling any better, dear?' he said. 'yes, i'm ever so much better since i've been in bed, but i can't help worrying about your clothes. i'm afraid they'll never be dry enough for you to put on the first thing in the morning. couldn't you stay at home till after breakfast, just for once?' 'no; i mustn't do that. if i did hunter would probably tell me to stay away altogether. i believe he would be glad of an excuse to get rid of another full-price man just now.' 'but if it's raining like this in the morning, you'll be wet through before you get there.' 'it's no good worrying about that dear: besides, i can wear this old coat that i have on now, over the other.' 'and if you wrap your old shoes in some paper, and take them with you, you can take off your wet boots as soon as you get to the place.' 'yes, all right,' responded owen. 'besides,' he added, reassuringly, 'even if i do get a little wet, we always have a fire there, you know.' 'well, i hope the weather will be a little better than this in the morning,' said nora. 'isn't it a dreadful night! i keep feeling afraid that the house is going to be blown down.' long after nora was asleep, owen lay listening to the howling of the wind and the noise of the rain as it poured heavily on the roof... chapter 7 the exterminating machines 'come on, saturday!' shouted philpot, just after seven o'clock one monday morning as they were getting ready to commence work. it was still dark outside, but the scullery was dimly illuminated by the flickering light of two candles which crass had lighted and stuck on the shelf over the fireplace in order to enable him to see to serve out the different lots of paints and brushes to the men. 'yes, it do seem a 'ell of a long week, don't it?' remarked harlow as he hung his overcoat on a nail and proceeded to put on his apron and blouse. 'i've 'ad bloody near enough of it already.' 'wish to christ it was breakfast-time,' growled the more easily satisfied easton. extraordinary as it may appear, none of them took any pride in their work: they did not 'love' it. they had no conception of that lofty ideal of 'work for work's sake', which is so popular with the people who do nothing. on the contrary, when the workers arrived in the morning they wished it was breakfast-time. when they resumed work after breakfast they wished it was dinner-time. after dinner they wished it was one o'clock on saturday. so they went on, day after day, year after year, wishing their time was over and, without realizing it, really wishing that they were dead. how extraordinary this must appear to those idealists who believe in 'work for work's sake', but who themselves do nothing but devour or use and enjoy or waste the things that are produced by the labour of those others who are not themselves permitted to enjoy a fair share of the good things they help to create? crass poured several lots of colour into several pots. 'harlow,' he said, 'you and sawkins, when he comes, can go up and do the top bedrooms out with this colour. you'll find a couple of candles up there. it's only goin' to 'ave one coat, so see that you make it cover all right, and just look after sawkins a bit so as 'e doesn't make a bloody mess of it. you do the doors and windows, and let 'im do the cupboards and skirtings.' 'that's a bit of all right, i must say,' harlow said, addressing the company generally. 'we've got to teach a b--r like 'im so as 'e can do us out of a job presently by working under price.' 'well, i can't 'elp it,' growled crass. 'you know 'ow it is: 'unter sends 'im 'ere to do paintin', and i've got to put 'im on it. there ain't nothing else for 'im to do.' further discussion on this subject was prevented by sawkins' arrival, nearly a quarter of an hour late. 'oh, you 'ave come, then,' sneered crass. 'thought p'raps you'd gorn for a 'oliday.' sawkins muttered something about oversleeping himself, and having hastily put on his apron, he went upstairs with harlow. 'now, let's see,' crass said, addressing philpot. 'you and newman 'ad better go and make a start on the second floor: this is the colour, and 'ere's a couple of candles. you'd better not both go in one room or 'unter will growl about it. you take one of the front and let newman take one of the back rooms. take a bit of stoppin' with you: they're goin' to 'ave two coats, but you'd better putty up the 'oles as well as you can, this time.' 'only two coats!' said philpot. 'them rooms will never look nothing with two coats--a light colour like this.' 'it's only goin' to get two, anyway,' returned crass, testily. ''unter said so, so you'll 'ave to do the best you can with 'em, and get 'em smeared over middlin' sudden, too.' crass did not think it necessary to mention that according to the copy of the specification of the work which he had in his pocket the rooms in question were supposed to have four coats. crass now turned to owen. 'there's that drorin'-room,' he said. 'i don't know what's goin' to be done with that yet. i don't think they've decided about it. whatever's to be done to it will be an extra, because all that's said about it in the contract is to face it up with putty and give it one coat of white. so you and easton 'ad better get on with it.' slyme was busy softening some putty by rubbing and squeezing it between his hands. 'i suppose i'd better finish the room i started on on saturday?' he asked. 'all right,' replied crass. 'have you got enough colour?' 'yes,' said slyme. as he passed through the kitchen on the way to his work, slyme accosted bert, the boy, who was engaged in lighting, with some pieces of wood, a fire to boil the water to make the tea for breakfast at eight o'clock. 'there's a bloater i want's cooked,' he said. 'all right,' replied bert. 'put it over there on the dresser along of philpot's and mine.' slyme took the bloater from his food basket, but as he was about to put it in the place indicated, he observed that his was rather a larger one than either of the other two. this was an important matter. after they were cooked it would not be easy to say which was which: he might possibly be given one of the smaller ones instead of his own. he took out his pocket knife and cut off the tail of the large bloater. ''ere it is, then,' he said to bert. 'i've cut the tail of mine so as you'll know which it is.' it was now about twenty minutes past seven and all the other men having been started at work, crass washed his hands under the tap. then he went into the kitchen and having rigged up a seat by taking two of the drawers out of the dresser and placing them on the floor about six feet apart and laying a plank across, he sat down in front of the fire, which was now burning brightly under the pail, and, lighting his pipe, began to smoke. the boy went into the scullery and began washing up the cups and jars for the men to drink out of. bert was a lean, undersized boy about fifteen years of age and about four feet nine inches in height. he had light brown hair and hazel grey eyes, and his clothes were of many colours, being thickly encrusted with paint, the result of the unskillful manner in which he did his work, for he had only been at the trade about a year. some of the men had nicknamed him 'the walking paint-shop', a title which bert accepted good-humouredly. this boy was an orphan. his father had been a railway porter who had worked very laboriously for twelve or fourteen hours every day for many years, with the usual result, namely, that he and his family lived in a condition of perpetual poverty. bert, who was their only child and not very robust, had early shown a talent for drawing, so when his father died a little over a year ago, his mother readily assented when the boy said that he wished to become a decorator. it was a nice light trade, and she thought that a really good painter, such as she was sure he would become, was at least always able to earn a good living. resolving to give the boy the best possible chance, she decided if possible to place him at rushton's, that being one of the leading firms in the town. at first mr rushton demanded ten pounds as a premium, the boy to be bound for five years, no wages the first year, two shillings a week the second, and a rise of one shilling every year for the remainder of the term. afterwards, as a special favour--a matter of charity, in fact, as she was a very poor woman--he agreed to accept five pounds. this sum represented the thrifty savings of years, but the poor woman parted with it willingly in order that the boy should become a skilled workman. so bert was apprenticed--bound for five years--to rushton & co. for the first few months his life had been spent in the paint-shop at the yard, a place that was something between a cellar and a stable. there, surrounded by the poisonous pigments and materials of the trade, the youthful artisan worked, generally alone, cleaning the dirty paint-pots brought in by the workmen from finished 'jobs' outside, and occasionally mixing paint according to the instructions of mr hunter, or one of the sub-foremen. sometimes he was sent out to carry materials to the places where the men were working--heavy loads of paint or white lead--sometimes pails of whitewash that his slender arms had been too feeble to carry more than a few yards at a time. often his fragile, childish figure was seen staggering manfully along, bending beneath the weight of a pair of steps or a heavy plank. he could manage a good many parcels at once: some in each hand and some tied together with string and slung over his shoulders. occasionally, however, there were more than he could carry; then they were put into a handcart which he pushed or dragged after him to the distant jobs. that first winter the boy's days were chiefly spent in the damp, evil-smelling, stone-flagged paint-shop, without even a fire to warm the clammy atmosphere. but in all this he had seen no hardship. with the unconsciousness of boyhood, he worked hard and cheerfully. as time went on, the goal of his childish ambition was reached--he was sent out to work with the men! and he carried the same spirit with him, always doing his best to oblige those with whom he was working. he tried hard to learn, and to be a good boy, and he succeeded, fairly well. he soon became a favourite with owen, for whom he conceived a great respect and affection, for he observed that whenever there was any special work of any kind to be done it was owen who did it. on such occasions, bert, in his artful, boyish way, would scheme to be sent to assist owen, and the latter whenever possible used to ask that the boy might be allowed to work with him. bert's regard for owen was equalled in intensity by his dislike of crass, who was in the habit of jeering at the boy's aspirations. 'there'll be plenty of time for you to think about doin' fancy work after you've learnt to do plain painting,' he would say. this morning, when he had finished washing up the cups and mugs, bert returned with them to the kitchen. 'now let's see,' said crass, thoughtfully, 'you've put the tea in the pail, i s'pose.' 'yes.' 'and now you want a job, don't you?' 'yes,' replied the boy. 'well, get a bucket of water and that old brush and a swab, and go and wash off the old whitewash and colouring orf the pantry ceiling and walls.' 'all right,' said bert. when he got as far as the door leading into the scullery he looked round and said: 'i've got to git them three bloaters cooked by breakfast time.' 'never mind about that,' said crass. 'i'll do them.' bert got the pail and the brush, drew some water from the tap, got a pair of steps and a short plank, one end of which he rested on the bottom shelf of the pantry and the other on the steps, and proceeded to carry out crass's instructions. it was very cold and damp and miserable in the pantry, and the candle only made it seem more so. bert shivered: he would like to have put his jacket on, but that was out of the question at a job like this. he lifted the bucket of water on to one of the shelves and, climbing up on to the plank, took the brush from the water and soaked about a square yard of the ceiling; then he began to scrub it with the brush. he was not very skilful yet, and as he scrubbed the water ran down over the stock of the brush, over his hand and down his uplifted arm, wetting the turned-up sleeves of his shirt. when he had scrubbed it sufficiently he rinsed it off as well as he could with the brush, and then, to finish with, he thrust his hand into the pail of water and, taking out the swab, wrung the water out of it and wiped the part of the ceiling that he had washed. then he dropped it back into the pail, and shook his numbed fingers to restore the circulation. then he peeped into the kitchen, where crass was still seated by the fire, smoking and toasting one of the bloaters at the end of a pointed stick. bert wished he would go upstairs, or anywhere, so that he himself might go and have a warm at the fire. ''e might just as well 'ave let me do them bloaters,' he muttered to himself, regarding crass malignantly through the crack of the door. 'this is a fine job to give to anybody--a cold mornin' like this.' he shifted the pail of water a little further along the shelf and went on with the work. a little later, crass, still sitting by the fire, heard footsteps approaching along the passage. he started up guiltily and, thrusting the hand holding his pipe into his apron pocket, retreated hastily into the scullery. he thought it might be hunter, who was in the habit of turning up at all sorts of unlikely times, but it was only easton. 'i've got a bit of bacon i want the young 'un to toast for me,' he said as crass came back. 'you can do it yourself if you like,' replied crass affably, looking at his watch. 'it's about ten to eight.' easton had been working for rushton & co. for a fortnight, and had been wise enough to stand crass a drink on several occasions: he was consequently in that gentleman's good books for the time being. 'how are you getting on in there?' crass asked, alluding to the work easton and owen were doing in the drawing-room. 'you ain't fell out with your mate yet, i s'pose?' 'no; 'e ain't got much to say this morning; 'is cough's pretty bad. i can generally manage to get on orl right with anybody, you know,' easton added. 'well, so can i as a rule, but i get a bit sick listening to that bloody fool. accordin' to 'im, everything's wrong. one day it's religion, another it's politics, and the next it's something else.' 'yes, it is a bit thick; too much of it,' agreed easton, 'but i don't take no notice of the bloody fool: thof course, we know that things is a bit bad just now,' crass went on, 'but if trass went on, 'but if the likes of 'im could 'ave their own way they'd make 'em a bloody sight worse.' 'that's just what i say,' replied easton. 'i've got a pill ready for 'im, though, next time 'e start yappin',' crass continued as he drew a small piece of printed paper from his waistcoat pocket. 'just read that; it's out of the obscurer.' easton took the newspaper cutting and read it: 'very good,' he remarked as he handed it back. 'yes, i think that'll about shut 'im up. did yer notice the other day when we was talking about poverty and men bein' out of work, 'ow 'e dodged out of answerin' wot i said about machinery bein' the cause of it? 'e never answered me! started talkin' about something else.' 'yes, i remember 'e never answered it,' said easton, who had really no recollection of the incident at all. 'i mean to tackle 'im about it at breakfast-time. i don't see why 'e should be allowed to get out of it like that. there was a bloke down at the "cricketers" the other night talkin' about the same thing--a chap as takes a interest in politics and the like, and 'e said the very same as me. why, the number of men what's been throwed out of work by all this 'ere new-fangled machinery is something chronic!' 'of course,' agreed easton, 'everyone knows it.' 'you ought to give us a look in at the "cricketers" some night. there's a lot of decent chaps comes there.' 'yes, i think i will.' 'what 'ouse do you usually use?' asked crass after a pause. easton laughed. 'well, to tell you the truth i've not used anywhere's lately. been 'avin too many 'ollerdays.' 'that do make a bit of difference, don't it?' said crass. 'but you'll be all right 'ere, till this job's done. just watch yerself a bit, and don't get comin' late in the mornin's. old nimrod's dead nuts on that.' 'i'll see to that all right,' replied easton. 'i don't believe in losing time when there is work to do. it's bad enough when you can't get it.' 'you know,' crass went on, confidentially. 'between me an' you an' the gatepost, as the sayin' is, i don't think mr bloody owen will be 'ere much longer. nimrod 'ates the sight of 'im.' easton had it in his mind to say that nimrod seemed to hate the sight of all of them: but he made no remark, and crass continued: ''e's 'eard all about the way owen goes on about politics and religion, an' one thing an' another, an' about the firm scampin' the work. you know that sort of talk don't do, does it?' 'of course not.' ''unter would 'ave got rid of 'im long ago, but it wasn't 'im as took 'im on in the first place. it was rushton 'imself as give 'im a start. it seems owen took a lot of samples of 'is work an' showed 'em to the bloke.' 'is them the things wot's 'angin' up in the shop-winder?' 'yes!' said crass, contemptuously. 'but 'e's no good on plain work. of course 'e does a bit of grainin' an' writin'--after a fashion--when there's any to do, and that ain't often, but on plain work, why, sawkins is as good as 'im for most of it, any day!' 'yes, i suppose 'e is,' replied easton, feeling rather ashamed of himself for the part he was taking in this conversation. although he had for the moment forgotten the existence of bert, crass had instinctively lowered his voice, but the boy--who had left off working to warm his hands by putting them into his trousers pockets--managed, by listening attentively, to hear every word. 'you know there's plenty of people wouldn't give the firm no more work if they knowed about it,' crass continued. 'just fancy sendin' a b--r like that to work in a lady's or gentleman's 'ouse--a bloody atheist!' 'yes, it is a bit orf, when you look at it like that.' 'i know my missis--for one--wouldn't 'ave a feller like that in our place. we 'ad a lodger once and she found out that 'e was a freethinker or something, and she cleared 'im out, bloody quick, i can tell yer!' 'oh, by the way,' said easton, glad of an opportunity to change the subject, 'you don't happen to know of anyone as wants a room, do you? we've got one more than we want, so the wife thought that we might as well let it.' crass thought for a moment. 'can't say as i do,' he answered, doubtfully. 'slyme was talking last week about leaving the place 'e's lodging at, but i don't know whether 'e's got another place to go to. you might ask him. i don't know of anyone else.' 'i'll speak to 'im,' replied easton. 'what's the time? it must be nearly on it.' 'so it is: just on eight,' exclaimed crass, and drawing his whistle he blew a shrill blast upon it to apprise the others of the fact. 'has anyone seen old jack linden since 'e got the push?' inquired harlow during breakfast. 'i seen 'im saterdy,' said slyme. 'is 'e doin' anything?' 'i don't know: i didn't 'ave time to speak to 'im.' 'no, 'e ain't got nothing,' remarked philpot. 'i seen 'im saterdy night, an' 'e told me 'e's been walkin' about ever since.' philpot did not add that he had 'lent' linden a shilling, which he never expected to see again. ''e won't be able to get a job again in a 'urry,' remarked easton. ''e's too old.' 'you know, after all, you can't blame misery for sackin' 'im,' said crass after a pause. ''e was too slow for a funeral.' 'i wonder how much you'll be able to do when you're as old as he is?' said owen. 'p'raps i won't want to do nothing,' replied crass with a feeble laugh. 'i'm goin' to live on me means.' 'i should say the best thing old jack could do would be to go in the union,' said harlow. 'yes: i reckon that's what'll be the end of it,' said easton in a matter-of-fact tone. 'it's a grand finish, isn't it?' observed owen. 'after working hard all one's life to be treated like a criminal at the end.' 'i don't know what you call bein' treated like criminals,' exclaimed crass. 'i reckon they 'as a bloody fine time of it, an' we've got to find the money.' 'oh, for god's sake don't start no more arguments,' cried harlow, addressing owen. 'we 'ad enough of that last week. you can't expect a boss to employ a man when 'e's too old to work.' 'of course not,' said crass. philpot said--nothing. 'i don't see no sense in always grumblin',' crass proceeded. 'these things can't be altered. you can't expect there can be plenty of work for everyone with all this 'ere labour-savin' machinery what's been invented.' 'of course,' said harlow, 'the people what used to be employed on the work what's now done by machinery, has to find something else to do. some of 'em goes to our trade, for instance: the result is there's too many at it, and there ain't enough work to keep 'em all goin'.' 'yes,' cried crass, eagerly. 'that's just what i say. machinery is the real cause of the poverty. that's what i said the other day.' 'machinery is undoubtedly the cause of unemployment,' replied owen, 'but it's not the cause of poverty: that's another matter altogether.' the others laughed derisively. 'well, it seems to me to amount to the same thing,' said harlow, and nearly everyone agreed. 'it doesn't seem to me to amount to the same thing,' owen replied. 'in my opinion, we are all in a state of poverty even when we have employment--the condition we are reduced to when we're out of work is more properly described as destitution.' 'poverty,' continued owen after a short silence, 'consists in a shortage of the necessaries of life. when those things are so scarce or so dear that people are unable to obtain sufficient of them to satisfy all their needs, those people are in a condition of poverty. if you think that the machinery, which makes it possible to produce all the necessaries of life in abundance, is the cause of the shortage, it seems to me that there must be something the matter with your minds.' 'oh, of course we're all bloody fools except you,' snarled crass. 'when they were servin' out the sense, they give you such a 'ell of a lot, there wasn't none left for nobody else.' 'if there wasn't something wrong with your minds,' continued owen, 'you would be able to see that we might have "plenty of work" and yet be in a state of destitution. the miserable wretches who toil sixteen or eighteen hours a day--father, mother and even the little children--making match-boxes, or shirts or blouses, have "plenty of work", but i for one don't envy them. perhaps you think that if there was no machinery and we all had to work thirteen or fourteen hours a day in order to obtain a bare living, we should not be in a condition of poverty? talk about there being something the matter with your minds! if there were not, you wouldn't talk one day about tariff reform as a remedy for unemployment and then the next day admit that machinery is the cause of it! tariff reform won't do away with the machinery, will it?' 'tariff reform is the remedy for bad trade,' returned crass. 'in that case tariff reform is the remedy for a disease that does not exist. if you would only take the trouble to investigate for yourself you would find out that trade was never so good as it is at present: the output--the quantity of commodities of every kind--produced in and exported from this country is greater than it has ever been before. the fortunes amassed in business are larger than ever before: but at the same time--owing, as you have just admitted--to the continued introduction and extended use of wages-saving machinery, the number of human beings being employed is steadily decreasing. i have here,' continued owen, taking out his pocket-book, 'some figures which i copied from the daily mail year book for 1907, page 33: '"it is a very noticeable fact that although the number of factories and their value have vastly increased in the united kingdom, there is an absolute decrease in the number of men and women employed in those factories between 1895 and 1901. this is doubtless due to the displacement of hand labour by machinery!" 'will tariff reform deal with that? are the good, kind capitalists going to abandon the use of wages-saving machinery if we tax all foreign-made goods? does what you call "free trade" help us here? or do you think that abolishing the house of lords, or disestablishing the church, will enable the workers who are displaced to obtain employment? since it is true--as you admit--that machinery is the principal cause of unemployment, what are you going to do about it? what's your remedy?' no one answered, because none of them knew of any remedy: and crass began to feel sorry that he had re-introduced the subject at all. 'in the near future,' continued owen, 'it is probable that horses will be almost entirely superseded by motor cars and electric trams. as the services of horses will be no longer required, all but a few of those animals will be caused to die out: they will no longer be bred to the same extent as formerly. we can't blame the horses for allowing themselves to be exterminated. they have not sufficient intelligence to understand what's being done. therefore they will submit tamely to the extinction of the greater number of their kind. 'as we have seen, a great deal of the work which was formerly done by human beings is now being done by machinery. this machinery belongs to a few people: it is worked for the benefit of those few, just the same as were the human beings it displaced. these few have no longer any need of the services of so many human workers, so they propose to exterminate them! the unnecessary human beings are to be allowed to starve to death! and they are also to be taught that it is wrong to marry and breed children, because the sacred few do not require so many people to work for them as before!' 'yes, and you'll never be able to prevent it, mate!' shouted crass. 'why can't we?' 'because it can't be done!' cried crass fiercely. 'it's impossible!' 'you're always sayin' that everything's all wrong,' complained harlow, 'but why the 'ell don't you tell us 'ow they're goin' to be put right?' 'it doesn't seem to me as if any of you really wish to know. i believe that even if it were proved that it could be done, most of you would be sorry and would do all you could to prevent it.' ''e don't know 'isself,' sneered crass. 'accordin' to 'im, tariff reform ain't no bloody good--free trade ain't no bloody good, and everybody else is wrong! but when you arst 'im what ought to be done--'e's flummoxed.' crass did not feel very satisfied with the result of this machinery argument, but he consoled himself with the reflection that he would be able to flatten out his opponent on another subject. the cutting from the obscurer which he had in his pocket would take a bit of answering! when you have a thing in print--in black and white--why there it is, and you can't get away from it! if it wasn't right, a paper like that would never have printed it. however, as it was now nearly half past eight, he resolved to defer this triumph till another occasion. it was too good a thing to be disposed of in a hurry. chapter 8 the cap on the stairs after breakfast, when they were working together in the drawing-room, easton, desiring to do owen a good turn, thought he would put him on his guard, and repeated to him in a whisper the substance of the conversation he had held with crass concerning him. 'of course, you needn't mention that i told you, frank,' he said, 'but i thought i ought to let you know: you can take it from me, crass ain't no friend of yours.' 'i've know that for a long time, mate,' replied owen. 'thanks for telling me, all the same.' 'the bloody rotter's no friend of mine either, or anyone else's, for that matter,' easton continued, 'but of course it doesn't do to fall out with 'im because you never know what he'd go and say to ol' 'unter.' 'yes, one has to remember that.' 'of course we all know what's the matter with 'im as far as you're concerned,' easton went on. 'he don't like 'avin' anyone on the firm wot knows more about the work than 'e does 'imself--thinks 'e might git worked out of 'is job.' owen laughed bitterly. 'he needn't be afraid of me on that account. i wouldn't have his job if it were offered to me.' 'but 'e don't think so,' replied easton, 'and that's why 'e's got 'is knife into you.' 'i believe that what he said about hunter is true enough,' said owen. 'every time he comes here he tries to goad me into doing or saying something that would give him an excuse to tell me to clear out. i might have done it before now if i had not guessed what he was after, and been on my guard.' meantime, crass, in the kitchen, had resumed his seat by the fire with the purpose of finishing his pipe of tobacco. presently he took out his pocket-book and began to write in it with a piece of black-lead pencil. when the pipe was smoked out he knocked the bowl against the grate to get rid of the ash, and placed the pipe in his waistcoat pocket. then, having torn out the leaf on which he had been writing, he got up and went into the pantry, where bert was still struggling with the old whitewash. 'ain't yer nearly finished? i don't want yer to stop in 'ere all day, yer know.' 'i ain't got much more to do now,' said the boy. 'just this bit under the bottom shelf and then i'm done.' 'yes, and a bloody fine mess you've made, what i can see of it!' growled crass. 'look at all this water on the floor!' bert looked guiltily at the floor and turned very red. 'i'll clean it all up', he stammered. 'as soon as i've got this bit of wall done, i'll wipe all the mess up with the swab.' crass now took a pot of paint and some brushes and, having put some more fuel on the fire, began in a leisurely way to paint some of the woodwork in the kitchen. presently bert came in. 'i've finished there,' he said. 'about time, too. you'll 'ave to look a bit livelier than you do, you know, or me and you will fall out.' bert did not answer. 'now i've got another job for yer. you're fond of drorin, ain't yer?' continued crass in a jeering tone. 'yes, a little,' replied the boy, shamefacedly. 'well,' said crass, giving him the leaf he had torn out of the pocket-book, 'you can go up to the yard and git them things and put 'em on a truck and dror it up 'ere, and git back as soon as you can. just look at the paper and see if you understand it before you go. i don't want you to make no mistakes.' bert took the paper and with some difficulty read as follows: i pare steppes 8 foot 1/2 gallon plastor off perish 1 pale off witewosh 12 lbs wite led 1/2 gallon linsede hoil do. do. turps 'i can make it out all right.' 'you'd better bring the big truck,' said crass, 'because i want you to take the venetian blinds with you on it when you take it back tonight. they've got to be painted at the shop.' 'all right.' when the boy had departed crass took a stroll through the house to see how the others were getting on. then he returned to the kitchen and proceeded with his work. crass was about thirty-eight years of age, rather above middle height and rather stout. he had a considerable quantity of curly black hair and wore a short beard of the same colour. his head was rather large, but low, and flat on top. when among his cronies he was in the habit of referring to his obesity as the result of good nature and a contented mind. behind his back other people attributed it to beer, some even going to far as to nickname him the 'tank'. there was no work of a noisy kind being done this morning. both the carpenters and the bricklayers having been taken away, temporarily, to another 'job'. at the same time there was not absolute silence: occasionally crass could hear the voices of the other workmen as they spoke to each other, sometimes shouting from one room to another. now and then harlow's voice rang through the house as he sang snatches of music-hall songs or a verse of a moody and sankey hymn, and occasionally some of the others joined in the chorus or interrupted the singer with squeals and catcalls. once or twice crass was on the point of telling them to make less row: there would be a fine to do if nimrod came and heard them. just as he had made up his mind to tell them to stop the noise, it ceased of itself and he heard loud whispers: 'look out! someone's comin'.' the house became very quiet. crass put out his pipe and opened the window and the back door to get rid of the smell of the tobacco smoke. then he shifted the pair of steps noisily, and proceeded to work more quickly than before. most likely it was old misery. he worked on for some time in silence, but no one came to the kitchen: whoever it was must have gone upstairs. crass listened attentively. who could it be? he would have liked to go to see whom it was, but at the same time, if it were nimrod, crass wished to be discovered at work. he therefore waited a little longer and presently he heard the sound of voices upstairs but was unable to recognize them. he was just about to go out into the passage to listen, when whoever it was began coming downstairs. crass at once resumed his work. the footsteps came along the passage leading to the kitchen: slow, heavy, ponderous footsteps, but yet the sound was not such as would be made by a man heavily shod. it was not misery, evidently. as the footsteps entered the kitchen, crass looked round and beheld a very tall, obese figure, with a large, fleshy, coarse-featured, clean-shaven face, and a great double chin, the complexion being of the colour and appearance of the fat of uncooked bacon. a very large fleshy nose and weak-looking pale blue eyes, the slightly inflamed lids being almost destitute of eye-lashes. he had large fat feet cased in soft calfskin boots, with drab-coloured spats. his overcoat, heavily trimmed with sealskin, reached just below the knees, and although the trousers were very wide they were filled by the fat legs within, the shape of the calves being distinctly perceptible. even as the feet seemed about to burst the uppers of the boots, so the legs appeared to threaten the trousers with disruption. this man was so large that his figure completely filled up the doorway, and as he came in he stooped slightly to avoid damaging the glittering silk hat on his head. one gloved hand was thrust into the pocket of the overcoat and in the other he carried a small gladstone bag. when crass beheld this being, he touched his cap respectfully. 'good morning, sir!' 'good morning. they told me upstairs that i should find the foreman here. are you the foreman?' 'yes, sir.' 'i see you're getting on with the work here.' 'ho yes sir, we're beginning to make a bit hov a show now, sir,' replied crass, speaking as if he had a hot potato in his mouth. 'mr rushton isn't here yet, i suppose?' 'no, sir: 'e don't horfun come hon the job hin the mornin, sir; 'e generally comes hafternoons, sir, but mr 'unter's halmost sure to be 'ere presently, sir.' 'it's mr rushton i want to see: i arranged to meet him here at ten o'clock; but'--looking at his watch--'i'm rather before my time.' 'he'll be here presently, i suppose,' added mr sweater. 'i'll just take a look round till he comes.' 'yes, sir,' responded crass, walking behind him obsequiously as he went out of the room. hoping that the gentleman might give him a shilling, crass followed him into the front hall and began explaining what progress had so far been made with the work, but as mr sweater answered only by monosyllables and grunts, crass presently concluded that his conversation was not appreciated and returned to the kitchen. meantime, upstairs, philpot had gone into newman's room and was discussing with him the possibility of extracting from mr sweater the price of a little light refreshment. 'i think,' he remarked, 'that we oughter see-ise this 'ere tuneropperty to touch 'im for an allowance.' 'we won't git nothin' out of 'im, mate,' returned newman. ''e's a red-'ot teetotaller.' 'that don't matter. 'ow's 'e to know that we buys beer with it? we might 'ave tea, or ginger ale, or lime-juice and glycerine for all 'e knows!' mr sweater now began ponderously re-ascending the stairs and presently came into the room where philpot was. the latter greeted him with respectful cordiality: 'good morning, sir.' 'good morning. you've begun painting up here, then.' 'yes, sir, we've made a start on it,' replied philpot, affably. 'is this door wet?' asked sweater, glancing apprehensively at the sleeve of his coat. 'yes, sir,' answered philpot, and added, as he looked meaningly at the great man, 'the paint is wet, sir, but the painters is dry.' 'confound it!' exclaimed sweater, ignoring, or not hearing the latter part of philpot's reply. 'i've got some of the beastly stuff on my coat sleeve.' 'oh, that's nothing, sir,' cried philpot, secretly delighted. 'i'll get that orf for yer in no time. you wait just 'arf a mo!' he had a piece of clean rag in his tool bag, and there was a can of turps in the room. moistening the rag slightly with turps he carefully removed the paint from sweater's sleeve. 'it's all orf now, sir,' he remarked, as he rubbed the place with a dry part of the rag. 'the smell of the turps will go away in about a hour's time.' 'thanks,' said sweater. philpot looked at him wistfully, but sweater evidently did not understand, and began looking about the room. 'i see they've put a new piece of skirting here,' he observed. 'yes, sir,' said newman, who came into the room just then to get the turps. 'the old piece was all to bits with dry-rot.' 'i feel as if i 'ad a touch of the dry-rot meself, don't you?' said philpot to newman, who smiled feebly and cast a sidelong glance at sweater, who did not appear to notice the significance of the remark, but walked out of the room and began climbing up to the next floor, where harlow and sawkins were working. 'well, there's a bleeder for yer!' said philpot with indignation. 'after all the trouble i took to clean 'is coat! not a bloody stiver! well, it takes the cake, don't it?' 'i told you 'ow it would be, didn't i?' replied newman. 'p'raps i didn't make it plain enough,' said philpot, thoughtfully. 'we must try to get some of our own back somehow, you know.' going out on the landing he called softly upstairs. 'i say, harlow.' 'hallo,' said that individual, looking over the banisters. ''ow are yer getting on up there?' 'oh, all right, you know.' 'pretty dry job, ain't it?' philpot continued, raising his voice a little and winking at harlow. 'yes, it is, rather,' replied harlow with a grin. 'i think this would be a very good time to take up the collection, don't you?' 'yes, it wouldn't be a bad idear.' 'well, i'll put me cap on the stairs,' said philpot, suiting the action to the word. 'you never knows yer luck. things is gettin' a bit serious on this floor, you know; my mate's fainted away once already!' philpot now went back to his room to await developments: but as sweater made no sign, he returned to the landing and again hailed harlow. 'i always reckon a man can work all the better after 'e's 'ad a drink: you can seem to get over more of it, like.' 'oh, that's true enough,' responded harlow. 'i've often noticed it meself.' sweater came out of the front bedroom and passed into one of the back rooms without any notice of either of the men. 'i'm afraid it's a frost, mate,' harlow whispered, and philpot, shaking his head sadly, returned to work; but in a little while he came out again and once more accosted harlow. 'i knowed a case once,' he said in a melancholy tone, 'where a chap died--of thirst--on a job just like this; and at the inquest the doctor said as 'arf a pint would 'a saved 'im!' 'it must 'ave been a norrible death,' remarked harlow. ''orrible ain't the work for it, mate,' replied philpot, mournfully. 'it was something chronic!' after this final heartrending appeal to sweater's humanity they returned to work, satisfied that, whatever the result of their efforts, they had done their best. they had placed the matter fully and fairly before him: nothing more could be said: the issue now rested entirely with him. but it was all in vain. sweater either did not or would not understand, and when he came downstairs he took no notice whatever of the cap which philpot had placed so conspicuously in the centre of the landing floor. chapter 9 who is to pay? sweater reached the hall almost at the same moment that rushton entered by the front door. they greeted each other in a friendly way and after a few remarks concerning the work that was being done, they went into the drawing-room where owen and easton were and rushton said: 'what about this room? have you made up your mind what you're going to have done to it?' 'yes,' replied sweater; 'but i'll tell you about that afterwards. what i'm anxious about is the drains. have you brought the plans?' 'yes.' 'what's it going to cost?' 'just wait a minute,' said rushton, with a slight gesture calling sweater's attention to the presence of the two workmen. sweater understood. 'you might leave that for a few minutes, will you?' rushton continued, addressing owen and easton. 'go and get on with something else for a little while.' when they were alone, rushton closed the door and remarked: 'it's always as well not to let these fellows know more than is necessary.' sweater agreed. 'now this 'ere drain work is really two separate jobs,' said rushton. 'first, the drains of the house: that is, the part of the work that' actually on your ground. when that's done, there will 'ave to be a pipe carried right along under this private road to the main road to connect the drains of the house with the town main. you follow me?' 'perfectly. what's it going to cost for the lot?' 'for the drains of the house, l25.0.0. and for the connecting pipe l30.0.0. l55.0.0. for the lot.' 'um! that the lower you can do it for, eh?' 'that's the lowest. i've figured it out most carefully, the time and materials, and that's practically all i'm charging you.' the truth of the matter was that rushton had had nothing whatever to do with estimating the cost of this work: he had not the necessary knowledge to do so. hunter had drawn the plans, calculated the cost and prepared the estimate. 'i've been thinking over this business lately,' said sweater, looking at rushton with a cunning leer. 'i don't see why i should have to pay for the connecting pipe. the corporation ought to pay for that. what do you say?' rushton laughed. 'i don't see why not,' he replied. 'i think we could arrange it all right, don't you?' sweater went on. 'anyhow, the work will have to be done, so you'd better let 'em get on with it. l55.0.0. covers both jobs, you say?' 'yes.' 'oh, all right, you get on with it and we'll see what can be done with the corporation later on.' 'i don't suppose we'll find 'em very difficult to deal with,' said rushton with a grin, and sweater smiled agreement. as they were passing through the hall they met hunter, who had just arrived. he was rather surprised to see them, as he knew nothing of their appointment. he wished them 'good morning' in an awkward hesitating undertone as if he were doubtful how his greeting would be received. sweater nodded slightly, but rushton ignored him altogether and nimrod passed on looking and feeling like a disreputable cur that had just been kicked. as sweater and rushton walked together about the house, hunter hovered about them at a respectable distance, hoping that presently some notice might be taken of him. his dismal countenance became even longer than usual when he observed that they were about to leave the house without appearing even to know that he was there. however, just as they were going out, rushton paused on the threshold and called him: 'mr hunter!' 'yes, sir.' nimrod ran to him like a dog taken notice of by his master: if he had possessed a tail, it is probable that he would have wagged it. rushton gave him the plans with an intimation that the work was to be proceeded with. for some time after they were gone, hunter crawled silently about the house, in and out of the rooms, up and down the corridors and the staircases. after a while he went into the room where newman was and stood quietly watching him for about ten minutes as he worked. the man was painting the skirting, and just then he came to a part that was split in several places, so he took his knife and began to fill the cracks with putty. he was so nervous under hunter's scrutiny that his hand trembled to such an extent that it took him about twice as long as it should have done, and hunter told him so with brutal directness. 'never mind about puttying up such little cracks as them!' he shouted. 'fill 'em up with the paint. we can't afford to pay you for messing about like that!' newman made no reply. misery found no excuse for bullying anyone else, because they were all tearing into it for all they were worth. as he wandered up and down the house like an evil spirit, he was followed by the furtively unfriendly glances of the men, who cursed him in their hearts as he passed. he sneaked into the drawing-room and after standing with a malignant expression, silently watching owen and easton, he came out again without having uttered a word. although he frequently acted in this manner, yet somehow today the circumstance worried owen considerably. he wondered uneasily what it meant, and began to feel vaguely apprehensive. hunter's silence seemed more menacing than his speech. chapter 10 the long hill bert arrived at the shop and with as little delay as possible loaded up the handcart with all the things he had been sent for and started on the return journey. he got on all right in the town, because the roads were level and smooth, being paved with wood blocks. if it had only been like that all the way it would have been easy enough, although he was a small boy for such a large truck, and such a heavy load. while the wood road lasted the principal trouble he experienced was the difficulty of seeing where he was going, the handcart being so high and himself so short. the pair of steps on the cart of course made it all the worse in that respect. however, by taking great care he managed to get through the town all right, although he narrowly escaped colliding with several vehicles, including two or three motor cars and an electric tram, besides nearly knocking over an old woman who was carrying a large bundle of washing. from time to time he saw other small boys of his acquaintance, some of them former schoolmates. some of these passed by carrying heavy loads of groceries in baskets, and others with wooden trays full of joints of meat. unfortunately, the wood paving ceased at the very place where the ground began to rise. bert now found himself at the beginning of a long stretch of macadamized road which rose slightly and persistently throughout its whole length. bert had pushed a cart up this road many times before and consequently knew the best method of tackling it. experience had taught him that a full frontal attack on this hill was liable to failure, so on this occasion he followed his usual plan of making diagonal movements, crossing the road repeatedly from right to left and left to right, after the fashion of a sailing ship tacking against the wind, and halting about every twenty yards to rest and take breath. the distance he was to go was regulated, not so much by his powers of endurance as by the various objects by the wayside--the lamp-posts, for instance. during each rest he used to look ahead and select a certain lamp-post or street corner as the next stopping-place, and when he start again he used to make the most strenuous and desperate efforts to reach it. generally the goal he selected was too distant, for he usually overestimated his strength, and whenever he was forced to give in he ran the truck against the kerb and stood there panting for breath and feeling profoundly disappointed at his failure. on the present occasion, during one of these rests, it flashed upon him that he was being a very long time: he would have to buck up or he would get into a row: he was not even half-way up the road yet! selecting a distant lamp-post, he determined to reach it before resting again. the cart had a single shaft with a cross-piece at the end, forming the handle: he gripped this fiercely with both hands and, placing his chest against it, with a mighty effort he pushed the cart before him. it seemed to get heavier and heavier every foot of the way. his whole body, but especially the thighs and calves of his legs, pained terribly, but still he strained and struggled and said to himself that he would not give in until he reached the lamp-post. finding that the handle hurt his chest, he lowered it to his waist, but that being even more painful he raised it again to his chest, and struggled savagely on, panting for breath and with his heart beating wildly. the cart became heavier and heavier. after a while it seemed to the boy as if there were someone at the front of it trying to push him back down the hill. this was such a funny idea that for a moment he felt inclined to laugh, but the inclination went almost as soon as it came and was replaced by the dread that he would not be able to hold out long enough to reach the lamp-post, after all. clenching his teeth, he made a tremendous effort and staggered forward two or three more steps and then--the cart stopped. he struggled with it despairingly for a few seconds, but all the strength had suddenly gone out of him: his legs felt so weak that he nearly collapsed on to the ground, and the cart began to move backwards down the hill. he was just able to stick to it and guide it so that it ran into and rested against the kerb, and then he stood holding it in a half-dazed way, very pale, saturated with perspiration, and trembling. his legs in particular shook so much that he felt that unless he could sit down for a little, he would fall down. he lowered the handle very carefully so as not to spill the whitewash out of the pail which was hanging from a hook under the cart, then, sitting down on the kerbstone, he leaned wearily against the wheel. a little way down the road was a church with a clock in the tower. it was five minutes to ten by this clock. bert said to himself that when it was ten he would make another start. whilst he was resting he thought of many things. just behind that church was a field with several ponds in it where he used to go with other boys to catch effets. if it were not for the cart he would go across now, to see whether there were any there still. he remembered that he had been very eager to leave school and go to work, but they used to be fine old times after all. then he thought of the day when his mother took him to mr rushton's office to 'bind' him. he remembered that day very vividly: it was almost a year ago. how nervous he had been! his hand had trembled so that he was scarcely able to hold the pen. and even when it was all over, they had both felt very miserable, somehow. his mother had been very nervous in the office also, and when they got home she cried a lot and called him her poor little fatherless boy, and said she hoped he would be good and try to learn. and then he cried as well, and promised her that he would do his best. he reflected with pride that he was keeping his promise about being a good boy and trying to learn: in fact, he knew a great deal about the trade already--he could paint back doors as well as anybody! and railings as well. owen had taught him lots of things and had promised to do some patterns of graining for him so that he might practise copying them at home in the evenings. owen was a fine chap. bert resolved that he would tell him what crass had been saying to easton. just fancy, the cheek of a rotter like crass, trying to get owen the sack! it would be more like it if crass was to be sacked himself, so that owen could be the foreman. one minute to ten. with a heavy heart bert watched the clock. his legs were still aching very badly. he could not see the hands of the clock moving, but they were creeping on all the same. now, the minute hand was over the edge of the number, and he began to deliberate whether he might not rest for another five minutes? but he had been such a long time already on his errand that he dismissed the thought. the minute hand was now upright and it was time to go on. just as he was about to get up a harsh voice behind him said: 'how much longer are you going to sit there?' bert started up guiltily, and found himself confronted by mr rushton, who was regarding him with an angry frown, whilst close by towered the colossal figure of the obese sweater, the expression on his greasy countenance betokening the pain he experienced on beholding such as appalling example of juvenile depravity. 'what do you mean by sich conduct?' demanded rushton, indignantly. 'the idear of sitting there like that when most likely the men are waiting for them things?' crimson with shame and confusion, the boy made no reply. 'you've been there a long time,' continued rushton, 'i've been watchin' you all the time i've been comin' down the road.' bert tried to speak to explain why he had been resting, but his mouth and his tongue had become quite parched from terror and he was unable to articulate a single word. 'you know, that's not the way to get on in life, my boy,' observed sweater lifting his forefinger and shaking his fat head reproachfully. 'get along with you at once!' rushton said, roughly. 'i'm surprised at yer! the idear! sitting down in my time!' this was quite true. rushton was not merely angry, but astonished at the audacity of the boy. that anyone in his employment should dare to have the impertinence to sit down in his time was incredible. the boy lifted the handle of the cart and once more began to push it up the hill. it seemed heavier now that ever, but he managed to get on somehow. he kept glancing back after rushton and sweater, who presently turned a corner and were lost to view: then he ran the cart to the kerb again to have a breathe. he couldn't have kept up much further without a spell even if they had still been watching him, but he didn't rest for more than about half a minute this time, because he was afraid they might be peeping round the corner at him. after this he gave up the lamp-post system and halted for a minute or so at regular short intervals. in this way, he at length reached the top of the hill, and with a sigh of relief congratulated himself that the journey was practically over. just before he arrived at the gate of the house, he saw hunter sneak out and mount his bicycle and ride away. bert wheeled his cart up to the front door and began carrying in the things. whilst thus engaged he noticed philpot peeping cautiously over the banisters of the staircase, and called out to him: 'give us a hand with this bucket of whitewash, will yer, joe?' 'certainly, me son, with the greatest of hagony,' replied philpot as he hurried down the stairs. as they were carrying it in philpot winked at bert and whispered: 'did yer see pontius pilate anywheres outside?' ''e went away on 'is bike just as i come in at the gate.' 'did 'e? thank gord for that! i don't wish 'im no 'arm,' said philpot, fervently, 'but i 'opes 'e gets runned over with a motor.' in this wish bert entirely concurred, and similar charitable sentiments were expressed by all the others as soon as they heard that misery was gone. just before four o'clock that afternoon bert began to load up the truck with the venetian blinds, which had been taken down some days previously. 'i wonder who'll have the job of paintin' 'em?' remarked philpot to newman. 'p'raps's they'll take a couple of us away from ere.' 'i shouldn't think so. we're short-'anded 'ere already. most likely they'll put on a couple of fresh 'ands. there's a 'ell of a lot of work in all them blinds, you know: i reckon they'll 'ave to 'ave three or four coats, the state they're in.' 'yes. no doubt that's what will be done,' replied newman, and added with a mirthless laugh: 'i don't suppose they'll have much difficulty in getting a couple of chaps.' 'no, you're right, mate. there's plenty of 'em walkin' about as a week's work would be a gordsend to.' 'come to think of it,' continued newman after a pause, 'i believe the firm used to give all their blind work to old latham, the venetian blind maker. prap's they'll give 'im this lot to do.' 'very likely,' replied philpot, 'i should think 'e can do 'em cheaper even than us chaps, and that's all the firm cares about.' how far their conjectures were fulfilled will appear later. shortly after bert was gone it became so dark that it was necessary to light the candles, and philpot remarked that although he hated working under such conditions, yet he was always glad when lighting up time came, because then knocking off time was not very far behind. about five minutes to five, just as they were all putting their things away for the night, nimrod suddenly appeared in the house. he had come hoping to find some of them ready dressed to go home before the proper time. having failed in this laudable enterprise, he stood silently by himself for some seconds in the drawing-room. this was a spacious and lofty apartment with a large semicircular bay window. round the ceiling was a deep cornice. in the semi-darkness the room appeared to be of even greater proportions than it really was. after standing thinking in this room for a little while, hunter turned and strode out to the kitchen, where the men were preparing to go home. owen was taking off his blouse and apron as the other entered. hunter addressed him with a malevolent snarl: 'you can call at the office tonight as you go home.' owen's heart seemed to stop beating. all the petty annoyances he had endured from hunter rushed into his memory, together with what easton had told him that morning. he stood, still and speechless, holding his apron in his hand and staring at the manager. 'what for?' he ejaculated at length. 'what's the matter?' 'you'll find out what you're wanted for when you get there,' returned hunter as he went out of the room and away from the house. when he was gone a dead silence prevailed. the hands ceased their preparations for departure and looked at each other and at owen in astonishment. to stand a man off like that--when the job was not half finished--and for no apparent reason: and of a monday, too. it was unheard of. there was a general chorus of indignation. harlow and philpot especially were very wroth. 'if it comes to that,' harlow shouted, 'they've got no bloody right to do it! we're entitled to an hour's notice.' 'of course we are!' cried philpot, his goggle eyes rolling wildly with wrath. 'and i should 'ave it too, if it was me. you take my tip, frank: charge up to six o'clock on yer time sheet and get some of your own back.' everyone joined in the outburst of indignant protest. everyone, that is, except crass and slyme. but then they were not exactly in the kitchen: they were out in the scullery putting their things away, and so it happened that they said nothing, although they exchanged significant looks. owen had by this time recovered his self-possession. he collected all his tools and put them with his apron and blouse into his tool-bag with the purpose of taking them with him that night, but on reflection he resolved not to do so. after all, it was not absolutely certain that he was going to be 'stood off': possibly they were going to send him on some other job. they kept all together--some walking on the pavement and some in the road--until they got down town, and then separated. crass, sawkins, bundy and philpot adjourned to the 'cricketers' for a drink, newman went on by himself, slyme accompanied easton who had arranged with him to come that night to see the bedroom, and owen went in the direction of the office. chapter 11 hands and brains rushton & co.'s premises were situated in one of the principal streets of mugsborough and consisted of a double-fronted shop with plate glass windows. the shop extended right through to the narrow back street which ran behind it. the front part of the shop was stocked with wall-hangings, mouldings, stands showing patterns of embossed wall and ceiling decorations, cases of brushes, tins of varnish and enamel, and similar things. the office was at the rear and was separated from the rest of the shop by a partition, glazed with muranese obscured glass. this office had two doors, one in the partition, giving access to the front shop, and the other by the side of the window and opening on to the back street. the glass of the lower sash of the back window consisted of one large pane on which was painted 'rushton & co.' in black letters on a white ground. owen stood outside this window for two or three seconds before knocking. there was a bright light in the office. then he knocked at the door, which was at once opened from the inside by hunter, and owen went in. rushton was seated in an armchair at his desk, smoking a cigar and reading one of several letters that were lying before him. at the back was a large unframed photograph of the size known as half-plate of the interior of some building. at another desk, or rather table, at the other side of the office, a young woman was sitting writing in a large ledger. there was a typewriting machine on the table at her side. rushton glanced up carelessly as owen came in, but took no further notice of him. 'just wait a minute,' hunter said to owen, and then, after conversing in a low tone with rushton for a few minutes, the foreman put on his hat and went out of the office through the partition door which led into the front shop. owen stood waiting for rushton to speak. he wondered why hunter had sneaked off and felt inclined to open the door and call him back. one thing he was determined about: he meant to have some explanation: he would not submit tamely to be dismissed without any just reason. when he had finished reading the letter, rushton looked up, and, leaning comfortably back in his chair, he blew a cloud of smoke from his cigar, and said in an affable, indulgent tone, such as one might use to a child: 'you're a bit of a hartist, ain't yer?' owen was so surprised at this reception that he was for the moment unable to reply. 'you know what i mean,' continued rushton; 'decorating work, something like them samples of yours what's hanging up there.' he noticed the embarrassment of owen's manner, and was gratified. he thought the man was confused at being spoken to by such a superior person as himself. mr rushton was about thirty-five years of age, with light grey eyes, fair hair and moustache, and his complexion was a whitey drab. he was tall--about five feet ten inches--and rather clumsily built; not corpulent, but fat--in good condition. he appeared to be very well fed and well cared for generally. his clothes were well made, of good quality and fitted him perfectly. he was dressed in a grey norfolk suit, dark brown boots and knitted woollen stockings reaching to the knee. he was a man who took himself very seriously. there was an air of pomposity and arrogant importance about him which--considering who and what he was--would have been entertaining to any observer gifted with a sense of humour. 'yes,' replied owen at last. 'i can do a little of that sort of work, although of course i don't profess to be able to do it as well or as quickly as a man who does nothing else.' 'oh, no, of course not, but i think you could manage this all right. it's that drawing-room at the 'cave'. mr sweater's been speaking to me about it. it seems that when he was over in paris some time since he saw a room that took his fancy. the walls and ceiling was not papered, but painted: you know what i mean; sort of panelled out, and decorated with stencils and hand painting. this 'ere's a photer of it: it's done in a sort of japanese fashion.' he handed the photograph to owen as he spoke. it represented a room, the walls and ceiling of which were decorated in a moorish style. 'at first mr sweater thought of getting a firm from london to do it, but 'e gave up the idear on account of the expense; but if you can do it so that it doesn't cost too much, i think i can persuade 'im to go in for it. but if it's goin' to cost a lot it won't come off at all. 'e'll just 'ave a frieze put up and 'ave the room papered in the ordinary way.' this was not true: rushton said it in case owen might want to be paid extra wages while doing the work. the truth was that sweater was going to have the room decorated in any case, and intended to get a london firm to do it. he had consented rather unwillingly to let rushton & co. submit him an estimate, because he thought they would not be able to do the work satisfactorily. owen examined the photograph closely. 'could you do anything like that in that room?' 'yes, i think so,' replied owen. 'well, you know, i don't want you to start on the job and not be able to finish it. can you do it or not?' rushton felt sure that owen could do it, and was very desirous that he should undertake it, but he did not want him to know that. he wished to convey the impression that he was almost indifferent whether owen did the work or not. in fact, he wished to seem to be conferring a favour upon him by procuring him such a nice job as this. 'i'll tell you what i can do,' owen replied. 'i can make you a watercolour sketch--a design--and if you think it good enough, of course, i can reproduce it on the ceiling and the walls, and i can let you know, within a little, how long it will take.' rushton appeared to reflect. owen stood examining the photograph and began to feel an intense desire to do the work. rushton shook his head dubiously. 'if i let you spend a lot of time over the sketches and then mr sweater does not approve of your design, where do i come in?' 'well, suppose we put it like this: i'll draw the design at home in the evenings--in my own time. if it's accepted, i'll charge you for the time i've spent upon it. if it's not suitable, i won't charge the time at all.' rushton brightened up considerably. 'all right. you can do so,' he said with an affectation of good nature, 'but you mustn't pile it on too thick, in any case, you know, because, as i said before, 'e don't want to spend too much money on it. in fact, if it's going to cost a great deal 'e simply won't 'ave it done at all.' rushton knew owen well enough to be sure that no consideration of time or pains would prevent him from putting the very best that was in him into this work. he knew that if the man did the room at all there was no likelihood of his scamping it for the sake of getting it done quickly; and for that matter rushton did not wish him to hurry over it. all that he wanted to do was to impress upon owen from the very first that he must not charge too much time. any profit that it was possible to make out of the work, rushton meant to secure for himself. he was a smart man, this rushton, he possessed the ideal character: the kind of character that is necessary for any man who wishes to succeed in business--to get on in life. in other words, his disposition was very similar to that of a pig--he was intensely selfish. no one had any right to condemn him for this, because all who live under the present system practise selfishness, more or less. we must be selfish: the system demands it. we must be selfish or we shall be hungry and ragged and finally die in the gutter. the more selfish we are the better off we shall be. in the 'battle of life' only the selfish and cunning are able to survive: all others are beaten down and trampled under foot. no one can justly be blamed for acting selfishly--it is a matter of self-preservation--we must either injure or be injured. it is the system that deserves to be blamed. what those who wish to perpetuate the system deserve is another question. 'when do you think you'll have the drawings ready?' inquired rushton. 'can you get them done tonight?' 'i'm afraid not,' replied owen, feeling inclined to laugh at the absurdity of the question. 'it will need a little thinking about.' 'when can you have them ready then? this is monday. wednesday morning?' owen hesitated. 'we don't want to keep 'im waiting too long, you know, or 'e may give up the idear altogether.' 'well, say friday morning, then,' said owen, resolving that he would stay up all night if necessary to get it done. rushton shook his head. 'can't you get it done before that? i'm afraid that if we keeps 'im waiting all that time we may lose the job altogether.' 'i can't get them done any quicker in my spare time,' returned owen, flushing. 'if you like to let me stay home tomorrow and charge the time the same as if i had gone to work at the house, i could go to my ordinary work on wednesday and let you have the drawings on thursday morning.' 'oh, all right,' said rushton as he returned to the perusal of his letters. that night, long after his wife and frankie were asleep, owen worked in the sitting-room, searching through old numbers of the decorators' journal and through the illustrations in other books of designs for examples of moorish work, and making rough sketches in pencil. he did not attempt to finish anything yet: it was necessary to think first; but he roughed out the general plan, and when at last he did go to bed he could not sleep for a long time. he almost fancied he was in the drawing-room at the 'cave'. first of all it would be necessary to take down the ugly plaster centre flower with its crevices all filled up with old whitewash. the cornice was all right; it was fortunately a very simple one, with a deep cove and without many enrichments. then, when the walls and the ceiling had been properly prepared, the ornamentation would be proceeded with. the walls, divided into panels and arches containing painted designs and lattice-work; the panels of the door decorated in a similar manner. the mouldings of the door and window frames picked out with colours and gold so as to be in character with the other work; the cove of the cornice, a dull yellow with a bold ornament in colour--gold was not advisable in the hollow because of the unequal distribution of the light, but some of the smaller mouldings of the cornice should be gold. on the ceiling there would be one large panel covered with an appropriate design in gold and colours and surrounded by a wide margin or border. to separate this margin from the centre panel there would be a narrow border, and another border--but wider--round the outer edge of the margin, where the ceiling met the cornice. both these borders and the margin would be covered with ornamentation in colour and gold. great care would be necessary when deciding what parts were to be gilded because--whilst large masses of gilding are apt to look garish and in bad taste--a lot of fine gold lines are ineffective, especially on a flat surface, where they do not always catch the light. process by process he traced the work, and saw it advancing stage by stage until, finally, the large apartment was transformed and glorified. and then in the midst of the pleasure he experienced in the planning of the work there came the fear that perhaps they would not have it done at all. the question, what personal advantage would he gain never once occurred to owen. he simply wanted to do the work; and he was so fully occupied with thinking and planning how it was to be done that the question of profit was crowded out. but although this question of what profit could be made out of the work never occurred to owen, it would in due course by fully considered by mr rushton. in fact, it was the only thing about the work that mr rushton would think of at all: how much money could be made out of it. this is what is meant by the oft-quoted saying, 'the men work with their hands--the master works with his brains.' chapter 12 the letting of the room it will be remembered that when the men separated, owen going to the office to see rushton, and the others on their several ways, easton and slyme went together. during the day easton had found an opportunity of speaking to him about the bedroom. slyme was about to leave the place where he was at present lodging, and he told easton that although he had almost decided on another place he would take a look at the room. at easton's suggestion they arranged that slyme was to accompany him home that night. as the former remarked, slyme could come to see the place, and if he didn't like it as well as the other he was thinking of taking, there was no harm done. ruth had contrived to furnish the room. some of the things she had obtained on credit from a second-hand furniture dealer. exactly how she had managed, easton did not know, but it was done. 'this is the house,' said easton. as they passed through, the gate creaked loudly on its hinges and then closed of itself rather noisily. ruth had just been putting the child to sleep and she stood up as they came in, hastily fastening the bodice of her dress as she did so. 'i've brought a gentleman to see you,' said easton. although she knew that he was looking out for someone for the room, ruth had not expected him to bring anyone home in this sudden manner, and she could not help wishing that he had told her beforehand of his intention. it being monday, she had been very busy all day and she was conscious that she was rather untidy in her appearance. her long brown hair was twisted loosely into a coil behind her head. she blushed in an embarrassed way as the young man stared at her. easton introduced slyme by name and they shook hands; and then at ruth's suggestion easton took a light to show him the room, and while they were gone ruth hurriedly tidied her hair and dress. when they came down again slyme said he thought the room would suit him very well. what were the terms? did he wish to take the room only--just to lodge? inquired ruth, or would he prefer to board as well? slyme intimated that he desired the latter arrangement. in that case she thought twelve shillings a week would be fair. she believed that was about the usual amount. of course that would include washing, and if his clothes needed a little mending she would do it for him. slyme expressed himself satisfied with these terms, which were as ruth had said--about the usual ones. he would take the room, but he was not leaving his present lodgings until saturday. it was therefore agreed that he was to bring his box on saturday evening. when he had gone, easton and ruth stood looking at each other in silence. ever since this plan of letting the room first occurred to them they had been very anxious to accomplish it; and yet, now that it was done, they felt dissatisfied and unhappy, as if they had suddenly experienced some irreparable misfortune. in that moment they remembered nothing of the darker side of their life together. the hard times and the privations were far off and seemed insignificant beside the fact that this stranger was for the future to share their home. to ruth especially it seemed that the happiness of the past twelve months had suddenly come to an end. she shrank with involuntary aversion and apprehension from the picture that rose before her of the future in which this intruder appeared the most prominent figure, dominating everything and interfering with every detail of their home life. of course they had known all this before, but somehow it had never seemed so objectionable as it did now, and as easton thought of it he was filled an unreasonable resentment against slyme, as if the latter had forced himself upon them against their will. 'damn him!' he thought. 'i wish i'd never brought him here at all!' ruth did not appear to him to be very happy about it either. 'well?' he said at last. 'what do you think of him?' 'oh, he'll be all right, i suppose.' 'for my part, i wish he wasn't coming,' easton continued. 'that's just what i was thinking,' replied ruth dejectedly. 'i don't like him at all. i seemed to turn against him directly he came in the door.' 'i've a good mind to back out of it, somehow, tomorrow,' exclaimed easton after another silence. 'i could tell him we've unexpectedly got some friends coming to stay with us.' 'yes,' said ruth eagerly. 'it would be easy enough to make some excuse or other.' as this way of escape presented itself she felt as if a weight had been lifted from her mind, but almost in the same instant she remembered the reasons which had at first led them to think of letting the room, and she added, disconsolately: 'it's foolish for us to go on like this, dear. we must let the room and it might just as well be him as anyone else. we must make the best of it, that's all.' easton stood with his back to the fire, staring gloomily at her. 'yes, i suppose that's the right way to look at it,' he replied at length. 'if we can't stand it, we'll give up the house and take a couple of rooms, or a small flat--if we can get one.' ruth agreed, although neither alternative was very inviting. the unwelcome alteration in their circumstances was after all not altogether without its compensations, because from the moment of arriving at this decision their love for each other seemed to be renewed and intensified. they remembered with acute regret that hitherto they had not always fully appreciated the happiness of that exclusive companionship of which there now remained to them but one week more. for once the present was esteemed at its proper value, being invested with some of the glamour which almost always envelops the past. chapter 13 penal servitude and death on tuesday--the day after his interview with rushton--owen remained at home working at the drawings. he did not get them finished, but they were so far advanced that he thought he would be able to complete them after tea on wednesday evening. he did not go to work until after breakfast on wednesday and his continued absence served to confirm the opinion of the other workmen that he had been discharged. this belief was further strengthened by the fact that a new hand had been sent to the house by hunter, who came himself also at about a quarter past seven and very nearly caught philpot in the act of smoking. during breakfast, philpot, addressing crass and referring to hunter, inquired anxiously: ''ow's 'is temper this mornin', bob?' 'as mild as milk,' replied crass. 'you'd think butter wouldn't melt in 'is mouth.' 'seemed quite pleased with 'isself, didn't 'e?' said harlow. 'yes,' remarked newman. ''e said good morning to me!' 'so 'e did to me!' said easton. ''e come inter the drorin'-room an' 'e ses, "oh, you're in 'ere are yer, easton," 'e ses--just like that, quite affable like. so i ses, "yes, sir." "well," 'e ses, "get it slobbered over as quick as you can," 'e ses, "'cos we ain't got much for this job: don't spend a lot of time puttying up. just smear it over an' let it go!"' ''e certinly seemed very pleased about something,' said harlow. 'i thought prap's there was a undertaking job in: one o' them generally puts 'im in a good humour.' 'i believe that nothing would please 'im so much as to see a epidemic break out,' remarked philpot. 'small-pox, hinfluenza, cholery morbus, or anything like that.' 'yes: don't you remember 'ow good-tempered 'e was last summer when there was such a lot of scarlet fever about?' observed harlow. 'yes,' said crass with a chuckle. 'i recollect we 'ad six children's funerals to do in one week. ole misery was as pleased as punch, because of course as a rule there ain't many boxin'-up jobs in the summer. it's in winter as hundertakers reaps their 'arvest.' 'we ain't 'ad very many this winter, though, so far,' said harlow. 'not so many as usual,' admitted crass, 'but still, we can't grumble: we've 'ad one nearly every week since the beginning of october. that's not so bad, you know.' crass took a lively interest in the undertaking department of rushton & co.'s business. he always had the job of polishing or varnishing the coffin and assisting to take it home and to 'lift in' the corpse, besides acting as one of the bearers at the funeral. this work was more highly paid for than painting. 'but i don't think there's no funeral job in,' added crass after a pause. 'i think it's because 'e's glad to see the end of owen, if yeh ask me.' 'praps that 'as got something to do with it,' said harlow. 'but all the same i don't call that a proper way to treat anyone--givin' a man the push in that way just because 'e 'appened to 'ave a spite against 'im.' 'it's wot i call a bl--dy shame!' cried philpot. 'owen's a chap wots always ready to do a good turn to anybody, and 'e knows 'is work, although 'e is a bit of a nuisance sometimes, i must admit, when 'e gets on about socialism.' 'i suppose misery didn't say nothin' about 'im this mornin'?' inquired easton. 'no,' replied crass, and added: 'i only 'ope owen don't think as i never said anything against 'im. 'e looked at me very funny that night after nimrod went away. owen needn't think nothing like that about me, because i'm a chap like this--if i couldn't do nobody no good, i wouldn't never do 'em no 'arm!' at this some of the others furtively exchanged significant glances, and harlow began to smile, but no one said anything. philpot, noticing that the newcomer had not helped himself to any tea, called bert's attention to the fact and the boy filled owen's cup and passed it over to the new hand. their conjectures regarding the cause of hunter's good humour were all wrong. as the reader knows, owen had not been discharged at all, and there was nobody dead. the real reason was that, having decided to take on another man, hunter had experienced no difficulty in getting one at the same reduced rate as that which newman was working for, there being such numbers of men out of employment. hitherto the usual rate of pay in mugsborough had been sevenpence an hour for skilled painters. the reader will remember that newman consented to accept a job at sixpence halfpenny. so far none of the other workmen knew that newman was working under price: he had told no one, not feeling sure whether he was the only one or not. the man whom hunter had taken on that morning also decided in his mind that he would keep his own counsel concerning what pay he was to receive, until he found out what the others were getting. just before half past eight owen arrived and was immediately assailed with questions as to what had transpired at the office. crass listened with ill-concealed chagrin to owen's account, but most of the others were genuinely pleased. 'but what a way to speak to anybody!' observed harlow, referring to hunter's manner on the previous monday night. 'you know, i reckon if ole misery 'ad four legs, 'e'd make a very good pig,' said philpot, solemnly, 'and you can't expect nothin' from a pig but a grunt.' during the morning, as easton and owen were working together in the drawing-room, the former remarked: 'did i tell you i had a room i wanted to let, frank?' 'yes, i think you did.' 'well, i've let it to slyme. i think he seems a very decent sort of chap, don't you?' 'yes, i suppose he is,' replied owen, hesitatingly. 'i know nothing against him.' 'of course, we'd rather 'ave the 'ouse to ourselves if we could afford it, but work is so scarce lately. i've been figuring out exactly what my money has averaged for the last twelve months and how much a week do you think it comes to?' 'god only knows,' said owen. 'how much?' 'about eighteen bob.' 'so you see we had to do something,' continued easton; 'and i reckon we're lucky to get a respectable sort of chap like slyme, religious and teetotal and all that, you know. don't you think so?' 'yes, i suppose you are,' said owen, who, although he intensely disliked slyme, knew nothing definite against him. they worked in silence for some time, and then owen said: 'at the present time there are thousands of people so badly off that, compared with them, we are rich. their sufferings are so great that compared with them, we may be said to be living in luxury. you know that, don't you?' 'yes, that's true enough, mate. we really ought to be very thankful: we ought to consider ourselves lucky to 'ave a inside job like this when there's such a lot of chaps walkin' about doin' nothing.' 'yes,' said owen: 'we're lucky! although we're in a condition of abject, miserable poverty we must consider ourselves lucky that we're not actually starving.' owen was painting the door; easton was doing the skirting. this work caused no noise, so they were able to converse without difficulty. 'do you think it's right for us to tamely make up our minds to live for the rest of our lives under such conditions as that?' 'no; certainly not,' replied easton; 'but things are sure to get better presently. trade hasn't always been as bad as it is now. why, you can remember as well as i can a few years ago there was so much work that we was putting in fourteen and sixteen hours a day. i used to be so done up by the end of the week that i used to stay in bed nearly all day on sunday.' 'but don't you think it's worth while trying to find out whether it's possible to so arrange things that we may be able to live like civilized human beings without being alternately worked to death or starved?' 'i don't see how we're goin' to alter things,' answered easton. 'at the present time, from what i hear, work is scarce everywhere. we can't make work, can we?' 'do you think, then, that the affairs of the world are something like the wind or the weather--altogether beyond our control? and that if they're bad we can do nothing but just sit down and wait for them to get better?' 'well, i don't see 'ow we can odds it. if the people wot's got the money won't spend it, the likes of me and you can't make 'em, can we?' owen looked curiously at easton. 'i suppose you're about twenty-six now,' he said. 'that means that you have about another thirty years to live. of course, if you had proper food and clothes and hadn't to work more than a reasonable number of hours every day, there is no natural reason why you should not live for another fifty or sixty years: but we'll say thirty. do you mean to say that you are able to contemplate with indifference the prospect of living for another thirty years under such conditions as those we endure at present?' easton made no reply. 'if you were to commit some serious breach of the law, and were sentenced next week to ten years' penal servitude, you'd probably think your fate a very pitiable one: yet you appear to submit quite cheerfully to this other sentence, which is--that you shall die a premature death after you have done another thirty years' hard labour.' easton continued painting the skirting. 'when there's no work,' owen went on, taking another dip of paint as he spoke and starting on one of the lower panels of the door, 'when there's no work, you will either starve or get into debt. when--as at present--there is a little work, you will live in a state of semi-starvation. when times are what you call "good", you will work for twelve or fourteen hours a day and--if you're very lucky--occasionally all night. the extra money you then earn will go to pay your debts so that you may be able to get credit again when there's no work.' easton put some putty in a crack in the skirting. 'in consequence of living in this manner, you will die at least twenty years sooner than is natural, or, should you have an unusually strong constitution and live after you cease to be able to work, you will be put into a kind of jail and treated like a criminal for the remainder of your life.' having faced up the cracks, easton resumed the painting of the skirting. 'if it were proposed to make a law that all working men and women were to be put to death--smothered, or hung, or poisoned, or put into a lethal chamber--as soon as they reached the age of fifty years, there is not the slightest doubt that you would join in the uproar of protest that would ensue. yet you submit tamely to have your life shortened by slow starvation, overwork, lack of proper boots and clothing, and though having often to turn out and go to work when you are so ill that you ought to be in bed receiving medical care.' easton made no reply: he knew that all this was true, but he was not without a large share of the false pride which prompts us to hide our poverty and to pretend that we are much better off than we really are. he was at that moment wearing the pair of second-hand boots that ruth had bought for him, but he had told harlow--who had passed some remark about them--that he had had them for years, wearing them only for best. he felt very resentful as he listened to the other's talk, and owen perceived it, but nevertheless he continued: 'unless the present system is altered, that is all we have to look forward to; and yet you're one of the upholders of the present system--you help to perpetuate it!' ''ow do i help to perpetuate it?' demanded easton. 'by not trying to find out how to end it--by not helping those who are trying to bring a better state of things into existence. even if you are indifferent to your own fate--as you seem to be--you have no right to be indifferent to that of the child for whose existence in this world you are responsible. every man who is not helping to bring about a better state of affairs for the future is helping to perpetuate the present misery, and is therefore the enemy of his own children. there is no such thing as being neutral: we must either help or hinder.' as owen opened the door to paint its edge, bert came along the passage. 'look out!' he cried, 'misery's comin' up the road. 'e'll be 'ere in a minit.' it was not often that easton was glad to hear of the approach of nimrod, but on this occasion he heard bert's message with a sigh of relief. 'i say,' added the boy in a whisper to owen, 'if it comes orf--i mean if you gets the job to do this room--will you ask to 'ave me along of you?' 'yes, all right, sonny,' replied owen, and bert went off to warn the others. 'unaware that he had been observed, nimrod sneaked stealthily into the house and began softly crawling about from room to room, peeping around corners and squinting through the cracks of doors, and looking through keyholes. he was almost pleased to see that everybody was very hard at work, but on going into newman's room misery was not satisfied with the progress made since his last visit. the fact was that newman had been forgetting himself again this morning. he had been taking a little pains with the work, doing it something like properly, instead of scamping and rushing it in the usual way. the result was that he had not done enough. 'you know, newman, this kind of thing won't do!' nimrod howled. 'you must get over a bit more than this or you won't suit me! if you can't move yourself a bit quicker i shall 'ave to get someone else. you've been in this room since seven o'clock this morning and it's dam near time you was out of it!' newman muttered something about being nearly finished now, and hunter ascended to the next landing--the attics, where the cheap man--sawkins, the labourer--was at work. harlow had been taken away from the attics to go on with some of the better work, so sawkins was now working alone. he had been slogging into it like a trojan and had done quite a lot. he had painted not only the sashes of the window, but also a large part of the glass, and when doing the skirting he had included part of the floor, sometimes an inch, sometimes half an inch. the paint was of a dark drab colour and the surface of the newly painted doors bore a strong resemblance to corduroy cloth, and from the bottom corners of nearly every panel there was trickling down a large tear, as if the doors were weeping for the degenerate condition of the decorative arts. but these tears caused no throb of pity in the bosom of misery: neither did the corduroy-like surface of the work grate upon his feelings. he perceived them not. he saw only that there was a lot of work done and his soul was filled with rapture as he reflected that the man who had accomplished all this was paid only fivepence an hour. at the same time it would never do to let sawkins know that he was satisfied with the progress made, so he said: 'i don't want you to stand too much over this up 'ere, you know, sawkins. just mop it over anyhow, and get away from it as quick as you can.' 'all right, sir,' replied sawkins, wiping the sweat from his brow as misery began crawling downstairs again. 'where's harlow go to, then?' he demanded of philpot. ''e wasn't 'ere just now, when i came up.' ''e's gorn downstairs, sir, out the back,' replied joe, jerking his thumb over his shoulder and winking at hunter. ''e'll be back in 'arf a mo.' and indeed at that moment harlow was just coming upstairs again. ''ere, we can't allow this kind of thing in workin' hours, you know.' hunter bellowed. 'there's plenty of time for that in the dinner hour!' nimrod now went down to the drawing-room, which easton and owen had been painting. he stood here deep in thought for some time, mentally comparing the quantity of work done by the two men in this room with that done by sawkins in the attics. misery was not a painter himself: he was a carpenter, and he thought but little of the difference in the quality of the work: to him it was all about the same: just plain painting. 'i believe it would pay us a great deal better,' he thought to himself, 'if we could get hold of a few more lightweights like sawkins.' and with his mind filled with this reflection he shortly afterwards sneaked stealthily from the house. chapter 14 three children. the wages of intelligence owen spent the greater part of the dinner hour by himself in the drawing-room making pencil sketches in his pocket-book and taking measurements. in the evening after leaving off, instead of going straight home as usual he went round to the free library to see if he could find anything concerning moorish decorative work in any of the books there. although it was only a small and ill-equipped institution he was rewarded by the discovery of illustrations of several examples of which he made sketches. after about an hour spent this way, as he was proceeding homewards he observed two children--a boy and a girl--whose appearance seemed familiar. they were standing at the window of a sweetstuff shop examining the wares exposed therein. as owen came up the children turned round and they recognized each other simultaneously. they were charley and elsie linden. owen spoke to them as he drew near and the boy appealed to him for his opinion concerning a dispute they had been having. 'i say, mister. which do you think is the best: a fardensworth of everlasting stickjaw torfee, or a prize packet?' 'i'd rather have a prize packet,' replied owen, unhesitatingly. 'there! i told you so!' cried elsie, triumphantly. 'well, i don't care. i'd sooner 'ave the torfee,' said charley, doggedly. 'why, can't you agree which of the two to buy?' 'oh no, it's not that,' replied elsie. 'we was only just supposing what we'd buy if we 'ad a fardin; but we're not really goin' to buy nothing, because we ain't got no money.' 'oh, i see,' said owen. 'but i think _i_ have some money,' and putting his hand into his pocket he produced two halfpennies and gave one to each of the children, who immediately went in to buy the toffee and the prize packet, and when they came out he walked along with them, as they were going in the same direction as he was: indeed, they would have to pass by his house. 'has your grandfather got anything to do yet?' he inquired as they went along. 'no. 'e's still walkin' about, mister,' replied charley. when they reached owen's door he invited them to come up to see the kitten, which they had been inquiring about on the way. frankie was delighted with these two visitors, and whilst they were eating some home-made cakes that nora gave them, he entertained them by displaying the contents of his toy box, and the antics of the kitten, which was the best toy of all, for it invented new games all the time: acrobatic performances on the rails of chairs; curtain climbing; running slides up and down the oilcloth; hiding and peeping round corners and under the sofa. the kitten cut so many comical capers, and in a little while the children began to create such an uproar, that nora had to interfere lest the people in the flat underneath should be annoyed. however, elsie and charley were not able to stay very long, because their mother would be anxious about them, but they promised to come again some other day to play with frankie. 'i'm going to 'ave a prize next sunday at our sunday school,' said elsie as they were leaving. 'what are you going to get it for?' asked nora. ''cause i learned my text properly. i had to learn the whole of the first chapter of matthew by heart and i never made one single mistake! so teacher said she'd give me a nice book next sunday.' 'i 'ad one too, the other week, about six months ago, didn't i, elsie?' said charley. 'yes,' replied elsie and added: 'do they give prizes at your sunday school, frankie?' 'i don't go to sunday school.' 'ain't you never been?' said charley in a tone of surprise. 'no,' replied frankie. 'dad says i have quite enough of school all the week.' 'you ought to come to ours, man!' urged charley. 'it's not like being in school at all! and we 'as a treat in the summer, and prizes and sometimes a magic lantern 'tainment. it ain't 'arf all right, i can tell you.' frankie looked inquiringly at his mother. 'might i go, mum?' 'yes, if you like, dear.' 'but i don't know the way.' 'oh, it's not far from 'ere,' cried charley. 'we 'as to pass by your 'ouse when we're goin', so i'll call for you on sunday if you like.' 'it's only just round in duke street; you know, the "shining light chapel",' said elsie. 'it commences at three o'clock.' 'all right,' said nora. 'i'll have frankie ready at a quarter to three. but now you must run home as fast as you can. did you like those cakes?' 'yes, thank you very much,' answered elsie. 'not 'arf!' said charley. 'does your mother make cakes for you sometimes?' 'she used to, but she's too busy now, making blouses and one thing and another,' elsie answered. 'i suppose she hasn't much time for cooking,' said nora, 'so i've wrapped up some more of those cakes in this parcel for you to take home for tomorrow. i think you can manage to carry it all right, can't you, charley?' 'i think i'd better carry it myself,' said elsie. 'charley's so careless, he's sure to lose some of them.' 'i ain't no more careless than you are,' cried charley, indignantly. 'what about the time you dropped the quarter of butter you was sent for in the mud?' 'that wasn't carelessness: that was an accident, and it wasn't butter at all: it was margarine, so there!' eventually it was arranged that they were to carry the parcel in turns, elsie to have first innings. frankie went downstairs to the front door with them to see them off, and as they went down the street he shouted after them: 'mind you remember, next sunday!' 'all right,' charley shouted back. 'we shan't forget.' on thursday owen stayed at home until after breakfast to finish the designs which he had promised to have ready that morning. when he took them to the office at nine o'clock, the hour at which he had arranged to meet rushton, the latter had not yet arrived, and he did not put in an appearance until half an hour later. like the majority of people who do brain work, he needed a great deal more rest than those who do only mere physical labour. 'oh, you've brought them sketches, i suppose,' he remarked in a surly tone as he came in. 'you know, there was no need for you to wait: you could 'ave left 'em 'ere and gone on to your job.' he sat down at his desk and looked carelessly at the drawing that owen handed to him. it was on a sheet of paper about twenty-four by eighteen inches. the design was drawn with pencil and one half of it was coloured. 'that's for the ceiling,' said owen. 'i hadn't time to colour all of it.' with an affectation of indifference, rushton laid the drawing down and took the other which owen handed to him. 'this is for the large wall. the same design would be adapted for the other walls; and this one shows the door and the panels under the window.' rushton expressed no opinion about the merits of the drawings. he examined them carelessly one after the other, and then, laying them down, he inquired: 'how long would it take you to do this work--if we get the job?' 'about three weeks: say 150 hours. that is--the decorative work only. of course, the walls and ceiling would have to be painted first: they will need three coats of white.' rushton scribbled a note on a piece of paper. 'well,' he said, after a pause, 'you can leave these 'ere and i'll see mr sweater about it and tell 'im what it will cost, and if he decides to have it done i'll let you know.' he put the drawings aside with the air of a man who has other matters to attend to, and began to open one of the several letters that were on his desk. he meant this as an intimation that the audience was at an end and that he desired the 'hand' to retire from the presence. owen understood this, but he did not retire, because it was necessary to mention one or two things which rushton would have to allow for when preparing the estimate. 'of course i should want some help,' he said. 'i should need a man occasionally, and the boy most of the time. then there's the gold leaf--say, fifteen books.' 'don't you think it would be possible to use gold paint?' 'i'm afraid not.' 'is there anything else?' inquired rushton as he finished writing down these items. 'i think that's all, except a few sheets of cartridge paper for stencils and working drawings. the quantity of paint necessary for the decorative work will be very small.' as soon as owen was gone, rushton took up the designs and examined them attentively. 'these are all right,' he muttered. 'good enough for anywhere. if he can paint anything like as well as this on the walls and ceiling of the room, it will stand all the looking at that anyone in this town is likely to give it.' 'let's see,' he continued. 'he said three weeks, but he's so anxious to do the job that he's most likely under-estimated the time; i'd better allow four weeks: that means about 200 hours: 200 hours at eight-pence: how much is that? and say he has a painter to help him half the time. 100 hours at sixpence-ha'penny.' he consulted a ready reckoner that was on the desk. 'time, l9.7.6. materials: fifteen books of gold, say a pound. then there's the cartridge paper and the colours--say another pound, at the outside. boy's time? well, he gets no wages as yet, so we needn't mention that at all. then there's the preparing of the room. three coats of white paint. i wish hunter was here to give me an idea what it will cost.' as if in answer to his wish, nimrod entered the office at that moment, and in reply to rushton's query said that to give the walls and ceiling three coats of paint would cost about three pounds five for time and material. between them the two brain workers figured that fifteen pounds would cover the entire cost of the work--painting and decorating. 'well, i reckon we can charge sweater forty-five pounds for it,' said rushton. 'it isn't like an ordinary job, you know. if he gets a london firm to do it, it'll cost him double that, if not more.' having arrived at this decision, rushton rung up sweater's emporium on the telephone, and, finding that mr sweater was there, he rolled up the designs and set out for that gentleman's office. the men work with their hands, and the masters work with their brains. what a dreadful calamity it would be for the world and for mankind if all these brain workers were to go on strike. chapter 15 the undeserving persons and the upper and nether millstones hunter had taken on three more painters that morning. bundy and two labourers had commenced the work of putting in the new drains; the carpenters were back again doing some extra work, and there was also a plumber working on the house; so there was quite a little crowd in the kitchen at dinner-time. crass had been waiting for a suitable opportunity to produce the newspaper cutting which it will be remembered he showed to easton on monday morning, but he had waited in vain, for there had been scarcely any 'political' talk at meal-times all the week, and it was now thursday. as far as owen was concerned, his thoughts were so occupied with the designs for the drawing-room that he had no time for anything else, and most of the others were only too willing to avoid a subject which frequently led to unpleasantness. as a rule crass himself had no liking for such discussion, but he was so confident of being able to 'flatten out' owen with the cutting from the obscurer that he had several times tried to lead the conversation into the desired channel, but so far without success. during dinner--as they called it--various subjects were discussed. harlow mentioned that he had found traces of bugs in one of the bedrooms upstairs and this called forth a number of anecdotes of those vermin and of houses infested by them. philpot remembered working in a house over at windley; the people who lived in it were very dirty and had very little furniture; no bedsteads, the beds consisting of dilapidated mattresses and rags on the floor. he declared that these ragged mattresses used to wander about the rooms by themselves. the house was so full of fleas that if one placed a sheet of newspaper on the floor one could hear and see them jumping on it. in fact, directly one went into that house one was covered from head to foot with fleas! during the few days he worked at that place, he lost several pounds in weight, and of evenings as he walked homewards the children and people in the streets, observing his ravaged countenance, thought he was suffering from some disease and used to get out of his way when they saw him coming. there were several other of these narratives, four or five men talking at the top of their voices at the same time, each one telling a different story. at first each story-teller addressed himself to the company generally, but after a while, finding it impossible to make himself heard, he would select some particular individual who seemed disposed to listen and tell him the story. it sometimes happened that in the middle of the tale the man to whom it was being told would remember a somewhat similar adventure of his own, which he would immediately proceed to relate without waiting for the other to finish, and each of them was generally so interested in the gruesome details of his own story that he was unconscious of the fact that the other was telling one at all. in a contest of this kind the victory usually went to the man with the loudest voice, but sometimes a man who had a weak voice, scored by repeating the same tale several times until someone heard it. barrington, who seldom spoke and was an ideal listener, was appropriated by several men in succession, who each told him a different yarn. there was one man sitting on an up-ended pail in the far corner of the room and it was evident from the movements of his lips that he also was relating a story, although nobody knew what it was about or heard a single word of it, for no one took the slightest notice of him... when the uproar had subsided harlow remembered the case of a family whose house got into such a condition that the landlord had given them notice and the father had committed suicide because the painters had come to turn 'em out of house and home. there were a man, his wife and daughter--a girl about seventeen--living in the house, and all three of 'em used to drink like hell. as for the woman, she could shift it and no mistake! several times a day she used to send the girl with a jug to the pub at the corner. when the old man was out, one could have anything one liked to ask for from either of 'em for half a pint of beer, but for his part, said harlow, he could never fancy it. they were both too ugly. the finale of this tale was received with a burst of incredulous laughter by those who heard it. 'do you 'ear what harlow says, bob?' easton shouted to crass. 'no. what was it?' ''e ses 'e once 'ad a chance to 'ave something but 'e wouldn't take it on because it was too ugly!' 'if it 'ad bin me, i should 'ave shut me bl--y eyes,' cried sawkins. 'i wouldn't pass it for a trifle like that.' 'no,' said crass amid laughter, 'and you can bet your life 'e didn't lose it neither, although 'e tries to make 'imself out to be so innocent.' 'i always though old harlow was a bl--y liar,' remarked bundy, 'but now we knows 'e is.' although everyone pretended to disbelieve him, harlow stuck to his version of the story. 'it's not their face you want, you know,' added bundy as he helped himself to some more tea. 'i know it wasn't my old woman's face that i was after last night,' observed crass; and then he proceeded amid roars of laughter to give a minutely detailed account of what had taken place between himself and his wife after they had retired for the night. this story reminded the man on the pail of a very strange dream he had had a few weeks previously: 'i dreamt i was walkin' along the top of a 'igh cliff or some sich place, and all of a sudden the ground give way under me feet and i began to slip down and down and to save meself from going over i made a grab at a tuft of grass as was growin' just within reach of me 'and. and then i thought that some feller was 'ittin me on the 'ead with a bl--y great stick, and tryin' to make me let go of the tuft of grass. and then i woke up to find my old woman shouting out and punchin' me with 'er fists. she said i was pullin' 'er 'air!' while the room was in an uproar with the merriment induced by these stories, crass rose from his seat and crossed over to where his overcoat was hanging on a nail in the wall, and took from the pocket a piece of card about eight inches by about four inches. one side of it was covered with printing, and as he returned to his seat crass called upon the others to listen while he read it aloud. he said it was one of the best things he had ever seen: it had been given to him by a bloke in the cricketers the other night. crass was not a very good reader, but he was able to read this all right because he had read it so often that he almost knew it by heart. it was entitled 'the art of flatulence', and it consisted of a number of rules and definitions. shouts of laughter greeted the reading of each paragraph, and when he had ended, the piece of dirty card was handed round for the benefit of those who wished to read it for themselves. several of the men, however, when it was offered to them, refused to take it, and with evident disgust suggested that it should be put into the fire. this view did not commend itself to crass, who, after the others had finished with it, put it back in the pocket of his coat. meanwhile, bundy stood up to help himself to some more tea. the cup he was drinking from had a large piece broken out of one side and did not hold much, so he usually had to have three or four helpings. 'anyone else want any' he asked. several cups and jars were passed to him. these vessels had been standing on the floor, and the floor was very dirty and covered with dust, so before dipping them into the pail, bundy--who had been working at the drains all morning--wiped the bottoms of the jars upon his trousers, on the same place where he was in the habit of wiping his hands when he happened to get some dirt on them. he filled the jars so full that as he held them by the rims and passed them to their owners part of the contents slopped over and trickled through his fingers. by the time he had finished the floor was covered with little pools of tea. 'they say that gord made everything for some useful purpose,' remarked harlow, reverting to the original subject, 'but i should like to know what the hell's the use of sich things as bugs and fleas and the like.' 'to teach people to keep theirselves clean, of course,' said slyme. 'that's a funny subject, ain't it?' continued harlow, ignoring slyme's answer. 'they say as all diseases is caused by little insects. if gord 'adn't made no cancer germs or consumption microbes there wouldn't be no cancer or consumption.' 'that's one of the proofs that there isn't an individual god,' said owen. 'if we were to believe that the universe and everything that lives was deliberately designed and created by god, then we must also believe that he made his disease germs you are speaking of for the purpose of torturing his other creatures.' 'you can't tell me a bloody yarn like that,' interposed crass, roughly. 'there's a ruler over us, mate, and so you're likely to find out.' 'if gord didn't create the world, 'ow did it come 'ere?' demanded slyme. 'i know no more about that than you do,' replied owen. 'that is--i know nothing. the only difference between us is that you think you know. you think you know that god made the universe; how long it took him to do it; why he made it; how long it's been in existence and how it will finally pass away. you also imagine you know that we shall live after we're dead; where we shall go, and the kind of existence we shall have. in fact, in the excess of your "humility", you think you know all about it. but really you know no more of these things than any other human being does; that is, you know nothing.' 'that's only your opinion,' said slyme. 'if we care to take the trouble to learn,' owen went on, 'we can know a little of how the universe has grown and changed; but of the beginning we know nothing.' 'that's just my opinion, matey,' observed philpot. 'it's just a bloody mystery, and that's all about it.' 'i don't pretend to 'ave no 'ead knowledge,' said slyme, 'but 'ead knowledge won't save a man's soul: it's 'eart knowledge as does that. i knows in my 'eart as my sins is all hunder the blood, and it's knowin' that, wot's given 'appiness and the peace which passes all understanding to me ever since i've been a christian.' 'glory, glory, hallelujah!' shouted bundy, and nearly everyone laughed. '"christian" is right,' sneered owen. 'you've got some title to call yourself a christian, haven't you? as for the happiness that passes all understanding, it certainly passes my understanding how you can be happy when you believe that millions of people are being tortured in hell; and it also passes my understanding why you are not ashamed of yourself for being happy under such circumstances.' 'ah, well, you'll find it all out when you come to die, mate,' replied slyme in a threatening tone. 'you'll think and talk different then!' 'that's just wot gets over me,' observed harlow. 'it don't seem right that after living in misery and poverty all our bloody lives, workin' and slavin' all the hours that gord a'mighty sends, that we're to be bloody well set fire and burned in 'ell for all eternity! it don't seem feasible to me, you know.' 'it's my belief,' said philpot, profoundly, 'that when you're dead, you're done for. that's the end of you.' 'that's what _i_ say,' remarked easton. 'as for all this religious business, it's just a money-making dodge. it's the parson's trade, just the same as painting is ours, only there's no work attached to it and the pay's a bloody sight better than ours is.' 'it's their livin', and a bloody good livin' too, if you ask me,' said bundy. 'yes,' said harlow; 'they lives on the fat o' the land, and wears the best of everything, and they does nothing for it but talk a lot of twaddle two or three times a week. the rest of the time they spend cadgin' money orf silly old women who thinks it's a sorter fire insurance.' 'it's an old sayin' and a true one,' chimed in the man on the upturned pail. 'parsons and publicans is the worst enemies the workin' man ever 'ad. there may be some good 'uns, but they're few and far between.' 'if i could only get a job like the harchbishop of canterbury,' said philpot, solemnly, 'i'd leave this firm.' 'so would i,' said harlow, 'if i was the harchbishop of canterbury, i'd take my pot and brushes down the office and shy 'em through the bloody winder and tell ole misery to go to 'ell.' 'religion is a thing that don't trouble me much,' remarked newman; 'and as for what happens to you after death, it's a thing i believe in leavin' till you comes to it--there's no sense in meetin' trouble 'arfway. all the things they tells us may be true or they may not, but it takes me all my time to look after this world. i don't believe i've been to church more than arf a dozen times since i've been married--that's over fifteen years ago now--and then it's been when the kids 'ave been christened. the old woman goes sometimes and of course the young 'uns goes; you've got to tell 'em something or other, and they might as well learn what they teaches at the sunday school as anything else.' a general murmur of approval greeted this. it seemed to be the almost unanimous opinion, that, whether it were true or not, 'religion' was a nice thing to teach children. 'i've not been even once since i was married,' said harlow, 'and i sometimes wish to christ i 'adn't gorn then.' 'i don't see as it matters a dam wot a man believes,' said philpot, 'as long as you don't do no 'arm to nobody. if you see a poor b--r wot's down on 'is luck, give 'im a 'elpin' 'and. even if you ain't got no money you can say a kind word. if a man does 'is work and looks arter 'is 'ome and 'is young 'uns, and does a good turn to a fellow creature when 'e can, i reckon 'e stands as much chance of getting into 'eaven--if there is sich a place--as some of there 'ere bible-busters, whether 'e ever goes to church or chapel or not.' these sentiments were echoed by everyone with the solitary exception of slyme, who said that philpot would find out his mistake after he was dead, when he would have to stand before the great white throne for judgement! 'and at the last day, when yer sees the moon turned inter blood, you'll be cryin' hout for the mountings and the rocks to fall on yer and 'ide yer from the wrath of the lamb!' the others laughed derisively. 'i'm a bush baptist meself,' remarked the man on the upturned pail. this individual, dick wantley by name, was of what is usually termed a 'rugged' cast of countenance. he reminded one strongly of an ancient gargoyle, or a dragon. most of the hands had by now lit their pipes, but there were a few who preferred chewing their tobacco. as they smoked or chewed they expectorated upon the floor or into the fire. wantley was one of those who preferred chewing and he had been spitting upon the floor to such an extent that he was by this time partly surrounded by a kind of semicircular moat of dark brown spittle. 'i'm a bush baptist!' he shouted across the moat, 'and you all knows wot that is.' this confession of faith caused a fresh outburst of hilarity, because of course everyone knew what a bush baptist was. 'if 'evven's goin' to be full of sich b--r's as hunter,' observed eaton, 'i think i'd rather go to the other place.' 'if ever ole misery does get into 'eaven,' said philpot, ''e won't stop there very long. i reckon 'e'll be chucked out of it before 'e's been there a week, because 'e's sure to start pinchin' the jewels out of the other saints' crowns.' 'well, if they won't 'ave 'im in 'eaven, i'm sure i don't know wot's to become of 'im,' said harlow with pretended concern, 'because i don't believe 'e'd be allowed into 'ell, now.' 'why not?' demanded bundy. 'i should think it's just the bloody place for sich b--r's as 'im.' 'so it used to be at one time o' day, but they've changed all that now. they've 'ad a revolution down there: deposed the devil, elected a parson as president, and started puttin' the fire out.' 'from what i hears of it,' continued harlow when the laughter had ceased, ''ell is a bloody fine place to live in just now. there's underground railways and 'lectric trams, and at the corner of nearly every street there's a sort of pub where you can buy ice-cream, lemon squash, four ale, and american cold drinks; and you're allowed to sit in a refrigerator for two hours for a tanner.' although they laughed and made fun of these things the reader must not think that they really doubted the truth of the christian religion, because--although they had all been brought up by 'christian' parents and had been 'educated' in 'christian' schools--none of them knew enough about christianity to either really believe it or disbelieve it. the imposters who obtain a comfortable living by pretending to be the ministers and disciples of the workman of nazareth are too cunning to encourage their dupes to acquire anything approaching an intelligent understanding of the subject. they do not want people to know or understand anything: they want them to have faith--to believe without knowledge, understanding, or evidence. for years harlow and his mates--when children--had been 'taught' 'christianity' in day school, sunday school and in church or chapel, and now they knew practically nothing about it! but they were 'christians' all the same. they believed that the bible was the word of god, but they didn't know where it came from, how long it had been in existence, who wrote it, who translated it or how many different versions there were. most of them were almost totally unacquainted with the contents of the book itself. but all the same, they believed it--after a fashion. 'but puttin' all jokes aside,' said philpot, 'i can't believe there's sich a place as 'ell. there may be some kind of punishment, but i don't believe it's a real fire.' 'nor nobody else, what's got any sense,' replied harlow, contemptuously. 'i believe as this world is 'ell,' said crass, looking around with a philosophic expression. this opinion was echoed by most of the others, although slyme remained silent and owen laughed. 'wot the bloody 'ell are you laughin' at?' crass demanded in an indignant tone. 'i was laughing because you said you think this world is hell.' 'well, i don't see nothing to laugh at in that,' said crass. 'so it is a 'ell,' said easton. 'there can't be anywheres much worse than this.' ''ear, 'ear,' said the man behind the moat. 'what i was laughing at is this,' said owen. 'the present system of managing the affairs of the world is so bad and has produced such dreadful results that you are of the opinion that the earth is a hell: and yet you are a conservative! you wish to preserve the present system--the system which has made the world into a hell!' 'i thought we shouldn't get through the dinner hour without politics if owen was 'ere,' growled bundy. 'bloody sickenin' i call it.' 'don't be 'ard on 'im,' said philpot. ''e's been very quiet for the last few days.' 'we'll 'ave to go through it today, though,' remarked harlow despairingly. 'i can see it comin'.' 'i'm not goin' through it,' said bundy, 'i'm orf!' and he accordingly drank the remainder of his tea, closed his empty dinner basket and, having placed it on the mantelshelf, made for the door. 'i'll leave you to it,' he said as he went out. the others laughed. crass, remembering the cutting from the obscurer that he had in his pocket, was secretly very pleased at the turn the conversation was taking. he turned roughly on owen: 'the other day, when we was talkin' about the cause of poverty, you contradicted everybody. everyone else was wrong! but you yourself couldn't tell us what's the cause of poverty, could you?' 'i think i could.' 'oh, of course, you think you know,' sneered crass, 'and of course you think your opinion's right and everybody else's is wrong.' 'yes,' replied owen. several men expressed their abhorrence of this intolerant attitude of owen's, but the latter rejoined: 'of course i think that my opinions are right and that everyone who differs from me is wrong. if i didn't think their opinions were wrong i wouldn't differ from them. if i didn't think my own opinions right i wouldn't hold them.' 'but there's no need to keep on arguin' about it day after day,' said crass. 'you've got your opinion and i've got mine. let everyone enjoy his own opinion, i say.' a murmur of approbation from the crowd greeted these sentiments; but owen rejoined: 'but we can't both be right; if your opinions are right and mine are not, how am i to find out the truth if we never talk about them?' 'well, wot do you reckon is the cause of poverty, then?' demanded easton. 'the present system--competition--capitalism.' 'it's all very well to talk like that,' snarled crass, to whom this statement conveyed no meaning whatever. 'but 'ow do you make it out?' 'well, i put it like that for the sake of shortness,' replied owen. 'suppose some people were living in a house--' 'more supposin'!' sneered crass. 'and suppose they were always ill, and suppose that the house was badly built, the walls so constructed that they drew and retained moisture, the roof broken and leaky, the drains defective, the doors and windows ill-fitting and the rooms badly shaped and draughty. if you were asked to name, in a word, the cause of the ill-health of the people who lived there you would say--the house. all the tinkering in the world would not make that house fit to live in; the only thing to do with it would be to pull it down and build another. well, we're all living in a house called the money system; and as a result most of us are suffering from a disease called poverty. there's so much the matter with the present system that it's no good tinkering at it. everything about it is wrong and there's nothing about it that's right. there's only one thing to be done with it and that is to smash it up and have a different system altogether. we must get out of it.' 'it seems to me that that's just what you're trying to do,' remanded harlow, sarcastically. 'you seem to be tryin' to get out of answering the question what easton asked you.' 'yes!' cried crass, fiercely. 'why don't you answer the bloody question? wot's the cause of poverty?' 'what the 'ell's the matter with the present system?' demanded sawkins. 'ow's it goin' to be altered?' said newman. 'wot the bloody 'ell sort of a system do you think we ought to 'ave?' shouted the man behind the moat. 'it can't never be altered,' said philpot. 'human nature's human nature and you can't get away from it.' 'never mind about human nature,' shouted crass. 'stick to the point. wot's the cause of poverty?' 'oh, b--r the cause of poverty!' said one of the new hands. 'i've 'ad enough of this bloody row.' and he stood up and prepared to go out of the room. this individual had two patches on the seat of his trousers and the bottoms of the legs of that garment were frayed and ragged. he had been out of work for about six weeks previous to having been taken on by rushton & co. during most of that time he and his family had been existing in a condition of semi-starvation on the earnings of his wife as a charwoman and on the scraps of food she brought home from the houses where she worked. but all the same, the question of what is the cause of poverty had no interest for him. 'there are many causes,' answered owen, 'but they are all part of and inseparable from the system. in order to do away with poverty we must destroy the causes: to do away with the causes we must destroy the whole system.' 'what are the causes, then?' 'well, money, for one thing.' this extraordinary assertion was greeted with a roar of merriment, in the midst of which philpot was heard to say that to listen to owen was as good as going to a circus. money was the cause of poverty! 'i always thought it was the want of it!' said the man with the patches on the seat of his trousers as he passed out of the door. 'other things,' continued owen, 'are private ownership of land, private ownership of railways, tramways, gasworks, waterworks, private ownership of factories, and the other means of producing the necessaries and comforts of life. competition in business--' 'but 'ow do you make it out?' demanded crass, impatiently. owen hesitated. to his mind the thing appeared very clear and simple. the causes of poverty were so glaringly evident that he marvelled that any rational being should fail to perceive them; but at the same time he found it very difficult to define them himself. he could not think of words that would convey his thoughts clearly to these others who seemed so hostile and unwilling to understand, and who appeared to have made up their minds to oppose and reject whatever he said. they did not know what were the causes of poverty and apparently they did not want to know. 'well, i'll try to show you one of the causes,' he said nervously at last. he picked up a piece of charred wood that had fallen from the fire and knelt down and began to draw upon the floor. most of the others regarded him, with looks in which an indulgent, contemptuous kind of interest mingled with an air of superiority and patronage. there was no doubt, they thought, that owen was a clever sort of chap: his work proved that: but he was certainly a little bit mad. by this time owen had drawn a circle about two feet in diameter. inside he had drawn two squares, one much larger than the other. these two squares he filled in solid black with the charcoal. 'wot's it all about?' asked crass with a sneer. 'why, can't you see?' said philpot with a wink. ''e's goin' to do some conjurin'! in a minit 'e'll make something pass out o' one o' them squares into the other and no one won't see 'ow it's done.' when he had finished drawing, owen remained for a few minutes awkwardly silent, oppressed by the anticipation of ridicule and a sense of his inability to put his thoughts into plain language. he began to wish that he had not undertaken this task. at last, with an effort, he began to speak in a halting, nervous way: ....... ... ... .. .. . ### . . ### . . . . ############### . . ############### . . ############### . . ############### . . ############### . . ############### . . . .. .. ... ... ......... 'this circle--or rather the space inside the circle--is supposed to represent england.' 'well, i never knowed it was round before,' jeered crass. 'i've heard as the world is round--' 'i never said it was the shape--i said it was supposed to represent england.' 'oh, i see. i thought we'd very soon begin supposin'.' 'the two black squares,' continued owen, 'represent the people who live in the country. the small square represents a few thousand people. the large square stands for the remainder--about forty millions--that is, the majority.' 'we ain't sich bloody fools as to think that the largest number is the minority,' interrupted crass. 'the greater number of the people represented by the large black square work for their living: and in return for their labour they receive money: some more, some less than others.' 'you don't think they'd be sich bloody fools as to work for nothing, do you?' said newman. 'i suppose you think they ought all to get the same wages!' cried harlow. 'do you think it's right that a scavenger should get as much as a painter?' 'i'm not speaking about that at all,' replied owen. 'i'm trying to show you what i think is one of the causes of poverty.' 'shut up, can't you, harlow,' remonstrated philpot, who began to feel interested. 'we can't all talk at once.' 'i know we can't,' replied harlow in an aggrieved tone: 'but 'e takes sich a 'ell of a time to say wot 'e's got to say. nobody else can't get a word in edgeways.' 'in order that these people may live,' continued owen, pointing to the large black square, 'it is first necessary that they shall have a place to live in--' 'well! i should never a thought it!' exclaimed the man on the pail, pretending to be much impressed. the others laughed, and two or three of them went out of the room, contemptuously remarking to each other in an audible undertone as they went: 'bloody rot!' 'wonder wot the bloody 'ell 'e thinks 'e is? a sort of schoolmaster?' owen's nervousness increased as he continued: 'now, they can't live in the air or in the sea. these people are land animals, therefore they must live on the land.' 'wot do yer mean by animals?' demanded slyme. 'a human bean ain't a animal!' said crass indignantly. 'yes, we are!' cried harlow. 'go into any chemist's shop you like and ask the bloke, and 'e'll tell you--' 'oh, blow that!' interrupted philpot. 'let's 'ear wot owen's sayin'.' 'they must live on the land: and that's the beginning of the trouble; because--under the present system--the majority of the people have really no right to be in the country at all! under the present system the country belongs to a few--those who are here represented by this small black square. if it would pay them to do so, and if they felt so disposed, these few people have a perfect right--under the present system--to order everyone else to clear out! 'but they don't do that, they allow the majority to remain in the land on one condition--that is, they must pay rent to the few for the privilege of being permitted to live in the land of their birth. the amount of rent demanded by those who own this country is so large that, in order to pay it, the greater number of the majority have often to deprive themselves and their children, not only of the comforts, but even the necessaries of life. in the case of the working classes the rent absorbs at the lowest possible estimate, about one-third of their total earnings, for it must be remembered that the rent is an expense that goes on all the time, whether they are employed or not. if they get into arrears when out of work, they have to pay double when they get employment again. 'the majority work hard and live in poverty in order that the minority may live in luxury without working at all, and as the majority are mostly fools, they not only agree to pass their lives in incessant slavery and want, in order to pay this rent to those who own the country, but they say it is quite right that they should have to do so, and are very grateful to the little minority for allowing them to remain in the country at all.' owen paused, and immediately there arose a great clamour from his listeners. 'so it is right, ain't it?' shouted crass. 'if you 'ad a 'ouse and let it to someone, you'd want your rent, wouldn't yer?' 'i suppose,' said slyme with resentment, for he had some shares in a local building society, 'after a man's been careful, and scraping and saving and going without things he ought to 'ave 'ad all 'is life, and managed to buy a few 'ouses to support 'im in 'is old age--they ought all to be took away from 'im? some people,' he added, 'ain't got common honesty.' nearly everyone had something to say in reprobation of the views suggested by owen. harlow, in a brief but powerful speech, bristling with numerous sanguinary references to the bottomless pit, protested against any interference with the sacred rights of property. easton listened with a puzzled expression, and philpot's goggle eyes rolled horribly as he glared silently at the circle and the two squares. 'by far the greatest part of the land,' said owen when the row had ceased, 'is held by people who have absolutely no moral right to it. possession of much of it was obtained by means of murder and theft perpetrated by the ancestors of the present holders. in other cases, when some king or prince wanted to get rid of a mistress of whom he had grown weary, he presented a tract of our country to some 'nobleman' on condition that he would marry the female. vast estates were also bestowed upon the remote ancestors of the present holders in return for real or alleged services. listen to this,' he continued as he took a small newspaper cutting from his pocket-book. crass looked at the piece of paper dolefully. it reminded him of the one he had in his own pocket, which he was beginning to fear that he would not have an opportunity of producing today after all. 'ballcartridge rent day. 'the hundredth anniversary of the battle of ballcartridge occurred yesterday and in accordance with custom the duke of ballcartridge handed to the authorities the little flag which he annually presents to the state in virtue of his tenure of the vast tract of this country which was presented to one of his ancestors--the first duke--in addition to his salary, for his services at the battle of ballcartridge. 'the flag--which is the only rent the duke has to pay for the great estate which brings him in several hundreds of thousands of pounds per annum--is a small tricoloured one with a staff surmounted by an eagle. 'the duke of blankmind also presents the state with a little coloured silk flag every year in return for being allowed to retain possession of that part of england which was presented--in addition to his salary--to one of his grace's very remote ancestors, for his services at the battle of commissariat--in the netherlands. 'the duke of southward is another instance,' continued owen. 'he "owns" miles of the country we speak of as "ours". much of his part consists of confiscated monastery lands which were stolen from the owners by king henry viii and presented to the ancestors of the present duke. 'whether it was right or wrong that these parts of our country should ever have been given to those people--the question whether those ancestor persons were really deserving cases or not--is a thing we need not trouble ourselves about now. but the present holders are certainly not deserving people. they do not even take the trouble to pretend they are. they have done nothing and they do nothing to justify their possession of these "estates" as they call them. and in my opinion no man who is in his right mind can really think it's just that these people should be allowed to prey upon their fellow men as they are doing now. or that it is right that their children should be allowed to continue to prey upon our children for ever! the thousands of people on those estates work and live in poverty in order that these three men and their families may enjoy leisure and luxury. just think of the absurdity of it!' continued owen, pointing to the drawings. 'all those people allowing themselves to be overworked and bullied and starved and robbed by this little crowd here!' observing signs of a renewal of the storm of protests, owen hurriedly concluded: 'whether it's right or wrong, you can't deny that the fact that this small minority possesses nearly all the land of the country is one of the principal causes of the poverty of the majority.' 'well, that seems true enough,' said easton, slowly. 'the rent's the biggest item a workin' man's got to pay. when you're out of work and you can't afford other things, you goes without 'em, but the rent 'as to be paid whether you're workin' or not.' 'yes, that's true enough,' said harlow impatiently; 'but you gets value for yer money: you can't expect to get a 'ouse for nothing.' 'suppose we admits as it's wrong, just for the sake of argyment,' said crass in a jeering tone. 'wot then? wot about it? 'ow's it agoin' to be altered.' 'yes!' cried harlow triumphantly. 'that's the bloody question! 'ow's it goin' to be altered? it can't be done!' there was a general murmur of satisfaction. nearly everyone seemed very pleased to think that the existing state of things could not possibly be altered. 'whether it can be altered or not, whether it's right or wrong, landlordism is one of the causes of poverty,' owen repeated. 'poverty is not caused by men and women getting married; it's not caused by machinery; it's not caused by "over-production"; it's not caused by drink or laziness; and it's not caused by "over-population". it's caused by private monopoly. that is the present system. they have monopolized everything that it is possible to monopolize; they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. the only reason they have not monopolized the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. if it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe. and if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air--or of the money to buy it--even as now thousands are dying for want of the other necessities of life. you would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless they had the money to pay for it. most of you here, for instance, would think and say so. even as you think at present that it's right for so few people to own the earth, the minerals and the water, which are all just as necessary as is the air. in exactly the same spirit as you now say: "it's their land," "it's their water," "it's their coal," "it's their iron," so you would say "it's their air," "these are their gasometers, and what right have the likes of us to expect them to allow us to breathe for nothing?" and even while he is doing this the air monopolist will be preaching sermons on the brotherhood of man; he will be dispensing advice on "christian duty" in the sunday magazines; he will give utterance to numerous more or less moral maxims for the guidance of the young. and meantime, all around, people will be dying for want of some of the air that he will have bottled up in his gasometers. and when you are all dragging out a miserable existence, gasping for breath or dying for want of air, if one of your number suggests smashing a hole in the side of one of the gasometers, you will all fall upon him in the name of law and order, and after doing your best to tear him limb from limb, you'll drag him, covered with blood, in triumph to the nearest police station and deliver him up to "justice" in the hope of being given a few half-pounds of air for your trouble.' 'i suppose you think the landlords ought to let people live in their 'ouses for nothing?' said crass, breaking the silence that followed. 'certainly,' remarked harlow, pretending to be suddenly converted to owen's views, 'i reckon the landlord ought to pay the rent to the tenant!' 'of course, landlordism is not the only cause,' said owen, ignoring these remarks. 'the wonderful system fosters a great many others. employers of labour, for instance, are as great a cause of poverty as landlords are.' this extraordinary statement was received with astonished silence. 'do you mean to say that if i'm out of work and a master gives me a job, that 'e's doin' me a injury?' said crass at length. 'no, of course not,' replied owen. 'well, what the bloody 'ell do yer mean, then?' 'i mean this: supposing that the owner of a house wishes to have it repainted. what does he usually do?' 'as a rule, 'e goes to three or four master painters and asks 'em to give 'im a price for the job.' 'yes; and those master painters are so eager to get the work that they cut the price down to what they think is the lowest possible point,' answered owen, 'and the lowest usually gets the job. the successful tenderer has usually cut the price so fine that to make it pay he has to scamp the work, pay low wages, and drive and sweat the men whom he employs. he wants them to do two days' work for one day's pay. the result is that a job which--if it were done properly--would employ say twenty men for two months, is rushed and scamped in half that time with half that number of men. 'this means that--in one such case as this--ten men are deprived of one month's employment; and ten other men are deprived of two months' employment; and all because the employers have been cutting each other's throats to get the work.' 'and we can't 'elp ourselves, you nor me either,' said harlow. 'supposing one of us on this job was to make up 'is mind not to tear into it like we do, but just keep on steady and do a fair day's work: wot would 'appen?' no one answered; but the same thought was in everyone's mind. such a one would be quickly marked by hunter; and even if the latter failed to notice it would not be long before crass reported his conduct. 'we can't 'elp ourselves,' said easton, gloomily. 'if one man won't do it there's twenty others ready to take 'is place.' 'we could help ourselves to a certain extent if we would stand by each other. if, for instance, we all belonged to the society,' said owen. 'i don't believe in the society,' observed crass. 'i can't see as it's right that a inferior man should 'ave the same wages as me.' 'they're a drunken lot of beer-swillers,' remarked slyme. 'that's why they always 'as their meetings in public 'ouses.' harlow made no comment on this question. he had at one time belonged to the union and he was rather ashamed of having fallen away from it. 'wot good 'as the society ever done 'ere?' said easton. 'none that i ever 'eard of.' 'it might be able to do some good if most of us belonged to it; but after all, that's another matter. whether we could help ourselves or not, the fact remains that we don't. but you must admit that this competition of the employers is one of the causes of unemployment and poverty, because it's not only in our line--exactly the same thing happens in every other trade and industry. competing employers are the upper and nether millstones which grind the workers between them.' 'i suppose you think there oughtn't to be no employers at all?' sneered crass. 'or p'raps you think the masters ought to do all the bloody work theirselves, and give us the money?' 'i don't see 'ow its goin' to be altered,' remarked harlow. 'there must be masters, and someone 'as to take charge of the work and do the thinkin'.' 'whether it can be altered or not,' said owen, 'landlordism and competing employers are two of the causes of poverty. but of course they're only a small part of the system which produces luxury, refinement and culture for a few, and condemns the majority to a lifelong struggle with adversity, and many thousands to degradation, hunger and rags. this is the system you all uphold and defend, although you don't mind admitting that it has made the world into a hell.' crass slowly drew the obscurer cutting from his waistcoat pocket, but after a moment's thought he replaced it, deciding to defer its production till a more suitable occasion. 'but you 'aven't told us yet 'ow you makes out that money causes poverty,' cried harlow, winking at the others. 'that's what i'm anxious to 'ear about!' 'so am i,' remarked the man behind the moat. 'i was just wondering whether i 'adn't better tell ole misery that i don't want no wages this week.' 'i think i'll tell 'im on saterday to keep my money and get 'imself a few drinks with it,' said philpot. 'it might cheer 'im up a bit and make 'im a little more sociable and friendly like.' 'money is the principal cause of poverty,' said owen. ''ow do yer make it out?' cried sawkins. but their curiosity had to remain unsatisfied for the time being because crass announced that it was 'just on it'. chapter 16 true freedom about three o'clock that afternoon, rushton suddenly appeared and began walking silently about the house, and listening outside the doors of rooms where the hands were working. he did not succeed in catching anyone idling or smoking or talking. the nearest approach to what the men called 'a capture' that he made was, as he stood outside the door of one of the upper rooms in which philpot and harlow were working, he heard them singing one of sankey's hymns--'work! for the night is coming'. he listened to two verses and several repetitions of the chorus. being a 'christian', he could scarcely object to this, especially as by peeping through the partly open door he could see that they were suiting the action to the word. when he went into the room they glanced around to see who it was, and stopped singing. rushton did not speak, but stood in the middle of the floor, silently watching them as they worked, for about a quarter of an hour. then, without having uttered a syllable, he turned and went out. they heard him softly descend the stairs, and harlow, turning to philpot said in a hoarse whisper: 'what do you think of the b--r, standing there watchin' us like that, as if we was a couple of bloody convicts? if it wasn't that i've got someone else beside myself to think of, i would 'ave sloshed the bloody sod in the mouth with this pound brush!' 'yes; it does make yer feel like that, mate,' replied philpot, 'but of course we mustn't give way to it.' 'several times,' continued harlow, who was livid with anger, 'i was on the point of turnin' round and sayin' to 'im, "what the bloody 'ell do you mean by standin' there and watchin' me, you bloody, psalm-singin' swine?" it took me all my time to keep it in, i can tell you.' meanwhile, rushton was still going about the house, occasionally standing and watching the other men in the same manner as he had watched philpot and harlow. none of the men looked round from their work or spoke either to rushton or to each other. the only sounds heard were the noises made by the saws and hammers of the carpenters who were fixing the frieze rails and dado rails or repairing parts of the woodwork in some of the rooms. crass placed himself in rushton's way several times with the hope of being spoken to, but beyond curtly acknowledging the 'foreman's' servile 'good hafternoon, sir,' the master took no notice of him. after about an hour spent in this manner rushton went away, but as no one saw him go, it was not until some considerable time after his departure that they knew that he was gone. owen was secretly very disappointed. 'i thought he had come to tell me about the drawing-room,' he said to himself, 'but i suppose it's not decided yet.' just as the 'hands' were beginning to breathe freely again, misery arrived, carrying some rolled-up papers in his hand. he also flitted silently from one room to another, peering round corners and listening at doors in the hope of seeing or hearing something which would give him an excuse for making an example of someone. disappointed in this, he presently crawled upstairs to the room where owen was working and, handing to him the roll of papers he had been carrying, said: 'mr sweater had decided to 'ave this work done, so you can start on it as soon as you like.' it is impossible to describe, without appearing to exaggerate, the emotions experienced by owen as he heard this announcement. for one thing it meant that the work at this house would last longer than it would otherwise have done; and it also meant that he would be paid for the extra time he had spent on the drawings, besides having his wages increased--for he was always paid an extra penny an hour when engaged on special work, such as graining or sign-writing or work of the present kind. but these considerations did not occur to him at the moment at all, for to him it meant much more. since his first conversation on the subject with rushton he had though of little else than this work. in a sense he had been doing it ever since. he had thought and planned and altered the details of the work repeatedly. the colours for the different parts had been selected and rejected and re-selected over and over again. a keen desire to do the work had grown within him, but he had scarcely allowed himself to hope that it would be done at all. his face flushed slightly as he took the drawings from hunter. 'you can make a start on it tomorrow morning,' continued that gentleman. 'i'll tell crass to send someone else up 'ere to finish this room.' 'i shan't be able to commence tomorrow, because the ceiling and walls will have to be painted first.' 'yes: i know. you and easton can do that. one coat tomorrow, another on friday and the third on saturday--that is, unless you can make it do with two coats. even if it has to be the three, you will be able to go on with your decoratin' on monday.' 'i won't be able to start on monday, because i shall have to make some working drawings first.' 'workin' drorins!' ejaculated misery with a puzzled expression. 'wot workin' drorins? you've got them, ain't yer?' pointing to the roll of papers. 'yes: but as the same ornaments are repeated several times, i shall have to make a number of full-sized drawings, with perforated outlines, to transfer the design to the walls,' said owen, and he proceeded to laboriously explain the processes. nimrod looked at him suspiciously. 'is all that really necessary?' he asked. 'couldn't you just copy it on the wall, free-hand?' 'no; that wouldn't do. it would take much longer that way.' this consideration appealed to misery. 'ah, well,' he sighed. 'i s'pose you'll 'ave to do it the way you said; but for goodness sake don't spend too much time over it, because we've took it very cheap. we only took it on so as you could 'ave a job, not that we expect to make any profit out of it.' 'and i shall have to cut some stencils, so i shall need several sheets of cartridge paper.' upon hearing of this addition expense, misery's long visage appeared to become several inches longer; but after a moment's thought he brightened up. 'i'll tell you what!' he exclaimed with a cunning leer, 'there's lots of odd rolls of wallpaper down at the shop. couldn't you manage with some of that?' 'i'm afraid it wouldn't do,' replied owen doubtfully, 'but i'll have a look at it and if possible i'll use it.' 'yes, do!' said misery, pleased at the thought of saving something. 'call at the shop on your way home tonight, and we'll see what we can find. 'ow long do you think it'll take you to make the drorins and the stencils?' 'well, today's thursday. if you let someone else help easton to get the room ready, i think i can get them done in time to bring them with me on monday morning.' 'wot do yer mean, "bring them with you"?' demanded nimrod. 'i shall have to do them at home, you know.' 'do 'em at 'ome! why can't you do 'em 'ere?' 'well, there's no table, for one thing.' 'oh, but we can soon fit you out with a table. you can 'ave a pair of paperhanger's tressels and boards for that matter.' 'i have a lot of sketches and things at home that i couldn't very well bring here,' said owen. misery argued about it for a long time, insisting that the drawings should be made either on the 'job' or at the paint-shop down at the yard. how, he asked, was he to know at what hour owen commenced or left off working, if the latter did them at home? 'i shan't charge any more time than i really work,' replied owen. 'i can't possibly do them here or at the paint-shop. i know i should only make a mess of them under such conditions.' 'well, i s'pose you'll 'ave to 'ave your own way,' said misery, dolefully. 'i'll let harlow help easton paint the room out, so as you can get your stencils and things ready. but for gord's sake get 'em done as quick as you can. if you could manage to get done by friday and come down and help easton on saturday, it would be so much the better. and when you do get a start on the decoratin', i shouldn't take too much care over it, you know, if i was you, because we 'ad to take the job for next to nothing or mr sweater would never 'ave 'ad it done at all!' nimrod now began to crawl about the house, snarling and grumbling at everyone. 'now then, you chaps. rouse yourselves!' he bellowed, 'you seem to think this is a 'orspital. if some of you don't make a better show than this, i'll 'ave to 'ave a alteration! there's plenty of chaps walkin' about doin' nothin' who'll be only too glad of a job!' he went into the scullery, where crass was mixing some colour. 'look 'ere, crass!' he said. 'i'm not at all satisfied with the way you're gettin' on with the work. you must push the chaps a bit more than you're doin'. there's not enough being done, by a long way. we shall lose money over this job before we're finished!' crass--whose fat face had turned a ghastly green with fright--mumbled something about getting on with it as fast as he could. 'well, you'll 'ave to make 'em move a bit quicker than this!' misery howled, 'or there'll 'ave to be a alteration!' by an 'alteration' crass understood that he might get the sack, or that someone else might be put in charge of the job, and that would of course reduce him to the ranks and do away with his chance of being kept on longer than the others. he determined to try to ingratiate himself with hunter and appease his wrath by sacrificing someone else. he glanced cautiously into the kitchen and up the passage and then, lowering his voice, he said: 'they all shapes pretty well, except newman. i would 'ave told you about 'im before, but i thought i'd give 'im a fair chance. i've spoke to 'im several times myself about not doin' enough, but it don't seem to make no difference.' 'i've 'ad me eye on 'im meself for some time,' replied nimrod in the same tone. 'anybody would think the work was goin' to be sent to a exhibition, the way 'e messes about with it, rubbing it with glasspaper and stopping up every little crack! i can't understand where 'e gets all the glasspaper from.' ''e brings it 'isself!' said crass hoarsely. 'i know for a fact that 'e bought two 'a'penny sheets of it, last week out of 'is own money!' 'oh, 'e did, did 'e?' snarled misery. 'i'll give 'im glasspaper! i'll 'ave a alteration!' he went into the hall, where he remained alone for a considerable time, brooding. at last, with the manner of one who has resolved on a certain course of action, he turned and entered the room where philpot and harlow were working. 'you both get sevenpence an hour, don't you?' he said. they both replied to the affirmative. 'i've never worked under price yet,' added harlow. 'nor me neither,' observed philpot. 'well, of course you can please yourselves,' hunter continued, 'but after this week we've decided not to pay more than six and a half. things is cut so fine nowadays that we can't afford to go on payin' sevenpence any longer. you can work up till tomorrow night on the old terms, but if you're not willin' to accept six and a half you needn't come on saturday morning. please yourselves. take it or leave it.' harlow and philpot were both too much astonished to say anything in reply to this cheerful announcement, and hunter, with the final remark, 'you can think it over,' left them and went to deliver the same ultimatum to all the other full-price men, who took it in the same way as philpot and harlow had done. crass and owen were the only two whose wages were not reduced. it will be remembered that newman was one of those who were already working for the reduced rate. misery found him alone in one of the upper rooms, to which he was giving the final coat. he was at his old tricks. the woodwork of the cupboard be was doing was in a rather damaged condition, and he was facing up the dents with white-lead putty before painting it. he knew quite well that hunter objected to any but very large holes or cracks being stopped, and yet somehow or other he could not scamp the work to the extent that he was ordered to; and so, almost by stealth, he was in the habit of doing it--not properly but as well as he dared. he even went to the length of occasionally buying a few sheets of glasspaper with his own money, as crass had told hunter. when the latter came into the room he stood with a sneer on his face, watching newman for about five minutes before he spoke. the workman became very nervous and awkward under this scrutiny. 'you can make out yer time-sheet and come to the office for yer money at five o'clock,' said nimrod at last. 'we shan't require your valuable services no more after tonight.' newman went white. 'why, what's wrong?' said he. 'what have i done?' 'oh, it's not wot you've done,' replied misery. 'it's wot you've not done. that's wot's wrong! you've not done enough, that's all!' and without further parley he turned and went out. newman stood in the darkening room feeling as if his heart had turned to lead. there rose before his mind the picture of his home and family. he could see them as they were at this very moment, the wife probably just beginning to prepare the evening meal, and the children setting the cups and saucers and other things on the kitchen table--a noisy work, enlivened with many a frolic and childish dispute. even the two-year-old baby insisted on helping, although she always put everything in the wrong place and made all sorts of funny mistakes. they had all been so happy lately because they knew that he had work that would last till nearly christmas--if not longer. and now this had happened--to plunge them back into the abyss of wretchedness from which they had so recently escaped. they still owed several weeks' rent, and were already so much in debt to the baker and the grocer that it was hopeless to expect any further credit. 'my god!' said newman, realizing the almost utter hopelessness of the chance of obtaining another 'job' and unconsciously speaking aloud. 'my god! how can i tell them? what will become of us?' having accomplished the objects of his visit, hunter shortly afterwards departed, possibly congratulating himself that he had not been hiding his light under a bushel, but that he had set it upon a candlestick and given light unto all that were within that house. as soon as they knew that he was gone, the men began to gather into little groups, but in a little while they nearly all found themselves in the kitchen, discussing the reduction. sawkins and the other 'lightweights' remained at their work. some of them got only fourpence halfpenny--sawkins was paid fivepence--so none of these were affected by the change. the other two fresh hands--the journeymen--joined the crowd in the kitchen, being anxious to conceal the fact that they had agreed to accept the reduced rate before being 'taken on'. owen also was there, having heard the news from philpot. there was a lot of furious talk. at first several of them spoke of 'chucking up', at once; but others were more prudent, for they knew that if they did leave there were dozens of others who would be eager to take their places. 'after all, you know,' said slyme, who had--stowed away somewhere at the back of his head--an idea of presently starting business on his own account: he was only waiting until he had saved enough money, 'after all, there's something in what 'unter says. it's very 'ard to get a fair price for work nowadays. things is cut very fine.' 'yes! we know all about that!' shouted harlow. 'and who the bloody 'ell is it cuts 'em? why, sich b--rs as 'unter and rushton! if this firm 'adn't cut this job so fine, some other firm would 'ave 'ad it for more money. rushton's cuttin' it fine didn't make this job, did it? it would 'ave been done just the same if they 'adn't tendered for it at all! the only difference is that we should 'ave been workin' for some other master.' 'i don't believe the bloody job's cut fine at all!' said philpot. 'rushton is a pal of sweater's and they're both members of the town council.' 'that may be,' replied slyme; 'but all the same i believe sweater got several other prices besides rushton's--friend or no friend; and you can't blame 'im: it's only business. but pr'aps rushton got the preference--sweater may 'ave told 'im the others' prices.' 'yes, and a bloody fine lot of prices they was, too, if the truth was known!' said bundy. 'there was six other firms after this job to my knowledge--pushem and sloggem, bluffum and doemdown, dodger and scampit, snatcham and graball, smeeriton and leavit, makehaste and sloggitt, and gord only knows 'ow many more.' at this moment newman came into the room. he looked so white and upset that the others involuntarily paused in their conversation. 'well, what do you think of it?' asked harlow. 'think of what?' said newman. 'why, didn't 'unter tell you?' cried several voices, whose owners looked suspiciously at him. they thought--if hunter had not spoken to newman, it must be because he was already working under price. there had been a rumour going about the last few days to that effect. 'didn't misery tell you? they're not goin' to pay more than six and a half after this week.' 'that's not what 'e said to me. 'e just told me to knock off. said i didn't do enough for 'em.' 'jesus christ!' exclaimed crass, pretending to be overcome with surprise. newman's account of what had transpired was listened to in gloomy silence. 'those who--a few minutes previously--had been talking loudly of chucking up the job became filled with apprehension that they might be served in the same manner as he had been. crass was one of the loudest in his expression of astonishment and indignation, but he rather overdid it and only succeeded in confirming the secret suspicion of the others that he had had something to do with hunter's action. the result of the discussion was that they decided to submit to misery's terms for the time being, until they could see a chance of getting work elsewhere. as owen had to go to the office to see the wallpaper spoken of by hunter, he accompanied newman when the latter went to get his wages. nimrod was waiting for them, and had the money ready in an envelope, which he handed to newman, who took it without speaking and went away. misery had been rummaging amongst the old wallpapers, and had got out a great heap of odd rolls, which he now submitted to owen, but after examining them the latter said that they were unsuitable for the purpose, so after some argument misery was compelled to sign an order for some proper cartridge paper, which owen obtained at a stationer's on his way home. the next morning, when misery went to the 'cave', he was in a fearful rage, and he kicked up a terrible row with crass. he said that mr rushton had been complaining of the lack of discipline on the job, and he told crass to tell all the hands that for the future singing in working hours was strictly forbidden, and anyone caught breaking this rule would be instantly dismissed. several times during the following days nimrod called at owen's flat to see how the work was progressing and to impress upon him the necessity of not taking too much trouble over it. chapter 17 the rev. john starr 'what time is it now, mum?' asked frankie as soon as he had finished dinner on the following sunday. 'two o'clock.' 'hooray! only one more hour and charley will be here! oh, i wish it was three o'clock now, don't you, mother?' 'no, dear, i don't. you're not dressed yet, you know.' frankie made a grimace. 'you're surely not going to make me wear my velvets, are you, mum? can't i go just as i am, in my old clothes?' the 'velvets' was a brown suit of that material that nora had made out of the least worn parts of an old costume of her own. 'of course not: if you went as you are now, you'd have everyone staring at you.' 'well, i suppose i'll have to put up with it,' said frankie, resignedly. 'and i think you'd better begin to dress me now, don't you?' 'oh, there's plenty of time yet; you'd only make yourself untidy and then i should have the trouble all over again. play with your toys a little while, and when i've done the washing up i'll get you ready.' frankie obeyed, and for about ten minutes his mother heard him in the next room rummaging in the box where he stored his collection of 'things'. at the end of that time, however, he returned to the kitchen. 'is it time to dress me yet, mum?' 'no, dear, not yet. you needn't be afraid; you'll be ready in plenty of time.' 'but i can't help being afraid; you might forget.' 'oh, i shan't forget. there's lots of time.' 'well, you know, i should be much easier in my mind if you would dress me now, because perhaps our clock's wrong, or p'r'aps when you begin dressing me you'll find some buttons off or something, and then there'll be a lot of time wasted sewing them on; or p'r'aps you won't be able to find my clean stockings or something and then while you're looking for it charley might come, and if he sees i'm not ready he mightn't wait for me.' 'oh, dear!' said nora, pretending to be alarmed at this appalling list of possibilities. 'i suppose it will be safer to dress you at once. it's very evident you won't let me have much peace until it is done, but mind when you're dressed you'll have to sit down quietly and wait till he comes, because i don't want the trouble of dressing you twice.' 'oh, i don't mind sitting still,' returned frankie, loftily. 'that's very easy. 'i don't mind having to take care of my clothes,' said frankie as his mother--having washed and dressed him, was putting the finishing touches to his hair, brushing and combing and curling the long yellow locks into ringlets round her fingers, 'the only thing i don't like is having my hair done. you know all these curls are quite unnecessary. i'm sure it would save you a lot of trouble if you wouldn't mind cutting them off.' nora did not answer: somehow or other she was unwilling to comply with this often-repeated entreaty. it seemed to her that when this hair was cut off the child would have become a different individual--more separate and independent. 'if you don't want to cut it off for your own sake, you might do it for my sake, because i think it's the reason some of the big boys don't want to play with me, and some of them shout after me and say i'm a girl, and sometimes they sneak up behind me and pull it. only yesterday i had to have a fight with a boy for doing it: and even charley linden laughs at me, and he's my best friend--except you and dad of course. 'why don't you cut it off, mum?' 'i am going to cut it as i promised you, after your next birthday.' 'then i shall be jolly glad when it comes. won't you? why, what's the matter, mum? what are you crying for?' frankie was so concerned that he began to cry also, wondering if he had done or said something wrong. he kissed her repeatedly, stroking her face with his hand. what's the matter, mother?' 'i was thinking that when you're over seven and you've had your hair cut short you won't be a baby any more.' 'why, i'm not a baby now, am i? here, look at this!' he strode over to the wall and, dragging out two chairs, he placed them in the middle of the room, back to back, about fifteen inches apart, and before his mother realized what he was doing he had climbed up and stood with one leg on the back of each chair. 'i should like to see a baby who could do this,' he cried, with his face wet with tears. 'you needn't lift me down. i can get down by myself. babies can't do tricks like these or even wipe up the spoons and forks or sweep the passage. but you needn't cut it off if you don't want to. i'll bear it as long as you like. only don't cry any more, because it makes me miserable. if i cry when i fall down or when you pull my hair when you're combing it you always tell me to bear it like a man and not be a baby, and now you're crying yourself just because i'm not a baby. you ought to be jolly glad that i'm nearly grown up into a man, because you know i've promised to build you a house with the money i earn, and then you needn't do no more work. we'll have a servant the same as the people downstairs, and dad can stop at home and sit by the fire and read the paper or play with me and maud and have pillow fights and tell stories and--' 'it's all right, dearie,' said nora, kissing him. 'i'm not crying now, and you mustn't either, or your eyes will be all red and you won't be able to go with charley at all.' when she had finished dressing him, frankie sat for some time in silence, apparently lost in thought. at last he said: 'why don't you get a baby, mother? you could nurse it, and i could have it to play with instead of going out in the street.' 'we can't afford to keep a baby, dear. you know, even as it is, sometimes we have to go without things we want because we haven't the money to buy them. babies need many things that cost lots of money.' 'when i build our house when i'm a man, i'll take jolly good care not to have a gas-stove in it. that's what runs away with all the money; we're always putting pennies in the slot. and that reminds me: charley said i'll have to take a ha'penny to put in the mishnery box. oh, dear, i'm tired of sitting still. i wish he'd come. what time is it now, mother?' before she could answer both frankie's anxiety and the painful ordeal of sitting still were terminated by the loud peal at the bell announcing charley's arrival, and frankie, without troubling to observe the usual formality of looking out of the window to see if it was a runaway ring, had clattered half-way downstairs before he heard his mother calling him to come back for the halfpenny; then he clattered up again and then down again at such a rate and with so much noise as to rouse the indignation of all the respectable people in the house. when he arrived at the bottom of the stairs he remembered that he had omitted to say goodbye, and as it was too far to go up again he rang the bell and then went into the middle of the road and looked up at the window that nora opened. 'goodbye, mother,' he shouted. 'tell dad i forgot to say it before i came down.' the school was not conducted in the chapel itself, but in a large lecture hall under it. at one end was a small platform raised about six inches from the floor; on this was a chair and a small table. a number of groups of chairs and benches were arranged at intervals round the sides and in the centre of the room, each group of seats accommodating a separate class. on the walls--which were painted a pale green--were a number of coloured pictures: moses striking the rock, the israelites dancing round the golden calf, and so on. as the reader is aware, frankie had never been to a sunday school of any kind before, and he stood for a moment looking in at the door and half afraid to enter. the lessons had already commenced, but the scholars had not yet settled down to work. the scene was one of some disorder: some of the children talking, laughing or playing, and the teachers alternately threatening and coaxing them. the girls' and the very young children's classes were presided over by ladies: the boys' teachers were men. the reader already has some slight knowledge of a few of these people. there was mr didlum, mr sweater, mr rushton and mr hunter and mrs starvem (ruth easton's former mistress). on this occasion, in addition to the teachers and other officials of the sunday school, there were also present a considerable number of prettily dressed ladies and a few gentlemen, who had come in the hope of meeting the rev. john starr, the young clergyman who was going to be their minister for the next few weeks during the absence of their regular shepherd, mr belcher, who was going away for a holiday for the benefit of his health. mr belcher was not suffering from any particular malady, but was merely 'run down', and rumour had it that this condition had been brought about by the rigorous asceticism of his life and his intense devotion to the arduous labours of his holy calling. mr starr had conducted the service in the shining light chapel that morning, and a great sensation had been produced by the young minister's earnest and eloquent address, which was of a very different style from that of their regular minister. although perhaps they had not quite grasped the real significance of all that he had said, most of them had been favourably impressed by the young clergyman's appearance and manner in the morning: but that might have arisen from prepossession and force of habit, for they were accustomed, as a matter of course, to think well of any minister. there were, however, one or two members of the congregation who were not without some misgivings and doubts as to the soundness of his doctrines. mr starr had promised that he would look in some time during the afternoon to say a few words to the sunday school children, and consequently on this particular afternoon all the grown-ups were looking forward so eagerly to hearing him again that not much was done in the way of lessons. every time a late arrival entered all eyes were directed towards the door in the hope and expectation that it was he. when frankie, standing at the door, saw all the people looking at him he drew back timidly. 'come on, man,' said charley. 'you needn't be afraid; it's not like a weekday school; they can't do nothing to us, not even if we don't behave ourselves. there's our class over in that corner and that's our teacher, mr hunter. you can sit next to me. come on!' thus encouraged, frankie followed charley over to the class, and both sat down. the teacher was so kind and spoke so gently to the children that in a few minutes frankie felt quite at home. when hunter noticed how well cared for and well dressed he was he thought the child must belong to well-to-do, respectable parents. frankie did not pay much attention to the lesson, for he was too much interested in the pictures on the walls and in looking at the other children. he also noticed a very fat man who was not teaching at all, but drifted aimlessly about he room from one class to another. after a time he came and stood by the class where frankie was, and, after nodding to hunter, remained near, listening and smiling patronizingly at the children. he was arrayed in a long garment of costly black cloth, a sort of frock coat, and by the rotundity of his figure he seemed to be one of those accustomed to sit in the chief places at feasts. this was the rev. mr belcher, minister of the shining light chapel. his short, thick neck was surrounded by a studless collar, and apparently buttonless, being fastened in some mysterious way known only to himself, and he showed no shirt front. the long garment beforementioned was unbuttoned and through the opening there protruded a vast expanse of waistcoat and trousers, distended almost to bursting by the huge globe of flesh they contained. a gold watch-chain with a locket extended partly across the visible portion of the envelope of the globe. he had very large feet which were carefully encased in soft calfskin boots. if he had removed the long garment, this individual would have resembled a balloon: the feet representing the car and the small head that surmounted the globe, the safety valve; as it was it did actually serve the purpose of a safety valve, the owner being, in consequence of gross overfeeding and lack of natural exercise, afflicted with chronic flatulence, which manifested itself in frequent belchings forth through the mouth of the foul gases generated in the stomach by the decomposition of the foods with which it was generally loaded. but as the rev. mr belcher had never been seen with his coat off, no one ever noticed the resemblance. it was not necessary for him to take his coat off: his part in life was not to help to produce, but to help to devour the produce of the labour of others. after exchanging a few words and grins with hunter, he moved on to another class, and presently frankie with a feeling of awe noticed that the confused murmuring sound that had hitherto pervaded the place was hushed. the time allotted for lessons had expired, and the teachers were quietly distributing hymn-books to the children. meanwhile the balloon had drifted up to the end of the hall and had ascended the platform, where it remained stationary by the side of the table, occasionally emitting puffs of gas through the safety valve. on the table were several books, and also a pile of folded cards. these latter were about six inches by three inches; there was some printing on the outside: one of them was lying open on the table, showing the inside, which was ruled and had money columns. presently mr belcher reached out a flabby white hand and, taking up one of the folded cards, he looked around upon the under-fed, ill-clad children with a large, sweet, benevolent, fatherly smile, and then in a drawling voice occasionally broken by explosions of flatulence, he said: 'my dear children. this afternoon as i was standing near brother hunter's class i heard him telling them of the wanderings of the children of israel in the wilderness, and of all the wonderful things that were done for them; and i thought how sad it was that they were so ungrateful. 'now those ungrateful israelites had received many things, but we have even more cause to be grateful than they had, for we have received even more abundantly than they did.' (here the good man's voice was stilled by a succession of explosions.) 'and i am sure,' he resumed, 'that none of you would like to be even as those israelites, ungrateful for all the good things you have received. oh, how thankful you should be for having been made happy english children. now, i am sure that you are grateful and that you will all be very glad of an opportunity of showing your gratitude by doing something in return. 'doubtless some of you have noticed the unseemly condition of the interior of our chapel. the flooring is broken in countless places. the walls are sadly in need of cleansing and distempering, and they also need cementing externally to keep out the draught. the seats and benches and the chairs are also in a most unseemly condition and need varnishing. 'now, therefore, after much earnest meditation and prayer, it has been decided to open a subscription list, and although times are very hard just now, we believe we shall succeed in getting enough to have the work done; so i want each one of you to take one of these cards and go round to all your friends to see how much you can collect. it doesn't matter how trifling the amounts are, because the smallest donations will be thankfully received. 'now, i hope you will all do your very best. ask everyone you know; do not refrain from asking people because you think that they are too poor to give a donation, but remind them that if they cannot give their thousands they can give the widow's mite. ask everyone! first of all ask those whom you feel certain will give: then ask all those whom you think may possibly give: and, finally, ask all those whom you feel certain will not give: and you will be surprised to find that many of these last will donate abundantly. 'if your friends are very poor and unable to give a large donation at one time, a good plan would be to arrange to call upon them every saturday afternoon with your card to collect their donations. and while you are asking others, do not forget to give what you can yourselves. just a little self-denial, and those pennies and half-pennies which you so often spend on sweets and other unnecessary things might be given--as a donation--to the good cause.' here the holy man paused again, and there was a rumbling, gurgling noise in the interior of the balloon, followed by several escapes of gas through the safety valve. the paroxysm over, the apostle of self-denial continued: 'all those who wish to collect donations will stay behind for a few minutes after school, when brother hunter--who has kindly consented to act as secretary to the fund--will issue the cards. 'i would like here to say a few words of thanks to brother hunter for the great interest he has displayed in this matter, and for all the trouble he is taking to help us to gather in the donations.' this tribute was well deserved; hunter in fact had originated the whole scheme in the hope of securing the job for rushton & co., and two-and-a-half per cent of the profits for himself. mr belcher now replaced the collecting card on the table and, taking up one of the hymn-books, gave out the words and afterwards conducted the singing, flourishing one fat, flabby white hand in the air and holding the book in the other. as the last strains of the music died away, he closed his eyes and a sweet smile widened his mouth as he stretched forth his right hand, open, palm down, with the fingers close together, and said: 'let us pray.' with much shuffling of feet everyone knelt down. hunter's lanky form was distributed over a very large area; his body lay along one of the benches, his legs and feet sprawled over the floor, and his huge hands clasped the sides of the seat. his eyes were tightly closed and an expression of the most intense misery pervaded his long face. mrs starvem, being so fat that she knew if she once knelt down she would never be able to get up again, compromised by sitting on the extreme edge of her chair, resting her elbows on the back of the seat in front of her, and burying her face in her hands. it was a very large face, but her hands were capacious enough to receive it. in a seat at the back of the hall knelt a pale-faced, weary-looking little woman about thirty-six years of age, very shabbily dressed, who had come in during the singing. this was mrs white, the caretaker, bert white's mother. when her husband died, the committee of the chapel, out of charity, gave her this work, for which they paid her six shillings a week. of course, they could not offer her full employment; the idea was that she could get other work as well, charing and things of that kind, and do the chapel work in between. there wasn't much to do: just the heating furnace to light when necessary; the chapel, committee rooms, classrooms and sunday school to sweep and scrub out occasionally; the hymn-books to collect, etc. whenever they had a tea meeting--which was on an average about twice a week--there were the trestle tables to fix up, the chairs to arrange, the table to set out, and then, supervised by miss didlum or some other lady, the tea to make. there was rather a lot to do on the days following these functions: the washing up, the tables and chairs to put away, the floor to sweep, and so on; but the extra work was supposed to be compensated by the cakes and broken victuals generally left over from the feast, which were much appreciated as a welcome change from the bread and dripping or margarine that constituted mrs white's and bert's usual fare. there were several advantages attached to the position: the caretaker became acquainted with the leading members and their wives, some of who, out of charity, occasionally gave her a day's work as charwoman, the wages being on about the same generous scale as those she earned at the chapel, sometimes supplemented by a parcel of broken victuals or some castoff clothing. an evil-minded, worldly or unconverted person might possibly sum up the matter thus: these people required this work done: they employed this woman to do it, taking advantage of her poverty to impose upon her conditions of price and labour that they would not have liked to endure themselves. although she worked very hard, early and late, the money they paid her as wages was insufficient to enable her to provide herself with the bare necessaries of life. then her employers, being good, kind, generous, christian people, came to the rescue and bestowed charity, in the form of cast-off clothing and broken victuals. should any such evil-minded, worldly or unconverted persons happen to read these lines, it is a sufficient answer to their impious and malicious criticisms to say that no such thoughts ever entered the simple mind of mrs white herself: on the contrary, this very afternoon as she knelt in the chapel, wearing an old mantle that some years previously had adorned the obese person of the saintly mrs starvem, her heart was filled with gratitude towards her generous benefactors. during the prayer the door was softly opened: a gentleman in clerical dress entered on tiptoe and knelt down next to mr didlum. he came in very softly, but all the same most of those present heard him and lifted their heads or peeped through their fingers to see who it was, and when they recognized him a sound like a sigh swept through the hall. at the end of the prayer, amid groans and cries of 'amen', the balloon slowly descended from the platform, and collapsed into one of the seats, and everyone rose up from the floor. when all were seated and the shuffling, coughing and blowing of noses had ceased mr didlum stood up and said: 'before we sing the closin' 'ymn, the gentleman hon my left, the rev. mr john starr, will say a few words.' an expectant murmur rippled through the hall. the ladies lifted their eyebrows and nodded, smiled and whispered to each other; the gentlemen assumed various attitudes and expressions; the children were very quiet. everyone was in a state of suppressed excitement as john starr rose from his seat and, stepping up on to the platform, stood by the side of the table, facing them. he was about twenty-six years of age, tall and slenderly built. his clean-cut, intellectual face, with its lofty forehead, and his air of refinement and culture were in striking contrast to the coarse appearance of the other adults in the room: the vulgar, ignorant, uncultivated crowd of profit-mongers and hucksters in front of him. but it was not merely his air of good breeding and the general comeliness of his exterior that attracted and held one. there was an indefinable something about him--an atmosphere of gentleness and love that seemed to radiate from his whole being, almost compelling confidence and affection from all those with whom he came in contact. as he stood there facing the others with an inexpressibly winning smile upon his comely face, it seemed impossible that there could be any fellowship between him and them. there was nothing in his appearance to give anyone even an inkling of the truth, which was: that he was there for the purpose of bolstering up the characters of the despicable crew of sweaters and slave-drivers who paid his wages. he did not give a very long address this afternoon--only just a few words; but they were very precious, original and illuminating. he told them of certain thoughts that had occurred to his mind on his way there that afternoon; and as they listened, sweater, rushton, didlum, hunter, and the other disciples exchanged significant looks and gestures. was it not magnificent! such power! such reasoning! in fact, as they afterwards modestly admitted to each other, it was so profound that even they experienced great difficulty in fathoming the speaker's meaning. as for the ladies, they were motionless and dumb with admiration. they sat with flushed faces, shining eyes and palpitating hearts, looking hungrily at the dear man as he proceeded: 'unfortunately, our time this afternoon does not permit us to dwell at length upon these thoughts. perhaps at some future date we may have the blessed privilege of so doing; but this afternoon i have been asked to say a few words on another subject. the failing health of your dear minister has for some time past engaged the anxious attention of the congregation.' sympathetic glances were directed towards the interesting invalid; the ladies murmured, 'poor dear!' and other expressions of anxious concern. 'although naturally robust,' continued starr, 'long, continued overwork, the loving solicitude for others that often prevented him taking even necessary repose, and a too rigorous devotion to the practice of self-denial have at last brought about the inevitable breakdown, and rendered a period of rest absolutely imperative.' the orator paused to take breath, and the silence that ensued was disturbed only by faint rumblings in the interior of the ascetic victim of overwork. 'with this laudable object,' proceeded starr, 'a subscription list was quietly opened about a month ago, and those dear children who had cards and assisted in the good work of collecting donations will be pleased to hear that altogether a goodly sum was gathered, but as it was not quite enough, the committee voted a further amount out of the general fund, and at a special meeting held last friday evening, your dear shepherd was presented with an illuminated address, and a purse of gold sufficient to defray the expenses of a month's holiday in the south of france. 'although, of course, he regrets being separated from you even for such a brief period he feels that in going he is choosing the lesser of two evils. it is better to go to the south of france for a month than to continue working in spite of the warnings of exhausted nature and perhaps be taken away from you altogether--to heaven.' 'god forbid!' fervently ejaculated several disciples, and a ghastly pallor overspread the features of the object of their prayers. 'even as it is there is a certain amount of danger. let us hope and pray for the best, but if the worst should happen and he is called upon to ascend, there will be some satisfaction in knowing that you have done what you could to avert the dreadful calamity.' here, probably as a precaution against the possibility of an involuntary ascent, a large quantity of gas was permitted to escape through the safety valve of the balloon. 'he sets out on his pilgrimage tomorrow,' concluded starr, 'and i am sure he will be followed by the good wishes and prayers of all the members of his flock.' the reverend gentleman resumed his seat, and almost immediately it became evident from the oscillations of the balloon that mr belcher was desirous of rising to say a few words in acknowledgement, but he was restrained by the entreaties of those near him, who besought him not to exhaust himself. he afterwards said that he would not have been able to say much even if they had permitted him to speak, because he felt too full. 'during the absence of our beloved pastor,' said brother didlum, who now rose to give out the closing hymn, 'his flock will not be left hentirely without a shepherd, for we 'ave arranged with mr starr to come and say a few words to us hevery sunday.' from the manner in which they constantly referred to themselves, it might have been thought that they were a flock of sheep instead of being what they really were--a pack of wolves. when they heard brother didlum's announcement a murmur of intense rapture rose from the ladies, and mr starr rolled his eyes and smiled sweetly. brother didlum did not mention the details of the 'arrangement', to have done so at that time would have been most unseemly, but the following extract from the accounts of the chapel will not be out of place here: 'paid to rev. john starr for sunday, nov. 14--l4.4.0 per the treasurer.' it was not a large sum considering the great services rendered by mr starr, but, small as it was, it is to be feared that many worldly, unconverted persons will think it was far too much to pay for a few words, even such wise words as mr john starr's admittedly always were. but the labourer is worthy of his hire. after the 'service' was over, most of the children, including charley and frankie, remained to get collecting cards. mr starr was surrounded by a crowd of admirers, and a little later, when he rode away with mr belcher and mr sweater in the latter's motor car, the ladies looked hungrily after that conveyance, listening to the melancholy 'pip, pip' of its hooter and trying to console themselves with the reflection that they would see him again in a few hours' time at the evening service. chapter 18 the lodger in accordance with his arrangement with hunter, owen commenced the work in the drawing-room on the monday morning. harlow and easton were distempering some of the ceilings, and about ten o'clock they went down to the scullery to get some more whitewash. crass was there as usual, pretending to be very busy mixing colours. 'well, wot do you think of it?' he said as he served them with what they required. 'think of what?' asked easton. 'why, hour speshul hartist,' replied crass with a sneer. 'do you think 'e's goin' to get through with it?' 'shouldn't like to say,' replied easton guardedly. 'you know it's one thing to draw on a bit of paper and colour it with a penny box of paints, and quite another thing to do it on a wall or ceiling,' continued crass. 'ain't it?' 'yes; that's true enough,' said harlow. 'do you believe they're 'is own designs?' crass went on. 'be rather 'ard to tell,' remarked easton, embarrassed. neither harlow nor easton shared crass's sentiments in this matter, but at the same time they could not afford to offend him by sticking up for owen. 'if you was to ast me, quietly,' crass added, 'i should be more inclined to say as 'e copied it all out of some book.' 'that's just about the size of it, mate,' agreed harlow. 'it would be a bit of all right if 'e was to make a bloody mess of it, wouldn't it?' crass continued with a malignant leer. 'not arf!' said harlow. when the two men regained the upper landing on which they were working they exchanged significant glances and laughed quietly. hearing these half-suppressed sounds of merriment, philpot, who was working alone in a room close by, put his head out of the doorway. 'wot's the game?' he inquired in a low voice. 'ole crass ain't arf wild about owen doin' that room,' replied harlow, and repeated the substance of crass's remarks. 'it is a bit of a take-down for the bleeder, ain't it, 'avin' to play second fiddle,' said philpot with a delighted grin. ''e's opin' owen'll make a mess of it,' easton whispered. 'well, 'e'll be disappointed, mate,' answered philpot. 'i was workin' along of owen for pushem and sloggem about two year ago, and i seen 'im do a job down at the royal 'otel--the smokin'-room ceilin' it was--and i can tell you it looked a bloody treat!' 'i've heard tell of it,' said harlow. 'there's no doubt owen knows 'is work,' remarked easton, 'although 'e is a bit orf is onion about socialism.' 'i don't know so much about that, mate,' returned philpot. 'i agree with a lot that 'e ses. i've often thought the same things meself, but i can't talk like 'im, 'cause i ain't got no 'ead for it.' 'i agree with some of it too,' said harlow with a laugh, 'but all the same 'e does say some bloody silly things, you must admit. for instance, that stuff about money bein' the cause of poverty.' 'yes. i can't exactly see that meself,' agreed philpot. 'we must tackle 'im about that at dinner-time,' said harlow. 'i should rather like to 'ear 'ow 'e makes it out.' 'for gord's sake don't go startin' no arguments at dinner-time,' said easton. 'leave 'im alone when 'e is quiet.' 'yes; let's 'ave our dinner in peace, if possible,' said philpot. 'sh!!' he added, hoarsely, suddenly holding up his hand warningly. they listened intently. it was evident from the creaking of the stairs that someone was crawling up them. philpot instantly disappeared. harlow lifted up the pail of whitewash and set it down again noisily. 'i think we'd better 'ave the steps and the plank over this side, easton,' he said in a loud voice. 'yes. i think that'll be the best way,' replied easton. while they were arranging their scaffold to do the ceiling crass arrived on the landing. he made no remark at first, but walked into the room to see how many ceilings they had done. 'you'd better look alive, you chaps, he said as he went downstairs again. 'if we don't get these ceilings finished by dinner-time, nimrod's sure to ramp.' 'all right,' said harlow, gruffly. 'we'll bloody soon slosh 'em over.' 'slosh' was a very suitable word; very descriptive of the manner in which the work was done. the cornices of the staircase ceilings were enriched with plaster ornaments. these ceilings were supposed to have been washed off, but as the men who were put to do that work had not been allowed sufficient time to do it properly, the crevices of the ornaments were still filled up with old whitewash, and by the time harlow and easton had 'sloshed' a lot more whitewash on to them they were mere formless unsightly lumps of plaster. the 'hands' who did the 'washing off' were not to blame. they had been hunted away from the work before it was half done. while harlow and easton were distempering these ceilings, philpot and the other hands were proceeding with the painting in different parts of the inside of the house, and owen, assisted by bert, was getting on with the work in the drawing-room, striking chalk lines and measuring and setting out the different panels. there were no 'political' arguments that day at dinner-time, to the disappointment of crass, who was still waiting for an opportunity to produce the obscurer cutting. after dinner, when the others had all gone back to their work, philpot unobtrusively returned to the kitchen and gathered up the discarded paper wrappers in which some of the men had brought their food. spreading one of these open, he shook the crumbs from the others upon it. in this way and by picking up particles of bread from the floor, he collected a little pile of crumbs and crusts. to these he added some fragments that he had left from his own dinner. he then took the parcel upstairs and opening one of the windows threw the crumbs on to the roof of the portico. he had scarcely closed the window when two starlings fluttered down and began to eat. philpot watching them furtively from behind the shutter. the afternoon passed uneventfully. from one till five seemed a very long time to most of the hands, but to owen and his mate, who were doing something in which they were able to feel some interest and pleasure, the time passed so rapidly that they both regretted the approach of evening. 'other days,' remarked bert, 'i always keeps on wishin' it was time to go 'ome, but today seems to 'ave gorn like lightnin'!' after leaving off that night, all the men kept together till they arrived down town, and then separated. owen went by himself: easton, philpot, crass and bundy adjourned to the 'cricketers arms' to have a drink together before going home, and slyme, who was a teetotaler, went by himself, although he was now lodging with easton. 'don't wait for me,' said the latter as he went off with crass and the others. 'i shall most likely catch you up before you get there.' 'all right,' replied slyme. this evening slyme did not take the direct road home. he turned into the main street, and, pausing before the window of a toy shop, examined the articles displayed therein attentively. after some minutes he appeared to have come to a decision, and entering the shop he purchased a baby's rattle for fourpence halfpenny. it was a pretty toy made of white bone and coloured wool, with a number of little bells hanging upon it, and a ring of white bone at the end of the handle. when he came out of the shop slyme set out for home, this time walking rapidly. when he entered the house ruth was sitting by the fire with the baby on her lap. she looked up with an expression of disappointment as she perceived that he was alone. 'where's will got to again?' she asked. 'he's gone to 'ave a drink with some of the chaps. he said he wouldn't be long,' replied slyme as he put his food basket on the dresser and went upstairs to his room to wash and to change his clothes. when he came down again, easton had not yet arrived. 'everything's ready, except just to make the tea,' said ruth, who was evidently annoyed at the continued absence of easton, 'so you may as well have yours now.' 'i'm in no hurry. i'll wait a little and see if he comes. he's sure to be here soon.' 'if you're sure you don't mind, i shall be glad if you will wait,' said ruth, 'because it will save me making two lots of tea.' they waited for about half an hour, talking at intervals in a constrained, awkward way about trivial subjects. then as easton did not come, ruth decided to serve slyme without waiting any longer. with this intention she laid the baby in its cot, but the child resented this arrangement and began to cry, so she had to hold him under her left arm while she made the tea. seeing her in this predicament, slyme exclaimed, holding out his hands: 'here, let me hold him while you do that.' 'will you?' said ruth, who, in spite of her instinctive dislike of the man, could not help feeling gratified with this attention. 'well, mind you don't let him fall.' but the instant slyme took hold of the child it began to cry even louder than it did when it was put into the cradle. 'he's always like that with strangers,' apologized ruth as she took him back again. 'wait a minute,' said slyme, 'i've got something upstairs in my pocket that will keep him quiet. i'd forgotten all about it.' he went up to his room and presently returned with the rattle. when the baby saw the bright colours and heard the tinkling of the bells he crowed with delight, and reached out his hands eagerly towards it and allowed slyme to take him without a murmur of protest. before ruth had finished making and serving the tea the man and child were on the very best of terms with each other, so much so indeed that when ruth had finished and went to take him again, the baby seemed reluctant to part from slyme, who had been dancing him in the air and tickling him in the most delightful way. ruth, too, began to have a better opinion of slyme, and felt inclined to reproach herself for having taken such an unreasonable dislike of him at first. he was evidently a very good sort of fellow after all. the baby had by this time discovered the use of the bone ring at the end of the handle of the toy and was biting it energetically. 'it's a very beautiful rattle,' said ruth. 'thank you very much for it. it's just the very thing he wanted.' 'i heard you say the other day that he wanted something of the kind to bite on to help his teeth through,' answered slyme, 'and when i happened to notice that in the shop i remembered what you said and thought i'd bring it home.' the baby took the ring out of its mouth and shaking the rattle frantically in the air laughed and crowed merrily, looking at slyme. 'dad! dad! dad!' he cried, holding out his arms. slyme and ruth burst out laughing. 'that's not your dad, you silly boy,' she said, kissing the child as she spoke. 'your dad ought to be ashamed of himself for staying out like this. we'll give him dad, dad, dad, when he does come home, won't we?' but the baby only shook the rattle and rang the bells and laughed and crowed and laughed again, louder than ever. chapter 19 the filling of the tank viewed from outside, the 'cricketers arms' was a pretentious-looking building with plate-glass windows and a profusion of gilding. the pilasters were painted in imitation of different marbles and the doors grained to represent costly woods. there were panels containing painted advertisements of wines and spirits and beer, written in gold, and ornamented with gaudy colours. on the lintel over the principal entrance was inscribed in small white letters: 'a. harpy. licensed to sell wines, spirits and malt liquor by retail to be consumed either on or off the premises.' the bar was arranged in the usual way, being divided into several compartments. first there was the 'saloon bar': on the glass of the door leading into this was fixed a printed bill: 'no four ale served in this bar.' next to the saloon bar was the jug and bottle department, much appreciated by ladies who wished to indulge in a drop of gin on the quiet. there were also two small 'private' bars, only capable of holding two or three persons, where nothing less than fourpennyworth of spirits or glasses of ale at threepence were served. finally, the public bar, the largest compartment of all. at each end, separating it from the other departments, was a wooden partition, painted and varnished. wooden forms fixed across the partitions and against the walls under the windows provided seating accommodation for the customers. a large automatic musical instrument--a 'penny in the slot' polyphone--resembling a grandfather's clock in shape--stood against one of the partitions and close up to the counter, so that those behind the bar could reach to wind it up. hanging on the partition near the polyphone was a board about fifteen inches square, over the surface of which were distributed a number of small hooks, numbered. at the bottom of the board was a net made of fine twine, extended by means of a semi-circular piece of wire. in this net several india-rubber rings about three inches in diameter were lying. there was no table in the place but jutting out from the other partition was a hinged flap about three feet long by twenty inches wide, which could be folded down when not in use. this was the shove-ha'penny board. the coins--old french pennies--used in playing this game were kept behind the bar and might be borrowed on application. on the partition, just above the shove-ha'penny board was a neatly printed notice, framed and glazed: notice gentlemen using this house are requested to refrain from using obscene language. alongside this notice were a number of gaudily-coloured bills advertising the local theatre and the music-hall, and another of a travelling circus and menagerie, then visiting the town and encamped on a piece of waste ground about half-way on the road to windley. the fittings behind the bar, and the counter, were of polished mahogany, with silvered plate glass at the back of the shelves. on the shelves were rows of bottles and cut-glass decanters, gin, whisky, brandy and wines and liqueurs of different kinds. when crass, philpot, easton and bundy entered, the landlord, a well-fed, prosperous-looking individual in white shirt-sleeves, and a bright maroon fancy waistcoat with a massive gold watch-chain and a diamond ring, was conversing in an affable, friendly way with one of his regular customers, who was sitting on the end of the seat close to the counter, a shabbily dressed, bleary-eyed, degraded, beer-sodden, trembling wretch, who spent the greater part of every day, and all his money, in this bar. he was a miserable-looking wreck of a man about thirty years of age, supposed to be a carpenter, although he never worked at that trade now. it was commonly said that some years previously he had married a woman considerably his senior, the landlady of a third-rate lodging-house. this business was evidently sufficiently prosperous to enable him to exist without working and to maintain himself in a condition of perpetual semi-intoxication. this besotted wretch practically lived at the 'cricketers'. he came regularly very morning and sometimes earned a pint of beer by assisting the barman to sweep up the sawdust or clean the windows. he usually remained in the bar until closing time every night. he was a very good customer; not only did he spend whatever money he could get hold of himself, but he was the cause of others spending money, for he was acquainted with most of the other regular customers, who, knowing his impecunious condition, often stood him a drink 'for the good of the house'. the only other occupant of the public bar--previous to the entrance of crass and his mates--was a semi-drunken man, who appeared to be a house-painter, sitting on the form near the shove-ha'penny board. he was wearing a battered bowler hat and the usual shabby clothes. this individual had a very thin, pale face, with a large, high-bridged nose, and bore a striking resemblance to the portraits of the first duke of wellington. he was not a regular customer here, having dropped in casually about two o'clock and had remained ever since. he was beginning to show the effects of the drink he had taken during that time. as crass and the others came in they were hailed with enthusiasm by the landlord and the besotted wretch, while the semi-drunk workman regarded them with fishy eyes and stupid curiosity. 'wot cheer, bob?' said the landlord, affably, addressing crass, and nodding familiarly to the others. ''ow goes it?' 'all reet me ole dear!' replied crass, jovially. ''ow's yerself?' 'a.1,' replied the 'old dear', getting up from his chair in readiness to execute their orders. 'well, wot's it to be?' inquired philpot of the others generally. 'mine's a pint o' beer,' said crass. 'half for me,' said bundy. 'half o' beer for me too,' replied easton. 'that's one pint, two 'arves, and a pint o' porter for meself,' said philpot, turning and addressing the old dear. while the landlord was serving these drinks the besotted wretch finished his beer and set the empty glass down on the counter, and philpot observing this, said to him: ''ave one along o' me?' 'i don't mind if i do,' replied the other. when the drinks were served, philpot, instead of paying for them, winked significantly at the landlord, who nodded silently and unobtrusively made an entry in an account book that was lying on one of the shelves. although it was only monday and he had been at work all the previous week, philpot was already stony broke. this was accounted for by the fact that on saturday he had paid his landlady something on account of the arrears of board and lodging money that had accumulated while he was out of work; and he had also paid the old dear four shillings for drinks obtained on tick during the last week. 'well, 'ere's the skin orf yer nose,' said crass, nodding to philpot, and taking a long pull at the pint glass which the latter had handed to him. similar appropriate and friendly sentiments were expressed by the others and suitably acknowledged by philpot, the founder of the feast. the old dear now put a penny in the slot of the polyphone, and winding it up started it playing. it was some unfamiliar tune, but when the semi-drunk painter heard it he rose unsteadily to his feet and began shuffling and dancing about, singing: 'oh, we'll inwite you to the wedding, an' we'll 'ave a glorious time! where the boys an' girls is a-dancing, an' we'll all get drunk on wine.' ''ere! that's quite enough o' that!' cried the landlord, roughly. 'we don't want that row 'ere.' the semi-drunk stopped, and looking stupidly at the old dear, sank abashed on to the seat again. 'well, we may as well sit as stand--for a few minutes,' remarked crass, suiting the action to the word. the others followed his example. at frequent intervals the bar was entered by fresh customers, most of them working men on their way home, who ordered and drank their pint or half-pint of ale or porter and left at once. bundy began reading the advertisement of the circus and menageries and a conversation ensued concerning the wonderful performances of the trained animals. the old dear said that some of them had as much sense as human beings, and the manner with which he made this statement implied that he thought it was a testimonial to the sagacity of the brutes. he further said that he had heard--a little earlier in the evening--a rumour that one of the wild animals, a bear or something, had broken loose and was at present at large. this was what he had heard--he didn't know if it were true or not. for his own part he didn't believe it, and his hearers agreed that it was highly improbable. nobody ever knew how these silly yarns got about. presently the besotted wretch got up and, taking the india-rubber rings out of the net with a trembling hand, began throwing them one at a time at the hooks on the board. the rest of the company watched him with much interest, laughing when he made a very bad shot and applauding when he scored. ''e's a bit orf tonight,' remarked philpot aside to easton, 'but as a rule 'e's a fair knockout at it. throws a splendid ring.' the semidrunk regarded the proceedings of the besotted wretch with an expression of profound contempt. 'you can't play for nuts,' he said scornfully. 'can't i? i can play you, anyway.' 'right you are! i'll play you for drinks round!' cried the semi-drunk. for a moment the besotted wretch hesitated. he had not money enough to pay for drinks round. however, feeling confident of winning, he replied: 'come on then. what's it to be? fifty up?' 'anything you like! fifty or a 'undred or a bloody million!' 'better make it fifty for a start.' 'all right!' 'you play first if you like.' 'all right,' agreed the semi-drunk, anxious to distinguish himself. holding the six rings in his left hand, the man stood in the middle of the floor at a distance of about three yards from the board, with his right foot advanced. taking one of the rings between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, and closing his left eye, he carefully 'sighted' the centre hook, no. 13; then he slowly extended his arm to its full length in the direction of the board: then bending his elbow, he brought his hand back again until it nearly touched his chin, and slowly extended his arm again. he repeated these movements several times, whilst the others watched with bated breath. getting it right at last he suddenly shot the ring at the board, but it did not go on no. 13; it went over the partition into the private bar. this feat was greeted with a roar of laughter. the player stared at the board in a dazed way, wondering what had become of the ring. when someone in the next bar threw it over the partition again, he realized what had happened and, turning to the company with a sickly smile, remarked: 'i ain't got properly used to this board yet: that's the reason of it.' he now began throwing the other rings at the board rather wildly, without troubling to take aim. one struck the partition to the right of the board: one to the left: one underneath: one went over the counter, one on the floor, the other--the last--hit the board, and amid a shout of applause, caught on the centre hook no. 13, the highest number it was possible to score with a single throw. 'i shall be all right now that i've got the range,' observed the semi-drunk as he made way for his opponent. 'you'll see something now,' whispered philpot to easton. 'this bloke is a dandy!' the besotted wretch took up his position and with an affectation of carelessness began throwing the rings. it was really a remarkable exhibition, for notwithstanding the fact that his hand trembled like the proverbial aspen leaf, he succeeded in striking the board almost in the centre every time; but somehow or other most of them failed to catch on the hooks and fell into the net. when he finished his innings, he had only scored 4, two of the rings having caught on the no. 2 hook. ''ard lines,' remarked bundy as he finished his beer and put the glass down on the counter. 'drink up and 'ave another,' said easton as he drained his own glass. 'i don't mind if i do,' replied crass, pouring what remained of the pint down his throat. philpot's glass had been empty for some time. 'same again,' said easton, addressing the old dear and putting six pennies on the counter. by this time the semi-drunk had again opened fire on the board, but he seemed to have lost the range, for none of the rings scored. they flew all over the place, and he finished his innings without increasing his total. the besotted wretch now sailed in and speedily piled up 37. then the semi-drunk had another go, and succeeded in getting 8. his case appeared hopeless, but his opponent in his next innings seemed to go all to pieces. twice he missed the board altogether, and when he did hit it he failed to score, until the very last throw, when he made 1. then the semi-drunk went in again and got 10. the scores were now: besotted wretch ........................ 42 semi-drunk ............................. 31 so far it was impossible to foresee the end. it was anybody's game. crass became so excited that he absentmindedly opened his mouth and shot his second pint down into his stomach with a single gulp, and bundy also drained his glass and called upon philpot and easton to drink up and have another, which they accordingly did. while the semi-drunk was having his next innings, the besotted wretch placed a penny on the counter and called for a half a pint, which he drank in the hope of st for a great effort. his opponent meanwhile threw the rings at the board and missed it every time, but all the same he scored, for one ring, after striking the partition about a foot above the board, fell down and caught on the hook. the other man now began his innings, playing very carefully, and nearly every ring scored. as he played, the others uttered exclamations of admiration and called out the result of every throw. 'one!' 'one again!' 'miss! no! got 'im! two!' 'miss!' 'miss!' 'four!' the semi-drunk accepted his defeat with a good grace, and after explaining that he was a bit out of practice, placed a shilling on the counter and invited the company to give their orders. everyone asked for 'the same again,' but the landlord served easton, bundy and the besotted wretch with pints instead of half-pints as before, so there was no change out of the shilling. 'you know, there's a great deal in not bein' used to the board,' said the semi-drunk. 'there's no disgrace in bein' beat by a man like 'im, mate,' said philpot. ''e's a champion!' 'yes, there's no mistake about it. 'e throws a splendid ring!' said bundy. this was the general verdict. the semi-drunk, though beaten, was not disgraced: and he was so affected by the good feeling manifested by the company that he presently produced a sixpence and insisted on paying for another half-pint all round. crass had gone outside during this conversation, but he returned in a few minutes. 'i feel a bit easier now,' he remarked with a laugh as he took the half-pint glass that the semi-drunk passed to him with a shaking hand. one after the other, within a few minutes, the rest followed crass's example, going outside and returning almost immediately: and as bundy, who was the last to return, came back he exclaimed: 'let's 'ave a game of shove-'a'penny.' 'all right,' said easton, who was beginning to feel reckless. 'but drink up first, and let's 'ave another.' he had only sevenpence left, just enough to pay for another pint for crass and half a pint for everyone else. the shove-ha'penny table was a planed mahogany board with a number of parallel lines scored across it. the game is played by placing the coin at the end of the board--the rim slightly overhanging the edge--and striking it with the back part of the palm of the hand, regulating the force of the blow according to the distance it is desired to drive the coin. 'what's become of alf tonight?' inquired philpot of the landlord whilst easton and bundy were playing. alf was the barman. ''e's doing a bit of a job down in the cellar; some of the valves gone a bit wrong. but the missus is comin' down to lend me a hand presently. 'ere she is now.' the landlady--who at this moment entered through the door at the back of the bar--was a large woman with a highly-coloured countenance and a tremendous bust, incased in a black dress with a shot silk blouse. she had several jewelled gold rings on the fingers of each fat white hand, and a long gold watch guard hung round her fat neck. she greeted crass and philpot with condescension, smiling affably upon them. meantime the game of shove-ha'penny proceeded merrily, the semi-drunk taking a great interest in it and tendering advice to both players impartially. bundy was badly beaten, and then easton suggested that it was time to think of going home. this proposal--slightly modified--met with general approval, the modification being suggested by philpot, who insisted on standing one final round of drinks before they went. while they were pouring this down their throats, crass took a penny from his waistcoat pocket and put it in the slot of the polyphone. the landlord put a fresh disc into it and wound it up and it began to play 'the boys of the bulldog breed.' the semi-drunk happened to know the words of the chorus of this song, and when he heard the music he started unsteadily to his feet and with many fierce looks and gestures began to roar at the top of his voice: 'they may build their ships, my lads, and try to play the game, but they can't build the boys of the bulldog breed, wot made ole hingland's--' ''ere! stop that, will yer?' cried the old dear, fiercely. 'i told you once before that i don't allow that sort of thing in my 'ouse!' the semi-drunk stopped in confusion. 'i don't mean no 'arm,' he said unsteadily, appealing to the company. 'i don't want no chin from you!' said the old dear with a ferocious scowl. 'if you want to make that row you can go somewheres else, and the sooner you goes the better. you've been 'ere long enough.' this was true. the man had been there long enough to spend every penny he had been possessed of when he first came: he had no money left now, a fact that the observant and experienced landlord had divined some time ago. he therefore wished to get rid of the fellow before the drink affected him further and made him helplessly drunk. the semi-drunk listened with indignation and wrath to the landlord's insulting words. 'i shall go when the bloody 'ell i like!' he shouted. 'i shan't ask you nor nobody else! who the bloody 'ell are you? you're nobody! see? nobody! it's orf the likes of me that you gets your bloody livin'! i shall stop 'ere as long as i bloody well like, and if you don't like it you can go to 'ell!' 'oh! yer will, will yer?' said the old dear. 'we'll soon see about that.' and, opening the door at the back of the bar, he roared out: 'alf!' 'yes, sir,' replied a voice, evidently from the basement. 'just come up 'ere.' 'all right,' replied the voice, and footsteps were heard ascending some stairs. 'you'll see some fun in a minute,' gleefully remarked crass to easton. the polyphone continued to play 'the boys of the bulldog breed.' philpot crossed over to the semi-drunk. 'look 'ere, old man,' he whispered, 'take my tip and go 'ome quietly. you'll only git the worse of it, you know.' 'not me, mate,' replied the other, shaking his head doggedly. ''ere i am, and 'ere i'm goin' to bloody well stop.' 'no, you ain't,' replied philpot coaxingly. ''look 'ere. i'll tell you wot we'll do. you 'ave just one more 'arf-pint along of me, and then we'll both go 'ome together. i'll see you safe 'ome.' 'see me safe 'ome! wotcher mean?' indignantly demanded the other. 'do you think i'm drunk or wot?' 'no. certainly not,' replied philpot, hastily. 'you're all right, as right as i am myself. but you know wot i mean. let's go 'ome. you don't want to stop 'ere all night, do you?' by this time alf had arrived at the door of the back of the bar. he was a burly young man about twenty-two or twenty-three years of age. 'put it outside,' growled the landlord, indicating the culprit. the barman instantly vaulted over the counter, and, having opened wide the door leading into the street, he turned to the half-drunken man and, jerking his thumb in the direction of the door, said: 'are yer goin'?' 'i'm goin' to 'ave 'arf a pint along of this genelman first--' 'yes. it's all right,' said philpot to the landlord. 'let's 'ave two 'arf-pints, and say no more about it.' 'you mind your own business,' shouted the landlord, turning savagely on him. ''e'll get no more 'ere! i don't want no drunken men in my 'ouse. who asked you to interfere?' 'now then!' exclaimed the barman to the cause of the trouble, 'outside!' 'not me!' said the semi-drunk firmly. 'not before i've 'ad my 'arf--' but before he could conclude, the barman had clutched him by the collar, dragged him violently to the door and shot him into the middle of the road, where he fell in a heap almost under the wheels of a brewer's dray that happened to be passing. this accomplished, alf shut the door and retired behind the counter again. 'serve 'im bloody well right,' said crass. 'i couldn't 'elp laughin' when i seen 'im go flyin' through the bloody door,' said bundy. 'you oughter 'ave more sense than to go interferin' like that,' said crass to philpot. 'it was nothing to do with you.' philpot made no reply. he was standing with his back to the others, peeping out into the street over the top of the window casing. then he opened the door and went out into the street. crass and the others--through the window--watched him assist the semi-drunk to his feet and rub some of the dirt off his clothes, and presently after some argument they saw the two go away together arm in arm. crass and the others laughed, and returned to their half-finished drinks. 'why, old joe ain't drunk 'ardly 'arf of 'is!' cried easton, seeing philpot's porter on the counter. 'fancy going away like that!' 'more fool 'im,' growled crass. 'there was no need for it: the man's all right.' the besotted wretch gulped his beer down as quickly as he could, with his eyes fixed greedily on philpot's glass. he had just finished his own and was about to suggest that it was a pity to waste the porter when philpot unexpectedly reappeared. 'hullo! what 'ave you done with 'im?' inquired crass. 'i think 'e'll be all right,' replied philpot. 'he wouldn't let me go no further with 'im: said if i didn't go away, 'e'd go for me! but i believe 'e'll be all right. i think the fall sobered 'im a bit.' 'oh, 'e's all right,' said crass offhandedly. 'there's nothing the matter with 'im.' philpot now drank his porter, and bidding 'good night' to the old dear, the landlady and the besotted wretch, they all set out for home. as they went along the dark and lonely thoroughfare that led over the hill to windley, they heard from time to time the weird roaring of the wild animals in the menagerie that was encamped in the adjacent field. just as they reached a very gloomy and deserted part, they suddenly observed a dark object in the middle of the road some distance in front of them. it seemed to be a large animal of some kind and was coming slowly and stealthily towards them. they stopped, peering in a half-frightened way through the darkness. the animal continued to approach. bundy stooped down to the ground, groping about in search of a stone, and--with the exception of crass, who was too frightened to move--the others followed his example. they found several large stones and stood waiting for the creature--whatever it was--to come a little nearer so as to get a fair shot at it. they were about to let fly when the creature fell over on its side and moaned as if in pain. observing this, the four men advanced cautiously towards it. bundy struck a match and held it over the prostrate figure. it was the semi-drunk. after parting from philpot, the poor wretch had managed to walk all right for some distance. as philpot had remarked, the fall had to some extent sobered him; but he had not gone very far before the drink he had taken began to affect him again and he had fallen down. finding it impossible to get up, he began crawling along on his hands and knees, unconscious of the fact that he was travelling in the wrong direction. even this mode of progression failed him at last, and he would probably have been run over if they had not found him. they raised him up, and philpot, exhorting him to 'pull himself together' inquired where he lived. the man had sense enough left to be able to tell them his address, which was fortunately at windley, where they all resided. bundy and philpot took him home, separating from crass and easton at the corner of the street where both the latter lived. crass felt very full and satisfied with himself. he had had six and a half pints of beer, and had listened to two selections on the polyphone at a total cost of one penny. easton had but a few yards to go before reaching his own house after parting from crass, but he paused directly he heard the latter's door close, and leaning against a street lamp yielded to the feeling of giddiness and nausea that he had been fighting against all the way home. all the inanimate objects around him seemed to be in motion. the lights of the distant street lamps appeared to be floating about the pavement and the roadway rose and fell like the surface of a troubled sea. he searched his pockets for his handkerchief and having found it wiped his mouth, inwardly congratulating himself that crass was not there to see him. resuming his walk, after a few minutes he reached his own home. as he passed through, the gate closed of itself after him, clanging loudly. he went rather unsteadily up the narrow path that led to his front door and entered. the baby was asleep in the cradle. slyme had gone up to his own room, and ruth was sitting sewing by the fireside. the table was still set for two persons, for she had not yet taken her tea. easton lurched in noisily. ''ello, old girl!' he cried, throwing his dinner basket carelessly on the floor with an affectation of joviality and resting his hands on the table to support himself. 'i've come at last, you see.' ruth left off sewing, and, letting her hands fall into her lap, sat looking at him. she had never seen him like this before. his face was ghastly pale, the eyes bloodshot and red-rimmed, the lips tremulous and moist, and the ends of the hair of his fair moustache, stuck together with saliva and stained with beer, hung untidily round his mouth in damp clusters. perceiving that she did not speak or smile, easton concluded that she was angry and became grave himself. 'i've come at last, you see, my dear; better late than never.' he found it very difficult to speak plainly, for his lips trembled and refused to form the words. 'i don't know so much about that,' said ruth, inclined to cry and trying not to let him see the pity she could not help feeling for him. 'a nice state you're in. you ought to be ashamed of yourself.' easton shook his head and laughed foolishly. 'don't be angry, ruth. it's no good, you know.' he walked clumsily towards her, still leaning on the table to steady himself. 'don't be angry,' he mumbled as he stooped over her, putting his arm round her neck and his face close to hers. 'it's no good being angry, you know, dear.' she shrank away, shuddering with involuntary disgust as he pressed his wet lips and filthy moustache upon her mouth. his fetid breath, foul with the smell of tobacco and beer, and the odour of the stale tobacco smoke that exuded from his clothes filled her with loathing. he kissed her repeatedly and when at last he released her she hastily wiped her face with her handkerchief and shivered. easton said he did not want any tea, and went upstairs to bed almost immediately. ruth did not want any tea either now, although she had been very hungry before he came home. she sat up very late, sewing, and when at length she did go upstairs she found him lying on his back, partly undressed on the outside of the bedclothes, with his mouth wide open, breathing stertorously. chapter 20 the forty thieves. the battle: brigands versus bandits this is an even more unusually dull and uninteresting chapter, and introduces several matters that may appear to have nothing to do with the case. the reader is nevertheless entreated to peruse it, because it contains certain information necessary to an understanding of this history. the town of mugsborough was governed by a set of individuals called the municipal council. most of these 'representatives of the people' were well-to-do or retired tradesmen. in the opinion of the inhabitants of mugsborough, the fact that a man had succeeded in accumulating money in business was a clear demonstration of his fitness to be entrusted with the business of the town. consequently, when that very able and successful man of business mr george rushton was put up for election to the council he was returned by a large majority of the votes of the working men who thought him an ideal personage... these brigands did just as they pleased. no one ever interfered with them. they never consulted the ratepayers in any way. even at election time they did not trouble to hold meetings: each one of them just issued a kind of mansued a kind of manifesto setting forth his many noble qualities and calling upon the people for their votes: and the latter never failed to respond. they elected the same old crew time after time... the brigands committed their depredations almost unhindered, for the voters were engaged in the battle of life. take the public park for instance. like so many swine around a trough--they were so busily engaged in this battle that most of them had no time to go to the park, or they might have noticed that there were not so many costly plants there as there should have been. and if they had inquired further they would have discovered that nearly all the members of the town council had very fine gardens. there was reason for these gardens being so grand, for the public park was systematically robbed of its best to make them so. there was a lake in the park where large numbers of ducks and geese were kept at the ratepayers' expense. in addition to the food provided for these fowl with public money, visitors to the park used to bring them bags of biscuits and bread crusts. when the ducks and geese were nicely fattened the brigands used to carry them off and devour them at home. when they became tired of eating duck or goose, some of the councillors made arrangements with certain butchers and traded away the birds for meat. one of the most energetic members of the band was mr jeremiah didlum, the house-furnisher, who did a large hire system trade. he had an extensive stock of second-hand furniture that he had resumed possession of when the unfortunate would-be purchasers failed to pay the instalments regularly. other of the second-hand things had been purchased for a fraction of their real value at sheriff's sales or from people whom misfortune or want of employment had reduced to the necessity of selling their household possessions. another notable member of the band was mr amos grinder, who had practically monopolized the greengrocery trade and now owned nearly all the fruiterers' shops in the town. as for the other shops, if they did not buy their stocks from him--or, rather, the company of which he was managing director and principal shareholder--if these other fruiterers and greengrocers did not buy their stuff from his company, he tried to smash them by opening branches in their immediate neighbourhood and selling below cost. he was a self-made man: an example of what may be accomplished by cunning and selfishness. then there was the chief of the band--mr adam sweater, the mayor. he was always the chief, although he was not always mayor, it being the rule that the latter 'honour' should be enjoyed by all the members of the band in turn. a bright 'honour', forsooth! to be the first citizen in a community composed for the most part of ignorant semi-imbeciles, slaves, slave-drivers and psalm-singing hypocrites. mr sweater was the managing director and principal shareholder of a large drapery business in which he had amassed a considerable fortune. this was not very surprising, considering that he paid none of his workpeople fair wages and many of them no wages at all. he employed a great number of girls and young women who were supposed to be learning dressmaking, mantle-making or millinery. these were all indentured apprentices, some of whom had paid premiums of from five to ten pounds. they were 'bound' for three years. for the first two years they received no wages: the third year they got a shilling or eightpence a week. at the end of the third year they usually got the sack, unless they were willing to stay on as improvers at from three shillings to four and sixpence per week. they worked from half past eight in the morning till eight at night, with an interval of an hour for dinner, and at half past four they ceased work for fifteen minutes for tea. this was provided by the firm--half a pint for each girl, but they had to bring their own milk and sugar and bread and butter. few of the girls ever learned their trades thoroughly. some were taught to make sleeves; others cuffs or button-holes, and so on. the result was that in a short time each one became very expert and quick at one thing; and although their proficiency in this one thing would never enable them to earn a decent living, it enabled mr sweater to make money during the period of their apprenticeship, and that was all he cared about. occasionally a girl of intelligence and spirit would insist on the fulfilment of the terms of her indentures, and sometimes the parents would protest. if this were persisted in those girls got on better: but even these were turned to good account by the wily sweater, who induced the best of them to remain after their time was up by paying them what appeared--by contrast with the others girls' money--good wages, sometimes even seven or eight shillings a week! and liberal promises of future advancement. these girls then became a sort of reserve who could be called up to crush any manifestation of discontent on the part of the leading hands. the greater number of the girls, however, submitted tamely to the conditions imposed upon them. they were too young to realize the wrong that was being done them. as for their parents, it never occurred to them to doubt the sincerity of so good a man as mr sweater, who was always prominent in every good and charitable work. at the expiration of the girl's apprenticeship, if the parents complained of her want of proficiency, the pious sweater would attribute it to idleness or incapacity, and as the people were generally poor he seldom or never had any trouble with them. this was how he fulfilled the unctuous promise made to the confiding parents at the time the girl was handed over to his tender mercy--that he would 'make a woman of her'. this method of obtaining labour by false pretences and without payment, which enabled him to produce costly articles for a mere fraction of the price for which they were eventually sold, was adopted in other departments of his business. he procured shop assistants of both sexes on the same terms. a youth was indentured, usually for five years, to be 'made a man of and 'turned out fit to take a position in any house'. if possible, a premium, five, ten, or twenty pounds--according to their circumstances--would be extracted from the parents. for the first three years, no wages: after that, perhaps two or three shillings a week. at the end of the five years the work of 'making a man of him' would be completed. mr sweater would then congratulate him and assure him that he was qualified to assume a 'position' in any house but regret that there was no longer any room for him in his. business was so bad. still, if the man wished he might stay on until he secured a better 'position' and, as a matter of generosity, although he did not really need the man's services, he would pay him ten shillings per week! provided he was not addicted to drinking, smoking, gambling or the stock exchange, or going to theatres, the young man's future was thus assured. even if he were unsuccessful in his efforts to obtain another position he could save a portion of his salary and eventually commence business on his own account. however, the branch of mr sweater's business to which it is desired to especially direct the reader's attention was the homeworkers department. he employed a large number of women making ladies' blouses, fancy aprons and children's pinafores. most of these articles were disposed of wholesale in london and elsewhere, but some were retailed at 'sweaters' emporium' in mugsborough and at the firm's other retail establishments throughout the county. many of the women workers were widows with children, who were glad to obtain any employment that did not take them away from their homes and families. the blouses were paid for at the rate of from two shillings to five shillings a dozen, the women having to provide their own machine and cotton, besides calling for and delivering the work. these poor women were able to clear from six to eight shillings a week: and to earn even that they had to work almost incessantly for fourteen or sixteen hours a day. there was no time for cooking and very little to cook, for they lived principally on bread and margarine and tea. their homes were squalid, their children half-starved and raggedly clothed in grotesque garments hastily fashioned out of the cast-off clothes of charitable neighbours. but it was not in vain that these women toiled every weary day until exhaustion compelled them to cease. it was not in vain that they passed their cheerless lives bending with aching shoulders over the thankless work that barely brought them bread. it was not in vain that they and their children went famished and in rags, for after all, the principal object of their labour was accomplished: the good cause was advanced. mr sweater waxed rich and increased in goods and respectability. of course, none of those women were compelled to engage in that glorious cause. no one is compelled to accept any particular set of conditions in a free country like this. mr trafaim--the manager of sweater's homework department--always put the matter before them in the plainest, fairest possible way. there was the work: that was the figure! and those who didn't like it could leave it. there was no compulsion. sometimes some perverse creature belonging to that numerous class who are too lazy to work did leave it! but as the manager said, there were plenty of others who were only too glad to take it. in fact, such was the enthusiasm amongst these women--especially such of them as had little children to provide for--and such was their zeal for the cause, that some of them have been known to positively beg to be allowed to work! by these and similar means adam sweater had contrived to lay up for himself a large amount of treasure upon earth, besides attaining undoubted respectability; for that he was respectable no one questioned. he went to chapel twice every sunday, his obese figure arrayed in costly apparel, consisting--with other things--of grey trousers, a long garment called a frock-coat, a tall silk hat, a quantity of jewellery and a morocco-bound gilt-edged bible. he was an official of some sort of the shining light chapel. his name appeared in nearly every published list of charitable subscriptions. no starving wretch had ever appealed to him in vain for a penny soup ticket. small wonder that when this good and public-spirited man offered his services to the town--free of charge--the intelligent working men of mugsborough accepted his offer with enthusiastic applause. the fact that he had made money in business was a proof of his intellectual capacity. his much-advertised benevolence was a guarantee that his abilities would be used to further not his own private interests, but the interests of every section of the community, especially those of the working classes, of whom the majority of his constituents was composed. as for the shopkeepers, they were all so absorbed in their own business--so busily engaged chasing their employees, adding up their accounts, and dressing themselves up in feeble imitation of the 'haristocracy'--that they were incapable of taking a really intelligent interest in anything else. they thought of the town council as a kind of paradise reserved exclusively for jerry-builders and successful tradesmen. possibly, some day, if they succeeded in making money, they might become town councillors themselves! but in the meantime public affairs were no particular concern of theirs. so some of them voted for adam sweater because he was a liberal and some of them voted against him for the same 'reason'. now and then, when details of some unusually scandalous proceeding of the council's leaked out, the townspeople--roused for a brief space from their customary indifference--would discuss the matter in a casual, half-indignant, half-amused, helpless sort of way; but always as if it were something that did not directly concern them. it was during some such nine days' wonder that the title of 'the forty thieves' was bestowed on the members of the council by their semi-imbecile constituents, who, not possessing sufficient intelligence to devise means of punishing the culprits, affected to regard the manoeuvres of the brigands as a huge joke. there was only one member of the council who did not belong to the band--councillor weakling, a retired physician; but unfortunately he also was a respectable man. when he saw something going forwards that he did not think was right, he protested and voted against it and then--he collapsed! there was nothing of the low agitator about him. as for the brigands, they laughed at his protests and his vote did not matter. with this one exception, the other members of the band were very similar in character to sweater, rushton, didlum and grinder. they had all joined the band with the same objects, self-glorification and the advancement of their private interests. these were the real reasons why they besought the ratepayers to elect them to the council, but of course none of them ever admitted that such was the case. no! when these noble-minded altruists offered their services to the town they asked the people to believe that they were actuated by a desire to give their time and abilities for the purpose of furthering the interests of others, which was much the same as asking them to believe that it is possible for the leopard to change his spots. owing to the extraordinary apathy of the other inhabitants, the brigands were able to carry out their depredations undisturbed. daylight robberies were of frequent occurrence. for many years these brigands had looked with greedy eyes upon the huge profits of the gas company. they thought it was a beastly shame that those other bandits should be always raiding the town and getting clear away with such rich spoils. at length--about two years ago--after much study and many private consultations, a plan of campaign was evolved; a secret council of war was held, presided over by mr sweater, and the brigands formed themselves into an association called 'the mugsborough electric light supply and installation coy. ltd.', and bound themselves by a solemn oath to do their best to drive the gas works bandits out of the town and to capture the spoils at present enjoyed by the latter for themselves. there was a large piece of ground, the property of the town, that was a suitable site for the works; so in their character of directors of the electric light coy. they offered to buy this land from the municipality--or, in other words, from themselves--for about half its value. at the meeting of the town council when this offer was considered, all the members present, with the solitary exception of dr weakling, being shareholders in the newly formed company, councillor rushton moved a resolution in favour of accepting it. he said that every encouragement should be given to the promoters of the electric light coy., those public-spirited citizens who had come forward and were willing to risk their capital in an undertaking that would be a benefit to every class of residents in the town that they all loved so well. (applause.) there could be no doubt that the introduction of the electric light would be a great addition to the attractions of mugsborough, but there was another and more urgent reason that disposed him to do whatever he could to encourage the company to proceed with this work. unfortunately, as was usual at that time of the year (mr rushton's voice trembled with emotion) the town was full of unemployed. (the mayor, alderman sweater, and all the other councillors shook their heads sadly; they were visibly affected.) there was no doubt that the starting of that work at that time would be an inestimable boon to the working-classes. as the representative of a working-class ward he was in favour of accepting the offer of the company. (hear. hear.) councillor didlum seconded. in his opinion, it would be nothing short of a crime to oppose anything that would provide work for the unemployed. councillor weakling moved that the offer be refused. (shame.) he admitted that the electric light would be an improvement to the town, and in view of the existing distress he would be glad to see the work started, but the price mentioned was altogether too low. it was not more than half the value of the land. (derisive laughter.) councillor grinder said he was astonished at the attitude taken up by councillor weakling. in his (grinder's) opinion it was disgraceful that a member of the council should deliberately try to wreck a project which would do so much towards relieving the unemployed. the mayor, alderman sweater, said that he could not allow the amendment to be discussed until it was seconded: if there were no seconder he would put the original motion. there was no seconder, because everyone except weakling was in favour of the resolution, which was carried amid loud cheers, and the representatives of the ratepayers proceeded to the consideration of the next business. councillor didlum proposed that the duty on all coal brought into the borough be raised from two shillings to three shillings per ton. councillor rushton seconded. the largest consumer of coal was the gas coy., and, considering the great profits made by that company, they were quite justified in increasing the duty to the highest figure the act permitted. after a feeble protest from weakling, who said it would only increase the price of gas and coal without interfering with the profits of the gas coy., this was also carried, and after some other business had been transacted, the band dispersed. that meeting was held two years ago, and since that time the electric light works had been built and the war against the gasworks carried on vigorously. after several encounters, in which they lost a few customers and a portion of the public lighting, the gasworks bandits retreated out of the town and entrenched themselves in a strong position beyond the borough boundary, where they erected a number of gasometers. they were thus enabled to pour gas into the town at long range without having to pay the coal dues. this masterly stratagem created something like a panic in the ranks of the forty thieves. at the end of two years they found themselves exhausted with the protracted campaign, their movements hampered by a lot of worn-out plant and antiquated machinery, and harassed on every side by the lower charges of the gas coy. they were reluctantly constrained to admit that the attempt to undermine the gasworks was a melancholy failure, and that the mugsborough electric light and installation coy. was a veritable white elephant. they began to ask themselves what they should do with it; and some of them even urged unconditional surrender, or an appeal to the arbitration of the bankruptcy court. in the midst of all the confusion and demoralization there was, however, one man who did not lose his presence of mind, who in this dark hour of disaster remained calm and immovable, and like a vast mountain of flesh reared his head above the storm, whose mighty intellect perceived a way to turn this apparently hopeless defeat into a glorious victory. that man was adam sweater, the chief of the band. chapter 21 the reign of terror. the great money trick during the next four weeks the usual reign of terror continued at 'the cave'. the men slaved like so many convicts under the vigilant surveillance of crass, misery and rushton. no one felt free from observation for a single moment. it happened frequently that a man who was working alone--as he thought--on turning round would find hunter or rushton standing behind him: or one would look up from his work to catch sight of a face watching him through a door or a window or over the banisters. if they happened to be working in a room on the ground floor, or at a window on any floor, they knew that both rushton and hunter were in the habit of hiding among the trees that surrounded the house, and spying upon them thus. there was a plumber working outside repairing the guttering that ran round the bottom edge of the roof. this poor wretch's life was a perfect misery: he fancied he saw hunter or rushton in every bush. he had two ladders to work from, and since these ladders had been in use misery had thought of a new way of spying on the men. finding that he never succeeded in catching anyone doing anything wrong when he entered the house by one of the doors, misery adopted the plan of crawling up one of the ladders, getting in through one of the upper windows and creeping softly downstairs and in and out of the rooms. even then he never caught anyone, but that did not matter, for he accomplished his principal purpose--every man seemed afraid to cease working for even an instant. the result of all this was, of course, that the work progressed rapidly towards completion. the hands grumbled and cursed, but all the same every man tore into it for all he was worth. although he did next to nothing himself, crass watched and urged on the others. he was 'in charge of the job': he knew that unless he succeeded in making this work pay he would not be put in charge of another job. on the other hand, if he did make it pay he would be given the preference over others and be kept on as long as the firm had any work. the firm would give him the preference only as long as it paid them to do so. as for the hands, each man knew that there was no chance of obtaining work anywhere else at present; there were dozens of men out of employment already. besides, even if there had been a chance of getting another job somewhere else, they knew that the conditions were more or less the same on every firm. some were even worse than this one. each man knew that unless he did as much as ever he could, crass would report him for being slow. they knew also that when the job began to draw to a close the number of men employed upon it would be reduced, and when that time came the hands who did the most work would be kept on and the slower ones discharged. it was therefore in the hope of being one of the favoured few that while inwardly cursing the rest for 'tearing into it', everyone as a matter of self-preservation went and 'tore into it' themselves. they all cursed crass, but most of them would have been very glad to change places with him: and if any one of them had been in his place they would have been compelled to act in the same way--or lose the job. they all reviled hunter, but most of them would have been glad to change places with him also: and if any one of them had been in his place they would have been compelled to do the same things, or lose the job. they all hated and blamed rushton. yet if they had been in rushton's place they would have been compelled to adopt the same methods, or become bankrupt: for it is obvious that the only way to compete successfully against other employers who are sweaters is to be a sweater yourself. therefore no one who is an upholder of the present system can consistently blame any of these men. blame the system. if you, reader, had been one of the hands, would you have slogged? or would you have preferred to starve and see your family starve? if you had been in crass's place, would you have resigned rather than do such dirty work? if you had had hunter's berth, would you have given it up and voluntarily reduced yourself to the level of the hands? if you had been rushton, would you rather have become bankrupt than treat your 'hands' and your customers in the same way as your competitors treated theirs? it may be that, so placed, you--being the noble-minded paragon that you are--would have behaved unselfishly. but no one has any right to expect you to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of other people who would only call you a fool for your pains. it may be true that if any one of the hands--owen, for instance--had been an employer of labour, he would have done the same as other employers. some people seem to think that proves that the present system is all right! but really it only proves that the present system compels selfishness. one must either trample upon others or be trampled upon oneself. happiness might be possible if everyone were unselfish; if everyone thought of the welfare of his neighbour before thinking of his own. but as there is only a very small percentage of such unselfish people in the world, the present system has made the earth into a sort of hell. under the present system there is not sufficient of anything for everyone to have enough. consequently there is a fight--called by christians the 'battle of life'. in this fight some get more than they need, some barely enough, some very little, and some none at all. the more aggressive, cunning, unfeeling and selfish you are the better it will be for you. as long as this 'battle of life' system endures, we have no right to blame other people for doing the same things that we are ourselves compelled to do. blame the system. but that is just what the hands did not do. they blamed each other; they blamed crass, and hunter, and rushton, but with the great system of which they were all more or less the victims they were quite content, being persuaded that it was the only one possible and the best that human wisdom could devise. the reason why they all believed this was because not one of them had ever troubled to inquire whether it would not be possible to order things differently. they were content with the present system. if they had not been content they would have been anxious to find some way to alter it. but they had never taken the trouble to seriously inquire whether it was possible to find some better way, and although they all knew in a hazy fashion that other methods of managing the affairs of the world had already been proposed, they neglected to inquire whether these other methods were possible or practicable, and they were ready and willing to oppose with ignorant ridicule or brutal force any man who was foolish or quixotic enough to try to explain to them the details of what he thought was a better way. they accepted the present system in the same way as they accepted the alternating seasons. they knew that there was spring and summer and autumn and winter. as to how these different seasons came to be, or what caused them, they hadn't the remotest notion, and it is extremely doubtful whether the question had ever occurred to any of them: but there is no doubt whatever about the fact that none of them knew. from their infancy they had been trained to distrust their own intelligence, and to leave the management of the affairs of the world--and for that matter of the next world too--to their betters; and now most of them were absolutely incapable of thinking of any abstract subject whatever. nearly all their betters--that is, the people who do nothing--were unanimous in agreeing that the present system is a very good one and that it is impossible to alter or improve it. therefore crass and his mates, although they knew nothing whatever about it themselves, accepted it as an established, incontrovertible fact that the existing state of things is immutable. they believed it because someone else told them so. they would have believed anything: on one condition--namely, that they were told to believe it by their betters. they said it was surely not for the like of them to think that they knew better than those who were more educated and had plenty of time to study. as the work in the drawing-room proceeded, crass abandoned the hope that owen was going to make a mess of it. some of the rooms upstairs being now ready for papering, slyme was started on that work, bert being taken away from owen to assist slyme as paste boy, and it was arranged that crass should help owen whenever he needed someone to lend him a hand. sweater came frequently during these four weeks, being interested in the progress of the work. on these occasions crass always managed to be present in the drawing-room and did most of the talking. owen was very satisfied with this arrangement, for he was always ill at ease when conversing with a man like sweater, who spoke in an offensively patronizing way and expected common people to kowtow to and 'sir' him at every second word. crass however, seemed to enjoy doing that kind of thing. he did not exactly grovel on the floor, when sweater spoke to him, but he contrived to convey the impression that he was willing to do so if desired. outside the house bundy and his mates had dug deep trenches in the damp ground in which they were laying new drains. this work, like that of the painting of the inside of the house, was nearly completed. it was a miserable job. owing to the fact that there had been a spell of bad weather the ground was sodden with rain and there was mud everywhere, the men's clothing and boots being caked with it. but the worst thing about the job was the smell. for years the old drain-pipes had been defective and leaky. the ground a few feet below the surface was saturated with fetid moisture and a stench as of a thousand putrefying corpse emanated from the opened earth. the clothing of the men who were working in the trenches became saturated with this fearful odour, and for that matter, so did the men themselves. they said they could smell and taste it all the time, even when they were away from the work at home, and when they were at meals. although they smoked their pipes all the time they were at work, misery having ungraciously given them permission, several times bundy and one or other of his mates were attacked with fits of vomiting. but, as they began to realize that the finish of the job was in sight, a kind of panic seized upon the hands, especially those who had been taken on last and who would therefore be the first to be 'stood still'. easton, however, felt pretty confident that crass would do his best to get him kept on till the end of the job, for they had become quite chummy lately, usually spending a few evenings together at the cricketers every week. 'there'll be a bloody slaughter 'ere soon,' remarked harlow to philpot one day as they were painting the banisters of the staircase. 'i reckon next week will about finish the inside.' 'and the outside ain't goin' to take very long, you know,' replied philpot. 'they ain't got no other work in, have they?' 'not that i knows of,' replied philpot gloomily; 'and i don't think anyone else has either.' 'you know that little place they call the "kiosk" down the grand parade, near the bandstand,' asked harlow after a pause. 'where they used to sell refreshments?' 'yes; it belongs to the corporation, you know.' 'it's been closed up lately, ain't it?' 'yes; the people who 'ad it couldn't make it pay; but i 'eard last night that grinder the fruit-merchant is goin' to open it again. if it's true, there'll be a bit of a job there for someone, because it'll 'ave to be done up.' 'well, i hope it does come orf replied philpot. 'it'll be a job for some poor b--rs.' 'i wonder if they've started anyone yet on the venetian blinds for this 'ouse?' remarked easton after a pause. 'i don't know,' replied philpot. they relapsed into silence for a while. 'i wonder what time it is?' said philpot at length. 'i don't know 'ow you feel, but i begin to want my dinner.' 'that's just what i was thinking; it can't be very far off it now. it's nearly 'arf an hour since bert went down to make the tea. it seems a 'ell of a long morning to me.' 'so it does to me,' said philpot; 'slip upstairs and ask slyme what time it is.' harlow laid his brush across the top of his paint-pot and went upstairs. he was wearing a pair of cloth slippers, and walked softly, not wishing that crass should hear him leaving his work, so it happened that without any intention of spying on slyme, harlow reached the door of the room in which the former was working without being heard and, entering suddenly, surprised slyme--who was standing near the fireplace--in the act of breaking a whole roll of wallpaper across his knee as one might break a stick. on the floor beside him was what had been another roll, now broken into two pieces. when harlow came in, slyme started, and his face became crimson with confusion. he hastily gathered the broken rolls together and, stooping down, thrust the pieces up the flue of the grate and closed the register. 'wot's the bloody game?' inquired harlow. slyme laughed with an affectation of carelessness, but his hands trembled and his face was now very pale. 'we must get our own back somehow, you know, fred,' he said. harlow did not reply. he did not understand. after puzzling over it for a few minutes, he gave it up. 'what's the time?' he asked. 'fifteen minutes to twelve,' said slyme and added, as harlow was going away: 'don't mention anything about that paper to crass or any of the others.' 'i shan't say nothing,' replied harlow. gradually, as he pondered over it, harlow began to comprehend the meaning of the destruction of the two rolls of paper. slyme was doing the paperhanging piecework--so much for each roll hung. four of the rooms upstairs had been done with the same pattern, and hunter--who was not over-skilful in such matters--had evidently sent more paper than was necessary. by getting rid of these two rolls, slyme would be able to make it appear that he had hung two rolls more than was really the case. he had broken the rolls so as to be able to take them away from the house without being detected, and he had hidden them up the chimney until he got an opportunity of so doing. harlow had just arrived at this solution of the problem when, hearing the lower flight of stairs creaking, he peeped over and observed misery crawling up. he had come to see if anyone had stopped work before the proper time. passing the two workmen without speaking, he ascended to the next floor, and entered the room where slyme was. 'you'd better not do this room yet,' said hunter. 'there's to be a new grate and mantelpiece put in.' he crossed over to the fireplace and stood looking at it thoughtfully for a few minutes. 'it's not a bad little grate, you know, is it?' he remarked. 'we'll be able to use it somewhere or other.' 'yes; it's all right,' said slyme, whose heart was beating like a steam-hammer. 'do for a front room in a cottage,' continued misery, stooping down to examine it more closely. 'there's nothing broke that i can see.' he put his hand against the register and vainly tried to push it open. 'h'm, there's something wrong 'ere,' he remarked, pushing harder. 'most likely a brick or some plaster fallen down,' gasped slyme, coming to misery's assistance. 'shall i try to open it?' 'don't trouble,' replied nimrod, rising to his feet. 'it's most likely what you say. i'll see that the new grate is sent up after dinner. bundy can fix it this afternoon and then you can go on papering as soon as you like.' with this, misery went out of the room, downstairs and away from the house, and slyme wiped the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief. then he knelt down and, opening the register, he took out the broken rolls of paper and hid them up the chimney of the next room. while he was doing this the sound of crass's whistle shrilled through the house. 'thank gord!' exclaimed philpot fervently as he laid his brushes on the top of his pot and joined in the general rush to the kitchen. the scene here is already familiar to the reader. for seats, the two pairs of steps laid on their sides parallel to each other, about eight feet apart and at right angles to the fireplace, with the long plank placed across; and the upturned pails and the drawers of the dresser. the floor unswept and littered with dirt, scraps of paper, bits of plaster, pieces of lead pipe and dried mud; and in the midst, the steaming bucket of stewed tea and the collection of cracked cups, jam-jam and condensed milk tins. and on the seats the men in their shabby and in some cases ragged clothing sitting and eating their coarse food and cracking jokes. it was a pathetic and wonderful and at the same time a despicable spectacle. pathetic that human beings should be condemned to spend the greater part of their lives amid such surroundings, because it must be remembered that most of their time was spent on some job or other. when 'the cave' was finished they would go to some similar 'job', if they were lucky enough to find one. wonderful, because although they knew that they did more than their fair share of the great work of producing the necessaries and comforts of life, they did not think they were entitled to a fair share of the good things they helped to create! and despicable, because although they saw their children condemned to the same life of degradation, hard labour and privation, yet they refused to help to bring about a better state of affairs. most of them thought that what had been good enough for themselves was good enough for their children. it seemed as if they regarded their own children with a kind of contempt, as being only fit to grow up to be the servants of the children of such people as rushton and sweater. but it must be remembered that they had been taught self-contempt when they were children. in the so-called 'christian' schools they attended then they were taught to 'order themselves lowly and reverently towards their betters', and they were now actually sending their own children to learn the same degrading lessons in their turn! they had a vast amount of consideration for their betters, and for the children of their betters, but very little for their own children, for each other, or for themselves. that was why they sat there in their rags and ate their coarse food, and cracked their coarser jokes, and drank the dreadful tea, and were content! so long as they had plenty of work and plenty of--something--to eat, and somebody else's cast-off clothes to wear, they were content! and they were proud of it. they gloried in it. they agreed and assured each other that the good things of life were not intended for the 'likes of them', or their children. 'wot's become of the professor?' asked the gentleman who sat on the upturned pail in the corner, referring to owen, who had not yet come down from his work. 'p'raps 'e's preparing 'is sermon,' remarked harlow with a laugh. 'we ain't 'ad no lectures from 'im lately, since 'e's been on that room,' observed easton. ''ave we?' 'dam good job too!' exclaimed sawkins. 'it gives me the pip to 'ear 'im, the same old thing over and over again.' 'poor ole frank,' remarked harlow. ''e does upset 'isself about things, don't 'e?' 'more fool 'im!' said bundy. 'i'll take bloody good care i don't go worryin' myself to death like 'e's doin', about such dam rot as that.' 'i do believe that's wot makes 'im look so bad as 'e does,' observed harlow. 'several times this morning i couldn't help noticing the way 'e kept on coughing.' 'i thought 'e seemed to be a bit better lately,' philpot observed; 'more cheerful and happier like, and more inclined for a bit of fun.' 'he's a funny sort of chap, ain't he?' said bundy. 'one day quite jolly, singing and cracking jokes and tellin' yarns, and the next you can't hardly get a word out of 'im.' 'bloody rot, i call it,' chimed in the man on the pail. 'wot the 'ell's the use of the likes of us troublin' our 'eads about politics?' 'oh, i don't see that.' replied harlow. 'we've got votes and we're really the people what control the affairs of the country, so i reckon we ought to take some interest in it, but at the same time i can't see no sense in this 'ere socialist wangle that owen's always talkin' about.' 'nor nobody else neither,' said crass with a jeering laugh. 'even if all the bloody money in the world was divided out equal,' said the man on the pail, profoundly, 'it wouldn't do no good! in six months' time it would be all back in the same 'ands again.' 'of course,' said everybody. 'but 'e 'ad a cuff the other day about money bein' no good at all!' observed easton. 'don't you remember 'e said as money was the principal cause of poverty?' 'so it is the principal cause of poverty,' said owen, who entered at that moment. 'hooray!' shouted philpot, leading off a cheer which the others took up. 'the professor 'as arrived and will now proceed to say a few remarks.' a roar of merriment greeted this sally. 'let's 'ave our bloody dinner first, for christ's sake,' appealed harlow, with mock despair. as owen, having filled his cup with tea, sat down in his usual place, philpot rose solemnly to his feet, and, looking round the company, said: 'genelmen, with your kind permission, as soon as the professor 'as finished 'is dinner 'e will deliver 'is well-known lecture, entitled, "money the principal cause of being 'ard up", proving as money ain't no good to nobody. at the hend of the lecture a collection will be took up to provide the lecturer with a little encouragement.' philpot resumed his seat amid cheers. as soon as they had finished eating, some of the men began to make remarks about the lecture, but owen only laughed and went on reading the piece of newspaper that his dinner had been wrapped in. usually most of the men went out for a walk after dinner, but as it happened to be raining that day they were determined, if possible, to make owen fulfill the engagement made in his name by philpot. 'let's 'oot 'im,' said harlow, and the suggestion was at once acted upon; howls, groans and catcalls filled the air, mingled with cries of 'fraud!' 'imposter!' 'give us our money back!' 'let's wreck the 'all!' and so on. 'come on 'ere,' cried philpot, putting his hand on owen's shoulder. 'prove that money is the cause of poverty.' 'it's one thing to say it and another to prove it,' sneered crass, who was anxious for an opportunity to produce the long-deferred obscurer cutting. 'money is the real cause of poverty,' said owen. 'prove it,' repeated crass. 'money is the cause of poverty because it is the device by which those who are too lazy to work are enabled to rob the workers of the fruits of their labours.' 'prove it,' said crass. owen slowly folded up the piece of newspaper he had been reading and put it into his pocket. 'all right,' he replied. 'i'll show you how the great money trick is worked.' owen opened his dinner basket and took from it two slices of bread but as these were not sufficient, he requested that anyone who had some bread left would give it to him. they gave him several pieces, which he placed in a heap on a clean piece of paper, and, having borrowed the pocket knives they used to cut and eat their dinners with from easton, harlow and philpot, he addressed them as follows: 'these pieces of bread represent the raw materials which exist naturally in and on the earth for the use of mankind; they were not made by any human being, but were created by the great spirit for the benefit and sustenance of all, the same as were the air and the light of the sun.' 'you're about as fair-speakin' a man as i've met for some time,' said harlow, winking at the others. 'yes, mate,' said philpot. 'anyone would agree to that much! it's as clear as mud.' 'now,' continued owen, 'i am a capitalist; or, rather, i represent the landlord and capitalist class. that is to say, all these raw materials belong to me. it does not matter for our present argument how i obtained possession of them, or whether i have any real right to them; the only thing that matters now is the admitted fact that all the raw materials which are necessary for the production of the necessaries of life are now the property of the landlord and capitalist class. i am that class: all these raw materials belong to me.' 'good enough!' agreed philpot. 'now you three represent the working class: you have nothing--and for my part, although i have all these raw materials, they are of no use to me--what i need is--the things that can be made out of these raw materials by work: but as i am too lazy to work myself, i have invented the money trick to make you work for me. but first i must explain that i possess something else beside the raw materials. these three knives represent--all the machinery of production; the factories, tools, railways, and so forth, without which the necessaries of life cannot be produced in abundance. and these three coins'--taking three halfpennies from his pocket--'represent my money capital.' 'but before we go any further,' said owen, interrupting himself, 'it is most important that you remember that i am not supposed to be merely "a" capitalist. i represent the whole capitalist class. you are not supposed to be just three workers--you represent the whole working class.' 'all right, all right,' said crass, impatiently, 'we all understand that. git on with it.' owen proceeded to cut up one of the slices of bread into a number of little square blocks. 'these represent the things which are produced by labour, aided by machinery, from the raw materials. we will suppose that three of these blocks represent--a week's work. we will suppose that a week's work is worth--one pound: and we will suppose that each of these ha'pennies is a sovereign. we'd be able to do the trick better if we had real sovereigns, but i forgot to bring any with me.' 'i'd lend you some,' said philpot, regretfully, 'but i left me purse on our grand pianner.' as by a strange coincidence nobody happened to have any gold with them, it was decided to make shift with the halfpence. 'now this is the way the trick works--' 'before you goes on with it,' interrupted philpot, apprehensively, 'don't you think we'd better 'ave someone to keep watch at the gate in case a slop comes along? we don't want to get runned in, you know.' 'i don't think there's any need for that,' replied owen, 'there's only one slop who'd interfere with us for playing this game, and that's police constable socialism.' 'never mind about socialism,' said crass, irritably. 'get along with the bloody trick.' owen now addressed himself to the working classes as represented by philpot, harlow and easton. 'you say that you are all in need of employment, and as i am the kind-hearted capitalist class i am going to invest all my money in various industries, so as to give you plenty of work. i shall pay each of you one pound per week, and a week's work is--you must each produce three of these square blocks. for doing this work you will each receive your wages; the money will be your own, to do as you like with, and the things you produce will of course be mine, to do as i like with. you will each take one of these machines and as soon as you have done a week's work, you shall have your money.' the working classes accordingly set to work, and the capitalist class sat down and watched them. as soon as they had finished, they passed the nine little blocks to owen, who placed them on a piece of paper by his side and paid the workers their wages. 'these blocks represent the necessaries of life. you can't live without some of these things, but as they belong to me, you will have to buy them from me: my price for these blocks is--one pound each.' as the working classes were in need of the necessaries of life and as they could not eat, drink or wear the useless money, they were compelled to agree to the kind capitalist's terms. they each bought back and at once consumed one-third of the produce of their labour. the capitalist class also devoured two of the square blocks, and so the net result of the week's work was that the kind capitalist had consumed two pounds worth of the things produced by the labour of the others, and reckoning the squares at their market value of one pound each, he had more than doubled his capital, for he still possessed the three pounds in money and in addition four pounds worth of goods. as for the working classes, philpot, harlow and easton, having each consumed the pound's worth of necessaries they had bought with their wages, they were again in precisely the same condition as when they started work--they had nothing. this process was repeated several times: for each week's work the producers were paid their wages. they kept on working and spending all their earnings. the kind-hearted capitalist consumed twice as much as any one of them and his pile of wealth continually increased. in a little while--reckoning the little squares at their market value of one pound each--he was worth about one hundred pounds, and the working classes were still in the same condition as when they began, and were still tearing into their work as if their lives depended upon it. after a while the rest of the crowd began to laugh, and their merriment increased when the kind-hearted capitalist, just after having sold a pound's worth of necessaries to each of his workers, suddenly took their tools--the machinery of production--the knives away from them, and informed them that as owing to over production all his store-houses were glutted with the necessaries of life, he had decided to close down the works. 'well, and wot the bloody 'ell are we to do now?' demanded philpot. 'that's not my business,' replied the kind-hearted capitalist. 'i've paid you your wages, and provided you with plenty of work for a long time past. i have no more work for you to do at present. come round again in a few months' time and i'll see what i can do for you.' 'but what about the necessaries of life?' demanded harlow. 'we must have something to eat.' 'of course you must,' replied the capitalist, affably; 'and i shall be very pleased to sell you some.' 'but we ain't got no bloody money!' 'well, you can't expect me to give you my goods for nothing! you didn't work for me for nothing, you know. i paid you for your work and you should have saved something: you should have been thrifty like me. look how i have got on by being thrifty!' the unemployed looked blankly at each other, but the rest of the crowd only laughed; and then the three unemployed began to abuse the kind-hearted capitalist, demanding that he should give them some of the necessaries of life that he had piled up in his warehouses, or to be allowed to work and produce some more for their own needs; and even threatened to take some of the things by force if he did not comply with their demands. but the kind-hearted capitalist told them not to be insolent, and spoke to them about honesty, and said if they were not careful he would have their faces battered in for them by the police, or if necessary he would call out the military and have them shot down like dogs, the same as he had done before at featherstone and belfast. 'of course,' continued the kind-hearted capitalist, 'if it were not for foreign competition i should be able to sell these things that you have made, and then i should be able to give you plenty of work again: but until i have sold them to somebody or other, or until i have used them myself, you will have to remain idle.' 'well, this takes the bloody biskit, don't it?' said harlow. 'the only thing as i can see for it,' said philpot mournfully, 'is to 'ave a unemployed procession.' 'that's the idear,' said harlow, and the three began to march about the room in indian file, singing: 'we've got no work to do-oo-oo' we've got no work to do-oo-oo! just because we've been workin' a dam sight too hard, now we've got no work to do.' as they marched round, the crowd jeered at them and made offensive remarks. crass said that anyone could see that they were a lot of lazy, drunken loafers who had never done a fair day's work in their lives and never intended to. 'we shan't never get nothing like this, you know,' said philpot. 'let's try the religious dodge.' 'all right,' agreed harlow. 'what shall we give 'em?' 'i know!' cried philpot after a moment's deliberation. '"let my lower lights be burning." that always makes 'em part up.' the three unemployed accordingly resumed their march round the room, singing mournfully and imitating the usual whine of street-singers: 'trim your fee-bil lamp me brither-in, some poor sail-er tempest torst, strugglin' 'ard to save the 'arb-er, hin the dark-niss may be lorst, so let try lower lights be burning, send 'er gleam acrost the wave, some poor shipwrecked, struggling seaman, you may rescue, you may save.' 'kind frens,' said philpot, removing his cap and addressing the crowd, 'we're hall honest british workin' men, but we've been hout of work for the last twenty years on account of foreign competition and over-production. we don't come hout 'ere because we're too lazy to work; it's because we can't get a job. if it wasn't for foreign competition, the kind'earted hinglish capitalists would be able to sell their goods and give us plenty of work, and if they could, i assure you that we should hall be perfectly willing and contented to go on workin' our bloody guts out for the benefit of our masters for the rest of our lives. we're quite willin' to work: that's hall we arst for--plenty of work--but as we can't get it we're forced to come out 'ere and arst you to spare a few coppers towards a crust of bread and a night's lodgin'.' as philpot held out his cap for subscriptions, some of them attempted to expectorate into it, but the more charitable put in pieces of cinder or dirt from the floor, and the kind-hearted capitalist was so affected by the sight of their misery that he gave them one of the sovereigns he had in us pocket: but as this was of no use to them they immediately returned it to him in exchange for one of the small squares of the necessaries of life, which they divided and greedily devoured. and when they had finished eating they gathered round the philanthropist and sang, 'for he's a jolly good fellow,' and afterwards harlow suggested that they should ask him if he would allow them to elect him to parliament. chapter 22 the phrenologist the following morning--saturday--the men went about their work in gloomy silence; there were but few attempts at conversation and no jests or singing. the tenor of the impending slaughter pervaded the house. even those who were confident of being spared and kept on till the job was finished shared the general depression, not only out of sympathy for the doomed, but because they knew that a similar fate awaited themselves a little later on. they all waited anxiously for nimrod to come, but hour after hour dragged slowly by and he did not arrive. at half past eleven some of those who had made up their minds that they were to be 'stood still' began to hope that the slaughter was to be deferred for a few days: after all, there was plenty of work still to be done: even if all hands were kept on, the job could scarcely be finished in another week. anyhow, it would not be very long now before they would know one way or the other. if he did not come before twelve, it was all right: all the hands were paid by the hour and were therefore entitled to an hour's notice. easton and harlow were working together on the staircase, finishing the doors and other woodwork with white enamel. the men had not been allowed to spend the time necessary to prepare this work in a proper manner, it had not been rubbed down smooth or properly filled up, and it had not had a sufficient number of coats of paint to make it solid white. now that the glossy enamel was put on, the work looked rather rough and shady. 'it ain't 'arf all right, ain't it?' remarked harlow, sarcastically, indicating the door he had just finished. easton laughed: 'i can't understand how people pass such work,' he said. 'old sweater did make some remark about it the other day,' replied harlow, 'and i heard misery tell 'im it was impossible to make a perfect job of such old doors.' 'i believe that man's the biggest liar gord ever made,' said easton, an opinion in which harlow entirely concurred. 'i wonder what the time is?' said the latter after a pause. 'i don't know exactly,' replied easton, 'but it can't be far off twelve.' ''e don't seem to be comin', does 'e?' harlow continued. 'no: and i shouldn't be surprised if 'e didn't turn up at all, now. p'raps 'e don't mean to stop nobody today after all.' they spoke in hushed tones and glanced cautiously about them fearful of being heard or observed. 'this is a bloody life, ain't it?' harlow said, bitterly. 'workin' our guts out like a lot of slaves for the benefit of other people, and then as soon as they've done with you, you're chucked aside like a dirty rag.' 'yes: and i begin to think that a great deal of what owen says is true. but for my part i can't see 'ow it's ever goin' to be altered, can you?' blowed if i know, mate. but whether it can be altered or not, there's one thing very certain; it won't be done in our time.' neither of them seemed to think that if the 'alteration' they spoke of were to be accomplished at all they themselves would have to help to bring it about. 'i wonder what they're doin' about the venetian blinds?' said easton. 'is there anyone doin' em yet?' 'i don't know; ain't 'eard nothing about 'em since the boy took 'em to the shop.' there was quite a mystery about these blinds. about a month ago they were taken to the paint-shop down at the yard to be repainted and re-harnessed, and since then nothing had been heard of them by the men working at the 'cave'. 'p'hap's a couple of us will be sent there to do 'em next week,' remarked harlow. 'p'hap's so. most likely they'll 'ave to be done in a bloody 'urry at the last minute.' presently harlow--who was very anxious to know what time it was--went downstairs to ask slyme. it was twenty minutes to twelve. from the window of the room where slyme was papering, one could see into the front garden. harlow paused a moment to watch bundy and the labourers, who were still working in the trenches at the drains, and as he looked out he saw hunter approaching the house. harlow drew back hastily and returned to his work, and as he went he passed the word to the other men, warning them of the approach of misery. hunter entered in his usual manner and, after crawling quietly about the house for about ten minutes, he went into the drawing room. 'i see you're putting the finishing touches on at last,' he said. 'yes,' replied owen. 'i've only got this bit of outlining to do now.' 'ah, well, it looks very nice, of course,' said misery in a voice of mourning, 'but we've lost money over it. it's taken you a week longer to do than we allowed for; you said three weeks and it's taken you a month; and we only allowed for fifteen books of gold, but you've been and used twenty-three.' 'you can hardly blame me for that, you know,' answered owen. 'i could have got it done in the three weeks, but mr rushton told me not to hurry for the sake of a day or two, because he wanted a good job. he said he would rather lose a little over it than spoil it; and as for the extra gold, that was also his order.' 'well, i suppose it can't be helped,' whined misery. 'anyhow, i'm very glad it's done, because this kind of work don't pay. we'll 'ave you back on the brush on monday morning; we want to get outside done next week if it keeps fine.' the 'brush' alluded to by nimrod was the large 'pound' brush used in ordinary painting. misery now began wandering about the house, in and out of the rooms, sometimes standing for several minutes silently watching the hands as they worked. as he watched them the men became nervous and awkward, each one dreading that he might be one of those who were to be paid off at one o'clock. at about five minutes to twelve hunter went down to the paint-shop--the scullery--where crass was mixing some colour, and getting ready some 'empties' to be taken to the yard. 'i suppose the b--r's gone to ask crass which of us is the least use,' whispered harlow to easton. 'i wouldn't be surprised if it was you and me, for two,' replied the latter in the same tone. 'you can't trust crass you know, for all 'e seems so friendly to our faces. you never know what 'e ses behind our backs.' 'you may be sure it won't be sawkins or any of the other light-weights, because nimrod won't want to pay us sixpence ha'penny for painting guttering and rainpipes when they can do it near enough for fourpence ha'penny and fivepence. they won't be able to do the sashes, though, will they?' 'i don't know so much about that,' replied easton. 'anything seems to be good enough for hunter.' 'look out! ere 'e comes!' said harlow, and they both relapsed into silence and busied themselves with their work. misery stood watching them for some time without speaking, and then went out of the house. they crept cautiously to the window of a room that overlooked the garden and, peeping furtively out, they saw him standing on the brink of one of the trenches, moodily watching bundy and his mates as they toiled at the drains. then, to their surprise and relief, he turned and went out of the gate! they just caught sight of one of the wheels of his bicycle as he rode away. the slaughter was evidently to be put off until next week! it seemed too good to be true. 'p'hap's 'e's left a message for some of us with crass?' suggested easton. 'i don't think it's likely, but it's just possible.' 'well, i'm goin' down to ask 'im,' said harlow, desperately. 'we may as well know the worst at once.' he returned in a few minutes with the information that hunter had decided not to stop anyone that day because he wanted to get the outside finished during the next week, if possible. the hands received this intelligence with mixed feelings, because although it left them safe for the present, it meant that nearly everybody would certainly be stopped next saturday, if not before; whereas if a few had been sacked today it would have made it all the better for the rest. still, this aspect of the business did not greatly interfere with the relief that they all felt at knowing that the immediate danger was over; and the fact that it was saturday--pay-day--also served to revive their drooping spirits. they all felt pretty certain that misery would return no more that day, and presently harlow began to sing the old favourite. 'work! for the night is coming!' the refrain of which was soon taken up by nearly everyone in the house: 'work! for the night is coming, work in the morning hours. work! for the night is coming, work 'mid springing flowers. 'work while the dew is sparkling, work in the noonday sun! work! for the night is coming when man's work is done!' when this hymn was finished, someone else, imitating the whine of a street-singer, started, 'oh, where is my wandering boy tonight?' and then harlow--who by some strange chance had a penny--took it out of his pocket and dropped it on the floor, the ringing of the coin being greeted with shouts of 'thank you, kind lady,' from several of the singers. this little action of harlow's was the means of bringing a most extraordinary circumstance to light. although it was saturday morning, several of the others had pennies or half-pence! and at the conclusion of each verse they all followed harlow's example and the house resounded with the ringing of falling coins, cries of 'thank you, kind lady,' 'thank you, sir,' and 'gord bless you,' mingled with shouts of laughter. 'my wandering boy' was followed by a choice selection of choruses of well-known music-hall songs, including 'goodbye, my bluebell', 'the honeysuckle and the bee', 'i've got 'em!' and 'the church parade', the whole being tastefully varied and interspersed with howls, shrieks, curses, catcalls, and downward explosions of flatulence. in the midst of the uproar crass came upstairs. ''ere!' he shouted. 'for christ's sake make less row! suppose nimrod was to come back!' 'oh, he ain't comin' any more today,' said harlow, recklessly. 'besides, what if 'e does come?' cried easton. 'oo cares for 'im?' 'well, we never know; and for that matter rushton or sweater might come at any minit.' with this, crass went muttering back to the scullery, and the men relapsed into their usual silence. at ten minutes to one they all ceased work, put away their colours and locked up the house. there were a number of 'empties' to be taken away and left at the yard on their way to the office; these crass divided amongst the others--carrying nothing himself--and then they all set out for the office to get their money, cracking jokes as they went along. harlow and easton enlivened the journey by coughing significantly whenever they met a young woman, and audibly making some complimentary remark about her personal appearance. if the girl smiled, each of them eagerly claimed to have 'seen her first', but if she appeared offended or 'stuck up', they suggested that she was cross-cut or that she had been eating vinegar with a fork. now and then they kissed their hands affectionately to servant-girls whom they saw looking out of windows. some of these girls laughed, others looked indignant, but whichever way they took it was equally amusing to crass and the rest, who were like a crowd of boys just let out of school. it will be remembered that there was a back door to rushton's office; in this door was a small sliding panel or trap-door with a little shelf at the bottom. the men stood in the road on the pavement outside the closed door, their money being passed out to them through the sliding panel. as there was no shelter, when it rained they occasionally got wet through while waiting to be paid. with some firms it is customary to call out the names of the men and pay them in order of seniority or ability, but there was no such system here; the man who got to the aperture first was paid first, and so on. the result was that there was always a sort of miniature 'battle of life', the men pushing and struggling against each other as if their lives depended upon their being paid by a certain time. on the ledge of the little window through which their money was passed there was always a hospital collection-box. every man put either a penny or twopence into this box. of course, it was not compulsory to do so, but they all did, because they felt that any man who omitted to contribute might be 'marked'. they did not all agree with contributing to the hospital, for several reasons. they knew that the doctors at the hospital made a practice of using the free patients to make experiments upon, and they also knew that the so-called 'free' patients who contribute so very largely directly to the maintenance of such institutions, get scant consideration when they apply for the 'free' treatment, and are plainly given to understand that they are receiving 'charity'. some of the men thought that, considering the extent to which they contributed, they should be entitled to attention as a right. after receiving their wages, crass, easton, bundy, philpot, harlow and a few others adjourned to the cricketers for a drink. owen went away alone, and slyme also went on by himself. there was no use waiting for easton to come out of the public house, because there was no knowing how long he would be; he might stay half an hour or two hours. on his way home, in accordance with his usual custom, slyme called at the post office to put some of his wages in the bank. like most other 'christians', he believed in taking thought for the morrow, what he should eat and drink and wherewithal he was to be clothed. he thought it wise to layup for himself as much treasure upon earth as possible. the fact that jesus said that his disciples were not to do these things made no more difference to slyme's conduct than it does to the conduct of any other 'christian'. they are all agreed that when jesus said this he meant something else: and all the other inconvenient things that jesus said are disposed of in the same way. for instance, these 'disciples' assure us that when jesus said, 'resist not evil', 'if a man smite thee upon he right cheek turn unto him also the left', he really meant 'turn on to him a maxim gun; disembowel him with a bayonet or batter in his skull with the butt end of a rifle!' when he said, 'if one take thy coat, give him thy cloak also,' the 'christians' say that what he really meant was: 'if one take thy coat, give him six months' hard labour. a few of the followers of jesus admit that he really did mean just what he said, but they say that the world would never be able to go on if they followed out his teachings! that is true. it is probably the effect that jesus intended his teachings to produce. it is altogether improbable that he wished the world to continue along its present lines. but, if these pretended followers really think--as they say that they do--that the teachings of jesus are ridiculous and impracticable, why continue the hypocritical farce of calling themselves 'christians' when they don't really believe in or follow him at all? as jesus himself pointed out, there's no sense in calling him 'lord, lord' when they do not the things that he said. this banking transaction finished, slyme resumed his homeward way, stopping only to purchase some sweets at a confectioner's. he spent a whole sixpence at once in this shop on a glass jar of sweets for the baby. ruth was not surprised when she saw him come in alone; it was the usual thing since easton had become so friendly with crass. she made no reference to his absence, but slyme noticed with secret chagrin that she was annoyed and disappointed. she was just finishing scrubbing the kitchen floor and little freddie was sitting up in a baby's high chair that had a little shelf or table fixed in front of it. to keep him amused while she did her work, ruth had given him a piece of bread and raspberry jam, which the child had rubbed all over his face and into his scalp, evidently being under the impression that it was something for the improvement of the complexion, or a cure for baldness. he now looked as if he had been in a fight or a railway accident. the child hailed the arrival of slyme with enthusiasm, being so overcome with emotion that he began to shed tears, and was only pacified when the man gave him the jar of sweets and took him out of the chair. slyme's presence in the house had not proved so irksome as easton and ruth had dreaded it would be. indeed, at first, he made a point of retiring to his own room after tea every evening, until they invited him to stay downstairs in the kitchen. nearly every wednesday and saturday he went to a meeting, or an open-air preaching, when the weather permitted, for he was one of a little zealous band of people connected with the shining light chapel who carried on the 'open-air' work all the year round. after a while, the eastons not only became reconciled to his presence in the house, but were even glad of it. ruth especially would often have been very lonely if he had not been there, for it had lately become easton's custom to spend a few evenings every week with crass at the cricketers. when at home slyme passed his time playing a mandolin or making fretwork photo frames. ruth had the baby's photograph taken a few weeks after slyme came, and the frame he made for it was now one of the ornaments of the sitting-room. the instinctive, unreasoning aversion she had at first felt for him had passed away. in a quiet, unobtrusive manner he did her so many little services that she found it impossible to dislike him. at first, she used to address him as 'mr' but after a time she fell naturally into easton's practice of calling him by his first name. as for the baby, he made no secret of his affection for the lodger, who nursed and played with him for hours at a stretch. 'i'll serve your dinner now, alf,' said ruth when she had finished scrubbing the floor, 'but i'll wait for mine for a little while. will may come.' 'i'm in no hurry,' replied slyme. 'i'll go and have a wash; he may be here then.' as he spoke, slyme--who had been sitting by the fire nursing the baby--who was trying to swallow the jar of sweets--put the child back into the high chair, giving him one of the sticks of sweet out of the jar to keep him quiet; and went upstairs to his own room. he came down again in about a quarter of an hour, and ruth proceeded to serve his dinner, for easton was still absent. 'if i was you, i wouldn't wait for will,' said slyme, 'he may not come for another hour or two. it's after two o'clock now, and i'm sure you must be hungry.' 'i suppose i may as well,' replied ruth, hesitatingly. 'he'll most likely get some bread and cheese at the "cricketers", same as he did last saturday.' 'almost sure to,' responded slyme. the baby had had his face washed while slyme was upstairs. directly he saw his mother eating he threw away the sugar-stick and began to cry, holding out his arms to her. she had to take him on her lap whilst she ate her dinner, and feed him with pieces from her plate. slyme talked all the time, principally about the child. he was very fond of children, he said, and always got on well with them, but he had really never known such an intelligent child--for his age--as freddie. his fellow-workmen would have been astonished had they been present to hear him talking about the shape of the baby's head. they would have been astonished at the amount of knowledge he appeared to possess of the science of phrenology. ruth, at any rate, thought he was very clever. after a time the child began to grow fretful and refused to eat; when his mother gave him a fresh piece of sugar-stick out of the jar he threw it peevishly on the floor and began to whimper, rubbing his face against his mother's bosom and pulling at her dress with his hands. when slyme first came ruth had made a practice of withdrawing from the room if he happened to be present when she wanted to nurse the child, but lately she had been less sensitive. she was sitting with her back to the window and she partly covered the baby's face with a light shawl that she wore. by the time they finished dinner the child had dozed off to sleep. slyme got up from his chair and stood with his back to the fire, looking down at them; presently he spoke, referring, of course, to the baby: 'he's very like you, isn't he?' 'yes,' replied ruth. 'everyone says he takes after me.' slyme moved a little closer, bending down to look at the slumbering infant. 'you know, at first i thought he was a girl,' he continued after a pause. 'he seems almost too pretty for a boy, doesn't he?' ruth smiled. 'people always take him for a girl at first,' she said. 'yesterday i took him with me to the monopole stores to buy some things, and the manager would hardly believe it wasn't a girl.' the man reached out his hand and stroked the baby's face. although slyme's behaviour had hitherto always been very correct, yet there was occasionally an indefinable something in his manner when they were alone that made ruth feel conscious and embarrassed. now, as she glanced up at him and saw the expression on his face she crimsoned with confusion and hastily lowered her eyes without replying to his last remark. he did not speak again either, and they remained for several minutes in silence, as if spellbound, ruth oppressed with instinctive dread, and slyme scarcely less agitated, his face flushed and his heart beating wildly. he trembled as he stood over her, hesitating and afraid. and then the silence was suddenly broken by the creaking and clanging of the front gate, heralding the tardy coming of easton. slyme went out into the scullery and, taking down the blacking brushes from the shelf, began cleaning his boots. it was plain from easton's appearance and manner that he had been drinking, but ruth did not reproach him in any way; on the contrary, she seemed almost feverishly anxious to attend to his comfort. when slyme finished cleaning his boots he went upstairs to his room, receiving a careless greeting from easton as he passed through the kitchen. he felt nervous and apprehensive that ruth might say something to easton, and was not quite able to reassure himself with the reflection that, after all, there was nothing to tell. as for ruth, she had to postpone the execution of her hastily formed resolution to tell her husband of slyme's strange behaviour, for easton fell asleep in his chair before he had finished his dinner, and she had some difficulty in waking him sufficiently to persuade him to go upstairs to bed, where he remained until tea-time. probably he would not have come down even then if it had not been for the fact that he had made an appointment to meet crass at the cricketers. whilst easton was asleep, slyme had been downstairs in the kitchen, making a fretwork frame. he played with freddie while ruth prepared the tea, and he appeared to her to be so unconscious of having done anything unusual that she began to think that she must have been mistaken in imagining that he had intended anything wrong. after tea, slyme put on his best clothes to go to his usual 'open-air' meeting. as a rule easton and ruth went out marketing together every saturday night, but this evening he could not wait for her because he had promised to meet crass at seven o'clock; so he arranged to see her down town at eight. chapter 23 the 'open-air' during the last few weeks ever since he had been engaged on the decoration of the drawing-room, owen had been so absorbed in his work that he had no time for other things. of course, all he was paid for was the time he actually worked, but really every waking moment of his time was given to the task. now that it was finished he felt something like one aroused from a dream to the stern realities and terrors of life. by the end of next week, the inside of the house and part of the outside would be finished, and as far as he knew the firm had nothing else to do at present. most of the other employers in the town were in the same plight, and it would be of no use to apply even to such of them as had something to do, for they were not likely to take on a fresh man while some of their regular hands were idle. for the last month he had forgotten that he was ill; he had forgotten that when the work at 'the cave' was finished he would have to stand off with the rest of the hands. in brief, he had forgotten for the time being that, like the majority of his fellow workmen, he was on the brink of destitution, and that a few weeks of unemployment or idleness meant starvation. as far as illness was concerned, he was even worse off than most others, for the greater number of them were members of some sick benefit club, but owen's ill-health rendered him ineligible for membership of such societies. as he walked homewards after being paid, feeling unutterably depressed and weary, he began once more to think of the future; and the more he thought of it the more dreadful it appeared. even looking at it in the best possible light--supposing he did not fall too ill to work, or lose his employment from some other cause--what was there to live for? he had been working all this week. these few coins that he held in his hand were the result, and he laughed bitterly as he thought of all they had to try to do with this money, and of all that would have to be left undone. as he turned the corner of kerk street he saw frankie coming to meet him, and the boy catching sight of him at the same moment began running and leapt into his arms with a joyous whoop. 'mother told me to tell you to buy something for dinner before you come home, because there's nothing in the house.' 'did she tell you what i was to get?' she did tell me something, but i forget what it was. but i know she said to get anything you like if you couldn't get what she told me to tell you.' 'well, we'll go and see what we can find,' said owen. 'if i were you, i'd get a tin of salmon or some eggs and bacon,' suggested frankie as he skipped along holding his father's hand. 'we don't want anything that's a lot of trouble to cook, you know, because mum's not very well today.' 'is she up?' she's been up all the morning, but she's lying down now. we've done all the work, though. while she was making the beds i started washing up the cups and saucers without telling her, but when she came in and saw what a mess i'd made on the floor, she had to stop me doing it, and she had to change nearly all my clothes as well, because i was almost wet through; but i managed the wiping up all right when she did the washing, and i swept the passage and put all my things tidy and made the cat's bed. and that just reminds me: will you please give me my penny now? i promised the cat that i'd bring him back some meat.' owen complied with the boy's request, and while the latter went to the butcher's for the meat, owen went into the grocer's to get something for dinner, it being arranged that they were to meet again at the corner of the street. owen was at the appointed place first and after waiting some time and seeing no sign of the boy he decided to go towards the butcher's to meet him. when he came in sight of the shop he saw the boy standing outside in earnest conversation with the butcher, a jolly-looking stoutly built man, with a very red face. owen perceived at once that the child was trying to explain something, because frankie had a habit of holding his head sideways and supplementing his speech by spreading out his fingers and making quaint gestures with his hands whenever he found it difficult to make himself understood. the boy was doing this now, waving one hand about with the fingers and thumb extended wide, and with the other flourishing a paper parcel which evidently contained the pieces of meat. presently the man laughed heartily and after shaking hands with frankie went into the shop to attend to a customer, and frankie rejoined his father. 'that butcher's a very decent sort of chap, you know, dad,' he said. 'he wouldn't take a penny for the meat.' 'is that what you were talking to him about?' no; we were talking about socialism. you see, this is the second time he wouldn't take the money, and the first time he did it i thought he must be a socialist, but i didn't ask him then. but when he did it again this time i asked him if he was. so he said, no. he said he wasn't quite mad yet. so i said, "if you think that socialists are all mad, you're very much mistaken, because i'm a socialist myself, and i'm quite sure i'm not mad." so he said he knew i was all right, but he didn't understand anything about socialism himself--only that it meant sharing out all the money so that everyone could have the same. so then i told him that's not socialism at all! and when i explained it to him properly and advised him to be one, he said he'd think about it. so i said if he'd only do that he'd be sure to change over to our side; and then he laughed and promised to let me know next time he sees me, and i promised to lend him some literature. you won't mind, will you, dad?' 'of course not; when we get home we'll have a look through what we've got and you can take him some of them.' 'i know!' cried frankie eagerly. 'the two very best of all. happy britain and england for the english.' he knew that these were 'two of the best' because he had often heard his father and mother say so, and he had noticed that whenever a socialist friend came to visit them, he was also of the same opinion. as a rule on saturday evenings they all three went out together to do the marketing, but on this occasion, in consequence of nora being unwell, owen and frankie went by themselves. the frequent recurrence of his wife's illness served to increase owen's pessimism with regard to the future, and the fact that he was unable to procure for her the comforts she needed was not calculated to dispel the depression that filled his mind as he reflected that there was no hope of better times. in the majority of cases, for a workman there is no hope of advancement. after he has learnt his trade and become a 'journeyman' all progress ceases. he is at the goal. after he has been working ten or twenty years he commands no more than he did at first--a bare living wage--sufficient money to purchase fuel to keep the human machine working. as he grows older he will have to be content with even less; and all the time he holds his employment at the caprice and by the favour of his masters, who regard him merely as a piece of mechanism that enables them to accumulate money--a thing which they are justified in casting aside as soon as it becomes unprofitable. and the workman must not only be an efficient money-producing machine, but he must also be the servile subject of his masters. if he is not abjectly civil and humble, if he will not submit tamely to insult, indignity, and every form of contemptuous treatment that occasion makes possible, he can be dismissed, and replaced in a moment by one of the crowd of unemployed who are always waiting for his job. this is the status of the majority of the 'heirs of all the ages' under the present system. as he walked through the crowded streets holding frankie by the hand, owen thought that to voluntarily continue to live such a life as this betokened a degraded mind. to allow one's child to grow up to suffer it in turn was an act of callous, criminal cruelty. in this matter he held different opinions from most of his fellow workmen. the greater number of them were quite willing and content that their children should be made into beasts of burden for the benefit of other people. as he looked down upon the little, frail figure trotting along by his side, owen thought for the thousandth time that it would be far better for the child to die now: he would never be fit to be a soldier in the ferocious christian battle of life. then he remembered nora. although she was always brave, and never complained, he knew that her life was one of almost incessant physical suffering; and as for himself he was tired and sick of it all. he had been working like a slave all his life and there was nothing to show for it--there never would be anything to show for it. he thought of the man who had killed his wife and children. the jury had returned the usual verdict, 'temporary insanity'. it never seemed to occur to these people that the truth was that to continue to suffer hopelessly like this was evidence of permanent insanity. but supposing that bodily death was not the end. suppose there was some kind of a god? if there were, it wasn't unreasonable to think that the being who was capable of creating such a world as this and who seemed so callously indifferent to the unhappiness of his creatures, would also be capable of devising and creating the other hell that most people believed in. although it was december the evening was mild and clear. the full moon deluged the town with silvery light, and the cloudless sky was jewelled with myriads of glittering stars. looking out into the unfathomable infinity of space, owen wondered what manner of being or power it was that had originated and sustained all this? considered as an explanation of the existence of the universe, the orthodox christian religion was too absurd to merit a second thought. but then, every other conceivable hypothesis was also--ultimately--unsatisfactory and even ridiculous. to believe that the universe as it is now has existed from all eternity without any cause is surely ridiculous. but to say that it was created by a being who existed without a cause from all eternity is equally ridiculous. in fact, it was only postponing the difficulty one stage. evolution was not more satisfactory, because although it was undoubtedly true as far as it went, it only went part of the way, leaving the great question still unanswered by assuming the existence--in the beginning--of the elements of matter, without a cause! the question remained unanswered because it was unanswerable. regarding this problem man was but- 'an infant crying in the night, an infant crying for the light and with no language but a cry.' all the same, it did not follow, because one could not explain the mystery oneself, that it was right to try to believe an unreasonable explanation offered by someone else. but although he reasoned like this, owen could not help longing for something to believe, for some hope for the future; something to compensate for the unhappiness of the present. in one sense, he thought, how good it would be if christianity were true, and after all the sorrow there was to be an eternity of happiness such as it had never entered into the heart of man to conceive? if only that were true, nothing else would matter. how contemptible and insignificant the very worst that could happen here would be if one knew that this life was only a short journey that was to terminate at the beginning of an eternity of joy? but no one really believed this; and as for those who pretended to do so--their lives showed that they did not believe it at all. their greed and inhumanity--their ferocious determination to secure for themselves the good things of this world--were conclusive proofs of their hypocrisy and infidelity. 'dad,' said frankie, suddenly, 'let's go over and hear what that man's saying.' he pointed across the way to where--a little distance back from the main road, just round the corner of a side street--a group of people were standing encircling a large lantern fixed on the top of a pole about seven feet high, which was being held by one of the men. a bright light was burning inside this lantern and on the pane of white, obscured glass which formed the sides, visible from where owen and frankie were standing, was written in bold plain letters that were readable even at that distance, the text: 'be not deceived: god is not mocked!' the man whose voice had attracted frankie's attention was reading out a verse of a hymn: 'i heard the voice of jesus say, behold, i freely give, the living water, thirsty one, stoop down and drink, and live. i came to jesus and i drank of that life giving stream, my thirst was quenched, my soul revived, and now i live in him.' the individual who gave out this hymn was a tall, thin man whose clothes hung loosely on the angles of his round-shouldered, bony form. his long, thin legs--about which the baggy trousers hung in ungraceful folds--were slightly knock-kneed, and terminated in large, flat feet. his arms were very long even for such a tall man, and the huge, bony hands were gnarled and knotted. regardless of the season, he had removed his bowler hat, revealing his forehead, which was high, flat and narrow. his nose was a large, fleshy, hawklike beak, and from the side of each nostril a deep indentation extended downwards until it disappeared in the drooping moustache that concealed his mouth when he was not speaking, but the vast extent of which was perceptible now as he opened it to call out the words of the hymn. his chin was large and extraordinarily long: the eyes were pale blue, very small and close together, surmounted by spare, light-coloured, almost invisible eyebrows with a deep vertical cleft between them over the nose. his head--covered with thick, coarse brown hair--was very large, especially at the back; the ears were small and laid close to the head. if one were to make a full-face drawing of his cadaverous visage, it would be found that the outline resembled that of the lid of a coffin. as owen and frankie drew near, the boy tugged at his father's hand and whispered: 'dad! that's the teacher at the sunday school where i went that day with charley and elsie.' owen looked quickly and saw that it was hunter. as hunter ceased reading out the words of the hymn, the little company of evangelists began to sing, accompanied by the strains of a small but peculiarly sweet-toned organ. a few persons in the crowd joined in, the words being familiar to them. during the singing their faces were a study, they all looked so profoundly solemn and miserable, as if they were a gang of condemned criminals waiting to be led forth to execution. the great number of the people standing around appeared to be listening more out of idle curiosity than anything else, and two well-dressed young men--evidently strangers and visitors to the town--amused themselves by making audible remarks about the texts on the lantern. there was also a shabbily dressed, semi-drunken man in a battered bowler hat who stood on the inner edge of the crowd, almost in the ring itself, with folded arms and an expression of scorn. he had a very thin, pale face with a large, high-bridged nose, and bore a striking resemblance to the first duke of wellington. as the singing proceeded, the scornful expression faded from the visage of the semi-drunk, and he not only joined in, but unfolded his arms and began waving them about as if he were conducting the music. by the time the singing was over a considerable crowd had gathered, and then one of the evangelists, the same man who had given out the hymn, stepped into the middle of the ring. he had evidently been offended by the unseemly conduct of the two well-dressed young men, for after a preliminary glance round upon the crowd, he fixed his gaze upon the pair, and immediately launched out upon a long tirade against what he called 'infidelity'. then, having heartily denounced all those who--as he put it--'refused' to believe, he proceeded to ridicule those half-and-half believers, who, while professing to believe the bible, rejected the doctrine of hell. that the existence of a place of eternal torture is taught in the bible, he tried to prove by a long succession of texts. as he proceeded he became very excited, and the contemptuous laughter of the two unbelievers seemed to make him worse. he shouted and raved, literally foaming at the mouth and glaring in a frenzied manner around upon the faces of the crowd. 'there is a hell!' he shouted. 'and understand this clearly--"the wicked shall be turned into hell"--"he that believeth not shall be damned."' 'well, then, you'll stand a very good chance of being damned also,' exclaimed one of the two young men. ''ow do you make it out?' demanded the preacher, wiping the froth from his lips and the perspiration from his forehead with his handkerchief. 'why, because you don't believe the bible yourselves.' nimrod and the other evangelists laughed, and looked pityingly at the young man. 'ah, my dear brother,' said misery. 'that's your delusion. i thank god i do believe it, every word!' 'amen,' fervently ejaculated slyme and several of the other disciples. 'oh no, you don't,' replied the other. 'and i can prove you don't.' 'prove it, then,' said nimrod. 'read out the 17th and 18th verses of the xvith chapter of mark,' said the disturber of the meeting. the crowd began to close in on the centre, the better to hear the dispute. misery, standing close to the lantern, found the verse mentioned and read aloud as follows: 'and these signs shall follow them that believe. in my name shall they cast out devils: they shall speak with new tongues. they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them: they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.' 'well, you can't heal the sick, neither can you speak new languages or cast out devils: but perhaps you can drink deadly things without suffering harm.' the speaker here suddenly drew from his waistcoat pocket a small glass bottle and held it out towards misery, who shrank from it with horror as he continued: 'i have here a most deadly poison. there is in this bottle sufficient strychnine to kill a dozen unbelievers. drink it! and if it doesn't harm you, we'll know that you really are a believer and that what you believe is the truth!' ''ear, 'ear!' said the semi-drunk, who had listened to the progress of the argument with great interest. ''ear, 'ear! that's fair enough. git it acrost yer chest.' some of the people in the crowd began to laugh, and voices were heard from several quarters calling upon misery to drink the strychnine. 'now, if you'll allow me, i'll explain to you what that there verse means,' said hunter. 'if you read it carefully--with the context--' 'i don't want you to tell me what it means,' interrupted the other. 'i am able to read for myself. whatever you may say, or pretend to think it means, i know what it says.' 'hear, hear,' shouted several voices, and angry cries of 'why don't you drink the poison?' began to be heard from the outskirts of the crowd. 'are you going to drink it or not?' demanded the man with the bottle. 'no! i'm not such a fool!' retorted misery, fiercely, and a loud shout of laughter broke from the crowd.' 'p'haps some of the other "believers" would like to,' said the young man sneeringly, looking round upon the disciples. as no one seemed desirous of availing himself of this offer, the man returned the bottle regretfully to his pocket. 'i suppose,' said misery, regarding the owner of the strychnine with a sneer, 'i suppose you're one of them there hired critics wot's goin' about the country doin' the devil's work?' 'wot i wants to know is this 'ere,' said the semi-drunk, suddenly advancing into the middle of the ring and speaking in a loud voice. 'where did cain get 'is wife from?' 'don't answer 'im, brother 'unter,' said mr didlum, one of the disciples. this was rather an unnecessary piece of advice, because misery did not know the answer. an individual in a long black garment--the 'minister'--now whispered something to miss didlum, who was seated at the organ, whereupon she began to play, and the 'believers' began to sing, as loud as they could so as to drown the voices of the disturbers of the meeting, a song called 'oh, that will be glory for me!' after this hymn the 'minister' invited a shabbily dressed 'brother'--a working-man member of the psa, to say a 'few words', and the latter accordingly stepped into the centre of the ring and held forth as follows: 'my dear frens, i thank gord tonight that i can stand 'ere tonight, hout in the hopen hair and tell hall you dear people tonight of hall wot's been done for me. ho my dear frens hi ham so glad tonight as i can stand 'ere tonight and say as hall my sins is hunder the blood tonight and wot 'e's done for me 'e can do for you tonight. if you'll honly do as i done and just acknowledge yourself a lost sinner--' 'yes! that's the honly way!' shouted nimrod. 'amen,' cried all the other believers. '--if you'll honly come to 'im tonight in the same way as i done you'll see wot 'e's done for me 'e can do for you. ho my dear frens, don't go puttin' it orf from day to day like a door turnin' on its 'inges, don't put orf to some more convenient time because you may never 'ave another chance. 'im that bein' orfen reproved 'ardeneth 'is neck shall be suddenly cut orf and that without remedy. ho come to 'im tonight, for 'is name's sake and to 'im we'll give hall the glory. amen.' 'amen,' said the believers, fervently, and then the man who was dressed in the long garment entreated all those who were not yet true believers--and doers--of the word to join earnestly and meaningly in the singing of the closing hymn, which he was about to read out to them. the semi-drunk obligingly conducted as before, and the crowd faded away with the last notes of the music. chapter 24 ruth as has already been stated, hitherto slyme had passed the greater number of his evenings at home, but during the following three weeks a change took place in his habits in this respect. he now went out nearly every night and did not return until after ten o'clock. on meeting nights he always changed his attire, dressing himself as on sundays, but on the other occasions he went out in his week-day clothes. ruth often wondered where he went on those nights, but he never volunteered the information and she never asked him. easton had chummed up with a lot of the regular customers at the 'cricketers', where he now spent most of his spare time, drinking beer, telling yarns or playing shove-ha'penny or hooks and rings. when he had no cash the old dear gave him credit until saturday. at first, the place had not had much attraction for him, and he really went there only for the purpose of 'keeping in' with crass: but after a time he found it a very congenial way of passing his evenings... one evening, ruth saw slyme meet crass as if by appointment and as the two men went away together she returned to her housework wondering what it meant. meantime, crass and slyme proceeded on their way down town. it was about half past six o'clock: the shops and streets were brilliantly lighted, and as they went along they saw numerous groups of men talking together in a listless way. most of them were artisans and labourers out of employment and evidently in no great hurry to go home. some of them had neither tea nor fire to go to, and stayed away from home as long as possible so as not to be compelled to look upon the misery of those who were waiting for them there. others hung about hoping against all probability that they might even yet--although it was so late--hear of some job to be started somewhere or other. as they passed one of these groups they recognized and nodded to newman and old jack linden, and the former left the others and came up to crass and slyme, who did not pause, so newman walked along with them. 'anything fresh in, bob?' he asked. 'no; we ain't got 'ardly anything,' replied crass. 'i reckon we shall finish up at "the cave" next week, and then i suppose we shall all be stood orf. we've got several plumbers on, and i believe there's a little gas-fitting work in, but next to nothing in our line.' 'i suppose you don't know of any other firm what's got anything?' 'no, i don't, mate. between you and me, i don't think any of 'em has; they're all in about the same fix.' 'i've not done anything since i left, you know,' said newman, 'and we've just about got as far as we can get, at home.' slyme and crass said nothing in reply to this. they wished that newman would take himself off, because they did not want him to know where they were going. however, newman continued to accompany them and an awkward silence succeeded. he seemed to wish to say something more, and they both guessed what it was. so they walked along as rapidly as possible in order not to give him any encouragement. at last newman blurted out: 'i suppose--you don't happen--either of you--to have a tanner you could lend me? i'll let you have it back--when i get a job.' 'i ain't mate,' replied crass. 'i'm sorry; if i 'ad one on me, you should 'ave it, with pleasure.' slyme also expressed his regret that he had no money with him, and at the corner of the next street newman--ashamed of having asked--wished them 'good night' and went away. slyme and crass hurried along and presently arrived at rushton & co.'s shop. the windows were lit up with electric light, displaying an assortment of wallpapers, gas and electric light fittings, glass shades, globes, tins of enamel, paint and varnish. several framed show-cards--'estimates free', 'first class work only, at moderate charges', 'only first class workmen employed' and several others of the same type. on one side wall of the window was a large shield-shaped board covered with black velvet on which a number of brass fittings for coffins were arranged. the shield was on an oak mount with the inscription: 'funerals conducted on modern principles'. slyme waited outside while crass went in. mr budd, the shopman, was down at the far end near the glazed partition which separated mr rushton's office from the front shop. as crass entered, budd--who was a pale-faced, unhealthy-looking, undersized youth about twenty years of age--looked round and, with a grimace, motioned him to walk softly. crass paused, wondering what the other meant; but the shopman beckoned him to advance, grinning and winking and jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the office. crass hesitated, fearing that possibly the miserable budd had gone--or been driven--out of his mind; but as the latter continued to beckon and grin and point towards the office crass screwed up his courage and followed him behind one of the showcases, and applying his eye to a crack in the woodwork of the partition indicated by budd, he could see mr rushton in the act of kissing and embracing miss wade, the young lady clerk. crass watched them for some time and then whispered to budd to call slyme, and when the latter came they all three took turns at peeping through the crack in the partition. when they had looked their fill they came out from behind the showcase, almost bursting with suppressed merriment. budd reached down a key from where it was hanging on a hook on the wall and gave it to crass and the two resumed their interrupted journey. but before they had proceeded a dozen yards from the shop, they were accosted by a short, elderly man with grey hair and a beard. this man looked about sixty-five years of age, and was very shabbily dressed. the ends of the sleeves of his coat were frayed and ragged, and the elbows were worn threadbare. his boots were patched, broken, and down at heel, and the knees and bottoms of the legs of his trousers were in the same condition as the sleeves of his coat. this man's name was latham; he was a venetian blind maker and repairer. with his son, he was supposed to be 'in business' on his own account, but as most of their work was done for 'the trade', that is, for such firms as rushton & co., they would be more correctly described as men who did piecework at home. he had been 'in business'--as he called it--for about forty years working, working, always working; and ever since his son became old enough to labour he had helped his father in the philanthropic task of manufacturing profits for the sweaters who employed them. they had been so busy running after work, and working for the benefit of others, that they had overlooked the fact that they were only earning a bare living for themselves and now, after forty years' hard labour, the old man was clothed in rags and on the verge of destitution. 'is rushton there?' he asked. 'yes, i think so,' replied crass, attempting to pass on; but the old man detained him. 'he promised to let us know about them blinds for "the cave". we gave 'im a price for 'em about a month ago. in fact, we gave 'im two prices, because he said the first was too high. five and six a set i asked 'im! take 'em right through the 'ole 'ouse! one with another--big and little. two coats of paint, and new tapes and cords. that wasn't too much, was it?' 'no,' said crass, walking on; 'that was cheap enough!' he said it was too much,' continued latham. 'said as 'e could get 'em done cheaper! but i say as no one can't do it and make a living.' as he walked along, talking, between crass and slyme, the old man became very excited. 'but we 'adn't nothing to do to speak of, so my son told 'im we'd do 'em for five bob a set, and 'e said 'e'd let us know, but we ain't 'eard nothing from 'im yet, so i thought i'd try and see 'im tonight.' well, you'll find 'im in there now,' said slyme with a peculiar look, and walking faster. 'good night.' 'i won't take 'em on for no less!' cried the old man as he turned back. i've got my livin' to get, and my son's got 'is wife and little 'uns to keep. we can't work for nothing!' 'certainly not,' said crass, glad to get away at last. 'good night, and good luck to you.' as soon as they were out of hearing, they both burst out laughing at the old man's vehemence. 'seemed quite upset about it,' said slyme; and they laughed again. they now left the main road and pursued their way through a number of badly lighted, mean-looking streets, and finally turning down a kind of alley, arrived at their destination. on one side of this street was a row of small houses; facing these were a number of buildings of a miscellaneous description--sheds and stables; and beyond these a plot of waste ground on which could be seen, looming weirdly through the dusk, a number of empty carts and waggons with their shafts resting on the ground or reared up into the air. threading their way carefully through these and avoiding as much as possible the mud, pools of water, and rubbish which covered the ground, they arrived at a large gate fastened with a padlock. applying the key, crass swung back the gate and they found themselves in a large yard filled with building materials and plant, ladders, huge tressels, planks and beams of wood, hand-carts, and wheelbarrows, heaps of sand and mortar and innumerable other things that assumed strange fantastic shapes in the semi-darkness. crates and packing cases, lengths of iron guttering and rain-pipes, old door-frames and other woodwork that had been taken from buildings where alterations had been made. and over all these things, a gloomy, indistinct and shapeless mass, rose the buildings and sheds that comprised rushton & co.'s workshop. crass struck a match, and slyme, stooping down, drew a key from a crevice in the wall near one of the doors, which he unlocked, and they entered. crass struck another match and lit the gas at the jointed bracket fixed to the wall. this was the paint-shop. at one end was a fireplace without a grate but with an iron bar fixed across the blackened chimney for the purpose of suspending pails or pots over the fire, which was usually made of wood on the hearthstone. all round the walls of the shop--which had once been whitewashed, but were now covered with smears of paint of every colour where the men had 'rubbed out' their brushes--were rows of shelves with kegs of paint upon them. in front of the window was a long bench covered with an untidy litter of dirty paint-pots, including several earthenware mixing vessels or mortars, the sides of these being thickly coated with dried paint. scattered about the stone floor were a number of dirty pails, either empty or containing stale whitewash; and standing on a sort of low platform or shelf at one end of the shop were four large round tanks fitted with taps and labelled 'boiled oil', 'turps', 'linseed oil', 'turps substitute'. the lower parts of the walls were discoloured with moisture. the atmosphere was cold and damp and foul with the sickening odours of the poisonous materials. it was in this place that bert--the apprentice--spent most of his time, cleaning out pots and pails, during slack periods when there were no jobs going on outside. in the middle of the shop, under a two-armed gas pendant, was another table or bench, also thickly coated with old, dried paint, and by the side of this were two large stands on which were hanging up to dry some of the lathes of the venetian blinds belonging to 'the cave', which crass and slyme were painting--piecework--in their spare time. the remainder of the lathes were leaning against the walls or piled in stacks on the table. crass shivered with cold as he lit the two gas-jets. 'make a bit of a fire, alf, he said, 'while i gets the colour ready.' slyme went outside and presently returned with his arms full of old wood, which he smashed up and threw into the fireplace; then he took an empty paint-pot and filled it with turpentine from the big tank and emptied it over the wood. amongst the pots on the mixing bench he found one full of old paint, and he threw this over the wood also, and in a few minutes he had made a roaring fire. meantime, crass had prepared the paint and brushes and taken down the lathes from the drying frames. the two men now proceeded with the painting of the blinds, working rapidly, each lathe being hung on the wires of the drying frame after being painted. they talked freely as they worked, having no fear of being overheard by rushton or nimrod. this job was piecework, so it didn't matter whether they talked or not. they waxed hilarious over old latham's discomfiture and wondered what he would say if he could see them now. then the conversation drifted to the subject of the private characters of the other men who were employed by rushton & co., and an impartial listener--had there been one there--would have been forced to come to the same conclusion as crass and slyme did: namely, that they themselves were the only two decent fellows on the firm. there was something wrong or shady about everybody else. that bloke barrington, for instance--it was a very funny business, you know, for a chap like 'im to be workin' as a labourer, it looked very suspicious. nobody knowed exactly who 'e was or where 'e come from, but anyone could tell 'e'd been a toff. it was very certain 'e'd never bin brought up to work for 'is livin'. the most probable explanation was that 'e'd committed some crime and bin disowned by 'is family--pinched some money, or forged a cheque or something like that. then there was that sawkins. he was no class whatever. it was a well-known fact that he used to go round to misery's house nearly every night to tell him every little thing that had happened on the job during the day! as for payne, the foreman carpenter, the man was a perfect fool: he'd find out the difference if ever he got the sack from rushton's and went to work for some other firm! he didn't understand his trade, and he couldn't make a coffin properly to save 'is life! then there was that rotter owen; there was a bright specimen for yer! an atheist! didn't believe in no god or devil or nothing else. a pretty state of things there would be if these socialists could have their own way: for one thing, nobody would be allowed to work overtime! crass and slyme worked and talked in this manner till ten o'clock, and then they extinguished the fire by throwing some water on it--put out the gas and locked up the shop and the yard, dropping the key of the latter into the letter-box at rushton's office on their way home. in this way they worked at the blinds nearly every night for three weeks. when saturday arrived the men working at 'the cave' were again surprised that nobody was sacked, and they were divided in opinion as to the reason, some thinking that nimrod was determined to keep them all on till the job was finished, so as to get it done as quickly as possible; and others boldly asserting the truth of a rumour that had been going about for several days that the firm had another big job in. mr sweater had bought another house; rushton had to do it up, and they were all to be kept on to start this other work as soon as 'the cave' was finished. crass knew no more than anyone else and he maintained a discreet silence, but the fact that he did not contradict the rumour served to strengthen it. the only foundation that existed for this report was that rushton and misery had been seen looking over the garden gate of a large empty house near 'the cave'. but although it had such an insignificant beginning, the rumour had grown and increased in detail and importance day by day. that very morning at breakfast-time, the man on the pail had announced that he had heard on the very best authority that mr sweater had sold all his interest in the great business that bore his name and was about to retire into private life, and that he intended to buy up all the house property in the neighbourhood of 'the cave'. another individual--one of the new hands--said that he had heard someone else--in a public house--say that rushton was about to marry one of sweater's daughters, and that sweater intended to give the couple a house to live in, as a wedding present: but the fact that rushton was already married and the father of four children, rather knocked the bottom out of this story, so it was regretfully dismissed. whatever the reason, the fact remained that nobody had been discharged, and when pay-time arrived they set out for the office in high spirits. that evening, the weather being fine, slyme went out as usual to his open-air meeting, but easton departed from his usual custom of rushing off to the 'cricketers' directly he had had his tea, having on this occasion promised to wait for ruth and to go with her to do the marketing. the baby was left at home alone, asleep in the cradle. by the time they had made all their purchases they had a fairly heavy load. easton carried the string-bag containing the potatoes and other vegetables, and the meat, and ruth, the groceries. on their way home, they had to pass the 'cricketers' and just before they reached that part of their journey they met mr and mrs crass, who were also out marketing. they both insisted on easton and ruth going in to have a drink with them. ruth did not want to go, but she allowed herself to be persuaded for she could see that easton was beginning to get angry with her for refusing. crass had on a new overcoat and a new hat, with dark grey trousers and yellow boots, and a 'stand-up' collar with a bright blue tie. his wife--a fat, vulgar-looking, well-preserved woman about forty--was arrayed in a dark red 'motor' costume, with hat to match. both easton and ruth--whose best clothes had all been pawned to raise the money to pay the poor rate--felt very mean and shabby before them. when they got inside, crass paid for the first round of drinks, a pint of old six for himself; the same for easton, half a pint for mrs easton and threepenny-worth of gin for mrs crass. the besotted wretch was there, just finishing a game of hooks and rings with the semi-drunk--who had called round on the day after he was thrown out, to apologize for his conduct to the old dear, and had since then become one of the regular customers. philpot was absent. he had been there that afternoon, so the old dear said, but he had gone home about five o'clock, and had not been back since. he was almost sure to look in again in the course of the evening. although the house was not nearly so full as it would have been if times had been better, there was a large number of people there, for the 'cricketers' was one of the most popular houses in the town. another thing that helped to make them busy was the fact that two other public houses in the vicinity had recently been closed up. there were people in all the compartments. some of the seats in the public bar were occupied by women, some young and accompanied by their husbands, some old and evidently sodden with drink. in one corner of the public bar, drinking beer or gin with a number of young fellows, were three young girls who worked at a steam laundry in the neighbourhood. two large, fat, gipsy-looking women: evidently hawkers, for on the floor beside them were two baskets containing bundles of flowers--chrysanthemums and michaelmas daisies. there were also two very plainly and shabbily dressed women about thirty-five years of age, who were always to be found there on saturday nights, drinking with any man who was willing to pay for them. the behaviour of these two women was very quiet and their manners unobtrusive. they seemed to realize that they were there only on sufferance, and their demeanour was shamefaced and humble. the majority of the guests were standing. the floor was sprinkled with sawdust which served to soak up the beer that slopped out of the glasses of those whose hands were too unsteady to hold them upright. the air was foul with the smell of beer, spirits and tobacco smoke, and the uproar was deafening, for nearly everyone was talking at the same time, their voices clashing discordantly with the strains of the polyphone, which was playing 'the garden of your heart'. in one corner a group of men convulsed with laughter at the details of a dirty story related by one of their number. several impatient customers were banging the bottoms of their empty glasses or pewters on the counter and shouting their orders for more beer. oaths, curses and obscene expressions resounded on every hand, coming almost as frequently from the women as the men. and over all the rattle of money, the ringing of the cash register. the clinking and rattling of the glasses and pewter pots as they were being washed, and the gurgling noise made by the beer as it poured into the drinking vessels from the taps of the beer engine, whose handles were almost incessantly manipulated by the barman, the old dear and the glittering landlady, whose silken blouse, bejewelled hair, ears, neck and fingers scintillated gloriously in the blaze of the gaslight. the scene was so novel and strange to ruth that she felt dazed and bewildered. previous to her marriage she had been a total abstainer, but since then she had occasionally taken a glass of beer with easton for company's sake with their sunday dinner at home; but it was generally easton who went out and bought the beer in a jug. once or twice she had bought it herself at an off licence beer-shop near where they lived, but she had never before been in a public house to drink. she was so confused and ill at ease that she scarcely heard or understood mrs crass, who talked incessantly, principally about their other residents in north street where they both resided; and about mr crass. she also promised ruth to introduce her presently--if he came in, as he was almost certain to do--to mr partaker, one of her two lodgers a most superior young man, who had been with them now for over three years and would not leave on any account. in fact, he had been their lodger in their old house, and when they moved he came with them to north street, although it was farther away from his place of business than their former residence. mrs crass talked a lot more of the same sort of stuff, to which ruth listened like one in a dream, and answered with an occasional yes or no. meantime, crass and easton--the latter had deposited the string-bag on the seat at ruth's side--and the semi-drunk and the besotted wretch, arranged to play a match of hooks and rings, the losers to pay for drinks for all the party, including the two women. crass and the semi-drunk tossed up for sides. crass won and picked the besotted wretch, and the game began. it was a one-sided affair from the first, for easton and the semi-drunk were no match for the other two. the end of it was that easton and his partner had to pay for the drinks. the four men had a pint each of four ale, and mrs crass had another threepennyworth of gin. ruth protested that she did not want any more to drink, but the others ridiculed this, and both the besotted wretch and the semi-drunk seemed to regard her unwillingness as a personal insult, so she allowed them to get her another half-pint of beer, which she was compelled to drink, because she was conscious that the others were watching her to see that she did so. the semi-drunk now suggested a return match. he wished to have his revenge. he was a little out of practice, he said, and was only just getting his hand in as they were finishing the other game. crass and his partner readily assented, and in spite of ruth's whispered entreaty that they should return home without further delay, easton insisted on joining the game. although they played more carefully than before, and notwithstanding the fact that the besotted wretch was very drunk, easton and his partner were again beaten and once more had to pay for the drinks. the men had a pint each as before. mrs crass--upon whom the liquor so far seemed to have no effect--had another threepennyworth of gin; and ruth consented to take another glass of beer on condition that easton would come away directly their drinks were finished. easton agreed to do so, but instead of keeping his word he began to play a four-handed game of shove-ha'penny with the other three, the sides and stakes being arranged as before. the liquor was by this time beginning to have some effect upon ruth: she felt dizzy and confused. whenever it was necessary to reply to mrs crass's talk she found some difficulty in articulating the words and she knew she was not answering very intelligently. even when mrs crass introduced her to the interesting mr partaker, who arrived about this time, she was scarcely able to collect herself sufficiently to decline that fascinating gentleman's invitation to have another drink with himself and mrs crass. after a time a kind of terror took possession of her, and she resolved that if easton would not come when he had finished the game he was playing, she would go home without him. meantime the game of shove-ha'penny proceeded merrily, the majority of the male guests crowding round the board, applauding or censuring the players as occasion demanded. the semi-drunk was in high glee, for crass was not much of a hand at this game, and the besotted wretch, although playing well, was not able to make up for his partner's want of skill. as the game drew near its end and it became more and more certain that his opponents would be defeated, the joy of the semi-drunk was unbounded, and he challenged them to make it double or quits--a generous offer which they wisely declined, and shortly afterwards, seeing that their position was hopeless, they capitulated and prepared to pay the penalty of the vanquished. crass ordered the drinks and the besotted wretch paid half the damage--a pint of four ale for each of the men and the same as before for the ladies. the old dear executed the order, but by mistake, being very busy, he served two 'threes' of gin instead of one. ruth did not want any more at all, but she was afraid to say so, and she did not like to make any fuss about it being the wrong drink, especially as they all assured her that the spirits would do her more good than beer. she did not want either; she wanted to get away, and would have liked to empty the stuff out of the glass on the floor, but she was afraid that mrs crass or one of the others might see her doing so, and there might be some trouble about it. anyway, it seemed easier to drink this small quantity of spirits and water than a big glass of beer, the very thought of which now made her feel ill. she drank the stuff which easton handed to her at a single draught and, handing back the empty glass with a shudder, stood up resolutely. 'are you coming home now? you promised you would,' she said. 'all right: presently,' replied easton. 'there's plenty of time; it's not nine yet.' 'that doesn't matter; it's quite late enough. you know we've left the child at home alone in the house. you promised you'd come as soon as you'd finished that other game.' 'all right, all right,' answered easton impatiently. 'just wait a minute, i want to see this, and then i'll come.' 'this' was a most interesting problem propounded by crass, who had arranged eleven matches side by side on the shove-ha'penny board. the problem was to take none away and yet leave only nine. nearly all the men in the bar were crowding round the shove-ha'penny board, some with knitted brows and drunken gravity trying to solve the puzzle and others waiting curiously for the result. easton crossed over to see how it was done, and as none of the crowd were able to do the trick, crass showed that it could be accomplished by simply arranging the eleven matches so as to form the word nine. everybody said it was very good indeed, very clever and interesting. but the semi-drunk and the besotted wretch were reminded by this trick of several others equally good, and they proceeded to do them; and then the men had another pint each all round as a reviver after the mental strain of the last few minutes. easton did not know any tricks himself, but he was an interested spectator of those done by several others until ruth came over and touched his arm. 'aren't you coming?' 'wait a minute, can't you?' cried easton roughly. 'what's your hurry?' 'i don't want to stay here any longer,' said ruth, hysterically. 'you said you'd come as soon as you saw that trick. if you don't come, i shall go home by myself. i don't want to stay in this place any longer.' 'well, go by yourself if you want to!' shouted easton fiercely, pushing her away from him. 'i shall stop 'ere as long as i please, and if you don't like it you can do the other thing.' ruth staggered and nearly fell from the force of the push he gave her, and the man turned again to the table to watch the semi-drunk, who was arranging six matches so as to form the numeral xii, and who said he could prove that this was equal to a thousand. ruth waited a few minutes longer, and then as easton took no further notice of her, she took up the string-bag and the other parcels, and without staying to say good night to mrs crass--who was earnestly conversing with the interesting partaker--she with some difficulty opened the door and went out into the street. the cold night air felt refreshing and sweet after the foul atmosphere of the public house, but after a little while she began to feel faint and dizzy, and was conscious also that she was walking unsteadily, and she fancied that people stared at her strangely as they passed. the parcels felt very heavy and awkward to carry, and the string-bag seemed as if it were filled with lead. although under ordinary circumstances it was only about ten minutes' walk home from here, she resolved to go by one of the trams which passed by the end of north street. with this intention, she put down her bag on the pavement at the stopping-place, and waited, resting her hand on the iron pillar at the corner of the street, where a little crowd of people were standing evidently with the same object as herself. two trains passed without stopping, for they were already full of passengers, a common circumstance on saturday nights. the next one stopped, and several persons alighted, and then ensued a fierce struggle amongst the waiting crowd for the vacant seats. men and women pushed, pulled and almost fought, shoving their fists and elbows into each other's sides and breasts and faces. ruth was quickly thrust aside and nearly knocked down, and the tram, having taken aboard as many passengers as it had accommodation for, passed on. she waited for the next one, and the same scene was enacted with the same result for her, and then, reflecting that if she had not stayed for these trams she might have been home by now, she determined to resume her walk. the parcels felt heavier than ever, and she had not proceeded very far before she was compelled to put the bag down again upon the pavement, outside an empty house. leaning against the railings, she felt very tired and ill. everything around her--the street, the houses, the traffic--seemed vague and shadowy and unreal. several people looked curiously at her as they passed, but by this time she was scarcely conscious of their scrutiny. slyme had gone that evening to the usual 'open-air' conducted by the shining light mission. the weather being fine, they had a most successful meeting, the disciples, including hunter, rushton, sweater, didlum, and mrs starvem--ruth's former mistress--assembled in great force so as to be able to deal more effectively with any infidels or hired critics or drunken scoffers who might try to disturb the proceedings; and--possibly as an evidence of how much real faith there was in them--they had also arranged to have a police officer in attendance, to protect them from what they called the 'powers of darkness'. one might be excused for thinking that--if they really believed--they would have relied rather upon those powers of light which they professed to represent on this planet to protect them without troubling to call in the aid of such a 'worldly' force as the police. however, it came to pass that on this occasion the only infidels present were those who were conducting the meeting, but as these consisted for the most part of members of the chapel, it will be seen that the infidel fraternity was strongly represented. on his way home after the meeting slyme had to pass by the 'cricketers' and as he drew near the place he wondered if easton was there, but he did not like to go and look in, because he was afraid someone might see him coming away and perhaps think he had been in to drink. just as he arrived opposite the house another man opened the door of the public bar and entered, enabling slyme to catch a momentary glimpse of the interior, where he saw easton and crass with a number of others who were strangers to him, laughing and drinking together. slyme hurried away; it had turned very cold, and he was anxious to get home. as he approached the place where the trams stopped to take up passengers and saw that there was a tram in sight he resolved to wait for it and ride home: but when the tram arrived and there were only one or two seats vacant, and although he did his best to secure one of these he was unsuccessful, and after a moment's hesitation he decided that it would be quicker to walk than to wait for the next one. he accordingly resumed his journey, but he had not gone very far when he saw a small crowd of people on the pavement on the other side of the road outside an unoccupied house, and although he was in a hurry to get home he crossed over to see what was the matter. there were about twenty people standing there, and in the centre close to the railing there were three or four women whom slyme could not see although he could hear their voices. 'what's up?' he inquired of a man on the edge of the crowd. 'oh, nothing much,' returned the other. 'some young woman; she's either ill, come over faint, or something--or else she's had a drop too much.' 'quite a respectable-looking young party, too,' said another man. several young fellows in the crowd were amusing themselves by making suggestive jokes about the young woman and causing some laughter by the expressions of mock sympathy. 'doesn't anyone know who she is?' said the second man who had spoken in reply to slyme's inquiry. 'no,' said a woman who was standing a little nearer the middle of the crowd. 'and she won't say where she lives.' 'she'll be all right now she's had that glass of soda,' said another man, elbowing his way out of the crowd. as this individual came out, slyme managed to work himself a little further into the group of people, and he uttered an involuntary cry of astonishment as he caught sight of ruth, very pale, and looking very ill, as she stood clasping one of the railings with her left hand and holding the packages of groceries in the other. she had by this time recovered sufficiently to feel overwhelmed with shame and confusion before the crowd of strangers who hemmed her in on every side, and some of whom she could hear laughing and joking about her. it was therefore with a sensation of intense relief and gratitude that she saw slyme's familiar face and heard his friendly voice as he forced his way through to her side. 'i can walk home all right now,' she stammered in reply to his anxious questioning. 'if you wouldn't mind carrying some of these things for me.' he insisted on taking all the parcels, and the crowd, having jumped to the conclusion that he was the young woman's husband began to dwindle away, one of the jokers remarking 'it's all over!' in a loud voice as he took himself off. it was only about seven minutes' walk home from there, and as the streets along which they had to pass were not very brilliantly lighted, ruth was able to lean on slyme's arm most of the way. when they arrived home, after she had removed her hat, he made her sit down in the armchair by the fire, which was burning brightly, and the kettle was singing on the hob, for she had banked up the fire with cinders and small coal before she went out. the baby was still asleep in the cradle, but his slumbers had evidently not been of the most restful kind, for he had kicked all the bedclothes off him and was lying all uncovered. ruth obeyed passively when slyme told her to sit down, and, lying back languidly in the armchair, she watched him through half-closed eyes and with a slight flush on her face as he deftly covered the sleeping child with the bedclothes and settled him more comfortably in the cot. slyme now turned his attention to the fire, and as he placed the kettle upon it he remarked: 'as soon as the water boils i'll make you some strong tea.' during their walk home she had acquainted slyme with the cause of her being in the condition in which he found her in the street, and as she reclined in the armchair, drowsily watching him, she wondered what would have happened to her if he had not passed by when he did. 'are you feeling better?' he asked, looking down at her. 'yes, thanks. i feel quite well now; but i'm afraid i've given you a lot of trouble.' 'no, you haven't. nothing i can do for you is a trouble to me. but don't you think you'd better take your jacket off? here, let me help you.' it took a very long time to get this jacket off, because whilst he was helping her, slyme kissed her repeatedly and passionately as she lay limp and unresisting in his arms. chapter 25 the oblong during the following week the work at 'the cave' progressed rapidly towards completion, although, the hours of daylight being so few, the men worked only from 8 a.m. till 4 p.m. and they had their breakfasts before they came. this made 40 hours a week, so that those who were paid sevenpence an hour earned l1.3.4. those who got sixpence-halfpenny drew l1.1.8. those whose wages were fivepence an hour were paid the princely sum of 16/8d. for their week's hard labour, and those whose rate was fourpence-halfpenny 'picked up' 15/-. and yet there are people who have the insolence to say that drink is the cause of poverty. and many of the persons who say this, spend more money than that on drink themselves--every day of their useless lives. by tuesday night all the inside was finished with the exception of the kitchen and scullery. the painting of the kitchen had been delayed owing to the non-arrival of the new cooking range, and the scullery was still used as the paint shop. the outside work was also nearly finished: all the first coating was done and the second coating was being proceeded with. according to the specification, all the outside woodwork was supposed to have three coats, and the guttering, rain-pipes and other ironwork two coats, but crass and hunter had arranged to make two coats do for most of the windows and woodwork, and all the ironwork was to be made to do with one coat only. the windows were painted in two colours: the sashes dark green and the frames white. all the rest--gables, doors, railings, guttering, etc.--was dark green; and all the dark green paint was made with boiled linseed oil and varnish; no turpentine being allowed to be used on this part of the work. 'this is some bloody fine stuff to 'ave to use, ain't it?' remarked harlow to philpot on wednesday morning. 'it's more like a lot of treacle than anything else.' 'yes: and it won't arf blister next summer when it gets a bit of sun on it,' replied philpot with a grin. 'i suppose they're afraid that if they was to put a little turps in, it wouldn't bear out, and they'd 'ave to give it another coat.' 'you can bet yer life that's the reason,' said philpot. 'but all the same i mean to pinch a drop to put in mine as soon as crass is gorn.' 'gorn where?' 'why, didn't you know? there's another funeral on today? didn't you see that corfin plate what owen was writing in the drorin'-room last saturday morning?' 'no, i wasn't 'ere. don't you remember i was sent away to do a ceilin' and a bit of painting over at windley?' 'oh, of course; i forgot,' exclaimed philpot. 'i reckon crass and slyme must be making a small fortune out of all these funerals,' said harlow. 'this makes the fourth in the last fortnight. what is it they gets for 'em?' 'a shillin' for taking' 'ome the corfin and liftin' in the corpse, and four bob for the funeral--five bob altogether.' 'that's a bit of all right, ain't it?' said harlow. 'a couple of them in a week besides your week's wages, eh? five bob for two or three hours work!' 'yes, the money's all right, mate, but they're welcome to it for my part. i don't want to go messin' about with no corpses,' replied philpot with a shudder. 'who is this last party what's dead?' asked harlow after a pause. 'it's a parson what used to belong to the "shining light" chapel. he'd been abroad for 'is 'ollerdays--to monte carlo. it seems 'e was ill before 'e went away, but the change did 'im a lot of good; in fact, 'e was quite recovered, and 'e was coming back again. but while 'e was standin' on the platform at monte carlo station waitin' for the train, a porter runned into 'im with a barrer load o' luggage, and 'e blowed up.' 'blowed up?' 'yes,' repeated philpot. 'blowed up! busted! exploded! all into pieces. but they swep' 'em all up and put it in a corfin and it's to be planted this afternoon.' harlow maintained an awestruck silence, and philpot continued: 'i had a drink the other night with a butcher bloke what used to serve this parson with meat, and we was talkin' about what a strange sort of death it was, but 'e said 'e wasn't at all surprised to 'ear of it; the only thing as 'e wondered at was that the man didn't blow up long ago, considerin' the amount of grub as 'e used to make away with. he ses the quantities of stuff as 'e's took there and seen other tradesmen take was something chronic. tons of it!' 'what was the parson's name?' asked harlow. 'belcher. you must 'ave noticed 'im about the town. a very fat chap,' replied philpot. 'i'm sorry you wasn't 'ere on saturday to see the corfin plate. frank called me in to see the wordin' when 'e'd finished it. it had on: "jonydab belcher. born january 1st, 1849. ascended, december 8th, 19--"' 'oh, i know the bloke now!' cried harlow. 'i remember my youngsters bringin' 'ome a subscription list what they'd got up at the sunday school to send 'im away for a 'ollerday because 'e was ill, and i gave 'em a penny each to put on their cards because i didn't want 'em to feel mean before the other young 'uns.' 'yes, it's the same party. two or three young 'uns asked me to give 'em something to put on at the time. and i see they've got another subscription list on now. i met one of newman's children yesterday and she showed it to me. it's for an entertainment and a christmas tree for all the children what goes to the sunday school, so i didn't mind giving just a trifle for anything like that.'... 'seems to be gettin' colder, don't it?' 'it's enough to freeze the ears orf a brass monkey!' remarked easton as he descended from a ladder close by and, placing his pot of paint on the pound, began to try to warm his hands by rubbing and beating them together. he was trembling, and his teeth were chattering with cold. 'i could just do with a nice pint of beer, now,' he said as he stamped his feet on the pound. 'that's just what i was thinkin',' said philpot, wistfully, 'and what's more, i mean to 'ave one, too, at dinner-time. i shall nip down to the "cricketers". even if i don't get back till a few minutes after one, it won't matter, because crass and nimrod will be gorn to the funeral.' 'will you bring me a pint back with you, in a bottle?' asked easton. 'yes, certainly,' said philpot. harlow said nothing. he also would have liked a pint of beer, but, as was usual with him, he had not the necessary cash. having restored the circulation to a certain extent, they now resumed their work, and only just in time, for a few minutes afterwards they observed misery peeping round the corner of the house at them and they wondered how long he had been there, and whether he had overheard their conversation. at twelve o'clock crass and slyme cleared off in a great hurry, and a little while afterwards, philpot took off his apron and put on his coat to go to the 'cricketers'. when the others found out where he was going, several of them asked him to bring back a drink for them, and then someone suggested that all those who wanted some beer should give twopence each. this was done: one shilling and fourpence was collected and given to philpot, who was to bring back a gallon of beer in a jar. he promised to get back as soon as ever he could, and some of the shareholders decided not to drink any tea with their dinners, but to wait for the beer, although they knew that it would be nearly time to resume work before he could get back. it would be a quarter to one at the very earliest. the minutes dragged slowly by, and after a while the only man on the job who had a watch began to lose his temper and refused to answer any more inquiries concerning the time. so presently bert was sent up to the top of the house to look at a church clock which was visible therefrom, and when he came down he reported that it was ten minutes to one. symptoms of anxiety now began to manifest themselves amongst the shareholders, several of whom went down to the main road to see if philpot was yet in sight, but each returned with the same report--they could see nothing of him. no one was formally 'in charge' of the job during crass's absence, but they all returned to their work promptly at one because they feared that sawkins or some other sneak might report any irregularity to crass or misery. at a quarter-past one, philpot was still missing and the uneasiness of the shareholders began to develop into a panic. some of them plainly expressed the opinion that he had gone on the razzle with the money. as the time wore on, this became the general opinion. at two o'clock, all hope of his return having been abandoned, two or three of the shareholders went and drank some of the cold tea. their fears were only too well founded, for they saw no more of philpot till the next morning, when he arrived looking very sheepish and repentant and promised to refund all the money on saturday. he also made a long, rambling statement from which it appeared that on his way to the 'cricketers' he met a couple of chaps whom he knew who were out of work, and he invited them to come and have a drink. when they got to the pub, they found there the semi-drunk and the besotted wretch. one drink led to another, and then they started arguing, and he had forgotten all about the gallon of beer until he woke up this morning. whilst philpot was making this explanation they were putting on their aprons and blouses, and crass was serving out the lots of colour. slyme took no part in the conversation, but got ready as quickly as possible and went outside to make a start. the reason for this haste soon became apparent to some of the others, for they noticed that he had selected and commenced painting a large window that was so situated as to be sheltered from the keen wind that was blowing. the basement of the house was slightly below the level of the ground and there was a sort of a trench or area about three feet deep in front of the basement windows. the banks of this trench were covered with rose trees and evergreens, and the bottom was a mass of slimy, evil-smelling, rain-sodden earth, foul with the excrement of nocturnal animals. to second-coat these basement windows, philpot and harlow had to get down into and stand in all this filth, which soaked through the worn and broken soles of their boots. as they worked, the thorns of the rose trees caught and tore their clothing and lacerated the flesh of their half-frozen hands. owen and easton were working on ladders doing the windows immediately above philpot and harlow, sawkins, on another ladder, was painting one of the gables, and the other men were working at different parts of the outside of the house. the boy bert was painting the iron railings of the front fence. the weather was bitterly cold, the sun was concealed by the dreary expanse of grey cloud that covered the wintry sky. as they stood there working most of the time they were almost perfectly motionless, the only part of their bodies that were exercised being their right arms. the work they were now doing required to be done very carefully and deliberately, otherwise the glass would be 'messed up' or the white paint of the frames would 'run into' the dark green of the sashes, both colours being wet at the same time, each man having two pots of paint and two sets of brushes. the wind was not blowing in sudden gusts, but swept by in a strong, persistent current that penetrated their clothing and left them trembling and numb with cold. it blew from the right; and it was all the worse on that account, because the right arm, being in use, left that side of the body fully exposed. they were able to keep their left hands in their trousers pockets and the left arm close to the side most of the time. this made a lot of difference. another reason why it is worse when the wind strikes upon one from the right side is that the buttons on a man's coat are always on the right side, and consequently the wind gets underneath. philpot realized this all the more because some of the buttons on his coat and waistcoat were missing. as they worked on, trembling with cold, and with their teeth chattering, their faces and hands became of that pale violet colour generally seen on the lips of a corpse. their eyes became full of water and the lids were red and inflamed. philpot's and harlow's boots were soon wet through, with the water they absorbed from the damp ground, and their feet were sore and intensely painful with cold. their hands, of course, suffered the most, becoming so numbed that they were unable to feel the brushes they held; in fact, presently, as philpot was taking a dip of colour, the brush fell from his hand into the pot; and then, finding that he was unable to move his fingers, he put his hand into his trousers pocket to thaw, and began to walk about, stamping his feet upon the ground. his example was quickly followed by owen, easton and harlow, and they all went round the corner to the sheltered side of the house where slyme was working, and began walking up and down, rubbing their hands, stamping their feet and swinging their arms to warm themselves. 'if i thought nimrod wasn't comin', i'd put my overcoat on and work in it,' remarked philpot, 'but you never knows when to expect the b--r, and if 'e saw me in it, it would mean the bloody push.' 'it wouldn't interfere with our workin' if we did wear 'em,' said easton; 'in fact, we'd be able to work all the quicker if we wasn't so cold.' 'even if misery didn't come, i suppose crass would 'ave something to say if we did put 'em on,' continued philpot. 'well, yer couldn't blame 'im if 'e did say something, could yer?' said slyme, offensively. 'crass would get into a row 'imself if 'unter came and saw us workin' in overcoats. it would look ridiclus.' slyme suffered less from the cold than any of them, not only because he had secured the most sheltered window, but also because he was better clothed than most of the rest. 'what's crass supposed to be doin' inside?' asked easton as he tramped up and down, with his shoulders hunched up and his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his trousers. 'blowed if i know,' replied philpot. 'messin' about touchin' up or makin' colour. he never does 'is share of a job like this; 'e knows 'ow to work things all right for 'isself.' 'what if 'e does? we'd be the same if we was in 'is place, and so would anybody else,' said slyme, and added sarcastically: 'or p'haps you'd give all the soft jobs to other people and do all the rough yerself!' slyme knew that, although they were speaking of crass, they were also alluding to himself, and as he replied to philpot he looked slyly at owen, who had so far taken no part in the conversation. 'it's not a question of what we would do,' chimed in harlow. 'it's a question of what's fair. if it's not fair for crass to pick all the soft jobs for 'imself and leave all the rough for others, the fact that we might do the same if we 'ad the chance don't make it right.' 'no one can be blamed for doing the best he can for himself under existing circumstances,' said owen in reply to slyme's questioning look. that is the principle of the present system--every man for himself and the devil take the rest. for my own part i don't pretend to practise unselfishness. i don't pretend to guide my actions by the rules laid down in the sermon on the mount. but it's certainly surprising to hear you who profess to be a follower of christ--advocating selfishness. or, rather, it would be surprising if it were not that the name of "christian" has ceased to signify one who follows christ, and has come to mean only liar and hypocrite.' slyme made no answer. possibly the fact that he was a true believer enabled him to bear this insult with meekness and humility. 'i wonder what time it is?' interposed philpot. slyme looked at his watch. it was nearly ten o'clock. 'jesus christ! is that all?' growled easton as they returned to work. 'two hours more before dinner!' only two more hours, but to these miserable, half-starved, ill-clad wretches, standing here in the bitter wind that pierced their clothing and seemed to be tearing at their very hearts and lungs with icy fingers, it appeared like an eternity. to judge by the eagerness with which they longed for dinner-time, one might have thought they had some glorious banquet to look forward to instead of bread and cheese and onions, or bloaters--and stewed tea. two more hours of torture before dinner; and three more hours after that. and then, thank god, it would be too dark to see to work any longer. it would have been much better for them if, instead of being 'freemen', they had been slaves, and the property, instead of the hirelings, of mr rushton. as it was, he would not have cared if one or all of them had become ill or died from the effects of exposure. it would have made no difference to him. there were plenty of others out of work and on the verge of starvation who would be very glad to take their places. but if they had been rushton's property, such work as this would have been deferred until it could be done without danger to the health and lives of the slaves; or at any rate, even if it were proceeded with during such weather, their owner would have seen to it that they were properly clothed and fed; he would have taken as much care of them as he would of his horse. people always take great care of their horses. if they were to overwork a horse and make it ill, it would cost something for medicine and the veterinary surgeon, to say nothing of the animal's board and lodging. if they were to work their horses to death, they would have to buy others. but none of these considerations applies to workmen. if they work a man to death they can get another for nothing at the corner of the next street. they don't have to buy him; all they have to do is to give him enough money to provide him with food and clothing--of a kind--while he is working for them. if they only make him ill, they will not have to feed him or provide him with medical care while he is laid up. he will either go without these things or pay for them himself. at the same time it must be admitted that the workman scores over both the horse and the slave, inasmuch as he enjoys the priceless blessing of freedom. if he does not like the hirer's conditions he need not accept them. he can refuse to work, and he can go and starve. there are no ropes on him. he is a free man. he is the heir of all the ages. he enjoys perfect liberty. he has the right to choose freely which he will do--submit or starve. eat dirt or eat nothing. the wind blew colder and colder. the sky, which at first had shown small patches of blue through rifts in the masses of clouds, had now become uniformly grey. there was every indication of an impending fall of snow. the men perceived this with conflicting feelings. if it did commence to snow, they would not be able to continue this work, and therefore they found themselves involuntarily wishing that it would snow, or rain, or hail, or anything that would stop the work. but on the other hand, if the weather prevented them getting on with the outside, some of them would have to 'stand off', because the inside was practically finished. none of them wished to lose any time if they could possibly help it, because there were only ten days more before christmas. the morning slowly wore away and the snow did not fall. the hands worked on in silence, for they were in no mood for talking, and not only that, but they were afraid that hunter or rushton or crass might be watching them from behind some bush or tree, or through some of the windows. this dread possessed them to such an extent that most of them were almost afraid even to look round, and kept steadily on at work. none of them wished to spoil his chance of being kept on to help to do the other house that it was reported rushton & co. were going to 'do up' for mr sweater. twelve o'clock came at last, and crass's whistle had scarcely ceased to sound before they all assembled in the kitchen before the roaring fire. sweater had sent in two tons of coal and had given orders that fires were to be lit every day in nearly every room to make the house habitable by christmas. 'i wonder if it's true as the firm's got another job to do for old sweater?' remarked harlow as he was toasting a bloater on the end of the pointed stick. 'true? no!' said the man on the pail scornfully. 'it's all bogy. you know that empty 'ouse as they said sweater 'ad bought--the one that rushton and nimrod was seen lookin' at?' 'yes,' replied harlow. the other men listened with evident interest. 'well, they wasn't pricing it up after all! the landlord of that 'ouse is abroad, and there was some plants in the garden as rushton thought 'e'd like, and 'e was tellin' misery which ones 'e wanted. and afterwards old pontius pilate came up with ned dawson and a truck. they made two or three journeys and took bloody near everything in the garden as was worth takin'. what didn't go to rushton's place went to 'unter's.' the disappointment of their hopes for another job was almost forgotten in their interest in this story. 'who told you about it?' said harlow. 'ned dawson 'imself. it's right enough what i say. ask 'im.' ned dawson, usually called 'bundy's mate', had been away from the house for a few days down at the yard doing odd jobs, and had only come back to the 'cave' that morning. on being appealed to, he corroborated dick wantley's statement. 'they'll be gettin' theirselves into trouble if they ain't careful,' remarked easton. 'oh, no they won't, rushton's too artful for that. it seems the agent is a pal of 'is, and they worked it between 'em.' 'wot a bloody cheek, though!' exclaimed harlow. 'oh, that's nothing to some of the things i've known 'em do before now,' said the man on the pail. 'why, don't you remember, back in the summer, that carved hoak hall table as rushton pinched out of that 'ouse on grand parade?' 'yes; that was a bit of all right too, wasn't it?' cried philpot, and several of the others laughed. 'you know, that big 'ouse we did up last summer--no. 596,' wantley continued, for the benefit of those not 'in the know'. 'well, it 'ad bin empty for a long time and we found this 'ere table in a cupboard under the stairs. a bloody fine table it was too. one of them bracket tables what you fix to the wall, without no legs. it 'ad a 'arf-round marble top to it, and underneath was a carved hoak figger, a mermaid, with 'er arms up over 'er 'ead 'oldin' up the table top--something splendid!' the man on the pail waxed enthusiastic as he thought of it. 'must 'ave been worth at least five quid. well, just as we pulled this 'ere table out, who should come in but rushton, and when 'e seen it, 'e tells crass to cover it over with a sack and not to let nobody see it. and then 'e clears orf to the shop and sends the boy down with the truck and 'as it took up to 'is own 'ouse, and it's there now, fixed in the front 'all. i was sent up there a couple of months ago to paint and varnish the lobby doors and i seen it meself. there's a pitcher called "the day of judgement" 'angin' on the wall just over it--thunder and lightning and earthquakes and corpses gettin' up out o' their graves--something bloody 'orrible! and underneath the picture is a card with a tex out of the bible--"christ is the 'ead of this 'ouse: the unknown guest at every meal. the silent listener to every conversation." i was workin' there for three or four days and i got to know it orf by 'eart.' 'well, that takes the biskit, don't it?' said philpot. 'yes: but the best of it was,' the man on the pail proceeded, 'the best of it was, when ole misery 'eard about the table, 'e was so bloody wild because 'e didn't get it 'imself that 'e went upstairs and pinched one of the venetian blinds and 'ad it took up to 'is own 'ouse by the boy, and a few days arterwards one of the carpenters 'ad to go and fix it up in 'is bedroom.' 'and wasn't it never found out?' inquired easton. 'well, there was a bit of talk about it. the agent wanted to know where it was, but pontius pilate swore black and white as there 'adn't been no blind in that room, and the end of it was that the firm got the order to supply a new one.' 'what i can't understand is, who did the table belong to?' said harlow. 'it was a fixture belongin' to the 'ouse,' replied wantley. 'but i suppose the former tenants had some piece of furniture of their own that they wanted to put in the 'all where this table was fixed, so they took it down and stored it away in this 'ere cupboard, and when they left the 'ouse i suppose they didn't trouble to put it back again. anyway, there was the mark on the wall where it used to be fixed, but when we did the staircase down, the place was papered over, and i suppose the landlord or the agent never give the table a thought. anyhow, rushton got away with it all right.' a number of similar stories were related by several others concerning the doings of different employers they had worked for, but after a time the conversation reverted to the subject that was uppermost in their thoughts--the impending slaughter, and the improbability of being able to obtain another job, considering the large number of men who were already out of employment. 'i can't make it out, myself,' remarked easton. 'things seems to get worse every year. there don't seem to be 'arf the work about that there used to be, and even what there is is messed up anyhow, as if the people who 'as it done can't afford to pay for it.' 'yes,' said harlow; 'that's true enough. why, just look at the work that's in one o' them 'ouses on the grand parade. people must 'ave 'ad more money to spend in those days, you know; all those massive curtain cornishes over the drawingand dining-room winders--gilded solid! why, nowadays they'd want all the bloody 'ouse done down right through--inside and out, for the money it cost to gild one of them.' 'it seems that nearly everybody is more or less 'ard up nowadays,' said philpot. 'i'm jiggered if i can understand it, but there it is.' 'you should ast owen to explain it to yer,' remarked crass with a jeering laugh. ''e knows all about wot's the cause of poverty, but 'e won't tell nobody. 'e's been goin' to tell us wot it is for a long time past, but it don't seem to come orf.' crass had not yet had an opportunity of producing the obscurer cutting, and he made this remark in the hope of turning the conversation into a channel that would enable him to do so. but owen did not respond, and went on reading his newspaper. 'we ain't 'ad no lectures at all lately, 'ave we?' said harlow in an injured tone. 'i think it's about time owen explained what the real cause of poverty is. i'm beginning to get anxious about it.' the others laughed. when philpot had finished eating his dinner he went out of the kitchen and presently returned with a small pair of steps, which he opened and placed in a corner of the room, with the back of the steps facing the audience. 'there you are, me son!' he exclaimed to owen. 'there's a pulpit for yer.' 'yes! come on 'ere!' cried crass, feeling in his waistcoat pocket for the cutting. 'tell us wot's the real cause of poverty.' ''ear, 'ear,' shouted the man on the pail. 'git up into the bloody pulpit and give us a sermon.' as owen made no response to the invitations, the crowd began to hoot and groan. 'come on, man,' whispered philpot, winking his goggle eye persuasively at owen. 'come on, just for a bit of turn, to pass the time away.' owen accordingly ascended the steps--much to the secret delight of crass--and was immediately greeted with a round of enthusiastic applause. 'there you are, you see,' said philpot, addressing the meeting. 'it's no use booin' and threatenin', because 'e's one of them lecturers wot can honly be managed with kindness. if it 'adn't a bin for me, 'e wouldn't 'ave agreed to speak at all.' philpot having been unanimously elected chairman, proposed by harlow and seconded by the man on the pail, owen commenced: 'mr chairman and gentlemen: 'unaccustomed as i am to public speaking, it is with some degree of hesitation that i venture to address myself to such a large, distinguished, fashionable, and intelligent looking audience as that which i have the honour of seeing before me on the present occasion.' (applause.) 'one of the finest speakers i've ever 'eard!' remarked the man on the pail in a loud whisper to the chairman, who motioned him to be silent. owen continued: 'in some of my previous lectures i have endeavoured to convince you that money is in itself of no value and of no real use whatever. in this i am afraid i have been rather unsuccessful.' 'not a bit of it, mate,' cried crass, sarcastically. 'we all agrees with it.' ''ear, 'ear,' shouted easton. 'if a bloke was to come in 'ere now and orfer to give me a quid--i'd refuse it!' 'so would i,' said philpot. 'well, whether you agree or not, the fact remains. a man might possess so much money that, in england, he would be comparatively rich, and yet if he went to some country where the cost of living is very high he would find himself in a condition of poverty. or one might conceivably be in a place where the necessaries of life could not be bought for money at all. therefore it is more conducive to an intelligent understanding of the subject if we say that to be rich consists not necessarily in having much money, but in being able to enjoy an abundance of the things that are made by work; and that poverty consists not merely in being without money, but in being short of the necessaries and comforts of life--or in other words in being short of the benefits of civilization, the things that are all, without exception, produced by work. whether you agree or not with anything else that i say, you will all admit that that is our condition at the present time. we do not enjoy a full share of the benefits of civilization--we are all in a state of more or less abject poverty.' 'question!' cried crass, and there were loud murmurs of indignant dissent from several quarters as owen proceeded: 'how does it happen that we are so short of the things that are made by work?' 'the reason why we're short of the things that's made by work,' interrupted crass, mimicking owen's manner, 'is that we ain't got the bloody money to buy 'em.' 'yes,' said the man on the pail; 'and as i said before, if all the money in the country was shared out equal today according to owen's ideas--in six months' time it would be all back again in the same 'ands as it is now, and what are you goin' to do then?' 'share again, of course.' this answer came derisively from several places at the same instant, and then they all began speaking at once, vying with each other in ridiculing the foolishness of 'them there socialists', whom they called 'the sharers out'. barrington was almost the only one who took no part in the conversation. he was seated in his customary place and, as usual, silently smoking, apparently oblivious to his surroundings. 'i never said anything about "sharing out all the money",' said owen during a lull in the storm, 'and i don't know of any socialist who advocates anything of the kind. can any of you tell me the name of someone who proposes to do so?' no one answered, as owen repeated his inquiry, this time addressing himself directly to crass, who had been one of the loudest in denouncing and ridiculing the 'sharers out'. thus cornered, crass--who knew absolutely nothing about the subject--for a few moments looked rather foolish. then he began to talk in a very loud voice: 'why, it's a well-known fact. everybody knows that's what they wants. but they take bloody good care they don't act up to it theirselves, though. look at them there labour members of parliament--a lot of b--rs what's too bloody lazy to work for their livin'! what the bloody 'ell was they before they got there? only workin' men, the same as you and me! but they've got the gift o' the gab and--' 'yes, we know all about that,' said owen, 'but what i'm asking you is to tell us who advocates taking all the money in the country and sharing it out equally?' 'and i say that everybody knows that's what they're after!' shouted crass. 'and you know it as well as i do. a fine thing!' he added indignantly. 'accordin' to that idear, a bloody scavenger or a farm labourer ought to get as much wages as you or me!' 'we can talk about that some other time. what i want to know at present is--what authority have you for saying that socialists believe in sharing out all the money equally amongst all the people?' 'well, that's what i've always understood they believed in doing,' said crass rather lamely. 'it's a well-known fact,' said several others. 'come to think of it,' continued crass as he drew the obscurer cutting from his waistcoat pocket, 'i've got a little thing 'ere that i've been goin' to read to yer. it's out of the obscurer. i'd forgotten all about it.' remarking that the print was too small for his own eyes, he passed the slip of paper to harlow, who read aloud as follows: prove your principles: or, look at both sides 'i wish i could open your eyes to the true misery of our condition: injustice, tyranny and oppression!' said a discontented hack to a weary-looking cob as they stood side by side in unhired cabs. 'i'd rather have them opened to something pleasant, thank you,' replied the cob. 'i am sorry for you. if you could enter into the noble aspirations--' the hack began. 'talk plain. what would you have?' said the cob, interrupting him. 'what would i have? why, equality, and share and share alike all over the world,' said the hack. 'you mean that?' said the cob. 'of course i do. what right have those sleek, pampered hunters and racers to their warm stables and high feed, their grooms and jockeys? it is really heart-sickening to think of it,' replied the hack. 'i don't know but you may be right,' said the cob, 'and to show i'm in earnest, as no doubt you are, let me have half the good beans you have in your bag, and you shall have half the musty oats and chaff i have in mine. there's nothing like proving one's principles.' original parables. by mrs prosier. 'there you are!' cried several voices. 'what does that mean?' cried crass, triumphantly. 'why don't you go and share your wages with the chaps what's out of work?' 'what does it mean?' replied owen contemptuously. 'it means that if the editor of the obscurer put that in his paper as an argument against socialism, either he is of feeble intellect himself or else he thinks that the majority of his readers are. that isn't an argument against socialism--it's an argument against the hypocrites who pretend to be christians--the people who profess to "love their neighbours as themselves"--who pretend to believe in universal brotherhood, and that they do not love the world or the things of the world and say that they are merely "pilgrims on their way to a better land". as for why i don't do it--why should i? i don't pretend to be a christian. but you're all "christians"--why don't you do it?' 'we're not talkin' about religion,' exclaimed crass, impatiently. 'then what are you talking about? i never said anything about "sharing out" or "bearing one another's burdens". i don't profess to "give to everyone who asks of me" or to "give my cloak to the man who take away my coat". i have read that christ taught that his followers must do all these things, but as i do not pretend to be one of his followers i don't do them. but you believe in christianity: why don't you do the things that he said?' as nobody seemed to know the answer to this question, the lecturer proceeded: 'in this matter the difference between so-called "christians" and socialists is this: christ taught the fatherhood of god and the brotherhood of men. those who today pretend to be christ's followers hypocritically profess to carry out those teachings now. but they don't. they have arranged "the battle of life" system instead! 'the socialist--very much against his will--finds himself in the midst of this horrible battle, and he appeals to the other combatants to cease from fighting and to establish a system of brotherly love and mutual helpfulness, but he does not hypocritically pretend to practise brotherly love towards those who will not agree to his appeal, and who compel him to fight with them for his very life. he knows that in this battle he must either fight or go under. therefore, in self-defiance, he fights; but all the time he continues his appeal for the cessation of the slaughter. he pleads for the changing of the system. he advocates co-operation instead of competition: but how can he co-operate with people who insist on competing with him? no individual can practise co-operation by himself! socialism can only be practised by the community--that is the meaning of the word. at present, the other members of the community--the "christians"--deride and oppose the socialist's appeal. 'it is these pretended christians who do not practise what they preach, because, all the time they are singing their songs of brotherhood and love, they are fighting with each other, and strangling each other and trampling each other underfoot in their horrible "battle of life"! 'no socialist suggests "sharing out" money or anything else in the manner you say. and another thing: if you only had a little more sense you might be able to perceive that this stock "argument" of yours is really an argument against the present system, inasmuch as it proves that money is in itself of no use whatever. supposing all the money was shared out equally; and suppose there was enough of it for everyone to have ten thousand pounds; and suppose they then all thought they were rich and none of them would work. what would they live on? their money? could they eat it or drink it or wear it? it wouldn't take them very long to find out that this wonderful money--which under the present system is the most powerful thing in existence--is really of no more use than so much dirt. they would speedily perish, not from lack of money, but from lack of wealth--that is, from lack of things that are made by work. and further, it is quite true that if all the money were distributed equally amongst all the people tomorrow, it would all be up in heaps again in a very short time. but that only proves that while the present money system remains, it will be impossible to do away with poverty, for heaps in some places mean little or nothing in other places. therefore while the money system lasts we are bound to have poverty and all the evils it brings in its train.' 'oh, of course everybody's an idjit except you,' sneered crass, who was beginning to feel rather fogged. 'i rise to a pint of order,' said easton. 'and i rise to order a pint,' cried philpot. 'order what the bloody 'ell you like,' remarked harlow, 'so long as i 'aven't got to pay for it.' 'mine's a pint of porter,' observed the man on the pail. 'the pint is,' proceeded easton, 'when does the lecturer intend to explain to us what is the real cause of poverty.' ''ear, 'ear,' cried harlow. 'that's what i want to know, too.' 'and what i should like to know is, who is supposed to be givin' this 'ere lecture?' inquired the man on the pail. 'why, owen, of course,' replied harlow. 'well, why don't you try to keep quiet for a few minutes and let 'im get on with it?' 'the next b--r wot interrupts,' cried philpot, rolling up his shirt-sleeves and glaring threateningly round upon the meeting. 'the next b--r wot interrupts goes out through the bloody winder!' at this, everybody pretended to be very frightened, and edged away as far as possible from philpot. easton, who was sitting next to him, got up and crossed over to owen's vacant seat. the man on the pail was the only one who did not seem nervous; perhaps he felt safer because he was, as usual, surrounded by a moat. 'poverty,' resumed the lecturer, consists in a shortage of the necessaries of life--or rather, of the benefits of civilization.' 'you've said that about a 'undred times before,' snarled crass. 'i know i have; and i have no doubt i shall have to say it about five hundred times more before you understand what it means.' 'get on with the bloody lecture,' shouted the man on the pail. 'never mind arguin' the point.' 'well, keep horder, can't you?' cried philpot, fiercely, 'and give the man a chance.' 'all these things are produced in the same way,' proceeded owen. 'they are made from the raw materials by those who work--aided by machinery. when we inquire into the cause of the present shortage of these things, the first question we should ask is--are there not sufficient of the raw materials in existence to enable us to produce enough to satisfy the needs of all? 'the answer to this question is--there are undoubtedly more than sufficient of all the raw materials. 'insufficiency of raw material is therefore not the cause. we must look in another direction. 'the next question is--are we short of labour? is there not a sufficient number of people able and willing to work? or is there not enough machinery? 'the answers to these questions are--there are plenty of people able and willing to work, and there is plenty of machinery! 'these things being so, how comes this extraordinary result? how is it that the benefits of civilization are not produced in sufficient quantity to satisfy the needs of all? how is it that the majority of the people always have to go without most of the refinements, comforts, and pleasures of life, and very often without even the bare necessaries of existence? 'plenty of materials--plenty of labour--plenty of machinery--and, nearly everybody going short of nearly everything! 'the cause of this extraordinary state of affairs is that although we possess the means of producing more than abundance for all, we also have an imbecile system of managing our affairs. 'the present money system prevents us from doing the necessary work, and consequently causes the majority of the population to go short of the things that can be made by work. they suffer want in the midst of the means of producing abundance. they remain idle because they are bound and fettered with a chain of gold. 'let us examine the details of this insane, idiotic, imbecile system.' owen now asked philpot to pass him a piece of charred wood from under the grate, and having obtained what he wanted, he drew upon the wall a quadrangular figure about four feet in length and one foot deep. the walls of the kitchen had not yet been cleaned off, so it did not matter about disfiguring them. +------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | | | | | | | | | this represents the whole of the adult population of the country | | | | | | | | | | | +------------------------------------------------------------------+ 'to find out the cause of the shortage in this country of the things that can be made by work it is first of all necessary to find out how people spend their time. now this square represents the whole of the adult population of this country. there are many different classes of people, engaged in a great number of different occupations. some of them are helping to produce the benefits of civilization, and some are not. all these people help to consume these things, but when we inquire into their occupations we shall find that although the majority are workers, only a comparatively small number are engaged in actually producing either the benefits of civilization or the necessaries of life.'... order being once more restored, the lecturer turned again to the drawing on the wall and stretched out his hand, evidently with the intention of making some addition to it, but instead of doing so he paused irresolutely, and faltering, let his arm drop down again by his side. an absolute, disconcerting silence reigned. his embarrassment and nervousness increased. he knew that they were unwilling to hear or talk or think about such subjects as the cause of poverty at all. they preferred to make fun of and ridicule them. he knew they would refuse to try to see the meaning of what he wished to say if it were at all difficult or obscure. how was he to put it to them so that they would have to understand it whether they wished to or not. it was almost impossible. it would be easy enough to convince them if they would only take a little trouble and try to understand, but he knew that they certainly would not 'worry' themselves about such a subject as this; it was not as if it were some really important matter, such as a smutty story, a game of hooks and rings or shove-ha'penny, something concerning football or cricket, horse-racing or the doings of some royal personage or aristocrat. the problem of the cause of poverty was only something that concerned their own and their children's future welfare. such an unimportant matter, being undeserving of any earnest attention, must be put before them so clearly and plainly that they would be compelled to understand it at a glance; and it was almost impossible to do it. observing his hesitation, some of the men began to snigger. ''e seems to 'ave got 'isself into a bit of a fog,' remarked crass in a loud whisper to slyme, who laughed. the sound roused owen, who resumed: 'all these people help to consume the things produced by labour. we will now divide them into separate classes. those who help to produce; those who do nothing, those who do harm, and those who are engaged in unnecessary work.' 'and,' sneered crass, 'those who are engaged in unnecessary talk.' 'first we will separate those who not only do nothing, but do not even pretend to be of any use; people who would consider themselves disgraced if they by any chance did any useful work. this class includes tramps, beggars, the "aristocracy", "society" people, great landowners, and generally all those possessed of hereditary wealth.' as he spoke he drew a vertical line across one end of the oblong. +------------+-----------------------------------------------------+ | tramps | | | beggars | | | society | | | people | | | aristoc | | | racy | | | great | | | landowners | | | all those | | | possessed | | | of | | | hereditary | | | wealth | | +------------+-----------------------------------------------------+ 'these people do absolutely nothing except devour or enjoy the things produced by the labours of others. 'our next division represents those who do work of a kind--"mental" work if you like to call it so--work that benefits themselves and harms other people. employers--or rather exploiters of labour; thieves, swindlers, pickpockets; profit seeking share-holders; burglars; bishops; financiers; capitalists, and those persons humorously called "ministers" of religion. if you remember that the word "minister" means "servant" you will be able to see the joke. 1 2 +------------+-------------+---------------------------------------+ | tramps | exploiters | | | beggars | of labour | | | society | thieves | | | people | swindlers | | | aristoc | pickpockets | | | racy | burglars | | | great | bishops | | | landowners | financiers | | | all those | capitalists | | | possessed | share | | | of | holders | | | hereditary | ministers | | | wealth | of religion | | +------------+-------------+---------------------------------------+ 'none of these people produce anything themselves, but by means of cunning and scheming they contrive between them to obtain possession of a very large portion of the things produced by the labour of others. 'number three stands for those who work for wages or salaries, doing unnecessary work. that is, producing things or doing things which--though useful and necessary to the imbecile system--cannot be described as the necessaries of life or the benefits of civilization. this is the largest section of all. it comprises commercial travellers, canvassers, insurance agents, commission agents, the great number of shop assistants, the majority of clerks, workmen employed in the construction and adornment of business premises, people occupied with what they call "business", which means being very busy without producing anything. then there is a vast army of people engaged in designing, composing, painting or printing advertisements, things which are for the most part of no utility whatever, the object of most advertisements is merely to persuade people to buy from one firm rather than from another. if you want some butter it doesn't matter whether you buy it from brown or jones or robinson.' 1 2 3 +------------+-------------+-------------+-------------------------+ | tramps | exploiters | all those | | | beggars | of labour | engaged in | | | society | thieves | unnecessary | | | people | swindlers | work | | | aristoc | pickpockets | | | | racy | burglars | | | | great | bishops | | | | landowners | financiers | | | | all those | capitalists | | | | possessed | share | | | | of | holders | | | | hereditary | ministers | | | | wealth | of religion | | | +------------+-------------+-------------+-------------------------+ during the delivery of this pert of the lecture, the audience began to manifest symptoms of impatience and dissent. perceiving this, owen, speaking very rapidly, continued: 'if you go down town, you will see half a dozen drapers' shops within a stone's-throw of each other--often even next door to each other--all selling the same things. you can't possibly think that all those shops are really necessary? you know that one of them would serve the purpose for which they are all intended--to store and serve as a centre for the distribution of the things that are made by work. if you will admit that five out of the six shops are not really necessary, you must also admit that the men who built them, and the salesmen and women or other assistants engaged in them, and the men who design and write and print their advertisements are all doing unnecessary work; all really wasting their time and labour, time and labour that might be employed in helping to produce these things that we are at present short of. you must admit that none of these people are engaged in producing either the necessaries of life or the benefits of civilization. they buy them, and sell them, and handle them, and haggle over, them, and display them, in the plate glass windows of "stores" and "emporiums" and make profit out of them, and use them, but these people themselves produce nothing that is necessary to life or happiness, and the things that some of them do produce are only necessary to the present imbecile system.' 'what the 'ell sort of a bloody system do you think we ought to 'ave, then?' interrupted the man on the pail. 'yes: you're very good at finding fault,' sneered slyme, 'but why don't you tell us 'ow it's all going to be put right?' 'well, that's not what we're talking about now, is it?' replied owen. 'at present we're only trying to find out how it is that there is not sufficient produced for everyone to have enough of the things that are made by work. although most of the people in number three work very hard, they produce nothing.' 'this is a lot of bloody rot!' exclaimed crass, impatiently. 'even if there is more shops than what's actually necessary,' cried harlow, 'it all helps people to get a livin'! if half of 'em was shut up, it would just mean that all them what works there would be out of a job. live and let live, i say: all these things makes work.' ''ear, 'ear,' shouted the man behind the moat. 'yes, i know it makes "work",' replied owen, 'but we can't live on mere "work", you know. to live in comfort we need a sufficiency of the things that can be made by work. a man might work very hard and yet be wasting his time if he were not producing something necessary or useful. 'why are there so many shops and stores and emporiums? do you imagine they exist for the purpose of giving those who build them, or work in them, a chance to earn a living? nothing of the sort. they are carried on, and exorbitant prices are charged for the articles they sell, to enable the proprietors to amass fortunes, and to pay extortionate rents to the landlords. that is why the wages and salaries of nearly all those who do the work created by these businesses are cut down to the lowest possible point.' 'we knows all about that,' said crass, 'but you can't get away from it that all these things makes work; and that's what we wants--plenty of work.' cries of ''ear, 'ear,' and expressions of dissent from the views expressed by the lecturer resounded through the room, nearly everyone speaking at the same time. after a while, when the row had in some measure subsided, owen resumed: 'nature has not provided ready-made all the things necessary for the life and happiness of mankind. in order to obtain these things we have to work. the only rational labour is that which is directed to the creation of those things. any kind of work which does not help us to attain this object is a ridiculous, idiotic, criminal, imbecile, waste of time. 'that is what the great army of people represented by division number three are doing at present: they are all very busy--working very hard--but to all useful intents and purposes they are doing nothing.' 'well, all right,' said harlow. ''ave it yer own way, but there's no need to keep on repeating the same thing over an' over again.' 'the next division,' resumed owen, 'stands for those who are engaged in really useful work--the production of the benefits of civilization--the necessaries, refinements and comforts of life.' 1 2 3 4 +------------+-------------+-------------+------------+------------+ | tramps | exploiters | all those | all those | | | beggars | of labour | engaged in | engaged in | | | society | thieves | unnecessary | necessary | u | | people | swindlers | work | work--the | n | | aristoc | pickpockets | | production | e | | racy | burglars | | of the | m | | great | bishops | | benefits | p | | landowners | financiers | | of | l | | all those | capitalists | | civiliz | o | | possessed | share | | ation | y | | of | holders | | | e | | hereditary | ministers | | | d | | wealth | of religion | | | | +------------+-------------+-------------+------------+------------+ 'hooray!' shouted philpot, leading off a cheer which was taken up enthusiastically by the crowd, 'hooray! this is where we comes in,' he added, nodding his head and winking his goggle eyes at the meeting. 'i wish to call the chairman to horder,' said the man on the pail. when owen had finished writing in the list of occupations several members of the audience rose to point out that those engaged in the production of beer had been omitted. owen rectified this serious oversight and proceeded: 'as most of the people in number four are out of work at least one quarter of their time, we must reduce the size of this division by one fourth--so. the grey part represents the unemployed.' 'but some of those in number three are often unemployed as well,' said harlow. yes: but as they produce nothing even when they are at work we need not trouble to classify them unemployed, because our present purpose is only to discover the reason why there is not enough produced for everyone to enjoy abundance; and this--the present system of conducting our affairs--is the reason of the shortage--the cause of poverty. when you reflect that all the other people are devouring the things produced by those in number four--can you wonder that there is not plenty for all?' '"devouring" is a good word,' said philpot, and the others laughed. the lecturer now drew a small square upon the wall below the other drawing. this square he filled in solid black. 1 2 3 4 +------------+-------------+-------------+------------+------------+ | tramps | exploiters | all those | all those | | | beggars | of labour | engaged in | engaged in | | | society | thieves | unnecessary | necessary | u | | people | swindlers | work | work--the | n | | aristoc | pickpockets | | production | e | | racy | burglars | | of the | m | | great | bishops | | benefits | p | | landowners | financiers | | of | l | | all those | capitalists | | civiliz | o | | possessed | share | | ation | y | | of | holders | | | e | | hereditary | ministers | | | d | | wealth | of religion | | | | +------------+-------------+-------------+------------+------------+ ############## ############## ############## this represents the total ############## of the things produced by ############## the people in division 4. ############## 'this represents the total amount of the benefits of civilization and necessaries of life produced by the people in number four. we now proceed to "share out" the things in the same way as they are actually divided amongst the different classes of the population under the present imbecile system. 'as the people in divisions one and two are universally considered to be the most worthy and deserving we give them--two-thirds of the whole. 'the remainder we give to be "shared out" amongst the people represented by divisions three and four. 1 2 3 4 +------------+-------------+-------------+------------+------------+ | tramps | exploiters | all those | all those | | | beggars | of labour | engaged in | engaged in | | | society | thieves | unnecessary | necessary | u | | people | swindlers | work | work--the | n | | aristoc | pickpockets | | production | e | | racy | burglars | | of the | m | | great | bishops | | benefits | p | | landowners | financiers | | of | l | | all those | capitalists | | civiliz | o | | possessed | share | | ation | y | | of | holders | | | e | | hereditary | ministers | | | d | | wealth | of religion | | | | +------------+-------------+-------------+------------+------------+ \___________ ____________/ \___________ ___________/ \/ \/ ######### ##### ######### ##### ######### ##### ######### ##### ######### ##### ######### ##### how the things produced by the people in division 4 are 'shared out' amongst the different classes of the population. 'now you mustn't run away with the idea that the people in three and four take their share quietly and divide the things equally between them. not at all. some get very little, some none, some more than a fair share. it is in these two divisions that the ferocious "battle of life" rages most fiercely; and of course in this battle the weak and the virtuous fare the worst. even those whose exceptional abilities or opportunities enable them to succeed, are compelled to practise selfishness, because a man of exceptional ability who was not selfish would devote his abilities to relieving the manifest sufferings of others, and not to his own profit, and if he did the former he would not be successful in the sense that the world understands the word. all those who really seek to "love their neighbour as themselves", or to return good for evil, the gentle, the kind, and all those who refrain from doing to others the things they would not like to suffer themselves; all these are of necessity found amongst the vanquished; because only the worst--only those who are aggressive, cunning, selfish and mean are fitted to survive. and all these people in numbers three and four are so fully occupied in this dreadful struggle to secure a little, that but few of them pause to inquire why there are not more of the things they are fighting for, or why it is necessary to fight like this at all!' for a few minutes silence prevailed, each man's mind being busy trying to think of some objection to the lecturer's arguments. 'how could the small number of people in number one and two consume as much as you've given 'em in your drorin'?' demanded crass. 'they don't actually consume all of it,' replied owen. 'much of it is wantonly wasted. they also make fortunes by selling some of it in foreign countries; but they consume a great part of it themselves, because the amount of labour expended on the things enjoyed by these people is greater than that expended in the production of the things used by the workers. most of the people who do nothing get the best of everything. more than three-quarters of the time of the working classes is spent in producing the things used by the wealthy. compare the quality and quantity of the clothing possessed by the wife or daughter of a rich man with that of the wife or daughter of a worker. the time and labour spent on producing the one is twenty times greater in one case than in the other; and it's the same with everything else. their homes, their clothing, boots, hats, jewellery, and their food. everything must be of the very best that art or long and painful labour can produce. but for most of those whose labour produces all these good things--anything is considered good enough. for themselves, the philanthropic workers manufacture shoddy cloth--that is, cheap cloth made of old rags and dirt; and shoddy, uncomfortable ironclad boots. if you see a workman wearing a really good suit of clothes you may safely conclude that he is either leading an unnatural life--that is, he is not married--or that he has obtained it from a tallyman on the hire system and has not yet paid for it--or that it is someone else's cast-off suit that he has bought second-hand or had given to him by some charitable person. it's the same with the food. all the ducks and geese, pheasants, partridges, and all the very best parts of the very best meat--all the soles and the finest plaice and salmon and trout--' ''ere chuck it,' cried harlow, fiercely. 'we don't want to 'ear no more of it,' and several others protested against the lecturer wasting time on such mere details. '--all the very best of everything is reserved exclusively for the enjoyment of the people in divisions one and two, while the workers subsist on block ornaments, margarine, adulterated tea, mysterious beer, and are content--only grumbling when they are unable to obtain even such fare as this.' owen paused and a gloomy silence followed, but suddenly crass brightened up. he detected a serious flaw in the lecturer's argument. 'you say the people in one and two gets all the best of everything, but what about the tramps and beggars? you've got them in division one.' 'yes, i know. you see, that's the proper place for them. they belong to a loafer class. they are no better mentally or morally than any of the other loafers in that division; neither are they of any more use. of course, when we consider them in relation to the amount they consume of the things produced by others, they are not so harmful as the other loafers, because they consume comparatively little. but all the same they are in their right place in that division. all those people don't get the same share. the section represents not individuals--but the loafer class.' 'but i thought you said you was goin' to prove that money was the cause of poverty,' said easton. 'so it is,' said owen. 'can't you see that it's money that's caused all these people to lose sight of the true purpose of labour--the production of the things we need? all these people are suffering from the delusion that it doesn't matter what kind of work they do--or whether they merely do nothing--so long as they get money for doing it. under the present extraordinary system, that's the only object they have in view--to get money. their ideas are so topsy-turvey that they regard with contempt those who are engaged in useful work! with the exception of criminals and the poorer sort of loafers, the working classes are considered to be the lowest and least worthy in the community. those who manage to get money for doing something other than productive work are considered more worthy of respect on that account. those who do nothing themselves, but get money out of the labour of others, are regarded as being more worthy still! but the ones who are esteemed most of all and honoured above all the rest, are those who obtain money for doing absolutely nothing!' 'but i can't see as that proves that money is the cause of poverty,' said easton. 'look here,' said owen. 'the people in number four produce everything, don't they?' 'yes; we knows all about that,' interrupted harlow. 'but they gets paid for it, don't they? they gets their wages.' 'yes, and what does their wages consist of?' said owen. 'why, money, of course,' replied harlow, impatiently. and what do they do with their money when they get it? do they eat it, or drink it, or wear it?' at this apparently absurd question several of those who had hitherto been attentive listeners laughed derisively; it was really very difficult to listen patiently to such nonsense. 'of course they don't,' answered harlow scornfully. 'they buy the things they want with it.' 'do you think that most of them manage to save a part of their wages--put it away in the bank.' 'well, i can speak for meself,' replied harlow amid laughter. 'it takes me all my bloody time to pay my rent and other expenses and to keep my little lot in shoe leather, and it's dam little i spend on beer; p'r'aps a tanner or a bob a week at the most.' 'a single man can save money if he likes,' said slyme. 'i'm not speaking of single men,' replied owen. 'i'm referring to those who live natural lives.' 'what about all the money what's in the post office savings bank, and building and friendly societies?' said crass. 'a very large part of that belongs to people who are in business, or who have some other source of income than their own wages. there are some exceptionally fortunate workers who happen to have good situations and higher wages than the ordinary run of workmen. then there are some who are so placed--by letting lodgings, for instance--that they are able to live rent free. others whose wives go out to work; and others again who have exceptional jobs and work a lot of overtime--but these are all exceptional cases.' 'i say as no married workin' man can save any money at all!' shouted harlow, 'not unless 'e goes without some of even the few things we are able to get--and makes 'is wife and kids go without as well.' ''ear, 'ear,' said everybody except crass and slyme, who were both thrifty working men, and each of them had some money saved in one or other of the institutions mentioned. 'then that means,' said owen, 'that means that the wages the people in division four receive is not equivalent to the work they do.' 'wotcher mean, equivalent?' cried crass. 'why the 'ell don't yer talk plain english without draggin' in a lot of long words wot nobody can't understand?' 'i mean this,' replied owen, speaking very slowly. 'everything is produced by the people in number four. in return for their work they are given--money, and the things they have made become the property of the people who do nothing. then, as the money is of no use, the workers go to shops and give it away in exchange for some of the things they themselves have made. they spend--or give back--all their wages; but as the money they got as wages is not equal in value to the things they produced, they find that they are only able to buy back a very small part. so you see that these little discs of metal--this money--is a device for enabling those who do not work to rob the workers of the greater part of the fruits of their toil.' the silence that ensued was broken by crass. 'it sounds very pretty,' he sneered, 'but i can't make no 'ead or tail of it, meself.' 'look here!' cried owen. 'the producing class--these people in number four are supposed to be paid for their work. their wages are supposed to be equal in value to their work. but it's not so. if it were, by spending all their wages, the producing class would be able to buy back all they had produced.' owen ceased speaking and silence once more ensued. no one gave any sign of understanding, or of agreeing or of disagreeing with what he had said. their attitude was strictly neutral. barrington's pipe had gone out during the argument. he relit it from the fire with a piece of twisted paper. 'if their wages were really equal in value to the product of their labour,' owen repeated, 'they would be able to buy back not a small part--but the whole.'... at this, a remark from bundy caused a shout of laughter, and when wantley added point to the joke by making a sound like the discharge of a pistol the merriment increased tenfold. 'well, that's done it,' remarked easton, as he got up and opened the window. 'it's about time you was buried, if the smell's anything to go by,' said harlow, addressing wantley, who laughed and appeared to think he had distinguished himself. 'but even if we include the whole of the working classes,' continued owen, 'that is, the people in number three as well as those in number four, we find that their combined wages are insufficient to buy the things made by the producers. the total value of the wealth produced in this country during the last year was l1,800,000,000, and the total amount paid in wages during the same period was only l600,000,000. in other words, by means of the money trick, the workers were robbed of two-thirds of the value of their labour. all the people in numbers three and four are working and suffering and starving and fighting in order that the rich people in numbers one and two may live in luxury, and do nothing. these are the wretches who cause poverty: they not only devour or waste or hoard the things made by the worker, but as soon as their own wants are supplied--they compel the workers to cease working and prevent them producing the things they need. most of these people!' cried owen, his usually pale face flushing red and his eyes shining with sudden anger, 'most of these people do not deserve to be called human beings at all! they're devils! they know that whilst they are indulging in pleasures of every kind--all around them men and women and little children are existing in want or dying of hunger.' the silence which followed was at length broken by harlow: 'you say the workers is entitled to all they produce, but you forget there's the raw materials to pay for. they don't make them, you know.' 'of course the workers don't create the raw materials,' replied owen. 'but i am not aware that the capitalists or the landlords do so either. the raw materials exist in abundance in and on the earth, but they are of no use until labour has been applied to them.' 'but then, you see, the earth belongs to the landlords!' cried crass, unguardedly. 'i know that; and of course you think it's right that the whole country should belong to a few people--' 'i must call the lecturer to horder,' interrupted philpot. 'the land question is not before the meeting at present.' 'you talk about the producers being robbed of most of the value of what they produce,' said harlow, 'but you must remember that it ain't all produced by hand labour. what about the things what's made by machinery?' 'the machines themselves were made by the workers,' returned owen, 'but of course they do not belong to the workers, who have been robbed of them by means of the money trick.' 'but who invented all the machinery?' cried crass. 'that's more than you or i or anyone else can say,' returned owen, 'but it certainly wasn't the wealthy loafer class, or the landlords, or the employers. most of the men who invented the machinery lived and died unknown, in poverty and often in actual want. the inventors too were robbed by the exploiter-of-labour class. there are no men living at present who can justly claim to have invented the machinery that exists today. the most they can truthfully say is that they have added to or improved upon the ideas of those who lived and worked before them. even watt and stevenson merely improved upon steam engines and locomotives already existing. your question has really nothing to do with the subject we are discussing: we are only trying to find out why the majority of people have to go short of the benefits of civilization. one of the causes is--the majority of the population are engaged in work that does not produce those things; and most of what is produced is appropriated and wasted by those who have no right to it. 'the workers produce everything! if you walk through the streets of a town or a city, and look around, everything that you can see--factories, machinery, houses, railways, tramways, canals, furniture, clothing, food and the very road or pavement you stand upon were all made by the working class, who spend all their wages in buying back only a very small part of the things they produce. therefore what remains in the possession of their masters represents the difference between the value of the work done and the wages paid for doing it. this systematic robbery has been going on for generations, the value of the accumulated loot is enormous, and all of it, all the wealth at present in the possession of the rich, is rightly the property of the working class--it has been stolen from them by means of the money trick.'... for some moments an oppressive silence prevailed. the men stared with puzzled, uncomfortable looks alternately at each other and at the drawings on the wall. they were compelled to do a little thinking on their own account, and it was a process to which they were unaccustomed. in their infancy they had been taught to distrust their own intelligence and to leave 'thinking' to their 'pastors' and masters and to their 'betters' generally. all their lives they had been true to this teaching, they had always had blind, unreasoning faith in the wisdom and humanity of their pastors and masters. that was the reason why they and their children had been all their lives on the verge of starvation and nakedness, whilst their 'betters'--who did nothing but the thinking--went clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. several men had risen from their seats and were attentively studying the diagrams owen had drawn on the wall; and nearly all the others were making the same mental efforts--they were trying to think of something to say in defence of those who robbed them of the fruits of their toil. 'i don't see no bloody sense in always runnin' down the rich,' said harlow at last. 'there's always been rich and poor in the world and there always will be.' 'of course,' said slyme. 'it says in the bible that the poor shall always be with us.' 'what the bloody 'ell kind of system do you think we ought to 'ave?' demanded crass. 'if everything's wrong, 'ow's it goin' to be altered?' at this, everybody brightened up again, and exchanged looks of satisfaction and relief. of course! it wasn't necessary to think about these things at all! nothing could ever be altered: it had always been more or less the same, and it always would be. 'it seems to me that you all hope it is impossible to alter it,' said owen. 'without trying to find out whether it could be done, you persuade yourselves that it is impossible, and then, instead of being sorry, you're glad!' some of them laughed in a silly, half-ashamed way. 'how do you reckon it could be altered?' said harlow. 'the way to alter it is, first to enlighten the people as to the real cause of their sufferings, and then--' 'well,' interrupted crass, with a self-satisfied chuckle, 'it'll take a better bloody man than you to enlighten me!' 'i don't want to be henlightened into darkness!' said slyme piously. 'but what sort of system do you propose, then?' repeated harlow. 'after you've got 'em all enlightened--if you don't believe in sharing out all the money equal, how are you goin' to alter it?' 'i don't know 'ow 'e's goin' to alter it,' sneered crass, looking at his watch and standing up, 'but i do know what the time is--two minits past one!' 'the next lecture,' said philpot, addressing the meeting as they all prepared to return to work, 'the next lecture will be postponded till tomorrer at the usual time, when it will be my painful dooty to call upon mr owen to give 'is well-known and most hobnoxious address entitled "work and how to avoid it." hall them as wants to be henlightened kindly attend.' 'or hall them as don't get the sack tonight,' remarked easton grimly. chapter 26 the slaughter during the afternoon, rushton and sweater visited the house, the latter having an appointment to meet there a gardener to whom he wished to give instructions concerning the laying out of the grounds, which had been torn up for the purpose of putting in the new drains. sweater had already arranged with the head gardener of the public park to steal some of the best plants from that place and have them sent up to 'the cave'. these plants had been arriving in small lots for about a week. they must have been brought there either in the evening after the men left off or very early in the morning before they came. the two gentlemen remained at the house for about half an hour and as they went away the mournful sound of the town hall bell--which was always tolled to summon meetings of the council--was heard in the distance, and the hands remarked to each other that another robbery was about to be perpetrated. hunter did not come to the job again that day: he had been sent by rushton to price some work for which the firm was going to tender an estimate. there was only one person who felt any regret at his absence, and that was mrs white--bert's mother, who had been working at 'the cave' for several days, scrubbing the floors. as a rule, hunter paid her wages every night, and on this occasion she happened to need the money even more than usual. as leaving off time drew near, she mentioned the matter to crass, who advised her to call at the office on her way home and ask the young lady clerk for the money. as hunter did not appear, she followed the foreman's advice. when she reached the shop rushton was just coming out. she explained to him what she wanted and he instructed mr budd to tell miss wade to pay her. the shopman accordingly escorted her to the office at the back of the shop, and the young lady book-keeper--after referring to former entries to make quite certain of the amount, paid her the sum that hunter had represented as her wages, the same amount that miss wade had on the previous occasions given him to pay the charwoman. when mrs white got outside she found that she held in her hand half a crown instead of the two shillings she usually received from mr hunter. at first she felt inclined to take it back, but after some hesitation she thought it better to wait until she saw hunter, when she could tell him about it; but the next morning when she saw the disciple at 'the cave' he broached the subject first, and told her that miss wade had made a mistake. and that evening when he paid her, he deducted the sixpence from the usual two shillings. the lecture announced by philpot was not delivered. anxiously awaiting the impending slaughter the men kept tearing into it as usual, for they generally keep working in the usual way, each one trying to outdo the others so as not to lose his chance of being one of the lucky one... misery now went round and informed all the men with the exception of crass, owen, slyme and sawkins--that they would have to stand off that night. he told them that the firm had several jobs in view--work they had tendered for and hoped to get, and said they could look round after christmas and he might--possibly--be able to start some of them again. they would be paid at the office tomorrow--saturday--at one o'clock as usual, but if any of them wished they could have their money tonight. the men thanked him, and most of them said they would come for their wages at the usual pay-time, and would call round as he suggested, after the holidays, to see if there was anything to do. in all, fifteen men--including philpot, harlow, easton and ned dawson, were to 'stand off' that night. they took their dismissal stolidly, without any remark, some of them even with an affectation of indifference, but there were few attempts at conversation afterwards. the little work that remained to be done they did in silence, every man oppressed by the same terror--the dread of the impending want, the privation and unhappiness that they knew they and their families would have to suffer during the next few months. bundy and his mate dawson were working in the kitchen fixing the new range in place of the old one which they had taken out. they had been engaged on this job all day, and their hands and faces and clothes were covered with soot, which they had also contrived to smear and dab all over the surfaces of the doors and other woodwork in the room, much to the indignation of crass and slyme, who had to wash it all off before they could put on the final coat of paint. 'you can't help makin' a little mess on a job of this kind, you know,' remarked bundy, as he was giving the finishing touches to the work, making good the broken parts of the wall with cement, whilst his mate was clearing away the debris. 'yes; but there's no need to claw 'old of the bloody doors every time you goes in and out,' snarled crass, 'and you could 'ave put yer tools on the floor instead of makin' a bench of the dresser.' 'you can 'ave the bloody place all to yerself in about five minutes,' replied bundy, as he assisted to lift a sack of cement weighing about two hundredweight on to dawson's back. 'we're finished now.' when they had cleared away all the dirt and fragments of bricks and mortar, while crass and slyme proceeded with the painting, bundy and dawson loaded up their hand-cart with the old range and the bags of unused cement and plaster, which they took back to the yard. meantime, misery was wandering about the house and gounds like an evil spirit seeking rest and finding none. he stood for some time gloomily watching the four gardeners, who were busily at work laying strips of turf, mowing the lawn, rolling the gravel paths and trimming the trees and bushes. the boy bert, philpot, harlow, easton and sawkins were loading a hand-cart with ladders and empty paint-pots to return to the yard. just as they were setting out, misery stopped them, remarking that the cart was not half loaded--he said it would take a month to get all the stuff away if they went on like that; so by his directions they placed another long ladder on top of the pile and once more started on their way, but before they had gone two dozen yards one of the wheels of the cart collapsed and the load was scattered over the roadway. bert was at the same side of the cart as the wheel that broke and he was thrown violently to the ground, where he lay half stunned, in the midst of the ladders and planks. when they got him out they were astonished to find that, thanks to the special providence that watches over all small boys, he was almost unhurt--just a little dazed, that was all; and by the time sawkins returned with another cart, bert was able to help to gather up the fallen paint-pots and to accompany the men with the load to the yard. at the corner of the road they paused to take a last look at the 'job'. 'there it stands!' said harlow, tragically, extending his arm towards the house. 'there it stands! a job that if they'd only have let us do it properly, couldn't 'ave been done with the number of 'ands we've 'ad, in less than four months; and there it is, finished, messed up, slobbered over and scamped, in nine weeks!' 'yes, and now we can all go to 'ell,' said philpot, gloomily. at the yard they found bundy and his mate, ned dawson, who helped them to hang up the ladders in their usual places. philpot was glad to get out of assisting to do this, for he had contracted a rather severe attack of rheumatism when working outside at the 'cave'. whilst the others were putting the ladders away he assisted bert to carry the paint-pots and buckets into the paint shop, and while there he filled a small medicine bottle he had brought with him for the purpose, with turpentine from the tank. he wanted this stuff to rub into his shoulders and legs, and as he secreted the bottle in the inner pocket of his coat, he muttered: 'this is where we gets some of our own back.' they took the key of the yard to the office and as they separated to go home bundy suggested that the best thing they could do would be to sew their bloody mouths up for a few months, because there was not much probability of their getting another job until about march. the next morning while crass and slyme were finishing inside, owen wrote the two gates. on the front entrance 'the cave' and on the back 'tradesmens entrance', in gilded letters. in the meantime, sawkins and bert made several journeys to the yard with the hand-cart. crass--working in the kitchen with slyme--was very silent and thoughtful. ever since the job was started, every time mr sweater had visited the house to see what progress was being made, crass had been grovelling to him in the hope of receiving a tip when the work was finished. he had been very careful to act upon any suggestions that sweater had made from time to time and on several occasions had taken a lot of trouble to get just the right tints of certain colours, making up a number of different shades and combinations, and doing parts of the skirtings or mouldings of rooms in order that mr sweater might see exactly--before they went on with it--what it would look like when finished. he made a great pretence of deferring to sweater's opinion, and assured him that he did not care how much trouble he took as long as he--sweater--was pleased. in fact, it was no trouble at all: it was a pleasure. as the work neared completion, crass began to speculate upon the probable amount of the donation he would receive as the reward of nine weeks of cringing, fawning, abject servility. he thought it quite possible that he might get a quid: it would not be too much, considering all the trouble he had taken. it was well worth it. at any rate, he felt certain that he was sure to get ten bob; a gentleman like mr sweater would never have the cheek to offer less. the more he thought about it the more improbable it appeared that the amount would be less than a quid, and he made up his mind that whatever he got he would take good care that none of the other men knew anything about it. he was the one who had had all the worry of the job, and he was the only one entitled to anything there was to be had. besides, even if he got a quid, by the time you divided that up amongst a dozen--or even amongst two or three--it would not be worth having. at about eleven o'clock mr sweater arrived and began to walk over the house, followed by crass, who carried a pot of paint and a small brush and made believe to be 'touching up' and finishing off parts of the work. as sweater went from one room to another crass repeatedly placed himself in the way in the hope of being spoken to, but sweater took no notice of him whatever. once or twice crass's heart began to beat quickly as he furtively watched the great man and saw him thrust his thumb and finger into his waistcoat pocket, but on each occasion sweater withdrew his hand with nothing in it. after a while, observing that the gentleman was about to depart without having spoken, crass determined to break the ice himself. 'it's a little better weather we're 'avin' now, sir.' 'yes,' replied sweater. 'i was beginnin' to be afraid as i shouldn't be hable to git heverything finished in time for you to move in before christmas, sir,' crass continued, 'but it's hall done now, sir.' sweater made no reply. 'i've kept the fire agoin' in hall the rooms has you told me, sir,' resumed crass after a pause. 'i think you'll find as the place is nice and dry, sir; the honly places as is a bit damp is the kitchen and scullery and the other rooms in the basement, sir, but of course that's nearly halways the case, sir, when the rooms is partly hunderground, sir. 'but of course it don't matter so much about the basement, sir, because it's honly the servants what 'as to use it, sir, and even down there it'll be hall right hin the summer, sir.' one would scarcely think, from the contemptuous way in which he spoke of 'servants' that crass's own daughter was 'in service', but such was the case. 'oh, yes, there's no doubt about that,' replied sweater as he moved towards the door; 'there's no doubt it will be dry enough in the summer. good morning.' 'good morning to you, sir,' said crass, following him. 'i 'opes as you're pleased with all the work, sir; everything satisfactory, sir.' 'oh, yes. i think it looks very nice; very nice indeed; i'm very pleased with it,' said sweater affably. 'good morning.' 'good morning, sir,' replied the foreman with a sickly smile as sweater departed. when the other was gone, crass sat down dejectedly on the bottom step of the stairs, overwhelmed with the ruin of his hopes and expectations. he tried to comfort himself with the reflection that all hope was not lost, because he would have to come to the house again on monday and tuesday to fix the venetian blinds; but all the same he could not help thinking that it was only a very faint hope, for he felt that if sweater had intended giving anything he would have done so today; and it was very improbable that he would see sweater on monday or tuesday at all, for the latter did not usually visit the job in the early part of the week. however, crass made up his mind to hope for the best, and, pulling himself together, he presently returned to the kitchen, where he found slyme and sawkins waiting for him. he had not mentioned his hopes of a tip to either of them, but they did not need any telling and they were both determined to have their share of whatever he got. they eyed him keenly as he entered. 'what did 'e give yer?' demanded sawkins, going straight to the point. 'give me?' replied crass. 'nothing!' slyme laughed in a sneering, incredulous way, but sawkins was inclined to be abusive. he averred that he had been watching crass and sweater and had seen the latter put his thumb and finger into his waistcoat pocket as he walked into the dining-room, followed by crass. it took the latter a long time to convince his two workmates of the truth of his own account, but he succeeded at last, and they all three agreed that old sweater was a sanguinary rotter, and they lamented over the decay of the good old-fashioned customs. 'why, at one time o' day,' said crass, 'only a few years ago, if you went to a gentleman's 'ouse to paint one or two rooms you could always be sure of a bob or two when you'd finished.' by half past twelve everything was squared up, and, having loaded up the hand-cart with all that remained of the materials, dirty paint-pots and plant, they all set out together for the yard, to put all the things away before going to the office for their money. sawkins took the handle of the cart, slyme and crass walked at one side and owen and bert at the other. there was no need to push, for the road was downhill most of the way; so much so that they had all to help to hold back the cart, which travelled so rapidly that bert found it difficult to keep pace with the others and frequently broke into a trot to recover lost ground, and crass--being fleshy and bloated with beer, besides being unused to much exertion--began to perspire and soon appealed to the others not to let it go so fast--there was no need to get done before one o'clock. chapter 27 the march of the imperialists it was an unusually fine day for the time of year, and as they passed along the grand parade--which faced due south--they felt quite warm. the parade was crowded with richly dressed and bejewelled loafers, whose countenances in many instances bore unmistakable signs of drunkenness and gluttony. some of the females had tried to conceal the ravages of vice and dissipation by coating their faces with powder and paint. mingling with and part of this crowd were a number of well-fed-looking individuals dressed in long garments of black cloth of the finest texture, and broad-brimmed soft felt hats. most of these persons had gold rings on their soft white fingers and glove-like kid or calfskin boots on their feet. they belonged to the great army of imposters who obtain an easy living by taking advantage of the ignorance and simplicity of their fellow-men, and pretending to be the 'followers' and 'servants' of the lowly carpenter of nazareth--the man of sorrows, who had not where to lay his head. none of these black-garbed 'disciples' were associating with the groups of unemployed carpenters, bricklayers, plasterers, and painters who stood here and there in the carriage-way dressed in mean and shabby clothing and with faces pale with privation. many of these latter were known to our friends with the cart, and nodded to them as they passed. now and then some of them came over and walked a little distance by their side, inquiring whether there was any news of another job at rushton's. when they were about half-way down the parade, just near the fountain, crass and his mates encountered a number of men on whose arms were white bands with the word 'collector' in black letters. they carried collecting boxes and accosted the people in the street, begging for money for the unemployed. these men were a kind of skirmishers for the main body, which could be seen some distance behind. as the procession drew near, sawkins steered the cart into the kerb and halted as they went past. there were about three hundred men altogether, marching four abreast. they carried three large white banners with black letters, 'thanks to our subscribers' 'in aid of genuine unemployed', 'the children must be fed'. although there were a number of artisans in the procession, the majority of the men belonged to what is called the unskilled labourer class. the skilled artisan does not as a rule take part in such a procession except as a very last resource... and all the time he strives to keep up an appearance of being well-to-do, and would be highly indignant if anyone suggested that he was really in a condition of abject, miserable poverty. although he knows that his children are often not so well fed as are the pet dogs and cats of his 'betters', he tries to bluff his neighbours into thinking that he has some mysterious private means of which they know nothing, and conceals his poverty as if it were a crime. most of this class of men would rather starve than beg. consequently not more than a quarter of the men in the procession were skilled artisans; the majority were labourers. there was also a sprinkling of those unfortunate outcasts of society--tramps and destitute, drunken loafers. if the self-righteous hypocrites who despise these poor wretches had been subjected to the same conditions, the majority of them would inevitably have become the same as these. haggard and pale, shabbily or raggedly dressed, their boots broken and down at heel, they slouched past. some of them stared about with a dazed or half-wild expression, but most of them walked with downcast eyes or staring blankly straight in front of them. they appeared utterly broken-spirited, hopeless and ashamed... 'anyone can see what they are,' sneered crass, 'there isn't fifty genuine tradesmen in the whole crowd, and most of 'em wouldn't work if they 'ad the offer of it.' 'that's just what i was thinkin',' agreed sawkins with a laugh. 'there will be plenty of time to say that when they have been offered work and have refused to do it,' said owen. 'this sort of thing does the town a lot of 'arm,' remarked slyme; 'it oughtn't to be allowed; the police ought to stop it. it's enough to drive all the gentry out of the place!' 'bloody disgraceful, i call it,' said crass, 'marchin' along the grand parade on a beautiful day like this, just at the very time when most of the gentry is out enjoyin' the fresh hair.' 'i suppose you think they ought to stay at home and starve quietly,' said owen. 'i don't see why these men should care what harm they do to the town; the town doesn't seem to care much what becomes of them.' 'do you believe in this sort of thing, then?' asked slyme. 'no; certainly not. i don't believe in begging as a favour for what one is entitled to demand as a right from the thieves who have robbed them and who are now enjoying the fruits of their labour. from the look of shame on their faces you might think that they were the criminals instead of being the victims.' 'well you must admit that most of them is very inferior men,' said crass with a self-satisfied air. 'there's very few mechanics amongst em.' 'what about it if they are? what difference does that make?' replied owen. 'they're human beings, and they have as much right to live as anyone else. what is called unskilled labour is just as necessary and useful as yours or mine. i am no more capable of doing the "unskilled" labour that most of these men do than most of them would be capable of doing my work.' 'well, if they was skilled tradesmen, they might find it easier to get a job,' said crass. owen laughed offensively. 'do you mean to say you think that if all these men could be transformed into skilled carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers, and painters, that it would be easier for all those other chaps whom we passed a little while ago to get work? is it possible that you or any other sane man can believe anything so silly as that?' crass did not reply. 'if there is not enough work to employ all the mechanics whom we see standing idle about the streets, how would it help these labourers in the procession if they could all become skilled workmen?' still crass did not answer, and neither slyme nor sawkins came to his assistance. 'if that could be done,' continued owen, 'it would simply make things worse for those who are already skilled mechanics. a greater number of skilled workers--keener competition for skilled workmen's jobs--a larger number of mechanics out of employment, and consequently, improved opportunities for employers to reduce wages. that is probably the reason why the liberal party--which consists for the most part of exploiters of labour--procured the great jim scalds to tell us that improved technical education is the remedy for unemployment and poverty.' 'i suppose you think jim scalds is a bloody fool, the same as everybody else what don't see things your way?' said sawkins. 'i should think he was a fool if i thought he believed what he says. but i don't think he believes it. he says it because he thinks the majority of the working classes are such fools that they will believe him. if he didn't think that most of us are fools he wouldn't tell us such a yarn as that.' 'and i suppose you think as 'is opinion ain't far wrong,' snarled crass. 'we shall be better able to judge of that after the next general election,' replied owen. 'if the working classes again elect a majority of liberal or tory landlords and employers to rule over them, it will prove that jim scalds' estimate of their intelligence is about right.' 'well, anyhow,' persisted slyme, 'i don't think it's a right thing that they should be allowed to go marchin' about like that--driving visitors out of the town.' 'what do you think they ought to do, then?' demanded owen. 'let the b--rs go to the bloody workhouse!' shouted crass. 'but before they could be received there they would have to be absolutely homeless and destitute, and then the ratepayers would have to keep them. it costs about twelve shillings a week for each inmate, so it seems to me that it would be more sensible and economical for the community to employ them on some productive work.' they had by this time arrived at the yard. the steps and ladders were put away in their places and the dirty paint-pots and pails were placed in the paint-shop on the bench and on the floor. with what had previously been brought back there were a great many of these things, all needing to be cleaned out, so bert at any rate stood in no danger of being out of employment for some time to come. when they were paid at the office, owen on opening his envelope found it contained as usual, a time sheet for the next week, which meant that he was not 'stood off' although he did not know what work there would be to do. crass and slyme were both to go to the 'cave' to fix the venetian blinds, and sawkins also was to come to work as usual. chapter 28 the week before christmas during the next week owen painted a sign on the outer wall of one of the workshops at the yard, and he also wrote the name of the firm on three of the handcarts. these and other odd jobs kept him employed a few hours every day, so that he was not actually out of work. one afternoon--there being nothing to do--he went home at three o'clock, but almost as soon as he reached the house bert white came with a coffin-plate which had to be written at once. the lad said he had been instructed to wait for it. nora gave the boy some tea and bread and butter to eat whilst owen was doing the coffin-plate, and presently frankie--who had been playing out in the street--made his appearance. the two boys were already known to each other, for bert had been there several times before--on errands similar to the present one, or to take lessons on graining and letter-painting from owen. 'i'm going to have a party next monday--after christmas,' remarked frankie. 'mother told me i might ask you if you'll come?' 'all right,' said bert; 'and i'll bring my pandoramer.' 'what is it? is it alive?' asked frankie with a puzzled look. 'alive! no, of course not,' replied bert with a superior air. 'it's a show, like they have at the hippodrome or the circus.' 'how big is it?' 'not very big: it's made out of a sugar-box. i made it myself. it's not quite finished yet, but i shall get it done this week. there's a band as well, you know. i do that part with this.' 'this' was a large mouth organ which he produced from the inner pocket of his coat. 'play something now.' bert accordingly played, and frankie sang at the top of his voice a selection of popular songs, including 'the old bull and bush', 'has anyone seen a german band?', 'waiting at the church' and finally--possibly as a dirge for the individual whose coffin-plate owen was writing--'goodbye, mignonette' and 'i wouldn't leave my little wooden hut for you'. 'you don't know what's in that,' said frankie, referring to a large earthenware bread-pan which nora had just asked owen to help her to lift from the floor on to one of the chairs. the vessel in question was covered with a clean white cloth. 'christmas pudding,' replied bert, promptly. 'guessed right first time!' cried frankie. 'we got the things out of the christmas club on saturday. we've been paying in ever since last christmas. we're going to mix it now, and you can have a stir too if you like, for luck.' whilst they were stirring the pudding, frankie several times requested the others to feel his muscle: he said he felt sure that he would soon be strong enough to go out to work, and he explained to bert that the extraordinary strength he possessed was to be attributed to the fact that he lived almost exclusively on porridge and milk. for the rest of the week, owen continued to work down at the yard with sawkins, crass, and slyme, painting some of the ladders, steps and other plant belonging to the firm. these things had to have two coats of paint and the name rushton & co. written on them. as soon as they had got some of them second-coated, owen went on with the writing, leaving the painting for the others, so as to share the work as fairly as possible. several times during the week one or other of them was taken away to do some other work; once crass and slyme had to go and wash off and whiten a ceiling somewhere, and several times sawkins was sent out to assist the plumbers. every day some of the men who had been 'stood off' called at the yard to ask if any other 'jobs' had 'come in'. from these callers they heard all the news. old jack linden had not succeeded in getting anything to do at the trade since he was discharged from rushton's, and it was reported that he was trying to earn a little money by hawking bloaters from house to house. as for philpot, he said that he had been round to nearly all the firms in the town and none of them had any work to speak of. newman--the man whom the reader will remember was sacked for taking too much pains with his work--had been arrested and sentenced to a month's imprisonment because he had not been able to pay his poor rates, and the board of guardians were allowing his wife three shillings a week to maintain herself and the three children. philpot had been to see them, and she told him that the landlord was threatening to turn them into the street; he would have seized their furniture and sold it if it had been worth the expense of the doing. 'i feel ashamed of meself,' philpot added in confidence to owen, 'when i think of all the money i chuck away on beer. if it wasn't for that, i shouldn't be in such a hole meself now, and i might be able to lend 'em a 'elpin' 'and.' 'it ain't so much that i likes the beer, you know,' he continued; 'it's the company. when you ain't got no 'ome, in a manner o' speakin', like me, the pub's about the only place where you can get a little enjoyment. but you ain't very welcome there unless you spends your money.' 'is the three shillings all they have to live on?' 'i think she goes out charin' when she can get it,' replied philpot, 'but i don't see as she can do a great deal o' that with three young 'uns to look after, and from what i hear of it she's only just got over a illness and ain't fit to do much.' 'my god!' said owen. 'i'll tell you what,' said philpot. 'i've been thinking we might get up a bit of a subscription for 'em. there's several chaps in work what knows newman, and if they was each to give a trifle we could get enough to pay for a christmas dinner, anyway. i've brought a sheet of foolscap with me, and i was goin' to ask you to write out the heading for me.' as there was no pen available at the workshop, philpot waited till four o'clock and then accompanied owen home, where the heading of the list was written. owen put his name down for a shilling and philpot his for a similar amount. philpot stayed to tea and accepted an invitation to spend christmas day with them, and to come to frankie's party on the monday after. the next morning philpot brought the list to the yard and crass and slyme put their names down for a shilling each, and sawkins for threepence, it being arranged that the money was to be paid on payday--christmas eve. in the meantime, philpot was to see as many as he could of those who were in work, at other firms and get as many subscriptions as possible. at pay-time on christmas eve philpot turned up with the list and owen and the others paid him the amounts they had put their names down for. from other men he had succeeded in obtaining nine and sixpence, mostly in sixpences and threepences. some of this money he had already received, but for the most part he had made appointments with the subscribers to call at their homes that evening. it was decided that owen should accompany him and also go with him to hand over the money to mrs newman. it took them nearly three hours to get in all the money, for the places they had to go to were in different localities, and in one or two cases they had to wait because their man had not yet come home, and sometimes it was not possible to get away without wasting a little time in talk. in three instances those who had put their names down for threepence increased the amount to sixpence and one who had promised sixpence gave a shilling. there were two items of threepence each which they did not get at all, the individuals who had put their names down having gone upon the drunk. another cause of delay was that they met or called on several other men who had not yet been asked for a subscription, and there were several others--including some members of the painters society whom owen had spoken to during the week--who had promised him to give a subscription. in the end they succeeded in increasing the total amount to nineteen and ninepence, and they then put three-halfpence each to make it up to a pound. the newmans lived in a small house the rent of which was six shillings per week and taxes. to reach the house one had to go down a dark and narrow passage between two shops, the house being in a kind of well, surrounded by the high walls of the back parts of larger buildings--chiefly business premises and offices. the air did not circulate very freely in this place, and the rays of the sun never reached it. in the summer the atmosphere was close and foul with the various odours which came from the back-yards of the adjoining buildings, and in the winter it was dark and damp and gloomy, a culture-ground for bacteria and microbes. the majority of those who profess to be desirous of preventing and curing the disease called consumption must be either hypocrites or fools, for they ridicule the suggestion that it is necessary first to cure and prevent the poverty that compels badly clothed and half-starved human beings to sleep in such dens as this. the front door opened into the living-room or, rather, kitchen, which was dimly lighted by a small paraffin lamp on the table, where were also some tea-cups and saucers, each of a different pattern, and the remains of a loaf of bread. the wallpaper was old and discoloured; a few almanacs and unframed prints were fixed to the walls, and on the mantelshelf were some cracked and worthless vases and ornaments. at one time they had possessed a clock and an overmantel and some framed pictures, but they had all been sold to obtain money to buy food. nearly everything of any value had been parted with for the same reason--the furniture, the pictures, the bedclothes, the carpet and the oilcloth, piece by piece, nearly everything that had once constituted the home--had been either pawned or sold to buy food or to pay rent during the times when newman was out of work--periods that had recurred during the last few years with constantly increasing frequency and duration. now there was nothing left but these few old broken chairs and the deal table which no one would buy; and upstairs, the wretched bedsteads and mattresses whereon they slept at night, covering themselves with worn-out remnants of blankets and the clothes they wore during the day. in answer to philpot's knock, the door was opened by a little girl about seven years old, who at once recognized philpot, and called out his name to her mother, and the latter came also to the door, closely followed by two other children, a little, fragile-looking girl about three, and a boy about five years of age, who held on to her skirt and peered curiously at the visitors. mrs newman was about thirty, and her appearance confirmed the statement of philpot that she had only just recovered from an illness; she was very white and thin and dejected-looking. when philpot explained the object of their visit and handed her the money, the poor woman burst into tears, and the two smaller children--thinking that this piece of paper betokened some fresh calamity--began to cry also. they remembered that all their troubles had been preceded by the visits of men who brought pieces of paper, and it was rather difficult to reassure them. that evening, after frankie was asleep, owen and nora went out to do their christmas marketing. they had not much money to spend, for owen had brought home only seventeen shillings. he had worked thirty-three hours--that came to nineteen and threepence--one shilling and threehalfpence had gone on the subscription list, and he had given the rest of the coppers to a ragged wreck of a man who was singing a hymn in the street. the other shilling had been deducted from his wages in repayment of a 'sub' he had had during the week. there was a great deal to be done with this seventeen shillings. first of all there was the rent--seven shillings--that left ten. then there was the week's bread bill--one and threepence. they had a pint of milk every day, chiefly for the boy's sake--that came to one and two. then there was one and eight for a hundredweight of coal that had been bought on credit. fortunately, there were no groceries to buy, for the things they had obtained with their christmas club money would be more than sufficient for the ensuing week. frankie's stockings were all broken and beyond mending, so it was positively necessary to buy him another pair for fivepence three-farthings. these stockings were not much good--a pair at double the price would have been much cheaper, for they would have lasted three or four times longer; but they could not afford to buy the dearer kind. it was just the same with the coal: if they had been able to afford it, they could have bought a ton of the same class of coal for twenty-six shillings, but buying it as they did, by the hundredweight, they had to pay at the rate of thirty-three shillings and fourpence a ton. it was just the same with nearly everything else. this is how the working classes are robbed. although their incomes are the lowest, they are compelled to buy the most expensive articles--that is, the lowest-priced articles. everybody knows that good clothes, boots or furniture are really the cheapest in the end, although they cost more money at first; but the working classes can seldom or never afford to buy good things; they have to buy cheap rubbish which is dear at any price. six weeks previously owen bought a pair of second-hand boots for three shillings and they were now literally falling to pieces. nora's shoes were in much the same condition, but, as she said, it did not matter so much about hers because there was no need for her to go out if the weather were not fine. in addition to the articles already mentioned, they had to spend fourpence for half a gallon of paraffin oil, and to put sixpence into the slot of the gas-stove. this reduced the money to five and sevenpence farthing, and of this it was necessary to spend a shilling on potatoes and other vegetables. they both needed some new underclothing, for what they had was so old and worn that it was quite useless for the purpose it was supposed to serve; but there was no use thinking of these things, for they had now only four shillings and sevenpence farthing left, and all that would be needed for toys. they had to buy something special for frankie for christmas, and it would also be necessary to buy something for each of the children who were coming to the party on the following monday. fortunately, there was no meat to buy, for nora had been paying into the christmas club at the butcher's as well as at the grocer's. so this necessary was already paid for. they stopped to look at the display of toys at sweater's emporium. for several days past frankie had been talking of the wonders contained in these windows, so they wished if possible to buy him something here. they recognized many of the things from the description the boy had given of them, but nearly everything was so dear that for a long time they looked in vain for something it would be possible to buy. 'that's the engine he talks so much about,' said non, indicating a model railway locomotive; that one marked five shillings.' 'it might just as well be marked five pounds as far as we're concerned,' replied owen. as they were speaking, one of the salesmen appeared at the back of the window and, reaching forward, removed the engine. it was probably the last one of the kind and had evidently just been sold. owen and nora experienced a certain amount of consolation in knowing that even if they had the money they would not have been able to buy it. after lengthy consideration, they decided on a clockwork engine at a shilling, but the other toys they resolved to buy at a cheaper shop. nora went into the emporium to get the toy and whilst owen was waiting for her mr and mrs rushton came out. they did not appear to see owen, who observed that the shape of one of several parcels they carried suggested that it contained the engine that had been taken from the window a little while before. when nora returned with her purchase, they went in search of a cheaper place and after a time they found what they wanted. for sixpence they bought a cardboard box that had come all the way from japan and contained a whole family of dolls--father, mother and four children of different sizes. a box of paints, threepence: a sixpenny tea service, a threepenny drawing slate, and a rag doll, sixpence. on their way home they called at a greengrocer's where owen had ordered and paid for a small christmas tree a few weeks before; and as they were turning the corner of the street where they lived they met crass, half-drunk, with a fine fat goose slung over his shoulder by its neck. he greeted owen jovially and held up the bird for their inspection. 'not a bad tanner's-worth, eh?' he hiccoughed. 'this makes two we've got. i won this and a box of cigars--fifty--for a tanner, and the other one i got out of the club at our church mission 'all: threepence a week for twenty-eight weeks; that makes seven bob. but,' he added, confidentially,''you couldn't buy 'em for that price in a shop, you know. they costs the committee a good bit more nor that--wholesale; but we've got some rich gents on our committee and they makes up the difference,' and with a nod and a cunning leer he lurched off. frankie was sleeping soundly when they reached home, and so was the kitten, which was curled up on the quilt on the foot of the bed. after they had had some supper, although it was after eleven o'clock, owen fixed the tree in a large flower-pot that had served a similar purpose before, and nora brought out from the place where it had been stored away since last christmas a cardboard box containing a lot of glittering tinsel ornaments--globes of silvered or gilded or painted glass, birds, butterflies and stars. some of these things had done duty three christmases ago and although they were in some instances slightly tarnished most of them were as good as new. in addition to these and the toys they had bought that evening they had a box of bon-bons and a box of small coloured wax candles, both of which had formed part of the things they got from the grocer's with the christmas club money; and there were also a lot of little coloured paper bags of sweets, and a number of sugar and chocolate toys and animals which had been bought two or three at a time for several weeks past and put away for this occasion. there was something suitable for each child that was coming, with the exception of bert white; they had intended to include a sixpenny pocket knife for him in their purchases that evening, but as they had not been able to afford this owen decided to give him an old set of steel graining combs which he knew the lad had often longed to possess. the tin case containing these tools was accordingly wrapped in some red tissue paper and hung on the tree with the other things. they moved about as quietly as possible so as not to disturb those who were sleeping in the rooms beneath, because long before they were finished the people in the other parts of the house had all retired to rest, and silence had fallen on the deserted streets outside. as they were putting the final touches to their work the profound stillness of the night was suddenly broken by the voices of a band of carol-singers. the sound overwhelmed them with memories of other and happier times, and nora stretched out her hands impulsively to owen, who drew her close to his side. they had been married just over eight years, and although during all that time they had never been really free from anxiety for the future, yet on no previous christmas had they been quite so poor as now. during the last few years periods of unemployment had gradually become more frequent and protracted, and the attempt he had made in the early part of the year to get work elsewhere had only resulted in plunging them into even greater poverty than before. but all the same there was much to be thankful for: poor though they were, they were far better off than many thousands of others: they still had food and shelter, and they had each other and the boy. before they went to bed owen carried the tree into frankie's bedroom and placed it so that he would be able to see it in all its glittering glory as soon as he awoke on christmas morning. chapter 29 the pandorama although the party was not supposed to begin till six o'clock, bert turned up at half past four, bringing the 'pandoramer' with him. at about half past five the other guests began to arrive. elsie and charley linden came first, the girl in a pretty blue frock trimmed with white lace, and charley resplendent in a new suit, which, like his sister's dress, had been made out of somebody's cast-off clothes that had been given to their mother by a visiting lady. it had taken mrs linden many hours of hard work to contrive these garments; in fact, more time than the things were worth, for although they looked all right--especially elsie's--the stuff was so old that it would not wear very long: but this was the only way in which she could get clothes for the children at all: she certainly could not afford to buy them any. so she spent hours and hours making things that she knew would fall to pieces almost as soon as they were made. after these came nellie, rosie and tommy newman. these presented a much less prosperous appearance than the other two. their mother was not so skilful at contriving new clothes out of old. nellie was wearing a grown-up woman's blouse, and by way of ulster she had on an old-fashioned jacket of thick cloth with large pearl buttons. this was also a grown-up woman's garment: it was shaped to fit the figure of a tall woman with wide shoulders and a small waist; consequently, it did not fit nellie to perfection. the waist reached below the poor child's hips. tommy was arrayed in the patched remains of what had once been a good suit of clothes. they had been purchased at a second-hand shop last summer and had been his 'best' for several months, but they were now much too small for him. little rosie--who was only just over three years old--was better off than either of the other two, for she had a red cloth dress that fitted her perfectly: indeed, as the district visitor who gave it to her mother had remarked, it looked as if it had been made for her. 'it's not much to look at,' observed nellie, referring to her big jacket, but all the same we was very glad of it when the rain came on.' the coat was so big that by withdrawing her arms from the sleeves and using it as a cloak or shawl she had managed to make it do for all three of them. tommy's boots were so broken that the wet had got in and saturated his stockings, so nora made him take them all off and wear some old ones of frankie's whilst his own were drying at the fire. philpot, with two large paper bags full of oranges and nuts, arrived just as they were sitting down to tea--or rather cocoa--for with the exception of bert all the children expressed a preference for the latter beverage. bert would have liked to have cocoa also, but hearing that the grown-ups were going to have tea, he thought it would be more manly to do the same. this question of having tea or cocoa for tea became a cause of much uproarious merriment on the part of the children, who asked each other repeatedly which they liked best, 'tea tea?' or 'cocoa tea?' they thought it so funny that they said it over and over again, screaming with laughter all the while, until tommy got a piece of cake stuck in his throat and became nearly black in the face, and then philpot had to turn him upside down and punch him in the back to save him from choking to death. this rather sobered the others, but for some time afterwards whenever they looked at each other they began to laugh afresh because they thought it was such a good joke. when they had filled themselves up with the 'cocoa-tea' and cakes and bread and jam, elsie linden and nellie newman helped to clear away the cups and saucers, and then owen lit the candles on the christmas tree and distributed the toys to the children, and a little while afterwards philpot--who had got a funny-looking mask out of one of the bon-bons--started a fine game pretending to be a dreadful wild animal which he called a pandroculus, and crawling about on all fours, rolled his goggle eyes and growled out he must have a little boy or girl to eat for his supper. he looked so terrible that although they knew it was only a joke they were almost afraid of him, and ran away laughing and screaming to shelter themselves behind nora or owen; but all the same, whenever philpot left off playing, they entreated him to 'be it again', and so he had to keep on being a pandroculus, until exhaustion compelled him to return to his natural form. after this they all sat round the table and had a game of cards; 'snap', they called it, but nobody paid much attention to the rules of the game: everyone seemed to think that the principal thing to do was to kick up as much row as possible. after a while philpot suggested a change to 'beggar my neighbour', and won quite a lot of cards before they found out that he had hidden all the jacks in the pocket of his coat, and then they mobbed him for a cheat. he might have been seriously injured if it had not been for bert, who created a diversion by standing on a chair and announcing that he was about to introduce to their notice 'bert white's world-famed pandorama' as exhibited before all the nobility and crowned heads of europe, england, ireland and scotland, including north america and wales. loud cheers greeted the conclusion of bert's speech. the box was placed on the table, which was then moved to the end of the room, and the chairs were ranged in two rows in front. the 'pandorama' consisted of a stage-front made of painted cardboard and fixed on the front of a wooden box about three feet long by two feet six inches high, and about one foot deep from back to front. the 'show' was a lot of pictures cut out of illustrated weekly papers and pasted together, end to end, so as to form a long strip or ribbon. bert had coloured all the pictures with water-colours. just behind the wings of the stage-front at each end of the box--was an upright roller, and the long strip of pictures was rolled up on this. the upper ends of the rollers came through the top of the box and had handles attached to them. when these handles were turned the pictures passed across the stage, unrolling from one roller and rolling on to the other, and were illuminated by the light of three candles placed behind. the idea of constructing this machine had been suggested to bert by a panorama entertainment he had been to see some time before. 'the style of the decorations,' he remarked, alluding to the painted stage-front, 'is moorish.' he lit the candles at the back of the stage and, having borrowed a tea-tray from nora, desired the audience to take their seats. when they had all done so, he requested owen to put out the lamp and the candles on the tree, and then he made another speech, imitating the manner of the lecturer at the panorama entertainment before mentioned. 'ladies and gentlemen: with your kind permission i am about to hinterduce to your notice some pitchers of events in different parts of the world. as each pitcher appears on the stage i will give a short explanation of the subject, and afterwards the band will play a suitable collection of appropriated music, consisting of hymns and all the latest and most popular songs of the day, and the audience is kindly requested to join in the chorus. 'our first scene,' continued bert as he turned the handles and brought the picture into view, 'represents the docks at southampton; the magnificent steamer which you see lying alongside the shore is the ship which is waiting to take us to foreign parts. as we have already paid our fare, we will now go on board and set sail.' as an accompaniment to this picture bert played the tune of 'goodbye, dolly, i must leave you', and by the time the audience had finished singing the chorus he had rolled on another scene, which depicted a dreadful storm at sea, with a large ship evidently on the point of foundering. the waves were running mountains high and the inky clouds were riven by forked lightning. to increase the terrifying effect, bert rattled the tea tray and played 'the bay of biscay', and the children sung the chorus whilst he rolled the next picture into view. this scene showed the streets of a large city; mounted police with drawn swords were dispersing a crowd: several men had been ridden down and were being trampled under the hoofs of the horses, and a number of others were bleeding profusely from wounds on the head and face. 'after a rather stormy passage we arrives safely at the beautiful city of berlin, in germany, just in time to see a procession of unemployed workmen being charged by the military police. this picture is hintitled "tariff reform means work for all".' as an appropriate musical selection bert played the tune of a well-known song, and the children sang the words: 'to be there! to be there! oh, i knew what it was to be there! and when they tore me clothes, blacked me eyes and broke me nose, then i knew what it was to be there!' during the singing bert turned the handles backwards and again brought on the picture of the storm at sea. 'as we don't want to get knocked on the 'ed, we clears out of berlin as soon as we can--whiles we're safe--and once more embarks on our gallint ship' and after a few more turns of the 'andle we finds ourselves back once more in merry hingland, where we see the inside of a blacksmith's shop with a lot of half-starved women making iron chains. they work seventy hours a week for seven shillings. our next scene is hintitled "the hook and eye carders". 'ere we see the inside of a room in slumtown, with a mother and three children and the old grandmother sewin' hooks and eyes on cards to be sold in drapers' shops. it ses underneath the pitcher that 384 hooks and 384 eyes has to be joined together and sewed on cards for one penny.' while this picture was being rolled away the band played and the children sang with great enthusiasm: 'rule, brittania, brittania rules the waves! britons, never, never, never shall be slaves!' 'our next picture is called "an englishman's home". 'ere we see the inside of another room in slumtown, with the father and mother and four children sitting down to dinner--bread and drippin' and tea. it ses underneath the pitcher that there's thirteen millions of people in england always on the verge of starvation. these people that you see in the pitcher might be able to get a better dinner than this if it wasn't that most of the money wot the bloke earns 'as to pay the rent. again we turns the 'andle and presently we comes to another very beautiful scene--"early morning in trafalgar square". 'ere we see a lot of englishmen who have been sleepin' out all night because they ain't got no 'omes to go to.' as a suitable selection for this picture, bert played the tune of a music-hall song, the words of which were familiar to all the youngsters, who sang at the top of their voices: 'i live in trafalgar square, with four lions to guard me, pictures and statues all over the place, lord nelson staring me straight in the face, of course it's rather draughty, but still i'm sure you'll agree, if it's good enough for lord nelson, it's quite good enough for me.' 'next we 'ave a view of the dining-hall at the topside hotel in london, where we see the tables set for a millionaires' banquet. the forks and spoons is made of solid gold and the plates is made of silver. the flowers that you see on the tables and 'angin' down from the ceilin' and on the walls is worth l2,000 and it cost the bloke wot give the supper over l30,000 for this one beano. a few more turns of the 'andle shows us another glorious banquet--the king of rhineland being entertained by the people of england. next we finds ourselves looking on at the lord mayor's supper at the mansion house. all the fat men that you see sittin' at the tables is liberal and tory members of parlimint. after this we 'ave a very beautiful pitcher hintitled "four footed haristocrats". 'ere you see lady slumrent's pet dogs sittin' up on chairs at their dinner table with white linen napkins tied round their necks, eatin' orf silver plates like human people and being waited on by real live waiters in hevening dress. lady slumrent is very fond of her pretty pets and she does not allow them to be fed on anything but the very best food; they gets chicken, rump steak, mutton chops, rice pudding, jelly and custard.' 'i wished i was a pet dog, don't you?' remarked tommy newman to charley linden. 'not arf!' replied charley. 'here we see another unemployed procession,' continued bert as he rolled another picture into sight; '2,000 able-bodied men who are not allowed to work. next we see the hinterior of a hindustrial 'ome--blind children and cripples working for their living. our next scene is called "cheap labour". 'ere we see a lot of small boys about twelve and thirteen years old bein' served out with their labour stifficats, which gives 'em the right to go to work and earn money to help their unemployed fathers to pay the slum rent. 'once more we turns the 'andle and brings on one of our finest scenes. this lovely pitcher is hintitled "the hangel of charity", and shows us the beautiful lady slumrent seated at the table in a cosy corner of 'er charmin' boodore, writin' out a little cheque for the relief of the poor of slumtown. 'our next scene is called "the rival candidates, or, a scene during the general election". on the left you will observe, standin' up in a motor car, a swell bloke with a eyeglass stuck in one eye, and a overcoat with a big fur collar and cuffs, addressing the crowd: this is the honourable augustus slumrent, the conservative candidate. on the other side of the road we see another motor car and another swell bloke with a round pane of glass in one eye and a overcoat with a big fur collar and cuffs, standing up in the car and addressin' the crowd. this is mr mandriver, the liberal candidate. the crowds of shabby-lookin' chaps standin' round the motor cars wavin' their 'ats and cheerin' is workin' men. both the candidates is tellin' 'em the same old story, and each of 'em is askin' the workin' men to elect 'im to parlimint, and promisin' to do something or other to make things better for the lower horders.' as an appropriate selection to go with this picture, bert played the tune of a popular song, the words being well known to the children, who sang enthusiastically, clapping their hands and stamping their feet on the floor in time with the music: 'we've both been there before, many a time, many a time! we've both been there before, many a time! where many a gallon of beer has gone. to colour his nose and mine, we've both been there before, many a time, many a time!' at the conclusion of the singing, bert turned another picture into view. ''ere we 'ave another election scene. at each side we see the two candidates the same as in the last pitcher. in the middle of the road we see a man lying on the ground, covered with blood, with a lot of liberal and tory working men kickin' 'im, jumpin' on 'im, and stampin' on 'is face with their 'obnailed boots. the bloke on the ground is a socialist, and the reason why they're kickin' 'is face in is because 'e said that the only difference between slumrent and mandriver was that they was both alike.' while the audience were admiring this picture, bert played another well-known tune, and the children sang the words: 'two lovely black eyes, oh what a surprise! only for telling a man he was wrong, two lovely black eyes.' bert continued to turn the handles of the rollers and a long succession of pictures passed across the stage, to the delight of the children, who cheered and sang as occasion demanded, but the most enthusiastic outburst of all greeted the appearance of the final picture, which was a portrait of the king. directly the children saw it--without waiting for the band--they gave three cheers and began to sing the chorus of the national anthem. a round of applause for bert concluded the pandorama performance; the lamp and the candles of the christmas tree were relit--for although all the toys had been taken off, the tree still made a fine show with the shining glass ornaments--and then they had some more games; blind man's buff, a tug-of-war--in which philpot was defeated with great laughter--and a lot of other games. and when they were tired of these, each child 'said a piece' or sung a song, learnt specially for the occasion. the only one who had not come prepared in this respect was little rosie, and even she--so as to be the same as the others--insisted on reciting the only piece she knew. kneeling on the hearthrug, she put her hands together, palm to palm, and shutting her eyes very tightly she repeated the verse she always said every night before going to bed: 'gentle jesus, meek and mild, look on me, a little child. pity my simplicity, suffer me to come to thee.' then she stood up and kissed everyone in turn, and philpot crossed over and began looking out of the window, and coughed, and blew his nose, because a nut that he had been eating had gone down the wrong way. most of them were by this time quite tired out, so after some supper the party broke up. although they were nearly all very sleepy, none of them were very willing to go, but they were consoled by the thought of another entertainment to which they were going later on in the week--the band of hope tea and prize distribution at the shining light chapel. bert undertook to see elsie and charley safely home, and philpot volunteered to accompany nellie and tommy newman, and to carry rosie, who was so tired that she fell asleep on his shoulder before they left the house. as they were going down the stairs frankie held a hurried consultation with his mother, with the result that he was able to shout after them an invitation to come again next christmas. chapter 30 the brigands hold a council of war it being now what is usually called the festive season--possibly because at this period of the year a greater number of people are suffering from hunger and cold than at any other time--the reader will not be surprised at being invited to another little party which took place on the day after the one we have just left. the scene was mr sweater's office. mr sweater was seated at his desk, but with his chair swung round to enable him to face his guests--messrs rushton, didlum, and grinder, who were also seated. 'something will 'ave to be done, and that very soon,' grinder was saying. 'we can't go on much longer as we're doing at present. for my part, i think the best thing to do is to chuck up the sponge at once; the company is practically bankrupt now, and the longer we waits the worser it will be.' 'that's just my opinion,' said didlum dejectedly. 'if we could supply the electric light at the same price as gas, or a little cheaper, we might have some chance; but we can't do it. the fact is that the machinery we've got is no dam good; it's too small and it's wore out, consequently the light we supply is inferior to gas and costs more.' 'yes, i think we're fairly beaten this time,' said rushton. 'why, even if the gas coy hadn't moved their works beyond the borough boundary, still we shouldn't 'ave been hable to compete with 'em.' 'of course not,' said grinder. 'the truth of the matter is just wot didlum says. our machinery is too small, it's worn hout, and good for nothing but to be throwed on the scrap-heap. so there's only one thing left to do and that is--go into liquidation.' 'i don't see it,' remarked sweater. 'well, what do you propose, then?' demanded grinder. 'reconstruct the company? ask the shareholders for more money? pull down the works and build fresh, and buy some new machinery? and then most likely not make a do of it after all? not for me, old chap! i've 'ad enough. you won't catch me chuckin' good money after bad in that way.' 'nor me neither,' said rushton. 'dead orf!' remarked didlum, very decidedly. sweater laughed quietly. 'i'm not such a fool as to suggest anything of that sort,' he said. 'you seem to forget that i am one of the largest shareholders myself. no. what i propose is that we sell out.' 'sell out!' replied grinder with a contemptuous laugh in which the others joined. 'who's going to buy the shares of a concern that's practically bankrupt and never paid a dividend?' 'i've tried to sell my little lot several times already,' said didlum with a sickly smile, 'but nobody won't buy 'em.' 'who's to buy?' repeated sweater, replying to grinder. 'the municipality of course! the ratepayers. why shouldn't mugsborough go in for socialism as well as other towns?' rushton, didlum and grinder fairly gasped for breath: the audacity of the chief's proposal nearly paralysed them. 'i'm afraid we should never git away with it,' ejaculated didlum, as soon as he could speak. 'when the people tumbled to it, there'd be no hend of a row.' 'people! row!' replied sweater, scornfully. 'the majority of the people will never know anything about it! listen to me--' 'are you quite sure as we can't be over'eard?' interrupted rushton, glancing nervously at the door and round the office. 'it's all right,' answered sweater, who nevertheless lowered his voice almost to a whisper, and the others drew their chairs closer and bent forward to listen. 'you know we still have a little money in hand: well, what i propose is this: at the annual meeting, which, as you know, comes off next week, we'll arrange for the secretary to read a highly satisfactory report, and we'll declare a dividend of 15 per cent--we can arrange it somehow between us. of course, we'll have to cook the accounts a little, but i'll see that it's done properly. the other shareholders are not going to ask any awkward questions, and we all understand each other.' sweater paused, and regarded the other three brigands intently. 'do you follow me?' he asked. 'yes, yes,' said didlum eagerly. 'go on with it.' and rushton and grinder nodded assent. 'afterwards,' resumed sweater, 'i'll arrange for a good report of the meeting to appear in the weekly ananias. i'll instruct the editor to write it himself, and i'll tell him just what to say. i'll also get him to write a leading article about it, saying that electricity is sure to supersede gas for lighting purposes in the very near future. then the article will go on to refer to the huge profits made by the gas coy and to say how much better it would have been if the town had bought the gasworks years ago, so that those profits might have been used to reduce the rates, the same as has been done in other towns. finally, the article will declare that it's a great pity that the electric light supply should be in the hands of a private company, and to suggest that an effort be made to acquire it for the town. 'in the meantime we can all go about--in a very quiet and judicious way, of course--bragging about what a good thing we've got, and saying we don't mean to sell. we shall say that we've overcome all the initial expenses and difficulties connected with the installation of the works--that we are only just beginning to reap the reward of our industry and enterprise, and so on. 'then,' continued the chief, 'we can arrange for it to be proposed in the council that the town should purchase the electric light works.' 'but not by one of us four, you know,' said grinder with a cunning leer. 'certainly not; that would give the show away at once. there are, as you know--several members of the band who are not shareholders in the company; we'll get some of them to do most of the talking. we, being the directors of the company, must pretend to be against selling, and stick out for our own price; and when we do finally consent we must make out that we are sacrificing our private interests for the good of the town. we'll get a committee appointed--we'll have an expert engineer down from london--i know a man that will suit our purpose admirably--we'll pay him a trifle and he'll say whatever we tell him to--and we'll rush the whole business through before you can say "jack robinson", and before the rate-payers have time to realize what's being done. not that we need worry ourselves much about them. most of them take no interest in public affairs, but even if there is something said, it won't matter much to us once we've got the money. it'll be a nine days' wonder and then we'll hear no more of it.' as the chief ceased speaking, the other brigands also remained silent, speechless with admiration of his cleverness. 'well, what do you think of it?' he asked. 'think of it!' cried grinder, enthusiastically. 'i think it's splendid! nothing could be better. if we can honly git away with it, i reckon it'll be one of the smartest thing we've ever done.' 'smart ain't the word for it,' observed rushton. 'there's no doubt it's a grand idear!' exclaimed didlum, 'and i've just thought of something else that might be done to help it along. we could arrange to 'ave a lot of letters sent "to the editor of the obscurer" and "to the editor of the ananias," and "to the editor of the weekly chloroform" in favour of the scheme.' 'yes, that's a very good idea,' said grinder. 'for that matter the editors could write them to themselves and sign them "progress", "ratepayer", "advance mugsborough", and sich-like.' 'yes, that's all right,' said the chief, thoughtfully, 'but we must be careful not to overdo it; of course there will have to be a certain amount of publicity, but we don't want to create too much interest in it.' 'come to think of it,' observed rushton arrogantly, 'why should we trouble ourselves about the opinion of the ratepayers at all? why should we trouble to fake the books, or declare a dividend or 'ave the harticles in the papers or anything else? we've got the game in our own 'ands; we've got a majority in the council, and, as mr sweater ses, very few people even take the trouble to read the reports of the meetings.' 'yes, that's right enough,' said grinder. 'but it's just them few wot would make a lot of trouble and talk; they're the very people we 'as to think about. if we can only manage to put them in a fog we'll be all right, and the way to do it is as mr sweater proposes.' 'yes, i think so,' said the chief. 'we must be very careful. i can work it all right in the ananias and the chloroform, and of course you'll see that the obscurer backs us up.' 'i'll take care of that,' said grinder, grimly. the three local papers were run by limited companies. sweater held nearly all the shares of the ananias and of the weekly chloroform, and controlled their policy and contents. grinder occupied the same position with regard to the obscurer. the editors were a sort of marionettes who danced as sweater and grinder pulled the strings. 'i wonder how dr weakling will take it?' remarked rushton. 'that's the very thing i was just thinkin' about,' cried didlum. 'don't you think it would be a good plan if we could arrange to 'ave somebody took bad--you know, fall down in a fit or something in the street just outside the town 'all just before the matter is brought forward in the council, and then 'ave someone to come and call 'im out to attend to the party wot's ill, and keep 'im out till the business is done.' 'yes, that's a capital idear,' said grinder thoughtfully. 'but who could we get to 'ave the fit? it would 'ave to be someone we could trust, you know.' ''ow about rushton? you wouldn't mind doin' it, would yer?' inquired didlum. 'i should strongly object,' said rushton haughtily. he regarded the suggestion that he should act such an undignified part, as a kind of sacrilege. 'then i'll do it meself if necessary,' said didlum. 'i'm not proud when there's money to be made; anything for an honest living.' 'well, i think we're all agreed, so far,' remarked sweater. the others signified assent. 'and i think we all deserve a drink,' the chief continued, producing a decanter and a box of cigars from a cupboard by the side of his desk. 'pass that water bottle from behind you, didlum.' 'i suppose nobody won't be comin' in?' said the latter, anxiously. 'i'm a teetotaler, you know.' 'oh, it's all right,' said sweater, taking four glasses out of the cupboard and pouring out the whisky. 'i've given orders that we're not to be disturbed for anyone. say when.' 'well, 'ere's success to socialism,' cried grinder, raising his glass, and taking a big drink. 'amen--'ear, 'ear, i mean,' said didlum, hastily correcting himself. 'wot i likes about this 'ere business is that we're not only doin' ourselves a bit of good,' continued grinder with a laugh, 'we're not only doin' ourselves a bit of good, but we're likewise doin' the socialists a lot of 'arm. when the ratepayers 'ave bought the works, and they begins to kick up a row because they're losin' money over it--we can tell 'em that it's socialism! and then they'll say that if that's socialism they don't want no more of it.' the other brigands laughed gleefully, and some of didlum's whisky went down the wrong way and nearly sent him into a fit. 'you might as well kill a man at once,' he protested as he wiped the tears from his eyes, 'you might as well kill a man at once as choke 'im to death.' 'and now i've got a bit of good news for you,' said the chief as he put his empty glass down. the others became serious at once. 'although we've had a very rough time of it in our contest with the gasworks company, and although we've got the worst of it, it hasn't been all lavender for them, you know. they've not enjoyed themselves either: we hit them pretty hard when we put up the coal dues.' 'a damn good job too,' said grinder malignantly. 'well,' continued sweater, 'they're just as sick of the fight as they want to be, because of course they don't know exactly how badly we've been hit. for all they know, we could have continued the struggle indefinitely: and--well, to make a long story short, i've had a talk with the managing director and one or two others, and they're willing to let us in with them. so that we can put the money we get for the electric light works into gas shares!' this was such splendid news that they had another drink on the strength of it, and didlum said that one of the first things they would have to do would be to totally abolish the coal dues, because they pressed so hard on the poor. chapter 31 the deserter about the end of january, slyme left easton's. the latter had not succeeded in getting anything to do since the work at 'the cave' was finished, and latterly the quality of the food had been falling off. the twelve shillings slyme paid for his board and lodging was all that ruth had to keep house with. she had tried to get some work to do herself, but generally without success; there were one or two jobs that she might have had if she had been able to give her whole time to them, but of course that was not possible; the child and the housework had to be attended to, and slyme's meals had to be prepared. nevertheless, she contrived to get away several times when she had a chance of earning a few shillings by doing a day's charing for some lady or other, and then she left everything in such order at home that easton was able to manage all right while she was away. on these occasions, she usually left the baby with owen's wife, who was an old schoolmate of hers. nora was the more willing to render her this service because frankie used to be so highly delighted whenever it happened. he never tired of playing with the child, and for several days afterwards he used to worry his mother with entreaties to buy a baby of their own. easton earned a few shillings occasionally; now and then he got a job to clean windows, and once or twice he did a few days' or hours' work with some other painter who had been fortunate enough to get a little job 'on his own'--such as a ceiling to wash and whiten, or a room or two to paint; but such jobs were few. sometimes, when they were very hard up, they sold something; the bible that used to lie on the little table in the bay window was one of the first things to be parted with. ruth erased the inscription from the fly-leaf and then they sold the book at a second-hand shop for two shillings. as time went on, they sold nearly everything that was saleable, except of course, the things that were obtained on the hire system. slyme could see that they were getting very much into debt and behind with the rent, and on two occasions already easton had borrowed five shillings from him, which he might never be able to pay back. another thing was that slyme was always in fear that ruth--who had never wholly abandoned herself to wrongdoing--might tell easton what had happened; more than once she had talked of doing so, and the principal reason why she refrained was that she knew that even if he forgave her, he could never think the same of her as before. slyme repeatedly urged this view upon her, pointing out that no good could result from such a confession. latterly the house had become very uncomfortable. it was not only that the food was bad and that sometimes there was no fire, but ruth and easton were nearly always quarrelling about something or other. she scarcely spoke to slyme at all, and avoided sitting at the table with him whenever possible. he was in constant dread that easton might notice her manner towards him, and seek for some explanation. altogether the situation was so unpleasant that slyme determined to clear out. he made the excuse that he had been offered a few weeks' work at a place some little distance outside the town. after he was gone they lived for several weeks in semi-starvation on what credit they could get and by selling the furniture or anything else they possessed that could be turned into money. the things out of slyme's room were sold almost directly he left. chapter 32 the veteran old jack linden had tried hard to earn a little money by selling bloaters, but they often went bad, and even when he managed to sell them all the profit was so slight that it was not worth doing. before the work at 'the cave' was finished, philpot was a good friend to them; he frequently gave old jack sixpence or a shilling and often brought a bag of cakes or buns for the children. sometimes he came to tea with them on sundays as an excuse for bringing a tin of salmon. elsie and charley frequently went to owen's house to take tea with frankie; in fact, whilst owen had anything to do, they almost lived there, for both owen and nora, knowing that the lindens had nothing to live on except the earnings of the young woman, encouraged the children to come often. old jack made some hopeless attempts to get work--work of any kind, but nobody wanted him; and to make things worse, his eyesight, which had been failing for a long time, became very bad. once he was given a job by a big provision firm to carry an advertisement about the streets. the man who had been carrying it before--an old soldier--had been sacked the previous day for getting drunk while on duty. the advertisement was not an ordinary pair of sandwich boards, but a sort of box without any bottom or lid, a wooden frame, four sides covered with canvas, on which were pasted printed bills advertising margarine. each side of this box or frame was rather larger than an ordinary sandwich board. old linden had to get inside this thing and carry it about the streets; two straps fixed across the top of the frame and passing one over each of his shoulders enabled him to carry it. it swayed about a good deal as he walked along, especially when the wind caught it, but there were two handles inside to hold it steady by. the pay was eighteenpence a day, and he had to travel a certain route, up and down the busiest streets. at first the frame did not feel very heavy, but the weight seemed to increase as the time went on, and the straps hurt his shoulders. he felt very much ashamed, also, whenever he encountered any of his old mates, some of whom laughed at him. in consequence of the frame requiring so much attention to keep it steady, and being unused to the work, and his sight so bad, he several times narrowly escaped being run over. another thing that added to his embarrassment was the jeering of the other sandwichmen, the loafers outside the public houses, and the boys, who shouted 'old jack in the box' after him. sometimes the boys threw refuse at the frame, and once a decayed orange thrown by one of them knocked his hat off. by the time evening came he was scarcely able to stand for weariness. his shoulders, his legs and his feet ached terribly, and as he was taking the thing back to the shop he was accosted by a ragged, dirty-looking, beer-sodden old man whose face was inflamed with drink and fury. 'this was the old soldier who had been discharged the previous day. he cursed and swore in the most awful manner and accused linden of 'taking the bread out of his mouth', and, shaking his fist fiercely at him, shouted that he had a good mind to knock his face through his head and out of the back of his neck. he might possibly have tried to put this threat into practice but for the timely appearance of a policeman, when he calmed down at once and took himself off. jack did not go back the next day; he felt that he would rather starve than have any more of the advertisement frame, and after this he seemed to abandon all hope of earning money: wherever he went it was the same--no one wanted him. so he just wandered about the streets aimlessly, now and then meeting an old workmate who asked him to have a drink, but this was not often, for nearly all of them were out of work and penniless. chapter 33 the soldier's children during most of this time, jack linden's daughter-in-law had 'plenty of work', making blouses and pinafores for sweater & co. she had so much to do that one might have thought that the tory millennium had arrived, and that tariff reform was already an accomplished fact. she had plenty of work. at first they had employed her exclusively on the cheapest kind of blouses--those that were paid for at the rate of two shillings a dozen, but they did not give her many of that sort now. she did the work so neatly that they kept her busy on the better qualities, which did not pay her so well, because although she was paid more per dozen, there was a great deal more work in them than in the cheaper kinds. once she had a very special one to make, for which she was paid six shillings; but it took her four and a half days--working early and late--to do it. the lady who bought this blouse was told that it came from paris, and paid three guineas for it. but of course mrs linden knew nothing of that, and even if she had known, it would have made no difference to her. most of the money she earned went to pay the rent, and sometimes there was only two or three shillings left to buy food for all of them: sometimes not even so much, because although she had plenty of work she was not always able to do it. there were times when the strain of working the machine was unendurable: her shoulders ached, her arms became cramped, and her eyes pained so that it was impossible to continue. then for a change she would leave the sewing and do some housework. once, when they owed four weeks' rent, the agent was so threatening that they were terrified at the thought of being sold up and turned out of the house, and so she decided to sell the round mahogany table and some of the other things out of the sitting-room. nearly all the furniture that was in the house now belonged to her, and had formed her home before her husband died. the old people had given most of their things away at different times to their other sons since she had come to live there. these men were all married and all in employment. one was a fitter at the gasworks; the second was a railway porter, and the other was a butcher; but now that the old man was out of work they seldom came to the house. the last time they had been there was on christmas eve, and then there had been such a terrible row between them that the children had been awakened by it and frightened nearly out of their lives. the cause of the row was that some time previously they had mutually agreed to each give a shilling a week to the old people. they had done this for three weeks and after that the butcher had stopped his contribution: it had occurred to him that he was not to be expected to help to keep his brother's widow and her children. if the old people liked to give up the house and go to live in a room somewhere by themselves, he would continue paying his shilling a week, but not otherwise. upon this the railway porter and the gas-fitter also ceased paying. they said it wasn't fair that they should pay a shilling a week each when the butcher--who was the eldest and earned the best wages--paid nothing. provided he paid, they would pay; but if he didn't pay anything, neither would they. on christmas eve they all happened to come to the house at the same time; each denounced the others, and after nearly coming to blows they all went away raging and cursing and had not been near the place since. as soon as she decided to sell the things, mary went to didlum's second-hand furniture store, and the manager said he would ask mr didlum to call and see the table and other articles. she waited anxiously all the morning, but he did not appear, so she went once more to the shop to remind him. when he did come at last he was very contemptuous of the table and of everything else she offered to sell. five shillings was the very most he could think of giving for the table, and even then he doubted whether he would ever get his money back. eventually he gave her thirty shillings for the table, the overmantel, the easy chair, three other chairs and the two best pictures--one a large steel engraving of 'the good samaritan' and the other 'christ blessing little children'. he paid the money at once; half an hour afterwards the van came to take the things away, and when they were gone, mary sank down on the hearthrug in the wrecked room and sobbed as if her heart would break. this was the first of several similar transactions. slowly, piece by piece, in order to buy food and to pay the rent, the furniture was sold. every time didlum came he affected to be doing them a very great favour by buying the things at all. almost an act of charity. he did not want them. business was so bad: it might be years before he could sell them again, and so on. once or twice he asked mary if she did not want to sell the clock--the one that her late husband had made for his mother, but mary shrank from the thought of selling this, until at last there was nothing else left that didlum would buy, and one week, when mary was too ill to do any needlework--it had to go. he gave them ten shillings for it. mary had expected the old woman to be heartbroken at having to part with this clock, but she was surprised to see her almost indifferent. the truth was, that lately both the old people seemed stunned, and incapable of taking an intelligent interest in what was happening around them, and mary had to attend to everything. from time to time nearly all their other possessions--things of inferior value that didlum would not look at, she carried out and sold at small second-hand shops in back streets or pledged at the pawn-broker's. the feather pillows, sheets, and blankets: bits of carpet or oilcloth, and as much of their clothing as was saleable or pawnable. they felt the loss of the bedclothes more than anything else, for although all the clothes they wore during the day, and all the old clothes and dresses in the house, and even an old coloured tablecloth, were put on the beds at night, they did not compensate for the blankets, and they were often unable to sleep on account of the intense cold. a lady district visitor who called occasionally sometimes gave mary an order for a hundredweight of coal or a shillingsworth of groceries, or a ticket for a quart of soup, which elsie fetched in the evening from the soup kitchen. but this was not very often, because, as the lady said, there were so many cases similar to theirs that it was impossible to do more than a very little for any one of them. sometimes mary became so weak and exhausted through overwork, worry, and lack of proper food that she broke down altogether for the time being, and positively could not do any work at all. then she used to lie down on the bed in her room and cry. whenever she became like this, elsie and charley used to do the housework when they came home from school, and make tea and toast for her, and bring it to the bedside on a chair so that she could eat lying down. when there was no margarine or dripping to put on the toast, they made it very thin and crisp and pretended it was biscuit. the children rather enjoyed these times; the quiet and leisure was so different from other days when their mother was so busy she had no time to speak to them. they would sit on the side of the bed, the old grandmother in her chair opposite with the cat beside her listening to the conversation and purring or mewing whenever they stroked it or spoke to it. they talked principally of the future. elsie said she was going to be a teacher and earn a lot of money to bring home to her mother to buy things with. charley was thinking of opening a grocer's shop and having a horse and cart. when one has a grocer's shop, there is always plenty to eat; even if you have no money, you can take as much as you like out of your shop--good stuff, too, tins of salmon, jam, sardines, eggs, cakes, biscuits and all those sorts of things--and one was almost certain to have some money every day, because it wasn't likely that a whole day would go by without someone or other coming into the shop to buy something. when delivering the groceries with the horse and cart, he would give rides to all the boys he knew, and in the summertime, after the work was done and the shop shut up, mother and elsie and granny could also come for long rides into the country. the old grandmother--who had latterly become quite childish--used to sit and listen to all this talk with a superior air. sometimes she argued with the children about their plans, and ridiculed them. she used to say with a chuckle that she had heard people talk like that before--lots of times--but it never came to nothing in the end. one week about the middle of february, when they were in very sore straits indeed, old jack applied to the secretary of the organized benevolence society for assistance. it was about eleven o'clock in the morning when he turned the corner of the street where the office of the society was situated and saw a crowd of about thirty men waiting for the doors to be opened in order to apply for soup tickets. some of these men were of the tramp or the drunken loafer class; some were old, broken-down workmen like himself, and others were labourers wearing corduroy or moleskin trousers with straps round their legs under their knees. linden waited at a distance until all these were gone before he went in. the secretary received him sympathetically and gave him a big form to fill up, but as linden's eyes were so bad and his hand so unsteady the secretary very obligingly wrote in the answers himself, and informed him that he would inquire into the case and lay his application before the committee at the next meeting, which was to be held on the following thursday--it was then monday. linden explained to him that they were actually starving. he had been out of work for sixteen weeks, and during all that time they had lived for the most part on the earnings of his daughter-in-law, but she had not done anything for nearly a fortnight now, because the firm she worked for had not had any work for her to do. there was no food in the house and the children were crying for something to eat. all last week they had been going to school hungry, for they had had nothing but dry bread and tea every day: but this week--as far as he could see--they would not get even that. after some further talk the secretary gave him two soup tickets and an order for a loaf of bread, and repeated his promise to inquire into the case and bring it before the committee. as jack was returning home he passed the soup kitchen, where he saw the same lot of men who had been to the office of the organized benevolence society for the soup tickets. they were waiting in a long line to be admitted. the premises being so small, the proprietor served them in batches of ten at a time. on wednesday the secretary called at the house, and on friday jack received a letter from him to the effect that the case had been duly considered by the committee, who had come to the conclusion that as it was a 'chronic' case they were unable to deal with it, and advised him to apply to the board of guardians. this was what linden had hitherto shrunk from doing, but the situation was desperate. they owed five weeks' rent, and to crown their misfortune his eyesight had become so bad that even if there had been any prospect of obtaining work it was very doubtful if he could have managed to do it. so linden, feeling utterly crushed and degraded, swallowed all that remained of his pride and went like a beaten dog to see the relieving officer, who took him before the board, who did not think it a suitable case for out-relief, and after some preliminaries it was arranged that linden and his wife were to go into the workhouse, and mary was to be allowed three shillings a week to help her to support herself and the two children. as for linden's sons, the guardians intimated their intention of compelling them to contribute towards the cost of their parents' maintenance. mary accompanied the old people to the gates of their future dwelling-place, and when she returned home she found there a letter addressed to j. linden. it was from the house agent and contained a notice to leave the house before the end of the ensuing week. nothing was said about the rent that was due. perhaps mr sweater thought that as he had already received nearly six hundred pounds in rent from linden he could afford to be generous about the five weeks that were still owing--or perhaps he thought there was no possibility of getting the money. however that may have been, there was no reference to it in the letter--it was simply a notice to clear out, addressed to linden, but meant for mary. it was about half past three o'clock in the afternoon when she returned home and found this letter on the floor in the front passage. she was faint with fatigue and hunger, for she had had nothing but a cup of tea and a slice of bread that day, and her fare had not been much better for many weeks past. the children were at school, and the house--now almost destitute of furniture and without carpets or oilcloth on the floors--was deserted and cold and silent as a tomb. on the kitchen table were a few cracked cups and saucers, a broken knife, some lead teaspoons, a part of a loaf, a small basin containing some dripping and a brown earthenware teapot with a broken spout. near the table were two broken kitchen chairs, one with the top cross-piece gone from the back, and the other with no back to the seat at all. the bareness of the walls was relieved only by a coloured almanac and some paper pictures which the children had tacked upon them, and by the side of the fireplace was the empty wicker chair where the old woman used to sit. there was no fire in the grate, and the cold hearth was untidy with an accumulation of ashes, for during the trouble of these last few days she had not had time or heart to do any housework. the floor was unswept and littered with scraps of paper and dust: in one corner was a heap of twigs and small branches of trees that charley had found somewhere and brought home for the fire. the same disorder prevailed all through the house: all the doors were open, and from where she stood in the kitchen she could see the bed she shared with elsie, with its heterogeneous heap of coverings. the sitting-room contained nothing but a collection of odds and ends of rubbish which belonged to charley--his 'things' as he called them--bits of wood, string and rope; one wheel of a perambulator, a top, an iron hoop and so on. through the other door was visible the dilapidated bedstead that had been used by the old people, with a similar lot of bedclothes to those on her own bed, and the torn, ragged covering of the mattress through the side of which the flock was protruding and falling in particles on to the floor. as she stood there with the letter in her hand--faint and weary in the midst of all this desolation, it seemed to her as if the whole world were falling to pieces and crumbling away all around her. chapter 34 the beginning of the end during the months of january and february, owen, crass, slyme and sawkins continued to work at irregular intervals for rushton & co., although--even when there was anything to do--they now put in only six hours a day, commencing in the morning and leaving off at four, with an hour's interval for dinner between twelve and one. they finished the 'plant' and painted the front of rushton's shop. when all this was completed, as no other work came in, they all had to 'stand off' with the exception of sawkins, who was kept on because he was cheap and able to do all sorts of odd jobs, such as unstopping drains, repairing leaky roofs, rough painting or lime-washing, and he was also useful as a labourer for the plumbers, of whom there were now three employed at rushton's, the severe weather which had come in with january having made a lot of work in that trade. with the exception of this one branch, practically all work was at a standstill. during this time rushton & co. had had several 'boxing-up' jobs to do, and crass always did the polishing of the coffins on these occasions, besides assisting to take the 'box' home when finished and to 'lift in' the corpse, and afterwards he always acted as one of the bearers at the funerals. for an ordinary class funeral he usually put in about three hours for the polishing; that came to one and nine. taking home the coffin and lifting in the corpse, one shilling--usually there were two men to do this besides hunter, who always accompanied them to superintend the work--attending the funeral and acting as bearer, four shillings: so that altogether crass made six shillings and ninepence out of each funeral, and sometimes a little more. for instance, when there was an unusually good-class corpse they had a double coffin and then of course there were two 'lifts in', for the shell was taken home first and the outer coffin perhaps a day or two later: this made another shilling. no matter how expensive the funeral was, the bearers never got any more money. sometimes the carpenter and crass were able to charge an hour or two more on the making and polishing of a coffin for a good job, but that was all. sometimes, when there was a very cheap job, they were paid only three shillings for attending as bearers, but this was not often: as a rule they got the same amount whether it was a cheap funeral or an expensive one. slyme earned only five shillings out of each funeral, and owen only one and six--for writing the coffin plate. sometimes there were three or four funerals in a week, and then crass did very well indeed. he still had the two young men lodgers at his house, and although one of them was out of work he was still able to pay his way because he had some money in the bank. one of the funeral jobs led to a terrible row between crass and sawkins. the corpse was that of a well-to-do woman who had been ill for a long time with cancer of the stomach, and after the funeral rushton & co. had to clean and repaint and paper the room she had occupied during her illness. although cancer is not supposed to be an infectious disease, they had orders to take all the bedding away and have it burnt. sawkins was instructed to take a truck to the house and get the bedding and take it to the town refuse destructor to be destroyed. there were two feather beds, a bolster and two pillows: they were such good things that sawkins secretly resolved that instead of taking them to the destructor he would take them to a second-hand dealer and sell them. as he was coming away from the house with the things he met hunter, who told him that he wanted him for some other work; so he was to take the truck to the yard and leave it there for the present; he could take the bedding to the destructor later on in the day. sawkins did as hunter ordered, and in the meantime crass, who happened to be working at the yard painting some venetian blinds, saw the things on the truck, and, hearing what was to be done with them, he also thought it was a pity that such good things should be destroyed: so when sawkins came in the afternoon to take them away crass told him he need not trouble; 'i'm goin' to 'ave that lot, he said; 'they're too good to chuck away; there's nothing wrong with 'em.' this did not suit sawkins at all. he said he had been told to take them to the destructor, and he was going to do so. he was dragging the cart out of the yard when crass rushed up and lifted the bundle off and carried it into the paint-shop. sawkins ran after him and they began to curse and swear at each other; crass accusing sawkins of intending to take the things to the marine stores and sell them. sawkins seized hold of the bundle with the object of replacing it on the cart, but crass got hold of it as well and they had a tussle for it--a kind of tug of war--reeling and struggling all over the shop. cursing and swearing horribly all the time. finally, sawkins--being the better man of the two--succeeded in wrenching the bundle away and put it on the cart again, and then crass hurriedly put on his coat and said he was going to the office to ask mr rushton if he might have the things. upon hearing this, sawkins became so infuriated that he lifted the bundle off the cart and, throwing it upon the muddy ground, right into a pool of dirty water, trampled it underfoot; and then, taking out his clasp knife, began savagely hacking and ripping the ticking so that the feathers all came falling out. in a few minutes he had damaged the things beyond hope of repair, while crass stood by, white and trembling, watching the proceedings but lacking the courage to interfere. 'now go to the office and ask rushton for 'em, if you like!' shouted sawkins. 'you can 'ave 'em now, if you want 'em.' crass made no answer and, after a moment's hesitation, went back to his work, and sawkins piled the things on the cart once more and took them away to the destructor. he would not be able to sell them now, but at any rate he had stopped that dirty swine crass from getting them. when crass went back to the paint-shop he found there one of the pillows which had fallen out of the bundle during the struggle. he took it home with him that evening and slept upon it. it was a fine pillow, much fuller and softer and more cosy than the one he had been accustomed to. a few days afterwards when he was working at the room where the woman died, they gave him some other things that had belonged to her to do away with, and amongst them was a kind of wrap of grey knitted wool. crass kept this for himself: it was just the thing to wrap round one's neck when going to work on a cold morning, and he used it for that purpose all through the winter. in addition to the funerals, there was a little other work: sometimes a room or two to be painted and papered and ceilings whitened, and once they had the outside of two small cottages to paint--doors and windows--two coats. all four of them worked at this job and it was finished in two days. and so they went on. some weeks crass earned a pound or eighteen shillings; sometimes a little more, generally less and occasionally nothing at all. there was a lot of jealousy and ill-feeling amongst them about the work. slyme and crass were both aggrieved about sawkins whenever they were idle, especially if the latter were painting or whitewashing, and their indignation was shared by all the others who were 'off'. harlow swore horribly about it, and they all agreed that it was disgraceful that a bloody labourer should be employed doing what ought to be skilled work for fivepence an hour, while properly qualified men were 'walking about'. these other men were also incensed against slyme and crass because the latter were given the preference whenever there was a little job to do, and it was darkly insinuated that in order to secure this preference these two were working for sixpence an hour. there was no love lost between crass and slyme either: crass was furious whenever it happened that slyme had a few hours' work to do if he himself were idle, and if ever crass was working while slyme was 'standing still' the latter went about amongst the other unemployed men saying ugly things about crass, whom he accused of being a 'crawler'. owen also came in for his share of abuse and blame: most of them said that a man like him should stick out for higher wages whether employed on special work or not, and then he would not get any preference. but all the same, whatever they said about each other behind each other's backs, they were all most friendly to each other when they met face to face. once or twice owen did some work--such as graining a door or writing a sign--for one or other of his fellow workmen who had managed to secure a little job 'on his own', but putting it all together, the coffin-plates and other work at rushton's and all, his earnings had not averaged ten shillings a week for the last six weeks. often they had no coal and sometimes not even a penny to put into the gas meter, and then, having nothing left good enough to pawn, he sometimes obtained a few pence by selling some of his books to second-hand book dealers. however, bad as their condition was, owen knew that they were better off than the majority of the others, for whenever he went out he was certain to meet numbers of men whom he had worked with at different times, who said--some of them--that they had been idle for ten, twelve, fifteen and in some cases for twenty weeks without having earned a shilling. owen used to wonder how they managed to continue to exist. most of them were wearing other people's cast-off clothes, hats, and boots, which had in some instances been given to their wives by 'visiting ladies', or by the people at whose houses their wives went to work, charing. as for food, most of them lived on such credit as they could get, and on the scraps of broken victuals and meat that their wives brought home from the places they worked at. some of them had grown-up sons and daughters who still lived with them and whose earnings kept their homes together, and the wives of some of them eked out a miserable existence by letting lodgings. the week before old linden went into the workhouse owen earned nothing, and to make matters worse the grocer from whom they usually bought their things suddenly refused to let them have any more credit. owen went to see him, and the man said he was very sorry, but he could not let them have anything more without the money; he did not mind waiting a few weeks for what was already owing, but he could not let the amount get any higher; his books were full of bad debts already. in conclusion, he said that he hoped owen would not do as so many others had done and take his ready money elsewhere. people came and got credit from him when they were hard up, and afterwards spent their ready money at the monopole company's stores on the other side of the street, because their goods were a trifle cheaper, and it was not fair. owen admitted that it was not fair, but reminded him that they always bought their things at his shop. the grocer, however, was inexorable; he repeated several times that his books were full of bad debts and his own creditors were pressing him. during their conversation the shopkeeper's eyes wandered continually to the big store on the other side of the street; the huge, gilded letters of the name 'monopole stores' seemed to have an irresistible attraction for him. once he interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence to point out to owen a little girl who was just coming out of the stores with a small parcel in her hand. 'her father owes me nearly thirty shillings,' he said, 'but they spend their ready money there.' the front of the grocer's shop badly needed repainting, and the name on the fascia, 'a. smallman', was so faded as to be almost indecipherable. it had been owen's intention to offer to do this work--the cost to go against his account--but the man appeared to be so harassed that owen refrained from making the suggestion. they still had credit at the baker's, but they did not take much bread: when one has had scarcely anything else but bread to eat for nearly a month one finds it difficult to eat at all. that same day, when he returned home after his interview with the grocer, they had a loaf of beautiful fresh bread, but none of them could eat it, although they were hungry: it seemed to stick in their throats, and they could not swallow it even with the help of a drink of tea. but they drank the tea, which was the one thing that enabled them to go on living. the next week owen earned eight shillings altogether: a few hours he put in assisting crass to wash off and whiten a ceiling and paint a room, and there was one coffin-plate. he wrote the latter at home, and while he was doing it he heard frankie--who was out in the scullery with nora--say to her: 'mother, how many more days to you think we'll have to have only dry bread and tea?' owen's heart seemed to stop as he heard the child's question and listened for nora's answer, but the question was not to be answered at all just then, for at that moment they heard someone running up the stairs and presently the door was unceremoniously thrown open and charley linden rushed into the house, out of breath, hatless, and crying piteously. his clothes were old and ragged; they had been patched at the knees and elbows, but the patches were tearing away from the rotting fabric into which they had been sewn. he had on a pair of black stockings full of holes through which the skin was showing. the soles of his boots were worn through at one side right to the uppers, and as he walked the sides of his bare heels came into contact with the floor, the front part of the sole of one boot was separated from the upper, and his bare toes, red with cold and covered with mud, protruded through the gap. some sharp substance--a nail or a piece of glass or flint--had evidently lacerated his right foot, for blood was oozing from the broken heel of his boot on to the floor. they were unable to make much sense of the confused story he told them through his sobs as soon as he was able to speak. all that was clear was that there was something very serious the matter at home: he thought his mother must be either dying or dead, because she did not speak or move or open her eyes, and 'please, please, please will you come home with me and see her?' while nora was getting ready to go with the boy, owen made him sit on a chair, and having removed the boot from the foot that was bleeding, washed the cut with some warm water and bandaged it with a piece of clean rag, and then they tried to persuade him to stay there with frankie while nora went to see his mother, but the boy would not hear of it. so frankie went with them instead. owen could not go because he had to finish the coffin-plate, which was only just commenced. it will be remembered that we left mary linden alone in the house after she returned from seeing the old people away. when the children came home from school, about half an hour afterwards, they found her sitting in one of the chairs with her head resting on her arms on the table, unconscious. they were terrified, because they could not awaken her and began to cry, but presently charley thought of frankie's mother and, telling his sister to stay there while he was gone, he started off at a run for owen's house, leaving the front door wide open after him. when nora and the two boys reached the house they found there two other women neighbours, who had heard elsie crying and had come to see what was wrong. mary had recovered from her faint and was lying down on the bed. nora stayed with her for some time after the other women went away. she lit the fire and gave the children their tea--there was still some coal and food left of what had been bought with the three shillings obtained from the board of guardians--and afterwards she tidied the house. mary said that she did not know exactly what she would have to do in the future. if she could get a room somewhere for two or three shillings a week, her allowance from the guardians would pay the rent, and she would be able to earn enough for herself and the children to live on. this was the substance of the story that nora told owen when she returned home. he had finished writing the coffin-plate, and as it was now nearly dry he put on his coat and took it down to the carpenter's shop at the yard. on his way back he met easton, who had been hanging about in the vain hope of seeing hunter and finding out if there was any chance of a job. as they walked along together, easton confided to owen that he had earned scarcely anything since he had been stood off at rushton's, and what he had earned had gone, as usual, to pay the rent. slyme had left them some time ago. ruth did not seem able to get on with him; she had been in a funny sort of temper altogether, but since he had gone she had had a little work at a boarding-house on the grand parade. but things had been going from bad to worse. they had not been able to keep up the payments for the furniture they had hired, so the things had been seized and carted off. they had even stripped the oilcloth from the floor. easton remarked he was sorry he had not tacked the bloody stuff down in such a manner that they would not have been able to take it up without destroying it. he had been to see didlum, who said he didn't want to be hard on them, and that he would keep the things together for three months, and if easton had paid up arrears by that time he could have them back again, but there was, in easton's opinion, very little chance of that. owen listened with contempt and anger. here was a man who grumbled at the present state of things, yet took no trouble to think for himself and try to alter them, and who at the first chance would vote for the perpetuation of the system which produced his misery. 'have you heard that old jack linden and his wife went to the workhouse today,' he said. 'no,' replied easton, indifferently. 'it's only what i expected.' owen then suggested it would not be a bad plan for easton to let his front room, now that it was empty, to mrs linden, who would be sure to pay her rent, which would help easton to pay his. easton agreed and said he would mention it to ruth, and a few minutes later they parted. the next morning nora found ruth talking to mary linden about the room and as the eastons lived only about five minutes' walk away, they all three went round there in order that mary might see the room. the appearance of the house from outside was unaltered: the white lace curtains still draped the windows of the front room; and in the centre of the bay was what appeared to be a small round table covered with a red cloth, and upon it a geranium in a flowerpot standing in a saucer with a frill of coloured tissue paper round it. these things and the curtains, which fell close together, made it impossible for anyone to see that the room was, otherwise, unfurnished. the 'table' consisted of an empty wooden box--procured from the grocer's--stood on end, with the lid of the scullery copper placed upside down upon it for a top and covered with an old piece of red cloth. the purpose of this was to prevent the neighbours from thinking that they were hard up; although they knew that nearly all those same neighbours were in more or less similar straits. it was not a very large room, considering that it would have to serve all purposes for herself and the two children, but mrs linden knew that it was not likely that she would be able to get one as good elsewhere for the same price, so she agreed to take it from the following monday at two shillings a week. as the distance was so short they were able to carry most of the smaller things to their new home during the next few days, and on the monday evening, when it was dark. owen and easton brought the remainder on a truck they borrowed for the purpose from hunter. during the last weeks of february the severity of the weather increased. there was a heavy fall of snow on the 20th followed by a hard frost which lasted several days. about ten o'clock one night a policeman found a man lying unconscious in the middle of a lonely road. at first he thought the man was drunk, and after dragging him on to the footpath out of the way of passing vehicles he went for the stretcher. they took the man to the station and put him into a cell, which was already occupied by a man who had been caught in the act of stealing a swede turnip from a barn. when the police surgeon came he pronounced the supposed drunken man to be dying from bronchitis and want of food; and he further said that there was nothing to indicate that the man was addicted to drink. when the inquest was held a few days afterwards, the coroner remarked that it was the third case of death from destitution that had occurred in the town within six weeks. the evidence showed that the man was a plasterer who had walked from london with the hope of finding work somewhere in the country. he had no money in his possession when he was found by the policeman; all that his pockets contained being several pawn-tickets and a letter from his wife, which was not found until after he died, because it was in an inner pocket of his waistcoat. a few days before this inquest was held, the man who had been arrested for stealing the turnip had been taken before the magistrates. the poor wretch said he did it because he was starving, but aldermen sweater and grinder, after telling him that starvation was no excuse for dishonesty, sentenced him to pay a fine of seven shillings and costs, or go to prison for seven days with hard labour. as the convict had neither money nor friends, he had to go to jail, where he was, after all, better off than most of those who were still outside because they lacked either the courage or the opportunity to steal something to relieve their sufferings. as time went on the long-continued privation began to tell upon owen and his family. he had a severe cough: his eyes became deeply sunken and of remarkable brilliancy, and his thin face was always either deathly pale or dyed with a crimson flush. frankie also began to show the effects of being obliged to go so often without his porridge and milk; he became very pale and thin and his long hair came out in handfuls when his mother combed or brushed it. this was a great trouble to the boy, who, since hearing the story of samson read out of the bible at school, had ceased from asking to have his hair cut short, lest he should lose his strength in consequence. he used to test himself by going through a certain exercise he had himself invented, with a flat iron, and he was always much relieved when he found that, notwithstanding the loss of the porridge, he was still able to lift the iron the proper number of times. but after a while, as he found that it became increasingly difficult to go through the exercise, he gave it up altogether, secretly resolving to wait until 'dad' had more work to do, so that he could have the porridge and milk again. he was sorry to have to discontinue the exercise, but he said nothing about it to his father or mother because he did not want to 'worry' them... sometimes nora managed to get a small job of needlework. on one occasion a woman with a small son brought a parcel of garments belonging to herself or her husband, an old ulster, several coats, and so on--things that although they were too old-fashioned or shabby to wear, yet might look all right if turned and made up for the boy. nora undertook to do this, and after working several hours every day for a week she earned four shillings: and even then the woman thought it was so dear that she did not bring any more. another time mrs easton got her some work at a boarding-house where she herself was employed. the servant was laid up, and they wanted some help for a few days. the pay was to be two shillings a day, and dinner. owen did not want her to go because he feared she was not strong enough to do the work, but he gave way at last and nora went. she had to do the bedrooms, and on the evening of the second day, as a result of the constant running up and down the stairs carrying heavy cans and pails of water, she was in such intense pain that she was scarcely able to walk home, and for several days afterwards had to lie in bed through a recurrence of her old illness, which caused her to suffer untold agony whenever she tried to stand. owen was alternately dejected and maddened by the knowledge of his own helplessness: when he was not doing anything for rushton he went about the town trying to find some other work, but usually with scant success. he did some samples of showcard and window tickets and endeavoured to get some orders by canvassing the shops in the town, but this was also a failure, for these people generally had a ticket-writer to whom they usually gave their work. he did get a few trifling orders, but they were scarcely worth doing at the price he got for them. he used to feel like a criminal when he went into the shops to ask them for the work, because he realized fully that, in effect, he was saying to them: 'take your work away from the other man, and employ me.' he was so conscious of this that it gave him a shamefaced manner, which, coupled as it was with his shabby clothing, did not create a very favourable impression upon those he addressed, who usually treated him with about as much courtesy as they would have extended to any other sort of beggar. generally, after a day's canvassing, he returned home unsuccessful and faint with hunger and fatigue. once, when there was a bitterly cold east wind blowing, he was out on one of these canvassing expeditions and contracted a severe cold: his chest became so bad that he found it almost impossible to speak, because the effort to do so often brought on a violent fit of coughing. it was during this time that a firm of drapers, for whom he had done some showcards, sent him an order for one they wanted in a hurry, it had to be delivered the next morning, so he stayed up by himself till nearly midnight to do it. as he worked, he felt a strange sensation in his chest: it was not exactly a pain, and he would have found it difficult to describe it in words--it was just a sensation. he did not attach much importance to it, thinking it an effect of the cold he had taken, but whatever it was he could not help feeling conscious of it all the time. frankie had been put to bed that evening at the customary hour, but did not seem to be sleeping as well as usual. owen could hear him twisting and turning about and uttering little cries in his sleep. he left his work several times to go into the boy's room and cover him with the bedclothes which his restless movements had disordered. as the time wore on, the child became more tranquil, and about eleven o'clock, when owen went in to look at him, he found him in a deep sleep, lying on his side with his head thrown back on the pillow, breathing so softly through his slightly parted lips that the sound was almost imperceptible. the fair hair that clustered round his forehead was damp with perspiration, and he was so still and pale and silent that one might have thought he was sleeping the sleep that knows no awakening. about an hour later, when he had finished writing the showcard, owen went out into the scullery to wash his hands before going to bed: and whilst he was drying them on the towel, the strange sensation he had been conscious of all the evening became more intense, and a few seconds afterwards he was terrified to find his mouth suddenly filled with blood. for what seemed an eternity he fought for breath against the suffocating torrent, and when at length it stopped, he sank trembling into a chair by the side of the table, holding the towel to his mouth and scarcely daring to breathe, whilst a cold sweat streamed from every pore and gathered in large drops upon his forehead. through the deathlike silence of the night there came from time to time the chimes of the clock of a distant church, but he continued to sit there motionless, taking no heed of the passing hours, and possessed with an awful terror. so this was the beginning of the end! and afterwards the other two would be left by themselves at the mercy of the world. in a few years' time the boy would be like bert white, in the clutches of some psalm-singing devil like hunter or rushton, who would use him as if he were a beast of burden. he imagined he could see him now as he would be then: worked, driven, and bullied, carrying loads, dragging carts, and running here and there, trying his best to satisfy the brutal tyrants, whose only thought would be to get profit out of him for themselves. if he lived, it would be to grow up with his body deformed and dwarfed by unnatural labour and with his mind stultified, degraded and brutalized by ignorance and poverty. as this vision of the child's future rose before him, owen resolved that it should never be! he would not leave them alone and defenceless in the midst of the 'christian' wolves who were waiting to rend them as soon as he was gone. if he could not give them happiness, he could at least put them out of the reach of further suffering. if he could not stay with them, they would have to come with him. it would be kinder and more merciful. chapter 35 facing the 'problem' nearly every other firm in the town was in much the same plight as rushton & co.; none of them had anything to speak of to do, and the workmen no longer troubled to go to the different shops asking for a job. they knew it was of no use. most of them just walked about aimlessly or stood talking in groups in the streets, principally in the neighbourhood of the wage slave market near the fountain on the grand parade. they congregated here in such numbers that one or two residents wrote to the local papers complaining of the 'nuisance', and pointing out that it was calculated to drive the 'better-class' visitors out of the town. after this two or three extra policemen were put on duty near the fountain with instructions to 'move on' any groups of unemployed that formed. they could not stop them from coming there, but they prevented them standing about. the processions of unemployed continued every day, and the money they begged from the public was divided equally amongst those who took part. sometimes it amounted to one and sixpence each, sometimes it was a little more and sometimes a little less. these men presented a terrible spectacle as they slunk through the dreary streets, through the rain or the snow, with the slush soaking into their broken boots, and, worse still, with the bitterly cold east wind penetrating their rotten clothing and freezing their famished bodies. the majority of the skilled workers still held aloof from these processions, although their haggard faces bore involuntary testimony to their sufferings. although privation reigned supreme in their desolate homes, where there was often neither food nor light nor fire, they were too 'proud' to parade their misery before each other or the world. they secretly sold or pawned their clothing and their furniture and lived in semi-starvation on the proceeds, and on credit, but they would not beg. many of them even echoed the sentiments of those who had written to the papers, and with a strange lack of class-sympathy blamed those who took part in the processions. they said it was that sort of thing that drove the 'better class' away, injured the town, and caused all the poverty and unemployment. however, some of them accepted charity in other ways; district visitors distributed tickets for coal and groceries. not that that sort of thing made much difference; there was usually a great deal of fuss and advice, many quotations of scripture, and very little groceries. and even what there was generally went to the least-deserving people, because the only way to obtain any of this sort of 'charity' is by hypocritically pretending to be religious: and the greater the hypocrite, the greater the quantity of coal and groceries. these 'charitable' people went into the wretched homes of the poor and--in effect--said: 'abandon every particle of self-respect: cringe and fawn: come to church: bow down and grovel to us, and in return we'll give you a ticket that you can take to a certain shop and exchange for a shillingsworth of groceries. and, if you're very servile and humble we may give you another one next week.' they never gave the 'case' the money. the ticket system serves three purposes. it prevents the 'case' abusing the 'charity' by spending the money on drink. it advertises the benevolence of the donors: and it enables the grocer--who is usually a member of the church--to get rid of any stale or damaged stock he may have on hand. when these visiting ladies' went into a workman's house and found it clean and decently furnished, and the children clean and tidy, they came to the conclusion that those people were not suitable 'cases' for assistance. perhaps the children had had next to nothing to eat, and would have been in rags if the mother had not worked like a slave washing and mending their clothes. but these were not the sort of cases that the visiting ladies assisted; they only gave to those who were in a state of absolute squalor and destitution, and then only on condition that they whined and grovelled. in addition to this district visitor business, the well-to-do inhabitants and the local authorities attempted--or rather, pretended--to grapple with the poverty 'problem' in many other ways, and the columns of the local papers were filled with letters from all sorts of cranks who suggested various remedies. one individual, whose income was derived from brewery shares, attributed the prevailing distress to the drunken and improvident habits of the lower orders. another suggested that it was a divine protest against the growth of ritualism and what he called 'fleshly religion', and suggested a day of humiliation and prayer. a great number of well-fed persons thought this such an excellent proposition that they proceeded to put it into practice. they prayed, whilst the unemployed and the little children fasted. if one had not been oppressed by the tragedy of want and misery, one might have laughed at the farcical, imbecile measures that were taken to relieve it. several churches held what they called 'rummage' or 'jumble' sales. they sent out circulars something like this: jumble sale in aid of the unemployed. if you have any articles of any description which are of no further use to you, we should be grateful for them, and if you will kindly fill in annexed form and post it to us, we will send and collect them. on the day of the sale the parish room was transformed into a kind of marine stores, filled with all manner of rubbish, with the parson and the visiting ladies grinning in the midst. the things were sold for next to nothing to such as cared to buy them, and the local rag-and-bone man reaped a fine harvest. the proceeds of these sales were distributed in 'charity' and it was usually a case of much cry and little wool. there was a religious organization, called 'the mugsborough skull and crossbones boys', which existed for the purpose of perpetuating the great religious festival of guy fawkes. this association also came to the aid of the unemployed and organized a grand fancy dress carnival and torchlight procession. when this took place, although there was a slight sprinkling of individuals dressed in tawdry costumes as cavaliers of the time of charles i, and a few more as highwaymen or footpads, the majority of the processionists were boys in women's clothes, or wearing sacks with holes cut in them for their heads and arms, and with their faces smeared with soot. there were also a number of men carrying frying-pans in which they burnt red and blue fire. the procession--or rather, mob--was headed by a band, and the band was headed by two men, arm in arm, one very tall, dressed to represent satan, in red tights, with horns on his head, and smoking a large cigar, and the other attired in the no less picturesque costume of a bishop of the established church. this crew paraded the town, howling and dancing, carrying flaring torches, burning the blue and red fire, and some of them singing silly or obscene songs; whilst the collectors ran about with the boxes begging for money from people who were in most cases nearly as poverty-stricken as the unemployed they were asked to assist. the money thus obtained was afterwards handed over to the secretary of the organized benevolence society, mr sawney grinder. then there was the soup kitchen, which was really an inferior eating-house in a mean street. the man who ran this was a relative of the secretary of the obs. he cadged all the ingredients for the soup from different tradespeople: bones and scraps of meat from butchers: pea meal and split peas from provision dealers: vegetables from greengrocers: stale bread from bakers, and so on. well-intentioned, charitable old women with more money than sense sent him donations in cash, and he sold the soup for a penny a basin--or a penny a quart to those who brought jugs. he had a large number of shilling books printed, each containing thirteen penny tickets. the organized benevolence society bought a lot of these books and resold them to benevolent persons, or gave them away to 'deserving cases'. it was this connection with the obs that gave the soup kitchen a semi-official character in the estimation of the public, and furnished the proprietor with the excuse for cadging the materials and money donations. in the case of the soup kitchen, as with the unemployed processions, most of those who benefited were unskilled labourers or derelicts: with but few exceptions the unemployed artisans--although their need was just as great as that of the others--avoided the place as if it were infected with the plague. they were afraid even to pass through the street where it was situated lest anyone seeing them coming from that direction should think they had been there. but all the same, some of them allowed their children to go there by stealth, by night, to buy some of this charity-tainted food. another brilliant scheme, practical and statesmanlike, so different from the wild projects of demented socialists, was started by the rev. mr bosher, a popular preacher, the vicar of the fashionable church of the whited sepulchre. he collected some subscriptions from a number of semi-imbecile old women who attended his church. with some of this money he bought a quantity of timber and opened what he called a labour yard, where he employed a number of men sawing firewood. being a clergyman, and because he said he wanted it for a charitable purpose, of course he obtained the timber very cheaply--for about half what anyone else would have had to pay for it. the wood-sawing was done piecework. a log of wood about the size of a railway sleeper had to be sawn into twelve pieces, and each of these had to be chopped into four. for sawing and chopping one log in this manner the worker was paid ninepence. one log made two bags of firewood, which were sold for a shilling each--a trifle under the usual price. the men who delivered the bags were paid three half-pence for each two bags. as there were such a lot of men wanting to do this work, no one was allowed to do more than three lots in one day--that came to two shillings and threepence--and no one was allowed to do more than two days in one week. the vicar had a number of bills printed and displayed in shop windows calling attention to what he was doing, and informing the public that orders could be sent to the vicarage by post and would receive prompt attention and the fuel could be delivered at any address--messrs rushton & co. having very kindly lent a handcart for the use of the men employed at the labour yard. as a result of the appearance of this bill, and of the laudatory notices in the columns of the ananias, the obscurer, and the chloroform--the papers did not mind giving the business a free advertisement, because it was a charitable concern--many persons withdrew their custom from those who usually supplied them with firewood, and gave their orders to the yard; and they had the satisfaction of getting their fuel cheaper than before and of performing a charitable action at the same time. as a remedy for unemployment this scheme was on a par with the method of the tailor in the fable who thought to lengthen his cloth by cutting a piece off one end and sewing it on to the other; but there was one thing about it that recommended it to the vicar--it was self-supporting. he found that there would be no need to use all the money he had extracted from the semi-imbecile old ladies for timber, so he bought himself a newfoundland dog, an antique set of carved ivory chessmen, and a dozen bottles of whisky with the remainder of the cash. the reverend gentleman hit upon yet another means of helping the poor. he wrote a letter to the weekly chloroform appealing for cast-off boots for poor children. this was considered such a splendid idea that the editors of all the local papers referred to it in leading articles, and several other letters were written by prominent citizens extolling the wisdom and benevolence of the profound bosher. most of the boots that were sent in response to this appeal had been worn until they needed repair--in a very large proportion of instances, until they were beyond repair. the poor people to whom they were given could not afford to have them mended before using them, and the result was that the boots generally began to fall to pieces after a few days' wear. this scheme amounted to very little. it did not increase the number of cast-off boots, and most of the people who 'cast off' their boots generally gave them to someone or other. the only difference it can have made was that possibly a few persons who usually threw their boots away or sold them to second-hand dealers may have been induced to send them to mr bosher instead. but all the same nearly everybody said it was a splendid idea: its originator was applauded as a public benefactor, and the pettifogging busybodies who amused themselves with what they were pleased to term 'charitable work' went into imbecile ecstasies over him. chapter 36 the obs one of the most important agencies for the relief of distress was the organized benevolence society. this association received money from many sources. the proceeds of the fancy-dress carnival; the collections from different churches and chapels which held special services in aid of the unemployed; the weekly collections made by the employees of several local firms and business houses; the proceeds of concerts, bazaars, and entertainments, donations from charitable persons, and the subscriptions of the members. the society also received large quantities of cast-off clothing and boots, and tickets of admission to hospitals, convalescent homes and dispensaries from subscribers to those institutions, or from people like rushton & co., who had collecting-boxes in their workshops and offices. altogether during the last year the society had received from various sources about three hundred pounds in hard cash. this money was devoted to the relief of cases of distress. the largest item in the expenditure of the society was the salary of the general secretary, mr sawney grinder--a most deserving case--who was paid one hundred pounds a year. after the death of the previous secretary there were so many candidates for the vacant post that the election of the new secretary was a rather exciting affair. the excitement was all the more intense because it was restrained. a special meeting of the society was held: the mayor, alderman sweater, presided, and amongst those present were councillors rushton, didlum and grinder, mrs starvem, rev. mr bosher, a number of the rich, semi-imbecile old women who had helped to open the labour yard, and several other 'ladies'. some of these were the district visitors already alluded to, most of them the wives of wealthy citizens and retired tradesmen, richly dressed, ignorant, insolent, overbearing frumps, who--after filling themselves with good things in their own luxurious homes--went flouncing into the poverty-stricken dwellings of their poor 'sisters' and talked to them of 'religion', lectured them about sobriety and thrift, and--sometimes--gave them tickets for soup or orders for shillingsworths of groceries or coal. some of these overfed females--the wives of tradesmen, for instance--belonged to the organized benevolence society, and engaged in this 'work' for the purpose of becoming acquainted with people of superior social position--one of the members was a colonel, and sir graball d'encloseland--the member of parliament for the borough--also belonged to the society and occasionally attended its meetings. others took up district visiting as a hobby; they had nothing to do, and being densely ignorant and of inferior mentality, they had no desire or capacity for any intellectual pursuit. so they took up this work for the pleasure of playing the grand lady and the superior person at a very small expense. other of these visiting ladies were middle-aged, unmarried women with small private incomes--some of them well-meaning, compassionate, gentle creatures who did this work because they sincerely desired to help others, and they knew of no better way. these did not take much part in the business of the meetings; they paid their subscriptions and helped to distribute the cast-off clothing and boots to those who needed them, and occasionally obtained from the secretary an order for provisions or coal or bread for some poverty-stricken family; but the poor, toil-worn women whom they visited welcomed them more for their sisterly sympathy than for the gifts they brought. some of the visiting ladies were of this character--but they were not many. they were as a few fragrant flowers amidst a dense accumulation of noxious weeds. they were examples of humility and kindness shining amidst a vile and loathsome mass of hypocrisy, arrogance, and cant. when the chairman had opened the meeting, mr rushton moved a vote of condolence with the relatives of the late secretary whom he eulogized in the most extraordinary terms. 'the poor of mugsborough had lost a kind and sympathetic friend', 'one who had devoted his life to helping the needy', and so on and so forth. (as a matter of fact, most of the time of the defunct had been passed in helping himself, but rushton said nothing about that.) mr didlum seconded the vote of condolence in similar terms, and it was carried unanimously. then the chairman said that the next business was to elect a successor to the departed paragon; and immediately no fewer than nine members rose to propose a suitable person--they each had a noble-minded friend or relative willing to sacrifice himself for the good of the poor. the nine benevolent stood looking at each other and at the chairman with sickly smiles upon their hypocritical faces. it was a dramatic moment. no one spoke. it was necessary to be careful. it would never do to have a contest. the secretary of the obs was usually regarded as a sort of philanthropist by the outside public, and it was necessary to keep this fiction alive. for one or two minutes an awkward silence reigned. then, one after another they all reluctantly resumed their seats with the exception of mr amos grinder, who said he wished to propose his nephew, mr sawney grinder, a young man of a most benevolent disposition who was desirous of immolating himself upon the altar of charity for the benefit of the poor--or words to that effect. mr didlum seconded, and there being no other nomination--for they all knew that it would give the game away to have a contest--the chairman put mr grinder's proposal to the meeting and declared it carried unanimously. another considerable item in the expenditure of the society was the rent of the offices--a house in a back street. the landlord of this place was another very deserving case. there were numerous other expenses: stationery and stamps, printing, and so on, and what was left of the money was used for the purpose for which it had been given--a reasonable amount being kept in hand for future expenses. all the details were of course duly set forth in the report and balance sheet at the annual meetings. no copy of this document was ever handed to the reporters for publication; it was read to the meeting by the secretary; the representatives of the press took notes, and in the reports of the meeting that subsequently appeared in the local papers the thing was so mixed up and garbled together that the few people who read it could not make head or tail of it. the only thing that was clear was that the society had been doing a great deal of good to someone or other, and that more money was urgently needed to carry on the work. it usually appeared something like this: helping the needy mugsborough organized benevolence society annual meeting at the town hall a splendid record of miscellaneous and valuable work. the annual meeting of the above society was held yesterday at the town hall. the mayor, alderman sweater, presided, and amongst those present were sir graball d'encloseland, lady d'encloseland, lady slumrent. rev. mr bosher, mr cheeseman, mrs bilder, mrs grosare, mrs daree, mrs butcher, mrs taylor, mrs baker, mrs starvem, mrs slodging, mrs m. b. sile, mrs knobrane, mrs m. t. head, mr rushton, mr didlum, mr grinder and (here followed about a quarter of a column of names of other charitable persons, all subscribers to the society). the secretary read the annual report which contained the following amongst other interesting items: during the year, 1,972 applications for assistance have been received, and of this number 1,302 have been assisted as follows: bread or grocery orders, 273. coal or coke orders, 57. nourishment 579. (applause.) pairs of boots granted, 29. clothing, 105. crutch granted to poor man, 1. nurses provided, 2. hospital tickets, 26. sent to consumption sanatorium, 1. twenty-nine persons, whose cases being chronic, were referred to the poor law guardians. work found for 19 persons. (cheers.) pedlar's licences, 4. dispensary tickets, 24. bedding redeemed, 1. loans granted to people to enable them to pay their rent, 8. (loud cheers.) dental tickets, 2. railway fares for men who were going away from the town to employment elsewhere, 12. (great cheering.) loans granted, 5. advertisements for employment, 4- and so on. there was about another quarter of a column of these details, the reading of which was punctuated with applause and concluded with: 'leaving 670 cases which for various reasons the society was unable to assist'. the report then went on to explain that the work of inquiring into the genuineness of the applications entailed a lot of labour on the part of the secretary, some cases taking several days. no fewer than 649 letters had been sent out from the office, and 97 postcards. (applause.) very few cash gifts were granted, as it was most necessary to guard against the charity being abused. (hear, hear.) then followed a most remarkable paragraph headed 'the balance sheet', which--as it was put--'included the following'. 'the following' was a jumbled list of items of expenditure, subscriptions, donations, legacies, and collections, winding up with 'the general summary showed a balance in hand of l178.4.6'. (they always kept a good balance in hand because of the secretary's salary and the rent of the offices.) after this very explicit financial statement came the most important part of the report: 'thanks are expressed to sir graball d'encloseland for a donation of 2 guineas. mrs grosare, 1 guinea. mrs starvem, hospital tickets. lady slumrent, letter of admission to convalescent home. mrs knobrane, 1 guinea. mrs m.b. sile, 1 guinea. mrs m.t. head, 1 guinea. mrs sledging, gifts of clothing--and so on for another quarter of a column, the whole concluding with a vote of thanks to the secretary and an urgent appeal to the charitable public for more funds to enable the society to continue its noble work. meantime, in spite of this and kindred organizations the conditions of the under-paid poverty stricken and unemployed workers remained the same. although the people who got the grocery and coal orders, the 'nourishment', and the cast-off clothes and boots, were very glad to have them, yet these things did far more harm than good. they humiliated, degraded and pauperized those who received them, and the existence of the societies prevented the problem being grappled with in a sane and practical manner. the people lacked the necessaries of life: the necessaries of life are produced by work: these people were willing to work, but were prevented from doing so by the idiotic system of society which these 'charitable' people are determined to do their best to perpetuate. if the people who expect to be praised and glorified for being charitable were never to give another farthing it would be far better for the industrious poor, because then the community as a whole would be compelled to deal with the absurd and unnecessary state of affairs that exists today--millions of people living and dying in wretchedness and poverty in an age when science and machinery have made it possible to produce such an abundance of everything that everyone might enjoy plenty and comfort. it if were not for all this so-called charity the starving unemployed men all over the country would demand to be allowed to work and produce the things they are perishing for want of, instead of being--as they are now--content to wear their masters' cast-off clothing and to eat the crumbs that fall from his table. chapter 37 a brilliant epigram all through the winter, the wise, practical, philanthropic, fat persons whom the people of mugsborough had elected to manage their affairs--or whom they permitted to manage them without being elected--continued to grapple, or to pretend to grapple, with the 'problem' of unemployment and poverty. they continued to hold meetings, rummage and jumble sales, entertainments and special services. they continued to distribute the rotten cast-off clothing and boots, and the nourishment tickets. they were all so sorry for the poor, especially for the 'dear little children'. they did all sorts of things to help the children. in fact, there was nothing that they would not do for them except levy a halfpenny rate. it would never do to do that. it might pauperize the parents and destroy parental responsibility. they evidently thought that it would be better to destroy the health or even the lives of the 'dear little children' than to pauperize the parents or undermine parental responsibility. these people seemed to think that the children were the property of their parents. they did not have sense enough to see that the children are not the property of their parents at all, but the property of the community. when they attain to manhood and womanhood they will be, if mentally or physically inefficient, a burden on the community; if they become criminals, they will prey upon the community, and if they are healthy, educated and brought up in good surroundings, they will become useful citizens, able to render valuable service, not merely to their parents, but to the community. therefore the children are the property of the community, and it is the business and to the interest of the community to see that their constitutions are not undermined by starvation. the secretary of the local trades council, a body formed of delegates from all the different trades unions in the town, wrote a letter to the obscurer, setting forth this view. he pointed out that a halfpenny rate in that town would produce a sum of l800, which would be more than sufficient to provide food for all the hungry schoolchildren. in the next issue of the paper several other letters appeared from leading citizens, including, of course, sweater, rushton, didlum and grinder, ridiculing the proposal of the trades council, who were insultingly alluded to as 'pothouse politicians', 'beer-sodden agitators' and so forth. their right to be regarded as representatives of the working men was denied, and grinder, who, having made inquiries amongst working men, was acquainted with the facts, stated that there was scarcely one of the local branches of the trades unions which had more than a dozen members; and as grinder's statement was true, the secretary was unable to contradict it. the majority of the working men were also very indignant when they heard about the secretary's letter: they said the rates were quite high enough as it was, and they sneered at him for presuming to write to the papers at all: 'who the bloody 'ell was 'e?' they said. ''e was not a gentleman! 'e was only a workin' man the same as themselves--a common carpenter! what the 'ell did 'e know about it? nothing. 'e was just trying to make 'isself out to be somebody, that was all. the idea of one of the likes of them writing to the papers!' one day, having nothing better to do, owen was looking at some books that were exposed for sale on a table outside a second-hand furniture shop. one book in particular took his attention: he read several pages with great interest, and regretted that he had not the necessary sixpence to buy it. the title of the book was: consumption: its causes and its cure. the author was a well-known physician who devoted his whole attention to the study of that disease. amongst other things, the book gave rules for the feeding of delicate children, and there were also several different dietaries recommended for adult persons suffering from the disease. one of these dietaries amused him very much, because as far as the majority of those who suffer from consumption are concerned, the good doctor might just as well have prescribed a trip to the moon: 'immediately on waking in the morning, half a pint of milk--this should be hot, if possible--with a small slice of bread and butter. 'at breakfast: half a pint of milk, with coffee, chocolate, or oatmeal: eggs and bacon, bread and butter, or dry toast. 'at eleven o'clock: half a pint of milk with an egg beaten up in it or some beef tea and bread and butter. 'at one o'clock: half a pint of warm milk with a biscuit or sandwich. 'at two o'clock: fish and roast mutton, or a mutton chop, with as much fat as possible: poultry, game, etc., may be taken with vegetables, and milk pudding. 'at five o'clock: hot milk with coffee or chocolate, bread and butter, watercress, etc. 'at eight o'clock: a pint of milk, with oatmeal or chocolate, and gluten bread, or two lightly boiled eggs with bread and butter. 'before retiring to rest: a glass of warm milk. 'during the night: a glass of milk with a biscuit or bread and butter should be placed by the bedside and be eaten if the patient awakes.' whilst owen was reading this book, crass, harlow, philpot and easton were talking together on the other side of the street, and presently crass caught sight of him. they had been discussing the secretary's letter re the halfpenny rate, and as owen was one of the members of the trades council, crass suggested that they should go across and tackle him about it. 'how much is your house assessed at?' asked owen after listening for about a quarter of an hour to crass's objection. 'fourteen pound,' replied crass. 'that means that you would have to pay sevenpence per year if we had a halfpenny rate. wouldn't it be worth sevenpence a year to you to know that there were no starving children in the town?' 'why should i 'ave to 'elp to keep the children of a man who's too lazy to work, or spends all 'is money on drink?' shouted crass. ''ow are yer goin' to make out about the likes o' them?' 'if his children are starving we should feed them first, and punish him afterwards.' 'the rates is quite high enough as it is,' grumbled harlow, who had four children himself. 'that's quite true, but you must remember that the rates the working classes at present pay are spent mostly for the benefit of other people. good roads are maintained for people who ride in motor cars and carriages; the park and the town band for those who have leisure to enjoy them; the police force to protect the property of those who have something to lose, and so on. but if we pay this rate we shall get something for our money.' 'we gets the benefit of the good roads when we 'as to push a 'andcart with a load o' paint and ladders,' said easton. 'of course,' said crass, 'and besides, the workin' class gets the benefit of all the other things too, because it all makes work.' 'well, for my part,' said philpot, 'i wouldn't mind payin' my share towards a 'appeny rate, although i ain't got no kids o' me own.' the hostility of most of the working men to the proposed rate was almost as bitter as that of the 'better' classes--the noble-minded philanthropists who were always gushing out their sympathy for the 'dear little ones', the loathsome hypocrites who pretended that there was no need to levy a rate because they were willing to give sufficient money in the form of charity to meet the case: but the children continued to go hungry all the same. 'loathsome hypocrites' may seem a hard saying, but it was a matter of common knowledge that the majority of the children attending the local elementary schools were insufficiently fed. it was admitted that the money that could be raised by a halfpenny rate would be more than sufficient to provide them all with one good meal every day. the charity-mongers who professed such extravagant sympathy with the 'dear little children' resisted the levying of the rate 'because it would press so heavily on the poorer ratepayers', and said that they were willing to give more in voluntary charity than the rate would amount to: but, the 'dear little children'--as they were so fond of calling them--continued to go to school hungry all the same. to judge them by their profession and their performances, it appeared that these good kind persons were willing to do any mortal thing for the 'dear little children' except allow them to be fed. if these people had really meant to do what they pretended, they would not have cared whether they paid the money to a rate-collector or to the secretary of a charity society and they would have preferred to accomplish their object in the most efficient and economical way. but although they would not allow the children to be fed, they went to church and to chapel, glittering with jewellery, their fat carcases clothed in rich raiment, and sat with smug smiles upon their faces listening to the fat parsons reading out of a book that none of them seemed able to understand, for this was what they read: 'and jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and said: whosoever shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me. but whoso shall offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. 'take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones, for i say unto you that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my father.' and this: 'then shall he say unto them: depart from me, ye cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for i was an hungered and ye gave me no meat: i was thirsty and ye gave me no drink: i was a stranger and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not. 'then shall they answer: "lord, when saw we thee an hungered or athirst or a stranger or naked, or sick, and did not minister unto thee?" and he shall answer them, "verily i say unto you, inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."' these were the sayings that the infidel parsons mouthed in the infidel temples to the richly dressed infidel congregations, who heard but did not understand, for their hearts were become gross and their ears dull of hearing. and meantime, all around them, in the alley and the slum, and more terrible still--because more secret--in the better sort of streets where lived the respectable class of skilled artisans, the little children became thinner and paler day by day for lack of proper food, and went to bed early because there was no fire. sir graball d'encloseland, the member of parliament for the borough, was one of the bitterest opponents of the halfpenny rate, but as he thought it was probable that there would soon be another general election and he wanted the children's fathers to vote for him again, he was willing to do something for them in another way. he had a ten-year-old daughter whose birthday was in that month, so the kind-hearted baronet made arrangements to give a tea to all the school children in the town in honour of the occasion. the tea was served in the schoolrooms and each child was presented with a gilt-edged card on which was a printed portrait of the little hostess, with 'from your loving little friend, honoria d'encloseland', in gold letters. during the evening the little girl, accompanied by sir graball and lady d'encloseland, motored round to all the schools where the tea was being consumed: the baronet made a few remarks, and honoria made a pretty little speech, specially learnt for the occasion, at each place, and they were loudly cheered and greatly admired in response. the enthusiasm was not confined to the boys and girls, for while the speechmaking was going on inside, a little crowd of grown-up children were gathered round outside the entrance, worshipping the motor car: and when the little party came out the crowd worshipped them also, going into imbecile ecstasies of admiration of their benevolence and their beautiful clothes. for several weeks everybody in the town was in raptures over this tea--or, rather, everybody except a miserable little minority of socialists, who said it was bribery, an electioneering dodge, that did no real good, and who continued to clamour for a halfpenny rate. another specious fraud was the 'distress committee'. this body--or corpse, for there was not much vitality in it--was supposed to exist for the purpose of providing employment for 'deserving cases'. one might be excused for thinking that any man--no matter what his past may have been--who is willing to work for his living is a 'deserving case': but this was evidently not the opinion of the persons who devised the regulations for the working of this committee. every applicant for work was immediately given a long job, and presented with a double sheet of foolscap paper to do it with. now, if the object of the committee had been to furnish the applicant with material for the manufacture of an appropriate headdress for himself, no one could reasonably have found fault with them: but the foolscap was not to be utilized in that way; it was called a 'record paper', three pages of it were covered with insulting, inquisitive, irrelevant questions concerning the private affairs and past life of the 'case' who wished to be permitted to work for his living, and all these had to be answered to the satisfaction of messrs d'encloseland, bosher, sweater, rushton, didlum, grinder and the other members of the committee, before the case stood any chance of getting employment. however, notwithstanding the offensive nature of the questions on the application form, during the five months that this precious committee was in session, no fewer than 1,237 broken-spirited and humble 'lion's whelps' filled up the forms and answered the questions as meekly as if they had been sheep. the funds of the committee consisted of l500, obtained from the imperial exchequer, and about l250 in charitable donations. this money was used to pay wages for certain work--some of which would have had to be done even if the committee had never existed--and if each of the 1,237 applicants had had an equal share of the work, the wages they would have received would have amounted to about twelve shillings each. this was what the 'practical' persons, the 'business-men', called 'dealing with the problem of unemployment'. imagine having to keep your family for five months with twelve shillings! and, if you like, imagine that the government grant had been four times as much as it was, and that the charity had amounted to four times as much as it did, and then fancy having to keep your family for five months with two pounds eight shillings! it is true that some of the members of the committee would have been very glad if they had been able to put the means of earning a living within the reach of every man who was willing to work; but they simply did not know what to do, or how to do it. they were not ignorant of the reality of the evil they were supposed to be 'dealing with'--appalling evidences of it faced them on every side, and as, after all, these committee men were human beings and not devils, they would have been glad to mitigate it if they could have done so without hurting themselves: but the truth was that they did not know what to do! these are the 'practical' men; the monopolists of intelligence, the wise individuals who control the affairs of the world: it is in accordance with the ideas of such men as these that the conditions of human life are regulated. this is the position: it is admitted that never before in the history of mankind was it possible to produce the necessaries of life in such abundance as at present. the management of the affairs of the world--the business of arranging the conditions under which we live--is at present in the hands of practical, level-headed, sensible business-men. the result of their management is, that the majority of the people find it a hard struggle to live. large numbers exist in perpetual poverty: a great many more periodically starve: many actually die of want: hundreds destroy themselves rather than continue to live and suffer. when the practical, level-headed, sensible business-men are asked why they do not remedy this state of things, they reply that they do not know what to do! or, that it is impossible to remedy it! and yet it is admitted that it is now possible to produce the necessaries of life, in greater abundance than ever before! with lavish kindness, the supreme being had provided all things necessary for the existence and happiness of his creatures. to suggest that it is not so is a blasphemous lie: it is to suggest that the supreme being is not good or even just. on every side there is an overflowing superfluity of the materials requisite for the production of all the necessaries of life: from these materials everything we need may be produced in abundance--by work. here was an army of people lacking the things that may be made by work, standing idle. willing to work; clamouring to be allowed to work, and the practical, level-headed, sensible business-men did not know what to do! of course, the real reason for the difficulty is that the raw materials that were created for the use and benefit of all have been stolen by a small number, who refuse to allow them to be used for the purposes for which they were intended. this numerically insignificant minority refused to allow the majority to work and produce the things they need; and what work they do graciously permit to be done is not done with the object of producing the necessaries of life for those who work, but for the purpose of creating profit for their masters. and then, strangest fact of all, the people who find it a hard struggle to live, or who exist in dreadful poverty and sometimes starve, instead of trying to understand the causes of their misery and to find out a remedy themselves, spend all their time applauding the practical, sensible, level-headed business-men, who bungle and mismanage their affairs, and pay them huge salaries for doing so. sir graball d'encloseland, for instance, was a 'secretary of state' and was paid l5,000 a year. when he first got the job the wages were only a beggarly l2,000, but as he found it impossible to exist on less than l100 a week he decided to raise his salary to that amount; and the foolish people who find it a hard struggle to live paid it willingly, and when they saw the beautiful motor car and the lovely clothes and jewellery he purchased for his wife with the money, and heard the great speech he made--telling them how the shortage of everything was caused by over-production and foreign competition, they clapped their hands and went frantic with admiration. their only regret was that there were no horses attached to the motor car, because if there had been, they could have taken them out and harnessed themselves to it instead. nothing delighted the childish minds of these poor people so much as listening to or reading extracts from the speeches of such men as these; so in order to amuse them, every now and then, in the midst of all the wretchedness, some of the great statesmen made 'great speeches' full of cunning phrases intended to hoodwink the fools who had elected them. the very same week that sir graball's salary was increased to l5,000 a year, all the papers were full of a very fine one that he made. they appeared with large headlines like this: great speech by sir graball d'encloseland brilliant epigram! none should have more than they need, whilst any have less than they need! the hypocrisy of such a saying in the mouth of a man who was drawing a salary of five thousand pounds a year did not appear to occur to anyone. on the contrary, the hired scribes of the capitalist press wrote columns of fulsome admiration of the miserable claptrap, and the working men who had elected this man went into raptures over the 'brilliant epigram' as if it were good to eat. they cut it out of the papers and carried it about with them: they showed it to each other: they read it and repeated it to each other: they wondered at it and were delighted with it, grinning and gibbering at each other in the exuberance of their imbecile enthusiasm. the distress committee was not the only body pretending to 'deal' with the poverty 'problem': its efforts were supplemented by all the other agencies already mentioned--the labour yard, the rummage sales, the organized benevolence society, and so on, to say nothing of a most benevolent scheme originated by the management of sweater's emporium, who announced in a letter that was published in the local press that they were prepared to employ fifty men for one week to carry sandwich boards at one shilling--and a loaf of bread--per day. they got the men; some unskilled labourers, a few old, worn out artisans whom misery had deprived of the last vestiges of pride or shame; a number of habitual drunkards and loafers, and a non-descript lot of poor ragged old men--old soldiers and others of whom it would be impossible to say what they had once been. the procession of sandwich men was headed by the semi-drunk and the besotted wretch, and each board was covered with a printed poster: 'great sale of ladies' blouses now proceeding at adam sweater's emporium.' besides this artful scheme of sweater's for getting a good advertisement on the cheap, numerous other plans for providing employment or alleviating the prevailing misery were put forward in the columns of the local papers and at the various meetings that were held. any foolish, idiotic, useless suggestion was certain to receive respectful attention; any crafty plan devised in his own interest or for his own profit by one or other of the crew of sweaters and landlords who controlled the town was sure to be approved of by the other inhabitants of mugsborough, the majority of whom were persons of feeble intellect who not only allowed themselves to be robbed and exploited by a few cunning scoundrels, but venerated and applauded them for doing it. chapter 38 the brigands' cave one evening in the drawing-room at 'the cave' there was a meeting of a number of the 'shining lights' to arrange the details of a rummage sale, that was to be held in aid of the unemployed. it was an informal affair, and while they were waiting for the other luminaries, the early arrivals, messrs rushton, didlum and grinder, mr oyley sweater, the borough surveyor, mr wireman, the electrical engineer who had been engaged as an 'expert' to examine and report on the electric light works, and two or three other gentlemen--all members of the band--took advantage of the opportunity to discuss a number of things they were mutually interested in, which were to be dealt with at the meeting of the town council the next day. first, there was the affair of the untenanted kiosk on the grand parade. this building belonged to the corporation, and 'the cosy corner refreshment coy.' of which mr grinder was the managing director, was thinking of hiring it to open as a high-class refreshment lounge, provided the corporation would make certain alterations and let the place at a reasonable rent. another item which was to be discussed at the council meeting was mr sweater's generous offer to the corporation respecting the new drain connecting 'the cave' with the town main. the report of mr wireman, the electrical expert, was also to be dealt with, and afterwards a resolution in favour of the purchase of the mugsborough electric light and installation co. ltd by the town, was to be proposed. in addition to these matters, several other items, including a proposal by mr didlum for an important reform in the matter of conducting the meetings of the council, formed subjects for animated conversation between the brigands and their host. during this discussion other luminaries arrived, including several ladies and the rev. mr bosher, of the church of the whited sepulchre. the drawing-room of 'the cave' was now elaborately furnished. a large mirror in a richly gilt frame reached from the carved marble mantelpiece to the cornice. a magnificent clock in an alabaster case stood in the centre of the mantelpiece and was flanked by two exquisitely painted and gilded vases of dresden ware. the windows were draped with costly hangings, the floor was covered with a luxurious carpet and expensive rugs. sumptuously upholstered couches and easy chairs added to the comfort of the apartment, which was warmed by the immense fire of coal and oak logs that blazed and crackled in the grate. the conversation now became general and at times highly philosophical in character, although mr bosher did not take much part, being too busily engaged gobbling up the biscuits and tea, and only occasionally spluttering out a reply when a remark or question was directly addressed to him. this was mr grinder's first visit at the house, and he expressed his admiration of the manner in which the ceiling and the walls were decorated, remarking that he had always liked this 'ere japanese style. mr bosher, with his mouth full of biscuit, mumbled that it was sweetly pretty--charming--beautifully done--must have cost a lot of money. 'hardly wot you'd call japanese, though, is it?' observed didlum, looking round with the air of a connoisseur. 'i should be inclined to say it was rather more of the--er--chinese or egyptian.' 'moorish,' explained mr sweater with a smile. 'i got the idear at the paris exhibition. it's simler to the decorations in the "halambara", the palace of the sultan of morocco. that clock there is in the same style.' the case of the clock referred to--which stood on a table in a corner of the room--was of fretwork, in the form of an indian mosque, with a pointed dome and pinnacles. this was the case that mary linden had sold to didlum; the latter had had it stained a dark colour and polished and further improved it by substituting a clock of more suitable design than the one it originally held. mr sweater had noticed it in didlum's window and, seeing that the design was similar in character to the painted decorations on the ceiling and walls of his drawing-room, had purchased it. 'i went to the paris exhibition meself,' said grinder, when everyone had admired the exquisite workmanship of the clock-case. 'i remember 'avin' a look at the moon through that big telescope. i was never so surprised in me life: you can see it quite plain, and it's round!' 'round?' said didlum with a puzzled look. 'round? of course it's round! you didn't used to think it was square, did yer?' 'no, of course not, but i always used to think it was flat--like a plate, but it's round like a football.' 'certainly: the moon is a very simler body to the earth,' explained didlum, describing an aerial circle with a wave of his hand. they moves through the air together, but the earth is always nearest to the sun and consequently once a fortnight the shadder of the earth falls on the moon and darkens it so that it's invisible to the naked eye. the new moon is caused by the moon movin' a little bit out of the earth's shadder, and it keeps on comin' more and more until we gets the full moon; and then it goes back again into the shadder; and so it keeps on.' for about a minute everyone looked very solemn, and the profound silence was disturbed only the the crunching of the biscuits between the jaws of mr bosher, and by certain gurglings in the interior of that gentleman. 'science is a wonderful thing,' said mr sweater at length, wagging his head gravely, 'wonderful!' 'yes: but a lot of it is mere theory, you know,' observed rushton. 'take this idear that the world is round, for instance; i fail to see it! and then they say as hawstralia is on the other side of the globe, underneath our feet. in my opinion it's ridiculous, because if it was true, wot's to prevent the people droppin' orf?' 'yes: well, of course it's very strange,' admitted sweater. 'i've often thought of that myself. if it was true, we ought to be able to walk on the ceiling of this room, for instance; but of course we know that's impossible, and i really don't see that the other is any more reasonable.' 'i've often noticed flies walkin' on the ceilin',' remarked didlum, who felt called upon to defend the globular theory. 'yes; but they're different,' replied rushton. 'flies is provided by nature with a gluey substance which oozes out of their feet for the purpose of enabling them to walk upside down.' 'there's one thing that seems to me to finish that idear once for all,' said grinder, 'and that is--water always finds its own level. you can't get away from that; and if the world was round, as they want us to believe, all the water would run off except just a little at the top. to my mind, that settles the whole argymint.' 'another thing that gets over me,' continued rushton, 'is this: according to science, the earth turns round on its axle at the rate of twenty miles a minit. well, what about when a lark goes up in the sky and stays there about a quarter of an hour? why, if it was true that the earth was turnin' round at that rate all the time, when the bird came down it would find itself 'undreds of miles away from the place where it went up from! but that doesn't 'appen at all; the bird always comes down in the same spot.' 'yes, and the same thing applies to balloons and flyin' machines,' said grinder. 'if it was true that the world is spinnin' round on its axle so quick as that, if a man started out from calais to fly to dover, by the time he got to england he'd find 'imself in north amer or p'r'aps farther off still.' 'and if it was true that the world goes round the sun at the rate they makes out, when a balloon went up, the earth would run away from it! they'd never be able to get back again!' remarked rushton. this was so obvious that nearly everyone said there was probably something in it, and didlum could think of no reply. mr bosher upon being appealed to for his opinion, explained that science was alright in its way, but unreliable: the things scientists said yesterday they contradicted today, and what they said today they would probably repudiate tomorrow. it was necessary to be very cautious before accepting any of their assertions. 'talking about science,' said grinder, as the holy man relapsed into silence and started on another biscuit and a fresh cup of tea. 'talking about science reminds me of a conversation i 'ad with dr weakling the other day. you know, he believes we're all descended from monkeys.' everyone laughed; the thing was so absurd: the idea of placing intellectual beings on a level with animals! 'but just wait till you hear how nicely i flattened 'im out,' continued grinder. 'after we'd been arguin' a long time about wot 'e called everlution or some sich name, and a lot more tommy-rot that i couldn't make no 'ead or tail of--and to tell you the truth i don't believe 'e understood 'arf of it 'imself--i ses to 'im, "well," i ses, "if it's true that we're hall descended from monkeys," i ses, "i think your famly must 'ave left orf where mine begun."' in the midst of the laughter that greeted the conclusion of grinder's story it was seen that mr bosher had become black in the face. he was waving his arms and writhing about like one in a fit, his goggle eyes bursting from their sockets, whilst his huge stomach quivering spasmodically, alternately contracted and expanded as if it were about to explode. in the exuberance of his mirth, the unfortunate disciple had swallowed two biscuits at once. everybody rushed to his assistance, grinder and didlum seized an arm and a shoulder each and forced his head down. rushton punched him in the back and the ladies shrieked with alarm. they gave him a big drink of tea to help to get the biscuits down, and when he at last succeeded in swallowing them he sat in the armchair with his eyes red-rimmed and full of tears, which ran down over his white, flabby face. the arrival of the other members of the committee put an end to the interesting discussion, and they shortly afterwards proceeded with the business for which the meeting had been called--the arrangements for the forthcoming rummage sale. chapter 39 the brigands at work the next day, at the meeting of the town council, mr wireman's report concerning the electric light works was read. the expert's opinion was so favourable--and it was endorsed by the borough engineer, mr oyley sweater--that a resolution was unanimously carried in favour of acquiring the works for the town, and a secret committee was appointed to arrange the preliminaries. alderman sweater then suggested that a suitable honorarium be voted to mr wireman for his services. this was greeted with a murmur of approval from most of the members, and mr didlum rose with the intention of proposing a resolution to that effect when he was interrupted by alderman grinder, who said he couldn't see no sense in giving the man a thing like that. 'why not give him a sum of money?' several members said 'hear, hear,' to this, but some of the others laughed. 'i can't see nothing to laugh at,' cried grinder angrily. 'for my part i wouldn't give you tuppence for all the honorariums in the country. i move that we pay 'im a sum of money.' 'i'll second that,' said another member of the band--one of those who had cried 'hear, hear.' alderman sweater said that there seemed to be a little misunderstanding and explained that an honorarium was a sum of money. 'oh, well, in that case i'll withdraw my resolution,' said grinder. 'i thought you wanted to give 'im a 'luminated address or something like that.' didlum now moved that a letter of thanks and a fee of fifty guineas be voted to mr wireman, and this was also unanimously agreed to. dr weakling said that it seemed rather a lot, but he did not go so far as to vote against it. the next business was the proposal that the corporation should take over the drain connecting mr sweater's house with the town main. mr sweater--being a public-spirited man--proposed to hand this connecting drain--which ran through a private road--over to the corporation to be theirs and their successors for ever, on condition that they would pay him the cost of construction--ã�â£55--and agreed to keep it in proper repair. after a brief discussion it was decided to take over the drain on the terms offered, and then councillor didlum proposed a vote of thanks to alderman sweater for his generosity in the matter: this was promptly seconded by councillor rushton and would have been carried nem. con., but for the disgraceful conduct of dr weakling, who had the bad taste to suggest that the amount was about double what the drain could possibly have cost to construct, that it was of no use to the corporation at all, and that they would merely acquire the liability to keep it in repair. however, no one took the trouble to reply to weakling, and the band proceeded to the consideration of the next business, which was mr grinder's offer--on behalf of the 'cosy corner refreshment company'--to take the kiosk on the grand parade. mr grinder submitted a plan of certain alterations that he would require the corporation to make at the kiosk, and, provided the council agreed to do this work he was willing to take a lease of the place for five years at ã�â£20 per year. councillor didlum proposed that the offer of the 'cosy corner refreshment co. ltd' be accepted and the required alterations proceeded with at once. the kiosk had brought in no rent for nearly two years, but, apart from that consideration, if they accepted this offer they would be able to set some of the unemployed to work. (applause.) councillor rushton seconded. dr weakling pointed out that as the proposed alterations would cost about ã�â£175--according to the estimate of the borough engineer--and, the rent being only ã�â£20 a year, it would mean that the council would be ã�â£75 out of pocket at the end of the five years; to say nothing of the expense of keeping the place in repair during all that time. (disturbance.) he moved as an amendment that the alterations be made, and that they then invite tenders, and let the place to the highest bidder. (great uproar.) councillor rushton said he was disgusted with the attitude taken up by that man weakling. (applause.) perhaps it was hardly right to call him a man. (hear! hear!) in the matter of these alterations they had had the use of councillor grinder's brains: it was he who first thought of making these improvements in the kiosk, and therefore he--or rather the company he represented--had a moral right to the tenancy. (loud cheers.) dr weakling said that he thought it was understood that when a man was elected to that council it was because he was supposed to be willing to use his brains for the benefit of his constituents. (sardonic laughter.) the mayor asked if there was any seconder to weakling's amendment, and as there was not the original proposition was put and carried. councillor rushton suggested that a large shelter with seating accommodation for about two hundred persons should be erected on the grand parade near the kiosk. the shelter would serve as a protection against rain, or the rays of the sun in summer. it would add materially to the comfort of visitors and would be a notable addition to the attractions of the town. councillor didlum said it was a very good idear, and proposed that the surveyor be instructed to get out the plans. dr weakling opposed the motion. (laughter.) it seemed to him that the object was to benefit, not the town, but mr grinder. (disturbance.) if this shelter were erected, it would increase the value of the kiosk as a refreshment bar by a hundred per cent. if mr grinder wanted a shelter for his customers he should pay for it himself. (uproar.) he (dr weakling) was sorry to have to say it, but he could not help thinking that this was a put-up job. (loud cries of 'withdraw' 'apologize' 'cast 'im out' and terrific uproar.) weakling did not apologize or withdraw, but he said no more. didlum's proposition was carried, and the 'band' went on to the next item on the agenda, which was a proposal by councillor didlum to increase the salary of mr oyley sweater, the borough engineer, from fifteen pounds to seventeen pounds per week. councillor didlum said that when they had a good man they ought to appreciate him. (applause.) compared with other officials, the borough engineer was not fairly paid. (hear, hear.) the magistrates' clerk received seventeen pounds a week. the town clerk seventeen pounds per week. he did not wish it to be understood that he thought those gentlemen were overpaid--far from it. (hear, hear.) it was not that they got too much but that the engineer got too little. how could they expect a man like that to exist on a paltry fifteen pounds a week? why, it was nothing more or less than sweating! (hear, hear.) he had much pleasure in moving that the borough engineer's salary be increased to seventeen pounds a week, and that his annual holiday be extended from a fortnight to one calendar month with hard la--he begged pardon--with full pay. (loud cheers.) councillor rushton said that he did not propose to make a long speech--it was not necessary. he would content himself with formally seconding councillor didlum's excellent proposition. (applause.) councillor weakling, whose rising was greeted with derisive laughter, said he must oppose the resolution. he wished it to be understood that he was not actuated by any feeling of personal animosity towards the borough engineer, but at the same time he considered it his duty to say that in his (dr weakling's) opinion, that official would be dear at half the price they were now paying him. (disturbance.) he did not appear to understand his business, nearly all the work that was done cost in the end about double what the borough engineer estimated it could be done for. (liar.) he considered him to be a grossly incompetent person (uproar) and was of opinion that if they were to advertise they could get dozens of better men who would be glad to do the work for five pounds a week. he moved that mr oyley sweater be asked to resign and that they advertise for a man at five pounds a week. (great uproar.) councillor grinder rose to a point of order. he appealed to the chairman to squash the amendment. (applause.) councillor didlum remarked that he supposed councillor grinder meant 'quash': in that case, he would support the suggestion. councillor grinder said it was about time they put a stopper on that feller weakling. he (grinder) did not care whether they called it squashing or quashing; it was all the same so long as they nipped him in the bud. (cheers.) the man was a disgrace to the council; always interfering and hindering the business. the mayor--alderman sweater--said that he did not think it consistent with the dignity of that council to waste any more time over this scurrilous amendment. (applause.) he was proud to say that it had never even been seconded, and therefore he would put mr didlum's resolution--a proposition which he had no hesitation in saying reflected the highest credit upon that gentleman and upon all those who supported it. (vociferous cheers.) all those who were in favour signified their approval in the customary manner, and as weakling was the only one opposed, the resolution was carried and the meeting proceeded to the next business. councillor rushton said that several influential ratepayers and employers of labour had complained to him about the high wages of the corporation workmen, some of whom were paid sevenpence-halfpenny an hour. sevenpence an hour was the maximum wage paid to skilled workmen by private employers in that town, and he failed to see why the corporation should pay more. (hear, hear.) it had a very bad effect on the minds of the men in the employment of private firms, tending to make them dissatisfied with their wages. the same state of affairs prevailed with regard to the unskilled labourers in the council's employment. private employers could get that class of labour for fourpence-halfpenny or fivepence an hour, and yet the corporation paid fivepence-halfpenny and even sixpence for the same class of work. (shame.) it was not fair to the ratepayers. (hear, hear.) considering that the men in the employment of the corporation had almost constant work, if there was to be a difference at all, they should get not more, but less, than those who worked for private firms. (cheers.) he moved that the wages of the corporation workmen be reduced in all cases to the same level as those paid by private firms. councillor grinder seconded. he said it amounted to a positive scandal. why, in the summer-time some of these men drew as much as 35/in a single week! (shame.) and it was quite common for unskilled labourers--fellers who did nothing but the very hardest and most laborious work, sich as carrying sacks of cement, or digging up the roads to get at the drains, and sich-like easy jobs--to walk off with 25/a week! (sensation.) he had often noticed some of these men swaggering about the town on sundays, dressed like millionaires and cigared up! they seemed quite a different class of men from those who worked for private firms, and to look at the way some of their children was dressed you'd think their fathers was cabinet minstrels! no wonder the ratepayers complained ot the high rates. another grievance was that all the corporation workmen were allowed two days' holiday every year, in addition to the bank holidays, and were paid for them! (cries of 'shame', 'scandalous', 'disgraceful', etc.) no private contractor paid his men for bank holidays, and why should the corporation do so? he had much pleasure in seconding councillor rushton's resolution. councillor weakling opposed the motion. he thought that 35/a week was little enough for a man to keep a wife and family with (rot), even if all the men got it regularly, which they did not. members should consider what was the average amount per week throughout the whole year, not merely the busy time, and if they did that they would find that even the skilled men did not average more than 25/a week, and in many cases not so much. if this subject had not been introduced by councillor rushton, he (dr weakling) had intended to propose that the wages of the corporation workmen should be increased to the standard recognized by the trades unions. (loud laughter.) it had been proved that the notoriously short lives of the working people--whose average span of life was about twenty years less than that of the well-to-do classes--their increasingly inferior physique, and the high rate of mortality amongst their children was caused by the wretched remuneration they received for hard and tiring work, the excessive number of hours they have to work, when employed, the bad quality of their food, the badly constructed and insanitary homes their poverty compels them to occupy, and the anxiety, worry, and depression of mind they have to suffer when out of employment. (cries of 'rot', 'bosh', and loud laughter.) councillor didlum said, 'rot'. it was a very good word to describe the disease that was sapping the foundations of society and destroying the health and happiness and the very lives of so many of their fellow countrymen and women. (renewed merriment and shouts of 'go and buy a red tie.') he appealed to the members to reject the resolution. he was very glad to say that he believed it was true that the workmen in the employ of the corporation were a little better off than those in the employ of private contractors, and if it were so, it was as it should be. they had need to be better off than the poverty-stricken, half-starved poor wretches who worked for private firms. councillor didlum said that it was very evident that dr weakling had obtained his seat on that council by false pretences. if he had told the ratepayers that he was a socialist, they would never have elected him. (hear, hear.) practically every christian minister in the country would agree with him (didlum) when he said that the poverty of the working classes was caused not by the 'wretched remuneration they receive as wages', but by drink. (loud applause.) and he was very sure that the testimony of the clergy of all denominations was more to be relied upon than the opinion of a man like dr weakling. (hear, hear.) dr weakling said that if some of the clergymen referred to or some of the members of the council had to exist and toil amid the same sordid surroundings, overcrowding and ignorance as some of the working classes, they would probably seek to secure some share of pleasure and forgetfulness in drink themselves! (great uproar and shouts of 'order', 'withdraw', 'apologize'.) councillor grinder said that even if it was true that the haverage lives of the working classes was twenty years shorter than those of the better classes, he could not see what it had got to do with dr weakling. (hear, hear.) so long as the working class was contented to die twenty years before their time, he failed to see what it had got to do with other people. they was not runnin' short of workers, was they? there was still plenty of 'em left. (laughter.) so long as the workin' class was satisfied to die orf--let 'em die orf! it was a free country. (applause.) the workin' class adn't arst dr weakling to stick up for them, had they? if they wasn't satisfied, they would stick up for theirselves! the working men didn't want the likes of dr weakling to stick up for them, and they would let 'im know it when the next election came round. if he (grinder) was a wordly man, he would not mind betting that the workin' men of dr weakling's ward would give him 'the dirty kick out' next november. (applause.) councillor weakling, who knew that this was probably true, made no further protest. rushton's proposition was carried, and then the clerk announced that the next item was the resolution mr didlum had given notice of at the last meeting, and the mayor accordingly called upon that gentleman. councillor didlum, who was received with loud cheers, said that unfortunately a certain member of that council seemed to think he had a right to oppose nearly everything that was brought forward. (the majority of the members of the band glared malignantly at weakling.) he hoped that for once the individual he referred to would have the decency to restrain himself, because the resolution he (didlum) was about to have the honour of proposing was one that he believed no right-minded man--no matter what his politics or religious opinions--could possibly object to; and he trusted that for the credit of the council it would be entered on the records as an unopposed motion. the resolution was as follows: 'that from this date all the meetings of this council shall be opened with prayer and closed with the singing of the doxology.' (loud applause.) councillor rushton seconded the resolution, which was also supported by mr grinder, who said that at a time like the present, when there was sich a lot of infiddles about who said that we all came from monkeys, the council would be showing a good example to the working classes by adopting the resolution. councillor weakling said nothing, so the new rule was carried nem. con., and as there was no more business to be done it was put into operation for the first time there and then. mr sweater conducting the singing with a roll of paper--the plan of the drain of 'the cave'--and each member singing a different tune. weakling withdrew during the singing, and afterwards, before the band dispersed, it was agreed that a certain number of them were to meet the chief at the cave, on the following evening to arrange the details of the proposed raid on the finances of the town in connection with the sale of the electric light works. chapter 40 vive la system! the alterations which the corporation had undertaken to make in the kiosk on the grand parade provided employment for several carpenters and plasterers for about three weeks, and afterwards for several painters. this fact was sufficient to secure the working men's unqualified approval of the action of the council in letting the place to grinder, and councillor weakling's opposition--the reasons of which they did not take the trouble to inquire into or understand--they as heartily condemned. all they knew or cared was that he had tried to prevent the work being done, and that he had referred in insulting terms to the working men of the town. what right had he to call them half-starved, poverty-stricken, poor wretches? if it came to being poverty-stricken, according to all accounts, he wasn't any too well orf hisself. some of those blokes who went swaggering about in frock-coats and pot-'ats was just as 'ard up as anyone else if the truth was known. as for the corporation workmen, it was quite right that their wages should be reduced. why should they get more money than anyone else? 'it's us what's got to find the money,' they said. 'we're the ratepayers, and why should we have to pay them more wages than we get ourselves? and why should they be paid for holidays any more than us?' during the next few weeks the dearth of employment continued, for, of course, the work at the kiosk and the few others jobs that were being done did not make much difference to the general situation. groups of workmen stood at the corners or walked aimlessly about the streets. most of them no longer troubled to go to the different firms to ask for work, they were usually told that they would be sent for if wanted. during this time owen did his best to convert the other men to his views. he had accumulated a little library of socialist books and pamphlets which he lent to those he hoped to influence. some of them took these books and promised, with the air of men who were conferring a great favour, that they would read them. as a rule, when they returned them it was with vague expressions of approval, but they usually evinced a disinclination to discuss the contents in detail because, in nine instances out of ten, they had not attempted to read them. as for those who did make a half-hearted effort to do so, in the majority of cases their minds were so rusty and stultified by long years of disuse, that, although the pamphlets were generally written in such simple language that a child might have understood, the argument was generally too obscure to be grasped by men whose minds were addled by the stories told them by their liberal and tory masters. some, when owen offered to lend them some books or pamphlets refused to accept them, and others who did him the great favour of accepting them, afterwards boasted that they had used them as toilet paper. owen frequently entered into long arguments with the other men, saying that it was the duty of the state to provide productive work for all those who were willing to do it. some few of them listened like men who only vaguely understood, but were willing to be convinced. 'yes, mate. it's right enough what you say,' they would remark. 'something ought to be done.' others ridiculed this doctrine of state employment: it was all very fine, but where was the money to come from? and then those who had been disposed to agree with owen could relapse into their old apathy. there were others who did not listen so quietly, but shouted with many curses that it was the likes of such fellows as owen who were responsible for all the depression in trade. all this talk about socialism and state employment was frightening capital out of the country. those who had money were afraid to invest it in industries, or to have any work done for fear they would be robbed. when owen quoted statistics to prove that as far as commerce and the quantity produced of commodities of all kinds was concerned, the last year had been a record one, they became more infuriated than ever, and talked threateningly of what they would like to do to those bloody socialists who were upsetting everything. one day crass, who was one of these upholders of the existing system, scored off owen finely. a little group of them were standing talking in the wage slave market near the fountain. in the course of the argument, owen made the remark that under existing conditions life was not worth living, and crass said that if he really thought so, there was no compulsion about it; if he wasn't satisfied--if he didn't want to live--he could go and die. why the hell didn't he go and make a hole in the water, or cut his bloody throat? on this particular occasion the subject of the argument was--at first--the recent increase of the borough engineer's salary to seventeen pounds per week. owen had said it was robbery, but the majority of the others expressed their approval of the increase. they asked owen if he expected a man like that to work for nothing! it was not as if he were one of the likes of themselves. they said that, as for it being robbery, owen would be very glad to have the chance of getting it himself. most of them seemed to think the fact that anyone would be glad to have seventeen pounds a week, proved that it was right for them to pay that amount to the borough engineer! usually whenever owen reflected upon the gross injustices, and inhumanity of the existing social disorder, he became convinced that it could not possibly last; it was bound to fall to pieces because of its own rottenness. it was not just, it was not common sense, and therefore it could not endure. but always after one of these arguments--or, rather, disputes--with his fellow workmen, he almost relapsed into hopelessness and despondency, for then he realized how vast and how strong are the fortifications that surround the present system; the great barriers and ramparts of invincible ignorance, apathy and self-contempt, which will have to be broken down before the system of society of which they are the defences, can be swept away. at other times as he thought of this marvellous system, it presented itself to him in such an aspect of almost comical absurdity that he was forced to laugh and to wonder whether it really existed at all, or if it were only an illusion of his own disordered mind. one of the things that the human race needed in order to exist was shelter; so with much painful labour they had constructed a large number of houses. thousands of these houses were now standing unoccupied, while millions of the people who had helped to build the houses were either homeless or herding together in overcrowded hovels. these human beings had such a strange system of arranging their affairs that if anyone were to go and burn down a lot of the houses he would be conferring a great boon upon those who had built them, because such an act would 'make a lot more work!' another very comical thing was that thousands of people wore broken boots and ragged clothes, while millions of pairs of boots and abundance of clothing, which they had helped to make, were locked up in warehouses, and the system had the keys. thousands of people lacked the necessaries of life. the necessaries of life are all produced by work. the people who lacked begged to be allowed to work and create those things of which they stood in need. but the system prevented them from so doing. if anyone asked the system why it prevented these people from producing the things of which they were in want, the system replied: 'because they have already produced too much. the markets are glutted. the warehouses are filled and overflowing, and there is nothing more for them to do.' there was in existence a huge accumulation of everything necessary. a great number of the people whose labour had produced that vast store were now living in want, but the system said that they could not be permitted to partake of the things they had created. then, after a time, when these people, being reduced to the last extreme of misery, cried out that they and their children were dying of hunger, the system grudgingly unlocked the doors of the great warehouses, and taking out a small part of the things that were stored within, distributed it amongst the famished workers, at the same time reminding them that it was charity, because all the things in the warehouses, although they had been made by the workers, were now the property of the people who do nothing. and then the starving, bootless, ragged, stupid wretches fell down and worshipped the system, and offered up their children as living sacrifices upon its altars, saying: 'this beautiful system is the only one possible, and the best that human wisdom can devise. may the system live for ever! cursed be those who seek to destroy the system!' as the absurdity of the thing forced itself upon him, owen, in spite of the unhappiness he felt at the sight of all the misery by which he was surrounded, laughed aloud and said to himself that if he was sane, then all these people must be mad. in the face of such colossal imbecility it was absurd to hope for any immediate improvement. the little already accomplished was the work of a few self-sacrificing enthusiasts, battling against the opposition of those they sought to benefit, and the results of their labours were, in many instances, as pearls cast before the swine who stood watching for opportunities to fall upon and rend their benefactors. there was only one hope. it was possible that the monopolists, encouraged by the extraordinary stupidity and apathy of the people would proceed to lay upon them even greater burdens, until at last, goaded by suffering, and not having sufficient intelligence to understand any other remedy, these miserable wretches would turn upon their oppressors and drown both them and their system in a sea of blood. besides the work at the kiosk, towards the end of march things gradually began to improve in other directions. several firms began to take on a few hands. several large empty houses that were relet had to be renovated for their new tenants, and there was a fair amount of inside work arising out of the annual spring-cleaning in other houses. there was not enough work to keep everyone employed, and most of those who were taken on as a rule only managed to make a few hours a week, but still it was better than absolute idleness, and there also began to be talk of several large outside jobs that were to be done as soon as the weather was settled. this bad weather, by the way, was a sort of boon to the defenders of the present system, who were hard-up for sensible arguments to explain the cause of poverty. one of the principal causes was, of course, the weather, which was keeping everything back. there was not the slightest doubt that if only the weather would allow there would always be plenty of work, and poverty would be abolished. rushton & co. had a fair share of what work there was, and crass, sawkins, slyme and owen were kept employed pretty regularly, although they did not start until half past eight and left off at four. at different houses in various parts of the town they had ceilings to wash off and distemper, to strip the old paper from the walls, and to repaint and paper the rooms, and sometimes there were the venetian blinds to repair and repaint. occasionally a few extra hands were taken on for a few days, and discharged again as soon as the job they were taken on to do was finished. the defenders of the existing system may possibly believe that the knowledge that they would be discharged directly the job was done was a very good incentive to industry, that theywould naturally under these circumstances do their best to get the work done as quickly as possible. but then it must be remembered that most of the defenders of the existing system are so constituted, that they can believe anything provided it is not true and sufficiently silly. all the same, it was a fact that the workmen did do their very best to get over this work in the shortest possible time, because although they knew that to do so was contrary to their own interests, they also knew that it would be very much more contrary to their interests not to do so. their only chance of being kept on if other work came in was to tear into it for all they were worth. consequently, most of the work was rushed and botched and slobbered over in about half the time that it would have taken to do it properly. rooms for which the customers paid to have three coats of paint were scamped with one or two. what misery did not know about scamping and faking the work, the men suggested to and showed him in the hope of currying favour with him in order that they might get the preference over others and be sent for when the next job came in. this is the principal incentive provided by the present system, the incentive to cheat. these fellows cheated the customers of their money. they cheated themselves and their fellow workmen of work, and their children of bread, but it was all for a good cause--to make profit for their master. harlow and slyme did one job--a room that rushton & co. had contracted to paint three coats. it was finished with two and the men cleared away their paints. the next day, when slyme went there to paper the room, the lady of the house said that the painting was not yet finished--it was to have another coat. slyme assured her that it had already had three, but, as the lady insisted, slyme went to the shop and sought out misery. harlow had been stood off, as there was not another job in just then, but fortunately he happened to be standing in the street outside the shop, so they called him and then the three of them went round to the job and swore that the room had had three coats. the lady protested that it was not so. she had watched the progress of the work. besides, it was impossible; they had only been there three days. the first day they had not put any paint on at all; they had done the ceiling and stripped the walls; the painting was not started till the second day. how then could it have had three coats? misery explained the mystery: he said that for first coating they had an extra special very fast-drying paint--paint that dried so quickly that they were able to give the work two coats in one day. for instance, one man did the window, the other the door: when these were finished both men did the skirting; by the time the skirting was finished the door and window were dry enough to second coat; and then, on the following day--the finishing coat! of course, this extra special quick-drying paint was very expensive, but the firm did not mind that. they knew that most of their customers wished to have their work finished as quickly as possible, and their study was to give satisfaction to the customers. this explanation satisfied the lady--a poverty-stricken widow making a precarious living by taking in lodgers--who was the more easily deceived because she regarded misery as a very holy man, having seen him preaching in the street on many occasions. there was another job at another boarding-house that owen and easton did--two rooms which had to be painted three coats of white paint and one of enamel, making four coats altogether. that was what the firm had contracted to do. as the old paint in these rooms was of a rather dark shade it was absolutely necessary to give the work three coats before enamelling it. misery wanted them to let it go with two, but owen pointed out that if they did so it would be such a ghastly mess that it would never pass. after thinking the matter over for a few minutes, misery told them to go on with the third coat of paint. then he went downstairs and asked to see the lady of the house. he explained to her that, in consequence of the old paint being so dark, he found that it would be necessary, in order to make a good job of it, to give the work four coats before enamelling it. of course, they had agreed for only three, but as they always made a point of doing their work in a first-class manner rather than not make a good job, they would give it the extra coat for nothing, but he was sure she would not wish them to do that. the lady said that she did not want them to work for nothing, and she wanted it done properly. if it were necessary to give it an extra coat, they must do so and she would pay for it. how much would it be? misery told her. the lady was satisfied, and misery was in the seventh heaven. then he went upstairs again and warned owen and easton to be sure to say, if they were asked, that the work had had four coats. it would not be reasonable to blame misery or rushton for not wishing to do good, honest work--there was no incentive. when they secured a contract, if they had thought first of making the very best possible job of it, they would not have made so much profit. the incentive was not to do the work as well as possible, but to do as little as possible. the incentive was not to make good work, but to make good profit. the same rule applied to the workers. they could not justly be blamed for not doing good work--there was no incentive. to do good work requires time and pains. most of them would have liked to take time and pains, because all those who are capable of doing good work find pleasure and happiness in doing it, and have pride in it when done: but there was no incentive, unless the certainty of getting the sack could be called an incentive, for it was a moral certainty that any man who was caught taking time and pains with his work would be promptly presented with the order of the boot. but there was plenty of incentive to hurry and scamp and slobber and botch. there was another job at a lodging-house--two rooms to be painted and papered. the landlord paid for the work, but the tenant had the privilege of choosing the paper. she could have any pattern she liked so long as the cost did not exceed one shilling per roll, rushton's estimate being for paper of that price. misery sent her several patterns of sixpenny papers, marked at a shilling, to choose from, but she did not fancy any of them, and said that she would come to the shop to make her selection. so hunter tore round to the shop in a great hurry to get there before her. in his haste to dismount, he fell off his bicycle into the muddy road, and nearly smashed the plate-glass window with the handle-bar of the machine as he placed it against the shop front before going in. without waiting to clean the mud off his clothes, he ordered budd, the pimply-faced shopman, to get out rolls of all the sixpenny papers they had, and then they both set to work and altered the price marked upon them from sixpence to a shilling. then they got out a number of shilling papers and altered the price marked upon them, changing it from a shilling to one and six. when the unfortunate woman arrived, misery was waiting for her with a benign smile upon his long visage. he showed her all the sixpenny ones, but she did not like any of them, so after a while nimrod suggested that perhaps she would like a paper of a little better quality, and she could pay the trifling difference out of her own pocket. then he showed her the shilling papers that he had marked up to one and sixpence, and eventually the lady selected one of these and paid the extra sixpence per roll herself, as nimrod suggested. there were fifteen rolls of paper altogether--seven for one room and eight for the other--so that in addition to the ordinary profit on the sale of the paper--about two hundred and seventy-five per cent.--the firm made seven and sixpence on this transaction. they might have done better out of the job itself if slyme had not been hanging the paper piece-work, for, the two rooms being of the same pattern, he could easily have managed to do them with fourteen rolls; in fact, that was all he did use, but he cut up and partly destroyed the one that was over so that he could charge for hanging it. owen was working there at the same time, for the painting of the rooms was not done before slyme papered them; the finishing coat was put on after the paper was hung. he noticed slyme destroying the paper and, guessing the reason, asked him how he could reconcile such conduct as that with his profession of religion. slyme replied that the fact that he was a christian did not imply that he never did anything wrong: if he committed a sin, he was a christian all the same, and it would be forgiven him for the sake of the blood. as for this affair of the paper, it was a matter between himself and god, and owen had no right to set himself up as a judge. in addition to all this work, there were a number of funerals. crass and slyme did very well out of it all, working all day white-washing or painting, and sometimes part of the night painting venetian blinds or polishing coffins and taking them home, to say nothing of the lifting in of the corpses and afterwards acting as bearers. as time went on, the number of small jobs increased, and as the days grew longer the men were allowed to put in a greater number of hours. most of the firms had some work, but there was never enough to keep all the men in the town employed at the same time. it worked like this: every firm had a certain number of men who were regarded as the regular hands. when there was any work to do, they got the preference over strangers or outsiders. when things were busy, outsiders were taken on temporarily. when the work fell off, these casual hands were the first to be 'stood still'. if it continued to fall off, the old hands were also stood still in order of seniority, the older hands being preferred to strangers--so long, of course, as they were not old in the sense of being aged or inefficient. this kind of thing usually continued all through the spring and summer. in good years the men of all trades, carpenters, bricklayers, plasterers, painters and so on, were able to keep almost regularly at work, except in wet weather. the difference between a good and bad spring and summer is that in good years it is sometimes possible to make a little overtime, and the periods of unemployment are shorter and less frequent than in bad years. it is rare even in good years for one of the casual hands to be employed by one firm for more than one, two or three months without a break. it is usual for them to put in a month with one firm, then a fortnight with another, then perhaps six weeks somewhere else, and often between there are two or three days or even weeks of enforced idleness. this sort of thing goes on all through spring, summer and autumn. chapter 41 the easter offering. the beano meeting by the beginning of april, rushton & co. were again working nine hours a day, from seven in the morning till five-thirty at night, and after easter they started working full time from 6 a.m. till 5.30 p.m., eleven and a half hours--or, rather, ten hours, for they had to lose half an hour at breakfast and an hour at dinner. just before easter several of the men asked hunter if they might be allowed to work on good friday and easter monday, as, they said, they had had enough holidays during the winter; they had no money to spare for holiday-making, and they did not wish to lose two days' pay when there was work to be done. hunter told them that there was not sufficient work in to justify him in doing as they requested: things were getting very slack again, and mr rushton had decided to cease work from thursday night till tuesday morning. they were thus prevented from working on good friday, but it is true that not more than one working man in fifty went to any religious service on that day or on any other day during the easter festival. on the contrary, this festival was the occasion of much cursing and blaspheming on the part of those whose penniless, poverty-stricken condition it helped to aggravate by enforcing unprofitable idleness which they lacked the means to enjoy. during these holidays some of the men did little jobs on their own account and others put in the whole time--including good friday and easter sunday--gardening, digging and planting their plots of allotment ground. when owen arrived home one evening during the week before easter, frankie gave him an envelope which he had brought home from school. it contained a printed leaflet: church of the whited sepulchre, mugsborough easter 19-dear sir (or madam), in accordance with the usual custom we invite you to join with us in presenting the vicar, the rev. habbakuk bosher, with an easter offering, as a token of affection and regard. yours faithfully, a. cheeseman } w. taylor } churchwardens mr bosher's income from various sources connected with the church was over six hundred pounds a year, or about twelve pounds per week, but as that sum was evidently insufficient, his admirers had adopted this device for supplementing it. frankie said all the boys had one of these letters and were going to ask their fathers for some money to give towards the easter offering. most of them expected to get twopence. as the boy had evidently set his heart on doing the same as the other children, owen gave him the twopence, and they afterwards learned that the easter offering for that year was one hundred and twenty-seven pounds, which was made up of the amounts collected from the parishioners by the children, the district visitors and the verger, the collection at a special service, and donations from the feeble-minded old females elsewhere referred to. by the end of april nearly all the old hands were back at work, and several casual hands had also been taken on, the semi-drunk being one of the number. in addition to these, misery had taken on a number of what he called 'lightweights', men who were not really skilled workmen, but had picked up sufficient knowledge of the simpler parts of the trade to be able to get over it passably. these were paid fivepence or fivepence-halfpenny, and were employed in preference to those who had served their time, because the latter wanted more money and therefore were only employed when absolutely necessary. besides the lightweights there were a few young fellows called improvers, who were also employed because they were cheap. crass now acted as colourman, having been appointed possibly because he knew absolutely nothing about the laws of colour. as most of the work consisted of small jobs, all the paint and distemper was mixed up at the shop and sent out ready for use to the various jobs. sawkins or some of the other lightweights generally carried the heavier lots of colour or scaffolding, but the smaller lots of colour or such things as a pair of steps or a painter's plank were usually sent by the boy, whose slender legs had become quite bowed since he had been engaged helping the other philanthropists to make money for mr rushton. crass's work as colourman was simplified, to a certain extent, by the great number of specially prepared paints and distempers in all colours, supplied by the manufacturers ready for use. most of these new-fangled concoctions were regarded with an eye of suspicion and dislike by the hands, and philpot voiced the general opinion about them one day during a dinner-hour discussion when he said they might appear to be all right for a time, but they would probably not last, because they was mostly made of kimicles. one of these new-fashioned paints was called 'petrifying liquid', and was used for first-coating decaying stone or plaster work. it was also supposed to be used for thinning up a certain kind of patent distemper, but when misery found out that it was possible to thin the latter with water, the use of 'petrifying liquid' for that purpose was discontinued. this 'petrifying liquid' was a source of much merriment to the hands. the name was applied to the tea that they made in buckets on some of the jobs, and also to the four-ale that was supplied by certain pubs. one of the new inventions was regarded with a certain amount of indignation by the hands: it was a white enamel, and they objected to it for two reasons--one was because, as philpot remarked, it dried so quickly that you had to work like greased lightning; you had to be all over the door directly you started it. the other reason was that, because it dried so quickly, it was necessary to keep closed the doors and windows of the room where it was being used, and the smell was so awful that it brought on fits of dizziness and sometimes vomiting. needless to say, the fact that it compelled those who used it to work quickly recommended the stuff to misery. as for the smell, he did not care about that; he did not have to inhale the fumes himself. it was just about this time that crass, after due consultation with several of the others, including philpot, harlow, bundy, slyme, easton and the semi-drunk, decided to call a meeting of the hands for the purpose of considering the advisability of holding the usual beano later on in the summer. the meeting was held in the carpenter's shop down at the yard one evening at six o'clock, which allowed time for those interested to attend after leaving work. the hands sat on the benches or carpenter's stools, or reclined upon heaps of shavings. on a pair of tressels in the centre of the workshop stood a large oak coffin which crass had just finished polishing. when all those who were expected to turn up had arrived, payne, the foreman carpenter--the man who made the coffins--was voted to the chair on the proposition of crass, seconded by philpot, and then a solemn silence ensued, which was broken at last by the chairman, who, in a lengthy speech, explained the object of the meeting. possibly with a laudable desire that there should be no mistake about it, he took the trouble to explain several times, going over the same ground and repeating the same words over and over again, whilst the audience waited in a deathlike and miserable silence for him to leave off. payne, however, did not appear to have any intention of leaving off, for he continued, like a man in a trance, to repeat what he had said before, seeming to be under the impression that he had to make a separate explanation to each individual member of the audience. at last the crowd could stand it no longer, and began to shout 'hear, hear' and to bang bits of wood and hammers on the floor and the benches; and then, after a final repetition of the statement, that the object of the meeting was to consider the advisability of holding an outing, or beanfeast, the chairman collapsed on to a carpenter's stool and wiped the sweat from his forehead. crass then reminded the meeting that the last year's beano had been an unqualified success, and for his part he would be very sorry if they did not have one this year. last year they had four brakes, and they went to tubberton village. it was true that there was nothing much to see at tubberton, but there was one thing they could rely on getting there that they could not be sure of getting for the same money anywhere else, and that was--a good feed. (applause.) just for the sake of getting on with the business, he would propose that they decide to go to tubberton, and that a committee be appointed to make arrangements--about the dinner--with the landlord of the queen elizabeth's head at that place. philpot seconded the motion, and payne was about to call for a show of hands when harlow rose to a point of order. it appeared to him that they were getting on a bit too fast. the proper way to do this business was first to take the feeling of the meeting as to whether they wished to have a beano at all, and then, if the meeting was in favour of it, they could decide where they were to go, and whether they would have a whole day or only half a day. the semi-drunk said that he didn't care a dreadful expression where they went: he was willing to abide by the decision of the majority. (applause.) it was a matter of indifference to him whether they had a day, or half a day, or two days; he was agreeable to anything. easton suggested that a special saloon carriage might be engaged, and they could go and visit madame tussaud's waxworks. he had never been to that place and had often wished to see it. but philpot objected that if they went there, madame tussaud's might be unwilling to let them out again. bundy endorsed the remarks that had fallen from crass with reference to tubberton. he did not care where they went, they would never get such a good spread for the money as they did last year at the queen elizabeth. (cheers.) the chairman said that he remembered the last beano very well. they had half a day--left off work on saturday at twelve instead of one--so there was only one hour's wages lost--they went home, had a wash and changed their clothes, and got up to the cricketers, where the brakes was waiting, at one. then they had the two hours' drive to tubberton, stopping on the way for drinks at the blue lion, the warrior's head, the bird in hand, the dewdrop inn and the world turned upside down. (applause.) they arrived at the queen elizabeth at three-thirty, and the dinner was ready; and it was one of the finest blow-outs he had ever had. (hear, hear.) there was soup, vegetables, roast beef, roast mutton, lamb and mint sauce, plum duff, yorkshire, and a lot more. the landlord of the elizabeth kept as good a drop of beer as anyone could wish to drink, and as for the teetotallers, they could have tea, coffee or ginger beer. having thus made another start, payne found it very difficult to leave off, and was proceeding to relate further details of the last beano when harlow again rose up from his heap of shavings and said he wished to call the chairman to order. (hear, hear.) what the hell was the use of all this discussion before they had even decided to have a beano at all! was the meeting in favour of a beano or not? that was the question. a prolonged and awkward silence followed. everyone was very uncomfortable, looking stolidly on the ground or staring straight in front of them. at last easton broke the silence by suggesting that it would not be a bad plan if someone was to make a motion that a beano be held. this was greeted with a general murmur of 'hear, hear,' followed by another awkward pause, and then the chairman asked easton if he would move a resolution to that effect. after some hesitation, easton agreed, and formally moved: 'that this meeting is in favour of a beano.' the semi-drunk said that, in order to get on with the business, he would second the resolution. but meantime, several arguments had broken out between the advocates of different places, and several men began to relate anecdotes of previous beanos. nearly everyone was speaking at once and it was some time before the chairman was able to put the resolution. finding it impossible to make his voice heard above the uproar, he began to hammer on the bench with a wooden mallet, and to shout requests for order, but this only served to increase the din. some of them looked at him curiously and wondered what was the matter with him, but the majority were so interested in their own arguments that they did not notice him at all. whilst the chairman was trying to get the attention of the meeting in order to put the question, bundy had become involved in an argument with several of the new hands who claimed to know of an even better place than the queen elizabeth, a pub called 'the new found out', at mirkfield, a few miles further on than tubberton, and another individual joined in the dispute, alleging that a house called 'the three loggerheads' at slushton-cum-dryditch was the finest place for a beano within a hundred miles of mugsborough. he went there last year with pushem and driver's crowd, and they had roast beef, goose, jam tarts, mince pies, sardines, blancmange, calves' feet jelly and one pint for each man was included in the cost of the dinner. in the middle of the discussion, they noticed that most of the others were holding up their hands, so to show there was no ill feeling they held up theirs also and then the chairman declared it was carried unanimously. bundy said he would like to ask the chairman to read out the resolution which had just been passed, as he had not caught the words. the chairman replied that there was no written resolution. the motion was just to express the feeling of this meeting as to whether there was to be an outing or not. bundy said he was only asking a civil question, a point of information: all he wanted to know was, what was the terms of the resolution? was they in favour of the beano or not? the chairman responded that the meeting was unanimously in favour. (applause.) harlow said that the next thing to be done was to decide upon the date. crass suggested the last saturday in august. that would give them plenty of time to pay in. sawkins asked whether it was proposed to have a day or only half a day. he himself was in favour of the whole day. it would only mean losing a morning's work. it was hardly worth going at all if they only had half the day. the semi-drunk remarked that he had just thought of a very good place to go if they decided to have a change. three years ago he was working for dauber and botchit and they went to 'the first in and the last out' at bashford. it was a very small place, but there was a field where you could have a game of cricket or football, and the dinner was a1 at lloyds. there was also a skittle alley attached to the pub and no charge was made for the use of it. there was a bit of a river there, and one of the chaps got so drunk that he went orf his onion and jumped into the water, and when they got him out the village policeman locked him up, and the next day he was took before the beak and fined two pounds or a month's hard labour for trying to commit suicide. easton pointed out that there was another way to look at it: supposing they decided to have the beano, he supposed it would come to about six shillings a head. if they had it at the end of august and started paying in now, say a tanner a week, they would have plenty of time to make up the amount, but supposing the work fell off and some of them got the push? crass said that in that case a man could either have his money back or he could leave it, and continue his payments even if he were working for some other firm; the fact that he was off from rushton's would not prevent him from going to the beano. harlow proposed that they decide to go to the queen elizabeth the same as last year, and that they have half a day. philpot said that, in order to get on with the business, he would second the resolution. bundy suggested--as an amendment--that it should be a whole day, starting from the cricketers at nine in the morning, and sawkins said that, in order to get on with the business, he would second the amendment. one of the new hands said he wished to move another amendment. he proposed to strike out the queen elizabeth and substitute the three loggerheads. the chairman--after a pause--inquired if there were any seconder to this, and the semi-drunk said that, although he did not care much where they went, still, to get on with the business, he would second the amendment, although for his own part he would prefer to go to the 'first in and last out' at bashford. the new hand offered to withdraw his suggestion re the three loggerheads in favour of the semi-drunks proposition, but the latter said it didn't matter; it could go as it was. as it was getting rather late, several men went home, and cries of 'put the question' began to be heard on all sides; the chairman accordingly was proceeding to put harlow's proposition when the new hand interrupted him by pointing out that it was his duty as chairman to put the amendments first. this produced another long discussion, in the course of which a very tall, thin man who had a harsh, metallic voice gave a long rambling lecture about the rules of order and the conduct of public meetings. he spoke very slowly and deliberately, using very long words and dealing with the subject in an exhaustive manner. a resolution was a resolution, and an amendment was an amendment; then there was what was called an amendment to an amendment; the procedure of the house of commons differed very materially from that of the house of lords--and so on. this man kept on talking for about ten minutes, and might have continued for ten hours if he had not been rudely interrupted by harlow, who said that it seemed to him that they were likely to stay there all night if they went on like they were going. he wanted his tea, and he would also like to get a few hours' sleep before having to resume work in the morning. he was getting about sick of all this talk. (hear, hear.) in order to get on with the business, he would withdraw his resolution if the others would withdraw their amendments. if they would agree to do this, he would then propose another resolution which--if carried--would meet all the requirements of the case. (applause.) the man with the metallic voice observed that it was not necessary to ask the consent of those who had moved amendments: if the original proposition was withdrawed, all the amendments fell to the ground. 'last year,' observed crass, 'when we was goin' out of the room after we'd finished our dinner at the queen elizabeth, the landlord pointed to the table and said, "there's enough left over for you all to 'ave another lot."' (cheers.) harlow said that he would move that it be held on the last saturday in august; that it be for half a day, starting at one o'clock so that they could work up till twelve, which would mean that they would only have to lose one hour's pay: that they go to the same place as last year--the queen elizabeth. (hear, hear.) that the same committee that acted last year--crass and bundy--be appointed to make all the arrangements and collect the subscriptions. (applause.) the tall man observed that this was what was called a compound resolution, and was proceeding to explain further when the chairman exclaimed that it did not matter a dam' what it was called--would anyone second it? the semi-drunk said that he would--in order to get on with the business. bundy moved, and sawkins seconded, as an amendment, that it should be a whole day. the new hand moved to substitute the loggerheads for the queen elizabeth. easton proposed to substitute madame tussaud's waxworks for the queen elizabeth. he said he moved this just to test the feeling of the meeting. harlow pointed out that it would cost at least a pound a head to defray the expenses of such a trip. the railway fares, tram fares in london, meals--for it would be necessary to have a whole day--and other incidental expenses; to say nothing of the loss of wages. it would not be possible for any of them to save the necessary amount during the next four months. (hear, hear.) philpot repeated his warning as to the danger of visiting madame tussaud's. he was certain that if she once got them in there she would never let them out again. he had no desire to pass the rest of his life as an image in a museum. one of the new hands--a man with a red tie--said that they would look well, after having been soaked for a month or two in petrifying liquid, chained up in the chamber of horrors with labels round their necks--'specimens of liberal and conservative upholders of the capitalist system, 20 century'. crass protested against the introduction of politics into that meeting. (hear, hear.) the remarks of the last speakers were most uncalled-for. easton said that he would withdraw his amendment. acting under the directions of the man with the metallic voice, the chairman now proceeded to put the amendment to the vote. bundy's proposal that it should be a whole day was defeated, only himself, sawkins and the semi-drunk being in favour. the motion to substitute the loggerheads for the queen elizabeth was also defeated, and the compound resolution proposed by harlow was then carried nem. con. philpot now proposed a hearty vote of thanks to the chairman for the very able manner in which he had conducted the meeting. when this had been unanimously agreed to, the semi-drunk moved a similar tribute of gratitude to crass for his services to the cause and the meeting dispersed. chapter 42 june during the early part of may the weather was exceptionally bad, with bitterly cold winds. rain fell nearly every day, covering the roads with a slush that penetrated the rotten leather of the cheap or second-hand boots worn by the workmen. this weather had the effect of stopping nearly all outside work, and also caused a lot of illness, for those who were so fortunate as to have inside jobs frequently got wet through on their way to work in the morning and had to work all day in damp clothing, and with their boots saturated with water. it was also a source of trouble to those of the men who had allotments, because if it had been fine they would have been able to do something to their gardens while they were out of work. newman had not succeeded in getting a job at the trade since he came out of prison, but he tried to make a little money by hawking bananas. philpot--when he was at work--used often to buy a tanner's or a bob's worth from him and give them to mrs linden's children. on saturdays old joe used to waylay these children and buy them bags of cakes at the bakers. one week when he knew that mrs linden had not had much work to do, he devised a very cunning scheme to help her. he had been working with slyme, who was papering a large boarded ceiling in a shop. it had to be covered with unbleached calico before it could be papered and when the work was done there were a number of narrow pieces of calico left over. these he collected and tore into strips about six inches wide which he took round to mrs linden, and asked her to sew them together, end to end, so as to make one long strip: then this long strip had to be cut into four pieces of equal length and the edges sewn together in such a manner that it would form a long tube. philpot told her that it was required for some work that rushton's were doing, and said he had undertaken to get the sewing done. the firm would have to pay for it, so she could charge a good price. 'you see,' he said with a wink, 'this is one of those jobs where we gets a chance to get some of our own back.' mary thought it was rather a strange sort of job, but she did as philpot directed and when he came for the stuff and asked how much it was she said threepence: it had only taken about half an hour. philpot ridiculed this: it was not nearly enough. they were not supposed to know how long it took: it ought to be a bob at the very least. so, after some hesitation she made out a bill for that amount on a half-sheet of note-paper. he brought her the money the next saturday afternoon and went off chuckling to himself over the success of the scheme. it did not occur to him until the next day that he might just as well have got her to make him an apron or two: and when he did think of this he said that after all it didn't matter, because if he had done that it would have been necessary to buy new calico, and anyhow, it could be done some other time. newman did not make his fortune out of the bananas--seldom more than two shillings a day--and consequently he was very glad when philpot called at his house one evening and told him there was a chance of a job at rushton's. newman accordingly went to the yard the next morning, taking his apron and blouse and his bag of tools with him, ready to start work. he got there at about quarter to six and was waiting outside when hunter arrived. the latter was secretly very glad to see him, for there was a rush of work in and they were short of men. he did not let this appear, of course, but hesitated for a few minutes when newman repeated the usual formula: 'any chance of a job, sir?' 'we wasn't at all satisfied with you last time you was on, you know,' said misery. 'still, i don't mind giving you another chance. but if you want to hold your job you'll have to move yourself a bit quicker than you did before.' towards the end of the month things began to improve all round. the weather became finer and more settled. as time went on the improvement was maintained and nearly everyone was employed. rushton's were so busy that they took on several other old hands who had been sacked the previous year for being too slow. thanks to the influence of crass, easton was now regarded as one of the regular hands. he had recently resumed the practice of spending some of his evenings at the cricketers. it is probable that even if it had not been for his friendship with crass, he would still have continued to frequent the public house, for things were not very comfortable at home. somehow or other, ruth and he seemed to be always quarrelling, and he was satisfied that it was not always his fault. sometimes, after the day's work was over he would go home resolved to be good friends with her: he would plan on his way homewards to suggest to her that they should have their tea and then go out for a walk with the child. once or twice she agreed, but on each occasion, they quarrelled before they got home again. so after a time he gave up trying to be friends with her and went out by himself every evening as soon as he had had his tea. mary linden, who was still lodging with them, could not help perceiving their unhappiness: she frequently noticed that ruth's eyes were red and swollen as if with crying, and she gently sought to gain her confidence, but without success. on one occasion when mary was trying to advise her, ruth burst out into a terrible fit of weeping, but she would not say what was the cause--except that her head was aching--she was not well, that was all. sometimes easton passed the evening at the cricketers but frequently he went over to the allotments, where harlow had a plot of ground. harlow used to get up about four o'clock in the morning and put in an hour or so at his garden before going to work; and every evening as soon as he had finished tea he used to go there again and work till it was dark. sometimes he did not go home to tea at all, but went straight from work to the garden, and his children used to bring his tea to him there in a glass bottle, with something to eat in a little basket. he had four children, none of whom were yet old enough to go to work, and as may be imagined, he found it a pretty hard struggle to live. he was not a teetotaller, but as he often remarked, 'what the publicans got from him wouldn't make them very fat', for he often went for weeks together without tasting the stuff, except a glass or two with the sunday dinner, which he did not regard as an unnecessary expense, because it was almost as cheap as tea or coffee. fortunately his wife was a good needlewoman, and as sober and industrious as himself; by dint of slaving incessantly from morning till night she managed to keep her home fairly comfortable and the children clean and decently dressed; they always looked respectable, although they did not always have enough proper food to eat. they looked so respectable that none of the 'visiting ladies' ever regarded them as deserving cases. harlow paid fifteen shillings a year for his plot of ground, and although it meant a lot of hard work it was also a source of pleasure and some profit. he generally made a few shillings out of the flowers, besides having enough potatoes and other vegetables to last them nearly all the year. sometimes easton went over to the allotments and lent harlow a hand with this gardening work, but whether he went there or to the cricketers, he usually returned home about half past nine, and then went straight to bed, often without speaking a single word to ruth, who for her part seldom spoke to him except to answer something he said, or to ask some necessary question. at first, easton used to think that it was all because of the way he had behaved to her in the public house, but when he apologized--as he did several times--and begged her to forgive him and forget about it, she always said it was all right; there was nothing to forgive. then, after a time, he began to think it was on account of their poverty and the loss of their home, for nearly all their furniture had been sold during the last winter. but whenever he talked of trying to buy some more things to make the place comfortable again, she did not appear to take any interest: the house was neat enough as it was: they could manage very well, she said, indifferently. one evening, about the middle of june, when he had been over to the allotments, easton brought her home a bunch of flowers that harlow had given him--some red and white roses and some pansies. when he came in, ruth was packing his food basket for the next day. the baby was asleep in its cot on the floor near the window. although it was nearly nine o'clock the lamp had not yet been lighted and the mournful twilight that entered the room through the open window increased the desolation of its appearance. the fire had burnt itself out and the grate was filled with ashes. on the hearth was an old rug made of jute that had once been printed in bright colours which had faded away till the whole surface had become almost uniformly drab, showing scarcely any trace of the original pattern. the rest of the floor was bare except for two or three small pieces of old carpet that ruth had bought for a few pence at different times at some inferior second-hand shop. the chairs and the table were almost the only things that were left of the original furniture of the room, and except for three or four plates of different patterns and sizes and a few cups and saucers, the shelves of the dresser were bare. the stillness of the atmosphere was disturbed only by the occasional sound of the wheels of a passing vehicle and the strangely distinct voices of some children who were playing in the street. 'i've brought you these,' said easton, offering her the flowers. 'i thought you'd like them. i got them from harlow. you know i've been helping him a little with his garden.' at first he thought she did not want to take them. she was standing at the table with her back to the window, so that he was unable to see the expression of her face, and she hesitated for a moment before she faltered out some words of thanks and took the flowers, which she put down on the table almost as soon as she touched them. offended at what he considered her contemptuous indifference, easton made no further attempt at conversation but went into the scullery to wash his hands, and then went up to bed. downstairs, for a long time after he was gone, ruth sat alone by the fireless grate, in the silence and the gathering shadows, holding the bunch of flowers in her hand, living over again the events of the last year, and consumed with an agony of remorse. the presence of mary linden and the two children in the house probably saved ruth from being more unhappy than she was. little elsie had made an arrangement with her to be allowed to take the baby out for walks, and in return ruth did elsie's housework. as for mary, she had not much time to do anything but sew, almost the only relaxation she knew being when she took the work home, and on sunday, which she usually devoted to a general clean-up of the room, and to mending the children's clothes. sometimes on sunday evening she used to go with ruth and the children to see mrs owen, who, although she was not ill enough to stay in bed, seldom went out of the house. she had never really recovered from the attack of illness which was brought on by her work at the boarding house. the doctor had been to see her once or twice and had prescribed--rest. she was to lie down as much as possible, not to do any heavy work--not to carry or lift any heavy articles, scrub floors, make beds, or anything of that sort: and she was to take plenty of nourishing food, beef tea, chicken, a little wine and so on. he did not suggest a trip round the world in a steam yacht or a visit to switzerland--perhaps he thought they might not be able to afford it. sometimes she was so ill that she had to observe one at least of the doctor's instructions--to lie down: and then she would worry and fret because she was not able to do the housework and because owen had to prepare his own tea when he came home at night. on one of these occasions it would have been necessary for owen to stay at home from work if it had not been for mrs easton, who came for several days in succession to look after her and attend to the house. fortunately, owen's health was better since the weather had become warmer. for a long time after the attack of haemorrhage he had while writing the show-card he used to dread going to sleep at night for fear it should recur. he had heard of people dying in their sleep from that cause. but this terror gradually left him. nora knew nothing of what occurred that night: to have told her would have done no good, but on the contrary would have caused her a lot of useless anxiety. sometimes he doubted whether it was right not to tell her, but as time went by and his health continued to improve he was glad he had said nothing about it. frankie had lately resumed his athletic exercises with the flat iron: his strength was returning since owen had been working regularly, because he had been having his porridge and milk again and also some parrish's food which a chemist at windley was selling large bottles of for a shilling. he used to have what he called a 'party' two or three times a week with elsie, charley and easton's baby as the guests. sometimes, if mrs owen were not well, elsie used to stay in with her after tea and do some housework while the boys went out to play, but more frequently the four children used to go together to the park to play or sail boats on the lake. once one of the boats was becalmed about a couple of yards from shore and while trying to reach it with a stick frankie fell into the water, and when charley tried to drag him out he fell in also. elsie put the baby down on the bank and seized hold of charley and while she was trying to get him out, the baby began rolling down, and would probably have tumbled in as well if a man who happened to be passing by had not rushed up in time to prevent it. fortunately the water at that place was only about two feet deep, so the boys were not much the worse for their ducking. they returned home wet through, smothered with mud, and feeling very important, like boys who had distinguished themselves. after this, whenever she could manage to spare the time, ruth easton used to go with the children to the park. there was a kind of summer-house near the shore of the lake, only a few feet away from the water's edge, surrounded and shaded by trees, whose branches arched over the path and drooped down to the surface of the water. while the children played ruth used to sit in this arbour and sew, but often her work was neglected and forgotten as she gazed pensively at the water, which just there looked very still, and dark, and deep, for it was sheltered from the wind and over-shadowed by the trees that lined the banks at the end of the lake. sometimes, if it happened to be raining, instead of going out the children used to have some games in the house. on one such occasion frankie produced the flat iron and went through the exercise, and charley had a go as well. but although he was slightly older and taller than frankie he could not lift the iron so often or hold it out so long as the other, a failure that frankie attributed to the fact that charley had too much tea and bread and butter instead of porridge and milk and parrish's food. charley was so upset about his lack of strength that he arranged with frankie to come home with him the next day after school to see his mother about it. mrs linden had a flat iron, so they gave a demonstration of their respective powers before her. mrs easton being also present, by request, because frankie said that the diet in question was suitable for babies as well as big children. he had been brought up on it ever since he could remember, and it was almost as cheap as bread and butter and tea. the result of the exhibition was that mrs linden promised to make porridge for charley and elsie whenever she could spare the time, and mrs easton said she would try it for the baby also. chapter 43 the good old summer-time all through the summer the crowd of ragged-trousered philanthropists continued to toil and sweat at their noble and unselfish task of making money for mr rushton. painting the outsides of houses and shops, washing off and distempering ceilings, stripping old paper off walls, painting and papering rooms and staircases, building new rooms or other additions to old houses or business premises, digging up old drains, repairing leaky roofs and broken windows. their zeal and enthusiasm in the good cause was unbounded. they were supposed to start work at six o'clock, but most of them were usually to be found waiting outside the job at about a quarter to that hour, sitting on the kerbstones or the doorstep. their operations extended all over the town: at all hours of the day they were to be seen either going or returning from 'jobs', carrying ladders, planks, pots of paint, pails of whitewash, earthenware, chimney pots, drainpipes, lengths of guttering, closet pans, grates, bundles of wallpaper, buckets of paste, sacks of cement, and loads of bricks and mortar. quite a common spectacle--for gods and men--was a procession consisting of a handcart loaded up with such materials being pushed or dragged through the public streets by about half a dozen of these imperialists in broken boots and with battered, stained, discoloured bowler hats, or caps splashed with paint and whitewash; their stand-up collars dirty, limp and crumpled, and their rotten second-hand misfit clothing saturated with sweat and plastered with mortar. even the assistants in the grocers' and drapers' shops laughed and ridiculed and pointed the finger of scorn at them as they passed. the superior classes--those who do nothing--regarded them as a sort of lower animals. a letter appeared in the obscurer one week from one of these well-dressed loafers, complaining of the annoyance caused to the better-class visitors by workmen walking on the pavement as they passed along the grand parade in the evening on their way home from work, and suggesting that they should walk in the roadway. when they heard of the letter a lot of the workmen adopted the suggestion and walked in the road so as to avoid contaminating the idlers. this letter was followed by others of a somewhat similar kind, and one or two written in a patronizing strain in defence of the working classes by persons who evidently knew nothing about them. there was also a letter from an individual who signed himself 'morpheus' complaining that he was often awakened out of his beauty sleep in the middle of the night by the clattering noise of the workmen's boots as they passed his house on their way to work in the morning. 'morpheus' wrote that not only did they make a dreadful noise with their horrible iron-clad boots, but they were in the habit of coughing and spitting a great deal, which was very unpleasant to hear, and they conversed in loud tones. sometimes their conversation was not at all edifying, for it consisted largely of bad language, which 'morpheus' assumed to be attributable to the fact that they were out of temper because they had to rise so early. as a rule they worked till half-past five in the evening, and by the time they reached home it was six o'clock. when they had taken their evening meal and had a wash it was nearly eight: about nine most of them went to bed so as to be able to get up about half past four the next morning to make a cup of tea before leaving home at half past five to go to work again. frequently it happened that they had to leave home earlier than this, because their 'job' was more than half an hour's walk away. it did not matter how far away the 'job' was from the shop, the men had to walk to and fro in their own time, for trades union rules were a dead letter in mugsborough. there were no tram fares or train fares or walking time allowed for the likes of them. ninety-nine out of every hundred of them did not believe in such things as those: they had much more sense than to join trades unions: on the contrary, they believed in placing themselves entirely at the mercy of their good, kind liberal and tory masters. very frequently it happened, when only a few men were working together, that it was not convenient to make tea for breakfast or dinner, and then some of them brought tea with them ready made in bottles and drank it cold; but most of them went to the nearest pub and ate their food there with a glass of beer. even those who would rather have had tea or coffee had beer, because if they went to a temperance restaurant or coffee tavern it generally happened that they were not treated very civilly unless they bought something to eat as well as to drink, and the tea at such places was really dearer than beer, and the latter was certainly quite as good to drink as the stewed tea or the liquid mud that was sold as coffee at cheap 'workmen's' eating houses. there were some who were--as they thought--exceptionally lucky: the firms they worked for were busy enough to let them work two hours' overtime every night--till half past seven--without stopping for tea. most of these arrived home about eight, completely flattened out. then they had some tea and a wash and before they knew where they were it was about half past nine. then they went to sleep again till half past four or five the next morning. they were usually so tired when they got home at night that they never had any inclination for study or any kind of self-improvement, even if they had had the time. they had plenty of time to study during the winter: and their favourite subject then was, how to preserve themselves from starving to death. this overtime, however, was the exception, for although in former years it had been the almost invariable rule to work till half past seven in summer, most of the firms now made a practice of ceasing work at five-thirty. the revolution which had taken place in this matter was a favourite topic of conversation amongst the men, who spoke regretfully of the glorious past, when things were busy, and they used to work fifteen, sixteen and even eighteen hours a day. but nowadays there were nearly as many chaps out of work in the summer as in the winter. they used to discuss the causes of the change. one was, of course, the fact that there was not so much building going on as formerly, and another was the speeding up and slave-driving, and the manner in which the work was now done, or rather scamped. as old philpot said, he could remember the time, when he was a nipper, when such a 'job' as that at 'the cave' would have lasted at least six months, and they would have had more hands on it too! but it would have been done properly, not messed up like that was: all the woodwork would have been rubbed down with pumice stone and water: all the knots cut out and the holes properly filled up, and the work properly rubbed down with glass-paper between every coat. but nowadays the only place you'd see a bit of pumice stone was in a glass case in a museum, with a label on it. 'pumice stone: formerly used by house-painters.' most of them spoke of those bygone times with poignant regret, but there were a few--generally fellows who had been contaminated by contact with socialists or whose characters had been warped and degraded by the perusal of socialist literature--who said that they did not desire to work overtime at all--ten hours a day were quite enough for them--in fact they would rather do only eight. what they wanted, they said, was not more work, but more grub, more clothes, more leisure, more pleasure and better homes. they wanted to be able to go for country walks or bicycle rides, to go out fishing or to go to the seaside and bathe and lie on the beach and so forth. but these were only a very few; there were not many so selfish as this. the majority desired nothing but to be allowed to work, and as for their children, why, 'what was good enough for themselves oughter be good enough for the kids'. they often said that such things as leisure, culture, pleasure and the benefits of civilization were never intended for 'the likes of us'. they did not--all--actually say this, but that was what their conduct amounted to; for they not only refused to help to bring about a better state of things for their children, but they ridiculed and opposed and cursed and abused those who were trying to do it for them. the foulest words that came out of their mouths were directed against the men of their own class in the house of commons--the labour members--and especially the socialists, whom they spoke of as fellows who were too bloody lazy to work for a living, and who wanted the working classes to keep them. some of them said that they did not believe in helping their children to become anything better than their parents had been because in such cases the children, when they grew up, 'looked down' upon and were ashamed of their fathers and mothers! they seemed to think that if they loved and did their duty to their children, the probability was that the children would prove ungrateful: as if even if that were true, it would be any excuse for their indifference. another cause of the shortage of work was the intrusion into the trade of so many outsiders: fellows like sawkins and the other lightweights. whatever other causes there were, there could be no doubt that the hurrying and scamping was a very real one. every 'job' had to be done at once! as if it were a matter of life or death! it must be finished by a certain time. if the 'job' was at an empty house, misery's yarn was that it was let! the people were coming in at the end of the week! therefore everything must be finished by wednesday night. all the ceilings had to be washed off, the walls stripped and repapered, and two coats of paint inside and outside the house. new drains were to be put in, and all broken windows and locks and broken plaster repaired. a number of men--usually about half as many as there should have been--would be sent to do the work, and one man was put in charge of the 'job'. these sub-foremen or 'coddies' knew that if they 'made their jobs pay' they would be put in charge of others and be kept on in preference to other men as long as the firm had any work; so they helped misery to scheme and scamp the work and watched and drove the men under their charge; and these latter poor wretches, knowing that their only chance of retaining their employment was to 'tear into it', tore into it like so many maniacs. instead of cleaning any parts of the woodwork that were greasy or very dirty, they brushed them over with a coat of spirit varnish before painting to make sure that the paint would dry: places where the plaster of the walls was damaged were repaired with what was humorously called 'garden cement'--which was the technical term for dirt out of the garden--and the surface was skimmed over with proper material. ceilings that were not very dirty were not washed off, but dusted, and lightly gone over with a thin coat of whitewash. the old paper was often left upon the walls of rooms that were supposed to be stripped before being repapered, and to conceal this the joints of the old paper were rubbed down so that they should not be perceptible through the new paper. as far as possible, misery and the sub-foreman avoided doing the work the customers paid for, and even what little they did was hurried over anyhow. a reign of terror--the terror of the sack--prevailed on all the 'jobs', which were carried on to the accompaniment of a series of alarums and excursions: no man felt safe for a moment: at the most unexpected times misery would arrive and rush like a whirlwind all over the 'job'. if he happened to find a man having a spell the culprit was immediately discharged, but he did not get the opportunity of doing this very often for everybody was too terrified to leave off working even for a few minutes' rest. from the moment of hunter's arrival until his departure, a state of panic, hurry, scurry and turmoil reigned. his strident voice rang through the house as he bellowed out to them to 'rouse themselves! get it done! smear it on anyhow! tar it over! we've got another job to start when you've done this!' occasionally, just to keep the others up to concert pitch, he used to sack one of the men for being too slow. they all trembled before him and ran about whenever he spoke to or called them, because they knew that there were always a lot of other men out of work who would be willing and eager to fill their places if they got the sack. although it was now summer, and the distress committee and all the other committees had suspended operations, there was still always a large number of men hanging about the vicinity of the fountain on the parade--the wage slave market. when men finished up for the firm they were working for they usually made for that place. any master in want of a wage slave for a few hours, days or weeks could always buy one there. the men knew this and they also knew that if they got the sack from one firm it was no easy matter to get another job, and that was why they were terrified. when misery was gone--to repeat the same performance at some other job--the sub-foreman would have a crawl round to see how the chaps were getting on: to find out if they had used up all their paint yet, or to bring them some putty so that they should not have to leave their work to go to get anything themselves: and then very often rushton himself would come and stalk quietly about the house or stand silently behind the men, watching them as they worked. he seldom spoke to anyone, but just stood there like a graven image, or walked about like a dumb animal--a pig, as the men used to say. this individual had a very exalted idea of his own importance and dignity. one man got the sack for presuming to stop him in the street to ask some questions about some work that was being done. misery went round to all the jobs the next day and told all the 'coddies' to tell all the hands that they were never to speak to mr rushton if they met him in the street, and the following saturday the man who had so offended was given his back day, ostensibly because there was nothing for him to do, but really for the reason stated above. there was one job, the outside of a large house that stood on elevated ground overlooking the town. the men who were working there were even more than usually uncomfortable, for it was said that rushton used to sit in his office and watch them through a telescope. sometimes, when it was really necessary to get a job done by a certain time, they had to work late, perhaps till eight or nine o'clock. no time was allowed for tea, but some of them brought sufficient food with them in the morning to enable them to have a little about six o'clock in the evening. others arranged for their children to bring them some tea from home. as a rule, they partook of this without stopping work: they had it on the floor beside them and ate and drank and worked at the same time--a paint-brushful of white lead in one hand, and a piece of bread and margarine in the other. on some jobs, if the 'coddy' happened to be a decent sort, they posted a sentry to look out for hunter or rushton while the others knocked off for a few minutes to snatch a mouthful of grub; but it was not safe always to do this, for there was often some crawling sneak with an ambition to become a 'coddy' who would not scruple to curry favour with misery by reporting the crime. as an additional precaution against the possibility of any of the men idling or wasting their time, each one was given a time-sheet on which he was required to account for every minute of the day. the form of these sheets vary slightly with different firms: that of rushton & co., was as shown. time sheet of work done by in the employ of rushton & co builders & decorators : mugsborough no smoking or intoxicants allowed during working hours each piece of work must be fully described, what it was, and how long it took to do. -----+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+----------- | | time when | time when | | | where working | started | finished | hours | what doing -----+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+-----------sat | | | | | -----+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+-----------mon | | | | | -----+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+-----------tues | | | | | -----+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+-----------wed | | | | | -----+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+-----------thur | | | | | -----+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+-----------fri | | | | | -----+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+----------- | | total hours | | -----+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+-----------one monday morning misery gave each of the sub-foremen an envelope containing one of the firm's memorandum forms. crass opened his and found the following: crass when you are on a job with men under you, check and initial their time-sheets every night. if they are called away and sent to some other job, or stood off, check and initial their time-sheets as they leave your job. any man coming on your job during the day, you must take note of the exact time of his arrival, and see that his sheet is charged right. any man who is slow or lazy, or any man that you notice talking more than is necessary during working hours, you must report him to mr hunter. we expect you and the other foremen to help us to carry out these rules, and any information given us about any man is treated in confidence. rushton & co. note: this applies to all men of all trades who come on the jobs of which you are the foreman. every week the time-sheets were scrutinized, and every now and then a man would be 'had up on the carpet' in the office before rushton and misery, and interrogated as to why he had taken fifteen hours to do ten hours work? in the event of the accused being unable to give a satisfactory explanation of his conduct he was usually sacked on the spot. misery was frequently called 'up on the carpet' himself. if he made a mistake in figuring out a 'job', and gave in too high a tender for it, so that the firm did not get the work, rushton grumbled. if the price was so low that there was not enough profit, rushton was very unpleasant about it, and whenever it happened that there was not only no profit but an actual loss, rushton created such a terrible disturbance that misery was nearly frightened to death and used to get on his bicycle and rush off to the nearest 'job' and howl and bellow at the 'chaps' to get it done. all the time the capabilities of the men--especially with regard to speed--were carefully watched and noted: and whenever there was a slackness of work and it was necessary to discharge some hands those that were slow or took too much pains were weeded out: this of course was known to the men and it had the desired effect upon them. in justice to rushton and hunter, it must be remembered that there was a certain amount of excuse for all this driving and cheating, because they had to compete with all the other firms, who conducted their business in precisely the same way. it was not their fault, but the fault of the system. a dozen firms tendered for every 'job', and of course the lowest tender usually obtained the work. knowing this, they all cut the price down to the lowest possible figure and the workmen had to suffer. the trouble was that there were too many 'masters'. it would have been far better for the workmen if nine out of every ten of the employers had never started business. then the others would have been able to get a better price for their work, and the men might have had better wages and conditions. the hands, however, made no such allowances or excuses as these for misery and rushton. they never thought or spoke of them except with hatred and curses. but whenever either of them came to the 'job' the 'coddies' cringed and grovelled before them, greeting them with disgustingly servile salutations, plentifully interspersed with the word 'sir', greetings which were frequently either ignored altogether or answered with an inarticulate grunt. they said 'sir' at nearly every second word: it made one feel sick to hear them because it was not courtesy: they were never courteous to each other, it was simply abject servility and self-contempt. one of the results of all the frenzied hurrying was that every now and then there was an accident: somebody got hurt: and it was strange that accidents were not more frequent, considering the risks that were taken. when they happened to be working on ladders in busy streets they were not often allowed to have anyone to stand at the foot, and the consequence was that all sorts and conditions of people came into violent collision with the bottoms of the ladders. small boys playing in the reckless manner characteristic of their years rushed up against them. errand boys, absorbed in the perusal of penny instalments of the adventures of claude duval, and carrying large baskets of green-groceries, wandered into them. blind men fell foul of them. adventurous schoolboys climbed up them. people with large feet became entangled in them. fat persons of both sexes who thought it unlucky to walk underneath, tried to negotiate the narrow strip of pavement between the foot of the ladder and the kerb, and in their passage knocked up against the ladder and sometimes fell into the road. nursemaids wheeling perambulators--lolling over the handle, which they usually held with their left hands, the right holding a copy of orange blossoms or some halfpenny paper, and so interested in the story of the marquis of lymejuice--a young man of noble presence and fabulous wealth, with a drooping golden moustache and very long legs, who, notwithstanding the diabolical machinations of lady sibyl malvoise, who loves him as well as a woman with a name like that is capable of loving anyone, is determined to wed none other than the scullery-maid at the village inn--inevitably bashed the perambulators into the ladders. even when the girls were not reading they nearly always ran into the ladders, which seemed to possess a magnetic attraction for perambulators and go-carts of all kinds, whether propelled by nurses or mothers. sometimes they would advance very cautiously towards the ladder: then, when they got very near, hesitate a little whether to go under or run the risk of falling into the street by essaying the narrow passage: then they would get very close up to the foot of the ladder, and dodge and dance about, and give the cart little pushes from side to side, until at last the magnetic influence exerted itself and the perambulator crashed into the ladder, perhaps at the very moment that the man at the top was stretching out to do some part of the work almost beyond his reach. once harlow had just started painting some rainpipes from the top of a 40-ft ladder when one of several small boys who were playing in the street ran violently against the foot. harlow was so startled that he dropped his brushes and clutched wildly at the ladder, which turned completely round and slid about six feet along the parapet into the angle of the wall, with harlow hanging beneath by his hands. the paint pot was hanging by a hook from one of the rungs, and the jerk scattered the brown paint it contained all over harlow and all over the brickwork of the front of the house. he managed to descend safely by clasping his legs round the sides of the ladder and sliding down. when misery came there was a row about what he called carelessness. and the next day harlow had to wear his sunday trousers to work. on another occasion they were painting the outside of a house called 'gothic lodge'. at one corner it had a tower surmounted by a spire or steeple, and this steeple terminated with an ornamental wrought-iron pinnacle which had to be painted. the ladder they had was not quite long enough, and besides that, as it had to stand in a sort of a courtyard at the base of the tower, it was impossible to slant it sufficiently: instead of lying along the roof of the steeple, it was sticking up in the air. when easton went up to paint the pinnacle he had to stand on almost the very top rung of the ladder, to be exact, the third from the top, and lean over to steady himself by holding on to the pinnacle with his left hand while he used the brush with his right. as it was only about twenty minutes' work there were two men to hold the foot of the ladder. it was cheaper to do it this way than to rig up a proper scaffold, which would have entailed perhaps two hours' work for two or three men. of course it was very dangerous, but that did not matter at all, because even if the man fell it would make no difference to the firm--all the men were insured and somehow or other, although they frequently had narrow escapes, they did not often come to grief. on this occasion, just as easton was finishing he felt the pinnacle that he was holding on to give way, and he got such a fright that his heart nearly stopped beating. he let go his hold and steadied himself on the ladder as well as he was able, and when he had descended three or four steps--into comparative safety--he remained clinging convulsively to the ladder and feeling so limp that he was unable to go down any further for several minutes. when he arrived at the bottom and the others noticed how white and trembling he was, he told them about the pinnacle being loose, and the 'coddy' coming along just then, they told him about it, and suggested that it should be repaired, as otherwise it might fall down and hurt someone: but the 'coddy' was afraid that if they reported it they might be blamed for breaking it, and the owner might expect the firm to put it right for nothing, so they decided to say nothing about it. the pinnacle is still on the apex of the steeple waiting for a sufficiently strong wind to blow it down on somebody's head. when the other men heard of easton's 'narrow shave', most of them said that it would have served him bloody well right if he had fallen and broken his neck: he should have refused to go up at all without a proper scaffold. that was what they would have done. if misery or the coddy had ordered any of them to go up and paint the pinnacle off that ladder, they would have chucked their tools down and demanded their ha'pence! that was what they said, but somehow or other it never happened that any of them ever 'chucked their tools down' at all, although such dangerous jobs were of very frequent occurrence. the scamping business was not confined to houses or properties of an inferior class: it was the general rule. large good-class houses, villas and mansions, the residences of wealthy people, were done in exactly the same way. generally in such places costly and beautiful materials were spoilt in the using. there was a large mansion where the interior woodwork--the doors, windows and staircase--had to be finished in white enamel. it was rather an old house and the woodwork needed rubbing down and filling up before being repainted, but of course there was not time for that, so they painted it without properly preparing it and when it was enamelled the rough, uneven surface of the wood looked horrible: but the owner appeared quite satisfied because it was nice and shiny. the dining-room of the same house was papered with a beautiful and expensive plush paper. the ground of this wall-hanging was made to imitate crimson watered silk, and it was covered with a raised pattern in plush of the same colour. the price marked on the back of this paper in the pattern book was eighteen shillings a roll. slyme was paid sixpence a roll for hanging it: the room took ten rolls, so it cost nine pounds for the paper and five shillings to hang it! to fix such a paper as this properly the walls should first be done with a plain lining paper of the same colour as the ground of the wallpaper itself, because unless the paperhanger 'lapps' the joints--which should not be done--they are apt to open a little as the paper dries and to show the white wall underneath--slyme suggested this lining to misery, who would not entertain the idea for a moment--they had gone to quite enough expense as it was, stripping the old paper off! so slyme went ahead, and as he had to make his wages, he could not spend a great deal of time over it. some of the joints were 'lapped' and some were butted, and two or three weeks after the owner of the house moved in, as the paper became more dry, the joints began to open and to show the white plaster of the wall, and then owen had to go there with a small pot of crimson paint and a little brush, and touch out the white line. while he was doing this he noticed and touched up a number of other faults; places where slyme--in his haste to get the work done--had slobbered and smeared the face of the paper with fingermarks and paste. the same ghastly mess was made of several other 'jobs' besides this one, and presently they adopted the plan of painting strips of colour on the wall in the places where the joints would come, so that if they opened the white wall would not show: but it was found that the paste on the back of the paper dragged the paint off the wall, and when the joints opened the white streaks showed all the same, so misery abandoned all attempts to prevent joints showing, and if a customer complained, he sent someone to 'touch it up': but the lining paper was never used, unless the customer or the architect knew enough about the work to insist upon it. in other parts of the same house the ceilings, the friezes, and the dados, were covered with 'embossed' or 'relief' papers. these hangings require very careful handling, for the raised parts are easily damaged; but the men who fixed them were not allowed to take the pains and time necessary to make good work: consequently in many places--especially at the joints--the pattern was flattened out and obliterated. the ceiling of the drawing-room was done with a very thick high-relief paper that was made in sheets about two feet square. these squares were not very true in shape: they had evidently warped in drying after manufacture: to make them match anything like properly would need considerable time and care. but the men were not allowed to take the necessary time. the result was that when it was finished it presented a sort of 'higgledy-piggledy' appearance. but it didn't matter: nothing seemed to matter except to get it done. one would think from the way the hands were driven and chivvied and hurried over the work that they were being paid five or six shillings an hour instead of as many pence. 'get it done!' shouted misery from morning till night. 'for god's sake get it done! haven't you finished yet? we're losing money over this "job"! if you chaps don't wake up and move a bit quicker, i shall see if i can't get somebody else who will.' these costly embossed decorations were usually finished in white; but instead of carefully coating them with specially prepared paint of patent distemper, which would need two or three coats, they slobbered one thick coat of common whitewash on to it with ordinary whitewash brushes. this was a most economical way to get over it, because it made it unnecessary to stop up the joints beforehand--the whitewash filled up all the cracks: and it also filled up the hollow parts, the crevices and interstices of the ornament, destroying the sharp outlines of the beautiful designs and reducing the whole to a lumpy, formless mass. but that did not matter either, so long as they got it done. the architect didn't notice it, because he knew that the more rushton & co. made out of the 'job', the more he himself would make. the man who had to pay for the work didn't notice it; he had the fullest confidence in the architect. at the risk of wearying the long-suffering reader, mention must be made of an affair that happened at this particular 'job'. the windows were all fitted with venetian blinds. the gentleman for whom all the work was being done had only just purchased the house, but he preferred roller blinds: he had had roller blinds in his former residence--which he had just sold--and as these roller blinds were about the right size, he decided to have them fitted to the windows of his new house: so he instructed mr rushton to have all the venetian blinds taken down and stored away up in the loft under the roof. mr rushton promised to have this done; but they were not all put away under the roof: he had four of them taken to his own place and fitted up in the conservatory. they were a little too large, so they had to be narrowed before they were fixed. the sequel was rather interesting, for it happened that when the gentleman attempted to take the roller blinds from his old house, the person to whom he had sold it refused to allow them to be removed; claiming that when he bought the house, he bought the blinds also. there was a little dispute, but eventually it was settled that way and the gentleman decided that he would have the venetian blinds in his new house after all, and instructed the people who moved his furniture to take the venetians down again from under the roof, and refix them, and then, of course, it was discovered that four of the blinds were missing. mr rushton was sent for, and he said that he couldn't understand it at all! the only possible explanation that he could think of was that some of his workmen must have stolen them! he would make inquiries, and endeavour to discover the culprits, but in any case, as this had happened while things were in his charge, if he did not succeed in recovering them, he would replace them. as the blinds had been narrowed to fit the conservatory he had to have four new ones made. the customer was of course quite satisfied, although very sorry for mr rushton. they had a little chat about it. rushton told the gentleman that he would be astonished if he knew all the facts: the difficulties one has to contend with in dealing with working men: one has to watch them continually! directly one's back is turned they leave off working! they come late in the morning, and go home before the proper time at night, and then unless one actually happens to catch them--they charge the full number of hours on their time sheets! every now and then something would be missing, and of course nobody knew anything about it. sometimes one would go unexpectedly to a 'job' and find a lot of them drunk. of course one tried to cope with these evils by means of rules and restrictions and organization, but it was very difficult--one could not be everywhere or have eyes at the back of one's head. the gentleman said that he had some idea of what it was like: he had had something to do with the lower orders himself at one time and another, and he knew they needed a lot of watching. rushton felt rather sick over this affair, but he consoled himself by reflecting that he had got clear away with several valuable rose trees and other plants which he had stolen out of the garden, and that a ladder which had been discovered in the hayloft over the stable and taken--by his instructions--to the 'yard' when the 'job' was finished had not been missed. another circumstance which helped to compensate for the blinds was that the brass fittings throughout the house, finger-plates, sash-lifts and locks, bolts and door handles, which were supposed to be all new and which the customer had paid a good price for--were really all the old ones which misery had had re-lacquered and refixed. there was nothing unusual about this affair of the blinds, for rushton and misery robbed everybody. they made a practice of annexing every thing they could lay their hands upon, provided it could be done without danger to themselves. they never did anything of a heroic or dare-devil character: they had not the courage to break into banks or jewellers' shops in the middle of the night, or to go out picking pockets: all their robberies were of the sneak-thief order. at one house that they 'did up' misery made a big haul. he had to get up into the loft under the roof to see what was the matter with the water tank. when he got up there he found a very fine hall gas lamp made of wrought brass and copper with stained and painted glass sides. although covered with dust, it was otherwise in perfect condition, so misery had it taken to his own house and cleaned up and fixed in the hall. in the same loft there were a lot of old brass picture rods and other fittings, and three very good planks, each about ten feet in length; these latter had been placed across the rafters so that one could walk easily and safely over to the tank. but misery thought they would be very useful to the firm for whitewashing ceilings and other work, so he had them taken to the yard along with the old brass, which was worth about fourpence a pound. there was another house that had to be painted inside: the people who used to live there had only just left: they had moved to some other town, and the house had been re-let before they vacated it. the new tenant had agreed with the agent that the house was to be renovated throughout before he took possession. the day after the old tenants moved away, the agent gave rushton the key so that he could go to see what was to be done and give an estimate for the work. while rushton and misery were looking over the house they discovered a large barometer hanging on the wall behind the front door: it had been overlooked by those who removed the furniture. before returning the key to the agent, rushton sent one of his men to the house for the barometer, which he kept in his office for a few weeks to see if there would be any inquiries about it. if there had been, it would have been easy to say that he had brought it there for safety--to take care of till he could find the owner. the people to whom it belonged thought the thing had been lost or stolen in transit, and afterwards one of the workmen who had assisted to pack and remove the furniture was dismissed from his employment on suspicion of having had something to do with its disappearance. no one ever thought of rushton in connection with the matter, so after about a month he had it taken to his own dwelling and hung up in the hall near the carved oak marble-topped console table that he had sneaked last summer from 596 grand parade. and there it hangs unto this day: and close behind it, supported by cords of crimson silk, is a beautiful bevelled-edged card about a foot square, and upon this card is written, in letters of gold: 'christ is the head of this house; the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.' and on the other side of the barometer is another card of the same kind and size which says: 'as for me and my house we will serve the lord.' from another place they stole two large brass chandeliers. this house had been empty for a very long time, and its owner--who did not reside in the town--wished to sell it. the agent, to improve the chances of a sale, decided to have the house overhauled and redecorated. rushton & co.'s tender being the lowest, they got the work. the chandeliers in the drawing-room and the dining-room were of massive brass, but they were all blackened and tarnished. misery suggested to the agent that they could be cleaned and relacquered, which would make them equal to new: in fact, they would be better than new ones, for such things as these were not made now, and for once misery was telling the truth. the agent agreed and the work was done: it was an extra, of course, and as the firm got twice as much for the job as they paid for having it done, they were almost satisfied. when this and all the other work was finished they sent in their account and were paid. some months afterwards the house was sold, and nimrod interviewed the new proprietor with the object of securing the order for any work that he might want done. he was successful. the papers on the walls of several of the rooms were not to the new owner's taste, and, of course, the woodwork would have to be re-painted to harmonize with the new paper. there was a lot of other work besides this: a new conservatory to build, a more modern bath and heating apparatus to be put in, and the electric light to be installed, the new people having an objection to the use of gas. the specifications were prepared by an architect, and rushton secured the work. when the chandeliers were taken down, the men, instructed by misery, put them on a handcart, and covered them over with sacks and dust-sheets and took them to the front shop, where they were placed for sale with the other stock. when all the work at the house was finished, it occurred to rushton and nimrod that when the architect came to examine and pass the work before giving them the certificate that would enable them to present their account, he might remember the chandeliers and inquire what had become of them. so they were again placed on the handcart, covered with sacks and dust-sheets, taken back to the house and put up in the loft under the roof so that, if he asked for them, there they were. the architect came, looked ever the house, passed the work, and gave his certificate; he never mentioned or thought of the chandeliers. the owner of the house was present and asked for rushton's bill, for which he at once gave them a cheque and rushton and misery almost grovelled and wallowed on the ground before him. throughout the whole interview the architect and the 'gentleman' had kept their hats on, but rushton and nimrod had been respectfully uncovered all the time, and as they followed the other two about the house their bearing had been expressive of the most abject servility. when the architect and the owner were gone the two chandeliers were taken down again from under the roof, and put upon a handcart, covered over with sacks and dust-sheets and taken back to the shop and again placed for sale with the other stock. these are only a few of the petty thefts committed by these people. to give anything approaching a full account of all the rest would require a separate volume. as a result of all the hurrying and scamping, every now and again the men found that they had worked themselves out of a job. several times during the summer the firm had scarcely anything to do, and nearly everybody had to stand off for a few days or weeks. when newman got his first start in the early part of the year he had only been working for about a fortnight when--with several others--he was 'stood off'. fortunately, however, the day after he left rushtons, he was lucky enough to get a start for another firm, driver and botchit, where he worked for nearly a month, and then he was again given a job at rushton's, who happened to be busy again. he did not have to lose much time, for he 'finished up' for driver and botchit on a thursday night and on the friday he interviewed misery, who told him they were about to commence a fresh 'job' on the following monday morning at six o'clock, and that he could start with them. so this time newman was only out of work the friday and saturday, which was another stroke of luck, because it often happens that a man has to lose a week or more after 'finishing up' for one firm before he gets another 'job'. all through the summer crass continued to be the general 'colour-man', most of his time being spent at the shop mixing up colours for all the different 'jobs'. he also acted as a sort of lieutenant to hunter, who, as the reader has already been informed, was not a practical painter. when there was a price to be given for some painting work, misery sometimes took crass with him to look over it and help him to estimate the amount of time and material it would take. crass was thus in a position of more than ordinary importance, not only being superior to the 'hands', but also ranking above the other sub-foremen who had charge of the 'jobs'. it was crass and these sub-foremen who were to blame for most of the scamping and driving, because if it had not been for them neither rushton nor hunter would have known how to scheme the work. of course, hunter and rushton wanted to drive and scamp, but not being practical men they would not have known how if it had not been for crass and the others, who put them up to all the tricks of the trade. crass knew that when the men stayed till half past seven they were in the habit of ceasing work for a few minutes to eat a mouthful of grub about six o'clock, so he suggested to misery that as it was not possible to stop this, it would be a good plan to make the men stop work altogether from half past five till six, and lose half an hour's pay; and to make up the time, instead of leaving off at seven-thirty, they could work till eight. misery had known of and winked at the former practice, for he knew that the men could not work all that time without something to eat, but crass's suggestion seemed a much better way, and it was adopted. when the other masters in mugsborough heard of this great reform they all followed suit, and it became the rule in that town, whenever it was necessary to work overtime, for the men to stay till eight instead of half past seven as formerly, and they got no more pay than before. previous to this summer it had been the almost invariable rule to have two men in each room that was being painted, but crass pointed out to misery that under such circumstances they wasted time talking to each other, and they also acted as a check on one another: each of them regulated the amount of work he did by the amount the other did, and if the 'job' took too long it was always difficult to decide which of the two was to blame: but if they were made to work alone, each of them would be on his mettle; he would not know how much the others were doing, and the fear of being considered slow in comparison with others would make them all tear into it all they could. misery thought this a very good idea, so the solitary system was introduced, and as far as practicable, one room, one man became the rule. they even tried to make the men distemper large ceilings single-handed, and succeeded in one or two cases, but after several ceilings had been spoilt and had to be washed off and done over again, they gave that up: but nearly all the other work was now arranged on the 'solitary system', and it worked splendidly: each man was constantly in a state of panic as to whether the others were doing more work than himself. another suggestion that crass made to misery was that the sub-foremen should be instructed never to send a man into a room to prepare it for painting. 'if you sends a man into a room to get it ready,' said crass, ''e makes a meal of it! 'e spends as much time messin' about rubbin' down and stoppin' up as it would take to paint it. but,' he added, with a cunning leer, 'give 'em a bit of putty and a little bit of glass-paper, and the paint at the stand, and then 'e gits it in 'is mind as 'e's going in there to paint it! and 'e doesn't mess about much over the preparing of it'. these and many other suggestions--all sorts of devices for scamping and getting over the work--were schemed out by crass and the other sub-foremen, who put them into practice and showed them to misery and rushton in the hope of currying favour with them and being 'kept on'. and between the lot of them they made life a veritable hell for themselves, and the hands, and everybody else around them. and the mainspring of it all was--the greed and selfishness of one man, who desired to accumulate money! for this was the only object of all the driving and bullying and hatred and cursing and unhappiness--to make money for rushton, who evidently considered himself a deserving case. it is sad and discreditable, but nevertheless true, that some of the more selfish of the philanthropists often became weary of well-doing, and lost all enthusiasm in the good cause. at such times they used to say that they were 'bloody well fed up' with the whole business and 'tired of tearing their bloody guts out for the benefit of other people' and every now and then some of these fellows would 'chuck up' work, and go on the booze, sometimes stopping away for two or three days or a week at a time. and then, when it was all over, they came back, very penitent, to ask for another 'start', but they generally found that their places had been filled. if they happened to be good 'sloggers'--men who made a practice of 'tearing their guts out' when they did work--they were usually forgiven, and after being admonished by misery, permitted to resume work, with the understanding that if ever it occurred again they would get the 'infernal'--which means the final and irrevocable--sack. there was once a job at a shop that had been a high-class restaurant kept by a renowned italian chef. it had been known as 'macaroni's royal italian cafe' situated on the grand parade, it was a favourite resort of the 'elite', who frequented it for afternoon tea and coffee and for little suppers after the theatre. it had plate-glass windows, resplendent with gilding, marble-topped tables with snow white covers, vases of flowers, and all the other appurtenances of glittering cut glass and silver. the obsequious waiters were in evening dress, the walls were covered with lofty plate-glass mirrors in carved and gilded frames, and at certain hours of the day and night an orchestra consisting of two violins and a harp discoursed selections of classic music. but of late years the business had not been paying, and finally the proprietor went bankrupt and was sold out. the place was shut up for several months before the shop was let to a firm of dealers in fancy articles, and the other part was transformed into flats. rushton had the contract for the work. when the men went there to 'do it up' they found the interior of the house in a state of indescribable filth: the ceilings discoloured with smoke and hung with cobwebs, the wallpapers smeared and black with grease, the handrails and the newel posts of the staircase were clammy with filth, and the edges of the doors near the handles were blackened with greasy dirt and finger-marks. the tops of the skirtings, the mouldings of the doors, the sashes of the windows and the corners of the floors were thick with the accumulated dust of years. in one of the upper rooms which had evidently been used as a nursery or playroom for the children of the renowned chef, the wallpaper for about two feet above the skirting was blackened with grease and ornamented with childish drawings made with burnt sticks and blacklead pencils, the door being covered with similar artistic efforts, to say nothing of some rude attempts at carving, evidently executed with an axe or a hammer. but all this filth was nothing compared with the unspeakable condition of the kitchen and scullery, a detailed description of which would cause the blood of the reader to curdle, and each particular hair of his head to stand on end. let it suffice to say that the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the paintwork, the gas-stove, the kitchen range, the dresser and everything else were uniformly absolutely and literally--black. and the black was composed of soot and grease. in front of the window there was a fixture--a kind of bench or table, deeply scored with marks of knives like a butcher's block. the sill of the window was about six inches lower than the top of the table, so that between the glass of the lower sash of the window, which had evidently never been raised, and the back of the table, there was a long narrow cavity or trough, about six inches deep, four inches wide and as long as the width of the window, the sill forming the bottom of the cavity. this trough was filled with all manner of abominations: fragments of fat and decomposed meat, legs of rabbits and fowls, vegetable matter, broken knives and forks, and hair: and the glass of the window was caked with filth of the same description. this job was the cause of the sacking of the semi-drunk and another man named bill bates, who were sent into the kitchen to clean it down and prepare it for painting and distempering. they commenced to do it, but it made them feel so ill that they went out and had a pint each, and after that they made another start at it. but it was not long before they felt that it was imperatively necessary to have another drink. so they went over to the pub, and this time they had two pints each. bill paid for the first two and then the semi-drunk refused to return to work unless bill would consent to have another pint with him before going back. when they had drunk the two pints, they decided--in order to save themselves the trouble and risk of coming away from the job--to take a couple of quarts back with them in two bottles, which the landlord of the pub lent them, charging twopence on each bottle, to be refunded when they were returned. when they got back to the job they found the 'coddy' in the kitchen, looking for them and he began to talk and grumble, but the semi-drunk soon shut him up: he told him he could either have a drink out of one of the bottles or a punch in the bloody nose--whichever he liked! or if he did not fancy either of these alternatives, he could go to hell! as the 'coddy' was a sensible man he took the beer and advised them to pull themselves together and try to get some work done before misery came, which they promised to do. when the 'coddy' was gone they made another attempt at the work. misery came a little while afterwards and began shouting at them because he said he could not see what they had done. it looked as if they had been asleep all the morning: here it was nearly ten o'clock, and as far as he could see, they had done nothing! when he was gone they drank the rest of the beer and then they began to feel inclined to laugh. what did they care for hunter or rushton either? to hell with both of 'em! they left off scraping and scrubbing, and began throwing buckets of water over the dresser and the walls, laughing uproariously all the time. 'we'll show the b--s how to wash down paintwork!' shouted the semi-drunk, as he stood in the middle of the room and hurled a pailful of water over the door of the cupboard. 'bring us another bucket of water, bill.' bill was out in the scullery filling his pail under the tap, and laughing so much that he could scarcely stand. as soon as it was full he passed it to the semi-drunk, who threw it bodily, pail and all, on to the bench in front of the window, smashing one of the panes of glass. the water poured off the table and all over the floor. bill brought the next pailful in and threw it at the kitchen door, splitting one of the panels from top to bottom, and then they threw about half a dozen more pailfuls over the dresser. 'we'll show the b--rs how to clean paintwork,' they shouted, as they hurled the buckets at the walls and doors. by this time the floor was deluged with water, which mingled with the filth and formed a sea of mud. they left the two taps running in the scullery and as the waste pipe of the sink was choked up with dirt, the sink filled up and overflowed like a miniature niagara. the water ran out under the doors into the back-yard, and along the passage out to the front door. but bill bates and the semi-drunk remained in the kitchen, smashing the pails at the walls and doors and the dresser, and cursing and laughing hysterically. they had just filled the two buckets and were bringing them into the kitchen when they heard hunter's voice in the passage, shouting out inquiries as to where all that water came from. then they heard him advancing towards them and they stood waiting for him with the pails in their hands, and directly he opened the door and put his head into the room they let fly the two pails at him. unfortunately, they were too drunk and excited to aim straight. one pail struck the middle rail of the door and the other the wall by the side of it. misery hastily shut the door again and ran upstairs, and presently the 'coddy' came down and called out to them from the passage. they went out to see what he wanted, and he told them that misery had gone to the office to get their wages ready: they were to make out their time sheets and go for their money at once. misery had said that if they were not there in ten minutes he would have the pair of them locked up. the semi-drunk said that nothing would suit them better than to have all their pieces at once--they had spent all their money and wanted another drink. bill bates concurred, so they borrowed a piece of blacklead pencil from the 'coddy' and made out their time sheets, took off their aprons, put them into their tool bags, and went to the office for their money, which misery passed out to them through the trap-door. the news of this exploit spread all over the town during that day and evening, and although it was in july, the next morning at six o'clock there were half a dozen men waiting at the yard to ask misery if there was 'any chance of a job'. bill bates and the semi-drunk had had their spree and had got the sack for it and most of the chaps said it served them right. such conduct as that was going too far. most of them would have said the same thing no matter what the circumstances might have been. they had very little sympathy for each other at any time. often, when, for instance, one man was sent away from one 'job' to another, the others would go into his room and look at the work he had been doing, and pick out all the faults they could find and show them to each other, making all sorts of ill-natured remarks about the absent one meanwhile. 'jist run yer nose over that door, jim,' one would say in a tone of disgust. 'wotcher think of it? did yer ever see sich a mess in yer life? calls hisself a painter!' and the other man would shake his head sadly and say that although the one who had done it had never been up to much as a workman, he could do it a bit better than that if he liked, but the fact was that he never gave himself time to do anything properly: he was always tearing his bloody guts out! why, he'd only been in this room about four hours from start to finish! he ought to have a watering cart to follow him about, because he worked at such a hell of a rate you couldn't see him for dust! and then the first man would reply that other people could do as they liked, but for his part, he was not going to tear his guts out for nobody! the second man would applaud these sentiments and say that he wasn't going to tear his out either: and then they would both go back to their respective rooms and tear into the work for all they were worth, making the same sort of 'job' as the one they had been criticizing, and afterwards, when the other's back was turned, each of them in turn would sneak into the other's room and criticize it and point out the faults to anyone else who happened to be near at hand. harlow was working at the place that had been macaroni's cafe when one day a note was sent to him from hunter at the shop. it was written on a scrap of wallpaper, and worded in the usual manner of such notes--as if the writer had studied how to avoid all suspicion of being unduly civil: harlow go to the yard at once take your tools with you. crass will tell you where you have to go. j.h. they were just finishing their dinners when the boy brought this note; and after reading it aloud for the benefit of the others, harlow remarked that it was worded in much the same way in which one would speak to a dog. the others said nothing; but after he was gone the other men--who all considered that it was ridiculous for the 'likes of us' to expect or wish to be treated with common civility--laughed about it, and said that harlow was beginning to think he was somebody: they supposed it was through readin' all those books what owen was always lendin' 'im. and then one of them got a piece of paper and wrote a note to be given to harlow at the first opportunity. this note was properly worded, written in a manner suitable for a gentleman like him, neatly folded and addressed: mr harlow esq., c/o macaroni's royal cafe till called for. mister harlow, dear sir: wood you kinely oblige me bi cummin to the paint shop as soon as you can make it convenient as there is a sealin' to be wite-woshed hoppin this is not trubbling you to much i remane yours respeckfully pontius pilate. this note was read out for the amusement of the company and afterwards stored away in the writer's pocket till such a time as an opportunity should occur of giving it to harlow. as the writer of the note was on his way back to his room to resume work he was accosted by a man who had gone into harlow's room to criticize it, and had succeeded in finding several faults which he pointed out to the other, and of course they were both very much disgusted with harlow. 'i can't think why the coddy keeps him on the job,' said the first man. 'between you and me, if i had charge of a job, and misery sent harlow there--i'd send 'im back to the shop.' 'same as you,' agreed the other as he went back to tear into his own room. 'same as you, old man: i shouldn't 'ave 'im neither.' it must not be supposed from this that either of these two men were on exceptionally bad terms with harlow; they were just as good friends with him--to his face--as they were with each other--to each other's faces--and it was just their way: that was all. if it had been one or both of these two who had gone away instead of harlow, just the same things would have been said about them by the others who remained--it was merely their usual way of speaking about each other behind each other's backs. it was always the same: if any one of them made a mistake or had an accident or got into any trouble he seldom or never got any sympathy from his fellow workmen. on the contrary, most of them at such times seemed rather pleased than otherwise. there was a poor devil--a stranger in the town; he came from london--who got the sack for breaking some glass. he had been sent to 'burn off' some old paint of the woodwork of a window. he was not very skilful in the use of the burning-off lamp, because on the firm when he had been working in london it was a job that the ordinary hands were seldom or never called upon to do. there were one or two men who did it all. for that matter, not many of rushton's men were very skilful at it either. it was a job everybody tried to get out of, because nearly always the lamp went wrong and there was a row about the time the work took. so they worked this job on to the stranger. this man had been out of work for a long time before he got a start at rushton's, and he was very anxious not to lose the job, because he had a wife and family in london. when the 'coddy' told him to go and burn off this window he did not like to say that he was not used to the work: he hoped to be able to do it. but he was very nervous, and the end was that although he managed to do the burning off all right, just as he was finishing he accidentally allowed the flame of the lamp to come into contact with a large pane of glass and broke it. they sent to the shop for a new pane of glass, and the man stayed late that night and put it in in his own time, thus bearing half the cost of repairing it. things were not very busy just then, and on the following saturday two of the hands were 'stood off'. the stranger was one of them, and nearly everybody was very pleased. at mealtimes the story of the broken window was repeatedly told amid jeering laughter. it really seemed as if a certain amount of indignation was felt that a stranger--especially such an inferior person as this chap who did not know how to use a lamp--should have had the cheek to try to earn his living at all! one thing was very certain--they said, gleefully--he would never get another job at rushton's: that was one good thing. and yet they all knew that this accident might have happened to any one of them. once a couple of men got the sack because a ceiling they distempered had to be washed off and done again. it was not really the men's fault at all: it was a ceiling that needed special treatment and they had not been allowed to do it properly. but all the same, when they got the sack most of the others laughed and sneered and were glad. perhaps because they thought that the fact that these two unfortunates had been disgraced, increased their own chances of being 'kept on'. and so it was with nearly everything. with a few exceptions, they had an immense amount of respect for rushton and hunter, and very little respect or sympathy for each other. exactly the same lack of feeling for each other prevailed amongst the members of all the different trades. everybody seemed glad if anybody got into trouble for any reason whatever. there was a garden gate that had been made at the carpenter's shop: it was not very well put together, and for the usual reason; the man had not been allowed the time to do it properly. after it was fixed, one of his shopmates wrote upon it with lead pencil in big letters: 'this is good work for a joiner. order one ton of putty.' but to hear them talking in the pub of a saturday afternoon just after pay-time one would think them the best friends and mates and the most independent spirits in the world, fellows whom it would be very dangerous to trifle with, and who would stick up for each other through thick and thin. all sorts of stories were related of the wonderful things they had done and said; of jobs they had 'chucked up', and masters they had 'told off': of pails of whitewash thrown over offending employers, and of horrible assaults and batteries committed upon the same. but strange to say, for some reason or other, it seldom happened that a third party ever witnessed any of these prodigies. it seemed as if a chivalrous desire to spare the feelings of their victims had always prevented them from doing or saying anything to them in the presence of witnesses. when he had drunk a few pints, crass was a very good hand at these stories. here is one that he told in the bar of the cricketers on the saturday afternoon of the same week that bill bates and the semi-drunk got the sack. the cricketers was only a few minutes walk from the shop and at pay-time a number of the men used to go in there to take a drink before going home. 'last thursday night about five o'clock, 'unter comes inter the paint-shop an' ses to me, "i wants a pail o' wash made up tonight, crass," 'e ses, "ready for fust thing in the mornin'," 'e ses. "oh," i ses, lookin' 'im straight in the bloody eye, "oh, yer do, do yer?"--just like that. "yes," 'e ses. "well, you can bloody well make it yerself!" i ses, "'cos i ain't agoin' to," i ses--just like that. "wot the 'ell do yer mean," i ses, "by comin' 'ere at this time o' night with a order like that?" i ses. you'd a larfed,' continued crass, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand after taking another drink out of his glass, and looking round to note the effect of the story, 'you'd a larfed if you'd bin there. 'e was fairly flabbergasted! and wen i said that to 'im i see 'is jaw drop! an' then 'e started apoligizing and said as 'e 'adn't meant no offence, but i told 'im bloody straight not to come no more of it. "you bring the horder at a reasonable time," i ses--just like that--"and i'll attend to it," i ses, "but not otherwise," i ses.' as he concluded this story, crass drained his glass and gazed round upon the audience, who were full of admiration. they looked at each other and at crass and nodded their heads approvingly. yes, undoubtedly, that was the proper way to deal with such bounders as nimrod; take up a strong attitude, an' let 'em see as you'll stand no nonsense! 'yer don't blame me, do yer?' continued crass. 'why should we put up with a lot of old buck from the likes of 'im! we're not a lot of bloody chinamen, are we?' so far from blaming him, they all assured him that they would have acted in precisely the same way under similar circumstances. 'for my part, i'm a bloke like this,' said a tall man with a very loud voice--a chap who nearly fell down dead every time rushton or misery looked at him. 'i'm a bloke like this 'ere: i never stands no cheek from no gaffers! if a guv'nor ses two bloody words to me, i downs me tools and i ses to 'im, "wot! don't i suit yer, guv'ner? ain't i done enuff for yer? werry good! gimmie me bleedin' a'pence."' 'quite right too,' said everybody. that was the way to serve 'em. if only everyone would do the same as the tall man--who had just paid for another round of drinks--things would be a lot more comfortable than they was. 'last summer i was workin' for ole buncer,' said a little man with a cutaway coat several sizes too large for him. 'i was workin' for ole buncer, over at windley, an' you all knows as 'e don't arf lower it. well, one day, when i knowed 'e was on the drunk, i 'ad to first coat a room out--white; so thinks i to meself, "if i buck up i shall be able to get this lot done by about four o'clock, an' then i can clear orf 'ome. 'cos i reckoned as 'e'd be about flattened out by that time, an' you know 'e ain't got no foreman. so i tears into it an' gets this 'ere room done about a quarter past four, an' i'd just got me things put away for the night w'en 'oo should come fallin' up the bloody stairs but ole buncer, drunk as a howl! an' no sooner 'e gits inter the room than 'e starts yappin' an' rampin'." "is this 'ere hall you've done?" 'e shouts out. "wotcher bin up to hall day?" 'e ses, an' 'e keeps on shouting' an' swearin' till at last i couldn't stand it no longer, 'cos you can guess i wasn't in a very good temper with 'im comin' along jist then w'en i thought i was goin' to get orf a bit early--so w'en 'e kept on shoutin' i never made no answer to 'im, but ups with me fist an' i gives 'im a slosh in the dial an' stopped 'is clock! then i chucked the pot o' w'ite paint hover 'im, an' kicked 'im down the bloody stairs.' 'serve 'im blooming well right, too,' said crass as he took a fresh glass of beer from one of the others, who had just 'stood' another round. 'what did the b--r say to that?' inquired the tall man. 'not a bloody word!' replied the little man, ''e picked 'isself up, and called a keb wot was passin' an' got inter it an' went 'ome; an' i never seen no more of 'im until about 'arf-past eleven the next day, w'en i was second-coatin' the room, an' 'e comes up with a noo suit o' clothes on, an' arsts me if i'd like to come hover to the pub an' 'ave a drink? so we goes hover, an' 'e calls for a w'iskey an' soda for isself an' arsts me wot i'd 'ave, so i 'ad the same. an' w'ile we was gettin' it down us, 'e ses to me, "ah, garge," 'e ses. "you losed your temper with me yesterday,"' 'e ses.' 'there you are, you see!' said the tall man. 'there's an example for yer! if you 'adn't served 'im as you did you'd most likely 'ave 'ad to put up with a lot more ole buck.' they all agreed that the little man had done quite right: they all said that they didn' blame him in the least: they would all have done the same: in fact, this was the way they all conducted themselves whenever occasion demanded it. to hear them talk, one would imagine that such affairs as the recent exploit of bill bates and the semi-drunk were constantly taking place, instead of only occurring about once in a blue moon. crass stood the final round of drinks, and as he evidently thought that circumstance deserved to be signalized in some special manner, he proposed the following toast, which was drunk with enthusiasm: 'to hell with the man, may he never grow fat, what carries two faces, under one 'at.' rushton & co. did a lot of work that summer. they did not have many big jobs, but there were a lot of little ones, and the boy bert was kept busy running from one to the other. he spent most of his time dragging a handcart with loads of paint, or planks and steps, and seldom went out to work with the men, for when he was not taking things out to the various places where the philanthropists were working, he was in the paintshop at the yard, scraping out dirty paint-pots or helping crass to mix up colours. although scarcely anyone seemed to notice it, the boy presented a truly pitiable spectacle. he was very pale and thin. dragging the handcart did not help him to put on flesh, for the weather was very hot and the work made him sweat. his home was right away on the other side of windley. it took him more than three-quarters of an hour to walk to the shop, and as he had to be at work at six, that meant that he had to leave home at a few minutes past five every morning, so that he always got up about half past four. he was wearing a man's coat--or rather jacket--which gave the upper part of his body a bulky appearance. the trousers were part of a suit of his own, and were somewhat narrowly cut, as is the rule with boys' cheap ready-made trousers. these thin legs appearing under the big jacket gave him a rather grotesque appearance, which was heightened by the fact that all his clothes, cap, coat, waistcoat, trousers and boots, were smothered with paint and distemper of various colours, and there were generally a few streaks of paint of some sort or other upon his face, and of course his hands--especially round the fingernails--were grimed with it. but the worst of all were the dreadful hobnailed boots: the leather of the uppers of these was an eighth of an inch thick, and very stiff. across the fore part of the boot this hard leather had warped into ridges and valleys, which chafed his feet, and made them bleed. the soles were five-eighths of an inch thick, covered with hobnails, and were as hard and inflexible and almost as heavy as iron. these boots hurt his feet dreadfully and made him feel very tired and miserable, for he had such a lot of walking to do. he used to be jolly glad when dinner-time came, for then he used to get out of sight in some quiet spot and lie down for the whole hour. his favourite dining-place was up in the loft over the carpenter's shop, where they stored the mouldings and architraves. no one ever came there at that hour, and after he had eaten his dinner he used to lie down and think and rest. he nearly always had an hour for dinner, but he did not always have it at the same time: sometimes he had it at twelve o'clock and sometimes not till two. it all depended upon what stuff had to be taken to the job. often it happened that some men at a distant job required some material to use immediately after dinner, and perhaps crass was not able to get it ready till twelve o'clock, so that it was not possible to take it before dinner-time, and if bert left it till after dinner the men would be wasting their time waiting for it: so in such cases he took it there first and had his dinner when he came back. sometimes he got back about half past twelve, and it was necessary for him to take out another lot of material at one o'clock. in such a case he 'charged' half an hour overtime on his time sheet--he used to get twopence an hour for overtime. sometimes crass sent him with a handcart to one job to get a pair of steps or tressels, or a plank, or some material or other, and take them to another job, and on these occasions it was often very late before he was able to take his meals. instead of getting his breakfast at eight, it was often nearly nine before he got back to the shop, and frequently he had to go without dinner until half past one or two. sometimes he could scarcely manage to carry the pots of paint to the jobs; his feet were so hot and sore. when he had to push the cart it was worse still, and often when knocking-off time came he felt so tired that he could scarcely manage to walk home. but the weather was not always hot or fine: sometimes it was quite cold, almost like winter, and there was a lot of rain that summer. at such times the boy frequently got wet through several times a day as he went from one job to another, and he had to work all the time in his wet clothes and boots, which were usually old and out of repair and let in the water. one of the worst jobs that he had to do was when a new stock of white lead came in. this stuff came in wooden barrels containing two hundredweight, and he used to have to dig it out of these barrels with a trowel, and put it into a metal tank, where it was kept covered with water, and the empty barrels were returned to the makers. when he was doing this work he usually managed to get himself smeared all over with the white lead, and this circumstance, and the fact that he was always handling paint or some poisonous material or other was doubtless the cause of the terrible pains he often had in his stomach--pains that sometimes caused him to throw himself down and roll on the ground in agony. one afternoon crass sent him with a handcart to a job that easton, philpot, harlow and owen were just finishing. he got there about half past four and helped the men to load up the things, and afterwards walked alongside the cart with them back to the shop. on the way they all noticed and remarked to each other that the boy looked tired and pale and that he seemed to limp: but he did not say anything, although he guessed that they were talking about him. they arrived at the shop a little before knocking-off time--about ten minutes past five. bert helped them to unload, and afterwards, while they were putting their things away and 'charging up' the unused materials they had brought back, he pushed the cart over to the shed where it was kept, on the other side of the yard. he did not return to the shop at once and a few minutes later when harlow came out into the yard to get a bucket of water to wash their hands with, he saw the boy leaning on the side of the cart, crying, and holding one foot off the ground. harlow asked him what was the matter, and while he was speaking to him the others came out to see what was up: the boy said he had rheumatism or growing pains or something in his leg, 'just here near the knee'. but he didn't say much, he just cried miserably, and turned his head slowly from side to side, avoiding the looks of the men because he felt ashamed that they should see him cry. when they saw how ill and miserable he looked, the men all put their hands in their pockets to get some coppers to give to him so that he could ride home on the tram. they gave him fivepence altogether, more than enough to ride all the way; and crass told him to go at once--there was no need to wait till half past; but before he went philpot got a small glass bottle out of his tool bag and filled it with oil and turps--two of turps and one of oil--which he gave to bert to rub into his leg before going to bed: the turps--he explained--was to cure the pain and the oil was to prevent it from hurting the skin. he was to get his mother to rub it in for him if he were too tired to do it himself. bert promised to observe these directions, and, drying his tears, took his dinner basket and limped off to catch the tram. it was a few days after this that hunter met with an accident. he was tearing off on his bicycle to one of the jobs about five minutes to twelve to see if he could catch anyone leaving off for dinner before the proper time, and while going down a rather steep hill the front brake broke--the rubbers of the rear one were worn out and failed to act--so misery to save himself from being smashed against the railings of the houses at the bottom of the hill, threw himself off the machine, with the result that his head and face and hands were terribly cut and bruised. he was so badly knocked about that he had to remain at home for nearly three weeks, much to the delight of the men and the annoyance--one might even say the indignation--of mr rushton, who did not know enough about the work to make out estimates without assistance. there were several large jobs to be tendered for at the same time, so rushton sent the specifications round to hunter's house for him to figure out the prices, and nearly all the time that misery was at home he was sitting up in bed, swathed in bandages, trying to calculate the probable cost of these jobs. rushton did not come to see him, but he sent bert nearly every day, either with some specifications, or some accounts, or something of that sort, or with a note inquiring when hunter thought he would be able to return to work. all sorts of rumours became prevalent amongst the men concerning hunter's condition. he had 'broken his spiral column', he had 'conjunction of the brain', or he had injured his 'innards' and would probably never be able to 'do no more slave-drivin''. crass--who had helped mr rushton to 'price up' several small jobs--began to think it might not be altogether a bad thing for himself if something were to happen to hunter, and he began to put on side and to assume airs of authority. he got one of the light-weights to assist him in his work of colourman and made him do all the hard work, while he spent part of his own time visiting the different jobs to see how the work progressed. crass's appearance did him justice. he was wearing a pair of sporting trousers the pattern of which consisted of large black and white squares. the previous owner of these trousers was taller and slighter than crass, so although the legs were about a couple of inches too long, they fitted him rather tightly, so much so that it was fortunate that he had his present job of colourman, for if he had had to do any climbing up and down ladders or steps, the trousers would have burst. his jacket was also two or three sizes too small, and the sleeves were so short that the cuffs of his flanelette shirt were visible. this coat was made of serge, and its colour had presumably once been blue, but it was now a sort of heliotrope and violet: the greater part being of the former tint, and the parts under the sleeves of the latter. this jacket fitted very tightly across the shoulders and back and being much too short left his tightly clad posteriors exposed to view. he however seemed quite unconscious of anything peculiar in his appearance and was so bumptious and offensive that most of the men were almost glad when nimrod came back. they said that if crass ever got the job he would be a dam' sight worse than hunter. as for the latter, for a little while after his return to work it was said that his illness had improved his character: he had had time to think things over; and in short, he was ever so much better than before: but it was not long before this story began to be told the other way round. he was worse than ever! and a thing that happened about a fortnight after his return caused more ill feeling and resentment against him and rushton than had ever existed previously. what led up to it was something that was done by bundy's mate, ted dawson. this poor wretch was scarcely ever seen without a load of some sort or other: carrying a sack of cement or plaster, a heavy ladder, a big bucket of mortar, or dragging a load of scaffolding on a cart. he must have been nearly as strong as a horse, because after working in this manner for rushton & co. from six in the morning till half past five at night, he usually went to work in his garden for two or three hours after tea, and frequently went there for an hour or so in the morning before going to work. the poor devil needed the produce of his garden to supplement his wages, for he had a wife and three children to provide for and he earned only--or rather, to be correct, he was paid only--fourpence an hour. there was an old house to which they were making some alterations and repairs, and there was a lot of old wood taken out of it: old, decayed floorboards and stuff of that kind, wood that was of no use whatever except to burn. bundy and his mate were working there, and one night, misery came a few minutes before half past five and caught dawson in the act of tying up a small bundle of this wood. when hunter asked him what he was going to do with it he made no attempt at prevarication or concealment: he said he was going to take it home for fire-wood, because it was of no other use. misery kicked up a devil of a row and ordered him to leave the wood where it was: it had to be taken to the yard, and it was nothing to do with dawson or anyone else whether it was any use or not! if he caught anyone taking wood away he would sack them on the spot. hunter shouted very loud so that all the others might hear, and as they were all listening attentively in the next room, where they were taking their aprons off preparatory to going home, they got the full benefit of his remarks. the following saturday when the hands went to the office for their money they were each presented with a printed card bearing the following legend: under no circumstances is any article or material, however trifling, to be taken away by workmen for their private use, whether waste material or not, from any workshop or place where work is being done. foremen are hereby instructed to see that this order is obeyed and to report any such act coming to their knowledge. any man breaking this rule will be either dismissed without notice or given into custody. rushton & co. most of the men took these cards with the envelopes containing their wages and walked away without making any comment--in fact, most of them were some distance away before they realized exactly what the card was about. two or three of them stood a few steps away from the pay window in full view of rushton and misery and ostentatiously tore the thing into pieces and threw them into the street. one man remained at the pay window while he read the card--and then flung it with an obscene curse into rushton's face, and demanded his back day, which they gave him without any remark or delay, the other men who were not yet paid having to wait while he made out his time-sheet for that morning. the story of this card spread all over the place in a very short time. it became the talk of every shop in the town. whenever any of rushton's men encountered the employees of another firm, the latter used to shout after them--'however trifling!'--or 'look out, chaps! 'ere comes some of rushton's pickpockets.' amongst rushton's men themselves it became a standing joke or form of greeting to say when one met another--'remember! however trifling!' if one of their number was seen going home with an unusual amount of paint or whitewash on his hands or clothes, the others would threaten to report him for stealing the material. they used to say that however trifling the quantity, it was against orders to take it away. harlow drew up a list of rules which he said mr rushton had instructed him to communicate to the men. one of these rules provided that everybody was to be weighed upon arrival at the job in the morning and again at leaving-off time: any man found to have increased in weight was to be discharged. there was also much cursing and covert resentment about it; the men used to say that such a thing as that looked well coming from the likes of rushton and hunter, and they used to remind each other of the affair of the marble-topped console table, the barometer, the venetian blinds and all the other robberies. none of them ever said anything to either misery or rushton about the cards, but one morning when the latter was reading his letters at the breakfast table, on opening one of them he found that it contained one of the notices, smeared with human excrement. he did not eat any more breakfast that morning. it was not to be much wondered at that none of them had the courage to openly resent the conditions under which they had to work, for although it was summer, there were many men out of employment, and it was much easier to get the sack than it was to get another job. none of the men were ever caught stealing anything, however trifling, but all the same during the course of the summer five or six of them were captured by the police and sent to jail--for not being able to pay their poor rates. all through the summer owen continued to make himself objectionable and to incur the ridicule of his fellow workmen by talking about the causes of poverty and of ways to abolish it. most of the men kept two shillings or half a crown of their wages back from their wives for pocket money, which they spent on beer and tobacco. there were a very few who spent a little more than this, and there were a still smaller number who spent so much in this way that their families had to suffer in consequence. most of those who kept back half a crown or three shillings from their wives did so on the understanding that they were to buy their clothing out of it. some of them had to pay a shilling a week to a tallyman or credit clothier. these were the ones who indulged in shoddy new suits--at long intervals. others bought--or got their wives to buy for them--their clothes at second-hand shops, 'paying off' about a shilling or so a week and not receiving the things till they were paid for. there were a very large proportion of them who did not spend even a shilling a week for drink: and there were numerous others who, while not being formally total abstainers, yet often went for weeks together without either entering a public house or tasting intoxicating drink in any form. then there were others who, instead of drinking tea or coffee or cocoa with their dinners or suppers, drank beer. this did not cost more than the teetotal drinks, but all the same there are some persons who say that those who swell the 'nation's drink bill' by drinking beer with their dinners or suppers are a kind of criminal, and that they ought to be compelled to drink something else: that is, if they are working people. as for the idle classes, they of course are to be allowed to continue to make merry, 'drinking whisky, wine and sherry', to say nothing of having their beer in by the barrel and the dozen--or forty dozen--bottles. but of course that's a different matter, because these people make so much money out of the labour of the working classes that they can afford to indulge in this way without depriving their children of the necessaries of life. there is no more cowardly, dastardly slander than is contained in the assertion that the majority or any considerable proportion of working men neglect their families through drink. it is a condemned lie. there are some who do, but they are not even a large minority. they are few and far between, and are regarded with contempt by their fellow workmen. it will be said that their families had to suffer for want of even the little that most of them spent in that way: but the persons that use this argument should carry it to its logical conclusion. tea is an unnecessary and harmful drink; it has been condemned by medical men so often that to enumerate its evil qualities here would be waste of time. the same can be said of nearly all the cheap temperance drinks; they are unnecessary and harmful and cost money, and, like beer, are drunk only for pleasure. what right has anyone to say to working men that when their work is done they should not find pleasure in drinking a glass or two of beer together in a tavern or anywhere else? let those who would presume to condemn them carry their argument to its logical conclusion and condemn pleasure of every kind. let them persuade the working classes to lead still simpler lives; to drink water instead of such unwholesome things as tea, coffee, beer, lemonade and all the other harmful and unnecessary stuff. they would then be able to live ever so much more cheaply, and as wages are always and everywhere regulated by the cost of living, they would be able to work for lower pay. these people are fond of quoting the figures of the 'nation's drink bill,' as if all this money were spent by the working classes! but if the amount of money spent in drink by the 'aristocracy', the clergy and the middle classes were deducted from the 'nation's drink bill', it would be seen that the amount spent per head by the working classes is not so alarming after all; and would probably not be much larger than the amount spent on drink by those who consume tea and coffee and all the other unwholesome and unnecessary 'temperance' drinks. the fact that some of rushton's men spent about two shillings a week on drink while they were in employment was not the cause of their poverty. if they had never spent a farthing for drink, and if their wretched wages had been increased fifty percent, they would still have been in a condition of the most abject and miserable poverty, for nearly all the benefits and privileges of civilization, nearly everything that makes life worth living, would still have been beyond their reach. it is inevitable, so long as men have to live and work under such heartbreaking, uninteresting conditions as at present that a certain proportion of them will seek forgetfulness and momentary happiness in the tavern, and the only remedy for this evil is to remove the cause; and while that is in process, there is something else that can be done and that is, instead of allowing filthy drinking dens, presided over by persons whose interest it is to encourage men to drink more bad beer than is good for them or than they can afford,--to have civilized institutions run by the state or the municipalities for use and not merely for profit. decent pleasure houses, where no drunkenness or filthiness would be tolerated--where one could buy real beer or coffee or tea or any other refreshments; where men could repair when their day's work was over and spend an hour or two in rational intercourse with their fellows or listen to music and singing. taverns to which they could take their wives and children without fear of defilement, for a place that is not fit for the presence of a woman or a child is not fit to exist at all. owen, being a teetotaller, did not spend any of his money on drink; but he spent a lot on what he called 'the cause'. every week he bought some penny or twopenny pamphlets or some leaflets about socialism, which he lent or gave to his mates; and in this way and by means of much talk he succeeded in converting a few to his party. philpot, harlow and a few others used to listen with interest, and some of them even paid for the pamphlets they obtained from owen, and after reading them themselves, passed them on to others, and also occasionally 'got up' arguments on their own accounts. others were simply indifferent, or treated the subject as a kind of joke, ridiculing the suggestion that it was possible to abolish poverty. they repeated that there had 'always been rich and poor in the world and there always would be, so there was an end of it'. but the majority were bitterly hostile; not to owen, but to socialism. for the man himself most of them had a certain amount of liking, especially the ordinary hands because it was known that he was not a 'master's man' and that he had declined to 'take charge' of jobs which misery had offered to him. but to socialism they were savagely and malignantly opposed. some of those who had shown some symptoms of socialism during the past winter when they were starving had now quite recovered and were stout defenders of the present system. barrington was still working for the firm and continued to maintain his manner of reserve, seldom speaking unless addressed but all the same, for several reasons, it began to be rumoured that he shared owen's views. he always paid for the pamphlets that owen gave him, and on one occasion, when owen bought a thousand leaflets to give away, barrington contributed a shilling towards the half-crown that owen paid for them. but he never took any part in the arguments that sometimes raged during the dinner-hour or at breakfast-time. it was a good thing for owen that he had his enthusiasm for 'the cause' to occupy his mind. socialism was to him what drink was to some of the others--the thing that enable them to forget and tolerate the conditions under which they were forced to exist. some of them were so muddled with beer, and others so besotted with admiration of their liberal and tory masters, that they were oblivious of the misery of their own lives, and in a similar way, owen was so much occupied in trying to rouse them from their lethargy and so engrossed in trying to think out new arguments to convince them of the possibility of bringing about an improvement in their condition that he had no time to dwell upon his own poverty; the money that he spent on leaflets and pamphlets to give away might have been better spent on food and clothing for himself, because most of those to whom he gave them were by no means grateful; but he never thought of that; and after all, nearly everyone spends money on some hobby or other. some people deny themselves the necessaries or comforts of life in order that they may be able to help to fatten a publican. others deny themselves in order to enable a lazy parson to live in idleness and luxury; and others spend much time and money that they really need for themselves in buying socialist literature to give away to people who don't want to know about socialism. one sunday morning towards the end of july, a band of about twenty-five men and women on bicycles invaded the town. two of them--who rode a few yards in front of the others, had affixed to the handlebars of each of their machines a slender, upright standard from the top of one of which fluttered a small flag of crimson silk with 'international brotherhood and peace' in gold letters. the other standard was similar in size and colour, but with a different legend: 'one for all and all for one.' as they rode along they gave leaflets to the people in the streets, and whenever they came to a place where there were many people they dismounted and walked about, giving their leaflets to whoever would accept them. they made several long halts during their progress along the grand parade, where there was a considerable crowd, and then they rode over the hill to windley, which they reached a little before opening time. there were little crowds waiting outside the several public houses and a number of people passing through the streets on their way home from church and chapel. the strangers distributed leaflets to all those who would take them, and they went through a lot of the side streets, putting leaflets under the doors and in the letter-boxes. when they had exhausted their stock they remounted and rode back the way they came. meantime the news of their arrival had spread, and as they returned through the town they were greeted with jeers and booing. presently someone threw a stone, and as there happened to be plenty of stones just there several others followed suit and began running after the retreating cyclists, throwing stones, hooting and cursing. the leaflet which had given rise to all this fury read as follows: what is socialism? at present the workers, with hand and brain produce continually food, clothing and all useful and beautiful things in great abundance. but they labour in vain--for they are mostly poor and often in want. they find it a hard struggle to live. their women and children suffer, and their old age is branded with pauperism. socialism is a plan by which poverty will be abolished, and everyone enabled to live in plenty and comfort, with leisure and opportunity for ampler life. if you wish to hear more of this plan, come to the field at the cross roads on the hill at windley, on tuesday evening next at 8 p.m. and look out for the socialist van the cyclists rode away amid showers of stones without sustaining much damage. one had his hand cut and another, who happened to look round, was struck on the forehead, but these were the only casualties. on the following tuesday evening, long before the appointed time, there was a large crowd assembled at the cross roads or the hill at windley, waiting for the appearance of the van, and they were evidently prepared to give the socialists a warm reception. there was only one policeman in uniform there but there were several in plain clothes amongst the crowd. crass, dick wantley, the semi-drunk, sawkins, bill bates and several other frequenters of the cricketers were amongst the crowd, and there were also a sprinkling of tradespeople, including the old dear and mr smallman, the grocer, and a few ladies and gentlemen--wealthy visitors--but the bulk of the crowd were working men, labourers, mechanics and boys. as it was quite evident that the crowd meant mischief--many of them had their pockets filled with stones and were armed with sticks--several of the socialists were in favour of going to meet the van to endeavour to persuade those in charge from coming, and with that object they withdrew from the crowd, which was already regarding them with menacing looks, and went down the road in the direction from which the van was expected to come. they had not gone very far, however, before the people, divining what they were going to do, began to follow them and while they were hesitating what course to pursue, the socialist van, escorted by five or six men on bicycles, appeared round the corner at the bottom of the hill. as soon as the crowd saw it, they gave an exultant cheer, or, rather, yell, and began running down the hill to meet it, and in a few minutes it was surrounded by a howling mob. the van was drawn by two horses; there was a door and a small platform at the back and over this was a sign with white letters on a red ground: 'socialism, the only hope of the workers.' the driver pulled up, and another man on the platform at the rear attempted to address the crowd, but his voice was inaudible in the din of howls, catcalls, hooting and obscene curses. after about an hour of this, as the crowd began pushing against the van and trying to overturn it, the terrified horses commenced to get restive and uncontrollable, and the man on the box attempted to drive up the hill. this seemed to still further infuriate the horde of savages who surrounded the van. numbers of them clutched the wheels and turned them the reverse way, screaming that it must go back to where it came from; several of them accordingly seized the horses' heads and, amid cheers, turned them round. the man on the platform was still trying to make himself heard, but without success. the strangers who had come with the van and the little group of local socialists, who had forced their way through the crowd and gathered together close to the platform in front of the would-be speaker, only increased the din by their shouts of appeal to the crowd to 'give the man a fair chance'. this little bodyguard closed round the van as it began to move slowly downhill, but they were not sufficiently numerous to protect it from the crowd, which, not being satisfied with the rate at which the van was proceeding, began to shout to each other to 'run it away!' 'take the brake off!' and several savage rushes were made with the intention of putting these suggestions into execution. some of the defenders were hampered with their bicycles, but they resisted as well as they were able, and succeeded in keeping the crowd off until the foot of the hill was reached, and then someone threw the first stone, which by a strange chance happened to strike one of the cyclists whose head was already bandaged--it was the same man who had been hit on the sunday. this stone was soon followed by others, and the man on the platform was the next to be struck. he got it right on the mouth, and as he put up his handkerchief to staunch the blood another struck him on the forehead just above the temple, and he dropped forward on his face on to the platform as if he had been shot. as the speed of the vehicle increased, a regular hail of stones fell upon the roof and against the sides of the van and whizzed past the retreating cyclists, while the crowd followed close behind, cheering, shrieking out volleys of obscene curses, and howling like wolves. 'we'll give the b--rs socialism!' shouted crass, who was literally foaming at the mouth. 'we'll teach 'em to come 'ere trying to undermined our bloody morality,' howled dick wantley as he hurled a lump of granite that he had torn up from the macadamized road at one of the cyclists. they ran on after the van until it was out of range, and then they bethought themselves of the local socialists; but they were nowhere to be seen; they had prudently withdrawn as soon as the van had got fairly under way, and the victory being complete, the upholders of the present system returned to the piece of waste ground on the top of the hill, where a gentleman in a silk hat and frockcoat stood up on a little hillock and made a speech. he said nothing about the distress committee or the soup kitchen or the children who went to school without proper clothes or food, and made no reference to what was to be done next winter, when nearly everybody would be out of work. these were matters he and they were evidently not at all interested in. but he said a good deal about the glorious empire! and the flag! and the royal family. the things he said were received with rapturous applause, and at the conclusion of his address, the crowd sang the national anthem with great enthusiasm and dispersed, congratulating themselves that they had shown to the best of their ability what mugsborough thought of socialism and the general opinion of the crowd was that they would hear nothing more from the socialist van. but in this they were mistaken, for the very next sunday evening a crowd of socialists suddenly materialized at the cross roads. some of them had come by train, others had walked from different places and some had cycled. a crowd gathered and the socialists held a meeting, two speeches being delivered before the crowd recovered from their surprise at the temerity of these other britishers who apparently had not sense enough to understand that they had been finally defeated and obliterated last tuesday evening: and when the cyclist with the bandaged head got up on the hillock some of the crowd actually joined in the hand-clapping with which the socialists greeted him. in the course of his speech he informed them that the man who had come with the van and who had been felled whilst attempting to speak from the platform was now in hospital. for some time it had been probable that he would not recover, but he was now out of danger, and as soon as he was well enough there was no doubt that he would come there again. upon this crass shouted out that if ever the vanners did return, they would finish what they had begun last tuesday. he would not get off so easy next time. but when he said this, crass--not being able to see into the future--did not know what the reader will learn in due time, that the man was to return to that place under different circumstances. when they had finished their speech-making one of the strangers who was acting as chairman invited the audience to put questions, but as nobody wanted to ask any, he invited anyone who disagreed with what had been said to get up on the hillock and state his objections, so that the audience might have an opportunity of judging for themselves which side was right; but this invitation was also neglected. then the chairman announced that they were coming there again next sunday at the same time, when a comrade would speak on 'unemployment and poverty, the cause and the remedy', and then the strangers sang a song called 'england arise', the first verse being: england arise, the long, long night is over, faint in the east, behold the dawn appear out of your evil dream of toil and sorrow arise, o england! for the day is here! during the progress of the meeting several of the strangers had been going out amongst the crowd giving away leaflets, which many of the people gloomily refused to accept, and selling penny pamphlets, of which they managed to dispose of about three dozen. before declaring the meeting closed, the chairman said that the speaker who was coming next week resided in london: he was not a millionaire, but a workman, the same as nearly all those who were there present. they were not going to pay him anything for coming, but they intended to pay his railway fare. therefore next sunday after the meeting there would be a collection, and anything over the amount of the fare would be used for the purchase of more leaflets such as those they were now giving away. he hoped that anyone who thought that any of the money went into the pockets of those who held the meeting would come and join: then they could have their share. the meeting now terminated and the socialists were suffered to depart in peace. some of them, however, lingered amongst the crowd after the main body had departed, and for a long time after the meeting was over little groups remained on the field excitedly discussing the speeches or the leaflets. the next sunday evening when the socialists came they found the field at the cross roads in the possession of a furious, hostile mob, who refused to allow them to speak, and finally they had to go away without having held a meeting. they came again the next sunday, and on this occasion they had a speaker with a very loud--literally a stentorian--voice, and he succeeded in delivering an address, but as only those who were very close were able to hear him, and as they were all socialists, it was not of much effect upon those for whom it was intended. they came again the next sunday and nearly every other sunday during the summer: sometimes they were permitted to hold their meeting in comparative peace and at other times there was a row. they made several converts, and many people declared themselves in favour of some of the things advocated, but they were never able to form a branch of their society there, because nearly all those who were convinced were afraid to publicly declare themselves lest they should lose their employment or customers. chapter 44 the beano now and then a transient gleam of sunshine penetrated the gloom in which the lives of the philanthropists were passed. the cheerless monotony was sometimes enlivened with a little innocent merriment. every now and then there was a funeral which took misery and crass away for the whole afternoon, and although they always tried to keep the dates secret, the men generally knew when they were gone. sometimes the people in whose houses they were working regaled them with tea, bread and butter, cake or other light refreshments, and occasionally even with beer--very different stuff from the petrifying liquid they bought at the cricketers for twopence a pint. at other places, where the people of the house were not so generously disposed, the servants made up for it, and entertained them in a similar manner without the knowledge of their masters and mistresses. even when the mistresses were too cunning to permit of this, they were seldom able to prevent the men from embracing the domestics, who for their part were quite often willing to be embraced; it was an agreeable episode that helped to vary the monotony of their lives, and there was no harm done. it was rather hard lines on the philanthropists sometimes when they happened to be working in inhabited houses of the better sort. they always had to go in and out by the back way, generally through the kitchen, and the crackling and hissing of the poultry and the joints of meat roasting in the ovens, and the odours of fruit pies and tarts, and plum puddings and sage and onions, were simply maddening. in the back-yards of these houses there were usually huge stacks of empty beer, stout and wine bottles, and others that had contained whisky, brandy or champagne. the smells of the delicious viands that were being prepared in the kitchen often penetrated into the dismantled rooms that the philanthropists were renovating, sometimes just as they were eating their own wretched fare out of their dinner basket, and washing it down with draughts of the cold tea or the petrifying liquid they sometimes brought with them in bottles. sometimes, as has been said, the people of the house used to send up some tea and bread and butter or cakes or other refreshments to the workmen, but whenever hunter got to know of it being done he used to speak to the people about it and request that it be discontinued, as it caused the men to waste their time. but the event of the year was the beano, which took place on the last saturday in august, after they had been paying in for about four months. the cost of the outing was to be five shillings a head, so this was the amount each man had to pay in, but it was expected that the total cost--the hire of the brakes and the cost of the dinner--would come out at a trifle less than the amount stated, and in that case the surplus would be shared out after the dinner. the amount of the share-out would be greater or less according to other circumstances, for it generally happened that apart from the subscriptions of the men, the beano fund was swelled by charitable donations from several quarters, as will be seen later on. when the eventful day arrived, the hands, instead of working till one, were paid at twelve o'clock and rushed off home to have a wash and change. the brakes were to start from the 'cricketers' at one, but it was arranged, for the convenience of those who lived at windley, that they were to be picked up at the cross roads at one-thirty. there were four brakes altogether--three large ones for the men and one small one for the accommodation of mr rushton and a few of his personal friends, didlum, grinder, mr toonarf, an architect and mr lettum, a house and estate agent. one of the drivers was accompanied by a friend who carried a long coachman's horn. this gentleman was not paid to come, but, being out of work, he thought that the men would be sure to stand him a few drinks and that they would probably make a collection for him in return for his services. most of the chaps were smoking twopenny cigars, and had one or two drinks with each other to try to cheer themselves up before they started, but all the same it was a melancholy procession that wended its way up the hill to windley. to judge from the mournful expression on the long face of misery, who sat on the box beside the driver of the first large brake, and the downcast appearance of the majority of the men, one might have thought that it was a funeral rather than a pleasure party, or that they were a contingent of lost souls being conducted to the banks of the styx. the man who from time to time sounded the coachman's horn might have passed as the angel sounding the last trump, and the fumes of the cigars were typical of the smoke of their torment, which ascendeth up for ever and ever. a brief halt was made at the cross roads to pick up several of the men, including philpot, harlow, easton, ned dawson, sawkins, bill bates and the semi-drunk. the two last-named were now working for smeariton and leavit, but as they had been paying in from the first, they had elected to go to the beano rather than have their money back. the semi-drunk and one or two other habitual boozers were very shabby and down at heel, but the majority of the men were decently dressed. some had taken their sunday clothes out of pawn especially for the occasion. others were arrayed in new suits which they were going to pay for at the rate of a shilling a week. some had bought themselves second-hand suits, one or two were wearing their working clothes brushed and cleaned up, and some were wearing sunday clothes that had not been taken out of pawn for the simple reason that the pawnbrokers would not take them in. these garments were in what might be called a transition stage--old-fashioned and shiny with wear, but yet too good to take for working in, even if their owners had been in a position to buy some others to take their place for best. crass, slyme and one or two of the single men, however, were howling swells, sporting stand-up collars and bowler hats of the latest type, in contradistinction to some of the others, who were wearing hats of antique patterns, and collars of various shapes with jagged edges. harlow had on an old straw hat that his wife had cleaned up with oxalic acid, and easton had carefully dyed the faded binding of his black bowler with ink. their boots were the worst part of their attire: without counting rushton and his friends, there were thirty-seven men altogether, including nimrod, and there were not half a dozen pairs of really good boots amongst the whole crowd. when all were seated a fresh start was made. the small brake, with rushton, didlum, grinder and two or three other members of the band, led the way. next came the largest brake with misery on the box. beside the driver of the third brake was payne, the foreman carpenter. crass occupied a similar position of honour on the fourth brake, on the back step of which was perched the man with the coachman's horn. crass--who had engaged the brakes--had arranged with the drivers that the cortege should pass through the street where he and easton lived, and as they went by mrs crass was standing at the door with the two young men lodgers, who waved their handkerchiefs and shouted greetings. a little further on mrs linden and easton's wife were standing at the door to see them go by. in fact, the notes of the coachman's horn alarmed most of the inhabitants, who crowded to their windows and doors to gaze upon the dismal procession as it passed. the mean streets of windley were soon left far behind and they found themselves journeying along a sunlit, winding road, bordered with hedges of hawthorn, holly and briar, past rich, brown fields of standing corn, shimmering with gleams of gold, past apple-orchards where bending boughs were heavily loaded with mellow fruits exhaling fragrant odours, through the cool shades of lofty avenues of venerable oaks, whose overarched and interlacing branches formed a roof of green, gilt and illuminated with quivering spots and shafts of sunlight that filtered through the trembling leaves; over old mossy stone bridges, spanning limpid streams that duplicated the blue sky and the fleecy clouds; and then again, stretching away to the horizon on every side over more fields, some rich with harvest, others filled with drowsing cattle or with flocks of timid sheep that scampered away at the sound of the passing carriages. several times they saw merry little companies of rabbits frisking gaily in and out of the hedges or in the fields beside the sheep and cattle. at intervals, away in the distance, nestling in the hollows or amid sheltering trees, groups of farm buildings and stacks of hay; and further on, the square ivy-clad tower of an ancient church, or perhaps a solitary windmill with its revolving sails alternately flashing and darkening in the rays of the sun. past thatched wayside cottages whose inhabitants came out to wave their hands in friendly greeting. past groups of sunburnt, golden-haired children who climbed on fences and five-barred gates, and waved their hats and cheered, or ran behind the brakes for the pennies the men threw down to them. from time to time the men in the brakes made half-hearted attempts at singing, but it never came to much, because most of them were too hungry and miserable. they had not had time to take any dinner and would not have taken any even if they had the time, for they wished to reserve their appetites for the banquet at the queen elizabeth, which they expected to reach about half past three. however, they cheered up a little after the first halt--at the blue lion, where most of them got down and had a drink. some of them, including the semi-drunk, ned dawson, bill bates and joe philpot--had two or three drinks, and felt so much happier for them that, shortly after they started off again, sounds of melody were heard from the brake the three first named rode in--the one presided over by crass--but it was not very successful, and even after the second halt--about five miles further on--at the warrior's head, they found it impossible to sing with any heartiness. fitful bursts of song arose from time to time from each of the brakes in turn, only to die mournfully away. it is not easy to sing on an empty stomach even if one has got a little beer in it; and so it was with most of them. they were not in a mood to sing, or to properly appreciate the scenes through which they were passing. they wanted their dinners, and that was the reason why this long ride, instead of being a pleasure, became after a while, a weary journey that seemed as if it were never coming to an end. the next stop was at the bird in hand, a wayside public house that stood all by itself in a lonely hollow. the landlord was a fat, jolly-looking man, and there were several customers in the bar--men who looked like farm-labourers, but there were no other houses to be seen anywhere. this extraordinary circumstance exercised the minds of our travellers and formed the principal topic of conversation until they arrived at the dew drop inn, about half an hour afterwards. the first brake, containing rushton and his friends, passed on without stopping here. the occupants of the second brake, which was only a little way behind the first, were divided in opinion whether to stop or go on. some shouted out to the driver to pull up, others ordered him to proceed, and more were undecided which course to pursue--a state of mind that was not shared by the coachman, who, knowing that if they stopped somebody or other would be sure to stand him a drink, had no difficulty whatever in coming to a decision, but drew rein at the inn, an example that was followed by both the other carriages as they drove up. it was a very brief halt, not more than half the men getting down at all, and those who remained in the brakes grumbled so much at the delay that the others drank their beer as quickly as possible and the journey was resumed once more, almost in silence. no attempts at singing, no noisy laughter; they scarcely spoke to each other, but sat gloomily gazing out over the surrounding country. instructions had been given to the drivers not to stop again till they reached the queen elizabeth, and they therefore drove past the world turned upside down without stopping, much to the chagrin of the landlord of that house, who stood at the door with a sickly smile upon his face. some of those who knew him shouted out that they would give him a call on their way back, and with this he had to be content. they reached the long-desired queen elizabeth at twenty minutes to four, and were immediately ushered into a large room where a round table and two long ones were set for dinner--and they were set in a manner worthy of the reputation of the house. the cloths that covered the tables and the serviettes, arranged fanwise in the drinking glasses, were literally as white as snow, and about a dozen knives and forks and spoons were laid for each person. down the centre of the table glasses of delicious yellow custard and cut-glass dishes of glistening red and golden jelly alternated with vases of sweet-smelling flowers. the floor of the dining-room was covered with oilcloth--red flowers on a pale yellow ground; the pattern was worn off in places, but it was all very clean and shining. whether one looked at the walls with the old-fashioned varnished oak paper, or at the glossy piano standing across the corner near the white-curtained window, at the shining oak chairs or through the open casement doors that led into the shady garden beyond, the dominating impression one received was that everything was exquisitely clean. the landlord announced that dinner would be served in ten minutes, and while they were waiting some of them indulged in a drink at the bar--just as an appetizer--whilst the others strolled in the garden or, by the landlord's invitation, looked over the house. amongst other places, they glanced into the kitchen, where the landlady was superintending the preparation of the feast, and in this place, with its whitewashed walls and red-tiled floor, as in every other part of the house, the same absolute cleanliness reigned supreme. 'it's a bit differint from the royal caff, where we got the sack, ain't it?' remarked the semi-drunk to bill bates as they made their way to the dining-room in response to the announcement that dinner was ready. 'not arf!' replied bill. rushton, with didlum and grinder and his other friends, sat at the round table near the piano. hunter took the head of the longer of the other two tables and crass the foot, and on either side of crass were bundy and slyme, who had acted with him as the committee who had arranged the beano. payne, the foreman carpenter, occupied the head of the other table. the dinner was all that could be desired; it was almost as good as the kind of dinner that is enjoyed every day by those persons who are too lazy to work but are cunning enough to make others work for them. there was soup, several entrees, roast beef, boiled mutton, roast turkey, roast goose, ham, cabbage, peas, beans and sweets galore, plum pudding, custard, jelly, fruit tarts, bread and cheese and as much beer or lemonade as they liked to pay for, the drinks being an extra; and afterwards the waiters brought in cups of coffee for those who desired it. everything was up to the knocker, and although they were somewhat bewildered by the multitude of knives and forks, they all, with one or two exceptions, rose to the occasion and enjoyed themselves famously. the excellent decorum observed being marred only by one or two regrettable incidents. the first of these occurred almost as soon as they sat down, when ned dawson who, although a big strong fellow, was not able to stand much beer, not being used to it, was taken ill and had to be escorted from the room by his mate bundy and another man. they left him somewhere outside and he came back again about ten minutes afterwards, much better but looking rather pale, and took his seat with the others. the turkeys, the roast beef and the boiled mutton, the peas and beans and the cabbage, disappeared with astonishing rapidity, which was not to be wondered at, for they were all very hungry from the long drive, and nearly everyone made a point of having at least one helping of everything there was to be had. some of them went in for two lots of soup. then for the next course, boiled mutton and ham or turkey: then some roast beef and goose. then a little more boiled mutton with a little roast beef. each of the three boys devoured several times his own weight of everything, to say nothing of numerous bottles of lemonade and champagne ginger beer. crass frequently paused to mop the perspiration from his face and neck with his serviette. in fact everybody had a good time. there was enough and to spare of everything to eat, the beer was of the best, and all the time, amid the rattle of the crockery and the knives and forks, the proceedings were enlivened by many jests and flashes of wit that continuously kept the table in a roar. 'chuck us over another dollop of that there white stuff, bob,' shouted the semi-drunk to crass, indicating the blancmange. crass reached out his hand and took hold of the dish containing the 'white stuff', but instead of passing it to the semi-drunk, he proceeded to demolish it himself, gobbling it up quickly directly from the dish with a spoon. 'why, you're eating it all yerself, yer bleeder,' cried the semi-drunk indignantly, as soon as he realized what was happening. 'that's all right, matey,' replied crass affably as he deposited the empty dish on the table. 'it don't matter, there's plenty more where it come from. tell the landlord to bring in another lot.' upon being applied to, the landlord, who was assisted by his daughter, two other young women and two young men, brought in several more lots and so the semi-drunk was appeased. as for the plum-pudding--it was a fair knock-out; just like christmas: but as ned dawson and bill bates had drunk all the sauce before the pudding was served, they all had to have their first helping without any. however, as the landlord brought in another lot shortly afterwards, that didn't matter either. as soon as dinner was over, crass rose to make his statement as secretary. thirty-seven men had paid five shillings each: that made nine pounds five shillings. the committee had decided that the three boys--the painters' boy, the carpenters' boy and the front shop boy--should be allowed to come half-price: that made it nine pounds twelve and six. in addition to paying the ordinary five-shilling subscription, mr rushton had given one pound ten towards the expenses. (loud cheers.) and several other gentlemen had also given something towards it. mr sweater, of the cave, one pound. (applause.) mr grinder, ten shillings in addition to the five-shilling subscription. (applause.) mr lettum, ten shillings, as well as the five-shilling subscription. (applause.) mr didlum, ten shillings in addition to the five shillings. (cheers.) mr toonarf, ten shillings as well as the five-shilling subscription. they had also written to some of the manufacturers who supplied the firm with materials, and asked them to give something: some of 'em had sent half a crown, some five shillings, some hadn't answered at all, and two of 'em had written back to say that as things is cut so fine nowadays, they didn't hardly get no profit on their stuff, so they couldn't afford to give nothing; but out of all the firms they wrote to they managed to get thirty-two and sixpence altogether, making a grand total of seventeen pounds. as for the expenses, the dinner was two and six a head, and there was forty-five of them there, so that came to five pounds twelve and six. then there was the hire of the brakes, also two and six a head, five pound twelve and six, which left a surplus of five pound fifteen to be shared out (applause), which came to three shillings each for the thirty-seven men, and one and fourpence for each of the boys. (loud and prolonged cheers.) crass, slyme and bundy now walked round the tables distributing the share-out, which was very welcome to everybody, especially those who had spent nearly all their money during the journey from mugsborough, and when this ceremony was completed, philpot moved a hearty vote of thanks to the committee for the manner in which they had carried out their duties, which was agreed to with acclamation. then they made a collection for the waiters, and the three waitresses, which amounted to eleven shillings, for which the host returned thanks on behalf of the recipients, who were all smiles. then mr rushton requested the landlord to serve drinks and cigars all round. some had cigarettes and the teetotallers had lemonade or ginger beer. those who did not smoke themselves took the cigar all the same and gave it to someone else who did. when all were supplied there suddenly arose loud cries of 'order!' and it was seen that hunter was upon his feet. as soon as silence was obtained, misery said that he believed that everyone there present would agree with him, when he said that they should not let the occasion pass without drinking the 'ealth of their esteemed and respected employer, mr rushton. (hear, hear.) some of them had worked for mr rushton on and off for many years, and as far as they was concerned it was not necessary for him (hunter) to say much in praise of mr rushton. (hear, hear.) they knew mr rushton as well as he did himself and to know him was to esteem him. (cheers.) as for the new hands, although they did not know mr rushton as well as the old hands did, he felt sure that they would agree that as no one could wish for a better master. (loud applause.) he had much pleasure in asking them to drink mr rushton's health. everyone rose. 'musical honours, chaps,' shouted crass, waving his glass and leading off the singing which was immediately joined in with great enthusiasm by most of the men, the semi-drunk conducting the music with a table knife: for he's a jolly good fellow, for he's a jolly good fellow, for he's a jolly good fel-ell-o, and so say all of us, so 'ip, 'ip, 'ip, 'ooray! so 'ip, 'ip, 'ip, 'ooray! for he's a jolly good fellow, for 'e's a jolly good fellow for 'e's a jolly good fel-ell-o, and so say all of us. 'now three cheers!' shouted crass, leading off. hip, hip, hip, hooray! hip, hip, hip, hooray! hip, hip, hip, hooray! everyone present drank rushton's health, or at any rate went through the motions of doing so, but during the roar of cheering and singing that preceded it several of the men stood with expressions of contempt or uneasiness upon their faces, silently watching the enthusiasts or looking at the ceiling or on the floor. 'i will say this much,' remarked the semidrunk as they all resumed their seats--he had had several drinks during dinner, besides those he had taken on the journey--i will say this much, although i did have a little misunderstanding with mr hunter when i was workin' at the royal caff, i must admit that this is the best firm that's ever worked under me.' this statement caused a shout of laughter, which, however, died away as mr rushton rose to acknowledge the toast to his health. he said that he had now been in business for nearly sixteen years and this was--he believed--the eleventh outing he had had the pleasure of attending. during all that time the business had steadily progressed and had increased in volume from year to year, and he hoped and believed that the progress made in the past would be continued in the future. (hear, hear.) of course, he realized that the success of the business depended very largely upon the men as well as upon himself; he did his best in trying to get work for them, and it was necessary--if the business was to go on and prosper--that they should also do their best to get the work done when he had secured it for them. (hear, hear.) the masters could not do without the men, and the men could not live without the masters. (hear, hear.) it was a matter of division of labour: the men worked with their hands and the masters worked with their brains, and one was no use without the other. he hoped the good feeling which had hitherto existed between himself and his workmen would always continue, and he thanked them for the way in which they had responded to the toast of his health. loud cheers greeted the conclusion of this speech, and then crass stood up and said that he begged to propose the health of mr 'unter. (hear, hear.) he wasn't going to make a long speech as he wasn't much of a speaker. (cries of 'you're all right,' 'go on,' etc.) but he felt sure as they would all hagree with him when he said that--next to mr rushton--there wasn't no one the men had more respect and liking for than mr 'unter. (cheers.) a few weeks ago when mr 'unter was laid up, many of them began to be afraid as they was going to lose 'im. he was sure that all the 'ands was glad to 'ave this hoppertunity of congratulating him on his recovery (hear, hear) and of wishing him the best of 'ealth in the future and hoping as he would be spared to come to a good many more beanos. loud applause greeted the conclusion of crass's remarks, and once more the meeting burst into song: for he's a jolly good fellow for he's a jolly good fellow. for he's a jolly good fellow, and so say all of us. so 'ip, 'ip, 'ip, 'ooray! so 'ip, 'ip, 'ip, 'ooray! when they had done cheering, nimrod rose. his voice trembled a little as he thanked them for their kindness, and said that he hoped he deserved their goodwill. he could only say that as he was sure as he always tried to be fair and considerate to everyone. (cheers.) he would now request the landlord to replenish their glasses. (hear, hear.) as soon as the drinks were served, nimrod again rose and said he wished to propose the healths of their visitors who had so kindly contributed to their expenses--mr lettum, mr didlum, mr toonarf and mr grinder. (cheers.) they were very pleased and proud to see them there (hear, hear), and he was sure the men would agree with him when he said that messrs lettum, didlum, toonarf and grinder were jolly good fellows. to judge from the manner in which they sang the chorus and cheered, it was quite evident that most of the hands did agree. when they left off, grinder rose to reply on behalf of those included in the toast. he said that it gave them much pleasure to be there and take part in such pleasant proceedings and they were glad to think that they had been able to help to bring it about. it was very gratifying to see the good feeling that existed between mr rushton and his workmen, which was as it should be, because masters and men was really fellow workers--the masters did the brain work, the men the 'and work. they was both workers, and their interests was the same. he liked to see men doing their best for their master and knowing that their master was doing his best for them, that he was not only a master, but a friend. that was what he (grinder) liked to see--master and men pulling together--doing their best, and realizing that their interests was identical. (cheers.) if only all masters and men would do this they would find that everything would go on all right, there would be more work and less poverty. let the men do their best for their masters, and the masters do their best for their men, and they would find that that was the true solution of the social problem, and not the silly nonsense that was talked by people what went about with red flags. (cheers and laughter.) most of those fellows were chaps who was too lazy to work for their livin'. (hear, hear.) they could take it from him that, if ever the socialists got the upper hand there would just be a few of the hartful dodgers who would get all the cream, and there would be nothing left but 'ard work for the rest. (hear. hear.) that's wot hall those hagitators was after: they wanted them (his hearers) to work and keep 'em in idleness. (hear, hear.) on behalf of mr didlum, mr toonarf, mr lettum and himself, he thanked them for their good wishes, and hoped to be with them on a sim'ler occasion in the future. loud cheers greeted the termination of his speech, but it was obvious from some of the men's faces that they resented grinder's remarks. these men ridiculed socialism and regularly voted for the continuance of capitalism, and yet they were disgusted and angry with grinder! there was also a small number of socialists--not more than half a dozen altogether--who did not join in the applause. these men were all sitting at the end of the long table presided over by payne. none of them had joined in the applause that greeted the speeches, and so far neither had they made any protest. some of them turned very red as they listened to the concluding sentences of grinder's oration, and others laughed, but none of them said anything. they knew before they came that there was sure to be a lot of 'jolly good fellow' business and speechmaking, and they had agreed together beforehand to take no part one way or the other, and to refrain from openly dissenting from anything that might be said, but they had not anticipated anything quite so strong as this. when grinder sat down some of those who had applauded him began to jeer at the socialists. 'what have you got to say to that?' they shouted. 'that's up against yer!' 'they ain't got nothing to say now.' 'why don't some of you get up and make a speech?' this last appeared to be a very good idea to those liberals and tories who had not liked grinder's observations, so they all began to shout 'owen!' 'owen!' 'come on 'ere. get up and make a speech!' 'be a man!' and so on. several of those who had been loudest in applauding grinder also joined in the demand that owen should make a speech, because they were certain that grinder and the other gentlemen would be able to dispose of all his arguments; but owen and the other socialists made no response except to laugh, so presently crass tied a white handkerchief on a cane walking-stick that belonged to mr didlum, and stuck it in the vase of flowers that stood on the end of the table where the socialist group were sitting. when the noise had in some measure ceased, grinder again rose. 'when i made the few remarks that i did, i didn't know as there was any socialists 'ere: i could tell from the look of you that most of you had more sense. at the same time i'm rather glad i said what i did, because it just shows you what sort of chaps these socialists are. they're pretty artful--they know when to talk and when to keep their mouths shut. what they like is to get hold of a few ignorant workin' men in a workshop or a public house, and then they can talk by the mile--reg'ler shop lawyers, you know wot i mean--i'm right and everybody else is wrong. (laughter.) you know the sort of thing i mean. when they finds theirselves in the company of edicated people wot knows a little more than they does theirselves, and who isn't likely to be misled by a lot of claptrap, why then, mum's the word. so next time you hears any of these shop lawyers' arguments, you'll know how much it's worth.' most of the men were delighted with this speech, which was received with much laughing and knocking on the tables. they remarked to each other that grinder was a smart man: he'd got the socialists weighed up just about right--to an ounce. then, it was seen that barrington was on his feet facing grinder and a sudden, awe-filled silence fell. 'it may or may not be true,' began barrington, 'that socialists always know when to speak and when to keep silent, but the present occasion hardly seemed a suitable one to discuss such subjects. 'we are here today as friends and want to forget our differences and enjoy ourselves for a few hours. but after what mr grinder has said i am quite ready to reply to him to the best of my ability. 'the fact that i am a socialist and that i am here today as one of mr rushton's employees should be an answer to the charge that socialists are too lazy to work for their living. and as to taking advantage of the ignorance and simplicity of working men and trying to mislead them with nonsensical claptrap, it would have been more to the point if mr grinder had taken some particular socialist doctrine and had proved it to be untrue or misleading, instead of adopting the cowardly method of making vague general charges that he cannot substantiate. he would find it far more difficult to do that than it would be for a socialist to show that most of what mr grinder himself has been telling us is nonsensical claptrap of the most misleading kind. he tells us that the employers work with their brains and the men with their hands. if it is true that no brains are required to do manual labour, why put idiots into imbecile asylums? why not let them do some of the hand work for which no brains are required? as they are idiots, they would probably be willing to work for even less than the ideal "living wage". if mr grinder had ever tried, he would know that manual workers have to concentrate their minds and their attention on their work or they would not be able to do it at all. his talk about employers being not only the masters but the "friends" of their workmen is also mere claptrap because he knows as well as we do, that no matter how good or benevolent an employer may be, no matter how much he might desire to give his men good conditions, it is impossible for him to do so, because he has to compete against other employers who do not do that. it is the bad employer--the sweating, slave-driving employer--who sets the pace and the others have to adopt the same methods--very often against their inclinations--or they would not be able to compete with him. if any employer today were to resolve to pay his workmen not less wages than he would be able to live upon in comfort himself, that he would not require them to do more work in a day than he himself would like to perform every day of his own life, mr grinder knows as well as we do that such an employer would be bankrupt in a month; because he would not be able to get any work except by taking it at the same price as the sweaters and the slave-drivers. 'he also tells us that the interests of masters and men are identical; but if an employer has a contract, it is to his interest to get the work done as soon as possible; the sooner it is done the more profit he will make; but the more quickly it is done, the sooner will the men be out of employment. how then can it be true that their interests are identical? 'again, let us suppose that an employer is, say, thirty years of age when he commences business, and that he carries it on for twenty years. let us assume that he employs forty men more or less regularly during that period and that the average age of these men is also thirty years at the time the employer commences business. at the end of the twenty years it usually happens that the employer has made enough money to enable him to live for the remainder of his life in ease and comfort. but what about the workman? all through those twenty years they have earned but a bare living wage and have had to endure such privations that those who are not already dead are broken in health. 'in the case of the employer there had been twenty years of steady progress towards ease and leisure and independence. in the case of the majority of the men there were twenty years of deterioration, twenty years of steady, continuous and hopeless progress towards physical and mental inefficiency: towards the scrap-heap, the work-house, and premature death. what is it but false, misleading, nonsensical claptrap to say that their interests were identical with those of their employer? 'such talk as that is not likely to deceive any but children or fools. we are not children, but it is very evident that mr grinder thinks that we are fools. 'occasionally it happens, through one or more of a hundred different circumstances over which he has no control, or through some error of judgement, that after many years of laborious mental work an employer is overtaken by misfortune, and finds himself no better and even worse off than when he started; but these are exceptional cases, and even if he becomes absolutely bankrupt he is no worse off than the majority of the workmen. 'at the same time it is quite true that the real interests of employers and workmen are the same, but not in the sense that mr grinder would have us believe. under the existing system of society but a very few people, no matter how well off they may be, can be certain that they or their children will not eventually come to want; and even those who think they are secure themselves, find their happiness diminished by the knowledge of the poverty and misery that surrounds them on every side. 'in that sense only is it true that the interests of masters and men are identical, for it is to the interest of all, both rich and poor, to help to destroy a system that inflicts suffering upon the many and allows true happiness to none. it is to the interest of all to try and find a better way.' here crass jumped up and interrupted, shouting out that they hadn't come there to listen to a lot of speechmaking--a remark that was greeted with unbounded applause by most of those present. loud cries of 'hear, hear!' resounded through the room, and the semi-drunk suggested that someone should sing a song. the men who had clamoured for a speech from owen said nothing, and mr grinder, who had been feeling rather uncomfortable, was secretly very glad of the interruption. the semi-drunk's suggestion that someone should sing a song was received with unqualified approbation by everybody, including barrington and the other socialists, who desired nothing better than that the time should be passed in a manner suitable to the occasion. the landlord's daughter, a rosy girl of about twenty years of age, in a pink print dress, sat down at the piano, and the semi-drunk, taking his place at the side of the instrument and facing the audience, sang the first song with appropriate gestures, the chorus being rendered enthusiastically by the full strength of the company, including misery, who by this time was slightly drunk from drinking gin and ginger beer: 'come, come, come an' 'ave a drink with me down by the ole bull and bush. come, come, come an' shake 'ands with me down by the ole bull and bush. wot cheer me little germin band! fol the diddle di do! come an' take 'old of me 'and come, come, come an' 'ave a drink with me, down by the old bull and bush, bush! bush!' protracted knocking on the tables greeted the end of the song, but as the semi-drunk knew no other except odd verses and choruses, he called upon crass for the next, and that gentleman accordingly sang 'work, boys, work' to the tune of 'tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching'. as this song is the marseillaise of the tariff reform party, voicing as it does the highest ideals of the tory workmen of this country, it was an unqualified success, for most of them were conservatives. 'now i'm not a wealthy man, but i lives upon a plan wot will render me as 'appy as a king; an' if you will allow, i'll sing it to you now, for time you know is always on the wing. work, boys, work and be contented so long as you've enough to buy a meal. for if you will but try, you'll be wealthy--bye and bye- if you'll only put yer shoulder to the wheel.' 'altogether, boys,' shouted grinder, who was a strong tariff reformer, and was delighted to see that most of the men were of the same way of thinking; and the 'boys' roared out the chorus once more: work, boys, work and be contented so long as you've enough to buy a meal for if you will but try, you'll be wealthy--bye and bye if you'll only put your shoulder to the wheel. as they sang the words of this noble chorus the tories seemed to become inspired with lofty enthusiasm. it is of course impossible to say for certain, but probably as they sang there arose before their exalted imaginations, a vision of the past, and looking down the long vista of the years that were gone, they saw that from their childhood they had been years of poverty and joyless toil. they saw their fathers and mothers, weaned and broken with privation and excessive labour, sinking unhonoured into the welcome oblivion of the grave. and then, as a change came over the spirit of their dream, they saw the future, with their own children travelling along the same weary road to the same kind of goal. it is possible that visions of this character were conjured up in their minds by the singing, for the words of the song gave expression to their ideal of what human life should be. that was all they wanted--to be allowed to work like brutes for the benefit of other people. they did not want to be civilized themselves and they intended to take good care that the children they had brought into the world should never enjoy the benefits of civilization either. as they often said: 'who and what are our children that they shouldn't be made to work for their betters? they're not gentry's children, are they? the good things of life was never meant for the likes of them. let 'em work! that's wot the likes of them was made for, and if we can only get tariff reform for 'em they will always be sure of plenty of it--not only full time, but overtime! as for edication, travellin' in furrin' parts, an' enjoying life an' all sich things as that, they was never meant for the likes of our children--they're meant for gentry's children! our children is only like so much dirt compared with gentry's children! that's wot the likes of us is made for--to work for gentry, so as they can 'ave plenty of time to enjoy theirselves; and the gentry is made to 'ave a good time so as the likes of us can 'ave plenty of work.' there were several more verses, and by the time they had sung them all, the tories were in a state of wild enthusiasm. even ned dawson, who had fallen asleep with his head pillowed on his arms on the table, roused himself up at the end of each verse, and after having joined in the chorus, went to sleep again. at the end of the song they gave three cheers for tariff reform and plenty of work, and then crass, who, as the singer of the last song, had the right to call upon the next man, nominated philpot, who received an ovation when he stood up, for he was a general favourite. he never did no harm to nobody, and he was always wiling to do anyone a good turn whenever he had the opportunity. shouts of 'good old joe' resounded through the room as he crossed over to the piano, and in response to numerous requests for 'the old song' he began to sing 'the flower show': 'whilst walkin' out the other night, not knowing where to go i saw a bill upon a wall about a flower show. so i thought the flowers i'd go and see to pass away the night. and when i got into that show it was a curious sight. so with your kind intention and a little of your aid, tonight some flowers i'll mention which i hope will never fade.' omnes: to-night some flowers i'll mention which i hope will never fade.' there were several more verses, from which it appeared that the principal flowers in the show were the rose, the thistle and the shamrock. when he had finished, the applause was so deafening and the demands for an encore so persistent that to satisfy them he sang another old favourite--'won't you buy my pretty flowers?' 'ever coming, ever going, men and women hurry by, heedless of the tear-drops gleaming, in her sad and wistful eye how her little heart is sighing thro' the cold and dreary hours, only listen to her crying, "won't you buy my pretty flowers?"' when the last verse of this sang had been sung five er six times, philpot exercised his right of nominating the next singer, and called upon dick wantley, who with many suggestive gestures and grimaces sang 'put me amongst the girls', and afterwards called upon payne, the foreman carpenter, who gave 'i'm the marquis of camberwell green'. there was a lot of what music-hall artists call 'business' attached to his song, and as he proceeded, payne, who was ghastly pale and very nervous, went through a lot of galvanic motions and gestures, bowing and scraping and sliding about and flourishing his handkerchief in imitation of the courtly graces of the marquis. during this performance the audience maintained an appalling silence, which so embarrassed payne that before he was half-way through the song he had to stop because he could not remember the rest. however, to make up for this failure he sang another called 'we all must die, like the fire in the grate'. this also was received in a very lukewarm manner by the crowd, same of whom laughed and others suggested that if he couldn't sing any better than that, the sooner he was dead the better. this was followed by another tory ballad, the chorus being as follows: his clothes may be ragged, his hands may be soiled. but where's the disgrace if for bread he has toiled. his 'art is in the right place, deny it no one can the backbone of old england is the honest workin' man.' after a few more songs it was decided to adjourn to a field at the rear of the tavern to have a game of cricket. sides were formed, rushton, didlum, grinder, and the other gentlemen taking part just as if they were only common people, and while the game was in progress the rest played ring quoits or reclined on the grass watching the players, whilst the remainder amused themselves drinking beer and playing cards and shove-ha'penny in the bar parlour, or taking walks around the village sampling the beer at the other pubs, of which there were three. the time passed in this manner until seven o'clock, the hour at which it had been arranged to start on the return journey; but about a quarter of an hour before they set out an unpleasant incident occurred. during the time that they were playing cricket a party of glee singers, consisting of four young girls and five men, three of whom were young fellows, the other two being rather elderly, possibly the fathers of some of the younger members of the party, came into the field and sang several part songs for their entertainment. towards the close of the game most of the men had assembled in this field, and during a pause in the singing the musicians sent one of their number, a shy girl about eighteen years of age--who seemed as if she would rather that someone else had the task--amongst the crowd to make a collection. the girl was very nervous and blushed as she murmured her request, and held out a straw hat that evidently belonged to one of the male members of the glee party. a few of the men gave pennies, some refused or pretended not to see either the girl or the hat, others offered to give her some money for a kiss, but what caused the trouble was that two or three of those who had been drinking more than was good for them dropped the still burning ends of their cigars, all wet with saliva as they were, into the hat and dick wantley spit into it. the girl hastily returned to her companions, and as she went some of the men who had witnessed the behaviour of those who had insulted her, advised them to make themselves scarce, as they stood a good chance of getting a thrashing from the girl's friends. they said it would serve them dam' well right if they did get a hammering. partly sobered by fear, the three culprits sneaked off and hid themselves, pale and trembling with terror, under the box seats of the three brakes. they had scarcely left when the men of the glee party came running up, furiously demanding to see those who had insulted the girl. as they could get no satisfactory answer, one of their number ran back and presently returned, bringing the girl with him, the other young women following a little way behind. she said she could not see the men they were looking for, so they went down to the public house to see if they could find them there, some of the rushton's men accompanying them and protesting their indignation. the time passed quickly enough and by half past seven the brakes were loaded up again and a start made for the return journey. they called at all the taverns on the road, and by the time they reached the blue lion half of them were three sheets in the wind, and five or six were very drunk, including the driver of crass's brake and the man with the bugle. the latter was so far gone that they had to let him lie down in the bottom of the carriage amongst their feet, where he fell asleep, while the others amused themselves by blowing weird shrieks out of the horn. there was an automatic penny-in-the-slot piano at the blue lion and as that was the last house of the road they made a rather long stop there, playing hooks and rings, shove-ha'penny, drinking, singing, dancing and finally quarrelling. several of them seemed disposed to quarrel with newman. all sorts of offensive remarks were made at him in his hearing. once someone ostentatiously knocked his glass of lemonade over, and a little later someone else collided violently with him just as he was in the act of drinking, causing his lemonade to spill all over his clothes. the worst of it was that most of these rowdy ones were his fellow passengers in crass's brake, and there was not much chance of getting a seat in either of the other carriages, for they were overcrowded already. from the remarks he overheard from time to time, newman guessed the reason of their hostility, and as their manner towards him grew more menacing, he became so nervous that he began to think of quietly sneaking off and walking the remainder of the way home by himself, unless he could get somebody in one of the other brakes to change seats with him. whilst these thoughts were agitating his mind, dick wantley suddenly shouted out that he was going to go for the dirty tyke who had offered to work under price last winter. it was his fault that they were all working for sixpence halfpenny and he was going to wipe the floor with him. some of his friends eagerly offered to assist, but others interposed, and for a time it looked as if there was going to be a free fight, the aggressors struggling hard to get at their inoffensive victim. eventually, however, newman found a seat in misery's brake, squatting on the floor with his back to the horses, thankful enough to be out of reach of the drunken savages, who were now roaring out ribald songs and startling the countryside, as they drove along, with unearthly blasts on the coach horn. meantime, although none of them seemed to notice it, the brake was travelling at a furious rate, and swaying about from side to side in a very erratic manner. it would have been the last carriage, but things had got a bit mixed at the blue lion and, instead of bringing up the rear of the procession, it was now second, just behind the small vehicle containing rushton and his friends. crass several times reminded them that the other carriage was so near that rushton must be able to hear every word that was said, and these repeated admonitions at length enraged the semi-drunk, who shouted out that they didn't care a b--r if he could hear. who the bloody hell was he? to hell with him! 'damn rushton, and you too!' cried bill bates, addressing crass. 'you're only a dirty toe-rag! that's all you are--a bloody rotter! that's the only reason you gets put in charge of jobs--'cos you're a good nigger-driver! you're a bloody sight worse than rushton or misery either! who was it started the one-man, one-room dodge, eh? why, you, yer bleeder!' 'knock 'im orf 'is bleedin' perch,' suggested bundy. everybody seemed to think this was a very good idea, but when the semi-drunk attempted to rise for the purpose of carrying it out, he was thrown down by a sudden lurch of the carriage on the top of the prostrate figure of the bugle man and by the time the others had assisted him back to his seat they had forgotten all about their plan of getting rid of crass. meantime the speed of the vehicle had increased to a fearful rate. rushton and the other occupants of the little wagonette in front had been for some time shouting to them to moderate the pace of their horses, but as the driver of crass's brake was too drunk to understand what they said he took no notice, and they had no alternative but to increase their own speed to avoid being run down. the drunken driver now began to imagine that they were trying to race him, and became fired with the determination to pass them. it was a very narrow road, but there was just about room to do it, and he had sufficient confidence in his own skill with the ribbons to believe that he could get past in safety. the terrified gesticulations and the shouts of rushton's party only served to infuriate him, because he imagined that they were jeering at him for not being able to overtake them. he stood up on the footboard and lashed the horses till they almost flew over the ground, while the carriage swayed and skidded in a fearful manner. in front, the horses of rushton's conveyance were also galloping at top speed, the vehicle bounding and reeling from one side of the road to the other, whilst its terrified occupants, whose faces were blanched with apprehension, sat clinging to their seats and to each other, their eyes projecting from the sockets as they gazed back with terror at their pursuers, some of whom were encouraging the drunken driver with promises of quarts of beer, and urging on the horses with curses and yells. crass's fat face was pallid with fear as he clung trembling to his seat. another man, very drunk and oblivious of everything, was leaning over the side of the brake, spewing into the road, while the remainder, taking no interest in the race, amused themselves by singing--conducted by the semi-drunk--as loud as they could roar: 'has anyone seen a germin band, germin band, germin band? i've been lookin' about, pom--pom, pom, pom, pom! 'i've searched every pub, both near and far, near and far, near and far, i want my fritz, what plays tiddley bits on the big trombone!' the other two brakes had fallen far behind. the one presided over by hunter contained a mournful crew. nimrod himself, from the effects of numerous drinks of ginger beer with secret dashes of gin in it, had become at length crying drunk, and sat weeping in gloomy silence beside the driver, a picture of lachrymose misery and but dimly conscious of his surroundings, and slyme, who rode with hunter because he was a fellow member of the shining light chapel. then there was another paperhanger--an unhappy wretch who was afflicted with religious mania; he had brought a lot of tracts with him which he had distributed to the other men, to the villagers of tubberton and to anybody else who would take them. most of the other men who rode in nimrod's brake were of the 'religious' working man type. ignorant, shallow-pated dolts, without as much intellectuality as an average cat. attendants at various psas and 'church mission halls' who went every sunday afternoon to be lectured on their duty to their betters and to have their minds--save the mark!--addled and stultified by such persons as rushton, sweater, didlum and grinder, not to mention such mental specialists as the holy reverend belchers and boshers, and such persons as john starr. at these meetings none of the 'respectable' working men were allowed to ask any questions, or to object to, or find fault with anything that was said, or to argue, or discuss, or criticize. they had to sit there like a lot of children while they were lectured and preached at and patronized. even as sheep before their shearers are dumb, so they were not permitted to open their mouths. for that matter they did not wish to be allowed to ask any questions, or to discuss anything. they would not have been able to. they sat there and listened to what was said, but they had but a very hazy conception of what it was all about. most of them belonged to these psas merely for the sake of the loaves and fishes. every now and then they were awarded prizes--self-help by smiles, and other books suitable for perusal by persons suffering from almost complete obliteration of the mental faculties. besides other benefits there was usually a christmas club attached to the 'psa' or 'mission' and the things were sold to the members slightly below cost as a reward for their servility. they were for the most part tame, broken-spirited, poor wretches who contentedly resigned themselves to a life of miserable toil and poverty, and with callous indifference abandoned their offspring to the same fate. compared with such as these, the savages of new guinea or the red indians are immensely higher in the scale of manhood. they are free! they call no man master; and if they do not enjoy the benefits of science and civilization, neither do they toil to create those things for the benefit of others. and as for their children--most of those savages would rather knock them on the head with a tomahawk than allow them to grow up to be half-starved drudges for other men. but these were not free: their servile lives were spent in grovelling and cringing and toiling and running about like little dogs at the behest of their numerous masters. and as for the benefits of science and civilization, their only share was to work and help to make them, and then to watch other men enjoy them. and all the time they were tame and quiet and content and said, 'the likes of us can't expect to 'ave nothing better, and as for our children wot's been good enough for us is good enough for the likes of them.' but although they were so religious and respectable and so contented to be robbed on a large scale, yet in small matters, in the commonplace and petty affairs of their everyday existence, most of these men were acutely alive to what their enfeebled minds conceived to be their own selfish interests, and they possessed a large share of that singular cunning which characterizes this form of dementia. that was why they had chosen to ride in nimrod's brake--because they wished to chum up with him as much as possible, in order to increase their chances of being kept on in preference to others who were not so respectable. some of these poor creatures had very large heads, but a close examination would have shown that the size was due to the extraordinary thickness of the bones. the cavity of the skull was not so large as the outward appearance of the head would have led a casual observer to suppose, and even in those instances where the brain was of a fair size, it was of inferior quality, being coarse in texture and to a great extent composed of fat. although most of them were regular attendants at some place of so-called worship, they were not all teetotallers, and some of them were now in different stages of intoxication, not because they had had a great deal to drink, but because--being usually abstemious--it did not take very much to make them drunk. from time to time this miserable crew tried to enliven the journey by singing, but as most of them only knew odd choruses it did not come to much. as for the few who did happen to know all the words of a song, they either had no voices or were not inclined to sing. the most successful contribution was that of the religious maniac, who sang several hymns, the choruses being joined in by everybody, both drunk and sober. the strains of these hymns, wafted back through the balmy air to the last coach, were the cause of much hilarity to its occupants who also sang the choruses. as they had all been brought up under 'christian' influences and educated in 'christian' schools, they all knew the words: 'work, for the night is coming', 'turn poor sinner and escape eternal fire', 'pull for the shore' and 'where is my wandering boy?' the last reminded harlow of a song he knew nearly all the words of, 'take the news to mother', the singing of which was much appreciated by all present and when it was finished they sang it all over again, philpot being so affected that he actually shed tears; and easton confided to owen that there was no getting away from the fact that a boy's best friend is his mother. in this last carriage, as in the other two, there were several men who were more or less intoxicated and for the same reason--because not being used to taking much liquor, the few extra glasses they had drunk had got into their heads. they were as sober a lot of fellows as need be at ordinary times, and they had flocked together in this brake because they were all of about the same character--not tame, contented imbeciles like most of those in misery's carnage, but men something like harlow, who, although dissatisfied with their condition, doggedly continued the hopeless, weary struggle against their fate. they were not teetotallers and they never went to either church or chapel, but they spent little in drink or on any form of enjoyment--an occasional glass of beer or a still rarer visit to a music-hall and now and then an outing more or less similar to this being the sum total of their pleasures. these four brakes might fitly be regarded as so many travelling lunatic asylums, the inmates of each exhibiting different degrees and forms of mental disorder. the occupants of the first--rushton, didlum and co.--might be classed as criminal lunatics who injured others as well as themselves. in a properly constituted system of society such men as these would be regarded as a danger to the community, and would be placed under such restraint as would effectually prevent them from harming themselves or others. these wretches had abandoned every thought and thing that tends to the elevation of humanity. they had given up everything that makes life good and beautiful, in order to carry on a mad struggle to acquire money which they would never be sufficiently cultured to properly enjoy. deaf and blind to every other consideration, to this end they had degraded their intellects by concentrating them upon the minutest details of expense and profit, and for their reward they raked in their harvest of muck and lucre along with the hatred and curses of those they injured in the process. they knew that the money they accumulated was foul with the sweat of their brother men, and wet with the tears of little children, but they were deaf and blind and callous to the consequences of their greed. devoid of every ennobling thought or aspiration, they grovelled on the filthy ground, tearing up the flowers to get at the worms. in the coach presided over by crass, bill bates, the semi-drunk and the other two or three habitual boozers were all men who had been driven mad by their environment. at one time most of them had been fellows like harlow, working early and late whenever they got the chance, only to see their earnings swallowed up in a few minutes every saturday by the landlord and all the other host of harpies and profitmongers, who were waiting to demand it as soon as it was earned. in the years that were gone, most of these men used to take all their money home religiously every saturday and give it to the 'old girl' for the house, and then, lo and behold, in a moment, yea, even in the twinkling of an eye, it was all gone! melted away like snow in the sun! and nothing to show for it except an insufficiency of the bare necessaries of life! but after a time they had become heartbroken and sick and tired of that sort of thing. they hankered after a little pleasure, a little excitement, a little fun, and they found that it was possible to buy something like those in quart pots at the pub. they knew they were not the genuine articles, but they were better than nothing at all, and so they gave up the practice of giving all their money to the old girl to give to the landlord and the other harpies, and bought beer with some of it instead; and after a time their minds became so disordered from drinking so much of this beer, that they cared nothing whether the rent was paid or not. they cared but little whether the old girl and the children had food or clothes. they said, 'to hell with everything and everyone,' and they cared for nothing so long as they could get plenty of beer. the occupants of nimrod's coach have already been described and most of them may correctly be classed as being similar to cretin idiots of the third degree--very cunning and selfish, and able to read and write, but with very little understanding of what they read except on the most common topics. as for those who rode with harlow in the last coach, most of them, as has been already intimated, were men of similar character to himself. the greater number of them fairly good workmen and--unlike the boozers in crass's coach--not yet quite heartbroken, but still continuing the hopeless struggle against poverty. these differed from nimrod's lot inasmuch as they were not content. they were always complaining of their wretched circumstances, and found a certain kind of pleasure in listening to the tirades of the socialists against the existing social conditions, and professing their concurrence with many of the sentiments expressed, and a desire to bring about a better state of affairs. most of them appeared to be quite sane, being able to converse intelligently on any ordinary subject without discovering any symptoms of mental disorder, and it was not until the topic of parliamentary elections was mentioned that evidence of their insanity was forthcoming. it then almost invariably appeared that they were subject to the most extraordinary hallucinations and extravagant delusions, the commonest being that the best thing that the working people could do to bring about an improvement in their condition, was to continue to elect their liberal and tory employers to make laws for and to rule over them! at such times, if anyone ventured to point out to them that that was what they had been doing all their lives, and referred them to the manifold evidences that met them wherever they turned their eyes of its folly and futility, they were generally immediately seized with a paroxysm of the most furious mania, and were with difficulty prevented from savagely assaulting those who differed from them. they were usually found in a similar condition of maniacal excitement for some time preceding and during a parliamentary election, but afterwards they usually manifested that modification of insanity which is called melancholia. in fact they alternated between these two forms of the disease. during elections, the highest state of exalted mania; and at ordinary times--presumably as a result of reading about the proceedings in parliament of the persons whom they had elected--in a state of melancholic depression, in their case an instance of hope deferred making the heart sick. this condition occasionally proved to be the stage of transition into yet another modification of the disease--that known as dipsomania, the phase exhibited by bill bates and the semi-drunk. yet another form of insanity was that shown by the socialists. like most of their fellow passengers in the last coach, the majority of these individuals appeared to be of perfectly sound mind. upon entering into conversation with them one found that they reasoned correctly and even brilliantly. they had divided their favourite subject into three parts. first; an exact definition of the condition known as poverty. secondly; a knowledge of the causes of poverty; and thirdly, a rational plan for the cure of poverty. those who were opposed to them always failed to refute their arguments, and feared, and nearly always refused, to meet them in fair fight--in open debate--preferring to use the cowardly and despicable weapons of slander and misrepresentation. the fact that these socialists never encountered their opponents except to defeat them, was a powerful testimony to the accuracy of their reasonings and the correctness of their conclusions--and yet they were undoubtedly mad. one might converse with them for an indefinite time on the three divisions of their subject without eliciting any proofs of insanity, but directly one inquired what means they proposed to employ in order to bring about the adoption of their plan, they replied that they hoped to do so by reasoning with the others! although they had sense enough to understand the real causes of poverty, and the only cure for poverty, they were nevertheless so foolish that they entertained the delusion that it is possible to reason with demented persons, whereas every sane person knows that to reason with a maniac is not only fruitless, but rather tends to fix more deeply the erroneous impressions of his disordered mind. the wagonette containing rushton and his friends continued to fly over the road, pursued by the one in which rode crass, bill bates, and the semi-drunk; but notwithstanding all the efforts of the drunken driver, they were unable to overtake or pass the smaller vehicle, and when they reached the foot of the hill that led up to windley the distance between the two carriages rapidly increased, and the race was reluctantly abandoned. when they reached the top of the hill rushton and his friends did not wait for the others, but drove off towards mugsborough as fast as they could. crass's brake was the next to arrive at the summit, and they halted there to wait for the other two conveyances and when they came up all those who lived nearby got out, and some of them sang 'god save the king', and then with shouts of 'good night', and cries of 'don't forget six o'clock monday morning', they dispersed to their homes and the carriages moved off once more. at intervals as they passed through windley brief stoppages were made in order to enable others to get out, and by the time they reached the top of the long incline that led down into mugsborough it was nearly twelve o'clock and the brakes were almost empty, the only passengers being owen and four or five others who lived down town. by ones and twos these also departed, disappearing into the obscurity of the night, until there was none left, and the beano was an event of the past. chapter 45 the great oration the outlook for the approaching winter was--as usual--gloomy in the extreme. one of the leading daily newspapers published an article prophesying a period of severe industrial depression. 'as the warehouses were glutted with the things produced by the working classes, there was no need for them to do any more work--at present; and so they would now have to go and starve until such time as their masters had sold or consumed the things already produced.' of course, the writer of the article did not put it exactly like that, but that was what it amounted to. this article was quoted by nearly all the other papers, both liberal and conservative. the tory papers--ignoring the fact that all the protectionist countries were in exactly the same condition, published yards of misleading articles about tariff reform. the liberal papers said tariff reform was no remedy. look at america and germany--worse than here! still, the situation was undoubtedly very serious--continued the liberal papers--and something would have to be done. they did not say exactly what, because, of course, they did not know; but something would have to be done--tomorrow. they talked vaguely about re-afforestation, and reclaiming of foreshores, and sea walls: but of course there was the question of cost! that was a difficulty. but all the same something would have to be done. some experiments must be tried! great caution was necessary in dealing with such difficult problems! we must go slow, and if in the meantime a few thousand children die of starvation, or become 'rickety' or consumptive through lack of proper nutrition it is, of course, very regrettable, but after all they are only working-class children, so it doesn't matter a great deal. most of the writers of these liberal and tory papers seemed to think that all that was necessary was to find 'work' for the 'working' class! that was their conception of a civilized nation in the twentieth century! for the majority of the people to work like brutes in order to obtain a 'living wage' for themselves and to create luxuries for a small minority of persons who are too lazy to work at all! and although this was all they thought was necessary, they did not know what to do in order to bring even that much to pass! winter was returning, bringing in its train the usual crop of horrors, and the liberal and tory monopolists of wisdom did not know what to do! rushton's had so little work in that nearly all the hands expected that they would be slaughtered the next saturday after the 'beano' and there was one man--jim smith he was called--who was not allowed to live even till then: he got the sack before breakfast on the monday morning after the beano. this man was about forty-five years old, but very short for his age, being only a little over five feet in height. the other men used to say that little jim was not made right, for while his body was big enough for a six-footer, his legs were very short, and the fact that he was rather inclined to be fat added to the oddity of his appearance. on the monday morning after the beano he was painting an upper room in a house where several other men were working, and it was customary for the coddy to shout 'yo! ho!' at mealtimes, to let the hands know when it was time to leave off work. at about ten minutes to eight, jim had squared the part of the work he had been doing--the window--so he decided not to start on the door or the skirting until after breakfast. whilst he was waiting for the foreman to shout 'yo! ho!' his mind reverted to the beano, and he began to hum the tunes of some of the songs that had been sung. he hummed the tune of 'he's a jolly good fellow', and he could not get the tune out of his mind: it kept buzzing in his head. he wondered what time it was? it could not be very far off eight now, to judge by the amount of work he had done since six o'clock. he had rubbed down and stopped all the woodwork and painted the window. a jolly good two hours' work! he was only getting sixpence-halfpenny an hour and if he hadn't earned a bob he hadn't earned nothing! anyhow, whether he had done enough for 'em or not he wasn't goin' to do no more before breakfast. the tune of 'he's a jolly good fellow' was still buzzing in his head; he thrust his hands deep down in his trouser pockets, and began to polka round the room, humming softly: 'i won't do no more before breakfast! i won't do no more before breakfast! i won't do no more before breakfast! so 'ip 'ip 'ip 'ooray! so 'ip 'ip 'ip 'ooray so 'ip 'ip 'ooray! i won't do no more before breakfast--etc.' 'no! and you won't do but very little after breakfast, here!' shouted hunter, suddenly entering the room. 'i've bin watchin' of you through the crack of the door for the last 'arf hour; and you've not done a dam' stroke all the time. you make out yer time sheet, and go to the office at nine o'clock and git yer money; we can't afford to pay you for playing the fool.' leaving the man dumbfounded and without waiting for a reply, misery went downstairs and after kicking up a devil of a row with the foreman for the lack of discipline on the job, he instructed him that smith was not to be permitted to resume work after breakfast. then he rode away. he had come in so stealthily that no one had known anything of his arrival until they heard him bellowing at smith. the latter did not stay to take breakfast but went off at once, and when he was gone the other chaps said it served him bloody well right: he was always singing, he ought to have more sense. you can't do as you like nowadays you know! easton--who was working at another job with crass as his foreman--knew that unless some more work came in he was likely to be one of those who would have to go. as far as he could see it was only a week or two at the most before everything would be finished up. but notwithstanding the prospect of being out of work so soon he was far happier than he had been for several months past, for he imagined he had discovered the cause of ruth's strange manner. this knowledge came to him on the night of the beano. when he arrived home he found that ruth had already gone to bed: she had not been well, and it was mrs linden's explanation of her illness that led easton to think that he had discovered the cause of the unhappiness of the last few months. now that he knew--as he thought--he blamed himself for not having been more considerate and patient with her. at the same time he was at a loss to understand why she had not told him about it herself. the only explanation he could think of was the one suggested by mrs linden--that at such times women often behaved strangely. however that might be, he was glad to think he knew the reason of it all, and he resolved that he would be more gentle and forebearing with her. the place where he was working was practically finished. it was a large house called 'the refuge', very similar to 'the cave', and during the last week or two, it had become what they called a 'hospital'. that is, as the other jobs became finished the men were nearly all sent to this one, so that there was quite a large crowd of them there. the inside work was all finished--with the exception of the kitchen, which was used as a mess room, and the scullery, which was the paint shop. everybody was working on the job. poor old joe philpot, whose rheumatism had been very bad lately, was doing a very rough job--painting the gable from a long ladder. but though there were plenty of younger men more suitable for this, philpot did not care to complain for fear crass or misery should think he was not up to his work. at dinner time all the old hands assembled in the kitchen, including crass, easton, harlow, bundy and dick wantley, who still sat on a pail behind his usual moat. philpot and harlow were absent and everybody wondered what had become of them. several times during the morning they had been seen whispering together and comparing scraps of paper, and various theories were put forward to account for their disappearance. most of the men thought they must have heard something good about the probable winner of the handicap and had gone to put something on. some others thought that perhaps they had heard of another 'job' about to be started by some other firm and had gone to inquire about it. 'looks to me as if they'll stand a very good chance of gettin' drowned if they're gone very far,' remarked easton, referring to the weather. it had been threatening to rain all the morning, and during the last few minutes it had become so dark that crass lit the gas, so that--as he expressed it--they should be able to see the way to their mouths. outside, the wind grew more boisterous every moment; the darkness continued to increase, and presently there succeeded a torrential downfall of rain, which beat fiercely against the windows, and poured in torrents down the glass. the men glanced gloomily at each other. no more work could be done outside that day, and there was nothing left to do inside. as they were paid by the hour, this would mean that they would have to lose half a day's pay. 'if it keeps on like this we won't be able to do no more work, and we won't be able to go home either,' remarked easton. 'well, we're all right 'ere, ain't we?' said the man behind the moat; 'there's a nice fire and plenty of heasy chairs. wot the 'ell more do you want?' 'yes,' remarked another philosopher. 'if we only had a shove-ha'penny table or a ring board, i reckon we should be able to enjoy ourselves all right.' philpot and harlow were still absent, and the others again fell to wondering where they could be. 'i see old joe up on 'is ladder only a few minutes before twelve,' remarked wantley. everyone agreed that it was a mystery. at this moment the two truants returned, looking very important. philpot was armed with a hammer and carried a pair of steps, while harlow bore a large piece of wallpaper which the two of them proceeded to tack on the wall, much to the amusement of the others, who read the announcement opposite written in charcoal. every day at meals since barrington's unexpected outburst at the beano dinner, the men had been trying their best to 'kid him on' to make another speech, but so far without success. if anything, he had been even more silent and reserved than before, as if he felt some regret that he had spoken as he had on that occasion. crass and his disciples attributed barrington's manner to fear that he was going to get the sack for his trouble and they agreed amongst themselves that it would serve him bloody well right if 'e did get the push. when they had fixed the poster on the wall, philpot stood the steps in the corner of the room, with the back part facing outwards, and then, everything being ready for the lecturer, the two sat down in their accustomed places and began to eat their dinners, harlow remarking that they would have to buck up or they would be too late for the meeting; and the rest of the crowd began to discuss the poster. 'wot the 'ell does plo mean?' demanded bundy, with a puzzled expression. 'plain layer on,' answered philpot modestly. ''ave you ever 'eard the professor preach before?' inquired the man on the pail, addressing bundy. imperial bankquet hall 'the refuge' on thursday at 12.30 prompt professor barrington will deliver a oration entitled the great secret, or how to live without work the rev. joe philpot plo (late absconding secretary of the light refreshment fund) will take the chair and anything else he can lay his hands on. at the end of the lecture a meeting will be arranged and carried out according to the marquis of queensbury's rules. a collection will be took up in aid of the cost of printing 'only once, at the beano,' replied that individual; 'an' that was once too often!' 'finest speaker i ever 'eard,' said the man on the pail with enthusiasm. 'i wouldn't miss this lecture for anything: this is one of 'is best subjects. i got 'ere about two hours before the doors was opened, so as to be sure to get a seat.' 'yes, it's a very good subject,' said crass, with a sneer. 'i believe most of the labour members in parliament is well up in it.' 'and wot about the other members?' demanded philpot. 'seems to me as if most of them knows something about it too.' 'the difference is,' said owen, 'the working classes voluntarily pay to keep the labour members, but whether they like it or not, they have to keep the others.' 'the labour members is sent to the 'ouse of commons,' said harlow, 'and paid their wages to do certain work for the benefit of the working classes, just the same as we're sent 'ere and paid our wages by the bloke to paint this 'ouse.' 'yes,' said crass; 'but if we didn't do the work we're paid to do, we should bloody soon get the sack.' 'i can't see how we've got to keep the other members,' said slyme; 'they're mostly rich men, and they live on their own money.' 'of course,' said crass. 'and i should like to know where we should be without 'em! talk about us keepin' them! it seems to me more like it that they keeps us! the likes of us lives on rich people. where should we be if it wasn't for all the money they spend and the work they 'as done? if the owner of this 'ouse 'adn't 'ad the money to spend to 'ave it done up, most of us would 'ave bin out of work this last six weeks, and starvin', the same as lots of others 'as been.' 'oh yes, that's right enough,' agreed bundy. 'labour is no good without capital. before any work can be done there's one thing necessary, and that's money. it would be easy to find work for all the unemployed if the local authorities could only raise the money.' 'yes; that's quite true,' said owen. 'and that proves that money is the cause of poverty, because poverty consists in being short of the necessaries of life: the necessaries of life are all produced by labour applied to the raw materials: the raw materials exist in abundance and there are plenty of people able and willing to work; but under present conditions no work can be done without money; and so we have the spectacle of a great army of people compelled to stand idle and starve by the side of the raw materials from which their labour could produce abundance of all the things they need--they are rendered helpless by the power of money! those who possess all the money say that the necessaries of life shall not be produced except for their profit.' 'yes! and you can't alter it,' said crass, triumphantly. 'it's always been like it, and it always will be like it.' ''ear! 'ear!' shouted the man behind the moat. 'there's always been rich and poor in the world, and there always will be.' several others expressed their enthusiastic agreement with crass's opinion, and most of them appeared to be highly delighted to think that the existing state of affairs could never be altered. 'it hasn't always been like it, and it won't always be like it,' said owen. 'the time will come, and it's not very far distant, when the necessaries of life will be produced for use and not for profit. the time is coming when it will no longer be possible for a few selfish people to condemn thousands of men and women and little children to live in misery and die of want.' 'ah well, it won't be in your time, or mine either,' said crass gleefully, and most of the others laughed with imbecile satisfaction. 'i've 'eard a 'ell of a lot about this 'ere socialism,' remarked the man behind the moat, 'but up to now i've never met nobody wot could tell you plainly exactly wot it is.' 'yes; that's what i should like to know too,' said easton. 'socialism means, "what's yours is mine, and what's mine's me own,"' observed bundy, and during the laughter that greeted this definition slyme was heard to say that socialism meant materialism, atheism and free love, and if it were ever to come about it would degrade men and women to the level of brute beasts. harlow said socialism was a beautiful ideal, which he for one would be very glad to see realized, and he was afraid it was altogether too good to be practical, because human nature is too mean and selfish. sawkins said that socialism was a lot of bloody rot, and crass expressed the opinion--which he had culled from the delectable columns of the obscurer--that it meant robbing the industrious for the benefit of the idle and thriftless. philpot had by this time finished his bread and cheese, and, having taken a final draught of tea, he rose to his feet, and crossing over to the corner of the room, ascended the pulpit, being immediately greeted with a tremendous outburst of hooting, howling and booing, which he smilingly acknowledged by removing his cap from his bald head and bowing repeatedly. when the storm of shrieks, yells, groans and catcalls had in some degree subsided, and philpot was able to make himself heard, he addressed the meeting as follows: 'gentlemen: first of all i beg to thank you very sincerely for the magnificent and cordial reception you have given me on this occasion, and i shall try to deserve your good opinion by opening the meeting as briefly as possible. 'putting all jokes aside, i think we're all agreed about one thing, and that is, that there's plenty of room for improvement in things in general. (hear, hear.) as our other lecturer, professor owen, pointed out in one of 'is lectures and as most of you 'ave read in the newspapers, although british trade was never so good before as it is now, there was never so much misery and poverty, and so many people out of work, and so many small shopkeepers goin' up the spout as there is at this partickiler time. now, some people tells us as the way to put everything right is to 'ave free trade and plenty of cheap food. well, we've got them all now, but the misery seems to go on all around us all the same. then there's other people tells us as the 'friscal policy' is the thing to put everything right. ("hear, hear" from crass and several others.) and then there's another lot that ses that socialism is the only remedy. well, we all know pretty well wot free trade and protection means, but most of us don't know exactly what socialism means; and i say as it's the dooty of every man to try and find out which is the right thing to vote for, and when 'e's found it out, to do wot 'e can to 'elp to bring it about. and that's the reason we've gorn to the enormous expense of engaging professor barrington to come 'ere this afternoon and tell us exactly what socialism is. ''as i 'ope you're all just as anxious to 'ear it as i am myself, i will not stand between you and the lecturer no longer, but will now call upon 'im to address you.' philpot was loudly applauded as he descended from the pulpit, and in response to the clamorous demands of the crowd, barrington, who in the meantime had yielded to owen's entreaties that he would avail himself of this opportunity of proclaiming the glad tidings of the good time that is to be, got up on the steps in his turn. harlow, desiring that everything should be done decently and in order, had meantime arranged in front of the pulpit a carpenter's sawing stool, and an empty pail with a small piece of board laid across it, to serve as a seat and a table for the chairman. over the table he draped a large red handkerchief. at the right he placed a plumber's large hammer; at the left, a battered and much-chipped jam-jar, full of tea. philpot having taken his seat on the pail at this table and announced his intention of bashing out with the hammer the brains of any individual who ventured to disturb the meeting, barrington commenced: 'mr chairman and gentlemen. for the sake of clearness, and in order to avoid confusing one subject with another, i have decided to divide the oration into two parts. first, i will try to explain as well as i am able what socialism is. i will try to describe to you the plan or system upon which the co-operative commonwealth of the future will be organized; and, secondly, i will try to tell you how it can be brought about. but before proceeding with the first part of the subject, i would like to refer very slightly to the widespread delusion that socialism is impossible because it means a complete change from an order of things which has always existed. we constantly hear it said that because there have always been rich and poor in the world, there always must be. i want to point out to you first of all, that it is not true that even in its essential features, the present system has existed from all time; it is not true that there have always been rich and poor in the world, in the sense that we understand riches and poverty today. 'these statements are lies that have been invented for the purpose of creating in us a feeling of resignation to the evils of our condition. they are lies which have been fostered by those who imagine that it is to their interest that we should be content to see our children condemned to the same poverty and degradation that we have endured ourselves. i do not propose--because there is not time, although it is really part of my subject--to go back to the beginnings of history, and describe in detail the different systems of social organization which evolved from and superseded each other at different periods, but it is necessary to remind you that the changes that have taken place in the past have been even greater than the change proposed by socialists today. the change from savagery and cannibalism when men used to devour the captives they took in war--to the beginning of chattel slavery, when the tribes or clans into which mankind were divided--whose social organization was a kind of communism, all the individuals belonging to the tribe being practically social equals, members of one great family--found it more profitable to keep their captives as slaves than to eat them. the change from the primitive communism of the tribes, into the more individualistic organization of the nations, and the development of private ownership of the land and slaves and means of subsistence. the change from chattel slavery into feudalism; and the change from feudalism into the earlier form of capitalism; and the equally great change from what might be called the individualistic capitalism which displaced feudalism, to the system of co-operative capitalism and wage slavery of today.' 'i believe you must 'ave swollered a bloody dictionary,' exclaimed the man behind the moat. 'keep horder,' shouted philpot, fiercely, striking the table with the hammer, and there were loud shouts of 'chair' and 'chuck 'im out,' from several quarters. when order was restored, the lecturer proceeded: 'so it is not true that practically the same state of affairs as we have today has always existed. it is not true that anything like the poverty that prevails at present existed at any previous period of the world's history. when the workers were the property of their masters, it was to their owners' interest to see that they were properly clothed and fed; they were not allowed to be idle, and they were not allowed to starve. under feudalism also, although there were certain intolerable circumstances, the position of the workers was, economically, infinitely better than it is today. the worker was in subjection to his lord, but in return his lord had certain responsibilities and duties to perform, and there was a large measure of community of interest between them. 'i do not intend to dwell upon this pout at length, but in support of what i have said i will quote as nearly as i can from memory the words of the historian froude. '"i do not believe," says mr froude, "that the condition of the people in mediaeval europe was as miserable as is pretended. i do not believe that the distribution of the necessaries of life was as unequal as it is at present. if the tenant lived hard, the lord had little luxury. earls and countesses breakfasted at five in the morning, on salt beef and herring, a slice of bread and a draught of ale from a blackjack. lords and servants dined in the same hall and shared the same meal." 'when we arrive at the system that displaced feudalism, we find that the condition of the workers was better in every way than it is at present. the instruments of production--the primitive machinery and the tools necessary for the creation of wealth--belonged to the skilled workers who used them, and the things they produced were also the property of those who made them. 'in those days a master painter, a master shoemaker, a master saddler, or any other master tradesmen, was really a skilled artisan working on his own account. he usually had one or two apprentices, who were socially his equals, eating at the same table and associating with the other members of his family. it was quite a common occurrence for the apprentice--after he had attained proficiency in his work--to marry his master's daughter and succeed to his master's business. in those days to be a "master" tradesman meant to be master of the trade, not merely of some underpaid drudges in one's employment. the apprentices were there to master the trade, qualifying themselves to become master workers themselves; not mere sweaters and exploiters of the labour of others, but useful members of society. in those days, because there was no labour-saving machinery the community was dependent for its existence on the productions of hand labour. consequently the majority of the people were employed in some kind of productive work, and the workers were honoured and respected citizens, living in comfort on the fruits of their labour. they were not rich as we understand wealth now, but they did not starve and they were not regarded with contempt, as are their successors of today. 'the next great change came with the introduction of steam machinery. that power came to the aid of mankind in their struggle for existence, enabling them to create easily and in abundance those things of which they had previously been able to produce only a bare sufficiency. a wonderful power--equalling and surpassing the marvels that were imagined by the writers of fairy tales and eastern stories--a power so vast--so marvellous, that it is difficult to find words to convey anything like an adequate conception of it. 'we all remember the story, in the arabian nights, of aladdin, who in his poverty became possessed of the wonderful lamp and--he was poor no longer. he merely had to rub the lamp--the genie appeared, and at aladdin's command he produced an abundance of everything that the youth could ask or dream of. with the discovery of steam machinery, mankind became possessed of a similar power to that imagined by the eastern writer. at the command of its masters the wonderful lamp of machinery produces an enormous, overwhelming, stupendous abundance and superfluity of every material thing necessary for human existence and happiness. with less labour than was formerly required to cultivate acres, we can now cultivate miles of land. in response to human industry, aided by science and machinery, the fruitful earth teems with such lavish abundance as was never known or deemed possible before. if you go into the different factories and workshops you will see prodigious quantities of commodities of every kind pouring out of the wonderful machinery, literally like water from a tap. 'one would naturally and reasonably suppose that the discovery or invention of such an aid to human industry would result in increased happiness and comfort for every one; but as you all know, the reverse is the case; and the reason of that extraordinary result, is the reason of all the poverty and unhappiness that we see around us and endure today--it is simply because--the machinery became the property of a comparatively few individuals and private companies, who use it not for the benefit of the community but to create profits for themselves. 'as this labour-saving machinery became more extensively used, the prosperous class of skilled workers gradually disappeared. some of the wealthier of them became distributers instead of producers of wealth; that is to say, they became shopkeepers, retailing the commodities that were produced for the most part by machinery. but the majority of them in course of time degenerated into a class of mere wage earners, having no property in the machines they used, and no property in the things they made. 'they sold their labour for so much per hour, and when they could not find any employer to buy it from them, they were reduced to destitution. 'whilst the unemployed workers were starving and those in employment not much better off, the individuals and private companies who owned the machinery accumulated fortunes; but their profits were diminished and their working expenses increased by what led to the latest great change in the organization of the production of the necessaries of life--the formation of the limited companies and the trusts; the decision of the private companies to combine and co-operate with each other in order to increase their profits and decrease their working expenses. the results of these combines have been--an increase in the quantities of the things produced: a decrease in the number of wage earners employed--and enormously increased profits for the shareholders. 'but it is not only the wage-earning class that is being hurt; for while they are being annihilated by the machinery and the efficient organization of industry by the trusts that control and are beginning to monopolize production, the shopkeeping classes are also being slowly but surely crushed out of existence by the huge companies that are able by the greater magnitude of their operations to buy and sell more cheaply than the small traders. 'the consequence of all this is that the majority of the people are in a condition of more or less abject poverty--living from hand to mouth. it is an admitted fact that about thirteen millions of our people are always on the verge of starvation. the significant results of this poverty face us on every side. the alarming and persistent increase of insanity. the large number of would-be recruits for the army who have to be rejected because they are physically unfit; and the shameful condition of the children of the poor. more than one-third of the children of the working classes in london have some sort of mental or physical defect; defects in development; defects of eyesight; abnormal nervousness; rickets, and mental dullness. the difference in height and weight and general condition of the children in poor schools and the children of the so-called better classes, constitutes a crime that calls aloud to heaven for vengeance upon those who are responsible for it. 'it is childish to imagine that any measure of tariff reform or political reform such as a paltry tax on foreign-made goods or abolishing the house of lords, or disestablishing the church--or miserable old age pensions, or a contemptible tax on land, can deal with such a state of affairs as this. they have no house of lords in america or france, and yet their condition is not materially different from ours. you may be deceived into thinking that such measures as those are great things. you may fight for them and vote for them, but after you have got them you will find that they will make no appreciable improvement in your condition. you will still have to slave and drudge to gain a bare sufficiency of the necessaries of life. you will still have to eat the same kind of food and wear the same kind of clothes and boots as now. your masters will still have you in their power to insult and sweat and drive. your general condition will be just the same as at present because such measures as those are not remedies but red herrings, intended by those who trail them to draw us away from the only remedy, which is to be found only in the public ownership of the machinery, and the national organization of industry for the production and distribution of the necessaries of life, not for the profit of a few but for the benefit of all! 'that is the next great change; not merely desirable, but imperatively necessary and inevitable! that is socialism! 'it is not a wild dream of superhuman unselfishness. no one will be asked to sacrifice himself for the benefit of others or to love his neighbours better than himself as is the case under the present system, which demands that the majority shall unselfishly be content to labour and live in wretchedness for the benefit of a few. there is no such principle of philanthropy in socialism, which simply means that even as all industries are now owned by shareholders, and organized and directed by committees and officers elected by the shareholders, so shall they in future belong to the state, that is, the whole people--and they shall be organized and directed by committees and officers elected by the community. 'under existing circumstances the community is exposed to the danger of being invaded and robbed and massacred by some foreign power. therefore the community has organized and owns and controls an army and navy to protect it from that danger. under existing circumstances the community is menaced by another equally great danger--the people are mentally and physically degenerating from lack of proper food and clothing. socialists say that the community should undertake and organize the business of producing and distributing all these things; that the state should be the only employer of labour and should own all the factories, mills, mines, farms, railways, fishing fleets, sheep farms, poultry farms and cattle ranches. 'under existing circumstances the community is degenerating mentally and physically because the majority cannot afford to have decent houses to live in. socialists say that the community should take in hand the business of providing proper houses for all its members, that the state should be the only landlord, that all the land and all the houses should belong to the whole people... 'we must do this if we are to keep our old place in the van of human progress. a nation of ignorant, unintelligent, half-starved, broken-spirited degenerates cannot hope to lead humanity in its never-ceasing march onward to the conquest of the future. 'vain, mightiest fleet of iron framed; vain the all-shattering guns unless proud england keep, untamed, the stout hearts of her sons. 'all the evils that i have referred to are only symptoms of the one disease that is sapping the moral, mental and physical life of the nation, and all attempts to cure these symptoms are foredoomed to failure, simply because they are the symptoms and not the disease. all the talk of temperance, and the attempts to compel temperance, are foredoomed to failure, because drunkenness is a symptom, and not the disease. 'india is a rich productive country. every year millions of pounds worth of wealth are produced by her people, only to be stolen from them by means of the money trick by the capitalist and official class. her industrious sons and daughters, who are nearly all total abstainers, live in abject poverty, and their misery is not caused by laziness or want of thrift, or by intemperance. they are poor for the same reason that we are poor--because we are robbed. 'the hundreds of thousands of pounds that are yearly wasted in well-meant but useless charity accomplish no lasting good, because while charity soothes the symptoms it ignores the disease, which is--the private ownership of the means of producing the necessaries of life, and the restriction of production, by a few selfish individuals for their own profit. and for that disease there is no other remedy than the one i have told you of--the public ownership and cultivation of the land, the public ownership of the mines, railways, canals, ships, factories and all the other means of production, and the establishment of an industrial civil service--a national army of industry--for the purpose of producing the necessaries, comforts and refinements of life in that abundance which has been made possible by science and machinery--for the use and benefit of the whole of the people.' 'yes: and where's the money to come from for all this?' shouted crass, fiercely. 'hear, hear,' cried the man behind the moat. 'there's no money difficulty about it,' replied barrington. 'we can easily find all the money we shall need.' 'of course,' said slyme, who had been reading the daily ananias, 'there's all the money in the post office savings bank. the socialists could steal that for a start; and as for the mines and land and factories, they can all be took from the owners by force.' 'there will be no need for force and no need to steal anything from anybody.' 'and there's another thing i objects to,' said crass. 'and that's all this 'ere talk about hignorance: wot about all the money wots spent every year for edication?' 'you should rather say--"what about all the money that's wasted every year on education?" what can be more brutal and senseless than trying to "educate" a poor little, hungry, ill-clad child? such so-called "instruction" is like the seed in the parable of the sower, which fell on stony ground and withered away because it had no depth of earth; and even in those cases where it does take root and grow, it becomes like the seed that fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it bore no fruit. 'the majority of us forget in a year or two all that we learnt at school because the conditions of our lives are such as to destroy all inclination for culture or refinement. we must see that the children are properly clothed and fed and that they are not made to get up in the middle of the night to go to work for several hours before they go to school. we must make it illegal for any greedy, heartless profit-hunter to hire them and make them labour for several hours in the evening after school, or all day and till nearly midnight on saturday. we must first see that our children are cared for, as well as the children of savage races, before we can expect a proper return for the money that we spend on education.' 'i don't mind admitting that this 'ere scheme of national ownership and industries is all right if it could only be done,' said harlow, 'but at present, all the land, railways and factories, belongs to private capitalists; they can't be bought without money, and you say you ain't goin' to take 'em away by force, so i should like to know how the bloody 'ell you are goin' to get 'em?' 'we certainly don't propose to buy them with money, for the simple reason that there is not sufficient money in existence to pay for them. 'if all the gold and silver money in the world were gathered together into one heap, it would scarcely be sufficient to buy all the private property in england. the people who own all these things now never really paid for them with money--they obtained possession of them by means of the "money trick" which owen explained to us some time ago.' 'they obtained possession of them by usin' their brain,' said crass. 'exactly,' replied the lecturer. 'they tell us themselves that that is how they got them away from us; they call their profits the "wages of intelligence". whilst we have been working, they have been using their intelligence in order to obtain possession of the things we have created. the time has now arrived for us to use our intelligence in order to get back the things they have robbed us of, aid to prevent them from robbing us any more. as for how it is to be done, we might copy the methods that they have found so successful.' 'oh, then you do mean to rob them after all,' cried slyme, triumphantly. 'if it's true that they robbed the workers, and if we're to adopt the same method then we'll be robbers too!' 'when a thief is caught having in his possession the property of others it is not robbery to take the things away from him and to restore them to their rightful owners,' retorted barrington. 'i can't allow this 'ere disorder to go on no longer,' shouted philpot, banging the table with the plumber's hammer as several men began talking at the same time. 'there will be plenty of tuneropperty for questions and opposition at the hend of the horation, when the pulpit will be throwed open to anyone as likes to debate the question. i now calls upon the professor to proceed with the second part of the horation: and anyone wot interrupts will get a lick under the ear-'ole with this'--waving the hammer--'and the body will be chucked out of the bloody winder.' loud cheers greeted this announcement. it was still raining heavily, so they thought they might as well pass the time listening to barrington as in any other way. 'a large part of the land may be got back in the same way as it was taken from us. the ancestors of the present holders obtained possession of it by simply passing acts of enclosure: the nation should regain possession of those lands by passing acts of resumption. and with regard to the other land, the present holders should be allowed to retain possession of it during their lives and then it should revert to the state, to be used for the benefit of all. britain should belong to the british people, not to a few selfish individuals. as for the railways, they have already been nationalized in some other countries, and what other countries can do we can do also. in new zealand, australia, south africa, germany, belgium, italy, japan and some other countries some of the railways are already the property of the state. as for the method by which we can obtain possession of them, the difficulty is not to discover a method, but rather to decide which of many methods we shall adopt. one method would be to simply pass an act declaring that as it was contrary to the public interest that they should be owned by private individuals, the railways would henceforth be the property of the nation. all railways servants, managers and officials would continue in their employment; the only difference being that they would now be in the employ of the state. as to the shareholders--' 'they could all be knocked on the 'ead, i suppose,' interrupted crass. 'or go to the workhouse,' said slyme. 'or to 'ell,' suggested the man behind the moat. '--the state would continue to pay to the shareholders the same dividends they had received on an average for, say, the previous three years. these payments would be continued to the present shareholders for life, or the payments might be limited to a stated number of years and the shares would be made non-transferable, like the railway tickets of today. as for the factories, shops, and other means of production and distribution, the state must adopt the same methods of doing business as the present owners. i mean that even as the big trusts and companies are crushing--by competition--the individual workers and small traders, so the state should crush the trusts by competition. it is surely justifiable for the state to do for the benefit of the whole people that which the capitalists are already doing for the profit of a few shareholders. the first step in this direction will be the establishment of retail stores for the purpose of supplying all national and municipal employees with the necessaries of life at the lowest possible prices. at first the administration will purchase these things from the private manufacturers, in such large quantities that it will be able to obtain them at the very cheapest rate, and as there will be no heavy rents to pay for showy shops, and no advertising expenses, and as the object of the administration will be not to make profit, but to supply its workmen and officials with goods at the lowest price, they will be able to sell them much cheaper than the profit-making private stores. 'the national service retail stores will be for the benefit of only those in the public service; and gold, silver or copper money will not be accepted in payment for the things sold. at first, all public servants will continue to be paid in metal money, but those who desire it will be paid all or part of their wages in paper money of the same nominal value, which will be accepted in payment for their purchases at the national stores and at the national hotels, restaurants and other places which will be established for the convenience of those in the state service. the money will resemble bank-notes. it will be made of a special very strong paper, and will be of all value, from a penny to a pound. 'as the national service stores will sell practically everything that could be obtained elsewhere, and as twenty shillings in paper money will be able to purchase much more at the stores than twenty shillings of metal money would purchase anywhere else, it will not be long before nearly all public servants will prefer to be paid in paper money. as far as paying the salaries and wages of most of its officials and workmen is concerned, the administration will not then have any need of metal money. but it will require metal money to pay the private manufacturers who supply the goods sold in the national stores. but--all these things are made by labour; so in order to avoid having to pay metal money for them, the state will now commence to employ productive labour. all the public land suitable for the purpose will be put into cultivation and state factories will be established for manufacturing food, boots, clothing, furniture and all other necessaries and comforts of life. all those who are out of employment and willing to work, will be given employment on these farms and in these factories. in order that the men employed shall not have to work unpleasantly hard, and that their hours of labour may be as short as possible--at first, say, eight hours per day--and also to make sure that the greatest possible quantity of everything shall be produced, these factories and farms will be equipped with the most up-to-date and efficient labour-saving machinery. the people employed in the farms and factories will be paid with paper money... the commodities they produce will go to replenish the stocks of the national service stores, where the workers will be able to purchase with their paper money everything they need. 'as we shall employ the greatest possible number of labour-saving machines, and adopt the most scientific methods in our farms and factories, the quantities of goods we shall be able to produce will be so enormous that we shall be able to pay our workers very high wages--in paper money--and we shall be able to sell our produce so cheaply, that all public servants will be able to enjoy abundance of everything. 'when the workers who are being exploited and sweated by the private capitalists realize how much worse off they are than the workers in the employ of the state, they will come and ask to be allowed to work for the state, and also, for paper money. that will mean that the state army of productive workers will be continually increasing in numbers. more state factories will be built, more land will be put into cultivation. men will be given employment making bricks, woodwork, paints, glass, wallpapers and all kinds of building materials and others will be set to work building--on state land--beautiful houses, which will be let to those employed in the service of the state. the rent will be paid with paper money. 'state fishing fleets will be established and the quantities of commodities of all kinds produced will be so great that the state employees and officials will not be able to use it all. with their paper money they will be able to buy enough and more than enough to satisfy all their needs abundantly, but there will still be a great and continuously increasing surplus stock in the possession of the state. 'the socialist administration will now acquire or build fleets of steam trading vessels, which will of course be manned and officered by state employees--the same as the royal navy is now. these fleets of national trading vessels will carry the surplus stocks i have mentioned, to foreign countries, and will there sell or exchange them for some of the products of those countries, things that we do not produce ourselves. these things will be brought to england and sold at the national service stores, at the lowest possible price, for paper money, to those in the service of the state. this of course will only have the effect of introducing greater variety into the stocks--it will not diminish the surplus: and as there would be no sense in continuing to produce more of these things than necessary, it would then be the duty of the administration to curtail or restrict production of the necessaries of life. this could be done by reducing the hours of the workers without reducing their wages so as to enable them to continue to purchase as much as before. 'another way of preventing over production of mere necessaries and comforts will be to employ a large number of workers producing the refinements and pleasures of life, more artistic houses, furniture, pictures, musical instruments and so forth. 'in the centre of every district a large institute or pleasure house could be erected, containing a magnificently appointed and decorated theatre; concert hall, lecture hall, gymnasium, billiard rooms, reading rooms, refreshment rooms, and so on. a detachment of the industrial army would be employed as actors, artistes, musicians, singers and entertainers. in fact everyone that could be spared from the most important work of all--that of producing the necessaries of life--would be employed in creating pleasure, culture, and education. all these people--like the other branches of the public service--would be paid with paper money, and with it all of them would be able to purchase abundance of all those things which constitute civilization. 'meanwhile, as a result of all this, the kind-hearted private employers and capitalists would find that no one would come and work for them to be driven and bullied and sweated for a miserable trifle of metal money that is scarcely enough to purchase sufficient of the necessaries of life to keep body and soul together. 'these kind-hearted capitalists will protest against what they will call the unfair competition of state industry, and some of them may threaten to leave the country and take their capital with them... as most of these persons are too lazy to work, and as we will not need their money, we shall be very glad to see them go. but with regard to their real capital--their factories, farms, mines or machinery--that will be a different matter... to allow these things to remain idle and unproductive would constitute an injury to the community. so a law will be passed, declaring that all land not cultivated by the owner, or any factory shut down for more than a specified time, will be taken possession of by the state and worked for the benefit of the community... fair compensation will be paid in paper money to the former owners, who will be granted an income or pension of so much a year either for life or for a stated period according to circumstances and the ages of the persons concerned. 'as for the private traders, the wholesale and retail dealers in the things produced by labour, they will be forced by the state competition to close down their shops and warehouses--first, because they will not be able to replenish their stocks; and, secondly, because even if they were able to do so, they would not be able to sell them. this will throw out of work a great host of people who are at present engaged in useless occupations; the managers and assistants in the shops of which we now see half a dozen of the same sort in a single street; the thousands of men and women who are slaving away their lives producing advertisements, for, in most cases, a miserable pittance of metal money, with which many of them are unable to procure sufficient of the necessaries of life to secure them from starvation. 'the masons, carpenters, painters, glaziers, and all the others engaged in maintaining these unnecessary stores and shops will all be thrown out of employment, but all of them who are willing to work will be welcomed by the state and will be at once employed helping either to produce or distribute the necessaries and comforts of life. they will have to work fewer hours than before... they will not have to work so hard--for there will be no need to drive or bully, because there will be plenty of people to do the work, and most of it will be done by machinery--and with their paper money they will be able to buy abundance of the things they help to produce. the shops and stores where these people were formerly employed will be acquired by the state, which will pay the former owners fair compensation in the same manner as to the factory owners. some of the buildings will be utilized by the state as national service stores, others transformed into factories and others will be pulled down to make room for dwellings, or public buildings... it will be the duty of the government to build a sufficient number of houses to accommodate the families of all those in its employment, and as a consequence of this and because of the general disorganization and decay of what is now called "business", all other house property of all kinds will rapidly depreciate in value. the slums and the wretched dwellings now occupied by the working classes--the miserable, uncomfortable, jerry-built "villas" occupied by the lower middle classes and by "business" people, will be left empty and valueless upon the hands of their rack renting landlords, who will very soon voluntarily offer to hand them and the ground they stand upon to the state on the same terms as those accorded to the other property owners, namely--in return for a pension. some of these people will be content to live in idleness on the income allowed them for life as compensation by the state: others will devote themselves to art or science and some others will offer their services to the community as managers and superintendents, and the state will always be glad to employ all those who are willing to help in the great work of production and distribution. 'by this time the nation will be the sole employer of labour, and as no one will be able to procure the necessaries of life without paper money, and as the only way to obtain this will be working, it will mean that every mentally and physically capable person in the community will be helping in the great work of production and distribution. we shall not need as at present, to maintain a police force to protect the property of the idle rich from the starving wretches whom they have robbed. there will be no unemployed and no overlapping of labour, which will be organized and concentrated for the accomplishment of the only rational object--the creation of the things we require... for every one labour-saving machine in use today, we will, if necessary, employ a thousand machines! and consequently there will be produced such a stupendous, enormous, prodigious, overwhelming abundance of everything that soon the community will be faced once more with the serious problem of over-production. 'to deal with this, it will be necessary to reduce the hours of our workers to four or five hours a day... all young people will be allowed to continue at public schools and universities and will not be required to take any part in the work or the nation until they are twenty-one years of age. at the age of forty-five, everyone will be allowed to retire from the state service on full pay... all these will be able to spend the rest of their days according to their own inclinations; some will settle down quietly at home, and amuse themselves in the same ways as people of wealth and leisure do at the present day--with some hobby, or by taking part in the organization of social functions, such as balls, parties, entertainments, the organization of public games and athletic tournaments, races and all kinds of sports. 'some will prefer to continue in the service of the state. actors, artists, sculptors, musicians and others will go on working for their own pleasure and honour... some will devote their leisure to science, art, or literature. others will prefer to travel on the state steamships to different parts of the world to see for themselves all those things of which most of us have now but a dim and vague conception. the wonders of india and egypt, the glories of rome, the artistic treasures of the continent and the sublime scenery of other lands. 'thus--for the first time in the history of humanity--the benefits and pleasures conferred upon mankind by science and civilization will be enjoyed equally by all, upon the one condition, that they shall do their share of the work, that is necessary in order to, make all these things possible. 'these are the principles upon which the co-operative commonwealth of the future will be organized. the state in which no one will be distinguished or honoured above his fellows except for virtue or talent. where no man will find his profit in another's loss, and we shall no longer be masters and servants, but brothers, free men, and friends. where there will be no weary, broken men and women passing their joyless lives in toil and want, and no little children crying because they are hungry or cold. 'a state wherein it will be possible to put into practice the teachings of him whom so many now pretend to follow. a society which shall have justice and co-operation for its foundation, and international brotherhood and love for its law. 'such are the days that shall be! but what are the deeds of today, in the days of the years we dwell in, that wear our lives away? why, then, and for what we are waiting? there are but three words to speak "we will it," and what is the foreman but the dream strong wakened and weak? 'oh, why and for what are we waiting, while our brothers droop and die? and on every wind of the heavens, a wasted life goes by. 'how long shall they reproach us, where crowd on crowd they dwell poor ghosts of the wicked city, gold crushed, hungry hell? 'through squalid life they laboured in sordid grief they died those sons of a mighty mother, those props of england's pride. they are gone, there is none can undo it, nor save our souls from the curse, but many a million cometh, and shall they be better or worse? 'it is we must answer and hasten and open wide the door, for the rich man's hurrying terror, and the slow foot hope of the poor, yea, the voiceless wrath of the wretched and their unlearned discontent, we must give it voice and wisdom, till the waiting tide be spent come then since all things call us, the living and the dead, and o'er the weltering tangle a glimmering light is shed.' as barrington descended from the pulpit and walked back to his accustomed seat, a loud shout of applause burst from a few men in the crowd, who stood up and waved their caps and cheered again and again. when order was restored, philpot rose and addressed the meeting: 'is there any gentleman wot would like to ask the speaker a question?' no one spoke and the chairman again put the question without obtaining any response, but at length one of the new hands who had been 'taken on' about a week previously to replace another painter who had been sacked for being too slow--stood up and said there was one point that he would like a little more information about. this man had two patches on the seat of his trousers, which were also very much frayed and ragged at the bottoms of the legs: the lining of his coat was all in rags, as were also the bottoms of the sleeves; his boots were old and had been many times mended and patched; the sole of one of them had begun to separate from the upper and he had sewn these parts together with a few stitches of copper wire. he had been out of employment for several weeks and it was evident from the pinched expression of his still haggard face that during that time he had not had sufficient to eat. this man was not a drunkard, neither was he one of those semi-mythical persons who are too lazy to work. he was married and had several children. one of them, a boy of fourteen years old, earned five shillings a week as a light porter at a grocer's. being a householder the man had a vote, but he had never hitherto taken much interest in what he called 'politics'. in his opinion, those matters were not for the likes of him. he believed in leaving such difficult subjects to be dealt with by his betters. in his present unhappy condition he was a walking testimonial to the wisdom and virtue and benevolence of those same 'betters' who have hitherto managed the affairs of the world with results so very satisfactory for themselves. 'i should like to ask the speaker,' he said, 'supposin' all this that 'e talks about is done--what's to become of the king, and the royal family, and all the big pots?' ''ear, 'ear,' cried crass, eagerly--and ned dawson and the man behind the moat both said that that was what they would like to know, too. 'i am much more concerned about what is to become of ourselves if these things are not done,' replied barrington. 'i think we should try to cultivate a little more respect of our own families and to concern ourselves a little less about "royal" families. i fail to see any reason why we should worry ourselves about those people; they're all right--they have all they need, and as far as i am aware, nobody wishes to harm them and they are well able to look after themselves. they will fare the same as the other rich people.' 'i should like to ask,' said harlow, 'wot's to become of all the gold and silver and copper money? wouldn't it be of no use at all?' 'it would be of far more use under socialism than it is at present. the state would of course become possessed of a large quantity of it in the early stages of the development of the socialist system, because--at first--while the state would be paying all its officers and productive workers in paper, the rest of the community--those not in state employ--would be paying their taxes in gold as at present. all travellers on the state railways--other than state employees--would pay their fares in metal money, and gold and silver would pour into the state treasury from many other sources. the state would receive gold and silver and--for the most part--pay out paper. by the time the system of state employment was fully established, gold and silver would only be of value as metal and the state would purchase it from whoever possessed and wished to sell it--at so much per pound as raw material: instead of hiding it away in the vaults of banks, or locking it up in iron safes, we shall make use of it. some of the gold will be manufactured into articles of jewellery, to be sold for paper money and worn by the sweethearts and wives and daughters of the workers; some of it will be beaten out into gold leaf to be used in the decoration of the houses of the citizens and of public buildings. as for the silver, it will be made into various articles of utility for domestic use. the workers will not then, as now, have to eat their food with poisonous lead or brass spoons and forks, we shall have these things of silver and if there is not enough silver we shall probably have a non-poisonous alloy of that metal.' 'as far as i can make out,' said harlow, 'the paper money will be just as valuable as gold and silver is now. well, wot's to prevent artful dodgers like old misery and rushton saving it up and buying and selling things with it, and so livin' without work?' 'of course,' said crass, scornfully. 'it would never do!' 'that's a very simple matter; any man who lives without doing any useful work is living on the labour of others, he is robbing others of part of the result of their labour. the object of socialism is to stop this robbery, to make it impossible. so no one will be able to hoard up or accumulate the paper money because it will be dated, and will become worthless if it is not spent within a certain time after its issue. as for buying and selling for profit--from whom would they buy? and to whom would they sell?' 'well, they might buy some of the things the workers didn't want, for less than the workers paid for them, and then they could sell 'em again.' 'they'd have to sell them for less than the price charged at the national stores, and if you think about it a little you'll see that it would not be very profitable. it would be with the object of preventing any attempts at private trading that the administration would refuse to pay compensation to private owners in a lump sum. all such compensations would be paid, as i said, in the form of a pension of so much per year. 'another very effective way to prevent private trading would be to make it a criminal offence against the well-being of the community. at present many forms of business are illegal unless you take out a licence; under socialism no one would be allowed to trade without a licence, and no licences would be issued.' 'wouldn't a man be allowed to save up his money if he wanted to, demanded slyme with indignation. 'there will be nothing to prevent a man going without some of the things he might have if he is foolish enough to do so, but he would never be able to save up enough to avoid doing his share of useful service. besides, what need would there be for anyone to save? one's old age would be provided for. no one could ever be out of employment. if one was ill the state hospitals and medical service would be free. as for one's children, they would attend the state free schools and colleges and when of age they would enter the state service, their futures provided for. can you tell us why anyone would need or wish to save?' slyme couldn't. 'are there any more questions?' demanded philpot. 'while we are speaking of money,' added barrington, 'i should like to remind you that even under the present system there are many things which cost money to maintain, that we enjoy without having to pay for directly. the public roads and pavements cost money to make and maintain and light. so do the parks, museums and bridges. but they are free to all. under a socialist administration this principle will be extended--in addition to the free services we enjoy now we shall then maintain the trains and railways for the use of the public, free. and as time goes on, this method of doing business will be adopted in many other directions.' 'i've read somewhere,' said harlow, 'that whenever a government in any country has started issuing paper money it has always led to bankruptcy. how do you know that the same thing would not happen under a socialist administration?' ''ear, 'ear,' said crass. 'i was just goin' to say the same thing.' 'if the government of a country began to issue large amounts of paper money under the present system,' barrington replied, 'it would inevitably lead to bankruptcy, for the simple reason that paper money under the present system--bank-notes, bank drafts, postal orders, cheques or any other form--is merely a printed promise to pay the amount--in gold or silver--on demand or at a certain date. under the present system if a government issues more paper money than it possesses gold and silver to redeem, it is of course bankrupt. but the paper money that will be issued under a socialist administration will not be a promise to pay in gold or silver on demand or at any time. it will be a promise to supply commodities to the amount specified on the note, and as there could be no dearth of those things there could be no possibility of bankruptcy.' 'i should like to know who's goin' to appoint the hofficers of this 'ere hindustrial harmy,' said the man on the pail. 'we don't want to be bullied and chivied and chased about by a lot of sergeants and corporals like a lot of soldiers, you know.' ''ear, 'ear,' said crass. 'you must 'ave some masters. someone's got to be in charge of the work.' 'we don't have to put up with any bullying or chivying or chasing now, do we?' said barrington. 'so of course we could not have anything of that sort under socialism. we could not put up with it at all! even if it were only for four or five hours a day. under the present system we have no voice in appointing our masters and overseers and foremen--we have no choice as to what master we shall work under. if our masters do not treat us fairly we have no remedy against them. under socialism it will be different; the workers will be part of the community; the officers or managers and foremen will be the servants of the community, and if any one of these men were to abuse his position he could be promptly removed. as for the details of the organization of the industrial army, the difficulty is, again, not so much to devise a way, but to decide which of many ways would be the best, and the perfect way will probably be developed only after experiment and experience. the one thing we have to hold fast to is the fundamental principle of state employment or national service. production for use and not for profit. the national organization of industry under democratic control. one way of arranging this business would be for the community to elect a parliament in much the same way as is done at present. the only persons eligible for election to be veterans of the industrial army, men and women who had put in their twenty-five years of service. 'this administrative body would have control of the different state departments. there would be a department of agriculture, a department of railways and so on, each with its minister and staff. 'all these members of parliament would be the relatives--in some cases the mothers and fathers of those in the industrial service, and they would be relied upon to see that the conditions of that service were the best possible. 'as for the different branches of the state service, they could be organized on somewhat the same lines as the different branches of the public service are now--like the navy, the post office and as the state railways in some other countries, or as are the different branches of the military army, with the difference that all promotions will be from the ranks, by examinations, and by merit only. as every recruit will have had the same class of education they will all have absolute equality of opportunity and the men who would attain to positions of authority would be the best men, and not as at present, the worst.' 'how do you make that out?' demanded crass. 'under the present system, the men who become masters and employers succeed because they are cunning and selfish, not because they understand or are capable of doing the work out of which they make their money. most of the employers in the building trade for instance would be incapable of doing any skilled work. very few of them would be worth their salt as journeymen. the only work they do is to scheme to reap the benefit of the labour of others. 'the men who now become managers and foremen are selected not because of their ability as craftsmen, but because they are good slave-drivers and useful producers of profit for their employers.' 'how are you goin' to prevent the selfish and cunnin', as you call 'em, from gettin' on top then as they do now?' said harlow. 'the fact that all workers will receive the same pay, no matter what class of work they are engaged in, or what their position, will ensure our getting the very best man to do all the higher work and to organize our business.' crass laughed: 'what! everybody to get the same wages?' 'yes: there will be such an enormous quantity of everything produced, that their wages will enable everyone to purchase abundance of everything they require. even if some were paid more than others they would not be able to spend it. there would be no need to save it, and as there will be no starving poor, there will be no one to give it away to. if it were possible to save and accumulate money it would bring into being an idle class, living on their fellows: it would lead to the downfall of our system, and a return to the same anarchy that exists at present. besides, if higher wages were paid to those engaged in the higher work or occupying positions of authority it would prevent our getting the best men. unfit persons would try for the positions because of the higher pay. that is what happens now. under the present system men intrigue for and obtain or are pitchforked into positions for which they have no natural ability at all; the only reason they desire these positions is because of the salaries attached to them. these fellows get the money and the work is done by underpaid subordinates whom the world never hears of. under socialism, this money incentive will be done away with, and consequently the only men who will try for these positions will be those who, being naturally fitted for the work, would like to do it. for instance a man who is a born organizer will not refuse to undertake such work because he will not be paid more for it. such a man will desire to do it and will esteem it a privilege to be allowed to do it. he will revel in it. to think out all the details of some undertaking, to plan and scheme and organize, is not work for a man like that. it is a pleasure. but for a man who has sought and secured such a position, not because he liked the work, but because he liked the salary--such work as this would be unpleasant labour. under socialism the unfit man would not apply for that post but would strive after some other for which he was fit and which he would therefore desire and enjoy. there are some men who would rather have charge of and organize and be responsible for work than do it with their hands. there are others who would rather do delicate or difficult or artistic work, than plain work. a man who is a born artist would rather paint a frieze or a picture or carve a statue than he would do plain work, or take charge of and direct the labour of others. and there are another sort of men who would rather do ordinary plain work than take charge, or attempt higher branches for which they have neither liking or natural talent. 'but there is one thing--a most important point that you seem to entirely lose sight of, and that is, that all these different kinds and classes are equal in one respect--they are all equally necessary. each is a necessary and indispensable part of the whole; therefore everyone who has done his full share of necessary work is justly entitled to a full share of the results. the men who put the slates on are just as indispensable as the men who lay the foundations. the work of the men who build the walls and make the doors is just as necessary as the work of the men who decorate the cornice. none of them would be of much use without the architect, and the plans of the architect would come to nothing, his building would be a mere castle in the air, if it were not for the other workers. each part of the work is equally necessary, useful and indispensable if the building is to be perfected. some of these men work harder with their brains than with their hands and some work harder with their hands than with their brains, but each one does his full share of the work. this truth will be recognized and acted upon by those who build up and maintain the fabric of our co-operative commonwealth. every man who does his full share of the useful and necessary work according to his abilities shall have his full share of the total result. herein will be its great difference from the present system, under which it is possible for the cunning and selfish ones to take advantage of the simplicity of others and rob them of part of the fruits of their labour. as for those who will be engaged in the higher branches, they will be sufficiently rewarded by being privileged to do the work they are fitted for and enjoy. the only men and women who are capable of good and great work of any kind are those who, being naturally fit for it, love the work for its own sake and not for the money it brings them. under the present system, many men who have no need of money produce great works, not for gain but for pleasure: their wealth enables them to follow their natural inclinations. under the present system many men and women capable of great works are prevented from giving expression to their powers by poverty and lack of opportunity: they live in sorrow and die heartbroken, and the community is the loser. these are the men and women who will be our artists, sculptors, architects, engineers and captains of industry. 'under the present system there are men at the head of affairs whose only object is the accumulation of money. some of them possess great abilities and the system has practically compelled them to employ those abilities for their own selfish ends to the hurt of the community. some of them have built up great fortunes out of the sweat and blood and tears of men and women and little children. for those who delight in such work as this, there will be no place in our co-operative commonwealth.' 'is there any more questions?' demanded philpot. 'yes,' said harlow. 'if there won't be no extry pay and if anybody will have all they need for just doing their part of the work, what encouragement will there be for anyone to worry his brains out trying to invent some new machine, or make some new discovery?' 'well,' said barrington, 'i think that's covered by the last answer, but if it were found necessary--which is highly improbable--to offer some material reward in addition to the respect, esteem or honour that would be enjoyed by the author of an invention that was a boon to the community, it could be arranged by allowing him to retire before the expiration of his twenty-five years service. the boon he had conferred on the community by the invention, would be considered equivalent to so many years work. but a man like that would not desire to cease working; that sort go on working all their lives, for love. there's edison for instance. he is one of the very few inventors who have made money out of their work; he is a rich man, but the only use his wealth seems to be to him is to procure himself facilities for going on with his work; his life is a round of what some people would call painful labour: but it is not painful labour to him; it's just pleasure, he works for the love of it. another way would be to absolve a man of that sort from the necessity of ordinary work, so as to give him a chance to get on with other inventions. it would be to the interests of the community to encourage him in every way and to place materials and facilities at his disposal. 'but you must remember that even under the present system, honour and praise are held to be greater than money. how many soldiers would prefer money to the honour of wearing the intrinsically valueless victoria cross? 'even now men think less of money than they do of the respect, esteem or honour they are able to procure with it. many men spend the greater part of their lives striving to accumulate money, and when they have succeeded, they proceed to spend it to obtain the respect of their fellow-men. some of them spend thousands of pounds for the honour of being able to write "mp" after their names. others buy titles. others pay huge sums to gain admission to exclusive circles of society. others give the money away in charity, or found libraries or universities. the reason they do these things is that they desire to be applauded and honoured by their fellow-men. 'this desire is strongest in the most capable men--the men of genius. therefore, under socialism the principal incentive to great work will be the same as now--honour and praise. but, under the present system, honour and praise can be bought with money, and it does not matter much how the money was obtained. 'under socialism it will be different. the cross of honour and the laurel crown will not be bought and sold for filthy lucre. they will be the supreme rewards of virtue and of talent.' 'anyone else like to be flattened out?' inquired philpot. 'what would you do with them what spends all their money in drink?' asked slyme. 'i might reasonably ask you, "what's done with them or what you propose to do with them now?" there are many men and women whose lives are so full of toil and sorrow and the misery caused by abject poverty, who are so shut out from all that makes life worth living, that the time they spend in the public house is the only ray of sunshine in their cheerless lives. their mental and material poverty is so great that they are deprived of and incapable of understanding the intellectual and social pleasures of civilization... under socialism there will be no such class as this. everyone will be educated, and social life and rational pleasure will be within the reach of all. therefore we do not believe that there will be such a class. any individuals who abandoned themselves to such a course would be avoided by their fellows; but if they became very degraded, we should still remember that they were our brother men and women, and we should regard them as suffering from a disease inherited from their uncivilized forefathers and try to cure them by placing them under some restraint: in an institute for instance.' 'another good way to deal with 'em,' said harlow, 'would be to allow them double pay, so as they could drink themselves to death. we could do without the likes of them.' 'call the next case,' said philpot. 'this 'ere abundance that you're always talking about,' said crass, you can't be sure that it would be possible to produce all that. you're only assoomin' that it could be done.' barrington pointed to the still visible outlines of the 'hoblong' that owen had drawn on the wall to illustrate a previous lecture. 'even under the present silly system of restricted production, with the majority of the population engaged in useless, unproductive, unnecessary work, and large numbers never doing any work at all, there is enough produced to go all round after a fashion. more than enough, for in consequence of what they call "over-production", the markets are periodically glutted with commodities of all kinds, and then for a time the factories are closed and production ceases. and yet we can all manage to exist--after a fashion. this proves that if productive industry were organized on the lines advocated by socialists there could be produced such a prodigious quantity of everything, that everyone could live in plenty and comfort. the problem of how to produce sufficient for all to enjoy abundance is already solved: the problem that then remains is--how to get rid of those whose greed and callous indifference to the sufferings of others, prevents it being done.' 'yes! and you'll never be able to get rid of 'em, mate,' cried crass, triumphantly--and the man with the copper wire stitches in his boot said that it couldn't be done. 'well, we mean to have a good try, anyhow,' said barrington. crass and most of the others tried hard to think of something to say in defence of the existing state of affairs, or against the proposals put forward by the lecturer; but finding nothing, they maintained a sullen and gloomy silence. the man with the copper wire stitches in his boot in particular appeared to be very much upset; perhaps he was afraid that if the things advocated by the speaker ever came to pass he would not have any boots at all. to assume that he had some such thought as this, is the only rational way to account for his hostility, for in his case no change could have been for the worse unless it reduced him to almost absolute nakedness and starvation. to judge by their unwillingness to consider any proposals to alter the present system, one might have supposed that they were afraid of losing something, instead of having nothing to lose--except their poverty. it was not till the chairman had made several urgent appeals for more questions that crass brightened up: a glad smile slowly spread over and illuminated his greasy visage: he had at last thought of a most serious and insurmountable obstacle to the establishment of the co-operative commonwealth. 'what,' he demanded, in a loud voice, 'what are you goin' to do, in this 'ere socialist republic of yours, with them wot won't work'!' as crass flung this bombshell into the socialist camp, the miserable, ragged-trousered crew around him could scarce forbear a cheer; but the more intelligent part of the audience only laughed. 'we don't believe that there will be any such people as that,' said barrington. 'there's plenty of 'em about now, anyway,' sneered crass. 'you can't change 'uman nature, you know,' cried the man behind the moat, and the one who had the copper wire stitches in his boot laughed scornfully. 'yes, i know there are plenty such now,' rejoined barrington. 'it's only what is to be expected, considering that practically all workers live in poverty, and are regarded with contempt. the conditions under which most of the work is done at present are so unpleasant and degrading that everyone refuses to do any unless they are compelled; none of us here, for instance, would continue to work for rushton if it were not for the fact that we have either to do so or starve; and when we do work we only just earn enough to keep body and soul together. under the present system everybody who can possibly manage to do so avoids doing any work, the only difference being that some people do their loafing better than others. the aristocracy are too lazy to work, but they seem to get on all right; they have their tenants to work for them. rushton is too lazy to work, so he has arranged that we and nimrod shall work instead, and he fares much better than any of us who do work. then there is another kind of loafers who go about begging and occasionally starving rather than submit to such abominable conditions as are offered to them. these last are generally not much worse off than we are and they are often better off. at present, people have everything to gain and but little to lose by refusing to work. under socialism it would be just the reverse; the conditions of labour would be so pleasant, the hours of obligatory work so few, and the reward so great, that it is absurd to imagine that any one would be so foolish as to incur the contempt of his fellows and make himself a social outcast by refusing to do the small share of work demanded of him by the community of which he was a member. 'as for what we should do to such individuals if there did happen to be some, i can assure you that we would not treat them as you treat them now. we would not dress them up in silk and satin and broadcloth and fine linen: we would not embellish them, as you do, with jewels of gold and jewels of silver and with precious stones; neither should we allow them to fare sumptuously every day. our method of dealing with them would be quite different from yours. in the co-operative commonwealth there will be no place for loafers; whether they call themselves aristocrats or tramps, those who are too lazy to work shall have no share in the things that are produced by the labour of others. those who do nothing shall have nothing. if any man will not work, neither shall he eat. under the present system a man who is really too lazy to work may stop you in the street and tell you that he cannot get employment. for all you know, he may be telling the truth, and if you have any feeling and are able, you will help him. but in the socialist state no one would have such an excuse, because everyone that was willing would be welcome to come and help in the work of producing wealth and happiness for all, and afterwards he would also be welcome to his full share of the results.' 'any more complaints?' inquired the chairman, breaking the gloomy silence that followed. 'i don't want anyone to think that i am blaming any of these present-day loafers,' barrington added. 'the wealthy ones cannot be expected voluntarily to come and work under existing conditions and if they were to do so they would be doing more harm than good--they would be doing some poor wretches out of employment. they are not to be blamed; the people who are to blame are the working classes themselves, who demand and vote for the continuance of the present system. as for the other class of loafers--those at the bottom, the tramps and people of that sort, if they were to become sober and industrious tomorrow, they also would be doing more harm than good to the other workers; it would increase the competition for work. if all the loafers in mugsborough could suddenly be transformed into decent house painters next week, nimrod might be able to cut down the wages another penny an hour. i don't wish to speak disrespectfully of these tramps at all. some of them are such simply because they would rather starve than submit to the degrading conditions that we submit to, they do not see the force of being bullied and chased, and driven about in order to gain semi-starvation and rags. they are able to get those without working; and i sometimes think that they are more worthy of respect and are altogether a nobler type of beings than a lot of broken-spirited wretches like ourselves, who are always at the mercy of our masters, and always in dread of the sack.' 'any more questions?' said the chairman. 'do you mean to say as the time will ever come when the gentry will mix up on equal terms with the likes of us?' demanded the man behind the moat, scornfully. 'oh, no,' replied the lecturer. when we get socialism there won't be any people like us. everybody will be civilized.' the man behind the moat did not seem very satisfied with this answer, and told the others that he could not see anything to laugh at. 'is there any more questions?' cried philpot. 'now is your chance to get some of your own back, but don't hall speak at once.' 'i should like to know who's goin' to do all the dirty work?' said slyme. 'if everyone is to be allowed to choose 'is own trade, who'd be fool enough to choose to be a scavenger, a sweep, a dustman or a sewer man? nobody wouldn't want to do such jobs as them and everyone would be after the soft jobs.' 'of course,' cried crass, eagerly clutching at this last straw. 'the thing sounds all right till you comes to look into it, but it wouldn't never work!' 'it would be very easy to deal with any difficulty of that sort,' replied barrington, 'if it were found that too many people were desirous of pursuing certain callings, it would be known that the conditions attached to those kinds of work were unfairly easy, as compared with other lines, so the conditions in those trades would be made more severe. a higher degree of skill would be required. if we found that too many persons wished to be doctors, architects, engineers and so forth, we would increase the severity of the examinations. this would scare away all but the most gifted and enthusiastic. we should thus at one stroke reduce the number of applicants and secure the very best men for the work--we should have better doctors, better architects, better engineers than before. 'as regards those disagreeable tasks for which there was a difficulty in obtaining volunteers, we should adopt the opposite means. suppose that six hours was the general thing; and we found that we could not get any sewer men; we should reduce the hours of labour in that department to four, or if necessary to two, in order to compensate for the disagreeable nature of the work. 'another way out of such difficulties would be to have a separate division of the industrial army to do all such work, and to make it obligatory for every man to put in his first year of state service as a member of this corps. there would be no hardship in that. everyone gets the benefit of such work; there would be no injustice in requiring everyone to share. this would have the effect also of stimulating invention; it would be to everyone's interest to think out means of doing away with such kinds of work and there is no doubt that most of it will be done by machinery in some way or other. a few years ago the only way to light up the streets of a town was to go round to each separate gas lamp and light each jet, one at a time: now, we press a few buttons and light up the town with electricity. in the future we shall probably be able to press a button and flush the sewers.' 'what about religion?' said slyme. 'i suppose there won't be no churches nor chapels; we shall all have to be atheists.' 'everybody will be perfectly free to enjoy their own opinions and to practise any religion they like; but no religion or sect will be maintained by the state. if any congregation or body of people wish to have a building for their own exclusive use as a church or chapel or lecture hall it will be supplied to them by the state on the same terms as those upon which dwelling houses will be supplied; the state will construct the special kind of building and the congregation will have to pay the rent, the amount to be based on the cost of construction, in paper money of course. as far as the embellishment or decoration of such places is concerned, there will of course be nothing to prevent the members of the congregation if they wish from doing any such work as that themselves in their own spare time of which they will have plenty.' 'if everybody's got to do their share of work, where's the minister and clergymen to come from?' 'there are at least three ways out of that difficulty. first, ministers of religion could be drawn from the ranks of the veterans--men over forty-five years old who had completed their term of state service. you must remember that these will not be worn out wrecks, as too many of the working classes are at that age now. they will have had good food and clothing and good general conditions all their lives; and consequently they will be in the very prime of life. they will be younger than many of us now are at thirty; they will be ideal men for the positions we are speaking of. all well educated in their youth, and all will have had plenty of leisure for self culture during the years of their state service and they will have the additional recommendation that their congregation will not be required to pay anything for their services. 'another way: if a congregation wished to retain the full-time services of a young man whom they thought specially gifted but who had not completed his term of state service, they could secure him by paying the state for his services; thus the young man would still remain in state employment, he would still continue to receive his pay from the national treasury, and at the age of forty-five would be entitled to his pension like any other worker, and after that the congregation would not have to pay the state anything. 'a third--and as it seems to me, the most respectable way--would be for the individual in question to act as minister or pastor or lecturer or whatever it was, to the congregation without seeking to get out of doing his share of the state service. the hours of obligatory work would be so short and the work so light that he would have abundance of leisure to prepare his orations without sponging on his co-religionists.' ''ear, 'ear!' cried harlow. 'of course,' added barrington, 'it would not only be congregations of christians who could adopt any of these methods. it is possible that a congregation of agnostics, for instance, might want a separate building or to maintain a lecturer.' 'what the 'ell's an agnostic?' demanded bundy. 'an agnostic,' said the man behind the moat, 'is a bloke wot don't believe nothing unless 'e see it with 'is own eyes.' 'all these details,' continued the speaker, 'of the organization of affairs and the work of the co-operative commonwealth, are things which do not concern us at all. they have merely been suggested by different individuals as showing some ways in which these things could be arranged. the exact methods to be adopted will be decided upon by the opinion of the majority when the work is being done. meantime, what we have to do is to insist upon the duty of the state to provide productive work for the unemployed, the state feeding of schoolchildren, the nationalization or socialization of railways; land; the trusts, and all public services that are still in the hands of private companies. if you wish to see these things done, you must cease from voting for liberal and tory sweaters, shareholders of companies, lawyers, aristocrats, and capitalists; and you must fill the house of commons with revolutionary socialists. that is--with men who are in favour of completely changing the present system. and in the day that you do that, you will have solved the poverty "problem". no more tramping the streets begging for a job! no more hungry children at home. no more broken boots and ragged clothes. no more women and children killing themselves with painful labour whilst strong men stand idly by; but joyous work and joyous leisure for all.' 'is there any more questions?' cried philpot. 'is it true,' said easton, 'that socialists intend to do away with the army and navy?' 'yes; it is true. socialists believe in international brotherhood and peace. nearly all wars are caused by profit-seeking capitalists, seeking new fields for commercial exploitation, and by aristocrats who make it the means of glorifying themselves in the eyes of the deluded common people. you must remember that socialism is not only a national, but an international movement and when it is realized, there will be no possibility of war, and we shall no longer need to maintain an army and navy, or to waste a lot of labour building warships or manufacturing arms and ammunition. all those people who are now employed will then be at liberty to assist in the great work of producing the benefits of civilization; creating wealth and knowledge and happiness for themselves and others--socialism means peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind. but in the meantime we know that the people of other nations are not yet all socialists; we do not forget that in foreign countries--just the same as in britain--there are large numbers of profit seeking capitalists, who are so destitute of humanity, that if they thought it could be done successfully and with profit to themselves they would not scruple to come here to murder and to rob. we do not forget that in foreign countries--the same as here--there are plenty of so-called "christian" bishops and priests always ready to give their benediction to any such murderous projects, and to blasphemously pray to the supreme being to help his children to slay each other like wild beasts. and knowing and remembering all this, we realize that until we have done away with capitalism, aristocracy and anti-christian clericalism, it is our duty to be prepared to defend our homes and our native land. and therefore we are in favour of maintaining national defensive forces in the highest possible state of efficiency. but that does not mean that we are in favour of the present system of organizing those forces. we do not believe in conscription, and we do not believe that the nation should continue to maintain a professional standing army to be used at home for the purpose of butchering men and women of the working classes in the interests of a handful of capitalists, as has been done at featherstone and belfast; or to be used abroad to murder and rob the people of other nations. socialists advocate the establishment of a national citizen army, for defensive purposes only. we believe that every able bodied man should be compelled to belong to this force and to undergo a course of military training, but without making him into a professional soldier, or taking him away from civil life, depriving him of the rights of citizenship or making him subject to military "law" which is only another name for tyranny and despotism. this citizen army could be organized on somewhat similar lines to the present territorial force, with certain differences. for instance, we do not believe--as our present rulers do--that wealth and aristocratic influence are the two most essential qualifications for an efficient officer; we believe that all ranks should be attainable by any man, no matter how poor, who is capable of passing the necessary examinations, and that there should be no expense attached to those positions which the government grant, or the pay, is not sufficient to cover. the officers could be appointed in any one of several ways: they might be elected by the men they would have to command, the only qualification required being that they had passed their examinations, or they might be appointed according to merit--the candidate obtaining the highest number of marks at the examinations to have the first call on any vacant post, and so on in order of merit. we believe in the total abolition of courts martial, any offence against discipline should be punishable by the ordinary civil law--no member of the citizen army being deprived of the rights of a citizen.' 'what about the navy?' cried several voices. 'nobody wants to interfere with the navy except to make its organization more democratic--the same as that of the citizen army--and to protect its members from tyranny by entitling them to be tried in a civil court for any alleged offence. 'it has been proved that if the soil of this country were scientifically cultivated, it is capable of producing sufficient to maintain a population of a hundred millions of people. our present population is only about forty millions, but so long as the land remains in the possession of persons who refuse to allow it to be cultivated we shall continue to be dependent on other countries for our food supply. so long as we are in that position, and so long as foreign countries are governed by liberal and tory capitalists, we shall need the navy to protect our overseas commerce from them. if we had a citizen army such as i have mentioned, of nine or ten millions of men and if the land of this country was properly cultivated, we should be invincible at home. no foreign power would ever be mad enough to attempt to land their forces on our shores. but they would now be able to starve us all to death in a month if it were not for the navy. it's a sensible and creditable position, isn't it?' concluded barrington. 'even in times of peace, thousands of people standing idle and tamely starving in their own fertile country, because a few land "lords" forbid them to cultivate it.' 'is there any more questions?' demanded philpot, breaking a prolonged silence. 'would any liberal or tory capitalist like to get up into the pulpit and oppose the speaker?' the chairman went on, finding that no one responded to his appeal for questions. the silence continued. 'as there's no more questions and no one won't get up into the pulpit, it is now my painful duty to call upon someone to move a resolution.' 'well, mr chairman,' said harlow, 'i may say that when i came on this firm i was a liberal, but through listenin' to several lectures by professor owen and attendin' the meetings on the hill at windley and reading the books and pamphlets i bought there and from owen, i came to the conclusion some time ago that it's a mug's game for us to vote for capitalists whether they calls theirselves liberals or tories. they're all alike when you're workin' for 'em; i defy any man to say what's the difference between a liberal and a tory employer. there is none--there can't be; they're both sweaters, and they've got to be, or they wouldn't be able to compete with each other. and since that's what they are, i say it's a mug's game for us to vote 'em into parliament to rule over us and to make laws that we've got to abide by whether we like it or not. there's nothing to choose between 'em, and the proof of it is that it's never made much difference to us which party was in or which was out. it's quite true that in the past both of 'em have passed good laws, but they've only done it when public opinion was so strong in favour of it that they knew there was no getting out of it, and then it was a toss up which side did it. 'that's the way i've been lookin' at things lately, and i'd almost made up my mind never to vote no more, or to trouble myself about politics at all, because although i could see there was no sense in voting for liberal or tory capitalists, at the same time i must admit i couldn't make out how socialism was going to help us. but the explanation of it which professor barrington has given us this afternoon has been a bit of an eye opener for me, and with your permission i should like to move as a resolution, "that it is the opinion of this meeting that socialism is the only remedy for unemployment and poverty."' the conclusion of harlow's address was greeted with loud cheers from the socialists, but most of the liberal and tory supporters of the present system maintained a sulky silence. 'i'll second that resolution,' said easton. 'and i'll lay a bob both ways,' remarked bundy. the resolution was then put, and though the majority were against it, the chairman declared it was carried unanimously. by this time the violence of the storm had in a great measure abated, but as rain was still falling it was decided not to attempt to resume work that day. besides, it would have been too late, even if the weather had cleared up. 'p'raps it's just as well it 'as rained,' remarked one man. 'if it 'adn't some of us might 'ave got the sack tonight. as it is, there'll be hardly enough for all of us to do tomorrer and saturday mornin' even if it is fine.' this was true: nearly all the outside was finished, and what remained to be done was ready for the final coat. inside all there was to do was to colour wash the walls and to give the woodwork of the kitchen and scullery the last coat of paint. it was inevitable--unless the firm had some other work for them to do somewhere else--that there would be a great slaughter on saturday. 'now,' said philpot, assuming what he meant to be the manner of a school teacher addressing children, 'i wants you hall to make a speshall heffort and get 'ere very early in the mornin'--say about four o'clock--and them wot doos the most work tomorrer, will get a prize on saturday.' 'what'll it be, the sack?' inquired harlow. 'yes,' replied philpot, 'and not honly will you get a prize for good conduck tomorrer, but if you all keep on workin' like we've bin doing lately till you're too hold and wore hout to do any more, you'll be allowed to go to a nice workhouse for the rest of your lives! and each one of you will be given a title--"pauper!"' and they laughed! although the majority of them had mothers or fathers or other near relatives who had already succeeded to the title--they laughed! as they were going home, crass paused at the gate, and pointing up to the large gable at the end of the house, he said to philpot: 'you'll want the longest ladder--the 65, for that, tomorrow.' philpot looked up at the gable. it was very high. chapter 46 the 'sixty-five' the next morning after breakfast, philpot, sawkins, harlow and barrington went to the yard to get the long ladder--the 65--so called because it had sixty-five rungs. it was really what is known as a builder's scaffold ladder, and it had been strengthened by several iron bolts or rods which passed through just under some of the rungs. one side of the ladder had an iron band or ribbon twisted and nailed round it spirally. it was not at all suitable for painters' work, being altogether too heavy and cumbrous. however, as none of the others were long enough to reach the high gable at the refuge, they managed, with a struggle, to get it down from the hooks and put it on one of the handcarts and soon passed through the streets of mean and dingy houses in the vicinity of the yard, and began the ascent of the long hill. there had been a lot of rain during the night, and the sky was still overcast with dark grey clouds. the cart went heavily over the muddy road; sawkins was at the helm, holding the end of the ladder and steering; the others walked a little further ahead, at the sides of the cart. it was such hard work that by the time they were half-way up the hill they were so exhausted and out of breath that they had to stop for a rest. 'this is a bit of all right, ain't it?' remarked harlow as he took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief. while they rested they kept a good look out for rushton or hunter, who were likely to pass by at any moment. at first, no one made any reply to harlow's observation, for they were all out of breath and philpot's lean fingers trembled violently as he wiped the perspiration from his face. 'yes, mate,' he said despondently, after a while. 'it's one way of gettin' a livin' and there's plenty better ways.' in addition to the fact that his rheumatism was exceptionally bad, he felt unusually low-spirited this morning; the gloomy weather and the prospect of a long day of ladder work probably had something to do with it. 'a "living" is right,' said barrington bitterly. he also was exhausted with the struggle up the hill and enraged by the woebegone appearance of poor old philpot, who was panting and quivering from the exertion. they relapsed into silence. the unaccountable depression that possessed philpot deprived him of all his usual jocularity and filled him with melancholy thoughts. he had travelled up and down this hill a great many times before under similar circumstances and he said to himself that if he had half a quid now for every time he had pushed a cart up this road, he wouldn't need to do anyone out of a job all the rest of his life. the shop where he had been apprenticed used to be just down at the bottom; the place had been pulled down years ago, and the ground was now occupied by more pretentious buildings. not quite so far down the road--on the other side--he could see the church where he used to attend sunday school when he was a boy, and where he was married just thirty years ago. presently--when they reached the top of the hill--he would be able to look across the valley and see the spire of the other church, the one in the graveyard, where all those who were dear to him had been one by one laid to rest. he felt that he would not be sorry when the time came to join them there. possibly, in the next world--if there were such a place--they might all be together once more. he was suddenly aroused from these thoughts by an exclamation from harlow. 'look out! here comes rushton.' they immediately resumed their journey. rushton was coming up the hill in his dog-cart with grinder sitting by his side. they passed so closely that philpot--who was on that side of the cart--was splashed with mud from the wheels of the trap. 'them's some of your chaps, ain't they?' remarked grinder. 'yes,' replied rushton. 'we're doing a job up this way.' 'i should 'ave thought it would pay you better to use a 'orse for sich work as that,' said grinder. 'we do use the horses whenever it's necessary for very big loads, you know,' answered rushton, and added with a laugh: 'but the donkeys are quite strong enough for such a job as that.' the 'donkeys' struggled on up the hill for about another hundred yards and then they were forced to halt again. 'we mustn't stop long, you know,' said harlow. 'most likely he's gone to the job, and he'll wait to see how long it takes us to get there.' barrington felt inclined to say that in that case rushton would have to wait, but he remained silent, for he remembered that although he personally did not care a brass button whether he got the sack or not, the others were not so fortunately circumstanced. while they were resting, another two-legged donkey passed by pushing another cart--or rather, holding it back, for he was coming slowly down the hill. another heir of all the ages--another imperialist--a degraded, brutalized wretch, clad in filthy, stinking rags, his toes protruding from the rotten broken boots that were tied with bits of string upon his stockingless feet. the ramshackle cart was loaded with empty bottles and putrid rags, heaped loosely in the cart and packed into a large sack. old coats and trousers, dresses, petticoats, and under-clothing, greasy, mildewed and malodorous. as he crept along with his eyes on the ground, the man gave utterance at intervals to uncouth, inarticulate sounds. 'that's another way of gettin' a livin',' said sawkins with a laugh as the miserable creature slunk past. harlow also laughed, and barrington regarded them curiously. he thought it strange that they did not seem to realize that they might some day become like this man themselves. 'i've often wondered what they does with all them dirty old rags,' said philpot. 'made into paper,' replied harlow, briefly. 'some of them are,' said barrington, 'and some are manufactured into shoddy cloth and made into sunday clothes for working men. 'there's all sorts of different ways of gettin' a livin',' remarked sawkins, after a pause. 'i read in a paper the other day about a bloke wot goes about lookin' for open trap doors and cellar flaps in front of shops. as soon as he spotted one open, he used to go and fall down in it; and then he'd be took to the 'orspital, and when he got better he used to go and threaten to bring a action against the shop-keeper and get damages, and most of 'em used to part up without goin' in front of the judge at all. but one day a slop was a watchin' of 'im, and seen 'im chuck 'isself down one, and when they picked 'im up they found he'd broke his leg. so they took 'im to the 'orspital and when he came out and went round to the shop and started talkin' about bringin' a action for damages, the slop collared 'im and they give 'im six months.' 'yes, i read about that,' said harlow, 'and there was another case of a chap who was run over by a motor, and they tried to make out as 'e put 'isself in the way on purpose; but 'e got some money out of the swell it belonged to; a 'undered pound i think it was.' 'i only wish as one of their motors would run inter me,' said philpot, making a feeble attempt at a joke. 'i lay i'd get some a' me own back out of 'em.' the others laughed, and harlow was about to make some reply but at that moment a cyclist appeared coming down the hill from the direction of the job. it was nimrod, so they resumed their journey once more and presently hunter shot past on his machine without taking any notice of them... when they arrived they found that rushton had not been there at all, but nimrod had. crass said that he had kicked up no end of a row because they had not called at the yard at six o'clock that morning for the ladder, instead of going for it after breakfast--making two journeys instead of one, and he had also been ratty because the big gable had not been started the first thing that morning. they carried the ladder into the garden and laid it on the ground along the side of the house where the gable was. a brick wall about eight feet high separated the grounds of 'the refuge' from those of the premises next door. between this wall and the side wall of the house was a space about six feet wide and this space formed a kind of alley or lane or passage along the side of the house. they laid the ladder on the ground along this passage, the 'foot' was placed about half-way through; just under the centre of the gable, and as it lay there, the other end of the ladder reached right out to the front railings. next, it was necessary that two men should go up into the attic--the window of which was just under the point of the gable--and drop the end of a long rope down to the others who would tie it to the top of the ladder. then two men would stand on the bottom rung, so as to keep the 'foot' down, and the three others would have to raise the ladder up, while the two men up in the attic hauled on the rope. they called bundy and his mate ned dawson to help, and it was arranged that harlow and crass should stand on the foot because they were the heaviest. philpot, bundy, and barrington were to 'raise', and dawson and sawkins were to go up to the attic and haul on the rope. 'where's the rope?' asked crass. the others looked blankly at him. none of them had thought of bringing one from the yard. 'why, ain't there one 'ere?' asked philpot. 'one 'ere? of course there ain't one 'ere!' snarled crass. 'do you mean to say as you ain't brought one, then?' philpot stammered out something about having thought there was one at the house already, and the others said they had not thought about it at all. 'well, what the bloody hell are we to do now?' cried crass, angrily. 'i'll go to the yard and get one,' suggested barrington. 'i can do it in twenty minutes there and back.' 'yes! and a bloody fine row there'd be if hunter was to see you! 'ere it's nearly ten o'clock and we ain't made a start on this gable wot we ought to 'ave started first thing this morning.' 'couldn't we tie two or three of those short ropes together?' suggested philpot. 'those that the other two ladders was spliced with?' as there was sure to be a row if they delayed long enough to send to the yard, it was decided to act on philpot's suggestion. several of the short ropes were accordingly tied together but upon examination it was found that some parts were so weak that even crass had to admit it would be dangerous to attempt to haul the heavy ladder up with them. 'well, the only thing as i can see for it,' he said, 'is that the boy will 'ave to go down to the yard and get the long rope. it won't do for anyone else to go: there's been one row already about the waste of time because we didn't call at the yard for the ladder at six o'clock.' bert was down in the basement of the house limewashing a cellar. crass called him up and gave him the necessary instructions, chief of which was to get back again as soon as ever he could. the boy ran off, and while they were waiting for him to come back the others went on with their several jobs. philpot returned to the small gable he had been painting before breakfast, which he had not quite finished. as he worked a sudden and unaccountable terror took possession of him. he did not want to do that other gable; he felt too ill; and he almost resolved that he would ask crass if he would mind letting him do something else. there were several younger men who would not object to doing it--it would be mere child's play to them, and barrington had already--yesterday--offered to change jobs with him. but then, when he thought of what the probable consequences would be, he hesitated to take that course, and tried to persuade himself that he would be able to get through with the work all right. he did not want crass or hunter to mark him as being too old for ladder work. bert came back in about half an hour flushed and sweating with the weight of the rope and with the speed he had made. he delivered it to crass and then returned to his cellar and went on with the limewashing, while crass passed the word for philpot and the others to come and raise the ladder. he handed the rope to ned dawson, who took it up to the attic, accompanied by sawkins; arrived there they lowered one end out of the window down to the others. 'if you ask me,' said ned dawson, who was critically examining the strands of the rope as he passed it out through the open window, 'if you ask me, i don't see as this is much better than the one we made up by tyin' the short pieces together. look 'ere,'--he indicated a part of the rope that was very frayed and worn--'and 'ere's another place just as bad.' 'well, for christ's sake don't say nothing about it now,' replied sawkins. 'there's been enough talk and waste of time over this job already.' ned made no answer and the end having by this time reached the ground, bundy made it fast to the ladder, about six rungs from the top. the ladder was lying on the ground, parallel to the side of the house. the task of raising it would have been much easier if they had been able to lay it at right angles to the house wall, but this was impossible because of the premises next door and the garden wall between the two houses. on account of its having to be raised in this manner the men at the top would not be able to get a straight pull on the rope; they would have to stand back in the room without being able to see the ladder, and the rope would have to be drawn round the corner of the window, rasping against the edge of the stone sill and the brickwork. the end of the rope having been made fast to the top of the ladder, crass and harlow stood on the foot and the other three raised the top from the ground; as barrington was the tallest, he took the middle position--underneath the ladder--grasping the rungs, philpot being on his left and bundy on his right, each holding one side of the ladder. at a signal from crass, dawson and sawkins began to haul on the rope, and the top of the ladder began to rise slowly into the air. philpot was not of much use at this work, which made it all the harder for the other two who were lifting, besides putting an extra strain on the rope. his lack of strength, and the efforts of barrington and bundy to make up for him caused the ladder to sway from side to side, as it would not have done if they had all been equally capable. meanwhile, upstairs, dawson and sawkins--although the ladder was as yet only a little more than half the way up--noticed, as they hauled and strained on the rope, that it had worn a groove for itself in the corner of the brickwork at the side of the window; and every now and then, although they pulled with all their strength, they were not able to draw in any part of the rope at all; and it seemed to them as if those others down below must have let go their hold altogether, or ceased lifting. that was what actually happened. the three men found the weight so overpowering, that once or twice they were compelled to relax their efforts for a few seconds, and at those times the rope had to carry the whole weight of the ladder; and the part of the rope that had to bear the greatest strain was the part that chanced to be at the angle of the brickwork at the side of the window. and presently it happened that one of the frayed and worn places that dawson had remarked about was just at the angle during one of those momentary pauses. on one end there hung the ponderous ladder, straining the frayed rope against the corner of the brickwork and the sharp edge of the stone sill, at the other end were dawson and sawkins pulling with all their strength, and in that instant the rope snapped like a piece of thread. one end remained in the hands of sawkins and dawson, who reeled backwards into the room, and the other end flew up into the air, writhing like the lash of a gigantic whip. for a moment the heavy ladder swayed from side to side: barrington, standing underneath, with his hands raised above his head grasping one of the rungs, struggled desperately to hold it up. at his right stood bundy, also with arms upraised holding the side; and on the left, between the ladder and the wall, was philpot. for a brief space they strove fiercely to support the overpowering weight, but philpot had no strength, and the ladder, swaying over to the left, crashed down, crushing him upon the ground and against the wall of the house. he fell face downwards, with the ladder across his shoulders; the side that had the iron bands twisted round it fell across the back of his neck, forcing his face against the bricks at the base of the wall. he uttered no cry and was quite still, with blood streaming from the cuts on his face and trickling from his ears. barrington was also hurled to the ground with his head and arms under the ladder; his head and face were cut and bleeding and he was unconscious; none of the others was hurt, for they had all had time to jump clear when the ladder fell. their shouts soon brought all the other men running to the spot, and the ladder was quickly lifted off the two motionless figures. at first it seemed that philpot was dead, but easton rushed off for a neighbouring doctor, who came in a few minutes. he knelt down and carefully examined the crushed and motionless form of philpot, while the other men stood by in terrified silence. barrington, who fortunately was but momentarily stunned was sitting against the wall and had suffered nothing more serious than minor cuts and bruises. the doctor's examination of philpot was a very brief one, and when he rose from his knees, even before he spoke they knew from his manner that their worst fears were realized. philpot was dead. chapter 47 the ghouls barrington did not do any more work that day, but before going home he went to the doctor's house and the latter dressed the cuts on his head and arms. philpot's body was taken away on the ambulance to the mortuary. hunter arrived at the house shortly afterwards and at once began to shout and bully because the painting of the gable was not yet commenced. when he heard of the accident he blamed them for using the rope, and said they should have asked for a new one. before he went away he had a long, private conversation with crass, who told him that philpot had no relatives and that his life was insured for ten pounds in a society of which crass was also a member. he knew that philpot had arranged that in the event of his death the money was to be paid to the old woman with whom he lodged, who was a very close friend. the result of this confidential talk was that crass and hunter came to the conclusion that it was probable that she would be very glad to be relieved of the trouble of attending to the business of the funeral, and that crass, as a close friend of the dead man, and a fellow member of the society, was the most suitable person to take charge of the business for her. he was already slightly acquainted with the old lady, so he would go to see her at once and get her authority to act on her behalf. of course, they would not be able to do much until after the inquest, but they could get the coffin made--as hunter knew the mortuary keeper there would be no difficulty about getting in for a minute to measure the corpse. this matter having been arranged, hunter departed to order a new rope, and shortly afterwards crass--having made sure that everyone would have plenty to do while he was gone--quietly slipped away to go to see philpot's landlady. he went off so secretly that the men did not know that he had been away at all until they saw him come back just before twelve o'clock. the new rope was brought to the house about one o'clock and this time the ladder was raised without any mishap. harlow was put on to paint the gable, and he felt so nervous that he was allowed to have sawkins to stand by and hold the ladder all the time. everyone felt nervous that afternoon, and they all went about their work in an unusually careful manner. when bert had finished limewashing the cellar, crass set him to work outside, painting the gate of the side entrance. while the boy was thus occupied he was accosted by a solemn-looking man who asked him about the accident. the solemn stranger was very sympathetic and inquired what was the name of the man who had been killed, and whether he was married. bert informed him that philpot was a widower, and that he had no children. 'ah, well, that's so much the better, isn't it?' said the stranger shaking his head mournfully. 'it's a dreadful thing, you know, when there's children left unprovided for. you don't happen to know where he lived, do you?' 'yes,' said bert, mentioning the address and beginning to wonder what the solemn man wanted to know for, and why he appeared to be so sorry for philpot since it was quite evident that he had never known him. 'thanks very much,' said the man, pulling out his pocket-book and making a note of it. 'thanks very much indeed. good afternoon,' and he hurried off. 'good afternoon, sir,' said bert and he turned to resume his work. crass came along the garden just as the mysterious stranger was disappearing round the corner. 'what did he want?' said crass, who had seen the man talking to bert. 'i don't know exactly; he was asking about the accident, and whether joe left any children, and where he lived. he must be a very decent sort of chap, i should think. he seems quite sorry about it.' 'oh, he does, does he?' said crass, with a peculiar expression. 'don't you know who he is?' 'no,' replied the boy; 'but i thought p'raps he was a reporter of some paper. ''e ain't no reporter: that's old snatchum the undertaker. 'e's smellin' round after a job; but 'e's out of it this time, smart as 'e thinks 'e is.' barrington came back the next morning to work, and at breakfast-time there was a lot of talk about the accident. they said that it was all very well for hunter to talk like that about the rope, but he had known for a long time that it was nearly worn out. newman said that only about three weeks previously when they were raising a ladder at another job he had shown the rope to him, and misery had replied that there was nothing wrong with it. several others besides newman claimed to have mentioned the matter to hunter, and each of them said he had received the same sort of reply. but when barrington suggested that they should attend the inquest and give evidence to that effect, they all became suddenly silent and in a conversation barrington afterwards had with newman the latter pointed out that if he were to do so, it would do no good to philpot. it would not bring him back but it would be sure to do himself a lot of harm. he would never get another job at rushton's and probably many of the other employers would 'mark him' as well. 'so if you say anything about it,' concluded newman, 'don't bring my name into it.' barrington was constrained to admit that all things considered it was right for newman to mind his own business. he felt that it would not be fair to urge him or anyone else to do or say anything that would injure themselves. misery came to the house about eleven o'clock and informed several of the hands that as work was very slack they would get their back day at pay time. he said that the firm had tendered for one or two jobs, so they could call round about wednesday and perhaps he might then be able to give some of them another start, barrington was not one of those who were 'stood off', although he had expected to be on account of the speech he had made at the beano, and everyone said that he would have got the push sure enough if it had not been for the accident. before he went away, nimrod instructed owen and crass to go to the yard at once: they would there find payne the carpenter, who was making philpot's coffin, which would be ready for crass to varnish by the time they got there. misery told owen that he had left the coffin plate and the instructions with payne and added that he was not to take too much time over the writing, because it was a very cheap job. when they arrived at the yard, payne was just finishing the coffin, which was of elm. all that remained to be done to it was the pitching of the joints inside and payne was in the act of lifting the pot of boiling pitch off the fire to do this. as it was such a cheap job, there was no time to polish it properly, so crass proceeded to give it a couple of coats of spirit varnish, and while he was doing this owen wrote the plate, which was made of very thin zinc lacquered over to make it look like brass: joseph philpot died september 1st 19- aged 56 years. the inquest was held on the following monday morning, and as both rushton and hunter thought it possible that barrington might attempt to impute some blame to them, they had worked the oracle and had contrived to have several friends of their own put on the jury. there was, however, no need for their alarm, because barrington could not say that he had himself noticed, or called hunter's attention to the state of the rope; and he did not wish to mention the names of the others without their permission. the evidence of crass and the other men who were called was to the effect that it was a pure accident. none of them had noticed that the rope was unsound. hunter also swore that he did not know of it--none of the men had ever called his attention to it; if they had done so he would have procured a new one immediately. philpot's landlady and mr rushton were also called as witnesses, and the end was that the jury returned a verdict of accidental death, and added that they did not think any blame attached to anyone. the coroner discharged the jury, and as they and the witnesses passed out of the room, hunter followed rushton outside, with the hope of being honoured by a little conversation with him on the satisfactory issue of the case; but rushton went off without taking any notice of him, so hunter returned to the room where the court had been held to get the coroner's certificate authorizing the interment of the body. this document is usually handed to the friends of the deceased or to the undertaker acting for them. when hunter got back to the room he found that during his absence the coroner had given it to philpot's landlady, who had taken it with her. he accordingly hastened outside again to ask her for it, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. crass and the other men were also gone; they had hurried off to return to work, and after a moment's hesitation hunter decided that it did not matter much about the certificate. crass had arranged the business with the landlady and he could get the paper from her later on. having come to this conclusion, he dismissed the subject from his mind: he had several prices to work out that afternoon--estimates from some jobs the firm was going to tender for. that evening, after having been home to tea, crass and sawkins met by appointment at the carpenter's shop to take the coffin to the mortuary, where misery had arranged to meet them at half past eight o'clock. hunter's plan was to have the funeral take place from the mortuary, which was only about a quarter of an hour's walk from the yard; so tonight they were just going to lift in the body and get the lid screwed down. it was blowing hard and raining heavily when crass and sawkins set out, carrying the coffin--covered with a black cloth--on their shoulders. they also took a small pair of tressels for the coffin to stand on. crass carried one of these slung over his arm and sawkins the other. on their way they had to pass the 'cricketers' and the place looked so inviting that they decided to stop and have a drink--just to keep the damp out, and as they could not very well take the coffin inside with them, they stood it up against the brick wall a little way from the side of the door: as crass remarked with a laugh, there was not much danger of anyone pinching it. the old dear served them and just as they finished drinking the two half-pints there was a loud crash outside and crass and sawkins rushed out and found that the coffin had blown down and was lying bottom upwards across the pavement, while the black cloth that had been wrapped round it was out in the middle of the muddy road. having recovered this, they shook as much of the dirt off as they could, and having wrapped it round the coffin again they resumed their journey to the mortuary, where they found hunter waiting for them, engaged in earnest conversation with the keeper. the electric light was switched on, and as crass and sawkins came in they saw that the marble slab was empty. the corpse was gone. 'snatchum came this afternoon with a hand-truck and a corfin,' explained the keeper. 'i was out at the time, and the missis thought it was all right so she let him have the key.' hunter and crass looked blankly at each other. 'well, this takes the biskit!' said the latter as soon as he could speak. 'i thought you said you had settled everything all right with the old woman?' said hunter. 'so i did,' replied crass. 'i seen 'er on friday, and i told 'er to leave it all to me to attend to, and she said she would. i told 'er that philpot said to me that if ever anything 'appened to 'im i was to take charge of everything for 'er, because i was 'is best friend. and i told 'er we'd do it as cheap as possible.' 'well, it seems to me as you've bungled it somehow,' said nimrod, gloomily. 'i ought to have gone and seen 'er myself, i was afraid you'd make a mess of it,' he added in a wailing tone. 'it's always the same; everything that i don't attend to myself goes wrong.' an uncomfortable silence fell. crass thought that the principal piece of bungling in this affair was hunter's failure to secure possession of the coroner's certificate after the inquest, but he was afraid to say so. outside, the rain was still falling and drove in through the partly open door, causing the atmosphere of the mortuary to be even more than usually cold and damp. the empty coffin had been reared against one of the walls and the marble slab was still stained with blood, for the keeper had not had time to clean it since the body had been removed. 'i can see 'ow it's been worked,' said crass at last. 'there's one of the members of the club who works for snatchum, and 'e's took it on 'isself to give the order for the funeral; but 'e's got no right to do it.' 'right or no right, 'e's done it,' replied misery, 'so you'd better take the box back to the shop.' crass and sawkins accordingly returned to the workshop, where they were presently joined by nimrod. 'i've been thinking this business over as i came along,' he said, 'and i don't see being beat like this by snatchum; so you two can just put the tressels and the box on a hand cart and we'll take it over to philpot's house.' nimrod walked on the pavement while the other two pushed the cart, and it was about half past nine, when they arrived at the street in windley where philpot used to live. they halted in a dark part of the street a few yards away from the house and on the opposite side. 'i think the best thing we can do,' said misery, 'is for me and sawkins to wait 'ere while you go to the 'ouse and see 'ow the land lies. you've done all the business with 'er so far. it's no use takin' the box unless we know the corpse is there; for all we know, snatchum may 'ave taken it 'ome with 'im.' 'yes; i think that'll be the best way,' agreed crass, after a moment's thought. nimrod and sawkins accordingly took shelter in the doorway of an empty house, leaving the handcart at the kerb, while crass went across the street and knocked at philpot's door. they saw it opened by an elderly woman holding a lighted candle in her hand; then crass went inside and the door was shut. in about a quarter of an hour he reappeared and, leaving the door partly open behind him, he came out and crossed over to where the others were waiting. as he drew near they could see that he carried a piece of paper in his hand. 'it's all right,' he said in a hoarse whisper as he came up. i've got the stifficut.' misery took the paper eagerly and scanned it by the light of a match that crass struck. it was the certificate right enough, and with a sigh of relief hunter put it into his note-book and stowed it safely away in the inner pocket of his coat, while crass explained the result of his errand. it appeared that the other member of the society, accompanied by snatchum, had called upon the old woman and had bluffed her into giving them the order for the funeral. it was they who had put her up to getting the certificate from the coroner--they had been careful to keep away from the inquest themselves so as not to arouse hunter's or crass's suspicions. 'when they brought the body 'ome this afternoon,' crass went on, 'snatchum tried to get the stifficut orf 'er, but she'd been thinkin' things over and she was a bit frightened 'cos she knowed she'd made arrangements with me, and she thought she'd better see me first; so she told 'im she'd give it to 'im on thursday; that's the day as 'e was goin' to 'ave the funeral.' 'he'll find he's a day too late,' said misery, with a ghastly grin. 'we'll get the job done on wednesday.' 'she didn't want to give it to me, at first,' crass concluded, 'but i told 'er we'd see 'er right if old snatchum tried to make 'er pay for the other coffin.' 'i don't think he's likely to make much fuss about it,' said hunter. 'he won't want everybody to know he was so anxious for the job.' crass and sawkins pushed the handcart over to the other side of the road and then, lifting the coffin off, they carried it into the house, nimrod going first. the old woman was waiting for them with the candle at the end of the passage. 'i shall be very glad when it's all over,' she said, as she led the way up the narrow stairs, closely followed by hunter, who carried the tressels, crass and sawkins, bringing up the rear with the coffin. 'i shall be very glad when it's all over, for i'm sick and tired of answerin' the door to undertakers. if there's been one 'ere since friday there's been a dozen, all after the job, not to mention all the cards what's been put under the door, besides the one's what i've had give to me by different people. i had a pair of boots bein' mended and the man took the trouble to bring 'em 'ome when they was finished--a thing 'e's never done before--just for an excuse to give me an undertaker's card. 'then the milkman brought one, and so did the baker, and the greengrocer give me another when i went in there on saturday to buy some vegetables for sunday dinner.' arrived at the top landing the old woman opened a door and entered a small and wretchedly furnished room. across the lower sash of the window hung a tattered piece of lace curtain. the low ceiling was cracked and discoloured. there was a rickety little wooden washstand, and along one side of the room a narrow bed covered with a ragged grey quilt, on which lay a bundle containing the clothes that the dead man was wearing at the time of the accident. there was a little table in front of the window, with a small looking-glass upon it, and a cane-seated chair was placed by the bedside and the floor was covered with a faded piece of drab-coloured carpet of no perceptible pattern, worn into holes in several places. in the middle of this dreary room, upon a pair of tressels, was the coffin containing philpot's body. seen by the dim and flickering light of the candle, the aspect of this coffin, covered over with a white sheet, was terrible in its silent, pathetic solitude. hunter placed the pair of tressels he had been carrying against the wall, and the other two put the empty coffin on the floor by the side of the bed. the old woman stood the candlestick on the mantelpiece, and withdrew, remarking that they would not need her assistance. the three men then removed their overcoats and laid them on the end of the bed, and from the pocket of his crass took out two large screwdrivers, one of which he handed to hunter. sawkins held the candle while they unscrewed and took off the lid of the coffin they had brought with them: it was not quite empty, for they had brought a bag of tools inside it. 'i think we shall be able to work better if we takes the other one orf the trussels and puts it on the floor,' remarked crass. 'yes, i think so, too,' replied hunter. crass took off the sheet and threw it on the bed, revealing the other coffin, which was very similar in appearance to the one they had brought with them, being of elms, with the usual imitation brass furniture. hunter took hold of the head and crass the foot and they lifted it off the tressels on to the floor. ''e's not very 'eavy; that's one good thing,' observed hunter. ''e always was a very thin chap,' replied crass. the screws that held down the lid had been covered over with large-headed brass nails which had to be wrenched off before they could get at the screws, of which there were eight altogether. it was evident from the appearance of the beads of these screws that they were old ones that had been used for some purpose before: they were rusty and of different sizes, some being rather larger or smaller, than they should have been. they were screwed in so firmly that by the time they had drawn half of them out the two men were streaming with perspiration. after a while hunter took the candle from sawkins and the latter had a try at the screws. 'anyone would think the dam' things had been there for a 'undred years,' remarked hunter, savagely, as he wiped the sweat from his face and neck with his handkerchief. kneeling on the lid of the coffin and panting and grunting with the exertion, the other two continued to struggle with their task. suddenly crass uttered an obscene curse; he had broken off one side of the head of the screw he was trying to turn and almost at the same instant a similar misfortune happened to sawkins. after this, hunter again took a screwdriver himself, and when they got all the screws out with the exception of the two broken ones, crass took a hammer and chisel out of the bag and proceeded to cut off what was left of the tops of the two that remained. but even after this was done the two screws still held the lid on the coffin, and so they had to hammer the end of the blade of the chisel underneath and lever the lid up so that they could get hold of it with their fingers. it split up one side as they tore it off, exposing the dead man to view. although the marks of the cuts and bruises were still visible on philpot's face, they were softened down by the pallor of death, and a placid, peaceful expression pervaded his features. his hands were crossed upon his breast, and as he lay there in the snow-white grave clothes, almost covered in by the white lace frill that bordered the sides of the coffin, he looked like one in a profound and tranquil sleep. they laid the broken lid on the bed, and placed the two coffins side by side on the floor as close together as possible. sawkins stood at one side holding the candle in his left hand and ready to render with his right any assistance that might unexpectedly prove to be necessary. crass, standing at the foot, took hold of the body by the ankles, while hunter at the other end seized it by the shoulders with his huge, clawlike hands, which resembled the talons of some obscene bird of prey, and they dragged it out and placed it in the other coffin. whilst hunter--hovering ghoulishly over the corpse--arranged the grave clothes and the frilling, crass laid the broken cover on the top of the other coffin and pushed it under the bed out of the way. then he selected the necessary screws and nails from the bag, and hunter having by this time finished, they proceeded to screw down the lid. then they lifted the coffin on to the tressels, covering it over with the sheet, and the appearance it then presented was so exactly similar to what they had seen when they first entered the room, that it caused the same thought to occur to all of them: suppose snatchum took it into his head to come there and take the body out again? if he were to do so and take it up to the cemetery they might be compelled to give up the certificate to him and then all their trouble would be lost. after a brief consultation, they resolved that it would be safer to take the corpse on the handcart to the yard and keep it in the carpenter's shop until the funeral, which could take place from there. crass and sawkins accordingly lifted the coffin off the tressels, and--while hunter held the light--proceeded to carry it downstairs, a task of considerable difficulty owing to the narrowness of the staircase and the landing. however, they got it down at last and, having put it on the handcart, covered it over with the black wrapper. it was still raining and the lamp in the cart was nearly out, so sawkins trimmed the wick and relit it before they started. hunter wished them 'good-night' at the corner of the street, because it was not necessary for him to accompany them to the yard--they would be able to manage all that remained to be done by themselves. he said he would make the arrangements for the funeral as soon as he possibly could the next morning, and he would come to the job and let them know, as soon as he knew himself, at what time they would have to be in attendance to act as bearers. he had gone a little distance on his way when he stopped and turned back to them. 'it's not necessary for either of you to make a song about this business, you know,' he said. the two men said that they quite understood that: he could depend on their keeping their mouths shut. when hunter had gone, crass drew out his watch. it was a quarter to eleven. a little way down the road the lights of a public house were gleaming through the mist. 'we shall be just in time to get a drink before closing time if we buck up,' he said. and with this object they hurried on as fast as they could. when they reached the tavern they left the cart standing by the kerb, and went inside, where crass ordered two pints of four-ale, which he permitted sawkins to pay for. 'how are we going on about this job?' inquired the latter after they had each taken a long drink, for they were thirsty after their exertions. 'i reckon we ought to 'ave more than a bob for it, don't you? it's not like a ordinary "lift in".' 'of course it ain't,' replied crass. 'we ought to 'ave about, say'--reflecting--'say arf a dollar each at the very least.' 'little enough too,' said sawkins. 'i was going to say arf a crown, myself.' crass agreed that even half a crown would not be too much. ''ow are we going' on about chargin' it on our time sheets?' asked sawkins, after a pause. 'if we just put a "lift in", they might only pay us a bob as usual.' as a rule when they had taken a coffin home, they wrote on their time sheets, 'one lift in', for which they were usually paid one shilling, unless it happened to be a very high-class funeral, when they sometimes got one and sixpence. they were never paid by the hour for these jobs. crass smoked reflectively. 'i think the best way will be to put it like this,' he said at length. '"philpot's funeral. one lift out and one lift in. also takin' corpse to carpenter's shop." 'ow would that do?' sawkins said that would be a very good way to put it, and they finished their beer just as the landlord intimated that it was closing time. the cart was standing where they left it, the black cloth saturated with the rain, which dripped mournfully from its sable folds. when they reached the plot of waste ground over which they had to pass in order to reach the gates of the yard, they had to proceed very cautiously, for it was very dark, and the lantern did not give much light. a number of carts and lorries were standing there, and the path wound through pools of water and heaps of refuse. after much difficulty and jolting, they reached the gate, which crass unlocked with the key he had obtained from the office earlier in the evening. they soon opened the door of the carpenter's shop and, after lighting the gas, they arranged the tressels and then brought in the coffin and placed it upon them. then they locked the door and placed the key in its usual hiding-place, but the key of the outer gate they took with them and dropped into the letter-box at the office, which they had to pass on their way home. as they turned away from the door, they were suddenly confronted by a policeman who flashed his lantern in their faces and demanded to know why they had tried the lock... the next morning was a very busy one for hunter, who had to see several new jobs commenced. they were all small affairs. most of them would only take two or three days from start to finish. attending to this work occupied most of his morning, but all the same he managed to do the necessary business connected with the funeral, which he arranged to take place at two o'clock on wednesday afternoon from the mortuary, where the coffin had been removed during the day, hunter deciding that it would not look well to have the funeral start from the workshop. although hunter had kept it as quiet as possible, there was a small crowd, including several old workmates of philpot's who happened to be out of work, waiting outside the mortuary to see the funeral start, and amongst them were bill bates and the semi-drunk, who were both sober. barrington and owen were also there, having left work for the day in order to go to the funeral. they were there too in a sense as the representatives of the other workmen, for barrington carried a large wreath which had been subscribed for voluntarily by rushton's men. they could not all afford to lose the time to attend the funeral, although most of them would have liked to pay that tribute of regard to their old mate, so they had done this as the next best thing. attached to the wreath was a strip of white satin ribbon, upon which owen had painted a suitable inscription. promptly at two o'clock the hearse and the mourning coach drove up with hunter and the four bearers--crass, slyme, payne and sawkins, all dressed in black with frock coats and silk hats. although they were nominally attired in the same way, there was a remarkable dissimilarity in their appearance. crass's coat was of smooth, intensely black cloth, having been recently dyed, and his hat was rather low in the crown, being of that shape that curved outwards towards the top. hunter's coat was a kind of serge with a rather rusty cast of colour and his hat was very tall and straight, slightly narrower at the crown than at the brim. as for the others, each of them had a hat of a different fashion and date, and their 'black' clothes ranged from rusty brown to dark blue. these differences were due to the fact that most of the garments had been purchased at different times from different second-hand clothes shops, and never being used except on such occasions as the present, they lasted for an indefinite time. when the coffin was brought out and placed in the hearse, hunter laid upon it the wreath that barrington gave him, together with the another he had brought himself, which had a similar ribbon with the words: 'from rushton & co. with deep sympathy.' seeing that barrington and owen were the only occupants of the carriage, bill bates and the semi-drunk came up to the door and asked if there was any objection to their coming and as neither owen nor barrington objected, they did not think it necessary to ask anyone else's permission, so they got in. meanwhile, hunter had taken his position a few yards in front of the hearse and the bearers each his proper position, two on each side. as the procession turned into the main road, they saw snatchum standing at the corner looking very gloomy. hunter kept his eyes fixed straight ahead and affected not to see him, but crass could not resist the temptation to indulge in a jeering smile, which so enraged snatchum that he shouted out: 'it don't matter! i shan't lose much! i can use it for someone else!' the distance to the cemetery was about three miles, so as soon as they got out of the busy streets of the town, hunter called a halt, and got up on the hearse beside the driver, crass sat on the other side, and two of the other bearers stood in the space behind the driver's seat, the fourth getting up beside the driver of the coach; and then they proceeded at a rapid pace. as they drew near to the cemetery they slowed down, and finally stopped when about fifty yards from the gate. then hunter and the bearers resumed their former position, and they passed through the open gate and up to the door of the church, where they were received by the clerk--a man in a rusty black cassock, who stood by while they carried the coffin in and placed it on a kind of elevated table which revolved on a pivot. they brought it in footfirst, and as soon as they had placed it upon the table, the clerk swung it round so as to bring the foot of the coffin towards the door ready to be carried out again. there was a special pew set apart for the undertakers, and in this hunter and the bearers took their seats to await the arrival of the clergyman. barrington and the three others sat on the opposite side. there was no altar or pulpit in this church, but a kind of reading desk stood on a slightly raised platform at the other end of the aisle. after a wait of about ten minutes, the clergyman entered and, at once proceeding to the desk, began to recite in a rapid and wholly unintelligible manner the usual office. if it had not been for the fact that each of his hearers had a copy of the words--for there was a little book in each pew--none of them would have been able to gather the sense of what the man was gabbling. under any other circumstances, the spectacle of a human being mouthing in this absurd way would have compelled laughter, and so would the suggestion that this individual really believed that he was addressing the supreme being. his attitude and manner were contemptuously indifferent. while he recited, intoned, or gabbled, the words of the office, he was reading the certificate and some other paper the clerk had placed upon the desk, and when he had finished reading these, his gaze wandered abstractedly round the chapel, resting for a long time with an expression of curiosity upon bill bates and the semi-drunk, who were doing their best to follow in their books the words he was repeating. he next turned his attention to his fingers, holding his hand away from him nearly at arm's length and critically examining the nails. from time to time as this miserable mockery proceeded the clerk in the rusty black cassock mechanically droned out a sonorous 'ah-men', and after the conclusion of the lesson the clergyman went out of the church, taking a short cut through the grave-stones and monuments, while the bearers again shouldered the coffin and followed the clerk to the grave. when they arrived within a few yards of their destination, they were rejoined by the clergyman, who was waiting for them at the corner of one of the paths. he put himself at the head of the procession with an open book in his hand, and as they walked slowly along, he resumed his reading or repetition of the words of the service. he had on an old black cassock and a much soiled and slightly torn surplice. the unseemly appearance of this dirty garment was heightened by the circumstance that he had not taken the trouble to adjust it properly. it hung all lop-sided, showing about six inches more of the black cassock underneath one side than the other. however, perhaps it is not right to criticize this person's appearance so severely, because the poor fellow was paid only seven-and-six for each burial, and as this was only the fourth funeral he had officiated at that day, probably he could not afford to wear clean linen--at any rate, not for the funerals of the lower classes. he continued his unintelligible jargon while they were lowering the coffin into the grave, and those who happened to know the words of the office by heart were, with some difficulty, able to understand what he was saying: 'forasmuch as it hath pleased almighty god of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust--' the earth fell from the clerk's hand and rattled on the lid of the coffin with a mournful sound, and when the clergyman had finished repeating the remainder of the service, he turned and walked away in the direction of the church. hunter and the rest of the funeral party made their way back towards the gate of the cemetery where the hearse and the carriage were waiting. on their way they saw another funeral procession coming towards them. it was a very plain-looking closed hearse with only one horse. there was no undertaker in front and no bearers walked by the sides. it was a pauper's funeral. three men, evidently dressed in their sunday clothes, followed behind the hearse. as they reached the church door, four old men who were dressed in ordinary everyday clothes, came forward and opening the hearse took out the coffin and carried it into the church, followed by the other three, who were evidently relatives of the deceased. the four old men were paupers--inmates of the workhouse, who were paid sixpence each for acting as bearers. they were just taking out the coffin from the hearse as hunter's party was passing, and most of the latter paused for a moment and watched them carry it into the church. the roughly made coffin was of white deal, not painted or covered in any way, and devoid of any fittings or ornament with the exception of a square piece of zinc on the lid. none of rushton's party was near enough to recognize any of the mourners or to read what was written on the zinc, but if they had been they would have seen, roughly painted in black letters j.l. aged 67 and some of them would have recognized the three mourners who were jack linden's sons. as for the bearers, they were all retired working men who had come into their 'titles'. one of them was old latham, the venetian blind maker. chapter 48 the wise men of the east at the end of the following week there was a terrible slaughter at rushton's. barrington and all the casual hands were sacked, including newman, easton and harlow, and there was so little work that it looked as if everyone else would have to stand off also. the summer was practically over, so those who were stood off had but a poor chance of getting a start anywhere else, because most other firms were discharging hands as well. there was only one other shop in the town that was doing anything at all to speak of, and that was the firm of dauber and botchit. this firm had come very much to the front during the summer, and had captured several big jobs that rushton & co. had expected to get, besides taking away several of the latter's old customers. this firm took work at almost half the price that rushton's could do it for, and they had a foreman whose little finger was thicker than nimrod's thigh. some of the men who had worked for both firms during the summer, said that after working for dauber and botchit, working for rushton seemed like having a holiday. 'there's one bloke there,' said newman, in conversation with harlow and easton. 'there's one bloke there wot puts up twenty-five rolls o' paper in a day an' trims and pastes for 'imself; and as for the painters, nearly everyone of 'em gets over as much work as us three put together, and if you're working there you've got to do the same or get the sack.' however much truth or falsehood or exaggeration there may have been in the stories of the sweating and driving that prevailed at dauber and botchit's, it was an indisputable fact that the other builders found it very difficult to compete with them, and between the lot of them what work there was to do was all finished or messed up in about a quarter of the time that it would have taken to do it properly. by the end of september there were great numbers of men out of employment, and the practical persons who controlled the town were already preparing to enact the usual farce of 'dealing' with the distress that was certain to ensue. the rev. mr bosher talked of reopening the labour yard; the secretary of the obs appealed for more money and cast-off clothing and boots--the funds of the society had been depleted by the payment of his quarter's salary. there were rumours that the soup kitchen would be reopened at an early date for the sale of 'nourishment', and charitable persons began to talk of rummage sales and soup tickets. now and then, whenever a 'job' 'came in', a few of rushton's men were able to put in a few hours' work, but barrington never went back. his manner of life was the subject of much speculation on the part of his former workmates, who were not a little puzzled by the fact that he was much better dressed than they had ever known him to be before, and that he was never without money. he generally had a tanner or a bob to lend, and was always ready to stand a drink, to say nothing of what it must have cost him for the quantities of socialist pamphlets and leaflets that he gave away broadcast. he lodged over at windley, but he used to take his meals at a little coffee tavern down town, where he used often to invite one or two of his old mates to take dinner with him. it sometimes happened that one of them would invite him home of an evening, to drink a cup of tea, or to see some curiosity that the other thought would interest him, and on these occasions--if there were any children in the house to which they were going--barrington usually made a point of going into a shop on their way, and buying a bag of cakes or fruit for them. all sorts of theories were put forward to account for his apparent affluence. some said he was a toff in disguise; others that he had rich relations who were ashamed of him because he was a socialist, and who allowed him so much a week so long as he kept away from them and did not use his real name. some of the liberals said that he was in the pay of the tories, who were seeking by underhand methods to split up the progressive liberal party. just about that time several burglaries took place in the town, the thieves getting clear away with the plunder, and this circumstance led to a dark rumour that barrington was the culprit, and that it was these ill-gotten gains that he was spending so freely. about the middle of october an event happened that drew the town into a state of wild excitement, and such comparatively unimportant subjects as unemployment and starvation were almost forgotten. sir graball d'encloseland had been promoted to yet a higher post in the service of the country that he owned such a large part of; he was not only to have a higher and more honourable position, but also--as was nothing but right--a higher salary. his pay was to be increased to seven thousand five hundred a year or one hundred and fifty pounds per week, and in consequence of this promotion it was necessary for him to resign his seat and seek re-election. the ragged-trousered tory workmen as they loitered about the streets, their stomachs empty, said to each other that it was a great honour for mugsborough that their member should be promoted in this way. they boasted about it and assumed as much swagger in their gait as their broken boots permitted. they stuck election cards bearing sir graball's photograph in their windows and tied bits of blue and yellow ribbon--sir graball's colours--on their underfed children. the liberals were furious. they said that an election had been sprung on them--they had been taken a mean advantage of--they had no candidate ready. they had no complaint to make about the salary, all they complained of was the short notice. it wasn't fair because while they--the leading liberals--had been treating the electors with the contemptuous indifference that is customary, sir graball d'encloseland had been most active amongst his constituents for months past, cunningly preparing for the contest. he had really been electioneering for the past six months! last winter he had kicked off at quite a number of football matches besides doing all sorts of things for the local teams. he had joined the buffalos and the druids, been elected president of the skull and crossbones boys' society, and, although he was not himself an abstainer, he was so friendly to temperance that he had on several occasions, taken the chair at teetotal meetings, to say nothing of the teas to the poor school children and things of that sort. in short, he had been quite an active politician, in the tory sense of the word, for months past and the poor liberals had not smelt a rat until the election was sprung upon them. a hurried meeting of the liberal three hundred was held, and a deputation sent to london to find a candidate but as there was only a week before polling day they were unsuccessful in their mission. another meeting was held, presided over by mr adam sweater--rushton and didlum also being present. profound dejection was depicted on the countenances of those assembled slave-drivers as they listened to the delegates' report. the sombre silence that followed was broken at length by mr rushton, who suddenly started up and said that he began to think they had made a mistake in going outside the constituency at all to look for a man. it was strange but true that a prophet never received honour in his own land. they had been wasting the precious time running about all over the country, begging and praying for a candidate, and overlooking the fact that they had in their midst a gentleman--a fellow townsman, who, he believed, would have a better chance of success than any stranger. surely they would all agree--if they could only prevail upon him to stand--that adam sweater would be an ideal liberal candidate! while mr rushton was speaking the drooping spirits of the three hundred were reviving, and at the name of sweater they all began to clap their hands and stamp their feet. loud shouts of enthusiastic approval burst forth, and cries of 'good old sweater' resounded through the room. when sweater rose to reply, the tumult died away as suddenly as it had commenced. he thanked them for the honour they were conferring upon him. there was no time to waste in words or idle compliments; rather than allow the enemy to have a walk-over, he would accede to their request and contest the seat. a roar of applause burst from the throats of the delighted three hundred. outside the hall in which the meeting was being held a large crowd of poverty-stricken liberal working men, many of them wearing broken boots and other men's cast-off clothing, was waiting to hear the report of the slave-drivers' deputation, and as soon as sweater had consented to be nominated, didlum rushed and opened the window overlooking the street and shouted the good news down to the crowd, which joined in the cheering. in response to their demands for a speech, sweater brought his obese carcass to the window and addressed a few words to them, reminding them of the shortness of the time at their disposal, and intreating them to work hard in order that the grand old flag might be carried to victory. at such times these people forgot all about unemployment and starvation, and became enthusiastic about 'grand old flags'. their devotion to this flag was so great that so long as they were able to carry it to victory, they did not mind being poverty stricken and hungry and ragged; all that mattered was to score off their hated 'enemies' their fellow countrymen the tories, and carry the grand old flag to victory. the fact that they had carried the flag to victory so often in the past without obtaining any of the spoils, did not seem to damp their ardour in the least. being philanthropists, they were content--after winning the victory--that their masters should always do the looting. at the conclusion of sweater's remarks the philanthropists gave three frantic cheers and then someone in the crowd shouted 'what's the colour?' after a hasty consultation with rushton, who being a 'master' decorator, was thought to be an authority on colours--green--grass green--was decided upon, and the information was shouted down to the crowd, who cheered again. then a rush was made to sweater's emporium and several yards of cheap green ribbon were bought, and divided up into little pieces, which they tied into their buttonholes, and thus appropriately decorated, formed themselves into military order, four deep, and marched through all the principal streets, up and down the grand parade, round and round the fountain, and finally over the hill to windley, singing to the tune of 'tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching': 'vote, vote, vote for adam sweater! hang old closeland on a tree! adam sweater is our man, and we'll have him if we can, then we'll always have the biggest loaf for tea.' the spectacle presented by these men--some of them with grey heads and beards--as they marked time or tramped along singing this childish twaddle, would have been amusing if it had not been disgusting. by way of variety they sang several other things, including: 'we'll hang ole closeland on a sour apple tree,' and 'rally, rally, men of windley for sweater's sure to win.' as they passed the big church in quality street, the clock began to strike. it was one of those that strike four chimes at each quarter of the hour. it was now ten o'clock so there were sixteen musical chimes: ding, dong! ding dong! ding dong! ding dong! ding dong! ding dong! ding dong! ding dong! they all chanted a-dam sweat-er' in time with the striking clock. in the same way the tories would chant: 'grab--all close--land! grab--all close--land! grab--all close--land! grab--all close--land!' the town was soon deluged with mendacious literature and smothered with huge posters: 'vote for adam sweater! the working-man's friend!' 'vote for sweater and temperance reform.' 'vote for sweater--free trade and cheap food.' or 'vote for d'encloseland: tariff reform and plenty of work!' this beautiful idea--'plenty of work'--appealed strongly to the tory workmen. they seemed to regard themselves and their children as a sort of machines or beasts of burden, created for the purpose of working for the benefit of other people. they did not think it right that they should live, and enjoy the benefits of civilization. all they desired for themselves and their children was 'plenty of work'. they marched about the streets singing their marseillaise, 'work, boys, work and be contented', to the tune of 'tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching', and at intervals as they tramped along, they gave three cheers for sir graball, tariff reform, and--plenty of work. both sides imported gangs of hired orators who held forth every night at the corners of the principal streets, and on the open spaces from portable platforms, and from motor cars and lorries. the tories said that the liberal party in the house of commons was composed principally of scoundrels and fools, the liberals said that the tory party were fools and scoundrels. a host of richly dressed canvassers descended upon windley in carriages and motor cars, and begged for votes from the poverty-stricken working men who lived there. one evening a liberal demonstration was held at the cross roads on windley hill. notwithstanding the cold weather, there was a great crowd of shabbily dressed people, many of whom had not had a really good meal for months. it was a clear night. the moon was at the full, and the scene was further illuminated by the fitful glare of several torches, stuck on the end of twelve-foot poles. the platform was a large lorry, and there were several speakers, including adam sweater himself and a real live liberal peer--lord ammenegg. this individual had made a considerable fortune in the grocery and provision line, and had been elevated to the peerage by the last liberal government on account of his services to the party, and in consideration of other considerations. both sweater and ammenegg were to speak at two other meetings that night and were not expected at windley until about eight-thirty, so to keep the ball rolling till they arrived, several other gentlemen, including rushton--who presided--and didlum, and one of the five pounds a week orators, addressed the meeting. mingled with the crowd were about twenty rough-looking men--strangers to the town--who wore huge green rosettes and loudly applauded the speakers. they also distributed sweater literature and cards with lists of the different meetings that were to be held during the election. these men were bullies hired by sweater's agent. they came from the neighbourhood of seven dials in london and were paid ten shillings a day. one of their duties was to incite the crowd to bash anyone who disturbed the meetings or tried to put awkward questions to the speakers. the hired orator was a tall, slight man with dark hair, beard and moustache, he might have been called well-looking if it had not been for a ugly scar upon his forehead, which gave him a rather sinister appearance. he was an effective speaker; the audience punctuated his speech with cheers, and when he wound up with an earnest appeal to them--as working men--to vote for adam sweater, their enthusiasm knew no bounds. 'i've seen him somewhere before,' remarked barrington, who was standing in the crowd with harlow, owen and easton. 'so have i,' said owen, with a puzzled expression. 'but for the life of me, i can't remember where.' harlow and easton also thought they had seen the man before, but their speculations were put an end to by the roar of cheering that heralded the arrival of the motor car, containing adam sweater and his friend, lord ammenegg. unfortunately, those who had arranged the meeting had forgotten to provide a pair of steps, so sweater found it a matter of considerable difficulty to mount the platform. however, while his friends were hoisting and pushing him up, the meeting beguiled the time by singing: 'vote, vote, vote for adam sweater.' after a terrible struggle they succeeded in getting him on to the cart, and while he was recovering his wind, rushton made a few remarks to the crowd. sweater then advanced to the front, but in consequence of the cheering and singing, he was unable to make himself heard for several minutes. when at length he was able to proceed, ho made a very clever speech--it had been specially written for him and had cost ten guineas. a large part of it consisted of warnings against the dangers of socialism. sweater had carefully rehearsed this speech and he delivered it very effectively. some of those socialists, he said, were well-meaning but mistaken people, who did not realize the harm that would result if their extraordinary ideas were ever put into practice. he lowered his voice to a blood-curdling stage whisper as he asked: 'what is this socialism that we hear so much about, but which so few understand? what is it, and what does it mean?' then, raising his voice till it rang through the air and fell upon the ears of the assembled multitude like the clanging of a funeral bell, he continued: 'it is madness! chaos! anarchy! it means ruin! black ruin for the rich, and consequently, of course, blacker ruin still for the poor!' as sweater paused, a thrill of horror ran through the meeting. men wearing broken boots and with patches upon the seats and knees, and ragged fringes round the bottoms of the legs of their trousers, grew pale, and glanced apprehensively at each other. if ever socialism did come to pass, they evidently thought it very probable that they would have to walk about in a sort of prehistoric highland costume, without any trousers or boots at all. toil-worn women, most of them dressed in other women's shabby cast-off clothing--weary, tired-looking mothers who fed their children for the most part on adulterated tea, tinned skimmed milk and bread and margarine, grew furious as they thought of the wicked socialists who were trying to bring ruin upon them. it never occurred to any of these poor people that they were in a condition of ruin, black ruin, already. but if sweater had suddenly found himself reduced to the same social condition as the majority of those he addressed, there is not much doubt that he would have thought that he was in a condition of black ruin. the awful silence that had fallen on the panic-stricken crowd, was presently broken by a ragged-trousered philanthropist, who shouted out: 'we knows wot they are, sir. most of 'em is chaps wot's got tired of workin' for their livin', so they wants us to keep 'em.' encouraged by numerous expressions of approval from the other philanthropists, the man continued: 'but we ain't such fools as they thinks, and so they'll find out next monday. most of 'em wants 'angin', and i wouldn't mind lendin' a 'and with the rope myself.' applause and laughter greeted these noble sentiments, and sweater resumed his address, when another man--evidently a socialist--for he was accompanied by three or four others who like himself wore red ties--interrupted and said that he would like to ask him a question. no notice was taken of this request either by mr sweater or the chairman, but a few angry cries of 'order!' came from the crowd. sweater continued, but the man again interrupted and the cries of the crowd became more threatening. rushton started up and said that he could not allow the speaker to be interrupted, but if the gentleman would wait till the end of the meeting, he would have an opportunity of asking his question then. the man said he would wait as desired; sweater resumed his oration, and presently the interrupter and his friends found themselves surrounded by the gang of hired bullies who wore the big rosettes and who glared menacingly at them. sweater concluded his speech with an appeal to the crowd to deal a 'slashing bow at the enemy' next monday, and then amid a storm of applause, lord ammenegg stepped to the front. he said that he did not intend to inflict a long speech upon them that evening, and as it was nomination day tomorrow he would not be able to have the honour of addressing them again during the election; but even if he had wished to make a long speech, it would be very difficult after the brilliant and eloquent address they had just listened to from mr sweater, for it seemed to him (ammenegg) that adam sweater had left nothing for anyone else to say. but he would like to tell them of a thought that had occurred to him that evening. they read in the bible that the wise men came from the east. windley, as they all knew, was the east end of the town. they were the men of the east, and he was sure that next monday they would prove that they were the wise men of the east, by voting for adam sweater and putting him at the top of the poll with a 'thumping majority'. the wise men of the east greeted ammenegg's remarks with prolonged, imbecile cheers, and amid the tumult his lordship and sweater got into the motor car and cleared off without giving the man with the red tie or anyone else who desired to ask questions any opportunity of doing so. rushton and the other leaders got into another motor car, and followed the first to take part in another meeting down-town, which was to be addressed by the great sir featherstone blood. the crowd now resolved itself into military order, headed by the men with torches and a large white banner on which was written in huge black letters, 'our man is adam sweater'. they marched down the hill singing, and when they reached the fountain on the grand parade they saw another crowd holding a meeting there. these were tories and they became so infuriated at the sound of the liberal songs and by the sight of the banner, that they abandoned their meeting and charged the processionists. a free fight ensued. both sides fought like savages, but as the liberals were outnumbered by about three to one, they were driven off the field with great slaughter; most of the torch poles were taken from them, and the banner was torn to ribbons. then the tories went back to the fountain carrying the captured torches, and singing to the tune of 'has anyone seen a german band?' 'has anyone seen a lib'ral flag, lib'ral flag, lib'ral flag?' while the tories resumed their meeting at the fountain, the liberals rallied in one of the back streets. messengers were sent in various directions for reinforcements, and about half an hour afterwards they emerged from their retreat and swooped down upon the tory meeting. they overturned the platform, recaptured their torches, tore the enemy's banner to tatters and drove them from their position. then the liberals in their turn paraded the streets singing 'has anyone seen a tory flag?' and proceeded to the hall where sir featherstone was speaking, arriving as the audience left. the crowd that came pouring out of the hall was worked up to a frenzy of enthusiasm, for the speech they had just listened to had been a sort of manifesto to the country. in response to the cheering of the processionists--who, of course, had not heard the speech, but were cheering from force of habit--sir featherstone blood stood up in the carriage and addressed the crowd, briefly outlining the great measures of social reform that his party proposed to enact to improve the condition of the working classes; and as they listened, the wise men grew delirious with enthusiasm. he referred to land taxes and death duties which would provide money to build battleships to protect the property of the rich, and provide work for the poor. another tax was to provide a nice, smooth road for the rich to ride upon in motor cars--and to provide work for the poor. another tax would be used for development, which would also make work for the poor. and so on. a great point was made of the fact that the rich were actually to be made to pay something towards the cost of their road themselves! but nothing was said about how they would get the money to do it. no reference was made to how the workers would be sweated and driven and starved to earn dividends and rent and interest and profits to put into the pockets of the rich before the latter would be able to pay for anything at all. these are the things, gentlemen, that we propose to do for you, and, at the rate of progress which we propose to adopt, i say without fear or contradiction, that within the next five hundred years we shall so reform social conditions in this country, that the working classes will be able to enjoy some of the benefits of civilization. 'the only question before you is: are you willing to wait for five hundred years?' 'yes, sir,' shouted the wise men with enthusiasm at the glorious prospect. 'yes, sir: we'll wait a thousand years if you like, sir!' 'i've been waiting all my life,' said one poor old veteran, who had assisted to 'carry the "old flag" to victory' times out of number in the past and who for his share of the spoils of those victories was now in a condition of abject, miserable poverty, with the portals of the workhouse yawning open to receive him; 'i've waited all my life, hoping and trusting for better conditions so a few more years won't make much difference to me.' 'don't you trouble to 'urry yourself, sir,' shouted another solomon in the crowd. 'we don't mind waiting. take your own time, sir. you know better than the likes of us 'ow long it ought to take.' in conclusion, the great man warned them against being led away by the socialists, those foolish, unreasonable, impractical people who wanted to see an immediate improvement in their condition; and he reminded them that rome was not built in a day. the wise men applauded lustily. it did not appear to occur to any of them that the rate at which the ancient roman conducted their building operations had nothing whatever to do with the case. sir featherstone blood sat down amid a wild storm of cheering, and then the procession reformed, and, reinforced by the audience from the hall, they proceeded to march about the dreary streets, singing, to the tune of the 'men of harlech': 'vote for sweater, vote for sweater! vote for sweater, vote for sweater! 'he's the man, who has a plan, to liberate and reinstate the workers! 'men of mugs'bro', show your mettle, let them see that you're in fettle! once for all this question settle sweater shall prevail!' the carriage containing sir featherstone, adam sweater, and rushton and didlum was in the middle of the procession. the banner and the torches were at the head, and the grandeur of the scene was heightened by four men who walked--two on each side of the carriage, burning green fire in frying pans. as they passed by the slave market, a poor, shabbily dressed wretch whose boots were so worn and rotten that they were almost falling off his feet, climbed up a lamp-post, and taking off his cap waved it in the air and shrieked out: 'three cheers for sir featherstone blood, our future prime minister!' the philanthropists cheered themselves hoarse and finally took the horses out of the traces and harnessed themselves to the carriage instead. ''ow much wages will sir featherstone get if 'e is made prime minister?' asked harlow of another philanthropist who was also pushing up behind the carriage. 'five thousand a year,' replied the other, who by some strange chance happened to know. 'that comes to a 'underd pounds a week.' 'little enough, too, for a man like 'im,' said harlow. 'you're right, mate,' said the other, with deep sympathy in his voice. 'last time 'e 'eld office 'e was only in for five years, so 'e only made twenty-five thousand pounds out of it. of course 'e got a pension as well--two thousand a year for life, i think it is; but after all, what's that--for a man like 'im?' 'nothing,' replied harlow, in a tone of commiseration, and newman, who was also there, helping to drag the carriage, said that it ought to be at least double that amount. however, they found some consolation in knowing that sir featherstone would not have to wait till he was seventy before he obtained his pension; he would get it directly he came out of office. the following evening barrington, owen and a few others of the same way of thinking, who had subscribed enough money between them to purchase a lot of socialist leaflets, employed themselves distributing them to the crowds at the liberal and tory meetings, and whilst they were doing this they frequently became involved in arguments with the supporters of the capitalist system. in their attempts to persuade others to refrain from voting for either of the candidates, they were opposed even by some who professed to believe in socialism, who said that as there was no better socialist candidate the thing to do was to vote for the better of the two. this was the view of harlow and easton, whom they met. harlow had a green ribbon in his buttonhole, but easton wore d'encloseland's colours. one man said that if he had his way, all those who had votes should be compelled to record them--whether they liked it or not--or be disenfranchised! barrington asked him if he believed in tarrif reform. the man said no. 'why not?' demanded barrington. the other replied that he opposed tariff reform because he believed it would ruin the country. barrington inquired if he were a supporter of socialism. the man said he was not, and when further questioned he said that he believed if it were ever adopted it would bring black ruin upon the country--he believed this because mr sweater had said so. when barrington asked him--supposing there were only two candidates, one a socialist and the other a tariff reformer--how would he like to be compelled to vote for one of them, he was at a loss for an answer. during the next few days the contest continued. the hired orators continued to pour forth their streams of eloquence; and tons of literature flooded the town. the walls were covered with huge posters: 'another liberal lie.' 'another tory fraud.' unconsciously each of these two parties put in some splendid work for socialism, in so much that each of them thoroughly exposed the hypocrisy of the other. if the people had only had the sense, they might have seen that the quarrel between the liberal and tory leaders was merely a quarrel between thieves over the spoil; but unfortunately most of the people had not the sense to perceive this. they were blinded by bigoted devotion to their parties, and--inflamed with maniacal enthusiasm--thought of nothing but 'carrying their flags to victory'. at considerable danger to themselves, barrington, owen and the other socialists continued to distribute their leaflets and to heckle the liberal and tory speakers. they asked the tories to explain the prevalence of unemployment and poverty in protected countries, like germany and america, and at sweater's meetings they requested to be informed what was the liberal remedy for unemployment. from both parties the socialists obtained the same kinds of answer--threats of violence and requests 'not to disturb the meeting'. these socialists held quite a lot of informal meetings on their own. every now and then when they were giving their leaflets away, some unwary supporter of the capitalist system would start an argument, and soon a crowd would gather round and listen. sometimes the socialists succeeded in arguing their opponents to an absolute standstill, for the liberals and tones found it impossible to deny that machinery is the cause of the overcrowded state of the labour market; that the overcrowded labour market is the cause of unemployment; that the fact of there being always an army of unemployed waiting to take other men's jobs away from them destroys the independence of those who are in employment and keeps them in subjection to their masters. they found it impossible to deny that this machinery is being used, not for the benefit of all, but to make fortunes for a few. in short, they were unable to disprove that the monopoly of the land and machinery by a comparatively few persons, is the cause of the poverty of the majority. but when these arguments that they were unable to answer were put before them and when it was pointed out that the only possible remedy was the public ownership and management of the means of production, they remained angrily silent, having no alternative plan to suggest. at other times the meeting resolved itself into a number of quarrelsome disputes between the liberals and tories that formed the crowd, which split itself up into a lot of little groups and whatever the original subject might have been they soon drifted to a hundred other things, for most of the supporters of the present system seemed incapable of pursuing any one subject to its logical conclusion. a discussion would be started about something or other; presently an unimportant side issue would crop up, then the original subject would be left unfinished, and they would argue and shout about the side issue. in a little while another side issue would arise, and then the first side issue would be abandoned also unfinished, and an angry wrangle about the second issue would ensue, the original subject being altogether forgotten. they did not seem to really desire to discover the truth or to find out the best way to bring about an improvement in their condition, their only object seemed to be to score off their opponents. usually after one of these arguments, owen would wander off by himself, with his head throbbing and a feeling of unutterable depression and misery at his heart; weighed down by a growing conviction of the hopelessness of everything, of the folly of expecting that his fellow workmen would ever be willing to try to understand for themselves the causes that produced their sufferings. it was not that those causes were so obscure that it required exceptional intelligence to perceive them; the causes of all the misery were so apparent that a little child could easily be made to understand both the disease and the remedy; but it seemed to him that the majority of his fellow workmen had become so convinced of their own intellectual inferiority that they did not dare to rely on their own intelligence to guide them, preferring to resign the management of their affairs unreservedly into the hands of those who battened upon and robbed them. they did not know the causes of the poverty that perpetually held them and their children in its cruel grip, and--they did not want to know! and if one explained those causes to them in such language and in such a manner that they were almost compelled to understand, and afterwards pointed out to them the obvious remedy, they were neither glad nor responsive, but remained silent and were angry because they found themselves unable to answer and disprove. they remained silent; afraid to trust their own intelligence, and the reason of this attitude was that they had to choose between the evidence and their own intelligence, and the stories told them by their masters and exploiters. and when it came to making this choice they deemed it safer to follow their old guides, than to rely on their own judgement, because from their very infancy they had had drilled into them the doctrine of their own mental and social inferiority, and their conviction of the truth of this doctrine was voiced in the degraded expression that fell so frequently from their lips, when speaking of themselves and each other--'the likes of us!' they did not know the causes of their poverty, they did not want to know, they did not want to hear. all they desired was to be left alone so that they might continue to worship and follow those who took advantage of their simplicity, and robbed them of the fruits of their toil; their old leaders, the fools or scoundrels who fed them with words, who had led them into the desolation where they now seemed to be content to grind out treasure for their masters, and to starve when those masters did not find it profitable to employ them. it was as if a flock of foolish sheep placed themselves under the protection of a pack of ravening wolves. several times the small band of socialists narrowly escaped being mobbed, but they succeeded in disposing of most of their leaflets without any serious trouble. towards the latter part of one evening barrington and owen became separated from the others, and shortly afterwards these two lost each other in the crush. about nine o'clock, barrington was in a large liberal crowd, listening to the same hired orator who had spoken a few evenings before on the hill--the man with the scar on his forehead. the crowd was applauding him loudly and barrington again fell to wondering where he had seen this man before. as on the previous occasion, this speaker made no reference to socialism, confining himself to other matters. barrington examined him closely, trying to recall under what circumstances they had met previously, and presently he remembered that this was one of the socialists who had come with the band of cyclists into the town that sunday morning, away back at the beginning of the summer, the man who had come afterwards with the van, and who had been struck down by a stone while attempting to speak from the platform of the van, the man who had been nearly killed by the upholders of the capitalist system. it was the same man! the socialist had been clean-shaven--this man wore beard and moustache--but barrington was certain he was the same. when the man had concluded his speech he got down and stood in the shade behind the platform, while someone else addressed the meeting, and barrington went round to where he was standing, intending to speak to him. all around them, pandemonium reigned supreme. they were in the vicinity of the slave market, near the fountain, on the grand parade, where several roads met; there was a meeting going on at every corner, and a number of others in different parts of the roadway and on the pavement of the parade. some of these meetings were being carried on by two or three men, who spoke in turn from small, portable platforms they carried with them, and placed wherever they thought there was a chance of getting an audience. every now and then some of these poor wretches--they were all paid speakers--were surrounded and savagely mauled and beaten by a hostile crowd. if they were tariff reformers the liberals mobbed them, and vice versa. lines of rowdies swaggered to and fro, arm in arm, singing, 'vote, vote, vote, for good ole closeland' or 'good ole sweater', according as they were green or blue and yellow. gangs of hooligans paraded up and down, armed with sticks, singing, howling, cursing and looking for someone to hit. others stood in groups on the pavement with their hands thrust in their pockets, or leaned against walls or the shutters of the shops with expressions of ecstatic imbecility on their faces, chanting the mournful dirge to the tune of the church chimes, 'good--ole--sweat--er good--ole--sweat--er good--ole--sweat--er good--ole--sweat--er.' other groups--to the same tune--sang 'good--ole--close--land'; and every now and again they used to leave off singing and begin to beat each other. fights used to take place, often between workmen, about the respective merits of adam sweater and sir graball d'encloseland. the walls were covered with huge liberal and tory posters, which showed in every line the contempt of those who published them for the intelligence of the working men to whom they were addressed. there was one tory poster that represented the interior of a public house; in front of the bar, with a quart pot in his hand, a clay pipe in his mouth, and a load of tools on his back, stood a degraded-looking brute who represented the tory ideal of what an englishman should be; the letterpress on the poster said it was a man! this is the ideal of manhood that they hold up to the majority of their fellow countrymen, but privately--amongst themselves--the tory aristocrats regard such 'men' with far less respect than they do the lower animals. horses or dogs, for instance. the liberal posters were not quite so offensive. they were more cunning, more specious, more hypocritical and consequently more calculated to mislead and deceive the more intelligent of the voters. when barrington got round to the back of the platform, he found the man with the scarred face standing alone and gloomily silent in the shadow. barrington gave him one of the socialist leaflets, which he took, and after glancing at it, put it in his coat pocket without making any remark. 'i hope you'll excuse me for asking, but were you not formerly a socialist?' said barrington. even in the semi-darkness barrington saw the other man flush deeply and then become very pale, and the unsightly scar upon his forehead showed with ghastly distinctiveness. 'i am still a socialist: no man who has once been a socialist can ever cease to be one.' 'you seem to have accomplished that impossibility, to judge by the work you are at present engaged in. you must have changed your opinions since you were here last.' 'no one who has been a socialist can ever cease to be one. it is impossible for a man who has once acquired knowledge ever to relinquish it. a socialist is one who understands the causes of the misery and degradation we see all around us; who knows the only remedy, and knows that that remedy--the state of society that will be called socialism--must eventually be adopted; is the only alternative to the extermination of the majority of the working people; but it does not follow that everyone who has sense enough to acquire that amount of knowledge, must, in addition, be willing to sacrifice himself in order to help to bring that state of society into being. when i first acquired that knowledge,' he continued, bitterly, 'i was eager to tell the good news to others. i sacrificed my time, my money, and my health in order that i might teach others what i had learned myself. i did it willingly and happily, because i thought they would be glad to hear, and that they were worth the sacrifices i made for their sakes. but i know better now.' 'even if you no longer believe in working for socialism, there's no need to work against it. if you are not disposed to sacrifice yourself in order to do good to others, you might at least refrain from doing evil. if you don't want to help to bring about a better state of affairs, there's no reason why you should help to perpetuate the present system.' the other man laughed bitterly. 'oh yes, there is, and a very good reason too.' 'i don't think you could show me a reason,' said barrington. the man with the scar laughed again, the same unpleasant, mirthless laugh, and thrusting his hand into his trouser pocket drew it out again full of silver coins, amongst which one or two gold pieces glittered. 'that is my reason. when i devoted my life and what abilities i possess to the service of my fellow workmen; when i sought to teach them how to break their chains; when i tried to show them how they might save their children from poverty and shameful servitude, i did not want them to give me money. i did it for love. and they paid me with hatred and injury. but since i have been helping their masters to rob them, they have treated me with respect.' barrington made no reply and the other man, having returned the money to his pocket, indicated the crowd with a sweep of his hand. 'look at them!' he continued with a contemptuous laugh. 'look at them! the people you are trying to make idealists of! look at them! some of them howling and roaring like wild beasts, or laughing like idiots, others standing with dull and stupid faces devoid of any trace of intelligence or expression, listening to the speakers whose words convey no meaning to their stultified minds, and others with their eyes gleaming with savage hatred of their fellow men, watching eagerly for an opportunity to provoke a quarrel that they may gratify their brutal natures by striking someone--their eyes are hungry for the sight of blood! can't you see that these people, whom you are trying to make understand your plan for the regeneration of the world, your doctrine of universal brotherhood and love are for the most part--intellectually--on a level with hottentots? the only things they feel any real interest in are beer, football, betting and--of course--one other subject. their highest ambition is to be allowed to work. and they desire nothing better for their children! 'they have never had an independent thought in their lives. these are the people whom you hope to inspire with lofty ideals! you might just as well try to make a gold brooch out of a lump of dung! try to reason with them, to uplift them, to teach them the way to higher things. devote your whole life and intelligence to the work of trying to get better conditions for them, and you will find that they themselves are the enemy you will have to fight against. they'll hate you, and, if they get the chance, they'll tear you to pieces. but if you're a sensible man you'll use whatever talents and intelligence you possess for your own benefit. don't think about socialism or any other "ism". concentrate your mind on getting money--it doesn't matter how you get it, but--get it. if you can't get it honestly, get it dishonestly, but get it! it is the only thing that counts. do as i do--rob them! exploit them! and then they'll have some respect for you.' 'there's something in what you say,' replied barrington, after a long pause, 'but it's not all. circumstances make us what we are; and anyhow, the children are worth fighting for.' 'you may think so now,' said the other, 'but you'll come to see it my way some day. as for the children--if their parents are satisfied to let them grow up to be half-starved drudges for other people, i don't see why you or i need trouble about it. if you like to listen to reason,' he continued after a pause, 'i can put you on to something that will be worth more to you than all your socialism.' 'what do you mean?' 'look here: you're a socialist; well, i'm a socialist too: that is, i have sense enough to believe that socialism is practical and inevitable and right; it will come when the majority of the people are sufficiently enlightened to demand it, but that enlightenment will never be brought about by reasoning or arguing with them, for these people are simply not intellectually capable of abstract reasoning--they can't grasp theories. you know what the late lord salisbury said about them when somebody proposed to give them some free libraries: he said: "they don't want libraries: give them a circus." you see these liberals and tories understand the sort of people they have to deal with; they know that although their bodies are the bodies of grown men, their minds are the minds of little children. that is why it has been possible to deceive and bluff and rob them for so long. but your party persists in regarding them as rational beings, and that's where you make a mistake--you're simply wasting your time. 'the only way in which it is possible to teach these people is by means of object lessons, and those are being placed before them in increasing numbers every day. the trustification of industry--the object lesson which demonstrates the possibility of collective ownership--will in time compel even these to understand, and by the time they have learnt that, they will also have learned by bitter experience and not from theoretical teaching, that they must either own the trusts or perish, and then, and not, till then, they will achieve socialism. but meanwhile we have this election. do you think it will make any real difference--for good or evil--which of these two men is elected?' 'no.' 'well, you can't keep them both out--you have no candidate of your own--why should you object to earning a few pounds by helping one of them to get in? there are plenty of voters who are doubtful what to do; as you and i know there is every excuse for them being unable to make up their minds which of these two candidates is the worse, a word from your party would decide them. since you have no candidate of your own you will be doing no harm to socialism and you will be doing yourself a bit of good. if you like to come along with me now, i'll introduce you to sweater's agent--no one need know anything about it.' he slipped his arm through barrington's, but the latter released himself. 'please yourself,' said the other with an affectation of indifference. 'you know your own business best. you may choose to be a jesus christ if you like, but for my part i'm finished. for the future i intend to look after myself. as for these people--they vote for what they want; they get--what they vote for; and by god, they deserve nothing better! they are being beaten with whips of their own choosing and if i had my way they should be chastised with scorpions! for them, the present system means joyless drudgery, semi-starvation, rags and premature death. they vote for it all and uphold it. well, let them have what they vote for--let them drudge--let them starve!' the man with the scarred face ceased speaking, and for some moments barrington did not reply. 'i suppose there is some excuse for your feeling as you do,' he said slowly at last, 'but it seems to me that you do not make enough allowance for the circumstances. from their infancy most of them have been taught by priests and parents to regard themselves and their own class with contempt--a sort of lower animals--and to regard those who possess wealth with veneration, as superior beings. the idea that they are really human creatures, naturally absolutely the same as their so-called betters, naturally equal in every way, naturally different from them only in those ways in which their so-called superiors differ from each other, and inferior to them only because they have been deprived of education, culture and opportunity--you know as well as i do that they have all been taught to regard that idea as preposterous. 'the self-styled "christian" priests who say--with their tongues in their cheeks--that god is our father and that all men are brethren, have succeeded in convincing the majority of the "brethren" that it is their duty to be content in their degradation, and to order themselves lowly and reverently towards their masters. your resentment should be directed against the deceivers, not against the dupes.' the other man laughed bitterly. 'well, go and try to undeceive them,' he said, as he returned to the platform in response to a call from his associates. 'go and try to teach them that the supreme being made the earth and all its fullness for the use and benefit of all his children. go and try to explain to them that they are poor in body and mind and social condition, not because of any natural inferiority, but because they have been robbed of their inheritance. go and try to show them how to secure that inheritance for themselves and their children--and see how grateful they'll be to you.' for the next hour barrington walked about the crowded streets in a dispirited fashion. his conversation with the renegade seemed to have taken all the heart out of him. he still had a number of the leaflets, but the task of distributing them had suddenly grown distasteful and after a while he discontinued it. all his enthusiasm was gone. like one awakened from a dream he saw the people who surrounded him in a different light. for the first time he properly appreciated the offensiveness of most of those to whom he offered the handbills; some, without even troubling to ascertain what they were about, rudely refused to accept them; some took them and after glancing at the printing, crushed them in their hands and ostentatiously threw them away. others, who recognized him as a socialist, angrily or contemptuously declined them, often with curses or injurious words. his attention was presently attracted to a crowd of about thirty or forty people, congregated near a gas lamp at the roadside. the sound of many angry voices rose from the centre of this group, and as he stood on the outskirts of the crowd, barrington, being tall, was able to look into the centre, where he saw owen. the light of the street lamp fell full upon the latter's pale face, as he stood silent in the midst of a ring of infuriated men, who were all howling at him at once, and whose malignant faces bore expressions of savage hatred, as they shouted out the foolish accusations and slanders they had read in the liberal and tory papers. socialists wished to do away with religion and morality! to establish free love and atheism! all the money that the working classes had saved up in the post office and the friendly societies, was to be robbed from them and divided up amongst a lot of drunken loafers who were too lazy to work. the king and all the royal family were to be done away with! and so on. owen made no attempt to reply, and the manner of the crowd became every moment more threatening. it was evident that several of them found it difficult to refrain from attacking him. it was a splendid opportunity of doing a little fighting without running any risks. this fellow was all by himself, and did not appear to be much of a man even at that. those in the middle were encouraged by shouts from others in the crowd, who urged them to 'go for him' and at last--almost at the instant of barrington's arrival--one of the heroes, unable to contain himself any longer, lifted a heavy stick and struck owen savagely across the face. the sight of the blood maddened the others, and in an instant everyone who could get within striking distance joined furiously in the onslaught, reaching eagerly over each other's shoulders, showering blows upon him with sticks and fists, and before barrington could reach his side, they had owen down on the ground, and had begun to use their boots upon him. barrington felt like a wild beast himself, as he fiercely fought his way through the crowd, spurning them to right and left with fists and elbows. he reached the centre in time to seize the uplifted arm of the man who had led the attack and wrenching the stick from his hand, he felled him to the ground with a single blow. the remainder shrank back, and meantime the crowd was augmented by others who came running up. some of these newcomers were liberals and some tories, and as these did not know what the row was about they attacked each other. the liberals went for those who wore tory colours and vice versa, and in a few seconds there was a general free fight, though most of the original crowd ran away, and in the confusion that ended, barrington and owen got out of the crowd without further molestation. monday was the last day of the election--polling day--and in consequence of the number of motor cars that were flying about, the streets were hardly safe for ordinary traffic. the wealthy persons who owned these carriages... the result of the poll was to be shown on an illuminated sign at the town hall, at eleven o'clock that night, and long before that hour a vast crowd gathered in the adjacent streets. about ten o'clock it began to rain, but the crowd stood its ground and increased in numbers as the time went by. at a quarter to eleven the rain increased to a terrible downpour, but the people remained waiting to know which hero had conquered. eleven o'clock came and an intense silence fell upon the crowd, whose eyes were fixed eagerly upon the window where the sign was to be exhibited. to judge by the extraordinary interest displayed by these people, one might have thought that they expected to reap some great benefit or to sustain some great loss from the result, but of course that was not the case, for most of them knew perfectly well that the result of this election would make no more real difference to them than all the other elections that had gone before. they wondered what the figures would be. there were ten thousand voters on the register. at a quarter past eleven the sign was illuminated, but the figures were not yet shown. next, the names of the two candidates were slid into sight, the figures were still missing, but d'encloseland's name was on top, and a hoarse roar of triumph came from the throats of his admirers. then the two slides with the names were withdrawn, and the sign was again left blank. after a time the people began to murmur at all this delay and messing about, and presently some of them began to groan and hoot. after a few minutes the names were again slid into view, this time with sweater's name on top, and the figures appeared immediately afterwards: sweater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,221 d'encloseland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,200 it was several seconds before the liberals could believe their eyes; it was too good to be true. it is impossible to say what was the reason of the wild outburst of delighted enthusiasm that followed, but whatever the reason, whatever the benefit was that they expected to reap--there was the fact. they were all cheering and dancing and shaking hands with each other, and some of them were so overcome with inexplicable joy that they were scarcely able to speak. it was altogether extraordinary and unaccountable. a few minutes after the declaration, sweater appeared at the window and made a sort of a speech, but only fragments of it were audible to the cheering crowd who at intervals caught such phrases as 'slashing blow', 'sweep the country', 'grand old liberal flag', and so on. next d'encloseland appeared and he was seen to shake hands with mr sweater, whom he referred to as 'my friend'. when the two 'friends' disappeared from the window, the part of the liberal crowd that was not engaged in hand-to-hand fights with their enemies--the tories--made a rush to the front entrance of the town hall, where sweater's carriage was waiting, and as soon as he had placed his plump rotundity inside, they took the horses out and amid frantic cheers harnessed themselves to it instead and dragged it through the mud and the pouring rain all the way to 'the cave'--most of them were accustomed to acting as beasts of burden--where he again addressed a few words to them from the porch. afterwards as they walked home saturated with rain and covered from head to foot with mud, they said it was a great victory for the cause of progress! truly the wolves have an easy prey. chapter 49 the undesired that evening about seven o'clock, whilst easton was down-town seeing the last of the election, ruth's child was born. after the doctor was gone, mary linden stayed with her during the hours that elapsed before easton came home, and downstairs elsie and charley--who were allowed to stay up late to help their mother because mrs easton was ill--crept about very quietly, and conversed in hushed tones as they washed up the tea things and swept the floor and tidied the kitchen. easton did not return until after midnight, and all through the intervening hours, ruth, weak and tired, but unable to sleep, was lying in bed with the child by her side. her wide-open eyes appeared unnaturally large and brilliant, in contrast with the almost death-like paleness of her face, and there was a look of fear in them, as she waited and listened for the sound of easton's footsteps. outside, the silence of the night was disturbed by many unusual noises: a far-off roar, as of the breaking of waves on a seashore, arose from the direction of the town, where the last scenes of the election were being enacted. every few minutes motor cars rushed past the house at a furious rate, and the air was full of the sounds of distant shouts and singing. ruth listened and started nervously at every passing footstep. those who can imagine the kind of expression there would be upon the face of a hunted thief, who, finding himself encompassed and brought to bay by his pursuers, looks wildly around in a vain search for some way of escape, may be able to form some conception of the terror-stricken way in which she listened to every sound that penetrated into the stillness of the dimly lighted room. and ever and again, when her wandering glance reverted to the frail atom of humanity nestling by her side, her brows contracted and her eyes filled with bitter tears, as she weakly reached out her trembling hand to adjust its coverings, faintly murmuring, with quivering lips and a bursting heart, some words of endearment and pity. and then--alarmed by the footsteps of some chance passerby, or by the closing of the door of a neighbouring house, and fearing that it was the sound she had been waiting for and dreading through all those weary hours, she would turn in terror to mary linden, sitting in the chair at the bedside, sewing by the light of the shaded lamp, and take hold of her arm as if seeking protection from some impending danger. it was after twelve o'clock when easton came home. ruth recognized his footsteps before he reached the house, and her heart seemed to stop beating when she heard the clang of the gate, as it closed after he had passed through. it had been mary's intention to withdraw before he came into the room, but the sick woman clung to her in such evident fear, and entreated her so earnestly not to go away, that she remained. it was with a feeling of keen disappointment that easton noticed how ruth shrank away from him, for he had expected and hoped, that after this, they would be good friends once more; but he tried to think that it was because she was ill, and when she would not let him touch the child lest he should awaken it, he agreed without question. the next day, and for the greater part of the time during the next fortnight, ruth was in a raging fever. there were intervals when although weak and exhausted, she was in her right mind, but most of the time she was quite unconscious of her surroundings and often delirious. mrs owen came every day to help to look after her, because mary just then had a lot of needlework to do, and consequently could only give part of her time to ruth, who, in her delirium, lived and told over and over again all the sorrow and suffering of the last few months. and so the two friends, watching by her bedside, learned her dreadful secret. sometimes--in her delirium--she seemed possessed of an intense and terrible loathing for the poor little creature she had brought into the world, and was with difficulty prevented from doing it violence. once she seized it cruelly and threw it fiercely from her to the foot of the bed, as if it had been some poisonous or loathsome thing. and so it often became necessary to take the child away out of the room, so that she could not see or hear it, but when her senses came back to her, her first thought was for the child, and there must have been in her mind some faint recollection of what she had said and done in her madness, for when she saw that the baby was not in its accustomed place her distress and alarm were painful to see, as she entreated them with tears to give it back to her. and then she would kiss and fondle it with all manner of endearing words, and cry bitterly. easton did not see or hear most of this; he only knew that she was very ill; for he went out every day on the almost hopeless quest for work. rushton's had next to nothing to do, and most of the other shops were in a similar plight. dauber and botchit had one or two jobs going on, and easton tried several times to get a start for them, but was always told they were full up. the sweating methods of this firm continued to form a favourite topic of conversation with the unemployed workmen, who railed at and cursed them horribly. it had leaked out that they were paying only sixpence an hour to most of the skilled workmen in their employment, and even then the conditions under which they worked were, if possible, worse than those obtaining at most other firms. the men were treated like so many convicts, and every job was a hell where driving and bullying reigned supreme, and obscene curses and blasphemy polluted the air from morning till night. the resentment of those who were out of work was directed, not only against the heads of the firm, but also against the miserable, half-starved drudges in their employment. these poor wretches were denounced as 'scabs' and 'wastrels' by the unemployed workmen but all the same, whenever dauber and botchit wanted some extra hands they never had any difficulty in obtaining them, and it often happened that those who had been loudest and bitterest in their denunciations were amongst the first to rush off eagerly to apply there for a job whenever there was a chance of getting one. frequently the light was seen burning late at night in rushton's office, where nimrod and his master were figuring out prices and writing out estimates, cutting down the amounts to the lowest possible point in the hope of underbidding their rivals. now and then they were successful but whether they secured the work or not, nimrod always appeared equally miserable. if they got the 'job' it often showed such a small margin of profit that rushton used to grumble at him and suggest mismanagement. if their estimates were too high and they lost the work, he used to demand of nimrod why it was possible for dauber and botchit to do work so much more cheaply. as the unemployed workmen stood in groups at the corners or walked aimlessly about the streets, they often saw hunter pass by on his bicycle, looking worried and harassed. he was such a picture of misery, that it began to be rumoured amongst the men, that he had never been the same since the time he had that fall off the bike; and some of them declared, that they wouldn't mind betting that ole misery would finish up by going off his bloody rocker. at intervals--whenever a job came in--owen, crass, slyme, sawkins and one or two others, continued to be employed at rushton's, but they seldom managed to make more than two or three days a week, even when there was anything to do. chapter 50 sundered during the next few weeks ruth continued very ill. although the delirium had left her and did not return, her manner was still very strange, and it was remarkable that she slept but little and at long intervals. mrs owen came to look after her every day, not going back to her own home till the evening. frankie used to call for her as he came out of school and then they used to go home together, taking little freddie easton with them also, for his own mother was not able to look after him and mary linden had so much other work to do. on wednesday evening, when the child was about five weeks old, as mrs owen was wishing her good night, ruth took hold of her hand and after saying how grateful she was for all that she had done, she asked whether--supposing anything happened to herself--nora would promise to take charge of freddie for easton. owen's wife gave the required promise, at the same time affecting to regard the supposition as altogether unlikely, and assuring her that she would soon be better, but she secretly wondered why ruth had not mentioned the other child as well. nora went away about five o'clock, leaving ruth's bedroom door open so that mrs linden could hear her call if she needed anything. about a quarter of an hour after nora and the two children had gone, mary linden went upstairs to see ruth, who appeared to have fallen fast asleep; so she returned to her needlework downstairs. the weather had been very cloudy all day, there had been rain at intervals and it was a dark evening, so dark that she had to light the lamp to see her work. charley sat on the hearthrug in front of the fire repairing one of the wheels of a wooden cart that he had made with the assistance of another boy, and elsie busied herself preparing the tea. easton was not yet home; rushton & co. had a few jobs to do and he had been at work since the previous thursday. the place where he was working was some considerable distance away, so it was nearly half past six when he came home. they heard him at the gate and at her mother's direction elsie went quickly to the front door, which was ajar, to ask him to walk as quietly as possible so as not to wake ruth. mary had prepared the table for his tea in the kitchen, where there was a bright fire with the kettle singing on the hob. he lit the lamp and after removing his hat and overcoat, put the kettle on the fire and while he was waiting for it to boil he went softly upstairs. there was no lamp burning in the bedroom and the place would have been in utter darkness but for the red glow of the fire, which did not dispel the prevailing obscurity sufficiently to enable him to discern the different objects in the room distinctly. the intense silence that reigned struck him with a sudden terror. he crossed swiftly over to the bed and a moment's examination sufficed to tell him that it was empty. he called her name, but there was no answer, and a hurried search only made it certain that she was nowhere in the house. mrs linden now remembered what owen's wife had told her of the strange request that ruth had made, and as she recounted it to easton, his fears became intensified a thousandfold. he was unable to form any opinion of the reason of her going or of where she had gone, as he rushed out to seek for her. almost unconsciously he directed his steps to owen's house, and afterwards the two men went to every place where they thought it possible she might have gone, but without finding any trace of her. her father lived a short distance outside the town, and this was one of the first places they went to, although easton did not think it likely she would go there, for she had not been on friendly terms with her stepmother, and as he had anticipated, it was a fruitless journey. they sought for her in every conceivable place, returning often to easton's house to see if she had come home, but they found no trace of her, nor met anyone who had seen her, which was, perhaps, because the dreary, rain-washed streets were deserted by all except those whose business compelled them to be out. about eleven o'clock nora was standing at the front door waiting for owen and easton, when she thought she could discern a woman's figure in the shadow of the piers of the gate opposite. it was an unoccupied house with a garden in front, and the outlines of the bushes it contained were so vague in the darkness that it was impossible to be certain; but the longer she looked the more convinced she became that there was someone there. at last she summoned sufficient courage to cross over the road, and as she nervously drew near the gate it became evident that she had not been mistaken. there was a woman standing there--a woman with a child in her arms, leaning against one of the pillars and holding the iron bars of the gate with her left hand. it was ruth. nora recognized her even in the semi-darkness. her attitude was one of extreme exhaustion, and as nora touched her, she perceived that she was wet through and trembling; but although she was almost fainting with fatigue she would not consent to go indoors until repeatedly assured that easton was not there, and that nora would not let him see her if he came. and when at length she yielded and went into the house she would not sit down or take off her hat or jacket until--crouching on the floor beside nora's chair with her face hidden in the latter's lap--she had sobbed out her pitiful confession, the same things that she had unwittingly told to the same hearer so often before during the illness, the only fact that was new was the account of her wanderings that night. she cried so bitterly and looked so forlorn and heartbroken and ashamed as she faltered out her woeful story; so consumed with self-condemnation, making no excuse for herself except to repeat over and over again that she had never meant to do wrong, that nora could not refrain from weeping also as she listened. it appeared that, unable to bear the reproach that easton's presence seemed to imply, or to endure the burden of her secret any longer, and always haunted by the thought of the lake in the park, ruth had formed the dreadful resolution of taking her own life and the child's. when she arrived at the park gates they were closed and locked for the night but she remembered that there was another means of entering--the place at the far end of the valley where the park was not fenced in, so she had gone there--nearly three miles--only to find that railings had recently been erected and therefore it was no longer possible to get into the park by that way. and then, when she found it impossible to put her resolve into practice, she had realized for the first time the folly and wickedness of the act she had meant to commit. but although she had abandoned her first intention, she said she could never go home again; she would take a room somewhere and get some work to do, or perhaps she might be able to get a situation where they would allow her to have the child with her, or failing that she would work and pay someone to look after it; but she could never go home any more. if she only had somewhere to stay for a few days until she could get something to do, she was sure she would be able to earn her living, but she could not go back home; she felt that she would rather walk about the streets all night than go there again. it was arranged that ruth should have the small apartment which had been frankie's playroom, the necessary furniture being obtained from a second-hand shop close by. easton did not learn the real reason of her flight until three days afterwards. at first he attributed it to a recurrence of the mental disorder that she had suffered from after the birth of the child, and he had been glad to leave her at owen's place in nora's care, but on the evening of the third day when he returned home from work, he found a letter in ruth's handwriting which told him all there was to tell. when he recovered from the stupefaction into which he was thrown by the perusal of this letter, his first thought was to seek out slyme, but he found upon inquiring that the latter had left the town the previous morning. slyme's landlady said he had told her that he had been offered several months' work in london, which he had accepted. the truth was that slyme had heard of ruth's flight--nearly everyone knew about it as a result of the inquiries that had been made for her--and, guessing the cause, he had prudently cleared out. easton made no attempt to see ruth, but he went to owen's and took freddie away, saying he would pay mrs linden to look after the child whilst he was at work. his manner was that of a deeply injured man--the possibility that he was in any way to blame for what had happened did not seem to occur to his mind at all. as for ruth she made no resistance to his taking the child away from her, although she cried about it in secret. she got some work a few days afterwards--helping the servants at one of the large boarding-houses on the grand parade. nora looked after the baby for her while she was at work, an arrangement that pleased frankie vastly; he said it was almost as good as having a baby of their very own. for the first few weeks after ruth went away easton tried to persuade himself that he did not very much regret what had happened. mrs linden looked after freddie, and easton tried to believe that he would really be better off now that he had only himself and the child to provide for. at first, whenever he happened to meet owen, they used to speak of ruth, or to be more correct, easton used to speak of her; but one day when the two men were working together owen had expressed himself rather offensively. he seemed to think that easton was more to blame than she was; and afterwards they avoided the subject, although easton found it difficult to avoid the thoughts the other man's words suggested. now and then he heard of ruth and learnt that she was still working at the same place; and once he met her suddenly and unexpectedly in the street. they passed each other hurriedly and he did not see the scarlet flush that for an instant dyed her face, nor the deathly pallor that succeeded it. he never went to owen's place or sent any communication to ruth, nor did she ever send him any; but although easton did not know it she frequently saw freddie, for when elsie linden took the child out she often called to see mrs owen. as time went on and the resentment he had felt towards her lost its first bitterness, easton began to think there was perhaps some little justification for what owen had said, and gradually there grew within him an immense desire for reconciliation--to start afresh and to forget all that had happened; but the more he thought of this the more hopeless and impossible of realization it seemed. although perhaps he was not conscious of it, this desire arose solely from selfish motives. the money he earned seemed to melt away almost as soon as he received it; to his surprise he found that he was not nearly so well off in regard to personal comfort as he had been formerly, and the house seemed to grow more dreary and desolate as the wintry days dragged slowly by. sometimes--when he had the money--he sought forgetfulness in the society of crass and the other frequenters of the cricketers, but somehow or other he could not take the same pleasure in the conversation of these people as formerly, when he had found it--as he now sometimes wondered to remember--so entertaining as to almost make him forget ruth's existence. one evening about three weeks before christmas, as he and owen were walking homewards together from work, easton reverted for the first time to their former conversation. he spoke with a superior air: his manner and tone indicating that he thought he was behaving with great generosity. he would be willing to forgive her and have her back, he said, if she would come: but he would never be able to tolerate the child. of course it might be sent to an orphanage or some similar institution, but he was afraid ruth would never consent to that, and he knew that her stepmother would not take it. 'if you can persuade her to return to you, we'll take the child,' said owen. 'do you think your wife would be willing?' 'she has already suggested doing so.' 'to ruth?' 'no: to me. we thought it a possible way for you, and my wife would like to have the child.' 'but would you be able to afford it?' said easton. 'we should manage all right.' 'of course,' said easton, 'if slyme comes back he might agree to pay something for its keep.' owen flushed. 'i wouldn't take his money.' after a long pause easton continued: 'would you mind asking mrs owen to suggest it to ruth?' 'if you like i'll get her to suggest it--as a message from you.' 'what i meant,' said easton hesitatingly, 'was that your wife might just suggest it--casual like--and advise her that it would be the best way, and then you could let me know what ruth said.' 'no,' replied owen, unable any longer to control his resentment of the other's manner, 'as things stand now, if it were not for the other child, i should advise her to have nothing further to do with you. you seem to think that you are acting a very generous part in being "willing" to have her back, but she's better off now than she was with you. i see no reason--except for the other child--why she should go back to you. as far as i understand it, you had a good wife and you ill-treated her.' 'i never ill-treated her! i never raised my hand to her--at least only once, and then i didn't hurt her. does she say i ill-treated her.' 'oh no: from what my wife tells me she only blames herself, but i'm drawing my own conclusions. you may not have struck her, but you did worse--you treated her with indifference and exposed her to temptation. what has happened is the natural result of your neglect and want of care for her. the responsibility for what has happened is mainly yours, but apparently you wish to pose now as being very generous and to "forgive her"--you're "willing" to take her back; but it seems to me that it would be more fitting that you should ask her to forgive you.' easton made no answer and after a long silence the other continued: 'i would not advise her to go back to you on such terms as you seem to think right, because if you became reconciled on such terms i don't think either of you could be happy. your only chance of happiness is to realize that you have both done wrong; that each of you has something to forgive; to forgive and never speak of it again.' easton made no reply and a few minutes afterwards, their ways diverging, they wished each other 'good night'. they were working for rushton--painting the outside of a new conservatory at mr sweater's house, 'the cave'. this job was finished the next day and at four o'clock the boy brought the handcart, which they loaded with their ladders and other materials. they took these back to the yard and then, as it was friday night, they went up to the front shop and handed in their time sheets. afterwards, as they were about to separate, easton again referred to the subject of their conversation of the previous evening. he had been very reserved and silent all day, scarcely uttering a word except when the work they had been engaged in made it necessary to do so, and there was now a sort of catch in his voice as he spoke. 'i've been thinking over what you said last night; it's quite true. i've been a great deal to blame. i wrote to ruth last night and admitted it to her. i'll take it as a favour if you and your wife will say what you can to help me get her back.' owen stretched out his hand and as the other took it, said: 'you may rely on us both to do our best.' chapter 51 the widow's son the next morning when they went to the yard at half past eight o'clock hunter told them that there was nothing to do, but that they had better come on monday in case some work came in. they accordingly went on the monday, and tuesday and wednesday, but as nothing 'came in' of course they did not do any work. on thursday morning the weather was dark and bitterly cold. the sky presented an unbroken expanse of dull grey and a keen north wind swept through the cheerless streets. owen--who had caught cold whilst painting the outside of the conservatory at sweater's house the previous week--did not get to the yard until ten o'clock. he felt so ill that he would not have gone at all if they had not needed the money he would be able to earn if there was anything to do. strange though it may appear to the advocates of thrift, although he had been so fortunate as to be in employment when so many others were idle, they had not saved any money. on the contrary, during all the summer they had not been able to afford to have proper food or clothing. every week most of the money went to pay arrears of rent or some other debts, so that even whilst he was at work they had often to go without some of the necessaries of life. they had broken boots, shabby, insufficient clothing, and barely enough to eat. the weather had become so bitterly cold that, fearing he would be laid up if he went without it any longer, he took his overcoat out of pawn, and that week they had to almost starve. not that it was much better other weeks, for lately he had only been making six and a half hours a day--from eight-thirty in the morning till four o'clock in the evening, and on saturday only four and a half hours--from half past eight till one. this made his wages--at sevenpence an hour--twenty-one shillings and sevenpence a week--that is, when there was work to do every day, which was not always. sometimes they had to stand idle three days out of six. the wages of those who got sixpence halfpenny came out at one pound and twopence--when they worked every day--and as for those who--like sawkins--received only fivepence, their week's wages amounted to fifteen and sixpence. when they were only employed for two or three days or perhaps only a few hours, their 'saturday night' sometimes amounted to half a sovereign, seven and sixpence, five shillings or even less. then most of them said that it was better than nothing at all. many of them were married men, so, in order to make existence possible, their wives went out charing or worked in laundries. they had children whom they had to bring up for the most part on 'skim' milk, bread, margarine, and adulterated tea. many of these children--little mites of eight or nine years--went to work for two or three hours in the morning before going to school; the same in the evening after school, and all day on saturday, carrying butchers' trays loaded with meat, baskets of groceries and vegetables, cans of paraffin oil, selling or delivering newspapers, and carrying milk. as soon as they were old enough they got half time certificates and directly they were fourteen they left school altogether and went to work all the day. when they were old enough some of them tried to join the army or navy, but were found physically unfit. it is not much to be wondered at that when they became a little older they were so degenerate intellectually that they imagined that the surest way to obtain better conditions would be to elect gangs of liberal and tory land-grabbers, sweaters, swindlers and lawyers to rule over them. when owen arrived at the yard he found bert white cleaning out the dirty pots in the paint-shop. the noise he made with the scraping knife prevented him from hearing owen's approach and the latter stood watching him for some minutes without speaking. the stone floor of the paint shop was damp and shiny and the whole place was chilly as a tomb. the boy was trembling with cold and he looked pitifully undersized and frail as he bent over his work with an old apron girt about him. because it was so cold he was wearing his jacket with the ends of the sleeves turned back to keep them clean, or to prevent them getting any dirtier, for they were already in the same condition as the rest of his attire, which was thickly encrusted with dried paint of many colours, and his hands and fingernails were grimed with it. as he watched the poor boy bending over his task, owen thought of frankie, and with a feeling akin to terror wondered whether he would ever be in a similar plight. when he saw owen, the boy left off working and wished him good morning, remarking that it was very cold. 'why don't you light a fire? there's lots of wood lying about the yard.' 'no,' said bert shaking his head. 'that would never do! misery wouldn't 'arf ramp if 'e caught me at it. i used to 'ave a fire 'ere last winter till rushton found out, and 'e kicked up an orful row and told me to move meself and get some work done and then i wouldn't feel the cold.' 'oh, he said that, did he?' said owen, his pale face becoming suddenly suffused with blood. 'we'll see about that.' he went out into the yard and crossing over to where--under a shed--there was a great heap of waste wood, stuff that had been taken out of places where rushton & co. had made alterations, he gathered an armful of it and was returning to the paintshop when sawkins accosted him. 'you mustn't go burnin' any of that, you know! that's all got to be saved and took up to the bloke's house. misery spoke about it only this mornin'.' owen did not answer him. he carried the wood into the shop and after throwing it into the fireplace he poured some old paint over it, and, applying a match, produced a roaring fire. then he brought in several more armfuls of wood and piled them in a corner of the shop. bert took no part in these proceedings, and at first rather disapproved of them because he was afraid there would be trouble when misery came, but when the fire was an accomplished fact he warmed his hands and shifted his work to the other side of the bench so as to get the benefit of the heat. owen waited for about half an hour to see if hunter would return, but as that disciple did not appear, he decided not to wait any longer. before leaving he gave bert some instructions: 'keep up the fire with all the old paint that you can scrape off those things and any other old paint or rubbish that's here, and whenever it grows dull put more wood on. there's a lot of old stuff here that's of no use except to be thrown away or burnt. burn it all. if hunter says anything, tell him that i lit the fire, and that i told you to keep it burning. if you want more wood, go out and take it.' 'all right,' replied bert. on his way out owen spoke to sawkins. his manner was so menacing, his face so pale, and there was such a strange glare in his eyes, that the latter thought of the talk there had been about owen being mad, and felt half afraid of him. 'i am going to the office to see rushton; if hunter comes here, you say i told you to tell him that if i find the boy in that shop again without a fire, i'll report it to the society for the prevention of cruelty to children. and as for you, if the boy comes out here to get more wood, don't you attempt to interfere with him.' 'i don't want to interfere with the bloody kid,' grunted sawkins. 'it seems to me as if he's gorn orf 'is bloody crumpet,' he added as he watched owen walking rapidly down the street. 'i can't understand why people can't mind their own bloody business: anyone would think the boy belonged to 'im.' that was just how the matter presented itself to owen. the idea that it was his own child who was to be treated in this way possessed and infuriated him as he strode savagely along. in the vicinity of the slave market on the grand parade he passed--without seeing them--several groups of unemployed artisans whom he knew. some of them were offended and remarked that he was getting stuck up, but others, observing how strange he looked, repeated the old prophecy that one of these days owen would go out of his mind. as he drew near to his destination large flakes of snow began to fall. he walked so rapidly and was in such a fury that by the time he reached the shop he was scarcely able to speak. 'is--hunter--or rushton here?' he demanded of the shopman. 'hunter isn't, but the guv'nor is. what was it you wanted?' 'he'll soon--know--that,' panted owen as he strode up to the office door, and without troubling to knock, flung it violently open and entered. the atmosphere of this place was very different from that of the damp cellar where bert was working. a grate fitted with asbestos blocks and lit with gas communicated a genial warmth to the air. rushton was standing leaning over miss wade's chair with his left arm round her neck. owen recollected afterwards that her dress was disarranged. she retired hastily to the far end of the room as rushton jumped away from her, and stared in amazement and confusion at the intruder--he was too astonished and embarrassed to speak. owen stood panting and quivering in the middle of the office and pointed a trembling finger at his employer: 'i've come--here--to tell--you--that--if i find young--bert white--working--down in that shop--without a fire--i'll have you prosecuted. the place is not good enough for a stable--if you owned a valuable dog--you wouldn't keep it there--i give you fair warning--i know--enough--about you--to put you--where you deserve to be--if you don't treat him better i'll have you punished i'll show you up.' rushton continued to stare at him in mingled confusion, fear and perplexity; he did not yet comprehend exactly what it was all about; he was guiltily conscious of so many things which he might reasonably fear to be shown up or prosecuted for if they were known, and the fact of being caught under such circumstances with miss wade helped to reduce him to a condition approaching terror. 'if the boy has been there without a fire, i 'aven't known anything about it,' he stammered at last. 'mr 'unter has charge of all those matters.' 'you--yourself--forbade him--to make a fire last winter--and anyhow--you know about it now. you obtained money from his mother under the pretence--that you were going--to teach him a trade--but for the last twelve months--you have been using him--as if he were--a beast of burden. i advise you to see to it--or i shall--find--means--to make you--wish you had done so.' with this owen turned and went out, leaving the door open, and rushton in a state of mind compounded of fear, amazement and anger. as he walked homewards through the snow-storm, owen began to realize that the consequence of what he had done would be that rushton would not give him any more work, and as he reflected on all that this would mean to those at home, for a moment he doubted whether he had done right. but when he told nora what had happened she said there were plenty of other firms in the town who would employ him--when they had the work. he had done without rushton before and could do so again; for her part--whatever the consequences might be--she was glad that he had acted as he did. 'we'll get through somehow, i suppose,' said owen, wearily. 'there's not much chance of getting a job anywhere else just now, but i shall try to get some work on my own account. i shall do some samples of show-cards the same as i did last winter and try to get orders from some of the shops--they usually want something extra at this time, but i'm afraid it is rather too late: most of them already have all they want.' 'i shouldn't go out again today if i were you,' said nora, noticing how ill he looked. 'you should stay at home and read, or write up those minutes.' the minutes referred to were those of the last meeting of the local branch of the painters' society, of which owen was the secretary, and as the snow continued to fall, he occupied himself after dinner in the manner his wife suggested, until four o'clock, when frankie returned from school bringing with him a large snowball, and crying out as a piece of good news that the snow was still falling heavily, and that he believed it was freezing! they went to bed very early that night, for it was necessary to economize the coal, and not only that, but--because the rooms were so near the roof--it was not possible to keep the place warm no matter how much coal was used. the fire seemed, if anything, to make the place colder, for it caused the outer air to pour in through the joints of the ill-fitting doors and windows. owen lay awake for the greater part of the night. the terror of the future made rest or sleep impossible. he got up very early the next morning--long before it was light--and after lighting the fire, set about preparing the samples he had mentioned to nora, but found that it would not be possible to do much in this direction without buying more cardboard, for most of what he had was not in good condition. they had bread and butter and tea for breakfast. frankie had his in bed and it was decided to keep him away from school until after dinner because the weather was so very cold and his only pair of boots were so saturated with moisture from having been out in the snow the previous day. 'i shall make a few inquiries to see if there's any other work to be had before i buy the cardboard,' said owen, 'although i'm afraid it's not much use.' just as he was preparing to go out, the front door bell rang, and as he was going down to answer it he saw bert white coming upstairs. the boy was carrying a flat, brown-paper parcel under his arm. 'a corfin plate,' he explained as he arrived at the door. 'wanted at once--misery ses you can do it at 'ome, an' i've got to wait for it.' owen and his wife looked at each other with intense relief. so he was not to be dismissed after all. it was almost too good to be true. 'there's a piece of paper inside the parcel with the name of the party what's dead,' continued bert, 'and here's a little bottle of brunswick black for you to do the inscription with.' 'did he send any other message?' 'yes: he told me to tell you there's a job to be started monday morning--a couple of rooms to be done out somewhere. got to be finished by thursday; and there's another job 'e wants you to do this afternoon--after dinner--so you've got to come to the yard at one o'clock. 'e told me to tell you 'e meant to leave a message for you yesterday morning, but 'e forgot.' 'what did he say to you about the fire--anything?' 'yes: they both of 'em came about an hour after you went away--misery and the bloke too--but they didn't kick up a row. i wasn't arf frightened, i can tell you, when i saw 'em both coming, but they was quite nice. the bloke ses to me, "ah, that's right, my boy," 'e ses. "keep up a good fire. i'm going to send you some coke," 'e ses. and then they 'ad a look round and 'e told sawkins to put some new panes of glass where the winder was broken, and--you know that great big packing-case what was under the truck shed?' 'yes.' 'well, 'e told sawkins to saw it up and cover over the stone floor of the paint-shop with it. it ain't 'arf all right there now. i've cleared out all the muck from under the benches and we've got two sacks of coke sent from the gas-works, and the bloke told me when that's all used up i've got to get a order orf miss wade for another lot.' at one o'clock owen was at the yard, where he saw misery, who instructed him to go to the front shop and paint some numbers on the racks where the wallpapers were stored. whilst he was doing this work rushton came in and greeted him in a very friendly way. 'i'm very glad you let me know about the boy working in that paint-shop,' he observed after a few preliminary remarks. 'i can assure you as i don't want the lad to be uncomfortable, but you know i can't attend to everything myself. i'm much obliged to you for telling me about it; i think you did quite right; i should have done the same myself.' owen did not know what to reply, but rushton walked off without waiting... chapter 52 'it's a far, far better thing that i do, than i have ever done' although owen, easton and crass and a few others were so lucky as to have had a little work to do during the last few months, the majority of their fellow workmen had been altogether out of employment most of the time, and meanwhile the practical business-men, and the pretended disciples of christ--the liars and hypocrites who professed to believe that all men are brothers and god their father--had continued to enact the usual farce that they called 'dealing' with the misery that surrounded them on every side. they continued to organize 'rummage' and 'jumble' sales and bazaars, and to distribute their rotten cast-off clothes and boots and their broken victuals and soup to such of the brethren as were sufficiently degraded to beg for them. the beautiful distress committee was also in full operation; over a thousand brethren had registered themselves on its books. of this number--after careful investigation--the committee had found that no fewer than six hundred and seventy-two were deserving of being allowed to work for their living. the committee would probably have given these six hundred and seventy-two the necessary permission, but it was somewhat handicapped by the fact that the funds at its disposal were only sufficient to enable that number of brethren to be employed for about three days. however, by adopting a policy of temporizing, delay, and general artful dodging, the committee managed to create the impression that they were dealing with the problem. if it had not been for a cunning device invented by brother rushton, a much larger number of the brethren would have succeeded in registering themselves as unemployed on the books of the committee. in previous years it had been the practice to issue an application form called a 'record paper' to any brother who asked for one, and the brother returned it after filling it in himself. at a secret meeting of the committee rushton proposed--amid laughter and applause, it was such a good joke--a new and better way, calculated to keep down the number of applicants. the result of this innovation was that no more forms were issued, but the applicants for work were admitted into the office one at a time, and were there examined by a junior clerk, somewhat after the manner of a french juge d'instruction interrogating a criminal, the clerk filling in the form according to the replies of the culprit. 'what's your name?' 'where do you live?' 'how long have you been living there?' 'where did you live before you went there?' 'how long were you living at that place?' 'why did you move?' 'did you owe any rent when you left?' 'what was your previous address?' 'how old are you? when was your last birthday?' 'what is your trade, calling, employment, or occupation?' 'are you married or single or a widower or what?' 'how many children have you? how many boys? how many girls? do they go to work? what do they earn?' 'what kind of a house do you live in? how many rooms are there?' 'how much rent do you owe?' 'who was your last employer? what was the foreman's name? how long did you work there? what kind of work did you do? why did you leave?' 'what have you been doing for the last five years? what kind of work, how many hours a day? what wages did you get?' 'give the full names and addresses of all the different employers you have worked for during the last five years, and the reasons why you left them?' 'give the names of all the foremen you have worked under during the last five years?' 'does your wife earn anything? how much?' 'do you get any money from any club or society, or from any charity, or from any other source?' 'have you ever received poor relief?' 'have you ever worked for a distress committee before?' 'have you ever done any other kinds of work than those you have mentioned? do you think you would be fit for any other kind? 'have you any references?' and so on and so forth. when the criminal had answered all the questions, and when his answers had all been duly written down, he was informed that a member of the committee, or an authorized officer, or some other person, would in due course visit his home and make inquiries about him, after which the authorized officer or other person would make a report to the committee, who would consider it at their next meeting. as the interrogation of each criminal occupied about half an hour, to say nothing of the time he was kept waiting, it will be seen that as a means of keeping down the number of registered unemployed the idea worked splendidly. when rushton introduced this new rule it was carried unanimously, dr weakling being the only dissentient, but of course he--as brother grinder remarked--was always opposed to any sensible proposal. there was one consolation, however, grinder added, they was not likely to be pestered with 'im much longer; the first of november was coming and if he--grinder--knowed anything of working men they was sure to give weakling the dirty kick out directly they got the chance. a few days afterwards the result of the municipal election justified brother grinder's prognostications, for the working men voters of dr weakling's ward did give him the dirty kick out: but rushton, didlum, grinder and several other members of the band were triumphantly returned with increased majorities. mr dauber, of dauber and botchit, had already been elected a guardian of the poor. during all this time hunter, who looked more worried and miserable as the dreary weeks went by, was occupied every day in supervising what work was being done and in running about seeking for more. nearly every night he remained at the office until a late hour, poring over specifications and making out estimates. the police had become so accustomed to seeing the light in the office that as a rule they took no notice of it, but one thursday night--exactly one week after the scene between owen and rushton about the boy--the constable on the beat observed the light there much later than usual. at first he paid no particular attention to the fact, but when night merged into morning and the light still remained, his curiosity was aroused. he knocked at the door, but no one came in answer, and no sound disturbed the deathlike stillness that reigned within. the door was locked, but he was not able to tell whether it had been closed from the inside or outside, because it had a spring latch. the office window was low down, but it was not possible to see in because the back of the glass had been painted. the constable thought that the most probable explanation of the mystery was that whoever had been there earlier in the evening had forgotten to turn out the light when they went away; it was not likely that thieves or anyone who had no business to be there would advertise their presence by lighting the gas. he made a note of the incident in his pocket-book and was about to resume his beat when he was joined by his inspector. the latter agreed that the conclusion arrived at by the constable was probably the right one and they were about to pass on when the inspector noticed a small speck of light shining through the lower part of the painted window, where a small piece of the paint had either been scratched or had shelled off the glass. he knelt down and found that it was possible to get a view of the interior of the office, and as he peered through he gave a low exclamation. when he made way for his subordinate to look in his turn, the constable was with some difficulty able to distinguish the figure of a man lying prone upon the floor. it was an easy task for the burly policeman to force open the office door: a single push of his shoulder wrenched it from its fastenings and as it flew back the socket of the lock fell with a splash into a great pool of blood that had accumulated against the threshold, flowing from the place where hunter was lying on his back, his arms extended and his head nearly severed from his body. on the floor, close to his right hand, was an open razor. an overturned chair lay on the floor by the side of the table where he usually worked, the table itself being littered with papers and drenched with blood. within the next few days crass resumed the role he had played when hunter was ill during the summer, taking charge of the work and generally doing his best to fill the dead man's place, although--as he confided to certain of his cronies in the bar of the cricketers--he had no intention of allowing rushton to do the same as hunter had done. one of his first jobs--on the morning after the discovery of the body--was to go with mr rushton to look over a house where some work was to be done for which an estimate had to be given. it was this estimate that hunter had been trying to make out the previous evening in the office, for they found that the papers on his table were covered with figures and writing relating to this work. these papers justified the subsequent verdict of the coroner's jury that hunter committed suicide in a fit of temporary insanity, for they were covered with a lot of meaningless scribbling, the words wrongly spelt and having no intelligible connection with each other. there was one sum that he had evidently tried repeatedly to do correctly, but which came wrong in a different way every time. the fact that he had the razor in his possession seemed to point to his having premeditated the act, but this was accounted for at the inquest by the evidence of the last person who saw him alive, a hairdresser, who stated that hunter had left the razor with him to be sharpened a few days previously and that he had called for it on the evening of the tragedy. he had ground this razor for mr hunter several times before. crass took charge of all the arrangements for the funeral. he bought a new second-hand pair of black trousers at a cast-off clothing shop in honour of the occasion, and discarded his own low-crowned silk hat--which was getting rather shabby--in favour of hunter's tall one, which he found in the office and annexed without hesitation or scruple. it was rather large for him, but he put some folded strips of paper inside the leather lining. crass was a proud man as he walked in hunter's place at the head of the procession, trying to look solemn, but with a half-smile on his fat, pasty face, destitute of colour except one spot on his chin near his underlip, where there was a small patch of inflammation about the size of a threepenny piece. this spot had been there for a very long time. at first--as well as he could remember--it was only a small pimple, but it had grown larger, with something the appearance of scurvy. crass attributed its continuation to the cold having 'got into it last winter'. it was rather strange, too, because he generally took care of himself when it was cold: he always wore the warm wrap that had formerly belonged to the old lady who died of cancer. however, crass did not worry much about this little sore place; he just put a little zinc ointment on it occasionally and had no doubt that it would get well in time. chapter 53 barrington finds a situation the revulsion of feeling that barrington experienced during the progress of the election was intensified by the final result. the blind, stupid, enthusiastic admiration displayed by the philanthropists for those who exploited and robbed them; their extraordinary apathy with regard to their own interests; the patient, broken-spirited way in which they endured their sufferings, tamely submitting to live in poverty in the midst of the wealth they had helped to create; their callous indifference to the fate of their children, and the savage hatred they exhibited towards anyone who dared to suggest the possibility of better things, forced upon him the thought that the hopes he cherished were impossible of realization. the words of the renegade socialist recurred constantly to his mind: 'you can be a jesus christ if you like, but for my part i'm finished. for the future i intend to look after myself. as for these people, they vote for what they want, they get what they vote for, and, by god! they deserve nothing better! they are being beaten with whips of their own choosing, and if i had my way they should be chastised with scorpions. for them, the present system means joyless drudgery, semi-starvation, rags and premature death; and they vote for it and uphold it. let them have what they vote for! let them drudge and let them starve!' these words kept ringing in his ears as he walked through the crowded streets early one fine evening a few days before christmas. the shops were all brilliantly lighted for the display of their christmas stores, and the pavements and even the carriageways were thronged with sightseers. barrington was specially interested in the groups of shabbily dressed men and women and children who gathered in the roadway in front of the poulterers' and butchers' shops, gazing at the meat and the serried rows of turkeys and geese decorated with coloured ribbons and rosettes. he knew that to come here and look at these things was the only share many of these poor people would have of them, and he marvelled greatly at their wonderful patience and abject resignation. but what struck him most of all was the appearance of many of the women, evidently working men's wives. their faded, ill-fitting garments and the tired, sad expressions on their pale and careworn faces. some of them were alone; others were accompanied by little children who trotted along trustfully clinging to their mothers' hands. the sight of these poor little ones, their utter helplessness and dependence, their patched unsightly clothing and broken boots, and the wistful looks on their pitiful faces as they gazed into the windows of the toy-shops, sent a pang of actual physical pain to his heart and filled his eyes with tears. he knew that these children--naked of joy and all that makes life dear--were being tortured by the sight of the things that were placed so cruelly before their eyes, but which they were not permitted to touch or to share; and, like joseph of old, his heart yearned over his younger brethren. he felt like a criminal because he was warmly clad and well fed in the midst of all this want and unhappiness, and he flushed with shame because he had momentarily faltered in his devotion to the noblest cause that any man could be privileged to fight for--the uplifting of the disconsolate and the oppressed. he presently came to a large toy shop outside which several children were standing admiring the contents of the window. he recognized some of these children and paused to watch them and to listen to their talk. they did not notice him standing behind them as they ranged to and fro before the window, and as he looked at them, he was reminded of the way in which captive animals walk up and down behind the bars of their cages. these children wandered repeatedly, backwards and forwards from one end of the window to the other, with their little hands pressed against the impenetrable plate glass, choosing and pointing out to each other the particular toys that took their fancies. 'that's mine!' cried charley linden, enthusiastically indicating a large strongly built waggon. 'if i had that i'd give freddie rides in it and bring home lots of firewood, and we could play at fire engines as well.' 'i'd rather have this railway,' said frankie owen. 'there's a real tunnel and real coal in the tenders; then there's the station and the signals and a place to turn the engine round, and a red lantern to light when there's danger on the line.' 'mine's this doll--not the biggest one, the one in pink with clothes that you can take off,' said elsie; 'and this tea set; and this needlecase for mother.' little freddie had let go his hold of elsie, to whom he usually clung tightly and was clapping his hands and chuckling with delight and desire. 'gee-gee?' he cried eagerly. 'gee-gee. pwetty gee-gee! fweddy want gee-gee!' 'but it's no use lookin' at them any longer,' continued elsie, with a sigh, as she took hold of freddie's hand to lead him away. 'it's no use lookin' at 'em any longer; the likes of us can't expect to have such good things as them.' this remark served to recall frankie and charley to the stern realities of life, and turning reluctantly away from the window they prepared to follow elsie, but freddie had not yet learnt the lesson--he had not lived long enough to understand that the good things of the world were not for the likes of him; so when elsie attempted to draw him away he pursed up his underlip and began to cry, repeating that he wanted a gee-gee. the other children clustered round trying to coax and comfort him by telling him that no one was allowed to have anything out of the windows yet--until christmas--and that santa claus would be sure to bring him a gee-gee then; but these arguments failed to make any impression on freddie, who tearfully insisted upon being supplied at once. whilst they were thus occupied they caught sight of barrington, whom they hailed with evident pleasure born of the recollection of certain gifts of pennies and cakes they had at different times received from him. 'hello, mr barrington,' said the two boys in a breath. 'hello,' replied barrington, as he patted the baby's cheek. 'what's the matter here? what's freddie crying for?' 'he wants that there 'orse, mister, the one with the real 'air on,' said charley, smiling indulgently like a grown-up person who realized the absurdity of the demand. 'fweddie want gee-gee,' repeated the child, taking hold of barrington's hand and returning to the window. 'nice gee-gee.' 'tell him that santa claus'll bring it to him on christmas,' whispered elsie. 'p'raps he'll believe you and that'll satisfy him, and he's sure to forget all about it in a little while.' 'are you still out of work, mr barrington?' inquired frankie. 'no,' replied barrington slowly. 'i've got something to do at last.' 'well, that's a good job, ain't it?' remarked charley. 'yes,' said barrington. 'and whom do you think i'm working for?' 'who?' 'santa claus.' 'santa claus!' echoed the children, opening their eyes to the fullest extent. 'yes,' continued barrington, solemnly. 'you know, he is a very old man now, so old that he can't do all his work himself. last year he was so tired that he wasn't able to get round to all the children he wanted to give things to, and consequently a great many of them never got anything at all. so this year he's given me a job to help him. he's given me some money and a list of children's names, and against their names are written the toys they are to have. my work is to buy the things and give them to the boys and girls whose names are on the list.' the children listened to this narrative with bated breath. incredible as the story seemed, barrington's manner was so earnest as to almost compel belief. 'really and truly, or are you only having a game?' said frankie at length, speaking almost in a whisper. elsie and charley maintained an awestruck silence, while freddie beat upon the glass with the palms of his hands. 'really and truly,' replied barrington unblushingly as he took out his pocket-book and turned over the leaves. 'i've got the list here; perhaps your names are down for something.' the three children turned pale and their hearts beat violently as they listened wide-eyed for what was to follow. 'let me see,' continued barrington, scanning the pages of the book, 'why, yes, here they are! elsie linden, one doll with clothes that can be taken off, one tea-set, one needlecase. freddie easton, one horse with real hair. charley linden, one four-wheeled waggon full of groceries. frankie owen, one railway with tunnel, station, train with real coal for engine, signals, red lamp and place to turn the engines round.' barrington closed the book: 'so you may as well have your things now,' he continued, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone. 'we'll buy them here; it will save me a lot of work. i shall not have the trouble of taking them round to where you live. it's lucky i happened to meet you, isn't it?' the children were breathless with emotion, but they just managed to gasp out that it was--very lucky. as they followed him into the shop, freddie was the only one of the four whose condition was anything like normal. all the others were in a half-dazed state. frankie was afraid that he was not really awake at all. it couldn't be true; it must be a dream. in addition to the hair, the horse was furnished with four wheels. they did not have it made into a parcel, but tied some string to it and handed it over to its new owner. the elder children were scarcely conscious of what took place inside the shop; they knew that barrington was talking to the shopman, but they did not hear what was said--the sound seemed far away and unreal. the shopman made the doll, the tea-set and the needlecase into one parcel and gave it to elsie. the railway, in a stout cardboard box, was also wrapped up in brown paper, and frankie's heart nearly burst when the man put the package into his arms. when they came out of the toy shop they said 'good night' to frankie, who went off carrying his parcel very carefully and feeling as if he were walking on air. the others went into a provision merchant's near by, where the groceries were purchased and packed into the waggon. then barrington, upon referring to the list to make quite certain that he had not forgotten anything, found that santa claus had put down a pair of boots each for elsie and charley, and when they went to buy these, it was seen that their stockings were all ragged and full of holes, so they went to a draper's and bought some stocking also. barrington said that although they were not on the list, he was sure santa claus would not object--he had probably meant them to have them, but had forgotten to put them down. chapter 54 the end the following evening barrington called at owen's place. he said he was going home for the holidays and had come to say goodbye for a time. owen had not been doing very well during these last few months, although he was one of the few lucky ones who had had some small share of work. most of the money he earned went for rent, to pay which they often had to go short of food. lately his chest had become so bad that the slightest exertion brought on fits of coughing and breathlessness, which made it almost impossible to work even when he had the opportunity; often it was only by an almost superhuman effort of will that he was able to continue working at all. he contrived to keep up appearances to a certain extent before rushton, who, although he knew that owen was not so strong as the other men, was inclined to overlook it so long as he was able to do his share of work, for owen was a very useful hand when things were busy. but lately some of the men with whom he worked began to manifest dissatisfaction at having him for a mate. when two men are working together, the master expects to see two men's work done, and if one of the two is not able to do his share it makes it all the harder for the other. he never had the money to go to a doctor to get advice, but earlier in the winter he had obtained from rushton a ticket for the local hospital. every saturday throughout the year when the men were paid they were expected to put a penny or twopence in the hospital box. contributions were obtained in this way from every firm and workshop in the town. the masters periodically handed these boxes over to the hospital authorities and received in return some tickets which they gave to anyone who needed and asked for them. the employer had to fill in the ticket or application form with the name and address of the applicant, and to certify that in his opinion the individual was a deserving case, 'suitable to receive this charity'. in common with the majority of workmen, owen had a sort of horror of going for advice to this hospital, but he was so ill that he stifled his pride and went. it happened that it turned out to be more expensive than going to a private doctor, for he had to be at the hospital at a certain hour on a particular morning. to do this he had to stay away from work. the medicine they prescribed and which he had to buy did him no good, for the truth was that it was not medicine that he--like thousands of others--needed, but proper conditions of life and proper food; things that had been for years past as much out of his reach as if he had been dying alone in the middle of a desert. occasionally nora contrived--by going without some other necessary--to buy him a bottle of one of the many much-advertised medicines; but although some of these things were good she was not able to buy enough for him to derive any benefit from them. although he was often seized with a kind of terror of the future--of being unable to work--he fought against these feelings and tried to believe that when the weather became warmer he would be all right once more. when barrington came in owen was sitting in a deck-chair by the fire in the sitting-room. he had been to work that day with harlow, washing off the ceilings and stripping the old paper from the walls of two rooms in rushton's home, and he looked very haggard and exhausted. 'i have never told you before,' said barrington, after they had been talking for a while, 'but i suppose you have guessed that i did not work for rushton because i needed to do so in order to live. i just wanted to see things for myself; to see life as it is lived by the majority. my father is a wealthy man. he doesn't approve of my opinions, but at same time he does not interfere with me for holding them, and i have a fairly liberal allowance which i spent in my own way. i'm going to pass christmas with my own people, but in the spring i intend to fit out a socialist van, and then i shall come back here. we'll have some of the best speakers in the movement; we'll hold meetings every night; we'll drench the town with literature, and we'll start a branch of the party.' owen's eye kindled and his pale face flushed. 'i shall be able to do something to advertise the meetings,' he said. for instance, i could paint some posters and placards.' 'and i can help to give away handbills,' chimed in frankie, looking up from the floor, where he was seated working the railway. 'i know a lot of boys who'll come along with me to put 'em under the doors as well.' they were in the sitting-room and the door was shut. mrs owen was in the next room with ruth. while the two men were talking the front-door bell was heard to ring and frankie ran out to see who it was, closing the door after him. barrington and owen continued their conversation, and from time to time they could hear a low murmur of voices from the adjoining room. after a little while they heard some one go out by the front door, and almost immediately afterward frankie--wild with excitement, burst into the room, crying out: 'dad and mr barrington! three cheers!' and he began capering gleefully about the room, evidently transported with joy. 'what are the cheers to be for?' inquired barrington, rather mystified by this extraordinary conduct. 'mr easton came with freddie to see mrs easton, and she's gone home again with them,' replied freddie, 'and--she's given the baby to us for a christmas box!' barrington was already familiar with the fact of easton's separation from his wife, and owen now told him the story of their reconciliation. barrington took his leave shortly afterwards. his train left at eight; it was already nearly half past seven, and he said he had a letter to write. nora brought the baby in to show him before he went, and then she helped frankie to put on his overcoat, for barrington had requested that the boy might be permitted to go a little way with him. there was a stationer's shop at the end of the street. he went in here and bought a sheet of notepaper and an envelope, and, having borrowed the pen and ink, wrote a letter which he enclosed in the envelope with the two other pieces that he took out of his pocketbook. having addressed the letter he came out of the shop; frankie was waiting for him outside. he gave the letter to the boy. 'i want you to take this straight home and give it to your dad. i don't want you to stop to play or even to speak to anyone till you get home.' 'all right,' replied frankie. 'i won't stop running all the way.' barrington hesitated and looked at his watch. 'i think i have time to go back with you as far as your front door,' he said, 'then i shall be quite sure you haven't lost it.' they accordingly retraced their steps and in a few minutes reached the entrance to the house. barrington opened the door and stood for a moment in the hall watching frankie ascend the stairs. 'will your train cross over the bridge?' inquired the boy, pausing and looking over the banisters. 'yes. why?' 'because we can see the bridge from our front-room window, and if you were to wave your handkerchief as your train goes over the bridge, we could wave back.' 'all right. i'll do so. goodbye.' 'goodbye.' barrington waited till he heard frankie open and close the door of owen's flat, and then he hurried away. when he gained the main road he heard the sound of singing and saw a crowd at the corner of one of the side-streets. as he drew near he perceived that it was a religious meeting. there was a lighted lamp on a standard in the centre of the crowd and on the glass of this lamp was painted: 'be not deceived: god is not mocked.' mr rushton was preaching in the centre of the ring. he said that they had come hout there that evening to tell the glad tidings of great joy to hall those dear people that he saw standing around. the members of the shining light chapel--to which he himself belonged--was the organizers of that meeting but it was not a sectarian meeting, for he was 'appy to say that several members of other denominations was there co-operating with them in the good work. as he continued his address, rushton repeatedly referred to the individuals who composed the crowd as his 'brothers and sisters' and, strange to say, nobody laughed. barrington looked round upon the 'brothers': mr sweater, resplendent in a new silk hat of the latest fashion, and a fur-trimmed overcoat. the rev. mr bosher, vicar of the church of the whited sepulchre, mr grinder--one of the churchwardens at the same place of alleged worship--both dressed in broadcloth and fine linen and glossy silk hats, while their general appearance testified to the fact that they had fared sumptuously for many days. mr didlum, mrs starvem, mr dauber, mr botchit, mr smeeriton, and mr leavit. and in the midst was the rev. john starr, doing the work for which he was paid. as he stood there in the forefront of this company, there was nothing in his refined and comely exterior to indicate that his real function was to pander to and flatter them; to invest with an air of respectability and rectitude the abominably selfish lives of the gang of swindlers, slave-drivers and petty tyrants who formed the majority of the congregation of the shining light chapel. he was doing the work for which he was paid. by the mere fact of his presence there, condoning and justifying the crimes of these typical representatives of that despicable class whose greed and inhumanity have made the earth into a hell. there was also a number of 'respectable', well-dressed people who looked as if they could do with a good meal, and a couple of shabbily dressed, poverty-stricken-looking individuals who seemed rather out of place in the glittering throng. the remainder of the brothers consisted of half-starved, pale-faced working men and women, most of them dressed in other people's cast-off clothing, and with broken, patched-up, leaky boots on their feet. rushton having concluded his address, didlum stepped forward to give out the words of the hymn the former had quoted at the conclusion of his remarks: 'oh, come and jine this 'oly band, and hon to glory go.' strange and incredible as it may appear to the reader, although none of them ever did any of the things jesus said, the people who were conducting this meeting had the effrontery to claim to be followers of christ--christians! jesus said: 'lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth', 'love not the world nor the things of the world', 'woe unto you that are rich--it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.' yet all these self-styled 'followers' of christ made the accumulation of money the principal business of their lives. jesus said: 'be ye not called masters; for they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not touch them with one of their fingers. for one is your master, even christ, and ye are all brethren.' but nearly all these alleged followers of the humble workman of nazareth claimed to be other people's masters or mistresses. and as for being all brethren, whilst most of these were arrayed in broadcloth and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day, they knew that all around them thousands of those they hypocritically called their 'brethren', men, women and little children, were slowly perishing of hunger and cold; and we have already seen how much brotherhood existed between sweater and rushton and the miserable, half-starved wretches in their employment. whenever they were asked why they did not practise the things jesus preached, they replied that it is impossible to do so! they did not seem to realize that when they said this they were saying, in effect, that jesus taught an impracticable religion; and they appeared to forget that jesus said, 'wherefore call ye me lord, lord, when ye do not the things i say?...' 'whosoever heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not, shall be likened to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand.' but although none of these self-styled 'followers' of christ, ever did the things that jesus said, they talked a great deal about them, and sang hymns, and for a pretence made long prayers, and came out here to exhort those who were still in darkness to forsake their evil ways. and they procured this lantern and wrote a text upon it: 'be not deceived, god is not mocked.' they stigmatized as 'infidels' all those who differed from them, forgetting that the only real infidels are those who are systematically false and unfaithful to the master they pretend to love and serve. grinder, having a slight cold, had not spoken this evening, but several other infidels, including sweater, didlum, bosher, and starr, had addressed the meeting, making a special appeal to the working people, of whom the majority of the crowd was composed, to give up all the vain pleasures of the world in which they at present indulged, and, as rushton had eloquently put it at the close of his remarks: 'come and jine this 'oly band and hon to glory go!' as didlum finished reading out the words, the lady at the harmonium struck up the tune of the hymns, and the disciples all joined in the singing: 'oh, come and join this 'oly band and hon to glory go.' during the singing certain of the disciples went about amongst the crowd distributing tracts. presently one of them offered one to barrington and as the latter looked at the man he saw that it was slyme, who also recognized him at the same instant and greeted him by name. barrington made no reply except to decline the tract: 'i don't want that--from you,' he said contemptuously. slyme turned red. 'oh, i know what you're thinking of,' he said after a pause and speaking in an injured tone; 'but you shouldn't judge anyone too hard. it wasn't only my fault, and you don't know 'ow much i've suffered for it. if it 'adn't been for the lord, i believe i should 'ave drownded myself.' barrington made no answer and slyme slunk off, and when the hymn was finished brother sweater stood forth and gave all those present a hearty invitation to attend the services to be held during the ensuing week at the chapel of the shining light. he invited them there specially, of course, because it was the place with which he was himself connected, but he entreated and begged of them even if they would not come there to go somewhere; there were plenty of other places of worship in the town; in fact, there was one at the corner of nearly every street. those who did not fancy the services at the shining light could go to the church of the whited sepulchre, but he really did hope that all those dear people whom he saw standing round would go somewhere. a short prayer from bosher closed the meeting, and now the reason for the presence of the two poverty-stricken-looking shabbily dressed disciples was made manifest, for while the better dressed and therefore more respectable brothers were shaking hands with and grinning at each other or hovering round the two clergymen and mr sweater, these two poor wretches carried away the harmonium and the lantern, together with the hymn books and what remained of the tracts. as barrington hurried off to catch the train one of the 'followers' gave him a card which he read by the light of a street lamp- come and join the brotherhood at the shining light chapel psa every sunday at 3 o'clock. let brotherly love continue. 'oh come and join this holy band and on to glory go.' barrington thought he would, rather go to hell--if there were such a place--with some decent people, than share 'glory' with a crew like this. nora sat sewing by the fireside in the front room, with the baby asleep in her lap. owen was reclining in the deck-chair opposite. they had both been rather silent and thoughtful since barrington's departure. it was mainly by their efforts that the reconciliation between easton and ruth had been effected and they had been so desirous of accomplishing that result that they had not given much thought to their own position. 'i feel that i could not bear to part with her for anything now,' said nora at last breaking the long silence, 'and frankie is so fond of her too. but all the same i can't feel happy about it when i think how ill you are.' 'oh, i shall be all right when the weather gets a little warmer,' said owen, affecting a cheerfulness he did not feel. 'we have always pulled through somehow or other; the poor little thing is not going to make much difference, and she'll be as well off with us as she would have been if ruth had not gone back.' as he spoke he leaned over and touched the hand of the sleeping child and the little fingers closed round one of his with a clutch that sent a thrill all through him. as he looked at this little helpless, dependent creature, he realized with a kind of thankfulness that he would never have the heart to carry out the dreadful project he had sometimes entertained in hours of despondency. 'we've always got through somehow or other,' he repeated, 'and we'll do so still.' presently they heard frankie's footsteps ascending the stairs and a moment afterwards the boy entered the room. 'we have to look out of the window and wave to mr barrington when his train goes over the bridge,' he cried breathlessly. 'and he's sent this letter. open the window, quick, dad, or it may be too late.' 'there's plenty of time yet,' replied owen, smiling at the boy's impetuosity. 'nearly twenty minutes. we don't want the window open all that time. it's only a quarter to eight by our clock now, and that's five minutes fast.' however, so as to make quite certain that the train should not run past unnoticed, frankie pulled up the blind and, rubbing the steam off the glass, took up his station at the window to watch for its coming, while owen opened the letter: 'dear owen, 'enclosed you will find two bank-notes, one for ten pounds and the other for five. the first i beg you will accept from me for yourself in the same spirit that i offer it, and as i would accept it from you if our positions were reversed. if i were in need, i know that you would willingly share with me whatever you had and i could not hurt you by refusing. the other note i want you to change tomorrow morning. give three pounds of it to mrs linden and the remainder to bert white's mother. 'wishing you all a happy xmas and hoping to find you well and eager for the fray when i come back in the spring, 'yours for the cause, 'george barrington.' owen read it over two or three times before he could properly understand it and then, without a word of comment--for he could not have spoken at that moment to save his life--he passed it to nora, who felt, as she read it in her turn, as if a great burden had been lifted from her heart. all the undefined terror of the future faded away as she thought of all this small piece of paper made possible. meanwhile, frankie, at the window, was straining his eyes in the direction of the station. 'don't you think we'd better have the window open now, dad?' he said at last as the clock struck eight. 'the steam keeps coming on the glass as fast as i wipe it off and i can't see out properly. i'm sure it's nearly time now; p'raps our clock isn't as fast as you think it is.' 'all right, we'll have it open now, so as to be on the safe side,' said owen as he stood up and raised the sash, and nora, having wrapped the child up in a shawl, joined them at the window. 'it can't be much longer now, you know,' said frankie. 'the line's clear. they turned the red light off the signal just before you opened the window.' in a very few minutes they heard the whistle of the locomotive as it drew out of the station, then, an instant before the engine itself came into sight round the bend, the brightly polished rails were illuminated, shining like burnished gold in the glare of its headlight; a few seconds afterwards the train emerged into view, gathering speed as it came along the short stretch of straight way, and a moment later it thundered across the bridge. it was too far away to recognize his face, but they saw someone looking out of a carriage window waving a handkerchief, and they knew it was barrington as they waved theirs in return. soon there remained nothing visible of the train except the lights at the rear of the guard's van, and presently even those vanished into the surrounding darkness. the lofty window at which they were standing overlooked several of the adjacent streets and a great part of the town. on the other side of the road were several empty houses, bristling with different house agents' advertisement boards and bills. about twenty yards away, the shop formerly tenanted by mr smallman, the grocer, who had become bankrupt two or three months previously, was also plastered with similar decorations. a little further on, at the opposite corner, were the premises of the monopole provision stores, where brilliant lights were just being extinguished, for they, like most of the other shops, were closing their premises for the night, and the streets took on a more cheerless air as one after another their lights disappeared. it had been a fine day, and during the earlier part of the evening the moon, nearly at the full, had been shining in a clear and starry sky; but a strong north-east wind had sprung up within the last hour; the weather had become bitterly cold and the stars were rapidly being concealed from view by the dense banks of clouds that were slowly accumulating overhead. as they remained at the window looking out over this scene for a few minutes after the train had passed out of sight, it seemed to owen that the gathering darkness was as a curtain that concealed from view the infamy existing beyond. in every country, myriads of armed men waiting for their masters to give them the signal to fall upon and rend each other like wild beasts. all around was a state of dreadful anarchy; abundant riches, luxury, vice, hypocrisy, poverty, starvation, and crime. men literally fighting with each other for the privilege of working for their bread, and little children crying with hunger and cold and slowly perishing of want. the gloomy shadows enshrouding the streets, concealing for the time their grey and mournful air of poverty and hidden suffering, and the black masses of cloud gathering so menacingly in the tempestuous sky, seemed typical of the nemesis which was overtaking the capitalist system. that atrocious system which, having attained to the fullest measure of detestable injustice and cruelty, was now fast crumbling into ruin, inevitably doomed to be overwhelmed because it was all so wicked and abominable, inevitably doomed to sink under the blight and curse of senseless and unprofitable selfishness out of existence for ever, its memory universally execrated and abhorred. but from these ruins was surely growing the glorious fabric of the co-operative commonwealth. mankind, awaking from the long night of bondage and mourning and arising from the dust wherein they had lain prone so long, were at last looking upward to the light that was riving asunder and dissolving the dark clouds which had so long concealed from them the face of heaven. the light that will shine upon the world wide fatherland and illumine the gilded domes and glittering pinnacles of the beautiful cities of the future, where men shall dwell together in true brotherhood and goodwill and joy. the golden light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of socialism. appendix mugsborough mugsborough was a town of about eighty thousand inhabitants, about two hundred miles from london. it was built in a verdant valley. looking west, north or east from the vicinity of the fountain on the grand parade in the centre of the town, one saw a succession of pine-clad hills. to the south, as far as the eye could see, stretched a vast, cultivated plain that extended to the south coast, one hundred miles away. the climate was supposed to be cool in summer and mild in winter. the town proper nestled in the valley: to the west, the most beautiful and sheltered part was the suburb of irene: here were the homes of the wealthy residents and prosperous tradespeople, and numerous boarding-houses for the accommodation of well-to-do visitors. east, the town extended up the slope to the top of the hill and down the other side to the suburb of windley, where the majority of the working classes lived. years ago, when the facilities for foreign travel were fewer and more costly, mugsborough was a favourite resort of the upper classes, but of late years most of these patriots have adopted the practice of going on the continent to spend the money they obtain from the working people of england. however, mugsborough still retained some semblance of prosperity. summer or winter the place was usually fairly full of what were called good-class visitors, either holidaymakers or invalids. the grand parade was generally crowded with well-dressed people and carriages. the shops appeared to be well-patronized and at the time of our story an air of prosperity pervaded the town. but this fair outward appearance was deceitful. the town was really a vast whited sepulchre; for notwithstanding the natural advantages of the place the majority of the inhabitants existed in a state of perpetual poverty which in many cases bordered on destitution. one of the reasons for this was that a great part of the incomes of the tradespeople and boarding-house-keepers and about a third of the wages of the working classes were paid away as rent and rates. for years the corporation had been borrowing money for necessary public works and improvements, and as the indebtedness of the town increased the rates rose in proportion, because the only works and services undertaken by the council were such as did not yield revenue. every public service capable of returning direct profit was in the hands of private companies, and the shares of the private companies were in the hands of the members of the corporation, and the members of the corporation were in the hands of the four most able and intellectual of their number, councillors sweater, rushton, didlum and grinder, each of whom was a director of one or more of the numerous companies which battened on the town. the tramway company, the water works company, the public baths company, the winter gardens company, the grand hotel company and numerous others. there was, however, one company in which sweater, rushton, didlum and grinder had no shares, and that was the gas company, the oldest and most flourishing of them all. this institution had grown with the place; most of the original promoters were dead, and the greater number of the present shareholders were non-residents; although they lived on the town, they did not live in it. the profits made by this company were so great that, being prevented by law from paying a larger dividend than ten percent, they frequently found it a difficult matter to decide what to do with the money. they paid the directors and principal officials--themselves shareholders, of course--enormous salaries. they built and furnished costly and luxurious offices and gave the rest to the shareholders in the form of bonuses. there was one way in which the company might have used some of the profits: it might have granted shorter hours and higher wages to the workmen whose health was destroyed and whose lives were shortened by the terrible labour of the retort-houses and the limesheds; but of course none of the directors or shareholders ever thought of doing that. it was not the business of the company to concern itself about them. years ago, when it might have been done for a comparatively small amount, some hare-brained socialists suggested that the town should buy the gas works, but the project was wrecked by the inhabitants, upon whom the mere mention of the word socialist had the same effect that the sight of a red rag is popularly supposed to have on a bull. of course, even now it was still possible to buy out the company, but it was supposed that it would cost so much that it was generally considered to be impracticable. although they declined to buy the gas works, the people of mugsborough had to buy the gas. the amount paid by the municipality to the company for the public lighting of the town loomed large in the accounts of the council. they managed to get some of their own back by imposing a duty of two shillings a ton upon coals imported into the borough, but although it cost the gas works a lot of money for coal dues the company in its turn got its own back by increasing the price of gas they sold to the inhabitants of the town... ... changing societies & personalities, 2021 vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 https://doi.org/10.15826/csp.2021.5.4.150 received 22 june 2021 © 2021 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova accepted 16 december 2021 d.kochetkov@cwts.leidenuniv.nl published online 30 december 2021 igudkova@gmail.com article knowledge: from ethical category to knowledge capitalism dmitry m. kochetkov centre for science and technology studies, leiden university, netherlands department of project management, ministry of science and higher education of the russian federation, moscow, russia irina a. kochetkova peoples’ friendship university of russia (rudn university), moscow, russia institute of informatics problems, federal research center “computer science and control” of the russian academy of sciences, moscow, russia abstract in the post-industrial economy, the efficiency of scientific knowledge generation becomes crucial. researchers began to interpret knowledge as a factor of economic growth in the second half of the 20th century; since then, within the theory of economics and management, various approaches have been developed to study the impact of knowledge on economic growth and performance. with time, the focus of knowledgebased theories shifted from corporate management to macrosystems and economic policy. the article describes the main stages in the development of socio-economic concepts of knowledge and analyzes the theoretical and methodological aspects of each approach. the authors have also formulated the critical problems in the analysis of the economic category of knowledge at the present stage and suggested ways of overcoming them. the article may be of interest both to researchers and to practitioners in the sphere of corporate strategies and economic policy. keywords knowledge management; intellectual capital; knowledge economy; economics of scientific knowledge; triple helix; quintuple helix acknowledgement this paper has been supported by the rudn university strategic academic leadership program. https://changing-sp.com/ 554 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova introduction the category of knowledge was first introduced into scientific circulation in ancient greece. however, initially, this term had an exclusively philosophical or ethical meaning. socrates considered knowledge a source of virtue, and his disciple plato interpreted knowledge similarly. aristotle’s interpretation was much closer to the modern understanding of the word, but it would not even have crossed his mind to regard knowledge as a way of developing the greek economy (in fact, the very concept of economics in its modern sense did not exist at that time). until marx’s time, practice had been seen as something unworthy of a philosopher. the christian church even equated knowledge with revelation, and wealth was declared sinful. everything changed with the advent of the scientific and technological revolution, followed by the industrial revolution. natural sciences were rapidly developing, and technical inventions were rapidly changing the world. surprisingly, the economics came to the role of scientific knowledge and technological progress in the development of socio-economic systems only in the second half of the 20th century. at the present stage of the development of science, knowledge, as well as scientific and technological progress1, are considered the factors of economic growth, regardless of school and course within the framework of economic science. however, theoretical and methodological disagreements between neoclassicists, institutionalists, marxist, and other schools often obscure the very essence of knowledge generation processes and their economic significance. first, it is necessary to trace the evolution of the theory of economic growth. classical economists from adam smith to marshall attributed higher economic growth rates mainly to the accumulation of physical capital (marshall, 2013; mill, 1848; say, 1836/2008; smith, 1776/1874). thus, in the classical theory of economic growth, knowledge was absent as a category. the economic crisis of the 1920s–30s made economists concentrate on the problems of the business cycle: thus, keynes (1936) dealt with fluctuations in unemployment and output in determining interest rates and money supply. harrod and domar, following the keynesian model, adopted a constant savings rate and capital intensity ratio when deriving the economic growth formula (domar, 1946, 1947; harrod, 1939). solow’s neoclassical growth model included maximizing the profits of producers, who align marginal costs and marginal productivity of factors of production; maximizing utility by consumers, who save a fixed share of their income for future use; the equality between savings and investment, and the replacement of capital and labor (solow, 1956). technological progress was an exogenous factor in the solow model—countries with a higher level of savings had a higher income level. still, higher growth rates were possible only due to a higher level of technological progress. lucas (1988), arrow (1962), and romer (1990) made the technological 1 the authors consider scientific and technological progress as a process of implementing scientific knowledge in practice; therefore, in the text we will use the term “knowledge” in relation to both scientific knowledge and scientific and technological progress. in cases where the difference is essential for the study, we will make an appropriate emphasis. changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 555 factor endogenous by introducing knowledge or human capital into the production function along with physical capital. not only is the economic interpretation of knowledge changing, but the new neoliberal paradigm of science and higher education is also emerging. this issue is considered, for example, in the article by olssen and peters (2005), and others (hornidge, 2011; jessop, 2016). in classical liberalism, the individual is characterized as having an autonomous human nature, capable of realizing their rights and freedoms. in neoliberalism, the state seeks to create not just a person, but a competitive entrepreneur. education and science in the concept of neoliberalism are interpreted in terms of inputs–outputs, thereby being reduced to an economic production function. the main aspects of the new public management are flexibility (for organizations through the use of contracts), clearly formulated goals (both organizational and personal), as well as focus on results (measurement and managerial responsibility for achievement). in addition, the microeconomic methods of the quasi-market or private sector with their new set of contractual norms and rules replaced the “ethics of public service”, according to which organizations were regulated in accordance with the norms and values arising from assumptions about the “common good” or “public interest”. consequently, the concepts of “professional” or “trustee” are considered in the framework of the “principal-agent” scheme. the scale of institutional changes at the current stage allows us to talk about a new socio-economic formation—knowledge capitalism. generally, nowadays, there are four factors2 that can shift the production possibility curve to the right without an inflationary gap (arranged in increasing order according to the degree of impact): • physical capital • increase in the quantity of the workforce • increase in the quality of the workforce • scientific and technological progress the first factor is functionally dependent on the level of savings and investments. the third and fourth factors are the result of the efficient generation of scientific knowledge, which can be accumulated both in the form of human capital and intellectual property3. accordingly, the effective generation of scientific knowledge can eliminate structural imbalances and ensure economic growth without inflationary costs. the purpose of this work is to propose a definition of the economic category knowledge, based on the comparative analysis of the interpretations of knowledge generation in various socio-economic concepts. furthermore, we intend to clarify what role knowledge plays in economic processes at the current stage of development and how this phenomenon affects various socio-economic systems. 2 the authors deliberately do not consider natural resources as a factor of economic growth in the new economy. on the contrary, the resource orientation of the economy of a country (region) may have extremely negative consequences. 3 an example is the leontief paradox, which showed the capital intensity of american exports precisely in terms of human and not physical capital. https://changing-sp.com/ 556 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova processes of knowledge generation the concept of knowledge generation is rooted in schumpeter (1934), who methodologically separated innovation from inventions. the cycle of scientific and technological activities includes three phases: invention (creating new knowledge)– innovation (implementing new knowledge)–imitation (copying innovation by other market players). vanderburg (2005) extends this scheme from the perspective of the technology life cycle: invention–innovation and development–diffusion–substitution. it should be noted that the concept of diffusion of innovation has become extremely popular towards the end of the last century (eveland, 1986; peres et al., 2010; rogers, 2003). lonergan expanded the scope of diffusion of innovation by proposing a repeated cycle of technological, economic and political changes: situation–insight– communication–conviction–agreement–decision–action–new situation–insight, etc. (lonergan, 1997). it should be noted that a distinction is made between analytical knowledge (scientific base) and synthetic knowledge (engineering base) (laestadius, 1998). science is to explain the global issues of human existence and the world, or to find universal patterns—“ truths” (frezza et al., 2013). lonergan (1997) further emphasized mathematical and empirical heuristic structures. engineering/ technology aims to meet the urgent needs of man and society (koen, 2003), to create artifacts. analytical knowledge more often takes an explicit or codified form (articles, reports, patents); synthetic knowledge exists in a tacit form, it results in new products and technological processes (popov & vlasov, 2014). codified knowledge has a standardized compact form (david & foray, 1995) and can be delivered over long distances (foray & lundvall, 1996); tacit knowledge is sensitive to localization—it is usually transmitted personally. this classification of knowledge came from the work of polanyi (1962), who wrote about the impossibility of separating the produced knowledge from the personality of the researcher. moreover, two types of knowledge (explicit and tacit) dynamically interact with each other, which is the basis of the spiral process of expanding existing knowledge. nonaka and takeuchi in the mid-1990s created a model for the interaction of explicit and tacit knowledge in the process of knowledge generation in the workplace. this model is known as seci and will be discussed in more detail in the following section of this paper (nonaka & takeuchi, 1995). individual and organizational knowledge is maximized by translating tacit knowledge into explicit, which can then be interpreted, presented, codified, stored, retrieved, and disseminated (nunes et al., 2006). sociologist pitirim sorokin proposed an original interpretation of knowledge generation as an epistemic process (sorokin, 1941). his model included three stages: • mental integration is the union of two narratives into a single system as an act of creation of the human mind; • empirical objectification is a means of “delivering” new knowledge to the final recipient; • socialization is the dissemination of knowledge among individuals through socialization agents. changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 557 the latter emphasizes the social context of the utilization and dissemination of scientific knowledge, which makes it similar to the diffusion of innovations and hermeneutics. considering the acquisition of new knowledge as a production process, three stages of knowledge generation are traditionally distinguished: generation, dissemination, and utilization (popov et al., 2009). we proposed to supplement the model with the distribution of knowledge; thus, the knowledge generation cycle consists of four stages: (a) production; (b) exchange; (c) distribution; (d) utilization of knowledge (kochetkov & vlasov, 2016). it is essential to draw a line of demarcation between exchange and distribution. in the case of an exchange, we deal with the relationships of one or more economic agents. distribution implies the free distribution and use of new knowledge by an unlimited circle of economic agents. distribution of knowledge allows the creation of externalities that stimulate regional economic development. knowledge-spillovers, in this case, are an exogenous factor in relation to a particular company or industry (jacobs, 1969, 1984; porter, 1990). knowledge-based management concepts knowledge management considering the generation of scientific knowledge as a production process, we need to determine the control functions of this process. without dwelling on the whole variety of management theories, we adhere to the concept of the classical administrative school of management (fayol, 1949), which distinguishes four main functions of management: planning, organization, control, and motivation. it seems relevant to us to interpret motivation as leadership, respectively, further we will adhere to this functional scheme (planning, organization, control, and leadership). in the mid-1990s, nonaka and takeuchi developed the seci explicit/tacit knowledge generation cycle (nonaka & takeuchi, 1995). the acronym seci refers to the four-phase cycle of knowledge creation: • socialization: tacit knowledge is distributed between people through the institution of mentoring, conversations, corporate culture, exchange of experience, etc. key skill: empathizing. • externalization: people begin developing metaphors and analogies to explain the rational meaning of implicitly informed behavior. tacit knowledge becomes more explicit in the process of developing concepts. in other words, this process can be described as a codification of tacit knowledge. key skill: articulating. • combination: explicit ideas are combined with other explicit ideas in finding dependencies and eliminating redundancy; the culmination of the process is the creation of complete descriptions of processes and procedures for completing tasks. speaking of scientific knowledge, we mean the formulation of scientific laws. key skill: connecting. • internalization: explicit ideas expand during development. knowledge is again in the zone of socialization, and the spiral of knowledge cultivation is entering a new round. key skill: embodying. https://changing-sp.com/ 558 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova nonaka and takeuchi classified knowledge as an asset based on the seci model into four groups: • routine knowledge assets: tacit procedural knowledge routinized and contained in organizational culture, action, and everyday practice. • systemic knowledge assets: explicit, codified and systematized knowledge stored in documents, databases, manuals, specifications, and patents. • conceptual knowledge assets: explicit knowledge in a symbolic form, including product concepts, brand equity, design styles, symbols, and language. note that scientific knowledge also belongs to this group. • experiential knowledge assets: tacit knowledge arising from collective experience, including the skills and judgments of individuals, prosocial feelings such as trust and care, as well as motivational resources that fuel engagement, passion, and tension. the concept of nonaka and takeuchi is mainly focused on procedures, which causes difficulties in quantifying the result. in an attempt to bridge this gap, the theory of intellectual capital was developed. there are a number of terms quite similar to knowledge management. e.g., the term “cognitive management” can be found in literature treated as “the systematic management of processes by which knowledge is identified, accumulated, distributed and applied in an organization to improve its performance” (abdikeev, 2014, our translation from russian—d. k., i. k.). based on this definition, we can conclude that the terms “cognitive management ” and “knowledge management ” are synonymous. intellectual capital (ic) the concept of intellectual capital was originally used in corporate strategies and had the same theoretical prerequisites as knowledge management, so it is often very difficult to draw a clear distinction between these two theoretical concepts. brooking (1996) defined intellectual capital as a combination of intangible assets that allow companies to create sustainable competitive advantages. stewart (1997) defines intellectual capital as “knowledge, information, intellectual property, experience that can be used to create wealth” (stewart, 1997, p. x). dumay (2016) replaces “wealth” with “value” for two reasons: (a) the term “value” is used much more often in theoretical studies of intellectual capital and the practice of strategic management than “wealth”; (b) the inputs and outputs of the process of creating intellectual capital cannot always be measured in money. thus, the question about what constitutes the intangible assets that make up the intellectual capital of an organization is still open for debate. traditionally, three components of intellectual capital are distinguished: human capital, structural capital and customer capital (bontis, 1998; miller et al., 1999). the first two components are internal in relation to the organization; the third one is external. in relation to the latter, the term “relational capital” (khavand kar & khavandkar, 2013) is often used, which covers all external relations of the company, including market relations, relations of cooperation, power and management. changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 559 this approach seems to be preferable, as the company in the process of creating value contacts not only customers, but also suppliers, authorities, and public organizations (for example, in russian business practice, relations with government structures make up an important part of intangible assets; sometimes they even are the key asset of a company). the concept of human capital goes back to adam smith as “acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society. the acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person” (smith, 1776/1874, p. 122). one of the first to use the term “human capital” was nicholson (1891). later it was adopted by various authors, but until the end of the 1950s, it did not become a part of the lingua franca of economists. this term was introduced into wide use by mincer (1958). schultz (1961) considered human capital as something akin to property, which fundamentally distinguishes this concept from the classical interpretation of labor in economic theory. the publication of the book by becker (1993) marked the finalization of human capital as an independent research field4. the main component of human capital is the knowledge and skills acquired in the process of education, training, and work. however, in recent years, health has been increasingly referred to as a component of human capital (goldin, 2016), although this indicator is often used in the analysis of macro systems5. structural and relational capital are sometimes referred to as social capital, which, in its turn, forms intellectual capital together with human capital. thus, the typology becomes multilevel. j. nahapiet and s. ghoshal (1998) refer to social capital as cognitive capital, which means general cognitive codes (symbols), language and meanings (narratives). this definition is very close to frolov’s classification of institutions (frolov, 2016): • regulatory—norms, rules, customs, standards, conventions, contracts, etc. (north, 1990); • functional—status functions and routines (nelson, 1994; searle, 1995); • structural—organizational forms and models of transactions (scott, 1995); • mental—collective representations, beliefs, stereotypes, values, cognitive patterns, etc. (denzau & north, 1994). thus, the term “institutional capital” seems to be more applicable in this case, because it more accurately describes the essence of the phenomenon (fig. 1). it is important to note that institutional capital comprises those institutions that directly participate in or contribute to the value creation process. 4 however, becker, by his own admission, was forced to use a long subtitle to defend himself from the attacks of critics. 5 on the other hand, firms also take care of their employees’ health, usually by paying for health insurance and sports. it recognizes the importance of employee health indicators in the value creation process. https://changing-sp.com/ 560 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova figure 1 the structure of intellectual capital human capital relational capital institutional capital knowledge and skills health internal environment external environment normative institutions functional institutions structural institutions mental institutions value creation regarding the process of creating intellectual capital, researchers most often identify combination and exchange (nahapiet & ghoshal, 1998). the concept “combination” goes back to schumpeter: “to produce means to combine materials and forces within our reach” (schumpeter, 1934, p. 65). this concept is also found in the cycle of generating explicit/tacit knowledge of nonaka and takeuchi (1995) and in studies of organizational learning (boisot, 2013; cohen & levinthal, 1990; kogut & zander, 1992). combination along with codification is one of the ways of producing new knowledge. knowledge exchange can exist both in the external and internal environment of an organization. the processes of internal knowledge sharing are most consistent with the institution of teamwork, which is a form of social interaction based on the unity of goals, objectives, and methods of work performed and built into the organizational context (kozlowski & bell, 2003). the most important determinants of a successful team are complementarity of skills (davis, 2009), mutual assistance (khatri et al., 2009), and trust between participants (chiregi & navimipour, 2016). the exchange of knowledge in the external environment refers to various forms of networking. as an example, we can cite “hybrids” in the terminology of williamson (1991), who made a methodological transition from the “ firm-market” dichotomy to the “market-hybrid-hierarchy” coordinate system. recently, researchers have increasingly used the theoretical and methodological apparatus of intellectual capital in the process of analyzing mesoand macro-systems (bounfour & edvinsson, 2005). in this case, the process of creating intellectual capital is supplemented by at least two phases—distribution and utilization. as mentioned above, exchange is a closed process in which two or more partners participate. in contrast, distribution is an open process of disseminating knowledge within a certain economic space. distribution creates positive externalities; therefore, its role for economic growth changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 561 is even greater than in the case of exchange. in particular, marshall (2013) was among the first to identify the role of externalities in economic development; later, arrow (1962) and romer (1986) further developed and supplemented the concept; it was finalized by glaeser et al. (1992). this type of externalities, known in science as mar (marsall–arrow–romer), is based on the flow of knowledge (knowledge-spillovers). a prerequisite for their occurrence is specialization, as externalities are endogenous to the industry. the concept of j. jacobs, unlike mar, implies a diversified economy (jacobs, 1969, 1984). the flow of knowledge in its interpretation is an exogenous factor in relation to a particular industry, but endogenous in relation to the territory. m. e. porter subscribed to the same view (porter, 1990). the utilization of knowledge in a given territory plays an equally important role in the process of creating intellectual capital. knowledge can be consumed as part of a product or service of both final and intermediate consumption. in the latter case, a company or another department within the same organization may act as a customer. in the situation of intermediate consumption, knowledge is often transferred in the form of intellectual property objects (ipos). thus, the key indicators for the analysis of the intellectual capital of a country, city or region could be easily identified—these are, first of all, indicators of the creation and use of intellectual property objects, the knowledge-intensiveness of goods and services produced, as well as indicators of the health of the population included in the workforce. it should also be noted that a country (region, city) is not an economic agent, unlike a company, therefore the main task of the government is to create conditions for the accumulation of intellectual capital within a given territory. accordingly, with reference to the mesoand macrolevels, our definition of intellectual capital of a region (country) is as follows: the intellectual capital of a region (city, country) is a set of assets, factors, and conditions that determine the production (codification, combination), exchange, distribution and utilization of knowledge in the process of public production in a given territory. research and practice in the field of intellectual capital is the subject of a wide range of organizational theories and methodologies, but the theoretical understanding of this matter is still quite limited (dumay, 2012). theoretical and methodological pluralism causes a lack of unified approach to the assessment of intellectual capital6. this theoretical inconsistency is an obstacle to understanding intellectual capital, possibly explaining the limited use of intellectual capital management and accounting (measurement) methods (rooney & dumay, 2016). thus, most schools, within the framework of knowledge-based management concepts, focus on the description of procedures, but have poor measuring instruments, and most importantly, do not provide a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the role of knowledge in the process of economic growth, which often interferes with their practical application. 6 for example, the lack of a unified approach to accounting for intangible assets is a rather serious problem, considered in accounting studies. https://changing-sp.com/ 562 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova knowledge-based economic concepts learning economy the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge has been used in a number of works on the learning economy (david & foray, 1995; foray & lundvall, 1996; lundvall & borras, 1997; lundvall & johnson, 1994). the learning economy is an economic system in which the ability to learn is critical to the success of people, firms, regional and national economies. learning is understood not simply as access to information but as acquisition of certain knowledge and skills (lundvall & borras, 1997). learning as a process is present in both knowledge-based and traditional sectors of economy. the development of competencies in low-tech industries may be more significant for economic growth than in a small number of high-tech enterprises (maskell, 1996, 1998). the learning economy is one of the theoretical branches of knowledge-based economy; however, in economics and economic policy, the term “knowledge economy” is more rooted than “learning economy” (european council, 2000). nevertheless, the learning economy played an important role in the transition from managerial concepts of the micro-level to the analysis of knowledge generation processes and their impact on economic growth at the macro-level. first of all, this concept has been widely used in regional studies (maskell & malmberg, 1999; morgan, 1997; storper, 1995, 1997), particularly, in the theoretical concept of regional competitiveness. the discourse of competitiveness at the macroeconomic level goes back to michael e. porter. in his influential work, the competitive advantage of nations (porter, 1990), porter applied his concept of strategic advantage to firms and industries to analyze the competitive position of nations. he argued that the new competitive advantage paradigm had replaced the obsolete ricardian theory of comparative advantage. porter’s position was severely criticized, primarily by paul krugman (krugman, 1994, 1996). nevertheless, the concept of porter, despite some internal inconsistency and obvious incompleteness, was recognized both among the “new regionalists” (huggins, 2000, 2003; malecki, 2002; maskell & malmberg, 1999), and political discourse (european commission, 1999, 2004; dti, 2003). one of the most authoritative works on the new paradigm of regional development was published by morgan (1997). it formulates the following basic principles of a new approach to the development of regions: • the network paradigm overcomes the traditional state-market antinomy thanks to developed intermediary institutions, such as regional development agencies. • the convergence of economic geography and innovation studies creates a potentially important new research area that focuses on the interactive model of innovation, as well as the role of institutions and social agreements in economic development. the network model of innovation and development of the social capital of territories were put into practice in the 21st century, but mostly within the framework of the knowledge economy. changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 563 knowledge economy the knowledge economy can be generally defined as an economic system where knowledge is a key factor (or resource) of production and economic growth (kochetkov & vlasov, 2016). the term “knowledge economy” was coined by machlup (1962) in relation to one of the economic sectors and this term immediately found wide application in the corporate sector. drucker (1970) noted the crucial role of knowledge in the process of creating added value. in the late 20th century, knowledge began to be perceived as a key factor in economic growth. thurow (1999) provided a set of applied recommendations for achieving a high level of social welfare through the knowledge economy. it was important to comprehend theoretically the role of knowledge generation in economic growth, to find their place in economic models. the knowledge economy is based to a large extent on endogenous models of economic growth. romer (1990) introduced into the production process the factor of accumulated knowledge that arises as a result of r&d at universities or research institutes. stocks of knowledge that exist in the form of constructions, formulae or models are non-rival goods with positive externalities in consumption, since they are freely available. romer assumes separate production functions for research products, intermediate and final consumption goods, illustrating the endogenous process of technological progress and its impact on economic growth. workers in the research sector produce new ideas that they sell to firms, which, in their turn, apply these ideas for production of final goods. the productivity of workers in the final goods industries increases when they get the best tools for the job. thus, economic growth is ultimately the result of the use of human resources in the research sector, such as universities and research institutes. the production function is similar to the solow model: − α α= 1 ( ) ,yy k al where y is the level of output, a is the level of technology, ly is the volume of labor costs, k is capital, and α is the labor input coefficient of production. the level of technology a is now the result of the workers’ efforts in the research sector. the total labor force (l) can be used either in the knowledge sector la, or in the final goods sector ly: = + .a yl l l technological progress in endogenous economic growth models equals an increase in research labor: = δ  .a a l a this definition implies that the increase in the overall productivity of factors of production will be proportional to the number of labor units related to research and development (r&d). with a constant share of labor involved in r&d, technological progress will be proportional to the labor force—the result found in the romer/ grossman-helpman/aghion-howitt models and many others. accordingly, higher population growth rates are beneficial, not harmful to economic growth because the economy can attract more people to research and development. https://changing-sp.com/ 564 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova an essential alternative specification of the r&d equation, which, at least on the surface, supports the key results of the romer/grossman-helpman/aghion-howitt models without imposing economies of scale, suggests that the increase in overall factor productivity depends on the proportion of research work, not its quantity: = δ = δ  .a la s a l eliminating economies of scale is an extremely attractive idea, but nonetheless, it contradicts the foundations of the romer/grossman-helpman/agрion-howitt models. the specification without economies of scale is counterfactual, according to which an economy with one unit of labor can produce as many innovations (or at least can generate equivalent growth in the total productivity of factors of production) as an economy with one million units of labor. besides, both specifications of the model did not find empirical evidence. jones (1995) showed the possibility of using the average research productivity parameter (the so-called decentralized model) in the model: ϕ λδ = δ ,aa l where δ is the average productivity of research labor, a is the stock of knowledge or technology in the economy, ϕ measures externalities during the r&d process, λ reflects the possibility that duplication and coincidence of studies at a certain point reduce the total number of innovations produced by la units. accordingly, the growth rate of knowledge is equal to: λ − ϕ δ =  1 .a la a a by differentiating this equation, one can find that the technological progress rate ga is determined by the population growth rate and externalities: δ = − ϕ , 1a ng where n is the growth rate of labor. the knowledge economy is an essential part of political discourse, e.g., it initially formed the basis of the regional policy of european integration (european council, 2000). the decisions of the lisbon european council are often regarded as a political failure now because these decisions were not implemented properly and did not produce expected results. nevertheless, it was these decisions that led to the development of such projects as the european research area (era) and smart specialization. the world bank is evaluating the level of development of the knowledge economy at the global level. its methodology includes 147 indicators for 146 countries in the following areas: economic indicators, institutional regime, power, innovation, education, gender indicators, and information and communication technology (ict) (chen & dahlman, 2005). based on these methods, the kam knowledge index (ki) and the knowledge economy index (kei) were created (world bank institute, 2012). changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 565 economics of scientific knowledge the economics of scientific knowledge (esk) is one of the youngest areas in the heterogeneous field of “science of science”. the esk relies on concepts and methods of economic analysis to study the epistemic nature and value of scientific knowledge (zamora bonilla, 2012). the expression “economics of scientific knowledge” was first popularized by w. hands in a series of works from the 1990s (hands, 1994a, 1994b). the term itself arose by analogy with the sociology of scientific knowledge (ssk). the theoretical framework of the economics of scientific knowledge consists of two major theoretical paradigms—optimization and exchange. the former is based on the premise that the search for the best research methodology is the rational maximization of the utility function by the individual (scientist). c. s. peirce was one of the first scholars to discuss this topic in 1879, less than ten years after the emergence of marginal analysis in economic theory (kloesel, 1989). the book remained almost unnoticed but was re-discovered almost 100 years later by rescher (rescher, 1976). in his later works, rescher consistently developed pierce’s ideas (rescher, 1978, 1989). another author who tried to apply the costbenefit rationality to the problems of the philosophy of science was j. radnitzky (radnitzky, 1986, 1987). another approach to optimization is an attempt to define a specific (“cognitive” or “epistemological”) utility function that should be maximized by rational scientific research. it is a strategy of making decision on the adoption of certain assumptions or hypotheses. therefore, it is assumed that scientists must solve a scientific problem instead of looking for an alternative solution if and only if the expected utility (eu) that they receive from the first decision is higher than the expected utility that they will receive from any other solution to this problem. the expected utility of accepting hypothesis h, taking into account the evidence e, is defined as: ∈ = ∑( , ) ( , ) ( , ), s x u h e u h s p s e where s are the possible states of the surrounding world; u(h,s) is the epistemic utility of accepting h if the true state of the world is s; and p(s,e) is the probability that s is a true state, taking into account the evidence e. naturally, the fundamental problem of this approach is the very definition of a utility function (or what is a utility in this case) (zamora bonilla, 2012). levi (1967) and hilpinen (1968) add the risktaking parameter to the expected cognitive utility: = −( , ) ( , ) ( , ),eu h e p h e qp h e where parameter q is a measure of the scientist’s attitude to risk: the lower q in the researcher’s epistemological utility function, the greater is the tendency to avoid risk. numerous economic agents are interconnected, which generates multiple social phenomena that are also studied by economic science. from this theoretical premise, a paradigm of exchange in the esk was developed. the metaphor of the https://changing-sp.com/ 566 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova scientific market was put forward by coase (1988), who argued that he did not see the difference between the market for goods and the market for ideas. this approximation allows us to use market analysis methods for epistemological purposes. it should be noted that the theory of market relations in science studies is the subject of heated debate. a number of researchers claim that the more science becomes a market, the less it benefits ordinary citizens (fuller, 2000). the esk is a young7 and promising scientific field. however, it stands closer to epistemology than to economics. despite the use of economic research methods, scientific knowledge, as a rule, is considered in isolation from the actual economic processes. helix models the helix models describe the cyclic process of the development of economic and social systems. the triple helix concept was introduced at the turn of the millennium (etzkowitz & leydesdorff, 2000) and influenced regional development projects in the 21st century. its structural components were studied by henry etzkowitz from the university of entrepreneurship (etzkowitz, 1983, 1998), and by loet leydesdorff and peter van den besselaar in the field of evolutionary dynamics of science, technology and innovation (leydesdorff & van den besselaar, 1994, 1998). the triple helix implies the interaction of the university, business and government in creating innovation. an important role is played not only by the participants themselves, but also by the type of relationship between them. for example, in the ussr and other countries of the socialist camp, there was a closed model, where the state played the role of supreme arbiter (fig. 2) in relations between universities and industry—mode 1 (etzkowitz & leydesdorff, 2000). the model is characterized by isolation from the outside world, and the absence of a market mechanism determines the low efficiency of the innovation process. unfortunately, this model of “bureaucratic innovation” not only still exists in russia but is also actively stimulated by the state through direct financing mechanisms, tax incentives, and companies with state participation. figure 2 an etatistic model of university–industry–government relations state industry academia source: etzkowitz and leydesdorff, 2000. 7 excluding the work of c. s. pierce, but it was invisible to the scientific community for a long time. changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 567 mode 2 of the triple helix implies the independence of its participants from each other. goods and services are acquired from each other on a contract basis for reasons of profit. thus, mode 2 goes back to the classics of economic theory, the “invisible hand” of adam smith (smith, 1776/1874). nevertheless, as we know from the further development of economic science, classical political economists did not take into account market failures. therefore, this theoretical model almost never works well in practice (just as there is no market economy in its purest form). mode 3 of the triple helix implies the overlapping of institutional spheres (fig. 3). it is in the overlay areas that redundancy is generated. generation of redundancy is on the top of information flows (leydesdorff, 2018; leydesdorff et al., 2017). the term “triple helix” is usually associated with this model. figure 3 the triple helix model of university–industry–government relations state industry academia tri-lateral networks and hybrid organizations source: etzkowitz & leydesdorff, 2000. for this model to function, an “endless transition” is extremely important. it is nothing more than an endless process of creative destruction according to schumpeter. this process stimulates a constant increase in the role of knowledge as a resource in production and distribution (etzkowitz & leydesdorff, 2000). in one of his later works, etzkowitz also emphasized the exceptional role of the university and state in the period of the change of technological paradigms (etzkowitz & klofsten, 2005). the university assumes the roles of creating development forms unusual for common practice (in addition to traditional training and fundamental research). business is increasingly engaged in self-training and research. the government (in this case, regional authorities) provides support for initiatives through regulatory mechanisms, fiscal policy instruments, and direct funding. elias carayannis and david campbell expanded the model of the triple helix by proposing the quadruple helix. in addition to the university, business, and government, the fourth helix includes civil society institutions. the authors themselves defined the fourth helix as “public” (based on media and culture) and “civil society” (carayannis & campbell, 2009). of course, the public is a core element in the knowledge-based society as the main consumer of knowledge. https://changing-sp.com/ 568 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova knowledge flows permeate all areas of public life. an equally important component is the “knowledge culture”, which includes values and lifestyle, multiculturalism and creativity, the media, universities, and multi-level innovation systems (local, regional, national and global) (carayannis & pirzadeh, 2014). together, they form the “creative knowledge environment” (cse), i.e., a social environment conducive to the creation of new knowledge and innovation. this concept directly correlates with the institutional environment, in particular, with the degree of economic freedom in the country and the type of social contract. if the quadruple helix contextualizes the triple helix model in social environments, then the quintuple helix introduces the natural context of innovation systems. the quintuple helix, in full accordance with the interdisciplinary nature of modern scientific knowledge, aims to create and develop conditions for the sustainable development of society, the economy and democracy in the midand long term. carayannis & campbell introduced the concept of “social ecology”, which represented a transdisciplinary field of research for comprehensive solutions to global problems (carayannis & campbell, 2010). thus, while the first three helixes represent the institutional spheres of the innovative development of society, the fourth and fifth helixes contextualize their interaction in social and natural environments. discussion and conclusions the socio-economic approaches to knowledge as an economic category are summarized in table 1. the subject-object scheme is the basis of classification. table 1 knowledge-based socio-economic concepts theoretical concept/ framework key thesis subject object note 1. theory of economic growth: 1) neoclassical solow model the level of technology is a given (exogenous) factor economic agents; macro level entities (city, region, country) technology level within the production function the most universal theoretical models; the theoretical basis of the knowledge economy and neoclassical theory as a whole 2) endogenous growth model the stock of knowledge accumulated in the economic system overcomes the law of diminishing returns stock and flow of knowledge within the production function 2. knowledge management strategic management of knowledge generation processes creates sustainable competitive advantages economic agents knowledge generation processes within the firm one of the most popular and widely used models in the corporate sector; however, the weak point is the lack of a single quantitative methodology for analysis and control changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 569 theoretical concept/ framework key thesis subject object note 3. intellectual capital the accumulation of intangible assets creates sustainable competitive advantages economic agents; since the 90s. xx century – macro level entities (city, region, country) intangible assets (human capital, relational capital, institutional capital) a more transparent quantitative methodology than in the previous case, however, key indicators remain the subject of discussion 4. learning economy learning ability is a critical factor in economic success economic agents; regions learning processes within economic systems this theoretical concept existed for a rather short period of time, losing theoretical competition to the knowledge economy 5. knowledge economy knowledge is a key growth factor in the new economy economic agents; since the 90s. xx century – macro level entities (city, region, country) knowledge generation processes within economic systems it is one of the most recognized and widely used socioeconomic concepts at the present stage of development; based on the theoretical basis of neoclassical models of economic growth; popular in political discourse 6. economics of scientific knowledge the researchers' decisions in the process of choosing a methodology are similar to maximizing behavior of an economic agent; it opens new possibilities for applying the methods of economic analysis in epistemology resercher; research team optimization of the function of cognitive (epistemic) utility a young and extremely promising field of research, which is closer to epistemology than to economic theory 7. helix models 1) triple helix overlapping of institutional spheres generates redundancy universitybusinessgovernment generation of redundancy and synergetic effect influenced most regional development projects in the 21st century 2) quadruple helix the fourth helix includes civil society institutions + public and civil society contextualizes the triple helix model in social environments 3) quintuple helix introduces the natural context of innovation systems + natural environment contextualizes the triple helix model in natural environment source: authors’ own development table 1 continued https://changing-sp.com/ 570 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova the variety of theoretical approaches is historically explainable, but at this stage we need integration. a theoretical understanding of the knowledge economy at the macro-level requires new approaches because the government is neither an actor in the generation of knowledge nor an economic agent. nevertheless, the government creates conditions for effective generation of scientific knowledge. in our opinion, it is necessary to formulate a new theoretical field that synthesizes the approaches of the knowledge economy, knowledge management and intellectual capital at theoretical and practical levels. the goal of the new scientific field should be the formation of the theoretical foundations of public administration, focused on improving the efficiency of knowledge generation processes as a factor in economic growth. let us call it the theory of knowledge-based public administration. this theory is based on two premises: 1. functional differentiation of entities in the process of knowledge generation. the process of knowledge generation includes 4 phases: production (codification/ combination), exchange, distribution, and utilization (fig. 4). the state, not being a direct participant in these processes, performs the essential function of creating the conditions for efficient generation of knowledge within the socio-economic system. these conditions are implemented in the form of institutions created by the government. at the same time, both government and actors in knowledge generation (universities, research institutes) are representatives of society; in other words, they are connected with society by principal-agent relations. in turn, economic agents are part of society, i.e., we can speak about the relationship between the whole and the part. figure 4 functional diagram of the entities in the process of knowledge generation actors of knowledge generation economic agents government production production utilization exchange exchange creating institutions distribution utilization society changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 571 for approximation purposes, we attribute knowledge generation actors to the public sector (universities, research institutes); corporate departments (r&d) are economic agents in this diagram. they both produce knowledge and make an exchange on a contract basis. nevertheless, it is the public sector that disseminates knowledge through various distribution channels, creating positive externalities. the corporate sector, on the contrary, is interested in limiting the effect of externalities through the legal mechanism of intellectual property. economic agents consume knowledge in the form of final or intermediate consumption products, as well as intellectual property objects. the government is also a consumer of knowledge, but its primary function is to design and implement optimal institutions. it is important to note that the generation of knowledge is a cyclic process, which is reflected in the seci explicit/tacit knowledge generation cycle. 2. the process of knowledge generation is based on the continuous transformation of intellectual capital. in the description, we followed the process approach: the inputs of the process are human, relational and institutional capital; outputs are products of final/intermediate consumption and objects of intellectual property (fig. 5). the outputs of one process can become the inputs of another. figure 5 the process of transformation of intellectual capital inputs outputs ic1 ic2 ic3...n human capital relational capital structural capital codification combination exchange distribution final consumption products intermediate consumption products intellectual property objects https://changing-sp.com/ 572 dmitry m. kochetkov, irina a. kochetkova if we look at the theory of the knowledge economy through the prism of k. marx’s theory of social reproduction (marx, 1885/1992), it becomes obvious that part of the country’s economy will always be involved in the process of reproduction of intellectual capital8. we can state the emergence of a new socio-economic formation—knowledge capitalism. we understand knowledge capitalism as an economic system based on expanded reproduction of intellectual capital and characterized by high mobility of resources and factors of production. accordingly, one of the important consequences of the transition to knowledge capitalism will be a further decrease in the role of national borders in the global economy, i.e. the process of its de-territorialization. knowledge capitalism along with the knowledge economy is a template for national policies (primarily, western countries and “developed” asia) starting with the reports of the oecd (1996) and the world bank (1998), which consider education as an underestimated form of knowledge capital that will determine not only the future of the economy but also society as a whole (guy peters, 2012). intellectual capital has a number of significant differences from physical capital that shape the new formation: • the accumulated intellectual capital (stock) directly affects the flow of new knowledge. this ability of the system to self-development underlies theories of endogenous economic growth. knowledge creates the effect of externalities—for example, the knowledge gained in one scientific field creates a cumulative wave in other scientific areas; the same applies to industries. at the same time, the costs of replicating knowledge in comparison with the costs of their creation are negligible. • the period of renewal of intellectual capital is much shorter than that of physical capital. it can be associated with moore’s law, according to which the chip power doubles every two years without increasing the cost. accordingly, the business cycle in modern conditions is becoming much shorter. • the intangible nature of knowledge does not allow us to talk about the complete alienation of the results of scientific work. the process of alienation is affected by such characteristic of scientific work as authorship. therefore, we can assume that an increase in the share of intellectual capital in products will contribute to a more equitable distribution of income in the future. • an essential component of intellectual capital is human capital, which has high mobility. therefore, the task of both firms and the government is not only to create/attract human capital but also to retain it. it is important to note that here we get a new “paradox of knowledge”. knowledge is created both through public funds and through private investment. it is impossible to split financial flows within one socio-economic system. therefore, private business often uses the knowledge created at the expense of all taxpayers to create their own products, including intellectual property. on the other hand, very often inventions of 8 even adam smith attributed knowledge and skills to constant capital. changing societies & personalities, 2021, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 553–580 573 private companies change the world for the better (remember mobile phones). from the global perspective, the private ownership of knowledge, which is supported by the patent law institution, deepens inequalities between countries. this huge topic is beyond the scope of this study, but it is an extremely interesting and promising direction for future work. references abdikeev, n. m. 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